Why EVERY Home Listing Needs Staging • Trisha Lee
Dec 27, 2024
Trisha Lee talks about how she got into the home staging business. Trisha discusses the benefits of home staging for real estate agents, including increased perceived value, faster sales, and a higher return on investment. Trisha also shares specific home staging tips and mistakes to avoid in different rooms of the home, such as the entryway, dining room, living room, and kitchen. Last, Trisha talks about the role of aesthetics and creating an emotional connection with buyers through professional home staging.
Why Relationships Are Your Most Important Daily Activity
Dec 27, 2024
Mary-Anne Gillespie talks about the trends she sees with her clients when planning for 2025. Mary-Anne discusses the importance of building relationships and how to build business by reaching out to people. Mary-Anne also discusses social media and connection to people and shares ideas on how to reach to you sphere 55 times every year. Last, Mary-Anne discusses how much time should an agent spend in lead generation activities.
How To Use AI To Make Better Content For Real Estate • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Dec 23, 2024
In this episode Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg talks about how to use AI to create the best content to grow your real estate business. Kim also talks about how AI can hurt your business if not used correctly and how to avoid that.
3 Videos You Can Make During The Holiday Season • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Dec 12, 2024
In this episode Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg will talk about 3 videos you can make during the holiday season that will help your business grow in 2025.
LIVE EVENT! The Blueprint to Become A Top Agent In 2025 • D.J. Paris
Dec 11, 2024
We are excited and proud to announce that our first live event for listeners is scheduled for Jan 7, 2025! We have amazing speakers lined up to help provide all the tools you need for your best year ever: Lead Generation, Leveraging Social Media Video, and Strategic Business Planning!
How To Become An Top Producer In A Rural Market • Jenny Sommerlot
Dec 05, 2024
Jenny Sommerlot, a realtor specializing in rural real estate in Malacca, talks about her journey and strategies for success. Jenny emphasizes the importance of community involvement, consistent social media posting, and detailed buyer consultations. Jenny also highlights her approach to setting client expectations, including discussing commission structures and market conditions. Last, Jenny discusses her plans for 2025, including focusing on personal deals and acquiring new builder clients.
The Top Authority On Residential Real Estate Trends • Jack Miller
Dec 02, 2024
Jack Miller talks about how he got into the real estate business. Jack discusses the value that real estate agents provide to consumers and how they need to better demonstrate and communicate that value. Jack also discusses the impact of the NAR settlement on agents, especially buyer’s agents, and how they are adapting to the changes. Jack talks about the role and trends around dual-career vs single-career real estate agents, and how brokerages can support different agent types. Last, Jack discusses the trends around real estate commissions and how should be able to command higher commissions by clearly articulating their value.
Tax Saving Secrets Of Top Real Estate Agents • Deni Baldwin
Nov 27, 2024
Deni Baldwin talks about what made her decide to become an accountant. Deni discusses the benefits of incorporating as an S-corporation to save on self-employment tax and determining a “fair and reasonable” salary as an S-corporation employee, and how that impacts the taxation of the remaining business income. Next, Deni talks about the differences in asset protection between sole proprietorships, LLCs, and corporations. Last, Deni discusses the pros and cons of holding investment real estate in an LLC vs a corporation, especially around issues like refinancing and triggering gains.
How To Keep Getting Leads While You’re Eating Turkey During the Holidays • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Nov 25, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg will show you exactly what to do to enjoy your holiday season but still keep your social media active and bring in clients!
How To Become The Preferred Real Estate Agent Of A Building Or Neighborhood • Gia Devenyi
Nov 22, 2024
Gia Devenyi talks about how she started her career in real estate in the suburbs and eventually transitioning to the city. Gia talks about the challenges she faced when moving from the suburbs to the city and building a new client base. Gia also describes how she became very involved in the Metropolitan Place building, becoming part of the community and eventually becoming the go-to agent for that building. Last, Gia talks about her passion for fashion and how she intentionally incorporates her unique style into her work as a real estate agent.
First Time Homebuyer Age Has Changed! • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Nov 21, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris and DJ discuss the impact of the recent presidential election on real estate agents and the housing market. Chris discusses the trend of rising average ages for first-time home buyers and home sellers in the U.S and the reasons behind this shift. Chris also discusses the increase in multi-generational home purchases. Last, Chris shares strategies for real estate professionals to support first-time and younger home buyers.
Best Real Estate Social Media Practices for 2025 • Cole Jarvis
Nov 15, 2024
Cole Jarvis talks about his background and how he got into social media marketing. Cole discusses the mistakes real estate agents make in their social media strategies and the importance of creating authentic content. Cole also discusses the evolution of social media platforms, stressing the importance of agents adapting their strategy to earn views and engagement in the current landscape. Last, Cole shares strategies for building a strong personal brand and standing out on social media for real estate agents.
What Agents Need To Understand About Hispanic Real Estate Clients • Ainhoa Garcia
Nov 01, 2024
Ainhoa Garcia shared her story of coming to America as an au pair in 2012 and eventually transitioning into a real estate career. Ainhoa discusses the challenges she faced as an immigrant, including learning the language, navigating immigration status, and building a client base from scratch. Ainhoa emphasizes the importance of getting involved in the community, volunteering, and building genuine relationships with her “family of clients” to grow her business. Ainhoa also highlighted the significant and growing Hispanic homebuyer market, providing insights on how non-Hispanic realtors can effectively serve these clients by understanding the cultural nuances around family involvement in the home buying process.
Over 500m In Real Estate Sold • Cindy Raney
Oct 31, 2024
Cindy Raney describes her transition from a financial advisor to becoming a successful real estate agent. Cindy talks about the challenges and strategies of breaking into and thriving in the highly competitive luxury real estate market. Cindy also discusses her approach to maintaining consistency and productivity through a dedicated team, coaching, and a structured daily routine. Last, Cindy talks about the role of social media and digital marketing in her business, as well as the significance of hard work and discipline in achieving her level of success.
How To Combine Your Passions & Real Estate • Brandon Doyle
Oct 29, 2024
Brandon Doyle talks about his journey into real estate and what’s it like working with family. Brandon talks extensively about his YouTube channel dedicated to smart home technology, the content creation process, and how it helped him position as an expert in the field. Brandon discusses strategies for leveraging short-form and long-form video content, as well as using AI tools to streamline content creation and repurposing. Finally, Brandon talks about the systems and technologies he uses to run their real estate practice.
How Chicago’s Top Solo Agent Wins Listings • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Oct 28, 2024
In our October episode, Carrie McCormick describes what her typical week looks like. Carrie explains how to use listing presentations to make yourself stand out from your competition. Carrie also discusses the power of video as the go to tool for 2025 for story telling of the property you’re marketing. Next, Carrie discusses the importance of connection with the buying agent. Last, Carrie talks about differentiating yourself in the market you operate.
How Agents Can Increase Their Speaking Confidence & Effectiveness • Linda Ugelow
Oct 23, 2024
Linda Ugelow discussed the value of embracing imperfection and mistakes in your videos to build relatability. Linda also discussed developing a positive relationship with the camera as one of strategies for overcoming performance anxiety. Linda and DJ also talked about the potential benefits of using TikTok for realtors. Last Linda and DJ addressed the challenge of self-criticism when watching yourself on video and the need for self-compassion.
How To Convert Real Estate Leads Into Clients • Mitch Ribak
Oct 18, 2024
Mitch Ribak talks about how he found quick success in real estate. Mitch explains that he focused on lead generation, follow-up, and business planning to build his real estate business. He discusses his modern team model that allows him to work fewer hours while being more profitable. Mitch emphasizes the importance of balancing business success with personal life and family time. Mitch highlights the importance of managing expectations, continuous improvement, and taking action on strategies learned.
From Broke To The Top Agent In The State In 4 Years • Austin Cheviron
Oct 16, 2024
Austin Cheviron talks about his real estate and coaching journey. Austin discusses how his vision helped him come from being broke to being the top agent in Indiana. Austin also describes how he built his team and trained them to close over 500 transactions with an average monthly budget of only 20k to do it. Last, Austin and DJ discuss the importance of educating agents in financial management.
If you’re an agent interested in learning to turn your content into cash and use video to get clients, apply ASAP for Kim’s Video Boot Camp. It’s a small group live coaching program with limited spots. Only run twice a year, apply now for the October cohort. You’ll learn how to be confident on camera, how to make high-quality videos easily and what videos to make to actually bring in leads. Join the hundreds of other agents from coast-to-coast who have learned from Kim and are now bringing in big commissions from social media.
How To Convert Your Real Estate Video Content Into Commissions • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Oct 01, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg will show you exactly how agents are bringing in commissions through video. What does it look like? What are the skills you need? What is the process?
If you’re an agent interested in learning to turn your content into cash and use video to get clients, apply ASAP for Kim’s Video Boot Camp. It’s a small group live coaching program with limited spots. Only run twice a year, apply now for the October cohort.
You’ll stop stressing about what to post and learn how to message, build a strategy and craft high-quality video easily. Join the hundreds of other agents from coast-to-coast who have learned from Kim.
Why is N.A.R.’s Clear Cooperation Policy Under Fire? • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Sep 30, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris explains what the N.A.R Clear Cooperation is. Chris and DJ discuss the pros and cons of clear cooperation. Next, Chris discusses why are agent’s connections important at this moment. Chris also talks about who is pushing against the Clear Cooperation policy and why. Last, Chris explains what changes would he personally do to the real estate policies if he had the power.
How To Work With Clients That Want To Buy Properties Outside The U.S. • Maximiliano Götz
Sep 24, 2024
Maximiliano Götz a seasoned professional with over 25 years of experience in the real estate business in Argentina talks about how he got into the real estate business. Max also talks about the real estate in Argentina. He shares his insight on how foreigners can invest in real estate in Argentina.
Why Showing Up On Camera Is More Important Than Ever Post NAR Settlement • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Sep 20, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach & Award-winning Marketer Kim Rittberg gives tips on how to build-in video to your other professional activities. Kim also talks about how to show what’s unique about you by using video. Last, Kim talks about the importance of being a human in the age of AI.
Let Kim know specifically what you’re doing for your business this week by dropping her a line here.
Making Videos About Other Agent Listings • Phil Wells
Sep 19, 2024
Phil Wells talks about how he started his career in real estate. Phil describes how he built his business without a sphere of influence in NY. Next, Phil discusses how he built his social media presence and his YouTube channel and how his YouTube channel and videos impacted his real estate business. Phil and DJ also discuss how to decide what content to provide to your audience and audio podcasts vs. video content.
Starting In Real Estate Later In Life • Julia Stauffer
Sep 13, 2024
Julia Stauffer with Macdonald Realty in West Vancouver talks about how she transitioned to a new career in real estate in the age of 50. Julia discusses elements that helped her shift be a success and how she built her business. Next, Julia talks about how she approaches video content for her social media and how she built her brand. Last, Julia shares tips she would give to a brand new agent.
This Is More Important Than Social Media For Marketing! • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Aug 30, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris discusses the results of Luxury Presence 2024 state of real estate marketing report. Chris and DJ talk about the big shift that is happening in the tools used by agents in marketing. Next, Chris talks about the importance of video in real estate business and authenticity. Chris also discusses marketing budget and email marketing.
How To Transition From Dual Career To Full Time Agent • Ryan Overcash
Aug 29, 2024
Ryan Overcash talks about how he got into real estate business. Ryan discusses networking and building relationships and emphasizes the importance of these two elements in both business and life. Ryan also discusses the general concerns about the changes in real estate business regarding the NAR settlement. Ryan stresses the importance of adapting to changes in the industry. Last, Ryan discusses innovative marketing strategies and describes how he leveraged his passion for gold in his business.
Why You Need An Accountability Partner • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Aug 28, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach & Award-winning Marketer Kim Rittberg talks about the importance of accountability. Kim discusses the role of accountability partners. Kim also discusses her 7 day course on how to get good in camera.
Let Kim know specifically what you’re doing for your business this week by dropping her a line here.
Listen to Kim’s 5 minute mini-master classes on marketing every Friday on The Exit Interview with Kim Rittberg podcast The Exit Interview with Kim Rittberg.
In this episode Michelle discusses how to use your passions to build better content for your social media. Michelle explains what value series is and how to build a T graph using your passions. Michelle also emphasizes the importance of environment in creating connections with your audience. Last, Michelle talks about the importance of bonding one-on-one with your audience.
What A Top 1% Agent Is Doing Post-Settlement To Keep Their Business Strong • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Aug 26, 2024
In our August episode, Carrie McCormick discusses what she’s doing to adapt to the new NAR rules. Carrie also discusses the importance of practicing your speech especially in the beginning of this new era. Carrie shares her predictions on what will happen with the slight decrease in the rates while the inventory is still low. Last, Carrie discusses the importance of strengthening your current client relationships.
Mortgage Discrimination & How To Close The Homeownership Gap • Anna DeSimone
Aug 23, 2024
Anna DeSimone author, talks about how her career started. Anna talks about the importance of educating the consumer. Next, Anna discusses the state of the real estate market at the moment and fluctuations that have been seen during the last decade. Anna also discusses the the process of property valuation. Anna and DJ also discuss unconscious bias. Last, Anna talks about her book and the lost opportunities she presents there.
How To Generate Real Estate Leads On YouTube • Sam Caudle
Aug 20, 2024
Sam Caudle talks about what got him into real estate and how he started posting videos on his YouTube channel. Sam describes how he makes his videos and how he comes up with the topics. Sam also describes his shooting and production process and discusses the length of his videos. Next, Sam talks about SEO specifically to YouTube and shares his tips. Last, Sam discusses the course he offers to help real estate agents build their YouTube channels.
Self-Growth Is The Key To More Real Estate Business • Dani Hampton
Aug 15, 2024
Dani Hampton talks about the beginning of her career in real estate. Dani discusses talks about teams and how the team she joined helped shape her career and also what she looks in an agent when they want to join her team. Next Dani and DJ discuss the importance of self-growth. Dani also talks about how she approaches social media and branding. Last Dani discusses how she builds client relationships and how this sets her for success.
Does Rent Control Help or Hurt Tenants & Landlords? • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Jul 31, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris talks about the current topics in the real estate world right now. Chris and DJ discuss the rent control policy proposed by President Biden. Next, Chris explains better solutions to this policy. Chris also discusses what agents can talk to their clients about during this time with low inventory. Last, Chris gives his predictions on 0% coops.
A Top 1% Agent Reflects On First Half Of 2024 • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jul 29, 2024
In our July episode, Carrie McCormick talks about what she learned in the first half of this year. Carrie also discusses the importance of hospitality in the real estate business. Next, Carrie explains what she’s been using AI for in her daily job and how every agent can incorporate it in their business. Last, Carrie discusses the importance of social media for her business.
In this episode Michelle talks about how to create content that will make you stand out in IG and will lead to more appointments and business out of the platform. Michelle also discusses the importance of building your own community on your platform. Next, Michelle talks about how to provide unique content to your followers.
What Does Financial Freedom Look Like For Real Estate Agents? • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Jul 25, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin talks about how to control your money and don’t let your money control you. Dr. Erin explains what financial management is and she also gives a step by step financial management guideline for financial freedom.
The Art Of Luxury Properties • Howard Lorey
Jul 19, 2024
Howard Lorey the Executive Vice President and Brokerage Manager of Nourmand & Associates talks about his transition from professional musician to a career in real estate. Howard discusses agent development and the processes he uses when coaching his agents. Next, Howard talks about what non-luxury agents misunderstand most of the time about the luxury real estate. Howard also talks about the NAR settlement and the changes he’s seeing in his market. Last, Howard describes how to stay in touch with high net worth clients after the sale.
Always Go Back To What Works • Nikki Miller
Jul 17, 2024
Nikki Miller the Founder and CEO of formerly The LEAD Syndicate and now Lever by Movoto talks about how she got started in real estate. Nikki describes how she built her whole business door knocking. Nikki emphasizes the importance of continually doing the things that brought you success in the first place. Last, Nikki talks about how her company, Lever by Movoto, and how helps agents build and grow their business.
How To Build Strong Client Relationships • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Jul 11, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin talks about the importance of building strong relationships with your clients. Dr. Erin shares a few tips on effective communication. Dr. Erin also talks about client management and how to best leverage it.
What to Film on Your Summer Vacation or Down Time for Social Media • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Jul 10, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach & Award-winning Marketer Kim Rittberg talks about what to film on your summer vacation. Kim talks about how to film yourself or your family and what to write to match with this content. Last Kim discusses how to capture ‘visual metaphors’ and what that means!
Listen to Kim’s 5 minute mini-master classes on marketing every Friday on The Exit Interview with Kim Rittberg podcast The Exit Interview with Kim Rittberg.
Over 1 Billion In Production Per Year • Jim Remley
Jul 09, 2024
Jim Remley talks about how he started his real estate career at the age of 19. Jim talks about what he’s coaching agents to do to keep productive right now and how to build friendships that will ultimately bring business your way. Next, Jim discusses buyer representation and how to convince your buyers that they need you. Jim also talks about growing your team/brokerage and shares tips on how to attract a producing agents. Last, Jim talks about what how to get repeat business and discusses how he coaches his agents on achieving this.
What Agents Should Understand About Financing Options • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Jun 28, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin explains seller financing and first-lean position. Dr. Erin also defines seller financing. Next, Dr. Erin discusses the benefits for sellers and buyers when using seller financing. Last, Dr. Erin talks about assumable mortgage, its benefits and its limitation.
Two Things Your Real Estate Videos Must Have • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Jun 26, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach & Award-winning Marketer Kim Rittberg talks about 2 types of content you need to succeed. Kim discusses how to make these videos and what to put in them. Last, Kim talks about how to leverage Chat GPT in creating content for your social media.
Why Every Real Estate Transaction Should Include A Trust • Alessandro Chesser
Jun 25, 2024
Alessandro Chesser the Founder and CEO of getdynasty.com talks about how he got into the business of managing people’s trust. Alessandro talks about what getdynasty does and what are the benefits of having your home put in a trust. Alessandro and DJ discuss when is the best time to put your home in a trust.
Rising Star With Her Own Podcast • Kelly Dugan
Jun 21, 2024
Kelly Dugan with the Gold Group talks about how she got into real estate business. Kelly discusses what she’s doing to stay productive and keep the business growing. Kelly also talks about how she educates her clients in their real estate journey. Last, Kelly talks about teams and her experience of being a part of a team.
In this episode Michelle talks about how to create loyalty by building a community. Michelle walks you through the steps of building a community with your content, creating content that serves your own community, prospecting that comes as a result of building your community and finally using ChatGPT to create content relevant for to your community.
How To Double Your Production • Ryan Rodenbeck
Jun 14, 2024
Ryan Rodenbeck with Spyglass Realty talks about how he got started in real estate. Ryan discusses how he help agents double their production. Being a tech person, Ryan discusses where the tech space is headed for the realtors and how the technology is developing to assist agents. Ryan also discusses how is he training his agents to have the buyer agency conversations with their clients. Last, Ryan and DJ interest rates.
Calculating Your Monthly Income Goal • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Jun 13, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin discusses the 2 ways she uses to keep herself motivated. Next, Dr. Erin explains what financial freedom means to her personally. Last Dr. Erin explains how to calculate your monthly income goal.
Dr. Erin would love to hear from you, email her at erin.m.helle@gmail.com and also check out the handout here.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Kaplan Real Estate (From now until August 31, use code 10BAP for a 10% discount on Kaplan’s Buyer Agency Professional™ (BAP™) course).
How To Future Proof Your Real Estate Business • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jun 03, 2024
In our June episode, Carrie McCormick talks about the changes that are seen in the world right now with the development of AI. Carrie also discusses the changes in the searching, buying and selling properties methods from the younger generations. Carrie emphasizes the importance of always following these changes and developments in order to remain relevant.
How To Get Out Of Your Own Way • Chris M. King
May 31, 2024
Chris M. King with StatusFlow talks about how he got into coaching. Chris talks about the correlation between psychology and success. Next, Chris discusses what the role-model mindset is and how to adopt it. Last, Chris discusses how agents can create more innovative solutions.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Real Estate • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
May 30, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris talks abut his experience in Inman Miami and his take out of the event. Chris and D.J. discuss next generation AI and how its going to impact the way agents do business. Next, Chris discusses about politics and economic activity and how an election year impacts the housing market. Last, Chris gives advise on how can agent use the data from their MLS to provide value to their clients.
Here’s Your Next Month Of Social Media Content (On Us!) • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
May 23, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin talks about her family and what being a military wife with kids looks like. Dr. Erin discusses 10 different topics you can talks about in your social media posts. Dr. Erin also walks you through the steps to create social media content on a particular topic that will cover the whole month.
In her first episode Michelle Berman-Mikel talks about building presence on Instagram without being present. Michelle talks about how to maintain a very dynamic presence in Instagram and how to balance personal presence with business presence. Michelle also shares 5 problems that come as a result of not having a targeted audience. Last, Michelle gives a real life example on how to differentiate yourself using your Instagram content.
Why No One Is Watching Your Videos – And How To Make Them Watch • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
May 20, 2024
Real Estate Video Coach & Award-winning Marketer Kim Rittberg shares why people aren’t watching you videos… and advises you how to make videos that buyers and sellers will watch! And then hire you!
And learn how to bring in clients through your videos with Kim’s Video Boot Camp Intensive! In just 3 days you’ll go from feeling overwhelmed and not getting clients to easily reeling them in! *Next session starts in early June*
Agent Jessica says: “I just got my third client directly from Instagram! This is 100% because of Video Boot Camp. I am so appreciative of you!”
Grab Kim’s Free Download: Improve Your Video Quality to Increase Your Revenue! Grab 10 FREE tips from a former media executive so that you can take your videos from mediocre to magnetic. Grab the free download here
Why Real Estate Agents Need To Partner With New Western • Kurt Byers
May 13, 2024
Kurt Byers with New Western talks about what brought him into real estate. Kurt describes what New Western is and what services they offer. Kurt also talks about their agent partner program is and the solutions they offer to agents. Last, Kurt discusses how agents can leverage from partnering with New Western.
Building Excellence as a Realtor • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
May 09, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin shares her 6 tips on how to build excellence as a realtor.
You can download the Agent Proposition Step-By-Step Guide here. Erin would love for you to guide or help you in this process. Simply email them to erin.m.helle@gmail.com.
How To Scale Your Real Estate Business • Nadira Taylor
May 06, 2024
Nadira Taylor with Diamond Mine Real Estate talks about how she got into the real estate business. Nadira also discusses affordable housing, how she got involved in this niche and what she does to help first home-buyers in their journey. Nadira talks about how she uses social media to educate people on affordable housing solutions. Nadira also talks about the impact of NAR settlement in the future payment structure. Last, Nadira discusses her book “Dream. Catch. Hustle” and shares what agents can learn from it.
Inventory Is About To Hit The Market & Here’s What To Do To Prepare • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Apr 30, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris and D.J. discuss discuss the latest news on the NAR settlement. Chris also discusses what agents could be doing right now to adequately prepare their business for the shift. Next, Chris talks about the effects of baby-boomers’ holding on to their properties for longer and how agents should how to build your team to prepare for the time when these properties will hit the market. Last Chris and DJ discuss the importance of Google My Business and your own website.
In our April episode, Carrie McCormick talks about how to build your business and your brand. Carrie goes back to the beginning of her career in real estate and discusses how she got to where she is right now. Carrie also discusses the importance of knowing your clients and your market, the struggles she faces in her every day business and how to stay positive when facing challenging times. Last, Carrie talks about how to market an ultra high net worth property and how she’s building a network with agents in different market and how that has been helpful to her.
How To Communicate A Real Estate Agent’s Value Proposition • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Apr 26, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
Following the guideline on how to draft your value proposition and mission statement, Dr. Erin Helle guides you on what to practically do with this proposition. Dr. Erin talks about the tools, coaching and network she uses to help investors build life-changing businesses.
You can download the Agent Proposition Step-By-Step Guide here. Erin would love for you to share what you came up with. Simply email them to erin.m.helle@gmail.com.
Recruiting Real Estate Agents With Predictive Analytics and A/I • Sean Soderstrom
Apr 23, 2024
Sean Soderstrom, Co-Founder and CEO of Courted.io talks about his background and describes his career shift. Sean discusses the importance of technology and sophisticated tools to support all the processes and data that are available to agents now. Sean also discuss how A/i and tools are helping agents to be connected with each other easily. Last, Sean emphasized the role of having a system that gathers all the data in one place.
RealSynch – Connecting All Your Real Estate Tools • Scott Sillari
Apr 19, 2024
Scott Sillari with Real Synch talks about his long experience in coaching and in the real estate industry. Scott discusses the importance of connecting people and how sharing your experience leads you to success. Scott also discusses his platform and how it helps business owners reach their goals and dreams by guiding them to make the best business decisions. Scott also emphasized the platform’s feature that makes different systems talk to each other.
Why Real Estate Agents Need To Post Their Videos On YouTube • Gemma Leggett
Apr 18, 2024
Gemma Leggett with RE/MAX in Toronto talks about the challenges of changing careers and her transition from film industry to real estate. Gemma also discusses the challenges she had coming from Paris to Toronto and trying to fit in Canada’s real estate industry. Gemma discusses Youtube videos, and the importance of everyone being genuine. Last, Gemma talks about the power behind asking your clients why they chose you to work with.
Why You Need to Make an About Me Video and What Should Go In It • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Apr 12, 2024
Award-winning marketer and realtor video coach Kim Rittberg teaches you about leveraging video and social media marketing to sell more homes and break down how to do it. Take part in her challenge for this week! Kim was an executive at Netflix and People before bringing her passion for coaching and teaching to real estate agents across the country. She spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway Home Services National Convention and has clients from nearly every agency.
Don’t miss Kim’s 1x a year ‘VIP Real Estate Agent Media Day’ where she’ll create your messaging to highlight you as the ‘go-to agent’ and film you on a special filming day in New York City. It includes full hair & makeup, we do all the script writing for you, and an exclusive intimate networking dinner. You’ll walk away with months worth of video and social media content, plus finalized messaging materials for you to get on speaking panels and pitch the press, apply here.
Defining and Communicating your Value Proposition as a Real Estate Agent • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Apr 09, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin Helle, discusses the importance of concisely communicate the value that you bring to your clients and why should they use their hard earned money to pay for it.
You can download the Agent Proposition Step-By-Step Guide here. Erin would love for you to share what you came up with. Simply email them to erin.m.helle@gmail.com.
Seller Mistakes – The Book Every Agent NEEDS To Read • Michael B. Bell
Mar 29, 2024
Michael B. Bell with Sotheby’s International in Pasadena talks about how he started his career in real estate business. Michael describes how he built his business in his 20s. Michael also talks about his book “Seller Mistakes” where he gives all his secrets to building a successful business. Last, Michael discusses how he handles communication with his clients, shares his advise to the agents who are struggling right now on how to stay busy and active and also talks about the importance of building relations.
Should You Speak In Your Real Estate Videos Or Stay Silent? • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Mar 28, 2024
Do you really need to speak on video for social media? Can it really help you sell more homes? Award-winning marketer and realtor video coach Kim Rittberg teaches you about leveraging video and social media marketing to sell more homes and break down how to do it. Take part in her challenge for this week!
Kim has her ‘VIP Thought Leader Media Day’ where she’ll create your messaging to highlight you as the ‘go-to agent’ and film you on a special filming day in New York City. You’ll walk away with months worth of video and social media content and all of your materials for a media kit.
Grab her free 10 tips to video that sells more homes + bonus ‘Get Confident On Camera’: Newsletter — Kim Rittberg.
Time Blocking Secrets For Real Estate Agents • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Mar 26, 2024
Welcome to another episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin Helle, discusses the importance of these two time-blocking and calendar management. Dr. Erin encourages agents to make a list of the things they need to do for the week and then prioritize them. Dr. Erin talks about the importance of prioritizing the most important things for the business.
32 Transaction In First Year During the Pandemic • Mark Plesha
Mar 22, 2024
Mark Plesha describes how he transitioned from his W-2 job into the real estate business in the middle of the pandemic. Mark discusses the pros and cons when working with investor buyers. Next, Mark explain what probate leads are and how he works in that area. Mark also emphasizes the importance of being nice and how that translated into business opportunities. Last, Mark discusses what he’s doing right now for the future of his business.
What Does The NAR Settlement Mean For Real Estate Agents? • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Mar 19, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris and D.J. discuss the NAR lawsuit on commissions settlement. Chris discusses how will the buyers be affected and the possibility of them being taken advantage of. Chris also gives advise on what agents should tell their clients right now. Next, Chris discusses the impact of the settlement on the buyers and what does the future of buyer’s agents looks like.
Quadrupling Production In Just Two Years • Cameron Buening
Mar 18, 2024
Cameron Buening a 30 under 30 class of 2023 laureate talks about his shift in career from musical theater to real estate. Cameron discusses how he found clients during his first year as a realtor. Cameron talks about how he quadrupled his business and discusses the importance of open houses in his success. Cameron also talks about first-time home buyer seminars he offers. Last, Cameron talks about interest rates and the zero dollar commissions.
Laying The Foundation • Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health • Dr. Erin Helle
Mar 15, 2024
Welcome to the first episode of Grow with Me: Business, Wealth & Health with Dr. Erin Helle.
In this episode Dr. Erin Helle introduces herself and talks about what she’ll be offering in her segment. Dr. Erin explains that twice per month she’ll be offering guidance in building your skills, systems, mindset and goals.
How To Get Seller Homes Ready To List • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Mar 11, 2024
In our March episode, Carrie McCormick talks about how she helps sellers get their homes ready for the market. Carrie discusses the hard conversations she has with her clients and the importance of having data to show them when asking them to make changes. Carrie also talks about building relationships with agents in different markets and the step further she’s taking there.
Carrie can be reached at carrie@atproperties.com or by phone at 312.961.4612.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
How Should You Approach Zero Dollar Cooperative Commissions? • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Feb 29, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris and DJ discuss how the situation evolved around the cooperative commissions. Chris discusses what buyer agents should do when they are faced with a zero cooperative commission rate. Last, Chris also discusses the approach that buyers agents should take at the moment.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
How A NAR 30 Under 30 Winner Generates 300 Leads Per Month At No Cost • Caira Button
Feb 27, 2024
Caira Button a 30 Under 30 2023 laureate talks about her initial plan when she moved to Chicago and how that lead to her career in real estate. Caira shares her tips and tricks for starting a YouTube channel and also discusses how she built her own channel. Caira discusses her process of writing, editing and publishing a video on her channel. Caira also talks about how she built her team.
Caira Button can be reached at caira.button@compass.com.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
How Real Estate Agents Can Save Tens of Thousands Every Year • Shahar Plinner
Feb 26, 2024
Shahar Plinner a tax expert talks about how he got into taxes. Shahar discusses ways agents can structure their entities that enable them to save on taxes. Shahar also discusses how to keep a clearer picture of your taxes by keeping separate accounts. Shahar shares tax deductible examples for agents to leverage.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
Relationships Outperform Market Conditions Every Time • Brad Boeye
Feb 23, 2024
Brad Boeye talks about how he got started in the real estate business as the third generation in the business. Brad discusses his perspective on the market right now and where it’s headed. Brad also discusses branding and what he’s doing to maintain his brand. Last, Brad talks current market and the importance of good relationships.
Brad Boeye can be reached at bboeye@bradboeye.com.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
When You Should Dance on Social Media Video • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Feb 20, 2024
Do you enjoy dancing? Award-winning video marketer and coach Kim Rittberg shows you how and when you can dance on your social media and grow your business doing it.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 Well, I never thought I’d say this, but today’s episode is all about dancing. interested. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by apply design Welcome to a revolution in real estate presentation brought to you by apply design the leading Virtual Staging solution tailored for forward thinking realtors. Now in today’s fast paced market making a lasting impression is everything. With applied design you unlock the full potential of every listing, transforming empty spaces into stunning buyer attracting homes all with just a few clicks. And in just a few minutes. Choose their DIY staging available for as low as $7 per image, or save time with their auto staging feature for as low as $10.50 per image plus experience their service firsthand with a trial image absolutely free. Their intuitive platform empowers you to bring visions to life ensuring your listing standout Captivate and sell and for listeners of keeping it real apply design is offering an exclusive 15% off your first purchase. Simply use the code real 24 That’s our EA L two four at checkout. Elevate your listings enchant your clients and achieve faster sales with apply design. Don’t let your properties blend in make them shine with applied design. Your success story starts now visit them at apply design.io. Again, that’s applied design.io Remember, your first impression is the only impression. And now onto the show.
Kim Rittberg 3:02 Giving real listeners my absolute favorite podcast I am Kim rickford I help real estate agents get clients leads and more revenue through video and podcasts. And I run a video bootcamp program. And I do one on one work. My background is that I came in from TV being a TV producer and a journalist and then shifting into digital video at US Weekly and Netflix. And I bring all of that to you as real estate agents. So you understand how to make great content that really brings in clients. So talking today about why you should dance on video. We’re so I actually am a huge advocate generally of not dancing on video. I think that the whole idea of dancing on video is not necessary. If you don’t like it, right? The whole idea of like do a dance on Instagram, do a dance on Tik Tok be silly, it can work. And other times it won’t work. It really just depends on who you are. But I’m here today to talk about the times that you should be dancing on camera. So I’m going to step back and say when you’re thinking about what content to be making, really, really important, especially for real estate agents to be merging that personal and that professional. So a lot of times I work with agents, it’s one or the other. It’s all personal. Cats, you walk in your dog, a trip you took with your your spouse, your favorite restaurant, and your feed should not be totally personal. Because then someone can’t go there and know how they can work with you. They’re not going to refer you to someone that a lot of times people go to look at your social page after they’re considering working with you. So I’ve had agents come to me and say, Oh, I close the deal, because I know they looked at my page and they saw I was legit, and they were able to get to know me, and then they worked with me. So it’s important that your feed should not just be all personal. It’s important for people to get to see some of that professional as well. So the times though, there’s other times where I go to your feed and it’s like all videos where you’re talking to the cat Camera, or all just listed, just sold. So the times when your feed is all professional, and it really doesn’t have any of you, you’re really missing out on bringing in clients that way why. So, if you have all of the homes that you’ve listed and sold great, in some ways, it’s awesome, it shows that you’re credible, and that you’re an agent who can do work and has done work. So you’re making the home seller happy, you’re making the buyer happy, they’re seeing that you’re doing the work, the the actual owner of that home that you’re selling feels like they’re getting love and support, and they’re getting more eyeballs on their house. However, if everything in your feed is just listed and just sold and all of the home content, you’re not able to elevate yourself as the go to agent. So someone’s not necessarily getting to know you. They’re seeing that home, the kitchen, the backyard, great, but they’re really not getting to know you in any advanced way. So the key is to merge them both. So we talked about merging them both what does that look like? How does that look like in practice? So you have to think about what are the things that are part of my life, my personal life that I love, and I can talk about all day and I am actively doing, meaning it will be hard for you to film it that I want to bring in to my social. Now this brings us to dancing. I have two left feet. So I don’t actually have two feet, I’m okay with a little bit of wine. I’m okay at dancing in a casual setting, but I despised literally despise dance routines. So like I always hated when you know if there was like, I remember an eighth grade play dance routine as a part of like a talent show or something or sing. And you’ll have to revert routine. I was always in the back row. I just can’t count. So 123 and four. So for me, that’s a very uncomfortable situation. Okay. But recently, I was on a vacation with my husband. And he enjoys a dance class here and there. So I said, Okay, why don’t we take a salsa class? hoping you’d say no, because I really hate dance classes. But he said yes, I knew he would find it fun. So I’m thinking in my head, okay. This is deeply uncomfortable for me. And we’re doing salsa in public in public, in a public square. I’m gonna capture some content of this. Okay, so hear me out. Before we salsa danced for my social media. One of the things that I always talk about is being uncomfortable, because I teach people to be on camera to get out of our comfort zone, right to push yourself a little bit so that you’re uncomfortable, a little bit uncomfortable, because that little bit of discomfort is going to go and help you grow. Right? If it’s uncomfortable, it means your brain is growing. So that is one of the things I consistently talk about. So then when I’m dancing, and I’m dancing, not in a way that I’m loving, but in a way that’s slightly uncomfortable for me, it really pulls back to my business. So when you’re making a video of you dancing, you can just do a silly dance, that’s fine. But you really want to pull it back to your business. So I have a good example actually. What am I my real estate agents Oh, she’s so fun. Alice, she roller skates. She roller skates in properties. I love that. So roller skating on its own, could be a great part of her professional and personal content. But it’s great when it’s tied together. So when you’re figuring out what part of your personal life to put into your social media, the ones that metaphorically are really closely tied are awesome. That’s because people’s brains can connect it more easily. So I’m dancing, salsa, I’m wearing like a yellowish dress, actually, someone came over to me and said, You look like the dress, you’re wearing the dress and 10 Things I Hate About You know, not 10 things at about you win with Kate Hudson 10 How to Lose a Guy in 10 days anyway. And so I posted it and it got a lot of engagement. And the reason why I got a lot of engagement is because people just like to like see you on vacation and having fun. But also, I am clearly very focused on this dance. And I’m having fun, but I’m also it’s hard. It truly is hard for me. And I wrote that in the caption that, you know, it took a salsa class, this is deeply uncomfortable. I’m practicing what I preach. For some this is fun. It’s not fun for me. And so that’s the time when even if you don’t like to dance, you should dance on video, when the part of your personal life that you’re bringing to social media is aligned. So how does that work another team other other ways. I don’t think there are a hard and fast rules about what you should and shouldn’t put on. However, I think you really need to have a strategy that you live by. And so you say when I post content my professional content is under these buckets. And my personal content is under this bucket when they can dovetail amazing Fantastic, great when they don’t dovetail, okay, they could still exist, it’s a way to bring people in. So the important part about bringing in that personal content, there is only so much professional content that people are going to respond to and engage with, right? Not everybody’s gonna have something to say about that kitchen counter, or about the market, or about mortgage rates. So people, especially especially, especially, real estate agents, yeah, that’s sphere of influence. It comes from your friends, your colleagues, your family, your neighbor, or the bagel store owner that you could tell I live in New York, the bagel store owner, but everyone you connect with, and when you’re on social, they actually want to see some of your personal life. You know, people ask me how much is too personal, I think you can figure out what feels too much what feels too personal to share. But other times being more open and being more vulnerable, generally, is really great. Talking about your life, talking about your family, talking about how you got to where you got talking about challenges in your life, that’s very relatable to people. So really bringing people in on that personal level. So when you’re talking about expanding your sphere of influence, you want to activate all of your contacts, they’re all going to be more activated by seeing you on a vacation or dancing, rather than they might not be commenting on those homes, they’re still seeing those homes, so you’re still able to activate that into leads and sales. But when you want engagement, you’re gonna have much more engagement by having that dancing video than just by doing all of the real estate content. So when you’re thinking about dancing, I’m gonna go back to dancing. If there’s a dancing trend, and you’re funny, and that’s a part of you, as a brand, as you’re not brain bass person that feels right for you, then you should do that. But if it doesn’t feel right for you don’t do it. Or look at it, and say, Where’s the metaphor in this? Right? Like, how does this relate to being a real estate agent to working for myself, I mean, everyone knows when you’re a real estate agent working hard, right? And you’re always in that growth mindset, you’re always learning new skills, you have to be out in the field a lot, you’re really shaking a lot of hands. And so when you have experiences, you can kind of relate it to being a real estate agent, running your own business. And so just be conscious of, there aren’t hard and fast rules on when to dance and when not to dance. But bringing people into your life. Whether that’s you doing a salsa class, whether that’s you doing karaoke, whether that’s what you walk in your dog, whether that’s you, I don’t know, I have some outdoorsy agents that work with me whether you’re on a bike ride, really make sure to connect that
with people like have, bring that onto your social. So people are like, Oh, I love to ride my bike. Hey, where do you ride, that’s beautiful. So people, you’re gonna get more engagement and things like that. And also, though, Next Level is like, if you can tie your personal life back to your professional life. That’s fantastic. I think that that’s really, really like a hole in one when we’re talking about you think about those thought leaders that go to agents, the experts of the industry, they’re really mining their personal life, for those greater truths. So really looking and saying, what’s happened in my life, what’s happening in my life that I’m learning from, that I’m growing from that I’m pushing myself. And so that’s where the magic comes in, is when you’re really mining that for those metaphors, visual metaphors to say you’re a bike rider or let’s say you like to hike, you’re in a beautiful area, you look out from a little bit of a hill. Maybe it’s a metaphor of hiking is like being an agent. You’re always climbing you don’t know where the summit is. But once you get there, the airfields clear. And it feels amazing. I just made that up right now, you guys, it’s not kind of impressive. I’m very poetic. True story. My mom is actually a poet, so maybe a little bit of her seeped into me. Okay. I’d love to hear questions from you. What would you like to learn about? What should I talk about next time I’m keeping it real. Make sure to connect with me. I’m on Instagram at kinrick Berg. And don’t forget when you post content tag me, I love my keeping it real folks. They’re like the best. I have friends all over the country now. So make sure to tag me at camera, Burke, you can follow me on Instagram. You can follow me on Instagram, you follow me on Facebook. And you can grab my free download 10 tips to make videos that grow your revenue. Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about, and how to be more comfortable on camera. So that’s a free download cambric for.com It has a pop up there or slash newsletter either one. And let me know. Let me know what we’ll need to cover next time. I love connecting with you. Keep up the good work. I know it’s hard, you’re doing great. And showing up at all is better than not showing up and you are activating you can turn your content into cash. You can turn your content into cash. So don’t let your phone be a doom scrolling. Let it convert content into cash. You can do it Right everybody I’m Kim Rydberg RITTB ERG on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever and grab my free download. Until next time.
Real Estate Instagram Prospecting Top Strategies • Michelle Berman-Mikel
Feb 16, 2024
Michelle Berman-Mikel the CEO & Founder of Beyond the Method™ and Berman Media PD talks about how she got involved in social. Michelle discusses what do realtors get wrong about their Instagram and also how often should agents post and what should they post. Michelle also breaks down the types of posts they arrange for their clients for every day of the week. Last, Michelle discusses the importance of using media to connect with prospects.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re talking with one of the top Instagram prospecting coaches in the country for realtors. Get excited and stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by apply design Welcome to a revolution in real estate presentation brought to you by apply design the leading Virtual Staging solution tailored for forward thinking realtors. Now in today’s fast paced market making a lasting impression is everything. With applied design you unlock the full potential of every listing, transforming empty spaces into stunning buyer attracting homes all with just a few clicks. And in just a few minutes. Choose their DIY staging available for as low as $7 per image, or save time with their auto staging feature for as low as $10.50 per image plus experience their service firsthand with a trial image absolutely free. Their intuitive platform empowers you to bring visions to life ensuring your listing standout Captivate and sell and for listeners of keeping it real apply design is offering an exclusive 15% off your first purchase. Simply use the code real 24 That’s our EA L two four at checkout. Elevate your listings enchant your clients and achieve faster sales with apply design. Don’t let your properties blend in make them shine with applied design. Your success story starts now visit them at apply design.io Again, that’s applied design.io remember your first impression is the only impression. And now onto the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Instagram prospecting coach Michelle Berman. Before we get to Michelle, just a couple of quick reminders first support our sponsors. We love them. They’re the reason we can do these episodes and pay our staff so please check out their services and products consider investing in them. We vet our vendors, our advertisers and only pick ones that we know are actually going to help your real estate business and second, leave us a review let us know what you think of the show whatever podcast app you might be listening on us to right now. You know let us know what you think and we read every review and comment helps us make the show better and better. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event Instagram, let’s talk with Michelle Berman.
Today on the show our guest is Michelle Berman. Michael and Instagram prospecting coach for real estate agents. Let me tell you more about Michelle. Now Michelle is a nationally sought after Instagram prospecting coach, speaker and owner of Berman media PD. She’s also the creator of beyond the method, which is an online course that teaches realtors and loan officers how to tap into the brains of their ideal clients and leverage the data it provides to actively prospect on the platform of Instagram. Her specialty is helping agents see the platform as a viable lead source so that they could scale their relationships but also build credibility in their local markets. Michelle is also the host of the coffee and questions podcast. And Michelle is an expert in understanding and utilizing psychology to help people tap into the power of Instagram and its ability to be a lead generation source for your business. To learn about Michelle’s course and all things Michelle visit her website Berman media pd.com. I will have a link to that in the show notes and also follow her on Instagram which is Berman media social br M A N. Berman media social link to that as well in the show notes. Michelle, welcome to the show.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 5:20 Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. And I’m so excited.
D.J. Paris 5:24 I’m so excited to have you. We rarely ever talk about Instagram, and I am not particularly skilled at Instagram myself. So I am excited to learn along with our audience. But tell me more about you. How did you get involved in social?
Michelle Berman-Mikel 5:39 Yeah, this is my absolute favorite story to tell. So thanks for starting with that question, for sure. But I actually got into the Instagram space way back in 2014. So when that when that started, at that time of my life, Instagram was much more about sort of the influencer space, right in the sense of, you know, not necessarily holding a pretty hot product and getting paid to do it. But more so I was the broker between the large brands and the Instagram accounts that we were placing content on, or buying ad space on. So really what happened was I was sort of in the middle of these huge brands trying to promote product, trying to drive website clicks and trying to drive views. And honestly, at that point, buying things off Instagram wasn’t really a thing yet, you had to go to a website. So I was in between the brand and in between the accounts themselves. So in that process, I personally purchased several large Instagram accounts to do this on my own. So I was selling ad space of my own, I was working with the brands to create all the ads writing all the copy, deciding on which pages to put their content on to hopefully drive sales. And what I learned in the process was really, really quickly how to see through the crap, right? Hope I can say that that way, but fake views, fake likes, fake everything that’s on the platform, right? Yes, it was my job to sniff it out. Because if a company was paying me a large sum of money to help them produce more money, and we put we chose that Instagram page to put their ad on and it didn’t produce anything, then that ultimately fell back on me. So in the process, I just had to really be able to sniff that stuff out. So with that being said, I got very good at understanding what worked, what didn’t work, what kind of content was going to resonate with an audience and what wasn’t, what kind of copy was going to actually get someone to take action. So long story short, I face planted into the art of human psychology and sales psychology and have those two worlds merge. Fast forward to today, I run a very large Instagram prospecting company. So we specialize in teaching real estate agents and loan officers how to actually actively prospect on Instagram, versus what a lot of us know as passive prospecting, right, which is, traditionally what Instagram has been, which is sort of this platform of just post content, make good videos, write good captions, make sure you show up in your stories consistently. But then you just sort of sit and wait for inbound messages. So you’re sort of living in this reactive space. And I have spent the better part of you know, close to five years since launching beyond the method, trying to flip that upside down and showing people that Instagram is not just a placeholder for great content, it’s a platform that can actually replace a lot of the outbound prospecting that you have to do or that real estate agents tend to do in the form of like cold calling, and, and all kinds of other things. So that’s the fast way to go from 2014 to today.
D.J. Paris 8:47 This is real, I’m really excited to dive into this because I, I really only know to look at Instagram, from a research and development perspective from an agent. So an agent can follow all of their clients and their prospects, and learn about their lives and then use that as reasoning to reach out, Hey, I saw you went on vacation, I saw the picture of that fancy dinner you made. So that’s and that is not about posting content. And so I’m really excited to learn more about sort of best practices with content and also relationship building. But the only thing I know to do with Instagram is be like, Oh, I saw somebody did this and maybe I could reach out and develop, you know, a stronger relationship that way. But there’s so much more, of course to developing a content calendar really thinking about what kind of content somebody can somebody can produce and promote that actually drives business in a way that’s authentic and and not salesy. So yeah, let’s talk about it. Well, maybe the first thing to talk about is what do Realtors get wrong about their own Instagram accounts like what are they doing that you just go gosh, I if I could wave a magic wand and tell them all not to do this, what were what are they doing that you wish
Michelle Berman-Mikel 9:59 they Oh my Got, how much time? Do we have DJ all the time. There’s a handful of them. And I’m gonna do my best to keep it Switzerland as far as how I would describe this. But there’s really two big ones that jumped out at me as someone who spends all day every day consuming real estate agents content on Instagram. First and foremost is they’re leveraging boilerplate templates, right? So what that means is that they’re using services that are producing the same type of content for every person that’s using the service. And the problem with that is for you as the real estate agent, right? You’re like, Yes, this is easy. It’s cheap. Cool. Now, I don’t have to worry about it. I checked my social media box. But the problem is that there’s no person there. There’s no brand built into that. There’s definitely no like, who is Michelle? Or who is DJ invest involved in that content. And the problem with that, for me as a consumer is I’m not hiring you as a real estate agent, because your content says that you’re the top 1% in your area. I’m hiring you because I like you as a human. There’s something psychologically that’s connecting us, right? Oh, you’re into CrossFit, too. So hi, my husband runs ultra marathons. Wait, so it is mine. Right. And now we’re building this like very intentional and very authentic relationship. And then you as the real estate agent, I hire you as the vehicle to get me from, I want to buy a house, but I’m, too I now own a house. But I’m choosing you because I like you, and then you just become the mechanism to get me there. Right. And so I think real estate agents think that Instagram is a place for them to show off. And it’s it’s sort of overproduced, and it’s like this big giant production of content. And I have had, in my almost 10 years, I’ve probably had a videographer follow me around like maybe three or four times on one hand, right? So 95% of the content that I produce on a daily basis is from my phone. That’s it, right? So
D.J. Paris 11:59 so we’re so we’re just about understanding correctly, we’re talking about, for example, the kinds of boilerplate content that Realtors often will fall back on is closed, closed sale, or I just won this award or I just got, you know, I’m in the top, as you said, 1%. I just again, it’s it’s achievement here are all my achievements, or, and you’re right, that doesn’t really speak to what I mean, anyone other than your parents might want to see or your maybe your best friends. But
Michelle Berman-Mikel 12:30 yeah, boilerplate content. Also, second, to your point there, DJ, because yes, absolutely. But the second part to boilerplate content is, if you’ve ever seen those sort of stock images that go out, sure, right, where if you’re, if you’re paying, you know, 150 bucks a month, and it posts on your behalf, and all it does is slap your photo on it, but it’s the background is a kitchen that’s not of one of your listings, or it’s not like that type of stuff, right? It’s very unauthentic. It’s definitely not organic content. And it’s usually when rinse, wash, repeat, right? So I have a friend that I’m talking to on Instagram right now. And he recommended another person to me, and he’s like, Hey, you gotta go look at this guy’s Instagram. And then you gotta yell at him. Because I know him. So tell him I told you to yell at him. And I was like, What are you talking about? And I pulled up his Instagram, and every single piece of content was one of the stock templates. And the only personal photo on the entire account with over 200 posts was his profile photo. That’s it. So that’s the problem, right? It’s like if I click on this gentleman’s account, I’m like, Who is this dude? Right? It’s just says his business business business or quote template. So
D.J. Paris 13:41 should should we think about Instagram as Yes, a way to demonstrate what we know and maybe some of our achievements, I certainly feel there’s a place for that. But most importantly, would you define Instagram as a way for people to get to know me or the agent as an actual individual both professionally and whatever degree of personal somebody wants to expose
Michelle Berman-Mikel 14:07 Absolutely 1,000,000% And there’s certainly a great point there that you just mentioned that I don’t want to skip over which is you know, how personal Are you willing to get you know, I have a private coaching client who he is not comfortable posting his children on Instagram. I have no problem with that right? I have a two and a half year old so any of you guys who see my Instagram you’ll see him he’s the best thing ever, but I love talking about him I love posting about him. But not everybody is that comfortable? Right? When you when you have things like hunting or shooting right like my husband is medically retired Greenbrae so we shoot a lot like we have we have we own several guns in our home. And for me, that’s just part of who I am. But that’s not going to go on my Instagram, right like maybe a video of my husband and I going to the range for like a date night, but I’m not going to be posting other content related to the gun piece right now. But
D.J. Paris 15:00 is the reasoning for that that is the reason for not posting gun content because you feel that’s a fairly polarizing topic or,
Michelle Berman-Mikel 15:10 but at the same time, I’m not going to diminish who my husband was, and the fact that he serves or served our country. And is, is that incredible shooter like, and we have a lot of fun going and doing it. But it’s also like another big one is the religion piece, right? Like, can we use? Can we use that in our content? Yes or No, right. But I have clients who, for example, they’ll say, like, Michelle, we love hunting. So how can we post about hunting without it being this polarizing thing. And what I always say is, maybe we don’t post a dead animal, but maybe we just post pictures in front of our car in our camo, right, like getting ready to go. So there is certainly a way to be able to talk about anything and everything that you want to talk about in a way that is designed to be comfortable and consumable. But Instagram as a platform as a whole is designed to be a place where someone gets to know me as a human, and gets to see how credible of a XYZ, I am, right? In this case, we’re talking about real estate agents. So I don’t care as a consumer, if I’m your first house you’ve ever sold, or your 100th house you’ve ever sold. Because if I don’t like you, I’m still not going to hire you. Even if everyone is saying you’re the number one person. So that’s where the active prospecting piece of what I teach specifically comes in, because in order for me to determine, as a consumer, that you’re the real estate agent that I want to hire, there’s some some sort of qualifications, if you will, that are going to make me feel the need or sort of the urge, if you will, to reach out to somebody via social.
D.J. Paris 16:46 That makes sense. I’d like to ask a few other questions that I that are coming to mind that Realtors often ask me about social and I’m not an expert at all. But one of the questions and I know this isn’t an easy, quick answer, but how often to how often to post or write. And we’ll start with their how often to post. So I know this is part of your program. And by the way, we should really be plugging Michelle’s program because she goes through this in step by step details. But beyond the method, it’s been around for five plus years, she updates it all the time. And you can find that at Berman media pd.com. And we’ll have a link to that. But as far as sometimes agents are like, gosh, I don’t have all this time. So what what is your first sort of answer or response to somebody going? How much? How much time is this going to take? And how many posts should I be doing?
Michelle Berman-Mikel 17:37 It’s such a big question. And it’s so loaded, what I what we do for our clients, we have a 30 day calendar, right? So we post 30 days out of the month. For me personally, if you can see my content, I post once every two or three days on my grid, and I am in stories constantly. So stories is for me personally, as someone who’s you know, on Zoom, I don’t even know how many times a day way too many hours by end of our monthly zoom report would be really bad. You know, like your phone tells you like your screen time report, it’s up 60% or whatever. Yeah, I would be worried or nervous to see my Zoom one. But so for me my focus and my emphasis is on my stories consistently every single day. And then my feed content is very intentional. It’s very planned. It’s very thoughtful, and like it just be real, right? Like, if you don’t have something to post that day, then don’t post it. But at the same time, you can strategize and build that out to the place where like in my phone, I know what my next four or five pieces of content are already right now, it comes down to do I have time to write the caption, right. So today I wrote the caption and was able to get it out. And so that’s why there’s a new piece of content out. But for our clients when we are helping do this for them, or when we are coaching it for them. We tell them 30 pieces of content on a monthly basis. But more importantly, that 30 pieces of content is or what’s important about it is what it is broken down into, right. So what are the four categories that make up the 30 pieces of content? Because I believe personally, that there’s this big sort of 8020 rule that’s floating around in the social media space. And I by no means am like saying, you know, these other individuals are not correct. I’m just simply saying that our strategy is a little bit different. In the sense of, of 30 pieces of content a month 15 of those are personal. So half of them are Who am I as a individual, right? And then the other 15 are broken down into three different categories. Each of those three categories are business related. But you have three different categories of business. So you’re not shoving one specific conversation or one specific type of content down somebody’s throat multiple times a month, right? So that 30 pieces of content if you’re producing 30 consistently What I will say is, if we’re doing it for you, you’re gonna get 30 a month. However, if you are the one doing it, don’t stress out over, oh, it’s been two or three days in between, just stay consistent with your calendar of what kind of content you should be producing. And having that in place, like I know what’s coming next, I just have to be able to get to it.
D.J. Paris 20:20 And one of the cool things about Instagram that I think often gets forgotten was we tend to link Instagram and Facebook together, they’re obviously same company, and, you know, one sort of birth the other in a sense, and we tend to think of them as similar platforms, they’re really not, because what you can do an Instagram are one of the major advantages is people can find you very easily. And they can find you through demonstration of some of your hobbies, your interests, your personal stuff, as, as Michelle, as you were saying, and so you know, through hashtags through through content, you can actually find other people that are into the same stuff you’re into. And guess what people who share experiences people who share hobbies, passions, they tend to want to work together. So this is it’s fun. So whatever it is that agents do, maybe in their off hours, even as boring as it may be, if you’re into reading, like that’s okay, that that for some people. I mean, I don’t think reading is boring. But I understand that read writing content about it, you can say, well, how do I do that? Well, you could do a video of a book review of something you just read, that really blew your mind. Or you could just talk about this the best book I read this year or whatever, there’s lots of fun ways to take someone’s passions and interests and produce really easy content, for sure.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 21:39 For sure, for sure. And that those hobbies and those interests, that is how you prospect that knowing that about you about yourself, is how you prospect. So you, you actually sort of started to say a DJ without even probably realizing that you were but those hobbies, right? Like if you’re into reading, right, I’m super into reading I my husband and I love our quiet time when my son’s asleep on the weekends. He’s still naps for a solid two, two and a half hours. So we get our books out. And it is like quiet time. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me like we are reading, right. But it is our favorite time, I just finished the fourth wing series, Rebecca Jaros, who came out with those two books. And I’m now reading the Left Behind series, if anybody’s familiar with them, but I’m a diehard reader. I love real books. I don’t I’m not a huge audible person, I’d much rather hold it in my hand. But what where I’m going with this is when you are actively prospecting on the platform. So many times I hear people will say, How do I do that? Where do I start? Who do I interact with. And there’s really some structure to that. So the way that I teach this quite simply, is it’s five days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, each of the five days are associated to a specific category. And that category is designed to help you talk to the people that are ideal clients of yours that also share those mutual interests. So I’ll do this as fast as possible. And I know we won’t have time to like dig into each of the categories specifically. But Mondays, for example, is following day. So what that means is you’re actually interacting with the people who are following you, not the other way around. Right? So for clarity, when we open Instagram, and we look at our accounts, or when we open it and we see our grid or our feed, right? Both of those are going to show us people that are already I’m sorry that we’re following, right. So we’re going to see the same people that were normal or used to seeing, right, but if we flip that upside down, if I have 10.5 1000 followers, right, and I only follow 1400. I’m not worried about the people that I’m following on this Monday day, right? Because I already know that I’m consistently interacting with those people just naturally. So on Monday, I’m focused on the 10 and a half 1000 that are following me that I don’t know, right? So if I’m scrolling that list, and I’m like, yeah, here’s a realtor. I don’t know, here’s a loan officer, I don’t know, right, I am initiating contact with them. So I’m gonna go to their account, I’m going to see if they have a new piece of content, I’m going to see if they have a new story up, and I’m going to create engagement. There’s some structure around how many and all of that, but I won’t get into that. And the beautiful thing about Monday, is, if you’ve ever heard of like the one two or three degrees of separation, right, we all know the person would somehow based off of that up to six degrees, or I guess six degrees of separation Max is how far we would have to go before we even know somebody, Instagram literally hands that to you on a silver platter in this sense. Because even like you and I getting connected DJ, how did that happen? Right? You interviewed somebody that I knew. So I clicked on her profile, did the suggested accounts button, got this big drop down of all these other accounts and then boom, here’s this, keep it real podcast with DJ and I’m like, Oh, well, I go on podcasts all the time, right. So here’s an opportunity to create a relationship and that relationship was built on via all I did was interact with a realtor that had started following me that I didn’t know. Right. So that’s, and here you are. I mean, here we are right um, which is beautiful. But so Mondays is really easy in the sense of Mondays focus is on the people who are following you, they’re there for a reason, right? Give them a reason to stay by being interactive with them. So that’s what. So
D.J. Paris 25:23 just just to make sure I understand. So Mike, I think this is gold. This is so important. So Monday’s, what we’re doing is we’re going into our feed we are looking or we could go into our follower list, I guess, what would be the best way to figure out if we follow the person or not? Is it literally just one by one? Or do you have like a special word, we’re only
Michelle Berman-Mikel 25:42 focused on the people who are following us in this case. So what you would do, however, many people are following you, and mine is 10 and a half 1000. Right. So I would literally just click on that number, and I would just scroll through the list go down. And we have a tracker, it’s a big, really, I kind of lovingly say it. It’s a very sexy Excel spreadsheet. But really, it’s just a big Excel spreadsheet. But it’s all color coded and pretty and whatever, right. But on Monday, you’re going to end up adding anybody that you interact with, you’re going to add their name to that list, and then you have a tab specifically for it that will grow. Because obviously, you’re not going to be able to interact with every single person that’s following you every Monday. It’s not reality. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 26:22 so the the reason and the reason that we’re interacting with our followers content is the people that follow us is because they are going to notice that we’re interacting, and we’re talking about engagement, like writing content, comments on their posts, maybe sending them would a DM categories, classify or Okay, so any any content, any contact with their content or themselves. Yeah.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 26:48 And keep in mind, right, like, if somebody starts following you, and you don’t know them, they obviously are following you for a reason something created the desire in the other individual to start following you. But if you don’t show up for them in any form of reengage, right, meaning if you start following me DJ, and I just let it go, and I just never go to your profile and engage back with you. You’re sort of kind of a lurker follower and you’re like, Oh, well, I’m following Michelle. But now I don’t really know where and eventually you might stop following me altogether. Right? So how do we create a stick factor? And then how do we create an opportunity to have a conversation with someone as it’s happening, sort of striking, while the iron is hot, if you will, or the concept of that when someone starts to consume us? Now, we’re not saying to somebody, like if you start following me right now, I’m not going to go and send you a DM and say, hey, thanks so much for following me like absolutely not, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to engage like a normal human, we’re going to go look at your content, see if you’ve posted something that I can resonate with, and then I’m going to re I’m going to react or respond to that.
D.J. Paris 27:54 So yeah, I think you were you brought up a really good point. So what we’re what you just talked about is the dreaded linked in connection, because what happens sometimes when we accept a Yeah, we know this, you accept if you accept somebody, I don’t know what they call it, the more connections I think, in LinkedIn, when you accept a connection friend, so to speak, you know, sometimes you instantly get those automatic DMS inside of LinkedIn saying like, Oh, by the way, I want to sell you X, Y, or Z, or be your service provider. And nobody likes that. Literally. So if you if someone follows you don’t just write them a DM, thanks for following me. Would you like do you need a realtor? That is not how humans interact? And it is not how people I mean, maybe once out of 1000, you might get lucky, but everyone else will just be turned off? Because that’s not you haven’t demonstrated that you are interested in getting to know that person at all.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 28:44 Well, and that ties into the second big mistake that from your original question. Like we just magically got to this place where I feel like it’s perfect to bring this up. Don’t have an automated message in your DMS. Yes. And I get so many of them, right like if I and I just got one right now while you and I are recording live, I got one where I sent a message a while back and literally just got an auto responder. So she obviously has many chat or something timed to send out an auto responder at a certain time. Some people have on set automatically so as soon as they get a message, they automatically send out an auto responder. So for For context, right let’s say for example, DJ you posted in your stories, a picture of you holding a Dutch Bros that you went and got in the morning on your way to work, right? And I comment or engage back in that via story reply, aka DM right. So if I respond to your story, and I say oh my gosh, I’m a huge Dutch bro fan. I have recently been getting the protein coffee. What did you order question mark send in you then have an auto responder that kicks back and says thanks so much for reaching out for to me for all your real estate needs. Here’s my cell phone number please call me like I’m instantly turned off and I’m definitely not responding to you but you Even more important than that, you are not going to ever see my message, right? Because now Instagrams not going to tell you that you have an unread message. Right? So the amount of time that’s going to lapse between you even seeing that there was that message from me in the first place to you responding to me is going to be way too long for me to be to, for me to stay engaged, if that makes sense.
D.J. Paris 30:22 It totally. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. And I also think, too, that in this as, as a man, I can only think about this from my perspective, and maybe the male perspective is, you know, there is such a thing as called sliding into someone’s DM. So as men, male realtors, we should be mindful of that, you know, in particular females, I guess it never happens to me, I never get any, any unsolicited, sort of romantic things inside of Instagram, but women do and so can we just really quickly talk about if we’re going to DM somebody who follows us and, and we’re not as familiar with them, we’re going to send them, you know, Hey, I saw you got this coffee or this thing? And I’m really into the same thing. How do we do that in a way that doesn’t come off as flirtatious or non professional? Do you have any just general guidelines there? As a woman who probably gets those kinds of messages often?
Michelle Berman-Mikel 31:18 Yeah, unfortunately, I do. And when my husband and I first got married, we’re actually about to celebrate five years. But when my husband and I very first got married, we used to make fun of it together, like I would get the messages, and then I’d run into the other room and show him and he would respond, and it would just be fun. But now it’s not as funny anymore, because I’m a mom. And you know, I’m very happily married. And it’s sort of just annoying. But here’s the thing I will say is when I can very quickly tell intuitively, when it’s a message that is worthy of my response, right? So if someone just says Hi, H i, and that’s it not responding, right? If someone is sending me a message saying, Hi, beautiful, did all of this obviously not responding? Right? If someone says, Hi, do you have a few moments for us to chat? Not responding to that? Right? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 32:09 that’s the one. I hate that one, too. Hi, Michelle,
Michelle Berman-Mikel 32:12 do you have room in your day to take on more clients? Like, obviously, you didn’t look at my profile? Like if that’s what you’re right. So I think the number one thing I can tell every single one of you guys that are listening to this and how to how to deal with that is use your intuition. Right? Men have it women have it, we have different versions of the same intuition. But you can tell right, and my my pet peeve, if you will, is when a lot of the older generation will say, Well, I just don’t want to I don’t know. So I just respond to all of them. I’m like, no, just because I’m 33. And you’re 50 doesn’t mean that I’m 50, I’m not going to have the same intuition that I currently have. Sure. Right. So I think it’s just a matter of like, using your intuition and allowing using
D.J. Paris 32:56 your best judgment. Yeah. Yeah. And also as as men understanding, we don’t get those kinds of messages, but women do. So being extra mindful. I mean, literally, I’ve never once gotten one of those messages. But which is, which, you know, is just the different experiences that men and women have
Michelle Berman-Mikel 33:13 fans on how you initially engage, right, and what you say on your side. And so there’s a message structure that we teach, I’ll give you give it to you very quickly. But story replies, when you’re doing a story reply, it’s designed to be in three parts. Now, any of you guys have ever read what to say, or the art of conversation, or any of these really, very, very good sales psychology books, is that is how I formulated all of this. So it’s not just theory, right? This is truly like how it actually works on a day to day basis. But a story reply in those three parts. So again, all of these three parts is one message, but that one message is broken down into each of these sections or segments. So part number one is acknowledgement. So what is the person on the other side desire by using social media in the first place, right to feel her to feel seen to feel acknowledged for who we are and what we’re doing? So if I’m responding to your story about Dutch Bros, and I don’t acknowledge the fact that you’re holding a cup of coffee or that you are holding Dutch Bros coffee, I’m missing the boat there, right? I’m doing you a disservice. And I’m doing myself a disservice in trying to build our relationship. So acknowledgement first, so I’m going to acknowledge quite literally, hey, it’s awesome that you got Dutch Bros. I’m a huge Dutch Bros fan, too. Then part number two to the message comes in, which is subliminal business play. So this has been tried and tested over and over and over again. And the best way to do this is to tie it into your clients or the fact that you have clients or the fact that you’re actively working. So what would that sound like for you right? Like and let’s pretend I am the real estate agent Michelle, and I’m prospecting new DJ in my DMS right so I see the story of you posting, are you holding Dutch Bros? I’m gonna say it’s awesome that you got Dutch Bros. I’m a huge fan of Dutch Bros as well. I’ve been getting the protein coffee recently, and then the subliminal business play might be. Dutch Bros is actually my favorite place to take clients for coffee before we go look at houses. That’s my civil middle business play. So I’m not prosper, I’m not selling them directly, right? I’m simply acknowledging the fact I’m bringing to light subliminally, the fact that I have clients, right? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 35:31 so your your, your, your your telling, instead of selling, you’re basically talking about an experience that’s related to your business without saying, and you might be the next person that I want to take. You’re just saying, Oh, hey, I love Dutch friends, I take all of my clients there. Before we go, I’m so glad to see another Dutch brother fan out there or whatever.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 35:51 And then And then the third part is ending it in the question, right, ending it in the form of a question. So my final segment to that message that I’m sending you would be something like what’s your go to order at Dutch Bros? Or how often are you? Are you stopping at Dutch roses? You know, I go three times a week and my husband hates it. Ha, right. So anything in the form of a question is designed to get engagement, right? So if I’m ending it in a question, I’m anticipating you responding to me, and then when someone responds, so let’s say you do respond, my job at this point is to keep the conversation going as long as I can, right? We all know that in sales, the number one thing that we need to do is capture attention for as long as possible, right, the longer we can keep it, the more likely we have the opportunity or will have the opportunity to convert it. So my number one suggestion in your DMS is live in the land of curiosity, meaning ask questions all the time constantly, never respond in the form of a statement, or something that is a rhetorical question, right? In that sense, questions that are designed to continue the conversation is key, because we have to get through the four to seven touch points. That traditionally is what a real estate lead takes anyways, to convert in the first place.
D.J. Paris 37:08 And there’s also transition sort of ways to transition from the sort of the statement about the post into the question. So I was thinking, as you were saying that, you know, what I would probably add, if the roles were reversed, as I would say, like, hey, Michel, you know, after saying your Dutch Brothers, that’s awesome. I love Dutch Brothers, they take my clients there. Hey, funny timing. I actually am looking for a new order. I I’m kind of getting sick of my regular order. Do you mind sharing what you ordered? Would you recommend it or something like that? Where I’m Yeah, yeah. And I’m just sort of a little bit more, you know, slowly and gently squeezing us into, hey, by the way, tell me tell me something about you.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 37:51 Yeah. And I love that. And that’s the thing about it is every single one of us, no matter who you are, you’re going to do it a little differently. But the beauty of it is that you have to do it the way that you would do it and that there’s no magic one to this question is the number one question if you ask it, everybody’s gonna respond, right? It doesn’t work that way. So being able to just be intuitive, I think is the key and most importantly, living in the lane of curiosity and your messages. And I think the biggest thing that I want to make sure we don’t miss is prospecting is not a if I get to it, I’ll get to it type of situation, right? Especially when it comes to Instagram. So I prospect on Instagram every single day, I don’t prospect in the form of cold calling at all anymore, zero, I haven’t had to cold calling yours. I’m very grateful for that. But and if you’re listening to this, and you do cold call, that’s you keep doing it, right. But designate a time of your day or time block it, which is I think the phrase that most people use, right time block a hour of prospecting in your morning or in your afternoon or if you don’t have a solid hour, you can designate maybe it’s a little bit in the morning and a little bit at night. Right. But it has to be a non negotiable and I think that that’s the problem with with Instagram right now is people are seeing it as if I if I have time, I’ll get to it when I get to it. Versus this is an opportunity for me to truly never have to cold call again. If I do it right, because I can build a relationship digitally first work through the touch points and then get on the phone with them. Hello. Never having that weird, gross cold call feeling ever again. That’s super intrusive, feels very invasive, you’re catching them at the wrong time. They’re like, why are you calling me who are you? I’ve already talked to five other realtors. Right? Like, we want to avoid all of that. And so avoiding that feeling is literally why I developed the prospecting part of the Instagram platform the way that we do it because I know how that felt many many years ago, and it’s awful. I don’t know anybody that enjoys getting on.
D.J. Paris 39:56 No, it’s It’s terrible. So Monday is for reaching out to our followers and initiating some sort of interest in their activities, their passions and seeing if a conversation emerges from there, at the very least, even if it doesn’t, what we’re doing is demonstrating care and that we’re interested in someone else, and that we’re paying attention, which is the most one of the most flattering things that any human can experience is somebody’s paying attention to them, like you said, being seen being heard, most importantly, being acknowledged, and that’s through the content or the comments, or the DM is, Hey, I saw you did this thing. Awesome. That’s really cool. What do we do on Tuesdays?
Michelle Berman-Mikel 40:37 Tuesdays, and thank you for pushing us along there. I intend to go on tangents when I kept asking No, no, no,
D.J. Paris 40:43 I could talk about I could talk about it for hours. And I’m like, I got I better remember. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Tuesdays are
Michelle Berman-Mikel 40:49 Tuesdays and Thursdays are actually the same. So well, they typically have different categories. But the theory behind Tuesdays and Thursdays is the same. So what Tuesdays and Thursdays are is when you’re not at home, or when you’re not at work, where do you go? What hobbies do you have that you could potentially be having conversations with individuals about real estate, and I have a client, I’m gonna use her as an example. She is a plant lady, hardcore plant lady, every closing gift for every client is a really beautiful, real plant. Right? I told her, I was like, I can never hire you to be my realtor, because I will kill the plant. But I love it. I love plants. I have green plants all over my house that most of them are not real. But when she brought that up in that context, she was like, Well, how do I add? How do I make that a category where I can talk to other people about plants on Instagram, and have it be in my area? Right? And she was shocked at how fast I was able to find flow.
D.J. Paris 41:46 It’s so easy. There’s uh, yeah, you could go to any any florist. You could go to any plant person that’s local. You could you could say, hey, let’s jump on an Instagram Live, I’ll promote your business will you promote? We can talk about real estate and talk about plants. I’m just throwing ideas.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 42:03 You’re doing my job for me. Like that’s exactly what the idea behind it is. So when it comes to finding them, right, like, we did this together on a Zoom meeting her and I literally Googled plant shops in her area. She actually she happens to live in Connecticut. But so we googled plant shops, and the only thing that really came up was Home Depot and Lowe’s. And we’re like, no, no, right? So I showed her was a trick that you can do on Instagram. And I said, Sarah, go find your plant shop that you go to on Instagram. She’s like, Oh, I already know their account. So she goes to their account. And then in their profile, if you see the contact button, and then right next to the contact button, there’s this little tiny button that is a person with a plus sign. And if you click on that, it’s going to give you this huge drop down of suggested accounts. And Instagram is saying that based off of following this plant shop, you might like all of these, right? And we went through all of those, so many of them are either other little plant shops, coffee shops that also sold plants in her area. bloggers that blogged about plants in her area. I mean, like the list was endless. And she was like, Michelle, my town is so small, How is this even a thing? And I’m like, Thank you Instagram, because you just created a community for yourself in your hyperlocal market. Right? And I really want to hit on that in your hyperlocal market. Yeah, we’re
D.J. Paris 43:23 not finding plant shops from all over the country, which anybody could do. And that doesn’t really necessarily speak to the local community. Correct,
Michelle Berman-Mikel 43:31 right. But like Instagram, if by using that suggested button, right, Instagram is literally giving you what you are asking for, right, which is I want to find other people who are into plants and other plant shops or other bloggers or whatever, in my area. So to go back to your original question, and to keep the flow of the tracker happening, Tuesdays and Thursdays are designed to be these types of days right so you’re focused on Hobbies specifically, or things that you enjoy outside of work. Now this can be at home, right you can I have a client who’s really into homesteading, right? If that’s you, there’s a whole community for that on Instagram. If you’re into like knitting or arts and crafts, or if you’re a mom, right, I have a hockey mom client that I adore her. And she’s like, Michelle, I don’t do anything other than go to hockey, like every single day we go to hockey. And I was like, that’s a day on your tracker, because all of the different arenas that your son’s play in all of the different teams that have their own Instagram accounts, all the different small businesses that support the hockey community, aka SEL hockey stuff, all of the coaches that have their own Instagrams, right, the list goes on and on and on. And the beautiful thing about all of this, so Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can have different categories for each of the days, right? So if you have multiple hobbies or multiple different things, but the idea behind Tuesdays and Thursdays is that you are talking to people about things that you also share a passion for or an interest in. And if I’m commenting on if I’m my client, that’s a hockey mom, right if I’m Like, if I’m sorry, if I’m commenting on a hockey teams post about them winning a game or winning a match, right? Guess who’s gonna see my comment, all of the other moms or all of the other people that are into hockey that are probably following that Instagram account. And the idea is that they are going to see my comment, they’re going to see my interaction, they’re going to click on my profile, go and see if you’re doing it right that you are posting about hockey and that you’re posting about your kids being interested in hockey too. And now there’s this connection. And then the subliminal part of that happens, which is we’re showing all of our real estate content are showcasing our credibility through our testimonials and all these other things. But the connection is initially made via mutual shared passion or interest.
D.J. Paris 45:49 Love, it’s we’re finding local people as best we can in our community. And just that little tip, that really cool tip that I did not know about is look for the little icon. So look for an account of a business or a page that that your Instagram account that you’re into, that’s shares your one of your passions. And then you can see a little icon you click on that, and it will show you suggested accounts that are very similar. And you can start looking to see if you can find also, you can other find other accounts in the area, you can also there are Instagram, you know, there’s search functionality to and Instagram. And so you could also start searching via certain hashtags. And obviously look for hyperlocal things like if you’re, if you want to find we do this here in Chicago a lot where there’s so many different neighborhoods and suburbs, that there’s all these, you know, for example, Mom groups that talk about activities for children, very common. And, you know, there’s certain hashtags for that, and, you know, etc. Okay, so Tuesdays, and yeah, that’s
Michelle Berman-Mikel 46:49 the tracker when you build it out. And thank you for saying all that because you again, you’re you’re doing my job for me, DJ, good job. But uh, the the tracker when it’s built out, right, you have it broken into three categories. So you have hashtags accounts, and geo tags, and each of your days of the week is separated that way, with the exception of Mondays and Fridays, or Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which we’ll talk about here in a second. But so Tuesdays and Thursdays, you have hashtags, you have accounts, you have geo tags, and then we teach a trick called the wormhole effect, which is simply if you click on one of those hockey pages, for example, you find the the hockey arena that your kid plays out consistently. And you click on their most recent piece of content, let’s say they have 30 likes, if you click on the people who liked it, you then start interacting with those individuals, right. So that’s the wormhole effect. With the idea behind that being you’re connecting with more and more people that are actively using the page or consuming the page and just getting your name exposed to those who are interested in the same thing in your area. So So
D.J. Paris 47:49 quick question about that. So you just said something very powerful. So again, let’s say we’re, we’re our passion is being a hockey mom. And we are looking at the account for the rink, the arena that our child plays at. And we see all of the other, you know, hockey moms that might be following that Instagram account, how do you encourage people to interact? Because this is going to be people that don’t know you, but that have a shared interest? You’re both into hockey being hockey mom, and you’re going to the Serena, what would you say is a great point of engagement. How do you how do you sort of
Michelle Berman-Mikel 48:26 it goes back to the exact same the same methodology, right? So the same three prong initial response, which is acknowledgement, subliminal business play, and then in the form of a question now, if that’s her story, replies, right, or DMS story reply, a DM is the same thing for those of you guys listening that that don’t know the terminology, they are the same, right? So if you’re responding to a story that ends up being a DM, but if you’re commenting on someone’s content on their feed, it’s a little bit different, right? It’s a little simpler, you don’t need to do a full three prong response. But you do need to do have acknowledgement, right. I will tell every single one of you if you are commenting on a piece of content, and your comment doesn’t stand out to me as the person that produced content or produced the piece of content, I’m not responding to you, right. So if you’re like awesome content, great photo, this is really cute, or your son is really cute exclamation point. It’s like that’s what everybody says right? And not to be facetious about it, but to simply say, in a sea of a bunch of comments, your job is to stand out. So if you see somebody’s posting of their son’s playing at the same hockey arena that your son plays, right, I acknowledge it. Oh my gosh, this is awesome. I had no idea that you guys also played hockey here. I’ve been coming here with my son for the last five years. Period. Right? And that could be something that’s going to stand out. Now if you’re responding to her story, that individual story that posted that photo of her boys in front of the hockey arena and you’re like, Well, how do you break the ice? Same concept right the three prongs were Have a reply applies, which is acknowledge subliminal business plan and in the form of a question. So your final question to that could be something like, I’ve been coming here with my sons for the last five years, how long have you and your boys been playing in this arena? And you can even go one step further. Like, when are you guys there? I would love to like say hi, right, like, say hi, yeah, you know. But it gets a lot easier when you have that shared connection or that mutual interest. And then the thing about that, which is funny is to your point, DJ, which is, there’s a degree of separation, where you even realize that you already knew that person without even realizing it, right? So you may click on their profile and be like, Oh, that’s the life of this person, or, Oh, that’s the best friend of this person that I’ve never talked to. Right, and it becomes so easy to start a conversation. So Tuesdays and Thursdays are that right? And I always say, it’s just think through that and your everyone’s like, Well, I’m really boring. I don’t do anything. No, that’s not true, right? You have interests, you have passions, even if you don’t leave,
D.J. Paris 51:04 even if it’s a TV show that you watch it I was doing this the other day, I was watching the curse, which is a show on Showtime. And it’s one of the most uncomfortable shows I’ve ever seen. It’s purposely written to certainly activate someone’s anxiety and interpersonal sort of challenges. It’s, it’s, it’s really good, Emma Stone and Nathan fielder. It’s very, very good. But anyway, it’s very hard, I find it very difficult to watch. There’s a lot of symbolism in the show. And I go, I am going to the Reddit forum, or the Reddit group for the subreddit for the curse, and there is one. And I’m like, I think they’re trying to portray him as like a Jesus like character. And anyway, I wanted to see if my theory was was accurate. And sure enough, other people had the exact same theory. But you could do the same thing on Instagram, you can say I just saw the ending of episode so and so with, with this, you could even post content about it and say, I don’t really understand what the ending means. If anyone has seen this, if you have, you know, ideas, or you could search for other people’s content about that particular episode, say, Hey, I just found your content. I’m a little confused about the ending. Here’s what I think. But what do you think? I mean, it doesn’t have to be something you even go out and do. It could be something you consume, like, you know, like coffee, or a TV show or
Michelle Berman-Mikel 52:18 book or anything. Yep. And the easiest. The easiest way to do it if you’re like sitting struggling thinking of ideas for topics is if you’re like you’re in Chicago, right? But Chicago is freaking massive. So the thing about that is five subsidies or five sub sub not subdivisions, but so five subsidies within the city. So I live in Clarksville, Tennessee, right, but my husband and I live in Sango, which is a subsidy within the Clarksville zip code. But here in Clarksville, if I were to say to a mom or somebody at the gym, or whatever. Oh yeah, we live in St. Louis. Everybody knows what that means. So if you go to Instagram, and you type in hashtag Sango, Tennessee that is going to come up. So if you’re going to do it on a Tuesday or Thursday, what I would recommend is pick your top five subsidies or cities specifically that you sell real estate in or want to find hashtags find geo tags, find specific accounts that are related to those cities. So here in 10 are here in Clarksville, we have a Instagram page called Local Clarksville, which is basically the page that shares anything and everything restaurants, mom’s stuff, bookstores, coffee shop, everything right for Clarksville, and that page becomes sort of the springboard to all these other pages that could give you ideas of who to be engaging with in different types of accounts. So Tuesdays or Thursdays, you could just do it what we call small business day, which is you’re using those five subsidies and just looking at their hashtags, looking at their geo tags, and then just go into town.
D.J. Paris 53:47 So yeah, there’s a there’s a, for example, as a gene store I go to that just happens to be a block from where I live. And it’s really, I think, probably the only good gene store in Chicago, certainly one of few. And they have, it’s tough, it’s tough out there as a small business owner, and then all they sell are jeans. And yeah, they sell very expensive jeans, and you have to be into expensive jeans in order to like want to spend the kind of money to do that. So they are struggling like every other small business. So one of my first calls would be like, Hey, I know there’s other guys like me out there that probably don’t even know you guys exist. So I want to make sure that people know you exist because I love having you in my neighborhood. And by the way, I’m a realtor and I do these things. But what I really want to do is focus on promoting your jeans because I wear them I’m a big fan. Can I come in and do a quick, you know, five minute interview with you. Obviously, there’s no downside for the owner unless they don’t want to be on camera. Somebody will do it. It’s free. And you’re going to tag them. They’re going to tag you you promote it, they promote it. Everybody wins. You could do that. Yeah, twice a week. Easy.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 54:49 Oh, easy, easy. And obviously the hobbies is the key focus with the small business sort of being that backup to that. But for sake of time I want to give you guys Wednesday, so Wednesday is what I call CRM day. So this is a very important day that I can tell you right now, I’ve been doing this specifically for beyond the method and my program for five years, and people still don’t do this, which I’m assuming that’s probably why I’m still in business, obviously. But but it’s I say that funnily but what Wednesday’s are designed to be a CRM day. So what that means is you are taking your database and your cold leads, right? So if you’re paying realtor.com leads, so flex leads, why Lobo, whatever red X whoever, right, you’re purchasing data from, find them on Instagram and find them. Oh,
D.J. Paris 55:36 that’s brilliant, I never would have thought to do.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 55:41 Right. So like in your Excel doc, on Wednesday, you have a tab at the bottom, you upload the CSV file out of your CRM. Now depending on what CRM you use, like something like follow up boss, right, for example, they will link a Facebook profile to that individual, it doesn’t link Instagram yet, for whatever reason, I don’t know, tell him to work on it. But it’ll link a Facebook profile, you can go look at that person’s Facebook, or try to find and see if it’s the right one, and then cross check it to Instagram. Now the reason for that is most of the time, a person is going to have the same profile photo on Facebook and Instagram that they would on one or the other platforms, right, we typically do that. Smart, that means that you’ll be able to confirm or deny this is the same person, especially because a lot of people, especially if it’s individual personal accounts, they’re private, right. So in order for you to send or follow them on Instagram, you’re going to have to send a follow request, they have to approve it. So if you’re going to do that, you want to make sure you’re following the right person and confirm that based off of seeing them on Facebook first. So on Wednesday, there, it’s two parts, right? You’re uploading your CRM, you got 500 names, 1000 names, whatever it is, and you’re working through the list, you’re finding them on Facebook, you then cross check, find them on Instagram, and every Wednesday, you just keep working through that list and make sure that you consistently are talking to the people that are on that list. So you take the first 45, then the next Wednesday, you go do the next 45, you just keep working through until you repeat at the top of the list. In the process of doing that, you’re obviously going to start having a lot of really good warm conversations. So eventually, that person is going to get moved off of Wednesday, onto another day of your tracker, aka Friday, which is what we call reengage day. And I know that this is getting somewhat confusing, but visually it’s a lot easier to see. But that’s what that’s what Wednesday’s are designed to be the cold lead part of it is if you get a if you’re buying leads in any capacity, right? Zillow leads is a great example. Because when Zillow calls you, or when you get a lead from Zillow, they’re just calling you Right? Like you don’t have time live transfer. And no like, Oh, this is Michelle from Michael calling me this is her Instagram, she has a dog, she has a two and a half like she you don’t have that access that fast. Right? So the beautiful thing about that side of it is when someone calls you like that you get this inbound lead your job as the real estate agent moving on from that are in moving on from right now to every conversation you have moving forward is on the phone with them. Let’s say it’s you DJ, right. And I you and I are you are inbound calling me. I’m the realtor. You’re the Zoli coming in. So I’m gonna say hi, DJ, this is Michelle Berman. Michael, great that you are calling Bubba ball go into my script, right? But then here’s where this gets important. At the very end of the conversation, it is your job to make sure you are connected to them on Instagram, right? So at the end of your call, you will literally say hey, DJ, this has been an amazing chat with you. I’m really looking forward to seeing you on Saturday when we go to your xyz property or on Friday when we go meet for coffee to talk about your house, blah, blah, blah, right. But before we hang up really fast, I want to make sure we’re connected on Instagram, because that’s my primary platform that is the primary place that I communicate with all of my clients. So what’s your Instagram account really fast? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 58:58 it almost doesn’t even give them the option to say no, because you’ve already qualified it by saying, Hey, this is where I communicate most effectively and most consistently. So yeah, if you know, I wouldn’t even ask if you don’t mind. I would just say what’s what’s like, just like you said, I
Michelle Berman-Mikel 59:12 had I had a client and I’m curious what your thought is on this TJ because I had a client who was like, Michelle, is it weird to say that, like, if somebody’s gonna think that that’s weird, and
D.J. Paris 59:21 it can seem weird. Yeah. But the way that you said it was not weird, you qualified it. You explained why you were asking for it. And it was a perfectly logical reason. Yeah. So I think if you just said hey, what’s your Instagram? Then people can have all sorts of thoughts in their head about why are they asking for this? Are they are they flirting with me? Are they you know, who knows? But I think by saying by qualifying at the way you did, it gives really no reason for somebody to say no,
Michelle Berman-Mikel 59:50 you’re just having a conversation with someone and you’re quite literally saying, This is my primary method of communication. I know we had discussed meeting on Friday for coffee. So I just want to make sure we’re connected there. So that if you have any questions between now and Friday, when I see you, you can message me. Right, perfect. So and then once that happens, once you start following them, or they start following you, they obviously get added to your tracker. So you can track that that individual is now following you so that you can stay consistently in front of them. Because I will say realtors are notorious for terrible follow up. I think everybody would say that, that they are, even if they’ve been in business forever, right? They’ll say like, my biggest weakness is not like closing the loop. Right, closing and working the lead until you get a hard No. And so that’s certainly a way to make sure that you can track it. But yeah, so that’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Friday is simply reengaged day. So what that means is quite literally reengage anybody that you’ve had a good conversation with. So if a conversation comes to a natural stopping point, which it will they all do normal, it’s very normal, you simply reengage them. And then the way that we do this is we track and we color code them, right? So if it’s the first reengage, if it’s the second, reengage, etc, we can track that. And then once we’ve gotten to four or five, really solid back and forth, and really solid touch points with that individual, then it’s our job to for the ask, right, your job is to get them on the phone or attempt to set an appointment, whatever that looks like for you zoom meeting, Calendly, Link, whatever, whatever that is for you. But you have to attempt to go for the ask at that point. And then Friday basically gives you the opportunity to stay in front of all of your warm leads.
D.J. Paris 1:01:32 And then what are we doing on the weekends? Are we taking the weekend?
Michelle Berman-Mikel 1:01:35 I don’t engage on the weekends. And that’s, that’s me personally, I want to tell everybody is the tracker that I’ve designed is Monday through Friday. If but it’s what I mean by that as it’s five days, right? So it’s five days designed Monday through Friday. However, if you want to do it Tuesday through Saturday, I don’t care. Right. If you want to do it Wednesday through Sunday, I don’t care. There’s no better day or worst day, it’s a matter of like what are the five days for you that are going to make sense. I also know that real estate agents notoriously are the busiest on Saturday and Sunday. So asking them to prospect and spend an hour in their DMS or an hour on Instagram specifically doing what I’m teaching is going to be harder, right? Mondays, there’s no reason most most real estate agents are used Mondays as their admin day or as they’re like, chill, I’m going to catch up day because of a crazy weekend. So but that’s just how it’s been formulated. But if your schedule is completely different, and everything I just said doesn’t apply to you as far as days, then do it do the five days on the days that makes sense for you.
D.J. Paris 1:02:38 So just to sort of recap the the way that I think you’re telling people to approach Instagram is really as a connection tool, not as much of a consumption tool. So we’re either going to use it to unwind and sort of just have, you know, entertain ourselves with other people’s content. But for us, it’s for our for our business, we want to be super intentional and think of it as how do we find how do I find people who are into the same things I’m into? And how do I engage them on a regular basis so that we can share our passions and connect that way? And then we can naturally lead that into Hey, oh, by the way, I’m a real estate agents etc. Yeah, so so we really for the if we’re finding people we don’t already know, we’re really looking for shared interests. We’re connecting that way. And then we’re moving on.
Michelle Berman-Mikel 1:03:28 At some point here connection. Keep that in mind. Right, right. Yes, thank you. Because a shared connection is equally as powerful as a shared connection. I’m sorry, as a shared passion or hobby, right? Yeah. Because some of my closest friends in the industry today, right? I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed Kyle Draper DJ, but if not, you should write but Kyle and I became very good friends because we accidentally found each other on Instagram. And we’re like, hey, we were both on the same show. And now anytime I’m in Dallas, I am always having dinner or meeting up with Kyle. We’ve also spoken in events together. We’ve done podcasts, all the things right. And what’s funny about that, as I met Kyle during COVID, when clubhouse was really big at the time, so I heard Kyle’s voice went Instagram found him realize we had all these connections, and was like, Oh my gosh, I just gotta send him a message. So I did. Fast forward, you know, three plus years. Here we are. So I think it’s just as much about mutual interest or shared passions as it is actual just straight up connections, right and what those degrees of separation might be that could turn into a business opportunity or in your guys’s case on the real estate side, specifically a lead right like oh, you you worked with so and so that I know or Oh, I know the owner of that place. How often do you go
D.J. Paris 1:04:50 Yeah, it’s funny I always think about this with because this podcast we interview mostly a top 1% agents from all over the country, and I work route agents. So if I were not hosting this podcast and some other buddy, somebody else was doing what I do, I would be calling those agents that, you know, were interviewed in my area that were featured on any podcast, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, and be like, Hey, by the way, I just listened to your interview with such and such podcast, you’re exactly the kind of agent we want. At our firm. If you’re ever thinking about, you know, this idea of, you know, using media to find people to find prospects to connect, is really just the way that we think of it mostly as a consumption model. I’m going to consume other’s content, or I’m going to just post you know, stuff about my business. We’re not really thinking about it so much in the terms of connections. So I love that that’s like, the major focus for you is how do we actually connect? And let’s we want to make sure that if you’re loving what Michelle is saying, and I don’t know how you wouldn’t be because I’m learning a tremendous amount. And I’ve had Instagram experts on our show for a long time. And I’ve not learned ever this much before. So if you’re liking what Michelle is saying, and you are, please go to please consider investing in beyond the method you can find that at Berman media PD, that’s Paul David so Berman media pd.com link to that in the show notes, of course, and learn more about this because Michelle teaches all of this and literally gives you a step by step sort of template and an idea of how to authentically connect with others on Instagram and turn that into your number one prospecting source and I am now thinking about it as from a recruiting perspective for agents about how I can do the exact same thing from a recruiting person you know, from from recruiting, and of course I can there’s no difference. So I am going to I’m going to consider taking this course but this we could talk for hours more but we don’t want to. Certainly poor Michelle is already given us a good hour and 15 minutes. So what we want to do is we’re going to we’re going to end the episode here but guys, if you liked what you heard the best two things you can do. First of all, go to Berman media pd.com Learn about Michelle’s program, follow her on Instagram as well. She She doles out all sorts of great advice and tidbits there that are always going to be helpful to you whether you invest in her program or not. That’s Berman media social on Instagram. But please consider investing in this program. Because if this becomes your number one recruiting source or recruiting i Sorry, I’m in recruiting mode. So this becomes your prospecting the same thing prospecting recruiting prospecting mode, this is going to be the best money you ever spend. Instagram is not going away. And this is still the number one platform that people are really wow. Yeah, it’s it’s the number one platform people are using that you are going to want to find for clients. It’s really the best prospecting tool there is for real estate agents. prospecting, I think I think Facebook doesn’t quite cut it for this. Facebook’s got its own great things about it, you can do wonderful things there. LinkedIn has some some great things. But Instagram is still kind of the place where you can find other people much more easily than you can and other other areas, other social platforms. So this is the the time that 2024 is the year to really get into Instagram. So Berman media pd.com is where you flirt about all things Michelle, and beyond the Method program, guys, it’s absolutely amazing. And the second way is let us know how much you liked this episode, because we got a lot more to talk to Michelle about and if you guys loved this, let me know. So we can have her back on the show more regularly, maybe she comes on as a as a repeating guest so that we can continue to provide this content to to you guys. So Michelle, I will not keep you captive any longer, you have been so generous, and really spilling all of the secrets that that you could and you know, 75 minutes, which is really impressive. And again, that really also speaks to who Michelle is as a person. You know, these these, she gave you really some incredible strategies, guys, by the way, you probably should listen to this episode a second time just to cover, go through and get everything and Michelle talks fast. I talk fast. But she had a lot of great content in there. So I’m not saying it to our view count by double, although that’d be great for us. But really, I’m doing it because I need to go back and listen to it again and make sure I’ve got a lot of these fundamentals down and then consider investing in Michelle’s program. So on behalf of our audience, thank you Michelle for taking, you know a good chunk of your afternoon to to talk all about Instagram. I’m so glad you found us and I’m so grateful to have you on the show. Personally, our audience I’m speaking for them as well and on behalf of Michelle and myself thanks to the audience. Thanks you guys for sticking around to the very end. We appreciate you again consider investing in Michelle’s program follow her on Instagram, Berman media social is her account and also a I’ll tell a friend to think of one other realtor that is thinks they should do more on Instagram. By the way, pretty much every realtor feels that way. So anyone you can think of that is looking to do more with Instagram this year. That’s basically everyone shoot them a link to this episode. That would be a huge thank you to me. And, Michelle, let’s spread the word. And also leave us a review. Whatever you’re listening to us on or watching us on. Let us know what you think of the show. We do read all the comments, even the tough to read ones. And we make adjustments because the show is for me, it’s not for Michelle, it’s for you. So let us know what we can do to continue making the show better and better. All right, Michelle, thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks so much,
Michelle Berman-Mikel 1:10:41 guys. Appreciate it.
What Is Wellness Real Estate? • Sheila Alston
Feb 15, 2024
Sheila Alston with Healthy Home Media talks about her journey into wellness real estate. Sheila describes what wellness real estate is and how to promote it. Sheila also talks about her magazine and how it can help agents differentiate themselves from other agents. Last, Sheila discusses current trends of the home wellness space.
Please check out Sheila’s magazine here and get $50 off of your first purchase using real50.
This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and Apply Design (get 15% off of your first purchase using real24).
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show. And we’re going to be speaking in just a moment to my guest, Sheila Austin about wellness, real estate. What is that. But before we get to Sheila, just a couple of quick reminders. First of all, if you’re new to the show, welcome. We appreciate you and hope that you find our episodes really helpful for your business. Give her a returning listener. Thank you. Thank you double thanks. And please continue to listen, let us know what we can do to improve the show and also tell a friend about the show. And last thing I’ll ask if everybody out there could just take one minute, leave us a review on whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on. That really helps the show out gets us in front of more ears. So thank you to everyone also check out our sponsors. They keep the bills paid for us. So please check them out. We love our sponsors. And we also of course love all the listeners. So let’s get right to it. My conversation with Sheila Alston.
Today on the show we have Sheila Austin from Healthy Home media. Let me tell you more about Sheila. So Sheila Austin is a trailblazer in the real estate industry. Now she has walked the agent path, but ultimately understands the challenges of lead generation and the struggle to differentiate oneself in a crowded market where everyone sounds the same. But here’s the exciting twist Sheila has discovered a unique approach to leverage your skills and more importantly, has empowered agents nationwide to do the same. And on this episode, she unravels the secrets now brace yourself for a transformative experience, as Sheila reveals how you can shift from chasing leads to effortlessly attracting leads you The key demonstrating genuine care for your clients. By the way, something we have been saying for years and years. So we are so excited, Sheila is with us. But by leveraging a little known industry to growing trend like crazy that you probably don’t know. So I know that got jumbled up at the end there. But we’re going to talk about something that is a growing trend that real estate agents need to jump on immediately to really help their marketing attract more clients. We’re going to discuss that in just a moment. So if you are intrigued, stay tuned. And join us as Sheila unveils the art of flipping the script on lead generation, please follow Sheila at her website, which is media.com My apologies, she was helping me out there because I just closed the tab by accident healthy home media.com. And also please follow her on Instagram, which is wellness agents. And on Facebook healthy home media, we will have links to all of that in the show notes. So you don’t even have to listen to what I said. But we’re gonna please click through and check out because what Sheila’s offering is very, very cool. Sheila, welcome to the show.
Sheila Alston 6:06 Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 6:10 Thank you, and happy to have excited to have you because this is a topic that we haven’t even even announced the topic yet. But it’s a topic I’ve never heard of. So I mean, I’ve heard of it. But I’ve never heard of it in relation to this industry. So I am as a marketer, somebody who is very excited to chat with you. But before we get to kind of what we’re here to discuss, let’s tell talk a little bit about your journey. Our audience always likes to know, you know, sort of how are our guests to have progressed in their career? Why real estate how they got in, and I know you were an agent. So can you tell us about that journey for you from you know, being an agent to then, you know, switching pivoting to really helping agents with their marketing? Yeah,
Sheila Alston 6:50 well, sure. I, I became an agent in 2018. And I guess a lot like other people, you know, is kind of a second career for me. You know, I was a stay at home mom, and my kids were getting older. And before in my business life, I had been in marketing, I’d studied marketing, but I had also done a lot of interior design. And I had become a certified health coach, but I didn’t I for some reason, I didn’t want to be a health coach. And my husband and I had flipped a lot of homes. And so I always just had this passion for real estate. So I thought I’ll become a realtor. And maybe I can combine some sort of, you know, interior design with that, or do some staging. And I really wanted to not waste my health coaching background, I thought, gosh, there’s got to be a way to integrate healthy something, how can I how can I do that? And I just stumbled upon wellness, real estate. And it was a term I hadn’t heard before. And I thought what is this? Why is nobody talking about this. And then I found NAR screen, sort of designee and so I, you know, got my designation, and I was like ready to tell everybody about how it was as wellness agent. And people were like, What are you talking about? What is this? And so I just kept deep diving into this. And I thought, okay, nobody, this is something it’s just maybe too far out there. I’m just going to keep plugging along, but maybe my, maybe my stitch will be, you know, interior design and that. And I just found that, gosh, I was living in a luxury market. And being an agent in a luxury market, I’m gonna have a lot of affluent friends. But I didn’t want them to feel like, you know, they were practicing with me, right? Like, they they’re gonna want to hire the best agent in the area. Why would they hire me even if they’re friends and I didn’t want to like pressure them, I wanted to provide value first. So of course, I work for a top broker, I worked on a team and I did do some great sales. And but what I found was that it’s just being a new agent. And even my friends who had been agents for a really long time, this whole lead generation was really a pain point for a lot of people because, you know, you know that you are great with clients, you know that you can walk them through the transaction. Great, but how do you talk about your business with people without having them? You know, run away? Because if it’s just literally How’s the market? And you know, in talking about interest rates, like, I don’t know, everybody’s friends with like, 10 agents, right? So if you’re saying the same thing, everybody else is saying, you know, they’re just, I don’t know, I just have so many friends who became secret agents like they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t talk about their business at all. And that’s not how you grow your business. Right. So in the back of my mind, I was learning all these things. Meanwhile, I was diving deep into wellness, real estate, and we’ll get into what that is. But I just thought, well, I’ll create something that will differentiate myself. And I ended up sharing with sharing it with tons of realtors and they loved it so much that I realized that’s my true passion. So even though at the time I was making a little bit more money, or a lot more money, selling real estate I thought well Oh, this is this is going to make a bigger impact. And I’m going to be able to help more people this way. So that’s my journey.
D.J. Paris 10:06 And you’re kind of at the forefront of the wellness movement with respect to real estate. So I just want to recap a little of what you said, just to make sure our audiences is on board. Because this is new to me. This is even relatively new to Sheila, although she’s been doing this for a while, but we’re want to make sure everybody has a good awareness. So here’s the problem we’re solving for. So the problem is, as a realtor, as Sheila said, so elegantly, everybody knows 10 realtors, and in fact, they probably want in every family just about, or extended family at least. So not only are you competing with all the other bozos that your friends know, who sell real estate, but also potentially realtors in your own family. And also, yeah, you know, what are the questions that agents get when they’re at a cocktail party, and someone introduces themselves and finds out? You’re a realtor? Well, yeah, you’re just like you said, how? What’s going on with interest rates? What about inventory? Basically, what’s going on with the market? Is what people hear. agents get that question a lot. And so we what we want to do is really give you RMU, with something that would really differentiate you from essentially all the other agents in your marketplace by actually providing value to your prospects and your clients and Sheila’s stumbled across. It’s kind of I’m like, a little bit jealous, because I actually, I’m like, I should have come up with this idea. It really, really, I’m actually, like, a little mad at Sheila, that she’s okay. You can promote it to like, it’s, that’s true. That’s true. And by the way, we do have a special code, we have a coupon code for what we’ll share with you towards the end of the show, where you can actually take advantage of this opportunity. Guys, I really do think it’s a no brainer. It’s very cool. But let’s just dive right into it. What are we talking about?
Sheila Alston 11:49 Well, just to use, you mentioned something that I thought of, and as when you’re at a cocktail party, and people say what do you do for a living? And if someone says, you know, I’m a realtor? That is the worst thing that you can say,
D.J. Paris 12:01 what insurance agent?
Sheila Alston 12:03 Did you know why? It’s because they just whenever they think about realtors, they dump you into that box. Now you are one of them. So if they don’t like realtors, they probably you know,
D.J. Paris 12:16 I have a friend who is a luxury car salesperson. And he does not say I sell cars, because he doesn’t want to be lumped in with you know, look, you know, not every car salesman, or car salesman, just in general, maybe don’t have the rep always have great reputations, and I’m not in any way being disparaging to that industry. I love car salesmen. I just We just know that how people think about them. So he says ideal in luxury auto. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. What does that mean? He does. And he really does. He’s like, Well, ideal and Bentley’s and whatever, you know, whatever the cars are. He doesn’t say I sell cars, because nobody really wants to talk to a car salesman. But if you’re talking about luxury, Ooh, what’s a Bentley? Like, you know that? Well,
Sheila Alston 12:59 he’s creating curiosity. And that’s the whole point. So if you have, when someone asks you what you do for a living, you need to say something that creates curiosity. And that’s usually either leading with the problem or being a little vague with what that is where people like, Oh, what’s that? So don’t say that your realtor. What you’re going to learn from me is that you need to leverage this growing trend that we just mentioned, which is wellness, real estate. And so maybe before I tell you how to do that, I tell ya, let me tell you what wellness, real estate as well. So I don’t know if you’ve heard of the global wellness Institute, they are the ones who track this wellness growing trend around the globe. And they have identified wellness real estate as a pretty large segment, that’s already $275 billion. And it’s projected to grow to be 870 or 850 billion by 2027. Like it’s growing like gangbusters. And what it is, is it’s forward thinking developers who are building communities, residential communities that are centered on wellness. So it’s not just let’s add a pool or community center and build this and say that you can have, you know, this great luxury lifestyle. It’s not that it’s I’m intentionally building this community to support healthier living, and how can I do that? How can I bring people together? How can I get them motivated to go on walks? How can I get them eating better food? How can I bring more natural light into their home? How can I use energy efficient building practices to make the home more safe, and more, I mean, bring more fresh air and bring more natural light in. All of these things are things that developers are thinking, even before they’re building anything during the planning stage, and that’s what makes the difference and you’re seeing these communities pop up kind of all over the globe, really, but there’s so many that are coming all over the country and it’s pretty exciting. There’s communities called Agra hoods that are centered on an organic farm. And so that’s kind of like farm to table living. And I’m here in San Diego. And there’s one being built in Encinitas, which is just a mile from the beach. So it’s not like you have to be out in the country to live on a farm or have and they’re going to have a five or six acre regenerative farm, they’re going to have a local brewery on site that actually uses the local produce, they’re going to have farm fresh eggs, I think. And they’re going to have a coffee bar that uses the beans roasted or they’re growing on site. And they’re gonna have edible walking trails, and they’re going to have green space for music festivals. And so you can have this walkable community, that’s pretty much in the suburbs. That’s really normally a car dependent area. And it’s offering just a different kind of way of living for for people so that they have another option to just be healthier, which is awesome, I think.
D.J. Paris 16:02 Yeah, I think, you know, the wellness trend, certainly Millennials have embraced and even younger generations, of course, we understand the importance of physical Well, being mental well being etc. And, you know, we although we Americans, I think I just saw this statistic is very depressing. It was like 70% of Americans are overweight. So I’m not here to address why that’s, of course, you know, there’s a lot of factors of why that is, but the point I’m making is overweight, people are also thinking about their health and what they can do to correct it now, you know, correcting ones, ones, you know, health is not the easiest thing. But it is something that is in the zeitgeist, we are constantly a huge industry, wellness, and taking care of oneself getting in better shape, and having the environment around you to help support that. So I, I’m a big fan. So let’s so keep telling us more about how to realtors fit. So
Sheila Alston 16:59 that’s the thing is like, I just here’s this trend, developers are building this stuff. And nobody’s talking about it, right. And so and then you also have all of these other small businesses that are coming up with like, no VOC carpeting, and got certified fabrics and all of this stuff, that’s kind of healthier options. And then I think with the pandemic, and people being stuck at home, they’re really realizing how their environment is. And that’s why you know, people moved around a lot, but you can get sick from your home environment. So there’s all of this stuff swirling around and I thought, Gosh, why aren’t Realtors talking about this? We are the ones in people’s homes. We’re the ones who are recommending contractors, we’re the ones that during home inspections are making people feel okay about remediating mold or being scared about it. You know, we’re the ones that are kind of guiding them to find a home that checks these boxes, right? But why couldn’t we be the ones that also you know, connect them with healthy home professionals and help, you know, not be the Healthy Home expert, but let them know that it’s an option so that they can make some better informed choices that are going to empower people to be live in an environment that supports healthier living. And, you know, when I first started this, I thought that you needed to become a wellness agent. And really, I’ve been doing I have my magazine that I created has been around for three years. And the agents who have found me first are the ones who are trying to do that. But what I’ve learned is that wellness real estate really is just a bridge to have more conversations about real estate, because it’s not How’s the market, how our interest rates, it’s like, this is a new and exciting trend. Let me tell you about it. And here’s the magic words, that I teach all my agents. So not everyone can live in these wellness, lifestyle communities, but everyone deserves to live in a healthy home. So what I teach my agents to do is connect with These Healthy Home professionals in your area, go find them, because most agents don’t know about them. You know, most agents just have their title lending. You know, a few contractors who can do stuff at home. That’s your list. If you have a long list of client past clients that have small businesses, you might refer to them, but you don’t have you know, who’s the EMF person who’s the air quality tester who’s the water filtration expert, who’s the you know, the green appraiser. You know, there’s a lot a long list of college psychologists, eco designers, wellness architects, biophilic designers, there’s lots of people that are experts in the home environment, that if you just connected with these people and started talking about them on your Instagram page, and just shared you know, I care about you, I want you to live in a healthy home. Let me be your connector for everything home. I’m expanding my knowledge and network and that’s what I want to be for you.
D.J. Paris 19:55 I love all of that. So basically you’re at a cocktail party What I would say, based on what you told me, my, my head was swirling, a lot of the things you mentioned, by the way, I don’t even know what those are. And I get my getting I’m getting excited to learn about color. And, and what you know, this reminds me to have people get very confused about. And they should be confused, like, let’s just talk about solar for one second. So solar is an interesting industry. And I’m not here to cast any aspersions on the industry or be pejorative towards them. But it is very confusing. If you want solar, just call three different companies and give you quotes and you will get three wildly different quotes most likely, and you will be more confused than ever. So people, but people are checking this stuff out, they want to know their air quality inside their home, they want to understand, you know, what sort of harmful things might be there and how to increase their overall health inside inside of the home. So and outside the home. So if I was at a cocktail party, and someone said, Hey, what do you do say, Hey, I’m a realtor. And you know what I’m really into right now, I’m becoming really fascinated by this growing trend called what wellness, real estate, let me just give you like, me tell you what it is because really cool. And then you just mentioned a couple of data points, like like you had mentioned, and say, what I like to do is obviously yes, I help people buy and sell homes, but I really want to help connect them with professionals who can help make that home as healthy as possible, because you’re probably thinking about this stuff anyway. And nobody really knows who to trust and how to do it. So I’ve got all these connections, and we want to, I don’t want to just sell your home, anyone can do that. I want to actually sell you a home where you feel where you thrive. And it feels really healthy and isn’t
Sheila Alston 21:42 rambling, that’s so much better. I mean, the one liner I teach my agents to say is really just to start with the problem and say, you know how so many people are realizing that the home environment matters, and that there are toxins that are coming into your home, I don’t know if you know that. But like you can create a home that supports healthier living. And so I am a real estate agent, and I am wellness focused real estate agent, I really just want to give goodwill and share how to create a healthier home. So I’m expanding my knowledge and network to include these healthy home professionals so that I can be your connector for everything home because I believe that everyone deserves to live in a healthy home. And then people are like, what, you know, tell me more? Can I follow you? You know, like, I’m
D.J. Paris 22:24 Yes. So I see this being, you know, as you said, you can really use this in a number of areas. Number one, you could reach out to all your existing clients, you’ve helped sell homes for say, Hey, if you know, I have been studying this, this, this new thing, I have this network of people that I I want to introduce you to if you’re feeling like the home could use, you know a wellness upgrade, you know, there’s ways to do that. You can also as you mentioned post video content, as you learn about this, this could be your part of your
Sheila Alston 22:53 value added content, right that you’re doing
D.J. Paris 22:56 value added content. And then also, you can use this again, when you’re talking to prospective new clients. So to me, this would be this would be a absolutely wonderful way to to really differentiate yourself. Now let’s talk about the magazine because there is a physical or a digital component to this that you have put together. So talk us talk us through what you provide for agents and how they can utilize this serve. Okay,
Sheila Alston 23:23 well, so if you’re just talking about wellness, real estate, I feel like you know it can at first it can be like what is this? Sure you have a great conversation, but how are you actually helping people and and how can you do this without, you know, adding more work to your plate because I understand how agents are already really busy, right. And so I created this magazine, and at first it was called Wellness real estate magazine. Now I have three different covers to choose from that are all the same magazine, but one is healthy home and one is wellness at home. So it’s a branded magazine that’s branded to you. So you can join my digital membership and you’ll get the digital magazine every month. It’s it’s not like any other, you know, generic magazine that you get to brand. It literally is written by healthy home experts. So I have a biophilic designer, I have a wellness architect who writes monthly, I have a building biology expert who’s also a home inspector and she writes monthly, I have the green building design summer who will write occasionally. And I have a organizer. And I also have a celebrity chef. That’s all there’s always the recipe in there. And she specializes in allergen free foods. And so I just feel like it’s a really unique piece of content that you get to share that you can feel proud of saying, hey, you know, let me share this with you because everything that’s inside here is going to help you live healthier. And they’re going to learn something for sure that they you know, haven’t seen before or haven’t learned about and they’ll look forward to getting your content. So if you join the digital members You get a branded mobile feed issue, and then you get a digital unbranded flipbook that you can share. And you can embed it on your website to drive traffic there. And then for $25, more, you get a whole bunch of social media stuff that I create, I create reels that have prompts, so that you can, you know, you can personally read what I say, and everything that I talked about is about, you know, how to create a healthier home. And it’s meant to be value added content to kind of add on to your local real estate content so that you have more of a well rounded, you know, social media feed and marketing campaign. And then I also now have direct mail. So you can actually get a physical copy, you can farm your local neighborhood, you can promote your business partners or your, your healthy home professionals that you find in there. So I have lots of ways that you can even print these magazines out and have them at events, and that are going to differentiate you and I have a good story to tell you about that, too.
D.J. Paris 25:59 So what we’re what we’re talking about is a solution. So we think about providing great value, a value added content to our prospect list our sphere of influence, you know, we think about other realtors for a second, what are they sending out as far as content on a regular basis? Well, it’s going to be market updates. It’s, you know, here’s what’s going on in your neighborhood. All of that stuff is great. Does it differentiate yourself from other agents? Probably not. Certainly, you know it, there’s a lot of that already floating around out there. In fact, a lot of brokerages do it for their agents. So you know, you, you may that may be getting those people may be getting a lot of those emails every month, but are they getting anything about wellness and real estate, almost certainly not. So this is an opportunity to to not have to put that information together yourself as the agent, you can lean on Sheila and Sheila’s got a team that writes, puts and edits these this publication which can be in a digital format, or even a printable format. So she’s got different pricing for both, you can of course, you know, brand yourself in the magazine. So that it’s your you know, you’re you’re putting you know, the your brand there. And she’ll even said you can even add your own experts in different ways there as well. And on top of that, she’s going to give you exact social media, content to film and produce for yourself. So with comes from you, she’s going to tell you exactly what to say how to do it, you literally follow the instructions. And now you’re putting out content on social that nobody else has.
Sheila Alston 27:33 Yeah. And let me give you an example of how this works. Right. So I have this agent, Terry Brown. She’s a Coldwell Banker agent in Atlanta. And she went to her Church’s Jazz Festival last month. And she said she got a table and she was right across the aisle from another broker who had two agents there. And she was like, Oh, God, and she brought a little house plant with her. And everybody was looking at her like, Why do you have a plant, and she had my magazine that was branded to her. And she basically just talked about the home environment and how plants help clean the air and how she really wants to help her clients live, healthy. And so basically, she shares this magazine that helps you create a healthier home. And if you wanted to join her email list, she would send you the digital copy every month, and she got 25 people to join her email list. I don’t know about you, but most people don’t want to join a realtor’s email list. And so the fact that she got 25 in one afternoon, and then she got a listing two weeks later. So that’s the power that this you know, vehicle has to just create more conversations and connection with people. It’s pretty powerful. And I have another agent who actually is she’s branding herself as a holistic agent. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. I
D.J. Paris 28:49 think I’ve had her on the show before if we had somebody who considers himself the holistic agent, I can’t remember that. Well, maybe it was Christie
Sheila Alston 28:56 Woodford but um, but Tori McGee is one another one in Atlanta and she has a great website. And she’s basically she was telling me, you know, so many people have brokerage websites, or they just have websites and everybody’s saying the same thing. Let me find your dream home. She’s like, people don’t go to agents websites to look up homes anymore. They just don’t do it. They go to Zillow. Right? So you need to have your website be your calling card of how you’re different. Like, what are you providing, and if you haven’t taken the time to look inward and find out what your differentiating things are like, you need to do that too. But then also, if you talk about what’s trending, the magic is that all of a sudden in people’s eyes, you’re an authority. You are a forward thinker. You care and you’re not really you don’t really have to do anything extra but already be the connector that you already are and just connect with some different people. And the minute you talk to a business professional that is working so hard to try to create a healthier home for people whatever that businesses are. And you say you’re the first realtor that comes to them and says, Hey, I love what you’re doing. Can I share what you’re doing on my Instagram, you’ve got like a new best friend. And you know, and you’re so you’re helping out a small business in your area, and you’re promoting healthy living, and you’re being a forward thinker, and you’re being the connector for everything home, and you have a whole bunch of new stuff to talk about with people. So it’s just such a win win all around.
D.J. Paris 30:23 It’s a win win. And most importantly, I think it’s what the clients are interested in anyway. So I always think about this as an example, I remember, let’s just go back 30 years, whenever that was 30 years, and I never saw an air purifier in anybody’s home 30 years ago, like unless maybe somebody had extreme allergies, and their doctor gave them some sort of prescription for this air purifier that they bought. That was this big clunky thing. And then you know, 20 years ago, Dyson comes out or whatever the the big air purifier company is realizing everybody wants an air purifier. So and now they’re most people, I don’t know, most people, but a lot of people have them in their homes. This is a thing that people are thinking about. They’re already buying plants for these reasons. They’re already thinking about air quality and mold and pollen. And I have cats and cats, you know, can you can get very sick from like toxoplasmosis. And that, you know, pregnant women can be around cats. Anyway, there’s lots of things that people are exploring. And with the rise of Tiktok, and Instagram reels people are now getting access to this information at faster speeds. So they’re already knowing about this, and you get to be their, their connector to actually how to how to make it. Yeah,
Sheila Alston 31:39 I mean, imagine, imagine, so you’re supposed to be cold calling people right or not cold calling, but you’re supposed to be connected with your network every day. And you’re supposed to call them and what do you say? So so many agents don’t want to do that? Because it just feels cringy to just keep talking about you know, the market? Hey, do
D.J. Paris 31:53 you want to sell your home?
Sheila Alston 31:54 Do you know anyone looking to buy or sell like, oh god, yeah. But imagine you knew someone who’s going to remodel their home and they have a young child that has asthma. Imagine now you get to be the one that says hey, I want to connect you with the green design center. Because they have a whole bunch of flooring options and paint options that can help you mitigate the VOCs that are going to be in your home. And you’ll be able to pick healthier choices so that when your child is rolling around on the floor, they’re not getting off gassed in their face with all these toxic chemicals. So you’re helping a family live healthier. Now all of a sudden, you’re getting out ahead of things instead of chasing leads and asking them Are you looking to buy or sell, you’re being their home connector already, right. And people don’t remember what you say, they remember how you make them feel. So if you’ve connected with them, and they all of a sudden feel like, wow, thank you so much, you just made this wonderful for my family, you just connected me with someone who’s going to help my child live healthier, or help us live healthier, you are in their circle of trust. Now, you know, when it is time to sell their house for sure you’re gonna get a listing appointment, you know, because you showed that you cared ahead ahead of the are you looking to buy or sell? You know, I
D.J. Paris 33:12 love it. So the magazine is what’s the publication frequency? How often are you creating new newest, so
Sheila Alston 33:19 I do it every month. And so every month if you you know, if you have the digital issue, you get your own URL, you actually get to have a little feature article about you, you there’s a place for you to have a coupon or something about your listings in there. And that’s just auto updated every month, the social media also is updated every month, you’d go into my portal and you can find it, if you wanted printed issues, we’re really flexible on that you can send them quarterly, you can send them by monthly you can send them monthly, I do take the date off of them. So if you sent them quarterly, they usually will last two or three months. And I do feel like so many agents have had such success printing them out and hand delivering them from people like during the holidays, it’s such a good gift to be able to have conversation instead of just you know putting your name on a calendar or putting your name on pins or you know, whatever and just sending that out. Wouldn’t it be better if your calendar had health you know how home maintenance tips for how to live healthier or just something like that instead? Or the magazine right so
D.J. Paris 34:24 I love that. So if you have a you have a direct mail version of this as well where you can actually physically so so people can always subscribe to the digital they can always print out and have those available but if it was me I’d want to have the print the professionally printed magazine because just looks better. So tell us about that as
Sheila Alston 34:51 well. Well it’s a magazine people will keep because it’s not like every magazine that you see right and so your face gets printed on the cover inside you There’s a little note that I write and you can completely change it. Like I literally send you a Canva template that you can customize. And then you get an inside back cover template the Customize. So it’s not, you know, I love reminder media, they’re great. But when I was an agent sending reminder media, even though it’s customizable, it’s not it’s limited, right. So when I created mine, I want it to be a little more flexible than that, because everybody’s brand looks different, you might want to change the colors. And you might want to completely change the whatever’s written there. And so you’ll get the inside back cover for whatever you want. And also the back cover. But here’s the exciting thing is the publisher that I work with. If you send 1000 or more copies, we can hyper localize it for you. So we can put your town name on the front. Not only do are the addresses exclusive to you, but you can also add, you can mail some to your sphere, and some to address as you don’t know, you can, we can actually normally it’s for 2500 or more. But if they mentioned you, and they want to sign up and send 1000 or more, they can get a feature article written about them inside the first issue. So we could literally put their face on the cover of their hyperlocal. And it’s such a way to build authority is having a, you know, magazine article written about you and you’re on the cover. So you’re just not, you know, it’s not just branded to you, but you’re in the magazine.
D.J. Paris 36:30 You know, it’s so funny, I was thinking about magazines the other day because I received the Costco connections magazine, which for all people who who are Costco members, we all get this magazine once a month, and it’s literally the only magazine I get. I never look at it. But I always think because I, I just I’m not I don’t go to Costco that often. But and I don’t really care. But I do look at it. And I do I don’t really thumb through it. But I do look at it, I see what’s on the cover. And and then I toss it. And I’m always like, I wonder why they do this. And then it dawned on me recently, because it works, it clearly works, they must know what they’re doing, they’re not wasting all of this money on this Costco connections, because it doesn’t generate business for them. They’re not stupid. They’re obviously at the top of of the wholesale sort of, you know, you know, retail space, that’s them. And they published this printed, you know, magazine. And then I thought about realtors and I go, who has a printed realtor magazine. And I was like, nobody, the only printed realtor magazine in our marketplace is like a third party company that is just like talking about the industry in general and features, you know, agents and different articles. And it’s cool, it’s really great. But nobody has their own magazine. And I was like, This is so cool, because it’s going to be like nobody subscribes to magazines anymore. So this is also going to be something that they noticed, it’s not going to be stuck between Elle and Vogue and all the other magazines that people you know, used to subscribe to that. Let’s just be honest, they’re not anymore. This is something you’re going to be sending them. And not only is it okay, I’ve got this magazine that no one else has. But it also is something that I actually would thumbed through, why don’t I thumb through the Costco connections, because it’s all the same stuff in Costco every month I yeah, just not a big deal to me. But I would I would thumb through this, because guess what, I have two kittens now. And maybe there’s gonna be an article on there and how to keep the home, you know, free of toxoplasmosis from from Kenya someday or just here’s to how to improve the air qualities when I walk in, I don’t always just smell the litter boxes. So the point is, is this is stuff that people do care about, they are looking at wellness, I would suspect that almost everybody on social media follows some wellness accounts in some capacity. Right, we all follow somebody, I follow a guy called knees over toes as a workout guy. So I’m following them, everyone’s following them. This is a way to have your own physical. And by the way, the physical, you know, the physical issues are more expensive, of course, you gotta mail them and print them. And you don’t have to do this, right, you could go strictly digital, I would encourage you to step up, though, and do the physical mailer because people are going to be even if they don’t read it, they’re gonna be impressed. They’re gonna be like, Wow, my agents got something going on. This is really cool. So I’m, I’m well, and we have
Sheila Alston 39:18 such great pricing, if you’re sending to 1000 or more, it’s 329 An issue, which is a really good price. But here’s the thing, we have a partnership program, where if you give us your list of vendors, and we can call them to get ads, or you know, we’ll call them and say hey, would you like some exposure in this Realtors magazine? They they wanted us to call you because they refer you a lot. And if we sell an ad in their magazine, we’ll split the revenue with them and we’ll create the ad and it helps to reduce the cost of the magazine. So depending on how many ads they get, they could literally get it down to where it’s the same cost as a postcard but they’re sending this beautiful magazine and We like to call the mailbox moment really the mailbox moment. And I think you know, for years Top of Mind used to be a thing, like, you know, top of mind works for Costco because you go to Costco already, you’re already a customer, you’re like, oh, yeah, I need to go to Costco. And it used to work where it’d be like, okay, yeah, oh, I need to sell my house. There’s a realtor. But that doesn’t work anymore. Right? Like, you get so many realtor ones. And you can easily go on Google and find who’s selling the most on your street. So how can you be memorable? That’s what we like to say, instead of just being top of mind, how can you be memorable. And if someone sees this magazine, and sees what you’re putting out there, and, you know, of course, it represents your values and what you think is important and that you care you are, you’re being that memorable, because you’re providing value.
D.J. Paris 40:46 Absolutely at the website to see all of the different options, digital and print healthy home media.com. You can, the pricing is on there as well. And you can you can schedule a strategy call, but you said something that I just want to go back to this idea of having partners help compensate or pay for the cost, right? So you could have lender and attorney and inspector you can have people who want to get exposure as Sheila was mentioning inside the magazine, and that could help be how you afford to do the print the printed material. So, you know, think about if you could get the price down with a few partners who want exposure to you know, $1 an issue printed or even possibly, who knows how low it could go? Boy, that’s a no brainer. Yeah. Because as you said, yeah, and the Costco connections thing. Yeah. It’s always like who reads this? I don’t know who reads it. But it does remind me, oh, yeah, I gotta go to Costco soon. So even if they don’t thumb through it, when they they are likely to thumb through it. But even if they don’t, they’re going to see, wow, I’m getting this physical magazine from my agent who is clearly into healthy living. And I think that is, again, it’s an ultimate differentiator. So I am such a huge, huge fan of this. Where do you see, Sheila? Curious? Are you seeing any additional trends in the home wellness space, that are kind of exciting, and, you know, new sort of things that that, you know, different? Different industries are coming together to?
Sheila Alston 42:22 Well, I think, you know, when I hear about my, you know, the wellness architect, when she talks about the wellness kitchen, I was like, oh, that’s kind of exciting. What’s the wellness kitchen. And it’s simple things, but it’s just about organizing, you know, your kitchen so that healthy things are easily reachable, right. But then also, you see like appliances that are coming out, there’s a whole new steam oven. So and there’s an air fryer, right, so that you don’t have to use that microwave oven that’s putting radiation in your food, you could use a steam oven and a convection oven, an air fryer, and you could still you could get wonderful tasting food that’s going to be way healthier for you. You’ll notice that designers now there’s eco designers that specialize in, you know, getting new things that aren’t from overseas and sprayed with all those toxic chemicals like fire retardants, anything that is got extra chemicals on it, you don’t want it like I had an interview on my podcast with a got certified carpet person. And she’s an interior designer. And she said she sells these organic, beautiful wool rugs that are totally toxin free. And then she says the designers just don’t know. And she saw one of these designers who bought this for a client. They’re spraying all that scotch guard all over it afterwards. And then the kids are playing on it. She’s like, Oh, gosh, you just ruined it. You know, she’s like, not every homeowner knows about this stuff. But every designer should write and I was like, you know, realtor should, too. Because you’re the ones recommending people. And it’s not that you need to become a healthy home expert. just expose yourself to this stuff, start meeting some new business people and start sharing what they’re doing, you’re gonna learn about it, you’re going to be helping, not only them, but the people that you’re connecting them with. And, you know, in turn, we’re making a difference because you’re helping people live healthier. And I just feel like that’s a ripple effect that you can be proud of.
D.J. Paris 44:19 Yeah, and I’ll give the audience a quick story of my own. So I was just thinking about this, as you were saying that so about five years ago, a friend who was in the real estate industry came and to me, just as as I say, Hey, what’s going on with you? And he said, You know, I am starting a magazine for realtors, and I went for a magazine for realtors. And he said, Yeah, and this was like, you know, 2018 Maybe. So I went, Oh, that seems like the world’s worst idea. No one reads magazines anymore. And he goes, No, no, no, I’m in and he said it’s going to be exclusive are only going to send it to the top 500 realtors, and I was like, nobody is going to care about this. And I even said that to him like nobody cares. Like, you’re better off just making a digital magazine, and I don’t even think anyone’s going to care about that. But good luck, I wish you the best. And I thought for sure he’s gonna fail. Five years later, the magazine here in our local market, Chicago is as big as ever, it’s just for realtors. And agents are getting, like, steamrolling over each other to try to be featured in this magazine. So people do want physical marketing materials these days. And, you know, flyers, brochures, all of that’s fine, but really coming up with something unique, that actually provides value. What this magazine actually did, this one I’m referencing, why it became successful is because they would interview these top agents, they would learn about how they grew their business, they would provide articles for realtors in there kind of similar to what we do on the show. And people do read it, I was featured in it once people read my article reached out. So I was like, wow, I guess I was totally wrong. And I was. So guys, you know, please, please don’t think of this as another newsletter. Don’t think of it as think of it as a way to really differentiate yourself. And you can get people to pay for this, you can reach out to your vendors and say, hey, I want to do something really cool for all of us, we’re going to include you in this and we want you to help contribute to it so that we can get you more business as well, Mr. or Mrs. You know, vendor. So I’m a huge fan of this idea. I’ve never seen anything else like it on the market. And I really encourage agents do and it’s not that expensive. By the way, if you even if you’re just doing the digital one, it’s, it’s, it’s remarkably cheap, I won’t even go into the pricing because it’s so inexpensive. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s it is so worth so much more than what you’re charging such as
Sheila Alston 46:45 wanted it to be such a no brainer. And I wanted every type of agent to be able to leverage it. So I wanted a new agent who doesn’t have a home sale yet to just have it be a no brainer to just be able to share the digital issue. And then for anybody who’s already doing farming, you know, we want to we want to just have you switch from whatever you’re doing and try this instead and make it competitive price wise, but then also just add more value to our customers who are the agents. And
D.J. Paris 47:12 I do love that story of the agent who went to the church Jazz Festival and had these issues sitting on her table and a plant and then really saying, yeah, so of course I can help you buy and sell a home. But here’s what I’m really into right now. And isn’t this cool? Would you like to be on the list? So you can get these tips and tricks? Who would say no to that? No. And then you can market to those? Yeah, you can market to those people forever. And like you said, 25. I mean, that’s like, that’s like one of the most successful open houses of all time, if you can get 25 names. Yeah, that’s incredible. And so yes, and by the way, the cost for the digital is I just calculated it, it’s less than 1/4 of one month of my gym membership. That’s how cheap this is. So this is what Sheila said, it’s a no brainer, guys, it is a no brainer. Do this before everyone else in your market has
Sheila Alston 48:05 well, and I will raise prices eventually. But I’m just keeping it low, you’re gonna have to, you know, I am I’ve had the magazine for three years, but I haven’t. I’ve been busy building it. So I haven’t really done an exposure sales launching things. So really, if you get in now you’re just an introductory pricing basically. And if when I do raise prices, you’ll never your price will go up, you’re always locked in. So it’s a good time to get in now.
D.J. Paris 48:31 Kulfi home media.com is where you go and we have a promo code if you use the code real 50 R EA l five zero, you will get 50% off $50. Sorry, sorry, $50. Yes, yes, not 50% Because you could be making a $5,000 order and she needs to stay in business. But $50 off. And guys, that is a crazy, what do you see the pricing for this? That is at least for the digital one, it’s almost free. So let’s let’s go ahead and support Sheila guys. This is what your your audience wants to hear about and read about. And it’s a way just to make yourself unique in the marketplace. So healthy home. media.com is where you go. But if you’re not yet convinced, if you’re like I still want to kind of check this out, follow Sheila on social media and actually see what she’s putting out there. So you can get a sense for whether it would be a good fit for your business. And I can assure you that it will be but the way that you follow Sheila is on Instagram wellness agents, agents, plural wellness agents on Instagram and Facebook healthy home media. Again, we’ll have links to all of this in the show notes. But if you do sign up, please use the promo code real five zero and you will get $50 off one month essentially. And Sheila this way I really I’m super excited about this. I rarely ever get excited about a product or a service because you know I just, I don’t see a lot of unique sort of things entering the market in the space. This to me is extremely unique. So I was couldn’t be more excited to talk about this with you today, on behalf of our audience want to thank Sheila for obviously creating this product and opportunity for agents to differentiate themselves. So thank you, thank you for coming on our show to talk about it. And on behalf of Sheila and myself, we want to say thank you to our audience for sticking around to the end, the best way that you can help us continue to grow is to tell a friend, I think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Sheila, and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. Or just have them pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Also, if you’d like to leave us a review on whatever app you might be listening to us on. We appreciate that. So iTunes, Spotify, wherever, please let us know what you think of the show. And lastly, support our sponsors. They’re the ones paying the freight they keep the show running, please check them out and support their products and services as well. We’ll Sheila, we appreciate your time today. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks. Yeah, thank
Sheila Alston 51:10 you Can I say one more thing is their time. I just wanted to give one more free resource. So if you do go to my website, and you click on free resources, I have a whole bunch of downloads that are available for you to check out like conversation starters, workbooks to help differentiate your brand, create your one liner, all that sort of stuff. And I also didn’t tell you, but I am just now going to be launching a new app for your phone. And it’s called Boost your real estate brand. And I literally haven’t launched it yet. But if you go it’s available now. So you’re kind of one of the very first and I have a whole free course called the wellness advantage so you can learn about it. And so if you just search your Android Google Play or go to the app store and look for boost your brand or boost your real estate brand you’ll be able to see it and they can download that free
D.J. Paris 51:59 awesome booster real estate brand on your app store download it check it out and Sheila has a tremendous I’m so glad you mentioned this because I forgot to mention it because I actually was looking at your free resources on your website. I was like wow, there’s some really really cool stuff here. She has after closing checklists, what does that mean? Check it out. This is a way to stay in touch. After the closing guys. She has all sorts of cool things how to brand yourself green staging ideas, you know marketing tools, social media ideas, it’s all free so check it out healthy home media.com click on free resources and get on her mailing list as well and most importantly get that magazine Let’s become the first person in your marketplace to be the wellness agent and wellness expert and and you know blit trait blaze the trail Yeah, so anyway, Sheila, thank you again. We will see everybody on the next episode healthy home. media.com is where you go. Thank you. Thank you.
How A Broker Owner Tripled Her Agents’ Production • Lisa Troyano Ascolese
Feb 07, 2024
Lisa Troyano-Ascolese talks about how she got into real estate business. Lisa discusses what she thinks about 2024 and what are her plans for her business. Lisa discuss the future of brokerage and what is she doing to encourage her agents to do to keep busy this year. Lisa also talks about the marketing strategies she thinks work right now. Last, Lisa shares her thoughts about agent commissions.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be speaking with a broker owner who purchased a brokerage and then within five years tripled the production of the agents in that brokerage today she’s going to tell us exactly how she did it. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re gonna be speaking with Lisa Triano. Aska Leesy before we get to Lisa, just a couple of reminders. By the way if this is your first time checking us out welcome and if you are not if it is not your first time, welcome back. We appreciate you the best way that you can always help us continue to grow two things, three things. I’m going to ask for three things one, of course, tell a friend about the show. There’s lots of realtors that don’t know about us, so please let them know about keeping it real. Another way is by supporting our sponsors, they help keep the bills paid. We love our sponsors and every sponsor, we hand select with specifically really wonderful tools and services to help your real estate business. And third, leave us a review wherever you’re listening or watching this episode. Please let us know what you think of the podcast and helps us continue to get better and better. Alright, enough of me. Let’s get to the main event. my conversation with Lisa Triano Eskalene easy.
Today on the show, our guest is Lisa Triano askeleen She’s a broker owner is a podcast host she’s a top producer. She’s a speaker. She’s a total superstar in Hoboken as well as in Jersey City. She has two offices there they service New Jersey. And but let me tell you more about Lisa because she’s really really an amazing guests that we are able to have on the show. So Lisa describes herself as a serial entrepreneur. She is the sole owner licensed partner and broker of record for Engel and Volkers Hoboken and Jersey City real estate brokerages as well as the my Hoboken real estate team leader she recently released the first to market mobile staging app called restaged with the hopes of helping with the planet’s rising furniture waste issue. She’s a podcast host a public speaker and a decorated award winning entrepreneur. Lisa thrives in purpose search sorry, Lisa thrives in purpose searching and business creation with a Bachelor of Science in marketing and management from Siena College and a partial MBA studies. Lisa has risen in multiple organizations before leaving corporate America and following her dreams of working for herself. She began a career in real estate over 10 years ago utilizing her strong background in online advertising, sales and marketing for several Fortune 500 companies to sell. Some of New Jersey’s most prestigious properties or clientele is included professional athletes, prominent members of the entertainment industry, among other high net worth individuals. She’s known for her unbridled enthusiasm, unique marketing techniques and knowledge of the real estate market as a whole. Lisa continues to win awards for both real estate and entrepreneurship to see all of the super cool things Lisa is up to please check her website which is LT a endeavors.com. Literally everything she does is on there but also I want you to follow her on Instagram my home book and so it’s like my Hoboken but H O me instead we’ll have a link to that as well in the show notes. Also subscribe to her pod cast, which is called breakfast with brokers, which she does weekly, and she interviews agents and basically talks about the market. Lisa, welcome to the show.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 5:08 Hi, thanks for that intro. That was awesome.
D.J. Paris 5:10 You do a lot of things.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 5:12 I do a lot of impressive. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 5:14 exactly. Yeah. Well, yes, I can appreciate that we, we have one brokerage here you have two brokerages, I can’t even imagine doing two, we have one with just under 800 agents. And that is keeping us very, very busy. The idea of having to just oh, that just makes my head spin. But you not only are doing that you’re also hosting a show you also entrepreneurs, speaker, you do it all. And most importantly, you develop agents. I want to talk about this because one of the most important or impressive things I saw from you is that not only did you purchase angle and Volkers in you open these these two offices, but you also tripled the production of those offices. And let’s be honest, that is not easy to do at angle and Volkers is already an amazing brand. We have them here in Chicago, clearly a name that people respect and admire, certainly one of the white glove firms. But to triple the production of any office, regardless of the name that’s on the sign out front is I mean, we I would love to triple our agents production. So tell me what what you’re doing or what you did, because I think our show is all about agent development. So tell us how you think Well, before we get to that, I’m so sorry. I gotta go with my first question. We will get to agent development second. Sorry, tell us how you got in the industry? Yeah,
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 6:38 so actually ties well into your second question. I was in online advertising sales in Manhattan, working for several Fortune 500 companies. And I worked for an incredible man who was had an open door policy. So I literally sat next to the CEO of the company in this giant loft. There were no doors, it was just he had this great open air policy basically come in pitch me whatever idea you might have. And I’ll I’ll critique it, I’ll give you my feedback. He was like he was a serial entrepreneur and just off the charts. Brilliant. And I had this idea for like an event planning company. And I went to him. And I remember sitting across the table from him. And he’s going through my business plan. I’m like, What did I just do? I just gave my boss my exit strategy. Like, this is the dumbest idea. I fell right into it. And like, he closes it up. And he was like, you know, what’s the problem? That’s great. And I was like, Well, I have a job here. And he’s like, I’m laying off half the company tomorrow. No, you’re never safe when you work for someone else. And I was like, that’s true. I flat out said I loved his honesty. he flat out was like you don’t make enough money. I’m not laying you off. But half the company will not be here tomorrow. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 7:47 And that’s it’s important thing, by the way to realize that if you for people that do have corporate jobs, or maybe you’re thinking about getting into real estate, I was one of those people who was very highly compensated at a tech firm. Prior to this, I had just gotten a perfect review, I’d gotten a raise. And then I got laid off a week later, even though all signs pointed to I am doing great. But because I was so highly compensated, I was very easily they could get rid of me pretty easily. So that’s a really strong point. Yeah.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 8:19 And when I went on to go through like six or seven rounds of layoffs, and then finally they closed my division of the company, and I was out on the street, they had no money left. They didn’t give me any severance. And I remember being like, I’m gonna just get my at the time my late mother was a realtor. And I was like, I’m just gonna get my real estate license all my friends, we’re moving to Hoboken, I’ll do a couple rentals and it’ll pay the bills. And I remember jumping into it with I had the the event planning company that I was starting and kind of started doing them and I had to make a decision worth my time and kids one side or a million dollar condos on the other. And I was like I’m going for the Cocteau’s. So I close my company and I start time as a mom and pop company eventually bought the remaining owner out and and here we are. So real estate, yay. Unbelievable.
D.J. Paris 9:10 It’s amazing. It is it’s it’s funny how people get into this business, and then some, you know, ultimately become, you know, broker owners. So let’s talk a little bit about agent development, as we were, as I was getting to at the beginning and realized I hadn’t properly sort of gotten your story. So how do you think about training again, angle and Volkers is is really a brand at least here in Chicago and I’m guessing in most parts of the country where it’s I don’t know that there’s a lot of brand new agents who joined angle and Volkers I know it’s a lot of like, hey, once you get to a certain level, you know that’s that’s a place and again, maybe they do train new agents as well. But regardless, as a broker owner, you are always wanting your agents to do better production, more production. And of course, you’re there to guide them. So How do you think about that? And, you know, tell us like kind of what you’re talking to your agents about right now is 2024 just started, we had a tough year last year, at least here in Chicago. I know we did. Probably you guys dealt with the same high interest rates and low inventory that everywhere else did. So how are you thinking about this year?
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 10:19 I’m cautiously optimistic. If you asked me that question, I think three months ago, I would have told you that in the hatches and grab your helmets, and that’s it. But I have to tell you, I think I mean, our markets a little resilient in that regard. Like we get the word five minutes outside of Manhattan, you can get into Manhattan from Hoboken and four different ways like train bus vote, you know, Uber, we’re right across the river. So for us, we always bounce back a little bit quick, and we’re about nine months out of Manhattan’s market. So our nine month lag, I should say for Manhattan’s market. So we have a nice, like people are always moving in and moving out and moving in moving out. So there’s always like a decent amount of transactions for us. That being said, when we closed last year, there were 53 properties on the market for 60,000 people, and there’s 1011 realtors that identify as Hoboken as their market. So the math is just not mapping. So it’s, it’s one of those situations is where I think we’re gonna continue to see low inventory, anything that comes on the market gobbled up with multiple offers over asking. And I think the low inventory is really what’s keeping us going and keeping that that steady. But a lot of parts like we start with North Jersey, a little bit of West and we some South Jersey as well. Not all those markets, but certain pockets of those markets. And, you know, we’re seeing it across the board. So I think as long as demand remains that high, we will continue to to to have, you know, a healthy situation. We just need we need a little bit more inventory. And I don’t I’m sure you guys are seeing the same thing by us. The issue is, you know, we have everybody that is stuck in these two, two and a half percent interest rates. And during COVID All of the pricing shot up. I mean, our single family market in Hoboken went up 24% In two years. Wow. So now, you know, that brownstone that was 1.8 is you know, significantly higher. Now you can’t get anything decent for under two, five. And, you know, again, the math isn’t happening. It’s like people are like, Well, I’m just gonna stay on my condo until these rates come down. So it’s I think if we see, if we just see a five if we just see 59999 And like, a just a five, I think we would have like a wild spring. But I don’t know. I mean, now they’re talking about
D.J. Paris 12:32 no one has the crystal ball. It’s funny, I hear everyone’s got their own number when it comes to rates like your 6.3. Obviously 5.9 would be amazing. We don’t know, I’m actually going to see Lawrence Yun, who’s the NAR Chief, Chief Economist. And next week, I’m just lucky enough that he’s in Chicago, because I think ours here. Despite all of their problems, we’re still having this market. I know we won’t go there. There was the I don’t know if you saw there was news yesterday about I’m very curious to see what that’s about. But that’s just the gossipy part of me. But anyway, I will get to chance to to come back and do an episode on what Dr. Yoon soo predicts for this year. He’s usually fairly accurate. But this is a big problem. Right? I think it’s 85%. Yeah. 85% of us homeowners with a mortgage have less than 5% rate. Yeah. So as you’re saying, I mean, I’m at 2.9%. Like, I’m not moving. Yeah, yeah. So so it’s a problem. But is there does the math work? And this is I guess, the question and it’s market specific. But I’m curious, does the math sort of work when rates are where they’re at now? Just because oh, we are dealing with cat a lot of cash offers I bet. So that may that may sort of negate what I’m about to say. But for non cash offers, I think now might actually be a decent time to buy because anytime rates do drop to the low sixes it’s going to be an it’s going to be so much competition. I just wonder if people are going to be gripped vastly overpaying if they were to buy today, lunch curious.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 14:10 I’m already on like three group chats with friends and family like talking about my in laws have a house that went up across the street from them. They live in a modest block back up to it. commercial districts like not a cul de sac like not like, you know, everyone’s like, the house just hit for two, eight. And it’s like, what?
D.J. Paris 14:28 It’s everyone’s already overpaying.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 14:31 Everyone’s really overpay but I also think that like to your point right now is a great time to buy because you have a little bit of leverage. And, you know, whatever still sitting on the market right now might not necessarily be bad. It just might be, you know, it was mispriced or, you know, it’s not the typical you know, all white modern farmhouse everyone wants like it just might be a little different that you can change I think, I think to your point, it’s a great time to buy.
D.J. Paris 14:58 I also want to talk A little bit about brokerages. So this is something we don’t ever talk about on the show. And being somebody who’s in management at a brokerage. I think there’s a lot of times a disconnect between what agents maybe expect from a brokerage and also just how brokerages work. I think. I think one myth that I’d like as a broker owner you can I probably appreciate dispelling is that the margins for brokerages are high they’re really not. And you know, brokerages are in competition with other brokerages, of course for commissions and everything. So you know, we’re at a situation where I think agents continue to split clients squeezed the agents, the agents squeezed the brokerages. You know, things are changing a bit. Do you think there’s going and of course, the lawsuits with respect to commissions? Do we Do you think there’s going to be like a massive change in the next several years with how agents are compensated? Obviously, it’s a crystal ball question. But just curious about, you know, how it’s all going to is, are things going to fundamentally change do you think?
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 16:02 I mean, I think yes, I think I think frankly, we’re the last agent, the last agency, the last industry that hasn’t been shut up, right, We’re the last ones that, you know, taxis had Uber and blockbuster had Netflix, you know, We’re the last ones that really haven’t had a major shake up. So I think, I think yeah, I think something’s coming what that is, to be honest, I have no idea. You’re absolutely right, the margins, the margins are very thin for brokerages. I mean, I only have 33 agents across to brokerages, and that’s kind of by design. Sure. Cuz, you know, but to your point, more agents is more money. Right? So it’s like, it’s, I think we, we, the power of the brokerage was diminished with certain models that emerged, you know, not naming names, but the Catholic model. And, you know, a lot of things were dangled in front of agents faces like, you should come here, you can make 95% of your commission. It’s like, right, but now you have a bunch of people running around the industry that don’t know what they’re doing and have absolutely no one to call. I mean, there’s there’s a brokerage that again, I would never call anyone out. But there’s a brokerage, where it took me two months to find the broker to month on where to send the check, like, yes, it’s, I mean, really, it’s so I think, to a point, and this is a good segue into your other questions, I think everything’s gonna go back to some level of basics. And you hear Tom Ferry talk about it, you hear Buffini talk about it, but there’s going to be some level of back to basics. And I think what, what we offer and what I’m sure you do as well is, you know, you need some sort of guidance, you need somebody I came up with a mentor perspective where I could call that person at 9pm. Or I can call them at midnight, or I can call them at one in the afternoon, and he picked up and that’s 100% why I became a successful agent quickly, because I had answers to questions. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 17:47 I can’t think of anything more important for an agent who’s newer or just looking to increase production is having somebody who’s either doing slightly better than they are or who’s just an industry veteran, who can say like, here’s how to do it, call me when you need help. And brokerages I think are a lot of them are starting to move more towards the team model, which teams a lot of times can pick up the slack of, of where a brokerage, maybe smaller, maybe doesn’t have as much support or training. I’m seeing that a lot happen here in our, in our market here. A lot of we’re seeing a lot of brokerages step away from training and kind of put that in the laps of the team leaders. So that’s kind of interesting. But again, there’s there’s quality control issues with that, I’m sure depends on the team, of course. But the idea of just having a mentor is so critical, we are actually finally putting a true mentorship program together this year at our brokerage, it’s taken us a long time. And it’s really tricky. As you know, mentorship programs are tricky because you know, you don’t want to give your your agent that just joined you a bad experience at the same time. You’re putting a lot of trust into the whoever the mentor is. And at the same time, you have to figure out how you’re constantly communicating with both to make sure that everybody’s happy and getting what they need. And of course, you know that but that’s what a brokerage should be doing. That’s literally part of the job if that’s something they offer, or if they don’t offer that you know, they should have Hey, if you call between this time and this time, you’re gonna get one of us on the phone, we’re here to help you. We you know, we are we’re here to help but not every brokerage is like that. I will say this to anyone listening. If you are somebody who is calling, and you don’t get good responses, this is the year to maybe explore other options, see what other firms offer because mentorship support training, these are the things that you are paying for for your brokerage please please please take advantage of them. Yes, if you’re going to a firm that doesn’t have these things, but they offer you like the highest commissions. Okay, fine, you get that that’s a trade off, but really understand that there are other solutions out there, and maybe it makes sense to earn less commission if you’re getting better, of course better training and support. What are you encouraging your thought about fundamentals? What are You encouraging your agents to do this year, just to sort of stay busy. You know, we can’t control the interest rates or the market inventory, but we can control our actions. So just curious on what you’re seeing successful agents do right now? Yeah, I
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 20:15 mean, I think we’re actually approaching it from like a three prong approach. So basically, we’re looking at the people that actually have to move. So I’m encouraging them to develop relationships with, you know, attorneys that might handle trust and estate work attorneys that might handle divorce, you know, really get in touch with old, like retirement communities, let you know, if you have somebody moving in, they most likely have to sell something, I mean, really acting as an advisor for these people that are going through a very scary transition in their life. Like, I think this country doesn’t do a good job of kind of protecting our elderly people. And it’s a scary time for them, right. And they’re saying, I just saw another podcaster. I don’t remember the name of but it was like, they’re calling it the silver tsunami. And it’s like, most of the transactions that will happen in the next five years are people over 65 cashing out. And I think the best thing you can do, or any agent can do is really start to make relationships in that realm. That’s certainly something I never knew anything about. And now I have wonderful relationship, friendships with divorce attorneys, and trusts and estates attorneys. And you know, that sort of thing. I think that’s going to be key going forward, because they so many of those baby boomers are cashing out in the next couple of years. Oh,
D.J. Paris 21:27 yeah. Great, great, great point, Lisa. So everyone listening, if you do not have relationships with divorce attorneys, estate planning attorneys, accountants, financial advisors, these are all people that deal with a lot of times someone’s entire net worth. And so they know that they understand the situation somebody is having a life event change, or inheriting a bunch of money, maybe from a parent who is, you know, passed away, they need boomers, baby boomers are going to be transferring a Trant on trillions of dollars down to over the next handful of years. To, to to their their siblings, or sorry, their offspring. And this is the time to build those relationships. So that when it maybe even becomes a tax advantaged reason why somebody buys or sells or put something in a trust, that you’re their person. So now’s the time to start reaching out to those providers and start saying, I want to build a relationship with you, I want to learn, you know, how can I send you business and you know, here’s what I look for. And you can also to
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 22:29 be like, to be I’m sorry to interrupt you, but to be ethical about it, you know, it’s a scary time, I think they’re, you know, that generation is very ones out to get their money, you know, so it’s one of those things to like, to really approach it from, like a place of assistance and a place of helping and be like, we’re gonna make sure that everything’s safe, and your kids get everything and you’re happy. And, you know, just being an ally in that process. That is, to me sounds terrifying. You know, I think that’s gonna go a long way. And it’s actually doing something nice with what we’re doing, you know. So I think it’s a great, great option.
D.J. Paris 22:59 It’s an amazing option. I’m so glad you mentioned that because it we are fiduciaries. So we are responsible for making sure we’re doing what’s in our client’s best financial interest. And as Lisa just said, it’s really the right thing to do. So I would say in every conversation with or every client conversation at some point, say, Hey, by the way, do you have somebody managing your estate? Do you have a will? Do you have some of the setup it not that you have to get involved as the agent, but you just want to say I just want to make sure everything’s protected, and that we’re doing things in the right way, even if it’s just to show that you care, that even just saying that demonstrates I care about your situation. And I know people that can help with this, if you need that you have a good accountant, do you have a good financial adviser? Do you have enough insurance? Are you covered in everything? Even though yes, we’re selling homes, we want to make sure that this home fits into your financial plan. I bet if if an agent would say that to to a potential client, and maybe they’re interviewing three or four other realtors as well, I bet those other agents probably wouldn’t bring up those kinds of things. Because it gets it gets tricky, where you don’t have to answer those questions when they’re like, Well, what about this as I, Hey, that’s not my area of expert expertise, but I have people that can help that can help you with that. Or let’s just get everyone on the same page. Yeah, totally. From a marketing perspective, because that’s your background, I want to talk about what marketing strategies do you see working like right now? What what do you see agents doing that successful? Maybe what do we see agents doing that you sort of shake your head and go, you know, not a good idea? Yeah,
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 24:34 I think, you know, this whole concept of, of agents having to be their own social media marketers. I think some are born for this. I think some need to hire someone. It’s I think it’s a long the, you know, I think you have to find a place and this is one thing that we do offer is like that you can stand out right. And I think a lot of agents there’s a lot of ego involved in this business. I mean, I’m sure you you’ve seen it, you know, and there’s part of that that’s actually really great. They because it allows these agents to kind of, you know, create this persona and they create this whole business surrounding that ego and it’s wonderful, it can also go in a very bad direction. So I think it’s, I think it’s one of those things where find, find a way that you can create a platform for yourself where you stand out. Because, like I said earlier, we have 1011 realtors that identify with Hoboken as a product, that’s insane, were one square mile. So you really need I think 7078 of us do the most work, you need a way to stand out. I mean, social media is still free, which is crazy to me like that. I mean, the fact that people aren’t diving into that, diving into AI in certain ways, like, there’s so that’s the fun part of this, I think, like come up with creative videos, come up with creative videos for yourself, not just for properties, you know, market yourself through video, if you’re sending don’t just send emails, what’s an open rate for an email now, it’s like nothing, you know, if you, you send it with a video on it, that’s someone interesting are directed to that person. So we’re doing a lot of that we’re doing a lot of very targeted marketing, we also utilize our network. So Anglin Volkers is in 33 countries around the world. And we actually work very well together. You mentioned the one in Chicago, I think we just sent him something a couple of weeks ago, like we we work very well on the referral side of things. And we double down on that because we do have a great relationship with the shop. So I think you know, kind of find your niche and then get it out into the world. I also think and this is a buzzword, so I hate to I can watch my agent Tom Worley rolling his eyes right now, if he’s ever listened to is the term authentic. I think we were being authentic before authentic was cool. And I think that’s key like you’re this is, you know, we did this all the time, we’re doing multiple transactions a month, all that stuff, but we forget that a lot of times this, this is like the most important transaction for someone. So out there renting a Bentley and driving around the street, like acting like, you know, that does nothing for anybody. You know, it’s you want to authentically present a home authentically present yourself and kind of cut away with all that craziness. Like, I think that’s a big trend that’s gonna go haywire is the days of you know, rolling up to the estate in the McLaren. I think you’re done. I think it’s you got to do something a little bit more authentic.
D.J. Paris 27:13 I think you’re right, and good riddance to those days. My opinion because because, well, and there’s nothing, you know, again, everyone’s different. And cheers to the people that do that. And I’m not here to disparage them. But But I think authenticity, the way I think about it is skills are well, honesty and skill. So it’s like, are you actually telling the truth? Are you presenting your actual self? And are you good? Are you actually useful to the agent and the useful agents always do business? It’s funny, it’s an you guess you have to have a good marketing plan. And you have to, there’s more to it than just being good. But being good is really the most important thing. And it’s this is the year to sharpen skills, because as I’m sure you’re seeing this in your market, you know, yeah, there’s 1000 agents who identify, you know, as Hoboken, but I’ll bet you by the end of this year, there won’t be 1000 agents, I’ll bet you there’ll be a lot of a lot fewer. And the agents that are still around and doing all of those things to sharpen their skills and keep their marketing strong, are going to gobble up market share. I mean, I certainly hope that’s what happens, because we certainly could use in this industry. But you know, some agents probably do need to leave the industry not have you know, have their own fault. Maybe they were never trained, well, maybe they don’t, it’s just not really their job. But we’re gonna see, I mean, we’re already seeing it, we have a holding company for agents that don’t actively practice, we started like 10 years ago, just like, as a kind of as a goof like, well, I guess we should have a holding company started with one agent, now we have 1000 agents in there. And the last in the last year, we’ve seen 200 People join our holding company, not not like from our firm Obrador, holding just in the in the whole state of Illinois. So we’re seeing huge people leaving, which should be very actually both scary and very exciting to anyone listening to this, because exciting, because you’re gonna have more opportunity, scary because it could happen to you, too. So I think it’s important that if you just keep doing the right things, and learning, I don’t see any reason why somebody wouldn’t be successful. But I like so we talked about social media, yes, of course videos. But you know, in right now, I think we think about how do I be useful on social media, there’s all sorts of ways to do that, you know, pick a micro market at some sort of geographic area and do videos about that area and highlight the restaurants and I mean, you could do all sorts of fun things that are really useful to the community. And then you could then go into those like restaurants say, Hey, I just made a video about you guys here. I just wanted to let you know I’m gonna tag you, you guys. If you want to send it out, that’d be great too. And there’s all sorts of ways to get immersed in the community but I I think that’s that’s going to be the key is getting back to those basics of, of getting involved in the community learning your skills, but but I am curious, you know, what, what are you know, are you seeing anything else like, are you seeing Traditional mailers, for example, I’m hearing agents going back to doing a lot of physical mailers. To
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 30:06 me the mailer thing, I’ve never, I’ve never got it, I’ll never be a proponent of it, I know their success with it, I know you have to do it, like 45 times upside down. And from a lock of hair, I don’t know, everybody talks about it. Like, it’s the God’s gift to our business. I don’t get it. I have agents that do it. And I support that I love it. To me, it’s so much money. It’s just, it’s just litter, like, and I’m not, you know, I’m not saying like from an environmental perspective, it’s just, I mean, I personally get like six a week. So if I’m an agent, so it’s like, to me, I don’t know, I don’t get the mail or thing I get that it works. And if that’s your if you swear by it, by all means die on that hill. But for me, I don’t get the mail or thing personally, I think you’re way better. Utilizing video and unique ways. I sent out a text Yesterday, I went through all of my old landlords and gave them a video just saying, Hey, you may have made a lot of money. Like let me you know, let me know if if you have any interest in selling because this is the difference of what you can make. And here’s a net proceeds worksheet, blah, blah, blah, I have like six meetings next week just from doing that. And it’s I don’t have a ton of landlords, you know, I have maybe like 2020 to 30 landlords and I have six meetings. I mean, that’s a huge return. So I feel like that sort of thing. I think we need we’re gonna need to get creative. And I think we’re going to need to learn how to surf and videos. I think video and social or anything you can do from text messaging is fantastic.
D.J. Paris 31:35 Yeah, and I love that with text messaging with systems like Bom Bom or loom where what’s really cool if you if anyone listening hasn’t explored those. What’s really neat is if you know somebody with one of those accounts, have them send you one just as a test, because what’s cool is they’ll take a video, and and this really, you can send it if you’re like iPhone, iPhone, or I don’t know what it looks like for Android. But what’s cool is it will literally take the video that you make and create like a little gif, three second GIF, and then it’ll send it to the person and then you know, it’ll, they’ll see that they have a video for them right in their text message. And they’re more likely to click on it, we sent an email, we send an email to all 700 plus of our agents announcing we have a new managing broker, which is a very big deal for us. And so we sent out an email on Sunday, which is not the best day to you know, send out an email. But it’s all of our agents say, hey, just FYI, this big, long thing, here’s our new managing broker, welcome, etc. And then we sent an SMS on Monday to say just with a video, and we were curious to walk out the higher open rate, we knew text messages were would but it was night and day difference, we had almost a 50%, almost 50% of our agents clicked on the link in the text message, about 15% of our agents clicked on the link in the email, or open email, even open the email. And maybe that says more about how we communicate via email than anything, but it’s just the way it is. I mean, people are, well, you know, this, nobody reads their email, you’re a broker owner, you know. So this idea of utilizing SMS in a way that’s not invasive, that’s not overly communicative. But like providing value is amazing. It’s such a great creative way. And people don’t probably want to take your phone calls all the time, either, right? So that’s a great way to sort of have a conversation without having a conversation and you’re like, Hey, I just you know, here’s a you know, let’s take a look at your property and see if it’s a good time to sell.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 33:33 Yep, 100%. I mean, even if you like from a brokerage perspective, even recruiting, I mean, my I have a great relationship with some of my best agents, and they show me the text messages, they get these campaigns that these are crazy, it is wild. I mean, you’ll have like, Hey, want to work here. And they’re like, no thanks. And they’re like, hey, but you really should work here. And they’re like, no thanks. And he’s like, Please work here. It’s like, Oh, my God. And it’s just it’s like, relentless. I mean, to the point where I think it almost turns them off, like, totally, you know, it’s, I don’t know, I think there’s an art to it. And I think that’s, that’s really going to separate, like, who makes it through this next transition is who can figure out what that art is and how you can do it authentically to yourself. And and really utilize these because there are so many tools that I mean, I don’t even know if you’ve dove into AI at all, but like, I try and do like a little each week, because it is the stuff you can do it that is incredible.
D.J. Paris 34:23 I mean, II, you know, the most obvious application, or the first one I had heard of was dropping your listing description, and it’ll rewrite it and or, you know, you’d tell it to rewrite it in a particular way. You can also tell it to abide by, you know, whatever rules are applicable in your particular state or federal rules around making sure it’s not a housing violation. But But yes, you can do that. That’s sort of I think most people know about that stuff now. But what if you were like, I don’t have anything to do for the next two days, because I don’t have any client appointments. You could literally as Chad GBT. Hey I’m a realtor, I have the next two days free. And I My goal is this, I want to reach out to 10 new people or whatever. And please give me ideas about how to do that it will literally give you ideas. So you don’t even have to come up with your own ideas anymore, which I think is so cool. And yeah, so utilize AI, I think if it is like, I don’t remember if it’s the Odyssey or whatever, there was the oracle at Delphi, I think, maybe for the Odyssey, but anyway, anyway, whatever is the old Greek mythology thing, but the Oracle Delphi was this thing, you know, you could ask anything for and it would tell you the answer. I feel like Chet GBT is our version of that. It’s not perfect, but it can do a lot of cool things. So you start talking to it, and start asking questions and asking for help, like, hey, help me market this property? What? Oh, there’s something really cool. You could do that. I’ll mention real quick. I just learned about this. You can put it I did this for myself, because I wanted to see, the building I live in is only three years old. It’s a brand new development or new ish. And so I said, I wonder what chat GBT, which I don’t even use the paid version. I have like the free version, which only goes back to like, 2020 or something. So it scours the web. But it only scours that I think through like, 2020. I don’t think there’s anything more current than that in in its database. Although I may be wrong. Anyway. I said, I wonder what chat GBT knows about my condo unit or my building. And I said, Hey, I live at this address. Tell me everything you know about it, which I was just interested to see, it knew what kind of countertops I had. It knew the pricing was wild. Because what it did is it it probably scrape the website that was for my building, when it when building was selling units, or I don’t know where it grabbed the data from it didn’t say, or it, maybe it did, but I didn’t look. But regardless, it knew everything. And I thought, if I was an agent, practicing, I would put this in F before every listing, because maybe there’ll be some fun little facts and things to know about the property that you would never know. Or maybe even a listing agent doesn’t know. And you know, you’ll just learn it knew when it was built, it knew it just knew everything. It knew what the average price points were, I was so cool. So you know, you should do that before every listing just to find or if there’s nothing that if it doesn’t know anything about the property, I would say, well tell me some cool things about the neighborhood that maybe a prospective buyer would want to know. Like, where’s the cool restaurants, whatever, it could be anything. So yeah, AI? Absolutely. Very cool.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 37:19 It’s very cool. It’s very scary, but it’s very cool.
D.J. Paris 37:23 What do you think there’s going what do we think about commissions? Now I know New York, New Jersey, you know, your your you guys have a very unique market there. But do we think agent commissions are going to change? Do we think do you do you? Are you seeing a trend where listing Commission’s are coming down going up staying the same? Just curious.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 37:46 I mean, we what I’m seeing, or what I ended up finding out what we started to see where the buyer’s agents were only getting 2%. So usually in our market, it’s a five or 6% listing. And we usually split it in half, two and a half to the listing agent, two and a half, Green Rovers. What I started to see was more and more 2% listings. And it coincided around the time that all these lawsuits happen, which don’t even get me started on those. But so when all that so I was like, oh, maybe it’s a reflection of that maybe people aren’t willing to give it out and up when you actually looked at the HUDs and the closing disclosures, you were seeing that this listing agent was keeping three and only giving out two. So I think there’s going to be a little bit I think listing agents are probably going to have a little bit more control over where that distribution lies. And we started doing it here for some properties, because to be honest, there was so much like tumultuous, like fighting over over deals. I don’t know it was a post COVID thing. I don’t know if everybody was just inside for too long. I don’t know what happened. But like, there was like two months ago, I spent the entire day arguing over a refrigerator. This guy just took his subzero refrigerator and just rolled it out the door was like it’s not like a refrigerator. It’s a $10,000 item. Like we have a problem here. I was like Sue me like it was just it’s so like contemptuous. So I think that if you as the listing agent have that option, you know, okay, well, here, I’m gonna give him like 2000. And Mike allows you to kind of control the deal a little bit more and keep things going. I mean, I think the other thing is to listing agents, it’s not a slam dunk, now, you know, to sell or it won’t be. So I think we’re going to have to do way more marketing. I think we’re gonna have to do way more, you know, higher end videos and higher end promotion. And so that is costly. So I could see that being more of a shift that I’m not necessarily worried about, but vigilant of whether or not there’s not going to be buyer’s agency. I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s really doing the whole industry a disservice and the seller a disservice to just eliminate buyer’s agency being paid. I think people think that Realtors get paid too much but if they actually saw what was going on in the back end, they would be appalled. I had multiple people this year be like I don’t know why You do this? Like, what? And they couldn’t, you know, my clients know how hard I work and they’re happy to pay the fees. I haven’t honestly had pushback on fees and years. But who knows, you know, the more that these crazy lawsuits get published, it’s it’s a it’s a sad state of affairs, I think they you know, people? Well, I’ll leave it at that. I think it’s, it’s, it’s more along the lines of like a mental situation or a mental health situation than it is anything else. But I agree, I think people that I’ve really worked with a good realtor, really know how much work is done and how much we do to keep the deal together. So I think in the end, I think that’ll prevail. I do think we’re gonna go through a weird time of justifying our fees. But I think at the end will be fun. I
D.J. Paris 40:46 think so too. And I think this is where skill just kind of wins the game. If you’re if you’re worried about if you’re, if you’re getting pushed back on your commissions. To me, I would see that as an agent, I would see that as feedback that maybe I’m not communicating my value proposition as well as I could be. And really saying, here’s why, in fact, if I was an agent, I would just say, I would explain to you how I get paid. I want to explain to you exactly how it works. And I want to explain why, why it’s worth it, why believe it’s worth it. And, you know, you don’t have to have that conversation every time. But for anyone that’s on the fence. I mean, this is kind of the lawsuits were kind of about this where, you know, commissions were kind of nebulous and kind of confusing, and nobody really understood them except the agents because it wasn’t super obvious who was paying the Commission’s and how it all worked. But this is a great opportunity to get ahead of it and really just explain it to buyers. Okay, technically, you’re not paying a commission, except you are paying a commission. And let me explain how it’s all baked into the price and everything so you get a better sense of where it comes from and how it all works out. I think I know, just agents explaining things better is always a win. And I think that to your point, I think they’re not You’re not going to get as much pushback. I think when it’s more confusing. I think that’s when people are like, wait a minute, what am I paying? Like? It’s like when I go into buy a car, which I like never do, because it’s such a bad experience buying a car, or at least I feel awful. Yeah. You always feel like you’re getting ripped off. Like nobody ever is like, here’s Okay, here’s what I’m going to make if I sell you this car, like, I’m happy to say if somebody’s like, Hey, I make 400 bucks each time I sell a car, I need to up this by 400 bucks. So I can make, like I get it. Like, we can have that conversation. I’m not I’m not a monster. But if I feel like you’re ripping me off now I’m not and I don’t trust you. Or if I feel like I don’t know the real story. Now I’m like, Well, now I don’t know who to believe. So I think with realtors we don’t thankfully we are not we are not cars. There’s nothing wrong with car salesmen. I love love good car salesman, but we know that the stigma in that industry is I don’t think I’m getting ripped off. I don’t know. So we don’t want that, you know, that same stigma here. And I think a lot of it’s just explain, explain, explain, explain. Tell everybody how it works. There’s no secrets anyway. I mean, it’s not anything to be embarrassed about. Who
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 42:56 isn’t looking at the hood. And notice that like, Yeah, I mean, like, obviously, were a massive line item. But it’s also like, like, what I started to do now is literally lay out before I start working with someone exactly what’s going to happen, the entire transaction and exactly what we’re going to do for you on each side. And I like I said, I’ve never had anyone pushback ever, ever the past like three or four years when it’s really been a question, you know, but to your transparency.
D.J. Paris 43:25 I agree. We should also mention, I didn’t do a great job of this on this episode. But I do want to mention that Lisa, you know, look, she owns two white glove brokerages in Jersey City and Hoboken angle and Volkers if you don’t know them, they’re amazing. They’re really, really at the top of the, at the at the top of the mountain for these, you know high. They attract very high producers, they also develop people into high producers, it’s just a good company. So if you are in those areas, and you’re an agent, now again, company like ours, we hire tons and tons of people. But Lisa is a little bit more. She’s she’s she and her team are very careful about who they bring on board because they want they want to develop you or they want to bring you on and find a solution for maybe an issue you’re having at your current brokerage. So if you’re like, I would like to work at a place like that, where by the way, when Lisa came on board, she tripled production. That would be pretty cool if you’re an agent. So how about checking out what Lisa has to offer? So Lisa, if there is an agent out there that’s interested. And by the way, guys, I want to also talk about if you’re a New York agent and just a second, but if somebody’s thinking about maybe making the switch, Lisa what’s the best way they should reach out to learn about your brokerage?
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 44:39 Yeah, I mean, you could reach out to me personally, it’s info at my home boeken.com You could text me 201-213-2617 Or you could actually I’m on social constantly. Obviously like I said earlier, it’s a big focus for us so you could DM me at at my home boeken so m YHOMEB o ke dot com. And then our if I’m sorry, our brokerage account is at EV, Hoboken JC. So you can do that one too. But either way, we’ll have
D.J. Paris 45:10 links to all that in the show notes. Thank you for that. And also want to mention, too, that for agents that are in other parts of the country that have clients that maybe move to New York, I mean, Hoboken and Jersey City are really considered New York at this point, it’s becomes, you know, a very desirable area, regardless of what somebody’s price points may be. Those are included in the sort of Manhattan sort of market. So if you have clients that are moving into New York, reach out to Lisa, because her team focuses on the Jersey side, do you guys do New York as well, or just the Jersey side?
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 45:46 We have a great relationship with our New York office. So we actually have, we can end our Brooklyn offices. So we actually we can help you, you know, if we could actually do like a 360 approach, we can give you some options in New Jersey that we think are comparable to New York, and then you know, we can send you to New York agents and they can handle it as well. So yeah, by all means, if I’m the starting point, I’d that would be great. So
D.J. Paris 46:05 it can if you’re if you’re somebody where people from those areas move to retire to probably going somewhere further south and warmer. If you are in one of those markets, where are fed from those areas, another good person to reach out to to say, Hey, I bet you have people that are moving, let’s figure out a way to mutually benefit each other. So I’ll reach out to Lisa,
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 46:26 and overseas. I put nine families overseas last year nine Wow. While we have an overseas component, like we always do a decent amount overseas. Nine is insane. That’s
D.J. Paris 46:37 incredible. So reach out to Lisa also, I want you to subscribe to her podcast, which is breakfast with brokers, you can find it anywhere podcasts are served and follow her on Instagram on all the social platforms my home boeken will have the link to that in the show notes. Lisa, thank you so much for being on our show. We greatly appreciate your time you’re raising a total superstar. Lisa is the person watch. We’re gonna have to have you on again, because you have a Virtual Staging app as well that I certainly we didn’t even get to, which is called restage. Check that out. It’s available on on your app store. restaged. It’s a Virtual Staging app. That’s hers. Check it out. Lisa, thank you so much. On behalf of the audience, we appreciate Lisa for spending an hour with us and on behalf of Lisa and myself want to thank the audience for sticking around to the final app for the final minute of the episode. And also please tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Lisa send them a link to the show. We can you can find us everywhere. So Lisa, thank you so much. We will see on the next episode.
Lisa Troyano Ascolese 47:43 This is great. Thank you so much.
Future Top Producer & Current Rookie Superstar • Erica Campos
Jan 24, 2024
Erica Campos with Coldwell Banker in Chicago talks about how she ended up with a brand new career in real estate. Erica discusses what she did to be this successful in her first 6 months in the business. Next Erica talks about open houses – how she organizes them and her follow up procedures. Erica also discusses social media and her goal for 2024 in that regard. Last, Erica talks about cooperation with vendors and creating good relationships.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be talking to a brand new agent. She’s in her seventh month, and she is crushing it. She’s going to tell you exactly how she’s doing it. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to a another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide. I am your host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with new top producer Erica composts. And, by the way, if you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re glad you’re here. If you’re returning thank you for coming back. Also, as always, please tell a friend about the show. Let other agents know about us. I just got back from a market outlook here in Chicago where we had the National Association of REALTORS chief economist Dr. Lawrence Yun speaking on his predictions for 2024. Perhaps I’ll do an episode on that myself. But it’s going to be a tricky year. So not as tricky as last year, hopefully. And he was actually fairly optimistic. But you know, we’re still going to see, you know, relatively high rates this year. You know, maybe dipping down into the lower sixes by the end of the year was his prediction. But regardless, this is going to be a tricky year just is. So let’s help each other tell other agents about our show. Let us know if there’s agents in your market where you’re just like, I wonder how that person is doing it. Somebody who’s really crushing it, well reach out to them or they can reach out to us. But we want to always continue to help our audience. We have the record number of listeners right now. So thank you for being here. Thank you for telling a friend and let’s just get to it the main event my conversation with Erica compass.
All right, today my guest on the show is Erica composts with Coldwell Banker in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Erica and this is actually a really sort of unique episode for us. I’ll tell you why in just a moment. But with over two decades of experience in insurance, finance, sales and customer service, Eric Campos brings a wealth of knowledge and unique expertise to the table. She’s a full time realtor, member of National Association Of course Chicago Association and the resident real estate counsel. She’s affiliated with Coldwell Banker in Oak Lawn, Illinois, she services Chicago and the suburbs. Now, Erica’s at 40 years old Erica decided just recently to take her own leap of faith and dive headfirst into the world of real estate, leaving her nine to five behind as a financial literary coach. She joined Coldwell Banker with a fire in her eyes and a relentless dedication to succeed. I should mention that Erica just started practicing in the last Erica was in the last eight months, I believe.
Erica Campos 4:10 Yeah, about that, like six, seven months it was back.
D.J. Paris 4:13 Sorry. I was giving you more experience than you have. So six months? Yes, six, six months and change. I want to tell you more about Erica. I really shouldn’t have asked her a question just yet. But I did. But I want you guys to hear this because this is really cool. Within her first six months, which she just just cleared six months, Erica closed an impressive four transactions as most of us remember our first six months. We probably didn’t close for transactions, so congratulations to her. But this really proved her quick grasp of the real estate market and her ability to connect with clients. She didn’t wait for the new year to even start making waves. Already this year. She closed a deal. By the way, the date that we’re recording this is January 5, so she already has a deal on the books closed for 2024. Congrats That’s to her. But also I want to also mention this because I think this oftentimes gets overlooked and forgotten about by realtors, the longer they’re in the business. So Eric has really dedicated herself to education in that first six months. So this are some of the accreditations that she has earned just within the last year. So she already is a pricing strategy advisor. She is also a property management trainer. She’s gone through property management training Community Investment Corporation. She’s a real estate investing working with investors. She is a financial literacy coach, as we mentioned before, and she’s a lead renovation, repair and paint sort of expert so she is doing a lot of different things and we’re gonna talk about why she’s adding all of these designations and what how they’re helping her with her clients, but I want everyone to follow her on the various social channels Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok LinkedIn. You can find her while LinkedIn you just search for Erica compost. But for all the others she has realtor dot Erica ca MPLS. And you can find her we will have links to all of Erica social media in the show notes. Erica long intro but welcome to the show.
Erica Campos 6:10 Thanks, CJ, thank you, thank you for having me. I am super excited that I that I got a chance to be on. I’ve been a fan of your channel for such a long time. Even before I decided to even enroll in real estate school. I would listen to your podcast and it has been a true motivation for me to get my license finally do it really well. I Yeah. So while I was studying, I listen, just to get everyone’s perspective and what is going on in the real estate world. And again, it was just very motivational and inspirational and oh, good motivation. So why I decided to just go for it. Well,
D.J. Paris 6:51 that I am. Boy, you’ve you’ve you’ve I am very surprised. I did not know any of this. So wow, that was that was a lot to take in. Thank you. It was a real, it’s a it’s a real honor to hear that. So thank you so much for sharing that I was not expecting that. And we should also mention, too, that you are the what you really threw me off my game with that one, that one that one hit that one hit me pretty hard. Congratulations. Well, I’m really proud of you as well. Because, you know, people don’t usually have this kind of success in their first six months. And it wasn’t handed to you. These are things you all earned. So I am but I’m glad to hear that maybe I was a small part of that over over the journey. And what I really want to talk about, I want to start with why the switch to real estate first. So you had this sort of, you know, traditional corporate life before. Why the switch?
Erica Campos 7:46 Well, it all started when I was 17 years old. I I’ve been in a I was an insurance agent for local State Farm agent all state. And then eventually I went to work for brokerages, bigger companies, but I fell in love with the industry back then I was 17 years old started part time still finishing high school. And once I turned 18, I you know, became licensed for both property casualty life and health pass them all the first time same as my real estate license, which I know is a it’s a very difficult that test. So, you know, again, I fell in love with the industry, I was always in contact with realtors, and with loan officers and lenders. And I think it also comes naturally to me to understand this industry, you know, and I would always get on the phone with loan officers and processors and ask them well, what’s the what’s the interest rate now what’s going what kind of conventional and FHA programs are happening. And so throughout my career, I learned a lot about risk management. So I would go out and inspect the property to make sure it will go through our underwriting, make sure that the house is not falling down that we are ensuring you know, good structure for both the insurance company and for our clients. And I think that goes a long way now as well with when I am looking at houses with my clients, I’m able to detect, you’re gonna need a new roof in the next two years, you’re gonna need this furnace. It’s it’s a goner, you know. So I think my clients definitely you know, love that about my experience. And then along the way, of course, you you have to be a good salesperson because I was also hourly plus commission, and then you have to provide great customer service because you want to build that trust, and you want them to continue coming to you as the expert. So I did that for about 1718 years. And in the midst of all of that I also was an educator. So I was building a little side business. Basically I could say it’s it was life skills like life skills, educator teaching, life skills and financial literacy. since back then, and so I have a big education background too. I started teaching all over Chicago and high schools as well, financial literacy and life skills, education. And I think all together with my experience and being so detailed and analytical and the plus the education piece, I feel good that it’s helped me transition into what I am now. And my last job, I was a Financial Literacy Coach. And I taught all over underserved communities, and young adults reentry, folks. And that pretty much led me into real estate again. So I think it was just a leeway into that. And once I got licensed, and I started doing open houses, and I started getting clients, right off the bat, I realized, okay, I don’t know if I can juggle these two. And I don’t like working for other people. I like to, you know, work for myself. And so I told my husband, listen, I really would love to focus on real estate, I know that I can hit the ground running, give me six months, if in six months, I don’t so one thing. I’ll go work for somebody else, I guess. And six months out, you know, for for transactions, and then the fifth one this month, and I have a couple more in the pipeline. So I guess the insurance and financial has always been in my life. And I think I missed it for some time. And now back into that industry. So it’s, I love it. I really love it. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 11:41 it’s it’s very interesting, I think a lot about previous careers and how they relate, I’m always interested in thinking about, you know, how to somebody takes skills from from maybe, in this case, you had somewhat related careers, but still weren’t specifically, you know, super real estate focused. But the idea of customer service, and being either a financial literacy coach, or an insurance agent, these are all about these are really service jobs. In my mind. I know, they’re technically considered sales jobs. But I always think, you know, the best agents are the ones that serve the clients most effectively. And I think that does translate really well, customer service. So I imagine that skill that you honed over almost 20 years, probably served you very nicely when he stepped into real estate,
Erica Campos 12:27 you know, definitely did I know that for me, my clients come first, I will always go above and beyond for them. If I don’t know something, I’m not afraid to say you know what, let me get back to you. Let me find out. And so then I, they’ll go ask someone from my brokerage. Sure, my managing broker, but it’s very important to me, it’s my reputation. But it’s also important that the trust, I don’t want to be known for, you know, real estate agents, we don’t have a good reputation a lot of times, right, some some some agents have made that for us, unfortunately. So I, I make sure that I go above and beyond and even those clients that I’ve already closed deals with, I still contact them, I still ask how their house is coming along, I send them you know, congratulation cards, Christmas cards, holiday cards. For Thanksgiving, I know it was only four. But I personally dropped off pumpkin pies with a thank you note and my business card to each and every one of my clients. So and potential clients. So you just got you have to go above and beyond. And one of the things that I’ve listened to in your podcasts and that I mean, I know myself is that 20 ins can easily forget who their realtor was, you know, even who sold them their first house, I’m not going to be that agent, you’re gonna know who I am. So even if I’m like, I don’t want to come across as a pain in the butt. Right. But, you know, again, the holidays, birthdays, so I make sure I collect good information so that I can you know, continue to communicate with them in more than just a business way. Like personal. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 14:10 you just gave an idea just sprung forth from what you just said. So I want to share it with our audience. But I really going to credit Erica with this because it was her words that that brought this up in my mind that I was thinking about when somebody moves in, especially when you know somebody’s buying a property. And whether it’s their first property or not. I don’t think it matters for this idea. But the idea that you were saying about how you’re staying in touch after the sale so they don’t forget about you is critical. Obviously we all know that. But sometimes it can be tricky to think about why to call somebody and and so I was just an idea that popped up as you were talking Was that pretty much in every home there’s always an unfinished project of sorts, right? There’s some sort of, you know, whether it’s there you have to redo a room or you want to do a bigger sort of thing or just cleaning out a closet or whatever. Project there’s, of course, everybody has lists of projects that are unfinished in there, wherever they live. And I think too, that would be a fun thing for agents to do once you sell them the home is reach out, you know, within that next year and say, Hey, how’s it going? How’s the home is, as you had said? And then I probably would say, Hey, do you have any projects that you’re working on for the home? Just curious what if you’re doing anything or things you want to do, because the reason I’m asking is, if you need any referrals, if you need, you know, if you’re looking for a particular handyman, or somebody to help you with this particular project, I’ve got people to talk to, or at least I’ll find good people for you. That would be a great reason to reach out and everyone’s got a project that they need to do. So you just you just spurned that within me. So I just wanted to share that. Let’s and I also want to say to you are the I believe the newest agent to ever been on our show, I should have mentioned that at the beginning. Because you are only six or I guess you’re in your seventh month now. So this is really a fun one for me, because all of a really a lot of our listeners, it’s not so much whether they’re new, but they love you know, our audience really loves sort of the new person’s energy, right? The new Realtors energy because, you know, life has not kicked them around enough yet. So there’s still a lot of optimism and excitement, but also you’ve just really hit the ground running. So tell us how you did it. You mentioned open houses was that sort of the first thing you did once you once you you know, join Coldwell Banker was that a big deal to start getting out there and talking to clients or prospective clients? Okay,
Erica Campos 16:31 well, one, I will say that I’m known to break records. So I’ve opened another record here and all my other sales careers I have broken records and have helped companies reach numbers that are impressive. So you know, not broken another record. And my goal is to break Coldwell bankers record as the first you know, newest stages bring in so many at a certain time. I would like to hit Rookie of the Year, which I think I have one more transaction, and they give you a year, right, two months to do it. And I’m doing it hopefully in seven, eight months. So I’m hoping that to record there. But um, so how did how did I start? Well, one, I have a very big sphere of influence. I always say that because in one of my prior businesses, I’ve met 1000s of people and I made the followed me all through all the social medias. So I’m very consistent as much as I can. And so when I decided to go into real estate and sign up for schooling, that is when I started posting, like, Okay, I’m studying for my real estate exam. This is what I do this is, you know, I started giving out advice on how to study. And then when I passed, I took a picture of me celebrating downtown Chicago, you know, with a hot Chicago hot dog. And so, it you know, so I think what helped me too, is just announcing it out there like being consistent about what I’m doing. And believe it or not, people are watching, you know, you do make a difference. You do empower people you motivate and inspire others. And like I said, you didn’t know, you know how you inspired me. And so this is why so we don’t know until we put it out there. And so I think that helped me a lot. Because again, before I even decided what broker I was going to join, I already had people asking me to be their agent, you know, and so, so then, for me, I had already been interviewing a couple of companies, and I decided on Coldwell Banker Realty and Oak Lawn, it just felt right, you know, sure we community is so important. So I needed and wanted in office environment that I can go into to talk to other agents, I’m very talkative and I love sharing my experiences and learning from others and vice versa. So that’s what I needed. That so I interviewed there. And I really I really fell in love with their mission and, and their support for newer agents and their programs. And they’re, you know, CBU universities what they call a or CB University. Amazing training, you know, so that I believe also helped me hit the ground running Coldwell Banker is political banker is very well known. And I also wanted to make sure I joined a well known company as well. So, yeah, I mean, just just walking and just inviting my sphere of influence, to follow me through this journey, I think has helped me quite a bit in addition to my experience and expertise. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 19:35 I think that’s right. So you did what everybody is told to do. And most people don’t do which is start telling everybody that you’re a realtor and start conditioning them which takes time because they were used to seeing you in different capacity, obviously, the finance world and insurance world, but certainly not the real estate world specifically. So you had to educate. We I guess this goes back to education, really, you had to start educating not only the people in your life to know that you’re a realtor, but then you started educating them about real estate. So that’s what’s what’s what’s really great. And social media is such an effective medium to to do that with. And so and then, okay, so you told everybody you know, from all your different previous careers, your sphere of influence your friends, family, of course, previous clients, which is amazing, because, of course, you know, with your background in insurance, Boy, that’s a lovely, you know, group of people to say, Oh, by the way, I am doing this other thing, too. And everyone’s got to live somewhere. So I love that. Well, I want to talk about open houses, because I feel that, you know, whether you had a sphere of influence or not, and you did, but a lot of people don’t they move to a new city, they get their license, they’re like, well, that doesn’t relate to me. I’m not from here. But anybody can do an open house. And so let’s talk about how to do it. Because we have had people write in sometimes and say, Well, I know you guys talk a lot about every person you talk to you says I should do open houses, but I don’t have any listings. I’m a little bit too shy to ask, you know, other agents in my office, can I please sit? You know, do an open house for you? How did you do it? I’m curious, like, what was the process for you?
Erica Campos 21:17 Well, one, I know that that was one of the lead generation. I wouldn’t say I don’t know, like, tactic. I guess that is easier for newer agents, right? And it doesn’t matter if you have listings or not, obviously, especially as a newer agent, you are not. But so I’m not shy. I will ask you. And I’m not afraid of rejection, being an insurance industry and in sales. Rejection is nothing anymore, you know, all right, on to the next, right. So for me, I would write an email, introduce myself as a new Coldwell Banker realtor to our existing offices. So we have multiple offices all over Illinois. So I said, Hey, I’m bilingual. I have this experience sales, customer service, you know, I’m professional. And if you need help with your open houses, I would love you know, I would love to help you. And so I started getting people, agents reaching out, you know, from different parts of the city to I was willing, really, oh, yeah. And especially within your office within your company, you’d be surprised that agents are very, especially those seasoned agents, they’re so busy, they need help, right? And I was not afraid. So I did research on open houses. I also took a Coldwell Banker course, on successful open houses, how to do them to safety protocol, because safety is so important. You know, checklists, I even added my own little things. So I made sure that everything that I brought, had my logo, my name, my contact information. So I would make like these little, little sheets that I would put a stick on to the water bottles, my marketing. And and luckily for me, the agents would tell me, look, this is your open house. So you do whatever you this is your you take all your leads you so I’ve made sure that I do that. I wouldn’t give people the option to sign in. I would say let me sign you in initially would say, you know, oh, no, I Well, this is a requirement by the buyer, and for everybody’s safety. And I would not let them sign in, I would do it for them. So that tells me No, right. So then we have your name, your phone number, email address, are you working with an agent? Most of the times they are most of the times they’ll say no. So when they’re not, I would make sure that I would really follow up with those particular people. But they all went into my CRM. And so I would follow up, I would send them newsletters, even if they have an agent.
D.J. Paris 23:58 So let’s, I’m gonna let’s I want to, you just said a lot and all of it was great. I want to slow it down a little bit and kind of go step by step because this is this is really wonderful information for our listeners. So you Yes, you had the the logo giveaways, you, when when people walk in, the way that you get them to sign in is you say, Hey, let me sign you in this. And if they say well, you just go Oh, it’s a compliance. It’s a safety measure for us, you know, as as agents. I’m just need your name, email, phone number, whatever. And, and yes, that’s a that’s a really, really smart way just to not ever have any nose because who’s going to disagree with safety? Right? So I love that. And you, how did you promote the open house? No,
Erica Campos 24:46 good. Well, if I had about a week or two, then that gave me a chance to create my own fliers put it all together with my information posted all over social media. Do some door knocking kind of post them in the library in that area. So kind of like scouting the neighborhood and the sun’s talking to people. But I will tell you that for me, that was very rarely the case, most agents would reach out to three days prior. So now I’m like rushing, trying to put things together. But as I went along, I learned Okay, Erica, make sure you print several of these so that if you get an agent that contacts you, you have everything ready, you have your checklist, you have this, I made like a little in my truck, I carry like this little box with all of my Open House information, like things that I would need, snacks and tape, like everything you need, I have a whole checklist that that I use to make sure that I even booties you know, I make sure that there’s always booties and make sure I have you know, the sign in information to fly different flyers, I guess, a business cards, just, you know, just cute things that you can place. And of course, I go and purchase snacks for, you know, for people something that they can just grab, you know, and go. And then like I said a flyer with my information on it.
D.J. Paris 26:11 So person goes through the property. You know, either you know, they’re asking questions, or they’re they aren’t they leave you already have their information they’re walking away with, you know, a flyer or whatever, then how quickly do you reach back out to them?
Erica Campos 26:25 I reached out to them the next day. Okay, so
D.J. Paris 26:29 hey, it was nice meeting you like email phone call? How do you do it text,
Erica Campos 26:32 I do a text message. I start with text messages. And I thank them for, you know, for joining or for coming into our open house. And if they have any interest, you know, please let me know, I’d be more than willing to help you give you more information. And then I’d say you know, if you don’t mind, I would like to put you into my newsletter, it gives you great homeowner tips, buy guides, and I rarely ever get to know. So. So for me, it’s contacting them right away and kind of determining, okay, is this person like a green like, okay, they’re motivated, sure, have a realtor, do they not? And then bills are like, Well, I’m just looking you up. A lot of times you get people who are just just wanting to look around just oh, there’s open houses. Let me I’m just curious. Sure. Gonna get a feel for them while I’m showing them the house as well. Right. Well, I also try to
D.J. Paris 27:22 have I have a quick question. Hold up. Quick question. So while you’re taking their temperature as you’re walking them around the property, do you make a little note of it somewhere? So you remember, because I know for me, I would forget if I mean, if only one person came through, then you won’t get that. But if 20 people come through, I’m going to be like, who’s What do you take notes? Like, how do you
Erica Campos 27:41 so I have a clipboard, a cute little clipboard with the sign in. And then I have a comment section that I write notes, like, it was a couple that they’re buying the second home, or they’re trying to upgrade or down, you know, downsize. So I do have a note section and I write it down. Because yet sometimes you get so many you forget who they are. And so I definitely keep notes. Yes. And
D.J. Paris 28:06 you can even reference that in your text if you wanted to, if they’re you know, you don’t want to make too long of a text obviously, the next day, but you could say, hey, you know, thanks for coming through really excited that you’re looking at your second home or whatever, you know, looking, you know, this is exciting that you’re moving from the city to the suburbs, or you know, whatever. It’s always great when people I always love when salespeople reference that in their follow up something that they, you know, like I get pitched for a lot of technology companies for real estate. So I love it when I have a meeting. And then the next day, they’re like, hey, great conversation. Oh, by the way, this thing that you mentioned, or you know, is I always find that to be very flattering. And it’s like, it’s like, oh, they’re listening. That’s that’s a good thing. Like we
Erica Campos 28:49 personalize it. I know we can all copy and paste, right? I’ve made a mistake where I’ve copied and pasted forgot to change somebody’s name. And I’m like, Oh, I’ve done the same thing. No. So So that’s lesson learned, right? So I make sure that I take notes, and I personalize it. And that’s pretty much with all of my clients, regardless of you know, what transactions or where I met, I always want to make it personable. I always want to personalize it to our conversation. I think that that makes you stand out. And you know, they don’t feel like oh, they’re, they’re, they’re selling to me. Nobody wants to be sold to right. So it’s like, yes, that’s a great point that you brought that up. You’re
D.J. Paris 29:27 right. I mean, there are people that do like to be sold, but I think they are the minority of the public. I certainly
Erica Campos 29:36 do think it’s those that are in the sales industry that like to be
D.J. Paris 29:40 probably yes, I you know, like my boss. He loves to be sold. He just because he’s a business owner and he just he loves that whole process. Me. I hate it. I just go just give me the information. I mean, personality types, we’re all just definitely. And I’m like, give me the information. I’m a pretty smart guy. I’ll figure it out on my own. Just be there to answer my questions and And, and don’t try to push me into anything because I don’t I don’t like being pushed. But some people do. Most people don’t. So yeah, your boy, you’re doing that. And I know we’re talking a lot about open houses, but only because I don’t get to ever get this granular with it with somebody because you’re so new, like this is a major thing for you so Okay, so I think we covered open houses and oh, and follow up. So you basically are assigning you know, somebody a color or temperature, you know, hey, red hot, you know, who knows? Super cold, whatever. And then you put them in your CRM, how so they’re getting your monthly newsletter about real estate? And then how often are you reaching out on top of that, just to sort of make sure that they know, you’re not just, you know, somebody on their email list?
Erica Campos 30:44 So they’re green, I would say, I like to touch like, maybe one or every two weeks, I, you know, depending on what will how fast they’re looking if there’s an area there, not sure. So about one or twice, you know, maybe once every two weeks, I guess I would say on average, and then those that are still on the fence, you know, maybe a yellow, I would say then I met a couple at an open house, and they were considering selling their each of their own homes and moving in together and buying one. So me I’m like, oh, that’s three transactions, all in one, you know. So I, they were somewhat on the fence of they’re still thinking about it. So I put them in the yellow category. So what I did is I looked up their their current homes, and I sent out VMAs. And so I have them signed up for a monthly CMA like a market report. Awesome. And then I noticed that one of the houses, they were not getting any exams, or homeowner exams. So in my email, I wrote to her, and it was great meeting her. But you know, I am here to help not just to sell. And I noticed that there was no event that she could possibly apply for one so and
D.J. Paris 32:03 that’s money to their pocket. So you’re essentially giving them an opportunity to possibly find income, or find, you know, a bonus sort of so to speak, I had the same issue. When I bought my first home in Chicago a million years ago, I didn’t know about the homeowners exemption, and I had for years, I never took advantage of it. And after like two or three years, somebody was like, do you know about this, and I wasn’t in real estate time. And I said, No, I was like, I had no idea. So like, That is incredible. How do you? How do you look that up the homeowners exam, or that’s just a Chicago thing? I’m thinking, right, that’s not necessarily a nationwide thing.
Erica Campos 32:40 Here’s what I use. I use remind, remind you, I use remind and then you know, of course most will tell you, it’ll tell you right there, you know who the owner is. So I use remind quite a bit to figure out who the owners are, then sometimes remind will give you the contact information for who the owner is. You have to make sure that they’re not on Do Not Call list. But many you can mail all you want, right that’s, you know, you could do that. But then I checked like the deed as well, just to make sure. I’ve also found that I people have made mistakes, things have been filed under you know, a for instance, right now I’m working with the prospect, I’m hoping I’m able to list their condo. And I looked it up and I noticed that someone else’s name was on there. And so I you know, I asked him about it. And he says I have no clue that is Erica.
D.J. Paris 33:35 Oh my god, what else owns the property? So
Erica Campos 33:37 then I go to the title company, you know, Burnett title, who’s in Coldwell Banker, and I say, Hey, do me a favor, like just confirm, is this a mistake, we confirmed that it was a mistake. And then it was fixed a year later. But for a whole year it had somebody else’s name on there as like a deed in a deed. And so it’s so important that we look up our own properties, but also provide that value to your clients that’s going to tell them that you are ready to work for them that you’re serious and that you are an expert you know here I found this even if you don’t come with me, even if you decide maybe you want to listed with another agent that you’ve always worked with, but just know that I will go above and beyond and if maybe we can’t I can’t work for you. How about your refer business to me?
D.J. Paris 34:23 So here’s here’s what I’m hearing from from Eric from Erica just speaking directly to our audience and I hate to make it sound this simple, but I think probably Oh, I’m gonna say it’s simple but difficult. She basically outworks the competition meaning and I don’t mean necessarily more hours, although probably more hours that she puts in as well. But most importantly, she takes the professionalism of the business very, very seriously. She wants to really cover all of her bases. You’re very intentional about how your processes you have a process for open houses. You have a process I mean I want to I want to switch gears just for a moment because you went full steam into I need lots of designation process, and you knocked them out. And I want to mention this to everybody look, there’s a certain amount of marketing, that is benefit to, even if you don’t learn anything from the designations and you of course you will. But even if you didn’t, and it’s all a big, you know, just not that helpful, although it will be. But even if it wasn’t, it still looks really good. When you have all of these designations after now, nobody knows what they mean. And nobody knows, really, nobody cares. But what they do care about is that you’re dedicated to the craft, you’re dedicated to the industry, and you’re taking it seriously. And most people don’t have seven different designations, which I think you have or close to that. The only one I would recommend that I didn’t see on there, and I’m sure you’re gonna do it anyway. Because you’re you’re done all the others. Certified negotiation expert, I think is a good one. And I guess yeah, you’re not because of
Erica Campos 36:03 course. Yeah, that’s
D.J. Paris 36:05 Yeah, but but the point is, is this is a way to gain an edge, as in competition. And that’s not why Eric is doing it, she’s doing it, because it’ll better service our clients. That’s really the main reason to do it. But it’s a nice little side benefit to be like, Oh, by the way, you know, when you’re talking to other agents, they may, you know, she’s not going to say this, but they’re not going to have all of those initials after their names. So I absolutely, really applaud you, you’re probably the, probably the only guests we’ve had on with that many designations. And typically, when people go down that path, they can tend to get caught up in education, and then not production. And you’re doing both. And that’s what’s really impressive is you’re not like Well, I’m just going to sit in and do online classes all day. So I get designations, you’ve also closed six deals in you know, in your first six months, and, and even a deal already this year, which is, which is incredible. And you’re really just following the process, you’re doing all of the things that every single guest I’ve ever had on here says this is what you should do, and you’re actually doing it. So I am so excited to hear about your success. So let’s talk about so we talked about open houses, I want to also and we talked about after I what I call after care, which is just following up staying in touch, you’re calling these people or texting or emailing them every couple of weeks. You’re saying hey, just checking in, how’s everything going? You’re providing value to them? Let’s talk about social media. What are you doing on social to what what are you doing? How do you think about posting content? Are you doing mostly videos? Images? Both? Are you talking about yourself? Some? You know, some realtors are like, here’s me, here’s me at the gym this morning at 5am. Other others just do, hey, here’s this cool house I’m you know, doing an open house for or doing a showing at? What is the kind of content that you push out there? And how do you think about
Erica Campos 38:02 it, all of it. However, I need it. My goal for 2024 is to get better at being intentional with my social media. As far as you know, the content that I’m posting video is one that I am extremely afraid of. I don’t know why I’m a big public speaker. I’ve done it for a zillion years. But that camera hits and I’m like, like frozen, right? Like, or I feel like what do I say what? I think people want to see you naturally, whether you stutter, whether you mess up, or you know whether your hair is this way. I think people now I think that’s more acceptable. Because I never wanted to sit there and edit. You know, my videos, I just felt like why. So I have to get better at posting videos that are educational as far as in rates dropping, or, you know, program changes, or what I do on a day to day basis. That’s one thing I would like to show people is okay, this is what I do from the minute I wake up. This is sounds boring, but this is what is how I search MLS. This is how I organize, you know, my whole day of taking a client to two showings, you know, it can be boring, but that is something that I would like to show, you know, social media. Posting as well. I want to be a little more intentional as far as providing value more value. But I will say that what I have posted are pictures and of course of me studying when I was when I passed. And I have a lot of followers that email me or send me private messages asking me what advice can you give me for passing this exam? Right. So I had a little secret that one of my instructors gave us. It’s a guide that a lot of people don’t know is out there and it’s free. Every state has it. so that it basically walks you through, hey, this is how your test is going to be structured. And this is how many questions are going to be per topic? This how many you’re going to have? Where
D.J. Paris 40:11 do you find that, by the way, for anyone who might be studying, we can provide a link to that in the show notes when we publish the episode. But do you happen to know off the top of your head?
Erica Campos 40:20 I will say that I have gotten, I think over 20,000 views over it. And it’s been six, seven months.
D.J. Paris 40:30 Oh, you made a video about it? Yeah, well,
Erica Campos 40:31 there’s a video. There’s my video on my tic tock that’s there. But every it’s a handbook. And every state has its a candidate, Illinois candidate handbook.
D.J. Paris 40:44 We will we’ll link to the tic toc video for sure. I’ve never heard of that. So that’s amazing.
Erica Campos 40:50 Yep, on top of your real estate book, and you know, whatever else that right there is like the Bible of real estate to pass. So you know that that video got me a lot of comments and, and a lot of views, I think it’s 15 20,000 or more views, I think amazing, amazing. Well, so I post things, little things like that. I do post when I’ve done open houses, what what I’m doing, I definitely post when I am under contract, especially when I close my gifts that I take my clients, I always take pictures of my the attorney, the whole team that was involved in it. And I’ve gotten a lot of, you know, praises for Wow, you just started and you’re you’re on fire, I had closings back to back to back to back. And so you know, so just just sharing your wins. And even I have to get better at sharing some of my struggles too. You know, it’s not always easy. So 2024 I do plan on being more intentional with what I post?
D.J. Paris 41:56 Yeah, I think I think sharing the losses or the struggles is something that agents tend to be afraid to do, we don’t like to you know, nobody wants to post vulnerabilities that are, you know, challenging things that are hard. Of course we everyone’s going through hard things at all times. And I wish people were more more courageous to want to share that on social media because I’m I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of seeing all the wins. I love seeing the wins. But I know that life isn’t all wins. And so I think agents that are willing to be vulnerable which again takes courage and really not necessarily share oh gosh you know I’m going through a divorce or something. I mean, you’d want to create healthy boundaries to make sure you know you’re not giving information away that isn’t appropriate. But you know, if you’re having a bad day if you’re struggling if the deal falls through, you know, people want to want to hear about how you handle not you Erica but just I’m speaking to the audience. People love to hear about how people move through struggle because we all struggle and so I encourage everyone who who is only posting you know, here’s me lifting my max at the gym in the morning, show a time where maybe you didn’t have it and you couldn’t get to the gym that morning and you stayed in bed and you know and you ate bad food all morning and you know or whatever you did something that wasn’t perfect. And I think talking about imperfection is the most relatable thing on the planet. But you you talked about being afraid of video that is which you would never know that if you’re either watching our episode or listening because of course Erica is seemingly super comfortable in front of the camera super confident, very elegant and eloquent. But she is telling you something vulnerable it’s hard for her to get in front and film video so I would recommend we have Kim Rydberg is one is our video expert for our channel here for keeping it real. Kim Rydberg literally all she teaches people is how to do great video how to get comfortable. So a little shout out to Kim Rydberg we’ll have a link to her stuff as well, because we’re the biggest Kim fan. She’s out in New York. And she’s the queen of that she comes from the media background and knows how to knows how to do video. So she is she is a great, great guide for you. So definitely check her out. But yes, let’s let I want to finish up with challenges. So what is hard for you right now and I don’t mean, necessarily in your personal life, although you could share that if you want to. But I’m mostly interested in your professional life where you’re we heard about all these successes. Where’s the struggle right now? What are you What is hard for you right now? Well,
Erica Campos 44:29 what is hard for me right now, I will say being a new agent, it’s not having a ton of experience like not having, you know, sold or closed on 2040 5060 deals, you know, like some like some agents have. And with each deal, each transaction I learned something new, whether it’s something that I helped with or something I might have already known or a mistake. So I always say we learned from our stakes, right? So you. So you take that along, I’m very hard on myself when it comes to making mistakes. I am a perfectionist. And so I always want to make sure that I that I have the information that I know what I’m speaking about. But when I do make a mistake, or when there’s something that I don’t know, I’m not afraid to say, or apologize, you know, I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. But going forward, that always stays in my head, like, I will never make that mistake ever again. An example I’ll give you is, I also work with investors, my current clients that I’m working with, they’re in the pipeline right now. They’re, they’re newer investors. And so for one of them, she wanted to buy a multi unit property. So we went to go see one. And it was it was a very unique property very nice. It was like four townhouses together in one building. And I remember the realtor saying to us, well, I can only show you too have those units, because the tenants didn’t allow us to go into the other two units, even though we gave them 48 hour notice. All right. So my client fell in love with it. And they said, all those other two units are practically the same. So we went with that day of the inspection, we’re finally able to get into those two units turns out, yes, it turns out that, first off those two units look nothing like the other two units. And there was water damage from both, you know, ceilings, there’s roof damage, right? So inspector starts doing his thing. And he’s like, what, I would think twice about this. And I said, you know, yes, and learning that going forward with her. And I, me and my client, we agreed, we’re not going to be placing any offers, until we get to see all the units available, because we’re not going to this again. And I don’t want to put my client in a situation where she’s consistently paying for inspections, and then right for mistake like that, right. So it’s something I learned along the way, and I take bits and pieces of what I’ve learned in experiences throughout, and I, you know, just gets better, it’s just getting better and better. So,
D.J. Paris 47:08 well, I love that, you know, I think really what I’m hearing is embrace, as uncomfortable as it is embrace mistakes and embrace imperfection. Because it is, as you said, it is the effect, it’s the only way we actually learn, believe it or not. So we don’t we don’t learn when the stove is cold, and we touch it, we learn when the stove is hot, and we touch it. And hopefully, we only have to learn that once.
Erica Campos 47:30 We have to do as a realtor, even those who are very well seasoned, they still don’t know everything, they still learn something with a last change so much. So that’s why I’m so passionate about education and staying up to date with these laws, especially with Chicago, and then the suburbs, all these little suburbs and, and Chicago has their own laws, you know, regulations, the City, Illinois does as well. And you got to make sure you understand the contracts between Chicago and Illinois, which one goes with what, there’s just so much. I’ve also made sure I’m bilingual. So that is also something that sets me apart, I want to say 90% of my clientele are you know, Latinos, and I want to say, maybe, like 80% are Spanish speaking. So I made sure that the team I built and when I say team, I mean vendors, all were Spanish speaking, right, because as a loan officer, you need to be able to do your job, I can’t do mine and yours together, it’s just impossible. And it’s not my expertise. Same thing with inspectors. Same thing with the attorneys. So I’m always looking for good vendors that can provide that service to my clients. And, and also my husband, he is a huge support. He’s a electrical city inspector, very knowledgeable. And so whenever I run into a situation, you know, I FaceTime him, like, why does this look like this? You know, or what is this? And he’s like, there has to be certain apps. I mean, he’s so much help and so much support, and I’m so grateful that I have someone, you know, that can support me that way. And on top of that, I know you mentioned building like bent love vendor list in one of your podcast episodes. And that’s so important because he knows the trade. He has a lot of friends in different trades, right? So he’s an electrical guy as a plumber. He has a friend who also has his own electrical company. He has a tile guy, a flooring guy. So I’m always able to refer, you know them to my clients, which is which is good. But I’m also very tough on very particular on who gets to be on my vendor list. You should be
D.J. Paris 49:46 exactly, yeah, well, you shouldn’t be because you they’re your reputation. So if you send somebody so yeah, so let’s, you know, it’s really a great lesson to make sure our vendors are doing good job. And what I recommend is once when you refer not you, Eric, of course, just as general advice to our listeners, when you do refer an agent to, or sorry, a client to a particular vendor, what I would say is, hey, I’m referring you to so and so they’re amazing. If for some reason you don’t have a good experience with them, or if they don’t get back to you, or something happens, where you’re not happy with it, please call me immediately. I have other people, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that. And I think that really sets it up so that because they might feel like well, I don’t want want to tell Erica, the person was no good because she, she’s really loved them. And I always like to set it up. So it allows for somebody to say, you know, I didn’t really have a good experience, or they didn’t get back to me in three days or whatever. So anyway, I think I was
Erica Campos 50:46 in the follow up, because a lot of times, they don’t want to tell you, right? And for me, I need to know, because it’s my reputation, like you said, and I have to also let them know, the courtesy like, hey, just FYI, this is what my client said, and you know, is that what happened? Or can you explain the situation. So that way, they also have the opportunity to fix the issue or whatever that time was unsatisfied for, or with. But I think having a good list of your vendors experienced as well, that makes a world of difference, especially the lender and the attorney. Well, this
D.J. Paris 51:22 is a perfect place to wrap up the episode, there’s been so much value you’ve provided Erica, I really can’t thank you enough for not only being a listener of ours while you were building your business, and still continue to be a listener as you’re building your business. I really thank you as just a podcast host for our listeners. And I also want to thank all of our listeners for paying attention and listening to this episode. Being a supporter of our show, it means a lot to me. And if you are somebody that’s like, I’d like to be on the show someday Erica had that dream. And here she is. And it’s funny, because I didn’t know that. And I was asking Erica, just when she came on, I go did we find you? Or did you find us because I don’t really do too much with the casting. And and then she said, Oh, no, no, I know about you. But But the idea is that you can also be on the show overtime. And Erica is somebody that you’re going to want to watch. She’s going to be Rookie of the Year this year, she is already crushing it. She’s taking this job extremely seriously. And for anyone who’s a little bit sad or depressed because of the condition of the market. Yeah, a lot of people are that’s okay. But you if you surround yourself with content from people who are just pushing through and doing the work, Erica doesn’t know that this is a hard market because it’s the only market she’s known. So to her. This is just what she’s doing. So if you’re a little bummed out, because things are harder now. Yes, I get it. I’m with you. We have 800 agents here. They’re they’re depressed to everyone’s dealing with this. But if you can connect yourself with accounts like Eric has, who’s consistently just pushing forward, it’s easier to be motivated to continue to do the same. So please, everybody follow her on the various social channels, Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. You can find her Eric I’m sorry realtor dot Erica composts and then LinkedIn of course just look for her name. We will have links to all this in the show notes. And if anyone out there is needs a realtor in Chicago, maybe you have a client moving, perhaps they’re Spanish speaking and they need someone to work with Erica would love the opportunity to connect with agents from all over the country. And by the way, Chicago people don’t when they retire, a lot of times they move they move somewhere warmer. So Eric has got people that at some point she’s going to need to push out and although I Erica might just get licensed in every state could knowing how seriously she takes the business but no, of course she’s gonna refer business out. So if you want to connect with her, What’s the best way Erica that an agent or maybe even a client can reach out to you?
Erica Campos 53:51 You know, my social media platforms, they can reach out to me there. They can also reach out to me directly 630-291-5971 or they can email me at Erica dot gambles at C B which is C as in Charlie biz and boy CB realty.com
D.J. Paris 54:12 link to those in the show notes as well stay in touch with Erica she’s got amazing energy, she takes the job seriously. And maybe, I mean, I’m gonna follow her because I need to be motivated sometimes too. And her energy is not only infectious, but she’s just one of those rising star stars that we can all learn from even if we’re 20 plus years in the business because she is really doing it. Erica, thank you so much for being the newest realtor to ever be be on our show. One of the first agents of the year to be on our show as well. And also congratulations on doing a deal already this year in your first five days. That is incredible. Please check out Erica follow her all over social media on behalf of the audience. Erica, thank you for reaching out to us. Thank you for being part of our show. Also. Thanks, Eric. On behalf of Eric and I think You the audience, thanks for gosh, I think we had, this was our sixth or seventh year, I don’t know six years maybe of doing the show. We have 500 plus 520 episodes, I think. So thank you for keeping helping keeping our show going, please tell a friend, please tell everybody who you know, especially new agents, they need to hear somebody having success. And Erica is doing that. And it’s not just falling in her lap. She’s literally making all of this happen herself. So send this episode to another agent who’s maybe starting out or one who’s just struggling right now and most agents are struggling. So this is a great opportunity to tell other friends about the show. We appreciate you for that. And also please support our sponsors. We love our sponsors. They are the ones that paying the bills for us. So thank you to our sponsors, please check out their products and services so that they continue to advertise with us. All right, Erica, thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next episode.
Erica Campos 55:52 Thank you have a good one.
What’s Going On With Real Estate Commissions? • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Jan 19, 2024
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
In this episode, Chris discusses his predictions for 2024 and what will real estate market look like. Chris also talks about what will happen with the buyer-side commission. Next, Chris and DJ discuss why this is a great time for buyers to enter the market. Chris also shares some tricks on how to unlock inventory in your market. Last, Chris discusses 2 things that will differentiate you from other agents and bring you success this year.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we have one of the most sought after journalists and speakers to talk about his predictions for the real estate market and 2024 crystallin. Sal is our guest. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our newest monthly series called unpopular real estate opinions with Chris Lynn sell. Now Chris Liddell is a real estate technology analyst and director of content at large. He specializes in new solutions to old questions, constantly exploring the cutting edge of technology in the real estate space. Chris also has many years of experience as a licensed Realtor in the state of Michigan and has worked as a marketer, a digital strategist and a trainer for major national brands like Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices of Michigan, and Coldwell Banker Schmidt Realtors throughout his real estate career, Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions ranging from modest rural starter homes to multimillion dollar waterside compounds, and accomplished musician, actor and speaker Chris has engaged with audiences sizes ranging from 30 to 3000. Most recently, Chris was a featured speaker at the National Association of Realtors Conference this past fall, and he’s probably done other engagements even since we are CEU. Oh, for all things, Chris, please visit his website, Chris Lynn cell.com. Also he posts a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter. We will have links to Chris’s social media profiles. You can follow him there, Chris, welcome to the show. Once again, DJ,
Chris Linsell 3:03 glad to be back. Thanks for having me. Happy New Year 2024. Here we are. Happy
D.J. Paris 3:08 New Year. And I would also just really quickly like to say thank you to our audience, I got a very nice holiday gift. I try not to bog myself down in the metrics of of our show. However, we did have our very biggest month ever, which I didn’t even know I don’t ever look at December numbers because they were always the lowest of the year. But my marketing person shared our statistics just the other day with me for December. I was like don’t show me and he goes no, you want to see these. And they were actually up. So thanks in part to Chris Chris has actually been part of our show for years. And we have a new feature for him now, which is very exciting, called unpopular real estate opinions. So we this is our second episode in this series. We’ll be doing this monthly. Chris, let’s let’s jump right into it. What’s what’s unpopular right now in your mind?
Chris Linsell 3:59 Oh, man, well, DJ again, thanks for having me back. I love that every every time we get together now I get to bring some of the topics that I talked about with people on social and in person. And I’m just kind of earmarking all the ones that people yell at me the most about so that I can share them with you. Because just because people don’t like it doesn’t mean it ain’t true. So I’ve got a few unpopular opinions that maybe we should chat about. The first is and, you know, take this with a grain of salt here. But the first is 2024 is going to be a terrible year for real estate until it’s not. And I know that sounds like a really weird way of saying it. But basically what I’m trying to get at here is that the beginning of 2024 is going to be challenging. We’ve got a lot of people who are proud masticating that 2020 For the new year, it’s going to be a brand new leaf. I don’t think so man, I think that the first half of 2024 is still going to be very challenging for a number of reasons. But the second half of 2024 is likely to be one of the busiest times in real estate that we’ve seen in a long time, a certain certainly compared to the first half of the year. So for agents who are looking to do some forecasting for themselves on this year, I wouldn’t be forecasting pretty lean until about June and then get your roller skates on, because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to get get to and from fast enough to serve us all the clients that you’re going to have.
D.J. Paris 5:44 Yeah, and I think I think you’re right. So it really will be sort of this diametrically opposed in your mind, sort of halves of the year. So we’ll have the half nots, maybe in the, in the first half of the year due to, you know, market construction, we’ve got high interest rates, we have low inventory, we just have less activity quite
Chris Linsell 6:06 Yeah. And you know, here’s the reason why this, this tends to be kind of a flashpoint issue for for folks, is ultimately some of the reasons why I think 2020 for the second half is going to accelerate, and not necessarily for the better of our clients, honestly, is, we have in 2023 experienced this incredible constriction of the market just in general. I mean, it was just it was a hard time to buy and sell a home in the United States. And I’ll even say, hard time to sell a home, even though homes are fetching record prices, it’s just a difficult time to sell because the markets feel so uncertain at the moment, and that’s making sellers nervous. We’ve just, we experienced some record constriction, in 2023. And 2024 is going to be the year where all of the pent up demand that occurred through 2023. And frankly, still some leftover pent up demand in COVID. That’s going to kind of break loose. And that’s going to be really exciting and interesting. But the reason why this is kind of an unpopular conversation topic is I don’t think this is necessarily to the benefit of our clients. Because we’re going to go from having quiet, challenging markets to extraordinarily hot and competitive markets, we’re going to see whiplash amongst our buyers very, very quickly. Sellers with unrealistic timelines. And then you’re going to layer in on top of all of that these lawsuits faced by NAR that are going to create a whole new level of uncertainty around commissions, which is not something that was a part of the conversation from COVID through 2023, I guess the second half of 2023. But it’s going to be a busy year in real estate. Real estate professionals need to keep their head on straight if they actually want to translate that busyness into benefit for their clients. Do
D.J. Paris 8:19 you believe that? That in the upcoming let’s say 24 Next 24 months, that there will be any reform to buyer side commissions? Right? Where are they going to have to come to the table with with cash? Is it going to be built into their mortgage? If they have one? Or is it still going to be all technically sourced by the seller and just maybe more transparently split?
Chris Linsell 8:49 Great question. Here’s a couple of things that I am confident it will not be. I’m confident it will not be built into a mortgage. The reason behind that is 99%, maybe 98 and a half percent of mortgages in the United States have, excuse me particular stipulations that regulate the only real property can be used as this this tool can only be used to finance real property. So though there are certain percentage level exceptions to that, that conveniently get applied by the banks and not by outside sources like you can you can actually roll in your closing costs and some loans into the mortgageable amount. Banks are happy to charge you interest on that stuff. Sure. But the other fees and costs associated with real estate, I think will be a very challenging hill to climb as far as rolling them into mortgages. to your specific question about whether or not I think we’ll see any reform. The answer is yes, but I think the reform will occur On our on the level of professional bodies, I don’t see the United States as a governmental body passing any kind of mortgage reform in the next 24 months. That is maybe a commentary on the state of politics in the United States, but just generally speaking, that seems like a no win issue. Because you have particular interests on the part of consumers that happen to also kind of come up at odds with the interests of one of the largest professional advocacy groups in the entire country, almost the world in an AR. So I don’t think there’ll be any kind of movement from a from a legal perspective there, but I do think NAR will likely in install some new internal professional regulations, but they are just going to be tweaks to the initial to the existing law regs, which basically says you can offer optionally to pay a buyer’s agent, it is not an assumed requirement, like like it is now basically, which, which is what got NAR in trouble before, it’s going to become optional, you can choose whether or not you want to offer a buyer side. And that just will become more explicit. What does that actually change? Pretty damn close to nothing. Frankly, I think we are going to and again, on popularly I understand this is going to be to the detriment of our consumers and to the detriment of us professionally, because it’s just going to extend the quagmire through which we have to wade through on this issue. 2024 is going to be a year where we have to explain to every single client, why that lawsuit happened, what the results were and what it means to them. And the real kind of sticky wicket clients are going to be insisting that things change, even though they don’t even know what they want them to change to other than they just want to pay less. So this is going to be a year where we should start rehearsing that conversation. Because again, first half of the year, it’s going to be pretty quiet the second half of the year, there’s going to be an incredible amount of activity. So you’re going to be having this conversation on a regular basis with people. So
D.J. Paris 12:31 if if we do assume that the second half of the year quarters three and four are going to be more active, more buyers, certainly as rates decline, which we hope happens and seems to be what the economists are predicting. Would you recommend as an agent today to really encourage the both sides buyer and seller or or just one or neither? To participate in the market before it gets flooded with competition?
Chris Linsell 13:05 Oh, big time 100% In fact, the real, like the purchasing power of dollars is going to be I’m sorry, let me let me rephrase that the purchasing power of buyers is going to be measurably higher in the first half of the year. And the reason behind this is you know, Lawrence Yun from from NAR Chief Economist from NAR has has publicly predicted that he expects to see interest rates, hold steady for the first, you know, quarter or third of the year and then start to trickle down that start that when we see mortgage rates trickle down, I am willing to bet I’m willing to bet the backyard on the fact that when we see four weeks in a row of trickled down mortgage rates, we’re going to see an increase out of out of that a disproportionately large increase in buyer activity. So the reduction in mortgage rates are going to be offset by this buyer activity. And it’s going to make it harder and more expensive at the end of the day to buy a house. Because even though that rate is going to go down, the competition is going to go up by a disproportionate percentage. So if you have clients who are waiting on the sidelines right now saying, Well, I’m not I’m ready to buy a house, but I’m not going to buy it until I have a mortgage rate that you know starts with 6.2. These are people who the banks are just salivating over because yeah, they might get a 6.2% mortgage rate, but the purchase price on their home isn’t going to be $410,000 Are whatever the median prices right now, it’s going to be $460,000, they’re gonna make more money, the banks will make more money at lower rates, if we see that trickle that slow trickle down. 2024 is going to be a challenging year to get the timing right. And whenever I say, whenever I’m talking to people about how to effectively service their real estate clients, when it comes to market timing, I always tell them, if you have a client who thinks that they’re going to time the market, this is somebody that you should refer, because this is somebody who will waste your time. And when it is actually time when they actually feel like they’re activated, they will never be satisfied, because the window for their success is non existent, despite what they actually say.
D.J. Paris 15:54 Yeah, it’s a very strong point. Yes. And that that being said, as an agent today, what would be I think, really beneficial is that Realtors start proactively contacting clients and having these conversations and having this explanation of, here’s why it might make sense to list today or to get into the buyer side. You know, in talking about their creative financing solutions, I know, we wanted to get into some some solutions to help help buyers a little bit more when it demonstrates are high, but also just having the conversation of it’s very similar to having the the buy low sell high conversation, when when you know, we’re talking about securities and financial advisors, you know, if they’re, if they’re worth their salt, they, you know, once a stock is up significantly is not the time to purchase traditionally. So but but psychologically, it feels like the time to buy because things are looking good in the stock market. So we know that logically, but emotionally, that’s sort of the hurdle people have to get over. And I think the emotional hurdle gets extinguished or gets cleared very easily with logic, but I think it has information has to be communicated. And that’s not necessarily the message that I’m seeing a lot on in the media. Right now, I’m seeing a lot of talk about mortgage rates, I’m not seeing a lot of talk about whether it’s actually a good time to purchase and what the logic behind that is, or to sell. And I think this is where a realtor can really earn their stripes by reaching out to their clients and saying, Hey, here’s what really is not being talked about. And if you have data to back it up even better to say, you know, let’s go back a couple of years when rates were below 4%. And let’s take a look at what the average prices of homes, you might be looking at purchasing, let’s see what they closed for. Let’s see what they listed for and let’s see what they closed for. And let’s remember what the what those times were, if you were an agent back then if not, the data is there, you can go back and look. And you will you will, you know we can all shutter from from a little bit of those times about how difficult it was to just do much of anything, if you’re on the buy side
Chris Linsell 18:09 100%. In fact, any agents I’m gonna give, I’m gonna give anybody who’s listening, if you’re feeling motivated by DJs, golden words of wisdom, which you all feeling motivated by her. If you are if you just made a mental notes that you need to start talking to your clients about opportunities relative to kind of the expected timing in this market. I’m gonna give you some ammunition here. And this is actually, again, I’m gonna I’m gonna use an unpopular opinion here. Everyone who’s listening to this, take it steal this put this in your quiver, as a provocative topic to get a conversation started. Real Estate and 2024 is not going to have an inventory problem. It’s got to have a mortgage problem. And what I mean by that is, yeah, it’s true that we don’t have enough enough inventory to service the needs of the buyers. But the root of the inventory problem is mortgage rates. And we were talking earlier, remind me what you said, what percentage of homeowners in the United States currently have a mortgage rate less than 5% 85% 85?
I mean, that’s insane. 85 out of every 100 homeowners have a mortgage rate of less than 5%. And I would venture to guess I don’t have the numbers in front of me. Excuse me, but I would venture to guess there’s a sizable percentage of people with a mortgage rate of less than 4% right now. And so, this is a choke point in the inventory cycle. That is going to create havoc for for inventory issues. And again, it is this is a mortgage problem. If you We are, if you want to take DJs advice and start having these conversations open with that line, we don’t have an inventory, we have problem, we have a mortgage problem. And then you can, you can stretch out DJs suggestions around the sorts of things that you should do to facilitate that conversation. Take it a step further, we have data from just, I mean, from the last year and a half of what, what the price of homes were when that when they closed at certain mortgage rates, and we had we had a mortgage rate ascent. I mean, in the last two years, we had a section a couple of months, where mortgage rates were between two and a half and 3%. And a couple of months between the three and three and a half, and so on and so on and so on, you can look back to each of those sections and look at the median prices of homes that are closing in your market. And then you can use those those prices and adjust for inflation. And you can say, okay, here in today’s dollars, here’s where these homes were closing. If that then you have data, you are armed with data to go to your consumers and say, Listen, this is what we can expect if mortgage rates hit this amount. This is where the median price is going to be. And you’re going to have an incredible amount of competition here is this where you want to be as a buyer, what’s the perfect window for you? What is what is the what is going to serve you best. And if you are servicing seller clients, you can tell folks right now like where is based on based on what we expect this trajectory of this market to be what’s going to be the price is going to get you to your goals, because ultimately right now, servicing sellers is not about selling their house, it is that that is a relative conclusion based on the construction of inventory. Servicing sellers is all about finding them their next place. If you can unlock that key, if you essentially treat your sellers as buyers, because that’s what they are right now. Then you you unlock more inventory for the market. So take that advice. Use that line, we don’t have an inventory problem, we have a mortgage problem, that is something that we need to solve and start talking through strategy, you’re gonna get more people leaning forward into your conversations than sitting back and being passive.
D.J. Paris 22:34 I also think too, I talked to a lot of top luxury agents who get these massive listings for let’s say, you know, 5 million and above these just incredibly high net worth individuals who are playing at this, you know, top 1% level of income and, and, and, and just wealth. What’s interesting, and again, I’m as not as a nonpracticing agent, I didn’t know this until I told somebody told me years ago, but that when you sell a, you know, X, you know, million dollar home. One of the challenges is, is actually finding the buyer, actually listing it on the MLS is is oftentimes not that not as successful as actually reaching out to people who can afford those kinds of homes directly and saying, Hey, I’ve got this new listing, reaching out to agents who have worked in those same price points and saying, what buyers do you know, I’ve got this listing, you need to come see it. And I’m almost wondering if we’ll start to see a shift for even on the non luxury side, listing agents starting to reach out to homeowners who do not have their listing on the market and saying, I’m in the process of selling so and so’s home, they need a new place. And you know, it’s kind of similar to what real estate investors have done for years, where they just send postcards to these multifamily homes going, Hey, if you’re the owner, I’d like to buy your property. And they just kind of hope that somebody reaches back on I’m curious, we’ll start to see more of that this year.
Chris Linsell 24:06 Yeah, I am, too. I mean, it’s like, in again, in some of the weirdest ways it feels like 2024 is going to be a cycle of a lot of the things that we don’t do anymore, that maybe we’re gonna start doing again, and will it actually be effective? will we actually be able to test the effectiveness of these strategies? I mean, ultimately, what it really comes down to is there’s always going to be changes in every market, including real estate, you know, we’re a cyclical business. If if, if we never cycled, we would have a fundamentally unhealthy market that was based, you know, that is propped up on artificial things. We should cycle every market cycles. Ultimately, though, what is going to separate the real performers from the pretenders out Yeah, as real estate professionals are the ones who can anticipate the cycles and get ahead of, you know, kind of run to where the ball is going to be, instead of just always chasing after the ball.
D.J. Paris 25:13 Yeah, and I think this, we were talking about this offline about really figuring out since going back to mortgages being or the housing market having a mortgage problem this year, really thinking about creative ways to appease or solve for that. And there are there are creative solutions, there’s all sorts of, you know, solutions. And this would be, I think, a great time to really reach out to those top loan officers in your local market, and say, Hey, let’s let’s brainstorm here, you know, what, what ammo, can I come with? To convince a seller that it’s a good time to list? And how can we appeal most successfully to buyers? And does the seller help in that, and we know that, you know, to one buyer downs, for example, are are a pretty common alternative right now to, you know, incentivize buyers to get off the sidelines. Any what other suggestions do you have for agents who are just sort of unclear about what to do right now?
Chris Linsell 26:13 Well, I mean, ultimately, the most successful agents, especially when we’re trying to solve financing problems, the most successful agents are the ones who are going to do two things better than their competitors. The first is, they are going to leverage the best connections in their market, to professionals who do things that they cannot do. So like there is a limited amount it’s not, it’s not zero. But there’s a limited amount of value that you can provide to your clients, when they have mortgage specific questions. You can definitely provide a 30,000 foot view maybe even a 10,000 foot view of of the options of the strategy and the way to apply those different options. But at the end of the day, your advice can only extend so far, because you don’t have the ability to exercise and actually put into action, some of those financial instruments that will get your clients across the finish line. So there’s a I think 2024 is going to be a year, where your connections to really savvy and thoughtful mortgage brokers of all stripes, ones that conduct FHA and rd loans, ones that specialize in jumbo or luxury loans, ones that optimize for speed, I guarantee you, there will be somebody in your 2024 real estate world who’s going to need a mortgage in eight days. And it’s just there’s going to be a client, we’re just we’re just going to see that kind of volatility in the market. If you’ve got a mortgage person who can optimize for speed, you are going to be a winner. So these are these are the like kind of the base level. But there’s this whole other element too, especially for folks who are not going to necessarily be perfectly serviced by the mortgage industry, primarily because the interest rates are not where they need to be. If you have financial advisors who can generate ideas on how to use existing wealth, how to create loans from protect, perhaps existing assets, if you have financial managers who can, you know, if you are somebody who is fortunate enough to have like retirement savings or investment accounts that you don’t have to liquidate, but you can borrow against this is something I’m seeing begin to rise in the mortgage space, or in replacement of mortgages as people borrowing against investment accounts. Because the loans are processed differently, the interest rates are different. And it still frees people up to keep that money invested. They’re just borrowing against that money. The agents if you if you are struggling with answering some of these questions, get connected with the people in your market who answer these questions in other contexts, because these are going to be your best friends for generating transactions because ultimately, unless you’ve got a mortgage license and work for a bank, there’s only so much advice that you can give so connect with the people who actually can actualize that advice.
D.J. Paris 29:39 So we’re talking about accountants, we’re talking about financial advisors, CPAs financial planners, also estate planning attorneys really talking about this would be a great time to reach out to some of these professionals and say, hey, I want to give my clients the best possible opportunities this year for You know, moving and you know, we need to explore, I would love to explore some any any, any creative ideas you have based on different levels of wealth or net worth. There’s all sorts of solutions more, of course to
Chris Linsell 30:13 yeah, let me give you one other kind of alternative. A lot of people don’t think of this. But if you have clients who are looking to buy in HOA dominated buildings or neighborhoods or coops, I can tell you from personal experience, because I’m on the HOA of my neighborhood. That
D.J. Paris 30:36 is that is a thankless job, Chris, we appreciate on behalf of your association. We appreciate you guys
Chris Linsell 30:43 keep the roads plowed. And I’m not driving the plow, so I’ll help write the checks.
D.J. Paris 30:48 Sorry, I just had to I do appreciate you because I know nobody else does.
Chris Linsell 30:52 Well, honestly, I did. That means a lot coming from you. Thank you. No, but this is an under utilized resource. But most HOAs that were formed after 2008 require new residents to include in there to include in their initiation into the neighborhood, their financing information. And though there are different, you know, effort, every HOA has their own rules, most HOAs require the specific information around the details of individual residents to remain confidential. But there is nothing in most bylaws that say that HOA reps can’t talk about these things in aggregate. So for instance, if you’re looking to get into a neighborhood, like if you’ve got a client who’s looking to get into a neighborhood, and you’re struggling with how to solve the financing problem, go to the HOA board and say, Listen, we’re trying to solve the financing here, we want to make an offer we want to live here. How have other people paid to get in here totally. And there, they can tell you, in fact, most of them, they have a vested interest in you buying in there because they want to fill their slots, they want to they want to make sure that the HOA is solvent. So they can say well, 50% of people bought with cash 50% up to 30% of people bought with a with a conventional mortgage 20% of people bought with maybe maybe with a loan from from a stock portfolio. 5% of people were land contract, you know, whatever it is, I don’t know, I don’t I don’t know the specifics. But go to these HOAs, they have all this information, they can tell you this is especially valuable in major urban centers where you have buildings that have hundreds of units. I mean, they can tell you like, in the last 10 years, the percentage of people that bought in cash were x, I mean, it is that information is available, they want you to have it because they want you to buy in there. So they’re not going to tell you that the guy in two J, you know, bought in cash, but they can tell you X percentage of transactions that occurred in the last 10 years have been in cash or have been in traditional mortgages. So there are there are means to to get this information, you just have to figure out who is actualizing that information and go right to the source. I
D.J. Paris 33:32 love that. Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap up. So for those of us that have HOA opportunities, reach out to the HOA and say, Hey, we’re we would love to know what creative solutions people have used to to, you know, secure their, their their transaction. You know, how have people done this? Are there any lenders that you’ve seen time and time again come through the HOA that people seem to be satisfied with and maybe a unique way, the This happened in my own building, when when we were buying there was one lender who just seem to get things done in a really super creative way that other lenders couldn’t and talk. It happened among a lot of the people who were buying, we were all chatting with each other, which was very unusual. But we were all talking about it because we were all experiencing this one issue and somebody says oh, I’ve got the person. And we all kind of went to that person. And there’s you know, that person got a lot of business, but it was because they had a creative solution. So yeah, I think that’s a wonderful idea. Well, Chris, I think this is a great place to sort of wrap up for today. I know we could keep talking and I know there’s a lot more I certainly want to talk about. And I know this is near and dear to your heart in our next conversation about sort of vulnerability with with data, cyber attacks stuff. We know MLS is of uncompromised, and we know that that also the you know the real estate industry at least The National Association of Realtors and everything underneath it has struggled to keep up with with tech. And so we know there’s a lot of vulnerability there that we should probably talk about and how agents can sort of prepare for some, you know, some of that disruption because it enters that already it has already happened. But yeah, we will we will keep that for our next conversation along with anything else by the way. It please follow Chris on LinkedIn and anywhere else that he is posting on social we will have links because he posts a lot of these unpopular opinions. And if you disagree, and you have a differing viewpoint, please let Chris know and we will bring that up on our show. So I will be monitoring this stuff as well. So please follow Chris crystallin cell li n s e LL, again, links to his social will be in our our show notes. And please follow him on his website. crystallin sell.com. He is a sought after speaker he travels all over the country all year round speaking at conferences, all specifically real estate related and he is the guy to to talk about when it comes to predictions. He is tapped every year, for the last many years for National Association of REALTORS to talk about predictions. This is the guy so please reach out to him. He loves to speak to your association, maybe even your brokerage crystallin cell.com is where you can find and reach out him directly. Again, also follow him on social Chris, great to see you again. And we will we’ll be doing this every month this year. So see everybody on the next episode. A thank you to all of our listeners I wanted to I can’t remember if I said this at the beginning of the episode or if I said this just to Chris. But we had our biggest month ever in December sorry if this is I said this twice. But that was incredible to us. So thank you to everyone who has been following us and supporting us. Thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to Chris, who selflessly comes on here every single month, and of course to the audience who continues to tell a friend about our show. All right, I will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Chris. Thanks,
Chris Linsell 37:02 guys. Talk to you soon.
How To Not Be “Cringey” On Video • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Jan 10, 2024
Want to sell more homes through video but feeling self-conscious? Award-winning video marketer and coach Kim Rittberg who helps agents across the country raise their revenue through social media has 5 tips for you to make video that connects and isn’t cringey!
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode, video expert Kim Rydberg is going to speak specifically about how to make engaging content that isn’t, well cringe worthy. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business. Again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:34 My Awesome, real listeners. This is Kim Rickard. I am a video marketing expert and I love joining you on keeping it real. I have made so many amazing agent friends from across the country worked with so many of you to help you get more clients, sell more houses, buy more houses. Anyway, I’m really happy to be here with you as if you haven’t heard from me before. And my voice is new to you. I was in TV news for 10 years, I launched the video unit for Us Weekly magazine. So I spent 15 years making really strong content, understanding how to tell a great story and getting people ready for video, getting them ready for TV, everyone from congresspeople, to CEO to regular people. And now I use all that to you, as an agent, get clients have more people that want to work with you grow your revenue. And I do one on one work and group courses, especially my video bootcamp is my signature course, especially for real estate agents. It’s really fun. And you probably have probably heard many of my clients actually on this very show. Over the past six months, I’ve had many of my clients on the show talking about how they’ve made it into the top 1% through video and through podcasts. So all of this means and if you’re watching me on video, there’s some trophies behind me. I have won many awards for my videos. I don’t say that to brag, but I say it too. I have so much passion for content. And I absolutely love teaching agents how to leverage your phone and your messaging to actually bring in more clients. It happens every single day. And I’m going to show you how to do it. Today we are talking about what are we talking about today? How to not be cringy on video. And the reason why I’m calling this episode that is because so many of my clients have this thought in their head, what am I going to make that’s going to be not cringy but actually grow my revenue, bring people in, make them like me, make them trust me, have them work with me. So I really want to say from the very beginning, so many people feel cringy they think that they’re on video, and we’re like, Does anyone care? Why am I doing this? Should I be making this video. So it’s very important to step back before you even really make any videos really thinking about your strategy. So who is your audience? And what makes you different? If so many agents were like, I’m a real estate agent based in like, I’m a real estate agent based in Las Vegas. I’m like, that’s not really what you are, you have probably an area you cover. Maybe you do rentals, maybe you do a certain price point, maybe your audience is I have one one of my clients focuses on people who are downsizing. So even if you have a wider band than that, you probably have an area you serve more than others. So anyway, first you’re gonna think about who am I talking to you more often? What areas am I covering, and then you’re gonna talk about your strategy, meaning what you’re gonna make. So, as you come up with content, you’re trying to bring people in through the front door or the side door or the back door not to be too funny. But truly, you want to bring people in to your content to get to know you to expand your sphere of influence, right? In real estate is all about how many people you know how many people you’re talking to how many, how many new connections you can be making and how you can bring them into you until they’re working with you. So video and social media is all a part of that. Your newsletter marketing is a part of that your videos are a part of that. If you’re a guest on podcasts as a part of that every single thing is elevating you and people’s minds over the person next door over the other agent over their over their friend’s cousin who’s maybe sold some houses you want them to choose you so At Number one, how not to be cringy. When you’re looking at your strategy, figure out what you like. What I mean by that is, you’re a consumer of media. So figure out when you watch videos, what do you like? What makes your skin crawl? And what are you like, Ooh, I like what that person’s doing. I’m gonna give you an example. My client, Debbie DiMaggio. Fantastic. She is top 1% Asian in California. She really did not like talking to camera. So I talked to camera, I’m comfortable with that. It doesn’t bother me at all. Actually, that’s I communicate very well and comfortably like that. But she wasn’t into it. I’m like, no problem. So with her, we did more videos from when she’s being interviewed for a podcast. And we also leaned into lifestyle content. So for her, that was a match for her. And she’s been doing really well. She’s expanding into more coaching. She’s growing her business great with content. So it is important to remember if something’s not right for you, don’t do it, and you’re gonna feel cringy if you’re doing something that is cringy for you. Another one of my clients, Randy baru is this incredible agent based in New York is like 300,000 followers on Tiktok. He’s very comfortable on camera, he is an amazing, amazing marketer, you should, you should follow him. He’s fantastic. He’s an amazing marketer, he does things that maybe my other agents aren’t comfortable if maybe they’re not as comfortable on camera, or they’re not as comfortable, like improvising. So if you’re just starting out, you might not want to do sort of tick tock style videos, like more, you know, like the lip sync stuff, or a little theatrical, like he has an amazing background in theater, that might not be right for you. And that’s okay, right. Like, you should not do something that doesn’t feel right to you. So it’ll be cringy. If you feel cringy, and you’ll feel cringy if you’re doing something inauthentic. So for me, that means dancing, like I’m not a good dancer. I’m a bit I remember if my wedding does, my husband makes fun of me. We were starting to do that edit James at last that very soft song like and last. So we start dancing. And we were doing like a 123 and 4123 and four, and I just could not keep the beat, like I just can’t keep a beat. And he was counting for me. And he’s like everyone thought I was counting, but I was helping you. Anyway, I digress. I’m a bad dancer. So I rarely will dance. And if I dance, I make it clear, I’m dancing, because it’s funny, I’m dancing to prove a point or I’m dancing to teach you. But I don’t do a lot of the dances that does not work for me. So I will feel cringy when I’m doing things that are not natural. All right. So when we’re talking about those YouTube videos that do feel natural, figure out what it is that you like, and what feels right for you. I generally always, always, always recommend every single agent, no matter who you are, you should be teaching. If you don’t feel comfortable teaching by talking to camera in that sort of like broadcast reporter way, there are a lot of other methods you can do for that you can reach out to me, I can give you all of my ideas. There are a lot of ways besides just talking to camera, so that doesn’t feel natural to you. But me know, we’ll connect, I’ll give you some other ideas. So it’s really important to understand what you like to do and what feels right for you. But the point is, you do have to be on camera. And so there’s always a mechanical, technical, technological way to do a different style to make it feel right for you. So, alright, so number one, don’t be cringy is pick styles that feel good for you. Number two, get out of your own head, you will be cringy if you are even if you are teaching, if you are really self conscious, and you’re feeling not confident, I can feel that your audience can feel that. So if you meet somebody, and they’re sort of like talking to you and trying to be confident or selling themselves to you, but it doesn’t feel right, you get an achy feeling, you have to believe what you’re saying you really really have to believe what you’re saying. It’s very, very important. So you have to get out of your head, you have to stop thinking about like, the mean person in high school at your cafeteria table that you didn’t like that was mean to you. That’s not who you’re talking to. When you’re making videos, you’re talking to your ideal client, we’re talking to buyers and sellers in your market, you’re talking to people we’re going to refer them. And even if you’re starting even if you’re starting out and a lot of your initial network, or you know, friends, family, former colleagues, they’re gonna refer you, if you start showing up as an expert, they will start seeing you as the expert as a real estate agent as a go to agent in your area. So believe it get out of your own head, believe your own message. One, this is a great actually a great example. I have Jessica Burton, based in Houston, this amazing, she is a video bootcamp graduate of mine, when she’s also doing another program with me. She is this great Houston agent. And what we worked on with her was we talked about bringing people into her life more. She’s just a really engaging person. She has children, she’s like working really hard. And I said, let’s bring people more into your life. You know, because I think a lot of times we see each other’s social feeds. And it’s like this house closed. This house is for sale. You know, it’s very straightforward. And when we’re talking about letting people in through the back door, the side door, the front door. You’re bringing people into your life to get to know you and the more you engage with them and the more you connect with them, that’s going to Grow Your Business. So Jessica has been having more content that’s a little more personal, bringing people into her life as as a top agent, but also as a mom. And she’s making really great engagement from that. And that’s really driving business. And so that’s awesome to see in that, sometimes we want to be like, a little uncomfortable or pushing ourselves a little further, but not again in that area that feels cringy to us, because it feels off brand, right? So exposing more of yourself is great. But we’re again, not getting into that area that’s like, This doesn’t feel right to me, okay. Another one is bring value. So one way to not be cringy is to bring value, if you’re educating people, you’re educating buyers, you’re educating sellers, you’re educating renters, all of that stuff you’re bringing value to people, you cannot be cringy, because people will appreciate that you’re teaching them that you’re bringing them knowledge. So remember that that it’s never cringy to help. It’s never cringy to teach someone something. So that’s really like another mental mindset as you’re building out your video strategy to be serving people with your knowledge and bringing that value. Now, I do like to say we’re talking about what types of videos to me, one thing that I like to flag is that
just drinking some water, if anybody heard a little pause, um, if you are one of those people, you’re you’re sort of lighter fun, you’re sort of lighter, go for it, like, lean into that. So again, we’re talking about not being cringy. Again, we’re talking about authenticity. So one of my agents in South Carolina crystal, she has such great content. She’s really fun. And she leans into the lip syncing and the trend based stuff and it works for her because it’s really natural for her. And it’s fun, and you watch it, you’re like, that’s fun. For people who are open to sharing their stories and the lighter side, one great thing you could do is share horror stories from real estate. You know, you walk in, you’re about to show somebody something, and there’s like five mice in the apartment. I mean, I live in New York, that’s probably more common for us to have rats or mice, but cockroaches, but share it like you can share a horror story. You can share how you got into it. One of my client’s another crystal, she is in New York City. And she posted this great video about how one day changed her life. And it helped her be a real estate agent that was like 12 years ago, bringing people into the story of how you got into real estate. And again, it can be a mix of content, you know, some stuff can be lighter, some stuff can be more straightforward. But you really want to have that mix of content. Because some people love educational videos, other people might come in the side door through your lifestyle videos, someone else might, you know, see a homeless thing. So there’s all these different avenues to bring people into your network and to bring them into your sphere of influence. So again, you really want to have the different type of content, and have a mixture of content for it. So it’s, it’s funny, because I laugh, like when people ask me like how to not be cringy. The other thing is, it’s really important to remember you have to practice. And when I talk about practice, I’m really more often talking about if you’re doing a tour, like a tour where you’re talking in it, or if you’re sitting down and doing educational content, you really have to practice that. Because more likely than not, if you just hit record, and you start talking kind of goes everywhere, right? It goes everywhere. And so it’s it’s really important to know that you have to practice or you’re going to be uncomfortable, you’re going to be uncomfortable. And that’s just how things work. So, in the practicing arena, speaking of a couple of ways to do it is instead of having a script that you’re like memorizing, have bullet points. So you’re gonna have bullet points of what you’re going to say. And you can practice them. And people ask me often should I do a teleprompter? Or should I just kind of speak off the cuff, it really depends on your comfort level. If you read a teleprompter smoothly, and it sounds really good, do it, it’s actually faster. But if you’re not, then don’t. So again, the most important thing is to have like bullet points. So if you’re doing a really short video, you want to have three bullet points that are ready. And those three bullet points you’re just going to go, you’re going to kind of know what they are practicing them, you could record I generally say two takes maybe three Max, do not record up to do not record eight takes, you’re not gonna get better, you’re only gonna get tired. If you’re recording eight takes instead of three takes that could have been two other videos. So just think about being efficient at the beginning. If you’re really at the beginning of your video journey, like you haven’t really recorded a lot of content. It’s going to take a while at the beginning. But the more you move, don’t record something eight times, record it two or three times and move along. Because it’s not really it’s what’s called diminishing returns. There diminishing returns at that point. So it is important to like, practice it and move along. A good way to practice if you’re gonna mentor kind of know like one fact about each area, talk about it and get comfortable with improvising because it’s nice if you can kind of like move in the space a little bit comfortably without being like frozen stiff and like reciting one fact, right? The more you do it, the more you’ll be comfortable with it. And when you’re doing a tour, you don’t necessarily have to be like in every single space, you could just talk about some of the rooms and then the rest of the rooms you can show on video, you don’t have to give, you have to be on camera for every single room. So now we’re talking about practicing is for educational videos, you’re gonna have your bullet points. And you know, a lot of times you’re doing like a marker report or something like that, when you’re practicing, that should be probably a teleprompter. If you’re using stats or quotes or things like that, it’s a lot easier to use a teleprompter for things like that. And practice, practice the other thing, practice all the time. And by that I mean get comfortable with talking on camera. So let’s say you’re just like walking through your house, start talking to the camera, just as a part of your day. If you’re on Instagram, Instagram Stories is really, really good way to just start being on camera more. It’s very low stress because it disappears after a day. It’s a really, I really encourage my agents to get comfortable with it. Try to post twice a week that will get you in the mix more. And one thing I was just about to say about Instagram stories and practicing you as you do that tag me and I’ll reshare so show up on Instagram Stories, bring people into your day. Talk about if you drink coffee or tea, talk about what you’re doing. Talk about where you’re headed, is your day busy? Is it not busy, like just bring people into your life more. These sorts of things like might seem cringy you’re like, who cares about my life. People are on social media because they care about your life. They’re not only following celebrities, we’re all voyeuristic. We all want to know what other people’s days look like. And especially when we talk about that teaching content, that content that’s bringing people into your life. Teaching can be facts can be like, here are my tips to do this. Teaching can also be, hey, look, I’m taking you on a tour of this new coffee shop in our neighborhood. You know, that sort of lifestyle and educational mix together. But it really can be arranged. So don’t be don’t be worrying that you’re cringy when you’re bringing people useful information, you’re never cringy so All right, I’m gonna wrap it up and tell you and don’t forget tag me. I’m on Instagram at Kim K, I am ri TTB erg. I also have a YouTube channel Kimber content, and I have a free download. So link down in the show notes. And I can send it to an Instagram is a free download, which is fabulous. It’s 10 tips to make a great video to get clients. That is a must watch. It’s a must look at. And if you’re interested in talking to me about video bootcamp, my signature course, just messaged me on Instagram, I love my keeping it real people. And throughout video bootcamp, we learn we you I teach, you learn, but it’s a great community. I teach you everything from what you should say to the equipment you should use, how to actually connect with those clients that are now looking at your content. All of those things. I have a lot of testimonials on my page. Some of my clients are getting, you know, old clients popping back in as new clients fresh deals from referrals from across the country. And so many people are growing their revenue and becoming the go to agent in their area. And that’s our coaching program. It’s a live coaching program called Video bootcamp, you can message me about that. And so make sure number one, how to be cringy I’m just going to recap that a recap. How to not be cringy on video. Number one, figure out what you like, what feels right to you. That is the only type of content you’re gonna make. You’re never going to make content because it’s online, you’re gonna make content if it feels right for you. Don’t want to dance, don’t ask. You will feel cringy if you are being cringy get out of your own head. Don’t judge yourself so much. Okay, so we all think that our voice sounds weird and that we look weird angles bad bla bla bla bla bla, get out of your own head. Very, very, very important. Your audience is your ideal clients, your audience is not the Mean Girl, the mean boy, the mean kid from cafeteria in high school, these are ideal clients of yours. Bring value. So bring value in your content. That is another way to make sure you’re not being cringy is if you’re bringing that value. And if you are fun, light, go for it. Again, we’re talking about authentic content. It’s not going to be cringy if it feels authentic and natural to you. Share those horror stories of real estate. Do the lip synching videos. Let people know how you got into it. Let them know funny stories of your past life and your current life. I know a lot of my agents have switched from one career into being a real estate agent and have fun, just have fun with your content, people will think you’re not cringy if you’re confident and you’re really enjoying it. Every video is better than the last. So if you’re still juggling judging yourself and feeling about it, every video gets better. So don’t worry. Post your videos tag me and I will I will connect with you. I’ll give you resources I’ll cheer you on. I’m a really big cheerleader. Again, my name is Kim Rydberg. I’m an award winning video marketer. I love teaching real estate agents how to grow their client base through video. I have spoken at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention, the women’s Real Estate Investment Summit, and I teach real estate agents across the country in video bootcamp group and one on one coaching, how to get more clients directly through video and podcasts. So message me on Instagram at Kim Ripper que IMRITTBE RG and tag me on your Instagram I will cheer you on. Until next time
Real Estate Predictions For 2024 • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jan 08, 2024
In our January episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties and Christie’s International shares some interesting facts about 2023 and also shares tips and tricks for 2024 on how to generate leads. Carrie emphasizes the importance of collaboration in 2024. Carrie also shares top 10 ways to find leads she is planning to use this year. Last, Carrie and DJ discuss how you can use AI to gather information on the property you’re showing.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you curious about what one of the top real estate agents in the country thinks is going to happen? In 2024? I know I am. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today on the show is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, the past 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here in the local area. Carrie is currently ranked in the top 12 of agents in the entire group there, which is I shouldn’t even say 1%. She’s in the top point 00 1% which is actually even bigger accomplishment, of course. So she’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury property. She also works with a lot of developers, and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. I happen to live in a Carrie McCormick development. So I can speak to that. And she does get to do some really cool things. So we are so thrilled to have her please follow Carrie on Instagram, which is Carrie McCormack real estate, I will have a link to that in the show notes and our website, which is Carrie McCormick, r e.com. If you’re an agent who has clients, maybe you’re in a different area of the country, and you have clients that move in and out of Chicago, Carrie would love the opportunity to network with you and maybe, you know, create a referral relationship because she has lots of clients that move out of Chicago. And she’s always referring those to other agents. So definitely reach out to her Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:10 Thank you, it is the end of 2023. And I’m so excited to talk about 2024. So I’m going to give a few interesting facts about 2023. I’m going to give some tips and tricks that I think would be good for everyone for 2024 to generate leads. But just coupling on what you said is collaboration. I think that’s going to be a big deal in 2024. And anyone who is listening who wants to follow me on Instagram and wants to collaborate on posts, I would love to do that. People are moving all over the world right now, though, especially obviously through the United States. If we collaborate and share properties and post our properties in different markets, we’re going to start moving everyone in collaborating much better. So you know, I’m happy to do that. So please reach out to me if you’d like to collaborate on Instagram, but I want to share some interesting facts that I found. And this is about the typical homeowner. So in the past, a typical homeowner has accumulated more than $100,000 in housing wealth over the last three years. Wow. So if you’ve been home in the last three years, you’ve accumulated more than $100,000 in wealth, obviously approximately, in comparison to renters. It says actually, I take that back. I take that back. The average was I gotta get my facts straight. The average was $396,000 in wealth, versus 10,000. For renters now this is just over the United States is just as not in Chicago. But the general was you’ve accumulated more than 100,000 the average was 396,000 in wealth over the last three years with your home Um, especially if you live in Florida. Sure, or a renter, it’s, you’ve accumulated $10,000 in wealth. And that’s an important fact to know why you should buy a house, why you should invest in real estate and not be a renter. So that was just kind of a fun fact, I found that with the Fed out of the Federal Reserve data, so I thought that was an interesting fact to share with people. Obviously, we’re in December of 2024, on 23, going into 2024, everyone’s asking what the prediction is, nobody knows. Right. But you know, being boots on the ground and hearing and feeling the market, I think we’re going to have a good and exciting 2024, mortgage rates are starting to come down a little bit, they’re projecting in 2024, that they’re going to continue to come down, the only thing we’ve got to worry about is inflation. So you know, it’s always a balancing act. But I can see and tell that there’s so many buyers on the sidelines right now, they are waiting for these rates to come down, which again, they are, they’re waiting for more inventory to come into the market, which I’m seeing more and getting more calls for inventory. So that is going to be the strength of our 2024. Market. So with that, I think it’s important as brokers that we find the leads, right, and I am sure that’s what everyone’s trying to do is find the sellers find the buyers, where are we finding these leads? And what I thought we would do is go over, I started compiling a list of the top 10 ways to find leads in 2024. I love it. Is it okay, if I share that with you guys? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 6:44 let’s know this is great. Because right now everybody is struggling on both the buyer and the seller side. So yeah, let’s talk about it.
Carrie McCormick 6:52 Yeah, so for over the last couple of months, I’ve been strategizing of what I’m going to do in 2024. And here is my top 10. So one is QR codes, there are so many different ways to use QR codes, I know that they’ve been around for a long time. And there’s free QR code generators, there’s all different things that you can do, you can actually tie them to a lead sheet. So if someone scans your QR code, it goes into a lead sheet, which then all of us or I’m sorry, like an Excel sheet to capture the information. And then down into you can just drop it right into your CRM, you can use them for your videos, your social media, your property tours, those QR codes can track. So make sure you find a way and a system to make sure that those are capturing data, YouTube videos that educate that is going to be a lead generator, right? You want to treat just like your podcast here, right? You you create a platform that people learn. And as soon as they understand that you’re a source of information, they’re going to follow you and they’re going to want to work with you. The third one, which is my favorite is AI we know it’s here it’s coming. It’s such an incredible source. I don’t think that’s going to replace us, it’s just going to help us right, it helps us with all different types of property descriptions, the one thing I started asking is like, what is a social media post, it’s going to attract attention in December, let AI tell you what it is let it help you come up with hashtags and keywords. Use it as a partner for your business. So AI is going to be important in 2024. Number five is link your Instagram stories to lead capture pages. So if you have a business account on Instagram, you can put a link in there and say you want to know more, click here, it links to a lead generation page where you can capture their information. And then once you have their information, of course, then send him send them make sure you follow up and send them the information that you’re looking for. So again, use your Instagram stories as a lead caption, or lead generator, which I think is amazing. Next one is buy lunch, not leads. So I used to be big into buying leads and you know, they’re really just kind of hit or miss. So instead, if I was going to spend $100 a week on leads, I’m going to spend $100 on lunch. There’s nothing better than meeting someone face to face, creating a relationship with them. That $100 That you invested in a lunch is going to be a lifetime of leads. And you just make sure that you’re obviously keeping up with your relationships. So I think that’s going to be important deepen the relationships. Another thing that I’ve done this is number seven is finding properties that are second homes. Right so here in Chicago we have a lot of second home buyers, the second home Um, clients are not sometimes using their homes. So I’m reaching out to them, let’s say they’re in Florida or Arizona, and say I see that you own a home at, you know, the Waldorf Astoria. You know, if you’re not using the home, we’d love to talk to you about getting it on the market. That’s been a way to generate leads of properties that are just sitting here, people aren’t using them. But let’s try to reach out to those sellers and see if they want to sell them.
D.J. Paris 10:24 How might, how might we find those? Those properties? What’s is there? Is that just through sort of word of mouth? Or is there a directory we can go to? Or how do you locate those, you know, second homes? Yeah.
Carrie McCormick 10:37 So within the MLS, there is a search function in there, it’s called Remind, so you can go through that their sales, Genie also has it, you can go through a website called Ben verified people search, it takes a little bit of work to locate and find these people. There’s also an app on our phone, or on my phone, it’s called forewarn, there’s a lot of companies that use that as well. So of course, it’s a little bit of digging, right. So but you know, once you find you find that they’ve got two addresses, gosh, online, there’s so much information you can find on people, you know, and it’s just, it’s an introductory call or email to them. If you’re not using this property, please let me. So a little bit of work, but it definitely pays off. So second home owners, I think are important lead source. And then just really going back to the basics, you know, always you know, dig into your CRM, dig into your database, go to where the people are that you want to meet. So whether, you know, we hear this all the time, whether it’s a golf or a charity event, or an art opening, go to where the people are, and network with those people. My last tip is an A this is another statistic that I read is don’t forget about the baby boomers. So the stat was that the baby boomers control 70% of wealth in our country right now. So they’re getting to the age of pure retirement. So make sure, again, go where the baby boomers go, you know, connect with them. Don’t forget about them, because I believe they’re going to be selling and buying a lot of property in the next few years.
D.J. Paris 12:16 Awesome. I’ve got some additional thoughts to some of these that I was taking notes of. So that was an awesome, amazing list. I mean, amazing. And I just wrote a couple of notes that I thought would be helpful. I was this is kind of funny for our audience. So I was actually messaging Carrie last night on tech school, I just found this really cool thing. And I sent it to her I got really excited. So So I happen to live in this in a development that Carrie wrapped and works with a developer and I was like, I’m curious if I typed in this particular development into AI, just the address, hey, tell me everything you know about this address. And I put it in and it knew everything about our development, it knew the kind of countertops we typically have. It asked it even it knew the average price point, it knew what kind of bedrooms and bathrooms were available. It summarized our development or carries development just perfectly. So if you’re not gonna believe this, you got it. I’m sure it just scraped a website and which had all this info, but it pulled it out. And I thought boy, if I wasn’t if I was a practicing agent, before I went to anybody’s property. And again, I don’t know, I don’t know how well this would work for single family homes. There’s probably not as much information, but I don’t know, I would be typing into or using. I use Bing if you don’t want to pay for chat. GBT, Bing has the app, you can download it and it has what’s called assistant, which is chat, GBT, you can literally just speak to it and say, Hey, tell me everything you know about x address. And within 15 seconds, you have tons of information. So for everyone listening, please do that when you before you go to a showing. Or if it if, if the AI can’t find anything about the property, say, give me five interesting facts about the neighborhood or the you know, the suburb or the or the neighborhood in the city or wherever, you know, just some cool things so that when maybe there’s a lull in the conversation during the showing, like, hey, there’s couple cool things I can tell you about this area, you know, that sort of thing. buying lunch, I wanted to write about this carrier. So Right. And I wanted to give you an additional idea for buying lunch, reach out to everybody you know, who’s a client or a prospect and say, Hey, I would like to buy lunch for your office, you know, they’re people because they’ll come into the office, hey, great, I could do a little 15 minute, you know, here’s what you need to know about the market for 2024 and buy everyone pizza or something and, you know, still keep it to probably $100 and come in and provide some value. And you know, no one else is doing that. So this would be a great opportunity. Everybody wants to know what’s going on with housing and 2024 Buy some pizza, bring it in for the office, and you could reach even more people. And then my last suggestion is about the baby boomers, as Carrie was saying 70% of the of the wealth in this country. His is controlled by by one demographic group. So what are those people typically doing to protect that, that wealth? Well, they’re typically going to an estate planning attorney, and they’re talking about do I need to put a trust together, or I need to put my property in LLC? What do I need to do for my kids, you know, etc. These are the people you want to make friends with, you want to make friends with these estate planning attorneys. Also in a negative way, the divorce attorneys also have a lot of these issues they deal with. But this is where Realtors really can can develop strategic partnerships, not just with a lender, not just with an inspector, go to where as as Carrie said, Go to where the clients go, they go to these attorneys, and they say, help me make sure I protecting everything. And you could start to develop these relationships. And when they say, oh, you know what you should buy another property or you should have an investment property. And you know, those are or, you know, hey, so and so’s getting divorced, here’s an opportunity to help them find their next property or sell their existing. So just a couple of add ons to what Carrie said, guys, this is this is the kind of stuff we like to do on the show. And Carrie has been with us, since the very, very beginning. Literally the very beginning. In fact, I, I have a picture of Carrie and I when I first started, we took these professional photos together, we both we it’s so funny, it’s like they’re like five or six years old now. But they look very cute. So after they’re older. They’re older than that. Well, we have both aged very gracefully, I will say or at least you have I will say but we both have. But we she has been a fixture on the show, guys, if you hear all those beings in the background, by the way, we’re trying to avoid that Carrie tried her best to remove those, we’re we’re working on it. It’s no big deal. The reason what all those things are, are people trying to email Carrie going, I need to I need something or so she is literally that busy. And she is still making time for the show, guys. So please bear with us through the bangs. I know it’s annoying, but that just goes to show you how busy she is and how sweet she is for working through that and helping our audience. So please, please, if you’re looking for a realtor in the Chicagoland area. I mean, that’s this is why I would choose this is my and I’m a realtor, and I would still choose Carrie, because she really is that good. And I did choose her.
Carrie McCormick 17:20 I’m gonna give you one more tip, though, I’m what you were saying. Just a couple, unlike with the attorneys and the horse attorneys, wealth managers is how you know I’ve created those relationships is I’ve always given back to them. So for example, I said to a few of the divorce attorneys, if you are going through a case, and the people are trying to keep the asset trying to keep the home, but they just want to know what the value is, I’m happy to give that to free of charge. You know, it’s just it’s me give providing you data happy to run a CMA for you happy to be a resource for you. So giving to them first, and being a resource to them, versus asking them to give you clients, right so it’s the you know, give them and they’re gonna give back. So you know, even sending them a postcard an email, just letting them know that you are going to, you know, be a resource and free CMAs or whatever it is for them, our free quarterly updates for them. You know, that’s a good way again to give, and then one day you’re gonna get back. And
D.J. Paris 18:20 a suggestion for that is what you can ask an estate planning attorney, a divorce attorney, hey, if I come across anybody that might be somebody that you you could be able to, to work with, or somebody who already has an attorney, but once a second opinion, what’s the language I should use? How should I do that? And then literally, anytime you know, somebody that’s like, Yeah, I’m getting a divorce or I do need to review my estate plan and my will be like, You know what, before you even if you already have somebody, I’ve got a really good person for a second opinion. And you because everybody should get a second opinion on big things like that. They just should, you know, we get second opinions before big surgeries and things of that nature. So, you know, that’s the kind of stuff that you want. And by the way, might as well make those relationships with doctors too. Now that I’m thinking about it, like orthopedics, for example, are increasingly more important as people age. So find a good orthopedic doctor and say, hey, you know, I work with a lot of, you know, people of a certain age and you know, they talk about different aches and pains, is it okay, if I can refer them to you? Believe me, a doctor is gonna say absolutely, or, you know, if they’re too busy, they’ll know who to refer to. But these are the strategic partnerships you can put together. Well, Carrie and I both have heart outs. And this is a great place to end because I mean, this is just this was a really great, great conversation with all sorts of tips and tricks. So please, for anyone who would oh by the way, Carrie is so sweet too. If you have questions, she is not. She is busy so so give her some time but if you have questions for her, you can reach out to her. Carrie what’s the best email to reach to reach you up?
Carrie McCormick 19:55 Yes, it’s Carrie ca RR ie at It is an apple T as in Tom properties.com. So that’s Carrie at@properties.com or call me 312-961-4612.
D.J. Paris 20:11 Awesome. Well, thank you Carrie. Once again, we I almost feel like we’re we’re like brother and sister in a certain way. So I love the fact that you come on here, every single week, every single month, rather. And you’re going to be doing that through next year as well. So thank you. Thank you, on behalf of Carrie and myself, also, thank you to the audience. We appreciate you we have we have I can’t believe it at some point, I’m sure my this will go down in popularity, but it is it is still increasing in popularity. So I’m so thankful. I don’t think that has anything to do with me. But I’m grateful that people are sharing the podcast and certainly telling the other agents about it. So please continue to do so it’s the best way you can help us grow. And also let Kerry know how much you appreciate her being on the show because she doesn’t have time for this. And she makes time every month. So thank you, Carrie. Thank you the audience. This will actually go out in January early January. So hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season in New Year. And we will see you on the next episode. Thanks Gary.
Don’t Miss Out On These Revenue Opportunities for 2024! • Fee Gentry
Dec 30, 2023
Fee Gentry a coach and author talks about how she got into real estate. Fee discusses what you can do today to future proof your business. Fee also discusses the importance of positive mindset and what agents can do to protect it. Last, Fee widely discusses additional streams of income for agents and how they can leverage from their actual position.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you concerned about what the future may hold for realtors stop being concerned because today we’re going to talk about how to future proof your business. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. I’m DJ Parris, I’m your guide, and host through the Show and welcome if you’re new, welcome back, if you’re returning, and as always, please tell a friend about our show. Other Realtors need to know we we have a huge audience 10s of 1000s of you listen to every episode, there’s like 1.6 million realtors, and I’m gonna put it on you guys, you got to get me in front of all of them. I’m just teasing. But that would be awesome. Just tell one person about us that would really help us and it would make make our audience even bigger. So thank you in advance for that. Also, check out our sponsors, guys, our sponsors are awesome. They’re so sweet and nice. They keep the show rolling, check out their products and services. They have awesome stuff. So please do that too. But let’s get to my main event. Today we’re talking to fi gentry and this is a real true superstar in the industry, not just the top producer. This is somebody at the highest levels of the industry and she is now consulting with agents and teams to help them take their business to the next level. So you really want to check this out. It’s very cool, but let’s just get right to it. My conversation with V Gentry.
We have V Gentry on the show as our guest from exp in Georgetown, Texas. Let me tell you more about fee. A fee Gentry is a dynamic figure in real estate. She excels as an entrepreneur and investor a speaker, a coach and an author. She’s the visionary founder of the black exp network, a co founder of the one exp initiative and a former director on the board of EXP world holdings LLC since 2004 When she became a licensed Texas realtor. Her mission has been helping women and underserved individuals achieve financial independence through homeownership. With over two decades of entrepreneurial experience fee is the driving change both within and beyond the real estate sector. She’s currently the CEO of live better ventures running a business incubator and hosts the fellowship on YouTube. Now to for all things fee we want you actually to go to her Instagram which is at fi Gentry fi Welcome to the show. Well thank you DJ man, like when you read that I was like Who’s he? Who’s he talking about? Was that amazing? Lady really sounds like she sounds she’s a little superstar. Well, you are a superstar and I am excited to number one. You’re such a sweet person we were just chatting backstage and I’m really really excited to speak with you. But besides being just a pleasant and lovely person I really want to you have some really great things we’re going to talk about today specifically money that realtors are leaving on the table and also with the talk of AI and and just technology always you know increasing and trying to edge out Realtors what we can do to future proof our businesses. So we’re going to talk a lot about that. But before we get to, to that to that let’s talk about you and I’d love to hear about how you got into real estate because you have done a lot so tell us about that journey.
Fee Gentry 4:51 Man Real Estate DJ was like Plan F for me like I had it was nowhere on my radar. Actually I was in physical therapy school, so I had, you know, my goal was to be a physical therapist, and I, you know, so I went to PT school, you know, I did post rehabilitation. I mean, that was in fitness. That was my career. And
D.J. Paris 5:10 we should mention for anyone, I’m sorry to interrupt your your lovely story, but just to make a big deal about this. PT school is often talked about as being just as challenging to get into as pre med because there’s there’s fewer actually PT schools than there are med schools. And I don’t know if that’s still the case, but it is a big deal to get into a PT program. And so yeah, I’m sorry. So tell us tell us. Yeah,
Fee Gentry 5:32 so I was Yeah. So it was in the number one physical therapy program in the state of Texas. And I just, I just said, this is not for me, like, because I had, it was just weird. And I was, I’ve always been an entrepreneur since the age of like, 910 11 years, I’ve always had businesses. So I read this little book like a lot of people have write that book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad by keister in the in you know, that one little sentence says that 90% of people with millions of millionaires or people who have wealth are in the real estate business. I didn’t see the sales part I just saw in the real estate. So silly me, my mom was building a house in Central Texas sight unseen. And so her realtor was like, and who also happen to be the commissioner of the state of Texas was like, we I came to meet, you know, check on check on the house and meet with him. And he said, you would be really good. In real estate. He goes on to introduce you one of my friends who happen to be the, and she was there. I didn’t know who it was avis woocash happen to be the commissioner of the state of Texas made like you could be top 1%. And I was like, you know, I just didn’t even listen to them. And I blew it off. And I thought about it for a while. And I started having all these people recruit me into the real estate industry. And I promise you DDJ I did not know a, you know, a listing from a lockbox. When I got in the business, I had no clue. And so first year, I sold 39 homes, unbeknownst to me, I thought it sucked. I didn’t I was like, because I got this backup, this little bronze metal. It was it was at the Big Red company, kW. And I got this bronze medal. I was like, Oh, I don’t how do I get a silver? I
D.J. Paris 7:02 mean, how do I get a bronze, that’s the worst of all the metals. barely made it on the podium.
Fee Gentry 7:07 And, and if you don’t know this about me, but like, I’m 511, almost six foot tall. So, you know, former collegiate athlete love sports. So I’m, like, very competitive. So that’s how I got in the business of real estate. And so I just grew from there. So I went from being a solo agent that I grew that I became, like, I was in a smaller town, I was living up north. And so let’s come like this medium size fish in a in a small pond, and start growing a team of people and then wanted to start, I wanted to, you know, own a franchise. And that didn’t work out. Thank God because 2008 then happened. Oh, good. Sorry, my saved myself. But I still I mean, I still took a bloodbath like everybody else. But um, but yeah, so that’s how I ended up in business. Yeah. Wow,
D.J. Paris 7:49 that is, that’s quite a story. And your story doesn’t end there. Because from there, you went on to serve and in management capacities at the corporate level, you know, with exp in particular, and just, you know, continually coaching consulting, writing. You, you do it all, and it is, it’s it’s so impressive, and there’s so much we could talk about. And I think, you know, being that you were so connected to agents, I would love to talk about, you know, 2024. Now, this episode might not actually publish until early January, or potentially late December. But regardless of it’ll be, you know, 2024 is on everybody’s mind will no matter when this actually drops. But people had to tough 2023, or at least the eight most of the agents I knew. And every so often I talked to an agent and said, I’m having my best year ever. I was maybe 1% of agents I talked to so. So for for most of us, it was it was a tricky and difficult year. And I think, you know, for somebody like yourself who’s so disciplined, so focused, so just committed to finding solutions. I really do want to talk about what agents can do in 2024, just to help keep their keep stay in business and keep their business rolling forward. So just any advice or guidance that you might have for what agents should be focusing on right now during the winter months when we know things are slower anyway, but how they could set themselves up for possibly having a better 2024 2025? Right.
Fee Gentry 9:19 That is an amazing question. I get that question a lot. And I and I talk about that a lot. We wish we’d have started in October. So the people that I work with we say let’s start in October that 90 day window right? But since it since we can’t do anything about it, let’s start today like so what can you do today? And I always talk about what do you need to do right now to future proof your business right for 2024. So that so my goal here for your audience is just to help set them free, right, free from you know, worry about artificial intelligence taking over free from, you know, the text from these major, you know, institutional investors and I want to set them free from any other outside forces because the first part that The we have talked about is let’s sit there, let’s let’s get their mind in check, right? So I want them to I don’t want to be a victim of the economy, I want them to, you know, first of all, let’s talk about your mindset, you have to make a decision. So that’s the very first thing I talked to people about, make a decision that you should thrive in 2024. Number two is to have a plan, like and not have people keep writing business plans, but I’m talking about an action plan because we we all feel good about planning. Oh, well, I wrote my business plan for 2024. Well, what are you going to do? What are the action steps that you’re gonna take in the first 30 days, and, and I always talk about this, is keep it simple. We write these elaborate business plans, and I’m just talking to people about in 2024, we’re going to just have to keep it simple. Like and go back to the basics and the fundamentals of of everything, yes, we need to leverage artificial intelligence and learn how to use that. But we need to leverage it in and I’m calling collective capitalism is or collect, you know, or collaborative capitalism this year, that’s what people should be focusing on 2020, for who it’s not what you need to do, or how to do it, who do you need to connect with, in order to get through the next year to two years, and possibly even three years, because I believe, Mike, this is the you know, according to fee disclaimer, right? These are just my own thoughts, beliefs, I believe that real estate is going to substantially change in the next 24 to 48 months, whether it’s from the Department of Justice, you know, the court cases, or whether it’s, you know, technology, or, or the consumers who’ve just decided, we’ve just, they’ve got a different feed, and they want to, and they want to do something or the the collapse of nor I mean, I don’t know, we don’t know, I have a crystal ball. But either way, like I said, my goal is to set your audience free to, to do something different this year. Thank
D.J. Paris 11:46 you. And I think, by the way, a wonderful goal and very appreciative to you to come on here and and share some of your wisdom and knowledge. And we should, you know, I was thinking, as you were saying about keeping it simple. So I recruit agents for a living and I, our audience, a lot of them don’t do that. But I think you can pause our audience can possibly relate to this little quick story. So for years and years, every week, we’d have a management meeting, and it would they would say, DJ, how many people did you hire this week? And that was our measure of how well DJ I was doing. And I’ve been doing this 13 years. So that’s just a standard metric. It’s like, how many sales did you get, you know, that kind of thing. But it was how many people that I recruit. And then we finally realized that what we call our key performance indicators. That’s just the end result of me doing all the other tasks. And so, you know, assuming that I never get better at recruiting, what is the actual driver? It’s how many conversations do I have on a daily basis. So it reminds me of that Brian Buffini, old Brian Buffini thing that where he would say, you got to meet two to five people every day, if you’re a realtor, and just add them to your database. And and I was like, well, and there’s a lot more to it, of course, but if we’re looking at the most basic activity that a realtor should probably consider if they don’t have enough business right now is keep adding people to your database, keep having conversations, meet new people, get them into your CRM. And so for me, I don’t focus on how many people are recruited anymore. It’s how many conversations that I have this week with agents. And then you know, we track my close ratio, and all that. But really, what we’re finding out is we know DJ needs to talk to 20 different agents a week if he’s going to get, you know, five people to join or whatever. So, so I really appreciate you saying that, because we can look at the end results, sales, you know, deals closed and go. And then we can go, that’s a lot of stress. If we go back to just I gotta beat a whole bunch of people, and I go, that’s not the only thing anyone needs to do. But it’s it’s a way to think about scaling back your, you know, what do I actually need to do on a daily basis?
Fee Gentry 13:45 Absolutely. That’s the one. If you do nothing else, that’s it.
D.J. Paris 13:49 You never improve your skill set. I mean, this is what I always say to like, with me, if I never become any better as, as a recruiter, if I just double the number of people I talk to, in theory, I should double the number of recruits that I have. So and of course we everything. But But yeah, so So let’s, let’s talk a little bit more so. So thinking about, yes, there’s all of these outside factors. You know, you mentioned technology. We talked about the rise of AI, the flight to teams, there’s lawsuits, there’s all these things that and I want to go back to mindset just for a moment because I I was curious of what your advices for you talked about first making a decision that I’m going to have a good next 12 months Yes. How do you protect that mindset? Because we know that it’s, it’s, you know, when things are good, it’s easy to have the mindset and when things are strong, are challenging, it’s harder. So do you have any, any any suggestions to protect that mindset and really guard it so that some of these outside influences don’t start to color it in a way that we now are? Oh my gosh, oh, this isn’t gonna happen. Yeah,
Fee Gentry 14:55 I am. 100% my own The best critic, my own best person that that number one, I always do is like, turn off the television, get off social media, and then get away from negative people in what will all those three things have people. It is kind of weird, like, we’re supposed to talk to people. So like, so like, want you to have conversations, but with the right type of people, right. But it’s so but in the other thing that I do is I have, you know, I have a lot of my friends or colleagues, we’re all learners. So we’re we’re, you know, we’re staying on top of books or reading books on money on mindset, on you know, manifestation or money, your prayer, whatever, whatever it is that you believe in, find something that you can do every single day, that takes you out of this crazy world and brings you back inward. Because we keep looking at these external forces, everything we need is already inside of us. And so that’s the number one thing that I really recommend is for people to go inward when everybody else is being crazy.
D.J. Paris 15:56 Yeah, and also we can get crazy too. And so this idea of, of having a practice of some sort of discipline, like you were saying, prayer, meditation, whatever it is, something that takes you a little bit outside of the craziness that you that we all deal with inside our own heads to this is it gives some additional space in our lives to be able to say, You know what, there’s, there’s more than just me out here, I’m somehow connecting with this, you know, greater thing, that that’s not just me. And it’s it’s a nice respite from sometimes our own struggles that that we have. So I’m a big, big fan of that and big believer in that as well. And also, I think it’s the birthplace of creativity, I think, when you can get quiet and listen to your intuition. Like you were saying that sometimes in a lot of times the answers bubble bubble up, but if you’re not quiet, I don’t if I’m not quiet, I don’t hear them mean
Fee Gentry 16:54 either. Yeah, yeah, I just, I absolutely just like, I’m, I do that twice a day, I just get quiet twice a day or something, you know, and I always recommend, I always recommend finding that piece. For me, it’s like either putting my feet in the grass, looking at water or something like that, like connecting with nature, connecting with your inner, you know, your, your source, whatever, I need to do music, but just find like, find that internal peace is really, really key. Yeah. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 17:20 And the other thing too, that I think about I’m curious to get your take on it is this. It’s an old expression. But I think it’s accurate, at least for me that the journey is really is really where it’s at the destination is nice, and it’s nice to celebrate. And, you know, when we when we have these major goals we accomplished it’s great for a day or two to sort of celebrate and, and then I don’t know, but I often watch out. For me, I often get depressed when I when I achieve a goal and I wish I didn’t know is very common. I can get really, really depressed because then it’s like, oh, now Oh, okay, now what? You know, and then it’s like, I gotta just, if I if I were to think about Yes, the goal is nice, and we should celebrate our wins. And then we should realize it’s all about chopping wood and carrying water just consistently doing the work. Yeah. Yeah, that’s,
Fee Gentry 18:10 that’s it. DJ, I’m glad you mentioned that because i It’s the mamba mentality. And there’s a lot of especially in the real estate industry, or like they just said, you know, as it being an athlete or something. So I think about Kobe Bryant is that, you know, after the championships, he goes back and he’s looking at game film and shooting 1000 shots after he’s won a championship. I’m that girl, you know, I’m that girl too. And so, the journey as I’ve gotten older, and in I’ve started learn and appreciate patients and enjoying just the little things like the just the habit of practice, we’re just practice, right? Just practice it enjoying that journey. But man, it took me three years plus, it’s taken me a long time.
D.J. Paris 18:50 I was talking to my personal trainer the other week or two ago, and I was saying, I’m just going to have to throw myself in the way of pain, physical pain for the rest of my life if I want to be fit. There’s nothing pleasant to me about like lifting heavy weights, it’s painful, it hurts, it’s but he the results are pretty cool. But I have to be willing to go through the discomfort and the willing, I mean, how muscles grow. It’s how we grow as people. So this idea of like throwing ourselves into discomfort is not fun, but it seems to be the only way I know to do it. So this idea of of getting into habits, you know, and just like I don’t like working out but I do it. I don’t I don’t have to like it. I just do it.
Fee Gentry 19:33 Yeah, it’s about happier. It’s about creating habits. So when I was talking about you know, when you’re making people making plans and goals, no, you need to develop habits. That’s the number one thing James clear. His book is probably one of the books that I recommend more than anything is atomic habits. Long read. And in the way he builds that book. It’s creating a habit right I mean, whether we even lace up a book so yeah, it’s creating habits a man like you said it sucks, but you just you just do it.
D.J. Paris 19:58 And here’s here’s the good news. I was thinking about this with exercise. So I don’t like exercise some people do. I truly I know some people actually really do love it. So I’m only speaking for myself, but I never did enjoy lifting heavy weights. And, you know, even doing cardio is not my favorite thing. But if I want to, if I want to live a long life, I probably have to do those things. So I finally just said, Well, I got to do it, I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. And so if you have parts of your business that you don’t like to do, but are critical, then you can start to think about do I have to force myself? Sometimes the answer may be yes. Or it may be I can leverage other someone else to maybe do something for me, because number one, I don’t like doing it. Or number two, I’m not good at it. And there’s all these ways now to get people to help you. We have a global economy, we have this gig economy that we can tap into and get help from people in other places that, you know, maybe charge less than what people locally would charge to do similar work. And if you’re having problems staying on top of your habits, yeah, well, maybe get some help or get an accountability partner. But let I want to talk a little bit about future proofing one’s business and this idea of having leaving money on sorry, leaving money on the table, because I think this is something that most agents don’t think about at all. They’re just focused on the next transaction, the next client, and there are a lot of opportunities I as somebody who is in management at a brokerage. You know, this is a huge focus for brokerage owners right now. But it also can be something that teams agents, they really should be thinking about additional streams of income. So let’s talk about that. Yeah,
Fee Gentry 21:38 so this is probably one of my favorite things to talk about. And I’ve been talking about it for a long period of time. So DJ, most real estate professionals are renting their careers. Let me say that again. Most real estate professionals are running their careers, they’re going from transaction to transaction. They’re doing you know, they’re there. They might be at a brokerage where they have unfavorable terms, and then the other parts of the money that they’re leaving on the table. So I want you to imagine this that I always kind of do this exercise. Put draw circles if somebody’s watching this, do this as I’m talking about it, write a circle put your name in the middle of it. What do you wrote most real estate agents do? Like how many people how many people get paid during a real estate transaction? So let’s let’s just start naming them who gets paid in real estate transaction, the realtor, the realtors, both the buyer and seller
D.J. Paris 22:28 side the buyer sellers the brokerage gets paid the title, title company gets paid, the lender gets paid video inspector home inspect the utility companies get paid if if sometimes movers,
Fee Gentry 22:43 movers, movers, yeah, you videographers stagers the sign companies state, the state the state, you know, the state records county clerk clerks. So DJ, when I do this, I have found that on one single transaction, so up to 41, people get paid off a one transaction and guess who’s in the middle of that transaction? Yeah, the agent, the agent. And that’s what I talked about leaving money on the table. We are now when you talk about that gig economy, we have the ability now, as entrepreneurs, we have to stop being self employed, I’m talking to people about be going from solo to CEO or being self employed to a real estate business owner. And a lot of people think they’re real estate business owners and they’re not they are self employed. And so the entrepreneur of the future is going to have to stop leaving money on the table in there are, you know, compliant ways for you to get paid, especially from title from a from a mortgage company and for mortgages, because you’re watching the brokers do it. I mean, our brokerages are doing it in the models of you know, so now in the future, and it’s nothing new, but it’s a different way to look at it. Look at it, if you keep saying that your lender, my lending partner, if your lending partner is not providing you a resources or an ability to get paid or something that’s not your partner. That’s just a vendor. And so we have the vendor. Yep. It’s just a vendor. And so there are so many different ways to get paid on the table. If you’re we have you know, we have real estate professionals who have you can own a vending company, we have real estate, I mean, you know, I’m sorry, staging company we have we have real estate owners who own who can become, you know, property managers, you know what, you know, yeah, check, check your little bit, but there’s so many Sure, sure. I’m looking at right now, in this country. We have 30,000 Baby Boomers retiring every day in June who wants to be a YouTube star. He doesn’t want to own a plumbing company, ah, bet company. He doesn’t care about being a property manager. But we have the ability to go ahead and buy our cashflow. We as real estate professionals can buy our cashflow. We keep creating these companies and doing these transactions. But we can create we can buy cleaning companies we can buy move out companies. I mean, there’s so many different ways right now for us to make money and we’re leaving 1050 Getting $20,000 a month on the table. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately is either buying into equity, so creating equity positions with companies who, who already serviced the real estate industry, their handyman companies or their landscaping company tile and grout company, all those get paid off of a real estate transaction, by the way. And that’s where that’s where there’s the opportunity. And so, especially those in the real estate businesses, like who are, you know, bigger teams, you’re already utilizing these services, you know, the moving services, moving trucks, I mean, moving companies, there’s, there’s so many opportunities, like we talked about the 41 ways that people up to 41 ways people get paid off with one single real estate transaction. That’s how you’re leaving money on the table.
D.J. Paris 25:42 I love that. And this idea of investing in, you know, taking some of your capital, your, you know, commission money, for example, and reinvesting it into another business where you have an equity position. And, yes, there are all sorts of ways that agents can align themselves and get paid in, you know, legal, legally compliant ways. RESPA compliant,
Fee Gentry 26:04 right, was right. But DJ, most of it most of the ways I can teach you, I mean, I’m teaching, I’m doing it with like, sometimes you’re doing with no money down, because real estate, we’re real estate professionals. So like, we’re we’re they may suffer and don’t know how to market, or they don’t have a CRM, they don’t understand, we already got to do that as real estate agents. That’s what our that’s what our job is. We know how to connect people we know, we know how to do social media, I mean, all think about all the tools that we have in our tracks as real estate professionals, it makes total sense for us to, like you said, we can just we can, like I said, do some earned equity with within those positions. Yeah, in revenue share. That’s what I know. Yes, it’s revenue share.
D.J. Paris 26:45 Yeah. So for every vendor that an agent has, they absolutely should reach out again, making sure it’s, you know, violating license law. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, find out, find out what what the rules are in your local market and state, and then reach out to, you know, the, the attorneys reach out to, and some people are able to help you in certain ways, and some aren’t. But if you’re sending business to somebody, you should be asking them to do the same at the very least, or saying, how could I help you, for example, if you’re very good, if you’re strong, like you were saying, at social media, if that’s your thing, as an agent, you’re really good. Well guess what most business owners aren’t. So you have, you know, relationships with inspectors, you know, all these ancillary sort of services, you then can go to those and say, I can help you with that, or let me at least just fire some business off to you. And then let’s work out an arrangement where, you know, where we can both party, you know, both participate in the profit. So I love that. Yeah,
Fee Gentry 27:47 that’s, that’s, that’s the new way way of doing real estate businesses, you know, how do you make money in between the Commission’s that’s this is what it looks like, looks like right? Because unless, you know, unless you as a solo agent, or even as teams figure out a way to earn multiple streams of revenue, it’s going to get tough, it’s going to continue to get tough in terms of gaining market share. These are blue ocean strategies that are out there and like I said, one out of every 12 business owners are just going out of business and we’ve seen that in COVID in so that’s why we’re having a hard time finding a handyman reliable handyman that’s where we’re having a hard time finding that Christians H back you know, plumbers videographers you know, we’re having a hard time finding those people so
D.J. Paris 28:30 be really encourage everybody to watch South Park just did a in the last month or so they did a special called enter the pan diverse and I one of the plots one of the subplots of it was that we are so used to having things done for us that these trade positions, these skilled skilled labor positions, handyman plumbers, etc painters, you know, people don’t assume a lot of younger people don’t aspire to those positions. They weren’t like you were saying want to be you know, more and more involved in technology be on YouTube or whatever. They’re not necessarily wanting seeing that as a viable you know, sort of career even though it is a viable career. And so as a result those those trades are really suffering and but the need is still there. So you’re absolutely right, like if you think handymen are going out of business oh my gosh they’re probably having their they are going to do better and better and better and better because less people are learning those skills and we all need a handyman so So you’re absolutely right these these trade jobs are off they’re so critical. Yeah,
Fee Gentry 29:34 yeah, they are so critical especially for us in like said in our industry because like yeah, it’s and I talk you know so I get to talk to these you know these handy guys and these trade men and it’s it’s been it’s been really really fun talking to them and working with their businesses Yeah, yeah.
D.J. Paris 29:50 What at the end of the South Park episode the handyman and the these the trade positions, they become the celebrities now because they become the wealthy people. So it’s great Very cute story but but it’s got a very strong point is, is, you know, we there are opportunities here to think about, you know, sort of services that are not going out of business that are not you know, a handyman is basically future proof at least for a long time until robots come in and do it all that’s a long ways away so yeah and maybe it maybe it will never happen and there’s always going to you know, in Realtors too, you know realtors are worth their weight in gold if their skill set is high enough if their skill set is actually valuable about Zillow or or any of the other, you know, tech providers coming in Redfin. Redfin is a better example. Not just slight Redfin, I like Redfin, they’re great, but they have not really disrupted the market as much as we thought maybe they could. And it’s not because of anything, you know, negative towards them. It’s just people want to talk to agents who, you know, and again, they have agents, but we understand it’s a little bit of a different relationship there. So, yes, so So what you can do, if I understand is, you can help agents identify these opportunities, and then help create a plan to actually generate, you know, some of these relationships, is that, is that right? That is
Fee Gentry 31:15 correct. So I help real estate professionals, mostly teams, brokerages, you know, title companies, lenders, especially those of us who are getting up who either who are getting up in age, and they don’t have a transition plan to how to get out of their business, and, or those who are growing and want to add multiple streams of revenue to them. And so I have partnerships and jayvees. And so I, I help these companies create the plans, I help them acquire, acquire either these new businesses, or I help them where I help them put in relationships, so we can create up create the financial streams for them. So that’s what I’ve been doing for like this last year, is just because of the price like, well, let me use the buy relationships with, you know, some of the top lenders, title companies and doing it in a RESPA compliant way. And it has been amazing, especially for people just like I said, who have been running their careers, and just, you know, most real estate, people think they’re gonna be able to sell their businesses and they’re not right. They’re just, you’re just not going to. And so I teach them how to transition out of it and keep that keep that income stream coming in. And that happened. Started from exp I learned that from you know, it’s just a different business model. Yeah, yeah.
D.J. Paris 32:22 Yeah, it’s funny. So one of the things I started, we started doing here as a recruiting tool. And for any of those, any of those who are listening who are either brokerage owners, or team owners who are looking to expand their team and hire, I’ve got a great tip for you, that you could start doing this in your local market is offer free headshots, and invite the agents from other firms that you’re looking to recruit or bring on your team or whatever. And here’s how we do it. So because this is exactly to your point, basically, what you’re doing. So here’s how we do this, we hire, we get hire this photographer, and then I said, Well, I don’t want to pay for all that myself, because it’s quite expensive. So instead, so now we have an insurance agent that hangs out during the party. We have like a PA headshot party, we have an insurance agent, we have an attorney, we have a lender, we have an inspector, and we have a financial advisor. So we have everybody that would love to talk to all of these people, we all share the cost. This is a strategic partnership. This is exactly you know, basically what you’re saying is yes, these they’re not paying me but we’re all paying the photographer and I only have to pay the photographer a little tiny amount now because and I get to do this event that is pretty cool. People get free headshots. So my point is is is this is a way to do a version of that like you were saying is building these these partnerships where you know you’re getting in front of the people you want and then hopefully, you know either sharing the cost or having somebody even compensate you for some of those efforts and you absolutely could do this just to talk about title for one second and I know every state’s a little different so I don’t want to throw numbers out there that because they wouldn’t be applicable to any anyone unless they were in our situation but I will tell you as a brokerage owner at least in the state of Illinois, it is major major revenue for a title deal and other states it’s less but regardless it’s still something and you if you’re not figuring out a way to beat to participate in that way you are absolutely leaving money on the table here in Illinois it’s big big money and in other states it’s not as big but it’s still money on the table
Fee Gentry 34:24 right and it’s in his for doing the things that you already do anyways and that’s what I keep you know people like well I don’t want another job but I don’t want to go run a handyman service business No, I’m gonna teach you I’m teaching you how to do this without you’re not going to go pick up hammers you’re not gonna you’re not gonna you’re not gonna go you know, have to become a virtual assistant yourself or anything. This is like these are ways that you can do this with with up you know, with operate operations, Operation line operationalize control, right like, like, it’s just people put butts in seats to to make sure that work gets done because that’s what your job is to do is, you know that if you’re a team leader, just it’s your job is to make sure the work gets done. Yeah, it’s quarterback. And
D.J. Paris 35:01 so as an agent to, you know, you should be cultivating these relationships with your vendors anyway and talk about saying, Hey, I would like us to be a more strategic partner and figure out how we can help each other next year. So yeah, I’m happy to continue to send you business, Mr. Mrs. vendor, and I’d like you to be more part of the team as opposed to just a vendor for me. So what can we do together, where, you know, we can both participate in, in the success of this, and I’m going to refer every single person who comes my way to you, and I’d love to hear about, you know, maybe what you can do on your end to help facilitate more deals for me, or maybe some marketing dollars or whatever, again, is RESPA compliant and you know, licensed law compliant. But there are ways to do this. And agents are oftentimes not as confident to to ask, they don’t know exactly what to ask for, you know, I think most agents understand well, I can ask my lender to help me with like a seminar or webinar signs are, we understand that because we, we’ve been taught how to do that, but we haven’t been taught how to do the other stuff. And this is where you come in, because this is what you teach. Yeah. Yeah, it’s critical, because this is why you would go to fi because you don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Don’t try to learn it all yourself, go to somebody who’s already figured it out, like fee and have have her help consult with you and give you some suggestions. Because she already knows how to do it.
Fee Gentry 36:27 Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s been amazing. Yeah. People think of it outside. Yeah, yeah, there’s some, you know, there’s some nuances and intricacies. But we’ve now done it, you know, done it across the country. And now, and it’s, it’s Yeah, and you’re right, it varies from lot a lot, you know, from state to state. They’re different laws about different things. But yeah, love to help anybody who’s, who would live, you know, open to talking to anybody who’s interested in in, in looking down that path. Yeah. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 36:50 And there is really, even if the, for example, even like, even with utility companies like cable phone for people that still use cable and phone will still do and they do. Yeah. And you know, this is an opportunity to reach out to the cable company and be like, Hey, can I get a spiff on every time I send someone over to you? And, again, whatever the rules are in your area, fine. But most most of them be like, Sure, I’d be happy to solar is another one. There’s lots of of, you know, for home, renovators, staging companies, etc, have so many opportunities,
Fee Gentry 37:27 I’ve got a price list of the average of those. And so the ones that you’d be just most shocked on was like utilities. It’s the average household for utility, and I don’t even have to here but I think if I remember off the top of my head, and like the state of Texas, is is $1,300. Well, you get a referral of that they’ll give up give you up to 30 or 40% referral on that. Think about that. I mean, you don’t mean just like, yeah, people weren’t paying utilities. I mean, there’s so many, like you said solar, oh, my gosh, if you know if they have solar in your in your state, but it’s it’s being compliant, right. It’s the RESPA compliant ways and and how you build it? Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s, it can be very, very, it’s very, very lucrative. And attorneys
D.J. Paris 38:03 have been doing this for years and years and years. Attorneys have referral relationships with other attorneys who are in different specialties. Obviously, realtors do this, all my clients moving to Florida, and I live in Illinois. So I need to find someone in Florida and I’m going to take x percentage of the commission by handing you know, you an agent down there the deal. And yes, you can do similar versions of this. And I love the thing you were saying to about this hyperlocal where you could go to businesses in your local market and say, Look, I have I have a following on online of people that you know, know, like, and trust me, they listen to my suggestions, and I’m happy to sort of drive business to you, Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner? Would that be okay? Of course the answer is going to be yes. And then. And then the question is great. Can we either workout a relationship where maybe, you know, I, maybe there’s a revenue share, like you were saying, or maybe we can reciprocally send each other business. But I think, you know, business owners love this idea of, oh, you’re gonna help me grow my business? Awesome. Let’s, you know, they understand the nature of the the reciprocity.
Fee Gentry 39:13 Yep, exactly. Yeah. And there’s, and there’s so there’s three ways that people can generate business that way. So I call it like one being an affiliate, right, like we talked about, like you could possibly get income to being we call just a connector connector, like where you you, as the real estate professional look really good by being able to offer that higher level tier of services on it, and you may get a discount yourself. And then three is like absolutely, you know, you’re going to when you become a professional you are sharing and revenues or you might own or you do performance guarantees, you get some performance bonuses on stuff and in the revenue share. So those are three different tiers. And I’ve got about four other tiers of way you can ways you can, you can do that. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 39:54 mean, we’re in what are we talking about sort of bottom line on a transaction if Have a and again, I, you know numbers are gonna vary wildly. But we’re talking about possibly adding 1000 or more dollars in revenue in profit to even a transaction? Possibly, possibly, or more. So, or more or more. Yes, yes, I was being very conservative, because I know, I know even what title gives us per deal here in Illinois, but which is which is 1000s. Right?
Fee Gentry 40:27 Something that title, just just, yeah, just just just a title mortgage. If you just think about we talked about when we set up to 41 different ways you can get paid on a transaction. Okay, let’s just say you got paid on three more. Just just mentioned, you got just paid on those, just three, the basic, the basic core three, let’s just say it’s mortgage, handyman services or housekeeping services? I don’t know. I mean, you know, you pick three, it’s way more than you did before, and it’s doing the exact same.
D.J. Paris 40:56 You’re all right. You know, we all like it’s funny. I, I have a how do we find are the people that, you know, we hired to clean our homes on a regular basis? Well, yes, we could go online and try to find, but we usually ask our friends, right, we go, Hey, who’s your cleaning person? Are they good? Okay. Yeah, right, yeah. But those people are worth their weight in gold, when you can find a good cleaning. Anyone, any vendor. That’s, that’s excellent. We’re like, oh, my gosh, and and, you know, people just freely sort of give out those referrals. And that’s awesome. And you should do that. And you should also say, Gosh, I want to help build your business, you are such an excellent vendor, I want to help you. And that’s where you start is how can we help each other? And agents are just not used to asking that question. And this is the question and fees going to help you not only identify all these opportunities, and possibly becoming an equity partner in some of their businesses, or some sort of, you know, affiliate or referral relationship, whatever, there’s ways to do it. And whether you’re getting paid, maybe you’re getting paid in sweat equity, maybe you’re getting paid that in physical dollars, but services for your business that can be you know, maybe there’s a by the way, accountants, those are pretty important people. Right. So accountants is another opportunity, you and I know they’re on your list. You’ve identified everyone. So this is exactly guys, I think this is a perfect place for us to stop because if you haven’t built some of these strategic partnerships and relationships to earn more than just a commission on a sale, and yes, that’s we understand that’s how agents get paid. But there are other avenues and fee is going to help you figure out how to do that, how to identify and how to approach those businesses and what to offer them and what to expect in return. And guys, like he was saying you’re already referring people to other vendors anyway, you might as well see if there’s an opportunity to work together. And you know, it’s you just you’ve opened my eyes actually because we’re I’m kind of a business owner myself. So I now have to start looking at our strategic partnerships and realize oh yeah, maybe I’m I’m leaving some things on the table. In fact, I know I’m leaving. In fact, I’m going to ask for you to take a look at my podcast and tell me how I’m leaving things on the table because I totally 1,000,000,000,000% and leaving money on the table. So I’m doing it guys you’re doing it. We’re all doing it Fi is here to save us all so find for all things fi just find her on Instagram she’s she’s she’s easy to find search fi Gentry online, there’s not there’s one fee gentry and that is her. Which is one of the cool things about having a name like V Gentry is a name that you certainly remember and is unique. And fee is really the real deal again but on the board of directors and exp she she’s she’s that she’s the real thing. Author coach, athletes and a top producer and brokerage owner just everything she’s done it all so please reach out to her because she knows where this business is headed. Because she has been at those upper levels and Management at really the highest levels of some of the biggest companies out there. So guys, she she knows she knows what’s coming and she wants to help you future proof. So find her on Instagram at fi Gentry Fe GE and try and we’ll have links to all of these ways to get in contact with us in our show notes. But I would just want to thank fee for spending an hour with us we so much appreciate you You’re such a wonderful guest and you have such a passion for helping agents which is exactly what the show is all about. So on behalf of the audience, thank you thank you to fi This is a wonderful way for me this is my last interview before the before I go on holiday break. So what a what a fun interview for me to have. So selfishly thank you for you. But our audience also thanks to you and then on behalf of Fi and myself. We want to thank the audience do you stuck around to the very end we appreciate you we honor you This is for you. So thank you. Tell us how we can improve the show number one leave us a review let us know Good, bad, indifferent, let us know what what we want more of less of tell me to shut up, whatever. Let me know how to make the show better, but also support our sponsors. They’re the ones that pay the bills. So please check out their products and services. I promise you we I do not allow vendors to come on and be advertisers. Unless they have unbelievable services for agents, and telephones. Please tell a friend about our show. Another agent in your office, they need to hear this by the way, you’re owner of if you’re an agent and you work for a brokerage, instead of being the brokerage owner, send this to the owner because the owner needs to know about this as well. The owner needs to know or the team leader needs to understand there is opportunities and they already know it. They just don’t have the strategy about how to get there Fi is going to help them do that. So reach out to fi she’s awesome. We’ll have her contact information in the show notes. Find her on Instagram at fi Gentry fi have a wonderful I’m just gonna say have a wonderful holiday season and you’re here.
Fee Gentry 45:55 I know I can’t wait I don’t have anything good plan. I plan on traveling but I’m gonna be actually just focusing down and rebranding and doing some new stuff. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 46:03 well, by the way, too, like fi has I was we were joking about this before I the fi is the best voice ever. She was just the self soothing voice. So I said if you’re going to hire a consultant, you’re going to have somebody work with you. Wouldn’t it be cool to have somebody with a voice like fee? Well, you might be directly so in fact I need a strategic partnership with FIFA. I’m only teasing. But I am happy to promote fi because she She’s wonderful and very, very skilled. But she also has a wonderful voice and she hosts shows and she does it all. So reach out to her she will get you on the right track fee. Thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next episode.
Fee Gentry 46:39 Thank you so much.
AI For Real Estate Agents In 2024 • Tara Meier
Dec 27, 2023
Tara Meier a real estate marketing technology expert talks about how she got into the real estate business. Tara discusses the importance of online presence and also shares tips on how to utilize AI in your everyday work. Next, Tara talks about the best way to create content. Tara also discusses her thoughts on sharing personal life vs professional life on social media. Last Tara gives tips on how to use paid ads on social media.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Curious about how to utilize AI in your business for 2024. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. Welcome if you’re new, welcome back if you are returning, and in just a moment, I’m going to be speaking with top producer Tara Meyer. Before we get to Tara, just a few few quick announcements. Number one, let us know how we’re doing tell us, the best way you can tell us how we’re doing is by leaving us a review. So whether you’re listening to us on Apple podcasts or Spotify, or one of the other million places you could find us let us know what you think of the show. We take your feedback into account and we make changes because this is all about you. And one way you can help us in addition to that is also by telling a friend think of another realtor that could benefit from while you’re about to hear an amazing conversation with Tara and send it over to somebody because everybody needs to know about AI and we’re going to be talking about that a lot today and also online presence and how to build your brand via social. So we’re gonna talk about all of that stuff. So please tell a friend and also support our sponsors. That’s the last thing they’re the ones who pay the bills they keep our show rolling and we love our sponsors please love them back check out their products and services give them a try. I promise you won’t be disappointed. But alright guys enough pitching for me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation from with from my conversation with the great Tara Meyer.
Today on the show, we have Tara Meyer from my home, which is in Chandler, Arizona. Let me tell you more about Tara. Tara Meyer is a seasoned real estate marketing technology expert with over 20 years of industry experience. She’s known for her entrepreneurial spirit and Tara also excels in leveraging innovative marketing technology to enhance visibility and productivity. Now as a coach and consultant she specializes in brand and identity development, online presence and online presence and reputation management and social media strategy. Tara’s expertise extends to AI and automation. That’s what everybody’s wanting to learn about. We’re going to talk about that today. Also digital advertising CRM implementation and transaction management systems. Her focus is on driving growth and efficiency for real estate professionals through cutting edge strategies and tools I want we’re gonna have such a fun conversation today with Tara. But before we do I want everybody to follow her on Instagram. We have a link to this in the show notes but it’s underscore Tara T Ara Meyer, m e i e r underscore so underscore Tara Meyer underscore, don’t worry. We’ll have a link to it. You can find it there. And please follow her on LinkedIn as well search for Tara Meyer. We have a link to that in the show notes as well and go to her website, which is Tara meyer.com We to learn about all things Tara? Tara, welcome to the show.
Tara Meier 4:30 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:31 I have to say my very first real girlfriend in life was named Tara. And so and I haven’t thought of that name in a very, very long time. So I’m having these weird flashbacks to my early 20s of going this this painful relationship that was a million years ago and actually she’s she’s she’s a lovely person. Everybody’s first relationship was was terrible. I think so. But it is it is funny. I I I haven’t talked to too many terrorists since then. And I was I had a moment where I was, I was like, why am I thinking about my Oh, that’s right. They have the same name. So just kind of a cute story. But she’s married has kids, she’s doing great. But anyway, let’s talk about some fun stuff today. Because I, I’m a marketing person as well. You’re a marketing person. You’re about systems and branding, and marketing. And we’re going to talk about all that fun stuff, as opposed to just how’d you grow your business, which is what I do on every other episode, which is really fun and exciting, too. But people really want to hear about systems and marketing. So let’s talk about that. But before we do, I do want to find out how you got into the business. How did you start in real estate and why?
Tara Meier 5:43 Yeah, so and 2002, I found myself at the front desk of a title insurance company. I spent 10 years at first American Title kind of doing various positions I, you know, grew from, like a set of receptionist, I did escrow disbursements and signings, and finished off as an examiner on the title side. Shortly after that, I was recruited by a an agent who liked my title background, he was focused primarily in REO at that time, so that was around 2010. And I, you know, helped him with it. I mean, he was a one man show running like, you know, 30, various 30 to 50 Reo dispositions at one time. So it was all things vendor management and Cash for Keys and some of those, you know, not so sexy things. And then from there, I transitioned, I got my license in Arizona in 2012. I was a, you know, a successful agent, I think I did, roughly around 150 transactions between two 2012 to 2019, when I also got my broker’s license, and then I quickly decided, I decided I wanted to pivot and do something new. And so I went into prop tech, that where I was a supervisor and a Program Manager for Zillow offers, and you know, I learned all things, you know, scaling and how to, you know, operate with, well manage people, as well as work with some of the most top producing agents in in the western United States that were affiliated with Zillow offers at that time, they unfortunately went through a wind down, which everybody knows.
D.J. Paris 7:31 We all know, we all know, Zillow offers this is no, by the way, by the way, I know a lot of people have strong feelings about Zillow in general, I do not have those same strong feelings. I am, I am a big fan of tech companies, Zillow, I don’t you know, will they ultimately try to replace agents? I guess, you know, they say they won’t. But regardless, I think Zillow really does act to really help agents more than than and I know that not everyone agrees with that. But I am a fan of Zillow. Actually, they used to be a sponsor of my show, and I used to have them on the show all the time. So I’m a big fan. Yeah,
Tara Meier 8:05 it’s it really, it was a great company to work for, I learned a lot about culture and, and just like how to operate at a in a high capacity. So I really valued my time there. It’s unfortunate that it ended but you know, that’s things happen for a reason.
D.J. Paris 8:19 Bad timing, that not you but the it was just timing with the market and everything and, and it wasn’t the only company the only, you know, company like that to go or division of a company like that to go under pretty much most of them did. So it wasn’t exclusive to Zillow. But um, so So you pivoted you, you were doing that, and then that ended. And then where do you go from there? Yeah, so
Tara Meier 8:42 then I was picked up by another prop tech company actually called the orchard and I was the general manager and launched the Phoenix market here. And they also went through a wind down. So I was there for about a year and a half. So my, my tenure in Prop tech lasted about four years. And then I was like, Okay, I need to do something different. And maybe I just need to go back into real estate. And so I was kind of playing with that and trying to relaunch my, my indie career, at the worst time, probably possible. You know, while we were kind of going through these high interest rates, and everything of 2022 and 2023. And then I was actually approached by or I followed a friend of mine, Aaron Lacey, who’s also an MTD for my home. And he had, you know, kind of sent out an SOS like, I’m looking for somebody who’s really into marketing and can help me kind of grow what I’m doing here. And so I, you know, reached out to him was like, Wow, this sounds really fun. And I don’t know if I have like the chops for it, but I’m willing to give it a try. And, you know, it just made sense, because it was like, even throughout my entire like real estate career. That was the thing that I focused on the most was the marketing technology piece. I was in charge of doing the websites I was in charge of, you know, doing all of the lead gen of setting up our online presence of doing all of these things. So I have a knack for it and a passion for helping others. And you know, I’m also this kind of side by side side hustle, but I’m also a crossfit coach. And so I Yeah, so I love helping people like just lifting them up and and helping them navigate, you know, complex, complex things, whether that’s you know how to do a snatch or clean and jerk, or navigating how to figure out how to put together a Facebook post. So I,
D.J. Paris 10:30 I have one CrossFit question for you. I don’t know that this is a CrossFit move necessarily. But I in fact, it’s funny, I was telling Tara, I gonna have to leave at two o’clock. And the reason I have to leave is I have a personal training session, not not CrossFit, but I do like a weightlifter workout. But when I was going to ask you, because I’ve only seen CrossFit people do this. And for everyone else who’s listening, like shut up, get to the real estate stuff. But I just want to ask one quick question is, can you do a muscle up? Is that is that a? Do you know what a muscle up is? Those are insane. You can do one?
Tara Meier 11:01 Oh, yeah, I can do them on the rings. And I can do it on the bar. So
D.J. Paris 11:04 so so I want everybody to know what Tara just said, mean, she is the strongest person to have ever been on this podcast, because she will tell you, it is one of the hardest things you can possibly do as an exercise. And literally I’ve had on NFL football players on the show that cannot do that. So that is incredible. So you are a very fit person. That is incredible.
Tara Meier 11:26 Athlete, yes.
D.J. Paris 11:28 Yes. Oh my gosh, that is amazing. You guys, if you don’t know what that is, Google muscle up, it doesn’t look as hard. Just give it a try. And if you could even anyway, alright, let’s get to the fun stuff. But the reason I’m saying this is my trainer just got her did her first muscle up ever it took her a year to get there. So and she’s like the strongest person I know. So that’s really, really impressive. So discipline is not a problem for you is guessing
Tara Meier 11:53 no, it is not a problem. I love trying to figure things out, whether it be you know, a muscle up or walking on my hands, or you know how to get somebody to look at my, my website. So
D.J. Paris 12:06 let’s start with online presence. So realtors, I agree, most of them have little to no online presence with the exception of, Hey, I just sold this home, or I just listed this property and I’m gonna throw, you know, pretty boring post on Facebook or Instagram. That’s usually about it. Let’s talk about what agents can do in 2024 to really provide value to their followers on social media, because and I want to get your opinion on this, I believe the best way to really garner interest is to, you know, provide some sort of content that isn’t all just about look at how great I am. But more about here’s some maybe questions or some answers to questions that you Mr. or Mrs. Follower might have. Or here’s some content that you just would find interesting. So I’d love to get your overall philosophy on online, you know, branding, especially with with social media. Oh,
Tara Meier 13:04 gosh, yeah. So, so much to talk about there. So first and foremost, my, you know, online presence is, is probably the most important thing that a real estate agent can do. I mean, you know, 90% of people are going online and Googling you whether you are a referral or whether they see a postcard come in the mail, they’re going to be Googling you. They’re going to be checking out who you are, what you stand for what your online marketing looks like, before they decide to pick up the phone and call you. And so by the
D.J. Paris 13:36 way, also, also your friends are going to do the same thing. So don’t assume that just because you work a referral based business, meaning your clients refer or it’s your sphere of influence, those people are also going to search you.
Tara Meier 13:49 Yeah, yeah. And that’s, that’s, you know, a common misconception right now is that referrals will just pick up the phone and call and that was maybe true five years ago. Now on average, it’s taking them two to three weeks of research before they actually decide to pick up the phone and call. So online presence number one is showing up consistently so that it’s not confusing, you know, all of these online platforms like zillow.com, Redfin, realtor.com homes.com, they’re all going to create profiles for you, whether you like it or not, because they are fed from the IDX feeds. And so it’s important that you go in and you take control of what people see from you. And so that means updating, adding a profile, photo photo, if there is an opportunity to showcase a banner, like in realtor.com, you should do that. Make sure your bio is up to date and accurate and not outdated, and also ensuring that all of your links work to your various platforms. Google business is one that’s, you know, I think way under leveraged right now for real estate agents. And it’s so important because you could drive all of your reviews there and it’s the first thing people see when they go Will your name and there’s a lot of ways to optimize it for hyper local type content. And we talked about content, you know, whether you’re posting it on social media. So if you’re into doing Facebook, YouTube, tik, Tok, Instagram, all of those, I think it’s great. I personally don’t think that you need to be an influencer on any of those platforms in order to have a successful business. But what I do think you need to do is you need to show if you decide to show up on one of those, you need to be present, and you need to engage on a consistent basis. So you know, we look at different platforms like they are going to give you kind of either a positive result, a neutral result, or a negative one. And profiles that you have kind of out there, like maybe you have a Twitter or now known as X platform that you’ve had for five years, and you don’t do anything on it. It almost kind of gives that like negative Wow, does she open get
D.J. Paris 15:57 rid of it? Get rid of it, if you’re not using it? Because nobody likes to see last post? 2018 you’re like, well, it just, it just appears that you’ve abandoned something, right?
Tara Meier 16:08 Totally, totally. And, you know, you know, there’s there are certain, there are certain things that are good about having some of those platforms, but like I said, if you’re not on there consistently using it, posting consistently, then get off of it. And then with regards to content, I’m with you. Like I think that, you know, gone are the days when just posting a house for sale is going to be exciting. I mean, I’m to the point, I don’t know about you, but if I see it, I just scroll right by, and now people, people want to, they want to be entertained, they want to be informed, they want to be inspired. And so you really kind of have to identify your audience. Number one, that’s probably when you venture into this content producing realm is you need to identify who your audience is going to be. And that includes like uncovering like, what are there? What are their consistent struggles? What are their problems? What are what do they want to know? What are they asking online, and there’s a ton of different resources for you out there to kind of figure that out. Like chat, GBT is a great resource. You can you can use it to help you identify your audience in your niche. Or if you have a niche, like what are some of those common questions that you can maybe answer in some of your posts? And so So identify your audience that’s probably like, the biggest thing Yeah, yeah. So
D.J. Paris 17:38 I just jumping in just because you said a lot of really great stuff there. So here’s what guys if you’re like, Well, I, I sort of don’t know my audience. What my target audience is, well think about if you’ve worked with clients in the past, who did you enjoy working with the most? Was it a certain demographic, maybe an age range, maybe a certain type of buyer or seller first time versus maybe an investor or whatever you enjoyed, you know, and you can literally then type that into chat G but for if you wanted to work with first time homebuyers, for example. And I would want to know what’s the average age of a first time homebuyer Okay, well, that you can ask chat JpT that, and then I would say, hey, chat, GBT. What are give me 10 common concerns that a first time homebuyer has or hear 20 questions that a first time homebuyer may have, or what might a first time homebuyer be searching for on Google or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. You can literally just ask these questions to chat GBT. And it won’t always be perfect answers, but you will get a lot of good data that way.
Tara Meier 18:39 A ton of good data. And I would say don’t be afraid to reiterate your question, the original question that you asked, because so many people I hear, you know, like, yeah, I answered a couple of questions. And it kind of came back with gibberish. Like you have to there’s a science and an art to the prompt. You have to tell it who you are. So I’m a real estate agent in this specific area. I want to know what, you know, what homebuyers first time homebuyers are struggling with in the Phoenix area. So and then give me 10 or 10 ideas for content to use on social media. So you have to be very specific. Otherwise, it will, you know, go off and who knows what kind of direction? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 19:21 but it is really cool too. Because if you think like, Okay, if one of the questions comes back with chat up saying, hey, neighborhood selection, or suburbs selection is one of the biggest challenges for new first time homebuyers like, Oh, that makes sense. Well, guess what, guys, you can now create content going. Here’s how people choose neighborhoods or here’s or here’s let’s do a tour of a neighborhood or, you know, the content is really endless. What you really want to find is how what really all you’re doing is answering the questions first time homebuyers or whatever your demographic is past.
Tara Meier 19:55 Mm hm. And I love that when it gives you the 10 ideas and then you say okay, I want to live Write on number one. And then it’ll give you like 10 More ideas or you can break it up into like a script for YouTube. You know, you can just continue to get more and more granular as you go down the chat until you get like, you know, get to the gold I guess. For
D.J. Paris 20:16 anyone who’s looking for the free version of chat, GBT? Yes, you can you can Google it and find it. I personally, if you’re not going to pay for it, you don’t probably have to at this point. Down the road. Yeah, there’s going to be some additional functionality you want to have access to, but I personally, I never search on Bing, but Bing, Microsoft owns chat, GBT. So inside of the Bing app, they have the chat. GBT is in there. And it’s pretty well updated, I think to 2022. So it’s pretty current with information. And you can literally just speak to it. So if you don’t have the Bing app, download it just to use it for chat. GBT. That’s sort of my pro tip. Sorry, territory.
Tara Meier 20:53 Awesome. No, I love it. I love it. I think that I was at the end of my gonna answer all of your questions.
D.J. Paris 20:58 I think so. Yeah. So so the idea is, you know, now now we’re really talking about AI. I was telling this to Tara. Just before we started, and I’ll make this very quick, because this is really about Tara. But I found a really cool application for AI. This this weekend, I was set. I wonder what’s a AI knows about my condo. And I just put in the building. It was built a few years ago, and it knew everything I just wrote, tell me everything you know about and I gave the address. And I go, Oh, my God, agents could do this before every single listing they have they just on their way, you know, use the Bing app, talk to it, say tell me everything you know, and let’s say it comes back with nothing. Let’s say it’s like, I don’t know anything about this home. Okay, fine. Then say give me five fun facts about the neighborhood or the city or the suburb or that whatever. You can use it to get information that you know, or give me things first time homebuyers in this neighborhood might be curious about or, you know, where’s the nearest grocery store, things like that you can get really, sort of, you could just ask it things that you can then use in your conversations.
Tara Meier 21:58 I love that one of my favorite features of chat, GBT, I actually have the paid version, just because I do a lot of training on it. But with a $20 a month version, you get an option to upload a photograph. And you can upload a photograph of the listing that you’re doing, and it will give you like, you don’t just ask it for a listing description for this property that I’m uploading a photograph of, and it will give you give such a great description of not only the architecture, but it will also go into what is surrounding it, because there is I believe the metadata that’s attached to the photos. Sure, yeah, yeah. So
D.J. Paris 22:34 that’s really smart. So it’ll know that it’ll know the coordinates of that most likely, if you have your, your, your, your metadata in there, and then it will just look for for other information, kind of, oh, that’s brilliant. I love it. Yeah,
Tara Meier 22:46 and I’m sure it takes into consideration to other listings that are around the area. So it kind of like you know, triangulates, all those different things and just really gives you some really juicy stuff.
D.J. Paris 22:57 So for $20 a month, if I was a brand new agent, and I really didn’t know much about architecture, or I hadn’t learned that yet. I would before every listing, just upload one picture and say, Tell me everything you know about this particular photo with everything that you can, you know, surmise, and this way guys would say, Oh, this is a Tudor home and, or whatever it may be. So Oh, that’s such a great suggestion. I love that.
Tara Meier 23:21 Yeah, yeah, any you know, and it’s not just limited to like, kind of listing and everything, like AI can really help you craft like a really compelling bio, it can help you build your brand. You know, it can help you draft copy for your websites for you know, all of your social media posts and everything like that. So I use it all the time. And you know, I will say that, yes, you definitely have to, like look it over. But as far as like getting, like the creative juices kind of flowing and making, you know, getting things started on the path to creativity, like it is a block remover, like so, use it, it will, it will change your world.
D.J. Paris 24:02 Yeah, it really, it really will. I think ultimately, over time, there’ll be applications developed into it that are very assistant focused, where you’re going to be a it’s going to know you it’s going to know your schedule. It’s going to know you know, your you know, your challenges, and it’s ultimately going to start you know, helping you but now for now you can just manually ask it everything. And as Tara was saying, you know, you can start talking to it and telling it who you are, hey, I’m a realtor. I’m this age. I have been in the business this long. The more specific information you give it, the better answer, it will it will give you and I’m looking for first time homebuyers in this area. What you could even ask it, what suggestions do you have for me to find first time homebuyers in this area and it will give you it will give you all sorts of suggestions. Let’s talk about so what I think what most agents know about AI today is listing descriptions we know we can throw or listing description that we write in, or we don’t even maybe AI will write it for us. But if we have one, we can have it write a more persuasive one, or you know, and you can even tell it to avoid fair housing violations. So you can always say, Please rewrite this in a more persuasive way or more emotional way or, or whatever. And please make sure to avoid, you know, fair housing violations. And it’s, again, you want to double check everything, but you can add that in at the end. Mm
Tara Meier 25:27 hmm. Yeah, for sure. The other I mean, it, you know, it’s not limited to just listing descriptions or branding, even if you are utilizing like a CRM, and you want to put together some kind of open house campaign, or, you know, texting strategy, you can use it to, you know, navigate that as well and come up with, you know, email templates, texting templates, anything like that, that you want to add into your CRM in order to you know, nurture your clients. So,
D.J. Paris 25:56 yeah. And also we you can use it let’s I know, very popular thing for agents is doing some doing webinars or seminars where you’re, for example, Hey, I’m gonna help you buy your first home or, you know, from renting to buying what why you would consider that are investing in real estate or whatever the particular topic might be? You can have chat, GBT, right, you not only, you know, descriptions, for every every slide, they can actually create the slides for you as well. So it’s really very, very cool. If you’re like, I’m not good at graphic design. I don’t use Canva or Photoshop. Yes, I mean, you still may have to tweak some things, but it can put a pretty decent first draft together for you. Yeah,
Tara Meier 26:38 for sure. For sure. One of the, you know, things that have come up recently, like with the team at my home is, is putting together kind of seller, seller education classes, and like, you know, initially those types of things, they seem like a really big elephant to have to swallow at the, you know, right off the bat. And so, it, if you start it and do it systematically, you can really, you know, any take it just one step at a time, you can develop an entire like course, to, to teach on, do the presentation, and then also put together a marketing strategy to help people bring people into your classes. So, you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s very holistic, I mean, you can just do the whole, the whole thing, and it makes it very doable for just your average, you know, average individual who needs to generate some business and make some contacts.
D.J. Paris 27:32 Yeah, if you if somebody’s you know, if ever if our listeners are thinking, Okay, I want to create great video content on social media this year, but I don’t really want to write the scripts, and I don’t, you know, it’s hard for me to come up with topics. This is what you can use chat GPT to do as well. Say, Hey, create a create a 62nd, you know, script for me, specifically talking about, you know, X, Y or Z. And, and then give me five different versions of that, or five different, you know, five different examples altogether. And literally, that’s your script, or at least a good first draft for a scripted, you just saved yourself hours. And now you just have to turn your phone around and hit the record button. Yes,
Tara Meier 28:15 yes. And you know, you have so many resources out there as real estate agents with regards to market data. And, you know, everybody wants to do a market update, but nobody want knows what to say. Or sometimes in some cases, you may not even know how to interpret some of the data that’s coming through. And so use things like chat GBT, or even cloud AI is a really good one for consuming large amounts of data. So you can get some like 10 key takeaways on like a really hefty document. And then you can ask it to generate you a scripture just like he just like Did he was saying and it will even go into as much detail as giving you like the cutscenes and what should be incorporated like on on screen as far as text is concerned. So it does it just it saves you so much time and leaves you way more time to actually connect with people and your families? Like I mean, this is going to be like the biggest time saver I think and we’re really going to see some some leveling up. I feel like in the real estate industry, thanks to AI. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 29:12 do you want to be at the front part of the curve here because once everybody understands how to utilize it, it becomes a little bit less significant for the individual agent, because everyone’s going to be utilizing these tools in in different ways. But you really want to be at the front end of this because this is the time to really explore AI. I would love to also Tara ask you okay, we should mention by the way, Tara does consulting and coaching for real estate agents. She talks a lot about audit, marketing, automation, branding, AI systems. This is her specialty. She is a marketing guru. So if you’re interested we have caught Tara’s contact information in the listing description. Please, please please reach out to her and she can let you know what her different training and coaching are. shins are terrible. Let’s talk a little bit about batching content, because we know like, in an ideal world, I’d film a video every two days, and maybe a 62nd video on on, you know, Instagram or Facebook. But we know that that’s pretty difficult to do when things are flying at an agent, you know, at any given time, and maybe every two days isn’t realistic. So could you batch the content? And do you recommend sort of batching versus individual, you know, doing it every two days or so.
Tara Meier 30:30 I personally love batching. I have tried both ways. Both, you know, doing it on the fly, and trying to, you know, juggle a million things at once, you know, even just like when in my regular job, I mean, I have other clients and everything that I have to work with too, just like real estate agents. And I have to set aside like two to three hours a week for planning, and, and recording. So I may have a day where I do just kind of like the plan, I find my audio I do, you know, kind of all of the background, you know, write out my caption and do my hashtags. And then I have another day where it may just be super simple. And then the recording is just like one and done. And I’m, I’m scheduled and I’m and I’m done for the week, I love that it makes my week so much less stressful. And so if you can do that, I, I highly suggest it you could use anything from you know, Google Sheets to organize kind of your plan for the week, to tools like Trello or Asana, both of those are very easy to use and free. Actually, all of those are easy to use and free. I personally like Asana, I have tried everything else. And that’s the one that kind of works best for me and for what I need. And, you know, it really just takes a lot of the pressure off of the posting piece too. Because I mean, how many times have you gotten to a point where like, Oh, I’m gonna do this real and, you know, and, okay, maybe I don’t want to post it after all, or a post it and then you delete it because you’re like, Oh, it was really embarrassing. Or I didn’t think it was going to do well. If you schedule it, and then you just don’t think about it, and you just let it go. You know what I mean? And you kind of you just have to be okay with some are gonna flop and some are not. And, and, and, and batching really helps I think not only with time saving, but also with like your mindset as it pertains to getting content out.
D.J. Paris 32:29 Yeah, and also to, let’s remember everyone that just because you post something on social a video, for example, a very small percentage of your audience is actually going to see it. So it’s not like every single person you know, is going to watch this video and then have a judgement about it, whether it was good or bad. You know, it very, very small percentage. So don’t worry too much about, you know, that part of it of like, oh, my gosh, this isn’t perfect. I don’t think anyone’s expecting perfection out of your content. I think what they’re expecting is good quality information. curious to get your thoughts on them.
Tara Meier 33:03 Yeah, no, I 100% agree. And you know, it’s important to kind of come up with some guidelines for yourself with regards to what it is you’re going to be posting just to kind of keep your guard rails your bumpers on, so to speak, so that you don’t get too far off. And, you know, law lands. And, and it also makes it easier to plan that way, you know, and people want information, they want it, like I was saying earlier, they want to be entertained, they want to be inspired. And so coming up with some common themes for yourself that makes sense and resonate with who you are and who you want to be as a brand is going to be an important first step even like back when we’re talking about you know, creating and identifying who your audience is. Because you can’t please everyone. And so, it’s important that you’re talking, you know, you have to narrow down who it is you’re talking to, and not care about who you know, like like you’re saying your your friends and your sphere. Yes, they might see you but only only a few of them will and you know the the reason that you’re doing social media and you know, reels or Tik Tok or anything like that is to reach new followers. And so you want to be speaking to them. And if you don’t raise your hand and be yourself and let people know what it is you do, then they’re not going to find you.
D.J. Paris 34:20 So I have a question about personal revealing personal details about your own life versus just professional details. Right? So we could we can talk we can have a brand that is exclusively, I provide great information about buying and selling homes, real estate stuff. And I also know a lot of agents want to show parts of their personal life as well that people could find maybe interesting because it shows what that agent is passionate about. For example, you’re you’re a workout person, a CrossFit person. So I’ve seen agents who are CrossFit people post you know, little Quick videos of their workouts, do you have an opinion? And again, everybody’s temperature around sharing private, or personal, you know, sort of information is as different. So obviously, there’s no correct answer. But what’s your overall thought on professional content versus personal content.
Tara Meier 35:19 So I think a good mix is always a good idea. People, they want to know the person behind the profile. And I think how much you share is really your choice and dependent on how much how comfortable you are doing that, and whether that’s something that you feel is important. So, I mean, I’m, I try to be a mix, you know, I kind of think of like stories is kind of my place to engage with the people and share kind of, you know, silly memes about my husband or something like that. And then, you know, I tend to kind of keep my reels a mix of personal, inspirational and business. And I think, you know, it’s important to share who you are outside of business, because I don’t know, I personally, I built a lot of my business around CrossFit, when I was actively selling, and had I not done CrossFit and not like, let those people know what it was I did, then I probably wouldn’t have been as successful as I was. So people like to connect with, like people. So show who you are and what you do outside of just real estate. Did
D.J. Paris 36:29 you end up working with CrossFit people who would be attracted to a she’s a CrossFit person, I saw our videos. So they would start to think, Hey, she’s like me, I want to work with people who are into similar things to me. Like I imagine he probably did work with CrossFit people.
Tara Meier 36:43 I did. Yeah. A lot.
D.J. Paris 36:46 Yeah, it’s funny, I used to, when I used to see Realtors showing their workouts, I always always was like, I don’t really get it, like, Do people really care. And then I sort of like watching people work out now, like, I don’t know why, even if it’s just for a few seconds, there’s something kind of inspiring about it for me to remind me to continue on my physical health journey. But also, it’s like, oh, that person’s, you know, really disciplined. And also, and I’m not saying everyone has to work out in fun, like workout videos, but whatever it is, you’re passionate about any part of your life, you can feature it. And, again, that might just speak to somebody who also has those same passions, and is like, God, I wish I had a realtor that was into some of the same stuff that I’m into. Or I’d be more comfortable with a realtor who was into some of these, you know, I’m a, if you were like a big Harry Potter fan, I’m not. But if you were, I would be talking about I mean, that’s an old thing, but whatever, whatever a newer version of Harry Potter, that’s your thing? I would I would talk about it all the time on social media, if that was your thing, because you’re gonna attract those people who have that same passion.
Tara Meier 37:48 100%,
D.J. Paris 37:49 do you have an eye? Do you have a suggestion for a mix of personal and professional? So in other words, hey, here’s some information about buying and selling homes, or I just bought, you know, I just had a client do this or that. And here’s what I got going on in my personal life, do you have like a suggestion for a mix of maybe what percentage should be each? Yeah, I
Tara Meier 38:08 personally think that it’s like, you know, two thirds, you and 1/3 business, especially for real estate agents, you know, and it’s, it’s more like, who you are with a sprinkle of real estate, kind of in there. And if you can relate what you do on a daily basis, like maybe you’re at the park working, and you’re like, hey, getting work done, while I’m, you know, watching my kids throw, throw a baseball or something like that. So, you know, there’s subtle ways for you to do it. on a consistent basis, it’s just kind of figuring it out and making, you know, you have to just do it is really the strategy, you have to just figure it out what’s gonna work for you. And, you know, make sure that you’re paying attention to the analytics and the the data that’s within the system. So you can kind of see what’s getting, you know, the most engagement and maybe what’s not so you can shape your content. That way
D.J. Paris 39:01 we can we talk a little bit about digital advertising and beyond like, we’re talking about creating content. Do you have specific thoughts on agents who are thinking about doing Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads? Or Instagram ads? Any specific? Have you seen agents have success with that? Or is that is that a tough mountain to climb? Just curious, your thoughts?
Tara Meier 39:24 Um, yeah, so you know, Facebook ads, bulk of the population is on Facebook. I mean, it’s got the biggest audience out there. And so if you are just going in and boosting posts, posts, like randomly, like, you don’t have any strategy behind who it is you’re trying to target. I think you’re pretty much like throwing spaghetti at the wall, just kind of seeing what, what, what sticks. There’s, there are ways to be much more strategic about your ads that you’re doing on Facebook, Instagram. And you know, and I’ll talk about LinkedIn in a second. But with regards to Facebook and Instagram, there’s a lot of ways to kind of layer your farming So if you are farming specific areas, you can layer some digital ads on top of that. So utilizing phone numbers and email addresses that you may have from your farms, you can create custom audiences and target them in more than one way. So you may be sending them a postcard in the mail. So they’re getting that. And then they’re also starting to see you online. So they’re like, oh, my gosh, this person is everywhere. I think that that’s probably the most strategic way to do any kind of Facebook or Instagram ads at this point, especially for real estate. It’s just being, you know, strategic, you could even you know, download your, your contacts from the cloud, and Google and you know, so that way you have like your sphere, and some people that maybe maybe maybe you’ve worked with in the past that you may not have contact with anymore. So there’s a lot of ways to do them.
D.J. Paris 40:47 That’s a really good point, too. So basically, what Tara was saying is, you can take your CRM and export all of your contacts and upload those into Facebook as a custom audience. And what Facebook is going to do is try to match those email addresses and the names with accounts that they have. And it isn’t going to be a perfect match, always. And it might not find everybody, but it’s going to find a lot of people. And if you upload all your clients, for example, you probably wouldn’t want them to receive an ad that says, hey, buy your buy your first home, right? Assuming that these are people that have already bought a home, right, they might want to get up, think about are you looking to upgrade to your next property, you can make a specific ad for that or looking to make a change, that kind of thing. So you can get really granular about this. And there doesn’t have to be a million different buckets. But there may be a few buckets of you know, this isn’t yet a client. This is a client that I’ve already worked with. And you can have different ads going in this way. And guys, I used to Facebook used to come on my show every single month corporate and talk about and they would say do not Boost Post, do not Boost Post, if you’re a realtor, they would literally just tell us to do, it goes back a few years, but the head of the real estate department and Instagram or Facebook would better would say do not boost posts, guys, you want to be way more strategic. And so Tara can actually help you with all of this stuff, too, and help you figure out what your audiences are. It is a little complicated, but she can help you get get set up that way.
Tara Meier 42:12 Yeah, 100%. And with regards to LinkedIn, So LinkedIn is actually has been named like one of the like, you know, top things to do for 2024. As far as ads are concerned, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities there, particularly with people who are doing like commercial, and agricultural things that are more business to business. But also on the luxury market. Like there’s a lot of contacts you can make, you can do some some targeting, with regards to job titles, things like that, to kind of make your targeting a little bit more specific and segmented. And, you know, I personally have not run any ads on LinkedIn. This is just kind of done my research. So I’m excited to dive into it on my own and see what it could do, some of my colleagues have been working on it. And they’ve been just, you know, singing its praises. So if you have not taken an opportunity to check out LinkedIn for your marketing efforts in 2024, that’s definitely something to start keeping an eye on.
D.J. Paris 43:16 And it’s also the social media platform that I think realtors use the very least, it seems to be not used at all by realtors, and it is used by literally every other industry. So this is a place where I would spend a lot of time for example, if you had a client that worked at at a corporation in your local area, I would go into LinkedIn and see if I could find like the head of HR for that particular organization, if it’s big enough to have that, or the owner and say, Hey, I just worked with one of your, one of your employees, I help them, you know, buy, sell or whatever. And I would love the opportunity to come and bring lunch for the audience for the office. And you know, reach out and do a free webinar about you know, working with a realtor or whatever this is what you can use LinkedIn to do is you can actually find this information and use it in a hyperlocal way. So it’s not just about making as many connections as you can on LinkedIn, which is great as well, or posting great content to LinkedIn. But you can actually use it for research and development to find opportunities for you to reach out to, you know, because every every corporate person I know they use LinkedIn, they love LinkedIn, they use it. Realtors don’t usually use it. So don’t be don’t be fooled into thinking oh, no one uses LinkedIn. They do. It’s just realtors.
Tara Meier 44:29 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’ve I’ve used it more in the last like four years than I ever thought I would. But it’s amazing, like the number of connections that you can make on that platform. You know, it’s great to just stay up to date on a lot of different market trends because that’s where it’s a great place for you to also share your insights as far as like what you know about the market. So just be strategic about what you’re sharing there. And, and I and you join groups. There’s there’s all kinds of things on there for you to put participate and engage. So,
D.J. Paris 45:01 yeah, I’m a big fan. We’re actually streaming live to LinkedIn right now as well. So we streamed, yeah, we streamed out to all the major platforms. And and that’s guys, you know, that’s kind of what you want to again, the whole point is, should I be on Facebook? Should I be on Instagram? Should I be on LinkedIn? Tick tock? Where is your audience hanging out, that’s where you want to be, where and also what you enjoy, like, if you hate LinkedIn, don’t, don’t do with it. If you hate tick tock, don’t be on tick tock, because it’s not going to work for you as well. You want to be on something that you feel comfortable with, but also that your audience your your preferred audience is hanging out at how do you know where your preferred audience hangs out? Ask them send out a survey to all of your clients and say, Hey, I’m working on my marketing strategy for next year. Just curious, where do you spend the most time? What you know what, what social media channels, if any, do you spend time on that will tell you we found out in an organization that I saw that I helped that unrelated real estate, that LinkedIn was the number one place, I would have never guessed that I would have guessed Facebook. But for this organization with 1000s of members, LinkedIn was the clear winner. And we wouldn’t have known that had we not asked. So we put a lot of our resources into LinkedIn at that point. So great, a suggestion there is just reach out to your audience and say, Hey, can you help me I’d be curious on where you’re spending a lot of time. And that’ll give you some guidance. So Tara Meyer is our guest. And I want to make sure that we tell everybody that she is a coach she can she is a digital strategist. She is also a marketing strategist, and most recently AI and she’s a systems person. So for example, if you wanted to learn how to deal with transaction management, and maybe not have to do all of that, all that work, she can help you figure that stuff out as well. She’s a systems person, and she’s very, very effective. So if anyone out there is like, gosh, I would like to work with someone like Tara, maybe she could help you know, take my marketing strategies or my systems to the next level. Or just learn more about AI and automation. Tara is your person so you can find her Tara meyer.com You can also follow her on Instagram underscore Tara Meyer underscore will have links to that, as well as her LinkedIn profile and all of her social channels as well as YouTube. We will post all of that in our link in our description. So please, please, please follow her. Tara, I want to thank you so much for coming on our show. This was really great. We I counted 10 different suggestions that you gave throughout the interview. So guys, if you miss some of them, please go back and re listen. And the best way you can help us is just tell a friend about the show. Tell another realtor that struggling with I mean everyone’s struggling right now guys, it’s just a tough time to be in real estate. So everybody needs as much help as possible. Do do a good deed tell a fellow agent about the show that helps us grow. Also support our sponsors and support Tara follow her on Instagram, LinkedIn, reach out to her Tell her how much you appreciated her her appearance today and also maybe reach out to her about coaching. She would love to chat with you. So, guys, on behalf of the audience. Tara, thank you so much for being on our show. I know how busy you are. And thank you for spending time with us and on behalf of Tara and myself. We want to thank the audience for sticking around to the very end. And thanks again for supporting our show and telling a friend. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you so much, Tara.
Tara Meier 48:24 Thank you for having me. It’s been a blast.
Why Real Estate Agents Need Mailers In 2024 • Janine Sasso
Dec 21, 2023
Janine Sasso the Hyper Local Agent with Coldwell-Banker in Chicago talks about how she got into real estate and grew her business. Janine discusses the role open houses played in the beginning of her career. Janine also discusses how she addressed her youth to make people comfortable to work with her. Next, Janine describes how she built and perfected her mailing list and how she grew her farm.
D.J. Paris 0:00 I’m gonna blow your mind right now. Did you know that in 2023 the ROI on mailers, physical mailers is 10x? Guys, we’re gonna make the case today why mailers are important and you need to be doing these in 2024. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with author and top producer Janine Sasso. But before we get to Janine, just a couple of quick reminders as always support our sponsors. We love our sponsors. And they are helping us continue to produce episodes for our show. So please check out their products and services, I promise that they will only select sponsors that will actually help you grow your business and continue to tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing like great agents like Janine says, so we’re about to hear from and send them a link especially this episode. Guys. Just wait until you hear what Janine is about to say it’s pretty wild. So anyway, it even blew my mind and I was like, really? We’ll just wait. It’s awesome. All right, let’s get right to it. My conversation with Janine Sasso.
Today on the show we have author and top producer Janine Sasso from Coldwell Banker in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Janine now, Janine Sasso is on a mission to impact more agents with young children to earn their dream income. Now forget about time blocking and say goodbye to expensive mailing companies or mailer companies Janine is going to share her proven lead generation tactics that have been ranked the number one lead generation technique for decades. But with a modern twist for today’s busy agent, Janine was tired of choosing between a career of being a mom and discovered how geographic farming has allowed her to scale her success quickly, mainly with mailer marketing, and community events. And before you go, I don’t want to do mailers. I am telling you, you want to do mailers. Stay with us. We will convince you in this. This conversation why that’s important. To learn more about Janine I want you to go visit her website. There’ll be a link to this in the show notes. The hyperlocal agent.com is the hub of everything Janine, you can also find her on all the different social channels except Twitter. She is She is not a Twitter person. I don’t even know who is Twitter person anymore in real estate but she is on every other social channel including Tik Tok. We will have links to her social channels in the show notes, but just do a search for Janine Sasso and find her and also she has an amazing book that I want you to check out called success with real estate mailers. And that is on Amazon. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Janine, welcome to the show.
Janine Sasso 4:20 Well, thanks for having me and introducing me to your audience like this is going to be a fun one. Because we’re going to convince people right convince people have done direct mail is not that. I
D.J. Paris 4:32 hope so. So I am holding up right now a a handwritten card, which if you’re listening, you won’t hear this from one of my last guests. And I we were talking about we were talking about mailers, and in this case, handwritten cards. And I was saying to him, he because he’s a big fan of writing handwritten cards that I know we’re gonna be talking about something slightly different, but just sending things through the mail. And I said, how often how many cards do you get a year from anybody? You know, outside of your birthday outside of, you know, the holiday, I mean, just like random, hey, I’m thinking about you cards. He goes, I get about one a month. And I was like, you get one a month, I get like one a year. So I’m holding one up from the guy who I actually said that to and he, after the thing, maybe he was just trying to be funny. He wrote me one. And so I got my one for the year. But this is how big the opportunity really is to send mail. I mean, I don’t even get junk mail anymore. Like it’s amazing. Like, my mailbox is usually empty. And it is certainly the mail I do get is not real is not from realtors, it might be like a catalog or something. But that is about all I receive. But Janine, let’s start. Before we get to mailing. I want to start at the beginning and sort of learn your story and how you grew your business and how you came to be. So how did you get involved in real estate?
Janine Sasso 5:47 Alright, so here is my fabulous story. I was born and raised in Germany. So I didn’t grow up here. I didn’t go to school here. And when I came over, I have an early childhood educator education degree. So that was where I thought I was gonna end up and I started looking at daycares. I had a three year old at the time that I finished my degree. So I started looking at daycares. I interviewed thinking, well, at least I can bring him with and I can be with him. And after the first interview, I was mortified at the working environment, I was mortified at the pay. Mind you, I had to figure out how do I go back and visit my family as a first generation immigrant in so many words. And you can really not afford a you know, flight ticket back home to Europe, if you are on that kind of salary. So it posed a big, like obstacle when like, Okay, I need to find something else. My husband’s mother’s and my mother in law has been in real estate. And she was the nudge that said, why don’t you give it a try. I started going to evening classes knock that out in like, eight weeks, I believe and got my real estate license. Wow.
D.J. Paris 7:09 And so being an immigrant in in the Chicagoland area should also mentioned I think I said this earlier, but Janine here is here in the Chicagoland area along with me. But it’s not the easiest, you know? Yes, we have millions of people who live here, however, you’re not from here. So your sphere of influence, I assume was almost nothing or very small, maybe limited. Was your husband from Chicago? I guess he’s from Chicago,
Janine Sasso 7:32 I guess. Well, so that was my, you know, a little caveat there because my mother in law is still a licensed and active agent, my husband’s referral business in so many words. I wasn’t even going to touch that. Because unless I wanted to have a really awkward Thanksgiving conversation was hey, you sold and Judy’s house, I was my deal. Right? I wasn’t gonna go there. So I’m like, Okay, so there went that. No family here didn’t grow up here. No school, my kids were too little. So I didn’t have any school, PTA sports, all of that good stuff. I had nothing and okay, this is gonna be interesting. So I started literally with zero. I did open houses. So that was my start. I’m like, Okay, let me figure out something. And open houses was where I got my feet wet in real estate, you know, leads, per se.
D.J. Paris 8:21 Yeah, that makes sense. It’s something that we hear from literally almost every agent we’ve ever had on the show. And we’ve done over 515 episodes. Everyone says I started doing open houses. And then, you know, people listening are like, Well, what happens when you don’t have a listing, you beg everyone in your office to allow you to do a listing? I’m guessing that’s what you did.
Janine Sasso 8:45 That’s what I did, in addition to rental leads, so our MLS does allow rentals. And because of that, I’m like every rental lead, I was like, me, me, right? I mean, my email folder, because it wasn’t for this transaction. It was always, hey, I have another rental lead for you. Right? So and
D.J. Paris 9:02 we should also mention, too, that Chicago is not known as a huge hub for Germans to emigrate to. We have like a large Greek population, we have a large Polish population. We have lots of cultures that are here. But German, there’s, I mean, maybe there’s a large German constituency here. I don’t think so. But, but but it’s not like you could just go oh, I’m just gonna go sell to all the German people. I know. I’m assuming that that wasn’t as easy to do either. No,
Janine Sasso 9:28 that wasn’t on the, on the table either. And we blend extremely well. So most often people need to listen to me for like, a little while before they catch on to an accent. So you know, it’s one of those things where we we blend in. I’m like, I can’t even tell I mean, and I get polish a lot people are like, Oh, are you polish? I’m like, no, yeah.
D.J. Paris 9:45 But well, the country is a very close, close proximity. So yeah, so the accents are similar, but you’re right. Yes, you do blend in, especially here with the large Polish community that we have. So the bottom line is you have to start from zero Go and tell us how did you so open houses were a key. Tell us more like, how did you really move forward?
Janine Sasso 10:07 So the first year, I tried everything that, you know, you see these Facebook posts of like, hey, I really have to get a deal in the next 30 to 60 days, what should I do? And you have 365 different answers. And you try to do as many as possible. And that’s what I did, right? I tried the open houses, I looked at cancelled listings I looked at for sale by owners, but just what happens when you look at a little bit here, a little bit there, right? You don’t really get that traction. And my first year, I am not your average success story. I’m like, my first year, I made $15,000, which is not terrible, but it’s true. It’s one five, so one, five, that was it. And for a career that I thought like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna be you know, I’m gonna be rookie of the year or something. It was really eye opening, that there was a lot of things involved to learn. And the main one was running a business. Again, I came from an employee mindset, right, you show up, you get paid for your hours, you go home. So it was really a crash course of you could work 24/7 If you really wanted to, it’s crazy.
D.J. Paris 11:21 Yeah, and trying to figure out what’s the what are some of the best sort of strategies to build a business and there are so many different strategies, like you said, and we were just talking about this with a friend the other day, she was saying, you know, my, she goes, I think my parents made a terrible mistake when I was a child. And they put me in every sport in every activity. And I said, Yeah, parents do that I kind of the same thing sort of happened to me. And, and I didn’t look at it as a negative. And she’s like, it’s very well intentioned, like, it’s a good, you know, it’s a lovely thing to do that for your children. But she goes, what it didn’t do is it didn’t get me to hyper focus. And one thing that I really, really enjoyed, and I could have really done something special in, you know, whatever, whatever she was was talking about. And it was just a good reminder that like, oh, yeah, when we, when we try, when we do try to do everything, we end up not really specializing in anything. Yeah,
Janine Sasso 12:19 so one of the things that again, my first year was very similar, I tried so many different things. And now one of the resources that we have on our website, that hyperlocal agent is 35 plus free lead gen strategies. And the reason that, you know, there are so many different ones, the basics that everybody talks about, but a they’re free, you can do them literally with $0, because that’s where I started. But you have to find something that connects write something where you’re like, I can get up each and every morning, and I can do something with that. And for me, that was geographic farming. That is where I decided I can be happy here.
D.J. Paris 12:58 And what’s great about geographic farming is it is focusing you into one well, obviously you can’t farm everywhere. So you have to just by default, choose a geographic area, or could be more of a demographic farm. I guess if you were like only going after doctors, you could buy a list of doctors and I guess you could mail to them. But geographic farming seems like it makes the most sense. Because of course, it allows you to then really hone your your skills on the inventory and the needs of that community. Right? You you’re going to learn over time where the best starter homes are for families moving maybe out of the city into the suburbs, where the best school districts are you this is just going to allow you to really build a brand around a particular geographic area is that is that fair to say?
Janine Sasso 13:44 Right. So once I started to get hyper focused on that being my you know, preferred way to get in front of buyers, as well as seller leads, everything just became easier, because it wasn’t like I was you know, I was like flailing around before trying all the things. And now it’s like, okay, you had to focus you’re like, did it serve my purpose of becoming a better known name, a better known person, people will refer and trust because the other part I had to overcome when I started I was I was in my early 20s. So I had to figure out, right? How do I make them feel like I have all, you know, the know how that somebody in their 50s or 60s Probably has, even though they might be licensed for two weeks, as you know, fourth career versus somebody that decided to make this the career in the first place. So again, it’s just things in my head, probably but people will have a certain perception. So
D.J. Paris 14:42 I don’t think that’s yeah, I don’t think that’s in your head at all. I think that is a 100% absolutely logical sort of objection, right? Somebody goes, Hey, we’re gonna buy an $800,000 home. Do we want to give it to the 22 year old Right? Like maybe not only because not that the 22 year old couldn’t be the Greatest agent on the planet they could be. But if we’re playing the odds, maybe that would be a hurdle to overcome. I’m just curious, before we move on, how did you address sort of your your youth your age, in a way that was allowed people to still feel comfortable, you know, giving you those transactions?
Janine Sasso 15:17 Knowledge? I mean, honestly, that’s what it came down to. When you started having a conversation with me at the open house. It was a very detailed conversation, right? It’s like asking the right questions. Well, tell me like, What were you you know, thinking for your ideal home? And it’s like, okay, like, what were you thinking in terms of downpayment? What was more important, those specific questions? And, and then you start also demonstrating all of a sudden, they were like, Oh, I didn’t even think about that. That was interesting.
D.J. Paris 15:56 Yeah, that makes sense. I’m curious to you were your I think your net was going out a little bit, but you came through just fine. Your video is was frozen, which is no big deal. I have a question, though, for any of our audience that hasn’t yet chosen to geographically farm. How? Or maybe up, here’s a bet maybe a different question. Let’s say we picked you up and dropped you into a city where you didn’t know anybody, which is basically what happened to you in the Chicagoland area. But let’s say we did it today. And we moved you to another area knowing everything, you know, now, different city, you know, nobody, and you don’t have to choose a new farm, what would you look for? In picking the geographic farm? How would you make that determination of where
Janine Sasso 16:38 so my first farm, the one that, you know, I still farm to the state i i lived in. So being close to home was, you know, one of the first things if I get dropped in the middle of a new place, I hope I’m gonna have a house over my roof, or, you know, a roof over my head. And I would probably start there, right, just because it’s close to home. And one of the reasons that I did decide to farm was, I didn’t want to drive 30 minutes to a listing appointment, I didn’t want to drive an hour for showing, right. I’m like, call me call me crazy. But I’m like, my time is not really well spend getting to and from appointments, one of the reasons being, I have to hire a babysitter to kind of make sure my kids don’t have to tag along, right. And I have this rule, I’m like, kids do not belong on listing appointments, they have come to open houses, they have come to buyer appointments, they have come to, you know, office events, they they’re pretty much there half the time, all the time, but not listing appointments, and not brand new clients. Like that’s my Sure,
D.J. Paris 17:38 of course, I want to make I want to make a quick point to because also choosing an area, that hope that you live in is also beneficial, because you get to say to everybody, by the way, I live down the street, or I live just you know, a few blocks over this is this is my area. This is where I live, this is what I know there’s something powerful in that versus Oh, where do you live? Oh, I live in the city 30 minutes away, or I live, you know, in another suburb? Which again, all of that is fine. Maybe not everyone lives in an area that they want to geographically farm. But if you do, Boy, that’s a powerful thing to say to somebody. It’s like, oh, by the way, this is where I choose to be here. And this is why I want to work with eight people in this area. Yeah,
Janine Sasso 18:18 so one of the biggest things on that one is my home value is directly tied to the listings that I get, right? If I give away the listings in so many words, it’s not going to do my own house any good. Now, if I want to fight for the best possible price that they can get, it’ll benefit my my own home as well. Right?
D.J. Paris 18:39 Oh, that is a very Hold on a second. Well, we’re gonna start we’re gonna pause that that is brilliant. You just said something really, really, really smart. And kind of it’s kind of a cute thing to to say it’s sort of almost as a little bit of a humor to it. But boy, that is I just don’t I want to slow that one down just a little bit. Because that is something nobody has ever said on the show. So Janine just basically said, she also gets to say, you know, if it comes up, she can say, Hey, by the way, by me getting you the very best price on your home, Mr. And Mrs. Seller, that’s actually going to help everyone in the community, including me, because I’m in your community. So I am incentivize, not just for my commission, but I at some point, I’m going to leave, and I want to sell my home and I want to make as much money as possible to obviously she’s not going to say quite like that. But you get the point. That’s a very, very good point.
Janine Sasso 19:28 It doesn’t, you know, I mean, you will not find the hardest working agent for that reason alone inside your hyperlocal area. Now, if you live there. Now, you might say, Okay, well, I don’t live there and I don’t you know, I can’t use that one. That’s true. However, if those are your stomping grounds, you then have to face the next seller that you sit down with and say, Well, what did you do over at Mary’s house because you gave it away? Right? You will not do that. You will say I fought the best I could for Mary’s house. So I can sit here today with you. And I feel really confident to tell you I did a super amazing job over there. And I’ll do this Same here because for me, it’s my reputation. And that part, right? It’s an easy one.
D.J. Paris 20:07 And how big is your farm? Meaning? Is it a certain number of households? Is it just a particular area? Like, how do you think about that?
Janine Sasso 20:14 Okay, I’ll take you back through my farming journey, because when I tell you my number right now, it is over 5600 homes. So that’s a lot. That’s where I started, I started out with 100 printed flyers, and 100 printed flyers, I decided to invite them to a neighborhood garage sale, out of that 100 flyers. After two years, I finally decided there has to be a better way. And I graduated into my first mailing route. So I use a service called Every Door Direct Mail through the United States Postal Service, when I started. And that’s where I graduated to my first route, I want to say in 2017, it was 400 houses, I felt so proud of me that I can like you just push a button and there’s like, postcards going out. Right? And I was literally heading to the playground and the mailman working his nine to five would deliver it. So I could still be at the park. And I could still do the mom things I do. Sure. And things were happening, like I had leads coming into, you know, my email inbox as I was pushing them on this way. So I’m like, I need to do more of that. So one route led to a second one, a second to a third and third or fourth, I believe I’m at Well, for more at this point. So
D.J. Paris 21:38 yeah, so when you first were doing the flyers, were you hand delivering them? Were you putting them on people’s doorsteps, that kind of thing? Yeah,
Janine Sasso 21:47 so I I’m not a door knocker. So I will, you know, try my best not to encounter people. I’m an introvert by nature. So just you know, striking up a conversation with strangers might be also partially a cultural thing. Everybody is into the small talk about the weather, especially in Chicago. And having you know, somebody in the elevator tell me hey, yeah, nice weather today, right? I’m not sure. What’s happening, right? Used to those little cultural quirks. And you know, now I talk about the weather just like anybody else in Chicago. But it’s one of those things where I just made flyers, I put them in door hanger backs. I took my kid, but I get in the stroller, and I just hung it on the neighborhood, right? took a walk, like that’s what I did. So when
D.J. Paris 22:35 you were doing 100, let’s just talk about how long it takes to actually start to make an impact and get results because we know that one mailer is basically no mailer, right? If you just do one, you might as well don’t do anything, because the odds of you getting a success, there are obviously very low, but over time, and with consistency, those numbers increase. So when you were doing 100, flyers, you know, how long did it take before you started getting any reach outs?
Janine Sasso 23:02 So that first flyer I did was actually an event invitation, I said, I would love to do a neighborhood garage sale. So I would like to coordinate a date I would be helping with advertisement. And if this date works for you, go ahead and send me an email that you’re in. And then I’ll just send you the details. And that flyer 100 flyers out I did get 10 responses back.
D.J. Paris 23:27 Wow, that’s sweet. You were offering I want to make sure I understand. So you’re offering to promote someone’s garage sale, but you don’t know that they even want to do a garage sale. You’re just saying, Hey, if you’re thinking about a garage sale, I’m going to help you is that basically it?
Janine Sasso 23:43 That’s basically it. I don’t know, you remember, I’m in the suburbs, right? So people love to have things to do Sure. On door. And that event for me. So garage sales, for me was always like, fun to look through other people’s right junk. And like, I love it. It’s like one of those things when again, you find something that you love. It makes sense. I’m like, okay, rather than now going from like, you know, different different houses all over the area. Why can I have a garage sale in my own neighborhood where I can literally just go from house to house to house to house and have it my way right? So that’s what we did.
D.J. Paris 24:20 So how would you help them with their with their with their garage sale?
Janine Sasso 24:26 So the garage sale itself was obviously for me if you think about garage sale. Why do people have garage sales? Obviously the first one is right, too much stuff or kids have outgrown things. But then you also have the people saying like well, we’re actually getting ready to downsize. Right so the first one was like, oh, that’s
D.J. Paris 24:45 brilliant. I never Oh my god. I have net well I look as a not look. When people when people ask me when people I don’t I say I’m in marketing when people ask me because the moment they ask when I tell them I’m in real estate they’re like Oh, how’s the market? I’m like, No, I don’t practice real estate. So I am always the lat the last one to the to the to the party. You what you just said is so brilliant. And I have I and by the way, I don’t think anyone’s said this on the show ever before. So this this is something that I imagine a lot of our audience Yeah, guys, people have garage sales might be moving. Brilliant.
Janine Sasso 25:19 Well, you’re welcome. So thank you, it goes back to mentality, right? I mean, it goes back to know your audience know your crew. And when you look at our baby boomers, right, when you look at the people that are currently selling based on Nar stats, or whatever your you know, report you look at, these are the people that have the equity, these are the people whose houses are paid off. Those are also the people that come from a generation of war, it’s like it was really hard to accumulate the things that they have donating the things that they paid, like the dining room set 1000s of 1000s of dollars for and you just now give it away. That doesn’t make any sense, right? So it goes back to understand who you are serving. So for me, it was like, okay, I can have somebody come to their house to a driveway, and then give them even a little bit of money for the dining room set that nobody else wants anymore. Anyhow, right. They’re happy, they see me drive traffic in terms of marketing, they understand that’s what I do for a living and I get hyped.
D.J. Paris 26:17 So you would basically say I will help try to drive traffic to your to your to your garage sale, maybe you provide some signage, things like that. How would you actually market how would you sort of attract people to go to the to go to do that? I keep saying open houses the garage sale,
Janine Sasso 26:35 but that one evolved, right? So but same principle for the open houses, the marketing principles behind it are all the same, you find the person that you think will be aligned with what you have to offer? Might that be a garage sale, might that be an open house might be a listing, right, you find the person, you find what they need, you find the right messaging, and then you just bring them in. So in this case, it was a very simple one for Hey, you love garage sales. Not only do I have one, I have a you know, neighborhood garage sale to promote where you can just hit 10 houses in a matter of a day. And you don’t have to drive all over the place. So it eliminates that time constrain, right. And you bring them in. So for the open houses, same scenario, you have an open house you like, Hey, if you’re looking to get into the open house, you don’t want to wait for an agent to schedule a showing perfect opportunity. We have an open house on Saturday, right? Come on by. And then same for the listing, I’m sure you’re tired of seeing all the crappy listings on the market. Good for you, I have the perfect one. It’s, you know, hitting the market tomorrow. If you want the details, let me know find the right audience, find the right message and get it done.
D.J. Paris 27:41 And you know, I my marketing wheels are spinning because I was now thinking basically what you’re doing is going into a neighborhood and saying I’m going to organize a neighborhood garage sale and whoever wants to participate can participate I’m gonna leave a flyer on is that my understanding is you basically come in saying, hey, I want to do one for the entire neighborhood or get as many people as possible, because there’s strength in that that’ll help everyone. Oh my gosh, this is I love this ever. By the way. We’re gonna pause, go get this book, because this is what she literally wrote a book about success with real estate, mailers. It’s on Amazon. It’s got great reviews. Please go there’s a link to that in our show notes. I’m sorry. Continue. Good, you good. So let’s
Janine Sasso 28:21 break it, I guess down for the mailers because they might be like, Okay, we’re talking a garage sale. And now we’re going back to a book like where’s the connection? So I’ll break down the connector for you guys. When it comes to mailers, you have three calls to actions, right. And I kind of have them described as a stoplight. So if you think about red, orange, or yellow, whichever color you want to have there and green. Red is the hardest call to action you can have which is come schedule an appointment. Yet every single agent puts on their mailer, something along the lines of Call today for your free consultation.
D.J. Paris 28:56 Who does that nobody calls nobody gonna call and I
Janine Sasso 28:59 don’t want to consultation, right? It’s like a timeshare. I’m like, No, I don’t want to sit through a free breakfast so I can use all the timeshare. I don’t want it. But it’s hard, right? It’s hard to get an appointment booked from a mailer, a piece of paper. So the second step and that’s the one I use for the garage sales strategy is registrations. It is not quite as difficult to get people to say, hey, I’ll register for that. Because if something changes, they can just say, hey, something happened. I’m gonna have to back out. Okay, no problem, right? We have that happened was our seller sometimes. Well, I was scheduled a listing appointment and then we get a message like, Hey, I forgot about this appointment or hey, can we you know, again, it’s okay. They registered and now I can continue on with my follow up, right. And then the easiest way, by far when it comes to postcards is simply Hey, I already went ahead and put you free home value report. And you can get it right over here and we Just drive them to a website to offer them a free home evaluation at the push of a button. Right? Three o’clock in the morning, three o’clock at night. It doesn’t matter they can get.
D.J. Paris 30:13 Yeah, I like that. I like that I’m with you on the red, the red light part about call for a free consultation that just doesn’t appeal to most people. The other two options seem much, much, much stronger. But I love the idea of say, hey, just get a free home evaluation. But doing it via postcard, as opposed to where most people will do those is via email. And that’s okay, too. But it’s a little bit. It’s a little bit easier to ignore on email, I believe. And that’s my my guess. Because we all just get flooded with emails, we don’t really get flooded with mailers anymore. It just doesn’t happen. And I was going to ask you why you chose postcards over you know, envelope types of mailers. But I’m guessing it’s because it’s one less step. And it’s cheaper?
Janine Sasso 31:06 Well, I actually do both. So postcards was just you know, what everybody ended up knowing me for. But it’s really the the print marketing behind it, right. So we do have microphones we work for, you know, people that have been in the house for 15 years or more like some of them will get a note card, we do a color like a color coded system. So we can like batch create them and then it just like, Okay, we just send out based on color. So it’s really simple to keep track of a lot of the things, postcards, they are just simply the easy button of you know, somebody like we have a local printer. And we do recommend everybody typically does go with a local printer when it comes to EDDM mailings. Because it will cut down on shipping costs and the local printer oftentimes can also drop off directly to the designated mailing office that it needs to go to. So local printers have always been my recommendation for agents to utilize on that. And it’s like it’s just easy, right? You just design the front, the back, you send it off to print, and then from there, it gets delivered. It doesn’t have that extra step like you said.
D.J. Paris 32:14 And so but you do both. So let’s talk about the envelope mailers as well. So you started with postcards, and now you’re doing both. What do you do for the open meat, you know, kind of mailers?
Janine Sasso 32:27 That opened me? Okay, so that one is bought off my follow up? When somebody asked for a home evaluation, right, there has to be a follow up. And the cool thing is was a geographic farm, I really don’t have to worry about too much about what do I do next. Because as I’m concentrated in my geographic farm, I’m always going to have something going on, right? There’s going to be there an event maybe there’s going to be another mailer. Like there’s always a follow up that is already taking off the hassle of whatnot, what’s the next step? Right, because they get to lead people get a leader salary, and they’re like, I got to sell a lead. Now what it’s like and even if I was to drop the ball on the follow up, I know something else is in place, which is fantastic. So little peace of mind there. But the envelope, for example, we use them for a follow up every single month after you say, hey, I want to know what my house was worth. Chances are you’re not going to list with us that day. Sure, what a week, and probably not that month, sometimes you do. But sometimes you don’t. We’ve had people in our follow up for two years. And again, if I just send them one envelope a month, at you know, 66 cents right now for a stamp. Again, I was in office where I can print and the envelope cost me about 11 cents, I think so my follow up to that person 77 cents. And, again, for me to get my name out to make sure I get a listing, I do track it. I don’t have my numbers for this year, I can give you 2021 I was looking at a 10x ROI. So based on I sent 60,000 mailers, I want to say it cost me about 24 grand and 2021 2022 each individual year and well over $240,000 in Commission received. So one to 10 as a return. I’ll take it I keep
D.J. Paris 34:25 mailing Do you know I have lived at so I’m in a new development. And I tell the story all the time. So I apologize to the audience if they’ve heard me say this a million times. But I’m gonna keep saying it because it is exactly what you’re talking about. So I’m in a new development. When I say new it was built three years ago and I was one of the one of the first people to move and we’ve got 40 Some units. Not one, not one mailer have I received in that three years now. You can make the argument well, yeah, you just moved into a new development. You’re not moving. You don’t know that and seven Real people have moved Believe it or not, to at least two couples have these are not my resident, but but some of them are million plus dollar listings. And two of two of those people have actually moved in within those three years. And not there’s 46,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area. Not one of them has sent me a mailer crazy. Well,
Janine Sasso 35:23 I mean, it’s really not that crazy, because everybody is so focused on the social media, right? And that’s like, one of the things that I tell people, it’s like, okay, you have two choices to make, you can continue to go where everybody else is going, right? Because it’s it’s allowed container. If you want to be noticed online, either, you’re going to do something really, really crazy. We all seen the listing agents standing butt naked in front of their listing, going viral and then getting kicked out of the brokerage. Right? We’ve all seen that one. But either you do something really crazy, or you go somewhere else, where it’s not that hard to get attention, right? Because it’s either you’re going to do more, or you’re just going to do it a little bit smarter. So
D.J. Paris 36:03 yeah, and what’s funny is, you know, 30 years ago, mailers, what was everybody was doing, and they moved away from it to go into social because technology has pushed us all in that direction yet, you’re right that that is a much you have to scream pretty loud and social to make any sort of impact, or you’re going to be just creating content, constantly just constant content. And boy that that can be I mean, for a working mom, that’s difficult. So yeah, you’re a single person in your 20s. Yeah, you can make content all day, you can probably do that. But for and I’ll tell you, every postcard I ever receive, I at least look at before I throw it away. I don’t always open every envelope, especially if I know it’s junk mail, like, Oh, this is my credit card company pretending that it’s not my credit card company, you know, one of those, those things where it’s like urgent, open, and you’re like I know this is this is not an urgent open situation. So I toss it, I don’t open everything. But I look at everything that’s a postcard. So that’s also a really, really great point. And it’s also the most inexpensive way. For people that are thinking, Oh, mailers are expensive. Well, are they I mean, if you’re getting a 10x return, I’d like to get a 10x return on any investment I ever make. So I mean, that’s an incredible return. So yes, this is awesome. So tell us, let’s get to the specifics. How often are you mailing? You talked about the follow ups at least once a month? Is there? Is there more to what or is it the same message every month? By the way?
Janine Sasso 37:26 No, I mean, the message itself depends on what’s going on to you, right? I mean, especially like COVID is a prime example. There was a lot going on during that timeframe, our messaging has really, you know, depending on what is happening, like the interest rate being what the interest rate are, right? I mean, that becomes a message message is really dictated by market happenings, and where your prospect is your ideal person. So if you are focused on families, for example, and you’re going back to school, like you’re going to have a lot of other things on your plate, and if you are a retired person looking to downsize, so it goes back to No your ideal person, right? So if you are looking at okay, what is it that that I do? First up, I do not believe, like, you don’t have to mail monthly, like, I’m just gonna put that out there. I do have a big thing where I think you really have to think about who’s telling you, you have to mail monthly.
D.J. Paris 38:23 And people who have the mailing stores
Janine Sasso 38:26 telling you exactly these people will sell you on a 12 month contract, because then they don’t worry about getting another customer for the next 12 months because they just have one. It’s like you have to mail at least 12 months in order to see a return. Now I’ll give you the story for my brand new farm. So I recently expanded into a brand new area. I walked out of it with a listing within the first 30 days. Now, do I have to mail monthly? No. So I personally mail about roughly eight times a year. So with the Chicago market, we do have a little bit of seasons going on. So I have more activity more signs on the ground in the summer. So you will typically see me mail more towards like the later part of the year over the winter when nobody wants to set foot outside into the spring market. Because it’s not my decision to say you know real estate sale to you around it’s matters, what the consumer thinks. And if the consumer things Super Bowl Sunday is the day the spring market kicks off. I just have to come to terms with that. That that is their thinking right? Me trying to explain to them that they’re wrong. It’s going to take much more effort than me just saying okay, fine, you’re right. But we should start in October to talk because otherwise you have missed the prep time and your beautiful spring pictures of your beautiful yard because again, I’m in the suburbs, we put a lot of pride into our you know, curb appeal and our yards. And you can see them in February when it’s all snow covered and blah and all the leaves are gone. So it’s one of those things where you just want to make sure that you really understand your market, which, again, every agent, I’m sure knows their market that they’re in. Right. And then you just act accordingly. So between the eight mailers, and one event, initially, I have since branched out and added a couple of other events for December right now, for example, we are doing letters to Santa for the community. And it’s just again, you make a child smile, and that goes back to my early childhood degree. So again, I’m, you know, I take more to the kids sometimes than the parents. But when you have, you know, little campaigns like that, that make the children happy, and they help the parents take something off their plate, your name just comes along with the goodwill that you’re demonstrating for the community. And that alone, and it needs to be genuine, in my case is very, very genuine. It needs to be genuine. You can’t just do it for the money, right? I could get nothing out of it and still be happy that I’ve done something nice for the community that I live in.
D.J. Paris 41:01 Yeah, I want only because I don’t have children. I just and this is my ignorance. Probably people will ask me what is the letters to Santa things? Explain that to me.
Janine Sasso 41:12 So when I look at the letter to Santa, right, it’s like every kid writes a letter to Santa. And we have put up a mailbox inside the community. And we tell our parents drop it right, make sure you scan our QR code, because in that QR code will now lead them to a Google form. And we just say, hey, we want to make sure your letter doesn’t get lost at the North Pole. So let me know your name. Or your children’s names, let me know where the response letter is getting mailed to. And this year, we added actually a certificate. It’s like Do you want a nice lifts certificate? Or do you want a warning letter off like come on little Johnny Coronavirus, you know, turns up behavior. I love that. Um, so that’s what we added this year, and they just fill out the form. Okay, so we get their email, we get their we get their address, they subscribe themselves to our email list with that. And we just send out a letter and continue growing our you know, hyperlinks away,
D.J. Paris 42:11 I just want to put a I just got to get to the end of this. So the letter goes out and it says it’s to the child back from Santa saying, Hey, we got your letter, like what does it say in there? Other than that,
Janine Sasso 42:22 yeah, it says like, hey, thanks so much for your letter. You know, me and Mrs. Claus are really excited to come down and you know, visit your house soon. Rudolph was excited, I know, you’re probably going to leave me a cookie, something along those lines. And if we have a parent, adding something in the special notes feels like, Hey, can you mention like he’s been really good was his new baby, you know, baby sister, we squeeze that one in there, we customize it a little bit for them, and then we’ll send it up in the mail. And they love it. They love it.
D.J. Paris 42:56 You know, I was just thinking as a child, I wrote a lot of letters to say no, because that’s what you do. And I never got one back. So that is awesome. I, I didn’t even know that was an option. So I am I am. I’m being educated. But guys think of how exciting this would be for a child to get a letter back. And probably unless, unless I would just my parents just didn’t know about these things. I never got one. So I imagine a lot of people didn’t. So you’re right, even even if it doesn’t translate into a deal. It almost certainly will at some point, because you’re doing something that is very, very special for that family. And it’s not expensive. It’s really pretty inexpensive. Yeah,
Janine Sasso 43:36 I mean, the the letters to Santa last year, we brought just over 100. So you know, I’m looking at $66 that I spent in postage. Again, this was not an expensive campaign, but it had a huge impact of just having somebody really feel grateful for having you there as a community expert as a hyperlocal agent of choice. And then again, if they have friends looking to move into the neighborhood, if they are having parents that need to sell, right, that is that part of goodwill, we were like, Hey, you should talk to Janine right? And you should have a conversation. Or you should at least interview her. I know you have your best friend was an agent, but at least maybe interview her right? It gets our name out there with them. And I can it’s easy to do because I don’t have to worry about when do I do my follow up. I could do my letters to Santa and just get them out at 11 o’clock at night. Like I can do the activity itself. Regardless of you know, the working hours per se, again, when you go back to being a mom. You know, I know we tried to schedule this episode and I’m like, Well, I’m driving my kid. 12 o’clock comes along. I’m like, my kids going to school and I’m the designated driver. Right then three o’clock rolls around. I’m like, all of a sudden there’s pick up again. And it’s like, my day is spent in the car a lot and I know I’m not the only one which is why postcards and envelopes and mailers have been so fun. Giving, just this week I put a post up. And it was all about my calendar mailers. And I said, what other lead generation activity lets you do this at, you know, 11 o’clock at night, in your rubber ducky bathrobe and get developed eight leads out of it. Like there’s not many other lead gen and you can do it during normal business hours, of course, right. But it’s like, it’s the flexibility that it allows, you know, as parents who want it all, because I know I’m not alone, when I say I want to have a really good career, I also want to be there when it comes time to pick up my kids from school to make breakfast could be there for dinner, right. And so it’s like trying to fit all of this into a 24 hour period is sometimes a little rough. But this is why postcards and mailers, emails have really afforded me that lifestyle. I know other agents can have too, which
D.J. Paris 45:53 versus doing things on social, which really requires more attention, more energy more time, because social media is really best done in as a two way communication, right? You might post something, someone writes you back, you’re gonna want to continue to engage with them. So that of course, you build a relationship from there, but postcards are really a one way. And that frees up your time to continue to do mom activities work on other parts of your business, and you’re not constantly you know, 24/7 Checking your Instagram and Facebook. Did I reply to every comment that I did? I it’s it’s a lot of work.
Janine Sasso 46:32 Well, it’s that and it’s like, every time I have like this content creation worthy moment where I’m like, Oh, I gotta you know, I gotta get it on camera. I’m like, my kid sits there. And he was like, you know, talking to grandpa on the phone on my phone. So it’s like, my phone is occupied, because he needed to FaceTime his Papaw or, you know, he was just because I’m still working at like, are trying to work and do something at four o’clock. I’m like, hey, here, watch a YouTube episode, right? Or where we’re out running errands, and he’s got my phone. I’m like, I can’t even record what I’m doing. Because my phone is occupied. I’m a little guy. So there’s a struggle there. Oh,
D.J. Paris 47:11 quick question about when you identified your farm, then you had to collect the data of that community? Did you? Do are there certain services? You recommend to pay for that? Or how do you recommend sort of collecting all the neighborhood information?
Janine Sasso 47:28 You have MLS access, right? So you know what’s happening in your areas, you have tax record access. So for those listeners that do not have anything like that, obviously there is the title companies, there’s really no need to pay for a service giving you data. And I’ll, I’ll give you the example for my email list. I do not purchase an email list for my neighborhood, I compare it to when we as real estate agents get messages, hey, I have a new healthcare quote for you. Do you want it? I am very annoyed with it. If I personally do not like it, why would I want to do that to somebody else, and I don’t care if it’s an SMS, if it’s an email, if I do not seek out the information from you, and you just decide to buy a list from somebody and then start spamming me, you’re gonna put a certain taste in my mouth that I personally don’t like. It is a little bit more effort to collect the emails on your own through open houses through the Senate, letter to Santa campaign. But your open rates will be better, your click rate will be better. And with that, again, it’s not about you know, those vanity metrics of I have 3000 people on my list, it’s like, you could have 300 people on your list and be extremely profitable, more so profitable if these people actually want to hear from you. So it goes back to vanity metrics on social media. It’s the same for geographic farming, right? I’ll get scooped up on those. So
D.J. Paris 49:00 you so you wouldn’t purchase a list of a geographic farm and just start mailing out? You?
Janine Sasso 49:06 Well, so purchase a list of emails and phone numbers.
D.J. Paris 49:10 Okay, so I know you don’t do that. So you’re only directly digitally marketing to people that you’ve had some sort of connection, you’ve met them. Now for mailers you do you would buy a list of of that area.
Janine Sasso 49:23 So for mailers, the EDDM is an app service available through the United States Postal Service, right. So that part is readily available, there is no need to, you know, have any secret connection, it just you can you can do it as an individual agent. And that part alone has helped me. Now if I go and find individual addresses and say, Hey, I only want to look at people who’ve lived in their house for 15 years. And I want to send them something a little bit more specific that states Hey, after having lived in your house for such a long time, you know sometimes the thought about moving comes up I just want you to To know that I am here, whenever you’re ready, if you’re not ready to move, that’s fine. You live in a perfectly amazing neighborhood, you and I both know that, you know, wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, whatever it is. But if I look at like these types of marketing campaigns, we have tax record access, or title company, depending on you know, where you’re listening from, we really don’t need to pay anybody anything to get that data. And then it’s just a matter of Oh, yeah, that’s a fair bit of a right and sweat equity. Which one do you want to put in? Do you want to pay a service to get it done? Or do you want to stuff the envelope themselves? And put in spec? S, but equity? So? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 50:42 it’s a good question. And I you just brought up a really strong point for anyone listening who’s like, how do I get access to this kind of information, reach out to lenders reach out to title companies, attorneys. Between those three resources, somebody will be able to get you the data that you want. And title companies, attorneys, and lenders all want your business. So they want you to be successful. So yes, leverage your relationships with the other professionals.
Janine Sasso 51:14 Absolutely. So I mean, obviously, then there are other ways. And right now we’re exploring a CRM that will have an integrated postcard, you know, service with it. And I tried it. So far, loving everything about it. So you know, I’m in the middle of getting all of this built out. It is really, really powerful when you are starting to have QR codes, and then you add those to your mailing pieces. And I was sharing that in one of my groups yesterday, I send out a mailing to 90 or 75 homes roughly. And I had a QR code on there that was trackable per house per address. So far, I got two scans back. And it states the name of the person, it states the address of the person the campaign of came from. So these are now leads that I can follow up on based on a QR code scan. Right. So super powerful direct mail has evolved. So so much. And it’s not just paper anymore, it is smart paper. And people need to see where the gaps are for the attention, and then go after that one. Don’t go down the mainstream of AI, right. I mean, yes, I use AI to a certain degree in my business, it is not to create 365 pieces of content for the week. Right? It is it this is what everybody is trying to do more and more and more. Don’t go where everybody’s gone. Go the other way.
D.J. Paris 52:39 Yeah, and, and go where people will have enough attention to see your message, social media, you’re fighting, you’re fighting a lot of different people for that attention, mail, you’re not fighting that many people. And you know, you’re fighting a couple of catalog companies and a few credit card companies that’s about it. I mean, I don’t even get I don’t even think my banks and I don’t even think my bank sends me statements. They have it for years, you know, in the mail, so I literally get almost no mail. So I get excited when I get a postcard. Or, gosh, a handwritten note, I’d probably fall over some, I get just a couple of those a year or two. That’s another amazing thing. Now that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work to do it, but boy, you want really great return, you know, but if you’re getting a 10x on you know, doing an audit through an automated system that’s a pretty pretty strong that now for people that you don’t yet know that you’re sending stuff out to you haven’t yet met them. How are you? Because I know that people that you have that are in your lead list are getting about eight mailers a year. What about the people who aren’t yet who haven’t yet raised their hand, but you’ve you’ve put them into your you know, into your mailing
Janine Sasso 53:53 actually it’s the reverse weight so people that I have not you know, people in my farm all of them about eight mailings a year people that have raised their hand they do not go on a monthly
D.J. Paris 54:07 got it so they get more got it
Janine Sasso 54:09 they get a little bit of I love it. So you know they raise their hand they took the next step so now it’s up to me to take my next step and and that again builds that relationship right there I’m watching from the sideline they might have seen my sign they might just watch and see you she actually able to do it she actually gonna sell it and it’s like oh they’re so sold writer she did it you know what the sign came down? You know what it’s time for her to come over to my house and have a conversation people need to form trust
D.J. Paris 54:39 Absolutely. And and now with QR codes like you were saying on the mailers everything can be tracked you so I think well we don’t really know what the return or the return on investment necessarily. It’s kind of hard to how many people even you know, check this out. Well now with QR codes, everything’s trackable. So that’s to say
Janine Sasso 54:55 so I know we’re gonna have a recording on there. So I guess sometimes the video people get a little bit of an X One. So this one here is just, you know, I’m holding up a screenshot right now showing what the QR code messages look like. So if you have that video, you know, you can see it, it’s just the name just like I described it, it has the name, it has the address in itself, you get real time notified real time notification. And the interesting part is, these people did not complete our opt in form. So all they did was they scan, and then they stuck. They’re like, Oh, I have to enter my information. I’m not gonna do that. That’s okay. You don’t have to anymore. I’m already there. So I already know, what
D.J. Paris 55:33 does each person have? It’s their own unique QR code, or is it just what? Oh,
Janine Sasso 55:40 I getting fancy for 2024. So that is fancy. It’s, it’s starting to take shape. Again, that’s part of what we’ve been working on at the hyper local agent to make it more affordable and accessible for real estate agents, who are not mega teams who do not have a marketing budget that is bazillions of dollars. And it’s like, putting data back in front of the agent that you know, should have it and not the companies was holding that information. It’s our little thing we’re working on. I
D.J. Paris 56:15 love it. And Janine has all sorts of courses that you should check out at the at. Sorry,
Janine Sasso 56:21 I got asked so many questions. Over the years since I started sharing what I’m doing. Everyone’s like, how do you do this? And every now and then there’s a course that comes out for it. My Calendars. For example, my garage sale is on there, because people ask what do you do? Or how do you do it? There is a process because I actually, you could have seen me on TV was the garage sale, I had Fox 32 news report on my garage sale about two years ago, because we had 180 sellers, and it was wild. And the streets were packed. And it was crowded. And it was amazing. So
D.J. Paris 56:58 yeah, I love that. And so guys, I think this is a great really a great place to wrap up because I really want I think we’ve made the case mailers work in 2023 2024. We anticipate being just as successful with these because why shouldn’t they be and no one’s doing it. So let’s start doing it. And it’s it’s not as expensive as it sounds. And yet, you may need to give it a couple of years, you may need to think, Hey, I’m going to be doing this for a couple of years. And you know what, faster? Well, Janine says no, Denise says it’s, you’re gonna get you’re gonna get results faster than that. But I am telling you even even if you just keep doing it, you will, you will get absolutely results because you’re gonna follow Janine method. And you’re going to do that because you’re going to pick up her book, which is success with real estate mailers on Amazon, or you’re going to and or you’re going to also check out all the different courses. She has some really cool ones. Like, what if I want to do a fun comic, like comic book style mailers, she has a course on that, like, that’s cool, right? That’s fun. She has some a bunch of free stuff as well for different lead gen ideas, how to do garage sales, how to do you know all sorts of geographic farming quarterly newsletters, green screen course how to actually use green screens for video stuff. And anyway, she’s got really, really cool stuff. She has even monopoly style mailers, you can have really a lot of fun. So she’s got a lot of it’s for free. And some of it costs money, but it’s all worth your time, and your resources. So if you go to the hyperlocal agent.com, you’ll see all of her different courses. And again, the book is success with real estate mailers, which is available anywhere books are sold to certainly on online as well as Amazon, we’ll have a link to that. Now. And I also want to say for anyone listening who is like, this sounds pretty cool. But maybe I could partner with Janine and maybe I’m a local Chicago agent, and I kind of want to do what Jeanine is doing and maybe I’d be a good fit for her team. So if you are somebody that wants to geographically farm and maybe want to partner with Janine, in particular, in any way that makes sense, you can reach out to her. Also, if you’re an agent who has, maybe you don’t live in Chicago, of course, most of our most of our listeners don’t. And you want a good agent to refer business to if any of your clients are moving to the suburban area, Janine would love the opportunity to develop a referral relationship with you. And of course, she has people you know, here in Chicago guys is as people get older, they go south, a lot of them leave and they go to Florida and Arizona and Texas and lots of places where it’s a lot warmer, so she has referrals that she needs to start sending out as well. So wouldn’t be the worst idea to reach out to her and maybe put her on your mailing list and start mailing her ever I mean, honestly, it’s not the worst idea. Natalie like, because Janine is going to get honestly about 50 people who reached out to her after this after we published this episode, so stand stand apart. But you know whether You’re not you reach out to Janine and partner with her or just will read her book or go to one of her courses. She’s the real deal. I think she’s proven that in this conversation, she’s super, no nonsense, here’s exactly what to do. And it works. In fact, Ginni, and I want to invest with you. And I want to give you all my money, because I want a 10x return. So I may just deposit money into your bank account. And you could, you could do the heavy lifting, I teach you how
Janine Sasso 1:00:25 to because you are in charge of your business, right?
D.J. Paris 1:00:28 Oh, darn it, I gotta do it myself.
Janine Sasso 1:00:31 And you can train the assistant, it’ll be the best asset in your business promise.
D.J. Paris 1:00:35 And you’re absolutely right, with a 10x return, you can hire an assistant, you can have somebody basically stuffing envelopes, doing some of the heavy lifting, or just designing it or whatever, when you’re getting that kind of return. It really frees up even more of your time because you can then delegate. So that’s the
Janine Sasso 1:00:53 biggest part. You don’t have to scale, you can just increase the quantity increase the money, and it scales beyond anything else. You don’t have to hire additional isas. You don’t have to do anything else other than scale up, which is really
D.J. Paris 1:01:06 Janine, I’m gonna, I want to ask you one last question, because I recruit Realtors for my company. And this is just such great timing, because we have planned our 2024 How are we going to recruit agents? And yes, of course, we’re going to email everyone you have to you know, of course, we’re going to be sending a monthly email with a cute little whatever. But our main focus is not email and it’s not social media. It is mailers. Funny enough. Now I want to ask here’s my question to you. How many recruiting emails do you get from other brokerages? Because look, the reason I’m asking telling this and I want you everyone to stay tuned while I’m while Janine is answering because everyone’s you know, right now, people are exploring other brokerages or they’re thinking of creating a team, or they already have a team and they want to grow their team. So recruiting is going on. Outside of people like me who recruit for a brokerage, you might just be wanting to start a team or build your team even further. So you probably get a lot of recruiting emails, I’m guessing. So
Janine Sasso 1:02:06 the recruiting is one of those things where, you know, I like to look and see how I feel after I got to recruiting. I’m not a feely person. But it’s like, it’s interesting, because we will feel first before our brain kicks and analyzes. Right? So I always see like, how do I feel about it, and I do have like, a lot of them actually come in via SMS. So they are paying services, I will say the SMS are mediocre at best. So they are getting deleted right away. There’s people that I actually know, since I am a trainer, there’s also like I said, a lot of people that I have relationships with, and that I’m now on a list. So I feel like it’s very impersonal. So you know, the, the SMS, not connecting. And
D.J. Paris 1:02:54 by the way, nobody really wants to get an SMS from somebody they don’t we just don’t share
Janine Sasso 1:02:58 anything. You know, it’s like, hey, no, you cannot. It’s very impersonal. It’s, you know, I didn’t ask for that. So it’s you know,
D.J. Paris 1:03:07 so you get a lot of too
Janine Sasso 1:03:11 many emails, it is just the emails, the way they are presented, the more polished an email looks, the faster it goes in the in the spam folder, right? So the emails I send are more like newsletter or not newsletter more like journal entries, right? It’s like a little life update on like bringing people into my story. So there are different, which is also why my open rate on my emails is typically about 50 to 60%. And it’s one of those things where you really just think things through, like, how do you feel about it? What do you want the person to feel? Right? And when you look at recruiting from a piece of mail, it’s gonna stick around longer. Make sure you have a really good call to action, not just sign up was my brokerage today. Right?
D.J. Paris 1:03:53 Yeah, cuz no one does that either. And, but how many mailer recruiting mailers Do you receive as an agent per year? Zero, she just showed zero, guys. So this is my point. Nobody is doing this. Whether you’re trying to find for your own business and find clients or you’re a guy like me, who needs to recruit for your team or your brokerage? This is the missed opportunity. Yes, it’s a little bit more expensive, although not really, actually now that I think about it, it actually isn’t because I pay for email services, I pay for people to help with content. All of this costs money, it’s really probably not that much different from mailing.
Janine Sasso 1:04:32 That’s not and your attention is going to be much more focused on it.
D.J. Paris 1:04:36 Well, guys, everyone should be mailing in 2024. Janine Sasso is the queen of the real estate, mailers. I dumped her that. So that’s not an official title, but you’re actually not the
Janine Sasso 1:04:47 first one who came up with a title so you know, I’ve heard it before interest. Maybe you should make this my thing. So
D.J. Paris 1:04:53 could be your brand. Well, you’re the queen of it on our podcast. How about that? That for sure. So Janine Has woke up to send her a tiara and a sash.
Janine Sasso 1:05:05 So I will go.
D.J. Paris 1:05:07 Oh gosh. Now I have to go get a tiara and a sash. All right. Well, everyone, please go out and get yourself real estate, mailers, the sorry success with real estate mailers, the Book link to it on Amazon. And if you’re not a want to read books, she’s got all sorts of odd video courses as well. Go check it out and written courses. She’s the real deal. She’s also an instructor, and that’s her backgrounds education. That’s what she’s good at. So why not reach out and partner with her? Check out her? All of the resources, the hyper local agent.com is where you can find everything Janine, funny. It was funny at the very beginning. Before we started, I asked you and I go, what social Do you want me to promote? She’s like, No. And I was like, oh, yeah, of course. You’re the mailer person. So it was it was real. But she is also on every social platform. She’s she’s all over social. So sad to say hi to her there as well. But certainly check out for 2020 forecast, let’s let’s all have a better 2020 More than 2023 2023 was tough. It’s tough. It was a tough year this year. But you probably weren’t doing mailers. So next year, probably going to be tough, too. So let’s go ahead and try to make it as easy on ourselves as possible, especially those of us with part time jobs or our our moms or dads, you know, raising children. Your time is valuable. And you know, just posting content of you at the gym every morning showing how fit you are. Yes, that’s cool. And yes, that maybe might get you a deal or two. But that’s not really really what people want, right? People want something that is specific to their particular needs. And Jeannie is going to show you how to do that through her mailing system. So All right, guys. Janine has to run up. She has been amazing. On behalf of everyone listening. Janine, thank you for your time. Janine is a very, very busy mom. Thank you. Thank you. And on behalf of Janine and myself, we say thank you to our audience. Thanks for sticking around to the end. Please tell a friend, please support our sponsors. Please support Janine and reach out to her tell her that you loved her on this episode. She would appreciate it. All right, Janine, thank you so much. You are amazing. I will see everybody on the next episode.
Janine Sasso 1:07:08 I’m keeping it real.
From Consulting To N.A.R. 30 Under 30 • Kelly Carlson
Dec 20, 2023
Kelly Carlson talks about why she switched from a consulting career into a real estate career and discusses the challenges she faced when she made the jump from one career into the other. Kelly discuss the importance of open houses in the beginning of her career in real estate. Next, Kelly talks about social media and her marketing plan for 2024. Kelly also talks about the tours around suburbs of Chicago she organizes for her prospective clients. Last, Kelly describes what is she doing now that the market is down to keep busy.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re talking to a National Association of REALTORS 30 under 30 award winner about how she’s becoming a top producer in her 20s. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide, and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer, Kelly Carlson. But before we get to Kelly, just a heartfelt thank you from the entire podcast team here. We just recently crossed over 3.3 million downloads. That’s a very big deal to us. So thank you for continuing to support our show. The best way you can help us grow of course, tell a friend and also please support our sponsors. They pay the bills and we love our sponsors. And we only select those that actually have products and services to help you grow your business. So check them out, keep listening. We are so thankful and now let’s just get right to it my conversation with superstar Kelly Carlson.
Today on the show, our guest is Kelly Carlson with Kelly Carlson homes at properties Christie’s international real estate here in Chicago. Let’s tell you more about Kelly. Now Kelly Carlson is an award winning broker with add properties in Christie’s international real estate in their Western Springs office that’s a suburb of Chicago. Now after launching her real estate career in the city, and 2020 After four plus years and consulting Kelly was named angle and Volkers Chicago Rookie of the Year and more recently recognized as a member and this is such a big deal of the National Association of REALTORS 30, under 30 Class of 2023. Just to let people know what that is, every year, the National Association of REALTORS wants to find the agents who are in their 20s who are doing really exceptional things in the industry and having exceptional success as well and highlighting them and she was one of the award winners this year with a love of interior design historical homes and do it yourself updates. This career is the perfect blend of her passions and professional background. And she’s no longer doing the consultants Monday to Thursday fly out and then back on the weekend. So she gets to stay here in Chicago more often. Please visit Kelly at her website, which is Kelly Carlson homes.com. And follow her on Instagram, Kelly Carlson homes, Facebook as well. We will have links to both are all of her social media in our show notes. Kelly, welcome to the show.
Kelly Carlson 4:06 Thank you so much for having me, DJ, this is such a pinch me moment when I was in the process of getting my license. I was binging all of your old episodes in 2020. So very cool. full circle moment to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:19 Well, it is a it’s an honor to have one of our listeners on the show. And yeah, it’s excited to to chat. It’s always fun when when people find us or we find people. And I’m just so grateful that you’re here and you have done some really exceptional things. I am also curious. So I know you’re a University of Illinois grad, did you go straight into consulting right out of school? Was that kind of your path? Yes.
Kelly Carlson 4:47 And it was kind of one of those you get recruited in the fall of your senior year and then started in October after graduating so had a nice long summer vacation, and then it was really time to get to work.
D.J. Paris 5:01 Did you have that consultants life where you were traveling to clients during the week coming back on the weekends? Was that kind of how you started?
Kelly Carlson 5:09 I was not every Monday through Thursday. But my particular consulting group did have a lot of special projects. So it took me to a lot of remote locations across the US. So had great airline status at that point. And that is probably the one thing I missed. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 5:28 no, no more. No more first instant first class upgrades. My sister lost that as well. She’s now with a startup prior to that. She wasn’t a consultant, but but she used to travel for different jobs. And now she’s lost all of that. And she still occasionally gets an upgrade, but it is we laugh and go, Oh, great. You’re just like the rest of us now which. So why the switch from consulting to very few people, I think, get out of consulting, because it is such a really, it’s a wonderful career and track. It really, truly is. It’s not, of course, the travel stinks. But ultimately, a lot of people stay in it. So I’m curious what was so why did you get out and why real estate? Sure.
Kelly Carlson 6:10 Well, this story kind of goes back to, I want to say high school college because I had always had a love for architecture home, I took every CAD class at my high school went to a pre architecture camp at U of I. And ultimately, when I was kind of in that phase of applying to schools, it was still end of recession, residential architecture was not necessarily the place to find a job at the time. So I thought, well, I liked math and science, I’ll do civil engineering, which is a complementary fields to architecture. And so did that at U of I, great kind of versatile degree, I knew I didn’t want to do traditional design engineering. And so I started looking into consulting, which is a route that a lot of engineering graduates go into. So that seems to be a nice mix of getting to work with people client services, but also relevant to my degree. And so yeah, I did that for four years, starting at a big four firm and then moved on to a smaller boutique management consulting firm, I could not think of a better place to launch my career, it really taught me the value of exceptional client service, and how to be professional, how to manage a very demanding schedule and still meet deadlines. But it got to a point where I, you know, I’d been at two firms, I didn’t see myself in it for the long haul, and didn’t think that going to another company was going to, you know, solve what I felt like was missing. And so it kind of brought me back to that place of you know, I’ve always loved real estate architecture that is just always fascinated me. And the voice in my head previously had always been that you went to school for engineering, and you’re a consultant, and this is what you do. But I started to think about it differently. In terms of how could I leverage this experience in the corporate world, to differentiate myself as somebody, you know, I didn’t have a sales background, but I had a lot of transferable skills for a totally services business. And so I did it, I quit my job in October of 2020, got my license, and got hit the ground running in January of 2021.
D.J. Paris 8:33 Right, right smack dab in the middle of the pandemic,
Kelly Carlson 8:36 perfect timing.
D.J. Paris 8:40 That is incredible. And then for you to have enough success to catch the eye of the National Association of Realtors, for their 30 under 30 is quite a big deal. I know many, many people, friends of mine, who who have not made that list, and I’ve tried many times, a lot of my friends have made the list as well. But boy, it’s a big feather in your cap. So congratulations. I’m excited to learn more about maybe what they they see in you as well. And I think civil engineering too, is a really nice transferable skill. And I know again, that wasn’t really your career, but it was your your field of study and interest. Because civil engineers, you know, people don’t really know what that is. Just 111 thing that civil engineers do is they they’re really good at visualizing. So they can see like two points of land and they can visualize a bridge across or like if there’s a river in between or something they can they can visualize things that aren’t there and then they can bring those things to life. So I imagine even just that skill along with your architecture, knowledge and love of of homes, and interior design probably is pretty helpful when you’re maybe walking a client through a home saying I you can probably see things that maybe I wouldn’t be able to see for example, I’m just curious if that ever comes up where or maybe it’s a renovation, you’re able to maybe visual lies that more effectively than, you know somebody without those skills.
Kelly Carlson 10:03 Yes, that has definitely been helpful. The renovation friends, the home that we’re sitting in, I’m sitting in right now is actually the home that my husband and I just bought, and did not look like this a few months ago. And there was a lot of work to get into this place. And so something I was able to do for myself, but then also for my clients, who are maybe struggling in the current low inventory market, not able to find that move in ready home, or they’ve got to kind of grow into it, knowing what is in place, and what can be done. Over time. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 10:40 it’s funny, if you’re watching this, you’ll see you’re probably listening. So you won’t see this. But Kelly has an all white kitchen. I also, although you won’t see this on mine, because I’m at the office, but I have an all white kitchen. And we were talking to sort of laughing about that earlier. And I just I have all white everything white walls, white, you know, I’m like, really all white, white and black. And I’m thinking like in, it’ll be funny in like, 10 years, when people are like, Why were people doing all white? Like what you know, like, it’s cool now, but it won’t be cool forever. So it is kind of funny how styles evolve and change over time. But let’s talk about how you built your business? Because yes, I think the consulting background, every consultant, I know, in the Big Four, you know, professionalism, hard work, meeting deadlines, and just being of service, you talked about customer service are really sort of the main pillars. And being a good listener, think consultants are great listeners as well. But they you know, those are really important skills that obviously transfer over into real estate. But you still had to build your business people see you as I saw you as a consultant that was your your profession and a very well respected profession. And then you know that that was your path, and then all of a sudden, you’re pivoting. Was it challenging to, you know, introduce your sphere of influence to your new career or was like, what was that process like?
Kelly Carlson 12:02 Sure. So as you know, after I got licensed, I started interviewing at different brokerages and met Jennifer Eames, who is a Top Producing Chicago agent, also the licensed partner of angle and Volkers Chicago and Linkin Park. And her and I connected and she had had a previous career prior to real estate as well. And so once I did get my license, I was so excited to come over to her company. And, you know, unlike a lot of new agents, they start out on a team, and they learn from that team member and they help out and it’s a great way to get experience. But the unique thing about angle and Volkers at the time is there a boutique firm, and Jenny had told me she’s, you know, if you come over, you can be a solo agent, and we will help you, we will give you those tools. And so that was something that, you know, I was so grateful for her mentorship and being able to get started as a solo agent. But under, you know, having the experience of getting to cover open houses. And that was a huge part of building my business outside of, you know, making sure, and this was a big thing that I had been taught and don’t, don’t be a secret agent, like make sure that your sphere of influence knows you know that you are in real estate. And this is a full time serious career for you. So I think I took advantage of, you know, social media and a newsletter and just connecting with people, I now had more time to be able to call up friends and people I knew from college to go grab coffee because I wasn’t traveling. And so it was kind of a mix of just offering out all of my weekends to do open houses, for any agents in our office and then working with, you know, friends and friends of friends. Over time. You know, I say that first year was a lot more friends and family, open house buyers. And then over time it kind of, I think, you know, I had done a good job with those friends that they felt comfortable referring me to their friends and family. So over time, it’s become more referral based. But I’d say you know, if you’re a new agent, like don’t be afraid to let your people know that this is your career.
D.J. Paris 14:26 And letting you know you talked about open houses I feel like agents don’t do do or agents may not know depending on what firm they’re at or who their circle is that they know of other agents. But if you work in an office where there are agents with listings, and I you know not there are small firms with just a couple of brokers so this might not apply to everyone but if there is someone in your office with at least one listing, I would go and ask beg, plead and and do anything you can to get in their good graces if you’re a brand new agent to I sit in open house. Can you tell us? That’s my suggestion? What would you recommend? Do you agree? Or, you know, what is your experience with open houses?
Kelly Carlson 15:09 100% I actually my first buyer client was from the first open house that I’ve held. And that’s not how it goes every time, you know, there are gonna be times where you sit in an empty condo for two hours, and, you know, scroll your phone or check emails. But other times, you might connect really well with somebody and I’d say, just, you know, asking questions, trying to get to know a person, see what information you can learn about them. Because then when you are following up, you aren’t going to be like that false agent who is sending them the same email saying, Do you want to buy this kinda? Or do you want to work with me on something else, I think trying to create some kind of personal connection is, is, can can make a difference. And that was the case with my first buyer clients, they were so impressed by how much I remembered from our five minute conversation. So it goes back to that listening, I think, yeah,
D.J. Paris 16:09 I think you’re right. And that’s something to consider. So the first step, of course, is getting getting an open house when you don’t have a listing, which, you know, beg the people in your firm to help you do that. And then when you have people walking through the open house, Kelly, what I heard from you is pay very, very close attention to what they tell you and maybe even take notes after they leave. Because and I was thinking about this, as you were saying, I was like, why would you be the eighth person that maybe another real eight other realtors might be? And I go oh, because they’re going to other open houses? Like it just occurred to me? Oh, yeah, of course they are. And so of course, they’re going to get eight follow up messages from thanks for coming to my open house. And if you can add in, you know, whatever the conversation was, yeah, all of a sudden, now you’re, you’re you stand above everyone else.
Kelly Carlson 16:56 Definitely. But it’s a win win for the listing agents, too. Because, yeah, like you said, they’ve got maybe multiple listings, and they can’t be in two places at once. So it’s never good to ask,
D.J. Paris 17:06 it doesn’t hurt to ask. And also, in many cases, it really makes the seller look good to the or sorry, makes the selling agent look good to the seller, or the listing agent, I should say. Because I technically the selling agent is the one who buys anyway. I don’t know why they we do it that way. It’s too confusing. Buy side and sell side. Yeah, but anyway, I don’t make the rules. So sorry for the confusion there. But yeah, for anyone who, for anyone who, you know, is a listing agent, you know, we know that oftentimes by asking a listing agent, Hey, can I sit in open house for your property, they get to then say to the seller, hey, we’re going to do an open house. And of course, that just makes the seller think that the listing agents doing stuff. And that’s a good thing, too. So it really is a win win for everybody. Obviously, for the agent sitting the open house, if nobody shows up, you know, that is always a bummer. But it happens. But the important thing is, these are where people do come in to open houses. And I know that you know, we live in so much of a virtual world now. But I really encourage everyone if you’re if you’re if you’re not slammed with appointments these days, I would be asking every listing agent I knew in my office, can I please please, please come sit in open house? And okay, cool. So let’s talk I want to talk about social media. Because I’m 47. And I used to be I used to feel like I was a young guy, I’m not a young guy anymore. But I would you know, social media is just kind of a different animal for people who are in your case, you’re like about 20 years younger. Tell us a little bit about how you’ve built your business on social. I’m just curious on what’s worked for you. How do you think about content? You know, what, how are you in the you know, how are you posting? Tell us about that?
Kelly Carlson 18:46 Sure. You know, initially I had thought you know, you have to be on every single platform and just, you know, reach everybody from every direction and I started to learn that I think age is a big part of figuring out what your where your demographic is. And for me at 29 I save most of my fear and people my age are still on Instagram, Facebook, not so much tick tock I don’t have I probably should but I just am afraid I get too addicted. But that’s been kind of the biggest social media piece for me. I have a business account, but I like to mix in still some personal with that. i You will probably never see me post a just listed or just sold post.
D.J. Paris 19:39 Well, hold on. What why is that? Why do you not post those?
Kelly Carlson 19:43 Because you don’t I my kind of thought process as I’m deciding, you know, to put together some form of content. My question is, is this adding value to the consumer. And when I saw those, and when I see them, you know, it’s kind of as it doesn’t do much for me, however, if I see, you know, a picture of a couple in front of the house, and there’s a story behind it, I’m interested and it gives me more of the taste of you know, who that agent is, and how they work. And so I love, you know, on occasion to share clients stories in that way. And yes, sure, it’s showing that you are, you know, selling homes and you know, you’re successful and all that, but it’s not so in your face. So I think it goes back to the is it something that is adding value, as we are fixing up a 1920s tutor, I have been sharing some of our renovation journey. Because I personally love seeing before and afters, I think that’s content people generally enjoy. And what it’s kind of evolved into is going back to kind of helping people see what they can do with a space. And also, you know, doing things, depending on what your budget is, you know, here’s places to splurge, here’s places to save. So, I found that to be kind of complementary with, you know, posting normal real estate stuff, too. But I don’t have a great, you know, like talent or anything of what I do, I just, when I have the time, I, you know, come up with an idea and, and post away. I think
D.J. Paris 21:22 that’s really, really great advice. I’m not a fan of the just listed just sold stuff, either. I think it’s perfectly okay to do. It doesn’t do much for me, it doesn’t necessarily turn me off when I see it. But it doesn’t light me up either. Like when I see somebody do it. In this, I’m sort of not a good example, because I see all my friends having success, and I’m very excited to see them when they get there just listed just sold. But if I was just a consumer, not in this industry, I’d be like, I mean, it’s, it’d be like the equivalent of you know, somebody saying, I just got a, you know, I just got this big sale at the company I work at I close this big deal. It’s like we don’t do that, really, we might tell our friends and family and just close this big deal. But we don’t necessarily broadcast it, but Realtors do broadcast it. And that’s fine. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but it shouldn’t. I don’t think it should be the primary, I don’t think anyone would say that should be the primary driver for what your content is, I think people you write are more interested in the story. They’re more interested in learning about you, and kind of what you’re into. And also, if you want to see really cool DIY before and afters, I encourage everybody go to Reddit and subscribe to the DIY subreddit. It is awesome. And there’s like, I think there’s millions of people subscribed to it. And you get to see all sorts of projects in there. And there’s a reason why millions of people are in they’re not everyone’s a DIY er that’s in there, but they just love lurking and seeing. So if you are somebody who does projects, check out the DIY subreddit, whether it’s a home renovation or just something outside of real estate, you could document a lot of that stuff, put it in social and it just shows people that you have passion and interest, and that you’re kind of doing cool stuff. So I’m a big, big believer in that as well. So that’s interesting. So you’re you’re an Instagramer more than anything tick tock is not your thing. I stay away from tick tock, I post our videos there, but I don’t browse tick tock for the exact reason you mentioned is I’m way too, I have way too much of an addictive personality, and I would get lost in it and hours would go away. So but whatever social media platform that that, you know, I think somebody is on, it’s probably the one, the one that they liked the most is probably the one where where they should spend the most time. But let’s let’s talk about so you had this great apprenticeship, sort of, you know, mentorship with one of the top producers here in Chicago. And then you had to make a transition because you and your husband just bought this place out in the western suburbs, you’re not all that close to the city as you used to be right in the city. And was that a bit of a trends, a transition as well for your business was it was the majority of your business in the city prior? And how is that shifted as you’ve moved out west? Sure.
Kelly Carlson 24:04 You know, it’s interesting, because at my age, late 20s, a lot of my clients, I think COVID kind of said this up. We’re moving out of the city maybe earlier than they had would have been in the past. And so I having grown up in the western suburbs, Clarendon Hills, I already had a pretty good knowledge of many of the western suburbs so I was able to help several buyers and some sellers out that way. So for a good portion of my time in the city, I was splitting my time a bit between western suburbs and the city. So I’d say the transition wasn’t it hasn’t felt you know, crazy, but I am now in a very, you know, hyperlocal market where most of the agents who do the business here live in town and Part of that I started to learn very quickly, it’s how many of the deals are happening off market, they don’t even hit the private market, they are happening, you know, just because there’s word of mouth in town. And so it kind of got me thinking that I would want to find a more local brokerage, I had such an amazing experience that angle Volkers and have nothing but amazing things to say about Jenny and the whole team. But I quickly realized that, you know, being kind of the new girl in town and being with a brokerage that had a very strong local presence would be an important piece for establishing myself here long term. So I’m still trying to figure it out. It’s, it’s still somewhat new. But I’ve got a really great business plan for 2024. And Trisha, Roberto is the managing broker for at properties, Hinsdale and Western Springs. And she’s been so wonderful at getting me ready for this next year. So
D.J. Paris 25:59 yeah, let’s talk about this next year. So what’s what’s on the marketing plan? I am always interested on you know, and again, I know you talked about with social media, you don’t necessarily have a training calendar, or sorry, a content calendar. But I’m curious on what kind of marketing efforts you plan to do to to find additional buyers and sellers in 2024.
Kelly Carlson 26:21 Absolutely. So my kind of big marketing campaign for 2024, I’m calling it going west, buying your first home in the western suburbs. So you know, there’s a lot of, you know, Chicago residents, their homeowner, maybe they own their condo, or they’re renting, they’re ready for that move to the suburbs, but they don’t, they’re maybe not from the area. And so they don’t have that knowledge of you know, if schools are important, where you know how to navigate that commuting to downtown, if they’re still going to work in the city, how to make that as easy of a transition as possible, what, you know, what are the things they like to do in the city that they can still find some version of out this way. And so so my focus is going to be helping with those first time suburban buyers. And that’ll be, you know, through kind of educational content on Instagram featuring different suburbs, local businesses, etc. But then also, something I’ve started implementing is suburb tours, where I will take a client out privately, for a couple of hours, and we’ll toward maybe, you know, five or six suburbs will drive around, I will share, you know, kind of my take on how that local market is, things that are notable about that town. And I think it’s a great way to get to know somebody before you start looking at homes. But it’s also, I think, a better way to get somebody out here versus maybe trying to drag them to a happy hour at, you know, of downtown bar in Western Springs. So that’s, that’s a big part of me. And in addition to kind of my typical, you know, newsletter, you know, I like to do quarterly client events, at boutique fitness studios, or maybe a fun, local Happy Hour spots, things like that.
D.J. Paris 28:20 You just said something that really, really sort of piqued my interest, because I was trying to think, as you were saying it, just like we’ve done over 500 episodes, has anyone ever said this before? And I don’t think anyone has. So I want to go back to something that you mentioned about these tours. I think this is a brilliant idea. And I’ve we we did not I did not know you were going to talk about this. So I’m so excited. Because now I just got to collect my thoughts. Because here’s what I was thinking. I’ve never heard of anybody doing this. So typically, you know, you work with a realtor, when you’re ready to buy, you already know approximately where you know, the city, you know, maybe even the subdivision if you’re out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood, if you’re in the city, whatever, you have a general idea. And we all hate when we get those buyers who call and they go, I’m open anything and you’re like, Oh, now we got to pick this out. But what I love about what you’re doing is you’re helping people make a decision of where they want to live, not the home itself, which you’ll do step two, step one is probably the most challenging of the steps is where should we live? And people normally go on that journey themselves. They do not usually have a guide with them. Yeah, maybe they’re watching YouTube videos, learning about different suburbs, but they’re not necessarily even being driven around to different suburbs going well, here’s some cool things about this one. And here’s some, you know, maybe not so cool things. And here’s this suburb and I mean that in Chicago, we have kind of I don’t know how many suburbs like probably more than 50 Altogether, villages and suburbs. So it can be really I’ve lived here 21 years and I still don’t really understand the suburbs. And so that’s what that would be Incredibly helpful for me if I was going to move out in the suburbs, and I’m in this industry, and I don’t know, I don’t know if you know anything about the suburbs. And so that is such an important thing is really what here’s what I heard you do. You thought about what the need is, what is the need? Well, people who live in the city, a lot of them move out to the suburbs, because they want to start a family get more space, whatever, lots of reasons. People typically move from urban to rural, and so great. So she Kelly knows this happens. That’s where you grew up, as well. And she thought, well, what’s one of the challenges with that? Well, picking up picking a place picking a an area to live to move in, and there’s so many different options. So I’m going to do these tours, I am so impressed with that, because that is an incredible service to provide. And absolutely I would be I would be thrilled if I was living in Chicago. And I was like, Well, I gotta move out to the suburbs, I need more space. And then I have to go out and I gotta figure out, I gotta look at all the suburbs I got as a huge thing. And so for you to take somebody around or take a group of people around for a few hours. Amazing. I can’t imagine is I’ve never heard of anyone else doing that I’m sure other people do. But it’s got to be it’s not like a unique thing that you came up with.
Kelly Carlson 31:14 Yeah, I was, you know, I was really struggling to brainstorm, you know, how do I get that type of person? You know, they’re not going to take the train out here to come to an event of mine. But I think I think like you said, just kind of what is that need? And how can I steal that? Ensure you are spending upfront kind of a lot of time upfront with a person. But you know, I think when you invest in somebody like that, they’re more likely to want to invest in you. And it also I think, can save some time on the back end, because you aren’t spinning your wheels, touring 10 different areas, because they have no idea what they want.
D.J. Paris 31:54 Yeah. And if you even if you video, some of it, and not necessarily videoing the client you’re taking out but if you take some quick little shots, you can then put those together and create clips of like, hey, we did a tour today we toured these four suburbs, we showed, you know, we showed them the downtown’s and the schools, whatever. And you could actually make that into content as well. And I would think, you know, that’s a tremendous value that an agent can provide is, you know, this idea of being the gateway to the actual house, I think is devalued a little bit right now, because we have the ability as consumers to find properties on our own, we really don’t need a realtor for that. It’s good realtors are worth their weight in gold. But it’s for I think it’s for a lot of stuff like what you’re talking about, I think it’s really like, Hey, can you help me figure out where I should live? Like, that’s the really, that’s value. Anyone can search Zillow and find a property. So I love the fact that you do that I’m I’m sort of stepping on this point a little bit, because I want our agents to know like this is the way you should think about it is what are the needs that my clients have? What is something that maybe is a decision that they are going to have to make? That’s a challenging one? And how can I make it easier for them before they even know that they want to use me, because before you buy a home, you got to figure out what area you’re at. So you’re actually doing a step before they’re even thinking necessarily about calling a realtor. So I really want to give you kudos to that. Because that is really an impressive and impressive thing. Let’s talk about when the market is slower. So right now the market is slower. Interest rates are higher than anyone would like inventory is down. What are you doing to stay busy? Because and also, by the way, majority of your friends probably aren’t moving out to the suburbs, or I don’t know, you know, majority of your city friends are probably still in the city. And maybe they’re renting maybe they’re buying but I imagine you know, not a lot of 29 year olds are probably purchasing right now. So you know, your, your peers. So what are you doing to sort of stay active, stay busy in a down market?
Kelly Carlson 34:01 Sure. And one thing I do want to clarify is that I even though I live in the western suburbs now, I’m still working on my city business too. I’m sure that might change over time. But I think especially with having at properties be all over the city, I’ve got access to, you know, the River North office and the Western Springs one. So I’m still, you know, keeping somewhat busy with that, but it is a down market things are slower. And I think it’s easy for agents to immediately freak out and my brain has gone to those places too. But I really have tried to think of it as an opportunity of, you know, this is the gift of time that I don’t have in the spring market when I’m running around with like a chicken with their head cut off. No time to breathe, and all those projects that I wanted to do I now have the time to So an easy one. for this time of year is, you know, if you’re not sending out a holiday card, you absolutely have the time. You know, whether it’s handwritten, or it’s a cool, you know, personalized postcard, I’d say, spending the time and truly writing a nice note to your clients, your vendor partners, friends, family, etc. So that’s something I’m working on these next couple of weeks. But on top of that, I think just keeping up with my CRM, and I live and breathe by that. So that is my reminder system for reaching out to everybody from past clients. And just checking in and seeing how people are doing, inviting people to go get coffee and lunches again, it’s the stuff that I didn’t have the time for that I am doing now, in addition to just really fine tuning that business plan for next year.
D.J. Paris 35:54 Yeah, let’s
Kelly Carlson 35:56 broker tours to, you know, go yes. This is your time to do it. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 36:03 Agreed. And the reason why people should go to broker opens, there’s a lot of reasons. One is to learn inventory in the area, but also to build relationships. You know, we are, we are human apes. And we, we like connection, we’re interpersonally wired. So we’re wired for connection. We’re wired for also familiarity. So if you are going to broker opens, if you’re participating in the industry, if you’re making friends, if you’re going to events and you know doing Association stuff, you’re just going to meet a lot of other agents. And guess what happens when they receive an offer for one of their listings from your buyer, and they see your name. They’re like, Oh, I know Kelly Kelly’s awesome. Does that influence maybe their decision? Well, in a perfect world, it wouldn’t. But does it? Of course it does. Of course it does. So you want to make as many relationships as you can. With other realtors, obviously, you want to play nice in the sandbox. It is a cooperative commission. But let’s remember that these are little little ways that you can give yourself a slight psychological advantage you want when somebody sees your offer coming through, you want them to be like, Oh my god, I love Kelly, I’m so glad her buyer wants to buy this. Right. That’s, that’s the reaction you want from the listing agent. And I think you know, not enough is really said about that. And yes, obviously, the listing agent wants to do the very best for their seller. But it definitely doesn’t hurt to see a familiar face from that buyer’s agent. So guys, really great suggestion there, go to the broker opens, go to the open houses, go to the events, make friends, it might just help you win a deal that you don’t know, in that you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Especially if maybe you come in at the exact same price and conditions as some other agent they go. I don’t know the other agent. I know Kelly, right. So that might be just what ends up winning you the deal. So really great suggestion. Really great suggestion there. I also wanted to you mentioned your your you do newsletters and you do some time. Oh, I want to talk about your CRM. So I know what I I wanted to ask, I want to drill down just a little bit because pretty much every brokerage has, or at least you know most brokerages offer a CRM or you can go out and purchase one on your own. What is your How does your CRM tell you what to do? In other words, do you have it set up so that every one of your prospects or clients gets a certain you get a reminder to call them on a certain day? Or email tax? Like how does that work for you?
Kelly Carlson 38:34 Yeah, so I, and I’ve worked with a few different CRMs over the years, paid for one, you know, had one to end and now I’ve got one in app properties. And I think the what makes the most sense to me is, you know, first you categorize your different groups of people into maybe, you know, your A, B and C. And so those A’s are, I’m getting a reminder, at least monthly to reach out to them. If it’s, you know, a new Open House lead or new buyer referral, etc, they are getting much more frequent reminders like that, at least, you know, a couple of times a week during that first, you know, first month or so after the introduction. But then I’ve got you know, my VCs who maybe will work with, maybe not everybody is on my newsletter, so everybody will get that monthly, but those, you know, B and C’s, they’re getting, I’m getting reminders quarterly to reach out to them. So I think spending the time it does take some time to organize your CRM and that way I think has saved me so much time nowadays, because I’m not going through everyone individually and saying I don’t really need to reach out to that person. The system just does it for me. So it’s helped me prioritize the big ones. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 39:53 yeah. So you categorize you, you. You put each one into a particular group A, B, C, etc. And then you have a particular number of touches that you wish to do over the course of a certain period of time a year, whatever. And so every day you wake up and you have a list of to dues that’s kind of automatically generated for you to keep you on track. Is that my understanding?
Kelly Carlson 40:15 Yes. And yeah, so I don’t have it, like sending out emails for me, I, I don’t, I don’t like the automated stuff. But so it just, I can decide that if I want to text the person or call them depending on the relationship, or if I saw something on their social media recently that I want to congratulate them on. But it’s just a reminder, to have some kind of touchpoint.
D.J. Paris 40:39 Yeah, do something with so and so. And whether it’s comment on a social media post, pick up the phone and call them, write them a note, text them, whatever it is, almost doesn’t matter, just that you’re doing something that lets them know that you’re thinking about them in some way. And you know, as simple as this is, I think the vast majority of agents don’t set up their systems this way, where you don’t really want to wake up every morning and go, What should I do today, that’s just too much to the candle. It’s too much to try to figure out as a realtor, it’s, you got too many responsibilities, there’s too many just options. What you really want is somebody to hand you, you know, virtually a little thing that says, These are the 10 people you have to reach out to today. And then you go okay, I just have to do that. And it just chunking your life into that’s what a CRM for me is just can make life a lot easier for just says, All you got to do today is deal with these, these 1015 things and then you never have to worry about losing touch with somebody, you don’t have to go Oh, when’s the last time I called so and so because you will let you know, unless you fell behind on your CRM tasks, you will know exactly when the last time you chatted with that person and how that worked. And again, this is all kind of like customer service slash marketing 101. But it is also something that’s easy to forget to do. It’s you know, I call these like the push ups of real estate, it’s like, it’s really hard. It’s hard to do it. But it’s a really good idea. And it’s super simple, right? So it’s super simple to pick up the phone and go, Hey, I was thinking about you how you doing? I am on a couple of realtor friends of mine, a couple of I must be on a few of their CRMs, I get a call from a friend. Every single month, he calls me, and it’s the sweetest. And I’m not, I’m never gonna be a client of his I’m a realtor as well. He calls me once a month and goes, we’re not. I won’t mention his name. But we don’t go out socially. I mean, we have before but we’re not that close. Every single month, he calls me and he’s like, I was just thinking about you. And I’m sure it showed up on a CRM to call DJ today. But you know what, it makes me feel special, it really is a nice thing. And he’s a sweetheart for doing it. Because I’m never going to be his client. But he’s, he’s, he’s still putting me through that system. And, boy, I got a call last night from him. And I was like, God, I love that you do this, even though it’s not going to benefit you directly in your business. You’re just a good dude for doing it. And I’ll tell you, people, people know that stuff. So if you can just be somebody who’s, you know, a lot of a lot of my people, service professionals in my life, don’t contact me, outside of business stuff. And I you know, I think it’s a great idea. If you don’t have a CRM, as Kelly said, now’s the time to sort of put that together. You’re not as busy right now. Now’s the time. Kelly, what other suggestions would you have for somebody who’s in their 20s? Who got or 30s? Or it doesn’t matter? The age doesn’t matter newer to the business? And it’s going oh, my gosh, this is such a hard market? Like what do you would you recommend? If you had to start all over today and you knowing what you know, now, what might you suggest open houses? We talked about? Organizing your sphere of influence? Are you putting everybody you know, in, in your, in your database? Is it like, hey, even the dry cleaner? Who knows my name? Am I putting those people in? Like how detailed do you get with yours?
Kelly Carlson 43:51 I probably should be better at adding everybody under the sun. I know, I know everybody in it. So I, you know, have scrubbed it at one point. And I didn’t know, you know, a number of emails that like you know what, that’s just taking up room and space. So I’d say I know, of at least every person in there, but I probably should get better at just adding in because it’s so easy to add somebody to a newsletter drip campaign. If they unsubscribe, they unsubscribe and that’s okay. But you never know. They might read something that resonates with them. And that’s, you know, happened a few times where I’ve not even knowing that person was subscribed and they replied, You know, I wonder newsletter, blah, blah, blah, I have a question for you. So I think leaving those opportunities open is a good reason to have them in your CRM for sure. If
D.J. Paris 44:44 you didn’t have a big sphere of influence, and you’re a newer realtor, how might you expand that? How might you start to add people to your database? If you were what would you suggest to a new agent?
Kelly Carlson 44:55 Yeah, I mean, I’d say obviously open houses kind of keep going back to that. But I mean, you got to be diligent. And after that, you might get a list of names and sit down and organize them nicely into your CRM, that’s a great way for me to build my CRM over time. Sorry, I hope you can’t hear my dog in the background right now. And then also getting involved in various organizations for maybe join an intramural League, or, you know, whatever it is get involved in your condos, one of their committees, and I think it’s a great way, you know, you’re getting to know these people. So you’re not like spamming and stealing their email addresses. But chance opportunities, where you are getting to meet a lot of new people. And there’s a way to, you know, contact them, you have their information, I see no problem with adding them. And that’s a good way to build your CRM as well. Yeah, I always,
D.J. Paris 45:56 I always love it, Brian Buffini had said that he goes, if you really want to be successful as an agent, and you’re newer, he goes meet two to five people every single day, which is not an easy task. But if you can meet two to five people a day be like, Oh, by the way, I’m a realtor, oh, if you know, if you give me your email, I’ll stay in touch with you or something. If that’s all you did, and you just met two people a day, and you did that, let’s just say 200 days out of the year. So that’s adding 400 people to your database. Within a couple of years, you’re going to be flush with business.
Kelly Carlson 46:27 Absolutely. And yeah, and for those that are building, and it’s a smaller pool, like really cultivate that, and make those people feel, you know, important and connected and taking good care of that small group of people, they’ll naturally want to, you know, introduce you to their friends and family. So I think it kind of goes back to adding value to the consumer. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 46:58 Have you run into ever any issues where you know, and again, you’re, you’re a younger person, you have a youthful look, as well. So curious if that’s ever been a challenge for you, as you’ve been growing your business as it’s like, Oh, you look so young, you know, maybe too young to be a realtor, I’m not suggesting you look so young, too young to be a realtor. But has that ever come up? And is that ever a hurdle that you’ve had to had to work with? I
Kelly Carlson 47:23 get that all the time. Still, I am sure when I’m a little bit older, I will appreciate it. But it is a challenge when you’re younger agents, and you are competing against very established brokers who have been doing this for 20 plus years. So I’d say the first thing is being willing to learn. So if you don’t have that listing, yet, like offered to help, and learn every aspect of the listing process and the buying process, and once you have data that you can price, the experience, I think that is what speaks for itself. You know, obviously doing the research, if you are up for a listing, and really, you know, getting into the data and really proving yourself that way, I think that can be helpful, but I think experience is a big part of it. And it’s hard to get that experience when you are young. So I really think the best way is just offering to help even if it’s you’re getting paid to $25 to cover a showing or $50 for an inspection or whatever it is. It’ll just make you more confident when you are in the moment with a client’s. But it can also I think, help to demonstrate, you know, your value and, and your experience.
D.J. Paris 48:45 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, just do as much as you can do as much activity as you can don’t worry about getting paid as much as getting experience. Really a great, great place to wrap up. I also want to remind all of our listeners if you have clients or you have friends that live in the city of Chicago, or the suburbs, but specifically if they’re in the city and thinking about making that move to the suburbs, but maybe you don’t work the suburbs, or maybe you’re not an agent in Chicago, maybe you’re an agent somewhere else, but you’re one of our listeners, Kelly is would be a great resource for those clients. I again, I just love the idea that she takes people on tours to help them figure out what suburb is the best fit, you’re going to such a cool thing. So if you have clients that you don’t may have that experience in any one to refer to Kelly or you have clients, you know you’re in a different state and they move here and they’re thinking about making that trip out west. Kelly B Kelly would love the opportunity to chat with you. So definitely reach out to her. And the best way to do that is you can find her she’s all over online but you go to our website Kelly Carlson, it’s Kelly, ke ll y Carlson homes.com. We will have a link to that in the show notes. Also follow her on Instagram I’m Kelly Carlson homes, you can see some of the cool, non bragging stuff that she does on there about about her projects that she works on in our interests. And also, we want I want to thank you, Kelly, on behalf of all of our listeners, for coming on our show. This is really exciting for us. I love chatting with younger realtors who are really making a huge splash. Not that’s not my opinion. That’s the National Association of REALTORS opinion about you. So I’m really grateful that you came on our show today because you really are somebody that agents should be following, even just to see what Kelly’s doing. So maybe you can get some good ideas and replicate some of that success for yourself. So follow her on Instagram, Kelly Carlson homes, go to our website. And if you think you might be a partner for Kelly, or guess what guys, people move out of the suburbs too. And they move to Florida and in Arizona and lots of places from Chicago. So maybe you’re in one of those markets. And he will say hey, Kelly, I want to know when one of your clients is looking to move, reach out to her, she would love the opportunity to chat and see if there’s a there’s a fit there. So, Kelly, on behalf of our audience, thank you, thank you so much for coming on. On behalf of Kelly and myself, the audience, we love you. We are so grateful that you stick around to the end of the episode, please tell a friend about our show. Think of one other realtor that could benefit send them a link. And also leave us a review that really really helps us with our cert with just being seen in the various podcast directories. So let us know what you think of the show. We take your suggestions very, very seriously to heart. We want to always make the show better for you. So tell a friend and leave us a review and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Kelly. Thank
Kelly Carlson 51:44 you so much DJ, this is such a treat.
3 Easy And Non-Lame Video Ideas To Attract Clients • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Dec 19, 2023
Need some fresh ideas that will get clicks? Learn from Video Boot Camp educator Kim Rittberg 3 easy and impactful ideas you can make today!
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today our resident video expert Kim Rydberg is going to show you three easy videos you can make today that will get people to click. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:33 Right today, we are talking about three easy videos that people will actually want to watch. And not just people, the buyers and sellers and potential clients. Hey, everyone, I’m Kim Rydberg. I’m an award winning video marketer. And I have my signature video bootcamp program that has seen so many agents come through. I love teaching agents like you how to grow your business with video because your phone right there is the most cost efficient way to market yourself. And the thing you need to do in 2024, if you haven’t done it yet, you’re not too late ish, sort of just kidding, but it’s never too late. And I really want to focus today on the three videos that you can make easily that people will actually watch. And I don’t mean that in a snarky way. But a lot of people are making videos that people don’t watch and it ends up being frustrating. You’re wasting your time you’re wasting your money. So I’m gonna advise you on what videos you should make that will be fruitful that people will click on you will connect with people and then you will actually sell more houses. How did I get here, I have in the past year have spoken at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention, the women’s Real Estate Investment Summit. Before that, I was a TV news producer for 10 years writing and producing stories about all types of different topics. And I launched the first ever video unit for Us Weekly magazine, or to People Magazine, Netflix. What you need to know is that I love storytelling. And I really understand how to make good content that makes people want to buy from you. I shifted from journalism into branded content, which then brought me into real estate specifically, and I’ve had hundreds of agents across the country, take my video bootcamp course and work with me one on one to actually bring in clients. So I’m gonna sprinkle a little of that. Oh, and if you’re on the video, you can see I got some trophies in the background because I’ve won some awards for my video work, but it’s not about me. It’s about you and how I can help you make some money. So one idea that actually I was it’s on my list, I did my video bootcamp course I have a workbook that I give you all these great story prompts. And we were talking about in a brainstorm one video is a great video that I think every real estate agent who has any stories to share should be making is a story about a crazy moment in real estate. So real estate is known, you know, for it’s up, it’s down. It’s crazy. You you you think you’re seeing a beautiful farm you walk in, you’re like, oh, you know, someone, someone in my video bootcamp said they were going to do a showing, and they walked in, and someone was like, in bed, in bed during the showing. And, you know, the deal didn’t happen. But that’s a really, really funny story. These sorts of stories where you’re showing people who you are your personality, that you’re like a really good person, a cool person, a relatable person. It also shows people sort of subconsciously through the backdoor, that you are someone who sold a lot of homes, because if you have crazy stories, it means you sold enough homes, bought enough homes so that you have stories, right. So we’re kind of like backdoor bragging that I’m a successful real estate agent. But on top of that, people will click on crazy stories because the stories are funny, like any sort of crazy story people want to hear. They don’t know how it’s going to end. It has an element of surprise those are really good storytelling tools. So number one, a great video to make is sharing a crazy real estate story and it doesn’t have to be like the most epic thing but it could just be like something funny that happened. And this is something to remember, this is the sort of video that will appeal to anybody who wants to hear a funny story but also other agents will chime in engagement is engagement, you really do want people to weigh in and get that engagement going. The more people comment, the more people other people comment. So it really does help out a lot. And another, this is funny, another one of my agents shared a story where like, they were selling a property to a celebrity, and it just like went totally haywire. And the person came in, I think the person was like, really tall, the ceilings were too short. Anyway, that was funny. And so number one crazy real estate story, make sure to share that. And the reason why that is important. And same as with these other ones is, when you’re thinking about what videos to make, you always need to step back and build a strategy. And that’s something I do with all of my students, my clients, before we ever hit record, we really build out that strategy. What am I consistently showing up and talking about? What am I consistently showing up and teaching being really steady and consistent with that, so someone goes to your page and knows who you are immediately. So you’re building the know like, and trust factor making someone trust you, like you relate to you on a personal level, because this is going to be a big transaction, right, you’re going to be their partner in all of this, it’s very important to remember that. And in addition to in addition to the crazy real estate story, a behind the scenes of a deal. Could be a great, great, great video, one video I did with one of my real estate agents, he, you know, one, a good way to start to give ideas is just start writing down moments that have happened, moments in deals, things that were challenging things that were interesting, big wins. So one of his wins, he had done a letter writing campaign to get someone to sell. And he ended up bringing on his house selling it went really well. He got a good commission. So what I thought was alright, let’s turn that story into how I turned 55 cents a stamp or whatever stamp was at that point, how I turned 55 cents into $50,000. And it’s taking the idea that you can write a letter and all it costs is the cost of the stamp, but you’re making this huge commission off of it. That hasn’t really good headline in it. So bringing people behind the scenes of your deal, did it almost fall apart one of my other I have these two ages. I love them. They’re based in Westchester, New York, they by mistake killed a blueberry bush of when they were getting the house ready for sale. Instead of hiding behind that they just had fun with it. And they sort of talked about it like the time we killed our clients, blueberry bush, and they just kind of had fun with it and made it like not such a big deal. That’s a great idea. So the behind the scenes of a deal. It could be did the deal almost fall apart? How did you salvage it? Did you end up selling it for a lot more than you were expecting? Was there a bidding war? Did you show up and you thought it was x? And it was actually why like whatever is happening, bring people into it because people love to hear stuff that they don’t know. People are voyeurs. That is why they’re online. Alright, so we got the crazy real estate story or behind the scenes of a deal. That’s idea number one.
All right, the next one, as I mentioned before, I worked in TV for a long time, and I worked at a news magazine show called inside edition, and a lot of their segments are like, you’ve never seen a room like this. I’m like, oh, what’s in the room is it like, filled with spiders, and you know, kind of selling it as this wow factor. So you can sometimes isolate a thing in a house or apartment, an area and focus in on that one thing. So selecting something that’s really big, or really small. It’s not the words not hyperbolic, I’m forgetting the word. But making something like on a big scale. So here’s an example. One of my clients who went to this, the showing it was I don’t even think it was his it wasn’t his property, he just went to the showing. It had a bed, that is remote control bed that Phil that comes down from the ceiling. I mean, that’s very, very cool. So the video was just about the bed. That video got millions of views. So when you’re thinking about how you’re going to present, not every video inside a home has to be a tour. Sometimes you can go to a place and there’s like something really interesting. And you can just zoom in on that moment. And make that big, right? It could be another one of my agents was telling me about that. People are really wanting plunge pools, like really cold water plunge pools. So that could be like a reveal. You know, I think she and I built together that idea is the number one thing clients are wanting right now. A plunge pool and how you can make that video is you can either just film the actual thing you’re talking about, or you could film you’re getting into it, right? I mean, I hate cold water. So I’m not gonna volunteer myself, but you could be getting into that pool and you know, expressing like, oh my gosh, it’s really cold, but it feels so good. I feel really alive. So when we’re talking about the next one, it’s something big, something small, something on the extreme. It’s on the extremes. And again, it doesn’t have to be your own property. This could be someone else’s property, but picking something out, it could be something amazing on the ceiling, right? It could be like an old tin ceiling. And likewise, you could also pick out something similar to this in your town or your city, right, as a real estate agent, you are the expert, you are people’s part, you’re like the tourism office, right? So you can be highlighting those factors. And as I mentioned before, actually, several of my agents have been keeping it real. So you might have heard them. Kathy, Jessica, Josh, Debbie, Steven, anyway, a lot of my agents have been on the show, and they’ve talked about the things that they show how they market what they bring in. So something really big and something really special is a great way to really highlight that. Now, the last one that I think is super important that people overlook is something personal, a video that people click on something personal, that you’re revealing. I’m not talking about like the deep dark secret that you like, have never shared with anybody, I’m not talking about that. But when you’re online, you’re really allowing for people to get to know you through any door, the front door, or the side door or the back door or whatever you want people to just know about you to engage with your content. So not every single video should be home tour. Not every single video or piece of content should be you and your dog. Okay, so we step back and we create a really, really great big strategy. That’s what we do. In my video bootcamp. And in my in my client work, we always sit down and create that strategy. But a big part of that strategy is connecting people to you as a person. So one video you could do is five things you don’t know about me. And it’s just you can get video of you doing work, walking through a house, walking your dog, the footage can be whatever you want it to be. And you can either voice it over or add text, but bring in those factors like so for me. Something you don’t know about me. I would maybe say, Hey, I’m Kim, some things you didn’t know about me. I backpacked I took a gap year and I backpack for a year. I used to play lacrosse. I am a certified scuba diver. I speak Spanish. I hate olives. And I have two children. So it’s kind of a mix of things that some people can connect with me on. And other people are like, Oh, that’s interesting. So maybe if someone has kids, they might say, Oh, how old are your kids? Maybe if someone’s a scuba diver, they’d be like, Oh, I snorkel or I scuba dive, you know, and they want to comment on that. Weirdly, people always comment about my olives. They’re like, how can you hit all of your horrible evil person, but it’s true, I do hate olives. So again, you’re really trying to bring people into your life. And we’re not again, that one is not about I won this award, I close this much deals, I earned this much money. This personal video is not about that. It’s really about bringing people in to get to know you as a human. So as we know, you’re trying to expand your sphere of influence. And so some of your deals are gonna be coming through friends, family, cousins, former colleagues, people, you just met other business owners in the area. So when you’re putting out that personal video, you’re allowing people to pull back the curtain and get to know you a little bit. You will also see, as you make the video, put that video out, people will show up and comment that you did not realize followed you at all or have been active. And so that’s a really a good start to continue to engage with people, people you haven’t seen in 10 years, people you just met last week. Don’t forget that. The social media world is an online coffee shop. So don’t treat it like, Oh, I’m gonna post this no one’s gonna comment or like, I’m not going to look I’m going to I’m too weird. I feel weird about it. I’m just going to post in running, go get my coffee, no, post it, come back later. See who liked it. You commented on it respond to every single comment. That’s true for every post. But people will comment on a personal story in different ways that aren’t going to comment on your home tour. I’m not saying don’t do the home tour, I feel very strongly about home tours. You need to do them. Sometimes you get business from them fine. Sometimes, they’re not building you up as this amazing expert, you need to layer on other content on top of that, and Home Tour should not be 90% of your content. It should be some percent, but not 90%. So we are talking about those three videos that will get people to click let me talk about I already told told you why people will click on each one. The craziest real estate story. Oh, I want to go back sorry about personal. So this is something I think is really, really important. And I’ve been working with more of my agent clients to push more of them out of this. So one of my agents, Jessica, I love her. She’s a great personality and she has kids and I’ve been pushing her to include more content of her as a mom and like in her regular life and being more of like every person all of us I think kind of our in our professional world. And so pushing ourselves to open up more and show more of that and she’s gotten crazy engagement sky high engagement so much more than before. One of my other age I just had this great video about
an inspirational motivational video actually about changing their life. They went, I think they had a huge weight loss and like change their lifestyle, but they did a video about that. And it works because I think that’s a part of your story. And that’s a part of who you are, that really lets people get to know you better. So the personal can be very powerful when layered in with professional as a part of a strategy. So I don’t want to see dog walking photo dog walking video, and then like beach vacation video, and then shopping video like that doesn’t that doesn’t necessarily connect as a strategy. But when you have when we work together, we create the strategy. Some of its professional and some of it is personal but tied together. Alright, so we’re talking today about the three easy videos that will get people to click we have sharing behind the scenes of a deal or a crazy real estate story. Awesome. These are great ideas, they will get a lot of people to be like, Oh my god, are you kidding? All of these ideas. Don’t forget to engage with people who comment on them, ask a question, connect with them in a real way. So we got the craziest real estate story that you have something really big, something really small, just like zooming in on a special factor. And then a third video is something personal about you. Now, how do you make these videos, you can make the videos however you feel comfortable doing it. A video when you make a video, it can be as simple as you talking to camera. Don’t forget to add captions when people watch without sound they can follow along. You can also show footage of what you’re talking about. So when we’re talking about something really big, or something really small, you’re filming that item, you’re either talking over it or adding text for the personal video. For the Personal about you video, you can either share photos of yourself from different parts of your lives. Or, or you can film yourself doing something related to that, like if I’m going to share that I speak Spanish or but it’s not as visible that I hit all this, I might have like me picking up balls and throw them in the garbage. If I have a video, if I mentioned that I love to travel, I would probably put in a photo of me in Cambodia when I was younger. And so I would really want to bring that story to life. Again, if you’re not super comfortable making the videos. Don’t worry, in my video bootcamp class, you’ll learn how to do that. But keep it simple. I always say Keep It Simple until you’re ready to do a little bit more. So I want to see you make these videos and even if you can’t make a full video, do it as just an Instagram story. If you’re on Instagram, you record it, you post it, it goes away after a day. So if you don’t love it, that’s okay, record it, post it and tag me in it. You can always reuse the story later. Make sure to tag me I’m at Kim Redburn KMRITB RG and I mentioned before video bootcamp, I run this video bootcamp course for agents across the country. They’re all seeing higher engagement more client leads, they’re opening new business through it. It’s fantastic. It’s a live coaching class. So message me on Instagram. I also have a free download 10 tips to make videos that make you money in less time. More money in less time. That’s like key. So I have a free download and you can grab that in the show notes. You can grab that from my Instagram. And if you’re just joining me for video bootcamp, make sure to message me again I’m at Kim Rydberg K IMRIT, t b e r g and I love helping you unleash the power of video. To grow your business. You really can supercharge your business with video it’s just about understanding how exactly to do that. I love to keeping it real people to make sure to tag me message me on Instagram or Facebook wherever you’re at, and I hope you have a great day.
How To Do Both Residential & Commercial Business in 2024 • Pieter Hanson
Dec 14, 2023
Pieter Hanson talks about how he transitioned from a banking career into commercial real estate business and finally to residential real estate. Pieter discusses how his health struggles have impacted his life and priorities. Pieter also talks about today’s real estate market, how agents can stop exiting the business and what are the useful skills for agents even in the era of AI. Last, Pieter discusses keeping in touch in between transactions and how he does that.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Can a realtor be successful in both residential and commercial? Well, a lot of people would say no, but we found somebody who would say yes, stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Peter Hanson. But before we get to Peter, just a couple of quick reminders. Actually, I have something new to say. I normally say the same things every time but I have a new thing. So it was coming to my attention that via the different podcast apps that only about 300 of our 515 episodes show up that is a limitation of what’s called an RSS feed. It’s not we would love to have all of our episodes available. So we actually do but you’re only going to see the top the most recent 300 in you know, whatever podcast app, you might be listening to us. And so if you want to actually go back further, and many people do, because the idea was to create this library of content that would really be applicable anytime. So I’d love for you to grieve and go back into the archives. Well, how do you do that? Well, you can go to our website, keeping it real pod.com every single episode we’ve ever done is there and that’s probably the only place you can find all of them until they update technology and allow for more than 300 episodes to pass through a fee. But anyway, you guys can go to the website if you want to. We’d love to have you check out the website. We’re very proud of it. And you can listen to every episode we’ve ever done. So thank you for that. Also, please leave us a review and tell a friend but let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Peter Hanson.
Today my guest is Peter Hanson with real broker in Quad Cities which if you’re not familiar with the Quad Cities, this is what borders Illinois and Iowa there’s four cities as as you might suspect, two on each side. This is like the northwest corner of Illinois, and the northeast corner of Iowa. But let me tell you more about Peter. Now after high school, Peter joined the US Navy after his time in the Navy and then he went to college. He actually worked in retail and also then private banking. In 2007. He resigned from the bank and opened a bar and grill that is still thriving today. 18 years later, congratulations for making it through the pandemic also amazing. But that’s not all. He then got his real estate license in both Illinois and Iowa in that same year. So he worked for a local hometown broker in their commercial division from 2007 to 2014. And to 2014 he transitioned to the residential division, where he practiced both commercial and residential real estate and in 2022. If that wasn’t enough, he partnered with a local microbrew and opened another restaurant just this last October I guess last October to October Scott. He has a long term girlfriend named Julie also my mom’s name, who owns a dog kennel with her sister and live and they live on the property. He enjoys golfing, fishing, hunting and casual Jeep and or Harley riding on the weekends. He has one daughter and three grandkids who live here in my hometown. Well not my hometown, but where I live Chicago. Please follow Peter out his website which is Peter Hanson. realtor.com Peter spelled p i e t e r so Peter with an eye at the beginning p i e t Are Hansen realtor.com You can also find him on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, we will have links to all of that in the show notes. He’s probably the only Peter Hanson, which is p i e, t r, so you can find them really easily. Or you can click the links to his social media, right from our show notes. Peter, welcome to the show.
Pieter Hanson 5:18 Thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 5:21 Really excited to speak with you. It’s amazing, all the things you’ve done. And I think the a lot of what you what you’ve done in your career are some of the hardest professions I’m really, really impressed. Usually people have success at one thing, you are consistently having success and a number, a number of buckets. And I am always so impressed by talking to people who operate at a high level. So tell us see, so from what I understand your story correctly, you went into the Navy, came out, went to school, then had a couple of jobs in retail, and then and then in banking, and then why the switch to real estate just out of curiosity. So I
Pieter Hanson 6:05 opened up the bar and grill at the same time I got my real estate license, and the bar was always a dream of mine to do I had an opportunity, I liked my job at the bank, and the bank is still a great friend of mine and a great resource and, and a great community bank here in the Quad Cities. But I was getting more and more responsibility that I really didn’t like, I was having to work later hours and, and I just thought you know what I’m gonna do this bar thing I’m gonna get out of the bank, and I need some income. And, and I thought, you know, I’ve always thought real estate, people who are successful were successful because of not necessarily how smart they were, but how many people liked them. And I felt like I had a pretty significant sphere of influence, a pretty great background from the banking and, and the retail side and how to deal with customers and people in the public. And so I thought, hey, I’m gonna open this bar, and I’ll ease into the real estate thing. So that’s kind of how it worked. It’s
D.J. Paris 7:11 amazing that you took on two things at the same time, both of which required tremendous activity. However, maybe one feeds the other in a certain way, I suspect, it’s probably been times where patrons of the bar have ended up becoming clients as well. I’m assuming that happens once in a while. So
Pieter Hanson 7:33 to your point, I got into real estate, if you people can remember, 2007 2008 was probably the worst time to ever make this change. And I told myself, that if I can survive in 2007, and 2008 going forward in real estate, if I can survive, then I am going to be positioned perfectly to survive when times are good. And we know that that’s a cyclical thing. And it’s going to drop and up and drop and down. And so I chose that as a challenge and an opportunity to thrive. And I do think that there are some parallels between the bar and real estate. However, when I went into real estate, it was in the commercial division. That’s right. Yeah. And around the Quad Cities, the commercial division is a good old boy network, if you know what I mean. I mean, I were in Chicago, too. I was a newcomer with no experience. And I really had to scrape and fight for everything that I got. Having said that all these people that I’m meeting through the bar, and and all these new relationships I’m establishing are asking me if I can help them buy a house. And I thought to myself, I if I can sell a million dollar building, I can I can sell a house? Well, my broker didn’t allow that. The commercial broker that I work for said, You’re a commercial agent, you refer all those. So I started referring those leads. And finally in 2014, I actually added up the commission that I would have received had I not referred them and I thought this is dumb, I got to get out of commercial and into residential. So that’s how that worked.
D.J. Paris 9:18 Wow. And now you do you do both. And now
Pieter Hanson 9:22 I do both. Yes. So one of the things that when I when I got my license and I worked for a local broker, one of the things and I and I actually went from the commercial broker to the residential broker was the same broker. But the policy the company policy is that that you can sell residential and commercial but you say it can’t sell commercial and residential. And the way they explained it to me was that if you went to the ER to get your fingers stitched up because you cut it with a knife, you’d let a thoracic surgeon so your finger up right. But if you went to the emergency room for How to Have a heart transplant, you wouldn’t let an ER doc do that. Right? And so they kind of compare that that, you know, if you can do commercial, you can handle residential, but the same does not always work the opposite way.
D.J. Paris 10:14 How do you feel about that? Now? Do you agree with that? I will tell you my my opinion, it depends again, on the sector of commercial because certain sectors are certainly more complicated, and, you know, industrial buildings and land development. And some of those things, to me are like almost like Alien and foreign. But I don’t totally disagree with that. I think there is some intelligence there that a residential agent ought to, in many cases refer to a commercial broker, but a commercial broker, certainly, I think the training tends to be a lot stronger for commercial, there tends to be a just a lot, you’re serving a lot more masters in a deal. There’s a lot that can go wrong, and you just are exposed to a lot of different things. But I’m curious what what are your thoughts today on on that policy?
Pieter Hanson 11:01 I do agree with you. 100%, a commercial agent, you know, commercial is Buyer beware. So there aren’t as many disclosures and cover your, your rear end kind of documents, but at the same time, it’s a slower sales cycle. And you really have to learn to think outside the box, get creative and understand spreadsheets and, and how accountants feel because a commercial decision, commercial building is sold on a financial basis based on the numbers not Oh, I love this building, I have to have it. Whereas a house is a very emotional decision. And, and as long as you qualify can make it happen. That’s
D.J. Paris 11:41 amazing. I have my brother in law is a commercial broker in Tampa, and he works with a lot of retail, and shopping centres and things of that nature. And so, which is a little closer, I guess, in some ways to, to residential, maybe. But it’s, you know, he can work on deals for two or three years before they close. And then when they close, it’s a wonderful day, but it is a lot of hand wringing and sweating for those three years. Well, yeah, for sure. For sure that residential provides probably more stability. And also just, you know, there’s just maybe just more opportunity there in certain markets,
Pieter Hanson 12:21 well, in the train, the transaction is way more fun to you know, there’s nothing more satisfying than helping a first time homebuyer or, or helping somebody find a home for their new family that they absolutely love. And you get to work directly with them. And it’s, it’s not as intimidating and it’s just a it’s a it’s it’s more stressful in certain certain circumstances. But it’s also more fun.
D.J. Paris 12:47 And by the way, we should also mention that, you know, you had a health challenge in the early in the mid 90s, which I’m curious if if you’re willing to share a little bit about that, sort of how that has impacted you, your life and your priorities. I didn’t mention that, of course earlier. So, so
Pieter Hanson 13:07 I was working at a local clothing store, which was a, you know, for those people in Chicago, the old Mark shale type of of store and high end clothing store and the gentleman that owned it was about 10 years older than me and was an amazing mentor, when it came to customer service and work ethic and doing the right thing at the right time. So I worked for him for 12 years, and towards the end of my tenure there. I got very sick and ended up having a bone marrow transplant at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. And and that was a pretty scary experience because the mortality rate at that time was wasn’t super great for for what I was going through but, but I survived. I’m here and the lesson that I took out of that is that one never give up and always have faith that that things will work out to never worry about stuff you have no control over because you just it’s not worth your your your sweat equity. And three, live every moment like it was your last and take chances and work hard and it’ll all work out.
D.J. Paris 14:16 I couldn’t I couldn’t add on to that at all. That sounds pretty like a pretty great credo to live one’s life. I want to talk about your success in a sense of, you know, achieving the goals that you set out for not necessarily anyone else’s measure of success. You do a number of different things you do them well. And I’m curious in in real estate, sort of. If you know for our listeners, what are some of the things that you or activities or thought processes that you have that you think separate you from maybe other agents that aren’t having that kind of success or what might you coach somebody to start doing or do more For over 2024
Pieter Hanson 15:02 One of the biggest things is commitment. And, to your point, when we were talking about the other business that businesses that I was in, I was married to that first bar that still thriving today 24/7 I, I was always there, I had to be. And so the real estate, you know, my first couple years, in real estate, my transactions were four and five, because I wasn’t dedicating myself to the real estate, but it was allowing me to have this in the background, do as much as I can when I can. And then as I got further along in the bar and grill and, and had a management team and could step away from that a little bit, lo and behold, my traction, my transactions went from four to eight to 18 to 28 to 36. And, and the more transaction I have, the less time I spent at the bar. So commitment, commitment, I think is committing yourself to it is the biggest thing. The second thing is having a support network at home, that allows you to answer that phone call every time it rings, to leave somewhere on a Sunday afternoon when you’re watching the football game, and show a property to to stay up late at night and put multiple offers together and to solicit the help of your family. If in fact, you need some help to get something done. So the family network has to totally understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and be committed to your success as much as you are. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 16:39 that’s a really good point. Realtors tend to be, it’s tough to set boundaries as as an as an agent, it’s tough to set a schedule, because of course, things fly at you in real time. And they often seem very urgent, and sometimes they are urgent. And so it becomes challenging for agents. And I think back to what you said about sort of being a part time agent, initially, and I think, you know, it’s one of those things, which I hear this a lot because I talk to a lot of new people who just pass their exam. And they say, Hey, you know, I’m just going to be part time for now I have this other job, I need the steady income. And I always say I completely understand I mean, I you have to pay your bills, you have responsibilities. And I say it’s just a harder path. It’s a tougher path. Because you’re you’re now having to do these two things, which both are really full time jobs, even if even if you think the real estate thing is just part time, it’s still going to come up when it comes up. And it’s going to be not probably in alignment with your other job schedule. And, and there are lots of people that will say just quit the other job and do real estate full time. And that would be great. In an ideal world for everyone who is, you know, wouldn’t be too much stressing about paying the bills. But that’s not the majority of us. So I’m glad to hear I love hearing success stories where people because it’s so easy to tell somebody will just quit and do this all all and you’ll be fine. And maybe you will and if you do the right if you do the hard work you probably will be but boy it’s a stressful tough but a few years as you get into real estate as you know, foreign foreign five transactions does not make much of a salary. But yes certainly gets gets you on the path. And yeah, but it allows you to then probably find the confidence to or the the reasoning to go, you know, I can do this. And now I can have somebody helping me here at the bar at a bar restaurant. So So yeah, the part time versus full time thing is always such an interesting conversation because people get very adamant about their opinion one way or the other what somebody should do, and I always say, hey, you know, your financial situation better than me. But, you know, hopefully, in an ideal world, you’d get to a place where you can do this full time. But it but it’s a tough path. I mean, it just,
Pieter Hanson 18:52 I liked it. I like the people that that say to me, you know, hey, I’d love to get into real estate, what you know, how do you like it? And I tell them that about it? And they say yeah, I’m just, you know, I’m just really looking for more flexibility, a more flexible schedule. And I kind of I react the way you just did. And I’m like, Well, you’re right, you do get some flexibility. You’ll never miss your kid’s Christmas concert. You’ll never miss their ballgame. You’ll never miss their First Communion. But guess what? When it’s over, you’re going right back to work if you’re gonna do anything.
D.J. Paris 19:24 Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s, it’s how, you know, I was talking, I was just at the gym just before I came here and I have a trainer and it’s kind of funny. It’s, it’s similar to what you just said, we were talking about training. And we do like weightlifter style workouts. It’s a lot of heavy weights, resistance, things like that. And I was telling my trainer been with her three and a half years and I was kind of laughing because it is kind of funny. I said working out is all about how much pain can you tolerate and pain maybe isn’t the right word discomfort, I guess is maybe a better word. How much discomfort can you tolerate and are you pushing against resistance? And that’s how you build muscle. And it’s pretty much as you know, of course, and our listeners know how you get better at any skill, really. But you have to be willing to tolerate some discomfort, you have to be willing to go to the, you know, go to the child’s recital and then go, I gotta race home after this, and I’ve got work to do. And yes, that is not fun for anybody to do. But it is certainly what is required. And so, you know, realtors, you know, a lot of times only learn that once they’re in, and then they’re like, Oh, I didn’t realize the commitment. For sure, would love to talk about, again, back to sort of your success, you know, being dedicated, fully dedicated, and understanding what is required. How well actually, let’s talk about this year, because we’re talking you talked about the market, of course, being cyclical, we are in a difficult market, I would assume in most, our sorry, difficult time to be a realtor in most markets in the country. Occasionally, I talked to somebody who’s up 50% for the year, and they’re, they’re the unicorn, most people are struggling, at least our agents, our agents are struggling here, we have almost 800. And, you know, most almost all of their productions were down for this year, which of course, is is not fun. But I think you brought up a really good point, when you said that you started in 2007. For those that again, don’t remember, that was a very difficult time. Now in a in a in a way, though, it was really the best possible time for you. Because as people were exiting the business, you were getting in, and you were like, if I can survive this, then it’s gonna be really not as scary the next time when it’s when it’s a market. And I’m curious how you view today’s market, I we’re seeing a lot of agents exit the business, we have a holding company, which is for agents who don’t practice, we went from like 800 agents in our holding company, which is just, you know, a place to hold the license to over 1000. Within this year, just so many people leaving from from the industry. Curious, like if you know what you think about that? And how agents could, you know, stop, you know, exiting the business. I
Pieter Hanson 22:12 feel like if and I don’t know this to be true, but I suspect this to be true that if you looked at the jump that you made in the past year from 800, to over 1000. If you looked at those agents, my guess is that a majority of those agents have not been Realtors for five years. And so yeah, I feel I feel like they got in the business when times were great. And deals were being thrown at people at a crazy rate. And you had to be an absolute idiot not to get some deals done and make it you know, but now now they’re actually having to work there. And you’re having to market themselves. They’re having to, to work weekends, do open houses do things to get creative, and they’re like, God, this sucks. I’m, I’m working way too much. And so and so that it’s almost like attrition, you know, they just get the retention going and get out. And I think that’s, that’s probably and I’m down this year as well, a little bit. But, you know, I opened a new restaurant last year, and we opened a new brokerage and I left the old firm and started the new firm. And there’s reasons for that. But I feel like those of us that have been in the business for, you know, 1520 25 years are a little bit insulated, because we’ve got our residual clients and our reputation. And so I feel that the the economy does affect it some but but we’re the veterans are a little more insulated than the newcomers. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 23:34 And speaking of a veteran in a different way, forgot to, of course, thank you for your service as as as a Navy man, to our country, and to all of our listeners here. So thank you. Awesome. Thank
Pieter Hanson 23:47 you. Well, so
D.J. Paris 23:49 yeah, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about activity. So if you were a brand new agent today, and I want to sort of set this up. So Peter was was talking about, you know, a lot of these people who have like in our, in our case, our other our holding company. Yes, he’s right. The vast majority of people who have joined our holding company recently are people who either were nearing retirement or just like I’m done, or they were within their first few years, not doing well, and realizing they didn’t want to pay their MLS dues going forward. So, of course, that all that factors in but if I was a brand new agent today, I would actually be excited, because I would there are people leaving the industry, which means there’s market share to pick up. And I think now is the time where agents should really step on the gas in their marketing efforts in their outreach efforts to try to pick up some of these, some of these these clients that you know, maybe they’re not buying right this moment or selling right this moment. But you know, they will be at some point and their realtor may be exiting and leaving. Or just, you know, not working as hard right now. That’s another thing that happens. Even successful agents in down markets tend to, to relax a little bit more. So I think now’s a really good time to get in, although not certainly an easy time. Curious, your thoughts. So
Pieter Hanson 25:10 I couldn’t agree with you more regarding that. I do feel that when it comes to work ethic and marketing and timing, you know, when in 2007, when I got my license, Facebook was just kind of a brand new thing. And the kids today that are starting to be realtors, and even the, you know, late 50s, early 60s, agents like myself, are having to adapt to the digital age, that computer isn’t going anywhere that Facebook is only going to get stronger marketing and digital media is incredible how you can get your, your name out there and shoot high quality videos. And if you can embrace that, and you can run with that you will be successful going forward. I struggle with that a lot. But, but I happen to have a team that is very good at it that we collaborate together and they’re helping me succeed in that arena. But I feel like agents today are poised way better than, than those of us that used to look in an MLS book, literally a paper book. No, no online stuff, you know, and now, your client comes to you more educated than you sometimes on a property because of the information that they can find. So I feel like the agents today are really set up for success if they if they take advantage of the digital because if they don’t, they’re going to be left behind and the AI for that matter. That’s a whole nother issue. But how amazing is AI and as scary as it is, it’s going to be incredibly helpful in our industry used properly.
D.J. Paris 26:53 I used chat GPT this morning to calculate the probability of i I’ve met my producer for this podcast is a lovely woman zonna. She’s been with me for four years she lives in Kosovo, she’s originally from Albania. It just so happens that I met another woman unrelated to Zonta independent, who is on I’ve never met in person we meet for we we talk almost every day virtually, of course, he lives in Kosovo. And I met a woman recently, who not only knows Ana, which is complete coincidence, went to school with her worked in the same office as her at the same company, even at one point, and now lives in Chicago. And I said I wonder what the probability of that is. And so I put chat GPT to work and and it didn’t come up with it gave all sorts of interesting equations and eventually said it was one in four quadrillion was the probability which I suspect is probably I don’t even know if quadrillion was an actual word. But I guess it comes after billion trillion, I guess, quadrillion, but regardless, it’s a very low probability. But I love that chat, GBT could figure out some estimate of that. And I think as as realtors, you know, the AI is is going to be really cool, because it will allow us to be more persuasive in our listing descriptions that already does that. It allows us to maybe give some great marketing ideas. You know, if I was an agent, I go, I don’t really know what I should do today. I would go straight to chat GBT and say Hey, can you give me five activities that I could do right now, as a realtor? That might be a good idea for outreach or meeting new people, or I want you to add more people to my database. Where should I go? You know, and there’s all sorts of great suggestions that a chat GBT can have. I have a friend of mine, who’s a CEO of a digital storage company. And he doesn’t have a chief marketing officer because he has built one inside of chat. GBT. So I’m our chief marketing officer. So maybe my jobs on the line. But he’s doing that now. So there are some really cool things coming. And I’m curious, I all this being said, I the My question is, where do you think the important skills that a realtor is going to need or needs today or needs for the future? If it isn’t, hey, I’m the gatekeeper to this building or this property? Yes, they’re going to they have access to pretty much all of that data and information now, Zillow basically changed changed that whole dynamic, but what are the skills that you think realtors are still valued and useful for today?
Pieter Hanson 29:26 The every, every deal is different. And even though it might be cookie cutter to a certain extent, there’s certain steps that need to happen. People don’t know how to negotiate first of all, they have no clue. They talk too much. There’s a lot of things that a realtor does if he educates his buyer seller properly to ensure that that is going to transaction is going to go smoothly and that everything is anticipated. I like to find myself a prop One find her not a problem solver. I want to find the problem before it happens. And so I don’t have to solve it on the spot. And I think people that try to do this on their own, leave money on the table, frustrate themselves and inevitably lose deals because they don’t know what they’re doing. And everyone thinks with the internet, they can they can handle it. And you know, some people probably can, honestly, but I think the majority of the general public needs us desperately. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 30:31 I think there’s a lot of soft skills or interpersonal skills that come up that are really important stress management, emotional regulation, under understanding how to deal with adversity, and urgent, bad news that comes up. And in every transaction, there’s some bad news that happens at some point, and it’s going to come up a lot of times unexpectedly, and then it’s about how do I make sure my client is able to remain stable during this? Or what can I do to keep my, my, my client moving forward, or at least understanding sort of the gravity of what’s going on, without succumbing to, you know, sort of, you know, being completely stressed out, because, of course, nobody wants a stressed out client, I went, I bought a condo three, three or so years ago. And even though I’ve been in this industry, I mean, I’m not a practicing agent, but I am licensed. But even being around top realtors, like you and all the agents, here we have about 800 agents in our company, you would think I would have handled that a lot better. And I did not I was stressed. I was like, convinced I was making a horrible decision. I had to I had to basically at some point, I sort of went to that philosophy of an attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client. So I said, I’m not going to represent myself because I am not, I am not the the most objective party here and I’m just getting too emotional. And it made me really appreciate realtors that are excellent at keeping things, you know, decoding the information that’s being sent from the other side, putting it in a way that doesn’t make me completely nuts and or the client completely stressed out. So I think those interpersonal skills check GBT hasn’t yet solved for that maybe it will someday, I don’t know. But certainly, the you know, the the human skills are really, really important. And it made me realize that after my last purchase, well, and
Pieter Hanson 32:33 I and I think I agree with everything that you said. And you know, I aligned myself with real, because of those technology options between the Knowledge Library, their, their revenue, share their bolt, their AI, or their AI, this company is leading the industry in, in what’s happening in the future. And, and as much as I am a hometown guy, and as much as I am a local shop local, be local, I own businesses, I want people to support me, in this industry. I just don’t feel like the local brokers have the funds and to keep up with technology and provide their agents with life changing financial, security and future that that everybody’s going to need and need to have if they’re going to succeed in this industry.
D.J. Paris 33:27 Yeah, I agree with you. 100%, as well, I would like to talk about customer service, actually not customer service during the sale. So we’re going to talk about customer care, I guess maybe it’s the better word. I’m not sure what the official word is. But keeping in touch in between transactions. So we know somebody buys a home, depending on your market, they may be moving five to 10 years, who knows every markets a bit different. But you know, there’s some predictable patterns there. So you’re going to have this period of time, where likely they’re not going to actually need you day to day to help them with a transaction. But what are your suggestions for making sure that the client doesn’t forget who you are number one, and we say that sort of is a bit being a bit facetious. But people there are there are amazing studies out there that will show there’s a certain percentage of people who like their realtor, if the transaction closes, and then two years later, they’re like, I don’t remember who our realtor was. It’s a much higher number than then I’ve ever thought happened to my parents. They sold a property and out east and great realtor and then two years later, I go What was I per Realtors name? My dad’s like, I have no idea. So that is that happens. And so I’m curious on how you think about making sure that that doesn’t happen, of course with your clients. So
Pieter Hanson 34:47 I tend to if you see something, say something is my attitude. If I think that I need to call DJ, I haven’t talked to DJ, I just pass DJ on the interstate, I saw him at the grocery store. I used to think to myself, Oh, I gotta call DJ. And then two days later, I’d run into DJ and I’d say, oh, DJ, I was just gonna call you and DJs. Like, yeah, whatever. Well, I pick up that phone and I make that call. And Julie knows that sometimes I sit in that garage for 45 minutes after I’ve been home at night, because I made that quick phone call to DJ and we struck up a conversation and talk for half an hour. So if you need if you think about something, call them one. Two, I send out postcards because I like to run into DJ at the grocery store and say, Hey, I got your Thanksgiving postcard thanks for thinking of me. Boom, I know, it’s corny the mail is is somewhat antiquated, but I still use it. I’m older, I’m comfortable with it. The the the most important thing that I think is front of mind, you know, all the avenues that we have with Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, posting things online that aren’t asking necessarily for someone to respond, but but maybe giving them a little knowledge about the community, hey, this, you guys have seen this bank building forever. This was built in the 18th, you know, front of mind stuff. So so people say themselves, oh, there’s Peter, there’s Peter without actually going out of their way or opening a piece of mail or answering the phone. So and I need to get better at it myself. And then lastly, Card Writing. I go through spurts where where I’ll write out 40 cards, and I’ll mail you know, 10 of them a week. And, and then there’s times where you know, I haven’t done that since September. But I need to do it again. And I’ll get motivated. And I’ll have a day. And I’ll just knock out a bunch of them. That I think is impactful too.
D.J. Paris 36:49 How many handwritten cards do you receive? Not once you’ve sending out? How many do you get in just estimating in a given year? 10. Okay, so less than one a month. Mine is much less than 10. I think I meant like two to three a year. And again, I’m not complaining it’s I’m but I’m so honored when anybody spends two minutes to write me a card. I don’t know what it is about receiving a card in the mail, a handwritten card, but boy, it just, there’s a tangible feeling there. That is way beyond a digital, Hey, I saw that you went on vacation, a little, you know, Facebook, like or whatever. Those are great too, of course. But there is something really, really powerful about somebody wrote this card, they put a stamp on it, they addressed it, they dropped it in the mail, as a lot of steps there that are super obvious to somebody when they receive that. And I think it’s kind of baked into the experience. So I am with you. You talked about mailers. I am a huge fan of mailers. Number one because most people aren’t anymore, as you said, you know, people are more digital, of course there, which is exactly why mailers should happen because you’re not getting that much mail anymore. I’m not getting much mail anymore. Even the junk mails is toned down. I’m like what’s happening with all these companies, a catalog companies, I guess they’re all online, but but I don’t even get a lot of the catalogs anymore. And so I’m like, wow, my, if somebody were to send me a postcard, I would absolutely see it now, maybe 15 years ago, when the mail was just, you know, insane. Maybe it would get lost in all of the catalogs and junk mail. There’s not as much anymore. So I think it’s a perfect time to send a mailer. And to your point. This is a way if you’re sending mailers once a month, once every few months, it’s pretty hard for somebody to forget about you, even if it’s just a postcard, because your names there. They might they you know, every realtor sends out an email newsletter. And I’m not saying that’s a bad idea. It’s a great idea. But everyone also does that. So you want to do things that maybe are a little bit more than just that. I’m not saying don’t do an email newsletter. But I love that and handwriting a card. I don’t know that there’s a better way to tell somebody I care that even just hey, I was thinking about you, I hope you’re doing well. Whatever. Well
Pieter Hanson 39:06 buy, sell, build, get buy, sell, build QC, you know, between Sarah and Andrea, my partners, we’ve got things planned into the fourth quarter of 2024. Whether it’s mum delivery, like we did this year, we bought 500 mums, and the back of my truck was filled for two days delivering these mums and people just absolutely loved them. You don’t need to say hi to them, put it on their porch with a sticker on the thing and a postcard in it. And they would text you and they’d say, Dude, we’d love the mom, thanks for thinking of us. You know, I mean little things like that. And our brokerage does those things extremely well. What’s
D.J. Paris 39:44 really fun about that stuff to it. I talk a lot about these kinds of fun activities that realtors can do. They don’t have to be expensive. They don’t have to even cost anything really picking up the phone and saying hey, I’m thinking about you. How are you doing? What’s going on? You know, and not necessarily Hey, I need to buy or sell right now I’m your guy, but calling and just saying, Hey, I was thinking about you, how are you? And or I saw this thing on LinkedIn, maybe it looks like your company just did this something big or you got a promotion or whatever there are, those are always the things I think that win the race. And also at the very least, even if it doesn’t necessarily lead to a transaction, you’re going to feel good about yourself when you do something nice, like drop off a mum or two on someone’s doorstep. And then they find it later. Boy, I mean, you can’t you almost can’t put a price tag on on how successful that kind of campaign is. Because people will be talking about it. Like who gets just random flowers from people, nobody, nobody only from your spouse or partner or boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. Those are the only people giving anybody flowers. And so the idea of even just doing a little thing, like mums, and mums are cool to their unique. I love that idea. Yeah,
Pieter Hanson 40:59 we have we have a good time doing it too. And it’s a big collaboration in the office and it gets brings everybody together to work under under one roof for a common goal. And it’s it’s great team building. And it’s just fun.
D.J. Paris 41:13 And you know, it’s funny, we should probably talk about this only because it’s the end of the year. And this is you know, holiday cards and holiday gifts. And agents always struggle. Should I do something for my clients? There’s pessimistic people that will say, Well, if you do it once, you’re going to have to do it every single year forever. It’s like, well, I don’t know, that doesn’t sound so bad. But for some people, they struggle with this. I’m curious on your thoughts about end of year, sort of stuff with clients? Do you do them? Do you wait until a different time of the year or, you know, just curious,
Pieter Hanson 41:45 traditionally, some of my partner’s that had a holiday party. And they’re really expensive. And people look forward to him every year. And they say, Hey, are you guys having your party this year and, and I personally don’t do that. I like to reward the client. At the time the transaction closes. And depending upon how close they are, the size of the deal, whatever dictates, you know what, what I might do for them. But I always do something for them. The remaining time is I might single handedly call someone invite them to dinner with Julie and I. And as much as she sometimes doesn’t like doing it, we tend to have a pretty good time hanging out with someone that we don’t normally hang out with and learn something about that person that we never knew. Generally, that’s our takeaway. I never knew that about it, you know? So we try to do a little bit of that, but I don’t do anything it a certain time of year to reward them necessarily. Yeah. Well,
D.J. Paris 42:46 I think that’s very encouraging. For everyone listening who goes, Oh, my gosh, I didn’t do anything for the holiday season, December holiday season for my clients, it doesn’t really matter, do something throughout the year. And then at the end of the year, not as important, of course. But I love this, this idea of customer service and customer care, really, to me and hard work and discipline and all of these these things, but Customer Care is just the the key, I think it’s really making sure that people when they think about you go wow, my agent knows what’s going on in my life stays in touch with me. And is is is, is doing some sort of ongoing communication. And you said something very important, I just want to want to end on which was, now we have mobile devices, these super powerful, you know, almost magical devices in our pockets that shoot near perfect video, and for essentially for free of the cost of the device. And you can you know, learn a little bit about a building or maybe a local retailer, if you want to support local businesses, or maybe even interview a local business owner and say, Hey, I’d love to just learn about your business or your building or whatever. And you could post a quick one or two minute video on social media about that. And you could do that every single day of the week. If you if you didn’t if you weren’t slammed with clients, and what does that do for your public the people that are following you? They they think, wow, this person is really into real estate or they’re supporting our local community. They’re active, they’re doing things. So I am such a fan. I just I know you said it sort of quickly. And I wanted to go back to talk about the importance of providing value on social media as opposed to just hey, look at this cool this home I just sold, which is fine. I just don’t think that should be the only thing because right after I see that stuff, I was going I don’t care.
Pieter Hanson 44:36 You got to start somewhere and you’ve got to do something even if it’s wrong, you’ll learn but what content becomes so important and so impactful when it comes to people enjoying it and not being annoyed by it. I
D.J. Paris 44:51 couldn’t agree with you more and I think this is a great place to wrap up before we wrap. I want to make a mention we have Gosh 1000s and 10s of 1000s of listeners, we’re so grateful for them for sticking with us for as long as we have. But Peter Hansen, he he works for his brokerage, his real, great brokerage, national brokerage. And he and his team are always interested if there are any, any talent that in that area, any agents that think they might be a fit for Peter and his team, please, please feel free to reach out, they’re always looking to to expand their reach. Also, if you’re an agent that has clients that move in and out of the Quad Cities area, but maybe you don’t practice there yourself, certainly reach out to Peter. And if I were an agent, I would be looking to see where people retire from if they move from the Quad Cities, and then I would be reaching out to Peter, if I was in one of those markets going, Hey, I would love to talk to you about when people leave your market, you know, talking and connecting. So Peter, of course, would love the opportunity. He’s a commercial agent, residential agent, he can do a lot. So if you have businesses that are going in and out of that area, or people going in and out, or if you are an agent and want to maybe join his team and perhaps provide some value, he would love to opportunity to see if they you guys would be a fit. So what’s the best way that an agent could reach out to you if they want to partner with you in some way.
Pieter Hanson 46:17 So certainly, the email address Peter at Pt hanson.com is a very effective way. Certainly, you could reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook as well. Those digital media’s provide some privacy yet get the message across and I could get back to you. Certainly, if you were to ask me for any of my cell phone number, contact number that way, I’ve certainly would provide that for you. And, and if you’re any good at the internet, you can probably find that through Google yourself. So any of those ways would be a great way to get a hold of me. And I’d love to sit down and, and tell you the real story and tell you my story. I
D.J. Paris 46:58 love that. And remember, Peter is p i e t er, so he’s super easy to find. If he was Peter Hanson, without the without the AI, it’d be a little harder. So this actually works in his favor. So he’s very easy to find. And he’s a wonderful, wonderful man, and very successful in a lot of different areas. And if I were an agent, I would want to talk to you because I feel how do you do it all? What’s the word of the secrets we got through some of those today, but boy, somebody that, you know, I would certainly want to be mentored by so if you’re an agent in the area, or if you have clients kind of going in and out of that area, please reach out to Peter, he would love the opportunity to connect. And also please reach out to Peter and thank him for his service to our country we our military is is grossly under appreciated, I believe on a regular basis. So even if you’re just want to reach out and say thank you, that would be appreciated for him as well. Peter, thank you so much for your time. today. Thank you for coming on our show spending an hour with us and really giving us a lot of insight into your business and how you juggle many different businesses, but doing them all really, really effectively. And I love that Peter Hanson realtor is the website that’s P e t e r h a n s o n realtor.com. We’ll have links to all of his social media as well as his website, on on our show notes. So please reach out and on behalf of our listeners want to just thank Peter for spending time with us today. And on behalf of Peter and myself. We also want to thank the listeners and the viewers, you guys are the reason we do the show. And if we are planning speaking of Peter talking about his planning for 2024, we are planning for 2024 as well. So if there is a top agent in your market, we don’t really look for guests anymore. Because of the popularity of the show. We’re really, really lucky that publicists usually come to us. But that means we miss a lot of people. So if there’s a superstar in your market, we might not know about them, let us know we’ll reach out and see if we can get them on the show. So think of the most successful agent in your market as a listener and go I want to know what that person does. Let us know who that person is. We’ll we’ll do the rest. But thank you so much, Peter. Really great conversation. And hope everyone I don’t know when this episode will be released. It’ll probably be before the end of the year. So if so everyone have a happy December holiday season. Happy New Year, all of that. And Peter, thank you. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, TJ.
More Seller Checklist Mastery With Ali Garced • Breaking Down Ali’s Systems • Ali Garced
Dec 13, 2023
Welcome to Breaking Down Ali’s Systems mini-series with Ali Garced.
In this mini-series Ali will be explaining how she built her systems both for buyers and for sellers. In the second episode of Seller Checklist series, Ali picks up on the pre-list part where she left off in the first part of this checklist.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today on the show top agent Allie Garside is going to share with you more about her seller checklist that she uses to convert dozens and dozens of clients every single year. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Ali Garced 1:34 What’s up everyone again, it’s Ali Gorsedd ally, the agent. Coming back with part two of the seller checklist. Again, this checklist has helped the agents on my crew on my ESP crew earn six figures in six months, making like three times the amount that they were making. Previously at other brokerages, it’s so important to have a foundation, I’m not saying that you need to join me in order to make this happen. I’m saying you need to have a foundation and I’m giving it away to you. So if you want a copy of these checklists, here’s the checklist to get a copy of the chocolates ready. Number one, give a five star review to keeping it real on this podcast that you’re listening to. If you’re watching this on YouTube, number two is like and comment below saying anything that you’ve learned, however, the slightest bit that this may have helped you. I know this is going to help you a lot. But any comment will help. And number three is text me for the checklist will meet its will meet over zoom. It’s 520-341-2552. That’s my work, phone number text the word checklist to that number checklists, by the way, being one word, text checklist 25203412552. If you’d rather hit me on Instagram, I’m Ally FBI agent. So let’s begin last time I left off on the listing presentation. So let’s assume we got the listing what to do. So from here, we’re going to start on the pre list. Now, we’re going to make sure that we have a copy of the keys, of course to all the screen doors, the detached ad, use the garage, you know any anything and everything, the front door, the back or the side door, the window, the sheds, everything, have make sure that the sellers have an extra copy. And the garage openers, it’s they want to make sure that they I see that they keep it on their person. Because I just don’t like I don’t want to have to deal with any theft. So of course want to make sure that if they’re going to be living in the property, make sure that they hide their valuables stored in the safe or just take it out of the house or take it out of the condo. If the property is gonna be vacant, then they can leave the garage door openers or maybe you want to safeguard it for them. However you want to do that make sure you just do it the same way every time. So that way you don’t forget and think oh, I have the the garage door opener for 4712 North palisade but on this other house on North Street, I ended up keeping up the house, you’re gonna drive yourself crazy. So whatever method you want to do do the same thing every time and that is key consistency always wins. Okay. Then you want to tell them the the photo requirements and the staging tips. We tend to work with one photographer. We like them a lot. They are pricey, but they do amazing work. So they have their own photography like list. If you do not already have a go to photographer, reach out, reach out, you know, find some on Instagram, find some on Google and see if they have a list of photography, like tips for real estate sales. That way you can use their checklist. I’ll show you in my emails to my canned emails that I use my photographer’s checklist because why am I going to recreate the wheel just like with these seller checklists with my buyer checklist that I’m giving to you guys the referral checklist? I haven’t even gone to that section yet. Would Do not recreate the wheel, you should be just like adding to it and making sure that it’s as you know, as easy to follow as possible for your business. Okay. And then you want to make sure that they are the the sellers are working toward that photography, a checklist. Hey, have you mowed the lawn? Hey, have you pulled the weeds? Do you need a landscaper Dena contractor for that? Because I have you know, I know a guy. Okay, carrying on then you want to? Oh, seems like maybe my computer’s a little frozen here? Oh, no, there it is. All right, then you want to schedule the photographer. And you want to make sure that you have enough time in order to do that. Or rather that the sellers have enough time in order to do that. Sometimes as you know the house as soon as you walk into the listing presentation, it’s ready to sell. Sometimes it’s not. There was one time Oh, just a super quick rant, if I may, again. So this was the that same listing my second listing ever that I got off a postcard my very first round of postcards, and the one who lied to me about Hoa, he was a hoarder. And as I was walking upstairs to where he hadn’t been upstairs in probably over a year, a year, he hadn’t been upstairs, there was stuff everywhere I was I was going up the stairs, he’s I stepped on a gun, I stepped on a gun, which was loaded. I mean, I know how to I know how to use guns, you know, I was a federal agent for the Air Force for a decade. But just the fact that like I step again, just the point being some sellers are going to need some extra time, in order to get their house photo ready, some will need your help. Some agents already have this available to where they have, you know a cleaner to where the cleaner can help them. Again, everyone needs to sell no matter who they are, like what kind of background they have. So it’s always always good to have a cleaner or two in your back pocket. If you do not have a cleaner, I would suggest going on Airbnb and message some of the owners so as like a as a guest, I message them in the owners and say Hey, who do you use as a cleaner I’m looking for I’m looking for reliable cleaner they’ll give you they’ll help you. So because I think if someone were to message me on it on Airbnb, because I’m a I’m a landlord as well, I own about eight properties. And if someone were to message me, you bet I would share my cleaner. I want to help her. Anyway, here we go. Um, okay. So you want to make sure that the house is ready to go you this this goes into the specifics of which photography package we get. We do the same thing every time whether it is a luxury Well, luxury, of course is I think, subjective. But so whether it’s like a $700,000 house or a $200,000 house, we do the same package every time. Now of course we might add on the videography for the meet the middle package or the extra package like what I talked about last week. Or I might add on even more the 3d Home Tour The the the Zillow so that way connects to Zillow and it bumps your listing up on Zillow higher because you paid for that Zillow feature, the Matterport, whichever you want to do, we do the same thing every single time. Well, depending on the package that they choose, so you want to make sure that that’s labeled. Because always think about this, you might not want to be selling forever. This is the purpose of a checklist. I had a checklist that I was following this my first year in the business. And now this is the checklist that everyone that I refer to follows everyone in my crew, they have this foundation for them, they don’t need to think I didn’t want to think I just want to wake up and say okay, what part of the checklist Am I at Check, check, check. And it’s it’s just automatic. Not automatic as well to do it, but you get my boy. Okay, then you’re gonna have your TC send disclosures. A quick note on TC, if you don’t have a TC get one e me delete. I said that kind of weird immediately get a TC because they are oh my gosh, there were there. They are so worth it. For what even if the TC is charging like $500 for a transaction, the amount of hours that they’re going to save you for every single transaction and it’s labor upfront, and they only get paid if you get paid at the close of escrow. And if your seller cancels, they don’t get paid. I mean it’s a no brainer. So I do want to backtrack to what I said last week when I said that I have a $3,000 cancellation fee. Part of that $3,000 cancellation fee goes to the TC for her troubles, so I will give her her Porsche and not not I don’t think it’s like 100% of what she would have made had be continued with the sale. But I believe it’s like 50, maybe 40%. So I want to keep my TC happy because we’re sending her a lot of business. Okay, create showing instructions. This is super important. I really like showing time not all agents use showing time. Not all agents know it’s showing time is not all agents will even bother looking up showing time. I know that you know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t you might be, you might be the agents that refuses to use showing signs or refuses to comply. So here we go. I use showing time because it’s so it’s super easy to block out times for, you know, times where the house is ready to view and times that are blocked out. So this is super important for homes where the sellers are going to still be living in it. If the sellers are still living in it, I always have a CBS code on the Super box. I am pretty sure that everyone that has a Supra will probably have access to CBS. I don’t think that that would be Arizona specific. But I do I have noticed that not a lot of agents know what a CBS code is. So you know how there’s a super box, right? Like you need to have your phone you need to have Bluetooth on you need to punch in your code for your MLS and then pick an excellent you get the key
is that having a CBS code is an extra layer of say, protection against privacy or for privacy, to where if to where agents can’t just roll up on the property after not having viewed showing time, not realizing that the sellers are in their home that they work from home, or that they’re having Thanksgiving dinner, or that they’re just having dinner. And so it prevents people from just being able to get access to the key after they sign in. And then it’s going to ask them okay, what is the CBS code. And I have sometimes agents will have the CBS code on the MLS, I always have the CBS code after they talk to me they have to talk to me, I never want to be in a situation where an agent who doesn’t read and you know what that’s all of us sometimes just rolls into a house while the seller is there with their family, you know, just gotten out of the shower. I work with a lot of military and military love their guns, I do not want to be responsible for any sort of shooting, you know, just to be safe. And it doesn’t even have to get to that extreme. But just to be safe. I want to make sure that my sellers have their privacy. So that way, as soon as I get a call or a text saying hey, what’s the CBS code? I’m asking them? Are you outside of the property schedule a call schedule a time through showing time? That is when the property is available? Oh, well, we’re outside. Okay, well, I’m so sorry. The showing time clearly says on the MLS use showing time. Again, this is the this is the process that I use. Not everyone uses it. This is because the a lot of the listings that I have are occupied homes, if they’re not occupied, I’m not going to have a CVS code on there. I want to have as little amount of friction as possible. And I just want anybody that rolls up. Sure. Go right on in. Of course after using the super box. So also another thing that I used to get a lot which I don’t get that often anymore. Are people saying that their Supra wasn’t working? Hey, I think maybe like my super box is or my phone isn’t updated. And I’m like, Okay, well then update it. You know, I My concern was how do I know you’re even an agent? Of course. I was looking them up online. So this is the story a lot of people I got quite a few amount of phone calls, saying hey, I’m outside your listing at you know, 4712 North palisade drive, and I can’t get in my go. That’s, that’s strange. There’s a super box to the super box die, because my side shows that it’s at no charge at 80% What’s up? And they’re like, oh, yeah, I think it’s a problem on my phone. I think I just haven’t updated it. I’m like, okay, cool. Well, the property is available. Let me know when you’ve updated it, and then you can head right on in some time, and I was getting some pushback sometimes again, you can never be too safe. I think. I would rather I would rather turn away a potential buyer than allow a stranger that with with bad intent into a house into a listing of mine. So you know, all day every day I’d rather turn away a buyer than put somebody in danger. So at that point, I would I wouldn’t have to look them up you know, like hey, if you were refusing to update your your, your Supra app on your phone, one your that’s probably the only house you’re at, you know, are you doing this at every single house that you’re showing? So I’d say okay, you know, like what’s your what’s your car number or your MLS NUMBER? Your your license number? I’d look them up. So So, anyway, that’s just a side note, make sure that you just don’t allow anybody all willy nilly, you know, into the property just because they say they’re an agent. So yeah, that okay, stepping off my little soapbox here, talk with the seller and confirm all the data that you’re going to be using the open house, verify that, because you’ve already you’ve already established this at the listing presentation. Either they either they’re, you know, green with open houses to go or maybe not, or they have dates where they know they want to stay in the house, they don’t want to be bothered, so no open houses, then. And then it’s your own decision, whether you want to host the open house, or whether you want your partner to or whether you want someone else to now, I do want to say this, as soon as you have a listing it that’s like, you know, at a higher price point for your neighborhood, oh, you’re gonna get calls left and right, the week that you put it on the market, from actually, you know, what, you’re not going to get calls, you’re gonna get text messages, the amount of text that I that I get for listings that are on the higher price point for Tucson, they’re like, they come at me with all sorts of grammar will say that, and they’ll say, hey, I want to do your I want to be your open house person this Saturday. And that’s it, you know, that’s all the text will say I’m like, Okay, hi. Which listing? What’s your name? Are you an agent? Which brokerage? You know, like, it’s, it’s so easy, I think to get an open house, if you’re looking for an open house, first of all, call them second of all send a voice or video text of them, showing them that you’re a real person that you’re not a bot, introduce yourself. There was one one person that was very, very, very seem shady and was like, oh, you know what, like, I you know, I don’t even it’s just started giving me like a little bit of attitude. And I was like, You gave me no information. I don’t know which property you’re looking to do an open house for? Why should I choose you? I’m getting six of these texts every day. Not that it should be any sort of competition, but just doing the bare minimum, say a phone call, you’ll stand out. Yeah, just do what other people are not doing and you’ll get for this business, you just have to be just a slight have a slight edge, if you will, if you’ve read that book, okay. Um, let’s see. As soon as you have the open house dates, this is why okay, this here we go. As soon as you have the open house dates, and they’re verified till the TC, make sure that it’s on the MLS, either have a VA, verify that it’s on the MLS, or you just take the time to make sure that it’s showing publicly and on MLS, drop the MLS input sheets, pages one and two, this is probably just Arizona specific. So I’m just gonna say make sure that your paperwork is done. Make sure that the sellers sign on all and they don’t finish on all the pages sign wherever they need to ask your TC for that, create a single property, squeeze a squeeze page and add the link to the description box of each of the sellers checklists. So I sell or I have I give my sellers homework. Right. So sort of from that very, very first phone call in the first series of the seller checklist. I give them homework, you know, I want them to look up the H the year of the H fact that you’re the water heaters what needs to be done? Why is it not a level 10 out of 10 What would make the house a 10 out of 10 Just start thinking you know, have a copy of the keys when I come and start working on the clue report. That’s their homework. And so then after that, once I get the listing, I’m going to I’m going to create this the property page, the squeeze page through KB core, again, it’s just two steps, you could probably just YouTube that or if you are with exp you know, ask your broker.
So once I have that, that website, that is a website that I tell my sellers to share. There are some Facebook pages that I cannot post in because I’m a realtor, you know, like there are some pages where they can post in because they’re not a real estate professional, therefore they can post so I’m gonna say don’t share the Zillow listing share this website, this is the website that I want you to share. Because anybody that clicks on it, I get their information, I’m able to start the you know, Excel sheet or start tracking how many people have viewed the property and I can start that conversation, it’s a better chance of conversion to sell your house. I’ve never had any seller had any issue with that they’re happy to comply, unless they don’t do Facebook, which you know, that’s fine, then just email. So, of course at that point, we’ve got the listing so we want this the signs to be placed. Call your sign or sign company or go online and order the coming soon. If you do coming soon. I’m actually not the biggest. I’m not the biggest fan of coming soons because I’ve noticed that as soon as I do it coming soon. The intent is to draw more attention, right like ooh, like create a buzz and have it like on the mark Good and, and but what it does in reality in from my experience is it attracts the lowball offers for however long you’re doing the Coming Soon I think it’s like 14 days max for ours. I don’t even do that anymore. So I don’t even know how long it is i I’ve written coming soon it’s out. It it tries to lowball offers. And it attracts very aggressive agents, which I do this on the buyer side, too. I get it. But it attracts very aggressive agents saying, Hey, we can take this mark the property off the market if you accept our offer today. And that’s not what I want to do. Because of course, the sellers are like, Oh my gosh, we’re already getting offers great, yes, but they’re below us. And we can get more. So I don’t do coming soon as anymore. I just have it live, you can compete with everyone else. And I will know who is more serious because at that point, everyone has the same starting time. I want everyone you know the gates to open for everyone at the same time. Therefore, it’s the most apples to apples comparison I can make. If someone is presenting me an offer that says hey, I’ll order a order. I’ll offer an extra $10,000. If you accept today, we might lean more toward that if you know if everything else is even Steven, or if someone else, you know if all the offers are around the same but one person says we don’t want any seller concessions, our buyer will pay for all the closing costs. Wow, that’s great. Or my favorite, which I do with all of my buyers to get our offers accepted 99% of the time is we have non refundable, earnest money, take our money in case we decide to back out you get money, here’s 500 bucks, you know that? What does that do one as a buyer’s agent. This is a quick tidbit on the buyer side as a buyer’s agent that makes sure that your buyer is actually on board with selling with purchasing the property. And as a listing agent, you can present that to your seller saying hey, the buyer is so serious about this that they’re willing to lose $500 Just for the opportunity for you to take this off the market. This is this is brilliant. I mean it’s it’s every day that this happens in North Carolina. It’s never that this happens in Arizona. non refundable earnest money is on heard of in Arizona. That’s why you get my my offers accepted as a buyer’s agent. Because we don’t have to offer much we can offer 150 bucks. And then that way we can be under contract for two weeks. If for some reason something happens the seller the buyer is only out 100 of the bucks, but the seller walked away with something. So of course more is better. But um, anyway, back off my my rant here, add a lockbox Of course, if you don’t already have a lockbox, this is where I tell my my crew to go. Let’s see. Okay, next, write a description that’s not boring. There was recently a post that I saw that have a listing that was written I mean, like, like someone in Gen Z wrote it and it started with this house is busted. Don’t you think that is eye catching, you know, like, for better or for worse, like that property drew a lot of attention. And whether or not you agree with using words like bussing or popping or or I forget, man, it was a whole paragraph like a whole six lines of just Gen Z speak. And it was like it was nothing about the property, not any of it. And like no part of that said, this was a three bed two bath house in this type of neighborhood and says that this house is buzzing, no lie, no cap you don’t like that draws attention. So of course that might not be bring on brand for you that might not be on brand for the seller. Always ask your seller for permission before you do something like that. But that the amount of likes views just on Zillow, that that property had blew everything else, all of its neighbors out of the water. So don’t be afraid to be different, is what I’m saying. Show a sense of humor, especially like when you’re reading a listing, when I’m reading a listing agent as a buyer’s agent, and it has a sense of humor. I already want to work with that listing agent. It maybe that’s just me, you know, like if this was a normal, very boring, very dry listing description, then I’m like, okay, cool. Just another, you know, another transaction, all right. But if it shows any sort of personality, or like, Wait, this agent is going to be pretty cool. And I already feel like I connect with them. I want to work with them even more. Okay, so then you want to send your off off market property email to your buyers, again, that’s very similar to that to the email before which says I’m about to meet with the seller. Do you want more information? I can’t really tell you too much yet. But if you do want more information on this, as soon as I can tell you more, email me the word V IPE My throat is going a little dry here. Okay, then you want to create the Canva order postcard, oh, this should be in bold because I don’t do this, this is my BA. So you want to create the the postcards to be sent out, I use t pmco. There are plenty of other ways to send postcards out, this is just one that I got used to it’s pretty good price, you can have a sample sent to your house. And it’s a way for you TPM co.com, by the way. So that’s you have to create a free login. And you can create either like a radius around your listing, or you can draw the area that you want to send to you you can have I think like as few as maybe like 30 properties you can mail to or as many as you want. And you so you just upload a front and back of the postcard that you can create on Canva. I don’t create anything on Canva. I don’t even know how to log in, I don’t want to log into Canva I have my VA do it. I say hey, use these photos, use these words, make it pretty. And that’s it, then send it to me for review. Then I upload it to TPM CO and we mail it. So I said eight mailers throughout every single transaction. One is Hey, did you know that Bob down the street is selling and then those I just keep them updated throughout the throughout the entire transaction. And I tell them Be on the lookout for my next mailer when we go under contract. Be on the lookout for my next mailer. After the appraisal after the inspections are done. Be on the lookout like congratulate like what they do. The appraisals was run perfectly Be on the lookout for my next mailer after the appraisal is done. And then of course the closing the follow up, you know you want to send her just have as much traffic as you can to your property. Then I do a video on Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, I also include LinkedIn and threads, and I pay my VA $1 per post to post on six different platforms every single day. He is a virtual assistant out in the Philippines. I found him on online jobs.ph. And so I pay him $1 per platform. So $6 a day, times 30 days in the month, I pay him about $250 a month and I am on every single platform that I can think of is ever Pinterest. And I personally do YouTube. And I’m always top of mind. So anyway, that’s just a little side rant there. So I make a video on I throw it on all these websites describing the off market house. If anyone wants a private viewing before it goes live, let me know. And of course, keep in mind you have to make sure that you’re staying, you’re cooperating with the clear cooperation rules, then call all of their neighbors and go on our real estate Bible. That’s again, that’s only for my my exp crew but the scripts give away to find out what they say. Ask for a free CMA for what their home is worth. These are different social media posts to have. And let’s see KB core, this is the listing presentation. We already did this. A week before it goes live, call the signs or just do it online, have your VA switch it from from coming soon to for sale. If you did coming soon.
Then you want to call again, make sure that that clear report the insurance report if your state requires this, that your sellers are working on it if they need any help help them if they haven’t already have the sellers send a copy of all the paperwork that they signed. At this point. If you haven’t already, if you probably should have introduced your TC to the old parties of the all selling parties. And yeah, just introduce them. You want to make sure that they save your TCS information so that we know emails get lost and share phone numbers too. If your TC is okay with that input photos and listed on Facebook marketplace and then boost it. I don’t always do this I used to the quality of the leads are not incredible. So I stopped doing this. You can also do it on Craigslist Craigslist is hit or miss depending on what city you’re in. And then if the listing date is pushed back, which sometimes it happens, sometimes the sellers aren’t ready yet they haven’t cleaned they haven’t. You know whatever it is, tell the tell, make sure that you you have that reflected with your videos. So for example, over here I have tell my lender to postpone the listing of the week video. Again to make sure that we’re staying in like you’re clear cooperation. But any any content that you want to make sure that you’re posting at an appropriate time. You want to make sure that your videographer makes the video and edits it with your at your with your with The Properties address your phone number, your logo, and upload the link to your YouTube. I am bullish on YouTube, I started heavy on my YouTube channel, Ali the agent or why EXP and that is what I’ve been hitting hard. I’m very very big on on YouTube because even though I had close to 70 transactions more like 68 transactions, my first two and a half years in the business, all through social media, well 94% of my business was through social media, I would have doubled those transactions had I focus on YouTube instead. Now, I can’t you know, I can’t really kick myself too much. I did pretty well. I made more money than I ever thought I would this this fast. But I you know, I whatever I can only do I can only control what I can control. I can’t control the past. So now I’m heavy on on YouTube. If you want to talk about YouTube, let me know. I’m all about right now. Okay, tell your TC, the super box info. Especially there’s a CBS code. And so tell them which serial number of your of your super box that you have for which property, the CBS code what is etc. Let them know that the showing time as well. So that way they can up update what dates are good still, what dates are not good for viewings, and have them double check the county parcel info or the lot info because sometimes it will be wrong, you don’t want to get a fine. And if you haven’t already get the TOS sets of keys from the seller want to keep in the Super box and want to put in a contractor lockbox, just one of those that you buy from Home Depot. Again, it’s just in the rarity that an agent you know, hasn’t updated their their Supra app on their phone and they are a legitimate agent and you verified it just in case you know all that fails, then you can say okay, this is the this is the lockbox code, and then they can show the property. So, if the house is vacant, or if it will be vacant during the inspection period, then tell the TC and you can that way the TC can just schedule the vendors whenever they want. If the house is not vacant, you want an end say like the well either way, whether the sellers work from home or if they go to the office, you they need to know when the inspections are. So you want to make sure that the TC doesn’t just automatically schedule listings or, or listings that they don’t automatically don’t just schedule inspections. So you want to make sure that they are that they’re good with that time. And the sellers, the sellers homework on helping advertise. Again, I give all of my sellers homework every single step of the way. But because this is a group effort, I’m not working for you, you’re not working for me we’re working together. So submit the photos, the description onto the onto the following Facebook pages that I cannot post on or they’ll delete it. The Davis you know any sort of local Facebook groups this is only gonna apply to Tucson so local Facebook family groups, spouses groups, knitting groups, soccer groups, everything and anything that they are a part of church groups, whatever, bowling, whatever it is how the posted everywhere, because if it were to come from an agent, you are going to be probably reported booted from the group. You don’t want to do that. But the sellers have a lot of leeway. So have them work with you there. And 24 hours before going live send that email with a subject line forward to a friend. This is not something that I came up with on my own this is from Tom Ferry, the subject line is going to be thorough to a friend. Now the in the body of this email it’s going to say we’re about to list a property in the next 24 hours that I believe will sell in two weeks. The home is located in Tanka verta Arizona, and will be listed for $500,000 forward this email to a friend who you know is in the market but hasn’t found a home yet. My personal cell is 914-318-4918 Yes, it is my my actual personal cell. They can call me directly and I can give them the details before it hits the market. Sincerely Aligarh said PS if I don’t pick up leave a voicemail or text me This is huge because it already starts that advertising for you. And it’s you’re telling them there’s there’s the CTA or the call to action in the subject line. Oh, I’m supposed to forward this message. I’m supposed to forward this email to a friend.
Now this next section here I’m not going to cover because it’s very very specific to southern Arizona MLS only and it’s only to be done if you are doing the paperwork which I do not suggest you do the paperwork very different from me saying you shouldn’t know the paperwork You should know the paperwork, the contracts like the back of your hand, which by the way, which side is the back of your hand, I like never really knew that. But either way, know that know the contract that pays you money. Doing the contract does not actually pay you money, someone else can do that for cheaper and faster, with fewer errors. So I’m going to skip this. If you don’t have a TC, if you’re with exp go on exp workplace and look up. transaction coordinator Vegas, you’re going to find a lot interview them, also know that they are interviewing you, you want to make sure that you are a good fit, they do not just work for you do not treat them like they are just like they they’ll just wake up at, you know, at midnight to write an offer for you respect them. Otherwise, they will drop you they don’t need to work with you. Okay, the next section of the checklist for sellers one week before going live. So some of this is like not just completely in chronological order, but you get the point. So give the transaction coordinator, the property description, the showing instructions, we’ve already done this, the HOA information and ask the seller for the complete list of all dates and times over the next three months, where they will not be able to drive back to the house to let the dogs out the dates and times where the house will not be clean, say Thanksgiving dinner, that they do not want buyers in the house. That’s you’re going to tell the TC to mark to mark or block off on showing time. And then you’re going to send the seller emails, which I haven’t even gotten to yet but I’m going to end this video here. So stick around, I’m going to show you my canned emails that I send every single time. And the last section here is take a screenshot of the Zestimate the Zillow Zestimate before your listing goes live. And then you’re going to take another I’m giving you a little bit of a What is it foreshadow into the future? Take another screenshot of your listing after it’s sold. And of all the properties after you sell the house. And you tell them hey, this is how much your property increased after my listing on 4712. North palisade drive and Tucson sold. So this is why you do this before and you do it after that where you can start those conversations. Oh my gosh, this ally, the agent person increased my home value by $13,000. Maybe when we sell oh wait Barbara needs to sell? Maybe she needs Sally’s information. Yes, she does need Ali’s information. Okay, next section here is live on the market. Once you’re live, well obviously the first checklist item there is live. And again, I hope you’re watching this on YouTube. If this has been helpful so far, text me for the word checklist or text me the word checklist for the checklist. Text checklists 25203412552 If you’re enjoying this, give this episode a five star review. You can do it right now while listening to it it is for free guys. Did you know that that to leave a review it is free 99. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, give us a thumbs up. I super, super appreciate it comment below whether you want more of a specific topic within these checklists, or if it’s helped, I want to hear from you. Okay, carry on. So as soon as you’re live in the market, please ensure that you go on Sky slope, this is going to be exp specific. So just make sure that you’re following your rules for paperwork. And this is where it’s important to make sure that you’re also overseeing the TC. So you want to make sure especially with exp that your your transactions need to be uploaded into sky slope within 48 hours in order to become in compliance with Arizona Department of Real Estate. Don’t get in trouble. And then give the property tours, the property videos, tour etc. To the TC have them upload it to get ready to go live on the market. If you haven’t already done that, the Facebook marketplace any other Facebook, local Facebook pages, they are money guys, if you’re not on them, get on them right now. Join as many as you can. And make sure you read the rules. If for some reason you’re not finding any good groups create your own. Now that’s a whole beast and a half. Actually on my podcast, the aging Goldmine, we interviewed someone who has like 15,000 people in their Facebook marketplace, or the Facebook group. And that’s how they get all of their leads is just their Facebook group now and it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work to get people to respond and you have to do polls and like check in and constantly post. But if you don’t want to do that, then just write on other people’s Facebook pages but also make sure you abide by the rules or you’re getting kicked out and that will be the last listen you’ve ever posted on there. So put the just listed email send that out. We already did that that forward to a friend email remember, send out the open house email and along with the postcards to the neighbor’s door knock, invite them to the neighbor only, I do the neighbor only open house just 30 minutes before the actual open house starts sometimes an hour depending on the type of neighborhood that we’re at, if I think that they’re going to take their time, and really snooped around or really just want to talk for a long time, then I’m going to have that neighbors only for an hour. If I think that they’re that the neighborhood is little bit more hustle and bustle, they want to get in and out, they want to see, you know, what’s the condition of the property. Okay, that’s it, that’s all I want to know goodbye, then I’ll probably just do 30 minutes. The importance of that is because sometimes you never know what type of neighbors are going to come into your open house. So if you have the open house at just one time, the neighbors are gonna come in whenever they want, right, because that’s not the neighborhood only exclusive, you know, neighborhood VIP preview, that’s just for them. You don’t know the exact relationship that your sellers had with that neighbor. And you’re inviting everyone, right? Unless your neighbor unless your seller says, Hey, invite everyone, but you know, but Nancy across the street and never got along with her that I’m sure that’s happened to you guys before or at least happen to me like, hey, you know, because I’ve asked them, Is there anybody that for some reason, would not talk highly about your house? Because guess what, I’m not gonna go door knock that house. I, the last thing I want to do is invite that person to the house and have them crap talk my listing, and have them say, Oh, well, the sellers, you know, bash the sellers bash the property. That’s not what I want. And I think that’s a great reason why to have the neighbors only first to get their gossip out. And then we can shoot them along, say, thank you so much for coming. Now, I do want to follow up. But I want to make sure that the public has access to this house now. So they are able to view it with fresh eyes. And I’ll see you on the next one hearing it whatever it is. So because I think it’s even worse to have an open house and then have like that one neighbor that stays for the whole three hours, because I know that you’ve had this happen, or at least I’ve had this happen. And they’re just, they’re just oversee everything, you know, they want to know who’s coming in, because I want to make sure that I you know, I choose the neighbor, it can get very open houses, they’re a lot of fun. Are they okay? After every agent that views the home at Oh, ask them for feedback.
So ask them what the what the buyers liked what they didn’t like. And what I’m looking for here is is stuff that that can be changed, hey, the you know, the plants out front are just too much, let’s move some of them to the backyard. Let’s move some of this over there. Or it actually smelled you know, hear which you should be able to tell unless you don’t have a sense of smell like me. You know, anything that the sellers need to know, it’s also really good to get that feedback. Because at that point, you’re getting more and more feedback that usually says the same thing. What do you think of the price? And if a lot of people are like, Oh, it’s a great price, then that’s excellent. But if a lot of people if you’re consistently saying that the that the buyer’s agent thought that the buyers thought it was way out of, you know, way too high, then that’s something that you can take back to your seller and say, hey, the the market has spoken. Four out of the six people that have viewed the house all thought that the property was listed too high. And at that point, you can have a price adjustment. It’s important to get that feedback and keep it in a spreadsheet, you can keep it in this Trello checklist put at the very, very top in the description. Okay, and then every single day send a bom bom text to the seller. And well. Okay, this is I used to have every single day back when homes were flying, right like COVID. But now that homes are maybe taking weeks, some depending on what area of the country you’re in, might even be taking months to sell. Maybe every single day, it’d be a little bit too much. Either way, you want to make sure that the seller knows how often you’re going to be communicating with them. So if you if you told them you’d be sending them an update every single week, do it put on your calendar for you know, Fridays at 9am to let them know what the recap was. How many people showed the property you know this week? Brett there were 14 people that viewed the views of house eight people left you know reviews or left feedback saying that and a majority that feedback said this one person said that we had you know XYZ amount of showings and and this is a great way for you to do the research every single week right before you send this bom bom saying there were two other listings that came up on the in our zip code or in our neighborhood and or this one house sold essentially what what went under contract, what sold what’s fresh in the market, essentially what’s our new competition, you always want to let them know. So I think something that’s really bad is when the sellers are the ones that are telling the agents Hey, have you seen this property? If that is, if you ever have attacks, you are so behind on it like you’re behind. And if you cannot handle that, then that is such an easy thing to outsource to somebody else. So hire a transaction coordinator, or I’m sorry, hire a virtual assistant. Or maybe even pay your transaction coordinator a little bit more to do that for you. Everything in life is negotiable. Man, everything, okay? Add a copy of the Supra of the key to the super box. This should be up for there. But you get the point. We’ve already done that before. If it’s been if the property’s been on the market for too long. Then at that point, with all of the feedback showing that you have proof, it’s not just you coming out of the woodwork all Boolean all willy nilly saying, Hey, we let’s come down on price. You can say, hey, out of the 3560 days that we’ve been on the market, we’ve had 14 showings or we’ve had 25 showings and out of those 25 75% of the buyers thought that the property was purchased was listed too high. I think it’s time to make an adjustment because the market has spoken. I suggest that we adjust the property the price to XYZ. Take a look that information below and let me know your thoughts. This should not be a text, any single piece of roadway good information or really, really bad information, Do not text that as a phone call. And that’s coming from me. I don’t answer phone calls. I don’t do phone calls. But you need to make sure that you are on the phone with them to be able to leave that phone call on the level that you want them to be. If you were to get this as a text, and you’re the seller, how would you think immediately you’re thinking, Oh, it’s it’s game on let’s we’re fighting, you know, like, you never want to leave something as big as this or the appraisal to a text. Guys. Call call call call. And I never thought I would say that slightly feel like a boomer but for that important stuff, you need to make sure that you’re that you’re calling them. Okay, once I have the photos of the listing, add them to the AEC Marketing Center, this should have already been up there. Um, you know what, I have a feeling as I have shared these checklists, I think some of this has been rearranged. So I’m now going to be sharing these checklists as a PDF, not as a seller, not as a Trello link. This was an order. It’s not an order now. I think maybe I took I was naive thinking that everyone knew how to use Trello and stuff is being rearranged. Okay. Open the super lockbox to make sure that it’s posted on the site and the front door, the side of the house that should have been done already. mailers, I mail 30, around 30 homes. So you can which is very, very small compared to a lot of people who get a lot of listings from mailers, you know, they send 100 300 500 I send 30 I sent 10 houses to the left that house to the right 10 You know, north south east west. And I say I have a QR code that is linked to a bom bom video, I use bom bom because I can track the how many people opened it, the percentage of people that watched it. And this is what I say, Hey there, it’s Aligarh said if you’re receiving this, that means that you are a neighbor of the listing that I currently have at 4712 North palisade drive, and they wanted to take advantage of this market, they wanted to sell at what they think might be the highest. And it’s a three bed two bath house, in case you don’t already know, it’s about 1500 square feet. If that sounds similar to yours, and you’d like to see how it goes. Follow along, I’m going to be keeping you posted throughout the way. If you happen to know of anyone that would be interested in purchasing the house. Like if you know if your Uncle Joe wants to move to the neighborhood. Hahaha, you know, let’s let’s discuss it, give me a call. My phone number is 914-318-4918 I’d love to talk to you. And that’s it. That’s it and I took one minute max. Keep it short. Keep it simple. Introduce yourself, add your personality. People are not going to call somebody that seems extraordinarily boring unless maybe they will. They’re boring too. That’s a match made in heaven. Either way, add your personality, everyone’s personality is different. And there’s an agent for everyone. There’s a client for everyone. Okay, and I’m sure that you’ve know you know this by now seven times is the magic number. Well, I’ve heard between seven and 14 times is the number for people to even remember who you are let alone list with you. So make sure that that you are getting in front of people and getting in front of people doesn’t always have to cost money guys, you don’t have to do postcards. I’m I’m not the biggest fan of postcards. Again, it’s because I haven’t stuck with it long enough. Anything that you stick with long enough will work but it the more that you do open houses and you’re to put 30 signs out all in a row with all you know your your face on every single one, people are going to see that if you send mailers people are going to see that with your face on it. If you drop off just you know your business card or that Zillow Zestimate saying, Hey, I think, you know, this is what Zillow thinks your property is worth. I love to hear your thoughts because I have my own call me. And you have your little, you know, photo on there. The more times you get in front of people, the more actually that people will think that they already know you. So, yeah, that’s, that’s it, okay. If the house is on the market for the average, or like or more than average days on market, then go to your seller and say the good news is that we now know what the buyers think your home is worth. This is something that we didn’t know when we listed your property because we didn’t have that information available at the time. And now we know what the buyers think your home is worth. And talk about the price adjustment, copy and paste the URL that goes to your single property squeeze page that you created. post is a post this again, this is a duplicate this, and this is bolded. So this is something that you don’t have to do your VA can log into your Facebook, and post that listing on on everywhere that they can give the sellers a squeeze link, this is a repeat. Okay. Oh, man, I’m glad that I have a duplicate of this that’s just on my own personal off to the side here. Okay. Marketing the property, tell the title company, go on business.google.com. Again, back to your business page. It is so so important. So add, I would schedule it to add one photo of each of your listings every single week, you always want to keep your your Google business page active. So don’t dump in all 40 photos all at once, dump in one, maybe two a week, schedule it out, put it on your calendar, put it on your BAS calendar, say hey, VA, I want one photo, the kitchen and you know, or just this is the link to all of the photos. These are the photos that I actually want up there. Can you post one every Monday and one every Thursday. And until until it’s depleted. Create a single property squeeze page we’ve we’ve been over this but this goes to a specific KV core, a good a good YouTube that I found on how to do it with kB core.
And then create a video on YouTube shorts, depending on what you think about about shorts, but I love YouTube. I’m bullish on YouTube, like I’ve already said, so put your listing on YouTube, and partner with your partner with anybody if you have a good lender partner, or if you have a good title partner or attorney partner, you you can get in front of their audience who also works with buyer agents. And you can have them do a listing of the week. Or you can just do it on your own, send it to all of your buyers and send it to all the buyers in your office. If you have a crew send it to all of their buyers and say, Hey, this is the Deal of the Week. Why is it a deal with a week? Well, if you house hack this property, you could probably save you know, $200 a month, you could probably make $20 a month if you rented out these bedrooms, whatever it is just you know, put the property out there I love if you can’t tell already. I love digital social advertisement as opposed to paper. Okay, creating a video to run as a YouTube ad. This isn’t mandatory, but it is a way to put your property in front of masses. So I do have I found a couple of videos that it that where you can put your listing as a YouTube ad get in front of more people. And that also helps when it comes to your future listing presentations as well. Because because you can say hey, for my platinum package, we also run your property as a YouTube ad. These are our previous stats we’ve had, you know 14,000 People see this one video. So we got in front of 14,000 potential buyers. That’s a way to make yourself stand out because not many agents are doing YouTube ads. They might be throwing it on YouTube, but are they putting money behind it? Maybe maybe not. Okay then sellers homework to helping you advertise this is a duplicate we’ve already got over this. Okay. Next tele sellers This is again a duplicate Wait, this looks a little bit different here. Okay, the contractor This is backtracking this should be earlier but if they need assistance with anything if they want to fix you know, the you know, whatever it is you have connections if you don’t ask around and make sure that you befriend these connections because you’re going to need them a good contractor reliable contractor or plumber, insurance come person everything and then you’re going to mail out all of the Zestimates of the neighboring homes. Remember what the the list of 100 200 neighbors that your VA or you got a lot and you took a screenshot of those estimates now that your property is on the market you can you can use this as a way to Dornoch with something in your hand saying hey just wanted to show you that this is what Zillow thought your property is worth. I have my own thoughts but I’d love to hear yours you can just drop it off or you can actually snail mail it whatever you want to do have a call to action call me open house of course get their permission we’ve we’ve already covered open houses quite a bit so I’m going to skim through this portion. Decide on what dates and times work best make sure that it’s advertised create brochures ask your title company because our title company here I mean they’re great they have branded small water bottles with my photo with my name with my number on it. And then on the other side is their logo their photo their number and they pay for it they pay for little like you know personalized bags of what is called Oh cookies, yeah, they a little cookies. They could do the the brochure they can they can help with advertisement do not think that you are alone in paying for all of these advertising costs. There are lenders that you can partner with their title companies that you can partner with their insurance companies that you can partner with. And they will help you especially at this time, everyone needs to rely on each other even more, it’s no longer you know 2020 2021 Where houses are flying off the shelf. So use that partnership to grow together Introduce yourself doing a bom bom video, introduce yourself to the neighbors send out those send out those mailers and the day of the open house by or maybe the day before by some large balloons get put out your 20 At a minimum 20 signs making it very obvious for people will say that like don’t pay attention when driving on the road. Make sure nobody gets lost make sure everyone knows it’s so obvious where to go when to turn left when to turn right when it turned around when they’ve gone too far. So place your 30 signs out. Put the balloons up by Champagne, maybe you know however you feel about alcohol put out the branded information put out your branded pens, the sign in sheet whether you want to do that paper or digital I liked digital but I found that people weren’t too comfortable putting it digital or war they were putting in wrong information. So I just went back to good ol ink and paper pen and paper. Okay, five days before the open house you want to make sure that you’re telling the sellers to clean up giving them any last minute to dues if you want to do a face to face time say hey just want to make sure like if if you’re comfortable with it if you want to have a double but just verify that the house is in good shape let’s let’s do a FaceTime whenever you’re ready so that way I don’t drive across town or you know our agent here doesn’t drive across town sees the property and realizes no no this property is not ready for an open house. Okay and then I that’s when I hook up with my seller or seller with my cleaner if they need cleaning if they want to pay for cleaning then hey this is this is my my girl she’s a great cleaner and you can coordinate where I usually coordinate because she speaks only Spanish so extra credit print off all of the Coming Soon listings and the pocket listings that you know of plus any other properties that builders or developers are creating put it in a big big like three ring binder and with a title saying like off market do not show the public and don’t open that folder. It’s all it’s all about what what it looks like right like appearances are everything and we used to do this a lot as like federal agents for better or for worse, right i mean cops is all time they’ll come to a subject interview Victor, not victim, but Senator to interview, they’ll bring their B folders and it’s you know, saying Oh, pretty much giving them the psychological thought in their mind that oh my gosh, they must have a lot of evidence on me. I’m screwed. You know, like I’m caught I might as well tell the truth. But instead it’s just paperwork that we’ve had on the floor it’s just whatever we thought hey, who has a folder who has a folder good put it all together boom put on the market or put on the market put it on the on the table. But this shows your value Hey because you do have access to builders you do have access to to you know the built the developers you have access to off markets you have access to coming soon and that that’s a good way to pick up buyer clients from that.
During the open house pace a place a pad of paper and pen to sign in or electronic already covered this portion. For clients with realtors with them just ask them to sign in just for because the sellers usually want that and then ask if they’d like the tour or just come back if they have any questions. For clients without a realtor, some people go very, very aggressive. Some people are very, very standoffish or not standoffish, but like, Hey, do you do your own thing? It’s whatever way you feel comfortable with. Some people are like, Oh, you are working with an agent. They step outside. They’re like, oh, where’s your agent? Then? Are they too busy? That I think that’s very aggressive. Some people are like, okay, cool. Well, then walk around, you’ve seen a house before. If you want the tour, I’m more than happy to give it to you. Otherwise, I’ll be here. I am going to ask you a couple of questions that will when you get back if that’s okay. And they’re usually like, okay, cool. So what questions do you ask them? When they come back? Say, Hey, what did you What did you enjoy about the property? I’m looking to give as much feedback to the seller as possible? And then what did you not enjoy? Like, don’t worry, and this is always what I say there. They’d never want to offend the seller, right? They’re always like, Oh, well, I’ll only say this this little bit, but I’m not going to tell him the truth. And that’s what I say, Hey, if you can be as brutally honest, they don’t know who you are. And I’m not going to tell them who you are. Don’t worry. And they’re like, oh, okay, cool. Well, I thought that the, you know, whatever it is, I thought that XYZ could be improved. Perfect. That’s really you can take that to your seller, and maybe fix that, or work on that or just keep that in mind. For if offers come through. That’s probably gonna show in the offer, okay. Then you’re going to add all the names, numbers, emails to your Cavey core of everyone that showed up that same day, you’re going to send them a bom bom or if you don’t have bom, bom. Just send them a regular text video of you video is important. The key word is video of your face saying, Hey, Bob, it’s Emily gar said we just met a couple of hours ago at the open house here. It’s the warmth of the pool in the backyard. I just want to say thank you so much for coming by the open house. If you have any other properties that you’d like to look at, I’m more than happy to show you. I actually have available tomorrow all day. So if you’d like to view any properties, let me know and I’m here for it. So, men, you want to give the debrief to the seller, given the numbers and leave them with either a feel good or maybe not maybe it’s not a feel good maybe the sellers need to know that XYZ needs to be fixed. So it might not be feel good again, they need to hear the bad, the good, the bad, the ugly everything they are they hired you to give them advice. So do not give them just what you think they want to hear which is feel good. That is not why they hired you. Okay, next is any new clients that you have follow up any of the agents that you met follow up saying it was great to meet with them because of course, you don’t want to be a butthead to any agents that you potentially might be working with. You might be working with them on that property or in the future. So always be nice. This is something that sometimes is so hard for agents and and I don’t want to call anybody out but man some there are some age groups that are very, very not nice. So and of course if you’re looking to recruit this is a perfect opportunity to be like, Oh man, this agent was killer. If you’re looking to expand your brokerage that’s perfect. Don’t ever be rude. Okay, go on na r dot realtor slash safety. For safety tips when doing open houses. Be very aware if you would prefer to do a buddy up you know, buddy system for open houses, a lot of our agents in our crew do that and they kind of just like one off like split the leads that come in, or work them together. 5050 And then you want to ask for referrals. So do they know if anyone else has been on the market that’s looking to sell right now? Do you know of anyone moving to any state at all? I can help them if I know of someone that that’s a good agent in that city. And then of course, if they’re usually gonna say, oh, no, not at this time. That’s when you can go one step further. Oh, okay. You don’t do not know anyone that has recently had a job promotion? Or maybe like, what about having a baby? Or maybe like a couple whose kids went to college already? They’re looking to downsize? Okay, still no? Okay. Well, I would love to if you could keep me in mind. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to be following back up in like about a month if that’s okay. Or whatever it is. Just be yourself. And then this is the last segment before I’ll cut it because I didn’t realize I had been babbling for 62 minutes. Here we go. If the property has been sitting on the market, remember if the house isn’t selling the price is not compelling. So let’s talk adjusting the price. If the house has been on the market for two weeks or dipped again depends on the on the days on market, the average ask the Ask the seller in case you haven’t already, what price are you no longer seller because say they only wanted to sell if they can get for 75 but they want to list that 500 But they you know at 450 They would rather just rent you you’re gonna want to have that conversation again. Because maybe it is the case where you do just have to cancel they would rather just rent the property and then you get your $3,000 cancellation fee and you wish them the best you connect them to a couple of good property managers if you know of any. If you know of any in Tucson, please message me at the agent on social media, and then yeah, okay so then the last segment here is going to say if again this is again if the property has been sitting on the market make sure you you do your weekly update updates to the seller you know what the days on market are week after week. If this is too much for you have a fellow agent do it have a VA do it for you. And say the market has spoken typically when there are buyers that walk through the property, but I’ve placed no offers. That means that the pricing is off. And sometimes it’s off between two to 5%. And if the house is listed, and there are no viewings, or no no showings and no offers, that means that their pricing is off by more than 5%. Luckily, we’ve had viewers that walked the properties but no offers. So let me ask you, would you like to lower it to two or five by two or 5%. And of course that’s after you’ve run the numbers to a more appropriate price. That’s going to be it for today. On the next video I’m going to finish the checklist as well as show you the canned emails. I never think of what to say in email. It’s the same email one through six every single time. Do not recreate the wheel. We agents do enough of that in their business. If you have any questions hit me up on Instagram. I’m Ally the agent al i. If you want a copy of the checklist, let’s meet over Zoom Text the word checklist to 520-341-2552 If you enjoyed this video, give this video like comment below and give DJ and keeping it real a five star review on Apple and Spotify in order to get the checklist. We’ll see you on the next one.
New Changes To Lending Limits Agents Need To Know About! • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Dec 08, 2023
Welcome to the October episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses the changes happening in the lending world and also shares strategies for listing agents to get the most out of the changes in the loan limits. Next, Joel discusses why this is a great time to buy. Joel also shares his thoughts about the upcoming market.
Sign for Joel’s newspaper by sending an email at joel@rate.com writing “newsletter” in the subject line.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Did you know there have been changes to the loan limits for jumbo loans versus conventional loans? Or we’re going to talk about that today and show you some creative solutions to get around high interest rate environments. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show today, once again, is our monthly series learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. And he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. So last year alone, Joe gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with them. And that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of loan officers nationwide. fact there’s 400,000 loan officers in the country and Joel is currently ranked number 137. Even in this down market. Joel has closed transactions this year for 102 million. So if you are looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Jolie’s the very best we’ve ever worked with Joel can be reached at joel@rate.com. Again, Joel at jll@rate.com. You can also shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel sharp. Welcome back.
Joel Schaub 2:55 Hey, thanks so much for having me on. We have so many things going on in the market right now. These are usually my favorite time of month getting on here. Giving back and talking about things that really can help agents grow their business.
D.J. Paris 3:10 Yeah, thanks. We love having you. And even when you are either in your office or working Mobley you always make time for our show. And we absolutely appreciate that. So yeah, let’s talk about some changes that have been happening in the lending world. I’ve been hearing a lot about loan limits that have changed. Um, can you shed us some light to our audience of what is that and what do agents need to understand about it?
Joel Schaub 3:40 Yes, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve been seeing multiple posts from everybody talking about the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan limits have gone up, instead of just talking about it. How does that help me as an agent what was not able to get a loan above the new limits before? Right? So the numbers, if you haven’t heard are up to $766,550 a mouthful, right? So the bottom line for this is that you’ve always been able DJ to get loans above it before but they were considered jumbo mortgages, right? So if you’re in the jumbo category, they were with higher interest rates, they were with more downpayment and typically a lot harder to get underwritten and approved. So now, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have said that loan amounts that go up to 766 550 now fall under their category, which means a lot more advantages for first time homebuyers, for example. So
D.J. Paris 4:44 now we’re we’re what used to be classified as possibly jumbo is could potentially be non jumbo at this moment.
Joel Schaub 4:54 And so think of it last year if you were buying an $800,000 home you couldn’t put down On 5%, if you were buying an $800,000 home, you are well over that number, that 5% down would have put you into a jumbo category. Well, now you’d go out and buy an $800,000. Home with $40,000 down. And now the loan amount there of 760 falls under the jumbo limit. So there’s some big advantages for first time buyers here. And that’s why I always like to, like get into the weeds with this, it’s not so much seeing the data and hearing the numbers. But if I’m an agent, how do I go out and market to my database right now to get one more buyer or one more seller. So think of this right? A lot of times, you’re right on the cusp of pricing a property, right, we’d ever want to price ourselves into a jumbo loan, if you can, right meaning now knowing that first time homebuyers can bind with 5% down in most of the Fannie Mae conforming limits. Think of that as a strategy in terms of how you would price the home, maybe you wouldn’t price it at 825, maybe price it down at 805. Knowing that a first time homebuyer would qualify. And that’s where they will be setting their limits themselves.
D.J. Paris 6:14 That’s an interesting strategy. So actually listing agents may want to consider if they have a home that is within these sort of like, if they have a home that’s 800,000 or above, this would be a great thing to consider when pricing.
Joel Schaub 6:32 Yeah, take it to the next step, what would have put somebody out of jumbo before, okay, so the jumbo limit last year was 726,000. That means if you had a listing that was over 907, everybody was 20%, Down, Right? You had to otherwise, you were in a jumbo without 20% down, and I won’t get into how that would really affect the rates being higher and mortgage insurance. But now that $907,000 listing is easily under the 766 number. So taking a little bit of time doing the math to see where you should price your homes. And then knowing this gives you a lot of talking points when you’re out getting a new listing or helping a buyer. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 7:18 you know, I’m thinking as, as what an agent might want to consider talking to their buyers about is maybe now is a good time to buy because number one, a lot less competition, a lot less buyers are flooding the market. So prices are relatively stable at this point. We know when there’s lots of buyers that flood the market, of course, supply and demand the pricing goes up. So what you can always do is possibly refinance your rate, but you can’t refinance. You know what you spent, what you bought the property for. So this may be a good time. So what you know, but at the on the other side of it is the public goes but rates are at seven plus or you know, maybe even higher. And yes, money is a little more expensive to borrow at this time. But with a lot less competition, you’re not going to be likely to overpay. And so to me, I think this end with these loan limit increases as well. This is what I would be educating buyers on if I was an agent working today I’d be talking about I know it seems like it’s not the right time, because everyone else wants a three to 4% You know, loan but those days those days have passed. And the good news is less competition and probably lower pricing.
Joel Schaub 8:37 I think you’re exactly right DJ with the rates this year. It’s been sixes sevens and even eights as of this month and buyers are still calling 80 to 100 a month, I’m actually overwhelmed by the number of people, especially where I live in Chicago, that the rents DJ are just so much where they’re still looking to buy even though the rates are high.
D.J. Paris 9:02 Yeah, and again, just remember to guys competition, right? We want to talk to our buyers about competition and when we have lots of buyers flooding the market, we know that influences prices, and you know your job as an agent is your fiduciary. So you are to do what is best for the client’s financial interests. So having these conversations with buyers about Yes, it’s a slightly more expensive time to borrow than it was in previous years. But I would much rather borrow at a higher rate for temporarily for to get a lower price on the home I want to I want to buy so we’ve seen you know prices are stable right now. So now’s the time to get the buyers off the fence and can you know encourage them to consider not waiting for those rates to come down.
Joel Schaub 9:51 You know I had an agent the other day asked me so they know what I do in terms of even in this down market doing $10 million a month and They say I want to get to $10 million a year. Howard, how is it possible that you’re doing it? So I shared one of the two, one rate buydown techniques that I talked to a lot of buyers about. And when there’s no competition out there when you’re actually submitting an offer, because rates are high, and you can ask the seller to fund a to one buy down, I like to tell them that, if you don’t ask, you’re not going to get all right. So if you’re not familiar with a way to do it, if you’re an agent, connect with your lender, ask them do you facilitate to one by downs, almost every lending partner out there, we’ll do this for you. And on a $400,000 loan, just asking the seller to give a 10 to $12,000 credit DJ will lower that client’s payment by almost $500 a month. Versus if they were just getting 10 to 12 grand off the price barely changes their payment by $88. Wow, writing. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 11:01 So this is a great a great option for sellers to even consider as maybe putting that in as part of their offering. Without waiting to have it as for say I am willing to work with you on your loan. And if a if a buyer down would make sense to get this deal closed, we will do it. And so it really becomes I think a marketing tool for both sides, obviously at the buy side, but it’s also something that listing agents should be aware of. So they could consider if that would make some of these these offers more attractive.
Joel Schaub 11:37 Instead of doing a price reduction, right, a $10,000 price reduction is probably not going to move the needle and we certainly don’t want to do a $25,000 price reduction on a four or $500,000 home. Therefore, if we could just give up 10 to 12 grand in price, and give it to the buyer that’s gonna make that buyer in that price point, make that home look so much better than the neighbor’s house, right? It’s about payment. For a lot of the first time homebuyers. Almost everyone asked me, not how much am I approved for but what are my payments if I buy this home? And so that’s the big deal if I’m a listing agent, and I know that it’s overpriced, and I don’t want to ask the seller and come back with that damn conversation about they can sign for another price reduction. How about we do a marketing blitz and show right now that with rates down there in the low 70s, I even today was able to lock in a 30 year fixed with the buy down where for the first year the rate was 4.99%. In year number two was 5.9. And then fixed for the 30 years, we were back to 6.99%. And that was all because the seller gave a 3% credit to our buyer. So we use that to drive the rate down and then use a two one buy down strategy to further give the client savings.
D.J. Paris 12:59 And these are the kinds of strategies that really do separate the top agents from the rest that agents who are willing to understand there are these creative solutions that 99% of agents aren’t that familiar with that this is how you get to become a specialist. And this is where why we have these these episodes with Joel because he of course is. And he teaches all of you the same stuff. So you know, just as a quick plug for Joel, he’s been coming on our show for five plus years, providing incredible value to everyone. So please, if you don’t have a loan officer that is bringing you these kinds of ideas, reach out to Joel, he would love to chat with you about that as well. Joel, I would also love to talk about your sort of thoughts about the upcoming market. So we know it gets a little slow in the winter months. And of course, spring is not far away. So do you have any thoughts about what we might be thinking what we might be seeing? I know it’s no one’s got a crystal ball, but what what are your best thoughts for for this upcoming spring?
Joel Schaub 14:06 Well, I have a hot take, okay, this is it might not be what everybody’s expecting. But this is gonna be an earlier spring market than ever. Okay, rates really did just come down in the last two weeks. Okay. And by all indications, we’re probably about a 48% chance that the Fed cuts rates and QE number one, meaning buyers are going to be out there hot and heavy. They don’t want to miss out and it’s strange, but it’s true. There’s going to be multiple offers if the properties are priced right. And I’m not talking March, April, May, I’m talking January, the start of the new year we’re going to start seeing rates, they might be down into the mid sixes. And if we see that we’re going to have buyers coming out of the woodwork that say finally, rates are no longer in the eighth they’re not in the sevens I can easily get into the six says, and then still use a buy down strategy to get a rate maybe at four and a half or five and a half for the next two years. There’s gonna be a lot of activity early. And we’re going to look back on this episode saying to him, Joel, you were right.
D.J. Paris 15:16 You know, I still just think there’s so much opportunity right now to convince buyers are not convinced, of course, they should do what’s best for them, but to encourage them to really consider the implications of if the Fed did drop. If tomorrow if the Fed decides, you know what, early Christmas present for everybody, we’re going to drop 200 basis points, we’re going to drop 2% of the rate on a rate. Can you imagine what would flood the market as far as buyers? Everybody who is on the sidelines right now, would jump back in because of course, it’s such a huge event. And this would be really, it would be a good and a bad thing for buyers. It’s good because it gets them off the sidelines bad, because now they’re all competing with each other.
Joel Schaub 16:00 You’re exactly right. This is the we’re gonna see early, but I think towards the q4. So it’s gonna be this kind of like a camel shaped recovery next year, I think we’re gonna see it really shoot up in q1, when feds are talking about rates, summer is going to be a little bit slower, but the feds are going to cut again. And so when we get into the fall market, there’s going to be rates considerably lower multiple offers, getting back to the tougher situations as agents that you better be ready for. And so TJ is exactly right. Knowing that this is coming, like they’ve outlined to the feds are cutting rates, why wouldn’t we try to go out and buy now when there is less competition, because once we own the home, the client can refinance that loan, and get the better interest rate down the line. We should
D.J. Paris 16:51 also mention too, that these types of strategies, you know, this goes back to sort of the stock market ideas. Buying when a stock is undervalued or underperforming, doesn’t feel as encouraging at the time of purchase. If you are, you know, just getting into the stock market, or like oh my gosh, this company’s down, I want to buy them when they’re not doing well. Well, yeah. Because then when they when they rebound, of course, you’ll you’ll receive all the upside benefit. So you have to I think, as an agent, really think about how do I start conditioning my clients that even though that rate feels a little yucky at the moment, don’t worry, it’s yes, it feels yucky. But here’s why it’s still a really good idea. I think if if if agents can start having these conversations with some of these bullet points that you share every single month on our show, they would get more transactions right now, I am absolutely confident of that. Because everybody talks about the rate and rate rate rate rates are high. Yes, yes, we all know that. And here’s why it’s still a great time. And having those conversations is is really doing the right thing for your client. And it’s doing the best thing for them from a fiduciary perspective, making sure that they know what everyone else doesn’t that it’s actually a great time to consider borrowing right now, even though that rate is higher than anyone would like, of course, rates are always going to be higher than anyone would like Right. Of course, that’s always the case. But we know that the Fed has Joel said is outlining an opportunity in the next year or longer to decrease rates to a more palatable time. You don’t want to wait for that time. Because by the time that happens, everyone’s going to be in the market.
Joel Schaub 18:28 If we can afford the monthly payment with the higher rate, think what happens. Okay, so now we’re buying a piece of real estate today, when it’s uncomfortable, right? Let’s be clear, like rates in the low 70s. Even if you get them down into the six, that’s still a lot of uncomfortability for a lot of folks when rates were in the twos and threes during COVID. Okay, but stick with me here and think of like in my market of Chicago, it’s not crazy million dollar homes. My my average client, most of them hundreds a year are four or $500,000 homes. And if you bought a $400,000 home right now when nobody else was buying, because rates were in the sevens, and rates get down to five and a half, you better believe that $400,000 home is worth more buyers are going to start paying more for homes when rates go down. So why wouldn’t we go buy something now when rates are high, only if we can afford it, we don’t want to get in over our head. We don’t want to buy a piece of real estate and it’s going to cost us too much money. But if we can comfortably afford it, and we know that rates are coming down, you know your home is going to be worth more and then you’ll reap the benefit when you refinance the loan.
D.J. Paris 19:42 I love that it’s so true. And we’re gonna keep banging the drum on this because once rates do start to really come down, this is all going to be a lot more obvious. And so we want to try to get you in on on the ground floor so to speak, so that you can do not only do what’s right for your client, but also To begin to, you know, really show your value as an agent, right value as an agent, why are they paying you as much as they are to help them buy or sell a home? It’s because of ideas like this. So thank you, Joel, for that I also Joel, Joel is what a lot of people who listen who might not know this about about Joel and his team, is they are exceptional at client appreciation events. Really, Joel and his team, it’s the best I’ve ever seen in this industry, with the amount of giving back that Joel does it he and his team. And I’m just curious to know, because you are always so on top of this. You know, it’s the holiday season agents are probably thinking about what they may want to do for their their clients in it, whether or not it’s you know, something for this holiday season or the future. What might you suggest because you always have amazing ideas for your own clients.
Joel Schaub 20:57 Well, I’m already looking ahead. Unfortunately, the December months have been booked and planned since July, right. So right now, as of this taping, what we’re talking about, we just did it with my team this morning, Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, all right, and sending sending gifts on these off days. So it’s not just the events that we do if you’re an agent, trying to come up with ways to touch your database on off days, like Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, I do Presidents Day, I do National Pizza Day, I do all of these little cute things. Because if it’s Christmas or New Year, you’re lumped into the mix, there’s so many gifts, I stopped doing birthday gifts as well, everyone gets a birthday gift. And I know that boo, you don’t send out birthday gifts, I don’t I want to stand out you as an agent want to stand out, no matter how good your gift is to a client. Something better, right? You’re gonna send but when they’re not expecting a gift, when they’re not expecting something boy, they say that that came from my realtor, that realtor sent me this gift. So I encourage you to think of these off days where you can send out small tokens of value where you look different. And I know DJ, you were talking about events. And I just went on the tangent because I was just doing you know,
D.J. Paris 22:19 I really I really meant all sorts of marketing appreciation that you do, which whether it’s events or product, or you know, gifts. And I really miss it was my Miss misspoke. But But yeah, so of events are obviously always great as well. I was thinking more about the the actual gifts. So you were you were saying you were saying what I didn’t say. So thank you for that. And yeah, so maybe not focusing so much on the December holidays. As much as it’s kind of like this, we do the same thing for our holiday parties. I don’t know, if guaranteed rate does the same thing as we stopped planning them for December because we’re like, Everyone’s so busy, nobody so hard. Like we’re we just do it in January now. And we do that because number one, it’s kind of fun to have a party in January when no one’s expecting to have a party. So Joel is basically saying the same idea whether you’re doing a client appreciation event, or just a gift, you know, find a fun, cute thing that is on an off day where people wouldn’t be expecting those kinds of things.
Joel Schaub 23:24 I had a I did a kind of a pipeline review with an agent today. And so this was an agent that is in the city of Chicago has a big database. And they do a lot of volume. And I looked to see who their preferred lender was. And I noticed that they were only capturing about 5% of their business. And so during the presentation, I was sharing with them that they did last year to the tune of about 310 deals, but their person, their their person that they were so loyal to only captured about 5% of the business. And I shared with them that they’re leaving money on the table because out of the last 15 transactions. There are 14 different mortgage lenders on that list. And I said whether you decide to partner with my team, and I showed him everything that we do, and I said this is worth money, literally there’s RESPA compliant ways that lenders would pay to be your preferred lender. And on that example, it was about $48,000 A year is what I shared that I’d be willing to step up in a heartbeat and write them a check for 48 grand a year to apply to RESPA compliant things like silho and their events. And it kind of blew them away. They I knew we were valuable. And I knew that my preferred lender that they liked it was a high school buddy and he’s like, I know about grown to them and I really did need to you know they connected with me. They wanted to hear what I was doing with other agents. And the reason I bring this up is if you are listening to this and you do a lot of business, connect with a lender. literally doesn’t, you want somebody that’s local that you really like that wants to spend money with you? Okay? And this is where all realtors they’re afraid to go ask but don’t lenders will step up DJ, how often do you hear me talk about this
D.J. Paris 25:14 every single time and I love that you’re you’re you banging the drum about this is hold lenders accountable for helping you grow your business, they want more of your transactions? Of course they do. And as a result that that is worth something and of course staying within RESPA and and you know whatever association rules apply making sure you’re doing it the right way. But making sure you’re not undervaluing your business as an agent. You know, if you’re doing however many deals a year, and on the buy side, think about how many different lenders did I work with? And on those those lenders? What did they do to help me further my business? And what are they doing currently to help me further my business? And did they send me any referrals, and you know what, and that now it’s time to start interviewing loan officers.
Joel Schaub 26:04 So if you’re listening here, and you’re doing over $20 million of annual production per year, reach out to me for sure, I’ll show you what you should be doing. And how you can go back to your lending partners there and say, there’s somebody else out of state that’s willing to do this for me, can we even come up with something close to it. And if you’re doing less than $20 million, reach out to me and get on my newsletter. This is where I share with you the simple tips, tricks, and things that will make you sound smarter. Make you have real talking points in digestible little bites. So it’s just an email to me, it’s joel@great.com JO el@rate.com. And in the subject line, you can write a newsletter. And then that’s it. There’s nothing you don’t need to write me three paragraphs unless you want to tell me how much you love us. But it’s easy to sign up for the newsletter, you can unsubscribe anytime, and it’ll be action packed with things that you can actually use to grow your business to the next level.
D.J. Paris 27:08 Yeah, I really echo that get on Joel’s mailing list every Wednesday or so they are sent a sends out this great, super easy to read and understand and actionable bullet points about here’s what’s going on in the market. Here’s as an agent, what you should be talking to your clients about. You don’t have to wait for Joel to come on these episodes, although we hope that you continue to listen to our show as well. But don’t wait even for this, you want to know weekly what’s going on. So get on his mailing list, send him an email joel@rate.com There’s 1000s of people on this on this email list. Now it’s grown hugely popular, and it’s a nice service that Joel provides for our listeners. So thank you, Joel. And also again, if your loan officer is just not really helping you do more production, or come up with creative solutions for your clients in this market. Now’s the time to again, find the really good loan officers and guess what Joel is one of them. So reach out to him and if he can’t assist you, He will give you some great ideas of where you could possibly go but he and guaranteed rate they’re licensed in all 50 states they can of course help you as well. So Joel up, everyone emailed Joel get on his mailing list joel@rate.com If you are, you know doing more than 20 million also say, hey, I want to do a review of my business with you and see what Joel can and his team can put together for you as well. So Joel, another wonderful episode, it’s our last episode of the year for learn with a lender. So Joel, thank you so much for another year of service to not only me personally, and my team, but also every single listener, we had the most number of downloads to date. In our entire history. This year, we were up about 30%. So we are super grateful because it’s people like you that come on and give us this valuable information that keeps people coming back. So thank you to our audience too. You guys are the greatest this may be the final episode of the year. So I would be remiss to say thank you to everyone who’s been with us, either whether you’re new or that you’ve been with us since the beginning but we appreciate you please tell a friend tell a friend and by the way if you know another agent that’s like that, you know, their their preferred loan officer isn’t doing a good job for them. Send them a link to this episode. You know, it would do them a service as well. And just keep keep the love going let other agents know about our show. But on the in the interest of wrapping up this year, we will say goodbye to Joel and hello to Joel in January for a whole new year of content. So thank you to Joel and his team at guaranteed rate again, email him joel@rate.com guys he’s really that good. And I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it. It he really is and he’s earned my business so he should he has let them have the opportunity to earn your business. as well, Joel, I need to become your pitch, man, maybe we can, we can work out, I could start doing commercials for you, I’ll be the I’ll be as your biggest fan, I’ll be your pitch tomorrow big
Joel Schaub 30:10 fan and everyone that. Remember, like the sky is not falling rates have already come down. So take away with this next year. If you’re in this business now stay in the business. If you’re new to the business, stick with it, there is so much that you’re going to be able to do when other people leave. So keep positive, know that rates are coming down. And know that no matter where rates are at if you work your sphere, work, the people that you know, and then do a great job. This business is for you, you’re going to do great now
D.J. Paris 30:43 is that now’s the time really that the good agents do even better. So this is the time because they take market share away from the agents that are falling behind. Don’t let that happen to you. Keep listening to our show, reach out to Joel he will give you ideas about how to keep moving your business forward. And please keep coming back and listening. So Joel, on behalf of everyone. Thank you on behalf of Joel and myself to the audience. We love you. Thank you for a great year, and we will see everyone in 2024 Thanks Joel.
Is A/I Coming For Real Estate Agents? • Unpopular Real Estate Opinions • Chris Linsell
Dec 07, 2023
Welcome to our monthly feature Unpopular Real Estate Opinions with Chris Linsell.
Chris Linsell talks about the current situation in the real estate market. Chris discusses mortgage rates and why this is an amazing time to buy a home. Next, Chris talks about AI and its impact on the real estate market, an agent’s job, and the commissions. Chris also discusses how agents can evaluate the level of service they offer and what they can do to improve. Last, Chris discusses the importance of building a portfolio of expertise.
D.J. Paris 0:00 is AI coming for your job? Well, yes, but also No. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I am your guide and host through the show and today I’ll return to keeping it real as our one of our favorite people that has been with us almost since well, almost since the beginning of our show certainly has been with us for many years Chris Lynn cell and we actually have a new title for Chris’s episodes that he’s going to be coming on regularly with us used to be called closing time, we came up with a with a different and kind of a more fun title we both thought, which is called unpopular real estate opinions with Chris Lin Sal, let me let me actually tell you more about Chris, if you are new to the show, if you are a returning guest or sorry returning listener to our show, you probably already know this about Chris, but let me tell you more about him to everyone who is new. Crystal Ansel is a real estate technology analyst and director of content at large. He specializes in new solutions to old questions, constantly exploring the cutting edge of technology in the real estate space. And Chris also has many years of experience as a licensed Realtor in the state of Michigan, and has worked as a marketer, a digital strategist and a trainer for major national brands like Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices of Michigan, and Coldwell Banker Schmidt realtors. Throughout his real estate career, Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions ranging from modest rural starter homes to multi million dollar waterside compounds, and accomplished musician, actor and speaker Chris has engaged with audiences sized ranging from 30 to 3000. Most recently, Chris was just a featured speaker at the 2023 National Association of REALTORS Convention, which he just returned. Many of you listening may have already may have seen him speak there. But Chris, what oh, by the way, before Chris comes on, please follow Chris on LinkedIn, we’ll have a link to his LinkedIn page. He has writes great content there. And also if you are looking for a sought after speaker, either for a brokerage, maybe an association or a conference, Chris would love to chat with you. He is constantly traveling across the country speaking to lots of Realtors, Chris Lynn cell.com is where you can find his touring schedule and how to get in touch with him. Chris, welcome back to the show. DJ,
Chris Linsell 3:57 it’s great to be back, we might have to work on cutting that intro down a little bit, I realized I gave you a lot of info. And you know, most people that don’t care about that stuff, they just want to they want to get to the meat inside of the sandwich. So thanks. Thanks for having me back. It’s really a pleasure to be chatting with you again. You know, when I was or anyone who doesn’t know, DJ and I originally met when I was the senior writer for a website called the clothes and did a lot of content and and professional development for real estate professionals through the close hence closing time the former name of our segment but now that I am have moved on in the next chapter beyond the close, launching some new ideas here Unpopular Opinions perhaps man I’m looking forward to digging into it today. It’s It’s It’s good to be back chatting.
D.J. Paris 4:56 It’s very exciting to have you back Chris is very very important person, I believe, currently in the real estate journalist space. Chris is very, very well informed on what’s going on. From not just from a news perspective, but also from the perspective of working agent. And you’re also in direct communication with working agents as of course, you being a working agent yourself up. So let’s, let’s get right into it. What? Well, there’s a lot to go over. What do you what’s on your mind today?
Chris Linsell 5:30 Man, what’s on my mind today? Well, you know, there’s a lot of stuff, obviously happening in the real estate space right now. I think I think it’s important for for real estate professionals right now, to realize that we are, we’re currently I don’t know if you ever seen the video this, we’re currently standing on the beach, watching the water get pulled away from the shore. Like, like what happened in I think it was in Thailand, when there was this earthquake. You know, out in the ocean, everybody standing on the beach was watching the water recede, like there was waves that were getting pulled back like the tide was going out. And everyone was like, What the heck is going on? It’s pretty quiet in here right now. But there’s no water like we’re used to all of that water. In this video is building to a giant wave that’s going to come crash over the beach. And right now I have this kind of gut feeling that real estate might be going through that scenario. We’re all standing on the beach. It’s relatively calm. There’s, you know, it’s not perfect, but we’re not getting splashed right now. But pretty soon, we’re going to face some challenges as an industry challenges that we haven’t faced in a long, long time, maybe ever. And it is time for real estate professionals to start thinking about this, because we’re about to get wet as as the same would go. But I’m here to talk about why we might get wet and to tell people where they can buy their surfboards, because just because the waves are common doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful either.
D.J. Paris 7:12 Yeah, it’s funny I that I think that’s a really apt metaphor. And it makes a lot of sense, because it does feel very calm. Right now, certainly, the waters are murky. And, you know, there’s a lot that people are, at least the agents that I communicate with are unhappy about, but not as unhappy, maybe as they’ve been in recent, previous years. But there is obviously there’s there’s challenges with inventory and interest rates. I saw Jamie Dimon yesterday from from Chase, had basically said, Yeah, recession is coming. So um, that was that was depressing to see that usually. I don’t know, whatever Jamie Dimon says, I usually think is probably probably close to accurate. But he is not an economist either. So who knows, but he has a team of them working for him. But yeah, we would love let’s talk about where that kinetic energy is building right now out and out in the surf. And when it’s going to come crashing into us and what we can do sort of brace ourselves for it. Yeah.
Chris Linsell 8:18 Well, let me let me start by giving you an unpopular opinion, but not untrue, about the mortgage rates that you just mentioned. So it’s true that we’ve seen volatility in the mortgage rate sector, significant volatility relative to what we’re used to, right. Like it was not that long ago, that the status quo for mortgage rates was in the threes in the fours 4% for residential loans. What felt high at, you know, in recent memory, so to see rates where they are right now feels volatile, it feels like a shock even for those of us who have seen rates higher than this. It’s just been a long time since those rates have been that high. But let me set some, let me let me kind of set a straight here. It’s not popular for me to say this, but we are going to experience as an industry, a significant set of disruption. When industry went when our interest rates come down a little bit. And let me explain why. Right now, most people in most markets are experiencing what I would consider price stagnation. Relative to the interest rates, these high interest rates are not driving prices down. They’re just generally keeping them pretty, pretty pretty much flat. This is because these high interest rates, which usually would drive prices down are being buoyed by our lack of inventory, as you mentioned before, right like, even though you Interest rates are high demand was so high that now that the interest rates have come up, we’ve just kind of hit that equilibrium. But not down here where we want it, it’s up a little bit higher, this equilibrium is higher than most people are comfortable with. So imagine what would happen. If say, in 812 16 months, the interest rates drop two percentage points, and all of a sudden, we are seeing mortgage rates in the five percents. While all of this pent up demand for home purchases is going to explode onto the scene. And imagine what will happen when the buyer pool literally doubles in two weeks, when interest rates snapped down again, we’re going to see prices pop, especially in on demand markets, like major metros, tourist destinations, anywhere where there’s water, especially freshwater, we are going to see prices pop by 30% 50%, even in the span of a quarter, it would not surprise me to see interest rates go down, and prices pop by 20% 25. This
D.J. Paris 11:12 is a pretty this is a competition thing. We’re talking about 100% competition 100%.
Chris Linsell 11:17 Because you’re gonna have all of a sudden, all these buyers who had decided, I’m going to wait out the mortgage, the mortgage rates, I don’t have to move right now. But I cannot surrender my my 3% mortgage rate on my existing home, I can’t surrender that for an 8%. But I might be able to stomach it for 5%. So all of those buyers are going to flood into the market and all of a sudden, we’re going to see prices on homes skyrocket. And this is not going to be good for our markets in general, we’re still trying to find this balance between supply and demand. So an unpopular opinion, all that to say is the following. This is actually an amazing time to buy a home for buyers. Because if you have the capital to be able to temporarily brace the existing payments, thanks to the mortgage rates that are elevated, you have low competition and flat prices, which means your your your search process is relatively predictable. You could if you bought a house right now, if those mortgage rates like we’re all predicting, popped down by 2%, in the next 24 months, you can refinance that house, but you cannot refinance the price of the house. If you want to wait. If you cannot lock in today’s price, and then wait to buy it for two more years, you got to lock in at both places. But you can refinance that rate, even though it’s a little higher than you’re used to. Now, not everybody has that opportunity. I recognize this is another reasons unpopular opinion. Not everybody has the opportunity to go in at the higher mortgage rate because capital is tight, I totally get that. So this isn’t something that applies for everyone. But if you are working with buyers right now, it is time to start framing this situation as an opportunity because genuinely hate to say it, I don’t think it’s gonna get easier for buyers. In fact, I think it’s gonna get harder. And right now is the time that buyer’s agents should be counseling their clients to say, Now is the time if you want to strike on these sorts of things, it’s time to be active in the in the in the market right now.
D.J. Paris 13:35 I agree, I think that I would love to see a calculator. And by the way, if one of our listeners is so skilled in their in math to create this, but I would love to see based on some of the assumptions you just mentioned, what that breakeven point is for when it doesn’t make sense to purchase in a higher interest rate low competition environment like now which because and then assuming that at some point in the next several years, you may be able to refinance down to a lower rate if if rates do in fact decrease, which which we would hope they will. But you’re right, that the as the value or as the price. As the interest rates come down, of course, competition will be increased. So I think you’re right, this is, I think a huge opportunity for agents to just explain to their buyers money is just more expensive right now. It’s just a little bit more expensive. And here’s the good news. The bad news is yes, it’s going to cost you more to to you know, get a place currently, as far as the if you’re borrowing but you have not only less competition, as Chris said prices are relatively flat and a less competition. And then you know, as interest rates of course increase you’re able to or decrease you’re able to refinance hopefully in the future, but you know, you’re basically going to get a better price today. Just based on competition,
Chris Linsell 15:01 yeah, 100% 100%. Now, I want to layer in another unpopular opinion that goes along with this one we’re talking about, I mean, it’s easy to talk about the mechanics of our market. Because we’re all kind of watching we’re I mean, most most MLS is you can see what’s closing, you can see when it’s closing, you can understand the volume of your market, you can understand it relative to the historics. So most of us can see that stuff pretty pretty evidently, if we’re looking for it. But let me add in a layer of kind of unpopular opacity, if it will, something that kind of cloud things a little bit, which is the the added element of technology, specifically AI in this conversation. I know it’s unpopular to say this. But AI is common for your job. And let me be more specific, you’re not going to get replaced by AI, but you’re going to get replaced by somebody who uses AI very soon. Like, I’m not kidding, in the next 36 months, this is going to be a real consideration for people. And let me tell you why I think that this is true. We have seen an unprecedented acceleration in terms of the the path of AI, DJ, I don’t know if if you saw this or not. So if you if you did, I’m gonna give you a gimme here. And if you didn’t, then we’ll we’ll go from there. How long do you think we’ve been talking about chat? GPT? How long do you think this tool has been on the scene for us? How
D.J. Paris 16:38 long has it been on the scene? I don’t know. Yeah. How long is it? How long has it been in the zeitgeist? I’d say, year, maybe year and a half. It
Chris Linsell 16:50 just chat GPT became available to the public, just barely a year from when we’re recording this. It’s been available to the public one year and one day from today. It feels like we’ve been talking about this for a long time. Because I mean, a year is a long time. But we’ve also been really intensely talking about it. And one of the reasons we’ve been really intensely talking about it, is because it has developed so fast. Think about where we were a year and a half ago, nobody was using it was even thinking in the context of technology, how can I use AI to improve my real estate business? And now, I mean, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, I have spoken to literally 1000s of Realtors over the last just three months about how AI will affect their real estate business. And let me tell you, things are not slowing down, things are speeding up. It is very reasonable to believe that a year from right now, AI will be unrecognizably powerful relative to what it is right now. So if you are thinking to yourself, This is a technology that will not affect me and my business. You are akin to the realtors, who in the early 2000s thought now, there’s just no way that a company like what are they called Zillow, Zillow, zili, there’s no way a company like that could affect my real estate business. Of course, people are still going to want to come in my office and flip through the phone book that was the MLS, then if you are one of those people, you’re fooling yourself AI, and somebody who’s using it is coming for your job. And if you’re not prepared for that three years from now, you’re going to be doing something else.
D.J. Paris 18:54 Yeah, I mean, it’s even AI has even changed the way that I searched the web because now for the most part, I will well, I’m trying to think of if this is a true statement for me, it’s close enough to true most of the time, I will go to chat GBT with my query before I’ll go to Google. And that is only going to in Google’s developing their own. They have barred, they have their own AI. But eventually, we are going to stop submitting even search queries the way that we’re doing now. It’s it’s chat, GBT already has voice input, and that’s going to continue to develop and people are going to just start getting accustomed to talking to their devices and asking for information. I do it almost every day. i The way I think about it is you know, I don’t know if it goes back to the Odyssey but but this whole or wherever, whatever mythology this is, but the oracle at Delphi, this Greek mythology thing I have that now and or at least a version of that. And I speak to it all the time. And I’m curious and how Do you think that may impact a realtors job? Well, you mentioned? Yeah. Like how? What? Yeah.
Chris Linsell 20:07 Well, I mean, I’ll start off by saying, This is not an exaggeration. My children speak to and I don’t want to say it out loud. Our smartest speaker. Yep, my children speak to our smart speaker literally daily. And they ask it the sort of things that would have taken me a minute to get for them using the internet, and would have taken me at their age going to find somebody who just physically knew the information that I was asking. So my kids, this is this isn’t a learned behavior. This is an organic behavior for them. And it is for anybody who grew up using this technology. And the emergence of of artificial intelligence to pair with that sort of interface is going to, like I said, completely revolutionize the way that we think about information and execution of tasks. How will that affect real estate professionals? Well, there are two big things that I think we should consider. The first is, and I know, unpopular opinion here. But the first is if your value as a real estate professional is based on your access to tools, or your ability to execute procedural things, you’re screwed, I hate to say it, but this is going to change the way that we conduct real estate holistically, there will be no longer there will no longer be hours necessary for editing photos for writing listing descriptions for inputting and updating the MLS, there will no longer be hours necessary for sorting through and prioritizing communication on platforms like CRMs, there, frankly, will be no longer a need sooner than later to, to automate and even generate the sort of passive communication that just two years ago, I was on the close, trumpeting as an absolute necessity for building your real estate brand. Having email drips, creating the right social media content, making sure your website stays up to date, these used to be jobs that we did with our own fingers with our own precious hours, this is going away. In fact, I would be willing to bet 30% of real estate hours in our job will be gone and dedicated to machines. Within timing, I want to say 24 months, but maybe more like 18 months, 16 months even. I mean, it’s going to change the way that we think about this business, it is no longer going to be a to do list, it is going to be a list of important commitments. It’s no longer I have to do these 20 things to get my listing live, it is just two questions, how can I serve my clients and what is in their best interest? Those are the things that you will be responsible for. Can you imagine a world where you don’t have to post to Instagram or update the MLS? Or think about filling out the forms for your for your, for your local boards, license renewal, you don’t have to do any of that stuff any longer. Great, but also terrifying for those of us for those of you frankly, who hang your hat on the ability to do that stuff, because you’re not going to have to do it anymore.
D.J. Paris 23:39 Yeah, I sort of I sort of have a few thoughts about that. So what Chris is saying is absolutely right, it’s going to be wonderful thing for agents in particular with MLS input for listings and just you know, photography all of that is going to be much much simpler and it’s going to just be automated you’ve talked about you know, email marketing and different sorts of ways that that agents are spending their their man hours you know working on responses to clients a lot of that casual stuff or operational stuff will absolutely be automated I’m curious do you think Commission’s will be affected as a result of a lot of a realtors operational tasks being, you know, auto generated or automated to some degree is that going to squeeze commissions because typically when I hear about any when I hear about efficiencies that are, you know, technological efficiencies that are coming, I wonder how that’s going to impact the public’s view of a realtors worth and are they going to want to continue to pay you know, five to 6% to sell their home?
Chris Linsell 24:52 Yeah, I actually think it’s gonna bifurcate commissions and if my broker is listening I I apologize in advance for the argument, I’m going to start in the office in just a second. I think that Commission’s AI is going to affect Commission’s the following ways it’s going to make, it’s going to drive down the cost of somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 to 70% of real estate professionals, I bet you in three years, I bet you that most real estate professionals, 70% of them will be operating in the realm of what discount brokers operate in right now. flat fee, hourly, that sort of thing. I genuinely think, because there’s so many real estate professionals, frankly, who hang their hat on their ability to access the MLS and schedule showings, that sort of thing does not, that is not a resume skill anymore. So I bet to a whole chunk of those people are going to go down to the discount brokerage level. The other percentage, the other 1520 25, maybe percent of commissions, or a commissioned agents are going to get paid more. And let me tell you why. Because right now, these agents are kind of in the mix with everybody else here, it’s difficult to separate this wheat from the chaff. But AI is going to make it abundantly clear, who has the skills necessary to really serve their clients and their clients needs. On a personal and dynamic and individual basis, it is going to be the difference between a dedicated, like think about it this way, they like the agents who are going to be in this top performers. These are your personal physicians who know that your health and wellness inside and out, they know every square inch of your medical record, and all the rest of these people are going to be WebMD. So you are going to have the opportunity to either have the most premium service available, or you’re going to essentially have a self service experience where somebody is just facilitating access to the platforms that you need. Now, what are the downstream effects of that? It could be hate to say it, it could be a bifurcated experience for a lot of consumers, that only the rich get this premium hands on experience. And the whole, all the rest of us get the self service experience. But let me unlock this as an opportunity for anybody who is thinking about where they fall in here. There is an incredible opportunity for anybody who wants to provide that five star service to those who don’t think that they either deserve it or can afford it. Yeah, you have a chance to bridge that gap to become all of a sudden like, like think about when luxury brands all of a sudden create a line of products that are accessible on multiple price levels, but with the same level of service and integrity. It is it is a transformative moment for those businesses they quadruple or sometimes 10x their business, you could do that. It’s just a matter of understanding, how do I provide that level of service? How do I make it accessible to other people within the market? How do I make it so I am not just serving the elite of the elite? There’s so much opportunity there?
D.J. Paris 28:48 How would you recommend somebody Mayst would start to think about providing or increasing the amount of service they provide. We talked about, you mentioned the sort of white glove service this this five star service? How does an agent start to evaluate? am I providing that? And if not, what steps should I start to take to improve? Well,
Chris Linsell 29:12 I mean, I think honestly, this kind of dovetails very nicely with some of the conversations I’ve been having and other people have been having around the effect of these lawsuits that have recently been levied and, and, you know, I’ve hit inflection points against the National Association of Realtors. If you’re not in the loop on that you’re I don’t know where you’ve been. But long story short, National Association of REALTORS was found liable for promoting practices that were seen as uncompetitive or that were uncompetitive. That’s what that’s what the verdict was essentially that collusion essentially correct collusion collusion, a tie tied to the way that we pay by IRS agents specifically and just the Commission, the commission structure in general, promoted by the National Association of Realtors.
D.J. Paris 30:09 And let me see if I understand because I have a very rudimentary understanding of of why this system was set up the way it was, why it’s a problem. Now, I guess that’s maybe where we could start. So my understanding is that the way that this was set up for to encourage homeownership was to say, Okay, we’re going to, we’re going to do a basically you pay it when you leave scenario, so that as a first time homebuyer, which we want to encourage, in this country, we’re going to you’re the buyer technically isn’t going to shell out write a check for the realtors commission for to their agent, when they purchase a property that is going to be paid, technically by the seller who is going to write that check to both agents, if there are two agents, and then when that home buyer goes to sell their property, they’re then going to pay back into the system that they So my understanding is, it was a way to encourage or incentivize homeowners who didn’t want to or weren’t able to bring, you know, this commission to the table to close to buy a home, and then they’re gonna basically pay back into to it when they sell. Yeah,
Chris Linsell 31:18 that’s that’s certainly the the kind of the, that’s the National Association of REALTORS explanation for sure. Not to say that you’re, you know, like, you know, puppeting that, that viewpoint, but that’s definitely the argument that they used. I don’t think that that’s a perfect argument, nor do I even think it’s a really a fair characterization, frankly. Agreed.
D.J. Paris 31:41 Yes, it’s but I would say that was the idea, right, that the National Association of REALTORS will say is, is Hey, and the challenge with that is it’s not really how it works. Because the way that Commission’s yes, technically the seller is going to pay the Commission’s however, it’s all baked into the price anyway, so it really is being shared by the buyer and the seller, regardless of who’s actually writing the check. Right,
Chris Linsell 32:06 right. So, so thinking about this scenario, we can go, you know, into the lawsuits. In fact, maybe we have an entire episode where we just shrug into lawsuits, because I got a lot of unpopular opinions about both sides of this lawsuit. But as far as applies to kind of our, you know, anyone who’s listening to this, if you’re in the real estate space, and you want to think about how you can start preparing yourself to be on the correct side of that bifurcation of commissions, and make sure you’re not relegated down to the hourly employee, essentially, who’s just pushing buttons. One of the things that you can do right now is to start thinking about not just not just your Commission’s and your lead, you know, lead database, and the clients that you serve, not just thinking about these things as individual transactions, but about thinking about them as an overall building of your portfolio of expertise. And let me let me give you an example of what I mean here. It is rare, that you have a successful attorney who has on his card, something like John Q, attorney, good at law, all of it, you know, like, they don’t just that’s not the way that expertise is built. Same with your doctor, frankly, you do not have a doctor who’s like, John Q. MD, I know the whole body. And now you know, doctors they need to know the whole body. Generally speaking, lawyers need to know the whole law, generally speaking, but these are not the people you pay the big bucks to, nor are they frankly, the people that you would go to if you have a very specific question about a very specific thing, lawyer, medical or otherwise, you as a real estate professional should be thinking about this to each of the clients that you take right now should be a part of building this portfolio of expertise. Such that you have a reason to say I am John Q realtor expert in blank. It is no longer excessive or acceptable to say I am John Q realtor expert in real estate. We’re all experts in real estate. We all have a real estate license. You’re an expert, I’m an expert. We’re all experts. Okay, whether or not we actually have the definitional knowledge that’s a different story. But as far as the public goes, we’re all experts. What you need to start thinking about is separating yourself and your expertise by building a portfolio business the debt bounce traits, what the heck you’re actually good at. Yeah. And one way, a quick and easy way you can start doing this is when you take on new client conversations, let’s say you’ve got a lead who’s interested in buying a house, maybe an interested person is interested in selling a house, the first meeting that you have with them, and this is going to feel so unnatural, I realize this is going to tell me I’m crazy for this. But you need to say something along the lines of, well, I’m interviewing you, too, I haven’t decided whether or not I’m taking you on as a client, I need to make sure that your needs make sense for me as well, to start thinking about every client as an opportunity to build your portfolio of expertise. And if you have potential clients that are not going to work towards building your portfolio of expertise, these might not be the right clients for you. And again, I recognize this is this is first world problems, if you are in a situation where the rent is due, and you’ve got to get a transaction closed, by all means. This is a place where you say you know, I’m going to prioritize this next month. But if you are not in an emergency situation like that, if you if you believe that your expertise, for instance, is in waterside condos, and somebody comes to you with a piece of vacant land out in the middle of the woods, this is not your client. This is not going to help you build that portfolio.
D.J. Paris 36:31 I think you’re right in real estate. Real estate agents seem to be it seems to be we’re a little bit behind on some of these other specialized professions where, you know, yeah, you pass the bar, you get get your law license, and then you are really specializing in some version of law. Yes, there are general practice attorneys, and there’s general, you know, physician, physicians, general practitioners, and they can do some basic things. And what what they what they will almost always do is is refer out when it comes to something specialized. So I think you’re right, you know, I wouldn’t go to my estate planning attorney, if I had a, you know, a civil matter that I wanted to get resolved or criminal, or, yeah, I would, I would go somewhere else. And I think the opportunity is for each agent to really start to think about as, as you said, very bluntly, but I think elegantly at the same time is what are we actually good at? Right? Not not the collective we the individual, I what am I actually good at? What what service Can I can I provide? And how do I increase? Not only how do I increase my knowledge of that service? But how do I start to rebrand or, you know, just evolve my brand, to really start to focus in one to two sort of specialties. Yeah,
Chris Linsell 37:55 100%. And let me let me bring this analogy, full circle, the those like just kind of general practice attorneys and general practice physicians, those people play an important role in their field, I’m not gonna I’m not discounting that. But those folks are more akin to that bottom portion of real estate professionals that I was talking about, they are hourly, or flat fee, they are not going to do something specialized for you, they are not going to do they’re not going to execute a specialized task. And that is, Okay, if that’s the kind of real estate you want to practice, there’s ways to be successful there, too. You just have to ramp up your production, you got to be able to close, I mean, seriously, I think in four years, if you’re on the, on the lower side of that bifurcation, you’re gonna have to close 100 transactions a year in order to, to make this you know, a real, a real career that you can scale and be successful in, relative to the, like, 11 that most people do right now. I mean, 10x in your business is not an easy feat. And we’re not going to have 10 to 10x number of transactions in the country. So you’re not just going to have to increase your business, you’re gonna have to take it from somebody else, which, you know, not an easy task either. So, all this to say, don’t be a real estate professional, who is just satisfied, filling out the boxes on the MLS, and just taken every opportunity that comes along. Like you know, and treating them all the same. This is your time right now. We are we are in relatively consequence free zone. We’re on the beach. The wave has not come in on us yet. This is the time to be figuring it out right to be putting sandbags up around the beach house so that when the wave does come in, it’s not going to wash you away. We have the time right now. If you’re not doing it right now. Uh, I mean, I guess, thanks for, you know, for me and mine, you know, we’re gonna be more prepared than you will be. But there’s room for everybody here if we can all get on if we can all get on board for sure.
D.J. Paris 40:14 Yeah, I’m just trying to think now of what are some practical action steps agents can take one of courses is defining what their actual value is for themselves, you know, really to sit down on a piece of paper and say, Why would I hire me? What is it that I can actually provide? And then how do I market that or two things? How do I improve those skills? Or continue to evolve those skills? And how do I? How do I market that and really start to get people to associate these particular skills, not just I can help you buy, sell rent, etc. But I am particularly good at x. And, and you know, you maybe you’re right, as you start thinking about, if anything is outside of that, it’s tough to say right now to people to do this, to maybe turn away business when the market is is, you know, not as apt not as active as anyone any realtor would like, at this time. But maybe it does make sense to start to think about what might I turn away? That doesn’t necessarily fit into my skill set? And and where can I refer that and still get paid a referral commission? Of course, just like, attorneys do this. I don’t know if physicians operate that same way. But certainly attorneys do. And, you know, just something to think about. Yeah,
Chris Linsell 41:32 for sure. I mean, one, one practical step you can do right now is, and let me be totally clear, I’m not suggesting that when I want, you know, my this strategy, I’m not suggesting that the strategy is exclusive, meaning this is the only thing that you should do. But one thing that you can do right now, is get together a collection of your colleagues who all specialize in different things to essentially create a referral chain, to be able to say, I’m good at condos, you’re good at vacant land, you’re good at luxury, you’re good at for at first time buyers, you’re good at first time sellers, we need an opportunity to create these referral relationships such that we don’t lose. It’s not about losing business. It’s about appropriately allocating the people who need a podiatrist, to the podiatrist and the people who need an optometrist and the optometrist. It is not a matter of like, of giving up business, it’s a matter of getting it to the right places. And if you find yourself in a situation where you’re like, Well, nobody’s sending me referrals. No, I don’t have anybody to serve us right now. It’s an indicator that your niche is too small for your market. If you do not have anybody that you are good, if there’s no clients for what you’re really good at, you have a skill that nobody is utilizing, that is not necessary for your market. And that’s a clear sign that you need to either switch, expand, or team up with somebody. And this is the kind of the last thing that I would add in the situation is I think we are going to see the emergence in the next three years of I don’t want to say a run, well, maybe I do. We’re going to see an emergence, a renewed importance, emergence of real estate teams, and how teams address the needs of their of their clients, both because it allows a real estate professionals to work together to be able to offer that premium service in a way that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do individually. And we’re also going to see these teams emerge as vehicles for stability to be able to generate leads together to be able to use technology tools together to be able to share the burden of the business across multiple, multiple people. I mean, teams are pretty popular model right now. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see a dramatic increase in these people are calling team ridges, like brokerages that just focus or function as big teams. I think that might be a thing pretty soon.
D.J. Paris 44:21 Yeah, it seems like it should be and this idea of just sub specializing and merging, you know, different practitioners together into a team. It’s already happening. It’s been happening for years. And now with the additional sort of pressures of technology that are coming to sort of reduce the need for the general practitioner and increase the need for the sub specialist. I think you’re right that teams are going to start having it’s it’s, it’s going to be a lot of yes on my team. This is the first time homebuyer here’s the condo person Here’s the renter or the rental, you know, agent, etc. and commercial agents and all of that. That’s very, that’s very interesting. I do, I do see that coming, because we’re starting to see that even in our own brokerage, we’re seeing a lot of people starting to team up just to offer a wider breadth of services. And, you know, they’re basically their Commission’s are staying the same, but they’re able to provide better service to their agents. So I think that that’s a lot, you know, I think is a great place to sort of stop for today, because it’s really a lot for our audience to think about is really to start mapping out. What does if I were to specialize in in a couple of areas of real estate, what would that what would that look like? Where and what would I need to adjust? In my business right now to find more of that? How do I find more clients that are first time condo buyers in my market, or, you know, it could be also to like, I work with young families, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific type of transaction, it could be a specific type of individual or group of individuals that you enjoy working with, but But creating some sort of specialty, and really thinking about how do I, how do I penetrate that market, through my expertise, and through marketing. And, you know, I also think, too, if you’re not sure what you’re best at the best, because I think a lot of us, you know, we we may have either an inflated sense of self or deflated sense of self, but it might not be always the most accurate sense of how the world perceives us. So if you aren’t sure what your skills actually are, ask your clients, ask them, you know, in a way, say I would I’m trying to revamp my marketing, I would just love to know, if you were to think about why you chose me? And what was it about your experience with me that you know, that that led you to have a happy experience? I think if you ask them for that you will find out very quickly, you’ll start to notice patterns in the way that people respond. And you can start to organize that into a thought of okay, how do I specialize in these kinds of skills? I guess?
Chris Linsell 47:09 Yeah, 100% 100%. And, you know, the long the short of it is you can strip all of this conversation down to basically a single axiom, which is, do something really well and do it for your clients. If you can do that, you’re gonna be okay. But I know easier said than done. Reminds
D.J. Paris 47:31 me about something Adam Carolla has been saying, his whole life, he says, I never met a really, really skilled carpenter because he comes from the carpentry world, who was ever out of business, or was ever was ever lacking business. And he said, in really good carpenters are rare. And as a result, they are in high demand. And they are never, never at a loss for work. And you know, that is something to consider as well, as you were saying about, you know, if you have this specialty, but it isn’t being appreciated by your community, or you haven’t maybe effectively marketed it. Or maybe it’s just not that useful to your community. This is where you can start to think about, if I specialize in something, yes, it’s scary to then think I maybe I’ll turn away certain things. But maybe I’ll attract a lot more of my audience who really just wants X, and I’m the person that provides x. And I think that’s true. Like, if you’re good, it’s anything, you’re unlikely to ever be really out of work unless you’re you unless you have some particular skill that’s just not valued in the workplace. But certainly for realtors, everyone’s got to live somewhere, almost 93% of all homes, I believe this is accurate, as a whole. All homes sold, are sold through a realtor in the United States, something like that. So they’re still utilizing realtors. So now it’s time to think about what can I specialize in? And how do I get so good at it, that I’ll, I’ll never have to really worry about being out of work. It’s kind of like becoming become unfavorable if you have a boss. And the way that they say that is provides so much incredible value. I mean, it’s so simple, but it’s hard to do. But if you provide so much value at your company, even if you get fired, you’re going to get picked up by someone else who sees your value. So I think that’s just a really great thing. This time to increase skills, I guess is 100%.
Chris Linsell 49:23 And you said it perfectly become on fireable guys, we are our own bosses in real estate, become unviable from your own business. That’s that’s the I love it. That’s the best way to leave those blank.
D.J. Paris 49:37 All right. Well, Chris, we are so so happy to have you back. And we’re Chris is going to be coming on regularly as he was for unpopular real estate opinions with Chris Lynn. So for all things Chris to see his touring schedule to learn more about what his current thoughts are. Go to his website Chris Lynn cell.com You can also book him he you know if you work in particular if you are volunteering at your local association or state association or you’re part of the National Association. Chris has spoken to too many, many associations all over the country. So consider him for your next speech or if you have a brokerage. He would be happy to speak with you about that as well. Also follow him on LinkedIn crystallin Sal, just find him on LinkedIn. We’ll have a link to both of those his website and LinkedIn on the show notes. Chris, welcome back. We are so happy to have you. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
Chris Linsell 50:32 Thanks DJ
Why Your Reputation Is Your Greatest Resource In Real Estate • Jerry Wolking
Nov 29, 2023
Jerry Wolking with Keller Williams Greater Quad Cities talks about how he transitioned from landscaping business to real estate. Jerry discusses his involvement with Graduate Realtors Institute and how important it is for realtors to seek similar courses. Jerry also the importance of knowing how to navigate your career when the market shifts. Next, Jerry talks about local association and its importance. Last, Jerry talks about how he got into commercial real estate and why.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to talk about a realtors most valuable resource. No, it’s not time and it isn’t your clients, it’s actually your reputation. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcasts made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Jerry Woking. But before we get to Jerry, just a couple of quick reminders as we finish up 2023 The best holiday gift you can give us not that we’re asking you. But if you are so inspired and love our podcast, please do share it with a friend won’t cost you anything but please send them a link to either our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed from any browser or send them a link to from Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you might be listening to this podcast and also please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. We appreciate it but I hope everybody has a wonderful holiday season we’re going to be cranking out just as many episodes this month as per usual and we have some really exciting things planned for 2024 So stay tuned for that but let’s get to the main event my conversation with Jerry Wilkin.
Today on the show my guest is Jerry woking from Keller Williams greater Quad Cities, which is actually Illinois, and Iowa. So there’s four cities for those of you not in the Midwest and not familiar with, I guess Quad Cities was self explanatory, but it actually borders two states, Illinois and Iowa. But let me tell you more about Jerry. By the way, before I get into Jerry’s bio, Jerry is Alex Wilkins father, Alex is somebody we featured recently on our show, we were so incredibly impressed with Alex, if you haven’t listened to that episode, I really encourage you to do that. And Alex is like, Oh, I learned everything from my dad. So we’re like we probably should bring his dad on to who’s also a very successful agent for 30 plus years. But let me let me go through more of Jerry’s bio. Jerry has been in the business since April of 1993. That is 30 plus years. Congratulations. He started as a part time agents like so many of us and became a full time agent a year later in 1994. After selling his landscape company, he is licensed in Iowa and Illinois. And Jerry is one of these rare types of agents who is able to successfully boot residential and commercial. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how he manages both of those lanes. He is also a graduate of the realtors Institute and a certified negotiation expert, in my opinion, the most. One of the designations I think agents should explore because certainly it’s something you can tell your clients that you are a certified negotiation expert. I’m a huge fan of that. Also, he Jerry has served on the Professional Standards Committee, the Grievance Committee and the commercial committee and now teaches classes to realtors on various topics at his local association. Jerry Oh, I’m sorry, fine. You can learn more about Jerry at his website. We will have a link to this in the show notes and in the description, which is QC biz box QC bei zbox.com and goes over what Jerry is all about. Jerry, welcome to the show.
Jerry Wolking 4:54 Thank you, sir.
D.J. Paris 4:56 Well, Jerry and I just had we were just talking sort of back Stage, if that’s the right expression, and it was really a lot of fun because Jerry is your so much like, like your son, and he is just such a wonderful young man in this Chicago market. And we’re so grateful to have him on the show. And now we’re so happy to have you. So you’ve been doing this congratulations on 30 years, by the way. Yes,
Jerry Wolking 5:21 sir. Yes, it’s been a long haul, as
D.J. Paris 5:26 well, you know, right. Right. Now I well, actually, Jerry, let’s talk about how you got into so I know you were in landscaping, you had a business and why the switch from landscaping to you know, I guess, the way I think about it, landscaping is one of those industries that seems to never go out of fashion. And real estate say people have to live somewhere and people need to maintain their their properties, their lawns, etc. So why to switch from from landscaping.
Jerry Wolking 5:57 Thank you for asking. I’ve done many, many things DJ I’ve had, I’ve had a very I tell people all the time if I died tomorrow, I have lived a full life. I’ve been a drummer and a heavy metal band for a long time. I raced motorcycles, semi professionally i i sold life insurance, I was a welder at John Deere. I’ve been an auto mechanic. I’ve been a contractor many, many different things. And I found a love of landscape back in the late 80s, early 90s and still do a lot of it today. But you know, the body only holds up for so long. They don’t make a laptop that will plant the 400 pound tree so that that takes its toll after a while but I had always had an interest in real estate. And it here in the Midwest and landscape season is pretty short lived and when it gets November, December, all of a sudden there’s no lawns to mow there, you’re not planting flowers and and the ground is frozen for doing any planting. So the winters would be scarce very scarce. And I was actually working in a body shop and I was getting paid $100 a car to paint cars out in Geneseo Illinois, no heat had a little space heater. And this guy was flipping cars he gave me 100 bucks a car to paint them. I was miserable. And, and I was sitting in this little office and I happened to be reading newspaper on my lunch break. And it said a career in real estate reading in the newspaper. And I’m like, I’ve always had an interest in real estate to see what it’s like. So I had to borrow the money long story short, I was so broke, I couldn’t pay attention. I had to borrow the money to go to my real estate my real estate class started. And I get and went through it passed the class with flying colors pass my test. And then next you know, here I am a real estate agents and that was in April of 93. Still had my landscape company. And as you know real estate being a commission business, I’d never worked in a commission world before. It was scarce to start with, you know, because it is far too easy. Here’s my quote of the day, it is far too easy to get a real estate license it there are so many people in this industry who shouldn’t be in it. And let me preface DJ by saying I’m probably going to say something that offends someone today because I love your show. The name of your show is very fitting. So let’s we’re gonna get real here today.
D.J. Paris 8:16 Let’s get real. Yeah,
Jerry Wolking 8:18 there you go. So, you know, I started out like most other agents taking open houses from from the big producers who didn’t want to do them. And at the time, I was working for the one of the largest brokers in the Quad Cities that were the largest broker in the Quad Cities at the time. And we had this thing called floor duty, where you could sit at this table in this little office for two hour shifts. Each agent got two hour shifts, and any phone calls that came into the office inquiring about listings, went to the floor duty person and that was your business to capitalize. So I was taking as many floor duty sessions as I could get most of them in the evening hours five to seven, five to six, because I was out planting trees and mowing lawns during the day. And what had happened was I was getting busy enough after for duty in open houses that I would literally change clothes three and four times a day I would go out and mow two lawns, change clothes, Go show a house go out and plant two trees, change clothes go out and show a house that was going on and on for months. And the turning point for me was I had a showing at a condominium in East Moline and I was planting trees all day I was mud from head to toe and I was late for my appointment like 15 minutes late and I did not have time to go home and change clothes. So I drove to the appointment with my rig had my you know my mowers and everything sticking out the back. I’m in my landscape gear. I’m mud from knees down to my boots, dried mud and as I walk up to the showing and 15 minutes late and the gentleman is sitting on the front porch of this condo on the front stoop. And I said hi my name is Jerry walking. I’m the realtor here to show you the property and he just looked at me he He goes, Are you a real estate agent? And I said, Yes, sir. And I also landscape company. And this was the turning point in my career. This day, this gentleman looked at me, he had a very stern look on his face. And he said, I’m not interested in a part time agent. The next week, the next week, I sold the company, I sold the landscape company and went 100% in two real estate, that was a big jump, and I went five months, my first five months with no paycheck. And I had been used to, you know, having steady income, I had employees at trucks I had, you know, plenty of contracts to do, I sold my company to my dad who was retired from the military looking for something to do. He, by the way, today still runs that same company to this day, off of a lot of the same clients that we had back in the early 90s. But it was that push of that gentleman telling to me telling me I’m not interested in a part time agent that made me go, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t continue to go changing clothes three or four times a day. This went on for months. And it was wearing me out. And I wasn’t succeeding at a high level at either position. Now, you know, because I’m part time landscaper part time real estate agent. So it was probably the greatest slap of reality I could ever get for him to say that. And that’s when it turned and I started taking off from there. And I was lucky enough to have a broker by the name of Irene Romeo, who said to me, you’ve got great stuff, kid, you need to go to GRI now. That’s where you need to get so I did my my first full time year I started GRI did the I think he did a fall session spring session fall session I didn’t consecutively learn to not and it catapulted me forward on being able to get my business started and growing. So I’ve been surrounded by a lot of great people who helped me get started and saw something in me that was worth that was worth nurturing. So I’m very fortunate that way.
D.J. Paris 11:54 And for any of our listeners who aren’t familiar with GRI Do you mind sharing just a little bit about what that is? That’s
Jerry Wolking 11:59 a graduate Realtors Institute. One of the things I noticed today, we I’ve written several real estate classes. My partner Deborah and I, we’ve written classes, she does all the technical stuff, the PowerPoints and all that and we presented these classes to realtors, and now the Board of Realtors has picked them up. But GRI is a class is a segment of classes from everything about marketing, about personal growth, about the real estate industry about appraisal. It’s a great place for residential agents to go and get a lot of education in a short period of time because it’s like four and five consecutive days of classes. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is now is brokerages, at least in our area. And please know everything I’m saying is based on our area because that’s what I know. They’re fragmenting so much it used to be in the early 90s There were two 800 pound gorillas here in town. And they controlled everything one of them control 52% of the market at one time. So every other house was listed by this brokerage well as these other companies have come into play, Keller Williams exp, and all these other companies that are coming. It’s fragmented the talent. But what happens when you fragment the talent, unfortunately, is those startup brokerages don’t have the resources or the time to train those agents properly. And that that creates now we’ve got an industry full of the blind leading the blind. And it gets chaotic. And you can ask any veteran agent most of the time. It’s the new agents that are exciting to watch when they’re growing, but they’re also the ones that tend to get in the way it’s not their fault. It’s because nobody’s teaching them. That’s why I said earlier, it’s far too easy to get a real estate license because real estate pre licensed course they don’t teach you anything about the business. You know, it’s all law and agency and all those sort of things, but don’t teach you anything about getting through a transaction how to get through a bad appraisal, how to get through a bad home inspection. And in my opinion, commercial this is just my opinion, commercial and residential should be two completely different licenses. Why why are they able to do both is beyond me. They are two different animals. But so back to GRI what GRI does is takes for a small brokerage or brokerage who doesn’t have a training or mentor program, put those new agents through GRI put them through CRS, the CRS and the GRI courses will teach you years and years of knowledge that you’re not getting just by bumping and banging your way through the pinball machine. In you learn from you know, I’ve said I’ve gotten enough credit hours from the school of hard knocks that I could graduate with a master’s degree now. So but luckily I was at a brokerage that had a great training program. We had some we had a mentor program in place that was very, very helpful. So GRI CRS for residential agents starting up dad is one of the first places that I would go to start getting Your real estate training unless your brokerage offers
D.J. Paris 15:03 or even in addition to what your brokerage, what your
Jerry Wolking 15:07 I attended, what I see a lot of is a lot of training and exercise and efforts, put in the areas of lead generation, lead generation is awesome. But if you get a bunch of leads, and you don’t know how to convert them, or you don’t know how to keep their transactions together, you’re shooting fish in a barrel and are coming right back to life again, through another agent somewhere. It’s a bad experience for everyone all around when you don’t have knowledge and skills to close a transaction.
D.J. Paris 15:32 Yeah, let’s talk about the current sort of climate for realtors right now. So we’re recording this. So it’s we’re getting close to Thanksgiving 2023. We know interest rates are higher than buyers would prefer in relation to where they were three years ago, not in relation to historic averages. But the buyer temperature out there is cool to bid because of the interest rates, a lot of people are locked in or at least feel maybe locked in to a refinance rate they did years ago, I know I feel this way I have a 3% rate on my primary residence. And I don’t want to give that up. And so we have a lot of people like me, who are in a similar situation. So there’s not much inventory, obviously not as many buyers flooding the market. And also it’s the end of the year that tends to slow things down as well. So Jerry, you’ve been doing this 30 years, what do you know that people who haven’t been through this kind of part of the cycle of the business, maybe it’s maybe some part of a down cycle? What do you know that that? Or what would you say to somebody who’s who’s struggling right now? Yeah, in this area? Great
Jerry Wolking 16:43 question. So, so where I pride myself mostly DJs. In my I have, you know, I’m not one of the top 1% producers, as we talked about earlier, but but I can weather the storm, because I can wear many hats. Being is as well experienced in both residential and commercial as I am. It allows me to adapt in many different ways I can go where the hunt is, and I’m very comfortable going where the hunt is, there’s no conversation with any agent that I’m not comfortable having now, regardless of what you produce. I can I can hold that conversation with you. And there was times when, when I remember in down markets, it wasn’t so much. Where’s my next lead? Where’s my next deal? It was what can I learn to get me that next week? What can I learn to get me that next deal, I’ve always built my career on being the chase, not the chaser. And the way I’ve done that is by learning things and getting in depth knowledge on different ways to do things. So you know, when I came in the business in 1993, interest rates were still double digit. So when we hear people talk about now the interest rates are climbing, interest rates are climbing, my first house was 11.75%. And that was on a special lottery drawing rate. I had to stand in line at 530 in the morning to get a lottery ticket to get this special low rate of 11.75%. And I was one of the people chosen. So yes, rates have increased, they doubled from where we were a year or so ago in some cases. But when those things happen, like when 2008 2009 rolled around, that was a huge change foreclosures were coming on the market everywhere. So my adaption was if there is there’s foreclosures and things that’s coming on the market, that means the investors are coming out of the woodwork. So how do I get to work with the investors? I got to learn the investment game and I had some real estate investments before. But I dove deep into figuring out net operating income and what is the vacancy factor? And, and what’s what’s my cost coming in? What’s the cost outlay going to be for purchased this home for 36,000? What’s it going to cost to get it up to 110. So you can be profitable, learned about holding costs, all of those sorts of things, a lot of it, I knew already in the back of my mind, but it moved it to the forefront of the mind. So as the market changes, and it is changing, you need to look at other ways that you can be helpful that you can be of service to the public good. You can be of service maybe to other agents, because when you don’t have something to offer, there’s no reason for anyone to call you. So I just got I just got a call yesterday from a gentleman who wanted to fight his property taxes. His assessment went up considerably. So we took a look at his properties. And I called them yesterday and I said I said Chuck, you might want to keep your mouth shut. They got you assessed at 65,000 square foot. Be quiet. Don’t play that game because you should be higher than what they’re assessing you at. So it just that piece of advice and information alone was priceless to him because he showed up to spend $900 $1,000 on two appraisals. So just by giving that information, but he’s called me multiple times over the last three or four years we’ve done Two or three transactions with this gentleman. But so the point being, there’s always somebody buying something, there’s always somebody selling something, how do you get in front of those people? And how can you be valuable to that particular part of the market when it becomes an investor market be valuable to the investors if it’s a buyers market be valuable to the buyers. But it’s a seller’s market be valuable to the sellers in use constantly, ever changing. Adaptability, learning to be adaptable to what’s in front of you right now, I talked to an agent of a couple years ago. And when the 2008 crash hit, his business dropped dramatically. So he learned how to fight tax assessments. And he was charging people I think, $150 or something like that, to put together their tax assessment, though, he would give them all the information, and they would go to the board of appeals and fight their taxes. But that kept him alive, kept him in the game kept him relevant. And so then when those people, when the market started to turn, they come to list or sell. He’s the guy they call because he got them out of a bad situation, whatever. So I’m very big on knowing the game not just being in the game, but knowing the
D.J. Paris 21:07 game. Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more, as you were giving so many great examples there, I was thinking, you know about the current situation where I don’t know what the percentage is anymore, I want to say it’s 85% of homeowners in the US have a mortgage rate of less than 4%. That may not be true with a capital T, but it’s close enough to where we have a lot of these people like myself, you know, anyone who has a mortgage who’s refinanced or, you know, in the last several years probably has a pretty attractive rate. So I think there’s a huge opportunity for agents to start having conversations with people like me, people who feel trapped in not trapped, but locked into this low rate. And say, actually, there are some creative solutions. If you did want to move right now, there are ways we can sort of, you know, navigate through high interest rate environments like to like buy downs, for example, there are this is this, I think, is really were in a good agent is separating separate from, you know, really divides the good agents from from the not good agents, because the good agents will will will call somebody before they call them going, Hey, I’m thinking about buying or selling right now. Because maybe there’s lots of people right now that aren’t thinking about that. But if it was me, I would be calling everybody I know saying, Hey, I just want to give you my take on what’s going on right now. If you are thinking of a move, we do have some options and creative ways to explore that. But again, just establishing that, as you said, I’m just not in the market. I know the market. I know what’s going on. I think that’s so important.
Jerry Wolking 22:44 Yeah, it was to touch on what you said about the buy downs that there’s one of the things right there that you should be focusing on right now as an agent coming in, in the game, how does financing work? And one of the first things that I started learning about when I got into business, I would notice and remind you I was in the business before the pre approval thing was a big deal. So now it’s it’s pretty much standard. But I remember you could get pre approval letters and everybody that was like golden. But I sat down with a lender name was Brenda Wilde one day I talked her on the phone. I said, Brenda, what are my qualifying ratios when I’m talking to people? I want to know when I’m holding these conversations with people about buying debt. Yes, you can’t afford to buy so many times, EJ if somebody said, Well, I can’t afford to buy. Well, where are you living now? Well, I rent a little apartment. How much are you paying 1300 a month, or $1,300 a month here in the Quad Cities, you know, our market is about a third of what you that are there in Chicago $1,300 A month I’ll buy you 140 $150,000 house. And a lot of people don’t even realize that. So I’ve had a lot of success in converting renters into homebuyers, because they didn’t think that they could buy not realizing what it cost. They don’t understand downpayment, they don’t understand closing costs. So there again, whenever you’ve got storms like this happening, there’s usually programs that all of a sudden spring up to help keep the market of flow. So you learn about first time homebuyer programs. You learn about programs for veterans that veterans can use, there’s usually something out there to help people. So you have to go learn that program. Because let’s face it, if you’re doing 3040 transactions a year, and then all of a sudden that drops to 15. You need to make up that difference somewhere if you’re going to stay in the game. This is when we see markets like this is when we’ll see the agent count start to drop. It happens all the time. And as is the real estate market picks up all of a sudden everybody wants to be a realtor because they’ve watched HDTV and they like houses I love That’s my reason for getting in the business because I like houses. Okay, let’s see how long that lasts after you’ve shown 137 of them in four days. But anyhow, just learning where there’s always an apple to pick somewhere and is watching closely and learning to see what that is. There’s always nothing stops dead. There’s always some movement somewhere When
D.J. Paris 25:00 you said something really important earlier, which was about providing value being of service? And yes, that really is the name of the game and in my in my opinion, it’s yeah, it’s it’s really, I think it’s, it’s a creative fun thing to to consider for your business. Because you know, we have this database of customers we have or prospects, and we go, Gosh, I don’t why do I? Why Why would I, I don’t have any reason to call so and so well, you should have reasons to call them you should know a lot about every one of your contacts in your database, you should know what’s going on in their lives. And you if nothing else, if there’s nothing to talk about with real estate, you could at least contact them and celebrate things that they’re experiencing or or helping them with any like, you know, Jerry, for example, is, you know, he has been doing this 30 years. Do you think he knows the best Roofers in town? Of course he does. He knows the best accountant. He knows the best inspectors. So Jerry is is breadth of wide breadth of information that he gets to then reach out to his sphere and say, Hey, I’m your guy. I know these things. And of course, that takes time to develop lists like that. But if you can start to put your value proposition together, and start to think about how can I continuously add value, people only buy and sell when every five to 10 years, seven to 10 years, whatever it is. So you better figure out something that you can do in those seven to 10 year windows, where you’re going to stay in front of them. And it’s probably not just your real estate, email newsletter, hey, that’s fine, whatever, it’s fine. But you should be thinking about other things that those customers actually want to learn about. During that time. To obviously, just keep your name in front of them. Yeah.
Jerry Wolking 26:43 And being very involved in your community. That’s where Alex has had huge success. Being very involved in your community became become the the source. I just had a guy text me here last week, he goes, You’re my source, man. But I need something. You’re my source. So what a great compliment, actually, for you and I got online, I was texting a previous client who’s like, hey, I need somebody to put windows in Who do you suggest, you know, being that go to source that keeps you in front of people a lot of times, but being involved with your community is another big way. Because people recognize your name. And I’ve been around long enough now. I can be be anywhere Menards or Lowe’s and I’ll put down my debit card and the person go, oh, you the real estate guy. That’s awesome. To hear that they know you for that. But yeah, there’s this being involved on different levels and being of service to everyone around you. That part I think I’ve done very well. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to help a lot of people with a lot of things. And a lot of times DJ the business comes to me just because of those things. Not not not because I’m out, you know, pushing my Facebook post, or, or I’m the greatest realtor. And none of that is just because I’ve established a relationship on a different level through a different avenue. And they know you’re the real estate guy, right? Yeah. Why do you ask you buying or selling? What I’m thinking about selling my mom’s house, whatever. Next thing, you know that conversation is going whenever someone says to me, you’re the real estate guy, right? I always say, Are you buying or selling. And then we go from there to conversations things into something. I
D.J. Paris 28:15 love that it reminded me of one of one of the interviews I had a few a year or so ago, where a woman gave a suggestion that I had not heard before. And it’s so simple. And that, you know, if you have a local newspaper, for example, most most markets do. And you know, reach out to who’s ever in charge of the real estate portion of not necessarily the advertising. But if anyone’s you know, the real estate person to talk about what’s going on real estate wise in the community and start sending them stats, say, Hey, mister missus, reporter, I’ve got some stats about what’s going on out here. I thought maybe that would be helpful for you because they’re looking for content. And I said, Oh, that’s such a smart idea. Because people still read newspapers as much as we think people don’t some some people do, of course. And this is another way to get your name out there. And to be seen as an expert, when you can help a journalist with making sense of what’s going on out there. There’s a million ways to do it, to be of service and to be a value. And I want to make a big strong push, Jerry, with your help to encourage our audience to get involved with their local association. I want to talk about why that’s important, and how that can benefit the individual because I wish I would have done that. 14 years ago. I just started getting involved about five years ago. And I wish I could go back and get involved at our local level earlier because what it did for me and I’m curious to get your thoughts. What it did for me is not only did it did it, is it a lot of fun and we do a lot of good work and we’re here to support the industry, the real estate industry, and I got to make some wonderful friends along the way people who are like minded people Who want to see the industry succeed, and also just mastermind with all these great agents who also give back. And so I’ve learned more about the industry, I have a better social life. And and I’m doing good out there, or I think we’re doing some some version of good out there. So I’m just Just curious. And also, there’s so many great things the association’s offer, that the members oftentimes don’t take advantage of trainings, you know, all sorts of things. But just, I want to make a pitch for everybody to consider getting involved. And just want to hear your thoughts on that. Oh, absolutely.
Jerry Wolking 30:30 There again, when I first got in my career, I was so blessed to have Irene Romeo, who pushed me towards GTRI. But I was also still to this day, I hear this gentleman’s voice, I see his face. And I asked questions, sometimes I get into situation and I’ll and I’ll be to myself, What would Fred tell me to do? Fred Desso, the best broker in the business as far as I’m concerned, he’s just a wealth of knowledge. And and he always has an answer. Even if he has to make it up. He always has an answer, but I just love talking with him. He’s just full of wisdom. But both of those agents are very involved with the both those brokers were very involved with the board, they suggested I get involved with the board. And I did, I got involved with the board very early on with the professional standards, the Grievance Committee, the regional professional standards, sitting on different various committees throughout the board, and we have a dynamite Board of Realtors. But it teaches you not only do you get to know the players and who’s who in real estate, but you also see the adversity sometimes that people are dealing with from a whole different perspective. See, it’s very easy as an agent, you have a rub with another agent somewhere and you’re defending your position. But if you get out of yourself and get into what is that person experiencing. And by being on the board and hearing, especially on like the grievance committees and professional standards, you hear those stories and things going on, and then you start to have a little little more compassion for I get it, I know why they got in this position. But it helps getting yourself in that position, you know, at some point in time, and it just helps move the board forward as well. So I cringe a little bit when somebody complains about some of the board raise the rates again, well, of course, they did just look at the economy in general, that’s not the board trying to gouge you. The board’s trying to keep up so I get a little offended sometimes when people complain about a board because our board does a lot for us. We have a great MLS, we have great keysafe system, we have great leadership, we’re in great position financially. And that’s all from having good people sitting at the table. So you learn a lot from the inner workings of the business, when you’re involved at the board level as well. It’s not You’re not seeing it from your little perspective, but seeing it from the overall marketplace that you’re in. So highly, highly encourage getting involved with the board at some point in time. I
D.J. Paris 32:59 couldn’t agree with you more, I think I’d be shocked if it didn’t result in actually indirectly getting you more business, even though that’s not why you’re going to do it with
Jerry Wolking 33:10 us. Yeah, I think I told you earlier, a lot of the commercial referrals I get are from residential agents, even from other brokerages. They have their own brokers, and they’ll refer me people because I can speak their language or I’ve sat on a committee with them. And at some point in time, so I’ve established that relationship. You know, there’s a great dynamite agent here in the Quad Cities, his name is John locust and, and he’s told me once I saw him last year, I did a class I was teaching, and he said, you know, you have two reputations in this business, one from your peers and one from the public. And that is very true. That is very true. So
D.J. Paris 33:45 yeah, I want to I’m going to say that I’m going to say that for Jerry, again, we have two reputations in our industry, one with our peers, for remember is called a cooperative commission. Everybody cooperative compensation, and, and and with our clients as well. So those are two separate things. And oftentimes, the relationship between the agent and the customer might be different from the agents and to other agents and you want to have a good relationship with both because you both have to play in the same sandbox.
Jerry Wolking 34:17 Absolutely. And, yeah,
D.J. Paris 34:20 I want to I want to talk about the importance of learning the market. So when when people are newer to the industry, of course, the primary focus is on lead generation as it probably should be. And they also have to become good at the job which of course, we’re talking about skills. So I want to talk about actually becoming a good realtor. So there’s the marketing side, the lead gen side. I’ve talked about that. A ton on the show over the years, million ways to lead generate. I would like to speak to you and get some best practices in your opinion about if if I was a newer agent and I’m full could sing in a local area? How might I start to learn about the actual inventory? Price points? You know, what, what do you recommend? Because ultimately, you do want to be an expert in some some geographical area. Yeah,
Jerry Wolking 35:14 yeah. And, again, that’s where Alex has excelled. He’s learned his neighborhood just by walking the streets getting involved with neighborhood associations, those sorts of things. And myself area, because we’re in the Quad Cities, there’s a large difference between the Iowa and Illinois sides of the river. Valuation wise, big difference. In fact, the joke is, for a lot of us, it’s not the Mississippi rivers, the Mississippi ocean, because it there is a huge divide between the two sides of the states. If you’re an outsider, coming in, a lot of it looks like one big city here to us. But from those of us who live here, it’s very territorial. The difference between Iowa and Illinois and the islands, to try to get somebody from Iowa to come to Illinois is very difficult. Although there’s one little catch to that. But we there seems to be more people moving from Illinois go into the Iowa side, the property taxes are less those sorts of things. So by knowing your market is knowing not only the price of the home, the sell price of the home, how many days on market, that’s all stuff that you can get from your stats. And by looking at it. But knowing what makes those areas tick, what makes those neighborhoods work, like Alex talks about the neighborhoods and he’s worked in, he knows the historical, the history of a lot of those homes. He knows who owns those homes, he knows who lives in them. Now, those sorts of things. Same as myself, I look at things more from a I’m a very mechanical person, I’m blessed with the ability to fix or build anything. In fact, 20 minutes before I got online with you, I was I was putting brick and mortar on some columns. I’m building a site but I learned the neighborhoods from the architecture from the years they were built from the mechanicals that were used to build them like for example, a simple example would be here we have certain neighborhoods that have this sewer system called Orangeburg pipe. Not all four cities have the habit Moline hardly use it at all. Rock Island uses it a lot that dwarf the older parts of bettendorf used it Northwest Davenport used it a lot. It’s failing across the board, it’s getting old enough now that it’s collapsing, it’s not a question of will it collapse, just when so buy when I’m representing buyers, going to those particular neighborhoods, I’m asking that house in into we’re just Orangeburg pipe us there because that’s kind of set forth and inspection that maybe I would not use in Moline. So knowing your market that way, not only valuations and wise, but what makes that neighborhood work? Where are the city streets? Where’s their development coming bike, if you go to bettendorf in North Davenport, you know, to 53rd Avenue corridor, I know you don’t know what that is. But 20 years ago, that was cornfield. Now, it’s 200,000 plus per acre, to go out there. So if I’m leading an investor, and he’s going to be looking forward to long term buy and hold properties, let’s go where the growth is next, you know, so our cash flow may be a little less right now. But in the end result of property value increase. So it’s knowing the market that way as well. And not just average sale price and things of that nature. There’s so many other things in the intrinsic values is what I call it, what else is happening there? Are their school closings coming up, or their school boards and merging. Is there we just had a new Amazon development that come into town here this year. Where’s that? What’s gonna happen around that area, we have an area called the T BK that’s growing like wildfire out there. Those sorts of things. It’s knowing the market from from that aspect, as well as the dollar values and things of that nature, if that makes sense.
D.J. Paris 38:47 It makes perfect sense. I was just thinking that one specific example about the Amazon like a distribution center, or whatever’s coming coming out your way. That’s a really, it’s a really interesting sort of comment, because there is opportunity there because now we know they’re going to be hiring people to work at this particular plant, or maybe they already have people there. But just getting curious about what is that going to do? Where are those people going to come from who are going to work there? Where are those people may be live? What would their commute look like? If they are coming from further away? And maybe they now want to move closer to the facility? You know, where’s where are the school districts that are desirable for people, you know, understanding that, what the needs of those, you know what, here’s what’s coming? Situations, I think are making just incredibly valuable. You’re more proactive than reactive because, yes, I want to I wanted to also switch gears and talk a little bit about commercial because this is we have about 800 agents in our firm and boy, a lot of them who are really residential agents go I would like to dabble a little bit in commercial. And of course that’s like what does that even mean? Because there’s Lots of different sectors of commercial. And of course, it’s not just a, you can’t paint it all with the same brush commercial could mean lots and lots of different things. But you, you really straddle both, which is impressive and difficult. So I’m curious about how did you get into commercial and why
Jerry Wolking 40:17 being a bigger business owner in the past, commercial use was important to me. Because I needed space, I needed a shop space. And it’s probably one of the calls I get most is for people for shop space, but I guess had an interest in it and watching it. And I like math and working with numbers who work with numbers a lot. And I noticed there was a void. There was a void in that marketplace as far as people being serviced, and a lot of it was from intimidation. A person wants to start a business and they’re not sure where they’re going to find space. So they don’t know what a triple net lease is. They don’t know the difference between triple net and a gross, and they don’t know what cam charges are. And it wasn’t being explained to them on many levels. And and there used to be signs I remember seeing signs up that would say you’re in front of a space that would say available, what is available means it means for sales that mean it’s for rent, what is available mean? And I so I just started learning the language itself and managed to get into a couple of transactions and started learning from there. But there’s the difference DJ, I started learning, I didn’t just do the transaction and get a commission and walk away. I wanted to know the why. How does it work? So So you know, started doing a lot of reading leases, just just going through them and reading what does that mean calling an attorney say okay, this clause says this, what exactly does that mean? And took a CCI M course some different CCM courses, reading articles and realtor magazine, truly learning what it’s like or what it is to be a commercial practitioner, because I truly believe with the whole of my heart that commercial and residential should be two different licenses. And they’re not. And unfortunately, you know, I was really looking at one of your podcasts from another gentleman, I can’t remember where he’s from. But he’s talked about staying in your lane and referring out I think he said when he bought his own house, he referred to a residential agent to buy his own house, because he didn’t know that area. And unfortunately, our license gives us the ability to list and sell just about anything. And that creates problems. And you know, the commercial practitioners they get irritated with our residential person is trying to do a deal with them. And I can see why then that agent will call me say, well, he won’t talk to me and won’t give me the information. And it’s because you’re not going to know what to do with it even if they gave it to you. And if you’re going to represent a tenant, for example, let’s take a tenant that’s going to go and lease this space. And it’s $13 a square foot, you know, net lease and you got to canvass $7 a square foot and you can’t calculate that rent, or you look at their lease, and you can’t determine if it has an escalation clause. And what is that escalation clause? What is the escalation clause based on as far as the rent, increase those sort of things, there’s so much trouble that you can get a person into because you didn’t know how to play that particular game or didn’t know how to guide them. And you should really stay out of that, because you could think about it. I take it very personal as my responsibility. If I’m representing a tenant, and I’m getting
D.J. Paris 43:26 weak Jerry there for just a second. He’ll be popping right back in so bear with us just a moment. There’s Jerry. Okay, once. All right, we that’s okay. You we were just finishing up with we were just talking about commercial and how maybe referring out is, you know, staying in one’s lane and yeah, not necessarily practicing until you’re competent, so to speak. Yeah,
Jerry Wolking 43:52 exactly. So if you’re going to do a commercial Ted, you use the term dabble. I hear that all the time. Don’t dabble. And Don’t, Don’t dabble, your financial responsibility that you have for that client is huge. And it can be the determining factor of their business profitable, they’re not because you got them in a bad lease in a bad position or something where they made a bad purchase. And there’s so much more than just pricing and dollar per square foot and all that it’s what are the environmental, what’s the environmental outlay look like? You know, Is there potential problems there? I lost the listing once because I noticed the test spot on the building and I asked the gentleman about it, and he’s like, Oh, that’s nothing I meant nothing. Because across the parking lot, I see a trailer over there. This is environmental survey or something like what what is this all about? Come to find out he had been contaminated by a neighboring gas station and he didn’t want anyone to know that. So when I asked him to prove to me you’ve got a clean site. It cost him $5,000 But it made him angry and he pulled the listing from me and I was okay with that. I’m okay with that. Take that list right If can’t be honest with it, but yeah, so you’ve got to know the game is more than just making a commission because you can make huge especially in commercial, you can make some really big mistakes, and people are relying on you the expert, and you did not give them expert advice.
D.J. Paris 45:18 Yeah, I agree. So if you know, or at the very least partner with a commercial agent and be you know, their apprentice or be their shadow, while you are educating yourself on the transaction, just make make your life as easy as possible. Don’t, don’t take on clients that you can’t service, it’s, it’s just not gonna
Jerry Wolking 45:42 only make your life easy, but it’s take care of that client the best way you can and some way, you know, I would not go to my dentist to get my ankle operated on. They’re both in the medical profession. But you know, they’d be able to figure it out. Maybe, but no, I take that responsibility very, very personally, and I wish more agents would do. So there’s a lot to know in the commercial world and you need to learn that game. Yes, you can bang your way through. I’m happy to help anyone who will get through a transaction, but I don’t partner very often, I’ve been asked to do 5050, I’ve always turned it down except for one occasion. Because it won’t be 5050 It’d be more like 7525. And so I have offered it if someone wants to 5050 Look, I’ll coach you through if you want to try that. If you want to try the transaction, but you need to put in your time, you need to serve your pain, because there’s a lot to learn and it’s not gonna be as easy as you think it is.
D.J. Paris 46:41 Yeah, I agree. I think for everyone listening right now, there’s the you know, to sort of recap everything Jerry was was talking about on the show. We On this episode, I think we’re really speaking of his competence, and I think or skill development maybe is a better way to say it. Let’s make 2020 for the year of skill development. So what how are you going to do that? Well, you’re going to lean on your brokerage for additional trainings, you’re going to seek out certifications like GRI, certified negotiation expert like Jerry, who’s who’s does both? You’re going to reach out to your local association, not just to maybe serve on a committee, but also to find out what are they offering? What sort of trainings and support are they providing to agents, remember, we do pay our associations quite a bit of money. So there are lots of services I’m, I’m on our member care taskforce here in Chicago, I didn’t even know all of the benefits and services that we provide to our members. Until I now I’m the vice chair of the committee and I still don’t know them all by heart. So reach out to your local association, especially if you’re struggling and say, Hey, I’m struggling right now. Do you have any suggestions for classes I can take people I can talk to, you know, and also, as Jerry said, you know, we got to learn the market, right? So this is a great opportunity to really do a deep dive into your local market. Get that expertise so that when people do reach out to you, you have knowledge about what’s going on. Jerry Of course, does 30 years in the business. I think this is a great place to wrap up I do want to encourage anyone who’s a buyer seller and investor, commercial or residential who is interested in doing something in the Quad Cities area Jerry wilking is your man please reach out to him Jerry if there are any buyers sellers investors out there that would love to speak to somebody with your expertise what’s the best way the
Jerry Wolking 48:34 best way for me actually DJs to text me because I respond to texts we get so many bombarded with people trying to sell us Internet services and marketing services text me because then I have a greater chance of knowing that you’re real and that you’re legit but or email email me very well also.
D.J. Paris 48:55 Yeah, do you mind sharing your your number numbers 309-373-0373
Jerry Wolking 48:57 and email is Jerry walking kw@gmail.com.
D.J. Paris 49:08 Well, Jerry walking Keller Williams Quad Cities the not only a 30 year veteran in the industry amazing reputation and has a now a son who is crushing it here in the Chicago market. This is the first time we’ve done a father son not combined episode but had a father and son on the show at different times. So it is it is no surprise how, why, how and why Alex is doing so well. Jerry, so congrats to you on your career and also on raising another realtor family who is not just not just surviving but thriving in thriving in this market. So please check out Alex’s episode and let’s send Jerry’s episode to anyone else in your area. Any other realtor that may be struggling right now guess what? Everybody’s struggling a little bit right now. So send them a link To this episode, the best way you can help us our listeners is by telling a friend just think of one other realtor that could benefit from all the great stuff Jerry said and shoot them over a link to this episode. Also leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. We would greatly appreciate it on behalf of our audience. Want to thank Jerry, for coming on. We appreciate you, Jerry, thank you gave us tons of great strategic sort of objectives that we can do right now. And on behalf of our audience want to thank Jerry for spending his time with us today. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Jerry. You’re
Jerry Wolking 50:32 awesome. Thank you, man.
How To Make Video Content When You’re Alone • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Nov 27, 2023
Kim Rittberg is an award-winning Digital Content Strategist and On-Camera Coach who helps real estate professionals and business owners grow their income leads & credibility with video and podcasts.
She spent 15 years as a media executive at Netflix, PEOPLE Magazine, and in TV News and she launched the first-ever digital video unit for Us Weekly magazine.
Kim coaches real estate agents to be better on-camera and make unforgettable social media, video & podcast content that brings in leads, clients and revenue.
Kim has spoken at the Berkshire Hathaway Home Services National Convention, been featured in Business Insider and Fast Company and has been a speaker and instructor at PENN and Syracuse University. She also hosts The Exit Interview with Kim Rittberg podcast spurred by her decision to quit corporate and launch her own business after working in the hospital while giving birth to her second child. The podcast helps women craft careers that work for their life – instead of the other way around.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today our resident video expert Kim Rydberg is going to show you how to make great video content. When you’re all alone. Stay tuned to this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:29 Hey, keeping it real folks. I’m Ken rickford. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you. I’m really excited to talk to you today about how to make content alone. And the reason why that’s so important is because all of us need to be making content all the time to grow our business. So as a real estate agent, you need to make content, you don’t always have somebody with you. If you do have an assistant or a social media manager, that’s awesome. But a lot of times you don’t. So I’m going to go through the specific details on how to make content when you’re alone. So I’m Kim Britt Berg, I’m an award winning Digital Marketer. I spent 15 years in media, meaning I was the person writing and producing scripts for national news outlets like inside edition and Fox, I even went to the Oscars for Us Weekly. I was the video head for Us Weekly. And now I love taking all that knowledge about how to write scripts, create content that really appeals to people from social media, and help you real estate agents grow your business. And I’ll tell you the rules about what makes great content never changes, the platform changes how you make it changes, the technology is much more accessible now. But making great content is universal. And you can learn it, it’s a skill you can learn. And I now teach agents across the country, in group courses, my video bootcamp course, and I do one on one work where I work directly with agents to help them make better content specifically to get leads to sell more homes, and to get more clients to grow your revenue. So I want to jump right into how to make content when you’re alone. So I was thinking about this recently, I went to Paris. Very nice, where I went to Paris. And I went to Paris to piggyback my husband’s work trip. And so when did it happen was I had a day where I was by myself and I was like dressed nice. And I want to shoot some content. I’m like, okay, like thinking in advance, what am I going to do when I shoot the content? What am I going to use? What tools am I going to use, and I realized, this is great. This is something I teach my clients and students in my courses, so I wanted to bring you into it. So when you’re thinking about filling by yourself, the situations where you might need it is you might be doing a home tour, you might be filming something in your area, right like a local restaurant or a bar. Again, a big part of being a real estate agent is being that trusted person that trusted resource. And so you want to be bringing people into what’s in your area, presenting yourself as that local expert, you don’t always have someone to film you. Ideally, if it’s a super active filming session, you have someone but you might not. So when you’re on a real estate tour, maybe you’re doing a neighborhood tour, maybe you’re just filming a video about your area. And it’s not necessarily a tour, but you’re featuring like something that you love, right. So it’s very important to understand how to film by yourself. So number one, thinking about what materials you might need. I’m a big advocate of like not over buying things, I have a whole cabinet basically a graveyard of dead equipment that I don’t use. Because even if I know how to use it, I don’t feel like using it. It’s either cumbersome or hard to set up. And if you’re not a super techie, it’s just annoying. So I’m a big advocate of only buying what you really need. When we’re talking about filming by yourself. What you can do, I think the bare minimum is really some sort of tripod with a ring light. And now if you’re sitting in your office and you’re not out on the go, a standing tripod, meaning there’s like three tries three things on the bottom, a stand, you can put your phone in it and a light around it, that’s gonna light you nicely and that’s not going to have your phone bubble around. Now if you’re on the go, it’s important to get something like that but that really can fit in your bag and your briefcase, whatever, that you can Bring with you. Not too big, not too cumbersome. So, one thing is if you’re filming content on the go, like for example, like I mentioned, I was in Paris, I had a selfie stick, that then doubles as a tripod. Why is that a great physical and to have so the selfie stick, you can hold it across, you can hold it out from you, and then you can film yourself. But when I opened the tripod, that’s when I could sit it on the street and walk by and create content capture content without needing someone to help me. So that was an all in one. So I bought us a little selfie stick, that then had a little tripod that opens out from the selfie stick. So selfie stick has like an arm, a metal arm, those little tripod legs folded out from it, it folded down to a really small size that could fit in my purse. So to me, that’s very important. I’m on vacation, I’m not carrying around a backpack, I’m just wearing a regular bag. So that is what I got. So again, I recommend a tripod with a ring light, whatever size fits where you’re going to be. So if we’re talking about filming on your own, and you’re going into an apartment and you’re kind of by yourself, yeah, just bring a tripod with a ring light set it up. But if you really think you’re gonna be out on the go, I would recommend getting like a traveling tripod a small one. And if you’re looking for like specific materials, you can message me you can message me on Instagram. I’m Kim Rydberg ri TTP ERG message me and I’ll give you some ideas. So once you have your materials, you bought your equipment, you have to think about what you’re gonna film, right. So you have to have a plan in mind. So let’s say for example, you want to film something awesome in your town, maybe you want to feature a really great new restaurant. So we’re talking about what are you going to film you have to think about? How am I filming this? Where am I going to be? What might it look like? So knowing where you’re going to film. So I’m going to go back to the example of me being in Paris, and I have a video that I have on Instagram, it says like how I filmed myself when I was in Paris, you can set up the tripod, put it on the ground. And again, this depends on on how big your tripod is where you’re at, you’re gonna put it down on a surface either on the ground, or on a table or something like that. You’re going to turn it on, the best resolution of the camera is not the selfie mode, it’s the regular mode. But if you can’t manage that do selfie mode, so that way you can see the screen. You prop it up on the tripod and you set it down. And let’s say you want a shot of you like walking into the restaurant, right or maybe you’re walking in. So for me in Paris, I wanted a shot of me walking by the camera on the Sen river. I just it was like a cool shot. It’s just like you see the water next to me a little pedestrian overpass, you could see people kind of walking around it looked Parisian. And I wanted to get the idea that I was in Paris right that I was there. So I was I walked really far away from the tripod. Don’t look at the camera, and you walk consistently past the camera. This is called B roll footage. It’s footage where someone’s it’s not the action is not your sorry, it’s not you talking to the camera, it’s kind of action that shows what’s going on. So let’s say again, you’re going to the restaurant, maybe you set up the tripod where you’re seeing the name of the restaurant above you, and you’re walking through it. So maybe we’re seeing the I’m going to like pick a random restaurant in New York City.
White Horse tavern, it’s a bar near I used to live in the West Village in New York City, White Horse tavern, the sign is above you, the tripod is set up across the street, you walk across the doorway, and you’re setting up that you’re going in. Or maybe you’re walking, you’re walking from one side, you’re going into the door, and then you close the door. And the tripod is catching that from across the street. Or maybe it’s set on a table outside. But again, you’re getting the signage to you’re showing somebody where you’re at. So it’s one shot, you know, you’re getting, again, you have to visualize what am I going to do? What am I going to film to tell the story. So if you know you’re going to talk to camera and explain a little bit about what’s happening, you can be setting up that camera where you’re talking to camera. So we just got the shot where you’re walking in, and you’re walking into the restaurant. And then you can be setting up that little tripod at a table or you can bring it inside where you’re filming as long as it’s not loud. Set it up talk to camera, we’re talking about framing it meaning like what is what does it look like? What does the composition look like? You don’t want to be too close you want it to be so that there’s a little bit of space above your head. There’s you know more of your body in the shot. And when you’re really trying to establish where you are you want to film wide enough wide enough shot so that you’re seeing more behind you. A lot of times we see a lot of content on social media, it’s like the same background. We’re talking to camera, you’re in your office, it’s a lot of the same when you’re out and about really make it look different. Like capture that cool stuff. If this restaurant has some really cool fountain. If this restaurant has a really amazing mosaic wall, maybe it has like a cool living wall of plants. Maybe it has a cool smoker Maybe it’s like a barbecue pit with an amazing smoker. really capture that whether you’re in the shot or not. You want to be capturing that content. Okay. And we talked a little bit before I mentioned about prepping your video. Have write it down. Have your overall idea ready, I like to say prepare your script. A script makes it seem like you’ve to write it out like an article, even just three bullet points of what you know you’re going to cover that will help keep you organized, it will keep you moving. It will make sure your video is more interesting. And it will make sure you don’t ramble, I think it’s very important to understand without a structure, a script or bullet points, you’re just gonna ramble because you don’t really know what you’re covering. So it’s always important to go in with the plan. So let’s say you say, Okay, I’m going to walk into the restaurant, I’m going to show the sign in the restaurant, I want to cover the kitchen, I want to film the actual, like dining area. And I want to talk to the camera about what I think is interesting about it. So you have to be thinking about the shots. So you know, you want that exterior shot that says the name of the restaurant, and you’re gonna want to show the actual inside of the restaurant. And but for that shot, you can hold your camera and be turning camera ever so slightly, very slowly to show all the different sides of the restaurant. If you do not have a steady hand, you can always film it study, you can play with a lot of things in edit, don’t worry about it. If you do think you’re going to be doing a lot of like moving walking shots. In terms of materials, you can always get a stabilizer or a gimbal to put on your camera. Totally optional, not mandatory. Again, in terms of preparing it if you’re filming for vertical social media, like tick tock or Instagram, you’re gonna be filming things things vertically. If you’re filming them for YouTube, and vertical, you’re gonna start to film horizontal. And then you can always edit it down to be vertical later, make sure you’re always filming the highest resolution, go check your camera settings, Google, how do I get the highest camera settings possible, make sure for your own camera, you’re filming on the highest possible settings, this will take up more space, but it will make a much better video. Right. And now you know, if you’re doing a restaurant video, you might want to do something where you’re like showing someone around the restaurant. And even if you don’t want to talk to camera, you’re gonna want to voice it over leader. Voice Over it means when you hear someone’s voice over the footage, write that down. When you’re doing a voiceover, you really want to be concise, so write it down. And then you’re going to record that. Lastly, if you don’t have a tripod, you can always use a shelf. So you know, there’s kind of always like a ledge or a shelf or something, sometimes I’ve used like a my purse, I take my purse, I lean it up against something, I’ve used a water bottle, I mean, it’s just anything that you can get a steady place to put your phone can be a tripod, one thing to remember is lighting. So as you’re filming all of these things, you always want to make sure you’re you’re getting good lighting, meaning it’s not too dark, but it’s also not too light. So if you’re in the middle of the day and have a really, really bright light, that’s going to really be harsh, okay, it’s not gonna look that good. So you kind of want to balance light. And you don’t want to be half in shadow and half out of shadows. So you want to be in one spot. Consider the composition when you’re filming. So it’s good. If you’re, if you’re talking, you can kind of be right in the middle of the frame or slightly to the side. That’s nice. And then you want to kind of have things balanced, you know, the rule of threes, like have things in different thirds. Because we’re doing a lot of vertical vertical content, the composition rules have changed a little bit, if you’ve ever heard the rule of thirds is if you’re looking at something and it’s like horizontal, like a sideways painting, they have the rule of threes, where you want something like not always just in the middle, but kind of in the different thirds. Vertically, it’s a little bit different, right, it does change. So it’s just important to remember that and you just want to have your shots a little bit different, not always like the same thing in the middle all the time, you’re gonna vary your shots a little bit. Um, one thing to remember is very, very important. Always film B roll footage B roll footage is footage of what you’re seeing. So in a restaurant, that’s the restaurant booth sets the kitchen, that’s the entrance sign, it’s anytime that you’re not really talking to camera. The reason why that’s important is because you can always add things later. You could make your whole video without you in it, and just film a lot of that same restaurant, and then you can talk over it afterwards. Or you can add text. But without that B roll without that footage. It’s hard for someone to know what is this restaurant? Where is it? What’s it like? What’s cool about it? And again, when you’re filming something, don’t forget to think about what do you think is cool about it as you’re making that video. So you have to tell the story. From your point of view. This is not a Google article about the restaurant. It’s your point of view in the article. And it’s your point of view on the restaurant. And that’s why people are working with you as their agent. They trust you and they trust your opinion. And so Leslie so you’re getting that B roll, you’re thinking about lighting and composition. And in terms of filming on your own. One last thing when you’re filming and you’re out and about give context to where you are so if this restaurant is on the main street, make sure to show the main street if this restaurant is like a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and as beautiful farm or maybe this beautiful sunset this beautiful beach show that sometimes we live in this like small world like you know the phrase seeing the forest seeing the forest for the trees or seeing the trees of the forest but stepping back, stepping back and saying Great. I’m in this little restaurant. Awesome. Step back. Where is this restaurant? Is it by highway? Is it on the main street is it on the beach? So just giving a little more context to where this says, All right, so today we’re talking about how to make content when you’re alone. So I’m going to recap by the right materials. So figure out what you’re filming. And if you’re going to be on the move a lot, or if you’re kind of standing, you’re going to be getting some sort of tripod with a ring light or like a little travel tripod, maybe with a selfie stick, whatever is good for you, you’re going to prepare your video most important, think ahead about what you’re going to talk about what you want to capture, you can always write it later. But you need the ideas of what you’re going to cover and what you’re going to talk about, you really only get one chance to film it. So make sure to cover filming a lot of it film all the interesting things that you might have noticed. And lastly, so the on that note of making sure you know what you’re filming, if you’re going on vacation, same rules apply. Like think about all the things that make your vacation interesting. So you would want to film the ski slope or the pool or or the ocean or your hotel or an amazing meal you had. So you really want that varied content. The one thing is you don’t want a video of just you talking to camera. When you’re in the Bahamas, I want to see the Bahamas right. So really bring people into your life by capturing as much content as possible. You can always add text or voiceover later. Alright, as you can tell if you could probably tell my voice I love teaching people about video. Video can grow your business, it is the most amazing thing and if you don’t know how to make great video to grow your business, you’re never too late. It’s never too late. You’re never too old. You’re never too young. It’s perfect. So reach out to me on my instagram Kim Ripper KMRI TTB erg. I also have really awesome free downloads you can grab from Kim ripper.com/newsletter drop me an Instagram I love hearing from the keeping it real folks, you’re all really cool. And I’ve now worked with so many of you in my video bootcamp classes that I run twice a year. Reach out I hope to hear from you. And if you’re making content when you’re alone, make sure to tag me in that video. Whether you’re making an Instagram story or a full reel. I want to hear what you’re making when you’re alone. Tag me and I will cheer you on. I am a big cheerleader. Alright, thank you so much for joining me. I am Kim Rydberg and I’ll talk to you next time
5.5 Billion In Sales Through Authenticity • Louise Phillips Forbes
Nov 22, 2023
Louise Phillips Forbes describes her transition from dancer in Broadway to an industry leader in real estate. Louise talks about what is she and her team doing now at a down market. Louise also discusses the importance of building relationships with other realtors. Louise also talks about how her very authentic style/look impacted her business. Next, Louise discusses the importance of participating in associations and giving back to the community. Last, Louise discusses teams in real estate business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re gonna talk to an agent who had no business background before becoming a real estate agent, and his todate closed over 5.5 billion in real estate by embracing her authentic self. You’re gonna want to check this one out. So stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host to the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with superstar and I really mean superstar Louise Phillips Forbes from New York. And before we get to Louise in really You guys can’t get we can’t get to her fast enough. But before we do, please do me a favor to things leave us a review whatever app you’re listening to us on. Let us know what you think of the show. We really do take those comments to heart and it helps us get in front of more people and also tell a friend I think one other realtor that needs to hear what Louise is about to tell you and trust me you’re gonna want to share it after you hear this but let’s get to the main event. my conversation with Louise Phillips Forbes.
Today our guest on the show is a New York City legend Louise Phillips Forbes with a Louise Phillips sports team with Brown Harris Stevens in New York City. Let me tell you more about Louise. For over three decades Louise Phillips Forbes has been an industry leader in New York’s residential real estate market with their career sales exceeding dramatic pause 5.5 billion end up dramatic boss she is considered one of the elite power brokers in Manhattan she really is a true superstar Louise has been named residential agent of the Year by REBNY, which is the Real Estate Board of New York for her consistent achievements and leadership within the industry. She’s a multi time winner of homesteads real estate, which is now brown hair Stevens esteemed broker of the Year award. Louise has also been acknowledged many times as the number one listing broker company wide and currently lists one of the firm’s top sales sorry currently leads one of the top firms top sales teams, she has developed a significant following among developers buyers and sellers throughout Manhattan from the Upper West Side and upper east side to the West Village Tribeca Wall Street really everywhere Manhattan and and the boroughs are Louise probably serves prominent New Yorkers, please follow her on Instagram, which is Louise Phillips Forbes team. I will have a link to that in the show notes and also visit our website which is Louise Phillips forbes.com. And we will also have a link to that as well. Louise, so happy to have you. Thank
Louise Phillips Forbes 4:06 you. I’m just gonna add to that lovely intro. That there’s also Weezy underscores says and that’s W E z e underscore F E z if you really want to get a little essence of Weezy
D.J. Paris 4:23 should I call you Weezy as opposed to one
Louise Phillips Forbes 4:25 I met my husband on a blind date and I was like oh, all my friends call me my husband’s very elegant and he certainly elevates me. And I was like oh my friends call me Wheezy and he was like turning the menu going. I will never call you with a
D.J. Paris 4:42 fan of the Jeffersons or
Louise Phillips Forbes 4:44 I don’t know but you know I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, and that’s just what everybody called me growing up. So I
D.J. Paris 4:51 love that you still have a little tiny bit of that Nashville accent which I just think is one of the best accents in our country. I love that Nashville accent Well,
Louise Phillips Forbes 5:01 you know, when I when I’m negotiating particularly, it’s something that I don’t intentionally do it. But when I’m a little nervous, I go home, you know, we go home, my home and my accent and so, yes, wait till I spend about 10 days in Nashville. And then I’m like, y’all, it’s waiting for y’all do it.
D.J. Paris 5:23 Oh, I love Nashville. So my everybody loves Nashville. It’s pretty much a universally beloved city. It’s like Charleston is kind of that way, Austin, there’s a few cities that you’d never you’d be hard pressed to find somebody that goes, Oh, Nashville, yuck. Like everybody loves it. But anyway, let’s get to to your origin story. Like our audience always loves to hear I know you’ve been been in this business for 30 plus years. But why did you get started? And how’d you get started in real estate?
Louise Phillips Forbes 5:53 Well, I always say that I kind of fell off the boat from Nashville to New York City, I came here, really seeking the Broadway lights, I was a dancer. And, you know, I still I miss it. I did some off Broadway things. But you know, really, with everybody who is in real estate, we all have multiple chapters in our life, I would say the new generation is being educated to be in real estate. But my journey was through the back door, which was through through coming here and ended up in New York. And literally, I was bartending and somebody was like, you’d be so great in real estate. And I went, I took the card, I met her friend, and he was like, You got a job. And I called my brother, I was like, I got a job, I got a job. And he’s like, you know, that’s commission only. Oh, no. And for all the new brokers out there, I just want to say keep coming back, because I literally made $8,400, my first year. And I lived on 30 bucks a week, I came to New York with a ton of bucks in my pocket. And, you know, almost $6 billion later, you know, I have I am. So in the right place, I have a degree in special education and elementary education. And I had a scholarship to dance and dance to dance companies, and how real estate, build all those holes, I have no idea. But it’s not the business of brick and mortar. It’s really the business of people. And that is what blows my skirt out. You know?
D.J. Paris 7:39 You know, that is, by the way, just the blows my skirt up expression is adorable. I love I love that. I love that. But But you’re right. And it is it is a relationship, of course business. It’s an interpersonal business, and you know, brick and mortar. Even real estate offices aren’t that packed anymore, unless there’s teams that are working in need to sort of have that space. So many people are, you know, moving away from from the brick and mortar offices, although I still there’s obviously still tremendous value in that. But I would love to learn a little bit about, you know, you’ve been here, you’ve been around 34 years, I want to dive into sort of just a more challenging topic, because of where we currently are. And it’s something that everybody’s probably experiencing some version of, which is it’s a down market, it just is we it’s where we are. And the interest rates are up, of course, inventory is down again, I know Manhattan is kind of its own echo system there that maybe sometimes a little bit outside of what the rest of the country is, is experiencing. But, you know, I would always love to hear from huge producers like you and your team. How are you keeping everyone motivated work moving forward? What is your team focused on right now? Because of course, you’re still working?
Louise Phillips Forbes 8:58 Right? Of course. I mean, listen, I I didn’t have a Rolodex for all the young listeners, that was a thing that we held all of our contacts in. Now we have our phones, but but I had no context. All my friends were like starving artist. And, um, and you know, I would just say that I was not comfortable with the Commission model because that meant that I needed to, I had to find I had to be worthy. I needed to earn my keep. And and something clicked in me which is a philosophy in down markets and up markets. It doesn’t matter. That I realized that if I looked at myself, not as a salesperson, but an educator. I felt much more comfortable and if I operate it from being of service at all times, what goes around comes around. So these are those markets that operating by Mike by being of service to my competitor, and sharing my knowledge and collaborating and doing more than I need to do comes back 18 fold. So, that is one of the greatest wisdoms that I’ve learned through trial and error, honestly. And there’ll be people that will, you give them an inch, and they take a mile. And then when you really need them, they’re not there. But for the most part, for the most part, it is, it is appreciated. And honestly, it’s what buyers and sellers come and go, but we have each other for decades, and the richness that that gives you in wise wisdom and experience, and I love it when I’m going to lose a piece of business. Hopefully, I’m losing to somebody I respect.
D.J. Paris 10:58 Yeah. And and, you know, there’s enough business to sort of go around, right, and you don’t win every deal. Of course, as you have been in this business long time you win a lot of them, obviously. But it is it is always I always say it’s always a good idea to play nice in the sandbox, especially because it is at least for now. It’s called a cooperative commission. We’re supposed to be cooperative. Yes. Yeah. How important? How important is the relationships you’ve built with other realtors over your career?
Louise Phillips Forbes 11:25 Massive, massive? I mean, every time I do you know, so you’re talking about like, you’re asking me, it’s a difficult market. So what’s my advice? What are we doing? You know, we are out there every day. I, I am very data driven. I always say I’m not the smartest pencil in the in the bucket. But But I but I get so much accolades for effort, energy consistency, I never I never give up. And and I think these are the markets where your knowledge and data like who can figure out what anything is worth since COVID. Right? Because it’s so there’s no cycle, right? And so I, every time I get a pitch, which we probably average five to seven a week, if not more. I talked to 50. I’m not saying for 50. Brokers just for that analysis, what’s happening? Do you have any offers heavy, you know, when you drop the price, did it make a difference, then I’m not only giving my owners a bunch of numbers, I’m telling the story to the texture, the broker wanted to list this at $2 million, but the owner asked to put it on for three weeks at two and a half. Well, eight weeks later, they just dropped it to 199. And the market is different today. So So that’s telling the story. So I don’t have to pressure anybody, we’re partnering together. It’s like, Hey, I can’t make up the market. So that kind of collaboration is how I approach everything, whether it’s a buyer, a broker, I’m interviewing to an agent to come and work on our team, like, Who are you, and you demonstrate that by the data points that you share them?
D.J. Paris 13:19 Yeah, so it’s important to know the market and to study the market on a daily basis, which I suspect, most agents probably could upgrade their amount of time they spend learning, learning the market and on a daily basis. And in addition to the prospecting and working with their existing clients, and all of the things you need to do to keep the business running is this idea of and collaboration, learning from other agents is so important. And I wanted to go back to something you had said about educating because you are an educator, that was your, that was your training. That and and in in special needs, which of course is requires an even really a more sophisticated skill set to be able to address the needs of of people with developmental disabilities and those types of challenges. And it probably I would assume your level of patience that you have, in communicating with with clients and really educating them is probably served you extraordinarily well. Because again, as Realtors we oftentimes can forget how challenging, you know, emotionally a purchase or sale can be for the client, it’s easy for us to sort of say oh, it’s all going to work out, but it may not feel that way to the client in real time.
Louise Phillips Forbes 14:32 salutely Absolutely. And I would also say that I learned a long time ago for myself, because I used to be on the same roller coaster as is them when we didn’t get the deals. I was so disappointed. I also felt it was somehow another my fault. And and you know what I have come to look at everything and this is part of me having an executive coach and me learning so that you know, like, sometimes your skill is not necessarily the most important thing, if your will is there. And, and it’s also how you perceive it like, listen, have faith in the process, that was not the right house for us. And we have to, we have to say, what can we have learned from that? What would I have done differently? Should we have given that extra 20 grand that we really wanted to wait? Maybe we could have gotten their attention. But But I also don’t dwell on it. Because usually, we learn a lot about ourselves. And most of all, they learn about themselves in their partnerships, their relationships have of who’s going to really make the final decisions, and when do you let go of the numbers and you focus on the heart of it. Because that, to me, is why I really am so fulfilled, because what I do is not a transaction. It’s it’s, you know, it’s purposeful, it’s it’s making, it’s, you know, I built the rest of my life around my home. To be a part of that is such a privilege. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 16:10 it really is, there’s, I think we couldn’t ever over focus on the interpersonal importance of, you know, being in this business, you’re legitimately, you know, working with somebody who maybe it’s their largest financial purchase of their life, or certainly one of the larger financial purchases in really, probably anyone’s life. But it’s more than that. It’s that emotional connection we all have to our to our abode to our residents, we we feel a certain way about it, it’s important, it defines us in a lot of ways. And you I also want to talk about aesthetics, just just briefly, because I think we never talked about this on the show. And of course, aesthetics are just one little minor portion of anyone’s business. But I love the fact that you have a look, you have a style very much unto you, that is very much you. And it’s very cool. And you are a creative person, you are a dancer, you know, so you have this really cool way of expressing yourself physically. So I would just love to hear a little bit about how you’re able to do that in real estate. I love that. I
Louise Phillips Forbes 17:15 love that. Well, you know, talking about my look, I always when I teach real estate classes or whatever I’m working on in collaboration with with some of the real estate board or our courses for continuing education. I literally tell the story about when I showed up. My first day in real estate. Okay, just everybody close your eyes, I usually say Okay, good buddy. 400 kids in the audience, and I’m like, close your eyes. All right. Imagine a unity car with a prairie skirt, green cowboy boots with a hole in my left one. And shoulder pads. I just I just want you to have the visual. And honestly, I had never been in an office. I was a dancer. I have a degree in special education. I didn’t. I didn’t even I did Tony Roberts, creative visual Robins. I listened. I listened to his I learned how to creatively visualize who I wanted to be. Yeah, I was in my 20s. And I’m just wasn’t, I was pretty cash. I mean, as you see, I haven’t changed that much. But I do have a look. Because, you know, I remember when my sister I’d go home and my sister was a school teacher, and she married her college sweetheart. And she’s amazing, but we’re like, getting in gang. And, and she would like Let’s go shopping. And I would end up with all these outfits that my sister would wear. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what am I doing? So I would say just embrace who you are today and who you become every day. You know? Because I don’t know. I mean, I’m a lot for a lot of people. So I mean, yes, sometimes I’ve left and the wives would say like, you know, I’m gonna go next time, my husband, you’re you’re really high energy for my husband.
D.J. Paris 19:17 But I think I think what comes across for you in your sort of your energy in your presence is two things that come to mind. For me authenticity is absolutely first and foremost, I believe you. And I believe that you are the person you’re portraying, which is really a skill in and of itself, because a lot of us have fear around being, you know, uniquely ourselves and maybe how that may be perceived. And also so there’s that authenticity, authentic part, but also I think there’s this sort of passion that sort of also radiates from you that is very clear that you are doing what you want to do. in your business, it is there doesn’t seem to be hesitation or you I mean, you’ve been doing for 34 years. But it is like you are you are, it seems you are as into it today, as I suspect if I would have interviewed you 33 years ago, I bet it would be about the same level of passion and excitement.
Louise Phillips Forbes 20:16 Yes, other than I would be a little more timid, because I will never forget the first coop deal that I did with the attorney who I’m still working with today. And she it was a $63,000 walk up, apartment. Yes, they did exist at that point. And she’s like, so how’s the board package coming in? I’m like, what? She’s like, well, this is a call off. And I’m like, wait a minute, what does that mean? So I just want you to know that it’s okay to not know everything. I mean, you might want to know a little more than that. But, but, you know, I learned a long time ago, I’m terribly dyslexic, and I only make dyslexic children. And, you know, owning those imperfections in ourselves, actually, for me, turned out to be my secret weapon. My spatial memory is like rain, man. So I think that sometimes, I have heard kids say to my own kids, wow, I would never tell anybody. I’m dyslexic. And my son is like nine years old at the time was like, just means I learned differently. It’s no big deal. But that vulnerability is inviting. Yes. It’s like, I’m going to trust you with a little bit about me. Yes.
D.J. Paris 21:32 And I’m trusting you with information that you can use to harm me, meaning you can reject me, you can make fun of me, you could and most people won’t do that. So it’s this fear we have of like, If I reveal this about me, maybe I’ll get punished for it. However, most people aren’t like that. Yes, once in a while somebody will, you know, especially kids in a playground, maybe in grade school, they’ll make fun of, but, but adults aren’t really so much that way. And I think I think the courage to be vulnerable, is is both one of the hardest things to do. It’s also one of the most rewarding because what you find what I found in my life is that people don’t run away generally. And
Louise Phillips Forbes 22:12 I think, you know, listen, I have had, you know, my, I’m not sure my passion came came from being just so incredibly grateful. I mean, I lost my mom when I was 23. And my brother died in my arms when I was 30. I had a boyfriend who passed away when I was 38. And my dad passed away 10 days after I met my husband on a blind date. And, and I literally think that my mother sent me my angel and brought me from, you know, took hers back. But but when you go through those kinds of obstacles in your life, you just can’t sweat the small shit. And believe me, I still do a maybe you can believe that. Sorry. That’s okay. But I still do but that but but but when you have loss, and when when you have the privilege to be focused around people’s homes, because what is home thing for you, it’s family. I left my family, right, I lost a lot of my family. And so my clients, I have seven, eight, God children, you know, they can’t I mean, I met my husband on blind date from a client. So I created a new family that happened to be part of what I do in business.
D.J. Paris 23:29 I am so I am so touched by that. And you know, you did just list a lot of challenges that you have gone through, because of course, you’re human and people leave us they you know, it’s just part of the deal.
Louise Phillips Forbes 23:45 I was gonna say it also armed me to deal with this dates, and loss, and family. And when I have I hear from my clients that they have an autistic child, well, I am the first person to connect the dots. Let me let you talk to my friend who has three boys and her son is three and he’s autistic. And she’s got so it’s like, sometimes it’s too much for people. But again, I just want to be of service whether or not exactly
D.J. Paris 24:14 and you know, also going through tremendous heartache and pain builds resiliency, and that allows you to realize, wow, I can get through difficult times I can I can survive them. And I can emerge a stronger person because now I know how to handle some of the really, really tough, you know, valleys of life as they say. I would you know, you are very immersed in in giving back specifically, I know that you do a lot with the local association, and maybe even statewide and national but certainly I know you have contributed a lot Can we just tell all of our audience because I I do a lot of volunteering at the at the local level. Here with our association. We tell everybody they should Get involved with their local association. Yes,
Louise Phillips Forbes 25:02 yes. And, you know, it is through giving. I mean, a sounds like, I feel like I’m a minister for a minute, but in through giving, we receive so much. And, you know, I think that, that I’m always an all when somebody who always is like, well, you’re so busy, it’s like, but if I’m too busy to make a difference than I am missing my purpose. So I will say that, again, if I am too busy, to try to make a difference to pause to be present for somebody’s need, then I am missing my purpose. And that’s really, if you live like that, that that, you know, it does pull you thin, because I don’t have probably enough boundaries. But I, I think that’s the way to live, if I go to bed, and I still haven’t done enough, and maybe I’m gonna wake up tomorrow, again, with the purpose to do more.
D.J. Paris 26:06 You’re right, and I feel the same way. So I’m probably stretched too thin myself, however, I can always pull back on certain obligations. But what I have gained by getting involved with our local association here is I’ve gained a social life, way more than I had before. I have all sorts of events to go to. But more importantly, I have all of these like minded other real estate professionals, who are committed to helping and being of service. And boy, is that a great energy to be around. And whether it be up totally
Louise Phillips Forbes 26:38 whether you’re doing you know, I mean, we are in every kind of nonprofit world, the people in our world of real estate, because they’re, you know, they’re not just a handful of us, they’re millions of us. But you know, nothing is better than when you’re doing dealing with something that’s for Housing Works, or for ALS. I mean, I have I’ve been to a number of the my, my dear friend was honored and also client honored for the American Society for cancer for breast cancer, and she was a survivor of breast cancer. And that’s just been the last three weeks. But it is really like, if we can find what fills our soul. And it’s not about ourselves. It’s also where you know, your, your sphere of influence becomes where you can be a part of the fabric of a community.
D.J. Paris 27:36 Yes, and you know, I always say to, you know, life has so many challenges, and so much pain is going to come into all of our lives. It’s just part of the human experience. So if you can build in sort of guaranteed wins throughout your life, they help sort of offset some of the challenging times. And being of service for me has been one of those things that it just feels too good to give up. It’s almost I almost feel a bit selfish when I do it, because I’m really sort of doing it for me, because I want to I want to feel good, but I’m also hopefully doing some good out there in the in the community. But, but I do it for me. Sort of Yeah, for sure. Because I know I’m going to feel proud of myself this
Louise Phillips Forbes 28:19 this morning. And literally I just said to my my husband because my kids one my son is in college and the other one is in boarding school and I was like for Thanksgiving, why don’t we go to the Bowery and let’s serve. And then let’s go look at the parade. Like you know, like, and, and I, I listened to a guy who was a doorman, who goes every Wednesday, every week to serve breakfast a meal at the Bowery. And he’s like, my whole week is like set. You know what I mean? Like it sets appreciation, gratitude, that you know, being thankful. And he said he just gets to work as a doorman and he’s like, there’s nothing that’s gonna shake me because life is great. I have my health and I have a roof and so you know, I’m not everybody’s journey to finding what what blows his skirt up is going to be different but but but make the time to do it because it’s it’s really in giving. You know, my mom used to say you have to give it away to keep it and I would be like, but wait Ma, if you give it away, you don’t have it. Right. So you know that one by one.
D.J. Paris 29:37 And what you said earlier, it once you give it away it comes back and you said 18 fold, which again, I’m sure it’s just a number that you’re using. But it’s but it’s it’s it’s not so much whether that’s accurate or not, but it’s accurate enough to be able to say it comes back in multiples and that is something that I have found absolutely true. There’s almost a little magical element to it that I can’t quite put my finger on why it comes back? You know, but it does, it seems. Yeah.
Louise Phillips Forbes 30:04 Yeah. And if it doesn’t, it’s that that’s like that that story, pay it forward, it doesn’t doesn’t matter if it’s not that person. It’s the seed that’s planted. You know. Um, so that’s the way I feel about sharing about my dyslexia, about having lost, it’s like, I might make somebody uncomfortable, but I might make somebody go, Oh, I’m not alone. Yes, you know, um, I wanted to say also that kind of, in bringing back to what we do, and when you have this philosophy of being of service, and, and being generous with your knowledge, you know, hey, you know, having people that I probably just said this last night, I was talking to somebody about meeting them for coffee, because they’re, they want to do something different. And I was an asset, I think that I probably brought, like, 80 people into real estate by this point, you know, where people are like, Well, I was a sales manager, I was an architect, I was an investment banker, I could do this, you know, or I was an actress or whatever. And, and I will say that the time that I had that cup of coffee, I promise you, when you get you see, you know, when you see somebody who’s going to be great at real estate. And, and when you get that time, and you give that time, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the other side of the negotiating table. And they’re five bids, and they’re like, Wait, please, listen, here’s the deal, you need to come up, I would love to see if I can’t tell you what the other bids are. But you know, you really get you extended yourself to me. So I want to make sure I do my best for you. Because I know they’re your personal friends. Right? That’s, that’s all about relationship.
D.J. Paris 31:58 I mean, what that is worth is almost it’s almost not countable. Because it’s so it’s, it’s worth so much to build those relationships, and then those relationships will possibly help. And that is I wasn’t expecting
Louise Phillips Forbes 32:11 that just to be clear. But again, it’s just a seed that was planted. And I’m saying that for people, when you know, even when I know, I can’t make an appointment, like, I know, I can’t do it, because my owner is definitely not gonna let me in. I sometimes pick up the phone, and I will say, I’ve just done my best I cannot even negotiate this. But let me tell you what I can do for you. Because and brokers are like always, like, you didn’t need to call me for that lease. But to me, doesn’t that make you feel important? Yes. Because I do care. And sometimes I can’t do anything about it. And that seven tene second phone call is like 27 chips. Again, not why I did it. But but that’s how I know how I feel when somebody makes that effort.
D.J. Paris 33:05 Yeah, it’s it’s important to be heard, to feel heard, to allow others to be to be feel heard as well. And that is something that that is so so critical. I want to switch gears to talk just a little bit about teams because you run an incredibly successful team. And right now we have seen over the last, well, gosh, you’ve you’ve been at this much longer than I but certainly a flight to teams or a trend towards team building. In the last I would say five years or so certainly in the last
Louise Phillips Forbes 33:37 I would say 15 years. But yes, there are some I mean, in New York, we have some teams that have, you know, 1230 I mean, you know, the sort of I mean, Serhan has his own business now. You know, so listen, I I built my team, not purposely because honestly, I don’t think of myself as a business person. However I am, which I’ve come to learn. But it really came out of being of service and I can’t be everywhere and I don’t like it when somebody says you know, she’s my boss. I mean, I can’t stand that it’s like minute and a we are a machine and I’m a spoke and you’re a spoke, and we all need each other. But I think that the most important thing and I said it earlier you know, I spent many many years not wanting brokers or agents who were in the business to come on my team. Number one, I’m dyslexic, I have to do things a certain way. I rarely write my emails because I will be here for 973 minutes just to get three paragraphs. Um, and I say that jokingly but it’s kind of an accurate. And, and so I need a lot of support. And and I don’t want very established agents habits. Because the philosophy of being of service, the philosophy of going above and beyond the philosophy of, you know, well, can I just send it like this? And we’ll just add that other stuff later? No, we have to provide excellence and value every turn, because that is demonstrating why they should choose to operate with us. It shouldn’t even be a question, if we so so. So that’s sort of one thing, I would say. And I think there’s a natural mentoring, although people tell me I’m very intimidating, which I find very funny, because if you really knew me, it’s like, I’m just a little kid. But I guess I guess it’s really I built my team, purposefully today around the support that I need, but also looking for the right chemistry, because we all have to have the same philosophy. I’ve always, you know, I don’t like to have one person work on this and one person work on that. I don’t even want to have the energy to try to figure out who should be what I do match personalities. I don’t match the financial or the specialty. I match personalities, because I do know, my clients.
D.J. Paris 36:39 You use a personality test to do that as well, correct?
Louise Phillips Forbes 36:43 I do. I mean, my husband is wicked smart. And people are always like, you know, you and your husband worked as like, oh my god, we he would just, I would drive him crazy. Because he is I always describe us as like, I’m the kite and he’s my streak. So, so, but he is very smart. And he is a tech entrepreneur, and has built and sold a number of companies. And at some point, you know, he started trying to figure out how to hire the right people in his own businesses. And, you know, he, he, for the heck of it, he gave me this personality index. And it was created by the guy that was selecting the bomb, the person who dropped the bomb, so it’s a pilot, and the copilot. And so that’s how it was created in the 40s. But it’s morphed into this tool of determining personalities and what people are good for? Well, you know, it’s a, b, c, d, personality traits. Well, I am so off of what’s important on relationships, that’s the B, it doesn’t even mark and not only that, my husband jokes, he’s like, You care more about the relationships that that are not nice and don’t like you, and you want to figure out why than the ones that are just right in front of you sometimes. You know, I just want to try to figure out what makes those people tick. Sure. Um, and so what I did come to realize that I had at one point in marketing guy who was also a real estate broker who came back came in from the advertising world. And he was desperately trying to be a broker. And he presented well, and he was amazing. But when he did the personality index, he was literally turning himself inside out. He was not at all being who his natural self was. And so, you know, I know. I mean, now I have enough of the right people in the right seats, that we literally can finish each other sentences. And, and by the way, when I piss somebody off, which I do, because I’m a lot, you know, the intent is, you know, my intent. It’s not that it’s just not having time. And so the trust that’s built with those moments, and lots of them, you have built your own dynamic of a family. I also, I want to say one more thing about compensation because I remember watching older agents have assistants, and they kind of barked at, like, get me copy and make copies and that’s a typo. do that over again. It’s like it was not collaborative. And I really wanted to have something that was people I couldn’t hit, I can’t be everywhere. So I didn’t want many knees. I just wanted people that complimented my many weaknesses, but also that diversity of who’s going to be attracted to who I As we work together, and and that that is was a really good. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it just sort of happened where, where I felt I feel I filled the seats with people that complimented my weaknesses, or, you know? Yeah, I would say that. And so they don’t think like me, they, they complement our strategy.
D.J. Paris 40:30 I love that. And we should also mention, too, that if you are a realtor in the Manhattan market, and maybe you are thinking of a switch, or maybe you just want to see what other opportunities are out there to see if there is better chemistry. Maybe you’re not currently on a team and you think that could you could provide some value to the team and maybe get some value as well. Or maybe you’re somebody that’s currently on a team and it’s just maybe not the right fit. Of course, not all teams are. And so if you think that you would like to partner with Louise and her team, obviously she does not take everyone in fact, she doesn’t take hardly anyone because she wants to find the right fit. But when she does find that she she embraces them and brings them on, she has a very successful team nearly 6 billion in sales. So Louise, if any of our listeners who are realtors in your area, are interested in thinking that maybe they would be a good asset to you, what’s the best way they should reach out? You
Louise Phillips Forbes 41:28 can do you can DM me on Wheezy underscore says or you can go to the website. I don’t know if if if you’ve got a chat log in your in your podcast. But no, I mean, I think those are two great spots.
D.J. Paris 41:44 Yeah. And and also realize too, that, you know, when you’re reaching out to top producers, like like Weezy, she’s, she’s busy, she’s a very busy person. So so be be patient. A lot of people listen to our show, and a lot of people will probably be messaging her. So please be patient there. And also think about I always think if you’re going to approach a top producer, think about what you can, what problems you can help solve for them. And if you can think about what, what you can bring to the table, as opposed to just what you might get, you’ll probably get a lot further. And Louise and her team obviously are exceptional. They’re really they’re legends in the New York market. So it is a very, very big deal. And please do reach out to her if you think you could be a good fit for her. And then her and her team will we’ll take a look. But also I want everybody to follow Louise, check out her website, which is which is sorry, it is Louise
Louise Phillips Forbes 42:41 forbes.com.com. And
D.J. Paris 42:44 then Louise Phillips Forbes team is where you find her on Instagram. We will also have a link to your Wheezy one as well. We will have a link to all your social profiles, but also just wanted to ask one final question. What was the biggest mistake that you think you’ve made in your into 30? Or a mistake that you sort of wish that you could go back and correct? Because I always like to humanize our guests a little bit too. So can you think of something that you wish you would have done different in your career?
Louise Phillips Forbes 43:14 Hmm, wow, there are so many things. What would I have done differently? I mean, I you know, I don’t I don’t think there’s I am grateful that I don’t live in regret, right? Because even if I’ve made mistakes, which there are pretty much every day, the ability to clean up your mistakes and own your part in it, I think is really valuable. So you don’t live in the negative. I’m trying to think of an example that that that just stands out. I mean, I’ve I’ve
D.J. Paris 43:58 here’s what I love. Here’s me by the way, just Well, here’s what I love about why, why you’re stopped. I love this because you don’t live in regret, you keep your side of the street clean. When you make mistakes as you say you do every day, you own them, you acknowledge them, you make amends if you need to, and you move on and you don’t hold on to it. So the fact that you’re not holding on to it doesn’t mean you you don’t didn’t make mistakes you admitted as much. But that you know, you don’t you don’t have a list of these horrible atrocities that have been committed, which probably weren’t horrible anyway, but the idea of letting go and moving forward is really
Louise Phillips Forbes 44:35 I will say one thing about and I can think of one of the most difficult times in my I almost got out of real estate. So I had a team, a couple of team members that worked with me, and you know, I had a contract but I am not a business minded individual. And, you know, I just it just, I operate with such trust and You know, people I used to I remember, I had somebody who sat next to me and when I was young, younger in the late 90s, early 2000s, and she was locking up her desk with all of her files. And I thought to myself, like, how odd is that? And so I never felt like, you can’t take AI relationships. Right. But in fact, you know, I had a team members that worked for me for a decade, and just shy of a decade, and we had had such an intricate fiber of how we operated. That, you know, I knew exactly where I was, you know, if I’m, I’m selling an apartment to somebody that my kids go to preschool with. And I’m kind of clear where that that relationship came from. But I had a couple of agents that left and went to another firm, and they left very strategically on time at, you know, planning, probably three to four months in advance and targeted my business for five years still today. And I was so devastated emotionally, that I just didn’t understand that betrayal, that it took me three years to thaw out. Trust, unconditionally, however, I got my ducks in a row. So. So if you’re building a team, even if it’s your best friend, have a good contract, don’t be short sighted. And also, if you’re going to have employees, like operations, drivers, marketing people, have a third person, contractor, third party contractor, hire them, have them on a payroll, pay 20, whatever percent more for their salary, protect yourself, because I have had, I’ve had people fall and be disabled. And you know, or go on disability, and I would never have known how to manage that. So it’s a big thing that people who build teams are not addressing, and it’s going to bite them in the rear end.
D.J. Paris 47:11 100% agree. So if you are joining a team, make sure that that team seems to have their HR in order and some sort of operations in order so that you can
Louise Phillips Forbes 47:22 clear yes, contract terms, everything. Because you’re in the business and you you need to take care of yourself. Sorry about my phone.
D.J. Paris 47:32 No, it’s no, it’s perfect timing, because I gotta get a good call as well. So this is perfect time for us to wrap up, you’ve provided so much value to our audience. So on behalf of everyone listening, we thank you, Louise for your time today. You are a superstar, obviously in the New York market. And we are so honored to get some of your time today because we know how valuable that is for somebody as busy as yourself. So on behalf of the audience, thank you. And on behalf of Louisa and I we want to thank the audience as well for sticking around to the very end, please tell a friend about this episode. Please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. But the best thing to do for sure is just keep spreading the word. Let other agents know that this podcast exists. And we have grown to we just crossed over 3.2 million downloads. Thanks to you guys. Not things. Not thanks to me. So we apply it. Thank you on behalf of our entire crew here. And Luis thank you again. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks a lot. I’ll
Louise Phillips Forbes 48:27 see you in New York soon.
D.J. Paris 48:29 I will be there and I will we’ll go to Katz’s or something we’ll have fun. I love it. Alright, see you later. Bye bye
How To Upgrade Your Real Estate Website • Malte Kramer
Nov 21, 2023
Malte Kramer the CEO of Luxury Presence talks about his journey and how he ended up in real estate. Malte dispels a few myths around website creation and talks about SEO and how to bring traffic to your website organically. Malte shares a few recommendations on nurturing leads. Malte also discusses AI and its impact on the real estate business. Last, Malte shares his short-term predictions on real estate market.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you thinking of upgrading your personal realtor website? Well, today we’re have a conversation with one of the top website designers in the industry, and he’s going to tell you exactly what you should think about if you decide to upgrade. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with multi Kramer, who is the CEO and founder of luxury presence. They make realtor websites. So it’s gonna be a really interesting one because we’re going to talk all about what a realtor website should have and shouldn’t have and maybe what you should consider for your own site. Before we get to Malte please tell a friend about the show. That’s the best way you can help us think of another realtor that could benefit from this great conversation we’re about to have or any of the other conversations we have in previous episodes, send a link over to another realtor that would really help us and also please leave us a review especially if you’re listening on iTunes or really anywhere that you’re finding our podcast. Let us know what you think of the show we appreciate it and are so grateful for everyone listening right this very second it’s been five or six years we’ve done 500 episodes over 3 million downloads all because of you guys really it’s all because of you so I’m so grateful. This is we’re getting towards the end of 2023 and I just wanted to say thanks in case I forget to do it in a future episode. So thank you thank you thank you keep listening. We’ll keep making episodes and enough from me let’s get to the main event my conversation with multi Kramer.
Okay today our guest on the show is multi Kramer and I want to tell you more about multi. Multi Kramer is the CEO of luxury presents, which is the leading real estate marketing platform and one of the fastest growing propped up companies in the United States since founding the business in 2016. He’s grown it to over 100 million in revenue with a global team of 600 employees and a client list of nearly 10,000 real estate professionals. To date luxury presents has raised 50 million from notable investors, including top VC firm of Bessemer Venture Partners, Zillow co founder Spencer Rascoff, real estate Coach Tom Ferry, NBA champion, Dirk Nowitzki, and NFL Pro Larry Fitzgerald. Now originally from Germany, Malte moved to the United States on a basketball scholarship to Pepperdine University, and after graduating as valedictorian he began his entrepreneurial journey by launching a fundraising app called giver and went on to receive an MBA from Stanford. Multi was named a Housing Wire rising star in 2021, rising Entrepreneur of the Year in 2022 by.la, and Housing Wire tech trendsetter in 2023. He’s a dedicated rescue dog dad, the author of play for something which is a North Star for student athletes and a finisher of a half Ironman multi Welcome to the show.
Malte Kramer 4:32 Thank you so much for having me DJ. I
D.J. Paris 4:35 forgot to give you the most important thing a plug. Everybody go visit multi and his website which is luxury presents.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes and I’d like you to follow a luxury presents on LinkedIn as well as Instagram. Just search for luxury presents and subscribe again LinkedIn and Instagram. We will have links to that as well in the show notes notes, I am very excited to chat with you. Because before we get into what your company offers, I, I very rarely have I been impressed with real estate agent websites. And I know you do more than that, but specifically that I think you guys probably do it better than just about anyone. So I’m excited to get to that. And I’ve also noticed over the years being on this show, we have we interview top 1% agents and more than any other website design firm, the luxury President shows up over and over and over again. So I figured it’s probably time to talk to the to the man who made it all happen. And I’m curious to sort of get your thoughts on why your brand has attracted so much top talent in the real estate game. And I know that you aren’t just for top tier brokers you can handle and I’m sorry, in Illinois, we call everyone a broker. So Realtors off site, but you work with individual Realtors of any of any production level. But um, let’s let’s first start with you. So tell us you know, we understand your your guy from Germany, you came over, did your undergrad by the way undergrad in Malibu, right? Is that where Pepperdine is? It? That’s right. Yeah, that’s a tough, that is a tough place to be. It’s like it’s almost right on the beach, even if I remember correctly. Very
Malte Kramer 6:24 little studying gets done out there. Grade school under. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 6:28 And then and then off to Stanford. So tell us a little bit about your journey. You know why? Why real estate because it doesn’t appear that that was really in your background?
Malte Kramer 6:39 Yeah, you’re right. I I fell into real estate. I was an entrepreneur out of undergrad. So I had two previous companies in different industries. One was a nonprofit fundraising app. And in 2015, a real estate agent out here in Beverly Hills, who was a friend asked me to do some consulting work for her. And I was very curious about the industry. And she was she still is one of the most successful agents in the world. Her name is Jade Mills, she sold over 7 billion in her Korea sales. Some of the most expensive homes has sold the Playboy Mansion and Chartwell estate and all of these very famous, you know, 100 plus million dollar homes. And naturally, I wanted to see what does the inside of her business look like? How does she market herself. And so I spent several months working with her and I told her, I will do all of this work, set up your digital marketing, which was my background, if you let me be a fly on the wall, I want to come to listing appointments, I want to see how you run your team. And so that’s how I got started and how I fell in love with the industry. And it for me, it’s always been about helping other people scale. It’s something that I really enjoy. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, it’s what has opened doors for me and us, I grew up in Germany. So I’ve been able to build my life and my business here and find my fiancee here. And all of it goes back to the ability to start a business. And so it’s something that I’m passionate about. And I’ve just found real estate agents, ultimately, they are all intrapreneurs at heart. And I love the idea of being part of their their growth and helping them scale. How
D.J. Paris 8:15 did you start to put together an offering that would be unique from other other tech firms that are offering website development solutions for realtors? And what was what was what was the hole that you saw in the industry that you thought you could fill? Yeah,
Malte Kramer 8:35 we wanted to bring together the performance side and the the design side and the especially in the luxury market of the very high and aesthetic that agents were looking for. Most of the agents I talked to, they said one of two things, they either said, I have a website, and it looks great, but I’m not getting any leads. And I’m not really using it for any advertising. Or they said I have a website. It’s a lead gen site, I am getting some leads from it. But I’m embarrassed to put it on my business card, I’m embarrassed to put it on my flyers. And it never made sense to me why you had to pick one or the other. And so our goal in the very beginning was to come out with a website product that worked for the very high end agents like Jade Mills, who cared about aesthetics, but also had were built on a platform and had the tools and had the services to provide the performance marketing the lead gen that agents were looking for, and that they really needed to grow. So that was the that was the starting point. And then since then we’ve obviously built a lot more and it is a full end to end marketing platform now.
D.J. Paris 9:38 Yeah, let’s let’s talk about I want to start first to dispel a few myths around website creation and then we can get into some of the the other other ancillary stuff that you do that is not just a front end website design, but there’s a lot of misconception even still with why someone should have why Realtors should have their own website isn’t just a online business card, should it have a home search feature with IDX data feed, so that they, you know, visitors can can search for properties. There’s a lot of debate on this topic. And I’m curious of how and you talked about this is we want something that looks beautiful, but also performs. You know, let’s, I would love to talk about all of this conversion. What’s the intention? As you guys think about websites? Is it more Look at how pretty I am? And is it also I want to push you through some sort of funnel so that you know you’re being marketed to, but I’d love to hear just, you know, overall, how you think about websites? Yeah.
Malte Kramer 10:43 There are two goals for for any website. And the first is to establish credibility. It’s about branding, establishing trust, and you can use your website just as a digital business card and still serve that first goal. So credibility is number one, and then two is lead generation. And not everyone uses their website as a lead generation tool, not everyone chooses to run digital ads, or do SEO, or do social in a way that drives traffic to their website. But that first goal everyone has, and everyone should have, in my mind, you know, just think about what you do when someone tells you about a product or service they like, right, you take out your phone, you Google it, and you go to the website, and you do your research. And it’s no different with any business we learn about. So even if you’re not running any advertising, chances are any repeat or repeat, sorry, referral business or word of mouth, those people are going to look you up. And so not having a website, in my opinion, is means you’re missing out on business. Almost certainly, right? If someone Google’s your name, and nothing shows up, right? You don’t you don’t have credibility. So that’s part one. And then on the lead gen side, there’s a lot that goes into it. Obviously, you know, conversion rate of the website matters a lot. You really should build dedicated landing pages, in my opinion, if you’re using them for specific ad campaigns. And not just drive traffic to a general homepage, which we both know is is never going to convert at the same level as dedicated landing page. But yeah, those are the two high level goals that we that we start with. And then based on on our clients preference, we built the site accordingly.
D.J. Paris 12:21 One of the one of the myths I want to dispel is the idea of putting up a website, and not understanding what SEO is and how important it is to actually drive traffic if you’re looking for organic traffic, meaning, you know, putting up a website and just hoping that people find it. You know, if I think most of our audience would know that, that that isn’t the way the world works these days, and hasn’t for quite some time. But it’s really important for people to remember that SEO is a is a is a difficult, difficult beast to really work with. You’re dealing with hundreds of factors that Google takes into account in order to determine when somebody does a search what you know what rank your particular website will be for that particular keyword or key phrase. And you’re not only competing against all the other realtors potentially in your area, you’re also competing against the brokerages themselves. Online lead gen companies like Zillow, Redfin, there’s a tremendous amount of competition for what we would call short tail keywords, which would be something like I live in Chicago, so Chicago realtor, if I were to try to rank for that, it would be very difficult, it would be a long, multi year process. It’s possible but it would be incredibly difficult. But there are longtail keywords that that people can have success with. So for example, in Chicago, maybe Chicago Realtors is too difficult to break into on Google, but maybe Wicker Park realtor cop for condos, you know, which is a long a longtail keyword meaning many, many words in that phrase, that is something that possibly you could work towards. Can you just talk just for a moment on SEO just so that when people are thinking about websites, they’re not necessarily getting the wrong impression? I’m going to put this website up and people are just going to find it? Yeah,
Malte Kramer 14:15 this is a very common misconception and a mistake agents make is they launched a website, and then they think magically, leads are gonna appear. And the reality is you have to drive traffic there somewhere. So the at a high level, there are three ways you can do it in a scalable way. One is on social media organically, which requires a lot of content. And we can get into that later, too is on Google organically, which is SEO, and then three is paid advertising, which we can talk about later as well, which is the most reliable, fastest way, but also probably the most expensive. So let’s hone in on the second one SEO. There’s a lot that goes into it. Google’s algorithm has hundreds if not 1000s of ranking factors that we know They take into account when they decide what are the 10 results that they’re going to show on the first page for any given search. And as you noted longtail keywords, the more specific and the smaller the search volume. Typically, the lower the competition, the easier it is to rank. And that’s usually what we recommend people start with is create a block, put blog posts on there that answer very specific questions that someone in your market may have. So something like what are the property taxes in Silver Lake could be a great blog post that someone might look for. Now, this keyword pause perhaps is only getting 10 searches a month, 50 searches a month, something very low. But if you do that with enough articles, and you rank for enough of these keywords, you can drive significant keyword search volume over time. The great thing about SEO is it compounds right you write the article once, and then once it ranks, it generates traffic every single month. And you don’t have to spend any additional money on acquiring that traffic. So it is a very effective high ROI long term strategy, in my opinion,
D.J. Paris 16:02 that we should, we should I just wanted to make one quick point about about that particular strategy. So what we have to think about, I think this will be helpful for anyone who has a website and is looking to rank organically for some of these longer tail keywords, like Malte was saying property taxes in Silver Lake, what you really have to focus on with respect to the blog post is, and this would be my recommendation, do that keyword search, do it in an incognito browser, so you get a true search result, versus doing it in your you know, locked anyway, just do the search, look for the top three or four results, see what kind of content those search results are, are, you know, have published, and then you have to beat that you have to do better than those top three searches. So you’re going to want to put some video in there, you’re going to want to put longer form content, the days of short form, text content is are over people want long form. So these are these is the way if you really want to go down this this path, you have to beat everyone out because Google’s objective is to serve up the best possible content for that particular search. And if yours isn’t the best possible content, well, Google can tell pretty quickly because people will bounce off of your site more quickly than maybe other sites and they’re gonna go well, we don’t want people to bounce off our site and have to do another search. We want them to go to the one that they think has the best. And they were just going to look at consumer behavior. So they’re going to look at what happens when someone visits your website. And then they’re going to determine Hey, this is a pretty good or not so good answer to this question that somebody put in the search. So let’s let’s talk about the other two ways of generating traffic because I think this is the more predictable path and certainly, certainly, yeah, certainly the less arduous task, which would be paid advertising and social media, organic social media. Let’s Yeah, let’s start with Windows.
Malte Kramer 18:01 Yeah, let’s talk about let’s talk about paid ads. Next, so paid advertising both on social and search, for obvious reasons as the most reliable way to get traffic to your site, you’re paying per click. And the way I recommend you approach it is by thinking about what type of offer you can make that will get get someone to give you their contact information. And usually that is a lead magnet or a type of offer that provides a lot of value. This could be a market report, this could be a home valuation, this could be access to a curated set of listings, if you have access to off market listings, this could be the promise of getting access to those. So think about what is the what is the thing that someone who’s searching on Google, or someone who’s browsing social media could be a good client will likely want and see value and and when you start with that offer, then the rest of the ad and the landing page becomes pretty clear. Usually you would target a keyword around that offer. So let’s take home valuations for example, you could target free home valuation or home valuation in Silverlake on Google, someone clicks on the ad gets to a landing page. Again, you want to mirror what you’re targeting on the landing page. So it should speak to that particular keyword search. And then you have on that landing page, a forum where someone can put in their contact information. Obviously, the more fields you ask, the lower your conversion rates going to be if you just ask an email to probably get a lot of leads, but you don’t know a lot about them. If you ask a phone number a conversion rate will be lower, but generally the quality of the leads will be higher. And from there the last and maybe most important step is these are leads that have to be nurtured. These are internet leads that are going to be on Google intent will be a bit higher than on on social media in general, because people are searching proactively for something within real estate whereas on social media, you’re in interrupting their experience by showing them an ad. So they may not be in the market at all. And so generally quality will be a little bit lower, and they’ll require more nurturing, and nurturing should take place over weeks and months. Speech elite matters. And then you want to have a nurture sequence, ideally automated, and some type of email marketing going out. Again, with the goal of providing as much value as possible, the goal is not to aggressively sell these people, the goal is to give them so much value that they trust you. And when they’re ready to transact, you’re the the agent or the brand that they call. So that’s the approach that we take two paid advertising at a high level, we’re
D.J. Paris 20:40 talking about email drip campaigns, on possible text campaigns, depending on what contact information you’re getting. Also, if you’re getting a phone number, the speed to lead is so critical. And again, these are a little different than a zillo lead. So Zillow, people have already raised their hand, they’ve already clicked on a particular property and said, I want to go see that. So it’s already as hot of a lead as you could probably get it being that they already want to take action. Whereas you’re right with paid advertising. Yes, they’re searching for something that you hope is is you know, a call to action. But you’re right, there may be a delay in the actual step to purchase or sell a property. So that the idea of how do you recommend nurturing? What what do you guys, what have you found with your clients works? Sort of the best for ROI? Is it? Is it a series of emails? Is it a combination of email, video text? What are you guys finding, as far as trends that seem to convert most,
Malte Kramer 21:45 it’s a combination of all three, ideally, and I would base the exact sequence on where the leads came from and where they are in the funnel. So if we’re talking high funnel, top of funnel, meaning someone on social media who downloaded a market report, you don’t really know if they’re ready to even talk to you. So phone call may not resonate, well, those we would have a sequence that’s a little bit lighter touch, I would recommend something that’s mostly email based, and you’re going to start sending them to newsletter, they’re going to need more warming up. Now, if you get someone who requested a home valuation, chances are on Google, chances are intense, a lot higher, they’re a lot more ready, definitely call and text them. And a lot of touch points, probably nine touch points over the course of two weeks as appropriate. One of the really exciting things that is happening now, thanks to AI is so much of this can be automated and still feel very personalized. We are about to broadly released, we’ve been in beta for our AI texting tool. And so leads that are coming in from your website, this tool can engage them. And if you read through the conversations, you are not able to tell that you’re not talking to a human being. I mean, it’s, it’s uncanny how well it corresponds. And it then sets up an appointment. And we’re seeing about 15% lead to appointment conversion rates, which is Wow, very high, obviously, for internet leads. And this was just text based text conversation.
D.J. Paris 23:15 And just to sort of put that in perspective, a 15%, lead to appointment ratio would be about Well, I think it’s three times or Well anyway, well, it’s gonna say, as I know, for Zillow, and upcity, and leads of that nature, which are internet leads already raised their hand, I want to go see this, if you can convert 5% of those leads, which by the way, our pay to play leads, either you’re paying on the front end, or the subsidy, you’re paying on the back end, but you’re buying the lead from those tech companies. And if you can close 5%, you’re a superstar. So the idea of, of getting a 15% conversion is incredible. And
Malte Kramer 23:54 to be clear, this is 15% from leads to meeting requests. So there’s the additional step you have to share of actually close, it may end up being a few closed and 30% of them that would get you to a 5% close rate, which I would be extremely high. You know, on average, I think industry average is something like 2% If that so but yeah, these, these AI tools are making it a lot easier. So you’re not the one anymore who has to do the texting and the calling yourself you can outsource that to to an AI assistant, which is really exciting. Are
D.J. Paris 24:26 you guys I am the most excited for AI around I’d love to talk about AI I’m most excited personally outside of real estate for this idea of having an assistant for me, where I’m able to converse with this assistant. Make sure that they know what I need on a daily basis, whether it’s scheduling, reminding me about XY and Z go pick up the groceries go, you know, whatever it may be that’s coming. And we’re seeing the most earliest versions of that in some of these website AI systems whether it’s Customer Service, we’re seeing this now, it used to be a lot pourer. In years past where you would go onto a website, you’d start a chat you clearly, they would just lie and say it was somebody’s somebody that wasn’t a real person, you can tell really quickly, because the conversation wasn’t all that authentic and organic. But now AI is getting a lot a lot better. And we’re seeing you’re actually able to have a meaningful interaction with with an AI Chatbot. Because the technology is just, you know, it just keeps keeps evolving. Are you guys adding that in as a feature as like a customer service? chatbot, I’m assuming to your front end websites.
Malte Kramer 25:42 We are Yes. So on the on the consumer facing side, there are a lot of these tools popping up now. And more and more companies doing this where the AI will communicate with the consumer on your behalf. And obviously, your website, chat is a great medium for it. Text after a contact inquiry comes in is a great medium for it. So that’s one part. And then the second part, which you also touched on, I’m even more excited about is AI, an AI assistant for the agent. So something that plugs into your systems, and then gives you a ideally voice based interface to interact with the AI assistant in the same way you would interact with a human assistant and just give a TAS and ask it to provide information. This is coming. We’re working on something we announced in August presents copilot which is our AI powered mobile platform. So this is exactly what we’re working on is giving agents their own 24/7 ai assistant who can take all the admin work all of the stuff that you hate doing, and take that off your plate. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 26:46 to me, that’s, that’s the, that’s the most exciting part for me is the idea of having some sort of assistant that and and companies are working on this, you guys are working on this, I think, you know, this is so exciting for agents, you know, maybe not as exciting for virtual assistants who, who who are working overseas right now for a lot of lot of realtors. But, but it is going to be really helpful. And companies like yours are going to start offering this product soon. So very excited to to see that offering in the future. Let’s talk about the platform of the actual website platform. So there’s the front end, which is the customer facing website, where they can learn about the agent, possibly search for properties, get a sense of the the realtors skill set their aesthetic, all of those things I will say before I ask about other other parts, because luxury presents, I believe has some of the prettiest and most aesthetically pleasing website design on it that I’ve seen in real estate. Have you were you surprised when he first got into this business that there wasn’t a lot of beautiful realtor website designs out there because I just can’t find them other than what you guys have.
Malte Kramer 28:02 I was and there’s so much great content to work with, especially in the luxury segment. That was always something that I was really passionate about is great design. And we from from the very beginning, we’ve invested in a in a strong design team, we brought over a design leader from Airbnb and she’s built an amazing design team. So it’s been part of the company’s DNA from from day one. And yeah, I always felt that was a missed opportunity for a lot of agents if you have this, this much great photography and videography and you’re selling such great product. Why not build a website that matches that that beautiful aesthetic? Well, let’s
D.J. Paris 28:43 talk about conversion. What’s what’s behind what’s under the hood. So we know what’s going to face the you know, eight client facing, you can go to luxury presents.com You can see some of the biggest names in real estate use luxury presents. But I’d love to know what’s behind the hood, what we can’t necessarily see ourselves, you know what’s going on behind the scenes outside of just this beautiful looking website.
Malte Kramer 29:07 Yeah, so the whole platform was built from the ground up specifically for residential real estate agents, teams and brokerages. So the entire CMS, the entire back end of the websites, everything is specific to real estate. So when you go into the back end, first thing you’ll notice is that the CMS is super easy to use. All the input fields are related to the type of content you want to show on your website. We have modules for your neighborhoods, we have pre built landing pages, we have an instant home valuation tool that you can use for lead gen, we obviously have our IDX home search tool. We’re expanding that into full collaborative search now with presence copilot, which works sort of seamlessly across desktop and mobile where you can take the leads that are coming in from the website and then start sharing listings with them via a mobile app. So it’s all integrated into one place. And then obviously you have module As for your listings, so they’re coming in from the MLS, and then you can showcase them on your website, you can create standalone property websites. So with a very intuitive website builder, you can go in, you can launch single property sites. And then you have modules for your leads for all the things we’ve talked about, we have a lead intelligence feature. So we pull in third party data, to tell you more about the leads that are coming in from the website. It’s quite spooky, actually, you go into lead, and suddenly you see past addresses they’ve lived in, and their social media links and their, their, their family names. And so it’s very easy to gauge, is this a real person or spam? And are they in my price range? Are they a good fit customer? Should I be spending my time on them? So yeah, there’s a lot there. And all of it is real estate specific. And we’ve we’ve worked, we’ve built this in very close partnership with a lot of our clients, many of which, as you noted, are at the, at the top of the game, and we take what they’ve learned what they found works, and we try to distill that into the product.
D.J. Paris 31:04 Yeah, you know, in particular, this consumer behavior, sort of database is retailers use this all the time to be able to predict when somebody is pregnant, for example. And it’s not because they’re necessarily buying a birth control, or sorry, a pregnancy test. There’s other signals that retailers have access to just with all this buying data that would actually tell somebody before they might even know that they’re pregnant, that there may be something going on with them and being being pregnant. So there is some incredible ways of of sort of taking data and running it through different systems, like you were saying, partners of yours, who then can really provide incredible information, here’s their social here, here’s what we know about their family, here’s what we know about them based on the email address they provided and their name. And it really just gives the agent more information to be able to have that conversation when they do reach out. And it gives them more than just an email and phone number and first name. So I’m a huge fan. Tell us a little bit about sort of the CRM functionality or the now that the leads in the system. So someone visits the website, there’s some call to action, they sign up, and then it goes into some sort of nurturing capacity. Talk a little bit of if you don’t mind talk a little bit about sort of what that looks like for the agent, how the agent sort of sees that lead come in and what they do do with it from there. Yeah,
Malte Kramer 32:36 so we we are not a CRM. And we while we offer some, what I would call lightweight CRM functionalities to manage your leads to now with presence copilot, do collaborative search to invite a client to have them on a list and tagged so there are some CRM functionalities. But for teams in particular that are looking for a more robust and full fledged CRM, we recommend that they use any of our integration partners. So we have native integrations with all the major CRMs and generally recommend using us in conjunction with with a CRM. Yeah, that
D.J. Paris 33:13 makes sense, because that’s a whole other sort of vertical to try to a mountain to climb, and you’re competing against massive, massive companies that have, you know, 15 years on you maybe have experience. So I agree that would be that’d be a tougher mountain. So the good news is they do integrate with all the major players out there, because of course they need to. So the good news is, it’s really, really easy, and it’s a pretty seamless integration. Let’s talk about I’d love to talk about website trend design trends, because this is something that is always evolving and changing. I remember 10 years ago or so there was a move to go to what’s called flat design, or minimal and flat design. And I’m curious on Where’s where do we think websites are headed? Because ways in which consumers are interacting online is changing. So I’m curious if you if you have any future trends that you think are emerging? Yeah.
Malte Kramer 34:14 In terms of the aesthetic, I would say, a trend. One trend we’ve noticed is back to real simplicity. And I think a recognition that what matters most at the end of the day is is usability and we have to start with usability and and craft the aesthetic rather than the aesthetic getting in the way. So there’s there’s a trend towards simplicity, I would say, given what’s possible now. We’re seeing more sort of more immersive experiences and interactive experiences. You know, five years ago had you asked me would not have recommended having video playing the background on mobile Now this is very much possible because of where internet speeds is and what technologies. So, you know, more interactive experiences, more, more use of video throughout the side. And, and I’d say an overall trend back to simplicity. What
D.J. Paris 35:17 about light versus dark as far as just color, I know you guys tend to skew dark, which I think is particularly interesting around real estate. That is a more modern trend, although now, white is is is real popular inside of homes, although that’ll probably be changing in 10 years anyway. But I’m curious on just color, what colors, I love the fact that you guys skew darker, or at least the a lot of the websites, I’ve seen skew darker, because that’s also was not really that popular in you know, realtor websites until you guys came along. Yeah.
Malte Kramer 35:52 So the preference between dark and light, I would say really comes down to the emotion someone wants to evoke. And I have seen some agents that really want the light and airy feel that you can get with a lighter color palette, and especially in markets that are perhaps more more something like Miami, where you would want to sort of present that type of feeling. I’ve seen light color palettes work really well. But overall, yeah, I think especially in the high end market, agents still love the dark and moody look. And the the one thing I would say is just regardless of the color palette, just to make sure that everything is very legible. Sometimes I see people use very small fan fonts, because it’s, you know, it looks sexy, to minimize the fonts. But again, like focus on the usability first making sure it’s readable and easily easy to navigate. So, you know, not letting the creativity get in the way of the usability. And then I do think it’s valuable to have accent colors beyond black and white, even if it’s sparingly used for things like your CTA buttons. If you’re just working in a variable, a CTA is a call to action call to action. Yeah, you want to be able to draw attention to specific buttons on the site or specific links, especially if you’re using it on as a landing page. You’re not going to get the landing page to perform as well if you don’t have any color on it, and it’s just black and white. So some color as an accent is always a good thing.
D.J. Paris 37:31 Yeah, I agree. And one thing that I’ll just sort of share if you’ve this is how you know if you’ve visited a luxury presence website for for an agent. What and I was so impressed you guys were the first company that I found that that did this. And now I’m sure they are all doing it probably copying what you guys, you know, came or I don’t know if you’d necessarily pioneered it. But really, we’re the biggest firm to bring it to market that I found was that when a consumer visits the luxury presents website, one thing happens. In fact, I have seen this a lot of brokerages now have this as well, where as the login, Google login will instantly show up, especially if you’re on a Chrome browser. So what happens is person visits website, they instantly get Hey, please log in, well, they probably haven’t logged in before. If there are new new person, they click on that it instantly creates a connection between their Google account if they’re logged into Google, which they are most likely. And then it instantly creates an account inside of the back end system for luxury presence so that the agent gets to capture that information instantly. It’s a one click thing. It is very, very, very cool. And I hopefully I’m not sharing too much of your secrets, because it’s not really a secret. But I love the fact that you guys really put a lot of faith into that process. And it works. I can’t tell you how many websites outside of real estate, I have clicked on that exact same Google thing. Before I even done anything on that website. I just go okay, whatever I’ll call click on it. It’s amazing. I’m curious to know how that came to be. And yeah, how successful that is for you guys.
Malte Kramer 39:07 It’s been incredibly successful. It’s the single it’s the one thing if you don’t do anything else, and you want to get more leads from your website, that’s one thing you should add is the one click Google login. It came about we have a team that’s just constantly focused on innovation around conversion and how can we drive more leads to our clients from their websites, and out of their research and and dem testing things? We get these ideas like this one click Google login tool. I’ll give you one other great one. This would probably be number two on my list, which is an exit intent form I was just about
D.J. Paris 39:47 to ask. Okay, so here’s what exit intent is every one as the person starts to move their mouse closer to the X for that particular tab or even the browser. The website can And notice through like JavaScript or whatever, some sort of script that will notice the mouse movement will notice its persons moving in that direction. And they will put up an interstitial, or what we would call like a faux pop up a little pop up saying, Hey, before you leave, or that’s what they used to do. I don’t know what they show now. But a little bit of a like a call to action, just before the person is like walking out the door. If it was a retail shop, one more thing, kind of thing.
Malte Kramer 40:24 Yep, that’s exactly right, that works extremely well as well. What
D.J. Paris 40:27 do you recommend putting it like, so I have a thought I want to get your take on it. So if you are going to add an exit intent, which is what we’re talking about somebody wanting to exit out the website and getting a final offer. Now, if it’s retail, if you’re selling a sort of a product, maybe you’d put off 10% off if you know before you leave that kind of coupon obviously Realtors don’t have necessarily that but it could be a white paper could be a free home pay. Before you leave, let’s let me find out. Let me tell you what I think your home’s currently worth something like that is that what you’re seeing works best?
Malte Kramer 41:01 Yeah, this goes back to the previous point around offers. Whenever you interrupt someone’s experience, I recommend make sure that you’re giving them a lot of value. Otherwise, they’ll be angry, right, you’re sort of they’re trying to leave your website and you’re telling no Hold up a second. And that’s not the time to make an ask, it’s the time to give a lot of value. And the way you give value is through an offer, like what you just mentioned, something that works really well is if you have access to off market listings, that’s often often something that’s has really high perceived value. So sign up here to get access, that’s a
D.J. Paris 41:36 good one off market. That’s a great one. The other the other thing I was I was thinking of with respect to to sort of website trends and design is, is less is more with respect to text. Because at least on a on a homepage, we certainly want information there. That specific that does talk about what the agent does, who they are. And you know, but the more information we provided in a text form, I think we start losing people as we get. Again, they’re all dependent. While I should let me back up, it really depends on the intent of the actual consumer. So what I recommend, and by the way, anyone who has a website, can can find a service that will do this is install what’s called a heatmap system, which will just basically track the clicks the mouse movement on somebody’s website, and you will start to get a better sense of what your consumers like about your site, and what they don’t like if you’re getting a high bounce rate, if you’re looking at your Google Analytics, and you know, the average bounce rate is 13 seconds. Well, okay, what why are they leaving after 13 seconds? What am I not? What am I not providing? And the heat map will tell you what’s most interesting to people on your website, it’ll give you at least a general idea of maybe the direction to go. I imagine you guys use heat mapping all the time to constantly refer How often are you reef reforming your designs to match the sort of consumer behavior that’s always changing? Yeah,
Malte Kramer 43:13 we we’re constantly adding to the library of elements. And often we’ll find something that we think everyone should have. And we turn it on for everyone if we believe that it’s a best practice. So the Google one click login, for example, people can opt out of it. But we’ve established it as a best practice that comes standard with all of our templates are all of our themes. And then our library, I think at this point, we have over 500 different elements, meaning widgets that you can use on the website. Obviously, our websites are always very customized. So every agent has different preferences, different elements they use. But there are some best practices that our team develops that we then roll out for everyone. And this is I would say on at least on a monthly basis, we come out with something something new.
D.J. Paris 44:02 And with respect to the somebody becomes a client of yours, can they do their own design? Meaning can they utilize your elements and organize them in the way that they think makes sense? And can they also offload that to you guys as well? Are there different levels of service there? Yeah, there are
Malte Kramer 44:23 we offer everything from working with our team to use the existing elements to create something that’s still customized, but within an existing design framework. All the way up to something fully custom where we’re starting from scratch our design team is can design anything that you have in mind. We don’t have a self service offering where you would build it left completely on your own. That said, once we build the first draft of a website, many of our clients they’re in the platform all the time building their own landing pages and using the existing elements so that it is very much possible Yeah,
D.J. Paris 45:00 I think that is really cool. And I would like to make sure our audience knows how they can learn more about luxury presents, because we want, even if you don’t choose luxury presents as your front end website, sort of design team, and you probably should consider that. But at the very least, you’ll get a good education of what good design looks like. So that if, if luxury presents isn’t the right fit, you can go maybe find somebody that is a little bit closer to what you need. But what is the best way that an agent can learn? And by the way, when you go to the luxury President web presence website, you will see some big names on there that you know, in the real estate world, and, you know, from from all different sorts of providers. They’re all big fans of luxury presents, but what’s the best way? Should they go to the website and request a demo? Or how does how does it work?
Malte Kramer 45:49 Yeah, so if you request the demo on the website, you can have a consultation with our team. And they’ll be able to walk you through examples of our design, they’ll be able to show you case studies of the marketing we’ve done for our clients. So you can get a sense, if you just want to get a sense of our design work on the websites we have on our website, we have a design portfolio page, you can check out or if you follow us on Instagram, we post a lot of our work there. And that will give you a good sense of the design quality.
D.J. Paris 46:20 And I had one final question and I just Oh my gosh, I It’s eluding me at the moment. So I will remind everyone to please visit luxury presents.com. There’s a call to action on there where you can put in your information and they will reach out to you and give you more information about In fact, the top producer in Chicago, actually in Illinois, Don McKenna is She’s a local legend here in Chicago. And she’s also in Florida, and I think South Carolina and a few other markets. She is She’s a customer. And along with a lot of other very Jade Mills, you mentioned Ryan serhant, Tom Ferry, etc. There’s lots of lots of big names on here. So guys, really, you should check this out, whether it’s the right fit for you today, or it’s something to aspire to, because this is not the lowest cost provider. But that’s why it’s a luxury brand. luxury brands have luxury pricing. But the top agents in the country really do use luxury presents, and they really don’t have much competition, quite honestly, at least I have. I mean, there’s little shops that in every city that will build people websites, but not people that understand realtor websites quite the same. So I definitely recommend checking that out. And also please follow them on LinkedIn. They actually I was talking to multi before the show. And he said actually our LinkedIn is really, really successful for us. So luxury presence is where you find them on LinkedIn, same on Instagram, I will have links to all of this in the show notes. And since I can’t remember my final question, I will just ask you, where do you think the real estate market is headed because you are affected by high interest rates as well. Because even though you’re in the luxury space, and you’re your audience, our top Realtors mostly who are doing just fine. This year, we have a lot of agents in a down market currently who are struggling. I know that this is a little bit outside of your purview necessarily. But are you hopeful that the that interest rates will change in the next year? Do you have any any insight you could share about where you see trends coming for, for what real estate agents might expect? You know, in the next year or so?
Malte Kramer 48:33 Yeah. I am hopeful. Although I think it’s it’s gonna get a little bit worse before it gets better. Yeah, my best guess is six months of things getting worse. And then as slow recovery. The numbers I’ve seen all have a two plus year recovery to get back at least to get back to historical averages. And it’s not the best news. And obviously it’s you know, it’s a tough market right now. But I think it’s better to be realistic about how long it’s going to take and to buckle down and find a way to be successful in this market environment because it may last for a while. But yeah, that’s my best guess is probably two years of recovery.
D.J. Paris 49:23 I think you’re probably right. And I did remember my last question. It was about recruiting. So this is a huge opportunity. Right now we are seeing a flight to teams in the brokerage world in the agent world really I should say agents are either joining teams creating teams this is I mean Maltese business is pretty much all teams for the most part. A lot of his these big producers, our teams, not all but a lot of them are and these are also great recruiting sort of magnets for agents because agents are always looking to see what teams might be a good fit And they’re going to look up the website. So even if there’s two sort of components, there’s the consumer part of it that you want to attract. But it’s also if you’re looking to build your team, you really need a beautiful looking website to also attract those other agents. Are you seeing some of your some of your agent clients using them as recruiting tools?
Malte Kramer 50:18 Yeah, it’s a great point. And you mentioned Dawn McKenna earlier, she is actually a great case study for this. She launched with us back in 2016. At the time, she had four agents on her team was doing about 120 million in annual sales. And since then, she has scaled to 20 agents, six markets, she’s now in Naples, she’s in Salt Lake, all over the place. And if you ask her, she’ll say it was the brand she created. And it was the website, those two things have helped her the most. And she gets a lot of her agents through just organically, they there, see the brand does see a social, they see the website. So it definitely helps in that regard. And one thing I’ve seen, some teams do is create dedicated recruiting pages on their website that speak to agents who may want to consider joining them.
D.J. Paris 51:03 Yeah, that goes back to the idea of creating specific landing pages for different people who are visiting the website. So driving somebody just to the homepage, it gives them a general overview of what that agent is all about, or the team is all about, but having a specific, dedicated page that you drive somebody to maybe through either organic work, you know, best real estate team in Silver Lake, for example, or looking to join a real estate team in Silver Lake. Those are longtail keywords that people do search now. And they might not get more than, you know, 10 to 50 searches a month, like multi was saying earlier, but wouldn’t you like to be number one for those 10 to 50 searches, I know I would kill to be number one for those, even if it’s just a handful of people a month. So creating those individual landing pages is really, really critical. So please reach out to luxury presidents, they have all of these tools and guys, the best. The biggest plug I can give to them is the top agents in the country use it. Almost everybody I’ve interviewed on this show. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But the vast majority of people I interviewed today on the show us luxury presents, so I am not a paid spouse spokesperson for them. I am literally just telling you what I witnessed. And that’s why I had multi on the show today to talk about sort of what makes them different. And boy, they are they different. So check them out luxury presents.com. Follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn links to all of that in the show notes. And on behalf of our audience. Malte thank you so much we know you were you know you are a you know, a mid sized company of 600 employees this is this is you don’t have time to just basically jump on a podcast for an hour. Every every every so often. So you do this. You did this as a favor. I appreciate that. Thanks from our audience to you. And then of course, we from our audience we want to we we also multiday, I want to thank the audience for sticking around to the very end, please help us in a couple of ways. One, if you know an agent that’s looking to build a website, shoot them over to luxury president.com presents calm or maybe they probably already have a website and they want to maybe improve it, shoot them over to luxury presents. And also please tell a friend about this episode. Think of one other realtor that’s looking to up their online game in 2024. And send them a link because this might actually give them some information about how they can improve their web presence. And also, please leave us a review wherever you’re listening to the show. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Tell us we read every one of your comments. And it always helps us to improve as well. Marty, thank you so much for being on the show. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks
Malte Kramer 53:38 for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thank you
Step By Step Seller Checklist For Real Estate Agents • Breaking Down Ali’s Systems • Ali Garced
Nov 17, 2023
Welcome to Breaking Down Ali’s Systems mini-series with Ali Garced.
In this mini-series Ali will be explaining how she built her systems both for buyers and for sellers. This is the first part of the Seller Checklist series covering the whole process from the beginning, even before you meet your client, to the follow-up after the end of the transaction.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today ally Garside is going to share with you her seller checklist. Trust me. This is awesome. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Ali Garced 1:30 What is up my beautiful friends beautiful agents I am here. This is Aligarh said ally the agents on all social media spelled al I am back with another series of the seller checklist this time. So we’re going to go over from the very, very start before you even meet with a seller all the way to the very, very end past the transaction what you do in the follow up. So we’re probably not going to get to every single portion during this one series. So this is going to be maybe either part one of two or part one of three in the seller series for checklists. So thank you, DJ, if you have been enjoying these checklists, please give keeping it real a five star review on whichever platform you listen to it. I believe Apple is the best way to give the review. But however you listen to it, I highly suggest you watch these series again on YouTube. Because I’m sharing my screen, I’m going to be vocalizing as much as I can, but I can’t get to everything. Plus, to be able to maximize this experience. Fellow real estate agents hop on YouTube and watch this in person you can that way. That way you can follow along and start creating your own checklist. I’m showing you everything I not like holding anything of these checklists. To me, I am very much in the opposite mindset of that I like to share, which a lot of people don’t have doing unless they have been featured on this podcast because this podcast is all about sharing. So again, please give DJ five star review. I would super appreciate that. If you’d like to give me a follow and connect with me talk with me. We can become referral partners, whatever you want to do. My name is Ali, the agent on all social media that is spelled a li that’s how I spell Ali Ali, the agent or if you want a copy of these checklists, text the word checklist as one word one word checklist. Otherwise, it doesn’t the auto response doesn’t work. So one word checklists to the phone number 520-341-2552. And again, I’ll give you the buyer checklist which I already covered the seller checklist which I’m starting today and the referral checklists. I mean I also have onboarding checklists for teams and crew. These checklists are what helped my crew. The agents on my on my crew earn six figures in eight months. Some of these agents are earning three times the amount that they were earning at previous brokerages before coming over to us before coming over to our crew. So if it’s helping them you know, it hopefully will help you and I’m glad to share these with you from the bottom of my heart. I’m literally just trying to help so yes, let’s get started right. Alright, guys, we let’s get started. Here we go. Okay, I use Trello. Again, you don’t have to use Trello So in previous in previous episodes already, I’ve laid out how I organize my Trello board. So in here again following on follow along on YouTube, I have already opened up my seller checklists my seller template. So at the top here you’ll see that I name it seller name that I have the name the address the Coming Soon date if we decide to do that I’m actually not the biggest fan and then the go live date and the expected Close of Escrow or Coe. as I go along, some things are going to be just Arizona specific. So keep in mind, Always talk to your broker because you have any questions always talk to your TC two for a quality check. Talk to whoever else you might need to to see hey, is this How do we do this in our state or start implementing it, because there’s something that I there’s some things that I implement from other states, for example, I implement the non refundable, earnest money that North Carolina does into Arizona, which Arizona does not do that, which is crazy, Arizona is very buyer, it’s very safe for a buyer to back out and get all their money back, they can really, really hurt a seller if they wanted to. But um, here we go. Okay. So in the description here, again, you don’t have to use Trello. But it is it is free, I have a bunch of questions where I will, I will get to it in the method that they that they asked me. So sometimes a seller or a potential seller will call me because they saw me on Google, and I don’t pay for Google ads, guys, I just have my Google business page. So if you do not have your Google business page, you are missing out on the number one website in the world, which is free, it is free to have a Google business page. You know what here, let me show you mine. So in that way, business.google.com is how you’re going to start your business, your Google business page, you do have to be verified in order to in order to like make into any sort of rankings. And to be verified, you have to gate post postcard in the mail. So if you have a formal address, like a work address, perfect, if not, you’re going to have to use your personal address. So if you don’t mind sharing it excellent. If not, use your work address or you know, figure it out on some other way. But Google reviews are so so powerful. I have been in the business for two and a half years. And I have been ranked number one on Google when you search like military real estate agent in Tucson or some sort of specific word, someone told me that I that I rank for number one I’m on, you know, the one of the first real estate agents in Tucson, and I’ve been doing this for two and a half years, I only have 77, zero Google reviews, you don’t have to have hundreds or more in order to start getting phone calls from sellers. So I will say that, for Google business. This is a whole, you know, Bs in and of itself. But always try to be adding photos, I’m pretty sure you could also add videos too. So definitely do that. But as long as you’re tweaking it somehow, once a week, add one photo on there of a listing that you have, or or maybe even someone else’s listing, of course with that listing agents permission, always always gonna have it in writing and saving in your folder. But if you get a review, then go ahead and respond to it. And yeah, and also some people will think that negative reviews will hurt you. It is all about how you respond to those negative reviews because that is what people want to know how you respond to negativity. Because I’m sure it’s human nature. Like whenever you go to a Yelp for a restaurant and or like a moving company, I just recently did that you see like the negative reviews? How does that company publicly treat that person? You know? Anyway, I’m going on a rant here, but Google Business Review. So get that started there Google business page, and keep that up to date. So
where am I so depending on how the seller comes to you, whether it’s a phone call, or an email, or a group chat, because you’ve trained your your besties your friends to say, hey, whenever you know of a potential seller, please have that group chat sort of group chat with me, don’t just give them my phone number. I’ll never hear from them that way, please sort of group chat. It’s a warm handoff, and it creates more stickiness. So however, however way you typically have that first conversation, which might be various different ways, depending on how long I feel, but those sellers want to stay on the phone, I will stay as long as they want. Sometimes they just want to touch base and say, Hey, we’re interviewing around, and I want to give you the opportunity. No, we want to interview you. So great. Go ahead and establish a little bit of rapport. Do not keep them on the phone too long. But make sure that before you get off the phone, you have that appointment scheduled, some sellers are ready to chat, they are ready to go. So if you have time, if you answer the phone, then at that point, do it you know, stay on the phone and go through these questions until you start getting a sense that they are you know wanting to get off the phone that they have other things to do so but the point of the foot the first phone call or the first text message, you know, the point of that initial contact is to get the listing appointment, get your foot in the door, so that you might be asking all these questions you might be asking three questions. It really really depends. So that’s like the funnel Right? Like they might come from here from there from wherever you that at that point, you want to start putting them in your funnel the way that you do things, which is the same every single time. So what I do and what you guys are more than happy to. I’m more than happy to share these exact questions with you. If I go on Calendly I love Calendly you guys are free to copy and paste these questions calendly.com. So let’s see a l e n d fly. I don’t know why I’m like trying to memorize it, I can literally just read this slash gar said Realty cars. That is my last name, G AR CE de Realty slash seller. If you go in that, you’re going to see exactly what I’m showing you here. So this is the information that I want, before we book the formal or more formal, either phone call or a zoom call, I always prefer zoom. So here we go. I asked for their name, their email, their phone number, of course, the address of the property they’re selling. And I asked them, if they would like a connection to a great real estate agent in the city that they’re moving to or agents, a couple of agents, of course, that’s going to help with the referral. Right? Oh, and I blocked this off for about 45 minutes just in case. I also ask them have Have you ever had to file an insurance claim on the property you’re selling? At least in Arizona, it takes quite a bit in order to get those insurance claims. And of course, state by state check with your broker, in case you aren’t sure. But whenever there is, we have to do a clean report, right? We have to find out the comprehensive loss underwriting, you know, whatever report has the property ever had to file a claim because the buyers need to know about that. So if that’s if they do if they ever have had to file an insurance claim, that takes a very long time. So you want to get that process started ie immediately, then the next question is, in a perfect world, when would you want to sell your house by that gives you have the opportunity to or the insight to know okay, I need to meet these with these sellers like tomorrow, or oh, they’re not looking to sell for another eight months? Great. They’re just doing research. Keep them on your follow up. And I’ll get into exactly what the follow up is like in my checklists. But it just gives you an idea of how fast you’re looking at. The next question I asked, What will a buyer a buyer be nitpicky about during their inspections, or the walkthrough of your property? This? And by the way, I have all of these questions with asterisks. So they have to put something in of course, they could put, they could get by with just putting like a spacebar or like a period and not answering it. But I’m going to ask it again, in the Zoom call. So what this question does here is have them start thinking, putting there was a phrase, let’s just start thinking like a buyer, you know, like star taking a little bit of emotional attachment away from the home that they love so much. And start thinking about what is the buyer going to be complaining about? Oh, yeah, we’ve had that like sink that’s always leaking? They’re probably going to be complaining about that. Or, Oh, we do have a you know, whatever it is. And then the next question, what is most important to you in a real estate agent? What specifically are you expecting of us? I use the word us because I again, we’re in case you don’t know this, I was interviewed on a couple of episodes ago, if you search ally on keeping it real, where a DJ interview just me and my business not not not the checklist stuff, I actually run an an out bound referral only business. Now, I had so many leads my first year in the business, that I couldn’t keep up with it. So I had to form a crew, a team, I use a team loosely because we don’t have any team splits at all. So that’s why I say us, because I fell in love with prospecting, I fell in love with finding clients. And that’s all we want to do. So when I start saying us, because it’s not going to be just me working on selling your home, it’s going to be me and a trusted agent, someone on my crew who I refer to refer to my crew members. So to the client, it is we are both helping them out. It’s two agents for the price of one. But on the back end, it’s really just a referral. So we work hand in hand. Of course, I’m here for anything. But that’s why I started saying us just in case you’re wondering about that. And the next question, will all parties be on the title? Sorry, will all parties on the title be on the call that you booked on this Calendly? If they say no, do not go on the call, say Okay, Let’s reschedule. And let’s make sure that all parties are there. So you want to make sure if you use Calendly you know that as soon as somebody books, if you have the settings up, you’ll get an email and you’ll get a text message saying Aligarh said a potential seller booked a call with you November 14 at 5pm. Excellent. You can then log into Calendly or look at your calendar on I use Google Calendar and see the questions that they answered. If this question is checked, no. Then And I’m not going to have the appointment. I want all the all the parties that need to be there on the call otherwise, every time you flex on your rules, you know what happens? Guys? I don’t even need to explain that to you. Okay, what else? And then the last question, what else should we know before we meet? Again, that’s a catch all pretty similar to my buyer side where, where if you wanted to take a look at my buyer checklist, again, it’s the same thing. It’s calendly.com/gorsedd Realty slash buyer.
And then the last section is where they can send text messages to so that way they receive the link to the Zoom call. So after that, after that is, you know, they fill out the information, they book a call, and all the parties are going to be there and they’ve answered all the questions. Then at that point, let’s Let’s book a zoom call, or I will call them because sometimes at that point, it’s just go ahead and start the start. Have that be the listing appointment. Again, this part is still a little bit flexible. Sometimes they just want to do zoom, which is fine. I will I will go at your pace. Because the last thing I would want to do is force my foot in the door when they didn’t want me there. Like and force the listing. That is just a recipe for disaster. We’re starting off on the wrong foot, I’m probably not going to get a five star review. No. So if they wanted me to resume first before in person, perfect, let’s do that. If they so I’ll send them a text after that say, Hey, Ali, I’m so I’m so excited to to get you scheduled a call, would you like this call to be over zoom? Or would you like it to be in person at your house, boom. So either way, zoom or at their house, then let’s go to the Trello checklist. So of course when we go to the we’re jumping a little bit forward here, but when we go into the the listing appointment, the rest of these questions in this Trello are going to be answered. So it’s going to be you know, the typical questions How much do you own the property again, shoot me a message text the word checklist to phone number 520-341-2552 to get a copy of these questions. You know, Hoa any litigations, any additional liens? What should I know that we haven’t discussed yet. Age of the, you know, roof H HVAC, water heater, etc, everything. But here we go. Let’s start starting with bullet point number one, under the very first section of the seller checklist pre meet, what are you doing before you even meet with them. One, of course, add the client or clients all the parties involved to your calendar for either daily, weekly, monthly follow up, depending on how far out they plan on selling. And so I of course add them to my CRM as well, which is right here, a couple of bullet points down, add them to my Cavey core. But I also add them to my calendar because I do not want this to get lost you because I’m sure you know it, it sometimes can be hard to catch up on everybody that you need to talk to on your Cavey core or on your CRM, right like there’s sometimes like 40 people to reach out to a day, that’s a lot, especially if they all decide to respond that day. So you’re having all these conversations. So therefore, as a as a safety measure, I also put them on my calendar in the color red, red means appointments to me on my google google calendar, so I will never skip out on that. Then next, get their full names filled out. Because of course, sometimes people go by nicknames or people go by their middle names, but that’s not what the tail record, say, etc. Get their email, get their phone number and immediately ask again, in case you haven’t already, or in case they haven’t answered, hey, what’s important to you in the agent that you’re choosing to represent you to sell your home? And then take notes and make sure that you are listening. The next question or the next item on the checklist is ask the sellers two questions before they’re going under contract with them. So and same thing with the buyer side too. How often do you expect to hear from me or us? And when you reach out to me how quickly do you do expect the response back? Because if they’re if this is a perfect time for client expectations, same thing with the buyers, were sometimes we sleep. I don’t think clients always know that. But sometimes real estate agents do sleep and we kind of have to remind them of that, hey, I actually turn off you know, my my business hours after six o’clock I’m actually just spending with family. But if there’s anything else that you need for me, you will be the first thing that I get to the morning the next day. So what if they seem to be maybe I don’t want to say the word reasonable but if they’re like hey, you know if you’ve take if you take a couple of hours, four hours to get back to me totally fine, perfect. Whatever your business I’m not saying there’s any right or wrong. I’m saying whatever. works for you. Perfect, if not have that conversation with them. Because if there’s if they’re expecting X and they’re not budging, and you’ve tried to establish those expectations and it’s still not going to work, then it might be a red flag to continue. Remember, it’s not always the best to take on every single listing, you’re not going to get along with every single client. Sometimes you can save so much time and even better, so much energy and peace of mind by not taking some clients on. Never forget that. Oh, man. Okay. Ask me how I know. Okay, so then next, ask them what the best method of communication is for them. What I do, whenever I send a referral out is I’m on the text, thread, especially for all iPhones. Even better, if not, I’m actually leaning toward WhatsApp, especially since I have a lot of military clients and they’re coming from all sorts of the world, you know, Germany, Japan, Korea, so WhatsApp is super important to us. So all the parties are going to be on WhatsApp, that’s gonna be me, the actual listing agent, all all of the bar, the seller parties, maybe even you know, title or on the buyer side lender, and then stick to that if they prefer texts, or if they prefer phone call, or if they prefer email, just make sure I actually add that to the very, very top of this Trello checklist I never forget, I just put in all capital letters, text or email. But if it is email, I usually text them to saying hey, I just sent you an email because I don’t know if that’s what I would want for me. So okay, going on. I add them to my Cavey core, I add them as you know, either a prospect or an active lead or an actual client. And then I set up market alerts on Cavey core there’s probably same thing if you’re using command if you’re Keller Williams or you know anything like that Lyon desk, then I go to my county assessor website of course, this is only going to be for Tucson here but go in your county assessor website or ask title and look up who else purchased the home who else is a legal owner of the property is an LLC, is it multiple sellers, one time I was selling a property that was owned by five different sellers. Luckily, four of them were in we’re still in the city. But the other one was, I think in like across the country, it was very, very difficult. But hey, at least was my third transaction. I love that I had these difficult transactions in it like early on. So that way you know everybody that you need to be talking to. So everything that I haven’t bold in these checklists, I have a virtual assistant do you can do the same thing. So pretty similar to like my buyer checklist as well. So then I have a virtual assistant. The next step here is to send the pre list email. So I also have them send the 47 ways to make your home sell faster. That’s a document that I will be giving you as part of this checklist after we meet the ultimate seller checklists and the what we do for you attachment. I create a timeline for the sellers to get ready for the listing appointment. I make the listing appointment this is very easy with exp if you’re with exp you just hop on Cavey core and like in a matter of maybe three clicks you have the listing presentation, of course then you have to personalize it or customize it for that address for the radius for Nina just getting the comps but it’s a great listing presentation and they actually just increased their they now they don’t have like the listing boxes or whatever I actually personally haven’t used that yet they just rolled it out. Then of course the make the listing appointment you should have already done that. Then the next step is again in bolt. So this is something that your that your virtual assistant can do or it can be automated with using Zapier or Zapier or however we pronounce it. So choosing the title company that you typically work with, send them a text and then a call, whatever your method of communication is typically with them and say hey, what’s up Gina? I have another listing can we do an early bird escrow? And would you mind assisting me again with those snacks and the branded water bottles? With both of our branding This is the address this is these are the open house dates that we’re thinking of. I’ll let you know in case they change. Y’all are the best I’ll be so much XL XL. Yeah. Then you want to make sure that after the title company again, this might be different depending on your state but after the title company looks up that property you want to make sure there aren’t any liens that you weren’t aware of. And that way you can have done your research before you even meet with them. So the rug can be pulled out from under you. I assume that these phrases I should probably just make up my own at these. This boy okay. You want to call the HOA if the HOA applies. You want to make sure see if there are any liens on the property. This Bibi in the boat one time Oh We went on the market. And the seller told me this is my I think my my second listing ever came from my very, very first round of posting fliers up or doing mailers.
And which was like one of the very, very few times that I’ve actually, anyway, it doesn’t matter. I am not really the biggest fan of mailers. But it’s because I have been consistent with them enough. So I sent out one one round of mailers, and I get a listing. I’m like, Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. Why doesn’t everybody do this? Right? So I’m getting with the seller, and the seller never told me that. Or rather, the seller told me that the HOA gave gave him a pass because he was elderly, because he’s a vet that he didn’t have to. But he didn’t have to mow his lawn. Well not mow the lawn, but like take care of the weeds because we don’t have grass here in Arizona, that the HOA, like dude was doing it out of the kindness of their heart. And I believe that this now that I’m saying this out loud, I’m like, how could I even believed it the way that he said it was very convincing, guys. Okay. So it wasn’t until we went on, we went live on the market. When what hope I forget how exactly I found out I think maybe it was title at that point, because I did title after instead of opening up earlybird escrow, which I will always open up early bird escrow. This is a reason why to do it. They said yeah, you cannot sell the property unless the seller pays off the debt that’s already in collections. That was from the HOA, because the HOA said, No. Why would we ever just allow somebody to have weeds? Why would we be doing this work for free? We did not have that, you know, that agreement set with him. And he paid he waited so long to pay off his bill that we now send it to collections. And of course, once it’s in collections, I can barely do any talking because it’s through the attorneys. And it only had to be him he didn’t want to. And he pretty much said oh yeah, I thought you wouldn’t notice I’m like, okay, cool. On taking, I’m naughty, I’m deleting you from my KB core. I’m not even gonna ever do a follow up with you. But a lesson learned, please do not make my mistake. Open up the earlybird escrow? Yeah. And then of course, after this, we’re going to be getting into a lot of the questions that you want to make sure that you have prepared for the listing appointment. Why are you moving? Are you aware of any of what homes in your neighborhood are going to be selling are typically selling for already? How much do you owe on the property? Does it have solar? How much is left in the solar? Is it a lease? Is it alone? What will happen if if you don’t sell what are your plans, then if they say they don’t really care, then that means they’re not really motivated. And at any point, they can just say, You know what? Cancel this listing, I just want to rent it out. Instead. I’ve had that happen to me, too. And off, does that hurt? So before I even get any further, I do want to give you this lesson learned as well. I now have a $3,000 cancellation fee. Do you know how much I’m sure you do. You spend a lot of money up front working with sellers, you do not spend upfront money working with buyers. For this reason, I actually lean toward working with buyers. There’s no there’s gas, that’s all I pay for gas and my time. It’s not the $1,000 for photos and staging and videography. And for the drones. And for the aerial photos. It’s not you know, the staging, just in and of itself, there is so and all the marketing that comes to it is a lot of upfront. Time, money, effort, blood, sweat, and tears. So for that reason, I always have no matter who it is no matter what, I have a $3,000 cancellation fee. That’s a catch all. So that will pay for the photos, the staging, if we do that, the marketing efforts that we took, and the rest is to pay for our time. Because we are professionals. There is no reason that you know, attorneys should be you know, even I can go on a rant I already am going on a rant about this, huh? So attorneys have the what is it called? The Why am I blanking? Man, what is that word? I’ll get to it. But if attorneys can be paid like beforehand before they even do the work, so can we and our contract even says So again, this is Arizona. Our contract is different from every other states. But our contract allows us to work on what’s the word, please comment below the word if you’re watching this on YouTube, or if you’re even, you know, listening to this on Apple comment the word below I know you’re thinking of it, and I can’t think of it. But you know what I’m talking about. So, no matter what, I have a $3,000 cancellation fee. Only one time ever have I ever had that been? Have you ever even had an objection to that? And I explained to them, Hey, we’re spending a lot of money upfront the photos alone cost nearly $1,000 and I’ve been hurt before in the past where I spent, you know, $3,000. And then the seller decided to take it off the market. And then not only did I lose $3,000, but I also lost the opportunity cost in order to help out other clients. They honestly, I was just so honest with them, and they’re like, You know what, I get it. So the cancellation that I have is in the additional comments of my contract my TC knows that I do that every single time that everyone in our crew, like in my ESPN downline, they do that. So that way they don’t get burned. Because I got burned once and girl, do you know that I followed up? I followed up until I got that listing again, like, Hey, how’s the rental going? Hey, have you gotten any tenants in there yet? Hey, like, luckily, the property management companies in Tucson are not that good. So that helped me I got the listing back, we sold it. But after that, that was a lesson learned that I will not be working for free again. So please don’t do you know, you also should not be working for free. Okay. So the next question, if you were a buyer looking to purchase your house today, what would you pay for it? And of course, this is going to elicit some emotional reaction, but also could tell you that the sellers are pretty much on core on on par for what the house is what the house is worth. Then, on a scale of one to 10 with 10, being your home is perfect. How would you rate it? That’s question number one. The follow up question to that is what would make it the 10? That question that part of the question is the most important of those two, because it gets them thinking, oh, what what could I do? What would the buyer be wanting to do in order to make this the perfect property? So and then, of course, is that a price range that you feel comfortable with? How soon would you like to be settled into your new home? How much longer do you plan to stay in your current home? Who do you think would be the next person on your street to move get those referrals have listings, listings generate more listings, just like buyer buyers can generate listings, especially if your buyer knows what specific area that when I moved to but they have no homes there on the market that are available? Boom, that’s money. So door knocking? Alright. How much do you think your home is worth? And how did you get that number? And what if any objections Do you think the buyers are gonna have about your home? The other one is, will you be living here while it’s in the market? Or will you have moved out by then? Or do you plan on staying at say, like an Airbnb or staying with a friend in order to make sure that your house that you know, if buyers come outside see the see the for sale sign outside, they can just hop right in without having to coordinate their listing agent, or their buyer’s agent calling me then calling you taking you out of work saying hey, can you leave Davis Monthan Air Force Base and come open your house, they’re already outside. So you know, don’t rush too much don’t get a don’t get a speeding ticket, but they’re outside and don’t you want your house to sell, it can be a lot it’s very, very, it can be very frustrating. So it might be worth taking a week or two. And making sure that you don’t have the dogs in the house and it’s clean one time and that way. It’s just show ready for the next two weeks. The next question, what are the best selling points of your home? What questions do you have about the listing process? And then you want to mail them, depending on the timeline, right? Say they want to meet tomorrow, I’m not going to be mailing them. I’m just going to bring them my five star reviews, my home selling guide why to work with me, essentially, why you want to fall in love with me to be able to fall in love with me because you want me to sell your home. When I come over on Friday, say Are you prepared to live with me at that time? This is a question that I never really felt too comfortable with. But now I realize I need to ask it. And I’ve been asking it the last couple of times. And it is it. I don’t know why I was scared of that question. I thought it was too strong, but it’s direct. So you need to ask them when I come over on, you know, Thursday that we just decided next week? Are you going to be able to list with me at that time? Guess at that point, you’ll be able to see their actual reaction? If they’re serious about listing? Or if they’re not, will all the decision makers be present. And that’s when you look at the title and say, Hey, will you and your brother and your sister and your aunt and everyone else is on that owns this property? Will everyone be at the appointment because everyone needs to sign? And then the day of the day that you meet them before meeting them, create a video outside of their home and say, Hey, this is hey, it’s Emily Garson, what’s up guys. This is one of my clients that are that are potentially bringing their home to the market soon. If you’re looking to live in this community of bear Canyon hills in Tucson, Arizona, send me a message because this home isn’t for sale yet. And then save it. And during your listing presentation, which I’ll show you later. says show it to them say this is something that I recorded and with your permission, I would like to send this to my database. I’ve already started working for you. And it’s like Whoa, no other listening agent that came to my house already did that. And this agent isn’t shy to get on camera. She’s gonna do whatever it takes to sell my house. So, then the day that we meet, take a photo of the property
the questions that I need for the listing agreement, what uh, of course, this agreement is going to be slightly different depending on your on where you are, but what appliances are going to are you going to be bringing with you what will be staying make sure you you don’t want to be you don’t want to have to end up paying for a fridge. Luckily, I’ve never had to do that. But uh, hey, I’m gonna say Never Never. So all right, it’s not doesn’t paper. You want to make sure the list price that you give them the comps. And the commission. Of course, now commission is so you know what’s going on with commission. So make sure that you are providing enough value to where they are comfortable with that. And of course, if they’re dual agency, you’re gonna need to have them sign that I do end up reducing my commission if if we do dual agency. And of course, we have questions on our on our listing agreement that says do you consent to signs? Do you consent to marketing? We’ve never had anybody say no. Do you authorize that we use a keysafe that will allow me to open up the lockbox, etc. Just follow follow, I won’t go too much into detail with that specifically, but just pretty much ask them go through the listing agreement with them. That’s pretty much what that bullet is. Email the sellers, about the pre appraisal. So these are the steps to take before and during the appraisal appointment. So you can maximize your home’s value, therefore increasing the likelihood that the transaction is going to go smoothly. And an appraiser is just an opinion. But they’re going to be doing some extensive research on the comps and the condition of your property. So I always tell my sellers to stay if they’re able to be at the house with the appraiser. Perfect do it. Because there but also give them give the appraisal give her her space. But you’re going to hand them the piece of paper of all the updates that you’ve done what you love about the property. And that way, if the appraiser has any questions Who better to answer that then though, then the sellers themselves, I have found that to be really, really good. It’s worked out it’s worked out really well. And then of course, just very simple exterior, you want to start keeping in mind that you need to mow your lawn, you need to pull your weeds and not say that the HOA is doing it for you for free. You need to put away any toys or you know tools like a trip the appraiser, I’m kind of getting like a little ahead of myself here, but the interior, the access, the comfort, these are just things that I already want them to start thinking about, hey, I haven’t even had the listing yet, but I’m already giving you homework, I’m thinking ahead, that’s what I’m showing them. So keep your children and your pets out of the appraisers way. And of course give them the list of upgrades that you’ve done. Anything you know can be Hey, I painted this at you know, anything that has shown that the sellers care about the property. Then, like I mentioned before, get the listing presentation that’s just on this website KV core, or wherever you get your listing presentation, it’s just called when the listing and then create for seller, and then you input the address and you click enter. That’s it, it’s as easy as that with with exp. I’ve never done anything else, it’s worked for me and it works great. So then you want to bring the following printed documents with you. This is where it depends on how you want to do it. And also depends on who your audience is. You might not want to go fully digital. If you’re selling 55 Plus home or you know homes in a 55 plus community, you might want to go digital if you’re selling you know and millennials home or you might just want to get the wet ink signature for the listing agreement and then do the rest later. However you want to do it that I will leave completely up to you. Because I have found that I brought every form in the beginning every form on paper because I just wanted to make sure that we could just take a photo easily scan it send it to my TC start getting ready. But signing all of the all the paperwork in person t know how tired the seller is, you might not realize how tired they are because you’re pumped. Your adrenaline is going you’re like oh we just got this listing and the sellers like oh my god, there’s another forum. Why did I choose even sell my house? You know, like, no get get in, get out. And believe them wanting more. So then tell the seller to call their insurance company and get a clue report. You want to start that immediately. Again, I’m not sure if this is just for Arizona or for all 50 states. But make sure you get that insurance list with the last five years or as long as as as long as they have owned the property because they’re going to provide that to the buyer within five days of being under contract. Ask the seller if that if they have any prepaid HOA and asked if they can get it back. Sometimes people will prepay the HOA they forget that they sell the property they lose, you know, they lose the property to sell the property and they’re like, oh my gosh, wait, I spent I just like lost $500 on prepaid HOA. So see if they can get it back. Or if they can’t get it back then at least incorporate it to the negotiations. Maybe get another extra $500 or the equivalent amount in you know, less closing costs or higher purchase price, whatever you want to do. Pre qual the sellers, ask them, why are there selling? Ask them? What’s their plan B, this is again, this is in case you maybe didn’t ask them beforehand what was on the checklist? I hope you’re still staying with me if you’re if you’re liking this, please give this video a like if you’re watching this on YouTube, if you want these checklists, text me 914-318-4918 I’m Ally, the agents on all social media. And let’s continue on. Oh, or text the word checklist 25203412552. So when you’re looking at the title commitment, look at who’s the seller is that? Is it the same as who we thought it was? There was a lot of fraud going on. There was a lot of fraud, so you don’t want to waste your time on a fake seller. And then Zillow, this is so so important, because this is going to help you leverage that one listing for more listings later on. So take a screenshot of the Zestimate. Yes, I’m saying Zestimate. And no, I’m not saying that that’s accurate. But take a Zestimate screenshot of that the house that you’re about to list, because you want to save that for your records for later. Because in case you didn’t know already, if you take a screenshot of it, your as soon as you list the property, the Zestimate is going to change. So you want to keep that typically lower amount as proof. And then after fast forward to after you sell. You want to take another screenshot of the Zestimate then after he sold the house as far as what the house is worth according to Zillow, and that is bragging rights all day every day you to to do it a step above, you want to do the same thing for all 100 neighbors of that. Have that listing 100 200 300 Have your VA do this take a screenshot of the Zestimate of all of the neighborhood neighbors in the area before you go live. With that listing. Say you know the house is 480,000. And then after you sell it’s now 492 boom that is perfect, perfect mailing stuff to mail or door knock or just talk about say, Hey, I sold the house on 123 Main Street, your you being here at 124 Main Street, just by me selling Bob’s house next door, your property increase $12,000. Like that is a great foot in the door in order to get the listing.
Okay, then you want to email your buyer database with a subject line. I’m about to go meet a potential seller I got this from Tom Ferry, and their conferences and in the body of that email to your to your buyers. You want to say I can’t share too much yet, but I’m about to meet up with a potential seller who’s thinking about listing their home. What I can tell you is that homes like this usually or typically sell for above ask in just a few weeks. Of course we used to say days but now it’s no longer days at least here in Arizona, it’s not. If you already know that you want the details reply with V IP, boom, what are you going to do once you send that email once whoever responds or you can also post it on social media, whoever responds, put them in your Cavey core, put them in your CRM with a specific hashtag or tag, I would do VIP or I would do VIP palisade or VIP you know street name, and then remain in strong contact with them because that is a buyer so and if you don’t work buyers, then refer it out. Okay, then the day of the listing presentation, what you want to bring with you calendar, like a printed out calendar, or at least like it again, depends on who your audience is, maybe if they are more digital than just your computer, it’s fine to show them the calendar. Because you want to reverse engineer when you want to be listing. You want to print out your Zillow reviews, your Google reviews your your business card. If you do business cards, I don’t do business cards, the CMA, the MLS input sheet, again might be different your area and the folder for them to keep it if it’s branded even better, and the copies of the signed contracts. Along with the seller net sheet, I leave a couple of different seller net sheets. So one is if I leave three. So one is kind of where I’m what I’m thinking that the house is going to be at depending on what they’ve already told me over the phone. Or if I if I’ve already seen it via FaceTime or zoom, and then the second one is going to be a little bit lower. And then the third one is gonna be a little bit higher. They don’t want to make it too high. It’s I don’t want to get their hopes up. And I will never want to be the agent that says oh, I can sell your property for more than the other listing at that than the other agents so that they could because I don’t ever want to set anybody up for dinner. appointment I will I’m a straight shooter. Hey, if I don’t think it’s gonna go that high, I’m never gonna lie to anybody. But okay, next, have the sellers fill it out completely Of course. Then you want to go on ESP Marketing Center and create the digital media post it’s um it’s free on easy marketing center I’m sure your brokerage probably as the same thing to just go there, create some digital posts or maybe hire a virtual assistant to do it. And then you want to add the YouTube video link to the link tree if you have a link tree saying hey, new, you know, you just want to start promoting it digitally. Already with like the the listing presentation, follow your MLS rules. Of course, if you have any questions, ask your broker, send the clue or the insurance to the TC and add that to the MLS. Because it’s even better if you know add everything to the MLS. And then remember that you’re going to be their agent for free until they tell me that they want to list with me. So I’m providing value value value, I’m saying hey, this is what you get when you list with me. And it’s okay at that point, if they say you know what, we will be live with another agent, because I know that I that we probably weren’t going to be a good fit, there was something in there. And I always ask, you know, always ask, Hey, you know, is there something that I could have done? Is there something that we didn’t cover that I should have covered more, I’m looking just to just to improve. And sometimes they’ll tell you sometimes they’re they’re too shy, and that’s okay, you know, it’s fine, you can’t win them all, there’s so much more business to go around than to dwell on one listing, although it hurts, you know, like, I will not discount the fact that it hurts, especially maybe if you really thought that you were going to get it. But just take that effort and double down with this checklist. This checklist will show you how to double down and get even more listings out of it. So again, the more you have in the pipeline, the less emotion you’re going to have, if you end up losing a listing, so keep your pipeline Hi, baby. Alright, then the last portion of this side of the segment is schedule a day with the sellers. So when you the videographer can create some videos. So if you have a local videographer, perfect if not, if you have a spouse, perfect, that works too, it doesn’t need to be professional. In fact, the more professional looking it is, the more polished it is, the less real it is, the less people can can actually relate to it. So and I also I do videos of me, it’s not just the property, but I have my face on there, again, my branding, and you can put it on YouTube, you can throw YouTube ads behind it, you can do a Facebook ad behind it, you can use that, throw it into a QR code, send it to the flyers, send it as flyers, to the neighbors and get more listings that way. Then the day that was the presentation, I’m gonna do this listing presentation. Well, I’m not going to do the listing presentation, I’m going to tell you what is on my checklist. And then I think maybe that’s where I’m going to end it. Maybe we’ll see we’ll see also, for the future, if you’d like me to just do one street shots or like all throughout the entire checklist, let me know I’m here for it. I would love to hear your feedback, put it in the Apple podcast review or Spotify review, for keeping it real. We want to hear from you. I do want to thank you for all the positive reviews that you’ve left so far. I really appreciate that. So yeah, five star review, please do it for DJ. Alright, the listing presentation, our crew within exp has access to something called the locker room nation. So we all have our logins and this has like hundreds and hundreds of videos. Ask your broker in case you don’t already have one, but I’m sure you have you have access to some sort of Google Drive or something like this, where you have access to watch actual listing presentations, buyer presentations, you know, anything, etc. So that way you can just get in the mind in the mind flow. That’s not the word in the mindset. That’s the word of the listing presentation. So review it, maybe hop on some podcasts, listen to other episodes of this podcast, have maybe like a potential listing agreement or listing presentation of what it’s like, hype yourself up, do a couple of push ups, you know, get the blood flowing because you want to show up with energy. And maybe I said that because I would I’m more attracted. I think people are more attracted to people with energy. But not everyone is I am not everyone’s cup of tea and I get that you know, if I were to show up with listening as a listing agent to get a potential listing with a seller that was not me you know, that was very easy or or very like, you know, we wouldn’t get along. And again, that’s okay. There’s an agent for every one So be yourself. This is me so this was this was a wham Okay. Review the listing presentation from the real estate Bible. This is this is the real estate Bible is a Google Doc that I have for my ESP downline. It’s like To now close, like 200 pages. Okay, so skip that. Ask for referrals. Of course, hey, do you know if anyone else is looking to this looking to sell on the street? Especially they’ve been there for a long time. They know the neighbors. I feel like now in this day and age, a lot of people don’t know the neighbors, which is crazy. But But yeah, it’s not just other sellers in that area is Do you know of anyone moving to any state? Do you know of anyone that you know, needs to upgrade their house? Or downgrade their house? Or Did anyone get a job transfer and they need to relocate than anyone else in the military that, you know, that’s PCs saying this this season? And then typically be like, Oh, no, I don’t at that point, you make it one step further to try to connect make that connection in their mind that does anyone you know, that’s recently had a promotion, or they plan on starting a family. So they want a bigger house now, job relocation, make specific, specific examples. So that way, they’re like, oh, my gosh, yeah, I forgot that hairy digits get promoted. Or maybe Harry did just lose his job. And he’s looking to downgrade his house. And you can help. Okay, next, go over the open house schedule. Not all sellers want open houses, some sellers want to open house every other day. So ask them what you know, this is depending on if you like to do open houses, if you want to do open houses, if you plan on having someone else do open houses, then perfect. But so this is whatever you want to do. And go start those dates, because you want to have those dates immediately. You want to start mailing the neighborhood, for the neighborhood only open house and you want to start mailing you know, advertising the actual open house, because the faster you can have those open houses put on online on the MLS, the more people you’ll get through. Then, of course, the clue report, again, at the end of the listing presentation, ask them, Is there anything that you have heard that we’re out of sync on? Or is there anything that you’re confused about? Is there anything you’re worried about? You want to make sure that anything that’s on their mind that they get off their chest? Because they’re gonna have questions, and you will probably have to ask this question at least twice. They might not feel comfortable. If you’re a stranger, they might not feel comfortable asking you, oh, man, well, we met with, we met with this other agent, this other agent brought us cookies. And they said that they would sell you know, they promised us X but they don’t want to tell you that because they’re just waiting for you to say that. So ask them, hey, is there anything that maybe another agent said that you would like to go over? Because there might be some that we didn’t even cover and I love to show you what we do.
So make sure that you’re talking like honestly, to them about that. If they are working with another agent, or if they’re interviewing other agents, what has the other agent done that I haven’t already gone over? Not if they’re working with other agent that was a poor word to say poor wording to say that I do not I’m not in the business of stealing plus, again, only sets you up for failure. But I definitely been that person where there’s different theories of when to go into listing appointment, if the seller is going to be interviewing agents, some people want to go first, they want to get the foot in the door. That’s it, I will, you know, smash it. And they’re there, I’m going to leave with listing appointments. So that way, no one else, anyone else after me isn’t even going to have a shot. Some people want to be the last one. So they’re like, Hey, let’s go over all of you know, all of whatever, maybe they didn’t say that didn’t make you feel comfortable. I’ll show you how I can make you feel comfortable. And this is what I do in order to list your home. So different opinions on that. I don’t I’m not really persuaded either, you know, one way or the other. There are pros and cons to both. Because if you do bank on being the last one, and that first agent gets it, then you snooze, you lose, you know, but if you are the last one, and they still they are still thinking of that first one where it was like, Oh my God, that first one was so good. There’s almost like so what’s the opposite of like the recency bias, where they’re like, oh, they they’re glorifying that first one, even though it could have been the same as the last one. And it may psychology in there. You choose which one you want to you want to do. But you just want to make sure that you cover everything that maybe other agents have covered. So yeah, and use the pricing structure if you do not have a tiered package for sellers create one now. I have one for my exp downline and everyone uses it. That’s how we get 8% listings. So again, it’s think about what like, think about this, if you were a seller, what would blow you away? What would you pay extra for in order for people to market your property and then see what’s realistic, see what you what you can do and create three different tiers or maybe two different years or four. But at least that way, psychologically, when you go to a listing appointment. Instead of them thinking should I choose ally, or should I choose Mark instead of that If you’re thinking, Oh, should I choose Ali’s bronze package, Silver package, or gold package? You know, it’s a different way of thinking in the BiggerPockets world or like investing world, instead of saying, Hey, this is my this was my offer, take it or leave it and stand you say, Hey, this is my cash offer. And and this is my financed offer. Which one would you like? So that way they’re like, oh, it’s instead of yes or no, it’s do I choose a? Or do I choose B, I love the tiered structure, again, this, I’m only giving that out to those that join my crew. They have it and it’s working well, for them, they’re getting 8% listings. But it’s not hard, you know, like, just think about what, what extra things you can do, add it to your middle package, and then add even more to your to your 8% package. But you have to bring in the value, you know, anyway, so if you ever want some more trainings on that, I do that all the time. When you get the listing, you know, when you get the listing, if you get the listing, when you get the listing, tell your virtual assistant and this is where I say take have your virtual assistant or you I guess but hire someone else out, get your kids do it. Get your kid to get the list or title company to get the list of all 100 or 200 homes nearby. Before you go live right. Take the screenshot of the Zillow Zestimate take all the Zestimate values, save them in a folder. You’re going to need this later on. And when you walk the property Oh yeah, well, we’ll leave it here right after this walk in the properties. This is a checklist that I created because I always forgot to check the year of the H vac every single time every time I leave the house but I don’t I forgot the year of the H back in the year the water heater. So now that’s part of the checklist. Check the vents ask them if they’re gonna get new vents installed or filters. That’s an easy fix right like vents can look so ugly and it can change it can change the the look and feel of a property. But just popping up a new vent and just changing the filter can make a world of a difference. Especially if it goes from yellow to white. And then of course the number of bedrooms. If the owner changed it, make sure that you are not advertising a property that’s that was say a five bedroom as a five bedroom if they changed one of those bedrooms into a den say they turned you know a closet or they got rid of a door or anything like that. Just make sure that you are aware that sellers might be able to might be changing some stuff around a five bedroom when they purchased it might not be a five bedroom when you’re selling it. So I think this is where I’m going to leave it off. If you have been enjoying this. Thank you so much. i Please please please give DJ keeping it real podcast a five star review, letting them know how these checklists have been helping you again, I’m sure I’m sharing everything that I have with you. So if you want a copy of these checklists, text, the word checklist to 520-341-2552. My name is Ali, the agent on all social media that is a Li and that’s it. I’ll see you on the next one. And until then, stay safe.
What To Do When Your Real Estate Client Has a Tax Problem • Hubert Johnson
Nov 16, 2023
Hubert Johnson a Tax Attorney with Guardian Tax Law talks about how he got into tax law and why he decided to stay in this lane. Hubert discusses tax liens and what realtors need to know on this topic. Hubert also talks about property seizure and how important it is to get valid information in order to avoid it. Last, Hubert talks about property protection.
D.J. Paris 0:00 If you’ve been a realtor long enough, you’ll run into the situation where your buyer or seller can’t buy or sell because of a federal tax problem. We’re going to show you what to do in those situations. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we are going to be speaking with tax attorney, Hubert Johnson. Before we get to Hubert, just a couple of quick reminders. If you are new to the show, we appreciate you thanks for tuning in. And the best way that you can help us continue to make more episodes is by two things tell actually three things, maybe three things to do. First, tell a friend I think of one other realtor that could benefit from these sorts of episodes and please share with them also support our sponsors. There are really the reason we can keep paying our staff and continuing to make as many episodes as we do. So please, we love our sponsors. Please love them back check out their products and services. And third, leave us a review on whatever podcast app you may be listening to us on or watching us on. We appreciate it. We read your comments and we make changes to continually improve for you. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Hubert Johnson.
Today on the show, our guest is tax attorney Hubert Johnson from Guardian tax law in Tucson, Arizona. Let me tell you more about Hubert. Now, Huber Johnson has over 14 years of experience as a tax attorney. And in that time, Mr. Johnson taught graduate tax law at Baruch College, lectured to tax professionals in seminars and training across the country and has co written two books on debt tax debt resolution. Mr. Johnson launched Guardian tax law PLLC in November of 2019 and has assisted 1000s of individuals and businesses in dealing with IRS and state tax issues. Hubert has five children he’s married to Katie Johnson. His passion is coaching and officiating youth sports, mostly basketball and soccer, volunteering in his community and for His church. He loves history, sarcasm and helping people pay as little as possible in taxes, please visit his his firm’s website which is Guardian tax law.com. We will have a link to that. In the show notes we’re going to talk about specifically why you’re going to want to reach out to Hubert for either yourself or your clients also follow his follow his YouTube channel which is at Guardian tax law on YouTube, just search for Guardian tax law. We will also have a link to that in the show notes because they have some great content out there to learn Hubert Welcome. Welcome to keeping it real.
Hubert Johnson 4:18 Thank you for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:19 Oh, thank you. We I’m excited to this is a bit of a departure for for us I spend most of my time talking to top realtors. And I love when when when we have a guest opportunity that is a little bit outside of what we normally do, because I think this could really provide some excellent value to our to our listeners, but I’d love to learn a little bit more about you. As you know, we know you’re a tax attorney. So how did you sort of get into tax law? Was that something that you knew from from day one of of law school that you wanted to get into or how did you get there?
Hubert Johnson 4:53 I actually hated loss tax law in law school. I took a federal income tax And I ended up teaching it later. That’s what I ended up teaching. But I didn’t like it. And so my, it’s one of those things I graduated, took the bar and my wife ended up in the hospital for five months, life just went upside down on me. And so I needed a job. And I ended up applying for and working at a tax law firm. And when I first went in, I did the interview, and I was talking to my brother afterwards. And he’s like, he was asking me about, and I said, Well, I’m just helping people who haven’t paid on taxes, etc. I said, Hold the phone. Helping people to pay less in taxes is one of the most patriotic things you can do. And I fell in love with and I’ve done it ever since.
D.J. Paris 5:42 You know, I do I do like that. And I’ve always loved the expression, whatever side of the political spectrum that you fall on. i We are, you know, sort of em, we don’t we don’t have a political slant on the show. Certainly our guests can. Well, but you know, we are agnostic, I guess for politics, but I’ve always loved the expression. Nobody pays $1 more in taxes than they then they want to or that they that they ought to. Right. So nobody does that, regardless of whether you’re the wealthiest Americans or not. I think there’s something to be said that, that we all could, you know, we want to use the tax laws at our disposal to really make sure that we’re minimizing our tax exposure. And
Hubert Johnson 6:24 it’s across the spectrum. It’s all Americans that are impacted by the IRS. I don’t help people avoid taxes or high taxes, because then you go to go, you get to go to a criminal tax attorney, which isn’t me and you do not want to go there. But again, helping people wherever they are. realized and know what their rights and options are is really important. And my office manager makes fun of me. She says I always make people cry. But it’s from unburdening this huge burden that affects people dealing with taxes.
D.J. Paris 6:55 And we should also mention, I mentioned Hubert has taught at Baruch College in New York, I didn’t mention New York, but for those of you that aren’t from the East Coast, maybe aren’t familiar with that university, that is a very, very excellent and top tier university. So this is this is a very, very smart and competent man. And I’m excited that you’re here. Before we get into some of your actual specialties, around tax liens, and what you wish Realtors knew about, you know, the roadblocks or getting over some of those roadblocks they may run into with clients situations. Can we just talk for a moment about how about a realtors own specific tax situation specifically around how they’re compensated? And I know this, this isn’t exactly what you do. But can we just make a plead for our listeners to consider incorporating and actually exploring being paid as a, as a business owner versus just as an independent contractor? Sure, and
Hubert Johnson 7:49 this is pretty much falls into how do I not become or need Guardian tax law. So if you follow this advice, you won’t be in trouble with the IRS. And again, I love giving free advice out that helps people avoid these tax issues in the first place. Because it is amazingly stressful. Issue number one, net corporate get a business structure, some kind of formation if and the main reason for this is it protects your personal assets from any IRS debt, believe it or not, when you have a corporation, and if you incur liabilities under it, and you close it out almost all of the tax that under that corporation goes away with that corporation, that doesn’t mean you can open up one ein after another and just try to avoid it. But if something happens, economy goes bad, you have to close the business down and then reorganize in a different form. You can do that. And we close out business debt all the time, and it protects, it separates the business tax issues from your personal issues.
D.J. Paris 8:50 I have I have a great story or sorry that maybe it’s not a great, it’s actually kind of a sad story. But it’s a story that illustrates this. Just yesterday, I was with somebody that had owned a very successful brokerage, real estate brokerage here in town, he sold it, and the building that he had purchased 20 years ago, while this is more of a Chicago thing, but the taxes for the property taxes for that particular property went from this is not an exaggeration from 30,000 a year to 106,000 a year in one year now. So basically, you know, 300%, or whatever percentage that that would be. And any year he’d already appealed it, it was supposed to be 100. And like 40,000 He got it down to 106. So anyway, he was at a scenario now where to your point, he he’s like I’m just I can’t he was I’m just gonna give the keys to the to the bank at this point because I can’t obviously afford to continue that and because it’s in an LLC or however he has it structured. We’re talking about the same sort of situation.
Hubert Johnson 9:48 Absolutely. And it’s not just text and like you mentioned, yeah.
D.J. Paris 9:50 So yeah, so if if you and by the way, this isn’t really what Hubert’s firm does. But if you would like to incorporate if you are You know, I say for sure if you’re a full time practicing realtor, you really probably ought to, it sort of depends on income level and you’re your CPA should be able to determine when that makes sense for you. But Hubert also knows a lot of CPAs across the country, not only does he know them, he knows the good ones. And, you know, I love my CPA is do I know for sure that she’s one of the good ones? I don’t know. I haven’t gone to jail. So I’m hoping, but, but the truth is, I really I really don’t know. I mean, I love her and I’m probably never gonna leave her unless she screws up badly. And I do really like her but but the truth is, I found her on my own. And I think it’s a better a better way to go is to go through somebody like Hubert who who knows who the at least some of the good players out there. So reach out to him if you are interested in considering that because if you’re being paid just as an independent contractor, there’s a very good chance, again, depending on how much commission you’re earning a year that you could actually save in basically how it could work. The way that I have it structured for me is I am an employee of my own company, my my aunt Well, I’m not a realtor in the traditional sense, but if I were those Commission’s would be paid to my business and then I take a salary. And the Ivan S corporation and the government or the the feds are actually quite lenient about what I have to pay myself based on my overall income. Anyway, so talk to a CPA if you don’t have a good one. Reach out to Hubert he’ll connect you with somebody. But let’s talk about your specialty now, Hubert, so thank you for that. But tell us all about tax liens and what what Realtors need to know. Well,
Hubert Johnson 11:34 just real quick on that. estimated tax payments, if you work for yourself, etc. Business write offs, a good CPA will save you a ton of money if you’re using TurboTax. h&r block, sorry, not to knock them but you need. There are plenty of CPAs that are cheaper than those companies and will do a much better job. As far as my specialty, we work directly with the IRS, we’re on the phone with the IRS and state tax state taxing agencies every day. And one of the big reasons we work with love Realtors so much is that we can help people buy and sell property. And so we have realtors that send people to us say, Look, this guy owes so much, we will set it up in a consignment agreement. And what to help people buy once you get an installment agreement, they still need to qualify based on income to debt ratio. But once that establishment is set up, there are mortgage companies that will still finance a mortgage, as long as it’s in an installment agreement status. Once that’s done, they can purchase the home and then we can go back and renegotiate with the IRS doesn’t mean they’re stuck pick making that payment. So there’s plenty of times that we get them into a home. And then we change gears and do something better for we might wipe out the debt, we might do something else. But getting someone into a home makes some a huge difference for people. And it is so important. So
D.J. Paris 12:59 let’s start with the beginning. So a realtor has a client who would be a perfect a perfect client for somebody for your firm.
Hubert Johnson 13:10 So a perfect climate is someone that knows they have a tax issue and is willing to deal with it. And so they usually run into those issues when they go to refinance, when they go to purchase a property and someone tells them Oh, you have a tax issue, you need to deal with it before you can do A, B or C. So they come in, they want to get this address, they want to move forward, purchase a home, move forward, improve their lives through working with realtors in purchasing real property. And those those are great clients because they’re ready to take care of the issue.
D.J. Paris 13:44 And I remember let’s say 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago there was a boom in the in the what would they call it the not tax reduction business but the debt consolidation business and, and that I see you smiling because that is that that was a very interesting business where there were a lot of non professionals playing in that space. Can you speak a little bit to that just because I know I heard a lot about that even just on news and radio and and all of that and how this is different from that. So
Hubert Johnson 14:18 debt consolidation really is people giving good financial advice helping people pay down their tax debt, you can get a lot of the same information from Dave Ramsey, or other financial professionals online. They’re not using any special licenses or skills to negotiate with the IRS. You have to be licensed with the IRS. You have to been having that experience to go in and do what’s called an offer and compromise a settlement. takes years of experience I’ve had over 300 accepted offers in one year alone. Me personally. And you’ll just the I think it was about a month ago we settled on $49,000 for 20 bucks. Your regular basis, we go as low as $20. If if the shoe fits, if you qualify, it’s an amazing service, we get one or two of those accepted every week. Unbelievable.
D.J. Paris 15:08 This is Yeah. So for those of you that are just going to, you know, a standard debt consolidation company, this is not really what that’s not really what they do, they may call your credit card company and try to negotiate for you or something of that nature, but they’re not going to have the licenses that are necessary to actually communicate with the IRS, with the feds and actually get something. Something done. And yeah, so that’s a fantastic suggestion. What else do should Realtors really understand about sort of the tax liens and, and you know, how you guys can fit in, so
Hubert Johnson 15:43 we can help people sell property, and that’s the other half of it is when they have a tax lien on their property. And they want to sell they can get rid of it. I had someone who interesting story. He was a third owner and a property. We went and dug into the taxes. He knew you owe the IRS, but he didn’t know how the debt was IRS tax that goes away after approximately 10 years. So we found out exactly when he needed to sell. We pursued it and made sure that debt fell off. He sold it he was able to walk away with that money. Wow. Simple.
D.J. Paris 16:21 That’s yeah, that’s incredible. Um, let’s talk about property seizure, because we know that that’s also an important topic that happens Realtors run into that all the time. Let’s talk about how to avoid that. And maybe how a realtor could at least begin to have a conversation with a client in that situation.
Hubert Johnson 16:39 So property seizures is something that I’ve never had an active client had their property seized, because you have to do a lot of things wrong to add property seats. I have had, I’ve stepped into cases where the other attorneys have done everything wrong, where they ended up going to tax court and losing. One guy charged him $25,000 To go to tax court and filed in the wrong venue or place. I still charged him the 25,000. No, that’s horrible.
D.J. Paris 17:09 No, I’m just laughing because of the absurdity of that. Yes, that’s yeah, no,
Hubert Johnson 17:13 but they had their their case was already before the Department of Justice. So here I’m dealing with this in federal court to give you an idea of where I am. And you know that the sale went through because they owed over there was over a million dollar home and they had a second home too. So that’s the very sympathetic situation. But I’ve stopped home cells that were with the DOJ as well. You don’t want to be before the DOJ. You don’t want to go to tax court and 99% of cases, you want someone that will attack that that get rid of it and preserve your assets and your property. There are ways to do that, without making it a 25 $50,000 case. Usually, you can deal directly with the IRS or state and address those issues. So if someone’s telling you, hey, we need you to go to tax court pay me 25 grand for it, get a second opinion. A lot of times if you do owe even if you have assets, equity and assets, you can settle or you can set up some kind of arrangement and just let that clock run or if the tax lien shouldn’t be there in the first place. So we’ve gone in and released tax liens one case where gentleman he partnered up with someone who was an ex con didn’t know it. And he embezzled money he put his name on property shouldn’t have had you’re shaking your head. So again, it was a giant mess. And you know, we went through and fixed it all up with the tax lien department. And one nice thing about the IRS, it’s not known for its efficiency. That’s sarcasm.
D.J. Paris 18:41 No, I’m laughing because I have I had Thankfully I’ve haven’t had any IRS issues. But I did actually just a funny sidebar. I I got a phone call years ago from the IRS and it was a gentleman he said, Oh, I need to you know you there was this one form for my business that I didn’t send in and I’d always heard the IRS will never call you. So if someone’s calling you it’s not the IRS. And I went play sounds like the IRS. He’s just asking for this one form that I don’t know why a scammer would want that. And sure enough, no, he really was with the IRS and he really did need this one particular form and and I faxed it over to him and he was he was actually here locally in Chicago so but most of the time the IRS I don’t think calls but but they do call once in a while or at least they called me and we got it resolved and it wasn’t it wasn’t a big deal. But but you’re right the efficiency of it. I think they were five years late I didn’t even know I owed this particular document and they called me five years after the fact and that’s why I got really nervous because I thought well that this doesn’t sound right. The guy goes everybody thinks I’m not who I am you can look me up I’m really the guy I worked on at the you know building a flatbed building downtown it was it was really more funny than anything but but for the first five times he called me I just deleted the voice and I’m like this is obviously a scam and no it was actually URL, but great point. So, so if if somebody is worried about property seizure, that’s when when they should reach out to you and just sort of get this get see what the options are. Is that Is that fair? Well
Hubert Johnson 20:13 call us right away. Because most situations can be saved and fixed. But what I was gonna say it’s about the efficiency. If you need to sell a property, the IRS actually will jump on it because they’re getting money from the sale of the property. Sure, well, we can within 30 days, we can help with the sale property getting a payoff letter from the IRS or lien subordination, or subrogation, that’s, you know, fancy terms for it, but allow for the seller property, even if the IRS isn’t going to get any money. So there’s a taxing department that is the most responsible department of the IRS, and you can jump on these cases and get it resolved. But as far as seizure, usually, like, everything’s going the wrong way. We’ve saved homes, we’ve saved properties for people heading in that direction. But again, they’re not doing everything wrong. They’ve got bad advice, or they don’t know what to do. And I have a client that I actually had to fire recently, about a year ago, because they were doing everything wrong. They had a rental property, that one they didn’t tell me about. Don’t tell your attorney, which they’re there to represent you that you have attorney client privilege, you can tell them pretty much everything about where your bodies are buried. But so they didn’t tell us about that they tried to hide it from the IRS, the IRS found it because they see most things. They tried to put it in a trust after they knew about the debt, which is a problem. Sorry, hit the wrong button. The trust was invalid anyway. And then they blew off the IRS. Ironically, we got $400,000 to, you know, that went away and expired in their case, and they owed about 800,000. But they still had this property that didn’t didn’t want to disclose. So the IRS went and now the notes on the door and started taking all of their renters payments. So they were moving to seize the property, they sent them notices to appear for summons. So they were being summons. And if you don’t appear to those you can have an A warrant issued for your arrest. So again, doing everything the wrong way. And eventually we terminated with them and said, Look, you’re not listening to us. And you’re going to end up in a criminal case. And so we’re this is the strongest way we can warn you. But listen to your attorney, listen to a good attorney, if you’re not sure, get a second opinion. But you can save most properties I’ve had people call me when I was just coming in to seize accounts, seize property and be able to stop it. As long as it’s not too late. If it’s too late, you might have to contact a bankruptcy attorney which again, they’re worse than we are.
D.J. Paris 22:55 So I’m curious for the majority of your clients who are dealing with a real estate sort of tax situation or tax lien rather on real estate? Is it more often investors who these are invest in best investment assets? Or are they more primary residences, just out of curiosity,
Hubert Johnson 23:16 there’s some investment property, but it usually not an investment group. So it’s usually an individual that has different properties that they’ve invested in rentals. We do a lot where we protect primary residences. The interesting thing about rentals if you’re using it to produce income, you can protect that from the IRS and even do an offer and compromise and wipe out that’s if it’s producing income for you. It’s seen as a mini business. So having rental property that’s actively being used, can really help serve you and we can protect that for you.
D.J. Paris 23:48 Yeah, that’s a really important point. If it’s making money, there’s, there’s that’s a good thing. And of course, that’s what investors are looking for. Is that positive cash flow. Also, I want to talk about property protection. Like, when will the IRS I know like come after a property that’s that’s encumbered or in a business? You know, and how can What do agents need to know about that?
Hubert Johnson 24:16 So I’ve never had someone come to me where I helped them, they listen to me and they actually had property seized. The main reason is, if you do it, right, you produce the documents you work with the IRS. Again, they’ll give you bad information. It’s It’s It’s always fun dealing with them. But when I step in our case, I’ve had plenty of times they told me Look, why are you here, this or that? A month or two later, they’re seeing a completely different tune. Oh my gosh, you’re making my job easy. It’s like Yeah, cuz I don’t want you looking too closely at my client. So we work with them for the benefit of our clients wrap up the case. That’s the main thing you have to work with the IRS. Putting your head in the sand is not a good strategy. And that’s the worst case scenario. I’ve had too many people hire me or others, and then ignore them. And things don’t go well, because the IRS just ratchets up, they’ll ratchet up the pressure until it’s easier time. And if it comes to seizure, you’ve gotten a lot of bad advice, call us, we can jump into it and usually stop it, but have a little horror story if you want to hear it. Love to. So this isn’t real property, but someone that I owned a car lot, who came to us and we were going to charge him seven grand on the spot to start. And I called the IRS spoke to the revenue officer. And he told me, there’s nothing you can do to save this client. They had been trying to get the seizure payment paperwork, process, and they have to send it to their attorneys. And you almost never deal with IRS attorneys. And he had been waiting months for and he told me as soon as that comes back, it could be Monday, it could be a month from now. I’m going in with a fleet of tow trucks. And I’m going to cut open the gates and just haul all of those cars off of his lawn. And I said, Well, that’s lovely. You know what, what do I say? I’m like, Okay, well, thanks for being straight with me. I called the club. Don’t hire us. You need to hire a business bankruptcy attorney right away to save your property. And I asked him, Are those cars even yours? He said, No, they’re on consignment? Oh, do you give that information to the IRS? said well, he asked for it. But I haven’t gotten around to it. So he called the Business Bankruptcy Attorney called me back and said he wants $20,000 I said pay the man. Don’t wait, don’t don’t blow off the IRS. It’s always better to deal with it and get good advice and deal with it head on.
D.J. Paris 26:41 Yeah, you know, it does seem to happen to car some mechanics, or I’ve heard of this happening very, it’s not that uncommon, where the business goes bankrupt, the cars they were working on, or the cars that are on consignment at the time. Get all wrapped into the debt and and it’s my brother in law lost lost a car that way. Anyway, so So yeah, it’s it’s yeah, that makes perfect sense that, that, you know, you’d want to step in pretty pretty seriously at that point and make sure that, you know, doesn’t all go go to pot.
Hubert Johnson 27:17 So success story.
D.J. Paris 27:19 Let’s Yeah, let’s
Hubert Johnson 27:20 hear. So this isn’t dealing with real estate, this gal actually got prosecuted for fraud. So pretty serious case, caught prosecuted by the DOJ owed as close to a million dollars and had quite a few rental properties in Chicago. So we tried to come in and look at it in a holistic manner. She didn’t know what was going on with the rentals, which ones are profitable, which ones weren’t, we lay that off or out for her got a bookkeeper got a CPA, and were able to look at and we actually sold off some of the properties that weren’t profitable, consolidated her holdings, so she was making money off of it got rid of other debt that was just killing her and not helping her. And she was able to turn around and set up an installment agreement and to deal with this and stop all the collection, stop all the seizures, and came out of it with all the properties she still wanted intact. Wow.
D.J. Paris 28:14 And so when you work with somebody who has a million dollar situation like that, and obviously every situation is unique, but what what could that be whittled down to when you when you’re dealing with the IRS? Could it be whittled down to zero? Or is it typically a percentage of it that? How does the IRS typically look at those kind of things.
Hubert Johnson 28:34 So that’s the you’re talking about the offering compromise. So it’s kind of like Cinderella shoe, if your financial situation fits what they’re looking for. It’s an amazing offer, we do it all the time I had. But if your situation doesn’t match, so again, I have an actor. And he’s making a couple million a year and he owes a couple million in taxes. He’s paying it down, he’ll pay it all off eventually. But he doesn’t qualify for an offer and compromise. It just makes too much money. Yeah, the other the gal that I was talking about, she had assets, she had rentals, and she was making well over 100,000 a year at her normal job. She just made too much money didn’t qualify. On the other hand, I just brought someone in, he has a lot of bills, but he’s making 17 grand a month. And he might not qualify for an offer, but we’re gonna put him in a hardship status where he doesn’t have to pay anything to the IRS for at least a couple years. And We’ll reevaluate a situation once it becomes a little more established. And consider those other options. So if you’re making, even if you’re making 10 to $15,000, it’s not automatic that you’re not going to qualify. Get a thorough review. I’ve had people one gentleman had a house. And this is an interesting real estate story. He had been told by a couple other tax attorneys that he didn’t qualify for an offer and compromise couldn’t do it. And then He even went on the IRS website plugged in his numbers. They told him no. He was referred to me by his parents and said, You need to call this guy he called me up. We went through his numbers. And by the numbers, he didn’t qualify, but I said, Hey, let’s make a couple adjustments. He had a 401k with about 14,000. And he ordered $80,000 Simple. Tell me about your house and it was valued by Zillow. We know Zillow valuations are accurate.
D.J. Paris 30:27 It’s usually not but sometimes. Usually, I’m friendly with Zillow. So I’ve tried to toe the line there. But the the listeners know what they think about Zillow.
Hubert Johnson 30:38 Well, he went got a sonar evaluation or appraisal of the property. But this house was built in the 1880s, or 90s. Last updated in World War Two, he was there with living with a couple of kids married with a couple of kids, it had led piping through the house, the roof leaked, I mean, it was it was needed so much work to it, I don’t take the 401k to necessary parents to your home. So you don’t have lead piping in your house, at least fix up the kitchen, the bathroom basic stuff. And I said talk to your wife, see what she thinks she loved the idea. And we because we redid the evaluation, we took the 401k didn’t necessary Paris, which is allowable by the IRS, we were able to settle that for I think it was between six and 7000 wiped up $80,000. And he got to keep this house. Now,
D.J. Paris 31:26 when somebody went when something somebody goes through that particular situation, just out of curiosity, how does that typically affect credit score? Or does it not? How does that, you know, with the IRS, you know, is working on, you know, an agreement that you guys come to settle on? does, how does that affect things like Fico. And
Hubert Johnson 31:48 it greatly improves it, because it shows that this debt has now been settled. Got it, and it doesn’t report it anymore as a negative, that that’s not being paid installment agreements. Again, you still have this tax debt, but it shows that you’re making regular payments on it. So going in and setting up some kind of resolution. Not only helps your credit, but it also stops the IRS from coming after you because that’s the worst thing I get the calls people you know, my bank accounts got it cleared out, I just got hit by a toxin I didn’t even know about that’s, that’s typically what we see is people come to us when the house is on fire. We love it. When people come to us with questions, hey, I might have this issue, or I think I owe but they haven’t come after me yet. Great, we can set it up for you. So they don’t have to worry about the world crashing down. As we deal with this, we can prevent all of that as we go through most cases.
D.J. Paris 32:38 Wow. And we should also mention to another reason to consider anyone who’s having a tax situation over to Hubert’s firm is that a lot of times with some of the creative strategies, they have to, you know, work with the IRS, you know, there is sales of property that happen, certain properties get sold. So, Hubert has to refer business out to realtors from really all over the country because his clients are kind of from everywhere. So can we talk a little bit about how a realtor could connect with you in the event where they have the situation? What would be the, for one of their clients? What’s the best way they should they should reach out
Hubert Johnson 33:17 what call her main line at 520-485-7371, you can contact us through our website. But the best thing is just called we do a free consultation. So I’m a little old school, I feel people should actually have information before they start paying for services, etc. And especially with taxes. People want to know how much I’m going to how much is this going to cost me compared to how much I owe. So we do a free consultation for people put their mind at ease. And we’d like you said, I call people and I use different networking, networking resources to refer business out across the country. I would love to have realtors, we keep a list a contact list of who we can refer business to who do we know and who do we trust?
D.J. Paris 34:02 Yeah. Yeah, it’s a really, really important point. And we should also mention too, that you are you’re located in in Tucson but you’re able to work with, with clients from really all over the US because you’re dealing predominantly with the feds. That’s sort of my understanding. Well,
Hubert Johnson 34:18 we deal with the feds and we deal with most states. There’s only two states that we can work with. And believe it or not, it’s Oregon and Washington.
D.J. Paris 34:28 So if you’re in the Pacific Northwest, find somebody else.
Hubert Johnson 34:31 State taxes that we can’t deal with because they require that you be licensed in the state as a CPA or attorney. But we work everywhere else. Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, New York, New Jersey, Florida. We handle state taxes wherever they have income tax and where they have sales. We deal with sales tax issues, when needed as well. But as far as property, yeah, we refer business and all across the country and we help people All across the country.
D.J. Paris 35:01 I also wanted to I was curious, you’d mentioned that you’re, you’re speaking to the IRS really daily. And obviously, the IRS is a massive employer. There’s, gosh, I don’t know how many employees work at the IRS. But I should have looked that up ahead of time. But it’s a substantial number. And I think the number is increasing, if I remember correctly with the current administration, I think almost, yeah, doubling, right? So is, is, I want to say 100,000 people, maybe I can’t remember the number. But regardless, you are, you’re dealing with with a specific group there? How important is it to work with an attorney? Who does have relationships with some like you? Do you deal a lot with the same people at the IRS over and over? Or is there a reputation that gets built up between attorneys and an IRS for like, oh, you know, for easier, smoother transactions.
Hubert Johnson 35:55 So technically, we can’t legally say that we have special relationships. Yes. But as you work with them, you gain a reputation. Yeah. And I’m not going to say that I have certain IRS agents on a blacklist, that I might just hang up on them when I get them because they’re horrible. But, you know, again, any professional relationship, you develop a reputation. And so we I think we have a really good reputation. But especially when it comes to resolving cases, we know the local revenue officers, but we deal with people all across the country, the number one asset that we bring into it to the table, as we know how to get the things done quickly. We know how to force the IRS to move when they don’t want to move, because they can take years to move on some things. But we know how to maneuver through their bureaucracy, it is You wouldn’t believe they just added about three layers to their bureaucracy in the last couple of years. And one of my associate attorneys was just in here complaining about how ridiculous it is. And when you’re talking to the IRS, we tried to skip the line and go about three to four layers deep into their bureaucracy, the average person calling the IRS they get bad information, they get told the wrong thing all the time. And so when people are trying to help them out, you know, again, one of the key things that I hear all the time is to qualify for a mortgage, you have to have your tax returns filed. The IRS will tell you you have to go back and file 10 years of returns have you heard that? It’s wrong. It’s in their internal revenue manual, their regulations that they can only go back six years. And the only reason to file a return older than three years is to lower a balance that’s already been assessed. So you can’t get a refund more than three years old. And following more than six years, they can’t even demand that you do it. So you’re paying a CPA to do work that’s unnecessary. Ah,
D.J. Paris 37:50 that’s that is interesting, because I always heard that sort of seven year number or whatever that number is. Certainly not. Yeah, that’s very, very interesting. So anyway, for anyone out there who has client with a tax lien or any sort of tax situation, that they are nervous about, that they have a debt that they’re that they owe to the government. This is a great time, you know, to reach out to Hubert because this is going to help get them on the right track path to homeownership and, and just out of their tax situation. So Guardian tax law is the website and Hubert and his team are specialists in tax strategy, especially related to the IRS. So reach out to him, he is looking for great realtors to refer business too, as well. So please consider adding him to your professional network. We are very, very impressed with what Hubert we just to pull back the curtain a little bit. We do get requests almost almost every week from different PR firms that are representing law firms, we almost always pass on those because they don’t seem to always be a good fit for us. But we were really excited to speak with Hubert today. So please consider using him. He works with a lot of a lot of realtors, and he helps your clients. So reach out to him Guardian tax law is where you go also follow him on YouTube at Guardian tax law. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Hubert I very much appreciate you coming on today and talking have we made tax tax liens fun or at least more fun than they probably are in normal conversation. So I appreciate your your your candor, and I really appreciate you being so generous with this information. I know that you know not all attorneys are so forthcoming with you know, sort of free information. So I really do appreciate that I know our audience does as well. So on behalf of our audience, want to thank you both for coming on our show. And we also want on behalf of Hubert and myself. We want to thank the audience for coming to getting to the end of this episode. I really want to encourage our audience to do two things. Two things that will help out both Hubert and our show. Tell a friend Think of one other realtor that could use this information. Maybe they have a client with a tax situation. And it’s becoming a stopper for them doing any sort of transaction, the perfect reason to reach out to Hubert and his firm. And also, please leave us a review that would help us know what you like and what we can improve on the show and also helps us get in front of more people. So tell a friend and leave a review. We very much would appreciate that. As always. Again, Hubert, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Robert.
Hubert Johnson 40:32 Thank you, DJ. It’s been my pleasure.
What Residential Agents Should Know About Commercial • Matt McLennan
Nov 10, 2023
Matt McLennan with Kidder Mathews talks about how he got into real estate and why he chose commercial real estate as his specialty. Matt discusses the situation in commercial real estate at the moment. Matt describes the systems that he uses and how these help him scale his business. Matt also describes the payment structure in commercial real estate and points out how different it is from the residential real estate payment structure. Matt also talks about the impact of AI in commercial real estate and the importance of utilizing it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever thought about adding commercial into your business? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and hosted the show and I have said that exact intro over 500 times. And I just wanted to say thank you to everyone listening right now because you’re the reason why we made it to 500 episodes. Also, please, please support our sponsors. They also help pay the freight that gets us to allow to have a staff and continue to produce these episodes. So please support the sponsors. Tell a friend about the show. And as always, please keep listening and let us know what you think of the show. If you want to leave us a review on whatever podcast app you may be listening or watching on now. Please do that we read every review and take your suggestions very seriously, because we’re always looking to improve and do a better job for you. But my guest today is Matt McLennan. He’s a commercial agent and he’s going to tell you everything that residential agents don’t know about what commercial agents do so let’s get right to the main event, my conversation with Matt McLennan.
Today on the show our guest is Matt McLennan hitter Matthews in the Puget Sound area of Washington State. Let me tell you more about Matt. Matt McLennan specializes in industrial leasing and sales in South King and pierce counties in Washington. Since joining Kidder Mathews Matt has facilitated this is incredible over two and a half million square feet of sale and lease transactions with total consideration exceeding 250 million. He received Kidder Mathews big hitter award in 2021 and 2022, a coveted recognition given to the company’s top annual producers, we are going to have a link to Matt’s page on kiter.com, which is for Kinder Matthews. And also please follow him on LinkedIn, Matt McLennan, we will have a link directly to his LinkedIn profile. And you can see what he is all about there. But Matt, welcome to the show. So excited to have you. Thank
Matt McLennan 3:41 you for having me. I’m excited to be here. You have a great show here. I’ve been a longtime follower, so I feel honored to be able to get on.
D.J. Paris 3:49 Well, I am honored that you are here because we we never we never talked about commercial. And so I love that you’re here. And it’s funny, we actually we do get pitched a lot for from commercial agents, but commercial is so vast. And you know, you know, and I know there’s so many different sectors. So I really what I’d love to do today, at some point is really give our audience who are mostly residential agents, a better understanding of what is a commercial broker? Do you know specifically what do you do? Because obviously, there may be some opportunities there for our, our audience to maybe interact with you and pass business over. And really just get a better sense of the commercial world. I think it’s very mysterious. I live here in Chicago. We have a ton of commercial firms here. And I know people who work at those firms and I’m still a little confused about how it all works. My brother in law is a commercial agent down in Florida. I’m confused at what he does. So it’s I would love to demystify it a little bit to give our audience better awareness so that they can they can you know, better help their clients when those needs come up. But let’s start at the beginning. So tell us how you got into real estate and what Why?
Matt McLennan 5:01 Great question it for me, it was very much by happenstance, I happen to be working actually for a wine distribution company. So I started off out of college and an entry level sales position and was was selling wine at a retail level wine and spirits. It was it was a big national distributor. And so I bounced around cities and territories moving, I got into some management positions. And it was it was a great job, great industry really cool. And then here in Tacoma, where I live now, I mean, it was literally hanging out with some out of outside of work, friends who happen to work for my current firm, Kidder Mathews. And so I’m just like you mentioned, I knew nothing about commercial real estate, it was very, it was very mysterious. I didn’t, I didn’t know how it worked. I don’t even know. I mean, I understood that there were commercial buildings, but I didn’t really understand that it was an industry per se. And so in hanging out on the weekends with these guys, you know, I started learning about it and understanding what the industry is. And then I saw what working in that industry could look like. And I started to look at what my goals were long term and just kind of my options and decided, hey, if now if I’m ever going to make a switch, I’m going to leave the wine industry seemingly, now is the time to do it. So I just dove right in didn’t really know a whole lot, I found somebody lucky enough to mentor me a little bit and kind of show me the ropes more or less. And, and that was really how it happened. There was no grand plan, I just fell right into it.
D.J. Paris 6:23 You know, it’s funny, I have a kind of a similar background, I was working for Anheuser Busch right out of college in St. Louis, and I was traveling around the country doing marketing things for them, and did that for a few years. And then it just got to be just, you know, too much after two years of traveling nonstop and, and wanted to I wanted to put my roots somewhere. But so and then I just sort of happenstance turned into real estate, you know, many years after that. So I, I know it’s a lot of us enter this market. But I really have so much admiration for for those that go into commercial because with residential real estate there, there’s a pretty tried and true, there’s many tried and true systems to achieve success, that are predictable, and trainable and repeatable. And I don’t know, I’m sure there are systems as well, of course, for commercial agents. But it is a much more difficult path. And in my under my understanding and experience with commercial agents, I’m always impressed because I just find that to be a totally different world and a much less predictable world. And something that I think is just you know, commercial agents really, I think don’t always get their due. Because I think it’s just incredible. I had a client once who this is a million years ago when I was a financial adviser who worked for like Marcus and Millichap, I think, or one of those firms. And I was a financial advisor anyway. And I said, Well, what do you think your salary will? Or what do you what you’ll earn this year? And she goes, Well, if I close this one deal, I’ll make two. This is 20 years ago, she said, I’ll make 250k for the year, I was like, wow, she goes, I’ve been working on it for a year and a half, it may not close. I’m like, Oh my gosh, she’s like other if I do that, I’ll have no income. And I was like, Oh my god. So I have so much respect for commercial agents, because it is a feast or famine, sort of scenario, at least my understanding of it. But tell us about how you got in meaning once you got in? How did you think about growing your business? Or maybe better yet? How did you determine where you wanted to specialize? Because obviously, there’s a lot of different sectors for commercial. Yeah.
Matt McLennan 8:27 So what you characterize I’d argue, is very accurate. I’m very familiar with the residential market, I track it pretty closely, purely out of curiosity for the most part, but it also has some relation to what I do, but I’ll be the first to admit I don’t, I don’t try to go buy and sell houses. Anytime my clients asked me to sell their house, I send them to my buddy who’s a residential agent. He helped me buy my house. I mean, I could have done that contract legally, but it’s it’s they’re different. They’re very different. So that by the way,
D.J. Paris 8:52 I’m interrupting for just a second. Do you hear that everyone? He refers his clients to residential agents and vice versa. So let’s, let’s make sure we all have a matt in our in our network. I’m sorry, Matt, go ahead.
Matt McLennan 9:06 No, you’re fine. I think that’s really important because they are so different. And at the end of the day as agents, whether we’re commercial or residential, our purpose is to serve our clients. And if you’re not an expert in what you’re doing, how can you properly serve the client? That’s something I believe pretty firmly in. So you know, going back to what you’re saying, though, I mean, commercial is so broad, I look at just comparing again to residential, it’s buying and selling homes for the most part, right. And that’s not to oversimplify it, but that is inherently what it is. Right commercial. I mean, you have hotels and lodging, commercial general commercial space, retail buildings, multifamily buildings, office buildings, industrial buildings, outside land and agricultural deal. I mean, it’s just It’s vast right? And that’s a mystery to a lot of people is how does that work? How to different product types work together with each other? They’re, for me personally, I work in the Seattle market. And we’re, by all measures a large market. So picking a niche is really important. That was kind of one of your questions is what did I just How did I decide to specialize in what I do. And I get categorized as an industrial broker because I work on industrial buildings. So think Amazon distribution centers, Boeing, aerospace, manufacturing plants, and really everything in between those two, any any warehouse type building is really my forte. And then within their leasing, sales, ground up development of those buildings, investment transactions related to fully leased stabilized assets for people who want to buy a cash flow, right. So for me, I was when I got into this, I mentioned that I completely fell into it. And I didn’t really know where to start, but I kind of was just reading the tea leaves. And this was back in 2017. And that’s when I got into the industry. And this Amazon thing was already well underway, right? And I thought, you know, these goods being stored in warehouses getting shipped to people’s doors that doesn’t see ecommerce doesn’t really seem to be going away, and it’s probably going to keep growing. So if I can get into that space on the building side of things, that makes a lot of sense. So again, I kind of just took a leap of faith, I didn’t really I didn’t think about it that much. If I’m being honest, I probably should have done my homework a little bit harder. But obviously, it’s it seems like it’s been a good decision. I don’t I don’t regret it at all. So and then fast forward, you know, here I am, seven years later and still making it work.
D.J. Paris 11:33 Let’s talk about your sector because and my I am barely above the level of ignorant in industrial, but from the few people I know, in industrial, they say that it is a booming sector currently, compared to other sectors, like, obviously, office space has changed. And, and so and with, you know, distribution centers, like you’re saying everyone’s shipping overnight these days or two day shipping. And so there are the centers. So yeah, I don’t I don’t think I don’t think we’re going backwards in that distribution method. And, you know, Amazon just gets its hooks India, and then it becomes that’s, that’s my go to and so of course they need big, big center. So is that the case that industrials actually doing quite well right now.
Matt McLennan 12:22 It’s doing quite well, I think if you look across in similar to residential, the commercial markets slowing down, for sure. And it really is all tied to this interest rate rise. There’s other macroeconomic factors that are having their impacts, for example, the work from home, that whole deal going on is having a huge impact on office space has been having a huge impact. But then you look at the interest rate environment. I mean, there’s there’s, there’s, there’s things pulling the commercial market down in general, but industrial specifically, has been incredibly resilient. And I think the reason being if you go back to the Great Recession, and when we were coming out of that, and really things started to pick up kind of in 1314 15 era. That’s when our industrial market specific to Seattle and a lot of the core markets, which typically are like the West Coast markets, East Coast markets, Port centric markets, that’s a big one for industrial real estate, for sure. And all those markets started to take off in 15 and 16. And we kind of had the steady rise, steady rise. And then 17 1819 I mean, the curve really started to inflect. And things got crazy hot pandemic hit, everyone panicked, went right back down. About five minutes after the pandemic hit everyone realize, oh, man, we have to everything’s got to get delivered to our house. We can’t go out anywhere. We can’t do anything. So as quickly as it dropped, it absolutely skyrocketed. I mean, it was unbelievable. Nobody saw it coming until it actually got underway. So about three months into the pandemic, I remember June, from about March to June when everything was shut down. Everybody, including myself was like, what, what, uh, what did we do? I don’t know, I couldn’t figure it out. And then by June, I mean, everything in our market was pretty much just full ramp. And I mean, we ran on rocket fuel all the way up to the moon. And we hung out there literally until that first interest rate hike in early 22. And then that’s when it was like alright, we need to leave the moon let’s let’s come back down to earth. And so all things considered the markets actually very healthy. The the metrics are pointing in any given direction, depending on the day, but it’s been a good resilient sector of the commercial market. It seems like it’s going to continue in that direction with some ebbing and flowing. I anticipate.
D.J. Paris 14:31 Yeah, I had a friend. I have a friend who works at Kellogg and up in Michigan Battle. I think it’s Battle Creek anyway, doesn’t matter. But he he was up there and during the pandemic, same sort of thing. As soon as as the pandemic hit again, they were nervous what’s going to happen to in this case, they do a lot of breakfast stuff. And it turned out that that their their sales just went through the roof and so they were like Go Go Go and all systems like you said to the moon, and then then they had to start pulling back at, you know, once once reality started, you know, normalizing, but it was a it was an incredible run for for, for some some providers during that time. So, you know when it comes to working for so you are you are contracted by companies who are looking to expand or maybe, you know, move move or open new centers? Do you know, do you will you work nationally with a company? Or do you work exclusively just in your area? So if they want to open up something in, you know, the Midwest? Do you come out and participate in that? Or is that more of a referral at that point?
Matt McLennan 15:37 Great question it. The simple answer is yes, I do work on a national basis, I have several clients that oftentimes just given my reach and my network, I work with a lot of Washington based companies, but a lot of those businesses then do business all over the country. And so for me, Kidder Mathews, my firm, specifically, we’re a West Coast based firm, we have 20 offices up and down the coast and five states. But I participate in several networking organizations have strong broker relationships that I co broker with in other markets. So if one of my clients called tomorrow and said, I need help in battleground Michigan, then I call my contact there, typically, we would work it on some kind of probably co broker agreement, or I might share for the deal out to them if it makes more sense to do it in that fashion case by case basis. But yeah, really, I mean, I use your use your 8020 rule 80% of my business, I probably do here in Washington state specifically, but then about 20%, I might go elsewhere out of state, wherever, wherever my client needs help. I mean, that’s, that’s kind of what drives that conversation. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 16:39 and your and your clients are ideally clients that stick around and grow with you and continue to use you. And so maintaining that relationship is, obviously is the one of the most important parts of your business. And that, you know, really isn’t as critical for residential agents, even though residential eights agents certainly want to work by referral, and certainly want their clients telling all their friends to use them. But the commercial world is a little different, you really have to be a relationship manager over time to maintain those relationships. And I’m curious, I bet our listeners who are mostly residential could learn, maybe from you about maintaining those relationships, obviously, you know, when you’re doing a transaction, or you’re working with a client on a particular project, of course, you know, I know you’re, you’re doing a great job there. How do you think about it in between projects? Are you still staying on top of, you know, what’s going on with the client? How do you maintain that visibility? Maybe in between deals with that?
Matt McLennan 17:39 Yeah, great question. So you asked, you know, who are my typical clients? It’s anywhere from a small mom and pop business up to an Amazon, right? And, you know, huge fortune 500 company with massive commercial real estate footprint for their operating portfolio. And so and I actually have it you know, this and I don’t is I don’t know what the average transaction period is for residential real estate, you know, somebody buys a home on average, every I would bet it’s over 10 years, or maybe, maybe it’s five, you know, whatever it is, seven to 10 years. Yep. Yeah, there you go. So if you look at it, keep in mind on commercial, you’re my clients are businesses, and so businesses constantly, I mean, some businesses are steady, Eddie, but a lot of them fluctuate with the marketplace and what’s going on in the greater economy. So on any given day, they might need more space, they might need less space, they might need to expand to a new location, whether that’s in state or out of state. So staying in front of them and maintaining that relationship is really, it’s paramount, because they make decisions a lot more often. Now, I’ll tell you candidly, like that example you gave of your friend 20 years ago, my transaction time, I mean, I’ll be often working on transactions for 234 or five years before I see a payday. This is kind of how it goes. So you gotta keep your pipeline full. And make sure that you you manage that accordingly so that you can learn how to survive. Right. But to your question, I mean, staying in front of them. What a business is care about what’s going on in the economic environment? What are their competitors doing? What’s going on in the neighborhood in the city is in the markets that they’re operating? Right, so that they can make informed decisions, because most of the time these business owners, they are experts on their business, they’re not experts on on their real estate, and that’s why they hire us to help them with that component, rightfully so. So I see it as my job and my duty to just keep them apprised on anything that’s relevant to them. So I’ve built at least just in my personal business, a lot of processes that allow me to track relevant information specific to my clients, ensure that I’m getting in front of them in a timely basis. And also just from a timing standpoint, tracking regular check ins and it’s more than just picking up the phone saying hey, how you doing, you need any help. Right? Has to be a little more strategic than that. But that but that is really the gist of it is is staying in front of your clients and giving them timely information. So then you’re actually truly adding value. Because if you’re not adding value, then you’re you’re wasting their time because they’re their business owners, they’re busy. They don’t have time to just talk to everyone all day. So it’s all about adding value. That’s, that’s kind of the forefront of what I try to do with every touchpoint. And with all my clients. Well, yeah, I
D.J. Paris 20:21 think that makes perfect sense. And let’s talk about some of those systems. So how will you go over some of those with us? You know, how do you think about systems? How do you automate or semi automate your business to be able to scale it, we’d love to hear about whatever, whatever comes to mind there. Sure.
Matt McLennan 20:39 So I’m a solo practitioner, a lot of commercial agents will create teams, a lot of people act solo, too. I think there’s pros and cons to both. So I operate solo, I have a client services coordinator who works for me specifically. So she helps me with a lot of the back of house efforts related to just administrative tasks, getting my clients information on a timely basis, scheduling a lot of the call to stuff that can get lost in the minutia, right, if you’re too busy running around doing 100 things at any given time, which, which sometimes I am. So I think that’s really important. But I think what’s more important is I remember when I got into this business, one of my mentors said to me, Matt, figure out what you’re good at, and figure out what you’re not good at. And anything that you’re not good at, go partner with the people who are good at that part partner, right? Don’t try to do everything yourself. Pay pay vendors pay people to do what you’re not good at, if if it’s a brokerage assignment, that you’re not an expert in, go partner with that person and share your commission, half your commission is well worth getting the job done and getting it done. Right. So that that’s always resonated with me. So I think I take a little bit of a different approach than a lot of brokers, because as agents, I mean, we’re only as good as our next commission, right. And so to a certain degree, I think a lot of us and I’ve been guilty of this at times, too, I’m not perfect, but you’re hesitant to spend money on systems and paying experts in anything, right. And I’ve tried to take more, especially in recent years, the opposite approach of build my business by recruiting and getting all the systems in place. So you know, what does that really truly look like? I mean, these days, there’s a million software systems out there that can help you with deal flow and contact management CRMs, automating processes, I mean, you name it, I could go into way too deep of a dive on that these days that that conversation, of course, is AI, which I’m certainly not the expert on AI. But I firmly believe that it is going to have a massive impact both on commercial and residential real estate, it already is, it’s already happening behind the scenes. And a lot of people don’t realize that. But that’s going to be a big one. But but to sum it up pretty simply, it’s just figure out what your processes are. And figure out you can’t always automate them, but you can at least organize and streamline them so that when you’re working on 1020 30, whatever it is transactions at a time, things don’t get lost in the mud, right? I mean, you can stay organized. And, and really, I mean, if you think about what makes a client unhappy, it’s usually when something slips through the cracks, or a mistake is made or a deadline is missed. If you can build your system and come up with a process that works for you. Great, everybody does it differently. You got to figure out what works for you.
D.J. Paris 23:23 Yeah, agreed. I, you know, I was thinking being that you have business owners as clients of everything from small to enterprise level. And that one of the ways that came to my mind, and this is such, you know, you mentioned LinkedIn. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. LinkedIn is, is the primary place where where Matt, you know, puts his social media effort. And I went, Oh, now of course, like, of course it is. Because it’s a business setting. It seems like, you know, you could probably do some fun things on Instagram, too. And I know you’re on all the social platforms. But LinkedIn certainly makes the most sense. So I imagine that is probably a great possible place for you also to prospect or at least do research on companies see what’s going on with clients of yours. And in the news, I imagine LinkedIn is probably a pretty great resource for you,
Matt McLennan 24:15 I would argue, yes, it is. And it’s arguably the best resource because these days in the digital age, I mean, just about any business has a LinkedIn presence. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re active. But whether they’re active or not, their employees are probably on LinkedIn, too. And a lot of the times my job is figuring out who is the decision maker at that business, right? Because that’s who I need to talk to, to try to get in front of them, or in them as a client, show them how I can add value, right? And so a lot of the times that might start on LinkedIn is saying, Hey, I know this business is down the street from my office. I know they work on a national basis. I want to figure out how to try to earn them as a client. So who’s the person I need to talk to? Let’s go to LinkedIn, see who’s on there. Who’s the CEO Is the President who’s the operations manager, again, business focus, right. And then it’s contacting those people figuring out if they’re active. I mean, it’s, it’s a great resource. I mean, there’s there’s a lot of software these days and other tools and other places you can find some of this information. But LinkedIn has proven to be a pretty good resource. And consequently, that’s where I spent at least on the social media side of things where with what I do, that’s where I spend, arguably the most amount of my time, because I think it’s being seen by these other businesses. And then probably, if I’m not using my clients as the primary source of my business, the other primary source of my business is other out of state commercial brokers, residential brokers, referring their clients to me when they need commercial help. And so if I’m getting my message out, over the social channels, and LinkedIn, specifically, those two shareholder groups tend to see that and then will will see my content. Because I spend a lot of my time I try to make my contact very educational. I’m trying to demystify commercial real estate, I mean, if you if you boil down my content to its most simplest form, I’m trying to teach businesses and my friends, my family, residential agents, you name it, what I do every day, and then frankly, why if you if you look at it on the personal side, why I’m good at it, right, and why people should consider hiring me. So that’s, that’s kind of the driver of it. And LinkedIn has proven to be an awesome resource where because that’s, that’s, frankly, where people are looking for that kind of information versus Instagram, checking your, your, your friends, photos from their family weekend, or whatever it is, right? I mean, that’s not that’s not a bad source for commercial real estate by any means. But it’s, it’s probably not the primary. Right? That’s been my takeaway from it.
D.J. Paris 26:40 So I yeah, that was that’s really interesting. I, it spawned a few questions for me. You know, just because it’s so funny. When we think about commercial, I would assume that when you mentioned that to somebody who’s not in the real estate industry, oh, I’m a commercial agent. I imagine their first thought goes to office space. And so you’re probably constantly saying, Oh, I don’t, I don’t really do a lot of that. I’m sure you probably have done that or do that. But obviously, that’s just one of one of many different sectors. So there’s this reeducation process. So when people hear commercial, just a lot of people probably aren’t as familiar with what that means. Because they’ve probably everyone’s worked with a realtor. So they of course, know, you know, buying and selling home stuff. But this education processes is really, really a really interesting and smart idea. And really the top residential agents I’ve had on the show approached their business very similarly. Like, we want to be the education people. And you know, I want to make sure my residential clients really understand, you know, what they’re doing and why it makes sense, or doesn’t make sense. But I am curious to questions. And I’ve never thought to ask this and I certainly am not wanting to refer you to reveal anything you don’t want to so feel free to, to answer this in the way that makes the most sense for you. But just because residential commissions are so obvious, you know, an average across the country is about two and a half percent or so times the price of a home that’s usually what we see for residential commercial is really wide open. And it depends whether it’s a lease or a purchase or sale. But just to get an idea of what a commission could look like for commercial just to give our audience an awareness of of what you guys are dealing with, you might just sharing sort of how it generally works.
Matt McLennan 28:20 Great question. Yeah, happy to share it. It varies significantly. I mean, it’s I’d argue it’s the wild wild west to it. I feel like I’m living in the wild wild west sometimes fighting for my Commission’s I mean, we all agents fight for commissions. That’s right. But but it there’s so much variability amongst the greater product types and markets those that’s what it really comes down to a certain product types have certain commission structures, and then different markets have different commission structures. So you know, it’s it’s debt, generally speaking, percentage based, so in that regard, not very different than residential. And if you were to look at a typical commercial sale, like in the Seattle market, specifically, it might be a 5% commission split two and a half, two and a half to buyer and seller’s agent. So pretty, a lot of the convert, keep in mind, a lot of the commercial transactions can get pretty large in size, you know, upwards of three 510 $40 million and well above, right? So at some point, everybody looks at it rationally and goes hey, we can pay 5% on a $15 sale. Sorry that you’re good but you’re not that good. So yeah, at the end of the day, a lot of those commissions get scaled back based on the size of the transaction on the sales side of things. Leasing and this is the one that everybody has the hardest time understanding because typically there aren’t unless you live in New York there aren’t leasing Commission’s associated with renting housing most most often. Right, right. And so but on the leasing side of things, and I do a lot of leasing is it’s typically percentage based, and it’s also calculated on the book value of the lease. So if I’m a business, and I sign a lease for five years, and I agree to pay A this much rent per month and let’s say my rent goes up 4% every year to keep up with inflation, everything else going out? Well, I can run that calculation out of what are those five years of total lease payments going to be for that landlord that they’re going to collect? And then depending on where you go, the leasing commission could vary a little bit, but there’s usually a percentage assigned to that. And that percentage is then applied to that total leasing consideration over the term. And then that’s, that’s the commission calculation and what’s paid out. So again, I mean, a lot of times, it’s this kind of plus or minus 5% number, and then that may or may not get split between multiple agents if there’s multiple agents involved. But that’s in its most simple sense. That’s kind of how it’s done. And then like I mentioned, it just kind of varies Market to Market product type of product type
D.J. Paris 30:48 variable, if it’s a 10 year lease, and you’ve you’ve getting a percentage on the entire 10 years of payments. Is that and again, I imagine being the Wild West, it can be structured any which way. But is it? Is it more often we get it all when when they when they move in? Or is it split up year to year? Just in case? You know, the business goes belly up? At some point? I just I do I’m not as familiar with how often you’re paid on something like that.
Matt McLennan 31:16 I probably get that question more often than any other when it comes to figuring out long term lease commissions, right? Because what if the business I put in goes belly up one year into a 10? year lease? Right? The answer to the question is they are typically all paid upfront, which creates a lot of heartburn for a lot of the landlords, because they don’t you’re you’re taking a risk, right. But I think the way to look at it is if you’re a landlord of real estate, looking at it on investment purposes, you own investment, every investment is really risky. I don’t care if you’re investing in real estate, or stocks or bonds, or whatever it is, right? So you have to wait, your risk, right. And part of that requires you and hopefully your trusted broker to look at the lease term that you’re getting ready to sign the tenant, the tenants business, what their viability is. I mean, we do a very deep dive into company financial statements and multiple years of history on what the revenues and their incomes and profits and everything look like because you got to feel comfortable that if you’re going to sign a 10 year agreement with this group that they’re going to pay rent for the next 10 years. Well otherwise, and
D.J. Paris 32:19 also your reputations if you’re representing the tenant, then obviously you want them to succeed as well, because you want that future business. So yeah,
Matt McLennan 32:29 totally. So it varies. It’s a total again, case to case basis. A lot of times I get paid up front, sometimes I agree to take payments over time. Usually it depends on the sophistication of the landlord. So our market, a lot of the times I work with large publicly traded REITs pension funds, life insurance companies that own pretty large scale real estate, and might be based on Wall Street. I mean, they have massive pocketbooks. So for them to pay a full commission upfront on a 10 year lease, they they see the value in doing that, to get the deal and get it all done and make me happy and make everyone else happy and get it done. Right. But if you’re a mom and pop who relies on this income stream, this is the one commercial building you own, maybe you’re you’re already retired, and this basically is this is what funds your retirement, right. And I come in as the broker and sign a 10 year deal and ask for you to pay me everything upfront. I mean, that could be months of their rent payments and months of what they live off of right? Sure. And so at some point they go, and that’s where I see some hesitation, and especially those kinds of clients wanting to work with brokers, because we cost money. And so at some point, if you’re, in my opinion, if you’re a smart, reasonable agent, you can see if you if you’re betting on yourself, you’re betting on the tenant, you believe in the deal you’re doing that tenants not going to go belly up after a couple of years, well, then it probably makes sense to work with that owner and structure a commission that’s paid over time, because that’ll, that does wonders for them and their cash flow and their ability to actually transact, you’ve now theoretically as an agent, set yourself apart from your competition, who maybe would be more greedy, who requires all that commission to get paid up front? So it just it’s there’s a huge variance. It’s just a really, it’s a case by case basis.
D.J. Paris 34:14 You mentioned AI and I hadn’t thought to ask that. And I should just talk to everybody about AI because of course, you know, I use AI every single day more as a place to get answers because I love just now I can very like easily ask questions and get specific answers. I don’t know if they’re always accurate. But I do love the ability to do that. But I tend to think of AI for how it suits my needs, which is creative prompts for different marketing things, asking questions that I want answers to, but I don’t really know how it applies so much in the commercial world. So I’m excited just to hear a little bit about what you’re seeing starting to happen and how you think it’s going to help you guys in your business.
Matt McLennan 34:57 I believe from a Residential and a commercial real estate standpoint, we’ve barely scratched the surface with AI. But so much more of it is happening in the background than any of us realized I was just at a conference actually in Chicago two weeks ago. For SLR, which is society of industrial and office realtors. And so we had a couple of speakers there a couple of industry experts, and the hot topic was AI, which is nothing new. I mean, it’s been a buzzword for for a while now, right? What are majority of if you’re a real estate agent, or really anybody who’s just kind of flirting with AI, what are you doing with it? It’s probably content creation and asking questions, right. But the capabilities of it from what I’ve been able to at least delve in and discover to date is so much data analytics, data interpretation, predictive models. And really also, I mean, a lot of real estate oriented tasks. I mean, they they ran out an example that I saw that basically, from start to finish a real estate of a I sold the real estate property, wow, looked looked up the property created, you know, an offering memorandum for it, got it listed, took in and queries from interested parties answered their questions, scheduled tours, I mean, basically, the only thing they couldn’t do was go meet with anyone in person, right? Because it just was physically impossible. So if you think as much as I terrified at the idea of AI taking my job, I don’t, I don’t think it’s it’s going to happen that way. On the On the contrary, it’s going to allow us to provide better service for our clients and streamline a lot of those more, just really time consuming, basic processes that need to be done. But aren’t the best use of our time, per se, they’re more, you know, $5 an hour jobs. And so if AI can be utilized for something like that, I mean, I see nothing but benefit from it. And that example I used was incredibly interesting. So that’s the direction it appears to be heading. A lot of the at that same conference I was just talking about, I mean, the big mantra that was being preached is that if you can’t figure out how to adopt this into your business in some way, shape, or form, your competition is going to start crushing you tomorrow. So that was kind of my wake up call. I’ve been playing with it a little bit. And now I’m going wow, I need to figure out how to really deep dive analyze this and get it in my business every day.
D.J. Paris 37:16 Yeah, I see a lot of opportunity for commercial where just feeding it the data that that you want to analyze and interpret, you know, used to be a lot more behind lock and key. Certainly, organizations like costar loop net, you know, have a tremendous amount of data. And while they have had a stranglehold and I love costar looking at but they have, they’ve had a very good run. And without very many competitors. I know crack sees a competitor, and there’s probably a few others. But I suspect that AI will allow commercial agents like yourself just access to more information over time when when these little niche services start coming out with AI to allow you to not have to do as much background analytics and more relationship management, which is is what most vendors at corporate or at businesses who you know, work on its relationships, right? It’s that that thing is hopefully never going to be solved by AI? I hope not. I think we’re all in trouble if they can somehow solve interpersonal relationships and do that for us. But the idea that it sort of listed a property took an increase, the example you gave and then sold a property is, is really incredible. But I don’t think relationships are going away. I certainly hope not. I’ll be out of a job too. If that happens. So I can I can appreciate that. That’s, it’s very, very interesting. I was at a conference with Zillow a few a few months ago, and they were talking about a there they were just mentioning, like, like AI isn’t really new at all. They said when we started the Zestimate, which everybody probably knows, they said, That’s AI, they said it was like 2003 or whatever they I forgot when they rolled out maybe it was 2006 or something whenever it was early 2000s. And that’s when they rolled it out. They’re like that, that’s AI are like, okay, so it’s actually been around for a long time. But now with GPT getting more accessible to the to the to the end user. It’s just really, really changing things, and certainly a lot of fun to learn about what the capabilities are. So what is the what are the misconceptions? Or what is it a misconception that residential agents have about the commercial world that if you could wave a magic wand and educate everybody about, I think you may have already said that the major point is, you know, stay in your lane. If you’re a residential agent, or at least consider staying in your lane. Because as much as you want to do every deal for every client, as Matt said very elegantly and simply, I think it’s like simple and elegant at the same time, is, you know, you’re not doing your client really any service if you’re not an expert in that particular area. And that’s just that’s just the truth. So, so there’s that But are there any other misconceptions that residential agents have? Because the worlds are really they don’t intersect that often. You know, commercial and residential agents are very different breeds, and they don’t oftentimes interact. So just what do you wish residential agents understood more about commercial?
Matt McLennan 40:17 I think there’s two things that come to mind. One is if I’m a residential agent, and I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and I’ve sold 1000s of houses, I’m I’m thinking to myself, I know how contracts work, I know how to navigate an MLS. I know my market, I know geographically where everything is, I can do it. And now my, my buddy’s plumbing business needs a 10,000 square foot warehouse space, I can do that. I know how to do it. How many times have you done it? Right. And so I think that that’s the big one. And then the other misconception is, hey, my client trusts me, they trust only me, they like working with me. And I can’t get to a comfort level of sharing them with a commercial agent who doesn’t know them. And we all know how that goes when it comes to sharing referrals, right? I mean, if the relationship you build with your existing client is strong enough, you should have no problem figuring out how to introduce them to someone else you trust, find that that’s that’s critical, right? Find a commercial agent that you believe is an expert, that maybe you know, or that you trust, right, I think that’s the big one. But the other big one is, is I think a lot of times, because the commercial commission structure is mystifying. And sometimes the transactions are large enough where the the commission payments seem much larger and maybe more alluring than your typical house sale. That’s another reason why residential, I’m going to do this myself, because wow, this is this looks like a great payday. And the number of times I’ve seen that, unfortunately, come at the detriment of the client where they overpaid or the transaction never happened, because the residential agent couldn’t figure out how to properly navigate the transaction and get the deal done. That’s what I get concerned about. And that’s what I see as the client, being at the detriment of all that, I’ll tell you candidly, I love sharing commissions, I’d rather do I’m a volume guy. So I would much rather do more deals and share my Commission’s then do less deals and do them all myself. And I like collaborating with people too. So I think that’s that’s really what it comes down to find your commercial agents that are in your market and active network with them make friends, I think you’ll be surprised a how much more you have in common with them than you realize, two, you can teach each other a lot of things. My buddy who helps me on the residential side, I met him at an open house when I was trying to go buy a house when I moved to a new town. And we hit it off. And we just kind of built a relationship from there. And then we’ve since made it a point of regularly getting together and just trading notes on what’s going on in our respective markets, which helps both of our clients all of our clients really so anyway, that’s that’s a really long winded way of getting back to the point of this, which is just don’t be afraid to engage with the commercial agent. Because in a lot of times, I think you’ll realize that like and I’m doing this with that same guy that I just use an example. He straight up called me and was like, Hey, this looks like it’s going to be an awesome, you know, pretty sizable deal. I have no idea what I’m doing. Can I just can I just can I basically ride your coattails and he’s like, will you if I bring you this deal and partner with you on it? Well, you kind of teach me along the way rather than just me referring it to you and you go do everything and then pay me a commission three months later, when it’s all done. I said, Absolutely. I’d love to teach. And that’s me personally, I just like to teach I actually enjoy the mentorship component of what we do. But that’s a big opportunity for residential agents, if you have any interest in commercial and don’t even know where to begin, refer that deal out and as a condition of referring it out, asked to be a part of the entire deal and get taught. And I would be willing to bet you nine times out of 10 that commercial agent is gonna go Yeah, okay, fine. You can be she can be part of it the whole time.
D.J. Paris 43:55 Yeah. Yeah, that is a really great suggestion. And you know, you were just going back to one point that you were making that happens, I’m sure a lot like you were saying with a residential agent has this relationship with a client who maybe is a business owner, so they help them on the residential side, and all of a sudden, there’s this commercial opportunity. And they go, Well, the client knows me like me, trust me. They don’t know you, they, they want me to do this deal. And I’ve always thought, obviously, there’s exceptions to every rule. But I mean, I don’t really understand the difficulty in saying to the client, you don’t want me on this one. And here’s why. I love you. I would love to do this. You’re my favorite client. And I’m not the right guy for this, but I got the right guy for this and I’m going to bring them in. We’re going to get you comfortable with them. I’m going to be on the deal. I’m going to be you know, watching it overseeing it, you know, however, whatever language you want to use. Yeah, I’m always shocked when I hear people say those kinds of things. I’m like, I don’t what kind of relationship do you have with with this client? If you can’t tell? The truth. And I
Matt McLennan 45:01 literally say that all the time, all the time, I probably more often than I should say, I’m not the guy for the job, thank you for wanting to hire me, I am not the guy for this job. And I tell this to my clients, I tell this to my friends, I tell this to my family, literally anyone within my network, what I know, I know my market area really well. I know real estate really well. And part of my job is being very visible and present in my community. So I know business owners, I know what’s going on, right? But I’m not always the right person for the job. But one thing that I try to tell everyone within my network is if you have a question on anything of Who do I go for this? Who is a good plumber for my house? Who can who can sell my house? Where do I move my business? What’s a good rental car company in the area? I mean, I’m I’m joking, but I’m dead serious. As far as how deep some of this goes, I say just call me. Because I’d be willing to bet you nine times out of 10. If not more that I can point you in the right direction. I’ll either tell you Yeah, I’d love to work with you on that I’m, I’m the guy to help you. Or I’m not the right guy. But these guys that share this wall with me, they’re the downtown office brokers, you want to go lease an office for your law firm. They’re the guys to call and I’ll make an introduction. They’ll they’ll work TEDx harder, because I have a good working relationship with them. So if I make the introduction for you, they’re going to move mountains, because they want to make me happy. I mean, it’s it’s truly a win win. But that’s, that’s really what it comes down to is find your expert. And then don’t don’t try to go on Google. And, you know, oh, how do I how do I do this? Or where do I find this person? Save yourself the time and effort and just call me? I mean, that’s, that’s I consider that part of my job. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 46:38 it’s it’s a really important thing for all of our audience to hear. So if there was anyone in our audience that has opportunities for you, maybe in your in your local area in Washington, or elsewhere in the country, you know, what’s the best way that someone should reach out to you to say, hey, I have this opportunity, I’m not sure if it would fit with what you do. But I wanted to run it by you. And by the way, Matt knows, lots of people in lots of different sectors in the commercial world, Mac can certainly find the right place for you. If if he it’s not him, as he said, he turns down a lot of business because he feels like it’s better to refer something that he’s not an expert in. But what is the best way someone should reach out to you if they have an opportunity?
Matt McLennan 47:22 Simply put email and phone and so I may be opening the floodgates a little bit on this one, but I’m sure you’ll you’ll have my website and the notes and everything like that. But if you go to kinder.com or search Matt McLennan Kidder Mathews you’ll you’ll find my page all my contact info, phone and email is public. And seriously, please call email me I like I mentioned I, one of the things I actually truly probably enjoy most about this business is demystifying it educating mentorship. And so I mean, I don’t care if you’re selling houses in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you’re curious about how Boeing builds airplanes in Washington and just what is it manufacturing center work? Call me email me. I’m happy to donate some of my time to just do exactly that. Because I think it said said guy in Cincinnati who or who is interested in the Seattle market, who knows, maybe moves out here one day, and I mean, you get where I’m going with this is also a good yes,
D.J. Paris 48:20 Cincinnati is a great example. Because I went I went to college near there, and Procter and Gamble is there. So that’s a great example of somebody in Cincinnati, you might still have an opportunity to work with Matt, because of course, p&g is there everywhere in the world. And you know, there are these you know, I’m from Peoria, Illinois, Caterpillar is there, right? They have factories all over all over, not just factories, but industrial, all sorts of, obviously real estate needs. And so this is a real opportunity, guys. So even if your business isn’t in the Pacific Northwest, don’t let that stop you from reaching out to Matt, because he works nationwide, number one, or at least he can connect you with the with people who he is happy to work. And I just had one last question only because I don’t know why this is occurring. To me. Maybe it’s only interesting to me. But I’ll ask it anyway, in the residential world, we’ve seen in the last, I don’t know, five years, or specifically the last couple of years, this growing trend for individual practitioners to really either join a team or build a team on their own. There’s sort of a strength and numbers mentality, which seems to work pretty well on the residential side, depending on how you set it up. Is that also happening on the commercial side, too? I know you’re an individual practitioner, but are you starting to see more commercial teams? Or is it still, you know, kind of a more individual type of business?
Matt McLennan 49:40 I haven’t seen the trend really switching in one direction or another here. Here’s the big thing with commercial, I’d say here’s I’ll try to break this down. Probably on average on any given year, I probably do somewhere between about 30 to 50 transactions a year. And I would argue that let’s let’s again, use the 8020 rule. With 80% of those transactions, I’m probably actually partnered with another broker. So while I don’t have a defined team, you know, the Clinton Anderson team and McLennan Smith team or whatever, right, I mean, as far as people that I’m jointly partnered with on every transaction that I work on, a lot of the times I’m reaching out, depending on the assignment, depending on the geographic location, especially if it’s out of state, right, I am partnering on a team basis to complete that transaction. And the strength and numbers mentality. I mean, there’s there’s obviously efficiencies on prospecting and business development and all that. And then the real big thing is like, we all try to be humans and live our lives too, right? So to a certain degree, if I want to go take a vacation for two weeks, and I’ve got a busy listing, well, hopefully, I am partnered with someone who was gone for two weeks can go show that building, get people through their answer email, and queries and calls and all that, right. So there is, I do see a lot of benefit in the team environment, and I’m certainly not against it, there may be a day that I go down that road. But at least on the solo side, where I’m at right now, I actually have the ability to create my team for each individualized assignment or client, however, I best see fit, which to me, actually, I kind of feel as a strategic advantage, because I’m not locked into just this one team dynamic with 234, whoever those individuals are, and that’s who we are. And that’s our team. And that’s how we work on every transaction. Because I again, I try to take the client first mindset with everything I do. So build a team that’s best for the client. That’s pretty much what I asked myself before I take on every assignment.
D.J. Paris 51:35 Yeah, I guess, you already you basically always are on a team, or almost always on some sort of team that you’ve facilitated to help sort of cohesively, you know, meet the client’s needs to close the deal. Get the specialties in place. So yeah, that makes perfect sense. I, I probably should have thought of that, that. But that makes that makes perfect sense. So, Matt, this has been really incredible. By the way, I’m just going to reiterate what Matt said at the very beginning as he chose a residential agent for his own property when he was buying a home. So guys, this is this, these are not people to fear, they’re not looking to take your deals away. But they’re also encouraging you to not necessarily jump into an area where you’ve not done it before, at the very least certainly partner up with somebody who’s done it before I would, there’s an Kai no two industrial agents here in Chicago. And they love it when residential agents attempt those, because they almost always fail. There’s almost always a screw up. And they come running to the commercial agent down the road anyway, and they learned their lesson, hopefully. But it is, it is certainly something that, you know, again, to stay in your lane thing is a good idea for most of us. So Matt has connections to all different sorts of sectors, certainly in the industrial space, he knows a lot there. But he also can assist you. And he’s got a lot of resources at his disposal to point you in the right direction, his email and phone will be in our show notes. Please reach out to him. He’s He’s a heck of a nice guy. And he’s very, very professional. That’s the one thing I will say I love about commercial agents is the commercial agents I know are there is still this sort of old, older school professionalism that I still like to see in real estate. It’s not as common on the residential side as much anymore. But I love the fact that commercial agents tend to come off as more of a corporate presence because they are dealing with a lot of corporate clients. And I’ve always really appreciated that about that industry here. I’m sitting in shorts, by the way. So I’m telling on myself, Matt is
Matt McLennan 53:39 I don’t wear this jacket every day. This is well he’s dressing going on later
D.J. Paris 53:44 today. But no, for sure. Got it. No, I just appreciate that. I think you can’t ever overdress I really don’t believe in over present, and there’s a certain polish to successful commercial agents that I’ve always appreciated. It’s a very, it’s a very difficult business. We think residential is hard. Guys, commercial is a lot harder. It just is. And you know, to make it in the commercial world, you have to have nerves of steel. And you have to really have have a lot of intelligence and a lot of sort of organization, and just great skill. So commercial agents, I’ve always been, they’re always some of the smartest best people in this industry. I’m so impressed with them. So for all of you that are listening, let’s find a good commercial agent to partner with reached out to Matt, if you have any. And by the way, if you know, people moving in and out of the Seattle area, well, I’m sorry, the Puget Sound area, which is sort of Seattle down to Tacoma, and everything in between, you know, also you can reach out to Matt as well, right? He’s got connections in that area, and he’s got people that he’s got clients that are moving and opening in other locations, too. So let’s, let’s make a great connection with Matt and let’s reach out to him so his email and phone number are in the show notes. I will post his Is social in there as well. And then his website or we’re sorry, his firm is Kidder Mathews, we will have a link to his direct page with all of his contact info. But Matt, really, on behalf of our audience, thank you for coming on a residential podcast and talking about commercial because I’m always once a year, I try to do a great commercial episode. So you met my goal for the year. And you did a great job. And it was really, really informative. And I am super ignorant to commercial. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing that with our audience. Guys, again, reach out to Matt, he’s just a heck of a nice guy. And, and a really, really a solid professional. So reach out to him for any commercial needs that you have. And if he can’t help you, he’ll likely point you in the right direction. And also, maybe you guys can share some business back and forth. So please consider reaching out to him. On behalf of the audience. Matt, thank you, we know how busy you are in the commercial world. And, and thank you for your time today. And on behalf of Matt and myself. Also want to thank everyone who’s listening right now and who made it to the end of the episode, we appreciate you please, just before you sign off, everyone listening, do one one or two favors you could choose ideally to but one one would be fine with me just tell a friend to think about one other agent that maybe would like to hear a little bit more about the commercial world, send them a link to this episode. Because of course we all know agents that are trying their hand at commercial, this might give them some some understanding of maybe how to best proceed if they’re on the residential side and maybe confused about where to go next. And then also let leave us a review wherever you’re listening to this. If it’s on an app, let us know what you think of the show. You know, let us know and we read all of those. Those comments. We want to continue to make the show better. So thank you for that. Matt, thank you for again for this great conversation and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, man.
Matt McLennan 56:46 Thank you, DJ, appreciate it. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on and love what you’re doing the podcast and with your business. Keep it up.
How To Keep Producing In A Down Market • Sara DeWulf
Oct 31, 2023
Sara DeWulf with Real in the Quad Cities talks about how she started her career in real estate 13 years ago. Sara discusses strategies she uses close 117 transactions in a year as a solo agent. Sara also talks about how she grew her google reviews and their importance. Sara also discusses what she’s doing to stay positive and productive in this down market and about basics of building in this business. Last, Sara shares tips for the new agents entering the market now.
D.J. Paris 0:00 It’s official. We’re in a down market. But what activities should agents be focused on right now to keep their business moving? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I will be your guide and host through the show. And we’re in just a moment going to be speaking with top producers Sarah DeWolf. But before we get to Sarah, just a couple of reminders. First of all, big thank you to everyone listening right now we just crossed over 500 episodes and 3.2 million lifetime audio downloads. That’s a big deal to me and our team. And it’s all because of you guys. So thank you thank you thank you. The best way you can always help keeping our show going is by telling a friend think of one other realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing interviews like the one you’re about to with Sarah and send them a link to our website which is keeping it real pod.com Or they can pull up any podcast app and just search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Guys. Let’s just get to the main event thanks for 500 episodes and hopefully another 500 in the in the upcoming years. And let’s get to it my conversation with Sarah Wolf.
Okay today on the show, our guest is serra de Wolf from with real in the Quad Cities. For those of you not from the Midwest. What are the Quad Cities there are four cities that sit right on the Illinois Iowa border. So she is licensed in both Illinois and Iowa but let me tell you more about Sarah. Now Sarah Wolf is a licensed Realtor both Illinois and Iowa since 2010. She is consistently among the top agents in the Quad Cities 22. The 2022 stats include selling over 36 million and closed volume with 117 transactions. That’s one every three days amazing. And as an individual agent, she did that now she’s also ranked in the prestigious Tom Ferry, the 1000 best realtors in the country. She ranks number 195 She’s in the she’s in the top point zero 1% of agents in the United States. And when she’s not working, Sara and her husband have two toddlers, they own a local young Lumberyard rental properties and an Airbnb. This is a busy woman and I’m excited to chat with her. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Dewulf 3:56 Thank you for having me. I’m tired just thinking about that.
D.J. Paris 4:00 Alright, well I’m tired reading it. I put that I love that expression. I’ve probably said it a million times on the show is if you want something done give it to a busy mother. They just get everything done. But every everyone follow Sarah on Instagram Sarah dewulf that’s D it first of all it’s S A R A D Wu L F ki realtor QC realtor yet Quad City so guys, don’t worry. It’ll link to it in the show notes. Sarah wealth QC realtor on Instagram. And we’ll also have a link to our website, which is Sarah Wolf. realtor.com. Sarah, I’m so excited to have you. Tell us how you got into the market in 2010. Not the easiest time to get into the market. So I want to hear about what that experience was like because we have a lot of agents today getting in right now. And it’s not quite as awful as it was back then. But it is still a challenging time. So tell us about how you got started in Y. Sure.
Sarah Dewulf 4:55 So at the time in 2010 I was in college and my major was A psychology. My dad was a realtor. So I am a second generation realtor. He was a managing broker for our offices and said, you should get into real estate. And so it wasn’t something that I grew up thinking that I was going to do. And I he did it for 20 years. And so I watched him and I always was interested in real estate. But I didn’t know that that was the path I was going to go down. However I was, I didn’t want to do school anymore. I didn’t want to get my Master’s or PhD and psychology does come in handy every day with real estate. So it does it worked out. So he, him and I work together, we will do all of our listings together and buyers separately. So it was kind of a we weren’t really a team, but sort of we were the father daughter team on listings. And so it was nice, because he He taught me everything I know. And we would drive around all day to different appointments. And I would listen to him and listen to 45 different agents calling him with headaches. And so I felt like I was on a fast track to learning this business, which every day is different. And now 13 years in, I’m still learning things, of course. And each deal has different different things that you’ve got to kind of work through. So he passed away in 2019. And it was pretty unexpected. He was he was in a surgery and my I looked at my husband, and we didn’t know if he was going to make it out of that surgery. And I looked at my husband and said, What am I going to do? Because it had always just been him and I he didn’t die that night, thankfully, but I had two more weeks with him. And he did unfortunately pass away. So I had to quickly pick up the pieces. And I knew for sure that he wouldn’t want me sitting around crying. So I just went right to work and figured out how am I going to really do this without him. So that was in 2019. And that year, I had sold 12 million in sales and 2020 I sold 20 23 million. So I almost doubled my sales. Thank you. And grew it ever since then. So I hope he’s looking down and proud. But he is certainly missed. But how lucky am I that I had such a great teacher for 10 years? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 7:09 it’s life is a mixture of tragedy and fortunate, fortunate events. And it’s just this dance of peaks and valleys. And we all go through it. And yeah, my heart goes out to you for losing your father. We’re all we’re all going to do it someday we’re all going to lose, lose our parents and it is the scariest thing ever. But I also you also had some a health issue yourself that came at a very young age. And I’m if you don’t mind sharing that I’m curious because I’m what I’m curious about is what how that experience maybe shaped you into who you are today? Because it was a pretty serious one, if you don’t mind.
Sarah Dewulf 7:55 Yeah, absolutely. So that I had melanoma, I had a mole on my arm that didn’t look great. But at the time I was 26. And that it’s probably nothing. And so I ended up going in probably way later than I should have. And they they took them all off and said, Oh, best case scenario, we caught it early stage one a will remove it. And then they said but because of your age, we’re gonna test a couple couple lymph nodes, just to make sure. Well, they did that and it to have the lymph nodes tested positive. So for whatever reason, the type of cancer that I had, they could see actively splitting under a microscope. So it was moving very, very quickly. So I quickly went from stage one A to stage three B, which is much more serious. So I had to do a lot of scans. And luckily it hadn’t spread past my lymph nodes. We caught it kind of just in time. So I had several surgeries. And that was a that was a rough time it was I was probably three years into the business. And so it was starting to get more consistent, but not quite. And so between just being scared to death, literally, am I going to survive this and I was dating my husband at the time, but we weren’t married. And so that was about a year long of going back and forth to Iowa City to the hospital there and just making sure that everything was okay and thank god no issue since and that was it’ll be 10 years in February. But it changed my life. I can’t I can tell you that for sure.
D.J. Paris 9:21 Yeah. What what did, obviously, you know, significant events like that do tend to change people’s perspective or their maybe even change their goals or their you know, the things that are they’re important the things that are important to them. They’re their values. How did that change here?
Sarah Dewulf 9:39 I’ve always been a don’t sweat the small stuff type of person. But even more so now. It’s little things that aren’t going to matter in five years or an agent just makes you so mad. You want to call and yell at them or say this isn’t right. But is it worth it? Is it going to change anything? No. So it’s just a matter of taking a day A time and being so grateful for my health, that at 26, it hits you different when you start to think am I going to make it? And you really don’t think about that in your 20s very often. And really, without our health, we have nothing. So all these little things stressors in life, if you’re happy if your family is healthy, that’s all that matters.
D.J. Paris 10:20 Yeah, I was having a moment last night where I was starting to judge myself. unfairly, I was thinking about something in my life that I don’t have as much of as I want. And I was cooking, and I really enjoy cooking. And I was making this meal that I’d never made before. It was kind of a fun thing. But I was sitting there going, Gosh, I don’t have this and that and you know, like, I’m so you know, I’m such a loser or whatever, you know, things that negative self talk. And I realized I said, well, but I have this moment where I’m cooking, and why am I like I could enjoy this moment, while I’m cooking. I can get back to beating myself up later. But I said, I said, Boy, I’m missing out on this fun thing I like to do just because I’m, I’m you know, caught up in this in this judgment. So it is really important, I think, to monitor and pay attention, be mindful of what’s going on inside of especially around, as you mentioned, like anger. You know, I think a great rule of thumb in this industry and anger is going to come up because people just do goofy things. And other realtors may do things that you don’t like, and your clients may do things that you don’t like. But I always say, I don’t make good decisions when I’m angry. And I certainly don’t have access to all my faculties. And I can’t make oftentimes the best logical decision. So I think what you said was really great. It’s like when you’re angry. That’s not right. Really the time to communicate, right? Settle down first. realize it’s like Sarah says, it may just be a small thing, even though it feels big in the moment. Give yourself a breath, and then respond. Yes, let it or just let it go. Let it go. Yes, unless it’s something where you can’t let it go. And you need to actually take action. But most of the time, most things resolve themselves. But Sarah, want to learn more about you because you have to get licensed in two states, not the easiest thing or most fun thing to do. But based on the geography of where you practice, it is critical. And so you have to sort of know how to do deals on two different probably MLS is I don’t know if it’s the same Oh, it’s probably the
Sarah Dewulf 12:20 same MLS luckily, it’s the same MLS Oh, thank
D.J. Paris 12:22 goodness, that makes it easier. But you know, I want to tell you, you did 117 sales last year. That is insane. In the best possible compliment. I could give somebody you knocked out almost 40 million in production. And this is what you did yourself, which is crazy. Let’s talk about how you did that. Yes, you had a father, a great mentor, wonderful realtor. And you learned and developed your skills. But most people who even come from a family that was in real estate, they don’t do 117 sales in a year. So what’s your secret? Not that there’s a secret? What’s your I hate to say that word? What’s the what’s your strategy?
Sarah Dewulf 13:05 What works? Yeah, it’s been so I, I had systems in place when I first started that I’ve tried to tweak over the years, as Sharan SIRVA says, just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean that it’s working right now. So I’ve advertised I used to advertise on Zillow that 10 years ago, that was huge for me, and I had a ton of customers come on clients come in that way. Now, I would never advertise on Zillow. So it’s little things along that I’ve just tried to tweak and get better. I should note that I also had a baby last year. And with that being said, I have an incredibly supportive husband and family and mom. And to which none of this would be possible without all of them. So it’s not just me. But I really to think two big things that my dad instilled in me is to create raving fans, and that customer service is a lost art. And I always remember when I go to a hotel and they go above and beyond maybe it’s my birthday, and there’s a bottle of champagne in the room. And it’s little things like that if you do more than what the customer expects. Any a lot. I shouldn’t say anyone but most people could be a realtor. It’s a lot harder than I think what people think. And it’s hard to grow your business and I also don’t think that people sit down and say okay, this is my business. I’m not just selling real estate, I’m I’m creating a business and I’m in charge of that.
D.J. Paris 14:31 I’m the business as opposed to in the in the businesses, all the stuff I need to do now my clients my prospecting all of the activities, and then on the businesses. Okay, let’s take a step back and look at this as a business owner. Where are their inefficiencies? Where can I delegate How can I make this whole process? All these processes run smoother?
Sarah Dewulf 14:50 Yes, yes. And I guess it’s it’s been interesting from 2010 to now seeing the difference in the market and in the Quad Cities we’re lucky because We don’t see these big huge drops in prices. We’ve, we’ve been consistent as far as equity goes. And so that helps. But it’s also not a big, it’s not a huge town like Chicago, but with Iowa and Illinois, we’ve got quite a few people. So it, I guess it’s just it’s important to look at your business and see what’s working and what’s not working and always be tweaking those systems. I think that oh, God, no. I said, when I started in your, you don’t have a lot of clients, and I was 23. And so a lot of my friends weren’t quite buying houses yet. And there’s things that I know that I did, right. And there’s, I guess, advice that I have that I should have done, I should have been working on Google reviews from day one I can’t
D.J. Paris 15:48 have, let’s pause for a second. So I want to I want to step in with this because we have about 800, just under 800 agents at our firm. And we didn’t do much with Google reviews up until about maybe three years ago. And now what we do is we send a the opportunity to do a Google review to every one of our broker or every one of our agents clients. So that we, you know, we, we just say, Hey, let us know what you thought of your realtor. And, and we went from having almost almost no reviews to now we have I think six or 700. It’s never too late to start everyone this can work.
Sarah Dewulf 16:23 This, this is a good story. So I had at my previous brokerage, they use testimonial tree. And when I switched, I lost all of those. So I went to my Google page. And I think I had 11 reviews, which is absolutely ridiculous for doing this for 13 years. So I knew I needed to do something and quick. So I have always been a believer in mailings and not the traditional postcard that people are just going to throw in the trash. I tried to stick to maybe three or four quarterly, something that they’re going to keep on their refrigerator. So in Iowa, we don’t have a professional football team. So the Hawkeyes are everybody cheers for the hot guys, or they should. So I send out the football magnet. And then I’m top of mind on their refrigerator all season long. I’ve send out grocery magnets, all kinds of just different things. But one thing that I did recently is I needed Google reviews. So I sent out something saying I’m celebrating 13 years in business. Thank you for all your support, I’m going to be giving away. I think I did a solo stove, a pizza oven, a Blackstone kind of some cool things that I spent $1,500. But gifts. Yeah, I sent it to my mailing list, which is about 500 people. It’s past clients, but it’s also just my sphere of influence. And I got 72 Google reviews. So that yes, and so in my clients were so excited. They they wrote the review, which probably didn’t take more than a minute. And when we drew their name, we sent anyone that filled one out, we sent even if it’s a $10 gift card or ice cream or something, they got something. But it was a good way to quickly grow those Google reviews because reviews are so important. And
D.J. Paris 18:02 everyone’s going to Google you even if they’re your closest friends, they’re still going to Google you just because they want to see how you do or what other what other clients think about you. And Google is obviously top of the mountain for for reviews. I would say Zillow is probably number two for where people find reviews. So yes, it’s a great idea. And it also helps with SEO, local SEO, in particular, meaning showing up on web searches when people are searching for realtors in their area. Google, you know can make a general assumption that if somebody’s got hundreds and hundreds of five star reviews, odds are they’re probably a pretty decent search result to serve up to to a consumer who’s looking. So yes, Google, my business is the name of the platform, or I think they changed the amount of things just Google business. But anyway, get yourself on Google. Well, I want to talk about referrals, because well, I want to talk about something that leads to referrals. You said, going above and beyond. Can you give us a couple of examples of ways in which you do that, that maybe you think not every agent does. Sure.
Sarah Dewulf 19:08 So most people don’t buy and sell houses every day. So a lot of times, especially with first time homebuyers, they’re intimidated and really don’t know what to do. So I it’s amazing to me how many agents don’t do buyer’s consultations, and that is a must for me. So when someone calls and they’re ready to buy a house, whether it’s their first house or their 10th house, we sit down to talk about their goals. I give expectations on the market, what’s what to expect. And if you do an inspection and you want to ask for something, please know that amends the contract. So we don’t want to ask for something small. Because a lot of times buyers want to renegotiate or whatever it ends up being so I do different checkpoints through the process with them. We start with our buyer’s consultation. Assuming they’re already pre approved, we’ll start shopping for houses. As we’re shopping. I’m pointing out things I’m certainly not an inspector but I Do a lot of inspections. So I can say, hey, this might come up, just be prepared, then will I have a full time assistant shout out Carrie, I could not do this without her. She is amazing. And so she does different checkpoints. Like when we get closer to closing, it’s Hey, Sarah wanted me to remind you to switch utilities. And it’s links to all the utilities, even internet cable all those things, or and then two weeks after closing, we send out an email saying, hey, just a reminder, make sure you sign up for that homestead tax credit. So I try to just make the process as simple as possible for them. But also, not too I don’t, I’ve never looked at my business as transactional. I’ve always just said yes to everything. And I think that that is, in part a big, I guess it’s a big part of my success, I see a lot of new agents that get so caught up in price point. And I don’t want to go show that $60,000 house. Well, the person that’s buying the $60,000 House has family and friends. And if you can create a raving fan, like my dad said, they’re gonna tell all their friends and family what a great experience they had with you. So that’s been really important to me is how do I make sure that my buyers and sellers have the best experience and that I’m giving them best case scenario, worst case scenario, and enough information for them to make an informed decision.
D.J. Paris 21:20 So right now the market is thank you for all of that, by the way, um, that was all just exactly the way I feel about what Realtors ought to do for customer service. And going above above and beyond is, it’s it’s it’s what it’s I think M Scott Peck wrote, it’s never crowded along the extra mile or someone wrote that book. But it’s, he’s he’s right, it’s literally not that crowded on the extra mile. And it doesn’t mean you have to, you know, sprint a mile for somebody, it does not mean that it just means going a little bit beyond what they would expect. You know, it’s as simple as just knowing what’s going on in your clients lives and reaching out to them from time to time to check in on them and ask about their kids or, you know, whatever they’re dealing with as a family or business. But it is the market has shifted. So we have interest rates in the eights at this point. If you’re lucky in the high sevens, and you know, there’s the vast majority of homeowners in this country have a under a 4% mortgage at this point. In fact, like, I think it’s like 90% have under a 4% mortgage. So there’s not a big incentive for people to move unless they have to. So I’m curious about what you’re doing to stay positive, stay productive. And just, you know, keep your business chugging along. Right now.
Sarah Dewulf 22:40 Yeah. Social media, I think is our biggest tool as agents. And I’ll get into a little bit on well, with social media, I think that it is the most important thing that we can be posting to, and people get so caught up in rates. And obviously, it’s very impactful into our market. But usually what I tell people when they get nervous about it is if you’re comfortable with the payment, the interest rate shouldn’t matter too much. And people sign up for 27% Credit cards every day. So if you lost the house, that is a great point. So if you love the house, and you can afford it, buy it
D.J. Paris 23:16 right away. Don’t sign up for 27% credit cards, everybody.
Sarah Dewulf 23:20 Especially when you’re buying a house. Yes, yes.
D.J. Paris 23:23 And if you are somebody that doesn’t pay their entire balance off every month, then yes, do not say. But yes, sir. So absolutely right. You’re right, the rate isn’t that important. But what the rate can do is still drive people away. Right? So you know that the rate isn’t that isn’t as relevant. But the consumer might feel like, Oh, I missed the boat a couple years ago, I could have gotten in for 2.9. So what is your does that happen? Do you do come across people like that?
Sarah Dewulf 23:50 Oh, yeah, constantly. And a lot of people sometimes it doesn’t make sense for them to move right now. If if it’s going to be a lateral move to a small, even a smaller house based on a 2.9% interest rate, then we just pause it. It. I guess for me, it’s the way that I’ve kept things moving is I try to remind people to not get their local real estate advice from the news. A news is going to talk about its doomsday and houses aren’t selling and that isn’t true at all, we still very much are in an inventory issue, at least in Iowa and Illinois and the Quad Cities. So things are selling really quickly. So one thing that I’ve done well for 13 years is every Tuesday I send out expired letters. So I go through the last seven days of expired listings. And we know those people want to sell their house or they wouldn’t have put it for sale. And sometimes circumstances change. But I would say that i i get i don’t know two to four listings a year from that. And a lot of times it’s just they picked they just called any agent and maybe didn’t have a good experience or maybe their house just wasn’t marketed for Not really. But to me in this market, at least here, everything is selling. So an expired listing is a really good way to get a new listing. So I started that 13 years ago, and it still works. That’s
D.J. Paris 25:12 amazing. So So I want to I want to break this down for anyone who’s not familiar with what expireds are. So these are obviously listings that have expired and there are services that you can subscribe to, for really very inexpensive pricing that will get that will serve you up daily, here are the expires or you can obviously look on your your MLS system and set up searches for that. But it’s the law, a lot of companies will provide these, you know, these daily leads to you. The problem is they sell those leads to lots of different agents. And so what Sarah’s doing, that’s very unique is typically when people hear maybe you should call expireds is that calling process, I’m gonna call the the homeowner. And that can work, it certainly can work, the challenge is that homeowners probably getting a lot of phone calls, especially when those leads become available, because when it expires, all these lead companies push it out to all of the people that are purchasing them. And so the person might get 10 phone calls in a day and you might be number eight, and they’re gonna be like, Ah, stop calling. It has nothing to do with you. So it’s Sarah does, which is really a lot softer. If she sends a mailer out do you do like a letter or postcard? What it’s just
Sarah Dewulf 26:17 a it’s just a letter. And it’s and it’s addressed right to them in handwriting, but the letter itself is tight. Yes. And so it’s it’s very simple, two, maybe three paragraphs of just a note not an obligation, we can get together kind of talk about different strategies. And it works. And I’d be happy to share it with anyone that’s listening. So email or shoot me
D.J. Paris 26:39 a message, please, please do that is so generous, we’ll provide Sarah’s contact information in the show notes so you can reach out to her to get her expired a letter, although if you’re in her market area, let’s not do that. But anywhere else, I will be teasing. There are no secrets in real estate. But we are so grateful that you shared that. And so this is really smart. And I want to break this down just a little bit further. So every Tuesday or once a week makes sense. Yeah. Every Tuesday, Sarah sees all the expires that have come in in the past week. And she sends this letter out hand writes the envelope, because what we what do we know, handwritten envelopes get opened, regular envelopes get thrown away. So handwrite your envelopes inside just just you know, a standard letter. And, and, and Sarah said she gets anywhere from two to four listings a year. Now that might not sound like a lot for sending out all those mailers. By the way, a lot of these lead companies that send you expireds can also send out mailers for you, although I don’t know if they can do the handwriting. So Sarah, Sarah does that manually, which is probably the better way to do it. But you could technically automate it if you really wanted to. But the idea is that this is still a cashflow, positive marketing expense, because, you know, if she’s sending out mailers, I’m assuming it still nets you, you know, two to four deals a year, it’s gotta pay for all of the mailers I’m guessing easily. Yes, easily. So it’s kind of a no brainer, like there’s no reason to not do it. And it doesn’t require that much work. Your assistant, I’m assuming does the majority of the heavy lifting there? Yep. Boy, that is a such a brilliant strategy, guys. She just gave you a basically something that should pay for itself. Now every market is different. And maybe if you’re in Metro Chicago, maybe that’s different than, you know, a more rural area, Sara’s not necessarily in a rural area, but a much smaller group of cities. So perhaps the you know, but I don’t know, maybe the competition is even more fierce where she has to. But regardless, it’s a heck of a good idea. And you just got to go try it for like two years. I’d say if you do it for two years, I’d be shocked. If you didn’t get and use her letter, she’s gonna give you the exact letter she uses that literally wins business. So please reach out to her that is awesome. So so now that now that things have changed with respect to where the market is, what are some of the things so in addition to expireds? You know, what are you doing for member referral perspective? Like, how are you staying in touch with your sphere.
Sarah Dewulf 29:08 So the biggest thing that I do after every closing is AD, any of the clients on social media, it’s the best way to keep in touch and to be you always want to be top of mind awareness. So when someone asks, Hey, who’s the realtor you would call? I’m number one, the biggest thing that I didn’t want to happen is that we close the transaction and they never hear from me again. And five years later, what was her name again, and I don’t want that. So I another thing that I do is if I have clients that maybe I sold the house to them five years ago and they got married, I’ll I don’t know if you know what small woods is, but it’s a it’s an online, if there’s a wedding photo, it goes in a wood frame, and it’s customized to them and you can make them any size. And so whether they live here or they live some they’ve moved away, we’ll mail that to their house and it’s probably, I don’t know, 50 or $60 maybe so it’s not the cheapest but it’s also not the most expensive, and it has the biggest income impact because it’s so emotional. It’s, oh my gosh, this is our family, it’s it’s a great thing to hang in their house.
D.J. Paris 30:09 So how do you get the float? How do you get the photo, if
Sarah Dewulf 30:13 they post it on Facebook, so
D.J. Paris 30:15 so you don’t ask for it, you just search through social media, you see if they have some sort of engagement photo, or wedding photo, or something that they seem to think is important to them. And then you take that photo, and you just do this without them even knowing and it just shows up on their door, it just shows
Sarah Dewulf 30:30 up at their door and says, Congratulations, wishing you a lifetime of happiness. And same with babies. That’s another big one. So I, the biggest blessing I think in real estate is clients that become friends. And not everyone, of course, but the majority, I would say become my friend. And it’s important to be a good friend. It’s not just real estate, but I also want to be the person that if they move here and they know no one Hey, who’s a good doctor? Where should I get my hair done? Just little things that I can maybe answer for them or give them suggestions I want to be their go to and all things real estate.
D.J. Paris 31:06 By the way, Sarah is the go to for dermatologists in her area, because I certainly am sorry, that was that was an easy joke. I just Yes. But but it is. But it is a really good point. By the way, everybody get your annual dermatologist appointment. And in fact, here’s a little pro tip, don’t leave the office before scheduling the next years, because you’re going to forget, that’s what I do every year, never leave a doctor’s office without scheduling the next appointment. Otherwise, if you’re like me, you won’t remember. But it’s really important because if I was moving to the Quad Cities, I would need a dermatologist I would need, you know, a bunch of doctors, right a general person, I might need a sports medicine person. And I wouldn’t know where to go. I mean, I guess you can look that up online, sort of, but I’d much rather have referrals. And so you want to be the I’m guessing you want to be the hub of all things. You know, service related, whether it’s real estate or not for your clients. Is that accurate? Yes,
Sarah Dewulf 32:00 yes. And mostly it’s, I want to keep the relationship going after closing. So that six months down the road, three years down the road, whatever it is, we’re still touching base the whole way through. By
D.J. Paris 32:10 the way back to the the the small woods, the small wood idea which I’m looking at it right now I pulled it up while you were talking. Sarah does this on an anniversary, but you don’t even have to do it on an anniversary like it literally could be done at any time. So it’s something that if you’re like I don’t know, when my clients anniversary is no problem, just find a picture of them, send it to them randomly, they will in fact, maybe even not on their anniversary would even be maybe more unexpected, although on their anniversary is amazing as well. But and that’s the other thing, too is everyone should know this information, you should reach out to your clients and say, hey, you know, I like to I like to know, wedding anniversary so that I can possibly, you know, send something. So if you need to get that information, you can literally just ask your clients for it. I don’t think anyone would would say I don’t want you to have that information. You want to know what the children’s ages are? You want to know, major life events stuff. So did they get a new job? Did they you know, what are they moving, obviously, is important. But, you know, these are important things. Because if if Sarah knows that somebody’s child is, you know, a junior in college or junior in high school, while they’re probably looking at colleges, or maybe you know, depending on the family, that that may be something they’re doing. So she now knows, oh, well. Maybe I could do something nice for them. You know, when she’s ready to leave for college, or whatever. The important part is she Sarah now has information she can choose to do something with, which is this is all the fun stuff of real estate too, right?
Sarah Dewulf 33:35 Yes, right? Yeah. I’m trying to think of anything. Oh, closing gifts are another big deal. I think a lot of times agents either forget or don’t want to do that. And it really kind of seals the deal for me, I feel like where I would say nine times out of 10 if they don’t already have some sort of like ring doorbell I give a ring doorbell at closing and sometimes a gift card to a local restaurant. I tried to never forget kids and dogs. So there’ll be we have a place called Freddy’s fritters here. And it’s a custom dog treat company. So we’ll throw in treats for them or ice cream for the kids something so that they know that I care about their family and I’m really excited for them on their purchase or their sale.
D.J. Paris 34:16 Yeah, I love that. Again, these are and these are things that don’t have to be necessarily expensive. They can even, you know, be free. There’s certain ways you can celebrate people, you know, the things that are important in their life. It doesn’t necessarily need to cost a lot. But it is something that most of the other service professionals in that consumers life are not even going to know about. They’re not going to know about their anniversary, they’re not going to know about their birthdays, unless they happen to know and they get that automated email saying happy birthday. This is a real opportunity to to really be able to touch somebody like Sarah was saying at a deep emotional level and find out what’s important to them and and be be there to to to celebrate with them and support them when they need it. I So let’s talk about the basics. So what are the basics of building a real estate business? Because I totally agree that this is the year to return to fundamentals. Because we know we can’t control the market. We can’t control inventory, we can’t control rates, but we can control our activity. In fact, it’s about the only thing we can control. So what are you doing right now just to stay busy? Yeah.
Sarah Dewulf 35:23 So I tried to just do the same things that I’ve been doing for the last 13 years. And it’s not rocket science. And it’s, I think social media is so great, because it’s an easy way to stay top of mind. But it’s not everything. And I see a lot of agents or lenders or whatever it is, that are maybe all in on social media, and they are killing it, and videos. And that’s all important, but then their sales don’t reflect that. So it can’t be the only piece but it’s a big piece. So I tried to just post stories and videos and different posts that are engaging, and not just something that, oh, there’s a boring house that nobody really cares about. So I guess it’s as a new agent, some things that I would have done differently, aside from the Google reviews is, I have a mailing list that’s on an Excel spreadsheet, but I don’t have an email list. And that is ridiculous. I should. And so that’s something that I’m going to be working on and something that I wish that I would have done 13 years ago, email is not going away, of course. And so I think it’s a big tool and a way to stay connected with people. So that’s a goal of mine that I’m working on. Another thing for new agents is maybe you’re not super busy right now. And I have some friends that got in the business and 2020. And it was easy. They just answered their phone. And we’re selling houses because it was such a crazy market. Well, now it’s harder again. And so I would join as many different networking groups, volunteer opportunities, it’s all about at the beginning, it’s not really what you know, because you don’t know a lot. It’s who you know. And so how do you pair those two things with who I know, while I’m learning everything I should know. Another really important thing I think, is learning the contracts inside out forward backwards, because I remember when I was 24, and a very seasoned agent would challenge me on something in the contract. And I knew the answer. And I knew I was right. But it’s hard to have that confidence. So the more you can know the contract and say, Okay, well, page four, paragraph nine talks about inspections. And you might want to go back and read that it feels a lot better when you know it, and you know it for sure. So learning the forums, I joined our board early on on the forms committee for that reason, so that I could see how other agents were interpreting something. And every form is, you know, different interpretation by different attorneys or whoever it is. But I think the more that you can know the basics, the better off you’ll be in the long run. I want
D.J. Paris 37:48 to I want to talk about this. So Sarah is talking about joining her volunteering, serving on at her local association. You can also serve at the state level, and of course, at the national level. But the first place that people typically start is their local level. And so they reach out to their local association say, Hey, do you have any committees that maybe need need some members, and you can apply? I know that here in Chicago for the association I belong to is 22 different committees, lots of opportunities there. And in addition to obviously, serving the industry and and learning more about the contracts. What also happens, and I’m curious to get Sarah’s opinion is you also get to meet all of the other really great people in the industry who are wanting to be of service, you get to develop relationships with them. And that only will help you as you continue to do deals, because you may run across a deal with that person. And, you know, again, just having a good connection with them being similarly minded being like, Hey, I volunteer with association with you. That is that is going to help influence indirectly, you know, a deal.
Sarah Dewulf 38:53 Yes, yeah, it’s I think it’s important to meet as many agents as you can when you’re new. We as as an agent, that’s now been 13 years, there’s constantly new agents, and especially in the last couple of years. So not all of them make it and I think it’s just the more people you can know, the better just from a sphere of influence standpoint.
D.J. Paris 39:14 Yeah, I agree. I wanted to ask about social media. Just want one thing about it, because I know it’s important to you, you you don’t over focus on it, which some agents do. But you mentioned posting content that was that was helpful. What what types of content whether it’s video or static posts, are you posting is it more about your life and what you deal with as a non realtor? Or is it more real estate related? Or is it a mix?
Sarah Dewulf 39:38 Mostly real estate related? I do try to throw in my kids every once in a while or a funny story of something that happened just to make it personal. I think people sometimes you can get on social media and that’s all just real estate, real estate real estate. And when someone Google’s Saratoga realtor, I want them to know me and so I’m trying to get better at video and that’s kind of The goal for this coming year is to really focus more on just being out there for people to see me more not necessarily the houses that I’m selling, even though that’s important as well. Great.
D.J. Paris 40:09 So that makes sense. And I also want to highlight this point is Sarah is a top top producer, and doesn’t have an email list. So guys, you don’t have to be up, you don’t have to be, you won’t be perfect. There’s always going to be systems that aren’t in place. And Sarah’s like, hey, 13 years, I don’t really have a good email list. But that’s a really easily solvable problem, right? She can literally just contact every single person she’s ever done a deal with and said, Hey, I’m just updating my records. I need that. So obviously, every problem has a solution. But, guys, I also want you to know that people at the very top they have issues too. There’s there’s things Sara is is a crazy success. And yet she doesn’t have an email list. And I’m not I’m not doing saying that Deepika. I’m saying that to humanize her that
Sarah Dewulf 40:53 Yes, right. Yes. Every but not all perfect. Yeah. And it’s always workable. Yeah. It’s always worth taking things and scaling. And
D.J. Paris 41:02 yeah, and this is where when you take a step back in your business, and you say, Oh, there’s the thing I don’t have, I need to work on that, as opposed to just all the things flying at you customer service related during the day, that eat up a lot of time. And then it’s hard to start take a step back, so important to look at all of your systems. What wanted to get one more idea. So if you were a brand new agent, today, you talked about social media talked about obviously, building up your sphere, what would you tell a new agent today to do join
Sarah Dewulf 41:38 as many different volunteer opportunities that you can. And that’s mostly because in the beginning, you might not be on appointments all day long, you’re at the office kind of okay, twiddling your thumbs on what to do. So it’s a way to get out there. Because when you’re new, you might not have the money to donate, but you have your time. And so that that is the big thing that I would do is join as many different committees or volunteer things that you can Google reviews, you want them to come from your clients and things. But even if you need to get a few from your boyfriend, or your best friend, do it. So those two things, and then I, from my own personal experience, I would do an email list right away, as well as the mailing list. And that’s been big for me from the beginning as my mailing list.
D.J. Paris 42:23 Yeah, well, we’re talking about branding, we’re talking about doing repeatable actions that will over time, you know, get your clients to associate you with real estate, especially if you’re newer. And you know, it’s easy to poopoo, the refrigerator magnet idea just because it’s such an old idea. However, if you do think about it, you want something that they’re going to see constantly with your name on it. And that is about as good of a gift as any, because everyone’s in the fridge all day long. So this idea of seeing your name constantly, is it really is a good idea that, you know, not everyone puts fridge magnets up. But for people who do they want, they will see your name. And that’s a good thing. And
Sarah Dewulf 43:05 I’ve done it for so long now that every fall and when it gets to my clients are like, where is it? When’s it coming? And then they post it, and then I share it. And so it’s just kind of a fun thing that ends up paying for itself easily.
D.J. Paris 43:16 Yeah, I mean, the downside is you’ll have to do with the rest of your career. The upside is it works. Yes, brilliant, brilliant idea. Well, I think this is a great presenter, you’ve given us so much good information. I think this is a great place to wrap up, by the way. If it is are you looking to add any members to your team currently? Or are you happy with with your production and to kind of just work on your own stuff?
Sarah Dewulf 43:43 Yeah, yeah, no, we, we opened a local real office called Buy, Sell build Quad Cities. And so we are looking to grow that as well as real. And I’m happy to just answer any questions if I can help anyone. So reach out to me send me a message on Instagram or an email, I’ll respond and send you the expired listing or anything that I can help with.
D.J. Paris 44:03 That’s awesome. And if you’re an agent in the in the Quad Cities, and it maybe isn’t getting the help that they deserve, or need real is an awesome company, too. I’m a big fan of theirs and they have some cool incentives that other firms typically don’t have. So give reach out to Sarah. She will have all of her contact information in the show notes and also please follow her on Instagram, which is Sarah dewulf que si realtor again, that’ll be in the show notes as well and visit her website, which is a sorry, just lost your website. I’m sorry. It’s
Sarah Dewulf 44:34 okay. It’s Sarah dewulf realtor.com.
D.J. Paris 44:36 That’s it. Sarah Wolf realtor.com on behalf of our audience, Sarah, thank you so much for your time today. You are an really impressive agent, mother and business owner affects multiple different businesses. And so it’s just amazing how you’re able to do all of that, and also be of service to our podcast. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Cute. Yeah. And on behalf of Sarah and myself, we want to thank our audience we just Yeah, thanks. We just crossed over the 500 episode Mark, we are so grateful to all of you. Please tell a friend think of one other agent that could use some of this information right now and send them a link to this episode, we would appreciate it and also, leave us a review wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Let us know what you think of the show good and bad so that we can continue to improve ourselves. It helps us out a lot. All right, Sarah, thank you so much. Thank you to everyone listening, and we will see on the next episode. Thank you
Why Buyers Should Purchase During High Interest Rates • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Oct 30, 2023
Welcome to the October episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses the importance of delegation, how to make it a success and how this will help you grow your business. Joel talks about events he organizes every month. Joel also discusses rates and what he’s doing to stay busy during this period. Last, Joel talks about partnering with him and discusses his weekly newsletter.
D.J. Paris 0:00 There’s a strong argument to be made for buying a home, even during a high interest rate environment. We’re going to talk about why stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide. I’m your host through the show. And today once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel Schaub from guaranteed rate now, Joel is the vice president of lending guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction last year alone, Joe gave back over four over $300,000 in closing costs to his buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, there’s 400,000 loan officers in the country and Joel is ranked number 137 out of that 400,000 Incredible last year. He did his highest amount of or he actually did 126 million last year. But let’s talk about this year because this is the most impressive number I really want you to focus on. Because this is really why I have Joel on the show. So we know that this is a tough year. This is 2023 We’re wrapping up. This is one of the toughest years for anyone in the real estate industry. Lenders, of course included. But this year alone, he’s closed 216 purchase transactions for just shy of $93 million. So when we’re talking to Joel that I want really us to distill what he’s doing, that is enabling him to continue to have success when so many loan officers and so many real estate agents are struggling. Joel has the secrets. We’re going to listen to him today. But if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. He’s my loan officer as well. And I would not hesitate to refer him to everybody I know. So please consider that my personal recommendation, Joel can be reached at joel@rate.com J oel@rate.com. And email him because he has this great weekly newsletter where he tells you what’s going on in the world of lending so that you can better communicate that to your clients. You don’t have to read everything he does the reading tells you exactly what you need to know. But please reach out to him. You can also send them a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joe Joel Schaub, and
Joel Schaub 3:53 thanks again DJ for having me on. And it’s funny when you were saying those numbers right, like we were talking before we got on the air here in terms of just everyone has lower production and you can busy regardless of how many deals you’re doing. It’s it’s about making sure that you stay active and keep your mind positive. So we’re gonna go through all the things that I’m doing and I’m an open book and I’m really excited to be here again, I
D.J. Paris 4:19 want to I want to ask you a question because this I think I’m going through this process myself we have a consultant that we’ve hired and you know, I we’ve never really been through this but he is having me go through a time value of money exercise to figure out what my what I’m currently making per hour, you know, as a I’m not an hourly employee, of course, but
Joel Schaub 4:39 wait a minute. Oh my gosh, I want to know about this. That sounds so
D.J. Paris 4:44 good. Yeah, cuz to know what my time is worth such that then I can say okay, I have these tasks to do. And is this something I could delegate out and actually pay somebody to do that isn’t you know, where I should be focusing my energy because it’s maybe not worth my time, or it’s something that just bogs me down to you, I feel, have really understood this and and really leveraged, you know, you have you have a great team in place you are the figurehead, you are the one in it, the front of everything. But I also know you’re really great at delegating out so that you can be in front of your clients as much as possible. So I would love to just sort of get a little bit of understanding of how you know, this is something you should do versus something you could you know, have someone else do because your time is better spent, you know, doing other things. When
Joel Schaub 5:34 I was first starting out, I wanted to control every part of the process, right? Like, that’s what I thought my value was, is that I can control it from beginning to end. And then I realized I am such a better delegator, I can absolutely hire somebody to do the job, I can train them. And I can make sure that they can do the job 80% as good as I can, so that I can move on and actually make a lot more money per hour, and I pay my people well. And the number one thing you want to do is try to replace yourself. And that’s the thing that I have done and built the team by not firing people that are exactly like you finding what your weaknesses are, and then hiring people to do those jobs for you.
D.J. Paris 6:17 Yeah, you really have threaded the needle so well with that, because it is a balancing act. Because the fear, of course, and I really I’m probably speaking for everyone who’s listening is that if I don’t control every part of the process, number one, like you said, maybe they are the person won’t do it as well. And maybe my clients might think, well, Joel should be doing everything. And the funny thing is you do almost everything because I’ve been your client and I know what the experience is like it is not, you are not just the figurehead who is sitting on top of a mountain that can’t be reached you are personally involved in I don’t think that’s how it works with all the big loan officer teams. I know. In fact, I know it isn’t. I know there are teams, where the person who is the face of it isn’t really interfacing with clients at all at all. And you have really figured out how to still have those great client relationships and run a business and a team. So I really applaud you for that. It’s I don’t know of any other team that quite does it the way you do it. So it’s amazing, I
Joel Schaub 7:17 want to share it. You’re exactly right. So if you’re if you’re a real estate agent right now, and I don’t know the production, right, and let’s say that you’re right now doing $10 million a year of production, and you want to take it to the next level, the one hire that you need to have is you need to be able to duplicate yourself and have somebody replying to your emails as you Okay. And so what I have here is I have a director of business operations, who’s in my inbox all day long. And he runs me like a puppet for real, like, make sure that my calendar is set, returns the phone calls to clients, and schedules everything as well as replying as me and setting up my day, my week and my month. And at first I thought this would never work. And now for two years, having somebody be you in your inbox completely frees you up to go out and get one more listing, go out and work with one more buyer. Your value isn’t replying to emails, or even answering the phone, I get the phone calls that are needed to me, but the buyers and the sellers really feel connected because somebody’s always answering and replying quickly. And
D.J. Paris 8:27 you know, the thing that I admire most I know this is sounding like this is a big commercial for you. But it is because of course I feel this this authentically towards you is this, this idea of delegation is really, really interesting to me, because what you what you seem to be able to do more effectively than a lot of other agents is and other loan officers is really understanding where you’re best suited. So you’re talking about delegating out, you outwork everyone in your in the in the activities that are generating the most income for you. So I know for example, you are just constantly at events and I think this is a great thing. You’re either hosting events or you’re going to events, almost, you know, most nights of the month really I know how hard you work and I think Realtors could really take a page out of your book and say hey, this this is a great way to stay in front of in your case realtors who can help bring business to you. And in a realtors case clients that could you know, obviously become become their clients. So can you talk a little bit about events and how you think about them and
Joel Schaub 9:35 I have a 30 day period. It’s not untypical that I’m doing 20 different events in any given month like today’s as we’re taping this I’ve had three events in the last two days, and they can range from small events where I’m helping real estate agents grow their business simple, happy hours, flower making events putting bouquets together. Wine tea He’s doing events, or right now one of the lowest cost events that we can do as a real estate agent is hiring a photographer right now and doing the fall and winter photos in advance. Right? Yeah. So this Saturday, I’m actually we have a Santa Claus, it’s a lot cheaper to get a Santa Claus in October, DJ. Yeah, that’s
D.J. Paris 10:19 a good idea. What a smart idea. For real. So
Joel Schaub 10:23 we have a Santa Claus. And we have a real estate agent. And so the Santa Claus for a three hour period is literally $250. And then we’re hiring a photographer, all in this event cost about $500. In this real estate agent has 60 families coming, they’re going to get their photos taken. And the agent then sends high quality photos via email, so that their clients can do a Christmas card, Hanukkah card, New Year’s card. And it’s so inexpensive. But agents don’t know how to do that. So partner with a lender that can actually split that cost with you. And that’s one great thing that we’re doing. And it’s just all the way up and down the spectrum from low cost to high cost. There’s things that we’re doing right now to grow the business. Six months out of the year, I’m doing 20 events per month.
D.J. Paris 11:13 I don’t know how you find the energy and the stamina for it, but you do and you’re great at it. And that’s what everyone in the local market knows Joel because he is so out in the public. You know, he is he is he is immersed in, in the, in our industry. And that is where you need to be. Let’s talk about rates. So rates are, you know, right now approaching the eights. At the time of this taping, we know it’s it’s a, you know, not the Preferred rates that anyone listening would like to present to their clients, of course, but this is where we’re at. So you are still going strong, you are still doing well. So I am excited to talk to you, because everyone else tells me Oh, it’s just uh, everyone’s sort of in the doldrums about it right now, but you are not. So I’m excited to learn what you are doing to stay busy and what you might recommend to our agents.
Joel Schaub 12:05 All right to either rates right now you’re exactly right DJ, as of today, they’re on a fast track towards 8%. And a lot of clients right now without the perfect credit scenario are well into the percents on a standard 30 year fixed rate mortgage, if they have any lower credit scores or lower down payments or unique properties, like a two to four unit building or an investment property. Okay, a perfect credit score, credit score, I should say borrower with 20 or 25% down, can absolutely get rates in the low to the mid 70s Right now, with minimal discount points. But that’s a far cry from even a year ago when they were in the low sixes okay. And so that’s kind of the atmosphere that we’re playing in right now. And so I focus on education, and you as an agent shouldn’t be doing the same thing. I have a hot take right now that I’ve been telling a lot of people and I’d be curious if you want me to share this hot take
D.J. Paris 13:07 all right, break breaking a break. We’re not breaking news, but we’re gonna we’re gonna dramatic pause for the hot take. Go ahead.
Joel Schaub 13:15 Well, this week, I’ve talked to several clients. And they were shocked when I said this. And once I explained it, they said, Wow, that makes sense. And two of them actually went under contract this week after going through this. So I said, now that you’re out looking at places with so and so realtor, I really hope that we actually go under contract before rates drop, I really hope rates stay as high as they are right now before you find the place. What do you mean I go,
D.J. Paris 13:44 so I don’t have any effects in front of you, but to be a screeching record.
Joel Schaub 13:51 And this is the truth. As soon as rates drop, if all of a sudden tomorrow rates were at five and a half percent, we’re gonna have a flood of buyers back into the market. And I explained, we had this I was living through it in 2020 and 2021. And most of the people that are listening here, if you were in the business, you remember how great it was, but it was terrible. Okay, terrible
D.J. Paris 14:11 for buyers. It was the hardest thing ever.
Joel Schaub 14:14 So follow me here, right? I said if we buy this home right now, and the rates are in the high sevens and good for you that you can afford it. Good for you that you have the downpayment, there are so many people that I talked to that actually unfortunately can’t qualify right now. And if they’re on the sidelines, you think it’s just one or two people. It’s 1000s of people that have this brilliant idea to wait for rates to come down. Okay, so if you buy that home at $500,000 today and rates are in the high sevens, as soon as those rates are in the fives, somebody’s gonna be willing to pay 50 grand more for your home because the payment is going to be so much less. And it’s true. And I don’t know where this is going to end DJ but this is absolutely what the next step in real estate is going to be rates We’ll be coming down. And that’s going to drive values up. And here’s why I know it to be the case here for real. One second, there’s no more inventory, we still aren’t getting new construction up to the level that’s going to put so much excess inventory into the market. And two, we don’t have any sellers that are really dying to trade their 2% or 3% rates in. So there’s not going to be a massive inventory for a while.
D.J. Paris 15:29 It makes all the sense in the world. And then so you you’re basically buying high but what you’re also you’re not buying high, the rate is just high, you’re not necessarily overpaying would that’s the important thing to remember, we always think about rates, we don’t think about prices much. And price and rates are inversely related. So they are negatively correlated, as one goes up, the other typically goes down. So the reality of it is Joel is is so right. And this is a wonderful perspective and paradigm shift to give to your clients to say, Hey, would you rather compete with 50 other buyers right now who can get in? We’re not right now. But what if rates were to come down right now? Would you want to compete with 50 people, that’s what it was like a couple years ago. And remember, people were buying sight unseen. They were waiving all sorts of contingencies. They were waiving inspections, they were just sort of throwing caution to the wind, because rates were so low, and a lot of people overpaid. And so let’s say you buy a place now and it’s in the sevens or the eights, whatever the rate may be less competition, you’re probably going to pay less. And when rates drop, guess what you get to do refinance. Take
Joel Schaub 16:36 a perfect example, let’s just even go lower in price, because a lot of my stuff that I help clients with aren’t these multimillion dollar homes, everybody thinks, oh, I don’t want to bother you with a $300,000 transaction. But that’s the bread and butter. These are the people that listen to me, they take advice, I can coach them on the next steps for homeownership. If you buy a home today at $300,000, and we put down 30 grand, when rates drop, your value will be 30 grand more, it’s going to go up people will pay more for home, if their payment is based on a 5% rate than an 8% rate. Okay, so now we put in 30 grand, and in a couple of years, we’re going to have 60 or 70 grand worth of equity. I’m not saying we sell but that is the strategy. That is what’s going to happen. So if you’re a realtor right now, and you have buyers saying I want to wait, you say well, yeah, I want to wait till rates come down to but listen to this. If you bought a home now and we put a low down payment. As soon as rates drop, you’re going to have a major increase in value to your place. That’s going to help you it’s a different talking point than what the media is talking about how bad rates are right now, okay? Be the bearer of good news.
D.J. Paris 17:51 You know, I want to really encourage everybody to, you know, if this didn’t just change your perspective, at least a little bit. By the way, I’ll give you a stat that changed my perspective yesterday, I’m going to add this in it’s a little, in addition to what we’re talking about now has nothing to do with this. But I’m going to give you an example. So this really changed my my mind yesterday. And then what you just said really helped me feel better about the current conditions of the market as well. So I’m going to give you guys something that I learned on top of what Joel just said. So we know that longevity, right? We know that the average age, at least in America, people live typically into their early 70s. That’s kind of when the actuary tables say, you know, we’re going to start expiring women live a little bit longer than men, but it’s early 70s to mid 70s. However, that’s not actually the really the true numbers. The real number is if you make it to 40, this is just blew my mind, if you make it to 40. You actually now your life expectancy is in the later 80s, which is really cool. And I heard that and it made me feel better. Because now all of a sudden, it changed my perspective. I went, Oh, I got a little bit probably a little bit more time left. And this is what Joel just did. He basically gave you a lifeline. He gave you some information that you can go out there in the world. And actually, it’s not just a rosy sort of, hey, this is the nice side of looking at high rates. It’s actually logical, and it makes sense. So please do me a favor, take this episode. Anyone who’s bummed out that you know, that’s a realtor or a loan officer who’s also struggling, please send this to them. This is what everybody needs to hear. So we can go out there and capture more business and get more listings and get more buyers. I
Joel Schaub 19:28 guarantee this is what’s going to happen. I don’t have the crystal ball in terms of when rates are going to drop. But I’ll reiterate this piece, if you’re buying something now, way above market rate, right we know the feds have pushed rates way too high for a reason to really stamp out inflation. So stick with me here. These rates should not be this high. They have to be this high to actually pull the inflation numbers down. If you’re buying a piece of real estate at these higher numbers, when rates come down and they will come down that property’s worth more? Okay. I don’t know, in the future, what’s going to happen? I don’t know where this all ends, but this next time period, this is truly what’s going to happen. Buy something now, in that price point that’s under a half a million, you know, it’s going to go up. Okay. That’s what’s that’s what we’re seeing.
D.J. Paris 20:17 One other question I have now I’m we’re going to switch to it to a different topic, but the same basic idea. Do first time homebuyers in your experience because you work not just with people buying or selling their second property or third, you know, they’ve worked with with loans before they have an expectation of where rates they’d like rates to be. But a first time homebuyer might not have any expectation, right? So do my question to you is do most first time homebuyers even care about the rate?
Joel Schaub 20:48 They’re very concerned with the rate? I don’t think this is the answer you’re thinking, but they really are. Because it’s one of the only ways that you feel like you have any damn control, we all know that it’s bad. Makes sense. And so like I can’t get, there’s no inventory, I can’t find the home that I want. But I’m smart, I have good credit, I have good income, I should get the best rate that’s out there. So I’m gonna go scour the internet, and I’m gonna go find the dark corners of the place that’s got the cheapest number. And that’s the wrong way to do it. But I understand the logic behind, there’s probably only one thing I can control is going out and trying to find a really cheap mortgage rate. And that’s similar to we’ve talked about this so many times before details, like, do you want discount eye surgery? Right? Right, I get in the group on for the coronary bypass surgery, or do I actually want somebody who’s done it for years. So there’s a happy medium, and I teach people all the time when they call me, I’m like, I might not be for you. I might not be the person if you’re calling 17 banks saying, What is your rate today? Are you the cheapest? There’s always somebody cheaper, right? There’s only one cheapest person. And what you were really asking is, what is the value that I’m getting working with you? And that’s what you that’s what you’re looking at?
D.J. Paris 22:05 Yeah, I mean, look, if you’ve been a realtor long enough, we know some of these discount loan shops who, you know, hey, again, as Joel said, it’s really attractive to chase rates, of course, who doesn’t want the lowest rate, but the rate itself is just one little piece of the entire puzzle. And the real, the real challenge is, can everybody work together to actually close this deal? And a lot of times those while we all know it without saying any names, of course, we know some of these firms are not as good at doing that. And so of course, working with somebody again, just like Joel said, Do you pay? Do you want to not that Joel is necessarily more expensive, but if he is, there’s a reason for it. And it’s not because you know, he just wants, you know, more money, it’s because his value is that he can get deals closed, and he got my deal closed. He gets lots of other people’s deals closed, that are friends of mine, and everybody raves about him. Joe wanted to ask one more thing about partnering with you as an agent, because I know that you have you do partner, you do all these events? Can you talk a little bit about that. And if anyone’s listening who is looking for a partnership, maybe what what you might suggest,
Joel Schaub 23:13 after the last episode dropped, I didn’t even tell you this, I’m glad to share this with you live, I got about 40 different emails within like an hour period saying what you shared was amazing. I want to do follow up. And I’ve talked to about seven or eight people out of those 40. And really built some great friends across the United States of just agents that I’m just giving back to and just having real conversations with and we’re actually closing transactions in the company that I work for is in all 50 states. But they always say, Hey, do you work in Florida? Or do you work in Texas? And the answer is always yes. And right now, it’s it’s important to have somebody that’s local for you. And if you don’t have somebody that’s local, really what you want is a partner that wants to contribute money. And this is where I’m gonna get in trouble. Okay, loan officers hate me saying this. But I’m one of the most generous people, I want to find ways to give back to my agents here in Chicago. And that’s where I live. And that’s where 85% of my business DJ is in the downtown Chicago market. So wherever you’re at, in the United States, I can teach and I can help and I can coach but the one thing that I can do is even if you don’t send any business to me, I want to get you on the newsletter so that you can get those bite size pieces of information that you can share with your buyers or sellers to elevate your game. You know without the jargon, what the hell’s going on, right so we can teach you every single week something new, and if it just gives one more seller to you, or gives one more buyer to you. That’s that’s the reason you tune in to DJ show.
D.J. Paris 24:57 Great, well, the easiest way to do that to get on his mailing list. And I do encourage you to do that. Because every week usually Wednesdays, his team sends that out. And it is chock full of information, little bite sized pieces that you can use. Like what Joel was saying today about, hey, he actually, his hot take was, it’s actually possibly a really good time to buy right now that will stop people dead in their tracks right now. Oh, it is why, right. Joel is gonna give you well, he just said it today. But he also said every Wednesday or Thursday, when he sends that out, you get exactly that kind of information, Wouldn’t you love to be able to call everybody you know, who’s on the sidelines right now and say, hey, look, I know, you might feel that it’s not a good time, I would like to talk a little bit more about why it might be a good time to buy. I know if somebody said that to me, I would go I’m my ears are open, tell me. And that’s what the kind of stuff that Joel sends out to you. And it’s really, really good stuff. So please, please, I encourage everybody listening, get on his newsletter, and of course, also reach out to him. joel@rate.com is the best place to do that. Joel, any parting words? Maybe something, you are such a positive person, you always sort of are looking for the opportunities and the challenges and you get excited about challenges. What how do you stay? How do you stay positive through difficult times?
Joel Schaub 26:18 Well, there’s a lot of ways is a positive right now. And I’ll share a story of just somebody that I was speaking to that was down and I asked this simple question. And I’m going to ask it to your audience to do you just have that listing right now that just isn’t selling. It’s just sitting there and you’re like, What the hell do I need to do to get a buyer into this home, right, so it’s sitting on the market, I want to go through a strategy right now that I did a month ago. And within one week, it was under contract, and they’ve already closed this deal. So before we start going through and doing another price reduction, let’s just talk about the to one rate by down strategy, and how we can get the seller credit to really boost the potential for buyers to come in and buy this place. So let’s set the groundwork. Here we have a listing. And this listing is a $500,000 single family home, and it is not selling. And we have a choice, do we make a reduction to 475. And hopefully that moves the needle DJ. And as I was talking to the client, the agent about what clients would come in and how that move the needle, I broke down the numbers. So I’m going to do that here and just talk about how I $500,000 sale, going down to 475. What that does, and how there’s a much better way. And once you know this better way, there’s going to be it’s going to be music to your ears, okay, so I broke it down like this, I said at $475,000. It’s a $25,000 difference. And that $25,000 At today’s rates, great. That does mean the buyer has about $150 less per month, that’s great. $150 less per month might be enough to get that buyer in the door, but I had a better solution. And I know a lot of you already know this, but let’s go through the specifics of how it helps you and helps the seller. So I suggested, let’s get on social media. And let’s promote that the seller is offering to buy down any buyer that comes in for the next two years and get their rates into the fives and sixes. And they knew about the strategy, they just didn’t know how to implement a to one rate by down. Okay, so remember, this is what we’re talking about. So I told them to specifically get on and we did a video together this is on a $500,000 place, the payment is $644 a month less than the home next door that was priced higher. Okay, so all we had to do is offer a 3% seller credit. And the payment now was over $600 A month less for that first year for the buyer coming in. And so if you’re a listing agent, and you have a place before we do a price reduction, let’s offer the buyer a 3% seller credit so that their lender can do a to one rate by down and I know that was wordy, but that’s how we do it. And it really worked. They had a full price offer there was another buyer that had just lost out on deal after deal and with rates going up they didn’t think they were gonna buy it it made all the difference in the world. So it’s a really successful way to do this.
D.J. Paris 29:41 Yeah, so basically how that works is the seller is buying down the rate so that the buyer feels better about the rate that they’re paying the monthly payment the buyer is doing that for two years, then it will go to you know its original rate or and of course, the person can refinance as well at that time possible. like. So this is a great strategy for sellers. And the challenge I always suspect with this is marketing it like making sure that people know that this property offers. So you were saying social media is a great place, because it’s not going to necessarily pop out of an MLS listing? Oh, by the way, this is a, you have to comb through it to find that. So do you find that that’s really effective to promote that on social media, hey, we’re doing this we’re going to be buying down the rate
Joel Schaub 30:25 it is. But it’s also really important to actually understand it, right? What is really more important than promoting it as you as an agent need to actually do some research and understand the ins and outs of what it is. So that you can effectively tell the seller as well as sell it. I know it because I was doing this back in 2007. When rates went up, then this is what developments were doing. We had big developments of condo conversions, apartments going to condos, and those condos were sitting stagnant. So the sellers were offering every incentive in the world. And that’s where we really got into buy downs back then, the last couple of years, there was no need to buy down a rate. They were in the twos and threes, right. So now that they’ve gone up, it’s come back into fashion. And most of the people talking about it don’t even know what it is. So work with somebody that actually has done it. And if you haven’t done it, do a little bit of research, go on to Google and talk type in to one rate by downs from the seller. And you’ll get a load of resources that you so once you understand it, you’ll be able to promote it better. And if Google doesn’t give you the answer, just call Joel, I’m happy to spend 10 minutes with you and just go into more detail. But you can do this, it’s a much better way than offering another price reduction because it makes the buyers payment a lot lower for a couple of years. And
D.J. Paris 31:53 a really, it’s a really cool creative thing that buyers are not going to be as familiar with. So it creates a little bit of exclusivity to the property that you may be listing. And it creates this cool little additional thing that probably 95% of the homes out there on the market don’t all have as well or maybe even high probably 99% Don’t offer that. So that is a really cool thing to just you know, it’s I almost consider it like a little hidden room at a house that’s unique and cool that you know, no other house has. So guys, you know, we want every possibility every possible option to get these homes sold. So this is a great way to attract more people that are maybe a little rate conscious at the time. So great opportunity guys reach out to Joel let’s get on his mailing list. joel@rate.com is his email, you can also reach out to him at 773-654-2049. A guaranteed rate is licensed in all 50 states. So even if you’re somewhere else, or even if you just want advice or you just want some help reach out to Joel he couldn’t be more generous with his time. It is the he is a big believer of givers get so he will always he gives to our show he gives to a lots of people. And so please don’t be shy and reach out to him. Joel on behalf of the audience want to thank thank you for being on we had covered a lot of great ground today talked about Biden’s we talked about you know how to talk about where rates are currently and why it actually may be a great time to purchase. And really just shifting everyone’s attitude and perspective in finding these opportunities today which which are elusive to a lot of people. So we just gave you some great ways, please share it with a friend. But on behalf of Joel and myself, we want to thank our A our agents, our listeners and which are all agents. And by the way, I just wanted to thank everyone personally, we have just crossed over 500 episodes, we’ve crossed over 3 million audio downloads. We are very very thankful and grateful to everyone listening. Please continue to share the show, leave us a review. That’s the other thing that really really helps us unless of course you’re gonna leave a one star review I guess you can leave a one star review to that’s fine. But thankfully most of you don’t but leave a review. Let us know what you think of the show. And let us know how we can improve because that’s our job. So please thank you also support our sponsors and also support our guests like Joel reached out to him. He is awesome. Alright guys, we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Joel.
Joel Schaub 34:21 Thanks so much for having me on DJ
The 3 Lead Gen Sources Every Real Estate Agent Needs • Jessica Burton
Oct 27, 2023
Jessica Burton with Indyquest Properties talks about what brought her to real estate and how she built her business while having another full-time job. Jess discusses 3 lead gen sources she uses and how she utilizes social media and video. Jess also talks about the the importance of exercise and how it positively impacts her business. Jess discusses current market and describes how is she staying busy and motivated. Last, Jess talks about her processes that help her keep organized and in touch with her clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Lead Generation is everything and we’re going to talk about your three main lead generation sources today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Jessica Burton. Before we get to Jessica, just a couple of quick reminders. Actually, I’m gonna use Jessica as an example. We are always looking for guests. And we’re very lucky that we get pitched by PR agencies every almost every day with guest ideas. But if you’re somebody that maybe doesn’t have a PR team and thinks you have a story to tell, well reach out to us, Jessica did this. And we are having her on her show today. And she is amazing. And we wouldn’t have found her unless she wrote into us. So please let us know if you think you would be a good guest or maybe you know somebody in your office, that would be a good guest, you could just go to our website, keeping it real pod.com. And there’s a little Contact Us form and let us know if we should talk to you or maybe somebody you know, so think of the hero in your area, your local market that you’d love to know how they did this and we’ll reach out and try to get the interview. Also, please tell a friend about the show. And also leave us a review wherever you’re listening to us there. All right, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Jessica burden.
Today on the show, our guest is Jessica Burton from indie quest properties in Houston, Texas. Let me tell you more about Jessica. Jessica Burton is an award winning realtor and continuous top producer she was licensed in 2016. That’s when she got licensed and Jessica draws from years of experience as a communications and marketing specialist and has created a reputation for her friendly client care, negotiation prowess and relentless dedication. She continues to use these professional skills to help her real estate clients find and sell their homes. Jessica is equipped with a deep rooted knowledge of the Houston real estate market always prepared with a local market perspective. And if you ask her what her business is built on, she will proclaim communication and care and dedication to her clients needs and goals. I want everybody to follow Jess on her website which sorry on Instagram, which is at just Kay Burton just GSSKBR to end just like its sounds and that’s Instagram and you can also find her on her indie quest website we will have a link to that on the show notes and by the way before we get started before just comes on or before she starts talking. She is in the process of looking for some assistance so if you are a possibly in real estate in the Houston area or if you are somebody that is looking for maybe an additional source of work while you’re building your business, reach out to Jessica because she may be a good fit for you Jess, welcome to the show.
Jessica Burton 4:24 Hi, I’m so happy to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:26 Can I call you Jess? Is that okay?
Jessica Burton 4:27 That’s what my friends call me so awesome. Well
D.J. Paris 4:31 I am super excited to to have you Jess is one of our listener of ours that has now is on our show and we couldn’t be happier that’s nothing brings me more pleasure than having somebody who has been a listener on the show. It’s really the most fun types of interviews I do so thank you for being a listener number one and thank you for taking time out of your busy busy week and and your mom and your your wife and your got a million other things going on. So thank you yeah, let’s I want To learn about you so and I want our audience to know about you. So let’s start at the beginning. I know you got your license in 2016, what brought you to real estate?
Jessica Burton 5:07 Yes. So, about 10 years ago, I started working in the legal field. So I was working with litigation attorneys in a marketing position. And honestly, a lot happened that year. So I ended up starting with this position was really excited about it had pivoted over from a fortune 500 company so much larger to a much smaller company, I’ve always been more comfortable with smaller companies, and ended up basically, you know, having a good start to it. But realizing really quickly, you know, there was no really upward growth for me, you know, I, it was a family owned business. And, you know, where I was, was, was basically the best that I was going to, you know, to do with the company, so, and that year, I actually, my, my dad passed away unexpectedly, and we were really, really tight. And, you know, it really gave me a lot of, I had a lot of introspection, you know, just about life, and, you know, what I the path I was going down, and you know, just just wanted just had a lot of, you know, insight and time to think about them. So, I had always really liked real estate and found it really interesting. So my sister is actually a broker in Austin. Oh, wow. And, you know, if for years, she would tell me about it, and I was just so fascinated by the stories and the people. I mean, as all of the real estate agents out there know, like, working with people, you just come across all sorts of, you know, exciting and interesting, people and stories. So, so for years, I was like, well, that’s her thing, you know, I need to go find my thing. So I avoided real estate, but then, you know, she encouraged me, she said, Just get your license, you know, I thought more about it was like, Okay, what’s a little bit of extra income, you know, on the side. And just, I started with Keller Williams in their coaching program for about a year and got a lot out of it, while I was still working in my marketing position in the legal field. Wow, yes. And
D.J. Paris 7:16 a lot to manage, and to things like that at once.
Jessica Burton 7:19 Well, I realized how much I loved real estate. So I was working, honestly, two full time jobs, you know, taking really trying to build my business with real estate, doing open houses on the weekends, really, you know, leveraging my my relationships with the my client attorneys who then turned into real estate attorney, excuse me, real estate clients. And, you know, just really realizing how much I loved this business. I mean, I love everything from design architecture, you know, the financial side of it. And then I feel like, you know, on the other side of that, working in the legal field, I really understood the importance about understanding, you know, the contracts, and, you know, the liability that goes along with that. So I was really, I made sure that I was very educated and, you know, knew exactly what was in those contracts. So I could explain that to my clients. And, you know, I was working with attorneys, so they, they have a certain way of thinking and, you know, a certain, I guess, you know, bar that they’re setting and their expectations of who they work with. So, you know, I was trying to keep up with that. And so I, I basically stayed with my, with the marketing position, until 2021. And I was doing around that time, I was doing probably, you know, closer to seven to 10 10 million. And this is all while working in
D.J. Paris 8:52 the two jobs. That’s amazing. And
Jessica Burton 8:55 I got pregnant with my daughter. And this was COVID, too. So I just realized I was like, I do not want to keep doing this. I was nervous about taking that next step. You know, as you know, there’s the security there with the health insurance, the salary, and you know, I just I wanted to, you know, make sure I was gonna be taking care of myself, but I also was ready to take that leap of faith. So I took that leap of faith to dove in 100% real estate in April 2021. ended up doing my best year ever that year, which a lot of people did. And I also was awarded one of the top 20 under 40 Real estate agents in Houston that year. So I think it was a little bit of a god wink like, hey, you know, you, you made the right decision. And yeah, and I was I was like working in the delivery room. I was out at showings three days after I delivered my daughter. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 9:59 Yeah, I
Jessica Burton 10:00 got a wild ride.
D.J. Paris 10:02 I really, it’s really an impressive story. And I think that, you know, as you were saying that I was thinking, we have probably a lot of listeners who have been in that similar situation where they were doing this maybe part time or in your case, you have two full time jobs. But even if you’re doing another job full time and real estate part time, at some point, making that that leap requires a tremendous amount of courage, and sort of willingness to cut that cord of like the salary and all of the benefits of the sort of more stable position that isn’t as risky, as far as you know, jumping off without a net, and you basically cut the net. And I wanted to just honor all of our listeners who have made that journey. And pretty much anyone who gets into real estate essentially goes on a similar journey, but especially if you’re coming from this secure and stable environment, where things are very predictable at least financially, and making that leap. So everybody who’s gone through that I we just built just Can I honor you, but I honor you as well for doing that. I think that again, it’s it’s something we don’t we don’t congratulate ourselves enough for making big steps. I think, you know, that’s sometimes the first step is the hardest, but it’s also the most important one. So congrats on that. Yeah, so I want to know how you grew your business. Because you know, you’re a we’ll call you a younger realtor, I don’t know if you feel young. But I consider you a younger realtor, you’re you’re still new ish in the business, even though you’ve been doing this for seven years now. But you also were 40 under 40. So I would love to know, like how you started marketing, you talked about, you know, hate my previous position, I had access to attorneys. So that, you know, led me I heard that correctly led me to some real estate attorneys and I sort of had some connections, there are just other attorneys maybe you worked with, but how did you build your business?
Jessica Burton 11:52 Sure. Well, I love being around people, I always have since I was a child, I am involved in a lot of different organizations. So always been drawn to just philanthropy and volunteerism. So if there’s an organization out there, I’ve probably been a part of it. And, you know, really, that was me, just I really liked to be a part of my Houston community. So you know, I’m part of the Junior League in Houston, part of the Houston rodeo, try to join my we have a civic association in my neighborhood. So try to get involved there. I’m not a gardener, but I’m in the garden club. And, you know, really what I what I’ve learned over the years, and I really think it takes so much grit in this business. I mean, you really, you have to reinvent yourself, and you have to pivot. And what I’ve determined that works, that has worked best for me is really having three lead generation sources at once. And of course, you know, we’re we’re in a industry that ebb and flows. So you know, just being able to evolve and adapt is is very important. So really, it’s I focus right now and have for a while on when I got started. I’m sorry. That’s what we’re talking about. When I got started. It was mostly open houses. I mean, that was really that was where I got so good with scripting, you know, so good with just talking to people about real estate.
D.J. Paris 13:31 And did you have at the time listings to do open houses for or were you asking other agents in your office?
Jessica Burton 13:39 Yes, so, so about a year into my real estate career, I moved over to a smaller brokerage. And this our brokerage, I’m still there, I’ve been there about six years is we are led by a wonderful broker and his wife, they’re, they’re just a dream team. And he, Creston is my broker, he is a wonderful, just influence and mentor. And, you know, he was willing to allow, you know, agents and myself to go and host these open houses. So, you know, when I first got started, I was really buyer heavy, as a lot of agents are so, you know, I didn’t have the opportunity to have many of my own listings at for sure. So of course, that’s changed through the years. But the open houses and then of course, you know, my CRM has been a really important tool so I actually use follow up boss and I love it. I love I’ve used a few others that one just seems to work best for me. There’s a lot of great tools in it. And you know, really just pivoting with advertising, figuring out you know, when it is tangible, you know how I can how I can use that but I’m also I use social media a little bit more in the big I mean, but I’m really utilizing it now. And so I’ll talk more about that as well.
D.J. Paris 15:04 So your three sources? I hear it, was his philanthropy one of one of your sources, or is that more? Anyway? What are your three? Your three marketing sources? Mine
Jessica Burton 15:14 are open houses, advertising, and then social media at this time?
D.J. Paris 15:21 What kind of advertising are you doing? Just out of curiosity?
Jessica Burton 15:25 So, you know, it really depends on I think there was a show recently, and someone was talking about, you know, understanding your demographics and how they get information. So, I usually I actually send postcards to, you know, the, the older demographic that really appreciates us and doesn’t throw away the mail. Because as we know, you know, the younger generation doesn’t really, you know, appreciate that as much. And, and then advertising in local newsletters, newspapers, some web uses me websites, and really, you know, it’s something that I track for about I try it for about a year. And if I don’t have any tangible return, I’ll usually pivot to something else. But what I’ve realized is that it’s important to be consistent.
D.J. Paris 16:18 Yeah, you’re right, it especially with some of the outgoing mailers, or phone calls, or emailing whatever the out sort of outbound activity is, it seems to, you know, it seems to take a lot of well, this, this podcast is, you know, just something I, I’ve done every, every, you know, few days for the last six years, it doesn’t make me special, but it just makes me somebody that’s done it for six years. And as a result, here we are, you know, talking with you and 500 episodes later, and it’s just about, you know, staying staying on target, but also measuring those metrics. How do you measure? So it is trickier when you’re doing website? You know, what website advertising? Or postcards? How are like, when you do get a client? Are you like, Hey, how did you hear about me? Or Is that how you’re measuring? Or how are you knowing if those those outbound sort of marketing things are working? Yep,
Jessica Burton 17:11 I usually do ask them, you know, how did you hear about me, or they’ll let me know, you know, a lot of people are pretty forthcoming with that information, like I saw you. And, you know, this sounds this advertisement, and I really liked it or, you know, some kind of feedback. And, you know, I’ve been stopped at grocery stores and in public before. So it’s really funny, because I, you know, especially like having after having my children, like you’re a tired mom, and you would run to the grocery store, and every single time you run into someone who knows. So I try to like, I put myself together a little bit more now when I go out because I, you know, have grown my reputation and my community and know a lot more people, as well. So, so really, it’s it’s sometimes not so tangible, but And that’s like social media, you know, sometimes people will see you continuously, but they may not say like, Okay, well, you’ve been showing up in front of me for a couple years on, you know, Instagram or whatever. You know, and that’s been ingrained in my mind, you know, but it’s, I usually try to think about the person. And if I do know them, usually, you know, how I’ve interacted with them.
D.J. Paris 18:19 Tell me, let’s talk about social media, because there’s so many different approaches to it. I’m curious of what works for you, and what social channels you focus on, and like what types of content you focus on? Sure.
Jessica Burton 18:35 Um, so I actually, I just took or I shouldn’t say, Jess was a couple months ago, I took Kim Berg’s video bootcamp and plug
D.J. Paris 18:46 that plug for. She is awesome. She’s one of our partners, she does episodes for us specifically on social media. She is amazing. She’s the real deal. And I’m so glad that you attended her course. Go ahead. No, I’m sorry. She’s
Jessica Burton 19:00 so great. I’m actually doing her poaching, of course, now. And that’s been wonderful. But she so I have a social media manager. And for probably two years, she kept saying, Jessica, you need to get on video, you know, these carousel picture. Posts, the algorithm doesn’t like it, you know, you really got to, you know, you’ve really got to amp it up, and she would give me these ideas and, you know, try to encourage me and then it really didn’t register until I had a person reach out to me through social media who’d said hey, I’ve been following you for years. I’d really like to purchase this home. I would love to hire you as my realtor. And that was a you know, $17,000 commission. So I thought to myself, like I can put out a few more reels I can, you know, I can do this. So that’s when I really got more serious about it and it first it was really really, you know, I was just not natural, I was just really hard on myself, I’m really in my head about it. And then I was led to Kim’s class and Ken within, like, a couple of days helped me and everyone else in the class, you know, just become more comfortable getting on video, you know, I stopped taking myself so serious and just started to have fun with it. And realize, like, you know, there, people on social media want to engage and connect, like, that’s the whole point of it. And I was doing it all wrong, like I would scroll, I wasn’t really engaging or commenting as much. And she, you know, gave me basically like an Instagram audit, and gave me the tools and courage, you know, encouragement, excuse me to just put myself out there. So, you know, I really I focus a lot on videos, reels. I also, you know, Eric, I’m engaging with a lot more people out there.
D.J. Paris 20:56 Yeah, I want to pause on that, because I want to make sure I get real, real clarity for our audience, when, when you say, engaging you were talking about as a consumer of social media, you would sort of do the infinite scroll, the more entertained by it in what I what I’m guessing. As far as increasing engagement, was you engaging with other people’s posts? Is that my understanding? Yes,
Jessica Burton 21:19 so that, so really commenting on people’s posts, because they’re putting them out there, and, you know, I would like them and move on. I also have been creating more polls, and realizing how much people people love to give their opinion. And I love seeing people’s opinions. So you know, you’re Mindlessly scrolling, and then you’re stopped with a poll, and a lot of times, people will, you know, they’ll tell me what they think or, you know, vote on it. So there’s just a lot more engagement that way. And, and then, you know, I was also I’ve also narrow down the kind of content I’m providing. So I’m a little bit more mindful, you know, trying to educate, but also entertain and, and just, you know, enjoy myself a little bit more.
D.J. Paris 22:03 So let’s talk about your video content. Because you’re right video is everything as as a as a writer, I’m I’m sort of at heart mostly more a writer than anything, and nothing is less sort of exciting for me than people moving away from writing, but I get it, it’s just where we are. So video is super, super important. Um, what kind of video content are you working on? And what do you put out there, I’m, what I’m curious about is, what percentage of it would be real estate focused, versus here’s, here’s what’s going on in my life outside of real estate. Yeah,
Jessica Burton 22:37 so I try to break it down a little bit. Because I did decide to do a, I have a business account, but I also mix in my personal life and there so I really broke it down in like four sectors. And so it’s Family, Occupation, relationships, and dreams. So I try to do 25% Family 25% occupation, you know, my real estate, business 25% relationships, so that’s gonna be like, you know, relationships with the community, or philanthropy or, you know, you know, just family friends a little bit more of, you know, that’s also tying into family, but just a little bit heavier on that side. And then dreams is also going to be a little bit more about, you know, how design or anything I’m really interested in. And that’s, you know, really isn’t mixed up from time to time. But I do,
D.J. Paris 23:31 you sort of alternate them, you’re, like, you know, you’re doing, you know, how many videos a week are you doing these days, roughly,
Jessica Burton 23:38 oh, gosh, I try to focus on like two reels a week, and then stories every day, but what we my social media person and I have organized is a calendar. So we have the calendar of posts of what we’re going to do for the next two months. And of course, that can change depending on if I get a new listing or need to, you know, market something, you know, we revisit that every two weeks and discuss what’s going on in the market. But it’s really that’s my goal, of course, you know, and, but that also comes down to you know, I have to backup and schedule a content, you know, afternoon to make sure that I do have, you know, these videos done so I’ve learned about and it’s so funny because I it makes me sound like I’m like a dinosaur or something. But, you know, like batching has become more popular. So I’ve been doing more batching because I
D.J. Paris 24:29 would let’s define batching for our audience. So batching is
Jessica Burton 24:33 when you actually just take a bunch of videos at once and that you can, you know, schedule for a different time. So it’s going to be as many as you’d like. So you would do like three separate videos that would you would span over two weeks. Got it. So that’s been really helpful because I was literally getting up and getting dressed and tried to do videos every single day and it was stressing me out. And you know, sometimes you wake up You do not want to be on camera. So I would just define, you know, a day a week, you know, for three hours, I’m gonna do videos. And here’s what I have in mind. And then planning ahead and having that, you know, I guess the plan and be mindful about it really helped me.
D.J. Paris 25:14 Curious, do you ever share and there isn’t a right or wrong answer here. I’m just curious, how do you ever share failures or mistakes, or I’m in a rough mood today, or this happened in my life? Obviously, everyone has personal boundaries. And those are everyone’s personal decision. But I’m just curious, I’ve started to notice a bit of a trend, at least here in our local market where I’m seeing Realtors start to talk a little bit more about, hey, this didn’t go my way today. And and there’s like a lesson that can be learned from that. It’s not just I’m complaining because it’s raining, and I wanted it to be sunny. But but you know, are you are you thinking about? I don’t know, do you share some of the some of the harder parts? Or is it? Is it more about all like, the fun stuff? Because people I think, like to see both? Yeah,
Jessica Burton 26:00 they do. So I think I share more of family life, you know, and sort of the Juggle juggling act,
D.J. Paris 26:09 or there’s lots of challenges.
Jessica Burton 26:11 Yes. So you know, I’ve done some, like days in the life of a realtor what people really like, and I’m like, you know, at first I was like, Who wants to see this, you know, who’s interested in this, but people really do want to connect with you that way. So I know, I kind of, I’m pretty light. You know, as far as like, the videos that I do, I’ll make jokes about like, you know, I mean, every realtor out there has probably experienced this where you can’t find like a key, you know, because it’s like the, the listing agent put it like two houses down, like behind a tree or something, you know, or you can’t unlock the door. And, you know, I’ve I’ve made jokes about that. But as far as like, you know, talking about the current state of the market, or, you know, being a little bit more vulnerable, I’m working on it, because I do think that it’s it’s good content, and it’s, it’s honest.
D.J. Paris 27:03 It is it’s it’s always to me, I’m always so impressed when somebody’s willing to share a difficult part of their life. And again, it’s not for everybody, for sure. And of course, we need to keep our privacy’s and, and things but I always encourage our audience to, you know, and again, I don’t think people ever want to hear you complain about stuff. But But sharing like this is, this has been a challenge today, because this this, and this happened, I think that would be really cool. A lot of times for audiences to know, like, Oh, these are the challenges Realtors face do, because of course, we know just how challenging it is. But I will say this, this is funny, I wanted to mention this, we were talking about video, we’re talking about video, and we’re talking about social media. And I was at a Zillow conference in the last few months, and they did a presentation and one of their presentations was like a two day thing. And they said, the headshot is dead. And I was like, Oh, I gotta go to this presentation. Because that sounds cool. So the headshot is dead. And what they were explaining is based on all their data, and they have more data about home buyers than anybody, of course. And they what they found is that with people who advertise on their site, meaning realtors who pay for leads, and that kind of thing, that if the headshot is if all things are kind of equal, meaning like the realtor is kind of about the same number of reviews. And you know, they’re looking at like three or four agents on a page when they’re looking at a listing, and they have to click one to ultimately decide on who the lead is going to go to. A lot of times, they said they have a 30% chance higher of being clicked. If it’s not a headshot, if it’s an action shot, I was like what’s an action shot, which basically just means the camera catches somebody doing something that’s not necessarily like staring at a camera looking perfect. And everyone’s you know, all filtered up. So this would be like catching you laughing or catching, you know, somebody smiling or, you know, whatever, making a grimace or some sort of silly thing, but when they’re not looking at the camera, so just a little tip there for everyone that just came to my book, but this is what we’re talking about sharing your life, right? Like the perfect headshot, nobody cares. But what people do like is they want to see the real person, you know, the real person behind it. So that’s where you can get videos of our real stories, that is such a great
Jessica Burton 29:10 funny because, you know, my corporate training really programmed me to try to be perfect and have it together and look, you know, look a certain way. And that’s, you know, I have fun, I bonded so much more with my clients and the people I’ve met when I’ve been vulnerable and real. You know, I mean, it’s not always sunshine and butterflies and you know, so it’s it that’s how you know I’ve also bonded with other realtors and you know, it’s beneficial for sure.
D.J. Paris 29:42 Yeah, I agree people connect to to imperfection and and challenge a lot more than they do to perfection because none of us can really connect with perfection. Unless we’re narcissist. If we’re narcissist then we think everything we do is perfect. So if that’s the case, you should go get help. But if you’re not if you’re a non narcissist This, what you find is you connect more with with people’s challenges. So anyway, I want to switch gears because there’s so much more to talk about. And I want to talk about how do we, you know, so we’re talking about, you know, building a brand, utilizing video and social media and other things that you’re doing. But you aren’t getting leads, leads coming in. And you know, what we know is getting generating leads is challenge number one, challenge number two is, oh, I have leads now, what do I actually do so that they don’t fall through the cracks? And then I don’t sort of, you know, not give that them the attention I need. So how are you staying on top of leads?
Jessica Burton 30:35 Yes. So I am really big on processes. I think that that was something that I realized early on, because I had both jobs, I didn’t have time to, you know, to go in and try to, you know, get organized every single day. I mean, I really, a CRM was something that I invested in early, because I knew that I needed to keep information in one place, I knew that I needed to figure out processes, and I couldn’t just like, you know, fly from the seat of my pants, which I did do for, you know, the first year. And, you know, so I am really big on processes, I follow the, like effective time management. So I think Rob Dyrdek is, is a big advocate of that. And so basically, what that is, is, is defining what you’re going to be doing basically every hour of your day. So it’s easier said than done, especially with having a family, especially with being in real estate, because you could have an email come in, or a call or anything that just, you know, steers your day in a different direction. So
D.J. Paris 31:43 you have to, you have two little ones that are, which you’ve said earlier, but we should also say are under the age of two. So you have you have a two year old and a nine month old. So you are you are crazy. This is like peak mom time right now fair to say
Jessica Burton 31:57 I have mastered the art of delegation, I mean, that has just like, that has been a game changer for me. So, you know, we have you know, I’ve thankfully, and I have a very supportive husband, I mean, he’s just, he’s wonderful. So that, you know, that helps so much. But, but really, you know, getting, making sure that my processor processes are in place. So, you know, I start I know, we were not talking about data, you know, the hours of every day, but something I do want to mention is, you know, we’ve got to have a lot of energy in this business, you know, we’ve having big energy, you know, and making sure that people know that we are prepared, and we can keep up, and we’re going to be there to, you know, provide the knowledge and, you know, make sure that we’re on top of, especially in the last couple of years, when things were moving so quickly. So I try to start every single day by working out before my kids get up. And then and that’s, that’s a, you know, hard and its own, but, but also, you know, trying to take a few minutes to have quiet time, like meditation time, I don’t want to call it meditation, because sometimes I can’t get out of my own head. But, you know, at least so I can set my day up and you know, have a clearer mind. So I can go into it, you know, really concentrating on work. So staying in front of clients is you know, been about my processes, but it’s going in, I try to contact at least two, two of my sphere, my that can be past clients, or, you know, clients I’m currently working with, and just just anyone that’s in my database, and I try to connect with them through a text message. I’ve actually since I took Kim’s class, I’ve been doing videos, like video text, sure. And people love it, you know, it’s really as something as easy as, like, Hey, I’ve been thinking about you and just wanted to say hi, or, Hey, like, I saw this, and, you know, I just wanted to see how everything was going or even, you know, if something has happened in someone’s life, that may not be so great, you know, you can give, you know, a nice message that way as well. So really trying to stay in front of people that way. But until I defined that I was going to actually follow up with two people a day, I would say and made sure as part of my processes, I would say I would do it but I wouldn’t do it. So now you know understanding from nine to 10am I’m following up with people
D.J. Paris 34:29 time blocking got you to actually complete the task correct. And, and and setting up your day before the day starts.
Jessica Burton 34:38 Yes. So I spend the last hour of my work day and I usually am in the office like nine to five I get home around 530 And of course you know, I try to devote that time when I get home to my kids but as we all know that doesn’t always work out. But at least you know have those couple hours before they go to bed. So if I know I’ve really concentrated and really put my head down at work and gotten through what I need to get through makes me feel so much better, you know, getting home,
D.J. Paris 35:09 how I want to go back to exercise for saying, We never talked about this on the show, and I just want to get your take on this, obviously everybody knows they need to act they should exercise for, you know, just for all sorts of reasons that are beneficial that I don’t need to go over. I’m curious on how important exercise whether it’s strength training, or cardio or accommodation, it’s, I’m curious, have you talked about needing the energy to do the job and we know this is a high energy job, how critical and you’re busy mom, you’ve got two little ones, you’ve running a business, you’re also running a household with your husband, you’re busy, yet you’re making time for this. And a lot of for a lot of us, exercise is going to be the thing that first goes when we get busy, because number one, it’s painful and hard. And you know, sweating is no fun. And but how important is that so that you can do all of your time blocking? In other words, I’m curious to know just how critical it is for you. Because I suspect it’s it’s obviously so important that you’re putting at the very front of every day. Yeah.
Jessica Burton 36:12 Well, it’s for me, you know, when, when I am exercising, it’s helping me create more energy because I’m in better shape. I you know, in addition to exercising, that’s also trying to eat clean. I definitely love my occasional glass of wine or a beer. So, you know, everything in moderation, right. But, you know, just trying to live a healthier lifestyle, so that, you know, it really helps me clear my mind. I mean, and I also, you know, after you have, I guess going back to having children, you know, they just they suck the nutrients out of your body. And you’re kind of weak for a while. And I noticed that. So even before I had children, I was like, you know, running half marathons. I did a half Ironman. But so and I’ve always been in when I was growing up, I was a competitive speedskater Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. So So physical
D.J. Paris 37:11 fitness is is always been important to me. Yeah, you’re very humble about it. But you’re clearly this has been a big part of your life. It
Jessica Burton 37:19 has been. But I also realize how you know, it helps with your endorphins. And it helps it has so many positive stress release. Yep. So and I feel like I mean, I so I’m a runner. So I usually run like three times a week, and then do like strength training two days a week. But I have just, that’s my, I call it my church, like, that’s when I can go out, I don’t have to think about the stresses of my day, or you know what I have going on, I can and sometimes I do, of course, but I can just really be out there and just be with myself and have some quiet time because you really don’t get that quiet time with kids or being in real estate. And usually my phone doesn’t start ringing until seven, you know, on most days. So it’s really, it’s been very important and impactful. So I still am a goal setter. So I’m still like setting goals, you know, to look forward to. And it’s another way to bond with people too, you know, trying to get into golf, my husband loves golf. And I found that that’s another you know, anything that I can that I have made. And I’m interested in a lot of different things. But I also feel like there’s a benefit to it. Because you know, you’ll be able to get out there be with people relate to someone, and just have a good time. When
D.J. Paris 38:35 also you have that athlete background. So this competition part is is sort of hardwired into you. It’s clearly, you know, works for your business as well. But yeah, I agree. I really would encourage everyone if you’re not currently exercising, we all struggle wanting to exercise. Nobody really wants to x at least I’ve ever met. Actually, I’ve met a few people that like exercising, but I certainly don’t. But if you can just force yourself to do it. If there’s other there’s lots of ways to force yourself. And I hate to even say force yourself because your personal trainer, I do have a purse. Yeah, I just actually came from her right before I come here. So sadly, I the only thing that works for me is the most expensive way to do it. But to do it, so whatever exactly
Jessica Burton 39:16 whatever works for you. I mean, I’m not the thing. Like there’s so many different ways to exercise like dancing. And, you know, I mean, we’re exercising every day. I remember when I was pregnant, I was like walking up four flights of stairs, and I was like God, I’m glad I’m exercising because I would have never made this.
D.J. Paris 39:33 What I will tell people is if you do nothing else in your business, if you change nothing else about what you’re doing, but you just get in physical shape. And I mean working out to a maximum intensity of about a seven out of 1010 being oh my god, I just collapsed. You don’t have to do that. But if you can get in. Look, I’m no expert, but I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. If you can do a seven out of 10 three times a week for you know, however much, many minutes it makes sense for you to do that. I bet you your business will increase because your energy will increase, your stress will decrease, you’ll have more time to put on your business. And just try it. And let me know if it doesn’t work for you. But it is it is a hard path. That’s the challenge with with with exercises is, of course it, I think it’s
Jessica Burton 40:16 really you can relate it to your business too, because you know, everyone started somewhere. So everyone was at the beginning of you know, their fitness journey, or their real estate journey. And then, you know, if you look at it that way, like it’s not going to be, you’re not going to go from zero to 100 in one day, like set those small goals. And then you’ll just get you’ll improve over time. I mean, that’s, it’s helpful to look at it that way. I
D.J. Paris 40:41 had to do earlier today, I had to do push ups until I collapsed three different times. Yeah, now, we don’t always do that. But, but I will tell you, that never gets easy. That’s never fun. It’s always super painful and brutal. But you know what, it’s a it’s a good idea. So if anything, we just encourage you to get physically fit for all the other reasons that you should, but it will help your business, I want to talk about delegation. And then I want to get into managing the roller coaster that we’re currently on. Right, we’re maybe we’re down in a dip at this point with rates and inventory. But before that, let’s talk about how you delegate because you’ve had amazing success once you started delegating. And let’s first define like delegating means taking some, you know, some activities off of our plate that we think could be better suited for someone else, maybe because we’re either not very good at it, or we don’t like doing it or takes up too much of our time. But something that if we didn’t have to do it ourselves, but still needed to get done, that we could pay somebody or or maybe team up with somebody to do so let’s talk about what are some of those tasks that you decided to delegate? And then how did you delegate them?
Jessica Burton 41:47 Sure. So I currently have a virtual assistant, she is so wonderful, I’m so in. There’s a company in Texas that actually trains these virtual assistants, she’s in the Philippines, on Texas real estate contracts. So this was like, you know, I had wanted an assistant for a couple years, I actually got her in 2021 as well. And she’s wonderful. And I wanted an assistant but I wasn’t ready to commit to, you know, the cost of having one, you know, I was worried that maybe I would get this assistant in, my business wouldn’t do as well. And of course, when I was ready to take the leap of faith, but hadn’t, but when I did, it was just a wonderful decision. So she handles everything from, you know, all the admin responsibilities, communicating with clients through email, setting up meetings, who does personal stuff for me, you know, personal stuff for, like, needs for my family. And, and then I also realized, I mean, it was taking me like two hours to do like a social media post. And I just didn’t love it. I, I was I mean in the generation of tech, but I just, I was in my head too much about it. So I, that was the, that was actually the first thing I delegated. I’m now that I’m thinking about it. And that was a godsend as well. So what I realized, like going through this, and having the time that I’ve gotten back, is that I want to delegate everything, you know, everything other than being in front of clients, because that’s what my strong suit is. I do love the marketing side too. So I really, you know, doing some of that as well. But that is time consuming, but really been out there, you know, lead generating and having client, you know, being in front of my clients. That’s what I really want to focus on. So I was able, when I really when I implemented both the Social Media Manager and the VA assistant, I grew my business about 30%. And it was, you know, I wish I would have done it sooner. So that’s why I’m currently looking for someone in person because I still have, you know, I do drop offs for clients, quarterly. So I hire like high schoolers in my neighborhood to go and do this. And that’s been you know, they go off to college. So you have to find, you know, new people every few years. I also, you know, have someone who puts out open science, Open House signs for me, you know, people who go and put suprise and these are all people that I have found, you know, and so having, I would really like to have an in person assistant who I can ask to do all of these things. If you’re
D.J. Paris 44:38 in the Houston area and you’re looking to also learn from somebody, maybe you’re a realtor and you’re newer to the business or you’re just looking for some additional work, but you want to learn from somebody who’s crushing it, reach out, reach out to Jessica and we’ll give her contact information will be in the show notes. We’ll give it out at the end as well. I’m curious about one another question about delegation. So you talked about a lot of times that the objection to that will be, oh, I can’t afford it. It’s too expensive. And I’m certainly not going to ask you what you spend on that. However, what I’m curious about is how long it took you before you broke even with your, in other words, you know, you have somebody as an assistant, that you’re paying them, whatever, whatever you’re paying them at point, you know, where you’re like, This is now working, and I’m actually making money more money, because you increased revenue by 30%. Did it take a long time for that 30% to kick in? Or was it was it pretty quick, or in the middle? It
Jessica Burton 45:36 was very, it was very quick. I mean, I’d say within a matter of months, wow.
D.J. Paris 45:40 It’s a pretty amazing return. Actually, if we think about think about, like, if you could get 30% return on your money in a couple of months, that would, that’s probably not exactly what happened for you. But whatever, 10%, even in a couple of months, you’re like, a financial genius. So this is clearly the numbers make sense. And thank goodness for virtual assistants, for people that agents that are listening that maybe, you know, can’t afford to pay somebody, you know, locally, maybe the, you know, the salary will just be too high. There are virtual assistants, Philippines is a huge source of that. So you certainly can find people and you’re going to be giving work to people who want work, and they are going to tell you what they would like to be paid. It’s not like you’re deciding, they are going to tell you, and then you can determine if that makes sense. But you can find people for really inexpensive. Well, and
Jessica Burton 46:30 I’ll add to that, too, because I came up with every excuse, you know, there was I was like, Oh, God, it’s gonna take me so long to train someone, and I just don’t have the capacity for this. And yes, there definitely was, you know, that the couple of months that we had to, you know, get adjusted, but, you know, she was the, the benefit that she gave to me and, you know, to my business was was well worth it. And, you know, she’s come up with other ideas for the business and have has continued to help threads. So it was a great decision. That’s
D.J. Paris 47:06 awesome. Let’s talk about where we are currently in the market. So well, we know where we’re are for listening. This is 2023 October, we’re getting towards the end of the year, we know what kind of year this was for most agents, and it wasn’t the easiest year for most agents. So how are you staying motivated? How are you staying? Busy? Are you changing any of your activities? Did you change activities this year to kind of meet the market? Or was it I’m just going to put the blinders on and do what I always have done? Because that that continues to work for you? You
Jessica Burton 47:37 know, yeah, there’s definitely been a shift, I think it’s something like 80,000 agents have left the industry this year. And I mean, the Houston market has just been saturated with realtors the last couple of years, which, you know, I’m sure that’s the same story elsewhere. But, um, but really, it’s made me focus more on my processes, and, you know, really try to be in front of people. So delegating even more responsibility for, you know, administrative work to my assistant so that I can go and, you know, have more lunches, or more coffees or stop, you know, drop bys to my clients. So, in addition to calling two clients a day, I’ve increased that, you know, some days it’s four, sometimes it’s five. But I’ve really, I have, you know, I’d make sure I’ve and I’ve had this in place for years, I’ve made sure that I send you know, handwritten birthday cards and handwritten notes. I every Thursday from 10 to 11. I do that. And, and then really just, you know, scanning social media see if or LinkedIn to see if there’s anything exciting happening in the clients life, so I can congratulate them. I think, you know, I mentioned the drop offs as well. So gearing up for my, you know, Halloween drop offs and Christmas. I also do a breakfast with Santa, then this will be my fifth annual. And it’s really grown. I mean, we are we I should, it’s my team. But me, I’m the person that puts it on, I just have a team that helps me to organize it. But it started during COVID and 2020. And, you know, we had like 20 families who came on like time blocks because we didn’t want to, you know, expose people. And now it’s like 200 or 250 people. And it’s become like a, you know, I’ve seen these kids take pictures with Santa through the years. So I’m like a big grown up with me. And I’ve just, I really, I think that there’s a lot of myths. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what’s happening in the market. So I’m making sure to research and educate myself. So when I talk to a client, for instance, I have a client who has been they’ve been looking for a house they have two small children. They outgrew their three, two and they want to move to for three, we just found the perfect house yesterday, it’s gorgeous, it’s priced well, and there are multiple offers on it already, because that’s still what we’re seeing in some of the markets in Houston, because inventory is still so low. And they just, you know, they just like everyone else there, they refinance the last couple years. And they said that they’re nervous, and, you know, don’t know if this is the right time, and what do they do, they think the prices are going to come down. And, you know, it’s just me, calming them down and explaining to them like, you know, we have the higher mortgage rates right now, but there are a lot of people who are on the fence and waiting, and you know, when those mortgage rates come down, it’s going to open the floodgates. And, you know, it may not be, you know, that may not be the best time to buy your, you know, it’s economics, you’re not going to be in a low mortgage, you know, low price point market at the same time. So it’s, for me, it’s just really, in social media has helped with that, too. So me just making sure people know, hey, I’m still in real estate, I’m still here to help you. And then trying to just make sure that I’m in front of people more than ever, and showing, you know, I’ve really, I think something else that set me apart, as a realtor is just really showing people that I care. I mean, these are people that I meet I, my clients become friends for life, because I genuinely do care about, you know, where they are in their life and this exciting milestone. But really, I’m just, I’m continuing and being consistent with what I’m doing. Because I know, you know, oftentimes, when people get nervous or theirs, they can feel a shift, a lot of people go into themselves, and they don’t stay consistent. So you know, more than ever, I’m just making sure that I’m on top of, you know, what I need to do and taking care of people.
D.J. Paris 51:56 And let’s talk about encouragement. Because you this is a business that is a sort of, it’s funny, because it’s an interpersonal business, we’re doing face to face interactions, at least thankfully, we’re able to do that, currently. And, but we oftentimes work alone, and we work in a silo, most of our day is spent, you know, maybe working from home, and we’re not as maybe connected, real estate offices are emptier than as technologies improved. It’s just people don’t have to go in as much. And so it’s it’s created a lot of I think, a lot of isolation. And I’m curious on you know, isolation is good, but it can be challenging when it’s a harder time, like maybe now and it’s easy to, to just, you know, not feel the best. And so how do you set up encouragement to? How do you like, what is your support system look like? So that you’re getting the encouragement you need, when times are maybe more challenging?
Jessica Burton 52:54 Well, um, you know, it’s, I think it’s about community in a way. So like, I go into my office every day. I mean, I really can’t work from home, because of the kids. But yeah, a lot of loud dogs. So, so I go in the office. So I’m there, you know, with some of my, my team members. And, you know, I think everyone has downside, so I make sure that I’m working out because I know that’s gonna help me and I listened to your podcast religiously, you know, in other podcasts, like, I think another person mentioned, Ed, my let love him. He’s just very encouraging. And, and that’s the thing I, I tried to, you know, surround myself with positive people, you know, people that are like, feeling like, it’s doomsday. I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want that to come into my space. Because, you know, that’s what you think is, is usually, you know, what is the expression like how your reality is. So I just really try to stay positive. And I also tried to get creative, you know, this is the time, like, who cares? You know, try something out. You know, try to make sure that I’m staying within my budget, but, you know, it doesn’t hurt to just, you know, try different things out or get creative or brainstorm with other people. So, you know, I also have a good team in my office, like I mentioned, my broker’s super encouraging, and, you know, I have a group of other realtors in the office that we, we just all sort of are there for one another. And also, my sister is wonderful. But really, it’s just, you know, making sure that I’m taking care of myself and staying consistent, like I mentioned.
D.J. Paris 54:42 I like that. You know, one thing you also had mentioned your husband earlier is obviously being an incredible amount of support. It was one of the first things you said earlier in the episode. And you know, for those of us that don’t have a partner who you know, is either is supportive or we don’t have a partner at all, this Here’s where it becomes really important if you do work from home, to have a support system and have people like you were mentioning your sister, co workers, etc, that, you know, if you are somebody that you know gets bummed out working at home, then find find someone, a realtor,
Jessica Burton 55:14 I will talk to you, and encourage you. I mean, we’re all you know, that it ebbs and flows. And sometimes we have good days, and sometimes we have bad days. But I mean, it makes such a difference when you like, whenever I’m in a down mood, and I call a friend who I know is gonna be in a down mood, like, nothing is good, nothing good comes from that conversation.
D.J. Paris 55:34 Very, very true. Yeah. So find, find people that that of course, share your worldview. And, and we all we all need support, that’s another thing. So if you don’t have a good support system, make 20 the rest of this year, the way that you find your support your tribe, find the people that are like you that that will encourage you that you can encourage, and you’ll help each other kind of that’s that, you know, rising tide raises all ships kind of kind of analogy. This has been really, really interesting, I want to just also talk, I want to end with just a little bit about process, because I know you’re a process person. So tell us a little bit about what process means to you. And maybe if you could share one or two of your processes that are really important for you. I know, we talked about time blocking, obviously, that’s one, but we’d love to hear any others.
Jessica Burton 56:22 Sure. So you know, I’ll concentrate on marketing a little bit. So I make sure that whenever I’m gearing up for you know, my client interaction that I stay in front of my people at least once every two months, and that’s really dependent on the tier. So follow up boss again, going back to that, I have broken out my people into different tiers. So this is going to be you know, my referral partners, there’s a great function like you can add tags to your people. So in that can group them in their different categories. So, for instance, I’ve got, you know, my people, my million dollar plus clients, you know, or in one tear, and then I’ve got my referral group or, you know, which is like my top 20 People who refer to business to me, or clients who, you know, have been past buyers, and, you know, did it’s really broken down into, like the price point segment. But having that there, because that also includes their birthdays, so I know that you know, I can see when their birthdays come up, so I can make sure that that card is sent out and they know that they’re cared for. I also am collecting information throughout the month to put into my monthly newsletter. So a new the newsletter, I’ve actually done this the cheaper way, I use MailChimp. So it’s like $10 a month. And and then I go to a website called lighter side of real estate, lighter side of real estate, they have all of these really helpful, like articles and like memes. And, you know, and if you cute and funny based, yes, yes. But it also has a lot of, you know, home related articles, or just like, you know, even like mortgage, what’s going on with just homes in general, like the market. And so I will build my newsletter throughout the month out any Houston happenings. And then make sure that, you know, each day, I’m really trying to focus on what’s happening in my clients lives or what’s happening, you know, throughout a process. So every Tuesday and Thursday, I do check ins with my active clients, just just, you know, even if I had nothing to say to them, I usually just say, you know, here’s what’s going on, here’s what we have to look forward to. I also have a timeline that is sent out to them whenever a transaction begins. So that’s going to tell them the important dates. So I’ll go back, I’ll reference that when we’re talking on the phone. A lot of these people, you know, are busy professionals. So I’m texting with them a lot. And that’s when also I’ll do a quick video and just say, hey, here’s where we are, just so they know that I’m there. And I haven’t just disappeared, even if nothing’s going on. So really, those are some of the processes. I don’t know if there was anything specific. No, no.
D.J. Paris 59:20 No, of course. Of course you can. No, that is that is I think incredibly helpful. I mean, we did we did a lot this is we’re coming up on an hour and we did a lot I mean we I could talk to you all day, and I would but then you wouldn’t get any you then your time blocking would really really get screwed up and I don’t I don’t want that in my conscious as affecting your day in that way. So you have been amazing and I will absolutely love to bring you back because justice is on. She’s on the rise. I mean she’s been doing this seven years but she is consistently growing her business year over year even in these tough markets. So she is in the process of looking for some for an assistant so In person, a local assistant, just what are you looking for just for any of our audience who is might be considering wanting to work with you, I’m
Jessica Burton 1:00:06 sure. So I’m someone who is comfortable with administrative work. So you know, there’s a lot of compliance documents and contracts. So if you have real estate experience, that would be helpful, if you’re licensed, that would be even better. But I’m also happy to help with that. And then someone that is comfortable with client interfacing, and communications, someone that also has marketing experience, social media, I mean, just to, you know, well rounded, but also, if you don’t, if you aren’t strong in one of these areas, I’m also really open to mentorship and just helping you grow. I truly believe that if someone is a rat, round me, I want to see them succeed. And you know, want to help you and you know, whatever capacity that I can, so, you know, it’s kind of a, I also just want someone who can keep up with me.
D.J. Paris 1:01:04 Well, if anyone out there feels like this could be a possible fit, what’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Jessica Burton 1:01:10 Sure. So um, I’m on Instagram at Jess K. Burton. Or you can call me at 281-704-2061 or email me at Jessica at Indie quest dotnet.
D.J. Paris 1:01:26 Awesome. Well, also, everybody should follow Jess at just k Burton on Instagram. And you can find her on all the other social channels as well. But she talked a lot about what she does for social media. So if you would like to see what somebody who’s got a pretty good handle on social media, what they do on a regular basis, follow her on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, see what she’s doing. And guess what you can, you know, inspiration, you can take her inspiration and actually duplicate hopefully some of her success. And she’s just a heck of a nice person. So let her know that you appreciate it are coming out on the show reach out to her we are I just had a guest. No, I never tell her audience to do this. But we just had a guest reach out. She said, I just was on your show. And I got over 100 emails. So and obviously. Yeah, I don’t want I don’t want to bombard you with our audience emails. But if you did appreciate just in the show, let her know she she said something very kind to me, which reminded me to do this. Before we started, she had said something that that was very impactful to me. And so please let her know how much you appreciate her being on the show. So on behalf of the audience, this is a great place to wrap up. Thank you. We appreciate you Jesse are a wonderful person. You could tell it comes through in the way that you communicate and obviously your great realtor as well. And you’re so generous and willing to share exactly how you grow your business. So we will definitely want to have you back on you know when when things are even more crazy and impressive for you because of course they will be. And so on behalf of the audience thanks Jess. And on behalf of Justin myself, we do this because everyone who is listening to our words just in my words right now, this is all for you. So thank you for taking time out of your day to listen and try to improve some part of your business I hope you got some value here I know I did. So again let just know that you appreciated it follow on social shoot or a quick message she’d she’d appreciate it too. And again, thank you for listening. We just asked our audience please tell a friend just was telling me she does this with realtors that for this podcast which Thank you just for that. Please do the same. We appreciate it. let someone else know especially there’s so many great things that just said to do practical things that you could do just by listening to this particular episode. So shoot a link over we would appreciate it and we will see em Thanks, Jess. We will see everybody on the next podcast episode and Thanks, Jess. Thank you
How Top Real Estate Agents Negotiate • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Oct 23, 2023
In our October episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties and Christie’s International shares tips that have worked for her while negotiating in creating a win-win situation for everyone. Carrie emphasizes the importance of knowing what your client wants but also paying attention to the desires of the other side of the negotiation.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be speaking with one of the top Realtors in the country about exactly how she negotiates for her clients. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today, as always, is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with AP properties here in Chicago. She Carrie is a top top one she’s more than a tough 1% Pretty she’s a top point 00 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors. And just to show you how much production she does. There’s about 47,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area Carrie is often ranked in literally the top 15 Sometimes the top 10 sometimes higher than that. So she is an amazing superstar. And she is an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors, and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. Please visit Kerry at our website, Kerry McCormick rt.com. And also please follow her on Instagram, Carrie McCormack real estate, we will have a link to that in the show notes and want it by the way, Kerry’s Instagram, or social media in general is so effective, that she was just recently nominated for Best real, it’s the best realtor social media in Chicago. And you can actually vote for her by going to the link in our show notes for Chicago agent magazine. So if you’d like Carrie and loved listening to her episodes, please consider voting for her in she’s actually social media influencer of the year. So check, check that out and vote for her please. All right, Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:16 Thank you. Thank you. And I’m just trying to think how long have I been on your show?
D.J. Paris 3:21 Five or six? Well, ever since the beginning. So I think it’s been at least five years thinks six years.
Carrie McCormick 3:26 I just I think back to the beginning. So thanks for having me. And I love being part of it and sharing my knowledge and listening to all of your guests as well. I think it’s a great community to be part of. So thank you.
D.J. Paris 3:39 Well, whenever I run into You’re welcome. And thank you. And whenever I run into agents here locally in the Chicagoland market, they always reference your episodes, in particular, because you are so well respected and regarded in Chicago, and you know, of course elsewhere, but it is it is always fun. You know, because we don’t I don’t do so many Chicago episodes anymore. And so it’s nice to when I run into people, they’re like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe you have carry on the show every every month, like you’re very much looked up to in this industry. So what would you like to talk about today?
Carrie McCormick 4:12 Well, we’re in the fall market here in Chicago. And you know, we’re in q3. And I feel like negotiations on deals have been changing a little bit. So, you know, there’s all different types of negotiation strategies. And as everyone knows, each deal is different. We have a lot of different personalities in the deal. You know, the sellers, the buyers, the brokers getting obviously are involved. Families sometimes get involved. So there’s just a lot of personalities and I just wanted to share some tips that I have in that have been successful for me in negotiating in creating a win win for both. I mean, I think that’s a common term that people say is you know, everyone feels like they want When are both sides are upset, you know, you’ve got a great negotiation going. But you know, there’s ways to strategize and get to the finish line. So I thought it’d be helpful to share what I know. And the first one is to figure out what the other side wants, and what drives them to be making these decisions. So in our industry, obviously, it’s buying and selling a home. So think about your first showing with the person, that’s your time to really interact with that buyer, or the seller and the broker to ask questions, obviously, we’re there to sell the home. But throughout that process, you know, we can ask questions that are about, you know, where do you live? Where are you currently living? Now? What do you not like about your house? Is it too small? Is it too big, and obviously, don’t ask it the way I’m asking them now. But you know, you you learn about their family, you learn if they’re renting, this is going to help formulate, if they are to make an offer on your listing is now you’ve got a little bit of background on them. Right. And again, it’s not it. It’s about leveraging your position, but it’s also the point of it is figuring out what they want, and what drives them. Right. So if they’re renting, Oregon, if they’re in a house in the neighborhood, and they’re having a child and schools are important to them, they really want to play room, you know, again, asking the right questions is going to lead to understanding your position when shooting, and you learn what’s personally important to them. Right? I also think it’s a good idea to not only understand what the buyer’s or seller’s want, but also you’re in front of their representative their broker. So you know, learn a little bit about that broker, what’s their negotiating style? Like? What is their track record? Have they sold in the neighborhood? Do they understand the cups? You know, maybe that broker doesn’t really know, the Linkin Park, single family home market, you know, so you can be an advocate to them and say, Hey, listen, I know that you haven’t sold a lot of homes and Linkin Park. So I went ahead and I prepared the CMA for you, Mr. Broker, you know, this might help just kind of show you what the last six months have looked like here.
D.J. Paris 7:16 Wow. So I just want to pause for a second because that is a very, very interesting, I’m curious. So basically, you have a buyer, and you’re bringing them to a listing, and then you can do some due diligence on the listing agent. And you can actually see if they’ve sold homes via the MLS in that market before, if you don’t recognize the name, or if it’s somebody that hasn’t doesn’t have a track record, you then will reach out and say, Hey, I know you may be new to this area, or you know, not as familiar with it, here’s some information that might help you. And is that usually well received? Because I could see agents getting offended. But that but I guess it’s all in how you present it.
Carrie McCormick 7:55 And it’s the delivery of the information, right? You know, and yes, I’m sure some people would get offended by that. But it’s not in a it’s just more of an educational, but I really don’t go that route. And unless I know my clients interested in the home, you know, I’m not gonna go do do all that due diligence. But sure, you know, and again, you the showing process is kind of like an interview process, right? Because especially if I’m with a buyer, and well, let me just reverse it, I’ve had buyers come into my listing, and they’re very difficult, right, they just they rip apart the home, like, Oh, my God, look at the way that this looks, this person hasn’t taken care of the home, and you can just tell with the personality, you know, they don’t like it or you know, they’re not there, they’re going to be difficult or you know, so you just kind of need to observe and understand. You know, what is the buyer, maybe the buyer wants to get the kitchen, you know, so I know now that when they come in with an offer, it’s going to be lower, because they need to factor in their costs. So again, during the showing process, of course, our job is to sell the home and highlight everything, but be observant, ask the right questions. So if that person was to make an offer on your home, you do have a little more information of what’s important to them, what drives them, and how to successfully get to a reasonable price when they make the offer. The other one is which I think is very important. I I’m primarily what we call a seller’s broker, I represent sellers, right. So understanding what my leverage is, right? So if I have a listing that’s on a wide lot, modern finishes in a great school district and there is nothing else on the market like that in Lincoln Park. I’m just making up a story. I know what my leverage is in this market, right? So when I’m there presenting the home, again, I can point out all of these facts and my cost per square foot. You know the age of the home the attributes that my home has that no other home has it it, if my home has everything every other home has, I’m not going to bring it up, I don’t have any leverage because there’s 10 other homes in the market that have the Sub Zero fridge up, right. But if my home is the only home that has x, I am definitely going to make sure I point that out and pointed out that I am the only home that has x. That’s my leverage, right. So again, understanding what that buyer wants. And then knowing what my leverage points are, make sure that I highlight those during my showing. And these are all very done, obviously, professionally and in good spirit. But again, the underlying message is preparing for that negotiation and preparing to get this house sold. The other one I wanted to mention is I love this one is agree on when you get an offer, agree on the easy stuff at the beginning. And what I mean by that, obviously, price is always going to be the contentious point of a negotiation, but agree on the small stuff, whether it’s a closing date with that not that small stuff, but you know, closing date or their pre approval letter or I don’t know, whatever it is, if there’s small stuff that they’re negotiating, just agree on that stuff. It just sets the tone for a nice negotiation. Two examples that I just had recently is we were kind of in the standoff of $100,000 apart on a deal. I’m on the seller side, you know, the natural thing is to meet in the middle, right? And that’s kind of everyone’s Oh, just let’s meet in the middle. When when. And so I prepped my seller for that. I said, Listen, we’re $100,000 apart on a multi million dollar deal. It’s it’s peanuts at this point, I’m the buyer is going to come back and split the difference, right? And he’s like, okay, a typical negotiation, right? The buyer came back with 60,000, instead of splitting the difference. And, and the broker said, We’re doing this to show good faith, that we’re a good buyer, and we want to get it done. And I thought, What a great move, he just made art. You know, it was $10,000. But what that did was my seller was so happy with this buyer. And said, let’s take it I mean it was done deal, sealed and delivered. Now we’re gonna go into negotiations of inspection items. Well, what did that seller just or the buyer just do? Sorry. He set himself up that if anything comes up in negotiations, my seller now thinks he’s $10,000. Ahead of that split in the middle thing he may give into it. But anyways, I just thought it was
D.J. Paris 12:43 Oh, that’s easy. I didn’t think about that. That’s yeah, that’s great as well. Yeah,
Carrie McCormick 12:48 that guy’s brilliant. Listening, he did a brilliant move. Another thing that just happened, which I also thought was brilliant, which came from me, so I have to take credit is I did a showing, and the client fell in love with a chair. Love this chair, you know, and so when they made the offer right out the gate, we said, you know, thank you for the offer. You know, we understand how much you love that chair, we just want to give you the chair, if you get if you buy the house, we want to give you Yeah, and the buyer was so happy. And we set that tone of that negotiation. In a good spirit. The buyer was so we thought that was so thoughtful. The broker came back to me said, Okay, now what do you guys want. And I said, nothing. We don’t want anything. I mean, obviously, we’re going to negotiate. But that was just a good gesture. My client knew how much you guys love that chair there, it’s not going to fit into their new home. If we come to an agreement, no strings attached, we want you to have the chair.
D.J. Paris 13:49 And that really requires you as the listing agent paying attention to the buyer and noticing Ooh, there’s something we could maybe we could do something for them. Because it’s probably not that common that somebody walks by or walks in and goes, oh my god, I gotta have that chair. Because they’re obviously thinking, you know, they’re gonna probably replace all the stuff that’s movable anyway. But I guess when you hear that, that’s an opportunity for you to come back because people get so emotionally tied to things. And yeah, and that is a great way. Especially furniture, I mean, furniture is a thing we just get, we get really excited about when we see a piece that really is like that would look cool in my place. So yeah, that’s a great, so those are two unbelievably good suggestions.
Carrie McCormick 14:34 So writing from a place of goodwill, right. So, and understanding again, in the beginning of a negotiation, you know, what is your purpose? What is your leverage, what the buyer wants, what the seller wants, and you can convey all of that and be strategic. And of course, at the end of the day, you know, you want to get the we’re fiduciaries to our client we want to get you know the best deal possible, but there’s ways to kind of maneuver that where everyone comes Out of the negotiation, feeling good about it. And that’s what we want. We want everyone to feel like they won.
D.J. Paris 15:07 And do you often if you don’t, maybe often, if you don’t know what the other side wants, I guess this is where good relationships come in where you could talk to the to the, you know, the buyers broker and have those conversations of yes, okay, well fit well with negotiating the price. But what are there any little things that we can agree upon now? To get them out of the way? I love that? Yeah,
Carrie McCormick 15:30 no, it’s easy. And my last tip to you this one, I say, exercise with caution with severe caution is, sometimes we need to put the decision makers in a room together, not physically, but maybe sometimes over the phone, I have done it in the past physically, which worked out really well. But you do have to be careful. And when I say the decision makers, I mean, the buyers and the sellers, because sometimes the agents, you know, there’s a lot on tag, right, that happens through the negotiation process. Sometimes there’s a lot of things that get misinterpreted based on an email tone, or text tone, or voicemail tone, or whatever it is. So I’ve had some negotiations that I’ve just put the buyer and seller together with us present, of course, on a phone call together, you know, and like I said, I’ve had them face to face as well. Sometimes when you have the decision makers together, you have a very successful outcome. I’d say every time I’ve done it, I’ve had a very successful outcome where, you know, like, they’re friends now. And it just especially when you’re dealing with certain personalities, it does work. But you that’s where you have to know your client, and you have to understand and know the know if it’s a good idea. So that’s why I say exercise with caution. But if you feel you’re at a point with good personalities you feels can be done, you know, getting the decision makers in the room.
D.J. Paris 16:59 It’s a great idea because we humans are wired for connection. And so we’re wired to get along mostly. So when you get two people who are in kind of an adversarial position, you know, competing against each other negotiating against each other, and you’re able to bring them into a room and it’s not a contentious environment, hopefully, then they actually like you said they actually bond closer together, they end up probably liking each other a little bit more at least, than they did before. And they end up wanting to work together and get the deal close. So I think those are all Wow, this is a great episode. We’re let’s cap it there because those were those were three amazing things in Karis. Gotta go more. Go ahead. No, you do. Okay. Well, that’s enough. Because that will save it will save other things for for next episodes. And boy that those are three amazing tips of great negotiation tips there for for our audience, please consider using that Carrie uses these herself and she is incredibly successful. So it would be behoove everyone to consider implementing some of these into their process. And please a couple of things to please remember to follow Carrie on Instagram. So you can find her at Kerry McCormick real estate, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes or websites Carrie McCormack RT. And if you are an agent in a another part of the country, Carrie works the Chicagoland area. But maybe you have clients that move to Chicago, she would love the opportunity to partner with you. And also she has clients that move out of Chicago. So if you are an agent that would like to maybe connect with Carrie, you can do that. Fine, you know, hit her up on Instagram or you can, you can email her she’s super easy to find just Google Carrie Carrie McCormick. And also, if you are an agent’s know Carrie has a team and if you think you would be a good addition to Karis team, certainly feel free to reach out. And you know if she has any openings or any opportunities, she will let you know. But and also, let’s remember to vote for her for influencer of the year with Chicago, I will have a link to that in the show notes. So even if you are not a Chicago broker, you can still vote. So we will have a link to that in the show notes. So please do that support our guests and our our fellow hosts like Carrie. And guys, let us also know what you would like Carrie to talk about on future episodes, she is going to be giving away you know her processes. So she is incredibly high producing agents. So let’s let us know what you would like to see from her hear from her. And on behalf of the audience. Thank you Carrie. As per usual, she has been with us since the very beginning. We love having her on and she is just a part of the show. So we’re so grateful for you on behalf of the audience. Thank you. And on behalf of Carrie and myself thanks to the audience. And please remember to tell a friend think of just one other agent everybody that could benefit from maybe somebody who needs some negotiation help send them a link to this episode and you know, just any Podcast Directory has our our links or you can send them to our website keeping it real pod.com By the way, we just crossed over 3 million downloads. So thank you to everybody for listening to You want to support our show, please also support our sponsors. They’re the reason we can keep doing these. So anyway, we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you Carrie. Thank you
Step By Step Buyer Checklist For Real Estate Agents • Breaking Down Ali’s Systems • Ali Garced
Oct 19, 2023
Welcome to Breaking Down Ali’s Systems mini-series with Ali Garced.
In this mini-series Ali will be explaining how she built her systems both for buyers and for sellers. In the third episode, Ali continues where she left on her Trello checklist during episode 2 and also continues to cover the entire homebuyer checklist.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today our friend Aligarh SID is going to share with you her exact buyer checklist that has netted her hundreds of real estate transactions. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Ali Garced 1:30 Welcome back to part three of the buyer series checklist. Again, this is what my group does. We love our checklists, we put everything in the checklist so that way we never forget anything. We can sleep easy at night and not wake up in the middle of the night thinking oh my gosh, did I do this? No. We’re gonna reference the checklist. Anything that you do more than twice should be part of a checklist. So welcome back. Aligarh said ally, the agent on all social media. If you have been enjoying this series so far, please go ahead and give DJ and keeping it real a review five star review on whatever platform you’re listening to this on, whether it’s YouTube, or Apple or Spotify, please go ahead and do that DJ does a lot for bettering this industry. And I love that. So if you are catching this on part three, and you have not yet watched part one or part two, I advise that you go to part one. And you watch that on YouTube, as opposed to listening to it. Because as much as I’m trying to vocalize exactly what I’m doing, it’s better if you follow along on the computer and can see and create your own checklist. If you don’t want to ask me for the checklist here, you can create your own checklists, just following along because I’m sharing my screen on everything. So otherwise, if you want the copy of my checklist, I am giving these away for free, just meet with me first text 520-341-2552. Or you could just find me on social media. Again, that’s ally, the agent, I have been meeting with a couple of you and it’s so nice that just being able to share a checklist and help other agents out. I love it. I’m here for this. So text me I’ve got a lot of reach outs on here for you. So let’s get started on the Trello checklist, where I left off at the end of part two of the series was the inspection period and the appraisal period. So assuming that the appraisal comes back and you know buyer and seller agree, or it comes back right at the purchase price. Excellent. The next step is or the next section rather is the before closing checklist. So first item on this checklist is to email clients the before closing checklist aka buyer email number five. And again, when you when you meet with me you get all these emails as well. So what does buyer email number five say? Well, what a good question. I’m so glad you asked. Okay, the first thing again, on every single one of my emails is a video so few people do this. Again, people this is not only another touch that a lot of other realtors aren’t doing. It’s a one time video that you create for all of your clients. And they get to see you and hear you again and you know, it’s almost as if you’re right there with them telling them hey, these are the next steps. So what does this three minute video say I pretty much just relay everything of what’s already in the body of the email and the text. Because again, if I were to just send this portion here if you’re looking along it’s just words and it’s so lengthy and it’s so boring who wants to read this even I don’t want to read it so therefore even though I made it you know bullet bullet format you know, no paragraphs or a few paragraphs it’s boring so make it as easy for them as possible to follow along. Boom they can click on this it goes straight to my bom bom which I pay for 23 bucks a month for the unlimited. I highly suggest you do the same you can also do loom as well. So, the next steps, what does this What the What does the text of buyer email number five say? It says number one, transfer all your utilities over to your personal name on and your credit card your checking account starting at the closing date. In Arizona, the date of closing or close of Escrow belongs to the buyer, it could be different in your state, definitely check with your team lead your broker, your you know, your state leaders. Also, along with what so essentially, what does the utilities entail the water sewer trash, the electric, the gas, etc. You also want to make sure that the solar lease or the solar loan, if that applies in this case, is transferred over. So in that way, the seller doesn’t have that anymore, and the buyer can take over the the loan or the lease whatever may apply. Number two, so important, schedule a locksmith to change the locks on your property the day of closing once you record. So again, it depends on you know, it might be different in other states, so so definitely check with your broker, I have had a personal scare with this where on my second closing ever, I was representing buyers, and they purchase a house from a bigger company. And it about two days later, they had not yet scheduled the lock the locks to be changed. And around midnight, this big company goes into their house barges into their house and tries to get them to move out of the house claiming that they were squatters. It was a whole thing. They said that there are no emergencies in real estate, that was actually an emergency. That was so scary. So even if you have never had any bad issues with this, please use my example to tell your buyers the importance of changing the locks as soon as the property records as soon as you can in your state. Number three, of course, schedule internet and cable because internet, at least in my area takes a long time to schedule. So you want to make sure that they are ahead of the game, the earlier they can do that the better. Again, this is this goes out about a week before closing. So it gives them enough time. And any other subscriptions or people that they’ll need, for example, if they have a pool scheduled the pool company, schedule the past the weeds.
You know, I’m trying to think of other other things, but it’s all pretty much that we have here. And what happens as you scroll down in this email, then I say it’s been great working with you. I’ve loved helping you through this home purchasing journey. Again, I repeat that also in the video as well. And the bottom of this email, I say Can I ask you for a favor? Do you know if anyone else was looking to buy or to sell. And this can be in any state not just in, you know, enter your city and state? Because from there, you can get referrals. And I’ve gotten referrals this way. It’s been great, actually, not from this email, but from me doing this also in a text. And I’ll explain more of that in a bit. And if they do have someone you know, can you start a group chat and introduce me to them, instead of them. Passing on your phone number, what you want is for them to start a group chat with that potential buyer with that potential seller with you on it that way. It’s a warm handoff, and it’s a better conversion rate after that. And then I explain what what referrals mean, because a lot of people don’t realize I don’t really know what that means. You know, my business runs off referrals. Clients don’t know what that means, especially if they’ve never been in a business owner. So I explained that to them. So boom, I sent by your email number five to the all buyer parties and heading back to this Trello checklist now. Then I asked them to write a review. Again, this is about a week before closing check the checklist there. So sometimes buyers aren’t comfortable yet. They want to make sure that they close, that’s totally fine too. I do reiterate to them, that the review is just based off of me as a person so far in their experience, so they don’t have to wait until closing. But if they prefer to wait till closing totally fine. I’m here for it. Thank you so much. So of course Zillow is once you actually have a closings, but Google doesn’t have to be so you can ask for several reviews from the same clients throughout the process. And that’s exactly what’s next after that is to do it on all of the review platforms. Google Zillow, realtor, Facebook business page if you have that, YouTube, whatever it might be. After that, complete the final walkthrough with the buyer or if the final walkthrough waiver applies then make sure that all the parties sign and it’s sent over to the brokers for the review. If you’re at the final walkthrough, take the keys out of the super box and put them in a General Contractor lockbox because sometimes you know listing agents of course coordinate with the listing agent, they’ll want to use that super box and, you know, immediately push it on to the next listing that they have. So definitely don’t want to keep your keep the keys in there. And you definitely want to confirm with the listing agent, that it’s okay that you remove those keys. So of course, just talk to them and figure out a spot to where the keys are safe. And not yet in the buyers control before you know recording, never do that. So just over communicate with the listening agent and work something out there. Then top again teleclasses scheduled locksmith to be to be done after closing, or do the closing gift I just started on with client giant and I love it. I personally am so bad at thinking of closing gifts. Oh, it is. so rough. I it’s just a blank sheet of paper when I think of what to give a glide for closing. So I signed up for client giant, I’m liking it so far, it’s actually pretty good price. Like for example, VIP clients are like 100 bucks for the year for gifts a year. So it’s 25 bucks. And I don’t have to think about it. Yes, please. So reach out to them. In case you also are like me and are a terrible gift giver. Otherwise, if you already have clients client gifts, you know that you already know what to do, I have made the mistake of ordering them too early like before appraisal because I wanted it to be done on time. And I wanted to give it to the client right at closing, like when they’re signing or when we meet at the house and I give them the keys. But as you know, 25% of all contracts fall out of escrow. So sometimes you’re left holding the bag, and sometimes you’ll give it to them anyway, it’s kind of awkward, you know, whatever. So you want to make sure that all the contingencies are removed before you order a gift. Don’t learn from my mistakes, please. So then, again, at the bottom here, as we continue scrolling through the checklist, just confirm that the clients and the spouses or even adult kids so that you’ve received a review on whatever platforms you’re looking for, again, with Google, it could be character. So hey, Ali was a funny realtor. That’s that counts. You know, whatever it might be. It helps. So you definitely want to definitely want to increase your Google presence because Google is the number one website in the world, followed by YouTube, which is the number two, Google owns YouTube, you need to be on both. So if anything, focus on YouTube, Google reviews with your Google business page and YouTube. But I have a whole a whole bunch of other videos on on YouTube, I’m definitely increasing my presence there. So day of closing, if the sellers are in town, oops, I meant to say if the buyers are in town, if the buyer, let me fix this right here. If the buyers are in town because the buyer checklist are in coordinated with them go to the closing, go to the signing, make sure that title tells you when when the signing is sometimes there’s a lot of lost communication, there’s have to stay on title to make sure that they tell you when the closing is asked me how I know. Bring your sold key or any sort of additional, you know, something that you want in social media for the clients to post on their pages as well as you to post on yours and your website. If the buyers are out of town, then go ahead and congratulate them call them and FaceTime them. Good phone calls are what people like. So definitely anytime you have good news, call them, don’t waste it on a text. So it’s like people love hearing good news. Then if buyers, again, being that I work with mainly military, a lot of all military have access to bass. And a lot of times the title companies will waive the notary fee, because the buyers or the sellers, whatever military clients that you have, have access to the base and they can avoid paying that $200 mobile notary fee. And they instead they could just go to base and sign there. This helps a lot when your clients are coming out from out of country stay say they’re stationed in Japan or Korea right now they can go on base there, you know have have the closing documents faxed over to the legal base on there, they coordinate with legal and they can sign there and then fax it back. It saves them 200 bucks. There’s no buyers will have to go anywhere to travel. It’s it’s super, super easy. I really liked that a lot. But of course if they don’t have access, if they’re not military, then you can just disregard that. That checklist or that check. Then next title is going to be asking you for the information that’s needed to get you paid, of course, very important Dante. So this goes specifically more into exp stuff where we have sky slope and it tells you you know what buttons to click here to make sure that you get paid. Again, if you’re in a different brokerage, then ask the other, ask other agents around you how to make sure. And then right before closing, call the buyers again with the new saying, hey, so far, so good. Just wanted to say that we are on track. Do you have any questions? And then as this is a perfect opportunity to ask for more referrals. So do you know of anyone else that is that’s looking to buy right now? Or do you know anyone was looking to sell? And then usually, again, because a lot of clients don’t know how our business works? Or what referrals even mean? They’re usually like, No, I’m the only one I know, moving to Aurora, Colorado. And that’s when you can say, I actually can work in any state I can. Do you know, if anyone else is looking to move in any state, I would love to help them find an agent that’s right for their needs. And usually, at that point, you know, what’s the most what’s the most common responses? No, I don’t. And then I find that that that’s a great opportunity for you to really drill in to what to, like activate their memory is specific examples. Usually, what I find is when people are looking to buy or sell is any life changes, like maybe someone you know that my that is pregnant now looking to maybe increase in, you know, upgrade their house, or maybe some parents whose like, kids just went away for college, that might be looking to downsize into something smaller? Do you have anybody like that, or maybe somebody that got a job promotion, and then just stay solid for a little bit and see, give them the opportunity to think about it? They might, they might have somebody. And if they do, again, tell them, this is the perfect time to train your your clients? If you do or when you do. Instead of you passing on my phone number, I would love if you do me a huge favor, and instead of just passing my phone number, if you could introduce me in a group chat. That would be that would mean a lot to me. And they’re usually like, oh, yeah, too easy. Yeah, I’ll introduce you to my friend, whenever I you know, find if someone find out about somebody moving. And that usually increases the conversion rate by a lot. So then the last section here on this before closing checklist is clearly a lesson learned for me. So I added it on here, make sure that the lead base disclosure has been signed by the buyer, and that they’re given the pamphlet, this almost became a quote, this was a close call for us. So if they don’t have it, ask your TC to do it immediately. Because the fine is big, and you’ll be the one paying for it. So that’s another foolproof measure to make sure that all of your paperwork is good to go. Then we have the after closing checklist. And what’s the first thing here buyer email number six, which essentially is asking for a review again, in case they haven’t yet reviewed, reviewed you. So let’s take you over to buyer email number six.
By your email number six here subject line, can you can you leave me a review. And here I say there are 1000s of Realtors in you know x city and you chose to work with me for that I am so so thankful. Can you let me know what I could have done to make it an even better experience? And what do I have for after that, of course, eight video, it’s two minutes long. It describes everything on here that I’m asking for review. And then I’m thanking them for the opportunity that they gave me to work with them. So And here again, after we meet together and you get these checklists, you’ll be you’ll see what the video exactly says. After that scrolling down the email here, can you make a video review of how I helped you? This, I usually do also when I’m on the phone with them. And when I’m giving the keys, that’s the perfect opportunity to take to snap a quick video doesn’t have to be long, 30 seconds. And the only thing that I asked them to do my Hey, would you mind if I take a quick video of you? And they’re usually like, yeah, of course, you know, they’re excited. You just have them buy a house. And they’re like, Yeah, cool. Of course, sometimes they’re nervous, but that’s natural. Not everyone is okay in front of a camera. So the highest level of testimonials are videos. So if you can get that, you know, the more you can get that and add that to your website to your Google business page, the more you’re going to rank so definitely ask them and you can it doesn’t have to be long. The only question they really have to ask or answer is what was it like working with Ally so they can start the sentence off that way working with Ally was and then just let them say whatever they want to say. And then you know, the longer the better of course. But anyway, I’m drilling off a little bit here. So back back to buyer email number six. This is where I asked them for a video review. And I also ask them to start off the the written review with the following like IPCs to Davis Monthan Air Force base with an Aligarh I said helped me buy or sell a home in XYZ city. And working with Ali was blank. I have this because these are key words. Again, SEO is so so important when it comes to getting reviews and getting ranked and therefore getting more clients clients reaching out to you. So I being that my meat and potatoes are working with military clients, I want the keywords PCs, I want the keyword Davis Monthan Air Force Base, of course, you’re also going to want to have your name and city, those, having those keywords will rank you. So you know, for example, say you live in, you know, I don’t I don’t know any other city just plug and play this exact beginning into your buyer email number six. And I also give some examples to some examples. If you were a buyer, how long did we work together that will show other people how impatient I am? What type of loan did you have, because the more that they can share that the more other people reading those reviews will say, Oh man, I also have an FHA loan. Great, it looks like she’s done this before. And maybe I want to work with her. Then the next is if you were remote, during the home buying process, if my team helped you with like during FaceTime, or sending you videos with the properties from afar. This is what we do for 90% of our clients. majority of them have not been in Tucson even until after closing. So and then negotiations, how do the negotiations work? How much under did we get the did we get the property? How much did you already have an instant equity because of our negotiation skills that you were able to close with with and immediately grow your net worth? How many other offers were on the table, and when the sellers chose your offer. And if there weren’t any how far under was the original list price, what were able to get it under contract for and was my team helpful in providing guidance. These are just some examples of what they can or you know, of course, they don’t have to use these. But I’m using these to trigger their memory from the very, very beginning of when we met all of the good you know, all the all the good times that we shared. And then of course, I have the link to Zillow and Google. I also have an example of a previous buyer review. So this, so go through your buyer reviews, find the one that you liked the best find like the one that just stands out and put that review in your template for this email. So in that way, other buyers can start to subliminally see, oh, this is like what she expects this is going to be okay, a really beefy, you know, testimonial, a really beefy review. So I do that. And then also at the bottom here, my business runs on referrals, meaning I rely on the on your word of mouth and telling other buyers and sellers to continue making a living, this is what I do to make a living. So if you know of anywhere of anyone moving anywhere in any state, please connect me, I can connect them to a few, a few realtors that will help them every step of the way. Thank you so much, then we’ll signature block, boom, and then I send it. Now that is buyer email number six. And that is the last of the official emails within the buyer process. But we’re not done with a checklist. So after that, of course, you get the keys from seller. And if it’s an eye buyer, make sure or a pretty much if it has like a programming. If it has a if the house has a keypad, you want to make sure that you have the instructions on how to erase all of the old codes and re program it or maybe just buy a whole new one in case you don’t have that. Again, changing your changing keys. As you know it’s it’s not a cheap at all locksmiths make pretty good money. So make sure what your buyers know about how much to expect to change out all the locks. Then in bold here in all of my checklists on my Trello anything in bold is what I have my assistant do so the assistant will add the client photo, the Client Testimonial to my website to social media and to post this is also a great way on specifically on Instagram for you to invite the client as a collaborator, because that way it’s that same post and it not only shows up in front of your audience, but now you’re showing up in front of their audience. Even if their audience is 100 people it doesn’t matter how few of their followers are you get in front of a whole new audience so now they’re their friends can say oh my gosh, wow, actually close with ally who is this ally person? They’re showing up on my on my feed because I’m friends with client actually, but realtor ally seems pretty cool. Maybe I’ll follow her maybe it’ll become a relationship later on. And then add them to home bot in case you’re using home bot. Home bot also was a it’s a great way to to get an insights goop on, if your clients are looking into the valuation of their home, how reliant they are with accurate information, that’s another story, it might be really good in your area, it might not. A lot of lenders do pay for this already, because it’s a great way for them to see if the buyers want to refinance. So they’re always keeping an eye on this. So reach out to a couple of lenders and see if they already have home bought, they usually have I think, like between eight to 10 slots available for them to give to agents. So reach out. And then one day after that, I reconfirmed that the clients have reviewed me on all the platforms. And it’s a lot of platforms, right? Like you want to be everywhere. So to make this as simple as possible, I tell them, Hey, I know it’s a lot, but you only have to put effort into one review. And then you can just copy and paste into everything else. So and I want to catch that early, I do it one day after, just to make sure because otherwise, if I’m doing it, you know, two months later, when I remember, later on down the road, they’re not gonna want to do it, the honeymoon phase is over, they’re there hi from purchasing a house is gone. So catch it early. And then of course, find out find out the status of the closing gift in case you’re using client joint or anything else like that, make sure that, that that’s being worked on. And again, the next two items are ways to or reminders to review the other the cross agent, of course, if they’re good, like I’m not a fan of leaving bad reviews, but so if the cross agent was exceptional, you liked working with them, and you truly want to work with them again, write them a business review on Google help their business out, because it’s such a small world, and the amount of agents that help other agents is very small, I’m finding so anything that we can do to help each other out, it will come back to you, you know, like so leave them a review, like and this was I have an example here. I’m another agent in this same marketplace. But if but this message is to every other agent, if you ever have a chance to work with the Sydney your Consider yourself lucky. They know what they’re doing for their client, we help them close or we work together on XYZ transaction like from Aligarh said realtor blah, blah, blah. That helps them out so much. And guess what, next time they have a listing, and you’re the buyer, guess who they’re going to want to work with you. So and then the same thing here, right at the bottom after this is invite them to any sort of annual parties events, or really any event, just keep that relationship going.
I also have inside this bullet here is to let them know that it’s not a recruiting event. Again, I work with exp so therefore, oh, we have to like explain ourselves like no, we’re actually here to work. Like we’re not here to recruit. So, yeah, so I have that in the script here. In case you aren’t exp. Like I mentioned before, I think if it was in my first video with this one or my my interview with DJ, but whenever I call an agent from a different brokerage, I literally have to say, hey, it’s Aligarh said, I’m a local realtor here with exp Realty. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to recruit you. And then I leave a little bit of a pause because they’re usually like, oh, they laugh or they’re like, Oh, thank goodness, you know, I’ve already gotten 1015 calls a day. And I’m like, No, I’m actually representing a buyer and we’re interested in 123 Main Street, you know, when can I do it? So I definitely in other exp agents now they definitely have to like be on the defense like, hey, no, we’re not trying to recruit. We’re just trying to be friends. Okay, anyway, carrying on. Then after you add all the photos and the videos taken with the client at the closing or presenting the closing gift, or at their house, put it in your Google business page. Anything you can do at least once a week to ramp up your Google business page, do it, especially if they leave a video testimonial. Ooh, that is perfect. Throw it on your on your YouTube through on your business page and watch yourself rank on page one. So also, if in case you want to do this, I know this is like a whole nother thing on its own. But you can also add that address of the property to a Google page that you own site stock google.com You can create a website there and where you can have like a lot of different pinpoints of hey, these are all the homes that I’ve sold. So in case you’re ever you ever need to you know, prove yourself pretty much to a buyer or seller. You can say hey, these are all the homes that I’ve sold in the last year or ever. Zillow does this too, but sometimes I feel like they don’t capture everything. So this is a good way for you to pinpoint and show buyer’s or seller’s in your listing presentation or your buyer consultation. Then the next section that we have here is following up one month after closing, I have realized that a lot of a agents are scared to reach out to their clients. Because as you know, as I know, something always breaks, right? Especially if it’s a first time homebuyer, something is going to break within the first three months, it’s just inevitable. So therefore, a lot of agents are scared to make that call. And they’re like, oh my gosh, I know that that like, you know, maybe the AC was a little bit old or, or, you know, something, they’re scared of actually following up and saying, Hey, is everything going, okay? But the clients want that the clients need that from you. Instead, what a lot of agents do is close, you know, they post their their stuff on social media, and then they call it a day they boom, they disappear. Right? When that client might actually need them the most like, oh, my gosh, my water heater just broke or, you know, something, they need a contractor they need to, they need an introduction to somebody that you know, but you didn’t ask them. Sometimes the clients don’t feel comfortable reaching out to you, they might think you’re too busy, they might think you’re that’s not your scope of work anymore. And although legally it’s not, it’s a way to even further develop that relationship. So one month after closing or you know, even one week out, but definitely one month one after as well reach out to them, saying hey, how are things going with your home? Like, honestly, how are things going and let them tell you, they might say oh my gosh, we freaking love it. I you know, that’s it like all all butterflies and roses, or been I’d say actually the roof caved in yours you know, something like worst case scenario, you can connect them to a real estate attorney or a contractor or landscaping person because they’re weeds are now out of control. Whatever it is just be a resource for them. They want that from you. And that’s another perfect opportunity to to see if they are looking if they know of anybody yet if they ever found remembered somebody that had a job promotion, et cetera, Cetera for a referral. And then after that, about five months after closing, that’s when I mail out the six month gift, like happy six months of being in your home, I we mail them a candle, small candle, branded and a card. And then about 11 months after right before their one year home. aversary we mail them a bottle of wine. Of course, if they don’t drink we mail or something else with our logo and a card as well. A lot of times people will keep this card, especially if you got them a killer deal like hey, I’m so I’m so happy that we work together and you were able to increase your net worth by $17,000. Just by closing on this house. That is something that they that they will keep keep on their fridge for a long time. And whenever they have guests over, they’re going to say oh my gosh, wow, you made $17,000 You add that to your net worth by purchasing this house, and whose name or they’re going to read it the bottom their alley, the agent. So don’t don’t sleep on on cards. They’re, they’re amazing. And then every three months again, if you have access to that home bot, you can log in, see if they see if they’ve logged in at all they made they may they may have not. They may have not they may have not why does that sound weird? Anyway, carrying on sending holiday cards around the holidays. Always good to do again, staying in touch with them. And sending birthday cards to the buyer or if they’re also married the spouses, the kids, whichever, you know the best way that you that you increase your relationship with them. So just stay top of mind and do it genuinely. So if you’re you know driving by the area, or maybe even if you’re not say Hey, call me I was just thinking about you hope you’re having a great day. And that’s it. Again, people like positive phone calls you do you don’t want to correlate your phone calls to mean bad news, which sidenote is what a lot of property managers do. So it’s nice to flip that on its head. Then keep sending the review me email that buyer email number six for the reviews if they haven’t already done it and ask for a video review just in case they haven’t done it yet. And when they do review actually respond. Google sees if you’re responding to your Google reviews, and the way that you respond is everything. So make sure that you’re professional, make sure that you’re you know whatever your brand is if you’re funny if you’re loud, if you’re sarcastic whatever it is, respond to the review. And when they do review blast it on on all of our social media on your Instagram, your Tick Tock, your YouTube your website everywhere and every year send a CMA I would probably actually even do this month six, so month six, and then probably every year after that send a CMA again another touch point to stay in front of them because you never know. You never know when they might be looking to sell when they might If you’re looking to purchase another property, so they could, you know, refinance or you know, pull money out of that one purchase another one you want them to become forever clients. And this was something that I learned from the Tom Ferry summit that I went to a couple of months ago that I’m recording this right now and 2023. They said, to stop calling these clients past clients, eliminate the term past clients from your vocabulary, they should be forever clients, just like you should be there forever realtor. So that doesn’t mean one transaction and they never hear from you, again, continue always furthering that relationship. And you’ll find that a couple years down the road, your business really will run on only referrals, your outbound prospecting will have you know, you won’t have to do as much outbound prospecting. So that starts with CMAs. Hey, as a, what I do is I have one of my teammates here are partners here with exp since we’re not on a formal team, there are no team splits, I have one of my partners here, send out all of the CMAS to everyone in my past clients, hey, as a service of working with Ali, I am working with Ali as well. We want to give you an update whether or not you if you if you’re interested or not. You don’t have to open this but just wanted to let you know we’ve done the research for for you. This is what Zillow says is is what your property is worth. But these this is what the what your actual property is worth based off of data. And this is why if you have any questions, please feel free to reach back out. This is our phone number look forward to hearing from you. And that’s it doesn’t have to be long at all. Then the last section of this follow up checklist is to send them the shred method link. Shred method, I made a video about this as well. It’s a it’s a company where you can utilize a line of credit in order to pay down or shred your mortgage is super, super fast. I am a big proponent because I personally have used it myself. Before I even told you before I even told anyone about this about this company, I love it. And it’s a great way for especially for your investor clients, but really helps anyone out to eliminate, like take take a 30 year mortgage. And instead of paying it over those three decades, you could pay it in months or even or years or even months, I paid off all my mortgages in four months doing this, but this is not about that. So anyway, look into it in case you have investor clients or somebody that wants to get rid of their mortgage, which don’t we all at the bottom section here is red flags. investors,
investors trying to get owner occupied loans without already living in the area. That is a red flag. And again, I have this on my Trello checklist. So if somebody touches this red flag, I know I don’t want to work with them. You do not have to work with everyone, you are your own business owner, you can choose who and who you work with, and more importantly, who you don’t. So if an investor is trying to say that they want to get an owner occupied loan, which I’ve had before, and they’re like, oh, yeah, but I still want to get you know, a VA loan or FHA loan? No, that’s not for me, I’m not doing that I will not go to jail for you. So next. So I add that to the red flag, and just my own personal notes here, which maybe, I don’t know, I should or should not be sharing. But either way, you’re gonna get this when you get a copy of this. If, if a client cannot respond to yes or no questions, it might be too early in the game for them. So again, there’s a power there’s the power of asking three questions in a row like three deep why? But if they can’t answer simple yes or no questions, it’s gonna be a difficult transaction. So at that point, I wouldn’t want to work with a client. And then the next thing here is if of course, the buyer doesn’t give you the pre approval letter or refuses to meet with any lender. Then at that point, again, it might be too early in the process for them. They might not be serious buyers yet. And a lot of scams are so many scams are happening right now where I’m sure you’re getting this to buyers, or suppose it buyers texting you saying hey, are you a real estate in your real estate agent in your state? Like yes. And then they try to get you to talk to them over WhatsApp. I’m not really sure how that scam actually ends up playing out. But I don’t do that. So just be careful. There’s so much scam, so many scams going on in this industry right now, especially for real estate agents. Be careful what emails you you know, click on to the same thing that you tell your clients that you’re warning your clients about. Keep that in mind for yourself. So that is everything. I’ve covered the entire homebuyer checklist. Again, these are giving away these checklists. Just you just have to meet with me first. Calendly I’ll send you my Calendly link you can text 520-341-2552 Text the word checklist and that’ll automatically send you the link to it only text the word checklist. One word, no emojis, otherwise it doesn’t work. But if you have any questions, I’m Ally to agent. Again, if this has helped at all, please give keeping it real a five star review. We love hearing from you. And we’re here for the seller checklist. That’ll be starting potentially next week. So thank you so much for tuning in. And we’ll see you on the next one.
How To Get Over 100 Real Estate Referrals On Social Media • Rachel Adams Lee
Oct 18, 2023
Rachel Adams Lee with the Rachel Adams Lee Group in Northern California talks about how she got into real estate. Rachel discusses how in her first year she knocked 200 doors and held 3 open houses every week but sold no homes for 4 months. Rachel describes how she built a business model around social media and discusses the biggest mistakes real estate agents make in social media. Next, Rachel discusses how to convert a follower into a client and how to do lead generation on social media. Last, Rachel talks about her programs focusing on social media and how to build presence there.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’ll be talking with somebody that generated 131 referrals in the last 12 months, all from social media and she’s going to tell you exactly how you can do the same. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents they pride themselves I’m delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Rachel Adams Lee. But before we get to Rachel, just a couple of reminders. Please, as always tell a friend about this podcast. Think of another realtor that maybe could use some encouragement or new strategy or new skill and turn them on to this podcast. We appreciate it. Also, leave us a review let us know what you think of the show. So whatever app you might be listening to us on let us know we read every review and always are here to make changes to better suit your needs. Alright guys, that’s it. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Rachel Adams Lee.
Okay, today on the show, our guest is Rachel Adams Lee from the Rachel Adams lead group in Northern California. Let me tell you more about Rachel. Now Rachel Adams Lee is just a small town girl Making Moves. She has a top 1000 agent in the US. She is also a multi passionate entrepreneur and mother of three boys by the way, all under four years old at this point. This is a busy woman. Also, if that is not enough, she also runs for six and seven figure businesses with their hub husband and lives life on their terms she loves helping others tap into their true potential and build the business of their dreams. Couple of fun facts positivity is her jam. You can find her snuggled on the couch in yoga pants, hair and a messy bun with her laptop. She is five feet tall and loves all things social media obsessed with having a healthy marriage what a great thing to be obsessed about and thinks Nutella should be its own food group. I might disagree. But I think Nutella is a I think Nutella is somehow hardwired for females more so than males in my experience, but I do like it as well. I got a couple of things I want to share with you guys. As far as things to check out. If you are an agent in Northern California, you’re not, you’re going to want to do this even if you’re happy at your current firm because what Rachel does is really really cool. Her team is expanding. Check out what they offer Rachel Adams Lee group.com link to that in the show notes. And we’re going to be talking about a couple of our businesses today. One is called Hello social coaching if you want good coaching for social media, hello, social coaching.com And also, if you would like somebody to help you with your videos, get social leverage.com We’re gonna be talking about that as well. So again, hello, social coaching.com Get social leverage.com Don’t worry about remembering those. Just go into the show notes and click. Alright Rachel excited to have you.
Rachel Adams Lee 4:24 Thank you. I’m stoked to be here. Send you guys all the vibes from Northern California.
D.J. Paris 4:30 Well, that’s what Californians are good at vibes. You don’t you know, I’m in the Midwest. We don’t have that word. We don’t even know how to interpret that word here. But we but we do love California vibes. Of course everyone does. Let’s start before we get into all the cool social stuff and by the way, the stuff I’m when Rachel starts telling her story about the success she’s been having and our team has been having with social, you are absolutely going to want to hear this. It’s shot thinking I’ve been doing this for six years, and I’ve had countless people on here who have social strategies. Rachael strategy is really, really awesome. So hang tight for that. But Rachel, let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into real estate?
Rachel Adams Lee 5:12 Oh, let’s go back. Okay, so, real estate in 2012. So my grandma was a realtor. My dad was a broker for 42 years. And I always said, I would never ever go into real estate,
D.J. Paris 5:23 by the way, by everybody who has parents that are in real estate say the exact same thing. My boss, same thing. But honestly,
Rachel Adams Lee 5:30 though, I feel like the reason was because like no one talked about work life balance back then, like my dad, I had an awesome childhood, but my dad would like miss dinner sometimes because he was doing showings and stuff like that. And I just was like, I never want to have that, you know. And I found myself in 2012, working at a real estate office, and I was unlicensed, and I was in a really unhealthy marriage. At that point in my life. My ex husband was 80%, disabled, but 50% was PTSD for the Marine Corps. So I spent my days at the office, like you’re gonna get your offer accepted, you got this, and I got my spent my nights like crying myself to sleep because I was just in a really dark spot. And I knew I wanted my life to change, but I didn’t know what that looked like. And I remember seeing all these paychecks coming through the realtors. And I was like, gosh, there’s so much more money than I was making. But I was making $15 That I could count on every you know. And so it was like, okay, stability versus instability, the thing I’d never done is like bet on myself. So I decided that I would do an accelerated program, I got my license in 90 days, and I jumped into real estate when I jumped into real estate. I want to say it was with both feet, because literally, my first year, DJ, I’m knocking 200 doors a week and doing three open houses every week. So knocking 200 doors, doing three open houses, and I didn’t sell any homes for the first four months. So like, rejection you face and the amount of like, but also the grit you get and like what I always said to people, like how do you keep doing that, like that’s four months with nothing. And I was like my why, like, why I was doing this was bigger than any excuse that I would could come up with, like I had to change my life. So it didn’t sell any homes for the first four months, but I ended up selling 39 homes that first year. And then 100
D.J. Paris 7:09 I want to pause for dramatic effect. We’re gonna we’re gonna do what’s called a pregnant pause 39 homes in your first year with really not a Trump, I’m assuming not a tremendous sphere of influence, or Oh, no,
Rachel Adams Lee 7:24 I’d never even looked at a listing presentation buyer presentation. Because like I was in all different industries. Before that, I was like a small a teepee taught people how to do food and wine pairing like I did, you know, was in restaurants, like I didn’t do the real estate stuff. And so it took me some time to get traction going. But what I did during those those first four months, and really that first year, like I wrote my listing presentation 100 times for 100 days, every day for 100 days, I mastered script practice, like I wanted to overcome every objection. So when it came, I wasn’t nervous. So if I didn’t have the clients, I pretended that I did. So I was like a really a student of the game. So I sold 39 homes that first year, then 109, the next year. And then 123. So three years in, I hit Wall Street Journal’s top 1000 agents in the country. We still have that today. And I, you know, I really I wanted to, I wanted to make an impact on my community. I wanted to be in a healthy marriage, I wanted to have kids, I wanted to be a mom, like, all these things were important to me. And so I knew that like I love doing the door knocking in the open houses, the thing is, you can have one conversation with one person at a time. So the belly to belly is really important. But I also wanted like more. And so I decided I would really start to like focus on social media. Because if I did social media, I would choose when I respond to people I choose when I post like I could make a business model around social media. And I never heard of anyone doing that. And I’m a Systems girl. That’s the only way I can survive having a four year old a year and nine month old and a nine month old. So I have to have systems in my world. And so I created a business model around social media and like the first year we had 17 referrals come in, then it was like 30 than 50 but last year we had 131 referrals come through social and that’s through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. So life looks very different. Now I’m a real estate coach I love I love teaching people how to build their businesses. I I travel all over the country speaking I travel with my family. So whenever I’m in a conference, I bring my littles and my nanny and my husband and it’s wild but it’s really fun.
D.J. Paris 9:36 If you’re wondering if you’re noticing that Rachel speaks quickly that’s because she has to because she has three little ones to attend to and for businesses to run. But guys, how great is this? This Rachel ed i don’t I’m not saying just speak slowly.
Rachel Adams Lee 9:52 You’re got a lot to do in capable of it and I’m told hanging out with me is like taking a shot of espresso. So good morning, everybody.
D.J. Paris 9:58 No, I I love it. I love it. I’m kind of the same way I have to do, I have to remind myself to slow down. But everything you’re saying is so gold golden, I want you to get as much in as possible through this episode. So let’s talk about social media. You know, what I’d like to maybe start with is what do most agents not understand about social media are what are they go wrong?
Rachel Adams Lee 10:19 That’s a great question. So I think the thing with most Realtors I’ll try to slow down a little bit because I get really excited. Oh, no, no, don’t
D.J. Paris 10:26 do not slow down. You’re perfect. I just love how fast you talk.
Rachel Adams Lee 10:30 So I think one of the biggest mistakes Realtors make is they make their social media all about them and all about real estate. And they think that like if look at his house, I just sold look at my new listing. Look at this order, god, look at me Look at me. And what you don’t realize is that people might find you because you’re in real estate, but they stick around because of who you are and how you make them feel. So you know, one of the biggest mistakes Realtors make is just talking about real estate. So when I’m talking to people with social, I say you need to make your social media like an 8020 principle 80% of what you post is actually going to be you who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re reading, what you’re eating, you know, like, why what makes you tick, why somebody would hang out with you on the weekend. And 20% is only going to be real estate 20% real estate, but you know what you could do, you could be watching or listening to this podcast right now, take all these notes. And then you’re gonna have the business model by the end of this for how to build a business through social media, then you as a realtor, go on your social media, and you make a post and say, you know, I was just hanging out with DJ Paris, and he interviewed a top 1000 agent in the country about how she got 131 referrals last year, I would love to share those notes with you, if you want a copy of my notes, leave your email below. You, as a realtor, if you can be the person who’s always adding value to others, when they need to buy or sell, or they have a referral for your location, they’re going to think of you. So what I do in my world is I think, okay, how can every single day when I woke up, I was like, How can I add value to others? How can I add value to others, my clients in my community, so like being the local expert, so it’s October, right? So I’m sharing where to look at the local Pumpkin Patch locations. Right, I’m doing a pie giveaway, if it’s December, I’m sharing, you know where to see the the local Christmas tree light locations, like you can Google this stuff for free, then go on Canva, get a free account and make it look a graphic. And the thing is, if you’re always adding value to people, then your platform becomes a place they want to hang out. And, you know, the algorithm is like this weird tricky place. But the simplest way to think of the algorithm because you hear that word thrown a lot around a lot. It is it is you’re impacting your influence you have on social media, it’s like whatever you’re looking at the goal of Facebook, Instagram, tik, Tok, snapchat all of them, the goal is to keep you on the platform as long as possible. So if you’re looking at a specific niche, they’re gonna give you more of that to keep you on it. The trick is, how are you as a realtor? The person that they want to be in front of? And that’s what my model goes through?
D.J. Paris 12:59 Yeah, it’s no, you just said so much there. And I want to I want to go back to some of the non real estate stuff like community focused stuff. So this, I feel is one of the biggest missed opportunities for realtors. Because if we think about like, if your whatever you’re into maybe you know, you’re a mom with with little ones. So you could create content specific to mothers who are working, maybe you have children, and you could do stuff about, hey, I have some resources for moms who are trying to do it all. It could be totally unrelated to real estate, or it could be hey, here’s some really cool events that are going on in our area for moms with little kids, or here’s some you know, Mom meetups or it can be here’s what’s going on for Labor Day, if you don’t have plans do that. It. i This now we’re talking about value. And we and what you said is so important is you have to think what do my you know, look, when somebody’s ready to buy or sell a home? Yes, they want some of that real estate content. But in between five to seven years of them not buying or selling a home, you probably don’t care that much about you selling a doing a listing. I mean, it’s cool, it’s good, but we want to you want to get them hooked on your content is what I’m hearing from you.
Rachel Adams Lee 14:03 Yes, absolutely. Yeah, you really want to so with social media, you’re either doing one of two things, you’re either educating people or you’re entertaining. You’re either educating or entertaining. And if you’re really doing social media high level you do to balance of both and I think people get so caught up because they’re like, I don’t even know what to post about. No one cares about the fact that like my you know, I sit in my office with my dog at my feet. Yes, they freakin do. They love it. Right? And so like when I if you’re going to build a business through social media, I want you to write down one through five, you’re literally 212345. Number one, you’re going to write down real estate because that’s the industry that we’re all in. But then two through five, you’re going to make it personal to you. What makes you tick, if you were in an elevator and someone said, Okay, tell me about yourself. What are some things you like? That’s your five things. That’s the other four. So like real for me, I do real estate and being an entrepreneur, I talk about being a wife and a mom, because that’s my number one, right? I talk about personal growth because I’m always on a journey to be like the best ever For myself, I talk about positive body image because it’s something that I struggle with and after having three kids, and the last would be in an emergency C section. Like my I, my body has changed a lot. And I had fertility and we’ve had four losses. And like I’ve really had this like journey to become a mom. And, you know, it is something I talked about, I wasn’t going to talk about it on social media, but I found myself like silently struggling, and I was like, Man, I have a super killer support system. And I’m struggling.
D.J. Paris 15:29 There, imagine what everyone else who doesn’t have that support. And by the way, what percentage of women struggle with what percentage of humans certainly women, I mean, this is 99% of women struggle with body image because of how we, as a society project, what women are supposed to look like. And obviously it’s very, we all know how tough women have it. So that’s a great, great thing to talk about. Yeah.
Rachel Adams Lee 15:50 And I just think like, you know, it can be a cool thing, too, is your four passions can change before I had kids, that was not something I talked about. But after I had kids like positive body image became one of my focal points of my life. So it’s something that I want to talk about with others. And so you come up with these different things that help you define who you are as a person. And then remember, people will find you because you’re in real estate, but they stick around because of who you are, and how you make them feel. And so you get really intentional on going through these and like if you go on my Instagram, and you’ll look at like the grid, right? Like the little pictures, you’ll literally see me go through these topics. And, you know, if if you join my real estate team today, you actually have to sign a social media addendum that says you’ll post at least three times a week, three times. Wow,
D.J. Paris 16:32 it’s part it’s part of the agreement to work with you. I love it. Oh,
Rachel Adams Lee 16:36 absolutely. Because if you’re not doing social media, as a realtor, now, you’re going to get left behind. And you know, one of the big things that we really are focusing on now is video. Yeah. You
D.J. Paris 16:47 know, it’s funny, I want to pause for a sec, because I wanted to get your take on this. I’m curious to get I have an opinion about this. But I’ll wait to hear your opinion first, although maybe I’ll be leading. leading you on this one. I’ll try not to what do you think the role of websites personal websites are going to be going forward? Are they going to be less important, more important, neutral, meaning an agent with their own website?
Rachel Adams Lee 17:11 Yeah. I think that you’re what you need to have a website because it can be linked to your MLS right for IDX. So like your search portals, and if you’re doing ads and stuff like that, but otherwise, your social media is your website on? Yes,
D.J. Paris 17:25 your web, stop working on your websites, everybody. First of all, your, your SEO, you’re not going to compete with the other people who are already locked in that those SEO results for top, you know, to one to three searches on or one to three positions on the search of Google anything under one to three no one clicks on it anyway. So don’t try to play that game. Because, again, have a nice looking website, like you said, have an IDX search built in so people can search instead of going to Zillow or Redfin, they’re going to maybe use your site, but realize that not people are gonna hang out on your website, one
Rachel Adams Lee 17:55 thing that I want you to look at, so go, you can do it right now. Sorry. And that’s a real what I was just doing this morning. Okay, so if you go to my Instagram right now, so you go to Rachel Adams Lee, what you’re gonna see is like the first line, so you want to be really intentional. So this is like a class for you guys on editing your bios, you want when somebody goes to your social media, you want it to be within one second, they know exactly what they’re looking at. So first, your profile has to be public, you cannot build a social media presence with a private profile. Because if you click on my page, and I’m Private, then you accept you add for me to be your friend or whatever follow by the time that I accept you, you forgot who I am, because you’ve done 15 things that day. So what the very first line you see is Rachel Adams Lee, top 1000. Realtor and business coach. The next thing you see is social media experts. So my credibility, right. And where I serve California realtors, you’ve got to say your realtor on your social media. And you have to say the area you serve, because if you want referrals, so think about this, I had 131 referrals come through last year, a huge portion of those are agents around the country. The rest are client and community, right. But you want to make sure that you always say the areas that you serve, because then it gives people to know where they can give you referrals, and they’re constantly meeting coming to your profile and getting value and laughing and connecting and feeling and cue you’re there buddy. And then by the way, you happen to serve that area, and then you continue moving on. And so the third line down is really where I do credibility. So you can see how many houses you sold or if you haven’t, if you don’t have the credibility behind you yet, you know, you’re with a top brokerage, like whatever you want to say there. And then my fourth line down is my personal stuff. So I my wife and I are working mama with three boys. And then the line after that is a call to action. So if you your call to action could be like click your to find out how much your home is worth. But you always want to have something for them to do. You’ll notice like if you go on my social media and let’s talk about reels for a minute let’s talk about video because it is the number one thing the algorithm favors above all else Right now, I spent a lot of time working on reels and doing video. And we have something we can talk about a little bit for you guys that will help. And what you’ll notice is if you go look at the reels, and you click on them, and you literally go over just to look at the reels, you’re gonna see what is called a hook. So what people don’t realize is when people select scrolling on social, you actually only have two seconds to frickin seconds to stop the scroll and see if what you’re posting about is something they want. So your hook that so what you do is when you create your video, you have the hook on the screen, literally for two seconds. When you use editing apps, like I use one called InShot. You can keep it on there for two seconds, and then you move forward. So like one says, How I gained 6000 followers in three months. Another one says how I got a $1.7 million buyer for mineral penthouse check out my system, how to hack the algorithm, best recording equipment for your videos to go viral. How to Lose 10 pounds with Chad GPT, right? Like, these are hooks. These are things that literally are going to stop people and they’re gonna say, oh, I want to learn about that. But if I don’t have an eye catching something on there, then they scroll past so many realtors, like one of the big mistakes they do DJ is they’ll be like, Hey, guys, my name is Rachel and today gone lost him. Who cares? My name is what am I going to talk about? That’s what you have to have. The second I
D.J. Paris 21:20 want to make two two quick points that I’d for clarifying. So when she’s talking about a hook, what we’re really thinking about is, when we’re scrolling on YouTube, let’s think about YouTube for a second, the videos that tend to perform the best have have sort of title cards. So what we’re really talking about with Rachael saying is we’re creating sort of title cards within a reel. So the first so that way, when they’re when they’re listed, as you she was saying to scroll through you literally without even having to click on the video, you can see exactly what the video is. That is huge. And I believe, Rachel, you may have to correct me on this, I believe, once you upload a reel into Instagram, I don’t believe you can edit or add a cover after the fact I may be wrong. Yes. So So I’ve made this mistake a million times where I’ve uploaded reels, they don’t have a title card, or the first few seconds that show what we’re going to do with written out. And you’re right, nobody knows what. Yeah,
Rachel Adams Lee 22:13 yeah. So you, you really need to have that done ahead of time and the title card, like he’s saying, so the cover page like that is important for when that’s important for when you are like creating a real for your page and someone’s scrolling on your content. But if they’re not on your page, and you get to the Explore page where I’m at a lot, that’s where you need to have the two for the the hook on there for the two seconds, because that’s where you’re gonna grab them. Now,
D.J. Paris 22:42 quick, quick questions. So I’ve got about, I don’t know, maybe 50 reels for this podcast, we grab little, we just started grabbing moments and doing our 62nd videos. Yeah, we did not think about title cards. So would it make sense to pull all of those down, add title cards, re upload them as as new post, just because it would probably get more visibility or moving
Rachel Adams Lee 23:05 forward? No, because that’s like deleting all your social media and starting fresh. It’s like when’s the best time to plant a tree? Right, plant the seed. Yeah. So Yeah, yesterday, can’t do it today. So you just start moving forward. So your next title card will be here. And you just again, you want to pull the hooks and I have what I can do for your listeners. Actually, I have a website that I’ll give you where if you go to I think it’s called Rachel’s freebies, yeah, go to Rachel’s freebies.com that will give them 20 Free hooks. So we’ll give them 20 They can use right now on their social media, which you guys can put that in the show notes. But if you go to Rachel’s freebies, that’ll give them 20 hooks they can use right now on their social media.
D.J. Paris 23:46 I also wanted to make one point, this is just a little aside that I noticed when I was searching for you on Instagram, and I want everybody not, don’t just go directly to Rachel’s Instagram, go to Google search, Rachel Adams Lee, Instagram, and I want you to notice the font that comes up on on Google when it shows the result it is a unique font because Rachel was very smart and realize that when you use a unique font, on Instagram, it actually pulls that into the Google snippet when people are searching on Google and it is so unique. It drew my eye immediately to it. I was like Whoa, did Google change their fonts all of a sudden? No just for Rachel because it and when you go to her Instagram page you will see her name is in a unique font. That is not by accident. That is not a mistake. That is notice how your eyes go straight to that a little little tiny thing I noticed but
Rachel Adams Lee 24:37 fancy font if you guys to free app, you can download it. It’s called fancy font. And so like whenever I’m writing emails, whenever like when I do captions on social media, I use a lot if I want you to see something, I capitalize it and I bold it because I want it to grab your attention because it grabs mine and I’m going a million miles a minute so like I have to have stuff that’s like stop. This is important. Read this. Yeah, I don’t Did you know this story you and I talked about before we went live about how so I was telling him about how I got a phone call today from someone who is going through a divorce. And she was saying she needs to find a realtor. And she said she was talking to her daughter at the gym about how she needs a realtor and her 17 year old daughter was like, I follow this girl on Instagram. Why don’t you call her? She found me because of a real you guys, the reels are the number one thing that algorithm favors and it will push you above other people in the feed. And so but the reason I brought it up as well, we’re talking, my phone rang and it was the attorney. And so I’m like, Oh, it’s so hard. I’m like, can I just pause this so I can go get that piece of business? Nope, I’m time blocked. This is the one thing I will tell you that makes you state guys, time blocking. Like my number one focus right now is doing this podcast with DJ because I committed to it, I’m time blocked for it. As soon as I’m done with him, I’m going to call back that attorney and I’m going to post a reel that I was editing right before I got on here. So like my whole life is time blocked. But you can do you can build this business you can have the kids you can do the things you want to do if you time block. When I did the door knocking the open houses, I time blocked for it, I would I would door knock two hours a day. And I could hit about 75 doors in those two hours. With social media. I’ll give you guys a system for how you can lead generate through social media for two hours. All my lead generation is in two hours because that’s like as long as my attention span can last before I’m like it’s not good. But you know, that’s that’s a success. If you can master time blocking as a realtor like you can do this. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 26:33 and it’s we’re talking about turn the phone off or put it facedown and don’t because things are going to be flying at you. As we all know, things fly at you all day long. And it’s easy. If you’re like me, you just get distracted by any shiny object. So good idea now. So let’s talk about content again. So we understand the importance of reels and what a reel is, at least an Instagram I believe is 90 seconds, Max, I can’t remember if it’s 60 or 90 short
Rachel Adams Lee 27:00 form video, it can be 90 seconds or less. But I’ll be totally transparent with you like the easiest reels that go trending and viral are like 10 seconds or less, and even seven seconds because you what you do. So a reel will play twice in a row. For someone who’s watching it. It’s called looping, it will play twice in a row for someone that’s watching it. And so what you do is the way you want to think about reals, like the strategy behind it is in this kind of content a little overwhelming, but I’ll give you something at the end, that will make it easy. So you’re going to record your video, okay, and you’re going to come up with your topic, you’re going to know what you’re going to do. So you’re going to record your video for let’s like my best ones are like seven seconds long, no joke. So seven seconds long your recall, you literally can record you typing at a computer and smiling for seven seconds, then you’re going to come up with your hook. So whatever the video is going to be about, and you’re going to put it on the top of the screen for two seconds, then you’re going to have two more things you’re going to share with them. And then you can be like see caption. What I will tell you is the real is to is to entertain them where you educate them. And you position yourself as the expert is in the caption below. Because what you’re going to notice on all of my reels like I have one that I put up earlier this week, and it talks about I think I was like at 60,000 views like as of this morning, and it talks it talks about how things that depreciate in value as soon as you buy them. And I said your car, your designer purse, Asa evils, like I made it kind of funny. And then I was like things that don’t real estate, and it is a five second video you guys, all I’m doing is walking towards the camera for five seconds. And then in the caption, I educate. And I’m like, let’s talk about why real estate is important to build wealth. And so I positioned myself as the expert in the caption, but in that I’m using 30, hashtags, six or geo hashtags. So people are like the hashtags matter, they do matter. They’re not going to make or break your content, but they do help. And if you can get more followers, why the heck not. So hashtags, I want to think of hashtags like Google. So if someone’s looking for a realtor, like a top luxury realtor, they can type in luxury realtor, and 1000s hundreds of 1000s of realtors have used that hashtag, but if it’s like Sacramento, luxury real estate Sacramento, there’s gonna be a lot fewer that are gonna pop up and my reels are good, so they’re gonna grab them. So with hashtags, like the the video, like the the system, I would say for video is like you’re gonna record it, you’re going to edit it and I use InShot. Like I said, you’re going to put your words on the screen, I do want you to put words on the screen because 80% of people are watching your videos without the sound on because they’re watching them at work when they should be working. And so you want to make sure you tell them what it’s going to be about on the screen. And then also this is like super heavy, but like the algorithm, it’s called alternative text and keywords. They’re watching the words you put on the screen, and that is going to be fed to the people out there that are looking in your genre. And then trending audio is the other piece. So the trending audio makes a massive difference on your reel and you just look for that little arrow in the bottom left screen that’s going up. And that is how you find the trending audio.
D.J. Paris 30:12 And let’s explain what trending audio is. Okay, so trending
Rachel Adams Lee 30:16 audio is the music that you hear on a reel that has a certain amount of uses that is catching into the algorithm. So it’s going to push it out in front of more people. So I only post reels with trending audio, because I want I know the system and the how to make it go, you know, have a better chance of going viral and getting in front of more people. But again, I’m targeting realtors, because I want referrals from Realtors around the country. And I’m targeting buyers and sellers in my local community, because I want them to position me as a local expert.
D.J. Paris 30:44 And do your reels. Are they ever more than let’s say 10 seconds or so? Or are they usually within that seven second
Rachel Adams Lee 30:51 are so like I when I’m educating when I’m teaching about something, I they’re a little bit longer, I have one that I was like not sure how it would do because it’s like, I think it was like 84 seconds or something. But I was teaching people about this rule that I call the five by five, which is how you wake up the algorithm when you make a post so they get more eyes on your content. So I was teaching them about it says like how to hack the algorithm and get more eyes on your content. That’s my hook. And then I’m teaching them an idea about the rule of 555. And so that is definitely a little bit of a longer one. And I want and you also you test it out, because my audience is different than your audience. So what works for me, the short reels where you entertain them and educate work for everybody. But like, my audience knows that I’m going to teach them how to build a business as well. So like, I’m going to educate if you don’t do that you you might do on where you say why it’s important to get a home inspection, like and that’s your hook. Right? Why it’s important to get a home inspection. And then or like three mistakes every buyer makes when not getting a home inspection to not getting approved for a loan, like you know what I mean? And then you educate them below. Anyone can do that.
D.J. Paris 32:03 Question about hashtags. So you said something that struck me as interesting, because I have heard, I’ve heard a lot of different opinions on on hashtags. So I have heard that Instagram prefers keeping the number of hashtags under six, you use 30. So can you speak a little bit to and I know you’ve tested at all, so is that sort of an old wives tale that only keep a few hashtags per post. So
Rachel Adams Lee 32:27 the algorithm is always changing, always changing the most you can have as 30 The least you could have as one, but you don’t get penalized for having 30. So I, I, again, I’m a Systems person, I’m not like what are the number six that I need to do? Screw that I have 30 my six are in there, pick the six you want. You know what I mean? Like I don’t you’re not getting you don’t get like, you don’t get hurt for having more hashtags. Got
D.J. Paris 32:52 it? Because it’s I know, at some point in social media, there was like what we would call a keyword stuffing. And people would just inflate but I guess the point is, Instagram doesn’t really care how many how many hashtags you have, if the content is keeping people engaged for that amount of time that they’re watching. They they don’t care. If you have crappy content, and you just have all these keywords and or hashtags, then yeah, maybe they would downvote that. But you’re absolutely right. It’s all about the quality of the content.
Rachel Adams Lee 33:20 Yeah, for sure. Okay, go ahead, I want to talk about so one thing I can we can talk about is how they can convert a follower into a client, because I think that’s important conversation. Huge. Okay, so you’re gonna have all these people following you. And what you don’t realize is right now only seven to 10% of your friends are seeing what you’re doing seven to 10% of your friend, by
D.J. Paris 33:44 the way, at best, it might it might even be like 3% Yeah, yeah,
Rachel Adams Lee 33:48 like think about all the people you have in your on your social media. But you see the same stories, the same post the same feed. And the rule is, if you’re not seeing them, they’re not seeing you. So every single month, all my social media clients, what we do is we take pen to paper, and we write down 25 names of people that we’re already friends with on social but we’re not seeing their content anymore. So you could pick your 25, it could be 25 local business owners, it could be 25 Realtors from around the country, it could be 25 past clients, it could be 25 people from your church. But each month you’re gonna pick 25 people. And then this is the way that you get in front of the people who you’re already friends with, but they’re not seeing your content. So it’s called My rule of 555. So five minutes before you make a post. you comment on five people’s post? A comment a five words or more.
D.J. Paris 34:39 Okay, hold on, let’s go on a backup. So here’s here’s what we’re talking about. I just want to make sure this is really clear, because this is absolutely an idea that not one person has ever shared. And the six years and 500 episodes, we’ve done this. So here’s what here’s what, here’s what Rachel is saying. So she’s saying one thing to know is that very few, a very small percentage of your followers on social are actually going to see your posts organically? Under 10%, for sure, so how do we get in front of that additional 90 plus percent. What she does is before she a while, when we first start out is the other thing she said was one way to sort of see who might be seeing your stuff and who might not is it’s this one to one relationship, if you are seeing their reels, their posts, odds are, they are probably seeing yours as well. But since we know most aren’t, you can take a look. And you can make an assumption that if you’re not seeing theirs, they’re not seeing yours, you’re gonna make a list of those people. And then five minutes before you actually post your Go ahead. Yeah, so
Rachel Adams Lee 35:33 five minutes before you make a post, you comment on five of those people’s posts, a comment of five words or more, and then what that does. So there are people who like you who love you who actually want to refer business to you, but you’re not top of mind for them. Right, like, and so the way you stay top of mind is being in front of them. And then once they start to engage with your stuff, you’re in there, and you’re not talking about real estate. So they’re not like, Oh, my God shut up. They’re like, wow, she’s doing this with her kids, oh, she went on this vacation, she read this book, she’s going through this with her body like, and they start to have things in common with me. And then they’re like, oh, and then when they’re in the grocery store, and five aisles down, they hear someone talking about selling a house, they’re like, oh, my gosh, Rachel, I got to run down and tell her you know what I mean. And so that works really well. The other thing you guys are going to do, and this is to help you turn a new follower into a client. So what happens a lot of times is like say that I have a post and my husband and I go to Tahoe, right, and we have our anniversary, when you do a birthday or anniversary post you get tons of people with like Happy anniversary, happy birthday. And everybody is like usually people do one blanket, thank you, like thank you for all the love and the messages. What what I want you to do is like when I tell my agents, we’re going to lead generate for two hours on social media, what you’re doing is you’re setting a two hour block. And you’re gonna go to a higher producing post that you have. Now your comments, you should respond to all your comments, because the point of social media is to have interaction. So just as a given if you people are commenting on your social comment back to them. But that missing link, this like magic piece that people don’t realize are your likes, your Likes are literally this, this list of people going, Hey, I’m watching, I’m right here, I see what you’re doing. But it’s usually a vanity metric people like I got 100 likes on that post.
D.J. Paris 37:12 It makes us feel good because we’re like people like us. But those people
Rachel Adams Lee 37:15 get no interaction. So what I do when I’m doing lead generation for social media, is I go on my computer, I don’t do it on my cell phone because I need to be able to like click on my with my mouse and stuff. So I go on my computer, I click on the likes, I scroll over the likes, I copy them and paste them into a Word doc. And then you guys I go one by one I literally go through. And what I would do is when so so say that Jessica comments on my posts, and she’s like Happy anniversary. I’m like, Thanks, girl. We had a great time. And then DJ likes my post. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go proactively to DJs page. So he likes my post. I go look at his social I see something happening in his world. What’s What’s something that just happened for you and your family recently? Like, um, I
D.J. Paris 37:55 just went to the US Open for tennis a couple weeks ago.
Rachel Adams Lee 38:00 Okay, perfect. So he likes my post for my anniversary, I would send them a private message. I’d be like, hey, DJ, thanks so much for connecting with me on my anniversary post. We had the best time in Tahoe. Oh my gosh, I saw you guys just wanted to US Open. That’s always been a bucket list for me. How was it?
D.J. Paris 38:14 So we’re now we’re talking about direct message. So now so your direct messaging why
Rachel Adams Lee 38:19 I sent him a DM. Okay. And I mentioned something super specific about DJ, I don’t say anything about the fact that he’s in Chicago, right? Yeah, I don’t say anything about Chicago, because it has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. And I’m gonna ask him about the US Open and then he’s gonna come back and you say, oh, my gosh, I saw Hayden like just started teething. That’s so crazy. Like, you’re getting sleep. And we’re gonna go back and forth, back and forth. Just talking personal life. Eventually, when I think the transition feels good and natural, maybe it’s same day, maybe it’s same week, maybe it’s a month, whenever it feels natural key word here. I say something to DJ of the effect of, hey, DJ, I really love getting to know you on a personal level, which makes me think we probably aligned in our business lives as well. I don’t have a great referral partner in Chicago. Do you have one in Northern California? You guys 131 referrals. This is how this conversation happens. Because I want to lead with the relationship. I always want to get to know the person first. And then we talk about the business. And it works. It works really, really well. And
D.J. Paris 39:19 we’re predominantly talking Instagram right now. I’m guessing right? Because or I guess,
Rachel Adams Lee 39:25 Facebook, I’m sorry. Facebook to me, I still get most of my business comes from Facebook still. I’m Facebook,
D.J. Paris 39:30 I see. Well, I’m just thinking of like, I’m thinking of a Facebook real. So let’s get really specific. So you have a Facebook page where you’re posting your reels, that’s public, anyone can access that. When somebody on Facebook likes it, do you you do have to be friends with them then to go back and message or you can well you could message with
Rachel Adams Lee 39:50 less human being friends. Yeah, you because I haven’t kept an eye on you only have 5000 followers on Facebook and I have like 20 what I have now but like I kept a long time ago. So For
D.J. Paris 40:00 me, you’re not saying friend them necessarily, you’re saying send them a direct message,
Rachel Adams Lee 40:04 you don’t have the friend or if you have the availability, but I just send them a private message. Gotcha. Yeah. And then again, this is where it is really important to have that public profile. Because if you have a private profile, and I go to say something to you, I can’t see what anything happened in your life. And the other thing too, is like, with social media, it can be this like beautiful, empowering positive place, it can also suck the life out of you. So you have to be really intentional. So like, if I’m going through, and I go to click on someone’s page, and I get that, like, oh, I would never be friends with this person in real life, right there. And then I block them. I’m out. Because I’m like, you get to choose who you have in your feed who you have in your life. Same thing on social, I want my social media to make me feel good, and inspire me and empower me. And if it makes me feel the opposite, those people don’t belong in my world anymore.
D.J. Paris 40:48 I love that. Yeah. Boundaries. It’s about boundaries. That’s really great. So okay, let’s let’s go back through those steps. So before you do your real, you are going to find people that have that you are that you are not seeing their content, they are not seeing seeing five minutes before we also stress
Rachel Adams Lee 41:06 people out, I feel like it’s just a post when I’m doing my lead generation. I’m not doing it on reels, I’m doing it on posts. So I do like a picture post that I’ve made. I could do it for reals. But when I’m doing my lead generation, its posts and you have to remember most of our audience probably are doing more posts than reels. So So do it with a post guys, like
D.J. Paris 41:26 how many how many posts versus reels would you recommend on a daily weekly basis?
Rachel Adams Lee 41:32 Great question. I think you need to be doing at least one reel a week, at least one reel a week, if not more, I think you should be posting at least three times a week. Now you could do just a picture post, you could do a carousel post, which is multiple pictures. So you can choose what that looks like. But you do want to make sure you’re doing the the reels and can I share with them that get social leverage what that is yes. Okay, so a lot of realtors come to me and they’re like, Rachel, I want to do video. But I don’t know how I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to record it. I don’t know what equipment I need. I don’t know, you know, all the things. So I really felt this question coming up a lot to me. And it was stressing a lot of people out. So I said, How can I fill that void for our industry. So I created something called the weekly real system. So we have hundreds of agents doing this around the country. And what we do is every week I find a trending real and real estate, I shoot the raw footage. Then on Monday, you get an email that comes to you and it says hey, your reel is ready to create. All you have to do is you go on this private website that we have. And it will say like for example, it will say film yourself smiling and typing on your camera for seven seconds. You send that into my team, then we’re going to edit it for you put the captions the hook, I will write the hook for you put it on the screen, I write the actual post for you. I give you your hashtags, your geo hashtags, and I find the trending audio that trending that week in real estate, and through Instagram. And so literally, it’s all done for you. It’s 97 bucks a month. So it’s super inexpensive. You get a real every single week. And what’s super cool is it is your fastest conversion that you will see for your platform. Because we have people that are doing it. And like one of our girls, she posted a reel and she got four leads from it. Another one her daughter was in preschool and her all of a sudden her reel came in to her preschool teachers algorithm and she was like, I need to sell my house, I had no idea you were in real estate. We have people whose social media is up, I get messages all the time. 415% 445% for engagement, like this is the fastest thing you can do to build your presence on social media and we can handle the entire thing for you. If you go to get social leverage, and you click on the weekly reels, it’s 97 bucks a month and it’s like a no brainer.
D.J. Paris 43:45 I love that and you guys are doing all the heavy lifting. All we’re doing is doing a quick little shot of us you guys do the editing, and then we just posted it. Do you recommend a post? Do you what about cross posting? What do we think about now maybe that’s sort of a little bit further ahead for a lot of our listeners, but Phase two would be considering dropping those into tick tock I guess YouTube shorts things like that. Do you do cross posting in different channels?
Rachel Adams Lee 44:12 Yeah, so when I make a real I posted on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube shorts and tick tock I don’t tick tock is literally just there because I post on it I don’t do anything through tick tock I don’t I’ve never got a referral through tick tock. I just do it to like get the overall why not? Yeah. And really I don’t post it my assistant posts it for me there. But Facebook and Instagram is my jam. That’s like where my main focus comes from. I have a YouTube channel my YouTube channel has like hours and hours of free coaching content. You guys are welcome to go binge it. We talked about like how I got in the luxury market. I just shared my whole open house system because we had a $1.7 million buyer walk into our open house and it has been converted and in contract seven days later. And so I get my whole open house system. I believe in our industry and just like sharing and giving and it always comes back around and So that’s why I do all these different things for free, because it’s like, why not? People did it for me?
D.J. Paris 45:06 Yeah, and it does people get hooked on content, and then you have this ability to market to them forever. And that’s the beauty of of, you’re creating really great content. Let’s talk about your coaching as well. Okay.
Rachel Adams Lee 45:19 So yeah, I have so a lot of people are like, Rachel, I feel like you’re my style. I love the ideas you’re doing. I would like more. So two things. One, I have a mastermind group, it’s 29 bucks a month. That one if you were to Rachel’s coaching crew, sorry for that tell you about that one, but it’s 29 bucks a month. And I go in there twice a month, and I coach for 45 minutes. This last week, we talked all about listing. So I went over my listing presentation with them. I’ve talked about how I broke into the luxury market, when you hire your first admin, hey, I did this Instagram posting, I got no traction. So it’s really cool because I go in my coach for 45 minutes, but there’s also q&a. So we’ve have 81 referrals already passed out in that group. It’s you have a membership library where you can watch all the coaching later. So literally for $126 a month, you could have your weekly real covered and you can be in a coaching mastermind group, game changer. The other thing is if you really want to do a deep dive on social if you’re like, you know what 2024 is the year that I’m really going to focus on social media at a high level. I have an eight week social media masterclass where I do deep dives into Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And I teach you like what to post how to post when to post, how to beat the algorithm, I give you a content calendar, it really just kind of helps you get some insight into like, really, if you’re doing social media at a high level, and it’s a place you’re going to focus on for lead generation. It helps.
D.J. Paris 46:44 I love it, I would cache we have covered so much. Let’s recap, let’s recap some of the different offerings because you’re giving away a lot of great content to our audience. So let’s what was the freebies link as well for people to check out Rachel’s
Rachel Adams Lee 46:59 freebies.com That’s gonna give them the 20 hooks to go viral. So Rachel, awesome.
D.J. Paris 47:06 And then we also have Hello social coaching. So if you’re looking to get some social coaching, that is.com That is the website, hello, social coaching, we’ll have links to all of this in the show notes and get social leverage as well. That is, that is the video reels that are done for you that you’ve just basically, and I want to talk to you off air about what I could be doing with my content. Because I have a we have a little bit of a different aim. But essentially same sort of thing. And I want to I want to get some ideas from Rachel as well. So I’m going to be signing up and I want everybody
Rachel Adams Lee 47:38 to about real estate guys is like you can have the life you want. You can build this business of your dreams. But real estate gives you the platform to do that. So like all of these amazing people I have in my world, I met them through real estate, and I’m a multi passionate entrepreneur, like I have a you know, like, I have four different streams of income for how I do run my life. But real estate is the foundation of everything. And so all the people that I’m in contact with all my main like, genre is still real estate. And we can build, you can do whatever you want. Like it’s it really is so fun. And so now like I get to be a working mom, I get to you know, like create these coaching courses and, you know, make six and seven figures and do all these things and still make an impact on my community and you guys have the exact same opportunity in front of you. It’s just what you choose to plug into.
D.J. Paris 48:25 Alright guys, this is a great place to wrap up because there’s a lot of to do’s here a lot of calls to action. So if you’re an agent in Northern California, I would probably want to work with Rachel at her Keller Williams team. She is the Rachel Adams elite group, you can visit Rachel Adams League group.com and learn all about what they offer their agents and team members. This is the year that people are moving. So moving meaning moving around offices not as much moving with homes. But certainly moving offices, this is a great opportunity. If you’re not getting the attention you need to consider maybe joining Rachel’s team. Also we have a lot of fun if you’re not in the Northern California area, not looking to switch firms. Lots of lots of cool opportunities to work with Rachel she’s got she’s got her reels system that she’ll do for you for what was it $29 A month 97
Rachel Adams Lee 49:15 A month for the weekly real service and then 29 bucks for the mastermind group, which if you check with weekly reals, it’ll ask you do you want to join the mastermind group and you can just
D.J. Paris 49:24 Yeah, I mean that is that is both as somebody who pays to get reals done, I know how inexpensive what you’re offering is and coaching for $29 a month we know guys that is the cheapest coaching price you will ever find for pretty much any type of coach ever. So definitely check that out as well. And we will have links to I and Rachel’s freebies.com too. We were gonna give you just all of these links. Guys, all I want you to do the way that you can help think Rachel is obviously Check out all her stuff consider investing in her courses. She’s obviously the real deal. Please do it. It’s inexpensive. It’s kind of a no brainer, but The way that you can help both of us to is Tell a friend about this episode, think of one, just one other agent that needs to get their social media health improved and send them this this interview, please, please, please, you can send them to send them right over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or the or any podcast app, they listened to search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button, but send them a link to this particular episode, you are going to be doing a lot of good for your co workers and also helping us in that same time. On behalf of our audience. I want to thank Rachel, busy mother, busy entrepreneur, and just a heck of a nice person. And think about all the content she gave us away for free today, all of the help, she literally just is like this is exactly how I do it. So we need to thank her. So I’m on behalf of the audience thanking you for that. On behalf of Rachel and myself, we got to thank our listeners. You guys are the reason we’re here and making it all the way to the end of the episode. That’s awesome. Thank you for that. So uh, please tell a friend. We We love you. We’re gonna keep producing these episodes. Of course, let us know what you think of the show. Also, if you have an extra few moments, leave us a review. Let us know what on whatever podcast app you’re listening. Let us know what you think of the show. We read those and we we’re here to serve you. So tell us what we could do differently and better. And again, please tell a friend. Again, Rachel, thank you so much. This was awesome. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Rachel.
Rachel Adams Lee 51:23 Thanks so much.
3 Ways to Get Yourself on Camera Today • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Oct 12, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals with Kim Rittberg.
Wondering how to sell more homes? Award-winning Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg brings you 3 ways to get yourself on camera today – to sell more homes! Kim has VIDEO BOOT CAMP starting in just a few short weeks! Apply here through her website.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s social media expert Kim rip berg is going to give you three ways to get yourself on camera today to help you sell more homes. Stay tuned this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:29 They keep me real listeners. I’m Kim Rydberg I’m really excited to be with you today to talk about how to get yourself on camera. today. I’m an award winning Digital Marketer. I spent 20 years in media in TV news, writing and producing scripts and getting people ready for camera. And then I launched the video unit for Us Weekly magazine, a celebrity magazine where I did what you need to do, which is to turn an empty conference room into a video studio. And so now I teach real estate agents and founders across the country about how to grow with video, I spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention last year, and I’ve taught hundreds of agents my methods. And I’m really excited to talk to you today about how to be confident on camera and how to get yourself on camera. I want to break through and say first of all, you have to realize it is really important to be on camera. I know it’s it’s a push it you have to break through the wall of saying I feel weird or like I don’t look good on camera. I don’t like my voice on camera. It is really important. And I want to share a couple of wins recently to really drive it home. So I run this program called Video bootcamp, which by the way you can apply right now there isn’t a mid October cohort, I only run it a few times a year. It is a seven week live coaching program where I get you confident on camera, and I get you off the hamster wheel of making content for social that just doesn’t have results. And I teach you a strategy. I get you on camera, and I give you processes. So you can consistently create good content without burnout. So I had an agent, her name is Tiffany, she was in my last video bootcamp. And she was not showing up. So I had met her at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention and she heard my get confident on camera. She came over to me after and said, I do want to show up on camera. I know I should. She ended up taking video bootcamp where we really get on camera, we get a strategy together of what we’re posting, we post it together as a team. She showed up on camera. And she got three calls from one video. And I cannot understate that this is not an outlier. Once you start showing up, people start hearing you like people can’t hear you if you’re not talking. So it’s really, really important to break through whatever your reasons are. And whatever your demons are, that are telling you not to show up on camera, it’s really, really important to break through those. And then once you’re on camera, we put the strategy together where say, okay, what are we making together? How do we optimize it to get more people seeing it. So I like to share that anecdote because I think it’s really, really important to remember how it how it can and how it will help you once you start showing up. And okay, so I’m gonna jump right into the ways to get on camera. So first of all, I talked a little bit about the importance of being on camera. But I do want to reiterate, I have a framework that I call get out of supermodel mode and get into teacher mode. Before going on camera, a lot of the work is behind the scenes. It’s not just what do I wear? How do I sit where to put the camera? It’s the mindset work of saying, I should be on camera. No one’s gonna mock me, my voice doesn’t sound that bad. You have to start telling yourself those positive things and fight back the negative voices because we all hear them. Even though I am a video expert and I was a TV producer for 10 years I’ve even done local on camera work. I didn’t want to show up on camera to promote my business, but I have a business and I need to promote my business. So we have to remember that showing up on camera is an integral part of our marketing. And secondly, we have to show up and think about the message we’re putting across. You need to be more focused on the message in the video rather than thinking about how you look and how you feel so I call it like get out of supermodel mode. So supermodel mode is when everyone’s looking at you and look at your hair and your outfit and judging your voice and teacher mode, we’re thinking more about the message more about the education that you’re putting in the video and how you’re connecting to your ideal client. And in my video bootcamp program, we talk a lot about that, like, Who’s your ideal client? And how are you reaching them? I think a lot of us feel like, Why does somebody want to watch this video of me riding a bike or something, make it connect to your plan, we build a strategy, and then it makes sense, it starts to make sense, and it starts to bring in leads. And I think until you have a strategy, and until you’re showing up on camera, it doesn’t really make sense. And it’s hard to cut through the self consciousness of being on camera. Alright, so the the number one thing is the importance of being on camera. So I really want to hammer home, you have to get on camera. Because if you don’t believe that you should be on camera, you’re always going to find a reason not to be, there’s a million other things we need to do in our business. Generally, when we’re running our business, we do the things we like to do. First, we do the things we don’t like to do last. And last, if we’re lucky, often we shove them off. But it is super duper important to show up and do this. And I apologize have a little bit of a cold, but I still like to show up for you giving your listeners there are easy ways to start showing up on camera. So number one, the first really, really easy way is to start showing up on Instagram stories. So Instagram Stories, if you don’t know, is the part of Instagram, where it’s just for 24 hours. So you show up, you post a video and it expires. So this is like a lower stress way to just start showing up. And again, it’s all about practice. If you start showing up today, your video might be okay, maybe a little maybe you feel a little awkward. But tomorrow will be easier. The next day is easier. It is like anything else. I know this from all of my clients, I prepare to be on camera, every time gets easier, every time gets better. Do you have to start showing up. So Instagram Stories is a great way to start showing up with low pressure. That’s one of the things I do in video bootcamp, I force us all to get on camera. Because I do think it’s important to work that muscle, just like you’re working any other muscle, right? You can’t get strong. Unless you go to the gym, you can’t just read a book about getting stronger, you have to go to the gym, it’s the same thing with being on camera. So Instagram Stories is a great way to just get out, you know, shake off the cobwebs and start putting yourself on camera. And another thing is, you know, I have this agent in California that I work with, and I love her she’s so fantastic. And she’s like, I don’t love like talking to the camera. It feels like a little weird. And one of the things that reminded her is you can start by being on camera, you could put the camera further from you and just do some work. So if I put my camera in the corner, and then I’m typing on my computer, you’re seeing me and I’m not necessarily talking to camera. So if that’s not like your main thing that you love doing, you can do that. Additionally, if you have an assistant or a friend or a spouse or whatever, who can ask you a question, and then you’re answering it to camera or answering it to them and recording. That’s also a way to get yourself on camera in just a little lower stress way. I liken that to if you ever watched like 60 minutes or a documentary, often the person is is answering someone like just a little bit away from the camera lens. This is what I did. By the way, the reason why I know all this is I was a TV producer. So I was the person next to the camera lens to I would say, answer these questions to me not to the camera. So that way you’re actually talking to someone and it feels more conversational. Not everybody loves talking straight to camera, it’s definitely a skill you need to practice. So that’s another way to do it. If you have someone around you have them ask you one question. So one question, what’s going on with the market? How are the interest rates? Should I buy now or something like that? Or like? What’s your biggest tip for someone looking to buy a home right now? And just have them ask you one question and ask that an answer that one question. And that’s you on camera, you could put that in Instagram stories, or you could turn it you know, you could put it up as a video. And the reason why I talk about Instagram Stories, there are a lot of platforms you could post your content on. I do love the idea that it’s a great way to practice stories is a great way to practice. But you could put your content on tick tock Youtube, Instagram doesn’t matter. You have to start showing up.
And then the other thing I want to flag you know, there’s so much talk about AI and automation. And I’m psyched about that, like, of course we all want to make more content with less so great. Can we use automation? Can we use AI? When I see people putting AI photos and quotes on their feed? It doesn’t do much like you’re showing up on camera to build those relationships, why people are trusting you with a huge investment. And it’s really such a personal relationship. You know that right? You all of these clients, you stay in touch with them, they work with you because they like you they trust you. It’s really hard to show and build that trust with a sort of robotic quote and a photo of a tree and And I’m being a little funny here. But it’s really hard to build that. And if you think about this, let’s say you’re put yourself in the shoes of a buyer, and you have agent a, posting a headshot and a little caption two sentences. And then you have agent B, who’s on video, and really teaching you something about the market or about how to sell your home about how to buy a home, and you feel their passion, you’re hearing their voice and maybe, like, maybe they have like a little cat crawls on them in the middle. So you know, they’re human, who are you going to work with, from a buyer standpoint, which person are you gonna work with. So remember that showing up on video really drives those relationships. And on the back end, all the social platforms are promoting video more. So the more you do video, the more your contents going to be seen. So don’t give up that opportunity. It’s really, really, really important. The last, the last tip I wanted to advise is do an interview. So I sometimes some of my clients, they prefer this style versus others. I think this is great and fun. One thing you can do is you can do an interview to show up on camera, what I mean by that, set up your camera, have someone talk with you in an interview setting, and film that and have that be social content. I will advise if you’re doing that, make sure the interview is really planned out. Because if you kind of meander, and it becomes sort of like a tangent of talking, that’s kind of boring for video, and people won’t want to watch that. But if someone’s asking you a question, and you’re answering it, and you’re cutting that up and putting it on camera, that’s great. Again, whatever is more comfortable for you, because I know that we all make excuses in our head about why we’re not going to do something. So I’m giving you different ways that you can do it because it’s not one size fits all right when I work with my agents, everyone has a different personality. You know, like I have some agents who really struggle with showing up on camera and then we were like, alright, let’s let’s have you be a guest on a podcast or let’s have you be a an interviewee and interview guest instead of talking to camera, and how do we show up and make that happen? I do like to say it’s really worth it to break through though I had one, my one client, he lives in Los Angeles. And he is such a killer. He’s amazing. He’s such a good agent really did not love showing up on camera. But I forced him to force him to I don’t force anyone I encouraged him to I supported him through it. And I interviewed him asking him his favorite spots in LA. That video got six times the viewership than any of his other videos. Just him talking on camera, no crazy visuals really just like, you know, just really him answering. People like to hear from people. And people like to know that you’re that local expert. So he gave his opinions on what were the favorite restaurants in the area. What were some amazing clothing stores in the area. What was his favorite coffee in the area? Short video, him showing up on camera showing up as the local expert bringing his opinions. That video got five times six times I forget six times the viewership and engagement. So he got seen by potential clients leads other restaurants people who would refer him other store owners. So showing up on camera is worth it. I mean, his other videos like the home tours, that’s fine. They were getting seen, you know, like 100 times, and this video is getting seen several 1000 times, you have to really understand the power of showing your face the power it can have for your business. To me, I get it and I get I get why we aren’t on camera, but it is worth it to push through. And then once you’re getting on camera, then we talk about okay, let’s talk about your strategy. What are the videos we’re going to do? How do we make the videos you’re doing even better, and make them drive even more, more traction, getting more leads, I think that’s really, really important to say no matter where you are. I love I love saying this, like when I work with my clients and video bootcamp, the live coaching program, whether you’re not showing up on camera, I will get you on camera and get you started. But if you’ve already been making content for years, but you’re not seeing those results, and you’re churning out content, let’s get your strategy in place. It means something’s happening behind the scenes that’s not connecting. So let’s get you a strategy in place. And let’s get you to the next level. One actually one of my agents, she was really like comfortable on camera making lots of reels. She has a good sense of humor. So she was leaning into some of those trending reels with lip sync stuff. She took video bootcamp. And she told me in her testimonial, she’s like, I thought I was good at video. But man, Kim really taught me so much strategy, and I was able to use it and I ended up getting a referral. So she got a referral directly from the video. And she had been making like content like really putting out videos before that. But she hadn’t seen that return on investment yet. She hadn’t really seen it pay off. And once you understand how to make the video what to make, how to get it to your clients, how to get it to those leads. That’s the part of it that really starts working and we all are putting in, you know, between like 20 minutes and four hours a week for social media that adds up. You know, time is money. If you’re not showing up and you’re not having a strategy in place, it tends to be wasted time so you really want to be clear Make sure that you’re showing up on camera and having a really strong strategy. So so that those are, those are some of my tips, I have a couple of bonus ways because people always ask me I get the same like struggles from my different clients that about showing up and other person is very interesting. Another woman I worked with, she lives in Iowa, I was gonna say, Idaho, Iowa, and she is an agent in Iowa. And she’s a real estate agent coach, too. And she wasn’t showing up on camera. And if you want to be coaching other people, you want to be teaching other people, you need to show up on camera, you need to show them your personality, you need to make them like you and trust you. And I encouraged her to start showing up and she’s sent a video, sorry, she posted a video in Instagram Stories, a bit of education on what she was doing that day or her point of view on something in the neighborhood. She messages me, she’s like Kim, I got a message from someone about this video. And I thought they were going to be making fun of me. And actually they said, What a great point. So she realized that all of the worries of someone coming over and judging her were totally in her head and they’re not real. So I’m gonna go over a couple of different ways that we can be showing up on camera and I’ll wrap it up in a second. And as I mentioned before, my video bootcamp, seven week live coaching, you can apply now the cohort starts in mid October. So definitely apply now. So we can hold a spot for you. It does fill up every single time it fills up. And it is seven weeks of live coaching and get you on camera get you off the hamster wheel of making content that’s not performing. I give you downloads, templates, scripts, a system and a process. We used to brainstorm better. That’s all in video bootcamp. And it’s live coaching and also a curriculum that you can save and use forever. And lots of feedback directly from me. I will look at your content. I will give you direct feedback. I love teaching and I’m as you can tell I’m very high energy. It’s really, really fun. So they’re going to link it out in the show notes. But my name is Kim Rydberg r i t t b e r g, and it’s kinrick Berg’s video bootcamp. So I’d love to see your application for that. And I’m going to also give you one more tip for being on camera. So we talked about number one, the biggest thing is a mindset shift. Go from supermodel mode to teacher mode. That is the biggest biggest change because 75% of my video bootcamp students and my clients struggle with even getting on camera. And then once you’re there, aim for the easiest ways to do it. Instagram Stories, shoot a video, answer a question that you get asked a lot. Think about a question that a lot of buyers or sellers ask you put that onto video posted on Instagram stories. If you really are having struggle struggling with it, put your camera in the corner, start doing some work. And then you have some footage of you working and you can write some words on it like hard at work, getting a house ready for ready for sale. They’re ready for showing. And then last one, you answer a question. So have someone sit right next to the phone? And have them ask you that question and answer to camera. They can ask you why you got started. What what’s a funny real estate story that you had, from your experiences, all of those sorts of things. And then the last one is have someone interview you. So sit down and have somebody could be in the office. It could be I’ve seen I’ve seen these for my clients that have been good as one was in the office like during sort of like a meeting. You could also do it like at one of your showings. So you could have like your assistant or another agent just like have a little like q&a. And then also you can both post it so that way you’re getting more eyeballs on it. And so that’s another really really good way and the interview should be really specific. It should be really focused on one topic. So it shouldn’t just be like about real estate it should be like
you know, the changing interest rate how we’re addressing it or the thing you should never do before you state your house like one specific thing that makes it really someone who understands what they’re getting and it’s a better hook to hook them in to grab them to make them want to watch it. Alright, I hope you enjoyed it I always love teaching the keeping it real listeners don’t forget to follow me on Instagram. i If you know if you know Alba listeners already know follow me on like friends, friends, social friends IRL, no virtual friends with all the keeping real listeners. And I am Kim Rydberg and I love helping you grow your business with video, getting on camera, getting confident and really understanding what to make to actually drive your clients drive your revenue growth. It’s really fun for me, I teach agents across the country and apply for my video bootcamp. The link will be in the show notes and until then, show up on camera because hiding from the camera means hiding from clients. I’m Kim rybrook. Have a great day.
Creative Ways To Become Invaluable To Your Market • Alex Wolking
Oct 11, 2023
Alex Wolking with Keller Williams in Chicago talks about how he started his journey into real estate at the age of 12. Alex describes how he still makes business the old-fashioned way and how important open-houses have been to his career. Next, Alex discusses how he built his business the second time around after moving back to Chicago. Alex also discusses the importance of knowing your market in details and shares tips for new agents on how to start studying the market they want to work in.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to speak to an agent who built a top producing real estate business by the age of 19. Then he gave it all up, moved to a new city and did it all over again. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, I’m going to be speaking with top producer Alex Woking. Before we get to Alex just a couple of reminders. The best way that you can help our show is really two things. Number one support our sponsors, they pay the freight and they make it possible for us to do these episodes. So please check out their products and services and consider investing in them. And second thing is to tell a friend just tell one other realtor about this episode. I promise by the end of this one, you will want to share it it’s that good. So please tell everybody you know about this podcast. It helps me helps us get in front of more agents and helps us do more episodes. So thanks guys really appreciate all the support by the way we did just crossed over 3 million downloads a few weeks ago, which is a huge milestone for us. So I thank you for sharing it telling a friend and continuing to listen but let’s get to the main event my conversation with Alex walking.
cake today on the show our guest is Alex woking with Keller Williams one here in Chicago. And let me tell you more about Alex. He is a second generation broker and real estate was all he has is all he has ever known at 12 years old, he began working for his father, who’s a real estate veteran in the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa and 2011 at 19 years old woking earned his Iowa real estate license and was awarded Rookie of the Year in 2012. Amazing walking small town roots taught him the importance of building strong relationships while maintaining discretion. And while approaching negotiations with discernment. woking spent time away from Chicago after graduating from DePaul, which is here in Chicago before returning to Chicago in 2016. Probably rebuilding his referral based network from scratch walking has since received numerous accolades, including recognition as a top producer by the Chicago Association of Realtors since 2019 2021 National Association of REALTORS 30 under 30 honoree and regarded by real trends as the top 1.5% agent in America on the real trends 1000 list for 2020 to please everyone, check out Alex on his website, Alex woking.com. It’s a la XWOL que i ng.com link for that in the show notes and follow him on Instagram, Alex, Alex woking, we will have a link to that in the show notes as well. Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. DJ, good to finally meet you. I am yeah, I am super excited to meet you. Alex is a little bit of a celebrity here in the Chicago real estate. I would say a rising star but I feel like your star has already risen. But it’s still continuing to rise. And I am so excited to get to talk to you because I’m always it’s to me it’s always impressive when people who are who are younger. And you have Gosh, you started so, so young. You know, we’re able to find success so so quickly. And I know it’s through tremendous, tremendous hard work, but we would love to hear a little bit of your story. So let’s go back to the beginning. Tell us how you got into real estate.
Alex Wolking 4:56 Yeah. So when I was told Well, my I’ll never forget, I always tell the story. My dad, as you know, and was a real estate broker in the Quad Cities. And actually back in March of this year, it was 30 a year in business. And I was 12. He called me and he was like, hey, I need you to log into this website and print this thing out for me. Well, it was the MLS and he wanted a listing sheet printed out because he was driving by on his way to a showing. I didn’t know what he did. But I was so fascinated by the system, I started diving through it, and I just thought it was so cool. And then later that week, he went to go meet with a single mom first time homebuyer, she had two daughters that were about my age. And again, I had never seen what my dad did for a living. And we’re, we went looked at this house, and he we went across the street, there’s a Wendy’s across the street. And we’re sitting there. And actually, the listing sheet that I printed was for this house. And I saw, we sat down and my dad just became this other person that was so cool. I saw him, like this woman was so nervous and scared. And her two daughters were about me and my brother’s age. And so we’re sitting there, eating our burgers or whatever. And watching my dad helped us woman navigate buying a house and putting her at ease. And then later hearing a phone call of when he called and said you got the house and you could hear her like scream with excitement over the phone. That was when I saw the whole arc of what my dad did. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I just became obsessed. And I was so obsessed at 12 years old, I got on my bike and went to open houses because my mom wouldn’t take me. I just wanted to help data, I thought it was the coolest thing. I wanted to help them do more of that. So I started doing going to open houses on my bike to learn the market and help them out. I went to you know, when I turned 16, I went to 229 open houses that year. I got to know the whole real estate community and other agents would call my dad be like, your son came through my open house today.
D.J. Paris 7:14 He took some of the some of the cookies. They did.
Alex Wolking 7:17 So they but you know what helped though was I would go into other agents, there were some agents, I would make a point to go to their open houses because I would hear how they would talk to clients that came through, I would hear how they worked. I could suss out who’s a good agent who wasn’t and I could, there were some agents, I would just go and they liked me so much that sometimes I would just go sit there open houses with them. Just watch them work and listen to them. And that’s all I got. You know, by the time I was 19 and got licensed I already I have already graduated real estate High School.
D.J. Paris 7:53 That is assessed. That is an incredible story. And, you know, we’ve done about 500 episodes. And that is one of the more unique stories that I have heard I love it. And it’s a good reminder for everyone listening that open houses are, are the way they are the way I
Alex Wolking 8:12 always joke. I mean, I was taught the old school way DJ I mean, I you know so many agents today that get into the business are taught social media and marketing yourself in video. I learned the old school old fashioned way eyeball to eyeball belly to belly toe to toe and I was you know, open houses door knocking I mean, the handwritten notes we had such a small town Midwest thing. And that’s really ultimately but I still build my business and have credited a lot of my success to today. And I had I had great teachers too. I had great teachers growing up. Yeah, my dad never I have to say this. My dad never ran real estate down my throat. I think a lot of real estate agents want their kids to get in business. They want their spouse to get in. He always let me discover on my own and he never pushed it. I think that’s part of the reason why I liked it so much because it was never forced on me. Well,
D.J. Paris 9:03 you got your license at 19. So you were in college, I guess at that time. And you were in college here in Chicago, and you got your license and in the sorry in Iowa, which is not super convenient. But so tell us about that.
Alex Wolking 9:16 Yeah. So I went to I went I did not have a traditional college career. I got licensed halfway through my freshman year and I got so I went home on weekends I went home every summer I went home on spring break I went home for a holiday break because you know, to Paul’s off from Thanksgiving to New Year’s I went home that whole time. I didn’t have my first Chicago summer until I moved back in 2016 or 2017 really because I just wanted to work but by the time I graduated, I had already had a book of business and clients that I was working with. So I graduated from DePaul and I moved back home to the Quad Cities the next day. And I graduated from the reason I went to DePaul in the first place was because they had In their College of Commerce, they actually had a degree in real estate. And that was what my training was in was more commercial focus, finance development, you know, that sort of thing had nothing to do with brokerage or sales, but I could go sell commercial real estate tomorrow if I wanted to, but I don’t want to
D.J. Paris 10:19 you know, people sell commercial I have the utmost respect for because it seems just like, I don’t think I’d like to do it. It’s, it’s a lot, a lot of stress. But, but anyway, um, so what’s so amazing about your story is, is you would think, you know, hey, Dad’s got this incredible business back home, he’s he’s established, He’s respected, I have my license, maybe I partner up with dad, or maybe I build my own brand there. But certainly the name is a name people may know. And so that would obviously be a huge leg up, you’ve already sent hundreds of open houses, you know, the good realtors, you’ve already established yourself, and you have a book of business there. So you would assume that that’s where you ended up. But you didn’t. And you decided to come here. And I want to make sure that people know that even though Alex said, Hey, during college, he went to school in Chicago, he would go home on the weekends. It’s not like we’re that close to the Quad Cities. It’s what at least two hours, maybe three and a half to three hours. Yeah. So I grew up in Peoria, Illinois, about three hours away from Chicago as well. And the I didn’t go to school in Peoria. But the idea of traveling like that on the weekends would have just driven me nuts. But regardless, you were really set up to build your business in Iowa, or you’re right in the Quad Cities, which is Iowa and Illinois, but not Chicago at all. And then you’re like, I’m going to come back to Chicago, and you had to start completely over. So how did you do that?
Alex Wolking 11:36 So this is where one Mr. Phil Byers comes into play. So Phil Byers, who is now with Compass. When I was 18 years old, my dad was a team leader for the Quad Cities office and Keller Williams, Quad Cities office and the in. So I was moving up here to go to Paul. And my dad reached out to Phil, who was the team leader at the time. And he said, You know, I’ve got this son, he’s going to DePaul, he loves real estate, you have anything for him to do. And sales like yeah, I’m sure we can find something for me do and my dad’s like, Alex is Alex is a, he’s a neat kid hangs up the phone. And that Phil will tell you that story like it was yesterday. And so I come barreling into Phil’s office, I had an hour long meeting with them. And he just looked at me and he’s like, I will help you do whatever you want to do. So when I want it at the end of 2015, I was 23 years old. I was number three in the Quad Cities office and I said the top 50 agents on the Board of Realtors there. And I had helped ranked my dad that year. Which I’m sure he was both proud of and disappointed. But at the end of 2015, you know, I did really well. And I had built up a book of business of just unique homes. That was my niche was hard to sell stuff. And but I knew it as a 23 year old single gay man. The Quad Cities was not the place for me.
D.J. Paris 13:17 Oh, that is all of our phones are going off right now. This is the second time ever, that they are testing. I learned about this the other day the Emergency Broadcast System. So that’s what you might have just heard. Mine will be coming in the next few seconds. So I will I will deal with that. So Alex has just got it. No big deal. We will we will cut that up.
Alex Wolking 13:38 So anyway, as a young 23 year old single gay man, I knew that the Quad Cities, especially after I had been there, it was not the place for me to be at that time of my life anyway. And I knew especially after having lived in Chicago, I mean, the greatest cities actually just voted one of the best cities in America for the seventh year in a row. I knew that I wanted more for myself. And I knew I would regret it if I didn’t move back to Chicago. So I agree. I was terrified. And I worked for Phil in college. I was an intern on his team when he was at properties at the time. So I went back and he and at the at the end of my internship, he said well, you know, if you ever decide to come back, your job will always be here. And I was like, Okay, great. So I filed that away. Cut to January of 2020 or 2016. I messaged him late on a Thursday night and I said I think I’m thinking about coming back to Chicago. Can I talk to you about taking my old job back on Firestone team, and he and I was coming up to I wasn’t planning on coming up to the city that weekend. But he said Saturday morning 9am My office bring coffee. I was like, okay, so I got my car and I drove up, you know, Friday night. I walk into his office. It’s Saturday morning and he’s like, see you want to come back? I said Yeah, I want to come at you How can I come work as a buyer’s agent for you on buyers home team, he’s like, What? Know what, you’ll be fine on your own. You see that empty desk across the hallway, Sit your ass over there, you’ll be just fine without me. You don’t need a team. You don’t need me, you know anybody else. You will be fine on your own. Just get your ass here was like, Oh, okay. It’s like when’s your slowest time there was like, right around September. He’s like, great. Start telling everybody that you know that you’re moving to Chicago in September, figure out the plan later, but just tell everybody that you’re moving. Okay. At that time, I was 24. And so I started telling people I’m really mad to Chicago, and people like what it was like, I don’t know, I’m gonna figure it out. Well, let me hold. I signed a lease September 1 of 2016. And I came back and then I transitioned my business for about two years 2017 2018 I partnered with an agent, the Quad Cities to kind of take over my business there. And then so I still was like, part time here my first two years, but I didn’t go full time here until January 1 of 2019. Wow. And
D.J. Paris 16:07 how did you build the business here? When you had such a strong foothold there? I’m sure there may be a little bit of overlap maybe people moving but but but usually people the Quad City stay in the Quad Cities. Same with Peoria where I’m from. So it’s not like oh, this is an easy transition. No, it’s It’s you are literally starting over. So how did you do it?
Alex Wolking 16:28 Oh, man, you know, DJ, I’m still figuring that. I think you know, I’ve just always been born with the gift of unbridled tenacity. And I’ve never there’s not a conversation I’ve strayed away from there’s not a you know, I’m I have no problem picking up the phone. But it really did it. When I first came back to Keller Williams came in really handy as an international brand. Because for years, I’ve gone to all the conferences, I’ve made a bunch of friends and built relationships with other agents around the country. They didn’t know anybody in Davenport, Iowa or Moline, Illinois. But when I moved to Chicago and made the big announcement, everybody knew somebody in Chicago. So my first four years 70% of my business was agent referrals. And that was that was a huge part of my business. Yeah, up until about 2020 2021. Really? And then it just of course, then it snowballed, right, I mean, you got I sent out just sold postcards ever around every property I sold like my first year here in 2017, I closed 10 properties for like 2.7 million. And then in 2018, I did 13 units for like 5 million. And then in 2019, I sold 28 homes for 15 million. So just it snowballed. It literally doubled year over year. And then I hired Kevin, my assistant director of operations now. And then from 2020, we went from 28 closed units and 15 and a half million to 52 units for 26 million. So that’s just I mean, that’s kind of where I’ve hovered the last two years is around that 25 $30 million. Mark. And it’s, you know, that’s, you know, it’s as they say, take the leap of faith and trust in that will catch you in it sure did.
D.J. Paris 18:28 Yeah, it’s it’s so funny because you, you know, you in your early in your teen years really did a lot of the heavy lifting, that people even when they get their license oftentimes don’t do and and look, I mean, you know, it’s it’s never too late to get in shape. It’s never too late to start building skills. It’s never too late for for anything. In life. If you put the effort in and you had obviously, you probably saw I’m sure your father worked extremely hard as as an A successful agent, every successful agent does. And so you saw his work ethic, and then you were able to also participate without really being in the industry for for some time. And boy, you know, reminds me of a story. So here in Chicago, one of the top agents we and by the way, Alex is mentioning Phil buyers, we have an episode we’ve done with Phil Byers, he is an exceptional person to listen to he’s he’s trained and coached numerous agents. He’s with Compass, you can go back through our archives and find Phil’s episode. It’s a he’s just such a wonderful human. One of our one of my favorite people. And I was thinking about another episode that I’ve done here in Chicago that your story reminded me of. So for people in Chicago who are listening, you’ll know this name, but everyone else might not. His name is Matt Lehrer sees one of the big producers one of the biggest actually have about 46,000 agents in Chicago and he’s one or two or three he’s always at the top. And what when I had him on the show millions of years ago, he he told me that his first five have yours in the business. I think he only sold, I can’t remember exactly 12 homes total in five years. And I said, he didn’t, he goes, Well, I was living at home, so I’d have to pay for rent he goes, but I considered it going to college. Like you were saying, by the time you were 19, you’re like, I’ve already put in my, you know, not maybe 10,000 hours, but I put in a lot of hours. And he would just get up every day and walk around River North, which is where he wanted to specialize. And he went to every building, and he just learned the inventory. And he goes, You know, I was poor. For five years, I made no money, I was a little it was a little embarrassing. But now he’s, you know, at the very, very top of the mountain. So it’s, you know, you have a similar story there. And I just I’m so impressed with people that put in that amount of work, because it’s discipline. And it’s not easy. Well,
Alex Wolking 20:44 and you know, in addition to that to DJ, as I learned very early on, and I think so many agents, they get success really quickly, and they just blow through every dollar they make. Where I mean, my first year in the business was 2011. That was the bottom of the market. Tough, tough, tough year, I didn’t sell anything, I got licensed April 2011. My first closing was until February 2012. And so man, I went a whole year without selling anything. And I almost got out of business. And my first listing was actually for sale by owner that I had converted from door knocking. And my second listing was a short sale. And that was I mean, I got in a very difficult market. So I’ve always been very cautious with how I spent my money, my marketing dollars and how I were referrals come from like in markets like this year that have been challenging. A lot of agents are freaked out and scrambling. I’m not because that I’ve been through that. And I watched my dad go through 2007 through 2010. And I, you know, I’ve watched, you know, having grown up and then I’ve been through market cycles before, and how you adapt and change in those markets. But what I wanted to say was right, as I was actually making copies of my license at the copier ready to go
there we go. Okay, I was actually so in December 2011, I was about to drop my license, I was gonna go hang out. I was making copies of my license. I was going to the Quad City or realtor association to turn it in. I had an appointment and everything. And the number one agent in the office at the time, Deb Houseman, she she saw what I was doing. She’s like, What are you doing? I was like, I’m hanging my license. She’s like, you’re not gonna be in real estate anymore. I was like, Yeah, I think I’m just gonna finish my degree. And I’ll get in real estate after that. And she’s like, really. So I’m just like, I think you should give that some time. Like, give it a few days, but don’t do it today. I was like, alright, so I canceled my appointment. I went to dinner with my mom and I got a ping on my phone back in the day when I had a Blackberry. And I had a, I got an email from her. And this was by this point, I was at home and it was probably like 11 o’clock at night, which is unlike Deb she’s Miss I’m in bed by 830 every night. It was an email from her saying I couldn’t sleep thinking about you getting out of the business. If it’s not hard, it’s not worth having. You need to go network more. And I was like networking, what’s never gonna she’s like, Alex, go make friends. And I was like, she’s like, You need to go make friends. So I’m in business today because of Deb Houseman and I built my business on her advice. The best advice I ever got in the industry was go make friends, that if I if I write a book someday about all my successes and adventures and my memoirs, the name of the book is gonna be called Go make friends. You
D.J. Paris 23:51 know, you’re absolutely so so right on. You know, we are wired for community, we’re wired for connection, we want to support our friends, we want to help them with their endeavors. We oftentimes, you know, use our not use our friends in a negative way. But we utilize our friends to Hey, who’s your doctor who’s your you know, who’s your hairstylist, who’s your accountant, and who’s your realtor. And so, it is you know, being being likable is such an important and I don’t mean changing who you are to fit someone else’s needs. I just mean being somebody who’s approachable, somebody who you whether you’re introverted or extroverted, you can learn skills to you know, be a likable person. And I always think that being you know, being likable is one of the key tenants of being in real estate. It’s being being somebody that can people can talk to and they can bring their challenges and there’s stress and and all of the ups and downs of a of a transaction. I mean it is every transaction stressful at some point, sometimes many times during it and the clients are stressing out just Like, you know, you would expect and being somebody that they can come to, and you’re making this massive decision with, you know, financially, and you get to be the one who’s who’s really guiding them is is really it’s almost, you know, blessing may be a little bit of a strong word. But it’s really, we’re very fortunate to be in this kind of profession where we’re literally guiding somebody through one of the more stressful parts of life is buying and selling homes.
Alex Wolking 25:26 Yes, yes. And that that advice of go make friends was literally how I always approached my business. And not only that, that was that was the mindset, the mentality I had when I moved back here to Chicago, and just starting over again, was I don’t have to go make friends. And then that was that was it.
D.J. Paris 25:44 It’s, it’s just incredible that that you’ve built basically two businesses before the age of 30. in two different locations, basically, starting from scratch, maybe you could argue, in the Quad Cities, maybe you had some additional resources there, but you still put in the work, you still rode your bike to all of those open houses. What what do you say to agents today who are starting out who maybe don’t have the guidance that that you were fortunate enough to have, you know, from your father and from from Deb, once you got started? And obviously Keller Williams, one Chicago here is a really, really well respected brand. here locally, I mean, obviously, nationally, internationally, too. But you have a lot of great people at your firm, and also people that like compass Phil buyers, a lot of people are in your corner. But you asked you went out and made those connections yourself. But let’s talk I want to talk about open houses just for a moment, because I think it is you were saying, you know, social media wasn’t really the main driver for your business. But, you know, making friends and also sitting hundreds of open houses, is really like, can you talk a little bit about what skills you learned by watching other realtors do?
Alex Wolking 26:54 Oh my god. So I don’t even know where to begin with that. Because there’s I’m an observer, you know, I’ve always been a lifelong learner, I love being a student. And a lot of what I learned was what to do and what not to do. You watch how a lot you remember, if anything, I wasn’t necessarily watching the agent, I was watching the buyers and the consumers coming through, and what their reactions were to what the agent was saying or doing. And what I found doing that is that people like the element of surprise, and I think one of the biggest things I took away was never rob a buyer from the element of surprise, you know, instead of saying, you know, this kitchen has an amazing pantry, let them discover that, you know, let them go and find that. When it came to converting and like just having a normal conversation with people just ask them. Oh, you guys, where do you guys go to brunch today? Have you been to this place around the corner? You know, there’s just so many things like that just being real, it just be real with people. And it’s so easy to say, Oh, well, you know, be yourself? Well, it’s hard to do, and you don’t know who you are. But there’s a I think that was the where I saw the greatest response from consumers at open houses was when agents were real, and relatable. And it instantly takes the guard down for a lot of consumers. So I mean, I used to dress up for open houses and I’d wear you know, the suit and tie and brown shoes and all of that. And what I found is that my conversion went up when I ditched the suit. Interesting. And, you know, Mr. Clerici, will have you believing otherwise. But anyway, you know that that’s, that’s authentically him. No, that’s not me. And, you know, I was I had to look at what markets I was serving. You know, the Quad Cities is a very kind of blue collar area. And, you know, I always was more drawn to areas that just felt real. So for me, the vast majority of my business is, you know, Lakeview uptown Edgewater Ravenswood Lincoln Square, and I don’t do I sold in 2022. I sold 51 homes, and only two of them were in Lincoln Park. And both of them were in the same building. So it wasn’t, you know, that’s just not my vibe. It’s not my energy. I just love where I can be real. And you know, the fact that I mean, if I went to a $2 million listing appointment in Ravenswood, and I showed up in a blue suit and brown shoes, they throw me off the front porch, because they like who are you? Did you come from downtown? Do you work this neighborhood? That’s, I had to find areas and markets that served the vibe and energy that I just liked. And I also had to find how I approach the business as well. You know, for me, I’m brutally honest, like blunt force trauma. If, but I am authentic and I, I know, to a granular level, my market block by block, which that’s a level of expertise that takes years to refine. And when I came back to Chicago, I started that whole Open House cycle all over again. If I wasn’t doing open houses, I was going to open houses. I was going to every broker’s open. Some of my greatest mentors in the business have come from that because they kept showing up over and over again. I mean, aside from Phil Byers one of my other great mentors has been Millie Rosenbloom. Oh, sure. What am I have a great story about Millie. One of my other biggest mentors spend Marlin granite key with REMAX do you talk about somebody who knows the market forwards and backwards side to side and knows the knows what year the furnace was replaced in a house? Because she sold it three times? I mean, that woman knows her inventory. I mean, that’s, that’s, those are the kinds of agents I learned from growing up. And, you know, I see through here in Chicago, I think a lot of agents just want to want the glamour of the business and the glamour of the listing. But they don’t know how to actually do the job, and they don’t know how to how to navigate with ease and finesse. I think that’s, you see, it’s so much with the newer agents coming in. But, you know, true expertise that’s really missing. And that’s something that you know, I valued as a small town real estate agent, you have to have that. I carried a lot of that small town mentality with me everywhere. John,
D.J. Paris 31:32 how do you recommend that an agent who is newer to the business start to learn the market? Obviously, some obvious things come to mind go to the open houses go to the broker opens if you’re if your area where you’re working has those, you know, obviously immerse yourself in out in the market, but when you’re also you know, studying the MLS like how do you how would you advise somebody to get started so that they can specialize in a particular area? Yeah,
Alex Wolking 31:58 that’s a great question. So what I did was I took a few small areas that I wanted to work in. And, you know, for me, I looked in Buena Park, I looked in if I wanted to do single family homes north of Irving Park Road. So I wanted to do point a park Grayson West Ravenswood castle with terrorists, you know, Edgewater, Glen, Glen, Lakewood, Balmoral, and I took each of those areas in a very granular level. And I went back 10 years, I went back just to see, you know, how many homes turned over every year what the price appreciation growth was, who are the agents that were doing most of the deals there, then I went to their open houses, and I learned who they are. And I learned, okay, what makes them what makes that agent so unique for this area. The other thing I found, too, is some agents is, you know, massive foothold in a market. And a lot of times, what you find out is they don’t, and they tout themselves as the number one agent for the area. And there, they done like three deals. But you know, perception is reality. So a lot of that I would find, okay, if I’m going to work in this neighborhood, what’s my angle, but what I did in the Quad Cities, and what served me extremely well here was I started to identify markets that had a gaping hole in them where no one was working them, or the agents who were working them were not doing anything to innovate. They had no market share. So I just went after the markets that really weren’t underserved. And that’s where I started. I went first. And that was, that was how I ended up working in my own neighborhood. My own backyard and Buena Park was I looked at all the single family homes on Hutchinson Street and junior terrorists. And around that were packing on Kassala terrace. Nobody was working in that market. Nobody was and having come from the Quad Cities and having my neck and my skill set my eye for selling really weird, funky, unique historic homes that just that fit into an interest of mine and a skillset of mine. So I was like the I’m the perfect agent to fit the role of this neighborhood. And then I just started attacking it. I give I give architecture tours every summer, you know, three times a summer every summer for the last seven years. I’m on the board of directors from Planet Park neighbors. I’m on the real estate development partners committee for the Uptown Chamber of Commerce. I’m on the board for the Uptown Chicago commission. Okay, and then I actually here’s what happened with one of the things that put me on map for that neighborhood early on back in 2018. I was walking on Hutchinson street one day and I saw all these homes that were for sale and it drove me nuts. I didn’t have the listing on any of them. But I thought to myself, You know what, I can’t find a buyer. So what I did I researched you know Historic Preservation groups and shipping and landmarks Illinois came up. And landmarks Illinois, I reached out to them because this is what I used to do in the Quad Cities. Every time I had an old mansion listed I called the Scott County Historic Preservation Society, did a private open house for them brought their members in and I used I sold one or two of my listings from that, and I got listings from it, too. So I called landmarks Illinois, and I said, Hey, you don’t know who I am. I’m a young real estate agent. I live in Buena Park, there’s a bunch of really cool mansions for sale on the Hutchinson street Historic District. If I organized a tour for your highest donors would would that be of interest to you? Because these are people that have money that understand historic preservation? And they said, Absolutely, we don’t know who you are. We just sniff you out first. But if you can organize that, yeah, we’ll totally we’re always looking for ways to get in front of our top donors. So I reached out to all the listing agents that had you know, listings on the street, every single one of them said yes. And I saw I said, Okay, this day, this time, you got I just need you listing agents to open up your property. I already have all the history on your house. I’ve done the research. I give tours of the neighborhood already. And then I’m going to bring all the people. So then I reached out to the Ottomans office, which was James Kappelman at the time, and I call this Tressa fair, who was her who was the chief of staff. I said, Hey, I’m doing a private tour invite only on Hutchinson Street for the homes that are for sale. I’m inviting landmarks Illinois, does the aldermen want FaceTime on this group? Because he can certainly come and join. She said, absolutely. I have 10 to 15 people that would show up to this tour. I had 41 people show up to this tour. And so I gave my very high spirited, you know, tour like I normally do. The aldermen showed up. Well, I gotten to know one of the neighbors on column Avenue. And he was a developer, and he had a really cool backyard. And I am the reservoir, which is a restaurant in the neighborhood I called. There’s a lender that I brought in that does construction loans and financing for rehab projects. So I called him he sponsored dinner and cocktails, you know, brought in from reservoir and reservoir came in and catered it at this developer’s house because I needed a cool place to have a cocktail hour at the end of the tour. The tour went off without a hitch. One of the properties on the tour did sell because of the tour. I wasn’t involved, but it did sell. And after that I had all of those residents who found out about the tour and how successful it was they started calling me and they started spending our agent didn’t sell the property if you want to bring a buyer will pay you you know a bonus or whatever. And then over the years this property is turned over. I got to know the neighbors and then I them during the pandemic because I gotten to know so many of them. They’re in my database and I thought to myself, well I have a database, I could just export this list of contacts into an Excel spreadsheet and voila, now I have a neighborhood roster that I can share with the neighbors. They ate it up. And because everybody knows summer 2020 when everybody was bored and had nothing to do we started doing what are called Black tails where everybody on the block got together every Friday 537 30 And BYOB bring a mask and we just got you know drunk in someone’s front porch backyard patio, their driveway whatever. And of course I was the only realtor there and from there on out you know it’s rare when I don’t get called for a listing on the street and if I don’t get the listing I was definitely competing for it and then I’ve had some sellers that have called and said hey, we’re listing with our friend we totally would have listed with you but we wanted to tell you first before it went on the market
D.J. Paris 38:52 so and by the way that’s like the greatest compliment even though it didn’t call your way you get it it makes sense.
Alex Wolking 38:57 And I got I’ve gotten probably four of those calls and and just this past month I closed to Amman Hutchinson so it’s a you know truly built my castle and built a moat around and I’m the fire breathing dragon up my castle but it’s but it’s bled over into other neighborhoods. And
now I’m getting calls from buyers who are saying, hey, we want to be in this neighborhood. What do you have coming? So and I did the same thing in the Quad Cities
it worked that was I found a an underserved market met the needs of the people that lived there and just became the face of it. And it’s not it wasn’t the end of this. This is a an area that really wanted community and actually backing up a little bit. When I started doing my initial canvassing. I did it door to door I knocked on everyone’s doors. I went down Hutchinson and I started asking people, I’m a new agent in the neighborhood. What do you want to what you know trying to learn more about the community and everything. Not one person slammed the door in my face. Everybody had a story to tell. And I told them, I just had a couple of questions. Not one person spent less than 45 minutes with me. I one person I spent two hours with. And they started introducing me to the other neighbors, right. And I just ask them, How long have you been here? Where did you live here before? What do you like most about living here? And what I heard from one woman that Glaser she was in her 80s. And she said, You know, I’ve been here since 1965. And when people started putting their gates up, I feel like the Gates divided us was like, Really, and I kept hearing over and over again, people wanted connection, they wanted to know their neighbors. There was one person I knew that lived in their house for 20 years, they’ve never met the person across the street from them. And so I brought this to one of the other neighbors and I said, Hey, we’ve got a need here. All that I’m keep hearing this over and over again, people want to get together and I got all the contact information now. And he’s like, I’ll make a phone call. So we call Vicki down the street who’s got this massive property? You know, it’s actually on the market right now. Suzanne gentleman has it listed 76 single family homes in the neighborhood. So we through we’ve sent out invitations to everybody. Of the seven like throwing a poor throwing a block party at Vicki’s house, she’s got this massive yard Come on out, if you live in the neighborhood, you know, come on out of the 76 single family homes, 58 of them showed up. That’s incredible. That was incredible. And Jonathan, God bless him. He had a sign in table, everybody had to sign in, or we had to get their badge and with their name and their address and where they lived. And Jonathan, let me work the sign in
D.J. Paris 41:43 table. So that’s the key. That’s the key table.
Alex Wolking 41:47 That was how I got to know everybody. And plus they saw my name. And I had been sending out mail once a month, I sent out a letter once a month, here’s some market updates. And here’s what’s going on in your neighborhood. So people saw my name like, Oh, you’re the one that’s been sending me those market reports. And that was it. So that was that was how it all got started.
D.J. Paris 42:05 Well, that is an incredible story. And I’m just digesting it myself. But what I was thinking of is what were the sort of crucial elements of of what you did there. And I couple things stuck out to me. I mean, aside from just the brilliance of, of, you know, reaching out to the landmark organization, and but but really what what you did was something that really anybody could do is get immersed in a particular community and find out, talk to the residents find out what they need, find out what’s not happening that they wish were to happen, and then come up with solutions. But and you’re so right. I mean, look, I mean, how many realtors who have tried to penetrate that particular market? Ever thought to ask, you know, the residents? Hey, well, you know, what, what if you were to if we were to change something what, you know, what, what could what could be changed? Or what would you like to see different? You don’t usually hear Realtors talking about that. They might say, hey, how long have you lived here? What are you thinking of moving and you know, the traditional sales kind of stuff. But you didn’t approach it from that at all. You’re like, I want to have all the knowledge of this of this area. So I can be a tour guide. And I can also be of service to the residents. And you just kept going from there. And it was all about being of service. And that obviously, look, you’re on all of these boards and committees. And we should also mention too, I know, this may have gotten lost in all of the things I was talking about all the accolades you’ve accomplished. But Alex is a 30 under 30 NAR National Association Realtors honoree, that is a very big deal. And so you know, what the National Association of REALTORS does every year as they take a look at, you know, the 1000s and 1000s of agents, oh, gosh, probably 10s of 1000s of agents who are under 30, maybe even 100,000 or more. And, you know, they look at people who are doing exceptional things. So, you know, that was that’s a huge accolade and a huge thing under your belt. But I love the ideas. You just seem like you want to build community. And I think that that is boy, what a smart What a smart and also fulfilling thing, but it’s fun. I imagine it’s all fun.
Alex Wolking 44:08 It’s a fun business. It’s a and people ask me about my business all the time. Like Mike got all these cool listings, you always got this unique stuff. And, you know, it’s not only getting to represent those properties, it’s getting to sell them to I mean, it’s fun getting to tell their story. And I always said the other part is of how I built my business. So you mentioned you’re fostering the community but then I had a bunch of resources because sitting on all those boards gives me incredible access to information. And also because I’m now on so landmarks Illinois came back to me a year and a half later and asked me to be on the board of landmark
D.J. Paris 44:39 I imagined they would they and I’m
Alex Wolking 44:42 still the youngest serving board member I’ve been on for four years now. I’m still the youngest serving one that they saw. I have, you know, tremendous opportunity there for for property for homeowners that have a landmark property. So I’ve got a lot information there. But the third piece of this is the A I mentioned earlier whenever these are not easy properties to sell, and they are not the ones you put on the market got multiple offers, these are ones that sit for a while. Even in this market, they still sit. And I’ve done the craziest, most outlandish, absurd stuff to sell these properties. I you know, I haven’t mentioned listed on Astor street where at Phil and I had that CO listed actually where we put that one up for auction that was in the middle of the pandemic and summer of 2020 I had Brian or lacquers house listed and we marketed that as a summer escape from the city of furnished rental finally sold that to somebody that tore it down because they wanted the land. I’ve sold properties that are you know, funky earthborn homes I’ve sold you know, they’re just really out of the box ways of selling it so not only is it getting in the door of these properties, it’s having the resources to help them and the out of the box creativity to sell them so it’s a it’s a three prong approach that you know for me I would so much rather have a difficult listing than another two bed two bath condo and Lakeview like that’s nice pays the bills but it doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning.
D.J. Paris 46:18 Yeah, you will you like a challenge? I do. And it’s it’s fulfilling because it what the challenge, you know, really activates within you as I see it is creativity. All of a sudden your creative sparks. You know, Lakeview is a very popular neighborhood here in Chicago for those who aren’t familiar and, and it’s great neighborhood, lovely neighborhood wonderful, not difficult to sell, it may be difficult to get market share. But what if you get a listing there, it’s probably going to sell. And it’s going to sell pretty easily because it’s so desirable. Buena Park is less known and not less desirable for certain types of people more desirable for others. But again, I love that you went to the to the part that like, I’ve never heard anybody in Chicago, I want to I want to be the Buena Park guy. Now I’m sure there are people that do but But 90% of the people I hear who are working in the city are like, I want to be the Linkin Park guy. I want to be the North guy. These are the sort of glitzy fun areas, Gold Coast, etc. And I love that you went the other way, because and the reason why you did is you did the research and you go, there’s a lot of opportunity here and it sort of meets my needs. I kind of liked these funky homes. And now I got to figure out how to connect with the community. And you did what what an incredible story. And I know there’s so much more to talk about. But I think this is a great place to wrap up. I’m gonna give a recommendation to our audience, I want you if you can, if you were so inspired by Alex’s story here about how he penetrated this community, I want you to go back and listen to the steps that he took. Because I really wanted to interrupt him every step of the way. Be like, okay, cool, how’d you do that. And I didn’t want to interrupt his flow. But I want you guys to listen to it again, because you will pick up exactly his thought process how he did it. And boy, please go out and do what he did, you will have a if nothing else, you’ll have a really enjoyable career, and you will have probably a very successful one. as well. I also would like to mention that if you are a realtor in the Chicagoland area, and maybe you feel you’re not getting the attention you need at your current firm, or you’re looking you know, this is the year where the market is down, people are looking to maybe switch firms, check out other teams, Alex’s Alex’s team is growing. So if you think you could be an asset to him, or if you’d like to learn from him, and you think you might be a good fit, reach out to him, you can find him on his website, Alex woking.com, as well as Instagram and all the other social platforms he’s on. So reach out to him, if you think he might be a good fit, I know I would want to work with him if I was practicing. So definitely reach out, I am so impressed. And also, for everyone else who doesn’t live in Chicago, you might have clients that move to Chicago. And you know, one of the coolest things about doing the show, I wish I could participate in the financial part of it. But even so it’s so rewarding that almost every time we do an episode for anywhere in the country, that person ends up calling us later and goes, I just got a listing from one of your listeners who you know, has somebody who’s coming in to buy or sell. And so please, if you are looking for a Chicago agent just to even partner up with boy Alex would be a good one to partner up with. So reach out to him. If and by the way, Alex has people that leave Chicago too. And he needs to refer business to other places. So maybe he doesn’t have somebody in your market that he can be the referral for a referral to you for so reach out to him. He’s a wonderful guy, and certainly doing all of the right things. And he’s somebody certainly to follow on social as well to see how he’s marketing himself. And he’s not a really big social guy. But when he does his social stuff, it’s actually really really impressive and excellent. So anyway, everyone check out Alex, Alex woking.com link to all of his stuff in the show notes. And on behalf of the audience. Alex, thank you so much for being on our show. We couldn’t appreciate you more, or I couldn’t appreciate you more You are exactly the kind of person. The reason I do this show is because of people like you. So thank you for being willing to be on the show. And I can’t imagine, I know our audience got a lot of value out of this. And on behalf of Alex and myself, let’s thank the people who make the show possible you the audience. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this episode. You guys are the reason we do this. And please help us by telling a friend I think of just one other agent that needs some encouragement right now. Maybe their business is down, guess what? Almost everyone’s business is down. This is a time to share information, send this podcast over to anyone who could use a boost or just anyone that’s interested in learning. Because guess what, there’s always more to learn and we would thank you that helps us get in front of more people and helps us in every possible way. So thank you for that. Alex. Thanks again, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Alex. Thank you
Strategies From A Billion Dollar Producer • Scott Harris
Sep 29, 2023
Scott Harris the Founder of The Harris Residential Team goes back to the beginning of his journey into real estate business. Scott talks about what he a his team are doing to have their best year ever. Scott also discusses the importance of believing in your clients and also the visionary brokerage and its four pillars. Next, Scott discusses mindset, competition and how he approaches it and positivity. Last, Scott talks about how he celebrates with clients after closing.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be speaking with a billion dollar producer and he’s going to share exactly how he runs his business. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And before I ever talk about our guest, I just want to say thank you, to our audience, everyone listening because we just hit a major milestone, we just crossed over 3 million downloads, audio downloads, by the way. And it’s all because of you. So thank you, thank you. Thank you. I know on every episode, I’m like, tell a friend, tell a friend, you guys are doing it. And I couldn’t thank you more. Please keep doing it. That really is the best way you can help us also support our sponsors. They’re the ones who pay the bills. We love them. So let let them know how much you love them. Check out their services and products, consider buying them in fact, just go ahead and buy them I promise. Our sponsors are awesome. They’ll all help your business. But today we have a great conversation with a billion dollar producer Scott Harris so let’s just get to the main event guys. Congrats again for all of us 3 million downloads big deal for me. Really appreciate it. But let’s get to the main event MY CONVERSATION WITH THE GREAT SCOTT Harris.
All right. Today our guest is Scott Harris with Harris presidential team of Brown Harris Stevens in New York City. His team covers Manhattan and Brooklyn. But let me tell you more about Scott. Now since 2003. Scott Harris has been involved in the marketing and sales of nearly a billion dollars of New York City residential property. It’s a really impressive number. He has been ranked among the top 250 agents in the nation and sales volume by The Wall Street Journal real trends top 1000 list. He and his team Harris residential team are regularly among the top point zero 2% of Realtors nationwide, with a focus on people first and a philosophy of visionary brokerage, they are passionate about helping their clients uncover what is next for them in their lives, identifying and securing opportunities in cooperative apartments, landmark townhouses, and condominiums please, to learn more about Scott and his team, visit Harris residential.com, we will have a link to that in the show notes and also follow him on Linked in and just search for Scott Harris. Because he posts a lot of amazing contents, we will have a link to that as well, in the show notes Scott gets has a tremendous following on LinkedIn. And he’s always publishing good content that you should check out Scott, welcome to the show. DJ,
Scott Harris 4:15 thanks for having me. And hello from New York.
D.J. Paris 4:18 Hello from Chicago and hello to all of all of our listeners from all over. Scott really excited to chat with you I love when I get to talk to somebody who has, you know, approaching the billion dollar mark or I think you guys have exceeded that you’re having an amazing year we were talking offline. And Scott and his team is having their best year ever. This is 2023 I want to just make sure in case somebody’s listening to this at a different time. This is a tough year for most agents but Scott and his team are crushing it so we’re excited to find out maybe what they’re doing and what you know our listeners can learn from Scott but Scott, I’d love to really start at the beginning of your journey into real estate so What brought you to real estate? Well,
Scott Harris 5:01 I grew up in, in New Orleans and my family, my father was had warehouses, he still runs a wholesale hardware business. So I spent a lot of sick days or summer vacation days in his warehouse doing running around doing stuff. My best friend and I were like riding bikes, in the wharves on the Mississippi River down by the French Quarter if you’ve ever been down there or and my mom ended up in high school being the marketing director for a Merrill Lynch affiliate. So there’s like a lot of commercial and residential real estate in my background. And for me, it was all about the architecture and design, I loved. All the old Spanish and French architecture, the French Quarter, my very best friend was there, and I’m sort of steeped in it, and, and then did nothing with real estate. For years, I was Toro touring musician, for the better part of my 20s, doing sales on one side booking bands. And then on the other side, being on the road. And when I finally decided I needed to make a move, I was in Boston at the time, I moved to New York, and my stepmother. And as you may have people in your lives, you know, you better than you know, yourself, they’re like Scott, I think you would be a great real estate agent. And it’s not something that I ever thought about. I actually found my college application recently, and it said, I think I want to get into something to do with architecture, you know, and I was like, Huh, that’s pretty funny. So I ended up I ended up here. And sure enough, that first year real estate when I moved to New York, I had no you know, no job, no place to live, no girlfriend, nothing, and just kind of contacts and a real passion wanting to be successful. And it was like a duck to water. Real estate was just I got my license started doing rentals, which is something you can really dive into in New York, because it’s so much of the business, so much of what people live in here. And it’s just been brick by brick building the business over 20 years. It’s
D.J. Paris 7:05 amazing. As a musician, so tell us about about a musician, what instrument instruments did you play?
Scott Harris 7:13 So if you know, like Pentatonix you know some of those acapella Sure, I was like a it was like a boy band for acapella in the late 90s, we used to open for bands like, and sync and 98 degrees and amazing, crazy and ridiculous and we were you know, wearing all, you know, you can just imagine what we were wearing and all of that it was a lot of fun. I think I had blue hair for a while. It was hilarious. And so as a singer,
D.J. Paris 7:42 that was that was basic. And singer a dancer, I’m guessing a lot of can move a
Scott Harris 7:48 little bit, I would say the dancing is like, I don’t know how much of a threat I’m going to be on anybody’s dance floor. But I definitely had a lot of time, a lot of fun jumping around, that’s for sure a lot of that’s
D.J. Paris 7:59 amazing. I love that. So I really want to sort of dive in, you know, maybe we’ll just dive into to, you know, the success you guys have been having this year because I’m always impressed with success. And, and, you know, I think our whole purpose of our podcast is to talk about people who are successful anyway, that of course, you are having a great year you and your team. By the way, I want to mention real quickly before we get started, I usually say this to the end and then I forget to do it often. But if you are an agent in the New York City area, if you’re working Manhattan, maybe Brooklyn, you know really anywhere in New York and you are interested in maybe looking to see what other teams have what they have to offer. Maybe you’re not getting the right attention or training or support from your existing firm, Brown hair. Stevens of course is a absolutely super reputable firm one of the one of the big, big firms in the country. But Scott Harris and his team would love the opportunity to chat with you so just keep that in mind as we’re talking because Scott this team is doing really well this year and they’re expanding so keep it in mind but But Scott yet let’s talk about what what how are you guys having such a great year? What do you think you’re doing? That is that is paying off right now?
Scott Harris 9:11 Well, first I think it’s it in terms of how we think about the business. Big picture, it’s all about helping and it’s all about service to our clients. So in a moment where that you may not be doing as many transactions I never think about your saying oh they’re doing great this year. All of the all of that is just the last the only thing you can see at the end it’s the lag they call it like lag measures right? That’s exactly right. Right. We measures are how are we adding value to clients and so if you’re every person listening, you have something special about you. You have some you come from you know whether you’re whatever you did before, I found like school teachers who become real estate agents are the most Amazing, they’re so patient, and they can really create good boundaries and like be good listeners. And so that’s just one example actors, singers, you know, performers, that’s one side of it. They’re great salespeople, but who are, you know, therapists, we’re like therapists and real estate is just the vehicle, right? It’s a, it’s a people business. And so what we’ve been doing for 20 years is developing relationships across every imaginable industry. And so when I sit down with my client, I’m just listening, what are the things they need? How can I help them across the board? And I’ve just found that the more value you add for your client, I want to introduce you to this person, I want to introduce you this person with absolutely no expectations of what it’s going to turn into. Has, I know that that is the bed, that’s the foundation for our success. And it just, it’s like an evergreen thing. You know, you start January 1, oh, I have I have to do this whole thing again. But what you’ve already done, is just connect to your clients and be that person that they call for everything. Yeah. And how does that relate to like a very specific, you know, we’re helping someone sell an apartment helping someone buy, we really take an A to Z approach. It’s like Danny Meyer, setting the table above and beyond, I mean, anything you need, you can be based in Asia, or in the Middle East, or Europe, or wherever you are, we can take care of every single thing to do with the preparation of your home above and beyond in terms of communication. Our our team is 11. But our extended team is 50 100 200 trusted people that we can go to and make sure that we get things done, right. So it’s, it’s a combination of the actual dealmaking where we really are focused on taking care of everything. And that just establishes this huge amount of trust. But I think it’s also big picture, how can we serve our clients, even when they’re not clients? Everybody, every, it’s not about, hey, do you have a referral from me, because you hear that thing all the time. That’s the best compliment, you can give blah, blah, blah. Because that’s what they mean. And it’s great advice. For anybody who’s ever read the million dollar real estate agent that is a great source of language, like to think about how you can you know how you can cultivate referrals. But it’s much easier than that, just get into conversation with lots of people, and ultimately, you’re going to help them in some way, and then they’re going to, they’re never going to forget you. Maybe that’s too generic. I mean, I can get I can get more detailed about how it’s helped this year.
D.J. Paris 12:38 I always think the fundamentals win the game. So what you’re talking about is really consistent with almost everyone I’ve ever had on the show who are all top 1% producers in the country. So is it unique? No. But success usually isn’t unique. It’s usually the the the action that is taken, you know, consistently and obviously, you guys are doing that. And I do want to dive into it a little deeper, because I’m curious, you mentioned, you know, providing value even when someone’s not a client. So this, this is for our listeners, this could be, you know, before they’re ready to use you, they’ve never used you before, but you want to start building that trust and building that, that relationship, or they have already used you. And they’re you know, in between transactions, and that may be 710 years, whatever it is in your local market. And, and I suspect Scott, you guys have an approach to handle both of those scenarios, when you meet somebody first, and then after a transaction, you know, sort of how you stay in touch. So I’d love to hear more about how you guys continue to add value.
Scott Harris 13:45 Well, I would say it’s like chicken or the egg, right? If you’re starting if you’re newer in the business, what can you do you want to make a list? Who are the 50 people in your life that are your biggest fans, right? And start just being consistent? It doesn’t have to be 50 calls a day. But can it be five? Can it be five, reach outreaches at two every single day, it’s the consistency. It’s just like going to the gym, it’s like any kind of consistency you can build in your calendar just to reach out I mean yesterday, right? And it can be very intuitive. You have this list in front of you. It can be very old school looking at the list, who are the five people that pop out of that list. When you look at it. I reached out to five people yesterday, one person told me his somebody in his family passed away and they’re gonna hire me to sell their place in you know, in the spring. I haven’t talked to him in probably a year and I just hey, how are you? I was in your old building. I was thinking about you. And that was just my connection point. Somebody else I hadn’t spoken to in a year he popped out of a list. I said, let me reach out to so and so. And he said, Oh, I’m looking to buy and flip something in the city. We ran out. We’re finished our projects in Connecticut. We’re ready to come back in the city. There are opportunities and that’s just yesterday. So you have your top 15 people you reach out to them. And just listen, I think the most important thing you can do is, is just the agenda is I want to connect with this person, I care about this person they care about me, it’s, it’s so much more fundamentally about the people. And if you really just focus on that something good comes out of it, you’re gonna find a way to be of service to them. I mean, my fundamental, for those of you who might be in like a networking group, like a BNI, or any kind of networking group across the country, they’re amazing. It’s all about giving, with no expectation, and then knowing that it’s going to come back from everywhere. And that’s, that has been, that’s just how I am I want to help people out, I want to listen for ways to help them, but it’s just doing that on a consistent basis will ultimately get the ball rolling. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 15:51 I agree. And I think it’s kind of the most fun part of the job for a lot of agents, which is I get to help people first, and I’m doing that for free. And it might look different to each particular contact, or client, maybe I’m connecting somebody with somebody who does roofing, or I’m connecting somebody with a dentist or helping somebody, you know, start to think about where their next home might be because of schooling and they have children, you know, or whatever, just, it could be anything, but maybe the transaction isn’t today. But providing that kind of guidance. And assistance is really what every person in this in this world once we want people to come with ideas to us and people to listen to, to our challenges. And there aren’t many professions, other than therapists, maybe attorneys, doctors, I guess, who really get to know their clients. And I think real estate is one of those professions where you really get a deep dive into somebody, and that, that allows you to build more intimate relationships with people but like, like Scott was saying, you really have to go first. And you have to pick up the phone. And you know, I love the fact that we have social media now to help us give us those those contact points. Like as Scott was saying, you know, he’s just calling Hey, how’s it going? I was in your building. LinkedIn is a great place to find out what’s going on with someone’s professional life. You can see if there’s any news about their company, you can see if they’ve had a promotion, you can even see when their birthday is that kind of thing. And you can just pick up the phone, say, Hey, I was on LinkedIn, I saw you just got a promotion like that. That’s a contact point, right? So there’s so much opportunity to pick up the phone and call and talk with people. And I want to talk to Scott, I want to pivot a little bit to talking about believing in your clients. I know that’s a big thing for you. So sort of walk us through what does that mean to you? And how do you? How do you create the sort of safe place for them to be able to share their lives with you.
Scott Harris 17:46 So I want to give a shout out, I listened to a lot of a guy named Ed my lead who has this wonderful podcast, he’s just terrific. And, and I’m not krimpet cribbing from him, but he said something recently, which I think is just it’s how we run our business. It’s, I see the potential in people. And I see and and more than that, when I sit down with someone and we talk or get on the phone or even zoom, right, that I’m listening to what their dreams are. I’m like a like an eight year old kid listening to his parents. If the parent says, Hey, I’m writing a book, or hey, I’m starting a business, hey, I’m opening a restaurant. Little Johnny doesn’t say, Well, what if the, you know, what if he can’t, I can’t raise the money? And what if, you know, I can’t work out a deal with the landlord. And you know, what if I don’t know what I’m doing? Little Johnny just believes that his parents or you know, his, his dad or mom is starting this business. And then they just it’s going to happen. It is already real. Right? So what I don’t know how I’ve maintained this sort of innocent belief in people. But I It is that simple. Someone says I want to do this, I’m like it’s happening. We’re going to make it happen. I don’t know how. And I’m not worried about how I have 20 years of experience, we will figure out how along the way, but it’s going to happen because you’ve we’ve created a space where I really hear what it is you want. And they’re things you might say they’re things you might not say I’m listening for both. And we’re starting to create this vision for what buyers are looking for sellers, what’s next for them? And it’s sort of you know, I have four pillars of what I call visionary brokerage. The first one is understanding like, who are you? It’s not about your property. It’s just who are you? What made you fall in love with where you live? What are you looking to do? And it’s because it’s this fundamental belief in people that they can that we can help them do it is like the most important and then we add wisdom on top. That’s our second pillar. And then we can have all these insights. You know, the way we run the business is create this system. You know, all of the I have an amazing operations person out give a shout out to Karen who does. She’s incredible and a transaction coordinator who’s Brooke and she’s incredible. So we have the system, the structure in place. But it allows for all this intuition where we can just have this crazy idea of like, hey, maybe we should you want to look on the west side of Manhattan, we have this idea of what about this thing over here. And we just have to trust, honor that like that intuition that sort of comes out of nowhere, because we’ve created the space where it happens. And I can pause there, but it’s, some people say it sounds a little woowoo, you know, a little, you know, but I really think it’s about having the structure in place. So that magic happens. Really, you are
D.J. Paris 20:45 you are so 100%, right? And it’s not it’s not woowoo, it’s, it’s just harder to measure. Right? So intuition is hard to sort of understand, but we all have had experiences. And it’s been my experience throughout life, that my intuition is usually right. I won’t say it’s 100%. Right. But it’s usually right, maybe 80%, maybe not, maybe it’s higher than that. And if that’s true, then I have a really valuable resource inside of me, however, I have to get quiet enough to allow or create a a container, where that intuition is free to spring forth, right. And so Scott is talking about doing this themselves, because he’s right, there are times where, you know, gosh, there’s nothing on the east side, but we have this other thing over there. And it sort of feels like it might be a fit for them. And even though it’s not really what they’re looking for, it feels like it might be so you know, those are kind of ideas that spring forth. It’s reminds me of that old saying, as a musician, you’ll appreciate this. It’s not the the notes that make the music. It’s the space between the notes. Actually, the silence between the notes that creates sound, otherwise would just be one blaring sound. So what we’re doing is what Scott’s really talking about is creating an environment where intuition can can can thrive. And and that is yes, maybe it sounds a little new agey, but it boy, is it powerful. And just about every realtor, I’ve talked to talks about their intuition, they trust their gut.
Scott Harris 22:14 Well, I think the part that people forget is, it’s your job to create, like, I think of us is like, we’re the captains of the ship. Right? We’re steering it. And they’re, you just forget, it lets you put yourself through it every now and then just how stressful This is. Right? Think about the most stressful things in people’s lives are losing a loved one getting divorced, and moving. Right, maybe you know, the new job losing your job, but like we we encounter people at their most stressed? Yes, job. One is to like really be calm, and be the space when they come, they come in contact with you. Everything swirling around, you’re like in the middle and like, it’s all good, right? It’s like you have to however you get there, yoga, Zumba, meditation, whatever it takes go running. I don’t you know, I do a few of those different things. But whatever it gets you so that when people come in contact with you, they’re like, okay, this person knows what they’re doing. And, and I trust them. Because when things are crazy, they just settle in like, oh, wait, we can find a solution here. And
D.J. Paris 23:28 yeah, the idea of the power, you don’t
Scott Harris 23:30 get sucked into the drama. And so many agents do. And of course, I mean, I’ve been Have I ever, ever yelled probably this week at somebody, right? Maybe not. But it’s just so easy to lose your temper when when the stress levels high, and you really want to close this deal. Oh my god, it’s like every everything is weighing on getting this one deal close, especially in a harder market. But you have to be like, wait a minute, like that it’s going to happen the way it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna it’s not this one. It’ll be the next one. But it’s like, how can I just stay calm?
D.J. Paris 24:01 Right, you’re so so absolutely right, I really want to step on this point. Because as real estate professionals, we forget, oftentimes what it’s like for the consumer and the consumer isn’t always sharing how stressed they are. Because there is it’s a vulnerable thing sometimes to say to a real estate agent, maybe you’re working with for the very first time and you’re going through a transaction. And you know, the consumer is stressed about a particular bump in the road along the way. And, you know, maybe they’re sharing it with their agent, or maybe they’re trying to just tough it out going, you know, but realistically, we know that, you know, real estate transactions are stressful, and it doesn’t help if the real estate agent that you’re employing is also feeling that same level of stress. Right, the real estate agent is there to calm the situation. Reduce the activation help solve those problems. It’s so you’re so right is whatever you need to do to reduce your activation staying out of the drama, you know, processing whatever, you know, negative stuff is flowing through you. And it flows through all of us it happens, like you were saying, you know, we all get angry, sad, scared, and learning how to manage those emotions more effectively. So we can show up and be that for our clients who are going to need at the boats, can
Scott Harris 25:20 I give you an example of something that just happened, please. So yesterday, we’ve got a I mean, it’s the scale, I think it’s like, if it gets overwhelming to you, if you’re listening, it’s like, just remove a zero, right? This is like a three and a half million dollar deal. And, and the, in the buyers, I’ve stressed already, you know, this is gonna be such a big deal. It’s like, okay, and the buyer came to us. And we were asking all these concessions. It’s a new building. And the buyer said, I want you to give us, we already given a small concession our commission to get to just finalize the deal. And they asked for, they were they wasn’t enough, they want us to give another few $1,000. And they were texting with a woman on my team. And she’s texting me, we have to say something, we have to do something and I said, You know what we need to do nothing. Like we are going to do nothing today. I’m not making this decision on the back foot when everything is swirling, let it sleep on it, go exercise, go get a drink, whatever you need to do tonight, we’re going to touch this tomorrow morning, and the buyer calm down. And his attorney reached out to us and said, Look, we just need to do something. And this is and it was very concrete. And we were like, That’s fine. Right? But it solved itself. And the best. And sometimes you just have to not respond to that email, doing one thing today is doing something. Right. It’s like, if you are like, oh my god freaking out, just put the phone down, put it in another room, go have dinner, I know, it may not be the best, most fun dinner. But like, try to distract yourself with something positive. And I that’s we focus on it all the time. Because that solutions come to you. People say OH, Sleep on it, and whatever, it’s actually a thing. You wake up a little with a little different perspective. And
D.J. Paris 27:05 maybe you’ve processed some of that stress while you’re sleeping or whatever activity, you know, it’s so funny, Scott, I was, I just learned this, I’m 47. I wish I would have learned this much, much earlier in life. But I was doing a meditation class. It was actually taught by LeBron James of all people. And so it was kind of funny. And I was like, Okay, I don’t, I would love to know what LeBron James does is one of the great greatest of all time. And he said, it’s critical for him to be mindful of his emotions, because it’s really stressful, you know, times on the court, he can’t allow himself to get angry, or scared or sad, because it impedes his ability to do his job. And he actually has less access to his all his resources when he’s stressed. And we know that the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight response kicks in when we’re stressed. And you just if you do just any a cursory dive into what happens biologically, we are limited in our resources, our brain has limited resources, our body is literally trying to survive at that moment. So it’s not the time to make any sort of really impactful decision. Unless you’re in a literally life or death situation. That’s why those resources are there. So being that that’s not probably what’s happening, it’s not the time to make decisions. And he talked about that in this meditation course. And he’s like, I have to be called the court because if I get upset, I lose he goes, I actually will perform worse. And this is the number one guy you know, maybe of all time, saying that are certainly one of them. So I am right on the same page with you. And there are ways to learn how to, you know, man better manage your emotions, or like Scott says, you know, hey, even if it’s just go, go take a walk, go have dinner, sleep on it could not agree with you more, that is such a wise tip.
Scott Harris 28:57 There’s, I’m just thinking, you asked him, you know, how are we being successful this year? And people accuse me of being an optimist, okay? And I will gladly say like, Yes, I am an optimist. And I think to be a good agent, you have to believe in your clients and you have to believe in being successful for them. Right. But you also there are so much noise there’s so much negativity in the news and and on social media in places right. And I would encourage people to take a look at what they’re consuming and reading and and even the people they’re around. You know, there are agents who are doing great and even if there’s they’re having a tougher year, like be around the people that are positive. Be around surround yourself with some positivity. People who have ideas, how are they going to actually move forward? Don’t the people who are not who are complaining about what’s going on but are like, Hey, let me try something new to get this sold. Let me try this If this isn’t working, let me try this. Okay. It’s not always it could be just price, you know, but there’s always something to do. But I think the bigger picture is maybe stop looking at the news, right? Maybe of subtract some of the stuff that just leaves you permanently stressed out all the time. There are so many agents who said to me, yeah, you know, there’s no inventory in my town. And and we talked through it, you know, like, Okay, well, how do you if ask a different question, right? How can I create some inventory? You know, ask it, and then maybe you’ll have an idea that just comes out of nowhere, like, maybe you want to host a dinner, or maybe you want to have people over to your home, and just, you know, talk about the successes you’re having, and something might unlock something might, you know, if you do if that results in one more deal this year, wouldn’t that be great? As opposed to,
D.J. Paris 30:50 you know, it’s, you know, just sitting, that is such a great ask a different question. That is such great advice. So Scott just said, you know, you’re let’s say you work with a buyer, there’s no inventory. And it’s frustrating, of course, it’s frustrating, especially for the buyer, it’s frustrating for the agent. And Scott said, Okay, well, let’s ask a different question. We can’t fix that. That that is, you know, what is? Is that old Zen saying, what are people say? I don’t know how they say it a different way. What is, it is what it is? Yeah, I learned it a different way. What is is what, what is the same thing? But what is is and if you push against reality, you’re you’re just going to tire yourself out, and you’re not going to affect it. But if you pivot and ask a different question, how can I create inventory? Well, that solves a lot of problems, right? And, and ultimately, that’s, that’s the job of the agent is to creative problem solving. And I could not agree with you more, change the questions, change the notice how you feel, when you’re watching, and absorbing information, news, social media, whatever, if it makes you feel good, good. If it doesn’t make you feel good, be mindful of that. And limit, because that is limit the amount of exposure you have to it is going to influence how you feel. It just does. It’s just the way it works. And social media and news media in particular, are very skilled at creating emotion, emotional intensity with their viewers, their audience, that’s their job, that is how they get paid. So it’s not that it’s not important information to hear. It’s just you have to realize that the way they keep you attuned to their channel or their their website, is by by creating such an emotional, intense environment that that sort of tap captivates you. And you have to be careful, because that’s going to influence how you feel.
Scott Harris 32:44 Indeed, yeah. So I was just, I was thinking about the one thing that we do, we have a stand up meeting three days a week as a team. And I mean, I meet with the members of the team every other week on a one to one and we talk about their business and how I can help them grow their business. So we brainstorm. And we come up with the really important thing that you can start a meeting with is going around the room and talking about what one thing you’re grateful for one thing you’re proud of, I learned that from an amazing business coach that I work with a guy named John Mark Shaw, who I’ve been working with for a bunch of years, He’s based in New York, give a shout out to John love him, he’s amazing. And that alone, just shifts the whole conference, the whole room, people might be having a bad day, or you know, they woke up, you just don’t know, if people are showing up with, you know, they may not have slept well, because they’re, they have a baby, and it’s, you know, they are up all night or their dog is sick or who knows, right. And like just focusing on one thing you’re grateful for one thing you’re proud of, can totally change your energy. And then when you get on that phone with the next call, not so you know, and you had a setback, there’s like a pause, and all of a sudden, you know, don’t bring that bad with you for the next call. You know, it’s
D.J. Paris 33:58 so important. And I know we’re spending a lot of time on this. But I really think it is one of the most important skills for agents to learn is how to, you know, set themselves up for success. You know, people call it mindset, or whatever you want to call it, just being able to prime yourself so that you’re in the best possible place to serve your clients and serve your your your own business as well. So I could not, I could not agree with you more. And it’s the reason this podcast existed for that exact same reason is I want people to realize agents who are struggling that this path is possible and, you know, 500 episodes later, thankfully, people are listening. And we appreciate that and and so we’re so grateful to people like Scott because, you know, a lot of times too, I think it’s easy to sort of forget that top producers still are doing a lot of the same activities that a brand new agent will be doing. They have more experience, they’re able to do it at a different scale. Hail. But I suspect Scott, I bet a lot of the same things you do today are things you did 20 years ago.
Scott Harris 35:06 And by the way, yes, yes. Like I think, you know, if there’s some simple thing I do, when I think of someone, I send them a text when I see something, and I’m like, Oh, I think of that person, I just do it. I don’t, there’s no, like, make a list and then do it. Like, if it takes two seconds, I do it. And that’s the way I’ve always been. I mean, I am I do have ADHD, it’s like, oh, I have an idea. Let’s do it. But if it’s simple, I do it. But I want to say something. Because if you’re out there, you’re like, Oh, this guy, you know, sold a bunch of real estate. And you know, he’s really got it figured out, I am stressed out, I make mistakes left, right and center, you know, I plenty of deals that die, that fall apart. And I make you know, I say the wrong thing all the time. And I call myself out in front of the team as much as I can. Because they need to know that it it continues, you know, you have a bad day, you think, Oh, I’m not good enough to get this piece of this, this listing and you talk yourself into some all of those things, the self talk, the negative self talk, it just continues, you have to really be aware of it and work through it. But the same things that you know, that you might struggle with, if you’re a newer agent. Everyone does it. And everyone continues to make mistakes. And it’s like, the more you just own it. And the team appreciates when I talk about my mistakes. Oh, I screwed this up. Sure. Oh, my God, I screwed this up. We launched a listing with the wrong price recently, I was like, Oh, God, like I can’t believe I did that. Just just stuff that you you have to call yourself out. Because it it makes people feel like they can they can be successful, and they don’t have to be perfect. You know, and that’s such a relief. Such a relief, like you’re a human, you make mistakes. I get it. I do it too. Right. And that’s the team is held to account, but not, but not held to perfection.
D.J. Paris 36:53 Yeah, I actually think successful people fail more than non successful people, I really do. Because I think once when I say fail, I mean making a mistake and error. You know, whatever that looks like, because it’s the only way we actually learn, we learn via mistake. You know, when we do something that we already know how to do that just sort of, you know, just validates what we already know, we don’t have much of a learning opportunity. But when we make a mistake, that’s where wisdom comes in. And that’s where Scott has 20 years of making mistakes. Which, and again, I say that in the most respectful way possible. I mean, Scott, we look at his his track record and his team’s track record, you know, billion dollars sold, these guys know what they’re doing. And they’re, they make lots of mistakes along the way, but they keep going and they keep learning. And that’s that’s the thing is I will just think if you can learn to get excited about making mistakes, then you’ll be in a little bit of a better position because they won’t be so devastating when they happen. You know, I make we have 800 agents here I make mistakes every single day terrible mistakes terrible mistakes and yet And yet yet here we are. And you know, our brokerage continues to grow Scott’s is as well. So, you know, it’s not about not making mistakes, as Scott said, you know, nobody’s perfect. But realizing that the mistake is actually the opportunity to then you know, correct something for the future. So it’s actually get excited about your, your errors, your mistakes, listeners, because that’s where the real growth happens. Yeah,
Scott Harris 38:32 there’s lots to learn. I mean, whenever we have a deal die, or like, we lose a bidding war, or whatever you want to consider, you can either consider it like, this is the fail, right? Something that happened, like, wait a minute, like, what did I learn through that? You know, we have I mean, and there’s so much out of your control anyway, you lose a pitch. Okay, what was there, it’ll be learned there, you know, we, if you bet 50% on your pitches, you’re doing incredibly well. We’re going you know, it’s, you’re gonna win some sometimes somebody has a relationship with the cousin and they’re gonna win the listing, no matter how they’re like, We love you. But if I hire you, my wife’s gonna divorce me. Like, that’s just the way it goes, you know? And you’re like, Okay, I get it. And is that a fail? No, it’s like, you just, you chalk it up, and maybe there’s going to be an opportunity where they refer you somewhere else.
D.J. Paris 39:21 Yeah, there, there’s, there’s always other opportunities, because of course, with real estate, everyone’s got to live somewhere. Right? So this idea of, you know, there isn’t a finite pie really, in this in this business, there’s so much opportunity, but you do have to sort of, you know, have the correct questions that you might be asking yourself or questions that will lead you into opportunity. And, and that’s really what Scott’s talking about is being super mindful of your thoughts. You know, what’s coming in, what you’re saying to yourself, how you’re treating yourself. And then of course, you know, how you’re, you know, interacting with clients as well. Scott, let’s I want to talk about client winning business. Because I think, you know, at your level, you know, you’re you’re dealing with, certainly, you know, you’re working in the most arguably the most difficult market in the country. And there’s lots of competition, lots of great agents in New York City, you being one of them. But there being lots of other really fantastic agents. I’ve had a lot of them even from Brown, Harris Stevens on my show. So I know how the competition is out there. How do you think about competition? And when you’re maybe up against, I assume, it happens in listing presentations, maybe you’re up against other agents, maybe even agents? You know, how do you sort of approach that? Because I know that that can be very stressful for for agents?
Scott Harris 40:49 Well, first, of course, you’re going up against other agents in a lot of situations. That’s just, I mean, I, if I were looking to buy a car, I’m looking at multiple cars, right? I mean, yes, you’re trying different things. So I think any good seller is going to do a little bit of due diligence. I think that’s actually great. I have a couple of answers to this one. And some people are going to, I don’t know how they’re gonna react. But I actually don’t think of everyone as competition. I mean, during COVID, I was putting out video after video to the entire brokerage community about how technology we could use to go and because we were totally shut down for a few months there. And I was like, Oh, you can use this video service to do shoots. And you can do this. And let’s try this. Because it’s like, I believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, you know, the better the more professional we are as a community, the more successful everyone is, okay, so I think of, I want to establish the best relationships across the brokerage community, because we eat 20% of the agents do 80% of the business, that’s just the nature of things. So I just want to be great at what I do, knowing that it’s going to help me as somehow and I want to help them do a good job. So I don’t always think about everyone is competition. Sure, if you flip it and say, Okay, I know I’m I’m there meeting multiple people, right? It’s like, what is how do I really articulate what makes us different and special? And I Okay, first, we have a track record. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back. But if I don’t say something, nobody else will. Right, right. 20 years of experience, lots of sales, and we have a great system to get this sold for you. But more than that we care about you. And I’ve been referred, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been referred to people, Scott, we refer to you because you’re not a jerk. Right. And I mean, I know that may sound like simple, but I actually care about the people and want to see them be successful. And that underpins everything. So the system is to create win win. It’s like I’m not if you’re looking for somebody to rip off, you know, rip off somebody’s face. That’s like a phrase, you know, like, really take advantage and like, you know, kill someone and get the best deal ever. That’s not my approach. Do I? Am I a good negotiator? Yes. Can I get great deals? Can I uncover great deals? Absolutely. But the approach is, how can I make this into a win win situation? Because if you don’t, they’re going to find a way to get you later. I really think like, big picture, if you can try your intention is to create a win win situation. For us a really happy buyer and a happy seller. That’s if i That’s my assumption, how do I do that? Right? How can I offer that, and it’s the intention, which will get you further and we’re going to be super resourceful, we’re going to be incredibly creative. And and in our marketing, we’re branding your property, if we’re representing a seller, you know, with a buyer, we’re selling, we’re selling the buyer, as you know, we’ve had people that we there was no way that we’re getting someone who had a dog in a building that doesn’t allow dogs, okay, pretty open and shut case, right? And we got them approved to buy and bring their little dog Benson into that property. Because we we found the way around it, you know, can they go into the service? I mean, it was they went to the service elevator and the dog couldn’t go out the regular, you know, in the regular entrance and whatever, it got a little crazy. But like, it’s just how can we care enough to really find answers when other people say they can’t be done. And that has served us really well. Right? And we have the track record to prove it. But if you if you are new, and you’re just like I really care, and I’m going to go learn, I’m going to study this inventory like nobody’s business. And I’m going to go I’m going to know every building there is or I’m going to know all the comps that sold I’m going to study the heck out of this. And when things close, I’m going to you know communicate that to people like hey, look at this closing on your block and you’re going to set up searches so that you just no more. You’re already way ahead.
D.J. Paris 44:56 Wait, what so what you You just gave you basically gave a pretty amazing, it might sound nonspecific, but it’s not not specific, it is entirely specific. You just gave a great plan for anyone who is, you know, learn your inventory, you know, understand the market, you know, increase your skill, set your knowledge and stay in touch with people. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s, and most importantly care about them. You know, that’s, that’s the missing piece, I always think, I think caring wins the game most of the time. You know, there’s going to be times where it’s just a strictly a numbers situation. Yeah, those are good happens, I guess. But the vast majority of human beings who are going to employ you to buy or sell a home really want you, they want to feel that you that you care about them. And you can demonstrate that and you can demonstrate that over and over again, empathy, sympathy, checking in on them, making sure they know that you know, what’s going on in their lives, that you know what their goals are. And I know that’s really important for you, as you get really excited. And if you’re not watching this live once, if you’re not watching this visually, you’re listening. Scott got really, really animated earlier when he was talking about, you know, working with his clients dreams, he got really, really excited. Because you because imagine if you have a real estate agent, if you’re not in this business, and you’re you need a real estate agent to buy or sell something, you wouldn’t you want somebody who is really excited, and your dreams, right? So that’s demonstrating care. And, and I think that, you know, Scott, that that it’s just oozes out of you.
Scott Harris 46:38 It also, if it’s about caring, then it’s your people so often forget, they’re like on the on the same side of the table, they sort of they just forget that they’re working with someone, you know that they’re not working against someone, like everybody, you’re helping someone they so desperately want to sell this thing, they have an idea of what they want to do. And it’s about them. Right? It just make it about them. Like you go to a cocktail party, you can get super nervous because you’re like, oh, you know, I don’t know anybody and whatever. And the second you just get curious about the person you’re talking to all that melts away. It’s like you can’t be fear. You can’t be afraid and curious at the same time. Right? Like, I’ve heard that before. I think it’s very, yeah, that’s true. Like, I want to learn about you. What are you about and, and when you care, there’s so much more forgiveness for little mistakes, you know, I care, I’m gonna figure it out. We’re gonna brand this property, we’re gonna just whatever we do, and it’s now and then it goes perfectly right? You know, people like, Okay, we had this deal. We had an exact strategy, we priced it here, we got a deal done, blah, blah, blah. Vinny Warren’s amazing. And then a lot of the times, especially in markets like this, it takes a little bit longer. A lot of you got very used to and 19 and 2021 to like things selling over asking in one day. Good. Well, that was fun for a minute. You know, I was in Vegas last year, and these la, los angeles agents were like, oh my god, it’s like, I’ve got to hire more people. I’m not sleeping my wife, you know, it’s crazy. My life is a shambles, because it was there just so much business. But now it just comes down, there’s never been a more important time to have a good system to manage this and to manage the people and all the potential, you know, the pitfalls of a market where mortgage rates are slightly higher than they were a year and a half ago.
D.J. Paris 48:34 Yes, slightly higher. And and that can in that can be a place where people get trapped. Agents can get in that mindset of high interest rates, low inventory, not as much opportunity. Well, okay, yes, maybe. And let’s, let’s let’s shift our focus and start thinking about how do we demonstrate one thing we can do is we could demonstrate care, I could reach out to every single person in my database over the next several months, let them know I’m thinking about them to actually check in see what what’s going on in their lives. You know, see what they’re doing on social media and comment on it and say, Hey, I saw you just got back from a vacation that looked awesome, you know, really excited for you, or whatever. There’s lots of ways you can demonstrate this. And, you know, if I was somebody without a listing today, without any listings today, what I might do is reach out to everybody I know and print out the Zestimate from Zillow and say, hey, if Zillow thinks your home is worth this, I actually think it might be slightly different. But I just wanted to share this with you give me a call, we can chat about it. Right. That’s an opportunity people, there’s always reasons to pick up the phone and call somebody and and connect with them. And that’s what this business is. It’s really, it really is a service business. I mean, it’s more service than it is anything you like you said, we’re on the same side of the table as the client, like how do we how do we always keep that that Uh, that perspective, right? Well, I
Scott Harris 50:03 wanted there was you were touching on, you know, something you can do is something I don’t think I mentioned yet. In New York, we have buildings. So if somebody buys an apartment in a building, it’s not hard for us to set up a search so that every time price comes available in that building, you can, it’s information you can share with your client, right? It’s like, oh, you know, it’s some of my high end clients, we’ve sold, you know, multimillion dollar properties in the building, it’s very exciting when you see something that’s selling at a higher price. But at the same I’ve had a situation downtown last year, where I’ve sold an apartment to, to a client, and the same apartment came available at a what I thought was an excellent price. And I said, I emailed my friend, I said, Oh, this is such an, it’s so interesting, I can’t wait to see what this sells for. He immediately introduced me to his friend who wanted to buy that unit, I negotiated without ever, I didn’t meet the client until about two months later. And we put a deal together just because I’m sharing that information. With no expectation. I was like, Oh, this will be neat, just because I wanted him to know about it. But the other piece, which I know I haven’t talked about is the idea of telling stories. Right? So if you have even if you one of the great things about having a team is that this team and some of the agents are new, they get to hear every single we’ve sold, maybe I think 80 apartments this year, you’re at 80 deals in New York, you know, that can be a pretty big, you know, volume. Some people sell 300 400 homes, and God bless you for being able to do that. That’s incredible. But every every agent on the team can own those stories as their own. And every you know, every other week, we we take an hour, and we talk about like three different case studies, like what did you do, right that the success and then every other week we do? What are the challenges you overcame? But the ideas that you’ve evolved? What are the stories of things that are happening today, because people love to hear about wins. And it’s like, you’re not bragging, you’re just like, oh, we just helped this client, you know, put a dog in their, you know, in a non in a building where no dogs are allowed. That was so exciting. Or we help someone get a great deal on this building, you know that that sale was a million dollars less than the last one that traded? Whoever that’s like, I want to hear that. Tell me more about that. Scott, you know, so those are, if you have good stories, share the stories, not people. What’s the question at cocktail parties in New York? How’s the market? Well, well, actually, you know, the the prices are up 4%? No, like, tell the story. Just tell the story about something. Well, we were helping this buyer. And you know, they’re, they’re excited about this neighborhood. You know, we got we got a deal done here. And we were having a lot of success in this neighborhood. You know, why do you ask what’s, you know, what are you thinking about? Like, there’s so many ways you can answer without the the boring market data information.
D.J. Paris 52:54 You know, that is a really great, great tip. Definitely have have stories to share that are authentic to you, that are impactful to you and that you have passionate about so that when you do get asked those questions, because that is the first question that anyone asked when, you know, when somebody says, Oh, I’m in real estate, Oh, how’s the market? Right, that you’re absolutely right, the number most commonly asked question, and and you can answer that with, with whatever facts and figures you have. But Scott has absolutely right, have some personal examples of things that you are currently working on or have done. And this is a great, I think, you know, Scott, you said something also very powerful. Like, after every deal, you guys go through and say, Okay, what went well, what what what were there, were there challenges or opportunities for growth? Or, or, you know, was there a story here that we can we can work with, you know, just basically working through the transaction after it’s done. And finding those those magic moments and maybe the challenging moments, and then learning from the challenging moments, and then really celebrating the magic moments. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s great for marketing, it’s great for keeping the team spirit up. And also just, you know, continuing to service the client. I
Scott Harris 54:07 love that. Thanks. It’s fun. It’s fun to do that. It’s much more interesting than we just did a webinar with an economist and you know, a mortgage broker and this a wonderful data. And it was we were talking about the market, but like, what really came to life is the stories. What are we seeing in the market, the actual deals? That’s where people can wrap their heads around it?
D.J. Paris 54:31 Yeah, I could not I could not agree with you more. I 100% a big fan of learn how to tell stories. I actually it’s funny, you just reminded me of a interview I had once with an agent in Florida, who sells mega mega properties like 30 million plus kind of you know, it is just a different sort of whole thing. And and he you know the because when you sell those types of properties, of course, you There’s whole teams that are involved that you have to work with. And there’s a lot more people involved in the transaction, a lot more complication. Usually, however, he said, it was really funny, he goes, Well, it’s all about story selling, meaning, it’s all about, you know, he goes, when I show a prospective buyer this property, I want to know what, what their vision is for the property. And I want to tell them the story of this property and really sell them on it. And that he goes, that’s really all I do, because I tell the story. And I, I unite stories, basically, which I thought was really a smart idea. Scott, one other thing, too. So we talked about providing value. I’m curious, what are you doing to celebrate your clients? You know, after a transaction? How do you stay in touch with people after?
Scott Harris 55:52 You know, that’s, it’s? It’s a great question. And I think a lot of people don’t think enough about how to celebrate with their clients. And, you know, we, it’s, it’s, there’s no one size fits all gift. Although a gift is nice, you know, it’s it’s an acknowledgement of a milestone, something happened here, that was important enough that we wanted to say thank you for entrusting us for like the biggest transaction probably in your life. Now, in New York, that’s not always true. You know, people are, you know, doing multibillion dollar deals in their jobs. And this is like, a place to live for them. And it happens to be $5 million doesn’t matter. You know, those people, I always you know, that I’m gonna botch the quote from that movie, Notting Hill, but at some point, you’re just a girl standing in front of a boy hoping that you know, he’s gonna love her.
D.J. Paris 56:49 Right? Yeah. Ask her to like, or whatever. Yeah. And that’s really,
Scott Harris 56:52 it doesn’t matter what the price is. This is a sacred moment for people. And so what’s the gift? What’s the gift? What is going to touch someone? Maybe it’s a donation to a charity that you know, they support? That’s easy to find, and people don’t we do that somebody is a runner, and they want we want to support the Central Park Conservancy on their behalf. Okay, sometimes, it’s, it’s just some beautiful roses, you know, it’s something simple like that. It’s, it’s certainly not always alcohol, not everybody drinks, right? A bottle of champagne, pretty is pretty boring. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s, it depends on the person. So like, take the moment to, to mastermind with your team, what do we think the best thing for them is? Take them out to lunch and give or take them out to dinner, do something to acknowledge this in banks, they have these celebratory closing dinners. You know, it connect on a personal level. I know it’s sometimes a little bit weird, hey, can we get together after the closing? But do it find a way to connect with people. But we also celebrate every every once a week, we have a meeting as a team and we go through what are our celebrations. And I think that people especially, you know, type A, I can speak for myself, the closing happens and you’re like, you don’t even take five seconds to celebrate it for yourself. Think about what you’re able to do. The people that you help. So celebrate for yourself, celebrate with your team, celebrate with your clients. Give them the room to be happy about what it is. Because it’s like they’ve just achieved something big. Maybe this is like their their lifelong dream, right? There’s a reason they call it a dream house, take a second to to really let that soak in.
D.J. Paris 58:33 Yeah, and also every year on the anniversary, you can relive that that moment, and you can remind them of that moment. And you can reach out and check in and say, hey, it’s a year, you know, year to the day that you bought that property, how’s it working for you, I just wanted to check in and see how it’s going. If you’re having any problems with anything, let me know I can help you get stuff back. I’m just excited. It’s been a whole year, you know, that sort of excitement and passion that I’m sort of speaking for Scott Scott obviously speaks for himself. But he’s, you can hear the passion in Scott’s voice. So I just love this, this conversation because I think what we’re really talking about is, is yeah, just being into your clients, get into your clients, like be into them, you know, be into what they’re into, you know, get excited about what they’re excited about help support their stuff, and their vision, their dreams and point they’re gonna be with you for life. I mean, that’s all we really want. I
Scott Harris 59:34 wanted to do something I learned a few years ago, I just never thought about it this way. We all get referrals, right? And we say thank you when they come in. And you know, if we if there’s a referral from another agent, it’s like, my favorite thing to do is write that it’s very easy to celebrate because you’re writing a big check to someone who referred you this client. Thank you so much. It’s amazing. You know, and for those brokers out in the in the rest of the country, it’s like our favorite thing to do. We send so much business it’s like we’ve done 15 deals in Pittsburgh this year for some reason we’ve, you know, referred that much out and Florida and Connecticut and all over the place. But, but if someone thinks enough of you to refer you, I keep them and I keep them in touch. And then, you know, what is that? Thank you that happens at the end of the transaction to them. Sometimes it’s, it’s, I don’t want to put $1 number on it. But is there something special you can do say a letter, a handwritten letter, but the little nuance which I loved was like, Okay, this deal came from here, and what was the what was the parent of that referral? And what was the grandparent? And can you go back how far and say, you know, I saw I did a rental deal in 2003. And that turned into 40, or $50 million of business over time. And I go back and say, you know, I just want to say, thank you, for trusting me, as this new agent who cold called you, when the classified ads were still a thing in the New York Times, because that I just closed another deal because of our relationship from 20 years ago. And I just wanted to say thank you. And it’s like, so I’m so full of gratitude, because I can really trace it back. And if you take a moment for that, like, I’m feeling so grateful right now, just think of John, this artists who hired me years and years ago, I had no experience, I had no business, you know, almost no business doing that deal. But it turned into so much more. And you can go in every direction. And think about all of the different ways that you have gotten to where you’ve gotten and just stand there for a second and say, who should I be? Thank you should I think right now?
D.J. Paris 1:01:35 Yeah, and boy, I was feeling grateful for the for the gentleman back in 22,003, who took a chance on you as well, because obviously, it’s it’s birth, this this amazing career that you are now in. And that is, it is such a great suggestion. Let’s appreciate the people in our lives and let them know how appreciative we are because are we are to them. That that is really the key is Scott. You know, it’s funny, we were this is a bit of a different kind of episode that we normally do. We’re talking a little bit more about emotional stuff. And but I think this is really what wins the game. And so, you know, care about people tell them how much they mean to you, you know, we know how much homes mean to people. So we want to we want to continue on with this, you know, increase intimacy, I think is the key to this business. And that’s through a lot of effort and caring consideration. Scott, I think it’s a great place for us to wrap up. I want to mention, for anyone listening, who is an agent in Manhattan, also Brooklyn, Scott’s team covers both both Manhattan and Brooklyn. If you are looking to maybe see what other options exist this year, maybe you’re not getting the attention you deserve, or just want to see, you know, what other teams are offering reach out to Scott, it may or may not be a good fit, but he would love the opportunity to say hello, and see if maybe you could be a good addition to the team. Also, if you are an agent elsewhere in the country, and you have clients that come to and from New York City, we We of course know New York City is can be a very transient place, people can go there and then leave. Well, of course, Scott needs people to refer to as well. And he would love to hear meet your referrals as well. So reach out to Scott, the best way to reach him is to visit him on his website, which is Harris residential.com. And then you can also find him on LinkedIn, Scott Harris, let’s definitely follow him. He posts almost daily on LinkedIn with was really great content there. So let’s, let’s follow these kinds of really impressive following there. But on behalf of our audience, Scott, I want to thank you for your time today you are amazing guest. This is the exact kind of conversations I love having. And you’ve really provided a lot of value. So thank you on behalf of the audience. On behalf of Scott and myself, we want to thank the audience as well. Thank you for sticking around to the end of the episode. Thank you for supporting our show, the best way you can help us is by telling a friend I think of one other agent that is maybe struggling this year and maybe just needs a little boost, send them a link to this episode, they will get excited. So send them over to our website if if they’re not a podcast person keeping it real. pod.com is our website. We’re on every podcast platform. Also leave us a review that helps us out knowing how we can continue to improve. So Scott, thank you again. We really appreciate all your time, and really great conversation. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Scott.
Scott Harris 1:04:48 Thanks so much for having me. It’s been awesome.
Tips From A Top Real Estate Coach • Debbi DiMaggio
Sep 28, 2023
Debbi DiMaggio an author, real estate leader and a coach talks about her experience in real estate business. Debbi explains the importance of being an real estate agent and how she loves working with new people. Debbi talks about her coaching program – Foundation for Success. Last Debbi emphasizes the importance of being present and why meeting people in person is the only way to get the real information about clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re talking to a top real estate coach about what you can do to finish the year strong. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide, and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer, author and real estate coach Debbie DiMaggio. Before we get to Debbie. Just a couple of quick reminders. Please, as always support our sponsors. You hear them at the beginning of the show. And then halfway through the interview. Let them know how much you love them because they help support and keep our show rolling. So check out their products and services. We appreciate that. And also tell a friend about this podcast. Think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing our interviews with top producers and send them a link. You can send them a link to whatever podcast app you might be listening to. Or you can send them right to our website, keeping it real pod.com Where every single episode can be streamed right from a browser. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Debbie Demacia.
Today on the show, our guest is Debbie Demacia with Corcoran in San Francisco and LA she’s also leader of the DiMaggio betta group. She’s been practicing real estate for a long time. Also as an author, a coach. Let me tell you more about Daddy. Now who is a top one and a half. Sorry, one and a half. I’m going to start that one over. Debbie DiMaggio is a top 1.5% producer of all agents nationwide. I wanted to make sure I got that right because that is a truly impressive statistic. She has been an author four times over she is a mother of two a wife and a philanthropist. Her love of meeting people travel design and experiencing new cultures has driven her success in real estate and beyond. Debbie aspires to inspire by living her purpose and passion is committed to helping her clients through their first second or third transaction or when mentoring others on their own paths to greatness. She’s also a full time realtor and a partner in a real estate firm Corcoran icon properties and the marketing director and coach for the company’s ad agents. Debbie loves helping others achieve their dreams whether your clients or other agents helping expand her business into coaching she coaches agents, Debbie also will guide you towards achieving your goals while holding yourself accountable, keeping you on track, which is easier said than done. And as I’m thinking about this out loud and reading Debbie’s bio, I can’t think of too many real estate coaches who have been practicing for 35 years on top of coaching. That is really a huge asset. So please welcome Oh, and let’s do let’s get Debbie’s tagline. First follow your passion, live your purpose. I want to give a plug for Debbie’s books before she comes on. By the way we will have links to all of her books. In the show notes. You can find them anywhere books are sold Amazon in particular, but her books are called The Art of real estate. Real estate rules 52 ways to achieve success in real estate contained beauty and during COVID She wrote beauty at any age because age is just an attitude. Follow Debbie at her website, Debbie and that’s D BB I know II Debbie DiMaggio di MAGG io.org Debbie dimaggio.org We will have a link to that in the show notes. Also follow her on Instagram at Debbie Demacia will have a link to that too. Debbie, welcome to the show.
Debbi Dimaggio 5:00 Thank you. Wow, what an introduction. Thank you so much. Well,
D.J. Paris 5:04 you have done a lot in your career, and there’s a lot to celebrate there and our audience, I hope they’re impressed because I’m impressed. And I talk to top producers almost every day on this show. And I get so excited when I get to talk to somebody like you, who’s not only a successful agent, but also a successful business owner, mentor, author. And now coach. So I am I’m a huge fan of that. I think they are no and a mother and I taught them and it’s that expression, if you want something done, give it to a busy mom, right? They just get things done. So you’ve gotten a lot done in your career. And now your son is working with you on the team, which is really cool. I think that is really, really neat. But I would like to go all the way back to the beginning of your career because people like to hear the origin story. Where did you come from? How did you get into real estate? Why real estate? So can you walk us through sort of how that happened?
Debbi Dimaggio 5:59 I can so when I was growing up. People always ask you what do you want to do when you grew up? I had no idea what I wanted to do. I figured one day it would hit me. The only thing I knew I did not want to do was real estate. It my dad was he used to buy and sell he was always on the phone. He was managing his investors very different. I’m a residential sales for over 35 years. And he was it was real estate. Nonetheless, he was on the phone, there was no cell phones at that time, he was always tethered to his phone, he was always working. I didn’t like know that we couldn’t go on proper vacations because he always had it in the works. So I so for as long as I can remember until I was probably 27 when it when I finally started real estate. The only thing I didn’t want to do all my life was real estate. And then I realized when I was working for other people, I worked in magazines and did some different things. Some days, I’d have a job for a week, a day, two weeks, I said this isn’t for me. I know there’s something out there. And that’s why I talk about people living their passion is so important. I kept trying and thankfully I have parents who allowed me to continue to try. And it just I realized I can’t have a boss, I don’t want someone telling me what to do. I like to work really hard. And I don’t want to work really hard and not be compensated for that. So it all kind of populated into real estate, which started out in rent tools in San Francisco. And a friend of mine, Adam and my partner said Debbie would rentals and this is the time before Craig’s List 19. It was 1990 390-490-1990 1990. About there was We’re in San Francisco, there, there was no Craigslist. So you would as a rental agent, you’d call on owners, property managers in San Francisco, these big gorgeous buildings. So you call to get a listing, like one building might have you know, 20 listings, and you continue to call and then you would work with people to get them into rentals. And it was so lucrative and I loved it. But I will tell you when I was 25. And this is where my coaching when I go back and how I’ve written my coaching programs. When I was 25, I was so lost, I was living in LA I loved LA but I wasn’t liking what I was doing. My fiancee at the time says get get your real estate license, which I did, but I hated being home. So I was super depressed. And I wrote out what I like what I like to do, I didn’t know what it was. I said I love working with people. I love meeting new people. I love helping people. I love doing something different every day. I don’t want to be tethered to a desk and I like a beginning, a middle and an end. And so that translate a couple of years later into this call of a friend’s and Debbie should get into rentals with me. And real estate has a middle a beginning, a middle and an end. And I get to meet people all the time. of all different nationalities of all different backgrounds because I’m from a little town called Piedmont California. We’re near Oakland and near Berkeley and it’s only 10,000 people and 4000 home. So I grew up there we raised our kids there. My parents still live there. So when I say meeting other people I get so excited. As soon as someone walks through the open house. I’m like, Oh, where are you from? You know, you know, they’ll say where they’re from now or no or where did you grow up and there’s always some crazy long story and I’m like, I’m from Piedmont. I grew up in Piedmont, I went to Cal and anyway, so that’s kind of where the tip of the iceberg where it started. And I’ve been doing practicing real estate for over 35 years and I still love it and I still get to meet new people every day.
D.J. Paris 9:50 It’s an incredible story. As as a coach, I think it would be fun to kind of dive right in to what’s going on today and and obviously San Francisco has a unique market as well, that isn’t always tracking the same as as other other markets here in the country. But I suspect it’s happening in San Francisco too. Of course, you’re dealing with, with inventory issues. I mean, San Francisco always has inventory issues. That’s part of the charm of it. But it also makes it incredibly challenging for people to build careers there. But, you know, you you mentor agents, you coach agents, you’ve written books, helping agents, what would what are you telling your clients agents right now? Who are, you know, struggling a bit, maybe they’re not getting as many listings, you know, there’s not as many buyers flooding the market? What are you telling them to do now, just to sort of stay engaged and busy? Yeah,
Debbi Dimaggio 10:49 sure. So that kind of taps into my coaching program called foundation for success. And it’s, it’s back to it’s just basic things. Okay. First of all, you can’t sit at home, you know, waiting for your phone to ring, you’ve got to be out there engaging and connecting. So you. So the first thing I said, we hire a new agent, I say, you have to be in the office sitting next to Adam Adams very structured, he likes to be behind his desk, he’s there, that’s where he works for me. I’m up in our loft at our house right now I’ll be in the car working, I’ll pull over and work, I’ll be, you know, checking on one of our properties that we’re preparing for market, I’ll just stand outside, I’ll be on the phone. So with the new agents, I sit down in front of Adam, Adam will be talking to ad agents over the time people call him with issues and problems you can hear how he is speaking, and what kinds of problems arise, you will never know until you hear it. And there’s always different kinds of issues that come up. But when you’re sitting there and listening to him. So that’s the first thing be in be present. The other thing is, so when you’re there, and an agent like myself, we carry a lot of listings, we’re very busy, Adam, and I chase very grateful for that. But if you’re there, and I see you’re there, and I get a client, a buyer that for one of my listings, and I don’t want to write it and maybe Adams writing for another person, I’ll say, hey, Dre, I you know, do you want this buyer? I mean, because they’re They’re so mean being present, that is my number one be present. The years
D.J. Paris 12:28 before, I’m sorry, Debbie, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but it’s so funny. I, before I started this podcast, I’m from a little, not a little town, but a smaller town in Illinois called Peoria. And I interviewed somebody who was like the seventh best realtor there just because he was a friend of a friend, because that’s where I grew up. And so this is all before I had the show, and actually was the impetus for this building the show. And I said to him, Brian is his name. I said, Hey, Brian, why is it that out of the 1000? Realtors in the area? Why or why do you think you’re number seven? He goes, Well, I’m not smarter than than anybody, are everybody. And I’m certainly not more skilled than everybody. But he goes, I show up on time to the office. And he goes, he goes, he goes, you’d be shocked the people that produce. And this is a long time ago, and not everyone works in an office anymore. But But if he would say the people that produce her, they’re like, eight or 9am. And they start working, and they actually start doing things. And I go well, yeah, there’s more to it than that. He was not really you guys. It’s a lot about showing up and just doing the work. And I I know, that’s not always the most exciting thing to do here. But it is the truth. Right? So that’s the
Debbi Dimaggio 13:39 thing that there’s no science to it. You know, you don’t have to be super smart. You have to be show up, be present, be kind, communicate. I mean, I just did a deal with an agent. He said, Debbie, do you know I’m new? And I said, No. I said, I want to commend you. I know, you have been so communicative. It’s been amazing. We had a few little things, but because we you know, we jumped off of a text off of an email, how to voice to voice conversation, we knew what was happening. We knew the insurance was a problem, you know, with all our fires here in California, so but we talked through it so we you know, we and I said you come to the office, I want to hire you. I mean, he was so good. And there are so many agents who have been around and are not communicative, communicative. And it’s a it’s a bummer because it affects the deal. It affects how you’re feeling. I mean, yes, you’re always stressed with your seller, your buyer because they’re going through a big transition. So we’re supposed to advocate for them and we’re supposed to like, make it work and if you can’t get a hold of someone, it’s so aggravating it’s so it’s, that’s also very important. You have to communicate, it’s I can’t even tell you how important
D.J. Paris 14:59 you No, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I was just thinking, as you were talking about the texting versus talking, I was thinking, Well, why is it that texting isn’t as effective to deal with frustrations and stuff? It’s because I don’t know why necessarily. But on text, you don’t get to discharge that stress as easily, right? If you get a sort of a message that maybe is a bump in the road in a transaction, or the other side is doing something weird, and you’re like, God, you get all frustrated. And as you said, Hey, let’s chat on the phone. Maybe we can work this out. And you’re able to work with another human and actually talk about the frustrations. That doesn’t translate as well on tech. So I think you’re so right, that moving away from texting, you know, even just with the the co op broker, the other agent on the other side, you know, get on the phone with them talk about what’s happening. Just
Debbi Dimaggio 15:49 I’ll give you an example of this. Okay, first of all, you need to know, you really need to know who you’re dealing with. Culturally, we’re all different. I’m 100%. Different people have different backgrounds, it’s like, then you know where they’re coming from, right? You have to know who the person is. So you can you understand, so it’s not like a bad thing. It’s just that you know, where they’re coming from, what their upbringing is how they might react. So that’s number one. So we were doing a transaction and the buyer, this girl, she had just come out of a divorce. She had bought homes before. But her but her in the Oakland area, her father lived in LA, completely different markets, Northern and Southern California, completely different. So once said that the agent I was working with wouldn’t get on the phone wouldn’t get on the phone. So I didn’t want to be mean, but I called her broker who was a friend of mine. And I said, Hey, Vanessa, I just, you know, it’s not an issue. I just if I can communicate with her on the we would understand what’s happening. So when the agent finally coming back, she explained her father’s in LA, he’s dictating from behind. He’s trying to protect her. I said, Okay, I get it. I go, I totally get it. I was in LA at the time, we were doing the deal in Oakland, and I was in LA on the phone with her. I remember I remember everywhere I was when I’m talking on the phone, I’m walking down Melrose Place from Alfred’s anyway, I said, Okay, that makes a ton of sense. In LA, they negotiate up in Northern California, we get all the disclosures ahead of time, the home inspection, the roof inspection, as the listing agent, we have everything. So when we present it, they know what they’re buying, well in LA, you go into contract, and then the buyer does all that. And then they renegotiate. So long in the short of it once I understood where they were coming from, we were able to move through it. But you can’t talk about that on a text.
D.J. Paris 17:49 Right? It’s yeah, there’s too much context. There’s too much nuance. And, and yeah, and there is, you know, it’s how we, it’s how we connect to other people is through face to face or voice to voice communication. And, and a lot of problems get resolved as well, just because two people are wanting to work together to get this deal closed. And so yeah, exactly. That’s so that’s, that’s a great tip. Oh, where else do you see agents struggling today? Like, as far as staying busy staying active, obviously showing up you mentioned, you know, being being communicative? What are some things that agents can do today to make sure they’re staying top of mind in their sphere? So when their sphere is ready to move, obviously, they hopefully choose them? Well,
Debbi Dimaggio 18:39 let me ask you a question. Where, where do buyers show up? Where do you see buyers?
D.J. Paris 18:49 Yeah, so where do buyers show up? They show up on Zillow, they show up or digitally, they show up on Zillow, they show up at open houses. Exactly.
Debbi Dimaggio 18:57 Okay, let’s get their open houses. Why as a new agent or an agent looking to build their business because of a slower market? Why aren’t you creating opportunities for yourself? How hard is it to say Debbie, you’ve got three listings. Can I hold it open? On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, so people love to look at houses. So one of our agents Chris Nava, I love this story. New agent. First thing he did before he started with us. His partner bought him our book, The Art of real estate. He had read the book before he came to us. He said, You tell me what to do. I’m gonna do it. He did it in more. He was a flight attendant full time. He would get home like at midnight on a Friday. He would do one of our open houses on Saturday and one on Sunday and he would show property on Saturday. Was he complaining or was he saying I don’t have things to do? He was so busy. I will tell you he is so successful now and he sat right in front of Adam for probably the first five years, I
D.J. Paris 20:02 love that. I love that. And you are so right. I love it when I hear. And I don’t hear it as much anymore. But But years ago, I would hear things like open houses don’t work anymore. And I’m like, Well, everyone I ever interview on The Show says they still work. And what else are you doing? It’s such a great opportunity to just learn how to talk to people about real estate, if nothing else, talk to buyers, you know, and learning how to present a property. And so for anyone listening who is like, I don’t have any listings, what you do is you ingratiate yourself with some of the top producers in your office like Debbie, and he called Debbie, please, please, please, please, can I do this? And if you you know, show enough initiative, Debbie’s gonna be like, sure that makes Debbie look good to the seller as well. It also is it’s a win for Debbie. And it’s a win for you. And you get some leads out of it, too. Yeah.
Debbi Dimaggio 20:50 And you and you. So not only are you meeting potential buyers, you’re meeting people who are just looking because they like everyone loves design. So they might just be in there. And then it might occur to them. Wow, that person was so nice to me. I’m not moving. But I know someone who would really benefit by Debbie service. And then you have the other one sellers. You’re in there. Meeting sellers, one of our agents was doing an open house, she ended up losing the listing because the woman wasn’t she was not her price point was what she wanted too much. But she also wanted to give it to her new son law. So but she lost it after being on the market. But she ended up meeting a seller and now she’s listing another home, if she didn’t give herself the opportunity for people to meet her. And she’s not a Piedmont agent. So there’s no way they would have found her if she wasn’t sitting at her open house.
D.J. Paris 21:46 It’s incredible. i i We have about 800 agents here at our firm, and I could not bang the drum harder, saying please ask another agent to sit in open house in an area that you want to specialize in. And and you know, they might not be able to say yes, it just kind of depends on the seller, obviously. But most cases, they will say yes. If you’re exposed,
Debbi Dimaggio 22:09 I mean, you want to expose your home to potential people. The other thing is if when homes, there’s right now in our market, some homes are selling in multiple offers still, and others are taking some time. So we had a house that took a long time to sell. And we had it open. Every weekend, we not only gave opportunity to other agents in our office, because we’re partners, we are partners in our firm, we were able to give our agents opportunities, we were able to meet new people, new agents, new people from the community we might not have met before. Now remember, as a realtor, you’re a kind of a little bit like a celebrity people see you because we market ourselves, you know, you’ve got your photo here and there and everywhere. So you have to give those people the opportunity, the public to see you touch you feel you. And if you’re not there, they don’t, you know, they don’t really know how to, you know, sometimes, yes, yes, they’ll pick up the phone sometimes, but it makes it better if they can find a connection with you by meeting you.
D.J. Paris 23:10 Yeah, that is such that is such a great a great tip. It’s, it’s amazing. And by the way, we should mention because I always wait till the end. And then not everyone makes it to the end of every episode. So I’m sort of remiss if I don’t do this now. But by the way, if you are a realtor in either the bay area or working in, in Los Angeles, and you are looking to maybe explore what other teams or other firms have to offer, Debbie, I mean, we were ran through her bio at the beginning, it’s really impressive that they are looking to expand their team. There with Corcoran, they’re awesome. 35 years experience top, you know, one and a half percent producer, Debbie and her team are awesome. So if you have interest, you know, the best place to learn about all things, Debbie is you go to our website, Debbie dimarzio.com or.org, rather, will have a link to that in the show notes. But she is also taking on new agents. Perfect. Thank you. And, and by the way, if you are not in those areas, but you want to be coached by somebody who is a 35 year top producer, I think that’s a pretty good idea. So you can also reach out to Debbie too, so anyone listening could benefit, you know, from reaching out to Debbie and you have lots of other programs as well. And books. So check out all things Debbie at our website. So Debbie, I’m curious to have we talked about open houses sitting open houses as a great idea. Let I would love to talk about marketing because I think the landscape of marketing has shifted. Obviously different age groups require different sort of processes. I grew up you know, on the telephone talking to my friends, that has gone away. Nobody does that anymore. But you ya. So, you know, it’s funny, but people have to be marketed to and sort of ever expanding ways. What are you how are you seeing the most success So are where are you seeing opportunities with marketing? And how are you reaching out to find new clients?
Debbi Dimaggio 25:04 Yeah. So now there’s, there’s all ages, right? You’ve got young people, you’ve got middle, you’ve got older people. So let’s start with the older people, a lot of them aren’t on email to receive a newsletter, they might not. They’re probably probably not on social media a whole lot. So you still have to do some of that postcard marketing. You do have to add that in. Because recently, we did a postcard mailing. We don’t do it often enough. But we did. And someone got that postcard and called me and said, I love the way you marketed that home. So you do have to do that. That’s important too. And maybe you don’t do it quite as every month, maybe you do it every quarter or something. But that’s really important to do postcard marketing. And those older people, I will tell you, they come in with that postcard three of them, they come in, and they’re like, I don’t know who I am. I’m here I got your postcard.
D.J. Paris 26:02 And so do you recommend for postcard marketing to you know, in an area that you’ve just sold? Maybe also, blanket is that sort of how you’re Are you doing it a different way.
Debbi Dimaggio 26:13 So I have two areas that I really liked to mark it that I really networked in from so Piedmont is one of them, where I grew up where our kids grew up. So I really like I’m, it’s my, it’s my area. So I really and I know everything about it. So and I know how to connect people, someone needed to get into a preschool out of made a call got him into the preschool they had tried for years and couldn’t get into the preschool. So we’re really hyper connected. Then we moved up to a little community up the hill, two minutes away, I hilar Highlands. And it’s nice because it’s this pretty this community of six HOAs. And we live overlooks San Francisco Bay. And so it’s like a really nice finite area to market. So we’ve had six on our little teeny Street, we’ve had six listings, and we’ve sold some of them two and three times on our streets, not even in the so it makes it a really defined area. But yes, wherever you are, if you’re you know, you’re in Chicago, and you’re like, I’m going to do the gold market to the Gold Coast, or whatever it is. Or, like, if you’re in an area with high rises like Chicago, you know, do one whole building like really try to take advantage of that. So yeah, so postcard marketing, newsletters, through E blast is important, you know, you will get some unsubscribes and I’m sensitive, so it hurts my feelings. But it’s important because then other people will be like, Oh my God, thank you or I missed the last one, who was the dog walker you recommended. So I’m trying to make it I’m really into marketing. And I’m the marketing director as well of our ad agents. So I’m very, like font sensitive, I can’t even watch TV without noticing fonts, I can see your font in the back keeping real podcasts. I mean, I just noticed things like that. Right now I’m working with someone to do a new newsletter with not as detailed because my other ones tended to be too long. So trying to condense it and just make it you know, very clean and fun. So newsletters are very important because people do get those and they do like some of the information. Don’t make it too long. You know, handwritten notes are super important. So what I literally just started doing at my open houses, I have a little card with Chase and Adam and I and then Corcoran on the back and my contact information. So as I was sitting at the open house, I was like, thank you so much, and I don’t put the address, I just thank you so much for stopping by, let me know if you’d like more information on this house or any others in the neighborhood. And then I can send them off with that card. If you know if I instead of giving them my business card, I can give them that and it has a little personal note, but also writing personal notes. Just in general, you know, it could be anything Do you know try to connect with your people past clients, you know, congratulations or it’s been a year Happy Anniversary or there’s a million reasons to you know, send someone a note or I thought you might be interested in this restaurants really fabulous, you know, but just keeping in contact with people. I know I’m talking a lot but you like right now I’m in the midst of putting my top 1000 people and as you go through it you realize God I really do know all these people. But don’t forget it’s not just buyers and sellers or family or friends. It’s the other one my most love ID beloved way to get business. Other agents, any agent listening to this show reach out to me I’d love to pay a 25% referral fee. I love to refer you someone I just wasn’t. I was in the Hamptons. Two weeks ago, referring another Corcoran agent didn’t have to go to make a personal introduction but it’s a friend of mine and she was selling her home. So I went and then I had just met Maula at in Nashville at our conference. We We’re both on the marketing panel. And so I said, I’m coming out, I’m going to introduce you to my friend who’s selling her house in Southampton. So I got to connect them and I’m gonna get a referral V, I got to spend a week in the Hamptons and I got to, you know, really solidify our bond with the agent who I only met briefly when we were in Nashville at our Corcoran conference. So no matter where in the world, a realtor is, I want to know them. Because I, I might have a need to refer someone in Chicago, I can’t even think of an agent I know in Chicago, actually. So
D.J. Paris 30:33 hear that Chicago agents, opportunity knocks, for too many beat because, you know, look, Debbie works in an area that people move into or move out of, I mean, obviously, there’s people that have lived in, in the Bay Area, their whole life as well. But a lot of people aspire to living in New York, San Francisco, you know, places like that. So not everyone’s from there. And sometimes people don’t always stay there. So and obviously, in the tech space, you know, it’s gonna attract a lot of people moving in and out as well. So yeah, great opportunity there to, to really, you know, so for everyone listening, think about where do the people in your community who aren’t born and raised? Where did they come from? Is there some patterns there that we can start to explore? And where did they leave where maybe once they retire? Where did they go, another opportunity to look for some patterns, and then reach out to other agents. You know, if everyone leaves and goes and retires down in South Florida, well, there you go, start making some introductions, start start making start For start, sorry, start meeting people in South Florida, who, you know, who obviously wouldn’t be happy to get to get those referrals, and you get that, you know, 25% referral fee. So, brilliant idea. That that is really something we don’t talk enough about on the show is referrals in that way from other agents. So I appreciate you saying that. So I guess it also playing nice in the sandbox, I want to talk about, we talked about the importance of that. And meaning, when you’re doing a transaction, even if you’re, you know, working against another agent, you are still cooperating or attempting to cooperate to close the Commission, the deal. You know, how important is that?
Debbi Dimaggio 32:14 Well, first of all, change the language you’re not working against you’re working with. So when we go into escrow with an agent on the other side, listing agent, selling agent, you’re working together, it’s not about you, it’s about your clients. So you’re working together and collaboration to make it go through as smoothly as possible for everyone, it’s going to be easier on you. And you know, I mean, we get wrapped into every deal emotionally, you can’t help it because you’re helping someone in their stress. So it’s the agents are there to you know, to work. So you want to make sure you’re communicative, you’re kind now, not only when you’re doing the deal, it’s important. But that’s, of course, one very important, but when you’re up against five other agents, and they know that Debbie and Adam are easy to work with, they communicate, they’re going to get the deal done, do you know how many times we’ve won a deal, or got a counter because they didn’t want to work with so and so they wanted to work with us. So that benefits our client, and then it benefits the agent because she knows that he or she is not going to be suffering with another agent who’s not doesn’t have those qualities.
D.J. Paris 33:27 Yeah, that is that is such an important point is is, you know, really having a reputation of being easy to work with. And you just said it yourself. You know, sometimes highest and best doesn’t win the deal. Because they go oh, that’s a person that is difficult to work with. Maybe it won’t close. I don’t you know, I’ve it again, you want the reputation of Oh, thank God, it’s an offer from daddy. That’s what I that’s what you want to say. Exactly.
Debbi Dimaggio 33:54 And then the other one is, oh, and then just been working with other realtors. So if other realtors in the community, they will call on you do you have something coming up or I have this coming up, you’ll get leads ahead of time saying oh, I’ve got this property coming up for two and a half million. It hasn’t hit the market yet. And you’ll get these calls. I remember one of our agents said well, I want to be like you guys, I want to be the cream of the crop or I get the call from all the other top agents. So it’s it’s it’s a benefit to your clients by just paying a human being and being kind and communicative. And it really pays pays you back because people want to work with you and it helps your clients get the deal.
D.J. Paris 34:44 You said something and it was just a language thing, but I think it’s very impactful. You said something very important. I I mistakenly said when you’re working against an agent, I’m glad you corrected me because you didn’t just say you know working on a deal with somebody you said a very specific phrase, you’re working with another agent. So I thinking about this when I talk to other agents and I go, Oh, have you ever done a deal with so and so we talked about it as I did a deal with so and so. But I very rarely hear somebody say I worked with another agent and working with sort of presupposes that there’s some sort of harmony there, and some sort of Team collaborative effort. And even if it’s just a little language thing, I think that wood is really great way to sort of trick the mind into thinking this is a more, you know, easy relationship and friendly relationship by saying, Oh, I’m currently working with so and so at a different firm to help close this deal. I think language really does impact how we feel about things. Oh,
Debbi Dimaggio 35:42 yeah. I mean, the language and the positivity, I mean, because in your mind is like you’re seeing something go smoothly, as opposed to like, like, if I named an agent that I know is difficult. I’m like, you just go off, it’s going to be so tough, or they’re going to she’s going to come back and renegotiate even though she already signed off. And it’s like, and then you kind of are stuck, and you have to deal with it. Right? So it’s just idea I can’t say enough about just working together. And collaboration is so key. Let me tell you a quick little story and agents, new agents just came to work with us. And, and, and this is just about your intuition and following your gut. So she came in to the office, and she was like, I met this lady the other day. She’s like, 87, and she was so nice. And she’s like, and it’s in, you know, this area, she told me the area, you won’t know it. But anyway, she’s in this area. That’s not so great. She’s like, but she was so nice. And she loved me, you know, we just really hit it off. And she invited me to this event. And I’m like, great, and she’s just really just like so excited. She’s talking about it. And I know because I have an 87 year old friend of Velma. And I call it Driving Miss Velma. And I take her out to lunch and she doesn’t have anyone. And I just I feel so good. Just being with her. She’s leaving to go out of town tomorrow. So when she gets back, we’ll go have lunch. And you know, I’m busy. But I always try to make time for Velma. And I have a good time. And it makes me feel good. And I know it makes her feel good. Sometimes I have her to my open houses just to be around people. Well, anyway, Dre is really excited. She’s sharing the story. And then she says I went home and I told my husband and he said, Why would you want to go out there? Why would you want to do anything out that in that area, I said, Oh my god, I go, I’m gonna cry. I said, stop right there, I don’t need to hear any more. When you were telling me you were lit up, you were so excited. You do not know if she has some other friend who’s going to end up giving you a referral because she’s like talking about how much she loves you and it’s going to be right smack in your neighborhood where you want to sell a house, you have no idea. If the gardener is going to have a referral, you have no idea who is going to have that referral. But that’s not the point. The point is she lit up when you light up and you’re being your authentic self and you’re feeling good. That’s when you start to attract I said it’s not like for like it’s not because if I do this, I’m gonna get this, it’s like because I did this, I just got a listing the other day at the open house because I was so happy and I was radiating and I just attracted that positive energy. So you just do don’t don’t, you know, like for like, it’s just you don’t know where it’s going to come from. That’s how I’ve always done my business. I’ve never, I’ve never like Oh, um, I got this listing, I’m only going to spend $1,000, not $5,000 on the marketing because I don’t, it’s not going to be worth it for this deal. It doesn’t matter when you have a really beautiful listing market the heck out of it, because now you have all those assets for all of your marketing and social media, which we haven’t even touched on and all of that. So you go with your gut and just watching her radiate was just was great. And I knew exactly.
D.J. Paris 38:58 And, you know, we sort of discard older people in in this in our society here. And we don’t give them the attention that that they need or deserve. And a lot of them are lonely and a lot of them are looking for, you know, some companionship and you know, even if nothing else comes of it but you made somebody smile a little bit and feel a little bit less alone. You’re gonna feel better about that, even if it doesn’t translate into a deal. But odds are I know that I would only refer people that I think care about me in any sort of feel like I would only refer my accountant if I thought my accountant really cares about my finances and cares about me. Otherwise, I don’t want to refer my accountant so you can demonstrate care to people and you’re talking about doing exactly that. Let’s talk social media. So tell tell us what how do you approach social media? Yes,
Debbi Dimaggio 39:50 so well. The reason I’m actually here with you today is because I hired Kim as a coach because when we started we started our own firm Highland partners in two 2008 2009 during the recession, people said, don’t you know there’s a recession? And why are you starting a company and we said, because we weren’t, we wouldn’t have an opportunity at another time. So we just trudge through. So I knew nothing about social media and oh, 809 and so I took it upon myself to learn everything. So in the process, it was a lot of hit and misses. So I created lots of different accounts and was practicing and so I have too many. And then with my Instagram, I have like five Instagrams, the different personalities, Debbie DiMaggio, storyteller, DiMarzio, better real estate, Debbie DiMarzio la beauty at any age, I have so many. So I was like, I have to work with Kim to hone it down. So I’m really working on getting everything down under Debbie DiMaggio. But we had to do social media, because you we weren’t going to start a company in oh nine with, you know, advertising on a billboard, you know, we weren’t going to be calling people, social media was the way to immediately ignite who we were. So we started on that. And then over the years, I’ve refined and now much better at it. But now it’s just there’s so much that comes after us. But it is super important because everyone’s on it. And they I mean, I was asking my friend the other day I go, you don’t watch TV. She’s like, No, I’m doing to duco. And my husband’s on reels, right. So it’s like, people are on it all the time. And so you have to be where the people are. So and again, that’s that’s one segment, there’s other segments. But you can easily take your instinct, I trade on social media for the agents, of course, and anyone who’s looking to sell a product, business or brand. And then you can share that across LinkedIn, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, you know, you can tick tock, another one I talked about called Alignable. You can take the same post and push to put it on all platforms, because everyone’s on a different platform. Like I go to LinkedIn to verify if someone’s real or not. And if they’re not on LinkedIn, I’m like, huh, I don’t think I’m gonna if it’s an agent, let’s say I’m like, Yeah, you don’t really have a LinkedIn presence. So how could you be serving your listings? Because, you know, you’re not really out there. So, you know, it’s, there’s a lot to it. But yes, social media is super important. You want to be in front of business people, you want to be in front of, you know, potential buyers that are on social media, or realtors, I had someone in Utah, someone said, my boss, my boss said, oh, you should follow Debbie DiMarzio she’s really good at social media. And I don’t even know who the boss was. And somehow I met this woman. And I’m like, Oh, my God, I have no idea. I know that. I mean, and my social media is nowhere near some of the people that you interview, but but it works. You know, it works that people do get to know you, you become familiar in front of them.
D.J. Paris 42:46 Absolutely. Let’s talk about your coaching program foundation for success. Tell us about that. Yeah,
Debbi Dimaggio 42:53 so I have five platforms that I coach on, and we’ve touched upon them right now. So the important thing is we want to educate, communicate and inspire. That’s why that’s what we have to do as a realtor. You know, people want to see design. So you might post design and all this different stuff. So the five marketing platforms, social media, get out in front of your audience, email, sphere of influence, eblast, you want to connect with people, newsletters, note cards, postcards, so touch points, you want to touch a minute, you know, more personal way websites, blogs, editorial contributions, so we can educate and inspire. So let me just give you a little example about that. People are like, Well, how do I do that? You know, what do I do? So you want to write a see write a blog, you can post the blog across all social media, then you can put it on your website, and then it’s a place so we just did one where my son was working with some first time homebuyers and the people that the buyers were got so overwhelmed about the process. So I broke it down. And I put it on my website. So now when we have a first time homebuyer, we can go to the link and share the link. So it’s a holding place for all that information that we give time and time again to buyer’s or seller’s well for us sellers, we’re always working with sellers to bring their house to market so I have the from lived in to stage to to sell, and I have just everything we do to get that house ready for market. I even have YouTube videos on that. And then the last one people podcast partnerships, and collaboration. So I’ve done in the past a lot of panel discussions where I bring in maybe five different people maybe a financial planner, a 1031, specialist of Fung Shui expert, and then myself, and then maybe a contractor and then we do like a q&a. And you’re getting in front of people you’re adding value, you’re giving them information, and they get to see you doing what you do best you’re giving back to them and educating them. So those are the five different principles. And I always say, Don’t get overwhelmed, I’ll teach you how to go through all of them.
D.J. Paris 45:06 And if you are interested in signing up for foundations for success, Debbie’s got an entire coaching program for you, as she just outlined, you can visit Debbie dimaggio.org link to that in the show notes and learn more about that. Yeah, I You said so much there. And I was thinking about this idea of doing these, these panel discussions. And so, you know, I think most of us have heard of first time homebuyer seminars. But what you said was, was really cool, because you could bring in all these experts from different fields, like a financial adviser, maybe, you know, an accountant, maybe, and you know, various tangentially related sort of services, a loan officer, of course, and, you know, appraiser attorney, whatever, and you all share the stage and you invite your clients, they invite their clients, and you sort of cross pollinate a little bit.
Debbi Dimaggio 45:59 Yeah, so you’re working working with professionals is really wonderful. And that’s another thing that we started called workshop Wednesday, where we have different professionals come in and speak to our agents can come, the community can come, we market it to everyone just to bring people into a room. And it’s a benefit for everyone. And it’s called workshop Wednesday. And that’s one of the ways we started in 2009. By bringing people into the office by offering lunch, and a speaker.
D.J. Paris 46:26 I love that that is such a great idea. Now, for those of you that don’t work in an office, you can take this idea to accompany. So if you know people that work at a company, bring something like this to them and say, Hey, I have this program I do for businesses, where I bring in experts, all different types of fields, where I can start to do some educational stuff for anyone who wants to sit in maybe you can, you know, let me use the conference room once a month for an hour. These are things you know, if you have an office, you could do them in house, or you can go places and do them. And I think that is a heck of a good idea.
Debbi Dimaggio 46:59 Yeah, it’s fine. We have one tomorrow.
D.J. Paris 47:03 Exciting. Well, Debbie, this has been awesome. I want everybody to do a couple of things, I want you to visit Debbie dimaggio.org. And that’s D BBI. And then DiMaggio di m a ggio.org. You can learn about all things, Debbie, her coaching her books, please go to Amazon, we have links to that in the show notes and check out her books, and her various programs and coaching. And if you are an agent in the LA or San Francisco Bay Area, and you’re like, Oh, I’m not really getting the attention I deserve or I need at my firm reach out to Debbie, her team is growing and expanding. And as she said at the very beginning, oh, by the way, you know, maybe she can help you with some of your some of your activity. So reach out to her, go to her website and do that. And also, if you are somebody who has clients that move in and out of LA or the San Francisco Bay Area, reach out to Debbie as well, she would love to partner with you. And you guys could trade clients back and forth. So, Debbie, thank you so so much for being on the show. You’re a fantastic guest I had we learned so much. And really everything you said in this interview was was actionable. So I really applaud you for that. Thank you. And on behalf of Debbie and myself, we want to thank our audience for sticking around to the very end and supporting our show, please tell a friend, tell one other agent about the show, we would really appreciate it everyone listening that will help us get in front of more people. And on behalf of myself and the audience. We want to thank Debbie for all of her time today. She is amazing. She doesn’t have time to do things like this, but she showed up anyway. And we applaud her for that. So please stay in touch with Debbie you can follow her on social media as well. Debbie DiMaggio will have that for all of her social channel stuff in the show notes. Debbie. Thanks again and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Debbie. Thank
Debbi Dimaggio 48:55 you so much. Thank you
Step By Step Buyer Checklist For Real Estate Agents • Breaking Down Ali’s Systems • Ali Garced
Sep 27, 2023
Welcome to Breaking Down Ali’s Systems mini-series with Ali Garced.
In this mini-series Ali will be explaining how she built her systems both for buyers and for sellers. In the second episode, Ali goes over buyer email number 3&4 and also her Trello checklist.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Hello keeping it real podcast listeners. Today is a special episode with one of my great friends in this industry ally, the agent she’s been on the show, and she was nice enough to do a special episode just for you guys about exactly how she works with buyers. This is her buyer checklist part two. If you didn’t listen to part one, don’t worry. Listen to this one. You can always go back to the first one as well. You’re going to want to hear this. So without further ado, my friend Aligarh said this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Ali Garced 1:49 Welcome back to the mini series on checklists specifically for buyers. Again, this is Aligarh set or ally, the agent on all social media. And I’m looking forward to part two of the buyer series. If you remember from last time, I went over part one of the buyer series when I where I went over email one, which really is part of my Calendly. Now that’s where I have my buyer intake. And I also went over buyer email number two, which is where I send the clients once we decide that we’re working together that we’re committed to each other, that I send them the email with all of the attachments. So that way, they’re educated on all of the steps, and they get their contract, everything like that. So what today’s episode is going to be on is that middle portion. So pretty much like contract to almost close, we’re going to cover buyer, email three and buyer email number four. And of course, the Trello checklist that I use for every single buyer, every single seller, every single referral, every single agent that joins the crew, the onboarding checklist, I won’t be covering that. But so if you want to follow along, I suggest watching this again on YouTube. I also in case you can’t watch us on YouTube right now, I do suggest that you watch this on YouTube as well later on after you listen to this episode. That will probably give you the biggest the best idea of how I you can visualize it better, you know. And also, if you’re interested in these checklists, shoot me a text, my phone number is 520-341-2552 Text the word checklist and we’ll set up a call. And then after that you can receive these checklists, I’m here to give it out no cost. So also, if you’re looking to one day, grow a team or increase your team if you’re already a broker owner, this is a great way for you to leverage and give a you know front to end checklist for how to work with sellers how to work with buyers how to work with investors, referrals that you can give to the agents on your team or you can use as leverage for those agents to to do the work and then know exactly what steps are on what is next. So that way, nothing is left because there’s nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night. And I know that every realtor has been there, where they’re like, oh my gosh, I forgot to send the due diligence report or you know, whatever it is. There’s you can you can avoid feeling like that. And you can help your team avoid feeling like that when everyone has a checklist of knowing exactly what they have done. What they have checked off what they have not yet. So again, my phone number is 520341 to five five to text a word checklists or if you’re interested in using this to grow your team, message me but anyway, so here is part two. I’m going to vocalize as much as I can Han, for those that are not watching this on YouTube, I do suggest if you find any of this helpful, please give DJ give keeping it real a five star review, or follow them on YouTube comment, any anything would help. And I really want to give back to DJ. So for having such a great podcast. So over here I’m sharing my Trello screen again. And again Trello. For those that have not used, it is a free project management tool free. Where you can create cards or boards and you can list out every single item on a checklist. And you can you share this, as you can see, I share it with my crew, and they can copy and paste it so in that and move it into their own board again, leverage. So you create the template and they can just copy and paste it and include their own address. And then yeah, so let’s go in here, the home buyer checklist part two. So the first time we left off at the end of the first section here, which was the buyer initiation, right? I’m not covering lead gen at this time, although I’m more than happy to do so in the future. And because at one point, I had so many leads, and I know that I know how this sounds, but I’d had so many leads that I had to form a crew, because I wasn’t comfortable. Like referring the leads out to someone in a different brokerage or a different crew where I didn’t know how they would treat my lead. Because the lead was that they’re my personal like friends and family. So I just wanted to make sure that they’re treated very well. So I was like, You know what, let me make this into a checklist. Let me make this into a process. Let me grow the crew. And that way I know, everybody that comes to me is taken care of in the same manner, nothing is left unchecked, literally. So we have sent them via email number two. And now there is a section here the next section, I hope that this was bright enough, let me make this brighter, is Doc’s needed to submit an offer. Of course, this is going to vary state to state. So the first thing on this checklist is when you’re calling the Yeah, when you’re calling the listing agent. You have to establish a good working relationship with them. I always a being that I’m with exp. I always call and you know, I compliment them on their listing. It’s a beautiful listing. And I say oh, by the way, you know, my name is Aligarh said I work with exp Realty, don’t worry, I’m not trying to recruit you. And usually they laugh because what do you know, some exp agents actually do sell. So that usually breaks the ice, but I do everything that I can to butter them up, right, because if they’re going to be working with with me, that does make my offer stand out over others over perhaps a grumpy realtor. It shouldn’t but it does. And just being a genuinely good person. And nice and incorporating some humor in this industry goes a very long way. I’m sure I’m sure you can attest that as well. So I always have it a point to always call the listing agent before you even submit an offer. Because without that relationship, they don’t know who you are. Sometimes they don’t even check their email you as you know, you’re getting tons of emails every single day, emails can get lost, they can go to spam junk the deleted folder, so always call them. Because at that point, you can as you’re over here, step number two in this section is I literally wrote butter them up. So ask what’s most important to the seller, and just let them talk. Sometimes they will say a lot. So that way you can make it a win win for your buyer for the seller. And then that way, hopefully it turns into more of a smooth transaction. So before you submit an offer step number three here is of course to tell the lender there, you don’t want to blind sight though the lender at any point, you want to make sure that the buyers qualify for that. You want to make sure you’re still keeping in contact with that lender throughout the whole transaction. Because what if something happens that the lender knows about although the you know, client had to take had to cut down from 40 hours a week to 30. Now they no longer qualify for that house. So always make sure that you’re keeping the lender up to date, hey, the client we looked at, you know, XYZ homes where we’re thinking of submitting an offer on this specific house. Are they good to go and you get the blessing from the lender. Excellent. So then at that point, of course you want with keeping the lender informed every step of the way. Just communication in general just goes such a long way. Then that way the lender can reach out to the listing agent and say Oh, by the way, my name is pretend on the lender for a second, my name is, you know, Aligarh said I work with XYZ mortgage, I just wanted to let you know that the clients that are about to spin an offer or that just submitted an offer, they are good to go, they’re fully pre approved, they are serious buyers, and I will do whatever it takes to make this a smooth transaction. If your lender is not doing that, ask them to do it, because I’m sure that they want to do that. Because the more that they also talk to listing agents, the more their name gets known. So if you shouldn’t have any issues getting a lender to do that, and there is a big difference between having them do that via email, via text or a phone call, always ask them to do it via a phone call. Because so many people aren’t. And on the listing side of things when whenever I say I get an offer, which is more often than not that that lender is not calling me. So I make it a point. And when I cover my seller checklist, I make it a point it’s on there. For me to reach out to a listing agent, I do not accept any offer until I have spoken to the listing agent until the lender, I make it a point to not accept any offer until I have spoken to the lender directly. And I know do they have to pull credit again, is there any chance of this falling out of contract, and, you know, XYZ. So carrying on here, send an email to the buyer introducing them to the TC because at that point, I hope that you have a TC if not, oh, once you hire one, you will be able you’re getting so much of your time back. So please, please do that.
That way that email can say something like this. And we can, of course, plug and play the tea your TCS name. So hey, you know, Alex is my buyer, I want to introduce you to my TC, he or she is going to be taking doing all the paperwork, they do a better than me faster than me, and make sure that everything is in regulation that we’re on track. So add this email to your contacts. And and then of course introducing the TC to the client when you’re ready to submit an offer, and then at that point, this specifically is for my brokerage. So this is how to find within our, our database, which is which is what we call sky slope, that’s where you input the the forms, there is some stuff that you’ll realize, or you might not realize, I know that I actually don’t do so I don’t do any of the paperwork. But my first transaction I did, and that was a mistake. Luckily, you know, nothing, nothing happened there. But um, but it was just such a not the highest and best use of my time. So that is what a TC is, is there for a lot of a lot of people sometimes think oh, you know, I can’t, I don’t have I’m not at the level of production for me for it to warrant me hiring a TC to which I would say if you cannot hire a TC now, there is very little chance of you being able to scale unless your your goal is not to scale, which is totally fine to everyone has different goals in this business. You know, some people only want to do a couple and that’s completely fine. But I would say if you do like doing the paperwork, then I don’t know, maybe maybe just be a TC and scale that business. But anyway. So not everything on here is specifically what I do. But if for some reason you are still doing the paperwork and if you happen to be an ESB and happen to be an Arizona this might help you otherwise you can just ignore that part. Of course, you know, you can delete it after we meet and talk and you get these chocolates, you can just delete that portion of I will say though, you will be given a link to this. So copy and paste it. Please do not edit my checklist that I am sharing for everyone. So hopefully you shouldn’t have access to do that. But just in case, please don’t take this copy and make any edits to it. That’s the one thing that I asked. Okay, so then you send the buyer broker exclusive agreement, in case you haven’t already. And I’m not going to really talk about at what point I do it because everyone likes to do it at different times. Some people only like to do it when they submit the offer. Some people do it before they even like viewing house. A lot of different theories and pros and cons to every to every, you know, decision on that. So at whatever point you want to submit, you want to send and have your buyer exclusive agreement signed, then you can just drag and drop that which is super easy again on Trello. You can just drag and drop it to this card or before or after. Then you send these are the forms here that we have to send to our clients in this state. So again, make sure that that’s appropriate for your state. All of these forms here. And of course, I’m not sending these a TC is because again, that’s not the highest and best use of my time, I’ll tell you my first transaction that I ever did. It took me two, maybe even three hours to even find the paperwork. Three hours, after my first year in the business, I did the math, and I was per hour per client. On average, I was making like 250 to $300 an hour for me to spend three hours looking to even find where these forms are kept. No, thank you, that is not a way to scale. And we’ll never do that again. So I highly suggest hiring a TC because they only get paid at the transaction, they only get paid when you get paid. There are no overhead costs. Anyway, I’m going on a rabbit hole, I’m sure you guys are are with me also. So let me continue going down here, sending the purchase contract. That’s after you know, of course, all the details of what’s going to go in the purchase contract. And that is where I’m going to take you to buyer email number three, which is once you get to that point with your client, have, you know you’ve shown or you’ve hired a showing assistant to show your client houses, and they finally narrowed down one, and they’re ready to go. They’re excited, excellent. This is where I, this is my process. From there, I send this email. And again, I use superhuman, it’s a way to save a lot of time and easily have drafts or templates, like very ready to go. So I send this email to the clients. So obvious, I’ll put them in the To line by or email an email number three is with a subject line drafting the offer. And the next steps. Of course, I’m always adding next steps because that’s what the buyer wants to know. Great. This is what we’re doing now. But what do I expect tomorrow? What do I expect the next what’s next. So of course, like in every single one of my videos I or emails, I have a video, because I love video because it goes so much further. If clients I’m gonna scroll down here, if clients were to just see all of this, by itself with a lot of words, that’s putting a lot of work on them, and you want to make this as smooth as possible for them. So in this video, once again, of this email, I’m pretty much reading this email to them. It’s storytime. Again, I want to make it as easy as possible for them. So I am telling them what exactly we need in order to draft the offer. And you’ll you’ll realize here I have a graph. So on the left side, it’s like the column of of what I’m looking for. So of course, the buyer names of phone numbers, emails, you’ll probably have it already, the address the purchase price, take your contract your your purchase, contract or offer to purchase wherever you’re located. And every single line item that needs to be written written in, turn that into a graph, just two columns, the left side is what you’re looking for the right side is blank, and you send that is template, that’s your buyer email number three. So in that way, I send this out to the buyers and they are the ones filling this out. One that provides them with more clarity, okay, this is exactly what I’m doing. It gives them more ownership. They’re the ones writing it in. And of course, it goes through every single portion of the purchase contract. So at the bottom here, or actually, let me scroll back up. So after my video, which is just a one minute video explaining what is in this email, I also added another video, which is the Purchase Contract Overview. Now they have already received this and buyer email number two, if you remember, because by your email number two has my buyer PDF, which is my video collection of taking the buyer from the very beginning all the way to the very close end of the transaction asking for the review. And so I clicked on this already. And this the buyer Contract Overview is on YouTube. And it could be unlisted. It could be listed if you want. Oops. Here we go. Maybe you heard that maybe you didn’t, but pretty much. That’s how it starts out. Hey, congratulations, you’re under contract, what happens now? And I walk them through what the rest of the contract is going to be like. So very beefy. There’s a lot of information but my clients have never said you know what, I think you offered too much information.
So that way they have that available. And then of course so they’re filling in this information that goes into the contract right? Then the bottom section here is the way ahead. So one, I want you to email us back and I say us because it’s me and the TC so in the in the two line it’s the bye areas that are going to be signing, the CC line is the the TC, email us back, I will be looking at over first, of course, you want to make sure that the price is what you spoke about that the numbers make sense that everything is on there. Because ultimately you are responsible for that. So after and then number two is tell your lender of how much you’re offering just again in case in case for some reason the buyer didn’t talk to the lender, they’re the ones reaching out to the lender, as well as you are saying, hey, just confirming again, we’re we’re making an offer on 123 Main Street, this is the price sign number three is for them to sign the offer number four on their list of the way ahead is I will be be presenting this to the listing agent and letting them know it’s in their inbox. Number five is the lender is going to call the listing agent and I’m telling the buyer this right like, Hey, your lender and I are working together to do the most we can for you. It’s a team effort. And then number six, be on the lookout. And for the next email, which should be we’re under contract. And then the attachments here that I have are the buyer advisory. Again, this is state specific, so I won’t open that up. But also, again, I attach the buyer client PDF. Again, this is the whole like video course pretty much on buying in your state. So this of course takes a lot of effort to make but it is so worth it once you make it because it should be evergreen, and it should apply to all buyers. So you send it and they send it back to you saying okay, this is this is what it is if you need to jump on a call saying hey, I thought we spoke about this much earnest money or that you were not going to ask for a home warranty whatever it is at that point. If it warrants a phone call Excellent. If not, you’re ready to go. All you have to do is text your TC saying the email that you were just see seed on the drafting the offer good to go. Can you draft it up? And yeah, so that’s that’s buyer email number three. Going back to the Trello checklist now, let me move this here. So we have sent out the offer. And at this point, they have sent us back to back to it I don’t want to jump too far ahead. Because there again, there are a lot if you’re following along on YouTube. If this has been helpful so far again, please like this video, comment on it saying what portion has been the most the most useful to you. If you’re interested in setting up a call text checklist 520-341-2552. But whatever platform you’re listening to this, whether Spotify Apple, please give keeping it real a five star review because DJ does so much for the agent community and I really appreciate him. Okay, so you take the prequel, of course, you’re going to be submitting the offer with a prequel I don’t, I don’t mean to say of course I want I want this to apply to all agents of all levels. So then, once you have all the documents submitted to the listing agent, follow it up with the highlights. So once that once your TC has sent has drafted the offer the buyers have signed, you’ve already looked at over you’re good to go. Then at that point, it becomes a decision whether you want to send the offer to the listing agent or your TC, I have my TC do it. And specifically in there I have the I write my own blurb of what I want the TC to copy and paste, but they’re the ones submitting it to the listing agent one it takes it save some of my time. And two, it comes from the TC to the listing agent. So in that way the listing agent is seeing Okay, Ali has a TC let me make sure that I keep them in the loop because I’m sure that you have all experienced this where cross agents forget forget to cc the TC and that’s like the most important important person to be seen. So I want the conversations the communication to be from the TC from the start. So then we they know like Hey, she needs to be CC on everything. So in what what am I typing out for the TC to put in the blurb right? Because we never send emails that are just like, hey attaches the offer. Let me know please confirm receipt and then attach the offer. That’s the worst thing you could do. What I do is I make sure that I highlight all of the main points purchase price, earnest money closing date, what we’re asking for seller concessions, every portion of it in bullets. I’m not reading a paragraph. No one wants to read a paragraph. It’s bullet form. We super look forward to you. We look forward to a smooth transaction. I’m the TC I’m working with with Aligarh said and afterward I call the listing agent Hey, just wanted to confirm that you received it. We super I look forward to making this as smooth of a transaction as possible. And I mean that. And so that way, the first time they’re getting an email is not just an offer that they found their junk and you know that you can do so much better. If you want to go above and beyond that, you can jump on bom bom, which is what I’m using right now to share my screen. And you can make a video saying, hey, Leslie, I love your listing, I know that we’ve spoken, I just wanted to add this video to this email, I wanted to introduce you this email is coming actually, from my TC, her name is Laura, you can you know, please add her as a contact in your email. So emails don’t get lost, please see see her and everything this offer is the best one that we could have made. I spoke to my clients and this is what we’re offering, please let me know if you have any questions. And I look forward to working with you. You know, doesn’t have to be long, like 30 seconds max. So that’s if you wanted to go above and beyond I don’t yet do that. So do that. And okay, I spent enough time on that on that section here. Here, this next item on the on the checklist is unfortunate that we have to write this, but it happens not everyone is honest. So screenshot on the MLS, how much that how much the CO broker percentage is going to be essentially how much you’re getting paid. Because it I’ve heard it happen a bunch of times where in the beginning, it’ll save 3%. But then you go under contract, you look at the MLS again, and you you know, you get paid only 2% or something like that. You want to make sure that if they said that they were going to be paying you three that you get paid three, so screenshot from the MLS and save it in your records, save it in a file, you can throw it into the Trello checklists directly as an attachment. However you save it, just make sure that you have a copy of that because it shouldn’t happen. But it happens sometimes. And that’s unfortunate. So
and going over here again, before you submit the offer, call the listing agent, I’ve already actually spoken over this spoken about this already. So that way everyone knows the ins and outs of the offer, send the private report or save the private report. Okay, that has the commission split. This is being redundant, but again, it happens, make sure that you do it. And then ensure that the proof of funds or the pre qual letter actually matches the name of the contract. Yes, this is clearly a lesson learned on my end, where somebody, you know, got pre approved with their own personal name and then wanted to buy with an LLC, or they added another party or you know, et cetera, et cetera, just make sure that the numbers match, you know, are we offering 60601, when they’re only qualified for 600. Just because things change, especially at as you work with a buyer that is on a little bit more of an extended timeline, anything can happen, their original pre approval, they may have swayed from that they could be pre approval more, they can be pre approved for less, so just make sure. Then the next category of this Trello checklist is when a buyer is under contract. So at that point, the first thing here is send buyer email number four, let’s take a look at that. Because what’s your email number four, it is the congratulations, we are under contract email. And again, my my buyer emails and my seller emails are one through six. So this is email number four out of six that the buyers will be receiving. What do I started off with? You guessed it a video of me saying woohoo, we’re under contract. Congratulations, I’m so excited for you. And giving let them know what happens. Now what happens next. So I hit them with a to do list. This is your homework, add the transaction coordinator in case you haven’t already to your contacts, they are going to be emailing you all the paperwork, wire the earnest money deposit immediately as soon as you can. Because in it and of course, the state dependent however long your state allows to do that. I know that some states do non refundable, earnest money. And number three is pay for the inspections, we won’t be able to receive a copy of the inspections until you have paid for it. This is about how much to expect for a home inspection. And of course, you know see these I say save these into a digital file. You can take it off your taxes at the end of the year but talk to a CPA to confirm I’m not a CPA. So I tell them more or less what they’re expecting to pay for the inspections at this point. This is nothing new. I’ve already told them this in the buyer initiation so that way they know because in our contract are what I want from them in via email number three is also what inspections do you plan on doing so in that way, it lets me know should we stay should we stick with that 10 day due diligence or do they want to do a lot of inspections where we might need to extend it? So I want to know that upfront. Number four in their homework, the buyer buyers homework to do is talk to the lender, let them know when you want to schedule the appraisal. This was very important a couple of years ago during you know, 2021 2022, where Holmes wanted, homes were just flying off, right. And the sellers wanted the quickest, close as possible. So the quickest, the quicker the buyer could confirm that they were going to close on the house. During the due diligence period, as soon as they realize, yes, I like it, the Home Inspections came in pretty good, let’s order the appraisal. As soon as they could order the appraisal, they would tell tell the lender, the lender orders the appraisal. And then that way, it saves time and you can close faster. So sometimes, and I don’t want to be too state specific here. But at least in Arizona standard is 10 days due diligence period, you know, if inspections come back and they don’t like it, they don’t even like you know how the house whatever the the way the wind blows near the house, they can just cancel. Usually they’ll get their money, their earnest money back because we don’t have non refundable, earnest money. But if they so if they like it during that due diligence period, if they know that they’re going to continue, boom, let’s order the appraisal, let’s do the appraisal sooner rather than later. Again, I explained the risk that in case, if you want to order the appraisal fast, to close faster, there is a risk that you might end up paying for an appraisal that you don’t end up needing, you know, because if the appraisers are booking out two weeks, and we order it now, but then by the time we get all the inspections back in 10 days, and you realize that you don’t want to continue, that appraiser might still be charging you. So it’s up to them whether or not they want to spend around 600 bucks. Sometimes they do. They’re like, yeah, I want to close fast. Sometimes they’re like, You know what, no, let’s wait until all the inspections come back. And we agree on the rehab are the fixes. So number five, is once we have all the inspections back, do not fret. I literally have it here written out all inspections reports are 60 to 70 pages long whether the home was built in the 1800s, or it’s a new build, it will be as lengthy as possible. It’s going to make you feel bad. Don’t freak out. I want to talk to you first. You know, once we get once we get those inspections back because it’s the it’s the inspectors job and explain this to them. It’s the inspectors job to point on every single imperfection. So that’s what they’re getting paid for. They’re not going to say oh man, the condition of this roof is beautiful, great roof, they’re never going to put that in a report. They’re only going to put everything negative. So I let the buyers know that especially for first time homebuyers. And number six if there are major repairs needed, let’s discuss renegotiating renegotiating and so they’re pretty weird. renegotiating. Okay, so whatever may come from the inspections we have to give in this state again, very this is almost when we talk about Arizona, we have to give the seller the opportunity to fix before we can talk about closing costs or you know, seller paying toward closing costs or reducing the price. So I’ll just leave it at that just because I don’t I want this to apply to as many people as possible. And of course seven does apply to everyone. Do not buy any large items until you close on this property. If you have any questions, talk to your lender first, Hey, can I buy this Hey, can I buy that don’t risk losing this property. Number eight is if it’s applicable, call the solar company and start transferring the lease over to your name. Number nine is review the pipe pyre the buyer packet PDF again and watch those videos that apply. And number 10 is if you are getting an appraisal after the inspection period is over. You’re telling your lender to order the appraisal. So that’s kind of like a repeat but it’s it’s very important. Now at the bottom here is I have it written watch this video for extra information. And what is that video? That’s the Oh yeah, I think that’s the over all under contract video. Oops, let’s X out of that. Hopefully you couldn’t hear that. That was an ad. So that’s the under contract video and what a why attach the buyer client PDF. Again, this is from buyer email number two, all the way until the end they are seeing the same PDF because it’s it’s their whole course right the buyer, the buyer the whole overall process. So maybe buyer email number two is where they just watched the first couple of videos but or even email number three so they don’t have to keep digging. Oh yeah, where’s that buyer PDF again, they’re not gonna have saved it’s not their job to. So again, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to work with you and give you a great five star review. And at the bottom of my email, of course, I have the way ahead. Your next to do list email will be your week before closing checklist. And I want to go back to the Trillo. So that’s buyer under escrow. I’m going to finish this section here. And then yeah, let me let me finish this section here. So as soon as you’re under contract, tell the lender, again, this, the lender should have already been kept up to date, because you have a checklist where you’re talking to the lender, and you’re telling the buyer to talk to the lender, and then you’re under contract at this point. They’re happy, they’re excited. Sometimes they’re nervous, of course, with you know, good reason, it’s probably the most expensive purchase of their life, or one of them.
Ask for a referral. Hey, I’m so happy that like that you’re so happy, do you is there anyone else that I can also make happy? Do you know of anyone else looking to buy or sell here in insert city. And, you know, that’s a great way to get a great time to get referrals. If I know a lot of agents do this, I personally don’t. But not for any like specific reason. This is also a great way, a great time to get a review. So a Google review, hey, up until this port up and up until this point, this is my agent in this city. And it’s been amazing. So far, we’re super excited, we just went under contract, keep you posted, you know. So you can, you can ask for a review then to with or in lieu of the referral. So of course, you’ve submitted the offer, you’re making sure that the buyer has wired the earnest money, and you want to talk to the title company made sure that they did that or however your state works. If you’re looking at a quick close tell the title to rush, the HOA paperwork that will cause extra, of course have to tell your client that if you are even in an HOA area, that is a lot of what we had to do in 2022. And ask them what type of inspections that they want to have in the property. This has already been done. You’ve already sent the under contract now what email ensure that the seller is going to have a either a contract or lockbox. So this is state dependent to some states allow that the inspectors can just go there without you without an agent, some states don’t. So Arizona, you have to be there with the inspector. So make sure that you know whatever whichever way it is that it applies. They’re staying in the regs, it regulations, sorry, that was like a military term I got used to. So then you confirm the deposit to the escrow or title, you’re looking at the title commitment, look at who’s the seller is the name who you thought it was. And you just want to make sure that you’re you’re you’re you’re probably seeing some overlap here to where like this is, of course, on the on the listing agents responsibility. But you also want to make sure, probably even before you place an offer, that when you’re making an offer, who who it’s to is actually on the county records of who owns who, who owns it. So I hope that explained that correct. In the way that you can understand. So at that point, you confirm that the lender ordered the appraisal, if there is an appraisal, you’ve scheduled the inspections or the TC has, and they just let you know, either you’re going to be out there or another agent, a showing agent can be out there. Again, state dependent, added to your calendar, if you are going to be doing that, and collect the HOA documents, if that’s applicable, remove any contingencies as you’re continuing through the transaction, the home warranty at that point, do finalize a social media post, hey, like we’re under contract, maybe you could share a reel, of course no specifics, but that you’re excited for your client that will generate more more referrals. Schedule a photo with a client’s bring the I have bring the marketing key. And then at that point, you contact the title company and you ask them for the commission instruction form. How you want to get paid, whether you’re picking up a check, which I suggest don’t Don’t, don’t drive to go pick up a check. Just like I don’t suggest you driving to go to your group to go to the grocery store to go grocery shopping go on Instacart. So I’m just like not a fan of driving and think it’s like a really big waste of time unless you’re being driven around and able to work in the backseat. But maybe that’s just how my brain works. So you want to make sure of course when that do when the inspection period ends. You want to know all the timelines you and your TC should have those dates like memorize and it’s well actually maybe instead of even memorizing it, this is what I do in the title scroll all the way up on this checklist. I have it here as as a template for the title PP purchase price close of Escrow earnest money due diligence period. So that way you know exactly what date it ends. Who is this for all of the biggest highlights or if there’s some some big to do, you can add it to the title. So in that way, as you see all of these, you know, as you continue getting more and more buyers under contract, you know, exactly where you’re at in the process. So let me go back in here. Then, where was I? Okay. If during escrow your client messes up the deal, or the client like, or the deal falls through, on your end, send the cross agent, flowers, chocolate champagne candy to their office with a card that says, hey, Lesley, I’m so sorry about what happened in the transaction. You know, even if it wasn’t your fault, if you worked with them, and you liked working with them, send them something of gratitude, it goes such a long way, because agents don’t really show gratitude to each other. So I’m so sorry about what happened with this transaction on 123 Elmo street, I know that you have a backup offer already. And you’re probably are and that you’re under contract with another offer. But again, I just wanted to say I’m so sorry, thank you so much for the time that we did work together, this goes such a long way, even if it was the most terrible, actually, especially if it was most terrible transaction. At least they realize you’re a person you care, you spent time out of your day to send them something, and it’s to their office. So they’re like, oh, man, you got balloons, what for? Oh, a transaction that caught on fire, like what? And they sent you balloons like that’s, you know, just think about that. That’s such a, I don’t know, I love this. I love this so much. Or, like vice versa, if the cross agent just goes above and beyond, or maybe they don’t even need to go above and beyond send them balloons anyway. Some of them a little candy, like lifesavers, candy, and card to their office saying how much you want to thank them for saving the deal, or just for being a great cross agent and ask them for their Google Business Review. Where business page where you can review them. And agent to agent review, I think goes such such a long way. And I love giving agent reviews, agents reviews, you know, of course, if I’ve worked with them, because as people are seeing as people are googling agents near them, and they see oh, this agent has a good reputation amongst other agents. That goes a long way. So it takes about a minute of your time. Okay, how to find signed documents. This is specific again, I hope that you were using a TC to do this. So I’m going to skip over this one. Ask the buyer when they want to order the appraisal. Again, this was already in the checklist. It’s It’s It’s redundant for a reason. So if there’s going to be a post possession, post possessions were very, very common. I’m sure your brokerage has a post possession form. If not, maybe ask the broker for one. Because there they need to have been told to seek legal counsel. Because there’s a lot of variations, a lot of things that could go wrong, you just want to make sure that you are covered.
And then once the appraisal comes back, then if it’s at a price or even higher, congratulations, that is a phone call to the buyer saying congratulations. Not only you know, did we get the offer in a we got you under contract at the price you wanted the terms you wanted. But you are getting equity instant equity as soon as you close and this is how much like because sometimes they’ll they’ll receive the appraisal but they don’t know how to read it, you know, so interpret it for them. Don’t be like oh hey, did you see that appraisal? Hey, congrats like you know, you got 15k They might not even know what page to even find that. So of course, read it, baby it as much as you can to them. And the buyers are under contract on a home with a pool, add the again just a pool safety notice in case you need that and tell the title company if the buyer is military because a lot of title companies will have military discounts, police or first responder discounts, educator discounts, just ask the title companies what kind of discounts they offer and make sure that that is applied for the buyer. So the bins are here this other section is is an Arizona specific term but pretty much in Arizona even though it’s like it’s an as is state when the buyer gets the inspections back they have the option to renegotiate. So the seller can so we so we we renegotiate right sometimes say hey can you actually fix this or that those are like pretty major items. The seller can say no. So in this case here I have if the seller decides to reject the buyers benzer that means that the the the form That means the buyer now has five days to decide whether or not they want to proceed. So it’s kind of like another just renegotiation period. Of course, that that applies to only Arizona, that you might have something similar in your state. So that is where I think I’m going to end today’s. Let me see, because the next is going to be the before closing checklist, which is the two weeks out, which correlates to email number five, that is where I will start it next. For the next episode, if you have any questions, again, I am more than happy to reach to talk to you guys about it. I am already like super excited with the amount of like people that I’ve been meeting with and talking to them with these about these checklists. Similar to me, like growing the crew, I don’t want to just like throw everything at you, I want to like talk you through it. Because Trello This is a lot, there’s so much on here. So again, this is a great way for you to leverage and continue growing your crew knowing once you have perfected it and say you’re the team leader. So you’re the broker owner, once you have perfected perfected it with your state your forms that are needed, your you know templates in here. At that point, you can just have the agents on your team copy and paste this and you know, you can share a board with them and see exactly what they have done and what they haven’t done yet. So if they’re stuck on a on a portion of the transaction, then you can check in say, Hey, I see that we haven’t received the appraisal back, you know, or whatever it is you’re able to see have better access and seeing what what step of the process each of your agents is at. So again, if this has been helpful to you at all in the slightest, please give this a like, subscribe to keeping it real on YouTube. If you’re listening to this on Apple on Spotify, give us a five star review. I know DJ does a lot for the community. And if you’re looking to schedule a call to get these checklists, text the word checklist to 520-341-2552. Again, that’s 520-341-2552 My name is Ali. I’m Ally, the agent on social media and we’ll see you later
5 Videos To Make This Week To Grab New Clients • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Sep 26, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals with Kim Rittberg.
Wondering how to get more clients? Making social media content but not seeing impact? Not showing up enough on video? Award-winning Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg has VIDEO BOOT CAMP starting in just a few short weeks! Join the hundreds of real estate professionals who’ve learned how to show up and grow their revenue through video. Apply here through her website. Keeping It Real Listeners get a special bonus when they sign up!
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today social media expert Kim rip berg is going to share with you five videos you need to make this week to help you get more business. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:32 Hello, my friends. I always love being here. And I love getting your feedback on Instagram, LinkedIn, and even through my website as well. Hi everyone, I’m Kim Rydberg, I help real estate agents become the go to agent in their area to boost their revenue, right, grab more clients. That’s what it’s all about. And I’m really excited to teach you today, the five videos that you can make this week to get clients. And you obviously don’t have to make all five. I mean, that’s a little excessive, but I’m giving you videos that you can choose from. So before I start, I wanted to let you know, I have an amazing video bootcamp. I’ve had hundreds, dozens, a lot of real estate agents, I taught hundreds of agents in the past year, my video book can take you from frustrated and overwhelmed to super confident on camera and getting referrals, getting referrals, getting more leads all of those things. So I really remove the overwhelm and just teach you how to get a great system that can be found on Kim ripper.com, our IA TTP RG or you can drop me a line on Instagram at Kim Rydberg. And let’s get started. So when people are designing a real estate agent, you know, they really have to trust you. So what are the five videos that can help build that relationship? So you, as I mentioned before, do not need to do all these videos, but I’m listing all five. So there’s something for everyone because I’m generous like that. So one of the first things I’m going to talk about is authentic videos. So what the actual video is, it could be a variety of things. But the important part is that it’s not super polished, super finished, it has to feel a little more real. So for any of you who are on Instagram, maybe lurkers and not posters to Instagram, they you see people posting stories, the little circles on top that disappear. That’s a great way to open yourself up, be more relatable, have a little more authentic content out there. That isn’t like all super polished real estate content. It really lets people get to know you. And it does really build that trust. It’s interesting. One of the things that I found with my clients, a lot of these real estate agents I work with, they feel a little weird, posting more personal stuff or soliciting engagement. But the ones who are doing it are seeing a ton of engagement. One of my agents, she was from Idaho. No. Yes, I don’t. Anyway, so we were talking about she wasn’t feeling comfortable on camera. But she started showing up. And then this one video, she didn’t want to post and I was like, You got to post it right? You just got to post it very first video, you might feel uncomfortable, but it’s the third, the fifth, the seventh, everyone gets better. She ended up posting this video to her stories. She was like hands over her eyes feeling weird about it. But then she got a response from someone going, Oh, that’s an interesting point about the market. And they weren’t like, oh, what’s wrong with your hair? What’s wrong with your outfit? People are actually interested to hear what you have to say because you are the expert in the field. They do want to know what’s going on in their area. So authentic videos. A good way to do that is go on Instagram stories. Just start talking a little bit about what you’re seeing another one of my my students from awesome, she’s from Florida, and she was telling me about what she was seeing in her neighborhood. I’m like, great, go on your walk and start filming it. And she was talking about seeing more construction and new development and she’s actually taking people along along the ride. She was very hesitant to show up when she started the video bootcamp. But like a few weeks into it, we worked on her confidence and she started showing up and she’s seeing a lot of engagement because she’s talking about what’s happening in the area of You talk show showcasing her expertise in a great way. And it’s very visual, right walking around your neighborhoods very visual, so, and you’re looking to expand your sphere of influence as an agent. So in Instagram Stories, you’re reaching a lot of different people, and you never know who’s gonna respond. So one trick is add, go into the little smiley face sticker area, and hit the word Pol, Pol. And just write a poll in there about whatever it is you’re talking about. Maybe you’re grabbing a cup of coffee, and then you’re saying, Do you like coffee? Would you like tea? Maybe it’s nighttime, and you’re like, Oh, my day is finally over. It’s eight o’clock at night. In your poll, you could say, Are you a night owl, or a morning person? These questions might seem simple, but people are like, zoned out right there. They’re scrolling on Instagram and the abyss, they just want something fun to play with and connect with. And that’s a great way to open those relationships, reopen those relationships, and you will be very surprised who is connecting with you. You never know, it could be your next client, it could be a referrer, it could be coming from 10 years ago. That’s what I see happening all the time to my students and my clients. The second video is a local video. So this is interesting. You know, we talked about being a local expert, that is your role, right? You want people to say, oh, Joe, Jane, they really know this area, I’m going to trust them. I trust that they’re getting me the best place for the best price, their knowledge about the rules. And by really positioning yourself as the expert in the area that pushes that forward, expert in the area. An easy way to do this, is you’re in front of a restaurant or bar or store in your area on your main street. Go with somebody, have them film you. And just answer have them that person asked you. What are your favorite spots in X town? So someone would say, Ken, what are your favorite spots in Brooklyn? And straight to camera, I would say, all right, my favorite spot is there’s a cocktail club called Clover Club on Smith Street. I love the croissants at this new French place in the area. And I love the park because it’s super quiet. And there are birds like chirping in the city, which you would never think. But I do love those spots and and clothing wise, there’s an awesome spot called and article down the street from me, which has great dresses. This might seem like, who cares? That’s not such a crazy video. But I’ll tell you, people have very strong opinions about their favorite spots in their neighbor neighborhood. And they’re very passionate about this. So one of my clients, he’s in California, we sat down and did this video. And it was like, Hey, Josh, talk to me about your favorite favorite la stores, or we picked a certain area. And he just, you know, let off his first his favorite restaurant, his favorite store and his favorite clothing store. What we made sure to do was to tag those stores, and the hashtags that were specifically local. And he got like 5,000% more engagement than his normal posts. So people feel very passionately about their area, and the local stores are going to be psyched to get that publicity, right. And then they’re going to feel more connected to you. And then maybe they’re going to do an event with you. And maybe they’re gonna refer you to people. But maybe it’s just another way to expand your sphere of influence. So you’re trying to position yourself as a local expert, so people trust you and give you money, sell a home with you buy a home with you. So a local video is perfect, you could do my three favorite things in this neighborhood. Let me take you to a new bar. Again, this does not need to be like a really high quality high velocity video, you can shoot it with your iPhone, it can be very casual. And if you want you can just put it in Instagram Stories. Again, they disappear after 24 hours. So if you’re really feeling shy about stuff, that’s fine. Alright, video number three, and authority video. What do I mean by that? You want to position yourself to buyers to sellers as the go to person that people trust, right? They’re giving you a lot of money, they’re investing with you. So if you have awards or accolades, actually, almost all of you do have awards or accolades, remind people of that, yes, you can post that, you know, square Hi, I’m the top 10 teams in my neighborhood. So proud. Thanks to everyone for trusting me. There are other ways to do it. One thing that I did personally, so I got an award for a big video production series that I did. And I was really excited, my kids were excited. And in addition to posting the actual logo, like a square of the award in your social media, or on your blog, and your website, I made a video where my kids sat with me and the word and they were like hugging and kissing me. And, you know, that sort of lets people know who I am what I’m about. I’m a working parent that connects to other people who are working parents. And it’s just another way to also showcase your authority, right? It’s like a way to say, you know, I’m a person who’s serious about what I do. I might be cool might be fun, but like I do this, well I do this right? I take a lot of pride in my job. And so just thinking of different ways to showcase your authority. And don’t forget you can take things from while ago like even if you have something from six months ago or four months ago, people don’t see everything you post only about 10% of people see any given post so Feel free to, you know, recycle it and every few months. Educational Video number four is an educational video. So I’m very bullish on educational videos, I think it’s a great way to actually educate people. But be it’s a great way to show people how knowledgeable you are, like, you do your job, because you will love it. You know what you’re doing, whether you’ve worked for one year or 40 years, you are an expert in your field.
There’s nothing that says expert than actually hearing from that person. So allow yourself to be on camera and explaining a little more about the market. And I know some people just feel uncomfortable sort of talking to a phone, I get that it’s not a normal thing. Totally. Right. So one of the ways that you could do that is a you can set up your phone. And instead of it being like right in front of your face, it could just be like right next to someone else. And someone else could ask you those questions. And you know, get an accountability partner, get another agent, they can ask you, you can ask them, it’s a little easier to answer someone’s questions than it is to talk to a blank screen if you’re not used to it. So that’s a good way around that. And again, pick topics that your clients ask you, what clients want to know, that’s a perfect topic for an educational video. And the fifth video that I recommend doing is put your opinion in there. I want to know if the markets up markets down. What do you recommend for buying for selling for renting? What do you think about new development versus versus, you know, all of the things that are happening in your area? What’s your perspective on it? Because really, everyone can get a website, an article, a blog, that’s fine, that information is searchable. But what’s your point of view on it? And when you’re working with someone, like what do you see? When do you think should they wait? Should they buy now? Like should should they rent for a little bit, they’re looking to you as their partner, right their partner in a big purchase a big rental, a big purchase. And it’s important to show your perspective. Otherwise, like why you right and they can just get this information online, they can put it together, they can do it themselves, right? They can be like, Oh, I don’t need an agent. I’m an expert on my own. So start putting that perspective in there. The point of view, you have that and the educational content really helps remind people who you are what you’re doing. All right. Now I want to recap and give a couple of examples of the videos I’ve recommended doing. So we are talking again today about five videos that you can do this week to get clients. And one is authentic videos, we are talking about showing up in a raw and candid way. If you have a pet up, put your pet name amazing. Take a walk in the mountains, take a walk by your lake with the dog, everyone loves a dog. And then don’t forget to add something for engagement. and tag me tag me I love when my agents tag me. And I really, really do. I’m very proud when people are learning from me, it’s really fun for me to get to teach people. So tag me when you post things, a local video, go to a local restaurant, taste that new bail in your neighborhood. Try it on a sweater and then new store, but really be the local expert feature and you don’t even this doesn’t even have to be video, you could just post new happenings in your area. You could post that on your stories you could post on your feed you put that wherever you want. But I recommend putting in your perspective, I think really bringing people into who you are having them hear your voice. So your Cadency Your personality is very powerful. Authority, video, anything, any awards you want any speaking events that you’ve done, any panels you’ve done, recycle those, if you posted it once, put it in a montage. If you posted it a few months ago, post it again, people do not see all your content. So don’t be precious about it. Don’t think oh, I posted this already. They don’t see all your content once an educational video, sit down and teach someone something. Start with the four questions you get asked the most. That is the easiest way to start and the most valuable. If it’s something we get asked a lot. Well it’s something people want to know. So start with that. And lastly, put your opinion somewhere in there. You know your opinion on the market your opinion on whatever it is. But put your perspective in there. People love hearing from you and hearing your opinion. Okay. To wrap it up, I am Kim Rydberg and I love helping you real estate agents become the go to agent in your area to maximize your leads and your revenue. I have an awesome video bootcamp coming up is like really, really fun. We’ve all learned together how to go from Oh, I posted this but nothing’s happening to making awesome videos together, having a great system and really understanding and getting leads and referrals specifically in clients specifically from video from social media. It’s really fun. We have ages from across across the country so you can get referrals you know build that network. And it’s awesome and then you can also grab a free download from me you can grab that on my website at Kim or.com Drop me a line on Instagram make sure to tag me message me say hi as you can tell unfriendly love to talk. Very nice. Cool. Thank you so much for listening on camera Berg and don’t forget to drop me a line
The Importance of Mentorship • Caroline Hobbs
Sep 21, 2023
Caroline Hobbs a coach from Saint Jose Broker at Reward Realty talks about her experience in real estate as a third generation in the business. Caroline discusses how easy it was to be driven by this legacy. Next, Caroline discusses how helpful it is working with a top agent and learning from them. Caroline also discusses the importance of having a mentor. Last, she emphasizes the impact of a leading platform that she and her team are working on and how it will help agents in their business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to talk about the importance of mentorship. And by the way, almost everyone I’ve ever had on my show, which are top 1%. Producers have all had mentors. Let’s talk about it today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re gonna be speaking with top producer and also software developer Caroline Hobbs. This is a really cool one, you’re going to want to listen to all of it, because there’s lots of great stuff here. Anyway, before we get to Caroline, one thing that you can do to help our show out two things actually is leave us a review. So you might be listening to us on Apple podcasts or any other podcast app. Please let us know what you think of the show helps us improve and obviously meet your needs more effectively. And please also tell a friend about the show. Think of just one other agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Caroline and let them know about the show. We appreciate it. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Caroline hops.
Today on the show, our guest is Caroline Hobbs. She is a broker and owner of reward Realty in San Jose, California, which is the heart of Silicon Valley. Let me tell you more about Caroline. Now, Caroline, if there’s anyone who understands the stress of uprooting one’s life, and finding the best place to raise a family, it’s Caroline. She’s the Tao mother of two’s career kicked off with Keller Williams in Palo Alto, where she learned everything that she knows from some of the world’s leading agents, some of them have even been on our show. Using her knowledge and intrinsic passion for helping clients achieve their goals. Carolyn built reward Realty from the ground up. As the team lead and head broker Caroline’s spends her days turning mundane listings into irresistible opportunities for local homebuyers and investors. When you work with Carolina, you can be rest assured that you’ll feel heard supported and respected by somebody with decades of experience. Now to learn more about Caroline’s brokerage, please visit reward realty.org again reward realty.org We will have a link to that in the show notes. And she is currently working on a new tech product specifically for realtors. We’re going to be talking about that at some point in the show today as well. And we’ll give you some information on how to learn more there. Caroline, welcome to the show.
Caroline Hobbs 3:57 Hi, thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 3:59 I am so excited to chat with you. And I don’t get a chance to talk to as many broker owners as I would like. So this is kind of a treat for me, because you really are wearing a lot of hats. Not only are you running your brokerage and your own personal business within the brokerage, and managing agents and doing all of the all of the hats that owners do that were and also working on a tech product at the same time. So I’m excited to talk about that. But why I always like to start off the show learning more about our guests. So tell us how you got into real estate.
Caroline Hobbs 4:35 So I’m actually a third generation real estate professional. My grandfather was a contractor who had his real estate license. My mother has been in the lending industry for over 40 years and is just getting ready to retire. And so while I was in college, I was introduced to a real estate agent who was number one in Keller Williams international and started working for her as her open house host and assistant.
D.J. Paris 5:06 Yeah, what’s it like to work for the number one, I just recently had the number one REMAX agent who happens also in the world who happens to be in California, not not in your neck of the woods down in downtown Los Angeles. But it was interesting talking to like the number one person in the world and he really hearing how somebody at the very tippy top of the mountain does it, not just the people who are just slightly underneath them who are also superstars, but the person at the very top you got you got that experience. So tell us about what you learned from working with some I mean, what a gift that is, I imagine 100%
Caroline Hobbs 5:41 I, honestly, I don’t think I would have figured out my strengths as an agent. Even in tech, without my start working with that agent, I had open houses to host and get face to face connections with clients very, very early, like before I was licensed. So from the get go, she used to joke that I posted more open houses than anybody else in Silicon Valley, because I hosted them every single weekend for years. So learning how to convert clients, talk to them, understand their concerns, hear them out, that was all super invaluable. But in all honesty for running a business, I think I learned a lot because this agent had not only her real estate license, but she also had an MBA, and what is a certified accountant. So she she was like the ultimate business person. So I like to say I stole all the knowledge that I could. I worked with her for six and a half years, and got to see the ins and outs of how she runs her business. How she conducts it, how she talks to clients how she closes the deal. But even more so I was in charge of running her database, which this is in 2008 2007, she had over 10,000 people in her database. Amazing. So this is way before most people even had a database most people were working off of, you know, a notepad, maybe an Excel sheet if you were advanced. Right.
D.J. Paris 7:15 And we should also mention that this is right at the most challenging time to be a real estate agent. This is when the market crashed. We had all those subprime loans were really brought the housing market down, by the way that is not happening now. Thank goodness. But you were you hurt getting doing this in a very difficult time?
Caroline Hobbs 7:36 Absolutely. Also, with the area that we are selling in our office, we’re with Keller Williams, and our office was in downtown Palo Alto, which is actually the number one office in the country as well. A lot of times, it’s just because of the price points that we’re at, you know, they’re at a much higher level, most people need to sell 510 20 houses to equate the same kind of price range. But just being surrounded by those agents who are really a lot more business minded than I find a lot of realtors to be was really inspiring the other person that was at the office at the same time with me, well known agent who started his own brokerage called Dalian Realty. You know, back when we were at Keller Williams together, he sold the most expensive home in America, which was over in Woodside for about $100 million. And he took that and reinvested it back into himself starting his company. So I like to think that I kind of learned from those around me. And that’s the path I ended up choosing as well. It’s
D.J. Paris 8:43 really, it’s really, again, such a gift, it’s a good reminder to our audience that if you currently don’t have a mentor, or you don’t have open houses to sit on weekends, beg anyone in your office as much as you can to go ahead and sit those open houses, you’re doing the seller a favor. And clearly you’re doing yourself a favor by not only learning how to talk about real estate to people that walk in off the street, but also possibly get some leads as well. And hopefully, you know, show those people other homes to buy. So this I cannot encourage people to do this. More. I think it’s it’s so critical. And everyone who’s listening probably already knows. Yeah, I know. I’m supposed to, you know, sit open houses. But I can’t think of an example. We’ve done about 500 episodes. I’m sure there’s one person that never said an open house on a 500. But that’s about it. Yeah. And I only talked to the top top agents in the country so and the very top agent at Keller Williams was like, oh, yeah, by the way, sit open houses. So yeah. Yeah. So even if you read Gary Keller’s book, it’ll tell you to sit open houses. So anyway, that that is just a good quick reminder. So when did you decide to sort of break off so you learned all this great information from your mentor and got to read really see a lot of high end sort of transactions and sort of the white glove approach, which is absolutely needed for you know, those kinds of transactions. And you were able to take that synthesize what you learned, and then build your own brokerage. Tell us about that.
Caroline Hobbs 10:15 Yeah. So my adventure with reward Realty started about 10 years ago, April was our 10 year anniversary of being in business. So I started this in 2013. And my goal was, I at the time, there was really, really high splits with the the major players. And as a newer agent at the time, well, not new, but like, I was a young agent. So I didn’t have a whole lot of resources. A lot of sweat equity went into it. But I wanted to create a place where agents could come, they could keep more of their commission, they could have access to the best tools, and really find themselves like a home. I very much am very involved with all of my agents at my brokerage. Today, as we’re recording this, this is Wednesday, we call it party day in our office. So we have our local broker tour that we go on. We all go to the meeting together, I actually sit on the board for our Real Estate Association. And we come back to the office, I have my agents in the other room right now kicking off the 100 days, to 100k with Tom Ferry, all the printed out books ready to go for them. So they’re listening to that while we record this right now. But we also do we do lunch, we we invite lenders and we roleplay. So really trying to you know, hone those skills, make sure that my every agent at our office is a beacon of information for all of their clients.
D.J. Paris 12:04 You know, it’s so funny because you say that, you know, this idea of having this once a week, sort of tour, you know, you call it part party day, and you get to go out and see some listings, you get, everyone gets the experience of walking through, there’s information that’s being shared. And then you come back and digest it all and then actually do some additional work with the Tom Ferry program, as well as role playing, which is I think one of the most invaluable exercises. Of course, this is awesome. I I’m thinking here we’re in Chicago, there are hundreds of brokerages here. I am sure that maybe one of them does that I’m sure. I’m just guessing. I don’t know of any personally that do that weekly. Again, I’m sure there are. And I’ll probably get some emails from people afterwards saying, Yeah, we do this, but it is very rare. And so I will, I will really honor you for that. And by the way, I always forget to say this until the end, if anyone is in the San Jose area, and would like that sort of experience as they’re growing their business to learn from somebody who learned from the very best. And also, practices at every single weekend literally teaches you and shows you how to do that. Check out reward Realty against reward realty.org. And by the way, no franchise fee. So how exciting is that? So you don’t have to pay that like mysterious 5% to the mothership, because there was no mothership. It’s just Caroline and her team. So that’s awesome. I love I love this idea of really building the skills of your agents, which is, I think I’ve seen a trend. I’m curious to get your take on this. I’ve seen a trend where managing brokers, people who are in charge of all of the agents, you’re I’m assuming you’re the managing broker as well, that yeah, so you have you wear a lot of different hats. And what I’ve seen over the last probably 10 years is this trend of the managing brokers are now being asked to do more recruiting because it’s getting more competitive, people are moving around a bit. And especially now, and they’re not they don’t have as much time to train. And so I think a lot of the training initiatives are being pushed off to teams, which I guess sort of makes sense in in a way. But I like the idea of joining a brokerage who actually the brokerage itself has amazing training. So I applaud you for continuing to support your agents in that way. Let’s talk about let’s talk about your your other venture because you were a little bit dissatisfied with database stuff. You wanted to do more. You’re right in the part of the country that loves tech, and it all of our tech, you know, sort of breakthroughs you come from your part of the country. So tell us a little bit about what you’re working on. This is actually really cool. Yeah,
Caroline Hobbs 14:53 absolutely. So we are essentially tied to Other some of the leading platforms follow up boss and open to close and building our own customized client portal, which will be client facing. So between the follow up boss and the open to close, we’ve actually created full cross functional usage of it. So currently they’ll link during Zapier, but we have a much more robust way of doing this, essentially allowing agents to solely work out of follow up boss, admins and transaction coordinators to solely work out of open to close and have everything sync all of the information showing up in the client portal to be accessible to your clients. And also be able to invite agents from the other side of the transaction to access the documents and things like that. So we can do an AI transaction management, kind of scanning the documents, reducing risk by by making sure that there’s not any kind of missing signatures missing, you know, questions skipped anything like that. And really having everybody worked together to get that file completed without a whole lot of trouble going back and forth.
D.J. Paris 16:10 So let me see if I understand because I think I do although I am a little bit under the weather. So I may just be making this up in my head, and you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I understand. So the problem you’re solving is, hey, clients oftentimes don’t really know where they are in in a, in a transaction. There’s no real portal for a client to go in and say, Oh, this is exactly where we are. Currently, they’re waiting for communication from their broker, their agent. And maybe their agent is good at doing that. Maybe they aren’t. But there isn’t a place where they can just go and see a snapshot of here’s everything that’s currently going on. So you built that solution. It was really actually, I don’t know that that solution. Does that solution exists before yours? Because no, you shaking your head? No, no. That is a brilliant idea. Because I was thinking about this, I bought a place a few years ago, and I hadn’t bought a place in a long time. So I sort of forgot the process. And now with like getting a loan and dealing with lender stuff, it was all that way, it was all online, they would they would ping me, I need this, this this but it was all through a portal, it made perfect sense. And then I could see the status of it, as well as the updates as they rolled in. I love that you’re doing this, this is really, really smart. So it’s a client centric approach to really keep them in the loop. And then also utilize existing systems that agents are already enjoying.
Caroline Hobbs 17:34 Yes, so that is definitely a major portion of it is I felt like there was always a client version or like a client facing part of this that was missing. Also, another thing that inspired me to do this, especially on the listing side, is a lot of times when homes are sitting on the market for a little while and not moving, they want to see like a whole tracklist of what you’ve done to market their home. So this allows you to make those notes in their follow up boss and have them sink directly into the client portal, where they can see every single action that you’re taking at each step. But furthermore, and I think this is where an agents will be a little bit more interesting is that all of your follow ups, all of those special touches, whether it’s gifting, marketing, all of that is going is a custom build out that we do for you and your follow up boss account and you’re open to closed account. So let’s say that a new company starts up for home valuations. And they have an open API and you want to incorporate it into your account and your client of ours, you’ll tell us open your account, we’ll set it up for you, we’ll help you know test it out to make sure that we’re using it at the highest and best level and help you get all of the Automate nations set up so that way it is just incorporated, you’re not going to another place to go make a change another place to go send out postcards, another place to go, you know, create your Commission’s or anything like that.
D.J. Paris 19:05 So there’s really there’s really two components here, there’s the client, the client facing side, which is going to give them updates, they can see your activity, they can stay in the loop and get notified when there’s when there’s new activity. And then on the other side, there’s the the agent facing side, which is going to link up with many different tools all in one so that you’re not logging in and out of all these different systems. And I don’t think anyone’s built that either. I guess Salesforce would be the closest thing to that. But it Salesforce is a giant massive tool that isn’t specifically real estate focused. So you’re basically taking existing tools and really hyper focusing them to the real estate agent experience. Yeah,
Caroline Hobbs 19:46 if you can imagine a tool that combines like disclosure IO, but for both sides of the transaction and compresses all of those files together for the most complete one and marking what’s missing. That’s kind of that’s the workflow that we’re, we’re building towards.
D.J. Paris 20:07 Awesome. When do you anticipate? Is it in beta testing now? Or how far is it ready for for
Caroline Hobbs 20:13 development. We have partnered with Bara agency, which is the number one real estate development company. There are CTOs. For this, we have evolved, who is helping us with our onboarding, Jackie, is a superstar and well known among a lot of the execs in real in real estate technology companies. And then, you know, so we really have partnered with some of the best of the best, we have regular meetings with open close and follow up boss, to make sure we’re all building alongside one another, to really create a super system. And I think a lot of our vendors are really seeing the value in what we’re doing. Being able to extend their client lifecycles, because they’re actually utilizing the tools that they’re paying for.
D.J. Paris 21:00 Right. And the reality of it is, and we all know this, who are practicing Realtors is there’s just too much to do in any given day, to really manage your entire business as an individual, it’s just too much. It really is. And so you need to leverage tools. And the problem with CRMs is I mean, certain CRMs are wonderful, but you really have to, if this is the era of integration, so we’re going to start to see tools combining lonewolf is doing this a lot. If people are following lone wolf, they’re purchasing lots of little tech companies and trying to create some sort of eco sphere to sort of suck you and Caroline is doing the same thing. And she’s she’s doing it with some of the biggest players in the space. So because it’s not, it’s still in development, you guys are working on it. Now, if somebody wants to sort of be informed of the updates, and you know, once it’s ready, where should they should I should they go to reward realty.org send you an email just to put on a list, that
Caroline Hobbs 22:01 would be fine, or use the link below to just go ahead and book a 30 minute consultation with me, we are getting ready to start onboarding people onto our open to close and follow up boss built out system. So basically all the action plans, all the touch points, all of that gets customized to the user, all the verbage we give you video scripts to go and record to put into your transaction emails, as far as updates go, and then those will sync to the client portal, we are expecting to we’re expecting we’re hoping to finish the client portal by end of q1 and 2024. So for anybody that is already on our platforms, they will automatically get you know first dibs and likely some beta testing on it. And then we will be selling it as a part of the tech stack that we’ve developed, as well as an individual product that people can access and use on their own transactions.
D.J. Paris 23:03 I love it. So stay tuned, but get on the mailing list. So we are I forgot Caroline mentioned that there is a link. So if you’re a brokerage if you’re a team, if you’re an individual that has many systems you want to integrate, you can schedule in the description below, you’ll see a link to schedule time with Caroline and her team to learn more. Also, you can also go to reward realty.org and shoot her message. I want to talk a little bit about the state of the market. Because of course this is a different year than last year we have our interest rates are different. Our inventory demand is different. And and I don’t know what it’s like in in the San Jose area, but I suspect it’s it’s similar to what we’re experiencing in other parts of the country. So basically, what I’m saying is the vast majority of agents, I talked to their businesses down. Occasionally I run into somebody who’s crushing it. But that’s an anomaly. It’s not as common as anyone would like. So how are you keeping your agents motivated? Obviously, I love the party Wednesday idea of going out and doing skill building. What else are you telling your agents to do right now to help you know, keep their business rolling.
Caroline Hobbs 24:17 Um, we do a number of things. So we do a lot of online marketing. So we do have new leads that come in every single day through several different programs. In addition to that, I do have all of my buyer’s agents, because I do run a small team within the brokerage as well. They host all of my open houses. I have built up a pretty strong stream of listings and reputation in the area. So fortunately, we’ve been able to keep business coming in and and you know, focusing on that way, but really we’re leveraging our systems to help differentiate ourselves be the first to contact And then with the roleplay, making sure that we make every single conversation count. You know, it’s fine in a busy market when you’ve got 100 leads coming in a day to, you know, mess up on a couple, but this is the roleplay. And we want to capitalize on every single opportunity. And so we want to make sure that our agents are ready to go. The second opportunity arises and that they’re able to have that persuasive conversation and help their clients understand what a good time it actually is to purchase.
D.J. Paris 25:36 Yeah, and let’s, let’s talk about rates. So interest rates are higher than than anyone would prefer currently, although historically not that high, but it feels high. I think now, even though it’s, you know, it doesn’t really, if you look at the numbers, I don’t think it’s too awful. Just it’s awful in comparison to 3%, which was an anomaly as well, a couple of years ago. So but it is an interesting conversation, because I think I’ve some friends that are lenders that I’m probably I’m getting the statistic wrong, but it’s something like 85% of us homeowners have less than a 4% mortgage. So we’ve, I don’t know, really created a challenge for realtors now to unless you have to move, it’s tough to ask somebody to give up their 3% rate for possibly, you know, a 7% rate. So are you? Are you coaching your agents on how to handle that particular conversation? And what would you recommend in those cases.
Caroline Hobbs 26:33 So there’s a few different things. Regarding the market here in Silicon Valley, we’re seeing a lot of cash offers come through. And I realized that it’s just because we get a lot of money from investors, and we’ve got engineers with RSU money and things like that. But what that indicates to me is there’s blood in the water. And if you’ve been in real estate long enough, you know that prices, home prices and interest rates have an inverse relationship. So what some of our partner lenders have been doing is they have programs where if you purchase now, they in six months, they’ll refinance you for free, no cost at all, very patient, but there’s always going to be I think that this reaction to the interest rates is a little bit of a generational thing. It’s less so with the move down clients, which is a lot of the people that we’ve served this year, I think younger buyers and their 30s, which is the majority of people buying and selling right now as people starting to have families and moving up in their careers and starting to move into a home that they might stay in for a little bit longer. They’re not going to stay in a townhouse. Because that’s what they could afford when they’re 2030 years old. And when they have two kids and need a backyard, no matter what their interest rate is, right now, will they hold on to it as an investment property and turn it into an investment property. That’s not a bad idea. But I kind of stand by the fact that there’s always going to be a reason to buy and sell. And in California, we are seeing a lot of people. Again, not as interested about the interest rates, but like acknowledging that the cost of living is so high here and moving out of state.
D.J. Paris 28:29 Yeah, that makes sense. And you said something very powerful. About the good thing to remember I sort of had forgotten this, that interest rates and home price is they have like a negative correlation like as one one goes up the other goes down so that that is a conversation to have with with buyers right now and sellers just say hey, yeah, you know, and there’s other other options too. With mortgages you could do buy downs. So by the way, if anyone’s not familiar with a Biden listen to our we do a monthly episode with Joel from guaranteed rate he talks a lot about Biden’s those are very common right now to help ease some of that, you know, that sticker shock of seeing the larger number on on that monthly payment. So but there are solutions, but I think you brought up a really good point is let’s talk about home pricing. Because at the end of the day, if pricing is coming down, because rates are high will ultimately that could be a good thing for both sides. But the math needs to be there right? So people agents need to I think do a little bit more math these days than perhaps they had to do before when when rates were so low that it and let’s also remember to when rates were in the threes and even the twos a little bit. Think about how many buyers flooded the market and how much how people were overpaying for some of these, you know these homes, so this is a time where there’s less buyers. So in a way that’s less competition, that’s good. And now you know, you might get a discount on the price.
Caroline Hobbs 29:58 Well I think that’s very true in other markets. Here’s the problem. Buyers and sellers in Silicon Valley are very spoiled. So it’s, I mean, can you imagine being an engineer you make, you know, $500,000 a year, including your stock income, and somebody tells you, no, you can’t have that house because somebody’s been $50,000. Warren, well, let us $50,000 equate to 200 bucks a month, 300 bucks a month. So they’re not gonna go out to dinner two times, you know. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why we see our prices go up at such a rapid rate. We are seeing multiple offers still. So there’s homes in San Jose, especially, that will have three, four or five offers after a week on the market. South County like Gilroy and Morgan Hill, there’s are expanding neighborhoods that are kind of hit or miss on the multiple offers, but we aren’t really seeing as much of a dip in pricing. But people are a little bit more conservative. So it just it makes pricing that much more important. So what I always say like, if you have tours going on for your area, put it on tour, get the feedback from other local agents and see what they think. I know when we put our I put every single listing of mine on tour, we usually have anywhere from 55 to 75 agents come through on that day. Wow. Which is amazing. Because you really get good feedback. Everybody in the area knows about your listing, they’ve walked it. And one of the things I encourage my team to do as we’re doing the tours is take pictures, it’s a great opportunity to make content, talk about what’s going on in the market that week. You know, people love video. So getting out in front of your audience and your sphere is amazing. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 32:02 let’s let’s talk about the role of video. Because I think you know, agents are going on tours, they’re going to broker open opens, they’re obviously doing showings with their clients and whatever listings they may have. So there, if you’re in a home, you have the opportunity to make a video even if it’s 60 seconds short form video, by the way, has, by about a foot I just did a presentation on this. So it depends on what stat you believe, but about a four to five times multiple. I think that’s the right way to say it four or five times more, maybe it’s not a multiple then even image posts and short and long form video. So actually people aren’t I mean, we look tick tock, this is a crazy statistic, just to show you the importance of of short form video and I know tick tock skews to a younger audience. But this is a crazy statistic 1.6 7 billion users Tiktok has, there’s only 8.1 billion people in the world, they have one out of every eight people going there at 1.1 billion of the 1.6 7 billion go there every single month. And it’s probably even more often than that. Because if you’re on Tik Tok, you’re not just going once a month, you’re going every single day. So short form, video is key. And it’s the easiest type of content to create, because it’s the shortest amount and it’s what people want to see. So I think there’s, you’re right, I think there’s so much opportunity going in anytime you go to a listing or any sort of property and just doing a quick little, it doesn’t just have to be showing your audience that you went to the gym this morning. And you know, you’re committed. And that’s fine, too. But yeah, create this great real estate content, just simply by going to a listing and saying, Oh, look at this cool thing in this house. I want to show you.
Caroline Hobbs 33:42 Yep, totally. And, you know, you really should be doing that. Even when you’re taking buyers out on tours, take pictures of cool things get on front while they’re upstairs living in the master bed, bathroom, and just be like, hey, when I just came by this listing, this is amazing. Come and take a look scheduled showing with me now.
D.J. Paris 34:03 Yeah, even if you’re with a client, what here’s what I would recommend because obviously you want to support that client, you don’t want to be doing other work while you’re doing that. But if you have a few moments, take a video of something cool in the house. Don’t say anything. You can always add your your commentary in later. But get that video so that way the client doesn’t necessarily know that you’re creating content for something else. But but create like just just even if it’s 10 seconds, show something and then you can always do a voiceover it’s a huge missed opportunity for agents and then posting
Caroline Hobbs 34:37 100%
D.J. Paris 34:41 let’s um, I want to talk to about about new agents because we do have a lot of new agents that listen to our show and are want to hear from top producers about what they should be doing right now. Well, we already talked about open houses. That’s an absolute no brainer. Aside from open houses, how should somebody be working their sphere of influence, especially if they’re new? What are the things that you would recommend to a new agent to make sure that the sphere of influence starts to now associate the new agent with being an agent and not you know, the person that used to work in tech, for example, and now he’s doing real estate and people still think of you as the tech guy. So how do you really begin to condition the people in your life to know that now I’m the real estate person.
Caroline Hobbs 35:30 First off, real easy. There’s a lot of tools like this like home bot, there’s a new one called fellow which I really like a lot. And I’m going to be integrating into our systems. These automated value tools. Get everyone you know, your whole Christmas card list, get them every single person on one of these AMV tools, you will immediately be associated with good news about their house. And you know, they’ll get a monthly email with updates on their home value, and they’ll know that you’re the person to go and talk to about it.
D.J. Paris 36:06 That is funny. It is funny. I’m sorry to interrupt. I was gonna say I love getting that Zillow email once a month. And look, don’t don’t kill me, everyone. I know not everybody who listens to this love Zillow. And I’m not saying this is a love Zillow thing. But you know what is cool about Zillow is that little Zestimate email once a month to tell me how if my home is appreciated or depreciated, whether it’s accurate or not another question, but just getting that it’s kind of like getting your FICO score every month for the credit, because it’s like, even though it doesn’t really matter. For me, I like knowing if my score went up or down or if my home price went up or down. And this is something that you can do to anybody whether they’re a client of yours or not. And odds are their own agent isn’t doing that.
Caroline Hobbs 36:48 Let me give you an idea to just go over the top. And for all the new agents listening, this is what you want to hear is go on to Zillow, screenshot your friend’s address with there’s the estimate, perfect love, shoot him a text and be like, hey, look how much your home is worth. Values are still up, people are still moving. Do you know anyone who’s in the market? I love it. It’s easy. It takes you three seconds. And it’s it’s one of the things that’s included in the 100k and 100 days for the Tom Ferry program is a Z estimate printout and you can mail these to people as well, you know, circle the price interested in actual value because we all joke, you know, it’s or off depending on the area.
D.J. Paris 37:35 But now, I will tell you by the way I got a chance to to spend some time with Zillow this year. And last year, I was very fortunate to be able to spend time with their senior leadership. And their their data engineers and their economists will tell you with with absolute honesty, I believe unless they’re unless they’re not being honest. But I believe they’re being honest, that that they’re within you know, 3%, give or take plus or minus, right. So they will say we actually check our data. And we are now so close that word about a 3%. One way there. Now I know everyone out there might feel differently. It’s
Caroline Hobbs 38:12 funny that you mentioned that. If you go on to Zillow into the agent toolkit, this is one of the things you’ll see there’s a Z estimate section and they have a graph, which shows exactly what you’re talking about based on. I don’t know, there’s probably about 26 cities listed. The thing about that, and some are there are some that are very close. And I think it really just depends on the market. You know, how much is the average? You know, at like over asking kind of price? Because really it comes down to like how are people bidding 5000 over are they bidding 200,000 over? So one thing I noticed on their chart is cities like San Jose are missing? Sure, because it’s just their numbers are not going to be anywhere as close since you have more of that emotional factor that comes into play with our buyers and their pricing decisions.
D.J. Paris 39:11 Yeah, that definitely makes sense. So so the the Z estimate is is going to be contingent on the area. But the good news is it’s probably better that it’s off than it’s, you know, I talked to somebody at Zillow once and this is many, many years ago when it wasn’t as accurate it is now and the guy goes, agents should be thanking us that it’s not that accurate because we’re making we’re making you more important because and so what Caroline is saying is is actually absolutely of such a great idea. Everybody in your database, especially if you’re new. Hey, I just noticed Zillow was saying your homes that circle it. I think I can I want to I want to double check those numbers. I want to see would you be interested in getting a more accurate quote or a more updated quote? That is a great who wouldn’t? And it’s going to give you the opportunity to really understand how and values. If you do enough of those, you know, you’re just going to start start to get what’s going on in your marketplace. And everybody always wants to know what their home is worth, whether they’re moving or not. We all want to know it. What are possibly our largest asset for most people is the largest asset. What that if it’s appreciating or depreciating? I love that idea. Well,
Caroline Hobbs 40:19 it also creates, I think, earlier in the call, you’re asking me about how I’m helping my newer agents stay busy. It creates conversations. So for internet leads, the average are, you know, you’ll typically sell maybe 5%. If you’re, if you’re good at converting on the low side, it’s like two to 3%. So what that tells me is that I need to have more conversations in order to produce more transactions. And sometimes, you know, internet leads are not the best. So you have to go outside the box. Circle dialing can work with the Z estimates as well.
D.J. Paris 41:02 What is circle dialing? Can you explain that to our audience? Yeah, circle
Caroline Hobbs 41:05 dialing is choosing a farm area. A lot of people do this with postcards, and mail marketing. Circles dialing is essentially taking that physical mail farm that you’re used to reaching out to and calling their phones. So there’s many different companies out there that will give you access to the phone numbers like red X Vulcan seven. And then there’s other companies that will link in and you can actually do like voicemail drops. Hey, this is Caroline Hobbs, your lantana Wisteria neighborhood realtor just wanted to give you a call this home just closed escrow and I thought you might be interested, they received multiple offers, give me a call if you’re curious and want to learn more. By the
D.J. Paris 41:52 way, this is such a great idea. I got very excited, I was waiting for her to finish, which is not what you’re supposed to do as an interviewer because I’m so excited. This is such a brilliant idea. Because think about this, you sell a home in a in a subdivision or neighborhood, right? And you want to you want to blanket the neighborhood by saying hey, by the way, it just sold so and so’s home. I’d love to chat with you. That’s that’s challenging to do unless you’re knocking door to door and I don’t even think people really appreciate that. Mostly, I mean, it’s pens, I guess where you live and make it the worst. That’s true, too. But if you have the fortitude to Dornoch, I applaud you. I just I think that that’s going the way of the dodo. So one thing that you can do is start to call but you know, maybe there’s 100 homes in that subdivision and yeah, you know, that’s kind of a lot of work to call 100 people using something like Sly dial where it’s going to drop right into their voicemail, you know, just say, hey, you know, and you wouldn’t say their first name, of course, because you would just record at once. But hey, this home just sold down the street wanted to, you know, suggest, you know, exactly, we actually Carolyn said it much better, and I won’t try to do what she said. But it’s such a brilliant idea, because everybody is interested also in their neighbor’s properties, because that’s gonna affect their properties, you know, that activity. So. And the other thing for open houses, you can do this with open houses, too. You can start, you know, schedule an open house and then blanket the neighborhood a couple of days before. Yeah, because everybody’s nosy. They want to see what’s inside of their neighbor’s home.
Caroline Hobbs 43:19 Well, you know, it’s funny, and it happens all the time. I get realtors that come or not realtors, but I get neighborhood homeowners that come in. And they’re like, we just wanted to creep on the house and see what it looks like inside. We’re not really in the market. We’re just or it’s like somebody will text me. Do you know what this sold for? I was creeping on Zillow and I see that it’s pending. Just don’t know those are like my star people. And now they have my phone number from the voicemail drops, and they know that I’m the person with the information about sales in the neighborhood.
D.J. Paris 43:54 Absolutely. It’s such a great idea and I actually think this is a great place to wrap up because you just gave our audience a really amazing couple of suggestions for how to stay busy. I mean guys, let’s just recap some of them number one if you’re not doing open houses, beg beg everyone in your office who has a listing Can I please please please come sit in open house for you Saturday, Sunday, whatever, and do as many of those as possible because not not only will it get you familiar with talking to buyers, it will also possibly get you some leads as well and just a lot of experience so that’s that’s a no brainer. We all know that. Now this idea of the Zestimate or as Caroline says the Z estimate I it’s too much work for me to say the estimate so I’m going to say is estimate I’m under the weather so I’m going to try to conserve my energy but but anyway, her idea is an amazing one. So if you’re new everybody you know just you know if you’d if you don’t know if they own or rent call them and say hey, do you do on your property? I’m, I’m you know, I just got my license can I I want to practice on on you and I want to, I’m going to send you something, you know, again, this is we want to condition these, these, these, your sphere to know that this is what you do. And by the way, it’s great experience as well to learn about pricing, learn about what Zillow sends out there. So that as an agent, because we know the number one place, consumers are going to see their value of their home is Zillow, like that’s where they’re going. So it’s a real good idea for you to know what theirs estimate is so that they don’t call you and say, just notice my homes at like 500 grand, you know, what I would do, I would put everybody’s address in there. And I as an agent, all my clients, everyone in my sphere, so that I get alerts for their homes, so that I could be the one to contact them and say, Oh, I just saw Zillow updated their estimate for your home, I want to take a closer look at that myself and see if it’s right. Brilliant idea. And we also talked about, you know, doing things with inside of neighborhoods, you can get these phone numbers, circle marketing, you can get these these phone numbers, and you can, you don’t have to call everyone if you don’t like cold calling, nobody likes cold calling, you could do a slide I’ll drop it in, hey, we got an open house coming up, or I just sold the home down the street. If you’re and we had multiple offers, and it sold for above listing, if you’re interested in seeing what your home might be worth right now, give me a ring not are you looking to sell? Because they’re they’re looking to sell or they’re not. But would you be interested in finding out what your home value is worth? Who wouldn’t say yes to and you know what? I’ve lived in a new development for two and a half years. And yeah, I’m in the business. But I’m not a practicing realtor. So I don’t think anybody thinks of me as a realtor, because I’m really not. Not one agent has ever called me to go, Hey, I know you bought a couple years ago, would you like to know what it’s worth right now? Now I know because I look at Zillow or whatever. But most of my construction
Caroline Hobbs 46:43 are like my hidden. Yes, like hidden source for new seller leads. You know, most people are going to move between years two and four in a new home development, and then it starts to kind of trickle and become more random. But you’re 100% right.
D.J. Paris 47:02 Not even one postcard not a full mile, not a postcard, it is wild. So and we have 45,000 agents here in Chicago, not one of them is doing it. So or at least it made my development. So great, great stuff from Caroline. And by the way, guys, she has leads. And that’s not the reason to go to her firm, because that is never a good reason to go to a firm, it is a nice thing that she does have leads now. So definitely reach out if but I think more importantly, is the skill building. And she actually does that every single week with her agents, she learned from the best. So why not learn from her, and she’s crushing it as well. So please, everyone go visit, especially if you’re in the San Jose area, reward realty.org see if you might be a good fit for Caroline and her brokerage. And for those of you that were really interested in some of the tech stuff she’s doing, where she’s integrating a client portal, and an agent portal with all systems sort of talking to each other, so that you don’t have to go in and out of various solutions to do your work. Reach out to her as well. And there’s a link in our show notes where you can schedule time to chat with her about whether this would be a good fit for your team, your brokerage, or just yourself. So Caroline, thank you so much for being on the show You were amazing. I really appreciate your your insight. And the advice you gave to our listeners was incredible. So we on behalf of the listeners I thank you for coming on the show on behalf of Carolina and myself we think our listeners to you guys are the reason we continue to do this, please we ask you to do just one thing, but I’m going to ask for actually two things. One, the most important thing is telephoned think of one other agent that you know isn’t maybe doing as well this year. By the way, that’s just about everybody. Maybe they’re a little dejected, a little down maybe they’re not at a firm like Caroline’s where they’re not getting as much skill training as possible. Shoot them a link to this. It’s gonna give him a couple of great ideas to stay busy. Please do that for us that will help us get in front of more more realtors. And also leave us a review that whatever app you’re listening to us on, let us know what you think of the show. We appreciate that as well. Caroline, thank you so much. You’re amazing. And I’m excited to hear more about the tech development as it goes. And maybe we’ll have you back when it launches and we’ll do a demo and have some fun. So thanks. Thanks. And everyone else we’ll see on the next episode. Thanks guys. Awesome.
The Very Best Idea For Real Estate Newsletters • Nicole Hajdu
Sep 20, 2023
Nicole Hajdu with Hajdu Group Dream Town talks about her experience and how she got into the real estate business. Nicole discussed how she got influenced by her father to get her real estate license and how she began thinking about business. Next, Nicole emphasizes the importance of marketing and how it impacts the real estate business. Last, Nicole discusses the importance of sending personalized letters to clients and how this helps maintain the relationship with them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today you’re going to learn my favorite tip of all time for creating amazing real estate newsletters. Oh add a lot of other great stuff to stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through this show. In just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer, Nicole Heidi but before we get to Nicole, just a couple of quick reminders please tell a friend about this podcast. Think of one other agent that maybe could use some tips from top producers like Nicole or maybe somebody who is already a top producer but is struggling a little bit and wants to hear from other top producers I’m sure you we all know other agents out there who are struggling. It is 2023 and it is a tough year for agents let’s help them out. Tell them about our show. That helps us out we thank you for that. Also leave us a review we really appreciate that whatever podcast app you’re checking us out on let us know what you think of the show. And you know what let’s just get right to the main event my conversation with a friend of mine and one of my favorite people in this industry. Nicole Hi do.
K today on the show we have Nicole Hi do from the high do group with Dream town here in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Nicole. With over a decade of real estate experience under her belt Nicole’s unmatched local expertise and dedication to our clients is evident in every real estate transaction. She provides her clients with highly personalized, collaborative and stress free stress free real estate experience. Nicole takes the time to listen to the needs of her clients and help them navigate the real estate process with ease. She is a highly driven individual and attributes her real estate success with her passion for learning and development. Nicole has also been named a Chicago Association of Realtors top producer and a dream town top producer every single year since 2016. And most recently was awarded at the five star professional. She’s I’m sorry, she’s a five star Professional Award winner and member of the Forbes 500 list as the founder of the high new group. Nicole and her team are proud to offer clients the best in class experience and strategies that they deserve. The height of group brings together the art and science of real estate relying on the tried and true methodologies to achieve success while elevating this process for clients. Please, everyone follow Nicole at the high do group real estate and I will that is spelled H A J D you but I will have a link to that in the show notes. So you don’t have to type it in. Because you would probably not get it through the way I’m pronouncing it. But also follow a goat please visit our website the how to group.com Again, that’s H AJJDUHAJD. You Nicole, welcome to the show.
Nicole Hajdu 4:25 Thank you, JJ. Thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:28 I would like before we get started just to say what a fantastic person Nicole is, at least to me, because this is just what a giver she has. And I don’t know that anyone will even care about the story but it meant something to me. So I’m going to share it. So Nicole is somebody I did not know we had no interaction I believe up until I somehow started receiving some emails from her. I probably signed up for it somewhere. And I started getting these really cool emails that I was very impressed by that she was sending out to her sphere of influence, and just on an off chance that she might want to chat with me or maybe even know who I am. I assume she didn’t. I sent her a message, I think on her email saying, I’m so impressed with this. Could I call you I just have a few quick questions. And she was like, Oh, my God, totally. So I called her she was in the middle of a conference, I think, with Tom Ferry, and like, somewhere in the southwest part of the country. And she just immediately picked up and we were talking like we had known each other for a long time. And here we are today, getting to speak to each other on the show. I’m a huge, huge fan of Nicole. She’s lovely, sweet person. And I’m glad to have you here. So Nicole, welcome.
Nicole Hajdu 5:38 Thank you. And I do remember that I remember, like yesterday, because you’re a bit of a celebrity in my eyes. It was a nice day.
D.J. Paris 5:46 I don’t have any awards, you have lots of awards, you’re the celebrity.
Nicole Hajdu 5:52 But I do remember that. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 5:54 actually, it’s funny, they make up awards for podcasters. And we’ve gotten about 20 different ones, or more than that. And they’re like, they’re not, they’re not really awards. They’re just, you know, somebody makes stuff up, and you know, whatever, but, but you get real awards that you’ve earned in one. So I am very impressed. But let’s, um, let’s, I don’t really know your story. So I’d love to hear how you got into real estate and why and, and, you know, sort of what keeps you going,
Nicole Hajdu 6:21 Okay, well, I got into real estate in 2007, when everybody was getting out of real estate, because it was the crash, right? And everybody was getting out, I got in and I didn’t think twice about it. I took I got my my license when my kids were four and three years old. And I remember that like yesterday, too, because I’d have to put them to bed and study and, and get my highlighter out and do fun stuff to pass that test. And I actually had three different jobs. I had my own business, I had a little print business, I was running, I worked in remodeling. And I was I was starting to do a little bit, you know, just getting into the real estate, right? So I was I was running around like crazy with these two kids. And my my then husband was in the police department and he worked opposite shifts. So it was me alone with the two kids and studying and got my license that way my dad was really influential me getting my license because he had his broker’s license. And but the year before he passed away, he said, get your license, you really need to do this, you need to either get your license become an agent, or you maybe own your own brokerage do something with it, because I’ve always wanted to own my own business. My dad was small business owner had a second generation plumbing contractor, commercial plumbing contractor. So being an old school Sicilian owning a plumbing company from 1929, you can imagine he put me to work when I was 11 years old, doing payroll. And you might remember this payroll was done on a ledger with a ruler, right. And I hate that somebody’s doing that 11 So I was working for him from 11 years old. And it really, really taught me a lot about business, integrity, you know, showing up when I needed to and structure and business planning because I got to live that life for so long. So he’s the one who influenced me into real estate, I got my license. And shortly after that, I had my daughter and about a year after that I ended up getting divorced. So I had three kids that a one year old, you know, a five and six year old and ended up winning my remodeling gay guy was there because I was in corporate and I went to Loyola University and I studied creative writing and photography, nothing nothing used for my career directly. But it was a good legal Critical Thinking type of major I had and gave me the ability to pretty much do anything I wanted in my life, which I’m grateful for, for having that education. But you know, being on my own and I’m glad my dad told me to do that and and get my license, but being on my own and having to have that flexible schedule. Because I needed to pick up my kids, I couldn’t have a nine to five. So it was pretty much baptism by fire. And I did that in 2007 Getting into market when nobody was getting in. I really was getting out so I really had to hustle, learn everything I could possibly learn through not podcasts then but through just training, Googling everything I can classes and I really just immerse myself in everything just to learn so I can be on my own with the with the three small kids. So it took me a few years, a few years to get to that point. But that’s how but that’s how I got started. So
D.J. Paris 9:58 it’s fine. I love the expression, if you want something done, give it to a busy mother or just give it to a mother, because it’ll get done. And I always find, you know, I’ve had a lot of moms on the show who started their career while they had children, like you did. And you know, you just think about how challenging that must be. And yet, people do it. So I always I applaud the mothers who take this as a career because I, I am a single person who does not have children, and doesn’t have a lot of responsibilities that I’m absolutely tied to. And I find it much harder to even, you know, stay on track myself, but boy, moms are really impressive, with, of course, everything they do. And so also, I was thinking too, that you got in the business 22,007, right, when things were not looking good. After the height of the market, like 22,005, and then 22,008, everything started to crash, maybe even 2007 A bit. And that is a very challenging time, at least, a lot of our agents today, or a lot of our listeners rather, they may be feeling a similar sort of way. Because of course, the market is a little challenging. Right now we know, interest rates are gosh, I was seeing today, like 7.2 is the average for a 30 year fixed, which obviously is much higher than anyone would would like. But it’s just a tough time right now, there’s a lot of people sitting on the sidelines, not a lot of listings, as well. So I think this is a really good timing for to have you on because we can talk about how you sort of persevered through a very difficult several years. So how did you start prospecting? Once you were, you know, getting into this career? What worked for you then? And how did you sort of start finding clients?
Nicole Hajdu 11:50 Well, I had to really think about how I wanted to do this and get the word out. And why would people trust me, especially with selling their home? Like buyers? Sometimes when you’re starting out, we all get more buyers than we do? listings, right? It just the net, just human nature for people to trust you maybe to drive them around and purchase a property more so than just that. So I’ve really kind of dug into, okay, what are my skill sets? What do I do? Well, what would make a difference in this industry? I always knew that I wanted to own a business, run a business and act like a business and not just have it be maybe like a you know, like a hobby. And I think people sometimes forget that in real estate, and forget that they have to run a business. So it was it was something I was doing at the same time like okay, business mind, and what are my skill sets and I looked at, okay, my college education. I started my own businesses from when I was younger, different little things I was doing. But I also worked in corporate. So I worked in TV production, I worked in advertising. We had big clients like Pillsbury, and Air Transat. And then I, and then I worked in. So I was first a print company, they knew a lot about print, then I worked into advertising, and then I went into TV production. So it was all aspects of marketing. So I took my background in marketing, and business development in terms of like project management. And I moved into real estate. So I wanted to get that out there. Yes, I know a lot about marketing, and I can market your home. And there’s I know about print and I know what quality is. And I started elevating that and reaching out to people through really just meetings like my neighbor. My neighbor told me that was my first deal with my neighbor. He’s like, we’re gonna look at building a home. I said, Listen, I’m getting my license right now. Please, please do not list with anybody. I’m going to list your house and sell your house. And every day I saw her I might almost I’m getting my license give me like two more weeks, two more weeks. And she was my first client. And she ended up we ended up selling to a really wonderful couple who I’m still friends with to this day. And that was 2007 was my first my first deal. And then I started marketing to my blog. Okay, well people know that I’m here. They know that I’m in real estate, or they heard that I’m in real estate because I’m telling them. We had black parties had mentioned that. I would send out postcards around the block. I would make phone calls. And I know right now I’m at Dream town. Uvalde Danny, who is the founder of dream town, he is really, really big on pick up the phone. If you just pick up the phone and call people. You never know it’s such a great opportunity to hear what they’re saying. Talk to them about whatever how’s the kids now we have we have access now to people’s lives that we never had before in 2007, right? Like I can See what you’re doing. I could see anything about your life and people could see about my life and pick up the phone and call and ask, right. And sometimes it leads to the best conversations or a connection. Or, hey, you know what I was just thinking about selling my house or my mom needs to sell our house, whatever it may be, it’s usually just organically happens if you reach out. So that’s what I started doing. I just started putting myself in opportunity in the way of opportunity. And I think people forget that too. You got to get out there and put yourself in that space to receive some opportunity.
D.J. Paris 15:36 You said a lot there. And a lot of great things to unpack. One of the things that I wanted to touch on was the phone that you mentioned, being that you and I are in a in the same generation. So we grew up with the phone, you and I grew up talking on the phone to friends, you were probably asked out on your first date via telephone, or at least that’s how it worked for where I grew up. And it was it was a lot of phone phones were really, really important. And of course to people today, anyone under 30, or even probably under 35 even, just don’t, they didn’t grow up using the phone. It wasn’t it wasn’t significant to them. And so as a result, they’re not really in that habit. However, I find that people are often very impressed with getting phone calls, as long as they’re, you know, not salesy, and whatever. But it just isn’t that common anymore. So I’m a huge fan of that to even talking to younger people even having, you know, the Gen, the Gen X Gen Z, people who aren’t really big on the phone curious to if you still are doing as much phone calling as you as you were before.
Nicole Hajdu 16:46 I am in fact, I’m doing more of it. Because I’m really big into coaching, I love coaching, I’ve hired coaches, and they all say the same thing, personal notes, send out the marketing, the postcards, newsletters, or personal notes and phone calls, I think those make the most difference in, in our business. There’s, I’ve been receiving a personal personal note in the mail, I feel like it’s a lost art.
D.J. Paris 17:16 And it’s it’s one of the right, it’s one of the greatest feelings. And it only happens to me, I actually have one right here that I just got that was like, from the or the association, they wrote me a nice, thank you, I get maybe two or three of those a year maybe. So it does, it really makes makes me feel good at least.
Nicole Hajdu 17:38 And I’ll write them you know, like, I know, Ninja says, you know, get out there and write five note cards three to five a week. Different coaching programs have different recommendations. But I started that maybe 12 years ago when I was doing Buffini. And in sometimes I get off schedule on that. And I just have to sit, you just have to sit down and prep yourself, you have to have your note cards there and know what your routine is every day and do the time blocking and the scheduling. I mean, it’s really all hands on deck when you think about marketing, because marketing is everything in business. And you know, it’s like gets your name out there.
D.J. Paris 18:15 100%. And also, you were creative writing major, or that’s what you studied in college. And that too, is not obviously not everyone has that kind of background or that skill set. But if you have the ability to write, and you know, you’re somebody that that has, you know, that is an avid reader or an avid writer, and you sort of have an awareness of of, of how to construct sentences, you can really make yourself stand apart even just in your listing descriptions. And for anyone listening who’s like, I’m not a good writer, that’s not what I’m good at chat. GBT is here to help, and they can you just throw in your existing listing and say, make this more emotionally appealing. And they’re gonna it does a pretty good job, you know, people like you and I have to, we would always do that manually. And that was something that that you know, you and I are skilled at. And then other people now can sort of catch up a little bit. So that’s just a little little tip for anyone out there who doesn’t feel like maybe there is skilled at that. But you really do. You are an excellent marketer. And I want to just highlight one of your things. And I’ve talked to you about this ad nauseam, I’m sure and, but to the audience, they don’t know this. So I want to just to talk about this one thing that you do, and I know you do a million other things, too. So I just want to focus on this because this is how I got really impressed with you and and I should mention, like my role here at our firm is I recruit realtors, and I I’ve never thought for a second that I would be able to recruit Nicole because it’s just not the kind of realtors that we really recruit. She’s a total superstar and we don’t oftentimes get you know superstars like that. But I was so impressed with this. I thought man this is this is so wonderful that I wanted to mention it just because I don’t think anyone’s ever talked about it. I on my show, in the six years I’ve had it. So I know it’s just one thing that you do. But can you talk about your email newsletter that you do every week, and sometimes even more than once a week, I feel like you do other things. But let us tell our audience what you do and why you do it.
Nicole Hajdu 20:15 Sure. So I do I do a, a postcard version, and then like a newsletter version. So the postcard version that I send out, which is an E blast, it is what things to do in the city, and things to do in the suburbs. And I send it to, I send a suburban one once a week, and the city one wants in or certain one, once a month in the city one once a week. Because people want to know, hey, especially if they have kids, family, people visiting, they want to know what to do in the city. And it’s something of value. So I want to be at top of mind all the time, I want them to think of me as their go to real estate person. So in order to do that, you have to touch them so many times a year. And part of that touch strategy, or is or campaign, if you will, is to do these newsletters, you know, let them know what’s going on in the neighborhood, what we’re doing as a team. And we’re even revising our newsletters and sending out letters now, handwritten sign letters, that state you know, what we’ve been doing as a team, what we’re looking to do in events. And we’re also going to then make that into the newsletter that we send out once a month. And we have a great marketing team that puts it together. And it’s very professional, and it goes to our out to our sphere. So we have multiple touches a month, throughout the year, where people will not forget that okay, Nicole Hyde, who does real estate, let’s call him the call. He’s that are you know, finger on the pulse, she listed this, she’s in our neighborhood, she’s doing this, her team is doing that. You know, and, and we talk about how our team is growing. And for people who are just starting out, you started out, you know, you start out, however you can, I mean, I I remember I lost a listing, pretty big listing early on. And the woman had a quick fact sheet. And the the seller said it was between you and this other person. But she had all her information on a quick fact sheet that just had bullet points, right, of what she’s doing, and what she’s accomplished and her credentials. And I’m like, Oh my god. So I started that, you know what, I only had like three things on it. At the time, it was very sparse of a quick fact sheet. But over the years it grew and grew. And now it’s over a page, right? And I use it all the time. And it’s the same thing. Just start it. Even if you don’t have a lot to put in an E blast or a newsletter, just start it and it will naturally just unfold and and create into something beautiful, that you can use and be a value. Totally
D.J. Paris 23:01 agree. And I want to spend a few moments on the what to do this weekend newsletter five things to do this weekend. Because this is a decision that literally, I’m just making this up every human being pretty much on the planet who has, you know, their weekends free is thinking about at some point during the week, oftentimes not until Thursday night or Friday night. Oh my god, what are what am I doing this weekend, at least that’s how I oftentimes feel. And what’s really amazing is it’s a decision or it’s something I have to think about every single week. So the genius of this to me is that you are basically filling the need. So she sends out this newsletter with the things to do in the city. And if you live in the suburbs, she sent you the suburb one. This is so easy to put together while it takes work, of course, but it’s so easy because we can just go to there’s websites that accumulate this and Nicole actually has a tough, difficult job. Because here in Chicago, we have hundreds of things going on every single weekend. She picks five things that she thinks is really interesting for the city. And it’s it’s so useful. And it condenses because there’s hundreds of things going on, I can see what she thinks are the top things to look at this weekend. And I use this and I think this is so brilliant. Because I get to look at this ever. I have always been somebody who thinks, gosh, I just want more suggestions in my life. Like I just want people to say you should go do this or you should like I did this with the US Open. I’m a tennis player, but I don’t watch tennis on TV. Well enough people over the years said if you ever get the chance to go to the US Open you should do that. I was like okay, I don’t I wouldn’t normally think to do that. And I just did it and because people told me to because it was a suggested to me so this is exactly right in that wheelhouse. Well, but people do this every single week. So they have to make these decisions for their family for themselves. what was gonna happen on the weekend our Realtors we don’t often think about the weekends because realtors are working oftentimes during the weekend but everyone else is trying to figure out what they want to do socially. So this is such a great idea. Hey, guys, I’m so impressed with Nicole, and she never miss it. She never misses it, she always gets it out. And it’s just something you and I’m sort of hooked on it. Like, now I’m hooked on it. I would, it would be strange for me to not see it once a week. And I might even think, Oh, I wonder if something’s wrong if she didn’t send it. So that’s really what you want is you want people hooked on your content, so that they’re waiting for it and anticipating it. And I just really applaud you for that as a really smart idea. And I don’t it takes it takes consistency, of course to do it. But over time, people just I’m sure you get a lot of feedback from people saying, Wow, that that’s so great.
Nicole Hajdu 25:37 We do it, we get feedback saying hey, listen, can you can you send me the magnet, I send them the magnets, they have it on their fridge when you walk into the house. And and I’ll go to events and people will say oh, thanks for sending its thank you for sending me what to do this weekend, I always look forward to it. Because I never know what to do. And the suggestions are right there or you forget you forget the date you forget the festivals going on or whatever it is, you’re not going to you just people just want easy, they want the easy button. And it’s just an easy way to provide value and, and let people know like, Hey, I’m here for you, you know, I got your back on what to do this weekend.
D.J. Paris 26:12 It’s really, it’s, it seems so simple. And I guess it is a simple idea. But it is a very important one to consider doing something that people are going to consistently need even between transactions, because you know, people are only buying or selling a home, I don’t know, every 710 years, whatever the stat is. So of course, they’re not going to really probably need your real estate newsletter every single month. Although it’s nice to do that, and certainly not a bad idea. But if you also can send them something that they do need every single week with like, if I was a mother, for example, or if I had small children, and I had a lot of people in my sphere of influence that had children, I might do a thing for kids, you know, here’s some cool kids events or whatever. And Nicole does things like that, which I think is so so smart. So there’s there’s that. And I also, this is Oh, we should mention too, that if anyone is listening, who is an agent who is looking to maybe join a team or maybe move from their existing brokerage or just explore other opportunities. This is the year we’re seeing a lot of agents move around to from offices. And it’s a great time to consider what other options exist. So Nicole, not only is Nicole a coach, and she really enjoys coaching, and she coaches her team, she also is coached herself. So I always think the best coaches have coaches. So Nicole and her team can do that. So if anyone out there thinks they might be a good asset to Nicole’s team or really is looking for more of that coaching. From you know that they’re not getting at their current firm to call what’s what’s the best way that an agent should reach out to you?
Nicole Hajdu 27:48 Either phones 773-727-2199, or my email, which is n hi, do H A J? Do you add drink? town.com?
D.J. Paris 28:00 Awesome. Did I did I spell that incorrectly? Any? Right? It’s a wonderful Hungarian name. So yes, let’s talk about this year. So let’s talk about the challenges of this year. And love to hear kind of what your team is how you’re keeping your team motivated, what you’re sort of having them do today, or while things are a little more challenging to just stay productive and stay moving forward.
Nicole Hajdu 28:33 Sure. So this year is different, very different than the last two to three years, right. I mean, I always say the last two to three years were just a complete anomaly. And they gave us momentum and more clients to build on. But yet very, very hard to look at the last two, three years in terms of numbers and think that that’s going to be just as easy to replicate going forward. It really I mean, I’ve never been busier than I was in the last couple years. I’ve done more real estate, hired and fired and hired new people and people laughed and just you know, a lot of changes a lot of changes in everybody’s lives. And now we’re up against another change. But you’ve been doing real estate for a while, you know, every year it changes no year is ever, ever the same. And I think when people first get into real estate, they don’t realize that I don’t think I even realized that that every year is different. There’s so many challenges there’s so many things in and economics that change politics, you know, depending on whether or not it’s a a year for office, it just there’s so much that goes on where it’s human nature for people to pay attention to these things and then react with everybody else reacting to if everybody else is holding off. Well, there must be a reason I’m scared. I don’t want to make that change. Right. So Oh, during COVID? Nope, we just stopped. I don’t think I mean, I didn’t list properties I say for probably about four weeks, right and COVID started. But I was still working. And I was reaching out to people. And I said, this is a great time to catch up on everything that I wasn’t doing. Making my phone calls, sending my letters, doing social media, thinking out of the box about, okay, how am I going to survive during this? Because we don’t know what’s going to happen? And are we going to have a job in two months, right, three months next year. So what did I do, I listed my house in the first four weeks at COVID. I said, if I’m going to tell everybody else to do this, I gotta do it. So I listed my house figured out how I was going to manage photography during COVID, how he’s going to manage staging, how he’s going to manage the entire transaction showings everything. And if I could do it, and successfully do it, I could tell my clients to do it, right, if that’s what they desired, because there was a great opportunity there, for people who were saving and ready to move, jump on it, get that low rate. So and that’s what I did. And then over the years, as things change, I knew things were going to change too, wasn’t always going to be just low hanging fruit. So now we’re into that change. And due to rates, rates are kind of putting a little bit of a hold on the market. There’s not as many people we’re listing properties, but there’s not as many people looking and there’s not as many offers, the offers aren’t, sometimes aren’t coming in where we want them to come in. So it’s it’s a shift in our thinking, a shift in our marketing shift and our pricing. And our team has seen it, we see it, we hear it on the news, we you know, podcasts that we listened to like everybody’s talking about it, it’s a change. So the team, it’s really important to keep up with the coaching and the training and educating yourself. But with my team, we’re constantly talking about what can we do to add value to our clients? What can we do to be there for our clients, and keep getting better at what we’re doing and know the market and know what’s happening and be able to guide our clients in a way where they understand that they can still get to their goal. Maybe it’s now maybe it’s in you know, six months or a year from now, but we’re here to help them. And we’re doing it by still showing our properties that we’re listing and selling, sending out the postcard sending out the newsletter, the five things to do this weekend. events, events are a really nice thing that you can do to your, for your clients, and get people together and have that community. Especially for people who want to get to know you more get to know what you do, or maybe a buyer seminar, there’s so many things that we can put out there. And we’re looking at putting it out there monthly, and quarterly and then once a year or two. So I think that really helps in a changing market, you have to be super creative, willing to spend money, when you don’t know if money is going to be coming in at the same rate. Or if you’re just starting, you got to spend the money to make money. And I think people forget that too in a business because so many businesses are brick and mortar and you have to get a business loan, we don’t have that it’s credit card, put on your credit card, write a check, we have to invest in ourselves. So I keep telling the team and myself like I need to sit down I need to invest in myself. And to give back do volunteer work get involved in things that you like, I do volunteer work for Maryville, I love it. And it’s something that I take time away from real estate in my family to do to give back. But it’s that experience that motivates you to do more in your business and more in your personal life and, and share things with the people around you. So I think it’s just, there’s a lot of things that go into being successful during a changing market. And I think you have to touch on all those things and really sit down and think about what do you want? What is the message you want? What kind of branding Do you want? Who’s your ideal client? That’s a big one too. And when that always changes? I remember I worked with six week for six weeks with a coach just having me write down my ideal client. Because at first you’re not getting your ideal client. You’re like, oh my god, do you want it? Sure. Yeah, let’s go out 700 times to go look at a house because your first deal right? And have it go south like three times before you close down. That’s how real estate ends up and then you know it starts off. So I think there’s just a lot that goes into it. And as you do this longer and longer you learn that it’s not just marketing. It’s getting yourself out there for events and being creative and giving back to your clients and giving back to the community and doing things at the school promoting. I have a big banner in the school I’m part of the faster Okay, on the school website, I mean, that was consistent for like eight years, and I get a lot of my business from the kids school. So it’s, it’s reputation, it’s doing the best that you can and keeping your being into it and having integrity. So then people can pass on your name and trust you, right? Oh, no, I have somebody for you, I have somebody for you. Because 90% of my business is by referral. And I think that’s what we really need to do and focus on building those relationships. So every year that the market changes, you got to analyze it and look at okay, what do I want? Do I want higher price point? Do I want more people? What kind of people do I want? And how am I going to do that, through marketing through events, they’re getting out there in the community, you can do all of it. And, and what you do now happens, you get you see the reward and about three months.
D.J. Paris 35:52 Interesting. So I want to say that so you see the reward in about three months, can you just say a little bit more about that?
Nicole Hajdu 36:00 Whatever we do now takes about three months to show the results. So if I make a phone call right now, and I have my list of phone calls to make, but make a phone call, I might not see that listing or that closing for about three months, that’s the timespan from speaking to somebody to actually having something come in place. Now it’s a numbers game, you got to talk to maybe 100 people to have X amount of deals. But it’s about three months.
D.J. Paris 36:33 Yeah, I agree. And I guess, really, what I’m hearing you say is a lot of just consistency and making sure that you’re not too heavily influenced by sort of what’s out there in the ether or in news media about how challenging this market could be, or even other agents talking about it. That is obviously a big topic. When I talk to other agents, when I see them socially or at events, I, you know, people just they’re struggling, it’s, it’s it’s a tough market right now. So it’s easy to, to think, Well, gosh, everyone’s struggling. And when we feel that way, oftentimes, that’s going to decrease motivation to continue doing the sort of normal building business building activities that that we should be doing. And I think it’s really important to know what’s going on, of course, in in the, in the industry and in the market, but also to not be too influenced by it. Because like you said, you know, yeah, today might be a day that isn’t great because of rates and but in three months, we don’t know. And we’re going to start to see people, you know, the results of our of our things. So you really, I always think it’s like you’re just doing your future self a favor, like whatever you do today, you’re doing us a favor for your future self. And, you know, the good news is, it can be a really crappy day today, because it’s not going to matter. In three months, we’re gonna have a different set of challenges and a different set of opportunities. And if I can just continue working today that’s going to bear fruit, you know, here in the near near future, not even a year from now, two years from now. So I think that’s a really important thing for people to think about today is know what’s going on, but don’t get too caught up in it. Because what you’re doing today isn’t about today anyway, it’s about three months from now. That’s right, or,
Nicole Hajdu 38:24 yeah, and it’s a numbers game. That’s why you have to write notes and call people because you have to reach out to as many people as you possibly can daily to, to be to be making a living when the market takes a step back, right? Because it always does. It’s always up and down, up and down. And if you look at the statistics over the last, you know, 75 years, you could see it going like this all the time. So it’s just timing. And I’ve been doing this long enough where the timing just was perfect during COVID for me to move, and for me to really start getting my name out there. It was just perfect timing. And there’s nothing I could control about that except my, my everyday actions. And it just hit that level of that opportunity. Just hit at the right time for me, and for my team. So and I mean like you like you just, you didn’t all of a sudden just start interviewing 20 people a week. That didn’t happen you it was hey, I have this idea. Everything is an idea. Got to get it out of your head and implement it somehow. And yeah, you gotta remember to be you too.
D.J. Paris 39:37 That’s it and, you know, clients do really like to see the agents doing things that seem authentic to that agent, and seem that you know, is is doing something of value. So I agree it’s I always like when people ask me like, boy, what’s your do right now. And like, I don’t think it really matters, just do, you know two or three things every day that are, you know, specific to getting your name out there in a way that’s comfortable for you. Like, for me, I’m, I’m not somebody, I’m not a practicing agent. So I don’t have just listed just sold kind of experiences in my life because I don’t do that. But, but there’s other things I do that I want to highlight on social media. So you know, depending on everyone’s whose listings personality, what you’re willing to share what you’re willing not to share, what we do know for sure is that your, your sphere of influence, and clients want to see you doing something that you enjoy, whether it’s being a realtor, or even maybe being being a mom, or just being a good citizen, or doing something that that is, you know, not a hey, look how great I am. Look at how much I contribute. But more of a just, this is what I’m really into, like when you started talking about the school, like you got a little bit excited, you were like, I like doing that. And, and, and I like participating. And I like giving back and you know with Maryville, you’ve dimensioned. And so, those those things are you, as soon as Nicole said that, if you’re watching it, you can see her face lit up, and that I feel the same way about some of the things that I’m involved with, and you can see it. And so that’s the kind of stuff that you want your clients to see as well, that like, you know, I have passion for the industry. And you know, here’s a little bit more about what you know what I’m into outside of the industry as well. And here’s how I help the community because real estate is hyperlocal. And we need to think about the community. I also wanted to ask you about, about, gosh, I just I just lost what I was going to ask you, but I will ask you about coaching. Because I know that is obviously something very important to you. You’re a top producer, you have a coach, and you also coach, your team, and maybe even other agents. Tell us a little bit about how important coaching is to you today, and how you like what you go to your coach for what does the top producer bring to their coach. So
Nicole Hajdu 42:03 interests so the coaching has developed over the years, I’ve got my first coach when I was getting divorced, I had no idea if I was making the right decision how to navigate it. So I hired a coach. I said this is I need to know this. I don’t know what I don’t know, right? So I put it on my credit card. I still remember it’s $3,000. And I was like, oh my god, I’m getting divorced. I have these two, three kids, not
D.J. Paris 42:27 the time to spend $3,000 $3,000
Nicole Hajdu 42:29 in a horrible market. So I did it though, and I was hooked. I’m like this woman is telling me and giving me information that I didn’t know I didn’t even know about this stuff. Like she’s putting things into my head and telling me I can she’s motivated me and giving me the support and, and making me courageous and telling me I’m I’m doing the right thing. And and then you’re like No, I am doing the right thing. This feels good. And I liked this. And I liked the information I’m getting. And I ended up getting divorced, and being able to be the breadwinner. And my family said to get remarried again. And I because because we didn’t have kids together. It’s just my three children. But I’m able to put them through private schools and have buy my own house and do all these things with this real estate career. And I owe a lot of it to the people who’ve helped me. So you’ve all helped me in my career. He’s owner and founder of dream town, he helped me quite a bit. He gave me so much opportunity. But he gave me opportunity because he saw that I showed up. And I showed up because I had the coaches behind me and information and the motivation there. And I was seeking help to become better. Because there’s I have blind spots. I can’t see everything I sometimes I do things and I don’t know that maybe that was not correct or wrong or not the best way to do it. And so I started with blue Feeny, then I then I went into the core coaching, then I did I’ve ninja done ninja, and back to core again and then I just got my coaching certificate. So I can eventually step into coaching to on a full time basis as I get older and don’t want to run around so much showing homes. But that’s not for another like 1015 years, but I’m preparing so I’m preparing for my future by getting my coaching certificate now and kind of dabbling with it and at least having a door open and be able to take that on. So with coaching I asked my my coaches that you know, you got to be upfront and honest and open. And you got to pretty much lay it all out there. Like they had a look at what I was spending and they’re like, Oh no, no, no, no. No, like, what are you doing? Because I like to spend money and I like to give money away and like donate and do all these things. And they’re like, whoa, you need to have some better business practices. And I knew that too. I just didn’t know like, Well, how do you do that? How do you do that? Show me how you do it. What do you do that works? What do you what am I doing? That’s not working? Tell me I want if you just told me, I will do it. And I think a lot of us just need that. Just tell me like what you’re saying. Just tell me make it easy. And I will go do it. And let me know what works and doesn’t work. I don’t want to find out and take five years to figure something out. That could take me three days with coaching. So I and as I started getting more and more coaching, I learned about what I needed from a coach. So I was able to ask for Tom Ferry, like it’s a Tom Ferry coaching when we talked. And I asked for a very specific coach, because I knew where I where my deficit was, what did I need help with? I needed help with time management, and I needed help with like, organizing, what am I spending per listing? What am I spending per buy? Where’s my money going? Those are the things I needed help with. And I had to ask for that specific coach. But to ask for a specific coach, you have to prove yourself and do the work prior to have that, you know, to have that luxury to do so. So I love coaching, it’s helped me greatly, and it helps my and there’s a lot of stuff I learned that I pass on to my team, and they don’t even have to pay for it. They just get it because they’re on my team. Right? Yeah. And I love sharing and they love hearing it. And they take some of it and some they don’t it depends on what you’re ready for. And when you’re ready for it.
D.J. Paris 46:44 Yeah, I agree. I wanted to ask I remember now what I had forgotten earlier, which is I want to just really quickly touch on open houses, I feel like newer agents, maybe aren’t as familiar with the importance of those. I’m curious to get your opinion on open houses, for new agents, and really, for any agent, but specifically newer agents who might be listening. You know, so we’re gonna have people of course, who are listening, who maybe are newer, who don’t have listings, they don’t have open houses to do for them their own clients. But what you know, but you you know, you can always ask other agents in your office, if you can sit for some of their open houses. Are you seeing open houses still having success for your team? And if so? Or if so, or not? What would you recommend instead?
Nicole Hajdu 47:34 Oh, open houses for for newer agents and seasoned agents. Definitely open houses, Tom Ferry is big on Mega open houses, where you invite a whole block or two to the open house, there’s so many things you can do to be creative and make it a big, a big deal and, and really get your name out there and also meet other people. And you have to learn about how to communicate with people when they come in. Because I think it’s a little bit of a trial and error thing. If you’re newer on you know, you don’t want to be like, Hey, are you approved? Are you this? Are you interested in this house like you there’s a way of doing it, right. And that takes practice. So there’s a lot of opportunity open houses. So we just brought on my son who’s at not him, but his friend. And he was amazing go getter going to college, he would do open houses, and he just sent me he’s like, I’m going to college tomorrow. But I just got this lead from a $2 million open house, I was sitting at his team. And he just closed his first deal in the first 30 days because he I sent him on showings rental showings, he could literally called every single followed up with every single person that came through for the rentals and got his first deal. So the open houses are a huge opportunity. If you you just have to put yourself in the place to receive those gifts. And you got to get out there. And it’s a great opportunity my entire team does it.
D.J. Paris 49:03 Yes, agreed. And thank you for that. And okay, so let’s I’m curious when you because people, I think oftentimes, I mean, we do this with people who are at a certain what we believe to be a higher status than we are with respect to maybe they’re at a different stage of their career. They’re, you know, bigger producer or maybe, you know, they’re just have some skills that that you feel that we don’t currently have. We looked at these people like I was at the US Open, I’m watching these, some of the very best tennis players in the entire world. And I’m like, well, it’s so easy for them. And of course it isn’t, and they’re putting in the work to get to that level. But it’s important to remember that even top producers have challenges as well. So when you find yourself unmotivated, maybe you’re maybe maybe even you have a little bit of sadness or fear or depression or whatever anxiety whatever you know is is is preventing you from being at your best? You know, how do you find the motivation to continue on despite, you know, because we all know that life gets in the way and life has challenges. So when challenges hit you, how do you persevere through them? Like, what what do you do to continue? So you’re not, you know, holed up in bed in the fetal position for weeks at a time which, and again, I’m not I’m not here to criticize anyone who is in that position, I have a lot of empathy for people that struggle that way. But when you’re feeling down, I really should be asking this question more often in my interviews, because I think it’s it’s really interesting, like, how do you stay motivated when when times are tough?
Nicole Hajdu 50:42 Wow. And I’ve been in that position, actually, when I was getting divorced with three little kids and had no money and was figuring out how the heck am I going to do this going from?
D.J. Paris 50:51 That’s a pretty depressing position. Yes,
Nicole Hajdu 50:53 it was pretty bad. There are a lot of not getting out of bed days. But I had to because for me, and I know, this isn’t for everybody. But I had three kids that were relying on me, so I had to get up and I had to pull myself together. And I think, to be in this business, you have to be a little bit outgoing. And maybe you’re an extroverted introvert, like me, I like to like my alone time. But I also like to be out there and talk to people and be social. So I think this could go for everybody who’s listening to, to this right now. That if you’re you are in this business, you’re going to be social. And that’s probably where you get a lot of your energy from. And just remember that if you’re going through a tough time, and it seems hard right now, get yourself out there go to events, I just went to a chase event last night, it was great made a new friend, talk to people we had a lot in common with. It just felt good to get out. And I remembered that’s how I also built my career was going to events, car events, the the coaching events, the seminars, just getting out there, and it kind of motivates you and pumps you up. And then you make those connections are like, oh, wait a minute, those connections, are you gonna feed my business later? Getting out there and meeting new agents and looking and hearing other people’s stories. Because everybody has a story. Every house has a story, every agent has a story. Everybody started from here, you know, to get to what we’re talking about now, especially the ones who share their stories. And I think that helps motivate people. I listen to audiobooks. So I’m on Audible on time driving in the car, I listen to so many people tell their stories about how things were not great. But guess what, when things are not great, that’s who makes you who you are. That’s what, that’s where you prove yourself to yourself, you know, your self worth you, you start to learn about a lot about yourself when things are bad.
D.J. Paris 52:51 And so I didn’t mean they’re up, but I was gonna say also you build resiliency during during challenging times, and you actually become stronger by facing, not necessarily conquering like things that are challenges because we can’t conquer our challenge all of our challenges. In fact, we can’t even conquer most of them. But we can learn how to cope with our challenges. So that they don’t completely, you know, remove us from what we know is going to be beneficial to you know, our actions. And you said something very, very powerful. I just want to say this, if anyone out there right now is struggling with you know, the markets tough and you know, everything’s about this year is a little bit more challenging, and you’re feeling demotivated or unmotivated. Rather, you said something very, very important, which is be sociable. Whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, you know, if it’s an introvert, if you’re more introverted, you maybe are just going to go out with the people that you’re closest with, that you’re most comfortable with, that aren’t going to zap your energy. But getting out of the house and being around other people that you enjoy, which is another great reason to give back and volunteer. Because if it’s something you’re passionate about, you’ll find like minded individuals. And I have the same philosophy. I have a goal every week of doing at least two but hopefully three social events a week. Now I’m a single guy, it’s easier for me to do that. I don’t have three children, which of course would would prohibit that, but if I did, I’d say okay, I want to just do one social event a week. And that could be going out with a friend, it could be going to an event hanging out with other realtors maybe volunteering something where I’m literally out of the house because I know for me, I’ve done enough social activities and other things out I know if I’m in my apartment, or in my condo, I will I can I can. I can start chasing my own tail, I can start ruminating I can start really getting into you know, the just feeling down and that’s fine. It’s okay to do that. But if you have scheduled activities where you’re forced to get out of the house and go be social, I scheduled them because I have to. I won’t be motivated to schedule them when I’m down. So I scheduled them when I’m not done. And so I try to like every week say, Okay, I got it, I want to go out and do something with somebody this week. And then, which is just how it works for me, and I always feel better. When I’m coming back from from those activities. I’m like, Oh, I’m so glad I’m not alone, you don’t have to suffer alone, I guess that’s the point is being around other people. And this is such a business where I think most Realtors do work in a silo, you know, we’re most aren’t even working in offices anymore, they’re working from home. So it’s, it’s really easy to just get trapped in your own thoughts and not realize that like, you know, there’s, there’s a sort of other world out there that can really help give you some of that motivation to then, you know, give you that extra energy to maybe even, you know, go through some of those harder times.
Nicole Hajdu 55:44 Well, yeah, you’re not alone, nobody is alone. In this, we all, when people are really truthful, you find out that we all are very alike, and suffer from the same things and, and, and get down. And if you’re social, and you’re out there, and you’re you’re gonna learn like, oh, wait, this person was feeling like I was and, and now look at them, and they got through it. And you do build resiliency through it, which we need in this business, because you’re like, sometimes it’s a really rough in this business, you get what
D.J. Paris 56:13 and there’s so much that there’s so much that happens in every transaction, there’s some something unexpected is going to happen in almost every real estate transaction. And usually, it’s going to be something that you news you don’t want to hear, because that’s just kind of how these things go. So you’re going to have these speed bumps, you know, life is going to throw these these challenges at you. And, and yeah, I think you’re right, like don’t don’t suffer in silence, you know, get out there, talk to other agents have people that you can call, because, you know, one of the things that really bothers me is is the you got this, you know, thing, and it’s like, no, you don’t always have this, and it’s okay to not have this. And that’s when you lean on other people. And you’re like, I don’t have it today. Like, I just need somebody to give me a hug, or I need somebody to tell me that I’m a worthy person, or, you know, to sort of, or I just want to go hang out with somebody and take my mind off my challenges, or I want to go to a or I want to hang out with a realtor who’s who’s crushing it right now and maybe learn a few things. You know, there’s lots of different options. But for me, I have to I have to get out of my my condo, I have to go somewhere. And I have to be very intentional about that. And I have to sort of force myself to do it. But it always works for me. So if anyone out there, we’re getting a lot of a lot of fan mail recently about people feeling depressed and alone. And I encourage you to really make those connections in the industry. Because number one, your realtor, every other realtor is probably going through similar things. And you can, you know, you can work together to keep each other to keep each other spirits up if you don’t, for example, have a coach currently. But Nicole, I think that it’s really a great place to kind of wrap because you gave so many amazing suggestions and tips. And I am such a fan of yours. And I know you have a busy team to manage and a busy business to run as well. So I want to for anyone listening out there who is really, really sort of captured by by what Nicole’s philosophies are and how she runs her team and her business. And if you think Boy, that sounds like I would like more of that. And you think that you might be a good addition to her team. Or maybe you’re an agent and another part of the country who has clients that move in and out of Chicago, you know, maybe they have you know, they’re transferring here for business. And maybe you’d want to, you know, have a referral agent that you trust. Obviously, Nicole is an excellent agent, you can chat with her about that. But if you’re local here, and you’re not getting the coaching that you deserve from your firm, and guess what, guys, most firms aren’t doing a great job of coaching, not because they it’s just firms, it’s just a difficult thing for most firms to be able to provide. Even though every firm says they do it. Most firms really struggle with that. So a lot of times now, the teams are taking over those responsibilities from the firm itself, to you know, then free up time for the firm to do other things. So Nicole is that person at her company? She works for great company as well. But you know, a lot of times let people flocked to teams just to get more individual attention. So if that is you or you just think you want to join a really great team, Nicole and hydro team would love the opportunity to chat with you again, Nicole, best way for anyone to reach out to you.
Nicole Hajdu 59:26 Sell 773-727-2199 or my email, which is n hi, do ha J Do you edrington.com Awesome.
D.J. Paris 59:36 Well, Nicole, thank you so much for your time. Today I am I’ve said this a number of times. I’m a huge fan. And I’m really really always loving what you do with marketing to so by the way guys get on her mailing list, even just to see what she’s doing. So that maybe you are in a different part of the country and you could sort of take that as inspiration to do similar marketing out firts so go to her website, you can sign up for her newsletter there as well, or reach out to her but follow her on Instagram, the Heidi group real estate, again, H A J. D, you will have links to her website, Instagram and all of her social stuff in the show notes. But check her out. She does cool stuff. And I’m a huge fan and, and even though she’ll probably never be one of our agents, I love the fact that she is doing what she’s doing at her firm. And I’m I’m going to always continue to support and follow you. So please, everyone, let’s, let’s do Oh, I’m going to ask our audience for one quick favor, please tell a friend about this episode. Think of one, one agent that could really benefit from some of the things that Nicole mentioned today. Again, staying motivated, understanding that, you know, life has its challenges too. And but what you do today is going to bear fruit here in the next quarter. So let’s let’s definitely a telephoned about the show, because it might be just what they need to get motivated today. So we appreciate that. And also one other thing, leave us a review. We really appreciate the reviews, whatever app you’re listening to us on, just let us know what you think of the show good and bad. You know, we want to hear you know everything so we can keep improving. So anyway, Nicole, thank you so much. Amazing. Hi, do group. And thank you. So glad to finally have you on the show. And we will say on behalf of the audience. Thank you to Nicole and on behalf of Nicole and myself, thank you to the audience for sticking around to the very end and supporting our show. Also check out our sponsors. We love our sponsors. Thank you, Nicole, and we will see everybody on the next Yeah, we’ll see everyone our next episode. Thanks. Thank you
The 3 Tools You Need To Make Amazing Real Estate Videos • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Sep 08, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals with Kim Rittberg.
Wondering what to buy to make amazing videos to grow your real estate business? Award-winning Real Estate Video Coach Kim Rittberg is here with tips on what to buy and what not to buy!
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be talking about the three tools you’re going to need to make the most amazing real estate videos. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Kim Rittberg 1:29 I am super excited to be here with you. I am going to teach you today the three tools you need to become the go to real estate expert in your area. With video. I’m really excited I love teaching real estate agents how to grow their business. My name is Kim Rydberg I help real estate agents become thought leaders and become the go to agent in their area using video and podcasts. How do I know how to do this such a good question. I spent 15 years in big media Netflix Us Weekly inside edition. I actually launched the video unit for Us Weekly. And now I teach real estate agents from coast to coast I spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention spoke at the Women’s Real Estate Investment Summit. And I teach a lot of agents. I do one on one and group coaching. And I hear from them a lot of times, their first question is what equipment should I buy? And I’m like, nothing. I don’t think you actually need nothing. But the truth is you need very little. So let’s get into it. What are the three tools you need to grow your real estate business? I am not talking about the people who are filming real estate tours, who are videographers whose business is to is to film real estate tours. I feel very strongly and not just I feel strongly my professional opinion and knowledge is that as a real estate agent, you need to become the expert in your field. And just listed and just sold will not get you there. So I’m not necessarily talking about how to film a better home tour. Because I don’t think that our home tour is going to grow your business. I am talking about how to film so that you stand out you as a person, because that is the differentiator I see with my agents, the ones that I’m working with, that are showing up consistently, are getting referrals. They’re getting leads, they’re getting cold listings directly from social media, it used to be like, Oh, well, maybe that’ll happen down the line. I recently had someone in my video bootcamp, her second video posted, she got two people for discovery calls. So it happens all the time. Another agent of mine kept showing up and he got a co listing for a multi million dollar new development. And it’s because they’re showing up consistently. It’s not the home tours that they got. It is them showing up. Because when you’re putting yourself out there, your job is to establish yourself as the go to person, the most knowledgeable person, their local expert, their best friend. And so that’s what I’m teaching you today about what tools we need. So I’m jumping right into it. The very first thing you need is a tripod with a ring light. These are so inexpensive, so easy going to Amazon, if you email me, I will tell you which ones to buy in Ringly. And a tripod is so important because you need to have a steady video. If you’re holding your hand holding hands Holding, holding my hand a video when you’re talking for a long time, it’s gonna get wobbly. I do a lot of handheld videos, I think those are fine. But in general, as you’re going to film a lot more content, it’s super efficient to set up a tripod. Your your phone won’t move a lot. The ring light that is so amazing why it lights you you’re going to look like on a list movie star. The thing about a ring light is it creates an even glow on your face. If you’ll notice you’re ever on a zoom call. You’ll look at yourself and you’re like, Oh, I look at them in a cave. That’s because you’re not getting good lighting and it’s hard to get good lighting. A lot of buildings that lighting is overhead so it’s casting a shadow. Oftentimes I see people sitting with a window behind them. That’s a big no no. The point is you want to bring light that’s gonna give you even lighting. So this tripod and ring light you can get a desktop one or you can get one if you Have the room in your actual room, the floor one, I personally use a floor tripod with a ring light, and it has a little connector, I can also make it become a desktop. So that way sometimes if I’m actually filming, like sitting on my desk on my computer, I can just use the ring light. If I want to look great for a Zoom meeting, like I do zoom meetings with clients or someone’s considering me for a speaking engagement, I want to look really good. So I’ll use that red light. So that’s my first thing, a ring light, and a tripod. So I know a lot of agents are out in the field, you know, you’re you’re out and you’re busy. One of my agents actually from my course, or my group coaching course, my video boot camp, she likes using a battery operated ring light. So you don’t always have to worry about finding a place to plug in, and you can set it up no matter where you are. I think that’s an awesome idea. In terms of handheld, if you want to, you can use a selfie stick, so you’re not so so so close. People ask me about all this other crazy equipment, but I’ll be totally honest with you. Unless you’re really into technology. It’s just gonna sit in your house collecting dust. I can’t tell you how many things I bought that I never used. You know why I don’t love filming. I don’t love editing. I like writing I like coming up with the ideas. I like directing. So I keep it simple. And I teach you to keep it simple, because your main job is to sell houses, or rent houses or apartments, whatever. And it’s not to be a cinematographer. It’s not to be an editor. So I want to arm you with the skills that I have, that regular people can use and take advantage of. Alright, so we went over tripods and relights. People ask me about steady filming, there are some tools you can buy about filming. To make it steadier, you hold your hands on the side, it helps you be steadier, there’s a thing called a gimbal. If you don’t want to tap don’t buy that stuff. I’ve tried to use these I use one once I found my own house for when I sold my own house, don’t hate, don’t hate me Don’t hate me. It kept spinning around and frustrated me after the first time I loved it the second time I hated it. So if you don’t love technology, don’t buy that stuff. It does help obviously make smoother shots. But if you don’t want the technology, don’t use it. One thing to get a steadier shot as you’re filming, is use a steady stance. So lean up against a wall, stand in a firm stance like your legs apart and kind of keep your body even, that’s a really great way to ensure you’re shooting in a steady way. And if you’re having a move, like if you’re panning across a venue, I’m not going to talk about how story you know how I feel about how stories are not going to make you rich. Let’s say you’re filming in a restaurant, a local restaurant in your area, you’re going to hold your camera and shoot really slowly move it very, very slowly. Alright, the next one I’m talking about is editing equipment. I am not going to tell you to get editing equipment that Hollywood editors use. Unless you love technology, don’t get it. So editing go with the simplest editing tools. If you really do not like editing and do not love technology, edit it inside the apps. So Instagram has tools in the app, these are made to be very, very user friendly. If you do not love editing and you do not love technology, I would say that is the simplest way to do it. If you’re okay with editing or Okay, the technology, there’s very simple apps called in shot I use that a lot of people use cap cut. And again, you put a video in it, and you edit it very simply. I’ll be honest with you, I have taken at least three different editing courses. And I’ve asked my editor friends to sit down and teach me I compensated them many different times because I was a TV producer. And I did need to learn to edit because I worked with editors. And now I edit myself because I’ve taken so many classes in the past, but I still don’t love editing. So if you don’t love editing and you really hate the technology aspect of it, outsource, hire someone hire a videographer, hire an editor, have a social media manager do it for you, Teacher Assistant, or come to my video bootcamp and I will teach you how to do it. All of these things you have to do in the way that works for your business. For example, I am okay with filming I’m fine with filming on my iPhone. I’m, I’m alright editor. I don’t love it. When I have a lot of editing to do I outsource it is not my greatest skill. It is not my biggest moneymaker. Right? If I’m spending three hours editing something to bad use of my time, it’s a bad use of your time too. So think about that, in terms of time is money. If it’s taking a really long time to edit one video, consider outsourcing it. Tools, other tools. So we’re talking about editing, there’s lots of apps that can make your videos a little more fun. So you see those big words appearing on the screen as people talk. People use the captions app for that that’s a super simple app to use. There are other ones people use descript these are very simple and user friendly apps they’re made for everyone they’re not made for experts are not made for movie or TV producers. Another one that I do like using depending on the level that you’re Using it out, there’s just like all these different user friendly videos, different apps that can help with editing. Alright, the last tool I’m gonna give you, I’m gonna make you have, I’ve been very strict about this confidence,
confidence and the right mindset. That is truly the most important thing. So, a lot of times people come to me and they’re like, really asking about the equipment. And I’m like, before we get to the equipment, are you showing up on camera? Do you feel good about being on camera? Do you watch yourself back? Are you working on videos, and then every few months, you’re like trying to level up your videos with more education? Or you’re sort of analyzing what’s working, what’s not working? You really have to start with the right mindset. Getting on camera is always the first thing. So I love my agents. i The keeping it real people are a little blast. They always like connect with me on social media, and we’re friends then. So connect with me on Instagram, at Kim Rydberg or LinkedIn, wherever you’re at Facebook, send me you on camera, show up, you could show up on Instagram Stories, you can just show up and just tell someone what you’re about to do today. I’m gonna say, Hey, I’m Kim. Today I’m walking around Brooklyn, New York to show everybody this cool new art gallery. Right? Do you love art? And you can put a poll yes or no? Do you love art? Yes or no? So it’s very, very, very important to start putting yourself on camera. And the reason why that is, is because people hire people, right? And it’s not just one home you’re selling, you’re always selling yourself when you’re on camera. And every time you pop up in that video, it’s a time to rekindle old relationships and build new ones. And I think that we all feel that it’s like, Am I really going to make a new relationship with a stranger on social media? And the answer is, absolutely. My agents across the country are having that happen. Sometimes it’s an old relationship, someone you knew from two years ago, seven years ago, 15 years ago, popping back up, because they’re seeing you show up. Other times it’s brand new relationships, new refers, that’s what I’m seeing from my clients. Both ends, some people are having new refers directly popping into their social media, Hey, I saw what you’re posting, I really liked that I have a buyer in my state looking for a home in yours. Let’s connect. I’ve had that happen to my agents recently. So it is happening and it happens all the time. So you do though have to be on camera. These are my gauges that are on camera. Not all of them will be on camera. One of them I had to pull teeth, she came to one of my big speaking engagements where I taught like hundreds of agents, and she didn’t even show up she had never been showing up. She was feeling really weird about it and really insecure. And she came and she did a video bootcamp. We push through that let’s show up on camera. And then we went into what are we making now that we’re on camera? What are we making. And she got two calls within the first week. So it happens all the time, you have to have that right mindset of it is important for me to be on camera. If I’m feeling that negative voices, I’m turning those down, and I’m getting on camera. So to wrap it up. You’re not a filmmaker, that’s no problem, you can still grow your business with video, not just you can still grow your business with video, you don’t even need those skills. I will say you don’t need any of those skills. You just need to learn how to use the basic skills and how to understand the strategy of it. And I can help you do that. Of course I do one on one plans. I do. group coaching video bootcamp, I do those where we all learn together, how to show up with confidence and how to make really good strategy, strategic videos that grow your business. I love doing that. It’s been really, really fun. So again, you can find me on Instagram at Kim Richburg r i t t b e RG and I have a free download make sure to connect with me I have a free download on how to make awesome videos and how to be confident on camera. And to wrap it up the three tools are you need that tripod and ring light and get one for your floor or one for your desktop. That is to get great even lighting and to have a steady steady video. The second tool you need it is an editing app. You can use a very simple one like cap cut or in shot or you can you can edit inside the social media app. They are made for regular people. So play around with them. I have tutorials you can message me and I’ll send you to my tutorials. I have lots of amazing how to videos on how to use that if you follow me on social you will see them and then lastly, the tool you need confidence, confidence. You need to have the right mindset to be on camera. Alright, thanks so much. It was great. Make sure to drop me a line on social and tag me when you show up on camera.
The Importance Of Confidence & How To Cultivate It •Susan Santoro
Sep 07, 2023
Susan Santoro from Susan Santoro team with William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty talks about her experience as a realtor, and discusses how she was motivated to get into this business by her husband who is a real estate developer. Susan discusses what is her drive to keep going and being successful as she believes that it’s important to believe on your decisions because in the real estate business you wake up every day unemployed. Last, Susan emphasizes that every agent should be very confident in their job and learn how to sell themselves.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s a special episode of Keeping it real as we get to speak with an agent who has been practicing for 39 years. Does she have some wisdom to share? Oh boy, does she stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with 39 year real estate veteran Susan Santoro. Before we get to Susan, just a couple of quick reminders. Please, as always support our sponsors. We love our sponsors. They help pay the bills for us and help us keep producing episodes. So check out their services and products and consider investing in them. And then second, please tell a friend about the show. Think of one other realtor that could use the wisdom that you’re about to hear from Susan and share this episode with another agent so send it over. Also leave us a review. I guess I asked for three things. Oh well. Thank you for everyone. We love you. We love our audience our listeners. We appreciate you but let’s get to the main event my conversation with Susan Santoro.
All right, today on the show our guest is Susan Santoro from the Susan Santoro team with William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty in New Haven County in Connecticut. Now let me tell you more about Susan. As since 1985 Susan Santoro has held a prominent position as one of the most distinguished agents within the greater New Haven shoreline region. As the foremost agent in sales at William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty is Guilford brokerage, she has garnered a reputation as an unparalleled performers securing the number one agent title and claiming the number three spot across the entire company. operating as a cohesive unit Susan leads the Susan Centauro team, which is a dedicated assembly of accomplished full time realtors, whose excellence earn them the distinguished top real estate award from Inman based on sales, amassing over 73 million in transactions just last year. Now year after year. Her achievements are underscored by multiple awards including the prestigious Connecticut magazine five star real estate agent Award. She secured the highest ranking for overall satisfaction. That’s a client award distinction showcased in Connecticut magazine. In addition to that she’s super into philanthropy and giving back she’s actively engaged with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a testament to her unwavering dedication to fundraising and also is involved with the Ronald McDonald House trees of hope. And we are just so honored to have Susan on the show before I bring up before Susan comes on. want everybody to follow her at Sue’s Instagram, so go to Instagram Susan Santoro underscore realtor. Now we will have a link to that in the show notes as well as Susan’s website. Susan, welcome to the show.
Susan Santoro 4:35 Thank you. Nice introduction. Thank you.
D.J. Paris 4:38 Thank you. Now the last time I was for anyone who isn’t I’m going to interrupt myself now twice as getting through this. Anyone who isn’t familiar with New Haven, New Haven is just outside of New York. It’s right on the basically right on the shore, and it is known for a number of things. Most probably most notably, people of New Haven will tell you and they will tell you with a straight face that they invented pizza. Now, I don’t know if that’s technically true or not. And that is a debatable topic and I am not here to be the final authority on whether it was in Naples, Italy, or New Haven, but New Haven people are very, very proud of their pizza. And I have eaten New Haven pizza and I’ve eaten the very famous Pepys clam pizza, which sounds really gross for a lot of you listening, but it is delicious. So Susan, I am a big pizza fan. And I love the fact that I’m talking to a New Haven person because I love your pizza.
Susan Santoro 5:36 I look forward to treating you to it when you come, but it’s between puppies and Sally’s. We have these pizza wars all the time, and everybody has their favorite. in Wooster street. There are plenty of other places in New Haven also. And the pizzas good everywhere. I
D.J. Paris 5:51 went to chat GBT for the official answer. And again, chat, GBT. It’s not exactly the oracle at Delphi, but it’s a it’s close to accurate. And I said, Where was pizza originated? And it said, while people of New Haven will tell you that it’s originated there, we believe it actually is from is from Naples. But it’s still not totally clear. So we’ll go with new cars.
Susan Santoro 6:15 And you can get New Haven style pizza in your hometown too.
D.J. Paris 6:18 Yeah. So for any Chicago people, if you are familiar with piece, which is always on the top, Chicago pizza places list, it’s not Chicago style, which is the deep dish stuff, but it is it’s thin crust, more of a tavern II sort of style. But But no, not tavern, but thin and big. And just delicious. I am a huge fan of of New Haven style. So anyway, we are talking about, I can talk about pizza. I will. But we want to talk about Susan and all of her amazing real estate accomplishments. Now, Susan, you’ve been in the industry nearly 40 years, which is so amazing and impressive. And you are still crushing it all these years later, I would love to start at the very beginning of your journey, like how did you get into real estate and why? So it
Susan Santoro 7:13 was kind of an accident. My husband is a real estate developer and kind of ran out of land needed a place to build. And I was like, why don’t you get your real estate license and go and look for some land for me to build on. So that’s how it started. And then I thought, Oh, we’re gonna have a family, I’m going to be a stay at home mom. And then, you know, once you have a couple of good sales under your belt, you’re either born with it, or you’re not that adrenaline, that fire in your belly, you can’t wait to make the next sale. And then it becomes addicting. And so by the time my daughter was born, five years later, it was a major career. And I still wake up every single day with that fire, and I can’t wait to see what the next deal is gonna be.
D.J. Paris 7:58 That’s amazing. And it is it is fun. I would like to ask you, what is the what what fuels that fire like inside of you? I never really asked this question. But I think it’s a good one. Like, what do you do? Are you aware of what it is inside of you that is just so eager to keep going forward? Is there certain goals you’re looking to hit? Is it just a feeling of satisfaction? Is it about helping? What is it?
Susan Santoro 8:23 So it’s a lot of the above except that I except for the goal part? I am not believe it or not most successful people always say, Oh, I’ve got this, you know, board or this, you know, the goals of my year. I don’t like goals. I just like to keep on going keep on going. And you know, not many people have asked me you know, kind of like, what is your why? But the truth is, is I dropped out of college after my first year, I was never meant to go to college. My mom was not happy and told me that, you know, if you want to be successful in life, you have to have that opportunity and go to college and get a degree. So and my dad who ran a major corporation was CEO of a major corporation also didn’t finish college. So why think it was one of those things like I’m going to show her and now we just you know we laugh about it every time I get an award I send it to my mom and I say no let me know when I’m going to become something so that was kind of my why it makes my dad super happy still checks in on me weekly wants to know my sales. And you know it gets a big smile on his face. So I think I think he remains my why he wrote a wonderful book called pilot your life. It sits on my desk and it’s my motivational Bible. It’s a great motivational book for people in business and he’s definitely my why.
D.J. Paris 9:50 Well let’s Yeah, let’s give a plug for that books say the title one more time and Father’s Day life.
Susan Santoro 9:54 Pilot your life. My dad is Ronald Shaw. He was the CEO of the pilot and corporations?
D.J. Paris 10:00 Oh, well, we certainly know who they are. In fact, I have they have offices here in Chicago. And I have I have friends that work at pilot, oddly enough, I have one friend that works at pi or did. I don’t know if she’s still there. But oh, that is wild. Oh, my gosh, yes. That is a big company. Wow. And isn’t it amazing, not not an MBA, not a college grad. And he was a CEO. Incredible.
Susan Santoro 10:26 Yes. And a lot of the book kind of talks about that, you know, and it’s just that that competence level, you know, I raised my daughter saying, you know, make a decision, believe in it, own it, it’s yours, and then just follow it. And that’s just sort of a simple way of life, whether you’re making a decision on going to a party or not, or whether you’re making a decision on a business transaction, I think it’s all the same. Once you own that, you believe in it, you just keep going. And that’s how I feel about my business. And I tell my team and other agents who asked me all the time, how do you still do these hours, you know, it’s 6070 hours, sometimes a week, how do you still do this, after all these years is you wake up unemployed every single day in our business, and you have to go out and look your best. You know, if you wear makeup, put on your makeup, put on, you know, get dressed, just go out and present yourself the best way possible, and you will be a success, you’ll be confident and it’ll show. And with that comes success.
D.J. Paris 11:32 You wake up unemployed every day, you know, that is so true. And it is, you know, I know there would be people to say, well, that’s a negative way to look at it. But you know, what, I have found that having that thought of, you know, it’s something that’s pushing against me versus something I’m running towards, like, the idea that I’m unemployed, oh, my god, I gotta pay my bills. That is, I think, a more powerful motivator than like, for example, if I was, if I was being chased by somebody with a knife, I think I’d run faster than if I was running towards a million dollars, I bet I would run faster with the guy chased me with a knife. So even though I would like not to be motivated by by pain, the reality of it is it’s true. We are as agents, we are unemployed every single morning when we wake up. And it’s an opportunity to not only find business, but to keep the business that we do have, and really treasure it, because it can go away at a moment’s notice. That is a really great lesson, we’ll
Susan Santoro 12:34 come up to you at parties, people come up to the grocery store. Everybody wants to know how the market is tell me about real estate or asking you about a particular property. And so that’s where again, you’re selling yourself constantly.
D.J. Paris 12:47 How when, how important is it for you to have that information about the local market? On hand ready to talk? It may be, you know, to varying degrees of detail, I’m sure. But how important is it when you’re at the grocery store? And someone’s like, Hey, Susan, you’ve been doing this forever? What’s the market? Like? How do you typically address a question like that?
Susan Santoro 13:08 So it’s very important, and I am a statistics person. So I do look at the numbers every day, whether it’s against, you know, me, my, I don’t want to call them competitors, but it just associates other associates. But I always kind of know what’s going on. I look at percentages in, you know, I just wrote an offer, for instance, in Fairfield County, and I usually based just out of New Haven County, but because Yale New Haven Hospital has bought up a hospital down in Fairfield County, we now have a lot of our doctors that are going that way as well. So I was just down there, and their business is done very differently than ours. But before I went down, I went and I looked at kind of where the numbers are. And I’m seeing that things are going approximately 13% over asking. So it was such an important tool for me to be able to share with my clients. We crafted a great offer the first time they didn’t want to go that high over and and they didn’t get the first house and the second one, they listened to me we crafted a perfect offer the sellers could not say no to and it went approximately 12.5% over asking, but our offer got signed. You know, so I think knowing the numbers is very important knowing your market. And then of course, you know, you can always, you know, tell someone you know what, I’m going to get back to you later, I’m going to look this up for you and good reason to make a phone call back to that person. Absolutely. You’ve captured them. It’s like being stuck in an elevator. And you know,
D.J. Paris 14:43 I love what one of I just want to go back to one thing that you said that for me was was pretty rough. It’s something that I can’t remember another one of our guests saying in all the episodes we’ve done, so I just want to step on it a little bit because I think it’s is really, really a great idea. So what Susan said, and she said it very quickly, and I just want to make sure that everyone heard it. She said, You know, when she was about to produce an offer, she looked at, you know, obviously comparable places, she looked at list price, and then sales price, and just did the quick math on what you know, that percentage over was, that way she can bring that data back to her clients say, here’s why we should consider this type of offer based on you know, other other comps, I don’t know that a lot of agents do that. And that is, you know, a lot of agents are like, Okay, Mr. or Mrs. Buyer, how much do you want to spend? Okay, maybe we can go a little bit over. And it’s more of just like finessing like the feeling of the of the buyer, but not actually bringing the hard data saying we should offer X based on I think that is a really great idea for anyone who’s working with offers, do
Susan Santoro 15:51 your homework, you know, before you go to do an open house, and I tell the agents on my team. And I always remind them, pull up a circle on MLS, as to everything around the area that you’re doing the open house at, know your statistics, know what else is out there, that house might not be right for them, you can easily get in the car after open house and take them to look at your the other listings around the area. So just do your homework.
D.J. Paris 16:18 And you probably also in in the county that you serve. And I know you work, you know a lot of places in Connecticut. But I imagine you know what neighborhoods people like our starter neighborhoods, you know, where they they graduate to when you know, you know where the best schools are, all of this is we’re talking really about knowing the community, knowing the inventory, knowing kind of what’s happening. How much time do you think you spend every day, sort of checking in on those stats.
Susan Santoro 16:51 I do it every night. So I am Luckily, I was born with not needing a lot of sleep, which works great. In my personal practice, I when the world gets quiet, you know, 11 to 2am, I’m on a computer, I’m just checking numbers, I’m checking towns, seeing what’s new seeing, you know, sales, that’s when I work the best. So I would say I do it every single night. But in the beginning of my career, I did two open houses every single Sunday. Did that for years. That’s how I built my, you know, my list of clientele. And, and I always always went on back then, you know, we had a book that we used to flip through and see what the listings were around the area and know and know the sales, so I was able to hopefully answer a question that may have come up in an open house. So I think it’s a good practice. If you get out of the practice. That’s not good. Yeah, get
D.J. Paris 17:53 back in. It’s, yeah, doing open houses. It’s it’s it just is the thing to do. And it’s always the thing to do. And technology has not really changed it too much to where open houses seem to be still very effective. Have it probably drives you crazy when you see newer agents not wanting to sit open houses on the weekends. I think if I was a new agent that I would beg other agents to let me come to their open house, I would sweat egg about
Susan Santoro 18:26 right I tell them all the time here I’m giving it to you. I mean, people are the people that are walking in the door, I some are just doing this as a hobby, right, they just want to go and see a nice house. But most of them are coming because they have an interest in buying a piece of real estate. It might not be that piece of real estate. But you now have their information, you hopefully have a conversation and get up a you know, repertoire with them. And they’ll call you when they’re ready to buy real estate or you can be in touch with them. And I think the technology today, you get their email, you just drip on them and drip on them eventually, when they’re ready to buy real estate. What was that Realtors name I met and it’s going to be right on the top of their you know their head. So I think it’s really important to put yourself out there. And whether that open house gym, the grocery store, you know, my family makes fun of me, but I never I’ll never walk out the door not in a matching outfit or having my hair look good or whatever. Because you’re always selling yourself. So and branding, branding, branding, you know, put your name, put your name everywhere that you’re you know that that’s allowed. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 19:38 totally, totally agree. I think those are all amazing ideas and things I agree with personally as well. So sort of the irony of you, not being you know, a college grad, but being ultra successful in real estate is you actually work a lot with Yale, which is in New Haven as well. So you know you work with a lot of the doctors at Yale you work, I think with faculty as well. So let’s, you know, this is something that I don’t think we’ve ever talked to anyone about is, you know, being sort of a friend to the university where you get, you know, sort of known amongst, you know, the the management there, that you’re a person that can help when professors come in and leave or when physicians come and leave at the hospital. So can you talk a little bit about how do you build? How did you build those relationships? And how, and how does that how does that work for you?
Susan Santoro 20:31 So you know, it’s become a niche. You know, as I think I’ve mentioned to you that one in one of my clients years ago, named me realtor to the docks, and that becomes my, my hashtag realtor to the docks. And it’s not only it’s not the only people that I work with, clearly, but it was kind of an accident, it was probably about 25 years ago, sold a house to a chief of a department that was coming in. And it was going to be a struggle, they were willing him from Harvard. So it took a while negotiations take a while it was probably a good year, that every time they’d come to town, I’d show them houses, show them around, get to know the area took them for pizza. And we obviously finally got into contract. And he said to me, like, I promise you, I’m going to be building a very big department here. And that department, I’ve moved my it’s, I’ve moved my 49th Doctor into that department from him in 25 years. Now, obviously, those those sales turn into they multiply, because then one of those doctors has someone coming from UCLA, they just came from, let’s say, and from another department, and then they give my name to that department, and then that starts spreading around to department. So right now I have three departments that I really get fed a lot of business from, from the Chiefs directly. Now, that’s it’s a lot of work. It’s not just oh, here’s a doctor, and they you go out and you show them a house, it’s, I get them sometimes on their second interview here. And they still have maybe four interviews to go. They want to see if they can afford to live in Connecticut. So I’ll take them in the car, I’ll spend a day and you know, it’s kind of a, you know, driving them around and educating them on the areas and drive them by house. And so you know, here’s approximately what this one would go for. So I really give them a full education out of maybe 10 doctors that I’ll take in my car that they’ve given me, maybe one or two, if I’m lucky, it will take the position.
D.J. Paris 22:38 So, so it’s a lot of time. Yeah, it’s a
Susan Santoro 22:42 lot of time, but it pays off. Because like I said they what I find is that, you know, I’m educating these very brilliant people on such a different level, right? I’m not, I’m certainly not saving lives, but I’m changing lives, and they don’t have a lot of time. So they come to me, kind of I’m a very good listener, because I have to be, they tell me what they’re looking for. And then if there’s something obviously not on the market now, but when they’re ready, I’ll use my resources. I don’t love cold calling. But I’ll do it. A lot of times, I’ll call my list of clients that I’ve amassed over 39 years and say, you know, do you know anybody who’s looking to sell in your neighborhood, I have this great couple coming to Yale, they’d be perfect. I do a lot of letter writing personal letter writing and just sometimes get an open listing, just say, you know, just let me just show it to this one client. And a lot of people don’t want their house on the market. And they’re thrilled to do it. And it just becomes a smooth transaction. And but I think it’s I think it’s interesting, you know, kind of niche I kind of call it where healthcare, you know, meats and real estate merge, right. It’s that Yeah. And I just like I said, it’s, you know, I think teaching them they’re so brilliant, but they don’t know anything about real estate. She don’t know what a septic tank is. Their eyes light up when they realize like, what actually goes into a septic tank. You know, they don’t understand financing. They know what they make, they know they can afford what they can afford, but they don’t understand, you know, 15 year versus a 30 year, you know, a fixed rate versus an arm. So I love teaching them and then, you know, like I said, we kind of changed their lives quickly and I have to do it efficiently and move on. So
D.J. Paris 24:45 what I want to go I want to go back to the open house or sorry, the open listing idea, because this was something that that stuck out as you were mentioning, so walk us through that because I don’t know that everyone listening is going to understand what that means. So,
Susan Santoro 25:00 you know, they’re in other areas not here. You know, they kind of pocket listings right there. Yeah, sort of the same thing. Except that, you know, I will literally call someone in a neighborhood that I think it’s perfect that their house is perfect for, and ask them that, you know, would you be interested in selling, here’s what I think I could get you. And you don’t have to put your house on the market, you don’t have to clean it, you don’t have to, you know, pick your socks up off the floor. Here’s when they’re going to be your let me bring them in. And, and it’s simple. And with COVID, that that was, that was a gift to a lot of people who especially, you know, some of my doctors who obviously, you know, couldn’t get sick, and we just bring them into one house, it was perfect, great, we make the deal. They’re not as picky as someone that may have, you know, a no timeline, you know, they just they want, they figure out what school system they want. I always send them to like, Great schools.org, I let them do their own homework. Never steer anybody towards a school system, because it’s different for everybody. You know, somebody might be looking for a kid that’s really strong in theater, or really strong in math. So, you know, I steer them to great schools.org, and then let them make their decision, and then kind of pick out three towns and run.
D.J. Paris 26:25 That’s a great tip, the that website for the pushing that whole conversation off, you know, for ethics, obviously, we can’t really steer somebody towards a particular school, but you can steer them towards the website and say, Do your own research I have found in I just LinkedIn just told me, I’ve been doing this for six years, which I didn’t realize. And I feel actually a little bit like God, it’s been six years, maybe maybe I need to hang it up. But I’m having too much fun doing it. But the reason I’m bringing that up is Gosh, I don’t know, I just lost my train of thought, oh, no, it was it was about what I was reflecting on over the last six years. Sorry. So over the last six years, I was thinking a lot about when I saw that I had been doing this six years, I was like, Okay, what are some of the common elements of some of these top producers? And you just said something that I think is incredibly important. And I think for someone like you, it’s kind of just like, that’s what you do. But I think a lot of realtors don’t do this. What Susan basically just said was that she goes and finds her own inventory for her buying clients. Right? She’s not just scouring the MLS, which of course she is doing that too. She’s like, you know, I’m going to just lob a call over to so and so down the street, because that’s the perfect house for my client. And I’m going to see if they would be willing to so I find that that is something that top Realtors often will do. And other agents just don’t even occur to them. They just look at the MLS that’s what’s there. If it’s not on there, sorry, can’t help you. I love that. So you are literally
Susan Santoro 28:06 it depends. I think it also depends on the age, the the Gen Z’s that don’t like to make phone calls. I’ve been hung up on a lot in my career, right, a lot of doors get shut in your face. Keep going, right, just keep going. The next door is open and and just don’t don’t let it stop you. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 28:26 I think it’s so important because people either you can wait for them to get ready to sell their home, or you can proactively go to them and say, here’s what I think I can get you if you’re interested. And I know that everyone’s got a price, everyone’s got a price for their home, that they would be willing to move even if it’s there for ever home. So, you know, if I you know, I might think I’m in my forever place now. But if you came to me with 100% Return offer like that I would make 100% on that’s not my forever home anymore, I’m gonna find something else. So that is such a
Susan Santoro 29:04 smart opening line for that is fill in the blank. If I could get you X. Yes, you would sell your house right? And fill in the blank and see what
D.J. Paris 29:16 love that you
Susan Santoro 29:17 might you might be thinking that they’re thinking here when they’re really just thinking here. Yeah. So, you know, on a good example of that is I had somebody call me once for a donation. And they asked me if I would at night. It was an organization who was important to me, but I’d given to them before. And I was planning on giving more that year, that particular year. And they called me and said, just wondering if you would match your donation from last year. Dom So I matched my donation. They could have gotten double from me if their approach was different.
D.J. Paris 29:55 Yeah, that is really absent Loli
Susan Santoro 30:00 saw in the presentation, all in
D.J. Paris 30:03 the presentation, thank you for it. That is such a great, great tip. I love that let’s let’s talk about presentation. When you go into a listing presentation, let’s say for example, and let’s say it’s not a instant slam dunk, it’s not a past client, it’s your you’re in competition, maybe with another agent. How do you approach listing presentations, and because obviously, you win a lot of them. So tell us about what you do in a listing presentation that you think maybe is a little different. So
Susan Santoro 30:36 interesting that you say that, because the thing that you said that really stands out, is what people think, right? Oh, this is a slam dunk. What I tell anybody who will listen to me, nothing is a slam dunk. If you’re going on a listing presentation of your brother’s house, be prepared. Everybody is a client, everybody deserves to get the best to make, you know, hopefully make a profit. But everyone deserves to be treated exactly the same. And I’ll go back to that in a second. Just saying that, you know, I, I think a common thread when I read some of my, you know, hundreds and hundreds of Google reviews, is when people come back and they say, you know, she treated us like we were her only client. And I think that’s really important is that you give whether they’re spending 100,000 or 100 million, it doesn’t matter treat everybody the same because their house is their castle. And so I try to do I like to do a two step program. Not everyone will tell you, it’s the best way to do it. But I like to go out the first time, if I don’t know the people, I don’t know the house, give me a tour. And I’d take notes, tell me what you’ve done. Tell me what you love about living here. And then I’ll come back, you know, Tom, I have to do my homework. Because I don’t care how good you are, you can’t go out and tell someone a price of a house without seeing it. It’s impossible. So
D.J. Paris 32:01 to what by the way, I want to pause you for a second because it I want you to keep going with this. But this is what a consultant does a consultant goes into a company and says, Tell me about the company. And then they go, I’m gonna come back and give you my findings. So this is what we’re talking about with a two step process, you’re doing it very much like a consultant,
Susan Santoro 32:19 right? Do your home, you know, go back, do your homework, and then come back and show them nuts. You know, sometimes I’ll talk about a little bit of my marketing on that first interview, you know, kind of what I do, you know, very quick, they’re always like, well, you know, what’s your commission, you know, what, we’re gonna go over everything when I come back, because there’s so much more to tell you about what I’m going to do for you. And it’s always about what you’re going to do for them, you know, and not for yourself. And so I don’t go in prepared to you know, sign right here on the dotted line, I may lose some, I have gone out on a few in my career. And we’re I’m called back, you know, the next day and they say, Oh, we signed with someone to meet they that person was maybe just buying the listing, they told them a really high number that sure, you know, that they wanted to hear and get him to sign on the dotted line. I’d like to be realistic, and otherwise they’re gonna call me every single day, why hasn’t my house sold? So I like to do my homework and give them real facts. And I’ll never take more than 48 hours before I go back. But I like to be prepared.
D.J. Paris 33:33 You know, it’s so funny, because I’ve been talking to top producers, I guess for six years now. And they pretty much everyone, you know, has a similar sort of answer. Like, like you were saying, you know, well, not the two step approach always but, but doing your homework, going in with, you know, information, having a presentation, and really having it very well practiced. I suspect that is missing from a lot of realtor training. I think a lot of agents don’t get that sort of training of listing presentation buyer presentation. You know, how do you you know, how are you extracting information how are you collecting that information? And then how are you using that information to you know, hopefully get the deal it is it is something that is a real art and a science I believe and something that that you’re obviously part of so you’re when you first go out there you’re on like a more of a fact finding mission, you’re like, tell me about the home. Tell me about all the things that that you want or that you’ve done to the home and you collect all this information and then you go back you process it you put it through some some different metrics. And then you’re like, Okay, here’s what just like a consultant, here’s my report. Here’s what we’re going to do. And
Susan Santoro 34:46 I come back with a nice bound book and it is not just statistics about you know William Pitt Sotheby’s but you know about me and what I’ve done but the marketing I bring them you know, actual, you know, for Photos and show them the difference of your cell phone photo versus my professional photographer. I have, I’m not a good photographer. So just because of that, I’ve used a professional photographer for 20 years. So that’s important. I think that people need to see it, touch it, feel it, and I bring them this book show them, here’s what I’m going to do for you. Show them the advertising, I show them, you know, where their house is going to appear, how it’s going to appear, and then give them real facts. Here’s the house that sold, you know, within your neighborhood, a Walden, why isn’t my house worth that much? Well, because they have a brand new kitchen. And you know, yours is from the 1970s. I mean, I don’t say that, but, you know, I try to give them the reasons as to why I think their house is worth what I think it’s worth. And then we talk about just the kind of the art of pricing, right, not just that 99 cent pricing, you know, the ending with the 99. Sure. But I have always sort of said, you know, it’s really important to let the buyer perceive a value, you, to me, You cast a wider net, the wider your net, the more people that come in, the more people that come in, the more offers you’re going to get, the more offers you’re going to get, the higher your price is going to be. So I think it’s coming on, you know, right? Here’s your market value, let’s come on under your market value, let’s cast that wider net. And you know, you’re kind of like, walk into a department store, right, that loss leader at the end of the aisle, it got you to cut into the store, and then you’re going to spend more, that’s what we want, we want more people to walk in, we need the traffic to get your price up. So I think it’s just important to tell them at all aspects about marketing.
D.J. Paris 36:46 I think so too. And there is this psychological principle called escalation of commitment. So what Susan’s basically saying is, hey, maybe it’s smarter to price it slightly under under market value, so that we have more people competing. And the reason why that’s significant for human beings is we are wired to as we agree to something as we want to continue to agree to something. So that’s what’s called escalation of commitment, you guys can Google it, but it’s basically a psychological principle, it says the, the more as you sit, continue to say yes to something, you you become more and more committed, it’s harder, actually to pull out. So in other words, if you’re going back and forth with somebody on pricing, you know, there’s multiple offers there’s bids, it’s actually more likely that those two people will continue to battle it out versus one person saying I’m leaving. So it’s actually a really smart play, because it plays into our human nature of wanting something and wanting to compete, and win and achieve, which is, is built into us. So that’s a really smart idea is get a lot of people interested in the property, and then you can have them all battle it out.
Susan Santoro 37:58 Right, exactly. And I think also back to that kind of to stuff, I think that the other idea behind it is it gives you time, if you don’t know the people give you time to maybe, maybe make a connection, right now you you can go down a rabbit hole, certainly on social media, and figure out who they might know or, you know, find out oh, they used to work for this company. You know, oh, did you do work with so and so. And, you know, it’s about fo Gosh, 35 years ago, I think, had a marketing company. Look at all these notes I had received in the five years I had been in business, a beautiful thank you notes from my clients. And they came up with a tagline. And it’s real trust, real care, in real estate. And that’s what they came up with. After looking at all of that I care about people, I really, I really truly care about them. I have a baby shower of an old client, I’m going to in a couple of weeks, I’ve been invited to weddings and bar mitzvahs and barbecues. And that’s a testament to me just fostering my relationships with people. But I, like my physicians, maybe I’m just, you know, I should have been a doctor and my other life if I ever wanted to go to college. I love medicine, I’m fascinated by it. And making them my friends has not only you know, it’s been great because I get to learn. But obviously, it’s helped in my career because they just continue to refer me and refer me. And it’s all this business if you want to stay in it long term. It’s just all about relationships. And I have a team that I started about 10 years ago, only two people on it, I don’t want more. It’s very different team. I kind of you know, I say it’s like one plus one plus one equals three. You know, putting our ideas and thoughts together and also putting our volume together just makes us greater, you know, it’s small team. But number one small team in Connecticut means a lot more More than just an individual person, and absolutely unique people, you know, everyone’s different, again, fostering relationships. One of the girls has been with me about 10 years, she’s a marathon runner, great connections, right? She’s out there selling herself all of the time. Obviously, we’ve made up a t shirt. So it says the Susan Santoro team, but then in the back in big letters down her backs as realtor, let someone come up and ask her a question while she’s out running or at the end of a marathon. Tap into that, right, one of the other girls has been with me about four years, she’s a mom of three kids, that is your perfect audience. Get involved with their sports get involved with their, you know, PTA. So, you know, I love to be able to problem solve with them love to be able to teach them how to tap into their resources and go through your index cards and call people. q4. I said, I’m not a goal setter in the beginning. q4 is my very favorite quarter. Because I like to look and see how much I could actually accomplish in q4. So I go through my address book, and I reach out to as many clients as I possibly can in a week.
D.J. Paris 41:17 What’s amazing, you know, that is a great idea. Because most people step off the gas and q4, you know, we have the holidays, we have family stuff, the best. But you you step on the gas.
Susan Santoro 41:30 Absolutely. It’s my it’s my very favorite time. And and I like to see like what can I accomplish between now and then. So, and again, I don’t set myself a number goal. But you know, sometimes it’s just as simple as an email, you know, hey, drove by your house today love the new color of your front door. Or you know, pick up a phone, you know, was thinking about you know, or look on look on Facebook, right? See how old their kids are now have a reason to call them. fostering relationships is key. If you want to stay long term in this business, it’s definitely the key to my success.
D.J. Paris 42:07 And thank God for social media in the sense that we now do get information about our clients, if we’re following them. And we get to enjoy their lives as they post about it. And it like Susan, like you just said, I get to call, Hey, I just saw you went on a trip to Cancun hope it was great. It’s the perfect reason to pick up the phone and not have to do a sales pitch on oh, by the way, you know, I you know, because that can always come up naturally as well. But I want to I want to go back to something you said that I think is really critical. And I think it comes through is care and trust, what you’re really doing because I believe that care and trust are earned, not automatically given and you have a huge an amazing history of constantly demonstrating care and trust. And therefore that when you know, it’s funny that your niche, one of your niches is doctors. Because I think I think the same way when I choose a doctor for myself a physician, I the only thing I really, really that’s most important to me is do I think this physician cares about me even just a little bit. If they care about me, I’m good. If I feel that they don’t care about me, then I’m going to look for another doctor. So I use that same principle. When I’m when I’m going to see a doctor I want I want I want them to actually care about me. People want the same thing, obviously, in a realtor in any in any service position. So I think that is such an important thing is demonstrating care and trust is really should be if people are going to set goals. I think that’s a heck of a good goal to set is I want every one of my clients to go. You know, Susan cares about me, or DJ cares about me or whatever that that is worth its weight in gold. Absolutely. Now, what are you what do you do to stay in touch with clients in between transactions? Because of course, people you know, buy their home and maybe they don’t move forever or for 10 years or what are we doing to stay in touch and make sure they don’t forget about you? Anniversary
Susan Santoro 44:22 cards? Happy anniversary, right? Some people are like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this house seven years because you forget right you forget how long you’ve been in it. So I’ll always write in the card how long sometimes I’ll you know, write little personal notes. Thanksgiving. I don’t do Christmas. I don’t do Hanukkah. I don’t sometimes I’ll do New Year’s Thanksgiving Thanksgiving card. It’s a great time to say thank you. You just does exactly what you’re saying. Thank you for your referrals, even if they’ve never given you one. They may have thought that they’ve mentioned your name. It may not have panned out but you’re thinking Am I do send a gift, I can’t talk about, you know what it is because you’re not supposed to. But I do send a gift to every client who does give me a referral, after closing, and, and they’re so appreciative of it and very surprised when they get it. And then they liked the idea of getting this gift. And so then they try to give you more. So one of my departments at Yale, there’s two girls who are in competition to see who can they keep calling me who’s given you more referrals this year. So it’s actually become like this very funny game. But I then I, like I said, I do that q4, I do spend a lot of time I have an old fashion, right, I have an index box with all of my clients names on an individual card. And then each month of when they bought it makes it easy. I obviously have it on computer also. But sure, I’m visual. So we’ll go through that card box. And we’ll start calling, you know, just checking in sending a note, like I said, send an email, there’s so many things that you can do, you do get hit up, I’m not going to tell you don’t for donations, you know, kids, add books, or you know, when you buy a pie or buy a candy I do I always buy anybody that comes to me and says they weren’t, you know, trying to sell food, I buy it and bring it down to the Ronald McDonald House, because it’s a very, unfortunately, a full house all the time. So I’ll always drop stuff there. But so yeah, you do get hit up, you do have to go out for drinks or dinner or lunch once in a while. I don’t mind it. Again, I love to learn things from people. So it just goes back to that being a good listener. And you just, if you just quiet for a minute and just listen to somebody else, you’re going to gain something that’s going to be momentous for you, it’s just going to change things for you, they might not realize that they’re telling you about their neighbor, who is going into a retirement home, they just might mention that not thinking about business. I heard that, go back to my office, I look up that neighbor’s name. And I write that neighbor letter. And I keep in touch and I keep sending letters until that neighbor calls me for a listing appointment. So good listening, just be a good listener.
D.J. Paris 47:32 Be a good listener and be inquisitive, like ask lots of questions about someone else’s life, right? Like, know what is going on. Because home and life is connected, right? We’re, they’re intricate, they’re obviously interchangeable. You know, your life and your home is really one thing. And so being in touch with what is going on in your clients lives. And listening, as you mentioned, allows you to just learn about what other opportunities may exist that they might not have even thought as an opportunity for you. They’re just sharing, you know, parts of their life.
Susan Santoro 48:10 Right. And I think you know, the other thing is, don’t make it about yourself. Very simply, just coming to mind quickly. You sent me an email two days ago, and I had a nutty day, and actually was traveling back from Chicago visiting my family and and then had a crazy day just hit the ground running. So instead of writing you an email saying, you know, I’m sorry, right? I’m sorry, is about me. You probably don’t realize this, but I wrote you and just said, Thanks for your patience. Now I’ve made it about you. Yes. It’s very important to realize, none of this is about me, me, me. You know, there’s lots of agents out there who are going to post every day. You know, I’m the best. I’m the greatest and there. There’s enough business to go around that. Some people want to deal with people like that, that’s fine. But I try to I want to make it about you make it about the client, what can I do for you? Not what it’s going to do for me and make me number one that will come just make it about make it about your client.
D.J. Paris 49:18 Yeah, demonstrate care and trust. It just it all it all goes back to that this this accountability thing to is, is acknowledging thank you for your patience. You know if you know we’re delayed on a response or an email, thank you so much for your patience. Here’s the answer that you’re looking for. Absolutely brilliant. versus saying, I’m sorry, DJ. Sorry, DJ. It’s not about DJ it’s about telling the client Hey,
Susan Santoro 49:48 there’s time waiting, right? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 49:50 I kept you waiting. Yes, I am. Sorry about that. But I acknowledged what you have. Yeah, that’s a really smart, smart idea. As we all
Susan Santoro 50:00 care, real trust in real estate, it’s my tagline. Actually, I should, if I, you know, want it someday, maybe I’ll get it tattooed someday. But, but it is, it’s a motto that I live by how important
D.J. Paris 50:13 is it to have a niche to read? Whether it’s, you know, your your, you know, you work with doctors you work with, with faculty at Yale, obviously, you have, you know, other clients as well. But how important is it to have a specialty, like, just like doctors have specialties?
Susan Santoro 50:29 I think nowadays, I guess if I was to get into the business again, you know, if that was new, I would try to focus more on that, I think there’s a lot of people who have made that really their success, you know, where it’s, you know, the, the waterfront specialist, or the this specialist, I think, you know, I can’t really called being a realtor to the docks by my niche. But I guess it’s just what I sell, you know, myself, and it’s just the time that I can dedicate to them, right, sometimes they don’t even realize what time it is, especially the ones in training, you know, they’re doing the residency here. They’re in surgery, they get out to in the morning, and they’re sitting down, and they might be looking online, to see all of the stuff that I you know, sent to them to look at today, all the new listings, and they don’t even think twice, they’ll start texting me. Yeah. And sometimes I’ll surprise them and answer them at 230 or three in the morning. You know, other times, I won’t and you know, try to say, okay, I get a little respect of time. But, but I think that that’s, you know, really important, I pay attention to them. And so I think that that’s sort of the niche thing, again, came about kind of by accident like that, but that’s when people come to me, and they say, Oh, Dr. So and So recommended you, I’m going to be you know, I’m coming in, in the neurology department. Great, you know, and that’s it. Yeah. And I was told that you never sleep. So it’s like, it’s become a joke, but they love that, that I can dedicate so much time to them, a lot of times people are, they’re texting or calling me even on WhatsApp, because they’re coming from another country. And I’m able to, you know, talk to them at crazy hours. So I think depending on what your your niche is, you can really hone in on it. I just interviewed with another department at Yale and not gonna mention him by name. And the chief sent me a nice note the other day and said, you know, we’d like to take you on as, as our realtor, if you don’t mind, we’re interviewing, you don’t mind. We’re interviewing a few people next week, you know, that we’re going to have you take out terrific. So you know, it’s another department. So, again, it’s, no one’s paying me to do this. So you don’t get paid until you’re sitting at a closing. And I think that goes back to that drive of waking up unemployed every day. You know, we don’t make a dime till you’re sitting at a closing. And don’t forget that. If the deal doesn’t end, when you write the contract, and it gets accepted. There’s so much more to it. You. You want to be able to give somebody PD, my kid fell out of a tree today. Oh, you know, we’re new in the area. We don’t know anybody. You know, do you have a pediatric pediatric ortho you can give us? Sure. You know, that’s what you want. You want that you want to be that person that they come to for the name of a restaurant, anything. So I think that that’s really important that just don’t let the deal and after you write the contract, yeah,
D.J. Paris 53:40 yeah, it’s so you, boy, you said you said a lot. Just there and a lot of really, really great stuff. I could not agree with you more, I think it’s super imperative that people think about, you know, the kind of relationships they want to have with their clients and to think well, what do I have to do to earn that relationship? What do I have to do to earn somebody saying something like, oh, this person cares about me and my realtor likes actually is is invested, you know, in my happiness, like, if they can say that, they’re gonna sing your names, the, you know, they’re gonna sing it from the mountaintops, to everyone else. The other thing too, is, you know, thinking about niches and you were talking about working with physicians, is you probably just by being around them, you’ve studied kind of what physicians are like, what their needs are, you know, obviously every everybody’s different, but they have commonality, I’m sure there’s certainly needs and you have just been a student of, of, you know, whatever departments you’ve worked in to where I suspect you’re almost thinking you almost think of yourself almost as an employee even if some of these you know other depart Let’s,
Susan Santoro 55:00 and some of the doctors that do come in think I am, you know, and they think I’m working for the hospital or the university. And, you know, sometimes I have to, if I if comes off, you know, explain that I’m not. And you know, here’s how I got, here’s how you got to me. But you know, it’s again, it’s just relationship building and caring, caring, caring. So I’m today, in fact, I’m just as I’m talking to you, I just got a, an alert just popped up on my computer, a client who I sold a house to three years ago, in the military, and was given my name from another realtor who follows me online, sold them a house, you know, not too far from here, they’ve been doing a lot of work to the house, they reached out to me, do you have a plumber or an electrician? So they sent me a note last week and said, you know, we’d love to have you over to show you what we’ve done to the house. And most realtors to be like, if they’re not selling, you know, I’m not gonna go over. And it is going to take up an hour and a half of my time today. And they my alarm just went off just reminding me that that’s where I’m going today at four o’clock. So you know, yes, it’s, it’s 45 minutes there, it’s 45 minutes back, I’ll probably sit there and visit with them for an hour and a half. Okay, but three hours of time, if their neighbor decides to sell their house, who’s going to be on the top of their head? Yeah. So you’ve got to just take the time to do stuff like that. And I’m excited to see what they’ve done to the house. And I really, truly do care. But
D.J. Paris 56:36 that’s, that’s the whole point is that you are happy to it’s not always easy to drive 45 minutes each way. It’s not easy, but you’re excited to do it. And it’s what ultimately demonstrates care and compassion. And I I’m in this I’m a professional, and I want to see this all the way through. Susan, this has been such a such a fun episode, you have given our audience an incredible amount of strategies and techniques and tips. And you know, from your 39 years in the business, is just incredible. Your motor is still revved up and ready to go every morning. I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to adopt the I am unemployed every morning idea. I love that. I think that is it’s not not to depress somebody not to make somebody feel no. But to have a bit of urgency, a bit of like, what am I going to do today? Where am I going to go? Who am I going to talk to right? And
Susan Santoro 57:37 you have to create you have to create your own interview, right? Create your own job interview every day, and get and also are you going to get up and, you know, brush your hair. If you’re going to go out and interview Yes, then don’t walk out of your house without doing that. So, you know, just always be ready to sell yourself. Because everyone out there is interested in real estate everybody. I don’t care who it is, whether it’s they’re making money or they want to be an investor. They want to ask you questions, so be ready and look your best.
D.J. Paris 58:08 Love it. Well, for every thing, Susan, please follow her on Instagram as Susan Santoro underscore REALTOR at Instagram. She also has a website at William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty we’ll post a link to that because Susan is just outside of New York City. She has a lot of people that are you know, moving in moving out. She works you know with with universities there so if anyone out there has clients that may be moving in or out and wants to network Susan with you what’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Susan Santoro 58:46 They can reach out to me they’re on social media. You said that you know the Instagram. Also this isn’t Santoro team is on both Instagram and Facebook. My email Susan Santoro 11 at gmail 11 is my lucky number. So Susan Santoro eleven@gmail.com. My phone number is all out there, they can Google me and they’re gonna find out everything about me. But yeah, I do a lot of a huge referral network and I’m always looking for agents in different areas and I love keeping in touch with them. And eventually I’m going to probably have eight or nine referral checks that will be coming in soon of referrals I’ve given in all different states. And again, a comes from I was talking to a physician that I went to on an appointment and he mentioned to me that his mother is going to be putting her condo up for sale in Florida. Really okay on the East Coast. Oh great. Where and we just start talking again. It was just conversation. I have a great realtor there. Oh, I didn’t necessarily have a great Realtor in his mother’s town. But I have enough of a network that I can go to and say, who’s the best in that town. And then I called that doctor that night on he gave me his personal cell phone number, called him that night, gave him this, this person already spoke to that agent. I have a chat coming in now. So you know, use every opportunity out there to talk about real estate. So I think I’ve probably given away all of my secrets now, but, but again, I love to teach. And I’m happy for anyone to reach out to me with any questions.
D.J. Paris 1:00:31 Well, Susan, you have been super generous to us on the show. We, we thank you on behalf of the audience, thank you for your time today and, and good luck at your, your your 45 minutes each way. Plus our our meet with with your your clients there. And just on behalf of everyone. Thank you. And on behalf of Susan and myself, we want to thank the audience for making it to the end of the episode. We just ask that everybody do two quick things. One, tell a friend think of one other realtor that is struggling right now that could use a little boost maybe a few fresh ideas to help them finish this year strong. Send them a link to this episode, we would appreciate it. And also leave us a review. Tell us what you think of the show. Let us know what you like and what we could do to improve this show is for you, and we want to continually make it better. So tell us what to do. Everyone go follow Susan on Instagram, Susan Santoro, underscore realtor link to that in the show notes as well as her website. Susan is a class act and is just an amazing, amazing realtor. Please reach out to her learn from her. And hopefully everybody can you know start to have more success in the way that Susan does, which is a lot about being professional, knowing your your data and staying in touch and caring about people it’s it’s really it’s just a lot of hard work. It’s what it is. It’s
Susan Santoro 1:01:59 a lot of hard work. You know that little thing on my desk that you know the old Chinese proverb you know, fall down seven times, but stand up eight. Keep going. Don’t give up. It’s a great career. Just it’s a lot of work.
D.J. Paris 1:02:12 It reminds me of that old Zen saying which says Before enlightenment chop wood carry water after enlightenment chop wood carry water.
Susan Santoro 1:02:23 Just keep going doing it right. Absolutely. We’ll see every great. Thank you so much.
D.J. Paris 1:02:28 Thank you so much, Susan. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Susan.
How To Level Up Your Communication Skills • Cathy LaMon
Aug 30, 2023
Cathy LaMon with The LaMon Team talks about her experience in real estate and how she switched from working in IBM to building her business in real estate. Cathy discusses the importance of having great communication with clients and the role phone calls and voicemails play in that regard. Last, Cathy discusses how important it is for new agents to not stop learning and trying to find what path best suits them in this business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 survey show that the number one quality that buyers and sellers want in an agent is great communication. Today we’re going to show you how to do that. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show, by the way, we just celebrated the only reason I know this is LinkedIn told me, but we just celebrated our sixth year doing this podcast. So I just wanted to say thank you to everyone listening right now. And of course everyone that has ever listened to our show, we have millions of downloads 10s of 1000s of regular listeners and we could not be more grateful to all of you. When I started this six years ago, I had like three listeners and they were you know my family. So I am glad that it has spread beyond that and we are about to be speaking with Kathy Limon top producer. But before we get to Kathy please help us continue to grow let’s go another six years, but I want to reach twice as many agents as we have. There’s 1.5 million realtors out there not all of them know about this show. So please help us out let it let other agents know about the show. Everybody wants to learn from top producers. So let’s let them know that this exists and it’s free. And also please support our sponsors. They are paying the bills and we love our sponsors so please check them out, buy their products and services and tell other people about them as well. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event happy sixth birthday to all of us and our birthday, I guess anniversary whatever. Happy six to all of us listening and let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Kathy Lamont.
Today on the show we have Kathleen Lemond with Keller Williams in Atlanta. And let me tell you more about Kathy. Now Kathy Lemond began selling real estate in 1992. After leaving the corporate world of IBM sales, where they were offering incentives to downsize their workforce. Kathy took advantage of that and joined a locally owned brokerage with about 500 agents and set to learn all that she could by attending trainings and conferences all over the country. In 2001. She was given the opportunity to invest in a new Keller Williams office in Buckhead where she has been ever since. And she has a small team consisting of herself, her husband, and a full time licensed Operations Manager. And their goal this year is to help 42 families build a life they love. And her average price point is about $750,000. And she works her and her team work predominantly by referral. I want everybody to visit Cathy’s website because not only is she our guest than we should always support our guests but she has a really beautiful looking website, Lemond team.com, L A m o n team.com. You can also find links to all of her social channels there. We will post links to that in our show notes as well. But Lemond team.com is where you go to learn about Kathy and her team. Kathy, welcome to the show.
Cathy Lamon 4:39 Thank you DJ and glad to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:41 Thanks. We’re glad you’re here at well as well. i It’s funny when you were I was when we were thinking about your bio and I actually was in Buckhead in 2001 with Anheuser Busch. I was they were having their conference in Atlanta and they had rented out a good a number of the bucks. had bars for this conference. The conference was at the CNN Center, or I don’t know what it’s technically called. But over there downtown, and then in Buckhead was they had all these fun nighttime activities. And then I went back and visited Buckhead, men probably, I don’t know, five or six years later, and it had really blossomed. And even now it’s obviously blossomed even further. But what a fun area to have an office you picked a great location
Cathy Lamon 5:27 is fun, fun things to do a lot of good restaurants, great people. And never a dull moment in Buckhead.
D.J. Paris 5:37 Lots of fun to be had. And it is really a fun place to visit. So if you haven’t, if you ever ever been to Atlanta, go to the world of coke, and go visit but
Cathy Lamon 5:48 yeah, I think it’s called World of coke. Yeah, it is. It is. There’s a beautiful Georgia Aquarium right next door to that. So it’s a great place to bring families and good place to visit.
D.J. Paris 6:01 Yeah, well, I love Atlanta. So Kathy, I would, you know, I understand you were in really the IT world. You were in sales before when you were at IBM. And and I understand you had an opportunity to take a nice exit package and then decide to switch to careers. Why did you decide to switch careers to real estate?
Cathy Lamon 6:19 Well, at the time, I had little kids and thought, oh, real estate, you know, you can kind of set your own hours do your own thing. I’ll try real estate. Well, anybody that’s in the business knows that, yes, you’re very flexible, unless you have a client and especially an out of town client, and then your time is their time. But it did work out well to just be able to pick up my daughter’s a little bit more often. And just give me the opportunity to be a mom a little bit more often. So it was it was a good move. And I, you know, I loved IBM, it was a great place to learn, it was a great place to start my career I came I went with them right out of college. And what I’ve realized about real estate is there’s even so much more growth opportunity, both personally in terms of training and growth opportunities there, as well as income, IBM kept me, I was on commission. But if you sold too much too early in the year, they would just raise your quota and you’d be back making the same money. So it was it was very tightly controlled and real estate in the US people say the sky’s the limit, and there is no ceiling and no floor. But it’s a great business.
D.J. Paris 7:44 It is. And I also to want to put this in perspective, because when you started the world, I mean, obviously the world changes every year. But it really has changed since when you started you were pre internet. So we’re talking 1992. I mean, technically the internet was sort of around but not Yeah, certainly wasn’t adopted by the by the public. And I remember I went to college in 1994. And that was the first time that we started seeing web browsers, and the ability to sort of and it still wasn’t widely used. So you were I’m guessing we were on the phone a lot with people who did not grow up pre 1994. They don’t know how to use the phone, they don’t use the phone today, they don’t communicate that way with their friends, I still think the phone is a really great way to communicate with people. And it’s kind of a bit of a lost art now. But I do think that and even though people may not be as accustomed to being on the phone as they once were, I think we have this yearning to actually interact of voice to voice. Obviously, we could do FaceTime. And there’s ways to do voice and picture at the same time. But I imagine you probably still pick up the phone quite a bit is that is that
Cathy Lamon 8:58 I do. As a matter of fact, I’d set a goal to make 10 calls every day. And a lot of those end up being voicemail and you know, there’s always this question, Should I leave a voicemail? Should I not and I just choose to leave the voicemail. I think if someone does take the time, it’s nice for them to hear my voice and maybe it’s a little more personal. I also I use text a lot too, though, you know? Yeah, there is
D.J. Paris 9:27 something to be said about a phone call. And that’s also one of the nice things about being on the phone these days is you are going to get a lot of voicemails because, you know, you get to choose now who you want to speak to and, and it’s it’s really I think made the phone a lot easier to use as because you’re like, well I’m probably gonna get a voicemail and then you get to leave the lovely message and my thought and Kathy, I know you’re right. It’s like are they even going to hear the message? I think most people listen. I don’t know. I mean, I’d be curious to see stats on this because maybe I be wrong, but I Oh, it depends on the age range, I think, yeah, well, if you’re listening to our podcast, you’re a realtor, you should be listening to your voicemails because there may be some business in there. But I understand the idea of like, God, am I just wasting my time leaving voicemails? I don’t think so. Because, for example, Kathy, if you called me on my birthday, to wish me a happy birthday, for example, you just came up in your CRM, I probably wouldn’t answer the phone, not because I don’t like you. But because it’s my birthday. And I probably don’t want to answer the phone. But maybe the next day or later on that day, when I go back to listen, I would I would very much go. That was sweet of her. That was Yeah. So for those that are like, Ooh, I’m a little nervous talking, most people aren’t going to pick up but you can still leave them a nice, thoughtful message.
Cathy Lamon 10:43 Well, what I realized to DJ is, when I do get people, I find out things that otherwise I would never have found out, you know, somebody has been sick in their family, or they’ve just gotten some kind of news. It’s, it’s amazing. And, you know, that’s one call, maybe out of 20. But if I hadn’t made the call, I would never know. So I’m always like, Oh, I’m so glad I made that call today.
D.J. Paris 11:11 Well, it’s true, too. Because a lot of times, you know, we think Well, how else do we get our news about people in our lives? While we might look on social media, and you know, when things are maybe not going well, for a family, or they’re going through some sort of, you know, difficult time, maybe they’re not posting about that on Facebook, some people do, a lot of people don’t. And so you might not know, unless you picked up the phone and reached out. So let’s talk about how you did get started. Free Internet, right, like you still had to go out and prospect. And obviously, you know, we’re talking about a long time ago, but I think, you know, a lot of the ways in which you probably prospected or built your business, then still are applicable today. Because I think fundamentals typically don’t change. So I’m just curious, you know, back in, in the early 90s, when you were starting this new career, how did you grow your business, where you didn’t have a background of being in real estate?
Cathy Lamon 12:05 Well, that’s one of the first things I did when I got into the business. Even before I got in, I had an IBM discount to buy a laptop, and I bought a laptop, and I loaded everybody that I knew into a database. So just you know, that’s the bare fundamentals. And that has not changed today. If people that’s how you get started as you build a database, so I did that, you know, we, we had computers that would access. So I, when I started, I called expired, listings for sale by owners, those were out on a computer, you had to go to the office to get it, you know, to key it in, and you could see the listings that are coming up, but you had to go into the office to do it. So that that is very different. But a lot of it was the same same old, same old, get on the phone and call those expireds. I eventually got to the point where I decided that really wasn’t what I wanted to where I wanted to live. And that expired for sale by owner world. So I ended up doing much more of a referral based business once I got a little traction going.
D.J. Paris 13:14 Yeah, I have. But I think even though you’re like oh, the expireds and for sale by owners aren’t for me. And I think most agents probably have a similar experience with for sale by owners, you have to be a special kind of personality, I think to be able to withstand some of the difficulties of calling expireds. And, and for sale by owners. They are tough calls, or they can be tough for us. But certainly the Kinder are students and kinder I’m sorry, the gentler approach is the working by referral, made, you know, famous, made famous by a lot of people. But in the real estate industry, Brian Buffini is sort of associated with working by referral live the easy life is one of his slogans. I know you’re a fan of Buffini systems, I am as well. And you’ve not just worked with the Feeny and his company, but other other systems too. But how important was it because I know you really dove into this, probably I’m guessing, getting the training at IBM where training is so important. And there’s such a white glove firm, that you probably sort of thought I gotta I gotta get my knowledge up. And so talk about going to conferences and the importance of that for you in those early days.
Cathy Lamon 14:29 In the company that I was with had good basic training, in terms of you know, when you’re getting started, and what’s the contract and what do you need to know. But for anything more advanced, I found I had to travel somewhere and learn and that suited my personality. So well. I I’m very learning based. I love learning new things. I think if if I didn’t if I stop learning in this business, I would not want to do it anymore. But even after all these years, I feel like I learned something new every day. A but I would go to conferences I went to there was a guy named Howard Britton that assembled all these top agents from all over the country and I went to that I went to the Feeny I went to some other trainers as well, just learning and trying to figure out what fit me and what felt right. And then my style now is a mixture of a lot of different trainers that I’ve heard over the years, my core is Buffini that just working by referral, that’s the core and I still love that system. And, you know, you can add on top of that, add the videos add add all the fun things, but at the core, it really needs to be in my opinion, it needs to be about a relationship. And digging deeper and going deeper with with people serving them at its deeper level as we can.
D.J. Paris 15:56 I could not agree with you more. I apologize our internet, it may be a little choppy. So if anyone’s if I’m chopping anyone, I apologize, but I absolutely agree with you, Kathy. You know, I was thinking about Brian Buffini, when what I liked about what I liked about Brian Buffini is he came up the idea basically it and there’s a lot of different principles of his teachings. But I’ve always loved the idea of sending an item he calls them item items of value, right. And he he says basically, you know, you really should be giving your your prospects or clients something of value, every single month, or whatever the time commitment is or the duration is. But it’s really important because you really always want to be sort of giving people things where they’re like that was thoughtful, that was helpful that that really is something information or something I can use. And he was a little bit ahead of the curve on that because now we know that like social media is all about providing content use, you know, it’s all about sorry, all about providing value through content. And like, you know, if we expect people to watch our videos on Facebook or Tik Tok, or wherever they may be, they better be pretty, at least nothing else entertaining. But better than that, hopefully providing some actual information that people can use. And Buffini was was one of the first people I saw a sales trainer that was like, this is the way to people’s hearts. Obviously, there’s more to it than just that. But I have always been a huge fan of that. I’m curious to get your thoughts on the items of value.
Cathy Lamon 17:29 Yeah, I mean, I think now most of us have transitioned into more of an email and or, as you pointed out social media, video messages. He still provides monthly mailers, things you can mail out. Yeah. So you know, that can be layered. It’s a bunch of layering. I think, you know, you never know what, what works for certain people. So
D.J. Paris 17:58 will you have built a referral based business and everyone now, I shouldn’t say everyone, I would say most agents I have spoken to during my career in this industry, about 13 or 14 years. Almost everyone I meet says they want a referral based business. So that is obviously a common goal for a lot of agents. How long did it take you to do that? And what were some of the ways in which you began to transition away from making the cold calls to how do I get other people to market for me?
Cathy Lamon 18:31 Again, I think it goes back to building relationships. When someone knows and trusts another person they are, if they have an opportunity, they will, you’ll be the one that they recommend to their friends. So I think it it it’s nothing magic about it. It’s just getting in front of people. To this day, we still do a lot of lunches. I have lunch with someone almost every day of the week. Coffees, just you know, just being in relationship with people. And when
D.J. Paris 19:05 let me drill down on that. I apologize. Kathy, this is real. This is really great. Because having lunch every day with somebody is something that all the hundreds of episodes I’ve done, I think you may be the first to talk about that specific, specific sort of strategy. And can you talk a little bit about who you choose to take to lunch what you talk about, because this this would be super helpful to our audience. Yeah,
Cathy Lamon 19:27 yeah. So I would say those that falls into two camps number one is past clients or prospects somebody that I’m working with or or have worked with so that that is one whole group that’s a pretty easy group because what do you talk about? You talk about their life, their their families, you know, the old Ford Family, Occupation, Recreation and dreams, you know, it’s all about getting to know them better. So that’s, that’s one bucket. The other bucket is trusted advisors. and this has been a focus of mine over the last few years to try to get to know more estate attorneys, more Wealth Advisors, CPAs divorce attorneys, so those people have the opportunity to refer multiple people. So to the extent that I can build a relationship there, the the opportunity is just much greater than, than an individual who might have a friend who needs to buy or sell real estate. So I really do a lot of both. The Trusted Advisor is a really fun thing to do, once you kind of get your feet wet with it, and they, they get my same marketing that I’m sent to everybody else. At first, I was like, Okay, I’ve got to send something just for them. And yeah, just for them, that’s real, you know, that’s real professional or real business. Not fun. But they like fun things too. So I kind of had to get over that. Next, it’s just too much work to do two different things. When I meet with them, I may bring something more professional, some statistics or questions for them on on their business. But the basic, the basic marketing is the same. So that’s been fun, I’m actually getting ready to start something I’m really excited about, I’m starting a group of women, who are what I would call trusted advisors. And I’m hoping we’re having our first meeting coming up. But I’m hoping to meet once a quarter with this group, and really build strong bonds. There’s a there’s a financial advisor, there’s a high end insurance broker, a state attorney, CPA, so there, it’s I think it has a lot of potential and recommend anybody could do that. Whether it’s women or men, or both.
D.J. Paris 22:00 Those are all amazing professions to consider to add to to your professional, you know, sort of services or professional network, I should say, because you’re absolutely right. Those are people that are oftentimes dealing with life events, which typically may result in a transition of home, people moving in people moving out selling buying. divorce attorneys are the most obvious example of that. And but you know, you’re right estate planning attorneys, as you mentioned,
Cathy Lamon 22:30 some of my best business in the last year has been from estate attorneys. So
D.J. Paris 22:34 such a smart idea and oftentimes a overlooked specialty for realtors, we think divorce, divorce, divorce, yes, and estate planning attorneys as well, because of course, those are and you know, you could also too, I think possibly, there’s just a weird idea that maybe isn’t a good one. But people who work in mergers and acquisitions as well may, if it’s they work locally, they may be having companies that are moving in moving out. So there’s maybe some opportunities there as well. But I agree that having that professional network is awesome, because you can basically share clients and refer and say, I’ve got a great estate planning attorney. And by the way, everybody needs a great estate planning attorney. It’s a really important thing. You know, and and when somebody’s going through a family change, having a good divorce attorney, obviously is important as well, and a good accountant and all of these things. So Kathy is so this is such a great point. I’m sort of sticking on it for a moment because I really wanted to sink in. Kathy, thank you for that. I really everyone out there. Yes. Have lunch with your clients and your prospects. And yes, yes, yes, always do that. And let’s add in some professional people where you can actually help their business. And I think the best way to have those conversations is say, Hey, I would like to learn more about your business, Mr. or Mrs. Estate Planning Attorney. What can I do I have clients, here’s what my clients are like, here’s what they do. Would they be of benefit to you? What can I provide to you first, and then hopefully, it becomes a reciprocal scenario. Exactly.
Cathy Lamon 24:08 Yep. Yep.
D.J. Paris 24:09 What else? What else did you do too? So we talked, we talked about sort of this networking, staying in touch with your sphere, taking them out, seeing them face to face, also doing the same creating this networking group that you have, and also just these trusted advisors. What I want to ask because we talk about this a lot and I know this isn’t there isn’t a probably a really easy answer for this. So I’m going to give you a little bit of a tougher question only just to see what you might answer because we talk about in real estate we hear this phrase a lot people who know like and trust us are the ones most likely to work with us. This is working by referral know like and trust. We hear that over and over again. But I also think that I believe that trust is earned. So I’m curious on Yes, you have to earn the know like and trust part. How are you cuz you obviously do earn it and you have earned it. What do you do during when you’re working with a client that would eventually get them to say, not just, you know, hey, I had a good transaction to closed, etc. But I really, really like Kathy, I really felt she did a good job for me. I imagine you have certain standards in your business that lead to the know, like and trust, I’m guessing.
Cathy Lamon 25:24 Yes, I know that we do. And we’re always working on trying to improve that. I mean, it’s boiled to me, a lot of it just is so basic, it’s communication,
D.J. Paris 25:36 and pick up the phone when it rings.
Cathy Lamon 25:38 Yeah, it’s being in touch, it’s making sure that the client needs are answered. And my husband and I work together, he works with buyers and I work with sellers and I do most of the lead generation, he is incredible about being patient. And spending, I hear him spending hours and hours on the phone with people explaining things in the inspection or explaining, you know, the appraisal issues or you know, whatever it is, it’s that taking the time with them. And he’s, honestly, he’s much more patient than I am. So he’s in a good role. But I think that that’s what people need. And it’s not, it’s not necessarily the first time buyers, some of the high end buyers need just as much as anybody else. So I think that that’s part of it, just taking time and building building that trust and doing what you say you’re going to do I have a great assistant who is there in the she ever dropped the ball, do I ever drop the ball, of course, occasionally, but for the most part, we do what we say we’re going to do. And then we love to stay in touch with people afterwards, too. And I think that’s really a lot of times where you build referrals is you know, it’s not just one and done. And you know, you’re you’re on to the next you’re, you’re calling them and checking on them and making sure we we, we love to stay in touch with people on an ongoing basis. I always say, you know, once you get in our web, you can’t get out
D.J. Paris 27:19 until you until you say stop. Exactly, exactly. And nobody probably ever does that. Because I never has. Yeah, of course, of course, if you don’t, it’s really important to you said something very profound now, which again, it’s back to a fundamental of in between the sales, what are we doing in between sales to stay in touch with that client, because they’re probably not moving for another, I don’t know, seven years, five, seven years, whatever. You’re more and, and but we want to make sure that when they are ready, and we won’t know when that is necessarily we want to make sure we’re top of mind. And so this idea of reaching out in between is is really it’s I think it’s a lot simpler than people make it because it could be as easy as somebody bought a home from you call them a month in Hey, how did the move and go How was everything you’re good? Any problems? Just want to be Call me if you have any, if you need anything, I’ve got a network of people I can connect you to it really that could be almost the call every year if nothing else you want to talk about is how’s the home? How’s everything going? What’s going on with the family? Everything good? It just, it could just be a check in really? And really Yep. I used to I remember I this is I’ll make this story very short. I will tell you this sounds really silly. But it made me feel very special. When I was in high school, I had a friend who had an older brother who went to MIT for college. He was like the genius of all of our friends. He was anyway, so he went to MIT and he says, Oh, I’m taking a class by Dr. Amar or Amir Bose the guy who created Bose sound. So Bose speakers, and he said, If you want to buy any Bose speakers, we get a discount. So anyway, because he was in the class, so I bought some speakers through my friend and whatever cheap speakers I mean, great speakers, but inexpensive. It wasn’t like a big purchase couple 100 bucks, whatever. And every year after that for five years, Bose would call me once a year and say just checking in, how are the speakers performing? And I was like, it blew my mind. Amazing doing it. Amazing right now I’m sure probably because it was purchased through his class. Maybe I got put in a special category of like, make sure to take care of these people. But it sounds silly, but it really made me feel important. I don’t I have never met another company that does that. And that was 1993 Maybe so so anyway, it’s this point back to call. Yeah. Lying about the house, all you have to do is contact how’s everything going? What’s going somewhat simple, but But you said I’m so okay. So in between sales. We want to stay in touch. When you’re working with a client when you’re in a transit Action, let’s say nothing’s happening. You get no activity on a listing, let’s just say as an example, no new interest, let’s say a week goes by, what are you doing? Are you doing anything to talk to the seller to say, Okay, here’s what’s happening, or, or what is your philosophy around that?
Cathy Lamon 30:18 DJ, that is the worst. That is the worst time when nothing’s happening in Atlanta, the market has been so good that we haven’t, we’re still not experiencing that. But I believe me, I’ve been through that I’m sure lived through it lived through the recession. So you know, I think that in normal times be before too many days go by, you’re getting a message from the market, the market, I always say the market will talk back, if we’re not getting showings, if we’re not getting offers interest, then the market is telling something telling us something. So I think just planting the seed obvious, maybe this isn’t obvious, but it goes without saying that, okay, here’s what I have been doing. You know, what, here’s where your listing has been, how many hits you’ve had on the website, etc. So a report to them. But then I think even after a week, we start planting the seeds for pricing, a pricing adjustment, unless it’s just like the recession or something like that. I think that normally, if a house isn’t getting any activity, it’s that’s that’s the message we need to be getting to the client. That makes sense.
D.J. Paris 31:38 It does it makes perfect sense. And are I know that there can be some call reluctance, or reluctance to pick up the phone? When nothing is happening? Even, you know, a few days, maybe we’re nothing’s happening. What are you doing to keep the buyer or seller informed, even when there’s not much to report? Because I know a lot of agents don’t maybe aren’t as proactive when things aren’t happening. I once asked a top producer here in Chicago. So silly, but I said, Why do you think she’s number two in all of Chicago? And I said, Why do you think out of 40,000 agents, you’re number two, and she goes, I call my clients every week and tell them what’s going on? I said, well, and she goes, that’s that’s kind of it. She goes DJ, you’d be surprised very few agents do that. Really.
Cathy Lamon 32:30 And I would not claim to be perfect at that by any means. But again, just picking up the phone and touching base. And even even when things are happening, I think that people just want to hear from you. I listed a new house yesterday. And you know, we’ve got some showings lined up and I plan to just touch bases with them and say, you know, they’re out of town actually. So they don’t know precisely what’s going on. But just to just to say you know, we’ve we’ve had these showings this first one said they weren’t interested but we know we’ve got some more lined up for the weekend. Just Just stop communication and honestly, I’m not always the best at it. But it’s a goal to to be more in communication and I think people appreciate it they they never mind when they when you’ve got their house on the market or a house for them under contract. I don’t think you can call them too often. I don’t think you can over overdo it. Or they’ll
D.J. Paris 33:29 let you know if you’re overdoing it odds are you’re probably not going to say stop communicating with me about this transaction.
Cathy Lamon 33:37 And so that brings up a point that you know, the best thing to start off with is to ask how you want to be communicated with I want to see you want to have a phone call Do you want me to text you do you want me to email you? So then the person who says I want you to call me they’re not gonna mind if you’re calling so we need to we need to continue to do that we kind of come in with sometimes we kind of forget on that but
D.J. Paris 34:04 you know what I love about top producers is they say these really profound things but to them it’s like like
that question said something incredibly important, which was ask your clients how do you prefer to be communicated? Would you like a phone call? Would you rather have a text you know, is it okay if I leave a voicemail you know, what, what are the hours you want me to call you? When do you not want me to bother you? These
important of the just this is what she knows, but a lot of agents don’t know this. So remember the problem. There’s the golden rule, which is the way you want to be treated. The Platinum Rule is like others how they want to be treated. That’s, you have to ask questions to get that. So Kathy, again, seems like a small thing you said maybe to you, but really, really profound. Don’t just assume everyone communicates in the same manner because they don’t. What? What are we doing to celebrate our What are you in your? Oh, I’m sorry, I wanted to mention this other thing you said that was really, really important because Kathy, is very self aware. She said at the beginning, you know, there’s certain things I’m not as strong at, which is why her husband spills in those, those challenges. So she talked to Kathy had mentioned, she maybe isn’t the most patient person with, and that’s not a negative, that’s just part of your personality, you’re good at some things and other things you’re you’re weaker at and maybe patients isn’t always something that you can just learn to be more patient. So a Kathy says, instead of just well, I’m going to fight against this and do it, I’m gonna get somebody who’s really, really good at that, because it is important that I have somebody that’s super patient, and she has her husband step in. So what is the lesson from this? Well, we know that teams are on the rise. And look, the truth is, you just can’t do everything, you just can’t, you’re not going to be good at everything. So I love the fact that you have I mean, your husband, Great Good Thing that his his skill set is different than yours. Because you guys can then complement each other and you go, Oh, you know, this person is gonna need some patients, you know, husband, you take care of this one, and, and it works works really well. And then that client gets everything they want.
Cathy Lamon 36:33 Right? And we intentionally when he joined me in the business a few years ago, and I never wanted there to be a situation where we would be like, Oh, you said you were going to call them? No, you said you were going to call them and nobody’s called them. So we have a very, very clear definition. Bob works with buyers, I work with the sellers. And occasionally we still are talking about our clients. And we know what’s going on. And occasionally, we’ll we’ll be involved in in the other side. But for the most part, it’s very well done, delineated. And that has worked very well for us. And I’m fortunate that he loves doing the bonfire. Not everybody does.
D.J. Paris 37:20 Well, and typically people who who are working agents that are working with buyers typically do need more patience, because those transactions tend to take longer. And obviously, there’s a lot more that can go wrong. On the buy side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it is it is great, though, that you do have somebody your husband, of course, in this case, that’s able to step in and and help out in that way. And make make it so that you don’t say, Well, I’m not really a buyer’s agent. No, I’ve my husband, he’s, he’s the buyer’s agent, and he’ll take awesome care of you. What, what are you do you do any client appreciation events? I’m curious if you’ve started doing that, or if you’re working on that, or if those in your business,
Cathy Lamon 38:03 we love parties. My husband says that we are a an event company posing as a real estate company.
D.J. Paris 38:15 You know, it’s funny, I asked that question. I was like, I hope she’s doing client appreciation, right? She’s gonna be like, Yeah, we we don’t do that. Because I had no knowledge. I’m like, I she has to do this. And so I’m so glad. We love it.
Cathy Lamon 38:25 We love it. And we do all kinds of things. We We love having dinner parties, we love having six people around the table and just breaking bread. That’s really where you get to know people and and we like mixing people up that don’t know each other. And sometimes we’ll have people that know each other. So we do all kinds of things. We’ll do some medium sized parties where maybe we’ll have 20 people over for drinks or something. And then a few times a year, we have a big event. We’re planning right now, a big pizza party. We have a person that a company that comes with this big wood, wood fired grill and they grill the pizzas. They’re delicious. We’ll have wine and beer. This year. I’ve got a gelato company coming to serve gelato, and we have a DJ and it’s all in our driveway. So it’s we’re praying for good weather, but um, it’s, it’s lots of fun. We’ve done a few we’ve done it several times before and it’s always a fun party. So that’s one of our biggest parties. We will probably have 200 people here altogether and my husband doesn’t know that yet. So don’t tell him but you know, we do pies. We do a pie party at Thanksgiving and we’ve done movie parties. We’ve done a little bit of everything. We love to travel and when we get back from a trip say to France for example, we will last year we had a French wine and cheese party so you know some things like that,
D.J. Paris 40:01 that’s a great idea. So you go on a trip, and I wasn’t sure where you’re going with that. So that’s amazing. You go on a trip, you know, you experience the culture of another country, and then you bring that culture back with you. That is, I have never heard of anyone doing that. That is a very,
Cathy Lamon 40:16 it’s very fun. Yeah. Oh my
D.J. Paris 40:18 gosh, brilliant. What a great, what a great. I always love these. It’s always I’ve been doing this for five or six years. Anytime I hear something new. And I know it’s not new. It’s not like you’re the first person to ever do that. I just have never heard of it. And so it’s new to me. And I love it. So that it’s a lot about activity, right? It’s it’s just like you were saying, I make 10 phone calls every day. I bet most Realtors don’t even do that. And I’m not here to criticize everyone. I’m just here to challenge people to realize this is what top producers do they pick up the phone or some version of that. Are you? Are you doing a lot on social media? Or is that something that you know, you’re not as connected to?
Cathy Lamon 41:00 So almost two years ago, I hired a marketing gal who was helping me and she is guiding me. She does, she actually does most of the posts. I’ll do I’ll do some myself just personal ones, but she’s doing the business ones. And I originally came to you through camera Berg. And Kim is helping me with video trying to get me we’re going to work on messaging this fall and really trying to create messages that resonate. And that going back to your original point of value. It’s not just about nothing, it’s about something that hopefully will, no message is going to appeal to everyone all the time that if we can just make it something that’s, that’s interesting and informative to a number of people. I think I’m really excited about that to try to kind of take it to the next level.
D.J. Paris 42:02 I also think too, and by the way, I plug for Kim Rydberg she has a her own series on our podcast. We love Kim. She’s our social media expert. And I didn’t realize that you were you came through by way of her so I am so excited because Kim is one of my favorite people I think I’ve just about ever met. So I am I just absolutely adore her and I encourage everyone to listen to her series on our show. Just look for Kim’s Kim’s episodes, she is a real gem. And it Yeah, you’re talking about value I think because I know there’s this. A lot of us in this industry have a perfectionist mindset. We want our headshots to look perfect or we want our by the way, I’m going to divert from my what I was saying I was just a zillo conference of the last two days I showing time, which is owned by basically by Zillow. I was at a conference for them, I was fortunate enough to get to go. And they said they showed a statistic that is so interesting speaking of headshots, and it just came to me I totally forgot. This is amazing. And I wish I could show people this, although it’s a podcast, so wouldn’t most people wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. But they showed some data that suggests that headshots are done. Nobody wants to see headshots anymore what they want to see as a still a professional photo. But what they actually want to see is you being captured, doing something that you enjoy something that is a passion for you, whether it’s real estate, maybe you play guitar, or maybe you’re into whatever, maybe you just want to you know, you’re a great mom or whatever you’re into. They actually people they had data to support this. They said, Nobody wants to see the perfect airbrushed photo anymore. They want to see you in action, which makes sense because we follow people on social media and we see them doing what they do. So for anyone out there who’s thinking about getting a new headshot, guess get a new headshot, obviously get that and get some shots of you doing other things. And people actually find that to be more inviting and more real and more authentic. So just a little little plug from something I learned from from Zillow last couple days but Kathy, sorry to
D.J. Paris 44:18 Oh, here’s another one real quick. Sorry, just because it’s coming to me use white linens if you can, on your listing presentations for the master bedroom or I’m sorry for the primary bedroom. Use white linens if possible because Zillow has found that by using a white like a do they are white you know comforter 30% more clicks versus a colored different color than white. I mean, crazy weird thing. So if I was an agent, I might just buy like a king size comforter, keep it in my trunk. So anyway, okay, back to Kathy. I’m so sorry. I just I got
Cathy Lamon 44:57 I got loaded up with ideas, your ideas
D.J. Paris 44:59 I think well, I need to learn from you because you’re you’re really, so much further along the path. And I’m Kathy, what? Let’s talk about boundaries. In the sense of, you know, we know that mother’s parents know this as well as Realtors know this, if we don’t set some sort of boundaries for our, you know, for our people in our lives, especially if we have children, they may challenge those boundaries. Clients can do the same thing. How do you handle a 10 o’clock? And then that not everyone? Do you set certain expectations for your clients so that they know what to expect? If they reach out at like an odd hour?
Cathy Lamon 45:45 I wouldn’t say that I typically say okay, you can call me for between eight and six. I don’t have that. I know agents have some agents have that on their voicemail and all that. But honestly, I usually got to bed around 10. And I’m not answering the phone after that. Yeah. You know, and but I do think that it it’s for me and my husband, it’s it’s more event or situation driven. I answered the phone last night because I just got a contract worked out at like eight o’clock. And the guy had a question. So I answered the phone at quarter of 10. And my now my husband has been up to midnight with people going, you know, when there’s a deadline on inspection or something like that. So we I wouldn’t say we have any hard and fast. Okay, these are our business hours. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing that. We’re at a point in life when we don’t have any kids at home. So it really takes the pressure off of sure of that. And we are working on no phones at the dinner. You know, that kind of thing. That’s that’s sort of basic but
D.J. Paris 46:56 but if if a message comes in late at night that you don’t want to handle you’ve been a realtor for a very long time. Can we tell the rest of our audience that in most cases, it can wait, it can wait till the morning?
Cathy Lamon 47:12 Yeah. Oh, yeah. There’s nothing wrong with voicemail. You get it tomorrow?
D.J. Paris 47:16 That’s absolutely right. And the problem with text messages is there’s no end to a text message conversation, right? Yes. Phone calls have a start. And yeah, text messages haven’t started. They don’t happen yet. Yeah.
Cathy Lamon 47:27 That’s a very good point. I never thought about that. But yeah, if you start it, unless you say, I’m sorry, I’m going to bed no, no night.
D.J. Paris 47:36 Yes. Which by the way, is it absolutely reasonable thing if the person is expecting some sort of response, you can just say, Oh, I’m I’m headed to bed first thing in the morning, I got it or whatever. What who can who can you know, argue with that? Um, Kevin, we should also mention, too, that, you know, our show is an a show for agents by agents listened to by agents as well. So you know, we also want to promote referrals. And we know that Kathy works in downtown Atlanta. She is in the nearby surrounding suburbs as well. But Atlanta is a hotbed for people moving in and out. Lots of big companies are there. And if anyone does have people moving into Atlanta, in particular, the metro area and the close suburbs, you know, Kathy is a great resource. So Kathy, if there are agents out there that either maybe want to connect with you, because you might have people that are moving from Atlanta, like Florida, or wherever they may be retiring to. Yep. So what’s the best way if somebody wants to connect with you that they can reach out?
Cathy Lamon 48:38 My website is just simple Lemond team.com, Li Mo n dot, hope sorry, la mo n team.com. I’m Cathy at Lemond teen.com on. I’m on Facebook, Insta, all those all those good places. And I think you said you’re gonna put it in the show notes to say, Well,
D.J. Paris 48:58 absolutely. But we I really, you know, Kathy, it’s funny. I was just sort of reflecting on what we’ve talked about today. And there are lots of great tips here that Kathy provided. So on behalf of our audience, I mean, really, this was a chock full episode of actionable strategies by somebody who’s been in real estate for over 30 years now. Congratulations, by the way, they do the math right on that. Yes. Yeah. That is That is impressive. And not and Kathy has seen oh, by the way, Kathy, you’ve been through some ups and downs. Last question. Are, are we worried right now about the market at all? Are we worried about interest rates? Or are we like we’ve seen this before, it’s going to be fine.
Cathy Lamon 49:41 We are going to be fine. And as you’ve pointed out, I’m a big follower of Brian Buffini. He is very optimistic about what’s going to happen with the rates and the market. His message right now is to focus on listings we need to be listing listing listing and learn You know, if you don’t have listings, go to a class and learn how to do them better. So just invest in yourself, invest in your people. And really, he says, we’re going to have a great 2024. So good things ahead.
D.J. Paris 50:16 And for anyone out there who’s like, how do I get more listings? There’s a million ways to do it. But one way that I think would be particularly applicable today is and Kathy can tell me if I’m not wrong, because I might be, but Well, I’m definitely not. But I’m also I may be wrong. That’s for sure. I’m definitely crazy. But, you know, people are always interested to know what their home value is, right? This is why Zillow became Zillow. It was the Zestimate it wasn’t the home search, it was actually the Zestimate. And this estimate then gave birth really to their home search. So you know, people, whether what, whatever we think of the Zestimate people like to see the Zestimate, whatever, however accurate we think it is or not, this is a great opportunity to take a lesson from Zillow playbook and maybe reach out to people who, whether they were your client or not. Hey, I thought I would show you what I believe your home is approximately worth right now. Would you be interested in seeing that? I mean, I would always be interested in seeing that. So I don’t know if you do CMAs for your clients. I’m sure
Cathy Lamon 51:20 I did one yesterday, as a matter of fact, yes.
D.J. Paris 51:23 And by the way, as much as I love, I think Silla is a great company. And I like so a lot of agents do not I understand and respect that as well. But if I’m looking for an actual CMA, I don’t, I don’t use best I use estimate as like a starting point, like, okay, that’s what Zillow thinks, but I want somebody like Kathy showing me exactly what she thinks after 30 years of business because she knows the market better than, you know, an algorithm likely could. So um, this is a great opportunity guys to exercise your your experience, and you know, show people hey, this is what I think right now. Great opportunity there. But on behalf of our audience for all the great tips and advice that Kathy provided, we say thank you to Kathy and her her, her team and her husband’s not on the call. But we we say thank you to him as well, for some of the tips that you mentioned that he has. And on behalf of Kathy and myself, we’d be remiss if we didn’t say thanks to the audience. Thanks for listening. Thanks for making me to be Thank you. And thanks for making it to the end of the episode we just asked everybody do two quick things for us. I know it’s a lot to ask. But just tell one thing, tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that could benefit. This is a great episode, send it to people that are struggling right now. agents that are like, What do I do? It’s a tough, yes, send this to them. They’ll get some great ideas. And also, please leave us a review. Wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Let us know what you think of the show. Construct constructive criticism is always important to us. We write we do this episodes, we do the show for you. So please let us know how we can improve it and also what you like as well. Kathy, thank you so much. We are so honored to have you. You’re a big deal. And you didn’t have time to do this. And you found time. So thank you, everyone. Yes, thank you. Oh, well thank you visit Lemond team.com L A m o n team.com Links to all of Cathy’s websites and email and social media in the show notes reach out to us she’s a lovely things she has wisdom guys learn from people who have been in the business 30 years. That’s the one thing they have that new agents just don’t they don’t have wisdom yet you don’t have it. That’s something that comes with time and people like Kathy, I don’t want to make you sound like you’re older Cathy that is not what I’m saying. I don’t think you’re older. But just being in the business this long is really a treasure and it’s no surprise that Cathy’s a top producer.
Cathy Lamon 53:40 So most people in this business love to share so absolutely reach out with questions I’d be happy to to have a dialogue.
D.J. Paris 53:49 Awesome. Lemond team.com is where you learn all things Kathy and her team. Kathy, thank you and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you, DJ
Step By Step Buyer Checklist For Real Estate Agents • Breaking Down Ali’s Systems • Ali Garced
Aug 29, 2023
Welcome to Breaking Down Ali’s Systems mini-series with Ali Garced.
In this mini-series Ali will be explaining how she built her systems both for buyers and for sellers. In the first episode, Ali describes how she breaks apart her process working with buyers into 6 different segments.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. Why Is today a special episode? Well, in just a moment, I’m going to be turning it over to Ali gar said Ally’s actually been on our show, actually recently. And she had such a great reaction from our listeners and fans, that we asked her to come back to do a couple of special episodes for just for you guys. And so today, she is going to be going step by step through her buyer checklist. And this is probably the best buyer checklist presentation I have ever seen. So guys, this is a literally step by step instruction to help level up your buyer checklist process. So without further ado, and by the way, we’re going to do more of these from some of our guests like Ali, please let us know if you want more of this because I think this is really really cool stuff. So I hope you guys enjoy it. Let us know your feedback. And now let’s turn it over to my friend Ali gar said also follow her on Instagram, Ali, the agent, its ally underscore the underscore agent. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. But let’s turn it over to ally. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Ali Garced 2:40 Hey everyone, it’s Aligarh set again or ally the agents on all social media that spelled a Li and I am back with my first segment of the buyer checklist. I promised DJ that I would share everything in my checklist. So originally, you know the checklists were the buyer’s checklists, the seller checklist, the investor checklists, the onboarding checklist. Originally everything was for my just for my downline, but I really want to I really hope that this helps just better the industry altogether. So I am giving away my buyer checklists, my seller checklists, my 200 Step onboarding checklist for agents, no matter what level or like level they’re at is still just for my downline, but I am giving away my homebuyer checklist and my seller one so this is part one of maybe two or three for the buyer side. We’ll see how it goes. And then I’m also going to have a two part buyer or two part for the seller checklists. So I am on Trello. And I am going to be walking through how I have everything set up on Trello. If you want to follow along, watch this on YouTube because I am sharing my screen. And if you can’t, that’s okay, I’m going to make it I’m going to vocalize as much as I can. So in that way, it’s as if you are following along. So I’ll start with what is even Trello right Trello is a free project management system. You could use your CRM, but I started using Trello because it was free. And I kind of just stuck with that. So I’m going to show you and vocalize how I have this laid out. Starting from the very left side, I have a whole section for sellers and then a whole section for buyers and then a section for referrals as well. And what I do for those in my downline is I give them access straight to this Trello checklist they can copy and paste it but for those that are outside of my downline, I will be sending you a link to it. So that way you can have access to but not the full access that I have given that I’ve poured my heart and soul into for my downline specifically. So on the left hand side here I have it I have sellers and buyers broken into three different columns. So one is like far out sellers and I’m calling like see sellers be sellers is you know, three to six months out, again to make sure that you’re hitting everyone on that specific tempo, then I have the third column is a seller’s getting ready to list, you know, you need to go on an appointment today and meet with them. Then I have one week before going live. The next column is once they are live on the market. The next column is once they’re under contract. Because again, as you start getting more and more, you know, properties under contract and working with more buyers and sellers to scale, you’re gonna get overwhelmed. So you need to have this organization in the beginning. So as if you’ve never used Trello, you can like drag and drop little cards. So you can you know, as soon as someone’s under contract, and then they’re they’re out a week out from closing, just drag and drop the card. Now, you know the numbers change for how many are about a week out from closing. Then the next column is the size of for sellers, then on the buyer side, which I will be focusing on today is how I work through my buyers. So again, see buyers about a year out but be buyers about six months out ish. And then a buyers, hot buyers or hot leads talk to them today. Then, of course under contract has its own column one week out from closing, once they’re closed for 2023, or whatever year we’re in, when you’re listening to this, then an archived one close but in the past, you know, before are further out than a year ago, if that makes sense. And then I also have a dead lead column as well. And then I go into the referrals. I have everything consolidated onto this Trello board. Again, this was for this is for the downline so they can just see how I organize things, I will show you mine, he is crazy. It has the same exact thing. But in order to make this as clear and easy for you to follow along. And for the agents to follow along. In my crew, I made it as simple as possible. So this is a template. So let’s start. Let’s open up this Trello checklist. And in the beginning here is the source. That’s the first thing you need to be tracking is who is giving you business where’s your business coming from because that is what you want to replicate double down on, you know if it’s all coming from Zillow, then double down on Zillow, if it’s all coming from a couple people that you know that consistently give you business, you show them some love, give them some gifts. And, and say thank you. So you need to know you need to track X I’m such a huge proponent of tracking everything, a track where your leads are coming from. So then, of course, I have like just the typical questions of of what you’re going to be asking what you need to know once you’re starting to work with the buyer. I have some attachments here, they might not apply to everyone because this is a buyer broker specifically for our area. critical dates list. Of course, this might not apply to you, but that’s okay. You can include your own attachments. And then buyer initiation. This is the first portion of the checklist. So I have my checklists, sorted into different segments and segments. So when we first start talking to a buyer, first thing is add them to your calendar, add them to your CRM. So that way, you know to follow up at what tempo what are the notes of what you previous previously said. The second for the second portion here is take the intake from the Calendly. And this is what I used to have as buyer email number one. For my buyers, I have buyer emails one through six, it’s canned, it’s template, it’s evergreen. So I just copy and paste all I do is just change this who the recipient is for, but I used to have this as buyer email number one. Now what I do is I send all buyers to my Calendly Calendly is a paid service. It’s about $160 a year, I highly recommend you sign up for it in case you haven’t already. But and if you want to follow along there too, with whether you’re looking at the screen or not. I you can go on mine and copy the exact questions that I have. It’s open to the public. So if you go on calendly.com/guard said Realty that’s spelled G AR C Ed Realty slash buyer will see exactly what my buyers are filling out before they meet with me. So I’ll show you here. Go as if you’re going to be booking an appointment. I’m getting their name, email number, I have a next up is the box that says you know, will you be selling another home before during this this next purchase? Yes or No? If yes, what’s that address what the zip code of the home you’ll be selling? Because when we meet at the time that they scheduled for, I’ll be asking if they want are a realtor in that area to help them sell their home before they purchase with us? What’s the reason that you’re buying and selling? Then I also have I also ask, what are the top three must haves? Very important, as you all know, what are the top three wants? What are the top three deal breakers? And the catch all? Is there anything else that you’d like me to know to be better prepared for our meeting? So this they might come out with something out of left field better that they put it in this Calendly now before your appointment with them, instead of you know, on the fly, where you might not know the answer, and you could have researched it beforehand. And this last section is for them to send text messages for calendaring to send text to the whoever’s booking the call. What this is only portion one, right I’m not, I’m not going to go into Calendly. Today, although I can on a on a next meeting, if you guys wish. But in the back end of Calendly, I also go into the work flows tab, because I want to make sure that I’m not going to be stood up. So I have the automatic email and texts sent out to the buyers or sent out to anyone who books with me saying thanks for you know, confirming you know we’re on for XYZ you scheduled this, this specific type of meeting. And then I also have a 24 hour out meeting in case they book out more than a day out. And then I also have the hour before it sends them a text it sends them an email saying hey, we look forward to seeing you in one hour for the home buying consultation. So let’s go back to my Trello checklist. That is what I have all the buyers fill out this is what used to be in my buyer email number one, so I will not be covering Berryman number one because instead now I have Calendly save so much time.
So you take the information of what they put in the buyer appointment, and you start looking you know, you already start thinking about what kind of homes are looking at, who’s going to be in the meeting, etc. So then going down this checklist here, ask the buyers before going under contract with them. This is while you’re meeting with them over zoom, and I meet with everyone over zoom. Because a lot of my a lot of my meat and potatoes clients are actually out of state. So because I do have a military background. So a lot of them our PCs thing is what they call moving in the military. So but then I got used to that. And I figured that that was such a better time spent, even if they are local in the area. Nobody wants to drive to an office, nobody want this was a power move, I think. So save the time for them. And for you meet over zoom. And that is where you go over a couple of questions, even more questions, because Calendly only allows 10 questions. So that’s where you ask them? How often do you expect to hear from me? What how can I be the best agent for you? And a lot of agents have issues with that question because it kind of like shifts the power dynamics, if they if you want to call it that. But don’t forget that not only are they interviewing you as an agent, you are interviewing them as clients do not work with someone that doesn’t make you feel good. You know, there’s so much business to be had, especially now that so many realtors are leaving the business, scoop up the rest of the business. Don’t Don’t be afraid to say no, because they’re every single client that you take on, I’m probably preaching to the choir here. But every single client that you take on, that you don’t feel good about, you know, you have like that. Like those bad butterflies in your stomach, whenever they call you or text you that is a sure sign that you are not meant to be working together. And that is okay, let them go. Because all the time that you’re spending with them is time that you could be spending with other clients that make you feel good. So anyway, then also ask them what’s the best method of communication? Of course, because some people only like phone calls. Of course, as you guys know, I don’t, I don’t like phone calls. But if they do, guess what I’m doing phone calls, text, email, whatever it is, what I like about Trello is I can add these notes to the very, very top. So as your Trello board gets busier as you’re adding other clients here you can easily you know, see, say Emma buyer in this city, this type of property, text or call, so that way you don’t have to remember who does MLA tax. Let me look at that calendar and let me see that email that came in. No, it says right there, Emma likes text messages. Then add them to your CRM over here. I have KB core and I love KB core. I didn’t in the beginning but wow. Like I really really like I only know about 30% of what it handles and I’m actually testing this out too. So if if you want a copy of this checklist and you haven’t already reached out to me on on social media, text the word checklist to Oh 520-341-2552 more than happy to send it to you. Then of course, you want to contact the lender or connect them to a lender, I usually do like a group chat with the lender, then of course, set them up on a search. Next on the Trello checklist is check in three days after setting them up on the search. And this is I also have setup on my CRM. So as I add each client into the CRM, in Cavey, core specifically, and I’m sure others do the same thing. I add tasks. So in three days from when we met, I’m going to add a task to notify me to reach out to the client saying, Hey, did you like everything on the on the search? Is there anything I could switch super easy for us to do? So just let us know want to make sure we’re not sending you trash? So then, here, as you can tell, next step is I had to send buyer emails one and two. Now, of course, by email number one no longer exists. So let me know let me change that right here. Send Email number two. Let me show you email. Number two, what does buyer email number two have? Ally? Well, let me show you. I use superhuman, it’s a way to do a lot of shortcuts. But you can do the same thing. With just saving this as a template on either Gmail or Outlook, whatever you use, but templated emails, do not be copying, or do not be writing the same email over and over again, that’s not a way to scale. And you want to be able to scale I imagine if you’re listening to this. So right here in two seconds, I pulled up buyer email number two. And it’s the title is we’re excited to work with you. Because what buyer email number two is, is the confirmation that you and I are working together exclusively, you’re not going to be using another realtor. So therefore, buyer email number two is very important for me, because this is the mean potatoes, everything I poured my heart and soul into this email, and to everything really that I do checklists, everything. And this has this is the way ahead, I show them the eggs, I show them everything of what buying a home is like in this market. So I started off with a video this video is evergreen, it’s not specific to I don’t say any names. I don’t say any specific information because I want this video to be evergreen and used for every single buyer email number two, in this in this video, you’ll see that I actually all I do is go over all of the words in the email. Because if buyers are to get an email like this, nobody likes reading anymore. So even if you make a video of you reading what you are sending them, they will watch that better, you know, they will watch that they will feel better. Instead of giving them homework, hey, read this whole long email. And you know that’s it. So I go over in this video what exactly I’m relaying to them in words of that email. Starting with number one what to do right now I give them homework, you know, buyers want to be told what to do, even even if they are investors that have you know, purchase multiple properties before they want to know think about it as a buyer. What is the next step? What do you want for me? What do I need to do? And what’s next? Always think about that, like what do they need to be hearing from me a lot of agents are too scared to add their to assigning them homework and I tell them straight up buyers, this is your homework. So what to do now is complete the buyer or open the complete buyer client PDF. This contains the entire step by step on how to purchase a property and boy does it you’ll see number two before I open an l open all the attachments at the end. Number two is message me if you’ve already had other agents show your properties we do not overstep or steal clients because if they have that if for some reason they really don’t like them, then I want to reach out to that agent and make sure because that agent might not even know and a lot of agents are too scared to do this. I don’t care. I do not steal clients. I tell everyone in my crew like we do we do. There’s so much shady madness that happens in this industry. Don’t make it worse. If you are working with another agent, excellent. Then work with that agent. We are going to focus our time on other clients that only want to work with us and I have no issue saying that and believe it or not at all. I’ve only ever lost to clients because of that and that’s okay. Number three is walkthrough, the purchase contract was which is attached. And with this video that I made for you this needs to be reviewed before we place offers. Number four is check your junk folder in case the listings that we send to you through the through our website through the MLS is sent to your junk. Number five is review the seven ways to make your offer stand out video. Number six review the buyer advisory on due diligence best practices and numbers Seven send us your pre approval or proof of funds, we cannot take the next steps without that. And then following us email here I have once again, whenever you have a property that you like, based off the emails that we send you please do the following. This is what you do. Once you find a property that you like, one, make sure it’s in a location where you’d like it to be, I cannot talk about you know, as as you know, realtors cannot talk about what area is safe. So instead, what we can do is give you the resources for you to figure that out on your own. So this is a list of schools, for you to do your research, if schools are important, is a spotcrime.com maps.google.com dropped a little yo guy walk the neighborhood virtually in case you’re not already there, make sure it’s within your pre approval amount, ensure your spouse or all other buying parties approved. And sure the numbers work for you. Let’s connect it with your lender. That’s why I do a group text with the lender. And if you’re serious about it enough to make an offer, and I tell this over the Zoom call with my buyers, if it’s a level seven or above out of 10, like 10, is you really want that property, if you want to make an offer on it, that’s when you send it to us, that’s when we start taking a look. So otherwise, there’s no point of seeing a house that you only halfway are interested in anything under seven, don’t send it then I told them that.
Then number six, I’ll look up all of the agent notes, I’ll send all the information to you any attachments that they have read it over. That’s number seven, and number eight, let’s get you in there ASAP. I tried to kill the deal before it even starts if you can’t tell, because there’s no point of seeing a house of contacting the listing agent. If the buyer is a VA loan, and they’re not even accepting VA loans. Of course, you’re going to ask Hey, was that was this a fluke? Was this a typo? But I tried to kill the deal before it starts, save your time save your sanity. Then as again, I reiterate it, there’s no point of driving to view a property that’s out of your budget and an area you don’t like. So make sure it is a hill. Yes. And the purpose of this video is to make sure is because I wish I had more information when I was a buyer. So I want to send you as much information as I can. Hopefully not talking too fast. Then, of course, in every single email that I have, I have a way ahead. This is what to expect next. That’s always what clients questions are, what to expect next. So next expect next by your email number three, which will be sent as we get closer to drafting your offer. I have 1234566 attachments in this buyer email number two, that might sound like a lot. But again, I’d rather I’d rather send them all the information now. So that way they have it and they can review at their own leisure as opposed to later on when they’re rushed. Let’s start with the beefiest one buyer client PDF. Now, as you can tell, if you’re following along here, this took a lot of work. I did not make this PDF, I hired somebody to do it because I am not digitally creative like this. But it’s in in pretty in prettier format. You know, there’s colors on here, it’s a little photo of me what I’m about that I used to be the military i inverse, these are some podcasts that I’ve been on in case you want to just learn a little bit more about me. Then I have another video on page two, page three of just a welcome introduction. This is me, I’m excited to work with you. Page four is what you can expect what the buyer can expect from me. Communication guidance, local knowledge, market expertise. Number five, page five is what I could expect from them submit a prequel, you know, before viewing properties, we cannot do that until I have your pre qual. And it’s you know up to date, that I also expect that they drive the neighborhood if they’re in a local area. Before we view that property that on the inside, I expect that they see the property on the outside. A lot of people might think oh, you know, you’re you’re telling the buyer to do too much. Trust me. I’ve only ever gotten positive feedback about this, like, oh, wow, no one’s ever told me to do that. That’s a good idea. It is. It’s a great idea. I got that from my dad, because I’m an investor as well. So I want to know what’s going on at 11pm on a Friday. And I tell them hey if you want to go extra credit if you go at at midnight on a Saturday night to see if you’re actually comfortable in that area that you’re interested in. So of course you can follow you can win if you text me again, the key word is going to be text training for a copy of everything here 25203412552 So following along general information, my work hours, this is how you know we’re going to be communicating then the real process starts where I have video after video three videos per page on talking them through the whole buying process, buyer client expectations home buying process. But what it’s like to buy a mark to buy a house in this market shopping for a lender. It’s exactly what I do when I shop for a lender Purchase Contract Overview and what is the specific market well Right now, then four steps that buyers forget to make when placing offers. And guess what, guess where I thought of these four steps, my own personal mistakes, so don’t make the mistakes I was making. So make sure that that your buyers see this seven ways to make your offer stand out. Now I should probably be up late update this one because this last one had the love letters which I do not do anymore do not recommend. And then under contract, I’m under contract. Now what? That’s always a question, right. And then at the bottom, you know, follow me on my socials. I’m telling the buyers these I’m not telling you this, although you can if you want to it’s ally, the agents. So that’s the BPS attachment. Next is the word doc, which I think my computer might freeze if I open so but what I have here is the what you can expect from me. Now what do I have here, it’s a video that is already on the buyer client PDF, that PDF has everything in a video series of what the buyer needs to make, to make an offer and to work with me. So the what you can expect from me attachment. The second attachment is exactly what I have already mentioned previously, it’s just been a Word doc, so they can follow along my work hours, you know, this is what I expect. Then the other two attachments are specific to this local area, it’s the purchase contract or in some states, I offered a purchase. But whatever the purchase contract is in your area, I attach that I attach them via email number two, but really, it’s their first email that they’re getting. So that way right off the bat, they see how formal it is. Then I also attach the additional clause in case they need to do anything outside of the original contract. So for example, waive the appraisal or anything like that. Then I also have the buyers roadmap, which is just a one pager color, you know, pretty looking thing. It’s a wheel that just walks the buyers through the purchase contract or through the whole home buying process. Then I have the buyer advisory my TC also sends this, but I would rather them my buyers have this immediately. So that way because this is lengthy, right? According to your to your MLS, this is going to be a pretty beefy one. And it helps out a lot common physical conditions in the property that a buyer should investigate. I want them to know that. And I don’t want them to only hear it from me and my videos, I want them to see, oh, this is you know, a statewide thing. Maybe I should get a sewer scope? Yes, you should. So that is that’s all the attachments that I have in via email number two, and I think I’m going to leave it here. So again, I there’s no way I can go through every single item on this just this first segment segment of my Trello checklist. But again, if you text training to 520341252 it takes you through every single thing. Now, I don’t have all scripts on here, but I have a couple of just questions to ask to not forget everyone in my exp downline, they have access to a lot more information than this. I have a two almost 200 page real estate Bible google doc which has everything that I know about real estate sales, and I mean everything, but that is exclusive to them. However, the most important portions, some of the most important portions of it is they’re all on the on the checklist that I’m sharing with you today. So if you’d like more you know what to do you know what to text. If you have any questions or I don’t know like want to schedule a one on one. I’m here for that. It’s calendly.com/garside Realty. I super hope this helps the next. The next training is going to be on the part two of working with a buyer will go over emails number three and four. Look forward to seeing you then. Bye
Why You Should First Work On Consistency • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Aug 28, 2023
Welcome to the August episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode, Joel discusses why educating new agents in real estate business is crucial and how growing positivity will help them handle stress. Joel also talks about work ethics and the importance of having consistency, setting priorities and discipline and how they lead agents to good relationships with their clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We’re approaching our 500th episode. And I just wanted to say that the number one characteristic that I’ve learned from all of the agents that we’ve had on our show of top producers has been consistency. We’re going to dive into that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Harris, I am your guide and host through the show today once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. He’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. In fact, last year alone, Joe gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, there’s actually 400,000 loan officers in this in the United States. And Joel is currently ranked number 137. Now this year alone, he’s closed. Oh my gosh, I just screwed something up. Joel. My numbers just got screwy. So could you please tell us your numbers? I apologize. My eye numbers are screwy
too. It’s crazy. I know.
Yeah, right now, I mean, we’re lucky enough to be just under $75 million close DJ for the year in purchase. And that’s 170 closed transactions year to date so far. Yeah, amazing.
That really is amazing. It is a tough year, a lot of our audiences probably, you know, feeling the challenges right now in the market. But what we do know is that consistency, hard work and discipline really pays off, it might just feel a little bit trickier today. But everything that people can do today is going to actually, you know, result in some bear some fruit here in the near future. So while it may feel I just want to address this because I run into a lot of realtors. So on my show, when this podcast when I talk to top producers, I’m speaking to the audience here for I just want to make a quick point that I hope resonates with everyone. So when I speak the top 1% producers, they get to where they’ve got by by tolerating market cycles, right? So they’ve been through UPS, they’ve been through downs, especially if they’ve been around, you know, since or the early 2000s. They’ve been through a few of these cycles. And they seem to understand the cycle. And so what I encourage anyone who hasn’t been through some of these cycles, and it’s feeling maybe a little tougher right now is, you know, seek refuge in some of these agents who have been around longer than you talk to them, ask them for the wisdom that they gained through these challenging times in the past, because they’ll give you all sorts of ideas of Oh, I wish I would have done this, you know, from 2008 to 2010, when the market was really, really struggling. And now you know, they’re able to do some of that today. And so if this is your first time going through a tricky market cycle, don’t don’t despair. It’s all part of part of the normal cycle of business. But we want to keep you motivated and encouraged to continue growing your business, which I know can be a little trickier. So Joel and I are going to focus on some things today that we really want to keep you engaged with your business even though you know right now, inventories low rates aren’t exactly where we want them to be. Yeah, that’s the rial Woody, and there’s things you can do to stay on top of it. So anyway, I apologize for that little rambling monologue there. But I did want to, I did want to make that point because we know it’s tough. And if you listen to my show, you know, we talked to these top one percenters. They’re like, everything’s great. This is so awesome. And it is great, because they’ve been through some of these hard times before, and they know how to navigate through them. So if you’re struggling, don’t you’re not alone. But we’re going to try to help you through that on this on this episode a little bit. And Joel has been around for a long, long time in this business. And he’s seen what top producers do throughout their time in practice to help you as well. So Joel, welcome once again to the show.
Well, I love that you’re talking about this. I love the tangent, you call it a rant. But I mean, it’s true. It’s really what we’re doing here is literally educating agents. Because if the negative news is all around, you surround yourself with positivity, I work with agents that right now can tell you what they would have done if they had all the time in the world, right? So if it’s, if it’s slow for you, right, think about what you could do to actually grow the business, right? Because these agents, if you’ve been around for years, we recall when we didn’t have any extra time on our hands. So if you’re sitting there saying, I have all the extra time on my hands, because I don’t have 20 deals closing a month, right? What do you do? Surround yourself, listen to these podcasts, right? Grow your database, right? Make sure that people know that you’re in the business. And so we’re gonna go through a lot of stuff today that will absolutely help you get even one more deal. Maybe it’s a new buyer, maybe it’s a new listing. But by tuning in, you’re really going to grow. So we applaud you for that.
I’m going to start with one that that I just heard, because I’ll forget in the next few seconds if I don’t say it now that I just heard from a former guest of of keeping it real. Also Joel, you know this person as well. He was a 30, under 30, National Association of realtor award winner, Jordan Pyle, he’s a local Chicago agent. He’s a, he’s a lovely, lovely guy. And I was talking to him recently, and he was telling me that one of the things he’s been doing with the extra time, as you mentioned, that he has now because he’s not closing 20 deals a month, is it in the sounds kind of it’s actually a really fun one, I think, at least it would be for me. And what he’s doing is he’s spending an hour every day. And that’s a lot of time. So if you have an hour, great if you don’t, you know, maybe you do a half an hour, and he literally is just replying to Facebook posts and Instagram posts for the people in his database. And he’s doing it in an authentic way. And what he’s doing is he’s looking at his his feed, I want to get really specific about this. He’s looking at his feed, when he sees a friend of his or somebody that is in his database, you know, goes on vacation, or maybe has some life event or just you know, goes out to a nice dinner and takes a picture of it. He comments on it. And he says it has to be authentic. He’s not just like, you know, it looks awesome. He he thinks about like a nice comment. He writes it and he goes, I want people to know that I care about their lives. And now I have time to demonstrate that through replying. And he goes, I do. I can’t remember if he does 30 or 50. I think it want to say he does 30 to 50 comments a day, and not not to the same people every day, of course. But and when I heard that, I said, What is that dude, he goes well, he goes, it generates a lot of goodwill. It generates a lot of people going wow, Jordan thought about me. And so that was my little suggestion.
Sure, it’s number one, we talk a lot on the show DJ about things that you can do that cost money. And the number one thing here, it’s not the number one thing, but this is one thing that you can do as an agent, if you stay consistent with it. So what is this rule? What is this, putting it into practice taking what Jordan Pyle did, and actually do it for yourself? Really, it costs no money, and your name consistently stays out there. And it’s not like you said, just that looks great. I did that for years, when I looked at listings, and I said, I really liked that color blue in the kitchen. That’s so amazing. Marcia, keep up the great work. And you just do this consistently. People know that you’re in the business, then you’re a realtor, right? If you’re listening to this, you could make sure that you’re out there doing the exact same thing. And how much does that cost? DJ?
Zero, it just costs time. All it costs us a little bit of time. And even if it doesn’t, even if it isn’t real estate related, what we’re talking about is building intimacy. We’re building relationships, you know, in the way that you build relationships beyond a sale is you care about somebody and what’s going on in their lives. And you show that you demonstrate that because I think intimacy has to be earned. And the way that you do that is by showing up.
Well, you’re exactly right. I mean, we kicked off the show talking about closing over 20 units a month, you know, different homes and I speak to agents daily that are saying I’d like to get to 20 closings in a year right. So if you’re doing 20 20 or 30 closings every single month? How do you have time to do any of this and you can kind of prioritize. So if you’re not at that level yet, and most people truly are, you do have extra time. And it’s all about what you set for your priorities. Right. So number one, that’s an easy thing to do. And the other one that I wanted to touch base on, of course, is making sure that you have a good database and adding people in refining it, and then doing small reach outs to everybody that’s there. If it’s a postcard, if it’s a pop by things that you can do, because this is still a people business DJ, right until the robots replace us, there’s still going to be somebody that needs to go out and show the homes. And they’re still going to need to be people on the lending, Attorney side title. So there’s real relationships that need to be built here. And it’s just getting back down to basics if you’re not extremely busy right now.
Yeah, this is the time to focus back on the fundamentals. When’s the last time that you’ve gone through and pruned? Not so much to remove people from your database? pruned isn’t the right word. When’s the last time you updated your database with information? Like, do you know your your? I won’t say clients necessarily, but but clients and prospects? Do you know their wedding anniversary? Why would you want to know that? Well, because then you can give them a call on their wedding anniversary every year and say, I’m thinking about you grats on year number 17. How many how many service providers are even thinking about that probably very few in there, that client’s life or that prospects life, you know that these are little things you can do that when you have time, you find out the soft parts of someone’s life that are tangentially related to business. You know, I think one of the one of the best ways another little suggestion, if you know where your clients work, or at least you have in your database of their employer, you can set up Google alerts for that employer for the news section. So what this would do is actually send you in real time when Google notices oh, let’s say you have a client who works at Boeing. And you know, some Boeing gets some major contract or something’s and that’s a big huge company. So maybe that’s not the best example. But but you get the ideas. Anytime you know, somebody’s employer is in the news, you then gives you another two, hey, just saw your your employer did this. Cool. Congratulations. Yeah,
I love that. That really is true. And one of the things that I’ve been doing for like three or four years now is setting up reminders for clients birthdays, and instead of a phone call or a text, I started doing videos years ago, okay, so I don’t know if you ever saw that website cameo, right? We’ve talked about this offline, right? And so you get celebrities to send a video on on your behalf, right? And so, who’s the bigger celebrity right now, if somebody is getting ready to buy a home Leonardo DiCaprio or you the realtor, you’re more important. Okay, maybe, maybe Leo or one of these top persons are but think about the power of you actually doing just a 15 second video, say happy birthday. And I make mine fun and silly. So I literally start yelling and screaming Happy Birthday and spinning around in the chair and just being real. Instead of being like, that’s just who I am. So I like to have fun with it. And I sing off key and I say it’s a very special birthday message from your favorite lender, Joel shop. And it gets such great replies. So do what’s authentic to you. If it’s heartfelt, do that. If it’s funny do that. But doing something that’s different. I tell you, there’s not a lot of people sending video messages to people on their birthday. And you just set it up every morning, I look at my phone. And I can do it right through Facebook to see how many birthdays are today. And it doesn’t take but more than a few seconds and I shoot the videos and send them out. And it’s a it’s been a big hit.
You know, these are the people skills we’re really talking about. I also wanted to touch on the actual hard skills, the hard realtor skills that I don’t say hard meaning difficult, but the important skills I you know, I had a call today, we have a holding company, which is for agents that aren’t actively practicing but want to keep their license active but they’re basically out of the business. They just have a license and are not practicing. And I got a call from one of our holding company agents today’s asking me to run a CMA for comparable market analysis for her particular property. And I said oh, okay, you know, and I she goes, Well, we’re just trying to figure out if we should sell it and I don’t she said I don’t really trust this estimate the Zillow Zestimate. So I wanted to get, you know, DJ, can you run me a CMA? And I said, Well, I’m not particularly good at it, but but I’ll do my best. And, and again, I think this is another huge opportunity for everyone who has a database of people that own homes, whether you are their realtor or not, when they purchased you have the ability to say, Hey, I was going to I’m practicing my CMAs or I’m just running you know, I do this for all for everyone in my database once or twice a year, whatever you however you want to market it and say hi, I was wondering if I You shouldn’t even ask you should just do it. Hey, I have a market analysis for you. I just wanted to give you an updated thing of what I think your home was worth whether you’re moving or not irrelevant. I just wanted to show this to you. Because most of my clients like to know what their home is worth, you know, every so often. That’s a huge opportunity. And it’s if you’re a skilled realtor, you can knock these out in probably 30 seconds or a minute each. So it’s not that they’re not that challenging to put together. But they are really helpful because I think every homeowner, whether they’re selling or buying, always likes to know what their homes worth.
And it sharpens your skill. So think of this. I love what you said there. But I’m going to take it one step further for agents that probably haven’t done a lot of CMAs. Who are they going to go do these for DJ, right? They don’t have a long database of people to do it for, you can still run CMAs for people that weren’t your clients that have bought with another agent, right? With values being upright now, it’s not good enough just to trust the Zestimate. And even if they’re not interested in selling, now you’ve given somebody something. So now taking that database, people that you know that know you doing some work for them. It’s not only going to keep you top of mind and when the time does come for them to sell. But it helps strengthen the skills that you’re going to need when somebody actually does need you. Right? Yes, I love it. I
agree. That’s, that’s, it’s, it’s excellent. And I also want to just to make one other suggestion. So if you haven’t, if our listeners haven’t yet fully embraced chat, GBT, don’t worry, whether it comes for our jobs or not as is up to the gods. But for now, it hasn’t totally taken over. But you can actually do some really fun things to keep you well actually, I’m going to give you a couple ideas here. First thing I want you to do this is not chat GBT, this is for for you that Joel, this is a Joel thing I want you to reach out to Joel and and subscribe to his newsletter which comes out in the middle of the week, usually. And it is for realtors to understand what’s going on in the lending world so that they can effectively you can effectively communicate with buyers and sellers about what’s going on without having to, you know, sit through hours long lectures about what’s going on in lending. So they sent out this newsletter, I want to do give a plug for that real quickly because it is so helpful. Guys, this gives you reasons to pick up the phone reasons to talk to people and it makes you sound intelligent, because of course it’s information that’s current and up to date, Joel, if somebody everybody should do this, just do it. Trust me, it’s going to be super helpful. What’s the best way that they should email you to get on your mailing list?
Well, I call my little nuggets, right. So it’s a weekly digestible newsletter that actually gives you talking points without sounding too smart or too dumb. That’s me. I’m like right down the middle. And that’s the way I like it. Right? Email, it’s so simple, literally, you could just send me an email saying please add me to your newsletter. And it’s Joel JOE l@rate.com Ra t.com. And the subject line could simply be add me to your newsletter. And in the inside, please add me or thank you or I heard you on the show. One sentence, you’ll get added. And then every single week, you’ll get one or two things that you can absolutely use to grow your business, pick up another buyer help a seller in ways that is not so nuanced that you feel like I’m just reading paragraph after paragraph really good stuff.
So yes, everybody please send an email to joel@radio.com asked to be added to the newsletter, trust me, it will help you in your business when you’re communicating with with buyers and sellers, and you won’t have to seek this information out because Joel is gonna send it right to your inbox. So I was asked to be on a radio show recently. And they asked me to prepare some some information. And the back to this is back to our chat GBT thing. And so I this is for homebuyers and sellers. And so I thought, Oh, this will be interesting. So I went to chat GBT and I said give me five reasons why it is a perfect time to buy or sell a property here in Chicago because it was a Chicago radio. And then I said give me five reasons why it’s not a perfect time. And the reason why I wanted both sides is because I wanted to be able to understand both perspectives and I wanted to see the data for both perspectives. And and this is really, really an important thing to understand. I have learned from interviewing hundreds of top Realtors across the country, that one of their skills that is really a really difficult skill to to learn. But once you have it really puts you in an upper echelon is understanding all sides of an argument, especially around buying and selling this will help you in your negotiating, it will help you understand the motivations of sellers and buyers. So what I like to do is as chat GBT, now you have to make sure that you’re getting current data and chat GBT is not necessarily always accurate. So um, you do your own research too. But I love this and I was able to go into this radio station with pros for buying and cons just in case it came up where somebody says it’s not a good time to buy a home right now I could say, Okay, I understand sort of why they might think that. And then I was able to go to the other side and say, but here’s some reasons why it might be a good time. And vice versa. You can do this for yourself every single day, you could say, you know, give me some some data about why it’s a great time to buy a condo in my in my, you know, my market area, or it’s a bad time to buy kind of these are good good things to know. So that you can, you know, be seen as as really, really knowledgeable and you don’t have to search on Google and go through everything anymore. Chat, GBT is going to search on Google for you and bring you those stats.
Knowing both sides of it. It’s what makes me a great husband to think about this. Knowing both sides and understanding things right makes you a better partner makes you a better human. And But all joking aside, yes, you can always make an argument for either side, right? And so I tell people all the time, you’re not in the right position to buy, like with the last lender said, the last letter wanting to commission. Right? Everyone’s focused on number one, right? But if you actually step back and talk to a buyer and say, this actually right now isn’t the right time for you, we should actually do X, Y, and Z. Boy, do you help people boy to people come back to you, right. So it’s hard if you don’t have a lot of transactions, but it takes time, once you have so many people, you can actually just be real with them, right? And try to help them. So I love the idea of using the chat GPT to go through and just get more information I’ve been digging in, I’ve read two books on it now. And it is not as cumbersome as you think, Boy, it can really help you do things. So if you haven’t done it, dive right in the trial version, of course, is free, there is an upgraded version at $20 a month as well. But you don’t need to don’t pay any money go in test. And it’ll help you be a better agent, for sure.
You know, you just said something really profound. And I think the ultimate, the ultimate skill that I or rather, there’s not one, one of the ultimate skills that top Realtors seem to, you know, have in their arsenal. And I understand this is going to take time. But this is where having a mentor or having people you could ask who are in that upper echelon can be very helpful. This is around under gosh, I just lost I apologize. I just lost my train of thought. It’ll come to me in a second. But the idea is that, you know, once, boy, I completely forgot, Joel, I know you’re
talking about this offline. I know exactly what you’re going with here. So the idea of like working, refining the skill about how you can write the right offer, right, this is weird. Thank
you. So let’s just go through it right. If you’re an
agent, right now, it’s pretty true that the top 90% of agents are winning most deals right, like so the same 90% of people, which means so many people are not winning deals. So if you’re out there, and you’re submitting offers and not winning, believe me, a lot of people are but the same agents are winning, what are they doing? Right? So they’re writing offers that are designed to win. So I just wanted to walk through the three things that I think make the most sense, and this is what we were talking about before. So when you’re submitting an offer, just keep it simple, right? That’s the number one thing a seller is looking for. So you’re trying to determine what would you want if you were actually accepting the offer? So although we talk about rate by downs and escalation clauses, at the end of the day, simplicity wins. So it’s not always the highest offer? It’s, there’s two words there, right, DJ, its highest and best. Yep. Which one’s the best doesn’t have to be the highest offer, right? So learning ways, what worked before and don’t complicate it, right? So that’s one, working with the right inspector always ends up either helping your deal or killing your deal, right? We got to keep deals together, if we’re lucky enough to win and get under contract, having an inspector that spooking the buyer, right? There’s always going to be a problem with some homes, right? Put it this way, there’s probably going to be some problem with every home, it’s just can you work with somebody that can describe it correctly, because if you go under contract and the buyer cancels over a minor inspection issue, we’re back to square one, right? And then three, it seems self serving, but work with a good lender, right? Work with the right partner that actually knows how to make the process simple. So that the buyer can get clear to close as soon as possible, and go through those steps so that they can actually refer more business back. Ok. So submitting the right offer, working with the right inspector and having a good lender or two in your pocket that you can call on. Those are the things that keep deals on track right now.
Because when you’re submitting Aw, thank you, Joe. Those are great. Three great things. And I want to also say aesthetically, this is just an aesthetic issue. When you’re submitting an offer, make it super easy to read, put the important stuff in bold, make sure it’s so obvious that they can look at it and fives, I saw an offer letter yesterday, I don’t know why. Maybe I’m have a negative opinion of this. And it’s not actually a negative thing. But I saw an offer letter that was made to look like a certificate, and it was kind of cute, whatever. And it was like visually, it was kind of cool, because it looked like a little certificate, like they won some sort of award. Okay, but it was really hard to read. And I was like, Okay, I guess it’s cute and whatever. But like, I had a hard time even looking and understanding what it was. And I was like, Okay, points for making it cute. But points taken away. Because you’ve made it harder for me to actually see this, I see what you’re trying to do. And if you didn’t, you’ve probably seen a million things like this.
handwriting, I’m still against this. I mean, I see people scribbling in with a pencil, right? type these up, ladies and gentlemen, type up, type it up. Okay, if you’re not typing it up, then write legibly. I mean, you shouldn’t be writing in the year 2023. We shouldn’t be using a pencil to write a purchase contract, we shouldn’t actually be signing pretty soon, we’re gonna get past that with all the digital signatures. For now. The idea that you’re writing these offers, and there’s missing blanks and you don’t have it complete, and you’re writing and pen or pencil. I know I’m gonna offend a lot of people here who are old school and they write but I bet you they have better penmanship than half of these doctors that are writing these up. It’s like the old saying that you can’t even read the prescription notes, right? So just simple things. If you if you don’t have good handwriting, let’s let’s start typing. Okay, can we get on the bandwagon like that?
The last thing I wanted to mention, yes, and absolutely. The last thing I want to mention is about having an opinion, I think this is one of the most important skills that that top realtors have is they have opinions that they share with their clients, a lot of realtors are afraid to share an opinion because they might think I don’t want to I don’t want to quell the deal. I don’t want I don’t want the deal to fall apart, I’m just going to be Switzerland, I’m gonna stay on the fence, I’m going to just play nice, and let’s get this deal closed. And yes, that’s part of the job too. And I for me, I will pay extra for any service provider in my life that has an opinion that I value, I will pay a premium for that I will I would pay a premium to a realtor who’s like I charge 7% or 8%, or whatever the highest amount is because but here’s why I charge more. Because I actually know if this is a good idea for you or not, or I believe I know if it’s a good idea for you or not. Now that takes time it takes experience, it takes skill, it takes a lot to get to a place where you can actually say this is a good buy, this is not a good buy good sale, not a good sale. This is really what I think separates the wheat from the chaff right like this. These are the agents that are at the very top they’re willing to say, just like you were saying, Joel, this is not a good decision for you, Mr. or Mrs. buyer or seller, I am advising you against this, that is worth its weight in gold. Most realtors are I believe, are really not willing to do that. And so the ones that are willing to sort of say, based on my experience, my knowledge, here’s what I actually think you should or should not do. Really, I think those are the agents that all that are successful.
It’s all boils down to why are you different, right? We’re commoditized, right? Agents, lenders, etc. Right? So you gotta be different in the beginning. I’ll challenge you and say it’s hard to take a position, right? You want to cater to everybody. So if you’re listening, brand new, that’s scary. It really is. What if I offend somebody? I need that deal? Right? What if, you know, what if they’re on the wrong side of the aisle? What if it’s, you know, you try to do that, but until you know why you’re different. Okay, it is hard to do that. So why are you different? What can you do and refine it so that you know it? In the lending business? For years, I’ve been the guy who gives back part of my commission on every transaction. And that changes the conversation from Hi, what is your interest rate? To I’ve heard all about you. In rates across the board. Most banks to be frank are the same. It’s a gimmick thinking like one banks drastically different than the next right? There might be somebody that’s a few dollars higher or a few dollars lower an interest rate. But there’s not too many people that consistently are willing to give part of their commission back. So I described that in great detail. And when they’re interviewing three lenders, nobody’s talking about that. They’re just saying I can go get you the best rate. We’re the cheapest. It’s it’s not true, right? So I stand with confidence. And I say, over the last 17 years I’ve given back back hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year to clients just like you, I’m going to get you the best rate I can. But I’m also going to do something a lot of other people won’t. And that’s how we win the business. Okay, so I challenge you as an agent to figure out what it is that you want to do, what are you doing that’s different? Or what would you like to do that’s different, and not be afraid to go out and say that on every single appointment? And it takes some time. But you’ll get there and it has to be authentic and from the heart.
Yeah, and so, you know, this is a great thing to think about as an agent is what are your clients consistently asking you for? And that’s a great place to start to think about, oh, how could I differentiate myself seems like my clients asked me a lot about certain topics or certain positions, this is where you can then start to build your knowledge base, and start learning more about X, Y, and Z so that you can, in fact, bring some of that to the table. You know, in Joe’s right, you know, the real reason why Joel is successful outside of all the great marketing, he does, to make sure that everyone knows about, you know, what he provides, is when it comes down to the actual work, Joel and his team are literally like the best I’ve ever worked with. So the reality of it is, is like, you have to be really super skilled. Because like Joe was saying, you know, yeah, there’s, there’s always going to be a realtor that charges a lower rate or a loan, a lending company that charges a lower interest rate, there’s always going to be lower cost providers out there. But if you can really have a good sense of like, know, when you work with me, we’re going to make this thing as smooth as we can. And that is worth a lot. That’s actually worth a lot of money, even though it’s not. It’s, it’s not it’s an invisible sort of savings. But it is a it’s a real savings. Because if you can get through a transaction smooth, it’s kind of like this. I haven’t I have a mechanic who I trust implicitly, I don’t go to another mechanic, I don’t get a second opinion. So he could be ripping me off. And I wouldn’t know, I trust that he’s not because he has demonstrated such incredible skill that I just go, I don’t have time to go and talk to other mechanics. And we can all relate to this. We all know how tricky it is we’re like, do we trust this mechanic or not? I finally found a guy. And I’m like, You know what, you’ve got my business. So if you if you’re, if you’re going to start ripping me off, I won’t even know. But I hope you don’t. And I’m sure he’s not. But my God, I love the fact that I don’t have to think about this anymore. And it just is. And I pay a premium for it, I’m sure. But it’s worth it.
Be that for your agents, right? If you’re an agent, right now you want to go out. And that’s how you’re building clientele. Right? Everything can be a race to the bottom, if you’re the cheapest person here, all that I realized years ago that I couldn’t control the market. I couldn’t control rates. But I could control how much I gave right? In the beginning, before I was at the level that I’m at now I gave my time. And I gave my knowledge and I gave my expertise later on. It took time to get the expertise, right. And so in the beginning, figure out what you can give, the more you give, the more you’re going to get. Okay, so if you can’t give back in terms of discounting your commission, right, because it’s just not works. Maybe not right now, if you can’t give back in terms of throwing large parties and spending money, right? Figure out what you can do to give back. Right? You can give back like we talked in wrap up here and go back to social media and make sure that you’re adding value in comments. Why do people make posts to read the comments? Right? Who’s seeing what I posted? We all are guilty of it? Right? Totally. So if you can put really poignant post comments down and people start seeing that you’re a genuine person, you’re just gonna grow your business right? So in in years past you couldn’t control the market you still can’t today but you can control how much you give and find ways that you can do things to give back you’re definitely going to grow
Yeah, the market is a lot like the weather it just is whatever it is, it is and we can we can have a feeling about the weather or the market and we can have that affect us and Okay, fine. And then we can also make additional choices to to move beyond what is uncontrollable, the weather the market. And so I think today, we just gave a tremendous number of opportunities for you to stay engaged, stay busy. And by the way, guys, another chat GBT suggestion if you just need to be motivated every day as chat GBT every morning. Can you motivate me today with with some you know, I don’t know. You could ask anybody to do anything. But start thinking about you know, if you need a little boost in your day as to LGBT for a little boost, like what can you tell me to get me motivated? I bet you had to come up with some pretty interesting ideas. But the point is, is you don’t have to do this alone. There’s lots of help out there. There’s podcasts like this. There’s people like Joel who will actually help you grow your real estate business as well. Oh, so this is another good opportunity. If you have extra time, maybe it’s a good time to evaluate your ello your loan officer and determine maybe there’s a better partnership out there for you. And Joel does partner with agents. So first thing, obviously get on his email marketing, or start his email newsletter, which comes out as nugget list every week, which specifically says, here’s what’s going on that Realtors need to know about how to communicate with lending rates and interest rates. You know, go to Joel Asare, send him an email joel@rate.com. And he will add you to that. But also, if you think that you would like to partner with Joel maybe doing some events, you know, just working together to get deals closed, Joel and his team are on your side. So reach out to him joel@rate.com and ask him for some partnership opportunities you guys possibly could work together as well. It’s a great time to start evaluating, you know, your your ancillary partners in real estate since you have extra time.
Yeah, DJ above and beyond the newsletter, I get people all the time saying I know you have a lender introduction template where you do waive the fees, I have a buyer that I want to refer to you How do I do that. And it’s the same thing, it’s joel@rate.com. And you can say, please send me your lender, introduction template email, and it’s already written out for you. So that you can introduce the buyer with the direct link to the online application, where when they complete it, they get a $1,500 closing cost credit. So now they’re working with a top lender in the United States where they’re actually not paying any underwriting fees. They’re not paying any appraisal not paying any points. And it’s gonna be a completely different setup for them compared to if they just call their bank, or the broker that they’re working with right now. So that’s an email joel@rate.com Send me the lender introduction template. And people always call to, they’re shocked to hear that I’m actually answering the phone, right. So it’s 773-744-1968. You can call if you get me live, it’s crazy the number of conversations, I’ve had DJ with agents all across the United States because of the show, and you’re just doing something really great here. So I love every single time I come on, and there’s a lot to be positive about guys, this is a really good reminder that the sky isn’t falling, there’s deals to be had stick with it. This is one of the defining years. If you can make it through this year, there’s greater sites ahead, okay, this is gonna be a big one. So stick with it.
Absolutely, the sky is not falling. And I’m not even seeing any indicators that that there is major tragedy ahead of us. Obviously, anything can happen. I can’t. It’s like the weather, anything can happen. But what we can control is our own effort. Reach out to Joel, he’s fantastic. His team is fantastic. He truly wants to help you. And, you know, just reach out to joel@rate.com. Also, everyone please tell a friend help our podcast grow by telling one other agent that you know about our show. We’re trying to keep agents engaged, interested and positively motivated throughout this. And by the way, guys, it’s not that bad right now it can feel that way. But it really isn’t historically, we are not in a terrible spot, but it can feel that way. But podcasts like this, we are trying to get you out of the doldrums into action. So tell you know there’s gotta be somebody you know, that’s a little bit bummed out who’s a realtor right now send them a link to this episode. Maybe this will kickstart them and have them help. You know, the real estate community at large. Let’s send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Or they can just find us on any anywhere podcasts are served, keeping it real podcast, please hit that subscribe and like button and also, you know, support our sponsors too. We are so grateful to have sponsors. They’re the reason that we can continue to pay our staff and do these episodes. So please check out their products and services as well. Joel, thank you so much. Once again, you’ve been with me five plus years on the show since almost the very very beginning. And we are so grateful for your your contributions to the show on behalf of the audience. Thank you. On behalf of Joel and myself thank you to the audience reach out to Joel get on his newsletter joel@rate.com reach out to him for any partnership opportunities that you may be able to to do withdrawal oh and by the way, even if you’re not here in Chicago, Joel’s company guaranteed rate they are in every single state so reach out to Joel no matter where you are. Guaranteed Rate is the bomb. So Alright guys, thank you so much, Joel. Thank you. We will see everybody on the next episode.
What Real Estate Agents Need To Understand About Property Foundation • Bob Brown
Aug 25, 2023
Bob Brown is an author, speaker, patented innovator, and the foremost authority on foundation repair diagnosis who shares his experience and how he started his career as a student doing a lot of concrete repairs. Bob discusses strategies an agent can use to inspect a home and the importance of doing it. Bob also talks about red flags agents should be aware when showing a house that may mean foundation issues. Last, Bob talks about his book “Foundation Repair Secrets: Learn How to Protect Yourself and Save Thousands” and how agents may find it useful.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How would you like to be able to walk up to a property and have a better idea of how healthy the foundation is? Well, today we’re going to show you how stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and I am glad that you are here. What are we going to learn today? Well, in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Bob Brown, who’s one of the foremost experts on property foundation. So he’s going to show you some skills that you can actually take and use with your clients when looking at properties. Super exciting stuff. Before we get to Bob. Just a quick reminder, please tell a friend about this podcast. You guys are our marketing engine, our marketing arm, we love you for it. Please continue to tell other people about the show so that we can reach more ears and eyes. So thank you in advance for that. And also please, please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show on whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on and leave us some notes to so we can see what feedback you have and we can always we’re always looking to improve the show and make it better for you. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Bob Brown.
Today on the show, our guest is author, instructor and foundation repair expert Bob Brown will tell you more about Rob Now Bob graduated in 1984 from ASU receiving a Bachelor in design science from school of architecture, and a Bachelor of Science from the School of Business specializing in real estate and finance. Now growing up Bob spent time learning construction trade, working with his family while learning good working habits. And he Bob successfully founded Arizona foundation solutions and built one of the only foundation repair companies to utilize licensed professional engineers on the front end to analyze initial conditions, make recommendations and specify repairs before presenting proposals to homeowners. Now after 35 years of this see successfully exited and along those 35 years, what he did is developed and patented four successful unique solutions with three more that are pending. He also developed a cloud based software solution to streamline and assist engineers and contractors in home foundation investigations. He also wrote and self published several publications including which way is the foundation moving sorry which way is my foundation moving and he has just published and released his newest book, which is called foundation repair secrets which is available on Amazon and anywhere else books are sold I want everybody to check out Bob’s website which is foundation repair secrets.com also follow Bob on Facebook and the E and we’re going to link to both of these his book as well as his social media but to find him on Facebook, just go to Facebook search for the dirt whisperer which I am just so tickled that that that is what Bob’s title so we will welcome the dirt whisperer here to our show. Bob Welcome.
Bob Brown 4:39 Thank you glad to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:41 Glad to have you here. Now this is a very unique episode for us after 500 I think episodes somewhere around there we very rarely have talked to people in real estate adjacent or rather realtor I should say you are in real estate realtor adjacent businesses. As and I was, so I’m so excited to have you on the show. Because this is this could be a skill building opportunity for our audience. And, you know, we are just excited to help our A our audience with with something like this, which we hope could help them, you know, differentiate themselves amongst the 1.6 other no 1.6 million other realtors floating around in this country. But but let’s get started at the beginning because you really are like a renaissance man, you have been hyper focused in the real estate industry really seemingly since since college. But you’ve also built software build solutions, you have patents, you are an inventor, and you and an author, right? So you really are doing so much for this industry. Can you tell us about sort of how you got into foundation repair.
Bob Brown 5:50 I, when I was in college, I worked my way through college doing concrete repairs. And when I got out of college, I thought, well, it’s going good, I got a few employees, I’m just gonna keep doing it. And so I did, I did a lot of concrete repairs, I had an old Chevy pickup truck that in the summertime, the only way I could keep it from overheating was to drive with the heater on full blast. So if you can imagine that being 120 degrees and driving with the heater on. But I would pile that back end up with bags of concrete and go do concrete repairs. And eventually that just led to more innovative things and morphed into foundation repair.
D.J. Paris 6:34 It’s amazing. And you know, when you’ve done so much with it you not only are you you know an X an absolute, registered, recognized expert in this field, you’ve published books, you have a new book that just came out foundation repair secrets. And also you teach these classes to realtors and other professionals in Arizona because there’s actually you teach a CTE class. And I want to mention because our audience is all over the country and even other countries that even if we have a lot of Arizona realtors who listen. But even if you’re in an area, a state, that’s not Arizona, you can still take Bob’s course you won’t get the CPE credit necessarily, but this is something that I think Realtors should really consider adding to their arsenal is becoming a foundation, you know, be more knowledgeable and foundation so that when you do evaluate properties for your buyers or your sellers, you just have a little bit more information that you know will help you hopefully win that business. But maybe I’ll start with this. And I don’t know anything about foundation repair. So you I am I am the list of newbies, but you will you will help me here. So we’re I’m here in Chicago, and our Realtors at our firm here or work locally. But are there any universal sort of first first glance, sort of strategies that when an eight when a realtor does go to a property? Is there anything that they can start to look for that would maybe send up any sort of red flag or a signal that they could say, oh, this, this might be an issue?
Bob Brown 8:14 Well, there are different strategies depending on if you’re a Lister or a buying agent, right. So if you’re a listing agent, it’s better to get on board right away and recognize some of these signs of stress, which we’ll talk about here in a bit. And maybe hire a licensed professional engineer to do a really good investigation before you get involved in the listing process. Because once that all gets going, it’s difficult to it kicks a lot of things into play that maybe you don’t want to have kicked into play. Now if you’re a if you’re a Lister, I mean sorry, if you’re a buyer on the other end, you want to engage some strategies like call a licensed engineer, before you before the home inspector delivers his report because once he delivers the report, you got two days left. It’s kind of hard to do anything, right? Right. Or the alternative strategy can be Hey, building a clause right from the get go that says that the building effect the home foundation inspector, or the home inspector rather, just notices that, hey, there’s a few signs of stress and I teach a lot of the home inspector. I teach a lot of their courses for their education. But if they start to see some of the signs and put it in the report, you get an automatic 10 day extension because then you’ve got time to deal with it.
D.J. Paris 9:47 Interesting so so ideally pre inspection, you would hire a foundation repair engineer and expert to come in and evaluate the property. Now for everyone who’s a realtor are listening, I can, I can hear a little bit of people thinking I already hired inspector, but you said the challenge with that is if they do see some signs of stress, you only have a two day window to really do something with that information. So ideally, you do it before, but what is the average cost? And I could I’m sure it fluctuates wildly. But if we were just an estimate on like, a single family home, you know, traditional, you know, four bedroom house two storey kind of thing. What, what price range are would Realtors be looking at or buyers and sellers if they wanted to have somebody come take a look?
Bob Brown 10:36 Alright, so, again, a couple of strategies that has happened in the past that maybe hasn’t served realtors, and that is cheap, I’ll call a foundation repair company because who, hey, they’re experts, right? And they’re really cheap. You know, they might do it for free, or maybe three or $400. But guess what, those guys are really interested in selling a big repair. Sure, half the time you’re going to end up with, oh, there’s an $80,000 repair needed. Right? And maybe it’s needed, maybe it’s not because these guys are not engineers, right? And guess what happens to the listing? Well, if you are the, if you are the listing agent, often what happens is the homeowner fires the listing agent, clocks, everything up paints, it hides it hires a new listing agent, and doesn’t disclose it. Right? Right. So if you’re a listing agent, and you don’t want to get fired, be proactive, right? And don’t call a foundation repair company. Now, if you call an engineer, they’re going to be you know, somewhere between 515 $100 for a good inspection. Well worth it if you’re the listing agent. Now, if you’re the buyer, that’s a bit of a crapshoot, right? Because it may or may not go through and the homeowner may not be willing to pay for it, I get that. But it’s better than paying $80,000 Down the road, right?
D.J. Paris 12:05 Yes. And also remembering too, that if, in a transaction, especially on the buy side, if it if the buyers do figure this out, let’s say there was something that was painted over or or hidden, there wasn’t a an engineer out there to actually see what was sort of, you know, Band Aid it over, and the transaction happens, you know, two years go by and all of a sudden, this now comes to light and they have to spend $80,000, there, they’re probably going to have some feelings about their their by side realtor, even though, you know, whether it’s the realtors fault or not. So I think you’re bringing up a really strong point, I’m thinking about, Look, nobody wants to reduce their Commission’s by $1,500 as an agent, obviously, we understand that same time. When you’re getting you know, 10 to $15,000 on this Transit Commission, maybe it does make sense to for peace of mind. And also just to tell your clients Hey, one thing I do is in maybe you pay for it yourself, that’s certainly an option, or you build it into, you know, your commissions or however you want to do it. But boy, you know, for $500 to $1,500. I would rather have that than a buyer call me two years later and say, how do you miss this?
Bob Brown 13:22 Well, and there’s also a risk strategy, where, hey, guess what a disappointed home buyer? Well, he might feel like somebody had some negligence there. And now maybe everybody gets sued, even though maybe not everybody’s at fault, right? And now you’ve got one of those mired up situations, it’s better to try to steer clear of that.
D.J. Paris 13:47 And you really, you’re bringing up a really good point about this idea of, you know, possible litigation, because when, when all of us, you know, if we’re talking about $1,000 repair, yeah, no one’s probably filing a suit over that. You could, you know, they’ll they’ll they’ll grumble, but they’ll pay it $80,000 is enough to get somebody going. Who can who can we is there somebody that should be responsible for this? And, and there are plenty of attorneys that would love to try to get that money back from the agent or from whoever they study, they think right? Yeah, somebody’s strategy
Bob Brown 14:19 is you just sue everybody. And hopefully you figure out who was at fault. Well, that means everybody has to defend themselves, right?
D.J. Paris 14:27 Yes. And we have 800 agents. So we have we have we haven’t had that particular incident happen, but it certainly could happen anytime. But yes, we understand the for anyone who’s listening who doesn’t know if you’ve ever if you ever have an action taken against you, that’s Bob’s exactly right. Everybody gets sued, everybody’s got to defend themselves. It’s not a lot of fun. And also it’s just a lot of bad will out there. Like you don’t want your client hating your guts. Even though it may be isn’t necessarily your area of expertise. So okay, so hiring an engineer is different from hiring a foundation repair expert, because as Bob said, it’s like going to a surgeon and saying, you know, should I do surgery? Well, they’re gonna, they want to cut you because they’re surgeons. So foundation repair company wants to do foundation repair, obviously, we get that, it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily not being fully honest. But you might not know, it’s like going to a mechanic when I eventually got a really good mechanic. And I always tell everybody, it’s like worth its weight in gold, because I never have to question what they tell me. I mean, maybe they’re scamming me, I don’t think they are, they certainly won my trust. And I just do whatever they tell me. So this is why hiring an engineer is really, really probably the better way to go. Because you would hope that there is no incentive for them to sell you additional services they just want to give you you know, structural engineers can do this. We’ve hired them for various condo buildings I’ve lived at it’s expensive, yes. But boy, is it nice. And also to a lot of times what these engineers can do is give you a schedule of like, here’s what we think is coming down the pipe for you, and a, you know, relative timeline. And here’s, and that really is worth its weight. Well in and
Bob Brown 16:05 go ahead, there’s an added dimension of the fact that, you know, the car mechanic probably knows how you know how the car functions really well. And, you know, there’s no knowledge that he needs. Additionally, that would probably make a lot of difference. But in a, in a home investigation, mainly what you’re talking about is geotechnical engineers that understand soil mechanics, and foundation repair contractors are not qualified in this area, nor are they qualified to be a structural engineer. So it’s, it does add another dimension to the fact that these guys that are foundation repair salesmen get their education from their one source supplier, that tells them how to sell that one product. Sure. And not a lot of education. I mean, engineers go through five years of school and three years of apprenticeship and two very difficult exams, and they’re overseen by boards of technical registration for their conduct. You don’t get any of that, but the foundation repair person.
D.J. Paris 17:13 Let’s talk about the relationship between soil and foundation. And what because obviously, you are the dirt whisperer, I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about dirt. So I’ll do a terrible pun, let’s get let’s get dirty and talking about That’s not even funny. Well, I just I was trying to think of a funny pun there. But anyway, let’s talk about the the what soil means to foundation and and how they interact.
Bob Brown 17:39 So there’s two basic kinds of soil that we need to really have distinctions for. One is a more granular sandy soil silty soil, and the other is clay types. And some clay types. Not all some clay types are what they call expansive soils, as you’ve probably heard the term but they don’t exactly know what it means. Well, what that really means is that when water hits those expensive soils, if they’re very dry, they’re going to expand. And guess what if they lose water, they contract. And you’ve probably seen like pictures of desert with all the cracks in it and everything right? Well, that’s clay soil, it’s dried up, and when it dries up, it makes all those cracks. And so clay soil can be cyclical, it can it can expand and contract and expand and contract. And if you have seasonal moisture pattern differentiations, your house can go up and down, up and down and have all kinds of problems. Whereas if it’s Sandy silty, those don’t get consolidated, those only move in typically one direction down. And so everybody thinks of settlement as the primary factor when in fact, there’s clay in in in a lot of stratas of soil. And when I say strata, layers, lots of layers, and each layer is different, like a seven layer chip dip. And each layer has different mineral contents and different moisture contents and different reactions to water and different amounts of water leaking into them through different channels. And so when when clay hit some of these channels, some of these layers, it expands, and you can actually push a house up. I’ve seen how house pushed up in the air nine inches. And it’ll tear house up it’ll, it’ll break concrete bend steel, very powerful force. And so it’s important to understand that there’s two mechanisms of failure here. One consolidation from sands and clays and sill are set sorry sands and silts and gravels. The other one is clay expansion which can settle also or contract depending on whether it’s getting wet or dry.
D.J. Paris 19:59 So how would How would a realtor learn about what is most common in their area of where they practice? For as far as soil type,
Bob Brown 20:09 you can go to the national conservation. Soil NCRs, I forgot the initials, but NCRs website, and they produce information, a lot of times maps that will tell you how expensive the soil is in the upper five feet, it was originally built for farmers. But all that data is still there. For most people to access,
D.J. Paris 20:36 got it got it, that’s really interesting. So it seems to me as is that it’s important for a homeowner, and certainly the realtor in a transaction buying and selling to sort of have, I would think an awareness of again, what pressure is being put on the foundation based on soil. So even just knowing that what type of soil and what the stressors are to that property really helps, I think, just give a better sense of valuation. So I would assume, if you have again, you know, ideally, you’re hiring an engineer to come out and do this work for you. Because ultimately, they’re going to going to be the final expert on on this this topic, but but just knowing a couple of these items about your local market area is going to be really helpful because you can, you know, get a history of a property’s foundation repair, if there has been Oh, that’s another question. How would How would a realtor let’s say a buyer’s agent going into a property? Would they be able to using just their own skill set be able to determine if there was foundation repair that had happened on this particular property? Is there any easy telltale signs that this property has already had foundation repair issues,
Bob Brown 21:54 I think it would be very difficult to see if Foundation, see by looking at it. If foundation repair has been done in the past now. Like if you’re from Dallas, pretty much be guaranteed that there is foundation work done. I mean, almost every house has problems in Dallas or Houston, maybe some parts of Colorado. It happens all the time. But it’s really hard. And I get Realtors coming to me all the time saying, Hey, I know like, you know that there is foundation work done on this house five years ago, can you tell me if it’s performing. And you know, if the analysis was done by a contractor, I could probably tell you nothing. If it was done by an engineer, and there was good records of it, I can tell you a lot. And so that’s another advantage of making sure you have things well documented, which an engineer would do, hard to tell by looking at it. And sure if if work was done, because everything is buried and covered up, you know, maybe in the concrete, if you see like a bunch of three foot squares where the concrete has been removed and replaced. Maybe that might give you a clue.
D.J. Paris 23:03 You know, I do want to go back to this idea of of being liable because I just was reminded, my brain reminded me about 10 minutes too late about one of our neighbors that growing up in a different anyway, not here in Chicago. But anyway, growing up there, there were some neighbors who purchased a property. This, I guess is slightly related to foundation. But basically there was mold remediation that happened. But they didn’t actually treat the mold, they painted over it, or they hired somebody to write it. And the seller knew the owner or knew the buyer. And so it was even more nefarious than that, because there was a personal connection between the two. Anyway, the buyer didn’t find out. This happened until many years later, when all of a sudden they were having these weird mold issues. And they found out that the person had put painted over black mold or whatever it was, you know, on the concrete in the foundation, and, and it was an 80,000 The reason this, it was an $80,000 repair. And we had even said you should sue those people because they lied to you. And they didn’t disclose this. And she goes, yeah, we’re just not going to do that. But but but it was like everybody was telling her to sue. So you’re really bringing up a really good point. And again, you know, obviously a realtor can’t determine everything that’s ever happened in this house if the homeowners are lying, but but it is important to sort of protect in a way it’s kind of a little bit of protection for your license, and maybe just litigation, hiring somebody for $1,000 or so to have come out. And, you know, again, we think about this is in Bob, I’m curious to get your thoughts because this is the year that we have a lot of agents exiting, the business rates are up inventories down. It’s a harder time right now to be in business as a realtor. There’s just less buyers out there and not as many homes to sell. So the reality of it is it’s trickier people are leaving. I think this is the time to level up your skills and really try to figure out what can I do going forward? That really sort of Future proofs my business. And I think this is a really smart way to consider it. Are there any other any other suggestions for realtors? And then I want to talk about the new book, sure of things that they can do aside from hiring an engineer there any little things that they could ask questions? Okay, great.
Bob Brown 25:20 Yes. So there are some very basic signs that will tell you if you have foundation related movement, and I use that term because foundations could go up or they could go down. And people make the mistake of saying foundation settlement. But foundation related movement is way more accurate. And there’s ways of telling. So for instance, if you see cracks in the drywall, and they’re either more than one or they’re significant in size, and by significance in size, I mean, you could stick a pencil, a sharp end of a pencil in it in the crack, and you can wedge it in there, so it’ll stay. That’s a significant crack. Okay. The other thing is, cracks on the outside bricks block. I I’m hesitant to say stucco, because stucco expands and contracts with heat a lot. And it can crack for a lot of reasons if they didn’t laugh at right or whatever. But it could be could be a sign of movement. If you have floors that are noticeably not level, that’s a pretty good sign, floor cracks, cracks and tiles, cracks under the carpet. By themselves, probably not anything indicator. But if they’re accompanied with other things, other things like the walls that I just mentioned, or like doors, if the door pinches, it doesn’t open and close, very good doesn’t latch right. You can see above the door, maybe it’s a gap is wide at one spot. And small on the other windows the same way. People sand down doors, so they work properly. But people don’t do that to Windows very often. So windows are kind of like the secret, like the secret tool of going in and looking at things and seeing if you have movement.
D.J. Paris 27:14 That’s interesting. So if the windows don’t easily go up or down, it could be it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s foundation issues, but it’s an indicator that there may be
Bob Brown 27:25 or sideways, the size sliders have the same problem. Yeah, closet doors, same thing. People don’t often fix closet doors, but they’re pretty good telltale signs.
D.J. Paris 27:34 So that’s a huge tip you just gave our audience. This is something you can do at every showing, you know, as a realtor, maybe you’re not necessarily checking every single window, but maybe you test a few and you say, Hey, I’m going to be testing a few of these windows just to see if there’s any indicators that there may be some foundation issues. And Bob, one thing I didn’t mention, and I’m completely sort of feel silly for not mentioning this, if anyone out there who’s listening who works with investors, or is an investor, this is really critical stuff. Because yes, single family homes, you know, you hope the inspector is good enough to sort of get a sense of what’s going on and on a you know, a single family home. But when we’re talking about, you know, multifamily properties, we’re talking about larger properties. And we’re talking about investors, you know, these are people that absolutely will be, I don’t know if they’ll always want to pay that fee to have an engineer come out. But boy, you are going to be really future proofing your business, if you can either get them to pay for it, or you pay for it yourself as the realtor, because these are people that are going to do additional projects. And if all of a sudden they have the first project you did cost him an extra 80 grand, you know, a year later, they may or may not hold that against you and may not want to work with you again. So I think if right, you know, everyone should consider this but if you’re working with with investors, this is really, really critical.
Bob Brown 28:55 Well, and I’ve been an investor for many years I’ve owned rental properties, both residential and commercial, so I know what it’s like and I actually bought a house once that had foundation problems and had to fix it. So I understand the issues. And by the way side note, you can see pictures and diagrams of all of these signs of stress in my book. And the
D.J. Paris 29:17 book is foundation repair secrets and the website is foundation repair secrets.com We will link to the Amazon book please consider buying it again guys. We’re talking about leveling up your skill. What can someone expect to learn from reading the book?
Bob Brown 29:33 Well, that’s one of them. Chapter five in the book is all about how to recognize signs of stress and and what they look like. I go into okay, you know, what are the various types of soils you know, one of my favorite sayings is you know, Clay sucks because it really does suck it actually pulls water towards itself. Engineers call it negative pore pressure to talk about all that kind of stuff, talk about foundation types, slab on grade crawlspace, post tension slabs, basements, all those all the different kinds of things and how old they are and and how they perform over time. And I talk a lot about what we’ve already discussed and that is, hey, why would I hire an engineer versus a contractor and I go into that in great, great detail so that people can viscerally understand what they’re in for, if they kind of take the cheap way out,
D.J. Paris 30:34 you know, to a lot of foundations, at least in the single family home market, here in our local area, not so much in Metro Chicago, I don’t think although I, I may be wrong, but certainly out in the suburbs, there’s a lot of drain tiles that surround a foundation. Right. And that is something that also I imagine is that part of an analysis is looking at drainage, when someone’s engineers evaluating the foundation or is that a, is that sort of a separate thing as well?
Bob Brown 31:02 It depends. You could have the engineer, include that in his scope of work. And certainly, you want to make sure the drainage works, right? If the drainage doesn’t work, right, whether it be surface drainage or subsurface drainage, you’re going to have problems and can because moisture is the catalyst of all of these problems. If the moisture is pretty much constant, you’re probably not going to have a lot of problems. But if there’s variations in the moisture, that’s when you got to look out.
D.J. Paris 31:33 Is there any rule of thumb for properties that have a basement? Is there any reason not to have a dehumidifier? kind of always running? in basements? It could that be problematic, too upsetting whatever the moisture currently is? Or is it always good to remove as much of that moisture as possible?
Bob Brown 31:54 Well, depending on your climate, you know, here in Phoenix, it’s pretty, pretty bone dry to begin, right? There’s not a lot of basements here either, but but, you know, places like maybe you know, Omaha or Chicago? Yeah, you’re gonna want that dehumidifier running all the time. And by the way, if you have a crawlspace, you probably want to get it sealed up and have a dehumidifier running in there also, because that’s just like a little mini basement. It’s your breathing the same air that’s down there that may not be all that great of air. Right?
D.J. Paris 32:26 Yeah, that’s, that’s a great tip, by the way. And a lot of here in the Midwest, we have a lot of crawl spaces. So that is absolutely an amazing tip. So if you’re a realtor, you’re taking a look at the basement, maybe you have a buyer client or it’s your listing your your list agent, you could say, you know, we may want to consider getting this getting this, you know, sealed up and having a humidifier in there running as well. It’s also I mean, it’s maybe not the most exciting gift to give somebody at a closing dehumidifier, but it’s actually a good
Bob Brown 32:58 idea. Probably keeps you out of hot water. Right. Keeps the mold out keeps everybody happy, right?
D.J. Paris 33:05 Yeah, I was just I was just giggling about the pond a little bit. But yes. Anyway, but it is is an idea. Again, these, these are things here in the Midwest, I feel like everyone’s got a dehumidifier in their basement after learning a lesson. They don’t usually have at first they so as the realtor, you could you could bring that up. What other there any other ideas that you as an engineer sort of wish Realtors understood about foundations and foundation repair and anything that that could help?
Bob Brown 33:38 Well, first of all, then clarify. I’m not an engineer, even though I owned an engineering company. I’m an architect by trade. But going on from there, engineers are really good at being objective. You know, quite often I would I would hear a foundation repair salesperson tell maybe a little old lady sitting across the table. And she says, Well, how bad is my foundation? And the foundation repair salesperson says, oh, you know, on a scale of one to 10. You know, I think it’s about an 8.5 You know, and I’m thinking wow, that’s the BS meter. You know, I don’t even know what that is. And by the way, Mr. Salesman, how’d you ride at 8.5? Well, you know, based on my years of experience and the fact that my kids need braces, I arrived at this conclusion. You want somebody doing data driven? Decisions. You don’t want to be in subjective, and you certainly don’t want to be as subjective with somebody who has something to gain by it.
D.J. Paris 34:49 Right? Yeah, this is this is why there’s even been a birth in the financial services industry around financial advisors who now watch Charge flat fees for you know, which is kind of a newer thing in the last 10 years and in that business because people would think, wow, they’re getting a percentage of the assets, I give them under management every single year, and that may or may not be in my best interest. So that does make a lot of sense. So just to reiterate that point, you know, guys, you really want to hire an objective third party who not only this is their job, but like, they have the actual training, they’re not a salesperson salespeople, you know, we all sort of inherently distrust or not distrust salespeople, but question salespeople and, and as it should be, so you want to really work with engineers who and as as I only have one architect, well, it’s not an architect joke, I’m gonna give it’s a very poor joke, but I’ll give it to you as an as an architect, because you’ll, you’ll understand it, none of our listeners will, but I’ll explain it. To them. It’s a funny joke, if you ever it’s a good joke for civil engineers, or architects. And the joke is that what is the joke? The joke is, what’s the difference between a psychotic and and a civil engineer? And the joke? The answer is one pays better. And the joke there to explain it is that what civil engineers and architects can do, which is so amazing, is they see what isn’t there. And then they create, or they’re able to visualize, and a psychotic sees what isn’t there as well, but they’re just not able to make it real. But the architects are so I don’t know, I shouldn’t have probably that was a dumb joke by
Bob Brown 36:23 and go. Vincent van Gogh.
D.J. Paris 36:27 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But anyway, that’s my little silly joke. But as far as let’s talk about the book so so foundation repair secrets, is the book available everywhere books are sold linked to the Amazon sales page, right? In our our notes, what what else? Give us some give us some of the other, you know, headings and chapters is this for who’s the book for more importantly,
Bob Brown 36:52 well, I wrote it primarily for homeowners and realtors, although I think a lot of engineers could benefit from this as well. And I say that somewhat timidly because, you know, engineers get a bit sensitive about non engineers telling them what they should be doing, even though I did own engineering company. But there’s, you know, this is a field of forensics, that’s not done by very many engineers, and they can, if they want to go into that field, they can learn some things that will be helpful for them. But mostly, mostly, I think it’s good for homeowners and realtors who want to understand how this how the Foundation’s work, how soils work, and how they interact together to cause foundation dysfunction. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is, well, this kind of one trick pony business that goes on in the foundation repair industry. So what happens is, there’s several big suppliers of products, and they find installers, and there’s usually an exclusive relationship. And it’s a very close relationship. Well, those guys provide steel peering products, or sometimes concrete peering products to go in the ground to lift things up, right. But what do you do if it’s heaving? Wow, they don’t have a whole lot to say about that. They try to ignore it. Because guess what, they don’t have a lot of products for it. So one of my patents and put it out there for contractors to be able to license from me is to be able to use a sub slab depressurization system on an existing house that dries out the clay’s and stops heating. So if you have a heating problem, now there’s a tool that can be addressed, as opposed to just shrugging your shoulders like everybody’s done for the last 50 years and say, well, there’s nothing we can do about it. And oh, it could be a little bit of heat. Let’s just put piers in any way to cover ourselves, and all that kind of business that goes on.
D.J. Paris 39:06 And so this would actually help remove moisture from the clay. Is that am I understanding that correctly? That’s correct. That’s correct. And moisture is the enemy. We will we will?
Bob Brown 39:17 Well, it depends. It depends. So like if you’re in Houston, probably it’s pretty wet soil for the last few 100,000 years. At moot. removing moisture isn’t the ideal thing to do. It just depends on where you’re at. And that’s another reason why you want an engineer involved because you want to figure out what the annual precipitation is and how variant how much varying it is. So it could be a helpful tool in some situations, maybe not all situations.
D.J. Paris 39:48 Right? Obviously there’s there’s over dry and over wet and rather are bad. But I guess I’m thinking practically if I’m a realtor, I want to learn a I have a little bit about this myself so that I can appear to have a degree of skill. Again, a, you know, not an official licensed opinion of foundation, but just a couple of things I could learn from your book, which would enable me to make a better decision for my buyers or sellers. And then the other thing I’d want to do based on what everything I’ve heard you say today is get the book, first get the book learn, maybe take a one of your classes as well, because you you teach classes to realtors about this stuff. And then what I would do personally, since realtors have to wear so many hats, and you can’t be everything to everyone is I would I would start interviewing architects or engineers, to say, Hey, I sell this many homes a year, I would love for you to be my partner to come in every single time and and build a relationship there and maybe even work out you know, a fee arrangement with them. And and then start marketing that to your clients. Hey, I’m adding a new service to my I’m just curious if you’ve seen agents adopt this kind of strategy and how it’s how it works for them.
Bob Brown 41:10 Yes, I have seen agents do it. However, unfortunately, most of the time they do it with foundation repair companies, which is, which is a problem for them. But you know, you don’t want to be searching for people. When the when the you know, time is of the essence, right? You’re running out of time, you know you don’t want what you want to do is just exactly what you said, Go proactively, go try to find somebody, you know, develop a relationship with them, make sure you’re on the same page with them that they understand what you’re looking for, and have them ready and then use that as a marketing tool. So that people understand that you’re a little bit better than the average Joe, you’ve got this under control, you have the right relationships, you understand how it works, all that kind of stuff.
D.J. Paris 42:00 It’s really brilliant. The book is foundation repair secrets just published. And it is available on Amazon. Other places books are sold. There’s hardcopy, there’s digital, so please consider purchasing. And again, even if even, you know for $10 with the book is $10 Digital, if it gives you three or four talking points, boy that’s worth way more than $10 in my mind on so absolutely no brainer there and also go to Bob’s website because he has a lot of information that he just gives away right on his site. He’s he speaks he’s an author, he’s an inventor, he’s a really neat guy in this space. And there aren’t a lot of experts in this space that work with that sort of talk to realtors. So I mean, Bob teaches Realtors do so foundation repair. secrets.com is the website to learn all things, Bob. And you know, he’s got an his Facebook page as well, which is just search for the dirt whisperer, we’ll link to that in our show notes. He’s got a lot of followers too. So check him out. He’s always posting great content, specifically short bits of content that realtors can subscribe to it. You know, it’s funny, Bob, I was thinking I am going to add you to my to my social media, I was just chatting with somebody about this. And I’ll just use say this as a sort of FYI, to our audience. There’s a new social channel called threads, which people have probably racked at once and maybe continue to like it. But anyway, I was thinking, you know, I never got into Tik Tok, or really Instagram Personally, myself, I’m not somebody that scrolls endlessly looking at stuff because I just I don’t know that that’s good for me. And also, I don’t have a lot of control over it. Well, this is how silly I am, I didn’t realize you can search for things on Instagram or Tiktok. And so if it was me, I would specifically search for things like foundation repair secrets, foundation repair, helps, I would subscribe to Bob’s channel. And I would start to teach the algorithms and whatever social channel you use that this is the kind of content you want to see. Instead of just having it passively kind of play out in front of you. You can actually search for things like this. So what wouldn’t it be cool, if every once a week you saw one of Bob’s posts just as you’re scrolling through Instagram, or Tiktok. And Bob does post quite a bit. And it’s always educational. So definitely subscribe to them, but start teaching the whatever social channel you’re using, start teaching it the best way to teach it search, do searches, specific searches. I know it’s a little bit of work, but this will tell the algorithms oh yeah, this person is interested in this. And it will serve up more of more of that than just you know some of the sillier content that isn’t going to help your business. So I’m so grateful Bob that you do have an active social channel. Again, it’s the dirt whisperer and we’re gonna link to all of Bob’s social channels so you can find them everywhere. He’s an author, he’s an inventor, he’s just he this is this is his his thing. And he is probably the number one guy in the country around this particular topic. So we are going to stay in touch with with Bob. I want everybody to go Consider buying his book, The dirt. The dirt whisperer, that is not the name of the book, though. Although it could be the name of a book I like that if you do a buy a biography, that’s got to be the name. But the the foundation repair secrets is the name of the book, Bob is the dirt whisperer. Follow him on Facebook, the dirt whisperer, find him on his website, foundation, repair secrets.com and consider buying that book. And basically, here’s the subtitle of this book, which really just sells it completely. Learn how to protect yourself and save 1000s That’s literally what you’re doing by learning some of these skills, protecting yourself as an agent and a homeowner and investor or protecting your clients. And you’re saving yourself lots of money in the process. And yeah, let’s let’s not learn from salespeople, let’s learn from engineers and architects, right? The people that know the math, let’s go back to the math. And Bob and his Bob and his ilk know the math. So and by the way, if you’re looking for a recommendation for a good you know, foundation expert or engineer, rather, in your area, you know, Bob would give it given had provided some resources. And you can also reach out to Bob to you know, he’s He’s very friendly. He’s a super, super nice guy. This is his passion. So if you go to his website, you can reach out to him there again, foundation repair secrets.com. Bob, thank you so much for being on our show. You’re wonderful. This was super helpful to our audience, I am on behalf of our audience want to thank you for being part of our show coming on. Hope we sell a lot of books for you and get people signed up. And also you can Oh, I wanted to mention one more thing. Ask tell your brokerage, hey, you know, managing broker or owner let’s hire Bob to teach us a couple of little tips and tricks for our particular area that he may know Bob can be hired for these kinds of consulting and speaking gigs as well. He speaks all over the country about this so you can find them foundation repair secrets.com You can hire Bob find him he is he’s the real deal. And very excited to continue watching your your career Bob, you do so many different things. You’re in it, you’re you’re an author, you do a lot of cool stuff. So thank you on behalf of our audience. And on behalf of Bob and myself, we want to thank our audience for making it all the way to the end of our episode. And please tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Bob. But maybe they don’t know about our show. Why don’t you let them know about keeping it real? Send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or you know, we’re on every social channel as well. So just hit that subscribe button and follow us. We appreciate it. Tell a friend and go buy Bob’s book right now foundation repair secrets and that link is on our show notes to Amazon. Bob, thank you so much and we will see everybody next time.
Bob Brown 47:51 Awesome. appreciate being here.
How To Become Top Of Heart With Clients • Grant Muller
Aug 24, 2023
Grant Muller with The Grant Muller Team and Speaker, Author, Certified High Performance Coach™ shares his diverse business background and expert negotiation skills. Grant describes how he transitioned from a person who abused with narcotics to a very successful real estate businessman. Grant also talks about how he always wanted to be a real estate agent and describes how he used his experience in consumer services to build his business in real estate. Last, he talks about his book ‘Top of Heart” and how you can build your business by building genuine and meaningful human connections.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to show you how to go from top of mind to top of heart. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer and coach and author grant Mueller. Before we get to Grant’s just a couple of quick reminders. As always, the best way that you can help keep our show moving forward and expanding is by telling the friend think of one other realtor that needs to hear what you’re about to hear from Grant and shoot them over a link. Also leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on whether it’s Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever, let us know what you think of this show really helps us as well. And one last thing if you’re not following us on social media every weekday we are posting a short form video clip from a recent episode that is a sort of a 62nd actionable you know video, the best way to say it sort of like the best hits of our recent episodes so you can find us every every social channel, just search for keeping it real podcast, hit that subscribe button. We appreciate it. All right on to my conversation with the great grant Mueller.
Today on the show, our guest is top 1% producer and coach and author grant Mueller with compass in Denver, Colorado. Let me tell you more about Grant. Grant Mueller is a speaker, author, certified high performance coach and realtor on a mission to help real estate agents achieve more without endless hustle. After becoming a millionaire before the age of 30 grant fell into a downward spiral that caused him to lose everything moving past addiction and homelessness. He built a remarkable real estate career as a consistent seven figure earner, and grant knows what it takes to sell. And it all starts with a heart centered approach. And his new book top of heart tells the story of how he went from homeless to over 1 million in gross commission income. Please help me welcome grant Mueller grant. Welcome to the show.
Grant Muller 3:47 Thank you DJ, I’m looking forward to our conversation.
D.J. Paris 3:50 And by the way for everyone, I want everyone to do a couple of things. First, go to grants website, Grant mueller.com. gra ntmuller.com, you can learn about all things grant author, he’s a coach, he has some free courses for you as well. So go to grant mueller.com. You can find on Amazon by the way, it has a perfect five star review from all the people that have reviewed it. And it’s not just like friends have reviewed it. Lots of people have reviewed this and they’ve all given it a perfect five stars. And it’s an awesome book. So please go on Amazon and purchase it. We’ll have a link to both grants website, all of his social accounts as well as a link to buy the book right in our show notes. But anyway, Grant Thank you again for being on our show. We appreciate it.
Grant Muller 4:39 Yeah, absolutely. I think after that introduction, there’s nowhere but no, we’re a bit down for me. So
D.J. Paris 4:44 I like to set up my guests for failure. I’d like to this is this is the mountain I’ve put you on it now. Let’s topple you over. I am I you and
I didn’t not
understand, you know, we sort of you know, oh, I’m sorry, are we? I am cutting out aren’t we? Okay. My apologies. Am I still cutting out grant?
Grant Muller 5:20 Yeah, you’re better now. But you that’s the second time you went out. So, boy, yeah, we might Yeah, we’re
D.J. Paris 5:26 having for everyone listening. I apologize. This is a Comcast issue for our entire business is dealing with this. So if this continues, I won’t know. So grant, will you tell me if I keep cutting out and then if we need to reschedule if it’s bad enough where we can’t do it? So we’ll try to fix this in post but um, let me know if it’s if it’s unlistenable. And we’ll just we’ll redo it for next week. So my apologies. No worries. Oh, no, no, everything looks good again. So we’ll see you there. Oh, the internet. It’s fun. You for a grant for telling me that. So so yeah. So I want to hear your story. Because I what I’m always most impressed with, is people who pull themselves up, it’s not even about failing, because everybody fails. Everybody makes mistakes. Everyone has hard challenges in life. But it’s it’s the resiliency that is that is built, you know, the from the ashes, right? It’s the strength and, and, and resiliency that comes out of tragedy that I am always so drawn to. And so I’d love to hear your story about how you, you know, overcame the obstacles that have showed up in your life.
Grant Muller 6:37 Sure, absolutely. Very quickly, early on. As, as a kid really, I learned how to pretend to be someone I’m not to fit in. And to get along with everybody. And it was a lesson I learned very early on. And as I got older, I kept pretending to be someone. I’m not just to kind of make it and to fit in. And in middle school, I started drinking. And by high school,
D.J. Paris 7:07 middle school, that’s amazing. That’s that’s a really early.
Grant Muller 7:09 Yeah, yeah. It was late middle school, but it was middle school. And by high school, I was drinking every day. And I somehow made it through high school. And as I went into the workforce, I started to figure out that workaholism has way better side effects and alcoholism. And so, I kind of cold turkey, quit drinking for a while. And I worked like a madman. And I was a stockbroker at Charles Schwab. And a year into that job, I was given a team of 24 stockbrokers to work under me. I was actually the youngest manager they’d ever promoted. So I had incredible success. A year later, I was the senior manager of a department with 60 people in it. And then shortly after that, I got recruited to an internet startup. Now, this is the late 90s. So Internet startup was just everything was everything. Absolutely. That tech boom. And it was a software company that was starting an internet services division in Denver. And which really dates it right, because now internet is everything. It’s not a division. And I was hired as the head of service, because I love customer service, consumer service. And that’s what I’ve been doing at Schwab. They hired me as the head of service. I showed up at my colleagues apartment where our first Denver office was her living room. And I said, Hey, I’m the head of service. And she said, Well, great. We have no clients. So you’re also the head of sales. And I said, Well, what are we selling? And they said, well, we don’t really know yet. But this internet thing is getting really big. And we need to figure out how we use our software for the internet. We want you to go find our first 50 Beta clients, and let them help us design the product. So we found the first 50 Beta clients. We went public, we all got rich, you know, Porsches and Ferraris started showing up in the parking lot. breakfast lunch and dinner was catered. I had a foosball table right outside my office. This is before Google. Before it was cool to show up to work in holey jeans. We were doing it. And it was really cool. Except I remember the night that we went public. And I was in my fancy condo overlooking the skyline of Denver. And I remember thinking to myself, well, I’ve done it. I met met my goal. I’m a millionaire by 30. But I thought is this it? Is this all there is? I was miserable. I was unhappy. I didn’t like who I was. And I was still pretending to be someone. I wasn’t at this internet company pretending to become a tech bro. But it wasn’t who I was. And so I think sometimes when we go after goals for the wrong reasons, in this case to make me feel better about myself, when we get those goals, and they don’t fill that hole, it’s just devastating. And that’s what happened to me, I started drinking again. And within a few months, I tried cocaine for the first time. And a few months after that I was fired because I was a daily cocaine user, from the very first moment I started. And so I went downhill very, very quickly. But no problem. I’m 28. I’m a millionaire, and at least in stock options, and I kept partying, I didn’t worry about it, I thought, This is great. I don’t have a job. Now to get in the way of the endless party. I was spending about $30,000 a month on cocaine, partying, various trips. And one day one of my checks bounced. And I thought, oh, it’s kind of weird. I need to exercise more shares, you know, when you’re spending $30,000, a month on party, and you don’t really sit down to balance your checkbook. In all honesty, I still don’t balance my checkbook. So I called up to exercise more shares. And they said, Mr. Mueller, we don’t see any stock options in this account. And I said, That’s right. Obviously, there’s misunderstanding. I have 16,000 shares, the stock options go look again. Well, it turned out, I had 90 days to exercise the shares after I left the company. And because I hadn’t, I forfeited about $1.2 million of stock options. In a moment, everything was gone. And we liquidated the cars. We bought coke with the liquidated cars, we did the Coke, within a week from then, that cars were gone, the Coke was gone, the friends were gone. And I was left in this condo miserable, pretty close to broke, with no real prospects. And long story short, I was foreclosed on a few months later. And I spent the next few years either couchsurfing or in the end, living on the streets. So that’s a little bit of the background. Luckily, things got bad enough for me that I was super desperate to do whatever it took to get clean and sober. And I believe that’s often what addicts need to get clean and sober as the willingness to do whatever it takes. And it was bad enough for me, I was supposed to go to prison for four years. And through what I believe was some kind of spiritual intervention, as well as a really loving family that didn’t give up on me. I ended up going to 30 days of rehab, and probation instead. And yeah, so that really quickly because I know your question is going to be well, that’s great, but how’d you end up in real estate. So I had always wanted to be a realtor, I had bought some investment properties along the way. And I really had a less than favorable opinion of the service I was getting from most of the realtors, being a guy that was doing consumer services for a living, I thought there was an opportunity to really professionalize and to really add some attention and beauty to the customer service process that I didn’t see. And so I’d never wanted to give up those great jobs, though, to become a realtor. So now it’s 2008. I’m living in a storage unit. And the market is at the very bottom, and my life is at the very bottom. And I think well, what better time than now. So that’s how I ended up being a realtor.
D.J. Paris 13:42 What and you got in it, possibly the you could argue in one of the most challenging times in real estate, you know, back in 2008 2000 to 2010. That was a huge crash. For those of us that were alive during that time, or remember, we’re practicing during that time. Although I might say, I might suggest that could have been a great time to get in only because there were a lot of people exiting the business around that time as well because it was so challenging to be a realtor during those those years. So I imagined kind of a trial by fire scenario where you probably got amazing training during those the that time as people were fleeing the market, which isn’t too dissimilar from what’s happening even today, we’re seeing a lot of agents leave the industry 2023 Here, rates are high, of course, inventory is lower than in most markets. So we’re having we’re seeing people exiting the business and we’re seeing the agents who are really stepping on the gas picking up that market share. But I want to just dial go all the way back to something that you said at the very beginning that I want to just make a point of because I’ve had a similar experience and and Grant was talking about once you achieve some major goal that he had this is this all Altair is moment. And I had a similar experience just a few years ago, I had always wanted to write. And I had a much, much smaller sort of goal. But my my lifetime dream was to write a funny article to be published in a in a humor magazine. And that was always kind of my thing. And there weren’t any humor magazines for a long time, National Lampoon was kind of the place I wanted to do that with, but they went out of business. Anyway, then, I had the opportunity to, I think, three or four years ago to actually get published in a magazine like that. And it was a big deal. For me, it was kind of like, my life’s ambition was just to be recognized with a piece of humor. And I remember that day being one of the saddest days of my life, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. And I remember going, well, this is a bummer. I thought this was gonna be the best day of my life. And I was very honored. And I was great. And I, it was a good piece. And I’m really proud of the work that I did, and it got published, I’m super proud of it. But I was also horribly depressed. And I think that is a very common thing, that all of us need to realize that that, you know, we sometimes we look for some external event, it’s like, that’s going to be the thing, if I could just achieve that, if I could just get you know, whatever the goal is, then I’ll be happy. And what you find out, at least what I found out is that it was the journey was really was really the real benefit. When I actually achieved the goal actually got really depressed. So it was like, Oh, the juice is it when I achieve the goal, that juice is all the work I did up to it. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on that just I just wanted to touch on that before we get into, you know, everything else.
Grant Muller 16:38 Now, it’s a super important theme. And it’s one that runs through my coaching, it runs through the book runs through a lot of the work that I do, I really believe that achievement comes from fulfillment, not the other way around. Yeah. So when we are fulfilled, fulfilled when we appreciate who we are, and maybe we don’t always like every part of who we are. But when we love ourselves, and we appreciate who we are, we appreciate the journey that we’re on and we bring some joy to our daily existence, achievement will flock to us. And just to put it in real estate agent terms, when we go to a listing appointment. And we’re solid about who we are and the value that we deliver. And we love being there simply for the act of being there and finding a way to serve, the person that we’re meeting with, it’s much more likely we’ll get the listing. fulfillment is where the achievement comes from.
D.J. Paris 17:31 100% I always think like, outcome is kind of up to the gods, like the outcome is, is up to things that are largely for the most part outside of our control. Sometimes things fall our way, sometimes they don’t, and we can, you know, improve our skill to have them fall more likely our way than not. But the end of the day, the one thing that we always have control over is our effort, our actions. And if we can derive fulfillment and pleasure from the work itself, then the actual goal becomes less significant, right? It becomes about the work. And the work ultimately leads you’re going to get the goals anyway. But what’s nice is you don’t have to live and die by the goals. You live and die by the work. At least that’s the way I’ve just tried to live my life.
Grant Muller 18:21 Absolutely. It’s so much more fun that way too. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 18:24 it is a lot less stress. Yeah, exactly. I want let’s, let’s talk about so let’s talk about real estate. So, you know, I didn’t want to talk about the book as well top of heart, which you know, again, is is a take on the expression top of mind. You know, we think oh, I want to keep our clients, we will always want to be top of mind when we actually want to be top of heart. And I am super interested in learning about what that means to you and how you keep yourself on top of heart with your with your clients and how you train agents to do the same.
Grant Muller 18:59 In 2008, I got I got a job at the front desk of a real estate office. nine bucks an hour living in a storage unit
D.J. Paris 19:06 after being a millionaire lost everything. Yeah, you’re back at the bottom. Yeah. But I,
Grant Muller 19:11 to me, it was amazing. I went to work, I got to go to a clean place to work. Instead of the life I’ve been living on the street. So it was fancy to me. I remember just thinking the glass doors were also clean. I mean, everything was so pristine. It was a big deal to me just to be inside just to have water or soda when I wanted. It was a huge deal to me, wasn’t hard to impress me. And I learned from being at the front desk a little bit about while I was getting my license. I noticed agents that did well and agents that didn’t and what they had in common, and a lot of them had this ability to just be they were just they seem to be the ones that I looked forward to. When they came through the door of the office. They were the ones that look forward to seeing those will also the same ones that seem to be have a higher production, and I didn’t quite put all of it together. yet, but I know now those are the people that when they reached out to the clients, the clients want to hear from them. Yeah. And so I, I got the but it took me a moment. And this was 2009. When I got my license, I started running Craigslist ads for foreclosure properties, and did the Direct Marketing route. And I was calling anybody who left a phone number I was calling beating them off reading the sales script to get an appointment. And I eventually fell upon a few clients. And at one point, I got a phone call from somebody, this is after I’d done four or five deals. And they said, Hey, so and so referred me to you. I’d like you to help me buy a house. I heard you’re a great agent. And I started taking them through the sales script. And they stopped me and said, No, no, you don’t, there’s no need for that.
D.J. Paris 20:49 You already got the sale.
Grant Muller 20:50 You got this later. Whoa, bro, like back off, stop selling. And let’s just meet. And I thought, Oh, is this what they’ve been talking about when they say real estate’s a relationship business. This is kind of cool. And that was my first referral, client referral. And now 98% of my business is repeat clients and referrals from clients. And I just fell in love with that process. And there was some times along the way. And I won’t get into all that now. But where I thought, well, if I’m going to do relationships, I’m going to do relationships on a huge scale. So I could build a huge business. And I kind of went up some peaks and valleys along that journey. But what I finally started to figure out, I was in recovery meetings at night, sure, learning how to get real for the first time in my life, to get real with who I am, my circumstances, the challenges I had. But then during the day, I was learning some top of mind tactics. And by the way, I think top of mind is great, but I was learning some tactics that didn’t feel congruent to who I was. And I felt like I was gonna have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t, you know, to have a really nice, friendly phone conversation, and then at the end to say, Oh, by the way, who do you know, though, I need to buy a house next year, six months,
D.J. Paris 22:06 and I battled just that, oh, man, I
Grant Muller 22:09 thought am I gonna have to pretend to be someone, I’m not again, to make it in this business. And I was virtually unemployable at this time. So I had to make it work. So I did some of that. But I started to learn along the way that when I created real genuine emotional connections and relationships with clients, and with people in my sphere, referral started to happen, almost like it was magic. And so what I like to say is that the know like and trust the top of mind, is absolutely a great place to start. It just doesn’t go far enough. And so that’s what type of heart comes from. So it’s know like, and trust is top of mind. And then on top of Top of Mind, so building upon that model is top of heart. And top of heart is the mindset, the skill set, and the heart set. And the mindset is to get real, to be who we really are this short version. But once we’re real with who we really are, and we’re creating great relationships, it’s not. It’s good. But what if we’re not really good at what we do? What if we don’t have the skill sets or the habits to follow through on what we need to do we use you and I were chatting before about consistency. But if you don’t have the consistency to do the things, so you’ve got to have the skill sets. And then heart set is all about how do we get present? How do we get connected? How do we build a community of people that we can be a part of that we can lead, and that we can serve. And that will then of course, also serve our business. And so it’s mindset skill set, heart set is top of heart.
D.J. Paris 23:42 I love that those are all super important. And I think you know, we you’re right top of mind is better than not being in someone’s head. But being in their heart is really where you can live forever. And then you have this ability to really connect with somebody at a deep level. And in real estate, you are helping people make deep emotional decisions. These are difficult financial decisions, they’re obviously big financial decisions, and they’re typically pretty emotional. And so I think you’re so absolutely right that, yes, we want to connect at a deep level emotionally, we also want to make sure our core competency our skill level is actually you know, good so that we can, you know, support and treat our clients in the way that we need. And then also just running a business, you’re doing a ring a lot of hats as a realtor. So what are some of the ways in which you suggest agents start to think about sort of penetrating into their clients hearts?
Grant Muller 24:45 Great question. You know, in I think a lot of us try to follow the rules, and we’re raised to follow the rules to do what’s expected of us, you know, to keep relationships kind of safe. insecure, and a little superficial, and in business and sales and real estate, it’s like that even more. And these, these top of mind tactics really, they keep us in front of rather than with people. So we’re really learned in real estate and think about some of the real estate coaching classes or classes you’ve taken, they really teach us to stay relevant in people’s minds rather than real with people. And, you know, that’s over that that world is done. The age of putting up the business front, it’s done it playing, you know, playing numbers, games, and calling human beings targets, or prospects. I think it’s time we bring the humanity back to business, and that we really treat people as human beings. And so to answer your question very directly, I think one of the greatest gifts we can give another human being is to allow them to be seen and appreciated, as they really are. Therapists call this positive. Think about just a second year unconditional positive regard is what a what therapists call it. And when I came across that term, I said, Oh, yeah, that’s it. So how do we hold people and hold space for them, and allow them to be seen and feel safe as they really are, that’s an incredible gift, we give another human being. And when we do that, then we start to enter that heart space. And when we get real, and we show up as we really are. Now, instead of a me and you thing, we’re a wee thing, right? And when we create that relationship at that level with somebody, and by the way, this doesn’t have to be a friendship, don’t get me wrong, we don’t have to have a bunch of pretender friends. This not all of my clients are friends with me. But we connect in some way emotionally. And that’s the difference between somebody saying, Yeah, I’ve got somebody you know, you can use as a realtor, if they’re asked, versus somebody just hearing somewhere about real estate across the room and going, you got to call a DJ, or I’ve never talked to you again. Right, right. Head to head to heart. That’s the difference.
D.J. Paris 27:09 Yeah, it’s absolutely, you know, you said something very important, which is about letting a creating a space where someone can be authentically themselves. It’s like, okay, what does that actually mean? What I think it the way that I interpret that is providing a safe, non judgmental place, where, for example, if I’m a realtor, and I have a client, where a client can, you know, express their emotions, they can talk about what their experience is buying, selling, you know, getting ready to buy or sell any part of the process, there’s an expression in a men’s group that I’m a part of called all of you as welcome. So it’s a very similar sort of idea, what you were saying, which is bring all of you to this, you don’t have to be a certain way you just have to be, and I as the agent will be here to allow you to be, and I will help guide you through this process. Is that kind of the way you you think about it?
Grant Muller 28:08 Yes, absolutely. And I think the way that we create that permission, is that we lead the way. So we bring all of who we are, we get clear about our own beliefs and our own strengths and our own values. So that we bring all of us to the transaction. Now, by the way, I’m not suggesting some kind of, I’m not a therapist. So guess what, I don’t have to just take every client and give them unconditional positive regard. I can have lunch or coffee with somebody and think you know what, I’m going to love them from a distance, I don’t think that they’re a great fit for me. So because I invest so much time and energy in the relationships for the people that are in my community, what people call it, their sphere, I call it my community, and I invest a lot of time and energy and love there. So you have to be somebody that I genuinely want to serve. And honestly, that’s not most people. So I have a process for meeting people and kind of letting them audition to be a part of my community. I don’t tell them they’re auditioning, of course, that would be terrible. But it’s just, you know, a way to think about it. And so, so I’ll add somebody to my just met tag in my CRM to put us to tactics level, and then I’ll invite them to coffee, and I’ll get to know them. And it’s not about judging them. It’s not about being friends or not, it’s about do we click? Do we do we have some common values? Do we click in some way? Is it easy? And do I have energy when I leave them or have they drained my energy? That’s, that’s it. It’s really
D.J. Paris 29:39 important stuff. And I could not agree more. It’s like, we have such a really huge opportunity in this industry where it’s such an interpersonal business, real estate, and it allows us to really work on our ability to deeply connect with other humans. Yes, we have to be great realtors, we have to have the skill sets. to actually perform the duties, our clients and trust upon us, but also this idea of it’s, it’s bigger than that, right? So so you know, a lot of emotion goes into these sort of, you know, transactions and relationships need to be pretty solid to help guide somebody through. And so what you’re really talking about is building intimacy. It sounds like, you know, when you’re you’re meeting with or determining if they’re, you know, what level of intimacy and intimacy is not a scary word, but it’s just about connection. You know, we’re talking about connection. And when people feel connected, they, like you said, they shout across the room, oh, my gosh, you need a realtor talk to talk to grant.
Grant Muller 30:42 And understanding what the person across the table needs from us. I have I wrote about a senior citizen in my book, who, you know, every time I went to her, I needed to add another hour to that time, because she needed that space. To share some of her life story, it became a, you know, it became a huge lesson for me, I learned so much from her. And I learned to slow down, and to realize that everyone has a story that could be valuable. The lady that I had lunch with today, right before this, she needs 25 minutes for lunch, bing, bang, boom, out, she wants to see me, she wants to hear me, she wants to tell me what she needs, you know, she’s kind of a networker, and we want to exchange some value real quick. She’s very business minded. And then she’s out the door, those two people need something very different. I had a client’s once once who unfortunately lost her son in an avalanche. And I ended up having lunch with her. She didn’t cancel the appointment. I didn’t know anything about this. And she cried through most of lunch. And I, I didn’t know I had no value to add, I have no children. I have not lost somebody in that way. But I created a space to allow her to have the space. And so I think it’s about understanding what people need from us and meeting them where they’re at.
D.J. Paris 32:00 Yeah, and not in your right you can have I always think there’s a distinction between judgment and preference, right. So we can allow people to be authentically themselves, which means you are free to express yourself as you are. And and I just lost my own train. Oh, but But I may still have a preference. So I can still have a preference that oh, that person I connect with better than this person. It doesn’t mean that person is good, bad, indifferent. It just means, like you were saying, Do we do our energies connect? And that’s really what you’re ultimately looking for in a client? What are what are some of the ways in which you determine whether your energies connect, when you’re like you were saying you have a just met person in your in your database? You take them out for coffee? And how do you then proceed from there.
Grant Muller 32:50 It’s a feeling I wish I could use, I wish I could give you some smart matrix I use. But you know, I generally no, it’s, well, I’ll put it this way, I treat those relationships, like I do any other relationships in my life, we all know, if we want to continue a relationship with someone or not. So I allow that that relationship to follow its natural course. And a lot of times, in my life, at least I’m a bit more of an introvert, I’m a bit of an acquired taste. So a lot of times for me, the natural course of a relationship is I meet somebody and immediate doesn’t really go anywhere right away. That’s just not who I am necessarily. So if it’s easy, and it feels like it clicks, then then I’ll know it. And so I just treat business relationships, like I do regular relationships, I just treat them like real relationships. And that sounds so simple. It’s taken a lot of work for me, that’s why I had to write a book about it to kind of figure out what the process is, but, but I had to get really clear about who I am, and what my values are. And then it’s easier for me to look for similar values, or at least values that are adjacent, aligned as best but if they’re even adjacent, that’s great. Um, you know, you might love serving a certain underrepresented population in your nonprofit work that’s very different than the population I love to serve. But we have the same heart for service. And so then that would be, you know, something that we have in common that we can then put to work in our relationship. So some common common beliefs, values, strengths are really valuable.
D.J. Paris 34:31 And it’s important for I think, one thing, I would put this in the soft skills category, but equally as important as any of the harder skills category is really thinking about who your ideal everyone listening, who is your ideal client, and I know there’s lots of different categories of clients. Not everyone is going to fit in the same in the same bucket. But what kind of clients do you meaning listeners? Do you you resonate with Who do you? Like? Do you like working with people that are the data driven? You know, just want to see the numbers non emotional, you know, sort of more empirically objectively based people? Or is it more of the deeper connecting touchy feely types or somewhere in between. And obviously, there’s a million different personality types. But thinking about what you resonate with what lights you up, Mr. or Mrs. listener, here is thinking about what what you’re looking for in the same thing that you do if you’re looking for a romantic partner, a business partner, friend, I mean, these are really important questions to ask yourself, because what what your brain can start to do is start to filter and look and start to seek those people out. But you don’t know until you know what you’re looking for. So I think what you’re saying, Grant, it’s so it’s a simple thing to say. But it’s really profound. And something that people can do over and over again, to start thinking about, if I could design my ideal client, what would they look like? What would how would they respond? How would they act now? Nobody’s perfect. So you can’t Don’t create a perfect human being because no, that doesn’t exist. But if you get some of the certain qualities that you look for, you know, how agreeable are they? How decisive are they these are things that you should be looking for, so that you can you know, better communicate with these people?
Grant Muller 36:22 Yeah, absolutely. And I would say, you know, I tend to get along with a lot of different personality types. But for me, I look for some common shared interests, so or goals. So I’m really big into horses. And many of my clients are horse people. And the cool thing is, I get to go do the thing that I love the most in the world. And by doing that, I naturally meet people who also love this thing. I love the most in the world. And so now, instead of us sitting across the table, looking at each other, we’re on the same side of the table, sharing in this in this thing we love together, and what builds better connections and sharing something you love together. And then when we do the real estate thing, the real estate thing is almost like a side note. It’s like we have a lovely day together. And then it’s oh, by the way, can you would you call me some time we actually want to have you over look at the house, you can help me sell sell is Do you still do that? Right? Yeah, I do that cool. And that’s that it’s that simple. And when it happens in that flow, it’s just, it’s beautiful. The other Monday morning, two weeks ago, I rode, I rode horses, through this beautiful, beautiful ranch property with one of my best clients, and a person who’s a great friend. And we had a view of what a great Monday morning. And just trust me when I say the numbers are super lucrative. So how, you know how beautiful is it to bring all of those things together. And I think that’s a big reason why I get to do the numbers I do without burning out. Because I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not I’m living congruent with my values. And I’m having a great time along the way. And that’s a lot of what my coaching is about is helping people to find a business plan that works for who they really are, so that they’re not failing to implement somebody else’s plan for them. Because I feel like we learn things that don’t feel right for us. So then we don’t follow through on them. And then we beat ourselves up and think there must be something wrong with us. And that’s just no way to live.
D.J. Paris 38:29 I agree. But let’s talk about your coaching. Because you just said a lot. And I was going to start heading down a different avenue. And I realized I would be hijacking the entire interview. And I don’t want to do that because I want to learn about what you actually offer with respect to coaching. So let’s talk about Grant Mueller. By the way, the web, the book, again is top of heart, find it on Amazon, anywhere books are sold, we will have a link to that in the show notes. And grant mueller.com is where you can go to learn about the coaching program. Let’s talk about coaching. So what does coaching mean to you?
Grant Muller 39:05 So in real estate, and in most of the world, training is confused with coaching a lot. So training is around learning tools, tactics, strategies, from another person who teaches us the method, we take that method, and we follow through with that method, hopefully to get similar results. In coaching, we believe that you have the answer to the problem. So in my coaching, and specifically High Performance Coaching, my job is to guide you to find your own truths. And sometimes those are emotional truth. Sometimes those are business truths. But I want you to help you find your own truth. And I believe that personal development is business development. Jim Rohn a very, very old time personal development guy used to say that and it’s so true, and we’re in a business where we actually get paid better When we improve ourselves What a blessing to be in that kind of business, if you’re a CPA, you don’t get to say that. So as we get we are the product that we offer the community. And so when we improve ourselves, we improve our product, we improve our business. And so in high performance coaching, we work through five big habit areas that have been proven through scientific study, and to be key components of high performance living and life. And high performance is around performing at a higher level in a sustained manner, while improving our relationships, and our wellness, so this is not peak performance, where we kill ourselves the hustle and grind. And then, you know, we end up petering out on the other side, because we’re exhausted, burnt out and not happy. That’s no fun. I like you know, my story, you know that I’ve been there done that. And I don’t want to go back there. So this is around living a fulfilled, inspired life. And then we happen to do really well financially at the same time.
D.J. Paris 40:59 Yeah, it’s kind of an all things, all things improve, I guess is always the, the intention, and always readjusting and recalibrating. I know that for me, like, recently, I have been doing too much service, stuff with respect to the real estate industry, I give too much of myself. And as a result, I’m a little bit out of balance. So it’s a good problem to have, it’s still a problem. So as a result, I have to read stuff as well. And so having a coach, I think it any part of your real estate journey, or just personal journey is is going to be critical, because you can have somebody who can see maybe the imbalances that that you’re currently stuck in, and everybody’s imbalanced at some some part of their life, right? No, no wheel is perfectly round. If it’s if it’s representing somebody’s entire life, there’s going to be bumps along the way. So it’s really nice, that since can’t smooth out all of our own bumps ourselves, which would be great if we could, but we can’t. So the good news is there’s people that can help us identify these bumps and smooth them help us smooth them out ourselves as well, which is through coaching. And so I am the biggest fan of having a coach. I mean, every professional athlete has a coach, and they’re already really good at their job. So I’m assuming that the rest of us need coaches as well. But yeah, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about that. So right now, it’s 2023. We’re halfway through a little bit past halfway through the year. And you know, let’s face it, it’s a tough year right now. It’s not the sky is not falling. So that’s good. There’s still business to be had, but it’s not quite as busy as it was in previous years. We’re all feeling that we all get it. Yes, it’s a little bit of a bummer. So what are what are grant? What are you sort of encouraging agents to do to stay productive stay positive to stay, but also realistic to also understand what what’s going on right now?
Grant Muller 43:05 There are many parts of that question. So you’re it’s a tougher year. And look, I’m I’m down from where I want it to be this year as well. So I’ll be super transparent about that,
D.J. Paris 43:17 by the way, by the way, everybody is. So yes, Grant is not alone. Yes, there’s exceptions. There’s a few people out there who are like my business is up, and 99% of us are struggling.
Grant Muller 43:29 I have I have a coaching client is having his best year ever. And I’m, I’m really proud of him. And I know I can see why he’s been building the momentum big time. And for me, you know, you don’t put out a book into the world and maintain great balance and all the other parts of your life. It just doesn’t happen. And that’s okay, I made that conscious decision. So the first thing about that rounding out conversation that you had is that in coaching, we make intentional decisions, rather than just letting things happen. So you know, if you’re going to take two weeks off from the gym, to push this big project through, so be it. That’s very different than looking back two weeks later and saying what happened in my life. And so we tried to be a little intentional about the trade offs that happen. But absolutely, then there needs to be trade offs. The second thing is when times get tough. I’ve always been taught and I always teach to look at the last 12 months of deals. And that makes sure you’re very clear about where that business has come from in its majority. If you’re if you have a fairly busy real estate practice, likely most of it is repeat and referral. Almost always is the case. Not always. But whatever that thing is whether it’s Zillow leads or its repeat and referral. Find ways to double down on that. So if I usually reach out to my people in my sphere once a quarter, I might add in an extra email I might make sure that I spend more time at lunch face to face with more people than I usually would, I might go a little deeper into my database than I usually would. But making sure that we’re taking massive action. So that’s number one. Number two, cutting back on expenses that aren’t necessary, and I am the president of the fanclub have expenses that aren’t necessary. You know, I think it might have to do with just my background of not, you know, living on the streets and not having everything for a while. So when I started making money, believe me, I want it if it’s pretty and, and fun and expensive, I want to buy it, but now’s not the time. And so understanding that, and the reason it’s not the time is not necessarily because you won’t make it through, although that could be the case. But more importantly, when we reduce the financial pressure for ourselves, then we don’t show up with commission breath. When we meet with clients, we have the ability to say no, I said, I said, No, thank you yesterday to a listing. You know, the seller said you have the best program, so and so as the best price, will you match the price? And I said, Thank you for asking, no, thank you. And I can do that, because I’ve reduced some of my expenses. And so I think when we reduce some of that pressure, we give ourselves some room to breathe. And then we can look at things logically and say last year, most of my business was repeating referral, I did it through three big client events, they were really expensive. So this year, instead of that, I’m going to reach out and do a wine club, I’m going to do a day at the park with without all the fancy stuff. Or I’m going to be together face to face with as many of these people as possible, or I’m simply going to text or Facebook Messenger and reach out and find out how people are. But in one way or another, we need to get into massive action, I’d love to say there was some easy button. But that’s just not the way it is we’ve got to get into some massive action, but in a clear, concise way with a plan. Rather than flailing. I see a lot of agents, unfortunately, that do nothing. Because it doesn’t feel like anything’s gonna make a difference, right? Because we have a short term problem with cash flow. And real estate isn’t a short term sales cycle. It’s a long term sales cycle. So the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the second best time is now so we have to get into massive action now. And I think what that does, I’ll give you an example. In my case, this year, I’m okay treading water. I’ve had some other big goals. I’m going to tread water this year. But I know that just the very act of all the momentum required to tread water this year, is going to give me a huge lift going into next year, because now I’ve got that massive action program in place. So as 6070 80,000 Realtors exit the business, my market share and your market share is going up without doing anything. But if we’re in massive action this year, will improve even more when we get some wind in our sales.
D.J. Paris 48:02 I was the other day with a top producer who was young, a young man he’s in his early 30s. I don’t know if that’s young anymore, but to me, it’s young.
Grant Muller 48:12 He’s young to me. Yeah. To me,
D.J. Paris 48:14 do you and me that’s young. And he was saying they were asking him? How do you what are you doing right now to step on the gas? You know, what, what are you doing to stay top of mind in the not top of heart necessarily, would grant could teach but just at least top of mind. He says you know what I do every day, here’s what I’m doing now is I’m doubling the amount of time I reply to Facebook and Instagram comments or posts. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. And I thought wonder why he’s doing that. And then I thought about it a bit. And he goes because it he explained it. He said because people post, typically on Facebook and Instagram, they post emotional parts of their lives, you know, typically victories, you know, things to celebrate birthdays, you know, events, whatever, special moments in their life, vacations, whatever. And so he goes, I want to celebrate with my clients. So I have to know what what they’re doing. And they’re going to post mostly, or post on Facebook or wherever. So I want to let them know that I acknowledge that, that I see that they just did this great thing. And I want to celebrate with them. So and this is his personality, and he’s like so I write 30 comments a day. He goes I’ve you know, so many Facebook friends and Instagram friends, and I’m constantly just, you know, giving validation, but he’s like it’s authentic. Because I authentically I’m excited that they went to Cancun or they just had this fancy dinner or their child just you know, was in a recital or something. And he’s like, yeah, he goes, that’s where I’m stepping on the gas. And he goes, I do it every single day. I do minimum of 30 comments and he goes in a year or two, I will have more business than I know what to do with and I said I love the right.
Grant Muller 49:53 I love that and when you when you jump in that big, you can have the you can have have the confidence that he has to say, I know that this is going to come through a couple of things you said there I have to jump in on. One is, he’s allowing others to be seen, just like we were saying, he’s giving them the gift of being seen. So number one, one great way to take that, from a top of mind to a type of heart tactic is when we and by the way, I love that he’s doing a genuinely if it wasn’t genuine, it wouldn’t work. Yeah, it would be a bad idea. So if that’s not you find another way. Right? Because Because that’s not for everybody. But one of my favorite things to do. And admittedly, I don’t do it as often as I could. But one way to go from top of mind to top of heart is to make the comment. Congratulations, DJ, awesome on, you know, Mitzi passing this six week on obedience school, your dog, I’m making something up now, you know, great job. But the next level, the double heart level is then put it take it out of social media and put it in the real world. So send a handwritten card that says congratulations on Mitzi on graduating from the six week obedience school thing. And when we do that, and take it out of social media and into the real world, it takes things to a whole nother level. Because there’s so much friction in sending out actual mail. People know what a pain it is to get a stamp and get an envelope, put it all together and write the card. But when you can, when you can create a system for that friction, so it’s not high friction on your end. Ie I’ve got a whole card library over here. You just dash out a card stamp that goes in the mail. It’s easy for you, but they can’t believe it. When they get it. They’re like, Wow, he really cares.
D.J. Paris 51:38 You might even bring a tear to their eye through a simple act of a greeting card. non real estate related Hey, saw you did or accomplished X or whatever. Congrats, so proud of you. You know, whatever. Just, I see you, I acknowledge you. I’m on I’m in your camp, and I want to celebrate with you or be there for you when you need help. That is what every human being on the planet wants.
Grant Muller 52:06 Yeah. And it’s it’s it. There’s no branding, please. No logos? Nope.
D.J. Paris 52:10 No, it sent me the three people’s names of No, don’t do that.
Grant Muller 52:15 And then if you want to take it, and everything is in degrees, everything, everything, everything that I think about is at different levels. So then, I always like to ask the questions, and then how can i What’s the next level of that. And the next level might be this will be ridiculous if your dog passed a beat in school. But let’s say that it’s a, let’s say your daughter just graduated in high school. Now I’m reaching out going DJ, I don’t know how you did that. I don’t have any kids. But I can only imagine 18 years of getting a kid all the way through high school. When can we go out to dinner to celebrate. And now I’m taking you out to dinner, we’re spending time together, we might talk a little bit about your daughter, but really we’re just gonna catch it’s an excuse to take you to dinner. And it’s an easy excuse. And it’s just a way to honor you as another human being who’s done something really incredible in this world. And so it feels good to me. And it feels good to you. And hopefully your daughter comes along too. It’s just it’s that’s top of heart. That’s all top of heart is I make my living that way. I’m not the most social person. So you don’t have to do a lot of this. But do it with people that you actually click with them. You look at your calendar, and you’re excited about how you’re going to spend your day you’re not thinking, Oh no, it’s another two hours of prospecting time this afternoon. I don’t want to do that’s just no way to live.
D.J. Paris 53:30 Now. It’s I’m calling my friends and seeing how they’re doing. It’s amazing. Yeah. And that what a great place to wrap up this particular episode. Grant, I could talk to you all day about this. And we definitely will have you back to talk more in depth. But the book is called top of heart guys. This is the key. Again, Grant said something very important earlier. So wouldn’t it be cool if you were just seeing as a guy that they have to meet? And oh, by the way, you also do real estate, right? So that’s kind of Grant’s whole thing is like you can just be an authentically you. And people will want to obviously tell other people about you and help you in your business. But you have to make space for that. And you have to learn how to build those relationships. Grant is going to show you how and I want to also make one point about grants book. He has a foreword or a blurb at least by Bob Berg who is the king of referrals. This is the guy and he wrote a blurb for your book grant. So that is I can’t even imagine what kind of feather in that in your cap it is but it is a good feather. Bob berg is the man and if Bob Berg says that this is a book to read, it’s a book to read. So I want everybody to go out. I’ve read all of Bob’s books, I think so anything Bob tells me to read, I read and Bob says to read Grant’s book top of heart. We’ll have a link to it on in the show notes and also guys, you need a coach, get a coach now is the time go to grant mueller.com and grant will reach out to you and see if you guys can win We’re together in a coaching capacity. And on behalf of all of our audience, we want to thank grant for coming on our show today. We appreciate you. Thank you for spending time out of your crazy busy day to do this. And on behalf of grant myself, we want to also thank the audience for making it to the end of the episode. And please, the best way you can help us continue to grow is by telling a friend I think of one other realtor that’s struggling right now. Every realtors or most realtors are struggling right now. So send them a link to this episode keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done could be streamed there. We’re on all the social channels. Find us there as well. Hit the subscribe button. Leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. We will see you on the next episode. Grant. Thank you so much. And we will we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks man.
Grant Muller 55:46 Thanks very much
Structure & Discipline From A Veteran Top Producer • Shelby Johnson
Aug 23, 2023
Shelby Johnson the CEO of Five Pillars Nation and former military shares her great experience as military and her transition into a career in real estate. Shelby discusses the importance of rules, structure, discipline and chain of commands and how she leveraged them in her business in real estate. Shelby also discusses the importance of self-esteem and its role in managing clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Do you struggle with structure and discipline? You probably do. Or at least I know I do. This episode is all about how to fix that. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we will be speaking with top producer and veteran Shelby Johnson. Before we get to Shelby, we have just a few announcements. First, please tell a friend about this podcast. That’s the best way to help us grow. We want to reach as many Realtors as possible. So just tell one friend, that’s all we ask. And also please leave us a review whatever podcast app you may be listening to this on. Let us know what you think of the show we really appreciate it helps us also get in front of more listeners. So that’s it guys. Let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Shelby Johnson.
Today on the show, my guest is Shelby Johnson from five pillars real estate with exp in Charlotte. Now, let me tell you more about Shelby Shelby. Now Shelby served in the army for six years before diving into real estate full time as both a broker and an investor in 2018. Now out of the gate, she was recognized at the Keller Williams Rookie of the Year all of North and South Carolina, and I’m gonna guess there’s 1000s of Keller Williams agents in both of those states. In fact, I know there is. So that is a huge, huge deal. She close to 48 transactions in her first year. Let’s just pause and marvel at how amazing that is. Everyone listening knows how amazing that is. Then she went on to move she moved on to create a traditional team called five pillars Realty Group, which and I’m gonna, you’re gonna have to pause again, because I’m gonna give you a number, it’s gonna blow you away. So after her first year, she created this group and then closed 500 additional transactions, in fact, more than 500 in the inner first two and a half years, insane. In the mid 2021. Five Pillars evolved out of the traditional team and to what it is today, which is now called five pillars nation, how exciting to learn about how Shelby has done this and what she can do to help you replicate the same sort of success. Now I want everybody because she is a coach as well. So I want I’m sorry, I have a little bit more to read. For Shelby My apologies. Outside of building her agent business, Shelby was flipping acquiring rentals. She was in the investment space, both short and long term rentals. She founded pints and properties, which is a nationwide real estate investors group and is passionate about helping real estate agents use their active income to build passive income portfolios as well. And for anyone listening. If you aren’t familiar with the investor side of real estate, it’s really a great opportunity. Because at some point in your career, someone will come to you and say I want to invest in real estate. And it’s good to really have that skill set so that you can of course, accommodate that agent as opposed to just referring it to someone else like the Shelby right. So it’s good that she can help teach you all that stuff and just how to be a really successful agent, even if you’re not on the investment side. Because her team and her done. I mean 500 transactions in two and a half years is insane. So amazing. Anyway, follow her on her on Instagram, which is that Shelby show, we will have a link to that in the show notes and also visit our website, five pillars nation.com And she has code thing that she does. And she even has free coaching as well. So check her out. I am such a big fan of you, Shelby, I just learned about you. I’m already a fan. But I’m excited that you’re on the show. So welcome.
Shelby Johnson 5:11 Thank you so much for having me, man, that was such an intro. Thank you, I
D.J. Paris 5:15 get really excited. I just, you know, it’s funny, I was just thinking about this, I’ve done about 500 of these episodes. And I get so excited, because I just love talking to people that are really doing exceptional things. And, you know, maybe it’s some insecurity of myself of not feeling as successful as my guests. But I liked that I liked that I get to talk to people like you, first of all, you served our country. So on behalf of all of our audience, thank you for that, that is the most important, you know, one of the most important things that we don’t often remember as, as US citizens. But um, thanks for that. And then also, you know, you have just had incredible success very early and quickly in real estate. So how did you get into real estate? You know, we know you were in you were in the army. And then did you come straight from the army into into real estate? Yeah, I
Shelby Johnson 6:08 did. So I served in the army for six years. And it was, my first duty station was lovely, I loved it, you know, I was going to be in the Army forever. And then I changed duty stations to another installation. It used to be called Fort Bragg, it recently changed to Fort liberty, North Carolina. And I just had a completely different experience that led me to considering other options. I’m like, Hey, like, I don’t have to do this for the rest of my life. And I would ideally have something where I had control over my time. And, you know, my income would directly reflect my paycheck as opposed to having to work, you know, years to hit the next benchmark to make the amount of money. And so I just started looking around for, you know, what could check those blocks. And it was real estate investing was actually what I stumbled upon first through Robert Kiyosaki, and
D.J. Paris 7:00 Oh, sure. passive residual income. Yeah,
Shelby Johnson 7:04 yes. And then bigger pockets. And so I had this idea, I was like, oh, I’ll just buy rental properties, and then I will make money in my sleep, and I’ll just, you know, ride off into the sunset and never have to talk to a human again, right. That’s really funny. If you have actually been in real estate investing, you know, that it’s not like that. But that was the original dream. And I decided to get my real estate license as a means to generate the active income to pour straight into my investment. So, and I what I didn’t realize at the time, because you know, a lot of people getting their license, they’re just like, oh, I’ll just, you know, I’ll just open some doors, show some houses and clothes and make a lot of money. And I didn’t realize it was like, No, it’s a whole app business. You know?
D.J. Paris 7:50 It is, and it is, it is funny, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot of people get into real estate as as agents, or like you said it on the investors on the investor side, you know, and not always understanding the amount of work and effort it takes. Because really, it’s no different really than many startup businesses. You know, there’s this learning curve, there’s time to generate, you know, enough income to keep the business afloat. There’s lead generation, there’s all of these, these pieces of really any business, that and it’s sometimes you know, the schools who teach the pre licensing classes, they don’t really talk about any of that. They just go, let’s help you pass the test. You know, the rules and regs stuff, which you forget about anyway, at the moment you pass the test. But, but this idea of really understanding like, it’s kind of a trial by fire in a lot of ways. And you You did it, and you were very successful. I’m curious, I’ve had a lot of military or ex military on the show who have gotten into real estate. And, you know, I am sure there are some non success stories. But boy, there’s a lot of success stories. I suspect. This is a guest, but I suspect the discipline and the structure of being in the military, I’m guessing was really helpful to then when you’re on your own and not really accountable. You know, assuming that you don’t have somebody looking over your shoulder every few minutes going, what are you doing right now, most Realtors don’t have that in their have to really be self sufficient and self starters. Did what you know, can you talk about what you learned in the military? And were you able to bring some of those skills over into real estate?
Shelby Johnson 9:27 Yeah, my military experience was absolutely huge in the ability for anything that I’ve done so far. And I didn’t even realize it at the time, like how impactful it would be for me. But like you said, with the discipline and the structure, for sure, that was a thing I was already used to getting up early and attacking my day. And also the military instills the sense of urgency within you because there’s so much there’s so many levels of like, you know, leadership and ranks and there’s like a lot of pressure all the time and Little bit of fear from getting yelled at or, you know, getting negative counseling or whatever. And so I still had that, like, deeply ingrained in me. So like, whether or not I had anyone over my shoulder, there was just the sense of urgency like, I have to do this, like now, like yesterday. And the other piece of that urgency also is the fact that in the military, you can’t, if you care at all about your survival, you can’t say I couldn’t do it, or I couldn’t figure it out, or it didn’t work. And so that idea of like, there is a way you just have to find it, no, is not an answer. That is incredibly helpful. Your one
D.J. Paris 10:41 it is, boy, I don’t know that anyone’s ever said that exact thing on our show. And if they have I forgotten it, but that is a brilliant thing to really, it’s simple. But this idea of learning, you know, learning to how to process and know, and learning what to know, really, really is and having it not feel like the worst possible thing to happen. And also, I mean, it’s like, I always think really successful people just fail more. So they’re just used to the nose and I say fail, I mean, they just don’t get their outcome most of the time, but they just keep going. And of course, military works all on, you know, there’s, there’s a chain of command and you are not to really question and I kind of it’s kind of like, I don’t even know, now in this country, we sort of like you get to question everything, and you get to just, you know, be an individual, and there is no rules. But in the military, there are rules, there’s really specific reasons for that. And it’s not because they want to control and punish, they just want a really effective military to actually keep the rest of us safe. And so there are processes that are tried and tested. And and you have to just trust that the people you know, that have put these rules in place, know what they’re doing. And you’re right, you don’t get to probably say no, as much as you do, you know, outside of the military, especially when someone’s asking you to do something. But there’s a reason for that. And it’s not because they’re evil people. They’re like, No, we know how to do this. And we want to teach you so that we can keep you safe. And you can keep everyone else safe. So I love that. And I imagine, you know, yeah, I’ve never met somebody who is ex military who was like, you know, I just can’t seem to be as I’m not a self starter anymore. It’s like, they all just learned it. So well. So I think amazing. And you’re right, like, again, not not hearing No, just going okay, well, I’ll figure out a different way around this. And the cool part about real estate, there’s a million ways to do it.
Shelby Johnson 12:33 Oh, my God, so much. It is the land if you’re creative, the world is yours in real estate, which is just such a beautiful thing. And one of the things I love about it so much, it’s like there’s never one way to skin the cat. There’s like 75 The the military in general, like besides those aspects, though, there was also the aspect of the organizational side of it. So like I worked in human resources, and I oversaw 700, you know, men within a soldiers, but at the time it was infantry was all guys. So it really was men. And I was in charge of seeing people come into the unit, leave the unit, go on deployments, redeploy award ceremonies, promotions, retirement ceremonies, and then also like, making sure that that aligned with all of the other operational things that were happening in the unit. And so the fact that I could, you know, I worked with the operations and looking ahead on the calendar and making milestones and benchmarks and sticking to timelines and the calendar being like a Tetris, you know, all of this stuff, directly ties into real estate, in addition to in the military, that people move duty stations all the time that they, yes, they change duty stations. And so everything has to be documented. Because when you leave, oftentimes, there’s not even a handover. So your replacement will come two weeks after you’ve left. And if you don’t have your operating procedures documented, so that way someone could pick it up on a third grade level and figure out how to do it. It’s unacceptable. So those were things that really helped, you know, documenting so that way I could automate and leverage and use my time wisely, those really impacted throughout everything that I’ve done so far in real estate.
D.J. Paris 14:16 Yeah, it makes perfect sense is having the standard operating procedures and this this tight, tight organization, so that things don’t fall through the cracks. Because, you know, like you were saying, you know, somebody somebody leaves, you know, a particular area where they’re deployed, and then their replacement comes in, but it’s weeks later, and they’re million things that happened in those two weeks and you’re like, Okay, now I have to figure out you know, how to keep this all all straight, it kind of similar in real estate, right? Like, deals fall through, things happen. And you know, it’s or even just, you close a transaction, and then you’re like, well, that person is probably not going to buy or sell another property for seven years or whatever the statistic is these days. How do I make sure that they don’t forget it? About me during that time, but I want to find out. What do you think was the main reason that you got to 48 transactions in your first year? I mean, you know, that’s insanely impressive. I don’t suspect there’s any magic sort of formula that you know that no one else knows. Maybe there is. But you know, what do you think made that difference for you? Why do you think you did that? Well,
Shelby Johnson 15:22 yeah, that one of the reasons is because I didn’t know how good it was when I was doing it. And that is one of the things I didn’t go in with the expectation of like, you know, an average Asian and a good first year closes, like, I don’t know what like six, I actually
D.J. Paris 15:36 maybe six, yeah, maybe, maybe six. And so I just
Shelby Johnson 15:39 went in knowing that I was gonna go absolutely as hard as I could. And the results followed from like, the input of the work, but I didn’t realize until literally, they were like, Oh, you’re a rookie of the year. I’m like, what? So I think that honestly, having my mind’s not constricted to what was possible. Helped. That was one thing. And then there’s, there’s, yeah, there’s, there’s a slew of other other reasons. Like I stayed in the local city that I knew all of the people that I had a relationship with, within my organization, they already liked me and trusted me and I was so annoying on the way out, like, I’m getting into real estate, tell everyone, you know, here’s business cards are like, so annoying. Um, that was a piece. And then I think the the cash, I don’t know, there’s, there’s a million pieces, there’s the sphere of influence that I had, the way that I aggressively tapped into it, the organization and the ability to, so what I did, also, I know I’m a little all over the place, but like, I, I am very impatient. I want, I don’t want to spend the year learning how to do something, I want to learn it in a condensed manner as efficiently as possible. So I, after a frickin day of going to my Keller Williams class and sitting in like, the class, that was a nice little slow pace, and we learned some things, whatever it was like, this is not going to cut it. So I went to the the owner, what are they called it Keller Williams, I don’t know, the like CEO, basically. And I was like, who are the top five agents in the firm, and I got their contact information, ran them down, I was so annoying, but into like a nice, pleasant way. Because, you know, new agents are a dime a dozen. They don’t pay attention. The first time you ask, it’s the 12th time that you asked to shadow them, that they’re like, Fine, just get in my car. And so I did. I literally shadowed every single one of them. And I asked, I pulled as many systems as I could from them. And I let go, the ones that I didn’t think worked for me and I implemented that.
D.J. Paris 17:43 I would what how much so by talking to those top five agents, and again, this is just a guess. But you’ll you would know this better than I could guess. How much time do you think you saved in? I mean, are we talking years maybe?
Shelby Johnson 17:57 I would say so I’m talking year especially since like, they were so kind once I first when I finally got around them and show them that I was like really valuing every minute, every second that they put into me, literally they sent me the email templates for contractor clothes, they sent me checklist. Here’s my buyers packet. Here’s my listing packet, like I I learned more in that first month than most agents learn in their first five years, I swear.
D.J. Paris 18:25 Yeah, no, you’re right. And, you know, this whole show was was predicated on the idea that top producers are actually really generous with with their processes, their systems. I wasn’t sure that was going to be the case, when I started the show, like five or six years ago, and I turned out I go well, I just hope people like are willing to be on it. Well, now I mean, we haven’t had to ask for a guest in years because they they want to be on the show. They they they appreciate giving back. You are you are obviously no exception to that you’re doing the same thing. And it is it is amazing. If you just ask But you’re right, you do sometimes have to ask a few times, and maybe more than a few times, because top producers their biggest challenge is time. And honestly, they don’t have time for yet. So you really have to make it a priority. To really, really just like just like how you would prospect a client. You know, like, you know, you’re saying obviously you don’t want to be super annoying, but you want to be pleasantly annoying in a sense where you’re like, you’re like No, I really respect you. I just want to take you out for 15 minutes for coffee or something. And even even if you just do that once a week, you’ll probably get just incredible like you were saying you got all sorts of handouts and guides and checklists and gosh, I can’t even imagine how much time that is. And you also worked at a at a firm Keller Williams is got some of the very best training on the planet. I mean, we you know, it’s kind of what they’re known for Gary Keller and that whole thing and so you’re already getting good training or like I’m gonna go out and find other stuff to really applicable stuff. Yeah. And so really
Shelby Johnson 19:57 something that like helped though if you you know if listeners You’re sitting there like, I’m gonna do that. I think that this tweak and how you ask is made it made a huge difference. It’s not, hey, will you teach me? Hey, you know, can? It’s Can I just sit and listen? You don’t even have to look at me. You don’t even have to talk to me once. Can I just sit while you make your calls? Can I guess it’s the difference. It’s like, I don’t want to teach you man. Like they’re thinking I learned this on my own. It’s not my responsibility to teach you. But you can sit there, that’s fine. Sure. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 20:29 Or like if someone’s doing an open house, say, Hey, can I just shadow you at the open house? I’ll go around handing out refreshments or something. But I just want, I just want to hear how you talk to people who you don’t? Yeah, you’re, you are so so right. And what I think you’ll most of our listeners would find, if they feel self conscious about asking is you to talk to your managing broker and say, Hey, can you help make an introduction to me? Again, I don’t want to be annoying to these agents. But I would love the opportunity just to like be a fly on the wall. Listen, maybe maybe they even take you on a listing presentation, right? Like I just want let them. I mean, I can’t imagine what you would have learned on a listing presence. It must have been just like, well, this is pretty awesome. Like you must have just learned. That’s amazing.
Shelby Johnson 21:17 Yeah, it was super helpful. Love them to this day. All of them are out there still slinging. So. But yeah, I would say that that was really helpful.
D.J. Paris 21:27 Let’s talk about systems because you scale, you didn’t just stop at 48 transactions, you scaled to, you know, hundreds of transactions per year. So what how do you think you made that because there’s only so much time you have and there’s only you know, so much of anything. So you have like you were saying you have to leverage resources time, you know, what are some of the systems that really made a huge shift for you to allow you that to get to that next massive level?
Shelby Johnson 21:55 For sure. Yes, the fact that I immediately had systems from these top performing agents that I was able to tweak and make my own and implement that was me still, as a solo agent, you know, I was still doing every piece of the puzzle by myself. That one of the big pieces that was my first like real step up, was hiring the transaction coordinator. And not just I actually hired and fired to before I got to the one that it was actual true leverage, you don’t have that fear in the back of your mind, what’s falling through? Are they telling people the wrong thing, like when you finally find the true piece of leverage that lifts it all off your shoulders, and then that piece was huge. And at the time, that transaction coordinator owned her own business. And she was managing several agents files, but she and I hit it off. And I think there’s a lot that goes with that, too. It’s like, you know, respecting communication being the agent that she wants to work with to not just you work for me working together. And because of this, by the end of that first year, it’s when I was starting the team. And I asked her, I was like, Hey, you are amazing. I love working with you. What would it take for you to be mine? Forever, leave the business and five come with me, you know, let’s build the paint the whole vision. And she did. And so that having an she was an agent for years longer than I was before she even started a transaction coordinator business, she was super detail oriented, where I’m more of like, sales and vision and all that stuff. So our powers combined, had a really good foundation for being able to take on more and more volume, and also have a lot of value to provide new agents as they joined our organization moving forward.
D.J. Paris 23:45 That’s amazing. Yeah, I feel like you just said so much there. No, no, no, no, no, I’m just processing it. It’s, it’s, it’s so it’s so impactful. This idea of it, we should also just mention what a transaction coordinator is just for anyone who isn’t familiar, which is basically you’re hiring somebody, they could be a virtual transaction coordinator that could be somebody local, like Michelle be, you know, was an agent that that wasn’t practicing and but knew everything. Some of the challenges with virtual transaction coordinators is that a lot of times, they’re from other countries, and they represent, you know, realtors in many different states or many different markets in the United States, which means they have to know a lot of different markets, and it’s just harder for those agents or sorry, those trends, transaction coordinators to really fully know exactly what you would need as as you know, the realtor to help their clients. So not all transaction coordinators and not all transaction coordinator companies are created equal. You as you said you hired and fired a few of them because I’ve seen some agents who just have the amazing transacts quarters and others are like you know, it’s not that helpful. So but but at Every successful really, truly successful agent I know pretty much has one has a transaction coordinator. So I mean, if you think about it, they they really do more than just doing the paperwork, they can create timelines for you, they can remind you, Hey, it’s 10 days before closing, here are the things we need to do. They remind the client, it’s a lot of just process.
Shelby Johnson 25:20 It was everything. And especially since exactly like you said, so the transaction coordinator, she was an agent in North Carolina, which was my state, and she knew the contract inside and out, and was like, over communicating with communicating with the clients. And the thing that I think is really cool is that I was so proud that she was an extension of my business, I was able to manage expectations with the client and truly mean it when I say hey, look, after we go under contract you get to work with her name is Megan, you get to work with Meghan, and she is a mazing, she is going to handle you know, work with you from contracts, I’m going to be there every step of the way. But I promise you want her on the timelines, you want her on the paperwork, because she gets it. And by able to manage the expectations there. And then she grabs it, and she outperforms even my raving excitation and like that extension of your business. And now Shelby and Meghan are phenomenal together. Does that make sense?
D.J. Paris 26:21 Absolutely. And transaction coordinators can be as inexpensive as I’ve seen, you know, TCCs, pay a charge like $300 on the low end, probably up to like 1000 bucks, I’m not even sure what what the most expensive ones paid. But even if you were paying $1,000 per deal, if you could save 20 hours of work, that might be worth it, you know, it’s certainly worth it for $300, I think it’s probably still worth it. If it if it’s $1,000, whatever it is, I mean, it allows you to not get bogged down, unless you like being bogged down in those steps if you’re an agent, and that’s what you do best, great. But then you’ll probably need to have somebody help you with the prospecting and all the other things. So you can’t do everything right or you, you can try to do everything, but you’re not going to do everything well. And, you know, figuring out what you what you don’t enjoy, or what you’re not good at is where you can off offload it and transaction coordination. Coordinators are the easiest, most obvious way to just free up some of your time. And you know what, it’s worth the money, it just is, in my opinion. So we tell all of our agents, not all of them do, but we tell please get a transaction coordinator, like we’ll help you the best we can. And we do help a lot. But you really want somebody who just is this is all they do. So
Shelby Johnson 27:40 I totally agree. And for new agents, if you’re out there thinking and you’re like, Man, I can’t, you know, I don’t want to pay for a transaction coordinator or whatever. This has worked really well for some of our agents where they’ll actually hire a transaction coordinator on their very first transaction, and then pay them a little offer to pay them a little extra and be like, Hey, this is my first one. I know you know exactly what you’re doing. Like if I give you a little bit of extra, you know, money, is there any way that you could like handhold me and teach me throughout the process, and the right transaction coordinator will teach them way better than you know, the Rockstar agent who already uses a transaction coordinator so probably forgotten how to go to contract to close anyway. So that’s been working really well.
D.J. Paris 28:24 God, I love that that is so that is so smart. Another thing too is ask the top agents in your office who their transaction coordinators are. And you know, that way you don’t have to, you know, spend as much time you know, getting going through, you know, ones that maybe you know, haven’t been a referral or so I love that. So transaction coordinator. I mean, guys, I know it sounds so silly. It’s so simple. But it really is you just got to think about where am I spending a bunch of time on my business. That’s not really what I like doing. That’s not really what I’m best at. And if if those those two things can be offloaded, you’re going to you’re going to be you know really, really going to have a lot more more freedom and fun because you just can’t wear every single hat effectively like you can wear some hats, but don’t try to wear all the hats because none of us are good at everything. Despite my what my mother told me growing up that I was being good at anything I do turns out she’s was wrong. But good retention was good. But turns out her boy can’t do everything despite despite me wanting to be good at everything. What what other systems are you utilizing? I’ll hear I’ll ask you have a better question. What systems are you using to stay in touch with your clients after a sale because this is a huge opportunity that my parents you know you you work in North Carolina but in Charlotte North to North Carolina I forget because I used to go to South Carolina so often I only think South Carolina because my parents had a place in North Myrtle Beach and when they sold that place, reason I’m bringing this up is took me years because it was kind of just bad time in the market and they went through a bunch of real Tourism finally somebody got it sold. And like a year or two later, not even two years. One year later, I asked my dad, I was like, Oh, hey, by the way, who was that agent? Because I think I had a referral, maybe for the agent out there. And my dad was like, I don’t remember. He’s like, I can figure it out. I can go back and like, and I go, You’re kidding. He remembered, my dad is a really smart guy. And he’s not a he’s not like somebody that just wouldn’t think about. He was like, I don’t, I don’t really remember. And I thought, boy, what, what a what a terrible thing for that other agent to like, did a great job. My parents were like, so happy that they got the place sold. And now they don’t even remember that person’s name. Crush it. And that’s a missed opportunity for that agent. Now, my parents don’t live there. So okay, maybe there’s a little bit of like, well, they live in Illinois. So maybe they’re not going to buy another property. But they might know people that are buying in that area are selling. So what do you do to sort of make sure your clients don’t forget about you?
Shelby Johnson 30:54 Yeah, so back in the day, I don’t do this anymore. I’m actually not closing transactions at the moment. But one of the other main pieces of leverage that I immediately implemented was an operations manager, or ops. And so she took all the systems that I was doing internally, and made them a team wide system to execute for all the other agents, which was really helpful because I, my first year, I was an Excel girl from from the army, I had all my people on Excel, I knew my little. And even that’s like, where I thrived. And I knew, you know, I need to do a CRM, I need to do our CRM, I wasn’t doing the CRM. So our ops, thank goodness, we had it set up. So that way, when the contract would close, the transaction coordinator would have a whole handover process with our ops. And they would, you know, take the client, and if they weren’t already in the CRM, put them in the CRM and put on the, you know, one week, check in one month, check in six month, check in happy home aversary In a year, and then also add us add them to our local events. So one of the things that we’ve done, we had the CRM but really baseline. But we invite people to our local events, we did the pints of properties once a month. And I love events as a way to constantly invite people to come hang out with you. It’s an in person drip campaign, they’re reminded in a non salesy way that you exist, and you are the real estate person. So we did that. And then we also did socials. So I really love social media as a way to nurture I have this whole thing about like, lots of agents will use it as a way to like, generate new leads. But to me, it’s really like social media, for most agents is a cultivation, it’s a nurture, it’s a reminder, as opposed to like fresh leads is a whole nother conversation. But those were kind of the three main things. We had the CRM in person events, and then social media.
D.J. Paris 32:49 That’s awesome. And we should also talk about, I want to talk about five pillars coaching, because this is you know, you’re basically taking the systems that you’ve put together, and really helping other agents kind of learned from, from your, all your knowledge. And so tell us tell us about what five pillars is and how you help agents.
Shelby Johnson 33:07 Yeah, so five pillars, is is founded on all of the systems that we use in our traditional team. So all of the systems that you know, I built your one, and they evolved over the years with our amazing transaction coordinator, Operations Manager and all these agents who were constantly providing feedback to adjust and evolve with the times. And it worked well for traditional get Millionaire Real Estate Agent Gary Keller model team. And then when I didn’t want to do that team model anymore for a whole nother conversation. I was like, we have all these tools and systems. What if we were able to, instead of charge 50%, for for doing all of the overhead? What if we were able to provide all of these systems to the agents, not take any splits and allow them to build their own businesses in the way that made sense for them. The other thing that we did when we changed the model is we had we had transaction coordinators, listing coordinators, we had a whole staff, and I helped them start their own businesses. So that way, the agents in turn, could have the systems to build their empires, and the same leverage that the team was paying for before now they could hire out directly and cut out the team as the middleman. So everyone got more money, but everyone got to keep the same systems and run their own play. Does that make sense?
D.J. Paris 34:32 Absolutely. No, that makes perfect sense. And if anyone is interested in getting some coaching, you do have you have a community that they can join, you have coaching that you offer? Can you just tell us a little bit about sort of how that works?
Shelby Johnson 34:46 Yeah, so the community is where agents go to stop being agents and start being business owners. So we’re all about building an actual business where you know the gold at the end of the rainbow is it sellable. If if they do want to sell, whereas most agents, we just live in this constant state of like chaos, and whack a mole. And so the whole intent is it’s a community of entrepreneurs who are building their own empires, alongside peers. And the way it’s set up is we have classes throughout the month on the different pieces of building a real businesses. And we also have what we call pods, which within our community, their small groups of peers, four to five people. And there’s like a schedule, they go through with goals and accountabilities. So they, it’s kind of like a self sustaining incubator for entrepreneurs. Does that make sense?
D.J. Paris 35:38 It does, because I think, you know, even more so than not learning how to be a great agent by going through the licensing classes, which I think all of us know, is not the purpose of the licensing class. But then, you know, you’re you’re thrust into becoming an agent, you join a firm, hopefully, there’s some good training, but the training is mostly going to be around how to find business, close deals, you know, it’s going to be about how to be how to do production. But it’s not necessarily about how to actually run a business. And that’s a totally different skill set. And quite honestly, I find that that, that, that those skills, unless you come from a family of all entrepreneurs, and you just sort of know that world, it’s a totally different world and a differently different skill set. And it’s not always intuitive. In fact, it’s oftentimes counterintuitive, right? Right. So so this is where I think we think about oh, I need training for like being a great realtor. But you also need training about how to actually treat it like a business. So I think it’s probably the biggest missed opportunity for agents out there, like agents know how to get realtor training, because there’s so many great sources and places and, and, you know, Shelby’s got got great training as well. But that’s actually not that uncommon. There’s lots of training facilities, but to actually learn how to be an entrepreneur in real estate. And more importantly, she said, something that I should have highlighted, I’m going to highlight it now, Shelby said something about making creating a sellable business 99% of Realtors do not have a sellable business, maybe 99.9%. So Shelby actually wants to teach you how to create something that will continue to add value and continue to be something that you can get paid on either indefinitely, or you can sell it at some point, somebody, this is not the what most agents know how to do. And it’s not the kind of business that they set up. And they can go their entire career 30 plus years, and still be successful, but not have a sellable business. So this is an incredible thing to actually, you know, give you almost sort of something to consider as like almost a retirement kind of thing, where you can actually take all this great work that you’ve done over your career and actually then make it there’s, you could assign a value to it and sell it.
Shelby Johnson 37:52 Yeah, exactly. And that’s something that I actually, it took me a long time to realize, because my first couple years of going through agent life, it was exactly what you said, it’s like I’m doing the things, I’m doing all the agent things. But what I didn’t realize is that there’s like, you know, you have to have a strategy within your business and like and development for your company, and you have to have, like, a marketing is an actual whole piece of the business that you need to develop into a systematic machine that can repeatedly bring in business into your business like, and, you know, most agents, when it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna go lead gen, and they pick up their phone, and they call five people or they post once on social media, and they’re like, I did it. And it’s like, if you’re building an actual business, if you go out and you talk to any real business, they have like a marketing budget, and they have a whole team dedicated to strategy and, and it’s just thinking about it from the lens of an actual business will totally twist in in a good way, the way that you think about your agent life and and the potential in what it holds for you in the future.
D.J. Paris 39:00 Yeah, it makes makes perfect sense. And so this is a it’s a good, you know, thinking like an entrepreneur entrepreneurs, typically start businesses, and then they also have an exit strategy. That was the thing that I didn’t know, when I started studying entrepreneurship was, oh, yeah, there’s this whole thing called an exit strategy where you actually, maybe you don’t maybe you want to do this forever. And you just want to do it until you till you fall over and they put you in the ground, and that’s fine. But for those of us that have like this idea of we want to retire or we want to pass on and maybe do this for a certain amount of time, and then move on, you know, you really have to have some pretty serious processes in place to be able to market the business to make it sellable. And then also to create so much value, that people will come to you and say I want to buy this business. And that’s again, a whole different level of skill that people like Shelby can teach you shall be right now, you know, it’s tricky time in the market. You know, rates are still higher than anyone would like, even though historically it’s not so bad. But, you know, in the short term, it feels Looks like they’re really high lending rates, of course, inventory tends to be down in most, most markets. So it’s an easy time to get discouraged, maybe even a little depressed. What are you telling your agents? Or what are you encouraging them to do? While the markets a little tricky right now and just keeping them everybody motivated and working?
Shelby Johnson 40:21 I think that this is the best time for them to double down, because of exactly what you said, it’s a lot of agents, the ones who are not so sure one foot in one foot out, are gonna get out, which is fan tastic.
D.J. Paris 40:34 It’s actually a great thing for everyone else.
Shelby Johnson 40:36 Oh, my gosh, it’s so great, because now those sales that they would have gotten, you know, from the few sales that’s out for grabs. And if you’re able, in your in your market, to be able to double down on building out your business, and especially marketing, in general, just eat away at the market share, get as much as possible, because when if slash when the market does turn, you will absolutely explode. So I think that now is the time if you’re in it, you friggin go hard. And if you’re not in it, please, just goodbye. That’s also bad. But like, you know what I mean? Does that make sense?
D.J. Paris 41:15 It makes perfect sense. And I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing it now we have a holding company, which is for agents that aren’t actively practicing. And I think two years ago, we had were the largest holding company in Illinois, I think we had maybe 600 agents. And then when the last two years, no, in the last year, we’ve added 150 agents, these are people who fight us, they’re like I’m getting out. We’ve never had that many people join our holding company in a given year. So lots of people are getting out. And that is a great thing for everyone else. So they can gobble up market share. So what are you telling your agents to double down on? Like, what are they actually doing to help take advantage of the fact that some agents are stepping off the gas?
Shelby Johnson 41:55 Right? So a lot of them are just walking in their specific marketing strategy, and going hard at whatever that strategy may be. And that’s a part of like, within five pillars nation, we’re not we’re not teaching you one specific way. It’s like, hey, there’s many different lead generations and marketing strategies. And depending on your own personality type, what’s an authentic fit for you, what you actually will put the time and effort into, and sometimes you don’t know starting out. So it’s really good to like test in the beginning. But as soon as you find that thing, whether it is door knocking or, or cold calling or content creation, or maybe it’s you know, YouTube ads, or direct mail, it does not matter. Everything works. But when you find that authentic fit, and you put the blinders on, and go all in on whatever that marketing strategy is.
D.J. Paris 42:48 Yeah, you know, I’m glad you said that there are a lot of different ways that you can do it. And I think you’re so right about find something that you enjoy doing that you can step on the gas, whether it’s, you know, I talked to a compass agent the other day, who said, he goes, You know, every day, I make 30 comments on people’s posts on Facebook and their authentic comments, I used to spend about half an hour, I see when someone goes on vacation or whatever. And I write them say, Hey, that looks really fun, or a great dinner or whatever, you know, whatever. And he goes, I cannot tell you just doing that alone. It really, really works. You know, because people feel appreciated, they feel seen and heard. You’re not just somebody asking for business, you’re actually commenting on their lives. And it’s like, oh, yeah, of course, that makes sense. But he’s like, he gets really into that. And so for people that really enjoy celebrating other people’s successes, social media is the place to do it, right? Because it’s everything’s a win on social media with what people post, it’s, you know, it’s not usually like, well, I got into a fight with my husband this morning. And, you know, it’s like, my husband and I just went on this great vacation or whatever. So these are think are huge opportunities to demonstrate care that you actually care about the people in your life. So that’s just one way to do it. There’s a million different ways as well. But whatever you’re doing, yeah, double down on it right now, because most most agents are not. So if somebody wants to really learn about five pillars nation, join the community, maybe get some coaching, possibly even join your team, because you have you have agents in every single state. What are are you can take on agents from every state, I should say, what are you You know, what’s the best way they can learn about five pillars and get involved with you?
Shelby Johnson 44:29 Yeah, five pillars. nation.com is the website and on Instagram is where I would love to, you know, shoot me a DM or reach out because I would love to talk to you about whatever you have going on in your business and see if there’s something that’s something too, it’s like everything that we have is documented. So if there’s a piece of the puzzle that you’re missing, it’s just as easy as sharing, you know, a link. So I’m more than happy to share any of our tools and systems and it’s at the Shelby show with us. or scores on Instagram. And then also if you are out there and you’re thinking about starting a meetup meetups have been wildly successful for my business and branding and lead generation and all of these other things we didn’t talk about today, but pints and properties.com, you can check that out and any of those and I would love to talk to you. So hit me up.
D.J. Paris 45:20 Yeah, pints and properties.com is a great resource five pillars nation.com and the Shelby Scott show with two underscores, we will put links to all of that, that’s Instagram, by the way, we will put links to all of that in, in the show notes. So you can, you know, dip your toe in the water start following what Shelby’s doing. But guys, I mean, there’s got to be some part of everyone who’s listening is business that you’re like, I could really use like a different listing presentation, or I don’t have a good buyer checklist, or I don’t really know the pathway to closing and I could use some some tips. Shelby’s got all this stuff. And she’s just nice enough to just say here, let’s let’s teach you how to do it. And, you know, she’s all about giving, and she served our country. So let’s help serve her and help her business as well. And she’s just a heck of a nice person. So, I always love you know, when our guests are so generous, and they all are and so Shelby is no exception. So I want to support Shelby, I want you guys to support her. So definitely check out five pillars, nation.com, pines, and properties.com, and also the Shelby show on Instagram. And you will learn all things Shelby and gosh, she her and her team are just skyrocketing their success. And she is a lot of fun and very, very sweet. So please reach out to her. She loves to help. And she’s helping you right now by being on our show. So let’s help her. So Shelby, thank you so much for being on our show. I can’t wait to have you back in the future, we can do a deeper dive into some of these amazing systems that you’ve put together. But guys reach out to her ask her for help. She and her team will definitely be in touch with you, Shelby, on behalf of our audience, thank you, thank you, again, for your service to the country, and for your service to this industry and helping our listeners too. That’s really super appreciative. I don’t have all those resources to give our listeners so thankfully you do. So don’t ask me you guys, because I’ll just go I don’t know. But Shelby has everything that you need. So reach out to her. She’s super great. So on behalf of the audience, thank you, Shelby. And on behalf of Shelby and myself, thank you to the audience for sticking around to the very end, visit all the Shelby websites and follow her on Instagram, and reach out to her with what you need. And again, a thank you for making it to the end. Please tell a friend about this podcast. Guys, this is a tricky year. Let’s help all of our fellow realtors. Let’s give them you know, some more resources to help them stay afloat. In this tricky time. Send them a link to this episode. You can find us at keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed live, or if they’re a podcast person, just pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe button. And also, if you can leave us a review. Whether you’re on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you’re listening to this YouTube, let us know what you think of the show. We take that feedback very seriously. And we always are here to modify to get better and better to make you guys appreciate us even more. So let us know what we can do to help make the show better. And let’s also reach out to Shelby Shelby, thank you so much.
Shelby Johnson 48:12 Thank you so much. So fun being here. Thanks for having me.
The Wisdom Of A Third Generation Real Estate Agent • Amanda McMillan
Aug 14, 2023
Amanda McMillan with @properties Christie’s International Bucktown shares her story on how she got into real estate and describes what’s it like being a third generation realtor. Amanda discusses how she grew her business to become the top producing agent in her market. Amanda also talks about the importance of training and also learning how to trusting your intuition.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be talking to not just the top 1% agent, but literally the top agent in her local market and do a deep dive into how she got there and how you can do the same. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide. I’m your host, and I have a few quick announcements. We’re gonna be speaking in just a few moments with Amanda Mc Millan a top top top producer. But before we get to Amanda, just a couple of ways you can help us and we’ll help the show. Best way is two things. Two things. First is to tell a friend think of another agent that doesn’t yet know about our show probably somebody in your office or another agent you meet out there who would like to learn from top 1% producers tell them about the show. The second way to check out our sponsors they are the reason we can keep paying our bills and producing episodes we love our sponsors and the services and products they provide are truly amazing we vet them thoroughly to make sure that we only present you with services and products that would actually help you build your business okay guys, help us out those two ways thank you in advance and let’s get to the main event my conversation with Amanda McMillan.
Hey, today on the show we have Amanda McMillan from Chicago home partner here in Chicago with at properties Christie’s international real estate. Let me tell you more about Amanda. Now Amanda McMillan is the CEO of Chicago home partner which is an intimate group consistently ranking in the top 50 City agents for both number of transactions and volume. And I’m going to pause in reading Amanda’s bio here because there’s 46,000 Real estate agents in the Chicagoland area. So this is a very very big, amazing statistic that she is in the top 50. They have been the number one team in the app properties Bucktown location, which is also one of the very top Buck add properties locations for the last eight years and as close over 58 million in 2022. Now over the past two decades, Amanda has operated one of the most profitable real estate teams in Chicago, accumulating hundreds of outstanding reviews from raving fans across Google, Zillow, LinkedIn and Yelp, successfully navigating to financial crises, crises, one worldwide pandemic, the birth of two children hosting a BA he hosts a biweekly podcast at Chicago real talk.com. While remaining a social introvert at heart and maintaining a 95% referral based business. I would like everyone to visit Chicago, real talk.com And that’s going to redirect you to Amanda’s YouTube page. And I’m going to encourage you even if you’re not a Chicago realtor, most of you listening are not the reason I want you to subscribe is I want you to pay special attention to hear how Amanda talks about the real estate market. How she informs her clients. This Her videos are amazing. And she is just a wizard at this. So please go subscribe Chicago real talk.com. We will have a link to that in our show notes. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda McMillan 4:47 Well, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:51 I’m excited to have you actually Amanda works very close to where I live. So we were just chatting about are sort of similar neighborhoods, but I am I’ve not met you before. So I’m so excited. Usually, I talk to people who live like far distances, and you’re actually about as close of a distance, but yet we haven’t met. So I’m super excited to have you on the show. And I think because you describe yourself as an introvert, you know, you’re not, you don’t make your presence quite as known as some of the other agents here locally, which I actually respect a lot, because I think that is the inclination of agents is to, you know, sort of yell it from the mountaintops, how great they we are, and I feel like you just you show don’t tell, which I think is even more impressive. So I just wanted to honor you for being you know, less in your face, I think, which I always respect agents that are a little bit more subtle. And you certainly fall into that category. I hope, I hope that comes off as a compliment. Cuz it’s like the best compliment I could think. I don’t know that I said it in the best possible way. But it is it is a compliment.
Amanda McMillan 5:57 No, absolutely. It’s been it’s been a heck of a ride. And yes, I, I will now say 21 years later, I tell people that I’m an extroverted introvert, because I’ve had 21 years in this business in which I’ve had to train myself to be a little bit more extroverted but, but I absolutely will be the person to say that the personality type that the media really shows out there doesn’t necessarily all always go hand in hand with a top producer.
D.J. Paris 6:21 Absolutely. And I would love to, you know, I think too, you know, ever since the pandemic started, and this is not in any positive thing about the pandemic. But one thing that did change is I think introverts in particular, people got used to working more remote, you know, doing zoom meetings. And I think for introverts that probably was like, so wonderful, because it allowed introverts to be in their sort of native environment, where they’re most comfortable, their energy is not being depleted, as much as and so I just think, like, never been a better time to be an introverted realtor and the fact that introverts are kind of people are learning more about that and learning more about what they need and how they process information differently. So I think that is super cool. I always, there’s so many times where I’ve talked to people wanting to become realtors, and they go, Well, I’m introverted. I don’t know if it’s a good fit. I’m like, oh, no, it’s a good fit. You just have to learn how to do things, you know, maybe differently than somebody who’s, you know, really out there. And, you know, being being super, super social. Not that you’re not of course, I’m sure you are.
Amanda McMillan 7:24 I’ve always actually said I think most consumers on the outside would be surprised to learn how many top producers are actually more introverted in their personality style than than the other.
D.J. Paris 7:36 I agree. That’s almost been not every I would say more than half of the top producers that I’ve interviewed, I suspect would identify that way. We were talking about Carrie McCormack, somebody who works at your firm who comes on our show a lot. She definitely considers herself that way as well. So I think there is something to it. That is again, very exciting for for anybody listening, who might think gosh, I’m not quite I don’t get as much juice out of, you know, being extroverted as I do introverted. So but I want to start at the very, very beginning of of how you got into real estate, why real estate? And can you walk us through that journey?
Amanda McMillan 8:12 Absolutely. It’s been a heck of a journey. That’s a great word for it. I am first and foremost, a third generation realtor. So I was born into it. It was in my blood. I will tell most people my first experiences with it was when I was working. My mom’s open houses and broker opens when I was a teenager, she would essentially pay me $50, which was a tremendous amount of money. Money said, you can’t answer any questions. You sit there. And if anybody says anything, you give them my card. So I wasn’t doing anything unethical or wrong or anything like that. But that was my introduction. As I moved into my young adult years, I absolutely will say that I think the backing behind why I ended up in this industry is because when we were around the dinner table, and we were talking about life aspirations, my parents would continually say to me, to myself, and my sister, they said, Girls, when you grow up, you can be anything you want. You want to be a movie star, you want to be president you want to be doctor, you can be anything you want. What do you want to be sidenote, you can’t go into real estate. Now, the reason they said that is that my mother sold residential real estate for 30 plus years, my father was in commercial real estate for almost as long. You know, as I like to tell people, it’s not that they didn’t think it was a wonderful industry. It’s just that at that time when I was growing up in the 80s, it just was looked at as a different type of industry. And it was it, it wasn’t necessarily where you wanted to end up. It’s kind of what you fell into a little bit more. And with that being said, they told me that at a very, very young age. Now, anybody that knows me and knows me, well says that I probably hit that in the back of my psyche, that somebody told me not to do something so that when the time came to be I said, Wait a second. You told me I shouldn’t do that. I’m going to do it and I’m going to show you how I knock it out of the park when I do it. So well. Long story short, it was in my blood, I was kind of told to stay away from it. And therefore I ran out in full force.
D.J. Paris 10:06 I love that you rebelled by going, I’m going to do exactly what you did mom and dad and maybe Grandpa, grandpa, grandma. No, no, but I love that. And it makes perfect sense. Because obviously, you you just were exposed to it at such a young age you you you didn’t have the same experience of somebody graduating college going, Gosh, what do I do now? And then maybe, like you said, maybe falling into real estate when, you know, maybe they went to school for marketing or some other purpose and maybe didn’t, you know, couldn’t find a foothold in that career. And then some people fall back on real estate, but I love the fact that it was it’s clearly in your in your genes. And, and you didn’t ignore that even though your parents were like we want we want you to do other things.
Amanda McMillan 10:49 Well, I didn’t say there’s one little interesting tidbit to it, because there was a side venture before I before I decided to come back to my one of my degrees actually, I had a double major in college and one of my degrees is actually in equestrian studies. For those that don’t know, that is the study of horses. I actually rode professionally, horses have always been a part of my life. They still are to this day, I wrote professionally out of college and I did that thing where I followed one of my absolute passions. And it’s one of those things that when you follow one of your absolute passions into life and into profession, sometimes it loses some of the passion and you realize that maybe it wasn’t the right idea. Yeah, so I did have an interesting side endeavor, but it was pretty quick. I actually got back into the real estate world by the time I was 24.
D.J. Paris 11:32 Are you are you still riding today?
Amanda McMillan 11:34 I am for better for worse. Sometimes people say I’m a little nuts and a little crazy. I do still ride and I still ride on a pretty competitive level.
D.J. Paris 11:42 And then do you ride Okay, I’m gonna ask you the one question I know about equestrian which is do you ride dressage? Or? That’s the only thing I know right? Is that is that the right word?
Amanda McMillan 11:50 That is the right word very good discharges the flat work a little bit art artistry, a little bit like dancing. That’s not what I do. I do jumping so I like big jumps and I like to jump in metastasis I can.
D.J. Paris 11:59 Amazing and where do you do so? Do you live in the city? I know your office is here. Are you out? Just out of curiosity because now I’m fascinated about where the horses
Amanda McMillan 12:07 so I’m our primary residence is in the city. Our horses live out near Libertyville. So they’re not far from the city. We do have a farm as well in Northwest Illinois. That’s the I always joke and say that I’m I love the city. I love everything about it. But I’m not always a city person so that we have a little bit of ability to get a 24 hour escape when we need to.
D.J. Paris 12:28 Well, I will tell you, I did I went to Mira vol, which is this like, sort of new agey fancy place in in Tucson with my mom years ago to, to kind of where like, wealthy people go to chill out and relax and find themselves but but I, my mum on the strip there. And so we went and we got to, to to really spend time with with horses and learn, learn about how to clean them and groom them. And it was part of a therapeutic process of, of getting in connection. And it was actually quite relaxing and peaceful. And yeah, so that’s awesome. I didn’t mean to get caught up on on on your equestrian stuff. But it’s it’s very cool. Especially for people who live in the city. Super cool. So So you got into real estate. You know, your parents said No, you said yes. And then what what you know, you’ve seen, gosh, hundreds, if not 1000s of agents come and go, I’m sure. in that timeframe. What do you think made the difference for you in terms of success? Like you’ve seen people make it you’ve seen people who don’t make it? What do you think was what were some of the reasons why you did better? And obviously having you know, families where you probably were more more attuned to it. But what do you think made the difference for you?
Amanda McMillan 13:44 I wish I could say that there was some sort of special pill or some sort of magic thing that I did. The reality is, is I worked my ass off. I mean, there’s no candy coating that is that, you know, it’s funny, I try I talked to him, I mentor a lot of younger agents and stuff like that. And the reality is, the first market I ever stepped into was just post September 11. I joined the industry in 2002. So that was that was my introduction. Now I didn’t know any different, so it was fine. But the reality is, is I entered the market at a time of complete crisis. Now in hindsight, 21 years later, and three crisis later. I think that that probably shaped a lot of the way that I work with my clients. But I came in from the start and I am always one of those believers that we are in charge of, of our own destiny, so to say, and that if I want to succeed in something, I know the odds are stacked against me. What am I going to do? I’m going to work incredibly hard to get there now. I think the hardest part for a newer agent is you don’t always know what to work harder on. You know, I think that that’s one of the question marks is okay, sure. I can show up and say I’m gonna work hard, but a lot of times it’s the question is the what where, why how when? So for me when I first got into the industry, I knew While I needed one thing, I needed training, right? That is all I needed. This was not an era in which there were teams or anything like that somebody that would take me under their wing. So I, at the time look for the company that I didn’t know if I’d stay with them long term. But I looked for the company that in my opinion, had the absolute best training possible. And I joined them, because I knew 1,000% At that point in time, I needed that. So if somebody was going to give me the training, and then somebody was going to put it back on me to execute all of those pieces, well, then I was at least setting myself up for better success.
D.J. Paris 15:31 It’s actually really a really rational and sort of logical approach that I think a lot of newer agents don’t know how critical the training Well, it’s tough. I you know, I think about this a lot, because you get your you pass the exam, you get your license, you join a firm, and every firm’s calling you at the same time. So you’re getting all of these, at least here in Illinois, they, everyone’s data gets sold to every brokerage. So we’re all calling at the same time going, please join our firm, and everybody says they have great training. That’s the other thing, too, is then trying to figure out which firms actually do a good job of that not all firms do at properties where you are, is absolutely known for having exceptional training, and always has ever since I’ve been in this industry. So you certainly you certainly are at a good firm. And I don’t know if you started there, but but you’re at a firm now that absolutely is well known for that. So you know is that something that you recommend when you talk to newer agents is like, hey, if when you’re choosing a firm, you know, think about what the training options are? And how just out of curiosity, how might you? If you are new today, how might you start to figure out which firms do a better job of that than others is? Do you Would you have any suggestions for agents that maybe this year are thinking maybe I should switch firms or look at other options? You know, because everyone does say after training?
Amanda McMillan 16:49 No, absolutely, absolutely, I think it takes definitely a lot of due diligence upfront, because the reality is, as you said, if when you get your license, anybody’s gonna give you a shot, right? The reality is, is it’s it’s not illegal to work anywhere, special, anybody will hire you. So the fact that so and so’s calling you and so and so is calling you, it may feel great. But it really doesn’t mean much. In terms of finding out the training, obviously, you want to sit down, you know, with the managing brokers, you want to hear what they have to say. But the reality is, is most managing brokers are accomplished agents that at some point in time decided to take a step back and doing it another way. So that’s a salesperson that’s trying to sell you on the training. And they should probably be pretty good, especially if they got put into that role to help coach agents in that capacity. So that’s a good starting point. Because I think there’s certain companies that a just when you go in and you meet with people, I think you’re gonna connect on certain levels, and you’re not going to feel right. So first and foremost, trust your gut trust what you feel in that connection, did you Did it feel appropriate sitting down? Did it feel like the office and everything like that had what you were looking for? Or did it feel often anyways, the next thing I would do is I would absolutely ask to talk to a couple of agents in that office. If you don’t know on yourself, ask them to broker say, Hey, I’d love to talk to an agent, I’d like to talk to somebody very, very experienced. And I’d like to talk to somebody that maybe has been newer in your program in the last six to 12 months, because then you can ask them what it is they have gone through and how it has come to be from that perspective. So I think that, you know, doing a little bit more due diligence, don’t be afraid to ask I think a lot of people when they join this industry, especially if they are are younger, and it’s a first industry, right, they have less confidence to push back. But I think you need to understand that that company wants you as well. And so with that being said, doing that due diligence, really making sure it’s a great fit for you is really something that I would encourage you to do. The other thing that this wasn’t a thing in my day and age, but I think the concept of teams is a great learning capacity. Now, that being said, I think there’s two types of teams, I think there are teams that are built to basically basically prioritize the team lead and manage their business. And then I think that there are teams that are built to basically try and create a winning environment for the team people in there. And there’s a big difference between that too. But in my experience, even once agents learn what they need to learn, the biggest thing holding them back in success is confidence or lack thereof. I have agents that I’ve worked with that are so smart at what they do, but they’re so afraid of getting asked a question that they can’t answer and being caught in that situation, that they don’t feel as competent to go and go out after the business because they’re afraid to get asked something they don’t. So like, for example, the way our team is structured is that when we do have newer agents on it, I want to put them in the scenarios very safely and protectively, where they’re doing things that they couldn’t necessarily do unless they had more business. I want them to do more showings. I want them to meet the contractors. I want them to sit through inspections, all these things with your ears open to your absorbing, you know from all these different pieces so that when you do get that client and you are working through a transaction, you know what an inspection is? Like, you know what meeting contractors are like, you know, all of these different pieces. And you also know, you’ve got a very strong backbone backbone to come and ask questions to so the team concept in my mind is something like, Gosh, I wish it was around when I when I came in. It was I was asking a lot of questions to my managing broker, I was very, very fortunate that at the time, I had a couple of great people in the office that would let me bang on their door and all the time asking for advice. But I know that a lot of people and especially in this day and age aren’t always as comfortable to go up to a senior agent and say, Hey, can you help me in this? And that’s where I think the team environment definitely would be something that I would at least explore if I was getting into the business now.
D.J. Paris 20:38 That’s all such amazing advice. I just had a few thoughts while you were saying that and to my one thought that I wanted to man to get your your reaction to specially for newer agents, you know, this would be this idea of being afraid of what you don’t know. Yes, of course, you are, like totally normal, rational, reasonable, don’t beat yourself up for being afraid of being asked a question. You don’t know. Yes, it’s scary, because you don’t want to look, you know, like you don’t know what you’re doing, of course, but there are, that’s just going to happen. So anyone who’s practiced long enough, probably still gets questions that they don’t have an immediate answer to, but certainly new agents. And so I encourage all of the new agents who join us. And we have, well, two things First, whatever firm you’re at, ask them let’s say I’m at a showing it’s three o’clock on a on a Tuesday, and a client asks a question, and I don’t know the answer, you know, I’m going to step away, and then I’m going to, you know, how can I reach out to the firm? And what would be a reasonable expectation of how quickly I could get an answer back, just so I could then communicate that to my clients, hey, I’m going to double check with my team, I’ll get back to you tomorrow or whatever, or in an hour, whatever is reasonable. So have that process mapped out already in your mind? And then say to the client, boy, that’s an amazing question. I’m going to double check with my team, because I want to give you a really good answer. And I just want to double check something, you know, you could even make it sound like you’re thinking about it, and you can act out that you have an answer, but you want to double check on it. But making sure you have that locked and loaded, I think is really helpful. And I think most people are completely understanding of, oh, I want to go check with my team and make sure that makes sense. I’m curious what your thoughts are
Amanda McMillan 22:14 1,000%. In fact, I always tell my team when we’re talking about this and doing some role playing. There are questions that I’m gonna get asked, I’m 21 years in, and I’ve done a tremendous amount of business. And I get questions asked all the time that I’m like, I’m not a Rolodex, like, I know a lot. But there’s certain things that I’d say the number one question that we get asked all the time is, somebody’s gonna say we’re gonna walk through a property, they’re gonna say, hey, what do you think this is worth? Number one question, we sure. And the reality is, is that we cover a very large area in the city, right? We do predominantly from the South Loop, North Rogers Park, and everything in between. And so with that, there can be a lot of different property types that come up. There’s no one in the world that can tell you if they walk in a property in that span, and come out to say, is it priced exactly right. Now I can give you a gut, I can say, hey, sure. It’s it’s, I don’t think it’s out of line. But I want to check a few things to make sure that it’s right. I can say, Gosh, that really feels overpriced. But like, so that’s something that I tell all the team, I said, You know what I say in that instance, I say it’s just that, hey, you know, what my gut is, is that it’s fairly appropriate. But I want to check what a couple of closings just finished up that I didn’t see what they finalized that and that will have impact. Let me get back to you later today. Just like that, I always say have had these certain sayings have some reason to be comfortable to go back to say, this is something that that we want more information on, just so that I can provide you the most recent most exact thing Hey, I want to I want to just touch base with my team leader. I have a good idea on this. But I know she thinks about it a little bit differently than I would love to provide you kind of with something a little bit more well, well rounded, anything like that. People don’t think twice on that’s going to come across way better to a consumer than giving them a made up answer that probably isn’t right.
D.J. Paris 24:03 Yeah, there used to be some weird statistic and I don’t remember it exactly. But it was something that that was popular for a while and I really encourage people to not take this advice which is more people are more willing to accept a wrong answer fast than the right answer slow, make the right answer slow. I think that is that is the way better but tell them say I need to do is crunch some numbers. I need to talk to somebody I want. Yeah, so I am right with you on that one. And by the way, I want to also just re promote I want everyone to visit Chicago real talk.com As you’ve noticed how Amanda has been communicating with us thus far. You know, she is has just a lot of information, a lot of wisdom. And I want you to really emulate some of the ways in which she communicates so by by subscribing to our podcast on YouTube again, if you go to Chicago, real talk.com It’ll take you there subscribe and notice which the way that she communicates to clients because she is a master communicator and Um, this is really something that that I want you whether you’re Chicago or not to just get an awareness of how she does it, because almost all of her business is referral 95%. So let’s talk about that, you know, Leads Leads are everything right? People want leads, they they want to figure out, you know, how to have have more business. And this is the year where everyone’s struggling a little bit more maybe than then in the last couple of years. So I’m curious on what you are telling your team to focus on right now for keeping leads generated, while interest rates are high. lending rates are high, rather. And of course, inventory is not as high as we would like it to be.
Amanda McMillan 25:39 Absolutely. You know, so it’s interesting when I first got into this business, and I I process things, I’m a processor, I’m very data driven, I overthink everything, if anything, I get my own way. Sometimes if my business because I’m, I’m trying to over strategize things. So when I decide something I can promise you, there’s a lot of thought process that goes into it. When I got into this business, I looked at it and said a couple of things. Number one, as I told you, I was already an introverted personality type. So that was one of the things that I really, really wanted to focus on to say, Okay, what type of what type of business model is best going to suit me? Is the idea of cold calling people going to be natural to me? Probably not. It’s the idea of door knocking, right? We’re going back 21 years people did door knock, is that going to come across naturally, even open houses I wasn’t very good at right. Of course, I’ve done all these things in my career. And I’ve tried to over the years get better at these things. But really, when I looked at how I had thrived in some of my past accomplishments, and who I was, I really knew that a referral based business model was going to be right for me, because it came down to the fact that first and foremost, it’s the most client centric model, right? For me to be successful, my clients have to be very happy with what I do, and very successful in what they do. So I knew that that was something that success is something that I could deliver, and something that I could control within who I was, because the reality is, is one on one with my clients. That’s my comfort zone, that is where I thrive. So the idea of creating this business model that essentially meant, if I leave all my clients as raving fans, that they’re gonna do that dirty work for me that I don’t necessarily think I’m good at, it was a no brainer to get to there. Now, the catch to this business model, here’s the catch, and it’s a big one, if you’re going to talk to talk, you have to be willing to walk the walk, if you’re going to run a referral based business model, you better be a heck of an agent to those clients. Because the only reason that they want to talk about you is because you left them feeling really good about what happened. And as I always tell people is that the success of a client doesn’t necessarily mean a closing, I’ve had a lot of referral sources that I have talked out of buying and selling time in and time out for years that they have never spent a commission dollar with me. But they’ve probably referred me dozens of clients. So you know, for me that rep, that model was always something that was good, because it was very controllable to me. And it also really highlighted my skill sets of where I thought I could thrive. Now we have over the years within the team, I don’t necessarily work online leads, we have worked them into our team structure for some of the team agents. But I’m also looking at it when I got into this business, I had a whole lot of nothing, right? I didn’t have a patent bank account, I didn’t have a huge network, I didn’t have all these things. So the idea of spending money on leads seemed not not realistic for me. So for me, it was the ability that if I can go out there if i could do great if I could really advise Well, right. And there were times that it was really hard because like I said, there wasn’t there wasn’t all the financial backing in what I was doing. But if you really do a great job and advise well and make sure that your clients know that what you’re telling them to do is absolutely in their best interest, then a referral based business model is something that can just thrive over the years.
D.J. Paris 28:58 You’ve just said something that I thought was super interesting. And I’d like to explore it a little bit because it really lit me up when you said this in just the best the best way which was talking, talking clients out of a transaction when it’s not in their best interest. This, this to me is where the the juice is of what most agents, you know, it’s not that it’s not that they want someone to make the wrong decision necessarily. They just maybe don’t want to get in the middle of the decision. And sort of be the reason somebody buys or doesn’t buy. I’m just sort of hypothesizing but I see most agents I think don’t do this. They don’t say this is a really good buy or a bad buy or a good set. You know, this is good for you. This is maybe not so good for you. I think realtors have have in their wanting to just sort of stay neutral have and maybe just fear of making the wrong suggestion. You know, oftentimes don’t give those recommendations. They’re like you want to put an offer and we can put an offer and I’ll give you some suggestions if you want to put it and offering, but should I put an offer in maybe is is a, it’s whatever it’s, at least for me, that’s all I want from any of my service providers in my life, I want them to say this is a good idea. And DJ, what we know about you, this is a bad idea. And I, that I will be with that person for the rest of my life if they do that. So I love the fact that you’re willing to say, you know, based on everything I know about you, this may or may not be a good idea. So just to
Amanda McMillan 30:27 kind of branch off on that I do like to clarify, I don’t make any of my clients decisions for them. And, of course, then I’m not going to make their decisions for them. That being said, People ask me all the time, let me know, what was what was the point in which your business really took off? What did you do what happened? And I will honestly go back to during the financial crisis, right? 2009 to 2011. Yeah, during that time, I and this has been my mantra since the very beginning, but I think it became much more easy to vocalize and broadcast. During that time, I will tell you exactly what I think is in your best interest, regardless of anything else, right. And so during that time, I was giving a lot of advice to say, I know you want to sell to buy this, or I know you want to do this. But here’s the things I need you to think about because realistically, I don’t think it gets you to your end goal. Now, that is absolutely talking myself out of business. Absolutely 1,000%, there’s no there was no calm about it. But what it did do is I did that time and time and time and time again during that time period. And people started to realize very, very quickly that if I give somebody advice was very real, it was very accurate. And it had absolutely nothing to do with my own personal benefit. And that is when my reputation took a giant leap forward. Because if you tell somebody not to do business, if you tell somebody to not employ you and not take a step forward on something, I will almost guarantee you, they will tell everybody that they know everybody how great the advice was that their real estate agent just gave them. And I have done more business off of telling people not to not to do things, if that’s what I thought then then the alternative because you build you build trust.
D.J. Paris 32:15 It’s it’s it’s like, it’s kind of like when you find a reputable auto mechanic or you just hold on to them for your dear life because you’re like, I don’t want to worry about whether you’re ripping me off or telling me I need to fix this thing in my car. I just You just want to trust somebody when they say you need to fix this and this in your car, you just go Okay, good. I don’t have to, I don’t have to worry about my mechanic anymore. Or my accountant or my attorney or my financial advisor or my realtor. I mean, just the idea of being able to go to somebody and say, Look, I know you can help me buy this home, I can I understand you can do that. But what in your you know, based on what you know about me, should I consider this will this get me to where I want to go? And that’s the part where I think realtors can really step up and like you said and differentiate themselves and be beat not just a hey, I’ve got a question about XY and Z be an actual source of wisdom. And I think that’s really what we’re talking about, as you were saying, I have some wisdom here. And this is my opinion about what is coming through in my wisdom. And that’s worth its weight in gold and everybody wants to be to receive wisdom. We don’t always listen. But But we love hearing it because we want an opinion from an expert. That’s really why, you know, realtors get paid so incredibly well to to help people buy and sell homes. I think it’s it’s a lot of it’s mechanical. And then a lot of it’s like, I like you were saying just telling people the actual truth. That way you see it, giving your opinion and, and then having them say, wow, my realtor really is looking out for me. My realtor obviously cares about me. And I think that’s really what you’re demonstrating, you’re demonstrating care, and everybody wants to be cared for. So I I applaud you for that. So if somebody doesn’t feel confident, confident, being able to, you know, maybe they’re new to the business, and they’re like, I don’t know, if some if this purchase, or the sale for my client is in their best interest, I truly just don’t have enough experience. That’s where you would then go to a trainer or coach or your managing broker and say, Can you help me figure out if this is you? If this looks like it may be in their best interest? Is that what you would suggest?
Amanda McMillan 34:21 1,000% Ask lots of questions. Ask questions to people that are have done it longer. I’ve done it differently. Whatever the case may be like I am a huge person that I believe collaboration is the way that we all move forward. Right? Even at my level, I’m constantly throwing ideas against people asking people ideas like this is how we grow as an industry. This is how we get better as an industry. We are not not a lone ship by any means. In fact, I read a book one of the books that I always say kind of changed my career. There’s a gentleman by the name of Tim Saunders. He back in the day right back 20 Some years ago, he was the chief solutions officer for Yahoo. He’s now taking And on his own role, he’s a fascinating and brilliant, brilliant businessman. I saw him speak when I was very early in the business. And he wrote a book. And what’s interesting about this book is it was very ahead of its time, and it’s called Love the killer app. Now, what’s interesting is this was back in I think the publishing date was either the late 90s, or the very early 2000s. We didn’t have apps at that time, right? But the whole mindset was just that is that he talked about the fact that we had to evolve, right? If we look at past times, especially in a sales based business, it was so much about the sharks in the barracudas, like, this is my business, I can’t share and collaborate with somebody else, because they’re my competition that there’s, they’re gonna take my business, it’s very fear based,
D.J. Paris 35:40 aggression based, like very, like, I need to beat you. And yeah,
Amanda McMillan 35:45 yeah. And he kind of brought up the idea and just said, Hey, guys, there’s enough business for all of us. What if what if we change that mindset? Why don’t we call us and he kind of termed as this, he coined this term love cats? And he said, What if we collaborate a little bit more? What if we go to our competitors? And say, How are you doing this? This is how I’m doing this. And what if we all get better together? Don’t we just create a better industry and that is something the book is phenomenal. The me watching him speak at one point in time was phenomenal, and it impacted the entire way I’ve done business over the last two years or two decades,
D.J. Paris 36:15 we thank you for that recommendation, we will put a link to is called Love is the killer app, how to win business and influence friends, you’re right 2003. And Tim Sanders is the guy is the author, and we will post a link to that great, great suggestion. Now, you know, it’s interesting, you talk about how you have really taken your business to the next level by thinking from a marketing perspective, I want raving fans, which means really, you’re focusing exclusively on the client or not exclusively, I’m sure you do some marketing, but the client experience. So what is the client experience? Like? How do you know if it’s a successful client experience? Because let’s just say that, let’s say every single time the transaction completes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a great client experience. So what how do you define that was a good client experience versus that one? We missed it a little bit?
Amanda McMillan 37:06 Well, I’d like to think we haven’t missed it. No, it’s interesting when I was newer in the business, and I remember very, very clearly, Dave Hanna, who was a huge mentor and a huge impact on my life. He was one of the managing brokers at Prudential preferred properties when I started up, wait all those years ago, and he really took me under his wing because he knew I was inquisitive. And he knew I had a lot of a lot of things that I was trying to figure out. I remember at one point in time, he, he pulled me aside and he said to me, he goes Amina, here’s some advice I’m gonna give you, you’ve got to learn not to take everything so personally, is that you take it too, personally. And at some point, now it’s okay. But at some point, it’s going to burn out. And once again, I’m a processor. So I walked away from that conversation, very grateful that it happened. I processed it for the next two days. And then I went back to him and I said, Hey, I want to I want to revisit that conversation. Of course, he was so busy at the time, he’s like, what, what conversation is that? And I said, the one where you told me that I take things too, personally. And that that was going to burn me out. And I said, I appreciate what you had to say. And I think there’s absolutely some value in it. But I think one of the things that’s going to make me different than one of the things that’s really going to make me great is that I do take those things, personally, is that I literally get on that roller coaster ride with my clients, and I ride the highs and I ride the lows so that when we get off that ride, we are both at the same endeavor, for better or for worse. And yes, I think I think what he was trying to tell me at that point, but I wasn’t ready to hear was the fact that I needed to learn how to kind of turn the emotional part of it off. So stay that invested stay on that ride, but maybe learn to, to kind of not get myself so worked up in it, right. That’s the experience that we learn. But you know, that’s something that I really took forward in this business is that I think any one of my clients will tell you is that I am in, I’m in the transaction, I’m in the heat of it. And it doesn’t matter if you’re buying a $200,000 condo, or you’re selling a $3.5 million home, we treat every one of our clients the exact same because they deserve that from us. And we we limit the number of clients that will work with at one time, as I’ll tell any agents I don’t, you’re never gonna see me in the top 10 agents of Chicago, I have a ton of ton of respect for those that are. But the way that we run our business model with what we do with the level of service that we commit to people, we restrict the number of clients that we’re going to work with at one time because we literally commit so much to them. And we have structured our small, intimate team to really focusing on the level of service, I was told so many times as I grew up in this industry, that the service has to take a step back as the business grows. And that is something that I’ve refused to believe over the years and I truly believe that our our business is showing that if you go online, if you Google the team, if you look at all the reviews, you’re gonna struggle to find to find a negative one. In fact, I think the only real negative ones you find out there or typically from the other side that was a little angry that I that I enforced the situation that should needed to be enforced. So I truly believe we stay very connected. We’re connected with all of our clients throughout it. Sure, there’s absolutely things that happen that are outside of our control, of course, on the other side that can leave some bad taste. But I’m a full believer that communication is key in all of this stuff. So even when things are going wrong, we are trying to be right at the forefront of everything happening to make sure that at the end of the day, our clients, you know, what they may not have liked some of the things that happened, but they’re going to be happy with how we managed and how we dealt with some of the curveballs along the way.
D.J. Paris 40:25 And on the flip side, it’s even more dangerous to do a less than ideal did have a less than ideal performance with a client. Because, you know, the, you know, certain studies have shown that people are more likely to spread, you know, hey, my client, my agent wasn’t very good versus was good. So you really have to do it for two reasons. One, you want referrals, and you want to do a good job for your clients. So you want that reputation. But if you don’t, the downside is they’re not going to talk, either. They’re not going to talk about you at all to their friends, or they’re going to say, well, they were okay. But you know, I felt like, oh, maybe, maybe they could have done more or less, or more or, you know, listened more or been more proactive. So you focus so much on the client experience, because that becomes your marketing. That’s the result of that is all your marketing essentially is done for you. It doesn’t mean you have an easy life. Like, of course, it’s not easy to give an exceptional experience to every single client. But if you hyper focus on that, like you said, whether it’s 200,000 or a million million dollar properties, you are going to have people that go Wow. And you know, I think the wow factor in this industry is not as hard to achieve as people may think it certainly takes a ton of work, no question about it. But is it? It’s, it’s difficult, because it’s a lot of work. But going that extra mile is is really, every I’ve interviewed almost 500 top agents now. They all go the extra mile. And they all say that, and I hope that you know, what does the extra mile look like for you?
Amanda McMillan 42:00 Well, you know, it’s funny, you say that I am going to deviate a little bit from your question, because I think it’s a really important thing to note. I personally think that in our world, to be a good agent, is incredibly obtainable. Incredibly, to be a great agent takes another another level of that perspective. But if you want to make a good living, if you want to have a good business that you are very proud of, and a substantial income and everything like that, I truly believe that just like anybody can go out there and do it, because it’s literally about showing up doing the job knowing what’s expected of you delivering results. It’s literally, as I like to say the threshold is not that high, that it’s something that an elitist group can get it. Now, I do think that there’s an absolute large step to get into a level of greatness. And for me, that’s where a lot of strategy and sophistication comes from. Right. And and it’s the same thing that people tell me all the time, they say, Oh, are you? Are you afraid that your job that your industry is going to go away? Right, all the information is out there? The reality is all the information is out there right now, and people are still very reliant on what we do. I don’t think our careers as top agents are really threatened at all, because the reality is, is my value to my clients? Sure, I can find a property sure I can put together a strategy. But the reality is, is it’s everything that’s in here to help navigate what’s happening out there. It’s the plans that we’re putting into place, the strategies to get there. When we hit certain roadblocks. It’s knowing where to sidestep what built in condo buildings are run in a manner. It’s the stuff that they don’t, they can get the information, but they certainly don’t know how to digest it.
D.J. Paris 43:44 Absolutely. I’m curious to what are you doing in between transactions to keep your clients aware that you’re still out there practicing making sure they don’t forget your name, let’s say so, you know, maybe they buy or sell a home every five, seven years. So you have this large swath of time in between? How are you staying in communication with them so that they when they’re ready, again, that they’re like Amanda’s the person,
Amanda McMillan 44:10 or certain and that’s, I think the name of the game of where we really have to concentrate our efforts as somebody that runs a referral basis based business model. Because the reality is, is most of my clients aren’t in the market for so many years. And if I’m not in contact with them, they may not be as quick to be in a conversation to say, Oh, wait, I love my realtor. And I want them to put you in touch with her. You know that the methods have definitely changed over the years. But I also am a firm believer that it’s really about the basics. First and foremost, we need to keep in contact with them. Right. And that really depends on the individual. You know, I’d say 20 some odd years ago, we created a client appreciation program. Thanks to Brian Buffini for helping with the ideas. I didn’t spearheaded. I didn’t reinvent the coin. But we did personalize it so they do a great program. We started something like that where we set Send a snail mail, monthly mailing about something in Chicago most of it is not really relevant to real estate. Because right most people don’t want to hear too much. Maybe once or twice a year, we send some real estate stuff. But other things
D.J. Paris 45:11 are more like here’s cool events going on. Or here’s just something to know about Chicago or
Amanda McMillan 45:15 certain we do online. Yeah, we do an online digital March Madness pool, we do the top 10 wines under 10 bucks, our favorite Alfresco restaurants for the year we do a charity toy drive, I mean, just stuff to keep people involved, right. And hopefully things that are that are interesting to them on some level. So we do that as a snail mail, we obviously over the years and then move that into an email campaign as well. And that we do both people know that I’m a huge stickler for, for snail mail in general, right? When I started in this industry, we were all very excited about emails now we all get hundreds and hundreds a day. And we’re really excited about mail. I believe in keeping in touch with people, you know, and that’s different on who it is whether we’re calling them texting them, emailing them, trying to set up a coffee date or something, keeping in touch with people and doing it for the right reason. I do it because I genuinely care about those people, right? These are people that were important to me, yes, there’s a business aspect to it. But these are people that I have the had the ability to genuinely get involved in their life and care about what’s going on. And if you can bring that compassion forward, people get it, people understand it. So I would say for people that aren’t so compassionate, that’s a harder piece to emulate, it might not be the right business model for you. But for me, that was one of the things, we’ll do some client appreciation events throughout the year. One of our favorites is like around October, we do photos for professional photos for our clients so that they can send out holiday cards, we used to do a big event every year at Arlington racetrack. We were really sad when that went away. But we’ve done a lot of fun things over the city. So we try and do some events just to give back and thank them. You know, I’d say the, in the more recent years, obviously social media has become a big component of it. Right? I have a love hate relationship with social media. It’s an ask those everyone. But you know, I love it, and I tried to say really, really positive about it is that we have the ability to connect with people and stay connected on a higher level. So I think for a business perspective, it’s a huge advantage if you can really use it and use it correctly, in terms of just understanding where people are at what’s going on in their lives being supportive, even if it’s from afar, having a reason to reach out to them from that. So social media has kind of implemented that. As you mentioned before, we just we’re about 11 episodes into our podcast, which once again, that was just an idea that stemmed a little bit from the pandemic. But, you know, it’s kind of interesting is that, we found that there are so many question marks about the market, right? There’s so many things going on, especially during more turbulent times. And We have certainly been in turbulent times for the last three years. And it got to a point where it was almost a little difficult to try and reach everybody at one point in time. So we created the idea of the podcast under the idea that we have so much Intel and information we wanted to share with people. And that this was at least a platform that we could try and reach a larger base to tell our people, Hey, I can’t I may not be able to get, you know, 2000 people on the phone this month. But I can put these words out there so that they can understand what’s going on. And if everyone’s freaking out, because the media is on this kick to make everyone really scared that we’re on the brink of a housing crisis, well, then we can talk about that. And hopefully I can have a larger span. And it’s one of those things that we’ve been doing now for we’re coming on a year anniversary, it’s been a ton of fun for us. And it’s one of those things that it’s it’s really, we’ve got the momentum now. And we’re really excited to see how people are reacting to it. And I can tell them at times I see people and they’re like, Oh my God, thank you so much like, we didn’t, we didn’t want to reach out we didn’t want to bother you. We know how busy you are. But just kind of hearing what you had to say about it really helped us to this time. And once again, they all comes back to that that level of compassion and that ability to want to do right in this industry.
D.J. Paris 48:53 100% I really encourage everybody right now go visit Chicago real talk.com Subscribe. Notice how effortlessly and notice how much Amanda wants to communicate right? She has things to say she’s she is confident she has experience. She has wisdom. She’s been in this game 21 years, you want to, you really want to emulate what Amanda has become. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to watch the ways in which she communicates. So go to Chicago, real talk.com it’ll redirect you to YouTube, hit that subscribe button, watch the way in which she communicates. And again, this is a self described introvert with you know, we’re all kind of both introverted and extroverted but more introverted than extroverted. Amanda describes herself and notice how well and effectively she communicates. I think this is one of the softer skills. And really, I mean, I would love to have you back on our show because you are so process driven you are so you just have a lot of wisdom that I’d love to extrapolate more from so maybe we can talk offline about About even doing some some future episodes because this was really really exceptional for me. And for our audience, I know I’m speaking on their behalf. So I would like everybody again, visit Chicago real talk.com Hit that subscribe button. Notice emulate success. And Amanda is one of the one of the top agents here in Chicago. And she just has a lot of great ideas. So for all of our listeners out there, we want to actually perfect time to say thank you to Amanda for coming on our show. And I’m excited to see more of Amanda here locally, I excited to to see you more events and things and chat more with you and see if we can do some more cool stuff on the podcast. So on behalf of our audience, Amanda, thank you so much for some of this great wisdom. Oh, by the way, anyone who is listening, in addition to going to Chicago, real talk.com If you are an agent in the Chicagoland area, and maybe you’re on a team, or maybe you’re thinking of joining a team, or switching teams, or maybe you’re at a brokerage, where you don’t feel like you’re getting the attention that you deserve, or maybe there’s a greener pastures out there, reach out to Amanda and her team and see if maybe you guys could be a good fit for each other. The best way to do that is, you know, look her up, she is Chicago home partner, I believe it’s Chicago home partner.com, we will have a link to that in the show notes. But reach out if you’re looking to maybe join a team. Or maybe you can be a value to Amanda or maybe you’re in a different market. And you have clients that come that move in and out of Chicago, and you want a great referral relationship. Talk to Amanda. She has clients that move out of Chicago, and she has you know, and you might have clients that move in. So reach out to her maybe create a connection and a referral base there. So on behalf of our audience, Amanda, thank you so much for being on our show. I am. It’s so so exciting for me to speak with you. And I’m so glad that you’re a local person here. I’m excited to get to know you better. And on behalf of Amanda and myself, we want to say thank you to our audience, our lovely, loyal audience. Thank you for making it all the way to the end of our episode. Please support a couple of things support Amanda, go subscribe to her YouTube channel. She’s awesome, you’re gonna learn so much. Also support our sponsors we love our sponsors are the reason we can pay the bills. So please check out their services and products. And last tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from listening to this great conversation with Amanda and send them a link to our to our website, I guess. Keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed we have, I think almost 500 episodes now. Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real. And hit that subscribe button so you get notified every new episode. Amanda, thank you so much for being on our show. You were wonderful guest. This was such a great conversation. And I thank you for your time and we’ll see everybody on the next episode.
Amanda McMillan 52:57 Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
From Professional Cyclist To Top 1% Real Estate Agent • Steven Cozza
Aug 08, 2023
Steven Cozza with Cozza Team talks about his transition from professional cyclist into real estate. Steven discusses strategies to help agents do and be more effective. Steven also goes into detail about teams and how they help make better agents and the importance of consistency for success. Last, Steven discusses disappointment and how to effectively cope with loss.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be talking with one of the former top cyclists in the world, and what lessons he took with him when he switched over into real estate. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top 1% producer Steven cosa. But before we get to Stephen, just a couple of quick reminders, the best way that you can help our show two things you can do first. So I should say the best ways you can help our show. The first way is to tell a friend of course, think of one other agent in your office or someone you know, out there practicing who hasn’t heard of our show and could use some of the wisdom that are these top producers share on every episode. And the second way that you can help us support our sponsors. I personally hand select our sponsors while zonna and I and we always make sure that our sponsors provide incredible products and services for you and they’re also the ones that pay our bills. So please check them out that you’d be doing us a huge favor, support our sponsors. And by telling a friend Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Steven cosa.
Today on the show we have Steven Koza with the Koza team in Sonoma and Marin County and the North San Francisco Bay. Let me tell you more about Steven and his team. Now Steven spent a decade racing bikes professionally in Europe. As a former elite professional cyclist Stephen has the mental stamina, tenacity and brilliance to make buying and selling process attainable reality for his clients. Stephen excels in the local market with buyers and sellers and surpasses the yearly sales average of Sonoma and Marin County realtors, now native to the area, he’s a valuable resource with his never give up attitude. Paired with the compass go above and beyond standard, Steven gives his clients 120% of his efforts. From urban condos to countryside estates, Steven treats each property with premium marketing services and a precisely focused strategy. Please follow him and his team at coza team that CO ZZ a team.com and also on social this Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Koza team is the handle we will have links to the social channels as well as koza team.com in our show notes, Steven, welcome to the show.
Steven Cozza 4:03 Yeah, thanks, DJ. I’m honored to be here. Thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:07 Well, we’re excited to have you and really I always love what’s such a neat part of this job for me or this I don’t know if it’s really a job so much. It’s just a fun fun thing for me to do. But I get to have conversations with not only people that I think would be interesting to our audience, which of course is the ultimate goal, but interesting to me as well. And I have always been fascinated by people that perform at high levels, whether it’s in business sports, any any field really I’m just always drawn to, to what I consider to be a sort of excellence and in skill. And so I’m excited to chat with you and how you were able to take some of those learnings from from your previous career as an athlete but let’s start all the way at the very beginning. Number one, how did you actually get into real estate or why real estate?
Steven Cozza 4:56 Yeah, totally. So um, well, I got into this He’s kind of funny, I got into a became a professional athlete athletes through cycling. And when I was in school, I never did well in school I was I’m dyslexic, and I struggled there. So I always excelled in sports, it was just where I gravitated to, and my mom grew up, my dad grew up in baby boomers gotta go to college, gotta go to college. So it was pretty tough for me to break out of that mold. But it was an avenue for me to not have to go to college sort of speak. So I really, really, really busted my butt to make it as a professional athlete. I raced in Europe for 10 plus years. And that’s what kind of led me into my real estate career in a weird way. Because my mom would always say, invest in 401k, you know, from my cycling, invest, you know, that your retirement is your retirement, and I said, Mom, I don’t even own a house. Why would I put money into a 401k? I don’t, I don’t have a place to live, you know, I’m renting. You know, so I said, I’m, I’m gonna save buy a house. So I said, forget the 401k for a while I say, bought my first house. And then just kept going from there. And I started buying more properties rentals, all while I was racing. So it was kind of an easy transition from when I left cycling to rolling move into a role of wanting to help others do what I had done with real estate. And yeah, so that’s how I got into it. And little did I know how much cycling would actually helped me with my career in real estate. It was, it’s quite incredible. I look forward to talking about that a bit today.
D.J. Paris 6:37 I’m excited to hear about that, too. I am also curious, just because cycling was, you know, I’m 47. And so maybe it’s an age thing, but I and also I grew up in central Illinois, where that just wasn’t a sport. It may have been a sport, but it certainly wasn’t a known thing where there was like, oh, that’s an option. You know, there was football, baseball, basketball, if you were lucky, you had some maybe tennis and golf, if you had the ability to do those kinds of sports, or hockey also is in that category. But cycling just wasn’t really known to me other than what I would see on TV. So just out of curiosity, how did you even sort of pursue being a professional cyclist? Was that something you knew from an early age that you wanted to do? Was that popular in you know, where you grew up? Just out of curiosity?
Steven Cozza 7:26 Yeah, I mean, I moved from I played ball sports, baseball, soccer, and then got into cross country running in high school, I realized I wasn’t so good at the ball sports, better than during sports. And from during my running years, my friends got me to start mountain biking, and I would take my mom’s mountain bike. And before I knew it, I broke it. And she’s like, Alright, let me get you your own home like, and then they really supported me. I started doing races started winning. And then in 97, when Lance won his first Tour de France, I said, Oh my gosh, I got to do that. I broke my shoulder in a wrestling accident in high school, and I had to ride on the road for a year. And I transitioned over from there and got on the national team. So that’s kind of how I got into it moved from ball sports to cycling sports.
D.J. Paris 8:15 So wow, that’s, that’s, that’s amazing. I guess you’re right. When Lance did when he became the biggest athlete in the world, pretty much or one of them. And so you’re right, that really brought, you know, cycling more to the forefront of of the average, you know, person in this country’s awareness of like, oh, this is a thing. And this is a thing where, you know, you, you can have a lot of success, and here’s this American just just crushing it. So that was curious. Well, that’s, that’s amazing. So
Steven Cozza 8:46 I remember to go back because I remember there was a friend of mine whose dad was a big cyclist, he, he called me one day, I was like, 15 years old, he said, Stephen, only one in a million can become a professional cyclist, like he and I, and that always got me when someone told me I couldn’t do something. So at that moment, I decided, well, I’m gonna prove them wrong. And it kind of rolled over into real estate with that same kind of attitude because real estate is a very hard career to make it in. I mean, I never knew it was as hard as it is now. Now that I’m in it, I realized it but when you when you hear about you see all these agents posting on their open houses and making money here and there, you think it’s a lot easier than it is once you’re in it. So you got to have that tenacity.
D.J. Paris 9:31 Yeah, I always think like the time by the time you have a showing or you have a buyer, you’ve almost already won the hardest part of the business, which is getting clients and getting to trust you in that purchase or sale. So I think I think yeah, I think you’re so right, that that we you know, especially on this show, too, I have to be very careful because when I when I talk to really successful teams or agents like like yourself, where you have both There could be a tendency for one of our listeners or a lot of our listeners to think like, well, he’s already over the hump of like the hardest part of this business and not realizing that maybe the lead generation part becomes a little bit easier over time as you build up a reputation and, and you get more referrals, and you figure out what marketing strategies were. But it’s still a certainly a grind, in a way, meaning like, you still have to put in the reps and the hours into this probably in a lot of the same ways that you did when he first started. So I’m excited to learn about, about, you know, what you learned as an athlete, and then taking some of those those lessons into real estate. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Steven Cozza 10:43 Yeah, totally. So um, really, when you jump into real estate, there’s different routes, you can go, you can get on a team, and you can try to maybe you inherited the business, or maybe you’re working with a parent. I didn’t have any of that. I mean, actually, my mom works with me now she was a teacher for 40 years taught kindergarten, and when she retired and said, Hey, come join a real estate team. And she’s great. It’s like she’s total, total natural at it. So it was kind of the reverse of what you normally see. But so so you have these different routes to take. And when you get on a team, some being on a team is a great thing. It’s you get a lot of support. But sometimes you don’t learn how to necessarily, you don’t learn the process of always how to get your own business. And when I started when I went to it was Frank Cardon, at the time, it’s it was the biggest brokerage in the Bay Area. They were around since from 1910 to like, 2000. And I think probably 16. They’re around for a long time. So I joined Frank guard Allen, but when I interviewed with the when I met the manager, Jim Michelson, who’s actually still the manager of our office today with Compass now, I actually I had no I still didn’t, I didn’t know anything about real estate at all, I’d gotten my license, which doesn’t really teach you what you really need to know, in the business. And so I remember, Jim told me later on, he talked to the manager, Frank Cardon, and Larry goes, Why would you take on a professional athlete, he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he’s not going to be a good man. And Jim goes, Are you kidding me? If he could be a professional athlete, then he can be a good real estate agent. And Jim was right. And I think that, like a lot of the listeners today, something to understand. And, you know, we’re always getting pounded over the head with every shiny whistle, and every every shiny bell and whistle of this product, or this product, or this system or this process. But I think it’s important to kind of get back to the basics of what makes a good real estate agent. And I studied this when I first got in the business because I, I studied the best in the business in our area. And I was like, how are they doing this? What makes them so good? And I remember I went to talk to the best Realtor in our town year over year for that she still is for, like 40 years. And I said, Hey, Peg, how do you do it? Like, what what are you doing? What’s your secret, and she said, You know what, Steven, there’s, there’s really no secrets except for this one thing. And she said, consistency. She’s consistent. She’s consistent with everything she does. And that really stuck with it for me, because that’s how it was as a professional athlete. It’s consistency. And it’s following a process. It’s following a plan and it’s having a coach, I can’t stress how important it is to have a coach. And maybe maybe you’re not in a position to where you’re quite ready to pay for a coach, I think it’s a great investment that gets a great return. But keep listening to keeping it real podcast, things like this, that that that is your coach, I mean, you can get carried away with too many things going after too many things. So keep, keep your focus when you’re listening to different podcasts, but have a plan and have a plan that keeps you accountable. And so if anybody listening today wants to have we have all our agents on the team they follow. It’s our Power Hour tracker. And sometimes it goes more than an hour a day, but it it has the key elements to our success built into it. And then it makes it so that we stay focused during that hour to achieve those things. And then from there, it’s like you work with your clients or showing properties and so forth. But you start with this. And from there, that’s where all your success comes from. So it’s our power tracker. I’m happy to share that. But to go back to about from cycling to real estate. I’m very lucky in the fact that I was able to have a career such as cycling because it did give me a little bit of an advantage with knowing you can work your butt off and still get no results. You can pound your head against the wall and still not win a race. Same thing with real estate and the best real estate agents out there. They’re the best at getting back up. Because they know, the sooner they get back up, the sooner they’re going to have their next success. And then they’re going to animate it wrong as they go. So I obsess over listing presentations, I could not stand how many I lost in the beginning, because, you know, I’m competing against like, PE, again, so forth. And now I don’t lose them. I mean, I just got another one where I was competing against, you know, the top agent in the town, and I get them at 6%. Sometimes they get them at 7%. So it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s that whole coaching athlete mentality, where you’re tweaking your performance, you’re tweaking what’s going on, you’re working with the plan, you’re making it better year after year, and you’re improving on it in the best you can, and not getting down when you get knocked down. Because let’s face it, real estate can be a losing sport. And it’s not easy. It’s very hard. But there’s a lot of rewards that come with that that hardens, you know, and it’s, there’s a lot of positives, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.
D.J. Paris 16:05 Now, there’s a couple a couple of couple things I want to I want to pause on only be gone forever. Oh, no, no, no, you were doing perfect. I just there, I had a bunch of thoughts as you were talking, because you said a lot of really, really great things there. And I just want to make sure that we we pause and step on them for a little bit for the audience. First of all, you mentioned sharing your Power Hour information. What’s the best way that one of our listeners? And by the way, everybody should do this right now? So I want to say it before I forget, what’s the best way they can reach out to get that information?
Steven Cozza 16:37 For sure, yeah, just email me s because the homes.com is the best way you can email me and we’ll get it right back to you.
D.J. Paris 16:45 Great, we’ll have a link to that in the show description and notes as well. Also, this, this idea of being coachable. You know, it’s something that that I, the times I’ve had athletes on the show like yourself, they’ve all said this, and it’s really important, we sort of forget that every professional athlete, I can’t think of an exception to this, there probably is one or two, but 99% of professional athletes have coaches, right? Maybe it’s 100%. But certainly even the most elite, the people at the very, very, very top of that whatever mountain, you know, particular mountain, they are climbing, they still have somebody watching going, oh, you know, maybe do this instead of that and stay on target. And one of the things that reminded me, you talked about getting a coach and I just wanted to share this suggestion as well. What if I can’t afford a coach right now, and I don’t know, there’s always that you can’t afford not to Okay, that’s fine. But sometimes people literally just can’t afford to do it. And so I was thinking of a story, Brian Buffini would tell when he couldn’t afford to have a coach or couldn’t find one. He actually was a guy here in Chicago. He befriended this guy in Chicago, Joanie ago, and they were each other’s accountability partner. And every day, they would call each other at night and go, did you win the day, and they had their own, you know, sort of whatever winning the day meant to both of them. And so that was a free thing that they did. And you can certainly, at least find somebody in your local market to help with that. But ideally, hiring a coach would be sort of, you know, even better than that. I did want to mention just a couple other quick quick things, I definitely want to ask you about any listing presentation, suggestions you might have, we won’t go to that quite yet. But I definitely want to hear you know how you’ve become better because you obsess about those. But I also think back to the athlete thing, this idea of failing is is so scary to us, right? We’re afraid of it. It’s the reason why we don’t pick up phones and and make certain phone calls. It’s it’s the reason that probably holds us back. Because nobody likes to be rejected. No one likes to fail. Athletes, though, get a lot of experience not winning, because of course, that’s the pathway to winning is actually failing. And so how important is it to be able to take the L and to it and to not let it defeat you. And as you said, it’s about getting back up. But how important is it to learn how to get comfortable taking the loss every so often?
Steven Cozza 19:07 Yeah, I mean, I would say, yeah, it’s not an easy thing to get comfortable with it. It’s hard. But the way I look at it, when I when I have a loss, I look at what I can do differently. And then use it as a positive because you learn from your losses. If you don’t have your losses, you’re not learning and nothing comes easy. I mean, well in cycling there in professional sports, there’s always the performing the dopers and stuff that people who are going to cheat in real estate and i By the way, I never took performance enhancing drugs otherwise, I probably wouldn’t need to be selling real estate. But but it does happen and with with real estate, there’s no quick way to the top. So you’re going to lose in if you are like on a team and they’re giving you all the leads, you’re never going to learn how to get them yourself and if you ever want to go somewhere else, you’re not going to have that so I would say the only one is the hardest way in real estate and it’s worth it. And through guests like this, you’re going to learn the systems and processes that help you steer, and in a better way. So Well, thank
D.J. Paris 20:12 you. By the way, I also forgot to say thank you so much for the wonderful plug you gave just a little bit ago to our, to our show, I am too, too humble sometimes to even ask for our audience to participate here with our show. But I appreciate you seeing the value in this and also being of service to our audience and sharing. But yeah, I’m sorry, go back to sort of being an athlete. So we understand you have this. We, you know, you’re talking about consistency. And we can certainly dive into what does that actually look like for you? What are the key? Actually, let’s just start there. What are the key behaviors? or activities that help? Sorry, that are the ones you need to be the most consistent on? Even today? How are those essentially similar to when you started or they changed over time?
Steven Cozza 21:02 That’s a great question. Um, so what is that? What is consistency mean? What are the activities and so forth? And how have they changed? So I would say, for us, for me, for the team, for actually every real estate agent, if, if you’re trying something, and it’s not working? Well, a lot of times, it’s not working, because you haven’t done it long enough. But you need to, you need to stick through it, stick with it. And so I’ve always, I’ve always set goals, you know, my first was going back to cycling, I said, If I don’t become a professional cyclist, by the time I’m 23, I’m gonna have to go to college. So that put this like pressure on me to, to be consistent to be following the process. And then same with real estate. I said, If I don’t, if I’m not making you know, what the top 20% are making within the first three years of the business, I’m going to stop and I’m gonna go to school become a firefighter. So I put that pressure on myself. And I think the same thing goes with like any prospecting plan that you set out to do, give yourself time instead of reasonable time. So like, if my farming this market farming this neighborhood, if that doesn’t provide results, within three years, that’s what I did. One of my first prospecting thing was farming, the neighborhood I lived in. And I still do it to this day have expanded, of course, but um, it took me I would say, it took me two, three years before I got a listing or any action from that farm and guess what I had to do? every quarter, every quarter, I would hand deliver 1000 printed newsletters, and they’re 11 by 11. By 17, you know, open fold. And it wasn’t just about real estate. This was you know, it touched on real estate, of course, but it was very community based, very, very localized. We did, we in our town, and there’s a river that comes through it. We did Petaluma River cleanups, we did neighborhood garage sale day. So it’s like a trail, you know, trying to list and you have all the garage sales, and it’s fun, like, you know, tons of homes do it. And there’s all these garage sales all over the area. We always had, you know, posted the events and things we were doing. So that took me three years before I got business. And now I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of dollars off that farm. I’ve had some sellers come out of that. And they’ve done four or five transactions with me now and they’ve referred the other people and it’s like this tree. I remember I took out my real estate license through John Ludlow. He’s not he’s not alive anymore. I mean, gosh, it was back in 2012. It was practically I think we’re using VHS tapes to do it. But he said he said, Do something in start off with a farm. And I know it sounds old fashioned, but I’m telling you, it’s connecting, and I would just hand drop under the max, I would not knock on doors. It’s 1000 homes, right walking in. Now we mail. But I still think that connection being out in the community, I met so many people while I was doing that. So consistency, don’t give up.
D.J. Paris 24:01 Well, I want to I want to point out this idea because I was you had mentioned that you were handing them out and then then you were mentioning there’s other ways to which you were participating in the community doing volunteer efforts, you know, helping with garage sales, and you know, just just anything you can do to get your name out there and at the same time, hand delivering 1000 1000 You know, newsletters which were which was actually I liked the idea that you did them bigger than the standard size to just makes it a little bit you know, more interesting to hold and sort of harder to immediately throw away maybe, but the idea of putting the work in is you know, I am hearing just obviously as a professional athlete, you’re putting in a lot of reps you’re you’re practicing you’re practicing fundamentals and and advanced strategies to but always going back to those you know, cycling is no well I know nothing about cycling personally, but I’m assuming it’s no different from so many other sports where it’s just a lot of practice, of course, so it’s got to be but it still leaping to reflect on but the idea of just repetition and reps, doing the reps and seeing those, and then and then by the way, not looking at it a year in going, Gosh, you know, no results, I’ve got nothing. And you’re like, I still got to stand out 1000 More of these next month, and I’m going to keep doing it until I get results. Because obviously, we know that that pathway should work over time, we know that it’s not, it’s not really a risky thing. It’s just a lot of a lot of time, a lot of effort. And look, and it worked out for you hundreds of 1000s of dollars in commissions. And it’s also something that as an athlete, you just get you understand the work that’s, that’s needed. So this is just like putting in your, your reps at the gym.
Steven Cozza 25:43 Totally. And when I started that farm, I, I ran it up on a credit card, but I’ll tell you, I mean, print printing is so cheap, you know, you print 1000 brochures, it’s super cheap. And John Ludlow said, you know, he said quality over quantity, you know, so he said His thing was go to 250 homes around you and not and really establish those connections. I’m not a real knock or cold call kind of I just, I know I need to move in that direction, I need to become more personal or more Ford. But I’m definitely I don’t want to I don’t like when people knock on my door. So I don’t really want to do it. And you know, it just worked the way I did it. And so, but yeah, like you said repetition. And here’s another really important thing, you only can do so much, my coach would always tell me, he said the best, the best realtors in the business, they have three to five prospecting methods, he said, Stephen, start off with two to three, build them out, build a fence around them. So they’re like their own little ecosystem, they’re working for them, you know, for you. And then you can add on more, but first dollar amounts around it, make it bomb proof, and then go to your next one. And not all prospecting methods have to cost money either. So, you know, speaking to like social media there. So if you’re new in the business, and you’re, you’re you’re you’re not, you don’t have a lot of funds, you know, own own the social media world, you know, that can that alone, that and of course open houses, that’s a given. But, um, as far as the print stuff, you just got to think about the return on your investment, you know, if you get one deal, is it going to cover, you know, and then how much how many deals you’re going to get over time, you know, of course, your career. So,
D.J. Paris 27:26 yeah, those those are really, really great strategies and also to like the idea of doing these volunteer, you know, community outreach kind of programs, oftentimes can be low cost to no cost, right. Like, if you’re offering to volunteer to clean up, you know, like, like a river or some waterway, or you know, a stretch of the highway or, or anything or volunteering at a local you know, shelter or whatever. Those things are usually low cost, because if you do invite your your audience I went to Sorry, I interrupted myself, but I went to one of the very best of those that I’ve witnessed, it was a compass agent of all things here in Chicago. By the way, I also want to do a quick plug for something and I can’t remember the gentleman’s name who runs it, but if you are a compass agent, and we know there’s a lot of you that listen, because we’ve had a million compass agents on our show, because they’re just you know, taking over but there’s a great thing called the 6am or club, which Yeah, which is the gentleman that runs
Steven Cozza 28:32 Michael’s SkyMiles he’s one Yeah, he’s great. He does momentum Monday to so he’s a free coach for Compass and I’ve gotten so many golden nuggets from him it’s it’s incredible
D.J. Paris 28:44 and little plug for my interview with Sky Michaels just one of the one of the neatest guys I’ve ever had on our show. And if you’re a compass person, please take advantage of that you’re very lucky to have not used Steven but the company is very lucky to have sky so please check out the six eight numbers club also maybe if you’re interested in not that I get paid to promote compass as a company but a good reason to consider them if you need some accountability. They’ve got a fun little way to do that. So anyway, but back back of course to Steve and I we I’d be remiss if we didn’t mention your your amazing team as well. It’s not just you, you have a wonderful group of people around you can you tell us a little bit about the team and and sort of why you developed one.
Steven Cozza 29:26 Absolutely. Real quick back to that the newsletter this is just in the volunteering thing. This is just a very basic thing but this shows you the power of that farm you can take a great nonprofit in the area and you can go to them so like we have mentor me, or relief Petaluma and you can say hey mentor me what are some what’s a fundraiser coming up or something that we can promote in our newsletters for you? And we do it for free? You know, and then of course so that’s great because you’re you’re doing something different you’re you’re our whole Why is giving back you know our team why So you’re connecting with this whole organization by promoting them. And now, our newsletter goes out to 10,000 homes. So these these charities, these people are really benefiting from what we’re doing. So it’s like, it’s like killing two birds with one stone, right. And so we always try to do that we also have our preferred lender, he advertises in it, he’s got his little section, so he helps pay for it. So think of stuff like that you can as service providers pay for a lot of stuff. So yeah, about the team. Having a team has been a huge thing for the coza team, of course, like turning it into that has made a big difference in my life, and then, of course, in their lives as well. I was a workaholic, the first, I would say, because I’ve been in the business, I ended up going through a divorce, it really tax my life. And that was obviously my own choice to be a workaholic, I could have, you know, backed it down. But my coach, when I finally had a good coach, he taught me how to have systems and how to build a team. And so we’ve got our marketing, the first person I hired was a marketing person. And I don’t know if that’s very common, but I realized, well, you know, I can handle working with clients, but the back end marketing stuff, the social media, all that. That’s where we’re getting our dips in business. So we hired a marketing lady, who now has a real estate license and our business more than doubled. After that, like that, it totally, it doubled. That was the year our business doubled. So
D.J. Paris 31:32 did you know that that was Did you know that hiring a marketing person was you know, that or not not hiring market, but identifying that that was that that’s where the hole was in the business to fill that, that you can’t do everything and be everything as as a solo practitioner, obviously, there’s going to be things that you enjoy doing or that you’re good at, and other things that aren’t necessarily easy for you to do, or that you want to do?
Steven Cozza 31:58 Totally, yeah, it was the consistency thing I kept going back to what peg told me in the beginning, you got to be consistent. And that’s where I was I was lacking was the consistency with my with the marketing the prospecting with the stuff that I didn’t do personally. And my coach said, we’ll calculate how much you make an hour, you know, find out what you make an hour. And then ask yourself if it’s worth spending your time on that. And if it’s not, then hire someone to do it. That was really, I would say, a change in point in my career was when I started treating my business like a business. Because far, often, too many times, as agents, we get stuck in the business, we got to we got to step out of it and work on our business. So I recommend anybody listening, take an hour a day, you can always find after you do your power hour or before you do your power spin an hour, too. So there’s two hours there now spend an hour working on your business, not in your business. And once you start working on your business, on a daily basis, that’s where you’re going to start seeing a lot of growth, because you’re not going to be stuck in it. When you’re stuck in it. That’s when you start to see these big dips and slow periods. But when you when you really work on your business, that’s where you start to grow, and consistently have business. That’s what I realized, at least.
D.J. Paris 33:18 You know, I remember learning in college, there’s a Stephen Covey book, I can’t remember if it’s first things first or highly the, you know, Habits of Highly Successful People, whatever it was, he had this matrix that I thought was, it’s something’s very hard to hard to do. I think for me, but really, really important that I think sort of speaks to what you just said, which is he called it the urgency versus importance matrix, which is really just for four boxes, you know, something comes at you, you put it in one of these four boxes, and that gives you an idea of how and when to respond to it. So it’s just because something flies at you in the form of an email, a text a phone call, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s urgent. It means it feels urgent because it just came in we see it we’re, you know, our brains are wired to want to fix solve problems, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best course of action at that particular time. And you just sort of run it through, like how important is this? How urgent is it? And then you decide when and when to respond back to it. I imagine as an athlete, you you were constantly having to evaluate, you know, especially, you know, while you’re racing, you know, what’s important, what’s urgent, what do I need to take action on now? What adjustments do I need to make? And there’s probably you probably also learned just really great decision making strategies. When you’re competing at that level. It’s all about making decisions in the moment that are best for you best for the team. Can you talk a little bit about undersea? You know, when things fly at you? How do you sort of determine this? I gotta reply to right away, or this this can hold off even though this might seem urgent in the moment. How do I you know, how do you make those decisions?
Steven Cozza 34:53 Well, I gotta tell you, I’m still kind of learning that in real estate and cycling it was pretty easy because it was one focus. It’s like everything’s recycling was real estate. Everything’s real estate, but there’s volunteering, there’s this, there’s that there’s all these different things that call for your attention or, you know, trying to do too much. And so I’m still learning that but something that I recently heard Warren Buffett’s while he so the story goes, he was in his private jet. And he, the pilot is pilot asked him, hey, Warren, how do you prioritize your time, and Warren goes well, to the most 25 things to you in your life. And you want to be a better father, you want to be better at selling real estate, you want to be healthier, more, you know, more fitness, take 25 of those things, and make a list of it. And, and Warren goes, Okay, now that you have that list of 25 things, take five of them, take the top five of those 25 and make a list of the top five. And then now Warren goes, Okay, now that you have the top five things you want to achieve, or do or be in your life, take those other 20 and throw. Because life is finite, we have enough time, he says if you can just focus on those five things, you’re going to do the best you can add on and maybe by the time you die, you’ll be able to achieve or maybe you won’t, but at least you’re going to know you did your best. But if you have the other 20, there, you’re not going to be good at anything. So that really hit me hard because I was such a scattered doing agent in the beginning. And I think it was okay in the beginning, but from my life, it wasn’t okay. And for other things that are really important to me outside of real estate, it was not okay, so now I’ve got more of a grip on that, and I’m doing what he says to do. Taking Warren Buffett’s advice there.
D.J. Paris 36:47 It’s that is a great a great, a great lesson, a great strategy. And so 100% true with what I’ve seen is that you really can only be good at a couple of things in life anyway, if you really as you know, as an athlete, you know, you could probably be as effective as a as a competitive cyclist versus Oh, I also want to play baseball and kind of do those things at the same time. Obviously, that’s that’d be almost impossible, if not impossible to be at the level that you could be if you just focused on one. So I totally understand that. And athletes do get that they understand, they have to sort of put again, I’m speaking as a professional athlete, which I am not, but putting the blinders on. And literally just doing what’s right in front of them that they know is going to guarantee success and realtors have to wear a million different hats, like you were saying. So it is tough, because it isn’t a singular either are, oh my gosh, I have to you know, take care of the marketing for my business, I have to take care of the customer service, I have to, you know, also these things are flying at me in real time that I have to reply to. So it is it is tough. And we acknowledge that challenge. And that’s why you know, I suffer,
Steven Cozza 37:55 I suffer from ADHD too. So it’s like, I’ve got that added element of hardship in which social media now and all this stuff. So you really got to learn the skills to focus on one thing at a time.
D.J. Paris 38:08 I love that it’s so it’s so funny, because I think when we talk, whenever I’ve had a professional athlete on, there’s that fantasy part of me that goes they’re going to know something I have never heard before. And that’s going to be the key that our audience is going to be like, ah, that’s it. And it’s it’s not that those things don’t exist, it’s that they do exist those things, and they are what we already know and just need to be reminded of which is fundamentals, discipline habit, you know, and staying on target and have and being coachable. Having a coach, do you find that that you are as coachable today, as you were when you started and really needed probably more help to get your business off the ground than you need today? Are you do you feel like you’re just as coachable today as you were then?
Steven Cozza 38:57 Yeah, I think so I get my I have to be careful because continued education is an important part of every week of my my business. But I gotta be careful with there’s so many trainings with Compass, they have so many trainings, they have the compass Academy, and it’s limitless, so I have to kind of pick and choose. So sometimes I’ll do Mondays. I like the podcasts, like keeping it real because you can sit in your car and going driving from one thing to the next. But it can really eat up a lot of your time. So if I can’t drive and listen to it, it’s kind of a challenge because once I’m in the office, I don’t have a lot of time to sit there. So I would say my coaching now is our podcast, like keeping it real. Those are kind of the momentum Mondays too. They keep me on my toes, but I try to grab a little golden nuggets here and there and not so much new prospecting ideas, but things to say like different scripts, you know, different ways to talk to clients and you know, all different types of stuff. So it’s not just about more prospecting Some things it’s there’s little things you can learn that make a big difference like the gal you had on the other day, who did 55 deals in two years that she does the VA stuff ally? I forget her name, but probably the agent. Yeah, yeah, I got her checklist. And, you know, we use checklists, too. So it was cool to see what the differences were there. But I loved her part about the frequently asked question, the videos, we’re totally going to do that. And we’re going to, we’re going to also post them on social media as well, just because we’re always looking for good video content. And, and so, and we, you know, I went through that actually went through, you’ve had her on Kim Rittenberg. Yeah, I took her video making course, I’m always trying to learn and get better. And taking her video making course was great. So kind of like one thing leads to the next. And before you know it, you’re just like this, like amazing, top notch realtor that that really knows their stuff. And people start to see you as like the expert in the field, and someone who really knows what they’re doing. That’s awesome.
D.J. Paris 41:04 I want to honor you for something you said at the at the beginning, which is related to this about being coachable is you went to the most successful agents in your area, and said, Hey, I’d love to chat with you and just get a sense now really, what you’re doing is going to the competition and saying, Hey, tell me what you do differently. So I can learn. And you know what? The top agent in your area said, Yeah, I’ll tell you, because, you know, she, out of the goodness of her heart doesn’t see other agencies competition, I’m sort of just putting myself in her mind, I could be wrong. But I have found that really, it is not uncommon that I bring on a top producer who gives that exact same idea of when I first started, I went to the top people and I said, Well, how are you? How are you doing? This? Is it this whole podcast is exactly that idea to and you know what we I never get to know. I mean, maybe once once a year somebody says, then I don’t really want to talk about talking to you know, your audience about what I do. Everyone else is like, yeah, totally just tell everything. And understanding that people in their market are also going to hear this, and possibly, you know, be more competition for them. But I find that that top agents are typically really, really, like, really generous with their time. You’re being generous with your time here as well. So I just wanted to give you a shout out for, for doing that.
Steven Cozza 42:19 Yeah, it’s important. I knew it was kind of like the only way to, you know, to really last record, I didn’t have a lot of time, I had a credit thing going up. I had started, you know, and so I’m like, I gotta What do I need to do? Just tell me people
D.J. Paris 42:33 probably saved. And you had you at a time? Yeah. You said you had a three year timeline of being a top 20% Producer within three years. That is a an aggressive, aggressive goal. But But you made it and and you’ve continued to do much, even much, much better than that even. But this idea of that is talking to a top producer helps. Like you said, it’s saved you probably years of trial and error, I would assume.
Steven Cozza 43:00 Oh, yeah, let me tell you every so setting goals are really important. Obviously, business plans are very important. Every time I’ve set one of those limits, like I got to do it by this point, I’ve somehow always hit it. And it’s like, I even forget about it sometimes. But like this year, we hit a million GCI. So that was pretty, that was amazing. You know, I wanted to do that by 2023. I made that goal like seven or something years ago, I wanted to be the top in our office, we hit that, I hit that. But the biggest thing, so real quick, because I know, I know, we have limited time. But when you when you talk about like learning from other agents, that compass I’ve learned from them too, because they use statistics. And Scott Michaels taught a class on business planning, which I teach to my agents now too. And if anybody wants help with business planning, I’ve got the stuff to send to you. So it’s part of the power tracker, but I’ll send the other stuff too. And what we learned from the stats that compass was producing was that out of the it was 95 agents that decided not to follow the business plan. 95% of agents do not follow their business plan throughout the year. And 5% do the 5%, who did follow their business plan throughout the year, made as much as the 95% made selling real estate. Wow. So that’s really huge data that’s pretty impactful information. And it kind of tells you something like business plans are important, you know, so, and there is some
D.J. Paris 44:34 there is something kind of invisible and magical about writing down a goal and like you said, maybe not even reviewing it every day, every month every quarter, maybe not reviewing it at all, but getting it written down at least once. There is and I’ve seen different stats on on goal setting and you know, you never know what to believe or what not to believe, but it certainly can’t hurt to write down your goals and And even if you never look at him again, but you’re right, there is something that sometimes like, you can’t really explain why just writing it down seems to sort of manifest it. I mean, there’s lots of ideas about why, but you’re right. It’s weird.
Steven Cozza 45:14 It’s weird. Like I did the ninja ninja agent training,
D.J. Paris 45:18 I could just sell like,
Steven Cozza 45:20 Ninja sign. And that was cool. I did that years ago. And they had you write down, I will make I will make and I was writing, I said, I want to make at the time I put $350,000 a year, I want to make three. And if you do that, and I wrote that down, and you have to write it down like on like five pages, like hundreds of times, I want to make 350,000 And just keep writing it. And, and I and I did the next year, that’s what I did. And it was like, it was like exactly that number. It was like within like 1000 bucks it was. So I we do that every year now we write down what we want to make at the start in the business plan. And we keep it. And it’s so bizarre, but it works. So manifestation positive energy, all that stuff gets your flow going, it’s all good.
D.J. Paris 46:02 That seems to activate something in the brain, where the brain says, you know, again, whatever you believe whatever anybody believes spiritually or philosophically about, you know, we’ll you know, we’re not here to debate that. But there is something that seems to happen, the brain somehow learns that, oh, this is what we’re aiming for. And unconsciously behind the scenes, it starts to figure out ways to bring that into one’s life, if it’s a realistic idea, I guess. And it’s, again, my thought about whether you believe in goal setting, or this magical things that can happen or not is what’s the harm in writing it down, you know, several 100 times. I mean, clearly ninja selling is a very well respected training program in this industry. And it’s not because it doesn’t work. It must work to be as successful as it is. So I love that. Thank you. For that I wanted to I wanted to ask about listing presentations only, because at the beginning, you did mention that that was a major focus for you was being obsessed with with that, which again, is a great thing in my mind to be obsessed with because of course, everybody wants listings. And if you are going to expect a high close ratio, when you have listing appointments, you better have a pretty darn good listing presentation, because you could make the assumption that every time you go to a listing presentation, there’s also another agent you might be competing with. It’s just a great thing to always and your competitor, so used to competing. So I’m curious about you know, just you don’t have to give away all your secrets, of course, but how do you approach a listing presentation that you think might be different from your competitors?
Steven Cozza 47:36 Yeah, well, you know, you think about what a seller really needs and wants and every seller is going to be different I started to learn based off of their personality. So first thing is is we send out a seller questionnaire and the seller questionnaire is in it I always send like this pre email before the appointment as like a reminder with the seller questionnaire, they fill it out, and it gives me a really good head start on understanding you know, things about the house, things about them things about what they want, you know, their needs are the most important thing, right. So if you can figure out in the personality test that disc test, I’m sure a lot of you have heard of the disc test, di SD, learn that, study it, do it on yourself, do it on your kids, do it on your wife, husband, partner, and really learn how to read people’s personalities because that’s the most important thing when you get into a listing presentation. It’s not about selling yourself or your company. It’s about when you leave that listing presentation, then say man, I liked that person, I want to be friends with them, but also them feeling like you were able to speak their language like they’ve been heard. So if it’s a C type personality, it’s going to be more like an engineer calculative you know, wants to see stats and numbers. If you can speak that language, you’re going to make them feel safer if it’s a it personality eyes and S’s are my favorite because S’s are like, you know, nurses or teachers, they’re, they’re motherly eyes are like you they’ll meet everybody at the bar and get their name, they just want to sit down and drink tea. All those things are important and then on top of it getting better at listening, so you can’t understand anything about what they need or want if you can’t hear what they’re saying. So listen, and by listening it it gives them by listen lit when you listen more you control the situation. So listening you get more information. And then last but not least, being able just to offer the most value. Because like it’s just like any trade if you have a painter that comes over and says I’m just gonna do it in one coat, it’s this price this and that. Or if you have another painter and say we have a whole team, we’re super professional, your paint job is gonna last we do an amazing job we don’t just spray and go you’re gonna go with the one even if they’re more money that’s more thorough, gives you more confidence. You know, so that’s the same thing you’ve got to offer value so for me I’m lucky with Compass we offer some the company itself gives us the tools that offer so much value. You know, starting with Compass concierge, you know, being able to remodel stuff for the people, at no expense to them until we close all that stuff, there’s so many things but have your value that you offer very clear and easy for them to see. And then the last thing is I don’t have a set commission, it’s it, the commission I charge, they have options. So depending on what fits their needs, they can choose, the lowest option is still the best option for me, it’s still 6%. But they have definite options that they can choose from. So
D.J. Paris 50:39 I like that too. Because then you you get their buy in, you get their buy in of this is what I think makes the most sense for me. It’s not a one size fits all, it allows people to, to to customize their experience with you.
Steven Cozza 50:55 And yeah, and actually, I always get three for at least 3%. So it’s five and a half percent option 6% option and a 7% option, the lowest I’ll get is 3%. For listing, buyer agent always gets two and a half percent. But yeah, when you give someone an option, there’s really no negotiating that has to really happen. They’re gonna just choose one, usually by default, and they’re all good. It’s all good value.
D.J. Paris 51:17 That is a brilliant thought I am so sorry, that didn’t even occur to me, when you give somebody an option, you just said something very profound. But it gives somebody an option and basically removes the urge to negotiate it, I guess people could still technically come back and say, well, let’s let’s, you know, let’s let’s try to negotiate because of course, that’s what people do in real estate. But it certainly reduces the frequency of those kinds of conversations. So that is a, you just said something incredibly profound. So and by the way, guys, this is why when you go to when you go to websites, and there’s usually some sort of software service offering, you will almost always see three options. And there is a reason for that. And that is not because we all want three options. It’s because the psychology of making decisions knows that three options feels optimal to the actual consumer, it feels like they have agency control power over their decision making strategy, and it makes them feel more comfortable. So anyway, just wanted to step on that for a moment. Because obviously, that is that is I’ve not I’ve never heard any of our other guests have options for listing clients. And boy, yeah, and I mentioned that on the buy side, too. It’s really bad
Steven Cozza 52:31 to have options, you got to have options in the worst options gotta be still very favorable for you. And, you know, it’s, I recommend going into negotiating, I was looking it up, it’s called the C Ren it’s, it’s C R E, it’s basically certified real estate negotiator, the C run certification. If you take that to our test class, you’ll know everything you need to know about negotiating for real estate buyers and sellers. It’s easy, I make all my agents do it. It’s amazing. So I’m not trying to sell their product or anything, but you don’t have to do all these years of learning how to negotiate, just take that two hour thing, you’ll learn all the tricks. And so yeah,
D.J. Paris 53:08 I love it. Steven, I could talk to you all day, I’m fascinated by you and I are similar beings in the way we think and act. So I could do go on and on for hours and hours, you don’t have that kind of time managing a team and managing your clients and doing all of the great things that you do for your community. And in for. And by the way, too, you know, we should mention that, you know, where Steven lives and practices, you know, Sonoma, Marin County, also, you know, parts of San Francisco Bay, if you are an agent, and you have clients, if that’s a feeder market for you, where clients are either moving from there to market or vice versa, you know, this is a great person to to connect with. Maybe you guys can trade referrals, maybe you guys could develop a and I say guys, of course, meaning any agent, men and men, men, women or other. So please reach out to Steve and if you feel that you could add value or if you’re looking for a referral partner in that area. I was I was at a breakfast yesterday with the top producing team here in Illinois. And they are in now six markets. They’ve opened offices in six markets. And they talked about the markets where they’re not they don’t have offices, and they have such strong relationships with their referral agents and partners. And you know, they said that that has been the secret to their success, because when they do refer business, they need to make sure that you know that experience is consistent, whether it’s their client or none, they referred so Stephen and his his team, our elite top, top, top white glove team. They are among the very, very, very best in their market. So please reach out to Steve and if you feel that you could maybe have a client that Steven would Be of service to our his team. Um, Steven, what’s the best way an agent who wants to connect with you? And also, you know, we talked about you have some giveaways for them with respect to some of your processes your Power Hour, which I love. What’s the best way just to remind our audience how to get that information from you?
Steven Cozza 55:19 Yeah, you can email me at SS and Sam, and then coza, my last name at coza homes always being plural.com ESCOs echoes homes.com. Or you can get me on Instagram. And I’ll get to you that way. But best way, just shoot me an email, and I’ll get all that stuff out to you. And we’re also looking to refer people in other markets too. You know, the referral business is something that I was late to the game on, it basically just started building that out and about a year ago, believe it or not, so the definitely wanting to network network more with other agents. So
D.J. Paris 55:49 yeah, yeah, and find find them on social at coza team, which is the the handle that you can find most of them, we will have links to all of their social channels on our in our show notes. And I also just want to make one final observation. And this is a a soft skill. But I think a really, really important one, whenever I am on with an agent who I can identify this particular skill, we haven’t talked about it. And I don’t know that we need to speak too much about it. But I wanted to, to, to give you a shout out want everyone to pay attention to Stephens tonality. When he talks, does he have a calming presence? Or does he have a an activating presence? To me, in my opinion, his voice, his tone, the way he communicates, is very calming and relaxing. And I will tell you that during real estate transactions, emotions run hot and cold. And they I’m not here to say one size fits all that every agent needs to be speak in the same manner that Steven speaks. But let’s remember how our voices and the way that we communicate how it impacts right the what we say we know that the data is really clear what we say not that important, how we say it critically important, like 90% of the actual effect of our communication is the way in which we say something. So the idea, I just wanted to point out that Steven has a very calming, calming voice and calming presence and you feel relaxed when you’re talking with him. And I will say that if you don’t have that reaction, when you’re with your clients, you can learn these are skills. This is not well, I was born as an activated Berserk because I’m kind of an activated person. But you can learn how to calm down how to relax and realizing how important that is to be able to communicate. So Steven, I just wanted to honor you for that it’s maybe it’s part of the California thing, you’ve got a little bit of that California relaxed. But obviously, as a professional athlete, you’re a super intense dude, it’s not that you’re not intense, you’re able, though, to focus that intensity in a way that doesn’t come across as making your clients anxious, or at least making me anxious as as the host of the show. So I applaud you for that it’s a soft skill, it’s probably not something that, you know, a lot of a lot of people would pay much attention to, but I believe it’s very important. So I you’ve been afraid?
Steven Cozza 58:12 Yeah. That’s a good, that’s a good point that you pointed out, I think, yeah, it’s, it’s, I can be very energetic too, for sure. But I think a lot of times working with clients, I always tell them, I tell my wife, gosh, I wish I was as good as with you as an with my clients because like I go into like client mode. And then it’s like, I’m very calm. And it is interesting that you bring that up. Someone a coach once told me said cut commission out of it, take it out, if you can learn to cut commission out of it and focus on what it’s going to take to get them to where they want to be and continue to tell your clients that you know what’s it going to take to get you to where you want to be. That’s what I want to do for you. Stop worrying about the commission, because that will come
D.J. Paris 58:54 perfectly said great place to end up. So everyone reach out to Steve and get some of his resources that he has so generously sharing the same resources he shares with his team. And also reach out to him if you think you could be a great referral partner. And who knows maybe down the road, if you’re an agent in that local market, maybe they will be looking for more team members. They’re not currently right now. But this is obviously the Koza team is the team to watch because they are just crushing it out there. And by the way, he is not in an easy market to compete. He is in one of the toughest markets. But that’s what a competitor loves, loves, loves a challenge. And you are already there. So congratulations on all your success. I want to say thank you on behalf of our audience to Steven and his team for taking time out today to be so generous to help our audience. So let’s all thank him by sending him some some virtual love. But also let him know what you thought about his performance on the show which of course is going to be lots of praise. So let him know how great he was here and also On behalf of Steven and myself, we want to thank you the audience, we want to say thank you for making it to the end of the episode, please tell a friend, think of one other agent that could benefit from this. You know, we know 2023 is tough. This is a tough year for every agent out there. Don’t let it don’t let anyone fool you. It’s tough. Even the ones people that are smiling are working a little harder this year than they normally would be. So let’s help our fellow agents as well rising, what do they say? What’s the expression right? A rising tide raises all ships. So let’s help the industry and help me to as well tell other agents about the podcast. We appreciate it. And I thank you in advance for that. So tell a friend and also thank you let’s let’s just say one last time. Thank you to Steven for coming on our show. Steve. It was great chatting with you. Such a pleasure and I hope to have you back in the future. Thank you.
Steven Cozza 1:00:50 Thanks so much. Thanks, TJ.
How To Connect With Real Estate Clients At A Deep Level • Josh Myler
Jul 31, 2023
Josh Myler began his career 15 years ago in San Francisco in sales and marketing, transitioning into real estate business. Josh talks about his activities in civic and charitable organizations. Josh also discusses how grateful he feels for the success he achieved in real estate, and shares some tips on how to manage clients. Last, Josh discusses two main hats he believes every agent should wear- the one of the therapist and the one related to interior design and architecture.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today is all about connecting with your clients. And we’re going to show you how to deepen those relationships. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide, and your host through the show, and in just a moment, we’re gonna be speaking with top producer, Josh meilleur. But before we get to Josh, just a couple of quick reminders. Please help us grow by telling a friend think of another realtor that you know, that could use some of the wisdom that Josh is about to impart to you and he is going to impart an incredible amount of wisdom to you send send somebody you know a link to this episode. Though, you can always send someone over to our website keeping it real pod.com Or any podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe button. Leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show and also please support our sponsors. Our sponsors are the best we love our sponsors. They are the reason we can continue to make episodes and pay our bills, check out their products and services and consider investing in them. We thoroughly vet them and only have sponsors on here that we know could actually help you grow your business. So alright guys enough for me. Let’s get to the main event. my conversation with Josh smiler.
Trade today on the show my guests Josh meilleur. With the agency in Beverly Hills, California will tell you more about Josh. Prior to joining the real estate industry Josh began his sales and marketing career 15 years ago in San Francisco in the.com. Arena, he quickly established himself as an asset to both small and large companies developing and managing sales and marketing processes for both internal and external sales teams. Josh also goes where his clients need him to go. There are a vast number of micro markets throughout Los Angeles and knowing how to define value in each of them is integral to Josh’s ability to help his clients transition from one area to another. And Josh is also very active in local schools, civic and charitable organizations. He’s a member of the National Association of Realtors, the California Association of Realtors, Beverly Hills, Greater Los Angeles Association of Realtors, and the combined la Westside MLS. He’s a top 1% producer, absolute superstar. And please visit his website, Josh meilleur.com jshmyler.com and follow him on Instagram. I’m going to spell this out but there’ll be a link to this in the show notes. Or in the description rather, Josh sale meilleur JSHSAYLEMY L E R link in the notes. Josh, welcome to the show.
Josh Myler 4:19 DJ, what a nice introduction. Thank you for that. And thank you for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure. Pleasure to meet you.
D.J. Paris 4:28 Pleasure to meet with you. We had a bit of a challenge getting us together Josh’s Mike was having some tech challenges. We had sent Josh the wrong link. And so it all sounds very calm now but Josh and I have were scrambling for for the last 20 minutes. So I appreciate Josh’s patience. He’s a he’s a good man. And we are excited to finally have you on the show. Tell us tell us the journey. i How do you get you know, it’s so funny. I always think you know there’s that Little kid, part of me that always wanted to go to Beverly Hills and be a Beverly Hills, you know, actor or, you know some sort of celebrity I think every child has some minor fantasy of that at some point in their life, and then to become a realtor and then to become a Beverly Hills realtor I always think is on there’s something kind of cute and I don’t mean cute in a pejorative way. I mean, like, in a very impressive way. I think that is, it is really a difficult place to plant your flag and to be somebody, because the competition, of course, is pretty fierce. So I’d love to hear the entire journey of how you how you got to where you are,
Josh Myler 5:38 oh, man, where, where do I begin? I really was on a very, very serious path to med school. I was pre med at Berkeley, I fought tooth and nail to get that degree. And then, you know, in the end, I just decided as I was graduating, I was going to take three months off. And I met a friend of Elon Musk’s and Elon and his brother Kimball, were starting a company there first. And they needed an analyst. And they thought, Okay, well, let’s hire this kid at UC Berkeley. And so it started as kind of like a summer gig while I was deciding whether I wanted to take the MCAT and go to med school. Long story short, that started a very sort of brief stint, I would think about five or six years in the software industry. And that’s where I cut my teeth in sales and business development. And then about three months before the.com bubble burst, I said, I’m out. I’m done. Smartest, smart man. Oh, I mean, I gotta tell you, it was very, very lucky. Because then three months later, it was all my buddies were like, We’re gonna reinvent ourselves and go, you know, do whatever it is we want to do really with our lives. And I had made that decision, really based on following my heart and saying, I really don’t like doing this, I don’t care how much money I’m going to make. And at that point, an older brother, my oldest brother actually was living in Pasadena. And I came down here just to visit him. And, you know, when I was growing up, I’m from Northern California. And so I had never somehow never spent any time in Southern California. I came down here DJ, and I was like, This is it. This city that the weather, all the obvious things about LA, I was like this place rocks. So I actually just because I had had enough money in stock options from my, you know, tech days, I just took about three months to decide what I wanted to do. And inside of that three months while I was just kind of figuring it out, a friend of a friend of mine introduced me to a woman named Best Stein, and best Stein was the general manager of the Beverly Hills Coldwell Banker office. And at the time, I was like, I’m not going to be a real estate agent. There’s no way I’m going to figure out how to get to med school I’m going to do, I talked to Beth, I talked to a few other people. And I thought I could do this, this sounds like it might indeed be a good fit. So I dive in. And I’ll never forget one of my first I was paired with a mentor. And one of my first days out, you know, showing was with my mentor, and it was like training day, we get in the car
D.J. Paris 8:55 to go gun. It hands me
Josh Myler 8:57 a gun, and a joint. And anyway, yada yada yada. We ended up walking to house and the showing was with Tommy Lee. Oh, my goodness. And I didn’t he didn’t tell me who we were going to see. We just want to give
D.J. Paris 9:15 you the heads up that one of the most famous rock drummers of all time, you’re about to walk into it. And in one of the one of the craziest personas totally, you know, a public crazy persona.
Josh Myler 9:28 Yeah, yes. And it was wild just to be again, as you just touched on a moment ago, to be all of a sudden throwing myself into real estate, throwing myself into Beverly Hills real estate and then the first showing really I go on with my mentor is with just a mega Rockstar. It was just a great fun day. And I thought to myself, Okay, I could do this, I could do this. Now of course the the preceding You know, five years, we’re not Tommy Lee and rockstars it was getting down and dirty, and earning my my stripes and you know, keeping my head down, making all the calls sending all the emails networking in the way that you know, a new agent should.
D.J. Paris 10:22 It’s a pretty incredible switch, though. Oh, by the way, I just want to add, I’m gonna I’m gonna one up your your it’s not even a one up. It’s a silly story. But my mom, funny enough, my mom, this is 20 plus years. This is during the Dr. Feelgood album year. So I’m going to say this is probably 1992 1993. Something around that that time I was in high school. My mom was here in Chicago. I’m sorry, the audience. This is the silliest story that ever happened to our family. My mom is at this very fancy hotel waiting for friends called the Drake here in Chicago. It’s like this world renowned hotel, and it’s a really fancy and whatever. So my mom’s sitting waiting. My mom’s very, very much a lady. By the way. I remember preface this by saying my mom is very much a lady. This, this disheveled gentleman comes over to her and and pays her a very nice compliment. And my mom recognizes that he is probably some sort of celebrity well, because of the way he’s dressed, but he sort of looks a little bit out of it. And it turns out it was Vince Neil of Motley Crue. And he had he gave her his phone number and he gave her Oh, wow. Very, very, very polite. He was very polite. He was very nice. But my mom, I think I think I just got a hit on by a rock star. Many, many, many, many moons ago. But I guess we both have a motley crew connection.
Josh Myler 11:50 Yeah, seriously, I mean, so silly, in the 90s to me, but what I am
D.J. Paris 11:57 interested in you in your in sort of the switch on your life path, because I too, went into college with a desire to possibly become a doctor and I bailed out pretty fast, you went all the way through, you did the organic, inorganic chemistry stuff, you did the hardest part, the worst. And the worst, the worst, you had the worst time in college, because of all the studying you had to do that everyone else didn’t have to do. And going on to that path, the MCAT then of course, in med school, and then getting into technology with, you know, with with the masks, and and then you know, getting out of technology and now into real estate. That is those are big swing right there.
Josh Myler 12:44 Yeah, very circuitous. As I say. And I gotta tell you, TJ wouldn’t do it any other way. I wouldn’t change a thing. You know, there are moments where I look back, or moments when I’m driving around, as I you know, as most real estate agents, do, we live on our cars. And I’ll be driving around the city. And I feel very blessed to be able to do the what I do, and I feel very grateful for the success that I’ve had. Yet still, I have these moments where I think I would have been an amazing doctor. I don’t mean that I don’t mean to sound like a jerk. I really do. I was thinking pediatrics or cardiology. And by the way, what was driving that part of me is my dad was a cardiologist. My mom was a retired nurse. So I grew up around the hospital. So there was that. And I do have that sort of mid second heart paying for maybe what could be but the truth be told, I really wouldn’t change a thing and the path that took me through, you know, software sales and high tech, straight into real estate. It’s funny, but I guess we all have our journey. Right? And although
D.J. Paris 13:55 it sort of sounds like you have a little bit of that, that he called that servant’s heart, right like that. I’m here to serve, I’m here to, to, to be of service horse. People who have that tend to be attracted to healthcare, real estate, you know, lots of industries, actually. So it seems like it actually would be probably a pretty good fit. Yeah. And
Josh Myler 14:17 I actually have a note on that I was just listening to a podcast with a guy named Michael singer. And he was talking about the pursuit of happiness and how we achieve ultimate happiness. And there are a number of answers there a million answers to that one is be of service, get out of your head, get out of your day, whatever kind of doom and gloom you’re experiencing in that moment, and go make sure someone else is happy. Go make sure you are doing the best you can to help someone else. And that is in my view, and for me has been a great source of happiness. The other thing that he said that I thought and this is DJ just a side note that I thought was interesting is He said that in all the studies that he did, that happiness for a lot of people comes from getting what you want, right? Most people would say if they get what they want, they’re happy. And he argues that, you know, getting what you want is a moving target. And so if you are going after something that’s a moving target, it’s always changing, you’re never really going to be happy. And then from a sort of more ethereal place, he talks about how inside of all of us, is this river happiness. And if we just succumb to it, jump in the river and drown in happiness. It’s there, instead of make it don’t make it conditional. So anyway, that’s a side note. And that’s part of what kind of drives me in this business, just to segue back is, you know, we all have hard days, we all have those shitty days that, you know, prevent us from getting out of bed. And one thing that really has helped, is focusing for me on my clients, it’s never about the deal. I mean, sure, it’s fun to do transactions, it’s great to get in the, you know, in the, in the depths of that deep end of the pool, if you will, with the other agent, we’re going back and forth, and negotiating. The search is also fun, right. But the matchmaking and the figuring out how there really is a buyer for every house and a house for every buyer. And then even more so seeing the look on that person’s face when they find just how to yesterday, someone walked into a house, one of my houses were my listings. And she kind of whispered, she didn’t think I could hear she whispered to her agent. So Should I just tell him should I tell him? This is the one. And she walked into the kitchen where I was standing. She looked at me and she had those eyes, those eyes that I just love, which is this is the one how do we make this work? It’s the best. And of course, that’s just the beginning, right? You got to get through the escrow, you got to close the deal. But there is really nothing like making someone happy. And, and being a part of that process.
D.J. Paris 17:18 There’s something to the magic that you just very, very elegantly described. And I’m glad and I was I was there in that room as you were describing it. And I appreciate you, you doing so. Because I think that’s, you know, some of the intangibles that we don’t talk about a lot on the show, we talk a lot about strategy and that’s great. But being able to bank some of those experiences to remind ourselves when times are maybe more challenging that this is what can happen you know, seeing somebody’s eyes light up making the transaction happen maybe even a first time homebuyer, you know, going from renting or purchasing is quite a quite a day. So there’s a lot of accomplishment and fulfillment and happiness. You know, you’re talking about Michael singer, by the way, if anyone isn’t familiar with Michael singer read the book, read books that he have, he has written because it is a fascinating story of technology guy who is also spiritually bent and trying to figure out how to be in both worlds at the same time. And he is probably does it better. He probably did it better than anyone I know.
Josh Myler 18:33 Yeah. The Untethered Soul the
D.J. Paris 18:35 Untethered Soul? Yes,
Josh Myler 18:37 that’s a great book.
D.J. Paris 18:39 Yeah, so let’s, um, but but let let, I would, you know, I do love the fact that you are connected. And I think that’s really important. How important is it for you, again, we know that there’s mechanics associated with a real estate transaction. There’s negotiating there’s there’s a lot of there’s numbers, there’s, there’s a lot there, but you’re you’re really clued into, you know, the experience, I think of the buyer and the seller. And I’m curious, I want to talk about that, because you play in a slightly different, slightly different level. You know, you’re working with high net worth individuals. These are Beverly Hills, you know, places, these are nice homes. What’s different about working with sort of that kind of clientele versus, you know, a lay person who’s, you know, not living in Beverly Hills?
Josh Myler 19:37 Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that it’s probably the number one thing I think about when you ask that question. DJ is experience, you know, the more high net worth people. This typically isn’t their first rodeo, right? So there’s, there’s less hand holding in one way, but there’s always hand holding, right? A first timer. is going to be fearful of things that are different than the guy who or the or the person who is more experienced in the realm of doing the deal. So an example of that is, you know, first I’ve got a couple right now who, you know, they’re getting beat out beaten by all these other cash buyers. They’re getting financing. And I think we’ve written four offers now, and they just can’t figure out how to win and the fatigue is setting in. And all the while, I’m kind of, in a way, smiling on the inside, because I’m watching the evolution of their experience happened before my eyes. It’s heartbreaking to lose what you think is the one. But I know better. And they are starting to learn what that process is like. And I’m such a believer I call it fatalistic, or what have you. But for better or worse, I’m a huge believer, because I’ve seen it, and I’ve experienced it, that there truly is when it’s right. And they’re ready and the house is ready. It’s going to be the best one of all right? So you take them through this arc of Wait, what is in escrow? And how do we do this and your teaching, which I really enjoy that process, versus someone who’s really experienced, and they get fearful of, I think, different things fearful that the other side isn’t being honest, or there is something wrong with the house that no one is going to be able to figure out and they’re not going to be able to figure out and you have to kind of coach them through more of an experience, experience perspective on fear. I would say, I really do try to make them feel like they have a guide. No matter who it is, no matter whether it’s a first time buyer or someone who’s buying their 10th house, I want them to feel like I’ve got the rudder, and we’re on the river. And we’re all on the boat, and it’s my job to keep us on the boat. Does that make sense?
D.J. Paris 22:17 It makes perfect sense. I, you know, I I’ve said this talked about this a lot on our show. So I apologize to our audience who pay me says, uh, you know, come up with something new. But for anyone who is newer to our show, you know, I had an experience two and a half years ago, where I bought a condo, it was not my first time buying a condo. And I also worked here at an agency where we have almost 800 agents. So you would think that I would, and I’m not, I’m not a practicing agent myself. But you would think with the amount of surrounding myself with agent, sort of, you know, agents are just around me all the time, whether it’s the show or my job, and I was buying a condo, and I was freaking out. And I needed somebody to, to call me down and tell me what to do. I needed a coach I needed, I needed to help her because I was I was representing myself. And I finally said, Well, this is silly, I need to have somebody else objectively looking at this, because I don’t I am way too connected. I’m way too dysregulated I am going to I was going through the ups and downs of of as a client would. And I my boss stepped in and he’s like, I’ll take I’ll take it from here. And it was it was really, really smart. Because what I think I’m curious about being able to emotionally comfort someone through a transaction. And, you know, we tend to not think of these skills as as, as important as obviously knowing the market and understanding negotiating tactics. And obviously those things are important too. But we don’t talk enough about the emotional side of it. I mean, these, these are still big purchase decisions or selling decisions for your clients, even though it’s not their first rodeo. You I assume assume oftentimes there are teams of people as well, that you have too many masters to serve. So I’m curious about how you keep everyone engaged and and moving forward?
Josh Myler 24:18 Well, I spoke on a panel fairly recently, and we you know, the question was, what are the keys to your success, and I talked about how we wear a lot of hats, as real estate agents. This is not something that is new, I’m sure to you considering how many real estate agents you are around and with whom you have conversations all the time. We do wear a lot of hats and I would say the two hats that I wear the most one therapist, right. And it’s not just therapy to our clients, it’s often keeping calm the agent on the other side Yeah, right, because we’re all in it together, you know, you’ve got a client who wants the same thing that my client wants. So let’s figure out how to, like lay down the guns and do this together. And that can be difficult, because there are as I call them out there, and I won’t name any names, the deal killers, right, the agents who, for better or worse, find a way to screw things up because of their own, the stuff that that’s going on inside of them heart and mind. So I would say that skill is something that I think can be learned. But I also think you’re born with it, it’s in your DNA, to keep everybody calm. Because it’s so DJ, it’s the most, in my view, one of the most emotionally charged endeavors is buying or selling a house, you’re dealing with people who have lived in their houses for 2030 years, sometimes, even if it’s two years, they’re just, they’ve got their identity wrapped up into this entity, because it is arguably the biggest thing they’ve ever invested in. Now they’re selling it, how much can how much am I going to get? How much it can? How much can you figure out how to get me or they’re looking to buy something, and that’s a big life change. So there’s a lot of psychology that goes into it. And then you again, you got to keep all the all the, all the bodies and minds and hearts calm on the other side. And that’s, that’s a challenge. And I feel like I’ve had a lot of success with that. You know, I have a business partner with whom I do a lot of business and you know, invariably, there’s a difficult client, you’re gonna you’re gonna have to deal with, you know, he’s not good at that. He’s not good at dealing with those humans. So he says, Send Josh into the living room. And Josh, we I it’s like, it’s like I’m the cooler. You know, like at the at the blackjack table at the blackjack table. Not a good thing. You don’t want to be the
D.J. Paris 27:14 the coolers is what when people start losing? Yes,
Josh Myler 27:17 yeah. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 27:18 But it reduces the temperature of the room. Yeah,
Josh Myler 27:22 that’s exactly right. And that’s what I have found is the key. One of the keys to my success is just keeping calm. The other hats are interior design, architecture. We’re dealing I think it’s so fascinating, because many of us don’t have law degrees, and we’re dealing with a lot of legalese. And we’re guiding people in ways that really walk that line. And, you know, I’ve learned my lesson, fortunately, have never been in a lawsuit. I don’t intend on being in a lawsuit because I’m smart enough to say, okay, that’s not my wheelhouse. I’m going to I’m going to stay in my lane, go talk to a real estate attorney. And that’s, by the way, another piece of advice I would give to any real estate agent who, you know, either just got in or who’s super experienced, I would say, know when to say when and to direct your clients, you know, to talk to a real estate attorney, because it will keep you at at a out of out of court and your clients out of court. So anyway, yes, the the therapist hat is one that I wear a lot and actually I enjoy it.
D.J. Paris 28:42 Well, you I think, you know, realtors, it’s funny, we talk a lot about skill based you know, different different skills that Realtors need, but I this idea of being able to lock in and really have a good awareness of what what the what the client needs is is not talked about as much I mean obviously we have the superficial parts where we need to know the specifics of you know what, what they want, why don’t they want to buy what they want to sell all the haves, musts, you know, and that and have nots. But then there is something about making sure that that client is is is maintaining their emotional regulation right throughout the transaction. And that’s really an important thing because it is such a stressful event. How do you how do you help clients stay calm?
Josh Myler 29:41 Well, I’ll tell you just as a quick story, this just happened yesterday. I’m not kidding. We’re representing these buyers. We keep getting keep losing out in multiples. And we were we lost this most recent one yesterday. We got the news. They didn’t select your offer. Okay. You know, boohoo, right. And we were offered the backup position. Right? My clients, you know, instinctively it was like knee jerk, no, screw them, if they didn’t want our offer, we, we don’t want anything to do with them. To which I said, Okay, hold on. And now it’s therapy, hat on, therapists hat on, let’s keep our eye on the prize. Because I have seen so many great things happen for people who didn’t get what they wanted immediately, but decided, okay, you know what, we’re going to take the backup position, and then the first position falls out, and it goes straight to the backup. And they thank me every single time, because what I did was I talked them out of letting their ego get in the way of the their them getting the prize. Right. So that’s one of the things that I say a lot is let’s, you know, stay focused and keep our eyes on the prize. And let’s not let our egos because truthfully, DJ, the person on the other side is making the decision, they’re long gone, after the escrow closes, you’re going to be in your house and joining that house, totally, with no thought about who sold it to you, or how it came to pass. So I think it’s really acknowledging when those moments happen, those those moments that are part of the human condition, those ego those getting your ego bruised. I mean, it’s it’s the most human thing ever, you know, getting getting rejected, is not a good feeling.
D.J. Paris 31:43 It’s not and is there’s a rejection component to buying and selling real estate. It’s almost like asking a girl out on a first date and having her say no, and there is a little bit of a connection there. Right. And so what we know is it doesn’t feel good to be to be put in putting in second second place. But would you say, you know, trying to help the client, understand, hey, second place isn’t so bad.
Josh Myler 32:14 No, and actually could could be the path to your succeeding. A really good friend of mine gave me the best piece of advice. He said, when when someone sends you an email, or leave you a voice message that pisses you off, that really gets you don’t respond, give it 24 hours, you know, we’ve all heard a lot of us have heard this. And it’s just the best, I mean, sometimes I’ll write the email, and I won’t say send it, you know, and then the next morning, of course, God, I’m so happy, I didn’t send that email, you know, we all we all are fallible, we all are human. And if we just give ourselves a beat, just to be to let all that stuff run through our veins, then I think we’d all be a lot more successful, we get closer to the things that we want and need. And I think we’d live a happier life.
D.J. Paris 33:14 Yeah, I always feel like there’s this, you know, anxiety that just kind of just permeates through us. And it comes out in the form of energy. And it comes out in the form of, you know, criticism or, or whatever it is, you know, it’s a hard thing for a human to endure this, this anxiety. And so we we push it out out into the world. And as a result, we make other people anxious. And you’re right, if we could all you know, take take a giant deep breath, and relax. We stay in
Josh Myler 33:46 the boat, seagulls in the boat DJ, your life is a river and it’s just a crate, there’s going to be rapids, there’s going to be maybe a waterfall. You know, just because you get your ego bruised, don’t jump out of the boat, let’s stay you know. So my job is that sort of boat captain is to keep everybody calm and prevent people from jumping in the water.
D.J. Paris 34:11 It is a really, really important and we’re speaking metaphorically but it is actual actually very practical, right? Because at the end of the day, people are you know, we have human reactions to human conditions. So we have, you know, a wrinkle happens in a transaction. And again, this is not talked about very, very often, but a wrinkle happens. The wrinkle gets smoothed out somehow. But what what we’re really we really need to do is now figure out what what was the emotional toll that that took on the client, how are they feeling? How are they doing? And, you know, you seem to have you seem to be really keyed into that. And ultimately, you’re right, we’re talking we’re really talking about feelings and how to manage mitigate feelings.
Josh Myler 34:59 That’s Right. That’s right. And of course, again, you know, I’m thinking about the more experienced buyers who are quicker to deal with the, the transactional side of the deal, but there they get every bit as emotional, sometimes more hot headed. So it’s just a different type of therapy. I mean, we’re talking about therapy a lot. But I really do think that it is such an important component to being successful as a real estate agent. And again, it’s something you can learn through trials and tribulations of doing deals and dealing with people. You know, I mentioned, you know, my wonderful buyer’s agent, his name is Evan Ferrante. And he’s a new agent. He’s been at it now two years. And we had a situation recently where Evan was doing a showing. And the house is actually occupied by a tenant who does not want to leave the house, this person knows that the house is going to sell. And she took me outside right after the showing, and just started bawling our eyes out. And so Evan calls me and I said, Welcome to the Jungle. Welcome to Real Estate, Powell. And so, you know, she’s, she’s like sobbing on his shoulder. And I’m like, so what did you do? And he said, I consoled her and told her, everything’s gonna be fine. And I, you know, if I, I mean, DJ has so many stories, so many stories. You know, like that. It’s been 20, actually 20 years, I got my license in 2003. And I think of it you mentioned 15 years earlier, I think of it as 15 years, because the first five years of that 20 was all training day, ya know, people’s thinking get.
D.J. Paris 37:05 Yeah. Trial by Fire. Yeah, I and yeah, and let’s talk about wisdom, because I think that’s, you know, you have a 20 year career, I think, when he gets 20 years, you now get to, like you were saying earlier, I’ve seen other transactions end up, you know, for example, we’re now in second place on our offer, but I’ve seen this workout where this actually might get accepted. How important is wisdom, to help, you know, keep your clients engaged.
Josh Myler 37:41 So important. I mean, you look, when we’re doing this matchmaking, when we’re putting a deal together, we’re putting two people who don’t know each other, right at all together, and we’ve got to figure out how to foster trust very quickly. In the same way, I have to make sure that they trust me, and my ability to do that. And so knowledge and wisdom, not just about market data, you know, I was an analyst right out of school for a tech company that ended up selling for a lot of money. That was my first job. And I do have that analytical OCD thing that helps me analyze markets and break down numbers for clients, that’s part of it. Right, they need to trust that, you know, the inventory, they need to trust that you have a handle on what value means, you know, all the variables in the equation of value. And there are a number of them, that you have a handle on all of them, and then can speak intelligibly about those variables and the whole equation, so that they trust, okay, you know, Josh can not only keep our emotions in check, so that we can keep moving forward. But also we trust that he knows what he’s talking about. Yeah. So knowledge, and an understanding of the market, in which you’re selling and working is is huge, in in the pursuit of, again, fostering trust in your clients,
D.J. Paris 39:17 you have to know you have to know the inventory. And you do of course, and it’s really something that, you know, 500 episodes in, has, has yet to be refuted by any of our guests. It’s like, you know, study the market, as if it were the, you know, the most precious document on the planet because it’s an ever changing document. But study the MLS, you know, 30 minutes an hour or two hours a day, just to make sure you know everything about your local market, and within a year, you’re going to be so incredibly knowledgeable. If you, you know, put a little bit of that discipline in place that you’re gonna, you’re gonna you We’re gonna leapfrog over other agents.
Josh Myler 40:02 Yeah, it’s important to put the data in context. Meaning it’s not just what’s happening right now. It’s how things have changed over time. So often when I’m when I’m doing my analysis for clients, who asked me, How much is my house worth today, I think it’s important to give them an opportunity to see how things have changed. So I’ll go two or three years back, so that they have a, it’s, again, that teaching element. They have an understanding of where, where we’re coming from. And I think now more than ever, that’s hugely important, because we just come out of the crate, arguably the craziest time in the housing market in the last 100 years. I mean, I would argue, ever, you know, what COVID did to the housing market was unbelievable. And I still think we are, you know, feeling latent effects. You know, I think that right now, there people have settled in to what I call the normalcy, that normal market, right, where, I think for a time after COVID settled, and rates started to come up. People were whining and crying, you know, bloody murder about old money was so cheap before rates were I mean, why can’t we have that again, and again, therapists hat, you’ve got to get over it and move on. Right as you want to buy a house, this person wants to sell you that house. The only way forward is to accept what’s now except Except what we’re dealing with now. And so that’s settled a little bit. And I’m surprised in it in the face of a lot of uncertainty in the market, not just housing market, but the broader markets, that there’s still many buyers out there who were making offers, as I said, we’re going into multiples against a lot of people. And I think the one variable left standing, and I’m sure DJ, you’ve heard this from other real estate agents is in the in the value equation is a lack of inventory. Yeah. Right. What surprises me again, is the the demand. But I think psychologically, people have gotten over what was there subscribing to the philosophy that okay, rates are what they are, and they will eventually come down. So let’s keep going. And let’s my buddy here,
D.J. Paris 42:43 Josh, cat has just made an appearance. Yeah, can do.
Josh Myler 42:47 Let’s, let’s, uh, let’s refi rates are bound to come down. So let’s refi. And, and, and keep our eye on the price.
D.J. Paris 43:00 Yeah, it’s, you know, how have you been working with buyers? Presently, that are sitting on the sidelines? What are these the sorts of things you’re saying to them? Who are, you know, worried about interest rates? And just, you know, is it is it is it as simple as, you know, date the rate marry the house? Is that kind of the philosophy? Or are you seeing buyers, pulling back,
Josh Myler 43:30 I liked that date, the rate, marry the house, I love that. I think there’s a little bit of that. My way my style is, and I think a lot of people who know me and have come to know how I work. Realize that I don’t push very hard. You know, I think of myself in a way, like I’m the anti agent, if you will, I am not trying to sell anybody anything. So if there is reticence or fear, let’s deal with that. First, there will always be a house. I mean, if we look back at history, you get pretty comfortable understanding that there there gajillion houses out there. And I don’t think a good thing to do ever is to push someone in to something too quickly. Or at all for that matter. You know, if you if you feel most comfortable, you know, dipping your toe in or sitting in the shallow end, so that you can kind of get your bearings. And let’s do that, you know, you may miss some opportunities, but again, there will be others. So I think people now again, there are great many people who have subscribed to the idea that we’re just going to rent right now and wait until rates come down? Fine, no problem. Let’s do that. And then there are other people who are ready to go. And so again, I’m using this boat analogy too much. But you know, there are a bunch of different personalities who have who come from a lot of different walks of life in this boat. And my job is to understand who my audience is. Understand to the extent that I can, their fears, their wants, their desires, their needs, and then figure out how to give that to them, and be there with them in that moment. Does that make sense?
D.J. Paris 45:41 It makes perfect sense. It’s really the consultancy sort of approach. It’s That’s right. It’s yeah. And you said very elegantly, perfectly. It’s, Hey, I see you, I hear you, I know you. Here’s what we’re here’s where we’re aiming. And it includes not just the numbers that includes the feelings and hand the numbers, and of course, the property and all of the specifics. And we’re going to aim towards it. And we’re going to keep moving forward. And we’re going to calibrate along the way it makes perfect sense.
Josh Myler 46:17 Yeah, there’s another facet to that, that we haven’t talked about. And that’s disclosure. Right when when real estate agents and in the in the real estate world, we talk about disclosures, we immediately think of disclosing, you know, a seller disclosing all they know about a house to a buyer. Right? Super important, super obvious, I think. But there’s also disclosures that happened between you and your clients, right. And so if we’re going to be there, and I’m going to be there, in that moment with you, whatever moment you’re in, I also am going to show you the data and disclose to you what the market looks like. So that you understand all the opportunities and opportunity costs, right? If you’re going to sit and wait. And so that you can never say to yourself, Josh did not tell us that if we sat and waited, that we would miss out on X, Y and Z. So I think there’s two things be there in the moment, but also make sure they understand what’s going on and what they may be walking away from, or getting themselves into or out of. So that again, they know their eyes are wide open.
D.J. Paris 47:29 I love this idea of like scenario planning. This is essentially what you’re doing. And you’re giving people visions of futures that they can walk around and and see how they find them to be comfortable or not. Again, we’re talking a little bit more thoroughly. Is that a word? I think it is, yeah, ethereal ly more than normal, but I think it’s important because we are, you know, we are, you know, obviously we’re just transacting homes, but what we’re really talking about is all the emotional components that go into the decisions. And there’s so many decisions that go into not even just buying a home, but living in a home. You know, it’s so, so critical to us as human beings, it really does become this important thing where as you as the agent can really get a sense of what that family or individual client needs, and be able to deliver to them exactly the experience they’re looking for.
Josh Myler 48:30 I mean, that that’s it, right? That’s the key to building, I think, a successful real estate career that’s lasting, you know, if you’re just in it to do a deal, I’ll tell you right now, it’s not going to be fun, and it’s not going to last very long. But if you are there with them, and you’re able to I think, boil down to their essence, all the questions you just mentioned, all the boxes that need to be checked. If you can guide them through that process, then you’re not just an agent anymore, you’re a friend, you’re an advisor. And, again, that part of the business is the part that I enjoy the most. And that I think I you know, is what is attributable to most of my success for sure. And that’s what I would say to any new agent. And it’s difficult sometimes I would say to them, try not to focus on the deal. Of course you need to do that, you know, focus on the client. Focus on the human part of it, not the transactional part of it, and that person will will feel like you’re there for them. Right?
D.J. Paris 49:48 Everybody wants to be taken every hour. I shouldn’t say everyone most people want to feel taken care of and, but one of the ways you can demonstrate care is through, you know, all this extra effort for through real estate, right? So you can constantly reach out to clients. Hey, let’s talk about what were you guys thinking about, you know, the next three years? What are you thinking about the next five years? Here’s where I see, here’s, here’s an opportunity I see for you. Here’s something, you know, again, just having these future conversations, it’s, it’s actually very exciting to have those kinds of conversations with clients. And because they’re going to be excited about it, of course, everyone’s typically excited about some something in their future. And you can begin to plan that with them. I think that’s a really interesting approach.
Josh Myler 50:41 I totally agree. It’s huge. And again, for newer agents who are not, you know, they haven’t yet experienced the kind of success they know in their hearts, in some cases they deserve and they will have, it hasn’t come yet. And so it’s harder to to focus on those more, as you said, ethereal things and, and not just get caught in the, in the in the trees. You know what I mean? Focus more on the forest. And I think the best agents, new or old, are those that have the ability to to focus on the trees and the forest. Because I’ll tell you, a lot of your our clients don’t have that ability. They’ve got blinders on emotional blinders. So totally, totally agree with you, TJ.
D.J. Paris 51:34 Well, this is a great place to look, Josh meilleur is the guest. He is an incredibly successful and amazing, connected, passionate agent in Beverly Hills with the agency, please visit him at Josh meilleur.com. If any of our audience has people that move in and out of the Beverly Hills area and are you’re looking to work with Josh or maybe refer business to or from him, he would be honored to speak with you. So definitely reach out to him also follow him on Instagram, Josh sail, actually spelled J O S. H is actually not I’m not going to spell it, because I’m going to put it in the description. So I don’t have it in front of me. My apologies there. But Josh, Josh, this was a wonderful time. On behalf of our audience want to thank you for coming on our show You were amazing, really, really impassioned speech, I had a wonderful time. And on behalf of our audience. And on behalf of Josh and myself to our audience, we want to say thank you for making it all the way to the end of the episode. As always, please remember to tell a friend, think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from Josh. We did a lot of good work today on this in this conversation. So please send them a link to the podcast, keeping it real pod.com Is our website and you follow us on all the social channels as well. Josh, we appreciate you. And we are excited to talk to you in the future. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Josh.
Josh Myler 53:10 Thank you so much, DJ, this is a real pleasure. I’m totally honored to be a part of it. Thank you for inviting me to do this.
How To Talk To Your Real Estate Clients About Mortgage Rates • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Jul 29, 2023
Welcome to the July episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses the rates going up and the importance of informing the buyers. Joel emphasizes the importance of agents checking their client’s profiles and making sure they’re qualified to buy property. Joel also talks about how agents should always inform their clients about the rates since it may affect their loans. Last, Joel talks about how new agents should always have information on their clients and a strategy for them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today you’re going to learn what top 1% realtors are telling their clients about rates in inventory. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to a another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show. And today, once again, is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. And he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. It’s his 20th year, actually 21st year. And he got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. And last year alone, Joel gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him. And that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, there’s 400,000 loan officers in the country. And Joel is currently ranked number 137 out of 400,000, which is amazing. Last year, he did a tremendous number of transactions, his highest amount ever, actually. But this year, he’s already closed 157 transactions purchase transactions for just shy of $71 million. And if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with and he can be reached. So I want everyone if you’re interested in reaching out to Joel, you should be because he’s fantastic. It you can reach him a couple different ways you can email him. So joel@rate.com jvl@rate.com Simple enough, or send him a message on his cell, which is 773-654-2049. And we’re also going to talk about if you’re not currently receiving his weekly newsletter, which is fantastic because it gives agents really digestible talking points so that they can understand what’s going on in the world of lending with respect to rates, and maybe what the Fed is thinking and how the how the loan companies are reacting to that. And it gives you ammo so that you can talk more intelligently to your clients. And so definitely shoot Joel an email joel@rate.com asked to be put on his mailing list. And you’ll get those talking points every single week. Joel, welcome. Oh, I’m sorry. One more? No, that’s it. Okay. Joel, welcome to the show. Sorry, I
Joel Schaub 3:45 Am I no fanfare, but it’s just good to be back. And every single time I come on, it’s one of the best days of the month because we actually get to chat. We get to go through things that will help agents grow their business, and I’m just definitely happy to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:01 I’m happy you’re here too. And I it’s funny because Joel Of course, and his business is not immune to what’s going on in the market. We know it’s a challenging time for real estate with respect to low inventory higher rates than then we all would prefer. So it’s tricky. We know it’s a tricky year. But I loved I asked Joel just before on before he came on. I was like how’s your business? Because everybody I run into whether they’re a realtor, a loan officer and I almost everybody is like, Oh, it’s a tough year. And Joe’s like, you know, I know it’s a tough year but we’re actually doing really well. So I’m excited to talk with you because I want to hear about some of the things you’re seeing that’s working out there right now. Any edge that you can help give to an agent when they’re working. You know on the buy side or sell side possibly I’m sure you see opportunities both but let’s I guess maybe we should just first let’s let’s just get the rate question out of the way we know rates have crept a little bit up closer now to 7%. We know they were down a little bit last year. Last time we talked to in the mid 60s. So they’ve crept up a bit. How you know, what, what are your thoughts on rates and what realtor should be thinking about?
Joel Schaub 5:10 What’s funny DJ rate should have slowed buyers down, right if a payment on a mortgage on a 6.75% rate versus a 2.75% rate, but we’re just not seeing that we’re just still seeing buyers out there that are so strong. So in demand for properties, they’re just not finding properties. And that’s kind of comes back to the supply and demand issue. Right now, we’re having buyers still if it’s a hot property, coming in at full asking price and losing right or going above asking price, and lose. And I see this happening for the rest of the year until next year. We’re just not getting enough inventory to make it either a buyer or a seller’s market.
D.J. Paris 5:58 Yeah, it’s sort of that in between. And I wanted to read you something I found from Redfin. And no, you know what, I don’t have it in front of me. But Redfin did some sort of study. And I don’t know how accurate it is, I’m just assuming it’s accurate, where they said that they believe that once the rates get into the high fives, like I think, I can’t remember the exact specific number. But it was, it was, it was around five and a three quarter percent, right around there somewhere. And they said, as soon as that happens, and eventually we hope, of course, all of us hope it does, you were gonna see this mass influx, like that’s the that’s the buying temperature that people really want it to get to before buyers flood the market, which of course, if that happens, we have a whole nother set of problems, because then we have all these buyers flooding the market. So I think there’s a huge opportunity right now, and it’s a little bit of an uncomfortable, maybe opportunity. But I think the smart, the really, really savvy realtors are going to be talking to their clients about, hey, we know that rates are maybe a little higher than you would like. But here’s what happens when they go down. And here’s what happens couple of years ago, when they were at historic lows. Remember how hard it was to even buy a property then and we may see a you know, a duplication of that if rates even go down into the high fives. So I’m just curious sort of what your thoughts are, you know, we know the whole date, the rate marry the home, which I think is about as brilliant of a saying as exists because it is absolutely a smart play. But what are you seeing out there? What are you recommending to agents, buyer’s agents
Joel Schaub 7:31 are hear this all the time. And I want to make sure that we go through a concept where a buyer says, Well, I don’t want to buy it DJ, I want to wait until rates come down, right. And then just reminding the buyer that what happened when rates went down before now you have instead of three or four offers on every property you might have 10 offers on every property. So if you are able to make the payments on the mortgage, it’s still a good time to buy a piece of real estate. Now, if you can’t afford it, it doesn’t matter what the rate is, if you can’t afford the payment we shouldn’t be buying. So we want to make sure that we walk through the client’s profile and understand where they’re comfortable. Make sure that if they can afford rates that are in the sixes, when rates come down, they’ll have already owned the property, they’ll be able to refinance the debt even lower, and then just work with most banks that will allow you to refinance with no fees. Because that’s usually the next hurdle that people say is Well, of course I want to buy. But down the line, I don’t want to be charged 1000s and 1000s of dollars to refinance. And there’s plenty of companies not just mind that if you’re getting a mortgage, they will have no cost refinance rates down the line, we just don’t know when rates are going to drop DJ. And the feds are talking right now, as we’re getting ready to tape this, that by the time this airs, we’ll have another 25 basis point increase to the Fed rates. And we may still have one more to go. Looking ahead to 2024. There’s already calls for the first quarter of Fed cuts. So looking at March or April into next year is when we believe the feds will be cutting rates.
D.J. Paris 9:09 I think if I were if I were practicing agent based on what you just said, what I might do to talk to my on the fence buyers who are waiting for those rates to drop. I would I would go through the data and look back to when rates were in the threes and show the activity in my local market about what what what was the quantity of homes purchased in the price range of maybe what buyer that I’m working with. And look at the at just the production there. How many homes were listed, how quickly did they sell to make the case that maybe yes, maybe today of course rates are higher than they were when rates were much lower, but look at the activity now versus the activity that in other words, it’s a lot less competitive today to purchase a home. So I think there’s that there’s that a balancing act that Realtors need to think about is, let’s remember what rates were like sorry, let’s remember what what being a buyer’s agent was like, when rates were that low.
Joel Schaub 10:09 I just had a client last week call me and they already owned a condo, and they were getting ready to buy a move up property. And they were complaining to me that there’s just no inventory on the market. They just couldn’t find something that they wanted to buy. And then I asked him, I said, Well, what are you going to do with your condo, they go, Oh, we don’t want to list that. I have a rate of two and a half percent. I don’t want to list that. And I said, bingo. That’s the situation that you’re seeing. There are so many people that don’t want to list their home they have on it is now an asset. They are now below market. So why would we list this home, when I could collect rents on this home, right. And so this is where it’s going to change DJ, I truly believe there’s a lot of buyers that are in rates in the twos and threes, that there’s no way they’re going to trade up to a rate that’s going to be in the sixes and sevens, it’s too much to stomach. However, when rates drop down to the fives, it’s going to seem so much lower that sellers are gonna say, Okay, I don’t mind a five and a quarter percent rate, but I sure as heck didn’t want to take that 7% rate. And as soon as we see that, we’re going to see an influx of inventory. And that won’t be q1 of next year. But it’s coming, you guys, literally this is all cyclical. So we start to look and really think about what will happen in the future, there will be a lot more inventory on the market, when those rates come down to the fives. Because all of those sellers, just like my last couple that said there’s nothing to buy, well, they didn’t want to sell their home. So multiply that by 1000s and 1000s of other families doing the exact same thing. And the only time we’re gonna get additional inventory is when those rates come down. And that could be as soon as q2, or q3 of next year. So it’s coming.
D.J. Paris 12:02 Can we just quickly talk about and I know we’ve spoken about this before, but we do have new listeners every single month. Just really quickly for those that are uninitiated unfamiliar with this idea of a rate by down, which is a possible strategy to do right now, which will help make some of those buying those buyers a little bit happier for the next several years. Can we just quickly explain what that is and why an agent may want to explore that?
Joel Schaub 12:29 Well, a seller funded by down is the flavor and it comes in a couple of different varieties. But if the buyer themselves is paying for the rate by down, it doesn’t do the buyer any good, right. But if we can get the seller to give a credit, then the flavor that comes in and I like saying it like it’s a bunch of ice cream, right pick the one that you like, and it’s up to one rate by down which means in the year one, the rate would be 2% lower than the rate that was locked in. In the second year, the interest rate would be a full point lower than the rate that was locked in. And then years three through 30 The rates of the whatever we locked in. Okay, so let’s just take a perfect example, I had a client that was writing a contract on a $300,000 home, and they wanted to get a 3% credit to drive the rate down. Okay. So the interest rate at the time was 6.25. And if the seller were to give them nine grand, which is 3%, that more than covered a two one rate by down, which meant in year number one DJ, the rate the client had was four and a quarter percent. In year number two is five and a quarter. And then for the life of the loan going forward, it would be six and a quarter. And the strategy would be that sometime in the next two years rates will be lower than six and a quarter. Okay, we take it one step further. And I have a question for you. If the client is willing to pay nine grand more for the home versus not paying that nine grand. Do you think that the payment that they get on that mortgage would be better if they just took the lower price or use that to do a rate buydown? Well, that’s
D.J. Paris 14:09 what I was thinking and I I’m gonna I always guessed wrong, so I’m not going to guess but that was my way. My thought is why not just take the extra nine grand and not build it into the rate. So I’m loving. I can’t wait to hear your answer.
Joel Schaub 14:23 Well, on a $300,000 loan, your instinct was right. Okay. However, you’re going to be blown away by the dollar amount of savings of dropping the rate down to four and a quarter. So if they just took nine grand off the purchase price, right, and these clients were doing 20% down. So on a $9,000 reduction, their total payment dropped about $61 a month, right? Okay. I like $61 a month. But if they kept the nine grand as part of the purchase price, what we did was we used all $9,000 instead of spreading it out over 30 years. If we took it and put it into the first two years of the rate, that meant their payment dropped $410 In the first year, right, every single month, their payment was $410. Less. In year number two, the payment was still $224 A month less every single month. And then in year three, it was what they would have signed up for originally. And so it’s just a temporary solution to a real temporary problem. Okay, rates in the next two years, there’s no crystal ball, but we really believe that they will be lower, the Fed is indicating that they’re going to be lower. So let’s see if we can drive the rates down right now, during those first two years. If I’m an agent, I’m listening to this, what it means is, I might have been able to solve a problem for a buyer that said, I just can’t afford the payments with these rates. And you say, What if we got the seller to give you a rate reduction for the next two years? Oh, tell me more. I just heard about it on the keepin it real podcast, I know now how to do this. And you can actually pick up maybe one more buyer. Or if you have a listing that’s being on the market for too long, and it’s stale, why not offer this to the buyers, instead of doing a $20,000 price reduction, we could give a nine grand credit to drive down the rates for a buyer. So there’s all these things, if you can learn a little bit more, you’re gonna pick up another buyer or help a seller.
D.J. Paris 16:29 And this is a great time to mention that these are the kinds of tips and advice that you don’t just give us once a month on the show, which of course, we are so honored that you do, but also that you send these out to everybody in your database, in the form of these agent, sort of data points and Agent information on a weekly basis that any one of our listeners can subscribe to, to find this and literally get this force fed to them in their inbox once a month or sorry, once a week, so that they can then take that right to the to their client and seem you know, more knowledgeable and in the know. And so anyway.
Joel Schaub 17:03 Yeah, they’re hot. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 17:07 Now you’re making me hungry. But I would like I would always like some hot nuggets to be able to feed to my to my clients. And so the best way to do that, just shoot an email to joel@rate.com say, newsletter, please or newsletter, you know, just write newsletter in there, they’ll sign you up. And you’ll get this. And this isn’t a super long document that you get every week where you have to pour through it and look at so many things to actual, it’s really concise. It’s perfect for exactly what you need to know to be able to communicate intelligently.
Joel Schaub 17:38 Yeah, breaks it down and simple so that you can have one more piece of talking point when you’re out doing showings, you say, Hey, did you know about a rate by down? Or did you know that there’s other options in the market besides just 30 year fixed rate mortgages, right? Looking at Adjustable Rate Mortgages, looking at different terms on the mortgage. And in a way that’s not so cumbersome. We make it fun, we make it easy. And I’ve had such good feedback from agents that say I was actually able to get another buyer because of one of the information that you provided in the newsletter. So really, really powerful stuff joel@rate.com. And it’s as simple as if you’re driving, just sending a message saying add me to your newsletter, and then we’ll put you on and then you’ll get follow ups for weekly update, I want
D.J. Paris 18:23 to I want every one I want you to send an email to joel@rate.com get on his newsletter. And now I want to tell a story about you that I was just that just occurred to me that as you were talking, and I want people to really think about everyone listening, think about how to incorporate this into your own business. And so I apologize, I’m going to take over just for a moment because I want to share a strategy that I should be nervous. A little bit. No, no, no. So Joel was naked? No, he was not naked. So so this was during I want to say that in I can’t remember the exact timeframe. So Joel, you may need to correct me a bit. But But I noticed Joel was doing this, when several years ago when it was really It might have even been before rates went down. And we were kind of in COVID and everyone was struggling and no homes were transacting. And it was really tricky. And it must have been outside of COVID Because you were doing events. But regardless, this was a time in the market. I’ve known Joe for a long time. So I can’t again exactly recall when this happened. But it was a time in the market where it’s really difficult. So it’s kind of similar to now. And I was asking Joel cash, how are you doing? Because Joel is such a top one percenter that you know, any change in his business that dramatically affects his team and you know, he’s got a lot of responsibilities and and he goes you know, what we’re doing right now is we you know, yeah, in but you know, our transactions. This is years ago, our transactions are down, but here’s what we’re doing. And what he said was so simple and yet so brilliant. And it’s really paying off for him today. So I’m going to tell you something that is is is has worked for him to now be where most of the other loan officers are really struggling. Joel is actually thriving. So several years ago, I was asking Joel cash, you know, everyone’s down. And he goes, Well, what we’re doing is we’re putting our foot on the gas for a client appreciation events and Agent appreciation events. And I said, Okay, well, what does that mean? And Joel and his lovely wife, Christine, and their team that their team is amazing. They were doing you and Christine in particular, you guys are such a powerhouse team. You were doing events every single night, I think for a month straight, you had like two nights off, which of course, is a lot for anybody to handle. And I was like, Oh, my God, how are you doing? He goes, this is how we stay busy. During this time we do. We do events to make our clients feel appreciated. And we just hope that you know, down the road that ultimately will result in some business. And that’s not really the entire reason to do it. Joel loves giving back. He loves celebrating with his clients. And I thought, I don’t know any other loan officers that are literally doing events every single night for a month straight. And this is like kind of your life all the time. And obviously, not everyone can can do an event every single night. But I think this is the time to do as much of that stuff as you can, because you have some time. And I don’t mean Joel, of course, I mean, all of our listeners Joe’s already doing it. But can we just talk a little bit about the importance of these client events, I know they mean a lot to you, you really love doing them. And ultimately, you know, could that be one of the success secrets of your team?
Joel Schaub 21:30 It really is, it’s one of the things that if I’m an agent right now, and you have loan officers that are courting you reach out and find somebody who’s actually willing to do this with you. Okay, because the number one thing that you want is a true partner that will actually execute not just on the mortgage side, but also help you and RESPA compliant dollars to help marketing. So I can’t do it in every single state. But there’s so many realtors, where we are doing events for them, planning it, getting it set up, doing the invites, doing the catering, the food, the flowers, the bartender, and these don’t have to be major expenses, sometimes we get away with just a $600 event. And we split it, we each pay $300. I had one last week on South Michigan Avenue, a beautiful $4.2 million home and we spent about $6,600. But for that home for each of us to spend a little over $3,000 It really made sense. And so if I’m an agent, right now, I’m reaching out to one of those loan officers that I’m working with and saying, I want to do a party, I want to invite my clients, I want you to help me, and then find somebody that really will put their money where their mouth is. And this is why a lot of mortgage people don’t like me. Because I’m always the money preaching this go work with somebody that wants to support your business, all these loan officers call you and say I’m really good. We have great rates, I’m here to tell you, we’re almost the same. Okay, we really are. If you’ve been in the business a long time, everybody has good rates unless they have bad rates. Everybody’s fast. Okay, so what you want to do is partner with somebody that actually wants to help you financially, what a novel idea, right? And good loan officers will do that in droves. And it’s not so much having people come to the event DJ, it’s making the phone call and telling people, Hey, I have an event coming up. It’s the reach out in the touch. And that’s what makes all the difference if they can’t make it. Fine. But now you’ve connected with them. And you’ve done it in a way where you’re not asking for business. I mean, how many times can you call somebody and say, Oh, by the way, if you know anybody looking to buy or sell, send them my way. That’s old, that’s stale. That’s lame, go invite them to something fun, okay. And it doesn’t have to break the bank, but partner with a lender, or an attorney or a title rep or an insurance agent, get your team of people around you as an agent right now. And over the next couple of years. When you have people that are in your corner, you’re going to grow your business.
D.J. Paris 24:13 I want to just add to that to the team because I a couple nights ago was out in an event and talked to a divorce attorney and I always sort of forget about what it’s sort of an unfortunate position. You know, depending on on how you look at it. But you know, one thing we can say about divorces is they usually end up with somebody moving, maybe both people or certainly one person is going somewhere new and you know, in most situations, so I was talking to this attorney and I was and I said how did COVID affect marriage because of course it had to have some sort of measurable effect. And I expected him to say what he did say which was divorce rates are up. We all spent a little bit too much time with somebody that we weren’t I’m planning on spending in a smaller a small space. And some of us it bounded bounded us closer together and others about it took us further apart. And so my point is, is this is a great opportunity also to reach out to some divorce attorneys. They are very in demand right now. So it’s tough. But this is a great opportunity when you’re doing these events to say, hey, you know, would you like to participate? Would you like to come in and be there, and in a divorce attorneys again, are, are really, really busy right now. So that that’s an opportunity to to add somebody like that to your team. I wanted to also last, lastly, ask about oh, I wanted to talk about back to the client events for just a moment. Because one thing that I think Joel, you do exceptionally well, and I encourage everybody to follow Joel and I forgot to mention this earlier, follow him on social media, just called Joel is Instagram handle a Facebook as well just search for Joel, guaranteed rate just called Joe, you’ll find them and we’ll have links to it in our show notes. But you I want you to see the way that he takes these really generous events to really help you know, some some agents business, help their clients, you know, these appreciation events or parties. And I want you to see how effectively Joel makes sure that that he has people there that are photographing the event, he then takes those photos, he makes them look really professional. And then he sends them out via social media. And he tags the people in it. So they get notified that oh, I’ve been I’m in a picture with, you know, this event that I was just in, they may share it, they may comment, and you get a lot of marketing capital for just telling the story of hey, I just did this event. So it’s it’s, it’s the event itself, which is amazing for the people that are there. And then all the people that get to see this generous thing that was done. And you know, their friends are tagged in it or whatever also get to see the same thing.
Joel Schaub 26:49 It lives on more than just the night of the event. And that’s the whole point of this, right. So there’s a beat behind the scenes, which is leading up to it the phone calls and making sure that people feel invited to something that’s big and fun. And then it’s afterwards you have all the collateral, right? hire a photographer and the photographer’s don’t need to be expensive, okay? I think every time we do a photographer for an event, it costs us a couple $100 Max. And then they create the photos, they edit them, they get them back. And then I overused photos, I go back and I do photos from an event that I did three years ago, and I repost. And so I’m good about making sure that it lives on more than just the one day that you did the event. And as an agent, you can do the same thing to tagging your past clients and actually sending them out. During the holidays, a photo of themselves, there’s so many ways that you can leverage one event into something so much more so that you could literally be the man or woman in your community that people know when it comes to real estate. And again, it does not need to break the bank, you just need to get outside of this fear of Oh, nobody’s going to come or I don’t know what to do. Sit down and collaborate. Again, with a good lender lenders are big on helping so make sure that you find somebody that’s local that really works for you. And don’t be afraid, right? The biggest, you know, the biggest success stories were people that dared to fail. And I’ve done even just first time homebuyer seminars where one person showed up. But I’ll be damned if that person didn’t buy a home. And they did. So I’ve had first time homebuyer seminars were 100% of the attendees DJ, have bought a home and got a mortgage with me, right? And even if it’s just one, nobody’s too big to get one extra buyer. Okay, so go out.
D.J. Paris 28:45 And it’s kind of like going to the gym, right? You just have to commit to doing it consistently. And especially if it’s a client appreciation event, because you’re right, it could be just a weird weekend where you have this event planned and one person shows and you’re like, Okay, well this doesn’t work never doing this again. And Joel has done so many of these. He’s had massive successes, where everyone there, you know, is is buying and, and, and also big attendance. And then he’s obviously just mentioned low attendance stuff. And those are gonna happen to I mean, it happens on our podcast, some some episodes, we do get 10,000 20,000 listeners and some get 30,000 And then some get 5000. And I can’t tell you exactly the rhyme or reason to any of it. But if I if I looked at those numbers individually, I would cry or I’d be happy. But I don’t have a whole lot of control. And I think that’s the way you need to think about these client appreciation events. You do everything you can to get people’s butts in the seats, and you do enough of them to where you’re going to have some wins some losses. Either way, you just got to keep doing it.
Joel Schaub 29:43 I love that. And you just got to keep going out there and helping new buyers right. It’s not people that have already owned if you’re renting a place right now and you’re getting ready to buy. That’s one of the biggest segments of my business. It’s not people buying multimillion dollar homes. It’s truly somebody who’s never bought a home before, they’re just putting down 5%, or they’re putting down three and a half percent, and they want to feel taken care of they want to understand payments. And really what they want to understand is rates in this market, they’re fearful, am I buying in at the wrong time? And I always go through this analysis of what are they paying in rent DJ, and where we live here in Chicago, it’s very easy to have rent, that’s two or $3,000, right? It’s just not uncommon. And the interest rate on rent, I always like to say is 100%, right, the rate of return is 100%. Out the door, right? So none of that money goes towards yourself. And so I’d much rather have an interest rate of six or 7% than 100%, that’s rent to once we walk through that scenario. It’s something that you as an agent could use to, if you’re renting, every dollar that you pay in rent is interest. You don’t get anything back, there’s no tax deductibility. And you’re not building equity. So paying six or 7%, much better than 100%. And it leads me to this. Most people when they talk about rates, they’re just focused on 30 year fixed rates, but buyers really should talk to their lenders about all the options right now. Okay, because a lot of buyers since they won’t have rates for 30 years in this mortgage should look at adjustable rate mortgages. And I know that can be scary for a lot of people hearing that term, because they think back to the subprime days, where the rates were so low, and then they spiked up on borrowers in the first year or two. That’s not the case anymore. So an adjustable rate mortgage comes in three flavors, five, seven, and 10 are the most common. And having a mortgage that’s fixed for seven years, for example, that’s a long time. It really is. And we believe rates should be lower, probably in the next two years, even next year. So why lock in a 30 year fixed rate if you don’t need to?
D.J. Paris 32:04 And also, that’s a really smart idea. And also to I mean, I remember when I bought my first property, it was even in the coffers quicker. Sorry about that. I, I didn’t know anything about rates, the rate was what it was. And I think it was in the fives I think or fours, I can’t remember. But whatever it was, it was my first time buying I didn’t know that was high low. I just knew Okay, well, that’s what it is. Here’s what I can afford. And it just wasn’t even a thought because there wasn’t an option. I mean, I guess I could have waited, but I didn’t know anything about it. And so I actually think you’re right, I think talking to renters right now is one of the smartest things you can do because they most of them probably aren’t rate conscious. They’re not thinking about that. They’re just trying to figure out how do I move from renting to buying and, you know, they may be able to do it with these high rates right now. And again, less competition less buyers out there, they might get a better, you know, price on the home they’re going to go for because there’s less buyers. So I think this is I think that is such a smart idea to talk to everyone that’s renting and just ask them Hey, what are you thinking about in terms of buying? Are you thinking about wanting to do that? You know, forget about rates when are you thinking about when would you like to do it if we could wave a magic wand because it might actually be a good time right now. And that’s that’s the conversation I’d be having an I guarantee you nobody is calling those renters and saying that that realtors to pretty much only want to talk to renters when the renter picks up the phone and calls them and says I want to buy something. So here’s an opportunity to bring that to a renter who might not even have thought about buying at this time.
Joel Schaub 33:35 You’re exactly right, low downpayment deejay do not need to break the bank for those first time homebuyer programs. If a client is paying two grand a month in rent over the next year, they’re gonna spend $24,000. Let’s go buy a $300,000 condo, we’re all you need to put down as 15 grand. I’m telling you, if you can pay $24,000 over the course of a year, you can save $15,000 for a downpayment. Most people already do have it saved, but they’re still thinking that rates are too high, or they want to wait. And it’s not wrong. We’re just going to show them something that’s more right. All right. So there’s a lot of opportunities. Get out there as an agent, and speak to renters. Make sure that they know that there’s an opportunity to not be throwing all that money away in rent, buy something, subscribe to the newsletter. I’ll give you tidbits that will absolutely help you close more deals and we like to call them hot nuggets.
D.J. Paris 34:31 Well, to subscribe to those hot nuggets, go. Go to your email and type in joel@rate.com jvl@rate.com send him an email, let him know in the subject line. You want to subscribe to the newsletter and he and his team will get you signed up and they do good good work guys. It’s really really it’s like it’s like getting an abbreviated revert Reader’s Digest style. Nobody knows Reader’s Digest anymore, but an abbreviated version of a lot of complicated information but with enough detail Al, where you’re not going to sound unintelligent or uninformed, you’re going to actually sound really, really well informed, but you’re not going to have to pull out the textbook and start studying because Joel and his team have done that for you. So go to go to your email, send sign up for that. Also follow him on social to see how Joel takes some of this marketing collateral through all these events and how he promotes that on social it’s a great masterclass in promotion. So please do follow him just call Joel is his his username, but you can find him on all social channels, just look for Joel shop, and we will have a link to his social in our show notes. But Joel, this is a great time to wrap up. Also, if you are an agent, and you don’t have a great relationship with a loan officer, or you’re kind of like, hey, maybe I’ll see what else is out there. also reach out to Joel and his team and see if you guys could work together you know, guaranteed rate of license in all 50 states, Joel and his team can help you in certain markets, other markets Joel know who to, you know, to pass you over to but this might be a great opportunity to build a wonderful relationship with a loan officer who will actually help you grow your business as opposed to just be there when you need, you know, a pre approval letter Joel and his team do a lot, lot, lot lot more than that. So reach out to him and see if you guys would be a synergy and work together. Joel, thank you so much for your time today. I’m glad to hear that you your team is still crushing it. It’s always so inspiring when I hear agents doing well in despite, you know, sort of somewhat difficult situation or circumstances. And I love hearing that it’s such a great positive breath of fresh air. And I know it provides our audience with a lot of value. So thank you, of course, on behalf of Joel and myself. We also want to say thanks to the audience for sticking it out to the end of the show. Please tell a friend about our podcasts. That’s the best way you can help us and also one thing I always forget to mention support our sponsors. They’re the ones who pay the bills. We love our sponsors. We have great sponsors, check out their services and consider buying or you know, investing in the products they have. They’re always for realtors that are looking to increase their business and we only choose sponsors that we think actually can help you. So reach out to Joel joel@rate.com Get on his newsletter. Follow him on social and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Joel.
Why You Need To Get Trained In Negotiation Strategy • Eirik Gislason
Jul 28, 2023
Eirik Gislason a Lic. RE Associate Broker at Brown Harris Stevens and MCNE Instructor, Real Estate Negotiation Institute, shares his 16 years experience as an Associate Broker, Trainer, Mentor, Coach, Manager, and Director of Sales. Erik discusses the importance of negotiation training for agents. Next, Eirik emphasizes that agents must know the core values of their clients get to know them very well. Last, Eirik discusses the importance of identifying your client’s needs to make better connections.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Do you know that less than 1% of practicing agents have taken a course on how to negotiate effectively? Let’s get you into that 1% Today, stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top 1% producer and master trainer Eric David Gislason. Before we get to Eric, just a couple of quick reminders guys, best way you can help us at our show, if we’re helping you is by a couple of ways. Tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit like today’s topic is a lot about negotiation. And so we’re going to this is a topic everybody needs to be aware of. So send this over to other agents in your office, we would appreciate it and the second way to support our show is by supporting our sponsors. We have the greatest sponsors in the world. They pay the bills for all of us. So please check out their products and services. I promise you every sponsor we have on our show has been thoroughly vetted. They are the real deal and I wouldn’t put anyone in front of you that wasn’t going to help your business. So check them out, please. Thank you. Thank you. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Eric Gislason.
Today on our show, we have Eric Davey Gislason with Brown Harris Stevens in New York City. Let me tell you more about Eric. Now Eric Davy gets listen is a master certified negotiation expert. He’s also a national instructor for the real estate negotiation Institute and founder of archway partners coaching. In addition, he’s a practicing associate real estate broker at Brown Harris Stevens with 17 years of experience in residential real estate as an agent, manager, trainer and director of sales. Eric is a well known speaker, panelist podcast guest and contributor on the subject of collaborative negotiation, value proposition and persuasion. He authors the blogs, unreal estate, and growing the pie and you can follow and subscribe. At Eric the expert, which is on all the social channels in particular YouTube and Instagram. We will have links to that in the show notes. But to see his video content on social media Eric is also originally from Minnesota and lives in Queens, New York City I will actually be coming to Queens in a month, maybe I’ll ask for some sort of advice for I go to the US Open and with his wife and two daughters. By the way notable award winner he is the world’s best dad 2012 through 2015 skipped a year but in 2017 wanted again skipped another year in 2018. But he was back to win it in 2019 through present day, please I’m gonna give you a couple of things to follow Eric on all of these things are really cool and interesting. So please listen, we will have links to all of what I’m about to say in the show notes. But what go to his coaching company for realtors, which is called archway partners inc.com Also, if you’re interested and you should be to become a certified negotiation expert, go to the regni.com That’s th e r e n i and you’ll see all the classes that you can attend there and then again follow him on Instagram and YouTube. Eric the expert which is e i r i k th e expert at YouTube, Instagram and everywhere else and we will have links to all of that so you don’t have to remember how to spell Eric in the show notes Eric, welcome to the show.
Eirik Gislason 4:59 Hey, TJ, thank you so much. Thank you for all of the plugs. And it’s a pleasure to be here. I am looking forward to our conversation. So thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 5:08 I am looking forward to it as well. I would like to start, I guess, at the start. So I do that with with almost all of our guests. But I am really interested, especially with somebody who’s been in real estate for almost 20 years now. How did you get in and why?
Eirik Gislason 5:25 Well, I love telling the story. And many, like many of your guests as I listened to your podcast, you know, there’s, it seems like we all have these strange ways of finding real estate, you know, it’s not something that seems like is the beginning of our path as we grow up and go through school and into college. So I actually moved to New York City to be an actor back in 1998, after graduating from college and starting a theatre company in, in in Minneapolis before moving to New York. So I had dreams of becoming an actor. I was an actor in New York for about 10 years, I did the tour thing, and I did regional theater, and commercials and voiceover work. And then I met my wife. And we’re doing a regional theater job in Roanoke, Virginia. She was a dancer, I was a character actor and a singer. And, and shortly after that, I think I realized that the theater world gave me what it was going to give me. And when I found my wife, and I and I needed to make a change. I was not a successful actor, I was not making a great living doing it. And so shortly after getting married, I was recovering from an from a knee injury from knee surgery. And I was temping I was I couldn’t work in restaurants anymore. Because of my knee. I was not acting. And I met somebody who was at a temp job. But it was also taking phone calls for real estate. And he’s the first person that actually gave me a real kind of behind the scenes or, you know, under the hood, look at what real estate was. Without sugarcoating it without making it into this fantasy. And he said, Look, you see I’m here at this temp job, because sometimes you know, the money is flowing. And sometimes it’s not, I’m trying to go to law school. And so you do what you have to do. But here are the skills required. And here’s what will make a good real estate professional. And I left that temp job thinking, I think this is something I would be good at. And so the next week I signed up for pre licensing in New York, the pre licensing process is ridiculously easy. It’s a little bit harder now than it was but it was a couple $100.45 hours worth of course of classroom work and then taking your tests. So two weeks later, there I am, I’m a licensed real estate professional looking for for a brokerage. And I was lucky enough to align myself with a company, a small company that was really good at helping generate and acquire leads for their agents. So I didn’t have to do the whole Craigslist thing getting my own leads. And I was able to hone my craft working with a lot of clients because I was given opportunities I was given at bats, as we say. And so I spent 10 years at that company, 10 years at that firm before then leaping and and going back into brokerage after being a director of sales and development for five years. So I grew that firm. They were a small firm, and I grew that firm in management and then went back into the field as an agent. And then shortly after that, I was introduced to the real estate negotiation Institute. So I 10 years of experience in the business. And I took a continuing education course on collaborative negotiation through this company, the real estate negotiation Institute, and I left that class completely blown away blown away by the content blown away by these the style of the teaching blown away by everything and I shortly thereafter contacted Tom Haman who’s the founder and CEO of the real estate negotiation Institute and said I think I need to coach for you I think I need to be an instructor. So I so that started my journey being a master certified negotiation expert and a national instructor for the real estate negotiation Institute, which I’ve been doing now for almost eight years while also having a full time real estate practice at Brown Harris Stevens.
D.J. Paris 9:30 Wow. And we should mention too that you have a coaching company for real estate agents archway partners, Inc. Tell us tell us a little bit about that.
Eirik Gislason 9:39 Well, it’s interesting Mike I was doing when I teach my courses, my my negotiation courses, I always inevitably have a few agents who want some additional coaching Who wants some additional help. And what I started doing was doing more mentorship, consulting, I called it coaching and it wasn’t and it wasn’t until I went on the journey of actually going through a coaching program, I went through a program that coach you for for several months, and then got my own mentor coach, so that I could really learn what it is to coach what it is to walk alongside someone support them, and and be more of an accountability partner and a support for them in their journey. What is it that they want to achieve? What is it that they want to do with their real estate career? What are your core values? Where have you been? Where are you in? Where do you want to go? And when I really started to understand my role as a coach, it became this beautiful marriage because what we talk about in in the certified negotiation, expert designation courses, is this idea of value proposition, right, the cost benefit analysis, and what are your benefits? How do you develop that value proposition? How do you understand what you have to offer? Any decision maker, any purchaser? Any landlord? Right? So that’s our jumping off point. That’s our tangent point, the value proposition. And when we look at that through a coaching lens, there are so many places we can go with that when we understand who we are, when we understand what we offer, and then how do we tailor that to each and every client. So that’s where archway partners that you know, the idea of the of the archway the doorway and walking through to new possibilities came from and now I’ve had my coaching company for about 18 months now.
D.J. Paris 11:29 That’s an incredible congratulations on that I was I was thinking if I were an agent in New York City, one of the it really anywhere, but specifically because you practice in New York City. And I want to talk about what the benefits are to becoming a certified negotiation expert, and why collaborative cooperation is really a sorry, collaborative. I apologize for the the term that you use that I wouldn’t
Eirik Gislason 11:55 get cooperation. It’s fits right in there. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 11:58 I was thinking a couple of things I want to talk about with that. Because you’ve sort of sparked something that I hadn’t thought of before. But I do want to mention before I get too in depth that I always forget to mention this. But if you are an agent in the New York area in New York City, in particular, Eric’s team is always looking for talented agents to you know, add value and where they can add value to you. So I was thinking as you were talking, if I was looking for, for a team, one of the things that agents I think these these days, just behind the scenes for a lot of people, if you’re not sort of even haven’t figured this out, yet working as an agent, a lot of times the managing brokers of firms are have a lot of responsibilities, they have to recruit talent, they have to retain talent, they have to do all the operations and the compliance, and they have to also coach and train. So over the years, what managing brokers have kind of figured out is we have some really great teams, sometimes the teams can help take over some of those responsibilities, specifically, around training and coaching, right make sense. And Eric is a professional Coach and Trainer and a certified negotiation master trainer. So if I were an agent, and I was like, I’m not quite getting the love and training and support that I need in my existing firm, I would be reaching out. So definitely reach out to him again, easiest way is just find him online. You can find them at Eric the agent, again, that’s EIR ik the agent level I’m sorry, Eric, the expert rather, Eric, the expert, Instagram, YouTube, etc, we’ll have links to that if you are thinking this is the year for a lot of agents are moving. So I’d be remiss if I forgot to mention that. But here’s what I really wanted to thank you for your welcome. Here’s what I really wanted to ask you while you were talking about collaborative, this sort of collaborative training. You know, I was thinking, as you go into negotiations or when you go into a deal, I would think that the vast majority of agents who haven’t been trained on value proposition, are probably just thinking about their own wants and needs and thinking how do we get what we want? Without thinking as you were saying, sort of understanding the holistic deal? What is the other side want? What are their motivations? What are they willing to just sort of negotiate and bend on? And I think that is such a an important skill that really isn’t hardly taught anywhere.
Eirik Gislason 14:16 It’s so true, it is so true. And one of the things that drew me to the real estate negotiation Institute and this content is exactly what you just said, this is not something that we are taught in pre licensing. Some people bring it from their earlier career if they’re if, if, if a real estate is a is a second career for them, but it’s not something that we’re taught and, and frankly, to your point a lot of managing directors and office managers and sales directors and I was a sales director for a long time. You’re so involved with so many things within each and every deal that it’s hard to sit down and have time to really get deep and train on negotiation and buyer psychology and This idea of understanding the other side’s needs, not that you’re going to guarantee them anything, not that you can guarantee them anything. But when we when we integrate the other side’s needs into our strategy. This is what Tom Heyman calls, he calls it the enlightened self interest, when when I know what the other side wants, and I do my best to incorporate their needs their value elements into trades into exchanges in the deal, I can actually grow a bigger pie. And that’s the reason my one of my two blogs is called growing the pie. Because we’re not talking about just a fixed pile of value. When we’re talking about a real estate transaction, everybody values things differently. And if I can identify what the other side wants and needs, and identify ways to exchange things of lesser value to me, to get things of greater value to me from the other side and do that strategically, I can actually make that pie bigger. And I can and I’m not, you know, I want the other side to be adequately satisfied, I don’t need them to get you know, it’s not kumbaya by the fire, right, this is not split the pie 5050 I want them to be adequately satisfied. So I don’t deal with the retribution or the entrenchment, the things that come along with putting someone on their heels or rubbing their nose in the dirt or whatever the the imagery is, I need to adequately satisfy them. And when I do that, I can actually create more value on my side of the transaction and get more than I would if I were just trying to split that fixed pie. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 16:32 I agree. And that’s a skill set. And it isn’t necessarily something that we all just can instinctively or inherently know ourselves. It’s something there are in I studied DBT dialectical behavior therapy, and there’s one of their modules is called interpersonal effectiveness, which is like, Okay, what does that really mean? It’s about having difficult conversations with people. In real estate, we oftentimes have to have difficult conversations, and it’s about how to meet both people’s needs. But first, you have to understand their needs. And I was thinking, an example that I’m curious to get your thoughts on would would be, I have a buyer, we’re putting in a contract, maybe there’s a multiple offer situation, and I’m just thinking, well, highest and best is going to win, which maybe most of the time is true, but not always, of course, and knowing what the other side’s motivations are knowing what they want from a buyer, and maybe it’s just highest and best. Or maybe it’s we put a lot of work into this house, we sort of want the next family that comes in to sort of understand and appreciate and respect what we’ve done, because we want to we want to sort of create a little bit of a legacy here, even with our existing, you know, work that we did with the home. So I guess, would that be considered out of understanding?
Eirik Gislason 17:44 I absolutely. And and I’m you know, this is, this is such a part of who we are as human beings. And we forget it sometimes as real estate professionals, because we put everything into downpayment timeline. And, and highest price, when that is not how every human being thinks in fact, we it’s not like, you know, let’s say that you are in a highest and best and it’s a million dollar property. And you’ve got a few buyers who are above the asking price at 1.1. But let’s say that you are at 1.08 or $20,000 off of the highest bidder. But you have made some sort of an appeal that is not price related or downpayment related that that that is that is important to or that lands with that seller. It’s not that they’re giving up $1.1 million. They’re making a trade on $20,000. And the question is, what is that thing, that connection, the fact that somebody is going to come in and take care of that home the way that they took care of that home? Right? What is what is that one thing or that as Chris Voss for never split the difference? That he calls those black swans? Right? What is that black swan? If there’s something that I can find out by being ceaselessly curious, by asking questions of the other side, that gives me a window into what they really want, and what they really value, then they they might be happy to give up $20,000 To satisfy that need that value element that’s important to them. So we often mistake this idea that, that, you know, the price is the only thing that matters. Or if I’m not 100% If I’m not all cash, I can’t compete. It’s just not true, if we can understand if we can start with the other side, and uncover those black swans understand those value elements. So that’s a great example.
D.J. Paris 19:43 Well, thank you and I was it’s just the first thing that came to mind but I was thinking, you know, your, your sort of further example of, you know, being $20,000 under highest and best and still possibly winning the deal. It’s really an important thing because most times the other side isn’t going to be would go out and spend that 20,000 is cash, it’s probably just going into the next property. And you know, odds are, there may even be a mortgage on the file on the next property. So that’s just all going in to, you know, an extra 50 bucks a month or something. And in payment, it’s it’s kind of a really a nothing, if it’s only looked at as highest and best and yeah, maybe that’s maybe that that will make the difference. But understanding that, you know, yeah, we’re coming in a little bit under, but I sort of have an idea of what the owner wants, and, you know, and being able to meet their needs in a different way, and still get your clients a little bit less than, than maybe, you know, what, what everyone else would have paid, I love I love all of us. Again, to me, these are all skills, and we are not taught about these in high school. I didn’t learn them in college, I did study persuasion, and understanding rapport and understanding how to, you know, how to listen, and how to, you know, sort of extract information, you know, in an elegant way from the people I’m chatting with. So I would I would love to, but actually before, before we go any further I would, because you are a coach, you lead a team, you’re also practicing yourself, and you teach at a national level. This is a tough year for realtors, I did meet somebody last night at a party, one of the top agents here in Chicago, who said he’s up 50%. And he’s the only person I know, everyone else’s is pretty much struggling who’s been in the business long enough. And we were laughing and he’s like, Yeah, I know, everyone hates me, because, you know, they, they everyone else is down. But but it is a tough year, I think for a lot of us, and rates are up inventory is down. I know in New York, it’s really tough with inventory. So what what are you doing to keep? Or what are you telling your students as well as your teammates to sort of keep them motivated? And and you know, moving forward, when it’s so easy to just to kind of go like, Ah, this is just hard right now?
Eirik Gislason 21:49 Yeah, I really do believe that we have to have these conversations with ourselves about how are we going to move from where we are right now to a market that we know is going to get better? Right? So first thing is to understand that this where we are right now is temporary. The question is, can you last? Through that time? Is that an easy thing for you? Or is that a hard thing for you? Are you on your last dollar and and not earning a living for another three months? If you’re not doing deals? Is that going to crush you? If it is, then let’s either put a plan together so that you can find a different way to maneuver through this industry? Are you know, are you? Are you doing rental deals rather than sales deals? Are you working on the sell side versus the buy side? Right? Are there things that we can do to help you on a different path than you’re on right now? Right? And then there are other agents who are like, Yeah, I know, I’m gonna survive this. It’s not an issue, whether we’re going to survive this. It’s a matter of how long this is going to be. And what do I do in the meantime? And so what I tell agents is, first of all, there is and this is a almost cliche, because so many people are saying it, but it’s absolutely true. This idea that this is a skills based market, right, I’ve, you know, I’ve been listening to some of your other podcasts, and we’re, you know, you’re talking about that, you know, the people running through to 2021, and part of 2022, you know, you could just throw a, you know, a sign in the yard, and you’ve got 30 people making offers, right, it was a market that did not require as much skilled, certainly required skill, but didn’t require as much skill as the market that we’re in now, right now, not only are you competing to get that next listing and find that next buyer, if you’re on the listing side, but you’re competing with a smaller amount of business, and agents all fighting for that business. So how are you going to get a bigger piece? To your point, this agent who’s up 50%? How do you get a bigger piece of a shrinking pie? And that’s where you need to really focus your energy, in my opinion, is if you if you go through, you’ve already figured out look this this in this industry right now where we are, it’s not going to kill me, it’s not going to take me down. So I know that I can make it through it. Now the question is, what do you do with this time, and if you can focus on getting a bigger slice of that shrinking pie, that’s, that’s going to give you a goal to actually maneuver towards or move towards. So you start doing things like understanding in a in a more deep and, and and higher level way. You’re the idea of negotiation of buyer psychology of actually going into those pitches. And instead of getting one out of three, or one out of two, you’re getting every one, how are you going to increase your odds of getting each deal? How are you going to build loyalty with each and every buyer, so that they end up being a deal rather than losing buyers here and there as you might be accustomed to doing? So how do you maximize the business that you do have and make sure that you win? Each and every time right this go and this goes back to the highest and best two, there are going to still be highest and best. But if you’re more prepared, or if you’re if you can prepare your buyers better, you’re going to find yourself on the winning side of that highest and best more often than on the losing side. And my one of my old bosses used to call the spilling milk, right? We, when we’re busy, we have a lot going on. And we’re just trying to keep every keep everything you know, in our hands. As we run forward, we have spilling milk left and right, but we don’t really care about the milk that spills because by the end of the time, we’re stopped running, we still have enough milk to drink, right, we’re just constantly going going going well, in a market that we’re in right now, we don’t want to spill milk, we want to make sure that we have as much milk there, maybe less milk in the glass to begin with. So we don’t want to lose more milk. And we can end that same journey with the same amount of milk, we just haven’t spilled a lot of it. And that’s what that’s what I usually teach people in this market is look, let’s figure out how you’re going to make it to the next level, because there will be another great market on the other side of this. But we do need to enhance our skills, and create an environment where we win more often.
D.J. Paris 26:07 I agree, and I think this is the time to really focus on skill based activities, because number one, most agents have a little bit more time to spend with sharpening their their skill set their tools. And also this is a time where human nature for the most for the majority of us and I’m in the same category. So I’m not saying that this is a negative, it’s just human nature is to want to when things aren’t as well maybe retreat a little bit and and, you know, do less activity because maybe we’re a little bummed out or or we’re so this is the these are the times where you might have to force yourself to do a little bit more activity. But understanding that you’re really doing your future self a huge favor by doing things today, and most agents are not most agents, I don’t know what percentage of agents have have reduced their activity. But you know, I just know that when when things are tough, you know, it’s easier to not go into action. And so this is the time to get an accountability partner, get a coach, you know, and really work on those skills and those habits so that you know what you’re doing today, a year, a year and a half from now will start to yield fruit or however long, you know, the the sales cycle is. And but yeah,
Eirik Gislason 27:20 to add to that, you know, I think that oftentimes, when we when we do find ourselves here, we’re We’re retreating, like you said, and we’re doing a little bit less a little bit less work than we know that we should be doing at the time. Sometimes the reaction to that from a lot of coaches in our industry or a lot of managers is to tell you the things that you need to do. And oftentimes, they highlight the things that you are least likely to want to do, right. So they basically say, these are the things you’re not doing. And this is why you’re not not successful. So you got to get out there and do all those things that you don’t like to do, because that’s the way that you’re going to break the cycle. Where I you know, certainly we have to do things that we don’t want to do, especially if we’re sitting on a couch, and we find ourselves not working as hard as we should be working. But my approach is a little different. I want to identify the things that you love to do. And you may have found that your real estate career for two years, you’re running around like a chicken with your head cut off. So you’re just trying to just get to the next place and do the next deal. And you forget about what you love about this business, what you love about people what you love about your knowledge, what you know, all the things that make this an attractive business. So my approach is to sit down and say let’s start with the things that you love, and do a lot more of that. So I’d rather you do 100% more of something that you love, than struggle to do 25% more of something you don’t like, and it doesn’t have to be Yeah, I want
D.J. Paris 28:56 to pause here for a second because that is such a wise, a wise wise statement doing more about what you especially when you’re you’re in a more difficult position. Like we know a lot of agents are this year. Yes, we know it. We know it’s a little bit of a bummer right now. And it’s easy to retreat. So what we call it and DBT stalking positives, do the things that you already liked to do. And here’s why. And I’m not I’m not trying to tell teach Eric anything, obviously here. But well, the only reason I’m mentioning is I was just I just learned this so Gallup the people who do lots of polling there big polling companies, a lot of people know they have this strength and weakness finder, and we had a professor from from Northwestern come in who’s trained. And she assessed our strengths and weaknesses. And I think there was 38 of them. And she goes whatever you were your bottom five are, don’t even try to improve those because she’s like, the data is really, really clear that you can’t, you can’t It’s not how you’re wired. It’s really you maybe can make them incrementally better. But like for example her most her biggest weakness was empathy. And she goes, it’s kind of funny, I wish I wasn’t empathic. I’m just not, it’s how I’m built. So I don’t try to pretend that I’m empathic I, I tried to focus on all the other positives, things that I do have a strike, she goes, so if you come to me for empathy, you’re probably not going to get what you need. We but she goes, my partner happens is very high in empathy. And so she sort of balances, her wife balances it out. But the point is, is know what your strengths are, know what you like to do, because you’re right, it’s much easier to get into action with the things that you want to do and you like doing and then you can build from there.
Eirik Gislason 30:34 Exactly. You know, it’s funny, the StrengthsFinder, the Gallup strengths, their system, my brother and I are building online content for my coaching company. And he’s a certified Gallup strength. Oh,
D.J. Paris 30:48 that’s funny. Oh, what a small world. Yeah,
Eirik Gislason 30:51 the great, it’s a great assessment. And they’re right on, I mean, this idea of, of not doing the things that you don’t excel at, but understanding, and this is great for interpersonal relationships, too, as well. You’re right. I mean, when you when you are a manager, or a coach, or a team leader, or just an agent, having interactions with clients, when you can look across and identify when you know what your strengths are. And you can start to identify potential strengths or strengths that the other side has, then you start making connections. Or if they have different sets of strengths, you then can understand why, you know, if you’ve got somebody who’s low on empathy, or empathy is one of their lowest strengths, you can start to understand then why or how you need to communicate with them in order to have a more successful relationship, rather than always butting heads because your strengths are completely different.
D.J. Paris 31:43 Yeah, it makes sense. And also, like you were saying, assessing the other person, especially like, during presentations, you talked about buyer and seller presentations. And I think so many of us think about first, okay, we got to learn a script, we got to know what we’re going to do when we get there. And we’re probably, realistically, we’re probably doing the same kind of pitch, every single time because we we’ve committed to memory, we’ve done it hundreds of times, maybe if we’ve been in the business long enough, and it has a certain success level. And we’re like, Hey, I do close one out of every three listing presentations, I do. But if you’re doing the same exact listing presentation each time, there’s probably a missed opportunity there to get some feedback from the person on the other side of the table, and then adjust your your, your strategy to better meet that person’s needs, which probably means not doing the same presentation in exact same way every single time.
Eirik Gislason 32:38 100%. And this, I actually have a course that I teach throughout my archway partners called the decision makers. And it’s all about so going back to the first thing we talked about, which is starting with the other side, identifying the other side’s needs, what Who are they right? So when we do a value proposition, we have to separate that make a huge distinction between what value proposition is and what a pitch is, right? We do a listings pitch, we call it a listing pitch, it’s really a value proposition. The pitch is something you given an elevator, it’s generic, it could be to anybody, right? It’s that thing that sells your product or service the best? Whereas a value proposition is something a little bit or vastly different in that value proposition must be in order for it to be at its its most effective, it must be tailored to the decision maker to whom you are pitching. So are they an assertive driver? Are they a collaborative feeler? Are they an expressive humanist? Are they an analytic thinker? What type of buyer is this? Or decision maker? Is this? And how are they best influenced? Right? Are they data driven? Do they love stories? And this is a huge aha I think for any negotiator is that when you go in and you you’ve tailored that pitch, you know exactly what you’re gonna say when you’re gonna say it. It’s basically a script, you’re forgetting the most important part who the client is. Right? Who are they. And when you if you can hone that skill of identifying different buyer types or different as I call them decision maker types, you are going to find these, all of these new doors open up and now you have this menu of benefits. And just like looking at a menu in a in a restaurant, you can start to pick the five the six benefits that convey the most utility to that specific decision maker. And you will find that your hit rate, your success rate is off the charts because now you’re the person across the table feels like you’re speaking directly to them and you’ve got a window into their heart, their mind, their soul, whatever. You know, you’re just so much more impactful and persuasive. When you know who you’re who it is that you’re dealing with
D.J. Paris 34:58 it and it’s more are intimate. And when I mean intimate I mean connecting, because you have taken feedback from the other person, you are then processing that yourself and making adjustments to fit that person’s worldview, their beliefs, etc. They’re their values. And and I think, you know, if we think about this, because I hear Realtors talk about this all the time, which is I don’t like selling to a certain type of individual, I don’t like selling to an analytic person, because all they want is the numbers. It’s not emotional. Other people love it. My point is, is what if you could learn how to speak their language, you’d, you maybe you’d enjoy working with those agents or those clients more, but more importantly, maybe you just be more effective at it, which means you’d close more deals, whether you like it or not, you’re still going to come across people who aren’t have the same sort of way they process information and make decisions like you were saying the decision making sort of understanding the decision makers and the strategies. And then it wouldn’t it be cool to go into a listing presentation or buyer presentation, having like five or six different styles of pitches, and then knowing Oh, this is this kind of person, I think I’m going to push the conversation more towards this because I know that this tends to sort of, you know, tickle the ivories of that particular, you know, thought process of that individual. That is incredible power as opposed to just, Oh, it’s another one these analytics people, I don’t know how to do this.
Eirik Gislason 36:23 100% your absolute right. And, and, and coaching, we call that flexing right? So I can flex my approach to meet that person where they are. It’s not they’re not being a jerk. You know, whatever label we put on them, they’re a jerk. They’re irrational. They’re, they’re, they’re crazy, you know, we put all of these labels on people, because we don’t know how to connect. So what you’re saying is absolutely right, if we can flex our approach and go, Okay, this is an assertive driver, they don’t want to have a personal relationship with me, they’re not going to ask me about my family, and my kids and where I went to college, if they do ask me where I went to college, it’s going to be to that whether they believe the college that I went to, is suitable for their needs, right. And if I can, if I understand that about them, it’s they’re not mean, they come off as your typical negotiator, very competitive negotiator. But they are in the everybody acts in their own interests. And their interest is to hire the person that they believe is going to do the best possible job for them. They don’t want a shrinking violet. They don’t want somebody who’s going to wind around telling stories or or use puffery or BS them on, on on the answer to a question they don’t know. They want you to be direct. They’d rather you say, You know what? That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer, or? That’s a great question. I know that you’re going to want specifics, you’re going to want details. I understand that. So before I answer the question, let me get you the specifics and the details that I know that you want. So that I can give you an answer that’s going to be that’s going to satisfy your needs. Imagine, if our agent said that to us, we’re a buyer or seller, and we’re an analytic. And our agent said that to us, it would be like music to our ears. And now all of a sudden, that trust component is going through the roof, when you didn’t think you could build trust with that person at all, you don’t think they will trust anybody. And now all of a sudden, you’ve connected with them on their level. And so now they start to that that trust factor starts to go up and up and up, and you change the relationship.
D.J. Paris 38:32 Yeah, you just gave such a really specific, really excellent example, in my opinion, because this idea of like, you’re just using analytic people is, you know, saying to them, Hey, I understand you process information this particular way. I know you like a lot of information that’s important for you to make a decision. Therefore, I need to go back and put together this information in a way that’s exactly how you want to see it. So you can then take it digest it. And people who are analytic understand that putting that data together takes time. So it actually gives you on the other side of the deal, a lot less pressure to come up with the answer right then and there, which probably isn’t going to be sufficient to satisfy their curiosity. Because unless you’re just an encyclopedia of information, and you’re able to present it in the way that they want, but probably they want to look at something they probably want to hold a hold or at least look on a screen and see that you’ve put some work in so they can be like this person speaks my language. It’s actually brilliant because it’s a win win for everybody. It’s it gets lets you off the hook a little bit to feel like oh, God, I don’t know the answer right now you’re going to, you know, and you’re going to say it to them in a way which most of the time they’re going to go hey, that makes sense. Just get it to me in the next you know, day or two and that would be you know, all digestive
Eirik Gislason 39:45 100% a dj you said like the thing you said about there, they’ll want the time to go through the data, the research that you prepare, and this is where those these these moments where we understand that there’s a different way of doing things come from, right. So if we are the kind of person we’re like, well, I want to get, I feel like I need to get everything to them immediately right now. So if I say, I’m going to take some time, I’m afraid they’re going to be upset with me, well, if you really understand an analytic thinker, then you will know that they’re very slow to make decisions. Once they make a decision, they commit to it, and they’re full bore. But they want to take that extra time. In fact, what I say to people who take my decision makers class, when we’re talking about how to influence a an analytic thinker, you say you if you’re, if you’re going to meet with them at noon, don’t met, don’t plan a 2pm meeting, if you’re going to meet with them at three, ask them if they want to go out to dinner, after your three hour meeting, don’t plan something an hour after you have a meeting with an analytic thinker, because you are going to end up in the last 15 minutes of that meeting, whether it’s an hour later, or two hours later, going, oh my god, how am I gonna get to my next appointment, you’re gonna start to rush them sites, you know, subconsciously, because you’re rushed. And then you ruin ruin all the relationship building and all the trust that you’ve been building for two hours goes out the window, because you got to get out the door to another appointment. So if you’re going to meet with an analytic thinker, set the entire morning aside, or set the entire afternoon aside, they may not need it. But you’re not going to ever feel like you are rushing them to a decision. And to your point that with the data, they will accept the fact that you need time to put together the data and the research and the way that they want to view it and the way they want to consume it. And if they believe that we’re on a tighter timeline, they will let you know.
D.J. Paris 41:34 Absolutely. And these are these are things that again, we know our own worldview, we know our own processes for making this oil. Some of us know and others of us maybe aren’t aren’t as clued into our own ways in which we we make decisions. But this is really a skill set and a knowledge set that you need to consider adding, because it’s only going to make every interaction you have with a client or the other side of a transaction go hopefully more smoothly, because you’re going to be able to identify, there’s key identifiers in the way people speak in the way they reveal themselves to you, which sometimes is conscious versus unconscious. There’s, there’s lots of cues that somebody who is trained on how to identify these cues, verbal cues, nonverbal cues, that we can actually start to paint a picture, maybe without the person even necessarily being fully aware that we’re putting them in a category, we’re doing it because that’s that’s how human beings cloud, classify things. But it’s how we make it’s how we can make adjustments and say, oh, this person is starting to fall into this category, I’m getting a better sense of what they may want to see or hear. So all of this is it’s all skills. And these are things that I can almost assure you, you probably haven’t been taught unless you have sought it out on your own. And so this is a great point to to remind everyone who’s listening, if you’re an agent in the New York area, and you’re looking for a team with this kind of information that they can impart to you, or if you’re an agent from anywhere in the country that’s looking to get some coaching. Eric would love the opportunity to speak with you as coaching companies archway partners, Inc. And of course, his his team over at Brown Harris Stevens is always looking for agents in the area to possibly join up on the team as well. So please check those two places out. Eric, I wanted to ask you to about what what do you what were there now actors are taught how to do this I in your backgrounds and acting? So I know there’s you know, there’s different styles, or different philosophies of of acting. There’s sort of the Strausberg I only know a couple I’m not an actor, but there’s the Strasburg method. There’s there’s method acting, I think that’s Rosberg, but there’s Buddha Haagen, there’s, there’s a few of them, that
Eirik Gislason 43:50 there’s some good poles right here.
D.J. Paris 43:54 Yeah, well, I my knowledge is, is, is very shallow. So I know. That’s it. That’s all I know, I don’t know how to do any of it. But but this is important, because I was listening to some actress talking about how they really pay a lot of attention to the other actors in the scene, to then get cues on how to then react, what to do with their hands, what just how to sort of be in the scene, but really sort of memorizing their own lines, if they have them to then forget them so that they can be present for whatever’s going on in the scene and understanding that there’s an interpersonal play between the actors who are, you know, not just reciting lines and walking here and there when they’re supposed to?
Eirik Gislason 44:36 Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know. Keep in mind, I’m a real estate agent. So you may not want to trust my acting advice, because it didn’t work out so well for me, but no, you’re absolutely right. You know, we always say acting is reacting, right? And this is the same thing. This is one of the skills I think, why you see a lot of actors who who end up in the real estate world, because one of the attributes one of this skills they bring to this career is being able to read people are being able to react to people in a moment. And that’s there is a skill to that. So certainly I think that, you know, one of my, one of my junior agents on my team runs a, a women’s improv company, this woman is so so she, she spent a many, many years she was an actress and a singer. And now she runs an improv company. Well, her this idea of She Loves role playing. So when we are when we’re talking, and we’re working through a situation is working with a, with a client, and she’s looking for some advice, I will present some options for her some ideas, you know, for her and say, What do you think, what would you do? And so we’ll work through that. And then what you’ll always want to do, after we’ve settled on what we think the next move is, she’ll say, Okay, let me workshop this with you. And then she’ll go, and she’ll tell me how she’s going to say it, when she gets on the phone or in person with the client or the CO broker, or whoever it is. So she’s constantly role playing so that it sets it sits and it sinks in for her. So there and a lot of people, I would say that, you know, I’m a big fan of role playing in my in my negotiation courses, we end this certified negotiation expert, the core concepts course, with a with a big roleplay we roleplay a deal, right, I got buyer’s agents and listing agents, they get there all the the backstory of their client, they know the the subject property specifics and all the comps. And we have them negotiate a deal. And it’s, it’s how we culminate all of this. It’s the culmination of all of the learning in this course. So I’m a big fan of role playing. But if you if you are someone who knows an actor in real estate, or who is hung out with an actor, if you can use them as a roleplay partner, get out of your comfort zone. And this is when we talked about the at bats, right, you’re going to hit more singles, hit more home runs, hit more doubles, you’re going to hit more, if you have been practicing, before you step up to the plate, right? That is just that’s just something we all know if our prepared to have that conversation to deal with the objections, all of that stuff. And if we’re prepared when we get into a real life scenario, because we’ve been role playing, our rate of success, or our likelihood of success goes up significantly. So I would highly recommend to anybody, any of your listeners, if you’re not role playing if you don’t have an accountability partner or a manager that will help you roleplay through scenarios. Well, first of all, take my class, and then you’ll be in the whole Ready Advantage Facebook community and you can roleplay with other certified negotiation experts. But it’s a big, big help to be able to, to flex that muscle and to practice
D.J. Paris 47:57 it. Yeah. And role playing to me is, you know, the really the only way I know to practice it, because it’s funny, we were just practicing. We were getting media trained at our local association here, because I serve on subcommittees and occasionally we are asked to do media, interviews and things so and I was like, Oh, I do podcasts. I don’t even know how to do this. And so they gave us some tips and some things and I went okay, I kind of know all that. And then we roleplay and I sat with a fake reporter who was at a printing I was on screen for like a TV spot. And I said, I don’t need to practice this. I got it. I know how to talk I can. I can BS my way through this and about 30 seconds. And I was like, oh my god, I did not prepare it anything at all. For this. I am out of things to say. I thought I could wing it. And I’ve done 500 of these episodes doesn’t mean I’m a good inherently a good interviewer, or good interviewee, but I certainly was like, Oh, that’s right, you got to practice. So practicing is everything. So even if you’re, as Eric is 17 years in the business, role playing is still great, because it’ll it’ll force you to do the things that you’re not very good at. and cause you to, as you said, move outside of your x, your your comfort zone. I also want to mention one other just practical as I’m a marketer. So I wanted to mention why I think the certified negotiation expert is from a marketing perspective. And from a skills based perspective, it’s an absolute win. But even if you’re just looking at it as from a marketing perspective, as far as all the designations go in, there’s lots of wonderful ones. I’m not saying one is any better than another, but I and I shouldn’t say but and I do think the certified negotiation expert designation is a very marketable one because it allows you to actually say, Hey, I’ve got this thing and only maybe 1% Of all the realtors in the country have it or whatever the percentage is. It’s not much higher than 1% I suspect. So it allows you to really differentiate yourself to arguably one of the most important skills in the game of being a real estate agent, which is of course negotiation. So being able to communicate that to a client, and say, hey, it’s something that they can understand without knowing anything about our, our industry. And so there’s just a really nice, it’s very on the nose. It’s exactly what it is. I’m a negotiation expert. And then you can actually talk about it in a way where I think it will help sort of differentiate yourself from from other other agents.
Eirik Gislason 50:28 Yeah, that’s right. And you’re, it sounds like you were in you’ve been in my class, because that’s exactly how we describe it, right. And in some cases, the biggest value that some agents get out of my class, and I think there’s so many, there’s so much value in it, there’s so many things that you can, that you can take from this class, whether you’ve been an agent in the business for three decades or three months, is a class that that that is accessible for new agents, but it’s also high level for those who have been negotiating for for several years. But sometimes what my agents get out of the class is a new way to your exact point PJ, a new way to, to convey this information to their client to have the conversation to to explain how they strategize, and how they work through negotiation so that your client knows when they’re no longer in the room, when they’re no longer standing next to you, that you are going to be advocating for them that you are going to be cooperative, as you mentioned earlier, cooperative, but assertive, that you have a plan in place, and that you’re going to be able to execute on that plan. So just being able to convey your strategy to a client in a in a sound, cogent, effective way is very, very important. But but but this, I mean, this, this the see any designation, the logo is also just a door opener, right? So when they see it, it’s in your marketing materials, it’s in your auto signature, now you can have a conversation, it brings up the idea of negotiation. And now you can highlight the importance. And what studies show is, negotiation skills are more important to our clients than marketing than market analysis, it is the highest skill that we can provide our clients. Now, in practice, it’s one of the we score lower than most anything in negotiation skills in the eyes of our client. And that’s where there’s this opportunity, if you can learn this skill, if you can master this skill, you will separate yourself from, you know, to your point 98% of the agents and in this country,
D.J. Paris 52:47 I think to this other thing, I was thinking as you were saying this, that why why is the negotiation part so critical. And I think obviously, it’s because it’s about money, usually. But it’s about the transaction and winning, winning the deal or earning the deal. However, I was also thinking, maybe the certified negotiation expert, sort of skill set comes really into play when a transaction gets tough, because I would assume that the vast majority of the most stressful moments the most emotionally trying parts of a transaction have got to be during the negotiation. Because there there could be a time where the deal might fall apart, or it feels like it might fall apart. The client might be freaking out going, oh my god, maybe I’m making the wrong decision. Maybe I’m giving up too much. So that’s probably a highly stressful time. Emotionally. It’s the least fun time I would think for the client, usually, unless maybe you’re on the left side. I guess maybe if you’re selling a property, maybe it’s a little bit more fun. But on the buy side, certainly it’s tough. And so I was just thinking, I bet those skills come into play to help calm everything down. As you’re going through the stressful times.
Eirik Gislason 53:56 You’re right. You’re right. And we talked about the this comes out of the book Getting to Yes As William Ury and Roger Fisher, who wrote one of the seminal works in collaborative negotiation the book called Getting to Yes, and they talked about this what’s called the SAM model and you know this The S is the stand it’s where we positionally bargain, it’s where we you know, it’s no I won’t Yes, yes, we will. No, I want to it’s the stand that we all take to not be moved off of our position. We don’t want to be thrown in one direction or another. So we anchor in we put we take a stand I will not sell my apartment for less than $700,000 come hell or high water. Let’s just stand right I need to understand what the area actual area of concern is. And what is emotionally driving this, this stand. Right so that’s the S A and M the stand the area of concern and the emotional motivators the app. So you’re right. It’s about understanding people. It’s about when at when they’re at their most anxious, the most frustrated. It’s not getting caught in position. bargaining but understanding what their actual area of concern is by asking questions. And then it’s about communication and offering options. People do not like to be backed into a corner, they don’t like to feel like they’re backed into a corner, they want options. And so at the hardest moment of the deal, when you’re communicating well with your client, and you are looking at all the value elements, that could be a possible way to get successfully get the transaction done, when you’ve identified what we call it, as Harvard calls your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If you have a strong BATNA, if you have a, which is Plan B, right, if you have a strong plan B, and you’re communicating, and you’re providing options, now your client feels empowered, and instead of feeling like they’re backed into a corner, or like they have no options, now you make them feel like, hey, if this doesn’t work out, it’s going to be because we didn’t meet our minimum goals. So if plan A is not going to work for us, let’s move on to Plan B, as opposed to getting into highest and best after highest and best and feeling like you’re just like a rag doll, getting thrown around, we have the power to help our clients remain resilient and empowered. And we do that by communicating with them in the hardest of times in the deal, just like you said,
D.J. Paris 56:24 and having, like you said, Having options. And also you said something very, very profound that I want to make sure our audience noticed. And if not, I’m going to I’m going to step on it a little bit in a good way is have is is we there’s a skill of DBT. We call it Cobra head, I almost forgot it. And basically, if this doesn’t go the way we want, here is what we will do, and getting their buy in client buy it hey, does this make sense? You know, I’m sure you’re getting buy ins all the time. But saying, here’s what we’re going to try, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s why we think it will work. If it doesn’t, here’s another alternative that we are going here’s our plan B right. And even just having a plan B is very empowering, because all of a sudden, now, when option A doesn’t work out, no big deal, we’ve got option B. And and it’s it’s most agents, I think, I don’t know, I shouldn’t speak for any other agents. But I think a lot of agents probably don’t have a plan B, you know, when they’re putting offers in, they haven’t or if they have when maybe they haven’t effectively communicated it to the client, because they go, I don’t really want my client to think that plan a might not work. So I just gonna I’m gonna mention if it doesn’t, if it doesn’t, I’ll deal with it when it happens, that’s probably not a strong strategy. Because there are going to be times when you obviously when you don’t get what you want, and making sure that the client already knows we have another option here. That that is profound. And I am really, really glad that you said that. These are all skills. Again, this is this is a skills based conversation. And we’re focusing a lot on it because guys skills when the game the found the fundamentals win the game. So these are all things you can learn. That’s the best part, you don’t have to be good at it, you just have to be willing to practice. And Eric, you know, he can teach you in a number of different ways. If you’re an agent in New York City, consider joining his team at Brown Harris Stevens, I mean, he’ll teach it to you one on one. He also if you’re not in the New York City area, which of course most of our audience is not, he can teach you any anytime. So you can visit his website, archway partners, Inc, I’m going to have links to all of this and you can become one of his coaching clients. And also, you should consider getting your certified negotiation expert certification, which you can do at at regni. And we will have a link to the regni. website so that so that you can see when their classes are available, you can take one from Eric. But Eric, I think this is a great place to start because I could talk to you all day, and you don’t have to speak to me
Eirik Gislason 58:54 now. Thank you so much DJ, this is so great. Oh, this was
D.J. Paris 58:58 so much fun. For me this is I would not say that I have necessarily the skills you’re talking about. However, I appreciate that those are skills that any one of us can learn. And we should consider learning those. And these are the soft skills that really can can win the game, push the ball over that one yard line. And there, they might even feel a little bit like magic once you learn them. Because you’re going to be unlocking things that are invisible to other people. And when you learn to unlock what’s the invisible which becomes visible to you. It just I think everything just becomes more fun and your your hit rate is going to go up, your success rate is going to improve your clients will be happier. It’s really it just makes it’ll make your life a little bit less hard. So if it’s if you’re not going to be motivated, do it because how exciting it is. Think about just reducing the stress and anxiety in your life. This will allow you to do that. So consider one way or the other, getting your CNA certification for whatever your motivation strategy is, but Um, this is the time to level up our skills, a lot of agents are leaving the industry, a lot of agents are pulling back on their efforts, because you know, they’re maybe a little bummed out. Now’s the time to find that grit within us and and do something fun, do something fun, like learn a new skill, do some of the activities, as Eric said that you do enjoy doing just to sort of get you up and up and add them. And then consider adding in some of these skills and let’s let’s all get a coach this year. Let’s, let’s let’s find a coach. Because this is the time we all we are all you ever have to think about is every professional athlete on the planet has a coach. So the very best athletes in the planet have coaches, you probably need one too. Let’s get one. And even if you can’t afford it, you know consider finding a way to afford it because this is going to help your skills and it’s coaching is mostly about skill. So let’s help develop everyone’s skill. Consider getting your CFP designation consider working with Eric directly whether you’re in New York to jump on his team or you’re anywhere else in the country and you just need a coach get a coach. So we will have Eric’s information all throughout our description archway partners. inc.com is where you can learn about his coaching program. The regni.com r e n i is where you can learn about becoming certified negotiation expert. There’s other designations they can teach you there as well. Eric teaches with them. And please follow Eric on his social media channels, Eric, the expert e ir ik the expert, Instagram, YouTube in particular, we’ll have links to all of that again in the description. Eric, I really loved chatting with you. Thank you so much. On behalf of our audience for coming on our show today. We appreciate you and your time. And on behalf of Eric and myself. We also want to thank our lovely audience who made its way all the way to the end of this great conversation, please, as always the best way you can help us tell a friend, they have one other agent that could use this skills based conversation and please send this to them. In fact, send it to every agent that you know, we would really appreciate it but just have to do it with one that’s all we ask. helps us continue to reach more people. So thank you. Thank you, Eric. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks.
Eirik Gislason 1:02:09 Thanks DJ
How To Connect At A Deep Level With Real Estate Clients • Diana Sutherlin
Jul 27, 2023
Diana Sutherlin with Sutherlin Group shares her transition from a sales agent to a real estate agent. Diana discusses how being a sales agent and former actress has taught her a very importance of learning from others and not having the need to show off. Next she emphasized that an agent should know a client’s personality and try to quickly assess their motivation and their needs. Last, DJ and Diana discuss the importance of listening to your client and letting them know they are both heard and seen.
D.J. Paris 0:00 top producers understand the importance of connecting deeply with their clients. We’re going to show you how to do that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show, by the way, welcome to everyone who is new to the podcast and welcome back. Of course, to our returning fans and listeners, we love all of you. In just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Diana Sutherland total superstar, top 1%. Producer, before we get to Diana, the best way that you can help our show if we’re helping you and I hope we are is by well, two ways actually telling a friend, you know if you can pause this podcast for just a second, send a link share it to to another agent in your office or somebody that you know that could really use some encouragement and some advice from a top producer this year. And the second way is by supporting our sponsors, we have the best and greatest sponsors. We love our sponsors. They are on our show because you guys purchase and use their services and products. So please check out what they’re offering. We’ve met them we know they’re awesome, and they’re going to help you grow your business. Alright guys, that’s enough. Let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Diana Sutherlin.
Today, my guest is Diana southerly from the Sutherland group in New Jersey, specifically Jersey City, Hoboken and up the Gold Coast. And let me tell you more about Diana. Now prior to a career in real estate Diana Sutherland produced sales training programs for Fortune 500 companies for nearly two decades. Her expertise in every area of sales, along with a background in interior design led her to a career that incorporated all aspects of her unique and invaluable background culminating in a sales volume of 18 million in her first year as a real estate agent. That’s an incredible number. As we all know now Diana and her team are distinguished Gold Coast agents that offer truly hands on full service sales and tailored marketing services. She’s partnered with developers since 2005 and has been the top selling new construction and waterfront agent for 18 years. She gets chosen by developers. We’re going to talk to her about that as well. Some of her projects have included 77 Hudson golds Cove phase one and two Trump Plaza Crescent court. 25 Senate plays Hamilton square and lofts. 222 Diana has received platinum level awards for the past 13 years from the NGR Circle of Excellence which is the New Jersey Association of Realtors, and the triple platinum award four years in a row at her previous brokerages. She closed on the highest priced waterfront condo in New York, sorry in New Jersey history in 2017 and continues to break her own records on top selling brownstones in Jersey City. Please everyone follow up Diana visitor website, a big fan of her website Sutherland group.com. That’s su t h e r l i n group.com. We will have a link to that in the show notes. And please follow her group on Facebook and Instagram which is Sutherland group and we’ll have a link to those as well in the show notes. Diana, welcome to the show.
Diana Sutherlin 4:51 Hi, thank you for the very lovely introduction.
D.J. Paris 4:55 Well I love doing introductions for people because it is always so awesome. auditioning to me about how, you know our guests have have really just accomplished so much. And oftentimes in a short amount of time, and I know you’re not new to the business, but even in your first year to do 18 million is really impressive. I know it’s not your first year in the business any longer. However, you have only gone up from there. So I am super excited to hear about how you’ve done that. And, and also, you know, what your overall philosophies are working with clients, I know you have certain thoughts of how you have grown your business that we’re going to explore. But the first thing I always like to know is how you got into real estate, you are a sales trainer prior to that, but but walk us through how you how you move from, from being sales, sales training program, sort of person to working in sales directly.
Diana Sutherlin 5:49 Okay. I, I ran a company for almost 20 years, and I trained fortune 500 companies in sales, all aspects, reading body language, overcoming objections, I loved I loved working with people, I loved drawing people out, I used to have to interview CEOs and high level executives on camera, and they’d be so nervous. And I just took pride in the fact that I would put them at ease, I’d ask the right questions. I just loved people skills. And, and I did that for a long time. Sometimes we like to reinvent ourselves, I went back to get my interior design degree, because I had always been buying properties, fixing them up selling them, and so forth. And I love design. So I was in just about ready to get my degree in interior design. And my girlfriend said to me, and I still had my other company, I’m very much a workaholic. So my girlfriend said to me, why don’t you get your real estate license? And I’m like, Oh, maybe I could do that part time. And she goes, Diane, I don’t know what you do part time you do nothing part time. I’m like, No, I get some I still had my other company open. And I was doing programs for very big corporations. And I thought, well, I’ll just do this, you know, on the side. And I literally I sold over 18 million in my first year I was I won Rookie of the Year for the northern region. I was a New Jersey, it was just crazy. And, and I thought why didn’t I was sort of taking all my skills, working with people, my sales skills, and my design skills. And I thought I should have been doing this years ago, years ago. So I just fell in love with it. And and I worked my butt off. I mean, I took you know, I always tell the story, but it’s really the truth. I worked I took two days off my first year, Mother’s Day and Christmas. And that’s it. And people laugh about it all the time. I mean, it really was two days. But um, you know, it’s it’s probably where I should have been all along. But all of those other things sort of led me to this.
D.J. Paris 8:24 Yeah, well, you clearly had the skills that you were training to different sales organizations to allow you to really flourish in so quickly. And on top of having not just a job but running a company, and then doing 18 million, and I suspect it wasn’t one transaction for 18 million, probably was a lot of transaction
Diana Sutherlin 8:47 transactions. And I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I was just sort of doing it, doing it doing it. And I used to do in my first year, I would get out there I did like three open houses a week, every single week. I was like oh, and I and I loved it. And I was learning it. And I was realizing that I was taking all these things that I had learned about communication skills, some of which actually came from a former life to a different. I started many, many years ago, in Manhattan, I was living there and I was an actress. And I had I still attribute some of the most important tips that I learned in every business that I’ve been in to what I learned in the acting world. Not that you’re acting or putting on a show, but that I actually I studied an acting technique that is very famous in New York, but it forces you to focus on the other person To listen to the other person to react to them hyperfocused and, and I took that into some of the sales training that I did. So many people are so self conscious, they want so badly to impress and show that I’m the market expert, or I’m this or that they’re not really paying attention to the person sitting in front of them. And you know, so that was a really big, big, big part of what I think that fed into my skills, almost more than anything else.
D.J. Paris 10:41 It’s interesting. You meant it’s interesting that you mentioned acting, because you know, and I don’t know, you know, where you studied, I was trying to think what are the, you know, I do know, like, there’s the Strasburg technique, there’s Gouda. Haga and there’s there’s a bunch of, I’m not an actor. So I have my knowledge is very limited, of course, but but that sort of training is so interesting, because as as somebody who’s not an actor, I think about what do actors really have to do? Well, they have to memorizing, and you’re right, though, there’s that whole other component that I don’t think about when I watch actors perform on TV, or a theater, which is listening to the other other actors and making adjustments along the way. So that it does seem like a connected experience. And I imagine that’s a really important skill set, especially when you’re sitting across the table from someone maybe who hasn’t worked with you before, as, as an old client, as a real estate client, and now is, you know, trusting you with a primary, very sizable purchase or sale.
Diana Sutherlin 11:39 Right? It’s, it’s interesting, because a couple of the things that you mentioned are, I had studied a couple of different of the biggest techniques, some of them actually make you more self conscious. And, and I can as an analogy, an actor’s can, an actor can some sometimes be so self focused, that they’re actually standing out side of themselves, watching their performance is very self conscious. And this was actually called the Meisner technique, and some teachers in New York teach it to this day. But it was all about focusing on the other actor, completely taking the focus off of yourself. And there’s something that I always there’s a little story, I want to throw in a little tidbit because I always whenever I am, I am training actors on my actors. And whenever I’m training agents on my team, I always tell them this story. There was a great great audition book in New York that every actor, it was their Bible, and it was called audition by Michael Shurtleff. And he talks about how self focused actors are, and that they can go into an interview, they can do this thing. They are so nervous about making a good impression, proving they’re the one that’s right for this job, that they’re not even listening or paying attention to the person across from them. And he told a story about how he was doing an audition up at the Ansonia Hotel in New York years and years. And you were going back a lot, two years. And he said, I saw 360 People that day, I think that was the number. And he said, I walked out of the day, lock the office, walked across Broadway. And here coming towards me is one of the actors that I had auditioned. And he said, I waved at him and I said, Oh, hi, you know, whatever. He looked at me, like he had no clue who I was. And this is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I saw 360 People that day. And I recognized and
D.J. Paris 14:00 remembered him. Yeah.
Diana Sutherlin 14:02 One and he didn’t recognize me. And I’ve never forgotten that. Because when people sit in front of you, I mean, one of the things that I that I love about working with people in some of this had to do with personality assessments that I used to teach and I studied and so forth, but they’re all types of people and they’re all types of buyers. If if you some of them are very aesthetically motivated, they’ll walk into a home and they absolutely I love the wallpaper. I could just they’re emotionally connected to the home there I could see my family sitting in this breakfast room looking out the window when you know the Cardinals sitting in the tree you know is right outside the window. And and that is a very different personality type than the one who’s very analytical, what what, you know, has been the value increase in the last five years? Where do you see this going? Show me a spreadsheet, show me the comps. And sometimes you will have a couple that are you’ll have one of each of this personality type. And they’re vastly different. And you have to assess very, very quickly, who are you talking to? What is their motivation? What is their trigger? What are their buttons, and really, really pay attention. If if you’re trying to prove to them how great you are, you’re not paying attention that takes that takes real focus. And sometimes you’ll sit there in front of a couple, and you’ll have to pivot between those two communication styles. But you have to do an otherwise they you can see them glaze over. When you’re lost, you know, it’s done. And I love that,
D.J. Paris 16:02 you know, it’s, it’s Thank you. That is such an important thing, too. You know, I was thinking as you were talking, trying to think about myself, I’m not a practicing agent, but I talk to agents all day and a lot of my what I do is recruit agents. So it’s a similar, it’s a similar sort of thing, because agents want different things from different brokerages. But what you said is so important, because oftentimes, and even on this podcast, I can I can be very self focused. I can, I’m listening, but I’m really more thinking about what’s the next thing I have to say. So that there’s not alone, not with you necessarily, but with other with other people sometimes. And I realize I’m totally out of this conversation, I know what I’m going to say next. And that’s good. But it’s only because I’m afraid that if I focus in on this other person and really connect with my, you know, my client or my podcast guests, that I’m not going to know what to say going you know, once there is a break in the conversation, and the reality of it is I’ll have probably a much better connected things to say, by paying attention.
Diana Sutherlin 17:03 Absolutely. And that’s why I think so many people overlook that piece of it. Even even open houses, I always have my young agents shadow me. And I’m like you, if you don’t start asking questions, the minute they walk in the door. Oh, hi. Do you live in the neighborhood? Oh, where do you Where are you coming from, you know, and get in a conversation, draw them out, you’re thinking of maybe moving across the Hudson to Jersey City or to Hoboken. If you don’t engage and ask those questions, you you have to treat it almost like a mini buyer’s consultation. If you don’t, it’s a complete wasted opportunity. I’ve been in so many houses, where agents will just sit there and Oh, could you sign in, please. And you know, they don’t want to bother them or be in their hair. So they let them wander around, or they spend so much time and I love I’m I used to teach product knowledge. So I love talking about passionately talking about finishes. I love that. And I was in design. So that’s exciting to me. But that’s only a piece of it. So much of it is Who is this person. People want to work with who they connect with? You know, you don’t have to sit there and go, I sold X amount last year. That’s not what does it. It’s who you connect with? Did they hear me everybody wants to be seen and heard. And you know, it’s always always I kind of inherently knew that. But I always teach my agents that it’s a mini buyer’s consultation, you know, and they’ll remember you.
D.J. Paris 18:56 Yes, because you’ll be the one where they feel wow, this person understands me. And they were listening. And and you already have if you wanted to, for example, because how successful you’ve been, you could just rattle off all of your accomplishments. And maybe there’s a small percentage of people that would be like, I just want to be entertained. I want somebody to razzle dazzle me, and maybe that would work. But the vast majority of us want to feel, as you said, heard, seen, and I was thinking about this last night and I’ll give you this sort of unusual, or a Monday night. So I was not it doesn’t matter what I do. I was I was getting I was at the stretch this place called stretch lab where they stretch you out and it’s they just open one in my neighborhood. And so I was doing an evaluation because I’m very inflexible, anyway, and the way the reason I’m mentioning this is when they stretch you out, it’s a very intimate sort of physical act where, like, there’s this woman stretching me out and she’s kind of on top of me and touching me in a very professional way but also kind of an intimate, vulnerable place. And and it was and I was I had kind of a weird reaction to but not a negative reaction, just like I felt very connected to this person. And I go, and even though I just met them, and there was no, this was just her job and she was stressing me out. But it was interesting. And I felt like oh, the reason why I feel so connected to this person is she’s touching me in a very professional platonic way. But but touching me, and I’m a single person, I don’t have a lot of touch in my life. And I go, Oh, so I’m holding on to this going, this feels very satisfying. And it reminded me of being heard and seeing people have the same sort of reaction when they actually feel heard or seen, or in my case, I had got touched. And that was very fulfilling. Even though that wasn’t the intention, I was going for there. I was really just going to get stretched out. But I went, Oh, it reminds me Oh, I miss touch. And so this idea of being heard and seen, and and really, like I recognize you is so so critical, and it kind of flies in the face of old sales techniques of objection. And coming up with a way to overcome. Yeah,
Diana Sutherlin 20:59 I love that you said that, because I, I have always told my team, if you’re in this only for the money, forget it. Your net people know, they know when you’re trying to sell them. And what’s so funny is I actually cannot stand sales. I’m like, I go into car dealerships, and I get angry, I get angry. And the fact is, it’s so funny, because it very beginning of the business, I have such an aversion to that, and I’m so authentic, I like to really authentically connect with people. And I will never forget, I will never forget saying to this friend of mine, you know, I just kept people telling me to close them, close them, close them. And I’m like, you know, I can’t think that way because it makes me feel like I’m pushing somebody, I’m selling them. And my girlfriend said to me, but Tiana you that is so the opposite of you. And you are only helping them to achieve what they came to you to do. And I thought well, and something clicked in my head. I actually said that to one of my agents on my team recently. She’s like, I always have this hesitation that I don’t want to be the salesperson I said, but they came to you for this help you are making literally I know it sounds corny, but it really is a dream come true in their life. And the fact is, if you come from a place of wanting to do that, and wanting to serve in that way, it will always come back to you because people know it. They know when you’re sincere. So I really believe, you know, for young agents or newish agents, don’t worry about this one sold more than I have that one’s done, whatever, be authentic care about the people in front of you and come from a place. Yes, you have to have absolute knowledge of your market. Definitely. But I know so many people that have tons of knowledge of their market. And they’re really good at all the coaching techniques and closing closing. There are a lot of people who don’t respond to that. They can feel the antennae go up right away, and they can just sort of feel that they’re being sold, you know. And so you have to trust that if you know, if you know your market, and you’re sincere and you really have in your gut, the desire to help people it’s going to come across.
D.J. Paris 23:47 And I always think too, I agree. And for anyone listening who is newer to the business and doesn’t know everything yet, which of course is a lot of us. I always say you know, have this kind of this little phrase. Or you might even have a better one, Dianna, because I’m not out there in the trenches, like like you and our guests. But I always like this phrase, and I tell it to our agents as just as something to keep in mind. But you might even have a different suggestion. But if you don’t know the answer to something always have, especially if you’re new, and you’re not going to know the answer to everything. I always say have this this expression, which is just say, that’s an amazing, that’s a great question. I want to double check with my team, because I want to give you a really complete answer. So bear with me while I check, or I’ll get back to you in an hour or next day or whatever. But it’s okay to be I can authentically say I don’t know, I’m going to find out and that’s what a consultant does. I mean, consultants get paid a lot of money to say I don’t know, I’ll find out. I’ll come back to you.
Diana Sutherlin 24:42 And let me tell you, I’ve been in this business a while and they’re constantly things I don’t know. And I always say that because I they and they will value that the client will will will appreciate that. Absolutely. And if you Try to budget, they’ll know, I think they’ll know. Or worse yet, they’ll find out. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 25:05 they’ll look it up and say up, she doesn’t know.
Diana Sutherlin 25:09 And I’ve seen agents do that they’ll throw out an answer, and they don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m standing in front of them. And sometimes I’m like, are, you know, you don’t want to correct the agent. But at the same time, you don’t want them to get sued, either, you know, so. But I am constantly in that position. I think, you know, the day we stop learning, I work with a lot of developers, and they’re things that are on such a high level that I can’t possibly know, you know, it’s going to be an environmental attorney who might have the answer to that, there’s always going to be things I don’t know. So, you know, so that’s a perfect answer, you know, if I can improve on that.
D.J. Paris 25:58 I think this idea of listening is so important. And yes, I do acknowledge that it can be scary to again, when we’re sitting there in a presentation buyer or seller presentation, where we’re like, trying to try to win the business. And I just want to say these things, and also then recognize when we’re getting a little bit outside of ourselves, maybe, you know, this sort of third person looking in going what’s the next thing I’m gonna say, or he’s gonna say, then going back in and saying, focus on the person, you know, and if you practice your pitches, that information will be there anyway, when you need it. But under, you know, and I’m curious to when when you are in a buyer or seller, presentation, and let’s say it’s not, you know, a slam dunk referral, or a previous client, somebody who’s new to you that you have to win over in some capacity. You know, when you talked about really listening to them? What are some of the things you’re listening for? I’m just curious, what, what you’re trying to assess?
Diana Sutherlin 26:54 You want to find out? Number one, what their motivation is? Why are they buying? Why are they selling? What what are their fears? What are there fears and objections? Because, you know, and I used to teach this all the time, you can’t overcome an objection, unless you know what it is. So, you know, so many stores, you know, say, Listen, if a customer’s unhappy, and they don’t come up and complain, they’re not coming back. And they’re going to tell 10 other people, you always want to suss out, what what are your What are your, your questions and your fears about this particular property? Or, you know, find out as much information about, are they both on the same page do they both seem to want to get I get a lot of couples, one wants to go to the suburbs, the other one hates the suburbs. So you kind of and sometimes for sellers, it will take me two or three years to get that listing, because they’re not ready to sell yet. They’re still in that kind of, so you sort of feel and you hear both of them, you let the both of them kind of verbalize what their hesitancies are, you know, what are the pros and cons? You know, I think it’s, you know, the who, how, what, why, you know, you want to know, why are they selling, you know, sometimes they won’t tell you, but often they will. And, you know, you just got to you’ve got to understand motivations. And I think you you have to understand motivations and fears, you know, and what’s their passion, what would make them really really happy, you know, try to zero in
D.J. Paris 28:52 on that. And that’s really important because you just said something really important, what would make you really really happy because for some people will be just get highest and best price. You know, if I’m selling a property, I don’t care or if I’m buying give me the lowest invest. And then other people if they’re selling a property they go well I obviously want to get as high a price as possible. But what’s really important is that the family that’s coming in seems to have some appreciation for what we’ve done here. And what we’ve you know, the improvements we’ve made, I just want a good family in here or good you know, whatever. That’s sometimes come rises even above the level of here’s what you’re gonna get for it. And, and that and knowing that is really critical.
Diana Sutherlin 29:30 Well, they feel appreciated this home, particularly if they were emotionally attached to it. If they put some of their heart and soul into it, somebody walks in and they emotionally love it. That can go a very long way. You know, I think that’s that can be super important to some people. And there was something else I was thinking about about buyers that had to do with that I’m in now Oh, it’s escaping me. I might, I might remember in a minute. But yeah, for sellers, that’s very important.
D.J. Paris 30:10 Well, I have a question for you while you’re thinking, because I am trying to remember Yeah, no, it’s okay. Just interrupt me at any time. If it comes in, I was thinking, I was curious, because you had said something about, you know, sometimes I have a consultation, whether it’s buyer or seller, or you give the example of seller in this case, where they’re not really ready to sell and maybe two or three years goes by before they actually list with me. I am curious, because connection is so important to you. How do you stay in touch with them in between those, you know, those times, right? So, you know, you have your your consultation, you realize they’re really not ready at this moment, but I want I want to be their person when they are ready. So how do you stay in touch with them? What are some of the things you and your group do to make sure they don’t feel like oh, Diana forgot about me, right?
Diana Sutherlin 30:56 I, you know, that’s a tough one. Because I, I have had so many clients over the years, and I try my best I will 100% admit, I am not the best person at mining my database. If I had to say there was at that’s one of the most important things, you know, I do it as much as I can. But I part of part of the day I work with a lot of developers, and which is fabulous, fabulous. But part of the downside of that is it takes a lot of time and focus. And so we are constantly like I have a newsletter that we’re we’re doing, you know, constant things, I do a lot of press things. So I’ll send it to them. Not sure if you saw this article, whatever, I’ll try to reach out if I, you know, remember certain sports events that their kids are in or things like that, I’ll always try to do that. But I could definitely be better at that. I’ve, I’m I’m you know, it’s funny, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, so much of my business has been past clients and referrals from past clients that I’ve I’ve honestly never been a cold caller. I’ve I’m not as great as I could be. And I think, you know, with the, you know, calling my database all the time, my, you know, sphere. And I was telling somebody the other day because she said My God, Diana, if you did that, can you even imagine what your business would be? Which is true. You know what I’m trying to get better at that I know what I was gonna say, I just remember what I was gonna say, I had a developer years ago, and I, I’ve never forgotten it, because it was such a great compliment. And I wasn’t even that long in the business. But I was representing his building. And he watched me so much with different buyers. And he said, you know, you have the most uncanny ability to listen to a buyer and almost immediately know exactly the home that’s right for them. Like, exactly, he’s
D.J. Paris 33:17 the best, by the way, that’s like the best compliment you could ever have.
Diana Sutherlin 33:21 And when he said that, to me, I’ve never forgotten it, it made me feel so good. And he goes, How do you do that? And I was like, listen, I pay attention. And literally, it was true, it was almost immediately people would come to me and even if I showed them something, even if I showed them 10 More things, it was that one that I told them they were going to fall I knew what they would fall in love with. You know, and and I love that and I’ve never forgotten that and it was very early, you know in the business for me. But anyway, that was what I wanted to
D.J. Paris 33:55 know it’s it’s so important. I think about this a lot and people on our listeners probably sick of hearing me say it so I apologize. But because a lot of you have heard this before but if you’re new maybe you haven’t, which is I have this like fantasy when I think about the service professionals in my life for different industries, accountant, financial advisors, attorneys, you know, whatever anyone that’s giving me personal trainer, you know anyone that’s helping me in my life somehow and my fantasies are always like I want that phone call which never comes but but but I love that I would love the phone call and I’ll just pick on my accountant who I adore. She’s the best and she’s wonderful. And I’m not picking on her really but I would but if she’s got a million clients I’m if I were her only client she’d probably do this. But But I have this fantasy that she would call me up one day and just go I was just thinking about you. I have this new idea. You know if this happened to me just the other day at the hair salon, I would get my hair cut and my the person that get my hair cut same person for like 15 years. She goes, I have an idea. And I was like I don’t even want to hear it just do it because you this is what you do. And I love the fact that you were thinking bout me, outside of, you know, like, I don’t expect anyone to think about me ever. But, but But what do you hear it does feel like, wow, someone’s thinking about me they want to have doctors, this is where I found as I’ve gotten older, I love having good doctors, because a good doctor for me will come and say, Hey, man, you’re doing really well or you’re not doing well. Or hey, you know, I’ve been really watching you for the last few years. Here’s, you know, just feeling like my doctors care about me is really important. And I think Realtors obviously, you know, demonstrate care through listening and really understanding the client needs. Yep.
Diana Sutherlin 35:39 And also, if you there was a couple of things that I made certain to do back when the market the horrible market crash. And I have to tell you, it was like trial by fire. I represented four developers during that period. Oh, my God, it was brutal. It was brutal. But for my resale clients that would call me in my home worth what am I going to do? Should I, I convinced so many of them not to sell, I convince so many of them not to sell. And I was like, you know, I had the single mothers who had one trial, you know, they were raising their entire, they’re all their net worth was in home all. And I was like, Is there any way you can hang on? Do you have to move right now? And if you do, can you rent it for the time being? My brokerage time was yelling at me. Yes, it was me getting listings. I said, You know what, I go to sleep at night. And guess what, not only did they come back to me when they were ready to sell making a couple of 100,000 more than they would have Thank you very much. But they also referred me five other people, of course. And because they knew if if all you’re doing is following the money, I know agents who put people in the worst positions, they could have been sold, you know, single fragile women out very, you know, areas they shouldn’t be living in the you know, that were a bit dangerous, because the Commission’s were 5% co broke, you know, some new development out, you know, far away from and, and I can tell you never, and I’ve said to my my team, always you sell that person, what’s right for them, I don’t care what they’re paying out. Because it’s going to come back to you five times over,
D.J. Paris 37:42 it really will one way or the other good or bad, it’ll come back to you.
Diana Sutherlin 37:47 To you. Absolutely. You know,
D.J. Paris 37:50 I would be remiss if I didn’t, because I know our audience is frothing at the mouth to hear and I know there and I’m going to disappoint our listeners, some of our listeners who are like, I want to fast track to working with developers and there isn’t most likely these days. However, I would love for you to share any guidance that you might have maybe with team members that are that you work with or just agents in general, if they wanted to start heading down that I want to be on the shortlist of developer agents that developers choose because you have you are the developer, Queen of New Jersey. That is that is it really is such an amazing feather in your cap because you are chosen and you have earned that spot. And I am curious on what you might suggest to agents who want to start to go up that mountain.
Diana Sutherlin 38:43 So it it’s it I’m not gonna lie, it’s not easy. Sometimes you might want to put yourself you know, in a position where of learning where you gotta learn. There’s no way you’re ever going to have the knowledge of what they need without being exposed to it. And sometimes that might be being on a team for a while. For some agents. It’s working in a sales center, a leasing office, something for another organization. You learn so much from that. And I was very, very fortunate. I started working with developers from two months into the business. And they saw what I was just smaller. I worked with a smaller developer that was doing a lot of you know, boutique style properties. And I was selling them and my banners were all over and then K Hovnanian, which is a huge developer approached me to do a project and then another big one came out of that and then of course, I got to be kind of known in that area. I did have a lot of skills that were very unique. I had the this sales skills, but I also have the design skills. And now, you know, you show you have to show your value. And some of that is, you know, like you talk about market knowledge of a market, I don’t just have knowledge of a market by resale comps, I have to go out and really do spreadsheets and do a deep, deep, deep dive for the developers, the demographics of certain areas, this and that, all kinds of things. And start small start working with like I did a small developer, you can imagine what can possibly come out of that. If you have any kind of skills in terms of I do staging, also, if it’s a, if it’s, I have several, you know, storage, you know, people are screaming at me all the time on my team, you’re buying more, you know, but the thing is, I am, I love even the light staging, which is it, you know, can make an enormous difference. If if I need a gut furniture, if it’s if I had to do three brownstones at a time, I wouldn’t have enough. So why would bring in a staging company, but I love to do it, because it’s a creative, you know, part of what I do, I still get to play with all of that. But even even things be aesthetically aware, you know, hone your skills in that. Even accessories, I can’t tell you how much accessories will transform a space artwork, gorgeous throw pillows, I mean, I deal with, you know, I, I get challenged very often with some very plain bland kind of places that are, you know, in the beddings looking, I will literally transformed the space just with bedding, throw pillows, artwork, and people come in, and they’re like, Oh, my God, I can’t. And I do that, even for some of my smaller developers, you know, so I think, trying to hone your skills in that way. But I think being under the wing, you know, or the umbrella of another company where you’re going to learn, I know, other agents who’ve worked on sales teams, you learn so much that way, so much, and sale. And interestingly, some of those marketing companies hire newer agents, you know, sometimes you’re on a salary with just, you know, a small bonus on each unit. I, I I represented some developers during the downmarket that I made Brant, I mean, brand new buildings, 414 unit building, you know, and so forth, made very, very little, because it was a broker outreach, that’s where it kind of started, which was to drive the broker community to the builder. And, and I was, so sometimes it feels like, Oh, my God, I’m working so hard. And there’s so little return on this, that has been an annuity that has paid me to this day, because I sold units, and then I’ve resold them. And sometimes I’ve sold the same unit three times. But after all these years, I got known in these buildings, I got known by the developers, you know. But just keep in mind, it’s a lot harder than I don’t want to discourage anybody. You have to have a certain temperament for it. Because serving many masters, masters, and not only that, whatever, you know, if you have a client that’s nervous, and things have been on the market too long, or there would imagine that that’s times 300.
D.J. Paris 44:18 Sure. Yeah, stressful conversations, you know,
Diana Sutherlin 44:22 some stressful and you’re literally under fire, and it’s like, what have you done for me lately? You’ve got to constantly keep coming up with ideas. When the market crashed, we had to come up with things like you know, let’s do let’s do a trip to Paris, in addition to their good commission for the next sale, you know, let’s you know what, you’ve got to think out of the box and go to other properties visit as many of the competing types of properties as possible. You know,
D.J. Paris 44:57 that’s a brilliant that is something that nobody Out of 500 episodes, I think has ever said about working with developers is Go study other developments and what works, what doesn’t work and bring that to a developer say, Hey, I’ve been, I’ve been noticing around because they all know the other projects that are out there, I don’t like this, I don’t like this, etc,
Diana Sutherlin 45:17 you gotta shot them. You don’t chop them, you don’t know what your competition is. And you think it’s you think it’s important to know competition, up the street for your house, you better believe it’s really important to do because there’s nobody that looks at one building, they’re gonna go to all of them. So what can you do to stand out? You know, and what are they offering, if suddenly they’re throwing in window treatments, if they’re doing this, you must stay on top of it, see their product, know how their product compares to yours, whether it’s a three unit building, a 200 unit building, shop, that product, you know, so very important.
D.J. Paris 46:05 Amazing advice. I would also like to ask, and this is this is, I think, can be a trickier question. Because you have so much success over the years, people oftentimes see somebody at your level and think, Oh, she’s got it made. She’s got and obviously, you know, I know from talking to so many hundreds of agents, top agents over the years that they’re working just as hard usually today as they were when they started. But a lot of times, you know, people listening think, Oh, this must be, you know, Diana is not affected by the ups and downs of the market, because she has all of this, you know, business built in, because she’s been so successful for so long. But obviously you are you struggled just as any other agent, does market market conditions affect you. This is, you know, we’re 2023, half a little bit of more than halfway through the year. Look, we the reality of it is inventory is down in most markets, of course, rates are still high. This is not the easiest time to work with buyers, certainly not the easiest time really working with sellers, either. It’s either maybe easier to sell a property harder to get the next property. So so it is a tough time right now. And what are you doing? Or what are you coaching your team to do to stay motivated to stay productive? Like, what are some of the activities you’re doing right now?
Diana Sutherlin 47:27 Well, we have an unbelievable lack of inventory where we are incredible lack of inventory. But you know, back and I and I, you know, there are so many buyers that are really nervous, they’re like this is just in the beginning of when the interest rates started going up. I heard over and over and over again. You know, this is just like 2009 2010. This is the opposite, thank goodness, at least where we are at that time. And the reason I worked with so many developers, and this was in downtown Jersey City, there were high rises going up galore, they were condo buildings. They were all just starting sales, they had to fill up those entire buildings and the market crashed. That was an over supply and an under demand. What we have now is the opposite. We haven’t you know, we have a huge demand, very little supply. We’ve We’ve got so many people coming out of New York right now. And what I tried to do is you always have to you have to pivot with any market. If you know, I think, you know, you’ve got to see what’s going on, you’ve got to anticipate where this is going. People don’t want to sell because why are they going to leave, you know, under 3%, mortgage, you know, interest rate, you’ve got a tough sell. It’s a very tough sell. So, you know, you’ve got to find ways, talk to loan officers, what can we do to help, you know, some of my sellers, it’s like, will they offer a two one buy down, you’ll buy the interest rate down for the first two years 1% For the second year. And then it goes to with with the understanding that many people are doing arms right now or they’re planning to refinance. A lot of people talk to mortgage people talk to everybody that you can to find out what’s going to help me move this product. If if, if it’s if it’s for a seller,
D.J. Paris 49:47 you’re you’re saying I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pause you but I only want you because you just said something very, very profound. And we’re going to get to the buyer in just a moment. I don’t want to apologize for jumping in here. But you said something very important, which was you Get almost get creative, but you don’t have to have the answers. But you have to have a good team. So reach out to the loan officers and say, hey, this person, look, loan officers know, nobody wants to go from 3% to 7%. Mortgage. I don’t want to do that. You don’t want to do that. But, but sometimes there are sellers that can do the 21321. Buyer downs, I mean, you can kind of craft it any way you want. There are creative solutions. And that’s where instead of just going, well, obviously, nobody wants to go from three to 7%. Yeah, we all know that. Now, let’s reach out to our lending partners and say, Guys, give me a compelling argument that I can then bring to a buyer to say, here’s how we’re going to help this make more sense than
Diana Sutherlin 50:43 that. And if they’re afraid, oh, but the market, it’s going to tank, it’s gonna go, we didn’t go down where we are, everybody was like, oh, you know, prices are gonna go down XMen, we didn’t go down at all, really, we actually went up. And so much of it is every it’s always supply and demand, no matter at the end of the day, I don’t care where you are, what year it is, it’s supply and demand. And the fact is, there was so little, and there were so many people who wanted to buy. Now, the other thing too, on the buyers side is you’ve got to help them get over their fear I’m going to buy in the market is going to tank, you know, or you know, and they’re so freaked out about the interest rates. And I love that line, marry the home date, the rate, it’s fine, get the rate because that can change, you know, but if you find something you love, and again, keep them focused on how long are they selling? I mean, how long are they living there? If if they’re going to flip this in two years? Yeah, maybe not. But you’re gonna live there for the long haul, you won’t be at what show from historically, what has happened, and what always continues to happen. Even back during the market crash. Look, I bought some properties, when that happened in some of in the buildings that my developers were selling, because it was like they were giving things away, that was a very unusual time that I don’t think we’re ever going to see again.
D.J. Paris 52:19 And we probably won’t see 3% interest rates ever again, either. And that’s it, it’s okay. It was an anomaly. Reaction to COVID. It made sense at the moment. And now we’re a little bit hamstrung, because, you know, we have, you know, again, so it’s tough right now, you know, you have somebody who wants to sell their property for a premium, or to, you know, to recognize the upside that they’ve seen. And that, yeah, Oh, where am I gonna live next. And that is that is tricky, it’s a tough position to be very
Diana Sutherlin 52:51 tricky. The, the good thing is, sometimes they’re going into areas that are not that the inventory isn’t quite as low as it is here. You know? And, um, and then if sellers are like, and if they come to me, if sellers come to me in this kind of market and say, oh, I want to sell this off market, why would you who benefits from that? I do, but they certainly don’t, there’s so many buyers out there, there’s so many buyers out there, and you want to get it out there, you want to get it out there and get it out there. And there’s all kinds of, you know, ways people are doing them. By doing that. I know some agents are underpricing a bit to get bidding mores, you know, whatever, whatever your particular style is. But there are buyers out there, it’s just managing their fear, manage fear. And
D.J. Paris 53:50 also, I suspect, Diana, that you have said this more than once. And I want to, I’m sort of making up the story in my head. And I’d like you to clarify or correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a really important one. Because right now agents want listings, because listings we know sell very quickly. However, buying the next property for that, that couple assuming they stay in the same market, looking for a comparable place, or maybe a step up or a step down, depending on where they are in their life can be very, very challenging. And I wonder how many times you have said to someone you know, we can sell your property in a day or two, or very quickly because of the conditions of the market. What I’m worried about is not finding you the next place. I suspect you have counseled people to say now maybe isn’t the right time to consider that. And you’ve probably turn down business as a result. I’m curious to hear Does that ever come into play? Especially right now where you’re like, you know, we have to think about inventory. Yes, we can sell the property. Yes. We’ll make a profit. I’m worried though about finding your next place.
Diana Sutherlin 54:58 Yeah, absolutely. loosely, I mean that definitely if they, if they don’t see that there are, there’s a little bit of a stream, even if it’s a small stream of things coming on the market of things that they could possibly do and marry the home date the rate, then, then maybe it isn’t the right time. I think. And that’s my point, again, about you give people the right advice, you may not get that initial, you know, commission, but guaranteed, I’ve seen this so many times, they’re coming back to you for years, and they’re referring you. And I’ve always said never, you know, it’s just like how you treat other agents, I’m very known in the business. And I’m very, very proud of the fact that I’m a really ethical agent, I know, agents out there right now that block other agents from seeing the properties, because they want to double it, we’re getting a lot of that they will double and, you know, buy and sell side. And it’s like you are literally destroying, you’re going to need that other agent. Yep, down the line, you are so short sighted. Because if you don’t play nice in the sandbox, and it’s one of the reasons, so many, so many of the developers came to me to do even the broker outreaches, because they knew I had such good rapport with so many agents, they come to me, I do an open house, they there, I mean, a broker’s open, they’re there do you know, and they support you, and they want to do business with you. And there’s a lot of kind of icky things that go on, you don’t want to be part of that. Always think long term, long term, you know, have a much bigger vision. And that’s exactly, it speaks to what you’re talking about, you know, sometimes you’ve got to be patient, and it may not be the right time. You know, if there’s I tell my clients all the time in a stacked building, meaning a high rise that has a whole line of the exact same unit, if two or three come on the market at the same time, do not listen now. Because it’s supply and demand. Again, you’re going to be competing with these two other people, not buyers know they can negotiate more in a situation like that. So I always encourage them, hang on, can you stay Can you rent for a year, whatever, whatever their possible options are. But you’ve got to be willing to not to let that immediate commission go. Postpone it or, you know, push it off a little bit. And and then they trust you. It’s all about, it’s all about building trust. It really is.
D.J. Paris 57:56 It is and it because it’s such a huge financial decision, you know, whether it’s somebody’s first time buying a home, or selling a home, or it’s their fifth home, either way, they are this is this, we’re talking about finances. You said something else about being in alignment or or being playing nice in the sandbox with other agents. I, I don’t suspect our listeners struggle with this, because I just assume our podcast listeners are the nicest agents in the on the planet. And I’m sure they are. But sometimes, but you know, there’s other agents out there who aren’t so nice to us, in particular. And I hate to even say this, because I wish I wasn’t saying it. But women get treated differently. Sometimes by sometimes by male agents, sometimes by other female agents. But regardless, women can be treated differently as well. I have a very good friend here in Chicago is one of the top agents he or she has been nicest person you could ever possibly meet. And sort of like when we’re together socially, she’ll go, you would not believe the way some men speak to me. And I’m like, as a man, I don’t recognize that. So as men, anyone out there who’s listening, who is a man, really, really understand that, that women sometimes do not get talked to in the same way that men are taught to and it is not easy to be a woman, not easy to be a woman in general, but certainly not easy to be a woman realtor, when men can can, you know, talk down to women? So I’m curious and when you see bad behavior out there happening to you, you know, you’ve probably experienced it as well. How do you process that and move beyond it?
Diana Sutherlin 59:34 You know, I, I don’t get that so much. But it could be because of how long I’ve been doing this and people around you’re, for the most part are aware of me at least, and my reputation so I don’t get that some but I did in the beginning. I did in the beginning. I actually will never forget this one agent saying and he was an old timer in the business here. hardly ever did any business. And I came in and you know, I guess he just assumed, you know, maybe I was a hat check girl before, who knows. But I remember one of my developers coming back to me and saying, What a nasty man, he just said, Oh, she just walked into everything. And I was like, oh, yeah, you know what? Yeah, I had, it really bothered me at first. But I learned to let it roll off my back. And with developers, every now and then I’ll get that kind of
D.J. Paris 1:00:38 advice club kind of,
Diana Sutherlin 1:00:41 can be a, but I am always one of them over, I’ve always with my knowledge, with my hard work with making them making their product project to success. And beyond what they ever thought, I mean, so many times, I’ve outsold their performance, you know, when they’re like, Oh, my God, you’re the best thing since sliced bread. And the fact is, sometimes you have to earn it. And I kind of know that, and I have to just, Okay, I’m gonna buckle up, and I’m going to show them, you know, and then they are completely the opposite. You know, there was a one of the big projects that I did every Wednesday, we would have our big marketing meeting. And every I was the only woman in there. And it got to be and the, the person who was the regional director was so difficult, everyone was terrified of him, terrified of him, even his own sales team was terrified of him. And it got to the point, we will walk into the meetings, the only person he ever talked to in there, or ask questions of was me. And the whole meeting, he just felt, and everybody else was kind of glad, because then they weren’t in the lineup, they were afraid, afraid, afraid. And I thought, I’m stepping up to this, I’m jumping in the deep end, I’m going to come up with some great ideas, I’m going to do the work that he’s asking me to do, do my research, think out of the box, you know, throw out some ideas here. And he respected me for it, you know, so you have to show your work, you have to know your worth, you have to know your worth. And then you have to show them. And sometimes you just have to prove it. I haven’t I have somebody right now that from the very beginning, he had a really bad, bad situation with a realtor prior to me. And it was so unfortunate, because I knew I was going to have to undo some of that damage, you know, in his mind with trust. And now it’s completely the opposite. But it was painful for for, you know, a few weeks. It was like God, he questions everything I do to see really think I don’t know what I’m talking about, you know, and it was really, really hard. Particularly after all the years, I’ve done this, and I think if he would just trust me, you know, we could get this done so much quicker and better. You know, and it took time, but I hung in there part of it is I like a child. You know, maybe that’s it. I like a challenge, you know, but we don’t get as much. We have a lot of women here that do real estate. And a lot of the top ones are women not all for sure. But a lot of them are incredibly intelligent women, you know, and I’m so good at what they do. And we all admire each other male and female alike. I think, I think the top agents always seem to kind of usually unless they’re just so hyper competitive with you. They seem to you know, um, you know, we have mutual respect most of the time.
D.J. Paris 1:04:14 I think that’s because you all know the amount of skill and effort that it takes to get to that level anyone can get there should they put in that amount of work and dedication, very few will go that that extra mile. And as a result, you’ve all you’re part of a community of people that have gone the extra mile now again, there’s outliers, there’s always the weird person at the top or you’re like I don’t like that person. But the vast majority are like we earn this spot we’d like that there’s compet healthy competition. We also by the way, are cooperating with each other it is called a cooperative commission. So it’s so it is so important inter Personal interpersonal skills with other agents, you know, if you, you know, right now, especially when you’re with buyers, so much competition, because obviously, there’s inventory challenges in most markets, this is the time to really build those interpersonal skills, I think between realtors, because, boy, you want you want somebody when they see your name on that offer to go out, I know Diana, she’s the she’s great, this is legit. And you
Diana Sutherlin 1:05:29 know what, you it’s it, you’re laying out a course for your business to be so much easier. You make enemies out there, let me and we all know the agents we see on a listing and we go, Oh my God, there’s gonna be a nightmare. And they’re gonna throw my offer in the trash or they’re, you know, or they’re going to use it to go get their own. But you we all know those agents. And you know what happens over time. People don’t want to work with them. They don’t want to work with them, because why would they waste their time? Their clients time? You know, you never trust anything they say, you know, and then you know, the ones you see their name, you know, man, this is a stand up person. We’re going to literally be professional to professional, and it’s a joy doing. It’s a it’s a pleasure doing business with people like that. So that’s why I’m saying don’t chase after that one commission here or that one commission here. I’ve had, I’ve had agents that have done lousy things to me, you know, I’m not gonna go badmouth them. But you know, when I see them coming, I’m kinda like, yeah, no, you know, I’m not going to seek out working with them. Let’s put it that way. And, you know, so it’s incredibly important. We’re here for the long term.
D.J. Paris 1:06:59 Yeah, I think, you know, we always want I always think like, whenever, my, somebody I’m calling when the phone rings. And now of course, it announces, you know, we’ve had caller ID since the 90s. Now, everyone knows the phone call who it’s from, you know, and I always want in any part of my life, whether it’s my family, my friends, you know, my, my work colleagues, my clients, I want, when the phone rings, I don’t want them to go deejays calling me I don’t want them to go, hey, hey, DJs, calling this is cool. Like, he’s probably got something fun and exciting to tell me or he’s, he cares about me, I want people to be pleasantly surprised. Like, I want them to see a smile on their face when, when, when they pick up the phone. And, and if and if you can, not you Diana, but if our listeners if we can think about as a realtor, you know, there’s always bumps in every transaction, there’s always something that goes wrong. And every single transaction, there’s always going to be some point of tension or stress. And if if you can still be every time that when you make those outbound phone calls to whether it’s another agent and attorney, a lender, loan officer or your client, and if the other person’s like, I’m excited to pick up the phone, you know, you’re doing a good job. That’s
Diana Sutherlin 1:08:14 right. And you sometimes have to be a mediator, we have to be mediators, we have to do conflict resolution, sometimes between couples, you know, members of a couple, we have to be therapists, when they’re sitting on the ledge, you know, constantly, we’re having to be therapists. And it’s like, and it’s part of the job. The other thing I will say is never be the smartest person in the room. Always keep learning. I am learning every single day. And I’ve thankfully, it’s always been my personality. I’m like a sponge. I never want to be that person that’s got to prove I know it all. I want to learn learn what and I’ve learned something, I learned something every day. And I learned something from almost almost every deal that I do. You know, and I look at everybody, as a team, my attorneys, my lenders, you know, you know, it’s like Teach me teach me the more I learned, the more I can serve my clients, you know, and then I know what I’m talking about, because I do know what I’m talking about. Right?
D.J. Paris 1:09:25 I the thing that we didn’t specifically talk about, but I think in encompasses Diana, your success has been passion, you clearly have a passion for what you do, helping your clients. And again, this sounds a little bit like marketing speak. But I know everyone who has listened to this episode by now can hear the passion that comes through in the way in which you communicate and so that is incredibly important, because passion is something that I think doesn’t get spoken about enough in this industry. And, again, because it’s such a heavy emotional decision whether somebody buys or sells a home game, it’s heavy financial decision, emotional decision, it’s stressful decision to have somebody on your team who is passionate for you, the client, having your best interests in mind. And being able it doesn’t mean you have to be expressive. Everyone’s different. Some people are introverts, some people are extroverts. There’s different ways to express passion. It doesn’t have to be in exactly Diana style, but it works really well for Diana. But notice how authentic she is. She works hard, she sharpens her skills, she’s constantly trying to improve all of these years later and learn and continues to learn her numbers and the market. The passion for learning, I think, is really what I get the most is that was probably the most I’ve gotten out of you is this, this continual hunger for learning, learning, learning. And I think that allows you to continue to grow. So I want to honor you for that. I also want to say to our audience, by the way, if there are agents out there who are in the Gold Coast area of New Jersey, Hoboken What else, sorry, Jersey City, Hoboken, up the Gold Coast, if you are an agent who is looking, you know, this is the year of teams, this is the year of recruiting, this is the year where agents are moving around, you know, this is a good time to explore other options, if you would like to possibly, you know, see what other options exist or if you think you could be a value to the Sutherland group, or maybe you would want to join forces with them reach out to Diana and her team, and they can see if might be a match. And also, by the way, if you’re an agent in another area, or another state, even who have clients who you know, come and go, possibly moving into New York City or obviously New Jersey, but Florida a lot of people retire to Florida from New York City, of course, and other areas as well. If you have these feeder markets going in and out, Diana would love the opportunity to partner with you to work with your clients as well. But I’m Diana, if there is an agent in your area or someone that wants to work with you directly what’s what’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Diana Sutherlin 1:12:22 Um, well, definitely, you can email me at Diana at Sutherland group.com. And my spelling is unusual, it’s su t h e r l i n group.com. You know, they can absolutely reach out to me there, I’m actually interviewing somebody this afternoon. So you know, it or referrals, I love referrals, we I send people back and forth. And that’s another reason to have great relationships with agents, you know, it’s very important, they have to know that you are going to take such good care of their client, you know, because it’s their reputation on the line too. So, so referrals, anybody looking to possibly join a team, you know, that, you know, maybe we can, you know, discuss whether it’s a good fit, but thank you for that DJ.
D.J. Paris 1:13:20 Well, thank you. This has been an incredible Episode You said so much knowledge and wisdom and strategy. And I think more so than anything, just your overall presence is so in alignment with the only word that keeps coming to me is authentic, this, this authentic willingness to to really want to help somebody make this, these these financial these decisions around what they buy and sell and where they live. It really comes through in your energy and I suspect is a big part of your success. You are clearly clearly into the the end result for your client you are you are on their team, you are their advocate, and you are listening and paying attention. So I love, love, love, love that. And that came through just perfectly I think today so Advic, everyone learned a ton from you. And so if you are interested in working with Diana and her team, obviously you can reach out to her Sutherland group.com, we will have a link to that in the show notes, follow them on social media as well. Sutherlin group will have a link to that as well. So you don’t have to write it down. And also, Diana, on behalf of our listeners, thank you for your time we know just how busy you are, you know, with all of the different groups that you work with developers, clients, your own team members, thank you for your time today. And also on behalf of Diana and myself. We want to thank our listeners for continuing to support our show. Yeah, thanks for sticking around to the very end. Please support our sponsors. Please tell one friend of On this episode, just one other agent that is maybe struggling or maybe somebody that goes, I would like to start to work with developers or or just I want to be more connected to my, my sphere of influence, send them a link to this episode, and that will help them so just tell one friend in your office about this episode, we would appreciate it and also leave us a review for you. Whether you like us or not, we love feedback. So please tell us how you’re finding these episodes so we can continually improve for you Diana, thank you so much for being on the show. We are honored to have you Diana Sutherland. Amazing total superstar Rockstar in New Jersey and New York City as well. Diana, thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Diana.
Diana Sutherlin 1:15:42 Thank you. Okay. Take care.
Why 36 Is The Magic Number Of Touches • Josh Anderson
Jul 25, 2023
Josh Anderson with the Anderson Group talks about his transition from the Army into real estate business. Josh discussed the importance of the power of networking and making new contacts. Next, Josh shares some tips for agents to use as their strategy in knowing their clients better and providing better value. Lastly Josh emphasized the importance of standards and procedures for an agent needs to follow.
D.J. Paris 0:00 If everyone in your sphere of influence got 36 touches from you over a 12 month period, what would that do to your production? We’re going to talk about it today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads into interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering clients a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business and real geeks is super easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is also mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness. Do yourself a favor and please visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. This episode is also brought to you from manuel.io who can take your listings and quickly virtually renovate them to show prospective buyers what’s possible, making your sales much faster. And for higher price points. Guys, this is awesome stuff and I’ll be telling you more about Manuel halfway through the episode. But for now, go visit manuel.io That’s mo d w e. l l.io. And now on to the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through this show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Josh Anderson of Nashville. Before we get to Josh, just two quick reminders. Please tell a friend about this show. Think of one of the realtor that’s struggling right now and send them a link and send him over to our website keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button and also please follow us on Instagram. We’re actually on all the social channels but we’re trying to grow our Instagram channel because we post really great content there a couple several times a week we post short form videos How do you find us top agent interviews so go to Instagram search for top agent interviews or that’s our handle and hit the Follow button. We appreciate it Okay, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Josh Anderson.
Today on the show our guest is Josh Anderson with the Anderson group Real Estate Services in Nashville, Tennessee. Let me tell you more about Josh. Now Josh Anderson is a highly motivated individual who is passionate about Nashville real estate and dedicated to serving his clients and community. Josh was born and raised in Nashville. He graduated from Louisiana State University graduated from Louisiana State with a degree in international trade and finance. He served in the US Army for eight years including a 10 month deployment in Bagram Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. These experiences along with his education have instilled in him a strong work ethic, discipline, and a desire to give back. With over 17 years of experience in the real estate industry. Josh has helped more than 2000 families achieve their homeownership dreams. He has also built a successful team that consistently ranks among the top five real estate teams in the southwest region. Now Josh’s unwavering commitment to client satisfaction is reflected in the fact that nearly 75% of his business comes from past clients, his sphere of influence and Agent referrals. Please follow Josh on Instagram and Facebook. There’s two places you can follow him on on social which is at sorry, tag Nashville. So that’s one of his accounts tag Nashville. The other is the real Josh Anderson. And by the way, we are going to have links to both of those in the show notes so you don’t have to even search around will tag right to it. Also visit his website at Josh Anderson realestate.com. And let’s all welcome Josh and thank him for his service to our country as well. Josh Welcome to the show.
Josh Anderson 5:00 Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate that.
D.J. Paris 5:03 Well, thank you for coming on our show. The hardest part of interviewing top 1% producers is finding time to do it. So we appreciate you and the fact that you’re not just, you know, running your own business, you have a whole team to to help as well. And we appreciate your time today. So thank you. I’m excited to chat with you, and would love to learn how you got into real estate. So you were a military guy. And then were you doing real estate while in the military? I actually recently interviewed someone who was, but I’m curious to hear your story.
Josh Anderson 5:36 Now, actually, actually, well, I’ll tell you, though, the after high school, I was smart enough to know that I probably didn’t need to go from high school to college. So I went into the military and did that. And then went to LSU. And I was actually in my junior year of college, when I got a phone call walking into my last final of the semester, that I was going to be going to Afghanistan for a year. And they actually didn’t know how long we’re gonna go. They told us three months, six months, it ended up being about 1110 and a half, 11 months, my goodness. And so it was, you know, it was like within eight months of 911. So it was back in 2002. And, anyway, so I got into real estate in April of 2006. It’s funny, it was actually April 1, so April Fool’s Day. And, you know, I graduated in finance and economics and worked at an investment bank. And I think I created a idea or a story in my head of what that was going to be. And it just, it wouldn’t fill in the buckets, I wouldn’t be mentored, I wouldn’t be challenged. And so I was getting my real estate license in the meantime, just because I’ve, I’ve always loved real estate architecture. And so I ended up, I ended up doing that. And within the first three months, I sold my first house. So I think I sold 23 or 24 houses my first year in the business.
D.J. Paris 6:59 That’s incredible. That’s an incredible amount of homes. I’m curious, because at again, I know, a lot of times people listen, and they’re like, well, it was different back in, you know, the early 2000s. Or I’m not sure it was so different. I know, client acquisition. I don’t think it’s gotten easier over the years. If you’re a brand new agent. So curious on how did you get that many deals done in your first year? I mean, that is truly a huge, huge as you know, a huge number.
Josh Anderson 7:25 Yeah, so I guess I did, I did those 23 transactions really in about eight and a half or nine months. You know, I think I kind of approached it with I approached it with the idea that it was really kind of guerilla marketing. So I was I was out networking constantly, I was having breakfast with people lunches with people, I was doing nonprofit and volunteering activities. I joined the Junior Chamber and the Young Leaders Council and all these different things. Because I was trying to add as many people to my database as possible, and I was shaking as many hands as possible. And you know, when you’re new, I always jokingly tell people, I, I knew that people weren’t going to necessarily just do business with me. So there were a lot of people I was like, hey, you know, when somebody has a property to buy or sell, who do you refer? And they were like, oh, so and so? And I said, Well, can I be your second place realtor? And no money asked love that. Yeah, so nobody asks that question. Right. So you know, how often somebody said no, like 0% of the time, of course and so I was always the second place realtor for so many people and it just requires the first place realtor did not answer their phone or not be available for you to become the first place realtor. And I one of my, one of my best sources. Now I was just gonna say my, one of my best referral sources is he told me he would never do business with me because he had his he had his team. He had his guy. Yeah. And that guy didn’t do whatever he needed, and then the referral source and the agent ever since.
D.J. Paris 9:01 So I’ve done about 500 episodes, you’re the first person to give that particular tip. And I think it’s one of the very best tips I’ve ever heard because, well, not only do I like it, but I have a little bit of a personal experience with that particular idea. My father is a paper salesman and he’s been doing it forever 40 years, and he’s like the least salesy person you’ll ever meet. He’s just a wonderfully nice human being. And because he’s not very salesy. I always was curious, like, how did how did you, you know, win these clients over who were already with other paper salesman, you know, they all basically have this access to the similar products and pricing. He goes, I just always told them like, hey, if your current person like screws up, I’d love the opportunity to help you out. And he goes, I just would wait and I’d wait for that and it it built a very nice career for him and obviously, for you as well. So I love that tip. So for everyone out there listening, let’s make sure we have that ret holstered and ready to pull out when somebody goes oh, you know, I already have a real Sir, but thanks be like, hey, that’s great. If anything ever changes or if you’re ever dissatisfied, you know, with with anyone service, I would love to have the opportunity to win earn your business. That is, that is a wonderfully wonderful suggestion. Thank you for that our audience needs you. So I’m sorry, I so so you. So I also want to make one other point, you actually said something else that was it. This is not something that that is this is commonly said, but it’s something that’s so important. I’m glad you said it, which is he didn’t assume that everyone in his current database was going to use him. Right. And you know, he’s a new realtor at this point. Maybe there’s a lot of his friends that are like, yeah, maybe I’ll wait a few years before I’ll give Josh, you know, my $700,000 home to sell or whatever. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable thought, really. And I’m not saying you thought that but but it could have been one at some people in your database has thought. So the idea of like, gosh, my friends aren’t really calling me. Right away? Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I would call my best friend who just got their license. But But what he did is he said, I need to add people to my database. So he went out, he did lunches, he did breakfasts, he did a volunteering, all of those things, add people to your database. And that is really the name of the game when he gets started. So cheers to that. And obviously, it worked 23 transactions in your first year as in credible? And then how did you continue to grow from there?
Josh Anderson 11:20 Yeah, and so just just going on that on that first year piece, you know, I probably did 75 open houses. And I tell people all the time, I don’t think I did a, I don’t think I did a single transaction from an open house. But what I what I did get was really comfortable meeting somebody and having to figure out what you need to say in the first seven seconds of meeting somebody and not hovering over them, but being available being a resource. So yeah, I don’t think I actually closed any deals from open houses. But I got really comfortable in front of strangers. In a house that wasn’t mine, that I didn’t know a whole lot about. I mean, I, I could read the MLS sheet. And most of these weren’t, these weren’t my open houses, it is one of my listings for open houses, I was just doing activities to get in front of people. And so that those are things that get somebody goes, Well, I’m not going to do 75 open houses to get zero business. But then you look up three or five years later and go, my scripts are better than yours, my objection handlers are better than yours, because I’m out doing all these things. And so I’d say the best thing that I the best things that I did in 2006. And I would argue that 2006 was probably a not as good but similar market to maybe 2018 1920. And then 2000 789 and 10 are probably a little bit more like we’re in now where it’s like hard to tire and hard to hard to convert. You know, conversion is very different today than it was five years ago. But I got really comfortable and very good. Looking back on it. I didn’t realize how good of a job I did with the basics. And when I say the basics, you know, time blocking, I literally to this day, you don’t you don’t have like they’re all outbound phone calls from 830 to 1130. Every single day, five days a week. And
D.J. Paris 13:15 let me let me pause you on that because that you just said something that that again, a lot of people say and then when people hear that, they’re like, Well, okay, what happens when you get that emergency tax, that emergency phone call the email that from a client, I need to speak to you right now and you’re in a time block? Obviously, nothing is absolute, you probably would break that if you needed to, but but how? How important is it that you that you keep on track during those those outbound phone call times? And do you even allow messages to come in? Maybe you don’t? I’m curious to hear
Josh Anderson 13:48 so. So everybody on my team makes fun of me? Well, two things I would say one, everyone. Is it their 911? Or is it your 911? Right? Was it their emergency? I mean, everybody else thinks everything is so important to them. But is it? Is it a priority for you? And so, for me, there’s nothing in real estate and 17 years that couldn’t wait two or three hours, there’s literally nothing, not one single thing. Even if there’s an issue at closing, like my, my administrative team can take care of that they can figure it out. And so that’s how serious I got about lead generation and lead follow up. And people always talk about lead generation but really lead follow up really worth it.
D.J. Paris 14:33 Before we get before we get to lead follow up. I did want one more question I meant to ask a few minutes ago and I forgot. But being that you are a military man and military is about process, precision, discipline, obviously hard work. Going above and beyond. I’m curious if there were any lessons I’m sure there were but anything that that that you learned in the military that you were able to take with you back into your real estate practice that really you think helped push you maybe where somebody who might not have had those experiences might not have those skills?
Josh Anderson 15:10 Yeah, I mean, I think there’s certainly there, there are standards and procedures for everything. And there’s also hurry up and wait, which happens a little bit in real estate. And that’s maybe why I’m so good at follow up is, you know, it’s like, when I think about follow up, I will follow up. Somebody told me early on in the business, it’s like, you follow up with somebody until they buy or die. And I like kind of probably took that a little bit to heart too much. But I really do. I mean, there, there was somebody we listed a property for two years ago that literally was in our database since 2009. And he never responded to any text messages any voicemails, called me one day while I’m in West Palm Beach at the Four Seasons. And he’s like, Hey, this is Sean. And I’m like, Hey,
D.J. Paris 15:57 like, trying to figure out who Sean is.
Josh Anderson 16:00 Yeah. And I’m like, he’s like, over on Fairfax. And I was like, Holy crap, this guy’s finally calling me This is unbelievable. Because I literally had lifting, you know, probably four to six or eight messages via text, email or phone call. He was on a market report, or a Market Snapshot. Then when we had top producer, there was like, unbelievable that he was responding to me. Of course, I was on vacation, right. But we ended up listing his property and selling it and it was like, Well, was it worth it? You know, it was a smaller condo near Vanderbilt University $300,000 $9,000 for I don’t know. 20 voicemails and text messages overtop? Yeah. Yeah. When?
D.J. Paris 16:44 When sake nine grand for 20 different text messages. Sure. Yeah.
Josh Anderson 16:49 But I but I win so much, because of the simple fact that I’m willing to follow up with people forever. I’m not doing anything massively different than most other people, except the consistency of doing it over time.
D.J. Paris 17:06 Isn’t it nice to that you have these very strict processes, it really helps take the emotion out of it as well, right. Like, I know, for me, I never went to the gym for people probably sick of hearing me tell the story. So I apologize if everyone listening is like, Oh, we’ve heard this. But the only reason I now go to the gym is because I have a trainer and I have a set appointment three times a week. And I just that just works for me. I know I’m going to show up if I have an obligation to someone else. And so I am I you know, one nice thing about having the standard operating procedures, these processes you created is you don’t really have to think like if you know, every day between 830 and 1130, you’re making your outbound calls, there’s not an option not to do it really right. It’s just like this is just what I do during this time, it becomes less of a challenge to talk yourself into it because it just becomes a habit.
Josh Anderson 17:56 Yeah. And it’s easy, I don’t have to like, really, from a time blocking person, I know exactly what I’m doing every day from 830 to 1130. And it’s boring. What I like about it is super predictable. And I know that if I make a certain amount of contacts, I’m going to certain I’m going to set a certain amount of listing appointments, or work with a certain amount of buyers, whatever it is, it’s almost guaranteed. If I make 20 contacts a day, I’m going to do a certain amount of deals every year, every month, every quarter. Well,
D.J. Paris 18:32 before we dive into your follow up process, which I’m super excited to hear about. I also just wanted to make make an observation that our audience has already made about you, which is or if they haven’t thought about this consciously, I’m gonna put this in everyone’s mind. Notice Josh’s tonality, notice how his his his way of speaking his inflection. Notice if it’s a calming presence, or if it’s a an alerting presence, where it’s, you know, some people they speak and you get this like fight or flight response, like oh my gosh, it’s it’s a little too intense. Notice how Josh comes off. Imagine meeting Josh in an open house. He said 75 of them is first year. Imagine that would would would you if you were walking into a home where you didn’t know the realtor or any you know brand new person. Would you rather have somebody like Josh now that not everyone’s wired the same, of course. But Josh’s voice is incredibly calming and relaxing. And people everyone listening you can learn how to manipulate your tonality in a way that’s authentic and puts people at ease. Josh is clearly somebody and maybe it’s a southern accent kind of thing that he’s got from Nashville. He’s a born he’s a born and raised guy there. But boy is is that not a calming? I mean, imagine that versus like a different type of accent from somewhere else that maybe isn’t as calming. So I just wanted to make that point that you have a very relaxing and easy to listen to voice. Way better than mine for sure. But um, let’s talk about the follow up process because this is really, really like been the key to your success. So walk us through it.
Josh Anderson 19:58 Yeah, before I get through that, that’s also neuro linguistic programming classes and all the all the all the conferences and all the things that I’ve done. Maybe a little bit of southern southern charm, and I don’t know. Thank you for that. So So today we’re talking a little bit about, like, what our what our 36 Touch program is. And, you know, it’s not just one piece of our marketing, it’s kind of encompasses all things marketing, which is such, it touches so many different pieces of our business down to the phone calls and the text messages, you know, the client events, the giveaways, the agent reviews, or the Google reviews, the agent referrals. So I’ll break some of that down. But really, all of it starts with kind of, you know, once a year, we do kind of the 12 week year in the traction book, and meet from a quarterly perspective. But once a year, we get together for our focus day, and it’s our one day all tonight, and we really work on. And there’s more data than just that one for follow up. But it’s knowing what our numbers are. And it’s putting an entire calendar together of literally month by month, quarter by quarter of all of our marketing, client events, giveaways, all of our social media, all of our reels all of our YouTube videos. So if you’re if you’re wanting to put together a really good 36 Touch, start with the idea of calendaring it, that doesn’t, that can be overwhelming if you’re trying to just be like, Alright, we’re going to do this all at one time. This has been a process over the years that we’ve taken client events off that didn’t get the ROI, or didn’t have as many people show up. And some of our easiest and best events and least expensive events have been our best turnout and some of our fixed cost ones that cost $10,000. And we’re like, oh 36 people showed up that sucks. And then other events where, you know, we’ve had 400 people show up. So it’s one of those deals that start with a calendar and and decide what’s important to you from a from a marketing perspective. So we know that we’re going to like to all of our past clients, they’re going to get a birthday call and an anniversary call, and a home anniversary call. And then they’re going to get you know, 12 postcards a year and 12 newsletters. So I mean, these are all relatively basic things. If they own a home, obviously, if their client, they own a home, we put them on a market report. So they get that, you know, either every two weeks or every four weeks. But breaking all that down is overwhelming, until you start breaking it down into pieces of your business. So our phone calls, you know, we realized, for me, maybe I’m a little bit robotic phone calls are easy for me, because when I looked at it, I said, Okay, what’s the best way for me to get in front of the most amount of people, it was either big networking events, or like niche events, but I knew a bunch of people were going to be there where I can shake hands with a lot of people, but then follow up with all of them afterward to get coffee or lunch or whatever it is. But I said, you know, I can’t do the Northwestern Mutual where I go and have coffee like eight times a day or whatever their appointment setting is, I’d love to do that. That’s the best quality probably for me. But to get 20 contacts a day, which was my goal, back in the day, was 20 contacts a day, I needed to be on the phones. So I needed a time block that three hours of outbound phone calls every day. And it still works, I still do it. And then I’m just a little bit more. I make decisions on what networking events that I do. But, but just breaking down some of these different things. So where I was going with that is the phone calls. Were hard for team members. And so we started doing client events to make the phone calls easier, because then they could just invite their clients to the events. And then they could say, well, while I have you how’s the house? Is there anything you need? Do you need our
Unknown Speaker 24:00 I love that. That’s smart. Yeah.
Josh Anderson 24:02 So it made it simple for them. And then, you know, if people aren’t doing Google used, not everybody wants to do them. But we have 804 805 Google five star Google reviews. Online, we’ve probably had 900 to 1000. Some of them get taken away occasionally, whatever Google’s algorithm is, but 804 five star reviews. We we can track every year since 2018. We’ve done at least 30 transactions a year that we can track from Google Reviews. Our average price point $650,000. So 30 deals you do the math, it’s it’s worth the time we’ve put in to do $20 million a year in volume just from that one source.
D.J. Paris 24:47 Just quick, quick, quick pause question for you around phone calls because a lot of people have phone dialing reluctance or that’s called the there’s a cute term for it, but but the unwillingness to want Pick up the phone. And obviously, the younger generation doesn’t talk on the phone at all anymore. Very, very much if at all. And so a lot of times people, especially younger people, like I didn’t grow up jumping on the phone that much. So this is this is really a challenge for me. My question is what, today what percentage of the time when you call do you get a voicemail?
Josh Anderson 25:21 Yeah, it’s probably at least 50%. It might be 60 or 70%. I don’t think it’s 75. But we leave voicemails and I know, and one thing I’ll say, before I talk about these voicemails is it’s not call reluctance. It’s value deficiency. It just truly is. You’re right. And so people can, people can say what they want, but you’re not call reluctance, you’re just value deficient,
D.J. Paris 25:47 you don’t have a good reason to call them. So you’re like, I don’t want to have a good reason.
Josh Anderson 25:51 Right? Yeah. So you don’t know what to say to them. You don’t know how to like, one of the biggest things that we talk about our trainers on our team is What does value mean to different people? Because for you value might be something completely different than what I value in a financial advisor or CPA or a doctor or a realtor. And so it’s called it’s, it’s, it’s value deficiency, because you really don’t know how to add value. It’s not that you’re not willing to, it’s just that you don’t know what the hell to say to them, or how to add value. As far as the voicemails, I tell my team always leave voicemails no matter what, because if you don’t leave a voicemail, they definitely don’t know that you call him. Right. I mean, for friends, they see that you call and they might call you back, but we’re talking about internet leads, sign calls, whatever, I always leave a voicemail, because they might check it. And they might call me back. But if I don’t leave one, they’re definitely not calling me up.
D.J. Paris 26:50 Yeah, I think you made a really strong point about call reluctance, this idea of, you know, Oh, am I making a sales call? Or am I actually calling with some specific value that I’m going to be bringing to the person who’s going to be picking up the phone. And if you do have that value really does, I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. But you’re so right, it, it pretty much eliminates the call reluctance, because you’re actually like, No, I’m gonna, I’m doing a good thing by calling for the person not not just selfishly, for me trying to keep my contacts satisfied, I’m actually doing something for them. And it makes those phone calls a heck of a lot easier.
Josh Anderson 27:25 I think you have to flip the mindset and come from contribution and go, you know, I always think of it like this, if I don’t call these people, they have to work with an inferior agent. And I don’t want them to work with an inferior agent. And I know, that’s like, maybe, you know, kind of ego driven, but it’s not, it’s more like there are a lot of good agents out there. And there’s a lot more bad agents, just like CPAs, and doctors and financial advisors, there’s good and bad and all these industries. And I know what I can provide my clients, and I know what value we add. And I know that a lot of other agents don’t add any value, and they just want to get a commission, and they’re never going to follow up ever again. And where the majority of our business comes from as long term follow up, and inviting them to our client events, and trying to educate them on how to be better business owners by doing trainings on a monthly or quarterly basis for one particular class, and then we do a wealth building class every month. And that’s not even real estate wealth building. It’s, it’s, I mean, that is certainly a large piece of it, but it’s more like, we all want to believe that we’re always going to make more money. But that’s just not the case, not for it, you’re not forever going to make more money every year forever. So how can we get better at not paying taxes? And can we invest in real estate or do flips or short term rentals? Or can we put our kids on payroll, things like that? So we’re educating our clients on that stuff?
D.J. Paris 28:57 Yeah, it’s it’s brilliant, actually. So we’re talking about value. So when he was when Josh was mentioning client, client appreciation events, you know, I’m immediately thinking and probably our audience is thinking Party Party Party. And yes, you know, I’m sure you have those obviously, you do have those as well. But this idea of continually adding value that isn’t just so you want to you want to buy your first home, well, let’s let’s get you into a seminar, which is fine too. But having this like, Hey, I don’t just sell homes. I also want to talk to you about wealth preservation, wealth building, maybe you bring in a financial advisor to talk about investments, you know, outside of real estate as well. There’s an accountant maybe like you were saying to talk about opportunities to you know, maybe you started S corp or an LLC to you know, to get some pass through income and things like that. So that is an absolutely brilliant strategy. It’s not one that I see a lot of realtors doing it at almost everything I see that Realtors do as far as events are usually around buying or selling real estate and again you said part of yours is about you know hey there’s passive income you can earn with through investments, real estate invest Yeah, but this idea of continually adding value, I think is like I would go to that seminar.
Josh Anderson 30:06 Yeah. And it’s even things as basic as like, Why do you have your money in a bank account, earning zero when you could have it in a money market account making four and a half percent right now? Yeah. And maybe your bank offers that. And that’s great. But you have to go ask them to do it, they’re not going to automatically give you a 4% if they can give you point, point 1%. And so we’re, we’re going through all these, like, one of my classes is 25, wealth building ideas. And it’s just ideas, it’s putting your kids it’s maxing out your HSA accounts. And it’s so it’s a lot of it is real estate, but a lot of it is not real estate, it’s doing a cost segregation on your investment property. I mean, my parents are in multiple commercial properties, they don’t even know what Cost Segregation is. And so and they’re intelligent people, they just have, they don’t know what it is. Yeah. And so, you know, it’s, it’s trying to figure out that value might not mean any like that class, for a lot of people, they’re just like, whatever. But for the ones that care and do want to save money on taxes, and do want to build wealth, it’s invaluable. And so that’s what we’re trying to do is constantly, and we do have the dinner party client events, the VIP events, we have things that are, you know, one of our best cloud events we’ve ever done is pictures in the park, it literally cost us a couple $100. And everybody forgets in September in October, that they’re going to need holiday pictures further or further pictures for their holiday card. And we have massive turnout in the fixed cost is literally like, if we have 100 people there, and it’s only $200 for the photographer to come out. Like it’s like a couple of dollars a person, it’s crazy, it’s amazing. And it’s something that I have to spend, you don’t have to spend 1000s of dollars you can do, you can add on to other events that are already like sponsored, I mean, there’s so many, you just gotta get creative.
D.J. Paris 31:59 And a lot of times too, with with photography, you know, family photos, in particulars, a lot of that gets framed a lot of it gets hung up on walls or put on on dressers or, you know, the set out for people to see. And, you know, that’s it also a memory that would trigger Oh, that was a Josh thing like, oh, yeah, I remember we went to that thing that just brought us to, that is a nice reminder, visual reminder of, you know, what you do without saying, hey, I want to put a you know, account a calendar for, you know, the local sports team on your on your on your fridge, and some people like that some people don’t. But everyone likes a family photo. And it doesn’t also have your name plastered on it. But inherently, your name is all over it, because you were the guy that facilitated that. So and yeah, the ROI on that is incredible.
Josh Anderson 32:44 Yeah. And so there’s just little things like, you know, this isn’t really part of the marketing, but it plays into the marketing, like when we meet with clients, buyer clients. Especially, they come into our office, and we do you know, a consultation with them. And we do a VIP intake form. So we want to know, their names, their birthdays, their anniversary, their kids names, do they have dogs? Do they have animals? What is their dream trip? What’s their bucket list? What what is their occupation? So we want to do an event or we want to market to all of our probate attorneys in our in our database. That’s how we that’s how we do is we get this VI, P and
D.J. Paris 33:27 you Oh, I just got
Josh Anderson 33:30 Yeah, VIP intake form is talking about and intake. It just allows us to know what their favorite candy bars and all these things. I mean, just silly basic stuff. But you know, the thing that I’ve told people all the time is if you if you send a birthday card to their kids, or you know their dog’s name, and you send their dog a treat huge, you’re winning them for life. And so I think those are really important things that you can do really inexpensively. And I try to tell my team, we need to be like the Facebook’s and the Instagrams and the tiktoks. Like their data companies, yes, their social media, but they’re actually data companies. And that’s important to think about when we gather, we get all their other information. I mean, think about we get everybody I mean, between the title company, the mortgage company and the realtor, we get as much information as Facebook has actually probably more sensitive information. And so I think that’s really important for people to understand is we have we have the ability to really go above and beyond and create like a four seasons experience or like a Ritz Carlton type experience if we want to. There’s a lot of people that just want to do transactions instead of have relationships. But my my, my database is my database has really done a lot more for me than just income. I mean, you know, some of some of my best friends have come Out of being in, you know, the Junior Chamber or Young Leaders Council type, class. And then they become clients and they refer me for life, which is income. But it’s also, you know, my ultimate goal is to be able to hang out with all the people that are clients. And that doesn’t always work out. But, you know, when we have 2000 clients, we really don’t need any more clients, we just need to do a better job of following them on Instagram, checking in with them loving on our database, and ultimately, educating them about wealth building, so they buy more real estate, it doesn’t have to be a traditional deal. It’s what if, what if your top 25 clients bought one house a year from you? So January one, you know, those 25 people are going to buy 25 homes? And then what have you had 10 more people in your database that were automatically going to refer you three people a year. That’s another 30 deals. That’s the 55 transactions a year. Most people that are watching this podcast probably aren’t doing 55 deals a year.
D.J. Paris 36:03 No. And so So you’ve basically determined your database can support and sustain that with all of the information that you are collecting about them so that you have a reason to reach out, for example, and I just want to highlight one of the examples you gave actually highlight two of them, because they’re super easy to do. What is somebody’s wedding anniversary, which you mentioned, I mean, for everyone listening, if you are married, when’s the last time either either somebody outside of your closest friends who happens to know your wedding anniversary, which most of your close friends don’t even know that outside of your family? And maybe a few close friends when’s the last time somebody who shouldn’t even know your wedding anniversary picked up the phone and said, Hey, man, Happy wedding anniversary. Hope you and your partner have a great day today. Nobody does that. I mean, that’s a simple thing. Another another thing that Josh didn’t say, but I know he does. Well, he did say, but I have an idea of of one way to help automate this. If you know, obviously, you’re going to know where your clients work, right? Maybe if both people work, you’ll know where both of them work. But you could literally go into Google. Yeah, Popeyes a great idea. And think about Popeyes brilliant idea. Because you can meet other people at their employer at their place of employment too. But I was also thinking, put Google alerts for all of those businesses. And you’ll get those news stories when they come in, and a great reason to reach out. It’s like we have Boeing here in Chicago. So be like, Hey, I just saw Boeing close to an amazing, huge deal with the military just thought that that was really cool. I hope, I hope you know, whatever you you can just be you’re talking about Facebook, you’re a data company, Facebook knows, they know where you work, they know all of this info, and they’re going to serve you up information that they think is relevant to your interests. Josh is doing this individually. Brilliant.
Josh Anderson 37:43 Yeah. Yeah. And, and I’ve gotten away from this a little bit, but the pot buys. I was doing up until COVID. And I just haven’t gotten back into it. But it’s something I actually mentioned. In the last couple of weeks to my Director of Operations, I was like, I gotta start. Doesn’t have to be all the time. But for me, it was like, I’m gonna go have lunch with somebody on Friday. And then I want the rest of my Friday to be pot bus. So wherever I eat in town, I want to look at my database who, who’s in that zip code? And who who can I? Where do they work? And can I either stop by their house, and we’re literally talking five or 10 minutes. I’m not trying to like, hijack their afternoon. I just want to get some FaceTime of hey, how’s it going? I was in the area I just felt like stopping by. Done.
D.J. Paris 38:32 And that’s and again, Josh is so intentional. And so well thought out that you go okay, well, if I just show up at my clients, you know, place of employment, that might annoy them. It might be there. They’re in the middle of something. So Josh is like, Hey, I just was in the neighborhood. I was down the street, I thought I’d swing by and I knew I knew we were over. So I just wanted to say hi hope all as well. And nobody says that nobody is going to you know, have a bad impression of that.
Josh Anderson 38:55 I even tell people when they got leave voicemails, hey, I was just thinking about you. I was in your neighborhood for a final walkthrough yesterday. Just wanted to check in see how the houses Call me if you need anything. That’s most of the time. They don’t call me back, but they do get the voicemail or they read it transcription on their phone. And it’s good. So gosh, you know, this is just like, This doesn’t have to be rocket science in our business. It’s It’s relatively simple. It’s not always easy, but it’s relatively simple. I mean, we’re not we’re not performing neurosurgery or anything crazy. Like this is literally just contact sport relationships. And just seeing just just checking in on people. And really check. I mean, like, one of the things we did really good during COVID was we really checked in on people like, I know, you know, when you talk to somebody and you’re like, Hey, how’s it going, man? And they’re like, Oh, good. And it’s like, no, but really like, Yeah, are you doing good? Like, I know a lot of people are struggling right now. Is there anything we can do for you? Are you you know, Unlike we paid a couple of people’s mortgage payments through our nonprofit, during COVID, because they could work, or we would go to people’s, a couple of my clients that own restaurants, we’d go and just get big ass tips to people because we could. And it was, you know, we didn’t know 2020 was going to be one of our most amazing real estate years of all time, and 2021. And, and so we were fortunate enough that those people took care of us, when it might not have mattered as much. But now we can go take care of them. And instead of giving a 20% tip, we can give 150% Tip If we need to whatever it is, especially if it’s a small, like a lunch that’s $15 it’s like, well, what if we just leave them another $15? Right? I mean, that helps out? And if that’s a win for them, and whatever, like,
D.J. Paris 40:52 yeah, it’s it’s no, it’s brilliant. And at absolutely there, I think most, most of the best gestures that I’ve ever that’s someone has ever done for me, they’re almost always usually on the smaller, like, if you wrote it on a piece of paper wouldn’t seem like a big deal. But to me, it meant it meant the world. So sometimes it isn’t even about, you know, and giving somebody 100% tip or 150%, if that is significant, because even if it’s only 15 bucks to them, they’ve probably not gotten a lot of 100% tips or 150% tips, and it just shows that you care, it shows that you want to help and it doesn’t even matter how big the gesture is. So you’re absolutely right. But demonstrating care and compassion is always the win, I think.
Josh Anderson 41:35 Yep. Yeah. And so, I mean, this isn’t, you know, this is all stuff we’ve built on over the years. And it’s, it’s good, Ken. And look, we’re not at a 10 We’re not I mean, we’re never at a 10 I don’t believe in 10s. I, you know, are we doing it at an eight and a half or nine? Sure. I think so. But can we always talk graded and make it better and make it a either a better system and process? Or can we make it a better experience? And so yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do. I mean, we don’t need to send, we don’t need to sell 10,000 houses a year, we need to sell a couple 100 and make, you know, help a couple 100 families a year and really be able to help them. You know, we had a girl here yesterday for one of my trainings. And actually all the people at my training were they were all clients that came to class that I created called the acronyms boss, but it’s business owners sharing strategies. And they’re all either small business owners or in sales or an executive or something. And she bought her house six years ago from us, and we’ve stayed in touch with her. And they were they were all just kind of saying how they all get postcards and all these things. But our nonprofit paid for her house. After she moved in. She had structural issues. And we made it right. Cost, it cost me us the nonprofit 12 grand to fix it. But and I don’t think that her work. The commission that we got from our house was 12 grand to be completely honest. But it was the right thing to do and like they had married have kids, and we want people to live in a good house. This
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Josh Anderson 44:48 And I also Well, we were gonna sell it at some point.
D.J. Paris 44:51 Well that’s that’s true. And I would imagine and again, you’re not doing it for the you know, for the pat on the back or for the market. And, you know, collateral you get for that. But you certainly do get a lot of appreciation from the vast majority of people that you help to that degree. I mean, they’re going to, I would I would assume they’re going to tell everybody they know, well, it depends, you know, if they’re comfortable sharing that information, but they’re going to at least feel it themselves, you they are never going to work with another realtor, you are their client for life, or at least you probably are. And they’re likely going to tell a lot of people you know, not again, that’s not why you’re doing it, you’re doing it because as you said, it’s literally the right thing to do. And and you took action, and most people wouldn’t, and that that’s huge.
Josh Anderson 45:37 Yeah. Well, like you said, it’s the right thing to do. And we were in a position to do it with our nonprofit. And that’s why we created the nonprofits, so we can help either other nonprofits or people you know, every year, we kind of do a, our Anderson group day where we go out in the community and volunteer. And if we can, you know, one year, we helped a lady whose aunt, her sister and her mom died in the same year, and she acquired all their stuff, and she had leaks in her house. And we were fortunate enough to be able to spend $23,000, or whatever it was, and we spent the day in our yard, cleaning it up, because it was a mess. And it was awesome. It was a team building event. It was good culture. Yes, it was strategic, kind of PR strategic giving. But it was, it was awesome. It feels good to make enough money to go give it to people that actually need it. I’m not necessarily saying I’m handing out that kind of money to people on the corner. But if I can help my clients or friends of my clients, and they’re in a real true need, it feels awesome.
D.J. Paris 46:46 And what’s nice about it is it feels awesome, no matter what else is going on in your life. And of course, Josh has problems just like everyone else, Josh has struggles, he’s got his wins and his losses and his personal challenges and his business challenges. He is no different from the rest of us. But when you give you at least those some of those challenges and troubles personally, sort of take a backseat for a little bit where you’re able to revel in, hey, I got some problems in my own life that aren’t perfect, and I’m still helping someone else with maybe some of their issues. And that is a wonderful way to feel while we may be going through challenges ourselves.
Josh Anderson 47:23 Yeah. And so some of the other 36 touch that we do, I mean, we’re kind of doing the high level stuff. But, you know, one of the big things for us is, is also volunteering, you know, every month and every quarter, we do a certain amount of volunteering. And it is, again, it’s kind of a team building event, not everybody can make it every time. Sometimes we have clients that come in down, and they’ve got to bolt out and go show properties, and that’s fine. But we usually do some kind of whether it’s second harvest, or feeding the homeless or whatever it is, even, even if it’s just giving money to somebody that’s, you know, giving money is not the same as going out and actually doing it but, you know, buying coats for the homeless when it’s the middle of the winter or buying, you know, I’ll tell you one year what I did, which feels really good to be able to go to Walmart, and buy like two buggies worth of just toys and stuff for kids that aren’t going to get much for Christmas. Pretty awesome. Yeah, so you know, a good day, that’s never gonna do that for my kids. But, but I did invite them to to go with me. And I was like, what toys and they were just dumping stuff in it, but it feels pretty awesome to be able to do that. And look, there’s plenty of other things I could do with that money, trust me, but it again, it goes back to can you help out and give back because you were fortunate enough and it freakin feels great.
D.J. Paris 48:52 It, it does. And again, it’s it’s a guaranteed win for you, the individual how you feel about yourself. And if it you know ultimately results in better customer service or, or client satisfaction, obviously great too. But at the very least, it’s something that you get to lay your head on the pillow at night after you do these events and go like I did something good today, when maybe you know not everything else in life is going well. It’s a really nice way to just build it a little good feeling to how people feel. And I wanted to ask you one last thing and I know we’re coming in at the end. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t think about this, you have a very calming presence. And I suspect you learned some of that from being in the military where I know they teach you about managing your heart rate managing your your, your sympathetic nervous system so that you’re not in fight or flight because you’re not going to have access to all of your best resources when you’re stressed and anxious. So how important is that for you now in real estate to be able to handle client challenges or challenge in a transaction? Is that is that a critical part of you know, keeping everyone calm and collected while they’re going through these ups and downs? For sure.
Josh Anderson 50:01 Look, we do this every day. Most of our clients, if not all of our clients, other than a handful of investors don’t buy certainly don’t buy a house more than once a year. So that’s a small percentage. Yeah, the average person’s bought a house every seven to 10 years. And even with the first time homebuyers that think they’re only going to live there for three or four years, they inevitably almost always live in it for five or six or seven or eight. And yeah, so you do have to, I mean, we’ve seen everything, so nothing. It’s not that it’s not a big deal. It’s just that we know how to navigate it. And so sometimes we have to take a deep breath, or step away and come back to it. But we do have to just say, Hey, guys, like I had one last night, there was kind of a final walkthrough. And my client called me and was like, Dude, I’m pissed. They left the door unlocked and left the lights on. And he’s already moved out. And he was just like, you know, he’s like, I’m responsible for this property until July 31. And, you know, he just kept texting me. I said, Look, dude, I said, I will call the agent in the morning, we’ll get it taken care of. It won’t happen again. They’ll have no more access to the house until July 31. When when when they are buying, they are the new owners. And it just kind of diffused the whole thing. I mean, I can’t do anything via text message at eight o’clock at night. I mean, he can be mad all he wants, but there’s nothing I can really do. And there was nothing really he could do. So he was really, truly just venting to me. Sure. And, you know, I just had to take it. And it’s okay. It was like, Alright, man, I’ll make it I’ll, we’ll make it right, we’ll get fit. Yeah, it’s
D.J. Paris 51:36 just being like, I totally get it man, I would feel similar. I get it, I will take care of this. And then you take care of it. And that’s amazing. Well, I want to also tell everybody who out there works as an agent in the Nashville area. If you are raising your your virtual hand right now, I would encourage you to check out Josh is Real Estate Group and team. He is always looking for good talent out there. So if you think that you would like to work with someone like Josh, or maybe you work in another market, and you have clients that move in and out of Nashville, I mean, it is one of the most desirable areas to move to in the last five or 10 years. So there’s a lot of people moving there. And you probably would want to refer that business if you know your clients moving. So if you’re looking for a referral source, or if you’re in the national market, you’re like, I don’t get this guide of trading or support for my own my own company, reach out to Josh and Josh, if somebody either wants to work with you, maybe a client or another agent, or an agent wants to refer to you what’s the best way they should reach out?
Josh Anderson 52:37 Yeah, best email that goes to myself and my director of operations is info at Josh Anderson realestate.com.
D.J. Paris 52:46 Awesome. Well, I want everyone to follow Josh on Instagram, Facebook, all the social channels look for tag Nashville. And also the real Josh Anderson will have links to that in the show notes. Also go to his website, Josh Anderson realestate.com. I would I would be switching brokerages if I lived in Nashville, because I would want to work with someone like Josh truly. And I’m not just saying that because you’re my guest today. But Josh is awesome. And he just has processed for everything and his process. It makes perfect sense to me. I’m a marketer, I love process, and Josh and his team are doing it. And they’re just nice people. So how about consider working with them reach out to Josh, if you think you’d want to maybe join his team or you have a business that he might be interested in. I also want to on behalf of all of our audience, Josh, I want to thank you for not only for your service to the country for for many, many years, but also your service to this industry, and giving back and all of the different things you do to help make your community better it is definitely appreciated by more than even just the residents of that community because we all get inspired to maybe go out and do some more good. And I really applaud you for your dedication to that. And also on behalf of and also Josh’s time. He’s busy. So thank you, Josh, for coming on our show. And on behalf of Josh and myself, I want to thank our audience, we want to thank you for sticking around to the very end and best way that you can help our podcast grow tell a friend that could just one other realtor that could could hear us I mean, he just gave some really great tips today’s so this is an episode worth sharing. So just share it with one other agent in your office. Somebody that’s struggling this year. Guess what every realtor is struggling this is a tough year. It’s a whoo it’s a tough year. So let’s help each other by passing this podcast over to your friends and anyone else you know that could benefit so Thank you, Josh. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks. Thank you
Tips On Referrals From An 150m Real Estate Producer • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jul 24, 2023
In our July episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties and Christie’s International discusses and shares tips on referrals. Carrie explains how important the referrals are and how to make them aiming people that move all the time from state to state. Next, she discusses why every agent should pay attention to having an appropriate referral that will benefit and add value to their business. Last, DJ shares his tip on your backup agent.
From Top Fashion To Top Real Estate • Julia Boland
Jul 21, 2023
Julia Boland talks about her incredible experience of 22 years in real estate business and how she transitioned from a career in fashion into real estate. Julia describes how much she learned when she started working as an assistant for an agent. Next, she discusses the strategies to use as an agent with the clients and the importance of preparing your clients before the transaction. Last, Julia emphasized the role of training which she and her team deliver for the new agents.
How Ali The Agent Closed 55 Sales In Her First Two Years • Ali Garced
Jul 19, 2023
Ali Garced was an Active Duty Air Force Major as well as a full-time Realtor shares her experience and how she got into real estate from the air force. Ali explains she started in real estate through investing and for that she listened to a lot of real estate podcasts to learn strategies and what a client really needs. Next she talks about how being in the military has taught her how to make connections and discipline. Last, Ali emphasizes that real estate it’s not just showing beautiful houses but it needs time and commitment on the agent’s side.
How To Kill Your Villains & Stop Hiding From The Camera • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Jul 10, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals with Kim Rittberg.
Kim Rittberg is an award-winning video marketing expert. From the hundreds of real estate agents she coaches, she’s realized the biggest hurdle is getting on camera. Why? How do you fight that? And once you fight through then what? What should you make?
Plus – if you want to totally revamp your social media and easily attract clients over just 4 days – Kim has a really exciting Video Boot Camp Summer Intensive.
She’ll teach you how to sell more houses through video! From stressed to totally in control and easily growing your client base. Spots are filling up so you can apply here!
Becoming A Top Producer Twice (In Two Different Markets) • Sarah Stone
Jun 30, 2023
Sarah Stone real estate expert and a top producing broker with Douglas Elliman’s Manhattan office, talks about her transition into real estate business. Sarah talks about the lessons from her past job and how she leverages them for her job in real estate. Next, she discusses the importance of being a good sales person for her. Last, she talk about the value of relationship with the clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to talk to a top producer who built an amazing business in New York City. Then life changed and she moved out to Connecticut and had to start all over again and built an even bigger business. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcasts made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producers Sarah stone. Before we get to Sara, if you want to continue to help our show grow, we just ask that you do really well three things I guess I’m going to ask for a lot today. One is telephone think of one other realtor that could benefit from these episodes. You know this is a tough year for realtors, especially if you’re working with buyers. So let’s help our fellow agents as much as possible please let them know about the show I appreciate it also support our sponsors, they pay the bills and we love our sponsors and we choose them very specifically only if they if I think they can add value to your business so please support them as well. And then third, follow us on social media. Almost every day we post short form video clips on all the major social platforms Facebook, Instagram, tik, Tok, LinkedIn etc. Where we post little best of clips from our episodes usually 60 seconds with an actionable strategy. So find us anywhere, any social platform just search for keeping it real, we appreciate it but enough about that let’s get to the main event my conversation with top producer Sarah stone
Okay, today my guest is Sarah stone from Douglas Elliman, she’s in Fairfield County, netiquette Greenwich, Westport, and also in New York and Westchester as well. Let me tell you more about Sarah, Sarah. This is really an impressive biography. So I really want you guys to clue in on this because we’re going to touch about a lot of what I’m about to mention here. So Sarah was a top producing a broker at Douglas elements Manhattan office at 575 Madison Avenue for a decade. She was Rookie of the Year during her tenure there in Manhattan. She sold many many high profile properties including 65th East 76 800 Park Avenue and the world famous Dakota Building which is at one West 72nd. She has now taken her experience knowledge and famed sales experience expanded it from New York into the Connecticut suburbs specializing in the purchase and sale of fine homes in both Fairfield and Westchester Counties. Sarah also has a finite for exterior interior design. She’s an expert in staging and decorating a home she she’s resided and raised children in both Bedford, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut. She is the perfect guide to find or sell your own suburban splendor. A former nationally ranked tennis player which I would love to ask a few questions to improve my own game. Sara spends her free time playing tennis and also pickleball and I do want to talk about pickleball because I am the noise of it is my only issue with Pickleball is noise. But it is a fun game. In one of Greenwich, Greenwich his most beautiful town parks or clubs Sara can also be spotted driving around in her vintage Mercedes convertible I want everybody to follow Sara on her Instagram she has an amazing Instagram following Sarah stone style so s s s Sarah with an H stone style we will so at Sarah stone style. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes and also a link to her Douglas Elliman website definitely check her out on social she does some really super cool thing. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Stone 4:57 Well, thank you that was an extremely ordinary intro, I really appreciate that. Thank you very much.
D.J. Paris 5:03 We really appreciate you coming on. Thank you, we appreciate you. And coming on our show is a big deal for us. We know just how busy top producers like you are. And it’s been the biggest and lovely a surprise for me as starting the show like five or six years ago in thinking, Oh, none of these top producers are ever going to have time for this. And yet here we are, like 500 episodes later, and still being able to get top producers like you to give us some time that I know is in short supply for you. So thank you. Thank you.
Sarah Stone 5:35 Absolutely. My pleasure.
D.J. Paris 5:38 Let’s start at the beginning. So how did you get into real estate and why?
Sarah Stone 5:45 So my journey to real estate actually started, I’d say fairly early on. Relatively speaking, I graduated with a degree in economics from Tulane University down south. And I I, at that time, my goal was let’s let me get a job that will make me the most amount of money, the quickest. I wasn’t like, oh, what’s my passion and what am I good at? And you know, not I was like, let me get into Wall Street and let’s get cracking. And that’s what I did. I worked for a mutual fund called Lord Abbott. That was my first Sure. Sure. At that I was in the GM building on 58th Street, right across from the Plaza Hotel. And I got my series seven, my series seven and 63 I
D.J. Paris 6:51 had those both as well my first job as a financial advisor, so I know that world. Yeah.
Sarah Stone 6:57 So I was working as I was selling working with regional managers to sell our various funds. And I did that for a little bit there. And then I moved on to another bank DLj which is back from that sort of a 90s was a boutique kind of bank back then that was bought by Credit Suisse First Boston while I was there. When when I as I was working at DLj. You know, I worked as a registered sales assistant for the bigger brokers retail brokers there. And it’s it’s very fast paced, high pressure. male dominated,
D.J. Paris 7:47 especially sell sell sell. Yeah,
Sarah Stone 7:50 business and frantically paced, although, you know, not not to say that this business isn’t. But it was just, you know, it was something like, oh, is this really did I pick the right thing for me. And this is when my introspective examination of of my, my thoughts and goals to really and truly were and, and this is another bit of diversion, but I was always into I wanted to be into acting theater modeling, and that kind of thing. So I said, Okay, you know, I’m going to try, I’m gonna go for all that stuff. I’m gonna go for my dreams, but the pay isn’t so great. When you’re starting out. So I said, I’m going to subsidize that with I’ll be I’ll sell some real estate on the side, you know, I had gone through the process of, of renting an apartment in Manhattan and I saw I got a little bit of of a window into how all that worked. And I saw my I asked my broker a lot of questions. And in Manhattan, especially, I mean, you’re paying back then you’re paying a 15% commission to the to your broker. And
D.J. Paris 9:15 yeah, let’s let’s talk about this. Let’s Let’s pause for a second because this is a very important distinction. What Sarah’s like, oh, okay, I really am acting modeling. I want to pursue that and I’ll do some real estate on the side. What what she What if you don’t know real estate, if you don’t know rentals in New York City, one of the things that she’s explaining right now and I apologize for being rude and interrupting but I want to make sure everyone understands is very different from pretty much every major other major market, maybe Boston’s a little bit this way too. But Boston and New York I think, are the only two markets that do this where oftentimes the renter, the renter pays the Commission, which is a tough sell, right? That is hard. Oh, by the way, I need an extra $5,000
Sarah Stone 9:57 Yeah, on top of I mean, You know,
D.J. Paris 10:01 on top of first month, last month, first month
Sarah Stone 10:03 last month and your security deposit, and here’s another, you know, 15% of it of the years rent. So, yeah, definitely, it was something that that I made note of when I was going through the process like, oh, doing the math, you know, let’s see if, and this is just rentals. You know, I wasn’t even thinking about the sales game then. So, I had a friend, I had sort of a connection at Douglas Elliman and, and they walk, you know, they said, let’s give it a shot, do your thing. And that first year, I made 10 times what I made doing the acting modeling gig in real estate, so amazing. I found that I really had a knack for it. And not only that I really enjoyed, I enjoyed, get up because I just love New York City so much. And I found that I really had so much passion for just checking it all out and getting to know all the different neighborhoods. And you know, and like, how great is that, like, my job is just kind of cruising around the city and checking out all the all kinds. I mean, especially in those early days, you wouldn’t believe like, what I was, wasn’t all glamour, trust me, it was, you know, I was trying like to sell this studio that was above Subway sandwich shop.
Unknown Speaker 11:39 Now like smell like bread all the time subway
Sarah Stone 11:42 bread, I still to this day, I burned my son’s memory to Subway, I can’t do it just takes me back to like, you know, I was probably I must have shown that thing over 50 times. So I spent a lot of time in that department. But that’s sort of like how it was. It was definitely the money was great at that time. And, and it was, I found that I really enjoyed it. And it was something that I was really good at. So it I just sort of morphed more and more making that into my full time occupation.
D.J. Paris 12:21 And so so you really built your career in the city, and then you’ve then made eventually made a move. And so essentially, I mean, it wasn’t like you moved across the country. So it was neighboring, but still far enough away, where it’s a different world, at least a bit of a different world. And having to sort of start over essentially, is incredible. It’s almost like, it’s almost like an attorney who passes the bar in New York, and then all of a sudden is like you don’t think I really want to live in Arizona? It’s like, well, they don’t have to, they don’t have to go do it all over again in Arizona, right? You know, and so you essentially had a similar kind of experience where you were moving from Manhattan, which is insanely, a challenging market to be a realtor, and whether you’re doing rentals or sales. I’ve interviewed tons of people, even from your firm who work in New York, how challenging Of course, we all know how challenging it is. And then to then go somewhere else and say, Oh, I’m going to like start all over essentially. And I understand it’s not completely starting over. But essentially it is. So that is even more amazing is that you’ve sort of you were Rookie of the Year in New York, and then you know, back into the suburbs as as your life changed. And so what was that transition like like going to a new market, a new area and trying to build your business again?
Sarah Stone 13:38 Um, well, it was it I was I’m very grateful for my firm Douglas Elliman because that the fact that they’re the biggest mover of real estate in Manhattan, and and they had, they had opened up a an element office in Greenwich about five years prior to my joining so they have nice established referral thing going on, on their own. I stepped in with some a lot of pre existing relationships with brokers that I had worked with in Manhattan while I was there, and when while I was in the city, I should mention I was you know, I worked in three different offices while I was there, I was a 575. But I was also on the Upper West Side for a little bit. I worked at nine at Madison for a little while. So I really got to know a lot of brokers and and and in this business you’ll find I mean, people go 20 years in this business easy. So there’s a lot there was a lot of people that are still very much active in their careers that I have worked with back then. So it was a very I was very lucky to be able to light up those relationships and Knock on you know, not call call people up and say, Hey, I’m back in the game, what have you got? Let’s go. And and it was the timing couldn’t have been better obviously with that the start of the the pandemic and the major shift the demographic shift that we all saw from the city to the suburbs. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 15:21 was that really was good timing. Actually, it wasn’t it was accidentally good for you. Yeah. What a fortunate what a fortunate thing. And, and yet still, there’s still a lot of competition, of course, where you are, and there’s a lot of great realtors. And so, you know, you, you, I’m assuming you were able to take a lot of the sort of habits and disciplines and that you learned, you know, we’re Yeah,
Sarah Stone 15:46 I mean, I think, you know, being a good salesperson is being a good salesperson, you know, like, you remember the, the, the Wolf of Wall Street. And that last scene, you know, he had gone to, to the federal prison for for, you know, his his tax evasion and fraud, wire fraud and all the stuff that he had done. And he got out and then he was giving seminars across the country and holding, he said,
D.J. Paris 16:19 Sell me the patent. Yeah. Right.
Sarah Stone 16:23 And like, and that’s sort of the that that’s the spirit, you know, like when if you have this skill, it can, it can really work across a lot of different platforms. So while I was doing it, and I was, you know, a realtor in Manhattan selling coops and condos, it my skill set was very applicable as far as as selling homes here hear up in the suburbs. It’s just you know, we didn’t have to happen septic tanks, and we didn’t worry about that, like, sewer sewage and all that stuff, roof. There’s a whole other aspects of, of real estate that goes on here that isn’t necessarily I mean, that in the city, you have to worry about Co Op or packages, which forget about it. I don’t miss those whatsoever.
D.J. Paris 17:15 I always loved when my sister bought a condo, or sorry, Co Op, in the West Village, many, many years ago. And my sister’s kind of a little superstar in her own in the industry she’s in and she was certainly more than qualified to buy this Co Op. And she you know, they got the offer accepted. And I this is like a million years ago, and I didn’t know anything about real estate. She’s like, Oh, now I have to go for my interview. And I was like your interview. I was like, what is that and so if you’ve no one’s ever dealt with coops before, you can obviously look this up. But there’s typically an interview process to make sure that the because coops are slightly different its ownership share. So everyone’s kind of owning everything to a degree. So they want to make sure that you’re not some total Bozo who’s gonna screw everything up for everyone. And so oftentimes, you do have to go in front of the board and forget about forget about that you put 100% down or whatever. They’re not evaluating that they want to make sure personality wise that you’re not a total joke.
Sarah Stone 18:13 They want to know who your best friend was, instead, they want to know your blood type. They want to feel your bank accounts. I mean, they they want to know every little detail about you and you have a package about that thick in front of you.
D.J. Paris 18:27 Did you ever see Did you ever have a deal go south because the personalities didn’t line up? Did that?
Sarah Stone 18:32 Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was I learned that that game very quickly. It was a the my very first one of my first Co Op deals, I remember I was dealing with a building on the Upper East Side. That was a very snooty you know, consider themselves quite a an established and and you know, prestigious buildings a 50% down require you had to put down at least half and then you had to have at least three times the amount of the apartment in liquid assets
D.J. Paris 19:13 in liquid assets.
Sarah Stone 19:15 Yep. On. So I did have like $4
D.J. Paris 19:17 million sitting in cash.
Sarah Stone 19:20 Yeah. And then my I had a client who was like, I’m paying all cash. And PS I have $50 million in the bank account. Let’s Let’s rock and roll. The board came back and said, Okay, we’d like to do the interview in on July 15. They my client said nope, July is no good. What do you have in August? So that was all they needed that that was that? That was Yang.
D.J. Paris 19:52 Sorry. You’re not a fit. We need you to come in July. Yeah, I’m amazing.
Sarah Stone 19:57 That was that they said if this guy’s If that’s how he’s gonna play it for you, I mean, you have to as though you’re approaching you’re, you’re getting an introduction with the queen. I mean, that’s how you have to think of it like you have to be so honored. You have to like, if you’ve got plans, forget it. You don’t care. Let’s go. Like, isn’t that
D.J. Paris 20:18 amazing? Oh, yeah.
Sarah Stone 20:19 Different world you come? I learned that very quickly. Yeah. And you probably
D.J. Paris 20:24 have to have to then prepare your clients for those interviews and say, like, Okay, here’s, here’s some suggestions about like, don’t speak unless spoken, you know, or whatever. But, uh, you know, only give the right answer don’t, whatever, whatever the you know, that same sort of thing, if you’re going in for like being deposed by the attorney, don’t say anything.
Sarah Stone 20:43 But, like, happy and affable, and, you know, talk about your golf handicap and the tennis match earlier that day. And that’s about it.
D.J. Paris 20:55 So moving out to the suburbs, moving away from the co ops the condos, more of single family homes, and really kind of learning a new inventory, I’m guessing, you know, is going out there and really trying trying to learn that. Real quickly, though, just curious. I want to go just briefly back to your very first year doing, you know, rentals and maybe some sales in in the city in New York. How do you think or why do you think you did so much better than so many other rookies that year? Was there anything that that you can say, you know, I was really good at X, Y, or Z, or I just did things that other people wouldn’t do. Just curious in what you thought made the difference for you?
Sarah Stone 21:36 Well, for me, it was I worked as an assistant to one of the top producers and a legend and I was very lucky to work for this man. His name’s Robbie Brown. He is he’s no longer with us. He passed away a couple of years ago, but he is a legend in the industry, and an incredible guy and, and not at all, like a typical broker, like he was laid back, he rode a bike around the city, you would ride a bike to, you know, to your listing appointments. He was he was so cool and casual about it. But that was on the exterior. Meantime, he was hustling like nobody’s business, you know, he was he was a great networker. He went to every party, he went to the opening of an envelope, you know, he was there. He He nailed the world, you know, he had people working for him that he just grind at it to send, you know, postcards out, blanketing the city with with mailings. You know, like that old age old adage that we love so much, if you throw enough shit on the wall, some of its gonna stick type thing. This really applies when it comes when it comes to this. And the other thing that I learned from him is the value of relationships. She had certain clients that that he worked with that it like it always goes back to the you know, it being a referral business. Right. So like he had certain people that he that he worked with that that was provided a pretty steady flow of of listings. And one of those sources was from a state attorneys
D.J. Paris 23:39 huge, huge deal. Yeah.
Sarah Stone 23:41 And and I, I thought, you know, when I saw when I went out on my own, I emulated him to the tee and I first thing I did was I targeted attorneys are so smart. And I did and it didn’t take that it didn’t take too many you know, I had probably two or three estate attorneys and I have one divorce attorney kind of that I really worked on developing those relationships with I would show up in the their office with lunch I would send you know bring donuts in the morning I went around introduce myself dropping business cards saying hello to everybody in the office you know to the point where they started throwing me some listings you know smaller ones at first and then when those would go well it would they give me the bigger ones and that’s that’s how I ended up getting that Dakota listing was through this estate attorney. Yeah, so it really is it you know if you have if you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world if if you have a loved one that had died and owns a Manhattan apartment, of course you’re gonna go with who your attorney recommends you use, especially if you’re not if you you know, if you’re the benefactor of the estate, you don’t live locally or you just hand it right over. And so I would have to say that that was really the most, that was a critical move that I made that that differentiated me from the rest of my of my pack. Let’s call it my incoming class.
D.J. Paris 25:31 It’s funny, because I’ve, I’ve certainly heard of attorneys calling divorce attorneys and of course, estate planning attorneys make all the sense in the world. I don’t know why that wouldn’t have occurred to me. But I think you might be the first person and all the hundreds of episodes we’ve done that have mentioned estate planning attorneys. So I’m, I’m almost thinking they may be a bigger opportunity in certain ways, because a lot of agents maybe do think I should call a divorce attorney and get and you should do that, of course, should build those relationships, but estate planning attorneys maybe go a little bit a little bit forgotten
Sarah Stone 26:03 about the radar, but yeah, absolutely. That’s brilliant. Yeah, that’s 1,000% that even more so than divorce attorneys, I’d say because, you know, divorce can get complicated. And, and typically, especially if they’re two people that are two parties that are have vested interest in in that apartment, usually, you know, somebody knows somebody, they lived in the town, they’ve got somebody they want to use, you know, you’re they’re less likely to need the referral than an estate attorney rate
D.J. Paris 26:37 point, because a lot of times when mom and dad pass, and the kids now are to deal with all the estate stuff, or one of them is people are either moving, or they living in different places kids live
Sarah Stone 26:50 in Wisconsin. Yeah, they don’t want to know from that they just, you know, it goes to the probate court and goes through probate probate, I should say, and, and they’ll, they’ll trust their attorneys to handle it for them. And that’s a really good spot you if you have a few relationships with with some very, you know, successful attorneys that have quite a few clients or estates that they handle it. Definitely that that is a huge place for for inventory.
D.J. Paris 27:28 I could see I could see two people, realtors doing webinars or in person, you know, events, where it’s like, Hey, if you haven’t done your estate plan, I’m gonna bring my my my estate planning attorney, and we’ll do a little combo of like, you know, a little present. Right, right. I could see that being
Sarah Stone 27:46 that shares. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, totally. Definitely, that that’s very much the case. Again, with you know, your with attorneys, you know, it’s you’re not supposed you can’t, technically you cannot get they are not entitled to a commission on that. So like, you can’t say, oh, well kick it back to you, you know, but you can in other ways, you know, tried you have had them benefit from from your business as you are from from theirs. And that is one way is bringing them in for something like what what you’re saying like a seminar or recommending them to your audience or your sphere of influence? You know, that’s definitely,
D.J. Paris 28:31 it’s actually even more brilliant in a way that I’m thinking, at least from my perspective, because everybody who owns a home needs a will. Right? So it’s like, every single person you work with could potentially be a referral to I mean, you know, depends on what that Estate Planning Attorney What kind of client they want. But like, every single person who owns a home should have some sort of estate plan in place, even if it’s just some, you know, easy well, that that they could do, but it’s a really smart because not everyone gets divorced. So it’s just like, Well, somebody’s getting divorced, I can certainly refer them to my to my, the attorney I like, but everybody needs an estate plan. So it’s actually you everybody, such as
Sarah Stone 29:11 a few things, you gotta pay taxes, and you gotta die. Those two things are
D.J. Paris 29:16 and we don’t know when. Yeah, yeah. Let’s let’s talk about I want to talk about the state of the market today, because you’re a huge producer. And the market is, at least I’m in Chicago. We have about 800 agents here at our firm. All I hear about in our agents are great. I’m not here criticizing them at all, but I hear a lot of people being nervous about rate where rates are with lending, obviously are higher than then. I mean, they’re always too high for anyone really, but they’re certainly higher today than they were, you know, two or three years ago. And you know, we’re approaching the sevens for you know, most 30 year fixes and fixed and then and then also inventory being because there’s This disincentive to move right now. Right? So if like, if I have a 3% mortgage, which I do, you’d have to really make a strong knot you but but a realtor would have to make a very strong case for me to go, I want to go from 3% to 7%. Like, that’s a tough, tough thing to swallow a tough pill to swallow. And what are you? What are you experiencing? And how are you coaching some of your clients through this, so that they so that there can, it can make sense for them to make these decisions?
Sarah Stone 30:29 Well, it’s, it’s been, it’s been tough, and that it really is a double whammy, because we’re just coming off of COVID, you know, the pandemic surge, where a lot of people that were sort of teetering are on the fence about selling, you know, it was in their five year plan, let’s say, and then this thing happens, that drives the value of their of their investment up some 20 30%. And you’re like, Well, gee, I better cash it. So we had a lot in the last two, three years, we’ve had a, we’ve seen a lot of that where people are, are cashing in their chips. So you’ve got a pause in, in the, in the action of of those, those people that would have been putting their homes on the market they’ve already sold. So we’ve got, we’re taking a hit from that side. And then we’re taking another from the interest rate side, because, like you said, to me, people are sitting, enjoying their two 3% rates, but they’re not seeing a dip in prices to incentivize them to if they if they want to, you know, downsize get something bigger, if they weren’t, you know, we’re just not, it’s just not, there’s no incentive for them to move unless you’re moving to an entirely different area. Or if you, you know, let’s say you’re in a certain zip code, because of the school system, and, you know, you want to move to a town where, or a different part of the country where the cost of living is much different. It’s, or it’s really, like, it’s not a choice, like you got to move because of your job or because of a divorce or it’s just, you know, one of those instances. So we’re really suffering with the inventory, and buyers are frustrated, it’s a really tough time. I mean, I can’t even imagine, you know, I have I’m working with buyers right now that are in, you know, in, I’ve got buyers that are in the 5 million plus range. And then I’ve got several buyers that are in the like, one to three range. And the one to three range is just
D.J. Paris 32:58 for get it is so much competition,
Sarah Stone 33:02 so much competition and they’re in they’re going in, they’re putting in offers, they’re waiving contingencies, you know, mortgage contingency appraisal, contingency inspection contingency, forget it, you know, we’ll pay, like, we’ll pay all cash, we’ll close when you want. Well, like, you know, we’ll, we’ll put a statue of your family in the backyard for the rest of us for the end of time for us to worship at your feet. I mean, but you’re, you’re going against 30 other applicants, like there that you are in a bidding war amongst, you know, there are literally got, we’re going against 2025 different bids. So how do you win? I mean, it is so so tough. So a lot of times like right now when I’m dealing with my buyers, as I’m looking at, you know expired listings, and I’m looking at you know, I’m knocking on doors, I’m I’m trying to go off market, because once you get involved with all of that craziness when when you are first to four weeks to market on the MLS, if you’re priced appropriately, it’s going to be a madhouse, I mean, if you’re overpriced, you’re overpriced, and that’s that you can’t do anything about that. But like if you’re, you know, your listing and that the one to three range, it is going to be an absolute zoo and you’re competing against the same people over and over and over again. It’s incredibly frustrating.
D.J. Paris 34:39 Are there any any tips you have to stand out in those offers? Any suggestions of you know, obviously, you don’t have a ton of control over all those multiple offers, but just anything that has helped you get a little bit of an edge when you’re submitting, you know, an offer that you know is getting a dozen or more other offers. so
Sarah Stone 35:00 well. So again, this is where relationships do play a big part. Because when you start to do a lot of business and a certain market, you get to know all the players, right. So like, if I know the listing broker, I know I’ve got an advantage because I can I can talk or, even better yet, if I’ve done a deal with that listing broker and we know each other, we can trust each other, then I know that I can go to I can, I can talk with that listing broker more frankly, and get more information for my client than then some than an unknown. So that’s where experience really is crucial. If you want to work with someone who’s been around the block a few times to know, because knowing the landscape, knowing the players really makes a huge difference. Because if it’s between you, and your client, or you know, Joe Schmo that, from some firm you’ve never heard of,
D.J. Paris 36:02 with the exact same offer, you’re gonna, you’re gonna win
Sarah Stone 36:05 equal, right, you’re gonna get it. So I would say that, that does play a part, for sure. The other thing I recommend doing is, you know, the family resume always helps like that. Cheesy, kind of, like, we love your house. And we like the love letter. Yeah, right. And the photos with the family and like, you know, because people, you know, homes are very, they’re very sentimental, meaningful things to people who who’ve raised a family and a home and spent decades of their life caring for this home, they really want to make sure that that home goes to somebody who’s going to do the same thing. You know, that’s just, it’s almost like, there is such a powerful emotional connection to, to a home that you’ve lived in and raise your family. And you really, you don’t want to sell that home to like a developer, you know, or some investor, like, you know, somebody representing like a, some guy in, you know, in some Russian oligarch, or something, sorry. You know, like, like, if you’re a nice, nice, you’re nice people that that have, you know, like you, you want to be like the school system, you’re a nice family, you absolutely want to present that to the sellers. And there is you can get an edge. I mean, I just, we just experienced this recently with a, with a deal that I’m doing in the moment at the moment in Bedford, New York, and in Westchester County. It was between my people. And, and, or it was gonna go to this developer who actually had put in a higher offer than we did. But this is, you know, they’re young couple, they want to raise a family in this home. They love so this was, this is another thing that that’s this is a tip that people love getting compliments on the work that they’ve done or the upgrades that they’ve done on the home. So you know, knowing like, this was a 1930. Just almost, it’s a gorgeous home that but they did so much work to it, upgrading it, decorating and painting and the moldings and the chandeliers, they did all the fireplaces over they, they really did a wonderful job. So we wanted to just throw, we wanted to tell them what a brilliant job that they had done how much we love the the the materials that they used in their kitchen, we love the the kitchen island that granite is, you know, get detailed. People love that stuff they love like, they like, you know, why do we do anything? Right? Like why do we renovate our kitchens and bathrooms and put all this all the stuff on the wall? Because we want people our guests to come in and say, Ooh, wow, great to have you like that’s why we do it. Right? So like to get that recognition to get that kind of like that’s going to get that’s going to work in your favor. People do what
D.J. Paris 39:39 what percentage, what would you guess because you are up against multiple offers, of course in the price ranges you’re at. And you know, you’re coming in with some of the more human parts of it. They’re like, Oh, we really love what you did with the kitchen, the blah blah, you know, and you can talk about that or even maybe the by a couple can record a little video or type out a letter or, you know, hey, oh my god, it’s so amazing. What percentage of offers Do you think Do That? Is? It’s kind of it’s it. I know it was more popular during the pandemic, when there were so many offers where it was like you had to do something to stand out. But now that that’s subsided, but inventory still low in there a lot of multiple offers now, is that a common thing? Or is that just something that like, I imagine most Realtors don’t do that they just put in the offer? See what happens?
Sarah Stone 40:30 Yeah, I guess it depends, you know, on the deal. It depends on you know, like, for example, if I’m representing one of those states, from the, you know, referral from a state Attorney, like those kids in Wisconsin, they just want, they want to divvy up the money, they got it, split it four ways, they don’t care, or something. It doesn’t work all of that that’s not sure. Not all the time. I guess it’s it, I would apply it as needed. It’s a situational kind of vibe, vibe out, you got to suss it out and see when it’s appropriate and where it’s appropriate. And of course, like, if it’s appropriate for your client to be, maybe you’re not representing a really nice family, like maybe you are representing, you know, an investor or somebody that wants to put a subdivided or do all or gutted or who knows. So it really, it’s that sort of a Yeah, apply as needed is what as is how I would phrase that. And that’s, that a good broker can can vibe out, especially if you are, if you’re, if you’ve worked with that listing broker before, you know that that’s in the, in the due diligence information gathering stage, a good broker should be able to guide you through that,
D.J. Paris 41:56 ya know, for sure I love that tip is, is if we think that the sellers have an emotional attachment to the upgrades they’ve made, that can be something that the agent can ask the other agent, hey, my client really loves what you guys did with the kitchen. And then they can configure out how much you want to oppress that in the in the offer. But certainly, people are always loved to be complimented on their work. So that is, you know, even even if it doesn’t win, win the bid, it certainly is a good practice to compliment people on what they’ve done right with their house. Because also, if they’re like most of us, I think most of us like we look in the mirror, and we see the little imperfections in ourselves. And I think most people think about that way with their home as well. It’s like, Yeah, I did this project. But then there’s like 10 Other projects I had didn’t get to. So most people look at their home. They’re like, Ah, God, I have so many things I have to do, and I haven’t done and then when somebody comes in is like, oh, that thing you did is really cool. It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s right. I did do that thing. Yeah, that’s really it’s a nice little reminder.
Sarah Stone 43:05 Yeah, I mean, at home, your home is your an extension of yourself. It is a representation of yourself. Absolutely. And just like you said, we look, we, when we’re living in it, we don’t see how fast we look and see the flaws. And we think everyone’s gonna come in and say like, Oh, that is like the wall color. She pin. Oh, like that, you know, I remember when I first got my first apartment on the Upper West Side, and I stayed the floors really dark. You know, so it was like this pre war apartment. And like, the walls were this really high ceilings. It’s like these moldings, beautiful, like, classic six apartment on the on the Upper West Side. And I stained them. Like, I just went for it. I stand in like ebony color, you know, so really shiny and kind of contrasted the white walls and everything. But, of course, I was like, Oh, God, is it like so? Is it too dark? Like did I pick the right shade? And I remember like walking, I would pray I would walk in to get my first impression of the place and then walk back out and then walk back and to like, get a fresh like, I must probably do that 20 times. And you know, my, my husband at the time was probably like, oh my gosh, she’s she’s totally gone berserk. But it was that first friend that came over. I remember her name is Eve we went to college together. She came over and she said I love your floors.
D.J. Paris 44:47 And then you never had to think about it again.
Sarah Stone 44:49 It’s like, Oh my God. God bless. Like, yeah, it just yeah, you need affirmation. we all we all love and need affirmation.
D.J. Paris 44:58 Well, I have I Have an all white condo, everything’s white, or like white and black, the fixtures are black, you know, but like the countertop stuff, the floor is light, all the walls are white, and I can’t wait for like 10 years from now, somebody will walk in and go, what were they thinking? Because everything changes, you know, at some point, like the all white thing will just not be cool anymore. And everything is going to look goofy at some point in history. So it’s funny. So you know, I just I’m looking forward to that kind of, because I remember when I bought my condo before in 2005, and we were doing certain things with granite. And that was real popular. And now it’s like, we look at those goofy granite. Some of the goofy or granite colors were like, what were they thinking? It’s like, No, that was in back in 2005. And now, you know, the white thing has kind of been in for the last five years, and it’s probably
Sarah Stone 45:52 leached floors that was that how to run or it was like, you know, those like bleached wood and Nantucket II kind of shingles and that like everything’s just like, been in the sun for too long, kind of
D.J. Paris 46:07 it is it is funny, but it is it’s important. I think agents sometimes forget that that like, there are real if you’re representing buyers, there’s real human beings on the seller side. And if you have a good relationship with with the listing agent, and and that’s where it’s really important to play nice in the sandbox, right? It’s like always, and look, I know, especially I think women get I mean, I don’t want to generalize based on gender, but but I think women get this much worse than men is that there’s just a lot of jerks that are realtors in the industry too. And I know a lot of women who are who are very successful in real estate, who are like, you would not believe the way I get spoken to by other realtors on a regular basis. Like Nice, nice. You see, you’re nodding your head. And it’s like, Well, how could I ever be mean to Sarah, she’s like a lovely, sweet person. Oh, she has to deal with this too. And the reality of it is it only is ultimately going to hurt the other agent if they’re a jerk to you. Because you’re not going to forget that.
Sarah Stone 47:02 Yeah. I mean that especially like the whole like listing broker buyer buying broker dynamic. Like if you’re the listing broker, you are like too cool for school like you are, you know, you should be grateful if you get a return phone call from the listing broker. Like, it’s just that’s the, that’s the market that we’re in right now. It’s a seller’s market, right. So like, you if you want to be on the sell side, and like, we’re on the buyer side, we’re all sweating away, and can we show it please? Oh, you’ll let us like, you just have to be so nice. And, you know, catch more flies with honey type thing. And the listing brokers stuff. It’s like, it’s like, can we just lose the attitude? You know, like, I, it’s just like, please, I don’t understand it, you know, like, it’s one of those, like, you know, when there’s like an event for a cocktail for brokers or networking event for brokers, and people are like, Why am I gonna go to that I don’t want to meet a bunch of brokers, like I’m not selling to brokers. And it’s like, Ah, no, you go to those, you go to all those cocktail parties, you you meet everybody, you handshake, you throw cards up, because you never know when that relationship is going to be important. And the network, you know, the more that that business is going, it’s going to inevitably build, if you put it out there, it’s going to build
D.J. Paris 48:35 Yes, and you could not be more more accurate there. And I’ve just heard that said over the years on the show, by just about every person we’ve ever had on is, is be really, really nice to other agents, and also realize that other agents might be having a bad day too, and give them a bit of grace when they falter, and maybe are less than professional, even though that’s never acceptable to be less than professional, but it happens. And it’s one of those things where, you know, the the top agents, I know, kind of learn how to grin and bear it a little bit more. It’s not quite as personal to them, when somebody’s awful to them. And obviously that sucks. We’re to ever have somebody be awful to anybody. But this idea of like, I’m just going to catalogue that I’m going to remember that and, you know, maybe in the future that maybe won’t serve that person that was crappy to me, maybe maybe, you know, and and we all want
Sarah Stone 49:34 karma happen. It’s a karmic situation, it happens and especially, you know, in a market like Greenwich where, you know, it’s it’s a big market, but there are a few very strong players that you’ll you’ll see again and again. And, and you know, and that’s the beauty of our business too is like a deal has a beginning and an end right like you can tolerate anybody for it through the length of time that it takes to, to sign a contract and get to a closing, it’s not like you’re gonna have to go to a nine to five job and see this person every day for the rest of your life. You know, like it, they when the deal is done, the deal is done. And that’s what I love. I love like the sense of, of completion, this the achievement of finale, you know, it’s over. So you can move on to the next one, but you just need to make it through that to make keep everybody happy. So we get to the finish line.
D.J. Paris 50:38 I agree. I think that is that makes all the sense in the world. One thing I wanted to mention, because I know we’re kind of running coming up on near the end of our time, I was thinking about your, you know, what your Oh, I know, I wanted to ask you, it was about what you do in between your deals. So you just talked about, like, there’s a beginning and an end to the relationship. You know, some a some clients are easier to work with than others. Some you’re like, I can’t wait to be the this person’s friend forever. And others are like, you know, that was a nice experience. And we don’t need to, you know, keep keep, you know, keep keep communicating. But what do you do in between those transactions, so that the clients don’t forget about you? Right? Like, obviously, you can’t be friends with everybody. But are you doing because, you know, if somebody’s only really utilizing you every, let’s say, five to seven years, or whatever the cycle is in your area? What are you doing so that they don’t forget? Oh, who did we use five years ago? Not that you’re forgettable? You are not forgettable, but let’s assume that we’re all forgettable? You know, we’re all we’re all forgettable. And and so, you know, what are you doing to make sure your clients don’t forget you.
Sarah Stone 51:49 I mean, you got to do all this stuff to stay top of mind. Right? Like, we all know the stuff, it’s just there. It’s, it’s a, it’s not, this is the gritty pain in the ass stuff that we all it’s like, we’re not looking forward to it. We don’t love coming up in your inbox all the time, and being so annoying, and videos, you know, like being in your face type thing, but it really it matters. It’s important, like you have to stay top of mind. And that means continuously marketing yourself reaching out, you know, to to your network. blasting out those emails, sending postcards, social media, obviously is incredibly important. And I always say it’s, it’s more like, it’s not like your I personally don’t get my my phone’s not ringing off the hook from my social media, you know, it’s not like someone’s looking at a tick tock that I made and like, Oh, my God, Sarah, like, it’s you, you are the one you have to sell our house. But what it does provide is like it’s a, it when they go to do some due diligence on you, and they go to check you out would be client, they’re gonna see all that stuff. And they’re gonna feel nice and safe and snugly found that they’re in good hands with with you like, so that stuff all really it accumulates, it makes you as the time goes on, and you’ve got more and more history, it’s all the better. So you really just, you can’t be afraid to put yourself out there. And I know that that’s so it’s not easy to do. It’s, it’s like it’s really it, you got to take the good with the bad when it comes to that stuff. But you really it’s in this day and age. And it’s crucial to not only maintaining your business, but really growing your business you need to stay relevant to the conversation.
D.J. Paris 53:56 It also gives people access, right? Like, it allows people to feel like they have a connection with you. Even at three in the morning when you’re asleep. If they’re awake, scrolling through Instagram, or wherever. And they’re now seeing like, oh, that’s maybe I know Sarah or maybe I don’t maybe I’m being introduced to her through a tick tock or whatever. But it allows people access to you more about you, without you having to make pick up the phone and you know, call make these cold calls, which you’ve done, you’ve done cold walking, you’ve done a lot of these more difficult, you know, sort of cold introductions, whereas, you know, social media is a great way for people just to remember might be reminded of what you do, right? So it’s like you can continually pump out content about all this cool stuff you’re doing in real estate in sort of the thought that like the right people will see it. My followers might see it they’ll at least be reminded I’m still in the game and doing XY and Z for for as a realtor. So I think for it’s it’s a lot of just a branding thing, right? It’s like it’s not it’s more than that, but I think from a branding perspective, it’s, you know, we know most people scroll, you know, scroll in some sort of social media channel once or twice during the day, might as well be one of the things they come across. Right,
Sarah Stone 55:12 exactly. And I mean, if you’re not doing it, somebody else is doing it, I can guarantee you that and like, the more that we are in, in an online business, you know, I mean, I think Zillow is a real game changer in the way that we, we have the availability of understanding your market and knowing what’s on the market. We didn’t have this pre 2000. I mean, the the client had to solely rely on the realtor to show you what was available on the market at that time. So now, they have access to pretty much almost every platform that you do. So how are you going to add value to that person? You know? How? How are you going to enhance that experience for them or provide, provide them an experience buying or selling a home that a different agent can’t, you know, yeah, so that’s really, you got to find exactly that your brand, your vision.
D.J. Paris 56:24 And what’s really cool is you get to lean into that now, whatever your thing is, like, could be outside of real estate, even maybe you’re passionate about something a hobby or, you know, particular belief system or group or whatever, you’re just into x. And what’s really cool. As an agent with social media, one of the good parts of social media is you get to not only find all the other people that are into x. But even if you don’t have a community of people that are into the same thing you are, you can start posting about that on your real estate page. If you’re really into something maybe it tangentially relates to real estate, or maybe it doesn’t. But if you’re into surfing or whatever you might be into, you know, you can do that. And then people start to feel like, Oh, that’s pretty cool. This, this is what this versus that do. And you’ll you can start attracting, you know, surfers or people who are in that space, simply by posting a lot of good quality content that a surfer might want, or that somebody that’s into cross stitch or whatever it might be. And you you get to be yourself, which is really cool. Below, up
Sarah Stone 57:26 and down an entire different demographic that you wouldn’t have had access to. And that’s like this job. You’re always working even when you’re socializing, and just generally having fun yet, like you’re actually what you’re what we’re working, you’re always you’re meeting people, you’re interacting with people, it’s an opportunity to let that person know who you are and what you do. You know, so that’s why it’s so important to I mean, obviously, we’re working your your career is important. But when I’m you know, playing tennis, or I’m playing pickleball or even if I’m going to you know, an event, a fancy Greenwich gala or something like that, that’s always an opportunity to connect with somebody and to grow your business. So like it’s a kind of a cool way to not feel guilty sometimes, like sometimes when you know you’re doing something that’s not work, work, work work, you’re like, oh, but really, when I’m, I mean, I’ve gotten a lot of business from playing tennis, because we women love to chit chat when we’re playing a double match, like we’re on the on the changeover. I’m like, Who doesn’t love to talk about real estate? You know, like,
D.J. Paris 58:49 everyone’s got to live somewhere.
Sarah Stone 58:51 Right? And like, it’s such, it’s so easy to casually be like, Oh, my God, you guys, the showing that I had earlier today, let me tell you, and they’ll lean right in they though they want to know. And my goal is always to make sure not don’t ever leave any social situation, without them knowing that I’m a realtor. Like, that’s all I have to do. That’s all you have to do. I don’t I don’t need to push it down. I don’t want to ram it down their throat and ask them where they live. And are they interested in selling in the next five years? You know, I all I need to do is have them register that somewhere in their peripheral that Oh, I played tennis with this lady and she’s a real estate broker. And you just don’t know how that’s going to germinate. You know, you just
D.J. Paris 59:44 it might. It might be that like that person’s brother is a realtor and so you’re not going to get that business but they might say oh my friend, you need to talk to my friend. She would be awesome because you know, so yeah, you’re right. You never know where it’s going to germinate. I love what you just said every Your job is, as a marketer, part of being a realtor is to make sure that everybody who you come across that you interact with understands what you do for a living, it does a great pushing is always, to me, I’m not a big fan of people. But I want to know, I want to know what all of my friends do I want to know where they work. Like I haven’t I have an interest in that when I meet somebody, you know, oftentimes what they do for a living might be the least interesting thing. But I still ask, and I still am like, Oh, what are you into? What do you do? That’s really, really important, we shouldn’t be again, and also everyone’s got to live somewhere. So they’re going to need a realtor anyway. So you might as well it’s not like you’re trying to sell them aluminum siding, or something that they may or may not need or want, right, you’re not selling something that’s not important, you’re actually like, well, you’re going to use a realtor anyway. So it’s a good idea to make sure that people know that that’s what I do. So I want to end with that. Because I think that is such an important, great, important thing. It may for everyone listening, let’s make it a goal that everybody in your life this year is going to get some sort of reach out from you in a gentle way to remind them that you are in the business. And you can figure out the best way to do that everyone’s got their own individual style. Make sure that everybody in your end that you’re consistently dripping something on them, maybe not every week, every maybe not every even month, but few times a year, at a minimum, they’re getting some sort of reminder that you are a realtor. So Sarah, thank you so much. And I also want to say for everyone before Before leaving, don’t leave the chat because I would like to remind everyone that Sara is always speak we talked about having relationships with other realtors, Sara is gets a lot of her business from referrals because she’s just that good. So if you have any clients that are moving in and out of Connecticut, even parts of New York, it doesn’t even matter where just reach out to Sarah she can’t help you. She’ll know who to refer to but she would love to connect with you specifically around you know, Connecticut, parts of New York as well. So for talking Fairfield County, Greenwich, Westport, Westchester County,
Sarah Stone 1:02:07 Westchester County right outside the city. Those Those are my wheelhouse is and I I love referrals. I think you’ll even I never chintzy with referral fees.
D.J. Paris 1:02:22 And, and Sarah’s clients oftentimes have other homes elsewhere or move. So if you are in an area that people may be retired to Yeah, you know, or Florida is the big one. Yeah. So let’s, let’s, you know, this, this is a two way street sort of scenario. So definitely reach out to Sarah also, if you’re a realtor in Connecticut, and you’re like God, I would love to work with someone like Sarah, I would love for her to be on to be on her team and learn from her. She learned from one of the best you can learn from her. She’s one of the best now. So you know, right now she obviously she’s they she can’t take everyone. But if you think you could add value to her team, or if you think you know, she could add value to your business, reach out to her this is let’s let’s build a relationship. So Sarah, if there is another realtor who wants to connect with you either for referral or maybe they’re interested in looking at Douglas Elliman or your team? What’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Sarah Stone 1:03:17 Well, they can always they can find me, my Insta, which is at Sara stone style. And if not that, you know, I my cell phone my email, which I don’t know if you can provide that in the notes. But But yeah, always reach out. My website is element.com/sharath stone. And there I will be and I would love I would love to connect with as many listeners as I possibly can. And really, this is fun. I would love to do this again sometime. Totally a total pleasure torture. I could chat with you all day.
D.J. Paris 1:03:52 Yeah, it was it was so much fun. So everyone deftly follows Sara on Instagram, Sarah stone style, we will have links to her email, also her website on in the show notes. So please feel free to connect with her. She’s super easy to find and make a connection with her and let her know what you thought of the episode. And also, you know, maybe you guys could do some business together so or maybe could join or two. So anyway, Sarah, thank you so, so much for your time. Sarah is a huge, huge superstar. We’re so grateful to have you on the show. So on behalf of the audience, thank you, and on behalf of and we want to also thank the audience too. So on behalf of Sarah and myself want to say thank you for listening and supporting our show support our sponsors. Thank you for watching and listening, please just tell one friend about the show. That’s the only thing we asked. You know, I guarantee everyone listening knows one realtor that could use a little bit of help this year. It’s a tough year for realtors. So let’s send them this link to this episode. Maybe it’ll help them get to the next level in their business. So Sarah, thank you so so much. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Sarah.
Sarah Stone 1:04:54 Pleasure. Thank you so much.
Use By-Downs To Help Buyers With Their Home Lending Rate! • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Jun 28, 2023
Welcome to the June episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses the current situation in the real estate business. Joel and DJ discuss the strength of the correct pre-approval letter. Joel explains the buy-outs and 2-1 rate by-down and discusses how do sellers explore by-downs. Last Joel talks about interest-deductions for first-time home buyers and how to explain it in real simple terms and mortgage insurance rates.
D.J. Paris 0:00 There’s a secret strategy known by top Realtors on how to get their buyers lending rates down. Right now we’re going to learn about how to do that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today once again, is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate, and he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. He got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. Now last year alone, Joel gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him. And that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all loan officers nationwide. In fact, out of 400,000 lenders in the country. Joel is currently ranked number one 137 last year. Oh, you know, I deleted Joel’s numbers from last year by mistake, but he did an incredible amount of production last year. But this year, he closed has closed already 137 transactions for just shy of just under $60 million in loans. If you’re ever looking for a loan officer, we could not more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Joel can be reached at his email, which is joel@rate.com J oel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know. Hey, Joel.
Joel Schaub 3:04 TJ, thanks so much for having me on again. And now we feel like summer is in full effect. And I’m really excited to be sharing what’s going on behind the scenes and mortgages so that the listeners can either close one more transaction on the buy side or maybe get one more listing. And it’s always my favorite time of the month when we connect together.
D.J. Paris 3:24 Me too. And you know, this is a time when it seems like there’s a lot of activity in the market. And the two major grumbles or complaints that I hear is low inventory, and rates not being where we would like them to be. So I’m curious to sort of get your take on what’s going on today in the market and how agents can take advantage of any opportunities that you see.
Joel Schaub 3:49 And the third grumble, right. It’s just my stomach before I have breakfast, right? It’s gotta be the third one, its rates on right lack of inventory. And then maybe the days where I skipped breakfast, but no, DJ, you’re exactly right. I feel that it’s strange that these rates being as high as they are, you know, just below 7% Right now, haven’t scared off buyers in the sense that we’re seeing two out of three homes go into multiple offers, you know what I mean? It’s amazing. And so when you have these properties that are actually hot, and they come on the market, there’s multiple offers on these. And it seems like it’s the dichotomy, right? There’s properties that sit and they’re listed incorrectly or they’re the ones that are priced correctly. And buyers are still saying I’m going to pay you 20 grand more than the listing price 30 grand, and with rates being this high, it’s not the way it should be. But there’s a major lack of inventory in all the major metropolitan markets.
D.J. Paris 4:49 Well, and this is an opportunity for realtors to understand and communicate to their buyers in particular, that you know, sitting on the sideline is is fine if your will Looking to lose a property, but with with restricted inventory, and the fact that there is multiple offer situations going on at, you know, sub, you know, high the high sixes in the lending rates? You know, I think realtors have to readjust their own expectations and make sure that when they communicate to clients that they’re saying, Yeah, I know that seems like a high number for an interest rate. But you know, going back to something you always say about dating the rate marrying the home and understanding that, you know, yeah, we may pay a slight premium, maybe we’re paying over asking, or maybe we’re paying a higher interest rate because of where rates are currently. But we’re going to be able to, you know, adjust that interest rate down, most likely when when rates do in fact, come back. But this is, I don’t think this is a time to sit on the sidelines, because there’s just not that much inventory out there.
Joel Schaub 5:50 And the ones that are jumping in, and what we really need to do is design offers that are going to win, right? How many agents out there listening, are submitting offers, and we’re losing, right? We don’t want to lose if we’re gonna go try to help our clients, we want to win offers, and we don’t want to be the one that is always coming in with the highest offer. All right. So I wanted to just share two strategies that we can do right now. And when we hear that dreaded, I’m calling for the highest and best, right, it seems like agents are doing that. The day they put it on the market. They’re saying, Okay, here’s an offer. And the agent comes back and says we’re looking for highest and best. So it’s the second word, it’s the best, right? So I don’t always want my clients winning by being the highest, I want to go in and say that we’re better than the other offers. And one of the ways that we do that is the strength of the pre approval letter. Right? Having the financing look as strong as possible is going to help you win here, are we going to be able to compete with a cash offer? Probably not. Right. But I just had one last week where we were not the top offer. We were really strong on the financing. And the most cash, the highest cash offer was about 10 grand less than ours. So we won even though we weren’t the highest financed offer, we were better than the cash offer. And it’s because we showed a strong downpayment, the property address on the pre approval letter. In other words, we were buttoned up, when all the other offers weren’t as strong, we looked like we were the easiest option for the seller, that will get to the bottom line. And so
D.J. Paris 7:25 not all three of not all pre approval letters are created equal. Right? Like, it’s important to to, you know, read, if you’re working with a lender, and you know, they’re going to be putting out pre approval letters, you do want the actual address of the property on the letter, that’s a significant thing. Because of course, that that that communicates a message to the seller,
Joel Schaub 7:52 the seller actually called because they do good sellers do if you’re listening, you know, you call and the other bank had a stale letter from over four weeks ago, they had an old rate, they weren’t convinced the buyers and even been in contact with the bank recently, where our letterhead, today’s date, it had the property address, it was all specific. And it encouraged the listing agent to actually reach out to me if they had any questions to make sure this deal went through. So working with a lender that will do that. And you guys have mortgage partners right now that are just dying to help you. So make sure that when you’re submitting your offer, you’re calling back that mortgage professional that you’re working with. And having them put today’s date on the letter, having them put the property address so that you can put together a nice package with a bow on top that looks better than every other offer. And I’m telling you that is better than coming in 50 grand over with a stale letter that doesn’t really match up.
D.J. Paris 8:50 Yeah, because if it’s a stale letter, and you know, it doesn’t look to be specific to the property or current, then then you have to investigate. Now the seller has to do homework and now they have to reach back out go, is this still is this current is this the right rate is still valid. And you never want a seller, especially in a multiple offer situation to have to do extra work because you didn’t you and your lender didn’t, you know, have an updated sheet?
Joel Schaub 9:19 Absolutely. And so what we’re doing now is I speak to the borrowers about what is the maximum amount that they would be comfortable putting down we need to stand out. So the idea right now, or 20% down being enough, maybe it is, but I’ve won a lot of deals recently where the buyer put down 30 or 40% on the pre approval letter not really stands out. It’s really saying look at this buyer, look at how strong they are. And I’ll remind you that if you have a pre approval letter that says that you’re 40% down, it doesn’t lock you into having to put 40% down on the loan. Okay, so if you can put your strongest offer forward, and the contract comes in, the borrower could still decide to get loan for more than that. You’re not lying, you’re not doing anything wrong in terms of the contract, but it helps you get this offer accepted. So being strong, finding alternative ways to make sure that you stand out, is the way that you’re going to submit offers that are designed to win. It makes perfect sense. Yeah. So let’s talk about buy downs as well. Okay, so we’ve touched on this before. But right now, one of the big chief complaints that buyers have is, I don’t want a 6.5% rate this is, you know, I currently am in a mortgage that the rate is 3%. So it’s a major change for me to go from 3%, all the way up to six and a half percent, right. So what we’re having a lot of sellers do is fund a to one rate by down. So I’ll give a quick example here. A buyer that’s let’s say, let’s say they’re buying an $800,000. Home with 20%, down at a six and a half percent rate, that mortgage payment is $4,102 4102. Okay, the same buyer could literally go up and buy a $936,000. Home. So DJ, almost 150, grand more, if the seller did a to one buy down for them, they literally would have a mortgage of 3910. So they would be less in terms of the monthly payment. And the seller is the one funding the rate by down. So it’s just a big strategy right now, not all sellers are going to do this for you. But if you can get in the habit of finding out what sellers would fund rate by downs for your clients, it is a big win for these buyers that are kind of maybe sitting on the sidelines, right?
D.J. Paris 11:41 How would you encourage a seller to explore the buyout option?
Joel Schaub 11:46 Well, it’s all about net dollars to the seller, right? There’s no magic in this right now. So if a net buyer down on that scenario for that $936,000 purchase, ended up being about 18 grand and credits that the seller needed to pay, and that would be about a little over 2% of the purchase price. In these hot multiple offer situations, you’re probably not going to win. If you come in and submit an offer that needs a seller funded by down they’ll probably laugh at you. They’ll say why would I want to go with this when I have three other offers that aren’t being complex. But this is a situation where maybe there aren’t any other offers DJ, and our buyer says I’m willing to pay the listing price if the seller funds rate by down, okay, so if you’re an agent out there, this is not an offer. It’s not a strategy for multiple offers. This would be more where you know that there’s not any other offers, let’s submit an offer as close to the asking price, but ask for some concessions.
D.J. Paris 12:45 Yeah, that makes sense. And that’s a good good thing to realize, if anyone out there who is dealing with listings that are sitting and are not not getting enough attention from buyers, this is a great strategy to start talking to buyers, sorry, started talking to sellers about to present that option to a buyer, this idea that we can we can help you with this uncomfortable, you know, mortgage payment, basically, for the next year or two, I think that is an exceptionally creative way to help people or, you know, bridge that sent days. And now we’re in the sixes.
Joel Schaub 13:23 And so the strategy here is, instead of just taking 18 grand off the price, because if the client was able to get an 18 grand credit to fund the buy down DJ, they would have also been able to pay 18 grand less for the home, right? So let’s actually just do the math on this for a moment. So if you’re listening 18 grand off, the price would be somewhere around 160 to $170 a month cheaper in terms of payment number 160 or 170 grand. But if you actually took that 18 grand and use the temporary rate by down strategy in year number one, the rate going from 6.5 down to 4.5 saves the client 910 bucks.
D.J. Paris 14:07 Right. And that’s a monthly number is the number that they care about. Right? We all look at our monthly out and in with respect to income and expenses. And so yeah, being able to cut a smaller check for a few years and hoping that you know the rates change and fall favorably during that time to where you can then refinance into a more comfortable long term strategy.
Joel Schaub 14:32 So let’s be clear, this is not a strategy where we’re not comfortable with what the payment is Anyway, okay, because this is not an excuse to get in over your head. Okay, let me be very clear. This is not a strategy where Oh, I absolutely need the seller to fund the buy down otherwise I’m uncomfortable. Okay. We don’t want to put our buyers into a bad position ever. We want our clients comfortable with the payments where the rates are today. We want to see if the seller wants to fund a buy down instead of taking A price reduction. And if so it’s hundreds of dollars in the clients favor terms of a monthly payment. And so it’s icing on the cake. All right, that’s the idea behind the to one rate down strategy, because I hear it all the time they go, Well, what happens in two years the rates are gonna go, your payment is going to be higher. It’s not like an adjustable rate mortgage, where all of a sudden, we’re afraid that rates are gonna go up. We know what the rates are, we’re locked in, this isn’t a way to get a reduction for the first year or two. And if we can get that paid for by the seller, everyone smiles.
D.J. Paris 15:38 Yeah, it definitely makes sense. If you were an agent right now, Joe, what would you incorporate? What would you encourage our listeners to start doing? As like, you know, a regular exercise to help keep the business moving forward?
Joel Schaub 15:53 Yeah, I mean, right now, you gotta literally look at what the client’s bottom line number is. That’s the big thing, right? You’re so right, when you say they look at what the payments are per month, right. And there’s a payment shock right now, just a traditional like first time homebuyer that’s buying a three or $400,000 home, their mortgage payments from being in the low threes or below to where they’re at now. They’re eight or $900 more a month for that home, that’s going to keep certain people on the sidelines. Okay? So you got to see if you’re a seller that has a property that’s not moving, doing a price reduction is really not going to move the needle much. We just talked about that. Right. So exploring the ways that you can say, seller to buy the rate down, people are all talking about rates right now. So if you can get in that language and say, reduced rates for the buyer of this property, you can put it in the MLS. It’s just another way to get interest in the property. And you got to understand that though, you have to understand what that to one rate buydown is. So that’s why I wanted to go slow and walk through how that worked. And make sure that sellers can maybe use this strategy to move a property that’s not moving.
D.J. Paris 17:05 Yeah, I also think to like, it’s an interesting time to reach out to homeowners, and to talk about the lack of inventory in the market. Because being that we are seeing multiple offers, it’s it’s a heck of a good time to consider listing a property, it’s it’s a difficult time finding a new property. So there’s there’s push and pull to all of this. But a good loan officer can sit down with a current homeowner and say, well, let’s figure out with your realtor, what we think we can get for this property based on current market trends. And then let’s figure out based on rates and availability of an inventory, what our next move is our next biocide transaction is. And it might make sense because, again, there’s just, it’s just one of those things where you have to kind of run the numbers. But this is where you really need a really dedicated a loan officer who’s able to sort of crunch those numbers to see, hey, it is a good time to actually list the property, even though we’re in high interest rates, low inventory, you’re gonna get more for your sale, it’s going to even out possibly on the buy side in the future. And then maybe you can even find a buy down situation if the seller is willing to do that, too. But I guess the point is that it’s we need to be very careful not to just say rates are high inventories low, like Yes. And it’s that old, you know, way of, of doing improv, right? Yes. And, yes, that’s true. And, and we can still find opportunities here and that people still need to move. And sometimes it makes sense to sell when there’s not much inventory, even though the rates are high and inventories low.
Joel Schaub 18:47 I gotta Yes. And for you, that makes perfect sense. The client says rates are high and inventories low. And you’ll say, you know, I don’t want to pay a six and a half percent rate and you’ll say, Yes, and your rate right now on rent is 100% interest because you’re paying every single dollar right to your landlord. And I like the idea of paying six and a half percent a lot better than I like being 100%. You put it in those terms, it’s really starts to sink home, what somebody’s paying for rent versus what they can actually get when they start owning a property.
D.J. Paris 19:18 I think I think there’s such an opportunity for because I didn’t know this until I owned a property. Nobody. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a dummy. And, uh, well, I’m a little bit of a dummy. But I suspect there’s a lot of people like me, so I’m not the only dummy out there that literally didn’t know about mortgage interest deduction when it comes to tax time. I didn’t know when I was renting because no one ever told me and I’d never had that experience. And then all of a sudden I got the nicest gift. You know, the next April after I bought my first property a million years ago. It’s like, whoa, what’s this? I get some money back and that’s something that I know that’s not necessarily going to get somebody to want to buy a property just for that alone, but that Here’s a nice benefit that I feel doesn’t get talked about enough. If you are taking out a loan.
Joel Schaub 20:06 I always break it down in this in real simple terms for a first time homebuyer and numbers that agents can repeat. Okay, because it’s hard to understand this interest deduction what what the hell? are we actually talking about interest? Taxes, right? Are we talking property taxes? Are we talking federal income, right? So, here it is, in a nutshell, if you’re an agent, and you want to be able to recreate this and explain it, and so we’re gonna use a real small numbers, we’re gonna say, a buyer that’s making 60 grand on a W two job, right, that now takes on a mortgage. And let’s say they have $10,000 of interest that they paid in year number one, well, before they had the mortgage, they paid federal income taxes, DGN, all 60 grand of their income, all right. But next year, since they’ve already paid $10,000 of interest, instead of paying taxes on all 60 grand, they’re only going to pay taxes on $50,000 of income. And this is not a CPA answer, right? This is not the exact numbers but this is the way that you can explain it so that you’re coming across educated, okay, and making sure that you’re teaching buyers exactly what interest deduction is in real simple terms.
D.J. Paris 21:20 Yeah, basically reduces your tax liability for income. And it’s it’s a fantastic thing, thankful thing that we should be very grateful for to our country, because it does make us all a little happier come tax refund time, but it’s also something that I get, I think that most renters are unfamiliar with. So it’s a nice little sort of add on to making, you know, the point that homeownership historically is a much better investment than renting, which we know is not an investment.
Joel Schaub 21:56 DJ, I’m so glad you said that. Because there’s so many people that are buying right now and and before we wrap up, I really wanted to hammer home the idea for buyers that they don’t need a large downpayment. All right, and I wanted to talk a little bit about the changes in mortgage insurance, because there’s so much misinformation out there on this. Okay. So most people think you need to have 20% down, right. And a lot of people have learned that maybe you don’t and agents out there, we all know that you don’t need 20% down. But it is crazy to me the number of first time buyers that still have this as a fallacy. Okay, sure. The next fallacy is that if you don’t put 20% down, let’s say we are a first time homebuyer doing a $300,000 purchase, and we’re going to put 15 grand down is my favorite kind of buyers, they’re going to buy, they don’t need anywhere near 20% down. And they’re always shocked to find out how low their mortgage insurance is because the online calculators overestimate this sure like crazy. A mortgage insurance for a $300,000 place with only 5% down might be 70 or $80. Okay, but everyone, everyone in their mother, everyone in their brother remembers when mortgage insurance was three or $400 a month. And so they’re hearing two different things, you got to put 20% down, because the mortgage insurance is too high. It’s really truly not the case, mortgage insurance rates have continued to go down. There’s a lot less volatility with people defaulting. And when there’s less defaults on mortgages, because values are going up, the rates are lower. And so you would be hard pressed to find a mortgage insurance that costs three or $400. So it’s a really good thing to sit down and talk to your mortgage guy that you’re usually working with, and have an understanding of how much mortgage insurance is for the price point that you’re at in your market so that you can speak intelligently to buyers because that objection will come up DJ.
D.J. Paris 24:02 There is yeah, there is a lot of resistance. You’re right there is a psychological hurdle to accepting privatized mortgage insurance. And I know when I when I got my first condo, I couldn’t afford to put 20% down. And this was back in 2005 or six and, and so I did have to pay PMI. And I remember there was a little bit of like, Oh, I’m doing this wrong, I’m doing something wrong. Because my ello at the time my loan officer was was not particularly skilled at like walking me through like, No, don’t worry, it’s no big deal. And it really was no big deal even back then. But it so I think I think there is like a lot of education that needs to happen. And this is where the realtor and the loan officer can step in and help you know Coach the client through because I remember feeling like a little bit of shame that I couldn’t put 20% down because I had been conditioned to think that was what you were supposed to do. That’s what a responsible homebuyer does and the real Aldi about Joe’s Joe’s. laughing because he’s like that has nothing to do with responsibility. You know, either you have the money or you don’t. But there are creative ways to do it. And so I had to do it with a second loan to cover the PMI. And it really did not negatively affect my lifestyle or, or my homeownership in a negative way at all. But I had that psychological hurdle to jump over. So as realtors, we need to recognize those hurdles when when they come up in buyers and recondition them to explain that you’re right, you don’t, you don’t need 20%. And not only do you not need 20%, it’s not necessarily a horrible thing that you don’t have it.
Joel Schaub 25:41 And there’s so many times where I talked to the parents of somebody who’s buying a home. So they’re young, first time homebuyers. And maybe the parents are giving a gift DJ. And they remember when mortgage insurance was high, when it really was throwing money out the window. Sure, okay. So they’re not wrong when they tell their son or daughter, oh, you’re talking to a mortgage guy, and they’re telling you to do mortgage insurance. Oh, so they were right for their time, mortgage insurance used to be on a $300,000 loan three or $400 a month. So when they’re being told all their son or daughter is told to go get mortgage insurance. Of course, it sounds like a scam. Of course, it sounds like I want to give the downpayment money and help them but I talked to so many of them. And what they find out is when they actually see the mortgage insurance numbers that they wouldn’t be presented, they no longer want to give the big gift to their son or daughter. So then then they end up loving me, because times change. And things change and need to be what’s current right now. And mortgage insurance rates have continued to come down. And that’s something that a lot of people that bought 10 years ago or 20 years ago, just wouldn’t be privy to. So now you are on this and you’re listening now, you know, as well, that mortgage insurance rates are as low as they’ve been.
D.J. Paris 26:58 Yeah, it’s, it’s a good time to, it’s the best time to not have 20% If you don’t have it. And again, these are all just little norms that we have to challenge from time to time. And this is why having a relationship with an ello who can keep you up to date on the current trends and keep adjusting a realtors understanding of what’s going on in the lending world is so, so critical. So this really brings us to a great point, Joel and his team send out a weekly recap of what’s going on in the mortgage world so that you as a realtor know, some data points, some some quick sort of, you know, tick tock style, you know, sort of quick and easy and important, you know, sort of little little data points to be able to explain to keep you and your clients up to date. So Joe, what’s the best way somebody can get on that mailing list?
Joel Schaub 27:49 Well, yeah, DJ, the mailing list actually just did three weeks ago talked about the mortgage insurance, I got a crazy amount of replies for agents to say, I did not know that I’m still in the old school thinking in terms of mortgage insurance being a lot higher. So you can email directly to me, and I’ll put you on the list. It’s Joel JOE l@rate.com. So really easy, Joel at r a t.com. And even if you’re just on your phone right now listening to this, you can drop an email. And in the subject line, it just says please add me, right. And then in the body, it’ll say, please add me to your newsletter. And it’ll be very straightforward. And then you’ll be able to have dissect double easy tidbits that you can share on a weekly basis without getting so caught up in the minutiae of the mortgage business. It’s something that you can speak to and say, every week, I learned something, and it’ll help you grow your business for sure.
D.J. Paris 28:45 And if you are also interested in partnering with a loan officer who’s going to actually help you grow your business, Joel and his team, this is really what they do exceptionally well. So if you’re looking to form a partnership, and see if you guys can coordinate together to improve both production on your side and on the loan side, reach out to Joel he and his team would love to speak with you. Guaranteed Rate, of course, is is eligible to practice in all 50 states. But Joel, what is the best way someone should reach out to you if they want to work on a partnership?
Joel Schaub 29:21 Yeah, you can email me directly and then you could even phone me 773-654-2049 You’ll be shocked that we actually answering return phone calls, and the buyers that you refer over, I can waive the fees for them. So I’ll give a $1,500 closing cost credit. And now as an agent, you’ll say I have a lender that’s in my corner that will help the buyer pay no points get their lender fees waived and the only expense that they would have to do their first transaction with us is the appraisal cost. So it’s a big win for you. And it’s a good way for us to start building a relationship.
D.J. Paris 29:57 And guys the way that you can help Joel be able to continue to offer those kinds of discounts is by helping our show grow and reach more listeners and viewers. So please tell a friend about the show. Think of one other realtor, maybe somebody who’s maybe a little bit pessimistic or negative right now there’s, there’s a lot to be pessimistic and negative about. But this episode might just, in fact, turn their mindset around. So tell other agents about our show just how one other agent is all that we ask. And also sign up for Joel’s newsletter by emailing joel@rate.com. And get that weekly update and reach out to him as well. If you want to partner and do some cool events together, nobody does events like Joel and his team, they’re incredible. And they’re, they’re here in Chicago. And Joe’s team is really nationwide. But here in Chicago, I get to get to go to some of Joe’s events, and oh, my goodness, are they a lot of fun, and they work for everybody. So reach out to Joel, if you don’t have a good relationship with a loan officer, or if you’re looking to see what other loan officers can do for you reach out to Joel and guaranteed rate because they’re just they’re just top top of top class. And so I couldn’t encourage you to do that more. So please do that. Tell a friend about the show and a great place to wrap up. So Joel, on behalf of the audience, thank you for coming on. Once again, you’ve been with us almost since the very beginning, we I was going to read a fan letter, but we will get to that on our next episode. I wanted to share it because we do get fan letters and I never read them. So I wanted to share that next time we come on we’ll do that. And but I wanted to thank you on behalf of the audience because the audience is so grateful that you do come on every month. And I want to make sure that we acknowledge droll. And then of course we want to acknowledge you the listener for coming on listening and absorbing this information. And hopefully, it’s helping you increase your business and making you more productive and hopefully more money as well. So thank you to the listeners. And thank you to Joel. We will see everybody on the next episode. So thanks so much. And Joel we’ll see you next time.
Joel Schaub 31:57 Thanks so much for having me on DJ
How To Make People Actually Watch Your Real Estate Videos • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Jun 26, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals with Kim Rittberg.
You’re putting time and effort into making the videos, you’ve done the work — how do you actually get people to watch it? How do you make it more interesting so people stop scrolling?
And Kim has a really exciting Video Boot Camp Summer Intensive – where she’ll be teaching you how to get more clients and sell more houses through video! In just 4 days you will go from stressed to totally in control. Spots are filling up so you can learn about it and apply here!
D.J. Paris 0:00 You already make videos for social media to attract more clients. But how do you get people to actually watch your videos? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Kim Rittberg 1:32 I love being here with keeping it real I have so many friends from across the country. I know when you follow me on Instagram you always say hi. So keep the notes coming and as you search hung up on video, please tag me at Kim Rydberg I will cheer you on. I will give you encouragement, I will give you tips. And I want to let you know I have a video bootcamp Summer Intensive coming up July 24, you will go from feeling overwhelmed and confused to totally in charge, confidently attracting your ideal clients getting homes listed, getting lots of clients interested in you. And it’s really about becoming the go to expert in your neighborhood. I give you all the tools, all the information. It’s gonna be an amazing group, and you’re gonna learn so much so fast from me, an award winning video strategist and expert. I spent 10 years in TV news. And then I was an executive at Netflix, Pop Sugar People Magazine and now I speak at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. I taught at their national convention, I spoke at the Women’s Real Estate Investment Summit, I guess teach at Syracuse University at NYU. So I know what I’m talking about anyway. But this is not about me. It’s about you and helping you grow with video and podcasts of don’t be afraid of them. Today we’re talking about, you’re putting in all this time and effort into making videos, right? You’re making content, but then how do you actually get people to watch it? Like what are some tricks that you can use. So that’s what we’re talking about today. And I want to remind you, a lot of times maybe 50 75% of the people that I see, getting on camera is the first hurdle to get over. So I have a video from keeping it real, maybe a month back about how to be confident on camera, you can also check me out on Instagram, you can check out some of my tips there and grab my free download as well. But if you’re struggling to even get on camera, that’s step number one. So make sure to get on camera, get yourself out of supermodel mode, and get into teacher mode, meaning stop thinking about how you look what you’re wearing how your voice sounds, and just start thinking about the message that you’re bringing, which is letting people know what an expert you are letting people know how much you want to help them in this amazing purchase or rental that they’re working on with you and that you’re the person that they should trust. So it’s all about creating that know like and trust when you’re talking about real estate and these huge investments. So here are some tips about what you can do to get people to watch those incredible videos. So first, I want you to start thinking about hooks, you can have a great video. But if it takes you about 10 seconds into the video for someone to realize what you’re talking about, or why they should want to watch, you lost that chance. So let’s say you have this great video about how to renovate your kitchen in under $300. I mean, I live in New York City, so that’s pretty cheap, but maybe it’s even $100 how to upgrade your kitchen in under $100. I would absolutely watch so I think that’s a really good idea for video. But if you start the video and we’re talking about short form video, okay, if you’re talking about long form video, it’s a little bit different. But if you’re talking about a short form video, a minute, and it takes you 20 seconds to even get into what you’re going to say you lost people. People are scrolling on their phones, they’re multitasking, they’re grabbing their coffee, they’re getting their soccer ball in the car, they’re putting their dog in the car, they’re getting their kids, they’re doing a lot to really have to grab them in those first few seconds with an amazing hook. Let’s say you feel like oh well my video is not that interesting. Like how do I make a good hook a hook is like the thing that grabs them, it can be the headline could be really beautiful visual. Even if your content isn’t like an amazing sunset, or a crazy bonfire, you know, something like really visual, maybe it’s just information, you have to merchandise it, you have to market it in a way. That’s interesting. So let’s say you’re commenting on the market. And maybe instead of just saying, Here’s my market take, you could give more information about your market take why you shouldn’t buy a home. Now, I would be surprised by that. Because I would be like, Why is this agent telling me not to buy a home? I want to watch. So it’s really about thinking of how do you entice someone to be curious? How do you pique their curiosity, that’s a really important part of getting people to watch your video. So we’re talking about a hook or headline. And again, with hooks and headlines, you can package them together. So you can see five tips to list your house. Five tips to win a bidding war. The biggest, like the biggest tip to staging your home successfully, so anything that feels really concrete, someone’s not like, Oh, I’m gonna have to read like a 400 page article on this topic. Like they know they’re gonna learn something really, really quickly. And then of course you deliver on it. We never have clickbait we never lie to people. So that is one way is have really clear and catchy headlines. I promise you, and I’ll challenge you, if you if you are making a video right now, or make a video now please do make a video. alter your headline the text on the very first frame, or start your video with something really, really visual. And tell me if you feel that you feel like in your numbers. Tell me if you’ve got more views, more engagement on that video, because it started with a big, bold headline of what’s to come. All right, message me on Instagram, I’m also on LinkedIn, I have Facebook, I use it less for business, but I still use it. And the next one is trying to think of catchy ideas. Now, a lot of people are gonna say, of course, I’m trying to think of catchy ideas. I’m coming up with a creative brainstorm. But I would say more often than not people really start recording and they’re not necessarily we’re not always pushing ourselves to think of like, what’s a new peg for this? What’s a new idea for this? So you can think of things that are related to pop culture? Is there a real estate show that you want to weigh in on? Is there real estate in a big TV show. So for example, I love succession. I live in New York City, so obviously successions in New York show, but I worked with one of my agents, and we did a succession based pop culture video, which basically, we showed the actual apartment and then we’re like, would you spend $50 million on this, because they talk about buying it for a ton of money. So you can relate your opinion, to a pop culture event or a moment, I just drink some water, obviously, you can hear my drinking water related to a pop culture moment. Again, you can also Like Comment on homes that you’re not listing. So if there’s a home in your area, that’s really cool. And you want to talk about it talk about it doesn’t have to be the house that you listed just and you’ll start seeing that the more you start watching other people’s videos, you’ll realize you don’t need to be the listing agent on videos to feature it and to get use of it.
So we talked about hooks, about really catchy ideas. And then another thing about really catchy idea. So think about a real estate show or a home renovation show or anything like that, that you love. Thinking about what you love about it, like actually just analyze it a little bit more. So if you think about those renovation shows you love the before and after. It’s very satisfying. And sometimes you love a sledgehammer, sometimes it’s satisfying to just see something be smashed. So start with a fresh eye on to your own work. Are you showing any homes that are brand new? Like are you working on a property, that’s a new development, see if you can get photos or videos that are before it was built, and then maybe the next shot can be the after? That’s very satisfying for people because you don’t often get to see that level of progress. You’re normally walking to a host and you’re like, Oh, here’s the house, here’s the apartment. So to be able to see that. And think about other things about renovation. Little quick fixes to renovate everyone’s always interested in renovating their home but on a budget or quickly. So if you have tips like that, or if you have homes that are that’s happening at you don’t always by the way have to be doing it. If you have ideas that you’d recommend to someone but you don’t have the footage of like it happening in a house. That’s okay. You can offer those tips. You just stand in like a beautiful home, stand with a nice background, make sure you’re always well lit, and that we can hear what you’re saying. But you can give advice, even if you’re not showing it. So those are some other tips, having relating it to pop culture. This is not real estate related but one of my students in my video bootcamp class, it was just the Super Bowl and Rihanna had to has revealed her pregnancy in that amazing red latex dress. And I had sent out an email immediately and let our video bootcamp people know earlier than that, that they should keep an eye out for pop culture moments based off of any big event. Super Bowl is a very big event. And so she posted a reaction to Rihanna announcing her pregnancy and her reaction video, it wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t over the top, it wasn’t even like scandalous or anything. Or like salacious or funny or whatever. It was really just her observation about that Rihanna must have slept really well that night because she was pregnant and like performing. And you know, that she was just basically crushing it on the stage. And she did it at the right time. And this role was happening. And that video got 13,000 views. This is someone whose videos were getting like 100 views before. So when you tie yourself into pop culture, you open yourself up to being discovered by more people, that’s called discoverability. Meaning people who don’t follow you, people who don’t know you can be shown your feed. So that’s a good thing to start thinking and trying to do is jumping on pop culture moments. So that’s one way to do it. And then the other thing is pop culture moments. Again, like I mentioned with succession, if there’s like a TV show that’s wrapping up, and it’s in some way related to your industry, that could work. So that person who’s commenting around as she is a coach, actually leadership coach. So it’s not necessarily like she’s so specifically connected to Rihanna. But if there’s any type of pop culture show, with real estate apartments, homes, that’s a really great way to like wedge yourself in if it’s the finale of something, or the premiere of something. So that’s a great way to try to get new people to learn about you. Now, house tour, I see so many home tours, I’ll be honest, I get a little upset when I only see just listed and just closed. The reason why I get upset is because real estate agents, y’all out there, you work so hard, you really distinct points of views, you do it because you love it. You all have opinions, like I’ve never met a real estate agent who’s just like, I don’t know, I just take the check. You know, you you are here because you believe in it. And you know how to talk to people, right, your salespeople, you know, I didn’t meet people, you know how to talk to them. The reason why I don’t like social feeds full of just listed and just closed Is that all it does is try to sell one house, but it doesn’t try to sell you as an agent. And I’m very, very nice about it. But I’m kind of tough about it. Because I think that, yes, you get to show your expertise in that, hey, look, I have sold some homes. So I think that’s good. It’s better than nothing. But it really doesn’t advance your goal, which is to become the go to expert in your neighborhood. And how do you become the go to expert in your neighborhood, by showcasing your expertise, your personality, letting people get to know you the opportunity to let people get to know you through video and podcast while you sit in your office is unbelievable. I’ve seen it for myself. I’ve seen it from my clients, one of my real estate agent clients, we did a YouTube series. And we focused specifically on raising him up as an expert. He got a multimillion dollar home listing from that. My other agent, he really focused on getting his Instagram looking more professional and sophisticated having more of a strategy. And he got a text message from someone, hey, haven’t seen you in five years, want to grab lunch, he got brought in on a new development listing, specifically because that person has kind of re re connected with him from Instagram. So these things are happening all the time. My other agent, she’s from South Carolina, she got a referral sent to her in Charleston, from an agent who she didn’t know who had been following her on social media. And she is somebody who’s really pushing her humorous side forward, she’s showcasing that she like has fun and, and will write funny little captions and do dancing or lip synching, which you don’t need to do. But it is about showing up and being yourself. So for some people that is walking around town and eating pizza, or drinking wine at the places in your neighborhood for other people that is being funny. For other people that is being very financially savvy, whatever is unique and authentic to you is what you should be doing. All right. That was a little bit of digression, but still learning. So it’s totally fine. When we’re talking about House tours, I want to remind you, you don’t need to just run a house store. You can also put in your own point of view about the house store. So let’s say you have a home and you have the video of it. You can also put in what you like about it, what struck you. You also can give tours of other homes, even if you’re not listing them as long as the listing agent says it’s okay you can come in and film it and put it on. And again, this is just a way for you to reach new people, for you to showcase your knowledge for you to showcase how you see the world how you see the real estate market. So again, we’re always really trying to elevate you as somebody who people go to for knowledge for expertise, or for partnerships. So it’s very important to not really just think about your Social Feed as oh, here’s a place to show houses that I’m listing or here’s a place to like, show houses that I would say, here’s a place to do anything you want related to homes, you could show up, you can give tips about buying homes, you have tips about selling homes, you can give, you can share your opinion on the strangest houses you’ve ever seen, in real life, or on TV. There’s a lot of really creative ways to go into this, especially because real estate, when you really think about it, almost everything in the world and pop culture is like related to shelter. Shelter is one of our basic needs. So I just realized that right now loud, so I’m probably gonna write that down and think about that more as a blog post. But shelter is really one of our basic needs. So everyone thinks about it has it rent buys something. So there’s a lot of different creative options to think about with that and tap into what you love. I have some of my agents love renovation. I’ve other agents love design. I’ve other agents who love the market. So whatever really makes it unique to you. That’s what you should be tapping into. You should be thinking about what are the things that I love to talk about? What are the things that I get asked a lot? What do people ask for my advice on? That’s really what you should do? You know, I sometimes get clients and they start asking me questions about like, their business strategy. And I’m like, I do have thoughts on business strategy. But like, that’s not really you really want to get into my zone of genius, you really want to know what I’m amazing at. Like, it’s showing you teaching you how to show up constantly on camera, is teaching you how to message, figure out what your message is, and make amazing video. So yes, I have intelligence other areas. But like, that’s not really what I show up as because that doesn’t really make sense for how I bring what I bring to the table. So I would encourage you to step in a little more and say, what is really unique to me, what is my perspective about that other people don’t have? What do I love talking about. So those are my tips about how to get people to watch your video one, amazing hooks and headlines, really, really, really clear hooks visually on the video, then come up with catchy ideas, those can be pop culture related ideas. They can be fun ideas, but a little outside the box, we’re not talking about just listed just close, right. And then house tour is putting in your perspective on that home, both your own listing or someone else’s listing. So you can show a home. But you can also say what you find really interesting about it, and maybe a history of the building. Also, you can bring a little more depth into that. Lastly,
I got to tell you, very hard to make people watch your videos if you’re not engaging. So social media starts with the word social. So you have to give to get on social media, meaning you need to be in there and communicating with other people. It’s a really big shift from the normal world where you would not walk over to a stranger and start talking to them about something random. In the social world, you have to start thinking about it as like a coffee shop. The people who are choosing to be on social media are choosing to be in that digital coffee shop. And so if you can interact with other people, both from your real world, and people you don’t know, but maybe or in your community, you can build actual real world relationships, which can actually convert into money through that. It’s a huge shift. Because I know people feel weird, it feels weird popping into someone’s like, feed and commenting. But if someone posted a video or a photo of something, and you have an actual opinion about it, let’s say someone mentioned the new opening of a restaurant in your in your area. You could pop on there and Bill and say, Oh, that looks great. What kind of food are they serving? Or what was your favorite dish? Something that does sound normal. If you said it at a cocktail party or in a coffee shop. We’re not spammy. We’re not selling people immediately. But we are starting to crack open those conversations. Also, don’t forget anyone you connect with in real life, connect with them online. Because engagement begets engagement. So if you’re right, if you’re commenting on someone’s post, they’re going to maybe comment on your post that gets more people to look at it. The more people comment on your post, other people will comment on your posts and see your post. This is true really for every single one. Certain platforms have different rules about it. So like LinkedIn, it shows me so if you commented on Kim Rydberg that’s me. If you commented on camera Burke’s post, your friends will see Jane Doe comments on camera Berg’s post. John Smith liked Kim’s post. So again, that is a really public endorsement of me, right? That’s pretty good, right? It gives me more credibility when you see people commenting on it. And even if it’s not as public as that on the other social platforms, it sends messages, it sends signals to the social media platform that people are interested in this. So it’s very important to remember that. All right, so now you have some tips about how to make that amazing video gets seen now, if you’re still like, you know what? I love Kim, I need to learn more from her. Well, I am hosting a video boot camp up, some are intensive. So in just four days, four short days with two hours each, you are going to go from clueless or maybe not clueless, but super confident. Video Creator, you’re going to get scripts and templates, you’re I’m going to give you a really great setup that’s going to make you look super professional. And I’m gonna help you get lots of ideas, tons of ideas to connect with your ideal audience. It is super fun. You can read all the testimonials from people who’ve taken it, they said they’ve learned so much they say I am such a great coach. I am very encouraging and supportive. And they also say that they’ve gotten referrals. They’ve gotten clients. That’s what we’re here for. Right? I see it for my clients, I see it for myself. So anyway, make sure to click, you can check out my website for the application form. It’s at Kim rydberg.com kimrittbrg.com. And it’s summertime. I know you don’t have time, neither do I. So we’re gonna learn together quickly and crush it together. It’s going to be so fun. So connect with me there kinrick berg.com, you can apply for my video bootcamp, you also can grab my free download fr EE free, there’s a free download how to make incredible videos, and also how to be more confident on camera. So lots of free goodies. And as always connect with me, drop me a hello on social media. But keeping a real audience is like probably the best audience in the world. You’re all friendly and nice and send me really cool notes. So keep it going. And if you post a video, using one of my tips, you post a catchy headline. Maybe you make a video related to pop culture. Maybe you engaged maybe you started to engage with someone shoot me a note. tag me in your video I will totally cheer you on you rock get out of that supermodel mode and get into teacher mode. Put yourself on video. You’re gonna grow your business and it’s gonna be awesome. Thanks
300m+ a Year – Top RE/MAX Agent In The World • Jordan Cohen
Jun 23, 2023
Jordan Cohen the #1 RE/MAX Agent Worldwide shares his transition from insurance to real estate business. Jordan talks about the importance of creating a dominant listing presentation and having the confidence in yourself as the realtor. Next he discusses transparency with your client and how important it is to explain the process in detail to them. Last, Jordan shares how he believes that every agent should think of themselves as stars and they should work hard on promoting themselves.
D.J. Paris 0:01 How does an individual agent produce over $300 million a year on average with no team? We’re gonna find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads into interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering clients a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business and real geeks is super easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is also mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness. Do yourself a favor and please visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. This episode is also brought to you from manuel.io who can take your listings and quickly virtually renovate them to show prospective buyers what’s possible, making your sales much faster. And for higher price points. Guys, this is awesome stuff and I’ll be telling you more about Manuel halfway through the episode but for now, go visit manuel.io That’s mo d w e. l l.io. And now on to the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, welcome to the show. If you’re a new listener, welcome back. If you’re returning we love our listeners. We’re just about to have I’m just about to have a conversation with the top REMAX agent in the world. His name is Jordan Cohen he’s going to be on in just a few seconds. Before we get to Jordan. Just a quick reminder, guys, we have a new social media what we’re actually publishing on social media now more content for you almost every day. Our actual my videographer can’t quite always do every one every day but almost every day we’re posting short form video links, sorry video clips to all the different social media channels including Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. And we’re posting these little 62nd clips from our episodes kind of the best moments of Best of if you want bite size that we show them in reels on Instagram and Facebook, tick tock of course it’s all video. So it’s there there you can easily find us just whatever social platform you use, just do a search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button and then if you can make sure that you’re checking that page because almost every day we’re posting these clips just in case it doesn’t naturally show up in your feed. So again, we have you know, depending on which social platform you use, you know we have different handles but just search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button and get even more content from us on a more regular basis. Alright guys, enough for me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Jordan Cohen.
Today on the show our guest is Jordan Cohen with REMAX in Southern California. Let me tell you more about Jordan. Jordan Cohen is an this is an incredible guest for us guys. So please Please pay attention to this bio here is really amazing. Jordan Cohen is the sixth time number one REMAX agent worldwide closing over 314 million in sales annually. How big is this team you might ask it as a team of one 314 million in sales annually. A team of one Cohen specializes in luxury estates and has been recognized in many publications including unique homes dream homes international Dupont Registry, and the LA Times. Because of his clientele of celebrities and professional athletes, he has been featured on ESPN. His listings have been profiled on extra and Access Hollywood. Jordan has also represented more than 150 professional athletes, actors, entertainers and Hollywood executives and he is a author and his newest book The agents edge secret strategy make your fortune selling real estate is is available now for everyone to purchase. And guys, if I was wanting to learn from the best, which of course this podcast is all about, I would buy Jordans books awards, all go buy Jordans book The agents edge, we will have a link to that in the show notes. You can also buy Jordans book directly by going to Jordan cohen.com. That’s Jor da NCOHEN. Just like it sounds Jordan cohen.com For all things, Jordan, also follow him on Instagram. his Instagram account is Jordan Cohen, number one or just one. So Jordan Cohen one we will have a link to all of that in the show notes. Jordan, welcome to the show.
Jordan Cohen 5:41 Man dj, i was i was a hell of an introduction. Man, I appreciate it so much. Thank you,
D.J. Paris 5:46 you’re a hell of a guest are excited to have you.
Jordan Cohen 5:48 I’m very grateful and humbled that you said such kind of stuff, man. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.
D.J. Paris 5:54 Thank you for for making time for our show and our audience. We appreciate it. And you know, you are known as a sort of the guy at the top of the REMAX mountain. But I our audience is always interested in hearing how people climbed the mountain first. So I would be curious to know how did you get into real estate? Was it something you always knew that you wanted to do? Or was this like a career change? So love to hear that story?
Jordan Cohen 6:20 Okay, sounds good DJ. So, no, I, it was kind of the opposite of what I wanted to do, because my parents had done it. But they, they kind of struggled, they were always kind of deal to deal when I was growing up. So it’s kind of the opposite. But I was a terrible student. I graduated from college with a 2.05 GPA, achieving my way through. And therefore when I graduated, I didn’t have any big corporations knocking down my door or anything like that. So the only thing I had going for me, I thought was a good personality. So I knew I would go into some sort of sales. But in truth, I wanted to be an insurance guy, because I wanted to be opposite of real estate. So I wanted to be insurance. But then there was a guy named Jim, that worked out at the gym that I work out at, and he carried business cards in his socks. And when he walked around, everybody scattered away from him, because he was Jim, the insurance guy. So I said, you know, I don’t want to be that guy that just went up the people who’s trying to sell insurance, not like there’s anything wrong with insurance. We all need it. But I didn’t want to be that guy. People ramp up. So basically, what I did was, I started a little business when I was in college called property promotions, where I did real estate advertising for my parents or for other realtors. So I saw I met all the realtors in the San Fernando Valley where I’m from. And most of them kind of struggled, but there was a few that did well. And there was one guy that in those days were going back 3334 years ago, there was one guy, that was the number one guy who’s making 400 grand a year, his broker told me that that’s more than NFL players made. I didn’t know anybody can make that kind of money. Huge, huge way sounds like oh shit. Real Estate isn’t such a bad thing, man. So I went into real estate right after college once I learned that somebody can actually make that kind of money. I started in entry level housing. My average sales price was under 200,000. For the first seven years of my career, it was 150 200,000. You know, I haven’t done many deals under 100,000. And then after about seven years, I got my first pro athlete, and he said, Hey, man, he just signed with the Philadelphia semi Sixers and he goes, Hey, man, let’s look in Westlake Village. You got to remember, this was before the internet DJ. So right. I didn’t really I’d never even been to Westlake Village. I didn’t even know where it was. And he goes, Hey, I think there’s some, you know, million dollar guard gated communities like, oh, man, there’s some amazing guard gated communities. I had no idea DJ I didn’t even know where Westlake was. So no one out there. I quickly learned that there were some guard gated communities. I did that first deal with him, which was I think it was around a million and a half dollars and I got that lottery money. I’ve never seen a paycheck like that. But for me, the interesting thing was, I met all the realtors that were selling these million dollar homes, TJ and I, they were all very nice. But I remember thinking man, they’re not any better than just because they’re selling million dollar homes and I’m selling $200,000 homes. I thought I could compete with them. So I did that deal. packed up my shit. I told my wife. We were just married, been married for 30 years. I said man, if these people can sell million dollar homes, I think I could do it too. So I packed up started all over.
D.J. Paris 9:32 It is interesting. I remember I talked to a guy from Texas one time on on our show years and years ago and he started out selling $300,000 homes and then he eventually got to a place where his average price point was 3 million. And I said what’s the difference in selling a $3 million home and a and a $300,000? Home? He goes psexec say it’s the exact same thing because it’s just it’s just a different clientele. And he said he goes I realized that at some point in his career now Now maybe when you get into the, to the higher echelon properties, it is a different process. But for 300,000 to 3 million, he’d said, he goes, I wish I wouldn’t have it not that there’s anything wrong with, of course, frightening service to $300,000 homes, those are wonderful. And in your case, 100 to $200,000 homes and even less. But did you find that it was actually a similar amount of effort to sell the million dollar home to the athlete versus, you know, some of the smaller properties that you were doing?
Jordan Cohen 10:28 It’s actually easier because the sellers, it’s not their first time around, so you don’t have to explain what liquidated damages and arbitration is. So it’s actually easier to transact a multimillion dollar home, the harder thing is to actually win the listing. That’s the challenge, because you’re competing against great realtors, there’s great Realtors at all price points, make no mistake, but you’re you’re dealing with people that are just more financially stable. So they’ve again, they’ve done many deals, so that’s more competitive. So it’s difficult to get those listings, it’s difficult to get those buyers, but the actual transaction, it’s probably easier than it is selling the entry level.
D.J. Paris 11:09 That’s a really strong point. So the competition of course, would be fierce. For those those listings, what are some of the, the techniques or the strategies that you would employ to separate yourself from other competitors that were also vying for those same deals?
Jordan Cohen 11:28 Well, that’s everything, DJ. And that’s, that’s the bulk of my book, to be honest with you. I don’t want to sound like a car salesman, but my book is there’s like seven chapters on that on listing presentation. So I’ll tell you how I became passionate about that. And this is the truth. So when I started, my broker at the time, told me to, you know, pick my geographic farm, which was in a city called Canoga Park door, knock, give away all the door magnets and notepads and, and then hopefully, you’ll get some listing appointments as time goes on. So I did everything he told me to do. And then I actually got my first two listing interviews, and the differences. I went into those listings and basically did what I was told to do, which was talk about comps, price and about my company. But I lost both those listings, and both those listings would have paid me about six grand each, which would have doubled my net worth, it would have gotten me out of my bedroom, my parents house and, and hit me at that moment, I’m like shit in that one hour, that hour and a half window, I gotta get better, I got to win those listings I dedicated, really my whole life at that point, to never feeling uncomfortable. Again, never feeling never, I wanted to have the most competence, I could, in a listing, interview a presentation. So I started create language with a bunch of seminars or pick a line here and there, but mainly create my own language that would enable me to win, that’s when my business took off. That’s when I enjoyed calling expired listings. That’s when I enjoyed pushing for those listing interviews. Because I felt I could beat anybody, I think the most important skill set a real estate agent can have is a dominant listing presentation, because everybody talks so much about lead generation lead generation. But at the end of the day, two or three people are losing those lead opportunities, those listening opportunities, I like to I want to have as much I want every seller to have as much confidence in me as I have in myself, that I’m the best realtors. And that all stems from a powerful listing presentation. So that’s, that’s everything. So that’s the tip I give every realtor, I say, prepare, have your listing presentation, practice it, be competent in it, and truly believe you’re the best Realtor in that interview situation. Once you have that skill set. Real Estate becomes fun, and it becomes a whole lot more profitable.
D.J. Paris 13:52 Yeah, I love that this what’s the Boy Scout Motto? Always be prepared, right? It’s this idea of you know, it is interesting, because listing presentations, you know, you’ll talk to some some agents who go I show up with a legal pad with nothing written on it. And I go in blind, right? Some people go in with literally no presentation, they go in to take notes, and they and that’s one approach. And then you have on the extreme other end of you know, a multimedia sort of, you know, presentation with slides and various devices. And you know, it’s interesting, everyone does it a bit differently. What’s your What are your take on the characteristics of a good listing presentation? Like what are some of the things that have to be there? And by the way, let’s just first address the question. The idea of going in with a with a blank legal pad and and saying to a seller, alright, let’s talk that being a listing presentation. What’s your response to people who do that?
Jordan Cohen 14:52 Well, first of all, I was trained when I first started in real estate to just talk about price and about the company so That’s, I guess that’s the reason why, you know, I’m very fortunate and humbled to say that I win or, you know, many more times than I lose, because most Realtors go in unprepared like that. So for me, it’s, it’s about saying, and how you say the same thing that we all do. How do you describe how do you get people excited about photography? How do you get people excited about just listens how to get people excited about social media, I call it like, my tools, right? My tools in my toolbox, it’s, everybody’s gonna say we put your home on Instagram, but it’s how you explain that to a seller in a powerful way, not about how many followers you have. But the benefits of that, to that seller, every seller, they don’t care so much about what you’ve done in the past, they care about what you’re going to do for them, right? So it’s, it’s knowing that, so explaining all the things you’re going to do for them in a very fluid, confident manner. That’s gonna, that’s gonna bang and then come. Okay, so I’ll give you like one of my good lines, TJ right. So I, I like to think outside of the box all the time. So I’ll tell you, because you asked me to do to give some takeaways, right, so I’ll give you a couple of days. So. So for me, one of the clauses that I always do is I say, Mr. Seller, I want you to have the same amount of confidence in me, as I have in myself that I am the best real estate agent, what I’m going to do is I’m going to talk about everything that I’m going to do for you. Because really, the job of a realtor is to maximize the exposure of the home to get as many people as possible to become aware of your own to truly maximize your exposure of your property, then get those people excited screen of them show up properly, and then get them to make the commitment to buy your home. That’s the job of a realtor. I shake my head, yes. And they get 10. I’m excited about that. Then I say now I’m going to tell you how I’m going to expose your home to not only real estate agents, but to the general public. And then at the end of the day, you have to choose the realtor that you think is the best one at exposure and of course salesmanship. Now, if you say things like that, the way that I just said it with confidence, fluid and power, it’s pretty hard to beat that. Right? Versus oh, let’s let’s talk about cops, you know, cops to the top,
D.J. Paris 17:19 you know what I you know, what I love too is is you you’re meeting the client, you’re really focusing on what the client’s experience of actually choosing a realtor is, you’re not, you’re doing something actually quite brilliant. Because you’re saying Hey, Mister, mister seller, you’re going through this process right now. So I am now on the same side of the table as you because I am repeating back the process you’re going through, as you’re evaluating, you know, different realtors. And here’s what I’m going to do for you. And I understand this is a tough thing for you to figure out who you want to end up using. Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. It’s a subtle little thing that you added in there. That was brilliant, because it puts you on the same side of the table as them you’re like, Yeah, I get it. You’re you’re you’re interviewing people, here’s what I’m going to do. And here’s what you know how to make the best decision. I love that that was subtle, but brilliant.
Jordan Cohen 18:11 Thanks. Do you also say like, listen, I appreciate the opportunity to interview for the for the job of working for you. I never say working with you. I cringe when realtors say that all the time. Oh, I’m so excited to work with you. And, and but it’s not the case. They’re hiring us to do a job to work for them to sell their home. So I say that put my ego aside. I say Mr. Seller, and I say it all the time. Thanks again for the opportunity to interview for the job to work for you. Thanks for that. But it would be an honor to work for you to be and I say that, because I still think human nature is people like to hear that they like to hear it because it’s the truth, especially people that aren’t a boss. They’d like to hear that they’re hiring somebody and they are the boss. So all even one of the lines I say, this is pretty good. Because I use this all the time. I think a lot of realtors can can take this line alone and say I say Mister Mister seller, kind of like an agent for an athlete and agents job for an athlete is to not only negotiate the contracts, but to get their clients and off the field money. Athletes love that Pizza Hut money, they want that shoe deal. They want all that. So a great a real sports agent is going to be on the phone all day promoting their clients to get them that off the field thing. It’s the same with me. I’m a real estate agent. The difference is I’m on the phone all day promoting my star, which is your house, your house is my star. So a good real estate agent is like a good sports agent or a good movie agent. We’re behind the scenes and we’re promoting our stars, which is your house so your house will be my star and I’m gonna spend all day every day that I can to promote your home to get people excited about Joe. That again, if you say that properly is a very powerful listing line. Not line but fact but it’s a powerful and relatable thing for a seller to hear
D.J. Paris 19:59 this episode Keeping it real is brought to you by Manuel. We’ve all been there you can see the potential of an outdated property but your buyer can’t and the opportunity is lost. You wish you could snap your fingers and transform the space. And now you can with Manuel. Now listen up. This visionary team with years of experience in real estate architecture design and prop tech built Manuel’s 3d enhanced listing technology to digitally reimagine a property so you can show your buyer the stunning possibilities in real time and inspire action. Manuel visually transforms high end homes as well as new developments to move prospects quickly. Josh on Million Dollar Listing use Manuel’s 3d listing tech to reimagine an outdated 1930s home and went from zero showings to 23 book showings and two offers in just 10 days. That’s impressive right? Now, you might be thinking I already get renderings done. Well, this is nothing like that this is next level interactive 3d like you’ve never seen. And you must see it to get the full picture. I couldn’t wait to try it myself. And really, honestly, the demo blew me away. I want you guys to experience Manuel and transform your properties. So I asked them to do something special just for our listeners. And they came through with a $250 credit on your first enhanced 3d listing, just use our special link live manuel.com, forward slash real. Again, that’s live manuel.com forward slash real, choose them for your very next listing help your clients see the future. And now on to our show. You’re absolutely right, everybody wants a concierge experience as a consumer, right, we want the the top level Hi, white glove experience as a consumer. But we don’t often get that unless we happen to be, you know, wealthy enough to have some of those experiences. But everybody wants the experience whether they ever get to have them or not. And what you’re really doing is you’re bringing that top top shelf white glove service to all of your clients, and you’re treating them all as equal, but you’re treating them all as if they are the most important client in the room or in your in your, you know, which of course they need to be forward to or need to feel that way about you. And I think I think that is a really, really smart way is to make sure that the that your seller is actually you know what their needs are emotionally so that you can be there to support them.
Jordan Cohen 22:36 Yeah, that’s a that’s a good point, too. That’s strong. Yeah, I totally agree with that. In the interviewer, real estate’s very competitive DJ, there’s, there’s more Realtors than there are listings, I think the last that I heard, there’s twice as many Realtors as there are real estate agents. So it’s incredible. So the better skill set you have of being able to walk into a room and interview against two or three other realtors, someone’s going to get that listing, someone’s going to get paid. So the more powerful your presentations going to be, the better you’re going to win. For example, I never talked about price until the end, when I first started, I was trained to talk about price in the beginning by a big trainer. And he says if you can’t agree on the price, get out of there more listings, do you have more phone calls to make you are prospecting to do so if you can’t agree on the price? If you have an illogical sell or get out? Well, then what would happen is I would see that I did that. So I would go and talk about price couldn’t come to an agreement on the price and I believe, and then I’d see that property actually come on the market at a right price. And I question myself, I said right, how come I didn’t pray. And then I realized I wasn’t giving them any reason to listen to me to believe in me, they switch. So now I give my powerful listing presentation. Always before I talk about the price, I want to establish the credibility DJ I want them to go. My goal on every listing interview, is to not to have them want to hire me, but to have them need to hire me to accomplish their goals, or at least believe they need me they need a guy like me to maximize exposure and to get their home sold for their money. Once I could get that and I could see it in their eyes. I could hear it in their voice. I gotta this is mine, then they’re gonna listen to me better and respect my, my evaluation of the price of their home. They’re gonna respect my opinion, once they trust me. And the way you earn that trust is by delivering a great presentation.
D.J. Paris 24:35 And you’ve done your
Jordan Cohen 24:37 DJ, how are we doing man?
D.J. Paris 24:41 doing amazing, by the way, because I My mind is just being flooded, because there’s so many realtors that will show up to a listing presentation. And, you know, maybe maybe they don’t feel that there’s a lot of competition it maybe there isn’t competition in this particular listing presentation. So they’ll say things like well, okay, what price point do you want? Mr. Mr. And Mrs. Seller, okay, well, we want to sell it at x, okay, well, we can try it at x. And let’s see what happens. You don’t go in that way you will win with you’ve done your homework, you know the price point you want, and you’re not really worried about the price. Because what because you are the expert, you need to first defend and impress upon them, what all of the accrued all of this sort of, you know, reasons why they should trust you, the price is going to work itself out once they trust you, because your whole mission is. So that’s really, really smart as price is at the very, very end. I love that. I think that is brilliant. It’s a truth.
Jordan Cohen 25:36 In fact, if I, if I’m not even have to compete with another realtor. So if a seller says, Hey, Jordan, we’re not even interviewing anybody else, you’re the number one guy in the county. And obviously, you’re the top guy in our area, you’re a good referral, all our friends have said, You’re a great, all this kind of stuff, you don’t even have to interview, we just want to come in basically it come listening, right? I gotta tell you, DJ, I still do my presentation, it’s a 30 minute investment for me, to be able to have them respect what we do as realtors, we work our asses off, right, I want to and we invest money. Notice I didn’t say spend money, invest money, we invest time, money, passion and energy to properly expose a home and get home. So So I want them to know that because I know I’m going to have more control of the escrow, I’m gonna have more control on the inspection process, and have more control on the pricing. So I still want them to go, wow, I didn’t realize you were gonna do this, that and the other two were, you know, to benefit me and the ability to sell my home. So thank you. So I give my presentation always, even if I don’t have to give it. I know a lot of realtors are hearing this God, why would you do that? Why would you spend 30 minutes I just explained why. Because it helps you earn their respect even more.
D.J. Paris 26:54 And it’s professional. And we’re in a professional environment. And even if it’s your best friend, who’s going to be your client, treat him like a white glove. It’s like if I walk into let’s just say like the Waldorf Astoria, which I once in a blue moon, I get to go to a place like that. It’s a different experience than walking into a lower priced hotel right there. There is an experiential component to this, that you that that top places have. Jordan has that and he applies it to all of his clients. And that is absolutely brilliant. Because of course, going back to our earlier point, everybody wants to feel special and important. Actually treat them as if they are because guess what they are, they actually are important.
Jordan Cohen 27:37 You know, I love the fact that you just said the word professional, I asked myself that I get asked my assistants every day I see is this professional is this look professional, I don’t put my picture on anything, DJ, I don’t put my picture on ads, I don’t put my picture on, on my signs, I don’t put my picture on anything. Because I always say to myself, when the day comes that lawyers start doing that, or doctors start putting their picture on their cards and things like that I get some do that I want to do that I want to make I want to build my brand is professional classes, I can’t so that’s amazing. He says I tried to be as professional as I can clean lines, everything clean and versus like, you’re never gonna see a picture of me holding my dog and real estate advertising or pretending like I’m on the phone, you know, nothing that just kind of looks, you know, to me doesn’t look as professional. It’s just a classy. So that’s
D.J. Paris 28:27 it everyone knows by now how inauthentic it is what do you drive, you know, down. In your case, you know, you’re driving on pch, or whatever. And there’s a billboard with a you know, with a lawyer with his sleeve rolled up going, I’m gonna fight for you. And he’s showing you his bicep and you’re like, Yeah, okay, we get it. We understand I want to see in the suit, though, when he gets into the court. But let’s talk about you know, we were so quick to shoe old ideas for how to you know, old sales ideas or marketing ideas. And I love the fact that you have actually taken some old techniques and actually made them not new again, but made them important again, and the font that we’re talking about fundamentals. So I’d love to hear how you you’ve taken some older ideas and made them into sort of cutting edge strategies
Jordan Cohen 29:15 100% a dj i i That’s exactly what I do. And I take time tested stuff that has worked for decades and decades and decades. I just explain it better. And I like to think that I use it better and I elevated so for example that’s a great question man. Just Listed right so every realtor will do a just listed right helps build your geographical farm and all that kind of stuff. But how do you explain those on a listing presentation so I’ll tell you what I do. So first of all, I elevate it so the way I got established in my farm and I continue to stay ahead of the curve in my marketing area, even like compete against great Realtors I say ahead. I do it bigger and better. I do different shapes, different sizes, better quality. cardstock but then the way I explained it on a listing presentation, so I’ll say to Mr. Seller, so the job of realtors to maximize exposure, we need to cast a wide net. So in order to cast a wide net, I’m going to blow it up with print, I’m going to blow it up with social media and blow it up with email blasts, and all the other good stuff that I do to blow it up internationally and nationally. However, sometimes the buyer is going to come from drunk just dropping the line in the water. And the way I’m going to do that is these epic, elevated just listed brochures. Notice I don’t say postcards, because it’s not just a cheap postcard that someone’s going to throw away. I like to invest in elevating it. So hopefully, a buyer that isn’t online all day, every day searching Zillow for a home actually lives in your area, or one of my other. That’s also on my my mail list that isn’t on the computer all day every day, you know, just swiping through Zillow. But they’ve always said, you know, if the right house at that single story home with the pool in the view, which is what you have Mr. Seller comes across my desk, or in my mailbox, I’m open to making that move. So what I want to do is I want to mail these incredible brochures to past clients, sports agents, business managers, relocation companies, and all your neighbors. So they can open it up, not throw it away so quick, and say, Man, honey, we love this neighborhood, or our friends want to move in this neighborhood. Isn’t this the exact house that we would want to buy? So some but then again, they’re not on Zillow all day, every day, open up the mail, and they see something beautiful like this. And I could show it to a seller, I can hand it to him. It’s something that he can see feel, touch and appreciate. Don’t you think there’s a small chance, any chance that there’s a buyer that lives right around the corner from you that’d be interested in your single story pool with a view home? And they say, Yeah, and I say so it’s my job, the job of a realtor is to bring your home to them, not just hope that they find your home. So that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to bring your home to people. So that’s an old trick, the old listing just listed. But if you do them, right, you elevate it and you explain them in a listing interview, you’re going to win, you’re going to sound like an expert. What I say makes sense. There’s some side benefits to it. Building your geographical farm, just representing the homes Well, representing yourself well, representing your industry and your business classy. But in reality, I sell homes every year as a direct result of those among
D.J. Paris 32:40 you said so much there. I am so impressed. I think there’s a lot of our listeners that you know it Look, guys, this isn’t a criticism of anyone listening, I’m certainly could fall prey to this as well. But let’s remember when we get a listing, it’s not enough just to drop it onto the MLS and let it syndicate out all over online and hope that someone stumbles across it. What Jordan is talking about is going oh, yeah, no, I’m going to do that. But that’s just like, maybe the maybe step one. And then I’ve got 25 other steps that I’m going to do to continue to cast a net and shoot this out to neighbors, I know which neighborhoods feed into this neighborhood. I know where the people who want to live here now where they’re currently living, I am going to send them a postcard to tell them about this
Jordan Cohen 33:29 postcard. Sorry. Sure. Brochure
Unknown Speaker 33:34 like a luxury brochure.
Jordan Cohen 33:36 It’s an invest not not a giant, you know, even though some might do that, but it’s a, it’s something that’s not so easy to throw away when you’re building your name as well as trying to sell the home. But even more than that, it’s a hell of a listing tool. If you use in franchising, and it is saying what I say you will win listings, just that way alone. That’s one of my tools.
D.J. Paris 34:01 The guy’s the book is the agents, Edge secret strategies to win listings and make your fortune selling real estate available everywhere books are sold, we’ll have a link to it in the show notes. Jordan, you are absolutely right. But this idea of when you get a listing everyone listening, you have to go out and find the buyers and you have to tell the seller how you’re going to do that. And Jordan is the king of doing that. He just basically are the king, the king of that and really think about how powerful that is. Most Realtors don’t really do that. They’ll say, Well, I will put it online and it’ll get distributed and every realtor will see it and they’ll tell their clients, what Jordan does. He goes, I know exactly where people who move who want to live in this. I know where they live now. And I’m going to make sure that they know that this place is available for sale. He did his homework. He knows his market. He is the king of his market because he knows where people want to live. And he goes out and says hey, the reason why he wins listings and he’s the number One REMAX guy in the world is he has a solution to all of the issues that may come up during the listing. He’s like, Don’t worry, I know where the people that are going to buy this place probably live right now I’m gonna go over to them and make sure they know about it like brilliant. That is a brilliant strategy for any homeowner. That’s all a homeowner wants to hear is where you got to find the buyer. And most listing agents go, well, we’ll put it up. We’ll see what happens.
Jordan Cohen 35:23 And yeah, thank you, man. These are from the bottom bar. Thank you for saying all those great stuff, man. It’s truly truly appreciate it. In fact, I’m kind of the the anti internet. So what I say is I say Mr. Seller, of course, you’re going to be on Zillow, of course, you’re going to be unreal as your.com and Trulia, those are automatic polls, you there’s no question about In fact, I, I buy the upgraded packages, because yeah, the internet is a great way to market and sell our home. But we only have 30 to 45 to an hour here for me to convince you that I am the best. And the way I’m going to do that is tell you everything I do above and beyond the internet, and above and beyond and better than the internet. But please, no, of course you’re going to be on Zillow with me as you wouldn’t be with any other realtor, I just want you to appreciate even more than I’m going to do to try to land that buyer. And then I go through my series of marketing tools. And just this is just one of them. Of course, I got many more that I talked about in the book for
D.J. Paris 36:24 sure. It’s incredible, it’s really treating this I get very excited talking to you because you take this very seriously you have a you you are prepared. This you don’t wing, this is a performance it is important. Right when you apply it. Yeah. Of course it is. And, and and it is so impressive. I love hearing and you know, it’s so funny, because this is this is how we distinguish people who are, you know, professionals from non professionals in this industry and, and people who are successful tend to be very methodical, and it is it is mostly about, you know, thinking three to four steps ahead. Like you know, this idea of of coming, you already know the price point, I’m sure that you think is best, you’re going to take that at the very, very end after you’ve already built so much rapport and so much. You’ve impressed upon them so much of your knowledge that they are now bought into you. It’s that they’re buying into your philosophy. And from there, then you can kind of steer the ship is Do I have that right?
Jordan Cohen 37:31 Yeah, totally. Totally get it. Yeah, absolutely. It’s very methodical. That was a great word that you said, and, and for sure. And again, this is just like one part of the book, right? It’s the listing presentation, I dive into how to turn open houses into listing opportunities not just to pick up buyers how to get listing interviews from I, I’m very I talk a lot about pricing, how to properly price it what language to use to try to control that aspect of or not controls, not necessarily the word but to earn the respect when it comes to pricing. I like to think I and how to protect your commission. That’s something I’m very proud of is how I present my full commission. I’m proud to say that I am a full commission agent, I earn that. And it’s what I say that how would I go about that? is in the book.
D.J. Paris 38:19 I love it. What What prompted you to want to write a book and give this out to this information out to other agents?
Jordan Cohen 38:27 To Great question, man, I, I was selling a home to an agent from CAA. So creative artisans. Yeah, it’s been big moving agent. And I sold him a home in my area that I work called North Ranch area of Westlake Village and I sold him a home there and then I listed his home in the Hollywood Hills. And he goes Hey, man, you’re so good at this. Yeah, to write a book ever thought about that. And I go, thank you. I go, I actually have I thought about writing. I’ve been doing this for 33 years, DJ, I’m at the point in my career where I actually like, you know, helping other realtors. It’s not a it’s not a corny thing. It’s just I dig it. Like I reply to every DM and email and call if I can help somebody make more money. It’s it’s a good thing. And I feel good about that. So I actually said, I’ve been thinking about it. He goes, can I connect you with one of our literary agents and like, oh, man, are you kidding me? Of course. So I did a zoom was with a literary agent named Anthony who CAA. And then he asked if you did he loved we got along beautifully. He said, Man, I love this idea of this book. It’s a business book, How to sell real estate. Remember, DJ this isn’t a motivation book. I don’t tell anybody to drink juice exercise, or a vision board. It’s not an energy book, none of that kind of stuff. This is a how to sell real estate book for real estate agents. So he said, so he said I would love to represent you. That was a win. Beyond DJ I couldn’t wait to tell my wife that I remember you telling me I have an agent because you man I’m a realtor. I’ve never been on that side. You work with agents. I’ve never been on that side of the table. So he’s absolutely, so I got excited. And then you write a treatment, but what the book would look like. So I did that. And that took me a long time because I wanted to be really good. And then the agent took that and that and he put it out to all the publishers, I had multiple offers. And I signed with HarperCollins leadership, because I just loved you know, Tim, and Cicely, who are the HarperCollins team, the leadership team, and we took it from there. Then I had a great collaborator who helped me put this in paper named Mark tab. And we wrote a phenomenal book that I’m very proud of. And the review, by the way, today is a very special day, DJ, today’s launch day. So all the people that have been pre ordering it, and there’s been 1000s of them, over the past few months, received their books today. So I’m already getting some amazing reviews. It’s a very, very proud moment. For me, it’s June 6, and, and I’m very grateful and humbled by all the great reviews. So that’s how the book came about. And I wrote it and I’m proud of it.
D.J. Paris 40:59 Well, the book is called agents edge secret strategies to win listings and make your fortune selling real estate. And it is available literally everywhere that books are sold Amazon, of course, Barnes and Noble target, online, of course, everywhere Walmart is, too so please, everyone go out and get their book. We’ll have a link to the Amazon store for the book right in our show notes. One last question, Jordan for you. Just out of curiosity. What’s the most satisfying part of being a realtor for you guys? Obviously, you’re you do this, you’ve worked on the smallest of starter homes to palatial estates. What is it that what do you enjoy the most about being a realtor?
Jordan Cohen 41:46 I DJ, you want the truth? Are you out the corny bullshit answer? That’s true. I want the truth. The best part is going to the bank after it closes, man. They put that money in the bank. That’s the best part about Listen, I’ve been doing this a long time. I just want to save as much money as I can. So someday I could slow myself down. I love moving people. I love having you know, happy buyers and happy sellers and watching people accomplish their goals. I love it. But for me personally, the best part is when the deal closes, and I get paid it I think I hope a lot of realtors that are listening to this Go man. I’m glad he said that because I think we’re all in agreement. It’s very easy for a realtor to say, Oh, I don’t care at all about that. I just want to make people happy. Well, that’s fine and dandy. But at the end of the day, we got a job to do, man and I want I want to I want to do as well as I can, man. So that’s that’s my happy moment is when it closes and I get to congratulate people and get that check. That’s the happiest moment for me. That’s the truth for I’m losing indeed. I’m losing you. You’re cutting out a little bit say that.
D.J. Paris 42:56 You guys. Yeah, I sorry. I love that. Jordan. Thank you. I know we’re having some technical difficulties. We’ll get that work done. Sorry about revenue. So sorry about that. Absolutely. Uh I can’t hear you at all. If those See, Jordan, if I can get better Hang on one sec. Sorry. Sorry about that. Oh, that’s okay.
Jordan Cohen 43:25 And then Claire now now.
D.J. Paris 43:30 It’s a little bit better now. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, sorry. I don’t know what’s going on here. Yeah, that was awesome. And I love that and I appreciate that. And of course, that’s the best part is is going you know, getting paid and going to the bank. And it’s it’s something that you know, we shouldn’t pretend it’s not the like a lot of times people will say everything but that Right? They’ll say oh, it’s about helping people and of course it is that too. We don’t we don’t tend to celebrate the financial part of it. And why are we in this business if we don’t want to celebrate the financial part? Yeah,
Jordan Cohen 44:04 I mean, I really love when when people close and close in a big one today. And I’m excited about that closing the big one today at the name drop out of my name. Drop it for Bret Michaels. You know from poison man, for sure. I love I get I get to represent them on a ton of deals. I love them. Every deal. And with that guy, it’s all about good karma. Right so I’m closing the good karma deal today. And it’s very exciting for me. So man, I love to see him happy. I’d love to see the buyer of his home happy I love everybody to be happy. But I’m going to be the happiest when I go to the bank at the end of the day and make my deposit
D.J. Paris 44:39 you can go red bandana to red is known to do that’s amazing, amazing. Jordan Cohen. His new book is called The agents edge secret strategies to win listings and making your fortune selling real estate number one, agent and real The Mac’s worldwide 300 million plus per year guys, how big is this team just him literally just
Jordan Cohen 45:07 made me and I got two assistants in the handle only one cell it.
D.J. Paris 45:12 It’s almost laughable. It’s so ridiculous because he’s that he’s that it’s laughable in like, oh my god somebody actually does this. And he does he’s incredible Jordan Cohen is his name, guys if you want to learn how to increase your your GCI and of course you do that, just while you’re listening to our show, you’re gonna you’re gonna need this book, Jordan Cohen, the agents edge, a super nice guy really fun, he’s going to actually tell you how to do things, not just why the how that’s the part that we need to get back to the house the strategies, he’s got them and they’re clearly working for him. And HarperCollins is an awesome publisher. So we wish Jordan the very, very best everyone go out and pick up his book. You can find it anywhere books are sold. But also check out what Jordan is up to. By the way, guys, he is also one of the most followed realtors and social media. If you go to his Instagram, he’s got over 500,000 followers. He’s He’s incredible. So follow him on Instagram, Jordan Cohen one and that’s I only looked at Instagram. I’m sure you’re on all the other platforms too. Now.
Jordan Cohen 46:16 I got Facebook for that and a little bit. Twitter, Jordan Cohen 21. But I like I really don’t on Tik Tok yet, but I really love it. So that’s
D.J. Paris 46:25 yeah, that’s the next frontier for you, I think. But yeah, he’s on Instagram and Twitter links to those both on his website, Jordan cohen.com. And it’s a really cool website, by the way, too. So that’s another great for agents looking for inspiration for how to create a great agent website. That’s a really fantastic example. So everyone go out and pick up the book. And we will on behalf of our audience, we want to thank Jordan for coming on our show giving us these amazing tips and tricks to help win more listings and, you know, just have a better 2023 And also increase the professionalism of the industry. I love it Jordans at the forefront of that. And also on behalf of Jordan and myself. We want to thank our audience for making it all the way to the end of the show. Want to thank our sponsors as well. So we want to thank everyone involved with helping us put the show together. So thank you, everyone. Jordan, thank you. We will see everybody on the next episode. Jordan, thanks so much.
Jordan Cohen 47:25 From the bottom of my heart DJ, thank you for having me. You have an incredible show. You’re an incredible guy. And it’s truly truly my pleasure and an honor to be on your show and I’m forever grateful. Thank you
How To Attract Hispanic Real Estate Clients • Marisol Jusino
Jun 16, 2023
Marisol Jusino with Coldwell Banker Realty shares her life experience as a victim of domestic violence and how she changed paths into real estate. Marisol discusses the difficulties she faced learning the real estate business and selling part and she emphasizes how important it is to stay loyal to people especially to clients. Marisol also explains the importance of learning new languages and how this helps you stay connected and gain the trust of your clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Would you like to attract more Hispanic, Latino or Latin X clients to your real estate business? Today we’re going to show you how to stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer Marisol just so you know before we get to Marisol, just a few reminders please the best way you could always help our show two ways. Tell a friend think of one other realtor that needs to hear what Marisol is about to show you. And to tell you, which is how to increase the number of Hispanic clients that you have. And let them know that this podcast exists, send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve done can be streamed right from a browser. You don’t even need a podcast app. And then the second thing is please support our sponsors. We love our sponsors. They’re the reason we can pay our bills, pay our team and just with our team alone, we’re doing like an extra 100 episodes a year just because of our sponsors. So please, please please check out our sponsors don’t fast forward through we keep the promos short and trust me they’re great products and services that you can use in your business. Okay guys, you’ve heard enough for me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Marisol Justina
Marisol just from Coldwell Banker she services Central Florida. Let me tell you more about Marisol. Now Marisol is Latina. She is a single mom. She is a domestic violence survivor and a realtor for the last 19 years actually 20 years. By 2010. She realized as much as she loved serving people Marisol did not have proper sales training, so she went on to timeshares for its training and in January 2013 returned to real estate once back in real estate while facing life continuous life’s continuous challenges, which at time has made it extremely difficult to work. Marisol realized that business kept on moving without doing much at the time, her phone was ringing and transactions were closing. And that’s when she realized she had learned to tap into a forgotten community within the industry, the Latino community, the largest growing minority in the United States. Marisol has been able to grow her agency and her confidence in ways she never thought possible. She is a top Realtor in Florida. Learn more about Marisol by visiting her website which is g 12. So the letter g 12. Professional group.com g 12. Professional group.com By the way, we will have a link to that in the show notes so you don’t have to type it in and please please please follow her on Instagram. That’s M Justino j u s t i n Oh, sorry. JUSINOMJUSIN Oh, the number one at Instagram again link to that as well in the show notes. So when I make a mistake, you don’t have to worry because you just click on it in the show notes. Marisol. We are excited to have you welcome to the show.
Marisol Jusino 4:28 Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:31 I am so excited to talk with you and talk about how you have grown your business and what our audience can gather from from you and it is a holiday weekend while we’re recording this so we are going to try to make this as light and breezy as possible so that if anyone is watching us as we record it live they can enjoy right into the holiday weekend. Marisol love to learn more about how you got into real estate. Tell me tell me that The process there, how and why?
Marisol Jusino 5:02 Well, they why was that I needed I needed to do something. I was in a domestic violence situation. And I knew I needed to get out of there. I didn’t know how. And as crazy as it sounds, years before I used to live in Ohio, I had a friend and she said, you know, she took me to a meeting with her friend. And her friend was a broker. And her friend said, well, let’s just recruit her. And my friend says, Well, no, she has little kids, you have no idea what you will do to her for that state in my mind. Then just before I move to Florida, you know, and I’m talking to a good friend. And at this point, I know that life is hard. And I have no idea what the future health. And I say, but I don’t even know what to do over there. Because back in Ohio, I used to work for NASA over there. And, and I, but I didn’t want that nine to five on that street yet out schedule. Plus, I was going to be leaving a bit of a distance from NASA. So she said, why don’t you just become a realtor. And some like that’s two voices. So I kept that in the back of my mind. So then when life began changing, I’m like, You know what, let’s do this. So I will I call a friend, which was the neighborhood my neighborhood expert. She was a realtor. She lived to house two houses down from me. She said, You need to go for it. I’ve not always known. You’re supposed to be a realtor. I’m like, how everybody knows. But I don’t know, you know? So she counseled me, I went and I took the license, you know, the classes. The weekend before I took my estate exam. I did a 10 a 10 mile race. And I broke my left because my leg? Oh, no. So I am like, I’m thinking this is it. And I said, Okay, God, when I am in that test, if I don’t pass, I’m done. But I guess I was supposed to be here. I did pass it. So that’s kind of my story. Well, I always
D.J. Paris 7:12 love the expression. And this is I’m not promoting or denying any anyone’s religious beliefs. But I always love the expression, whatever whatever anyone’s spiritual beliefs are that God never gives you more than you can handle. Yep, in a given moment, although it does get tested. And breaking your leg a day before a somewhat challenging exam is not not the easiest or most fun weekend before the weekend before the weekend before? Yeah. Well, it is it is interesting, too, that there are people that seem to show up in our lives. Again, whatever your anyone’s belief is about the universe or higher power or whatever. There are things that happen where sometimes people just know things about you that you don’t know. And if you just listen. You know, sometimes it’s like, oh, and a couple people are telling me to do this, maybe I should do it. And obviously it worked out really, really well for you. So tell us what it was like a getting into really an industry that you didn’t have experience in before. Was that challenging? You know, how did you grow your business
Marisol Jusino 8:17 II was having because first you don’t know much of your sleep, because we learned a lot. And everybody tells you when you take the real estate class, you know, you’re just thought how to pass an exam, not to have to sell real estate. I did have a lot of support. You know, there’s always good agents that try to help you on so forth. As crazy as it sounds, my very first listing, it was my son. And he was just seven, seven years old, seven, eight years old. And he goes to his again, you know, everybody believes what they believe. But he goes to his Sunday school teacher. And he says, By the way, do you happen to know anybody than you gotta
D.J. Paris 9:02 be? Hold on? I’m stopping this story because there’s no way this story is true. What do you first said, I want to just back up in case anyone missed that. So Marisol said something that at first I thought I clearly heard this wrong. And I’m not going to interrupt her. And then when she got out, I go, No, I heard it. Right. And I’m only pausing you, because this is the cutest story I’ve ever heard. Yeah. So this, she said her first listing was from her son who was seven years old, and he goes into school and go ahead. I’m so sorry.
Marisol Jusino 9:29 Yeah. He asked him, you know, do you happen to know anyone that needs to buy yourself at home? And he looks at him and he says, As a matter of fact, I do. I am thinking about selling. I said, Well, you need to use my mom because she just got her license. And that was my first listing.
D.J. Paris 9:49 That is that is the most adorable. It’s the it’s I’ve done 500 episodes. That’s without exception, the cutest and most adorable story that could ever be first Someone’s first listening. Cheers. Cheers to your son. That is yeah, that is really. Oh boy. That is that’s about that’s about having a good family team right there. So yeah. Oh my gosh, how cute is that? Well, what an adorable story and what a great son. Yeah, that’s so cute. So okay, so aside from, from that to everything sort of snow, like continue to grow from that will
Marisol Jusino 10:23 just be gone. It just it was just happening. I mean doing what the basic things that we do, yes, you know, because stuff does happen. But nevertheless, at the same time on my personal life, I was going through a divorce and all the craziness. So life was crazy. Life was crazy. But somehow, things always worked out. I mean, don’t ask me how this always did work out. But by 2020 10, that’s when I was because a lot of agents left the market in 2008 times get crushed. And the funny thing is that they say they usually say if you last five years, you’re gonna stay on the market. And I’m like, Well, you know what, I even if I sell one listing a year, I’m staying, you know, it’s like, I need to be that mark. But honestly, by 2010, I was worn out. And I had no idea what to do overwhelm in every sense. And that’s when I left and went into timeshares because I needed training. I needed to I mean,
D.J. Paris 11:32 there is there’s so many people that left in that time because it for those of us that weren’t in real estate at during that time. This of course is when the crash happened. This was a lot of the the the loans that that were done with, you know, they were very generous with loans Florida and particular was very hard, because they had much easier restrictions there. And so And like every third or fourth person in Florida had a real estate license at that time, it was some crazy statistics. So everybody had a license, people were making money hand over fist and they were just selling and reselling properties. And and then of course, the collapse happened. And it was devastating for many, many people. So I love the fact that you at that point, said, You know, I really could use more training and you know, the timeshare world, despite what anyone might think about that type of business that the sales man ship that is taught in those in those those rooms for those companies is beyond impressive, because it works.
Marisol Jusino 12:34 Yes, it does their training. i When young people come to me and asked me, you know, what should I do? I’m thinking about joining real estate and I my advice is always please do it. Get the license, go sell timeshares for a few months. Yeah. You’d be awesome.
D.J. Paris 12:54 Well, and those are those are particularly tough, because and I know like my parents used to do this when, when they were younger, when they maybe didn’t have as much money. But they would have you know, somehow they would be on lists where they would get flown to like Las Vegas. And they would go for, you know, get free free room and maybe a free hotel, or sorry, free airline, I’m not sure. And you’d have to sit through a presentation. But you know, you know, most of the people in that room are doing the same sort of thing they don’t really want to buy a timeshare. So it’s a very difficult sale, because you know, if the person is ready to buy, it’s great. But the vast majority of people just want the freebie. And so it does make it a challenge. And there’s a lot of objections to overcome and you’re asking for a lot of someone’s money. And it’s it’s it’s a very, very difficult sale. So I think you’re right, there’s the sales training, there’s got to be just amazing. He rates. Yeah, okay, so you were in timeshares. You got the sales training, and then you decided eventually to return it to the traditional brokerage world. Yet,
Marisol Jusino 13:56 well after I left time chairs, and I am like because I had said to myself, I don’t know if I can do this. And I’m thinking what do I do with my life? And I received a call from a former client. And he says, Listen, I don’t know why your nerves are making this call, but I need to talk to you. And I’m like what you tell me. And he says, Call me crazy, but you need to go back to real estate. This is you were born for that you need to go back. And I just smiled because at that point, I was actually coming from meeting with a broker. Just because I had also a friend that called in from the Miami area. And she said listen, I don’t know if you’re still in real estate. But I want to buy a condo you know, in the Orlando area. We have 400,000 cash. Can you help us? Heck yes. Yes and yes. So that’s that was my way back in. That was lucky And then at that point is just, you know, it was relearning. Because yes, I had learned the real the selling part. But now it’s like, burn patient ship part of the business. How and plus the technicalities, because there’s so much technology that everything changes, everything changes. So it was time to do that. But I was going through life, I still because unfortunately my case, you know, I, I was in an abusive relationship. As I mentioned, I divorced in 2005. But it wasn’t until literally early last month, that finally everything finally ended, because there was an injunction. So it’s been really a drain. So he’s just at sometimes you wonder, and that’s, but that’s when I noticed, is like, hold it. I mean, I’m still making it things are happening. Even in the worst days, there’s always the the ball is still rolling. And that’s when I’m like, but what is it and I began looking at my book of business, and it’s referrals of referrals of referrals. You know, I mean, two years ago, I close my first buyer, I closed them all over again, you know, so he’s like that referral book, when you stay in touch with them. And when you do what you’re supposed to do, yeah, they stay loyal.
D.J. Paris 16:29 They do. And first, I also want to honor you for sharing about your, your, you know, the challenges you faced and the, you know, victimization that’s happened that happened to you, and the fact that you were dealing with that, not only while it was happening, but for for about 17 years, or 18 years, after 18 years, I mean, you know, that is a heavy, heavy bag to carry around. And it is not an easy thing. So I honor you for carrying that bag for as long as you did, I know that that can’t possibly be easy. And also a good reminder, I think to anyone out there that that knows of maybe somebody that’s that’s in a similar situation that is currently in a similar situation, and maybe the people are afraid the person is afraid to leave, because maybe they don’t think about how they don’t understand how they could support themselves. If they were to leave a relationship. And maybe they think, well, it’s better to be in even an abusive one than non abusive one, because at least I least I can pay the bills in this abusive one, which, of course, you know, is is not not a great place to be. And to, you know, sometimes it’s just a couple of people to say, Hey, I think you can do this. And so it’s a great, great reminder to encourage people who are trapped, or who feel trapped in those in those sadly abusive relationships to maybe see a pathway out. And so I honor you for sharing that we I mean, we have 1000s and 1000s of listeners, I guarantee that that story is going to touch somebody, and maybe even inspire somebody who might be in that situation or know someone in that situation to maybe see a different path. And so I honor you for the courage to talk about that. Thank you. And, and I also want to talk about the Hispanic market, because I know that here in Chicago, which is where I’m located, we have a large Hispanic population. And there is a tendency, because we have about 800 agents here at our own company. So I just talked to a lot of agents. And I’m always recruiting agents for our firms. I’m always talking to agents. And whenever somebody brings up the Hispanic sort of demographic for finding buyers and sellers, a lot of times what what agents will say is, oh, well, I don’t know that I don’t know that market. I don’t know what those what that group of people is looking for. I don’t know how to communicate with them, I don’t really know how to infiltrate or penetrate that market to really get in. And so I would love any just information or advice you might have, because you’re right, it is the largest minority non minority group growing at the fastest rate in our country. So it’s important to certainly not ignore that group, but learn maybe how to better communicate with that group and understand what what what their needs and desires are. So I’d love to hear more about that.
Marisol Jusino 19:19 Well, in summary, because there’s so much that you can do, but the the question, the big question is, and most people said, Well, what do I do, just like you express is like this, and everything that is so known, we, we kind of tend to stay away from it. But it’s not that hard, because to begin with, you know, about 70% of the Hispanic population speaks English, you know, so that’s one thing, you know, yes. Will it help to speak Spanish? Well, of course, you know, of course it will. But if you don’t speak Spanish chances are Are your buyer or seller will speak English is there’s a big chance. Most of the buyers right now the Hispanic buyers are 30 and below 30 years old and below me, which means they have been born and raised in this country. So they are, you know, they know the language says the first thing, but that’s about English. That’s how we’re talking about English or Spanish, but knowing that Hispanic or the Latino language, it really is more than is an English or Spanish is how do we communicate what’s going on in there? You know, it will help, of course, to know a little bit of maybe the basics. Because you gain trust, when you speak about the basics. You know, when you say a few words in Spanish, like most people will say, you know, well, I took Spanish when I was in high school, that’s really, really sweet. But I have forgotten all about it. But what about if we are, but I hope that you can teach me how to, you know, that kind of, you can help me remember those little nuggets, you know, that will help that will really help. And it’s also the respect, you know, because when you when you are honest, because honesty will be the best policy you have to be honest. If you are not if they if they we don’t perceive the European honest, you will be treated nicely, but that there’s going to be a wall and the feet have you and if so happens that you do a transaction with that person. That’s the end of it. That’s the beginning and the end. Sometimes, as crazy as it sounds, it may be even better not to the transaction. But keeping the relationship.
D.J. Paris 21:52 Yeah, yeah, maybe even referring it for referring it to an agent who really is immersed into that, that community.
Marisol Jusino 22:00 Because is, is that it’s that transparency and explain the processes from A to Z, what I usually tell my buyers and my sellers, What You See Is What You Get you I’m going to tell you the good, the bad, the primary and the ugly, you’re going to know it all. And there’s a lot of time spent on that orientation, whether it’s the buyers orientation, or the listing presentation, a listing presentation with a Hispanic is not going to last you 20 minutes, I’m sorry to tell you that yellow is usually not going to, because they want to get to know you and we are not going to tell us our stuff until we know that you can be trusted.
D.J. Paris 22:44 Ah, that’s, that’s really interesting. So I was while you were talking about that I was thinking, I know here in Chicago, there are a tremendous number of Hispanic cultural events, there are cultural, they’re places where they were Hispanic people gather, there’s, you know, certain events and and, you know, experiences that they tend to have. And if I wanted to immerse myself in that culture to get more business, I would be going to a lot of those events, I’d be I’d be in the background for a while learning about that culture, learning about how they communicate what’s important to them. And then eventually, you know, sort of working my way into opening having them see me as a trusted adviser, but you’re right, it just, it isn’t going to happen overnight.
Marisol Jusino 23:33 Is not that that’s a good step to begin with to get to that person personal knowledge. So you’ll get that personal knowledge, you can go to events in which there you’re going to meet people one on one, although I really believe I mean, with so many Hispanics in the US right now, everybody knows at least one. I mean, everybody does is like build that relationship. Because from that relationship, you’re going to be selling to everybody. And when I mean everybody is literally if they love you and trust you, you call them or you said Listen, I need help on these, they will but again, you have to reimburse that. I mean when they call you and they will call you for little things, you know sometimes, you know their computer broke as crazy as it sounds, you know, can you help me? Well, I have learned a lot about computers by helping them you know, because it is Hispanic style your family and culture.
D.J. Paris 24:31 Absolutely. And and and family and culture are yes, I would have if you were to say what what would my guests be about what I know about Hispanic community, I would say family and culture as well. So that is that that rings true with my experience. I am I have a Hispanic name. I am not really Hispanic myself. My first name is Delphin and my middle name is Joaquin. So I have a Spanish from Spain, a Spain Spanish name but but anyway, but but the point is, is I was not I didn’t was not raised in that culture and, and so as a result, I but I do know we have gosh, probably a few 100 of our agents are Hispanic here at kale. So but yeah, you’re right it’s it’s it’s about earning trust because I think what what sometimes people forget about people who come to this country or who are in a minority group that are that are here is that they’re oftentimes and I mean, we should just be honest about it these are, you know, Hispanic people are often treated less than non Hispanics and other minorities get treated this way too. And we have to remember, especially if we’re not a minority, to remember that not everyone’s treated the same. And so some, some groups are going to naturally be a little bit more defensive or or it’s going to take more time to earn their trust, because of the way they’re treated on a regular basis. And so, you know, this idea that, you know, I, it would be great if everyone was treated the same. Sadly, it’s not exactly the way it is yet. So, you know, earning that trust is not an automatic.
Marisol Jusino 26:09 No, he’s not. But the reality is, and that’s just a little nod at the reality is that most, which is really interesting. I was, as I was looking at numbers, most Hispanics right now. I mean, they are they have been American board. So that means yes, they’re Hispanics. And when you get one, you get the family. But the culture is changing, in the sense that there’s more communication. You know, we’re beginning to see beyond, you know, your D, so your dad, because most of them the growth, the Hispanic population, since 2010. is due to Hispanics being born in America. Not other not not immigration, not immigration.
D.J. Paris 26:57 Yeah, that makes sense. And that opens up the that that a lot of times, like you were saying sort of resolves the the language barrier that could exist, because the ones the second generation, or the people that were born here, obviously are speaking English, maybe, maybe not. It might not be their first language, but they certainly grew up in our our school systems and learned English as well. Yeah, that makes sense.
Marisol Jusino 27:21 But I’m sorry, not what I was going to say. But you eat it does help to learn to communicate, because once you get to them, you’re going to be going home and mom and dad chances are they speak Spanish.
D.J. Paris 27:34 Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it’s it’s never been an eat? Well, I don’t, it’s never easy to learn anyone else’s language. But it’s never been easier because we have these devices in our pocket that we carry around 24/7. Like, there’s Duolingo, there’s a number of, of the, of the learning language apps. And, you know, maybe you won’t speak perfectly within a year of studying, but you’ll know enough to be able to at least show the community that you’re putting effort into learning their culture, their language, their traditions. And and, of course, Hispanic people have been traditions, it’s important to honor these traditions to be part of them to learn about them so that you can participate.
Marisol Jusino 28:17 Yes, anybody can be learned. I mean, it was. And I say that because I moved into this country. I’m originally from Puerto Rico. And I moved in 89. And when I moved from Puerto Rico, and I Lee ended up in the Cleveland, Ohio area. I didn’t know the language. Sure. I couldn’t speak the language. And I understand the frustration when you’re learning a second language. But if I tell people if I did it, anybody can do it.
D.J. Paris 28:51 And there couldn’t have been or I don’t know, Cleveland, all that well. But there couldn’t have been a large Puerto Rican community in Cleveland, right? That had to be very, very small.
Marisol Jusino 29:02 No, no way I was. And I didn’t, obviously, I didn’t know anybody. But they finally this is just a funny story. The funny story is that I’m like, Okay. I mean, I need to learn the language. So I turn on the TV because most people tell you turn on the TV. And that’s how you learn. Well, guess what? When I turned that TV on, what came up was the Beverly Hillbillies. And now I’m laughing about it, but I cried, I cried because it was like, I’ll never be able to, I’ll never be able to.
D.J. Paris 29:33 Yeah, it’s it is an interesting thing. If anyone ever has not had that experience of watching a foreign film or or watching a talent, a television show that was a shot and you know, in a different language, it is incredibly difficult to try to understand what’s going on if you don’t know the language at all, but you can learn it over time, of course, but it is that’s a hard way to do it for sure. So, so I would love to To know about the ways in which you stay in touch with your sphere of influence in between transactions, right? So while you’re working with a client, I assume you’re speaking with them all the time, you’re constantly servicing them, obviously, you’re doing a great job. But what happens? So the buyer sell the home, it closes. And then like, you know, maybe they don’t need you for the next seven years or so, until they’re ready to make another transaction. What do you do to keep that relationship strong during those those times? What if he’s
Marisol Jusino 30:33 the first the first time I’ve done a transaction with that person? You know, I let him know, throughout the process? Listen, this is coming to a close, but I’m not going anywhere. You need me, you call me? It doesn’t matter what I said, don’t call me at two in the morning. Yeah, but if you do, it’s okay. But my phone would be on silence. By but just to set that standard, that this is what you can expect. And then every now one that is more, more that the phone call of anything else? Because yes, you know, we’re thought to put everything in the CRM and send these and send that. And you know, what, most people will not look at it, it will end up in the spam folder, or they will unsubscribe is especially with the Hispanic client. And funnily enough, I am the same way. So this is how I realize how it was going on. Because in my case, it’s kind of the opposite when I was getting into the American culture. So it was that’s when I realized, but hold on, this is how I felt, this is what I was going through. And there’s a quote that says, show me how much you care. And then we can talk and it’s literally the same thing, it literally is the same thing is be there, yes, you’ll be invited to the birthdays, you will be invited, you know, to everything, you know, something is going on, sometimes to be decisions, sometimes big decisions are being made. And you’re called, you know, listen, what do you think about this? You know, and, and it is unknown or is it can be scary? It can be scary, but I always tell people, I will never tell anyone what to do. But what does your heart tell you, but you will be as they because they will see you as that contact at that person. And your phone will ring there. There were times in my worst times in which is like, Okay, what’s going to happen in here, because I didn’t have the mind to do anything, I’m overwhelmed, and so forth. And the phone rings. And they you talk and check it I haven’t heard from you in a while. So it’s really funny because it works the opposite way. If it’s been a while and you haven’t made contact, you will be cold, because they want to know, why haven’t you cold? So yeah, it’s really sweet. It’s really sweet.
D.J. Paris 33:08 I love that. And I want to make sure that you made a very important point that I believe he made a very important point, I just want to underline it, which was, you know, sending out email newsletters, which is very common, and I’m not here to tell you not to do that. Because I think, you know, there’s a reason to do that. I think there’s a there’s a good reason to do that. But is that necessarily going to demonstrate to a client that you care about them? No, it’s just gonna demonstrate that they’re on your email list, and you’re still in the business. And that’s okay, if that’s the intention, if the intention is like, Oh, this is all I need to do to stay in contact with somebody send them a newsletter? No, that’s probably not going to demonstrate to anybody that you care about them. It’s just gonna demonstrate that you’re still in business. So like, you were saying, I love that you said, hey, the transactions completed, but I’m not going anywhere. And in fact, when you need anything, anything related to your home or anything at all, you reach out to me and I, if I can’t do it, I’ll get you to the right person that can, that’s how you demonstrate care. And that’s what people that’s what everybody really wants. We don’t really want another email newsletter, but it’s not it’s okay to do it. Just don’t make that the only thing you do. And don’t think that that demonstrates care, it doesn’t. It just demonstrates that you’re a decent marketer, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that you’re helping anyone.
Marisol Jusino 34:30 And then the best that that is basically set it set them up and forget him. You know, that’s that’s the way I see it. And that’s the way
D.J. Paris 34:38 and that’s the way everybody feels when they get those emails. You don’t feel special for getting an email.
Marisol Jusino 34:44 Yeah, happy birthday. Even if you especially
D.J. Paris 34:47 if it’s a happy birthday email that is automated. It’s like pick up the phone, call the person they’re probably not going to answer anyway. You’ll get their voicemail and leave them a happy birthday message or sing them happy birthday or do something that It actually demonstrates that you care. And that goes a million miles further than even a text is better than an email, but a phone call, we still all love to hear somebody who now we don’t always maybe like to talk on the phone. But we love it when people reach out and say, Hey, I’m thinking about your happy birthday. Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah, it’s so much about demonstrating care, isn’t it to the client.
Marisol Jusino 35:24 And that’s, that’s the bottom line, which is, it works in reality, it works with any transaction, it really works with any client. But the, the other reality is that they with the Hispanic client is going to, if you’re resilient, if you’re really, if you really want that client, you’re going to have to work for it, it’s not going to come easy. But once once you have established that relationship is yours, but never take it for granted either.
D.J. Paris 35:56 I wanted to ask you about the Hispanic community, specifically about first time homebuyers, because I see a huge opportunity to educate certain renters in the Hispanic community who maybe had never even pursued homeownership, maybe they didn’t know how to do it, or what was what the process was. Maybe they were embarrassed to ask, I know that I was embarrassed to ask when I before I bought my first place. I didn’t want to ask anyone, like, what’s a mortgage? How does it work? I was too embarrassed because I was in the financial services world, not not in real estate. But I was like, I should know this. And I don’t and I feel silly asking. And now you can just Google everything, obviously and learn about it. But not everybody does that. And sometimes people just their blinders are on. No one’s taught educated them. So I’m curious on the, you know, hey, moving from renting to homeownership, doing those kinds of seminars, you know, bringing in, you know, inviting people in those communities that are really underserved, and teaching people about the pathway to homeownership. Was that something that you’ve been involved with? Or do you have any suggestions about how someone may consider doing that?
Marisol Jusino 37:12 I have been in the past. And there’s one really one thing to make clear, right? Now, as of last year, 7.9 million Latinos, were homeownership ready, financially. So the reality, but again, and they will come to those things, because like, like, in here, like we have, there’s so many first time buyers assistance programs available, because there are so many of them. And when they go through that program, you know, from A to C, they’re good, explain the process. But again, they weren’t really, when you approach them the first time is like, get rid of the idea that I gotta get 10 leads, and I’m gonna close in six months, I’m going to close these 10 people, no, no, because the same process you’re starting, you just got a heads up a head start. But you’re going to start that process of developing that relationship. And you can explain the process from A to C, but if you did not build that trust, they’re going to go find someone that they will trust.
D.J. Paris 38:23 Yeah, that just makes makes perfect, perfect sense. And, you know, that this idea of, of earning trust is the way the way that I think is, is of course, by being of service. And the I’ve always thought felt that the Hispanic community because they put so much emphasis on family, and there’s so and again, they they are historically have not been treated well by by people who, you know, especially first generation have a bit of a, you know, a language barrier, obviously, cultural barrier, and just being seen as maybe even a threat to our country. Some people see as many people as a threat, which is, which is unfortunate, but it is a reality that Hispanic people still sometimes have to deal with. And so this is really important to understand that history for anyone that really wants to serve that community, because to understand their history means you can empathize or sympathize and really get a better sense of the challenges that community faces so that you can be of better service that you can feel for the struggles that they they’ve had.
Marisol Jusino 39:30 And and the reality the another thing to view is, you know what I have learned and I’m sure everybody that’s watching right now has learned as well is you know, the issue is never the issue. Plain and simple. The issue is never the issue. So if something is happening if if I get upset, you know, it’s not the client is me. So I better go and find out what got triggered Me. So don’t personalize just professionalize and keep it up.
D.J. Paris 40:05 You know, you’re reminding me I’m going a little bit off off of off script for a moment, not that we’re on a script. But just off off the conversation, you just reminded me of a very smart thing that I’ve heard it spoken about in the 12 step rooms, which is, so if anyone’s familiar with with 12 Step programs, one of the one of the lessons that is learned in that room was people get sober, or they stop doing these problematic behaviors and find a supportive community to help them through whatever addictions they might have, is they learn that when something is activated within me, it’s not the event that’s active, it’s something like you just said, that’s within me that’s being triggered being adjusted. And it doesn’t mean that whatever’s happening externally doesn’t matter. No, it does matter. But it’s important to know that I am reacting a certain way and I can learn emotional regulation, I can learn how to how to control my response, so that I can be more supportive. While this chaos is happening to my client, as opposed because the client is going to be in chaos, the client is good, especially when something goes wrong, you know that, of course, our listeners know this, something always goes wrong with every transaction, there’s always a bump in the road. And during that bump, the client is probably freaking out, because that’s what happens. It’s a large financial purchase or sale. And you can be the adult in the room and say, Look, I know this feels a certain way. I know what this is, I know how to handle this, I am here to make sure you feel okay. And being that guide through the emotional ups and downs.
Marisol Jusino 41:40 That is correct. Plus, at the same time, if every time you meet with that client, especially if they’re buying, if every time if you’re building that relationship, if you are talking I like to tell them, like I always like I mentioned at the beginning, The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly, you know, and third party stories, just tell them stories. Listen, this, this may happen because I tell them, please throw walk on me. I don’t want you to go to bed with questions. Because by the time you wake up is going to be a nightmare. Yes. Please, please, please, I want to know you have any questions? Tell me I want to know what’s going on in your mind? And if I don’t know the answer, which by now I just laugh and I said I doubt that I want but if I don’t, I will find out I will find out if something goes wrong. And I tell them if there’s something that you think may go wrong, there’s something that you’re not telling me. So listen, this is a divorce course is going to court is going to come out is going to come out. So just tell me so we we can deal with it, we can find the solution, because everything has a solution. So let’s just talk about it and get to the bottom of it.
D.J. Paris 42:56 And I think you know, it reminded me of of when I bought my condo, not my first purchase, by the way a couple years ago. And I by the way I’ve been I’m not a practicing realtor, but I’m in with realtors every day all day. It’s, this is my job. And I talk to realtors, I teach realtors, even how to grow his business. And yet the day but the night before I was closing on my condo, all of a sudden, I had one of those freak outs where I was actually ice skating with my girlfriend and I couldn’t even hardly get on the ice. I go, I think I’ve ruined my life. I think this is a terrible decision. I don’t know what I’m doing. By the way, I’m in the industry, I have a license, and I’m sitting there and I’m like, I can’t get out of this. I think I just ruined my entire life. Anyway, everything turned out fine. But the point is, is I suffered silently. I really I mean I told my girlfriend but she didn’t really know what to do. Other than say it’s gonna be okay. But what I really needed at that moment was was another professional. I needed to share that with another professional and and they needed to say, Everybody feels like that. Don’t worry, it’s totally normal. You’re going to be okay, I’m taking care of this. And and so it’s a good reminder that even people who you think, Oh, they seem fine. You need to check in with them and allow them like you said, Please throw up on me. Because if you’re just throwing up like I was freaking out and I was like wait a minute if I’m freaking out it must be a real thing because I’m in the industry. Well no, it wasn’t it was all in my head. But I didn’t have anyone there to throw up on and so as a result I suffered and it turned out okay of course but you’re so absolutely right. And we forget this as Realtors sometimes because we always think it’s going to work out we’ll figure this out. The person might not always feel the same way.
Marisol Jusino 44:41 Well not lost. We need to find out where are they coming from? Yeah, where are they? And if we know them well enough. We know whether this is the first transaction we know whether they went to foreclosure in the past. Right you know they love their home, or you know they get denied it or they got taken by another agent, which unfortunately, it’s happened. So the more we know, when they say these, or even before they say it, because if we know, we know, we can walk a step ahead and say, Listen, this is the way you might be feeling now, and I usually turn specially to the buyers after they sign the contract is like, listen, after we signed this, this is the process. But this is the process that we have in writing, these are the steps that are going to happen, doesn’t matter what but now, let’s talk about the process that you are going to go through emotionally. Because I see what’s going on.
D.J. Paris 45:44 That is a brilliant way of saying it and also really, really calming. Because it it what you’re doing is, of course is is you’re basically validating someone’s feelings. And instead of just like, oh, it’s gonna work out, don’t worry, I got it. It’s like, I understand how you’re feeling a lot of people feel this way. You know, I’m here to guide you through. I’m, you know, I’ve got you and and being able to empathize with them and say, that must be a hard feeling. I get it. I hear you. I’m here to help help you through it is, is really what, and most people aren’t willing to share that without you asking because it’s embarrassing. It can be it can be embarrassing to somebody, it can be just painful to talk about. I mean, no one wants to talk about fear. But it’s there. And so what I loved about what you said is you asked How are you feeling about this? And if they were like, oh my god, I’m totally freaking out. I don’t think you’d be like, Well, you shouldn’t freak out. You should be like, no, no, I get it. Don’t worry, I’m here with you. I’m not I’m going to be the rock that you can hold on to as your freakout. And we’re gonna get you through.
Marisol Jusino 46:51 That’s it, just walk a step ahead of them. And just that, that I know what you need to know what’s going on. And tell him this is this is okay. It is okay. Or if they put a little bit of distance because people do that tells you there’s something there is something is going on that they’re scared to share. And at that point, you’ll see just evaluate the relationship they agent client relationship from A to C, evaluate all those conversations, because people always tell us how they feel. Yeah, they always do. So and if you know, we know, you know, and you will not be able to take offense if even if they scream at you or whatever. Because you know what’s going on? Yeah, I mean, it’s not you. It’s just, oh,
D.J. Paris 47:46 I was yelling at my girlfriend the night before. She had nothing to do with the transaction. She just was in the room. So I’m like, I’m yelling. I mean, I’m not really, I’m not blaming her, but I’m yelling, oh my god, I freaked on it. And she was just like, it’s gonna be okay. And I was like, you don’t know you’re not in the business. I’m in the business. I’m freaking out. Right? So what happens in your right being there to really be there during those emotional moments, and making sure the person feels comfortable to share those emotional moments? Boy, boy, you are, you know, they’re going to tell everybody about you. If if you help them during those during those tough emotional moments, and that they feel comfortable enough to share, they’re going to tell everybody oh my gosh, my realtor is the greatest. Yeah.
Marisol Jusino 48:27 Let’s remind them early on. That the reality is when you’re going to do something new, everybody’s an expert around them. Because I tell them now you’re going to go you’re gonna tell someone that you’re going to buy a house, everybody’s going to be an expert. And I said and people are willing tension, people are formed from a good heart. But the reality and I tell him, like, for example, and I use the pimple story, for example, if you get a pimple, you know, everybody’s telling you how to get rid of it. Everybody is, well, the one you have to go to the dermatologist, go to the expert, you know, because you can end up burning your face. So it’s okay. But if someone tells you something that puts you on ease and makes you scare, tell me tell me and I can explain what’s going on. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 49:19 or just correct the information. Sometimes it’s just like you said sometimes just bad information. You know, putting toothpaste on the pimple, maybe that maybe that really hurts the skin. Even though it sounds like a cool little hack to fix it. Maybe that actually would make things worse. I I had a similar experience at a dermatologist. Many years ago, where I was reading online, people were saying, oh, you should wash your hair less. It’s actually bad for the scalp to wash your hair every day. And I was like, Okay, I read enough articles that said it. I just assumed it was true. Waiting to go see my dermatologist who had been practicing for like 40 years. And I go it’s okay if I don’t wash my hair every day. Right? And he goes, No, you should wash your hair every day and I go no, no, I’m reading this stuff. He goes That’s wrong. don’t know, I’m not gonna maybe it’s different for women and for men, I’m not here to tell you what to do anybody what to do. But he was like, nope, well, I have I have a skin condition. So for my particular skin condition, so maybe I don’t know what the average person should do. But he said, with your skin condition, you need to wash every single day he goes, it’s actually going to make it worse. If you only wash your hair, like two or three times a week, it’s actually bad for you. And I was like, Oh, he goes, Yeah, don’t read. If you’re gonna read stuff online, run it by me. I’ll tell you the truth. And I was like, oh, yeah, of course. So you’re absolutely right. You know that making somebody because who knows what people read online, they can be persuaded they can read things that that you know, are in their best interest. And they don’t know it. And so that’s why you as a professional are so important. So Marisol, I think this is a great, perfect place to wrap up. I do want to mention for everyone listening, that Marisol works in Florida and guess where a lot of people retire to Florida, we all know that. So so at least everyone from Illinois goes down there. I know my parents are down there as well. So if anyone out there has clients moving to Florida, whether they’re, you know, maybe a second home, maybe retirement, you know, maybe they’re moving to the villages or one of those kinds of places, wherever they are, you know, especially if they’re in Central Florida. Reach out to Marisol she would love the opportunity to connect with other realtors. And by the way, she has clients that move other places too. So maybe you can work out a nice little referral network. And by the way, too, you know and I don’t know Marisol, if you’re looking to expand your group your team, but of course if you are people can reach out to you if they think they’d be a good fit on your team. But if you have clients, if anyone has clients that are moving to Central Florida, have them reach out to Marisol because obviously she is one of the top agents in that area. So and I want everybody to follow Marisol. First go to her website, which is g 12. Professional group.com link to that in the show notes and follow her on Instagram. M Just see no one at on Instagram. So m just seen one link to that as well, in the show notes, Marisol. It was such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much. This is actually we had a technical issue the first time we record we were trying to record so Marisol was nice enough to reschedule. Come back and do it all over again. So we are so grateful to you. And we on behalf of our audience, we want to thank you for coming in and spending an hour with us. And then also on behalf of Marisol and myself, we want to thank the audience for continuing to listen and support our show. Please tell a friend that’s all that we really ever asked if you tell one other realtor about the show. Let them know, especially somebody that maybe wants to break into the Hispanic market or learn how to serve that community. Even more effectively. Send them a link to this episode, you can send them to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream it right from that website or pull up a podcast app, tell your friend pull up their podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. We would appreciate it Marisol, thank you so much. I will see we will see everyone on the next episode. And yeah, I have. Well this is Memorial Day weekend. By the time this is released. It’ll be past that. But I hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day. And for everyone watching us live have a happy holiday so Marisol, thank you so much.
Marisol Jusino 53:18 Thank you so much. She was a true pleasure. Take care
Number One Real Estate Team In Ohio • Ryan Young
Jun 13, 2023
Ryan Young the Co-Founder and CEO of Fello and the owner of Young Team, talks about his transition from a well-known chef to real estate business. Ryan explains how working in a posh restaurant has taught him work ethic and discipline which is now serving him in real-estate. Next Ryan discusses the importance of calling FSBO and expired leads, and how they helped grow his business. Ryan emphasizes the importance of approaching people without judgment, listening more and talking less. Last, Ryan talks about his website Fello and explains how agents can best utilize it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 There are 36,000 realtors in the state of Ohio and today we’re going to talk to the number one team in the entire state. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Ryan Young. Before we get to Ryan, just two quick reminders. Actually three quick reminders. I’ll keep them real short. First, please support our sponsors. You heard him at the beginning of the show. We also have them throughout the interview portion, please, they are the reason we can pay our bills and pay our staff pay our team. So please support them check out their services and products we only we only promote products and services that we think are just unbelievably great for realtors. So that’s one second, please tell a friend about this podcast. That’s the other way we grow is by telling other realtors about us. And the third thing that you could do it that we think would be really helpful for you is actually to follow us on social media. Every single weekday we post a short clip from one of our episodes kind of like a best of with an actionable insight or moment we post them every day or every weekday on all the various social channels even including Tik Tok and we’re on like six or seven social channels so anywhere Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc Twitter, you can find us all those places just pull up any sort of social platform you use search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button, we would really appreciate it. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Ryan Young.
Today our guest is Ryan Young from a young team with Keller Williams in Cleveland, Akron and Canton, Ohio and also the founder of fellow which is a seller lead generation tool. We’re going to be talking about that shortly. I should also mention by the way before I get into Ryan’s bio that he I think it’s in his bio but just in case it isn’t he literally has the the most successful large team in Ohio so we’re super excited to talk to him about his business fellow and also the young team as well. But let me tell you more about Ryan. He is the CEO of the young team recognized as the number one large size team in Ohio and the number 18 team in the United States by Wall Street Journal real trends, the young team this is insane. Last year 2022 completed 600 More than 600 sales transactions with over 200 million in production 600 transactions 200 million in production insane. Ryan’s a third generation real estate agent with a real estate engrained obviously into his DNA. And the team has been at Keller Williams top 100 team for several years in a row in 2019. Ryan recognize the challenges faced by agents due to national prop tech companies and founded flash house flash house was a direct to consumer eye buyer that bought and sold over 500 homes in Northeast Ohio since 2020. And 2022 Ryan founded fellow which is high fellow.com hifelo.com link to that in our show notes, which since its launch in October of 2022 is quickly becoming the most powerful seller lead generation tool in real estate a coveted coveted place to be fellow is now being used by 35 of the top 100 Real trends teams in the country, including Rob to Ken ski, Jeff Cook, Robert slack, Andrew Duncan, and more probably many of the people that have been on this show us fellow so we’re gonna talk about that. At his core Ryan is committed to empowering all agents with the tools and tech that has fueled his team’s success to learn earn more about fellow go to high fellow h i f e l l o.com. Hi fellow.com for the seller lead generation tool. And if you are an agent in the Northeast Ohio area, this would be Cleveland, Canton Akron around there. If you are thinking about maybe seeing what other opportunities exist as an agent, I know I would be reaching out to Ryan, because I’d love to get, you know, on a team that did 600 transactions and 200 million last year. So anyway, reach out to them, you can visit them at the young team.com link to that as well in the show notes. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Young 5:39 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 5:42 excited to have you. For two major reasons. Usually guests, we have one, we have one major focus in your case, we’re going to talk about two of them. And I’m really excited. But before we get into you know the fellow and and what the technology that you’ve built does for agents, I’d love to hear your personal journey into real estate because you even though it is in your DNA and your third generation realtor. It wasn’t how you started, you didn’t start in real estate. You had a different career. So tell us about how you got into real estate and why
Ryan Young 6:13 yes, so many don’t know. But before I got into real estate, I was actually a professional chef. I graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, when I was 20 years old and thought I had a life all figured out right? Just like many 20 year olds, and I cooked all over the country and Chicago and Las Vegas in New York. And all of a sudden I got to my mid 20s and had a mid 20 life crisis and was like what am I doing with my life? I’m working hard. I’m making no money. I have no weekend’s no holidays, I, all my friends that I graduated with are all going out and doing things and visiting each other. And I’m stuck, you know, in the restaurant industry working a lot. And so I was in Vegas at the time, I think I was 26. I reached out to my folks who were realtors in Cleveland, they had a team, just the two of them. And I called them and said, You guys are going to think this sounds crazy. But what do you think about me moving back home, I was in Vegas at the time and actually getting into the real estate industry. And really what I was saying to them is I have an associate’s degree in culinary arts, I’m 26 years old, what can I do? What takes the littlest, the least amount of education littlest? Actually, that makes sense. When I’m saying least amount of education, the least amount of education. It has the most upside financial upside. And I was like, the real estate industry, you go to school for 120 hours. And next thing you know, you can sell people’s largest assets. And so they said, you know, if you’re going to do this, one of our core values is have a decided heart. And if you’re committed to it, and move back home, so I moved back with them. This is 2009 and got my license and then started building from there.
Speaker 1 8:06 It you know, you you have, you’ve made that a very condensed story. But we should I should mention that when you were working here in Chicago, at least only because I live in Chicago. Ryan wasn’t just a chef here in Chicago, he was a chef at the very number one most exclusive restaurant in Chicago, or if it’s not number one, it’s number two. And we are where I am. and I were talking about this beforehand, where you know, Chicago has a lot of really, really great restaurants. So he was like, at the very top of the mountain I’ve actually been to the restaurant Ryan was at it’s called a linear Google at some time, if you want to see the crazy molecular gastronomy stuff that they do. But but, you know, world renowned place. So Ryan was was not floundering in his career. But that’s just how difficult you know, working in foodservice can be even even at the top. And so it’s so amazing to me, that you were able to transition from what I consider I always think of chefs as being extraordinarily creative. I don’t know, maybe that’s maybe that’s not always accurate. But I always think like, that’s a different skill set than then doing real estate, but maybe it isn’t, I mean, obviously, mechanically, it’s different. But maybe the disciplines and the habits are similar. I’m not sure. So how was it making that transition from, you know, being a real professional chef to going and starting, you know, building a business from from the ground floor and in a totally different industry?
Ryan Young 9:29 Yeah, I mean, it’s funny, I owe a lot of the success I’ve had in real estate to my professional training in the culinary world. What’s interesting is the culinary world is a lot of creativity, right? It’s very hands on. When you’re working at the level of restaurants that I was working at, like the one in Chicago. It’s a very disciplined industry. And when you get to that level of elite restaurants where you It’s much more than loud music bumping in a kitchen while people are showing up hungover. It’s like, it’s a very like almost autocratic type of like environment where no one’s talking, everyone is very laser focused. And, you know, you’re striving to be the best restaurant in the world. And that comes with expectations. And so it’s interesting though, that kind of created the work ethic for me on what I applied to what I was doing in the culinary industry. And in some of these restaurants, where you’re working, you’re getting in at 10am, and you’re not leaving there till 2am. And if you apply that type of work ethic to an industry like real estate, I really do think that’s one of the things that propelled my career pretty quickly, because I was running circles around people, I was out working people in Northeast Ohio, when I first got licensed. And to me, that was not like an exhausting speed, it was the speed I was used to, if anything, it was a pretty casual speed, when you consider the nature of showing homes. And it’s, and it’s fun. And it’s, you know, it’s like it’s a little bit more informal and stuff like that. So for me, I really applied that work ethic and that preparation and how we approached being in the kitchen at some of these amazing restaurants, to actually applying that to my real estate practice and some of the discipline and how I approached our business. And I really do think that’s something that I attribute to the success we we had it early on, was the work ethic and discipline that I was taught in the restaurant industry.
D.J. Paris 11:36 Well, and in the restaurant industry, just just to sort of put a finer point on this, which I think, I think are not a finer point. But but my own little take on it, which I’m curious to get your opinion on, is when you work at the level of restaurants, and you worked with the chefs that are at that level, and the food prep and the sous chefs and the whole team. You never know when the Michelin guys coming in to do to do is do his review, right? They don’t give you the heads up. So you have to always everything is precision, right? There’s this precision model that we don’t know when we’re going to be judged on the world stage by some Bozo at Michelin, or whatever, you know, the local newspaper, whatever. So we have we and people are paying a super high premium to be here. So everything is perfect. I first out of college, I worked for well, second job out of college. But basically first job, I worked at Anheuser Busch, and I know a lot of people don’t automatically associate Budweiser, the beer with the actual beer, Budweiser with high quality. But there’s a reason why and it’s not number one anymore. Now I think Bud Light is number one. But Budweiser was the king of beers, as people know, for a long, long time. And it wasn’t just because of the marketing, like they legitimately had a precision that other beer manufacturers didn’t have an eye. I learned a lot of that from them. At a similar sort of situation, I was like I Oh, I’m working for the best or the biggest, rather, not necessarily the best. But the biggest. And I understand the precision that they played at was just a different level. So I imagine you have a lot of that as well.
Ryan Young 13:08 Yeah. And what’s interesting is before I was in Vegas, before I moved back to Cleveland, and I worked at the Wynn and Steve Wynn was notorious for treating, expecting him, holding himself accountable to the same actions that he holds all of his employees to. So you know, Steve Wynn would be walking through the casino, and if there was a wrapper, a little something on the floor, he’d bend over and pick it up. You know, it’s like, if that was his expectations of this is how we, when we are here, this is how we behave. This is how we approach the hospitality industry and how we approach every single client should feel like this is a special experience and stuff like that. And there’s a lot of you know, especially in that level of hospitality and restaurants and hotels and resorts, stuff like that, and talking about Disney and some of these other like, philosophically, just like the people that do it the best. It’s an experience and when we can apply that to the consumer experience that we have in the real estate industry. I say this, like with all due respect, but like the bar is set pretty low for our industry, which is a shame because it’s such an important experience in people’s lives. And so if you can provide a delightful experience or exceed the expectations of the customer creates long term business foundational type of opportunities that just creates so much long term business.
D.J. Paris 14:40 Yeah, I agree. I again, it’s just precision and and this experiential idea, like, like you talked about Disney. I don’t know if this is maybe this is a rumor, but I’d always heard and maybe this is true, we’ll assume it’s true for the sake of me saying it. But if it isn’t true, it’s a heck of a good idea where even the people who work in the park out with If even the people who are picking up trash even the the low the lowliest worker, maybe in the park, if they come across a patron, you know, when when a vacation or that visitor, I believe if they’re within a certain number of feet, they are expected to smile, look that person in the eye and smile, like they are expected not to be invisible, they’re not supposed to ignore the patrons are actually supposed to make the patron feel good about, you know, spending 1000s of dollars to walk in the park. Yeah, and it works. And it’s important, and there’s a precision to that there’s actually that’s just a rule, but it’s a heck of a good rule. And I imagine, you know, you’ve worked in places with those kinds of rules where, where it’s, well, hey, you know, we’re a premium brand, we’re a premium product. And, you know, if you can take that premium sort of experience and give it to the, you know, even a non premium consumer boy, you’re gonna make him feel like a million dollars. And that’s what everybody wants to feel like,
Ryan Young 15:57 in what it is, is, and you hear this term thrown around a lot, or this word thrown around a lot, but what it is, it’s a culture, it’s a, it’s a culture of, they hire to that culture at Disney or to these right, you know, it’s like, it’s an expectation, as soon as you walk in the door, it’s an expectation even before you walk in the door, in the interview process. This is what we are expecting from our team members. And when you when you create that culture, and that’s what essentially everyone is bought into, then all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like abnormal, or it’s not exhausting. It’s not it’s effortless, you know,
D.J. Paris 16:37 standard operating procedure, at some point, it just becomes that’s how we do things. Now, I would love I would love to, to find out because Ryan didn’t just become a realtor and become successful. His team is the most successful large team in Ohio, currently, which is an insane, incredible Ohio’s not a small place. I and I would love to know how you started, obviously, you’re getting your parents video, you probably had a good sense of what it takes being around it, because your parents, I’m sure you just identified sort of the work that’s needed. And also having this incredible work ethic ingrained into you and your previous culinary career. I’m curious, though, how you started because you still had to start with zero clients. Right? And I’m curious then, like, what that process was to grow from? Just starting in 2009, I believe is around that when he said to to Now, last year doing, you know, 600 with your team 600 transactions, which is beyond it, you’d be you’d have I think here in Chicago, I’d have to look at the stats, but I think you’d be the largest team in Chicago as well. So it’s obviously a massive accomplishment. So I’m curious, how did you ramp up?
Ryan Young 17:46 Yeah, so it’s not like the glamorous story that I think like people expect I actually spent the first two years living in my parents basement. I was also working full time at a restaurant serving I need to the front of the house to make some money. The market when this was right, I moved back to
Right when it all crashed?
Yeah, so it’s like not the best time to like get into real estate. So it’s like, I wish I could say like, my first couple years were like, you know, peaches and cream, but it was, it was raw, like, and it I was I was learning, you know, and I spent the first couple years I was doing everything from putting in science to I really wasn’t selling that much. There wasn’t much to sell, photographing houses in data input, MLS, like a little bit of everything, right. And then finally, after it, I think it was 2012. Um, I finally was like, Dad, I gotta get out of your house. And like, I’m 29 years old, like, what are we you know, and it’s funny because I, you know, in Vegas, I was living my best life bought a house when I was 22. And, you know, live, you know, live in a pretty, pretty good young person’s life. And I finally sent up like, you know, we were going to do this, let’s do this. And I moved out of their house, got my own place. And I said, let’s, let’s attack this, the market was starting to open up just a little bit. It was like, 2012. You know, we’re finally like, we bottomed out. And now I think we’re like, on the upswing. And I basically I got to coach I got super aggressive into calling expireds and fizz bows and lead generation, I got very aggressive. One of the things that I had going for myself was I was probably 29 at the time. And there were a lot of people moving back to Cleveland, my friends when you’re when you grow up in Cleveland. As soon as you turn 18 You get as far away as possible. Like, you know, it’s just one of those things like either you go to college or you move to Chicago or you move to LA or New York or wherever. It’s like you grew up in you look at this small town and you’re like, I just can’t wait to get out of here. The funny thing is, after a decade of being away, you realize how great Cleveland is. And so people start to move back just like I did, right. And so it was kind of I started getting a lot of people that were moving back. Once I started having a little bit more success. They were like hey Ryan longtime it’s In 10 years, we’re moving back, we see you’re doing well in real estate. So I started to pick up a lot of those first time homebuyers as the people moving back. But once I hit like 2012 2013, I just started out working everyone and I was in the office early, I was out on appointments late, and I was just grinding really hard. And we got to a point where I remember my parents use it sell like 3540 homes a year together,
I think, which is great, which is a great business, by the way, great business,
great business, no expenses very low, you know, high margin, like very respectable, respectable business. Um, I think after that year, we maybe sold 80 or 90 homes, and I was like, Alright, this is this is happening, like, let’s do this, right? And then we just went through the let’s hire, let’s bring out an EA, and we brought on someone to kind of hit man on demand was the
EA, executive assistant, is that what EA means executive
assistant? Yep. And then from there, you know, we, we basically started growing, kind of organically, like the, or I guess, at the time, he was an awesome, you know, person operations person. But they handled, they put a lot of things that we get away from me to let me continue to focus on selling and growing. And then before you know it, we had more opportunities than I can handle. And then we brought out a buyer’s agent. And it’s kind of like the, you know, the seventh level type of model how you continue to grow and leverage yourself more and more. And before you notice, probably 2015 2016, and we were selling 250 homes a year. And then it was like, Okay, now I started, I started hanging out in circles where people were selling 500,000 homes a year. And although 250 at the time felt like a big deal. When you’re hanging out with these people that are selling 1000 It’s like kind of suck, you know, it’s like I worthless. And so then I started aspiring to be to run a business more based on what some of these other people are building. And it kind of showed me that it’s like, Let’s be like, a big, it’s possible, let’s not be a big fish in a puddle. Let’s, you know, be a small fish in the ocean. And let’s keep growing. And so the funny thing is, we we started really growing heavy from late 2017 to I say, like 2021. And now we’ve kind of been, we’ve been pretty stable. Obviously, the launch of fellow be building a one other company potentially slowed us down a little bit. But it’s like, you know, we’ve been hovering between that five and 600 units a year. It’s a very comfortable business, our average agent sells about 45 homes a year on our team. So it’s, our agents are very high producers, very high productive. But now we’re actually at a place where once again, surrounding yourself with bigger agents in need being fellow has given me exposure to a lot of the biggest teams in the country. I see what some of these teams are building. And I realized that five to 600 units a year is nice, but we’re selling ourselves short, we can continue to grow. So we just kind of turned on that growth mode switch basically this year, to really start accelerating and expanding what we’re doing.
D.J. Paris 23:10 It’s incredible. It’s it’s I know, there’s probably a lot of our audience that feels Oh, I can’t relate to that kind of production. But I do want to say and Ryan made this very clear about outworking the competition being from his previous training of working at these high end culinary institutions and, and being expected to put in a lot of hours. But he was also not just putting in a lot of hours. He was doing the grunt work of real estate which is in you said it’s very quickly and I just want to make sure everyone who heard it understands what this is he mentioned about calling expireds and fizz bows and I always assume everybody knows what that means. But just in case you don’t. What that means is Ryan is calling people that do not want to hear from him because they have either hired a realtor who didn’t get their home sold, and they’re probably pissed off about it or it’s somebody who goes I am not going to work with a realtor. That’s the the for sale by owner I can I hope everyone knows what that means. But we’re calling people that do not want our calls. Ryan’s making those calls. And he’s and he’s having success with it. These are if you want to cut your teeth and really learn what you’re made of fizz bows and expireds are the battleground they are difficult they are tough. And these leads are sold to dozens of Realtors in your area every they get the same leads you do so it could be you could be sharing the same phone number with about 1520 other agents. So you might be the 15th phone call that person’s got the same day. So I’m just I’m making this a big deal because these are literally the toughest calls in real estate. And I think what a great place to just build character resiliency, learn how to talk to people outwork the competition, because you are definitely in competition on a Fizbo or an expired everybody’s drive and even wholesalers are trying to call them it’s just they’re getting bombarded so sorry to make such a big thing about this but it is important because It probably built a I’m curious what you learned from calling fizz bows and expireds. Because nobody talks about anymore.
Ryan Young 25:07 The I, I sound like the old guy that when I was there a guy to walk to school uphill both ways, bare feet and a couple feet of smell, like, I used to roleplay and practice every day, and I try to really, you know, press that upon my agents, the agents or the young team and be like, guys, like, I don’t think you understand the commitment, I invested into the craft of getting really good at it right. And then the second thing is, I realized that these are all just normal people. And they’re all you know, one of our core values is get out of judgment and envy, curiosity. And every time someone I talked to is pissed off, it’s like, they’re not pissed at me, right? They don’t know me, they don’t hate me. They know it’s like, but they’re in an uncomfortable situation. And the more you can approach a conversation is just the conversation. And I think I started to put, take less pressure off it and just listen more and come from a place of contribution. And trying to understand more, versus I think so many salespeople, they have these scripts, and the scripts are supposed to be a path or a guide of what you’re supposed to say. But when you’re, when you’re really, really dialed in, the conversation feels effortless, right? Like, this is what you do in your space, right? With podcasts and interviewing people, you make them very comfortable in opening up and talking. And it’s like, that’s our job when we’re calling these type of leads is to make them feel comfortable. And so sometimes if you just go through the script, but you’re not really listening to what they’re saying, it’s going to be it’s going to be, it’s just not going to end well, right. And so what I think I got really good at was so confident in my scripts and dialogues that I could sit back and actually listen and stop worrying about what the words on the paper say, or what I’m supposed to say. And actually just use those as kind of guiding points for me to get to where I wanted to go. And it completely changed the game. And it changed the game on how I approach listing presentations. And it changed the game how we approach building fellow as well, because it made me realize that like, there’s a lot of people out there that want our help. And it’s just a matter of the presentation of how we get in front of them and show them what they’re actually looking for, is how we can actually help them. And so that was that was like a, it was very big for our business for me to kind of grind my teeth on those and build our business through that because no matter what the markets doing, it could be 2010 all over again, or 2021 COVID I feel like I built the skill set to be able to go hunt, essentially and versus always just fielding inbound in nurturing and stuff like that. So it I’d say our business wouldn’t be where it was without that.
D.J. Paris 28:03 It’s an incredible growth, I think a great place to start talking about your newest endeavor. Again, it’s I definitely want to ask you about balancing your life because most Realtors I know struggle with boundaries around, you know, taking care of themselves, their families, their friends, their social, their physical health, etc. And their business. And you’re running two major businesses trying to do that in a team and you know, whatever’s going on in your personal life. And in you have time to even jump on a podcast with me. So I’m definitely would love to hear. But before we get to balance, I want to talk about fellow because this is you know, it’s funny, I’m in charge of the technology for our firm. So I get pitched by a lot of tech companies because we have about 800 agents and whatever I guess they think you know, we’d be a good sale. So I get I get a lot of pitches by different tech firms, and rarely to never do I do I hear about seller prospecting tools. We you know, obviously, the easiest type of leads to generate buyer leads. But there’s already a lot of different companies out there fighting in that space and you’re fighting in a different space. You’re playing in a different arena. I’m super excited to learn about it. So let’s talk about so by the way the website is Hi fellow.com hifelo.com But what is fellow tell us about it?
Ryan Young 29:26 Yeah, fellow is a seller lead generation platform. And I think the I always like to just preface we don’t sell leads, right? What we do is we help you incubate and help you create opportunities out of potential opportunities that you’ve already acquired. Okay, so
D.J. Paris 29:45 I want to ask a quick question. I’m sorry, I’m gonna interrupt you because I want to make this point. Why why did you decide not to sell leads? Obviously, you could have built that too. You could have built a lead generation platform and instead You said I want to build more of a sphere of influence nurturing, you know, already in your database seller lead platform, why the decision to go to somebody’s internal sphere versus the entirety of of, you know, the market?
Ryan Young 30:16 Yeah. So let me take the story back a couple of years. And I think this will help answer that question. So you mentioned in the intro, we had a company called Flash house, Flash house was a direct to consumer eye buyer that we built in Northeast Ohio. And within three years, we received about 5500 offer requests from sellers, okay. So we’re going direct to consumer, over three years, postcards, all these things, spending about six figures a month, driving these sellers or homeowners to request a cash offer. What was interesting to us was less than 2% of those people that requested an offer actually sold their home to us. So that 90 plus percent of people that were sitting there, I’m a homeowner, and I’m hands raised, hands raised, right. And so my, the young team was the beneficiary of those 98% of people, because I own both companies, right? So we realize that like, wait a minute, what are what are we doing here? Why are we trying to buy home? Why are we going direct to consumer, we feel like we’ve created some pretty powerful tools that have really helped us reduce down our customer acquisition costs. As we go direct to consumer, let’s empower agents with these tools. Right? In Originally, the whole thesis was we gave the agents the technology when we made it. And all we wanted to do is be the eye buyer standing behind them. So what it looked like was I call a few DJ and say, Hey, I’ve got a product, it’s free, all you have to do is upload your entire database, and we’re going to start incubating these opportunities. And if they want an instant offer a cash offer, we’re going to be the one to fulfill that cash offer behind you, and partner with you. And if we buy that house, then you’ll get to list it from us, you’ll be our listing agent after we buy it. So we piloted this in Northeast Ohio in June of last year. And we brought about 600 agents on the platform. And it worked. It was incredible. We started generating all these cash offers and all these people started raising their hands. But at the time, June of last year, interest rates started to rise, July they rise, Rose some more and then they kept rising. And for you know that 7%. And we wouldn’t we didn’t want to buy houses anymore, because there’s so much volatility, sure. But we found this unique tool that was driving us essentially opportunities for free, versus us spending the six figures a month going direct to consumer and trying to acquire new opportunities. So we realized that there was so many opportunities that were already acquired by the agents that were just sitting in their database that were, you know, that was stagnant that they haven’t talked to for a couple of years. And so if we can create this, essentially this engine that started to make those opportunities rise to the top, well, now all of a sudden, the agents don’t care, because it’s not costing them anything. We’re getting opportunities for free. So we have zero customer acquisition costs. Long story longer, we realize, Wait, why are we trying to buy houses, let’s just create a white labeled product and sell it to agents, essentially, to let them do whatever they want, they can buy the houses, they don’t have to buy the houses. Now ironically, you know, we launched it in October, I’d say more than 60% of our teams don’t even do a cash offer program, they just use it from the seller lead generation component. So we just realized, instead of selling leads, agents are already spending so much money trying to buy leads, let’s be a platform that’s a flat fee, that helps them actually create opportunities out of the existing database out of the prospects that they’ve already bought. And that’s where the real money is the money is in your database. And if we can help them shake that up and create the seller opportunities out of it. It’s really powerful.
Yeah, I used to, I used to have on a Coach Ryan de April, every every month on the show. And he’s I think he’s coming back shortly to for the fans of the show. He’ll be back. But He is fond of saying. So I’m just quoting him because it’s his statistic 16% of your database is going to transact and real is going to use going to need a realtor or transact in real estate in some way. Yeah, that’s what it is transacting real estate over the next 12 months. I’ll say it again. 16% of your database, according to Ryan will transact in real estate in the next 12 months. And if you have let’s just say 100 people in your database which would be a pretty moderately sized database, that’s 16 it’s 16 potential transactions but it’s really more like possibly 32 transactions because you have some people that are saying yeah, that was sorry that we are selling then buy something else or buy and sell whatever so that you know for people that are like wanting to buy leads because again the inclination is my database. I don’t have any current exciting offers coming up with within my sphere of influence, so I need to seek outside and Ryan with Say, Yeah, you probably don’t, that’s probably all going on internally, that you’re missing,
you’re 100%. And here’s what’s interesting. So we so if you do buy new opportunities that will let us help you convert those opportunities into also a seller, right. So we do three things really well, we take the client’s existing database, we plug it into our platform, and we start incubating them trying to drive seller leads, and these can be old buyer leads all paths, clients, or whatever, right? We plug them in our platform and start incubating them and basically creates a significant amount of traction on the seller side, we also take buyer leads in real time and sync them over to our platform to try to help them to become sellers, right? Because a lot of people that are looking to sell their home, first start off looking to buy. So if you’re getting a buyer lead, and that’s a predictive seller lead, right, maybe six months, 12 months out, so how can we start incubating them right. And then the third thing we do as we provide these, this marketing suite of products that are things like embeddable widgets, and landing pages and QR codes, to really help agents push it out organically, to continue to drive more people into that funnel. And what we found was, so we were doing the, you know, the ibuyer, we saw 30% of people that requested an instant offer would go to market within 12 months, right, like, so it’s a, it’s a start of if your mind is going to I wonder how much I can get from my house cash flow, you’re gonna sell the next thought you’re gonna sell in the next 12 months, what’s interesting, you’re
not gonna you’re not going to sell next week, you might you might sell and sell next
week, right, month 11. But our job is to incubate them and continue to drive them back to our custom dashboard that we built for these agents that keeps them working down the funnel. And what’s interesting is we had another revelation. The home value message is the most universal message message to every homeowner across the country, right? What’s my home worth. And so what we do is what we’ve gotten really good at is we leverage the home value message where my home’s worth to drive them into the funnel, and they land on this custom white label dashboard branded to your team and it’s all customizable. And we keep bringing them back to that dashboard every two weeks every two weeks, your home values change click here. And then there’s these additional call to actions like do you want to do a cash offer or if you want to get a CMA or if you want to sell now or whatever it is. So the goal is keep driving them back to that dashboard through the message of home value, what’s my homework, but then once they get there, try to get them down the funnel by hitting additional call to actions like as they get more serious stuff like that. And it’s interesting I’ve seen people in the young teams database seven eight months that have been incubating that finally in our clicking I want to sell my house and it’s like you know us as agents we have we’re so impatient. We just we want to attack them right as soon as they become a new lead. And a lot of times that’s not when they’re ready but then we give up on them fellow is sitting there incubating them and turning it over
D.J. Paris 37:59 to you know, it’s everything you said is so absolutely right on the money as a marketer I was I was just thinking about you know, I’m a I’m a condo owner and I was thinking the Irish I mean I’m going to use a different example so for a lot for all of us who are probably most of us receive experience monthly email that says your credit or at least I do, it’s free but I get like this thing that says my credit credit Yeah, whatever Yeah, whatever you’re getting, you’re getting that and it’s kind of I was called like the report card of life that like lets you know how you’re doing it you know that that credits the end all be all but the point is, is that every month I get an email in fact, I got it like the other day from Experian, one of the three credit unions and it said, Hey, congratulations, your score went up by three points. It’s like who cares? But it made me feel good. And and in to bring that into real estate is one thing that Realtors always forget is that even if you’re not looking to sell your home you it’s kind of nice to know what it’s worth on a monthly basis. So this idea of incubate I mean, what is Zillow? Zillow is two things. It’s here’s all the homes for sale in the area. And here’s what your home’s worth. That’s really all Zillow is, and they’re brilliant because people do want to know what their home is worth. And if you can, instead of them having to seek it out, if you can send that to them. And you can, you know, send that out to them proactively, which is what fellow does. I mean, that is significantly important. I’m in a new development I bought two years ago, I have received 00 communications from the 46,000 realtors in Chicago that said hey, you’re you bought your home for this and it’s now action while they there’s probably a reason it’s probably worth less than what I paid for it but but the point is, let’s just say that even in worth was worth more I still wouldn’t have gotten any messaging saying just so you know your your home’s. We think your home’s actually appraised by x. We’d love to talk more about that with you further. And by the way two people have already sold properties within that two years. So It’s not like people aren’t transacting in my building they are. Because you know, life events, people move, whatever. I love it, I think that is so bright. So I sort of stole your thunder there. But tell me tell me more about how fellow actually does the incubation part the, the automatic part of of nurturing.
Ryan Young 40:17 Yeah, everything is emailed lead generation. So it’s like, we have found, you know, we don’t, we completely sync with everyone’s CRMs. So if they’re doing automated texting plans or calling out of their CRM as they can, but basically, what we’ve gotten just really good at is driving that opportunity into the funnel, and then just incubating them through email and continuing to bring the consumer back every two weeks and landing on that dashboard. And like I said, I mean, it’s, it’s powerful when you when you build a database, and you realize that if they’re not landing on your dashboard, that means they’re probably going to a different person’s dashboard, or to Zillow dashboard, or realtor.com, or whatever it is, where they’re trying to essentially sell that opportunity to another agent. And so we’re really trying to help agents on the seller side, get their ecosystem, get their database back, essentially. And it’s been really powerful. It’s why we’ve grown as quick as we have, we’re working with the biggest agents all over the country. And you know, once again, the buyer side is very oversaturated, everyone is selling buyer leads, we just feel like we’re kind of playing in our own sandbox with focusing on seller lead generation. And I think now with just the climate of the market, with there being limited inventory. It’s just really
clicking. I love it, I have a bold prediction that Ryan’s company, if they haven’t already been receiving a buy offer from Lone Wolf technologies, they buy everybody who has a great product. So that is a I’ve just, I’m just being silly. But lone wolf seems to acquire really great idea companies, and this is one that I would imagine they would love to have in their portfolio. But fellow is is really cool, because you’re so right, everybody wants seller leads, because of course, those are the arguably easier of the two types of real estate leads to, to have to work. And yeah, they are the most coveted leads, and you’re there, you’re what you’re doing is you’re not selling leads, of course, because you’re you’re actually just taking somebody’s existing sphere of influence, and you’re nurturing it for them. And a lot of companies claim to do that. But I would sure love to put my faith in a company that’s helmed by the guy who runs the largest Keller Williams, or the largest team in Ohio. And and I’m not saying that to shower praise on you, but just objectively, that seems like a good idea. For me, well, I am
I am and my team is using it, my team is using it day in and day out. And so we’re building it but you know, with feedback based off of, you know, feedback based off of what my team seeing and when we’re breaking in we’re we’re having success and stuff like that. So we are the user. So this is not like us being some tech people in Silicon Valley, you know, that have no ideas what it’s like to be in the agent shoes, you know?
And you’re you’re not a tech guy, that’s not your background, how did you How and why did you decide to even build fellow?
Um, you know, we it’s all been an accident, right? Everything has been unintentional, but it’s like, we saw an opportunity. And then we saw another opportunity and then we saw demand and then a next thing you know, it’s like this is happening and like I said, it was not what it was. I was just trying to build give myself a competitive advantage. And it turns out that it we realized that it’s very, when you power it with technology, it’s very expandable and scalable and I it just kind of came organically
D.J. Paris 43:57 I think to what fellow can do which is I’m curious to hear your thoughts on is it can it’s not about necessarily waiting for somebody to say raise their hand and say I’m ready to sell. It’s actually it can be influential because I know if tomorrow if I got an email from an agent that was using fellow that said, Hey DJ, just FYI I think your home your condo is appreciated $200,000 Which by the way would be that’s a fantasy it’s not going to happen but if it did, I’d be like I think about selling Am I actively seeking out the Zestimate or what it’s worth I’m in this industry and I have no idea what my what my place is worth at the moment so I’m not looking but if somebody were to send me in Now obviously that’s an extreme example but if somebody were to just to send me Hey, here’s here’s what’s happened. Here’s what other places are going for in your area you know just updates again the surface part of this job in between the sales the here’s what’s important to you, Mr. homeowner or Mr. or Mrs. renter or whoever. This is what you’ll need today, even though you might not Lead me for the next five years, here’s what can be helpful. That’s what really fellow does is it’s consistently reminding, giving, giving the, the the sphere of influence actual value in between transactions. Yeah.
Ryan Young 45:13 Well, and what we’ve gotten good at is the what we’ve gotten really good at is actually getting them to take actionable items to work their way down the funnel to become real sellers to AI from a lead generation standpoint and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of products out there that are informative and like to incubate, but what we’ve gotten really good at is actually creating leads, and actually creating conversion, I guess I should say, out of these existing opportunities to get them to raise their hands to actually become listing appointments for you.
D.J. Paris 45:45 Amazing what everybody Ryan is gotta run. He is running the largest team in Ohio, he’s got stuff to do. So let’s support him. We’re gonna get him back on the show because we’re going to do a deeper dive into how he runs his team as well. But high fellow.com is the website h i f e l l o guys seller, lead gen seller lead gen that’s the gold those are the Glengarry leads, if you know. Yeah, those are what we call it, we call them the Glengarry leads at our. But anyway, those are the top of the mountain leads Hi fellow.com, learn about what they can do with your sphere of influence to get you more seller appointments. And also guys, if you’re in the north, if you’re in Northeast Ohio, you should probably work with the young team, let’s just be honest, go to the young team.com. Learn about what these guys do. Maybe it’d be a great fit for them. They have high expectations, so they don’t take it just anyone but their Keller Williams, awesome, amazing institution. Obviously, Ryan and his team are insanely successful, and great, guys. So please reach out to them if you think what they could offer and what you could offer them and they could offer you. So anyway, the young team.com is the place to go. Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show. I know how busy you are and appreciate. And I’m so excited to watch. Hi, I keep wondering called Hi, fellow fellow. But the websites Hi fellow.com. I keep wanting I’m excited to see the trajectory of fellow and how you continue to evolve the product. And maybe we’ll do like a giveaway for our listeners at some point or some sort of something we have.
Ryan Young 47:17 That’d be awesome. I just got I was just gonna say I appreciate I mean, it’s just cool to you know, spend time in hanging out with you. And, you know, there’s been a lot of really incredible members or you know, you’ve had a pretty strong audience on here. So I’m honored to be a part of that list.
D.J. Paris 47:37 Yeah, well, you were super easy to talk to. I feel like I feel like you and I could be could be brothers in some way. So yeah. So for everyone. Let’s support Ryan and check out hi fellow.com. Let’s also check out the young team. By the way, if you guys have clients that are moving to Ohio, or, you know, reach out to Ryan email to his, he and his team would love those referrals. Guys, last thing, please tell a friend about this show, we would appreciate it. Just think of one other agent in your office that would love to hear how somebody goes from being a top chef to a top real estate agent. Shoot them over a link to this episode, you can find us at keeping it real pod.com We are also on all the social networks. So check us out just search because it’s not always keeping it real is not always the actual handle. So just search for keeping it real podcast to hit that subscribe button. And we appreciate it. Ryan, thank you for your time. On behalf of Ryan and myself. We say thank you to the audience for sticking around to the very end. We appreciate you Ryan. We will talk See you later and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Ryan.
Ryan Young 48:42 Thanks, DJ. Appreciate it.
Photo Marketing Strategies For Your Listings • Devon Higgins
Jun 12, 2023
Devon Higgins the VP of Sales for PhotoUp & FolioWebsites shares his own journey of how he started the business as a digital marketer and how he ended up working with real estate agents. Devon discusses why agents should use professional marketing and invest more money on technology. Next he explains how important making videos for listing is, in order to stay in touch with people and to communicate closer with them. Last, Devon talks about the app (Agent Up) that he and his company have created and how it is becoming more agent central in advertising.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to show you how to upgrade your photo marketing game. What’s a photo marketing game? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through this show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with digital marketing expert Devonta Higgins, before we get to divan, just one quick reminder, actually two reminders. First, please tell a friend. If you can think of somebody right now that is looking for a podcast like this. Maybe somebody who’s newer to the real estate industry struggling to build their business wants to know what the top producers are doing, please send them a link, somebody in your office definitely fits into that category. And if you’re a solo practitioner next time or under showing tell the other agent, I would really appreciate it. But anyway, seriously, thank you for telling somebody about our show. We are so grateful. It’s been about five or six years. And that’s how we have marketed our business. So thanks to you for helping do that. And the last other thing I wanted to mention is we started clipping our episodes we people have been asking us to do this for years. Finally we got around to it. What that means is every weekday, although once in a while I forget but most weekdays, I publish a 62nd clip on all the different social media platforms like a best of from one of our episodes. And usually we find three to five best clips per episodes. We have a lot of these published at any way. They’re short, they’re bite sized, but they’re also really, really actionable. So we cross post them everywhere. You can find us on social, even tick tock Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, probably a few others I can think of but anyway, LinkedIn has already said that anyway, it’s everywhere. So please find us you can literally just pull up any social platform search for the keeping it real podcast, you’ll find us there. And you could also go to our link tree which is link tree forward slash keeping it real pod. Anyway, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. But guys, thanks so much for keeping our show rolling, telling other people about it and please follow us on on all the various social channels. We love getting to you more often than just through these episodes. So thank you. Anyway, that’s enough about me. Let’s get to the main event. MY CONVERSATION WITH divan Higgins.
Today on the show we have to Vaughn Higgins, let me tell you more about fun the Divan Higgins is a Michigan native and owner of two businesses. First is photo op, which is a real estate marketing services company and also folio websites which is for website design and development for realtors. He’s a seasoned entrepreneur, sports enthusiast husband, father of two beautiful girls and of course a realtor himself. Divan was born in Lansing, Michigan, but lived most of his life in Grand Rapids and we were actually just talking Off mic about how I was just in his neck of the woods watching a comedy show a few weeks ago. I love Grand Rapids. It’s a lovely lovely city. But he he has a marketing degree with a minor in entrepreneurship. After college. He did a short stint here in Chicago for a logistics company before moving back up to Michigan and Grand Rapids to begin his career in real estate marketing and eventually opening up his own marketing agency. Today we’re going to talk all about real estate real term marketing. Please follow divan on his website photo op. Is it done? I’m so sorry. Photo op.com
Devon Higgins 4:58 Yep, photo op.com or Photo op.net Either one will send you our way.
D.J. Paris 5:03 Awesome photo op.com or photo op.net to get all of your marketing realtor needs met divan tell us welcome to the show, by the way.
Devon Higgins 5:15 Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m excited to to be here and talk a little bit more about real estate marketing.
D.J. Paris 5:21 Yeah, me too. I, I’m a marketing guy myself. And this is always these are always the most fun conversations I get to have, because that’s my background. My training is in marketing. And I see, you know, it’s funny, we oftentimes think location is everything. And of course it is. And there’s other things, too, to get into that bucket of everything, which include marketing. So I am excited to help our audience learn from you today about how to better market their properties, and also maybe even find more clientele. So tell us how how’d you get into real estate?
Devon Higgins 6:00 Yeah, so for me the journey was kind of serendipitous I almost I would say fell into kind of real estate in the real estate marketing space. And bit on my end, like you said, and your intro, and thank you for leading me up with that. I studied marketing in school at Michigan State and wanted to use that degree, kinda like you said, went to Chicago for a year did the logistics gig didn’t love it, and just wanted to do some more marketing. So came back to Grand Rapids where I was born and raised and where I was raised and got into doing some digital marketing on my own, and helping other clients with their digital marketing. Some of the folks that I’ve been worked for were realtors, help them build websites, do newsletters help with social media. And then eventually came across a couple of guys working out of a co working space that were doing real estate marketing, specifically photo editing. And they had a team that they were working with photo editors, and designers and developers that were actually over in the Philippines. Both these guys were super cool dudes went out for beers with them ended up playing soccer with them. And then they said, Hey, Devin, you know what, I’d love you to come on over and work with us kind of as a part time basis and help us with some sales and marketing. So I said, Yeah, you know what I mean, I’ve I’ve obviously done sales and marketing. I’ve worked with a couple of realtors and agents before, let’s go ahead and give it a shot. So part time work and then went on for a while. And I just fell in love with the company who they are, what they stood for the team over in the Philippines, helping them grow and develop as leaders. So I kind of went all in, I said, Hey, guys, like, I want to continue doing this, I want to continue working with you. And they they agreed they were liking what I was doing. And they said definitely we’d love to bring you on full time. And I said I’d love to as well. But I’d have to shut down this other business that I have right that I’ve grown from scratch and kind of built up this clientele. So I was able to work out a deal with them where they brought me on. Over time as a partner, I was able to shut down everything else. And that led me to become a kind of full time real estate marketing with photo op. And then from there. I’ve worked with that now since 2014, and not a business and just in the past two years, I got my real estate license. Finally, from being in the real estate marketing space for so long. I’ve worked with a ton of photographers, media professionals, videographers in the real estate marketing space. And they obviously work with a ton of agents, we then are trying to expand our business and grow a bit and work with more agents directly. And in doing so I thought, hey, you know what, it’s a middle of COVID I’m stuck at home already not doing much. I’m gonna go ahead and sign up for this 40 hour course online, get my real estate license and see how that goes. And I did that pass the test and joined a small little brokerage here in my local neighborhood. And I’ve loved it. It’s been able to help me help friends and family with real estate. But also just get to know the industry even better at a more intimate level. Especially for me kind of personally, it’s helping me out with business and connecting with agents more and figuring out what their needs are.
D.J. Paris 9:23 Yeah, boy, you said a lot. That is so helpful. No, no, no really, really great stuff. That was super, super helpful for us getting a better a better sense of sort of where you came from and how you how you got to where you are today. So come your eye. I like to think of you as like an outsider. You know, you’re somebody who came outside of the industry marketing is such an important piece of, you know, the transaction process, but it doesn’t get talked about as much I think as it may be deserves. So I’m curious to get a better sense of sort of opportunities you see, or maybe even, maybe we should start with mistakes. Look, should we start with some challenges that you see that you know, mistakes or challenges that Realtors make when they’re trying to market? You know properties? For example,
Devon Higgins 10:15 I think the biggest mistake and I wouldn’t necessarily call it a mistake, it’s more knowledge of what real estate marketing can get agents and that is more listings or have the your current listings sell faster or for higher prices. And from what we know from looking at stats gathered by us internally and other organizations like na are and then only about 35% of all listings are actually shot with professional photography. And the listing starts there. Right? It starts with your photos, getting the photos out there on the listing, and then into all the listing aggregator websites, your Zillow or Trulia, Redfin, so on, so forth. And obviously, that all comes from your MLS. But only 35% of listings are shot with professional photography. And I say that because what we know as well, and doing this for years, and me kind of working more with agents now is in and actually did a study that said that 50 are actually agents who use professional marketing professional photos, right? videography, drone, aerial, whatever it might be. But professional marketing are earning twice as much commission than those agents who aren’t. Yeah. So have that right. Only 35% of folks are earning twice as much commission, what can you be doing, I think, as an agent to kind of up your level and up your game. It’s used professional marketing and professional marketing doesn’t have to be a massive burden. I think a lot of people think like, oh, my gosh, I got to spend an arm and a leg on all this marketing material. And we’re trying to come to the table at least, and make it more affordable. One because we have just a big, incredible team over in the Philippines that helps drive down cost. And do just because everything’s getting a little bit cheaper and easier to access, right, your average agent uses their phone for everything. We’re trying to empower agents to be able to do all the marketing from their phone, taken your photos from your phone, get them digitally edited right away, we have an AI technology that does that right now, which is pretty cool. Do your Virtual Staging, do your video do your floor plans, the more that you can do from your phone, just the better? Or even again, working directly with a professional who does this already? That’s that’s kind of step one. Hire out the professional have them do it. There are great people in every market. We know that from working with photographers all over the world, and they’re going to help you at the end of the day just make more money.
D.J. Paris 12:42 Yeah, it’s it’s really interesting. I see it like a lot of different ways, especially with I definitely want to talk about AI here in a moment. But I’m curious on you know, sort of your your thoughts are like technology is moving so quickly that Realtors you know, yes, do they technically need to hire a photographer a professional photog for their listings, they should because you want you want the very best possible photos. And you want people that have devoted their career to understanding how to get the best possible imagery out of each shot. So as a realtor, that’s not unless somebody has a professional photography background, that’s really not a realtors skill set. So you should partner with a company like photo op, but you can also create additional complimentary content for each of your listings with your phone. You know, thankfully, the technology has has, you know, gone so quickly, so that we now can do this ourselves and do supplemental material to the to the photography.
Devon Higgins 13:52 Yeah, exactly. And I mean, technology has grown a ton. I mean, since we started, we started in 2012. So we’re 10 years ago now. I mean, technology has changed a lot just in terms of even the marketing tools that people use, right you now it’s super common to see drone or aerial photo and video on listings, especially high end listings. That wasn’t even really a thing, or it was just starting in its infancy about 10 years ago. There are things like virtual tours, right? Whether it be Matterport, or using a 360 camera to allow you them to click through and walk through a home. Those are becoming more and more common and some of that technology. And these marketing tools just aren’t going away, right, the more marketing and the more material you can put online to allow a potential home buyer to get a better understanding of the home, the better. The other thing that we saw a huge spike in over COVID was Virtual Staging, right? People couldn’t get into homes to stage them or weren’t even allowed to go walk through in some cases. So how could they envision themselves in the home? Well, we’ve Virtually staged it right, we have a whole library of virtual furniture, you can pick out what assortment you want for each room or stage it with multiple different styles in one room to kind of give you an idea of different opportunities or different styles and sets that you might want to have in a living room or dining room or bedroom. So I think all of that has just pushed us forward. And again, I don’t see any way that we’re kind of pivoting back to the way listings used to be as a paper clipping in a magazine and you had one single photo that was given you all the information, there’s just so many other tools at our disposal now.
D.J. Paris 15:35 Yeah, I think that a lot of realtors, if you really want to be on the cutting edge, and really try to get expand your reach for as wide as possible, I would think that you want to create lots of short form video content for each one of your listings. Maybe you find a particular, you know, accent that the House has, or something kind of unique character, some sort of characteristic about the house. And you could do a 32nd video on that, to complement all of the professionally shot, you know, photos and aerial shots drone. So these are what the reason I’m mentioning all this, of course, is this is what people like to watch people like to see the in interior of a property and you can post these short form clips on social media all over. It’s it I think, I believe, in the coming years that this will be a much more significant way that people actually really go through the home buying experience is through the short form video clips, obviously we’re seeing tic TOCs exploded over the last several years. You know, short form video is here to stay, it’s not going away. And so what realtors can do immediately is start creating short form video content to compliment or or they can hire a firm to do that as well. But let’s talk about let’s talk about video for a while. So what are the opportunities right now that you see that Realtors could be taking advantage of for video marketing?
Devon Higgins 17:17 I mean, yeah, DJ, you said it perfectly. I think there’s there’s a bunch of different ways that realtors can take advantage of anything video related, and it really is figuring out what first works best for you. And for the listing specifically, I’ll start out by saying everything that you just said there DJ is backed up by the data, what we’ve seen is that listings with video, get about a 400% increase in engagement than those without, right, like you’re saying there, it’s just more engaging people like to interact with video, they’re gonna sit there, they’re gonna watch it, you don’t want to make a feature length film, right of the entire house, you want to get people just the taste, because you still want them to get through. But what we found is that anywhere from 30 seconds to get to two minutes max is a great length for a video. And really, that can range from the quick 32nd Tiktok video of a quick snap of each room walking through the house, it can be as long as an actual video walkthrough tour, where you’re going through every single room and just kind of giving a pan. As long as you’re putting some sort of video content out there, it’s going to help increase engagement and traffic to your listing. And all that does is then eventually increases hopefully the the sale price and the speed at which you’re able to get that listing sold. So yeah, anything from a short tick tock to a longer video that maybe you want to get professionally done. But you can again, do so much on your phone right now that don’t let that be an inhibitor. And if you want to go the more professional route, a bigger higher end listing, go ahead and move that direction. But always be thinking too. And this is maybe one thing that I’ve talked to a couple of different people about marketing in general, it’s not necessarily just the listing that you have right now. It’s marketing for the listing that you’re going to get next. Right. So the work that you do now the marketing that you do now is not only going to help you sell the home that you currently have for sale, but it’s going to also be a promotional tool to find that next listing right to help you get that next job that next client. So think of it as an investment in your future career not just selling that listing that day.
D.J. Paris 19:20 Yeah, that’s a really important point. I want to sort of step on that point and accentuate it because you are absolutely right. What you do today can be used as a future reel, a future sort of best of you know, or marketing for to get a new listing. So you know if it was if it was if I was if I had a listing what I would do, obviously I would hire someone to to do drone photography, I would have someone to do, obviously the internal interior shots, and then I would create short form content, maybe three to five I don’t know how many, depending on how how unique the property is little short form videos like this is so cool, you can’t wait, you know, check out this particular feature of this property. And that what you’re basically doing is you’re bragging about the house, you’re you’re you’re showcasing the house, the best features. And you’re then showing that to your next few clients, this is what I actually do. And what I think is really important about it is it shows the passion you have for the business, it particularly if you put yourself in the video as the realtor, you know, saying, Hey, I have this listing, here’s what I’m doing. It shows that you’re into it, your your, your your professional, but also that, you know, creating those little short form videos, just again, drips on people, is the repetition that hopefully, you know, the more of those you do, the more people will see it,
Devon Higgins 20:48 you’re I mean, you’re exactly right, and you’re your own brand, as an agent, right, you are going to be the one and if you’re willing and able to get in front of the camera, talk to people, right engage with them, they’re going to want to hear your voice, they’re going to want to see your face, they’re going to want to engage with you so that when you do see them, they feel like they already know you right, that step has already moved past. Now again, I don’t say that’s for everybody. I know some agents who just don’t want to be in front of the camera don’t want to do all of that themselves. One of the tools that we’ve done over the past few years, is actually spin up a virtual assistant company, as well within the photo op brand. So you can actually just film your own content, send it over to a VA have them kind of build everything for you and then upload it to your social media channels or to the listing. The what that does is just eliminates all the oh, I need to get in front of the camera or I need to learn all these social media platforms, I don’t want to learn Tik Tok, I don’t want to learn Instagram, you don’t have to write, you can hire somebody to do that. And what we’ve done is tried to say you don’t even have to hire somebody at 15 $20 an hour here, you could hire somebody at half the price, who knows all the skills, who speaks great English, who works kind of when you’re sleeping, so that you can leverage the amount of time and resources that you have to continue to do professional marketing. Because again, as we know, using professional marketing is gonna help you double your commission over time.
D.J. Paris 22:10 It really does work. And I’ll just kind of peel back the curtain on our own podcast here for a moment. So for the first five years of the show, I was not making videos, or rather not making short form videos for our audience to absorb these these smaller moments in the shows. in bite sized chunks, I was I just wasn’t doing it. And so eventually I hired people also from from Southeast Asia. And they they work when it while, like you said while I’m sleeping and they create these short form videos for us. And it is it’s just skyrocketed our reach. So, you know, we’re doing exactly what you’re talking about is exactly what we do on our podcast is we release a little short form video clip once a day, with like a little tip for realtors from one of our episodes. So you can literally call these these moments from this footage. And whether you do it or you hire somebody to do it. It’s this is this is how people like to absorb media.
Devon Higgins 23:18 Yeah, it’s just at the end of the day do it. Right. I mean, it’s that simple. And it sounds probably simpler than it is. But again, there’s, there’s resources available. There’s companies, there’s teams, there’s people out there that are willing to help you figure it out. So don’t look at it as this big burden. Look at it as truly an investment. And again, what it comes down to is we like to say it’s opportunity cost, right? Where’s your time best spent? Is it best spent creating your own real creating your own Tiktok right posting everything to social media, going out and taking the photos in some cases? Probably not maybe for some it might be but probably not your time is best spent getting new clients getting out there networking, right, building your brand, building your reputation, that’s where something that only you can do and you have expertise and there are people all over the place right all over the world who likely have a little bit more expertise and knowledge than you in some of these areas. Find those people hold on to them, hire them, get them trained up on your brand, your style, your technique, whatever it might be and then use them to leverage your time for bigger and better opportunities
D.J. Paris 24:26 100% agree and I you guys also have a new app coming out called agent up tell tell us of what agent up is and and why it’s important.
Devon Higgins 24:36 Yeah, so just like I kind of evolved from working with professional real estate marketers and media professionals and then grew into becoming an agent. Our photo brand has evolved as well so we’re becoming more of an agent centered brand we’re gonna still have the photo brand but also have an agent center brand called agent up where agents can come in and use our whole suite of services like property websites, virtual tours, photo editing, video editing, virtual assistants. And then we also are developing an app to be able to do all of those things directly from your phone. One of the coolest things, I think, that we’re going to come out with with the app is AI editing capabilities. So the ability to take photos from your phone, have them edited via AI and turned around and sent back to your phone within about five to 10 minutes. Whereas the typical real estate photo shoot right now is coming back to you. And probably 24 to 48 hours to have professional grade marketing material at your fingertips within five to 10 minutes is pretty unheard of. Now, is this going to take away what a photographer does? Absolutely, yeah, they’re still going to be, they’re still going to be a need for a professional photographer, and you should still 1,000,000% Use them on any of your listings that need that quality and that level of work. But if you want something quick, if you want something that looks really good, and can get back and can jump onto a listing within a matter of minutes, this is going to be a great tool for you. And again, maybe you have a lower end listing and the two to three to $400,000 range that maybe you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on professional marketing, this is a great option for that as well. So that’s one thing I’m pretty excited about.
D.J. Paris 26:17 Yeah, that’s really, really cool. Because I was thinking, how would I use it if I was out there with a listing? That is so neat, because I would hire a professional photographer, I think everyone should for, you know, almost every listing. And then I would walk around the property in turn interior exterior, take lots of lots of shots. And then I would come to your system and upload those have those those photos retouched tweaked a little bit via AI, and that would be my supplemental content. So I would be posting that stuff like check out this window or check out this, whatever, it would just be supplemental drips, so wouldn’t be like I would hire most of the professional photo for the main or professional photog for the main shots, right? And then I would I would have all this other content, video. And now, still images that you guys are working on to be able to, like you said, a turnaround time of five to 10 minutes via AI. So basically you’re going to be uploading your photos into into the into your cloud. And then you guys kind of tweak it a little bit and send it right back to me with a. I mean, that is that is amazing. That is really a super impressive thing that and then again, you can then drip that content on to the audience.
Devon Higgins 27:37 Yep, yep, I mean, drip content, teaser content, whatever you want to call it, again, just the more level of professionalism that you can bring to your business to your brand. It’s only going to help you in the long run. And I know I am using terms about AI and I know you’re interested in it. A lot of people are a lot of people are scared of it too. Right? of what’s going on chat GBT and things that are coming out, is it gonna take over the world? Is it good or bad. And that’s for other people to discuss who are much more able to do that. But I think for us, we know that it’s tear, we know that it’s coming, it’s going. So finding ways that we can leverage that, right? Because there is good that can come with it. And we’re trying to include AI in whatever we can to kind of leverage your time, your expense, whatever it might be to give again, more levels of professional marketing at your fingertips in a much faster, immediate route.
D.J. Paris 28:29 Yeah, the way that I’ve been thinking about AI recently as and it will evolve, and this will not probably be the way I think about it moving forward. But for now, I think about it as just like a helper, like a helper or a prompter. So if it’s like one of those things, where if you if you’re staring at a blank piece of paper, and you need some ideas for maybe a listing, you know, listing description, or really anything, you know, date night with the wife ideas, it could be anything, any any sort of idea generator and an idea generator and an AI chat, GBT in particular is particularly helpful for that. So in this technology is just going to get more and more sophisticated and more integrated into our daily lives to where we are, I believe we’re going to just start you know, in the near future, just start asking questions out loud, and getting those responses back to us through some sort of mechanism. You know, almost like the oracle at Delphi, what they used to say when when you know from the old Greek stuff, but but basically being able to access information quickly and get answers. And what I love about what you guys do is is you are at the cutting edge of this so you guys are really trying to help agents be able to do things at a very fast clip, which is a real game changer for real estate because again, as you said the turnaround time for professional photos. It does take time bit For professional photography, because of course, they have to put their art into, into the shots. And then there’s also the supplemental stuff that you can do along the way that’s much faster and much quicker, and can also help kind of grease the wheels. You know, at the end of the day, we’ve all been conditioned by now, sort of unwillingly, to expect perfection. Let’s be perfectly honest here, like we expect perfection in our photography. And in the images we see, which is not fair. And it shouldn’t be this way. But it is it just the way it is because filth filtering photos has just become commonplace, everyone can look perfect, blemish free, everything can look and seem perfect. With you know, a tap of a finger on a screen, it can smooth out all the rough edges. So because the consumer expects to see beautiful beauty, we have to have technology that accentuates beauty in order to compete. So it’s just the reality of where we are today. And I love that your technology really does this.
Devon Higgins 31:10 And in many ways to you bring up a great point, right. And it’s it’s been said many times beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we’ve found that to be very true from working with photographers for so long, who have much styles in terms of shooting in terms of editing in terms of what they think is the perfect picture. And one of the programs that we’ve done now is and because that just vary so greatly, not even from photographer to photographer, but even from like state to state city to city, a perfect look for a photo shot in Hawaii is much different than a photo that shot in Bangor, Maine, right? The level of editing What’s in the Sky, what type of window mask or window pull they want, so that that changes from person to person. And I think with agents, it’s very much the same, right? Whether it’s geographical, whether it’s the person who’s requesting the images, you want to be able to push and pull on that a little bit. So human is still pretty important in that. And I think just in terms of photographers, we’ve we’ve basically connected them directly to editors, we’re doing the same thing with agents and allowing them to work directly with a virtual assistant. Because we know that at the end of the day, if you can, buddy what exactly you’re looking for. And they’re able to do that on a daily basis and replicate that and build up kind of their repertoire, their relationship right with you, they’re going to be just much more efficient and getting to know what exactly you need. Now, can I help leverage that? Of course, and I think over time, it will. But right now, I think still the personal relationship when it comes to certain business aspects is is still very much needed.
D.J. Paris 32:49 Photo op.net is the place to go to learn all about photo op. So walk us through photo op. So I get I get a listing, how do you guys help me?
Devon Higgins 33:01 Yeah, so you get a listing, you’re wanting professional marketing done, right? Whether it’s you want to actually get some photos edited, you want photos virtually staged, you want a property website, you want to build your own virtual tour, we have the tools to be able to allow you to do that, you’re basically going to come to the website, photo op.net or photo op.com, you’re going to create a free account, the 10 credits, those credits are able to be used on any of our services, photo editing, Virtual Staging, video editing. And then you can also get access into our products. So the single property website, a virtual tour, and you can build basically what you need. If you like what you see, and you’re enjoying the service, you can sign up for one of our monthly subscription plans, and get a little bit of a discount on those credits. Or you can just use those on demand as needed. So it really is up to you on what you need and what you’re looking for. Obviously, higher volume agents might want to sign up for a subscription, save a little bit of money. But if you’re only doing a listing every now and then then it might make sense just to drop by whenever you have a listing, upload some images for Virtual Staging, build out a property website and then add it to the listing on your end.
D.J. Paris 34:13 Yeah, that sounds sounds amazing and perfect. What are some? What are you seeing in this year? So we’re 2023? We’re almost halfway through the year. What are we seeing as far as trends for real estate marketing that or is exciting to you or things that you’ve seen that? You know, it was impressive?
Devon Higgins 34:36 I think the the biggest trend that we’ve seen continue even through the pandemic. A couple of things it’s been one the Virtual Staging, which I mentioned earlier, continues to increase overall I think people just like the speed and the cost of virtually staging a few images instead of physically staging an entire home. And then the other one is these virtual walkthroughs I get 360 tour that can be done where you actually can just from your home, physically walk through a house and go room by room, turn around 360 degrees, hover over certain spaces know what the measurements are in that room. There’s some powerful tools there, where then you can kind of eliminate some of these homes that maybe the pictures look good, right? Maybe the areas look good. And maybe a video gave me an idea. But once I physically walked through the house and kind of understood the layout a little bit more, you know, maybe I’m more interested to go to that listing and actually walk through it in person, or you know what I can maybe check that one off the list. I think at the end of the day, it just gives Realtors the opportunity to leverage their time instead of going on maybe five or 10 home showings individually with a client, you’re only doing two or three that are narrowed down very specifically to hopefully a house that you’re going to want to make an offer on and hopefully get that offer accepted. As we all know right now, that’s probably the hardest part of the game is getting that offer accepted.
D.J. Paris 36:03 Yeah, for sure. It’s it’s tough year this year, with rates being where they are listings. Volume is down, although it’s starting to climb back up, which we’re excited to see. So this guy’s This is time to realize that the previous three years was a real anomaly. And homes were selling sight unseen, right, they were just being sold as is there was multiple offers dozens of multiple offers, in most cases. And so people weren’t even a lot of times visiting the properties before placing offers. Everybody of course, already knows this, now that the tables have turned, and now you have to be a little bit more aggressive with your marketing. And so okay, you got your photography done, start working on those short form clips, those short form videos, those short, those short form, still photos, you want to push as much content out into the public sphere as you can, because this is just going to get more exposure. And it’s also just a lot of fun to do as well. But what we’re really trying to do is what what when you’re out there marketing, and pushing out like short form video, yes, you’re trying to sell the home, but you’re also branding yourself along the way. You’re also demonstrating to everyone else in your audience, like oh, hey, by the way, I this is what I do for everybody. This is what I do for my clients. And that is also so it’s not even necessarily just about selling that particular property. It’s about showcasing your talents as a realtor.
Devon Higgins 37:41 100% again, yeah, looking forward right now just worrying about the listing that you have now it’s the next listing that you’re gonna get, how are you going to find that? Well, it’s a matter of how you market yourself today, and what people are seeing out there and you want people. I mean, like you were saying, getting more content out there more regularly, when people think of real estate when people think, oh, I need to sell my home or I need to now buy a home, you should be at the top of their thoughtless. And how do you do that you get in front of them, right? And that’s almost subliminal messaging in a way, right? If you’re constantly getting content out there that shows Hey, I’m a realtor, this is a listing I have or this is what I’m doing today. To help my clients right, they’re going to start thinking of you as the go to person for real estate. And at this point in time, there’s likely a realtor in most everybody’s network, right? You probably know somebody or have a friend of a friend who’s a realtor. How do you differentiate yourself? How do you put yourself above the other guy or gal in your market or in that same person’s sphere of influence? It’s marketing. It’s getting your name out there getting your brand out there staying front of mind, that’s going to help you get that next listing or get that next buyer.
D.J. Paris 38:51 Yeah, I could not agree more. The website is photo op.net. So photo op.net Also, photo op.com I believe is the same. So photo op is the company these guys can do it all for you. I highly encourage you to check it out photo op.net We’ll have links to what their services in our show notes. Devin, I’m so sorry. So funny. One of my very best friends is divan, and so I’ve been calling you divan the entire the entire I didn’t
Devon Higgins 39:24 I didn’t want to I didn’t want to stop you or he’s gonna let you go. And it was it was all good. I’ve been called divine. I’ve been called every
D.J. Paris 39:31 so my apologies to Devin. My one of my very, very good friends is a divine so I apologize for that. But it’s your great guy. And this is really really cool, interesting stuff. So anyone out there who wants to create more content for their real estate branding, you know, as a realtor, whether you’re listings whether you’re trying to drum up new business, check out photo op.net they they’re awesome. They just add They’re on the cutting edge. And if you’re all ever wondering, how do I start to participate in some of the new AI modeling that is going on photo op is the company to check out so I divided what’s the best? Devin? I’m sorry, what’s the best way that somebody should reach out if they want to learn more about a photo op?
Devon Higgins 40:20 Yeah, so definitely check it out the website Photo op.net Photo of.com. We’re on social media as well. Instagram, we’re at photo op marketing. We also we don’t have a tic tac yet, although it is something we need to definitely look into. But yeah, YouTube videos, if you’re looking for tutorial videos on how to get started with your real estate marketing, we have a bunch of how to videos there to check out. And then yeah, drop us a line, shoot us a chat. You can find me on there. My face is somewhere on the website. You can dig around and find me or you can email me at Devin at photo op dot nets. And that’ll go to me and I’d be more than happy to help you out.
D.J. Paris 41:03 All right, David Higgins from photo op, thank you so much for coming on the show giving us some examples and ideas of how to better strategize for branding and marketing efforts for realtors this year. Thank you so much. On behalf of the audience, we appreciate you and your time. On behalf of Devin and myself. We also want to thank the audience for sticking around to the end. We appreciate you. And we we only ask that you do just one thing which is telephoned think of one other realtor that maybe could use some help with their marketing efforts. Shoot them a link over to this episode, we would appreciate it you can find all of our episodes, which can be streamed right from our browser at our website, keeping it real pod.com or pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Please leave us a review as well. We appreciate it. We read them and we want to always continually improve to better meet our audience’s needs. So thank you, Devin, super excited that you were on our show. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks.
Devon Higgins 42:09 Awesome. Thanks, DJ.
What Real Estate Agents Should Be Doing Right Now To Manage Their Money Effectively • Quinn Driscoll
May 31, 2023
Quinn Driscoll a business coach and money mentor talks about her experience as a sought-after financial expert witness who worked in the high-stakes world of litigation. Quinn discusses how she helped a lot of agents manage their money and accounts. Quinn describes what differentiates people who are successful in sales from the rest of us. Lastly Quinn gives her expert recommendations for agents.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We talk a lot on the podcast about how to increase your revenue. But today we’re going to talk about keeping more of the revenue you already have through better money management for realtors. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with money management expert for realtors, Quinn Driscoll, but before we get to Quinn, I wanted to say that we are now experiencing a lovely boom in our numbers. Because we’ve started doing these short form video clips to reach more audience and give more content to you guys on a daily basis or a weekday basis. I don’t do it on the weekend. So if you’re not currently following us on social media, and we are literally on all the major channels, not Friendster, not MySpace, okay, that’s an old bad joke. But on all the more current ones, tick tock Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, of course and Twitter. So if you are not following us on there, and there really never was a good reason to follow us before unless you just wanted to get announcements about our episodes. While we said we need to give you more. So we now produce Monday through Friday, short form video clips from our episodes kind of like the best of from these episodes, the short form clips. And this way you guys can get a little daily dose of something that our our audience has, or sorry, some thing that our guests have said that we think is really super important. And we’d love that you listen to the entire episodes too. But if you just want the short form clips, please find us on social media we have different handles for all the different social media accounts. So just Google or sorry, go into whatever social platform you use search for keeping it real podcast and you’ll see our logo and hit that subscribe button so just wanted to let you guys know if you’re not currently subscribed to that we it’s a big deal for us. We love it. We’re getting 1000s of additional views and listens now to our podcasts just from these short form clips so please follow us we would appreciate it alright guys enough for me way too long to listen to me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Quinn driscoll.
Today on the show we have money management COACH QUINN Driscoll with value Gao also you can learn more about her at the value gal.com But let me tell you more about Quinn. Quinn Driscoll is a CPA and ABV. She’s a money management coach for real estate agents and brokers. As the founder of value gal she teaches successful business owners how to follow a money management system so that they can stop feeling confused, anxious or worse broke. Prior to working with value gal or at or creating value gal Quinn spent more than a decade as a sought after financial expert witness who worked in the high stakes world of litigation consulting. She is a frequent speaker and guest expert on financial topics including building a valuable business money mindset and goal setting for business owners. She is a superstar in the financial services world and we are so excited to have her on the show. Please follow her again. Go to her website, the value gal.com And also find her on Instagram at value gal Quinn qu I double n value gal Quinn Quinn Welcome to the show.
Quinn Driscoll 4:55 Thank you so much. So happy to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:57 I am just happy to talk to somebody With a lovely Minnesota accent so you’re from the Twin Cities and it’s a very mild but it’s a lovely accent I’ve always been a fan of of that little aspect that people in that area have. are you originally from the area?
Quinn Driscoll 5:14 I am originally from North Dakota so you Oh, that’s what I’m hearing. Okay, you’re more with belong. Oh is Yeah.
D.J. Paris 5:23 It’s one of the if there’s no I’m gonna sound like I’m bragging, I’m not bragging because I had a job that took me all over the country wasn’t like I planned out. But North Dakota is one of the six states I haven’t yet been to. So one of these days, I’ll make it over there. But Minneapolis and the Twin Cities is awesome. And you guys, one of the great great bands actually there in New York band, but they sing a lot about the about Minneapolis is the hold steady. So anyone out there wants to find a good rock and roll band The hold steady. They’ve been around forever. They sing a lot about Minneapolis and Husker do I think is also from anyway, doesn’t matter. All right, let’s get to the main thing here. Let’s talk about I could talk about music all day and bore our audience. But I don’t want them to leave. So I want to bet my background, I actually was a financial advisor, not a CPA, and certainly not not kind of having the credentials that you had. And this was a million years ago in a former life. But I find that we have here at our company, we’ve got almost 800 agents. And not only that, but I work with a lot of other agents and other firms because I volunteer with our local realtor Association. And so I hear a lot about money management. And it seems to be one of the big challenges of Realtors, because of course, those Commission’s kind of roll in when they roll in. And sometimes we need to sort of smooth out that roller coaster ride. So I am this is the first time in almost 500 episodes, I think that we’ve ever had a financial services person on so I am super excited about any tips and tricks that you can help our audience to better you’re getting smooth out those bumps in the commission payout world. But before we get to that, how did you get into, you know, dealing with with money and being a financial services person?
Quinn Driscoll 7:08 Yeah, so my story like many the story of many Realtors is I’m an accidental entrepreneur. So I always pictured myself safe and snug in a little cubicle, never thought from in a million years that I would be a corporate drop out with my own business. But I worked for 10 years in a very deadline driven high stress and perfection demanding job. So I did get the opportunity in that job to work with hundreds of small businesses and see behind the scenes of their financials. So that was such, you know, an interesting and weird and great experience. I was a CPA worked, as you mentioned earlier as a business valuation advisor in the litigation space. So working as an expert witness, you know, keep putting one foot in front of the other. And one day it was like, you know, you look around, and it was like, this is not another 30 years for me. So I realized that I had so much small business knowledge and experience that I wasn’t able to share in a way that I really enjoyed. I live like we mentioned in the Twin Cities, which is very much a big corporate town, a lot of big employers here. And literally, it didn’t know anyone who was a CPA mother of two small children who was running a, you know, basically an online business. So it was a super scary leap to decide to go out on my own and very unnatural to be taking a risk. So CPAs not known for our big dreams and like just going for it. So but you know what I had to do it. So I just had to, I had to figure out a way that I could help the smallest small businesses that really don’t get a lot of attention from you know, they’re priced out by CPA firms, and they just don’t have the, the attention of kind of the financial professionals world. But I also you know, I knew that I could not have started my business if I had spent every dollar that I made along the way. So the money management piece of it is just so you know, close to my heart from you know, My professional background standpoint, but also personally just knowing like it is really scary to own your own business. And to the extent that I can help real estate agents and brokers get a handle on those money management issues. It is just such a good match for what I Want to do?
D.J. Paris 10:01 Here’s how I know that the money management piece of being a realtor is difficult. I and my, my boss and my business partner created a commission Advanced Business simply to give people their Commission’s ahead of closing. And the only reason we need to even even though the only reason this business even exists is because of the challenges that Realtors face and don’t let not that we’re doing anything wrong, we love our commission Advanced Business, we’re grateful to be able to provide that service. But basically, you know, we’re charging people 10% To give them a loan on their money, which is going to close you know, in 20 days or whatever, whatever it is. And that’s just how commission advanced businesses work. But that wouldn’t be necessary if people maybe had some better spending habits or saving habits. And the challenge, of course, as a realtor is that is, is one of the least sort of impressed upon skills when somebody becomes a successful or even just a new realtor, you know, they’re not, they’re just trying to survive, they’re trying to, you know, eat what they kill, they’re trying to pay their bills, save for taxes. It’s and again, you were saying the smallest business as a realtor is about as small a business if you’re an individual practitioner, as possible. So what are some of the first things that anyone who is listening who is a realtor who’s not on a salary, which is unless you work at a company, maybe like Redfin, or some of those have salaried realtors, but everyone else is on their own, what are some suggestions that our audience can start taking advantage of to better, you know, handle their money?
Quinn Driscoll 11:40 Yes. So one thing that I have noticed with real estate agents, is that the people who are successful on the sales side are way ahead of anybody else, because you have learned how to follow a system. So you know that if a system works, if your lead gen system works, that you are going to get sales. So it’s the same concept for the expensive side, it’s you if you know what steps you should be taking, you know that you can implement those, right? So you’re a hard worker, you’re a go getter, you know that if you have the steps, and you have, you know, the support, and you know what to do, you can get it done. So the really interesting thing I think that just needs to be talked about a little bit is that with real estate agents, you have no problem talking about, you know, here’s my sales volume for the year, here’s my gross commission income for the year, everybody’s sharing that with each other, you know, it’s competitive, it’s kind of fun to see who can be a top producer. But then it’s like the conversation just stopped there. And not only does nobody talk about what it costs to run that business, but nobody talks about just nobody talks about the fact that you have to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money. So kind of just having that in your mind and being aware of the fact that, you know, there is a way to get a handle on your expenses. And just because nobody’s talking about it doesn’t mean that it’s not really important. So the first very first step is once you have those commissions coming in, no matter how kind of rudimentary the system is, you have got to start tracking your expenses too.
D.J. Paris 13:43 And what do you recommend? As far as a tool to do that there are obviously a million different tools. Do you have one that you prefer? Or is it whatever system you use is fine, just pick one. I’m curious to get your thoughts for tracking expenses.
Quinn Driscoll 13:57 Yes. So for tracking expenses, I always recommend number one having at least one business bank account, and at least and only one I should say business credit card. So job one, separate your business and your personal finances and have that dedicated business account and dedicated business credit card. At this point in 2023, pretty much any bank any credit card is going to have online tools for you. So whether it is allocation, enabling where you can, you know, go through your credit card statement and say here’s the category for all these things. That’s a great thing to do if that’s how you like to do it. Just even downloading at the end of the month to excel, the transaction data and going through and doing that yourself is a great way to do it too. You know, it doesn’t need to be fancy. It does doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s just starting with anything is really the best way to do it. When it comes to tracking your expenses,
D.J. Paris 15:10 and expenses, you know, I’m going to let’s back up even prior to that, because I Yes, we do want to track expenses, we you need a system, and you want separate accounts. So separate bank account, separate credit card, and you’re going to make those purchases, but not everybody even understands. Well, I’m gonna get off of expenses just for a moment, because I realized I had a really important question. And this, I’m curious if you can speak to this. When should someone decide to either become an S corp, or continue on or maybe an LLC, or continue on as an independent contractor. So when when when we become realtors, we join a brokerage? Almost certainly, we’re an independent contractor by default, and we’re going to get 1090 nines at the end of the year based on all the commission we’ve earned. At what point does it make sense to possibly create your own corporation, and then be an employee of your own corporation. For example, I have an S corp. I’m not a practicing realtor, but I’m kind of paid the same way. So imagine that I’m basically a realtor. So I have an S corp, I am a the sole employee of my company. Can you speak to why agents may want to consider that as an option as well? Yeah, so
Quinn Driscoll 16:29 I can speak to that a little bit. The first thing I would say is that you should have an LLC right at the beginning, definitely make sure that you have that state filing status is usually LLC, and then a Federal Employer Identification Number are kind of the two things you’ll need those to open your business bank account, to show that you are actually a business. So definitely start with an LLC right away. And that is a, that’s just start getting that separation from your business and your personal and start, you know, running your business as its own entity. And then from there, the you can still have an LLC that’s taxed as an LLC versus an S corp. So the time to switch to an S Corp is going to depend on your situation,
D.J. Paris 17:26 or depend on the amount of income you’re generating for the business.
Quinn Driscoll 17:29 Yeah, so I don’t have a, you know, hard and fast number. I would say that is something that you would want to talk to your tax advisor about, and definitely have a tax advisor.
D.J. Paris 17:42 Yes, it might I remember, when I set up the S corp, it was suggested to me when I got to around. And this is a long time ago, but I think it was around maybe $80,000 in in salary, or in commission or whatever income, maybe it was 100,000, somewhere in that neighborhood is when it started to make sense to explore S corp versus, you know, another system. So again, please get yourself a tax accountant, somebody that can actually answer these questions, because we’re talking about massive tax tax savings. And it for those of you that aren’t familiar with S corp, and one of the cool things is if it’s if it’s your company, and you’re an employee of it, you actually technically have access to the entire assets under under the company. Now you’ll pay yourself a salary. And you can pay yourself, what I think the IRS says is a fair and reasonable salary, which you can get calculated through your tax advisor. But I am telling you this is probably the biggest missed opportunity that many successful realtors have not explored is creating some sort of whether it’s S corp or LLC, whatever. And understanding why you want to be an employee of your own company. And when not and why there’s, you know, it’s kind of like when you buy a home and all of a sudden you realize, oh my gosh, the tax benefits from the mortgage interest are really great. And you didn’t really understand that before. This is the same sort of deal. You can reduce your tax liability to two for personal income when you have an S corp to very, very low. So anyway, we can move off of that. But please, everybody, get yourself a CPA. And if you don’t have one reach out to Quinn. She is She is the best. So let’s jump forward to Commission’s because this is what our audience cares about. This is how they get paid. This is how they eat lunch. So commission comes in now what how do we start? Like how much of that should I put aside for taxes? How should I do that? What are some strategies just to make it as automated as possible, so I don’t spend it all?
Quinn Driscoll 19:49 Yes. So the first thing that you want to think about is, you know your commission checks are not the same as your paychecks. So start with that mindset. have exactly like you’re saying, as soon as it comes in, if you have, you know, if it’s already spent, or if you’re thinking, Okay, I know exactly where this whole thing is going, you need to stop right there, because that’s what’s going to keep you on that roller coaster. So you, you really want to start with a system, a percentage based system to allocate each and every one of those commission checks that’s coming in. So it depends on the size of your business revenue wise, but for the smallest businesses, if you’re under 250,000, in revenue, what I suggest starting with is about 15% for tax savings, and target 30% For for your business expenses, and 50%, to pay yourself. So if you think through that every commission check that comes in at 50% is what’s available to you to pay yourself, that is a good place to start.
D.J. Paris 21:05 I think the mindset is so important, it’s a depressing, I have a little bit of a depressing mindset as I see a commission and I divide it in half and go, Okay, that’s really what I get to spend. So I understand the inclination to look at the entirety of it. But I think when you have these kinds of systems in place, and you just automatically like you were saying, allocate to you know, retirement to taxes, you then start to look at your Commission’s differently. And you’re right, it’s not a paycheck, it’s a it’s a sum of money, some of which you can use as a paycheck.
Quinn Driscoll 21:42 Right. And that mindset is really important to set you up, like we said, to be off the roller coaster. So let’s say that you’ve decided you are going to, you want $5,000 A month to go to you for your living expenses, just as an example. So that means if you have a $10,000 month, great 5000 going to you perfect, if you have a $20,000 month, then 5000 is going to you and 5000 gets to kind of you know, hang around until you actually need it maybe the next month when you don’t get 20,000. So it’s the the mindset of what is available to me, for my personal paychecks is different from what I’m actually going to take out every single time. So I should say there’s kind of a distinction there of the paycheck it or the commission check is deposited 50% is available to you. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to be the amount that you take out, you’re going to have a regular amount that is consistent coming to you.
D.J. Paris 22:54 I want to go back to expenses for just a moment. And I will want to tell you about something that really transformed my life as a I’m a creative person, mostly, which means I’m not particularly strong. At the financial side of business, I’m good at creating ideas and you know, being goofy, and that, you know, doing podcasts and things like that. But what I’m not good at is managing money. So what I did is I I never in my life had actually had a budget. And it sounds so simple for people that have budgets, like how can you run a business without a budget? Well, I didn’t. And how do you run your personal life without a budget? Well, I never did. So I three years ago, I started using you need a budget, which is an app online, it’s a web app, it’s like maybe 100 bucks a year or something like that. I am telling you it completely, I was able with three minutes a day now I spent not even three minutes, maybe two minutes a day, I’m able to reconcile all of my expenses, I’m able to see where I’m spending my money, all of my accounts get pulled into one location, one website, everything gets gets dropped there, and I can literally account for almost every single dollar that comes in or goes out. It sounds like a lot of work once you get the hang of it. Even for somebody like me who’s not numbers minded at all. It’s actually really, really easy to figure out. And it helps you really track the ins and outs. So I’m curious if if you have any thoughts on budgeting?
Quinn Driscoll 24:23 Yes. So I am curious about what made you kind of take the leap to become a budget person because a lot of people, they just have a negative connotation of budget like depressed Do you know what I mean? So if you were willing to share
D.J. Paris 24:39 Well, I just I knew that I was so here was here was my the impetus for me doing it. I suspect a lot of our listeners can can relate to this. I was like I bet I’m spending too much money in certain areas of my life that aren’t necessarily obvious like yeah, okay, if we go to Starbucks every day and we spend $10 or whatever, then you That’s pretty obvious. But there are like little things like subscription fees that I wasn’t realizing how many of those I have. I was how much am I spending on restaurants and dining out in entertainment? How much am I actually, like, I just wanted to know what percentage of my expenditures are for the things that I think are healthy and reasonable. And when you know, when everything is two taps away on your phone, and it’s not, you’re not physically handing over cash and receiving cash back, everything’s digital, it’s invisible. It doesn’t feel like anything. And I knew that it’s so much easier to you know, get Amazon boxes delivered every day and not think about the total amount I’m actually spending, right. So it was for me, it was because I am, it’s so easy to buy things. I wanted to make it just have like a little checks and balances, because I know I’m not going to stop buying things. But I wanted to know, how do I at least keep it in the front of my mind of how much am I actually spending?
Quinn Driscoll 26:00 Yes. So one thing that I find really helps a lot of business owners on both the business and personal side is before you start thinking about making a budget, and that seems like scary and a lot of work is to look back at what you have actually spent as a starting point. So a lot of times I will get into, you know, working with a client and we’ll pull up their QuickBooks financials and I’ll be like, Okay, so we have general business expenses here. $30,000. Last year, like let’s talk about what that is. And I give everybody a mini heart attack with this question. Because they’re like, $30,000, like, I don’t know. But then when we get into it, it’s like, Oh, yeah. Okay, that that was this. And that was, you know, all Yeah, these things, I guess that does add up to 30,000. So that makes sense. So it’s the kind of the process of the information gathering and the getting through the shock of what the actual numbers are. And then realizing like, okay, yeah, it actually this does make sense. And this is necessary. And so now I can feel good about that number in my budget, because I know that it’s real. And it’s I’ve done it before it’s doable, or the other way around, like, oh, I can’t believe I spent that much money and didn’t get anything out of it. So, you know, then it’s easy to be like, No, I’m not going to do that anymore. So yeah, it’s really once you start kind of getting the information and getting past that, I don’t want to look at it. Like I don’t want to log on to my bank account, or I don’t want to log on to my QuickBooks because I’m, I’m worried about what I’m going to find. That’s the hardest part, I think
D.J. Paris 27:42 it is it is the hardest part, and it is uncomfortable. But that discomfort quickly changes to comfort. Because what it allows what it does is it it creates this feeling of responsibility and power. So initially, yes, I totally am with you that it’s scary. It’s sort of like oh my god, I don’t want to like It’s like looking at looking at yourself naked in the mirror and seeing all the imperfections, you’re like, I don’t really want to do that. But once you start going, Okay, now I’m gonna start targeting these areas of my expenses. There are so many realtors who work incredibly hard, and build up amazing businesses treat their clients well really go above and beyond. And then because of their inefficient ways, or ineffective ways of managing their money are broke. And this is or even worse, I’ll hear somebody at an event, a realtor event, say I need to put a new addition on my house, meaning I need to go sell it, and they’ll say I need to sell another home to do that. And I’m again, I understand that. I mean, we can think like that, that’s fine. But instead of thinking transactionally let’s come up with a process to where you can have more regular income prediction, right so that you’re more predictable stream, so that you’re not worried about Okay, I gotta come up with another 10 grand to pay my taxes this quarter. Right and which is which is what just happened. So the good news for all of you out there listening who are like I’m not good at managing money. You can hire people to help you do this. They’re ridiculously inexpensive, in my experience, they’re super helpful and they will protect you from going broke. If nothing else, you should have a fear of going broke. I don’t mean you should be terrified. But you should have a healthy fear of losing all of your money because the reality of is realtors have to do everything they have to wear every single hat that a business owner has to wear and you know the skill sets that make you a great realtor might not be the same skill sets to be a great financial planner. So which is why you know, people like Quinn are so important to our industry. Quinn, what are some of the mistakes aches that you’ve seen Realtors make with respect to poor sort of money management?
Quinn Driscoll 30:06 Yeah, so I think the first thing and the number one thing is spending the commission check before it even hits the bank, you know, you know what you’re gonna spend it on. And so really starting out right away with that allocation system, and I like how you use the word target, because that is a great way to think about it, like, Hey, you might not be hitting your targets for expenses, or you know, anything in your business. But that’s okay. It’s just a it’s just a checkpoint, right? It’s, I’m going to check in with this and figure out, am I on target? And am I not on target? And what do I need to do to fix that? So I think the, you know, just having kind of a regular check in on what is happening with your money is huge. So many clients who I work with, are kind of blown away when we start working with a commission pipeline. So that’s kind of a fancy way to say, what deals are closing in the next two months? And how much are you expecting to get from that? Let’s, let’s put it on a literal calendar. So you can see when money is coming into your business, and just doing that, and updating it on a weekly basis is like, it’s so helpful to give you that clarity of like, Oh, if this was my revenue goal for this quarter, and I have this much coming in, I’m actually yeah, I’m gonna hit that goal, or like, No, I’m not, and I don’t have anything else cooking. So, you know, this is probably not the best time to be blowing up with a huge client event or something like that, you know. So it’s, it’s having the check ins on a weekly basis, I recommend with your commissions and your expenses, to just start, start having that flow of information where you know, where you stand?
D.J. Paris 32:05 Yeah, this, it’s the idea of like, it’s like stepping on a scale when none of us want to do it. But if we make a habit of it, we can start to notice trends, right? We don’t need to know, every moment of the day what our financial, you know, bottom line is, but we need to know where it’s headed. Right? So we need to know, are we heading in the right direction? Are we on top of it? Are we aware? Are we paying our bills, just working to sort of, you know, outpace expenses, you know, is this sort of cycle that Realtors get into, right? It’s like, I’ve got expensive sell a home got, you know, and it kind of cycles through, and it can be very stressful. And what we’re what we’re really talking about is minimizing anxiety, what we would really want to do is your job is hard enough, as a realtor, it’s already a anxiety ridden and difficult. And let’s make the financial part of it. The end goal, the actual where when you’re celebrating in the endzone with a touchdown, let’s make that the easiest part of the transaction, meaning, let’s not worry about overspending, you work so hard for this, let’s set up systems to automatically delineate those those assets as they come in to separate accounts. Let’s save some for retirement, let’s save some for taxes, let’s put some back into the business. Let’s pay our bills. But also, let’s evaluate our expenditures. Quinn says weekly, I would even say look at your expenses daily, which by the way, you can get down to about one minute if you use, you know, like mint.com or, or you need a budget is the one I use. But a lot of these these web apps are so helpful because they can literally pull all the data from the various accounts, put it in one dashboard for you. And you can just kind of do a check in and by the way, I found a even just I mean, it sounds so silly to say this, but like I found somebody charged me $300 For something that I didn’t recognize last month and I was like, oh, and I got the money back because it was it was actually a mistake. So if I wasn’t paying attention to that I would have just paid it.
Quinn Driscoll 34:15 Right and let me tell you from personal experience, if you have children who are on the iPad, who are buying sneaky apps, you gotta get a handle on that before it gets out of hand and they bought like all the you know Roblox characters or whatever it is. So check the statements.
D.J. Paris 34:32 Hilarious. Yeah, yeah, kids in the microtransactions. We need to evaluate this. Again, guys. What we’re trying to help you do is really take the hardest part of the business, the financial management part, the business part of it out so that you can be as you know, focus on what you do best, which is getting in front of clients helping clients buy and sell homes. So Quinn is this is what she does. So talk about how do you help Realtors better sort of plan for the future?
Quinn Driscoll 35:05 Yes, so I teach a five part system. It’s the acronym is clear. So C L E, AR Commission’s lifestyle expenses, allocation and return, those are the five areas that we are looking at, to figure out is everything, you know, at the level that it needs to be, so that things are working together. So the C Commission’s piece, you know, that’s obviously the money coming into your business, if you’re, if you have a successful real estate agency, you have your lead, Gen, you have your sales, you have your money coming into the business, that’s great. Because the other pieces are the parts that you can honestly control yourself, the Commission’s piece is the piece that’s most out of your control. So once you got that piece down, then the rest of it is actually a lot easier to deal with. So the L is for lifestyle. So we talk about, you know, how are you spending your time, your money and your energy in your life, not just in your business, but with your family, with your health, with your community involvement, all of those types of things? To understand, you know, are you doing the things that you want to be doing, and how is your money helping you with that. The next piece is expenses, as we’ve talked about. So looking at what you are spending your money on both in your business, and we can look at your personal two, if that is something that’s helpful to you. But to get into those details, and I am there to, you know, not shame you or tell you that you’re doing everything wrong, I think a lot of people get worried about that, like, Oh, this is it’s so bad, I just don’t even want anybody to know, but you know what, I’ve seen it all, don’t worry about it, we’re gonna get in there. And we’re gonna look at what you’re spending your money on. And are those things that makes sense are those things that you need to be running your business the best way you can. allocations, we have already talked about a little bit, having those targeted percentages is really helpful. So that every dollar that comes in, you have a you know, a mental map of where everything is going. And you know that you’re always going to have what you need available in your savings, and then return. So looking at the the ways you’re spending your time and money, and what is the return that you’re getting on those. So if you are running the same ads that you ran three years ago, that did great for you. And you haven’t looked at it lately, like, am I actually getting any leads from these ads? Maybe that’s a place where, hey, that’s a big chunk of budget that can go into a different type of ads or just, you know, into a different type of lead gen strategy. So really looking holistically at what are all the things that are happening, and what are the tactical steps that you need to take, but I’m help happy to help you with like is it we need to be on a zoom call, and we’re gonna walk through logging into the bank account, and we’re gonna cancel all the subscriptions that we don’t use anymore, you know, so I am there to be accountability, coaching, advice, sounding board, you can vent like all of the things, you know, it could be a little bit of a therapy session, because money is a tough, tough area. For a lot of people
D.J. Paris 38:34 money is really associated with lots of shame, too. And that’s, that’s the big thing I want everyone to it’s, again, it’s the idea of getting naked and stepping on a scale, it’s not an easy thing for everybody to do. And it’s hard enough to do. Using that same metaphor it you know, by yourself in your own bathroom alone, but then to then say here is me to the entire to someone else like yourself and say here’s all of my financial nakedness. It can be a little tough and people feel you know certain ways about their past spending activity. But guys, what I will tell you is get over that. People when you hire a CPA to help you with this, they don’t care. They just want to help you. And so even if you are if you have negative equity, or if you have credit card debt, or whatever the situation may be that you’re like, I wish I didn’t, or I wish I was in a different position. Get past that because what we really need to do is we want you to be able to pay your bills and plan for the future and build a successful business. So many Realtors leave the industry, not because they don’t have enough business because they don’t manage their finances. It’s like the silent killer that nobody talks about in this industry. Because we are all talking Talking about deals, deals, deals get more and more and more deals. And there isn’t any sort of, you know, like, if you go to the NFL and you’re, you’re a football player, and you can focus exclusively on the, you know, playing on the field and lifting weights and you know, doing all of this the skill building that you need to do to be a good professional athlete, they have people in the background, making sure that when you retire, you have a pension coming in, well, that doesn’t really exist for real estate. So you have to take control of that, unfortunately, that we haven’t figured out a way to automate that for people. So Quinn and and people like when are available to help you figure that out. Because there’s nothing worse than working for 30 years to realize, Oh, I didn’t save as much as I could have. Or even better, I didn’t take advantage of as much of the deductions that I could have. Right. My dad did his own taxes. He was a CPA, but that wasn’t his profession. But he did it for like 15 years, many a long, long, long time ago. And then finally, he started going to a CPA, and turns out that he had been doing it wrong the whole time. And the CPA was like, I cannot believe you are not in my dad was unintentional, but he was like, can’t believe you’re not in jail. That because I mean, it actually, my dad overpaid his taxes funny enough for like 15 years and so the the IRS had to give us a big check. Basically, don’t, don’t try to do everything yourself, get a professional, go to the value gal.com to learn all things Quinn Driscoll, she is going to help you manage your finances, guys, just hire somebody for this, don’t try to do it yourself. It’s too much. You have too much too, too many other things on your plate at once as a realtor, don’t put this on your plate, hire somebody, trust me, my my CPA, shout out to Debbie the crazy tax lady. That’s her her moniker which is hilarious. And she is not crazy. But that’s what she calls herself. And Debbie is my Savior. She tells me every year like for example, when I’ll talk about this, we’re going back to the beginning about like starting an S corporation. One day, Debbie called me and said, Hey, do you have monthly meetings for your board as board of directors, which by the way, I’m the only person on the board of directors for my silly little company? Yes, I she says well, you can expense those. And I can have two parties a year I think as well, like a holiday party. So there’s all these cool little ways where you can take advantage in an ethical way of the IRS tax codes by maximizing your deduction, deductions and your expenses. But you need to go to a professional for this tax, you know, just doing it online. Maybe it would give you some of that you know, using but going to a highly respected and competent CPA and money manager will be able to help you figure that out. And also we need to read just save for retirement to
Quinn Driscoll 43:04 Yeah, we sure do.
D.J. Paris 43:06 Was a lot. I was I was giving I was I was saying a lot there. And I apologize for that. But I was just trying to save money is it’s the thing we don’t talk about. And in this industry. Quinn, what what are the first steps? So so we talked about the first steps being when when when, when commission, first of all, establish yourself as an LLC, we talked about that and talk to a CPA about why that makes sense. We talked about creating an allocation strategy when Commission’s come in, they’re automatically distributed to channels that we don’t touch retirement taxes, etc. Expenditures. And then we also talked about return on investment, right? Like how do we actually evaluate our business expenses that are generating income for us and somebody like you can come along and take a look at all of our books and say, Okay, this is working for you. And this isn’t? Where do you see Realtors struggling the most when they hire somebody like you?
Quinn Driscoll 44:12 That is a great question. So struggling them. I think the struggle is at the very beginning of just getting over the I haven’t done everything right. And I know I haven’t and so I just feel like I’m going to be judged. Or I feel like you know, there. A lot of people honestly will be like, I don’t want to feel like I’m getting in trouble in math class again, because I’m not good with numbers. You know, so it’s really those kinds of deep seated emotional Shame, shame it is the shame so that’s tricky, but it’s it’s kind of like once you once you make the commitment, I think making the commitment is the hardest thing that you We’re gonna, you’re going to jump in, you’re going to do it, it’s going to be not perfect at the beginning, it’s going to take, you’re going to try stuff and it’s not going to work, and then you’re going to try something else. And you’re going to forget the other thing you were supposed to do. And that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. So, you know, just being okay with that as much as you can, when you are like an overachiever. You know, like a lot of a lot of the top producers and high performing agents are, it’s hard to let those kind of vulnerabilities show a little bit. So I think that’s honestly the hardest piece
D.J. Paris 45:37 I’ve had so many top producers on our show talk about I was my gross commission income was 500,000, or a million dollars, and I had no savings. Like people would say, yes, on paper, it looks like I am incredibly successful because of all of these transactions. And yet, I really have nothing to show for it in the bank. And that’s where this guilt or shame comes in of like, I don’t really want people to peel back the curtain and see, but the only way out of that is funny, I’m pretty confident in saying the only way to expel shame is by bringing it into the light, meaning expose yourself to somebody who can help guide you through. So even if you feel crummy about we’re current financial. Oh, and by the way, little pro tip for everyone, or little truth bomb, everybody feels crappy about their financial situation all the time. Nobody feels like I’ve got enough money. I mean, maybe 1/10 of 1% of the population maybe feels that way. For the rest of us. Everybody wants more money. Everybody wants to save more, spend less. We all feel like I should do better. Right? So your total, it’s totally normal to feel like I should be spending less and saving more. And I should be earning more. Right? Like that’s totally, totally normal. So don’t worry, find somebody like Quinn so quick, the best way that our audience can can deep work with you. And by the way, pick a CPA that has experience dealing with realtors, because they understand when for example, understands the realtor money sort of circle she understands that process. Pick somebody who gets working with small, independent businesses like yourself, like like realtors. But please, for everything to learn about when and what she offers go to the value gal.com also wants you to follow her on Instagram at value gal Quinn. We’ll have links to the Instagram and her website in the show notes. Quinn, any last tips or advice for our audience?
Quinn Driscoll 47:45 Um, yes. So I think as you just as you just alluded to, everybody thinks that they are the actual worst with money and that everyone else has it all figured out? That is not that is not correct. Nobody has it figured out. Everybody’s just doing their best. So you know, just do your best. And if you do need help with it, find somebody to help you. And my other my other thing I would say is that, you know, cut us CPAs and accounting brains a little bit of slack. We’re not trying to be confusing, or, like, you know, just giving you the profit and loss statement and talking our weird language that doesn’t make any sense to you. That’s just that’s just what we know. So ask the questions, ask so many questions. We really want you to feel good about where you are with your money. So if you don’t understand something, just sit ask your ask your financial person to explain it again, a different way. You know, just keep asking until you get it because they are here to help you.
D.J. Paris 48:52 Value gal v value. gal.com is where you can go we have a a thing that we’re going to be sending or we’re going to be providing to our audience. So I apologize, I’m jumbling it a little bit. In our show notes, you will see a link to get some help from Quinn. But please visit the value gal.com also follow her on Instagram as well as links to both those in the show notes. You guys need to get a CPA and a money manager reach out to Quinn if she can’t help you. She’ll know people that can on behalf of our audience. We think Quinn for coming on our show today and helping our audience stay in business and manage their money more effectively. Guys, this you worked so hard for it, let’s keep as much of it as possible. So on behalf of the audience, thank you Quinn for coming on and spending an hour with us. And on behalf of Quinn and myself. Thank you to our lovely beautiful audience. We had almost 50 people watching at one point during the stream here we’ll have 10s of 1000s more we’ll listen once this episode drops, we love all of you and so are so grateful to all of you. So for it Newsweek Thank you for supporting our show. And the best way that you can help us grow is by telling another realtor or anyone that owns a business, or anyone that is struggling managing their money about Quinn, and also any other realtor that wants to learn how to manage their money, tell them about keeping it real. Send them over to our website, keeping it real podcast, Jeff sorry, what’s our website, keeping it real pod.com Is every place you can go or you can just pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe and like button and let us know what you think of the show. Give us a review. We appreciate it. And we read all of your comments and reviews. So Quinn, thank you so so much. Oh, and by the way, I’m sorry. One last thing I want to announce after five years of being on the show, and I should have done this many many years before but I finally doing it. Now we have this short form clip video clips that we post every single weekday on Facebook, Instagram, tik, Tok, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, we post these short form 62nd clips from episodes like like this one. And we post them everyday. So you get a bite sized nugget of information that will help you run your business. So check us out on social media, our link tree which has all of our social plans, all of our social channels will be in the show notes as well. So click on that and follow us on this social network of your choosing. All right, Quinn, thank you so much for being on the show. We appreciate you and we look forward to seeing everybody on the next episode. Thanks Quinn. Thank you
How Real Estate Agents Should Talk About Lending Rates This Summer • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
May 30, 2023
Welcome to the May episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses what’s going on in the world of lending rates and what are the opportunities that agents should educate their clients on at the moment. Joel also talks about the importance of understanding the numbers and how to educate renters for their opportunities as property owners. Joel also explains the recent changes in the market that are affecting both people with lower credit score and those with perfect credit score. Last, Joel reminds everyone how to sign up for his weekly newsletter.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What can you do about high interest rates for your buyers and how it affects your sellers? Well, you probably think not much, but today we’re going to show you what you can do to keep your business running in a high interest rate environment. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks, how many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Right Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show. And today, once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Let’s tell you more about Joel Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 1220 years now to that actually 21 years. He’s been doing this since 2003. And he got to that level of being one of the top lenders in the nation because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to your client on every transaction. Last year alone, Joel gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him. And that puts Joel’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide, which is a really impressive number because there are over 400,000 loan officers in in the country and Joel is currently ranked 137 out of 400,000. So he is really at the very top of the mountain last year alone he closed 319 transactions is highest ever. And that was for 126 million in loans, which is insane. This year, he’s already closed. And remember, this is not an easy year for loan officers. He closed 106 transactions already for just shy of 40 or sorry, just over $45 million insane. Now if you’re ever looking for a to work with maybe a different loan officer, maybe you don’t have a great relationship with people that you’ve worked with in the past or you’re just want to expand your business and want to partner with one of the best we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Guess what he did my loan. That’s how much I like him. And it’s not because he’s my friend. It’s because he’s literally the best. Joel can be reached at and I want everybody to shoot him an email joel@rate.com J oel@rate.com. Asked to be put on his newsletter but also asked to have a conversation with someone on his team where you guys can talk about how he can help you grow your business, shoot him a text message also or call him at 773-654-2049 Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel welcome again to the show.
Joel Schaub 3:57 Hey TJ thanks so much for having me on. I love it that you referenced the Cubs even though they’re not having a good year you got to stay positive. And that’s kind of the message that I send over to real estate agents every time I meet them doesn’t matter what the market is you got to stay positive and that’s what we’re doing with the Cubs this
D.J. Paris 4:12 year. Well as as a Cubs fan that’s pretty much always how it is it’s we don’t win but we don’t care we just enjoy
Joel Schaub 4:20 there’s an old saying I think right win or lose will still booze you can go out to Wrigley and have a good time. That definitely holds true this year when they’re not winning two games.
D.J. Paris 4:29 Awesome. Well, what Okay, we got I think we have to talk about rates because rates are in the ether. Everyone’s you know, either frustrated about rates hoping that rates move a certain direction or just wanting to know from somebody like yourself who really has an inside track to what’s going on in the lending world. What do Realtors need to know about what’s going on today right now in with rates.
Joel Schaub 4:53 Well, listen, we’re now in this new normal right where when a client hears that rates are at six or six and a half percent. They’re actually not scared off by this, right? They may not like it. And I don’t like it either. But if you’re an agent, you’re not telling borrower something that they don’t know already, right? It used to be DJ, even just a few months ago, this was news. This was something that borrowers were not expecting. And now we’re finally getting to the point where everybody’s expecting it. Right? We’re actually off from the highs, there were rates that were in October, November for a 30. year fixed, that surpassed 7%. And now on today, you know, they’re averaging in the low sixes. It’s something that we can spread positivity about that they’re not as high as they once were.
D.J. Paris 5:44 Yeah, my, when I first got when I first bought a condo, I think it was 2005. And I was younger, younger man with, I think I still had pretty, pretty good credit, but I certainly didn’t have the income that I do today. And I Yeah, well, that’s true. I had perfect credit, almost, but very little income. But I remember I got five points, 5%, maybe, around that number, somewhere around there. And I was, that was okay. For me, it seemed reasonable. So I think people need to remember, historically that we’re, you know, if we’re just comparing against the 3% days of a few years ago, you’re always going to lose, because those were historic lows. But people are still concerned thinking that rates are higher than they’d like to be. Realtors are obviously struggling with this with their buyers. So what do you what sort of opportunities are there right now that agents should be educating their clients about and how to take action?
Joel Schaub 6:40 Well, right now, since rates are higher, we just have less buyers, right? We just simply do, they’re, they’ve been priced out. So there’s a lot of people that only could buy DJ, when rates were at two and a half or three and a half percent. And now that they are up over 6%, there is a contingency of buyers that just are not in the market. And so that means if we are in the market, we have less bids on that property, even though at the moment I say that I know that agents out there, say and not my market, we’re seeing multiple offers on hot properties. And I understand that for sure. But if we’re a buyer in this market, and the strategy would be I’m going to wait until rates come down to buy it’s not a good strategy, right? There’s going to be even more of an influx of buyers, if all of a sudden rates drop, and we don’t anticipate them just overnight. Dropping a full point, I think it’s going to be a gradual thing. But I do think that it’s going to start this year, even by the third and fourth quarter of this year. I do anticipate rates being lower than they are now.
D.J. Paris 7:42 Yeah, I mean, we also have to remember to back in the 3% days that obviously you were working probably harder than ever because nobody was priced out of the market, except everyone was kind of priced out of the market, because prices went up so much higher. It was like the rate was amazing. We’re like, whoo, I’d like to only pay 2.75% Except I can’t get anything because everyone’s buying things $100,000 over asking without even going to see the property. So let’s let’s all also everyone viewers, listeners, remember that those weren’t just the easy days, those were good days, but they were very difficult to actually get if you had listings, you were doing great. If you had buyers, it was tough. So now as Joel mentioned, yeah, rates are higher. But boy, I, you know, I’d rather have less competition and a slightly higher rate or you know, even even a much higher rate, knowing that I could at least get the property that I want, then refinance a couple of years later and bring that rate down.
Joel Schaub 8:38 What we’re seeing right now is sellers just don’t want to trade up and do that big of a rate increase. If I’m selling my house today that has a 3% rate DJ and I have to go with them take a 6.5% rate, I’m just not going to sell the home. And I think there’s some evidence here that if rates do dip into the fives, which we probably will see here in q3 and definitely q4 of this year and into next year, we will start to see sellers say Okay, now that rates have come down, I’m okay trading up. But I think that 6% is this, this threshold where sellers are just saying I’m going to stay put. And if we do see these rates, get down into the fives we will see a not a large number of sellers are still going to be sellers, DJ that will never sell that. All right, they’re going to be the incidental landlord, all of a sudden, they’re going to just keep that property and put a renter in it versus selling it. But I know that we will start seeing much more inventory as these rates come down and we’ll be seeing that soon.
D.J. Paris 9:37 You know, for me as a, as somebody who considers themselves slightly outside or adjacent to the real estate industry, I’m not a practicing realtor. I would much rather have less competition on on the purchase. So if the rates dip into the fives, which we hope of course they will I know the NAR Chief Economist believes they will Well, hopefully by get to about five and a half by this, you know, the end of the year, who knows, we don’t nobody has a crystal ball. But I would actually be a little afraid of that, because so many buyers are waiting on the sidelines, I would just hate for there to be a buying frenzy, waiting for that rate to hit. And then all of a sudden, I’m sort of back in a similar scenario to when it was 3% days, where it was just lots of buyers, prices going up, right now prices are down, this might be a good time to even get in at 6%. Knowing that I can get what I want, pay a little bit extra for a couple of years, maybe made probably less, but whatever, pay a little bit more, and then possibly refinance into a more comfortable place. To me, I think where you live is, is you know, it’s like you buy a TV, but after a couple of weeks, you don’t even notice, like how much you paid for it anymore. It’s just your TV, but at least it’s the TV you want. And I think that that that realtors, you know, really could do themselves a huge favor by saying, Hey, it’s okay, if you want to wait. But here’s what happened, the last time rates got lower, is we had this huge challenge of actually getting buyers to actually, you know, close on property.
Joel Schaub 11:11 So the action plan, if you’re a realtor is have the clients actually speak with a loan officer, somebody on the mortgage side to make sure they’re comfortable with the payments. So we’re so focused on this rate. But we don’t put a rate on a check every single month, and I’m dating myself saying a check, but you’re making a monthly payment. And the payment is what matters. It’s not the rate. So understanding what the all in payment is. And if you’re comfortable with that payment, let’s buy something if we’re not comfortable with that, then we have to wait. And it’s just about being honest with ourselves and understanding what is our maximum purchase price, working with a trusted loan officer to actually get that information. And I’m thinking, Oh, it’s much worse than they think. And we go through the numbers and they realize, okay, with these rates, it’s actually not that bad. Maybe my payment is 230 or $300 more per month than that price point. But when rates do come down, I can refinance the debt. So that’s one of the big things is just understanding the numbers, knowledge is more important than anything and just understanding where you are actually at. And doing that with your buyers will put you in a good position.
D.J. Paris 12:22 You’re so right, the actual rate percentage itself is largely irrelevant. It’s just what our brains kind of, for some reason, that’s an easier number for us to sort of grasp in our brain. rates are high rates are low. I know that number, but you’re right. At the end of the day, it’s about how much did I pay for the home? How much downpayment did I have? And what’s the check I’m writing every single month. And honestly, if it was me as a buyer, I would, I would say okay, my purchase price, because rates have gone up, my purchase price has probably come down. But so if prices a bit in certain areas, so I would still want to look at lower price properties. And see if maybe it’s not quite as big a chasm as back in the 3% days where I could afford, you know, a home, that’s an extra 150,000. Well, maybe prices have come down enough now to where that actual chasm between what you want, what the price is, is actually not as great as it used to be. So I actually think I would encourage everyone and not just because it’s good for the industry and good for the economy and good for your business. But I actually think you there’s an opportunity here to take advantage of what a lot of agents aren’t willing to do, which is a lot of agents are just sitting on the sidelines waiting for the rates to change. And it’s like, okay, maybe and maybe that’ll work out and eventually rates will change one way or the other. But I would encourage your clients to start looking because the moment somebody sees as you know, somebody sees their dream place. A lot of those trepidations and challenges go right out the window. They’re like we’re gonna have this place. Yep, it’s all it’s it’s 6%. Okay, I don’t care. I need this place. And we’ll refinance later.
Joel Schaub 13:55 I love that you say that because the payment really does break down a lot of the the walls of oh, I don’t want to buy because rates are high. So if you’re an agent right now that’s dealing with a lot of clients that are move up or higher end buyers that already own a home. Yeah, you do have an issue, right? A lot of people don’t want to move. But I work with a lot of agents where their book of business or first time buyers, you’re working with people that are already renting in a lot of markets throughout the United States, rents are as high as they’ve ever been. It’s very easy to spend two, three or $4,000 a month in rent. And it’s funny when you talk to these borrowers and say, Well, I’m going to wait one more year. I don’t like six and a half percent, or I don’t like 5.75. I’m going to keep paying the rent. Well, that’s 100% interest, every single dollar that you spent as money gone when you’re renting, I’d much rather have five or 6% of my money going to interest than 100% of it going out the window for rent, right and so, educating and talking to borrowers and see In what they can buy for an equal or even sometimes DJ lower amount than they’re paying in rent right now. It’s just that little switch that’ll go off in a borrower’s mind, you got to make the phones ring, you got to go create your own destiny right now you can’t just wait for borrowers to call and say I’d like to buy a home, it doesn’t work that way anymore. So find out where renters are and be the person that they go to and educate and teach in your business as well.
D.J. Paris 15:27 And right now, you’re right is it’s the absolute best time to reach out to first time homebuyers, renters in particular, and just saying, Hey, you got a huge opportunity. Now, so many buyers are sitting on the sidelines, let’s get you out of you know, giving away all of your, your housing money to the landlord. And let’s figure out a way to you know, to get you, obviously, some, a little bit of principal, and also some tax deductions next year on the interest, I think huge opportunity for anyone renting. So here’s here’s a quick little opportunity I have for anyone listening, if you’re looking to find more renters reach out to anyone you know, who works at a company, especially like a tech firm, where maybe it’s a lot, it’s a skewed younger workforce, maybe people in their 20s, in particular, and I would offer to reach out say, Hey, who is there an HR manager at your company? Or who, you know, can I come in and just plan a lunch and just do a quick little informational session about, you know why maybe buying now is a good idea, or why people should consider home ownership versus renting. And I would reach out to whoever is in charge of the HR or in charge of these events, and say, Hey, can I come in and bring lunch? I mean, this is a huge opportunity right? Now, if you’re like, I don’t know, any renters, you can find them talk to your clients say, Hey, do you have a lot of 20 somethings in your office, I would like to come and do a presentation and bring somebody like Joel along with you who can actually have the conversation and talk about this elegantly. And then you know, reap all the benefits of these people who aren’t shopping rates, they’re not worried about rates, they’re just wanting to maybe consider what the next step is. And the rate is not as important to them as somebody who’s already got a mortgage and looking to either upgrade or change. So yeah, huge opportunity there.
Joel Schaub 17:08 I always leave with education, and you go to those events do you talk about the number one objection that younger people have is the down payment, right. So I just always use this example, if somebody’s paying $2,000 a month in rent, these year, they’re going to spend $24,000 This year, right? If we negotiated rent per year, the way that we do per month, everything would change. And he said I’m gonna give you $24,000 to live here for the next 12 months, and you’re gonna give me nothing in return, I have to think that rents would be lower, they probably wouldn’t be. But when you put it in the actual annual dollar amount, and then you say, Well, you could actually buy a home with just 3% down on it first time homebuyer Program, or 3.5% down on an FHA program, you could buy a $400,000 house and only put down $20,000. And we have ways to help you with the seller to cover your closing costs. So do you want to spend $24,000 Over the next 12 months? Or can we put together 20 grand and actually go own a home. And that’s the big benefit that we talked about.
D.J. Paris 18:17 I love that. And I am starting to see a lot more buyers now taking advantage of the 3% programs, the three and a half percent FHA, I’ve seen a lot we’re seeing a lot of that here at our brokerage where people are doing more of those deals, where they are lower, you know, initial upfront and still getting pretty good rates. So you know, this is going to be another great opportunity to talk to anyone renting and say, Hey, I’m
Joel Schaub 18:44 so excited about it. So excited. I think the camera went out, but I haven’t the idea. It’s just such a great idea to get out there and actually educate
D.J. Paris 18:53 Well, Joel’s camera is gone, but his voice is still there. So we will power through. We only have a few people watching this live anyway. So it’s no problem at all. But Joe, I’ve also been hearing these these rumors that it might just be marketing stuff, but I’m hearing like, oh, there’s these programs now at certain lenders where even people with moderately Okay, credit or even less than Okay, credit are getting the same rates that people with perfect credit are having even better rates sometimes. And so I want to just talk is is that happening? If not, let’s let’s dispel that myth.
Joel Schaub 19:30 Yeah, you see it in the news a lot lately, right. The the Biden administration is giving people with lower rates, better or lower credit scores, I should say better rates than somebody who has good credit and a good down payment. Just do a quick search. It’s not hard to see all these news stories coming up. And really it’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have retooled their loan level price adjustments, and to put it really easily because They’ve been around for years, it’s just another way to price risk DJ, if you had a lower credit score, you would probably be charged a higher interest rate. Right? If you’re putting less money down, you’d probably be charged a higher interest rate. So none of this is new. What did happen recently was that they did make it easier for people with lower credit scores, and lower down payments, to pay less in fees. And so it’s overall a good story mixed in there, there are some casualties were people that do have good credit scores. And people that do have good downpayments are paying slightly more than they would have three months ago. So that’s absolutely true. But I want to dispel the myth that anybody who has a 650 credit score today is going to have a better interest rate than somebody who has a 780 credit score. It’s just simply not the case. And that has to make sense.
D.J. Paris 20:56 Yeah, it does in any, you know, there’s that old expression for for news media, which is if it bleeds, it leads, meaning, you know, as was pretty obvious, but in case anyone didn’t understand that, it’s, if it’s if it’s going to elicit outrage, or fear, or, you know, those are a huge human emotions. So obviously, news media outlets will focus on that part of it, and your video is back, which is great for our viewing audience. But yeah, so So this is, you know, this is just if it bleeds, it leads, again, an opportunity for an agent to correct the narrative that some of the news outlets are, are projecting just to get more views and clicks. So I’ll give you
Joel Schaub 21:38 an example of this. And I don’t mean to cut you off. But it really is important to understand that these low level price adjustments have been around forever. We just retooled them on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac side. And so here’s a perfect example of a borrower that had a 20% down payment, and a 650 credit score, today would pay about $3,000 less in costs on a $400,000 loan than they would have before. Okay, which is a positive thing. At the same time, a pretty cookie cutter deal where somebody has a 740 credit score, and they’re putting down 20%, that person now is going to pay $3,000 More than they would have before. And that’s kind of the outrage, right? Somebody that has good credit, a pretty typical situation 20% down, their loan level price adjustments have gone up by 75 basis points, where somebody with a lower credit score improved by 75 basis points. And so we’re never going to get this exactly right. They’re trying to make it more equitable, for lower credit score borrowers and more first time homebuyers. But there are casualties along the way. And I can definitely see the outrage on both sides.
D.J. Paris 22:54 Yeah, and again, we should just point out again, this is the exception rather than the rule. It’s very unusual. And it’s really just a convergence of events that are happening that create this, it’s not to specifically punish the people who are doing well with their credit and reward the people who have struggled, it’s just kind of a confluence of events. It’s a weird sort of thing that media sees it goes, ooh, great time for an article to get some clicks. And, you know, let’s get people pissed off who worked really hard on their credit. And, obviously, again, it’s not as widespread as as so I’m glad you dispelled that. So agents don’t have to freak out when they are dealing with clients with good credit. But it’s important to have these conversations with a loan officer like Joe like you, so that I don’t have to worry Oh, my God, I just saw this news story. First thing I would have done was lob a text over you going, is this true? Do I have to worry about this? And you would have said don’t know, here’s how it works. So this is why it’s so important to partner with, you know, people like Joel like you, who can actually help me navigate as the agent through this so that I know what to say to clients. That’s what I’m always worried about is what is my answer when a client asks me a question. And of course, we always want to be seen as the knowledge source. So tall having somebody like you on my team would be helpful because you’re going to feed me and I’m going to then feed that to my client.
Joel Schaub 24:16 I recently talked about this in my weekly newsletter that breaks it down so that you’d actually have bite sized pieces that you can talk to your buyers about or your sellers about. And instead of having this legal mumbo jumbo about Fannie Mae’s loan level price adjustments, it’s gonna written out for you, you can actually dissect it and understand in less than 60 seconds how you could disseminate information and not only sound smarter, but be smarter understand what’s actually going on in our industry. So if you want to sign up for the newsletter, it’s free. You can simply email me Joel J. O el@rate.com. And say, add me to your newsletter. That will send that over to you on a weekly basis to that you allow up to date information about the market. Completely no obligation. We’re happy to help you guys every step of the way.
D.J. Paris 25:08 Yeah, guys, I really can’t encourage you more to do this. Aren’t you tired of just getting, you know, prospecting prospecting emails from from loan officers are like Happy Mother’s Day emails, which is great. All that’s good. I’m not here to put it down. But aren’t you tired of only getting that from lenders, where if you sign up for Joel’s newsletter, which is awesome, because it gives you like four or five bullet points and some explanation, more explanation, but it gives you these bullet points where you can every single week where you can literally just parrot what is Joel sends to you. And so you can go out there and seem knowledgeable. And guys, it’s awesome. Subscribe, email joel@rate.com for that, and he will send you that out every single week and his team is awesome. Well, Joel, I think that’s a really good place for us to wrap up. I think we covered a lot today. We kept it short and sweet. Unless you have any other topics you want to dive into. I think this is a great place to wrap.
Joel Schaub 26:05 I’ll just leave you with if you’re an agent. Remember that it’s not all about 30 year fixed rates, have your borrowers look at all of the options. Okay? There are rates right now that are in the threes, fours and fives. You can utilize seller paid buy downs, understand what arm rates are looking like right now understand what 15 and 20 year rates are looking at right now. And understand how you can use it to one buy down for your clients in the next few years. While rates are going to continue to go down. Let’s make sure we understand all the ways that you can educate your borrowers and clients on how to get lower rates. So it’s not just 30 year fixed, get out there.
D.J. Paris 26:46 And I’ll tease you guys to about our previous episode that Joel and I did a month ago. So you’ll have to go back a few episodes to find it. But Joel talked about some really interesting loan products that I guarantee you’ve never heard of. I won’t tell you what they are, I’ll tease you. But if you go back to the previous episode, you will hear Joel talk about some cool opportunities. Specifically like when children are going to college, there’s opportunities there. And even like for parents that are elderly that are going into, you know, assisted living, or just buying a home for mom and dad as they’re older. So anyway, that’s the only tease I’ll give you but these are really cool products I almost guarantee you’ve never heard of. So go back a month ago, listen to that episode, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes by the way, so you don’t have to search too hard for it. Or even better just reach out to Joel directly and have him tell you about things like a two one body down and some of these other products that are really cool and creative ways to get your clients to a more palatable, monthly amount that they’re writing for their mortgage. So reach out to Joel joel@rate.com. You can also shoot him an email or sorry, obviously, you can shoot me an email, but you can also call him and we have his phone number there in the show notes. So guys, thank you so much for everyone watching, listening, supporting our show our numbers, which is amazing. I’ve really never been better. So I am so thankful. And Joel is part of that reason why we have such high numbers because his content is so incredibly valuable. He comes on every single month, please support him, how reach out to him, get on his newsletter and ask him for how you guys can work together to get more deals closed faster. So again, joel@rate.com He’s amazing. He’s the best. And on behalf of all of our age, our listeners and viewers. Thank you, Joel. And on behalf of Joel and myself, we say thank you as well. One last thing before you sign off, please don’t sign up just yet because I want to ask you to do just two quick things. One is tell a friend of course, tell one other agent who’s struggling right now about this episode, send them a link to this episode. And also, please check out check us out on social media we are on now all the social media channels. I didn’t have an Instagram account for the last five years. That was a mistake. We have one now. And we are posting daily content from these episodes. So I have one of a new member to our team France. He goes through he combs through each episode, he finds like three clips or so that are bite size, 60 seconds or less but something actionable. Something you can literally do right now to help grow your business. And we publish those every single weekday on social media. This includes Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, all the channels, so please just Google Find us on whatever channel we’re easy to find. So look for a subscribe and you’ll get that daily dose of wisdom from people like Joel In fact, I published one from today from Joe’s episode last month. So follow us if you want to find us on Instagram the easiest probably one there. It’s top agent interviews. That’s our hashtag or that’s our handle someone else that already had keeping it real podcast so anyway, top agent interviews, but just Google that you’ll find us Alright Joel, thank you so much and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Why Real Estate Agents Need To Ask For Reviews • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
May 29, 2023
In our May episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties and Christies International talks about testimonials and reviews. Carrie reminds us that you can ask all the parties involved in a transaction for a review, not only your client. Next, discusses platforms for reviews to live in and how to post them in your social media accounts. Carrie and D.J. also discuss how how to deal with negative reviews. Last, Carrie and D.J. emphasize the importance of asking for reviews from your clients and all the other parties involved in your transaction.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Carrie can be reached at carrie@atproperties.com or by phone at 312.961.4612.
D.J. Paris 0:00 You should assume that every client is going to Google you and read your reviews. So let’s help you get more reviews. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to Real the largest podcast for real estate agents and buy real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and today on the show is our annual ARPs our annual our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick it’s a lot of EMS from the Kerry McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties. Carrie is a top top top 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors in Cary is always not in the top 1% or even 1/10 of 1% but probably 1/10 of 1/10 of 1%. So out of 46,000 Realtors in Chicago, she’s like in the top 10 to 15 Out of all of them literally so she is a true superstar. She’s an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. And she has a reputation here in Chicago as being very sought after as a speaker. So if you ever need anyone to speak at events, she is also a great resource. We are just excited to have her on our show every single month for the past five years. Please visit her at her website, Carrie McCormick r e.com. But more importantly, follow her on Instagram. She has an incredible Instagram or social media presence. And she does it all herself. So you can find her at Carey McCormick real estate on Instagram links to those in the show notes. Carrie, welcome back to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:01 Well, thank you. Thank you. That’s quite the intro and I appreciate you and everything you do.
D.J. Paris 3:06 I appreciate you because you were one of the very first people to come on my little show at the time. And you have been such a loyal member of our of our staff I guess I’d say and it is a real honor i i will say for all of our listeners Karis name comes up a lot when I’m I work on some committees at the Chicago Association at the local level. And whenever we need speakers heard, your name is always always suggested and so I’m like I’m so lucky to be able to get to talk to her every month. So our listeners are lucky as well. So what do we got going on this week? This month?
Carrie McCormick 3:46 Yeah, so I wanted to talk about testimonials and reviews. Because you know, as we’re busy and we’re doing our thing you know it’s sometimes we forget about how important reviews and testimonials are and it just dawned on me actually, I forget what I was looking for but well it was a product I was buying actually and you know I went to go look at the reviews that everyone had written about this particular product and really kind of got you know, in depth of reading through the reviews and made a decision to buy something based on the reviews and you know, it is important in our business and I do think with people being online and making decisions that having a roof or testimonials we need to focus on them. So you know I’m it’s always this is always a reminder to myself, you know, I’ve got a lot of reviews online and there’s there’s months that go by that I’m like, oh shoot, you know, I forgot to do that. I forgot to ask that person for review. So implementing a system that right after your transaction is completed to make sure that you reach out to that home buyer or home seller and get a review for yourself and then I started thinking is, you know, in, in every transaction, there’s a few different parties involved, right? You’ve got the attorneys, you’ve got the lenders, you’ve got the inspectors. So why don’t you ask those people for a review as well, because they were part of action with you, as it Yeah. And, you know, I started doing that with the attorney. And you know, like, the attorney would send me an email and say, you know, it was so nice working with you, you know, you’re a true pro blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, well, thank you. And so are you. You know, would you mind I love that you did that. Would you mind? Here’s a link, you know, would you mind writing a little review for me, right, because I think it’s important not only from our consumers, our, you know, our buyers and sellers to give us a review, but everyone else in that transaction. And so you know, that’s another way to get more reviews. The other I noticed a problem. But the other challenge that we have is that there’s so many different places to put a review, right? You can do Yelp, you can do Google business, realtor.com, Zillow, your own company’s website, right? You’ve got all these different platforms that people can put reviews on, right. And so I work for at properties Christie’s international here in Chicago, and our company, after a transaction is complete at properties, Christie’s will send out an email directly to the consumer, to write a review for me, which is then housed on our website. Well, that’s fantastic. And that’s great. But not a lot of people go to the app properties website, to look at my reviews. Right? Right. So you know, I use a lot of Google business profiles. So I want the the review to be on there. And then again, you’ve got Yelp. So anyways, my point is, is that pick the platform that best works for you, and concentrate on that or find a way that you can cross? Do your reviews on cross different on different platforms? Sure. So I think that is, is great. And then once you do get those great reviews, what do you do from there? So one, obviously social media, right, so let’s exploit that great review. So whether you’re going to put it on your LinkedIn account, your Facebook account, your Instagram account, use that review and share it on social media. Some clients don’t like photos of them. So obviously, make sure that if you’re either posting their house or a picture of them, you ask them permission to do that, because a lot of people are private, and they don’t want other people to know that they bought a house or sold a house or where they’re living. So just you know, a word of caution, make sure that you ask for permission before you put a client’s name, of course name but you know, their picture and or their house up there.
D.J. Paris 8:00 So yeah, I have a bunch of thoughts. This is such great advice. And we don’t talk about reviews enough. And I’ll tell you what we did at our brokerage, similar to what app properties does, is, and this is something that anyone can really implement for themselves. And I actually built the system for our company. And obviously, somebody built it for your company as well. And it really wasn’t that hard to build. And so what we do is, every time one of our agents has a closing, it’s kind of a manual job, because we have to go through and pull the email address of the client, which I wish was in a central location where we could copy and paste, but a lot of times, it’s paper apps or whatever, and you anyway, you have to find the client’s information. But obviously, as the agent, you would already have that. So what I would do is I would let the client know, well, going all the way back to the beginning of the relationship, I would let them know say, hey, you know, once we get through this transaction, I’m going to be sending you a you know, an evaluation of me if you don’t mind sharing the good, the bad, the ugly, share everything. You know what the experience was like, that would really help me out. And then once that transaction closes within a couple of days, ideally maybe even while I don’t know if same day is the right the right time, you might have a better gauge on when to send I think we send it about a week after approximately is kind of when we do it. Just kind of let the dust settle on everything. And then the the way that we do it is kind of cute. We have I have a picture of a kitten. I would bring it up here on the video thing, but most of our audience wouldn’t see it anyway. But it’s like a kitten begging. So it looks like a kitten. It’s like the cutest picture ever. And it says would you please leave our broker a review and then it says if you know whether you had a good or, you know, whatever experience you had, we’d love to hear about it. And then we direct everyone specifically to either Zillow or Google for you know and like you said for our company stuff, which is not really the broker wants obviously that testimonial to live where they want it to live as well. So yes, the company that you work for might get this themselves might be sending these kinds of emails out. And you also want to reach out to the client. And then you want to, like you said, you want to ask permission to continue to use that. Testimonial, maybe say, Hey, you wrote, wow, thank you so much for writing this incredible review, would it be okay, if I use this in this this quote, maybe a line from it? Or, you know, in a social media post, or maybe an advertisement, is it would you be okay, if I, you know, would it be okay, if I used a picture of you? If so, can you send me one, if not, I can just put your name, if not, we can just put your first name. And like, whatever the level of comfort is, the person has, you can, you can then use that, like, Carrie, I know you’re a big fan of Canva. So you can then drop all that into Canva, make some cool posts, which you can actually post the testimonial on Google My Business, which is the you know, local sort of, you know, not you can actually post content there. So you can post it there, you can post it on all your social media channels. And I think it’s, the reality of it is is the first thing I do when I buy something on Amazon as an example. I go straight to the reviews before I purchase. So I think even in the best possible scenario where somebody’s referred a business deal over to you, maybe it’s a previous client, oh, you got to work with Carrie, she is the very, very best, I suspect. Of course, those are amazing, but I still think people probably look you up on top of that.
Carrie McCormick 11:35 I do I do. And another thing is, think about negative reviews. You know, it’s it’s kind of scary that well, when you ask someone for review, especially with a great, you know, transaction, you know that they’re gonna give you a good review. Today, you know, Zillow? Gosh, I don’t know how I don’t remember how they did their reviews. Or if you asked for more, that system automatically sent it out. But it was a star system, right. So it was like, it was so easy to rank someone, you know, one through five stars five being the best, of course. And someone gave me a four star review, which in the real world, it’s not that bad, right. But what it did is if I had 50 reviews of five stars, and one four star review, it took the whole average down pretty significantly. Yeah. And it was like, I was no longer a five star agent. I was like a 4.8 star agent, which was just like, No, you know, and it’s like you couldn’t remove that review. And it was like, you know, so it’s like, if you have, that’s not a bad review, but if you have a negative review or anything like that, we know what do you do? And obviously you you have to respond to the review. And obviously be gracious. And you know, the public will watch your review, or I’m sorry, watch your response and see how you respond to them. And I did I remember asking the person, you know, you know, I appreciate you I had a great experience with you. And you know, I appreciate the review. But I’m just had a curiosity, you know, why did I not, you know, get a five star versus a four star? And then the person said, Oh, I clicked on it wrong.
D.J. Paris 13:18 Right. Exactly.
Carrie McCormick 13:20 It was just like, you know, well, I appreciate the response. You know, and you know, I’m so glad you know. So there was a conversation that went into that. And I remember calling Zillow and I’m like, you know, here’s their response, can you change it because I want my five stars back and they could, or it was it was, it was out there. But you know, if you do get a negative response or a negative review, it’s so important to obviously respond to to that and be gracious and be professional, avoid blaming or any accusations, of course, and just remain professional.
D.J. Paris 13:56 In those comments live forever. So I what we’ve learned is it it’s funny too, because the four out of five star is actually harder to respond to than the one star, because the one star review, which which we get those two, those are actually easier to respond to because they’re usually the people writing them are usually a little goofy, right? For lack of a better word. I mean, unless you really screwed up and did a bad job as an agent. But usually the person is a little goofy. So they’re going to out themselves in their comments most likely about their goofiness and then your response to a one star review is actually you know, like all you have to do is own it and apologize and say I’ll do whatever I can to make this right. Because again, it’s going to live forever. And all that other people want to see is that you took ownership of it. You didn’t like you said you didn’t blame you didn’t judge. You didn’t say well, you did this and you’d write you know you did that and you just said I accept responsibility. I will do what I can to fix this. Thank you for your feedback. And I’m sorry for your experience. And that in that fixes it, it really does. And even if, you know it brings you from a 5.0 to a 4.6. When people dive into it, they’ll go, oh, there was one wacky person, and every single business has wacky reviews, it’s just part of the deal. So it’s all it’s not so much to me about the actual number, like, I would love to be a five oh, for everything to, but it’s not going to happen. So because it’s not going to happen, it’s all about the response for me,
Carrie McCormick 15:32 right. And I start doing that with businesses that I’ve encountered or services, you know, if they ask for a review, I’ve been giving them you know, reviews, because it’s, it’s how we build our business, too. So it’s important to me to get reviews from my clients, I want to be able to pay that forward to other businesses and service providers out there. Write good reviews, because of course, some businesses, you just see all the negative, you know, people do the reviews only when they have a negative experience. But I think it’s important to, to point out the good stuff as well.
D.J. Paris 16:05 Well, yeah. And also, it’s important to ask, we was funny, in our brokerage, we did not used to ask for reviews, and we had mostly negative reviews as a result. I mean, we still I shouldn’t say mostly negative, that’s not true. But we had a lot more negative reviews, when we left it up to chance, when we just said, Hey, because typically when people write reviews, they’re more likely to be unhappy than happy if they haven’t been prompted. If they’re doing it on their own volition. They’re probably upset, or they had the very best experience of their life. And people are more likely to do it when they had a bad experience and a good experience. So you do have to ask, and when you do ask, we went from having like 50 reviews, where we had never asked, we had about 50 reviews, and some of them were five stars, some of them are one star. And then we said, we’re just going to start asking everybody, even if they had a bad experience, we’re going to ask everybody, and we’ve gone from 50 to about 500 Google reviews within a couple of years, simply by asking, and almost all five stars now, like it’s incredible, by actually opening it up to everyone and asking for it, we get them. And we but again, but like you said, giving a review, especially to a small business in your local area is huge. We all all of us small businesses, every agents a small business to, we know when we get a review, because we see it and we get an alert. And it is a very important thing for struggling small businesses and all small business struggle, all small businesses struggle. So this is a way you like you said you can pay it forward. And you can also, you know, do a review swap. If you want to, you could say hey, I’m gonna leave you a five star review and hope that the person feels obligated to maybe even return the favor. That’s a
Carrie McCormick 17:48 great idea. And a lender did that to me once they said, you know, if you write a review for me, I’ll write a review back and it was you know, I don’t know if they wrote me a review back. But I thought that was nice, you know, it was a nice, you know, back and forth between the two. So I think that’s, that’s a great way to approach it, especially with a vendor or a partner. Well, that
D.J. Paris 18:11 was the other part that you said that was so brilliant, which was don’t just let the client chime in, because the client was probably going to have a good experience. But who knows, maybe sometimes deals go bad. And then you know, and then but there’s a lot of other people associated with the deal. The attorney, the lender, the processor for the lender. I mean, there’s a lot of people that can chime in. And also probably a good opportunity if anyone listening is a lender and wants to sort of gain favor with other realtors. Write your own reviews for people you’ve worked with and close deals with because they will appreciate it and they’ll probably more likely to want to work with you again too.
Carrie McCormick 18:49 Yeah, I mean, it gets your name out there right because you get to sign off on your reviews so your name gets out there so it’s not that a bad thing Yeah, it’s
D.J. Paris 18:57 it’s we live in in an environment or a society now where it’s so easy to be negative and ashamed to spew bad experiences so easily. Right? We have social media, we have just ways to talk about bad things. I had a very bad experience with a flatware company of all things like one of the worst possible buying experience I’ve ever had was buying silverware just recently. And this company, I won’t even mention their name, but they’re a big deal company and I’m an I think I’m a nice person. And they just went completely off the rails and I was like, I’m going to destroy this company. I can’t wait to review bomb them. And then I and I ultimately I didn’t because I don’t want to hurt another business but but like I was fired up to do it because they treated me poorly. So my point is is like if you know if you have other people in your corner that you can ask for reviews. Please ask don’t leave it up for just the angry people because the angry people are gonna write reviews. And, you know, with respect to people’s homes, things always can go can go sour out that aren’t even your fault that you can get blamed for. So stack some good reviews by asking a lot of other people associated with the deal. Ask the agent on the other side. That’s could be a review swap. Hey, I thought you did a really good job, Mr. And Mrs. buyer’s agent. I’m the listing agent. So I’m going to I just want to let you know I left your review, and then hope that they return the favor.
Carrie McCormick 20:20 That’s actually a good one too. What’s that? I’m sorry? Good collaboration?
D.J. Paris 20:28 Yeah, well, this is yeah, I am a big fan of reviews. And I use them a lot personally, in my own life to make decisions. So please ask your clients for reviews. I know. There’s always a thing about asking, asking for business, asking for reviews, asking for things. It’s hard, I get it. And I don’t know that you should always ask for everything. But asking for a review explaining why you want the review is important. Because if you explain it to your client, saying, hey, it’s really important, because people do look at my reviews. So I would appreciate it. If you could share your experience that would really help me, you know, in my own business, really that simple. I think that’s a great place to wrap up. Let’s keep this one short and sweet. Because I don’t think we can do better than that. That was amazing. So for oh, I want to tell everybody really quickly before you sign off, we have started clipping our episodes, it only took five years, I’m finally doing it. What does it mean? What does this mean? So I now have somebody who goes through these episodes and combs through them to find the very best like three to five moments per show that are these little small clips, usually 30 to 60 seconds, and we put captions to them and we make them look kind of pretty. And then we post them all over social media tick tock Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, everywhere. We are posting these and we post them every single weekday. So for example, for this episode, we’ll probably have to probably have three or four for this episode. So please, guys, don’t just wait for our episodes to come in. You can actually get bite sized information follow us on social we’re all over just Google us whatever social platform you’re using. Just search for keeping it real hit that subscribe button you’ll get a daily little dose of a little videos nugget of wisdom from people like Carrie and also please follow Carrie on face on sorry on Instagram and follow her on Facebook as well but follow her on Instagram particular she is like the queen of Instagram for realtors here in Chicago and Carrie McCormack real estate is the Instagram handle on you also follow her on her website which is Carrie McCormick ra if you are a realtor who has people moving to the Chicagoland area and you don’t practice here, Carrie would love the opportunity to talk with you she has a huge network of people that refer her clients to her because she is that sought after, especially in the high net worth luxury space, but she can help you with really all of your client’s needs. So if you have people moving to or from Chicago, she is a great resource for you. And Carrie, anything else we should be talking about? Yes,
Carrie McCormick 23:08 I have one more thing that I’m going to talk about or say to you is I am now speaking at Inman in Las
D.J. Paris 23:15 fancy
Carrie McCormick 23:17 hopefully we’ve got some listeners that will be at Inman and I’m excited to take the stage and I don’t know what about yet there but I will be in Las Vegas at Inman so if anyone’s going would love to meet you in person
D.J. Paris 23:31 I might have to attend as well just to come see you. That is amazing. Congratulations on that I love Inman and I actually saw the owner of your company speak at Inman, New York many years ago that one, and he was awesome. And I think we’re getting them on the show soon, which is very exciting, too. So congratulations, Carrie. If you got anyone who is near the Las Vegas area who’s going to Inman, that’s a session you want to see you want to talk to somebody? You want to hear what Carrie says because she is doing it every single day. 20 years and by the way, she doesn’t have a team. She is literally doing it all herself and she does over like 150 plus million in production a year. She’s absolutely incredible. So go see her in Las Vegas for Inman reached out to her if you have clients in the area. And if you’re a buyer or seller looking for an agent in Chicago, she is the very best so reach out to her. All right, Carrie, thank you. Thank you on to our audience. Thank you to Carrie. We will see everyone on the next episode. Thanks
Carrie McCormick 24:30 awesome. Bye
How To Stop Procrastinating Creating Videos As A Real Estate Agent • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
May 22, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate professionals with Kim Rittberg.
I don’t have the time, I feel self-conscious, I don’t know what to say. If this sounds like you (I know it does), award-winning real estate video Coach Kim Rittberg can help.
She will share tips to get yourself on camera, start attracting leads and clients right now.
Want to visit New York City and walk away with 13 videos for your brand and social media?
Kim has her one-time only NYC VIDEO SHOOT DAY: Thought Leader Accelerator. Find out more info and apply here! Special discount for Keeping It Real Listeners. Working to put yourself on Camera? Grab Kim’s Camera Shy To Camera Shine course. (Special 40% off for Keeping It Real listeners!)
D.J. Paris 0:00 are you procrastinating making videos for your real estate practice? Well, don’t worry, you’re not alone. But we’re gonna get you past that today with Kim Rehberg. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:30 Hello, keeping you real listeners. I’m so excited to be back. I get so many great notes from you. And I feel like now I have a lot of new friends across the country, I actually do have new friends. So keep dropping me notes on Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you’re at Facebook, I want to see how you’re taking my tips and actually using them. Today I wanted to talk about three things that you can do right now to start showing up on video. So to reintroduce myself, I’m chimeric Berg, I’m an award winning video producer, I spent the first 10 years of my career as a TV news producer. So writing scripting training people to be better on camera. I then took that experience to launch the digital video unit for Us Weekly, which led to $100 million sale. And then I worked in branded content at Netflix and Pop Sugar. Now I run my own business where I help real estate agents and business owners grow their leads their income and their credibility through video and podcast, which is why I’m here. I’ve been featured in Fast Company and Business Insider and I speak across national stages. I was at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention in Vegas this year. Maybe you saw me there. Anyway, I’m very friendly. So make sure to connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever and you can grab my free tips. In the show notes. Today, I really want to talk about not showing up on video. One of the major things I’m seeing with my real estate agents coast to coast, California, Ohio, Hawaii, Nebraska, wherever is that struggle to just get on video. So it’s not even at the point where like, oh, what’s the strategy? What should I do? It’s getting yourself on video. And I’m seeing that that is a hurdle that we need to overcome. I want to back up by saying you don’t need to be anything more than you. We’re all great, especially in an industry like real estate, you’re talking to people every single day. So you have a great personality, you know what you’re doing. It’s not that you’re shy, or it’s not that you’re an introvert, day in and day out, you talk to people. So already we are ahead of the curve in terms of comfort with people and comfort with showing up. And now it’s about transferring that to the camera. So first up before I even keep going I want to mention I am doing a one time only. I’ve never done this before. I mean, I’ve done this before, but not for real estate agents. I am doing a shoot day in New York City, meaning you fly to New York City, I film 12 videos for you with a professional filmmaker, professional editor, and I coach you on camera. So I direct you to put you super at ease. We have professional hair and makeup, it’s going to be so fun. So we’re gonna do a New York City shoot day plus dinner, and it’s going to be great. So if you’re interested, make sure to reach out to me and tell me you heard me and keeping it real, I’m offering a great discount just for keeping it real discounts just for keeping it real listeners. And the reason why I’m offering this visa, I think so many of my agents and business owners to really struggle with just doing it, just doing it. And so that’s why I set up the shoot day, I want to really lower that hurdle, lower the barrier to just showing up and getting there. And you absolutely can grow your converter business successfully with just your iPhone. Sometimes it’s helpful to have an award winning video director coaching you, you know giving you the confidence to speak comfortably to show up authentically. So that’s why I’m doing this one time only in New York City shoot day. You do not need to live in New York City, of course, fly in, do the shoot day, get your hair and makeup join me for dinner. It’s gonna be really fun. And then you get it all delivered. You basically don’t have to do a thing. So I want to mention that and now I want to get back to the things that you can do today to grow your business to get yourself on Video. So, number one, have a friend or family member interview you. So when we need to show up on camera, often we’re like holding up our phone, where’s my phone? Often we’re holding up our phone. And we’re like, oh my God, I feel so uncomfortable talking to a weird metal object. Okay. So when you’re just first starting out, I recommend having someone you know, ask you questions. Why is that easier? We’re all used to conversations. That’s not a barrier, obviously, especially for real estate agents, you talk to people all day long, you are great talkers, you have great personalities, that is a little easier to be putting yourself on video. So here’s how you do it. You get a little tripod or not, or you just hold the phone, your family or friend holds up the phone and asks, you just start with three questions. One is, what’s something you get asked all the time? To can be? What do you do? And why do you love it. And that’s a way to show a little bit of your humanity. And you can also feature like a fun fact. So a fun fact is always good to insert because someone knows how to talk to you. They’re not necessarily always going to comment on your social media video with like, Hmm, condos are interesting, or like, new developments aren’t interesting. But if you talk about that you use a skateboard, or that you love football that gets a conversation going that more people can participate in. So again, have them ask you questions. One could be something you get asked a lot. The second can be about why you do what you do and what you what you do whatever you represent. And then third can be something else that’s really fun. Maybe it’s a tip to buyers, or a tip for sellers. So that’s my first advice is get on camera with a conversational q&a. Your family or friend is right behind the camera, and you’re in front of it. If you’re posting to Instagram, or Tiktok, film it vertically. That’s also for YouTube shorts. All right. My second tip to get over that hurdle of getting on camera is be a guest on someone else’s video. Don’t always need to buy the Ferrari to sit in it. You can take a seat and someone else’s Ferrari. So they drive the conversation. Again, we’re talking about you are trying to jump over the hump of getting yourself on camera, right? That’s the truth. It’s easier to be interviewed. You can guide them with what questions you want to highlight, but you can show up and just answer questions, you’re still gonna want to prep, you’re gonna want to always prep before you’re on camera, feel good about yourself, have some water nearby smile, be full of energy. But it’s a lot a lot easier to show up for someone else’s video than to schedule yourself or shoot it yourself by yourself. So my second advice is show up for someone else’s video and ask someone so ask someone in your referral network, maybe it’s a vendor you work with a lot. Maybe it’s a mortgage broker or lawyer, meaning they’re more comfortable filming videos, and they can interview you. The third way that you can start showing up is through disappearing content like Instagram Stories, Facebook stories, content like that, that only lasts a certain amount of time. The reason why this is a great way to connect with people is twofold, maybe threefold, to vote. So number one, they disappear in 24 hours. So when you’re feeling a little bit stressed about you know, how am I hearing, how am I showing up, it lowers that stress level a little bit, because it’s going away in a day. Remember, nothing’s like deleted forever. So be careful, don’t do anything NSFW. Not Safe For Work. But the Instagram stories do disappear. And the reason I love Instagram Stories, Facebook stories is that they really give that connection. So let’s say my reels are always very time to music, and then lots of graphics. And it’s great. It’s great content, but people want to get to know you. And if you’re filming more real, more real content, authentic content, have you on site, maybe in your house, just prepping for your day, is letting people get to know you. And everyone’s interested in other people’s lives, no matter how boring you think your life is. Another thing I love about stories is they have these built in engagement mechanisms. So when we’re talking about engagement mechanism, meaning they can encourage people to interact with you. Now, why is interaction important? That’s what you want. If you envision social media as like a digital coffee shop, you want to be in the coffee shop, you want people to see you. You also want them to walk over and say hi. So when someone’s responding to something that you’re posting on Instagram stories, that is engagement. Obviously, it’s great. It’s like a potential lead coming over and talking to you. On top of that, the algorithm and social media likes when you get engagement. It says this is a person who people like to see the content of let’s put more of their content out there. So it will promote you. So the robots and the humans like interactive content. So here’s a couple of ways that you could do this. So you could put a poll so you could put a poll on your content. So let’s say It’s the morning, and you are getting ready for your day. And you’re talking about coffee. You’re getting your coffee ready. You’re making your coffee, you say, I love drinking a cappuccino every single day. A lot of people don’t like making fancy coffee, do you drink fancy coffee or regular coffee. Or you could say do drink tea, or coffee. And in the poll, you could just have the coffee or tea or fancy coffee or regular coffee, a very easy way for people to interact with you. So you’re not asking them, you know, what’s your favorite
chemists chemical compound, I don’t even know the word. You’re not asking them what their favorite chemical compound, you’re asking something that’s like on the tip of their tongue. So that is a really good way low stress, low effort, low barrier way to start getting yourself on camera, and not want to return back to something I mentioned earlier, about connecting with people, and about sharing more with yourself. So one of the things I’m seeing for my group coaching agents, and my one on one agents is, the more they’re bringing themselves to video, the more success they’re having. So for example, if you love to dance, and you go to dance class, one of my agents does this, actually, she loves dancing, you go to dance class, maybe you support the arts in your area, bring that in. Because a lot of times we think of social media as like sell, sell, sell, sell, sell platform for advertising? Well, when you’re in a relationship based business, like real estate, you’re just trying to build that relationship, like, yes, obviously, you want people to buy from you. But as soon as you’re selling, you’re losing. As soon as you’re selling, you’re losing, you have to think of it as a way to build that relationship with every single person who hurts your post, if you’ve got five hertz or 50 hertz, those are individual people who saw your posts and liked it, you should go back in and connect with those people go to their feed, comment on a post of theirs. So remember that it is a way to engage with them. So again, what I just said is when you see a post of yours, and a bunch of people put a heart on it, and they liked it, go to those people’s feeds, look at some of their content and don’t just heard it at a thoughtful comment, like, let’s say, it’s, it’s, it’s someone that you know, from the area, and you can post a comment with a question in that. And as you’re doing that, oh, look, I have a visitor, my daughter, but I’m going to continue recording because even though my daughter visited, we never break, we never break. And so part of that, when you’re talking about engagement is putting in and dropping in a comment, not just the thumbs up or the heart. And the reason why that’s important is because the heart doesn’t do much to build that relationship. You really want to start a conversation and you want to bring your opinions and your thoughts. Now talking about fun facts and things like that. I have seen this from my agent clients. I’ve seen this for myself. If I’m talking about video and marketing on camera all day long, sometimes people comment, engage. But a lot of times it’s the more personal stuff that people feel connected to, or they feel like they can then talk to you about. So one thing I always mentioned always I try to switch it up, but I hate olives. It’s very like simple, weird thing. But apparently everyone loves olives and thinks I’m like a homicidal maniac for hating olives. So try to incorporate that into like the bottom of a caption or into a video or somewhere. So that let’s say no one’s gonna comment on the video marketing details. No one’s gonna comment on my on camera coaching video on specifically the on camera work, but maybe they’re gonna comment on the fact that I hate olives. And like, does that mean you don’t drink martinis? Does that mean that you also heat pita bread? I love pita bread for the record. But anyway, the point is putting in fun facts allows people to start a conversation with you. It gives them the green light to say, Hey, Kim has a sense of humor. Kim has opinions like let’s see how she reacts. And again, it can be the same way with sports. Everyone loves talking about sports, right? People love talking about you know, your favorite travel spots. People love talking about books or music. So if you drop that in there, for example, I’ve seen someone say like, I love AC DC, or I love the Beastie Boys or I love Beyonce. That then gives me a hook to say, oh Single Ladies is the song I dance to when we’re having a dance party, things like that. Things that are unrelated to work. But again, we’re building that relationship for work. So I just think those are really important factors to think about as you are building up your content. Remember your content is to build those relationships. So again, I’m going to go back to what we talked about. And I’m going to add in a couple more details about the three things you can do today to start showing up on video I forgot to mention earlier, because I got so much amazing support from the keeping it real audience. I decided to put online a class that I’ve only taught live, but now you can get it no matter if you’re busy and we can’t connect our schedules. It’s called called from camera shy to camera shine. This is what I taught my Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices national convention agents. And it is an amazing course that gives you all the things you need to show up confidently on camera, plus a 10 day challenge to make you accountable. So it’s a really, really great course and you get 40% off if you’re keeping it real listener. So, alright, so we are talking about getting yourself on camera, and getting yourself on camera easily. I wanted to be honest right now and say My daughter came in and interrupted this recording. So you might have heard some sounds, but I do want you to notice that it didn’t make a big thing of it. So the same thing with filming. Sometimes, you flub a word, or you need to take a second take, it’s not a big deal. It’s okay, even the professionals do it. And I wanted to reiterate a few things about easy ways to show up on camera. So first of all, we were talking about the conversational method. So doing q&a with somebody, and that person can be off camera, meaning they’re behind the camera, and you’re talking straight to them. So you’re looking at the camera, but their eyes are like right behind the camera lens. Again, we care about the eyeline because eye lines break the connection. So if we’re looking at the eyeline, the person thinks we’re talking to them if we’re looking below the eyeline, you lose that connection. So it’s important to keep that eye aligned. But the most important thing is that it’s conversational. We’re always trying to show up as ourselves. We’re always trying to be authentic. And remember, we’re not authentic when that camera light comes on. Without a lot of practice, it takes a while. So now I have a weekly podcast, I show up all the time on social, but when I started showing up, I was frozen, I was stiff. And it just takes practice. You can read every book on fitness that you want, we need to go to the gym. And I was a little tough but sweet with one of my agents. Recently, she was saying that she really enjoyed my lesson, we were in the middle of a boot camp. And she really enjoyed the lesson about studying other people’s videos, when to stop a video like when’s the right time to end the video. And I said, Great, that’s so great. You learned that I haven’t seen you showing up. You can read read read all you want about showing up on camera, you need to show up. It’s a muscle just like every other thing. So I cannot stress enough. No one feels they’re ready. Everyone hates their videos, everyone hates their voice. Everyone hates how they look on camera. First time it’s hard. The third time is hard. The fifth times easier, the 10 times easier, and it will get better. But you can’t just keep practicing by reading you can only practice by doing it is a muscle, your mouth is a muscle. So that’s a really, really important thing to remember. So a few action items. So I’m going to reiterate, I’m going to remind you about my New York City shoot day if people are interested. That is on June 1, but message me ASAP. I only have a few spots. I normally only do this for huge brands. I’m doing it for business owners and agents at a discounted price for keeping it real listeners. So make sure to message me, you show up. I coach you on camera, I make you super confident I write the scripts, my award winning filmmaker films, you and IT professional editor edits your videos, it’s going to be amazing. And then we’re going to celebrate with dinner in New York City which is going to be really fun. That’s really fun. And then you could also buy my camera shy to camera shine on camera course. Again, special discount only for my keeping it real friends because I love you guys, you’re the best. And remember, follow me on instagram connect with me at Kim Rydberg and I’ll you know, connect with you and I’ll keep in touch with you and tag me when you do these things. Because you can show up and you can do it. It will grow your leads. It will grow your clients it will grow your confidence because you’re gonna be proud of yourself. Like I did the thing I remember when I finally launched my podcast, I was like, Can you did the thing. So every step is a great step. We have to crawl before we walk. So start showing up and tag me in your videos. And maybe I’ll see you on June 1. Maybe you’ll buy my camera shy to camera sign class, but regardless, we’re gonna be friends on Instagram. So at Ken Ripper, I will see you then
40 Million Closed In His First 18 Months! • Tony Clark
May 19, 2023
Tony Clark the Co-Founder of RealtyFlow shares his experience first in the investment area and how he transitioned into real estate during Covid. Tony discusses his journey in real estate and how getting a mentor helped him a lot by focusing on finding a niche. Next, Tony explains the importance of a niche and explains the cases when he thinks a niche doesn’t work. Last, Tony emphasizes the importance of keeping in touch with people in the business of real estate.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does somebody generate 40 million in sales in their first 18 months as a realtor? We’re gonna find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Tony Clark. Before we get to Tony. Just a couple of quick reminders guys, we are publishing now, every single weekday, a short form video clip from one of our episodes that has some sort of nugget of wisdom that you can take action on immediately. So we want to keep feeding you with these great, you know pieces of content from our guests. So the best way to find these is just to find us on social media. We are literally on all the platforms, not MySpace and not Google Plus, obviously, but on all the others, you know, Facebook, Instagram, tik, Tok, LinkedIn, YouTube, probably a few others. But anyway, just do a search for keeping it real podcast on whatever social app you’re using. And please hit that subscribe button and let us know what you think of the short form videos. And please also tell a friend about the show. Think of one other agent that needs to hear what you’re you’re about to hear from Tony and send them a link to either our website keeping it real pod.com Or just tell them to pull up a podcast app and look for keeping it real hit that subscribe button. We appreciate you. Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Tony Clark.
Today on the show, we have Tony cluck from Beverly and company in California and also with House haven in Tennessee. Let me tell you more about Tony. Tony is a real estate agent with a background in both real estate sales and investment real estate strategy. Now this is incredible, everyone, so please please check this out with in his first 18 months as a realtor. He closed over 40 million in volume. He also realized the importance that good systems make in a real estate agents business and has since opened up his own consulting firm dedicated to helping agents improve their systems and to scale their businesses and he even has his own CRM that is dropping probably by the time this episode is released, it’ll be available. So I want you to check out Tony in a couple of different places. First, I want you to follow him on Instagram. So follow him at Tony Clarke dot real estate. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And I also really want you to check out his new CRM and we’re gonna find out more about that today as well, which is Realty flow.io. Again, Realty flow.io. link to that will also be in the show notes. Tony, welcome to the show.
Tony Clark 4:13 Hey, thanks for having me. I’m I’m excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:17 I’m excited to talk to you. I rarely it’s funny I’ve been doing the show for for five or six years now. And I always feel like I’ve seen and heard it all from from our guests who are all superstars in the industry. But rarely do I get to talk to a lawyer like a rookie superstar. And not only did you close 40 million in your first year and a half, which is insane, obviously, but you also are like practice practicing now in two states in two markets, which is even more incredible. I know you’re mostly in California, but you also practice in Tennessee Nashville as well. So let’s get let’s start at the very, very beginning, which is not much that long ago. But I love to know how you got into real estate and why
Tony Clark 4:59 you I, I jumped into real estate actually, from the investment space, I worked at a private equity firm that did residential real estate just kind of wanted to learn the ropes, I was all the way back when I was a kid, I was that kid trying to sell baseball cards to his friends or try to flip golf clubs in high school, you know, just the stereotypical business minded kid. And I always say houses are just bigger toys than, you know, the stuff that we we sell growing up. But um, but yeah, so started at a private equity fund, kind of learning the investment side, they were based out of California, but bought in different markets in the southeast. And so I was essentially acting as a real estate agent for them, but just sourcing properties for them and running deal analysis and really got a lot of good experience there. But realized pretty quickly that basically what I was doing for them was being a real estate agent who could only have one client. And so I wound up transitioning from the fund to getting my license, and actually wound up moving to Tennessee with my wife after I got licensed so that we could start, you know, investing ourselves and build, build a clientele there, which was where I was really focused on when I was at the private equity fund.
D.J. Paris 6:19 Wow. So and, and were there lessons that you learned working in PE private equity that you were able to bring into the individual sort of realtor practice?
Tony Clark 6:28 Absolutely, I think the big thing that I learned from private equity is whether you’re buying one house or 1000, it all comes down to the numbers, at least when you’re looking at investment, real estate, that when you’re looking at a deal or looking at a market, it’s all about understanding one the risks that come with investing in that market, and then also what your numbers look like, or at the end of the day, if it’s a if it works on the spreadsheet and you’ve accounted for the risks, you know that you have a much better chance of that property being a good asset or a goodbye. And that translates to then working with individuals where it again, doesn’t matter if it’s a big fund or someone looking to buy their first property, you can just get down to the numbers and the end of the day, it is a big financial decision that they’re making.
D.J. Paris 7:20 Since I so rarely get to talk to anyone with your background. I just have a quick question. And again, I know you’re still more to this industry. But you have this unique perspective. Was it any surprise to you to see the eye buyer start to the eye buyers start to fade away? You’re talking about numbers, right? It’s all about the numbers and we’re seeing companies that really should have those numbers locked in pretty well. And I’m not here to disparage companies like Zillow. Like I love Zillow. Even they got it wrong, right? So it’s, it’s interesting. What do you think’s going on in the eye buyer side?
Tony Clark 7:53 Yeah, it’s one of those things that so the model that the eye buyers use is so tough to do at scale, it was really the the PE fund that I was at, was trying to do one to four unit residential properties at scale. And they were a small fund with, you know, a few 100 houses and I couldn’t imagine a fund bigger than them doing what they’re doing. You have to manage so many people and so many contractors and keep so many things straight that even if you have multiple levels of management, it’s just tough to get that right. And especially when you’re buying with with such tight margins, which is what we would see them doing I know I brought a couple of properties to those ibuyers didn’t do a lot of work with them. But you know, even the prices that they had to pay for the properties in order to win them and then try to sell them for higher. It’s just
D.J. Paris 8:45 like we’re gonna look at those and say like, they’re overpaying. This is crazy. Oh, yeah.
Tony Clark 8:50 Oh, they were I was like, either they’re much smarter than me because they know something or something. Something isn’t adding up. And I’m not gonna say I’m smart enough to go pay more than they are for this house. So I’m just gonna let it be.
D.J. Paris 9:03 As it turns out, they were wrong. So yeah, but so but let’s so our That’s it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get us off track. But I got Tony. He knows the private equity world. I was like what’s going on with all these I buyers. But let’s let’s get to the real meat of this because the really impressive thing you did in the first 18 months is close 40 million in production. And that is that that puts you in the top 1/10 of 1% of new realtors in the whole country. I mean, probably even more than the top 10 1/10 of 1%. So you are at this very elite level. I don’t think success happens by accident. Maybe unless unless you had a friend who had a $40 million property sold it was a one transaction just said I wouldn’t say that. I want to hear that story too. But I don’t think that was what happened to so how did you do it? Every one of our listeners and viewers is like they’re they’re dripping with jealousy just like I am. How did you do it and what what might you suggest to agents who want to duplicate that sort of success?
Tony Clark 10:06 Yeah, I mean, I think it was really a mix of a few things. And the first was, you know, I, I did get very lucky with both the timing and the market that I was in. So you know, there were some things that I did, and I’ll talk about that. But starting with, you know, getting into real estate right during the COVID, boom, and then being in Nashville, Tennessee, which is one of the more talked about investment markets. Definitely. Were some tailwinds that that helped so, but then within that, I know, when I first got my license, I had a mentor who kind of told me, he said, Hey, it’s, the first thing you need to do is find a niche. And for me, I’d kind of thought that, you know, investment, real estate made sense, but also, like, who’s gonna listen to a kid in their mid 20s? Tell them about investment property. So it was this kind of, like a lot of people. And, and so I really, that mentor was really pushing me on that. And I said, Okay, you know, I’m not going to do any marketing. The first time homebuyers, I’m not going to do any marketing for luxury, real estate, I’m just going to focus on this for six months. And we’ll see how it goes. And it was definitely slow getting started this first few months, you just kind of bumble around and try things that don’t work and try some things that work. And I think that, at least when I was first starting out, it was niching down and saying, I’m just going to focus on investors. And even within that, saying, I’m looking for a very specific type of investor. And I think this can go for any real estate agent who even if investors isn’t your niche, but let’s say it’s first time homebuyers, for me, I said, I’m looking for investors who need loans on the property where they’re not the flippers that are paying all cash and going to go flip 50 houses, I don’t want to go write a bunch of offers for them and get rejected, I’m looking for an investor who has, you know, has enough money for a downpayment and is looking for a rental, that’s just gonna give them monthly income. There’s a lot more of those out there. And there’s less, it’s kind of this sweet spot where there, there haven’t been as many realtors, at least, that I saw in Nashville who focused on that. And so once I identified that niche, then it was just asking the question, Well, okay, where are they at? Where can I find them? And then it turned into a lot of just let’s, let’s go to real estate meetups and let’s go bigger pockets was a big source, like, let’s go find those people. Essentially,
D.J. Paris 12:29 I’m going to pause you for a second because I want for anyone who is listening who is a little bit lost on like what Tony’s talking about. So you know, his niche was he wants to work with investors, he wants buy and hold investors who need loads, right? So we’ve now identified his niche. Now, you might be thinking, Well, where does Tony find these people who, and there are places to find it. But my question is actually going to be a different question, Tony, is, is it? It’s been my experience talking to other investors and people in this industry who do what you do, that finding the investors is actually the easy part. My suspicion is finding the deal is step number one, in other words, finding those opportunities to then present to a versus, you know, now traditional, you know, primary residence homebuyers are they can look on Zillow, they can look on Redfin agent isn’t always the one that finds the property. You know, the buyer are usually finding the property and bringing it to the realtor, I want to go see that place. Now for on the investor side, I’m guessing it’s a you finding the deal. And then you saying, Here’s a cash flow opportunity, and then going to your pool of investors. By the way, for anyone who isn’t familiar with bigger pockets, it is the largest online forum for real estate investors in the country. It is by far the top of the mountain. If you ever really want to get a good education and understand how investors think and talk to each other. It’s basically like Reddit for investors. That’s, that’s what it is. It’s, it’s where you can, it’s a social component. I’ve had the BiggerPockets guys on my show before I love those guys. They’re just awesome. And it is a great place to to learn how to talk to investors. But anyway, was I right about that, that finding the opportunity is really the hard part and finding the money and the investors is the easy part?
Tony Clark 14:15 Absolutely. I think that’s the first step being finding the investors as far as you know, if you find a great deal, but nobody can buy it, then you’re kind of out of luck. But that’s definitely the easy part. And I think then going and finding the deal comes down to even first I think understanding who you’re working with on the investor side, and what they’re looking for that was something that I learned from the private equity fund that I took into real estate was let me sit down with this investor and work through exactly what they’re looking for in a property and without getting too technical on the investment side, basically saying, you know, here is either the return that you’re looking for or what kind of neighborhood are you looking for as far as how quickly it’s going rowing versus how stable Are you know what not, let’s sit down and figure out what you’re looking for and then go find properties that fit that, that box, it’s the same thing. When I work with cars, I will take clients on who are looking to buy their first home or friends and family. And it’s the same thing as you know, I could love a house that we go see. But if it’s not the kind of house that they’re looking for, I just wasted both of our time. And so to really get narrowed down on their criteria, that then gives me a better a better feel for going out and finding those properties so that when I present it to them, I will know how to present it and say, Look, this is what fits your goals. And also I can kind of weed out a lot of the properties that don’t so so it kind of winds up being an easier way to search.
D.J. Paris 15:47 So basically, you you meet with an investor, you say, Okay, what are you looking for? In other words, is there an annualized rate of return that you’d like to have is the key one for tax deduction? And the most important thing is that the income is that the appreciation? So Tony walks his or doesn’t walk people through, he finds out exactly what his investors want and need. And then he says, Okay, I get it. I know what you want. Now my job is to go find these properties. So here’s question number two. So now you’ve identified the the needs of the client. And now it’s okay, now you got to find the hard part, the property? Where are you finding the properties? What percentage of the time are the properties on the MLS? And what percentage of the time? Are you doing creative ways to find things that are not available on the MLS?
Tony Clark 16:34 Yeah, I would say it shifted, even within the past couple of years, it’s definitely shifted where early on it was more off market, I would go just try to network with people. So I’d go to not necessarily real estate agent events, but real estate investor events, or business networking groups, and just ask everyone I knew I’d say, Hey, I’ve got somebody who’s looking for XYZ type of property, do you know of anybody? And then I’d put them into my follow up system and just follow up with them saying, I’ve got a buyer looking for this, do you have anything? And same thing with wholesalers, I would go find wholesalers or investors and say, Do you have anything coming up? Keep me on your list. And it was really just finding the people who are out there hunting for deals daily. And then keeping in touch with them. And that I think was key for finding those properties.
D.J. Paris 17:27 So you weren’t sending all these mailers to these these multifamily buildings or whatever saying, hey, I want to buy your property, which some people do and have success with that. You can go knock on doors, you there are ways to find properties that aren’t even aren’t listed at all. But that are you know, Mom and Pop may, you know owns owns a multifamily. And you there’s a million different ways and there are much, much better podcasts than this, specifically for how to creatively find those properties. We’re not real estate investing podcasts, per se, but I was curious. Um, but you do sometimes find them on the MLS as well, I’m guessing.
Tony Clark 18:06 Yeah, absolutely. And it was probably, I’d say close to 5050, where the MLS was a lot more of what you were talking about, if they were looking for just a property to park money in or some you know, a few new builds that were going to be nice corporate rentals, or, you know, you find properties on the MLS, but I’d always just tell my clients, I’d say, hey, I’ll set you up, I said, I have a three step process where I will set you up on the auto search for properties. And this I think works with any client where I’d say I’ll set you up on the auto search. So if I’m away from my office, for whatever reason, you get the properties and you don’t have to rely on me seeing them. I’ll also see see myself on the auto search. And that’s step two, and I go through that once a day. So if there’s something that really jumps out to me, then I’ll reach out to you directly as well. So it can be there’s two way conversation, you know, that I’m I’m actively looking for you. And then three is the off market properties. And that’s, you know, I’ll, I’ll really be personally reaching out to you on those. But I think that, that helped me win a lot of clients initially, where they said, Oh, he’s going to do more than just set me up on an auto search and wait for me to respond and just kind of earn some trust early on.
D.J. Paris 19:15 And how important is it to be active in these online forums like bigger pockets so that you can get access to this huge network of people who want to invest and also learn. I mean, I tell everyone, if you want the best education about how to how to add the service of being able to support clients who want real estate investment, advice and want those kinds of deals, bigger pockets is I can’t think of a better place to go than that. But how important is that for the education and also the networking?
Tony Clark 19:48 Oh, absolutely. I think it’s it’s big if people it’s just reaching out and letting people know that you’re there to add value. I think that’s the big thing is if you’re there to learn and to add value that Networking is big, because everybody can kind of see through, if you show up with the business card to the networking event and say, Hey, call me if you’re gonna buy sell a property, and they’ll they’ll add your card to the list of 20 other people. But if you’re there, and you’re, you’re either, you know, very interested in learning about their experience, and that’s where I see real estate agents and lenders and people who do that really well. They’re there to learn. And then they’re there to add value of, you know, even if it’s just one tip that I learned this from one of my mentors, he’s like, Hey, find one thing about your market that most real estate agents don’t know. And you can just throw that into your first conversation of Nashville, it was within the Nashville Metro, there were two different tax districts and one you paid about half the property taxes you didn’t the other. And I would just throw that into my first conversation where
D.J. Paris 20:46 I would like to know that if I was moving to Nashville, yeah,
Tony Clark 20:49 absolutely. And I’d say hey, here’s, you know, it’s the Briley loop the freeway, essentially, if you’re inside that your property taxes are going to be almost twice what they will if you’re outside, and all of a sudden, you’ve added value and build trust. But you can only do that if you get in front of people, either networking online or in person. And so I think that’s huge. I think that’s a big, big value add.
D.J. Paris 21:11 Yeah, I What a again, you’ve really only been practicing, as a realtor for a short amount of time. What percentage of agents do you think have your particular skill set with respect to you know, real estate investment? Like I, I’m just going to throw a number I’m completely making out of wholecloth, I’m going to say less than 3% of Realtors probably focus in the market that you’re in, or focus in real estate investing? Would that be? Roughly fair?
Tony Clark 21:42 Yeah, it’s that’s a question that honestly, I haven’t been around enough or in enough markets to see in Nashville, I will say. So now being in Nashville, and in California, that percentage was much higher in Nashville, I think just because there’s so much Nashville was exploded there. That’s yeah, but it was it’s still low. I mean, it’s still I think, you know, that three to 5% there, and then probably, you know, 1% or less that really focus on real estate in California on investing, invest where I am in California,
D.J. Paris 22:12 it’s such a nice additional avenue to add. So you know, and again, you can’t be all things to all people. You’re like, Hey, I’m not a luxury guy. I’m not a first time homebuyer guy. I mean, you could be and you could, you could get your way through those deals, obviously. But it’s not your main focus. But it’s, it’s, it’s a nice thing, you know, if it was me, and I guess it’s all about what you’re into, like you came from that world, you came from the PE world. It’s what you’re into. You’re a numbers guy, you’re a systems guy. And let’s actually, let’s switch to systems because that is, you know, anybody can grind out not anyone. But a lot of times people think well, Tony did 40 million in 18 months, in his first 18 months, he must have just grinded it out. You probably did. But I’m curious to know what systems helped make that a little bit easier for you. Because I imagine you were working pretty long hours to get to those numbers.
Tony Clark 23:06 Yeah, it was really, definitely trying to figure out how to take what I was doing my my, my motto as far as growing and scaling is I say, Okay, let’s, let’s work really hard. And then let’s figure out how to simplify what I’m doing. So that I can scale bigger, and then sit, work really hard, simplify scale. Like that’s, that’s kind of how I think about it. And so the first few months that I was in the business, it was let’s just call everyone I can have my cell phone or go through Facebook or you know, keep a Google sheet and then realize that’s not sustainable for anything. And so then started using a CRM and really keeping track of my contacts and trying to set tasks for myself to follow up with people and trying to you know, still make it personal because we’ve all seen the the automated emails where you know that you’re on a mailing list, and it sounds like a mailing list and you burn trust that way. So I said, Well, I don’t want to do that. But let’s figure out how to keep in touch with my clients and really just organize my database because like you were talking about with Oh, go ahead.
D.J. Paris 24:13 No, I didn’t mean to interrupt your flow. I’m super excited to hear about how what systems you built to do this. Yeah.
Tony Clark 24:19 Yeah. So it was really the first one was my database and at first I use the CRM that was provided from my brokerage and then tried a couple others but it was really more the functions of I would anybody who went into my database or anyone I’ve met, went into my database, I’ll start there. And then I tagged them as whether they were you know, buyer, seller, vendor, friend, whoever and then they get added to a couple of things were one I just had a newsletter that I pushed out and it wasn’t anything groundbreaking. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but it was just hey, you know I’m I’m in the market. Here’s a little tidbit to add value. And then From there, I always knew, you know, when I would be able to fish kind of with that newsletter, and then anyone who was active, I really kept track of where they were in the process and what they were expecting from me, if I had active clients, I would know that, hey, I’m gonna call them every couple of days or every day or you know, whatnot. And then anybody who was still a new lead, I’d push them through, I did have a few automated campaigns and templates and things I’d use for new leads. And it was really, I would just develop those based off of if I did something once, I’d say let’s figure out a way to simplify this the next time. So let’s put an automation or a task in and then let’s figure out how to do 100 times more work with that same system without it breaking.
D.J. Paris 25:45 So well, you’d meet with a client, and you’d get a sense of what their expectations are of you. And you would identify those and probably arrive at some sort of agreements, like, whether it’s verbal or just internal, you’re like, Okay, I know what I need to do for this client, which means I’m going to call them either every day, every other day, every three days, you you made that determination. Of course, every client can be different. And you make that termination. And then you set up the repeating tasks so that you don’t forget it. You know, again, this sounds so basic, however, the basics are the fundamentals are usually what win the game. And so it’s silly as it is to go. Remember, every three days in your calendar, you have to call so and so. It’s funny, I’ve told this story before, and I apologize for our audience that has heard it ad nauseam. But I talked to one of the top agents in Chicago here many years ago, and I said, What do you think it literally out of 46,000 agents, she’s number one, and I was like, how did you what what why are you number one, and you know, what did you do different? She goes DJ, I call every one of my clients every week, I go, and she’s like, well, oh, active clients, right? And she goes, active clients. And I said, and like, yeah, so not so but to kind of I was expecting a bigger and she goes, Well, obviously there’s a million other things she does. But she goes, That’s my secret sauce. And I was like, it’s it’s that and she goes, I know it sounds really silly, right? And she goes, That’s it? She goes, you’d be shocked. Most agents don’t they’re afraid to call their clients unless it’s good news. So, so curious to get you to get your thoughts like when you know, you have to call them every couple of days. Do you already know? I mean, unless it’s like new news that you have to provide to them. Do you know sort of what you’re gonna say?
Tony Clark 27:30 Yeah, typically it’ll be and whether it’s a, you know, I say call sometimes it would be a text, word communicate of, you know, get in touch with them to stay top of mind. And yeah, when there was no news, it would really just be a quick, usually just a quick text of saying, Hey, just wanted to check in with you. Nothing new on the market today are nothing new I’ve seen but wanted to let you know, I’m looking. And perfect. That was that was it? They know that I’m looking for them. But there was nothing there not I dropped off the face of the earth because they haven’t heard from me in two days. And they’re checking Zillow for three hours a day and feeling like their agent isn’t? Isn’t there with them?
D.J. Paris 28:08 Yeah, the number one reason people fire their agent is shocking, not shockingly, communication. It’s consistency and communication. So So okay, so you now have the systems in place where with respect to communication? What, tell me about how you began to develop your systems. So that because again, that isn’t necessarily super easy to scale, right? Because you have a certain number of clients, you have certain number of phone calls or texts or emails you can make in a day. So how do you how do you sort of keep it all organized?
Tony Clark 28:41 Yeah, so what I started to do with the systems is as I kept scaling, I said, Okay, I need to push a system until it breaks where like you said, the tasks, I let me just call everyone until I can’t call everyone anymore. And then let’s step it up. And so within my niche, what I wound up doing is I started tracking where I would lose clients. And I started to see, like, Okay, I’m getting X amount of leads in from and you mentioned, bigger pockets, I bought bigger pockets leads for a long time. And they were a great lead source where they would come in, and I had an automated workflow, come into my CRM, I hit them with an intro email that had a video in it, saying, here’s a little bit about the market. I’d love to book a call with you. Here’s my calendar invite. And then I just had an automated email and texts that would go out every day to them. Just if until they booked a meeting. And so that, you know, as one example, I realized, that came out of me realizing that I was losing a lot of leads that came in, because I even though I felt like I was reaching out to them quickly within you know, 1530 minutes. It wasn’t instantaneous and somebody else was and
D.J. Paris 29:52 isn’t that amazing? Yeah, that’s like 15 to 30 minutes. It’s almost like to happen to century ago. Yeah, that’s
Tony Clark 29:58 yeah, because but by that point, they’re done looking at properties, and they’re moving on to their next thing. And if somebody calls them right when they’re looking, it’s, you know, when I, if I need my lawn mowed, and I go call one lawn care company, and they don’t pick up, I’m just gonna move on and call the next one. And it’s, it’s ridiculous when you’re looking at it from the other side of things, we have such short attention spans, but it’s such a big thing. So, but yeah, I would track really, that being one example I, I would track where I was losing leads, and then try to figure out a way to plug that hole on if it was, okay, new leads are coming in, and I’m converting them at, you know, 20%, and I shouldn’t be at 30. Or I think I can get to 30. Let me go analyze that part of my business and make it better. And this is where I, I’m just a data numbers nerd on that side of things. And so I’d look at that, or then I’d look at my pipeline and say, Okay, I, you know, I’m getting a lot of good clients in, but then I’m not, you know, I’m losing them once they become clients, and I should be converting higher here. Okay? That’s because I’m not finding good deals for them. Let me go find more ways to find them properties are under contract, am I not doing a good job of communicating with lenders or inspectors or getting bids from contractors? You know, there’s, there’s different factors at each stage of the client journey? Or after they bought a property? How much repeat business Am I getting? And if it’s low, how can I follow up with them better? So there’s these, I kind of developed five different stages where I could be losing clients, and then I just tried to optimize each one of those and make those better. So it’s, it’s all based on stuff, but it’s just putting a framework in to, to think through it.
D.J. Paris 31:38 Well, push ups are basic to and they’re also super important, right? So I mean, that with the with the highest possible compliment, because it’s it’s always these fundamentals. And just as you were telling me, you know, I’m thinking about I’m a recruiter, I basically recruit realtors. So I could, I was trying to apply this to my own systems of like, where do I lose recruits? Like, why do they end up choosing other firms and where in my process, but because I think I think that comes from from that that private equity, large scale size, even though you were at a smaller firm, or at a smaller fund, you still were managing hundreds of houses. And so this idea of scalability is obviously important. So you have to look for those weak points. And this idea of doing an audit in your communication chain, in your, you know, or just in your sales pipeline, and looking at your five stages, identifying those weak points and plugging those holes as you said, Boy, I I’m loving that. In, you’re a numbers guy. So your, your, your your metrics person, so everything is is benchmarked, and metric. And we know we’re above the line or below the line before below. And what’s really cool about real estate stuff is there’s a lot of data out there that you can use to say what is the you know, on a bigger pockets lead or a Zillow lead, or whatever it might be, you know, the average close rate is this, I want to get to x. So a lot of this data is already there for you to benchmark against. And it just helps you become super efficient, I imagine.
Tony Clark 33:07 Absolutely. It’s and I think it’s something that had not everybody in real estate, but I feel like most of us are pretty competitive, too. And so if you can use data to say, Oh, here’s where the averages are. Here’s where the top tier are. I’m sitting, you know, below that, oh, what’s it going to take for me to get there for me to get to the next level? And I think it’s a good mesh of being able to use those, those data points to push yourself to be better.
D.J. Paris 33:34 Yeah, I mean, even I would even encourage all of our listeners or viewers, if there’s someone in your local market, who’s a realtor that you admire, that has like a very, you know, some really impressive numbers, whether it’s production, whether it’s days on market, whether it’s you know, percentage, or list price, whatever the metric is that you’re like, how do they do that? Literally call them and be like, I am so enamored with the way that you do X, Y, or Z. I’m your biggest fan, I noticed you do all these things. Could I grab 15 minutes of your day? I’ll buy you coffee or lunch or whatever I will, I promise you that will be called five of those people. One of those people, if not all five, we’ll take that 15 minutes. And have you ever done that? Where are you reaching out to other mentor? You said you have mentors? So
Tony Clark 34:20 yeah, absolutely. I think that’s something that either both within my market in Nashville, I did that a few times. And then even outside of the market, I’d find somebody who was out in Ohio or Pennsylvania, where they’re just crushing it in their market, but I’d say hey, you know, one big fan would love to even an investment real estate, it was the, hey, I can add value. I would love to push people your way. If they’re not a fit for Nashville, like the numbers look good in your market or whatever. You know, would love to pick your brain for 15 minutes, or usually instead of pick your brain. I don’t like that saying as much as just hey, I’ve got these three questions. Here’s the one thing I’m struggling with, we don’t mind sharing what you do here because I see you doing it really well. And that’s an easy answer for them. They don’t have to think through. Oh, what’s he going to ask? It’s no, here’s the question. Here’s where they can add value, and they’re happy, happy to get
D.J. Paris 35:16 super flattering to ask someone for their advice. It is what if you, we think maybe, oh, we’ll be annoying, those people will be bothering them, maybe well, but good chance you won’t be because they’re going to be so flattered that, that you’ve recognized something in their process that probably most people don’t recognize. They just see them as successful or, and you’re like, hey, I noticed you do this one thing. I’m, like you said, I’m such a fan of that. I would love to learn how you do that. And maybe I can add value to you and help you and etc. It’s all about those those connections. And those, you almost have to be a fan of other agents, I think, I have learned that after almost 500 episodes, the top agents that I’ve had on the show, they’re always like, so happy to get it, they get excited about other agents. Because they’re like, oh, there’s this other guy that does this really cool thing. And so I think that’s part of it, too. But knowing your numbers, right, that will go back to systems, you got to know your numbers, you got to spend the time, every single day studying your local market, studying your niche, you got to know the numbers. And most agents, the good news is, most agents really don’t know their numbers, if we’re being honest. So for the people that do spend that time and really niche down and figure out where they, they, they, they, they blossom and bloom, and it’s just it’s so impressive, because most agents aren’t going to spend that time doing it.
Tony Clark 36:43 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so I think if that’s you, and either if your numbers driven, or even if you’re not, but you’re able to take a little bit of time and run through it, you you have such a leg up on the competition, or you’ll at least, and I’d love to hear your take on this too. I think that’s how you can build a sustainable business, you’re never chasing the next client, then you say, you know, here’s my marketing budget for this month, or here’s how many people I need to cold call or, you know, if I do this, then this will happen within reason, you know, markets can change and shift or you’re never, I would think you’ll be less stressed on, when’s the next deal coming in, because you’re focused on those things that you can control to make that next deal happen.
D.J. Paris 37:25 Totally. And all that we can ever really control is is our thoughts and actions, right? So it’s like, yeah, that’s all we can control in. And the good news is, we can control it mostly. But I want to talk about Realty flow. This is your CRM, because you are a systems guy, and you were looking for a CRM solution for your particular niche. And you were like, I couldn’t really find one that was a perfect fit. You’re like, I’m gonna build one. So and by the way, many people have attempted this. This is not, this is a tough, tough business. But I want I want to, if I was going to get, you know, I would be looking at a CRM from a guy who did 40 million in his first 18 months, that seems like a guy I’d want to follow. So tell us about Realty flow and what you’re looking to do with that.
Tony Clark 38:15 Yeah, it really so Realty flow came out of the essentially came out of the consulting firm that I’ve been running for the last few months on basically, I’ve been going in and exactly what we just talked through with other real estate agents saying, hey, I’ll come in, I help you audit your numbers, I’ll help you look at, you know, what systems you’re using. And let’s figure out ways to streamline your business and kind of come in and do that. And I went through that a few times with agents and realized that there were some similarities between really agents at different productivity levels, you know, the top top tier agents usually had their systems pretty dialed a lot of newer agents, it their systems were like giving a Ferrari to a 15 year old, who hasn’t learned how to drive yet on right, you get these big CRMs that can do a million different things. But really, you just need a way to manage your contacts, track deals, manage tasks, which that was the one weird one that I just most CRMs don’t have just like a Google Tasks kind of thing where you can just put sticky notes in it all has to be assigned to contacts and whatever. And then just do you know, basic automated texting and emailing and then tracking those things. And so from that, I was able to link up with a couple of business partners that I worked with one before and one is a developer, software developer in the Netherlands, and they just finished on their project and they were like, Hey, Tony, you know, what, what are you working on? And it just kind of meshed where we decided we were going to launch a real estate CRM really with the same motto or mantra that I’ve been using for my business on just this is designed to simplify your business so that you can scale and so that you can then go work hard on your business and then Simplify it through the system and then scale. And so it’s really, it’s not meant to be anything groundbreaking other than just here as a clean, simple way to look at everything in your business instead of a convoluted dashboard with 1000 different things going on, that you have to sift through which so
D.J. Paris 40:18 I think what a lot of times CRMs are, you know, they’re built by developers and developers aren’t necessarily real estate agents, sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not mostly not. And so I think sometimes CRM companies, tech companies get some of the tools a little bit wrong only in the sense of understanding that providing, you know, all of these different features, functionality is great. But what it can result in for, especially a newer agent is a lot of anxiety. So they get this, like you said, they get, you know, their CRM, which is fully featured has all these amazing tools. And yet, it becomes overwhelming, because there’s so much it’s basically a blank canvas with all these different, you know, all this different paints a million paint colors, and it’s like, oh, what do I do? So you’re looking to sort of simplify the process, streamline it make it really accessible to agents, so that they can plug in and scale up.
Tony Clark 41:17 Exactly. And I think just designing it, you hit it right on the head, designing something that’s for real estate agents, because a lot of these big companies, it’s a CRM that works really well for an enterprise fortune 500 company with five levels of management, sure, it needs to do a lot more than a real estate agent, or even a brokerage or a team where you’re tracking very specific things. And it’s really just saying, let’s remove all the stuff that would work well for other industries, but that you don’t need in real estate and that do the things that you need in real estate really, really well. And then let’s, let’s bring in some fun stuff like we we pulled in chat GPT. So you can write listing descriptions and some other things we just, you know, pull that in so that you can do all of that from from the CRM, but it’s really like let’s let’s do the essentials really, really well and
D.J. Paris 42:04 get rid of the fluff. Yeah, the fundamentals let’s let’s keep keep the machine oiled and running. I love it. So I would encourage everyone to check out Realty flow.io checkout, you can do demos there, you can see the CRM and inaction and hopefully, maybe, you know become a client. So check out Realty flow.io. Also, I want everybody to follow Tony at on Instagram, Tony Clark dot real estate, we have links to both of those in our show notes. Tony, one last question. Now you’ve had a tremendous amount of success in the last 18 months, which again, it’s it’s like blowing me away your success. And by the way, hugely jealous of you so amazing, amazing. Success, their jealousy and in the most positive way. What what we’re missing, give us one mistake that that you made or something that you’re struggling with right now, just so that we know you’re human, we know that you have your own struggles.
Tony Clark 43:10 Oh, how much time do we have? Yeah, I think the if I were to think back kind of the the number one mistake that I make over and over is I try to do too much instead of leveraging either leveraging basically anything leveraging other people’s time, or abilities, or knowledge or software are all of these different things, I think the big mistake is I fall into the trap of oh, if I want it done right, I need to do it myself. And I think everything from I don’t need to go to every showing, I can have a showing agent do it or I don’t need to, you know, pretend like I know stuff that I don’t let’s go call a mentor or let’s you know, employ other people on my team and train them so that they can go do things better than I could on my own. I think that’s the thing that I struggle with the most. And so it’s not even a mistake that I made one time, it’s something I’m still working through on I try to hold on to things longer than I should instead of delegating them and putting them into the hands of people who can do them better than me.
D.J. Paris 44:22 My boss has always said if you if you delegate something, assume and again, this is not like written in stone, but this is his philosophy. Assume that they’ll that the person you delegate the task to will do it to about 70 to 80% of what you would do, so it’s not going to be perfect. It’s going to be 70 to 80%. Perfect, and then maybe you come in and tweak the blow blast 20 30% of it. But even that would be pretty helpful. Right? So like even if they don’t quite get it to the Tony Clark perfect perfection level. They can get you at 70 You know, three quarters of the way there and then you just you know, run the ball All into the endzone. That’s a pretty good deal, you know, but it’s hard because you do have to accept less than perfect work. Because Tony, you have very specific standards, high standards for, you know, whatever, you know, task, you may you may be delegating to somebody, and you have very specific rules and structure. But you do have to sort of accept a slightly less than for delegation. And that, to me has always been the hardest part. I’m curious if you struggle with that as well.
Tony Clark 45:32 Absolutely. And I’d say it’s even a pendulum where I, I struggle with either letting go too much, or not letting go enough, where if I hire somebody to do something, I’ve got a virtual assistant who he’s awesome. He’s been working for me for about a year, year and a half now. And when I keep going back and forth with him, even still, where all I’ll micromanage too much, and then I’ll let the reins out too much, as far as I don’t give them enough direction, not like I let him slack off or whatever, it’s just, hey, here’s the task, go do this. And he’s like, Well, we’ll tell me what, how do I do this? Or, you know, what, give me more direction. And it’s really finding that balance of saying, okay, here and in a new skill set also of managing people, that’s very different than doing things yourself. And I’m still very much learning that but I think that’s, that’s right on where, you know, 70 80% there’s the expectation, and then you figure out how to encourage and uplift and, and keep accountable. Anybody who is working for you.
D.J. Paris 46:33 Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really an impressive thing. And we now we are in a global economy. So for anyone out there who is, you know, thinking, I can’t afford an assistant, you might not be able to afford an assistant in your local market, but you might be able to afford an assistant from another country and other parts of the world who were the economics are different, where the cost of living is different. And we can get virtual assistants, who will, who will only want a certain amount of pay that you might be able to afford. So if you are struggling, you know, Upwork is a great website to find talent globally, to help you with whatever you’re struggling with. And if you’re not a numbers, guy, hire a numbers guy, you can find them all over the world. And if you’re, you know, need help in any other way, obviously, Tony’s leveraging that, and he’s saying the same thing that all of us struggle with this, we want to do everything ourselves, because, you know, we have a vision for exactly how things should look, feel and sound, but I’m having people help you. You can get help from all over the world. Now. We’re so fortunate. So I want everyone who’s listening to please Oh, one more thing. I’m sorry for interrupting myself. But for anyone who out there who is a realtor in the Nashville area in particular, you know, any Tennessee realtors. I want you to check out Tony’s brokerage, which is a house Haven, in Tennessee. They’re an amazing company, Tony was telling me offline about I was say, Tony, you’re amazing, you know, 40 million in your first year and a half. And he’s like, Oh, I wonder just did my managing broker he’s told superstar. So if you are an agent in that market, and you’re like, I’m not getting this, the tools, the training, the support that I need for my existing firm, I want to go work at a firm where a guy just knocked out 40 million in a year and a half like that’s, that’s a pretty cool place to me that they have a few nuggets of wisdom over their house Haven. So definitely reach out to Tony. You can find him on Instagram, Tony Clark dot real estate. Also check out his CRM Realty flow.io.io. And Tony also practices in Ventura County all over the LA area where he is with Beverly and company out there as well. So if you ever wanted to team up with him out in California as well, he would reach out and remember to Tony does deals all over the country. So he needs realtor partners. So he has investors that are looking for properties everywhere. So maybe you might be have a client that is looking for a deal that Tony can put together in another state another market. So if you’re a realtor, and you just want to network with Tony and sort of trade deals back and forth happens all the time, reach out to him, find him on Instagram, or check out his CRM as well. And Tony is on behalf of our audience. This has been such a fun conversation with you. We had a record number of people watching live which is amazing. So that is so I’m so excited for that to on behalf of everyone the collective audience. Thank you. We appreciate you. On behalf of Tony and myself. We also want to thank the audience for making it all the way to the end the episode please we ask that you do just one thing to help us tell a friend think of one other realtor that you know that is struggling I mean it’s 2023 This is a tough year for realtors. Let’s be honest, let’s make it a little bit easier for them. Send them a link to this episode so that they can learn from Tony You and they can have a $40 million next year and a half just like our friend Tony. Tony, thank you so much. You’re amazing. I’m excited to we’ll have you back on the show as you as you continue to scale because 40 million is your bottom now. So I’m excited to see where you’re headed. You’ll probably be a billion dollar producer and then look 10 years or so. So I’m excited to continue to watch your ascension. But keep us keep us in the loop. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Tony.
Tony Clark 50:32 Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening and I really appreciate the invite
Why Real Estate Agent Success Is Dependent On Relationships & Connection • Kevin Van Eck
May 12, 2023
Kevin Van Eck, the Executive Vice-President of Innovation and Education with @properties and Christie’s International Real Estate, talks about his transition from a paramedic to a real-estate agent. Kevin discusses the power of connecting with people and how real estate is a relationship industry. Next, Kevin emphasizes how technology is moving so fast (AI) and why agents should be up to date all the time to be more competitive in the market. Last, Kevin discusses the agents’ role in neutralizing and navigating the emotions of their clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be speaking with somebody who leads 1000s of top real estate agents across the country every single day and find out what he’s telling his agents to do. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Kevin Van Eck from add properties and Christie’s international real estate before we get to Kevin just wanted to let everyone know if you’re not following us on social I really want you to and not because I want to have a big follower count. Although I guess I do want to have a big follower count. But that’s not the reason I’m saying this. Because you know, you don’t owe me that. But I feel like I owe you more content. So what we’ve started doing is clipping our episodes, including this one. And what what that means is we’re finding short form sick 45 to 62nd clips of bite sized information extracted from the full episode that you guys can absorb every single day we’re publishing these daily or every weekday that’s not on the weekends. I’m a little too lazy to do that on the weekends, but during the week they were publishing one of these every day and we publish them to all the social media channels including Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, probably a few others on Twitter, that’s the other one. Anyway, find us on there. And the easiest way to do that what’s the easiest way to go to our website keeping it real pod.com I think I have all of our social links on there if not just whatever social platform you’re on. Search for keeping it real hit that subscribe button and then you’ll see those daily bite sized videos that will give you just a little bit of wisdom or hope every single day from one of our brilliant guests. Okay, I’ve made the pitch long enough please follow us on on Instagram, Facebook, etc. We appreciate it and now onto the main event my conversation with Kevin Vanek.
Today, my guest is Kevin Vanek with have properties Christie’s international real estate here in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Kevin as executive vice president of innovation for Christie’s international real estate Kevin plays a central role in developing and implementing a range of programs to drive growth and success among network affiliates and agents. These include technology agent performance, recruitment, retention, and third party partnerships Kevin’s experience as an agent, managing broker and agent performance coach and his role in developing brokerage technology gives him a unique perspective that few in the industry have a native Chicagoland Kevin graduated from the University of Illinois is an Army veteran and a world traveler. Please learn more about the brands that Kevin represents, which is at properties as well as Christie’s International to learn more@properties.com and Christie’s real estate, a Christie’s real estate.com Both links to those will be in the show notes. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Van Eck 4:25 Hi, DJ, thanks so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:28 I’m so excited to have you on I was just at a meeting down at the Chicago Association of Realtors for this for this committee I’m on and your name, believe it or not came up. This is not a surprise as you are very well regarded and respected here in the Chicagoland area. But you now you know represent a brand that has moved beyond just the Chicagoland area, which is really truly impressive. So I’d love to well before we get to that, let’s tell I want to learn about your journey. So Tell me a little bit about how you got into real estate, why you got into real estate and how you got to where you are today.
Kevin Van Eck 5:06 Sure. And going back to what you started with, you know, I served at the Chicago Association of Realtors for a long time. So they have a very special place in my heart. So that made me really smile when you said that. So thank you. That’s very good. I think the when I got into real estate, it wasn’t planned. It’s really interesting. I’ve had sort of a career where I’ve hopped around quite a bit between different industries. Like you mentioned, I served in the army, I was a paramedic, I wanted to be a trauma surgeon. And right before real estate, I was in restaurant franchising, and it was
D.J. Paris 5:41 very different from being a trauma surgeon. That’s,
Kevin Van Eck 5:44 that’s it’s funny the path that we all take, because I don’t think we, you know, anyone ends up where they had predicted if you ask them at 18, right? Right. So for me, it was the beginning of the downturn, and the restaurant group that I was working with, they were starting to feel it, they were based out of California, and the downturn was impacting quite a bit. And I had a friend at the time who was in real estate and said, maybe you try it, I thought my first reaction was the market is crashing is probably not probably not the smartest time to get in. And then I thought about it. And I thought about how you know, during that market would be the time to grab market share, and to actually grow a business because there were so many agents getting out of the business. And, and I saw an opportunity. And I was nervous as anyone would be I was prepared financially, but jumped into real estate. And I didn’t, it was interesting. I didn’t know what I was doing like most of us when we first get into real estate. And I had to learn very quickly, especially because of what was happening in the market at that time.
D.J. Paris 6:45 Yeah, it’s interesting, I started as a financial advisor in 2001, after that crash of the financial of the tech market in particular, and the stock market and of course, the events of 911. And it was, in some ways, it was the best time to get started because people were exiting the business, they had been burned by their financial advisors previously, who had put a lot of their assets into technology. And so in some ways, it was both the hardest time to get started. But also really fortuitous time. And I imagine you probably feel the same way when you got into real estate.
Kevin Van Eck 7:24 Agreed, I think it was, you know, I didn’t know what the good times were what people call the, you know, tooth out early 2000s, when it was almost, I call it the disney world of real estate. And I didn’t know that. So all I knew to do was you know, from 8am to 6pm, or longer work connect prospect. And it’s funny because I didn’t learn, you know, I didn’t have a lot of mentorship. And I could share more about that. But I didn’t have anyone really teaching me the ropes. So I learned, you probably remember this DJ in a website called active rain. And it was one of the first real estate blog sites and they told, you know, they told agents just to write cards, go out to lunch, dinner, breakfast drinks, and just see your people. And that’s exactly what I did. And that’s really what what launched my career at the time.
D.J. Paris 8:09 Yeah, it’s amazing that those same principles have, meet as many people as you can connect with them, interact with them, have some sort of communication strategy so that you’re sending something to them of value every so often or having conversations of value is is really sort of the discipline that even still works just as much today as it did that.
Kevin Van Eck 8:33 That’s right. It’s the basics, right, going back to the basics. And because it’s always been a relationship industry, and I don’t think, you know, you and I are both very involved in tech and trying new things. And but that still hasn’t replaced that one to one, that communication relationship, face to face that we have with our clients and other agents and colleagues in the industry, too. I don’t think it’s you know, there’s a lot of been a lot of talk over the years, and especially now with AI about agents being replaced, but nothing replaces that relationship.
D.J. Paris 9:03 Yeah, let’s talk about AI. This actually came up in my committee meeting this morning, we were sort of laughing about one of one of our committee members, because of the belief that in 10 years Realtors won’t be needed. This is a realtor and he says AI is taking over this is what’s going to happen. And it was a very interesting perspective. And I don’t know that he’s totally wrong. I hope that he’s wrong, but I don’t know. I know that as technology has sort of gotten past the year 2000 We’ve been hearing that every almost every single iteration of any new technologies. This is going to replace realtors, you know, even even going back to you know, pre Zillow days, there was sort of this talk of like, oh, people are just going to look for homes online exclusively. Not really need a broker anymore because Realtors used to be the gateway to homes they’re not really the gate the gatekeeper anymore because anyone who has access to the internet can search basically the MLS without ever realtor and and still, but but the realtor is as needed. I met with a friend who is on the board of actually I shouldn’t say where but but a big big financial services firm. And he had said 12 years ago to me, you guys are going to be out of business as a realtor, we got a business attendance and this is a guy who knows things. And he was like, You got to find a new line of work because it’s It’s over for you guys. He was TechSoup. Turns out he was wrong. He was right about a lot of other things but wrong about that. And thank goodness, do you think AI is is threatening to realtors?
Kevin Van Eck 10:34 I think you know, it’s hard to say in the long term, right. But things are things are moving so quickly. If you asked anyone six months ago, what chat GBT was, you know, who wasn’t on anyone’s the common person’s layout? Radar. Right? So I think now but look how quickly so a lot of agents and brokerages and tech companies have adopted open source AI, it’s wild. So in the short term, though, I don’t I don’t think we’re threatened by AI. But I think what it’s the perspective we have to have is that it is competition. It is competition with us, where we have to raise the bar and understand what we need to do to create great experiences. And to be able to, in competing with AI be able to guide consumers based on the non tangibles that they share with us. So I think, you know, because AI right now, it’s very technical, it’s glitchy all of that. But I do think, you know, from a data and stats standpoint, it can be something, but we need to put it to use. And we need to make sure that, you know I talk a lot about experience and consumer experience, the AI can’t create a consumer experience like you can.
D.J. Paris 11:45 Yeah, the only way I see AI actually replacing the role of a realtor, which in my mind. And there’s a lot that Realtors do, obviously. And this is going to be a very, very incomplete definition. And I’m not here to make that definition for all of our listeners and viewers because I am technically one but I don’t want to practice. So I want to be very careful in what I’m about to say I’m not looking to to ruffle any feathers. But I believe one of the primary roles of a realtor is to really guide their clients through the emotional ups and downs of a transaction. And that if AI can somehow at some point in the future solve for that which I I don’t see that but maybe who knows, I think then realtors have have more of a sort of thing to worry about. But for now, the hardest parts of the transaction are that emotional sort of regulation, that distress tolerance, the ability to to be there and be present while news either as in your clients favor or against and just understanding how to navigate through that as your clients are freaking out or, and that’s something that that it unless AI is at some point able to really understand empathy, compassion, wisdom, experience, and be able to soothe someone and help them stay regulated through through through a transaction. I think realtors are safe.
Kevin Van Eck 13:10 I completely agree real estate’s an emotional transaction. It’s not, you know, residential real estate is an emotional transaction. So you hit the nail on the head with the word emotion because I think even, you know, look at look at some of the disruptors that have been out there, whether it’s open door, purple bricks, the ones that tried to replace the agent in terms of guiding the consumer into a property and offering up properties and guiding them through the transaction. It didn’t work. And it didn’t work. Even during the pandemic, when you know, consumers weren’t out shopping for homes, everyone immediately went back because there’s when we talk about the emotional connection, it’s that emotional regulation during the transaction that an agent knows how to navigate, but it’s also that consumer emotion when they step into the right property, and I get a feeling. So I think about I really did this was, I don’t know 10 years ago, I was in New York City at an Inman conference. And I couldn’t I couldn’t sleep. So I turned on the TV and there was a commercial, it was maybe a precursor to Carvana where you could order a car online. And I thought, This is wild. If people are ordering cars online, they don’t need to actually sit in it and drive it. They’ll just order it, we’re in trouble. Because the next step is if someone’s spending $75,000 on a car online, it’s not too long until they’re spending 150 300 $600,000. online buying a house but we didn’t see it happen. You know, it happened in some cases during the pandemic, but I’m not I’m not feeling overly threatened. I think it’s an opportunity for us to utilize AI to better serve and create that experience for our consumers.
D.J. Paris 14:43 And for anyone that isn’t from here in the Chicagoland area. Of course. 95% of our listeners aren’t. Our viewers are not but for those who aren’t familiar with at properties, you’re most certainly familiar with Christie’s international just even, you know being in auction house have previously and still being an auction house. But understanding the story of app properties is particularly a strong one. Because you didn’t just come around you were just mentioning disruptors, you guys were disrupter. And you were disrupted in a way where here in Chicago, one of the largest real estate markets in the country, I don’t know when our properties was founded. But but whatever, early, late 90s, early 2000s, whenever. And what they did is they were an independent brokerage, and they went toe to toe with the big franchise firms and the big, large legacy firms, the ones that we all know, and we’ve had lots of guests on from those firms. And those are great firms too. And not only did you guys became the number, I believe the number one independent brokerage in the country very quickly, and you basically grabbed all of the talent that was here in Chicago, they all migrated, not all but almost all migrated to add properties. Because what you guys were building was so unique, so special, and you’ve continued this dominance here in Chicago ever since. And now you’ve partnered with Christie’s and you know, you guys are branching out at properties, meaning is branching out to other other markets. Christie’s, of course, is always always in markets, and also branching out, but this was an impressive rise. And you guys were really at the forefront of that of that disruption.
Kevin Van Eck 16:22 Yeah, I think it’s interesting, too, because it wasn’t, you know, I won’t say it wasn’t intentional, we always had the intention to grow. And that comes from the two founders, Mike golden and fat long, and who are super intelligent people, you know, they were the number one and number two agents in Chicago working with another brokerage when they founded that properties. So that story is super interesting about why they founded that properties, and why they left their previous brokerage, because that’s everything that app properties have been built on, which is, you know, agent first, if you give the agent, the best tools, the best resources, the best marketing, you’re going to organically attract agents. And then you’re also going to be able to provide that that higher level of service for your consumer, so that they’re also attracted to the brand and attracted to the app properties agent. And so everything from that point forward. And now since our acquisition of Christie’s international real estate at the end of 2021. We’re doing the same thing for our affiliates. They’re, we’re we’re injecting our tech, everything that we’ve done in our properties to become number one here. We are now injecting into each one of our affiliates around the globe.
D.J. Paris 17:28 I believe I’ve probably had more at properties agents on the show than any other any other brokerage in even including the large the larger brokerages. So it is, you know, it is a really tremendous talent pool that now other agents can participate in. And you know, whether you’re here in the Chicago area or somewhere else, there’s a lot of really cool things happening with with that properties at Christie’s International. But let’s talk about let’s talk about sort of brokerages because I think this is I don’t know, I’m calling this the year of recruiting only because I we’re seeing a lot of movement here at our company, people going in and out, people leaving the industry to join like a holding company just to sort of say I’m out for a while. But people are switching firms, there’s lots of team building going on, teams are obviously actively prospecting for more recruits. So obviously, that that trend is here. And this is I think, a year where a lot of agents are just kind of exploring their options. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on if you were an agent or any suggestions you might have to our listeners who are agents about how they might sort of evaluate where they’re at and what other avenues they should pursue?
Kevin Van Eck 18:44 Sure, I think that’s a great question. And you’re right, it is it is the time where agents are looking, I would be looking, I would I would be assessing where I was if I were still, you know, working with clients and actively selling, but I think looking why that’s happening, I think it was easy for everyone to be a hero in 2021. Right, it was because of the pandemic and because of everything that was happening. It was easy for agents and you know, some agents don’t want to admit it, but the growth that we saw during that year was just wild and not that agents didn’t work hard but a lot of it was market driven. Well now that the market is not is not you know participating that way and the market has changed it’s time where agents are looking around to understand okay, what is my brokerage doing for me? What are the What am I getting for whatever my split is what am I getting in terms of support and tech and marketing and brand and all of that to make it easy for me to sell as much real estate as possible. So I think that’s why you know, agents are taking a moment to look around I think my my I have a series of tips that I give because I think you have to be thoughtful I joined the wrong brokerage when I got my license when we were talking earlier and 2007 When I got my license I joined the wrong brokerage because I didn’t Ask the right questions. I was promised some things they weren’t delivered, which is why
D.J. Paris 20:06 we’re gonna call those, by the way we’re just gonna answer that he was promised leads anywhere is not given leads. Because that this industry,
Kevin Van Eck 20:16 you are so right, whether it’s a team leader or brokerage, you know, offering leads. But for me it was at the time, I realized that I’d been with another brokerage for about four months, five months, and I was designing my own postcards on whatever website it was that website is still around. But it looked like in elementary school child had built it and it took me four hours. So that’s when I realized, okay, this is not going to help me grow my business. It’s taken me four hours to build something that looks like you could have done with crayons and construction paper. And there was no support in doing it. So I that’s when I started to look around. And I found out properties at the time. And that’s what I that’s what I think is the number one thing for agents is take the time to look around and recognize sit back. And if you are thinking about making a move, I would first talk with your current brokerage and make sure that you’re not missing something. They’re definitely right. I would make sure because think about it agents were busy agents are busy, they’re out with clients, you miss emails, you miscommunications, your current brokerage might actually be offering what you’re looking for. You’re just not taking advantage of it. So I think that’s the first thing. And then after that, then I would I would sit back and think about okay, what brands stick out in your mind what brand resonates with the consumer you want to work with? And then start interviewing and ask tough questions. Don’t be this is your career, right? So ask tough questions like, how have you helped other agents grow their business? Ask for specific examples. dig into the details. How does this work? What is the process when I need to x? Because everyone, we’re all salespeople, right DJ? So it’s very easy. For you know, whether it’s a broker owner or a managing broker to say the right things, or they have to show you the right, thanks. Yeah. And then you can make an educated Apples to Apples decision. Also, based upon cost versus value, which I think is sometimes where we don’t make the right decision. I think, you know, there’s, there’s a brokerage for everyone, there will never be one brokerage, you know, there was a brokerage recently that said they would eventually be the only brokerage available. Good luck. Yes, consumers want choice agents want choice, there’s always going to be a different offering. So. So I think though, the cost versus value, a lot of times we’re attracted to a higher split. But we don’t always understand what we get or don’t get with that split. So there’s the trade off. So every agent has to make a decision. Okay? Am I going to be putting my own signs in the ground? Or are they going to be installed for me, and that’s a very basic one, it goes much deeper, but examples like that, because I think what we find, and I know, you’ve seen it, DJ, which is agents will make a decision, but they spend more time on admin or installing signs themselves or doing all these tasks that aren’t directly related to business growth.
D.J. Paris 23:07 Yeah, I could not agree more. I think that my suggestion for anyone that is out there to piggyback on what Kevin said, just a little pro tip, if you’re talking to a recruiter, somebody like me, for example, I know I’m honest, but you know, know that I’m being honest. So what I would recommend, if you talk to anyone who is a salesperson who’s saying, hey, you know, come work for us, we have, you know, all these great tools and features, and you know, everything that you’re looking for great. And then what I would do is I would randomly call three of their agents, people that you respect that you admire, and that are not referred to you by the person you’re talking to, because they might stack the deck, right? So this idea of of being able to reach out and say, Hey, I was thinking of joining your firm, I had a great conversation with so and so. And I just want to confirm that, you know, this is how it actually works there. And and do you think this would be a good fit for me, and usually the the agents there, if you call them at random in particular, you need to know that they haven’t, you know, sort of stack the deck in their favor, but you’ll get you’ll get the truth. If you talk to three people, one of them, one of them will say, Well, this is exactly how it is.
Kevin Van Eck 24:12 It’s very good advice, you know, talk to the people that are actually utilizing what’s there and what the value is and communicate, you know, if they could talk about their relationship with the managing broker, if they could talk about all these things that typically don’t come up when you’re when an agent is talking with the managing broker during a recruiting meeting. But I think, you know, when I say there’s a brokerage for everybody, I’m not downplaying the brokerages where agents are putting in signs or maybe it’s a higher split for lower service. I think that they’re, you know, of course, there are some teams or there are some setups where maybe that maybe that team leader does just want to be a team manager, right and so they have all the pieces in place to make sure that they can take some of that off of their agents plate so but that’s it but it’s a big decision and you don’t want to we all know agents that have hopped around and that’s okay because They’re trying to find their place but you don’t really want to be that agent you want to make, of course everybody wants to make the right decision the first time.
D.J. Paris 25:08 Yeah, and very few agents do. Some people some agents do because brokerages can change over time. an agent’s needs can change over time. And right now, and I don’t know what what the stats are, I’d love to see stats on how many brokerages an agent, you know, who’s does this for 20 years is on I bet it’s at least two, I would guess it’d be somewhere between minimum of one obviously up to maybe two or three. Obviously, you don’t want to keep switching because that’s disorienting your clients say it’s disorienting to you, you’ve learning new systems, you’re adapting and changing all your marketing. And so it’s not something that anyone goes into this business going I can’t wait to just jump jump from brokerage to brokerage. But the cool part is you can if you need to, and if you want to, and at least here in the Chicagoland area, we have hundreds of options on literally hundreds. And so it these brokerages are all in competition with each other, whether you know whether they they say it explicitly or not. And so they understand this, and they understand that they’re unless you work as an employee, for example, you’re a W two employee that yeah, maybe you can’t just easily move, you’ve got obligations to your employer. But if you’re an independent contractor, like 99% of Realtors, are you the power is in your hand. And so you get to sort of go around and talk to other firms and say, Hey, I’m over here now, but I’m looking for this. Can you help me? And I think that that is a tremendous amount of power that an agent has
Kevin Van Eck 26:36 agreed it’s very easy to move your license, right. But I think that’s why you’re thinking through it methodical and not making an emotional decision as an agent if something happens, or if someone is willing you with a large sum of cash, whatever that incentive might be. It’s thinking through carefully, because oftentimes, the incentives aren’t worth you know, aren’t worth the move aren’t worth whatever they’re selling. So
D.J. Paris 27:00 yeah, I It’s interesting. In the last few years, obviously, you’ve seen this as well, brokerages have been really throwing a lot of money at producing agents to attract them over and they sign some sort of agreement that maybe it’s a 123 year deal, whatever it might be. And a lot of brokerages were just buying up agents recently in the last several years, and I am but these are brokerages that some of them have never been profitable. So it’s very interesting to me. I’m curious what’s going to happen when some of those contracts come due. And these agents are now free agents again and can freely move and all of a sudden, maybe they’re not getting the same split that they were promised years before or, you know, there isn’t as much cash that there being a bonus. So it’s gonna be a very interesting model. I know that that, you know, when he there’s a race to the bottom that that can happen with brokerages to where you can literally just go to the brokerage that like you were saying that, you know, we’re an example of a brokerage that is a high commission, low fee model. And, and yeah, we don’t do all of the services that a firm like at properties does. And we also don’t charge for it. So it makes sense. And we have agents that are better fit here, and they wouldn’t likely be a good fit at your firm and vice versa. And both can coexist. And both can coexist peacefully. And it’s actually really exciting that there’s all these different options for agents. And so but let’s I want to I want to talk about, I’m gonna switch gears just for a quick moment and talk about because this is something that I would love to get your take on, which is leveraging what you call feeder markets. First, let’s define what a feeder market is. And then what sort of what your take on those are.
Kevin Van Eck 28:47 Sure, well, I view a feeder market as when you look at migration, right, and this has been a big term in recent months, especially since the pandemic and because of the rise, you know, the elevation or increase in property taxes across the US in different states. And then of course, there’s this political, you know, veil that’s over everything. So I think when when we talk about feeder markets, it’s where someone is most likely to come from and where they’re most likely to go to. So a good example of a feeder market would be locally the Chicago market to or from Southwest Florida. It seems like you know, the Naples market and Marco Island, Southwest Florida is a huge Chicago is a huge feeder market for that region. Whereas, you know, New York might be a feeder market for Miami and the east coast of Florida. Yeah. And so those are the I think the definition is, you know, where are people most likely to come from? And then the question, you know, how do you leverage that? Well, let’s go back. How about how about how do you want to identify that it’s really interesting, I’m working with a broker owner named Nick. He is in the Caribbean islands, and he’s done an amazing job there with a Christie’s international real estate brand and bringing together affiliates in the Caribbean And they’ve created sort of this conglomerate group, which is really cool, because there’s a lot of movement between the islands there. The other thing he’s done, though, that’s really interesting. And what he’s taught me is a lot of time feeder markets are driven by direct flight routes, where if you can find a direct flight route from a specific city to let’s say, Salt Lake City, or to Park City or to the mountains in Colorado or somewhere else, that city is likely to be a feeder market for that market. And so we started mapping out direct flight routes, because anyone that’s buying a second home or a third home or a second residence, even where they’re splitting their time, they’re more they’re more likely to do it. If there’s a direct flight route. Yeah, my and then
D.J. Paris 30:42 my parents. We grew up in Peoria, Illinois. And for some i It’s so funny, you say that because it didn’t occur to me until recently why they had this. There’s a direct there’s an airport, and there’s a direct route to to Clearwater, and Tampa, Clearwater, which are two different airports, but basically, but they do have flights to both and I went, why wonder why Pyare to Tampa, and I was like, oh, yeah, because retirees go down there. And my parents are retired out there as well. So it makes perfect sense.
Kevin Van Eck 31:12 Yes. And that’s it. I think that Chicago to, you know, the Chicago to Southwest Florida to a lot of as, as locals have, you know, they bought second homes there or they retire there. So I think the way to leverage it, though this for agents, right, I think and brokerages. So if you’re a broker owner, and you’re thinking through this, we’re doing this, I’m doing a ton of research right now for Christie’s international real estate when it comes to, okay, can we identify the sleeper feeder markets, because we can I can name that New York, Miami, Chicago to Southwest Florida, LA to Atlanta, all of those, but what what are the sleeper ones that we don’t know about and then using digital advertising to be able to market on both sides. So for agents, my recommendation is, you know, obviously, work with your brokerage in terms of, you know, if you’re a part of something like a network like Christie’s international real estate, or if you’re not, and you can’t leverage that, because you don’t necessarily have that start making connections with agents in those markets, and have those referral sources and relationships set up. It’s a huge opportunity we often miss and especially in a market like this, when there are fewer transactions, you want more opportunities. That’s one way to to, you know, stabilize your income or even grow your business through that type of referral business.
D.J. Paris 32:22 It’s the most common request when I interviewed top 1% agents from markets that receive a lot of inbound traffic from other areas beat feeder markets. So the number one request I get from, from agents I interview who say, when I say what do you want me to promote, they’re like, make sure you tell your listeners that if they have people moving to my area, I would be honored to and these are top 1% agents. These are busy, busy, successful agents. And they, they see the value in this. So I think you’re right, it’s making fun making those connections, finding realtors in those areas that you can trade clients back and forth and pass referrals over. And also making sure your clients know that you can still assist them if they’re moving to Florida or you know, Georgia, wherever it may be that you have a network of trusted real estate professionals in those markets, that they don’t have to go search or they don’t have to ask their friends who have already moved there. You already you can help them, but you have to let them know that otherwise, they might not think to call you because you’re the local you know, Chicago guy or you know, whatever city you’re in
Kevin Van Eck 33:26 a grid, you can be number one here, but they don’t ask you about a different market, if they’re moving, you’re buying a second home or whatever it might be. So that’s a, that’s a huge tip is make sure everyone understands, you can service them or advise them anywhere. And I also think it’s educate yourself on those on those feeder markets, educate yourself so you can sound and speak intelligently about Naples or so you can speak intelligently about the market in Miami. And then the other thing is social media makes it so easy to share content. And LinkedIn has really grown from a platform like that I’ve seen more interaction and activity on LinkedIn than ever. And I think there are stats out there that reflect that. But I think that’s a great place to be able to share to your point DJ, making sure that other people know that you can service and are knowledgeable and you are a global agent, let’s say you can in through those connections you make you can share their content. So that you you are showing that okay, you’re not just local in, you know, Central Illinois or in Chicago or in Southeast Wisconsin, you’re you’re you have the ability to service and you’re knowledgeable about the real estate market as as a whole.
D.J. Paris 34:30 Yeah, I think to it, we’re talking about the idea of feeder markets, which I’m so glad you brought that topic up. We talk a lot about referrals, but to other markets, but not this idea of sort of being strategic in advance of the client saying, Oh, I’m moving here. Can you help me find somebody having that information? I was thinking when you mentioned social media of creating content, if it was me if I had a lot of clients that were nearing retirement age, just as a really simple example, and this is really an obvious example. So it’s not necessarily something I’m coming up with you nicly but it’s something that I think you could you could take advantage of anyone listening is do your research on where people from your market move to. Also, I would look to where places where maybe that are up and coming like you were saying emerging theatre markets, emerging places of retirement or second homes, and you know, start putting up content of, Hey, are you nearing retirement and thinking about maybe getting a second place or winter vacation or just moving entirely? Here are some options that you might not know about? And again, that’s not necessarily even specifically real estate related, although I mean, it is, but but it’s really content that provides value to people who are in that stage of life.
Kevin Van Eck 35:40 Absolutely. And one more thing. So continuing on that is, if you can, if you know why someone is moving from, let’s say, LA to Atlanta, or why somebody is moving, you can actually then speak to the value that your market brings, and what you do specifically for clients coming from that market, and offer other other areas that might fit. So to your point, the up and comers, I remember, I worked, we have a company in Atlanta Annesley. They’re the number one luxury real estate company in Atlanta metro. And I lived down there for a year, working with them and learning and setting them up, essentially, with all of our resources. And it was great, they have a second home market called Blue Ridge, and it’s just an orange couple of hours north of Atlanta. And that place that that it is so expensive, the affordability there has gone down because it was especially during the pandemic driven up by second homebuyers. Well, there are plenty of other similar lakes and areas around Atlanta that someone moving might not understand or know about. So if you’re familiar with your truly familiar with your market, and the opportunities that are there are those those I guess the you know, up and coming markets, you can offer more and attract attract those, those movers or migrants to your to your community.
D.J. Paris 36:59 Yeah, I could could not agree with this. This, this is such a great conversation, as we’re seeing a lot of the baby boomers are retiring, if not already retired, they are moving. This is a huge percentage of our United States population. So we we have a real opportunity here to I mean, financial advisors have known about this for years and years and years going, there’s all these trillions of dollars of retirement dollars are going to be flooding the financial advisory space, and financial advisors have been trying to gobble up their their their percentage of market share, this is a great time to do the same thing for real estate, is really understanding who your clients are. Or even maybe you don’t have a lot of clients who, for example, if you want to focus on retirees that are retiring, but what you can do is learn about that and you can go interview other agents and talk to them. And it’s been my experience. And I’ve again, I’ve had so many properties, agents on the show, Carrie McCormick comes on every single month since almost the beginning to talk about, but it’s been my experience, like people like Carrie and everyone else, basically, who’s ever been on our show is so incredibly generous with their time with their thoughts. You know, not every realtor is going to have time to chat with you. But if you reach out, you’d be shocked at how few how infrequently top producers actually get asked by younger producers. Maybe they’re intimidated, they’re afraid, they feel like oh, I don’t want to bother so and so. This whole show has been about bothering since we started at six years been bothering top top producers and saying would you please come on and tell our agents what you do by the way, we’re not paying you so can you please come on and do it for free take an hour out of your day. And you know what, I think we’ve only had maybe two or three noes in six years. People realtors are tend to be very especially really successful realtors, they understand the cooperative nature of this business, they understand that being of service giving, having a little bit of that Servant’s Heart kind of mentality. Really, it sort of lights them up. So this is a great opportunity this year to to like going all the way back to the beginning of the conversation is look at the realtors in your market that you truly admire, whether you want to work at their firm or just learn from them, and take them to lunch, take them up for coffee, you know, see if you can get 15 minutes with them. And you’d be shocked at the lessons you’ve learned
Kevin Van Eck 39:21 a grid and locally there’s an agent named Tommy and there’s an agent who’s a real legend in Chicago real estate and a million I remember Tommy telling a story when he first got into the business inviting out Millie for lunch and he was nervous because he was new and she was this you know, huge producer. She met him they went out for lunch and they’ve been friends ever since. And that was a long time ago. And and I think it’s true. Why do you get into real estate? Why why do agents that end up being successful get into real estate, it’s service. It’s what you said DJ? It’s so whether it’s service with our colleagues and helping them mentor from that way or servicing our clients. It’s all it all comes from the same perspective and mindset.
D.J. Paris 40:02 Yeah, we were so lucky that we all sort of work. We’re not all of us. But most of us work independently, or maybe on a small team or large team, what we’re basically doing our own thing within that team, or maybe it’s just us independently. And we have the opportunity to see what everyone else is doing independently as well. And, and take little bits and pieces from, you know, obviously not taking someone else’s content or someone’s exact idea, but understanding how that can influence or inspire you to do more things. And, you know, I, there was a woman who had been sending me, I got on her mailing list, she’s a realtor, I’ll mention her name, because she’s such a lovely person Nicole Hodge do with Dream town. And what she did for years before I reached out to her, she would send an email on Wednesday of every week, this is such a brilliant thing. It’s so simple, but it’s brilliant. And it said, here’s the fun things to do in Chicago this weekend. And it would have like five or six ideas. And I was like, That’s brilliant. It had nothing to do with real estate. She never once mentioned that we’re in real estate, but she still does this to this day. And I went, That’s brilliant. Because this is so much value to anyone who around Thursday or Friday go, oh, shoot, I got to come up with something to do this weekend. And so I called her just out of the blue. She doesn’t know me, I don’t know her, I just called her she picked up the phone. And I’m like, I just gotta tell you, like, you don’t know me. She’s like, No, actually, I do know you, I listen to your show or whatever. But I said, you know, you don’t know me, but but I am so impressed by this. And, and then she and I become fast friends. And it’s one of those things that a lot of times these people do these really cool marketing things or branded things and and they you know, they get a lot of great results. But if it’s inspiring you reach out to them and say like, how do you do that? Like, how did you think to do that, you’ll get so many great ideas, because you don’t have to, like you were saying, You don’t have to build the postcard anymore. You know, exclusively on your own, you know, we have tools to help with that. And Canva can kind of do it for you. And some AI stuff can do it for you as well. But I would talk to the agents who have the best looking marketing materials already, and just say, How did you do that? And what’s your firm help you with that? Did you do it? Did you have a lender help? You know, there’s lots of little tips and tricks that aren’t really accessible. But if you reach out to people, they will tell you?
Kevin Van Eck 42:14 Absolutely. I think that’s part of the real estate community. I think if I can go on to marketing soapbox for a second, if that’s okay, I think you’re talking about content, you’re talking about something that very early on Nicole was doing. And I saw a lot of that from Dream town where they had, you know, the five, top five things to do in Chicago or whatever. What, from a content perspective we have as an agent, you have to be different, right. And because I think one of the things that I’ve really been talking about in app properties we’ve been talking about is you can’t do the same thing that every other agent is doing. You can’t otherwise you appear to be a commodity when it comes to the service side. But from a marketing standpoint, it’s not that attention spans have gotten shorter, maybe they have, but that’s not the point. The point is now we are being overstimulated by so many things that everything is trying to get our attention. And there’s some wild stat out there about how many ads or product placements we see. In any given day, it’s astronomical. So you need to make sure that when people see your stuff, they stop. When they’re scrolling through your social media, they stop. And when we talk about just listed and just sold, those have a place, right, whether it’s a postcard or on social media or wherever it might be digital ads, they have a place but if someone’s not actively buying or selling, and that property is not know if it’s not a $100 million aspirational property that people can scroll through, they’re not stopping. Right, right. So I think I just want to encourage agents think about what else your clients are interested in. And we we talked about this at Christie’s international real estate, I know if I have a high net worth individual likely they’re into art, automobiles, wine, something, you know, bag, Birkin, bags, whatever it might be. They’re into these things. So I can now use content that they’re interested in. That’s not real estate related, which is a term or a phrase you use earlier.
D.J. Paris 44:08 Yeah, I boy, I could not I could not agree with you more this idea of of being different and just understanding what your audience wants. If your audience wants to see your success over and over and over and over again, then by all means post exclusively just listed just sold. I don’t really think that’s what anybody wants to see exclusively. But But I understand and you said it has its place, it’s a good thing, you should definitely celebrate your accomplishments. And you know, it’s it’s you should be proud of that. That’s great. And that’s not really content for your audience. That’s more of a local showing up a little trophy and that’s fine. But then it’s also like, okay, also I want to create a lot of content that people go hey, I need that. I need that content right now. I need to know how you know, tips on how to get my home ready to sell or I’m in between buying and selling homes. So I do just want to know what’s going on. So Especially this weekend in my area, or whatever the content may be, the good news is, it can be about anything as long as it’s applicable to your audience.
Kevin Van Eck 45:10 That’s right. That’s it. So thinking outside the box, you know, I don’t think doing the same thing. If it doesn’t make you stop scrolling, then don’t post, if it’s not something that you would click like or engage with and comment on, don’t post it, come up with something different, think a little bit harder,
D.J. Paris 45:25 come up with something different. Because when I first got into this industry about 11, or 12 years ago, and I still see it every so often, but there was that phrase that everybody put at the bottom of their email that said, and I know where it comes from, and it comes from a very good place a good source. So I’m not poking fun at the source. But but because it’s a legitimately great source. But I think every so many people adopted this exact thing, where at the bottom line of their email, they said, I’m never too busy for your referrals. It’s like, who cares? Like, of course, you’re not too busy for anybody’s referrals like that? Would it be comes it the first person who did it? Okay, great. And now the 100th person who does it in your local market, you know, everybody was buying websites that was like, DJ sells Chicago, real estate.com. That was another another big fat. And I’m not saying I’m not putting those facts down, I do understand that there’s no place for that was cute. And I’m not totally, I don’t want to put anyone off. But I think you could be a little bit more creative and do something just a little bit more unique, and have more impact, and certainly certainly get more attention.
Kevin Van Eck 46:23 Absolutely. And this ties across everything, I think you have to do something different if a lot of times, again, it’s not, especially with top producers sometimes, which is they’ve got a great business, they’ve been growing, they you know, they’re they’ve got their income is solid, they’re not necessarily concerned, the problem is if they don’t innovate, or try something new and do something different, from what their competitors are doing, their business will not continue to grow, and it will shrink. So I think the the idea is, you have to you have to differentiate yourself, whether it’s with a physical listing presentation, whether it’s with a branding book, whether it’s with digital advertising that catches eyes, you have to be different. Otherwise, like I said, people are going to miss they’re there, we become a commodity we come up, we can become an industry that post just sold, where there’s just these cookie cutter homes that we’re scrolling through on Instagram, that doesn’t really do anything for the individual agents brand.
D.J. Paris 47:23 Here’s a little little tip, I want to get your opinion, a little suggestion I might have instead of just doing a just listed just sold, which by the way, again, I’m not saying we’re not saying don’t do that, that’s still you should be celebrating your accomplishments. And what I think would be really fun is when you do it just listed or just sold, or just whatever contract or whatever the announcement might be. It’s also do a little video, go into the home and show a couple of cool things that are in the home. That is way more engaging than just hey, I just sold this million dollar home if you sell a million dollar home, I want to see the inside of the cell and show me something cool in by the way, because it’s a $200,000 home $150,000 Home, there’s still something cool in that home, there’s something unique. And there’s a story to tell, even if it’s a 32nd story, go in with your camera and say you’re not gonna believe what’s inside. So this is so cool. And or here’s the best feature of what I just this property I just sold. That’s the kind of stuff that people go okay, cool. We’d like to see things like that.
Kevin Van Eck 48:18 It’s absolutely right, the word you use with story. We have to be better storytellers. You know, whether it’s like, what you’re saying is, can we tell a story about the experience we created for our buyer or our seller, tell the story that highlights that consumer and how you made their their transaction as seamless as possible, you did something that is unheard of. And it doesn’t mean like 2021 Everyone’s posting about how their average sales price to list price ratio was 101%. Yes, everybody’s was 101%. Right. So that’s not unique. But if you have a story to tell about a way that that transaction went, and if you also have a story to help guide clients now I think storytelling is an art we have to continue to master as agents. Because whether it’s helping and supporting and advising a client and how to price their home now as the market is changing, using cautionary tales using success stories, you have to use these stories because people relate to them. And so if you can do that with your successes to exactly what you’re saying, DJ, instead of a just sold Hey, I sold this it’s more about telling a story. How was this a unique experience or to your point, story about the home, talk a little bit about the history of the home or what that you know, that unique aspect of the home that they won’t see elsewhere.
D.J. Paris 49:34 And you can also talk to I think about the challenges that clients face throughout the buying and selling process and I think telling those stories is incredibly valuable because then that homeowner who might be in the middle of that process of buying or selling and they hit a roadblock and it seems bleak and they’re depressed or or they’re angry. Stories like this can help soothe the PERT the afflicted A customer because you can say, Hey, I’ve been through this before. And this could be a one to one conversation, this could be a social media conversation. But this is something that people need to feel that they’re not alone. And this is an opportunity for people to feel like, okay, other people go through this, I will be okay. So it’s such a such a great suggestion. And this is, I think, a great place. Because we covered a lot of ground here, I think it’s a great place to, to, to bring this episode to an end. And I just wanted to sort of go over a couple of the things we talked about today, as a recap, because we did, we did cover a lot. First, you know, obviously, we talked about Kevin and his, his rise through throughout, through add properties. And now Christie’s International, we should also mention, by the way, but before I conclude all of this, that Christie’s and our properties are always looking for quality agents who are thinking that they need more from their brokerage. And this is a great opportunity, you know, 2023, this is the year people are exploring, they would love the opportunity to see if they might be a good match for your needs as an agent. So I know you guys aren’t in every single market in the country, but you’re in a lot of them. And so if you have the itch to want to see what other options exist, just go to add properties.com also visit Christie’s realestate.com, I will have links to those in the show notes. See if there have local offices, by the way, they’re expanding, too. So they are opening offices everywhere. And I’m telling you, at properties came to Chicago against all odds and basically rose to number one, very quickly under the tutelage of as you mentioned two very very intelligent great guys, but did it and and they have a lot of knowledge. And that’s just just a great company. So could not and Christie’s the brand Christie’s of courses is so well regarded to a white glove brand. And it is it is just an awesome, awesome company. So I I’m the biggest app properties fan out there, even though I don’t work there. But I am a huge fan. So if anyone out there is exploring, please check out our property. So we talked about what what it’s like to maybe switch brokerages what questions you get some great suggestions on how to explore other options that we also talked about, you know, leveraging these feeder markets, this idea of how do we think beyond our current transaction? You know, where are some trends that maybe are happening in the future? How can I start, you know, creating strategies to make connections with agents and other markets? How can I you know, start to really develop that that additional sort of revenue stream by finding out you know, where my clients are going and where they’re coming in from and, and developing relationships. So you can have that two way interaction and get those phone calls once in a while, it’s like, Hey, I’m a broker down in Florida, my clients moving to Chicago or vice versa. That is a really, really powerful connection to have. So I’ve had agents on the show, by the way that literally fly to other markets, just to meet with agents to really say I am so serious about sending clients are way that I want to make sure that you’re the right person. So if you know that’s another, if you really want to step it up, that’s a great, great opportunity for sending a lot of people to a market, I’d be visiting that market as often as possible and, and making my presence there known to make sure that you’ve got great partners there. So anyway, this is a great opportunity to really explore your brokerage this year to explore you know, some of these feeder markets, also to understand that AI is not yet taking over and hopefully won’t take over. You know, we won’t become slaves to to the ai, ai machine. But who knows, I guess we’ll find all find out together. But in the meantime, your jobs are safe, because the one thing that AI can’t quite yet do, and hopefully never can is handle our emotions, and really give us guidance that is based on not just facts and understanding, you know, sort of the, the the intricacies and the subtleties of life that aren’t black and white. So, for everyone out there, please go visit@properties.com also Christie’s realestate.com links to those in the show notes. Kevin, I’m such a fan of yours. I’m so grateful that you took time out. I know how busy you are. So on behalf of our audience, we appreciate you. While we were doing this, we had the highest number of people ever watching us. I was telling Kevin ahead of time to go don’t worry, we’re recording this live broadcast live. No one’s gonna watch it. There was like 30 people watching which is incredible. So this is just how this is because of Kevin not because of me. So this is how respected this man is. Kevin’s a great guy. He’s He’s a real leader in this industry. And you know what he says is always a good idea to pay attention to because he just knows a lot. So we’re grateful on behalf of our audience. Thank you, Kevin. And on behalf of Kevin and myself, we want to thank our audience for sticking around to the very end. We love you. We honor you. We are so grateful we do this for you. And please support our sponsors. Please support Kevin checkout at properties and Christie’s International. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you Kevin.
Kevin Van Eck 54:58 Thank you so much DJ. It was an honor Good to be here.
Is 100% Commission The Future of Real Estate Brokerage? • Sam Sawyer
May 11, 2023
Sam Sawyer the CEO of Pinnacle Realty Advisors talks about the beginning of his experience in real estate when he was just 19 years old. Sawyer describes how he helped friends find apartments and condos while attending Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. Sam describes the tool they have built – Brokerage as a service, which is covers all the US, where agents can pick the brokerage plan they want. Next he describes the importance of connecting people and how the idea to connect old agents with the new ones will benefit everyone.
D.J. Paris 0:00 It’s 2023. We’re almost halfway through the year now and agents are moving around. So we’re going to talk all about recruiting today and switching brokerages. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves I’m delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer and real estate entrepreneur Sam Sawyer. Before we get to Sam, just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend about this podcast to send it over to another realtor that’s struggling right now that needs to grow their business in 2023 and let them know about our show. And also guys we have started now clipping our episodes and providing short form video content on all of the different social media channels. I think we’re pretty much on everything so you can find us on Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube really everywhere and probably a few others. So what we’re doing is every day I’m posting a short form usually 30 to 62nd video clip from one of our episodes with a tip or strategy that you can implement and use immediately. So this way you can get these little bite sized nuggets of wisdom every single day but you have to subscribe to be able to access these so find us anywhere on any social media channel. We also have a link tree you can look us up on link tree keeping it real pod is the link tree there. But anyway we will have all of this in the show notes but please follow us on social tell a friend and now on to my interview with Sam Sawyer.
Okay, today my guest is Sam Sawyer with Pinnacle Realty advisors in Austin, Texas. Actually, Pinnacle is all over Texas. Sam is an Austin guy. But let me tell you more about Sam. Sam Sawyer has been licensed to sell real estate since he was and this is incredible. 19 years old at 19 years old. I was not that mature. Not that forward thinking so I’m always impressed when I talked to agents who started that that early and knew that that’s what they wanted to do. But Sam began his career while attending Southern Methodist University SMU in Dallas, where he helped friends find apartments and condos very smart idea for college students. Following graduation, Sam worked his way up to senior vice president at Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty. So say that Sam later left Sotheby’s to help launch a brokerage called the collective with two other industry leading agents, which was eventually acquired by compass. Prior to launching Pinnacle Realty advisors. Sam worked for the Y Combinator graduate and venture backed startup zero down in Silicon Valley as their VP of real estate operations. Sam now lives in Austin and looks forward to expanding the pinnacle Realty advisors brand nationwide and we are excited to see him do that Sam, we are so excited. Oh, before I bring you on, let’s say how people can find you. So a couple of ways that you can learn more about Pinnacle Realty advisors first visit their website, which is Pinnacle are a.com Pinnacle are a.com and also follow Sam on Twitter. You can find him at Sam H Sawyer on Twitter. By the way we will have links to both Sam’s website and his social accounts on in the show notes. So you don’t have to write that down. Just scroll down to the Sona Let’s go and visit Sam and check out what he and Pinnacle are all about. Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam Sawyer 5:05 Yeah, glad to be here. Thank you for that was a nice intro. Thanks a lot.
D.J. Paris 5:09 Well, I’m just I’m grateful to have you on the show. You’ve been in real estate for a long time. And let’s start at the very beginning, because you’ve done a lot in real estate. A lot of times when I interview people, you know, it’s like, well, I’ve been a broker for the last or, you know, an agent, whatever it’s called in the state that people are listening to, for 30 years, and I’ve basically done the same thing for 30 years. So I am super excited. But how did you get involved in real estate?
Sam Sawyer 5:33 Yeah, I am. Well, it’s I don’t really know, I’m still doing it. But I guess I kind of started kind of on accident I played. I played lacrosse in college. And so in the summer, I would stay into summer school. And I was just really bored one summer and got my real estate license. And then kind of started out. So that was in between, like freshman and sophomore year in the summer. And then kind of started out helping friends on the lacrosse team, find apartments, and then, you know, started helping other people on campus, find places to live. And then when I graduated in 2009, it was kind of the worst time ever to look for a
D.J. Paris 6:23 job. Yeah, especially in real estate.
Sam Sawyer 6:26 And so I actually never intended on remaining an agent or doing what I’ve done, but it was kind of like timing, you know, pushed me a certain way. And so I started working at Southern, basically Briggs Freeman was a company in Dallas that had been around, they’ve been around for a long time, but they joined the Saudis network kind of in, right right around the time that I joined. So I worked at I worked at Southern these in Dallas for a number of years. And then myself and Jonathan Rosen and Christy Berry, who are two other agents there. We left and started a boutique, you know, pretty traditional boutique, high end like Luxury Firm in Dallas that we built up to a number of agents, 30 agents or so. And that was in 2018, when compass was expanding across the country. And so they acquired our firm. And we launched compass in Texas. So our entire brokerage firm joined compass, we became compass in Texas, we launched compass in Texas. And I stayed there for like a year and a half after the acquisition. And then through a mutual friend knew someone in San Francisco that was starting kind of a new age, new age mortgage company lending company, the zero down company. So I left and went to Silicon Valley, worked there for a number of years and kind of while I was there, I had an idea to build kind of a new age brokerage platform. And so left zero down in summer of 2020, and moved back to Texas down to Austin, and we started Pinnacle then
D.J. Paris 8:12 tell us more about pinnacle, because it’s really trying to do something a little different. And I always loved disruptors, you’ve been in sort of the the tech space, the real estate space, you are attracted to starting things and working with people that are trying to change the industry a bit. So tell us more about pinnacle. Yeah, so
Sam Sawyer 8:32 pinnacle, the way we call it brokerage as a service. So it’s kind of a play on software as a service. So it’s a subscription based brokerage platform that’s fully virtual, you know, everything’s online, lower fee, I don’t like to lead with lower fees, a lot of people associate lower fee with really bad service. So we’re really trying to build a platform where the agents can pick the brokerage plan they want, we have a number of different plans, you know, that appeal to a newer agent all the way up to, we have a product that’s a white label option that’s really similar to what side’s doing, you know, for a top producing team that wants to launch their own brand. So basically, we’re taking the brokerage sponsorship side is one part of the company. And then we have like an ala carte service side of the business. So the thing that drove me crazy about being an agent at traditional firms is, you know, they promised that they provided all these things for you, but you weren’t really sure what they provided. And they took, you know, I mean, I was a top higher producing agent. So I had a really good split, but I still didn’t see the value. And you know, most agents are on like a 7030 or 8020 split. The companies provide all these tools that you can go get for $20 a month on your own. Exactly. And so really, it’s really I built something I wish that I had all He’s wanted, a lot of people trying to disrupt this space are not real estate agents, and they don’t really understand what agents want. And so I’m just honest and building something I wish that I had and trying to build something that’s lower cost, but really good service. And and I don’t know, it’s really that simple. I mean, no, there’s a lot of people doing cloud based things. There’s lots of people doing interesting things on the branding side. But we’re trying to just build a platform that appeals to, you know, a lower end age, not lower end. But you know, an agent in the middle of nowhere in Texas, just as much as like an agent in Miami, Florida. And so no one’s really built a platform that spans, you know, the whole breadth of the industry. And the way that we’re able to do that is it’s a subscription business model. So we don’t rely on getting top producers, like, you know, we’ll take a five transaction a year agent, as long as you know, they’re a good agent. And that’s good with us. So we’re really just trying to be a platform that serves everyone let people pick how they want to run their business. If they need add on services, we’re happy to provide them, if they want to go use their own tools, then we’re fine with that, too. So it’s really like brokerage as a service, use what you want, you know, scale up and down as you need us. And that’s really how we think about it. So Well,
D.J. Paris 11:18 Sam, you are a man after my own heart, because I work at a brokerage that has almost a similar model here in Chicago little little bit different, but same idea. So just to get some get some additional clarity on like how Sam’s model works, and how it’s different from a firm like ours is, we have like a monthly fee that people pay, it’s a small fee. And then every time they do a transaction, they get 100% minus a small transaction fee, flat fee kind of thing. 350 bucks is what we charge, what Sam does is actually I even like it may be a little better than the way we do it is because Sam has like a subscription where you don’t pay those per transaction fees. And maybe there are ways where you could do that. But he has basically just a larger monthly fee. And he’s like, that’s we’re just gonna hit you once, once per month. And it’s, it’s really, totally reasonable. And if you are doing even more than one transaction a year, even just one transaction a year, it’s still a good a good deal. But anything more than one, it’s like a total no brainer. And I’ve been I’ve been here since 2011. Here at our company, my whole life is dedicated to a system very similar to what you’ve created in in Austin and Dallas and other parts of Texas. So I am I am right with you. I love this model. I think it’s brilliant. We’ve grown to about 800 agents in the last 11 years. And it was really, really helpful. We see no signs of that model slowing down? Well, I think it’ll only become more and more and more popular as agents start to think about, you know, are the tools I receive from, you know, firms that are taking 20 30% of my commission? Am I getting that value. And it’s not that the firm’s I always find in my experience that I people don’t usually complain about the service, or the support they’re getting at their previous firm. But what they but it does tend to be more of a value proposition. It’s more like, Hey, I’d like the guys at my firm. They’re awesome. They’re really helpful. They’re really, but are they worth 20 or 30% of every commission when I’m doing 99% of the job. And so company like yours is so wonderful for an agent that’s like I use and you provide tools to it’s not like you don’t have tools you guys do. But you know, as well as I do a lot of agents, they like you said they have their own tools, there’s a million options. There’s so many tech players in the space, they want to choose what they want to use, and it’s still gonna save them 1000s of dollars on every transaction, if they just, you know, choose a couple tools of their own if they don’t want to use your inherent tools, which I’m sure are great, too, right?
Sam Sawyer 13:42 Yeah, no, I mean, honestly, we like we provide a lot of tools that people are used to using, and we’re not trying to build a lot of like tools from scratch, like honestly compass, tried to reinvent the wheel and rebuild like super simple tools. And that’s where like a billion dollars went that they raised. Yeah, and it’s like, I mean, I thought compass at the time was like, the coolest thing in the industry. We sold our business to them, and we’re super excited about it. But we’re just kind of thinking about a different way where like, we’re letting people brand themselves we’re letting people you know if they have their own website like that’s fine. There’s a lot of things in the industry where broker does try to force agents to do things a certain way that for no other reason than trying to keep their brand cohesive and things like that. And yeah, yeah, and so yeah, that we’ve I like yeah, we’re we’ve we’re almost 700 agents now in like a year and a half.
D.J. Paris 14:36 Okay, well, you’re crushing my my now you’re making me feel like a bad recruiter. So the interview was over. Visit Sam Sawyer. I don’t know. I’m teasing I am. I need to learn what you’re doing and do this thing because you’re obviously doing it really, really well.
Sam Sawyer 14:53 But yeah, we’re in so impressed. Texas. So we were in a few states now Texas, Louisiana. We just launched Florida, and then we launched Arkansas. And then we’re gonna launch North Carolina soon. Wow. And then California. But yeah, it’s fine. But no, I mean, I love like your model, the company that you’re at, yeah, these, these models are just better for agents. So that’s kind of the high level thing with images. Making
D.J. Paris 15:19 it it’s, it’s so satisfying when you talk to an agent where this is like a perfect fit for them. Because even now, and we’ve been doing it for like 10 or 11 years, even now, people are still like, really, like it used to be. And thankfully the tide has turned, but it used to be suspicious, really, like you really can do all this, whereas the hidden fees were like, no, no, it’s really just what it is. And once people started getting more used to these models, because obviously you’re not the only person account brokerage in Texas that has this model, it’s becoming more popular, but it’s still, I don’t know, at least here in Chicago, it’s maybe 5% of the agents are at firms like ours. So it’s not that common, but it’s now I don’t get the like, what’s the catch? What’s the I don’t get that as much now I just get oh, that’s cool. But in the past, it was like, This sounds a little fishy. And it’s like, oh, no, it’s What’s brilliant about the fact that people respond that way to me, is that the branding is so strong that the other firms that they don’t look suspicious, sometimes the 100% firms look suspicious, and it’s like, actually, I kind of think of it the other way, personally, for sure.
Sam Sawyer 16:22 No, I agree. Yeah. You have to be careful with hyping only the cost savings, because a lot
D.J. Paris 16:30 of work. Because that’s what people start to think. Yeah. Yeah. Like
Sam Sawyer 16:33 in the beginning, we learned that the hard way. Because like we we did, too. Yeah. And then you attract some people that aren’t a good fit. And then yeah, I don’t know. But like when you approach it as like a service, first lower cost, build your own business? You Yeah, I mean, it attracts great agents, we get agents from, you know, some of the best firms around and then once they’re here, then they stop telling them
D.J. Paris 16:57 they get it. They’re like, Oh, yeah, because the reality of is I’m wondering, curious, your thoughts on this, when we first started, we only were going after agents to transfer from other firms and not brand new agents, because at that time, we didn’t have training and support in any real way. And we just wouldn’t have felt right about bringing on a new agent. And so we only brought over existing agents who really didn’t need a lot of help, just in case, what we learned very quickly was when those agents when any agent needs help, we can’t say, Well, we’re kind of this 100% model, we can’t really help you like that does not fly. So what we learned is we have to provide, in some cases, even better support than we would maybe anticipate because we don’t want people to ever feel oh, they’re not really going to help me
Sam Sawyer 17:41 right now. No, I agree. I mean, we really just started taking brand brand new agents like recently, kind of the same idea, it was like the mid to higher end agents don’t need as much hand holding in the beginning. But like newer agents, to me is a great way to grow. But like to me, we think about that, like we want to build like a real like mentor slash New Age training program, not like I don’t know, some of these training programs at the legacy brokerages are like worse than like sitting in third grade and 9095. And so we’re trying,
D.J. Paris 18:20 I’m never too busy for your referrals.
Sam Sawyer 18:25 That donuts in the office and like somebody you don’t want to talk to. But like we’re trying to rethink, like, partnering up newer agents with older agents. And really like, I mean, we’re a cloud based company, but trying to connect people in real life. Like we’re not like a faceless, like, we get that sometimes. So it’s like, oh, how is there a community it’s like we do in person events with our agents, and we have a Slack channel with all the agents like, I honestly think our agents talk to each other more than agents at a traditional firm, but in different ways than acting like the office is this place where that happened? Because even before COVID, the only real estate agents that sit in the office are the ones that don’t sell anything. So, you know, I don’t know, like, it’s just funny, like, compass in Dallas had this fancy office, it was awesome to go there. But you know, people are only they own like Monday from 12 to four because there’s an Office meeting and then no one’s there. And it probably cost you know, a couple $100,000 in rent or whatever. So it’s like, oh, no, you can spend the money in way better ways than paying rent or like I mean, I’m sitting in this you know, little crappy office in Austin all by myself. Like we don’t spend a lot on our staff and things like
D.J. Paris 19:41 that weren’t Yeah, for us. We we spend the majority of our stuff on staff, but our offices are not fancy. They’re slick. They’re just there they just are and you know what, almost, we even were able to leave ours open 24/7 Just because we own the building and whatever. But but the reality is no When he uses it even we have almost 800 agents, nobody uses it. Yeah, so it’s like, it’s like, you know, when, for agents were having a fancy office is important. And there are agents where of course, that’s important to them. And that works for their business model. But that’s a very few small percentage of agents. So the vast majority, I think, are coming around, because they’re going wait, I really work out of my home, mostly anyway, out of my car, it’s nice that there is an office in case they do want to come in and do some work. Um, it’s, I think it’s maybe good just for that feeling of maybe if if there is something local that they can use it even though they never are going to use it. So it’s kind of fun. I’ve been watching this model evolve over the years and watching it kind of hit the public, meaning the other agents in the area. Finally, there was this, you know, initially there was suspicion and now it’s like, oh, you know, and we’re seeing evidenced by by growth like yours like to get you know, almost that many agents in a year and a half is in sane as somebody who does this eight hours a day, five days a week, like, that’s insane. So I am I need to, to learn from from the master like yourself. Yeah, I’m curious on. And by the way, I didn’t mention this, and I forgot to in your intro, and this is equally as impressive as anything else in your in your resume. You were in that you were an AR 30 under 30. guy that is, that is a very, very big deal at only the very best agents I know have ever been on that list. We we usually here in Chicago, we usually never, it’s never been anyone from our firm, but it’s usually one or two people in the whole state of Illinois make it? And so I know what a big deal that is probably saying, but that was
Sam Sawyer 21:39 fun. You know? Yeah, that’s a good group. And everyone stays in touch afterwards. And yeah, some people when they when they read that they think that I was still under 30. Like, I just got it like last year. And I’m like, No, I’m not. I’m not like 28 now, but 36 Now, so that was a few years ago, but
D.J. Paris 21:57 still amazing. Yeah. It’s a badge of honor. You get to wear for the rest of your life. And very, very, it’s very rarefied air. And, and believe me, NAR who’s actually headquartered here in Chicago, and I get, I get to go there quite a bit. They take that that thing? Very, very serious. Yes. No,
Sam Sawyer 22:15 they are so patient on that was like harder than getting your passport or something like it was Yeah, you had to get a lot of references. I mean, it was fun. But everyone, should you learn something even applying for it. If you’re under 30. And an agent listening to this, it’s like, you know, it’s not just all about sales, it’s a lot of things go into it. So yeah, I’ve met some super cool people through that. And it’s a great group. So that’s awesome.
D.J. Paris 22:40 So let’s talk about 2023. So we’re, I don’t know, of quarter of the way through the year, a third of the way through the year now. And, you know, things, I think it’s the spring market and in many, many local areas, that’s going to increase activity, but we still have rates that are not what Realtors would like them to be for lending, although I, you know, there, there’s they are what they are. And that’s preventing some people from wanting to buy. We have still lower inventory and many major markets. So you’re seeing, I imagine, I mean, Austin is, is always always fun and exciting. I don’t know, the real estate market there. But I assume it’s probably booming, like always has been. But what are you telling? Because you have agents in different states? What are you telling agents to focus on this year, especially for those that maybe the phone’s not ringing as much as it was during during 3%? Interest rate days? Yeah. So what are you telling agents to do?
Sam Sawyer 23:35 Yeah, I mean, with, with the way that I mean, I kind of started out in a market that was way worse than this one, like in 2010. It was like, impossible to get things done, and people were way more afraid. And like things weren’t happening. And I think right now there’s kind of like the shock in the system because rates rates moved so fast and everyone kind of freaked out and prices a lot of things were happening but coming out of COVID prices or a mortgage rates were low but to me like with our agents are just when people ask me, it’s like, there’s always people moving. And like there’s always like, it’s not like people stop moving or stop selling houses, even if there’s less transaction. So you may have to like, work a little bit harder or try different things. But I mean, one thing I would always do is just go back to people that you had helped you know, rent a house or buy a house and literally just call them and ask them like, Hey, do you know anyone moving? Or like, Can I help you like figure out how much your house is worth? Like something I used to always do is like, it’s called free? Yeah. Do you want to know like, what homes have sold recently and not, not just send like some stupid email like actually like call them or tech.
D.J. Paris 24:57 You don’t have to meet them in person and take them out. coffee or something? Yeah,
Sam Sawyer 25:01 like you don’t have to call like, honestly, a lot of my clients were busy and they prefer texting, like, you know, like some that’s fine. It’s I don’t think that’s impersonal. I think sometimes people think they have to call. I think you just do whatever makes sense. But I’m just asking people for, you know, business and like a lot of younger agents are afraid to do that. But I used to, like, send, like, 15 written notes a week, like I would literally every Monday have
D.J. Paris 25:28 a Brian Buffini method the
Sam Sawyer 25:31 like, like, here’s a note, I can still do this. And yeah, and like on Monday, I would put 15 out and then by, I wouldn’t always like I would get it done. And I acting like I should always did it. But I would try to just write like, even like, hey, you know, say I’m like good seeing you today at the coffee shop. Like it didn’t have to be anything like in depth, it’s more just like sending somebody something in the mail. Like, I bet 80% of my business came from referrals. And I didn’t do a lot of advertising anything. So I think if you just want to, it’s really just asking people, if you can help them and the market, there’s nothing you can do about it except like figure out a way to make stuff happen. So I get, I get pretty like, I don’t feel sorry for agents that complain about the market, because there’s nothing they can do about it. Right, you can always find a way to sell a house. And like, those still will be like four and a half million transactions this year. They’re saying which is off, you know, from like 6 million, but I don’t know, real estate, residential real estate is the only job in the world where every single person you walk by every day need somewhere to live. Like there’s no other business on the planet like this. So
D.J. Paris 26:41 yeah, funeral directors, people who cut hair, real estate agents, all are gonna stay in business, if they keep working. You know, your idea is such a good one about if anyone out there have any of our listeners or viewers are, maybe again, the phone’s not ringing as much, maybe you’re in between sales, and you don’t really have anything to work on. It was me. And I’m just taking what Sam said, and he can tell me if this is a terrible idea if I misunderstood him. But what I would do is what Sam suggested is I would call everybody I know who owns a home, whether they were my client, or just a friend, and especially if their friend because what you can say is like, I know, I know you have an agent, but I’m practice I want to, I’m working on honing my skills for for CMAs for competitive market analysis. And I would just love because it helps me keep my skills sharp, I’d love to send you an update on what I think your home is currently worth. Because I went on Zillow, and I saw what they put for your home. And I actually think that might not be totally accurate. So what I’d like to do is give you my own two cents on it, can I just shoot that over to you, or maybe I can drop it by or whatever. And make that just a practice of doing once a month for our once a month once a year for everybody you know, and again, you’re adding value, because I mean, doesn’t everybody want to know what their homes worth like, but they might not think to look it up themselves because they’re not thinking of moving. And if all of a sudden they see that the value is different from what they expected in a positive way. They might go hey, you know what, maybe it is a good good time to consider getting out. Alright, so or, and then and then if they were like, Hey, that thank you for this, I’m we’re happy we’re not going anywhere, then I would say to that person like, hey, great. If this was helpful to you, one way that you could help me out is just anyone else, you know, who owns a home who’s who’s maybe you know, thinking about, you know, their their home value, like I would love to run a CMA for them, there’s no cost, I’m not gonna pressure him to use me. I just want to sort of keep honing these skills. So, boy, I mean, you could stay busy every day of the week just doing those.
Sam Sawyer 28:35 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s the truth. And yet a lot of people weirdly when I would ask them like, Hey, do you know anyone moving? They would be like, oh, yeah, like, I didn’t know that you wanted more clients like, right? Like real estate agents think that that’s like crazy, but normal normal. I’m not saying real estate agents aren’t normal sight. Like customers and clients sometimes don’t send referrals because they really think I like bothering their agent because they assume some agents are like so busy. But like, you have to just do it in a nice way. Like, hey, there’s a cool house on your street for sale. Like, you may want to see this. It’s listed for 1.3 million. And that’s it. You don’t have to like have any intention. But then they just kind of remember you and like, oh, Sam knows houses in this neighborhood or? Yeah, I don’t know. That’s something that I think a lot of new agents today just don’t do. And they think they go by Zillow ads and build their business. And I think that that’s a horrible way to go about it.
D.J. Paris 29:33 Like you can do it but what you have to realize about Zillow leads and we probably could agree that those are some of the more high quality internet leads that exist because of course there was hope. So this whole business model is basically today built on on making sure agents are happy buying their leads, however, even in the best paths and Zillow used to be a sponsor of ours. So I’m a fan of Zillow however, it I know because I know that I know their sales reps. You know if you can get above a five percent closing ratio on internet leads, especially these Zillow leads are good. But 5% is about what you’ll get if you do a good job with those leads. So that means you have to talk to 20 people before closing one. And you don’t know when those leads are coming in, and you have to first on it, it’s not that it can work, it’s super expensive. And it is just got a low hit rate. So you can do it if you want to spend 1000s of dollars a month and you want that to be your life. Or you can call everybody you know, and be like, Hey, let me run this cool thing for you that will actually help you. And then they’re going to tell and again, you know, it’s I was just at a top producer breakfast a couple weeks ago, and one of the they asked, the top producer has been doing it 20 years. They said, Do you ever ask for business and he goes, I never did. Until this year. He’s like, this year, the phone stopped ringing and he goes, You know what, I saw other people asking for it. I said, you know, my clients like me, like, I can ask them for that. And, and they don’t if they don’t have anyone, they don’t have anyone. He’s like, I work really hard for people. So he just started asking like, Hey, do you do you know anyone? And he goes, it was hard for him because he felt like maybe that felt like too intricate. But it’s like when it’s a friend when it’s somebody who’s become a friend, like you want to help your friends. So he goes, does he goes dumbest thing I did was not ask for the last 19 years. Yeah. And
Sam Sawyer 31:15 you have to ask the right way. Some people are annoying about it. And I was like, yeah, like, you can definitely be bad at asking like that. You can it’s not just like, ask in a weird way and bother people or people would like sort of avoiding you at the grocery store and stuff, probably. But yeah, I mean, it’s really like simple, like cool ways to ask, or, you know, if I were a super brand new agent starting over, I definitely would have like joined a team in the beginning. That’s something else. I always tell people, it’s like, absolutely. I started out completely on my own, I screwed up so many contracts. And I would get agents calling me and be like, how did you even fill this out? And I’m like, I don’t know, can like can you help me? Like, fix it? Because I, I don’t know, I just filled it in. And I think if you start on a team, even if you’re not making as much money for the first year or two, like you will jump ahead of people by like, years. And if you’re working with a good agent. I mean, I’m like, This is not what I did. But I wish that I did. And I think that you could have, you know, gone even faster. So
D.J. Paris 32:23 yeah, it’s a great way to you know, find open house opportunities in case like your brokerage isn’t as friendly to other agents in the firm, you know, saying, Hey, can I do an open house for you? And if they’re like, Well, you’re not on my team, I don’t really know you. Or now I just want to do my own thing. When you’re on a team, those opportunities tend to be more available, possibly leads at some point if there’s a rainmaker on the team who’s just distributing leads, but the very least even if those two things don’t happen, is you’re just going to be hanging out with people who know what they’re doing, and you will absorb that. And yeah, you’ll take a bit of a pay cut to do it, possibly. But gosh, you know, you were saying you should have done that when you started. I told and again, you had a you have a wonderful career. And it all worked out great for you, but might have been easier path. Right? So I totally agree with you there. And I give that suggestion as well to any new agent. And we don’t have a lot of teams here. So a lot of times I’m, as much as I would love to have the person day one after they get their license. A lot of times I’m like, Look, we’ll love we’d love to have you we don’t really have, you know, a lot of teams, so we don’t have a lot of those opportunities, we’ll train you and we’ll do a good job. But if you really want to get experience like yeah, maybe go find one of these big successful teams. And then you can always join us later to,
Sam Sawyer 33:40 ya know, for sure, that’s smart.
D.J. Paris 33:44 Well, I am I’m such a fan. I’m so glad that we’re talking because again, I just want to spread the 100% love out there not that we don’t like traditional brokerage models, too. There’s room for everybody. There just is and there’s some really like, you know, there’s I love all the big franchise firms. I think they’re expensive, but I do think they provide amazing quality support. You know, they do you know, there is a point a place for them, obviously, in the industry there. They’re still reigned supreme, but it is starting to shift a little bit and we’re seeing some of these brokerages with a little bit of a different business model coming in like you and just kind of just taken over and it is so exciting to watch and I I can’t imagine, you know, the the franchise or the large sort of national international firms, the big brokerages. You know what, I’m curious on what, what, how, how viable they think their model will continue to be into the future. I mean, maybe it will, I don’t know, I think it’s going to it’s going to start like when when, when top producers, top top producers start moving to and they they’ve they haven’t really done that much here in Chicago, but I know in other markets that that has happened and it’s like the floodgates just open because then everyone goes I want to go where that guy’s going. But
Sam Sawyer 34:58 no, I mean, we’ve seen gotten a lot of our markets where you get a few years of bigger agents. Yeah, I mean, I, I am not like a, I don’t have like any enemies with brokerage firms but like enemies with business models, and I just really don’t think like traditional commission split thing will be around in 10 years and people think I’m crazy for saying that but it’s like the innovators dilemma like I don’t know if Clayton Christensen is like this famous professor. But it’s like, you know, this philosophy called innovators dilemma where like, big companies are too afraid to take risks, because they don’t want to cannibalize their current business model. So they don’t do anything. And then it’s too late. But they know that like, things are changing. It’s, I mean, no one ever thought Blockbuster Video would go out of business. And, you know, they could have launched something that looked just like Netflix. And this business is no different to me, just because of the, the, the numbers don’t make sense. Like a decade ago, a big brokerage firm business model made sense. Because, you know, you had to be at the big firm to get your listings in the newspaper, literally, you know, like they owned the newspaper listing. So like, if you weren’t at Sotheby’s, no one would work with you. Now, it’s like the cost of tech and all these things is cheaper and splits are getting to a point where these big brokerages, their margins are nothing. And when agents want more, yeah, it just does.
D.J. Paris 36:29 Yeah, no, we’re starting, we’re starting to see this with Compass. And I hope we have so many compass listeners, I love compass, I actually think they’re such a cool company, from the way they branded themselves. And, and but you know, you’re seeing articles, and I’m not here to spread any fear, because I don’t know anything that anyone else knows. But anyone else doesn’t know, I don’t I don’t have any special information. But there’s lots of articles right now being like, how does compass actually continue to? Or how do they become profitable, they haven’t yet become profitable. They invested a lot into their technology, like you were saying, they built their systems from the ground up, which is kind of their whole spiel, which is like, we’re gonna be this really high end luxury brand. And we have the best systems, which maybe they do, maybe they don’t but but regardless, that they they were also very aggressive in acquiring agents, and they were giving very generous concessions to do that. And then once those concessions start to come due, and all of a sudden now, you know, they gotta pay the bills and deal with the shareholders. It’s, it’s, it’s really interesting. Like, they may have painted themselves a little bit kind of in a corner now trying to figure out the road to profitability and, and compass agents love it at Compass. So I’m, again, I think that’s great. But it is from a financial model. I’m like, How does this work? Like, how do they ever find a path to profitability if it isn’t through like ancillary stuff like mortgage title? That’s the only way I see them being profitable again, I’m I’m a dummy. So who knows? When I know
Sam Sawyer 37:53 Oh, no, no, yeah, look, I mean, a lot of my best friends are at Compass. I love compass. I love the leadership there. Me too. I’m not like an enemy of a brokerage at all. I always say that. I’m not trying to like single out other firms, but I’m like business models, I, I do have enemies against business models. But that’s just a different thing. But it’s like the, the numbers just don’t make sense as the industry gets more competitive. And then people ask me, Well, how do you all make money because they’re so used to companies having traditional infrastructure, and I’m like, Look, we make money every month, whether people sell something or not. So it’s just a completely different model. It’s like, we don’t take as much of your money, but our revenue is subscription based. We literally, when you sign up with us, you literally put your credit card info on stripe, like you’re signing up on Spotify. Like we have the same sort of thing. Yeah, so it’s like, it’s like a recurring revenue model, we’re able to forecast things better. We have we have 20 employees or so but like everyone’s remote you know, our biggest expense is payroll like we don’t have overhead and then the numbers look way way better than a traditional firm if anyone like really looks at it it’s more like a software business model applied to the brokerage industry and then we we have partnerships where we resell services we’re starting to do like there’s a lot of ways you can add on services that agents want that you don’t have to force them to use. So I want to I think a majority of our revenue over the next few years what could even come from the service side and not even from the brokerage side so it’s like
D.J. Paris 39:40 Yeah, yeah, we’re we’re starting was just so everyone knows and I again, I’ve I don’t have a reference for this stat. So I may be slightly off but it’s going to be close to accurate which and last time I saw this stat again, I’m just pulling this out of my my memory which is not reliable, but somewhere the average margin at a traditional brokerage is Something like 7%. Like it’s really, really low, which means they’re only making, you know, a tiny amount on their overall because there’s so much cost of doing business. There’s obviously the rent, there’s payroll, there’s your commissions, there’s all the marketing they do to sort of, you know, stay in stay in the public’s eye and the brokers of agents eyes. But, but yeah, it is, it is really interesting that there’s now these additional firms like ours. So I could not be more of a champion of your model, because your model, I love it, it’s literally the same cost just monthly. I just I love that. It’s so easy. It’s so simple. And you know, the cool thing too, for agents, when they do decide to take a chance and try a new model like yours, or here ours here in Chicago, is, you know, I always tell them, because I never want somebody to come in because they feel persuaded because I don’t think I don’t like to feel that way. So I always say I always say here’s, here’s the reality, let’s say everything I tell you is a lie. And we’re really terrible. And we really don’t help you. And we’re not that great. If you come over and you find that out, there’s like 500, other brokerages here in Chicago. And if you come in, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, DJ is a big liar. This sucks. You’re gonna leave a moment later, because there’s a million other people calling you to join their firm, and you’re gonna hate my guts, and you’re gonna tell everybody you know that we suck. So the reality of it is like, it’s not in our best interest to not take care of you. So so we all kind of go, you know, we’re we want referrals to, we want our agents to tell every agent Oh my God, why are you at a, you know, XYZ firm instead of kale. But we know that we have to earn that. And so I kind of like our model. For that reason is we have to really earn it. Like, we can have the low price and the high commissions. But if we don’t deliver on support, training, you know, what the agent actually expects, and also setting clear expectations. Here’s what we do, here’s what we don’t do. But if we don’t actually deliver on that people, everyone’s going to leave and and you know it as well as I do. So in some ways, I almost think firms like ours maybe even have to work a little harder to keep agents happy. Because, you know, they might think, well, maybe I’m not gonna get a whole lot. And then we have to go like, Oh, you’re gonna get all this cool stuff.
Sam Sawyer 42:04 Yeah. And then once they’re there, they realized that it’s the same or better, and they’re making more money. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s a lot of industry shifts that are making these things easier. Like, the agent as the brand is what I call it, but like, the agent name is way more important than like the brokerage name and a lot of markets and it like, you know, 10 years ago, it would be some of these or, like, you would say, the brokerage name first, then like DJ DJ. Now, it’s like, here’s Sam’s number. He works in these neighborhoods, like people don’t even really know where you work. Right? So I don’t talk about this for a long time. It’s like, Well, no.
D.J. Paris 42:49 Go ahead. I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Sam Sawyer 42:52 Yeah, it goes back like 30 years ago, like big brokerages. When this industry started, the business models were the exact same then as they are now, back then it makes sense. Because literally, the newspaper, I’ve written a blog about this, I’ll send you but you had to be at the big firm to get in the newspaper. And that was literally how listings were distributed before the internet. And I’m not I’m not even joking right now. Like, I remember my parents when I was little with like circle listings, and then oh, yeah, me too. Worried at the big firm, no one knew your house was for sale. And so like, that is why the commission split model like all these services back then a bit. And now, everyone’s still doing the same model. And we’re like launching people to Mars. Like, it just doesn’t make sense. Like the world has changed. But the brokerage business model blows my mind, because it has not yet it has not changed hardly at all in like 40
D.J. Paris 43:46 years. Well, and then, you know, exp comes along, you know, more prominently in the last five, five years. And they basically, it’s, and again, I’m not I’m not here to be disparaging on exp, I think exp is fine, obviously, they’ve been crazy successful. They’re one of the only firms and all they did was slightly tweak the traditional model by basically saying, no more offices, nobody cares. And we’re going to go more virtual and we’re going to give you a slightly better commission split than what you’re probably getting. And and by the way, anyone you know, they’ve kind of created this multi level marketing thing where you can get your downline where you can have agents from all over the country and you get paid a certain percentage on whatever their deals are. And that really, really worked for I know agents, some agents like exp some, some don’t. So whatever your feelings are about it, it has been crazy, crazy successful and what exp saves all their money is they don’t really do any marketing to the to the to the consumer to the home buyer, or home seller. They’re like nobody cares. Only people care about you the agent. So we’re gonna put that money back into you and kind of give you an incentive to keep recruiting and whatever, but your clients don’t care where you work. So why are we going to try to appease the client we want to appease you the agent they were really the First model, I saw that and now there’s been a few other firms that have followed suit. But it, it was pretty, pretty brilliant. It was just a minor tweak, right?
Sam Sawyer 45:10 No, I agree. It’s like that model like, and now it’s like the recruiting thing. You know, I mean, yeah, a lot of these companies are doing the same thing. And it’s like, you know, we take inspiration from other companies. It’s like a huge industry. But I think just the, the funny thing to me sometimes, like companies have pulled back from this. But like, when companies first came on the scene, every other firms started touting their technology. And there was like, this technology war is what I call it. And then like, you know, now we’re in this phase where, you know, ReMax or Coldwell Banker or someone, you know, laid off all of their internal tech and partnered with, like, Cavey core. And that’s fine. Like, I don’t think like a firm is way more than its tools to me. And it’s like, there’s all these other things that make a firm, and there’s different firms for different people. It’s like, sometimes people ask me, like, oh, how are you going to like, take over this firm? And I’m like, I’m not we’re not trying, we don’t think about it like that, like, Yeah, we should be different options. And like, no industry stays the same, like a decade from now, there’s no way the top firms will be the top firms. There’ll be a lot of new firms that people haven’t heard of right now. And maybe I’m wrong, but I’m gonna try to figure it out. And hopefully, everyone on here will know who our firm is in the next couple of years.
D.J. Paris 46:32 Yeah, well, they’re clearly it’s clearly already happening. But I think of it I think of it too, with like cable television, right? That’s, I mean, it hasn’t officially gone away. Obviously, there’s still millions and millions of American subscribers to cable television. But I would love to see the graph of that over the last 15 years about subscriber growth, versus people who just go, you know, I’m just gonna pay for four or five different streaming services. And you know, now everybody’s used to doing that paying monthly fee for their HBO max or their Hulu or Netflix. We all sort of are like, Yeah, we get it. Okay. We see the value there. Now, initially, it was a little little like, oh, how are we going to? How are they going to compete with the with the cable companies? Well, they served a need, where people didn’t want 500 channels of things they didn’t watch, and paying 200 bucks a month for it, where they can pay $15 a month and get like half of the shows they want. And so it’s just it’s been. And now it’s like, I don’t even know people that are actively looking for cable in there. You know, some people still have it, because they for whatever reason, they still want cable. But the vast majority of people I know don’t even have that anymore. And so yeah, perfect. Yeah, it’s so I think that will happen to the big brokerages if they don’t adapt and figure out how to be profitable by being a bit more generous to their agents, because eventually, the tide is is already turning, obviously evidenced by the success of your firm is is the tides turning. I mean, geez, if I could if I could hire 700 agents in a year and a half, I would be I’d be a very happy man. So you are you’re doing amazing work in the different areas that you’re in in, we should talk about this. So this is a great place to wrap up. So if you are an agent, and this conversation was like piqued your interest, and you’re like, Oh, I didn’t really know this was an option. And it’s not in every local market, like where I’m from in Peoria, Illinois, smaller city, they just don’t have 100% option there just doesn’t exist. And maybe someday someone will figure out how to do it. But it’s worth finding out if it does exist. And so, Sam, tell us what markets are you in for? We have agents all over listed. Yeah.
Sam Sawyer 48:33 So we think about it on like a state by state bases. We don’t focus on certain cities just because we all have our operations and everything is online. So Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida. And then we’re launching North Carolina like next week, like may first or may 2. And then California is one where we’re getting a lot of like inbound interest. And so I’m actually trying to figure out how to launch that like in the next 30 days, then you’re amazing here is in California, I’d love to talk to you. But California, Texas, and Florida are all similar markets that we feel comfortable. They are. And I used to live in San Francisco. So
D.J. Paris 49:19 those are the three biggest markets. So you guys are Yeah, and you’re in Louisiana and North Carolina. Certainly. Yeah, if you are an agent, any of those areas, just owe it to yourself. Even if you’re like I love my firm, I’m not leaving cool, don’t leave but learn learn what other options exist, because maybe today it doesn’t make sense. But maybe in a year from now, all of a sudden there’s a regime a regime change at your office and your favorite managing broker left and the new person you don’t like or whatever this is just just check out what they’re, by the way, great website. Really impressive. Its pinnacle, are a so are a so pinnacle. ra.com is where you go to learn about the different subscription models they have and You know, you can just figure out if it makes sense for you. And it takes time. For some people who explore this right away. They’re like, let’s do it. Other people, as you know, it takes years, some time for them for them to go. Okay, I’m ready, I’m really ready to move. So this is just a great way to plant the seed to see if it’s something that you want to do. So go to Pinnacle are a.com. And also, let’s check out Sam on Twitter. So you can find him Sam H Sawyer, on Twitter, you can read all about his thoughts, and learn what Elon Musk is currently up to fixing, hopefully fixing Twitter, or breaking it and having fun breaking in. So it is it is a fun time to be on Twitter these days, because it’s always changing.
Sam Sawyer 50:42 So sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 50:46 but it’s hopefully it what I what I do love about Elon Musk is he’s finally treating Twitter like an actual business because he has to because he just paid a bunch of money. And he’s trying to figure out a way to profitability for them and they’ve never really been profitable. So it is he’s he’s doing a hopefully some good work and maybe cleaning up some of the trolls on there, I hope. But it’s a great place to to check out Sam. So Sam H Sawyer, on twitter link to his website and his social media in the show notes. By the way, on behalf of the audience, we want to thank Sam, he is a busy busy man, it’s 1000s of agents working with him, it’s got to run a whole team, a company. He is a busy guy, and he took an hour out of his busy day to to help talk to us and our agents. On behalf of our listeners. We thank you, we appreciate you, Sam, you’re great. And also on behalf of Sam and myself, I want to thank the listeners and the viewers for sticking around paying attention to our episode, please support our sponsors, support Sam, go check out and if you know agents in any of the market season, send them a link to their website, they might not even know this model exists. And it is when people get excited about it, it is a really fun thing because like I didn’t know I could keep almost all my commission. I mean your case, they get to keep all of it really. So that’s even better. So check out pinnacle. ra.com. So on behalf of the audience, thank you, Sam, on behalf of Sam thank you to the audience. And we ask the audience to just do one. One more thing for us, which is to please tell a friend about the show. Think of one other agent that you know that could benefit from maybe like we just said maybe learning about Sam’s model, send them a link to this episode. And you can send them right over to our website keeping it real pod.com is where every one of our shows we have like almost 500 episodes now I’m forget exactly how many. But what’s interesting is on the podcast apps, it only typically when we show about 300 And not that I think anyone’s going back to Episode One. But you could if you go to our website, all of our episodes can be streamed right there and my intention when building the show was to have a library of content so that you didn’t have to just wait for our newest episode you could go back through so go back check it out, keeping it real pod.com and Sam, thank you so so much Pinnacle are a.com is the place to go to learn all things. Sam Sawyer and Pinnacle Thank you, Sam. We will see everybody on the next episode.
Sam Sawyer 52:59 Yep, thank you. This was great.
Attract Clients With The ‘3 E’S’ Of Great Video • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
May 04, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate professionals with Kim Rittberg.
Kim Rittberg teaches you how to apply The 3 E’s of great video to level up your video marketing as a real estate professional.
In this episode you will learn:
The ingredients of a great video
The 3 E’s of video
What to film to make a great emotional video
Bonus ideas for real estate videos
Kim Rittberg is an award-winning Digital Video Expert who teaches real estate agents how to grow their leads, revenue and credibility with video.
GrabKim’s Free Download:Improve Your Video Quality to Increase Your Revenue! Grab 10 FREE tips from a former media executive so that you can take your videos from mediocre to magnetic. You’ll also receive an additional PDF on how to go from camera shy to camera shine.
Social Moments: “YOU’RE NOT SELLING A HOUSE YOU’RE SELLING YOURSELF”, “PUT ANIMALS IN YOUR CONTENT”.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What are the ingredients that make up a perfect realtor social media video? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Kim Rittberg 1:33 How fun is this for me to be back on keeping it real? Today I’m going to be talking about the three E’s of amazing video. Hmm, the three E’s what are those good questions. First, I want to say I taught this for some real money in enterprise teaching. I’ve taught this at universities. So you guys are getting a real deal getting it for free on this amazing podcast. So I want to talk about the three E’s of marketing. So when we’re talking about content marketing, content, marketing means marketing. But it’s more like content. It’s what content, its content that people actually want to consume. We’re not talking about ads, we’re not talking about flyers, we are talking about content to bring people into your funnel, to bring them into the know, like and trust. So you can build that relationship with them, and eventually work with them. And so when we’re talking about the three E’s, these are the three E’s of great content. When you’re considering what content should I make, for my business, for my social feeds, you’re looking at the three E’s, which is every piece of content should be either emotional, entertaining, or educational. I probably said that backwards, really, most of it is educational, entertaining, or emotional. And when I say that, I mean, that’s the sort of thing that I’m saying it should make someone feel that. So when you’re making a video you should be focusing on what are you bringing in terms of value. So educational content, that covers a lot, right? Every person has their own perspective. That’s why I love working with agents, because every single agent has their own perspective of why they’re an agent, what they love about it. So some people love design, some people love the market. Some people love investments, some people have mortgages, and it really is a great way to bring your own unique point of view, because what’s educational to one person is not educational or interesting to another. But you’re putting yourself out there and you’re bringing people into your orbit so they can see you as that expert and get to know you. Because you’re not selling a home, you’re selling yourself. You’re selling yourself. So let’s talk about what makes good video. So generally, you have to think about like, why should someone watch this? Like, would you watch this? And I mean, really think about it, because sometimes I see people put out content, and I’m like, you wouldn’t consume that, would you? So first of all, think about the why of it, right? Is someone going to actually choose to watch this. So the hook comes into play here, the hook is the first two seconds of the video. If you don’t have them in the first two seconds, you don’t have them. Second number 15 or second number 30 of your video matters. Infinite to small bit compared to the first two seconds. I’m not really sure if I use that word, right. But it’s a really nice word, isn’t it? The first two seconds of the most important and everything after it is very much secondary. We’re talking about the hook. It can be the visual or it could be the headline that first two seconds. Ideally, back in the day when we’re talking about like TV and really high quality video made from brands who have tons of money. The very first frame should be super visual, like the most beautiful shot of most beautiful home you’ve ever seen. Are you on a mountain top talking? But the truth is with social media media, I think our expectations are lowered and talking head video like with just a person talking to camera can actually still do really well. However, having said that talking head video needs to have a really, really strong hook. So if You’re bringing content I’m doing giving, for example, let’s say an educational video about why.
Why high interest rates are the best time to buy a home? I’d be like, my, why would you say that? Right? It’s a good headline, because it makes me say, I don’t know if I agree, it makes me curious, I might want to click. So you start with the hook. And even though it’s just you talking on camera, that’s okay. You have to start with a really, really great hook, and then deliver what you talked about. And once you’re in the video, a super tight message. So the important things to make a great video is your hook is attention grabbing. It’s clear, it’s visual, and it delivers on the promise, if you promise people, you’re going to tell them why they should invest, you cannot make that video be about your dog. Unless your dog is so cute. Just kidding. Don’t make it about your dog really deliver on that promise, but a good hook piques your curiosity. And first, we’re talking about the good, what makes a good video and then we’ll return to the three E’s. So what makes a great video is a great hook, good visuals, and a story. So we talked about the good hook. The good hook is an amazing headline or an amazing first two seconds. And then we’re also talking about good visuals. So the more you can bring your first shot to be really strong, the better. I just held a webinar with a group of real estate agents in Canada and we a lot of them actually had dogs and two of them had ideas to do a dog story. I said, Great. I love you talking about your dog, a great hook for that dog video. Like the best dog parks in X neighborhood is the agent holding their dog up to the camera. Everyone loves a cute animal. Pets and babies are the best content for video. So you can quote me on that pets and babies are the best content for video. So this is this is really for our social media manager to cut cut this moment. So again, you’re talking about that hook. So I want to see the agent with that cute little dog at the camera smiling to camera and saying here are the best dog parks in Brooklyn, New York. And that’s a good hook. And now we’re delivering on that with the one to three best dog parks. And we’re just listing it out. So that’s pretty easy to shoot video, but I think it really delivers on the promise and starts with a really cute hook. Great. Another element of a great video is a story. Sometimes with short videos, it’s hard to say oh, there’s a beginning, middle and end. But if you’re telling more of a lifestyle story or an emotional story, there needs to be a beginning, middle and an end. So in an educational video, it’s more of one simple message. But in a story that like is about your life about how you became a real estate agent. You know what you’re passionate about, there is a beginning, middle and end to that. And we’re telling you about the types of videos that the three E’s are under. So we’re talking to educational video, and educational videos, any video where you’re educating, and that might sound obvious. First we’ll talk about the educational type of video and then how you’re going to execute it. So an educational video is one where you’re talking to camera. Sorry, not talking to camera, one where you are educating someone, how you execute that can be many different ways. But you are imparting information to the audience member. And ideally, that sort of ties in with your area of expertise, when you are establishing who you aren’t, and you’re the go to person for blah. That thing is what you should educate on. So I like to play sports, but I’m not a sports fanatic. So I’m not going to like be on video teaching people about the New York Knicks that’s not on brand for me and I cannot speak with expertise there. So you pick the areas that you are really confident and talking about. And that’s what you’re going to educate on. And in terms of executing educational content. A lot of people think you only have to be a talking head video sitting down and talking to camera for education. The execution method, how you make the video can vary. But when we’re talking about educational, that’s what it’s doing. It’s teaching, you could talk to camera, you could walk around the house and talk to camera you can if you’re comfortable walking while you talk, that creates some visual interest. You can also put be rollin bureaus, that footage that you see. So you could put in beautiful B roll of like a luxury gorgeous home, even if it’s not one that you’re representing. And then you can you know, put text or voiceover over that you know how to land a luxury home in x area or how much you need for your down payment for a $5 million house or whatever. But you can execute make the video in a variety of ways. But the angle is as educational meaning that is what the viewer is getting from it. So now we’re going to move on to emotional. So if you’ve ever watched a video where it has that sad music, and you grab the tissues, then that’s an emotional video. But in seriousness, an emotional video is anything where they want you to feel something so you An emotional video could be why I became an agent, it could be some angel could honestly sometimes it could be like a little sad, but happy in the end. It’s anytime you’re sort of storytelling and you want someone to feel something. So how to tell that story, what you generally would see for this type of content, its struggles, its overcoming, it’s overcoming issues. It is personal stories. You know, a lot of people have ups and downs. And for a lot of real estate agents, it’s not your first career, maybe it’s your second career. So you can bring back those personal struggles. From your past, people love getting to know people, I had one agent, and she sold Yellow Page ads. And I was like, we’re making a real about this, you sold Yellow Pages ads, that’s so cool. So you can bring back interesting and fun stories from your own life, I promise you, that is the content that people like to engage with. Because you don’t always want to be talking about real estate. Because you’re selling yourself, you’re not selling your home, you’re selling yourself that it’s nice to vary the content and let people get to know you. So that emotional content is done often with that always has a beginning, middle and end. You’re starting from a certain point, and you’re ending at a certain point. So for me, I started working for myself, because I was a media executive. And I loved my career. Like I love creating TV. I love creating video for Fox inside edition Us Weekly People Magazine. But when I had my second child, I was working in the hospital. And I was like, this is not success. For me. I don’t want to be working during Prime moments in my life. And so that is my why. And I turn that into content. Speaking of you might be hearing my kids coming home from school today, right now. So that is an emotional type of video. And you can execute that in a variety of ways, you will generally need to start filming B roll meaning footage of your life to showcase that. And the way that the way you’ll see a lot of those videos being done is through moments of footage and text or voiceover under it. And the last E is entertaining. You can entertain people, if that’s in your genre, you know, not everybody feels comfortable making people laugh. But I mean I do every once in a while I tried to do a pop culture video, or I’ll do something where I’m laughing at myself. So for example, I had a reel where I was trying to like do a funny transition. And instead, I ended up like hitting myself in the face with a snowball. So it was like a blooper or an outtake. But I knew that my audience is gonna think this is funny. So that is another way you can do it. And then pop culture moments are perfect for that. So I recently one of my students use the Rihanna Super Bowl moment when she revealed her pregnancy. And she tied that back to her own personal experience of being a working mom and how hard the pregnancy is. And her video wasn’t particularly funny, but it was like a really interesting take on this huge pop culture moment. And because she had it at the right time, it did really, really well. So connecting yourself to pop culture moments is another way to connect yourself to entertaining content. And I’m gonna go back to the pets concept. If you have a pet, I want to see the pet in your video. Pet videos are gold. Basically, every summer when I spend the summers, there’s like farms near where we are. And I basically make it a point to hold a bunny and smile at the camera holding the bunny. And then I film footage of the bunny running around. And then last summer actually, we had a vole. I didn’t use the content for social media, I should have it I would have but there was like a little hole which is like a mole crawling in and out of a hole in our base in our basement in our garden. And so I should probably use that as footage. But animals make great content. bloopers are good for entertainment, animals pop culture. And again, it’s a way to vary the content people do not want to go to your feed and see just listed and just sold. If you’ve ever heard from me before, you know that I am very adamant that just listen just old will not get you to the next level. But as you’re thinking about what entertaining content to make, think about bloopers outtakes from your life using a pet. Use your pet to give your message if you want to say I have a new listing, have your dog like moving your mouth and just like put in a thought bubble, you know, new listing 142 Clinton Street
this Sunday, open house, whatever, you know, you could just have fun with it. If it’s not a part of your personality, don’t push it definitely the most important thing is being authentic. But if you are a funny person, I think that it does show people who you are what it’s like to work with you. And that’s a differentiating factor. You know, people are working with you. It’s a relationship based business. So the more you can say, hey, this is who I am and a little bit of personal here is I’m a funny person, like, honestly, like I took improv comedy in my 20s in New York City like I am funny. And it took me a little bit of time to use that in my professional career in a way that felt natural and authentic because that is something people get from me if you’re going to work with me as your coach, you’re gonna get someone who cracks jokes and has fun and is not always super serious, even though I’m very knowledgeable. I have a lot of expertise. I’m you know, definitely like straightforward, but I’m fun and I’m easygoing. So I I think it is important to be true to who you are. And if you’re more honest and fairness, but if you’re fun, let it out, let it out with this entertaining content. So, alright, I had such an amazing time being on keeping it real with you, again, my assignment to you is, I want you to make a video that is either educational, or emotional or entertaining. I want you to make it, I don’t want you to tag me, and I will share it. And I will comment on it. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I love the keeping it real audience, you guys are awesome. You have connect with me on Instagram, I feel like a lot of us or social media friends now. But make one of these videos. And if you’re struggling with one of the videos, message me and say, Hey, I got stuck on this point. Sorry, you’re like carrying a lot of It’s almost dinnertime here. But sorry about that. If you are struggling, let me know what you’re struggling with. And you can grab my free tips. I have 10 tips to make awesome video and a bonus download of how to be better on camera. So you can grab those. There’ll be listed in the show notes. But you can also grab them from me at Kim ritter.com, you’ll see a little pop up and then you can just grab my free download there. As you go, I’m going to tell you, if you’re aiming for emotional video, make sure to film content of your life. If you want to tell your why. Dig back in your camera roll look back five years ago, 10 years ago, even if it’s a photo, ideally video, but even if it’s a photo, grab your old pieces of content, it will be easier to tell the story in video, when you have the content closer in your phone and you’re like, Oh, you found it, you’re not putting it on the back burner to search for. So when you’re talking about emotional content, I would say that is the sort of thing that you do really need a little bit of that archival video to tell the story. And if you’re gonna do entertaining content, you know, get ready for the next pop culture moment. Maybe if you’re a big sports fanatic, see what happens in the next you know the finals. If your team wins, maybe you can sort of connect it to real estate or just make a joke about it. But either way, feel empowered to try something new. And to remember the good the aspects of a good video, visuals, hook and a story. All right. Go forth and make a great video and don’t forget to tag me at Kim Rydberg K i MRITTB RG and keep reaching out I feel like I have so many new Instagram friends now because of you also keep reaching out and thanks for listening
What The Military Taught Me About Success • Sergio Nazzaro
Apr 29, 2023
Sergio Nazzaro a performance coach from Denver shares his experience gained as a soldier in Afghanistan and his transition into a real estate agent. Next, Sergio explains the principal is using from the military rules like serving clients in very high lever and correctness, and how an agent should be the eye for the transactions and have the ability to manage stress in order to deal with the client in a proper way. Last, Sergio discusses the importance of setting the boundaries from the beginning in relation to clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever noticed that veterans who become realtor’s ended up doing really, really well? And you might wonder why is that we’re going to find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment. We’re going to be speaking with top producer Sergio bizarro, before we get to Sergio just a couple Oh, actually just one one announcement to to to broadcast. And it is about social media. So we actually have an Instagram account now as well as Tik Tok. And we are on all the social channels including LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and probably a couple of others. But we specifically are now on Instagram. So you can find us top agent interviews again, top agent interviews and every single day or weekday I don’t do it on the weekends. But on the weekdays, we post short form video clips from our episodes that were you know, important moments, memorable moments, something that you could actually use in your sort of daily scrolling through social media. So please follow us. Tell us what you think about these video clips top agent interviews on Instagram and again you can find us everywhere on social media just search for the keeping it real podcast and hit that subscribe button and also please tell a friend about the show. Think of one other realtor that you know that’s struggling right now send them a link to our website or our podcast and we would appreciate it Alright guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Sergio bizarro.
Okay, today on the show, my guest is Sergio and bizarro with eight z real estate in Denver. Let’s tell you more about Sergio. Sergio is a real estate agent and performance coach from Denver, Colorado. He graduated from the Air Force Academy and served as an officer for six years and after getting out of the military and obtaining his MBA, he quickly realized his project management experience his digital marketing skills, his business education and his negotiation skills placed him in a unique position to excel in the representation of buyers and sellers throughout the home buying and selling process. Sergio is now on a mission to help entrepreneurs have it all in their marriage, their health and their business. Please follow Sergio on Instagram, which is at Sergio dot Nizar, that is NA ZZ aro we will have a link to that in the show notes. And also check out Sergios website where you can listen to his podcast and also consider becoming one of his coaching clients, which has become the standard dot live become the standard dot live. There’s a link to that as well in the show notes. Sergio, super excited to have you.
Sergio Nazzaro 4:26 Thank you for having me today. I really appreciate it, man. That’s quite the intro.
D.J. Paris 4:31 Well, I’ll tell you, you know, this is going to be I put a lot of energy into the intro because as a podcast host yourself. I don’t have to work as hard today. So I am really excited, because I just did my heavy lifting. Seriously, I love talking to people who have podcasts because Well number one, the conversation tends to be, you know, just more fluid and natural. But also, you know, just when people come on our show, I’m talking talking to the audience for a second. When people come on our show we ask them some questions. Just so we have some prompts of, of things to say in case the conversation lols. And we just need to fill some time or transition to a new topic. Sergio has some amazing ones, and I never ever get to them in my show. So we are going to make sure we get to some of these before the end of the show. But let’s start. Let’s start at the very beginning. And I’d love to know how you got into real estate and why real estate?
Sergio Nazzaro 5:22 Yeah, there’s, it’s, it’s interesting. So when I got into the military, I had just got back from Afghanistan. And I decided, well, I don’t know what I want to do with my life, I’m gonna go get my MBA, which that’s why most people get it. And so I’m using the GI Bill which pays for school, the government pays for school. And then they also give you a housing allowance to pay for your your your rent every month. Well, there’s a gap between my summer semester and my fall semester, it’s three weeks long. And the only way that I can make rent is I have to find a class to take. So I decide, well, let’s get this real estate license, I want to buy a house at some point. So I get my real estate license. And it’s a three week class, I finally get the money I need for my rent, I get my license. And I don’t do anything with it for a little while. Because it took a while for me to realize why I got it right. There’s always been like this little bit of a calling, right? I joined the military to serve people on a larger scale. I got my real estate license because of what happened to my parents when I was a kid. And so like there’s just this perfect storm that came together. And that’s why I got it.
D.J. Paris 6:28 Well, first, thank you for your service to this country and six years of service, if not more time altogether. That is more than Admiral and respectable. And on behalf of the audience, of course, we think thank you for keeping us safe. curious to hear the parents story. Tell us tell us I hope it’s not too tragic of a story as I’m laughing. I hope it’s not. But I’m interested to hear sort of what happens. So that turns you into, you know, we’re a real estate agent.
Sergio Nazzaro 7:00 Yeah, listen, just to kind of see the preface this, like, I’m really grateful that it happened. So it is a little tragic. But it all worked out. You know, we I grew up in New Jersey, and my parents moved down to Texas, and I was right around 12 years old. And we were living down there. And my parents decided that they wanted to plant some roots there and buy a home. So they find this new bill, they meet up with this real estate agent, and at the time it was stated income to get your loan. And for those of you who don’t know what that means, it means you just tell the bank how much you make. And then they’re like, Hey, we’re gonna give you money. That’s how we got into this HomeTrust. Yeah, he looked like a trustable person, let’s just here take all this money. And so they, they’re going to buy this home, and they have to qualify at a certain income level. Well, they don’t make that much money. And so the real estate agent tells him Listen, nobody’s going to check, just say that you make this much and everything will be okay. Why don’t they do some employee verification. And both my parents get fired from their job. Oh, we lose the house that we were about to get in, we had already put in notification on the rental. And so we ended up homeless for three months. Oh my gosh, it was because of that, that my parents, they’re like, Okay, hey, you and your sister need to go to your grandparents home in New Jersey for the summer. Your mom and I are gonna figure this out. And we’re gonna move to Colorado. And so I’ll never forget, it was the first time I ever watched my mom console my dad, because of what happened. And as a 12 year old boy, looking at your dad crying one, there’s something really great about watching your father be able to express those emotions, but
D.J. Paris 8:36 not as a 12 year old. Adult looking back. Yeah. 100 like hindsight, 20 as a 12 year old, that’s gotta be terrifying. It was
Sergio Nazzaro 8:45 and you just feel so helpless as to like, what’s going on. And because of that, because of that one moment. That’s the reason I had to join the military. That’s the reason I had to try to get into the Air Force Academy because my parents could afford college. I had one option. And it really was a domino that has said everything else in my life down this amazing path.
D.J. Paris 9:08 Wow. Well, I am. That is an incredibly unfortunate story about what happened to your family. I obviously, you know, things things have all worked out for you in particular, and has led you to this path. And it’s like, you know, sometimes the gift of these tragedies there’s there’s this gift that sort of shows up later. But seriously, a terrible terrible story there and but also a good reminder to everyone listening about why being ethical and honest is just the only only way to go because you don’t just possibly, you know, damage your own career or your license or, you know, you’re you’re hurting families. If you you know, there’s anyway, but I am. I am yeah, I’m sad to hear that but obviously, you know, it’s funny, you know, you Talk about being in the military, which is a service position, right? It’s like in the very nature of the job. And real estate, I feel is a service industry as well. So I’m curious. Well, there’s a lot of things. Of course, I’m sure you learned in the military discipline, structure, you know, lots of things that I wouldn’t know about, like you do. I’m curious on what you learned in the military, how it ended, ultimately ended up ends up serving you today? Are you taking some of those lessons and skills and bringing them into the real estate game?
Sergio Nazzaro 10:30 Oh, absolutely. I think just high level, right? Just a general sense of core values, right? The Airforce, right integrity, first service before self and excellence. And all we do. And I’ve tried to encapsulate that in the way I’ve run my business, like, I will talk you out of a home, if it’s a bad financial investment, right, I need to be able to put my head down at night knowing that we made the right decisions, right. And yet there is this pursuit that I’m on to be the absolute best at what I do to serve my clients at the highest level doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes. But I’m definitely doing that. And so there was those core values that really became part of my DNA. And I took those into this industry, because I feel like it’s lacking quite a bit. And you’ve seen this influx of agents. Now there’s like, kind of like a bunch of agents getting out. But you saw this influx of agents getting in when the market was hot, and things were easy. Well, the barrier to entry to this thing is really low. And so when you have that, there’s not a whole lot of like people holding each other accountable, except for some of these boards. And even that’s debatable. So I brought that in. And I think the other part about this is like this job, there is nobody watching you. There’s nobody telling you to wake up, there’s nobody telling you to make the phone calls, there’s nobody telling you how to get the business. I mean, you need coaches, but the end of the day, it’s you. And so what I took from that is like, cool, I have the discipline that I need, that I had in the military, and I can carry some of those foundational frameworks into this career and simply in taking that. And then run project management skills. When I was in office in the Air Force, like I’m leaps and bounds above everybody, because I’ve simply just taken that and applied that to, to this.
D.J. Paris 12:11 Well, you know, the one the one thing that that I know, we want to talk about, which I think complements what you just said, is about stress management. And I know this is a really important topic for you, and I am I’m simpatico with you I absolutely believe I went through a home buying experience a few years ago, and I’m in this industry, and it wasn’t my first home that I purchased. So you’d think I’d be like pretty used to the experience, although I haven’t done it that many times. But just being around the industry, you think I would know, it’s sort of how it goes. And I was completely up and down throughout the process. And it wasn’t all that complicated of a sale. There weren’t a lot of, you know, sort of pitfalls along the way, or the stumbling blocks or whatever, it literally went pretty smooth, and I was still completely out of my mind stress. So I came out of that experience going, Gosh, you know, people don’t really talk about the stress management of it, the management of for the agent themselves to handle their own emotions, and then also to how to, you know, reduce the distress level of their clients when those challenges happen. And I’m so glad that you want to talk about this because it doesn’t
Unknown Speaker 13:22 your business?
Sergio Nazzaro 13:25 So you broke up there for a quick second.
D.J. Paris 13:27 But sorry, I was saying about stress management, like what is stress management mean to you? And how do you apply that in your business?
Sergio Nazzaro 13:34 Yeah, I think the way I look at this as like as the as the professional in this transaction, you are the eye, you are the quarterback, you’re making sure that everything is working together. And if you as the agent don’t have the ability to manage your stress, how can you bring the power and the capacity that is required to make the space for your clients in a stressful situation, and to handle this without getting caught up in all of the emotion and the money and the potential emotions of the other agent or the seller or the buyer on the other side? And so I think it really starts with the skill set, have you been able to manage yourself and lead yourself through stressful situations, being able to recognize what those are put yourself in the best possible position to handle it so that you can lead your clients? And I think a lot of times, right, I just had experience today. Agents have no fucking boundaries in their business. They’re rude. I’m getting calls at like 10pm and I’m asleep. So I don’t answer calls after seven right. So my Do Not Disturb goes on. People are trying to write offers at 10pm and like get the hell out of here. Right like one you’re not allowing your clients to make a a decision when they’re in the best frame of mind. Nobody wants to make a decision at 10pm at night and to how are you showing up as an agent at 10 o’clock at night. And so there is this stress management where like you have to be thoughtful about the boundaries you’ve set your daily habits and routines, and then you have to be compact it enough to know that stress is part of this industry. That is why we get paid a lot of money. And I would argue sometimes we get overpaid for what we do, right. And so like stress management is one of the best tools that you need to have because you have to deliver that to your clients. And you also have to let them know that it’s going to be stressful. But your job is to mitigate as much of that as can by providing clarity.
D.J. Paris 15:22 Yeah, it reminds me I was recently I use the calm app for meditation. And I was, yeah, it’s a nice little app. And they’re all these courses throughout it. And gosh, I I’m like the worst person to talk about sports figures, because I don’t remember who this is one of the best, maybe LeBron James, I think it’s LeBron James, he has a course in there, which I didn’t know anything about him other than his name, I don’t, you know, I know. He’s like one of the very greatest of all time. And so I was like, I’ll take his course, he’s the greatest of all time, he’s probably got some wisdom, and the very first, and I didn’t, you know, I didn’t know, he was even a meditator, whatever, and I’m barely a meditator. But I was taking the course. And he was talking about state management at the very, very first lesson. And he was saying that all of this teammates on any, you know, any team he’s played for, he’s like, one of the big things we focus on is how to maintain sort of a level of calm when chaos is happening. And obviously, on the basketball court, chaos is always happening. And especially like, emotions can flare, people get punched, it hurt, you know, people bump into each other, and then you get a want to get angry and, and lash out or you get a bad call or whatever, you get tripped. And he was saying, we are taught to just not react and to learn how to manage our stress in our states. You were talking about how does the agent show up at at 10? o’clock? How does the client show up at 10? o’clock? You know, yeah, probably not? Well, unless you’re one of those strange people where that’s like your prime time to work. But most of us aren’t wired for that. And so I, at 46 years old, I never thought about stress management, with respect to how important it is for performance. I just thought, you know, and he was like, yeah, he was I literally don’t have access to certain resources. If I’m angry. He’s like, I can’t be my best basketball, I can’t be the best basketball player if I’m angry, or if I’m scared, or if I’m sad. And so he talked about like, and I was like, that’s so simple. It’s not easy. But it’s, it’s, it’s really important, because you’re right, the agent needs to show up as the professional and be the adult in the room and sort of just, I’m can weather the storms. Right?
Sergio Nazzaro 17:24 Yeah. And I think Listen, I have a very unique perspective on stress after being deployed to Afghanistan. And I hold that in a very special spot in my heart. And in my mind, because stress is all relative, right doesn’t mean what I experienced, you know, in combat was not, are more or less stressful than what somebody experiences with, with death, divorce or buying a home. It’s all relative to the individual. Sure, however, talking about state management, and your ability as a creator, to create the state that you know, you operate the best in all comes from stress management. So if you’re working on a, it doesn’t really matter, right? A $200,000 condo or a $200 million multimeter, whatever it is, your ability to manage stress in your state, as you show up to those is what sets you apart from everybody else.
D.J. Paris 18:16 Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s so absolutely true. And it’s it’s a practice, right. It’s not a switch that you flip and go Well, now I’m now I’m calm, cool and collected, no matter what’s happening around me or within me. It’s a practice. It’s a discipline. And the military obviously teaches this, I’m sure you were taught stress management in the Air Force. And just an incredible important skill, because of course, in combat, again, I’ve not been there. So I can’t speak to what the experience is like, but I would assume being calm, cool and collected is critical for survival for success of the mission. I assume it’s just number one in the priority list. Because if you’re not, if you’re not in a in a controlled state, then you may be subject to someone else’s controlled state, which might be the enemy on the other side who wishes harm.
Sergio Nazzaro 19:08 Absolutely. And, you know, as we’re talking about stress, there’s this other aspect of like, What do most agents have stressed with right now? Finding business? Yeah, lack of leads, lack of leads. And so let’s kind of like play this situation out, right? Yeah. When you don’t have business coming in and your stress starts to build. Right now you’re starting to have stress within the household right now. Maybe you’re speaking to your partner, a little bit sharp tongue because you’re stressed. Now maybe your kids feel it a little bit more. Right now your relationship with yourself, right? Like maybe now you’re having like, chest problems right now. Maybe you’re not you’re not sleeping well. And so all of this stress is starting to build. And so when a lead does come in, and they’re like, Damn, you’re frazzled as all hell, like I don’t want to work with you. Right? You miss out on the opportunity that presented itself. And so stress management, right like you mentioned is a daily practice. And it’s not just a switch, because if it was, we would all be super Zen and calm. But we’re not. We’re all running around fucking crazy. And I think that’s, that’s a really important thing because like, if you can manage your stress, when things are hard, your ability to manage your stress when things are good, will allow you to get more opportunities from those opportunities.
D.J. Paris 20:23 100% agree, and I think you said something at the very beginning about boundaries, which ties into this, which is, every agent should know when they are, you know, working at their best their natural sort of rhythm of their body and their mind, what parts of the day, the evening, the morning, which parts where are you at your your peak, you know, where you can actually you’re firing on all cylinders, you’re calm, your collected, but your your your productive. And if it’s not 10 o’clock at night, then maybe taking phone calls at 10 o’clock at night are replying and even a text messages. It’s really easy to do at 10 o’clock, because you’re sitting there watching TV or going to bed, but maybe not the best option. And also this idea of like, what are you? What are you teaching your clients, if you’re letting them message you at 10 o’clock, if you don’t want that if you want that fine. But if you don’t have a boundary people again, especially with text messages is a really great a great point. Because text messages really don’t end they start, but the conversation never really concludes. Right? And so there isn’t an a natural ending to this sort of interaction. So people just feel well, I’ll send them a message. And then, you know, if you reply right away, then, you know, sort of the assumption is that the next time that message comes in, you also reply right away, or at least, you know, maybe quicker than you would want to prefer. So let’s let’s talk about boundaries a little bit. What how do you how do you set boundaries around your business and your clients and what works best for you?
Sergio Nazzaro 21:53 Oh, yeah, great question. I think my business didn’t take off until I started to have boundaries. Like it really didn’t hit like a high like elite level until I started to create boundaries. And I think a lot of agents, myself included at the time were afraid to talk about boundaries, because they were trying to introduce them too late. And so your client has these expectations of like, well, we’ve been communicating. And now you’re just going to stop. And so I think the only reason that boundaries aren’t going to be effective or work is if you are not clear about them, and you don’t communicate them at the right time. So whenever I meet with a client, one of the things that we conclude the initial buyer’s consultation or listing consultation with is my working hours. And I tell them, right, like, I start my day at 830. And I will respond no later than 7pm. You can text me at seven o’clock, you will not get a response from me until 830 The next day. Oh, and by the way, I also don’t work Sundays. So if something comes up on a Sunday, you can talk to my assistant, right, but I will not be part of the transaction, I will get back to you on Monday. And so they get that they hear it, I follow up with an email letting them know, but I also say listen, you can text me, after seven, you can text me at 2am I don’t care. My phone’s on Do Not Disturb I’m I’m gonna get it. But if you have to get something off your chest or something pops up, go ahead and send it but just know that these are my working hours and 100% of the time. People are like, Okay, thank you. Do people be like, well, we want you know what, if we want to work past six, I was like, Do you think clearly after a long day’s of work, or a long day of work? Like not really as like cool, then let’s not make decisions and put yourself in a position that’s going to increase the stress for you. And so you put it back on the client. And now they’re like, I like this, you’re in control?
D.J. Paris 23:39 Well, and being also you’re not, you know, the setting the boundaries thing is important. Because you’re not just saying, here are my rules. You’re saying, here are my rules. And here’s why I have these rules. And here’s why it’s even good for you, Mr. or Mrs. client that I have these roles. So you’re not just saying hey, you know this, it’s my way or the highway too bad. You’re saying it’s, it’s my way, it’s not my way or the highway. It’s this is I can’t perform at my best at this time. And you you’ve set the expectation ahead of time so that they know the rules. And like you said I was going to ask you what percentage of the time I knew you. I hope so. But you’re gonna go there because you did. And I was hoping it was 100% because I’m like, you know, we all can appreciate and respect boundaries when they are set up ahead of time. If they’re reasonable. If they’re not reasonable, then yeah, maybe you’ll have a problem. But you know, you just set it in such a way that I can’t imagine anyone ever saying wow. And by the way, if they don’t like your boundaries, they’ll choose another agent that just won’t be you. And that’s okay.
Sergio Nazzaro 24:39 100%. And so that was my initial fears like, well, what if they choose somebody else? And my wife, she goes, Yeah, but those aren’t the people you want to work with. And I was like, damn, good point, Lizzie. And so like, that’s the truth. Like, imagine the people that don’t respect your boundaries. And now they’re texting you at 10pm How is that going to increase your stress? And then how does that impact the other clients that you have? How does that impact their experience? Or how does that impact your stress levels to try and get new business, like these boundaries are really important because it’s a slippery slope that can impact your other clients or your future business.
D.J. Paris 25:17 So we’re talking about really SOP standard operating procedures and having having some sort of rules of engagement, right. So this is what I do. This is what I don’t do, here’s what I’m available. Here’s what I’m not, here’s what I’m capable of. And here’s why. And not just here’s how it is, here’s how it is and why it’s the way it is. And it’s to your benefit, Mr. And Mrs. client that it is this way. And that is really hard to argue with, as you said, 100% 100% agreement on that, from clients. So clearly, it’s working. And, you know, just incredible. And I think a lot of agents, again, this is a structure, conversation, it’s having structure, having these these rules, these these sort of, you know, procedures that that you’ve as the individual agent have set up, and you’re right, this industry doesn’t naturally sort of allow for that, or promote that, because agents are kind of in their own silo, most of the time, it’s just them, they’re probably working from home, they really have no accountability, you know, unless they’re in a group or they have a coach or, or something. And boy, I will tell you, if you are somebody that is struggling out you, Sergio, because obviously you’re incredibly disciplined yourself, but you’re a coach, so you can appreciate this. Having having if you somebody that struggles with accountability, finding accountability partner, getting a coach even better, is really going to be the key to taking you to the next level. And it’s okay to be the person that wakes up and goes, I’m not good at like starting my day and knowing what to do like that’s totally honest, reasonable. And by the way, most of us are that way. So it’s not even unusual. But if you are that person, I had to do this with the gym. Two and a half years ago, I was 40 in my early 40s. And I was like, I don’t go to the gym, and I was ashamed of that. I was like I should go, I should want to go on my own. Well, I finally was like, I guess I’m just going to have to get a trainer because I know if I pay for something, I’m going to use it. And I started doing that. And here I am almost three years later, haven’t missed a session. And it’s not because I like going to the gym. I don’t. But I go there because I have accountability. It’s the only thing that works for me. Does it cost me a little bit extra money? Yeah, but I mean, I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. Because I set up the structure. So if you’re somebody who struggles like this, get an accountability partner, or even better hire a coach, and you have a coaching program and a business. So let’s let’s talk about the coaching since we can talk about right now. And then I want to jump into social media. But yes, about become the standard.
Sergio Nazzaro 27:42 Listen, I, my my first best year in real estate that I had was probably my third year ever, and I sold 52 homes, right around 35 $35 million in volume. Incredible. And I got to the end of the year, and I can say without a doubt that I was a professional success in a personal failure. My wife looked at me and we were struggling, we had to get into couples therapy we had called our wedding. I was hanging out with my parents and you know, they would say things like, dude, like you’re in the room, but you’re not in the room like, cuz I’m always on my phone, I was always doing something else and like to hear those things hit me right in the fucking face. I was like, damn, this is just like, This is not who I was meant to be. And I know a lot of real estate agents struggle with this. I know a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with this, right? Like, you’re going down this thing you’re trying to become you’re trying to make this money. It’s addictive. Like I get it, you’re trying to become you’re running your own business. And then you have a relationship. And then you have kids maybe and you’re trying to take care of your health. There’s all of these things going on. And so a lot of times we let things fall by the wayside, and we focus on one, maybe two, usually it’s your body. And then the other part of your business. It’s usually where people fall into. And I just started thinking, right, like, I got a coach. And he’s like, Well, what if you can have it all? And then what do you mean? He’s like, Well, what if you can have it all? What if you can have the business that you want the relationship that you want with your wife and your kids, you could have a connection with yourself where you can make decisions with confidence, knowing that you’re moving yourself in the right directions. And that it no matter what age you had an elite body, I was like, oh, that sounds great. And so I’ve been down this path of working on that for a long time. And so now I’m setting up my own company to do the same thing. And that’s simply to teach entrepreneurs how to have it all in their life because what I found is that when the your relationships with yourself, your spouse, your kids, and your fitness are all on point, your business will take care of itself. And what I found is once I was able to get aligned on those and not perfect I want to be very clear on that. Like I still have my struggles. But once I was able to get aligned on those was the first time I made a million dollars in a year.
D.J. Paris 29:53 That’s incredible. And I it’s not it’s not shocking, but it is awesome to hear and I like hearing these kind of success stories repeated. Because we do tend to focus in these compartmentalized ways, right? We focus on our health, and we get to the gym and we, we get our body in order, or we, you know, we work on these little sort of one offs. They’re important, but we don’t sort of see it holistically as easily. As we can see, I don’t go to the gym, and I need to focus on that. Versus like, well, if I did go to the gym, how would that impact my business? How would it impact my relationships? How would I be able to show up for my children or my wife, or, you know, my friends, my co workers, my clients, right? There is a lot of benefit to getting everything in line. And I do believe that balances is impossible, but you can get close. And if you can just get close to being in balance. Boy, you’re right, you’re well, I mean, look, you’re living proof you you went from unbelievable. And by the way, 35 million in your third year is insane in and of itself. But you said it came at a cost, right? It was like, That is a huge metric of success. For anyone listening to the show. I bet 99.9% of our listeners didn’t achieve that level of production in their third year. But maybe you wouldn’t want to, if it means you’re going to, you know, other things are going to suffer. So this is really I can’t, I could not agree with you more. Getting in alignment and taking care of it’s it’s I learned this from Brian Tracy a million years ago. And he just said two words, he goes, everything counts, like everything counts. So you better you better pay attention to everything.
Sergio Nazzaro 31:34 100%. And you know, I think, you know, you talk about balance, I would, I would challenge you on that. Because if it’s in balance, that means it’s in stagnation. And if it’s in stagnation, it means it’s one step away from either going backwards, but it’s probably not going to go forward. And so it’s semantics, but it is important. And so when you think about how all of these impact each other, I just want to make this like final connection on this, right? Like, the way you take care of your body and working out and your nutrition. When you look in the mirror, right before you get to the shower, you’re looking at the mirror naked, you’re like, damn, I like the way I look. Then you go take your shower, now you’re going on a meeting, and you show up and you feel like I feel good in my skin. I feel good in what I’m wearing your clients feel this magnetic energy, there’s this presence, you’ve elevated, everyone’s like, I don’t know what it is about you. But I’m attracted to it and not attracted to it in like a sexual way. But attracted to it. Like there’s something about you that I want to I want to work with. Yeah. And so when you do those, go ahead, no, go, No, I don’t have to go right ahead. And so you know, part of that is like cool. You’ve worked on your body. But there’s always been situations where you know, I’m getting ready to go on a listing consultation, and my wife and I get into a fight. Right before we’re on the way out. And I’m like, damn it, I’m gonna perfect timing. Great. Thanks, right, because that, you know, on that, so I’m blaming her, even though it’s her fault. However, think about what your relationship, you guys are connected, and you’re supporting one another, and your kids are looking at you. And they’re like, Mom, Dad, I love you. Right. And now you also have the body aspect of it. And now you go on that meeting, knowing that your home life has taken care of that you can show up to that with confidence. Oh, and by the way, when you have that connection on who you are, as an individual, those boundaries that we talked about are really easy to put in play because you know what you stand for. And so your business is impacted by all of these things, all of them. And if you don’t have the money in your business, then none of this other shit matters, because you can’t live the life that you want. And so it’s this, really, you have to look at it from all these different ways. But it’s really important to get these things moving forward together. And the only way to do that is to get clarity on what you want.
D.J. Paris 33:46 Yeah, and then there are systems to assist with making it not so manual for every part of your life, right? There are coaches you can hire, there are people that can help you manage finances, manage your body, manage nutrition, there are there are systems, thank God, we don’t have to come up with all of this ourselves. We can employ people, we can read books, we can attend seminars, we can, we can learn and it’s hard. But it’s the worthy endeavor because for the rest of my life, I’m going to be pushing a boulder up up the mountain every day. That’s just the deal. Like, that’s how it goes. Every time I go to the gym, I got a lift, and it’s even make it like a really easy metaphor, like I got to push really, really I got to be willing to go into some physical pain, to be able to get more muscle growth. That’s just the way the body works. And the same thing works in every other area of the life. If you can just get through that pain of this is uncomfortable. This hurts. If it’s going to lead you to a more balanced perspective, a balanced life like you were saying, If I couldn’t pay my mortgage next month, and I hope to God that isn’t the case. But let’s just say it was I wouldn’t be able to show up here for this interview very present in a very present way I would be terrified. Oh my god, how am I gonna pay my bills. I wouldn’t be able to do a good job interviewing you or if I was a practicing realtor, I wouldn’t be able to pry probably do a good job for my clients, I’d be so worried about that commission, not paying, you know, not coming in. So all of these things, everything counts. And this is why this is why getting a coach is so important because a coach can actually help you, in all of these areas figure out you don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to suffer alone, you can actually have somebody who has some wisdom, some guidance. And by the way, Wouldn’t you love to be coached by somebody who did 35 million in his third year, even if it was totally out of balance, like, Don’t you just want to know how to do that, like Sergio is the guy. But I’m gonna switch gears because I want everybody to consider by the way, reaching out to Sergio because he is he is he is the man, go to his website, become the standard dot live fill out a form, his team is going to contact you to see if you’d be a good fit for his coaching programs, listen to his podcast, as well become the standard. We’ll have links to that all in the show notes. You are a big social media guy. So I’m going to switch gears just for a moment. And I want to talk about the role of social media, that for realtors, what you found that’s been working, maybe mistakes you see agents making. So let’s talk about social media tell us how that applies to your business.
Sergio Nazzaro 36:09 The way I look at this is right, like it’s all leverage. When I first got in, it was like you got to cold call, you got to door knock, you got to do all this. And I was like, I tried it. And in the first seven months, I was like, I haven’t sold a single home. And none of this seems to be working. Right? Okay. Not that there’s not value to making phone calls. But I just I couldn’t keep up with the pace. And so I saw social media and I was like, Listen, you can put up these posts, it gets 100 likes or you put up this video and it gets 2000 views. I started to ask myself, would I ever make 2000 phone calls in a day?
D.J. Paris 36:45 I think it will be a long day. Be a long day.
Sergio Nazzaro 36:48 Right? You want to talk about being on balance? Right? And so I saw the leverage there. And I was like, Cool. Well, why is this so important to me, because people love stories. They love your story. They love your client story. They love information that’s delivered in an in a fun way. Social media is a really powerful tool, because it allows you to control whatever it is that you want to control and how you put it out there. It allows people to connect with you build trust with you that know like and trust becomes really easy when you not only just talk about real estate, but you allow them to see part of your life. And so the moment I started really getting into into creating content on a regular basis, nothing happened for 18 months. And then the year after that I got 24 deals from Instagram. And I was like, huh, I didn’t pay for a single ad. All I paid for was editing and distribution of my content.
D.J. Paris 37:41 Yeah, it’s all good, because the time and energy it took and I’m sorry, I missed how many months before you got your first deal for 1818? And then you got 24 deals that following year or that next 12 months? Yeah, well, those results clearly speak for themselves. How often were you posting and what type of content Did you find worked best for your audience?
Sergio Nazzaro 38:06 Yeah, so I think people want to see you. There is this speaker that came to our conference. Her name’s Chelsea pizza, go follow her on Instagram. She’s a really good coach. She said your brand is not a house. Nobody really gives a shit about your under contracts or your new listings or anything like that. Yes, you should promote them. But that’s not what’s gonna get them to like you. Because you DJ are not just a real estate agent, right? You’re, you’re more than that. And so people want to know what you like to do. I like to snowboard mountain bike, go to concerts, right like to be outside. I’ve done more listing and buyer’s consultations, mountain biking and skiing than I’ve done, like in an actual office setting. And so people are able to connect with me, I let them see a glimpse into my life. And so I think it’s really just about telling my story and then also telling my clients story through video.
D.J. Paris 38:56 Got it? So curious. So now a question I’m, I’m hearing these ghost questions coming in from from our listeners. And hopefully this is this is one that that I think a lot of our listeners might be having, which is, you know, this concern of, I’m afraid to show too much of myself on social because I want to keep certain things private. And I see agents that just, I’m at the gym. Now I’m at Starbucks. Now I’m doing all of these things. Now I’m with my kids. Here’s my dog. Curious. And again, everyone’s sort of, you know, the barometer for what everyone wants to share is different for each person. But how do you think about what you were willing to share and what you want to keep just for you and your family?
Sergio Nazzaro 39:39 The way I look at this is all of the things that have been in my life
can be a beacon of light to somebody else. And so the path I’ve chosen is I’m pretty much a open book that feels comfortable to me, right I feel comfortable talking about my struggles in my marriage that we used to have, I feel comfortable talking about the success that I’ve had, I used to be really afraid to talk about that. I feel comfortable sharing things about, you know, vacations I’m going on, or what I’m doing in the morning at the gym, all of those feel very natural to me. And so when you talk about like, well, what should I share? And what shouldn’t I share? I think there’s this aspect of like, well, what feels right to you? And then maybe take a moment to feel like, okay, this feels right to me, and then ask yourself this question. Are you playing it safe? Because you’re scared? Or do you truly not feel comfortable sharing it? Right? And
D.J. Paris 40:36 those are two very, very different things. There’s this, there’s this, Hey, I really want to take this leap. But I’m scared. And that’s an end, you need to get honest about that and say, no, okay, this is really a fear thing. And you know, what you can evaluate whether it’s a legitimate fear or whether it’s a fear to overcome, that’s, that’s fine, but just identifying, okay? The truth is, I’m actually afraid to show people I’m into, you know, weaving because I don’t think that’s masculine or something or, or I’m worried about how that might be perceived, or whatever, whatever, you know, your thing is that you don’t, but it’s like really important to you. It’s and the other thing, so the one thing is about figuring out, what is just legitimate fear of like, you know, maybe this would be better not to share, if my wisest self says, you know, don’t share that, because you want to keep that for yourself or for your close friends. And then there’s the other part that’s like, No, I’m just a little bit scared of how it might be perceived, like the fear of other people judging me. That’s a different thing. And that’s what what we’re talking about is like, you know, it’s funny. So you had mentioned going into couples therapy prior to your, your marriage prior to getting married. And even if you were still in couples therapy, I don’t think any rational human being would would be judgmental of that in a negative way. I think they would be like, Wow, that’s awesome. That him he and Lizzie went, you know, went into counseling to figure things out and to get the help that they need. And, you know, gosh, probably most couples need couples therapy. But just this idea of sharing it, what it does is it’s vulnerable, it’s courageous to share it. Because again, you are putting yourself out to possibly be judged and have somebody go, Well, what’s wrong with with their marriage or whatever, you’re willing to share it? It obviously worked out well for you guys. But even if it hadn’t worked out, well, the the willingness to share what’s hard, is what creates intimacy. It’s what creates this connection. Now I feel more connected to you, because I’m a therapy guy. I’ve been in therapy forever. So I like you more now. Because you’re like me, you’re a therapy guy. That’s cool. You’re a coach, I have a coach like all of these things. sharing these vulnerabilities typically have the reverse effect, we might have some fear about, oh, I’ll get judged. I’ll get rejected. People will laugh at me whatever. The truth is, that almost never happens. Maybe if you’re a child and you’re in the playground, maybe but as an adult, people just feel more endearing to you. They want to they feel like this. This guy’s sharing his heart.
Sergio Nazzaro 42:58 Yeah. And listen, I think there’s, there’s part of that, too, is like, if you don’t feel comfortable showing your face on camera, then right? If you don’t feel comfortable writing that sort of podcast and speak, there’s so many different ways to do it. And not one way is better than the other. But there’s something really special about being able to see another human being on the other side of the camera. Have them experience something, and you’ll be able to look at that and be like, oh, man, I remember the first time that happened to me. Right? I should probably reach out or I appreciate that. And they share it with somebody else. Like you don’t know the impact. And so I think there is this aspect of like, if you’re afraid to do it, and I’ll share this with you. I was one I used to be afraid of public speaking. And two, I was afraid to get on camera. And so how I got over it was I did 30 days of going live on Instagram. And I’ll never forget, I shot the first one, I put the phone down. I said every possible swear word you could possibly say throw it on the bed. And I went back to the conference. I didn’t come back and check it for six hours. I came back and like three people that watched it, it didn’t even matter. Right? And so I just think there’s this part where you like, you think that people are gonna judge you? And the reality is, it’s like 95% of people are consumers. 5% are creators. Be a part of the creative group.
D.J. Paris 44:13 Yeah, and even if nothing else, you can share parts of you that will create connections with people who what you’re saying might be exactly what they needed to hear or see that particular day. And that is something that is very invisible and hard to sort of think about ahead of time, but if you think hey, you know if I’m gonna post myself coming out of the gym, saying gosh, I just had a great workout. I’m so proud that I went and did this. It’s not a brag. I mean, it could be a brag if you’re bragging, but if you’re just sharing Well, I just did something really hard and now I’m off to work. You know, that might be what somebody needs to see to get them motivated to get in the gym or, and it doesn’t mean you only have to share success to like I’m always impressed and it’s so rare to see. But when people post their cheer challengers on social media that boy, that is that is a real courageous act as well. But I love that because it’s like we we don’t really relate to perfection, we only relate to imperfection. So this idea of going like, wow, like there was there’s an agent, I can’t help. I don’t have it in front of me. But there’s an agent that literally posts all their failures that they have as a realtor, which I love. And I’m like, boy, that’s That is incredible. And they’re like, yeah, it was the best decision I ever made. Because now people, now people feel like they can trust me, but I’m willing to share the imperfection of my life. And you know, because it’s all imperfection anyway, you might as well share it. It’s all everything’s imperfect
Sergio Nazzaro 45:38 100%. And, you know, I’ll share this, like probably the most vulnerable moment that I’ve had probably in 2023. My wife and I had a miscarriage about a month and a half ago. And it was really, really hard. And as part of my coaching company, I’m trying to let people see that your ability to be vulnerable and process these emotions have an impact. We’ve talked about all this right, TJ, I get on, and I share what it’s like to manage miscarriage as a man. Nobody talks about it. Right? I’ve never had so many people reach out share their stories with me. We have conversations. I’m talking like hundreds of people. And now I have a deep connection with these people about a mutual experience that nobody wanted to talk about. Yeah. Was that hard for me? Yes. Am I telling you to go do it? No, I’m just saying that like sometimes when you open up about something that you’ve experienced, and now you can start to navigate some conversations, the relationships that you build, right, you don’t know what’s going to come from that. And I’ll tell you this, two of those people have already reached out to ask me to help them buy a home. Now, I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation between the miscarriage conversation and real estate. But what I am saying is there is a direct correlation between your authenticity and your vulnerability and you’re able to communicate that and building deep connections with people that will eventually lead you and probably working with you.
D.J. Paris 46:59 Yeah, and by the way, sorry, sorry. So sorry to hear about about the miscarriage.
Sergio Nazzaro 47:04 I’m not trying to draw sad bombs on you. I just thought I’d share that.
D.J. Paris 47:07 No, I look it’s it’s not it’s not even sad. It’s it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a tragedy for sure. But what what what did you sharing that with me? Do just for me, okay, so I’m thinking about our relationship, which is a new relationship with you. We’ve only been, we’ve only known each other for about 45 minutes, I feel much more connected to you, after sharing what happened to your family what happened, you know, to or to your parents now, now to you. I feel more connected, we connect over challenge much more than we connect over over victory. Right. And so and we know that there’s, you know, I mean, miscarriages is such a common thing. Again, nobody talks about it, maybe close friends and family know, when when it happens. It’s happened in my family as well. And it’s something that people don’t really get the support they need outside of their friends and family, it’s hard to talk about, and people just don’t because it’s maybe there’s embarrassment, maybe there’s shame, maybe there’s just, I don’t want to burden people with this information, whatever it might be. The reality of it is people want to connect with you. And they connect with you through honesty and vulnerability, like you just demonstrated for our entire audience. So I commend you on that courage. And and really, just amazing. I could I share my toughest moment and 2023 No, I don’t think I could yet. So I don’t think I’m I can find that courage today to do that. So you’ve now inspired me to maybe think about finding that courage for the future. So I admire you for doing something that I can’t even do myself today. But that’s why you’re a coach. That’s why you’re so good at what you do. In social media. Oh, well, we just talked about we got I think we got through everything on social media, I wanted to ask about your your sphere of influence, and talking about the importance of how to cultivate and deepen those relationships, obviously, through vulnerability, like you’re talking about that, that certainly does it. But how else are you staying in touch with your sphere in a way that isn’t just hey, look at this new home I just sold, which is what we were talking about in social media, you know, just the just listed just sold just under contract. That’s fine. It’s great. It’s it’s wonderful. It’s a trophy that you can post, but probably not exactly what the clients always want to see from you exclusively.
Sergio Nazzaro 49:24 No, yeah. Who doesn’t care about new listings, people who just bought a home, right? So, you know, the way I look at this is every client has their story. And I have the reason I follow my clients on social media is I want to see how their life plays out. Because I care about them. I care about most of them. Some of them, right were terrible clients. I’m like, it is what it is. But the majority of them I want to I have a good relationship with them. And so I try to stay in tune with their story using social media. But I also try to create the relationship and continue Did nurse relationship in a lot of ways? One of them is, I always send them home anniversary gifts every single year. They get that for me. And then halfway through the year, I also send them cookies just because I wanted them to have like something sweet like why not, you know. And then on top of that, like during they’re twice a year, I’ll give them a call just to check in, see how they’re doing like just Hey, what’s up? One time a year also do what I like to call a real estate review. So think of it like as a CMA, we’re talking about their biggest investment, I refer to it as their annual checkup on their home, right? And then Thanksgiving, right? Like, this is kind of like my favorite time of the year, right? You have October, November, December, October, I invite them to my client appreciation party, November, all of them get home baked apple pies. And by homebaked, as you mean, like from a local bakery? Sure, then in December, they get my Christmas card. And like, it’s me and my wife and our newest son, Luca, who turns one on Sunday. And a lot of people are like, that seems really intimate. And I’m like, but it’s my family. And I want them to like I want to see them to see what’s going on. And so what’s been beautiful about that is like people call me on my birthday. No, right? People are sending me their Christmas cards, right? People are sending me gifts. And it’s interesting. And it’s like, I wasn’t doing it for that. But what I love about it is that, like, I know, we have an actual relationship now. And so I always tell my clients, our relationship actually begins after closing. And so I mean, that
D.J. Paris 51:31 will and you have a, you have processes in place to deliver on that promise, which don’t do any. Right. Right. But this idea is like, you know, you know, every year you’re going to be having this annual review, you’re gonna be calling them to other times throughout the year, you’re going to be you know, delivering things for them over the holiday season. And, and most importantly, you’re checking in on their social media to learn what they’re doing. So this way, when you do call them or you do reach out, you’re like, Hey, I saw you were just in Cancun, over you know, the last weekend like, how was that that looked awesome. Like you actually gives you things to talk about when you want to reach out because you know, what’s going on in their life? Thank God for social media for that, that aspect of it.
Sergio Nazzaro 52:12 Yeah, I think I just, you know, people, because I coach, I have coached some real estate agents at AZ to the director of coaching and training at etc. And a lot of agents get worked up and the fact that like, well, I don’t want to annoy my clients, I was like, would you annoy your friend, if you saw them go on vacation? You ask them how it was? And they’re like, No, I was like, so you think these people are just different? I’ll see if it feels right to you. And I tell them this, your intent is your compass. If your intent is simply to ask about their vacation, then that’s your compass. And that’s okay.
D.J. Paris 52:45 Yeah. I’ve always said, especially like, in the dating scene, sometimes, you know, men, I get, I’m a man. So I think from a man’s perspective, men who are like wanting to approach a woman, they’re like, I don’t want to be creepy. And I’m like, here’s the rule. If you’re not a creep, you don’t have to worry about it. If you’re a creep, then yeah, don’t approach a woman. But if you’re not a creepy person, you don’t have to worry because people understand that you’re not a creepy person, or they’ll figure that out really quickly. You don’t have to be too concerned. Like you were said most people aren’t thinking about you anyway, right? They’ve got their own problems, their own shit going on in their mind, and they just want to get through the day. But but the point is, they’re not really thinking about about you very much. But, but you can demonstrate a tremendous amount of care about them by by learning what’s going on in their lives and, you know, paying attention and giving them feedback that you know, what, what’s going on with them. And, yeah, all of this makes, you know, we’re gonna I’m gonna cut this episode off in just a moment, because there’s so much more I want to get to and I would have you on for another hour. And I’m going to have you back because this is this is all incredible. And Sergio, Sergio is just incredible person, you know, served our country has been incredibly successful in real estate is willing to start teaching other people about this. He’s doing this at his own company. He has his own podcast, he has also, you know, this, this coaching business that I want you guys all to explore. First, I want you to listen to his podcast and also check out his his coaching company. So I want everybody to go to become the standard dot live link to that will be in the show notes. And I want you to consider learning more about Sergios coaching program. God, you know, so many coaches in this industry have never actually sold real estate. So, so why don’t go to somebody who actually knows what they’re doing has actually been in the trenches, and also doesn’t just focus on business, he can tell you the pitfalls of focusing exclusively on business and what that does to every other part of your life. So he can actually help you holistically and really iron out any of the rough edges in your life and we all have rough edges. It’s all part of the deal. And so having somebody that can help guide you through those rough edges. I mean, our best thinking got us to those rough edges. Is ourselves right? So we could FASAB are all our own problems ourselves, we would guess what we can’t, but we can get help when we need it. And Sergio is there to help you. So listen to his podcast become the standard, go visit his website, become the standard dot live, check out his coaching program, follow him on Instagram, watch what he’s doing and consider getting through some of those fears yourself. Guess what, nobody likes the way they look or sound on audio or video. Nobody likes it. So if you’re like, I don’t like the way look and sound join the Club. We’re all in that same club. But you can still get through it and actually serve your clients better by putting yourself a little bit out there and somebody like Sergio can help find help you find the confidence to do that. So follow me on Instagram, Sergio dot Nizar na ZZ Aaro become the standard dot live is where you go to learn all things. Sergio. And by the way, if you’re a realtor who has clients that maybe has a vacation home, in, in Colorado, a lot of people do, he would love those opportunities to connect with you, because maybe he’d be a great resource for your clients and vice versa, you know, so reach out to him and connect with him. He’s a great guy obviously served our country and just a wonderful, wonderful realtor. So Sergio, we are so grateful to have you on the show. On behalf of the audience, we say thank you for your service to the country. Thank you for your service to this podcast. We are thrilled and I’m having you back. So this is not the end. This is the beginning of our relationship because you’re you’re, you’re amazing and I want you back. And on behalf of Sergio and myself, our audience is also amazing. They are the reason we keep the show going. You’re the reason we have sponsors. You’re the reason that we’ve done almost 500 episodes. Thank you. Thank you. We love our listeners, our viewers, please tell a friend. That’s the only thing I’ll ever beg of you. Tell one other Realtor in your office about the show we would greatly appreciate it. Tell them about Sergio as well get you know, check out his podcast become the standard and anyone who else might need coaching and guess what most brokerages aren’t even doing coaching anymore. So you need to find somebody like Sergio to do that. So reach out to him on behalf of the audience. Thank you Sergio and behalf of the Sergio. We thank the audience for being a being on board with us. So thanks everyone. We will see you on the next episode. Thank you Sergio.
Sergio Nazzaro 57:13 Thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful
How Do You Sell Ultra High Net Worth Listings? • George Doulamis
Apr 28, 2023
George Doulamis with Blankenship Group talks about his unique experience and transition from property management to real estate agent. George discusses how his experience as property manager helped him to get connections. George explains the importance of being forthright and maintaining the key communications skills with the clients and shows his strategies on how to sell a home. Lastly, he emphasized that a good agent should have innovative and creative ideas for selling a home, and why you should not be pushy to the clients, just wait and listen.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What’s different about selling a $300,000 property versus a $30 million property? We’re gonna find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Top Producer George dilemmas before we get to George just a couple of reminders first, actually this is a new thing we finally now have an Instagram account. I know it’s embarrassing I have had social media experts on the show for like six years and off air they were like why do you not have Instagram finally we do and not only do we have an Instagram account we’re actually doing some cool stuff with it. So I want everyone to grab their their device. Go check out Instagram and look up top agent interviews. That is our handle top agent interviews and every single day we post a short form video clip cold from one of our episodes and that has a short little take little tactic Tip of the Day. We do that every weekday although I think I missed yesterday but anyway most weekdays I have a new one there so top agent interviews on Instagram We are also on Tik Tok LinkedIn YouTube Twitter, Facebook, probably everywhere else but we post a post them everywhere so find us you can just whatever you know social media app you use search for keeping it real podcast hit that subscribe button. But the reels and the stories that we’ve been promoting the short form video clips have just gone gangbusters. I really wasn’t expecting so many people to to really be drawn to that but it seems to be scratching an itch for our listeners. We are so grateful to you. So hopefully you can find some value there. So follow us on Instagram top agent interviews but you know what, that’s the only thing I really wanted to get through today because we need to get to the main event my conversation with Georgia lamas.
Today my guest is George blomus from the Blankenship route, angle and Volkers in Destin and the 30 a corridor in Florida. Let me tell you more about George George was born in Massachusetts, 30 minutes north of Boston. Gosh, I love I love the Northeast. But aside from that he was he also he really grew up in Florida as a child but moved back to the Boston area as a teenager, parents were both blue collar and passed on their work ethic. Georgia unfortunately lost his father when he was 16. And this hurt but it helped him understand loss early in life. Soon after his father’s passing, George began to work part time for his older cousin managing his apartment buildings. And eventually, George relocated to South Florida and worked for Ritz Carlton. This was a real education in the world of service and how to apply to anything he would do in his future endeavors. From there, George would relocate to Destin, Florida, the 38 corridor, short time spent a short time as a property manager which led to the transition to being a full time realtor. Now we’re going to get into George’s story because it really doesn’t even stop there. But for everyone who is listening watching, I would like you to please right now. Go visit Instagram and follow George it’s George dilemmas are II don’t worry about spelling that. I’ll spell it right now but it will also be in our show notes but it’s George do you LAMISR e so again link to that in the show notes. Follow him on Instagram. George, such a pleasure to have you.
George Doulamis 5:05 Yeah, I’m super excited. I can’t wait to kind of tell my story, see if I can help out. Anybody will, wanting to listen, and it should be exciting.
D.J. Paris 5:13 Well, I have the only time I’ve been to your area was back in high school where many people from my hometown, which is pure Illinois, which is like Central Illinois, would go down for spring break to Panama City. So that was the closest I got. And that’s the last time I’ve actually been in that area. However, I have had several different people on our show from that area, the 38. area, the destin area, and oh my gosh, I cannot believe how much real estate transacts there, and the price points and just a whole nother world that is really down there. So I’m excited to hear about that. And how you. And also, by the way, highly competitive for anyone listening if you think your area is tough, which I’m sure is, oh, that area is because the price points are so high. There are a lot of agents who are fighting for that business. And George is one of the very successful ones down there. So we’re excited to have George you on the show. But let’s start at the very beginning. Like how did you get into real estate?
George Doulamis 6:12 Yeah, good question. So like I said, you, you were nicely to describe my background, really, when it started was the Ritz Carlton, I started learning service. And then as I was there, I think that was postcrash back in like 11 or 12 when the economy was starting to come back and South Florida. I wanted to move on and manage manage properties, manage associations. So I ended up trying I ended up finding a job in Destin. It’s funny when I got the phone call over the interview, I said with it, where the heck is Destin, Florida when I was in South Florida. We made the trip we loved it. Stay up for a weekend became property manager. Every weekend, though, I would get phone calls from agents. Hey, can you tell me everything about the association that condos? When
D.J. Paris 6:55 you were talking to agents all the time as a property manager? Sure. Well, I probably
George Doulamis 6:58 did what probably half your audience said, Oh, I
D.J. Paris 7:00 can do this. If these guys are calling me. If these morons can do it, I can do it.
George Doulamis 7:05 Exactly. So that’s how the transition started did. I’d say for the first year and a half after I got my license probably like a lot of agents that listen to this. I was part time as I did my full time job. And then I just took the leap. That’s how I got into it. I think having the experience of working a little bit real estate when I was younger, but that was more of maintenance. But collecting rent, this was the full time want to get the big listings like anyone else wanted to get the big commission checks, and just jumped into it.
D.J. Paris 7:35 It’s amazing. I you know, I was thinking as you were telling that story. I was going I’d read some of that obviously at the beginning, but hearing it you know really solidified what instinct I had, which you’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong, which often wrong. But this idea of working for such a white glove company like Ritz Carlton, I mean, this is top of the food chain, you know, right right there at the very highest level of service in the hospitality, and you know, vacation space. And I had a similar experience. When I when I graduated college, I went to work for Anheuser Busch right out of college. And again, different. Sort of I know those companies are seen differently, like Budweiser and Bud Light was predominantly the beers I worked on. And I don’t think people consider that in the same Echelon as a Ritz Carlton or Waldorf Astoria, for example. However, from a sales perspective, they are at the top of the food chain, or I don’t know if they still are, but they were. And I learned so much about perfection from Anheuser Busch. I know it’s kind of a silly thing to say, because we don’t think about those beers as being perfect beers. But there’s a reason why they got to the very top. And it’s not just because, you know, they’re the marketing was great. I mean, the marketing is great, as well as Ritz Carlton, the marketing is great, too. But there is a level of service that you must have learned there that I would almost say you must have a servant’s heart, which is I like an expression of temperament. Because you have been in the service industry for long and you’ve worked for some tough companies, meaning tough, meaning very demanding companies. And I just curious how that sort of, you know, as a property manager to like, that’s a thankless job where you’re constantly just taking an anger and trying to make everyone happy. And it’s not an easy life, or an easy job. But I’m curious, did that did those skills you developed at those places help you as a realtor, because a realtor is a surface job, too?
George Doulamis 9:29 Absolutely. And then it was the biggest thing. While you’re there, it is very tough. I mean, you actually saw people get dismissed all the time, because they couldn’t live the standard. We had certain ways certain things had to be done. You couldn’t say no, for example. And you’d have to navigate around problems because sometimes something like a property, something could be wrong. They’re paying an extreme amount of money just to stay there. They want to stay to be perfect, perfect. And you might be the first person of defense to have to hear this wasn’t ready. This wasn’t ready. How dare you I came to this property, because, but long story short, they always had a saying, we want to create a world where the consumer could not live without Ritz Carlton in that world. Wow, they had to be there. So I started thinking, as I probably it was probably internalized. But once I started going to real estate, how do we create experiences? How do I create a one on one experience where they couldn’t even imagine me not handling the transaction? So I think even from there, we started going, and then there was always whenever you went out into any of the ballrooms or the general areas, smile, you’re on stage. So right there, you’re like, Okay, it’s go time when I walked through the door, if I have a bad moment in the hallway, that’s fine. But once you walk through there, customers are, number one,
D.J. Paris 10:44 have your bad moments in private. Yeah, I, you know, you said something, I just want to say it. Again, I want to repeat something you said, because it’s simple but profound. And really, I hope our audience takes it in you said, I want to create a business where my clients literally cannot transact in real estate without me or that they, I mean, obviously, they can, but they feel that I am the guy, there’s no other option. I’m the top of the food chain as far as what their expectations are. And you learned all of that as not only a property manager because that is that is the toughest job. You know, property managers don’t get a lot of things. And by the way, if anyone is working, or sorry, if anyone is living in a condo, and you have an HOA or any you have in a property management team, the best thing you can ever do is like be super grateful and thankful. And like send the property manager like you’re awesome. Well, you know, once in a while, because that’ll get that’ll actually work well, because they don’t get a lot of that they only get the problems. And same thing with obviously anyone in the service industry, you know, tell them how special they are. But I’d love to learn about how you actually took some of those principles, you know, that you learned at as a property manager working in hospitality? And then also like, how did you actually implement that? Like, what was the plan, just to really prove to your clients that boy, they need you?
George Doulamis 12:08 I’d say from day one, like the Ritz Carlton like any major company has SOPs, right standing operating procedures. So I decided, whenever I got going, whether it was from from the point I started lead generating in the morning or taking a listing, there is going to be non negotiables that we take care of for that client. Anything from as simple as photos have to be top of the line, not the cell phones, not buying the cheapest photographer, you can find every property regardless to even when I started, had to have a video had to have some sort of video trailer and not on a camera, someone had to professionally do it. Those were non negotiables communication. Again, these are non negotiables. Because if we were going to talk to somebody who flew in on a private plane, to stay at the Ritz Carlton communication, it’d be top notch, they expect that when they walk in a property. So I started taking these for us at the time because we it was so learn, we started I started taking these values and implement them, like you just said, if it’s communication, the very best communication they’re going to get. If I was to sit down in your living room and lay out this game plan, how to sell your home and make these promises. Well, you better I told people all the time, you can fire me anytime you want if I don’t uphold these standards, because I’m so I’m so regimented in doing those. And truthfully, growing up with an Irish mother probably helps out a lot too. Because if you don’t, if you don’t follow your promises, it’s not going to be a good day for you as a kid in that house.
D.J. Paris 13:34 Yeah, well and Ireland to just I don’t know if your mom was born in Ireland or when she came when her family came over but visiting Ireland it the whole country and again, it’s obviously there’s a big tourism economy there but but just even just meeting normal people. There’s this sort of hospital hospitable nature to the Irish Greeks are the same way. Again, I’m, I’m getting like positive stereotypes, I guess. But but the reality of it is, is this idea of, of being of service is so important. And I I’m just going to make a guess. And you’ll have to again, tell me if I’m right or wrong. I, you talked about standard operating procedures, which I think is a brilliant idea, this idea of knowing exactly. Every time somebody is a client of mine, not just I’m going to do a good job because of course, but it’s like no, here’s exactly and mate, whether you share that with them, or it’s just internal. You have that list. And I bet, my guess is that if when you have a listing, let’s just say it isn’t getting a lot of attention, there isn’t a lot of showings, you’re just not getting a lot of interest for whatever reason, maybe not even had nothing to do with you just you know, whatever reason, it’s not getting a lot of attention. I suspect you have a standard SOP, a standard operating procedure about how often you communicate with that seller to you know, make sure that they’re aware of what’s going on. I suspect you have some sort of process in place, even when nothing’s happening.
George Doulamis 14:54 Absolutely, yes. So they’re going to get a phone call, email or text whatever their preference is. It least once a week, of course, after showings, we tell them we’ll be in touch within 24 hours, we want to keep them along the process. The problem is, again, this will probably ask this later. One of the problems I saw when I first started in real estate in diagnosing listings, communication is always the biggest problem, because they have nothing to talk about when they talk to the client. I’m sorry. We had a slow week, we had no showings. Thank you. Well, what did you do from my house that week? What are you doing? What are you being innovative? How are you doing now. And those were subtle things that I knew from the Ritz, and from property management, like when someone came to show up to their condo here locally, hey, by the way, this week, while you were gone, we had all the trees trimmed, we had this done, we had this done, we had XYZ, and I started applying those whenever I dealt with a listing. So yeah, so that weekly call wasn’t, unfortunately, like 85% of the agents out there would just go, sorry, we had no traffic today. But hey, when it gets busier, I let you know, you’re gonna let the market we’re going to do everything, almost overload them, in a sense, we want them to make sure that they understand everything we’re doing, and everything going on in the marketplace to what
D.J. Paris 16:10 and how I’m gonna, I’m gonna pause you again, because you just said something else that was that was brilliant. And to you, this is like just how I operate. But I want to make make step on this point a little bit, because I want our audience to really, really hear this. So not only is George call texting or emailing once a week, right, even if there’s no activity, he’s not just saying, Sorry, no activity this week, he’s actually okay, I still have to justify my job, I still have to let them know that I am actively working on the property. And here is the information I’m going to provide to them. Aside from the fact that, you know, we it’s been it’s been light and traffic, I’m going to talk about that. Maybe, you know, maybe I’ll have an explanation for why that is happening. Maybe even a suggestion about how to fix it. But also, by the way, this is all the other things we are doing currently for you. It’s it’s a subtle thing. But it’s very important, right? Because you’re giving somebody news they don’t want to hear and you’re also giving them news, they do want to hear, here’s what I am doing for you. And here’s what I think is going to happen going forward. So having the idea of like you were saying people will avoid their clients, because maybe they’re they don’t have anything else to say they haven’t given down a reason other than I’m just going to be delivering bad news. And maybe I should just leave them alone. It’s so funny. I’ve said this before. And I’ll just I’ll just make this really quick story. It’s a very short story. But I talked to one of the top producers in Chicago a few years ago on the show. And she was very soft spoken and very humble and but literally very top of the food chain like top 10 agents out of 46,000 agents here. And I was like, What’s your secret? Like? What do you think you’ve done? That’s so different. She goes, DJ, isn’t going to be embarrassing to say this. I call every client every week. And I was like, yeah, she goes, yeah, that’s pretty much. And I said, doesn’t everybody do that? And she goes, No. So I know, it’s a lot more than that. But even if that’s a standard operating procedure, which is for you, obviously huge, but I want to switch gears because I want to spend time. Now, for anyone watching or listening, you may have an inclination to want to shut this off at the next topic, I am going to encourage you to not shut this off, because George does something that I am absolutely crazy about. But if you get a little reaction inside of you, that’s like, oh, I don’t like I don’t like what I’m hearing, fight through it, because he’s going to possibly give you an opportunity to really take your business to the next level and fight through some of the fear that you may have around this. And of course, we are talking about phone prospecting. everybody’s least favorite topic. But it’s an important one, because since almost nobody does it, there’s a huge opportunity here. And by the way, we should talk about the kinds of properties that George is working on here. These, these are huge, high net worth individual properties down in that area. These are people that like you said, George was saying when he was at Ritz Carlton, you know, sometimes guests would fly in on a private jet. This is same sort of experience George has dealing with some of his buyers and sellers now, because that’s a destination where a lot of high net worth individuals play and and there’s, you know, normal side normal price properties there too. But George plays in a very, very exclusive space. And the idea of doing phone prospecting, to me is fascinating at that space. So, George, let’s talk about this. Please tell us all about phone prospecting.
George Doulamis 19:26 Sure. Well, to give a quick backstory, when I started, I was trying to figure out what to do, right? Should I go to buy or should I write blog? Should I do this? Should I do that? Because as we all know, when you get into real estate, yes, you have to study to take a test, but it has nothing to do with how to get business, right. So what I decided to do, I started watching YouTube, there was a guy from Massachusetts where I’m from, and he speaks fast like I do. He was like a bull in a china shop. So I liked that style. And I would literally pause thing, write it down, pause, write it down. Then I would Whole people. And now I can call people very freely. But it would the phone ring, don’t answer, don’t answer, don’t answer, because I didn’t know what to say. I was probably like, half the people listen to this. I was scared, they answered, my tonality would dip, DJ, you know, now, of course, I’m more polished. I’ve done this for such a long time. But that’s what happens. That’s the transition. So I started looking at listings in stunning them. Bad photos, bad description, I would interview sellers and say, you know, I understand you’re not going to sell now. But I just have to ask what went wrong? And they would start telling me, oh, I never heard from them. Everything was below rate. And I started figuring out, okay, if they say this, I want to get on their side as quick as possible, where a lot of people who call, they want to do objection handling. If you say this, I say that if you say this, and now we’re going like this,
D.J. Paris 20:52 right? At this point when there’s objective, sorry, just to pause for that. Object. objections are great to have an answer to but you are at a logger horn, right? Or I think that’s expression, you’re butting heads, right? Because you somebody’s coming at you one way, and you’re trying to counter and it becomes a force issue. You’re kind of like each trying to force your way in whoever has the strongest argument wins, which is tough. It’s a tough thing to do.
George Doulamis 21:16 And growing up in New England, confrontation is very easy. It’s normal, right? So I would do this. But then I started practicing doing script practice with people from California, with people that had different so I would start applying and say, Wait a minute, instead of asking, with this tonality? I’m going to shift it I’m going to say like this, I’m going to have a downswing upswing. I’m going to whisper when I had to say certain things. So it’s just a transformation. So over the years, I start getting up. So you’re right, I would start calling 500,000 million dollar houses, I can get them. Right. Couple of reasons. Energy over the phone. People have to understand how important that is. I used to say things now the back and like, how the heck did I get that listing? I know what I was saying. But the energy was there in the seller who just went through a bad experience said in their subconscious, I don’t want to get too boring into this will get bored. But the subconscious is saying wait a minute, this is different. 10 People just called me but this guy is different. Because his energy is different. His tonality is different. He’s asking questions that people generally don’t ask. So throughout the process, I just every time I had something, I’d fine tune it. And I would find angles not and that’s not unethical. What I’m saying by an angle, like if I knew I called you, and what was the old scripts? When are you going to hire the right agent to sell your house? Well, I used to hear that hidden cringe. I’m like, well, if I’m talking to my friend, because that’s what I would try to set it up as I’m not going to say, hey, DJ, Sell Your House came off the market? When are you going to hire the right agent?
D.J. Paris 22:47 Like George? My friend? Yeah. Talk to me like a human being? Yeah,
George Doulamis 22:51 exactly. So I perfected a line I really like to use and it works like gold. And I’ll give it out. People can use as much as they want. I’d get to the opening the call. And the question would be TJ I’m looking at these photos on the MLS right now. The kitchens gorgeous. How in the world did this thing not sell? And what I started finding out that’s an implied compliment rather than you hired the wrong agent. What starts going on subconscious, you’re an idiot, you hired the wrong person. I’m smart, I can help you. Right? Like Wait a minute. Now it’s confrontational. Their their sales resistance will build up now. And now for the next 1015 seconds on the phone. If you don’t shift that what happens? Have a good day, or if you’re in South Florida were first sold click. So well.
D.J. Paris 23:41 What’s brilliant about that? I mean, it is brilliant. So let’s let’s let’s repeat that line because it is a brilliant line. And as soon as you said it, I was like That is brilliant. Because you said you know hey, I hate Mr. or Mrs. Seller. Hey, I was looking at at the photos of your property unbelievable. Like the kitchen insane. How did this thing not sell? Or what? What was what what happened in the world? So yeah, how in the world did this not sell. And by the way, I just want to make another point about tonality because we’ve kind of moved on from that. The best thing that anyone who deals with with, you know, phone conversations or even just in person conversations, take a class on tonality understand how your voice and your inflection, as George says, going up and going down. Understanding how things become questions become statements become demands, understanding that it’s not that hard to understand, and you can practice with people. And yes, you can change the way you talk. So if you’re going to be delivering bad news, there’s a way to do that, that will decrease someone’s anxiety. And there’s a way to do it while you’re there. It’d be really anxious. You know, you can you could do it like that. And no matter what I say you’re gonna go, right and then if you say, Hey, we’ve had a tough week, you know, but you know, here’s all the things that has a different feel to it. And so sling tonality is everything. So I just wanted to honor you for that because very few People I’ve had on the show talk about tonality and talking about the way that they’re projecting their voice and anyone can learn. But I’m sorry. But back to back to your, your your script idea. That is a brilliant question, because what you’re really going for it sounds like is you want the story. Hey, what’s the story here? What what happened?
George Doulamis 25:16 Yeah. And that’s really the connection, right? We’re going to build rapport. We’re going to go a little bit deeper, we’re going to repeat and referrals. So I say how in the world that’s not so Oh, my agents, the biggest idiot in the world, he couldn’t get it done. Which is probably not right. That was probably overpriced. But anyways, we never jump on that we never jump on the agent. Of course, we’re not going to say, oh, yeah, I agree with you. But I could say, Wow, I’m so sorry to hear that this house definitely should have sold like just just, you know, we want to give them a little compassion get on their side. And then the next part of the scripting is rapport building. So we’ve already kind of got on their side, we went from like this face to face to like, arm around them. Wow, how this happened. So we’re like getting them saying, Hey, listen, I’m different. I want to hear what’s going on. I don’t have commission breath. I’m not salesy. I’m not pushing you. It’s more of here’s the process. So tell me what happened?
D.J. Paris 26:10 Well, it’s very much like, similar to what a consultant might do at a company, a consultant who’s brought in to rescue a company or fix a problem the company’s having, they might walk in and go, This place seems great. Like, what’s the problem here? Like what, like what’s going on here. And really, what you’re wanting to do is, is you’re out you want, you want the story, you want the person to tell you without feeling pressure, or stress or your right, or that, that they may feel stupid, that they hired somebody that maybe they feel didn’t do a good job, they could be angry at that person, that agent, they could also feel stupid, you mentioned that. And that’s important thing for people to realize, when you ask questions about, you know, the previous agent, you know, it’s kind of like when when people are in a bad relationship, and they break up and you say to the person Oh, I’m so sorry, that happened to you. And they go, I feel so stupid. I was in this relationship. And you’re like, you shouldn’t feel stupid, but people do sometimes. So that’s an important thing to realize. And the other thing that that you said that that was so so smart, or sorry, the other implication is that you have a solution. But you haven’t yet told them you’re like, how did this not sell this should be selling this should have sold, which means you know, something that they don’t know yet, which is also a very subtle way to project yourself as a leader, as somebody who knows a little bit more than they do. And they’re gonna be like, I know if my home didn’t sell, and I had hired an agent and somebody called me and goes, how did your place not sell? And I said, I don’t know. They just maybe they didn’t do a good job. I don’t know. And you’re like, This place should have sold, I would have been like, great. Tell me, tell me what you’re gonna do. Because that’s all I want. So brilliant, George, I really it’s not. Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. It’s this should sell and a lot of times, they’d be like, Oh, great. Let’s talk. I want to hear what you’re gonna tell me. So anyway, I’m just, I’m just honoring you for all of this. Sorry for stopping so often when it’s so important.
George Doulamis 27:54 Sometimes, you know, most of the time calling gets such a bad name, right? They’ll say cold calling doesn’t work. They’ll call it cold calling. Some people call it prospecting. Keep in mind what I just asked that question How in the world does not sell? Recently, I got a $7.69 million listing out of that. And when I when I sat down with him, after we signed everything I said, quick question. I’m always wondering, what led you to, you know, list with us? When you asked me a question, no one ever asked me how in the world in my home, not so. And they remembered it? Yeah, they remembered it right away. So I know it works. I probably said that question now. 25,000 times.
D.J. Paris 28:33 By the way, by the way, George is being authentic. He’s not saying it because it’s it’s part of the script. I mean, it is part of the script. But George is legitimately curious, what why did this place not sell? And that comes through? Right? If you say it, and it’s part of your sales tactic, maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. But when you’re authentic, and George is like, genuinely interested, like, what happened here? I can’t figure out what happened here, George, like, it’s probably the price. We all know that. But I want to hear it from their perspective. I want to know what they think went wrong. So brilliant, George,
George Doulamis 29:05 and I will say this really came from this part of my growth to where I’m at now came from an agent. He probably doesn’t remember I listen to a podcast. His name is Michael Ferraro, Ferro in Connecticut luxury agent. I was probably like a lot of agents listening to this or watching it. He would say, I’m getting $5 million listings by expired calls. I was like, how the heck nobody sits down I called him told me he’s like, Hey, listen, I’ll coach you for two months. I don’t have the time but I’ll coach you for two months. He actually turned me on. He got trained by Jordan Belfort The Wolf of Wall Wow.
D.J. Paris 29:40 Well, yeah. That’s that’s like the tonality.
George Doulamis 29:43 It was like on steroids. And, like there’s the scene from Wolf of Wall Street when he sells the penny stock, right. Jordan I because I took Jordan Belfort training after they paid for it. And he talks about he trained Leo on the whole sales thing. Sure, and he comes up and he As the fists down when you elongate words, so there really is such a profound skill set to this, if you want to do it. Now, you may get kicked in the teeth a few times on the calls, you’re like, Oh, it doesn’t work, which is fine with me, especially if you’re in my area don’t call. But you know. So.
D.J. Paris 30:18 Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. I’ve actually, you know, when I watched Wolf of Wall Street, I was I was obviously I was turned off to the way he conducted business. But I was fascinated by his sales techniques. And he still teaches I think he’s in Australia now, but he still teaches this stuff. You know, I don’t know how good you know, I don’t know what he’s training people on these days. I’m sure it’s great. But, but the idea of paying attention, not so much to as much of the words that we’re saying is how we’re saying things is really I mean, the, the the research is really clear that how we say things is infinite, almost infinitely more important than what we’re actually saying.
George Doulamis 30:55 And you know, part two, where he talks about it during his training, like, if you do what I did, in the 80s, this stuff is so good. It’s so easy to manipulate, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. It goes, I’m evidence number one. And that’s why when I come back and coach and tell everybody, you we want to be truthful, we want to be very careful we do because I’m not calling to manipulate. Yes, I can call it tonalities to get you to open up because at the back of aminos. If I can get you to list with me, I’m your number one option. I’m better than everybody else, because I know how exactly why this house didn’t sell. Now, if you have that here, right? If you have the inside, you can get it. If you’re going with falsehoods and everything else, you’ll be exposed eventually, because you can answer the questions the detailed. So what’s going on my listing what’s happening? What’s this? What’s that? Well, eventually, competition who’s going to beat you?
D.J. Paris 31:48 Right? That’s a you know, you settle you said things that are that are really quite brilliant, too. Because this idea of studying listings, and going through and trying to figure out maybe an expired or Fizbo? What’s what’s going on here? Why is this thing not selling? And yes, we could always come down to price because everything is always price. However, there’s a story that leads you to price that usually is a lot more intricate. And this idea of getting curious about that is is fun, it must be really fun for you, because you’re like, I want to figure out what is going on with this property. Is the seller crazy, and they just are never going to lower their price. Is the the agent not do a good job. What are the photos look like the video, you know, what was the marketing efforts that were done. But I also want to talk about your area is somewhat unique, because a lot of times that my understanding of your area and correct me if I’m wrong, is that, you know, getting listings is great. But when you’re having, you know, a $7 million listing, there aren’t a lot of buyers just walking around going, Hey, when’s the next $7 million listing going to hit the market? You have to sometimes go out and find those buyers even as the listing agent, right? And so I’m curious on what that process looks like. Like once you get one of these, these mega, you know, high high net worth listings. What are you doing to to find the buyer or do you not really have to because they come to you
George Doulamis 33:07 12 months ago, I wouldn’t have to do much looking right at the song in the ground, even if I mean, I didn’t sell it on the team. But the team, the gentleman who runs the team sold a $24 million listing sign in the ground. You know, amazing when a normal market, which probably a lot of your viewers and listeners are used to, especially here what we’ll have to do is we met we’re going to identify who’s going to buy the house right, we’ll do a buyer profile. For us, for example, we know it’s 90% chance and artist stain owner who may use it two weeks out of the year. Now some may use it a full month or two months. So we know okay, they’re probably not going to use it. They may even decide to rent it because we have such a short term rental market here. homes get rented per week, some on the weekends. So okay, we know that now we know what four or five states are our feeder states, right? Just Alabama, Tennessee, Texas is now big. Georgia has always been there. Not so much parts of Florida, maybe parts down the other Panhandle that want to upgrade, maybe they bought something in Panama City Beach. And so you know what, that doesn’t get the luxury feel that 38 does. So maybe I’ll trade my condo and want to get on the sand. So first we have to do is identify the buyer. And then we can go out different ways to market. We can’t call a neighborhood like we just do in West Palm Beach or Jupiter, Florida where we’d say hey, I know you live in a neighborhood now that has this, this and this, we just listed here and you could trade up. So we had to identify like Nashville. We obviously have companies there. But more importantly, we can market who directly buys from Nashville here. We can do zip codes, we can search that we can send marketing material, and we go along those roads and of course networking with other agents in those areas. We can call them Yep.
D.J. Paris 34:53 I was gonna say how important is it to have a network of agents in those feeder areas like whether it’s in New York City Eddie, you know, Boston, Nashville, you know, Charleston, maybe you know, I don’t I’m just making these these up maybe Chicago. But But how important is it for you to have like a dedicated network, so you can call and say, I’ve got a new listing, you got to tell your clients about this kind of thing.
George Doulamis 35:16 Certainly, it’s critical. I mean, especially if you want to stand out here, the last two years, we’ve been the number one team here. Last year, we beat the competition by 100 million the year before a little bit closer. And a lot of times, which is funny, the higher end agents in Nashville, Aspen, they’ll actually call us and say, Hey, I know you guys have some of the better listings. Do you have anything market right now? Or do you have anything that I have a client looking up to, like 18 million? Can you send Can you send whatever you have right now. Now, of course, having those other relationships where you can get on the phone, say, Hey, listen, we just listed X, Y, and Z. If you have anybody looking, oh, by the way, I’ll send you the video right now the video trailer, you can send it out to them. So yes, I mean, if you have that, it’s almost like a cheat code. Because then when you’re selling the listing presentation, part of it is our network second to none. I mean, there’s a reason we sell, you know, 445 million a year. You know, so there’s, there’s definitely value in that where I think if, if you haven’t sold that, or if you haven’t been part of a team and got to see how the machine works, you don’t really value having that network that strong.
D.J. Paris 36:27 Right? Right. So this idea of, of working on some of these higher priced listings, requires a different sort of skill set than maybe a price point that you don’t have to necessarily go out and secure the buyer, you just have to price it correctly. Make sure it’s the site is in the ground, and and that it’s visible online somewhere. So in the other thing, too, let’s talk about working with the sellers or buyers, really, it doesn’t matter. Because you’re you’re dealing with a lot of high net worth individuals, some of these people this is their third, fourth, fifth home, like you said, maybe they use it a few weeks a year, maybe they rent it, maybe they don’t. But regardless, you are often I’m guessing, dealing with teams, right? So a lot of these people have a manager or maybe an accountant or an attorney or some sort of financial planner, somebody that probably if not more than one or two people, they a lot of times you’re probably dealing with not just the buyer or seller, but also their their business team.
George Doulamis 37:25 Oh, absolutely, yeah. And you had to find out who the decision maker is. You know, even though some of these people are extremely wealthy, and they do have layers to them. Sometimes they still want to know everything. They want to be the person, I think where that part really comes in, is finding that person who’s a gatekeeper to get to that seller initially. But most of the people in this area, I would say, a lot of them are. They’re not old money, a lot of them. So they’ve worked for it. They’ve sold the businesses. Heck, I know, somebody who has one of the biggest houses on the beach, I think he owns every McDonald’s in Alabama. So he really worked up and now he has and he’s one phone call away where you can connect with him. So it’s a case by case thing, but you know, obviously, they have different layers, that is going to make it harder. But then you have again, it goes back to tonality and leading to that ego so that you know the person who is in charge of the property who you have to intermingle with. And they have a strong ego, well, how do I play up to the ego? How do I make sure they understand the number one option for them without getting them angry without being this or that. And I think that’s a crucial thing I think a lot of agents don’t think about, because let’s be honest, we’re just selling houses, right? We’re trying to make a dream happen for them, or in this case, sell their biggest asset. But a lot of times, I think agents get a little too full of themselves right there, we think that we’re more special than we are. And I think that can really hurt you too, when you’re talking to some of these managers or accountants or financial planners. So I think understanding who we’re talking to who the audience is, and how to handle that.
D.J. Paris 38:57 And it’s probably also that you come across as somebody with a very mild to non existent ego. And I think when you’re dealing with, with some people who may have an inflated sense of self because of their success, obviously, you’ve had a ton of success too. So you should, you know, anyone should have it, it should be you but obviously understanding you’re in the service business, you have to tamp that down, or and you just don’t seem to be the kind of person that that has much of that, which is awesome. But I imagine that that leaves room for the buyer or the seller to be able to express their ego if they want to and they’re not in competition with you, you are there to support them. And and you’re also analyzing every part of that person, right? You’re constantly thinking, you know, how do I best communicate with them? What’s the best way to say or do a certain thing so that it fits in with their worldview? You’re constantly analyzing and strategizing in order to meet that client’s need.
George Doulamis 39:56 Absolutely. And that’s really the biggest thing. Like do I have an ego When I need to coerce, but with most people, I’m here to, I’m there to serve them, right? And we know like, I know sellers who need more attention versus some that are like, Hey, give me a call when I get an offer. It’s all I care about, please don’t bother me during the week. I’m very busy. And then there’s others, every four days, hey, what’s going on? How’s this going? What’s with that? So, I think dialing into that personality, knowing exactly who you’re dealing with. At the end of the day, I don’t take it personal. I’ve actually had sellers complain about other agents, oh, they take me so personal. When I do this, when I do that, they start crying to me, I don’t want that in the next person. So that’s fine. If we want to have no feelings, I’m good at that, too. Because a lot of times I get accused of well, you don’t seem that happy when you first meet people. I’m like, Well, I’m just trying to look at the circumstances, how do we how can I help you as fast as possible. And I think some agents, they take everything so personal that guides, we’re really here for the clientele. Our feelings are secondary. Now you don’t want anybody screaming at you get that part. But sometimes, these are high stakes for them. These are high, high, high emotions, you get the gist of it, we’re about to close. Oh, by the way, they didn’t disclose there was a $50,000 assessment do? Well, now the seller has to pay for because he didn’t, you know, but the emotions are so high, and you’re the person in the middle, that has to take this abuse. While that’s happening. Yeah, so you just have to internalize it, hey, this isn’t me personally, I’m here to do a job. When it comes to that, and maybe a few cocktails after the transaction, you laugh it off, but you just try your best not to get take it personal.
D.J. Paris 41:35 Well, I think I think one of the easiest ways to overcome that feeling of something being personal, because I think anyone listening who has had a disappointment in a transaction, or maybe their best friend shows another agent, as opposed to them, you know, those kinds of situations can feel very personal. I, you know, when you were talking about, you know, making cold calls, that is a really easy way to understand. It’s a very intense way. But a quick way to understand that things aren’t very personal. Because when you’re calling for sale by owners expired listings, you are going to take a little bit of abuse, sometimes because people are angry, they’re, you know, I don’t want to talk to an agent, or I just hired one, and they screwed me over or whatever the reasoning is. And they by the way, they probably had gotten 10, other phone calls that day as well, because a lot of these, there’s a lot of services where you can pay for those leads to come in every day. And they sell them to many, many people. So the idea is you’re not even usually the first phone call. So it’s a tough, it’s a tough phone calls my point, the challenge. Or what happens though is is you really quickly realize, oh, I survived, you know, the guy told me to eff off, because I couldn’t even get my name out before he slammed the phone down. It wasn’t even your fault. But But and you’re like, Oh, well, obviously, that’s not me, that’s just that person was having a bad day. So I think all the cold calls you’ve made have probably helped make you a little bit have a little bit more of a Teflon. Because you’re like, it just happens, it’s not the end of the world.
George Doulamis 43:00 In the way I look at it too. If I’m making all these calls, when I’m talking to somebody, like in my earlier part of my career, when I’m doing a lot more opens, or I’m doing a lot more this, I want that interaction to be great. So the cold calls prepare you for that. So I’ll talk to people, I can’t call anybody, I can’t do it, I’m only good when I meet them in person. Well, what if you’re proficient with a stranger? How good you think you’re going to be when you’re with somebody who you meet face to face, you’re gonna even better. That’s all the way I looked at it. If I can get you There’s nothing. There’s no greater feeling in the world. When I call you in Nashville, I convince you to sign a listing agreement over the phone, I never meet you, I sell house, you get your wire. And we’ve never met to do that. It’s just, it’s just a great feeling. Because you convince somebody you’ve never met.
D.J. Paris 43:48 It’s kind of like the ultimate sale because also you’re dealing at a high net worth sort of transactions, not not that any transaction is better or worse than another. But certainly, you know, the stakes could be considered higher at at a higher price point. And and the idea of being able to do that sight unseen. Is is is an incredible, really victory. And and I don’t think it’s lucky, I don’t think it’s well, you just called somebody who didn’t need to meet with you in person. It’s like, no, no, George is extremely strategic about the way he communicates. And communication is is obviously the name of the game. I also before we get close to wrapping up here, I want to mention that I forgot to mention this earlier. So if anyone out there would love to be trained and George isn’t taking on everybody. He’s only going to take on one or maybe two people. But he is wanting to share some of his knowledge that he has learned from all the trainers he’s worked with and all of his own expertise and experience to possibly work with agents to teach them what he knows. By the way, guys, let’s just go back to this one fact that wasn’t even in George’s bio. That is like really crazy. His team outsold the next biggest team by $100 million in a year’s time like that’s pretty Press have. So if you ever were like, I wish my coach was actually out there producing, you know, George got got his, you know, he had a mentor who was successful and, and helped him and he wants to do the same. So if there is anyone who’s like, I want to learn what George knows, George, what’s the best way somebody could reach out? And again, you’re not taking everybody might only be one to one person. But you know, what are you looking for? And how should they reach out to you?
George Doulamis 45:23 Sure they can, you know, for now they go through Instagram, I think it’s probably the easiest. What we’re looking at really do. Like I said, I’m not trying to take on 1000 people, we’re trying to get people who may be either stuck, maybe they’re getting in. And I know the feeling you’re getting your teeth kicked on the phone, you don’t know what to say you don’t know how to say you don’t know how to go out and get business. That’s the really the worst thing about this business. What is the old saying 90% of people come into real estate with no sales training. 90% of people leave with no sales training. That’s true. We get into a brokerage. The brokers like hey, best of luck, go out there, go kill it. How do I do that? So we’re looking to help those and we’re also looking to help those that I used to do I could get to the $5 million tree, I could get to the door, I get the appointment. But then I don’t even know what saying the appointment to get it. Like when they ask a simple question. Why should we choose you over this and you start just verbal diarrhea, but I can do this, we can find I can fine tune that I’ve set before big time sellers. And we can help people get to that level they want. So I’d say if you’d like go through Instagram message kind of what you’re looking to do, we’ll connect we’ll see if we can be a value because we may not I may not be the best value for somebody. Right. But at the same time it was a connection, they want to talk further, I’d love to see why can help out?
D.J. Paris 46:39 Well, for anyone who is interested in learning from what George the knowledge torch has, and everybody should be interested in this, go to Instagram and follow him. George dilemmas are ie George like George D OULAMISRE, by the way, link to that in the show notes. So you don’t have to type it in or just search for George dilemmas, easy to find, and reach out to him and say I would love to learn what you learn. And possibly you guys could connect. And also by the way, George has clients buy and sell homes, not just in their area, the Destin 38 area, all over the country. These are high net worth individuals. So George also wants to keep expanding his network as well of agents. So maybe you guys could trade clients. Maybe somebody’s moving to Destin and George has people that are looking for properties and other areas that he doesn’t service. So if you would like to connect with George possibly for on a referral basis, George, what’s the best way? So is that the best way Instagram, they say?
George Doulamis 47:40 My name is so long, and then you start going George de la missa Blank, blank blank. Easiest way.
D.J. Paris 47:47 Awesome. So George dilemmas are E again, link to that in the show notes on Instagram, find George George, this was incredible. And you know, I know you’re just talking about your process. But for somebody that’s done almost 500 episodes of the show this this was an incredible episode. So I am so grateful to you, our audience is grateful to you. So on behalf of the audience, thank you for coming on the show, we really appreciate it, you gave so much value, that I suspect this will be one of our most downloaded episodes ever. So thank you in advance for all of the great traffic we’re gonna get because of you. And hopefully we can help you as well. On behalf of Georgia and myself, we want to thank the audience for sticking around to the very end. We appreciate you, we love you, we are here for you. And we are grateful that you tell a friend about our show. So think of one other Realtor in your office or somebody you know, in the industry, who’s maybe struggling right now it’s 2023. This is a tough year to be in real estate. Let’s help other agents so that, you know we get some good karma sent our way, send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just tell them to pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And one last thing guys, we just started clipping our episodes. And by the way, we’re going to have a lot of clips of this one. But we are now posting those short form video clips just in case you don’t want to sit through a full hour of me, which I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want to sit through the I don’t want to I don’t even want to sit there will pull out of me. But for anyone that wants to see some of our bite size content, which by the way, super easy and super fast, digestible, go to Instagram or on actually all the social platforms. But Instagram is our big push right now. So top agent interviews is our Instagram handle every single day, we post a short form 62nd clip from one of our episodes, and we will have a lot of them from this one. So be on the lookout for that. So go go to top agent interviews. And also while you’re on Instagram, go visit George George dilemmas, ar e send him a message tell them how awesome he was on the show because he is and was and maybe he’ll want to work with you and maybe you guys could train together. So George, thank you so much. This was a pleasure. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, George.
George Doulamis 49:57 Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
What Do Real Estate Agents Need To Understand About Rates In 2023? • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Apr 27, 2023
Welcome to the April episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel talks about the mortgage rate increases, and how this situation is creating a little confusion for the buyers. Next Joel discusses how agents should advise their clients properly, not to rush into the decision of purchasing the property just because of the current low rates. Last, Joel emphasizes the importance of communication and showing the clients different alternatives of loans.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What’s going on with lending rates? And where do we see them heading for the rest of the year? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I am your guide and host through the show today. Once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel Schaub, one of my favorite people in the whole planet. So you’re so lucky to get to listen to Joel because I am lucky to get to listen to Joel he’s from guaranteed rate. Let’s talk about Joel Joel is the vice president of lending a guaranteed rate he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. He’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. Last year alone Joe gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to his buyers who worked with him and that put his volume in the top one 10% of all lenders nationwide. By the way, if you’re watching this, you’re probably listening but Joe’s lovely wife, Christine just walked back and forth. And I would feel sad that I was talking because I would have loved to have said Hi Christine. We love you. Everybody loves you. But anyway, back to Joel. And let’s see where were we Oh, Joel is in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact out of 400,000 loan officers in the country Joel is in ranked number 137 guys. Last year he closed 319 transactions that was 2020 to its highest amount ever. He crushed it. He’s doing well this year as well. He is just constantly doing it. Joel is a legend here in the Chicagoland area, but guaranteed rate is licensed in all 50 states. So if you meaning our listeners are watching or viewing, watching, listening rather, are wanting a better relationship with a lender, somebody that can actually help you grow your business. Joel Schaub and his team are the kings of that they want to talk to you. And even if you’re not going to work with them directly, they have an amazing email list that we’re going to get you to subscribe to, because it’ll give you some talking points you can use with your clients. But if you are looking for a loan officer, we cannot highly more recommend sorry, we cannot more highly recommend Joel. He’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. He did my mortgage. I’ve sent people to him. He’s the very best out there. No full stop. Joel can be reached, reach out to him at his email joel@rate.com joel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel Schaub Joel welcome,
Joel Schaub 4:05 DJ, thanks so much for having me on. I love it when we go through the numbers, but I really like being here and giving back and this is what we were talking about. Before we got on the air. It’s being able to educate and learn just one or two more things that will help agents close another deal or help a buyer or maybe even get another seller. So I’m excited.
D.J. Paris 4:26 I want to start but we always put the plugs at the end. I want to put the plug at the beginning this time because speaking of giving back, you and your team put out y’all this is so funny, I have to have actually interrupting my own story because I started to send this to you earlier this morning in an email. I got an email from a very, very famous like a famous mortgage lender, kind of a celebrity mortgage lender on the East Coast. I won’t mention his name. He’s apparently a very nice person. Somehow I got on his email list. He sent me the longest email full I mean it was just chock full of stuff, and I looked at it in my mind, sort of I went dizzy. And it was just so much content in one email that I literally was like, I don’t know what to do with this. And it, and I was gonna send it to you because I was thinking, I’m so glad you don’t do that. But you do have an email that you send out every week that your team sends out, that literally gives you a several different data points of what’s going on in the mortgage world and the lending world. And so I want everybody who’s listening to our show to subscribe to that, because I’ve seen what other lenders send, and it’s not that good. But what you send is awesome. So where can people go to subscribe to that?
Joel Schaub 5:39 On Tuesday, we call that information overload, right? There’s just too much information out there. And right now, especially with buyers, they have all these different news sources talking to them about interest rates, and it’s all lagging data, right? They literally are being told one week, mortgage rates went up. And they’re actually lower than they were the and so having some bite sized education pieces that you can look at weekly, make all the difference in the world if you’re an agent, and we’ve created that list. So you can literally subscribe by just sending an email to joel@rate.com. And say, sign me up for your newsletter. And on a weekly basis, we give you digestible DJ, things that you can speak to in terms of not just the rates, but different programs and trends that are happening so that you can see my top of the market and do it in a way that sets you apart from others in your market.
D.J. Paris 6:35 Awesome while everyone go send that email to joel@rate.com. And they will get you on their email list. And then you when you’re talking to your clients, and they ask what’s going on in the lending world, you will have bullet points and you will not have to Oh, I have to send you this email. There was like seven videos in the email anyway, tons and tons of stuff. It’s information overload. But that is not what we do on this show, we distill down to the most important details because realtors and lending are intricately related and connected and one depends on the other. And we all need more business. So what’s going on? What should we be talking about this month?
Joel Schaub 7:16 Well, we got an action packed show because right now there’s so much volatility in terms of interest rates. And so it’s really important if you’re an agent to kind of be on top of what’s going on in the market, because buyers are asking, right, should I wait right now with rates being too high? If you’re an agent listening to this, I know you’ve heard that a buyer says I think I’m gonna wait until rates come down before we buy and DJ this. The problem with that is when rates do come down, we’re gonna see a flood of buyers back into the market. Okay. And we already know that the data points for the Fed are indicating that we’re going to drop rates over 100 basis points next year. So you’re hearing at first, that that probably has gone too far already. But they have to stay on track, at least this year with the rate increases. And as soon as it’s done, we will see a big drop. That doesn’t mean that clients need to wait until that day to get into the market. Even though we don’t really like this phrase of buy the home, right where you’re getting in. And I don’t even like this, but it’s married the home and date three, okay. However, you can literally use this exact same strategy, whether rates are going to drop in six months or two years. We shouldn’t be buying just specifically because of rate. And you know that?
D.J. Paris 8:37 Yeah, it’s you know, it’s so amazing. So we were looking at our numbers at our brokerage Today we have over 700 agents. And this this peel back the curtain a little bit, we were looking at our numbers, and we saw something that kind of stuck out at us. And it was really, really interesting. And so last week, with our agents, we only had nine new listings, which was very, very low for us were like, Oh, wow, that’s really low. This or I’m sorry, two weeks ago, nine, nine listings last week, 21 new listings, and we looked and we’re like, what’s going on? Is it the spring market? Is it? It’s it’s a lot of things, right? And the good news is, it’s a great time to list your property because, yes, there’s a little bit more competition, but rates are not again, I just I don’t think six and a half percent or six, even even higher than 6% is something to cry about. I just don’t think it is I think we need to readjust. We need to re educate our buyers and say, Hey, this is where it is. And there isn’t a whole lot of inventory. It’s starting to ramp up a little bit. But I still think I still think rates are fine.
Joel Schaub 9:45 And there’s a lot of ways to get rates that are lower. Okay, so let’s just have a conversation here. buyers aren’t shocked anymore, that rates are in the low sixes that’s absolutely one of the things that I’m hearing more and more as Yeah, I expect that this isn’t news, unlike last year where it was every single week, it continued to go up, and it was a shock to people. Now it’s kind of the norm. But there’s a lot of ways right now, to get rates that are lower than 6%. So if you’re an agent, you want to have your clients look at two things. It’s not just a 30 year fixed rate mortgage, okay? Especially on the smaller loan amounts, there’s not that big of a difference in the payment on a 15 or 20 year loan, it seems like people just forget about this. And they shouldn’t, a 15 year loan is in the low fives and a 20 year loan is in the high fives. So when you talk about rates being in the sixes, there are plenty of fixed rate options in the fives TJ. And then on the other end of the spectrum, when you’re in these larger loan amounts, you can look at the jumbo adjustable rate mortgages that are easily in the fives as well. So clients that are borrowing in most cities and states over 726,000, they’re going to do themselves a favor by shopping this around, they don’t need 30 years at these rates, the flavors come in five, seven and 10 years. And if you lock a rate for the next seven years, I’m fairly certain that we’re going to see rates lower in the next seven years than what we have today. So why take a fixed rate mortgage, as long as you can sleep well at night, you can take a rate in the sixes, or you can take a rate down into the fives and just work with a bank that will promise to do a free refinance for you. And there’s plenty of banks out there. So make sure you’re partnering with those people, whether it’s me or not, there’s so many banks currently, that no matter what they’ll do a no cost refinance for your clients. And that could get them over the hump too, if they’re afraid to buy now. So some good strategies there in terms of rates.
D.J. Paris 11:49 Yeah, that makes makes a lot of sense. What are you seeing any hesitancy is the hesitation that buyers had last year as rates were steadily increasing? We’re seeing that level off now. Are you seeing that the attitudes of buyers changing?
Joel Schaub 12:07 Well, they’re still very price conscious, right? It literally is hundreds of dollars more per month DJ. So we still do really want to dig in and make sure the clients come from with the monthly payment. Because there are a lot of people that because of this rate increase, probably shouldn’t buy. And they don’t hear that they just continue to be told, Oh, everything is fine, let’s get you into a home. And that’s not the best way to build a business. That’s a great way to be a salesperson. But there’s a lot of people that probably should not buy until rates do come down. And just working through and finding out what somebody’s comfortability is, is a lot more important than whether they qualify, because a lot of banks will lend him money. But if it’s hundreds of dollars more than they’re comfortable with, and you know that as an agent, you can set the expectation as to what they can go out and look at, okay, because the pricing is a lot different today than it was before. If they were only approved before and a 250,000 or $350,000 place. Now that rates are higher, that approval amounts come down a lot. So it’s important to be working with them and understand what their qualifications are. And really where their comfort level is.
D.J. Paris 13:17 What would you sell a you know, homeowners right now that are thinking that they maybe they will sell but they’re worried about inventory, right? So they sell their property, they might be worried? I don’t know if there’s enough inventory out there to buy something else, what what would you say to them,
Joel Schaub 13:36 I’ll tell them, they can come live with you until they find a place. Let’s get the home sold and DJ will put you up,
D.J. Paris 13:43 I’ll put you up myself. Now,
Joel Schaub 13:45 it is a problem, it is part of most conversations that I have. And what I always recommend people do is make sure they know what they can buy before they list their home because it’s gonna be a lot quicker on the sale right now you’re gonna sell your home a lot faster, then you’re probably going to find the home that you like in this market. Right? So with that said, though, just a little further on that conversation is that if you know what you’re going to sell it for, you don’t have to have it listed, you can go out and shop for the properties that you’re getting ready to buy. And as soon as you do go under contract in that place, be ready with your agent to have the place listed. Because if you’re in most markets, these are quick sales. And so there is a strategy to finding the home first that you want to buy. As long as you have the photos taken of your home. You can delay that putting it on the market so that it times out perfectly.
D.J. Paris 14:44 I’d love to talk also about some of the more creative products that lending institutions are are or that are offering that are popular these days by downs. I know we’ve touched on these before. I don’t think we can talk about this enough. cuz I don’t hear agents because I, I do speak to a lot of agents, not just through the show, but but even just out in my own personal life. And I mentioned the buy down thing. And I swear half of the agents I talked to go, what’s that? So I want to educate everybody about these buydown options, because I think this is such a cool way to mitigate some of the interest rate environment we’re in.
Joel Schaub 15:25 So let’s cut through all the data and like actually get down to the numbers and actually understand what what it means, right. So if developers are giving the money to the buyer, or the seller is giving the money to the buyer, this works, that if you’re just increasing the purchase price to cover the cost of the buy down. I’m not a proponent of that. So let’s do a strategy. Right now our little quick breakdown of a $500,000 purchase, the client is going to put 20% down, and then I’m going to give you a pop quiz on the savings because this is fun, I’m going to put you on the spot here. Because if you have a $500,000 home, and we wouldn’t be doing a $400,000 loan, we’re going to ask the seller for a 3% credit. And that 3% closing cost credit DJ will fund a two one rate by now. And that to one rate by down drives the rate down to full percentage points in the first year, one point the second year. And then the borrower pays the note rate in the final 28 years. So buyers will say well, why don’t I just take 15 grand off the price. Okay, if the seller was gonna give me 15 grand, I just want to pay 15 grand less for the home? Sure. And so I run that calculation. And I say that that will save on a monthly basis. $92 a month, which is good. So now the pop quiz comes in. And if you’re doing it on a two one buydown DJ, do you think it doubles the monthly savings? Do you think it’s a little bit less than doubled? Or do you think it’s more than doubled?
D.J. Paris 17:10 I would hear, I would say it’s more than,
Joel Schaub 17:15 yes, it’s more than but it’s a lot more than so you actually take this, it saves $496 a month, in our first year, to save $254 a month in the next year. And that’s where the problem is, it’s the first two years, we really feel that the feds gonna get this under control and rates will be lower. If we’re wrong, the sellers have still funded the buy down. So that’s a great strategy. And it does save a lot of money. Now, the big thing here is that the buyer still has to qualify on the higher payment. Sure, it’s not an excuse to get into a home that’s over your head. Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t want buyers having to have this to one buy down to qualify. But it’s a really nice bonus when the seller or we can negotiate. If it’s not even a developer, just individual selling the home to fund a to one buy down and it’s 3% of the purchase price. And then it takes 2% off year one and 1% the next year.
D.J. Paris 18:20 That’s great. And then I know that there’s you were mentioning before we got on air another strategy about parents who have children that are going off to college. Now, I will tell you what you’re about to mention. My I dated a woman many, many, many years ago whose family did exactly this. And it was a great investment for them. It worked out really well saved them a lot of money over the years. But let’s talk about that. Well, it’s called The Family
Joel Schaub 18:46 opportunity loan. And most banks that you’re already working with if you’re a realtor, and they do have this even if they don’t know it. And what it allows people to do is it’s twofold. The first one is Mom and Dad buying a home or a condominium for a college bound student. It can be enrolled right now or enrolling in the next semester. And they’re allowed to buy that property even though the client is not living in the son or daughter is not going to go on the mortgage. And you’re allowed to do that with just a 5% down payment. What that means is we’re essentially buying an investment property because in a year or two, the son or daughter probably won’t continue to stay in that price property. And so now we’ve created a situation where we’ve bought a home with only 5% down and you’re fully and legally allowed to rent it even after 12 months.
D.J. Paris 19:44 Yeah, it’s a great opportunity to have you know your child living live rent free, collect the rent from from the other tenants, and then continue to rent out the property as the child moves on. And I know I switched places I lived every every year in college as well. But this isn’t, you know, these are where a lot of people can save money on the room and board, right. So this is a great opportunity to invest a little bit and collect all of the tax deductions, which is nice about having income producing properties as well. So this would be another really great opportunity to talk to anyone that you know, that has children that are nearing the end of their high school years, or maybe their first couple of years of even college. This is when you know, you could start saying, Hey, has anyone ever talked to you instead of, you know, paying for rent for you know, your children at school, that maybe this is another option, this would be a great reason to reach out and just have that conversation with everyone who has a child in high school, you know, getting to the end of going off to college,
Joel Schaub 20:50 DJ, can you imagine how much money your I would have if our parents, instead of paying for the room and board at college bought a place and literally just kept that place. And that’s the point right now is a lot of people, you’re not doing this for the 18 year old that’s moving to college for the very first time, it’s usually the move up, they’ve been in college for a year or two. And maybe they’re a junior or a senior. And the other thing that I did not mention is that you are allowed to collect rents. So a lot of my clients have their daughter, and then they have two or three roommates, and they’re fully allowed to collect rents from the bedrooms that are there, as long as the parents qualify, that’s not a rental property. And it really allows for generational wealth, you’re buying something, and you’re not putting money into the room and board. Now the other side of that, which, unfortunately we see is a lot of times we have maybe a client whose mother or father unfortunately passes away. And now mom or dad needs to downsize, right, and mom or dad is elderly isn’t working. And the parents are making the choice, you know, your time, you’re at a point now where you become your parents parent, and you have to figure out am I going to pay for a lease for my mother for the next couple of years. Or, gosh, if I’m paying two or $3,000 a month, I I’d like to buy something for her. And I can afford the payment. I don’t want to put $100,000 down. So that’s the strategy again, you can just put 5% down and have mom or dad living in the property. And it’s completely different DJ than it being a second home or an investment property. These are priced as a another primary residence. And it’s the only time that I know of that any underwriter allows you to have a second primary residence. And that means the rates are a lot lower, the mortgage insurance is next to nothing. And it can count for 5% down. So there’s some strategies there again, it’s called The Family opportunity loan, I take it as an opportunity if I was an agent to reach out to the lenders that I’m working with right now and say, as listen to a podcast do you have this loan program and the good ones that you’re working with know all about it
D.J. Paris 23:10 because so the family opportunity loan allows an individual to possibly purchase another property for someone in the family, it’s it becomes a another primary residence you’re allowed to collect. Obviously, there’s qualifications and you need to fit into this very specific bucket here, but it you’re allowed to collect rent, but it’s not considered a rental property.
Joel Schaub 23:36 No, you have to have the parent in that property or the son or daughter in the property, what we can’t do is call it this and literally just have it be an investment property. So that goes against the nature of it. And so it does allow for somebody to move in you could collect rents, if there were bedrooms for sure. And then after one year, the son or daughter moves out or mom or dad moves to another location you’re fully within your rights to have that be an investment property as long as for the first 12 months it was occupied by the person that was on the upfront paperwork. That’s an
D.J. Paris 24:11 amazing strategy. So you live in the property for a year that cements it as a residence and and then from there on out you can kind of do do what you want with only and only starting the whole thing with only 5% down that is an incredible option. Guys these are the kind of creative ways that for lending and for real estate transactions that has really taken Joel from you know from from start to where he is now at the very very top of the of the lending food chain because he is always thinking about creative solutions for his clients. That’s That’s incredible. You kind of blew my mind with that I did not know that was that was an option so I’m I’m really one more
Joel Schaub 24:55 thing about this though ready DJ because I know right now people are thinking in their mind Well, if I put 20% down on that I don’t have to pay mortgage insurance. Okay, so let me tell you about why this program is amazing is that with 5% down and it’d be considered a primary residence. Let’s take a $400,000 property, yes, you could put 80 grand down and not have mortgage insurance. But I had a client recently just do the 5%, down, where they put down $20,000. And that mortgage insurance was about $51 a month. So $51. And yes, that money is going right out the window, I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t ever want to pay mortgage insurance. But the decision was, if I’m only putting 20 grand down instead of 80 grand, and I’m getting the exact same rate, I don’t want to put down 80 grand if it only cost me 51 extra dollars, exactly. That’s the solution. And if I’m an agent, now, I know two strategies, and I’m keeping my antennas up. I’m thinking of people that are getting older, and I’m thinking maybe they have a parent that needs this. It doesn’t need to be somebody who passes away. It just needs to be a situation where you want to put mom or dad into a property, or a son or daughter who’s college bound or enrolled in a property. And this is the strategy to do it without 20% down.
D.J. Paris 26:20 It’s amazing. Yeah, that is an amazing, you really are getting your balloon blowing my mind with those I did not I did not know that product existed. And what a great opportunity for anyone with with aging parents or who have worked, or who are parents themselves and have kids who are in college and you’re tired of paying that that room and board rent of let’s let you know, I also would, you know, it’s funny, I just saw the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun the basically the head economist, he just said that he was very happy with inflation, the numbers most important are recently released. And he said he believes rates are on the way down. So the very top guy at the National Association of REALTORS believes rates are are going to be coming down at some point and didn’t say when. But we hope we hope soon. But again, I still think this is not a time to get discouraged. This is just a time to get work a little harder, right? i This not not Joel Of course, Joel always works hard. But for everyone listening, this is the time where lots of people are sitting on the sidelines, lots of agents are not moving forward. You know, they’re they’re paying attention to only what’s happening in the news. And they’re just maybe they’re they have a little fear. This is the time to keep to bring these kinds of options to your clients, whether or not it’s the right fit for them that you know, you guys will figure out. But this is a time to commute over communicate versus under communicate.
Joel Schaub 27:56 You’re exactly right. When we think about what happened with inflation and what the Feds historic move up in rates, right? Maybe we see a little bit of volatility here where they go up a little bit before they come down. But the likelihood that the Fed does the same amount of rate increases that they’ve already done is next to nothing, there’s a very little chance that the rates continue to go up that much. Okay, it is much more likely that the worst of the inflation is behind us. And that means at some point in time, next year, we’re going to see rates come down. And they might come up a little bit. But the situation really truly is that we should stay positive. We know that rates here in the 60s aren’t something that makes you want to jump out of a tree, everything is okay. And in the near future rates will be lower. So let’s go out and get all the deals we can right now. And let’s help all the clients we can now because when the floodgates turn on again, you better be ready. Because rune rates are down. We’re gonna see that again in the future. And we had a lot more activity, so get ready for it.
D.J. Paris 28:58 I started as a financial advisor on September 12 2001, which of course we know what what happened the day prior. But it was also aside from the terrorist attack that happened. It was also the tech bubble had already started crashing significantly if we were if we if we were alive during those times. And I will tell you that people would told me at that time, this is the worst possible time to get in. I was coming in when people were losing 85 90% of if they were heavily invested in tech technology at that time. The turn of the millennium that people were down significantly, and I was told worst time you could possibly get in. It was the best time to get it actually because as a result I worked really hard. I didn’t know any different and as a result I just pounded through and I found people that were like me that were new to the market that you know didn’t have a history by Find me to say like, well, I made 80% last year, and now I’ve lost it all. This is a great time to pick up. What I’m really talking about is first time homebuyers, this is a great opportunity to pick up first time homebuyers. When people are ready to buy, they’re ready to buy, you know, rates be damned, you know, quite honestly, like when people need to move they need to move. So now’s the time to get in, I would encourage all of our listeners, find out where you’re the people in your contact list where they work. And I would, I would partner up with someone like Joel or Joel himself. And I would say, I want to go to visit some of these companies, I want to, you know, bring in some lunch, I want to do a whole pitch on, I want to talk to people who are in their, like late 20s or early 30s, who are thinking about buying who haven’t yet done it, that’s going to be my market. And if you do that this year, you’re going to be golden right now.
Joel Schaub 30:54 And that’s the reason if I’m an agent right now, like I continue to tune in to the cube into real podcasts, you’re getting information, you’re getting one extra thing that you can actually put in place right now. And if you’re in a market like we are, rents are not cheap, and I don’t really know a market. Now that I think about it, where rents are cheap. And if you are renting, the rate that you’re paying is 100 and DJ I like 6.5 or 6%, a lot more than I like 100%. Right. So remember this, when people complain about where the rates are, and they’re renting, remind them that the rate that they’re paying right now is 100%, all of that money goes out the window. And if you own the place, 6% is going out the window, and everything else is actually going to pay down your mortgage, and you get a tax deduction. So remember, the sky is not falling, if somebody is renting, you can help them and just work your sphere. There’s a lot of opportunities right now, and stay positive. And that’s my advice for you.
D.J. Paris 31:59 And guys, what I would recommend and when I say guys, I should stop saying that because obviously we we actually have more female listeners than than male listeners who say girls, but but I’ll just say everyone, this is this is what I would do if if if I was if I were you, and I meet with a client and they’re not sure, I would say you know what, I’ve got the group, the best mortgage person, the best lender, I’m gonna, we’re gonna have a conversation and they’re gonna try to figure out a creative strategy for you. You don’t have to know everything, you just have to know the right lender. And when you pass that person over, believe me, lenders love those kinds of introductions. So you what you want to do is partner with somebody who is this creative, somebody like Joel or just partner with Joel himself. That’s what I did. That’s what you should do. But if you’re if Joel isn’t, you know, able to help you, you can find someone else. But Joel, for everyone else who’s going to follow me and follow you. What’s what’s the best way that they should get in touch with you so that they can find out about out about these creative strategies and these different options.
Joel Schaub 33:05 But I love to keep it in real community because I’ve literally had personal conversations with dozens of listeners, they’re shocked when I actually return the emails to them and personally talk to them. And I love it. I mean, it’s just part of who I am. And it’s just one of those things where if you want you can email me joel@rate.com JO el@rat.com. And remember, if somebody’s paying, let’s say $2,500 a month in rent, their biggest objection isn’t that the payment that they can’t afford a mortgage is that they don’t have the downpayment. And so coming up with the strategies to do 3% down, or 5% down, where the rates are really attractive on these first time homebuyer programs, that’s going to make all the difference. They’re already paying a mortgage, they’re just paying somebody else’s mortgage. So help them get on the right track to homeownership. The more people you help, the more you’ll help yourself. And it all goes back to that givers gain mentality. If you can give and you teach and you educate people are going to follow you. And those people are gonna refer you more business. So get out there and put the people first and teach them and help them
D.J. Paris 34:20 agreed everyone out there grab while you’re probably on your phone if you’re if you are go to your email app and send an email to joel@rate.com asked to be placed on his weekly mortgage update lending list and you will get a market update once a week and it’s too much full of information where you can’t like the example I gave earlier today. It was very beautiful email I have to share it with you but it was yes. You got to see it was so overdone so much data, so much data. But the point is is most people you know look, we want two or three pieces of information We can lock into our brains. That’s what your, what your your weekly market update does. And it gives us a way to actually make more money meaning more clients helping more people. So everyone, and by the way, too, if you’re a realtor, and you want to partner with a lending a loan officer who can actually help you grow your business, Joel and his team, they’re very, they’re the best out there the best I’ve ever found, please give them a shot, reach out to Joel joel@rate.com. Or you can eat you can Joe give that you might give him the phone number one more time.
Joel Schaub 35:34 Now 773-654-2049. And we’re just happy to be giving back. It’s really great to be on I hope everybody got some useful information, today, we covered a lot about rates that covered the sky isn’t falling, and that rates probably will be coming down. But even right now where the rates are at, if you’re renting a home, it’s still much better to go out and see what we can buy. As long as you have a small down payment, you’re gonna be in the door.
D.J. Paris 36:01 And some creative strategies for people who have children in college as well as elderly parents who might need a residence. So, you know, pass this episode over. Oh, by the way, guys, we are now on Instagram. I want everybody to follow us please on Instagram at top agent interviews, I wish it was keeping it real. But that was already taken. So at top agent interviews, and we’re post in the reason I mentioned this is not because I want a big Instagram following. But because we actually, every single day we’re pushing out a short form video clip, usually under 60 seconds on actually all of our social platforms, including Tiktok. But Instagram is what where we find most of our audience is hanging out. So please follow us top agent interviews on Instagram, and even get a daily dose of this podcast. So Joel, thank you so much for another episode, another month. Another great episode of content is you know, everyone, get on Joel’s list. joel@rate.com email him now. Now Now tell everyone in your office to get on that list as well reach out to him with your buyer questions right. He is the man he’s got a whole team in place, they will work with you one on one. And, you know also on behalf of all of our listeners, we want to end viewers want to thank Joel for spending time with us today took time out of his busy day to be on the show, as well as we want to Joel and I want to thank the audience for continuing to support and listen and please tell a friend they could one other realtor that could benefit from this conversation and send them a link to our website keeping it real pod.com And also follow us on Instagram again top agent interviews. All right, Joel, great to see you and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Joe.
Why Love Is a Real Estate Agent’s Best Tool • Amy Corr
Apr 20, 2023
Amy Corr the Executive Vice-President of Culture and Agent Development for @properties and Christie’s International Real Estate, talks about her journey and her experience from tech firm to getting a real estate agent license. Amy explains how important is to give so much love to clients and get to know them better. Next, Amy talks about her passion for coaching and an innate ability to push people to do their best. Last, Amy emphasizes the importance of being authentic towards others.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What do buyers and sellers really expect from their agent? We’re going to find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide. I’m your host through this show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Amy core. But before we get to Amy, just a couple of reminders, oh actually got an announcement. So we finally have an Instagram account, which sounds silly. Everybody has an Instagram account. But we actually created one very diligently and intentionally so that we could provide more content to you the listeners. So we have a team now that goes through our episodes and clips out the very best moments. And we post those video moments usually 30 to 60 seconds on the various social channels including Instagram. So we’re on Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, probably some other places. But anyway, please follow us on Instagram, which is at top agent interviews at top agent interviews every day, we’ll be serving you up a short form video with a tip from one of our great great guests. Please also tell a friend about our podcast keep us expanding by telling other realtors about keeping it real. So send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, we have almost 500 Now can all be streamed right from a browser window Okay guys, let’s get to the main event my conversation with the great Amy core
right today on the show we have aded core with AP properties in Chicago also Christie’s international real estate. Let me tell you more about AMI AMI core oversees the development and delivery of branded coaching, training and business planning solutions that help agents consistently and sustainably grow their business resulting in genuine agent satisfaction and a thriving brokerage culture. Amy’s curriculum tackles every stage of the agent lifecycle from broker fundamentals to leveling up to top producer status to building and running successful teams. Her programming is practical, engaging and actionable, based on 20 years of experience as a six as successful sorry about that successful agent of her own right and award winning managing broker. She was born and raised in San Francisco, Amy graduated from Santa Clara University lives in Wilmette, which is basically Chicago with her husband and her two daughters. Guys, this is a really special episode for me. I am very very honored to bring Amy on. If you’re if you’re not from the Chicagoland area most of our audience is not at properties started as an independent brokerage and has as quickly or over their lifecycle of their business has become one of the most successful brands for real estate in independent brands in the entire country. So this is really, really exciting. We’re huge fans about properties. Amy welcome. Oh, by the way, everyone go visit@properties.com at properties.com. Also, Amy does a show every week with Kevin Vanek and that is at on it. Follow her on Instagram at coffee with Amy and Kevin. So at Coffee with with Amy and Kevin, I will have links to all of these in the show notes. So you don’t have to write this down. Amy, welcome to the show.
Amy Corr 5:07 Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for such a nice intro. You made me sound so good.
D.J. Paris 5:13 Well, you, you are incredibly impressive. And I am so so happy to chat with you today. So let’s I want to hear about you. I want to know your journey. So tell us how you started in real estate. How did you get involved?
Amy Corr 5:30 Yeah, no, that’s a great question. A lot of people usually start with how the heck did a California girl?
D.J. Paris 5:35 Yeah. How did you go from the west? How’d you not end up in the tech world?
Amy Corr 5:40 Yeah, well, I kind of started in the tech world. But yeah, so I actually moved from California out to Chicago, a couple years out of college. And I actually started in technology, I was moved out here by a tech firm and enjoyed it, you know, did technology for a while with a company called SSA. In fact, I looked them up to see if they still existed, they were just function bought by somebody else. So a while. But then I moved to a cool startup. And I think it was 98 or 99. And worked a ton in tech. And it was super interesting worked so many hours. But after about three years, I kind of was at this point where you know, I was getting old enough to think what the heck do I want to do with the rest of my life? And is this you know, is this what interests me? And I was I didn’t read the What color is your parachute? But it was definitely trying to figure that out. And my now husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, kind of just planted the seed. And he said, you know, you’ve always seemed like you kind of like real estate and you know, like looking at houses and I wasn’t I didn’t own anything at that point in time. And I thought, huh, that’s kind of interesting. So I explored it a little bit. Next thing you know, I enrolled at the place on Halsted Street in Chicago darkness was the gentleman who owned that company, the yellows, Hanson Yes. And really had some real estate. Yes, yes, yes. So I had no clue what I was doing, right. So I decided, Alright, I’m gonna go ahead. I still work full time. But I went, you know, in the evenings to study and get my license. And then I got, I got my license, I got licensed. And I just I actually, I don’t know if you know, Jan Smith, who owned J. Smith and Associates in Bucktown, she actually her old offices now are at properties Bucktown office, she was my first managing broker, I love her, I still see her often. And I just kind of hung my license with her because she was a friend of our family members. And I kind of didn’t even know what I was getting into. But I was sort of excited by the idea of I was working so many hours in technology. And what I remember hearing at the time, it was like 2002, and the market was moving was you know what, if you work really hard, you can be really successful, and you’re your own boss. And so I found that really interesting, because I was working so so hard to make somebody else a lot of money. And I loved my people and where I was at, but I just felt like you know what, if I’m going to do it, now’s the time, I don’t have kids, you know, I’m still single, why not make this change. So I jumped in and worked with Jan for a little bit and then moved over to a different brokerage firm. I worked with Suzy minor for about a year, which was great. That’s where I went met one of my very best friends who really kind of mentored me. And then she and I moved to add properties in 2002. No, sorry. 2004. So, you know, I’ve been with ad for a really long time, I was probably maybe agent 150 at the time. So think about how far I’m like blown away by how far we’ve come if you really think about it. I mean, I remember being in the basement of the Clyburn office selling real estate in the city, and now now look at us as a company, but it’s been a really phenomenal journey. I feel really fortunate and lucky that, you know, I’ve just sort of been given the opportunities that I have in in this industry because I’m just really passionate about it.
D.J. Paris 9:09 It’s an incredible story and I’m curious, so at properties has Gosh, I don’t know more than 3000 agents, I don’t know here in the local Chicago area, at least 3000 Probably more You’re certainly one of the biggest players and and yet you know, this sort of grassroots built business which you know, competes with Compass and and Coldwell Banker and at you know, and all buyer Baird and Warner and all of these other big players in the space and you guys came in like, it just sort of took over and what I what I see having what I saw have has happened in in here in Chicago is this the branding of ad properties is so immersive what it does. So App properties did something that I thought was brilliant, which, as a marketer, they basically said, what what is, and again, I don’t know, the conversations that led to this. So I’m just, I’m just pre presupposing. But they basically, you know, took one of the deepest, you know, experiences in human existence, which is love. And they said, We want to brand around love we want when people think about our brand, when they think about buying homes, when they think about our agents, when they think about our sort of processes, we want to be the happy, loving, fun sort of group. And they’ve they focused on the one word love, and that became your brand. And it just absolutely took off. And I’ve never, I’ve yet to see another brand in any industry, capitalize on love, and use it as their mascot as their bread and meat is literally your mascot. And it is such a strong message. Because of course, all of us have a connection to that word, you know, and we see it and you guys have it all over the city, you can’t go here in Chicago, you can’t go too far, in at least here within the city limits, without seeing the word love somewhere with the add properties kind of logo there. And they don’t even necessarily talk about real estate in most branding efforts. That’s what’s really cool. I love
Amy Corr 11:33 that that’s also intentional. You know, it’s also intentional. So I wasn’t in the room when it happened. But I was here when it did. And, you know, we were talking earlier about bad Wong, you know, I think one of the things that you you know, we have to incredibly credit him for is that, you know, he is the mastermind from the very beginning with so much of our branding and marketing strategy. Natasha, Pat Lowe, who’s, you know, our CMO now is incredible, and the two of them together, but he really drives that it’s, it’s what he loves to do. And, you know, all of our fun campaigns, if you’ve watched them throughout the years, you know, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, I think that is really sort of at the root of our culture is We laugh a lot. And, you know, we joke a lot, even in a lot of our management, you know, our different management meetings that we have, you know, we just really have an enjoyment of working together. And we really want that communicated out not just to our agents, but to the consumer. And, you know, because when we’re selling real estate, yes, it’s a transaction. But think about what is related to the home and what everybody thinks about homeownership and life. And so he was sitting down with Natasha, and he was like, I want to come up with a word that would just resonate with everybody something that everyone, you know, can relate to. And he ultimately, I think, even said, everything that’s, you know, something that everyone would love. And then he was like, Wait, that’s the word. Yeah. And, you know, we use our intention was, we’re going to use it as, you know, a campaign, we obviously aligned ourselves with Matthew Hoffman, who was the artist who actually designed the script for love, which we then you know, licensed and purchased through him. And we just started it as as something that we thought would be a cool campaign for, I don’t know if it was 2016 or 2017. And then it was just like, the response was crazy. So then we were like, Okay, why don’t we start taking this a little bit further. And we do a lot of the love magnets, people like to put those on their car. And I remember I was driving somewhere and I pulled up into to get gas somewhere in the in the suburbs. And I pulled in, and this guy pulls up next to me and kind of this kind of beat up car. And I’m like, Okay, I don’t know what he’s wanting for me. And he rolls down his window, because I’m pumping gas. And he was just like, where did you get that love magnet, I’ve been looking for one forever. And I was like, you know, buddy, today is your lucky day, I’m gonna give you my love could have mine. Yeah. And so it just became this thing that we realized, had this amazing experience, and it created this amazing emotion for people. So we have continued to use it, but we really try to use it in a way to that, you know, really pushes ahead of our brand. Like when COVID hit, we started doing signs that were Love is the unity in your community. And you know, it didn’t even have that properties on it, but it was like everybody just knew. And you sometimes I think when you lead with the right intention to focus on others, to give back to figure out how can we help other people instead of serving ourselves first, the universe opens up for you and I really do feel like that’s one of the things that I have learned and developed, you know, not just in my career but as a human working here at at you know, because we all work really hard but I think we’re always asking like, especially for our agents, what do they need from us right now? You know, how can we support them? You know, as independent contractors in you know, great markets, but also challenge In markets, and so, you know, the love is extended amongst one another, but then it you know, and it’s also a great branding opportunity for agents to use as they’re trying to connect with their clients, you know. And so it’s it’s kind of taken a life of its own. And so many of our affiliates, it’s one of the things that they really anchor to and have just really loved, loved having the opportunity to use in their own communities.
D.J. Paris 15:25 Yeah, I would love I would also love to talk about, sorry for the pardon the pun, would love to talk about teams, because I’m switching gears kind of abruptly only because, you know, this year with rates being where they are and inventory being less than what most markets would would prefer. We are now seeing a lot of agents moving around, right agents are starting to feel oh, maybe I’m if they’re on a team, maybe they’re not on the right team, maybe they’re a different brokerage, maybe there’s better options. And what what we’re seeing is this, this fractionalization of agents, the the the migration of agents who are sort of, on their own maybe thinking maybe I would be better in a collective, maybe I would be better in a group versus just me running everything myself. And at properties is obviously embraced. team mentality. There’s lots of teams that properties, lots of teams at many brokerages. I’m curious on what suggestions you might have to agents who are thinking about joining a team or creating a team?
Amy Corr 16:37 Ah, good, two very different kind of mindsets, very
D.J. Paris 16:40 different.
Amy Corr 16:41 You know, I think, I think it’s, you know, so first of all, I think that, you know, our industry, we are definitely seeing that the team model, you know, is definitely not going away. If anything else, I feel like it’s getting a lot stronger. And I think, you know, for a couple reasons, I think just the speed at which real estate is going now with technology, even if you think 2025 years ago, where we were just on the cusp of things being in the MLS, things being electronic. But I remember when I first started, I would still go and get signatures at night, right? Or the pace was just not quite as fast. And I feel like the consumer expectation was also not quite so high. I mean, think about what they expect now from print advertising to digital advertising to a full blown marketing strategy to where is the exposure, you know, there’s a lot of expectation. And so at some point, as a sole practitioner, you know, we can only handle so much, right, because we’re having to move so fast in order to compete with everybody else. So I think at some point, what I say to so many agents is that if you’re going to grow, there’s only one of you. So you have to figure out what is going to be your plan to scale. And you know, in some time, and what I oftentimes see is that they don’t always scale the right way. You know, I think it’s sometimes just getting bodies to help is the answer where, you know, we actually have a two day workshop that I built with a consultant that is a team’s workshop. And it’s for team leaders for them to really kind of understand like, Am I doing this the right way, because oftentimes, they just sort of develop the team, and have some people that are sort of all working together. But you know, no one has ever really evaluated, what’s the strategy behind this. And so what we really help a lot of team leaders take a look at and what I would encourage most team leaders to do is take a step back and see where your team is at. But what I would have them do is to almost take a sheet of paper and write down on one side, what are the things that I like to do most and I am most effective at? And then on the other side, what do I not like to do or what should I not be doing because it’s not the best use of my time. So many of the team leads that I see and consultant work with, you know, they’re great rainmakers, they’re great at bringing in the business reaching out to clients, they are phenomenal at that. What they aren’t always great at is managing the rest of their people, maybe creating structure for their people. And so what I find is they’re so busy out getting the business and fueling the pipeline. But then there are people who are feeling lost because that team lead just doesn’t have the time to help to develop them. Or what they also don’t always have is a good operations. Person operations are key, right? You’ve got the person that is out drumming up the business, but somebody has to be the backbone to make sure that business is being serviced correctly. And so, you know, I really encourage agents to take a step back and start looking at what roles do I need for the type of team that I’ve either midway built or really want to build. And sometimes what you can look at is some of your people, you’ve got really great talent, they’re just in the wrong spot. And so you know, we’ve we’ve got Um, lots of different, you know, ways for team leaders to really look at stuff. But I feel like sometimes they just sort of throw people into a group. And there isn’t really a strategy behind the growth. And so anybody who’s you know, has a team, I would really encourage that, you know, and I can dive into it for hours, but really just take a step back and understand at the end of the day, what do you want to be doing as a team lead? And what is your role going to be because you cannot be everything, and you need to figure out what roles need to be filled, you fill yours, and then you find great people to fill those other spots. And I will tell you, you will create some amazing synergy. So that’s really, I would say, for team leads for people who are thinking about being on a team, you have to ask yourself, you know, what is the reason for being on a team? Is it simply because I can’t figure out how to fish for myself. And I don’t like reaching out in prospecting. Before that is necessarily your only factor, I almost would even ask you, is this the right business for you? Right, because a big part of being in real estate, let’s face it, you’ve got to learn how to fish on your own. And I’m also a big believer of you cannot expect a team leader to just hand you leads, I think, the best run teams, it’s not that you won’t get them. But at the end of the day, that isn’t their sole responsibility. And that might be some team models of overflow. But my thought is, is that if that ever goes away, if that overflow or the Zillow leads, they purchase, if those dry up and suddenly the team is struggling, to me, it’s all hands on deck, and you better know how to fish. So the best teams I think are ones where team members come in and learn how to cultivate business from the best who is their team leader? And that team leader teaches them? And then I think, yes, definitely, there’s overflow. But you know, so I think when you’re a team member, or somebody who wants to go onto a team, I would ask those questions, I would you know, and if somebody just says, Hey, we’re gonna give you leads, that’s great in the short term, but if you’re in this business, for the long term, you’ve got to learn how to develop your own book of business, that’s your biggest safety net. Because at some point, if that team goes away, and you’re standing there and never develop the tools that it takes to be a great agent, you’re gonna be starting from the ground up again.
D.J. Paris 22:19 Yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had many, many people on the show over the years who have talked about purchasing leads versus handing leads out organically versus, you know, working referral based business. Of course, everybody who’s listening would love to have 100% of their business be referral based. And, of course, that is ultimately the goal, because it’s the most cost effective way to to run that, that this business. But it takes a tremendous amount of effort to get there. I but I also think it’s something we probably don’t talk about enough, which is raving fans, like how do how do you encourage your agents to because at properties here in the Chicago market is, if they’re not the highest producing real estate brokerage, they’re number two, they’re number one or number two. So you know, we have an opportunity here to talk to Amy and ask her what are you telling your your agents about? How to create raving fans?
Amy Corr 23:23 Yeah. I always tell people that you need to focus on the give. You know, I think as agents, you know, especially when we’re new in the business, and I was there, I still remember that panic attack of am I going to be cert able to survive and really grow a career. And there’s a lot of self doubt. I mean, we have all of these CEOs out there, right? They’re CEOs of their own business, but they sometimes barely believe in themselves. And so it’s, and I think for a lot of them, they feel like God, I have to go out and ask for business, I have to ask that question. Do you know anybody who’s looking to buy and sell? And so I actually remove that from the equation sort of all together? My big belief is, look, yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, focus on the person in front of you, and figure out what can I give to them today that’s going to change their life, you know, maybe even just a little bit, you know, and I play this fun game, we have a program called the road to Rolex, and we’ve got over 100 agents that are in the program for the year. And it’s an accountability program, and they’re in small groups of five, and they meet for the entire year. And I am coaching them, like I coach each of the groups kind of once a quarter. And so I was meeting with some of them. And I said, here’s what I want you to think about doing. I want you to like we have this amazing opportunity known as social media, Facebook, Instagram, we get to know more about the people that are in our sphere than ever before. Use it. Don’t use it in a bad way or feel like it’s self serving, but figure out what’s going to move the needle with people. You know, I had a great example I had an agent who had a somebody on Facebook who posted we’re going on Spring Break, and our, our dogs that are the place where we bring our dog, it’s full. Now we’re in a panic, we need somebody to come and you know, watch our dog for a week. So one of this agent who happened to know this woman who posted on Facebook, I said, Be the connector. Focus on the give this person needs something. Do you know anybody? She said, I actually have a girlfriend who does dog sitting part time. I said, Awesome. Or actually, she told me this scenario. So she said she connected and call the woman who does dog sitting and she said, Are you available the week of the 27th? How much do you charge? Can I get this person in contact with you? So sure enough, yep, it worked. She called this other person who posted on Facebook and said, Hey, I have somebody that can take care of your dog while you’re gone for the week. So the beauty of that situation, she just had the opportunity to make authentic contact with two people in her database. And all she did was focused on the give focus on how can I, you know, create an opportunity for others. And maybe she didn’t get a deal that day. But I’m telling you, if you do that all day long, that is going to change the trajectory of your business.
D.J. Paris 26:08 It’s that law of reciprocity thing, right? Like I do good for others, without the expectation of doing good to me. But people are pretty hard wired to want to return favors. So this idea of being real estate adjacent, I always I always like as this like, I’m going to be yes, I’m going to help you with your real estate transaction. That’s obviously the job of the realtor. But all the other stuff that exists all the ancillary, you know, things that come up, or, Hey, I need a pet sitter for my dog.
Amy Corr 26:47 And it’s all related to home. related. Yeah, well, I will say, sorry, no, I was just gonna say I always say to agents, it isn’t just the buy and sell. It’s everything in between, that in between is the secret sauce, if you take care of them in between those deals, like not only are they going to work with you again, but think about all the opportunity that that comes with that. And it’s you know, it’s taking the transaction out of it. It’s really focusing on the relationship piece. And, and yeah, it takes a little bit of lead time. You know, I think sometimes agents get a little antsy with it like, Well, nothing’s happening right now. It’s like, just continue the action, and it will happen, it just, you know, if you throw something out into the universe, at some point, it has to respond, you know, just sometimes as agents, we get impatient. So it’s just let it ride, keep doing it. And you’ll see the change. I’ve seen it in agents that I’ve coached over the years, you know, and some of the biggest agents that I’ve really seen and work with are the best connectors, I call them super connectors, you know, they’re the person that is called for everything. Do you have a guy for this? Do you have a girl for this? You know, who would you recommend in this situation, it’s like, Ah, you got to call Amy or you got to call DJ, because he knows everybody, right? That’s who you want to be. And then the rest takes care of itself.
D.J. Paris 28:02 You really want to bring people into your Echo system, you want to create your own echo system, so that a home buyer or seller or homeowner, or renter, anyone, whenever they have needs around, you know, home related items, that you become obviously the person that they that they go to. And therefore, it’s it’s sort of a simple but difficult thing, right? Like, so you have to, you have to It’s simple. It’s like push ups like good idea hard. So I so I think I think creating an echo system is really, really important, because what you’re really doing is you’re solving these micro problems along the way. And maybe they’re not like maybe they’re massive problems, but you’re solving problems outside of real estate outside of the transaction along the way. And that’s to me, I see that is really the job. The job is how do I solve problems in between transactions for or how to provide value slash solve problems? For for my, my sphere of influence? How do I do that, because if I do that, I can make a reasonable assumption that a vast majority of those people, if I’m consistently adding value to their lives, are going to feel and let’s just be honest, they’re going to feel that they owe you the opportunity to hire you for for a brokerage transaction. So for so I thought that that, you know, the the home selling process is is its own thing. And then but and we focus a lot on that because that’s what we’re in the middle of at any given moment when we’re dealing with a client. But if we can focus if we could really expand to focus on providing value outside of that transaction as much as possible. It’s actually number one. It’s really fun because you can you can, you know, accumulate and And, you know, start to put all of these different vendors and services together and start to create these these guides that you can then project out to, to your clients. But you can be reaching out to them consistently saying, what’s going on with your home, how’s everything going? Do you need anything? Like you can actually reach out to them not ask it like you were saying, not asking, Hey, are you thinking about buying or selling? But hey, how’s everything going with your home? Do you guys need anything, I’ve got the best plumbers, I’ve got the best, etc. I think that is so tremendously valuable. Because number one, every homeowner always has projects that are ongoing, right? Like, we all have ongoing projects, if you are a homeowner, there’s something that you’re like, I need to get to that one room and paint that one wall. And it’s not one thing. And everybody’s got that. So if I was an agent right now, I mean, I am an agent, but I’m not a practice. If I was a practicing agent today, what I might do if I was in between sales, I’m curious to get your thoughts on this, I might come up with my vendor list of all the people that I’ve worked with, and you know, different services related to home, you know, home stuff, and I would have that list. And I would be calling my friend saying, hey, just checking in. Are there any projects currently in your home that are unfinished? Or are you need to work on? Or? Or, or hey, also, if you want to meet to check the value of your home, I can do that, too. But I just wanted to see how everything’s going with the home just checking in on the home. How’s it going? You need anything I’m gonna accent? I mean, could you imagine nobody has ever made that call to me, by the way?
Amy Corr 31:41 That, here’s what I want you to, here’s what I want to identify. No one has ever made that call. So Kevin, and I just did a coffee last week. And the first thing on the coffee was pick up the phone. I’m telling you, if you were asking me which agent is going to win this year, is the one that picks up the phone and start, you know, face to face man to man voice to voice contact. You know, it’s the fastest way to get into a yes or a no. And we’re so afraid of no. But what if the answer is yes. And you’re missing all of those yeses. That’s what drives me crazy. And it’s funny because agents that I do coach, they get really nervous about the phone. And there’s a lot of them that do like they can talk to anybody until the cows come home. But the minute that they feel like oh my god, I’m calling somebody, and I’m interrupting them in particular.
D.J. Paris 32:27 Also, if they haven’t been following up with them, consistently, paths are like, Oh, I haven’t called that person in a year. It’s gonna feel weird. It’s good. Yep.
Amy Corr 32:36 Yeah, it’s like they would rather like rip off 10 band aids out there are as opposed to make that call, you know, but so it’s funny. So what I had encouraged a lot of agents to do is, you know, there’s those straight to voicemail apps fly dial. And so I said, You know what, let’s warm up with this. And so then they would push back with on me, and they would say, Yeah, but they know that I’m going straight to voicemail. So then I said, then just own it. Call them and say, Hey, Bob, you know what I wanted to give you a phone call. And I wanted to go straight to voicemail, because I know, oftentimes, you’re in the courthouse. But gosh, I would really love to connect with you and see how you and Susie are doing, how are things going with the house? Is there to your point, DJ, is there anything that you guys are thinking about during the spring? And can I provide any vendor recommendations? Give me a call back when you have a second, there is nothing that will ever replace the sound of my voice, the tone being inflection, my excitement and energy to be trying to connect with them again, I don’t care how hard you try how many exclamation points on text. You’re never gonna get it. And there’s so many agents who are so afraid to do it. It drives me crazy.
D.J. Paris 33:45 You are so right about the voice, straight to text voice, like the slide dial it straight to voicemail. You are so absolutely right. So I want to make this point because you just made it I want to I want to reiterate it and it’s a good one. People want to hear your voice. They also you if you want to do a straight to voicemail via sly dial or any of these other straight to voicemail services. And you might think oh gosh, like Amy said, Well, what if they know that I’m not actually calling them going straight to voicemail? Here’s how you would say it. And Amy just gave a great script there. What I would add to that, as well as saying, Hey, I didn’t want to bug you. I know you’re at work. I’m just shooting this right into your voicemail, but super excited to catch up with you. You know, bah bah, and then and so you don’t have to. I always say this about it’s kind of like the dating apps. I always say you don’t have to worry about being perceived as a creep. If you’re not a creep. Like if you’re not a creep, you don’t have to worry about it. So so if you’re going to someone’s voicemail, you don’t have to pretend that you’re not you can explain why you are doing that because you don’t want to bug them. Yeah. And by the way, most people aren’t going to answer the phone anyway. So you’re gonna get their voicemail
Amy Corr 34:54 to their voicemail right? And all of you out there you can thank us when you try this later today and you You get a client calling back? Who’s super excited to talk to you? Right?
D.J. Paris 35:04 But I mean, isn’t it really this idea of value? Right? Like, it’s I, I’ve done 500 of these episodes. And I would love to say that, that I’ve, you know, sort of extracted this this secret elixir of how to be a successful real estate agent over all these episodes. And it seems to be if somebody were to put me on stage and say, What did you learn from interviewing hundreds of top 1% agents in the country, I would say, they work really hard. And they’re constantly thinking about how they can add to their customers lives, like add some sort of value. And that’s pretty much it. Like, there’s a lot there. I mean, with those two things, that’s kind of everything. And it’s not easy, but it’s this consistently. Like, like, Amy, like, you were saying, How can I add value today? I mean, it can be as simple as, you know, if sometimes it’s funny, too, because people are like, Well, how do I how do I find more? Leads? How do I get more leads? It’s like, Well, okay, do you go to the grocery store? Yes. Okay. Do you run into people at the grocery store? Well, there’s people at the grocery store, I try
Amy Corr 36:13 not to, I hate when I hear them say I try not to Yeah,
D.J. Paris 36:17 right? Well, and I’m not saying you should talk to everyone at the grocery store. But I’m saying, if you can think about forget about leads, if you think about smiling at people or or acknowledging them, or complimenting them or saying something affirming, that is genuine, authentic, you know, something that moves you like I was, I was at a committee meeting with the Chicago Association of Realtors yesterday, and a friend of mine, or one of the people on my committee had purple hair. And I was like, I gotta remember to tell her I love that purple hair. If there’s always ways we can add value to people’s lives, and if we consistently do that, whether it’s a compliment, whether it’s being of service, whether it’s, you know, checking in on them, this is what wins the race. It’s always about effort. I think
Amy Corr 37:08 it’s effort, and it’s care. You know, I mean, and, you know, you had said there was, what you would say about agents is, you know, constantly providing value and working really hard. But I would also say, really being authentic, you know, I think as agents when you are looking at top producers, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t look at sort of your real estate heroes, or you see a top producer, you know, in your office and you say Dang it, you know, I really want to be like so and so, yes, there are certain things about that person that you’re attracted to. But don’t lose yourself. Because the thing is, is that and this is what I also say to agents is, look, you have a great engine behind you with App properties, Christie’s international real estate, you know, we’ve got a lot of stuff that you are able to go into a listing presentation, or sit down with a buyer and feel super confident. But here’s what I want you to work on. Who are you? And why are you bringing them the value? Because the thing is, is that they’re going to pick you because of you probably not much of anything else. Yes, you’ve got all of this other great stuff, which is going to add to that confidence. And you know, I think what I love the most in coaching, is when I get to that point where I can work with an agent, and I help them find themselves. You know, not everybody can just pick up the phone and be super confident and be able to say certain things doesn’t mean you’re not going to be successful, or does it mean that you don’t have to start slow start with a sly dial and be as nervous as all get out? It’s okay, it gets
D.J. Paris 38:34 okay. It’s okay to be where you are. So in other words, if you are scared, if you if you’re messing up. I mean, look, you know the the reality of it, is it. The phrase that I’ve hated my entire professional career career has been the fake it till you make it. I don’t like that phrase. Because it implies that we’re going to pretend that we have competence when we do not. I think I think it’s way better to acknowledge insecurity fear. I think people relate to that I think people now ultimately we want to develop skill and we wanted to, you know, hone those skills and develop those. But I think the being authentic, if I could make any sort of suggestion to our audience, whatever you’re into, I don’t care what it is, whatever you’re passionate about outside of real estate, somehow figure out a way to incorporate that into your real estate practice. If you’re into horses, if you’re if you’re into racing cars, whatever it might be your dogs,
Amy Corr 39:41 whatever it is, yeah, kids. Yep.
D.J. Paris 39:45 Yeah, bring that figure out a way to put that into your bring that into your business and you will attract other people who of course, also have those interests, but also people we we demand authentic. The city from our from our service providers, we want to know what you are like, we want to know what you do at home you don’t, you can set boundaries around what you’re willing to share. Privacy, of course, is important. But you know, we want to know who you are as a human being. And thankfully, we have technology that allows us to share those things. But people want to know who they are working with. They don’t, the skill is important, of course, but also the human side of it, who are you as a human being, and if you can demonstrate that, along the way of also providing value as as you continue to work with your clients, you’re just going to have a massive success.
Amy Corr 40:41 Yeah, I think especially just because, you know, we are in an industry that is so personal for our clients, you know, I mean, there is personality related to, you know, the selling of a property, you know, when we go in, and we are evaluating their house and giving them a price, there’s a lot of sensitivity to that, because there’s a lot of pride, and when, you know, when the price isn’t maybe what they expected it to be, you know, it’s a personal thing for them, right, because they believe, you know, gosh, but this was so special to me, I don’t see why everybody else can see it. So, you know, I say a lot that I think one of the biggest things for you know, being in real estate is that high emotional component, and really being able to lean in and understand you know, who these people are, because it is personal under, unlike other industries, and so, you know, back to your point, DJ, you know, the more authentic you can be, and the more that they can, you know, you don’t want to show them all of your flaws, but like when they’re feeling a little imperfect, if they’re feeling like, Ah, okay, I’m seeing the human side of this person, I feel more comfortable sharing my imperfections, or some of the things we’re worried about, because they have to open up about a lot. And you know, so I think as agents, again, you know, it’s, the more you are you, you are going to attract the people that are like you and you’re going to actually enjoy working with them more instead of working with people that are constantly pushing back on you or not believing you know what you’re saying. But it kind of starts with us figuring out who we are. And I remind my agents all the time you are CEO, you get to pick out all this stuff, you get to decide, you know, what you want to wear, who you want to focus on how you want to prospect, you know, you get to pick out the how, but you still have to do, and you know, and sometimes it takes a little while, you know, and what we were saying before, you’re gonna screw up, you’re gonna feel stupid, you’re gonna get nervous. But you know, I was talking to an agent earlier this morning, who just got her first eluxury opportunity. And she was like, I was so nervous, I’d wear all black because I felt like I was sweating everywhere. And she said, but what I told myself, is that this is a growth moment. I am growing, as I’m sitting here as terrified. And I said, Yes, you are.
D.J. Paris 42:54 Well, that’s true. Both things can be true, I am scared, and I’m excited. And both of those things can be be present at the same time. Yeah, I think I think it is so much about going all the way back to giving right we can always come back to value, like how do we improve people’s lives, right, we’re going to help them buy a home, we’re gonna help them sell a home, we’re gonna help them rent a home, we’re also going to allow them to, to come to us when they need, you know, things, fix things, things move. And, and we’re going to let them in on our how we how we cope with the ups and downs of, you know, a real estate transaction, for example. So I think the emotional sort of component or the emotional maturity of of, of an agent is really important to be able to anticipate the emotional reaction of like disappointment in advance. So I think really good agents. I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. No, okay, I’m about to deliver some rough news. Because we know that at any part, at some point in every transaction, there’s bad news, every transaction, there’s one at least one piece of bad news. So this is something we get to practice a lot. So the my point, what I’m trying to get to is, if you can identify, Okay, I know what the experience is. Or I’m going to ask other agents who have been through this kind of thing. What’s a typical client reaction to you know, not getting a home or having an offer come in goofy or whatever, whatever the the bad news is, being able to, to predict that that may be happening really makes because because I like I bought a home a few years ago, was not my first purchase. And I had forgotten because it had been a few several years.
Amy Corr 44:49 You forgot the pain.
D.J. Paris 44:53 And it was a really pretty easy transaction. And I was like, it was so stressful. And I was I was thinking god, I forgot I forgot how stressful this is. I mean, I’m not practicing agents. So I don’t know what a lot of our agents know. But boy, I really needed somebody to like, kind of give me a hug at certain times during a metaphorical hug, I guess. But, but the point is, is I think agents, it’s such, it’s, you know, we’re talking about a huge financial, you know, huge financial decisions here with respect to home ownership could be the largest financial purchase, possibly in you know, in the family. But understanding what the emotions are that are at stake, and understanding how to cope with those ups and downs, I think really separates the wheat from the chaff with respect to top producers.
Amy Corr 45:45 I agree. And I think what I would also say is, and this is something that I feel like I had on sort of my own journey of growth in my professional career, is I sort of felt like God, I’m supposed to just know how to do all of this stuff, if I’m gonna be really good. And you know, what I really learned is, you know, you’ve got to continue developing your craft, and you know, you don’t come out of the gate brand new knowing how to really be really solid when it comes to the emotional piece to your point, TJ, people may not necessarily know like, how do I respond or what should I anticipate, but you know, continuing to learn, read books, get mentored by other agents, but then also, it’s just you kind of have to go through enough transactions to then know, I know what’s going to happen this time. But one of the people that I really love is, it’s Chris Voss right with a V. The FBI hostage investing, hostage negotiator negotiator read is, yeah, so read his book. And we actually did kind of a workshop, Kevin and I were, we took some of his top tips, and kind of tried to apply them specifically to real estate situations, and sort of like how to use his scripting, because we aren’t saving a life. But sometimes we are saving a house, right. And one of the ones that I love to your point DJ was, I think it was called the accusation audit. And you know, where it kind of was like, Look, DJ, I know you’re not gonna love me, and you’re gonna be really upset when you hear this news. You know, it’s sort of where you put that into their psyche, where you’re already setting them up for a level of disappointment, or they’re already thinking, Well, I can’t be that disappointed at you. Right? So you kind of you but that was a technique that I probably used at certain points without even knowing it. But once I learned that, I thought, oh, my gosh, I use it on my kids. I wish I could use it on my dogs. I use it on my husband, you know what I mean? But suddenly, it was like, this is a communication technique that I can use that allows me to get the person on the other side prepared for something so bad so that when I deliver the actual news, it doesn’t feel quite as awful. Right. And he has a lot of interesting techniques.
D.J. Paris 47:48 Yeah, Chris Voss This is the never split the difference author, famous FBI hostage negotiator, guy, definitely read this book. But But this, this is what we’re talking about emotional, sort of competence, I would say or emotional coping competence, like real estate agents, you know, if anything, yes, they’re going to sharpen their skills with respect to, you know, market related data, right? They’re going to know, hopefully, they’re going to know, their, their, their numbers, but also knowing sort of the touch points of the clients understanding sort of, what are the motivations? What are the emotions, what are the personality types, and trying to cope ahead, I like the word cope ahead, say, Okay, tomorrow, I have to deliver some bad news to so and, you know, ex client, and like Amy said, I’m gonna maybe I’ll use one of the techniques to sort of maybe soften the blow a little bit. But I also, you know, you can cope ahead and start to think about how might that feel to somebody, okay, they’re gonna, they’re they lost, they lost the deal. Okay, how might that feel them, they’re gonna feel probably pretty defeated, they’re going to feel sad, they’re going to feel maybe angry. Maybe they’ll blame me. You know, you sort of need to go through all of these different instances in your mind and put yourself in their position and say, Okay, let’s let’s cope for all of these. Let’s cope ahead for all of these different inevitabilities. We don’t know which, which one’s going to actually turn out, but I’m going to prepare ahead so that when they respond with whatever their emotional responses, which is going to be probably severe, I am going to have a Don’t worry, it’s okay. Because x and that that I think is is really the key because I know if and as a homebuyer, myself, and home seller, I’ve done that several times. I just all all I ever want in a transaction. So think of me as more of like a lay person. I just want somebody to go it’s all going to be okay. That’s all I ever really want somebody to say somebody who I trust
Amy Corr 49:53 that and then here’s what we’re going to do next. Exactly, no, it’s going to be okay. And then they’re the ones that are going to move have the ball down the field. And that’s what we have to do as agents, we say it’s okay. But here’s the plan. And I loved your idea of as an agent, kind of taking in the shock of the bad news first, because let’s face it, there is an emotional component that we go through, we get so tight and close to these clients of ours, and their loss, let’s face it is our loss, it’s you know, the better the agents, sometimes, the more emotional or, you know, the harder we can take it, but the best agents understand that take the emotion in, allow themselves to be sad, be frustrated, be all the things that you need to be, allow it to pass, and then recognize I have to be the one that can go in with, we got this attitude, there’s something else for us out there. And you know, be able to remove the emotion to allow the clients to have as much emotion as needed. And I think that’s important, because sometimes an agent will get the bad news, and doesn’t take that time to process it and get to where they need to. And they’ll call the client too fast. And then everybody’s emotional, right? And then no one’s helping anyone. So you know, and I think that is practice, right? I think there’s a million times probably early on, that I was super emotional and called the client right away. Oh, that didn’t go so well. So, you know, it’s a lot of this. And what I also say, to so many agents is, you can be a serial student, though, too, you can read books, you can, we have a lot of classes, we’ve got a lot of programs that you can be in, at some point, you got to jump off the diving board straight into the deep end. And you got to just start, you know, working and trying to figure it out and make a ton of mistakes. And, look, we’ve also arrived DJ, you’re sitting here, I’m sitting here, how many times have we blown it?
D.J. Paris 51:45 Probably, like five times today, even I’ve blown it many, many times. Today, it’s a it’s a matter of effort, and, and discipline and, and discipline, I don’t want to say discipline, that’s a word. Nobody likes a habits, habits, let’s let’s build good habits. Discipline is a word that we should probably just get do away with
Amy Corr 52:07 ourselves some grace, you know, the other thing that I see so much with agents is, we’re so hard on ourselves, you know, I was in this group earlier. And this agent was just sort of not beating up on himself a little bit, but he just was just talking about his lack of confidence. And it was so great, because we have these accountability groups that meet every other week, it’s five of them. And, and two of his other team members were like, Robert, you are like amazing, because he was talking about reaching out to an agent in his community that I think is retiring from the business, and a mutual friend of theirs had said you guys should meet because maybe you’d be a great agent to take his business over. And so this guy, Robert was like, Oh, I don’t know, like, what if I’m not a good enough agent, or I’m not the personality type that he would want. And somebody from his group said, Robert, you know what, instead of you thinking that he may be your lucky star, you might be his don’t cut yourself, you know, so you know, you need to cut yourself some more slack, you are amazing. And so I just I see that so often amongst our agents. And, you know, I think one of the things that is also really important, you know, this is a lonely business, as a real estate agent, you know, we can come into the office, and we all sit around the watercooler and talk about our clients. But a lot of times we go back, and we’re really the ones dealing with a lot of these people’s situations. And that’s really hard. And so, you know, on our end of things, when we really try to support from management standpoint, is really being able to see the agent as the individual, you know, how are things going how’s work, how’s life, you know, that means so much for an agent to feel like they are really seen, you know, and it’s just to never underestimate that, because, you know, you’d be surprised some of the agents out there the things that they’re have going on, and how they are still able to carry themselves with such grace, running businesses, you know, and are all CEOs having to support themselves. It’s just, you know, it’s just amazing. So I just think for so many agents that are out there, you’re all rockstars and just recognize, you know, what you do is incredible and just believe in yourself because I don’t I don’t think agents always hear that enough. They should hear it from themselves, but they don’t.
D.J. Paris 54:17 Yeah, and they should, you should be in community, find your community. Even though you may be an individual producer and you’re producing big big numbers, find your tribe find people that can help support you, whether it whether it’s your your brokerage, or whether it’s just a community of other agents. You know, we are in a sort of communal kind of business, it’s I mean, it’s cooperative for sure. And or at least it’s supposed to be and so this this is an opportunity you know, you even though you might be working remotely, which pretty much everyone is these days you know, you don’t have to not be you don’t have to be apart from from people. So right This idea of you know, get support get an app properties does a great job of this. So we should really talk about, you know, if anyone out there is an A, you guys are not just in the Chicagoland area anymore. You’re kind of all over. Let’s talk about that. So if agents are wanting a different experience, maybe they’re not getting a certain amount of of support or training or resources at their current brokerage, and maybe thinking about switching, looking to see what other options exist. This is the year we’ve seen a lot of movement. How should agents start to explore Christie’s at properties?
Amy Corr 55:36 Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, locally, we’re at properties, Christie’s international real estate, and around Chicagoland, Wisconsin and Michigan, but we do have affiliates. You know, we’ve got properties in Indianapolis at properties in Dallas, we’ve got an amazing affiliate in Detroit, up in Wisconsin, we’ve got an amazing affiliate in Madison, in the Madison area. And then now the cool thing is we’ve got some really great agents just across the country, Christie’s Cirino, out in California, down to John our woods in Naples, we’ve got a lot of really great people and, and really what’s happening, and what I’m enjoying so much is what we have built as a culture and an opportunity to, to train and develop agents, we are really figuring out how to take that and expand that out into our affiliate network. So a lot of the programming that we do a lot of the support that we try to give to our agents, from accountability to you know, how to develop a great listing presentation, you know, we’ve got a really comprehensive approach to training and our technology, you know, platform has been really phenomenal to support the back end of our agents. So I would just say, if anybody is interested, it’s easy to find me on social media or, you know, you can email me but, you know, we’re, we really feel like, it’s also the idea that attraction, you know, I, I don’t recruit as actively anymore. But when I did, you know, I would always say, this is about you finding a great fit, but it’s also about us finding a great fit, right, it should really feel like a partnership. And I also feel like it isn’t so much as hiring agents, but it’s really them deciding who do they want to hire to help them run their business? And how can we be that little engine pack behind them, just to really make sure that they can take off. And, you know, I feel just so fortunate because I think, you know, culture for us has always been a really big thing. And DJ, you said this earlier, we kind of just, you know, we’re growing and did a lot of things. And I think one of it is like we really just focused on not so much what everybody else was doing. We really just took a look at like, you know, what should we be focusing on as a company? And you know, the question that we always have is, are we doing it good enough? Or can we be doing it better? And are agents feeling supported? Or can we be doing better? And, you know, and so we really kind of just came from that vein and, and I think the funniest is we’ve just never taken ourselves, you know, we are very serious about creating successful agents. But we also have a lot of fun. And, you know, I think sometimes that goes out of people’s lives too fast when it comes to work. And I think it’s finding the fun again, even though the market has its challenges. There’s so much opportunity out there and sometimes when we let ourselves go to have a little fun, it’s amazing how the universe will open up for us, you know,
D.J. Paris 58:20 a great, perfect, perfect way to wrap up the show. Amy, thank you so so much. Yes, go out. Have fun. Oh, I am so happy to I hope to have you on in the future as well. When everyone who’s listening who has made it this far to please please subscribe to Coffee with cat with Amy and Kevin’s you can find that on Instagram and YouTube should they do a weekly show talk about the sort of state of the market what you can do to keep your business moving forward at coffee with Amy and Kevin. We will have links to that in the show notes. If you are in any of the markets that Amy mentioned, you’re interested in exploring other brokerages at properties Christie’s international would love to talk to you. So please check them out@properties.com at properties.com. And, and behalf of our audience want to thank Amy for her time today. She is a busy, busy woman. And she was kind enough to be on our show. So thank you on behalf of the audience Amy. And on behalf of Amy and myself who want to thank our audience for continuing to support our show. Please tell a friend to think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this, this conversation with Amy and send them a link to this episode. The best way you can do that send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com is where all of our episodes live. Also on every podcast directory out there, just search keeping it real hit that speciated Amy thank you so so much. I had a great time with you. Excited to to have you on in the future because I want to talk to you about more more things related to how to be how to become a success. on real estate So, Amy, thank you. We will see everybody on the next episode.
Amy Corr 1:00:05 Hi everybody.
Why Holistic Real Estate Agents Are Crushing It In 2023 • Trish Arcaro
Apr 19, 2023
Trish Arcaro the Holistic Real Estate Pro, Maine’s Holistic Realtor & Industry Disruptor talks about her experience as real estate agent. Trish describes her transition from marketing manager in California to a real estate agent with a team. Next, she discusses the importance of being part of a group and having a mentor. Trish emphasizes, as a holistic agent, the aspect of serving and guiding people through their real estate experience while taking the well-being of the whole person into account.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What does it mean to be a holistic real estate agent? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Trish arcaro. Before we get to Trish, just a couple of quick reminders. Actually, I got an announcement to make we It’s only taken me six years to do this. But finally, I guess Better late than never finally we have an Instagram account. Please, please, please, please, please pause this podcast, go to Instagram and follow us not because I need the followers although I do need the followers. But I want you to follow me not just for me but for you because we’re actually posting daily content on Instagram that are short form video clips of these episodes. So if you want to just get the little nuggets of wisdom, I’ve got a team that is combing through the episodes finding the best parts and putting them on Instagram actually, they’re not just putting them on Instagram. They’re putting them on Facebook, tick tock YouTube, LinkedIn. I think that’s it everywhere basically every social channel. So anyway, please follow us find us on Instagram. It’s at top agent interviews at top agent interviews. I know keeping it real was taken so I had to find something else. Top agent interviews on Instagram. Thank you that would help us out a lot and please let us know what you think of the short form content. We are so excited about this. And also please tell a friend about the podcast tell anyone you know in your office Hey, listen to the show. It’ll help you increase your production that’s our goal. Alright guys enough for me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Trish arcaro
Hey, today on the show we have Trish arterra With next home experience in Maine. Let me tell you more about Trish. Trish. Our Kara is Maine’s holistic realtor and industry healer. Her unorthodox approach to real estate is rooted in holistic principles, which means she takes a look at your life and helps you manifest a home that aligns with your values, your aspirations and your lifestyle. It doesn’t matter if you’re a first time homebuyer or seasoned seller Trish will guide you through the process with compassion, care and expertise. Visit Trish at her website which is Trish r keroh.my. Next home experience.com We will have a link to that in the show notes. And also please follow her on Instagram she is at holistic real estate pro again holistic real estate pro on Instagram link to that as well in the show notes Trish Welcome to the show.
Trish Arcaro 4:17 Thank you for having me, DJ Paris. This is
D.J. Paris 4:21 we were we were both just laughing because Trish his last name is Italian and she goes I’m not really Italian. And I said well my last name is Paris and I’m not French. Go figure. But I’m glad we’re talking to people with with with unusual last names that don’t match their ethnicities. But tell us I would love to learn a little bit more about you and tell or expose our audience to to to your sort of way of doing business. I’m really excited to chat with you. I’ve I’ve been I love the fact that that I think in real estate. A lot of times people don’t have enough fun in the sense of with the things that may be thought to be not as aligned with real estate. So in real estate, we like to think like, oh, the headshot needs to look perfect, I need to be sort of more conservative and buttoned up and just, you know, a more sort of traditional business stuffy kind of approach. And you are like, No, my authentic self is I am into some interesting, cool things that are important to me. And I’m going to embed that into my business. And I just love that. So nobody probably knows what yet what we’re talking about. So I’m excited to get to that. But before we get to what you’re doing today, I want to hear about how you got started. So tell us how you got into real estate.
Trish Arcaro 5:38 So I, back in 2003, and four, I was working as a receptionist for a salon and there was a hairstylist there that does mortgages on the side. And I was like, how do you manage yourself doing mortgages and doing hair at the same time, I just don’t even know how she got it. But, you know, that started this, that seed was planted in my head, I was like, Oh, maybe I should try it in California. So was when I was in California. And fast forward to 2014. I just jumped right in, there was an opportunity to be a marketing manager for a team for real estate agency that I first started out in, and I grew with them. And then somehow, it’s so weird, because the universe just kind of aligns you and connects with you. Put you in the right place at the right time. So the team that I was working for, or working with their family lives around the block from my parents house in Los Angeles, it is so I’ve never met them. Yeah, never met them in my life before until I moved to Maine. And then they had California ties, Los Angeles ties and so happens that they lived around the block from my parents house. It’s so weird. So weird. And now we’ve become really friends. And I’ve learned so much from starting out as a team member, and then developing my own brand, successfully on my own since I’ve left the team. So how
D.J. Paris 7:05 did you go from West Coast to East Coast, you made a huge shift there.
Trish Arcaro 7:09 That was a quantum leap for me. So yeah. So when we literally decided to move to California to make we my husband and I were like, We don’t want to raise our kids out here. We don’t you know, in LA, I wanted something different. So we decided to move closer to his family here. And I, I dropped everything to pick up and then move really. And then I started real estate maybe six to eight months later. And I just went went on. And I barely had anything there like nothing. Sure.
D.J. Paris 7:52 Well, I always know that about. Yeah, there’s something about the idea of sort of having to make it work. Like for people that are there’s like a gift they call it like the gift of desperation in a sense. And I’m not saying you are desperate. Not having a safety net is is definitely like a huge risk. And, but but I always find it in some ways. Like it sort of forces people to get really, really, you know, sort of in line with their goals. And and then they can Yeah, and there’s no other option as a lot of times you just figure out a way to make it work.
Trish Arcaro 8:27 Yeah, it was very, you know, scary, you know, when I know feel like it’s the right thing to do. And there’s something better on the other side, once I get through this past this fear. And so, you know, moving from Los Angeles to Maine, just was the best is the entire family. My mom and dad bought a house out here followed me and their grandkids out here too. Yeah. So they have two properties, one in LA and then one here in Maine that I manage, me, my husband take care of while they’re gone. And they go back and forth. So I mean, it’s a whole win win situation for all you know what I mean? It’s all for the highest good. So it’s for my family and my parents.
D.J. Paris 9:09 Yeah, no, I mean, that’s amazing. And the culture is very different. Right? So you were like Southern California and then you move to sort of, you know, mid to northern parts of Maine and people are different. Values are different, everything’s different.
Trish Arcaro 9:23 Everything was different but the one thing I can say about Mainers out here when I first they’re so welcoming so friendly I stuck out obviously you know coming from
D.J. Paris 9:35 the west coast granola Girl Yeah,
Trish Arcaro 9:37 yeah. So I was like, you know coming from Pine like you know, palm trees the beach to Sandy tan all the time to like to like pines, trees and snow. Yeah. Then my experiencing i There’s a lot is that I’ve since living here in Maine and I would never change. And like I said it was just The best decision best Quantum Leap decision that I’ve ever made in my whole entire life so far. So that was
D.J. Paris 10:08 I love it. Yeah. And and now Yeah, you get to see the you get to see the colors change, you get to see the seasons, you get to eat a lot of lobster there’s, there’s, there are some benefits to living in Maine. You’re buying the mountains, you’re by the water. Just everything I just Yes. Such as everything’s, by the way for anyone that has not seen the colors change in the northeast, starting around like September October ish. If you’ve never done that, like I had a friend who I mean, it was one of those things that people told me for years, you got to see the colors change. And I was like, Yeah, you know, whatever. Yeah. And then finally, I had a friend in Boston, and she goes, you’ve never seen the colors change. And I’d been I’ve been to almost all the states, not all of them. But there’s like five or six I hadn’t been to at that time. And those happen to be like New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine where I still haven’t been to Vermont, but New Hampshire and Maine I had never been to and she’s like, Oh, perfect flying to Boston and drive up. And I legitimately was just the whole entire weekend, or however long. I was I was just constantly ping pong, my eyes were like, I have never Yeah, colored neon colored leaves I’d never seen like that color yellow, or green, or red or orange. I it’s just exquisite. And it’s, it’s we’re so lucky to have that in this country. And anyway, that’s my little go to Maine, and go see the colors.
Trish Arcaro 11:29 They actually they, you know, they actually have a map of like the levels of bright, though as, as the state changes, they have levels of the colors like, Well, you shouldn’t be here, this is the highest like you can see the colors and then it goes down, down down. And then it’s just so rad to see how our state just changes from one thing to another.
D.J. Paris 11:54 Well, it is funny, because it’s a small, it’s kind of a small window, and no one’s ever exactly sure what it’s going to hit or exactly like until you get really close to it. And then by then like everything books up. So you have to, you have to sort of make us somewhat of a guest like in the summertime or whatever. But so I was we were on all those sites, and oh my gosh, I just just such a beautiful part of the country. So tell us a little bit of So you moved west coast to to to Northeast, and then you had to start over. So I want to hear what it was like to start over in a new state where you’re not from no sphere of influence, really. So how did you how did you build.
Trish Arcaro 12:30 So I literally I didn’t put it into like perspective until I started really thinking about it, like, you know, you start thinking about your past and how you did it, I was like, Well, I really just took like, three steps in, which is the manifestation process. And it’s really just really getting clear on who I want to be around with getting clear on my vision and who I want to serve, and surrounding myself with those kinds of people and gaining so much information. And that’s why joining a team was so valuable to me because I had mentors that I can like, go to every time. And you know, it’s just for me it was more about there’s a goal, I want to serve people, I want to be able to dive myself into this community because this is where I’m setting my routes. So I might as well just embody myself as a real estate agent at that time. And then taking step number two would be taking those action steps. So doing the classes going out and meeting different people, you know, obtaining leads lead generation doing whatever I have to do as a real estate agent during that time, I did that. And then number three is just being open to receiving whatever is meant for me. So whether it’s the commission checks, whether it’s the actual clients that you attract, and you become lifelong friends with them and you start developing this brand and I didn’t really be wasn’t really in tune with myself then when I was on a team because I was representing a brand for someone else. It was not my brand. But now that I’m by myself and you know, part of a culture here at Next time, my experience is just just pretty much rock and launch me to where I am today. So those steps on my beginning days are so vital. So I knew I had to know what I needed to do. And then kind of just, you know, elaborated and collaborated with other partners in the industry to help me become who I am today.
D.J. Paris 14:38 I love that and it’s really, it’s really apt I was this you’ll you’ll appreciate it. You’ll probably find this interesting. So last night I was I was I was gonna just listen to some sort of more of just entertainment style podcast in the evening while I was relaxing. And a friend of mine said, you really should. I think you’d find this interesting. There’s a podcast by Sam Harris. Who’s more of like a Phyllis sort of a philosopher, but really just kind of a deep thinker. And some people like him, some people don’t, I’m not here to say whether he you know, you should listen to him or not. But anyway, he did a whole a 45 minute piece about freewill. And what was interesting was he was like, he doesn’t believe in free will, which is really interesting. And then he makes this case for why we don’t actually have free well, and he’s able to make that case pretty logically. And so what’s interesting is he says, It’s not that you don’t have some semblance of control over over parts of your life, of course you do. But for the overall sort of part of your life, really, things just kind of happen to you. And, and then it’s about what you do with what happens, you know, like, it’s like, things are just gonna happen, good things, bad things. And then it’s about what you make of those things. Yeah. But But he also said about getting clear with intention starts to sort of set in motion, you know, this idea of attraction and not in like a woowoo II kind of like, metaphysical way, but he’s like, no one, it actually activates, you know, certain parts of the brain that then start to look for those things. So this idea of getting really clear about what you want. Step one, is really important. And by the way, it’s what every consultant does, when they first talk to somebody, they’re like, Okay, tell me what you’re looking, what do you what do you want care at? What’s the problems? What are you looking for? Let’s get clear about that first, and then let’s figure out how to get you you know, those next few steps. So you’re absolutely right, it’s like, figure out what you want, then take the steps necessary. And then the hardest part may be for a lot of people’s being willing to receive, I think, yeah. It seems like that would be the easiest step. But for me, I think that would be the hardest part for
Trish Arcaro 16:38 me, you think so it for me, it’s a totally opposite. So like, it’s, I’d be happy to open to like, I’m open to receiving whatever is meant for me, like, I accept that the hardest thing for me is the how and the when is when I think five most of my clients have a hard time with is just, you know, like, When is this gonna happen? Like, how am I gonna get I was like, You hurry up and wait. It’s like, you can’t choke hold the universe. In that sense, where you’re like, you can try, you can try but it’s not going to the outcome is not what you want, or what you think you want. So it’s just, you know, again, releasing that control piece, and like just just letting it flow. And that’s what I did to build my business now was like, Okay, I got really clear, you know, my action was to I hired, you know, two different coaches, like, for me, so do self, like self development, get in with my inner child, do all that, like Shadow Work, all of those things, and then, you know, applying it to my business, and you know, for personal reasons, I doing it for it, but then, like, why can I just put it into my business? Like, why can I just inflict it, fuse it and then somehow I just one thing led to another, I get connected with a brand strategist who helped me develop the name, holistic real estate pro, like, and she was aligned with me, like minded all of these things, and it just so crazy, and how the universe just connects you. And I truly believe in divine timing, hands down, whatever, whatever you’re doing, whether it’s in business or in personal, it’s all about divine timing, it’s, it’ll happen when it happens. And you’ll know and, and you’ll know, just,
D.J. Paris 18:27 and I think, too, once you get more, and I’m going through this process myself, it’s like starting to make more space for for silence and a little bit of alone time, where, but but not alone time where I’m listening to other things or watching other things or just sort of taking time to sort of just allow things to emerge from within. And that idea that we have this sort of wealth of creativity and knowledge and, and just feelings in sort of intuition. You’re gonna I know, you’re really big into intuition. Yeah, what I will talk, I want to I definitely want to talk about how you apply that in your business. What I’ve what I found with intuition for me, is we live in a very noisy world, right? Like our phones are constantly asking for our attention, they’re begging for that attention. There’s a you know, there’s a lot of tech companies that you know, are vying for that, that space where they want your attention. And if I don’t give myself attention, if I don’t actually make space for these, like thoughts and ideas to emerge, then they’re just not going to be heard by my unconscious mind. So, so this idea about about get making some time is really important. Because like, again, that’s intuition. The signals are there, but if you’re not to,
Trish Arcaro 19:42 yeah, if you’re not listening to your heart or your, or looking at the science, there’s so many signs that people just miss. And I just think, for me, I have to really be in tune with myself and really know that you know, look beyond my third eye and just So make sure that like, Okay, what is my gut tells me that’s my first instinct is what is your gut tell you? If it’s like a hell yes, then hell yes. Then if it’s a heck no, no, don’t even don’t even go there. Or if it’s an unmanned middle, just sit with it a little bit. It’s okay to sit. If you’re totally right. Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 20:19 So like, for me too, with intuition, I find that what can be challenging for me is understanding what is real intuition. And also what might be anxiety, fear, things that like, for example, the most obvious example is when I go to the gym, which I don’t ever want to do, of course, but but I do it because I, it’s a good idea. So I go, and then I’m literally going to be diving headfirst into like, physical pain, right? That’s like, that’s the reason I don’t want to do it. Because it hurts. It’s terribly hard. But of course it is everything in life that’s worthwhile is hard. So no, you know, that’s, but I don’t like it. But I like the way I feel when it’s over. But my point is, is sometimes I’m just like, oh, I don’t want to go. And I’m like, Well, okay, and that’s fine. Of course, I don’t want to go. It’s painful. That makes sense. But is that really my intuition? Is that my wisest self? Or is that just a little fear? Part of me that’s just doesn’t want to, you know, do heavy weightlifting, of course. Yeah. And then I go, Oh, that’s actually just anxiety. And then the wisest part of me says, It’s okay, you can be anxious, but go anyway. And that’s really by intuition. Right. So so it’s idea of, of developing that in that sort of understanding of intuition versus, you know, oh, this is like a fear that I have that, you know, I’ve had since I was a child or something like, okay, it’s okay to have both. And, and so I’m curious on how you utilize. Oh, I wanted to ask you a question about intuition. Yeah. So it has your what is the hit rate or the success rate that you found with your intuition? In other words, how often is it? Would you say correct or right? Versus Oh, I followed my gut there. And it just didn’t lead me in the right path. Like, what’s the percentage of sort of, you know, outcome that you wanted versus outcome that you’re like, Oh, nope, I got that one wrong.
Trish Arcaro 22:06 80% are pretty great. Right there. Yeah. 20% I’m like, why not done that? Yeah. No. 80%
D.J. Paris 22:16 Well, nothing’s perfect. But like, percent is pretty close.
Trish Arcaro 22:19 It’s really close. And I you know, when I look back, I was like, ah, and I write down everything. Like I write down and I try to do things the goals that I want an outcome that I want that I desire, like a clear to close it or any no I’m like, right there, but I was like other something that is, you know, I’m preparing for the best obviously, in the you noticed that phrase expect the worst or?
D.J. Paris 22:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah, prepare for the worst expect expect
Trish Arcaro 22:49 that. And so, but there are things where just the universe just like, oh, no, we have this thing, we have this thing to deal with. You know, work, can we not, you know, be like that anymore. So there’s just just 80% of the time. I’m always right. My intuition. My gut is always right. Yeah. And 20
D.J. Paris 23:12 dopes, it, probably you probably see yourself in some ways, and I know you do a tremendous amount of action. So I’m not suggesting that you just kind of let things come to you. Because of course, life just doesn’t work that way. Now, most of us, maybe if we’re really lucky, I guess. But most of us don’t aren’t that lucky. So, so this, this idea of, you know, sort of being this almost like a leaf on on a river, just kind of, I’m paying attention, I’m doing things but I’m also not the river. I’m just going to let the river take me. Yeah, I’m going to pay attention. I’m going to take action when I need to. But I sort of suspect that that reduces a lot of fear and anxiety that you might have going, this is all going to work, like everything’s going to work out. I’m not going to fight against what is right. It’s that like, what is is like what is is I’m on a river and I Okay, and I’m gonna just let the river take me and I’m gonna pay attention and make changes when I need to. But I suspect you sort of see yourself a bit that way.
Trish Arcaro 24:06 So the phrase I love and it’s from a song is everything is is as it should be. Yeah, that’s it. Everything is as it should be. Every time my buyer’s or seller’s are like, I’m just so anxious that you know, everything is as it should be right now. It is fine. We are meant that if this house was meant for you, we would have gotten it if it wasn’t, you know, if it is it is it is not it’s not you got to accept that and that’s okay. It can you know, and yes, you know, this, we all know this mark is crazy, and people are not, you know, manifesting their house or they’re not getting the house that they want or they put so many offers in and so that fear and that discouragement, you know, this is where I come in and be like nope, I am positive. We’re going to find something like my enthusiasm, my my, my glow, my vibe. I’ve really keeps them together. And I kept them up and just making sure that you know, things are supposed to be like this things are supposed to, you’re supposed to experience these things before you get to the, you know, your goal. Like before you attain this goal, you need to experience certain things, rejection, fear all of these things, but yes, still have an open heart to receiving whatever is meant for you. You know, that, you
D.J. Paris 25:26 know, it’s it sounds sort of like some of the language you’re using sounds sort of subtle or maybe wordplay in a sense. Yeah. But it isn’t. Because I know that I get calmed down a lot when, like, you know, if something happens, and somebody’s wise enough in the group, if I’m in a group that says, Don’t worry, it this probably just wasn’t meant to be, but don’t worry, like things are going to work out. And if I trust that person, then will usually the person ends up being right, I found that to be the case, maybe something? Well, it’s it’s that old joke it. This is my favorite joke of all time. And it’s not a religious joke. So I apologize for anyone that might take this as like a religious thing. Trust me, it’s not, or at least not the way I think about it. But it’s just it’s a really simple joke. I think it’s the truest thing ever. It’s called, we make plans. God laughs right, which I always I love that. Because like, what’s more true than that? Like, yeah, we’d go for something and it just, that’s not what the universe or whatever. And, and it’s okay, because there’s going to be something else that does this,
Trish Arcaro 26:30 or something better. Yeah, this or something better. And that’s what it is, like, you know, today, you know, one of my clients, we put an offer in, and she was like, we put it in two days ago. And there’s, like 16 offers on this. And it was, yeah, and I was like, it’s this or something better. Honestly, if this or something better. And if it’s not, then we just move on to something else that you know, it may come back around, you just never know the universe are so funny in that way where, you know, you could become a backup lover, and you end up with the house, you just never know,
D.J. Paris 27:04 I am so impressed by that, that phrase, this or something better. And it’s not just a cute thing to say, to placate the you know, the client, it’s actually what you believe, because it’s what you believe it doesn’t come off as a cute little slogan or something that they tell you to say in sales, school or whatever. It’s literally what you believe, at your deepest part of you, because you apply those same principles yourself. And, and, and so if I, if I have somebody who’s congruent with their words, and their beliefs and their actions, where I know, they’re not just giving me a line that they you know, no, this will help placate the me. If I’m like, if I trust that person, I’m like, you just you just made that this disappointment slightly easier for me. Yeah, because I trust that you know what you’re doing. And if you’re confident about it, then I’m going to be like, okay, good, it’s not so so tense, your
Trish Arcaro 28:02 vibration, your vibration, your energy that you put out there in front of your client, or who your friend or whoever, they, they, they feed off of that in a lot. For me, my energy is so loud. And so you know, I attract these are all my clients the way I want them to like the way the type of client that I want, I attract those. And so they feed off of my energy, and they tell me time and time again, you have this calming aura about yourself, you have this positivity, where I feel down and all of a sudden, you just come up and have me look again and see and be like, Okay, this is not the end of the road. This is or just, you know, wanting one day at a time, one showing at a time kind of thing. It will, this journey is just not always going to be perfect. It’s going to be perfect for you, and how you experience it. So
D.J. Paris 28:57 well. Almost nothing in life is linear anyway, right? Almost everything goes up and down, up and down wild swings, peaks and valleys. Yeah, you know, heartbreak and love and everything in between, you know, death, birth, I mean, yeah, truly difficult and wonderful things happen to us, which are going to happen to us anyway. And this idea of, of not fighting the current that’s already taking you is it’s a lifetime of practice. I am not good at it. I try to control every area of my life because that’s the human condition. Yeah,
Trish Arcaro 29:32 you’re it’s up constant, work it within yourself. Especially as for me, in my line of business and my brand. It’s like I’m constantly working on myself every day to to make someone else’s day. You know, feel good. And, you know, that’s that’s the goal for me is to serve these families in my community and to help them achieve their goal. So their success is my success in that sense. And so I You know, I wouldn’t be here without, you know, the help and support and love from my clients and my friends and family. I just, you know, I just decided to embody myself as this and just, you know, let go and forget the fear of what people might think. And I think that’s what people do to me is because I don’t care what people think of me, especially in this market, like in this, you know, I’m not, I’m not your typical agent, in that sense. Like, it’s like I said, it’s like, unorthodox approach to real estate and, and it’s something that stands out and people are curious of what I do and and that’s how I attract these clients are like, Oh, you’re like me, you think you sound you you do things that I like to you love crystals. You love manifestation law of attraction. You love all them, like, Sure, come talk to me, I’ll talk about it all day long with you, whether it’s a house about houses are not I’ll talk about it. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 30:56 well, and and it’s, you’re attracting people who are into into that. And so as a result, you know, you’re you’re not having to even convince them that you’re this professional that has kind of a, I don’t want to say quirky, because that’s has a negative connotation, you’re not quirky in any in any way, you have this more unorthodox sort of style, which, really, at the end of the day, you don’t, because you’re a hard working realtor, and you’re working, you know, into the, you know, you’re working hard. But at the same time, you’re also like, Hey, I I’m not going to, I’m not going to be pushing against what is I’m going to just be guiding you to what, you know, what we think is what, you know, your next home. And if things don’t work out, don’t worry, we’re gonna we’re, boy, it’s very calming, I would say, yeah.
Trish Arcaro 31:42 Yeah, that’s a lot of people have, you know, the reviews I get, they’re like, you’re so calming. And just, you’re just there to, you know, if I call you frustrated, or I’m like, you know, I’m like a psychologist, coach, and like, everything that they want to dump on me, you know, and that will filter out the noise. And I know, they’re coming from a place of desperation, a place of lack, sharp fear, all of those things, and just somehow just let them sit in it. And I’ll tell I’m saying that it’s okay. You know, sleep on that, call me tomorrow, see how I just needed to just to just, of course, dump that on yo, like, it’s,
D.J. Paris 32:22 yeah, and then again, people need to get things out. Mm hmm.
Trish Arcaro 32:26 And then for myself, for me to digest all that, too, because I absorb a lot of energy from other people. And so for me, I do mind modalities, I’ll just meditate for a little bit, do a tarot reading for myself, write in my journal. And just remember that, you know, Trish, you’re manifesting and attracting like minded individuals, whether, you know, they’re on the same level as you or if there might be, you know, there’s a little struggle, there’s a little anxiety, there’s a little fear, but you are here to help them and guide them, your, your or their reason to move forward. Not me necessarily a reason but like, I’m part of their, you know, a huge part of their journey. So yeah, I just kind of remember, like, what I do, every time I remind myself, Who am I survey, and you also,
D.J. Paris 33:18 you take that responsibility very seriously, I can tell and that’s an important thing, like whatever somebody’s authentic self is that they want to bring into their real estate practice, they have to really be find the courage to sort of say, This is who I am, this is what I’m about, here’s why I think it serves you know, you Mr. Mrs. client, or here’s why it’s important for my business, but at the same time, like you what you’ve seen, authenticity seems to be the, the, the, the word I would put with you is you really are that person and as a result people are attracted because people are always attracted to authenticity, whatever the authentic self is,
Trish Arcaro 33:58 yeah, whatever it is, I mean, you know, you can have a different niche, different brand or whatever you do, and even other realtors asked me like how did you like manage to niche down to this like it’s really a lot of you know, it is a lot of work it’s a lot of self development and it was this was in the making, you know, years to come and I didn’t do this at the drop of a hat like I didn’t do this overnight this was like years in the making to actually deciding to come out like this as you know, especially in an industry that is so traditional and for me to come out like as a holistic realtor and there are many people out there that practice holistic real estate, you know, just like me or a little bit different than me but for me to be actually naming myself and becoming it you know, mains holistic realtor and an industry healer like that took a lot for me to just say out there and just put it out there. And you know, not hopefully The best but I’m just, you know, it’s just it’s it’s a risk for me, you know, maybe people won’t like that maybe it’s too woowoo maybe it’s too new agey, but you know, there’s so many people that deep down inside, they do practice some of these things that I do I just say it out loud. That’s it. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 35:20 But but the courage, the courage to say it out loud, I think is the secret sauce, right? Like, it’s, it’s like, I don’t have to hide this part of me. I don’t have to pretend that I’m not this way. And you’re not, you’re so different, really, than most of us. You just talked about the things that most of us just read about
Trish Arcaro 35:37 this talk about it? Yeah. And, and people have seemed to be really receptive. And even colleagues were like, how do I manifest this? I go, you’re manifesting every day.
D.J. Paris 35:47 Your thoughts create your reality you like it or not?
Trish Arcaro 35:51 Exactly. And then
D.J. Paris 35:54 what and that’s why if you if somebody accepts that, that premise that we’re all we’re Coke, well, maybe we’ll call it co creative universe, and they’re creating, and we’re sort of part of the creation process, then, then, if that’s the case, then you start to get really careful, or at least aware of what you are bringing what you are thinking about where you are putting your attention, because there’s a lot of ways where we especially right now, with the market, the way it is, we can, we could easily be putting a tremendous amount of our energy and attention into low higher interest rates that our clients don’t love. Lower, you know, less inventory for opportunities there. It’s, it’s, there’s a lot to feel crappy about if you want to, I mean, there’s plenty of it plenty of reasons. And that’s okay to acknowledge that it’s like, you don’t want to say, well, there’s no weeds in my garden, obviously, you want to take the weeds out. But at the same time, you don’t want to over focus on those weeds and miss some of the beauty that’s going on at the same time. Mm hmm.
Trish Arcaro 36:54 And, you know, a unique thing that I have my clients do, I had one my current client right now, because we’re searching and still looking, and still like, doing things. Because we’ve we lost out on like, a couple of deals. And I was like, listen, we have to do something different. So I want you to do this assignment. And this assignment is write a gratitude letter to your house that you’re living in right now. Even if you don’t own it, but it’s a house that you’re living under the roof of it’s giving your shelter, give a just write out your gratitude. On paper, it, see what comes up for you and see, see how it’s you know, giving you shelter through cold and, you know, keeping you warm, you know, you have a place to sleep, like all the things that you know, that you can think of give gratitude to your space and see what happens and I think that really opens up everyone’s mind. And just really like, kind of like, okay, now I have respect for what I have now. And now the universe can like open opportunities for me to be like, okay, yeah, here we go. Like, here’s some some listings that we can probably look at here. Some, you know, maybe you’re interested in change. You don’t I mean, there’s so many different things if you don’t show gratitude right now for what you have. How is the universe gonna give you something better than Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 38:13 could not agree more. I think I think gratitude is is just a great way to sort of flip the mindset quickly, it’s the quickest way I know to get out of distress, right and and there’s nothing wrong with with acknowledging distress of course, like of course, we need to acknowledge bad things that happen, but at the same time, you know, this idea of going Hey, in a year will I have found my perfect place like at worst case scenario, it’s like getting fired from a job Yeah, it’s like yeah, devastating at some time. Oh my God, my worlds over I don’t know what I’m going to do. And then a year from now, you’re usually in a better job with a better position. And we look back and go God, why was I so stressed? Well, because the unknown is stressful. So this idea of of acknowledging Okay, right now, it’s unknown, you know, you’ve lost a couple deals, but let’s, let’s let’s sort of think forward like once you get that poem, because you’re gonna get home we’re going to get you something let’s think about how you’re going to feel about that at that time and and and let’s be appreciative for what you currently have. I I don’t think that sounds odd at all. Like it’s it’s an odd thing for maybe not odd it’s an unusual thing for maybe a realtor to suggest what is it is it forget about you know, whether you believe in manifestation or evidence or whatever, but regardless, just practically, does that change your mindset? Of course it does. If nothing else, you just put them in a better mood for some some news that they didn’t want to hear.
Trish Arcaro 39:37 Yeah, and I think it’s just also too like for them for someone that is renting and showing appreciation for their space but then now it puts them into a mode of like homeownership or like, embodying so I embody this as a main holistic realtor. I want them to embody themselves as a homeowner. So like doing the things what a homeowner would do like, what would a homeowner gonna do, you know, get their money mindset straight, like Get, get their financial straight get checkout things that don’t serve them anymore and clear space and just again, showing that peace of gratitude and appreciation, huge goes a long way, like 100% of the time goes a long way when it comes to anything that you want in your life. And so that’s like one simple thing that one person can do, which is show gratitude. And but again, the second thing would be just maybe try embodying yourself as a homeowner, you know, like, you just never know, once because your thought, when do you have that thought in there? Now you have to put that into action, what are you going to do? And you’re basically telling your subconscious mind that this is real, like, Okay, I’m, you know, consciously Yes, I’m in this reality right now. But subconsciously, I’m going to be here. So I need to bring that out into the real world.
D.J. Paris 40:58 And I need to figure out what I need to do to actually get there. Yeah,
Trish Arcaro 41:01 yeah. And so you’re not mind tricking your subconscious. But you know, your thoughts, as soon as you think about what you want, and you know how you’re going to get there, or you don’t know how to get there. But you’re going to take a step anyway. It’s the your path will lead you to where you’re supposed to be.
D.J. Paris 41:19 And we’ll look, I mean, every professional athlete or not every professional athlete, but most professional sports teams have psychologists or lunch or coaches that will do visualization exercises where people can, you know, these top athletes, the people who are the very most skilled at their profession, in the entire world, basically, are also doing these kinds of exercises where they’re visualizing their outcome that they want. And they’re not all doing it, because they’re all in the New Age stuff. They’re doing it because it works. It works at the highest levels of athletics, which is a meritocracy, it’s all merit based and you don’t, you don’t get into being a professional athlete, unless you’re really, really good. So this idea isn’t so unusual, really know, this idea of getting clear. Yeah, it’s not it’s not it’s really not airy fairy.
Trish Arcaro 42:07 No, it’s not, it’s just your typical, you know, you’re just, everyone’s doing it and subconsciously, or consciously, they’re doing it, it’s just, I word it differently. And it’s, it means the same thing in that sense. So like, you know, getting really clear on your intentions are is a huge thing, like you, if you don’t know what you’re not clear about who you are as a person, or not clear what you’re going to want to desire, like what your goal is, and, you know, your loss, like you have to really get that understanding within yourself, and then surround your people to help you understand, if you don’t understand, get clear, you know, like, use your resources and talk to people and that you, if you want to be in this, you know, in a certain category, if you want to get yourself to the next level, you got to talk to those next level people, you know, like, you know, if you want to have higher income, talk to those people that how did they get to that higher income, or, you know, wherever, whatever, industry, it doesn’t matter if it’s real estate, it doesn’t matter where if you’re a medical, whatever, it’s still the same process, those three step processes, same anyway. And so what’s
D.J. Paris 43:18 what’s what’s great too, about talking to those people who are maybe one level above or more is that you find out what their mindset is, and what their thoughts and their beliefs and how they react to disappointment. And, and it’s usually a much like, what, whenever I love going to see, like, you know, concerts, obviously, I think a lot of us do, but but I’m a guy who’s been playing guitar my whole life, the reason why I like going to concerts, aside from just listening to the great music is also it’s not that I ever want to be a professional musician, but it’s very inspiring to see somebody who’s at that next level, and how seriously, they take their craft. And as a result, they have the success that I won’t have, because I’m not willing to put in that kind of effort. But this idea of, you know, we’re so lucky in real estate where, you know, we get to talk to top realtors, I mean shows like mine exists that that talk to people like you and, and so but you know, it’s you’re right, it’s this idea of, of figuring out the mindsets of the people that are a little bit further along the path than me is really could save you a lot of headache a lot. Yeah,
Trish Arcaro 44:22 and really tuning in to that, like, don’t just take it with a grain of salt, like really like, take do like, you know, take it away, like really implemented into your life and try you know, certain certain tasks or tips or something from a higher level may not work for you, but at least you tried and seeing like, okay, maybe I can tweak that a little bit a little bit to, you know, benefit me in that sense of my brand and my business and, you know, like there’s so many you know, we had an ex home conference in Houston and there were so many speakers and, you know, the the president of the A National Association Realtors was there. And this guy is amazing. We have the best right now President right now in our association ever. And you know, I’ve learned so much just five minutes speech, it was eye opening for me. And, you know, everybody comes from somewhere, everybody starts from the bottom. And you know, and they work themselves up and, and you’re right, if you’re willing to put in that energy to get up there, like that’s on you. For me, I’m like, I don’t want to feel burned out. So I do whatever I feel that is best for me and my family. And that’s the thing like I, to me, I Yes, I am a top producer, but in my life freaking number one in the company. No, I don’t, I’m not because I don’t want to be I want to be able to just to serve who I want to serve. And, you know, attract the clients that are meant for me and not not feel drowned in overwhelm, and just burnout from the real estate hustle. Like, that’s not what I’m all about. I’m all about common flow, and just, you know, moving with ease, like this job shouldn’t be hard at all. And it can be stressful, but you know, it’s how you respond, right? It’s how you respond to certain reactions, and, and you control what you can control. And I feel like I’ve been doing that, and tweaking it and working on it every day. But, you know, I’m successful. So thus far, and I’m so proud to like, even just talk about the way I approach real estate, because it’s a different thing. It’s it’s, it lights me up, every time I talk, if I’m the one someone was talking about it, I’ll talk about it all day in it. It’s a passion of mine. Now, it’s turned into something bigger than me.
D.J. Paris 46:46 I’d love to talk about social media, how, how do you approach social media to be an extension of your authentic self. So I’m curious on the content that you’re that you’re putting out there is just curious on your thoughts on that.
Trish Arcaro 47:02 So social media, I’ll do like the reels, I’ll pick a trending thing. And you know, I’ll do I’ll do a lot of I’m, I’m okay to be in front of camera. So it doesn’t really matter to me, I’ll invite a lender that who is aligned with me to join on them have fun, but I’ll do you know, I’ll share the steps that I take, you know, to becoming successful. So three steps to becoming or manifesting your house. So I’ll put it in slides, I’ll give them the verbiage that I use on a daily basis. And I don’t put out the market analysis, I don’t put out that stuff, I do that I have that for myself. So I can have the knowledge and expertise on my market, but the numbers and the grids and all that stuff. And that’s not for me, like, mine is more of just like being funny, being real, being raw. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows, you know, for being in real estate and or even on the holistic side is not always sure Ooh, whoa, you know, it’s I, you know, normal human beings do is just, you know, I just use a lot of my energy and my time to creating content with people that will grasp that, you know, like, you know, I have, you know, I have, like I said, I’ve partnered up with a lender, and she and I do tic TOCs and rails together that, that make it funny and seems like we’re like a married couple, or like, you know, just like a dynamic duo just just doing fun things. And I’ll throw in the verbiage of manifestation I’ll do the hashtags, all those things did get it out there. So that way people know about it. And I don’t know if social media is a great platform for me to express more of my, to my audience, and joining like, podcasts and things like that guest speaking is, is a huge thing for me too. And, you know, I’ve been doing it for the past, you know, two years now, like just guess, podcasting and just reaching out to a different audience. And people find me somehow they’re like, I want to move to Maine. And I want you I’m like, Oh, where do you find me on a podcast or on Instagram? And like, it was a you know, they’re not it’s very far few. You know what I mean? But that far, few turns out to be really cool. Like, I was like, Oh, someone actually was listening to me, or seeing what, you know, holistic real estate is about like this is where if they, if I can make an impact on them somehow to move forward into manifesting a house as I’m like, you know, my job’s done in that sense, like, yes. Okay, let’s do this. So,
D.J. Paris 49:35 well, we should also mention, before we wrap up that, you know, people do move to Maine from other parts of the country. You did, certainly a lot of your clients have or sometimes they have vacation homes in the Northeast. And so, you know, for anyone out there who’s listening who may have people that are exploring the Northeast for you know, vacation home or maybe move, Trish would love to opportunity Yes who work with you? Might as well let’s put that out in the universe too. So any agent out there with interest, by the way has clients that retire and they don’t always retire in Maine, they might go somewhere else like Florida or Texas or wherever. Arizona rubber people,
Trish Arcaro 50:16 mostly Mainers the snowbirds go to Florida. They go down south, so yeah,
D.J. Paris 50:21 so does everyone here in Illinois, they all go to Florida. So, but But my point is, is that, you know, look this, this is a referral based business also with agents. And, you know, let’s put that out there that if you’re looking for, you know, a good referral partner in, in Maine, uh, Trish is is is awesome. And she’s super well respected. Her clients love her. Obviously, she’s a top producer, and she’s fun. So I mean, if nothing else, she’s fun. And fun goes a long way in my book in real estate, because very few people are willing to be fun. So I love that. So if if Trish if there is another agent out there listening who either wants to refer business to you, or maybe wants to, you know, see if you have business for them. What’s the best way that or by the way we also it’s not only a realtors who listen to us, although I I suspect it’s 99% 9%
Trish Arcaro 51:16 of your your listing? Is somebody
D.J. Paris 51:19 who’s not an agent who’s maybe thinking about going to Maine, and maybe they want to work with you? What’s the best way that anyone who wants to connect with you should get into
Trish Arcaro 51:29 I’m usually on my instagram at holistic real estate pro but my website it’ll be in the show notes down there. You can connect me with me there my number my bio, everything is on there all about me. But it all in there too. Yeah. I mean, it’s just so you know, if you want to come to Maine, you know, I? I’m right here.
D.J. Paris 51:50 Everybody should go to Maine. I was it just go in the fall, go see the colors change? I promise it’ll blow your mind. And even if you’ve just just Google the images, and then when you see the images on Google realize that doesn’t doesn’t even do it a lick of justice. Like, it’s so much more intense than that. Yeah, it’ll be it’ll blow your mind. And it’s really the only part of the country that really has that.
Trish Arcaro 52:18 There’s a train actually, there’s a war train from Boston, all the way up. Like I think there is like a, they call it papers, the paper tour. And so it goes all the way up to Maine and then come back down, down to Boston. So there’s so many there’s so many tours and attractions or you know, companies out there that will take you on a tour through mass, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and see everything I mean, but Maine has, you know, the best lobster so you can still get lobster during that time. And yeah, I mean, yeah, if you guys want to come hang out with me on Instagram, I’m there all the time.
D.J. Paris 52:57 Fine. Trish on Instagram at my sorry, I’m sorry, holistic real estate pro. So at Instagram, holistic real estate pro also find her on her website, which is Trish r keroh.my. Next home experience.com. Again, links to all that stuff in the show notes. So, Trish, I want to thank you for allowing yourself to reach out to us and be honest. So we are you manifested this How exciting.
Trish Arcaro 53:24 I guess I did again, you’re like my freshman. This year. I was like, I need to manifest myself to be
D.J. Paris 53:29 done a lot of shows. Yeah, but first one of the year is a big one for me. I’m excited. I’m so excited. You’re not a newbie to podcast. So
Trish Arcaro 53:37 no, and I’m so excited to be on the show with you. And by the
D.J. Paris 53:41 way, you need to have a show. You know,
Trish Arcaro 53:44 somebody told me so my
D.J. Paris 53:46 realtor, just call it the holistic realtor or something. I am telling you, holistic real estate pro whatever. I am telling you, that would be awesome. You should you should consider it. Okay, I’m gonna have one more thing to do just just another like 10 hours a week. You got tons of time. Just a suggestion. I’m throwing it out there.
Trish Arcaro 54:08 That actually crossed my mind. And now it’s a sign again. should do this. I’m like, okay, so I think you know, having myself in my office. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 54:20 I could see you building a giant team, attracting a lot of other agents, if that’s what you would want. I don’t know if you would even want that. But I could see, I could see a lot of people being very, very much attracted to your mindset, your attitude, the way that you approach and I think that would be of tremendous service to other agents. Also to your clients, like here’s how to process disappointment. Here’s how to, here’s how to, you know, handle the ups and downs. I think you have a lot of wisdom that you could provide any good you’re doing it to your clients anyway. I just think if you put it, you put it on a podcast, I think it could live forever. So something to think about. Anyway, Uh, well, on behalf of our audience, speaking of our audience, we want to thank Trish for spending a good hour with us we really appreciate. So on behalf of everyone, we say thank you Trish for your time we know how busy you are. And it was really a bright spot in my otherwise busy day. I appreciate you your energy add coming onto the show. And then on behalf of Trish and myself, we want to thank the audience as well. Obviously, everyone who has made it to the end of the show, we love you, we appreciate you. Please help us by telling a friend think of one other realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Trish and send them a link to this episode. Or you could ascend to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed live there. If they’re not a podcast person, they can stream it from their browser. If they are a podcast person just have a pull up any podcast app search for keeping keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And one last thing if you want to be able to get extra special credit 10,000 gold stars leave us a review let us know what you think of the show. This really is important for us it’s not just me begging for reviews so that we get more exposure although that is great too. But it’s really to help us continue to improve the show so you know unless you’re gonna leave us a one star review then you don’t have to do that but now I’m teasing but really do let us know what you think of the show because I only know what you guys tell me so please please let us know what what you would like to see more of less of etc I want to keep making the show better for you leave us a review let us know what you think. All right Trish It was a pleasure I next time I’m in the Northeast I am coming to see you because I’m sure I will need an attitude adjustment at that point anyway. And you are going to be my you’re gonna be my guru while I’m there. And you have to show me around but I absolutely love the Northeast so everyone go visit and also reach out to Trish follow her look check her out on Instagram, holistic real estate pro she does some really cool content on there. Check it out. Trish thank you so much and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Luxury Real Estate – What Clients Need & Expect From Their Agent • Casey Napolitano
Apr 17, 2023
Casey Napolitano the founder and CEO of NDA Real Estate discusses her experience in the business coming from a multigenerational real estate family. Casey explains the knowledge she gained growing up and skills she possessed by her family and how these helped her career. Casey also discusses the importance of privacy and guarding your client’s information. Last, Casey talks about social media and how to use it to promote your business for free.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever wondered what it’s like working with celebrities and high net worth clients for their real estate transactions? Well, stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top of Beverly Hills producer Casey Napolitano before we get to Casey just actually got a brand new reminder for you guys. Normally, I just repeat the same stuff every time support our sponsors, tell a friend and yes do those things too. But we are really excited about this announcement. I finally out and this is embarrassing, because I should have done this like six years ago, but I’m finally doing it now better late than never we finally have an Instagram account. Now why should you care about that? I don’t even really go on Instagram that much. But a lot of realtors do. Right. But more importantly, we’re we wanted to start clipping out our episodes meaning finding those moments of each episode. That could be bite sized formats for good, you know, short form video. So we hired somebody new to the team and they are making short form clips, usually like 20 to 60 seconds about our episodes and we’ll be releasing those every day we’re releasing one of these clips. So you can follow us on Instagram our have to think about what our name is it’s top agent interviews, top agent interviews, because keeping it real was taken so top agent interviews on Instagram, you can find us on Facebook, we’re posting these clips, literally to like six or seven different social channels. We’re on Tik Tok. Now we’re on Instagram, linked in Facebook, you can find links to all of our all of our social channels on our website keeping it real pod.com. But please, please follow us on Instagram, we just started the account I think we have like 12 followers, which is crazy because we have 10s of 1000s of you listening to the show. So please find us on Instagram at the very latest and you’ll be getting these daily little nuggets of wisdom from our amazing amazing guests. So again, top agent interviews on Instagram, please subscribe, we would love to see you there and provide great content to you every single day. Alright guys, enough from that. Thank you for listening to this super long intro but we’re really excited about giving you guys some more content. So let’s get to the main event my conversation with Casey Napoletana.
Okay, today my guest is Casey Winchell and Paula Tonto with NDA real estate in Los Angeles. Let me tell you more about Casey. Now Casey Winchell. Napoletana is a real estate broker and the founder of NDA real estate, a luxury real estate agency serving California’s elite under her belt are hundreds of sales in Los Angeles ranging from probate fixer uppers to multi million dollar luxury estates. And in addition to working with such a wide range of properties, including Arios single and multifamily residential homes condos trust sales, she considers herself a short term rental expert. Beyond her exciting property investments and thriving real estate career. Casey is also a dedicated wife and proud mother to her three beautiful children Sienna Gemma and Jack. I was actually with my friend who has a jack a son Jack just this last weekend by the way. Along with being a foodie and an architecture and tennis enthusiast. I am also a tennis enthusiast by the way, she is proud to donate her resources to various charities supporting Women and Children in Need, everybody needs to follow Casey on Instagram, which is at KC annapolitan. Know that see a sey and a politan. Oh, also check out her real estate brokerage website, which is NDA hyphen r e.com. We will have links to all of this in the show notes. You don’t have to write it down. Just scroll to the show notes, follow her on Instagram, check out NDA real estate. Casey, welcome to the show.
Casey Napolitano 5:29 Thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 5:31 I am very excited to speak to you because you are the great granddaughter of one of the best. And I’m sorry, because we are going to get to your superstardom very shortly. But we need to I want to go all the way back to your great grandfather. In fact, I almost just just took some of your thunder away, but I have well, we will we will get to this. But Casey has a very impressive family history, and something that I was telling her offline but let’s let’s let the audience in on everything. So let’s go all the way back to the very beginning. Because I would love to know, you know, your real estate career obviously starts, you know, you have your own story, but you actually go back several generations. So I’d love to hear about how real estate was part of your family for all these years.
Casey Napolitano 6:17 Yes, so growing up, I moved like five times with my parents because they were always like buying homes and fixing them up and selling them. And I just, we’re constantly moving like in my younger years. And I was just like, wow, this is it at a young age that like really fascinated me. And then I had my great grandpa Vern Winchell, who founded lentils, donuts. And I never really thought anything of it. Honestly, probably until I went to college did I know like, how big of a thing that was. And so I like to bring it up now because people think it’s fun. But he also did real estate. I feel like he had like, dozens of homes like all over and it was just always so cool to me. Just real estate in general, that you could just be your own boss and find deals and, and every kind of deal is just so different. Like you could just like decide what you want to do. And then my parents when I was like row 10. I remember they bought a apartment building that needed everything. It was like just a wreck. And I watched them like redo all the units. And still to this day, like if they get a vacancy. I’ll come in and I’ll fix it up so they can get more rent. I’m kind of like become like the design Person of the family. And growing up. My dad did probate auctions. And also in New Home Sales auctions all over the country. Eat We even went to Portugal at one point. And I worked for him from a young age like I think I started working his auctions at like, maybe 1010 or 11 years old. They’re called probate auctions. And basically, if he would get a certain amount of properties every couple months, and then the auction would be out front of the house. And the house would be sold as is and everybody would have a better card. And there’d be no contingencies at all. So you’re buying all this stuff like it’s you. That’s it, you get what you get. And it was so exciting. It was just super fun. And then at one point, he was doing a lot of like, new home sales. So we would go to like Seattle, and there’d be like 50 condo units that weren’t selling and he would come and do like a new marketing program. And we would sell 50 units in one day in a hotel ballroom. It was super fun. Like it was super cool. It was different. So yeah, and then my mom she worked at or still works at rodeo Realty in Calabasas, and she does high end homes and then my grandma growing up, her name’s Brenda Winchell. She would be driving around like with her red nails and her platinum blonde hair and she’d be taking notes on her hands. I’ll never forget it. She would always have like notes on her hands, looking for like the next property to sell her clients. And also my Aunt Mimi is like a big time agent in Hollywood. So I was kind of like, I kind of like had to do it because I knew so much about it that it was like if I don’t do this, like I’m gonna really like start fresh somewhere else. So yeah, I went to Pepperdine, for writing for journalism. And then I was like, I think I turned 18 I got my real estate license, my salesperson license and then should I just go keep going or?
D.J. Paris 9:39 No, this is this is excellent. And you know, I was just no yes. I mean, all of this is great. I was thinking when you said Pepperdine. I remember Pepperdine is like right on the water too. Isn’t it like it’s
Casey Napolitano 9:51 amazing?
D.J. Paris 9:52 Yeah. If you if your child ever wants to go to Pepperdine, they are going to have an incredible is it matter? taboo or it’s in your mouth. It’s relevant. Yeah. Yeah, I have some friends that went there. They said, anyway, but but but aside from that, so it’s either donuts or real estate. You had to go into one of those one of those two industries. And yeah, yeah. And by the way, if anyone there are still a few windchills stores, or shops, where are they for anyone out there? Because if you haven’t had a windshields donut, I have had one. They are incredible. They are literally the best donuts you’ll ever have. Where can they find them in SoCal?
Casey Napolitano 10:29 So in Los Angeles, there’s one in Tarzana, Arthur receita, right off the freeway. And then there’s one on Melrose in Hollywood, that Oh, I think there’s, there might be one on Vine still. But back in the day, like there were every exit, like every exit off the one on one and there was a Windows doughnuts. And still to this day, if you see a donut shop, and the sign is shaped like a triangle, you know, it was a windshields at some point. So back in the 80s, when he sold the whole company to yum, yum donuts, you would start seeing that they would just keep the sign but then just a new new name was on it was that? Well, that
D.J. Paris 11:07 was that’s a very big brand. And so you know, I what I what I know a lot of our audience might be thinking as she grew up in a real estate family, this is all going this is all must be so easy for her because she’s just been involved with it for her entire life. And it goes back generations, you have grandparents and great grandparents. And in fact, I do want to make a point, your great grandfather, who did start winches doughnuts had said, Yes, that’s my business. But real estate is really the best investment. And he really, he really hammered that into the family. Right? So the idea was the doughnuts were what paid the bills, but then also wanting to build sort of multi generational wealth through through these real estate investments. And it obviously spread to like every member of your family.
Casey Napolitano 11:54 Exactly. 100%, for sure.
D.J. Paris 11:58 So you, you’ve been a broker, or you’ve been a realtor now for about 13 years or so, which is amazing. And you’re you’re crushing it in, in Beverly Hills, I would love to know, you know, I guess what our audience wants to know, is like, how did you grow your business? Right? So you came from a real estate family, but at the end of the day, you still have to build your own business, you know, how did you go about doing that? I’d love to know, like, what steps you took, I mean, because you’ve been a broker for 13 years, but you’re still relatively new as an agent, even though you’re crushing it. So I’d love to know, like how you got started.
Casey Napolitano 12:35 So in my early 20s, I did a lot of event promoting and Hollywood. And I feel like that was a good starting point to like build my network. Just I met 1000s of people, you know, just who wanted to go to the event and befriended them. And it was just all like, I don’t know, just like a natural kind of social thing that was like a good baseline. So I worked at my real estate company, it was like a big, commercial and acquisitions company, but I was like part of five people who do residential sales. So get there at like nine in the morning, and then work until like, six at night, like standard corporate job. And then I would go home, get ready for the event. And I was doing events at like, there’s like a famous club called Hide. And I would just like walk over there and work there from like, 10 o’clock till two in the morning. And then I would get up and go back to work, like get up at you know, 630 and get ready and go to work. I had like multiple outfits in the trunk of my car at all times, like for my many hats that I was wearing. And so I feel like that was a good way to like start the hustle of just like networking. Because in say, in real estate or sales in general, like you really just have to go for it and be confident and know as many people as possible. So I was doing that. And then honestly, my first client ever is my husband right now, which sounds kind of silly and dumb, but it’s
D.J. Paris 14:12 not at all it’s because I always say if you’re going to make mistakes, do it with family. They’re the ones that are if you’re new, you know, a lot of times people think, Oh, I don’t want to work with my friends or family right now. I don’t feel very experienced. And I always say Who’s most likely to forgive you? And it’s gonna be friends and
Casey Napolitano 14:31 I’m just saying you learned a lot with every single deal. Like even now like every single deal, like something new comes up and it’s just important to like, just keep going. But like I matched with him on Tinder. You know, I was in my early or mid 20s and my best friend was like you are dating like the worst guys like go on Tinder. And I’m like, but aren’t the worst guys on Tinder?
D.J. Paris 14:53 Exactly. Let’s go into the lion’s den where the worst people are.
Casey Napolitano 14:57 And he was like, dude, just try it. So Mind,
D.J. Paris 15:00 you found the good guy.
Casey Napolitano 15:02 I found the good guy like, which is like an understatement. So my first and only Tinder date.
D.J. Paris 15:08 His program we had only Yeah,
Casey Napolitano 15:12 it’s crazy. Or I was just super desperate. Like you never know.
D.J. Paris 15:18 We’re all super desperate. Now we knew
Casey Napolitano 15:20 like we knew. So when we matched his, his profile picture was him speaking at a wedding, like he was the best man. I was like, okay, like, this guy’s this guy’s like looking, you know, for something real. And so we went on the date, and it was like a three hour day the valet Parkers had to bring in my keys. They’re like, you, you guys gotta go like the restaurant go home. Yeah. And he was like, how many? How many homes have you sold? Because I was like, just talking about because he’s older. He’s seven years older. So I’m like, yeah, yeah. Like, I’m just like, big time real estate. And he’s like, how many homes have you sold? And I’m like, Ah, what worked on like, 20. You know, but I haven’t sold any thought myself. Right? Sure. So months past, and he’s like, we’re very serious. And he’s like, I really want to buy my first place. And I’m like, okay, cool. So we started looking at Sherman Oaks, and he was my client. And at the first one, like, he liked, we walked out front and he put his arm around me and he was like, this would be perfect for us. And so at that moment, I was like, oh, okay, so we ended up getting it together six months into dating before getting engaged or anything like that,
D.J. Paris 16:30 which everyone says never do that. And it worked out for you guys.
Casey Napolitano 16:34 Yes. And it just it just felt right. And it was a huge remodel. So to make matters worse, we moved in with my parents. So he’s like 3034 year old man right? Well with my girls. Yeah. And that was like a great test to see if we could last but
D.J. Paris 16:53 that is a that is a stress test for sure.
Casey Napolitano 16:55 Yeah. And my and my parents are super great, but we’re really close. So it’s like a lot. And so living through that remodel was amazing. And cut to we got pregnant like after we got married and we were living there. A month in we were like we want to live in Calabasas. Like we want to raise our kids in Calabasas. It’s so safe, Calabasas, like a great community for families. We don’t we want to be closer to my parents because they’re let’s be honest, free babysitters. And on the weekends, we would be traveling we would rent out the house on Airbnb. Like we were those weirdos that were like, it’s fine. Like, let’s just let’s let’s run it. Let’s rent it out. We had an owner’s closet while we’re living there. And that turned out to be an amazing lead generator for me. Really? So yes. So once. It’s such a crazy story. So like, when we decided we want to move to Calabasas, there was nothing for sale. And we just walked the neighborhood and we put about like 20 handwritten letters in mailboxes. And were like, Hey, I’m pregnant. Like, let me buy your house. And like, I think three people called me out of 20. And we ended. Yes. And we ended up buying the house that we’re in now. The tenant there was it was a rental property and the tenant gave it to the landlord. And the landlord called me like two weeks later, and he was like, I heard you want to buy my house. So I’m like, Yes, I do. Anyways, we ended up buying it like within we saw like it for we saw it for like five minutes, all the lights were off. It was just it was a wreck. And we were like, We’ll take it. And we got a great deal. And another It was another remodel. But we ended up keeping our first house. And so that became a full time rental property. So we started doing the Airbnb short term. And that was great. I would like a random celebrity would write it. And this particular celebrity is someone I actually like, went to middle school with like, so random. And she was like, by the way, we ended up connecting and she’s like, by the way, while I’m in town, I want to look for houses. Can you show me some? So then that’s when I started showing her houses. And then I got another celebrity in there. And she was like, I can’t find a property. I only want to live in this particular area like what can you do? So I started going on the MLS and finding expired cancelled withdrawn listings, hitting them all up. Got a lot of people angry. A lot of people hanging up on me. Like, what this is my privacy, like, I’m gonna do not call list. But then I would get like maybe two yeses. Oh, we’re still interested in selling it wasn’t the right time. So I’d give her those leads. And she’s like, damn, like you’re really hard working. Like I’ve never had this before. So then, the best part about that story is that something hit the market and she sent it to me. And she was like, can we get this house? And I’m like, Sure, let’s go see it. So she ended up buying that house that was listed. She could have gone I’m with her agent she worked with before, but because she knew I was like constantly thinking about her like that, that trust and that like hard working thing, she used me on that deal. So
D.J. Paris 20:12 it’s like at that time you guys were a team almost right. And she actually found the property, but you had done so much work and heavy lifting prior to that, that that didn’t matter who found it, she she was with you. And that that is such a wonderful compliment to you.
Casey Napolitano 20:28 It’s really important, though, to build trust more than anything with your client. Because there’s a lot of people out there that like, don’t have their clients back, like fully. And if you show them like, they’re your client, but you’re also their friend, like you literally care about their well being, then they’re gonna stick with you forever. And I just think that is the most important thing. It’s like, when you pick a doctor to do an important surgery on you, you go with the one that’s like, the most trustworthy, you know, you don’t go with the one who’s like gonna give you a discount.
D.J. Paris 21:04 Right? You know, it’s funny, I just started thinking about this, in the last couple years speaking of, of health, and I think this relates to real estate, because, you know, I have a number of doctors like everybody, you know, I’ve got a dermatologist, and I’ve got my general practitioner that does my physical every year, and I’ve got my you know, I’ve got the orthopedic person when I have a sports injury or whatever, right? So you have these, this, this team of people, a psychiatrist, you know, things like that. And, and all I really want, I mean, I want them to be competent, but more importantly, I want them to care. And I, I’ve had experiences with with physicians where I felt like they did care, and I’ve had experiences where I felt like they didn’t, and I will take somebody who cares about me even over somebody maybe who’s considered a more a better doctor, or maybe has more accolades or more accoutrements, you know. And I think the same applies for real estate. Like, if if your clients like you, like you were saying, you know, your friend saw all the hard work you did also had a benchmark, because they had worked with an agent prior and said, Well, my agent, my previous agent didn’t do this that, you know, that is that is what usually wins the race, in my opinion.
Casey Napolitano 22:20 Yes, for sure. So since then, I was working at like that big corporate office, all say it a boys club. And I started bringing in a bunch of deals, and people were like, noticing and wondering, what is she doing different? And I literally would do marketing, like social media photo shoots in the office, and it gets people talking, and honestly, DMing you, which gets you clients, like you would never in a million years think like, oh, I’m going to post me showing a house that someone will buy a house just from that post, like, like, there’s a new thing that’s happening, I’m sure it’s happening, where you live with agents, there’ll be going to brokers opens on Tuesdays, or it’s Tuesdays here, Tuesdays and Fridays. And they will just fully just show it on their story. And boom, someone will message them and say, Can you show me this? And then by
D.J. Paris 23:18 the way, can we can we pause for a second is that not the greatest idea that anyone who’s not busy, as a realtor should be doing in their local market go to the like, in the past, it was a little bit tougher to get brokers or I guess we call them broker opens here in Chicago. And by the way, for our audience, if I use the word broker, I It’s synonymous here in Illinois with realtors, so I apologize, I don’t want to confuse anybody, I’ll try to use the word realtor, just because I think that’ll be less confusing. But whatever these are called realtor opens broker opens. These, these are really like 15 years ago, when we didn’t have like, as much technology. It was kind of a headache to go to those things. And like, if you had a fancy client, they wanted to see something, maybe you’d go check it out, or you’d go to support someone else in your office or a friend of yours in the industry. But now you can go there and actually use it to your own benefit by posting. And by the way, a Casey I’m curious, I think people shouldn’t even just do this for those broker opens. But they should also do it for every time they go to a showing like you can find something about any property. That’s interesting. And you could do a quick little 32nd video, right?
Casey Napolitano 24:29 But there’s always like this fine line. So when I show a house to like my number one client of the moment, they’re my number one priority, and we find the house I’m not posting it, you know, because then someone might message me and say, Can you show me that and then and then sure, and then your script so? Yeah, so if it’s not one that my clients buying, like Yeah, I’m all about posting it is so important, and it’s actually like ends up being great for the listing agent as well because you’re bringing more eyes to Generally,
D.J. Paris 25:00 it’s a win all the way around. And again, for people that are in between clients, this is a great way to drum up some possible activity. Because if you, you know, and it’s also a great place to cut your teeth, doing video, because, you know, we now have our phones are very powerful. And even if you’re not going to have a professional lighting crew, you know, there which probably you’re not for a, you know, a broker open or something, you can, you can just shoot a quick, you know, you can shoot and edit and, and make these these short form videos and really excite your your your bass.
Casey Napolitano 25:38 Yeah, so the easiest editing app that I use is called an Shah. And it’s free, totally free, just download it, and you click on your phone, you could shorten it. And I just highly recommend making these reels on Instagram and make less than 30 seconds, quick shots. But another thing that I think is really interesting about real estate nowadays is the homes that were showing and we’re seeing are just cooler than before. So there’s a lot of competition, which makes it hard to be a seller. But if you have the opportunity to like stylize your home like you should, because it will stand out in a big way.
D.J. Paris 26:17 You have any suggestions of ways people can do that, that aren’t, you know, terribly invasive or don’t require, you know, tremendous, you know, reconstruction, like even just smart home, where things are are kind of exciting. And even though they’re not new anymore. You know, being able to control things with voice is kind of a cool feature.
Casey Napolitano 26:37 Yeah. One listing I can think about that was on the market before and didn’t sell. And then we took it off the market when our client allowed us to paint the cabinets and fix out. Switch out light fixtures like literally from I like to go to Lowe’s, like Lowe’s has like trendier light fixtures, than most other affordable places. And so I would switch those out and literally just paint the cabinets. And even though someone might walk through and say I’m going to redo this kitchen in a year or six months or tomorrow, they will get it, they will be able to feel what it’s going to look like. So like it’s worth every penny. And you could do all that like for under, you know, five grand, or 10 grand, if you if you put 10 grand into every listing, like it would just go a long way. Staging is like the most important thing. But then again, you get clients that are like, I can’t leave my house or I live here, I don’t have anywhere to go. So you just kind of have to roll with it and figure out the best scenario for your client. And the photos go a long way. Like even if you don’t change anything, if you just get a really high end photographer, which you should cover the costs up for your client. It will it could transform the property without even doing anything.
D.J. Paris 27:58 Yeah, it’s it’s it. I mean, we live in an Instagram world. I mean, we’ve been living in an Instagram world world. And remember, every one when we look at photos, now we look at images, we’re probably looking at images on social media, images, for anything, any part of life is now is really best or most most commonly viewed or absorbed by consumers by the American public, via social media. And all of you know, we expect perfection in these pictures. We expect things to look right we expect them to be filtered correctly. For better or for worse. That’s where we are. And so if you’re not putting that sort of thought into your your, you know, your staging your photos, you’re really doing your client a huge disservice because it’s not about the property. It’s about how people consume information people want to see now with video, oddly enough, I don’t think people expect perfection, especially for reels and some shorter form video where it’s like, Hey, this is what I’m doing today. Yeah, you can, you can get away with a little bit of imperfection there. But when it comes to staging, and listing a home and getting the photos, yeah, step it up. You’ll make more money for the client to plan everything, everything will work, and it’ll only cost you a few $100 More like it’s not it’s not
Casey Napolitano 29:18 money, like Time is money like it, sell it in a week sell it in a week. Everybody wants.
D.J. Paris 29:24 So as you’ve been growing Yeah, exactly. As you’ve been growing your business, I You’re a hustler. And that’s that’s what I’ve, you know, sort of garnered from from our conversation so far is you’re willing to do a lot of the things that, you know, like that, you know, other agents aren’t willing to do or maybe that you had to do to sort of stand out in the boys club and sort of get your foot in the door. You were writing personal notes and putting them in mailboxes like that. 99% of realtors are never going to do that. And it’s a shame because if they did, they would likely get results like I mean, you had a tenant in a building, take a handwritten letter handed off to the landlord, which by the way, never happens. Right? They were just very random. Yeah, like super random, but it did happen because you put in the effort, and you were calling expireds Fizbo for sale by owners, you know, people that were off the market and getting screamed at going I don’t want to talk to a realtor and yet you’re putting in that effort because you never know. And that’s the job the job is is a lot of rejection. And and here you are now and so. So I’m curious to find out what you’re doing today. So you’ve grown this incredible business, MDA real estate, you know, you guys work with celebrities, you work with non celebrities, you work in every area of real estate, also investment properties to what’s what’s your what, what are you doing these days for marketing purposes to get more clients?
Casey Napolitano 30:59 Social media number one, for sure. You know, as a requirement, every agent on NDA has to go to three brokers opens every Tuesday, if their schedule allows, like, if they’re free that day, they’re going and it’s working like you just you’ll just never know who you’re going to attract. And it’s just free advertising. That’s actually very natural. And it works. So yeah, that for one and then number two, we do these fun, NDA boxes like we give to clients. So it’s like, it’s a branding thing. But then it’s super like curated like go to that influencer. We call it like hashtag gifted by NDA. So like people will see these videos of the NDA boxes, which could they vary. So they’re very curated, like, I’ll get to know a client and I’ll be I will just start making notes of what to get them like, which is so like, funny because it’s like, beyond like real estate, but it’s important for them to know that you know them and you care about them. So like, for example, my clients that are in escrow right now are buying their dream home and keeping their first home as a rental. But we realized at their, at their first house that are both houses, you can see each other so it’s like, it’s just across the canyon. So like, just for fun in the box, we’re gonna get them some binoculars like,
D.J. Paris 32:26 Oh, that’s great, because I love money. It’s
Casey Napolitano 32:28 like fun, right? Like, not really to spy but like that. And then we’ll get them like, whatever it is a bottle of patrol. And recently, I got like a client, just like designer, keychain for their new keys, you know, stuff like that. And people love it. They just, they just eat it right up, and then use the video on your social media. And other people will see that and be like, wait a minute, I want an NDA box, like I want a home. But I also want the box. So I’m gonna hit them up, you know. So that’s one thing.
D.J. Paris 32:59 So when I’m curious, what’s the what are the differences when working with celebrities versus non celebrities, as far as helping them buy and sell homes is do celebrities tend to have an output celebrity and high net worth individuals in that in a same similar category? Because you work with both? And do they tend to have more of a team that you then have to sort of work with the entire team? Or is it I’m curious what the differences are.
Casey Napolitano 33:31 So everyone is totally different. It’s just like real life like celebrities, some have like business managers that you have to talk to. Exclusively, like, you don’t even really talk to the client, you just show them some houses and you talk to the business manager to make it happen. Others, you’re just dealing directly with them. Some literally have an entourage. But I would say like working with celebrities versus non celebrities. Everyone is just so different. Like there’s no no one’s in a box. Like no one’s in a box at all. Celebrities have been like really great to work with honestly, like just super chill and like eye on the prize and like big picture in my experience. And I feel like I have like an eye for what they want. Like recently, I sold a house to this amazing girl and it needed literally everything. But it was such a cool house that you could you literally you couldn’t find it anywhere. If it was built to this day, like it wouldn’t have all everything that it had that charm. And she was down to do the project. And we just like we’re just so in tune on it. So that that makes me super, super happy when I can find something super special like that, and then see a client transform it.
D.J. Paris 34:50 And so, at what point did you decide to sort of build your own brokerage have your own brand and really just make it your own thing as opposed to working under someone else?
Casey Napolitano 35:01 So it all started in 2020. You know, COVID was crazy. I was seven months pregnant. And for about a month if there was nothing, right, the whole world was just shut down. There was no, there was no real estate, no one was there was it like it was March to me, I would say March to May, debt. And I was just like baking all the time, just like strawberry bread, whatever I could do with it with my little girls. And so then in May, I was like, eight months pregnant. And then my phone started ringing. And people were like, Hey, I’m from Seattle, and I want to move to LA COVID is like getting me excited to like, be close to my family. Can you can you help us? And I’m like, Can I help you? Yeah, I can help you. And I’m like, I have this big Tommy and I have my mask on. And they at the time, you had to work gloves. And you had to schedule a showing and sign the COVID waivers. It was like a huge ordeal. So that was going on. And so I had one of the biggest month ever in June of 2020. Like of my career, and I was nine months pregnant. Even at the hospital, I was dealing with two escrows, which was great, because you’re just like, your mind isn’t like focused on what’s happening. It’s just like, you’re doing it all. And so you don’t have time to like stress. So at that point, I was like, Why do I need to work anywhere other than my own company? So that is when I signed up to get my broker’s license, which is a second kind of step in California. Yeah, and run my own brokerage. Why can I do that? I literally do all my own marketing. I have my own clients. I never got my clients from my company, private company. So I signed up for the test and you had to fly to Sacramento. Really? Yes. There was no testing in Los Angeles because the COVID Oh, right. Headquarters. Yeah. So I had my baby. And then I don’t know, maybe like a couple of months passed, and I got my test date. And got there. And it was just a huge ordeal. You have to leave it like four in the morning, wake up at three get there at seven. You get your you get your thing, and it says congratulations. And and then that was like the starting point. And I was like, Okay, let’s go. So then, I don’t know, a couple of weeks went by and I was like N D A, that’s it. And I looked at my husband, I was like it’s NDA. And he was like, yeah, it’s NDA, like I had no other ideas. It was just, it stands for non disclosure agency. And I really wanted to just like be different. And with my clientele, we we really know how to protect their privacy based on my experience with all of these cases before. So like, for example, when celebrities go to my house, you have to have a trust so that people don’t stalk you like it literally happens. And they hang out outside of your house if you don’t have a trust, again, paparazzi as well. Yeah, yeah. All kinds of weirdos watching you. And so that’s, that’s not cool. Like your house is supposed to be a place you want to just feel safe and inspired. And you don’t want to worry about any of those things. A lot of these people too. They’re just so busy working, that when they go home, they just want to chill, they just want to sleep. And if you have 20 people standing up front, like you’re not sleeping, so. So that client I was telling you about earlier that used me after I was sending finding her off market deals. I found out that on her last sale this that it was leaked. And and the reason why was because she kept the same trust on her previous house that was leaked by one of the agents. And she didn’t change the trust. So these media people have it saved, like this is a trust and they have an alert with the title company. Anytime this closes under this trust name. That’s her house. That’s her new house. It’s so creepy. So on the next one, I was like, Dude, you need to get a new trust. And you need to change the name completely like, and even the person who signs for the trust is somebody it’s somebody that they trust, but it’s not any same. Yeah, it’s not anyone with the same last name. So you have your mom or so just someone totally random that you trust
D.J. Paris 39:32 make the trail harder to follow. Yeah,
Casey Napolitano 39:35 yeah. So they will do they will sign everything on their behalf. And so I just got really good at figuring out how to keep these things private.
D.J. Paris 39:43 And there’s a lot of stress associated with that because a lot of that really goes beyond your control, right like you. You know, you might not know about trusts. You’re not a real estate attorney. You’re not You’re not an estate planning attorney. You’re not a business manager. And so You some of these things you probably learned along the way. But but but knowing that now it’s got to be so incredibly valuable to somebody who’s who is buying, like maybe their first property or, or something that hasn’t gone through this, like, oh, we need to, you probably have conversations about privacy, and publicity and all of that.
Casey Napolitano 40:19 Yeah, even even like every everyone, I recommend getting their house put it in a trust. It’s just important. For many,
D.J. Paris 40:27 it is a great a great idea whether it’s an investment property or not, and, you know, talk to an estate planning attorney or someone who knows how to do those things. Curious on. So you have a team, you have many agents on your team, of course, you’re looking for more agents as well. But I’m so our audience where you know, we’re realtor audiences are realtors, and I’m curious, you gave a really great suggestion would go to the open houses, take videos post on social, anything else? Are you still doing personal notes? Are you still doing the things that you were doing? At the very beginning? Curious what else is working for you?
Casey Napolitano 41:07 I mean, coming up with your own personal brand is so important. So like, for example, I have one agent on our team, and she’s such a hustler. And she also teaches yoga. And I am like, run with it. She was like, Really? Yes, go do a photo shoot at the yoga studio, like that is your audience. You know? Yeah, it could be beyond that. But focus on that, because that’s what she’s, that’s what she’s known for. And her, you know, community. And yeah, the whole like, and don’t be afraid of the camera. Like, it’s so lame that we have to like be models or whatever, and start like taking photos and stuff. But it’s important because people feel like they know you. And they want to know you if you’re if you aren’t afraid to just be who you are, and just be authentic and confident. Just, it’s just so important. So come up with your own personal brand. And run with it like social media, if you could just schedule a day, every week where you take content, like even just with your phone, it it will get you clients it really well.
D.J. Paris 42:17 i It’s such a great idea. And the yoga one is is a really good example because I could I could hear I know a lot of people listening to our show have other jobs, right? They do real estate part time, they want to do it full time, but they have to pay the bills. And right now real estate isn’t paying the bills for a lot of people. And so as they’re building the real estate practice, they have these side jobs, and maybe someone’s you know, an Uber driver, or maybe they’re a yoga instructor, or maybe they have a full time career is doing something else. Regardless, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to talk about that stuff. I actually think it’s quite endearing. Because if I can see someone who I who I believe is working two jobs, like, especially like a yoga instructor, as well as you know, realtor, I’m like, I’m doubly impressed. Like, that doesn’t make me think less of them, it actually makes me think more of them. Because I’m like, wow, they must really be hustling. Because in order to do two things, you got to put in a lot of work. And so for anyone listening, that’s like, even if you’re an Uber driver, I think there’s a way to brand that in a way that’s like, Hey, I’m doing this right now. Because I you know, there’s ways to frame it. If you’re if that’s your your side hustle. And there’s ways to frame it that isn’t necessarily going to make you look like you’re not a professional. There’s always ways to frame things. If you’re authentic, and you’re you’re proud of what you do, you should absolutely be talking about it. Maybe not every part of your life, right? You should have privacy too. But like this idea of like, Hey guys, I am a hustler. Anything that demonstrates I work hard. And I work for you, I think is is it again, if it’s authentic, absolutely people we all want our the people service professionals in our life, to be hustlers we want we want our accountants to be hustlers. We want our attorneys, we want our financial advisors, we want everyone who are doctors, we want all these people to be really, really skilled. And we know that the way to skill is through hard work. So anything that demonstrates hard work is usually a win. Even if it’s like, Hey, I’m doing this other job that I don’t want I really wish I wasn’t doing. I think there’s a way to even brand those things and say like, Hey, this is where I’m at right now. And I think you’ll still attract the right people at the right time by exposing being vulnerable, being vulnerable and saying this is who I am, you know?
Casey Napolitano 44:43 Yeah. And And on that note, being a mom I always like was afraid oh my gosh, like I’m gonna get pregnant people are gonna stop calling me like they’re gonna think I’m like have a headache or whatever. And and then once I read realized that people will say, Oh, can you help me with this, they will say it like gently, and then you go yes, then they’re not afraid to use your help. But with that, being whoever you are in your family life, for example, a mom, run with that as well. Go to as many mom events as you can with your kid, you know, use your time for multiple reasons, like, have fun with your baby, like help your baby like have do all these fun, like mommy’s but then it’s also literally going to help your business in a really natural way. So and then also another thing I want to say is, have lunch with somebody completely random, every one time a week, like someone that you met five years ago, or you just met them last week, like go to that lunch, even if you think oh, I don’t have anything in common or I don’t really know them. Just do it. The more people that you speak to, on a daily basis is the more business you’re going to get. And the more you’re going to learn and it’s just good. Just all around, you know, and like,
D.J. Paris 46:13 Yeah, I mean, I’m thinking back to the beginning of our episode, where you were talking about being an event planner, and meeting tons of people who are, you know, at these events and wanting to get into these events. And I mean, there isn’t, that’s a bout his greatest strategies I’ve ever heard to building up a real estate database contact database, because you’re literally just meeting people and in a fun social environment, you’re capturing their information, and then you can market to them or take them to lunch or develop a relationship or a friendship with them. You know, it’s really up to you what you want to do, but none of that can really happen unless you’re out there. Meeting people. And I think there’s, there’s ways that introverts can do this as well. So I don’t want anyone listening thinking, oh, gosh, I you know, being you know, going out in public is is taxing for me. I’m an introvert, believe it or not, most people wouldn’t probably know that about me. I’m an introvert as well. So are I’m more introverted than extroverted, I would say, I mean, I’m both I both but I’m more introverted, I need a lot of alone time, a lot of rest. But I’m really clear that in my life, you know, getting out in with other people is just, it’s just good for my, my overall health, my business, everything. So this idea of just the more things you can social things, and it could be online, you can be can do it online, you could do it in person. You know, I know, I know, realtor moms, speaking of moms, who have developed Facebook groups for like, here’s all the cool mom events that are going on in my area. And that becomes it’s not even a real estate thing. It’s a mom sort of resource up, and they get all the other moms to sort of contribute to it. And then they get all this business as a result of adding value to moms that has nothing to do with real estate.
Casey Napolitano 48:04 Yeah, it’s because of that trust that building that trust that’s just completely natural and authentic and real.
D.J. Paris 48:11 Well, let’s talk about your brokerage because you are growing, and you guys are just crushing it. And I know there’s gonna be a lot of our listeners who are SoCal agents. And they would are, you know, this is the year I mean, this is the year of recruiting and joining teams and switching firms. You know, markets changed, rates are different. Inventories different. Everyone’s a little uneasy right now. So a great opportunity to explore other options. And, Casey, I’m curious if you were looking for another agent to join your team, you know, what would you be looking for just in case any of our audience thinks they might be a match?
Casey Napolitano 48:49 Yeah, so NDA is always looking for new talent. And we’re looking for hustlers like our favorite word. Where you just like, want it, you just want to keep working and you’re hardworking. We’re, we hired quickly in the beginning to end and I learned a lot of things. Like for example, I hired someone and I literally, like got him a listing and he was like, I don’t have time to do.
D.J. Paris 49:18 Here’s, here’s a here’s a free $10,000 Check. No, I’m good. I don’t do a lot more than that. It was more than that. Yeah, Casey, I will fly out there. I will get my license and you can hand me any deal you want. And I will tell you,
Casey Napolitano 49:32 yeah, so we’re looking for people who like to work and they like people. Yeah, and just whatever makes you unique. We want to know about that. Like that’s, that’s super important. Yeah, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I can just tell when I meet someone that they have it that just the work ethic and the positive attitude is something thing that is so huge, like, I’m seeing that a lot of people are like super negative and, and I get it like, it’s a crazy time, it’s the world isn’t saying. But if you just are like glass half full person, things are gonna start happening for you and we want to work with you,
D.J. Paris 50:19 or at the very least, if you’re a glass half full person, I mean, you recognize the the weeds in the garden, you’re supposed to see the weeds, okay, there’s weeds in the garden. And there’s also some flowers there too. And if you can sort of see it all and see the beauty and some of the challenge at the same time, you know, it’s just going to be less stressful. Like, it’s, it’s still going to be hard. Life is hard work is hard. Business is hard. But it’s all about reducing distress, right. And so like, if you’re a glass half full person, you know, at least you’re paying attention and you’re going to get through it with a little bit less anxiety and stress. So that’s I always think it’s also infectious for the office to when there’s positive energy around people kind of feed off of that. So I’m right with you. If anyone out there is thinking about maybe exploring other options, you’re in the you know, the LA area, you’re an agent, maybe you’re not getting what you need from your current brokerage or your or your team or, you know, maybe you’re on your own and just kind of doing it yourself and, and really want to team up what’s the best way someone should reach out to you in case they think they might be a fit for you.
Casey Napolitano 51:26 Just call me or email me like I’m always available. And my goal is to have an agent representing NDI in every area of Los Angeles. So like, you know, we have Joe and Santa Monica, I have Steven and Silverlake, Justine in Woodland Hills. So I want someone everywhere. And then when I get a lead, I tend to be very like giving with my agents like I just got a lead in Santa Monica and I shared it with Joe just because he was there you know proximity and he really ran with it and he just did such a great job. So if you’re in Los Angeles and you want you want you want leads from like genuine leads, true leads from a great brokerage and then also like the support that would be that would be NDA. So just hit us up on email or
D.J. Paris 52:22 actual brokerage who hands out leads, this is a unicorn, this does not happen. We know this right? Casey knows this because she started at a firm and built it all up on her own without any leads. So she knows just how rare and valuable this is. So you have to prove yourself if you want to join her team meaning show why she you need to be part of the NDA team. Reach out to her the best way to do that go to her website, which is NDA, hyphen, R E NDA slash r e.com. I’ll have a link to in the show notes. There’s a contact us form. Also follow Casey on Instagram, Casey apartado will have a link to that as well in the show notes. But Casey, this it was such a pleasure chatting with you. And really fun to watch your ascension as you continue to grow the business and do well. So we are thrilled to continue. And we didn’t even get into your Johnny Knoxville story which I will have to do at a different time. Because you have some great celebrity stories that aren’t under NDA that we can talk about. So we will an NDA, get non disclosure agreement. I think we covered that. But the reason she she said that is she works a lot of celebrities and she has to sign NDAs all the time for her clients to protect their privacy, but she’s got some good stories that she can share. So we’ll we’ll have to have you back some time to hear some fun celebrity stories. But anyway, if anyone and by the way, I’ll wrap up with this if anyone out there is. Now again, Casey does work with high net worth individuals. So they sometimes have multiple properties in multiple locations. So even if you’re not an agent in Southern California, but maybe you have, you know, you’re in a different part of the country where people also have vacation homes, other properties, Casey would love the opportunity to work with you and refer business back and forth. So even if you’re a New York agent, or you’re down in Miami or wherever you are in the country, Nashville, Austin, all these, you know, fun destination places that people are buying multi, you know, second, third, fourth homes. Yeah, referrals happen. So reach out to Casey let her know how you can provide value to her clients, and she might be able to return the favor as well. So Casey, really appreciate you being on the show today. We want to have just as everyone ever wrapping up here, just want to remind everyone to please follow Casey on Instagram, Casey Napoletana, Instagram, and you can find all of this on her website as well, which we’ll have in the show notes. We want to thank Casey for coming on the show today on behalf of the audience. And on behalf of Casey and myself. We want to thank our audience Thanks for continuing to stick around and continue to make. Our numbers are still going up after five years, which is incredible. So I’m so grateful to everyone who is listening or watching at this moment. So thank you. Thank you. And please tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from this conversation with Casey. She’s a hustler. Think of one other agent that needs to hustle a little bit and send them a link to this episode. You can find us at keeping it real pod.com all of our episodes can be streamed there, or if they’re a podcast person, just pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe button. We would appreciate it Casey, thank you so much. I had a great time with you. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Casey. Thank
Casey Napolitano 55:42 you so much. Have a great day.
How To Go From Camera Shy To Camera Shine To Get Clients • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Apr 07, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate professionals with Kim Rittberg.
Hiding from the camera means hiding from clients! To grow your business in today’s market you need to show up on camera! According to the National Association of Realtors, an overwhelming majority of buyers and sellers want an agent who is using video. Kim Rittberg is an award-winning Digital Video Expert who teaches real estate agents how to grow their leads, revenue and credibility with video. Kim will help you go from Camera Shy to Camera Shine and crush those self-limiting beliefs holding you back.
To grow your business in today’s market you need to show up on camera. Grab Kim’s Free Download: Improve Your Video Quality to Increase Your Revenue! Grab 10 FREE tips from a former media executive so that you can take your videos from mediocre to magnetic.
Plus when you download these free tips, you’ll also receive an additional PDF on how to go from camera shy to camera shine. Grab the free download here.
Kim Rittberg’s ‘Grow Your Business with Video’ Boot Camp wait list is open! The live coaching course will begin mid-April, apply today to save a spot!
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you reluctant to get in front of the camera for social media videos? Well, today we’re gonna get you past that fear. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Kim Rittberg 1:29 I’m so happy to be back on keeping it real. I always have so much fun and please keep following me on social everyone has reached out to me I love engaging with and I love hearing from you. I’m Kim Rydberg I help real estate agents grow their leads income and credibility with video and podcasts. And I got here from being a TV news producer for about a decade, I launched the digital video unit for Us Weekly meaning I turn an office into a live TV studio, which is basically what every single business owner has to do today. And I worked in video marketing at Netflix and Pop Sugar. And so now I take all of that experience to empower and teach real estate agents, how they can leverage video and podcasts to grow their own business. It’s really, really fun for me, I do one on one and group coaching. And one thing I really want to focus on today is about being camera shy, and how you can go from camera shy to camera shine. I recently spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices National Sales convention in Las Vegas. Yes, I flew to Vegas, I was like the only person not participating in sin city in the world. I really was there just to speak and meet people. And anyway, it was really, really fun. There were 1000s of agents there I met so many incredible people looking to grow and invest in themselves. And one of I taught two sessions and one of the sessions, I want to drop some of the lessons that people really responded to here. And it’s about how to cut through your camera shyness how to go from camera shy to camera shine. And I want to start by saying, obviously, I’m a believer in video. But not just because I come from video and TV. But rather, there are all of these studies and all of these statistics that show that if you’re using video, you’re getting better conversion rates. And like over 85% of buyers and sellers want an agent who’s using video 90% of companies are seeing video convert to sales. So it’s just a better sales tool. And when you think about a filtered headshot with three sentences on social media, versus a video of a real estate agent, talking about their neighborhood, why they love it so much walking their dog letting you get to know them, when you think about those two agents, if you were a buyer who you want to work with. So I love teaching agents how to really grow with video. But one of the things you got to get that band aid off, you got to rip off that band aid. I personally was camera shy when I started my business when I left corporate. But I realized very quickly that you can’t be shy because hiding from the camera means hiding from clients. So today, I’m going to give you a couple of tips on how to get over that fear and some tactical ways to get you on camera. So number one, I want to say by the way, when you start showing up on camera, you will have some early wins. But the truth is it’s not like you make one video and suddenly a bunch of leads come in. But when you start using video in a consistent and effective and strategic way like you have a plan, you know your messaging you know who your ideal client is and you understand broadly the things you’re talking about. And then you’re showing up consistently whether that’s twice a month or seven times a month. It really will unlock a lot of leads. I’m seeing this with my one on one real estate clients I’m seeing with my group coke group coaching clients, the people who are showing up consistently are having dormant leads meaning people who I hadn’t seen in years come back, see their content reengage with it. And they’re connecting to new people because if someone is considering you then they go to your social page. You’re in their consideration set they’re checking you out on so Marshall, they’re getting to know you better there. So the more you can show up is, the more you can be competitive. And the reason why it’s so important to put yourself on camera is because you are your unique special sauce. Basically, if I have one video idea, and I give it to 100 Real Estate Agents, I’m gonna get 100 different videos back because you each bring your own unique, special something. So don’t forget that, you know, sometimes I think people feel like, oh, every idea has been out there, but you are what makes it unique? Your perspective? Your why, why you’re an agent, why you love that neighborhood, why you’re why you love helping people. So I want to I wanted to start with that. So I’m going to start with being on camera. Basically, hiding from the camera means hiding from clients. I was very camera shy when I started my business. I really had all those negative voices in my head that you all have. I feel self conscious of my voice, how do I look, I feel awkward acts of normal feeling everybody feels it. I’ve mean, I’ve trained on camera coached CEOs, members of Congress, celebrities, every single person feels that way. So you’re in great company. And then I basically, once you get your mindset, you have to really think about getting out of what I call supermodel mode. So get out of supermodel mode, stop thinking about how you look and who’s looking at you, and get into teacher mode. Start thinking about who you’re teaching, how you’re educating them. Basically, if you’re showing up on camera, it’s to speak to your ideal client. It’s to tell them what you’re about. It’s to tell them who you are, it’s to bring your experience and personality to the forefront. So step one, quiet those negative voices. And the best way to quiet those voices is to remember why you’re putting yourself on camera. Sure, you can keep just doing home tours, you can keep posting photos of homes, but the truth is you’re going to be more effective as a salesperson, if you’re putting videos out there. And additionally, think about this. How many meetings can you have in person each week, with one video, you can reach hundreds or 1000s of people while you’re out doing your business, while you’re having lunch with your spouse while you’re walking your dog. So just remember, the power of social media is that is working in the background. You know, those of you who are doing social life, you look, you’re like, oh, even if you’re not posting a lot, you’re still having hundreds or 1000s of people see your content. So the time you put in gets exponentially grown. Anyway, so I’m gonna return back to the concept of camera shy to camera shine. I felt that same way I was self conscious the limiting beliefs I had. I’m self conscious, who wants to hear from me? Am I really an expert? I mean, I do think of an expert. I was one of the beliefs I had less. But I know a lot of people feel like who am I? Why does anyone want to hear my perspective, but you have to remember, you’re only talking to your ideal client. So you’re going to ignore any of those negative voices you’re hearing in your head. When you’re feeling self conscious. you’re envisioning, Nancy from high school who was mean to you in the cafeteria. Or you’re envisioning John, the colleague who stabbed you in the back. Those people are not following on social if they are, and you feel like they’re writing mean things. It’s in their own head, it’s their negative, it’s their negativity. But truly attention is so hard to get. It’s so hard to get attention. So probably they’re not paying attention to you. They’re probably thinking about what they’re cooking for dinner. Right. So don’t give them any power. Don’t give them any any weight, really talk to your ideal client, identify who you’re talking to, and make every video for that person. And then the more you do that, you’ll start realizing that they’re responding, they’re there, they’re there for you. So we’re gonna stop hiding from the clients. Once personally, once I stopped hiding from the camera, and started putting myself on camera, and I’m seeing this for all of my clients. I had one video, bring me three new clients. I did one video, I immediately got three new clients. I’ve tripled my speaking engagements. I’ve quadrupled my inbound leads meaning on LinkedIn, on Instagram, I get notifications, I get emails for discovery calls every single week, because I’m out there on podcasts, because I’m out there speaking because I’m out there putting myself on social so but it took me a while to get there. So it’s not like it just happened overnight. And so I want you to get there. I’m seeing the habits. My agent or my agents, David, he had somebody pop into his phone. Hey, loving what you’re putting out there. You want to grab lunch somebody hadn’t seen in years, the CEO of his company had messaged him saying He’s liking his content. So it’s both for your clients, but it’s also for peers. It’s for referrals, you know, you’re building up that big referral network. So now we’re getting out of basically to go from camera shy to camera shine. We’re getting out of supermodel mode. We’re getting into teacher mode. That’s the biggest biggest thing. That’s the number one mindset thing. I cannot stress it enough. I’m not a huge person who like reads books about mindset and self help, but I’m very much in touch with who I am and fighting through the things that hold me back. back, I had a lot of fear to start my own business, I had a lot of fear to put myself out there. I’m now speaking on national stages. I’m now contributing to Fast Company Magazine. I’ve been written up in Business Insider, those things are all happening because I started showing up. So I’m such an advocate of bringing yourself out there, putting yourself out there, telling yourself, you deserve it, and you’re worth it, because it’s worth it to push through. So you have to get through that mindset. And then after you’re getting through that mindset, you’re repairing your body. So you have to remember that when you’re talking, the camera is stealing our energy. So the best way to counteract that is to practice being authentic on camera. And I realized this a little ironic, but people were like, just be yourself. Don’t try to be yourself.
Try to be yourself on video. It’s a different version of you. It’s one where you have to practice breathing, and get yourself psyched up before you go on camera. But remember that we all are a little frozen, a little robotic on camera at first, that’s okay. Video number one will be worse than video five will be worse than video 10. But like, once you’re 10 videos and 20 videos in 30 videos, and you’re gonna be like, Oh, okay, I’m showing up more as myself. But yeah, it takes practice. It takes practice, just like every other thing. So preparing your mindset is you’re getting out of supermodel mode, you’re getting into teacher mode, and you’re preparing your body you are actually preparing and practicing. And the best way to practice is by putting yourself on camera. So I’m going to give you a challenge this week, I’m going to check in on you. I know a lot of you are following me on social net, which is amazing. I love it, you are going to put yourself on camera. And basically putting yourself on camera can be any of these things. The best way to do it is just just start talking to your camera in a very like casual way. You just like what is your day look like. So for example, I would put my camera up, I’ll hold it out as far as I can hold it up a little higher than eyeline. So we’re not getting that up the nose of the chin angle. And I’m just gonna bring bring my social followers into my day. Hey, everyone, I’m back from Vegas. I’m super jetlag, I’m going to drink lots of coffee, my kids are on spring break. So I’m gonna spend some time with them. And then I have a lot of follow up emails from all the great people I met I met, and a couple of a few calls. And then I’m going to take my kids to paint art at a new craft studio in Brooklyn. And then I might also here’s a tip, we put that video out on Instagram Stories. Basically, Instagram Stories disappears after 24 hours. So if you hate the video, don’t worry, it’s gone. But Instagram Stories is a great way to really connect with people and bring them in in a more sincere way. It’s less filtered. It’s not necessarily like a home tour. And it’s not necessarily even commentary on the market. It’s just you being bringing people into your day, obviously, you want to tie it a little bit to your job. So you know, as I mentioned, in that video, I just shot I mentioned, I just went to a speaking engagement. I mentioned I’m a parent, because that is a part of my life and other parents really connect with that. So in those videos, you can mention things about your life, if you have a pet, if you play basketball, if you love football, if you know you have kids, something that lets people connect with you on a personal level. And then my other tip is, in Instagram Stories, there are these things called stickers. It’s that little smiley face square. If you put out a poll, like if I wrote, I’m having my coffee, I’m super jet lagged. I love coffee, I can’t live it on my coffee, a poll you could put in there is coffee or tea. And people will vote coffee or tea. This is just a way to engage with people just to say actually who’s watching my stories. And you’ll you’ll be surprised. Sometimes people will respond to the poll. I’m like, Oh, I didn’t realize that person is following me or engaging with my content that’s interesting. Maybe you want to reach out to that person, you should engage with their content. So we’re bringing that social aspect back into social media. But again, the best way to do that is by putting our face in there because you want to give people a chance to get to know you. So there’s that was my first tip on how to get yourself on camera, I want to see you putting yourself on an Instagram story. And if you’re not on Instagram, Facebook also has like a similar feature where it’s just you putting it up just for today. and tag me in it. First of all tag me It’s Kim RITTBRG Kim Rydberg tag me, I will share it I will engage I will cheer you on. I love seeing people get on camera because as I mentioned before, showing up has completely skyrocketed my business. It’s skyrocketing the business of my agents. I’m seeing it all over. So I really want that for you too. So tip number one, you’re gonna show up on Instagram Stories. You’re going to use that engagement sticker to encourage people to interact with you putting the social back in social media. Another thing to do is practice talking to your camera. So even if you’re not going to run the video on social media, which I think you should but basically Every time you’re introducing yourself, every time you’re thinking of something that you want to talk about, practice, sing it to your camera, your mouth, and your body is a muscle just like anything else. So you actually have to say the words. Basically, if I asked you who you are and what you do, and I hear likes and arms, it means you didn’t practice it enough. As I mentioned, before, I do a lot of on camera coaching. We all say arms and legs, when we’re, when we’re reaching for words, we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to say, if someone asks you a little bit about yourself, you should have that pitch, ready to go. Like basically, I worked in TV, I would get to pick people who got to be on camera, I would select our guests. If I can’t be confident that you can, like have a really strong sound bite, you can’t get on TV. So likewise, similarly, you’re going to present better would you really understand your message and message messages like a phrase but message means Hi, I’m Kim Rydberg I help real estate agents grow with income leads and credibility with video and podcasts. I came from 15 years in media and marketing. And now I love helping business owners grow because I’m a business owner, too. It’s important to me to help people, business owners, let their content work harder for them. Do more with less. So I love empowering people to make great content that stands out without the burnout. So a little bit of that, to be honest, I was kind of making it up on the spot. But you hear there’s not a lot of ohms and likes, because I’ve been practicing my pitch, practicing what I’m saying a lot. So when you’re going on camera, your voice should be comfortable saying those things. So those are a few of my tips today about getting on camera one, you’re going to put yourself on video, you’re gonna bring people into your life on Instagram stories to you’re going to start talking to your camera and recording it, you’re going to record it. Because that red light, like I said, when you record, everyone feels uncomfortable. The red light steals your soul a little bit to record it. And then the third step, once you’re really doing this a lot, I recommend watching it back without being super judgmental, you know, do you is your area lit enough? Are you standing in a dark room? Do you know what you’re saying? You know, do you need to practice saying what you want to say more? It is really important to watch it back. But I recommend that for people who are really doing it for a while because I know everybody hates watching their footage back. But it is a really important aspect of improving. So that’s a couple of tips of ways to improve and practice your speaking. My last tip on practicing being on camera is the same as practicing public speaking. Anytime you’re in a room with other people consider that an opportunity to be on camera to be presentational to speak in a presentational way. So let’s say you have a caravan or you have an agent meeting a broker meeting and you’re talking in front of 10 people, or 20 people don’t mumble casually like you would to colleagues, which is something I always did, I didn’t like really think to take those opportunities when I was in a more corporate setting. Take any opportunity where you’re feeling a little nervous, a little sweaty baby, maybe your heart’s beating a little faster, take that opportunity to be an opportunity where you’re saying this is practice for me to get my message straight, to really speak confidently to speak presentation only. And by presentational I mean just like a little more energy a little more confidence that you might then you might at lunch with a friend. So any time you’re about to speak in front of a group, start using these tips before you go on. So basically, before you go on camera, you’re going to practice your breathing, you’re gonna breathe in for a count of four or five, and you’re going to breathe out for a count of four or five. That’s a great way to regulate your body. And you’re going to practice what you’re saying. You’ve already been practicing what you’re saying in the privacy of your own home recording it, then practicing it out loud to people. These things seem small, but I’ll tell you, those small moments in life adds up, they add up more comfortable you can get on camera, the more you’re attracting those ideal clients and letting them get to know you. Again, we’re talking about bringing your expertise and your unique perspective and letting people see that. So all right, those are three great tips to be on camera. So now I’m challenging you be on camera, put yourself on camera, no matter your social platform find me I’m at Kim Rydberg tagged me in it and say, you know, you know, just whatever you’re gonna say just message me and say I heard you and keeping it real and I will cheer you on. And I wanted to let people know that you can give a free download. From my website. It’s Kim rydberg.com I have tips to make high quality video content that grows your revenue. And when you get that you’re also gonna get a bonus download. We’ve had to go from camera shy to camera shine tips like these. So make sure to check out my website Kim rydberg.com and I also have a video bootcamp that you can apply for it is launching very, very soon, applications are open. I only run this boot camp a few times a year. So if you seem like a person who really needs to get your, you know, gear get on camera start growing your business with video. This is It is perfect for you. Okay to keeping it real Audience is the best so message me Tell me what you want me to hear from me next. I love teaching you all and you’re so fun to connect with. So hope you have a great day and don’t forget to go from camera shy to camera shy and get yourself on camera.
How Does The Current Banking Crisis Affect The Real Estate Market? • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Apr 03, 2023
In our April episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties, talks about the financial crisis due to the bankruptcy of a large bank in the US. Carrie emphasizes the importance of starting to talk to buyers and listening to their concerns while learning about their lifestyle. Carrie also discusses the inventory shortage and how to find creative ways to help people move. Last, Carrie gives some advice to find rentals that are on the market without landlords living in it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How have the recent bank failures affected the real estate market? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made for real estate agents and buy real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute. It’s not Monday today when we’re recording it but that’s okay. The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Now let me tell you about Carrie Carrie is a superstar top 1% producer here in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 47,000 real estate agents in the Chicagoland area Carrie is in the top 15 Not 15% Literally the top 15 out of so it’s like top 99.999% of all realtors in the area. She’s a true superstar whose cows cow you know, I’m gonna count one of these days, I’m going to actually have that number because I want to know just how amazing you are as far as rank not that it’s that important. But I am so honored to have you on the show. But anyway, Kerry’s a true superstar. She’s an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors, luxury properties. And also she works with a ton of developers the place I live right now is one of Karis developments. So I am so such a big fan of Carrie, she’s been with our show, since the very beginning. I want everybody to follow her on Instagram. We were just talking about this beforehand, because I need some help with my Instagram. And Carrie was like, Can you believe I do all of that myself. And she does. So check out her on Instagram, Carrie McCormack real estate, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And also check out our website Kerry McCormick rt e.com. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:08 Thank you. I love that introduction. It makes me
D.J. Paris 3:12 Don’t we all need like an introduction like that, like all of us need one friend in our life that just, you know, maybe once in a while goes, let me tell you about all the great things about you that would be that would be that would actually be a fun way to start a start a morning. But I’m glad I get to start my morning with you today. You are an incredible superstar and I am always will I always take the temperature of the market by talking to you because you are the market in the way I think about it. So how are you feeling right now? It’s it’s we’re at the end of March. It’s been a goofy couple of weeks banks have failed. There’s been some weird stuff happening. But how is how are things going?
Carrie McCormick 3:52 Yeah, it’s it’s actually not doing too bad here in Chicago, you know, and I do agree like I’m in the market. 24/7. Right, I’m always in it. So from talking with buyers and sellers from all different age groups from all different, you know, income brackets, and I listen. And that is I will tell you, one of my biggest strengths, of being successful in the business is, is listening to people and when you listen to people, you learn so much about them and about the market and how they’re feeling. There’s a lot of funky stuff going in the market, but things are moving here. So but what I wanted to talk about was his inventory and everyone hears this word and you know, I’m sick of hearing it to have you know, there’s no inventory in the market. So, you know, instead of talking about it, let’s do something about it. How do we get more inventory in the market because I think in this spring and summer market that the folks that are the listing agents are going to be the winners in this market. So we need to find creative ways to get people to move. And one thing that has been difficult to get Get people to move are two big two big reasons. One, that there is no inventories like, where are they going to move to? Right? So they don’t want to sell their house. And two is their interest rates. So they did lock into an interest rate, you know, ones, twos, 3% interest rates, and they’re like, gosh, if I, if I move, I’m going to give up my interest rate, where am I going to move to, and I’m going to be stuck with a five or 6% interest rate, then you know, so we’ve got is, and I get it. So you know, put a credit to at properties Christie’s international because they a podcast to talking about inventory, and they had some great tips. And so I’m going to talk about those tips for all of us to use. And number one, is think about the rentals that are in the market. Right now, the landlords that own these rentals, the landlords obviously don’t live there. So that’s not their primary residence, they may have a higher interest rate on that property. And they’re not that emotionally tied to that property. So find those landlords, maybe they want to sell it, maybe they want to do a 1031 exchange, which means they trade the property, basically, they sell the one property, and then they identify another property. So you can get two deals out of that one person. So again, you can look in the MLS of properties that have been rented for years and try to find those landlords, especially if those leases were up, you can see that, you know, if you look at the history of properties, rented every March, let’s say or April, so you know that either they just signed a lease, and then maybe put them on your schedule, here, and and reach out to them. There’s so many ways to find these owners, right? How do you
D.J. Paris 6:53 find the owner? So that’s a good question. So we could go through the MLS and see especially like luxury buildings, people who have condos, were renting them out. Obviously, they’re already working with an agent, maybe the agent didn’t do a good job, we don’t know. But how would we then source the owner? What would you recommend there?
Carrie McCormick 7:11 Well, the internet’s a fun thing these days, right? So you can look in tax records, you know, the tax bill, and usually on that tax bill, that bills not coming to the investment property, the tax bills going to their home. So that, you know, look at the tax records, you can find them there. The white pages, actually, there’s something called been verified. Social media, you know, you can find them on social media, there’s just, it’s really kind of a little bit of detective work. And that’s kind of the fun part about it is of course, when you find I’ve actually there’s one property that a client of mine wanted to acquire, I could not find the owner could not find the owner, I actually went to the property and spoke to the tenant knocked on the door and spoke to the tenant and gave the tenant my information said, you know, I’m wanting to get in touch with your landlord. And the tenant passed along the information to their landlord, the landlord called me. So sometimes, again, it’s is having that, that drive to, you know, to find the people, but that’s what sets you apart because other agents won’t do that.
D.J. Paris 8:22 Reminds me of the story. I asked you a long time ago about how you started to work with developers, you’re like, Oh, I walked over to a development. And from downtown, I think you walked all the way from downtown to the development and said, Hi, I’m an I’m a new real estate agent, what’s going on here, and then that that is how you. So that’s a really good idea. If you can’t find somebody knock on the door, and say, Hey, I just wanted to pass this over to the landlord. Brilliant. Oh, I love that. And the other thing, too, is you can even partner up with management companies as well. property management companies, who are you know, you could build good relationships with them a lot of property management company. The property managers themselves aren’t necessarily practicing agents. So this is another great opportunity like, hey, when your owner is ready to sell, I would you know, and you can develop a little sort of back and forth kind of reciprocal thing going on. And you can refer does this to them and they can refer to you.
Carrie McCormick 9:21 Absolutely. So it’s, you know, it’s again, thinking out of the box. So rentals are a great source to find inventory. The other one isn’t, I’ve got a really great success story on this one is, you know, there’s a lot of people moving just on the move, right, in general, they’re moving out of Chicago, they’re moving to Arizona, Florida, Tennessee, wherever it is, and there’s just there’s mobility in the United States right now. In and out of so, obviously connecting with an agent in another city. So for example, I had was in Arizona and I flew out to meet with an agent and I you know, introduced who I am what I’m doing and she’s like, Oh, my client out here, she’s like, I think they have a house in Illinois in Chicago. She talked to them. And she’s like, Oh, my clients aren’t using their condo in Chicago anymore. And she talked to them. And they wanted, they’re like, Yeah, let’s just sell it. So I was able to find inventory of place that’s sitting here vacant, that people live in Arizona. And I connected with a broker who had a great relationship with those people. And she convinced she convinced them to sell the Chicago place. So again, it’s just it’s networking with other with your peers and networking with other brokers. Because, again, if you no broker in Montana, sold a client a home, and they’re done with a transaction, but I call that or any of your clients have places in Chicago that they’re willing to sell, I’m happy to give you a referral fee, if you just put that message out to your clients out there. And they’re gonna get a call. And, you know, it’s, they’re not using their place here in Chicago, and you’re gonna get another listing out of that. So, again, all of this is putting a little effort and work and digging into it, making those phone calls, taking the time and the effort. But that’s what it’s gonna take to get some more inventory in this market.
D.J. Paris 11:16 You know, what’s so funny, I was thinking about this, because I live in a development that you represent it and I love it. And I will hope to be there for quite some time. But you know, what would be kind of an interesting marketing idea is I’ve never had this happen. And all the years of homeownership, and I’ve rented and I’ve owned, and I’ve never received this in any way, ready for your next like some sort of marketing message that’s like ready for your next home. You know, something to the effect of like, the condo I purchased probably won’t be my forever home. So I think that people who buy condos typically, you know, I don’t know what the amount of time that they average American spends in a condo. But if you’re in a condo, odds are, if you’re not a retiree who’s looking to downsize, odds are you’re probably looking to upsize at some point to a more traditional style home. I think this would be a great opportunity to start talking to condo owners about what are your plans? What’s the plans right now? You know, do you want to live in the city for the rest of your life, especially if you’re in an urban area? Most people move out of the city at some point, right? Most people move out, they want more space they have maybe children get in the way they want, you know, more education opportunities, things like that. So I think there’s there I have yet to really see anyone talking about, you know, that transition from city to suburbs or and then returning sometimes people as they retire, come back to the city. But curious if you’ve kind of explored or seen any trends there?
Carrie McCormick 12:50 Oh, absolutely. I mean, there’s, that’s why I’m saying is that there’s all this movement, and, you know, part of our job as a real estate broker is to be, you know, consult with them. Because, you know, where are they going with it? You know, are they staying in this condo for five years? What’s their next step? And how can we get them to, you know, their next step, and that was gonna be my last tip about inventory is kind of being a matchmaker. I had a meeting the other day, or it was a couple of weeks ago, actually, with a dating matchmaker, not for myself, but she you know, she’s a very well known matchmaker and just kind of learning about her business and how she does it. And it just made it dawned on me of that’s what we do. I mean, we match people with the right lifestyle with the right house. And it was soon after that meeting, where I have a client of mine that lives in the Gold Coast here in Chicago, and they really aren’t unhappy with their house because I didn’t sell it to him. But because they there’s not enough light in there. It’s really dark, and it makes them depressed. And I was in another house that had a lot of light. And I called him and I said, Listen, I know that you’re not looking to move, but I know you hate your house because it doesn’t have a light enough light in there. Come see this home. It sits on a corner lot. It’s got south facing windows, they fell in love with the house. So again, I just started putting two and two together. I’m like, Oh my gosh, like that was just my client didn’t want to move. But you know, just knowing what people want in their life and where they’re going and what’s important to them and presenting an opportunity to them. Yeah, we’re a matchmaker.
D.J. Paris 14:29 I think that is such a such a good point. Because you know, when when I bought my most recent condo, one of your development opportunities, which which I’m thrilled the these years later, I I wasn’t specifically looking but as soon as I walked in, I was like, Okay, this is the one I want. And I was lucky enough to get it and I was also lucky enough timing wise to have with the current rates at that time were very low. So I have I have kind of, I’m disincentivized to move however, knowing my if you knew my why or what I was looking to do in my life, and eventually I probably will, at some point go out to the suburbs, I’m sure like everyone else. At some point, I’m going to make that transition anyway. And the rates are going to be what the rates are like, I won’t have any choice over it, just like I didn’t have any choice over it. Anytime I’ve ever gotten a loan, it just is what it is. I don’t think I think as Realtors we tend to focus on the rates, because it’s so interesting. It’s a, it’s a very tangible number that we can use as a reason for why things are the way they are. But when people need to move, they will date the rate, the new rate, and then they’ll refi. And so rates aren’t that much of a stopper. But I’m curious how you talk about that with your clients? Like, how do you sue the client that’s like, Oh, I missed out on the 3% days? And?
Carrie McCormick 16:03 Well, I mean, the reality is, they did miss out on it. You know, I mean, there’s, there’s nothing that we can do, you know, so I think sometimes people just want to be heard, or they just, you know, they just want to complain about it. But the reality is, it’s gone. But also when those rates were high, pricing was a little bit different, you know, so you know, they people were buying houses at higher prices, they were waiving inspections, they were waiving appraisal contingencies, now we’re in a more stabilized market where they can negotiate the home to some degree. And again, rates will change, just like everything, you know, its rates are not going to stay at 6% or 7%, they’re gonna end up coming down briefly, and then they’ll pop back up. And it’s just, it’s, it’s the market, but I always tell people to I mean, a house is so important of where you live, don’t stop your life, just because the rates at 6% I mean, it’s, it’s going to adjust and it’s going to change. And if someone is truly that concerned about their finances, and every point, interest rate point, then we probably should be looking at a less expensive property where they’re comfortable. So again, it just becomes of a consultant to them of what’s the right, fit and match for them.
D.J. Paris 17:15 Yeah, I I just I’m, I’m around so many agents these days. And all they talk about are rates, rates, rates, rates. And yes, that stops some people who don’t have to move maybe from from making a choice. It does block some people, but I don’t really think it blocks motivated buyers and sellers alike, it made my bum them out a little that they’re not getting quite the same rate that they could have gotten years before. But what if the human race is very resilient, right? Like, we deal with what’s in front of us, we don’t have an option. But what I was what I was getting to was, I could be incentivized to move even with a 3% rate going to a 6% rate. If it made sense for my why? Why would I do that. If it if it ticked off enough boxes, it would absolutely be the right move. And I would just have to get comfortable with that. So the idea is, I think realtors can start learning how to coach their clients. It’s kind of like, kind of like when you go to buy a new TV, and you do all this research. And then, you know, you spend months looking at this waiting for these TVs to go on sale, and you pick the perfect one. And then and then it just becomes your TV after like a week you don’t even think about it again. It’s just your TV. So it’s one of those things where we get fixated on, you know, comparing and contrasting and rates and blah, blah, blah. And at the end of the day, what’s most important is how does the person feel in their home? What do they really want? And, and that that tends to override the financial part of it.
Carrie McCormick 18:51 Yeah, but there’s some people that just they want the win or they want it, they want the win, you know, so it’s, I love what I do. I truly do. I love consulting with clients and talking with them about this. And it’s like being a coach, you know, a real estate coach with them, you know, of what to do and how to do it. So it’s it’s the best job in the world.
D.J. Paris 19:15 Yeah, be a coach. I like that coach consultant. That’s, I mean, we have those for, you know, our finances, we have those for legal matters. We have those for, you know, working out, you know, dietary stuff. It’s like why not have a real estate coach as well. I think if you position yourself as a coach, I think our audience could really benefit from that really thinking of yourself as like, Hey, before you make a real estate decision, talk to me, I can give you some some guidance, right? Because I do think that most people make real estate decisions on their own with and use a realtor to make the decision, but I don’t think a lot of real I don’t think a lot of can Zoomers really go to the realtor and say I need you to help me find x or or help me sell X, Y or Z. I think most people tend to want to do it on their own. And this, we’re a realtor who’s really comprehensive can come in and say, I’m going to be your guide throughout the entire process, right?
Carrie McCormick 20:19 There’s so much involved in it. So, and I don’t think they know that
D.J. Paris 20:23 they don’t. And this is an opportunity for the agent to step up. Now my marketing tip of the week. So I’ll just kind of peel back the curtain a little bit. So we at our company, here, we have two companies, we have a holding company for agents that are exiting the business want to keep their license active. And we have seen an incredible spike. In signups to that company, we’ve been doing the same marketing for that company since we started. So it’s not like we’re doing anything different. But all of a sudden, in the last third, 90 days, so it’s been since the beginning of this year, we’ve seen 100 Realtors join our holding company, which is normally we would see maybe 30 to 40 realtors. So we’re seeing a pretty sick significant increase. And what does this mean? These are agents that are leaving the industry. So what does that mean to you the listener who is not leaving the industry? Well, it’s kind of a good news, bad news thing. Good news is people are leaving the industry. So there’s market share up for sale, the bad news is, it’s still hard to get that market share. Here’s what I would recommend doing, I think now is the time to start offering as people are now coming back to work, I have a few suggestions. We are starting to see some companies are mandating in house working, or in office working mandates. So if you have clients, people in your sphere, that are going in back into the office that weren’t before, I would reach out to those those clients and ask them to introduce you to their HR department. If it’s a large enough company, and say, Hey, I’d love to come in and talk about, you know, the current state of the market, renting, buying, selling, etc, I’ll bring in, you know, sandwiches or whatever, I can do a little presentation. HR departments love this, because it makes them look like they’re putting on something for their agents. Obviously, you can get a lender to help pay for that, or an attorney or title company. So it doesn’t have to cost you anything. So that’s one suggestion is find out where everybody works, and say, Hey, can I talk to your HR department, maybe I can come do a little webinar or seminar. Another idea I have is back to the basics. This is something that everyone can do, and everyone should do, which is you should have at least a five data points for every single contact that you have in your database. So what I mean by that is I’m going to give you the five that I recommend that you have, obviously, I’m going to assume you already have somebody’s name, their email, their phone number, so we’re going to assume that, but I want you to know everybody’s birthday, I want you to know, their if they have a spouse, the spouse is birthday, of course the name as well. If they have children, I want you to know the children’s birthdays. I also want you to know where the parents or the the adults work, what name of those companies and their home buying or selling anniversary and or rental anniversary will say. So basically what you’re going to know is their birthdays, where they work and their work, their buying and selling and or renting anniversaries. If you know this, by the way, called just go down a list in your database. This will give you opportunities to reach out all throughout the year to say hey, I know it’s your son’s birthday today just wanted to wish so and so happy birthday. You can also set up Google Alerts. So once you know the name of the company that your friends work for, or your clients work for you, you can put those in Google Alerts and have it send you notifications when anything substantial happens at that particular company. That way you can reach out say Hey, I just saw you guys acquired this or you were just in the news for that or, and even better go into LinkedIn. LinkedIn will show you once. I would go every day, but you could do it once a week and look to see all the people that have had job promotions, all the people have changed careers. All of those kinds of things give you reasons to reach out. So again, we haven’t said one thing about real estate but I’ve given now you you know, many, many reasons to reach out throughout the year. And I don’t think I’m going to carry I’m going to ask you one last one question to round out the show. Do you ask for business? Yes. Ah, tell us how you do that.
Carrie McCormick 24:46 I’m pretty blunt.
D.J. Paris 24:50 will just say hey, DJ, do you need to? Like if how would you ask me for
Carrie McCormick 24:56 years to do that? I will tell you it’s Anyone that really knows me knows that I do not have an ego. I’m actually a pretty shy person. And I don’t like to talk about myself, I really don’t. And I don’t like to be photographed, believe that or not, I do not like to be photographed. But it took me feel comfortable with just asking people the straight question, and I learned to ask it around a purpose. And the purpose of it is kind of, like you said, is like, What’s your why don’t ask that specific, but what’s important to them? And have you ever considered moving, you know, like, you know, whatever the conversation leads to, and, you know, I’d love an opportunity to talk to you about that. Because Because of XY and Z, or because the markets doing this, and, you know, wrapping the whole question around the reason of why they should move or should sell, and make it more conversational. And, you know, some people say, no, or I appreciate it, but no, thank you, or whatever it is, it’s, you know, it’s usually a very nice comment. And then I’ll say, Well, can I follow up with you in a year from now, because life changes, you know, and I just, I’m not shy about that, you know, you know, I’m, I’ve got very thick skin, and I can take no for an answer. And actually, someone texted me the other day, and he said, You are the most persistent realtor I’ve ever. And he said, but you’re very professional. And I appreciate that. He’s like, why don’t you come over on the ninth. And I’m like, I mean, this is someone I’ve kept asking and asking and asking in a nice way, and I provide value, I provide information. And it was nice that he recognized it’s all very professionally done and persistent. And now I’m gonna go meet with him on the ninth. So we’ll see what happens
D.J. Paris 26:55 persistency wins the game. It just does. I, I had a similar thing where I kept reaching out to expand our podcast, I kept reaching out to real estate schools, because I want to do get real estate students who are entering the business hooked on our podcast, that would be a good thing for the show. And so I reached out to all these different schools, and I said, Hey, I would love to do these free. Here’s what I learned after interviewing lots of top realtors, like webinars for your students so that they know what they’re getting into. And I kept hitting this one particular school for two years, basically. And finally, they were like, Yes, look, we’re ready. Let’s do it. So sometimes things take time. If you just keep dripping on people in consistently adding value, that’s, that’s that’s the key, right? Like consistently giving, giving, giving, giving, and just hope, hopeful, but then asking, I love the idea of asking. I asked what like some people say you shouldn’t ask for business. Others say you should. I was having was at a presentation. Actually, Carrie, you were not at. But you have somebody you know, Stephen NATO, who’s a Chicago agent here who said, somebody asked him do you ask for business? And he says, not until recently. He said for the first like 10 years of his business, he never asked, right? Because he’s like an introvert. He just kind of likes to you know, he’s not an extrovert. And so he said, and you carry your your, your your introverted as well, pretty much aren’t you? Are you Would you consider yourself an introvert?
Carrie McCormick 28:35 I am. I am. Yeah, yeah.
D.J. Paris 28:38 Me too. Me too. Believe it or not, I am as well. Introverts can can do really well in this industry. And he goes, I never used to ask for business. He goes the worst. And he was saying, but he goes, he said, I started asking for business because he wanted to see like all these Beyonce shows this year. So he goes, guys, I’m not going to be able to go see all these Beyonce shows if I don’t have enough sales, and he just made a joke, made a joke about it. And he said, people really responded well to that. They were like, no, we want you to be successful. And he’s, of course is very successful. But I thought he goes I guess I flipped the script on asking. He goes, I totally asked now. He’s like, there’s no reason not to ask, right? It’s uncomfortable, but you have to do it. And you’ll get you’ll get some nose and
Carrie McCormick 29:23 yeah, you have to know the appropriate time to do it. You can’t just, you know, barge into a room and do that. But it’s it’s a it’s an art form. So
D.J. Paris 29:33 what, how? Give us one thing, one last final tip about social media, like what’s been working for you recently? Anything that or it’s something that you have or something not to do? Have you learned anything I
Carrie McCormick 29:49 don’t know about not to do? Because my tip is honestly is to be your own brand ambassador and be organic with your content. Um, you know, I think the reason, my and I don’t have millions of followers, you know, I feel like I’ve got a good following and my social media, but I think it’s because it’s truly me. You know, it’s, it’s, I try to curate each of my videos I, I’m the one that writes the scripts, I’m the one that comes up with the, the storyboard if you will, of them. And it’s, it’s truly who I am. So I think that’s, and I think if everyone when you do your own social media, and you are you’re true to yourself and your brand. So what I say is be your own brand ambassador, don’t when you start copying other people, I’m inspired by a lot of other people that are out there, and you take that inspiration and turn it into your own. So I think that’s important.
D.J. Paris 30:55 Yeah, it’s great tip authenticity, consistency. Yeah, let’s, let’s, let’s make this year, the year of doing more video to for all of our listeners do more live videos. And each time you’re at a showing, if you have a minute or so show something interesting about the house, hey, I want to show you guys this, people love to see those little short form videos of look at this really cool thing. Every house has some cool feature feature in your videos. Carrie, I think that brings us to the end of another Monday market minute. The I guess the lesson for today is get creative, get creative, to get more listings, get creative in your marketing. And don’t worry too much about rates just go out there and people still need to move. So get out there and talk to people find out their why’s. And also hopefully with the marketing tips I gave give you a reason to reach out just celebrate people this year. This is the year you know, it’s so funny, I will say this as one final thing. I’ve done so many of these episodes. And at the end of the are usually at the beginning of the episode. It’s almost clockwork, when I read somebody’s intro, which is you know, a list of their accomplishments and why they’re important and why we’re having them on the show. And they always go Gosh, I wish you could read it like almost every time so because gosh, I wish like you could see it in their face, they get so excited to hear and maybe slightly embarrassed. But it’s one of those things that you can really make people’s day by paying attention to their accomplishments. So, so obviously, in a podcast, we can, you know, there’s a structure for that. But as a realtor, you can do that through some of those marketing suggestions I gave, which is pay attention to other people’s accomplishments because not everyone gets to be on a podcast. And if you call them up and just say, Hey, I saw your company just won this big account. That’s, that is gonna go a long way with people. So anyway, pay attention to what your your your sphere of influence is doing and celebrate their successes with them. Everybody should be following Carrie McCormack on Instagram. So go to Instagram Carrie McCormack RTE link to that in the show notes. She does it all herself. She has an incredible social media following and she wants you to follow her as well. So check her out there also Kerry McCormack rt e.com For everything if you have clients, luxury clients, any any type of client that is moving the Chicagoland area that wants to work with a top real estate agent here in the area. Carrie is our recommendation. So if you’re a broker from another state, another area you have clients moving here, consider passing those over to introducing them to Carrie, Carrie, what’s the best way that an agent can reach out to you
Carrie McCormick 33:46 always call me 312-961-4612? I pick up my phone all the time.
D.J. Paris 33:54 Awesome. Well, thank you Carrie. Once again, on behalf of our listeners, you are amazing. We love having you on every month and on behalf of Carrie and myself. Thank you to the audience. Please tell a friend about our show. Think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this episode and send them a link over to our website. Keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed right from our browser or any podcast app has our show as well. Carrie, thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next next episode. Thank you
What Is Your Social Media Effectiveness Score? • Russ Cofano
Mar 31, 2023
Russ Cofano the CEO at Collabra Technology talks about his long experience with law school background working in a law firm legal hotline. Russ discussed the importance of eXp model and how the timing is incredibly valuable to effectiveness of this model. Next, he talks about a tool that his company has developed with the purpose to help agents build their digital marketing part of the job. Last, he explains why sales without marketing and branding is only half of the equation of digital marketing.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a tool that existed that measured all of your social media channels and effectiveness and engagement and compared it among the top Realtors in your marketplace and then told you what to do to get to their level? Well, stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Ruska Fano about his new venture sphere builder.io. Before we get to Russ, just a couple of quick reminders. As always the best two ways that you can help support our podcast. Number one, support our sponsors, check out what our sponsors are offering we love our sponsors, they pay the bills, and please check out their products and services and to tell a friend about the show. Tell one other realtor that you know you gotta listen to this episode. Specifically today we’re going to be talking about how to measure your social media presence against all the top producers in your marketplace. Very very cool stuff. So tell someone else about our show. That’s always the best way that you can help us keep going. But guys let’s get right to it my conversation with Ruska Fano?
Right, today our guest is Russ confido With Collabra technology. Let me tell you more about Russ now. Ruska. Fido is the CEO of Collabra technology, a digital marketing technology and analytics firm, which operates sphere builder, a comprehensive digital marketing platform that instantly provides comparative ranking and personalized insights about an agent’s online presence. Now Cabano has more than 30 years of senior leadership experience in nearly all facets of the real estate industry including brokerage technology, MLS associations and affiliated businesses go find his previous roles include President and General Counsel of EXP world holdings, Senior Vice President of industry relations at move dot inc, which is the owner of realtor.com By the way, I always thought realtor.com was owned by the National Association of REALTORS not not so anymore move dot move dot inc sorry moved attic move Inc owns and Russ is also was the Vice President and General Counsel at John L. Scott real estate and CEO of the Missouri Realtors Association. Kobato holds a Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctor from the University of Washington. Welcome Russ to the show. By the way, before we welcome Russ, everyone, I want you to go to sphere builder.io Sphere builder.io. And I want you to put in your information to download their white paper, specifically referencing and this is an incredible white paper about digital marketing use cases for real estate agents, you’re going to see what top agents are currently doing to expand their digital presence and engagement and improve their business. Russ, welcome to the show.
Russ Cofano 4:31 Thank you, DJ, thanks for having me. And looking forward to a great discussion about marketing for real estate agents.
D.J. Paris 4:37 Yeah, let’s let’s let’s dive into it normally, I mean, you’ve done you’ve done everything in this industry. You’ve been on really all different sides of the business. I’d actually I’d love to first before we get into marketing. We’d love to learn a little bit about your journey, sort of how did you get involved in real estate? Obviously, you know, you you’re an attorney, you’ve run Businesses and also worked in various aspects of real estate. So just walk us through kind of how you got involved
Russ Cofano 5:07 by at complete accident. So after law school, I was a lawyer that went into and my, I really wanted to be a developer. That was where my thought my calling was, I felt I, I, as a young boy, I really enjoyed going on vacations, my family, you know, was a middle class family. And so, you know, we would go on on car trips, and a lot of plane trips, and occasionally, we would stay at, you know, a decent hotel, never real luxury stuff that was not within my family’s means. And, and I wanted to build hotels, I thought that was really cold people like love going into hotels, and I thought it would be great to be a developer of some luxury hotels. And it the time I got out of law school, the commercial real estate industry was, you know, interest rates were, you know, hovering around 20%, it was just not a great time to be in the building business. And so got some great advices and you want to go be a lawyer and, and help developers from a legal side and then learn the business. And then once the market gets better, then you can, you know, actually move to the business side, I never intended to be a lawyer long term ever. And I got into this law firm, and by chance, a pure by chance, they were in a really good real estate specialty. And that’s what I wanted to do. They operated the legal hotline for the Washington Association of Realtors. And, you know, for those agents that watch, they know that in many states, there’s a legal hotline where you can call and get, you know, answers to your questions, etc. And so this law firm, basically had the contract for providing the Legal Hotline. And as the newbie, I that became part of my job,
D.J. Paris 7:05 you got to be the guy that answered the phones, I got to be the guy that answer
Russ Cofano 7:08 the phones. And so And initially, I thought, come on this is this is not I’m not building hotels here, I’m, I’m talking to realtors, right. And yet, I fell in love with I fell in love with, with the people in the industry. They are people that are glass half full people they have to be because it’s such a tough job. And they were so appreciative of of information that we gave them, I would get calls many times before they would call their broker, but they didn’t want their broker to know that they sold the house twice. Or, or, you know, other really challenging scenarios. And, and I just fell in love with the business, I fell in love with the people, all those things. And so that was sort of an entree sort of diverted the path. And then this law firm also did a lot of work representing realtor associations and multiple listing services, and brokerage companies. And I just, my my career just fell into that path. And that’s through sort of it just, you know, sometimes you get into a stream, and it takes you downstream and you don’t really decide to go there. It just takes you there. And I’m really fortunate that I’ve had a wonderful career that didn’t end up being a hotel developer. And, and I practice law for about 10 years. And then I during the the time when the internet actually became something of a commercial medium. I was became fascinated. I had a brother who was very much on the technology side and he kept on sending me things and I just I couldn’t get enough of where I thought this thing called the internet was going to be the 90s Right. And I started developing a specialty around data licensing and it was what at the time when multiple listing services. So realtor.com started you know, it came on to the scene homes.com Cyber homes if people remember that I mean just arrived the initial portals and and they were going to the MLS is and seeking to license data and MLS at the time. And many of them were still operating off literally computers and big rooms as opposed to the PC. Right. And so this was, you know, a long time ago, relatively speaking, and they didn’t really understand IP intellectual property and what it meant to date licensed data and all that and so I became that guy I started doing work for MLS across the country and helping them live Since their data, and I remember I was at one of the very first inland conferences, late 90s. And I was doing a speech on data and IP and real estate. And there were some guys in the audience that were running a little startup company in Seattle, they had gone down to San Francisco. And they heard me talk. And when I got back, I got a phone call from them. They said, hey, you know, we’re some extra Microsoft developers. We’re building this new application, it was one of the very first virtual tour applications. And they, they said, we need, we need some help, right? We know how to build great technology, but we don’t really understand this real estate world. And so I started being their lawyer. And then shortly thereafter, I got so enamored with what they were doing, and the opportunity to build some really cool technology that I jumped for my law firm became CEO of this little startup company, and we did the whole startup thing and eventually failed. You know, we, we almost got bought by one of the big players, but NASDAQ and the crash of NASDAQ really took the sales out of that process and learned a ton about technology development, learned a ton about bringing product to this industry. Some great lessons learned even though we ended up failing as a startup, wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s helping me today, learning going through the things we went back literally 20 years ago. And, and I don’t know all the right answers. But one thing that experience does is it tells you what alleys not to go down, right? And because if you go down that alley, you’re gonna get beat up, right? So the wisdom that I learned is what not to do. There’s still a lot of learnings about what to do in a very dynamic environment. From there, I went back into the brokerage side and my career ventually took me into organized real estate with the Missouri Association of Realtors, and and then back in 2014. Zillow was really making some headway against realtor.com Real Talk comm went from the number one portal to the number three portal I remember. Yeah, behind Zillow and Trulia. And, and some major execs left Zillow, and went or left realtor.com and went to Zillow. And that opened up a spot to come in and, and so I joined realtor.com. And at a time when they were going through some changes and being acquired by Rupert Murdoch, and and, and that organization and learned a lot again from from a technology portal standpoint, leads and all that and then left realtor.com and got the chance to, to help exp in the initial growth phase with the company, which was tremendously exciting and interesting. exp is a great company. You know, bringing a new model to real estate and the challenges around that. Again, another great learning opportunity and eventually left them and took some time off and got rejuvenated and then got this opportunity to come to collaborate and build what we think is a is a truly groundbreaking application for helping real estate agents be better marketers.
D.J. Paris 13:35 I’m really excited to dive into that I did want to touch since you you were, you know, part of EXP and helping them in really in their growth phase, which seems like they’re always in growth phase and they have just been skyrocketing. But that is a true success story. I mean, I am We’re an independent brokerage here in Chicago, so we’re not affiliated with anyone but we have about 800 agents or so here. And I know how long it took us to build that and I if I had one regret it was boy I wish I would have come up with the EXP model before exp because boy, are they just taking the ball and running with it. Basically the way I understand exp model is they took what Keller Williams had attempted to do in the past but didn’t quite have it fleshed out in the same sort of program, this idea of having a downline and having agents kind of underneath you and really just leaning into that model and realizing what exp realized I think that no other brokerage realized is that they leaned into this whole influencer kind of idea where people can build these online presences on YouTube on tick tock and really become this broker that or agent that other agents follow. And then that draws people in. I mean, I’ve interviewed some exp agents. I’ve had them on my show who have like 1000 Plus team members, because they’re a real popular or a person online and they provide all this value to other agents and then agents sign up is really an incredible thing that sort of caught fire. And I’ve always thought exp is really a b2b brand a business to business and not really a b2c brand. I don’t think I don’t think they care that much about the consumer because they focus all of their effort for their marketing on the b2b side, which again, it’s just such a brilliant idea. My hats, my hat’s off to them. I think exp does some really, really neat things. And they’ve really caught lightning in a bottle. I think very, very impressively.
Russ Cofano 15:33 Yeah, you know, the, the model, what, what exp is a perfect example of is how timing is so incredibly important to the effectiveness of a model. So Glen actually started exp in 2009. I think 2008 2009. And I met Glenn, when I was@realtor.com, I ran what was called our broker advisory board. And Glenn was on that that board, which was kind of weird, because not that Glenn’s not a smart guy, but but we had, you know, the biggest companies in the country on our brokerage doors, and we had this at exp, which was at the time at 500 agents in a kind of an odd model. Nobody got Yeah, nobody really understood it. Yeah, it stood it right. And so exp really kind of bumped around for about six, seven years. Before a variety of things came together and and the model took off and it was Right Place Right Time. For that model to come to the industry when the industry was looking for an alternative to agents were looking for an alternative with can be multiple streams of income, give me autonomy, it’s not about your brand is about my brand, my brand new agent. All those things leveraging a digital environment there exp world as and using the savings from that to be able to fund these alternatives, streams of income better, you know, revenue share model versus profit share model of kW stock you know, all those things were were groundbreaking right, Brett groundbreaking and, and it was just a perfect storm, in a good way. Good storm for the for the folks at exp that really got it going and continue to do quite well.
D.J. Paris 17:31 It’s funny, you say that the timing thing. So we’re at our brokerage here in Chicago. And I know we’re getting a little into the weeds. But just for people, I think this is kind of interesting for them to hear. And then we’ll dive really deep into marketing and branding. But we’re 100% firm, which which just means we have a transaction fee versus splits for our brokers. And we’ve made friends with pretty much all the big 100% firms all over the country. And we sort of do a lot of these mastermind meetings. And what we found funny enough from talking to all these, these big 100% firms is that usually almost in almost every case, they were first to market, they were just happened to be the first one in their city to do it. And so you’re right. And same with us. I would love to say that we are so brilliant that we had this thought and we executed it and the reality of it was it was perfect timing. We just got we got lucky. And you know, it’s well
Russ Cofano 18:23 yeah, I wouldn’t say you got lucky. I say you I mean I think luck is a is a function of of strategy, right that effort and effort you put your you make your luck. And so congrats. 100%. Agree,
D.J. Paris 18:42 I just need the timing was very fortunate. Had we done it six months before, after it might have had a different result. So sometimes the timing, timing works out. But you’re right, it’s ultimately it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But anyway, let’s talk about sphere builder because I am a big believer, and I’m quoting one of our frequent guests on our show Ryan de April, I don’t want to steal his words. But it’s probably not probably not even his initial words. But he’s something he professes to all of his agents, which is your network, your net worth is or your network is your net worth, right. So the idea that your sphere is really where you’re going to build your business, maintain your business, that is your asset. And so this idea of deep, sort of figuring out how to further deepen those relationships, create more bonds, more connection is only going to help grow the business. But you need help to do that. And that’s what you guys do. So let’s talk about sphere builder.
Russ Cofano 19:43 So, sphere builder is a we’ll talk about the application. But I want to talk more about sort of this, this movement that we’re trying to create around this idea of building a digital sphere. And it’s got sort of multifaceted to it. The first is that as to your point. Agents, when you go into a room, if you say to a group of agents, do you have a sphere? One out? They all they all say yes, I’ve got Yeah. And they know what it is right. And they know it is because it’s so important to their business and, and, you know, just this last week, some data came out. Zillow now owns 50% of the search market. And, and when you look at 98% of search is owned by big portals and by some large brokerage companies, only 2% is owned by the rest of the the entire rest of the industry, right? It used to be that and what is search search is today’s version of the Sunday paper from 20 years ago, that acted as a place where people could get outreach to or from, and so the industry, whether it’s right or wrong, lost the search battle, it’s gone. It’s now owned by other people that, you know, the traditional industry view is non traditionalist. So the question is, does that mean that the industry is subservient to those folks? And the answer is no, because the sphere, who agents know, in their local communities, their local presence, cannot be matched by a portal. And, and it’s that group of people that know like, and we talked about this all the time that know like and trust the agent, you’re walking down the street, you’re in your local environment, and and you’re the expert. You’re the influencer in your local community. And, and yet, when we talk about spheres of influence, most agents are really able to talk about how that sphere works in real life, you know, the 100, or 200 people that are in their quote, unquote Rolodex, or a CRM, that if they walked down the street and bumped into him, they could have a conversation. But what we’ve seen is that today, with the emergence of the digital world, social channels, Google, all those things, there is another sphere of influence. And that’s what we call the digital sphere of influence. And we believe, and our data shows that the tools and strategies and tactics used to build your sphere in real life, where you are engaged, your personality comes out, all those things are different than the tools and tactics and strategies that are that are necessary to build your digital sphere. And yet that digital sphere, the breadth, and the scope of that sphere can be 10 101,000x, the number of people that can be in your real life sphere. And and can do this by can do the same thing. It can create that know like trust relationship, that that is not reliant on search engines or portals or paid lead gen or all that to generate great word of mouth referrals. And at the end of the day, the best and most sustainable businesses in real estate, operate off those word of mouth referrals and repeat business.
D.J. Paris 23:37 So if I just to recap what you said, because you said a lot, and I want to make sure that I caught it correctly. This idea of having a digital sphere will say is can get the same results as a in person sphere, we’ll call it we’ll just I’ll just use in person and digital as as opposites. And in person sphere, we know we understand that we understand the value of that we also know that there’s a value to the digital sphere. What what I guess the distinction we’re making is that both can get you incredible results. But with the digital side number one, your reach is exponential, because of course, the way that technology connects us via social is obviously apparent to everyone but also the techniques or the practices to cultivate the digital sphere is going to be a different set of practices or some degree different than what you might do in person to develop those relationships.
Russ Cofano 24:36 That’s correct. And, and most agents today do a very poor job of being a digital marketer. Now I want to I want to, and it’s not because they’re not able to, I mean, they’re certainly capable. They just haven’t learned the tools and the techniques in order to do that.
D.J. Paris 24:56 Right. I was laughing because I put myself in the poor digital mode. I couldn’t category as well. So I am one of one I am one of, I am just like the listeners,
Russ Cofano 25:07 and you have lots of friends. So don’t don’t feel alone in that in that category. And it’s important that one thing that we were one of our mantras is this in, in every organization, there is a sales function, there’s a sales department, and there’s a marketing department. And they’re different. They’re they’re managed by different talent sets, the the deliverables are different sales is about lead gen and conversion, and the driving of revenue. And marketing is about positioning and branding. And, and creating a fertile ground for the salespeople to to work off of, they work synergistically and collectively together toward the same result. But they’re fundamentally different functions in any organization. A real estate agent is an organization, it’s a business, right? And, and what we believe is that, and it’s, it’s a sales business. So the people that come into it, tend to be great on the sales side, they know how to lead generate, they’re good at it. It’s, you know, the technology tools that have been built today are focused on lead generation, if you go to any Facebook group, and you talk about you throw out the word lead, Gen, you’ve got people from a variety of different perspectives, talking about the best, the next, the coolest, the newest lead generation scenario, big companies talk about the leverage of lead gen lead gen lead gen, all great. But lead gen without marketing. Sales without marketing is only half of the equation. And, and so our perspective, and our technology is designed to help agents not be better lead generators, there’s plenty of stuff out there to be lead generators, but actually help agents be better digital marketers. And that’s what we’re trying to solve a sphere builder. Because we want the business to come to agents through building of great spheres, as opposed to an agent having to go cultivate that business, your lead generation.
D.J. Paris 27:18 Interesting. So how do you do that?
Russ Cofano 27:21 Well, first of all, the cool thing about the digital sphere, and a digital agents online presence is it’s measurable with data, we can actually look and we have a tool called sphere index. It’s the first tool of its kind, it’s groundbreaking. It’s a real time analytics tool, where an agent will come in and provide to us their social handles their Google business profile, their Zillow review page variety of places where they show up online, they give us those public profiles, and then we have an application that goes out and essentially crawls those sites, takes looks at the at the publicly accessible data, we don’t look at private stuff, we’re just looking at what anybody would see. If I went to your, your Facebook page or Instagram page, we have a we have a way to look at that we capture it. And then we run it through an algorithm that basically measures and puts different I’ll call it emphasis on certain activities. And then we come up with a score. And that’s what we call our sphere index score. It takes about three minutes. It’s free. And it’s it’s the first like I said, real time scoring mechanism of an agent’s digital presence. It’s important that when you begin a digital marketing journey, you begin with a baseline, because what happens what’s happening in the industry today, agents will go to a conference or they’ll see something on Facebook or they’ll go to the watch somebody somewhere they say you should do this. And so they’ll throw that piece of spaghetti at the wall, and then it will generate immediate results. They go, Oh, that didn’t work. And then they’ll go see somebody else saying something else and they go, they’ll take that other piece of an Italian guy, so you know, the it won’t be spaghetti. It’ll be rigatoni. They’ll throw rigatoni at the wall. Right? And, and that didn’t work, right, that didn’t produce a lead, oh, shoot, then they’ll see somebody else. And they’ll say, Well, that’s some vermicelli and then throw those vermicelli at the wall. And and, and so they’re constantly throwing things at the wall. We want to get them off of that of that treadmill and say look at let’s look at where you are. Let’s measure it. Let’s measure it against a benchmark. And this is the cool thing that we developed. We have what’s called a local pro benchmark. And the idea is that and if you go to our site, you’ll see We We essentially create a score of zero to 100 as to how effective an agent is in their digital marketing presence. But if we just said to you DJ, your score is 45, you’re gonna go, great. What does that mean? Well, honestly, it means nothing because there’s no relevancy to it. There’s no comparison to it. So what we do when we go into a local market, and we launched this application first and in Denver in Huntsville, just a couple of weeks ago, and it’s going to be going nationwide. We go into create, we actually look at top producers. So in Denver in Huntsville, we went out and collected data around the top 5% of agents in those two market areas by volume production, these are the agents that are doing production, right. And we ran all those agents through our algorithm. And we then developed a score that reflects how those agents are doing digital marketing. What is their what are their Facebook profiles look like? What does their Instagram profiles look like? How do they show up on on Zillow? How many reviews? Do they have? All those things? Do they have a Google profile? What’s on their Google profile? What are their reviews in Google or Facebook or Instagram? A massive amount of data and we created a score that basically is this benchmark that says if you’re a top producer in these markets, your marketing looks like a 72. Okay, now, when I say to DJ, you’re 45. Yeah, you say, Okay, I’m gonna 45 compared to people that are the top 5% of the industry doing 72. And we want you to the next question to be, how do I get better? How do I actually get from 45 to 72. And we patterned the application off of a very popular consumer application called Credit Karma. I’m not sure if you’re using Credit Karma, but we love it. And Credit Karma basically gives consumers a credit score. And, and says, Okay, you’re a 675. Right? Well, good, you need to get to 700 to be good. And if you want to get to excellent, maybe you want to be to 800. And then they take you through this prescriptive journey in doing things to help you have a better credit score. And as you do those things, when you go back to credit, karma, your 675 just became 700. And then it became 725 became 750. And now you have this, this scoring incentive around your credit score that helps you go through this, this journey, right, because it’s not a 90 day, get fit, quick scenario. It’s a journey, it’s a long term approach. And so we say, credit, karma is for consumers on their credit journey, as sphere builder is for real estate agents on their digital marketing journey. So we start with a score. And then we create what we call recommendation cards. And we help agents based on their data, not other people’s data, their data, how they can improve their profiles, how they can create content, both non listing and listing content, to create more engagement, more followers to build it. And over time, as we re measure them, that’s that four year 45 will become a 50, and a 55 and a 60. And all of a sudden, you’re going to be at 70, which is similar to a benchmark. And we’ve seen a tight correlation between digital marketing activities and production.
D.J. Paris 33:33 So as there’s a positive correlation, then between the score as it rises, you’re seeing income, production volume increase, as a result of tightening up some of the practices. You know, this is, this is very, very interesting, because it’s, it’s, it’s so it’s so interesting. So I know talking about measuring, and we don’t really measure social engagement as a whole, or sorry, I just say, digital marketing, we’ll just say, we don’t really measure it, we measure it in little silos, right? We say, Well, we did this one post, and here’s, here’s the results. And I like it, or I don’t like it, or here’s what I need to fix for the next time. And then over time, you can maybe start to see some trends in videos that are produced or static images that you’re throwing up on Instagram, Facebook, tick tock even. And you can start to start to figure out what your audience is into. But what what you guys have done is actually say, we’re going to actually, we’re going to actually benchmark the most successful agents in your area and kind of show you what they’re doing and guide you from where you are today. Almost like a Credit Karma repairing your credit score repairing your social media credit score over time, and as you increase, we’re going to be checking to make sure it’s going up and you’re just going to do these Several things that we’re going to suggest to you, and then you’re going to get the results of that. I mean, it’s it’s a very simple idea. But it is it is brilliant in a way, because it really does. It’s like, you know, I can step on the scale every day. And it will tell me how what my actual weight is. And it might also tell me my body fat and whatever metrics it measures. But if I only look at that weight measurement, I don’t really know what that tells me, right? It tells me what my overall weight is. But it’s not particularly helpful to to know if I’m healthy or not. I mean, yes, it would tell me if I’m overweight or underweight. But other than that, it’s kind of like, what do you do with that? And what do you want it to be? And that’s where people then go to personal trainers or dieticians or people that can actually make sense of this, this information, and say, Here’s where you really want to be. And here’s how to get there. I love the fact that you guys are like a prescriptive kind of service where it’s like, hey, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, you’re gonna go see the doctor, we’re gonna give you your weight. And then we’re gonna tell you what you need to do to, to get to get, you know, more fit, so to speak, in the digital marketing space. Super exciting. And I don’t, to my knowledge, I don’t know of any company that’s that’s currently doing that for realtors.
Russ Cofano 36:08 No, we’re, we are the first we won’t be the last. I mean, we every good idea has other folks that want to replicate it, but we are the first real time analytics and and marketing platform that, you know, there are some things that we do that other people do, nobody has put the package together. And what we’ve found is that Realtors don’t, they want easy, and they want things to be very intuitive. And one thing we’ve done in the design process is try to put everything in one platform. So an agent, you know, is not having to navigate from one platform to another platform to log in, log out Log In Log Out. The hope is that this becomes their digital marketing platform. You know, we have content creation opportunities, it’s, it’s very Canva. Like in from a content creation standpoint, we connect to an MLS. And so the moment an agent takes a listing, that listing shows up in our in our in our application, so an agent can then create marketing materials around that listing. We have an both an organic sharing function so we can take content, and seamlessly. If you’ve got multiple social channels with one click share that content out in one click in a very effective way. And we also have an advertising platform. Obviously, organic sharing is great because it helps your current followers know that you’re doing things. But if you want to grow your sphere, you’ve got to advertise, you’ve got to reach new people with new content. And, and so our system essentially replace replaces Facebook Ads Manager, which is for most agents a nightmare. And now you could take content that’s created in the platform, and with a couple of clicks get advertising campaigns created. So it’s designed to be kind of a one stop shop that begins it’s wrapped around data and analytics. And that’s the thing that we as we’re iterating around the idea, we actually went out to this industry called martec marketing technology. It’s a $500 billion worldwide industry. And we looked at martec applications outside of the real estate industry. So now what real estate was doing, but what other b2b and b2c companies were doing with Mar tech. And the two things we found that really kind of drove how we ideated around the technology was one automation was critical, right. And today, automation is very possible. And quite frankly, it’s going to become even more interesting with the chat GPT stuff. And then analytics, analytics were interwoven with all of the automation and drove with with data and machine learning the ability to be smart automators. And so we’re bringing those two things together. In an application, the the metaphor that we use internally is we built an iceberg. We want agents to see the tip top of it above the water that’s beautiful, and easy and to navigate around. But underneath it is a massive amount of of application data and tools that the agent will never see, but we’ll help them be better at at this marketing game.
D.J. Paris 39:52 I think that’s great. This idea of just getting a score. There used to be a social score, sir So that was popular about 15 years ago, and I can’t recall the name of that cloud clouds. Yes. With a K. With a K. Yeah. And thank you, that is a thank you. And if anyone who’s listening remembers cloud, you would get a score, and you wouldn’t know what to do with it, you would see it, and you would go, Okay, I’m a 77, or whatever it was, and you’re like, I don’t know what that means. And they, and they never figured out what to do with the number. And I don’t know if clouds still around or not. But but but yeah, they, they had a really neat idea, the metric of it, and then they weren’t able to sort of say, well, here’s, here’s how to improve that score. That’s what you guys are essentially doing, and which I absolutely love. So what are some of the lessons you’ve learned from studying some of these top producers in the various markets that you guys have explored? What are some of the things they’re doing well on on social or digital marketing? So any suggestions, just overall suggestions that you are or even mistakes that you see agents making?
Russ Cofano 41:09 Well, we talked about the mistakes, let’s talk about the successes, because it’s a far more positive thing, right? We actually, as we were building the application, we said, you know, there’s, there’s a bunch, there’s people out there that are being successful in this digital marketing endeavors. And we need to go out and find them and do some research around them and, and bring their stories to the rest of the industry. And so we spent months researching and writing a industry paper that you mentioned, thank you at the beginning of the show, you can you can go to it at sphere builder.io. and navigate to the paper and download it. It’s about an 18 page. It’s not it’s not a two pager, it’s it’s a very in depth paper at the end, it’s a deep
D.J. Paris 41:57 dive, and it’s a it’s a worthy read, it’s everybody should go to sphere builder.io and scroll to the bottom or you’ll see it’s actually right at the top, put in your information, you you’re going to want to read this.
Russ Cofano 42:12 And we found me there’s we found many we can only highlight for Nikki Beauchamp, Stacy Stob, Pinky Benson, Brad Allen, a couple of folks run brokerage companies, some are individual agents, different parts of the country, doing things all incredibly successful, all very successful, but doing things differently. And so the first learning is that there, there is no one size fits all approach. And we don’t, when we talk about being prescriptive, we don’t tell agents, this is who you need to be online, that the thing that stood out with all of these folks, and I think if you were if they were your guests, they would say there’s an authenticity that comes through in who they purport to be online. Because, again, think about this, in this in the sphere building in real life, you meet somebody in your church group, or your kids soccer team, or whatever environment and and it’s you and them and your personality and who you are, is coming through. Well, now you’ve got to replicate that in an online digital environment where you’ve got to provide snippets of information about who you are, and what makes you you and, and everybody is different and unique. And so what we found is that they all approached both the platforms that they used, that they relied on, some were heavy, YouTube, others heavy Instagram, others, heavy Facebook, some Twitter, others combination of all the all of the above and more Tiktok. Find the platforms that you really want to excel on, that matches who you are, and the method and that you want to share content. And then the second piece is be consistent. And over time, because this is not a 90 day diet, you’re not going to become a successful digital marketer. By approaching it with a 90 day lead gen mentality. You won’t so you might as well not do it. It’s like It’s like going on, you know, a 90 day diet, you may lose weight, right and then 90 day diet, but guess what, if you don’t change your lifestyle, that weights gonna come right back on. Yeah, you can, you can fix your credit score. And yet, if you go back to the same spending patterns, your credit score is gonna go right back to where it is. And the same analogy holds true for digital marketing. If you don’t build a sustainable approach Due to developing the know, like trust persona, online, then you you may make short term inroads, but long term if you’re in this business for the long term, and that’s who our customer is what we’re not. And you know, I hate to say this, but we really don’t want to serve agents who are in the business to make a quick buck. That’s not who we’re marketing to. We want agents that are serious about being real estate professionals. A lot of quick buck agents are leaving the business because it’s not as easy to make that quick buck anymore, right. And so we want to help those agents that truly love this business, are professionals do great service for their clients, and need help being better marketers. And the four people that we highlighted in the paper, I think, are great lessons for agents in your, in your watching this podcast to go and read about how they’re approaching this marketing approach and being very successful and in different ways.
D.J. Paris 46:01 Yeah, so So walk me through. So let’s say I sign up, I submit my my social channels to you guys, you start, which by the way you can do for free, you can go to the website, again, also to check out the white paper, sphere. builder.io is where you can go to do this. But anyway, let’s say I sign up, I submit my my social accounts to you to your team, you start to analyze it, you assign me a social score relative to the you know, an agent in my agents in my market, who are who are have a strong digital presence as well as a strong business. And so now I know where I’m at, where some people I might aspire to be or at, then how do you help get me from here to there.
Russ Cofano 46:49 So we have these recommendation cards. And so we’ve analyzed your data. And for example, we will analyze your social profiles, there’s a ton of information on your social profiles, that it’s important to be consistent in how you provide that information. And a lot of agents are not consistent, the first thing I will tell you is that we asked you whether you have a Google business profile, if you do not have a Google business profile, you will not score well in our in our system. Because if you don’t have a Google Business Profile Google in Google Search, how somebody’s going to find you. They punish you, right in from a search algorithm standpoint. So the very first thing we will say is get your Google profile, and we provide a link to go do that. We also analyze the data that’s on your profile. So if you don’t have a website, link there, if you don’t have a phone number, if the information is not consistent, we we show that to you, again, lots of agents, maybe got their Google profile Google Business Profile three years ago, and then move brokerage companies. Well, guess what, they probably still have some of their same, they haven’t updated it. So there’s somebody who goes or Google profile Google business profile, sees broken information from three years ago, well, well, that’s not good, right. And, and so consumers are smart, especially the younger consumers, they They stalk agents, right? Before they make that phone call reach out, they’re looking at your online presence. And if they see inconsistent profile information, that’s a sign that you are not on top of how you present yourself to them. How well are you going to be on top of presenting their property and a listing? Right? It means something to consumers today. So we go through that process. And then we start analyzing, you know, what is your follower base? How engaged are your followers? How often are you posting? What are those posts doing for you, and then we help you get better at that through content, both listing content, not listing content, it’s, it’s not hard, it’s just something that requires a bit of training. And we want to make it fun at the same time, right. So hopefully, the fun comes in. And in seeing that score, tick up as you do these things, and hopefully generate some business in the, in the context. And you can see this, this, we call a virtuous cycle of, of feedback that breeds activity, more good feedback, more good activity. It’s like getting I mean, your analogy to stepping on the scale. If you if you’re if you’re trying to lose weight, and you step on the scale in the morning, and you see that you’re two pounds lighter, you’re gonna be psyched to go on that evening run. Right? That’s true. And that’s what we want to create that that measurement over time is that dopamine hit that we want to deliver to the agent to keep them on the train down this path.
D.J. Paris 49:50 I think that is so well said it really you’re a coaching company of sorts, but in a different way. You’re a digital coaching company, in the sense that and an analytics company I don’t I don’t want to lump you in with with all the other coaching programs out there because that’s not really what you do. But in a sense, you are a consulting firm, I guess maybe that’s a better way to say it. Because what you’re doing is you say, give us all your dad, not all your data, but all your social channels so we can analyze the data. And we can take a look and see what works, what isn’t working, where there’s room for improvement, and then come back and say, Hey, by the way, we noticed your LinkedIn hasn’t been updated in three years. And it’s still showing you with your previous firm. By the way, your your Zillow, you have three different Zillow profiles, they’re all over the place, we need to get all of this working cohesively because we don’t know where someone’s going to look for information for you. But certainly Google, you know, is is Google My Business, for example, is a place that that, you know, people don’t think about. But of course, we all utilize when we’re searching for local things. So the idea is you guys are going to give suggestions and not just the top 10 things to do to get your digital marketing health in order, but really saying very prescriptively. Here’s based on what you’re currently doing, and we’ve analyzed everything, here’s what the exact steps you Mr. or Mrs. Agent need to take?
Russ Cofano 51:11 Yeah, so two things I want to I want to clarify one is, is we are not, we’re a SaaS technology company. So we don’t provide managed services, we don’t charge agents for talking to a human that is that’s not what we’re about. In fact, we, we want to support coaching organizations, our application would be a great I mean, if you’re a coaching organization, you should call us. And here’s why. Because today, you have zero ability, because I don’t think you have our tool, it took us a long time and a lot of engineering to build the tool that we have, we can help you help your clients, if you’re a coach, understand their their digital presence and manage it over time. To the extent that there’s specific things that a coaching organization is helping their agents or their clients do, we don’t want to replace that. We want to augment that right? And so really, there’s a place there’s a really synergistic place for us to work with coaching organizations because of the approach that we take to data analytics. So that’s that’s number one. And and number two is you know, in terms of of right now we’re I want to make sure that we’re clear with your your viewers. We’re in Denver in Huntsville. Today, we’re going to be doing a national launch in the next quarter and available to agents around the country. So there’s a place on our website that if you’re interested in this technology, you can let us know. And part of of us developing why it’s so slowly roll out is we need MLS data, right and, and MLS working with MLS is they’re great to work with, but they’re not the speediest organizations in the world. And so we’d love if there’s an MLS, listening to this, we’d love to talk with you. Because these are this is the kind of application that we’re the partnership with MLS, we can bring it to all your agents and get them going on the application. And then finally, the third thing I will say is, we’ve had really great conversations with brokerage companies who want to integrate the application as a productivity tool. We’re being told by brokerage executives that agents, especially today are looking for ways to build market share. And you know, back to my old business school days, there was this old adage that in at the top of the cycle, you drive revenue, that’s when you you put you put your foot on the gas pedal, and you make as much money as you possibly can. And at the bottom of the cycle, you drive market share. People are going out of business, you capture their market share so that when the cycle recovers, you can step on the gas pedal. And so now is absolutely in our opinion, and we’re hearing from brokerage companies, executives as well is that we’re in a down cycle. Nobody can change that right and we know it will get better and the cycle will wrap up again. Now is when smart brokerage companies and smart agents will be building market share and there’s no better way to do it than traditional marketing.
D.J. Paris 54:34 Yeah, this is the year to capture market share it is we get as Russ said, we know there’s been an exodus started already. We also have a holding company for agents that don’t actively practice and now it’s the weirdest thing I never thought I would say this but our holding company actually has more agents that are actively producing company. They’re not related. They’re separate entities but, but we we never thought that This little holding company that we created would now have like 900 agents it’s because the conditions of the market have changed and people are the onesie twosie agents, the the part timers are starting to exit and sunset out. And it’s a great time for agents to pick up market share this year. So this is a good time to get your digital marketing health in order. And and you know, again, I always I have this fantasy recite, it’s so funny because what you guys, what you do in real estate is kind of the always the fantasy I have around the service providers in my life. So like my accountant, all I mean, I want my accountant to keep me out of prison, and to make sure that I’m not being audited. Of course, yes, that’s that’s the job of the accountant. But I would I would, my fantasy is that my accountant goes, I have a few ideas for you this year. Right? My accountant doesn’t do that. And I’m not I’m not disparage, I’m not trying to say anything pejorative towards towards my account, I love BioCarbon. But that would you know, those are what, what I would be looking for, I would like to know, you know, here’s what you could do to, you know, this next year to really increase you know, your, or decrease your tax exposure or whatever. So basically, you guys are a prescriptive service. And I love that and you’re utilizing technology. And really, you’re not reinventing the wheel, you’re not saying, Well, this is what we think works, you’re literally just going market by market and say, here’s what the people in your market are doing. And that and I understand, also, the challenge of connecting to all the MLS is to get this data, I can appreciate that all the MLS has have different API’s, it’s gotta be a nightmare. I can’t imagine what your engineers have to deal with there. But this is something that you definitely want to be on the waiting list for because once they do open up in your market place, the top agents are going to subscribe to this service, because it’s the only one that exists out there. So now’s a great time to learn about it. Also learn some best practices, if you read the white paper, they have four case studies that are just incredible reads of really successful agents and for different markets, what they’re doing digitally. And they’re doing things a little differently, as Russ said, and you can take some of their, the their suggestions and actually apply it to your own business. But I want to know my digital marketing score as well. So if you go to sphere builder.io, you can see the white paper you can get on their waiting lists to see if when they open up in your your market. And by the way, if you’re in Huntsville, Alabama or Denver, and we have listeners, I’m sure in both of those markets, we should reach out because they are basically almost good to go there. So they are ready to launch. Russ, is there anything else that that we should know about what the tool does?
Russ Cofano 57:47 Know I think this has been a great conversation DJ and I think we’ve we’ve covered right place right time for a new piece of technology. You know, we we know that agents are inundated today with people looking for their attention. And, and so this is something that is worth a few minutes of agent’s time to come in and investigate just the white paper in and of itself is, is worthy of spending an hour with and reading it and, and it will generate ideas for you. Even if you never use our technology or ever become a subscriber, you’ll get some great ideas. And, you know, we’re a company that is built with people who have been around the industry for a long time who support the industry. We’re not about disintermediating the realtor in fact, we’re about empowering the realtor i i As I said in the beginning, I fell in love with the industry and the people in the industry 30 years ago and I think that the United States needs effective Realtors helping consumers and this is just one way that we can help that process.
D.J. Paris 59:10 I agree. So everyone who is listening, please visit sphere builder.io By the way, we’ll have a link to that in our show notes. So you can just scroll there and click and get read the white paper get on their waitlist, continue to follow collabora which again is the company that that is putting out these products and see if it would be a good fit for your brokerage. And by the way, if you volunteer or work at the local state or national association level, great conversation to have at your next meetings with whatever committees you might be with to say, hey, this might be something we would want to bring to an association or in MLS directly as well. So I imagined that that could happen for you guys. So that’s very exciting.
Russ Cofano 59:56 Well, we are all heirs and DJ thanks for having me on today really appreciate the conversation. And hopefully some of this has been helpful to your listeners.
D.J. Paris 1:00:06 Definitely. And so before everyone leaves, just a couple of quick reminders, please help us continue to grow by just telling a friend about one friend about this episode, maybe somebody who’s struggling with their digital marketing in your office, somebody you know who’s an agent that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Ross, send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. Or if they’re a podcast person, just pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And also, please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show that helps us continue to improve and grow as well. On behalf of the audience want to thank Russ for his time. Amazing conversation. Russ, thank you so much. On behalf of Russ and myself. We also want to thank the audience for continuing to support also, by the way support our sponsors. We love our sponsors. So please continue to listen to the show support us let us know we can do to help keep making the show better for you. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Ross.
Russ Cofano 1:01:03 Thanks, TJ. Talk to you soon.
Branding Advice From A Top Beverly Hills Real Estate Agent • Ivan Estrada
Mar 30, 2023
Ivan Estrada with Ivan Estrada Property Team explains that he understood that real estate was his passion while completing his Bachelor’s Degree in Finance & Accounting at the University of Southern California. Ivan discusses the importance of transparency with the client and using communication techniques like creating a weekly marketing calendar or making content videos helps strengthen relationships with clients. Last, Ivan emphasized commitment to a client is the key to a great bonding with clients.
Check out Ivan’s course “Brand With Video” and get 25% off using the code “REAL”.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What are the strategies to market and effectively sell a 1020 $30 million home? And can you use those same strategies for all of your clients? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I have your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top Beverly Hills luxury agent, Ivan Estrada. Before we get to Ivan, however, just a couple of quick items to mention. First, thank you for continuing to listen and support our show, please check out our sponsors what they offer and provide we only work with brands that are going to help you grow your real estate business. So please support them because they support us and also tell a friend, think of one other agent specifically, this episode is going to be a lot about branding and marketing. So gosh, we all know agents that could use a boost in their in those efforts. So please send this episode over to them to send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com. Obviously, we’re on every major podcast platform as well just search for keeping it real, hit that like and subscribe button, we appreciate it. And also just a quick sneak preview, I am going to or our team rather is going to start clipping our episodes and finding the best moments from each episode and start promoting that or pushing that content out via our various social channels. This will include tick tock Instagram, Facebook, Instagram, said Instagram twice, LinkedIn, YouTube, all of the major social channels are going to start receiving this content. So this way, whatever is your preferred social channel of choice, you can start getting regular content from us. Our goal is to push out a couple of these a day with little short 30 to 62nd clips. So stay tuned. We’re not quite ready for that couple of weeks, but this way, you’ll get regular daily tips and advice from the top agents in the country super excited to do that. And really the only reason we’re able to do that is because our listenership and viewership has increased so much that we now have a bigger budget to spend on these kinds of efforts. So thank you, thank you, thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to our listeners. But let’s get to the main event my conversation with Ivan Estrada.
Today on the show, my guest is Ivan Estrada. He’s a top 1% Realtor author and what you know and he does a lot of things. So I want to talk to you about Ivan here. So just to give you some more information. Ivan Estrada is a highly successful real estate agent in Los Angeles with over 14 years of experience, and this is an incredible and more than half a billion dollars in sales. He has a degree in finance and accounting from USC as well as a CPA and broker’s license. Ivan’s tailored approach to each client and expertise in business, finance and marketing has allowed him to work with a diverse range of clientele from luxury sellers and buyers to international investors. And of course, first time homebuyers. He’s a branding expert for high end luxury homes, and he has been featured in numerous news outlets including ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox 11 News. Ivan is a frequent speaker communicator and panelists for various organizations has established himself as a mentor of I’m sorry, a member of several boards, and has received numerous accolades. Oney is a mentor as well. He’s also the author of the book brand with purpose which you can find on Amazon. Also, we have a link to that in the show notes and he’s also got a video course called brand with which has 15 modules to help you take your business from video clueless to video prowess. Visit Brand with.com and use the promo code real for 25% off. But to learn about everything Ivan’s doing, go to go to his website, that’s probably there’s two websites, and we’re gonna link to both of them. One is Ivan estrada.com. So that’s IV anestrada.com. And also brand with.com. But Ivan estrada.com is a great hub for everything, Ivan, what a such a pleasure to have you, thank you for being on the show.
Ivan Estrada 5:27 No, thank you for thank you for having me. It’s, I’m ready to have some fun, let’s have some fun,
D.J. Paris 5:33 let’s have some fun. And there’s not there’s not enough fun in real estate, I think so that you can always use more fun, and I love talking to marketing and branding people because that’s my background. My sister, I only have one sister, she’s a brand branding person, a CMO outside of real estate. And so this is what I live for. I love talking to agents who specifically are really involved in their branding and marketing. And you You’ve not only you’re involved with it for yourself and your clients, but you also teach this to other realtors and other businesses, as well. But before we get into the meat of everything you know, and your expertise around video and branding and social media, I would love to learn a little bit more about you. Do you mind going all the way back to the beginning of the story for how you decided to get into real estate?
Ivan Estrada 6:20 Absolutely. So for me, I was born raised in Los Angeles. parents immigrated here from Mexico. And so the American dream is to go to college, right, which I did, I ended up going to USC, here in Los Angeles, majored in finance and accounting, worked at a big firm, got the CPA license, did what you were supposed to do, to work up your you know, to for the American dream, and, you know, about three years into it. I just realized, I think I made a mistake. Like, this was not what I thought it was going to be. And don’t get me wrong, I’m great with numbers. I’m great with people, but it wasn’t my purpose. It just was not my purpose. And a friend at the time, it was Season One of Million Dollar Listing and he said, I was watching the show, and why don’t you should do you should get into real estate. And I thought you’re absolutely nuts. Like that is definitely not my thing. I’m not in sales. I you know that that was a complete opposite of what I went to go to school for, right. And of course, that little, you planted a seed in my head, I read I think about 33 or 34 books on real estate, I went to Barnes and Noble. I went to the library, I just got a bunch of books, educated myself, and I thought, You know what, I think this could be my thing. You know, my guy. I love networking. I love business. I love branding. I love people, I love real estate, especially here in Los Angeles. And then I just decided, I left the accounting world behind me and jumped into real estate. And it’s been the most incredible, challenging, amazing, scary, and life growing to the, to the degree that it’s completely changed my life. And I mean, I’m so grateful for real estate for the life that it’s given me. And for what it’s allowed me to do. I’m literally living my purpose and my passion.
D.J. Paris 8:17 Wow. While you just said you said quite a bit. And we just heard heard some of your why that you know what’s interesting too is you have these these very to it, you know, the way I’m thinking about it, these sort of diametrically opposite skill sets with the CPA hard objective number driven, an analytical mind. And then you also have this incredible creative mind, which, which allows you to, you know, produce content and really have fun with your branding and, and be very intentional about sort of, you know, the messaging you’re putting out there. And where those two worlds meet is a really nice center, because usually agents are good at one or the other. Right? They’re either good at the analytics or they’re good at the people side of things or the marketing side. You sort of have both of that. So I love the fact that you’re teaching people who don’t have maybe both of those skill sets fully fleshed out that they can develop them over to absolutely
Ivan Estrada 9:13 you can absolutely develop them because I’ve heard this before. Well, I’m not good at numbers. I’m not good at planning. I’m not creative. But I’m like Baloney, you definitely are. We just have to find your creativity. We have to figure out okay, so you’re not good with numbers. That’s fine. What are you comfortable with? Are you good with planning? Oh, yeah, I can plan and then kind of figuring out how to kind of find those holes in their business and trying to fill them with something that’s going to create an incredible brand incredible real estate brand. I mean, that’s why we’re here and an incredible future no matter the recession, inflation doesn’t matter. Build a really solid business. That’s recession inflation proof.
D.J. Paris 9:52 Yeah, I agree. And everything is skills, right. And there’s certain predilections people have where they’re going to take certain skills more easily than others. But, you know, video, I think thank goodness technology has maybe maybe one of the best parts about technology is that it’s moved so quickly that it’s enabled, even the least savvy of us with respect to creating, you know, content, you know, maybe some of us aren’t people who have ever had to light a set, or had to worry about, you know, which camera angles to use for a particular shoot, right. Most Realtors probably don’t deal with a lot of that they’re probably hiring other firms to do the photos when they have listings. But I am so interested in, in, you know, the fact that now technology has allowed it so that agents can really can do this at any any level, they can create video content, we all have these phones, you know, attached to us almost like an umbilical cord that are as powerful as some of the equipment that you know, 10 years ago was was 1000s and 1000s of dollars. So it’s really been more, it’s probably never been more accessible and more easy to get into creating video content, even if your skill sets low.
Ivan Estrada 11:05 Oh, absolutely. I mean, when I started 14 years ago, I was lugging around one of those Sony handycams shirt, the big tripod, with the microphone that was not wireless, that you had to like, you know, I had to make sure I got like a nice 15 foot wire, wire microphone. And there was no lighting because it was too expensive. We didn’t have like those light rings that now you can put on your phone and right and just as a tripod and take it anywhere with battery operated. And so it was a lot harder back then, you know, in order to create content to do editing in order to come up with concepts, right. That was I think the hardest thing for a lot of people was like, What do I talk about? You can go on Google. And I was probably the number two agent who started using video that I know of, because no one else was doing it. And so there was like no instruction, there was no manual. But nowadays I tell agents, I said, just like what you said, we all have a phone, we all have. I don’t know if we’re going to talk about chat GPT. But if you don’t know what to talk about chat GPT will let you know exactly what to talk about. It’s the easiest way to come up with content, we’ve actually been using it for blogs and other marketing materials. And it’s absolutely amazing. But there’s literally no excuse, there is no excuse for not creating content, there’s no excuse for not using it and building your brand. And building your real estate portfolio. Because these days, buyers and sellers, regardless of what generation they’re from, they are Googling and they are looking for videos. And if you do not have videos, at least one that introduces yourself of who you are, what you doing the business, they’re gonna think this person’s not credible. Next,
D.J. Paris 12:48 well, and let’s talk about what an introductory video does for the consumer. So we you know, I think this is something that, that agents probably do want to be very intentional about if you’re creating a welcome or an introductory video of not a specific one to a client. But if you have a general one, that one you probably do want to think through I’m assuming, and that’s if that’s going to be somebody’s first impression of you, for example, if it’s on your website, you know, I assume that when we want, we want sort of to look a little bit better than some of the more quick form videos that we might do that are more throw away based on you know, something going on in the market today, we might do a little video there. But if we’re doing an introductory video, what’s your sort of advice on how to how to think about putting that together?
Ivan Estrada 13:34 So I would create both two videos, one for buyers and one for sellers, right? Because we’re both doing different things. So I would start there two different videos, one for buyer and one for a buyer and one for a seller. And then get in, get into the shoes of a buyer and a seller. And think to yourself, I would write down notes. If I was looking to buy a home. What would I want to hear from an agent? Like what are the things that are going to trigger me to call that agent amongst the ocean of realtors. Same thing for sellers. And the thing is that we have to be very careful. They don’t care about our awards. They don’t care about your achievements. They don’t care about any of that they care about. Are you a good negotiator, right? How long have you been in the business? And what are your results? Do you have any case studies? How do you differentiate yourself? Right? What type of branding and marketing do you do for the listings? Let’s say this is for a seller. That is that’s different from other realtors in your neighborhood. Are you part of a team? And if you are, why is that of a benefit to a buyer or a seller? So trying to talk to them instead of I’ve you know been 14 Like for example me? I’ve been 14 years the business like now it’s like 600 million in sales people are gonna be like I don’t care. Like what can you do for me? Like why should I work with you? I want to make sure at the end of the day They want to know, as a seller, I was able to get as much money as possible for my listing. And it was as easy as possible to get through the process. And for a buyer, I was able to get the best deal with a seamless process that was painless as possible.
D.J. Paris 15:18 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I was thinking what while you were talking about this, that I just was hearing objections from our audience, which, of course, are not live now. But I was hearing. And I was and I had an answer to this. So I heard an objection, I came up with an answer, I want to give you the answer. And I want you to tell me what you would say it whether you would agree or disagree. So you had said, mate, you know, if you’re making this value proposition, I’m gonna make a video for buyers video for sellers, where you’re going to say, here’s what I do for you this is, this is what I have done for people in the past very specific stuff, here’s what I will do for you, here’s been my results. Now, which is great. I love all of that. What happens if you’re a brand new broker where you’re not going to have that track record? And, and and you might not have, you know, hey, I’m only been in the business six months? And I was my aunt, my thought of an answer and want to get your answer to that is I always like the it’s an old marketing principle. And I don’t know if it’s still as relevant it used to be, but it was called, if you can’t fix it, feature it. And so I always love that. So I know if I was newer, I might say, hey, just so you know, I am newer to the industry, but are and here’s why I actually think that might be a benefit to you, because I’m going to devote all of my time to you, because I don’t have as many clients as you know, somebody has been the business. Also, I work for a company that’s been around for 80 years, or whatever that might be, and I have a team there that’s going to work with me, blah, blah, blah, I would I would have I would address that. And I don’t maybe I wouldn’t step on it quite that hard. But I would do something to say, hey, here’s why I knew and here’s why it’s not a problem. I’m curious on what you might do.
Ivan Estrada 16:53 Absolutely. Because there’s no way with the way that that we have that we run the web and social media, they’re gonna know if you’re green or not, they’re gonna know, right, so might as well just tell them, and like what you just said, this is why it’s of a benefit to you, you know, I’m not working with as many clients, so you will have my full attention, right? I am hungry, I am the eager, right, I’m here to make sure you are part of, I’ll tell you what I tell my clients, you’re helping me build my business. And I want to make sure that you are going to be so, so happy with me that you’re gonna want to refer your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your minister, your priest, whoever. And then the other thing that I would also include in that video is a lot of new agents have been in other businesses where they have acquired skills that are complementary to our real estate business. By the way, this is what I did prior right? It could have been a teacher or a paralegal or whatever. And what are the skills that you learned there in that business? That that just absolutely make you shine in real estate and bring those out. Because at the end of the day, it’s real estate, we have mentors, right? We have people that especially if you’re a new agent, you’re part of a team, you can always showcase your team. But peep, every real estate agent is not the same, right? We’re all very different. We all it’s the same business, but how we market ourselves and how we actually provide the service is very different. Right? And, and so showcasing some of your previous experiences and how that’s going to help your buyer seller is incredibly important.
D.J. Paris 18:30 Yeah, I agree. I you work on a lot of very high end luxury homes, kind of in the ultra high net worth space, which is always so interesting to me, of course, because it’s such an unusual event, you know, these these big massive sort of compounds. In the West Coast, of course, all over the country. You’re in the West Coast, you’re in Los Angeles area, but Beverly Hills, specifically. I am curious, what what is different about marketing a luxury property versus a non luxury property? As far as how you think about the marketing the overall marketing strategy? How is it how is it different from a, like a $20 million property, something, you know, really on the high end, high net worth side to a, you know, three to $500,000 property? Is it the same strategy, or are there different techniques curious on what you’re doing? They’re completely
Ivan Estrada 19:21 different strategy. So when you’re dealing with people of that price echelon, a lot of them may be busy business men or women themselves. They have business managers, they have lawyers, I mean, these are people who, who have a lot of wealth and how they’ve gotten there was with the plan. And so if you are their real estate agent and you want to list their property, they’re going to say great, I would love to see your marketing proposal, and they want to see what you’re going to be doing daily, weekly, monthly. And if this is a really big property, let’s say it’s a one or two year con attract what is going to happen yearly. And they want to see a written plan and a written commitment from you saying, Okay, for the first month, we are going to be on this magazine, this magazine is going to be advertised here. Here is I’ve had people ask, I need to see the marketing budget for the first month, okay. 50 Doubt, whatever it might be, depending on the size of the property. Sure. $10,000 $5,000, I know that there’s agents in my office who have spent hundreds of 1000s, the first week of the launch of the property. And so those sellers, they want to know that you are committed with the plan with the marketing budget. And trust me, they will be checking if it’s if it’s not them personally, there people will be checking that it was on that magazine, that it was advertised that sometimes it gets a little invasive sometimes where they’ve said, Oh, you did spend $10,000, or $5,000. Great, we’d love to see the invoice. Right? Sure, it sometimes gets to that point. And so I think with a smaller property, it doesn’t get as intense than as a much larger property and keeping in mind that sometimes these larger properties do not sell, it might be the second third or the fourth agent that sells the property. But the marketing budgets are very high for these.
D.J. Paris 21:21 Yeah, and, you know, are there some lessons that agents who don’t play in the ultra high net worth space could learn from agents that do in other words, things that they could bring from from these, you know, these massive sort of marketing proposals that the high net worth clientele expected, and their teams maybe more even than they expect? Because they might not even be reviewing it? It might be their their advisors, their, you know, agents that are attorneys or their accountants. But I’m curious if there are some things that we could extract from from those high net worth proposals that we could bring in to the the lower end, I don’t even say lower price property, because they’re not lower priced properties, but more average price properties? Are there things that agents could do that would actually make it easier for them to win even more modestly priced property? Yes,
Ivan Estrada 22:12 absolutely. I mean, the marketing proposal that we talked about, for example, we create marketing calendars for all of our clients, it doesn’t matter the price point, will daily, weekly, monthly. And we commit to what we’re doing. And at the end of the end of the week, we send them a report of everything that was done. And why that is so important. I feel transparency in our business, especially with our clients, regardless of price point, is very important, especially when it comes to the marketing because, you know, for example, I I like to do a lot of research and I look at other people’s listing proposals and reports. And, you know, they’ll say we’re going to do photography, and it’ll be on Zillow and you know, kind of line item everything through. But then that’s it, right? They’ll tell you what, like, some people will say, Okay, well, you just told me everything that you’re doing, but show me on how you’re going to do all of that for my property. So there’s been times when we will, upfront in a listing appointment, depending on the property, we’ll run everything as if it were already our listing, right. And this is a report that you’re going to be getting weekly, like let’s say it’s week one, this is report that you got, this is what the marketing proposal looks like, this is the marketing calendar that you’re going to get every month that the property is on the market. And these are all the things that are going to be checked off. And so I think that’s incredibly important. Because the more transparency you have with your clients, the less they have to worry about, and the more that they’re going to feel comfortable during the whole process. And if you have a client who’s comfortable, let’s say it’s been on the market for three or four months, right? As long as they know that you’re doing everything on the list saying, hey, this was what we did this week, hey, this is what we did this week, you’re probably going to get an extension instead of you know, it’s been sitting on the market for two or three months. And I’ve had people in the past say, I haven’t heard from my agent and like, whole month, I don’t know what they’re doing. And so the less that you can, the less worry that you can provide to a client, the more they’re going to feel comfortable with you. And then we referrals, right? You want to make sure that that’s going to lead to future referrals.
D.J. Paris 24:20 I mean, I just I’m just thinking that any anybody who is selling a property, the friends, or the Friends of that seller, everybody knows they’re in the process of selling, they’ve probably told their friends and family of course, you know, maybe they’re even posting about it on social media. So people know, the home is is in the process of being up for sale. And as a result, friends are going to ask how’s it going, how’s the home sell going? Right? And imagine if every realtor on the planet who had a listing contacted their client in some fashion every single week, in your case, you you know, you have a report that’s here’s what we’ve done for you this week. Eat. And then here are the results. There’s what’s happened. Imagine if every real I mean, I’m almost sort of chuckling because 99% of Realtors do not do this, right? They’re not or I’m making that number up, but it’s probably close to accurate. Where it’s low. Yeah, it’s single digits, probably. But, but the top agents do. And it’s funny, it reminded me of I had a top one of the very top agents here in Chicago, we’ve got about 47,000 agents here. And she’s in the top 10, like, literally the top 10. And I asked her, How do you think why do you think you’re in the top 10? And obviously, everyone else really isn’t. And she goes, I hate to see because this is gonna sound really stupid. But I call every single person that’s a client of mine every single week, and say, here’s everything that’s going on. Here’s what I did. Here’s so very similar to sort of your approach a different way that she does it. And I go, and what what else? She’s like, Yeah, that’s kind of it. And she’s like, it’s a lot of work. But she goes this idea of of staying in touch with them, letting them know, imagine, you know, I’m at a cocktail party, hey, DJ, how’s your home sale going? Well, I can tell you, because my guy sends me a thing every single week telling me exactly what he did. And like, it’d be like he did, like no one else has that experience. So it’s such a great way to even just get noticed among that person’s friends and family, because they’re gonna be bragging about that.
Ivan Estrada 26:12 Exactly. And if when it comes to let’s say, you have to do a price cut, right? We’re in a different market. They’re going to know well, we you’ve done everything that you said you were going to do, and then some so the only thing we can left we have left to do is cut the price.
D.J. Paris 26:27 Yeah. I love that. What are some of the mistakes that agents make? With video on social media? Because we’re talking about video, so much video, I think we associate that with social media content more digestible. Here today gone tomorrow content? We see agents making videos all the time, what what do you think when you see good examples of this versus examples where you say I would have done that differently?
Ivan Estrada 26:55 So I mean, for anyone who’s just doing video, it doesn’t matter the quality or the, you know, just the time or whatever. Good for you. Because that’s a step. One thing that I would say that is not benefiting a lot of agents is they’ll do videos when they feel like it. Right? Let’s say they get super busy for two or three weeks. Well, I didn’t do any videos this week. So I’m not going to put anything on social media. Consistency in the video game is key. Having a marketing plan for your videos is key. Since I started producing content, there hasn’t been one week, maybe here and there, right? Maybe during a holiday week, where I didn’t have at least one video posted. on all my social media, we actually have I believe it’s three videos that go out Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, different content, different style, different audience. But we have a set schedule that goes out every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, on social media. Just producing one video, every once in a while for a listing or market report is not going to work. So having a set schedule of this is what I’m going to produce my content. And this is what I’m going to put it out there. Because even with Facebook, like Facebook Studio, you could put all your videos in there and schedule them to go out during certain times of the week at a certain time. And so consistency in the video game is what’s going to create results, not just on the fly videos every once in a while.
D.J. Paris 28:33 Well, I can I can attest to that here, just with my podcast. We, you know, we started out there was we didn’t do video at all, it was only audio. And it took a full year. Before we got any real traction. I used to have to fudge the numbers when people would ask how’s the show doing? And I’m like, you know, we would have 60 people that listened. And I’d say we had 100 I don’t have to do that anymore. So I apologize for those that I’ve liked in the past. But the point was is is that it did actually work because I focused and I’m not here to say of the best podcast on the planet for realtors. But thankfully, we have a lot of people that do appreciate it. And thank you for that. But it was just focusing on meeting the audience’s needs. I’m not particularly gifted at being a talk show host or a radio host. But I just thought gosh, if I were a new agent, what would I want to know from top producers? And and that also is probably a good way in a similar way to actually get content. So I’ve been you had mentioned chat GBT and I thought this is so interesting, because, you know, we worry a lot about chat GBT and what it’s going to do to you know, sort of jobs and so all of us it’s, it’s going to affect everything but but one really, really great way to use it is to use it to to create content. So, you know, if I was an agent, and you know, you were saying, Hey, you got to post regular video content you were doing let’s say you’re doing two videos a week and by the way, these can be 62nd videos, they don’t have to have a certain amount of time. It’s all about, you know, the the quality of the content. And if you’re thinking well, right, yeah, and I was I did this earlier today because I found I have to create a deck, I need to create a PowerPoint presentation for this thing. And I went to an AI powered up like, PowerPoint building company where you literally type in a question to that you would type into chat GBT and then it creates a slide based on the answers really cool. But anyway, so I had written a question I had written in there, you know, what are what are the do’s and don’ts of conducting an open house and I got about 50 different answers. And I thought this could be a 10 different videos, you know, because you can make these videos okay, if you’re doing an open house and by the way, you could send these to other you know, other agents or again, I work on the more the b2b side, so I would be doing content for other realtors. But it could be for for you know, people buyer’s or seller’s maybe a seller’s here’s how to get your home ready for an open house. And you could literally use chat GBT to get a whole list of of answers there. And, you know, just kind of saves you time.
Ivan Estrada 31:12 Oh, absolutely. And then if you want if you really want to get traction, because like Chachi Beatty can give you like a set of questions that you could ask that are pretty standard to real estate. But if you really want to do something timely, I always ask I asked my friends. Hey, quick question. What are some questions you have about real estate right now? Like, right right now in this moment, and then create a video about it. That’s timely because, right like with what’s happening with what happened with SPV bank? I had clients asking me, yeah, how does that affect me? How does that Okay, great. Let me go do some research and figure it out. And let me do a one minute video, maybe two minute video, put it on Instagram, and make sure you put that in the caption and I promise you that will get a lot more hits, then here are some rules for open houses, even though those are great. Those are great. Yeah, right. Those are evergreen videos. More evergreen. Yeah. But something it’s very timely is what’s going to go what they say viral, or you’ll get a lot of hits and a lot of traction. And it also shows you as a knowledge broker who really knows their stuff.
D.J. Paris 32:19 1,000,000,000,000% could not agree more. And I would be talking about well, the Fed just raised rates again, for the ninth time, consecutive time last week, right? They raised at 25 basis points. That was in the news, you know, the euro, everyone who’s listening, if even if you didn’t know it, your clients saw that. And if anyone is in the process of buying or selling, they may be wondering what does that mean for lending rates? And that could be a video. And my suggestion is to find a lending partner that sends you the agent weekly information about here’s what you as an agent need to know about the three banks that collapsed? What’s going on with Credit Suisse? What’s going on with, with the Fed raising rates, like get information from your partners, convert that into video content and make short form content that, you know, you know, yeah, chat, GBT isn’t going to give you really reliable answers to things like that. But that’s where you would then go and and find that information yourself, which takes maybe five minutes of reading about it online, or ask one of your lending partners, hey, what’s going on? What do agents need to know about this? Or what is one of my clients needs?
Ivan Estrada 33:25 100% 100%.
D.J. Paris 33:27 I love that one. So we let’s talk about so the idea of finding video content is actually we just came up with some ideas. If you want more evergreen content, maybe there isn’t much going on. Right now. When you’re thinking about creating content, then you can go back to your sort of, you know, whatever your clients are regularly asking you about over the years, you can just put those in a little folder and say, what about this or in Illinois, we have transfer tax and like I don’t I still don’t understand how it works. But anyway, that’s sort of thing that that people get confused about? And how do I how do I choose certain? How do I determine like, what schools are in what, you know, what areas what districts? I mean, there’s a million evergreen things that people are always going to want to know, you know, where? How do you know like, this could be a good one, you know, I’m just sort of having fun with these. But it could be like, Hey, should you go see your home that you’re about to buy at night on a Friday at 1030? It just to see what the neighborhood is like, especially if you’re in like an urban environment? What’s the noise level? You know, there’s like little tips and tricks that are evergreen things that you can just put in a spreadsheet and then whenever you’re like, I don’t know what I’m going to do today for a video. Just go to one of those. Anytime your client asks you a question, write it down and just go that’s going to be a video or find out what’s going on in the market or in the industry. That moment right now. High rates, right, low, low inventory. Those are the two big things people are curious about. I would be making videos about that all day long. Exactly. Let’s talk about Got your video course? Because you are a branding expert. We didn’t really talk too much about branding. Well, let’s let’s define what is let’s just define what branding is for real estate agents? Like, how would you think about branding when you’re talking about realtor stuff?
Ivan Estrada 35:16 So the easiest way I could put branding is, I always tell agents think about, what are people saying about you, when you’re not in the room? That’s your brand. And that could be positive, or it might not be positive. And so figuring out who you are on a foundational level, and what separates you from on a business, if we’re talking about business, what separates you from everyone else as an agent, right? Like, what why are people going to go to you, instead of anyone else. And I think that’s probably a part of, that’s the most important for a real estate agent, when they’re building their brand is really diving, it’s, it’s like personal, it’s personal development, right? It’s really diving deep into who you are. And and this is something we do in the course, to figuring out, okay, what makes you special? Like, what are the things that you want people to say about you, when it comes to your service, when it comes to your product, when it comes to your social media? When it comes to your delivery? When it comes to your website? When it comes to every every perspective about you as a brand? What do you want people to say? And then we work our way backwards, right? How do you want to make people feel, oh, I want to make them feel like this? Okay, great. These are the things that you’re going to have to do in the next six months to a year in order to get that, that that to that finish line. And so when building a brand, I tell people, Look, we’re all brands, believe it or not, even you know, the single mom with a three year old child, she’s a brand, she doesn’t know it, but she’s a brand. And so really understanding who you are as a brand is key in order to be successful, not just in real estate, but anywhere, right, really knowing what you’re good at. And that’s something that we put together in the course, and you know, it is a video course. But at the end of the day, it’s building a brand, and a goal and a vision, and then creating video content to support that brand vision. Because that how point,
D.J. Paris 37:19 how important is it to determine the brand prior to create because, you know, we have this inclination to want to jump right on, I have a video idea, I want to jump right into it. And that’s great, but might not align with the overall strategy or the vision. Right?
Ivan Estrada 37:34 Exactly. I mean, like, for example, let’s say the St. Regis right there a hotel chain, they only create videos that are in line with their brand, they’re not going to do something, oh, let’s talk about sneakers today, because I want to talk about sneakers, they’re not going to do it because it’s not in line with their brand. In the course we create brand pillars. Every company usually has about four to five brand pillars. And that could be like, for example for myself, its real estate, its technology, its community, its travel. And then under those brand pillars, there’s all these, then we go we dive deep into what those mean to us. And so when we’re creating content, when we’re updating my bio, when we’re writing blogs, when we’re doing creating flyers or updating our flyers, we look at those brand pillars. And we and we always say, Is this in line with our brand pillars, Is this our brand pillars, or this is our voice is this in line with our voice because if it’s not, I’m not going to do it because a it’s going to confuse people. And B, it’s not going to support the brand and and brands that we know that have been here for a very long time. They stick to their brand pillars, and that’s why they’re so successful.
D.J. Paris 38:46 Yeah, they stick to it. And then going back to the consistency piece. They, they understand that there’s a time delay on getting acceptance and traction. Just like there’s a time delay when you start your real estate business and having wild success. Most people
Ivan Estrada 39:02 don’t years, it takes years years.
D.J. Paris 39:05 And the same sort of thing for for social media or video content is we live in such a immediate sort of, we get immediate feedback and we get immediate metrics. And so you know, when we post something on social and it has a low number of likes, we feel a certain way about that, you know, some of us feel more deeply about it than others. But all of us have a reaction, whether it’s it’s probably more of a reaction than we ought to have. But it’s but it’s a reaction. And so people have this tendency to to put a lot of time and energy into a video. It doesn’t perform at the level they want. And it might not be because the videos not have good content or good quality. It might just be that they’re not favored in the algorithm yet because they’re rarely putting up content or their audience hasn’t gotten used to it yet, or just hasn’t been seen. And they get discouraged and they stop making things.
Ivan Estrada 39:54 Exactly and that’s when you have to go back to the intention. Why am I creating these videos for life? for comments, or am I creating these videos because I know it’s providing value to my current and future clients. And it’s also helping build my brand. Because if it’s about the likes and the comments, then you’re going in here with the wrong intention. And so I it’s very important to really be clear with that. Because, you know, I have friends, and I’ve gotten people asking me, well, these types of videos are getting a lot of likes, right? They could be real estate agents doing parodies, or, you know, things that are funny, and that’s great, right? As long as all your video content is not that and you’re not just going after the likes, and the comments, because I know a lot of real estate agents with a lot of likes, and a lot of comments and a lot of views, and no business. Yeah. So you’ve got to be very careful, very intentional with your content and be very patient.
D.J. Paris 40:51 Yeah, it is, it is a marathon. It is not, it is not a sprint. But boy, it’s it’s one of those things that, you know, has so much opportunity, because I noticed that I’m in I’m not even a social media, I’m not really a heavy social media user. But I’ve noticed that I’ve started migrating over to back to Facebook and Instagram, and I’m not somebody that just infinitely scrolls, but I do check out the stories and reels for about a minute a day. Because you can cycle through those pretty quickly, within a few seconds, I can, I can get a sense of what the video is about, I can see what my friends are up to. And some of you know, just other brands and what but I’ve noticed that even I when I’m like, I’m not gonna I’m not somebody that just you know, is on Facebook all day. Even I am now looking at these at the short form at least short form video content, what is your opinion between short on social media short form versus long form?
Ivan Estrada 41:45 So you should be doing both. And but both of them go on different portals. So the long form should only be going on YouTube. So you people use YouTube as a search engine. So that’s where you want to create all your, you know, long, long version q&a videos about real estate questions, answers that you have to questions. Maybe like your company, video, your team video, anything where you want to have it live on for a long period of time, a community video, for example, that is evergreen, three or four minutes, you want to put it on YouTube, but still also have a short version, short version for Instagram, Facebook, tick tock, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn is probably the where I’ve been getting a lot of viewership. So make sure that you don’t forget about LinkedIn. But the short term videos that’s that’s for those, those portals that I just said those social media accounts, the tick tock, Facebook, and Facebook, sorry, Instagram, Facebook, tick tock and LinkedIn. And the only the long versions go on YouTube, because YouTube actually prefers the longer videos. Sure.
D.J. Paris 42:59 They do. And they and now and YouTube even has has little shorts, shorts. Yeah, which is, but But you’re right. And this, this idea that now and there’s technology, like we’re actually using technology right now where we’re streaming to four or five different platforms, as we’re recording this, and it’s like the the technology is there, and you can learn how to use it. Now what about video editing? Right? So we Yes, we have phones, we know we can film things? And but for those of us that aren’t skilled at editing, do you have in your course you guys talk about that? Or give some suggestions about how people can get things edited?
Ivan Estrada 43:38 Absolutely. I mean, we have a partnership with a couple of companies iMovie I’ve been using. For the longest time there’s another app called cut. But honestly, when I’m creating content, like like on the fly content that’s not highly produced. What Instagram has is vary and tick tock, I don’t really like to go outside of that. Because sometimes it actually doesn’t favor your algorithm if you use another app to do editing, and then you embed it. So you don’t really need complicated editing software, if you’re using complicated editing software is because you’re doing a more highly produced type of video. I always tell agents, look, your time is valuable. You should be prospecting and lead generating in this market to not take classes on editing. Unless this is something that you want to do as a part time job on the side. There’s no time for that. Go out prospect, lead, generate network, do all that. If you need to do complicated editing. I would be doing that with a videographer. There’s so many applications out there websites, where you can go on there, you give them the the raw content, like Upwork, right? There’s so many people on Upwork are looking for work. It’s all over the world, by the way all over the world and it’s super cheap. So that way you don’t have to be doing any The editing, and they can do some really cool stuff at a very low price.
D.J. Paris 45:04 Tell us about about the program bandwidth. So talking about which by the way you can learn about a brand with.com. But tell us about the the video program and how it turned somebody in, you know, from a novice into into more of an expert.
Ivan Estrada 45:17 Yeah, absolutely. So the idea came to me, right before the pandemic, this was going to be an in person coaching seminar, two and a half days, to eight to 10 hours a day. And I already had the idea of okay, well, first, for the first section of the course has to be breaking those mental blocks and the mindset and the fear. Because I could do all the teaching, I can teach you how to be in front of a camera, how to talk, how to write script, how to edit, how to syndicate how to track and measure for results. But if you don’t get over the fear, the hurdle of you saying, Well, I don’t like the way that I look today, or I don’t like by the way how my voice sounds, or I’m just afraid of judgment. So I’m not going to do the, none of the the rest of the courses useless. And so once the pandemic hit, then we thought, Oh, crap, I can’t do any in person trainings for this. So we put together a system, there’s no system like this in the world, where it’s, we have the 15 modules, and we have it divided into four sections mindset. And then we go into the mechanics. And then we go into actual, the actual filming and the editing. And then the last part, which is super important is, like I said, before, having that marketing calendar, tracking for results, and constantly measuring, to make sure that all the work and all the effort and everything that you’re doing is actually working. And the course which is really cool, it’s you’re not just watching videos, because you’re not gonna learn by watching. It’s not, you know, you can’t learn how to play basketball by watching a ton of basketball videos. So every module is, is connected to each one, there’s a lot of work that you have to do, there’s a lot of typing. It’s it’s pretty much it’s like a college course, it’s everything I’ve learned for the last 14 years on building your brand. And I’m testing you and I’m asking you questions, and I need to see the answers. And then you’re actually filming video, and you’re submitting your video and you’re seeing your progress. As you go through the course, you’re doing daily video diary. So it’s a very robust system that we have set to make sure that people have all the training to feel confident to not only create videos that they’re proud of, but videos that work because like I said, you create all the videos you want. But if you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a brand that it’s attaching itself to. Then what’s the point?
D.J. Paris 47:46 And you you know, you’ve had it you’ve had TV experience, you’ve you’ve been on NBC is open house, a house honors Million Dollar Listing,
Ivan Estrada 47:54 I just did a TED talk last year, like the training that I got for my TED Talk, which we have in here on memorization like I had to learn of you. By the way TED talks are 100% Memorize. So 18 rows memorize, and it takes strategy that I thought I was like, There’s no way I can learn a one or two minute video by memory, but 1314 minutes, there is no way. And everything that I learned in there is in this course.
D.J. Paris 48:22 Amazing. Yeah, I want everyone to check this course out. It’s brand with.com Use the promo code real for 25% off. I’ve been you know, what would you say to an agent who says I know I need to do video I haven’t yet started? What’s the best first step for somebody to start getting involved in coming up with a video strategy?
Ivan Estrada 48:45 Well, other than taking the course, the next best strategy would be you need to have some type of accountability to yourself that you are at least going to start with one small video from a camera doesn’t have to be anything produced. But you need to have an accountability partner in order to just put out your first one because I’ve you know, even people who have had on my team, it took me weeks in order for them to pull the first one out because again, we go back into our head of I don’t like how I look. I don’t like how my hand gestures were all over the place. My left thigh was a little weird. And I’ve told my clients what you’ve got my agents, you’ve got this all wrong. You’re making this about you. This is not about you. This is about the value that you have to provide to someone else. So we first you need to have that mindset shift. And then you’ve got to have me as your accountability partner saying where’s the video? Where’s the video? Did you publish your video so someone in your office, it could be your manager if you have a coach? Well if you have a coach they’re making you do video so if you have a coach I’m pretty sure you’re doing videos but if you’re not asking your coach, I need to do a video. This is I need to do it by Friday, make sure that you have the goal, right? By Friday, I’m going to put a one minute video out that’s going to go on YouTube, Instagram, tick tock be very specific, by this time, in order for it to get done and have there be some type of consequence. And if I don’t create this video, by this time, I am going to send $100 to my, you know, a charity that is not one that you support. Let’s just put it that way. So that that way you have some type of accountability and a little fire to make it work.
D.J. Paris 50:31 I love that it’s accountability is so important. We just it’s not any sign of weakness. I think we’re, we look at it sometimes as I need somebody, I used to think about that having a personal trainer, I used to think, what’s wrong with me that I and it’s like, no, because now with a trainer, I actually get to the gym because I have accountability. And also, I have somebody that shows me what to do. But most importantly, I have somebody that I don’t want to disappoint. I’ll disappoint myself all day long. But disappointing, someone else is a lot harder for me. So that accountability piece, it will help shore up this like, I’ll do it later mentality, which we all have we you know, and we all you know, it’s just a normal part of the day to want to think that and having that accountability that check in. Also in the same thing you have, you have weekly accountability with your own clients that you’re helping them sell or buy homes, you’re checking in with them weekly as well. So this is this is a great approach, get an accountability partner and come up with a goal and say, here’s, here’s what I’d like you to hold me accountable for and here’s the consequence, and maybe even put a reward at the end of it if you get it done. But definitely put a consequence so that it gives you a little bit of the carrot and the stick. Absolutely. Let’s um, yeah, let’s I think this is a great place to to wrap up. I really want everybody to check out the brand with.com website, this really goes through Ivan’s program, you know, this is a guy who does very, very serious marketing and branding proposals and executes them is very, very strategic does this for high end, luxury homes, he sold over 600 million himself, him and his team. And they also now we’re going to show you the 14 years of experience that Ivan has wants you to learn from him. And these are tips and techniques you can use to really separate yourself from the competition. You know, we’re we’re all I think a little tired of seeing standard posts on Facebook and Instagram that are just listed just sold. Nothing wrong with that. But that’s typically the majority of the marketing I see for realtors out there is look what I just did. Look what I’m currently doing. And that’s all great. But there’s, I think there’s more that you can learn. You can solve problems you can create value without just only bragging about accomplishments. As Ivan said, you know, the clients don’t really care. I mean, I guess it’s a good thing to say I’m busy. And here’s what I’m doing. And that’s great. But you should also it should be a certain percentage of it should be educational. Here’s what you could learn today. Here’s what you might be worried about. And Ivan’s going to show you exactly how to find that content, cultivate it, shoot it, edit it, produce it, and consistently drop it, drop it live so that you can of course get people hooked on your content, which is the whole point right? We want people hooked on your content, but it takes time. The good news is it doesn’t really take any additional equipment. It just takes time but it also takes creativity and Ivan’s going to show you how to do that. And again, you can use tools like chat GPT to give you some ideas of what type of video content you want to create. Ivan’s going to go through all of that for you so I’ve been telling for anyone wanting to explore the video program again is that the best website brand with.com
Ivan Estrada 53:47 Absolutely So brand with.com is where you’ll find the course brand with video my book brand with purpose. It also my podcast brand with podcast and we also have a copy of my latest TED talk on there to inspire you.
D.J. Paris 54:03 Yeah, we will have links to all of that in the show notes guys subscribe to his podcast check out his book if you’re not yet ready to invest in the program and guys you should be because I’m gonna go through it myself. I am super excited Believe it or not, I had do a terrible job of video content for our podcast so I am like a lot of you going I should be doing more and this is the year that I’m going to commit to doing that because guess what, it’s going to bring me more listeners so even Podcasts can benefit from this of course but of course your real estate business can as well and so check out the podcast brand with podcast check out the the program brand with just go to brand with.com or Ivan estrada.com For all things Ivan check out his TED talk as well. We will have links to all these in the show notes. You can go check these out. And you should just be following Ivan on all of his social channels as well because guess what, that’s where he’s posting a lot of his video content. So great place to see what Ivan’s up to and you know, you can borrow from the Masters check out what he’s up to. Everything can be found at Ivan estrada.com or brand with.com. And again, remember to use the promo code real for 25% off the brand with video program. On behalf of our audience. Ivan wanted to say thank you so much for being on our show. Really appreciate you and all of the tips and advice you have given to the audience. It’s been awesome. And on behalf of Ivan and myself, we want to say thank you to the audience for making it all the way to the end of an episode here. Please, outside of checking out all the cool things Ivan’s involved in. Also, tell a friend about this episode. I know you know somebody in your office that’s not that is frustrated with their own branding or marketing efforts, send them a link to this, this might be just what they need to make 2023 a better year and let’s face it, it’s up to half a year for realtors. Let’s make it a little bit easier for them. Send them a link either over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just tell them to pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe button and also leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show what you like what we could do better that helps us improve as well. Ivan, thank you so much, sir. It was a pleasure having you on and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Ivan Estrada 56:13 Blast. Thank you
How A Top Real Estate Agent Finds Work-Life Balance • Cyrus Seraj
Mar 29, 2023
Cyrus Seraj with The MG Group Chicago talks about his experience with law school and then working in real estate business. Cyrus explains his journey working with his father when young, in finance later and real estate and how affection and connection with people started to grow. Cyrus emphasizes that it’s in people’s DNA to belong to a group and how great it is to share the responsibilities with others. Last, Cyrus discusses the importance of finding life-work balance in your life.
How Authentic Branding Resulted In 300k TikTok Followers • Randy Baruh
Mar 28, 2023
Randy Baruh as a New York City real estate professional shares his unique experience in the field of real estate and how he transitioned from the theatre to a career in real estate. Randy explains the importance of social media in reaching people without being in touch with them. Next, Randy discusses how important it is to be authentic and have fun as a real agent. Randy also talks about working with a team who makes magic happen. Last, he explains why you shouldn’t look at social medial as a lead generation but as a marketing tool.
5 Videos Real Estate Agents Can Make Today To Grow Their Business • Video Boot Camp for Real Estate Professionals • Kim Rittberg
Mar 27, 2023
Welcome to the first episode of Video Boot Camp for Real Estate professionals with Kim Rittberg.
In this episode, Kim shares her experience and strategies on how to make a proper video for the clients. Kim explains its importance and how a video can be very powerful in reaching the clients and building relationships. Kim also discusses her video boot camp on how to attract the ideal clients. Last, Kim shares 5 video ideas.
Grab Kim’s Free Download: Improve Your Video Quality to Increase Your Revenue — Grab 10 FREE tips from a former media executive so that you can take your videos from mediocre to magnetic. Plus when you download these free tips, you’ll also receive an additional PDF on how to go from camera shy to camera shine.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Not sure what to post on social? Well today you’re going to learn five videos you can make right now to grow your real estate business. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, keeping it real podcast listeners. This is your host DJ Parris your guide and host is how I normally start but today’s a special introduction here because I am not doing this episode. So I want to introduce you to our newest feature on the podcast. This is going to be a monthly episode called Social boot camp with Kim Rydberg now I had Kim on the show recently and I was I just completely had such a great time with her that I basically grabbed her and said you have to keep doing our show on a regular basis. So Kim is going to be doing monthly episodes specifically around social media and video really helping you figure out what are the top agents doing to increase their reach their engagement, you know, we all can be doing better and more on social media. But firstly, let me tell you who Kim actually is. So you know why she’s somebody you should be listening to and why I chose her to be on the show. So let me give you her bio here. Now Kim Rydberg is an award winning digital content strategist and on camera coach who helps real estate professionals and business owners grow their income leads and credibility with video and podcasts. Now get this she spent 15 years as a media executive at Netflix, People Magazine and in TV news, and she launched the first ever digital video unit for Us Weekly magazine. She knows this stuff well. Now Kim coaches real estate agents to be better on camera and make unforgettable social media video and podcast content that brings in leads clients and revenue. She has been featured in Business Insider and Fast Company and has been in speaker and instructor at Penn and Syracuse University and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School. She also hosts her own podcast mom’s exit interview, spurred by her decision to quit corporate and launch her own business after working in the hospital while giving birth to her second child. Now the podcast helps women craft careers that work for their life instead of the other way around. Please go check out Kim’s podcast mom’s exit interview and hit that subscribe button for her now let me tell you what you’re going to learn today because this is really exciting. This is our first episode and you’ve been so patient let letting me drone on about how much I just love having him on the show. But let me tell you what she’s going to talk about in just a moment. Today, we’re going to talk about five videos you can make today to grow your real estate business. And you know what, that’s all I’m gonna say let’s leave the rest up for Kim. So guys, do Kim a huge favor and let her know what you think of this episode. You can reach her she’s gonna give her contact information or you can always reach out to us we’ll pass it over to her. But tell another agent about the show specifically about Kim’s episode because we want her while her episodes which she’s gonna be doing these monthly. But let everybody know about this because Kim is a real superstar and we’re so so honored to have her so without further ado, let’s get to Kim
Kim Rittberg 4:38 I am so excited to be back with you all on keeping it real. I heard from so many of you. Direct Message me you sent me emails. I’m so appreciative of this audience. You all are investing in your cells and you really want to learn and I love that because I love to teach. Fun fact I just spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention in Las Vegas. I don’t know if any of you were there. It was really fun. Lots of great people great teaching great learning. And if you are interested in this episode, that means you’re looking to grow your business with video. So, if you’re struggling to show up on video, or you’re making some video, but it’s not landing your ideal clients, I have a brand new video bootcamp, it teaches you how to attract your ideal client and grow your leads income and credibility. I have dozens of awesome testimonials on my site, you can see, but be sure to check it out. As soon as possible. My last boot camp, actually, I had to close the doors early. So you can apply now it’s not binding, you can just apply and we can see if it’s a fit. Basically in the class, you’ll get a system and a process to create content consistently and efficiently. No burnout, you get pre built scripts and templates for videos. A proper set up for filming, I teach you how to repurpose your content, meaning you film once and you get 10 videos, and a brainstorm process and lots of accountability from me. I am an award winning video strategist. I spent 10 years in TV news, I worked at Pop Sugar video, US Weekly video, and Netflix marketing. But now for the past five years, I’ve been helping business owners and professionals grow with video. And I’ve won some awards. And anyway, it’s really fun. So let’s jump in and I want to teach you some stuff. So today I want to teach you about five great video ideas that you can make today as a real estate agent. The idea of video, I like to bring it back to the basics is video is not just okay post a video, here’s the client video has this amazing ability to reach your existing clients or existing network, find new leads new potential clients and reignite old old contacts. By that I mean, you can have a contact come out of the woodwork you haven’t seen in five or 10 years. My agents that I work with in one on one and group coaching are seeing this. They have someone reach out they haven’t seen in five years say, Hey, David, I loved your Instagram, I’m seeing you really showing up. And because the content is on brand, and it’s focusing on educating or entertaining that it’s really connecting. So I really want to start with that because I think it’s important before we talk about the video ideas, we remember what video can do for us. And again, I’m going to do another quick little tip before I give you my ideas. When you make video. Remember to make your video one of the three E’s entertaining, educational or emotional, meaning that is what you want the watcher to walk away with. So we’re never selling, we’re very rarely selling like, even, you know, maybe you’re saying, Oh, I won this award. Or maybe you’re saying just clothes just listed. That’s that should be like 20% of your social feed, to really convert to really bring people into you and into your network and be building that relationship, a tiny portion should be selling. But remember, you’re making this content because when you bring people in, when you build that relationship, eventually ideally, they will be a client and it’s not a client or refer. So that’s just something to really keep in mind before we jump into the ideas just level setting what it can do. And these ideas are really agnostic of platform. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook or Tik Tok, or Instagram or YouTube, all of these videos, they work, you know, they’re really solid ideas, they’re really showcase you and it doesn’t matter where you are. And this is basically these are five ideas I use, I sprinkle them throughout my real estate agent. And they work. They’re just like fun ideas that bring people in to you. So number one first idea, position yourself as a neighborhood expert. So that can go as a tour of the neighborhood you represent. It could also be a feature on some businesses. And the reason why these are really good is because if you’re selling let’s say I live in Brooklyn, New York. So if I’m selling in Brooklyn, I want people to realize I am really the expert. I know the values I know the people, I know which books are the best, which which you know, where you can walk your dog, it’s really important to position yourself as the expert so that can be you can be holding your camera and again, you do not need a lot of fancy expensive equipment. Actually, an iPhone is awesome, because people feel like they get to know you. So you’re gonna hold your camera out in front of you, or get a selfie stick. I don’t, I don’t really use a selfie stick. I just hold my camera. It depends how long your arm is, you’re going to hold it in front of you. And you’re going to make sure you’re standing a little bit far back you want people to see the street, you that’s called an establishing shot. If you’ve ever noticed in TV, before you see a scene you’ll see the outside of a house or the city you know, like the Los Angeles cityscape or the New York City skyline. They’re establishing where you are. So you’re gonna want to stand in the main street of your town or in a really beautiful park that everybody recognizes. And you’re going to introduce the concept of the video. You are not going to start with your name because especially if you’re making short form video, that’s not a good use of the beginning seconds. You’re gonna say do you want to know all of that? Brooklyn Heights, let’s jump in, or I just discovered the best. Top a spot in all of Brooklyn, check it out. And so you’re basically starting with your headline, you’re always starting with your headline, and then you’re jumping right into the video. So that’s number one. first idea is being a neighborhood expert. Number two is an SEO driven video. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What this means is that Google could find your video. So SEO even though I’m saying Google, it’s really just the ability to have words that people can find. So if you’re an Instagram, and your video says Brooklyn’s best restaurants, book, Brooklyn’s most family friendly restaurants, and that’s in your caption, someone in Instagram actually searched that and find you. So that’s very valuable. When you think about it, right? Being being able to be searched is very valuable. So what you can do to find a great idea that people are searching for you go on Google, start searching words about your neighborhood about your area, see what people are asking. You can go to Cora qu o Ra. That’s a forum where people ask questions, read it or add it Reddit is a good one, and YouTube. And you’re going to be looking at what is out there and what people are searching for. Everyone’s searching Google and you stop, like, what can I find in or what’s the best neighborhood in, it will fill in the blank for you. So basically, you want to see what other people are searching for. And so that video, it can be you can execute it on whatever you want. But if I found that people are searching for in Brooklyn, you know, which neighborhood in Brooklyn is closest to Manhattan or something like that? Now that I know if people are searching for that, I’m going to make a video about that, I’m going to stand right in the neighborhood, I’m going to film myself, I’m going to put something great and visual over my shoulder, I’m going to stand where the Brooklyn Bridge is, but I’m probably not gonna stand somewhere too noisy or too windy, because you’re not going to hear me. But I’m gonna stand in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I’m going to say, where should you live in Brooklyn, if you work in Manhattan, and you’re looking for a short commute, here are the top three neighborhoods that are closest to Manhattan. And then basically, I will talk a little bit about it. So that’s number two. Number one, we have the neighborhood expert video. Number two, we had an SEO driven video. Number three commonly asked questions. Basically, you are obviously an expert, you’re not just a real estate professional, you’re an expert, you talk to dozens, hundreds, maybe 1000s of people. And so what you should be thinking about is, what are they asked me a lot, because of a lot of people have already asked you it means more people want to ask you that. So that’s a really great thread to pull out to come up with ideas. So if you always get asked, you know, what’s going on with interest rates? Or should I buy a condo or Co Op or this new area? You know, you think it’ll be hot? In a few years, whatever the question is, you’re going to make make a video about that specifically. And remember, you don’t actually have to, you don’t actually need to answer all of the answers. Because it’s a short form video, you only have to fill like 1530 45 seconds, shorter is better. So you take your commonly asked question and you answer it. And again, you’re always starting with a headline, because it’s the headline that grabs people and brings them into the video. And when I say a headline, I mean, you start with that thought, that really catchy headline. And you also write on screen with words, your headline. So
number four, a trending sound video. I think you all know what this is. But if not, I will describe it. Basically, you know, the the all of the lip syncing and all the dancing, right and Instagram and Tiktok. They’re not all dancing and singing. Sometimes they’re just like music and someone’s doing something to music. Basically, those trending sounds come up more. So we just talked about search engine optimization means Google and find you better. While a trending sound. If you use it, it increases the ability for people to find you, we call that discoverability. So if you use a trending sound, you increase the discoverability of your social feed. So you can use that song in a fun way where you know someone’s dancing to the song or lip sing to the song. You also can just show something about your business. It could be behind the scenes of what you do each day and just use a trending song. But it is really important to think about that as a potential use because if you’re putting all your videos without sound, you’re really losing a really good opportunity. I want to say something about trending sounds. It’s very, very important to be solid on your message. And when I say your message, I mean your brand message Suraj what makes you unique in terms for to make this work? Because otherwise, it takes a really long time. If you see a trend out there, like someone’s dancing to some fun song, and they’re and they’re writing some text on it, if you don’t really know what your main content topics are, it becomes very hard and very time consuming to all of a sudden jump on like a fun trending song. So it’s very important that like, before you even make any of this content, you really know what you talk about who you are, right? Who are you as a brand. So when someone comes to me, I say, I help business owners and real estate professionals grow their leads income and credibility, I also let them know, I’m a mom of two. I live in Brooklyn. I love art, other little things. So when you get to my social feed, you’re like, Okay, this makes sense. I understand who this person is. And when I’m trying to jump on a fun trending video, I know what I talk about, I basically talk about video, I talked about being better on camera, I talked about being a working mom. And so you know, those are the sorts of topics you’ll be seeing there. And then it makes it easier for me to make a video quickly, when when a trending music comes up. And speaking of making something quickly. Video number five I recommend is a timely video. My first 10 years of my career was in news. And I have seen the ability for people to really get a lot of attention by pegging themselves to a news hook. And a news hook doesn’t have to be something political or sad. It doesn’t have to be news, it just has to be timely. So for I think the easiest way to think about it for real estate is the next thing the next time a big thing happens in your in the market and the financial markets, you should get on video and put your opinion on it. So for example, I’m gonna give you a real life example. My agent David, we were shooting a bunch of oversharing on LinkedIn live, and then it was the Silicon Valley Bank failure. So we made sure to film immediately the impact of that on New York City on New York City Real Estate. And it’s your opinion, so not only does it have the benefit of being a timely video that people really want to see, it has the benefit of putting you out there as an expert, as a thought leader. And so I think that that’s something to really keep in mind. And when I talk about timely, it doesn’t need to be news news news, like I mentioned before, it could be pop culture moments. So in my recent video bootcamp, one of my students Torres, I taught her to really think about pop culture moments and try to jump on it in terms of video content. And this was right after the Rihanna Superbowl moment, where she announced her pregnancy with this amazing red leather flutter spandex outfit. And I sent out a quick newsletter, everybody’s saying make sure to peg something to the Super Bowl to Rihanna specifically. And she did, she showed up on a video and it wasn’t like a dancing or singing video was her reaction to Rihanna. And that real instead of getting her normal few 100 views, it got 13,000 views, because you did it at the right time. And she had a different angle on it. Again, she’s talking to camera just talking about Rihanna his experience, it wasn’t a highly edited or highly polished video. But when you’re really thinking about what other people are thinking about, and you put yourself into the conversation, it can be really good. And I do want to say here, when you’re making these videos, there are ways to optimize it. And that’s something I go over in my video bootcamp, basically, building your brand, Making great video, and then getting it discovered. So you know, when you’re trying to do those timely videos, adding in the right hashtags, so you can get discovered. And if this is all overwhelming for you, don’t worry, because I have a video bootcamp opening up really soon. Applications will open soon if you go to Kim river.com. But I did want to mention about discovery because when you’re trying to jump on a trend, when you’re trying to jump on a new story, you really want to make sure you’re appearing in people’s feed so that they can find you. A couple of other things that as I was going through this, I was just gonna recommend. I talked a little bit about the idea of a headline, and I had lined on a hook is basically the idea that the very first few seconds of your video is the best chance to get people. So when you’re having your idea, really tried to think of a headline that like a media outlet would use. So instead of starting your video, with a text on it being like, here’s a restaurant in Brooklyn, it’s not a great headline. But how about the most delicious tapas restaurant in Brooklyn or three new restaurants you need to try right now in Brooklyn. That’s a better headline, right? It’s a little spicier, it’s a little more engaging. It really has more of that hook to hook people in. And then the other thing I wanted to remind people about is the brand element of it and really like being solid on understanding who you are and what you bring. And it is it’s important to know that because it really helps you figure out fresh ideas because the You really want to try to be yourself and the best version of yourself because you’re putting yourself out there as an expert, like you’re really a thought leader in your field. So I think that’s important. Another thing, this is kind of like, if I’m giving tips, maybe that’s one, class one, level one, or one, or class two, or one, I’m gonna give you a little bit of a video 301 tip when you’re filming, especially outside, but inside to a great way to get higher engagement, more people watching more people staying through the video, you can switch where you are. So for my example, earlier, we’re on filming near the Brooklyn Bridge meeting, I want to hold up my camera and start seeing I
want to know the Brooklyn neighborhoods that are closest to Manhattan. So you have a great commute. So maybe I start with a shot of the Brooklyn bridge behind me. But then on my second frame, frame, meaning the next moment in the video, I stop a start the next one, and I turn my body a little bit, and I have an entirely different background. Changing the visuals does a lot to keep people there. You know, I think we get used to seeing that talking head really like a person just talking to the camera, it’s fine. It’s not a problem, it’s better than not doing video, it’s a great way to showcase who you are what you do. But if you can add in more visual intrigue, more visual interest in it, that is great. And all you need to do basically, you have your first shot, where you’re filming at the Brooklyn Bridge, your second shot where you turned it a little bit and you’re showing some neighborhood in DUMBO, Another Brooklyn area, and then you’re turning your back to your third shot, it can be the same as your first shot. So it doesn’t have to be so complicated. But if you can, and you want to level up just that little bit, you can but that’s really like a through like a plus Apple for the teacher stuff. So don’t worry too much about that. And, again, thank you, I really love hearing from you. So message me which one of these videos are going to do and tag me because a lot of you, I forgot to tell you a lot of you tagged me in your videos, and I was so happy to hear from you. I was like, yes, these people are the best. So make one of these videos. Again, I’m gonna list out the videos, a neighborhood expert video, an SEO driven video meaning something people search for on Google or YouTube. A commonly asked questions what people asking you specifically just answer one of those those questions in a short form video. For you can make a video off of a trending sound can be like a dancing video or a singing video. Number five, a timely video, peg your next video to something happening. It could be something local, it could be like a big sports game in your neighborhood, or a big news event. But those are those five videos, I want you to make one of these posted and you’re going to tag me it’s at Kim KIMRI tt br j. So don’t forget, we’re gonna make it you’re going to tag me and you’re really looking to level up your video game and you really want to get out of that like I don’t know what to make, how do I make good video, all of that stuff. I my video bootcamp is opening in mid April. It’s sold out early. So if you’re interested to apply now, there’s some finding just go to my website, Kim ripper.com. You go to Courses and coaches, courses and coaching. And from there you can put in your information and basically I’m gonna show you how to set up or great has set up to shoot great videos, how to repurpose your content, and amazing system or process to create lots of awesome content efficiently. I give you scripts and templates. Basically you get my 15 years of knowledge and a seven week boot camp. It’s but it’s in a fun way. And there’s a lot of accountability so we’ll make videos together. You’ll get my input on those videos during live coaching sessions. It’s a live coaching program. So thank you so much for having me. I love hearing from you. Don’t forget to message me on Instagram or LinkedIn wherever Kim Rydberg r i t t b erg. Thanks so much
What Real Estate Agents Need To Know About Recent Bank Failures • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Mar 23, 2023
Welcome to the March episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel talks about the second largest bank failure in the US, and how this situation puts pressure on the Fed to change the course of rates. Joel explains a strategy on how to use higher rates and educate clients and not to buy just because the rates are low but always ask the question “WHY”. Lastly, Joel emphasized agents should organize events, spend money and engage with mortgage people to broaden their network.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What’s going on with these bank failures? And how is it going to impact your customers abilities to get mortgages? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show today, once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. And he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. Which, by the way, 20 years congratulations. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the client to the buyer on every transaction. Now last year alone, Joel gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with them. And that put Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all loan officers nationwide. In fact, out of 400,000 loan officers Joel is currently ranked number 137. Last year he closed 319 transactions, his highest amount ever, for 126 million this year. To date, he has closed 43 purchase transactions for just shy of 18 million. So if you are looking for a loan officer or a loan officer to partner with or for your customers, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. I use them as well. Joel can be reached at here’s his email joel@rate.com joel@rates.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049 Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel, welcome back.
Joel Schaub 3:06 DJ, thanks for having me on. I love that you made the Cubs reference at Spring Training. It is a new season right. And it’s kind of a new season right now for real estate agents out there as well. We were kind of talking before the show started about how people are getting more energetic and they’re getting back into it. And there’s just a lot to talk about.
D.J. Paris 3:26 It’s exciting, the sun’s coming out. So if you’re listening and you’re in a in a northern part of North America, where you haven’t maybe seen the sun so much, it’s starting to get a little warmer. If you’re in the southern part where it’s always sunny, then, you know another sunny day down there. But yeah, it’s it’s exciting. We’re starting to see activity as far as real estate, at least here locally in Chicago, this spring market has started we’ve seen activity rates have have been you know, okay, and so I think buyers are back at it. But curious to hear your your perspective, because right now we’re dealing with while by the time this release is you know, this will be probably after but we had some some banking turbulence. You know, we had Silicon Valley Bank, which which basically failed, and is being recovered by by the US government, you have a couple other smaller banks, regional banks chat being challenged as well. And then Credit Suisse overseas. So there’s a lot of uncertainty around the banking thing. And then it’s also like, what’s the Fed going to do? Are they going to raise rates, lower rates, how’s that gonna affect everything? Obviously, our listeners want to know, obviously, no one’s got a crystal ball but curious to hear what what what your interpretation of what’s going on right now is all about.
Joel Schaub 4:45 We’re back to this phrase. DJ, we’re bad news is good news. Okay. And it’s strange, but it’s true these bank failures actually put pressure on the Fed to change the course of rate increases. So this Bad news, which by any stretch of the imagination, having the second largest bank in history fail is bad news. And what that meant was more money rushing into the bond market. And as the price of those bonds went up, the yields went down. And so did mortgage rates. And so even though we’re not anywhere near the lows of the last six months and rates, the news is telling us that rates are down, and it’s an opportunity for agents to get back out and talk to buyers, because rates are down significantly, from just last week, by the time this airs, we’re probably going to see more of this continued rates and buyers are not afraid now, to see rates in the sixes or sevens. And that’s just kind of the norm. And are you seeing? Yeah, yeah. And so if you’re an agent, right now, if it was a year ago, people seeing rates creep up into the fives or sixes, that put a halt on a lot of buyers. Now we’re into a new year where that’s the norm. And we shouldn’t see them continue to creep down. But we still will see the Feds raise rates in the short term. But we’re already looking ahead to what they do in 2024. And they’re thinking that we’re going to see a cut early next year already.
D.J. Paris 6:14 Yeah, I think, you know, the, maybe it’s kind of a, a byproduct of our diminishing attention spans as Americans with technologies kind of I think zapped our attention spans tick tock in particular social media. I think I think hopefully, one of the maybe one of the benefits is that people who were upset that maybe they felt they missed the that that amazing rate, time period from a few years ago, I think the you know, I think we’ve forgotten, I think I think it’s we’re moving forward. Now, I feel like the public sentiment is changing. I don’t I don’t hear as much from agents saying, all my clients are really bummed that they missed the three, you know, three plus percent kind of era. I feel like we’re turning the corner on that people are starting to realize, you know, the six is is not a bad place to live. And even the seven sometimes it’s not, it’s not the worst place to date, to data rate. And you can always like Joe, you say, you know, date the rate, marry the home, you know, you can always refi in the future. So I think we’re starting to get more acceptance from the public about about where we’re at currently.
Joel Schaub 7:24 But if I’m an agent, I’m also talking to buyers right now, I want them to know that there are rate options in the fours and fives, there’s ways to do this. So let’s talk about two things that the agents that I know are really using seller by downs to fund the rates. Okay, so let’s talk about what that to one rate, buydown looks like or a three to one rate by down, understand the mechanics of this. And this could literally make the difference of you getting a buyer that wants to write an offer, or then waiting, okay, so the problem is that rates are high right now. And we think there’ll be high for the next a year or two, we can get sellers to give a closing cost credit to drive the rate down in the first one, two or three years. And so let’s just take a minute and talk about how that works. And how you can use this so that you can go educate buyers on this. And even if you’re a seller, you’ve probably seen this come across your desk. So making sure that you understand this, and can talk to your sellers about why the buyer is asking for our credit.
D.J. Paris 8:27 Yeah, let’s talk about it.
Joel Schaub 8:30 30 year fixed rate mortgages, they’re right now in the mid sixes as the time of this taping, but if you got the seller to give a 3% closing cost credit, we can take the rate at any bank and drive that down for the next two years. So that in the first year, the rate is 2% points lower. In the second year, it’s 1%. Lower. And then for the rest of the life and loan, it’s fixed. So it’s not hard to get rates that are in the fours right now. Sellers can pay for this. And it really changes the monthly payment DJ people are saving hundreds of dollars by using this exercise.
D.J. Paris 9:06 Yeah, no, it makes it makes sense. So the seller basically pays this concession. And does it go? Does it go directly to the bank? I’m guessing does it go into? Does it pay for principal interest or it’s just a part of the package or
Joel Schaub 9:22 it’s an escrow account so the client doesn’t lose the money let’s say next year rates have dropped drastically and we want to refinance, the money the seller gave is still there, and that will actually go to reduce the principal. So that’s a whole other strategy. Okay. But let’s talk about what that means. If you’re listening and you’re thinking well on a $500,000 home, why wouldn’t I just take 15 grand off the price? I’ll just Why mess around with all this. This seems like a magic trick or look at the math. If you take $15,000 off the purchase price, it might save about nine V or $100 a month on the payment, it’s good. But if you take that same $15,000, and have the seller buy the rate down for the client, on a $500,000, purchase, their payment would drop four to $500 a month. It’s a big difference. Wow. Yeah. And that can make the difference for somebody that can afford a home and not afford a home, okay? And it’s not an excuse to go buy something higher than you’re approved for. If you’re not comfortable with the payment with the way the rates are, let’s not buy let’s be honest with ourselves and be putting ourselves into something that we’re comfortable with. It’s just a way for the next two years, while rates are high, to get the seller to give us a lower rate. And I love lower rates.
D.J. Paris 10:48 Yeah, we all we all do. And at the same time, we also don’t want to chase rates, it’s like chasing the stock market. It’s anyone who any competent financial advisor will tell you don’t chase the stock market. You know, the smartest minds, financial minds in the country have a hard time doing it. And I’m certainly not one of those smartest financial minds. So I certainly don’t try to, you know, time to market as they say, and in the in the equities market. And the same thing with with rates, right, we know that buying a home is a financial decision. It’s a huge financial decision, oftentimes one of the biggest financial decisions of someone’s life. But it’s also a hugely emotional decision. And so I think the way that you solve for the fact that rates are higher than then probably people would want them to be is to really focus on the Y, right, talking about the y but also knowing that there are these creative financial strategies to make it more palatable along the way until you get to a place where maybe a refi makes sense.
Joel Schaub 11:51 I’m so glad you said that, because it’s not an excuse to buy, just because that rate is lower, it’s just a nice added benefit. So if you’re an agent, the last piece of this equation is just writing it on the contract as a seller credit. There’s nothing fancy about it listed as a seller closing cost credit. Almost every bank out there right now will do by downs. I don’t know a single bank right now, this is we don’t understand that. So work with a mortgage company that you know, and make sure that they know how to execute a to one rate by down for your clients, for a three to one rate down by down for your clients, and then go out there and submit offers that are designed to win and help. So that’s one strategy. The other strategy to get lower rates right now is let’s stop talking only about 30 year fixed rate mortgages. Okay. There are so many options out there, whether we talk about 15 year terms, 20 year 25 year terms, or looking at Adjustable Rate Mortgages again, okay, they’re coming back and our take out, yeah, either think of this, if we think in the next two or three years rates are going to be down and we don’t have the crystal ball, is there a big downside risk and locking rate for the next seven years. That’s a great arm, right? I don’t like three year arms or five year arms, I just don’t. But I like the seven and 10 year varieties. And when you’re borrowing serious money, all those jumbo arms are a lot lower. If you’re borrowing in that million plus range, you can get jumbo arms down at five and a quarter 5.125. And so speak with somebody about this, don’t just think that the 30 year fixed rates, the only option options to get them lower,
D.J. Paris 13:36 you just brought up a really good point, I hang out with a lot of realtors, with my different, I do a lot of association work. And so I’m around not even just Realtors at our company. But realtors who are you know, all throughout the industry here in Chicago, and everybody only talks about the 30 year fix. That’s absolutely so true. Realtors only know one number for when it comes to lending. And that’s the number they focus on. And you’re so right that that is not the end all be all number, it’s just the most, you know, discussed number is the 30 year fixed. So that is a really, really strong point is to remember there are other products with other options out there. And not to to think about the entirety of the mortgage lending sort of industry as one number is oh, it’s all based on a 30 year fixed. No, it’s just that’s just the most common number that people know. But there are other options like these bite down options and arms and etc.
Joel Schaub 14:35 And why is it so common? Right? It’s because it’s the lowest payment. The lowest paying, you’re paying over 30 years. And yes, that works for a lot of people. But you’d be surprised right now the number of people that are not interested in paying a loan for 30 Damn years. Okay, why are we paying it for so long? Yes, my payment will be a couple of $100 more but if I can pay this loan off in 15 years, and I can get it right Getting the low fives, especially right now I’m going to do that. If I have the bandwidth and I have a good income and my debt ratio is low enough, we really should be looking at those options, or at least discussing them. Even if we ultimately do go with a 30 year fixed, having that conversation is something that you should be doing, and making sure that you know what’s available, because a couple of years from now, when rates are even lower, maybe you end up going to a lower payment. But having lower interest right now is one of the key things that is going to get people to buy a property. So now we’ve covered a lot of things, we’ve covered rate by downs, we’ve covered other ways to make sure that we’re not just having 30 year fixed rate conversation. So don’t forget about arms. Okay. Don’t forget about lower terms so that you can get lower rates on mortgages.
D.J. Paris 15:52 Yeah, that’s really, really helpful. I’m curious, too. You work with a lot of top producers, you know, in our area, I’m curious on what you’re seeing them start to do this year, because we know that this is a, you know, a more challenging market. 2023 So far, has been tough. Inventory is still challenging. Although string market has accelerated things a bit curious in what you’re seeing these top agents doing, I don’t what I’m not seeing as agents running and hiding our top agents running and hiding. So I’m curious because you have such direct connections to them. I’m seeing them do a lot more events I’m seeing I’m seeing a lot of like, customer events, or client appreciation events, those kinds of things I’m seeing. So I’m just curious if you’re noticing anything, and you do a lot of those as well.
Joel Schaub 16:46 If you’re an agent, right now, it’s all about your sphere, making sure that you’re getting out there and doing events. And these don’t need to be big over the top events. So we’re doing so many things into one right now, in terms of getting out with agents and doing candlemaking parties and doing sips, right doing wine tasting events. We’re doing March Madness, parties, we’re getting ready for the baseball season and setting up viewing parties, things that are simple and getting back out there. And it’s just spending money, okay, you don’t have to do a lot. But if you’re not doing something, you’re doing nothing. And so for the last couple of years, when COVID was kind of like the mainstay, right? We’re finally getting past all of that, we’re getting back out there. And so if you’re not doing events, go partner with a mortgage person, all of these mortgage, people would be willing to spend money on you. Okay, that’s the reason why so many mortgage people hate me. I talk about this all the time. Go work with somebody that’s willing to spend money on you. Because these mortgage people will call you left and right and tell you how fast they are on mortgages and how good they are. Say, Hey, do you want to do an event? This event is gonna cost me $4,000? Do you want to split it with me? The first person that says yes, that’s your person, somebody that steps up and wants to help you grow your business. Those are the people that are going to be in it for the long haul. Okay, so they’re doing events, and then they’re doing client gifting. We’re doing St. Patrick’s Day gifting. We did Valentine’s Day gifting. We’re doing all these off days, like National Pizza Day, find a day send something out to 50 people, even if it’s as simple as just a small token gift partner with a mortgage person. They want to help you and go out there and do events this year, do gift giving, and put it on them. A lot of these mortgage guys have done this with other agents and ask them what are you doing with your other agents? You call me all the time asking for my business. Let’s do some business together. Do you want to help me sponsor something? They’re gonna say yes, the good ones will at least
D.J. Paris 19:05 I interviewed a woman recently who’s the number one team in her and her husband are the number one team in South Dakota. And I She’s so interesting. So such a neat a neat woman, neat realtor. One of the things she does is they have a moving van like but a big, like a kind of a like a moving truck. And not the biggest ones but you know, like one that anybody could drive without a special license anyway, what she does, it is so brilliant. And she says anybody who works with me can use it at any time. Like I don’t care if you bought a home for me five years ago, you can just call me you can use the band anytime. And on the side of it on one side is her branding for her real estate practice. On the other side is her loan officer that she works with. And the loan officer you know, pays to be on that side of the van it pays for the lease of the van. And so it pays for itself because she’s doing Something that you’re and you know, the loan officer is thrilled because his name’s getting shot all over town. And people are moving. And they’re seeing this. And I thought, you know, I’m sure she’s not the only person that’s ever done this, but boy, that’s a smart idea. I had never thought of that. And I thought, What a cool thing. And she goes, it’s great because in her in her local community, she says, everybody knows that they can just call me and borrow my van anytime whenever they need it. At any point, you know, any of my clients. And I was like, That is genius.
Joel Schaub 20:29 And that tells the story of somebody that’s willing to spend money. And so go back to your partners, right now, it doesn’t have to be a new partner, it can be one of your mortgage people that you’ve worked with for years, right now more than ever ask them to help you on something that you’re doing. Okay? This is the key, that person was willing to pay a lease, right? That person can do a lot of things that are RESPA compliant, they can never pay you just to give them deals. But there are so many ways that as long as it’s less than 50% of the total spend, you can go out and partner with a mortgage person and put their money where their mouth is, we just had an event, yeah, over New Years, where the total cost was $8,000. And we wrote a check for 4000 of it. And these agents are getting deals because they’re out there doing things. And that’s what I encourage everybody who’s listening to do think of one event that you can do, you don’t have to go from no events to an event per month, but do one a year or one a quarter, and partner with somebody that wants to help you with that on the mortgage.
D.J. Paris 21:29 It’s just all about relationships. And one of the best ways to deepen relationships is have social gatherings, whether it’s one on one, whether it’s a client appreciation event, whether it’s a drop by gift, whether it’s Hey, I’m thinking about you, you know, and if you if you’re really budget, you know, if your budget is very tight, you know, then there’s other ways you can you can do things but but this is the time to partner like Think creatively partner with a loan officer, who they can basically double your spend, essentially, if you find somebody who is going to be helpful, and Joel and his team would love the opportunity to do that with you as well. Also, one thing that Joelle and his team does that I think is exceptionally important, especially right now around all of the crisis that’s happening financially, at least at the time of this taping, again, hopefully, it’s resolved by the time this releases, but But Well, yeah, it probably won’t be Well, we hope so you’re right. We just hope that the adults are in the room at these at these big financial institutions making wise decisions to keep us all afloat. But one of the things that Joe that you do that I admire quite a bit, and it’s very helpful for me personally, as you send out a weekly email that your team puts together, and it highlights kind of here’s what you need to know about what’s going on in the lending world. And it also even talks a little bit about kind of the broader financial picture. And it’s bite sized stuff, it’s data points that agents, their questions that agents get all the time. And agents have to really kind of comb the internet for their own answers. And I like the fact that you send that directly to my inbox once a week in a bite sized way where I can read it. You know, when I can read it in 10 minutes, and really digested be like, Okay, now I’m, I’m more confident when I’m speaking to a customer. And so I’m just want to make sure that any of our listeners know you can also get on Joel’s email newsletter list. So you can receive these weekly updates as well. Joel, what’s what’s the best way they should do that?
Joel Schaub 23:29 Well, yeah, that newsletter came about it used to be private, I used to figure out the ways to make it digestible, right. So that we’re not having to explain every single thing to a client. And it became something like kind of a pop culture, people want to see this, they want to know, like, what is he talking about? And so they can email me and just say, add me to your newsletter. It’s just joel@rate.com. So J, o el@rat.com. And as simple as one sentence, add me to your newsletter, and then you’ll get weekly updates, and you’ll be able to speak about the mortgage side. And it’s not so it’s so cumbersome, right, we got to break it down in ways that give you fun talking points and just help you through it. So that’s one of the things that we love to do. And then helping clients get lower closing costs as the second one. So we can send you the email template where clients get a $1,500 closing cost credit if they’re working with us. Once that gets sent over with a newsletter, we’re happy to help buyers as well. So yeah, there’s a lot of good things coming up for the listeners, TJ.
D.J. Paris 24:35 Well, yeah, this is a great place to sort of wrap up for for this episode. And Joel as per usual, thank you. Great, great content, great information super helpful for our listeners. And for everyone out there. If you don’t have a good relationship with a loan officer Joel and his team would love the opportunity to chat with you reach out to him, you can email him also, whether you want to get on his email list or partner with him or maybe just And a client his way. Or maybe you’re a buyer or seller yourself and are interested in lending opportunities. Joel and his team are fantastic. So you can reach out to him joel@rate.com. And that’s via email. And then Joe, what’s the best way they could reach out by telephone?
Joel Schaub 25:17 After I did this, I had about 15 or 16 individual conversation, I talked to people all over the United States. And they were shocked to say, like, you’re actually going to spend time and I love it, because I like hearing about different markets and seeing what people are doing, and just sharing my feedback. So yes, 773-654-2049, you’ll either have any pickup personally, or you’ll get a return phone call from me. And it’s really great to see how just different markets were in what you’re doing. And we just share that information and help each other grow,
D.J. Paris 25:49 and guaranteed rates in all 50 states. So wherever you’re listening to this from a guaranteed rate can likely help you to fit in if they’re not able to assist, they’ll be able to tell you who to talk to as well. So anyway, Joel, thank you once again for coming on. You’ve been with us for years and years and years always brings great content. We love having you on excited to see you next month for another episode. And on behalf of the audience, we say thank you on behalf of Joel and myself to the audience. We also say thank you, please tell a friend about this show everyone listening, just think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this information. Maybe they’re a little depressed or down right now about the conditions of the market. This might help cheer them up and give them some things to talk about with their clients. So share this with the people in your office or any other realtors that you know that’s the best way you can help us grow and also support our sponsors too. But yeah, reach out to Joel get on his mailing list guys. joel@rate.com asked to be on there. Trust me, it’s worth it. You know, give you the ammo you need when you’re talking with clients. Joel thanks so much. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you, DJ
Digital and Physical Marketing Mastery For Real Estate Agents • Jesse Stein
Mar 20, 2023
Jesse Stein, founder and CEO of Audience.co and a digital marketer, discusses his experience in digital marketing. Jesse explains the importance of handwritten notes and why his software team build a robot that can write precisely like humans. Jesse also discusses how the card should be personalized to the specific client and how combining the old school method (handwriting notes) with modern methods like a you tube message could be very effective in building the relationships and adding value to the clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How cool would it be if all of your digital marketing as well as your physical marketing could be done together and in sync? Wouldn’t that be great? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with marketing expert Jesse Stein. Before we get to Jesse, just a couple of quick reminders. As always, first, thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode. Thank you for supporting our podcast. Please check out our sponsors and also tell a friend about the show. Think of one other realtor that’s struggling right now especially with their marketing, send them a link over to our website so they can hear this episode. Keeping it real pod.com is where all of our episodes live. Of course they also are on every single podcast app there is out there so tell someone else in your office you’d be doing us a huge favor. So thank you and you know what, let’s just get right to it my conversation with Jesse Stein.
Today on the show we have Jesse Stein from audience dot c o let me tell you more about Jesse. Jesse has an impressive background as a serial entrepreneur. He’s founded, grown and sold multiple online ventures throughout his career. His notable ventures include sports memorabilia.com, also a skincare brand and dietspotlight.com. In addition to his entrepreneurial success, Jesse is a domain name expert who founded and sold Soho digital for $32 million. He’s made angel investments in several companies such as integral ad science TMR, W distillery, data world sketchy blanket and whereby Jessie Ansari and whereby also Jessie holds an MBA from the Wharton School an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Lotter Institute, and a BA with honors in sociology and Asian Studies from UC Santa Barbara, and Sofia University in Tokyo. Please vote for to learn all things, Jessie, check out his newest venture audience.co That’s audience.co And we’re going to be speaking about that today. Jessie, welcome to the show.
Jesse Stein 3:50 Thanks, TJ for having me.
D.J. Paris 3:53 It’s an amazing pedigree, your your background, your vitae as as they say I love reading back and I would really you know, this is a more unusual episode for us so traditionally we’re are normally we’re speaking just to real estate agents about how they became successful and very rarely do we talk to sort of experts out tangentially related to real estate but but not specifically out there producing but I’m really excited to chat with you because you’ve been a digital marketer for or Gosh 20 plus years and I am excited to learn some of your sort of success secrets and what you might suggest our audience part you know, start paying attention to in 2023
Jesse Stein 4:39 Likewise, really excited to add value to you guys. You can get your your money back, but you can’t get your time back. So I really appreciate all the listeners here and I just want to add I just want to add value.
D.J. Paris 4:51 Great Yeah, well, let’s let’s start I would love to hear about the start of your digital marketing journey. Like how did you get into the digital marketing space?
Jesse Stein 5:00 I just graduated from Wharton in the late 90s. And Right Place Right Time, beginning of the commercial Internet, New York City, I was just married, started a company called Soho digital, which you had mentioned, and grew it into a $30 million interactive agency sold it in 2005. And they’re really learn how to build sales funnels by online media, and do SEO, and all that became the foundation really for my digital marketing career. And after that, I got into Domaining. After I sold that you’d mentioned that. So I bought hobbies.com biking.com boating.com yachting.com. All these like really category defining domain names. And the plan was to take these domain names and build them into full fledged businesses the way that you would buy beachfront real estate and build a condo tower. But the one that really took off was sports memorabilia.com. And Rob bought that as completely raw domain in 2005. And with a group of people eminently smarter and more talented than me, which is a common thread that runs through my career, we built it into the biggest autograph store on the internet top 500 internet retailer and we sold it to fanatics in 2013. And along the way, I built with business partners, a skincare company, two 50 million bucks sold in 2009. And that was all direct to consumer via internet, and then started dietspotlight.com, which became one of the biggest nutrition and diet websites on the internet. And at sports meme, we were sending handwritten notes to our customers. And we noticed that the customers that received the handwritten notes now I’m kind of segwaying into audience dot code. Yeah, the company that sends handwritten notes on behalf of realtors to help them drive more listings, and we combine the handwritten notes with digital marketing. So it’s really cool. We use the handwritten note as a Trojan horse. But at sports memorabilia.com, we’re sending notes. And we noticed that the clients that received notes spent way more money with us. So if someone had bought a mattress, yeah, they spent way more money spent way more money with us. But there was no scale to it. Because we were having warehouse workers and consultants and admin staff send the notes, the handwriting was often embarrassing. So like, there’s no scale to it, we were waiting for someone to do this. And so three years ago, hired a team of software engineers, and we built these robots and the software, and they hold pins, and they write precisely like humans, and we can go into that more DJ. But that’s kind of the genesis of my digital marketing career.
D.J. Paris 7:57 Well, that’s really fascinating. So I want to go back to the handwritten note, just sort of metric that you were you were mentioning that, you noticed that so somebody would buy something, they buy a piece of sports memorabilia, you’d write a Hey, thanks for being a customer, we really appreciate it, you know, someone would write it, maybe it would look nice, maybe it wouldn’t. But regardless, those people would then return and spend more money.
Jesse Stein 8:19 That’s exactly right, we noticed there’s a direct correlation between and we would run these AV tests where the control group would be the customers that didn’t receive notes. And then we take a look at the lifetime value of the customers that did. And it was just way beyond any kind of statistical probability. Those that received notes spent way more money were more loyal left, better reviews were happier clients, and so on and so forth. But again, there was no scale to it. And that was key. And then there was no combination with the note and digital marketing, which is absolutely critical, which I can talk about a little bit later on in the show, if you want.
D.J. Paris 9:04 Yeah, that’s, that’s fascinating. I think this idea of the return to pen and paper is, well, I don’t know that we’ve returned to pen and paper, I don’t know that we’ll ever return to pen and paper as a society. But there is something maybe even more magical these days about receiving a handwritten note. I can count on one hand, the number of handwritten notes I receive from anyone, you know, I outside of birthday cards and things, but just in a year, maybe I get three or four, maybe, maybe that’s even high. But every single time I do receive what I believe to be as a handwritten note, whether it’s, you know, helped with robots with pens, or if it’s somebody actually using their hand I read every single word, because I don’t know I guess we’re just hardwired to sort of appreciate that more. I’m not even sure exactly why that captures my Attention more than an email, but we all know just intrinsically that it does. And it’s also a lost art. It’s something that, you know, obviously, you know, all a lot of industries have moved very far away from. But there is something very, I would say connecting about handwritten notes. It feels like it feels intimate, and it feels special, and it makes the other person feel very. Yeah, very, very grateful. I’d say. So curious to get your thoughts on why handwritten notes why, why do you think that’s working? So well?
Jesse Stein 10:36 Yeah, just like anything when you zoom in the devils in the details, so it’s the way that we engineer the note. And then the key is the way that we combine it with AI, and digital marketing, which I’ll talk about in a second. And all the components are key, just like just like anything. So what we do with the note is, we print it, I’m just holding up, obviously, the people listening sure won’t be able to see this. But we printed on a thick stock card. We there’s, as it turns out, there’s an ideal character length. So you want your notes, whether you work with us, or whether you try it yourself. You want your handwritten notes, if you’re a realtor, to be right around 650 characters, this is enough character length, to be able to tell your story about for example, how you just listed 17 Chestnut Street in Toledo, Ohio. And you can even include a short market report there as well in the 650 characters, then what you want to do is you want to create a graphic on the front of the note that aligns with the neighborhood, so it’d be a local landmark. And then you want to apply a filter to the graphic to make it aesthetically pleasing, like a water color, or an impressionistic filter. And then you want your note card to be we’ve learned all this through trial and error, you want to know, a bifold. Note. So what it does is, so the card is bifold. And of course the envelope is handwritten, as well. But never use pre canceled stamps. So the temptation is to save a little bit of money by using the pre canceled stamp. As it turns out, people really notice that so use a real first class postage stamp cost is 62 cents handwrite, the envelope should be fixed doc. And then that will get that will get the note from the mailbox to the kitchen counter. Okay, and then it’ll optimize for open rate, which is great. So you have it open, but now they crack it open, they pull out the note. And it’s needs to be aesthetically.
D.J. Paris 12:55 So they open the note they see something a landmark that they recognize, and that a landmark that is likely to make them feel good about their community or wherever their geography, geographical location, they see something they recognize in a cool way with a cool filter on it that’s on the cover. And then they’re like, Oh, I know what that is. And then they and by the way, we’re really talking in this particular example about a cold mail, mailer. So somebody somebody receives, you know, a handwritten note on on heavy stock. We’re real stamp, not a not a stamp machine. They open it up, they see something they recognize, they still don’t really know what it is, they open it up. And okay, I just wanted to sort of catch our audience.
Jesse Stein 13:39 Absolutely. So and we can also talk to how to use these notes. Again, whether you work with us or whether you try it yourself, how you use notes for both geographic farming and to nurture your sphere. So there’s two different ways. For example, Tom Ferry, who’s seen every single real estate tool on Earth decided to invest in us and he’s a very happy client. So as Chris Heller, who you’ve interviewed, he’s a charmer of Keller Williams, you can ask all these people, you can go to our site, there’s dozens and dozens of testimonials from top agents, feel free to reach out to any of them. But they’ve opened the envelope, they take out the note, they read it, there should be no bait and switch element whatsoever to to the note or any of the marketing you do for that matter. And remember, in general, your marketing should be about adding value right about guiding more about educating more about helping more about serving more about mitigating and answering questions more than any other Realtor in your neighborhood. So that’s why our template library which is vast and we’ve sent millions and millions of notes so we know precisely the note templates that work depending upon the touch so you’ve just sold a house we know have touched number one needs to look like touch number three. And in general, the common thread that runs through everything we do is it’s all about adding value. It’s all about educating. It’s all about helping that homeowner make the right decision whether they go with you or not. So they’ve opened, they’ve taken the, the note out that notice the beautiful graphic, they’ve read it. And then what’s really important is to include a QR code sticker on there, and you you can’t print the QR code sticker, you need to actually have a real sticker. You can’t just print the QR code on there, because that looks mechanical. So
D.J. Paris 15:35 write that it’s sort of the whole thing sort of falls apart at that point. Yeah, you got it.
Jesse Stein 15:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that the illusion kind of falls apart. So make sure that the stamp on the front of the envelope is slightly off kilter. Make sure that QR code sticker is slightly off kilter. And what you want to do is you want to record a short, either YouTube video or a video that’s on your brokerage website. That is not personalized to the individual homeowner, because that’s way too much work, but personalize it to their neighborhood. Hey, greetings, Key Biscayne residents. Gradients keepers camp resident, thank you so much for scanning my note, I just wanted to include a little market report, let you know I’ve listed a few homes, in your area on your service, I produce quarterly market reports, remember, give, give, give, give, then get later. So it’s all it’s all about adding value. So you add the value, you have the QR codes ticker, then here’s the real power of the notes. And the real secret. twofold. Number one, you can now use the note as a Trojan horse to market to that homeowner in a variety of different ways. Okay, that’s why I named the company audience.co. I didn’t name it something old school with handwriting or addresses or something else, because I knew it’s all about taking a cold audience. And it’s about warming up that audience. So now, you can even go door knocking if that’s your thing. You can next time you see them at a networking event. And by the way, run this experiment, send 100 of our handwritten notes or do them yourself to 100 households go door knocking, you will be completely blown away at how receptive and warm and welcoming those homeowners are because you’ve generated the most important thing of all, which is reciprocity. You have sent them a beautiful, aesthetically pleasing note that guess what, you’ve optimized for the second secret, which is they’ve kept and displayed it. So the decision to sell one’s home is a really high consideration high dollar amount very, very, among the biggest decisions any consumer ever makes. So what are the chances that they’re actually going to be interested in listing their home on the day you send the note very, very 00. So as it turns out, handwritten notes, and I’ve been a marketer now for almost 25 years. This is the one medium that defies the time space continuum. And let me let me explain that because it sounds a little bit esoteric. there as long as you make it aesthetically pleasing and engineer it in the way I’ve talked about with a fixed doc note the bifold. Note, the note will end up on their kitchen counter will end up on their home office desk will end up even on the refrigerator and a magnet even on their mantel. And they will remember you and their their will have a warm feeling. And they will feel this sense of reciprocity. And so when they are interested in selling their home, you are absolutely going to be top of mind, I don’t care if you’re new to the farm. If someone else has been farming that neighborhood for generations, the fact that you took the time to send these beautiful handwritten notes with a real first class postage stamp will resonate, then use them as a Trojan horse. So what you want to do now and what our platform does is we find first of all, our lead filtering database makes it so we only send notes to the most likely to sell households. So we have map functionality where you can freehand draw, and you can literally take a scalpel out and get super surgical with their leads. So if you listed a home at 17, Chestnut Street, you can then hit surrounding households with our notes, but only the households that are most likely to sell. So we have 200 plus filters. So you can filter by owner age, equity level, how long ago the CLO was issued, and so on and so forth. Then what we do is we find all the email addresses of all this is where my digital marketing background comes in. We find all the email addresses of all the primary and secondary owners, we find all their LinkedIn profiles and we find all their other social handles. And then we have an app that you go to and you automatically follow up. So it’s using the node as a Trojan horse over later from our system, the homeowner gets an email with a subject line that says, Did you receive my handwritten note? And this will, this will double or triple response? Right? So response is typically, all in after all of our follow up between three and 5%, which is 10 to 12 times a responsive normal to right. Yeah, yeah,
D.J. Paris 20:21 exceptional. That’s exceptional. So so let’s go through the I want to go through the workflow again, because this is, is you’re kind of blowing my mind with all this. So okay, so I just sold a home in a neighborhood, I am going to now farm the rest of that neighborhood, I want everybody to know that I just sold this home, I’m going to send them each a handwritten note through your company, we’re going to slice up the neighborhood, there’s going to have an aesthetically pleasing picture on the front so that they’re going to want to display the car just like they would a birthday card, on their mantel or on their thing, because it’s something that relates to their community. It’s also cool looking. And on the inside, it’s going to have a note with some sort of value add in there and introduction and a QR code sticker, which would then link them to a video, maybe you using Bom or loom or YouTube or whatever your record some sort of video specific to that neighborhood, like, Hey, guys, I am so and so I just sold blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would love the opportunity to work with you, here’s some information about your McPhee i or i can give you a market update or whatever, you come up with some sort of message in the video. And then and then your system is going to go in and also identify those homeowners, we’re going to we’re going to look we’re going to solve for social media accounts, we’re going to pair them with any information that you can find. And then you have an app that will allow you to then start to follow those people. And you can start to then, you know, reach them in other mediums, such as on the digital side is that where so it kind of goes. So you’re saying the Trojan horse is the the the physical, you know card that they’re that your team is doing. But you guys aren’t just the card company, you’re like, Oh, we’re gonna go way, way beyond that. Because now we’re going to, we’re going to go from physical to digital,
Jesse Stein 22:13 you got it. And we were even inside of your app, you’ll even find optimized LinkedIn content that you can post directly onto your LinkedIn account or on Quora, or other channels. Sure, that positions you as the authority. And that’s all included in the platform. So it really is a holistic marketing platform. And then on the back end, I didn’t want to get into the weeds too much. But this is super cool. So what happens is, that follow up email sequence that I talked about, after you send the handwritten note. It’s a very deliberate and intentional sequence. It’s been totally optimized. And the first rips the first one yet drips. And the first one is very simple. The first email comes a week after our notes are sent. Did we get the note kind of did you get the note and it says, I fear I may have sent it to the wrong address I sent. I sent it here. And and it lists the person’s address that gets an eight to 12% response rate, which for anyone sending cold email? No, usually, it’s amazing. It people lose their minds when they use the platform because it’s all been optimized. So now, the second touch is even cooler. So what we do is we use I’ve been using we collectively as a company have been using chat GPT for two years now. So we’ve really gotten a chance we’ve created 10s of 1000s of articles with it. So we really know how to use it. What we do is we take your bio, as a realtor, we combine that with information about the homeowners home, everything from number of bedrooms to do they have a swimming pool, you name it. Okay with that month’s market report for Toledo, Ohio, or whatever neighborhood or what we what we do is we combine all three, and it creates a letter that says, hey, I sent you an email a week ago, and just wanted to let you know that I really did my research. And this is why I would love to have a conversation with you to at least get you a sense of what your home is valued at. And then it says your home is this your home is that by the way, I always love to add value. Here’s what’s happening in Toledo real estate market listings have been down 21% Baba, bah bah, bah, bah, it’s very organic, feels very casual. And it blows people’s minds. And that gets a really high response rate, too. So that’s all part of the audience platform.
D.J. Paris 24:46 And I guess maybe the best part about all of this is it’s to some degree automated, right? Like there’s manual review of course of of everything before it goes out so that you know to make sure that it’s it you know, it’s in alignment with the brand handing and all that. But the idea that it really takes a lot of that leg well takes all almost all of the legwork off of the agent’s plate. And you were saying at the beginning, you know, the one thing you can’t get back is time, right? So this idea of this actually is, I mean, I can’t even imagine how much time this would be. It’s just incredible. It just for our audience, the and Jesse, you’ll know this, Ben, I, I believe the the average return rate on a on a physical mailer is like if you get 1%, you’re a genius, like, so you’re, we’re now talking about, you know, 10 times that possibly, depending on on how you do it. But it’s all sequential, right? It’s, these are not one offs, one offs, we find, you know, have a very limited return. So we’re talking about as a sequence, so we’re really just initiating sequence. So your your team does all of this.
Jesse Stein 25:56 Our team does all of it, we even say automatically detect when you list or sell a home. And we trigger an email to you. And we’ve already set up your campaign. And what we do automatically, programmatically, is we take the home that you just listed, and or sold. And then we take the cover image that you featured on Zillow, or realtor.com. And if the home is not aesthetically pleasing, which some are not necessarily, or if it’s the front of an apartment, or whatever, we apply a water color filter to it, or an impressionistic filter to make makes it look cool. Yeah, look cool. And then we give you some of our best performing just listed just sold templates, you literally click on the link in the email, it takes you directly to the map, where we’ve already pre selected the most likely to sell households around the house you just listed or sold, which you can you can edit and change to your heart’s content. And then within 30 seconds, you can trigger a mailer to 100 200 households. So what clients consistently tell us and they’ve used every solution in the book is just the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to drive listings. And then to form deeper relationships with my sphere. And that’s what everyone wants the one caveat mTOR is, it’s not for agents that want instant gratification, right? takes time, you have to be persistent, you have to be consistent. If you got a listing on our first mailer, or second mailer, it was probably just luck or the right place at the right time. This is for agents that want to sell dramatically more homes over the coming years. And this is not by the way, this is not for folks that are just dabbling in real estate. We’re just a hobby, this is really the audience platform is for agents that are super ambitious and want to make this a career and want to form real deep relationships with the folks in their in their farming sphere.
D.J. Paris 28:05 And so do the agents have direct edit editorial control over over the content, so they can put their final approval and touches on it in case, you know, there’s certain things that your team wouldn’t know to put in
Jesse Stein 28:19 100%. So you can go right into the app and do that there’s like a million ways to contact us, you can go to audience health.com. And there’s someone right there on a live zoom. And then we have a large, very talented Customer Success group. So we can work with you one on one to make sure your campaign is perfect before it goes out.
D.J. Paris 28:39 By the way, I want to just completely stop what we’re talking about just to share one thing about Jessie that was very impressive to me, which I want to give you a compliment because I can count. Also, on one hand a number of times this particular strategy has has even come across my desk in the last bit since I started this podcast, which was about six years ago. So for all of our listeners, one of the neat things about having a podcast that people listened to, is publicists find out about it, and you just start getting blanketed with every guest requests you can imagine, which is very fun and cool and neat. It means you don’t have to go out looking for guests, which is very helpful. But it’s also challenging because you get lots of guest requests you have to filter through there, almost 99.9% of them are email based. Jessie did something very unusual. And I think this is a really great lesson that you can take. It’s into your real estate practice. And he did something very, very cool. He was down in his in one of his factories where his robots were in the process of writing cards, you know, and I’ve seen this before, this isn’t this particular technology isn’t actually new robots writing handwritten cards is not really all that unique. How Whoever. So he was down in his, in his, in his workshop with all these different machines going around, he was like, Hey, man, I want to be on your podcast, here’s all the things I can talk about. And he literally didn’t say like, Look at how cool our robots are, he was like, here’s what I can do for your podcast, here’s what I can give to your listeners. So he employed the same exact strategy, that, that he’s actually suggesting, you might want to use in this case, you know, with a QR code on the inside of the, of the mailer that you send, that goes to a video, Jesse sent me a video. And it literally was, here’s what I can do for you, meaning here’s what how I can help your show. And usually, that’s not the way pitches come across. And immediately, as soon as I saw it, I just said, book it, immediately book it, and when we reject most of the requests we get, but because it felt like he was doing something special for me when she was he was making a video just for me, and it had my name in it and all of that. And I went, gosh, you know, realtors should be doing more of these kinds of video messaging. It’s something that I, you know, if you’re going to text somebody, turn the phone around, make a little video message. If I mean, if it’s just a text in which a one line texting, you don’t have to. But if you really want to say something to somebody, turn the phone around, send it as a you know, as a text, or as a video message. Boy, that really got me and I just wanted to congratulate you for that that really caught my attention. And and the other thing too, is you’re not just writing cards, you have this entire platform. Most companies that do this, just do the handwritten cards. And that’s it. You guys are like no, no, that’s just the beginning, we actually are using that as the, as you say, the Trojan horse to get in to sneak in under under the under the door. And then we’re going to now we have everything and we’re going to be marketing you for up to you know, indefinitely.
Jesse Stein 31:54 Oh, I appreciate that. DJ, that means means a lot to me. And yeah, so I would encourage anyone listening to just make sure that you like the best way to add value is to think about what are what do I do uniquely? What do I know? Do I know pre construction projects better than anybody else? Do I have, you know, a relationship with the head of admissions at a private school? In my in my area? You know, how is it that I can create content and give give, give, give and then get and then I think the mistake that I’ve noticed a lot of people make is when they do talk about what they know. They often comes off as preachy. It often comes off as you should, instead of I did. And so your outro is he talks about this a lot of Gary Vee and others. And it’s so important. It’s so easy to miss. But the moment you say you should everybody tunes out, right? So the difference like Alex or mosey likes to talk about is you know, you should have oatmeal for breakfast, versus I had oatmeal for
D.J. Paris 33:15 lunch, once a judgement and the others statement
Jesse Stein 33:18 1,000% And I know it’s it sounds obvious, but no, it’s it’s a it’s a good one, you’ll immediately differentiate yourself from everyone else I can tell you, among the top real estate agents in all of Miami, his name is David Siddons. He sold $600 million in real estate last year. Very, very talented guy. And he is all about adding value. And so he’s constantly interviewing, you know, the important influencers in the neighborhood, the heads of admissions for schools, he’s creating content on his blog. And I really encourage everybody listening to not build their businesses on rented land. And what I mean by that, and I’m getting far afield from from handwritten notes, but I told you I just wanted to add value is that even if you’re with an amazing brokerage at Keller, Williams, exp, Douglas, Elliman, whoever it is make sure that you build your own website, and you build an amazing content and by the way, the brokerages will love this and you’re driving leads to that website building SEO, building expertise, authority and trust. Because who knows if you’re going to be at that same brokerage 10 years from now and right. The important thing is to not build your business on rented land. And by the way, the brokerages love this because you know that you’ll take so much ownership over your own website, and you’ll build that out and you’ll only benefit that brokerage. So all the content that you build, think about at least the way that we do it is think about how can I add value how can I give give, give and make sure you don’t build that content? On rented land, ie on somebody else’s platform.
D.J. Paris 35:05 That’s a good point because Realtors move, they move firms, even if you’re, if you’re listening now thinking I am never leaving my firm, just assume that someday something happens and you have to leave your firm. So whether you want to or not, when you have your own assets, and you’re not reliant upon the company’s tools and technologies, then you know, a lot of times those go away when you when you move, sometimes you can port them over to the new firm, oftentimes you can’t you want to build your own assets. And that also becomes almost I think, could be a way to leverage a higher commission split to if you’re like, hey, I don’t need your stuff. I’ve got my own. I, you know, that could become a point of negotiation when you’re looking at other brokerages. I wanted to ask you, though, about back to audience.co, which again, I’m just completely my mind is spinning with all of these, all of the services you guys offer. Let’s talk ROI. Because everybody wants to know, what’s the ROI now, obviously, this, you know, what, what are you usually seeing from your successful realtor clients?
Jesse Stein 36:07 Yeah, on average. So we’ve done a retroactive analysis over the last two and a half years, across 1000s of agents. So 18 months, after 18 months, it’s about 16.2x. So what we do is we look at what we look at our actual sales, but not only actual sales, because we’re not the rooster taking credit for the sunrise. And so the easy thing to do would be to be the company that says, oh, yeah, we sent a note to that homeowner, and that homeowner listed and sold with you, therefore we take 100% credit for that sale. No, that would be the rooster taking credit for the sunrise. And so what we do is we go back to the realtor and say, Hey, where are we responsible? It’s kind of like in digital marketing, first touch, last touch, like how do you do attribution modeling on this marketing channel. So you have to be honest, you can’t sand off the truth and put varnish on it. So that’s why we go to our realtor clients. And we
D.J. Paris 37:09 just the manual part really like did this? Was this because of us? Yeah.
Jesse Stein 37:13 Many times, it’s, you know, it’s never one thing. Right? It would be arrogant of me to say that we you know, the handwritten note was the reason why they listed their $5 million home, whatever value home? No, it’s a combination of things. And that’s why we offer in our platform, this integration, this digital handshake, you have to follow the user journey from the mailbox to the inbox, so to speak, you have to follow them from the note to where they are, which is digital. And so that’s that’s what we do. And so we ask a realtor clients estimate, but to what extent did we assist in the sale and sometimes it’s 10%. Sometimes it’s 50%. Sometimes it’s 80%. But we take that percentage, and we multiply it across everybody, and we use the we throw out the high and the low and we use statistical analysis. And then we come up with the number which is after 18 months of working with audience 16.2 And you spend $1 with us, you’re gonna get 16 $16.20 back. And But the caveat is, you have to do the follow up the right word. The fortune is in the follow up. Not work with us. If you don’t use the whole, it’s not a set and forget. Nope, nope, nothing is and any market or any channel that says that you’re going to you’re going to you know, lose lose fat while you sleep or, or gain muscle mass while you sleep runaway. You’re a huckster, we’re not. We’re a very powerful integrated marketing platform. But you do you do have to follow up like anything.
D.J. Paris 38:55 Boy, you’re in I think, I think the industry is needed a service like this. And it sounds like I’m doing a commercial for you. And I’m not, although if you ever do need someone to do a commercial, I’m teasing. But, but But seriously, I have been in this industry for 13 years, and I’ve yet to see this exact process from from sort of a to z and it also incorporating AI, which, which, of course is big in the news right now. I think so many of our realtors have probably been on chat GBT and GPT and tried tried a few things and then gone okay, I don’t totally know what to do with this yet. I like that you guys have been working with it for years and have actually sort of extracted out some of the best sort of best practices for your particular sequences. And this idea of because like, I know for me when I when I use chat, GBT oftentimes it’s it’s good for like, certain things. It’s not it’s only gonna get smarter though. It’s only gonna get more sophisticated. But you know, right now if I’m like, oh, you know if I Well anyway, I’ve done I’ve done lots of different acts. specimens with it, I find it very interesting. But I use it in a pretty dumb way. I don’t really know how to elegantly extract good data out of there. You guys have been doing this for years. So you do know how to do that. So like if I say, hey, write me a persuasive recruiting email for this realtor that I want to recruit to our firm. It doesn’t come back with anything too impressive, because I’m not really giving it a very, super specific question. I’m just sort of going, hey, just kind of search around online, find something that that you think might make sense, and it comes back, but it helps maybe with creativity helps some starting points. But it isn’t really a set and forget product right now. It’s just kind of like, maybe gives me a few ideas. But what you guys have done is actually done, you’ve done all the heavy lifting to determine this works. This doesn’t work. Here are the metrics. You’re all you know, objectively based. So you’re looking across the board at the numbers. And I mean, gosh, if I could get a 16 times return on every dollar I spend on anything, I would be a pretty happy person. So this isn’t a inexpensive platform, however, of course, but it shouldn’t be and of course, it wouldn’t be for 16 times return. And of course it’s not going to be inexpensive but that’s why this you know, I can’t even imagine the amount of time and energy and money you guys invested into this entire system. If anyone wants to learn more audience.co is the place to go. Jessie, what else should agents Okay, let’s let’s let’s wipe the slate clean for a second I want to talk specifically about Instagram and Facebook only because I think Realtors tend to live on Instagram and Facebook and with their social media lives. Tik Tok is becoming more prevalent for realtors, but I still think most agents are are hanging out on Instagram. And maybe then Facebook, you know, I don’t know which probably Instagrams doing a little bit more traffic than than Facebook for realtors these days, but I don’t know what our agents doing wrong. And what would you recommend that maybe they could make a slight shift or major shift that would they get better results from?
Jesse Stein 42:14 Yeah, so tours, vertical video. This is the first time in the history of the commercial Internet, in the history of social media, that where you can take one format, and distributed out natively to all the platforms. So Instagram is now native vertical video. So that is holding your phone up like a phone’s not landscape. So holding your phone up and shooting a video, a video walking around the neighborhood a video of a listing a video of a new construction, you name it, right? That’s vertical video, as produced or unproduced as you want to make it you can then distribute that out to Instagram natively, Twitter, natively Facebook, and of course, the most important up and comer tick tock and so people just think oh isn’t tick tock for selling hoodies to 14 year olds. Not at all. It’s so beyond that. And there’s hundreds of really forward looking realtors who are silently crushing it on Tik Tok, because it’s underpriced attention because there’s very few people there. So what I always look for are the opportunities where there aren’t many people there and you’ve got two to three year runway now on tick tock, and the beauty is you can use social media management software tool like a Hootsuite H O T shirt, right, and you can use that tool, shoot your vertical video, and then you can blast it out. And guess what? I bet some of you are thinking, Well, YouTube isn’t that landscape, no YouTube shorts, which you may have noticed, if you’re a YouTube consumer, YouTube shorts, which are minute or less, that’s all native, vertical. So the world is going native vertical video. And it’s really, really important to get on that bandwagon. And the last thing I’ll say, is 800 to 1000 word articles on LinkedIn, car, rush it and you can now on LinkedIn. Okay, on LinkedIn. So algorithmically. LinkedIn has never been about video and I can talk to you about why because of all of its back in training and how they actually make their their money 800 to 1000 word articles about your neighborhoods, market reports and so forth. Try to send you a maximum of four hashtags on LinkedIn and you want to post these articles and then the key is you want to Connect with as many people as you can like when you subscribe to audience, we get you all the LinkedIn profiles of homeowners in your farm. So you’ve got those. And then what you can do is you can use an automated tool like an octopus CRM, which is a Chrome extension to automatically connect to everyone on LinkedIn. And then when you post your content, they all see it. So those two things vertical video and 800 1000 word articles on LinkedIn.
D.J. Paris 45:27 I love it, I’m going to I, you know, it’s funny, I’m going to reach out Jesse to you because I want to explore doing vertical video for recruiting purposes for our brokerage. So I want to talk about how to do that in LinkedIn offline. So I am excited. This is one of the most exciting conversations I’ve had over the years, I’m really, really thrilled I really want everyone to think about there, we know that realtors are dealing with lots of reactive stuff. So all day long, you’re getting emails, texts, phone calls, you’re getting just lots of messages or things you have to deal with in the moment to secure a deal to deal with a current client. You know, and, and all of that just is going to interrupt your day and take your time. We know this just happens happens to me, I don’t even practice real estate, personally, even though I have a license. And but we have 800 agents here. So I’m getting their their challenges all day long as well. So I know the challenges that Realtors face, one of the hardest things to do is to consistently eke out these marketing strategies and to be able to consistently get them running day in day out, because let’s face it, you just got a lot of things to do. turning this over to a company where you can just kind of oversee and make your final edits, I think makes all the sense in the world. This again, this is what top agents are using. So audience.co is the place to go to learn about how this works, again, about a 16 times return on your investment after 18 months. Yeah, that’s that’s a that’s, that’s beating what I’m getting in the stock market by about a million miles. So this is this is again, it’s not we’re not talking, what we’re really talking about is growing your brand. And by doing by utilizing tools like this, this will allow you to have more time to do what you do best, which I think is the more one to one, intimate relationships, you know, the vulnerable, intimate sort of connections that you want to have with your clients. This allows you to do more of what you do best. Speaking with clients hanging out with them, meeting their needs, allow Jesse and his team to do all the other back end stuff so that you guys can you can do what you do best. So I’m a huge fan. Go to audience.co. Jesse, is there anything else our audience should know about about audience?
Jesse Stein 47:49 Yeah, well, I just wanted to recognize you and what you do as a perfect representation of the way that we like to guide our clients in terms of just add value add value add value. And the reason why one of the many reasons why kale is so successful is because of what you do DJ and so you’re you are adding value guiding more helping more educating more solving problems more by just having experts on here myself nodding, I’m not positioning myself as an expert. Oh, no, you’re an expert. I think all realtors you have on here and others. And so you really walk your talk. And it’s the reason why Cale crushes it and is able to offer the kinds of amazing Commission’s versus its competition that it does. And I just wanted to commend you for that.
D.J. Paris 48:46 Thanks, and really grateful to all of our listeners as well for continuing to support this podcast. Please, as you are, as we’re getting close to the end here, please remember to tell a friend just think of one other realtor that is struggling with their marketing right now. And but guess what, in 2023, all realtors are struggling in some way. This is a tough year. Let’s be honest about it. And let’s face it head on. And let’s think about this is the time to actually step on the gas and do more, a lot of agents are going to peel back because they’re going to have to this is the year that you want to step on the gas and push forward and gain market share. So audience dot SEO is the place to do that. Guys check it out. It’s really cool. I don’t have to pitch any more for Jesse because he he did an perfect job himself, but I want to become a customer. And so I’m going to look into this for my own efforts around recruiting. So I’m going to be using the same strategies you will likely be using if you check out audience.co. So check out audience.co Jesse and his team are amazing. They’re legit. He’s got the track record to back it up and all the metrics and data. So Jesse, thank you so much for being on our show. You’ve just been an amazing hour. Really appreciate you And yeah, and for everyone else again, tell a friend, leave us a review to let us know what you think of the show. It really helps us know how to continue to improve to meet your needs. So, Jesse, thank you so much on behalf of the audience and on behalf of Jesse and myself, I want to thank everyone for listening. We will see you next time. Thanks, Jesse.
Jesse Stein 50:19 Thanks, TJ.
Why You Should Create A VIP Club For Your Real Estate Clients • Amy Stockberger
Mar 15, 2023
Amy Stockberger talks about her journey as real estate agent, and why she decided to work with her father rather than starting a business on her own. Amy discusses the importance of relationships with the clients and how she started a VIP Club. Next, Amy describes how the agents can use branding themselves through monetizing it and how she created a lifetime support model saving stress and money. Last, she emphasized that building trust between clients and realtor is most important thing.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What is a VIP club? And why should you absolutely start one for your real estate clients today? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show. In just a moment we’re going to be speaking with the top producing team in South Dakota, Amy stock burger. But before we get to Amy just a couple of quick reminders please tell a friend about our show. The best way you can help us grow is by telling another realtor about what we do here, send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from a browser or if they’re already into podcast, just have them search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And also if you want to do us an extra favor leave us a review on whichever podcast app you might be listening to my voice right now on it helps us and it also not only does it help us reach more people but it also helps us know what you like about the show and also what we should change and improve because really guys we do this for you and we want your feedback so let us know what you think of the show unless of course you’re only gonna give us one star then you know you can skip skip the review the review all that’s not a word the review. Anyway, leave us a review tell a friend thanks again. We love you. We’re so grateful to be here five or six years in we’re gonna keep making more episodes and now on to my conversation with the great Amy stock burger
okay today on the show we have Amy stock burger with Amy stock burger real estate in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Let me tell you more about Amy. Now Amy and her husband are broker owners of Amy stock burger real estate and also run a team reg brokerage model which I’m excited to learn more about. Now. They have been the highest producing team in the state of South Dakota since 2017 and ranked 23rd in the nation by real trends. They served 559 clients for 171 million in volume back in 2021. That was with 15 agents. Last year they did for a work of 486 clients 160 6 million in volume. Now AMI created a unique and all inclusive lifetime home support system that turns their clients into referral machines resulting in over 70% of their business source from relationship referrals. Amy has also successfully monetized each pillar of her lifetime home support model, which has added a lucrative revenue stream while gaining clients and Agent loyalty like no other. To learn more, please visit Amy’s website, which is Amy stockbroker.com, which is m y sto CK BERG er.com. And by the way, we have a link to that in the show notes. Amy, welcome to the show.
Amy Stockberger 4:27 Thanks for having me, DJ. I’m glad to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:29 We got started a little late because Amy is down in Florida right now. And I was very, very jealous because I will be actually just a couple of hours from where she is starting in a couple of days. So I got very excited and we talked a lot about the winter months and how nice it is to get away for a moment or two. But Amy, I’m excited to to speak with you and you are you and your husband’s team and all of your agents you guys are just obviously you’re crushing it. So I’m always fascinated by A people who are who are doing really well and our audience loves to hear how you do that and how you started. And I’d love to go all the way back to the beginning of your career in real estate and first learn why real estate you know, how did you get involved? Why, and what was it like when you first started. Got it.
Amy Stockberger 5:18 So I got into real estate straight out of college, my dad had owned a Coldwell Banker brokerage at the time and did a really excellent thing for me, he got me a job. But at that time, I made $24,000 a year. And I’m the oldest Hi Dee, hi, I and he put me in the back office and said, Hey, sink or swim, see what you can do any any did the best thing for me taught me everything from the back end, the support team part of it and just knowing that the administrative part of running a brokerage, and then I fell in love with the industry, I got licensed, and I’ve done about every single position you can do within the real estate industry. So I started out support, I then we got licensed, and I became a buyer’s agent, which at that time was very, very, very new. There wasn’t a lot of teams at that point. And then I became a single agent went out on my own, and then quickly started my own team with my sister and a part time assistant. And then my husband joined my business back in 2009. And that’s when we really started to scale and take a hobby that paid me and made it into a lucrative career. And then we were team a team for a long time. And then we started our brokerage in 2019, and still run it as a team or as a broker. Yeah, as a team. In our brokerage we call the team rich, meaning that we still give all of that support that we really feel agents need to make them very, very successful in in their craft. And my vision is to create big juicy legacies for everybody within my ecosystem by using my lifetime Home Support Foundation.
D.J. Paris 6:52 So there’s a lot to unpack there, thank you for that information. I am, I was one thing that really struck me and again, really speaks to how well you run your brokerage and your team is that you really started this in 2019, which, again, you was not at not a champion had an easy year to do much of anything in real estate, right. So the fact that you you know, during the pandemic, were able to put these sorts of processes in place and start the foundation of this team, which again, I know you’ve been working in real estate long time before then. But this idea of doing this in the middle of the pandemic, boy, that’s what a bold and courageous move. Well,
Amy Stockberger 7:30 we started the brokerage in 2019, we started our real growth pattern really started in 2009. And we started our lifetime home support, you know, our our model of lifetime home support, we started that really in 2015, that’s when I really figured out that the way I was doing things i i loved taking care of the client, I loved the experience that the clients were getting. And I wanted to make sure that we were providing the highest level of service to keep us top of mind for them to have them review it refer us as much as possible and repeat business. And so that was the the really the game changer for us is when we put that into our business because then we’re we had a process a system a strategy to help the client before, during and after the home buying and selling process. And there’s so much to be said about how that before and after relationship part is could be even more important than that during the transaction, relationship heart.
D.J. Paris 8:26 Yeah, I’ve always thought that that was probably the maybe the thing I’ve tried to focus on in the show and talking to guests is I’m not? Well, initially, when I first started the show, I was mostly interested in how they treated their clients during a transaction. Because of course, top 1% producers are clearly you know, providing a level of service and support that maybe other agents aren’t. So my initially that was my my my main interest when I started the show. And then I realized pretty quickly early on that top producers all had very, very impressive strategies for while working with a client. But then I sort of got bored listening to it because it was a lot of the same stuff. And then I thought, well, I’m actually more interested in what happens in between sales. Because that’s, I think, where a lot of missed opportunities happen, obviously, you know, agents oftentimes just forget, because they’re busy. They’re in the middle of a million other things. And it’s like, oh, so and so bought a home three years ago. Yeah, I should probably reach out but having an actual strategy so that you’re staying in touch and providing value is amazing. But I wanted to actually go back to something you said because I always, every year I say I’m going to remember to ask guests more about this. And I never do. And I’m so glad because I would have forgotten today. But you you actually just jogged my memory. You were saying that you weren’t necessarily super happy with the way you were running things until was it around 2015 When you started really working on your process? So I’m curious is what were you doing back then that you that just to identify a problem or an issue that you were having? What were some of the issues you were having that you caught was due to want to create a solution for? Well, I
Amy Stockberger 10:02 was looking at the lifetime value of a client, you know, what is your lifetime value of your client, the value of them throughout your entire career, and it was putting the numbers to that, that, you know, when in a career, typically a lifetime value of a client, the times they’re going to transact is that, you know, in our market 100 to $175,000. And then what does that look like then for the lifetime value of the referrals that they’re giving us if if say, 10 to 15% of your your sphere is going to transact within 12 months. What’s that mean? When you you keep, you know, multiplying that success on making sure that your clients are becoming your referral partners. And so what I did in 2015, or before, what made me actually start, the lifetime home support model that I created, is I was running crazy open houses I was spending is immediate, felt like I had all this money going out on lead generation that the ROI wasn’t there. And I just knew that there had to be a better way to take care of my clients so that their experience was top notch. And then I also wanted to make sure that I again, had them there for being my referral partners. And then I wanted to monetize it, I that’s a big part of it. I’m a Systems person, like I said, Hi, di, there’s a system and strategy for every part of our business. And having that in place, I decided to put my my VIP club in. And so what my VIP club is, and I have a lot of different pillars within our business of our lifetime home support. But the one we’re going to visit with you about today was that VIP club where our clients get access to all of our pillars or a VIP club before, during, and after. So lifetime access for free. And so one of the first things I did is I put a moving truck in place, 15 foot moving truck in place. Put that there for my clients to serve them before, during and after for life. They get to use it for free. But But I monetized it right away. So I went back and did you monetize it? So I figured out what my debt service was for it. And I went and sold ad space on the back of it and made money off of my truck. So
D.J. Paris 11:58 I So did you purchase the truck? Or did you lease the truck? And then put like, how did you do that?
Amy Stockberger 12:03 Yeah, I purchased it, but you can lease. So yeah, I have created a whole system for other agents to take what took me how many years to perfect and I always say I have a PhD and failing forward, I’ve made all the mistakes. So what I’ve done is created a VIP course start your VIP course.com. And it it basically it’s a copy and paste formula to implement and monetize your VIP club. So agents can go out and take everything the ultimate all the material I have, I have a seven modules I have it broken down into the blueprint for your 32nd elevator speech about your VIP club, I have it broken down on how to monetize each pillar. So I have a moving truck, I have a party supply of a tool shed, I have a discount Market Center, I have a client events section, I have an agent recruitment section. And then I show them how to monetize each side of that with every system they need within it. Like there’s one whole module of just operations, because there’s so much that happens with all the departments within your company. And if you don’t have your systems, you’re not going to scale you need that those two are sisters, you need systems to scale. That’s just how it works. And so I have a whole module that’s just telling you here’s a checklist you need for every part of your business to implement and monetize this VIP program because at the end of the day, your clients are going to remember that experience and this experience that we’re providing which I’ll go deeper into on the next part of it here is that they’re going to remember it no matter what if you’re there and you have the systems in place to keep top of mind you know Gary Keller said it and Millionaire Real Estate that humans have two places in their brain for realtors, and it’s our jobs to knock the other one out and so that we’re staying top of mind so they’re their repeat business and referral business and so the trucks was the first thing monetize those I have two gonna have three here and 23 so monetize those guys. And then I added my party and tool shed almost almost immediately. And so what that is a a party tool equipment that they can use. So like think of banquet tables and chairs, commercial grade food warmers, cotton candy, snow cone, popcorn, machines, platters, anything you could think of for a party bouncy houses, all those things so clients can come back and use those for free for life. But a big part of this is that I put my brand on everything. So again with my truck, my clients get to use my trucks. My trucks are a marketing vehicle for me they get out 600 some, you know, impressions per mile. I bet they’re out there. So and then I monetize the back of them so people that so I make money off of my trucks and then now it’s my party party equipment. So everything that you know people for graduations, parties, people, my clients come back and use these for life. They throw parties, my name is everywhere. My brand is everywhere. So again, it’s more brand awareness right there in there. And I’m able to then you know, obviously my clients are referring us because they’re getting such value from us. And then there’s so many stages of homeownership. So we created our tool shed or tool shed has everything you can think of Um, that a client would need for every season of homeownership so from ladders, wheelbarrows, commercial grade, paint sprayers, carpet cleaners, you know, the big fans, all those things
D.J. Paris 15:10 they can. So basically you guys have all this equipment, your clients are able to contact you at any time say, hey, I need to borrow a power washer for my deck, or I need I have a children’s party coming up, I need a need to Can I use the bouncy house and then your truck is is there on at the event I’m assuming or nearby the event where people can see it. Your name is everywhere. You’ve monetized the truck. So it pays for itself. And you’re getting all this amazing marketing exposure and you become the person that you’re you create the stickiness because your clients are like, Oh, Amy’s got everything. I’m gonna just go to her. I’m one of her clients. That is brilliant.
Amy Stockberger 15:47 Absolutely. Then so because because we have we have over it’s actually this year, I betcha we’re going to be probably 2500 reservations that we’re going to have from our clients this year. But because there’s so and again, again, this is your branding yourself, you’re serving your client, which is what you want to do your brand yourself and then you’re monetizing I monetize all of them. So I’ve already said tool shed, they’re all monetized too. And you’re, I created software because of that, because your clients need a one stop shop that’s just about you. So when you think about the cycle of a buyer or seller, they’re out on your websites and your socials when they’re vetting you out. And or when they’re looking for houses. That’s what they’re doing. And that’s it. Yeah, they’re not coming back to your website, again,
D.J. Paris 16:29 to Zillow, any other time to check your price and see what their home is worth. Yeah,
Amy Stockberger 16:33 yep. So I created software, my lifetime home support software, so my clients can go out and they sell it to my students to where it has everything they need. So you’re serving, I’m providing value they’re going and looking at all of the equipment we have, they’re renting it on that on my software, so it easily can pick it up, it’s all set up by systems inside of it. So that might FTE my full time employee time on this is next to nothing because it is software, you
D.J. Paris 16:57 don’t have to actually organize that a lot. It’s all done through a system.
Amy Stockberger 17:01 And then and then that software though is set up where I have, you know, all my my Facebook blocked my Facebook feed, so that’s in front of them, everything for my client event is up there, everything for my home support team partners, which is another pillar, I’ll talk to you about my private Facebook group for them is on there. So I have listings on there, easy way for us to review or review me and my agents. So again, it’s it’s a place for them to go one stop shop that has everything they need. And I’m not selling to them, I’m serving to them, right. And again, if there’s one lead generation that everybody should focus on the most and spend the most amount of money on is their data bank, their data make, especially in a market like this, and this type of market is an opportunity market for those who, for those who are frozen in fear, they’re going to get just there, they’re going to get passed by they’re going to get passed by right now is it is it opportunity market. And this is where we’re gonna go in and pick up market share, that’s our market share is 23. You know, we’re climbing is the theme of our year that we’re going in. And that’s you need, and you need to do it through your data bank, because they are the best for know like and trust you. And the referrals from your data bank are the best referrals to work,
D.J. Paris 18:11 you’re almost guaranteed Yeah, they’re guaranteed
Amy Stockberger 18:13 and they come to you knowing your value. And one of the big things too, about this lifetime home support model, like my isa department, we have an 8% You know, contact to contract. Conversion Rate, you know, the market average is like one to two,
D.J. Paris 18:28 and then explain that to me. I’m sorry, I wasn’t not sure I totally understood that.
Amy Stockberger 18:32 My isa contract to close. Right. We have an 8% contract contract to close. Got it. Yeah. So that contract to close. Sorry, from contact to close
D.J. Paris 18:42 contact cold. Got it? Got it? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So the Minnesota
Amy Stockberger 18:45 lead comes in. So my lifetime home support model is a hook because you have to know that anybody who is going out to any website, they’re talking to five to six other brokers to so my lifetime home support model is the hook that keeps them with that said, hey, with us, you get access to all of these things for life. And I haven’t gone through all of them yet. But this is what we have. Because we’re lifetime home support. We’re here to save you time, stress and money. And we’re the experts of connecting buyers and sellers. And we do that and help you build wealth through real estate with our lifetime home support model. And so again, having this it just even if you’re doing lead generation for your web leads, you have this hook of lifetime home support that keeps them with you.
D.J. Paris 19:21 So, yes, and boy, again, you just said so much as a couple of things I want to I want to dial into because from our listener perspective, you said a couple of things that that really sort of grabbed my attention, which was well, actually, I’m gonna ask you a question. So you had said this, and you said this very quickly. So I want to sort of rewind back to this particular point, because I think this year, it’s particularly important and I think you would agree, but I’m curious, because you’d mentioned your database, your sphere of influence your you call data bank, is you know, the most powerful source of of new business And what I am curious about is and you’d set a percentage, and I just missed it. I know the percentage is 16%. That’s the number I know. But I don’t know which number I missed the 10 to 15%. Yeah. So here’s what here’s what Amy and I are talking about. So in your database, depending on what numbers you’re looking at, we’ll say 10 to 15% of the people in your database are going to transact in real estate within the next 12 months, or Amy, correct me if I have that wrong, but something to that effect, correct. So if we, if we know that, and if first of all, I think there’s a lot of agents that have never even put a database together. But if and if you haven’t, this is the time to do it, especially this year, because Amy’s exactly right, all the top producers this year, they are getting market share, they’re gaining market share on the agents that are a little bit reluctant or are pulling back, and maybe they’re a little scared, or maybe they’re depressed because of the way interest rates and inventory. But the brokers that are stepping on the gas a little bit and realizing this is the year to deepen relationships are just going to take that market share away from the agents that are pre are pulling back. But what I wanted to say is we’re basically you just basically smashed a myth or whatever or discredited a myth, which is I don’t have enough potential clients. No, you do, because 10 to 15% of the people you already know, are going to need a realtor in the next 12 months. I guess the question is, how, what percentage of those 10 to 15%? Are you actually going to earn or get, and if you just sit back and wait, it’s probably going to be a smaller percentage that if you’re more proactive, and what I’m reason I’m making such a big deal about this, I think this is such a relief to agents that are like, I don’t have enough leads, I don’t have anything new stuff coming. It’s like, okay, that might be but you already have this, this huge group of people that you could focus on, you know, developing more intimate relationships, more more connected relationships with but anyway, I just wanted to make that point.
Amy Stockberger 21:58 Oh, and that’s so true in a, the best real estate business you can build is a relationship based business real estate will always be relationship based. And now is that it’s always your should always be doing this, but it’s a game changer when you add something like this in to your business, because you can scale so quickly. And, and you’re serving. And if you’re not in this to serve anyway, it’s likely not going to work out for you, but you’re serving at such a high level that it becomes a law of reciprocity in humans are so predictable. And the Law of Reciprocity is just you get something you give something back and kind that’s just how our brains work. And so the our VIP club is such a huge part of our lifetime home support pillars. And you know, another part to that, I should say, so we have our party shed or you know, our trucks, we get those monetized or party shed or tool shed, those are all monetized. And again, our tool shed are things people don’t want to buy, rent or store we have. And that’s just the way they’re going to need the you know what they’re going to need. And in my course, since I’ve done this for so long, we thought we know and I have it all laid out in there. We know what equipment is good and what is not going to work we know what quiz equipments gonna last you summer, which one’s gonna last you two years. So I have laid that all laid out too, because that’s, that’s a trial and error thing, you know that you just wouldn’t know if you hadn’t done this process. So I’ve done that. But then another part of our home support team is our discount center. So I have a relationship with an online discount center that I’m offering up in this that they can go out and our clients get 85 to 25% off over 100,000 different national big brand names. So like Nike, Under Armour, Walmart, things like that, they get deeper discounts than what they would get on products and services they’re already going to buy that we’re offering up to our clients. So they can save another $5,300 a year just by using that and that so that’s you know, here’s another thing we’re offering you to save you time stress and money. And that has a lot of different lead generation in it that I’m using right now for corporate partnerships and, and building market share on that, which is totally different process. But it’s it’s so so so lovely because again, relationship based is a relationship based business is the easiest business to scale. And then the next one is my home support team. So again, our clients needs so many different services and products throughout all of his seasons of buying and selling right. So I put together what I feel is the best of the best of vendors within my local market who are part of my home support team. And they give our clients preferential treatment, preferential sometimes pricing and are there to make sure they’re giving them legendary care like we do so think of your obviously lender and inspector you know those things. We have all those within its age back. We have carpet cleaners, we have home cleaners, we have
D.J. Paris 24:39 the interior, probably mold remediation,
Amy Stockberger 24:43 everything so you know, I I charged these partners $3,500 a year to be a part of my program. And so my clients have access to it. So I have a huge lead gen or a huge revenue source in this but it’s it’s threefold. My home support team is threefold and that is It really is so beautiful for my clients because that’s another value add to my VIP. So they have access to all of my people that I’m keeping in front of them, because we have all the systems in to keep the home support team partners in front of my clients when they need them. They have the discounts, they have all of that. But then the second part of it is obviously the revenue generation. And that’s another big thing that brokers and team leaders really need to be thinking about this year is, what other revenue streams are you adding into your business, it’s very important to have other different revenue streams that you have laying down for to continue to keep monetizing your business and building it. And so so the second part is that we have the revenue stream coming in. And then the third part is market share. So a part of the requirement for my home support team partners to be a part is that we get to come in and present to their employees, we get to come in and tell them about our lifetime home support model all the things they get with being an AMI stockbroker real estate client for life, once we get into that one too many presentations and showing them all of our success strategies. Because we have a, we have a at least by Up program, we have an instant offer program, we have a guaranteed sales program, we will love it or leave it guarantee. So we have all these systems for every stage that once I get in front of them, and I’m telling them about, it’s far better than anything I could throw on social media. It’s far better than anything, it’s a one to many. And then we have a system where we’re staying sticky to where we’re keeping our information in front of that employee. So when they have a life change, which is where we can be a service to anybody in a life change, right? That’s what we do as realtors, that those people are who we can serve? Why would they not call me, they’re calling us because we’re the broker of choice, because we’re the ones who are offering the most amount of benefit, besides being the leaders in connecting buyers and sellers, but everything else they get for life with us.
D.J. Paris 26:41 So I just want to all of that was amazing. I wanted to point to something that I have never heard anyone else say. And I’m just going to kind of focus on it. Because I think it’s something that really any of our any of our listeners could possibly implement, although I Oh, by the way, for everyone who wants to learn this program in this system, Amy’s got an entire program for you, which is Is she calls it the copy and paste formula to monetize your own VIP club. And if you want access and Amy, it’s start your VIP club.com I believe Correct? Yes. So we’re gonna, by the way, there’s a link to that in the notes. And guys, this is really what you want. Because, look, I mean, anyone can put programs like this together, but I have never seen a broker or realtor put this kind of program together who has the level of success that Amy and her team do. And it’s it’s not like they’re only doing massive $10 million plus luxury deals, you know, she said their average price points, like, you know, 200 250,003 40 Yeah, so so. So that is a very, you know, sort of median price point for a lot of ACLs. She’s doing a lot of transactions, doing 500 Plus transactions a year with her team. And guys, she put all this together, and she wants you to learn more about this as well. So start your VIP club.com has a lot of this information, there’s, there’s, I think even a couple different membership options. There’s like a one time and then there’s monthly and all this but you know, it’s funny, whenever I see these kinds of products, it’s it’s really never backed by a brokerage or a team that’s actually doing a ton of production. So I think you have this really unique spot in this very crowded place. And we’ll show you how to, you know, create this amazing business, just like Oh, I’m actually doing it. And you know, I love that. So start your VIP club.com is where you can learn more about this. But the one thing I wanted to mention, which was a couple of things first having a private Facebook group. The only reason I’m mentioning this for your clients, by the way, which Amy has talked about is this is a brilliant thing I’ve never heard anybody mentioned this idea. Now here at our brokerage we have a private Facebook group for our brokers are in Illinois, everyone’s everyone’s called the broker. So for our Realtors, and they are, you know, they chat back and forth in there. We do trainings in there, we do a lot of celebration stuff, but I never have heard of a realtor having that for their clients. But it’s the same exact idea. It’s brilliant. Because your clients get to know each other, you’re probably posting content in there from time to time, and your clients get more direct access to you and your and the other clients so that in and of itself, I love and that’s something really just about anybody could could put together. But I love the fact that you have created this whole program that shows people step by step how to do things like yeah, you know, I think I do want to offer a van or storage or a shed with tools so that my clients can use it. The other thing you said that was really fascinating to me and as somebody who sort of works on the management side of of a brokerage. I don’t know why we’re not doing this, which is you charge your vendors, the ones that you refer to you charge them to be part of your preferred vendor list. And that is I’ve never heard anybody mentioned that that is such a smart idea. because number one, you want to make sure, of course, that they’re that they’re committed. And these vendors have do a good job, which you’ve already done. But it’s like, no, you should have to pay to get access to my clients, my clients are really the most important thing for me. And I want to know that, you know, I’m assuming that the thought is that you want these vendors to have some skin in the game, so that you know that at least you’re receiving some value along the way as well.
Amy Stockberger 30:21 Oh, gotcha. And think about it just as a from the realtors perspective, that client is trusting you for I mean, we play so many roles to these, these beautiful humans who are in a really big, big financial decision in their life. And, and they trust who you know, like and trust. And so, most importantly, people have been partners have always been so important to me, but I really, I really wanted to, to offer them to local Sioux Falls like our state, we don’t have a state income tax, like we just have, we have a lot of growth coming in. Because of that, we’re just you know, Forbes is where the best place to, you know, start a business. I think since my since 20 years now, since I’ve been in the business, you know, it’s been so long, but I really love growing local to, like, I really love giving back and growing local, you know, it’s like, Okay, I’m gonna help you grow your business, because I’m going to show you, I know how to market, I’m going to put you into my marketing, I have a whole system that I market for you to keep you in front of the people. And then they stay and they’re going to use you, it’s just a no brainer. And my home support team partners, I love them. They’re so good. And Mike, my goal this year is to have 125. So do the math on that $3,500 a year. Last year, we were right around that 100 mark. And the these these home supporting partners, they’re the ones who also do ad space on the back of my truck. They’re the ones my client events. So we do a really big client events a year and they’re the ones who I have a whole system in my course about this to that they pay for my client events, I have a whole sponsorship category, where they can pay for on that. So my monetize my client events. And again, if you’re not doing client events, you should anyway because you should be loving on them. But typically I sell anywhere between three to four additional units, every client event just from again, the law of reciprocity, and then having it is good for my home support team partners to they’re out there. And they come in, you know, the ones who are sponsoring, they’re there, and they’re meeting my clients face to face. And so it’s a great opportunity.
D.J. Paris 32:12 And the other thing that you said that I absolutely love, and I’ve sort of been beating the drum on this since I started the podcast, although I’m not a producing agent. So probably nobody listens to me, but but my guests, they do listen to so I wanted to make sure they that because you’ve said so much already, that I know a lot of our listeners heads are probably spinning going, Oh my God, there’s so many good ideas. This is a good one that I had. I’m trying to think of anyone we’ve done almost 500 episodes. My memory is garbage. So maybe somebody said this before, but I don’t think so. And here’s what Amy mentioned. And she said it very quickly. But it was really a brilliant nugget, in my opinion, which was when she has clients. She’s like, Oh, by the way, you know, she obviously knows where they work. She knows, you know, probably enough about the office they worked at or a little bit about their business. And then Amy’s like, Hey, who’s like the HR person, I want to talk to them and see if I can come in and do a presentation for the other employees, which is absolutely one of the smartest things because you’re going to have one of their employees vouching for you and saying, oh my god, you got to have Amy in here. She’ll bring in lunch, and she’ll do a little presentation. And that is absolutely brilliant. And nobody else does
Amy Stockberger 33:17 that. So I’m creating a course on this because we have you read the book, The Dream manager book? No. Okay, so the dream manager was, I think it was written in 2007. Back before the world was the world now, right where we’ve just had such a hard time with the employees and we own my husband and I own a handful of businesses. So we know how hard it is to keep keep keep attract and retain good talent. And so that’s basically the concept of that book is that it’s getting harder and harder each year to attract and retain good talent, so employees, and that a happy employee is a productive employee. So what I’ve done is I’ve created my and they a corporate partnership with all of these things with the foundation in my lifetime home support, and I’ve gone out to companies and just say here, I want to be a corporate partnership, I’m going to offer you all these things for free all this different parts of my VIP that we haven’t talked about all of it, I’m gonna offer that for you for free to put into your employee benefit program. And you can do this too, to help you become a better place to work for your employees don’t just have one more benefit of working for you. We’re going to offer up different Lunch and Learns activities because again, statistically an employee who owns is typically a more productive employee than an employee that rents is just stats is what it is that we come in and we just did we we get the opportunity to be in front of these people and not and again, I have you know, the high level you have the sea level that I’m getting in front of because we’re offering them this and I also get all the employees too. So the lead gen I’m able to give to my agents from from what we’re seeing from this is fabulous, like my goal is to have 10,000 employees signed up by the end of 23 We just signed up a really big one that I’m so excited about that it’s just going to be a huge thing for us to be able to help them the big company but also my employees or my my agents I’m gonna be able to help them grow their business even bigger than I have, because I’m gonna have more leads coming in for them through In this lifetime home support corporate partnership program.
D.J. Paris 35:03 Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a wonderful idea. Tell us more about the program itself for agents who might want to consider adding in some of not only these processes, but these revenue streams, right? Like, this is an amazing thing that you’ve figured out not just how to, because I’ve had a lot of agents on our show, who have amazing processes and strategies, and really, it’s just incredible, but they haven’t always monetized other parts of the business outside of the actual transaction, which of course, is monetized. So this idea of monetizing everything else, even like you were saying, you know, you know, getting a van and, and, you know, getting advertising on it. And even that in and of itself is smart, because it’s essentially becomes a free thing. But tell us more about the program to start your VIP club. Let’s I’d love to hear like what do people get? And what are the price points for it? Okay,
Amy Stockberger 35:55 so it’s basically the only course of its kind that gives agents single agents team leads brokers, a roadmap to creating a VIP club that will turn their clients into referral partners for life, and also to walk them through how to monetize each part of it. So from the moving trucks to the party shed to the tool shed to the discount center, I have discounts for all of these and discounts for the products that they can buy, as well as what products to buy, which ones are the best, then I it’s a seven course module seven module course sorry, in there and it has a section on each of the pillars for implementing monetizing checklists has a whole operations module has a whole marketing module for your own, I have a VIP clubs made for you, I have press releases made for you, I have your 32nd elevator speech made for you, I have your your first your rollout to your data bank, that initial rollout to your data bank, I have everything you’re gonna need to get sponsorship for your client events, how to throw a big a big, great client event again, I’m very system centric. So I also in this course gave away as a bonus. So my three of my my high level client event checklist from beginning to end that basically all they have to do is put one thing in it auto populates everything they need to do to run a a profitable client event that their clients are gonna love and their agents are going to attend. That’s the other part of it, to get their agents there to really love it. So that’s included in it. We also have a software, like I said that we created for our lifetime home support model. So it walks you through how the software works and what it’s going to do to save you on employee time. And it’s going to help keep you and give you more referrals because your clients have a one stop shop that that they’re going to need after the transaction again, they’re not going back to your website after the transaction, they’re just not. And so it just gives you a step by step no shiny object like I think our industry is so shiny object, don’t you like people throw money and all this stuff, and then they don’t go back and check the ROI. So this is a no shiny object. Here’s, here’s what you do, I’m going to show you how to do it, I’m going to give you all the tools you need from the contracts to sell off your sponsorship for your trucks to your client events, to your party and tool ship, as well as additional lead generation that goes into it. Because all of this has additional lead generation, I give away all of his stuff to nonprofits for free, I give it away to first responders for free, I give it away I sponsor some schools that I give it away to for free guess what I get to do I get to go in and talk to these people or I get to send in my employees to go in and talk to these people and tell them about our lifetime home support model. Because we’re doing that and it’s a good community to give back. I love that again, you should want to do that as a business owner. That it’s it’s a whole circle all around way for them to grow a airtight, no worrying about any type of market shift type of business.
D.J. Paris 38:38 So what I love is specifically going all the way back to one of my sort of initial questions was like, What are you doing in between the sales? Well, you’re basically telling us all of the things that you’re doing in between sales cycles, which how long and you’re like, what’s the average time where somebody buys or sells a home, and then on to their next, like seven years, five to seven years,
Amy Stockberger 39:00 actually three to five in our market. So when you think of the lifetime value of a first time homebuyer homebuyer, they’re a fiber, you know, they’re usually five transactions, you know, so you think about that, if that they’re five transactions for you as a first time homebuyer through the life of your career, then think of how many other referrals you’re getting per year off of them. That’s a really delicious career.
D.J. Paris 39:19 And the fact that you even have a private Facebook group really allows them possibly depending on how active they are in Facebook, to really get almost daily interactions with you, right, like, depending on how much content you guys are putting in there. But I was going to ask you like what do you do in between sales? Well, you’re doing so many different things where you’re just you’re constantly in contact and I bet you don’t even necessarily have to ask your clients Hey, are you do you need my help buying or selling something because you’re so present in their life? They’re reaching out to you I imagine you don’t even have to ask for the business.
Amy Stockberger 39:53 We know it’s it’s it’s beautiful. We really are going over 70% of our business comes from repeat each referral business and that’s, that’s a low because I also have an ISA department but my highest isa lead source is off of calls coming in. So those calls coming in are typically off of them either seen stuff that we’re posting out there about our lifetime support model or referrals in from past clients. And so, you know, that’s right, because then it’s then it’s Zillow, you know. So, my ISA is next one is Zillow. So it’s you actually
D.J. Paris 40:25 get more inbound calls than Zillow. But then you have like, purchasing leads from Zillow. Yeah,
Amy Stockberger 40:30 the company can list me calls or the commission via house calls. And then think about it though, too. So we, and this is all in my course. Again, it’s the hook, it’s a hook, they’re calling, because they’re contacting five to six different other agents. So again, my agents are trained that if they’re out, you know, the first time they’re showing you say, a client buyer doesn’t want to come in, and they’re meeting them in the driveway. They’re, they’re handing them the marketing sheet about their lifetime home support, and to say, hey, just by the way, oh, by the way, the sales this is what else do we have to do to help you build wealth wealth through real estate with our lifetime home support model with us and one year, you’re gonna save likely over $10,000? By doing something you’re going to do anyway?
D.J. Paris 41:05 Right? Amazing, what you really have, I mean, when you say you’re a systems person, you are really a systems person. So I imagine one of the main benefits is it just gives agents not just a blueprint of, of, you know, sort of how to think about building these systems, but actually tells them what to do on a daily basis.
Amy Stockberger 41:25 Yep. So at the end of every module, because that’s what it is, people will take a course and then they won’t know what to do. So at the end of every module, I call it my action step checklist, the end of every module, I have an action step checklist that tells them black and white, this is what you need to do to implement what you just learned. Here’s the checklist, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, on what you need to do, to move to the next step to continue to build that VIP club.
D.J. Paris 41:49 Yeah, it’s, it’s really amazing. And, and as far as cost, what what is the cost for the start your VIP club? 1997. Gotcha. So just shy of $2,000. And for anyone listening, that’s like, Oh, that’s a lot of money. Well, it’s really less than probably a third of one transaction. Right? So it’s, yeah, yeah, it’s it, guys. It’s a one time payment, you know, basically $2,000. And if some, if you could, you know, I think back to because I have to build the systems for our company in more of the recruiting side, and the retention side. And I can tell you, I spent a lot more than $2,000, putting all of that together over the last 12 years, and I would have killed to have somebody hand me a program like that, I would have gladly paid way more than $2,000, because it actually pays, it doesn’t just pay for itself, it actually generates incredible amount of revenue.
Amy Stockberger 42:42 Oh my gosh, the amount of revenue that you have from this, just from your repeat business is in there. And then when you think about it, yeah, it’s just a system and strategy. If you don’t have to come up with it. Mark Twain said, There’s no such thing as that original idea. Everything is just out there that just doesn’t exist. Same thing, you take this and it gives you a step by step on how to create it, implement it, and monetizing quickly. And then I also, I have a virtual assistant trained in my lifetime Home Support Program, that I sell time blocks out to my students to who want to implement faster. So my VA is have stepped into my students and help them just go with that if they don’t have either the bandwidth in house right now or they want extra help. As somebody who knows everything about this system already. They can buy time blocks in my lifetime home support, virtual assistants, too.
D.J. Paris 43:26 Yeah, that that makes so much sense. I I was I was at an event yesterday morning, here for our local association where we bring in top producers and have them speak to two to newer agents and we had about 300 people there. And it was a wonderful event and somebody grabbed me who I didn’t know he I guess he’s a fan of the podcast and said, speaking of virtual assistants, he goes I listened to an episode you did about you know why a virtual assistant makes sense. And I finally pulled the trigger did it he goes, I’ve like doubled my business because Easy,
Amy Stockberger 44:01 easy, easy. I told my agents all the time. If you’re doing it, then you’re the assistant you don’t need to be do you know my average agent, you know, like getting they’re selling, you know, close to 30 You know, and 22 homes a year and so that they shouldn’t be doing those things. You know, we have I think we have six VAs right now over in the Philippines that that we have and it just helps systemize so many things that we’re not worried
D.J. Paris 44:24 about. Yeah, we have VAs as well for our free running the back end of our brokerage not client facing vas, but you but but client facing bas are great too. And all of ours are from the Philippines as well. And boy I’ve had I’ve been using VAs in the Philippines for six years now I think and just incredible, incredible opportunities there. So globalized, we can find great talent from overseas, you know, with an internet connection and it’s just it’s just amazing.
Amy Stockberger 44:58 And right now just to speak to that I think a lot of agents again, and brokers who are just who are frozen in fear and not taking advantage of the opportunity and have let a lot of bas go. So right now there’s an influx of bas available. So again, for somebody thinking about that, that it’s right, now’s a good time to get a VA who’s trained in nearly every tech stack that’s out there.
D.J. Paris 45:20 Yeah. So what would you recommend, as a first step for somebody who does feel a little frozen right now, they don’t have a whole lot of clients, everyone’s bummed out about interest rates and inventory. And obviously, mindsets really important. So what would you recommend that somebody could do as just like a first step forward, to just start recognizing the opportunity that exists this year,
Amy Stockberger 45:47 they need to build their database, build their data bank, so if they want to email me, Amy and Amy stockbroker.com, I will send them my data bank builder, for free, send them out to for them to do just sit down and fill out just their data bank builder that’s just going to be memory jogs for them, of everybody they know who should be living within their database within their CRM, and then they need to turn around and do the next step. Put them in their CRM and let it start working for him. And then yeah,
D.J. Paris 46:13 are you a big fan of collecting as much data of data points as you can to give you a reason to reach out in other words, like how I don’t know how detailed you get with your with your clients in your CRM, but you obviously know where they work, because we talked about why that’s important. And also to you can put Google Alerts up for these companies. And if you see any major news come through another reason to pick up the phone, Hey, I just saw your company one this big deal or whatever. So I imagine a lot I mean, you’ve talked about a lot of what you do is real estate adjacent, or even not necessarily related to real estate, because you’re trying to just immerse yourself in their lives, which include work life, home, everything you I imagine you probably have a lot of data points in your CRM for each one of your your, you know, your data, or you said called Data Bank, sorry,
Amy Stockberger 46:59 yeah, we do we keep as much as we possibly can in there. I mean, that’s a big part, I think that I tell my agents is to that’s one of the benefits are working for our companies, our business plan is, is set up because I made all the mistakes. And so I’ve set it up so that they don’t have to, and they can scale easily and don’t have to do it the hard way like I did they are they’re able to do it the easy way with everything that we’ve we’ve taken care of for them. Because think about it too. Like I didn’t start as I didn’t use my CRM to the level I use it now, probably 10 years ago. I think if I did my head, I’m like, Oh, you have much more success. I would have had I use that the way I should have. But but then you think of a CRM, what are they using for those drip campaigns? Are they using the built in ones? Are they going back? Are they really putting any of their unique value propositions, my course has it all, I have a whole drip campaign for every part of it from the from the time they rent something to the drip campaign and the funnel they have from when they come in as a new lead. So you have the hook in there from a web lead to a past client to a nonprofit to your HST partners, all those in there. So you’re staying top of mind through all the ways you need to.
D.J. Paris 48:05 Yeah, it makes it makes all the sense in the world. I don’t know how big the rental the residential rental market is in Sioux Falls. I don’t know if that’s a possible source of revenue for agents. I here in Chicago, we’re in downtown. So obviously, there’s tons of rentals. And so many agents start out in rentals, and so many agents don’t. And I always encourage agents who aren’t like flush with leads, especially if they’re new, which of course nobody is, when they start, I’m like, do as many leads as you can, because almost everyone that owns used to rent, right? And I don’t know if that that might not translate to every market out there. But do you see a lot of agents doing rentals as a way to just as an entry point in your market to? Or do you encourage your agents to do that?
Amy Stockberger 48:49 If not, you don’t really have the biggest It’s not much. It’s just not even really a thing here? Yeah.
D.J. Paris 48:55 What about supporting local businesses? So you talked about having a vendor? Do you? I would love to know a little because this is another thing that anybody can go out and do go ahead and tell talk. So okay,
Amy Stockberger 49:05 so one of my standards of practice for our agents is that they have to be in a performing networking group that meets on a weekly basis. So at least group so and B and I’s are not for everybody. They’re just not they weren’t for me when I first got into the business basically, because I was dirt poor did not have the money for a BNI. And it just wasn’t the structure that my brain worked best in. So I created a leads group and I have a system for my agents to where they have to be a part of a leads group that again, that meets on a weekly basis, the benefit of leads groups, there’s exclusivity to your market, so it’s not like the chamber, I sit on the board of our chamber so I love the chamber chambers a big part of our business too, but it’s not like the Chamber you have exclusivity in that and you’re meeting with all the holidays over the one year you’re meeting likely like 40 times the investment to be in ours is about $45 a month and you have the opportunity to sit down especially as Realtors once a week and during your 32nd interview your 32nd commercial real Going around introducing, you’re giving out all your listings, you gotta get better bet that I’m telling you every seller in my list seller presentation that that’s part of my SOPs for my agents that we’re giving out our listings at everything. So again, word of mouth marketing, that’s the second place for buyers find out about a
D.J. Paris 50:13 listing, you’re giving out your listings. That’s very interesting. That makes sense.
Amy Stockberger 50:17 Well, at the second place buyers find out about a house for sale is through the realtor. So that word of mouth needs to be so big. And so that’s, you know, a big thing too, if you and I do have, I have a mini course coming out on that, and a blueprint to build a converting leads group. But that is such an easy, easy feel like you could do 10 transactions a year just from that I typically sell my personal business three to 4 million a year for my group that I started back in 2004. So So it, it’s such an easy, and again, it’s rapport build, it’s relationship building, and they’re out there, you’re building their business, so they’re out there helping you build yours. And again, the more eyeballs you have on your listings, the better.
D.J. Paris 50:52 Yeah, and you know, the vendor, the vendor list to is or the partnership list, I guess I should say is so important at this meeting, I was at yesterday, this this white, this top producer of that one of the one of the agents was they said, Well, where do you Where’s some of your best referral sources? And he said, Well, everyone talks about their existing clients, and yes, you know, good chunk of mine come from there. But he’s like, you know, what nobody talks about, because it’s maybe just a little bit slightly sort of uncomfortable. He goes, divorce attorneys, divorce attorneys are unbelievable. And the whole crowd you can see kinda like shuttered like, oh, I don’t really want it that’s dark and kind of, you know, maybe uncomfortable, but it was like, he goes, Oh, no, no, he goes, divorce attorneys are, first of all, they’re always in business. They always have lots of business, unfortunately. But, but, or fortunately, depending on the situation, but regardless, they have people who need to move, right. So this is these are huge opportunities to get in, to really think about leveraging these relationships and whether, you know, an earning, so I’d love to, I’d love to hear more about some of those partnerships that you have where you’re able to provide value like obviously on either end there.
Amy Stockberger 52:00 Yeah. So even probate to Anthony, we have attorneys in town for probate because estate planning attorneys Yeah, they have to. And that’s really one of the reasons like my instant offer program. So we have all like, like I said, systems and strategies for every part of the home buying and selling process for every season. So from that lease buyout, the very first house, and oftentimes that instant offer program we have is the last house. So that’s a really good program for you know, it’s typically it’s the older child who’s taking care of that for their their parents, typically out of state. And so having those relationships with probate attorneys in town to just hand those leads over. They’re just they’re going somewhere we know that they’re going to sell. And that’s a that’s a good good lead source for us.
D.J. Paris 52:40 Wow. Well, I and by the way, you know, so Amy’s a couple of things we want to mention here. So Amy’s program, you know, to really create a lifetime lead strategy, and have all the systems that by the way, she’s been working on for, gosh, quite a number of years now, and made all the mistakes that you don’t have to make, because they’ve already been made. And she already knows how to, to move past that. And to get her best practices. And again, she’s one of the top teams in the country. This is not, this is not a self help guru that has never actually practice. Like, like somebody like me who goes, Oh, this is what you should do. And you’re like, well, DJ, you never practice yet. Don’t listen to me. But listen, because Amy knows what she is talking about. And if you go to start your VIP club.com You can learn more about all of this. And guys, I don’t ever recommend any. Really, I mean, very rarely do I ever recommend a program for our audience because I don’t want our audience investing in something that that that they are going to come back to me and say, Why don’t like that DJ guy anymore. I just spent $2,000 and got nothing, no, you’re gonna get a lot with this program. And I need to use this program myself. For some ways I need to better strategize and process out are our business. And so this this is I’m going to be a client of this. And I’m going to, really I am because I need what here’s what I need help with. I need help better monetizing our podcast. So I’m going to I would love to chat with you offline about that. But But my point is, is Amy has figured all this stuff out. So guys, if you go to start your VIP club.com Then you can learn more about him, please, please consider investing in it. I know it’s a little bit of money. But trust me if it just gets you even just one deal, it pays for itself and it’s gonna get you a lot more than that. More importantly, it’s not even really about getting one deal and having it paid for it. It’s about setting up systems so that you don’t have to wake up every day and go What am I supposed to do? What should I do? Because that is a tremendous amount of anxiety. You know, we I know what that feels like when you don’t have processes and systems in place. It sucks when you wake up and you’re like there’s fear there’s, you just don’t know what to do. You’re sort of flying blind out there. Get a system this is this
Amy Stockberger 54:52 paralysis is overwhelmed paralysis. That’s just what happens if there isn’t a direct checklist and what you need to do. That’s what happens. Yep,
D.J. Paris 54:59 and By the way, the other thing I’ll mention for any agents that are in the Sioux Falls area, or are in, you know, a surrounding area of South Dakota and you’re like, oh, I don’t work with a team like this, my brokerage isn’t quite giving me these kinds of things. Or I would love to like work with Amy or maybe become a member of her team. While she obviously doesn’t accept every realtor that that reaches out. But Amy, she has her team is growing. They have 15 agents right now. And they are one of the top teams in the entire country. I know if I was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota as an agent, I there wouldn’t I wouldn’t even look elsewhere. I’d be like, Why just wanna go with the best. So, Amy, if there is anyone out there and by the way, guys, remember to that when the pandemic happened, a lot of people started moving to places that they weren’t moving to prior to the pandemic or Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, right? So you might even if you’re not in that local area, maybe you have referrals of people that are now exploring, getting, you know, you know, retirement homes there or, or, you know, maybe just moving to because they can work from home. So even if you just want to refer business to Amy like she would obviously love the opportunity to speak to you but if you are an agent in her in her area in Sioux Falls in in that local area, and you want to consider possibly working or joining up with her team. Me, can you tell us a little bit about what you your team is looking for in an agent?
Amy Stockberger 56:21 Yes. And for those who who are looking to refer business, we go to my YouTube channel living in Sioux Falls, we have a big book of business for every little I have, I have a very dedicated and systemized relocation integration process. So I guarantee they’ll be taken care of, to the nth degree. But yeah, we’re looking for an agent, we’re looking for agents who are there to serve, you know, again, my vision for my company is to build big juicy legacies, through wealth through real estate with lifetime home support. And that’s what I want for my agents, we have a very support driven model. So we have the insight Tran transaction management listing coordination inside sales department for the generate a lot of leads, we pay for the majority of the tech stack to for our agents so they can be as as profitable as possible for them. And again, I’ve set it up for them to build their businesses. So they don’t have to do it the way I did it, that they’re going to be out there doing what they’re best at, which is taking care of that client. And we have pretty much everything else that we’re trying to take care of for him on the backside of it so they can continue to keep serving more and more clients.
D.J. Paris 57:15 Wow. So if they’re if there’s an agent that is interested in maybe learning more or providing value to your team, or maybe just wanting your guidance on what’s the best way they should reach out to you,
Amy Stockberger 57:27 yep, just at AMI at ami stockbroker.com Or they can go any my handles are at AMI, stockbroker realestate.com. And then for our digital marketing or digital courses, it’s just ASR you Academy.
D.J. Paris 57:39 Yeah, ASR Academy, or if you just go to start your VIP club.com That’ll take you also right there as well. It’ll redirect you. We’re gonna have links to all of this in the show notes. Don’t worry, you don’t have to write it down. It’s all in our show notes. Just look for there. And we will have it in there. But Amy, oh, my gosh, this this is I could have you on every single week, we could be talking about another process another thing agents should be doing. And you know what, that’s not a terrible idea. I do offline. We could we could possibly even drill down now. Everyone, we’re I’m peeling back the curtain for our audience, isn’t it? No, no, but but this is this is what I’m curious. So I was just talking to one of my colleagues this morning, he was going how’s the podcast going? Now I’ll just give everyone a little behind the scenes of what it’s like to run a podcast. And I would call my podcast, a successful podcast because it pays for itself. We have sponsors, we have a pretty sizable audience. And I’m not saying that any sort of brag, or what younger people say flex for that reason, which is so so silly. I’m not I’m not doing it. Because I’m the person that always thinks oh, it’s no big deal. I don’t you know, I’m not that important. But we do have a pretty sizable audience. My point is, is I am always wondering what our audience needs. Now, because podcasting is largely a one way communication, right? I’m listening, you’re you’re listening to me and Amy, I don’t often get a lot of feedback, we get a lot of lovely fan letters, like almost every day, we get some one or two letters from people. It’s so sweet. But I don’t often I don’t often know what our listeners actually want or need, because there’s not an easy way to sort of get that feedback. So what I’m going to ask everyone to do is if you think that this would be really helpful if maybe once a month, we had Amy on and she did a deep dive into one particular, you know, pillar or something, just because I think we could create really, really a lot of value for our agents, or for our listeners, I shouldn’t say and for our agents in my firm as well, but where they could learn some of this stuff, because I think this you have so many processes. I think this really deserves more than than one go around so we could really do a deep dive and learn more so I would be honored to and yeah, and I am excited as well. So guys, everyone out there, please visit start your VIP club.com Also, Amy stock burger.com is another place, I can just go to the show notes, we’ll click on the links, there’s so much great content there, a lot of it’s free, by the way to Amy’s very, very generous around giving. And, you know, let’s it also again, if you’re an agent, you want to maybe join our team, or maybe you have business for people that are moving to the area, obviously, you know, why not refer to the number one team in the area, that’s what I would do. So a visit ami stockbroker.com, as well as an AMI. So as we’re kind of wrapping up here, I definitely saw oh, by the way back back to our audience. So audience, if you like, if you think this would be really helpful for you, I didn’t give you an action step, let us know. And there’s not an easy way to give us that feedback. But if you go on our, our Facebook page, or if you just send us an email, which you can do at keeping it real pod.com We have contact information there and all of our social channels, you can let us know. But if this would be really helpful for you, and I know that it would be, but I just want to double check with our audience, make sure that I’m giving you the value you want, let us know and we’ll have Amy back on. But Amy, on behalf of our audience, I say thank you for taking time out of your busy life, your very, very busy life, to come on our show and talk about some of these processes. And I hope lots of our people really consider investing in your start your VIP club. So they can have a lifetime sort of referral business. And this isn’t the same sort of thing that you get from other sources. This is this is a really unique program that also shows you how to monetize it all. So I mean, that’s, I think just an incredible value add. So start your VIP club.com. And also on behalf of Amy and myself, we want to thank the audience for making it all the way to the end of this episode. We appreciate you we love you. You’re the reason we do this show. And please just if you want to help us grow to things, support our sponsors. So consider investing in their products and services. They’re the reason we can pay our bills. And tell a friend about the show just one other realtor that you that is struggling right now. And guess what, almost all realtors are struggling right now. So send them a link to this episode. Maybe somebody that wakes up on a Monday and doesn’t always know what to do as a realtor. What should I do today? Well, this episode that Amy provided a lot of great suggestions for people to really make 2023 a good year let’s let’s let’s make this a year where you get more market share. This is the year agents are falling away. They’re falling off. And this is a great opportunity for those who stay because you’re gonna pick up that business but you need processes.
Amy Stockberger 1:02:32 Yes, DJ, thanks for everything you do for our industry. You’re awesome.
D.J. Paris 1:02:36 Oh, thank you, Amy. Well, I appreciate that as well. And, and again, we’ll talk about having you come on more regularly because I think this would be so much fun. All right, guys. Thank you. We will see everybody on the next episode. Visit our website keeping it real pod.com Tell a friend about the show. Invest in Amy’s in Amy’s in Amy’s program. Start your VIP club.com All right, Amy, thank you so much. We’ll see everyone on the next episode.
Video Production Secrets of Top 1% Real Estate Agents • Nick Niehaus
Feb 28, 2023
Nick Niehaus as a Co-Founder and Head Trainer at Business Video School talks about working with real estate agents. Nick discusses the importance of coaching and training, marketing tips and social media tricks. Last, Nick describes why, based on his experience, he believes video messages are very powerful to create a strong bond with clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Thinking about adding more video this year to your branding and marketing but not completely sure how to do it? Well, don’t worry, we’re going to talk to an expert today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with business video consultant, Nick Niehaus to tell you exactly what you should be doing this year to take your videos to the next level and attract more clients. Before we get to Nick. I guarantee there’s another realtor you know who needs to up their marketing game specifically around video send please send them a link to this episode Nick gives so many great tips and advice in here it was guaranteed to help them in your in their business. And they’re going to be guaranteed to be thankful to You for sending them a link. So please send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, and we have just about 500 episodes now they can all be played directly from a browser. You don’t even have to open up a podcast app, go to keeping it real pod.com Every episode there and also, we’re in every podcast directory so you can always search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Okay guys, let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Nick Niehaus.
Today on the show we have Nick Niehaus with Business Video School me tell you more about Nick. Now Nick Niehaus is the co founder and head trainer at Business Video school he has spent the last six years working with 1000s of real estate agents to help them overcome the challenges of transitioning to video communication, and marketing. In doing so Nick has become an expert at helping email up sorry, me. Repeat that last sentence there I screwed up. In doing so Nick has become an expert at helping small business owners gain confidence on camera and learn how to use video to grow their business through branding. Please everyone go to visit Nick’s website which is biz video school.com Business bi Z bi Z video school.com link to that in the show notes. Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Niehaus 3:48 Yeah, thanks, TJ. Thanks for having me on.
D.J. Paris 3:50 Very excited to chat with you. I you know the world has really changed a lot a while obviously the world’s always changing but certainly with the advent three years ago, you know, with when COVID hit, and we were doing work from home, I saw a shift in Realtors really probably more out of desperation than anything but just embracing some of the video conferencing technology, more video production when it comes to social media. And I’ve seen agents continue to evolve their video practices, even now we’re largely back to normal and we’re moving around and about of course, I’m still seeing that trend continue. Obviously the rise of tick tock has has also increased the popularity of video, but I am so excited to have you on the show because I want to talk all things video. You know, this is something that I think every one of our listeners or viewers can can relate to and try to figure out as they determine what they want to spend their time and energy on. In 2023, I think video is a great skill that really anyone can develop. And obviously, you teach people how to do that. So I’m excited to have you out.
Nick Niehaus 5:11 Awesome. Yeah, no, and I love talking about this stuff. But that’s the pandemic certainly sort of accelerated and disrupted all kinds of stuff with videos. So it’s been an interesting three years.
D.J. Paris 5:21 Well, let’s, let’s talk about the role of video. So first, let’s get into your background before we actually start giving suggestions to agents. So what brought you into into this space?
Nick Niehaus 5:33 Yeah, so I mean, I’ve been, so I actually, you know, when I went to college, I started working as a freshman for a company called College works painting, and then it worked in there for six years. And in that experience, like you basically you run a small painting business, kind of like an internship program. And so that was my first experience with with marketing, which I sort of put quotes around, because there was a lot of door knocking, because it’s like going out knocking on doors, putting fliers out, you know, all that stuff. And, you know, it’s going going away is back at this point. But the reason I bring that up is because I basically had been working in marketing ever since. And so it’s something that I’ve been good at, in some areas, you know, really bad at and others. What happened though, is I actually started a company, man, it’s been almost eight years, I think, at this point. And what we did is we would put out flyers for other businesses, right? So we got working with real estate agents. As a result of that, because of the concept of farming, we had this cool sticky flyer, you could like stick right in the middle of a front door, very, you know, I get kind of catching. And so we started working with them and started doing this farming stuff. And that was, that was probably about six years ago. And it was right when video was really starting to emerge as a marketing tool for small businesses. And so there was kind of this big, this big kind of moment in time where you can start to run your own Facebook, video ads, you can start to run YouTube ads, and very few small businesses were even kind of aware of these possibilities. And so we kind of went to these agents who you’re working with to in these flyers. And part of it was we didn’t want to be out there, you know, putting fliers on doors for the rest of our lives are like, well, what can we do, it’s a little bit more sustainable. And so we started making videos with them, and you know, bringing them into our studio and coaching them on camera. And you know, a lot of it ended up being sort of psychological stuff, you know, getting over that fear of the camera getting over their, you know, qualms about seeing themselves on that video screen. And then three years ago, right around the beginning of the pandemic, actually a little before that, we started to realize, you know, hey, these people are common, we’re making a video with them, you think this would kick start this, this sort of brand effort, hey, I’m going to use video everywhere, I’m gonna start, you know, sending sending my clients video messages and start making social media videos, you know, and it wasn’t happening, you know, and that’s, that’s what kind of led us to saying, well, there’s a gap here, you know, there’s something people are missing, or they misunderstanding, you know, how to use video is that the technical steps? And the more research we did it was there was sort of all of it, you know, and we said, Okay, well, we need to build a training program for this, we need to start teaching people how to use this, this new form of communication, which is the way that we saw it. And so timing, it worked out perfect, because we actually, we built a course and piloted it, we launched that December of 2019. And so like, within three months, the pandemic swept the country. And I mean, literally, we got shut down, we weren’t, we weren’t allowed to make videos with people for a couple months. And that that was a forced pivot, obviously. But we sort of immediately said, Alright, let’s start doing this training. We got this course, let’s see, we can do we brought some partners in, I think we had 900 people come through that first course within about three months, you know, so it’s like, okay, there’s clearly clearly a need for what we’re doing here. And we’ve just been kind of running ever since.
D.J. Paris 8:32 I, that’s amazing. I remember back, really, before video was so prevalent in social media, in particular, when you would go to do anything in the video, they would typically ask you, have you been media trained? Right, that was that was the the old age sort of skill set that have you been you’ve been in front of a camera before? This is really before, we all just had, you know, high definition cameras in our pockets that could you know, take almost comparable shots with, you know, with these $20,000 cameras. And so it used to be a thing where you’re like, No, you really do need to get trained, you need to know what to say and what not to say. And you still do need to get trained. But thankfully, the barrier to entry obviously has, you know, your phone, which everyone has. And so let’s I think first what would probably make the most sense for our audience is let’s set let’s make the case for video. And when I when we talk about video, let’s define what what we’re talking about. Why Why should Realtors be focused on video this year?
Nick Niehaus 9:41 Yeah, and I love that question because I think you know, a lot of folks they get into tactics or strategy way too fast, you know, in a lot of these conversations that go straight to like, alright, what kind of videos should I make? And that was one thing that stood out to me when we first started the school and we started looking into Hey, what exists out there is that a lot of the recorded presentations, a lot of the top you know stuff people were talking on was just so far down the path in our eyes, you know, sort of like, hey, they’re skipping a lot of steps here. And no wonder people are thinking they should do these things, but they’re not taking action because they’re, they’re overwhelmed. They’re confused, you know, and it’s kind of a byproduct of the way it’s being talked about. So. So yeah, I think I think taking a step back and asking ourselves like, well, what, what is it? What is video, right? I mean, so that’s where I started, like, in my mind, video is a form of communication, I think it’s important to see it that way. Because everything we do to communicate with someone remotely, right, so if I’m gonna send a text and email, used to be sending letters, we don’t do much of that anymore. But you know, letters, all that kind of stuff. It was all it was all kind of created to supplement or, you know, sort of replace a face to face conversation, right? So the only reason we ever do any of these other kinds of communication is because we can’t be physically face to face with that other person, right? So if we, if we sort of say, Okay, well, ideally, I get into the same room I’m sitting across from the table, we all know that when we’re in that context, we’re able to build relationships the most effectively, we’re able to close deals at the highest rate, all of that stuff is kind of maximized. Well, that’s what video simulates better than anything else, you know. So when we compare it to a phone call, all this kind of stuff, the only form of communication we have available that feels as close to a face to face conversation is clearly video, right? And that has has a ton to do with trust. So when I can see somebody I mean, there’s actually a part of my brains called the fusiform gyrus that recognizes other people’s faces, and it stores that information and tells us, Hey, I’ve seen this person before. There’s an element of how many times right, if it’s somebody, I’ve seen a bunch, I automatically trust you. Because my brain says, Hey, this must be somebody who’s sort of part of my tribe, right? I see them every day, or I see him every
D.J. Paris 11:48 day, they’re safe, because I see them visually. They’re in my visual space occasionally. Yep.
Nick Niehaus 11:55 Right. And we evolved, I mean, that’s what’s interesting is like, throughout evolution, like we have not evolved to understand really any of these other forms of communication. So our brains at a at a fundamental level, when they see a person’s face, they the only thing that your brain can really understand is that person must be in the room with me, you know, so consciously, we know it’s not, but most of our brain is non conscious, right? It’s sort of,
D.J. Paris 12:19 it bypasses a little bit of, of those critical factors of the brain. So when we see someone, especially, you’re so right, because it’s not even just face, I think, I think when people are taking full body videos, it’s like, all of a sudden, we know what their, their physical being looks like. And just like we would with an actor, or somebody on television, we feel connected in some small way, consciously or unconsciously, simply because we, our brain thinks you know that, that yeah, you’re right. We’re in close proximity with them, even though we’re not.
Nick Niehaus 12:57 Yeah. And that’s huge. And it’s actually I emphasize this a lot in our trainings when it talks about how you frame yourself in a video, right? So a lot of folks like, if they send a video to somebody, their head is for some reason, in the bottom half of the frame, you’ve probably seen this where it’s like, you know, vertical video and their heads right out of the bottom, and they go space above it, you know, for for no reason. And a lot of it’s just they don’t know how to hold the phone, or they feel a little uncomfortable about putting their body out there. But that takes away from that experience. Right? So rather like that, that makes my brain question what’s going on? Now? I’m kind of like, well, I think I’m talking to this person, but like, it’s just their head floating there, which is kind of weird, right? So yeah, I think the more any kind of video I mean, this, this goes for public stuff, it goes for the more more intimate one to one video messages, you know, you should try to sort of appear like you would in front of that person if you were sitting across the table, right? So you want to incorporate some of your body, you want to make sure your face is large enough that they can read all your facial expressions, you know, you want to be somewhat careful about lighting, but mostly just so they can clearly see your face not because you have to look perfect, but you need to make sure they can see you just like they would if they were face to face. And if you do that, I mean that it’s a game changer, right? I mean, this is like I love sending video messages. Like I love to send people like Happy birthday videos. 10 seconds long. It’s such a perfect example of this, because then they see me, right, they have that sort of mini experience of having this kind of really quick face to face chat. But they remember it for months. I mean, I’ve had people that I’ll send him a birthday video one year, and a year later, I miss it. And they’re sending me a message like, Hey, where’s my birthday video, you know, because they remember from the year before, right? So there’s all that there’s all that stuff that’s going on in the human mind. And the reality is, once you get used to doing this, a lot of people look at video and they’re timid about it. And they kind of put it off because of that. But once you get used to using especially video kind of as a one to one or one to just a few people form of communication. It doesn’t take any more time. Right? So the time it takes to sit in front of a camera and say, Hey, let me give you a quick update on the transaction. Here’s what’s going on. In my experience. It’s actually fun faster than typing it out. Because I’m, you know, I type and I make some mistakes, I gotta go fix it, and you gotta overthink what you’re saying and make sure they don’t misinterpret what you wrote with a video, you don’t have to worry about that people understand it better, we actually comprehend more information when we can watch a person talking versus just reading the text on the screen. So that I mean, you know, we could sort of create a huge laundry list of sort of all the benefits for it. But I think at a fundamental level, that’s what you have to remind yourself is, hey, this is it’s not out. It’s not always a performance, right? It can be a performance, just like you can write a blog post that might get read by 1000s of people. But we can also send a text or an email, right? And we don’t we don’t overthink those things, we just do it, it’s just part of our day to day experience. That’s where I think people really need to focus on videos, how how do you just make it a normal thing you do as part of your day to day communication. And if you start there, number one, you see benefits a lot faster, it has an impact immediately. And then you also gets so much more comfortable on camera. So when it comes, you know, a few weeks later, a few months later, when you’re getting ready to build that YouTube channel or build that Tiktok you’re you’re much more comfortable, you’re much more confident on camera, and you just move a lot faster because of that. So I think there’s you know, I think a lot of us have sort of mix that up, we sort of started on the heart and and we need to sort of reset a little bit and come back to the beginning.
D.J. Paris 16:16 Boy, you just said so much. And my brain is spinning a little bit because I was thinking we were going to really pretty much exclusively talk about how to do video better on social media. And you said something? And of course, you do teach that but I am you said something that that really resonated with me today. Specifically, because it’s just happened to me just before we started our show. So this is so perfect, because you were talking about using video for more regular communication. So yes, of course, there’s a social media sort of strategy there. And, you know, people, realtors are always trying to figure out how much of my personal life do I display do I put on display on my Facebook page and Instagram, etc. But you’re saying we’re really talking about as a different thing right now, which I think is really critical. Because this just happened to me before our show, which was you can send one to one messages to people because we think about branding and like I’m gonna put this out on Facebook, everyone’s gonna see it like you said, 1000s of people might read a blog post or see a video. But then there’s also one to one communication and I just received I will tell you, I we get pitched by advertisers, guests every single day on our show, a publicists, you know, whoever may reach out, you know, hey, book, our guests, I got it. This is probably happened in five years. I’ve out of 1000s of pitches. I’ve probably had this happen five times out of 1000s, no joke. And it was, hey, I made a video for you. I want you to check this out. I didn’t know if this was a guest. I didn’t know if it was a vendor. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what it was could have been a spam message. I had no idea. But he’s like, Hey, DJ, are actually wasn’t even meant to me. It’s for a producer. But but there was like, hey, zonna Check this out. And this guy has this company where he does computerized or robotic handwritten, you know, cards and notes and things anyway, and he was like, hey, DJ, I want to show this to you. I think there’s got to be a good fit for your show. Now, because I watched his 35 second video where he kind of like, I’m like, Oh, I know this guy. I instantly liked him. And and I don’t know anything about him, he might be a horrible human being. He might be, he might actually not be a good human being. I don’t know. But I liked him instantly. Because he took the time to make a video. I can’t even explain why I liked him. But there’s this unconscious part of the brain that when some when you do see somebody, you have a tendency to want to connect with them. And so there’s a visual component that bypasses even logic, like I don’t know this guy, he’s just some dude trying to get on my show, which happens all day long. Why do I really want and by the way, he’s not the only person with this exact kind of business. There’s lots of businesses that have these robotic things that handwriting, so it’s not even a unique value proposition. But for some reason I got so excited that he made me a video he made me though, it took him probably a minute to do it. It was crazy effective had he had just written me and said, Hey, I’ve got this thing I probably would have been like, no, there was something that lit up my brain automatically. The fact that I got a video message a one to one video message. And I know that isn’t necessarily the purpose of our conversation. But it just happened to me and it really affected. It affected the way we were like I’m like just bought it immediately book him.
Nick Niehaus 19:50 Wow. And from that. No, I mean, I love that actually. I mean, I think realistically I mean there’s a lot of people talking about how to do video for social media. I mean that you know, because because you can There’s a whole career of influencer, right? So there’s people out there whose job is to grow a following on social media. And I think it’s it’s a little bit unfortunate that so many business owners are looking to those people, and they’re learning about video from them, you know, I mean, then there’s, you know, they’re not all bad. It’s not a comment that they shouldn’t be doing that. But it’s a distraction. I think that’s the real problem, right, is that there are you know, I actually put out a sort of small survey on LinkedIn the other day, I was curious was like, Well, hey, remember when email first came out? You know, it’s been about 30 years at this point, right? But it’s like, remember, when it first came out? How did you use it initially? Did you send email to a single person at a time? Did you send it to like small groups? Or did you blast out, you know, massive newsletters to 1000s of people? And obviously, every single person said, I sent emails to just one person, right? Yeah. And we miss that step with video. Right? So we got, we got to the Yeah, so it’s like we started on on the other end of the spectrum, because a lot of that, I think, is because we all grew up with, I sort of define it as three primary categories of video, maybe just to, obviously, movies, television, and then some of us home videos, right. So some people will say, like, well, one, my dad had a camera, and he recorded us all the time. So they were on camera, but as you know, very intimate setting. And I think what happened is that a lot of us as we started to realize, hey, we have cameras in our pockets. Now we’ve got these tools available. We thought about the kinds of video we had the most experience with, right? So of course, we sort of immediately went to public facing video television shows stuff that, you know, 1000s Millions of people might see and talk about intimidating, right? I mean, and I did the same thing my very first video ever made, I put on Facebook, you know, I may have even put some money behind it. So I’ve seen by quite a few people. And it took me months. I mean, I went out and I bought equipment. And I set up a little mini studio and all this all stuff I tell our students not to do now. I did it. And it took me forever. But I still you know, I’m a fairly early adopter. So this was still six years ago at this point. But yeah, I mean, the further I got into it, the more I realized, like, Well, cool, that was great. And if I do that, consistently, I can do this branding thing. And you know, that all worked, especially over a long term period of time. But then I started sending video messages, you know, and that and that’s, that’s your example. I’ve had that happen a bunch of times. I mean, I had, you know, I was a totally new entity in the real estate space, because we weren’t, we weren’t working with realtors, and we sort of made this pivot into real estate. And for anybody who’s ever done that, you know, you kind of know how hard it can be to get through that front door. You know, obviously, real estate agents get pitched all the time, there’s all kinds of salespeople trying to sell to him. And so I was sending these video messages to brokers saying, Hey, can I come in and do a presentation for your agents and talk about video and I was putting a video in those emails, you know, and I got booked, I got a lot of doors opened. And you know, I’ve even had people tell me like, this is the most effective cold email I’ve ever gotten, you know, now granted, they’ve gotten more video emails since then. I’m not the only one doing it in St. Louis at this point. But I think there’s there’s another part of this kind of coming back to your example that is, is really urgent, you know, because there’s, there’s lots of reasons to get started doing this stuff right away. One thing that happens today, though, is that when somebody sees you make them a 32nd video that was just for them, they still have the same reaction of hey, this, this feels like television. And so they look at it, and they go, I would be too intimidated to do that. So that that is that additional layer of sort of like wow, like, you know, somebody’s used to make a video, it’s quicker than writing an email. So for them, they’re like literally saving time. And then the recipient is going oh my gosh, what an Impressive, impressive effort feels
D.J. Paris 23:39 like Saudi did something big, like when I saw this, right, this guy was it was in his warehouse with all of his machines, you know, scribbling robotic hands writing letters, and I was like, wow, look, I’m getting a behind the scenes tour. Of in literally all he does pull his phone out of his pockets. adj that’d be Yeah, you’re right. It seemed like a bigger deal to me than it than the effort that he put in. So the, the reaction you get is actually amplified more than the effort that’s put in, in theory, right?
Nick Niehaus 24:14 Yeah, yeah. And obviously, you know, you can’t know if that’s going to happen with every person, if you email somebody who’s a professional, you know, TV presenter or something, they’re not going to be as impressed. But that is, I mean, that’s a big deal. I mean, that’s especially like we this is why we talked so much about birthday videos, because every single person that gets that video from him, it was so little pressure on your part, right? I mean, you can literally go to Facebook, on your phone on the app, and you get a list of everybody’s birthday and literally next to each name is a messenger button, you click that now you’re in a one on one chat with them. And there’s also a video recording feature built into the messenger app, you know, so you basically hold the button down you say a few words and you click send and you can send 10 of these in like five minutes or less. I mean, that is you know, in terms of habits because obviously everything you want to do you as much of it as possible should become a habit makes a lot easier for you. I mean, that is a very, very easy habit to form you know, as a every day. But as I get my coffee or as I have lunch or you know, you’re tied to something already doing daily, I’m going to pull my phone and we’ll look at the list of birthdays, I’m gonna send one to anybody who I want to say that to you not to do it all your friends, but But I mean, imagine like somebody has been dragging their feet on making their first video, and they’ve been building this this Megan in this big mountain that they’re having trouble kind of overcoming. Start there two weeks from now you’ve you’ve made 30 videos, you know, you’ve increased the awareness with 30 people substantially, you’re developing those relationships, you may already have business from that outreach, even though all you’re doing is saying happy birthday, just from being top of mind, we had a we had an agent pick up like a $3 million listing a few weeks after sending somebody a happy birthday video, right? So you might have results already. And it’s like, I just I I can see, I see people sometimes almost kick themselves because they thought five years ago, they should start using video and they spent the past five years, procrastinating essentially right sort of finding reasons to keep waiting. And all it’s harder than I thought, Oh, it’s you know, it’s instant. It’s intimidating. And then they send these birthday messages and like, wow, this I should have started five years ago, you know, like, this is not there’s nothing about this. That’s hard. And it has such an incredible impact. You know, and I think that it just resonates with people. But the the urgency I was talking about is that more every week more businesses are doing this, you know, and I think if you do it first in your industry and the first customer, the customers are kind of getting video messages from you first. The advantage of that, like you you’re an innovator, this is stuff people go tell their friends about I mean, wow, you’re the hotshot agent in town. If you wait another six months, another year, another couple years, there will be other businesses doing it. And now all you’re doing is catching up, right? You don’t you don’t have the innovation. So the benefits still there. But you don’t set yourself apart the same way, right?
D.J. Paris 26:47 Boy, I agree with all of that. I actually think the one to one sort of option that we’re talking about one to one, meaning I’m going to produce a video for one person, in this case, the example of the happy birthday. This, this is such I’m only giggling because it is it I think about this, I was thinking about this, as you were talking that every year, of course, I have a birthday and Facebook tells you know the world that it’s my birthday, and I get you know, however many people say happy birthday, and I you know, 100 or whatever it is. And it’s lovely. And I’m so grateful for that. I get exactly zero video messages from anybody who say, you know, hey, I noticed it was your birthday today Happy Birthday, even if it was a 15 second message? Do I remember who out of those 100? Who wrote me on my Facebook page? Happy birthday? No, I mean, you know, whatever. It’s probably the same people every every year, I would remember who who made me a 15 second video because it would be the only video. And you’re right, it is a simple and easy thing. And it’s also a great way to get introduced to video if you’re not comfortable in front of the camera, because there’s really nothing at stake. You’re just like, Hey, happy birthday. And that is it. You know, you can use there’s other social media platforms that that can be used to prompt things like this. So birthday on Facebook? Absolutely. Like you said, go there every day. Look, first of all friend everybody you know, on Facebook and Instagram and or Instagram doesn’t have birthdays, but or maybe they do I don’t know. But But LinkedIn, LinkedIn does something very interesting where they show you when people have work anniversaries. So that’s another huge opportunity. Oh, I just saw you, you know, your fifth year at such and such company. Congratulations, hope you’re doing well. Or promotions or new jobs or you know, other life events. LinkedIn is really good. So that’s another place where you could find reasons to do that one to one short video. Why, you know, I’ve we’ve been doing this podcast for five or six years now. Nobody has talked about one to one videos. I am so one to one video messaging, I am really, really grateful to for you for this because it’s kind of blowing my mind.
Nick Niehaus 29:06 Yeah, well, I mean, I this is one of those things, too. It’s like, this is why I like you know, what was in our school, like, I get to focus 100% on video, my job is to learn about video and all different ways to use it and you know, kind of be as much of an expert as I can. And it’s an incredibly broad category. I mean, there are so many different kinds of video. But yeah, I mean, that was one thing that I’ve still been, I mean, the companies that make these tools like you know, just to name a few like, you know, bom bom dub, Vinyard loom, right? They, you know, they all kind of do similar things now, I mean, they talk about this stuff, obviously, you know, they some of these companies have written books and whatnot. But I don’t know if it’s just that people will just hear that as hey, you’re just trying to sell your product and so they tune it out or what, but when I’m listening to and I’m trying some of this stuff and I’m talking to some these power users, I mean, it’s it’s a no brainer. You know, a lot of the folks that I’ve seen that they get into a habit and hey, I did this for three Three weeks, I am never turning back, I will never stop using this tool like my clients are all understanding me better, my customer service has improved drastically, I’m getting more referrals, I’m getting more repeat business, it impacts everything. And here we are, and everybody’s still talking about tick tock and YouTube and all this other stuff, you know, and it’s not, you know, it’s like, I think we get stuck in this hole, one or the other type of mentality, it’s not the don’t ever do those things, there’s just so much more benefit to be had in the short term, especially from this much more intimate, you know, much higher touch kind of kind of experience, you know, and so as soon as Yeah, I mean, I’ve, we actually, you know, as we started to understand more of this, we sort of we created our curriculum and our school to focus on it, I mean, we, we sort of redeveloped our entire process, and we said, look, you start with video messages, you know, we actually have sort of four strategies we recommend people implement, so they start with video messages, they get that, you know, make that a regular part of how you talk to people, you know, to the point where it’s like, you just can’t help but reply by video, when it’s appropriate, then you start to incorporate video, basically, sort of scale yourself with video now, so this is like your, your FA Q’s, you know, like training for employees, if you tend to have employees on the team, you know, think things where you’re, you’re saying the same thing more than once in a several month long. Period, right. And so then that at that point, then those videos out is intimidating, you know, it’s not as hard they come because you have all this experience on camera now, you know, and then it’s like, so then the third one is, is build a video marketing funnel, something that you you control that’s designed that you can sort of predict the outcome from that you can, you know, put people in at the top and expect a certain amount of results to come out the bottom. And then once all that is in place, that’s when we recommend doing the social media stuff, you know, and if you do it that way, then all that new attention you generate from hopefully cross your fingers getting, you know, going viral on social media, then all that attention, which by the way, is more likely, because you’re you’re good on camera, you know how to make a good video at this point, you know, that that drives those people into a system, right, so then they hit your marketing funnel, they get, they get nurtured by that automatically, they come in your loot, you’re using video to convert the leads, so they’re seeing, you’re continuing to see you, you know, it’s like, it’s always, it’s always been kind of weird to me, that we have these folks out there that have all this video from a marketing perspective and running video ads or doing social media video, and then somebody comes into their system, and they stop seeing them on camera, you know, how all of a sudden everything’s just text and email, you know, and I’m always just kind like, when they’re kind of weird, like, you know, they already know you at this point, they’re seeing you on camera all these times, you know, and all of a sudden, the communication becomes less personal feeling like, that’s interesting and disorienting. You know, so I think we do it the other way around, you know, it just continues to feel like I’m just getting to know this person that much more. And yeah, I mean, I just the just the efficiency of this stuff, you know, getting to a point where by the time that person calls you and they say Okay, I’m ready to sell my house, like they’re well educated, they’ve been watching you. I mean, you know, we hear examples all the time people talking about like the the father in law, disrupting a transaction or something, it’s like, well, now you can educate people ahead of time before they ever even contact you. And they can forward those videos to their, their relative and say, Hey, you’re, you’re wrong, stop trying to tell me all this stuff, you know. But yeah, there’s just there’s so many different ways that this has an impact. And I think if you go in that order, if you sort of start with the simpler stuff that’s more direct, and then you build to the more public facing stuff. I think it all just just works more cohesively makes a lot more sense to your customers, right?
D.J. Paris 33:27 It does. And it’s really a quite a shift of process if you’re going to really think so you start with the easy quick video messages, the one to one, celebrate celebratory stuff or the universe, you know, things that are easy quick and you can you can just do daily, happy birthday, happy anniversary, but all those kinds of happy home anniversary, whatever, you do those and just a really quick procedural question. Because I’d love to get your thoughts so you mentioned you know, like, you go to facebook you see here’s five people’s birthdays today you make five videos. Are you sending them the video via Facebook Messenger which is you said you know, you could do or are you texting it to them? So that it’s been my experience that people open S texts more often then like Facebook Messenger, but curious on what you might suggest for like a happy birthday video.
Nick Niehaus 34:28 Yeah, I think you’re looking in that situation at a trade off between convenience versus impact. Right. So I think if number one, I don’t have the phone numbers of a lot of my Facebook friends so because of that I just have to send a message that’s kind of the first question is what do you have in terms of contact info? I also because it’s so fluid, you know, and I have all kinds of qualms with Facebook but not to get into that some of the stuff they do is really effective right? So the birthday things I mean, that’s been one of their their home runs from basically day one right? They got it ready to give them their per day. And that’s been one of the things that keeps people engaged in the platform, the fluidity of basically looking at the list clicking I mean tonight, and if you’re listening to this, like, try this sometime, you’ll see how fluid it is, right? It’s like you go in, there’s the messenger button, you click it, you click the button for the video, camera turns on, you hold it down, you record hits that I mean, and then you just hit the back button two or three times, and you’re back on the list. Right. So that yeah, so I’m always looking to kind of like, if I tell somebody to do it certain ways, like, are they going to do it, you know, that that’s obviously a challenge you run to with coaching quite a bit. Right? So that would be that’s the first thing I would say. Now, you are right, though, which is that people are going to be more likely to see the text message, right. So I think the way I would sort of think about it is like if you have a core group, you know, so you’ve got maybe like those 20 3040, people that are like, they’re the ones that pass you the referrals, they’re the ones that are repeat customers, the ones you really want to stay, you know, 100% in front of, that might be worth sending them a text, you know, and then even then even following up, if you don’t hear anything back from your student 100%, sort of certain that they’re going to get it everybody else, I think just doing it through Facebook is probably fine. Mostly because it is just so easy to do. And it’s a lot easier to build a habit because of that. So I could set an alarm on my phone for 9am. Every day it goes off, I go to Facebook, boom, send my five or 10 messages, and I’m done. So I would say you know, think of it that way, right? What’s going to be sort of the most, what are you gonna be able to execute on regularly.
D.J. Paris 36:28 I also, that’s a great answer. And I also love the idea of sort of jumping ahead a bit to having these sort of intro videos as well. So now that you’re going to be doing this regular, happy birthday, happy anniversary, kind of kind of, you know, event focused, you know, videos, you can also then create longer form videos that can be reused. So hey, you know, here are 10 questions that first time homebuyers tend to ask, I’m going to send this to you, I’m going to send you this video, which will maybe answer some of your questions. So I don’t waste your time later on, you sort of I guess you package it around, this is to help you and us, you know, be more efficient or effective, and provide value along the way as I made this little 510 minute video, which is here’s some pitfalls to avoid, or whatever, or here’s how to prepare for our meeting, or here’s what how the process works. It could really be anything that a realtor has found that their clients continually ask about. So that could be like the basis for how do I come up with these videos? Like what’s the content? Think about the questions you’re most commonly asked. And then you can make videos about that and say, Hey, I’m gonna send this to you ahead of time. And yeah, I’m always available, you can call me anytime, of course, too. But I want to sort of start edge leading you down a path and providing content to you that’s relevant and valuable. Instead of you having to ask me, I’m going to be pushing this to you proactively.
Nick Niehaus 38:03 Yeah, yeah. And I love that. I mean, that’s where, you know, it’s a shame, because I feel like a lot of times in these sort of business contexts, you have to talk about doing something from almost always from the standpoint of making more money or growing your business, right, like, that’s the hook, right. But it’s a little bit too bad, because video is so effective for customer service, you know, and I’d love to be talking more about that. And there are obviously a lot of agents that care about that. But that’s the place where of all the impacts it has. And there’s there’s I mean, you can you can double and triple E conversion, and just the numbers, you know, in terms of what video does are kind of mind blowing. But the customer service part is really crazy to me, because you can preempt I mean, you can give people an experience where they feel like you’re you’re reading their mind, right, because you know what they’re going to ask, you know, what the processes are, you know, are the sticking points in a real estate transaction are going to be, and this can all be automated, I mean, so it’s this incredible experience where somebody comes in, and every couple days or whatever the right touch frequency is they’re getting, you know, hey, by the way, the next thing is going to happen is this, and here’s me explaining it to you and, you know, video allows you to show versus just tell, you know, so you can talk about, we’re going to fill out this document, here it is, here’s what it looks like, here’s where you’re going to put this information. This is why you need to have this number figured out. Because it’s going to go here in this document. I mean, the sense of clarity that that creates for people is is immense. And you cannot do it. I mean, it’s almost one of those things where you can’t even really do it in person. I mean, you can make a video that has like multiple different clips in it that cuts from one kind of, you know, piece of paper to another this is obviously getting a little more advanced, but you can you can design it in such a way that it actually explains things in a way that’s more fluid and more easy to understand that even if you were sitting in front of that person and showing them the papers, you know, so I think when you do that, this is the kind of thing that then people come in the door they come in as a lead or maybe they become a customer, they start getting this communication, but it is you Do and I think that’s the part a lot folks overlook is like, they’re not just getting an email with this text in it that could have been written by anybody, they’re actually listening to you, they’re watching you there, as far as their brain knows they’re sitting there across the table from you, while you explain all of this to them, you know, so it’s building the relationship, so you’re helping them, they appreciate that you’re informing them, this is the smoothest real estate transaction they’ve ever been involved in. But they’re also getting to know you. And so it’s almost and I’ll tell you, I experienced this myself all the time. Now, it’s a little weird, then when you meet that person, because they know you there’s it’s called the parasocial relationship, they already have a relationship with you, though, as far as their brain knows, they’ve talked to you several times already. And that’s all going to be there, you know, so So once you do that on a regular basis, for a few months, like don’t, don’t be surprised that a lot of these folks come in, and they’re much friendlier, they’re much more comfortable, you know, they’re not at all considering working with another agent anymore, like they’ve already hired you in their head, and just talk about, I mean, you’re gonna find a better fit, you’re gonna have more of the right people choose to hire you, you’re gonna have higher lead conversion, transactions going a lot smoother, I mean, just just so many different things. And then one additional part I’ll just sort of throw into there is I really, like these are all pre recorded, right? So that’s great, you know, tell me about the process. But if you ever run into something that’s especially like frustrating or has a lot of emotion to it, that’s where you really want to use video, right? So if you’re going to share bad news, like, oh, they didn’t accept the offer, you know, that sort of thing, record a video message, because the empathy is substantially higher on video, right? So that they can, you know, so even even phone calls, you could call somebody, but then watching your face and seeing your facial expressions, and being able to read that empathy on your face, that does still go much further. So I think that’s another place you can incorporate it to, to really, you know, maximize that that sort of sense of, hey, this person has the bases covered, they’re totally in control, I can trust them completely. And that I mean, just in terms of the enjoyability, so to speak of the process and working with your customers, it really helps.
D.J. Paris 42:08 Wow, I mean, we’re almost talking a little bit of kind of a mini revolution here and communication, like change. Oh, yeah. Like, we’re really talking about one to one video communication, whether it’s pre recorded or live, there is something that activates and lights up our brain and makes us feel connected to the other person. And through repetition, whether it’s, again, whether it’s pre recorded or live, you start the brain starts to sort of build these neural pathways of familiarity. So all of a sudden, we’re like, Oh, I know, I know, Nick, I seen it all the time. is familiar to me, which familiar nice, comfortable, which means non threatening, which is, which is typically a gateway to the ability to sell somebody something, right. So trust, we’re now talking about, you know, know, like and trust. And I think you’re, you’re really on the cusp of this and agents that can start to move away from that. And not that there’s anything wrong with texting, if that’s appropriate for a relationship great. But you can pepper in, like, I love the idea of the bad news video message. So let’s do a real like a use case example. So I’m a realtor, my client loses this bid that they put in this this offer to buy a home, I have to give them bad news. Now. Would you recommend I do that live video? Would you recommend a pre recorded video? What do you think is? And again, it could be anything, every relationship is different. But what’s a general rule of thumb on something like that?
Nick Niehaus 43:50 Yeah, I mean, I think that one’s that one’s going to depend on the customer a little bit. I think it depends on sort of the question, the difference between those two is that when you when you try to get on like a video chat with them, you’re interrupting them. So it’s like a phone call. That’s one of the disadvantages of phone calls. They have to answer and you’re disrupting their day.
D.J. Paris 44:09 And they might not be, they might not be in a place where physically they want to be seen.
Nick Niehaus 44:14 Yeah, they might not want to be on camera, you know, they might not feel you know, so. But that being said, depending on the type of client, like they might prefer that because they want to ask questions, they want to, you know, they want to be able to dig in a little bit on it. On the other hand, if you pre record it, they can watch it at any time. You can be succinct, you can get straight to the point, you know, you can get right to the news right off the bat. So it really just depends on how the previous communication has been going. Right. So I think the thing to look at there is like, Is this somebody who calls you you know, do they like having a lot of conversations on the phone? Have you done zoom meetings with them? In that case, I would say hey, would you mind hopping on Zoom for a couple minutes want to give you an update on on the situation here, right? Sure. And again, that’s one where you want to get to a quick because you don’t want them you know, waiting for hours to get that info. On the other hand, if it’s somebody who’s been doing a lot of texting with you, or things like email, which are, you know, we call it asynchronous, right? So it’s something you should do, you can watch it anytime it doesn’t have to happen right at that moment, then a pre recorded message is probably going to be better for them.
D.J. Paris 45:14 I love that too. And at the end of a pre recorded message, you can always say, I’m going to call you in a couple hours, to just to check in on you as well. But I wanted I didn’t want to wait for this, I didn’t want to wait a couple hours, I wanted to get get this information over to you immediately. That is, that’s huge. All of this, all of this is huge. It I guess, at the end of the day, it demonstrates care concern, effort, whether it’s warranted or not, is another conversation meaning for some reason, our, our physicality, our the way that we are built as humans, we just like that we just like getting one on one videos. I mean, it’s just kind of how it how we’re wired. So if forget about anything other than it just, it used to be It felt good to get and it still does feels good to get a handwritten letter, those are sure pretty much done. Now, although I still think that that is an amazing thing. But what’s taking its place is these one to one videos, I think, and they’re still very rare. So if you can make a one to one video process, again, start with birthdays, start with home anniversaries, start with, you know, hope your kids are going doing well, when they’re going back to school this fall, you know, whatever it could be, it’s your kid’s birthday, happy birthday, whatever you need to get this information put in and you can do those all day long. And even if you had just did that, if nothing else, if all you did was birthdays, and any other you know, life event stuff that you know, I bet you’d get I bet you’d get business just just from doing that. And obviously that’s like 1% of what you actually do, and still learn the other 99% that is what Nick and his company is going to teach you. So Nick, tell us about about the service. And and you know, what it entails and why our listeners should be checking it out.
Nick Niehaus 47:13 Yeah, I mean, I think the the main thing to understand about Business Video School is you know, it’s a school for real estate agents, it’s about 95% of our students are real estate agents. And we teach pretty much all aspects of video. Now I will say we’re not for the video expert. So if you’ve been making video for five years, and you’ve already got a YouTube channel with hundreds or 1000s of followers, that kind of stuff, like, you know, there’s people to help you. And we certainly could, but that’s not who we’re built for. We’re built for the beginner. So beginner and intermediate, right. So folks that are, you know, having trouble making your first video, or maybe you’ve made a few, but it hasn’t become a habit. Everything we do is about building video habits, right. So just you know, kind of a quick overview of what we have included, there’s a lot so you don’t do you don’t kind of come in and try to take it all at once. But we’ve got nine different courses, some of which we teach live on a monthly or quarterly basis, we have something called video recipes, which is a script and example of us doing the video ourselves. So you can imitate our delivery style. It’s all the instructions on how to make it it’s the social media posts, it’s any sort of assets like music that might go in the video. So it’s basically all the ingredients, you need to make a video and make a new one of those every week. And then we do things a lot of fun stuff. Like we have challenges every month, we split up into teams kind of compete to make different themed videos, we have q&a sessions live q&a is you can come on to if you ever get stuck. And then a community you know, I think the community is a big part of it. It’s just a bunch of folks that or it’s very much no judgment. You know, this was a lot of folks, Sharon, I this is my first video ever made, you know, what do you think? And obviously, there’s lots of things they can improve. But we’re just there to encourage them when they’re first getting started, obviously. So I think that that’s really what you got to look at is that video, it’s a form of communication, and it is going to take some time to really start to understand and implement fully. So we work with folks sort of incrementally speaking so you can come in, you take a class or two you work on implementing you come in with your Q and A’s and you need them. And that’s why we set it up as a membership because we felt like hey, it’d be nice if it’s not just a course you don’t just buy something and it sits on your computer and you got nobody to talk to you like we wanted to have that community want to have the support the ability to come in and kind of get your questions answered. And that’s what it comes down to you know, so a video is a concern. You know, if it’s something that you want to do more with, I strongly recommend you come check us out. I mean, obviously, it’s one of those things that the sooner you do it, the more benefit you’re going to get. Because it is only increasing more and more people are doing this stuff every day. So I think we we did create a coupon code so if you’re listening and you want to save 10% Just use the code keep it real when you check it out, and you’ll save 10% on your monthly membership.
D.J. Paris 49:46 Yeah, so everyone please go visit biz video school.com bi Z video school.com link to that in the show notes, use the coupon code, keep it real and get 10% off on the monthly membership, which guys, it’s, it’s less than 100 bucks a month. And imagine if it just, you know, for a year What’s that? We’ll say it’s $1,200. It’s less than that, actually. Let’s just say it helps you get one additional deal. What’s that, on average, maybe $7,000 of commission. So I’d spend $1,000 To make $7,000. Guys, please please do this video is, is what people are. There’s a little bit of a desert of the last three years of interpersonal communication, intimacy, physical interactions, right? We, we even now, we are still recovering from this lack of, of in person stuff. Video is the closest thing we have to simulating real life interactions. It works way better than text, an email, and other even voice, you know, voice voice messages. So please consider doing this. You don’t have to have a big production studio. You don’t have to have special lighting. You just have to be willing to start this process. But let the guys at biz Video School, Nick and his team help you do this. We’re big fans. You know, this is the biz Video School has been around for a while they are huge. labcoat agents is a big fan of you guys. They’re the largest online community for for Facebook. So I know that that this is this is definitely a great service. So I encourage everyone out there to check it out this video school.com Use promo code keep it real? Well, this is perfect timing. I know. Nick is heading off to his next meeting. So we will wrap up this episode. We want to thank Nick on behalf of all of our listeners and our viewers. For all what you contributed to the show today. Thank you for all of your great content. And also on behalf of Nick and myself. We want to thank our viewers and listeners for continuing to support and listen. Support our show, please tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Nick send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from a browser and sign up for Nick’s abyss video. school.com Use promo code keep it real and let’s get your video up and running. This is the year to do one to one video. Nick, thank you so much for being on the show. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Nick.
Nick Niehaus 52:23 Yeah, thank you for having me.
Why Radical Honesty Is The Key To More Clients • Pamela Marcus
Feb 27, 2023
Pamela Marcus talks about her transition from advertising to real estate and discusses her experience with clients. Pamela also talks about “Pam’s rules” which is to always be honest and tell the clients the truth about the property. Last, Pamela discusses how advertising taught her discipline and customer service – two very valuable assets in real estate business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We all know you’re supposed to be honest with your clients. But how can you actually use honesty to attract more clients? Or we’re going to talk to a top producer today who does exactly that. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top 1% Producer Pam Marcus. But before we get to Pam, just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend about this episode. Think of one other realtor that could benefit from maybe they’re struggling this year. Let’s face it. 2023 is a tough year markets picking up a little bit right now. But it’s still pretty slow out there. And a lot of realtors are depressed, depressed, dejected, and sending them a link to this episode might actually help them snap out of it and have a great 2023. So do them a favor and it also does us a favor. So please introduce them to the show, you can drive them right over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button we would appreciate it Okay guys, enough of me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Pam Marcus.
Today on the show we have Marcus with the PAM Marcus team compass in New York City. Let me tell you more about him. Now Pam graduated NYU School of Business and also attended Wharton at University of Pennsylvania. And so she has this incredible pedigree but let’s let’s keep going through her history because it’s so interesting. She spent three years in bank marketing at Bankers Trust before segwaying into advertising as an account exec at Marine Midland Bank and then spent 12 years at grey advertising and 10 at Bates advert 10 years of Bates advertising convincing the public to eat brands like m&ms, Snickers, Campbell’s soup, and raisin bran cereal. And then she spent seven years in the travel business expanding a niche travel company called lawyers travel into other professional firms. And at the time, Pam didn’t even know how to use a computer or write a plane ticket. But the target figured if she knew advertising business, she would know how to take care of their travel needs. She also spent one year in her own consulting business helping hotels fine tune their marketing, and then three years at a startup called barbarac, which is they make ergonomically designed tools for women. And then eventually at the ripe young age of 60. She started her real estate career and I am so excited to welcome Pam Marcus to our show. Before that, I’d like everybody to follow her on Instagram. So please. And by the way, the link to her Instagram account is in our show notes. But you can find her at Pam Marcus real estate on Instagram and everywhere else on social media. Pam, welcome to the show.
Pamela Marcus 4:28 Thank you so much DJ. It’s really a pleasure to be here. And I’m flattered that you asked me to do this.
D.J. Paris 4:34 Well, I am flattered that you accepted to do this because I am just so impressed with anyone that starts a career of any sort at at you know the age that you did it with in your case with real estate but your background I am so fascinated with because I’m curious to learn more specifically about how that background helped you when you started and how it continues to help today. So My first question is about, you know, gosh, you had this really incredible career, non real estate related advertising, different marketing sort of jobs in different industries, and then at 60 decided to go into real estate. So why real estate at at age 60?
Pamela Marcus 5:19 Well, I was a number of reasons. The last place I was, which were the ergonomically designed tools for women, when we weren’t paid for six weeks, I said, this is silly, it’s time to leave. So if I’m not going to get paid, I might as well do something else. Just stay home and have fun. And what happened was, I tried to figure out what I wanted to do, because staying home and doing nothing was not going to suit me, I would drive myself and everybody else crazy. And I realized that I had done a couple of real estate investments for myself, I had done very well and that I love people. I love young people, and I love teaching and helping people. And I love shopping. So I said, you know, I think real estate could be a good fit. Am I went to school and I networked into Corcoran at the time, I knew some people. Sure. And that’s how I got into real estate. And it was an the very first client I took care of happened to be the daughter of dear friends of mine. They were of the ripe age to buy an apartment and they were my first clients.
D.J. Paris 6:30 Wow. And and how did you? So one quick question, because before we get to that story, because I’m curious, when you when you did start, you know, your background was was not real estate. So everyone, I’m assuming in your sphere of influence, including your friend who, whose daughter, of course, became your first client. I am curious how you made that transition known right to people in your sphere, so that they could start thinking about you as a realtor, as opposed to the marketing that, you know, somebody down on Madison Avenue being in more of the ad space, which is probably how they thought about you.
Pamela Marcus 7:06 I kind of I if I remember correctly, I did a mailer that basically played off of my background. You know, when I think it was sort of a plane ticket, we’re flying on to the next place. And I was a Manhattanite. I knew all these people. And I guess one tip I would always say is, people remember if they like you, they don’t always remember why.
D.J. Paris 7:32 Or they don’t always remember what you do, either. They just like,
Pamela Marcus 7:35 they just know they like you. So whether if they like you, they assume they like what you’re what you’re doing. And you know, this very first sale is kind of an interesting sale. Because I did it. And they wanted to buy an apartment that I told them not to buy. It was a land lease, and we don’t like land leases in New York unless you’re a Brit. And I said, I don’t think you should buy it. But they bought it. Well, about six months ago, I had to sell it. And I always have a rule that might the test I applied to something you buy as well do I think I will be able to sell it in five years without a lot of problems? Well, and can I do I think if the market is good, we can make a profit. Unfortunately, when I sold that this was the first sale I ever made that they lost money on the transaction. And I said to the wife, I said, Amanda, is Greg mad at me? She looked at me and she said, Absolutely not. He remembers you told them not to buy it. And and you know, they bought a very expensive apartment and they love it. And you know, but I think the thing is you if you ask me why I succeeded? It’s being totally honest. Yeah. And I guess that’s always been my nature. But at my age, I’m afraid if I wasn’t honest, I wouldn’t remember what I said.
D.J. Paris 9:11 So, advertising exec, who’s honest, oh my gosh. Sorry, I just that was an easy joke.
Pamela Marcus 9:19 But it you know, honesty is it’s everything. They may not want to hear it. But you have to tell them what you think.
D.J. Paris 9:28 Do you know I’ve done over 450 episodes of the show and hundreds of people I’ve interviewed and I am sure this you’re not the only person with this particular philosophy that I’m going to sort of circle back to because I found it to be particularly interesting, but it’s the first time someone’s verbalized that on our show. So I want to just make a point to step on it a little bit to make sure that it’s not lost and all the other wonderful things you said but you said two things that were really interesting. One was about When you’re always going to tell somebody the truth with the, with the idea of in five years, would I be able to resell this property for you, and actually have it be, you know, hassle free and ideally a profit. And that, to me is is fascinating. And it’s a great credo. And then, of course, you know, having to then deal with people who don’t necessarily take that advice and having to possibly disappoint them, even though you told them not to. And, and, but that honesty factor really goes a long way it reminds me of, and it’s happened just a few times in my life, when I’m thinking of buying or, or you know, buying a product or a service, and the sales rep would come back and say, You know what you don’t want you don’t want this, it’s not going to work for you. And I love that kind of honesty, and I’m always appreciative of it. And it is pretty rare, unfortunately.
Pamela Marcus 10:57 Yeah, I think I know where if I was giving advice it has to come from. Even if you need that commission check to pay the rent, don’t act like you do. If you have to take money out of a savings account and put it in your in your checking account. So you know, there’s a balance. It’s when you lose sight, and you’re desperate for the money that you will say anything. And you know, I’m I think where that came from from me is early on in my career. I was married and my husband was doing fine. So I didn’t need the money. And when life changed, and I really didn’t need the money, it was so ingrained in me that I’ve never acted that way. And I think that’s what people relate to. And in the end, they’re, they’re more loyal to you. And they stay with you and they recommend you.
D.J. Paris 11:55 Yeah, absolutely. The other thing too, about being desperate, and then acting desperate is that that oftentimes comes with less rational decision making, because your death because you’re feeling the anxiety or the fear of the financial insecurity, oh, my gosh, my checking accounts down, I need this commission to survive. And and then people start making different decisions than if their bank accounts were full. And so keeping a check on one’s own anxiety is really important. Because if that bank account is low, and you duty the commission, you have to really check yourself when you’re dealing with clients to make sure I’m still acting as if everything is okay. Because that will ultimately be in the client’s best interest.
Pamela Marcus 12:43 And even if you play a game with yourself, you know, you put money in the account, that’s really not money to live on. But psychologically, you have the money there. And I also think, no matter how little you have, you must give a closing gift. I cannot tell you how many people I have said to me, Oh, I’ll never recommend her. She didn’t even give me a closing gift.
D.J. Paris 13:08 Yeah, that’s it’s I mean, people can all they have to do is Google. The average commission on a particular like that information is even though they might not see it, when they’re closing, and they might not see the actual amount you’re getting paid, they can figure it out. And you have to assume that they are going to know it, whether they ever asked you or not. And then to think well, she just made 25 grand, and I didn’t she didn’t get me anything. I think you’re right, I think that’s a really good practice.
Pamela Marcus 13:38 And I also don’t think it’s how much you spend, I think it’s more what the thought else, and that you understand who these people are and what they could relate to, for example, people my age, I will often give them stationery, you know, engraved stationery with the name Manila dress, you wouldn’t want it if it was the last gift in the world. So it you know what makes sense for who the person is.
D.J. Paris 14:07 So you’re very intentional and thoughtful about what that person might like and want. And you’ve probably know their hobbies and sort of what their interests are, and then can can give them an appropriate gift as opposed to just getting the same thing for everybody, every time. That’s really important. I am fascinated by your ad background. And again, I know you haven’t just been in advertising, you’ve done a lot of different things. But I’m curious because we were talking before we started and you were saying my background really helped me when I decided to get into real estate. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what that means to you?
Pamela Marcus 14:41 Well, I was an account guy on packaged goods accounts. And by the time I finished it, Bates I was running all of the m&m Mars business. And I’ve been doing it for over 20 years and you really learn customer service and You learned how to deal with people and you learn how to listen. And I think that is the kind of background that I have much more patience now than I would have had. I’m not sure 20 or 30 years ago, I would have had patience to put up with all these questions. And, you know, so I think it it and it also taught a discipline of how to approach something, how to present it, you know, people are impressed if you don’t just walk around with a bunch of loose papers, but you lay it out, I wrote a buyer’s guide. And in the Buyer’s Guide, it has things like Pam’s rules, and people get a kick out of that. Because my rules are things like if we walk into a lobby, and it’s fake flowers, is that the kind of building you want to live in with fake flowers?
D.J. Paris 15:53 And, boy, I could talk for a full hour about my hatred of fake flower.
Pamela Marcus 15:58 Okay, there’s your answer. And then if I’m with people that are my age, or even a little younger, I don’t know how I feel about six or eight steps into the building, you know, someday, that may be a problem. And you know, I guess people they tell me, I’m funny. I don’t think I’m funny. I think I’m being honest. You know, to me, a living room that’s narrower than 12 feet looks like a bowling alley. So it’s those kind of things, or I made a mistake when I wasn’t in this business. And I bought an apartment, and it was on the third floor. And I only looked at the daylight. I never knew there was a street lamp outside of my bedroom window. Oh, yes. So those are the kinds of things that I think what you’re what I’m trying to do is educate them in ways that they feel as if they have greater knowledge, you know, how high the ceilings are? Or just the kind of you have to have a bathtub? You know, because if there are babies who need a bathtub. So I think it’s, I call it Pam’s rules?
D.J. Paris 17:14 Well, what it sounds like is two things. So what I hear you saying is, number one, obviously, your listening skills, your this comes from working on accounts, I’m guessing where, you know, you had to serve various masters during those account meetings, you had to win over groups of people at other companies, and you’re competing with every other ad firm in town who wants that business, and it become, really can become about presentation and, and of course, relationship and all everything, it’s so everything is so important. But then I also heard you talk, it’s really giving your own opinions about things which Realtors oftentimes are, I find, are reluctant to give opinion, because they sort of don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t know what someone’s, you know, particular interests, or, you know, you know, likes and dislikes might be, so they just go you know, I’m just gonna stay neutral. The client likes it good. client doesn’t like it, we’ll move on. I like the fact that you come in and say, Hey, this looks like a bowling alley. I think that is incredibly honest. And it really again demonstrates you don’t need or the commission more more than you need the person to be happy in their home. And I think the willingness to give your own opinion is probably a very powerful tool when dealing with clients.
Pamela Marcus 18:35 Well, I had an interesting experience the other day, we sold an apartment, and now the woman wants to buy another apartment, and we’ve been looking and looking. And we walk into an apartment. And she says to me, I really liked this. I said, Good now come to the window. And we walked to the window. And the adjacent living room could look right into her bedroom. I said to her, you can’t go to the window on a night gown. Is that what you want? Yeah. And she said, Oh, thank you. And then of course that evening, she had found something she really liked. And she wrote back and she said to me, you know, I want your opinion. Do you really like it? I said, Yeah, you know, you have my opinion. You were in love with the apartment before that and I’d made to go to the window should Oh, yeah, you’re right. But they trust you then. You don’t just keep saying yes. It they don’t need frankly, why do we deserve a commission check if all we do is arrange appointments,
D.J. Paris 19:45 right? Zillow can pretty much do all of that without you write. For the most
Pamela Marcus 19:49 we don’t. If we if we don’t add value, then why bother? Which is another one of my sort of pet peeves. I think you need to specialize is in a certain area, you can’t know all of Manhattan. If you I mean, if you look at my website, and you look at what I’ve sold, yeah, I’ve sold all over Manhattan, or even a couple in Brooklyn, and but there’s probably not a building on the Upper East Side that I don’t know about. Yeah. So I’m going to your, your domain that that and Sutton Place it, that’s my domain, and I’m happy to help help you any place. But I have better value in those places. And that’s one of the benefits of a team. Because different people have different skill sets in different areas.
D.J. Paris 20:39 Now, before we move forward, I always forget to do this until the very end of the show. So I’m going to do it now, since you just mentioned your team, because not everyone makes it to the end of the show, which only taken me five years to figure this out. But I figured it out finally, so I want to make a quick note for our listeners and our our viewers, which is that if you are a New York City agent, and you would like to work on a team, like the PAM Marcus team at Compass, and you think you might be a good asset to them, or they might be a good asset for you. I want you to reach out to Pam, because your team is looking currently for agents. Pam, quick, two quick questions about that. One, what is your team looking for in an agent, what would be like an ideal recruit for possibly your team, and then what’s the best way that they should reach out to you?
Pamela Marcus 21:30 I only like people who are hungry and want to work hard. It’s a little bit to me, I when I was divorced, and us your friends fix me up a tooth that only takes you so far, you have to be willing to go find some dates on your own. And it’s the same thing with me Don’t go on a team because you just want them to feed you business team will give you some business, but you also need to be building your own network and your own business. So I think you need the sense of initiation, I we all do things differently. But we all should have the same core values. And to me a team is not just to increase the GCI for a higher split to me a team is we think like, I can let you go and talk to a client and I know what will come out of your mouth will be similar to what I would say, the the team, the person who’s on the team, the longest since we’ve had a team is been with me for six years. I hear him speak and I think it’s my voice at this point most of the time. So you know, coming out of a younger person. So I think you need to I look I love to teach, you know, at this point, I love mentoring people. And because when I was in advertising, I mentored a lot of people and I still do. But you have to be hungry, and you want to you have to be willing to work hard. You have to be willing. I’m a little crazy. I can get you know, a little testy. But if you’re on my team, you know I love you and would do anything for you. Yeah. Well, that’s that’s, I think they’re my children.
D.J. Paris 23:24 Yeah, well, it’s a family. Yes, you know, to some degree and I. So if someone does think they may want to join the family and think they could provide value to you and receive a benefit, what’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Pamela Marcus 23:41 Shoot me an email.
D.J. Paris 23:43 Do you mind sharing your email
Pamela Marcus 23:45 pam.marcus@compass.com
D.J. Paris 23:48 Easy enough. And by the way, we will have a link to Pam’s email. So pam.marcus@compass.com, we will have a link to that in our show notes as well. And I’d be thrilled. Well, and I would be thrilled to hopefully find one of one of our listeners be possibly a fit for you. The other thing I want to mention very quickly before moving on to the rest of Pam story. And I’m so excited to hear more about I want to talk specifically about the ad background and how you bring the professionalism that you had back then in those client meetings and those, you know, those those types of business winning or possibly losing opportunities into the real estate world. But I’m also I wanted to also mention for anyone out there who is not in the New York area and maybe as a realtor in another part of the country or even in another even in another country. If you have clients that may be relocating moving to New York City, maybe people in the financial world are just for whatever reason moving to in maybe they’re having a second home or or they’re moving entirely over into the East Coast. Pam would love the opportunity to connect with you too and be a resource for you if you have clients moving into that area. So reach out to her as well. She would be honored to talk about Your client. So Pam question about going into appointments with real estate clients, maybe for the first time. And let’s assume this isn’t necessarily a referral, even though I know probably all your businesses or most of your business is probably referral. But let’s say it’s somebody who doesn’t know like and trust you yet. I imagine the idea of walking in? Well, I don’t know, you know, I’m going to ask you, because I don’t want to make any assumptions. Would you walk in, you sort of talked about this earlier, but I just want to drill down, would you walk in to let’s just say, a listing presentation? And let’s say that, you know, that that, that this client may be interviewing one or two other realtors, which, you know, I guess happens, of course, would you come in with a presentation? Would you come in with a blank pad of paper? Would you do it a different way? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what works best for you.
Pamela Marcus 25:52 First of all, I wouldn’t do it alone. And I learned this from advertising, people are going to like somebody better than they like someone else. And there’s a woman on my team who’s a little younger than I am, but a mature woman. We have been on two or three pitches together. We have never won the pitch. I always wait. And you always take someone else with you what I find, boy, girl, young, old, different personality. I partner very often on deals with someone at another agency, we’re very different. And that’s it’s not about the ego. If a if a lead comes in or request comes in, I would never do it on Okay, your next man up, you know, whatever. Not everybody’s not equal. You need to understand the situation and bring who you think make sense for that situation. And two peas in a pod, but you don’t need to.
D.J. Paris 27:04 That makes that makes a lot of sense. Sorry, we have a fire truck going but Okay, hopefully that wasn’t too loud. That Well, that was loud. Sorry. But yes, I that’s very interesting. I’ve yet to hear anyone mentioned specifically, there are lots of teams that do those together. But I’ve I’ve yet to hear anybody say we do this as a group that are to some degree more than me, just in case, maybe they don’t connect as much to me, but my team member, and also just, it really just expands the opportunity to win the business, I think because I don’t see it hurting the business, the opportunity, if you have another person with you, it only possibly could help because you’re right. Maybe they don’t connect to me, for whatever reason, but maybe they connect to this other person. So that’s really a smart idea is to bring somebody who has a kind of a different skill set or a different, you know, just a different Yeah, purse, different personality.
Pamela Marcus 27:59 Yeah. And it does one other thing if you win, win it, and you’re the only one that went. If anyone else goes to show the listing, they feel that they’re getting second fiddle. If they’re in the listing presentation initially, you’re closer to being on equal footing, and they don’t feel as if they’re being deprived if that person does most of the listing most of the showings that I do all the negotiating.
D.J. Paris 28:28 I love that. Oh, what a question about the listing appointment. Are you bringing in a presentation or Yes, yes, yeah.
Pamela Marcus 28:36 But that’s probably my background. And people fall for it. People like it. They like when it it. They feel as if you think they’re important, and you’re treating them properly. And the once or twice I got suckered into going Oh, would you just stop by? It never worked?
D.J. Paris 28:59 Yeah, it’s I am. I guess I’m impressed by people I know who just go I just bring in a blank pad of paper. And I have talked to those producers, those top producers. That’s the I would say that’s the exception rather than the rule because every top producer I they almost laugh when I asked them like, of course I bring in a presentation. I respect this person and their time. And maybe if it’s your best friend, you might not need that. But if it’s somebody who doesn’t, you know, isn’t in your close sphere. You have to win the business. You know that from the ad game?
Pamela Marcus 29:33 And even if you don’t win, even if you don’t have to, you’re treating them with respect. Yeah, I got an interesting call to divert a minute, last week from someone and she said to me, okay, I’d like to sell my apartment on Park Avenue. said okay, I said, you know, so many brokers. Why are you calling me you? Have you met me once or you know? Well, it turned out that I played canasta with her in Florida twice. Okay. Ken, so am I said to her? I’m flattered why you calling me. She’s what? I figured we’re good canasta player, you’re good broker. But and I am going down to see her next week. And I said, Well, she already gave it to me. I’m bringing yet I’m putting a presentation together. I don’t think you assume. Yeah. So you treat it as if it’s a new business pitch.
D.J. Paris 30:39 Even when it’s your canasta teammate, you’re going to say, you know, you’re probably more likely to win the business. And I’m still going to treat you as if you don’t owe me at all. And because there’s, there’s really no downside, right? The only downside is maybe you don’t win the business. But it’s not because you didn’t show up prepared. It might just be, you know, their son might be a realtor in New York, and they ended up doing that instead. Who knows. But, but it’s not because I wasn’t prepared. And that, you know, obviously, in the ad space, I don’t know if it’s still so much that way. But certainly it was in the past, and it probably is exactly that way still.
Pamela Marcus 31:16 So you can when you do that, yeah. But DJ, when you do that presentation, I think the strongest piece in our pitch package is what percent? Have we gotten relative to asking price on the last 10 sales?
D.J. Paris 31:30 Ah,
Pamela Marcus 31:32 so you’re fairly comfortable that we’re not coming in giving you a pie in the sky? Number two, when the listing will show? We’ll do that. Yeah, we’re showing you what we priced it at and what we sold it for. For the end, we keep it up to date on the last 10 listings.
D.J. Paris 31:53 i That’s just, I’m only pausing because I love that. And it really is, here’s my most recent track record. And here’s why it’s important. Here’s it’s in your case, it sounds like this is the important metric, because it is yes, I have all this history. And I have kind of a neat story. And, you know, my team’s really cool, and we’re great. And let me just show you what we actually do. And that is where the rubber meets the road, the data. And you’re basically saying, Well, here’s the last 10 transactions, because and that’s really, really smart. Because there are going to be if they are interviewing other agents, agents going to come in and go, Well, if I tell them it’s worth X, that might just win the business in and of itself. You’re obviously you’re that goes against your I mean, unless it’s true, you’re unwilling to, of course, you know, inflate a number. And as a result that, but you’re like, but here’s what I’ve actually done. I think that is incredibly powerful. I love that, again, something else nobody’s ever said on our show. Which is that’s why me
Pamela Marcus 33:00 well, by the time they’re my age.
D.J. Paris 33:04 Let’s talk about So okay, so I think I have somewhat of a sense of Oh, and by the way, one last thing about the listing presentation or the buyer presentation, where you don’t yet have the business. The presentation we talked about you come prepared, you have something that looks professional has some current data, you know, you’re going to explain everything that you do for the client, how important is the listening part of that, as well. And again, I’m curious to how that relates back to the ad background, where you’ve probably seen mistakes, ad execs have made in these pitches where they’re just like, I know what the client needs, and they push forward. And it’s not really what the client wants at all. And they didn’t do that listening components. I’m curious how important is that listening part when you’re in these presentations,
Pamela Marcus 33:52 very important. Let them talk let you listen to what they really want. And we never put a price in the listing presentation. We say we can’t give you the price until we see the apartment. You know you can tell us it’s meant and it might have been Min 35 years ago. So it we give you a price when we’re with you or we’ll say we’ll we’ll email you but you’ve back but that’s true in anything DJ about listening and just listening to what people are saying and what’s important to them. And it’s still their home. I mean for the most part we’re not selling investments we’re selling it was their home and they love it. And you can’t you can’t really you don’t want to insult them are very often in New York, it’s an estate and they really not ready to say goodbye to mama. We we I mean and there’s if they’re not ready, we tried to sell an apartment tried to sell it and finally after six months He said, Okay, I give up your complaintant and stage it, while we painted it and stage it and sold it within 5% of the asking price in a week, but they are not ready. So you really got to be sensitive. And listen. And I think you also have to show that there are so many agents, what makes you different. And one of the things we do and because it’s my marketing background, and I have such fun with it, is we wrote the buyer’s guide, we wrote a coloring book. And it’s a coloring book that has about 10 or 15 line drawings that really were photographs of different listings. But on each one is a fact about New York that relates to that picture. I’ve seen other people do coloring books, but it’s just a coloring book. Ours is an educational coloring book. And then it ends with a crossword puzzle about real estate. Now, even though that’s really not for the seller, it says we do things that are a little different. To get attention and show you we care, we just did a deck of cards. And the first card deck on the first card on the deck is the PAM Marcus team deals with a full deck. And the two jokers one is me and one is the team. I love it. And then it’s divided into neighborhoods and places in the neighborhood. So I think people like that they think they’re not just treated that they’re only going to get it just just sold just listed postcard, which I find very boring anyway.
D.J. Paris 36:41 Well, I would I would ask you what your opinion of just listed and just sold social media posts are but I suspect I know, which is whatever. No, go ahead. What is your I
Pamela Marcus 36:51 think it I think it’s good to get your name out there and good to give you credibility. And I think I think what’s important, and I tell the team, we all solicit business differently. I can’t tell you that the way I do it fits you. So but you need to do it, whatever is that works for you come up with a plan and do it. I mean, I got a sale coming out of a funeral. I spoke to someone at the funeral, someone sat next to me on a plane. And I ended up selling his father a you know, an expensive apartment three months later, but not everybody is comfortable doing it that way? Sure. So it’s it, you’ve got to, I guess what I’m saying is, you have to be yourself and find what works for you.
D.J. Paris 37:47 And that takes courage. I think it takes courage to give your opinion about something that it would be maybe easier in some ways to close a sale without giving your opinion like you were saying, the woman with you know, the person looking right into our living room, it would be easy for you to say Oh, I better not show her that. And that would go against all of your values. So I never, I would never suggest you wouldn’t do that. But a lot of agents would. And I think maybe that in it like, this is great. I’ll tell you a corollary example or kind of similar example to me because I don’t produce real estate. But, but I have an accountant, like a lot of us. And like this is this is it almost makes me want to cry. But I love this about my accountant. I never speak to her until she is like, Okay, you need to pay XY and Z. Well, a couple of weeks, or actually before the end of the year, she sent me a note. And it’s always sort of like humorous to get this and but it did make me almost want to cry. But I love this about her. She said, I’m getting really nervous about you this year. And for whatever reason, maybe there’s been some tax law changes or something I don’t know, she goes, I’m getting really nervous. I need you to cut a check to the government for this giant sum that I was not expected. And she goes, I just think this will help cushion the blow come tax time. And as as painful as it was to cut this check. I was like I love the fact that she got nervous about me. Like it sounds simple. But I like when my doctors show that they care about me in a way that’s more than and when my accountants like I’m thinking about you. And I’m getting a little scared. And I want to do this because I want to. And I was like, This is why I love this accountant. And maybe she’s the best out there. Maybe she’s not the best out there. I don’t know. She cares. And I’m in until till I get audited. I’m not going to I’m not going to change because I know she cares, right or wrong, good or bad. She cares about me. And that to me is the most important thing because I suspect she’ll work harder for me because she cares now maybe she’s just saying it. I don’t know, but it seems like she cares. And as a result, I won’t you know every so often I look for another account and just to make sure that my account is doing the right things, but I’ve not I wouldn’t leave unless all of a sudden someone’s like, oh my gosh, she’s really doing the wrong stuff for you, because she cares. So I think that is such an underrated or not talked about you talked about likability earlier, this likability factor is a real thing. And it is people make decisions based as we know that based on who they know, like and trust, and you have an opport, everyone has an opportunity to but you have to earn this, I think you have to earn know, like and trust through your actions. And obviously, you’re doing this, I have a quick question. So we talked about when you have a client, you know, sort of the professional part of going in with, with with all of your ducks in a row and really treating them as special as they are. But then the transaction happens. And then maybe there’s a seven year window where they’re maybe longer or shorter, where they’re not transacting in real estate. And they might, of course, refer business, but they themselves aren’t needing your services necessarily. What are you doing in between that time to make sure that they don’t forget about you? I don’t think they could forget about you, but just in the off chance that they that you don’t want them to what are you doing?
Pamela Marcus 41:12 Well, I told you, I like shopping. And somehow I started about 15 years ago, I give clients gifts at holiday time. It’s always it’s one gift goes to everybody, but it’s always something related to the house. And it’s young old boy girl never has the brand on it never has my name on it never, you know nothing, not that it is a personal gift. And I have now gone into homes when they go to sell and see seven or eight of them all over the place. So we do do holiday gift stirring COVID We did a couple of gifts, you know, we said you’re washing your hands so much we send some fancy soap. Sure, you know, a month or so later, we sent chocolate and said you need a little sweetness. You know, we if someone refer someone to me, and that person buys something, I send a referral gift, knowing who you are and what you would like, I do send the quarterly reports to the whole CRM database. But I think and the team sort of says that I don’t really follow the CRM database, I just kind of go Gee, I haven’t spoken to so and so in a while. And I’ll give them a call and say let’s have lunch or breakfast or meet for a drink and how are you? So it’s reaching out? Because it’s my network that gives me my business. And I think they can tell why would you want something with the compass logo on it. So
D.J. Paris 42:55 it’s funny, it’s funny, because I suspect I’m sorry to interrupt, I just want to make this point, because you just said it so beautifully, is you wouldn’t want things with brand specific stuff on it, because it does change the way people perceive that object, of course, and you might not want in your home to have you know, something sitting out that says so and so accountant or, or whatever the professional service is, and I’m in that same group, I agree. And obviously other realtors feel differently, and they do put their logos on things, and that’s fine. But I love the fact that you’re like, I don’t need to put my brand on here because I’m maintaining this relationship regardless. So they don’t need to look at the item and see my name because I’m staying in touch with them. Isn’t is that sort of the understanding is I’m not gonna get about you anyway.
Pamela Marcus 43:44 Okay, well, but you do need because at this point to be honest, EJ, if the lawyer that I’ve used for a long time got a call from an ex client, and then and he said to the client, well, how come you’re not using Pam on this trade? And it was someone that I had, you know, not been crazy about not really pursued? And she said, Oh, I thought she was retired or passed away, because I haven’t heard from her in a while. So it’s important to keep in touch with who you want to keep in touch with you know.
D.J. Paris 44:22 And by the way, thank you for that honesty of Hey, everyone, everybody snug
Pamela Marcus 44:27 Yes, when everybody’s not gonna want you know, and you’re not right for everyone. And this is a personal relationship. So you want to be with someone who you think a understands you b will fight for you and really cares. I mean, I had someone this week is in love with an apartment and doesn’t want to lose it. I said it’s good thing you’re not negotiating.
D.J. Paris 44:55 I suck because you’re not willing to walk away I said
Pamela Marcus 44:59 you Because you’d be overpaying, just let me play it out. I promise you, I won’t, you won’t lose it. But I’m not giving them full asking price until I have to it.
D.J. Paris 45:13 How many agents? What percentage of agents do you think and this is just a guess. But you’ve, you know, what percentage of agents wouldn’t would say what you said? Don’t worry, I have this. I am not going to let you overpay. And I know what what to do here. I think that’s a rare thing. And I applaud you for again, having a conviction having an opinion, and and sticking to it in the client’s best interest.
Pamela Marcus 45:43 What will you hope? I mean? Also, you have to remember the Jay I can get away saying things that the 30 year old can’t say it’s true, they will take it from me a little more than they’ll take it from everybody else. But it you have to really care. This is a tough business. There’s a lot of competitors. The other parts that I don’t think that brokers realize is how important your relationship is with the other brokers. Oh, I specially I don’t think that’s true outside of New York with all the lock boxes, but we don’t have lock boxes we interact. And very often it’s the broker who decides who gets the deal. And we all know there are certain brokers, I won’t go to their listing, you know, I won’t, they’re just too hard to do a deal with. And if you have that relationship with other brokers, your buyers going to get it because they know you’re going to play fair and square, they know they’re going to get a good board package. So I think people underplay the importance of playing well with their colleagues.
D.J. Paris 46:56 And, you know, this, too, came so much into play in the last several years during especially during lockdown with will say during the 3% rate, you know, time where we had so many buyers, and there were so many multiple offer situations, a lot of times sight unseen. And there is something to be said that highest and best offer might not win the deal, because maybe they go oh, I don’t know who this agent is, or they don’t have a good track record, or I don’t like them personally. And then they see a friendly name. Oh, I know. I know, Pam, she’s great. She’s gonna get this thing done. She’s a real pro. I imagine that in and of itself wins, sometimes over highest and best.
Pamela Marcus 47:40 Yeah, I think yes. And the firm you’re with and the credentials of that firm, and it’s important. People want to have a comfort level. So it’s it you have to play nice with the other with the your colleagues as well.
D.J. Paris 47:56 Yeah, it really just helps everyone, when when you do and I imagine you have to grin and bear it sometimes as well, when other agents aren’t being super nice to you. And I’m sure that happens a lot. Because, you know, for a million reasons, obviously, people treat women differently than men. And you know, people of different ages are treated differently. And again, this idea of also dealing with some of the abuse, I imagine that comes in,
Pamela Marcus 48:24 I like to you have to remember I built a career on brands. So to me, the brand is important, because it means something. Yeah. And I see, we get a reputation and you can’t change your reputation. You earn it one way or the other.
D.J. Paris 48:44 I used to do marketing 4 million years ago on right out of college with Anheuser Busch in St. Louis. And this was back when Budweiser was was known as the king of beers even I think today, but it was really the number one that and Bud Light were the two biggest beer sold in the country. And I always before working for them, I thought oh, those are kind of lower tier beers, they’re fine, but they’re not like good quality. Well, when I when I started working there, I learned that the quality control is so impressive at some of these brands, including Anheuser Busch, that oh, you know, they’re maybe they’re at a different price point than higher end product, but their product is perfectly done. And and there was a certain level of perfection that I was not used to in my normal life. And I was like, Oh, this is why they’re at the time. This is why they’re number one. Everything is professionally perfected. And you’re you’re coming from that same world of Yep, we get it, you know, whether it’s m&ms or you know, something that’s considered you know, a different price point for a snack. m&m people, to them, their product is is is incredibly important to them, and of course their professionalism for anyone that one interact with it like you on the on the ad side, you treat it as it’s the most important thing, just like you do with your clients today. I am going to just watch curious for one last question, and then we’ll wrap up. But I think it’s a good one. Or I hope it’s a good one, which is to say, right now we know 2023 is projected to be a challenging year for agents, you know, low inventory high rates, although hopefully the rates are starting to come down, thankfully, but still a challenging year, I’d say would would be fair, or at least according to the NAR Chief Economist who I saw a few weeks ago, so he was even saying it’s gonna be a tough year. But anyway, I’m curious what you would suggest to maybe a teammate of yours or just an agent who is isn’t saddled with a lot of clients right now. Maybe they’re like, I don’t know, really what to do. I’d love to drum up some more business. Just curious, what would you do? If you were maybe finding, oh, gosh, I don’t really have a lot of clients right now. What might you do to sort of seek out additional business? Or what would you recommend for somebody to do
Pamela Marcus 51:02 focus on where your strengths are, if you have sold in one building a couple of apartments, build on that. Send send a couple of mailings, not just sold just listed. But we we’ve done kitchen, you know, refrigerator magnets for a zip code, and listed 10 or 15, places on that little map. But not You’re not the supermarket in places you might not know about so that their message is, we know your neighborhood. So we know how to sell your neighborhood. Do some interesting mailings. But don’t go try something, see if it works, and then expand it. Everything is not going to work, see what will work and then expand it where you have more knowledge. I mean, I always found people say to me, Well, how do you pick up so much? How do you pick up so many people in an open house? Well, if you went to that Open House prepared, and you knew everything that was in your competitive set, and you knew the neighborhood, and you knew everything about it, they walked out and they said, Hmm, if I had a broker that represented me, I want to deal with somebody who really knows. And you’ve demonstrated that, you know, and that’s, I think, the most important advice, it’s like, you know, an educated consumer is is the best. And that’s what you really you want to be educated. You want to know what you’re talking about, and not just be sending out a bunch of BS and stand out, stand up for who you are, you know, defend your clients fight fear clients, I will just tell you one, I think about it often. My second client ever was a big sale for me. And it was a Fifth Avenue apartment. The lawyers couldn’t get together, everybody was nitpicking over the stupid contract. And I was so green at the time, I didn’t know better, but I called the meeting of the buyer and the seller in the apartment without the lawyers. And I stood there and I said, Do you want to buy? Yes. Do you want to sell? Yes. I said, Okay, well, we’re gonna stand here till we hash it out. And then we’re going to give it to the lawyers to draw up the contract. Do you know work? Brilliant, as well, but it worked. You had you have a buyer and you have the seller? Yeah. And they could not, you know, get past it. And I sometimes the attorneys get in the way for sure. Absolutely. And the truth was after that the when I got back to the office, and eventually it closed, my manager said to me, Pam, you’re going to make it in this business. So I think you know, you do what you need to do to get the job done professionally and showing you care. I’m always buying baby gifts. You know, I’m like The Walking baby gift person, but it’s always something I as I said, I like shopping. So it’s it’s fun.
D.J. Paris 54:17 Yeah, I just wanted to say one last thing as we wrap up that I meant to interject earlier, because you mentioned this and I again, demonstrating care. This checks that box for me in a way that I’ve never heard an agent say that they do, but it’s something that I would recommend to all of our listeners, and it’s probably something Pam does, which is she said something very important that I thought about after I bought my first condo back however many years ago, I thought, boy, I’m so lucky that at nighttime, this area doesn’t turn into like this crazy hotbed of activity that might interrupt my sleeping or you were Talking about like having a light that might come right into the, to the, to the house that from the street, and just and maybe even just hearing what it’s like when people are home and if it’s a multi unit property are they able to hear, you know, above and below them and those things which become really important once you move in, but maybe aren’t you don’t, you know, maybe you saw it at like 11 o’clock on a Friday when everyone at the building is at work and there’s no noise at all and, and you know, going in, and as a realtor. I always I always thought But wouldn’t it be cool if Realtors would say, you know, it’s a Friday night, I’m gonna head down to the place that you’re looking at. I just want to kind of get a sense of what what the, you know, is there anything weird with the lighting? Is there any weird noise coming from the street, or I’d like to bring you down and let’s make sure you’re comfortable with it. But however you do it, that is a brilliant thing, because that is, boy, there’s nothing more annoying than moving into a place and then finding out. There’s this obstruction that you just didn’t know about. Because you didn’t. We weren’t there at 10pm at night on a Friday.
Pamela Marcus 56:01 Right? And I always say go walk the neighborhood. Smart. Just go walk, see how you like it. I tell people, I like a block that has a lot of doorman, so that there’s always somebody when you’re walking down the block. But yeah, take your time to get educated. And even in the things we’re not allowed to say. Point them in the direction to learn what they can learn.
D.J. Paris 56:29 Well, perfectly set in a perfect place to sort of wrap up this episode for everyone listening. On behalf of everyone listening or watching, we thank you, for we thank Pam on behalf of the audience for spending an hour with us, we are so grateful. I can’t even count the number of tips you provided maybe without even realizing it. Well over a dozen of great tips from top, from a top producer about what you can implement immediately. That will increase your professionalism, also, the way that your clients think about you. So I want and then on behalf of all of our audience, on behalf of Pam and myself, we want to thank our audience as well for making it all the way to the end of the episode. We’re here to serve you, the audience. And we appreciate it a couple of quick things, the best way that you can help us grow is by telling a friend so think of one other agent in your office, maybe somebody you know, especially somebody that’s struggling right now it’s a tough year, send them a link to this episode with Pam, and help them help themselves in this year. So you can send it right over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com All 450 Whatever episodes we’ve done, you can stream right from a browser you don’t have to even use a podcast app. Or if the person is a podcast person, just search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And I also want everyone to follow Pam on Instagram, find her at Pam Marcus real estate. Also, you can email her if you maybe have a referral for her or you’re interested in joining your team pam.marcus@compass.com Both of those links will be in the show notes so you can just click there. But Pam, thank you so much.
Pamela Marcus 58:04 I thank you so much. I enjoyed it tremendously. Appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 58:10 Everybody, you too and we’ll see everybody on the next time. Thanks, Pam. Thank you
How To Improve Your Branding & Marketing in 2023 • Kim Rittberg
Feb 23, 2023
Kim Rittberg as an Tv news producer ,marketing medial specialist and coach for real estate agents talks about her experience in this field. Next, Kim emphasized the importance of social media and how making simple cheaper videos takes agents closer to clients. She also presents her method to prepare videos – called PATCH.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What our top branding and marketing consultants telling Top realtors to do this year to grow their business. Or we’re going to be speaking with one of those consultants today. Stay tuned this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with branding and marketing consultant to realtors. Kim Rydberg before we get to Kim, just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend about this episode. So many agents need help with their branding and marketing. And they can get some unbelievable tips from Kim In this episode, so send him over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever recorded, it can be streamed right from the browser, any browser and of course please support our sponsors there they were there who keep the bills paid and keep our staff paid so we can keep producing episodes. So check out their services and products and consider investing in them. All of the vendors that we have as sponsors develop products specifically to help you do more business. Okay guys, enough of that let’s get to the main event my conversation with Kim Rydberg.
Today on the show we referred to is a marketing and media specialist I wanted to tell you more about now Kim Rydberg is an award winning digital content strategist and an on camera coach. She spent 15 years as a media executive at Netflix, also People Magazine and in TV news and she launched the first Apple ever digital video unit for Us Weekly magazine. Now Kim coaches real estate agents to be better on camera and make unforgettable social media video and podcast content that brings in leads clients and revenue. Kim has been featured in Business Insider and Fast Company and has been a speaker and instructor at Penn and Syracuse University and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Annenberg School. She also by the way, my brother in law is also a patent grad. And he didn’t graduate from Annenberg. So that’s a new word for me. But graduating from University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School, she also hosts her own podcast called mom’s exit interview, which spurred by her decision to quit corporate and launch her own business after working in a hospital while giving birth to her second child. This podcast helps women craft careers that work for their lives instead of the other way around. That podcast again is called mom’s exit interview. We will have a link to both Kim’s website which you can find all things Gam at her website, Kim rydberg.com I will spell that que imrittberg.com link to that in the show notes as well as the mom’s exit interview podcast. Kim, welcome to the show.
Kim Rittberg 4:23 Thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:25 Super excited to have you i i only ever talked to realtors. So this is very exciting for me to talk to somebody that works with realtors and also somebody with an extensive media background and really all things media and all things video production TV would love to sort of get your take on what realtors can do to better further their online brands. Specifically social media, you know, video, anything and everything that you see working and also maybe some don’ts, right some do’s and don’ts, but Before we get to that, tell us about your history. How did you get involved in media?
Kim Rittberg 5:04 So my the beginning of my media career, I was a TV news producer for inside edition. So it’s a bit of everything red carpet, real estate lifestyle, it was great. Learn how to tell stories. And then I worked at on the record with Greta Van Susteren. So that was sure, yeah, a lot of crime politics. And then to be honest, I was never really a news junkie. And so I really wanted to get closer to the creative content. So I worked in long form TV for a bit like wives with knives, True Crime type of stuff. And then I launched the video unit for Us Weekly. So basically, I turned a conference room, into a live TV studio, we had an 18 person team that I was overseeing all the operations and all the creative. And what I love about that is that is what business owners and real estate agents right now are doing, everyone now is tasked with turning their office into a studio. And I think that’s probably one of the best skills that I took away from that storytelling, but also being resourceful with whatever you have. And since then, I also worked at Netflix and marketing and branded content, Pop Sugar, and now I run my own business, where I help real estate agents take those, take what they’re good at what they’re best at, but really harnessing that and helping them create great video and podcast to grow their business.
D.J. Paris 6:21 It’s really interesting, and you certainly have the pedigree for this conversation, which is why we were so excited to have you on because so often, I only really talk to realtors who do their own social media, their own video production, and some are so impressive. And but again, they’re primarily realtors, this is, you know, an extension of their marketing efforts. And, you know, I like they don’t necessarily have this background and experience in traditional, you know, long form and short form media and US Weekly is a really good example because of course, as the magazine becomes less and less popular, as less people are reading, you know, the the physical copy, obviously, their video has to really shine, which I love what I like about US Weekly, and I’m not a reader myself. But what I understand about US Weekly is they are masters at capturing somebody’s attention, holding their attention for a shorter period of time giving them something that that is of interest or exciting to the reader or their their viewer. And then moving on to the next thing. And they are just I mean, I don’t know that there’s anyone quite as good at the celebrity news game. TMZ, of course, is also really good at that. But But Us Weekly is kind of, you know, I’ve always thought of them as like top of the mountain. So I’m super, and then Netflix, of course, everyone listening as a subscriber or, well, you’re not stealing passwords anymore, because that over the weekend has been? Well, they haven’t officially I think rolled it out just yet. But it’s been announced, it’s the free ride is over 100 million people are going to have to figure out, you know, it gives them the 15 bucks, guys, it’s not that expensive. Let’s keep these big companies in business, we want good content. But anyway, enough about my little Netflix rant. But let’s um, let’s talk a little bit about what Realtors could do. And I think this is the year to talk about it because obviously videos not becoming less popular. But but also, this is a time I think that often our our audience our listeners or viewers are having and this is kind of an unfortunate thing. But this is a tougher time to be a realtor the we have lending rates are are significantly higher than they were two to three years ago. So less buyers are in the market. And we have inventory shortages all over the place. So this is a time when realtors are often very frustrated. This isn’t necessarily the easiest time but it does provide an opportunity to put some time in that you maybe don’t normally have into sort of furthering your video brand or your your social media banner your podcast. So anyway, we’d love to sort of start at the start like what what do agents not understand? Or where could they get started? How do you recommend that people start to learn?
Kim Rittberg 9:07 Great question and great point. I think you’re right that even when you’re feeling stressed about the clients are the sellers and the rates are. That’s actually the time when you need to say what makes me different. What makes me unique, and how do I stand out? The biggest thing I like to remind people, I think this gets forgotten. It’s not that you’re gonna make one video, and that one video is going to sell a house or that one video is going to bring in a client. It’s that a consistent strategy of doing video will two things, build new relationships, and rekindle old relationships. I have my agent saying they I got a text message from someone I haven’t seen in five years. He goes, I love your Instagram videos. Let’s grab lunch. And it’s that his new videos where he was showing up more and bringing his perspective. It’s reminding someone who already knew you So unless you’re really like just born, what you got, you know, you have five years, 10 years, 20 years of relationships, in your life and in your professional life, it rekindled those. And so that’s another way to think of it. And then online, you can build all these new relationships. So you can be doing collaborative videos with other people, you can use your videos to then engage with people in your area who can hire you. And I think people forget, you don’t just post a video and then like your business grows. But it really works. If you do it strategically. And you have you have what your goals in mind, like, I want to get x leads I’m looking to build in this area, this is my target client. But really being specific about your strategy, it can unlock that. And so one of the biggest things I think that I see from when I have my clients, what they struggle with is there’s three things that are in their head about not being on video and not doing video. One, I hate my voice, or I hate how I look. I’ve never met one person who comes to me and says, I love how I look and sound Kim, I just love it. Everyone hates us out of your own voice is a scientific thing, that how you hear your own voice in your ear is actually different than how other people hear it. Unless people run out of the supermarket screaming from your voice, you probably sound great. Yeah, and, and if you’re a real estate agent, you deal with people all the time, people like talking to you, people engage with you. So you just have to remember that video is just a version of you, you’re not used to it, you don’t like it at first. And you might be a little stiff at the beginning. But over time, you will get better and so you will get better and you will be hate yourself less on camera.
D.J. Paris 11:38 So and and this is what you said is a really good point about not liking your voice and or your appearance, video and audio. Again, if if we know that for some reason, there’s some sort of mechanism in our brain that that changes the way that we actually hear ourselves versus someone else a third party listening. Don’t listen to yourself. I mean listen to yourself for for things like continuity listened for, for pauses and arms and ahhs and sort of the technical stuff. But but if you’re worried about the the tonality of your voice, or the cadence, or rather just just you know the pitch, maybe ask other people ask them say, Does this is this pleasing? Do you enjoy listening to this is That’s good feedback. But if you know that, if we know that science says you’re not going to like your own image or voice, be very nice to yourself, because that’s not the bra that’s not the judge. It’s going to be what other people think.
Kim Rittberg 12:34 Absolutely true. And I have like specific tips on how to be better on camera that I’ll go over right after this. But I think you’re right that you you have to be kinder to yourself, all of us do. Like that’s just a part of life. I feel like as I’ve aged, I’m so much nicer to myself, my 25 year old me was much harder, harsher judge of my stress of my life. And I’m sure you know, you we all feel the same way. But in terms of there are ways to get better. But you do you have to say no, actually, that’s who I am. And there are little ways I can be better look better sound better have a better presentation on video. But overall, like we are we are and that’s okay, like, we have clients, we have family who loves us, we have friends. So you have to just get through that and know that every single person hates how they look and sound on video.
D.J. Paris 13:19 And can we just really quickly dispel the myth that video and audio production has to be perfect perfection. And I’m gonna say one, one thing about that is is that I that I believe, which is I believe people do not necessarily feel connected to perfection. They’re entertained by it. It’s interesting. It’s cool, it’s polished. But people seem in my experience, people seem to connect better with imperfection than perfection. And so if if you’re worried about making a video perfect, and maybe you stumbled over a word, or your hair just didn’t quite look the way you wanted it to. Odds are, I don’t I actually think that will endear people more to you versus push them away going, Oh, well, they didn’t fix their hair up properly. And obviously, you should have an awareness of your appearance and how you sound but this idea of stumbling over a word or two. I’m curious to get your take on that.
Kim Rittberg 14:11 You are so right because the other two things that stop people is thinking that video is going to cost too much and take too much time. The video that does well today is the authentic content. Like I remember being at Netflix and obviously the budgets for marketing at Netflix are very large compared to things in general but also compared to small business owners. So but there was this moment where we had a video that was from a script reading just the actors sitting around reading a script. And some one of those actors posted a short video on their iPhone of them just being like ooh scrip reading, like five second video 10 second video on their iPhone, and they uploaded it. And I got millions of views. And people were like, wow, this authentic video got millions of views. I’m like, Yeah, that’s what that is what people want. We know that. So I think there are times for those polished videos on the home tours to join footage after selling a luxury home. That is a time for a polished video. Absolutely, yeah, true. But truly, when you are connecting with people, there are only a few things that I think you should optimize for, like, I think you should be well with, try to sit in front of an open window with an open window, or window. To get natural light on your face is really good or get a ring light, I think lighting is good to have. But I think in terms of you do not need to be in a studio, you do not need this super fancy setup. Like you can grow your business grow clients get clients with you and an iPhone, and not only can you today that’s better than the other stuff. And until you’re at the point where you’re like, I really want to really want to level up to that next level. If you’re not doing video, you place your iPhone, with a really solid strategy and messaging can supercharge your business, like I really feel that way. When you’re at that next level. And you’re like I’ve done a lot of footage for Instagram or Tiktok or YouTube, whatever with my phone, I’m, I’m seeing it working, I have money I’m ready to invest for the next level, there is that next level, I think that’s where you bring in a camera crew and you start shooting and you do one day when you sit down and you’re filming a lot of content, and you’re scripting out in advance. Or maybe you’re going around your neighborhood with a camera crew, and you’re really showing off the things in your neighborhood. Keep in mind, all of those things can be done with an iPhone first. So I really think not only do you not need the more expensive stuff, you can grow your business with an iPhone. So yes, this felling GJ dispelling that
D.J. Paris 16:42 no, it’s an important one because again, that’s the equipment people like, oh gosh, if we think about if we’re following other realtors in our local market on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, et cetera, what what, what we notice is that agents who post a lot of content are showing these non perfect moments, maybe they’re on their way out of the gym, or they’re at a cafe meeting a client or they’re just, you know, getting ready for work. And there’s lounging at home or whatever. There’s a lot of like, This is who I am outside of the polished realtor sort of look, but and I suspect that there’s a message there they’re trying to send about I went to the gym, which I guess demonstrates some sort of level of like accountability for my health and, and maybe that’s considered a good thing. If it one’s choosing a realtor, you maybe want somebody who takes care of themselves. But this idea of getting a behind the scenes peek, like your Netflix example of the table read, where somebody just goes, Hey, this is kind of cool. Like, this is what I get to do before the cameras turn on. That is really people love behind the scenes stuff.
Kim Rittberg 17:46 Little moments, I think that people forget, first of all people don’t like to be sold to. So while you’re
D.J. Paris 17:53 some people, some people do, but tiny.
Kim Rittberg 17:57 So most of your social feed should be educational content or entertaining content. And some of it should be selling. When you can bring people into your life more that will end up selling the end goal is they’re relating to you better, and eventually they will refer you to someone or they will hire you. But those little moments in your life as a realtor and in your life. As a person as a dog owner, as a dad as a brother. It brings people in because if your whole feed is is like only selling that you need that educational portion, you need that entertainment portion. And some of that lifestyle stuff. People do want to see how other people live it people are very curious. They like to live vicariously through other people. So even things that are in your life, you’re like, who cares? Like I’m at Wegmans? Who cares? But you know, people care people think it’s fun. And if you can relate it back to your business, obviously, that’s even better. But people really do like to be brought into other people’s lives.
D.J. Paris 18:53 Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I think so many agents have one strategy when it comes to social media, which is I just closed the home. I want to post and brag about it. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Kim is shaking your head because I’m with Kim. I don’t think people should do that. But if you’re doing that, make sure you’re doing a lot of other fun exciting cool content, not just look at how great I am. So Kim, you had you were wanting to jump out of your chair though, so I’m gonna shut up what do you think about the I just listed just sold? Here’s how cool I am
Kim Rittberg 19:22 just listed just sold. Just Listed and just sold is like the basics of someone gives you a photo and you hit Upload. It is not a social media strategy. No, it’s not a social media strategy only because it doesn’t get you to that next level. It is the basics fine. Congratulations. I am proud of everybody for being on social and putting that just listen and just close. I really think though, that real estate agents are working so hard. They’re so smart. Every agent I’ve worked with has their own unique perspective, loves their job for different reason. loves helping people truly like honestly every person that’s why I like working with agents is because every person comes with their own Background comes with their own interests, their own desires, their own perspective of the market. And that’s what’s fun about it. But when you’re just doing just listed and just closed, you’re not showing people anything about why they should work with you. It is just selling. And the point is, this area is called Content Marketing. I did a course on content marketing, no one calls it that you just call it social media. But content marketing means you’re putting out content that people want to engage with. And it becomes marketing, because you brought people into your into your social feed, you brought people into your business. So the main idea is that most of your content should be educating should be entertaining, and should just be people enjoying watching you very little of it should be just listed and just closed. I think that once you’re coming up with new ways to show that I think that is fun. And some people’s feeds do really well. If you’ve lots of beautiful luxury homes. You can grow a business by just doing multimillion dollar home tours. But I still think you’re not really showing somebody who you are. So even if you’d like that, I would argue take not just your hand through the tour, put your face in it. What do you love about the home? Like why do you think it went for X dollars instead of x dollars? What went behind the deal? Was it a bidding war. So I think that tells the story, you have to tell that story. And you have to really bring people into you, you have to bring the you have it because it’s competitive. And to get that competitive edge, you need to insert more of yourself into it. And and if you want I’m ready to give my tips about how to be better on camera for everyone who’s too afraid.
D.J. Paris 21:27 I am, I am one half second away from that I just wanted to throw an idea to our audience that I love. If you’re worrying about worrying about content, what type of content what should I be, you know, and obviously Kim has courses of exactly what you should and shouldn’t do. I’ll tell you my favorite one. And this is so perfectly tied, I think to Kim, what you were saying that and this wasn’t mine. I just overheard someone doing this and I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me. It’s so simple. So Facebook Live. Now the reason why you may want to consider doing live videos is because people get notified, I think pretty much always if they’re a subscriber to your page that so you know you’re live right now, which obviously is a great indication to maybe they’ll click on it. So I had I talked to a woman this is all she does on her Facebook Live and I think this is just so brilliant. She gets on and she starts talking about Zillow because everybody goes to Zillow, we know this this and let’s not let’s let’s let’s, let’s put aside our feelings about Zillow for a second just realize people do use Zillow, obviously 100 and 100 and some million people a month ago. They’re just in America. So anyway, everybody you know is going to Zillow, and they’re looking at the Zestimate which is the, you know, approximated house value that says that Zillow thinks the home is worth. So she gets on and she goes, I want to show you something. I love Zillow, it’s great, but there’s estimate isn’t always accurate. I just want to show you an example of a Zestimate that I thought looked okay, and then I ran my own numbers. And I found it was wildly off. And I actually so then she goes through and it takes her five minutes. And she does it on the MLS and she kind of shows like, this is what Zillow came up with. But I actually think it’s worth $50,000 more and here’s anyway, and then she goes, Hey, by the way, anyone out there listening, would you like to know what your home’s worth right now. And she goes, I won’t do it here on the call. Because obviously I don’t want everybody to see what your home value is worth. But just shoot me a DM, and I’ll get in touch with you. And to me, that is the perfect strategy for a live video. Because number one, you’re creating incredible value. every homeowner always wants to know what their home is worth. And two, you’re going to the place where they are going to go. And you’re saying hey, that’s okay. That’s a good starting point. But I actually can give you a better number. So anyway, sorry to take up all that time. Kim, I just heard this a few weeks ago, and I thought what a brilliant strategy.
Kim Rittberg 23:42 I think that’s a great, no, it’s a great idea. And I think that’s a perfect example of this is a person harnessing the idea of educating. So she’s taking educating, she’s saying everybody wants to know what their home is worth. She’s taking that educating. She’s merging it with the platform. So she’s making a platform specific Facebook Live, and I agree about live content, people get notified. So they’re more likely to watch. But then she’s pushing you off social and into a direct relationship, which is with an action step. Yeah, with an action step. So I love that. Because I think you’ll see a lot of places you get a free download. If you click here, bringing people into your into a direct relationship from content is amazing. And I agree with that. I think that’s a fantastic tool. And I think there’s a lot of things that agents can do like that when when you’re creating content, if you’re creating content about a specific thing, having a call to action. Do you want to know like, message me for my blog message me for my market update, message me for the new neighborhoods, I think are going to explode in next year. You know, there are really a lot of unique ways to get people to connect with you willingly on their own. So you know, I think a lot of times we’re chasing, I think the idea is instead of chasing so much, sometimes people will chase you if you have really good content.
D.J. Paris 24:54 Well, let’s talk about your tips and strategies for people to produce better content. And then just you You know, I know you have you have two different systems you want to talk about. So let’s let’s get to it.
Kim Rittberg 25:04 Okay, I love going through this first one because a lot of times people don’t put themselves on camera because they don’t feel confident on camera. So I do think that before, you know, saying, What am I going to make, and I agree with your DJ people, I have a video bootcamp. And sometimes people in week one will say, What tool should I buy? Or what do you think about this, I’m like, absolutely ordered the tools. But the truth is, you need to be comfortable on camera, and you need to have a good understanding of what makes a good video. The tools come later. Order it. So Amazon doesn’t have a big shipping delay, but that’s not what’s going to make your video great. The right microphone, the right ring light, that’s not what’s going to make your video great, you are going to make your video great. And your message is going to make your video great. So forget about the tools, forget about the tech that comes later, fine. So I have a system called patch pa tch. And the first P is for prepare, basically to be on camera. You need to prepare not just your message, but your mindset. So a lot of people hate the sound of their own voice. In addition to that feel impostor syndrome, like Am I an expert who’s going to listen to me feel self conscious, whatever the noise in the back of your head is quieting that noise. Sometimes if people being like, what if people make fun of me? What if people troll me? Number one, if we’re being trolled amusing if people are watching, and number two, anyone who’s been negative, it comes from a negative place in their own mind. And I am self employed. I worked in corporate for a long time, I was very hesitant to show up on camera. I teach people to be better on camera, I helped them make video I realized what a hypocrite I am. I had to start showing up on video. And my my sticking point was all the other people who are corporate executives with me, they’re gonna make fun of me, they’re gonna think I’m desperate. I’m on video. And I’m like, You know what? Those people don’t run their own business. I don’t care what they think the truth is, I’m sure they’re not judging me. I’m sure they’re like, oh, there’s can making.
D.J. Paris 26:52 They have their own problems. They’re in their own.
Kim Rittberg 26:56 Or they don’t care. They’re worried about their, their child, they’re worried about their dinner, they’re worried about they have enough PTO for vacation, whatever, you know, anyway, they’re really not thinking about us. So P is prepare prepare your mindset and get out of model mode. How do I look? Is this the right angle? How do I sound into teacher mode, think about who you’re helping and who you’re serving. I think that’s the number one thing of preparation is preparing your mindset. And then a authentic basically, your job is to express on video, the authentic version of you. And when I say authentic, I know that that’s a word that’s like very, it’s sort of like it’s everywhere. Who cares. But the truth is, we all have like our inner us. And some of us are goofy and some of us are serious. Some of us are kind and some of us are inquisitive, and some of us are empathetic, that like special sauce of you needs to come through. That takes a little bit of practice. But it’s important to remember, I think a lot of us when I did some on camera reporting, I was generally behind the scenes most of my career, but I did some on camera reporting for one summer. My first time I was like imitating an anchor, like I was like, hello, this is Kim Rupert for photos. Everything. Like I don’t like that. So I was impersonating the person I thought I was supposed to be. And the idea is, you’re trying to just be the most confident version of you. So authentic. So P we have prepared your mindset and your message, but prepare your mindset, a be authentic, and t turn off distractions. When you’re filming, you got to be all in. So turn off your email, turn off your phone, give yourself like five minutes to just drink water, have tea but get in the zone. Because you can’t be like thinking about something else, you really want to be in the message thinking about what you’re saying and delivering it making sure you’re confident. This C is for confidence. Basically, if you don’t believe your message, nobody’s going to, and you have to feel like I love what I do. I love helping you. I love helping you find the right home. For someone else to be feeling that. So confidence is key. Again, don’t think about how you look, don’t think about how you feel. Think about your energy. You want your energy to be raised. That is what competence feels like. And then the H is harness harness harness your energy. That might seem a little like what does that mean? So harnessing your energy is having a self awareness of how you are it’s like what you said earlier DJ about saying, asking your friends about how you can improve asking your partner, your spouse or your business partner. Basically, we all have a natural energy. And of course that’s fine in life. On video. Our goal is to if you’re really high energy and you talk fast, like I am a New Yorker, I tend to talk fast and have high energy. I want to harness my energy to be a little more balanced. I can be when I’m not practiced to high energy. So harnessing my energy means coming down to the center for someone who’s very calm and perhaps introverted. harnessing their energy means bringing it off. There’s always like a mid level and you basically want to be a little closer to that but Will you. So that’s something that it might sound like a little weird harness my energy, you just have to know how you are. And I learned over time, I have a tendency to talk fast, so I have to slow down a little bit. Other people have a tendency to be flat, you have to inject energy, you have to remember the cameras steal some of your soul, the red light goes on, it’s stealing your energy. So you have to practice injecting your energy back into it. So that’s like, it’s, it sounds very complicated. But the more you get used to it, the more you’ll realize, like, Oh, I’m going on camera, I want to make sure not to be flat, I want to smile, and I want to raise my energy, maybe I’m listening to music. Maybe I’m doing a couple jumping jacks, like whatever it is, but you need to raise your energy. And so I think that’s the PA tch. So P is prepare a is be authentic, T is turn off distractions. C is competence, and he has harness your energy. So those are the tips to be on camera and to be better on camera to get yourself there.
D.J. Paris 31:00 I love those. The patch idea is great. I love all of those those topics. I was actually just reading a book, a YouTube book, and I can’t remember the gentleman who wrote it, I’ll have to, if I remember, I’ll put it in the show notes. But he’s the guy who counsels Mr. beast who is the you know, biggest YouTuber, I think, in on the platform at the moment, if you don’t know who Mr. Beast is Google him, because he is an example of somebody who has really figured out the YouTube in particular algorithm. But more importantly, I was reading about about starting in Utah. And he because his, his mentor wrote this book, he got access to Mr. Beast, and Mr. B said something very interesting. And I don’t really watch his videos per se, but I know who he is, of course, because he’s such a big deal. But what I what he said is, if you’re going to make video, he said, Just realize your first 100 despite your best efforts, despite all of the tools and resources you may or may not have are going to be absolute garbage. And he goes, Don’t worry about it, it’s going to be garbage. So don’t judge it. Look for ways to improve slightly every single time he goes don’t try to hit a homerun at first you won’t he goes like it’s just not going to happen. And your first 100 videos are going to be you’re gonna you’re gonna cringe when you watch them. But he said, you’re gonna get better over time. So I this is an important mindset thing. But if the number one guy on YouTube is telling you don’t worry about the first 100 videos, just try to get comfortable in front of the camera, try to improve and don’t shoot for perfection. Just shoot for a little tiny bit 1% better over time. I just thought I just read that a few a few weeks ago. And I was like, oh, yeah, that’s a great reminder.
Kim Rittberg 32:42 I agree because if Mr. Beast an award winning video strategist kinrick Berg says it. I mean, it must be true. But I do think and for regular people, I would say you don’t even have to get to 100 if you’re doing consistently one video a week, two videos a week. By month three, you’re gonna be like, Wow, I mean, I host my own podcast and it took me a few first of all God I took did so many takes to get my own voiceover voice well, for the first DJ for the first few months. You’re like, thanks for joining us here. Thank you for being here at Wait, wait. Thanks for joining us, you know, it just takes a while to the point is for everyone listening is it takes a while to practice being yourself on camera. That’s the truth. Being on video. And being on audio is a different version of yourself. It’s an altered version of yourself. It’s so it takes learning lessons and then practicing those lessons but it’s worth it like the truth is I’m giving you these tips because it’s worth it. Like even if you do these tips a little bit each week you will get there and it will grow your business like I’m not I’m not like I’m here to make you an influencer. I’m like, I’m here to make you money. I’m here to get you clients and it’s worth it. It’s worth the investment and it’s worth getting out of your comfort zone.
D.J. Paris 33:53 Yeah, and it’s so interesting with video now I just realized this as you were talking that the trying to see if the think of this is true, but it’s close enough to true if it’s not actually true. The vast majority of people I watch now content wise with respect to online and not through Netflix, not traditional, you know big media we’ll call it but but just on YouTube of Facebook, I’m now watching probably more media from non professionals or non traditionally Video Professionals than I watch traditional stuff. So I’m watching less Dan rather’s and Charlie Rose’s and more just somebody with a podcast with with a microphone or maybe a YouTube video. So that’s kind of an interesting shift. It’s probably terrifying for the for the big media companies, but that is how a lot of people we are spending more time watching regular people like us do video and short form and long form.
Kim Rittberg 34:53 I think that’s a really good point. And that is interesting about your own personal statistic and I think people should remember that, basically the structure of an interesting video or a good story, the first two seconds, one second, three seconds. That is where you catch people. So I think when you’re talking about, you know, the people who engage you and you want to watch like, you’re basically you’re stealing time, they’re stealing your money and time from Netflix. But if you’re making a video, one of the core things is catching that attention. So that hook is everything.
D.J. Paris 35:27 Can I tell you this is really embarrassing. So I’ve done this podcast for I think, five or six years now. And it was about a year ago that I we had a consultant, kind of listen to the show and give some he goes, actually, he’s pretty good. He goes, You guys produce it? Well, it sounds good. It looks good wherever he goes. But one thing that you don’t do, and this is right to your point, is you don’t have a hook. Maybe the title has a hook. But he goes how about the first five seconds of the video or the episode of in this case podcast? Say what they’re going to learn, as opposed to today. My guest is Kim Kim. Rip Berg. Well, you know, you know, some people know Kim, not everyone knows Kim. But if I say Hey, today in this video, we’re gonna have you know, somebody from Netflix, talk about video, you know, then I got it. So I had to learn this five years in. So when you’re starting your videos, you could just spend the first five seconds like today we’re gonna talk about this? Or if it’s an education video, for example, or if it’s an entertainment video, Hey, today we’re doing this, whatever it is, do you recommend doing that at the beginning?
Kim Rittberg 36:23 Absolutely. So the hook of a video is so important, I cannot express it enough. When I was a vice president of branded content of Popsugar. Like seriously, like media, my boss would say, Okay, your idea for this video for Target or se or Swift or whatever? What’s the hook? And it’s like, he’s like, I don’t even care that other stuff like, what am I seeing? What is the first second event? And the hook is so important? It’s the visual, or the text for someone to look at this in their tiny phone and say, should I watch this? Or should I not watch it. So it has to be eye catching? Meaning even if the visuals are not amazing, I think visuals. The expectation for visuals are a little lowered on social media. But ideally, good visuals. And even if you don’t have good visuals, if you have an amazing text headline, like three, like three reasons not to buy this home, or like, you know, five reasons why you should buy with high interest rates. I’d be like, what was this person talking about? Why I’m gonna watch it. So you have to think about a really amazing headline or a hook. When you think about like 10 years ago, Buzzfeed was like the biggest thing ever in media, they had all of those great clickbait headlines, because you were
D.J. Paris 37:35 the clickbait kings, the clickbait king, they still are they still, like that’s
Kim Rittberg 37:39 true, but I feel like it was very novel at that time to have. And I know you mentioned this earlier about like, the catchiness of whoever you’re talking to inside edition or US Weekly. But like a headline, I joke is that I worked at inside edition. And I love the voiceover artists. But if you ever watch a TV show, it has a tease for the show. And it’s like, you’ve never seen a cat do this. And I’m gonna go oh my god, what’s the cat gonna do? So a channel that announcer when you’re thinking of your idea, so I think a lot of my agents are like, oh, I want to, like, I love design or like I, you know, I’m my clients, I think would appreciate like a content about which floors to pick, you know, like, that’s something that like, when they go through the render process, I’m like, Alright, so it’s like, top five floors, like you should look at before it before installing. I’m like, Oh, I would watch that. If I’m in the middle of a renovation, or, you know, when the color of the year comes out that Pantone color of the year. It’s like, like three amazing ways to use the Pantone color of the year in your home. I’m like, Yeah, click watch it. And you know the thing about interest rates, so anything that’s timely, you’re still applying that hook. So interest rates go up or interest rate go down, or whatever you say, a contrarian opinion, so seasonally contradictory, with interest rates high, why you should buy and not just like, because I’m a real estate agent I want you to buy, right, I really like your house. And the reason I have some data to back it up and keep it short. So I have, I have another framework for how to make great video. And one of the tips in that is keep your message very simple. People cannot have a lot in their brain at the same time. This is short form video we’re talking about most of what we’re watching today is short form. YouTube, you can do longer, that’s fine podcasts, obviously longer. When you’re thinking about our short form video. Your message should be very simple. One takeaway, or three things but it’s still to the same point. It’s too much for people. So you want to have it like really, really simple. So a listicle always does. Well a number chart, like a number. You know, five things seven secret, seven, seven best kept secrets of Chicago’s north side. You know, five beaches, you’ve never visited la that you should be your neighborhood expert. You know.
D.J. Paris 39:57 There’s so much content that Realtors so Let’s go if your head is spinning right now going, Okay, this is all sounds great, what type of content Kim just gave about four or five examples, and I interrupted her in the middle, which I shouldn’t have. But the reason I did is because it doesn’t have to be real estate related, as Kim said, you know, real estate is hyperlocal, right? So you can say, hey, like I live in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. Wouldn’t it be cool if once a week, I saw a video that said, here’s a restaurant in Wicker Park that you probably don’t know about? That’s amazing. Like, I would love that, right? Because it’s in my neighborhood, I want to support it. I want to go out and try new restaurants. Maybe it’s here’s some cool events downtown Chicago, or in Kim’s case, she’s in Brooklyn. Here’s some here’s what’s going on in Brooklyn this weekend, again, is that real estate specific? No. But is it interesting to your audience, some of them for sure. So it doesn’t have to be look at this home, look at this thing. It should be you should have educational content about you know, things like why you should buy today, or why you shouldn’t buy today or why you should rent or not rent or whatever, here’s, you know, real estate content. And then you should also have some content because people only buy homes every, what, seven years on average. So you want to create content that they’re going to want to use in between those sales. So even if it’s just like, here’s all the cool events going on this weekend in this neighborhood. That’s a really easy video to put together. And it’s something that everybody wants to know about.
Kim Rittberg 41:19 Absolutely one of my one on one real estate clients, he does a lot of neighborhood tours that do well. And they do well. Because when you think about when you’re as a user on someone’s feed you it’s nice to see the homes. But it’s also nice to see the neighborhood because when you’re an agent, you’re the local expert. And to your point, DJ, we’re trying to bring people from that time when they worked with you kill that next seven years, keep keep in touch with them get referrals from them stay in their world. So any content that’s like local events, local venues, renovation, you know, renovation happens between that buy and sell period. So you’re trying to build and continue those relationships. So one of my agents does a lot of neighborhood tours, specifically the neighborhoods he covers, you know that he wants to get clients and obviously, but it brings people in and this is another thing, remember, again, you are building new relationships and reigniting old relationships with video. So when you’re making that neighborhood tour, you’re connecting with the venue with that social handle. So that’s again, another connection. You know, real estate agents are all about connecting with more people each week and each month, because that’s how you have clients. So you’re connecting with more people when you’re in those other spaces. So I totally agree that it does not all need to be real estate. Everything should be educational, entertaining lifestyle, a little bit of selling, but what you’re talking about can be real estate, it can be design, it can be renovation, it can be your life, it can be your life, in those videos, what you’re doing this weekend, and especially like definitely the neighborhood things, I think you really want to lean into being the local expert. So even timely things that are happening in your neighborhood. So I live in Brooklyn, we have this Brooklyn Queens expressway, a highway that runs in our area, and there’s a lot of hoopla over the last few years, are they going to do construction on it? Everyone’s worried about it? That doesn’t seem like something a real estate agent would cover but maybe maybe that’s the perfect thing to do an Instagram live with a local with a local official or or recorder. So it’s it’s like expanding out and thinking basically, the basics of like, when you’re creating content, try to think would someone watch this? What I read this in a magazine, would I watch this on someone’s computer or their phone? Think of it from that journalistic standpoint. And so like the framework I have for teaching people how to make better video is like me, SS why? So M message, get your message straight. Like I said before, one simple point on a secret gem in your neighborhood you never knew about why you should buy even with interest rates being high one simple messaging is video so and is your message. Ie it’s easy to understand. Nothing too. inside baseball, we’re not talking to the mortgage and mortgage lenders and the lawyers. We’re talking to regular people in layman’s terms. So very simple. You make sure your grandma and your seven year old neighbor neighbor can understand it, then you’re good at strategy. So strategy is like, Who’s your ideal client? Like Who are you trying to speak to? How much are you going to make each each month two videos a month? That’s fine. Four videos a month no problem like one live video a month no problem, whatever it is, be consistent with that and understand what you’re targeting like I don’t like when someone’s like, should I be on tick tock? I say I don’t know your clients on tick tock, then you should you know, I think having a really solid strategy we’ll be sure that you just don’t run out of time or money. So am message easy to understand s strategy? S smile because you’re always on camera. You got to put yourself on camera, and then why you’re a journalist. So basically, you’re a journalist. So what to my point earlier. Think about what is the top bid related to real estate that people might be interested in DJ and I went through a few of these things earlier DJ is going to do a video about something in Wicker Park a new bar in Wicker Park, I am going to do, how to put that Pantone color of the year in your home three ideas. That’s what I love. I love design. And my other agent, he’s doing that live video about the highway, everyone’s worried is going under construction, he’s going to do that. My other agent we are we’re doing design for him. We’re doing he’s doing a tour of three design stores he loves in California, it’s really natural to him talk about authentic. Yeah, he’s picking journalistic angles on things that he feels passionate about. Right and my other my other one, he’s doing the wood floor. So he says, my audience, they don’t want the Pantone color. That’s not what they care about. They want the flooring, I’m like, Great, let’s do the flooring. But the idea is you’re meaning making useful content for people, that’s also entertaining. You’re bringing them into your sphere, you’re connecting with them, you’re rekindling those old relationships and you’re building new ones.
D.J. Paris 46:03 At the risk of of alienating our animal activist listeners, please forgive me for this. But I had an idea that just today I realized I needed to put a rug underneath my dining room table, I were like in between rugs. And somebody said, you know, what would be a really cool thing to put as opposed to a traditional rug is get, like a cow hide or a calf skin or whatever it’s called. Those are very popular. I don’t know if they’re still popular, but they were popular last couple years. So I said, Oh, I’ve heard of that. But aren’t those like really expensive there, I thought they were like $1,000, which is like a lot for this little tiny pellets basically. And no, they’ve come down in price. They’re like, couple 100 bucks. Now they’re really reasonable. And they’re super cool. But I don’t know anything about it. So I’ve had to go online and learn about this, I spent no more than five minutes kind of, okay, I know what the prices are, I see how it works, I get it. And that could be a video that could be video like, hey, everyone out there, here’s here’s a design idea that you could share with your clients. If you’re looking to, you know, on hardwood floors, you want to put something underneath it. Like, again, it doesn’t have to be anything other than what you’re learning about at that moment.
Kim Rittberg 47:13 And here’s your hook. The hook again, for that video is one quick upgrade under $100. And that’s the hook to that video. So again, you have your content. I love that a content idea DJ and my hook is your sad looking room, whatever your sad looking room is with text on it and you say upgrade this room in less than $100 and write a quick video where you say this cowhide was only $99. From this and that store. Yeah, you know, follow me for more tips on how to live better on a smaller budget.
D.J. Paris 47:46 And you could also say stop buying raw ito the hook could also be stopped buying. Stop buying rugs for underneath dining room tables, right? Yeah, like what why should I
Kim Rittberg 47:56 write for never pay $1,000? For again? See, that’s great. So I think once people start getting into the goodness of it, yeah, it becomes fun. I think once you start thinking like, Well, what did I do this month that like can relate to real estate renovation, construction or my neighborhood? Then it brings you in? What do you do this weekend? Did you find a new bar you’re excited about? Did you get that rug for your house? And once you start living in that mode, and jotting those ideas down, as they come to you, you will find you have ideas? I think it’s when you’re sitting down with a blank journal, you’re like journal who has journal blank iPhone? Oh, no, what do I make. So I think to get to rotate to sort of vary your content feeds. So it’s not just Hunter Hunter just listed just close. You think about those other areas that you enjoy, that feels really fun to you, and then start making content around that.
D.J. Paris 48:50 And to like one way, endless source of content can be from your clients, when they ask questions, write them down. And because if they’re if a client is asking a general question, maybe they’re buying a home for the first time, or they’re just have a question about the process, or any questions that you get asked as a realtor, write them down. And that is content that can you know, you can say, hey, I want to do a series once a week, I want to tell you the most commonly asked questions that my clients asked me so that you don’t have to ask your realtor about it or whatever. And you could do that you could do a question and answer session. There’s so much content. So don’t get hung up in the aesthetics as much as the content needs to lead the charge, the content, the value of the content, people will excuse all of the aesthetic of sort of imperfections, right that things can maybe don’t look, as Kim said, Yes, get a ring light for God’s sakes get something that at least lights you correctly, but that’s what I mean. My ring light was like $100 but you can get them for $20 They’re not that expensive, but it’s so make yourself look okay, but don’t worry too much beyond that. Worry about the content people will excuse everything else for good content.
Kim Rittberg 50:04 I totally agree. And I love your idea. I think the q&a is something is a go to for all of my agents, especially when you’re starting out being on camera. And it feels weird to talk to the camera at first, have someone sit behind your phone? Yes, ask you the questions. It’s easier to talk to somebody than to just talk to a camera alone when you’re just starting out. So if you’re nervous thing on camera, write down your questions. Have your friend, your business partner, whomever behind the camera, and answer answer to them. I think that’s a good way A q&a is a great way because it’s full of educational value for your viewers, your consumers, your followers, your clients. But be it’s an easier conversationally, it’s easier to answer questions than it is to like, talk to camera when you’re not in that headspace yet. So I love that idea. I think q&a at the very base, if you’re really just starting out, and you’re maybe not ready for that lifestyle video, you’re not ready to do the neighborhood tour. Question and Answers are great about me, who are you? Like why should someone work with you? What do you love about being an agent, remind people about your empathy, your humor, your kindness, your your financial well being your financial whiz, whatever, that special sauce that makes you you. And then the q&a, the about you. And educational videos, I really think I am somebody I come from news, I think there’s a lot of value in bringing people information, just making sure it’s clear and catchy. So like, three, three, you know, three ways to get a mortgage, blah, blah, that you weren’t thinking whatever, you know, five, five tips for blah, three ways for this, but related to home buying, lending, renovating, new construction, condo, Co Op, all of these different things, but figure out like, what do you want to talk about, and then just put them in little bite sized nuggets. I’m a huge fan of educational content. I think, truly, you’re trying to establish yourself as an expert. I think that I love the lifestyle stuff. I think it’s good to mix that in. But at the end of the day, really people should see you as the expert, they should see you as their go to person. And so if you can create content that says I’m the expert, I’m the authority. This is how I think about the housing boom, the mortgage rates, the the new new construction in that area.
D.J. Paris 52:24 Yeah, demonstrating competence is really what I think educational content does is it demonstrates competence. And yes, posting a static image of this beautiful home we just sold or listed does in some way mildly demonstrate competence, because it says okay, well, I was, you know, they chose me to sell or buy this particular home. I closed it. Yes, that’s a start. But what what what I think Kim is really driving at is getting beyond that and going into process. So say, you know, this would be a good video content, like, Hey, you probably see a lot of realtors, you know, with with their posts about just listed just sold, you can even almost play off that trope, because it is a trope that everybody knows about. And people kind of roll their eyes like yeah, that that it’s a bad thing. I don’t want to I don’t want to give it a negative connotation. But it’s a very common approach. And you can say, you know, what, my clients and I can do that too. I can certainly post you know, things about, you know, what I’ve accomplished. But what I really what my clients really appreciate is x. And this is what I try and try to focus on. And it’s you’re not selling as, let me show you my process. Let me talk about how I, how I, you know, or how I treat my clients are, like, like you’re missing certain maybe qualities of your personality, or here are some processes that your seat might, here’s my secret sauce, give it away, give it away in video, and it will come back to you and clients or people love that sort of behind the scenes. Here’s the number crunching, they want to see that you have some sort of skill versus just look at how cool I am. Right?
Kim Rittberg 54:05 Yeah, and I think I’m not knocking just listen and just close. I think it’s good to show the sort of properties you sell. It sort of establishes what neighborhood you’re in what price point you’re at who you serve, I think that’s fine. But really at the end of the day, video is the biggest growth tactic for marketing. So a invest in video, but not just because stats say Mark sets a video marketing is more more advantageous because you get more leads from it. But also use what it’s good for video is good for letting people get to know you. And that it’s a relationship business you’re in, in real estate. So showing those parts of your personality showing your expertise, showing your authority. Photos are good. I mean, it’s it’s if you’re on social, that’s great because the truth is, it’s a lot of time. It takes time to post photos, texts, anything so I’m definitely not knocking being on photo, but there’s only so there’s only so much growth you can have by using filtered headshots, and house home photos, I think you will see your growth supercharged if you start experimenting with video like I will give a challenge to everyone listening that basically, if you start getting on video today when this podcast comes out, first of all, tag me tag, tag us both on on social media on Instagram love on Instagram, I’m also on LinkedIn, tag us on Instagram, you tag us in your Instagram story, we will share it, I’ll share it and then you’ll get more eyeballs on your Instagram story or tag us in your reel or whatever video only video, no no photos. But I think what you will start seeing that I think I know what you will start seeing is that as you start showing up more on video, you will start seeing more more contacts, more lead generation more engagement. And that is what we’re looking for. You’re building that authority, you’re building that expertise and you’re bringing people in and to your point about just listen to just close, I’m actually speaking at a Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices convention. And that’s the topic of my, the topic of my speech is more than just listening, just using video to rekindle old relationships and build new ones. So again, I think that we all have so much work and social media, it feels like this additional thing, so much time video is gonna be so much money, I don’t like my voice. But there are ways to do it faster and cheaper. Again, your iPhone is fine. And the way to do it faster is like we said you’re brainstorming ideas, have a list of ideas you’re going to do, when you sit down to film, film a few at a time, you will find that’s a much more efficient way to use your time. And then put those out once a week, or once or once or twice a week, or however much content you have. But really film a bunch at a time. Again, you don’t need fancy technology, but make three of them be educational videos, make one of them be a lifestyle video, you know, vary the content a little bit. But there are ways to do this efficiently. And, and getting out of your own head, of course, that you’re comfortable being on camera but and ways to get better as you go on. But I think if you really truly you start getting on camera today, your next quarter, your next half of the year is going to look different.
D.J. Paris 57:21 I agree. And I want to just throw one other idea because I know that a lot of times when agents are starting to think about developing a social media strategy or a video strategy, one of the first questions they’ll ask is what platforms should I be posting to. And I went through this. It’s an interesting sort of exercise, I went through this branding exercise for an organization unrelated to real estate, we were looking to create content for an organization I support that, but we didn’t know where our members hung out. Online. We weren’t sure if it was Facebook, Instagram, tik, Tok, LinkedIn, you know, excetera, Pinterest, and other places. And this is a men’s organization. And we’re like, gosh, we don’t really know. And so what did we do? We asked, we asked our members, we have several 1000 members, and we said, hey, where do you spend time and what we found was not what we were expecting, is that so for for this particular organization? Again, not real estate related, although it certainly could have been real estate related. LinkedIn for this particular organization was the place where most of our members are checking for the kind of content that we would be producing. And that never occurred to me in a million years. So if you’re wondering, should I do tick tock, Facebook, Instagram? What should I do? Well, I mean, you can make an assumption, and certainly, you know, pretty much everyone’s on Facebook and Instagram. So you could always make make a reasonable assumption that that would probably be a good place to start. But are your clients checking tick tock? I don’t know you? Can I ask them. So what I would do is go to your sphere of influence and say, Hey, I’m working on my, my sort of marketing plan for this year, just out of curiosity, I’m looking to create more content, and I want to sort of show up where you guys hang out. I would, and you could do an anonymous survey. So they don’t have to, you know, explain who they are. But I would ask your friends and family and people in your sphere of influence. Where are you spending time online? Is it YouTube? Is it Facebook’s, you know, etc? Because that will help you figure out where to really push your content. Kim, I’m curious to get your thoughts on that.
Kim Rittberg 59:28 I agree. 100% I think it is up to you to figure out where your clients and where your ideal clients are, and where they’re spending time. You can do a survey. You can also there’s a lot of research about the demographics and like psychographics of who’s using what, you know, Facebook is still the biggest social platform. It’s not growing so fast. So tick tock is the fastest growing but Facebook is still the biggest and for a certain demographic, Facebook is still the winner. So it depends. I recommend, you know, depending on your budget and your time constraints, I say like don’t Be on more than two or three unless you have, unless you have an infrastructure where someone else is posting for you, then I think you could be on more. Like, for example, I post to LinkedIn and Instagram natively, like, I’ll schedule them out, I’ll put them on LinkedIn. And I will schedule it for like the next morning to post to 7am Sure, Instagram, I’ll schedule it or I’ll post it live. Later, I’ll at a different point in time, I will download the videos or have them saved, I’ll put them in YouTube, but I will put in the schedule or in YouTube to post them three times a week, I don’t even think about it, like I do it once every two weeks, and I just have it timeout a lot of other content. So basically, if you don’t have a huge infrastructure, make it easier for yourself, figure out the number one or two places your your clients are, you don’t have to be everywhere. Don’t be everywhere, actually, I would say don’t be everywhere. Because you know, the places that are everywhere have huge, huge budgets. Your agency might be everywhere, they have a marketing budget, they have a marketer, so do not like figure out where you’re best off spending your time. And again, the lessons I was saying earlier about video, they still hold true for anywhere, it doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook, tick tock, Instagram, LinkedIn, you need a hook, you always need a catchy headline or a good visual. And on LinkedIn, a lot of it’s text based, you still need a good headline, if you don’t have the first line, that’s catchy, people aren’t gonna engage with it. So it’s still the basics of good video is good video anywhere. And the things that are different about each platform are specific things to learn for that platform. But the basics of good video is like you teach, you’re educating, you’re entertaining, and you’re having like a little bit of lifestyle, bringing them into your life, you’re selling a tiny percentage of the time. So I think the crux of making good video is applicable to all of them. And there’s lots of tools to figure out where your clients are a survey research. And then yeah, you can start asking people like, I think if you start start this process, now over the next few months, every single person says, they’re on LinkedIn and tick tock, maybe those are channels, everybody says they’re on Facebook and LinkedIn media, those are your channels. So I think try to really get in the flow of who your ideal client is not who your family is, but not your family, not your college buddies, but really your ideal clients. And I think that that’s it’s a bit of a different mindset. Like in my 20s, I had a jewelry company. I never spent money on myself, I never bought myself nice things. I didn’t have any money. So when I was selling jewelry, I didn’t have a sense of like, What would someone pay for this necklace. I went into the store I started selling, I was like, oh, people will pay like two or $300. So that necklace, wow. You know, that surprised me. I didn’t know that at the time. And the important thing is, don’t let it be colored by your own your college friends, your wife, your husband, your kid, their experience, you’re always talking to your ideal client or your existing client. So figure out where they are. And that’s where it to be. There is
D.J. Paris 1:02:55 so much to dive into in with respect to video with respect to social media, strategizing Kim, you don’t you’re not just here to do this episode, you teach this, this is your livelihood, you take all of your previous marketing and media experience, which is beyond impressive. You’ve worked for some of the giants, and basically distilled it down to what agents what realtors can use in grow to grow their their brand, virtually, and grow their video and media brand. Let’s talk about the services you provide. Because every I need this for our show. This is an embarrassing acknowledgement but true. We guys, I am I am just like you. I do not have we do not have an Instagram account for this. For this channel. We had one and it somehow got shut down. They thought it was Instagram shut it down. Oddly enough, they thought we were violating fair housing. And we were just promoting our podcasts. Because with housing it things can get tricky. So guys, I don’t even have an Instagram account. I am just like you I need to follow this advice. Because we’ve grown our entire audience just strictly through word of mouth. And it is time for us. Your five don’t wait five years like I did to grow your social channel. This is the year Thank God our content was good that we got a lot of listeners because now I really want to take it to the next level with social media. So I am going to be going on this journey with you. But Kim, tell us what you do for agents so that we can hopefully get some people just to realize this is the push I am going to be signing up but tell us what you offer.
Kim Rittberg 1:04:36 So basically, I have two offerings. I do one on one packages where I basically am your executive producer in a box. So I help guide you I sit with you. We we start now and then in six months basically you have a whole video component to your business. And so I help you do all of that come up with ideas execute the ideas across the video and podcast. So basically it Take my experience from Netflix and inside edition and People Magazine, and I turn you into a content creation machine. So those are one on one packages I do. I also have a video bootcamp specifically for real estate agents. So that means no matter where you are, you’re not making video, you’re making some video, but you want it more. It’s video Bootcamp for real estate agents to grow your client base. So it’s very, very focused, it comes up with, it helps you come up with ideas, it has tips on how to make videos efficiently and inexpensively. And it has ideas on how to engage clients in new ways. So it’s really an amazing class. So that’s gonna be a boot camp, it’s going to be a group of real estate agents. So you’re also going to have a community. So you’re gonna have new new people that you’re meeting a new referral businesses coming out of that. So it’s going to be a really awesome boot camp that is going to be starting off. And I just, I love it, because I think one of the things that is so great is my agents I work with are like, I never would have thought of that. But now it’s a component of their business. I think sometimes you just need that friend who like I’ve worked in video my whole life, of course, it’s second nature to me, but it’s my job to teach it to you in a way that is not overwhelming. It will help you grow your business, and in a way that you can still go about and live your life and grow your business. I don’t think that it’s your job to be a TV station, that’s not your job. It’s your job to your real estate agent and I help you come up with a video component of your business. It’s a component, it’s not your whole business.
D.J. Paris 1:06:30 So I agree. And this is it really from an ROI perspective, return on investment, video production, for you know, for your real estate business doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition. Your ROI, as Kim said can be you turn your phone around, you’re on a showing you say I just wanted to really quickly show you this really cool thing about this home, right? That costs virtually nothing, maybe nothing, just a little bit of time. And you can continue to create content on whatever budget you may have, which may be a small to no budget. And this is how people consume content these days. You know, the days of I was even Kim, I’m I’m curious if you’ve had this experience because you’ve been in in you’ve worked in TV. I have a hard time sitting through TV shows now and and movies in particular, my attention span has been reduced. I really I’m like legitimately worried about the future generations who I don’t even go on tick tock personally, because I’m afraid it’s just withering away my ability to concentrate for more than 15 seconds, which is not tic TOCs fault. I’m not blaming tick tock I’m just saying our attention spans are very, very short these days. So you do have to have these these enticements or these immediate hooks, as Kim said. But there is so much that you can do so quickly and for so inexpensively. But you do need to learn the tricks of the trade. Kim is going to teach you all of that. So I encourage everybody listening visit Kim’s website, Kim rydberg.com. Again, KIMRIWTBERGRI TTB erg.com link to that in our show notes she has, first of all her her background is beyond impressive. This is somebody who’s worked in in major media. She’s now taking that learning bringing it down to the individual business owner level and she wants to work with you as well. So check out Kim ripper.com. She has free events. She has paid events. She will she has white papers you can download. She has given a ton of content for you on this and you should be following her as well. On social media Kim, what? Let’s let’s get your social media handles.
Kim Rittberg 1:08:50 Yeah, great. Um, I am Kim Rydberg KIMRITTB RG, everywhere, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and I have a free download on my website. If you go to kinrick berg.com, or on Instagram or LinkedIn, I have a free download specifically for realtors, so that you can grow your business. You can grow your client base, and it’s specifically for real estate agents. So make sure to check check on my website. It’s free, you can grab it, share it with your friends. And I’m really excited. Honestly, I work for myself. And I love teaching people how to grow their business because I think that self employment gives you so much freedom. And it’s awesome. And it can be hard but it’s really it’s so gratifying for me to help other people build their business.
D.J. Paris 1:09:36 Awesome. Well, on behalf of all of our listeners want to thank Kim for her time on the episode today. She gave us so much great content and I would love to have Kim you’d love to have you come back as a regular guest. But for now, guys, I want to thank Kim so the best way you can thank Kim is by visiting her website Kim rydberg.com KMRITTB ERG dot com link to that in the show notes, check out her offering. This is the year to get into video, you can do it. Look, I have no media history. I am not a broadcaster. I don’t have I’m sitting in my office in Lincoln Park. This is not a professional studio. And we are now one of the most listened to shows in the country. And I don’t say that to brag, because who cares? It’s just more funny to anything. You don’t need all the accoutrements that you might think, to put on a show and get people to show up and watch or listen, I am proof of that. I do not look polished. I do not sound polished. I have moderately nice equipment. But I think altogether after five years, it cost me under $1,000. So guys, and when I started, it cost me like $100 for all the equipment. So you can do a lot with a little and but you need a guide. And Kim is your guide. So please support her. She wants to help you grow. She knows how to do this. So go to Kim rydberg.com r ittbrg.com. Again, link to that in our show notes on behalf of our audience. Kim, thank you so much for showing up giving us such great incredible content. Great advice. Amazing. And on behalf of Kim and myself, we want to thank our audience for making it all the way to the end of the episode. Please help us grow by telling just one other realtor about the show. Think of one other agent that really needs that push to get their branding in place. Send them a link maybe this will encourage them to start video or maybe it will encourage an office so send this out guys that’s how we grow. We grow through word of mouth. Please tell a friend we thank you for that. Kim, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks. Thank you so much.
Kim Rittberg 1:11:45 This is so fun.
How To Break Into Luxury Home Sales • Shayla Twit
Feb 22, 2023
Shalya Twit talks about her own lifestyle as an experienced agent in Sarasota Florida where the competition is very high. Shayla discuses the importance of marketing and advertising in real-estate and how experienced agents should source the business. Shayla also discusses what makes her stand out as an agent.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How do you break into the luxury market? Well, we’re going to talk to a top producer today who did exactly that. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment. We’re going to be speaking with top producer Shayla twit but before we get to Shayla, just a couple of quick reminders. First, please tell a friend about this episode. If you find value in it. Think of one other Realtor in your office that could benefit from hearing from shaylen Also, please consider also sponsz That’s not to say sponsor our sponsors but just support our sponsors check out their products and services. We are huge fans of our sponsors. They’re the reason we can keep doing these episodes. So please consider investing in their services. Every sponsor that we have, we are huge fans of and their products and services should be able to help you grow your business this year. Okay, enough of that. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Shayla to it.
Today on the show our guest is Shayla twit. She’s a luxury agent with Coldwell Banker in Sarasota, Florida. Let me tell you more about Shayla Shayla is has been selling real estate in sunny Sarasota, Florida since 2002. Specializing in luxury and waterfront real estate in the Sarasota man Manatee and Charlotte County areas she prides herself on her high touch and artfully curated concierge style originally from Stevens Point Wisconsin. She also hails from U W. SP with a business and a French degrees. She comes from a large family many of which are entrepreneurs as well whether extra time she will either be in the gym, playing with her two dogs and or cat or quite possibly volunteering with a fabulous team at the Humane Society at Lakewood Ranch to learn all things Shayla please visit her website Sarasota real estate sold.com Let me say that again, Sarasota real estate sold.com We’ll have links to that in the show notes welcome Shayla. Welcome.
Shayla Twit 3:47 Hi, thank you so much. Say to talk to you, TJ,
D.J. Paris 3:51 I’m excited to talk to you as well. We were Shayla and I were talking just before the show about I love Sarasota. So I am. So like, in my mind, I’m sitting next to you soaking up some of the the warmth of Florida right now. It is currently 11 degrees. No, I’m sorry. It is yes, it is. 11 degrees here in Chicago. It is sunny, but very, very cold. So appreciate. You’re probably having a warmer day than me.
Shayla Twit 4:23 I’ll try to bring some warmth, your way. We say
D.J. Paris 4:27 love it. If you have you’ve really done some super impressive things. I always like to start at the beginning of the journey, because so many of our audience really wants to know, you know how you got started, and then how you continued to evolve throughout your business. So how did you get into real estate?
Shayla Twit 4:48 Well, I went I didn’t go to college to become a realtor. I went and I got my business degree and I came down to Sarasota home of the Ringling circus So yeah, it’s a circus. All right. And my younger brother was here. I never knew anything about Sarasota and my younger brother who was going to bring late art school, which is a really prestigious art school, by the way. We didn’t know anything about I didn’t know anything about it only because my brother was here. And so he landed here, I came down right after college. And because nothing was really kind of working out that calm, we just apply for any jobs, you know? Sure. And nothing was exciting me anyway. And so I just, I had never been to Sarasota. I packed up my 19 Anyone read Oldsmobile, okay, I don’t even know how she made it all down here now. But I came, I moved right in with him, which was so nice to have a place and of course, with my brother and moved in with him. And within the first six months, I kind of was figuring my life out, I got a little job at Outback waiting tables. God knows I didn’t go to school for that. But it was an interim job. And everywhere we went, everybody, the whole conversation evolved around real estate. And so I just thought, like, I think I would do well at it, I would enjoy it, and Excel and just have fun with it. So I ended up just getting into it right away within the first six months of living here.
D.J. Paris 6:19 Wow, that is, that’s quite a quite a jump. And also to like, Florida has the most number of Realtors per capita of any state. So there’s tremendous competition out there.
Shayla Twit 6:33 I think I read somewhere as of, I think 2020, there were 195,000 in the state, which is insane. It’s insane.
D.J. Paris 6:42 It is. It is like, I think it was something like every fifth person in Florida has their real estate license or something like that,
Shayla Twit 6:51 you know, that’s gonna change, you’re coming up now. But I think you know, a lot of that too, is the people that are part time or they just do it here and there or sell to their family. So we got a lot of those. And then it’s and then it’s like you have that population. And then you have the population that actually makes a living and then you have the top one percenters. I mean, there’s other categories in between, but just to generalize.
D.J. Paris 7:15 Yeah, no, I think you’re right, we’re starting to see here in Chicago, a mass exodus of the agents who are the onesie twosie, you know, do a couple deals a year, we’re starting to see them exit the industry, which should be, I think, good news for a lot of our listeners. It’s also good news for us, because we have a holding company. So those agents transfer over into a holding company a lot of times to keep their license active. But the bottom line is there are people leaving the industry, and I think that will actually be be beneficial to existing agents, who are, you know, more full time or are really wanting to step on the gas in their business? Are you seeing that trend as well.
Shayla Twit 8:02 Um, I’m feeling it. I feel like it’s right now as we sit here, and we’re recording this early February. So it’s dated, but 2023. But it’s kind of an interim time right now. I feel like so like showings are down, even for me, and I’ve got a, you know, I’ll get some listings. And so I can only imagine for a new agent, they’re probably feeling that exponentially. And so you can’t help but think that that’s going to ultimately, you know, affect them financially. And I’m feeling the buzz around, you know, our office even. And we are in a tough office, we do have some new agents there. And the buzz around the community, because I have a big, you know, I keep my hand on the pulse within the community and my colleagues and just the talk about town. And, you know, there’s only so much business to go around. And I think with agents exiting exit is seeing how everyone put it, that the cream will rise to the top and that sellers if they’re smart, knowing that their properties will take longer in the market. Now they’re gonna want the full service ages now. They’re gonna want the full marketing package marketing and advertising matter. And so if we don’t have that experience, especially if you’re new in the last two years, you don’t know what you don’t know. You know?
D.J. Paris 9:22 Yeah, I think you just said a lot of really great things. I think you’re right now is the time to you know, if you are, if any of our listeners out there are wanting to really, you know, attract more sellers. This is the year to get your marketing packets, your listing presentations on point. You know, there’s a ton of services that can help you do this, but realize that right now, of course listings are there’s a lot of competition for listings. So if you are going up against other teams will first of all, maybe consider joining the team, right? So, you know, if you want to be a big player in your local market, find out who the teams are that are capturing this business. And you know, take a look and see what are their marketing materials look like? What what are their listings, they’re willing
Shayla Twit 10:17 to share. That was the That’s gold. I mean, if I were a new agent, I would seek out someone that’s been in the business a long time that is a top agent, and and mentor with that person, they’re willing to do that, that is absolutely priceless. You’re not reinventing the wheel here, I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m just doing what works for me as other agents do. And what works for me might not work for the other person. But I do think that honing in on your value proposition and really fine tuning it outlining, outlining that for your seller is important. I go in every single year and I revamp, I find to my marketing links that I send out as a pre package to my sellers. I revamped that this year, because I was like, I really want to express to sellers, like all of the unique curated services that we offer each and every seller, I can’t drive that home enough. Because sometimes I get stuck when someone says, Well, how are you different? Why would I hire you. And it’s like, I sometimes get stuck in the moment. So if you have it already outlined in a format, it’s so much better. You know, that
D.J. Paris 11:22 is a really, really like easily glossed over thing that I don’t want to gloss over. Because really having a list of services that you provide to your clients is critical. Because there are going to be those elevator kind of conversations where you only have, you know, maybe their in person conversations where someone’s like, hey, so how are you different from every other Realtor in town, you need to have three or four things that you say that you do ready to answer that question? Because let’s face it, the the other groups or teams or big producers in your local market have answers to those questions. Why should they trust you versus x? And it’s not, of course to ever disparage anyone who, who you’re in competition with, but to sort of separate and elevate yourself. And so you do need to know your value proposition. I think that is such great advice. And it sort of goes back to like when I first left college and had my first job, where they said, practice your objection handling, practice your value proposition, your elevator pitch in the mirror. I mean, it sounds it sounds silly, but you really should have three or four things. Or I’m asking RX, I should ask you, there should always be some information that you’re able to provide about what’s going on in the industry to talk to talk when you meet people. Is that?
Shayla Twit 12:54 Yeah, I would say yes, absolutely. And when I look back at like my older value propositions, I was a little I was too centered on me. And it was more about me, and I’m like, This is not about me how great I am, I think agents, but realtors, especially I don’t know, if we’re too egocentric or something like that the ego is good, but to a point, right? You have to have ego and empathy, empathy for the other person situation. So I totally switch that around. And I made I made sure and I was very hyper focused on the fact that like, you know, I’m curating first impressions for you. And that’s how we start the value proposition, like everything I do is like an art, like, you know, when you go and you make a painting, and you start the painting, you step away from it, and then you come back with new ideas. So you take your time, and make sure that from the wording to the photography, and the entire package presentation is really thoughtful and made for that person and for that property, because everybody, everybody’s property is as unique as them and so we take so much time and care into just the remarks that we put out there really thoughtful, you know, so we start from there and kind of move our way through like the presentation.
D.J. Paris 14:18 Yeah, I love that. I think every home has a story right? And every, every home should be able to have that story be told, and and really good realtors are able to do that they’re able to identify certain characteristics of a home or a personality type of a home sometimes even and really highlight and focus that in it that should all be coupled with the team or the individual agents branding. So we really encourage everyone to, you know, to think about this is the this is the year to level up your You’re sort of our brand and your brand.
Shayla Twit 15:04 Yeah, know how you want to portray your clients and their properties, like you want to stand out, like, instead of saying, like, you know, pointing out the obvious in the remarks, like paint a lifestyle, like, you won’t be able to imagine someone in that home and having a glass of wine at the rooftop, or, you know, whatever the, whatever the attributes of the home, you want to really highlight the most and not cover up the objections, but almost address them in a way that’s more artful that you’re not, you’re not hiding something like if it’s on a busy road, make it to a benefit, you know what I mean? So, so that you’re not, you know, people aren’t getting there and saying, like, oh, there’s a railroad track in the back, but like, you’ve already addressed it in a way that that’s creative to where, okay, like, they’re, they’re showing it, or they’re coming to see this, this is probably a better quality showing, because they kind of already know a lot of this stuff. You know,
D.J. Paris 16:00 there is a marketing principle of that I learned many, many, many years ago called if you can’t fix it, feature it, which basically means that yeah, give Pete give all the information up front. And, and so that when the person arrives there, you know, they’re fully aware of what the situation what the property has, and doesn’t have. I want to talk about lead leads, because everybody, of course, this business, real estate, realtor businesses are contingent upon lead generation. And I would love to know, right now, we know it’s difficult, right? We have are in a higher interest rate environment than we then Realtors would prefer for. So, you know, our lending partners are telling us that, you know, we might see rates in the fives, maybe the the low sixes this year, for 30 year fixed rates, that, of course, is going to have an impact on the number of buyers who want to participate. So we also know inventory has has dramatically shrunk. So we have this to two difficult challenges this year, we have low inventory and higher rates, although I think the rates are still pretty reasonable historically. But what are you? What are you doing to keep busy, stay productive, stay active and stay positive?
Shayla Twit 17:30 Well, I learned early on, I was lucky enough to be introduced to the Buffini and company system of referrals and repeat, you know that that whole models, so I was very, you know, looking back at 20 years, I’m still in that company, of just getting, you know, having access to the back end system, which was great. And the whole principles behind it, which the definition of real estate is lead generation it is. And however you want to break that down is your question. So, you know, for me, I’ve been doing this now 20, almost 21 years, so I really have my database, so I’m careful to stay in touch with them. Not too much, but just enough like so they’ll hear from me on a regular basis where you know, they’re passively on social media, but they always get like that, the snail mail or an E newsletter every single month. And so you know, staying in touch with those people because if you’re a longtime agent, the biggest thing you can do with what I would suggest is go back and source your business and keep doing what works. And not reinvent the wheel there and then figure out okay, like 75% 80% comes from repeat referral for me. So I keep touching those people whether I call text email, I will say I started this within the last like nine months I want to say and every I always touch them on the anniversary of the sale or purchase
D.J. Paris 18:59 love that. So we’re, I’m gonna pause you for a second because you’re saying so you’re saying so much great stuff that I I’m gonna I’m gonna slow us down a little because you’re talking about home anniversary, or we’ll call it home sales transaction anniversary date. So So by the way, nobody knows their home anniversary date other than no nobody this is this is a great opportunity to basically create a birthday event for for the property
Shayla Twit 19:31 and make an excuse to reach out so I took it a step further because I wanted it to be more personal that this isn’t a group email, anybody can send a text. So I made time in my calendar and you carve it out however you can and you can stack on but you go to the person’s house or to the gate or however far you can get to the neighborhood or the clubhouse whatever is art, it’s far into the house and you can get and I do a personal video and I text it to them and then I say In the video, I say, you know, happy anniversary, you bought the house, blah, blah. And I just want to see how the family’s doing. Yeah, you know, whatever the message is. And then at the end of it, I’ll say like, I’m going to follow up and send you your equity update in an email today. So you get your annual equity update. It’s hand selected hand curated for you. And I’ve gotten so many good responses from that. Like, it’s, it’s heartwarming, yeah. Because I’m like, I get excited to do that for them. And then I’m like, I can’t wait for them to see it and respond, you know. So it’s fun. And what
D.J. Paris 20:34 what you’re saying is, is simple, and you get super brilliant in a way, because it really serves a couple solves a couple problems. One is, okay, I’m not so busy right now. Because the rates in the market and you know, I’m not as busy. But what I could always do is do annual anniversary check ins with my past clients or any, it doesn’t even have to be a past client. It could be literally anyone who owns a property, you could just say, hey, you know, because I know, as a homeowner, the thing that I that I would always be interested in hearing about is what’s my, what’s the property’s worth, right? Yeah, so the idea of being able to send that to somebody on a on an annual basis, okay, I just, you know, did a little quick thing here for you, that is incredibly valuable to people, whether they want to move or not.
Shayla Twit 21:32 And they remember that and you know, you can take that same formula and spin it however you want. And whether they are just a friend, and you can look them up in the tax record and say, Hey, I saw that you bought your house X, you know, whatever years ago, I just thought I’d send you an equity. It doesn’t have to be a client. So if you’re new, and you’re looking to get business, it’s something to think about too. Like you don’t always have to be an agent of years and years. And I mean, I started somewhere, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, you know, all these things that you’ve developed over time, they just, they just become systems. And that’s the other thing. You have to develop systems and consistency. And just put the things in your schedule and do like, I’m a big fan of recurring tasks. Me to do them every so whatever. So it pops up. This is what I have to do today. So you’re not like you know what you’re gonna do in the calendar. It’s already organized.
D.J. Paris 22:24 Yeah, I think this is, it’s so funny. I we’re here in Chicago, there’s 47,000 realtors in our market here. I can count on one hand, the number so I moved into a place new construction two years ago, I can count on one hand, the number of mailers I’ve received. Not that mailers are the end all be all. But if anyone by the way, Chicago, one of the most aggressive, competitive real estate markets in the country, you would and I live in in new development in the city, you would think that even though I just purchased a property, realtors would be consistently bombarding, bombarding me with hey, here’s what your home is worth. Here’s what your price is worth. Here’s what the neighborhood’s worth here. Are you thinking of moving? I have gotten maybe one or two letters, and two years. So this is a huge opportunity. And again, understanding that mailers aren’t necessarily Yeah. There’s a huge opportunity out here to introduce yourself to people, because every homeowner is not every homeowner, but most homeowners want to know what their home property value is worth. Right? And they’re gonna go to Zillow, they’re going to look up their Zestimate because that’s what people do. And then you’re going to come in and say, you know, actually, I think Zillow has got it pretty close to right. But here’s what I actually think your home is worth based on my own research that you could do that all day long. Every day, right?
Shayla Twit 24:03 Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so to your point, I’ve been doing the mailers so it I think it’s a Market to Market thing. I don’t know, mailers might not be for every market. I do feel like that’s probably the case. I will say for me in my market. I do a lot on Longboat Key, which is just north of Siesta Key in Sarasota and it’s actually span Sarasota Manatee County have nine miles. But so they’re the demographics that are online vote, many snowbirds, lots people that aren’t even here, they’re probably up in Chicago, you know, when it’s cold. And so they are getting my mailer. And in the mailer, they get the listings, they get the QR codes and all the recent YouTube videos I’ve done and then on the back and some other things, and on the back. It’s got all of the market stats for their for their neighborhood or what’s transpired So they’re getting all of that every single month without question. And so that’s a regular that’s another system that we do to,
D.J. Paris 25:09 to keep that. Yeah. So so in between sales, you’re touching each one of your contacts, monthly or maybe even more often than that, how critical is having that that those structures in place so that people don’t forget that you’re their realtor, right?
Shayla Twit 25:32 It’s really important because you never know where the business is going to come from, even though I say or another agent says, like, oh, repeat referral, but at the end of the day, it’s because they remember you because you’re sending stuff out and on a regular basis. And so I reach them even more than that, because I do have a YouTube channel too. And so I post on Tuesdays and Thursdays on my YouTube channel, in addition to those, among other advertising things that we do, and the YouTube channel, which goes into my mailer, and it goes into my E newsletter every single month. And what we do is, like, we talked to area businesses, we do an end of the month market update in great detail. We tour restaurants, we give, you know, a lot of people really like the neighborhood tours, because it’s like, okay, you can you can show a house and it’s like, you know, to get the feel of the neighborhood, we take it a step further. So for example, if I, if I take a new listing, I do that home tour on the YouTube, and then we do a whole neighborhood tour. And so our sellers love that too. And it’s something that we have fun with, and that we share with the public, and it gets people to understand, like, get to know Sarasota, and what’s here and the lifestyle,
D.J. Paris 26:50 that that is really quite quite smart. Because of course, when people move anywhere, they want to know, what is the culture, like, what’s the lifestyle, and if as agents, you know, it’s so interestingly, you’re mentioning this I’ve certainly had on guests before who’ve talked about, you know, creating content, video content, specifically around, you know, different restaurants and retail shops, and, you know, other community focused content to support the local, local industry, local industries, but this idea of doing it with doing it so, so deliberately is really, really important, I think. And I love the fact that you’re doing this regular video content, about lifestyle, like, Hey, here’s what it’s like to actually live in this area. That is not necessarily real estate specific content, but it’s incredibly important and valuable, you know, along with schooling, as well as community, you know, different opportunities that exist. So how important are those sorts of lifestyle? You know, markers, or how important is that to help bring in clients for you?
Shayla Twit 28:18 Well, it’s been really a learning curve process, I will say that it is a marathon, not a sprint, the YouTube, I think, I think if you’re not doing video, you’re missing a whole channel pun intended, of ways to get people to know who you are. And to get business. If you’re just going to do one or two videos, don’t even do a video. That’s just my hardcore opinion on it, because it’s like you and everybody else stops. So if you’re gonna do it, do it even once a week or every two weeks, like stick to a schedule. I’ve got I’m starting to get more interaction with it. Now. I’m not up to even 500 subscribers yet, but it’s been it’s a it’s a challenging platform. I’ll say that to to grow. Yeah, but But it’s been fun. I think that people are now calling and saying oh my gosh, I saw your YouTube where they might have seen me they may have Googled me first or Google shares that are realtors, you know, and then they stumble on me and then they see my because my YouTube goes to my website, and it auto uploads on my website, too. So that’s why if you gotta do so many things to be out, you know, unless someone already knows about you. So,
D.J. Paris 29:37 yeah, so this idea of creating content for on social media for your, for the public for for your, your sphere of influence. I’ve I’ve had hundreds of guests on the show over the years, and they all typically tend to, to focus on a providing content, solving problems, I think is a lot of times what drives content. So if you’re a realtor out there, and you’re thinking about, what should I be focused on on social media, I always think, you know, just write down the most common questions that you’re receiving from your buyers, your sellers, and then start to create content around answering those questions. You know, like, and I imagine in Sarasota, you can because when people move, obviously, there’s just a lot of things outside of the house that are factored in.
Shayla Twit 30:39 I mean, like, we think like, so throughout the day, like, as you have conversations, as problems come up, as unique circumstances come up, we just write them down. And we’re like, Oh, that’d be good video, this would be good video. And a lot of the conversations I have are okay, what are the I want to be walkable to this? I have a dog, where are the dog places. So we did a walkability video, we’ve done the dog park video, we’ve done the spas, the restaurants, it’s not like anybody, like I said, anybody can just show a house all the time. And if that works for your page, great for us, I wanted to mix it up and make it fun. And just again, it’s just it’s people come here for the lifestyle. We have a lot of snowbirds here. That’s my main market, you know, beachfront condos and all that stuff. And you know, they come and go, and it’s been part of the year or half year, whatever. And they want to come here for the lifestyle in the sun. And, you know, there’s other benefits, too, of course, no state tax and all that other stuff. Unlike in Chicago, where you’re at with all the taxes. Sure. And so you want to tell them about all those great things and and learn about the area in that way.
D.J. Paris 31:53 Yeah, and I love you know, being that you’re in a competitive, Sarasota, southern Florida area, you’re in a competitive agent environment here in Chicago, we are competitive as well. How do you differentiate yourself? What what are some of the ways in which you sort of stand apart from other realtors?
Shayla Twit 32:14 Well, I think well, one of them is the YouTube channel, because I know there’s so many just start in a completely fall off. I mean, they do. And it’s interesting to watch that happened. And I and I’m happy to, you know, I guess not mentor people, or they comment upon me for advice, which is flattering, but I’m like, Listen, this is how it is like, don’t even start if you’re just not going to commit, you know. So I think because I’ve put myself out there so much, you know, on social media and the various avenues, I did actually get recently approached to do a professionally produced series, it’s called inside luxury listing in Sarasota, we actually did a little book in the studio yesterday. And so it’s going to be really excited to be released in March. And again, that’s something very different because it’s collaborating with other agents in town showcasing luxury properties that people couldn’t get into otherwise, unless they were on this, you know, show, and we’re just doing a different spin on it. And by me collaborating with I mean, I was asked, it was very generous, offered to be asked to be on this. But now with SEO, I can tag him and her and they can tag me and it just like it’s going to be mutually beneficial. So it’s not like we don’t look at that as competition. You know, we look at that as like, there’s enough business for everybody and by us coming together to give a different dynamic is just something really unique and fun and exciting.
D.J. Paris 33:47 Yeah, I think agents can really partner up and do these things themselves. I, you know, even agents, different offices can really partner up and and, you know, together, work together. It is called a cooperative commission. Let’s let’s not forget that. And yeah, there’s, there’s so much opportunity out there. People have to live somewhere. Right. And so, you know, I’m curious, what are you doing or what are what are you doing to help? Right now, agents are struggling interest rates, low inventory. Buyers are in shorter supply than before, when we were at 3% rates, so how are you staying active, busy? What are you doing to you know, keep your business rolling forward?
Shayla Twit 34:47 Well, I listen to basically from the time I get up in the morning, I’m listening to positive content, like your channel here and others just really positive mindset, real estate, millionaire billionaire mindset just like positive in positive out motivational, I have routines, I think routines are really impactful and important and the discipline behind that because you can be motivated that discipline. So I go crazy, I get up at four, I get up at four every morning and I get to the gym because I, the days I don’t work out, I just have anxiety, I just feel off. So once I get that workout in, I’m so much more motivated to tackle the day and get things done. And I think that those little rituals that you do, whether it’s journaling, or meditating or getting up or working out, or like playing with your dogs, or whatever, or going for a walk, to start the day, I think is immensely beneficial for people. If they just start, and then they stick with it.
D.J. Paris 35:57 Yeah, you know, I think the last five episodes I’ve done a peep. interviews have been with all about Miracle Morning, you know, so the Miracle Morning is is a very common popular sort of practice, in the sort of self improvement world, and having habits disciplines are really the kind of the keys to success. And so in this book, Miracle Morning, they talk about, though your physical health, your spiritual health, you’re, you’re basically setting yourself up for success early in the morning. So it’s business, physical, personal, etc. So yeah, I’m a huge, huge fan of that I imagine that book probably had a significant impact on you as well. So I guess maybe what I would be interested in is what your from a customer perspective, what do you think is? What do you think is helping helping you separate yourself from the other agents in your area? What like, what else are you doing? Aside from the CMAS?
Shayla Twit 37:16 I think that well, especially when I’m working with a buyer or seller, communication is my reputation. So what I mean by that is, for example, I just took a listing a week ago today, and it’s, you know, different market. Now, we got to change things up here. So and I’m reverting back to my old little habits that I did. Because over the last two years, we didn’t have to do all this. And that was one of them is okay. It’s been a week on the market. This is all this is everything that we’ve done. All the marketing, we’re doing a broker’s open, we call the cold call we yada yada. And so it’s all right there. And I like to do that before they can ask. Because when they ask, it’s like, when the seller saying, Well, what have you been doing? It’s like, you don’t want to be in that position. So I want to tackle it. I want to answer their questions before they even have the question. That’s my approach. And we also do a 30 day and I don’t know beyond that, you know, we’ll still do it if we have to do a 6090 day. But do that before they ask the question. Because it’ll it’ll go a long way. Not only just with putting them at ease, but also it will help if you need a price reduction, because my sellers already thinking charity said, Okay, it’s been slow. I think we priced a little too high. Let them come up with it first. It’s brilliant.
D.J. Paris 38:44 Yeah, you know, it. It’s funny, my boss, when he started to our company here at kale hit, I said, what I asked him, What was your goal, Nick, as a broker, owner of a company and with your clients, he said he only had one goal, which was he never wanted his client to have to call him first. He said, I never wanted a client to have to call me first I. So basically, you just said essentially the same thing. So you’ll be a so this idea of reaching out and proactively having communication with your clients, here’s what’s happening, or here’s what’s not happening. Here’s why. Here’s what the what, why, you know, the how, why, what, where while how, right, like all just basically explaining, here’s where we’re at, here’s what’s happening. And here’s where we’re going to move forward,
Shayla Twit 39:43 basically, and basically doing what you said you were going to do based on the listing presentation or the marketing link, or how have you produced that or, you know, give it to him. This is everything we said we were going to do at to this juncture and like you you know that that Is your word and you’re following through on your word. And you’re being proactive, not reactive.
D.J. Paris 40:05 Sure, yeah, yeah. So when, when listing stay on the market in for longer, longer periods of time, of course, then that becomes, they become vulnerable to possibly losing those listings. And so this, this is a great opportunity, because you really need to have a strategy. So that, you know, communication policy, so that at a particular time, whether it’s, you know, seven days, 14 days, 30 days, that you know, that that that person is going to receive that seller is going to receive information about how many eyeballs have checked out the property, online, how many people have scheduled appointments, and then you can use that data to then say, you know, based on other comps in the area, I’m not seeing as much interest in this property, or we’re seeing more interest in this property, and you can make adjustments from there is that how you sort of work it?
Shayla Twit 41:05 Yeah, and you know, your company might have like the automated you know, they’ll get the number of impressions or whatever per week, we also have that with Cole banker, global luxury. So that’s, that’s already built into what they’re getting. But I don’t think that’s enough, like for them to just get an automated something or they’re from the company, they need to, they need to hear from you. And another thing you can do is you can get a feel for whether they take call text or email, you know, generally you can kind of tell people like go with that, you know, read between the lines, and like, if they prefer a phone call calm and give them the rundown. And, and do it based on the client, and they’re in their comfort zone too. But I think all of these things will show that it shows value. And again, you know, people are gonna people that are still living in 2020 23 to market this is going to be really critical in the 2023. You know, market coming up for price reduction requests, because you’ve already shown you, you’re not just sitting around and calling them when there’s time to reduce the price. You’ve been doing all this work, all this quality. And now okay, we haven’t had anything, let’s get the price down to sell.
D.J. Paris 42:17 Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about about marketing. I would love to learn a little bit more about how you prospect. How do people find you? What advice do you have for agents who are maybe they don’t have a lot of buyers and sellers right now, what would you recommend for them?
Shayla Twit 42:38 Well, everybody’s got a phone. Yes or no? computer that you carry around, you have people that you can call? I think what I see a lot of new agents doing and I it’s like so redundant. All they do is they say I’m new, I’m a new agent call me like any business, I’m available for referrals, buyers and sellers, I can I can do this and that whatever. But I say like, give them information for give them value. Give them answers to questions before they can like put that good content out there. It’s still about content, right? And you can call you can text them you can eat you know, email, whatever, FaceTime, you know, and call your database go out into the community and you have a hairdresser go step by with like a little gift and just your card or something that’s the Buffini system where they call Popeyes. You don’t have to do stuff that’s expensive. Like I started out at a collagen and the money so you sell a phone, you could start a comp I didn’t know anybody. I knew nobody in town, my brothers, I can help these and college. He’s got his college buddies. He doesn’t know anybody. So I just started stopping by this. I just literally just walked into businesses introduce myself. I mean, you gotta be out there. You have to, you can cold call. You can get phone numbers now online, like, you can just call neighborhoods and say, Hey, did you know this is happening in your neighborhood? Like, can I get your email add them to the database now they’re on a drip, like there’s so many things you can do whether you’re new or a veteran,
D.J. Paris 44:17 I that’s such great advice. adding people to your database is really the key and Europe. Buffini person and everybody you know, we all love the Buffini and company company. And what we want to do is really make sure that everybody understands that the most important thing for lead generation is adding contacts to your database. It just is. So if you and I going back about 15 years, but Brian Buffini and Joe NIGO they would hold each other accountable for meeting a certain number of adding new people Pull to their database when they were practicing real estate. So they would call each other say, Did you meet two to five new people a day. That was their goal was to meet two to five new people every single day and add them to your database. Because, as you know, Shayla that your network is your net worth, right?
Shayla Twit 45:19 Yes.
D.J. Paris 45:22 Yeah, so. So I’m curious. So we’re talking about staying in touch, right? We’re talking about providing value staying in touch in between the the monoliths of buying and selling, so the transactions are the big, you know, big boulders, and then we have all these things in between. And what we really want to do is provide value to the client between those big boulders and curious on what types of content that you’re providing to them, so that they, you know, remember that you’re a realtor and that they’re in any real estate needs that they
Shayla Twit 46:05 can I’m here, right? Yeah. Well, you know, just again, from keep up, but like, it’s from, okay, like you can things to do, you can go to the ballet, I mean, people are always looking for stuff like that, like so in the E newsletter that we put out, there’s a little more, there’s more room than just the piece paper, that email. So the E newsletter is a little bit of a spin off of the mailer. And in that there’s more fun stuff, like fun happenings or like newsworthy things of, of Sarasota in the area and stuff like that. And like the restaurants and the other links, and just different things like that. You know, and outside of that I have a whole full list.
D.J. Paris 46:52 Yeah, I think it was realtors who provide guides for local communities. These can be incredibly helpful, like, is a silly example, but I was visiting my father, who was in Peoria last week. And it’s just a weirdest thing to say. But in Peoria, there’s a large Lebanese pub population for for whatever reason. So I said, Hey, Dad, let’s go to Let’s go to what’s the best Lebanese restaurant in town? Right. And so there’s tons of them. And so we have a lot of them. Yeah, we do. Yeah. And so because I been eating Lebanese food of my entire life, because that’s where I grew up. And curious. Yeah. So I was like, this is really interesting. So as a result, we, you know, we went online, and I, and there’s like, 20 different restaurants in Peoria that are for Lebanese. And so we’re like, I don’t I don’t know which ones. But like, those are the kinds of things that I need to, you know, we need to solve that problem. And I didn’t know which was the best thing. And this is where realtors can really add value and really differentiate themselves outside of even just real estate advice itself.
Shayla Twit 48:11 Yeah, like you want to be the mayor of Sarasota, or mayor of Chicago or whatever, like, and I thought that term was funny, but it kind of fit if somebody else does that, to me, they’re like, the mayor of Sears. And like, that’s kind of the goal. By the way. I’m happy Turkish, are you? Are you?
D.J. Paris 48:28 No, I’m not. I’m not. No, I’m not but. But the idea is, is the idea of coming together and train trying to create value for people by solving problems for them, right. So like families need to eat, families need to live somewhere. So this idea of providing content around those basic needs, oftentimes can be really fun. And it’s as simple as really just taking your phone and turning it around and turning the camera on and saying, Hey, today I’m talking about XY and Z. But promoting local, promote locally, and, you know, a lot of these businesses, the challenge here, this is such an opportunity, I think Realtors really miss out on this. So, what they don’t understand is that Realtors what Realtors don’t understand is that they can reach out to these businesses and offer them like hey, I want to I love your product service your store and I want to expose my audience to your you know your wares your your you know, whatever you’re shilling. And as as a result, I would like you to also you know, possibly, you know, mentioned me so you’re basically giving them free advertising by you know, doing a real or a video or a story about why you liked this particular vendor in your local community. And then you can from there go on to create content, supportive of that community, and then tag those, those those, you know, different businesses in there, and hopefully drive more engagement.
Shayla Twit 50:24 This is actually how my channel started. So it’s funny you say that because I was just going to be doing like logo, not just but it’s kind of started into from that. Because I’ve got friends who own businesses, and I just was like, I want to have you’re the channel that benefits me because it’s our channel. But really, it’s promoting you. And I hope it drives I hope it drives customers to you. And it’s been so nice to give back in that way. And it’s complimentary. We don’t ask anything in return, we just, and we just we have one of the video. And then we promote the video from these different platforms, email, social media, and the mailers. So they get hit a few different ways. And, you know, we pay for all that advertising, of course, and it gives the customer the recipient of the piece of mail or, you know, whatever something to look at and value and I’m not Honey, let’s go to this restaurant, or let’s go check out the football game at this bar or something like that. And it’s cool. And actually, so we’re coming up on our 300th video, and we invited everybody that was has been a guest thus far on the channel to the vet, one of the first places I did a video at was Rafferty’s bar, downtown Main Street. And so we’re gonna have it at the bar. And we’re just gonna have like a happy hour. And it’s we’re gonna do a little video and pass the microphone around. And it’s just gonna be like a big like to do and we’ll tag everybody and it’s just and then they can meet each other exchange car, there’s gonna be like a little business networking thing on top of having this great video. And it’s just like, it just, it feels really good to do that stuff. And I didn’t I didn’t see it coming, you know this far? Like it hasn’t it’s just been really enjoyable
D.J. Paris 52:04 process. Yeah, you basically created a community, it sounds like, and that’s really exciting. And people like community, we need it. We, we embrace it. And you know, I always think like, every single person always is thinking about the weekend, right? Like, what am I going to do this weekend? What are the events going on? What am I gonna do with my kids? What am I going to do with personally, and when you have these kinds of events, sort of structures in place, you can then begin to start to, you know, just help other the residents in the area sort of know what, what, here’s all the cool events that are happening in this area. And I think there’s tremendous value in that. And it’s,
Shayla Twit 52:55 it just makes my heart happy. And it sounds corny, but I’m like, it’s just fun to be able to do this. And they’re excited, and I’m excited. And we’re just sharing and listen, like, you know, I want people to make money. I want my friends to do well. And so whenever I can do referrals are great. And if Hey, they remember me and give me a referral person. I want that. And it kind of always comes back full circle. So it’s a win win. For sure.
D.J. Paris 53:23 Yeah, I totally, totally agree. And for anyone out there who’s listening who may want to refer business to Shayla, so she’ll tell us a little bit more about what you provide for you in Sarasota to your clients.
Shayla Twit 53:42 Well, I have staff just me I do have a full time assistant and her name happens to be Shayla as well, so she’s available. She’s been with me about six and a half years now and the Sheila’s so we have the two of us full time and you know, I guess from working with my sellers and and buyers, we’re just at your service basically. And happy to do that.
D.J. Paris 54:12 Or great grateful for you coming on our show but he gave tons of great information and strategies and content. We are so honored to have you Shayla thank you so much for being on keeping it real. I want to remind everybody to please visit Sarasota real estate sold.com Sarasota real estate sold.com which is everything related to Charlotte and we’ll have links to those in the show notes. Please follow her on social media, Instagram, Facebook as well as Tik Tok. So please do that. On behalf of the audience. We want to thank a Shayla for are coming on our show. We appreciate it. We greatly greatly appreciate it and be on behalf of the listeners. We want to thank you the listeners as well. To make sure to please tell another friend tell a friend about the show. Think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from our Sorry, I’m gonna I’m gonna redo this one at the end. But anyway, yes, we are grateful to have you. Thank you so much for being on our show. And we will we will see everybody on the next episode. Please tell a friend. Thank you. Thanks so much Shayla.
Shayla Twit 55:36 You’re welcome. Thank you
Top Real Estate Agent At 26 Years Old • Andres Bustamante
Feb 21, 2023
Andres Bustamante talks about his own life journey as a young real estate agent in Texas. Next, he describes why he thinks that starting with renting is the best strategy to increase sales. Andres also discusses why “referrals and social media“ helps new agents to grow the connections. Andreas also emphasizes that an agent should be a good storyteller, educator and problem solver.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We know the expression with age comes wisdom, but what about younger agents that already appear to be wise and crushing it? Even if they’re in their early 20s? Or we’re gonna be talking to one of those agents today? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show, and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Andres Bustamante. But before we get to Andres, just a couple of quick reminders, please the best way you can help our show two things, please support our sponsors. They’re the one that pay the bills, and they are the ones that allow us to do as many episodes as we can. So thank you, please check out our sponsors their services and products, consider investing in them by investing in them that will not only help your business, but also help us stay in business so we can keep doing these episodes. And the second thing to do is to tell a friend about the show 2023 is a tough year so far for real realtors, so let’s give them the best chance of success, introduce them to the show, send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com They can check out some of our episodes, and they can always of course like and subscribe on any podcast platform that they might be listening to shows on. Alright guys enough of that. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Andres Bustamante.
Today on the show we have Andres Bustamante with Keller Williams Nino team in Austin, Texas. Now I am really excited to tell you more about Andres. And if you are a listener of our show, and if you kind of just zone out during the bio, I really want you to zone in only for the next 30 seconds, because this is probably going to pique your interest. This is a really fun one today. So let me tell you about about Andres. So Andres Bustamante was actually born in El Paso, Texas to Mexican parents. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin as a first generation. He also spent one full year in France with an exchange family when he was 16. And that helped him become independent at an early age. And when when he was 19. He actually got his real estate license again at 19 years old. And this is the reason why he needed to figure out a way to pay for college. Now being a leasing agent. He was able to accomplish this he actually paid for his college education by being a leasing agent. Now this is where it gets really amazing. His first ever sale as a 21 year old was for $1.1 million. And at 23 years old, he decided to do real estate full time clearly he’s good at it. And he joined a team. Now his first year full time he earned rookie of the year he sold 21 homes for almost 7 million in volume. That’s in year one. Now in year 237 homes for 17 million. And in year three another 37 homes for 19 million. He’s currently by the way, guys, he’s currently 26 years old. Now visit all things Andreas on his Instagram and Tiktok at Andres booster TX A NDRESBUSTATX links to both of those will be in the show notes. Andres Welcome to the show, my friend.
Andres Bustamante 4:55 Thanks, DJ. That was a great intro. I mean, that’s the bio
D.J. Paris 5:00 It is the bio and I wasn’t joking, you are fascinating to me. And as a young man in this industry, to have this kind of success is is is amazing. It really is inspiring. And I’m so so happy to to I don’t know if you found us or we found you. But either way, this is an exciting interview for me. So let’s, let’s start at the very beginning, which by the way, it wasn’t that long ago. But let’s start at this idea of being a leasing agent at 19. Sort of how did you even know about that? I mean, at 19? You don’t even want to know what I was doing. I was like bussing tables? For nothing. What you got it? How did you how did you learn about that real estate?
Andres Bustamante 5:44 Well, firstly, I mean, you ever had one of those moments in life when you just don’t know what you want? For your life?
D.J. Paris 5:51 Sure, every moment of my every moment of every day? Yes. Certainly when I was younger, for sure.
Andres Bustamante 5:58 Yeah. So that’s how I was in college. I’m just like, I switched majors, like three times. I was supposed to be doing supply chain, that yeah, then I was like, oh, finance. And then I’m like, oh, I want to travel abroad, let’s do international business. But one thing I knew for certain I needed to find a way to pay for college. But But I didn’t want to have like that job towards like, I had someone telling me what to do. And this and that. I know a lot of us realtors can relate. So a buddy came to me, it’s like, Dude, you should try being a leasing agent or real estate agent. And that’s how I really got into it. Because I needed to find a way to pay for college. And I needed to find a way to make more money than anyone else could at that time as a 19 year old.
D.J. Paris 6:42 Yeah, and they’re just let’s, let’s face it, there just aren’t a lot of opportunities for 19 year olds, right? Like, you get a a minimum wage, or a low paying job, because that’s what 19 year olds get. And the fact that your friend came to you with this opportunity is is truly amazing. I imagine you have a tremendous amount of gratitude to that friend.
Andres Bustamante 7:04 He’s one of my best friends. He was my roommate. And when he was my roommate for like, five, six years.
D.J. Paris 7:09 Yeah. Wow. So So when when you started as a leasing agent, what did that look like? How did that work for you?
Andres Bustamante 7:16 Oh, it was insane. So it was back when we didn’t have the bluetooth for your phone to open lock boxes or anything. So I would have to go to like there was like 20 leasing offices in West Campus. That’s where the university students mostly stay. So I’d have to coordinate with like groups of students that were living in the condo to be like, hey, I want to show your place. I have several clients that are interested. It was crazy having to coordinate that, then I’d have to go to the leasing offices to get the keys. So no joke picture a 19 year old driving in his car with like, 20 keys in the clipboard. And I would frantically be like, Oh, is this the key? Or is this the key? And I had moments when the keys wouldn’t work. So I’m just like, I turn around to look at my clients. I’m like, Hey, guys, I don’t think we’re going to be able to see this one. But they were usually older. So I was always like, Oh my gosh, are they gonna trust me? How is this gonna go? Yeah, it was?
D.J. Paris 8:10 Did you? Did you work closely with students?
Andres Bustamante 8:14 Students, and I had several graduates. During that time, though, mostly students, through groups that I had joined that everyone lives 98 95% of students rented. So the apartments would pay me the condos would pay me once I got them to sign a lease.
D.J. Paris 8:33 It’s it’s it’s such a brilliant strategy. Because, you know, obviously, college kids have to live somewhere. A lot of times they’re bankrolled by their parents as well. So getting, you know, sort of that part approves probably a little easier. Because you’re, you know, I know when I went to college, or I went to the school called Miami University in Ohio, and I think we had to pay the whole semester rent upfront. I don’t know if that’s still done these days. But well, it was like 200 bucks a month, you know, so. So it was it was, you know, they were like, We don’t want to, you know, the landlords over there. Were like, we’re just going to collect it all. You Yeah. But, but but in your case, you know, it was probably a really great idea because you could network with the people that you knew in classes and in your social circles. And, and I imagine you were probably the only person in your social circles, aside from your best friend who was also doing it. Were you guys the only two that were really doing it?
Andres Bustamante 9:33 So my best friend actually did not end up doing it because he didn’t have like, he could not do it because of some certain visa requirements and whatnot. Sure. Yeah, unfortunately. But I was the only one in the group and I was part of like four groups. I was part of the UT soccer team, University of Texas soccer team. So every year people would need a rent. So I would get repeat clients for three years. And once once I set the systems, I would just tell the property manager Hey, I’m sending people over and they’re I’m pretty much sure they’re gonna sign. So it was like maybe 500 bucks per bedroom. And as a college student, that’s pretty amazing. Huge.
D.J. Paris 10:07 That’s amazing. And then did you have the foresight at that time? And again, a 19 year old? You know, look, we, you know, just that you’re even doing that at 19 is impressive. But did you have the foresight at that time to think, at some point, these these, these leasing tenant, these tenants are going to graduate? And, you know, I don’t know how many of them stay local, or, you know, leave and go elsewhere. But were those relationships? Like you said, you worked with them while they were in college every year? And then were you able to find the people that did stay after college and maybe even continue to assist them?
Andres Bustamante 10:49 Well, the thing is, my mindset wasn’t really on that I always thought I was going to be working as a in commercial real estate as a tenant rep with JLo, because I had internships with them. But then I was like, I don’t want to have an eight to five and I had a set salary there. So my mindset was never really it was more so I need to pay for college. This is what I’m going to do with this is
D.J. Paris 11:11 just getting me through till I get to Jones Lang LaSalle. Yes, because I
Andres Bustamante 11:15 had an internship with them. And in my head, I was like, I’m too young to be a real estate agent. And you are, yeah, yeah, that’s true. It was like people are not going to trust me. That was my mindset back then. That’s why I was saying, Oh, no real estate full time. I mean, a lot of my friends would be like, Dude, you don’t sell a house, you’re done. Or you don’t do this. You’re done. So I would, I’d be like, oh, yeah, they’re right. It was like a Yeah, the mindset thing, wasn’t there, unfortunately, at that time.
D.J. Paris 11:43 Well, I mean, you can’t expect a young person at that age to have a, you know, a healthy mindset around opportunity, right? They know, you don’t know what you don’t know. And at the same time, you’re also in college, you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna go down this path. I’m getting a degree, I want to go into commercial, I want to work in the, you know, for a more traditional commercial firm, like Marcus and Millichap Cushman and Wakefield, those those are the firm’s, you know, Jones Lang LaSalle. As you mentioned, CBRE, you know, places like that, and, and then you’re like, Well, wait a minute, I’m pretty good at this residential real estate thing. But I’m also in 2020 2122. But you did have success pretty early on, and you’ve had success every year. And so as much as your mindset obviously has shifted, you are obviously incredibly skilled. And I think skill is, is oftentimes, you know, the missing factor. For people who, who are struggling, you know, it’s mindset is part of it, of course, but also just being able to do the job is not an that isn’t, let’s talk about your first sale. So we’re sort of I’ve started dancing around it, you, you’re 21 years old, you have your broker or your your realtor license, whatever they call it in Texas, I don’t know if it’s broke or whatever. But your your realtor, and now again, a very reasonable thought nobody is going to trust me with this, you know, I wouldn’t trust a 21 year old, with my home, I just wouldn’t. And you know, what, that’s ageist and it’s, it’s probably ignorant on my part, but it’s understandable. And so you are now in the position of, I gotta grow, I got to try to figure out this. And you did. So tell us a little bit about how you got that first sale, which by the way, was $1.1 million, which I’m so so impressed by
Andres Bustamante 13:37 I was I’m sitting in my dorm room cafeteria. And I remember this perfectly. I just ordered something that resembled the pizza from you know, other dorm cafeterias are like the worst. And I get a call. And I’m listening to the guy. And I mean, you ever gotten one of those calls where it seems like a scam? Because it’s too true. You’re like, Dude, wait, what is that? He’s telling me his budget. He’s like, my budget is 1 million to 5,000,001 of my friends referred me to you that you helped lease. And I’m sitting with my, with my roommates and in the cafeteria. Yeah, I like my expression changes and I get up. And I’m still with my phone. And I legit told the guy, dude, you’re I’m sure you’re saying renting. So with a budget of 1005 1000 you can rent anything you want. And it’s like, you know, you know that rich, velvety voice. It’s like, you just know this guy is like super rich. So he’s like, No, dude. I’m looking to buy it’s 1 million of 5 million. And I’m like, okay, I can help you. I hang up and in that moment, I’m like, regretting that I said yes. Because I’m like, how am I going to figure this out? Sure. That was the moment when he called me that’s how it went. And I was just like, What is going on?
D.J. Paris 14:51 Yeah, so So what what did you do at that point? So you hung up and now you’re like, Okay, now I gotta put something together for this guy had
Andres Bustamante 14:58 a Oh my gosh, I had a week, I learned all the lingo. Like I didn’t even know what a nature way was. And I yeah, I had only done leasing and these were students. Yeah, the first ever tour. This guy is like very straight up, you’ll say what he means no filter. It was hilarious. Now he’s a really good friend. And we go to the first meeting and they’re barely building this, this condo, it’s the Austin proper downtown, beautiful building. And we walk in, and oh my gosh, that guy is just walking with me. He looks at the building inside the showroom. He sees the model in the middle. And in Spanish, she says no, megusta that means I don’t like it. Yeah, no good. And this sales rep was coming towards us, my client walks out. And I’m left alone with the sales rep. So I’m like, that was my first ever experience. And I said, Dude, I don’t know if this is common or anything. But then we ended up closing on a $1.1 million condo at the independent, which was incredible, that all those thoughts were going through my head during the whole transaction, like I’m too young, this is gonna happen. Crazy thing is, though, it was a lease referral. And that client is a really good friend of mine now. So it’s just crazy how it all happened.
D.J. Paris 16:15 It is and it didn’t, you know, it didn’t just happen, right, you had done an exceptionally good job for the tenant that referred to you. Although you know, and so you know, it’s, it’s, there’s some degree of luck in the sense of you happen to have done a great job for somebody that had somebody to refer to you. But you made that luck yourself, right. And so this is this is can happen to anybody at any age. And it did happen to you at an early age, you were able to convert it, you took it seriously, at 19, I wouldn’t have had the emotional maturity to even know what to do. So I am very impressed.
Andres Bustamante 16:54 One thing I always say leasing is so underrated. If you’re barely starting house, I always say look, find the top brokers top teams, and offer the value of look, you know what I understand that you’re extremely busy and your priorities are probably buying and selling. What do you have for lease that I can help you out with? And if you’re looking to join a team, that’s probably the best way to join a team offer value for free. And those leasing clients they might buy, but it’s always about who do they know that might buy as well, because I know a ton of people.
D.J. Paris 17:27 I couldn’t agree with you more here in Chicago, I talk about that a lot. When agents will come to me and say I’m thinking about joining a team, what companies do you recommend for teams, and obviously, there’s a lot of them. And I say, you know, there’s plenty of teams, you can join, I’m like, that’s not really a problem. But I said if you can bring value to a team, you have more, more, more leverage. And you can ask for more things. And if you can come and say, Hey, I noticed your team does a lot of sales. But I noticed you aren’t doing a lot of rentals. And for me, I think that you know, we can feed the sales beast by working with these people as renters today, stay in touch with them, educate them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when rates come down, maybe we’ll be able to convert them over to buyers. I think that’s an amazing strategy. I’m not not that not every market supports that. Right? If you’re in rural Idaho or something, maybe there just isn’t a rental market that could support you. But if you’re in a you know, some sort of metropolitan area Austin obviously being one Chicago where I am, guys, there’s so much business here and so much and and also most Realtors tend to ignore the renters, they tend to move away from those. So there’s not as much competition as well. So that is that is amazing to me. Now you joined a team, which I think was a very smart move pretty early on. Was that was that your role on the team was to be? Would it be the leasing guy?
Andres Bustamante 18:54 Not necessarily. And I joined the team kind of not really looking for it. But my company, the first company I joined housing scout was like, only leasing. Sure they never did sales. And it was funny when I would call people hey, there’s some that is from housing scout. I’m looking to buy a one month our condo, people like housing. Scott, what is that? So it was more so look, I don’t want to be doing leasing as much I want to transition into the sales. And my mentor. I heard him on bigger podcasts, bigger pockets podcast, the Oh Korzo. And I reached out to him because he was in Austin. And I’m like, Dude, I loved your podcast, I need to be on your team. I really want to get lunch and I kind of provided some value. And he was like, I’m busy right now and call me next week, calm next week. I set the lunch. Thankfully, this is like November 2019. And he’s like, Dude, I really like what you’re doing. I want you to join our team. So that’s how I joined the team. It was like me listening to podcast to get as much knowledge and a guy says I’m in Austin. So I said I need to join this guy’s team. And they weren’t looking for any team. They only had two agents.
D.J. Paris 19:57 Wow. I didn’t encourage everyone to do this right? Find the superstars in your local area. And you’d be shocked at how few how rarely, they actually get reached out to by newer agents. Yeah, and you might have to bug them a few times because they’re busy, right? And, but I know people that I’ve interviewed people on this show who go, if somebody emails me and wants to join my team, I typically ignore the first couple times they reach out. And, or I’ll just give them kind of a little bit of a brush off. But if they keep coming back, if they keep showing up, you know, maybe it’ll take a year of, you know, pestering me, but eventually, they sort of wear me down. And I’m like, okay, this person is serious. So it doesn’t mean you have to, you know, be a pest. But But I think this idea of being persistent and also helping a team solve a problem, right? So so instead of just saying, Hey, guys, I don’t really have a lot of leads, I’m kind of want to join a team, so you can help me, you know, generate more business. Maybe, maybe you could find somebody that’ll help you do that. But if you come in and say, Hey, tell me about your team, where are you guys having problems? What’s stopping you guys from growing? Here’s what I can bring, why you’re gonna have a lot
Andres Bustamante 21:10 of success. Yes. And like I said, they weren’t looking to grow a team, they were only two agents. So I became the third agent. And I wasn’t really handed down any leads, because it was the first time they ever Well, I wasn’t handed any leads. It was the first time they ever made the team. But I knew I wanted to join these guys, because they knew their stuff. So any new agents, the best recommendation I can make is, look, the brokerage that’s important, but who’s your team? For me, that’s always been the most important your mentors. That’s like a cheat code. And anything you can do,
D.J. Paris 21:41 yeah. agreed and could not agree with you more. And I love the fact that you said I didn’t get any leads at all. Because I think that also is a misperception sometimes when when I will have younger, younger, or newer agents like yourself, who have had this incredible success early on. And I think the inclination is to think somebody probably helped to help them out. And it’s not that they people didn’t help you. But you you source, your own leads, you source your own business, you get support, and mentorship and coaching from from from your, I mean, I guess it’s a team, you know, it’s technically a couple of people working together. But it’s we’re not talking about a team of 30 people we’re talking about.
Andres Bustamante 22:23 Now, we’re eight amazing transaction managers. So it’s good for you in quantity, for sure.
D.J. Paris 22:29 It’s unbelievable. And so as as somebody who’s settling into your business, you know, you’re now in what year three or four, basically full time? Yeah. So you’ve had an amazing run, let’s I just want to go over these numbers again. So So year one, you know, you basically did 21 sales, which is almost two a month. That’s amazing, in and of itself, you know, 7 million total in production. Year two, you went from 21 sales to 37 sales. So now we’re at what about three plus a month? Unbelievable. And then also last year, another 37 sales and for almost 20 million? So So you’re doing three, three plus transactions a month in your third year? This is this is just incredible. It really is. Tell us how you’re doing? How are you finding your clients? And and are they coming from referrals? Are they coming from? Are you purchasing leads? Where are you finding your clients,
Andres Bustamante 23:31 I have never purchased leads, the biggest thing that I say as helped is fear of influence referrals and social media. And one thing I want to say that’s so important as a real estate agent is that we’re we’re storytellers, we have to know how to tell a story. And I remember perfectly when I was telling clients look, buying a house is a great, this is a great thing to do. That I was really starting off and I didn’t have my house. So I said, You know what, if I’m telling people to buy a house, why am I doing it? And also kind of like, that’s probably my biggest expense. So I looked at my expense sheet one day, and I’m like, Yeah, housing is about 1000 to 1300 a month. I need to eliminate that expense. How can I do that house hacking. So I bought a house that was four beds, three and a half baths, lived in one room, rented out the other three. And while I was living there, I was living there for free and making $300 of cash flow. But the biggest thing about this what’s most important, the reason I’m saying this story is because I knew my target audience, I knew that I wanted people that have a big misconception, or 20% down. That’s always that’s such a big misconception. And we’re also educators so we we should teach people that then also oh my gosh, I have a lease that ends around this time and this and that. Oh, I just graduated college and I can’t afford this. Yeah, so I got that misconception and I made a post when I bought my house. Hey guys, I’m 23 years old, and I had a big risk misconception I thought I had to put 20% down. I had just graduated graduated college and everyone told me this was a bad idea and this and that. But you know what I did it. And now I’m living for free. And when I told that story, all my friends that could relate to undress, did it, he was doing what I did, I just graduated, they all reached out because of the relatability of a story, as opposed to me saying, Hey, I just bought this house. I just sold this, like, dude, what’s the story behind it? What did you help achieve? And that’s when you make it relatable to your peer group. And that’s when people reach out because they can feel it. Like it’s them, you know?
D.J. Paris 25:31 Yeah, boy, I am. So there’s a lot that you just said there that I’m processing because it’s also perfect. I think I am. Yeah, I’m a little I’m a little, you’ve actually flummoxed me a little bit, because I’m so used to hearing very, very similar, very similar stories. And this one is more more unique. But this idea of story selling it, you said a lot of things. Number one, first buying your own property at such a young age and house hacking and saying, Hey, here’s an opportunity where I can actually live rent free. And not only do I live rent free, I make a few 100 bucks a month on top of that, which is awesome. And I get all the depreciation from being an investment in investment. Yeah. So So Oh,
Andres Bustamante 26:18 my God. Yeah. There’s there’s so much there that I can talk about for sure.
D.J. Paris 26:23 It’s, yeah, your accountant is probably very happy with you with with, with advice, and you actually, you have more than one property now how to tell tell us Wow, that’s evolved.
Andres Bustamante 26:33 So this is I love talking about this. So I talk a lot I harp a lot about new builds, why new builds? Okay, resell you might close within 30 to 45 days. What if someone is telling you dude, my lease is in 10 months, but I really liked this price. Well, US problem solvers, storytellers, educators, that’s our job to find his problem a solution to the problem. So a lot of people told me Oh, 10 months from now. Oh, create what I would tell him. Okay, great. What if there’s an opportunity where you can lock the price, and within 10 months, the home is built? People were like, Oh, my gosh, let’s do it. So we wouldn’t go under contract for new builds for a low deposit, like 1003 1000. And people walk in on no joke, 100,000 plus inequity. This was when the market was starting 2020 2022 Sure. So the new build strategy was insane. And I bought another house, even though I hadn’t fulfilled that one year requirement as an owner occupant. So a lot of people know you need three, you can do three to 5% down with a conventional if you live in it for a year. But I wanted my my next house because I was so excited, I got the bug. And I found a builder that they did not finish the house until like 10 months from then. So I put this house under contract two to three months after getting my first house. And I locked the price, when I closed on that house a year later, was selling for 100,000 more. So what I did was get a home equity line of credit on that house 80% of the equity. And now I’m a hard money lender to some of my clients. So I know crazy with the you look, I lend money to people I have 120,000 line of credit.
D.J. Paris 28:13 It’s it’s it’s incredible. And I think all of this is mentorship, right and coaching and having people that know this stuff. And and you have the ability to now be a really an educator, I think, and you’re like, Hey guys, this this is I think living the experience, like you were saying is is really compelling. And it does. Obviously social media is all about shared experience. And so you have the ability to explain these processes in a way that, you know, educates and entertains and really inspires. And I imagine what percent I’m curious what percentage of your clients have come from, you know, social media now that people have been sharing your stories. And
Andres Bustamante 29:05 I would say about 25 to 30%. Wow. And the big thing here that a lot of people don’t understand is look, you meet new people don’t ask for obviously, no one’s gonna ask for an email. That’d be way too weird, but it’s like, Hey, dude, I had a great time be intentional, firstly, but I had a great time. What’s your social media, your Instagram, you get them on social media. The big thing here is you need to show people what you do. It’s not like, they’re just magically going to guess. So I put like two to three stories of what I do and not just real estate related, but I go to the gym, people want to relate with you on a on a level of not just real estate or real estate stuff. And when people start seeing that a lot, they’re gonna be like, Oh, in my head on that is real estate. I’ll relate both of them. So putting stories on social media has been something that is crucial. And anytime I meet someone new, I get them on social media so that they can start getting the seed planted on that it’s real estate. I keep seeing him You must be doing great. His team did 98 million in volume, which is what we did this past year. Oh my gosh, the relatability. That’s so important.
D.J. Paris 30:09 So yeah, you’re talking about branding or so. So this idea of creating content on social media that reminds people what you do what you think about, I was thinking about this. The other day, I was yesterday, I was driving home, or here back to Chicago from my parents home. And I was going a different way. And I noticed a big McDonald sign out in the distance where it was attached to a gas station. And I thought, you know, you drive by, you know, on highways, you drive by all sorts of fast food places, and I went, I wonder how important it is for McDonald’s to have that sign there. And because what it does is it just reminds me about McDonald’s, right? We’re talking about branding, and we need to be constant constantly reminding people what we do in a way that isn’t pushy. And so I think stories and reels, and the video clips on social media is really a great way to do that. Because you can do these little short clips of like, here I am at the gym. Oh, here I am with a at a showing here I am, you know making dinner, whatever it might be. How come? Were you doing two to three of those a day? Are you doing two or three of those a week? What is your social media calendar look like?
Andres Bustamante 31:27 Honestly, anything that I’m doing? I might do like, yeah, I would say two to five nowadays. Today, I am big on morning routine. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve had the success that I’ve had, I do the Miracle Morning. And I went to the gym 520 In the morning, and then I did sound after and I posted like a little picture. Hey, who else to Sona? Or what do you guys think? Cole cold plunge or sauna to get people engaged. And then before the podcast, I was like, Oh, I’m excited for this podcast, a little story made people start seeing that, like, Oh, this guy’s on a podcast. Oh my gosh, he must be doing great things. So I had my team meeting today I have my team meeting every Monday at 930. And then I made a video on Tiktok asking my agents like, what’s the best way to get leads? It’s the best way to get each one. So it’s how my social media is. You just take like, five seconds on a story. It’s so easy to do, you know?
D.J. Paris 32:23 Yeah, yeah. And I think people can do this too, if you know with their existing sphere of influence. So in social media, you’re you were saying when you meet somebody who’s you know, a civilian, somebody who might be a potential client. I’m not a realtor, you’re you know, maybe you’ll get their email if you if you’re lucky. But most important thing is social media. Because not only will will you be able to brand yourself to them, you’ll also now know what they’re into what they’re all about, right? When you’re scrolling through, and you see that they just went on a vacation or that they have, you know, some major life event, it gives you an opportunity to want to then reach out and say, Hey, I noticed you just did XY and Z. So do you use do you use it for like a little bit of research and development as well? So you know what?
Andres Bustamante 33:06 Oh, for sure. For sure. Like anytime I do it for research and development, but I’m never like the guy hey, let’s like send me an email. I’m very intentional about it. Like the stories and whatnot. And I’ve had a lot of people reach out. Hey, dude, I didn’t know you were doing real estate. That’s great. When I see him again. They’re like, Dude, you’re doing so much in real estate. Like I’ve joined soccer teams, I’ve Toastmasters. Probably the best thing anyone can join. Toastmasters is a public speaking group. And it’s worldwide. That’s probably the best thing I’ve joined. And now I’m Vice President of membership. So all the new members are the one that talks to me. So art, it’s it’s been amazing. And every, every month, we get like 20 Plus members 20 plus new people that I get to meet. So, ya know, that’s been great. All the groups have joined in being intentional about that.
D.J. Paris 33:55 Yeah, it is, it is so much this, your net worth is directly connected to your network, right? Like, we know that it says expression, it’s said, your network and your net worth are kind of connected. And it’s like yeah, and now you have to think about how to how to remind your net work, what you do without holding your hand out all the time saying, are you ready to buy and you’re ready to buy? Are you ready to sell right? In the way that you can do that is by sharing your experiences of daily life? And it’s Yeah, go ahead.
Andres Bustamante 34:29 And and one one other thing that I would say that that I do with my business partner, we host meetups once a month, to also be like, Oh, this guy’s like doing meetups and bringing these type of guests. You know, it’s all perception is so important. And last week, we had a meetup we had 60 plus people and I got three new potential buyers. So that was incredible. And then I hosted a home buying seminar and I got four potential buyers. I’m pretty sure two of them are for sure gonna buy this last week. So that’s already Six potential buyers.
D.J. Paris 35:01 Let’s back up. So how do you get six? So 60 people showed up to what was it a house hacking seminar, it was
Andres Bustamante 35:07 awesome. Now I don’t really do that house hacking seminars anymore. If I do, I do it via zoom. But it’s more so we every month, and I’ll send you some pictures about it. Every month, we have like a guest speaker. And this guest speaker was David toop. And a good friend of mine. He’s a big apartment. syndicator, 27 years old, this guy’s killing it. And it was all through posting on social media. And I put it up on Eventbrite. So that then anyone that signs up, I get their email. Yeah, so I have 60 plus, but I mean, 80 people signed up 60 came. So after all the emails, I got a photographer for that event, I made a Facebook group for it. So people start joining. It’s insane. And I recommend any Realtors do that, like hosting a meetup and getting people to see that getting a photographer, you know, the connection there? Oh, it’s been huge. That has helped a lot as well.
D.J. Paris 36:00 Yeah, you know, it’s, gosh, you’ve got my head spinning in in a couple different directions, because I am now inspired to do some more of that on the recruiting side. So, boy, you, you, you’re inspiring me. So this idea of doing you what we’re really talking about is providing value. So you know, you’re you’re big about you’re big into branding, which we’ve talked about making sure the people in your sphere know what you’re doing. And sort of unconsciously reminding them that oh, by the way, I’m a realtor. And then we’re talking about education, you know, making sure that we’re giving back to, you know, these people who might not know about, you know, for example, the 20% myth, right, the 20% downpayment myth, you know, is I know, that was always a major one for me, was like, Well, if I want to buy a $400,000, home, I don’t have 80,000 in cash, just waiting, you know, to put down so I just always assumed that that was out of reach for me when I was a young, younger person. Nobody sat down with me and said, Well, there’s actually some other ways you can do this. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I think there’s this huge opportunity. And it’s not like, once somebody gets to a certain age, they all of a sudden start understanding well, how how how home lending works. I mean, some people never ever really get it until they have to make that decision. And then they learn on the fly. I mean, that’s how it worked. For me, it was like, one day I went, I wonder if I could afford a home? And then I Googled it, you know, and then I was like, Oh, yeah. It was such, it would be such a great opportunity for somebody in my life, to say, Hey, you don’t have to google that I know this stuff, I’m going to sit down with you and go through it. So you either learn it by Googling, or they’re gonna go to somebody, and eventually they’re gonna go to somebody to buy the home anyway. But this is an opportunity to sort of establish yourself as the knowledge source. And by the way, these events that you’re doing, I’m assuming you’re getting other people to to pay for the events, or maybe you’re paying for oh, yeah,
Andres Bustamante 38:07 yeah, it’s do it. It’s all about how smart you can be. I have my title and lender, people paid for everything, everything. So it’s like, look, you can promote yourself right here. And we have a really good relationship. We’re gonna have 60 plus people, like, Dude, we’re game. So they paid for the full venue. It was amazing. Like, yeah, we had such a good turnout.
D.J. Paris 38:29 I love that. What would you recommend? So so this year, okay, so let’s talk about 2023. Because we are in a high higher interest rate environment than we were two years ago. We’re in a lower? Well, we’re in a low inventory environment, like we were two years ago. So there’s a lot of realtors out there. So now I want to I do want to talk about mindset for just a moment. Because it’s easy to get a little bummed out this year, I think it’s easy to take in and absorb a lot of the media, sort of the stories about the housing shortages, and the rates being obviously higher than than a lot of buyers would prefer. What are you doing? And and if we have sorry, and, you know, we’re looking at what economists are saying are going to happen this year, pretty much across the board. Economists are saying this is going to be a tough year. So I don’t want to pretend that it isn’t. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t amazing opportunities this year. And I’m curious because I know mindset is everything for you. What are you doing to stay motivated and stay productive despite some of these, you know, challenges in the market that you just obviously can’t control?
Andres Bustamante 39:44 For me? And this is like straight up I don’t believe in motivation. I think that’s like me neither here here. Yeah. Yeah, that’s for me. That’s BS. So one thing and I know a lot of people are gonna say like, oh my gosh, the morning or Seen, it’s just so important. Like, I don’t do my morning routine one day and I feel so different. And it goes a little something like this, I’ll wake up at 5:20am I’ll do my bed because those little wins are crucial. I’ll get to the gym around 530 to one hour that I take a cold shower. That has helped me a lot. Because whenever you are induced into stressful situations, you kind of get used to it, because I hate cold showers. I don’t like them. But it’s like it’s a stressful situation that it’s like, do you get used to it first thing in the morning. Let’s go. And
D.J. Paris 40:31 I want to pause for a second let’s talk about the benefit of a cold shower. So this is important because I’ve done this I did this for about six months straight. And and it’s debatable whether it’s healthier for you. So we’re not going to talk about the healthiness of it. As far as physically what but here’s what I will, I will tell you what I’m curious to undress to get your thoughts. If you can endure, so the reason to do a cold shower, forget it, it’s actually healthier for you, I don’t care, here’s why you want to do it. Even if it’s bad for your body, here’s why you should do it. Because it’s one of the hardest things that you can do every single day. That’s physical. And I hate it too. And I need to get back into it. i If you tomorrow, I encourage everyone who’s listening, try to survive 10 seconds, just 10 seconds, all the way cold shower, if you can survive 10 seconds, then, you know, tomorrow, try 15 seconds and then that 20 seconds, eventually you’ll be able to to survive. And it it is still it at least my experience every day it was it never really got easy. It was always brutal. But when I was done, which you know, you end up taking a one and a half minute shower because you just get through it. Yeah, let’s go. But once when I would step out of that shower, and I don’t know what the magic is over the endorphins that are firing, but it feels like you just ran a marathon and you won. So do you feel that same way when you step out of the
Andres Bustamante 41:59 shower? Yeah, I feel so amazing. But every day I dread it. I’m like, Just go into it. It’s the five second roll like everything in life did don’t think about it. Don’t think just do. You go into it, even though what we’re really
D.J. Paris 42:13 talking about is tolerating discomfort. Because anytime you want to grow in life, whether it’s your physical body, if you want to get stronger, obviously, you got to lift heavy weights, which is going to be painful. I just gave him the gym. It’s brutal. And you came from the gym as well today. And also when you want to improve your business, you’re going to have to get uncomfortable, you’re going to have to learn how to tolerate failures, discomfort challenge, and it’s something as simple as a cold shower. It sounds like it’s not connected. I am telling you doing it will put you in a mindset of I just did something really crazy hard first thing in the morning. Is that is that sort of how you feel?
Andres Bustamante 42:55 Yes, definitely. That God that’s perfectly well said that cold shower helps a lot with
D.J. Paris 43:02 it sounds silly, but it’s actually really, really important. So okay, so you start your morning, you go to the gym, you take a cold shower, what else do you do in the morning?
Andres Bustamante 43:10 Then I do meditation, transcendental meditation, which is great. I got it before that. Yes, exactly. TM, I gotta teach it for that. I just finished that those classes recently. Then I do affirmations, visualizing, and scribing scribing is like writing things down. And funny enough, I want to show you this. Sure. I do my top three tasks that I’m going to do for the day that the night prior. So I know at least what my routine is going to be. And then I don’t know if you can see it. But I amazing podcast is right here. And I checked that box. Because I want to put myself in the mindset that I’m going to have an amazing podcast. So it’s already done for me like before the podcast, I said, I’m going to have an amazing podcast. And I checked about that box to kind of get myself into that headspace of it’s already been amazing.
D.J. Paris 43:57 Yeah, I love that. I think that’s really smart. And this idea of setting your up your day, not just with your to dues but here are my here are my three big wins. These are the three big things I need to get accomplished there. Here’s what I need to focus on today. If you can do that, at the beginning of the day, then when other things come at you because things come at you all day, you’re able to filter a little bit better because you’re easily you’re more easily able to say okay, something just came at me. It seems urgent, is it actually important? Or Or oh, it’s not that urgent. It’s not that important cuz now as opposed to being just reactive, something comes in and then I want to take care of it right away. There’s an inclination to want to do that. But what I like about you is you you’ve prioritized your sort of lists per day, you know, the three big things you want to accomplish and you do it the night before again, this all sounds like you know life 101 But it’s really really important and a lot of people don’t do it did it last night? Wait You know, before I went to bed list the three things I need It’s due today. I didn’t, I should have. Because then when I got to work today, I was like, Oh God, now I have to make a list of what I’m going to do today. So, so let’s give another shout out to the Miracle Morning. And you know, it’s not a coincidence that after five years on this podcast, and 450 plus episodes, the number one most recommended book, but the two most recommended books are Millionaire Real Estate Agent from our guests, which is Gary Keller, famous, famous book about how to build a real estate business. And then number two for mindset, and just setting up your day for habits, habits, habits, habits. Miracle Morning is right up there lol rod. You tell me about how the Miracle Morning has really changed your life.
Andres Bustamante 45:44 Yeah, we’re going on on the base of motivation. Like, like we said, motivation, don’t really believe in it. It’s more so discipline. So it’s really look, okay, I’m feeling top of mind, top of mind, so that I can best help my clients. Because in order to best serve my clients, I need to feel my best. And whenever I do my morning, I feel my best. But it also goes back to what are my goals? And by looking at my goals that have helped me stay disciplined when motivation is not there, because it’s i 100% assure you, motivation will not always be there. So once you develop that discipline, boom, it’s great. And one of the best ways to develop that discipline is doing a program called 75. Hard.
D.J. Paris 46:26 I do that tell me about I don’t I don’t know this. Tell me about it.
Andres Bustamante 46:28 Oh, perfect. And I do it every year since I started in real estate 75 hard by Andy for Sella. Major Gee, that guy’s amazing. And it’s only five days, no alcohol, strict diet, you also have to read 10 pages of a book, you have to work out twice and have those two days, I mean, of those two times one has to be outdoors. So minimum is 45 minutes. So you do your workout, maybe in the morning, and then you do your other workout whenever you can. But the thing is, so two works out two workouts a day. Yeah, two workouts per day. They can’t be like after each other, and they have to be 35 minutes. So the big thing here is, whenever you say I can’t do this, what you’re essentially saying is I’m not making this a priority. Sherwood 75 hard if you don’t do one of those tests every day, you have to start all over. So two workouts per day, drink a gallon of water 10 pages of book diet, no alcohol and take a progress pic. And there’s an app for that. It’s amazing. But the big thing here is like, Dude, I have a lot going on. And I have to schedule time for my workouts. I just
D.J. Paris 47:39 don’t have time to do that. And so Exactly, yeah.
Andres Bustamante 47:43 But then the big. The big thing here is you develop that discipline to where it’s like, I know what my priorities are because I’m doing this program as well. And I have to work around the schedule that can make it work because I’ve had times no joke. I’m at a conference. It’s 11pm. And we’re going like, everyone’s going out for drinks. I’m drinking water. And it’s like, oh my gosh, dude, I forgot I had do my workout. So I’ve legit told my friends guys, I’m gonna walk around the city for 45 minutes. You guys just wait here. I’ve done that so many times. And it’s actually hilarious.
D.J. Paris 48:14 But it his life is so much about habits and discipline and motivation. As much as I love when motivation does hit it is a rare thing for me. Discipline is what wins the game. Motivation is just when you have a lucky day. Yes, this this is all just just great stuff. I really encourage everybody out there as we’re wrapping up to think about, you know, what are the habits that you could cultivate this year that would help you move the needle in your business? You know, is it a lack of follow up? Is it a lack of meeting people? Is it a lack of you maybe your social media isn’t very strong or maybe you’re not doing enough out, reach to your sphere of influence, or whatever it is as different skill you want to develop? Maybe you don’t know anything about investors and you want to start learning about House hacking or first time homebuyers or any of that you can put a plan together and get a community around you as well and get involved and then really start to hold each other accountable. It’s all about habits and discipline. Andres I am so excited to continue to watch your progress you have provided incredible value. Because again, I think in this conversation, you know we we really talked a lot about mindset. We talked about habits discipline, and working smart and you gave some incredible advice find a team, get a mentor. You know read The Miracle Morning come up with with you know your day before the next day. Make sure you know what you’re doing. And then it just and and also, you know, staying in good physical shape, I think not enough is said about the benefits of being in strong physical condition. This is a physical job that requires a ton of energy. And energy is important. And if you want to be a great Realtor you need, you’re going to have to have a lot of energy. And I think, you know, get your physical body in order, this is the year where you can get your physical body and in shape, you know, partner up with other realtors, like everything counts, so you can get together and and you know, and by the way, that’s another opportunity. If you want to do a meet up, you could find an accountability group of exercise people, that’s another way to meet people, right? So you’re involved in Toastmasters, you’re involved in all these other things. And by the way, at Toastmasters, you’re probably you know, the 20 new members every month, you probably like, Hey, by the way, what do you do, and they’re gonna ask you what you do,
Andres Bustamante 50:59 always. And last thing I do want to say, because referrals is a big part of my business. Whenever I do a buyer consultation, big thing, I asked for people’s birthdays, if they have kids, if they have dogs, if they have favorite wine, whatever. And then for my follow up, or whatever, it’s like, I send them stuff for their birthdays, I send them. So it’s just top of mind, because they’re always no people, but that’s at the buyer consultation so that I’m not asking it like around other things and all but just get a list of questions. And you get all that stuff. And that’s just, you know, is your reason
D.J. Paris 51:33 to reach out? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because a lot of times I know, agents will say, Well, I don’t know, you know, I don’t really want to call my friends, I don’t really, it’s like, well, if you do you know their anniversary, do you know their birthdays, you know, their kids birthdays, if you know those events, then you do have a reason to pick up the phone. And you don’t have to talk real estate. But you do have to demonstrate that you care. And I think have getting all of this information in your database in your CRM, about birthdays, anniversaries, major life events, allow you to then pick up the phone and say, Hey, I know it’s your kid’s birthday today just wanted to wish so and so happy birthday, like that, in and of itself is massive. Huge. All right, well, we’re gonna we’re gonna cap this one off here, this episode here because I could talk to you all day and I’d love to have you back in the future. Your future is going to be so impressive, I’m sure. But Andres really, really appreciate on behalf of the audience your time today on our show. You know if anyone out there is interested in maybe you’re a realtor in the Austin area and you’re looking to maybe partner up or maybe you’d be a good good benefit to to Andres his team you can reach out to him he’s with Keller Williams, the Nino team. Or if you’re a realtor, maybe in another area of the country and you have clients that are moving to Texas or or the Austin area and you’re looking to refer business to another realtor Andres would love the opportunity to work with you. But if anyone wants to reach out to you Andres or maybe somebody’s just looking for a realtor in the Austin area, a buyer seller, investor etc. What’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Andres Bustamante 53:12 Instagram for sure it’s add on that as BUSA Tx and Drs. B USDA, TX.
D.J. Paris 53:18 Awesome. And on behalf of Andre and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show support our sponsors support Andres, check out his Instagram checkout is Tiktok Andres booster Tx and also send him your referrals. He’s a great agent, he’s he’s killing it as a as a young man growing getting in this business I I’m making a prediction live that you will be one of the National Association of REALTORS 30 under 30 within the next three years. So this is a this is a young man to watch. And we’re excited. And we will see. We’re going to ask everybody just one quick thing before you leave the episode. Please tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing from Andres and send them a link to this episode. Keeping it real pod.com They can stream every episode we’ve ever done. Or just go to any podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that like and subscribe button. We would appreciate it Andres thank you so much for being on the show. Man I’m so proud of you. You’re You’re crushing it and excited to watch your your ascent as you continue to climb the mountain. So keep it up. Yeah, I
Andres Bustamante 54:25 really appreciate that.
D.J. Paris 54:27 All right, thanks. We’ll see everybody on the next episode. Thank you
Why You Should Become A Lifestyle Consultant • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Feb 20, 2023
In our February episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties discusses how realtors become lifestyle consultants and how important it is to have a conversation about client’s lifestyle too. Carrie also talks about the importance of negotiation as an educational tip. Last, Carrie shares three tips to use during negotiations with a client.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What if you consider yourself more of a lifestyle consultant than someone that only helps people buy or sell homes? How would that change your business? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today on the show is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Carrie is a top 1% producer here in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors in fact, past 12 months out of number up now up to 40 Almost 47,000 realtors in our in our area. Carrie is routinely in the top 15 of highest producers and rising not 15% Literally the top 15 out of 47,000 producers so she is a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors, and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent these high end developments, please visit Carrie at our website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. Also, please please please follow her on Instagram I she has she routinely gets awards for having one of the very best realtor IG accounts. So please, let’s all check out and you can get inspiration from some of the posts that she makes. Her Instagram is as at Kerry McCormick. That’s MCC o r m IC K real estate. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. You don’t have to type it in. But Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:00 Thank you so much. I’m actually impressed that you remember how to spell my name. There’s a lot of CS in there. There’s a lot of there’s there’s a lot. So thank you.
D.J. Paris 3:10 I just recently did an episode and I don’t think it’s released yet. But by the time this one releases, it’ll it’ll be released. And I literally got to the end of the interview, which was over an hour. And I realized I had called the person the wrong first name. And I said, Did I do that throughout the interview and he’s like, Yeah, budget. So I try to now be a little bit more aware of people’s names, but it has happened. So I am just glad to to remember you’re not that I would ever forget your name. But it is funny. Sometimes it happens. So Carrie and I are actually before we have a different topic that we want to go over today, which I think is going to be a great one around negotiation. But before that I was we were actually I was actually asking Carrie about our business. And she was telling me a scenario about a client that was interested possibly in moving and selling their existing home. But they were locked in at a very, very low rate with you know, a lot of us refinanced in the last several years, or we bought properties at you know, 3% rates, or 4%, or whatever it was at the time. And obviously that makes it sometimes more challenging when somebody today then wants to sell and is now going to maybe get a five and a half percent rate or a 6% rate or, you know, whatever it might be today. So, So Carrie, let’s talk about that. Because I think this is happening to a lot of agents where they’re just their clients are like, I don’t want to give up my rate. Yeah, and
Carrie McCormick 4:33 it’s it’s a real scenario. And I met with a client that asked me to come to their home. Obviously they wanted to sell their home or they’re thinking about selling their home and we just got into the nitty gritty of what they were looking to do. And he kind of barked back at me and he said, Well, you know, I’ve got a 1.875% rate interest rate 30 year fixed on this house. which was mind blowing, which I’ve never seen that before. But he said, he looked at me said, Well, why should I sell my house, it does not make financial sense for me to sell my house. And he went through, he was a financial guy. And he went through like all of his scenarios, and the cost to carry and appreciation and all of this stuff. And I’m just looking at him. And you know, as when he got done talking about his scenario, I just looked back at him. And I said, you asked me to come to your house. You know, you, you invited me here to talk about selling your home. So put the interest rate aside, right? That’s something I can’t change, or, I mean, it’s it’s real, is why do you want to move? Why are you thinking of moving, and then we started in this conversation about, you know, what their next steps are in life and why they’re moving kids are out of the house, obviously, the house is too big for them, they want to travel more, they want a lifestyle, where they can just lock the door and walk away and someone’s handling their packages, they don’t have to wear it worry about the roof, or, you know, water leaks, etc. So then we started in that conversation, which is the real reason that they want to move, right. And I said to them, and this is where as you know, realtors, we become consultants to our clients, you know, and it’s kind of like a lifestyle consultant, you know, of, okay, well, you have a choice, you can either keep the big house with your 1.875% interest rate, you can rent it out, right, then that comes with a whole slew of issues and problems, etc. Or you can stay in this house and travel and, you know, have a house manager and worry about your leaks and your roof, etc. Or you give up that interest rate, and you start living the life that you want. And you know that, you know, 6% interest rates aren’t going to be around forever, will he ever get that 1% Whatever he had absolutely not. But that’s a trade off. Right. And that became a discussion, which was kind of like a therapy session for them. And they have not decided yet what they’re going to do that was just the other day, but that’s what made me think of that is, you know, it’s it’s having these, you know, conversations with our clients of, of their lifestyle and what they want in their life. And I think that’s become more important to buyers and sellers. These days. It’s not just a house, I mean, it really is a home that old saying, and it’s how you’re going to live your life and, um, and what’s important to you.
D.J. Paris 7:30 Yeah, and there is sort of a, a, I don’t want to say it a reckoning but but a decision that ultimately they have to make where they have to just be willing to either give up the rate or not. And and that can seem like a big decision. And it can seem like Well, that just doesn’t make sense, we’ll just stay. And then you have to sort of suss out the other reasons, like you were doing about why they may still want to consider doing that. Because it’s not necessarily a bad financial decision, it just doesn’t feel good to go from one rate to another, but also to it’s, it’s like, people don’t, especially for the agent, sorry, especially for the buyers that in the last few years, wanted that that had these these rates that they were pre approved for and didn’t get the homes that they wanted. They I could even see that being an issue to where somebody’s like, well, now I can’t afford as much as I could two years ago when the rates were at 3%. And but then the other thing is like, well, they don’t maybe think that or they just wouldn’t know that people who did get homes at that time oftentimes overpaid. And so maybe kind of washes itself out a little bit. If the interest if they buy something today and the interest rates higher, and then in two years, maybe they refinance. Do you do you end up having a lot of those conversations too, with people like Well,
Carrie McCormick 8:49 yeah, all the time. Yeah, it’s, and that’s why it’s important for us as brokers to do our homework to and just coming up with solutions and having these conversations with our clients. And that’s goes into also one of my I’ll go through my negotiation tips. But, you know, there’s a lot of egos too, right. And you know, with clients either who didn’t win the House want to win the house didn’t get the interest rate, whatever, you know, everyone wants to feel like they won and, you know, boils down to their ego. So it’s understanding your, what moves your clients, what drives your clients, what’s important to them, and having those conversations around there. So I may take a therapy class of how to or psychology class of how to, you know, talk with people a little bit more about this, but it’s, it’s educational, it’s, it’s fun.
D.J. Paris 9:39 Well, yeah, let’s talk about negotiation. So you obviously negotiate more than just about any realtor I know because of your production, and you do it all yourself, which is even more impressive. So I would love to know what how you think about negotiations, how you sort of play nicely with other realtors but still fighting for your clients and also how you Manage your clients expectations?
Carrie McCormick 10:01 Yeah, you know, it’s it’s really interesting, it’s become a hot topic. You know, it’s it’s time to write, when you get to the point where you’re in negotiations, it’s all about time with your clients, and everyone’s you know, got valuable time. And this goes back to the ego to negotiations can be emotional for everybody involved. So first and foremost, I always like to say, as real estate brokers, we are a fiduciary to our clients. And you know, some people don’t even know what that really means. And what that does mean is we’re obligated by law, to act in our clients best interest, rather than operating out of our own self interest. You know, and I think, too, with negotiations, when you’ve got two brokers involved, sometimes it does, you know, get ego gets in the way to everyone wants to win. But we’ve got to put that aside. Can you hear that cat in the background?
D.J. Paris 10:56 I do. I hear I hear a very noisy cat. It’s totally okay, keep going.
Carrie McCormick 11:01 So nicely, cats not going to come over here. But we’ll see. But obviously, negotiations, I forgot where I left off. But negotiations are very important to closing every deal. In some agents go in with guns blazing, they’re ready to fight, you know, they start throwing out recent comps, and, you know, this house closed 10 years ago with this. And, you know, they start very negative, I think, and they start talking negatively about the client’s property. But I think once we get to the point of negotiations, we have a buyer, we have a seller, let’s look at this, instead of a fight, let’s look at this negotiation as an opportunity to reach an agreement. And that’s all it is, it’s you know, we don’t need to swing back and forth. So I put together three, what I think steps good steps are to start a negotiation. And I’ve learned this throughout the years. And the first one is, this is kind of common, but do do your research, obviously, do your research on the property, do your research on the market, and also do research on your clients personality. Because I think it’s important to understand the psychology of where your clients are coming from in negotiations. And that also goes to the seller side. So you can actually very quickly go on to Google, find out, you know, hopefully, you know what your client does for a living, but kind of dig deeper into what they do. Dig deep into what the what your opposing side does, as well, that’s going to give you some traits on their personality, and how they’re going to react to the negotiations, you know, whether someone’s analytical or someone is, wants to fight, you know, you can, you can kind of tell by some of their online profiles,
D.J. Paris 12:49 I see. So you would be looking at maybe their social media. Also, maybe any, like videos they may have put on YouTube, or things like that, or articles they may have written or just anything about them online is that absolutely,
Carrie McCormick 13:01 because if they’re in the profession, either they’ve attended conferences, or they’ve written speeches, or they’ve spoken, or they give their opinion, on certain things, you really can, you know, get an idea whether someone wants to be a fighter in situations, whether they want to be the winner in it, or if, you know, again, they’re more data driven, and they need to have that data in front of them. It’s just a really good small step to take to understand their personality. Right. I also think, you know, it’s important to know, the other side’s client as well. So again, you’re not just doing this just on your side, you’re understanding the other side. For example, I’ve got agents that will call and say like, Okay, here’s the offer, this is our best and final, we want to we want an answer by 6pm. Tonight, you know, like, right, my client doesn’t like that, you know, my client wants to go back and forth a little bit. So when you are in the showings, I think that’s a great time to get a read with the other agent. And sometimes I’ll ask, you know, agent, Joe, you know, tell me a little bit about your seller, what’s important to them? You know, when do they need to move, so I’m kind of trying to qualify what’s important to the seller. So when it comes to negotiations, I have a little bit of information and know how to propose this. You know, there’s some, again, some people like to ping pong back and forth. Some people like to cut to the chase. So it’s important to understand that so we have a successful outcome. And again, a lot of it is just asking questions, listening, which sometimes we don’t as agents, listen, but listen to what people are telling you. So you know how to strategize it correctly. I just had a scenario actually, while we’re on this podcast, I may get the answer to this. But for example, this is a real life scenario. We’ve been negotiating back and forth on a deal for three weeks. And we’ve had interior designers in this space, we’ve had contractors in this space, I’m on the seller side, we’ve had the buyer has brought in all of these and we’ve accommodated all of this, we are $25,000 apart on this deal. In the big picture, it’s not that much and not that I want to give away anyone’s money or I don’t want someone to overspend. But in the big picture, it’s not that much, we got to a point where the buyer said, Here’s my best and final offer you have this was literally you have six hours to make a decision, if you don’t respond in six hours are offers off the table. Okay, I couldn’t get ahold of my seller. Six hours came and went, it was the seventh hour, the buyer said, we’re done. Wow. So I thought, you know, again, that’s kind of where the ego comes into play. You know, we’ve been negotiating this for three weeks, you know, both sides are mad at each other. Now, they don’t even know each other, but they’re mad at each other. So the broker and I are trying to bring this back together, we kind of let everyone’s egos, you know, cool down for a little bit. So actually, you know, I communicated with the other broker this morning, she’s going to talk to her client, I talked to my client, I said, you know, this is kind of crazy to, you know, to multimillion dollar deal to end this over a six hour period, you know, we couldn’t respond you anyways. She said, she’s going to talk to her client and get back to me. So we’ll see what happens. Stay tuned, we’ll see if this deal comes together.
D.J. Paris 16:38 Like, hang on, hang on to see if I see if you get an answer here in the next few minutes.
Carrie McCormick 16:42 But again, that’s part of our job is understanding each side of it and understanding the client. So that’s I know, that was a long winded Tip of the day, but I’ve got one more is what was my last tip, now I went into that story. Oh, it’s just understanding like that each and every personality types, yeah, personality types in there. So we’ve also had clients where, you know, the, the mom will come in, or the dad will come in and is part of the decision maker will have the kids that are involved in making a decision. So not only understanding the the one that signing the contract, but there’s also other people in their lives, that are helping them make the decision. And if you don’t involve them, or you don’t understand that aspect of the deal. Sometimes your deal could go sideways. And you know, again, we’ve got parents involved with the kids buying, we’ve got, you know, grandparents that are lending money to people, you know, there’s all different parts of the deal that we need to understand. And all of that is discovered through getting to know your client, and asking the right questions that will set you up for success when it comes to the negotiation.
D.J. Paris 17:59 I love all of that makes makes perfect sense. And it’s just, you know, you said something really interesting that I wouldn’t have thought of which was the idea of going and sort of doing some research on your own client, seeing if you can determine personality traits based on not necessarily you asking them, because sometimes when you ask people questions, they’ll give you what they think is the answer that either you want to hear or that they feel comfortable saying what maybe isn’t actually the truth. It’s kind of like, we have 700 realtors in our company and your company have like three or 4000. And if an email went out to every agent saying, hey, just curious, would you like more training, less training or no training? Everyone’s gonna say I want more training. And then when it actually comes to putting a training program together, maybe 20 agents out of 3000 Show up or in our case, 10 agents out of seminar. And so we’re like, Well, everyone says they want more training, and then when we actually Institute so so I think what you said is actually quite smart. Because if somebody says, like, oh, during negotiations, I absolutely love the back and forth. But and you know that or maybe they don’t say that, but you can kind of get a sense through their social media, that they’re they’re fighters or they’re aggressive or, you know, there may be used to being in charge. That’s maybe another part of it is like you probably deal a lot with Well, I know you deal with a lot with C suite level, you know, enterprise level people who are, you know, used to getting their own way used to maybe snapping their fingers and having people underneath them do certain things. And so you probably treat those people differently, or have different you you probably approach them differently than you would people who don’t have, you know, a whole team that they’re always managing and controlling.
Carrie McCormick 19:43 Right? No, it is and I’ve got a client who runs a company and you know, he’s exhausted of making decisions all day and he knows his business and he looks at me and says, What would you suggest and I give my opinions like let’s do it.
D.J. Paris 19:59 That’s kind of client If I
Carrie McCormick 20:01 was good this deal ever, but you know, mean, but that was it, you know, like he, he trusted me enough to make the decisions. And of course, you know that it was great. But again, you know, that doesn’t work for for another client, right? So you do you have to understand what moves motivates your clients and you know, the internet such a good tool out there for everybody.
D.J. Paris 20:26 Yeah, it’s a great place to get a better sense of what your clients are actually like, when they’re not in front of you. I think that’s a great, great point. You know, it’s funny, I was I was watching a video, it wasn’t a video you made, it was another top producer here in Chicago. And I was sort of surprised this, he he even made this video because he had a tip for agents who are dealing with multiple offers. And to me, this is the most obvious thing. But he clearly felt the need to do it. Because he probably sees that most agents don’t do this. In fact, he gave examples. So here, I wanted to throw this your way and get your reaction. So he was saying, if you’re in a multiple offer situation, if you’re on the buyer side, and you know, you’re dealing with multiple offers, he’s like, the moment you send over, or as soon as you send over the offer, he’s like, you know, you got to follow up with a phone call. It doesn’t have to be that second, but you have to follow up with a phone call text, like, especially if it’s multiple offer. And I was like, Well, I just I was watching the video. I’m like, doesn’t everybody do that? And then he goes, he goes, the reason I’m making this video is I have three properties. Right now they’re in a multiple offer situations were getting like 10 offers per per place, or whatever the number was, it was more than one. And he said not one agent. Not one has called me to be like, Hey, did you get the offer? How did it look to you? He goes, they all just emailed it over. And he’s like, he’s like, I’m just making this video for the good of, of realtors. So, um, Does that shock you to hear that? I mean, you must deal with that all the time, too.
Carrie McCormick 21:54 Yeah, I think even to take that a step further. Sometimes, you know, people use dot loop or they use DocuSign Sure, they will literally just for the sign DocuSign over where so the email looks like it’s coming from Docusign.
D.J. Paris 22:06 So you don’t even necessarily know that it’s an offer? Yeah,
Carrie McCormick 22:09 I don’t even know it’s an offer. I don’t know who the agent is, unless I go through it. And that is bewildering to me that that people just literally forward something. And you’re right, it’s but again, you know, everyone is does their business differently. And I just I think they’re doing a disservice to their client by just forwarding an email, but nothing shocks me anymore. Everyone does something different. But kudos to whoever that was that made the video I think that was hopefully a good people paid attention and, and listened and learn from that.
D.J. Paris 22:45 So for everyone out there, please call the other agent after you submit an offer. And even just to politely say, hey, just want to make sure you got it. If you have any questions, read through it. You know, you want to play play nice and really say I just want to, you know, like, what do you do when you send an offer?
Carrie McCormick 23:00 Well, 100%, call the agent and give them. I mean, that’s like 100% call the agent. And you know, like I’m advocating for my buyers, right? So I tell them a little bit about them. I think what’s important for sellers to know, too. And this is kind of my tip is like, if I’m representing a buyer, I’m the buyer’s team, right. So we’ve got the buyer, we have the buyer’s broker, we have the buyer’s attorney, we have the buyer’s inspector. Right. So we’re a team. And that’s important for the seller to know who’s on the other side advising this buyer, not only are they picking the buyer and the buyer’s terms, the seller wants to make sure that buyers can get across the finish line. And how is that buyer going to do that by having a good team, the attorney is important. The inspectors important, the mortgage lender is hugely important. And the brokers important. So there’s four people on our side of the buyers table that a seller should be concerned about. So that’s what I like to highlight is Mr. Mrs. seller, or sellers in general, look to see who the buying team is. They’re the ones that didn’t get that buyer across the finish line. So I think that’s important to highlight as well.
D.J. Paris 24:15 Yeah, that’s a great, great suggestion. So I for my marketing tip of the week, just to pivot over, I wanted to get your idea about this isn’t a new idea. And I sort of I’m reluctant to even say it because I feel like I say it every single time I do an episode. So I apologize to our listeners if you’ve heard this before. But I also think I’ve been here, you know, I’ve been hearing to work out all of my life. And I didn’t actually take action till a few years ago and I finally started working out. So even though you may have heard this before, I think it’s still a good thing to hear again, but I want to get your take on it. And if you you might disagree that this isn’t a good idea. So I was thinking for anyone out there whose business is down and let’s face it, this is probably going to be a down year. For most agents, at least, most brokerages seem to be projecting that economists are projecting that for realtors, so we know this is going to be a tricky year to to have high high production numbers. But if I was practicing, and I didn’t have any clients right now, I was thinking of an idea of what would I do. And of course, this is where you come in, because I want to get your thoughts, but if it was me, I am always thinking as an homeowner, I always want to know what my home is worth. I mean, I don’t, I’m not looking to sell and I’m not looking to move. But it’s kind of like getting that credit score report every month, where just gives you your number, like, I don’t do anything with my credit, really, but I’m just kind of glad that I can see it every month. And it’s like, you know, thankfully, I have a good credit score. But it’s kind of just a little bit of a sort of checks and balances of my life going okay, my credit, okay, my credits, okay, nobody opened up 10 Credit cards in my name last month and spent a bunch of money. So I always think knowing some knowing your home value is kind of in that same category of like, Mmm, I probably won’t do anything with the information. But it’s good to know. So if it was me, I would call every single person I know who owns a home, whether I was their realtor or not when they bought it. And I would say, Hey, I you know, look, if you know they already have a realtor like Hey, I know you already have an agent, but I was just practicing running some CMAs. Or rather, I run CMAs for everybody I know you don’t have to say you’re practicing. And I wanted to send you what I think your home is actually worth because what I found is that a lot of times, you know, people who are homeowners will go maybe just to Zillow, look at the Zestimate we know that this is where the public goes. So they don’t go really anywhere else. They go to Zillow. So we know that’s where they go, we know they look at the Zestimate as realtors, all of us, you know, have certain feelings about Zestimate like it or hate it. Regardless, it’s not totally always going to be perfectly accurate, even though Zillow says it’s within about three percentage points of accuracy, which may or may not be true, I don’t know. But if people are only using that metric, and then you can come along and say hey, by the way, I actually disagree a little bit with Zillow, I think your home is worth X, lower, higher, whatever that is providing value. So if it was me, I would be just constantly sending out CMAs to my people. I know, what do you think about that you feel free to disagree? I’m just curious to what
Carrie McCormick 27:24 I like it. I you know, I think it’s a great tip. And I think it depends on how many clients you have. The one thing that I’ve done just to kind of ease it was not a CMA, it was just a general market report in their neighborhood. Yeah. And maybe that’s kind of what you’re talking about, because I feel like, and this is again, just my opinion that if I tell them where I think their value of their home is, and I don’t know, maybe they’ve done updates to it and they get offended, you know, by what, oh,
D.J. Paris 27:53 good point good,
Carrie McCormick 27:55 or, you know, it’s completely off. And then I look like I don’t know what I’m talking about so
D.J. Paris 28:00 or they disagree with it for whatever reason, and then you have to defend.
Carrie McCormick 28:03 So what I did actually is I sent out just like if it’s Linkin Park, I’ll send out a Linkin Park report of you know, in the last quarter house single family homes have been doing. And you know, if you want to know where yours falls in, because you know, there’s always the charts and what’s selling what’s not selling, you know, if you want more to drill down on your home and get an accurate, you know, CMA on your home, I’d love to come over and chat with you. So I kind of leave it open to that.
D.J. Paris 28:29 That’s a better way to do it. I actually like that better. So so just to recap that idea. So instead of Kerry sending out a sort of a blind CMA, and maybe having the person go, well, this doesn’t make sense. I made all these upgrades, or she’s got it wrong, she doesn’t, you know, you’re right, it unless the number is significantly higher than what they expect, they’re probably going to have questions or maybe feel like yeah, Carrie didn’t really maybe she didn’t miss something or so. So I love that idea. So instead of saying that, you could say, hey, in the surrounding areas, I’ve noticed the homes in your area are actually up, you know, 20%, or whatever the number is, if you want to sort of do a deeper dive into your property, I can figure that out for you. Yeah, that’s a much safer way to do it. I love that.
Carrie McCormick 29:16 And again, everyone’s got their way of doing it. It’s just it’s, it’s easier. And it’s allows, again, my goal is to provide value, or our goal is to provide value, but more importantly, I want to talk to them. I want them to pick up the phone or they want them to invite me to come over so.
D.J. Paris 29:32 So okay, so let’s I just want to drill a little bit deeper into this. So so let’s say I changed my approach. I’m not going to just automatically run the CMA I’m going to do a market report for their neighborhood, their suburbs or wherever. And I’m going to say hey, I noticed that homes are up or whatever the data is. I’d love to do a deeper dive with you. How do you so then are you going to email that to somebody? Are you going to call them what works best for you? What do you have that kind of information? Do you want to give it to them?
Carrie McCormick 30:01 So I feel like with email, people just delete it. Yeah, personally, you know, I think there’s like market report or you know, your neighborhood update or whatever, yeah, nobody cares. That gets deleted personally. But I would do it two ways I, I always print it shouldn’t say always, I print it, and I put it in an envelope, and I mail it to them. And I hand address it, just because if it’s a label, they’re gonna, they might throw it away. So I think there’s a better chance that they’re going to open up the mail. And then I will the net following week, I will follow up with an email with a subject line, did you get the envelope with the Market Report? And that way, you know, it’s, it’s a follow up, you know, and then I do have a hyperlink to that report. So if they did accidentally throw that envelope away, they can get it online.
D.J. Paris 30:57 Smart. And you get a pretty good response to those.
Carrie McCormick 31:00 I do. I do, or I’ve just gotten like a client of mine. Sam, he sent me an email you said, Thanks for the updated Market Report. Yeah, that’s fine. I mean, that’s, it’s an acknowledgment of it. And it’s it’s a touch point. And granite, he just bought his place a year ago. But you know, he was a touch point. So yeah, I think I get good response from that.
D.J. Paris 31:20 I love that. Well, I think that’s a great idea. So for anyone out there who is in between clients, or maybe wanting to provide some value in between deals, this is an opportunity to do some neighborhood reports and Mark reports, send it to everybody, you know, and then offer them to do a, you know, a more specific example with their own property. If they’re interested. I love that that’s really smart. Well, let’s, I think that’s a great place to wrap up for today. For everyone who is listening, I want you to think a couple of things. Number one, if you if you’re not here in the local Chicago market, and 99% of our audience, I think isn’t. So for everyone out there who is working in a different area here in US, Canada, wherever you might be listening from. If you have clients that are moving to Chicago, Carrie would love the opportunity to chat with them. She works. I mean, she’s a top producer, she works with a lot of relocation people. And anyway, anyone who’s moving here, she would love the opportunity to connect with you if you have clients in moving into the area. So please consider her for that. And then also, like I said, at the beginning of the episode, please follow her on Instagram, in particular, she does all her own Instagram herself. It’s amazing. And it’s a great example of how you can and what’s really cool about Instagram too, is you can actually, for the most part, look at people’s engagement. And you can actually look at other people’s engagement to get a better sense of where you might want your engagement to land as far as likes, comments, etc. video views. So please follow her on Instagram, which is at Carey McCormick real estate. Carrie. Oh, and one last thing, please everyone, the best way you can help us as a podcast is by telling a friend think of one other realtor realtor that could benefit from hearing this episode with Carrie today, which was awesome. And send them a link to our website. If they’re not like a normal podcast listener and they don’t normally, you know, subscribe to shows, she can send them over to keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever produced can be streamed right from the browser, or if they are podcast listeners, they can just do a search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. So please tell a friend that just helps us continue to reach more people. And we can do more episodes. And everybody wins. So carry on behalf of the audience that we thank you. You’ve been with us for years and years. You’re an amazing guest on our show and a contributor and we don’t feel like we could do the same show without you. So I’m so glad you’re still with us. And on behalf of Karen and myself. We also want to thank all of our listeners and our viewers for continuing to support our show. So again, tell a friend follow Carrie on Instagram at Carey McCormick art, our real estate which by the way is linked to the Instagram and her website Carrie McCormack art e.com is in our show notes. So please visit both of those. And yeah, let’s keep the train rolling. Carrie, great to see you. And we thanks again. We’ll see you next time.
Carrie McCormick 34:14 Awesome. Thank you guys.
How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything • Ivan Chorney
Feb 13, 2023
Ivan Chorney with Ivan&Mike Team at Compass talks about his own life journey and his transition from a bartender to moving to Miami from LA as a developer. Ivan discusses the importance of networking and communication as keys to a successful relationship with his own team and clients. He also emphasized a quote he repeats to his team ”How you do anything is how you do everything“, because that will determine how they will be as an agent. Last, Ivan talks about delegating work and how important it is to have a good relationship with clients and not feel neglected.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What is the secret recipe for being chosen by developers to represent their new construction? Or we’re going to talk about that today? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Top Producer IVAN Seany. But before we get to Ivan first just wanted to say thank you we are closing in now on we’re coming up on 500 episodes and we are we’ll probably hit that later this year. And we are so honored and grateful for all of our listeners and viewers. We now also stream live our episodes while at least the interview portion then we go back and produce it but while we’re interviewing our guests we actually stream live to YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn simultaneously so check find us on social media and you can actually watch us as we record our episodes you don’t have to wait for us to produce the episodes if you wish. So we just upgraded our equipment and we’re now streaming live to those three sources. So anyway enough about all that let’s get to the main event my conversation with Ivan shorty.
Okay, today on the show we have Ivan shorty with the Ivan and Mike team with compass in Miami. Let me tell you more about Ivan. Ivan. Tony leads the number one new construction real estate team in southeast Florida with Michael Mark Mara. Sorry, Mark. I’m gonna start that when
Ivan Chorney 3:03 it’s March arena,
D.J. Paris 3:04 March arena. Oh, yeah. Okay, take two. Gosh, what a day. All right, take two. Hey, today on the show we have Ivan Shawnee with the Ivan and Mike team with compass in Miami. Now I’ve been leads the number one new construction real estate team in southeast Florida with Michael Mark Torino. The Ivan and my team at Compass specializes in ultra luxury homes and new development sales. The team transacted listen to this guy’s to over 282 million in close transactions last year known for exceptional service. Charney is a property matchmaker sought out for his savvy negotiation style with a friendly down to earth demeanor. His real estate career began as a developer if you’re if you’re just listening, Mike’s making some some funny gestures in the back which is why I’m I’m laughing during his bio, so I apologize that I’m not that unprofessional. But he is he’s really making this fun. So let me get back to his his bio because it’s so great. His real estate career began as a developer sales rep selling pre construction projects in Miami and Miami Beach tourney is a trusted resource for reliable information to help his clients make accurate and informed investment decisions. He is entrenched in the Miami Beach community serving as a big brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters. Please visit Ivan and mike.com IV a n a n d mi ke.com to learn all things Ivan and Mike and also follow them on Instagram which is only miami luxury. Ivan I’m so happy to have you on the show. Welcome
Ivan Chorney 4:41 Hey man, thanks so much for having me. That was like the warmest toasty as welcome I like my glow and over here that’s that’s why I was making you laugh in the background.
D.J. Paris 4:52 Yeah, no, it is it people do it all the time. And because it’s it can be you know, it’s like not always something that people are used to Hearing is all their credits kind of at one side. I know it would make me very uncomfortable if someone are reading mine. So I definitely I definitely understand the urge to sort of have fun with it. And also it was just it was just that just your personality. I think that’s great. Yeah, let’s so I always love to start at the beginning of the story. So I’m curious of how you got into, well, first how you just got into real estate. So I know you started as as a as a sales rep for a developer. But how did you how did that come about?
Ivan Chorney 5:33 So I actually, I moved to Miami in 2005. I had been in LA for four and a half years. And I was, you know, kind of doing odd jobs in Miami to fill up the time and also, you know, make a little bit of money. I was also I was bartending for a staffing company. And one of the assignments was to bartend at the launch party for a new development called called Canyon Ranch in Miami Beach. So and you know, so I’m bartending this party, and it’s a launch and it’s just glamorous, and like, just gray look, and people dressed to the nines. Sure. And I’m like, I’m like, this is cool. Like, this is cool. All these people are cool. And they’re having they’re having an awesome time. And like, I’m like, this is this is what I think I need to do. Yeah. And I had already been working on my license, because I was like, alright, yeah, no, maybe I’ll use my money to invest. I was like, talking to my buddy in St. Petersburg.
D.J. Paris 6:42 Well, and it’s like, it’s like, every third person in Florida has a license, you might as well get one anyway. So
Ivan Chorney 6:47 yeah, right. Might as well I might as well jump in. And so while I was there, I spoke to the broker, who’s like, just the coolest dude, he had, like, you know, the frosted blonde tips were which were back. Really, they were really in back then. I even had them, like, a few years before that. So I can’t judge. But I was like, you know, so I just told him, I was like, I want to hang my license for you. I want to work on new on new construction. I’m like, what’s it going to take? He’s like, Well, you know, how many people in our database? I’m like, What’s the database? And like, and he’s like, how much experience you have in sales. And I’m like, Well, I was a personal trainer, and like, I sold memberships, that sales, sales, it was something. And anyway, you know, you’d like me, I was obviously, you know, somewhat personable. And he said, Listen, you know, come Come meet with my office manager. And we’ll figure something out. So I went met with the office manager, they, you know, they let me be a sales associate on, you know, in their brokerage, which, you know, basically, it didn’t cost them anything, I just was there. And I just made a point of like, going in every day to the office, going to every sales meeting, you know, which were often held at these new construction projects, and constantly asking, like, when was there going to be a project for me? I was like, you know, I was like, if you’ve, if you’ve seen Shawshank Redemption, they talk about like him sending the letters to get the library. Yeah. And they finally just gave him well, that was like me, I was like, What am I gonna get project? What am I gonna get project? So I ended up getting getting on a project in Miami Beach, which was like, it was not the most high end project that they had, but it was kind of like, alright, well, we’ll try you out here. And I was put on it with two very seasoned agents. And I quickly outsold them, and I was the I was the star sales agent on that team.
D.J. Paris 8:39 Wow, what? That’s an amazing story. Because number one, you were, you know, approach somebody at an event where, you know, you were the hired help. And then also, of course, working on your license at the same time, but just having the confidence to say to a, you know, to someone, they’re like, I want to work with you. In some ways, I think that’s like, every employers like fantasies situation where somebody’s like that motivated. Were even in a scenario where it’s not a real estate, specific sort of meeting for you and him, you’re still having the confidence to go like, I want this. And I. And so it’s, I’d love to say like, oh, I’m surprised that they would take a chance on you, because of not having that particular background. But now that I think about it, it actually makes perfect sense, because it wasn’t a time where they would expect for somebody to come up who isn’t yet in the industry and be like, I want to work with you. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how much of that just played in, you know,
Ivan Chorney 9:38 yeah, I mean, you know, and even now, you know, years laters 17 years later, and, you know, having this this great team and everything. What agents are constantly approaching us to come work with us? I mean, you know, we just brought on a guy a couple months ago, he was on me for a year to join the team. Yeah, I was like, Nah, sorry, wrong time. We’re not looking for any already, he was relentless. And I finally was like Mike, I’m like, gotta give this guy a shot. I’m like, I liked this guy. He was he was an athlete, he keeps keeps checking in with me, he wants to take me out for coffee. I’m like, I’m like, we need this kind of tenacity, in, in the work, you know, in the agent side of things, and it’s a quote, I repeat to my team, all the time is how you do anything, is how you do everything. So we know that that will correlate to how they will be as an agent.
D.J. Paris 10:28 I was trying to think I know a bunch of college athletes that have become realtors, I mean, some of them I’ve had on the show who are now top of the mountain realtors. But even just people who are newer to the industry who have that, that background, where they played some some level of college sports, they always succeed at in real estate. And it’s, it’s like I’ve yet to meet somebody who I know for sure played some sort of sport and then failed at real estate. I haven’t met those. I’m sure they exist. But boy, there’s something about that discipline, and that just hard work and tenacity, where they’re kinda like, yeah, I just gonna, I’m just gonna do the same effort I put into, you know, my sport into this. And I mean, you know, as well as I do, anyone who puts that kind of commitment in is guaranteed, almost guaranteed to be successful.
Ivan Chorney 11:12 Yeah, no, totally, that’s, that’s spot on. And even, you know, just having a tolerance for discomfort, you know, whether that, whether that’s just being in like, uncomfortable positions, you know, just like, having to grind and, you know, like, and sometimes do things that you don’t want to do, like, all that stuff, just, you know, keeps building character, and that, that ends up like, you know, being the building blocks for, you know, at least for me, those are the building blocks, building blocks of my success.
D.J. Paris 11:40 Yeah, mine to this idea of learning how to tolerate discomfort. I mean, it’s like, you’re a personal trainer, I just actually came from the personal trainer just before for this. And it’s, it’s, I won’t, but I’m to make just embarrassed to do that. But but it is, it is wild, because I’m almost three years in, and I never had that level of commitment to working out, I just didn’t my whole life. And so I’m like, I gotta get a trainer. And, and I will tell you that it’s no, it’s still not fun, because it’s pain. I mean, it’s, it’s painful. But it is, it is it is look taught me how to tolerate discomfort physically, that that physical discomfort of like, this is going to be painful, and there’s a huge benefit to doing it. And if I can just go well, the benefit is going to outweigh whatever the short term pain is. And that’s it doesn’t mean everyone needs to start like lifting heavy weights, but the idea of getting comfortable with whatever was the physical discomfort or mental discomfort or whatever it is, is so critical for being successful, because this is a business that really can knock you down pretty fast. And, and pretty hard. I mean, all it takes is, you know, you find out your, your best friend went with a different realtor, or you just you lose a deal for whatever reason. It’s not your fault. Yeah, it’s, it’s,
Ivan Chorney 13:02 and we all do. We all do. There’s all kinds of all kinds of roadblocks, you know, year near big deals, that just didn’t happen. And, and, you know, it’s it’s really tough at the time, especially when you, you haven’t kind of crossed over that, that kind of luxury or that that level of success, and you’re just trying to find your way to climb through and you miss those deals, and it’s tough, but it does build character. And that’s a you know, that’s the stuff I lean on now, in my success.
D.J. Paris 13:34 Yeah, it’s I think resiliency is just like the name of the game with this one. It’s just you’re gonna get knocked down constantly. And and just this idea of like, it’s all going to work out, I’m just going to keep at it. And, and it usually, usually is a lot of that it’s yes, or where it says, you know, so so I’m probably speaking for the audience here, because and they I think they understand the that your story starts with, with you sort of having this this opportunity, in a sense that you jumped on when you were not not in the industry at that moment. But for anyone that is in the industry right now. And I think I think I’d have an idea of what you’re going to say, but I don’t want to say it for you. Because I might be wrong. But I’m curious. And if anyone listening is going I want to be to be chosen to be to you know, work some any kind of developer does. Maybe it’s luxury, maybe it isn’t. But I would like to be chosen to represent a developer in some of these transactions. I know here in Chicago that is like, you know, it is and there’s pros and cons to being chosen to I know it’s not all Wine and Roses, but it is certainly something that people aspire to at least the option of being chosen. So I’m curious what you would suggest to somebody who wants to start taking steps to get the I have of developers.
Ivan Chorney 14:52 You know that there is a little bit of a difference from when I started in you know basically 2006 to now Oh, you know, when I got into the business there were there were agents that literally did nothing but work on developments. Sure, you know, like, and I had a friend who worked on a project with me. And he, he basically said it this way you have, you have house cats, and you have street cats. And he’s like, he’s like, I’m a housecat. He’s like, I’m never going to be street, that Street guy. And, and obviously, I wasn’t housecat at the time. Now, I’m a street cat, but it’s like, you know, the two, they were two very distinct groups, now, we’ve got these indoor outdoor cats. And we find that, you know, I find that a lot of the best developers, the top developments, they want seasoned agents that are actually out there in the street, you know, mixing and mingling with top clients, you know, from sure and around the world, and also, you know, socializing with all the other top agents so that they can mix with those agents and have those agents bring their, their clients and so it’s an even more coveted and harder spot to get. But I would say, two, I would say, two ways. One, find like an entry entry level kind of project, it might even be, you know, working for like culture homes, you know, you have some sales experience, you got your license, like, be willing to sell way out in the burbs, and just like, you know, like sound selling just a box of homes, you know, or, or some kind of real estate, that would be kind of like one way, and then you just work your way up, be she the absolute best in every one of those situations. And you’ll plot the plot, you’re on course, the other one is, you know, is the team route. And I would say get yourself on a team, you know, because I say the three keys to mastery are immersion, modeling, and repetition. So if you’re in a team, and you’re now immerse immersing immersing yourself and there should be other stuff with that, but you’re doing that you’ve got the leaders, the other, the other people on the team, you know, you’re modeling after and then you just keep repeating, repeating repeating, then that’s going to build a backbone of kind of the substance that developers are going to look for. And and then you’ll start having some of the, you know, the sales experience, you’ll start having some of the, you’ll know some of the talk, you can talk the talk. And I think you’ll you’ll you’ll have put together a database and all those kinds of variables that developers look for, and you might get a little bit of a leg up and be able to skip over Kolter homes and go right into work in a lower Miami Project.
D.J. Paris 17:37 Yeah, that makes that really makes perfect sense. Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. And I also think, too, like, I don’t want to minimize how hard it is for you to do that even today. Because it’s not like once you’re in you’re in because you have to perform and deliver every single time and the stakes are really high for you. Because there’s a line of agents cash a mile long that would love to take your spot on some of those development deals. And you’re in an ultra competitive market. In fact, you could argue Miami might be the number one real estate market in the in the world or the country, as far as was amount of dollars that sort of exchanged hands and,
Ivan Chorney 18:20 and and the most resilient to I must say, Yeah,
D.J. Paris 18:24 well, it is it is. Yeah, it’s like this time of year. I always think, Hmm, Florida has it. There’s there’s a lot of benefits to tax. It’s
Ivan Chorney 18:35 a lot. There’s a lot going for Miami, Miami is is just transforming so rapidly. It just keeps getting better and better.
D.J. Paris 18:43 Yeah, I was I was there. About two years ago, I hadn’t been to to Miami, and that that time and the staff staying down on South Beach and just just just love what what’s been done down there. So that’s, I think that’s really helpful advice. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s all the same things that I think we’ve heard, I’ve heard from other agents on the show, but I don’t think that means it’s, you know, repetition is, as you said, one of the three components, it’s the mother of skill, it’s, it’s doing the same thing, mother of mastery. Yeah, it is, I think, is this idea of just putting the blinders on and going for it and, you know, developing skills I think it’s you’re right, when you play at that level, the skill is really, really important. And a skills can be honed and sharpened. Right. So it’s this idea of just working on it. Let’s talk about the relationships because you you have a really when you work with developers, like that’s a really difficult thing because you’re serving many masters really, you’re obviously keeping the developers happy trying to sell at the rate that they want with the pricing that they want. Also dealing with other realtors dealing with buyers, and you know all sorts of factors. So You know, I know there’s it does not mean that it’s an easy job at all working on developments or with developers. But I’m curious on sort of, as your team has continued to grow, where do you find the most joy? Do you like working with, you know, the, you know, with developers with with the public with both, you know, I’m curious on what’s like, your favorite thing?
Ivan Chorney 20:24 Yeah. I mean, you know, as I said, I was, I was a house cat, and then I, you know, moved out onto the street, and I’m, I’m actually happier being a street cat. I like being out there in the world. I like mixing and mingling. And I don’t like being kind of just like, to not say stuck, but just like, you know, just too focused on one project. Because, you know, Miami is so, so dynamic and so versatile. And there’s so many great real estate opportunities, and I love selling everything, you know, so. So, you know, right now my, like, what I prefer to do, I want to work with, I want to work with people, I love to work, I just love working with great people. You know, like, when I first started in membership sales in, you know, for a gym. That was it was it was different kinds of sales, it was like using techniques chosing techniques, you know, and I remember the first time I used that closing technique to close somebody, and they bought a membership, and then I realized that they weren’t coming in. And like that I basically sold them, like, I didn’t like it, I didn’t feel good about it. What I what I what I do now is is relationships house like, first, I’m selling me, like, do you want to work with me? Like, here’s all the reasons why because it’d be your trusted resource, I’m a property matchmaker, I’m gonna put you with the most amazing property. But, you know, I want to become their friend, I want to I mean, because I truly, deeply care about them. And that’s what gives me the satisfaction because I know, in the end, I’ve helped put them in their family in a place where they’re just, they’re going to have the best lifestyle, like the best lifestyle that’s going to match their needs. So, so that’s what really like, you know, turns my crank so to speak.
D.J. Paris 22:17 Yeah, that’s your why you like you, like giving you there’s a lot of satisfaction in that. And so I’m curious, because you’re talking about wanting to become, you know, friends and envelop the sort of intimate relationships with with clients or, and really deepen, continue to deepen them so that, you know, they continue to, you know, obviously be part of your life. I’m curious, I’m always curious on what what are you doing? Or what do you recommend doing in between sales with a client so that you know, you just sold somebody a home they moved in? It’s their dream home, it might be their forever home? Or at least their for a while home? What are you doing so that to make sure that they don’t forget about you? One year, two years, three years, and just, I always think, you know, this is a huge opportunity, and probably something that a lot of agents struggle with, it’s like, okay, transaction over, I know, I should stay in touch. I’m not exactly sure how often and what and what to do.
Ivan Chorney 23:15 Yeah. Great point. That’s, I think that’s vital. Because you don’t you know, you don’t want to be a one pump chump. You want you not only it’s just do you want that repeat business, but you want them to tell their you know, their friends and their family. And and you want, and you just don’t know, for me, I just I want to know, how they’re doing down the road. So I think I think it’s, you know, part systems like you got to have systems in place. That’s, you know, your CRM, you got to have your CRM working. For me delegating, like, when I started really delegating and spending money on delegating. That was that was hugely transformative, you know, having assistants helping you do stuff, and they help us with follow up in a major way, whether it’s emails, text messages, sending gifts, sending letters, you know, so that’s kind of the whole kit and caboodle is that like, you know, we’re sending them gifts on their birthday, we’re sending them cards, we’re calling them, we’re checking in, you know, every every couple of weeks, you know, just saying hello, you know, how are they enjoying their place? They hear about this thing that’s going on, we send them articles, oh, the top 10 restaurants in Miami. We texted over to them where we have our assistance text over dome. So we’re just you know, cuz constantly trying to be say we’re trying to be like an internal resource as well.
D.J. Paris 24:43 Because that is such a you know, it’s so funny. This top 10 This top restaurants thing. It sounds so simple. And yet in all of the interviews I’ve had over all of the years, I don’t think anyone specifically gave that particular tip and I just realized as you were saying it, what a brilliant tip it is because you You can just make it neighborhood specific to wherever they live. And this is really an endless amount of content. I mean, you could say, you could do restaurant of the week, or you could do top three restaurants, or whatever, however you want to do it. But that is such an easy way to create content that’s actually valuable to the people that live in those communities. And in a way, that’s not, hey, I’m looking for another sale or, you know, send me the names of some of your friends, which of course, I’m not criticizing people who do it that way, either. Yeah, different way. Yeah. It’s not my particular approach. But But I understand that some people are better for people that are like, I don’t want to bug I don’t really want to bother people, it’s like, well, then send them things of value. And that is a great example, or something that, and you could do it with your sphere of influence. You could I mean, it’s, it’s not that much work. It’s about it. Boy, I would love I would love it. If every week, I received an email in the neighborhood I live, which is Wicker Park, and which is got hundreds of restaurants. I mean, we just have so many restaurants, and it can be overwhelming. And I live in the middle of it. And I’m like, God, I would love for somebody to be like, this is the place you should go this weekend. And I mean, I really would
Ivan Chorney 26:10 get that on a Friday. You’re like, Oh, I’m gonna go out tonight or tomorrow night like, oh, top 10 Like, this place, let’s say, oh, that’s the food I want. Boom.
D.J. Paris 26:17 I know. It’s it sounds silly. And it but it is like, again, that’s as an I’m guys. I’m not a practicing agent. I’m licensed, I don’t practice. So like I am somebody who is might be in your database. I’m like a person that is like in your database. There’s a lot of people like me, they want to know, you know, and they don’t always necessarily, you know, I think people who own homes are always interested in what my home’s worth. But aside from that, I think most a lot of the communication can just be like, Hey, how’s it going? What are you up to? What are you? And I imagine you do a lot about
Ivan Chorney 26:48 it? Totally. Yeah. All the time. I mean, I’m, I gorge, I gorge on all things Miami, like I’m just, you know, you can tell I light up when I talk about the city. It’s the city is my second love, you know, so I love sharing things about the city. And when I learned about, you know, oh, this, this new rooftop restaurant is coming to Coconut Grove. You know, I’m like, taking the link and I’m texting it out to all my clients who bought in Coconut Grove, you know, like, and it’s just, it’s really like a natural thing for me. And it obviously, it perpetuates the relationship, you know, for for years to come.
D.J. Paris 27:26 Let’s let’s I want to talk about delegating, because you mentioned that that was really a game changer for you when you started investing in hiring, you know, or just getting getting some of the things off your plate that maybe weren’t the things you really prefer to do. Or maybe they weren’t business building things but things that needed to get done. So I’m curious on on, you know, for there’s a lot of people out there listening who are going I would love to delegate some of my work, how do you figure out what you want to delegate and what you want to keep for yourself?
Ivan Chorney 27:57 I think it’s pretty easy. What do you what do you tend to procrastinate on? What do you what do you avoid doing? Delegate that shit, man, don’t do it. I mean, you know, Mike and I joined join partners, we became partners and and, you know, first years like, you’re not closing like crazy amounts of deals. And, you know, money’s a little bit tighter. And it’s like, you know, we were at that point where we were kind of like, overflowing, you know, like, trying to be Jack of all trades, writing contracts, doing follow up writing listings, like chasing our commissions. I mean, it was fucking hard. I’m sorry, I’m
D.J. Paris 28:37 sure. No, you can swear.
Ivan Chorney 28:40 It was hard. It was hard and overwhelming. And it took away from my ability to perform at what I’m best at, which is working with people and closing deals. Like, I love working with people. I love selling the best of the best real estate in Miami. I love going into the projects, you know, talking to the agents talking to developers. I don’t love working on contracts. I don’t love the minutiae of like, you know, the, you know, scheduling the inspections and being there the inspection like I don’t want to do that stuff. So once once I realized that for myself, Mike and I had a good conversation, he was on board and we decided like, let’s spend some money and hire somebody to do this shit. And let me tell you that was that’s a game changer. If you have not hired somebody to take the load off of you stuff you don’t like doing or don’t have the time to go out and hire somebody. Start with start with a virtual admin if you you know if you don’t have the budget to go full time somebody you know in person, get a virtual admin like it will be a huge game changer for people
D.J. Paris 29:53 and and command really affordable. I mean, you can you know, depending on the skill level, I mean, you can Find people as low as you know, I don’t know, $5 an hour, maybe even less. Now, obviously, it’s not so much about wanting to spend the least amount of money. But if that’s your budget, you can find people that will do it. And so you know, places like upwork.com are great resources where you can go post and add people from all over the world will vie for your business. And you know, you’ll have to figure out, you know, who you want to hire. But, but yeah, I that’s a great option. So for anyone out there that’s like, I can’t afford to have, you know, a full time assistant. Maybe you
Ivan Chorney 30:31 can’t afford not to. Yeah, well, you’re right afford not to I’m telling you can change.
D.J. Paris 30:38 And, and we should also honor the fact that probably when you guys were ready to make that financial commitment initially, was that an uncomfortable moment? Like, oh, my gosh, we was at a time where you were like, Oh, it wasn’t, it was easy for
Ivan Chorney 30:51 it. No, no, no, it was totally, it was hard to start spending, like, our own money that we were getting, and like, you know, as a real estate agent, you’re like, you’d never really know exactly when the next shark is comment or maybe know when the next one is, but not the one after that. And so that’s, that’s, that’s uncomfortable and brutal. But it’s, it’s necessary. And so now,
D.J. Paris 31:14 it’s again, it’s this idea of betting on yourself and going like no, this will work out, it might be uncomfortable for a while because I’m spending money. And yeah, there’s going to be times of like, I gotta train and build systems and all of those things. Yes. So you just got to push through that discomfort and realize, like, oh, top agents aren’t doing everything. They’re just doing, what they are, what they love and what they’re best at? And what’s what’s on Cornerstone activities. Yeah. So, we’re back to relationships for a moment. So, you know, you just gave a lot of great examples of providing value, you know, in between transactions, you know, staying in touch with clients, giving them something that they can use on a regular basis, making sure they don’t feel neglected, you know, whether it’s just reaching out and how’s it going, you know, saw you went on vacation, tell me about it kind of thing versus, you know, hey, here’s like some cool real estate info, or here’s some, you know, community info. How important is it to be really immersed in the community first. So we all know, real estate is usually hyperlocal. For most agents work, you know, locally, how important is it to be known in the community, not so much to be like a public figure, but just somebody that’s in the community and and supportive of the community? I imagine you guys are for sure.
Ivan Chorney 32:35 Yeah. I mean, you know, I guess there’s two folds that twofold. Answer, one, like, you know, I know, agents that have picked up and left one market plop themselves into another market and found found immediate success. You know, so there are there are ways to do that. And they clearly were not immersed in, you know, the, in the world, so to speak sure of that city yet. It’s, it’s, it’s clearly beneficial for us to be immersed in, you know, all the things Miami, I mean, and in volunteering. You know, like, as you mentioned, like, I’m a big brother, in Big Brothers, Big Sisters. We also we do a lot of donations to some of the, you know, the various big charities in Miami. Lois house is one that we we did it we we got a table for we invited people and we mix and mingle. So, you know, it’s good for people to see that, you know, it’s, we’re not just about the money, you know, we’re also about the community. And we get out and about, and we go to the chamber every now and again, and all that stuff. I you know, I think it’s important. It also, you know, it also kind of depends on who your your upline faces. You know, for people that, you know, like, if someone on my team was, you know, focused on getting single family home listings in X community, I’d be like, You need to start living in that community. You know, like, you need to start, you need to start going to, you know, the weekly mom’s events or or you need to see, like, start getting plugged into the schools and go into the art fair, like, you got to start digging yourself into that. And, and, you know, like Mike and I, we, we deal with mostly, I would say northeasterners is a big is a big portion of our clientele. northeasterners people, people from Chicago, California, a lot, a lot, a lot of tax flights and some Canadian insurance, some some Europeans and some South Americans. We actually came in, I specifically don’t have a huge amount of like local clients. So, you know, for us, it’s almost more important for us to be out and about in the world, you know, so we’re traveling to Europe in the summer, you know, trying to go to the head Hamptons are going into New York City a lot I hit. Well, that makes sense. I’m from Connecticut. So I go home to Connecticut a couple times a year. So that’s, that’s that’s kind of how we kind of get out into the bigger community, so to speak. That’s so
D.J. Paris 35:15 interesting. So you travel to where the potential customers are and where they are today. And and where they might be, obviously, in the future is is Miami that way that makes perfect sense. I’ve yet to hear anybody talk about that specifically about leaving geographically so that you can get in front of potential buyers or
Ivan Chorney 35:35 sides. I mean, I had a I had a prospect that I had been in touch with over the phone only, and he was from Atlanta, the compass ended up having the compass retreat in Atlanta. So I looked them up, and I said, Hey, what are you doing? I’d love to, you know, take you out for coffee. He said, No, come over my house. So he invited me over his house was this freaking giant mansion, in like one of the most, you know, wealthy areas of Atlanta, and we just, like, totally hit it off. And him it brought his wife over, they started pouring me whiskey, I was like, Oh my god. So you know, but it was great. Because like, you know, I know, as soon as they come to Miami, we’re going out and I’ve segmented that relationship.
D.J. Paris 36:16 In the same vein, I’d love to hear your perspective of the importance of building strong relationships with other realtors, whether they’re in your local market, and the people, you know, will be on, you know, maybe one side of a deal with against the other, working together to close it or even Realtors from other markets who might be referring clients in? How critical is it for you to have strong relationships with other agents?
Ivan Chorney 36:45 Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s super critical, I think, really, for every agent. You know, I know some agents that 75% of their business is referrals from other agents. That’s not us. But it’s actually something we’re working on growing. We actually have, you know, we’ve kind of put the structure in place to to really work on growing our referral network. We’re looking for great partners out there. But but you know, that’s why we went to buy we went to Atlanta. Jessica bade us who runs our team, she’s going to Boston this weekend to meet with agents, she was in New York meet with agents. Mike was in New York meeting with agents, Haydar Michael on our team was meeting with agents in New York. So this is really like a big initiative of ours to to get out there and meet lots of agents from the various feeder markets around the country, but you know, really, even around the world, because Toronto, London, you know, there’s, there’s other feeder markets, but even even just, you know, within Miami, it’s very, it’s very important, I think, to, to be well liked, you know, to be thought of as somebody who’s likable and easy to work with, you know, because I know from like my side, when, when I’m going to show listings, and I’m like looking at who the who the agents are, like, there’s occasionally going to be an agent where I go, like,
D.J. Paris 38:11 you never want to be on that end of it. You don’t want to be on that or somebody looks at you and want to know,
Ivan Chorney 38:18 like, I’m like this this person, you know, they do this they do that, like, you know, ex tried to steal my client ones, they’re a problem or they’re just, they just don’t they just don’t shut up. They just talk talk, talk talk talk to clients, like overwhelmed. I’m like, there’s there’s a few of them out there and my advice is don’t be that person.
D.J. Paris 38:40 i There’s a there’s a way Adam Carolla used to talk about he goes you never want to be as like a life advice thing and he was saying you never want to be the guy that when your name comes up on the caller ID to someone else they go oh, god bless told us that is a good point.
Ivan Chorney 38:58 Yeah, I mean, like I get calls from other agents that just asked him for like help like, Hey, I saw you closed this unit in this building. I have a client who’s thinking about buying the same unit two floors up can you give me some insight? And I’m like Absolutely. Like I want to be helpful because you know, when the shoe was on the other foot like maybe I’ll need them and the vast majority of agents not see me the vast majority a lot of agents can’t be bothered. You know, they even a lot of them have just just bad etiquette. They don’t answer the phone. I’m like Miami, it for as glamorous and wealthy as a city as it is. I really don’t think it’s the hardest city to become successful in because you just have to do this much more to set yourself above the people that are doing the bare minimum.
D.J. Paris 39:47 You know, I agree and you just said something very powerful that I want to make kind of like step on a little bit because it’s so you just said something actually quite quite brilliant I think which was if you are selling this protect really applies to condo sales. You know, this idea that if you’re about to list a condo, in a building that you haven’t listed in before, take a look at the closed listings and not just for the data, but actually go, Hey, maybe I’ll reach out to a couple agents that just closed the deal here and be like, hey, is there anything I need to know, I’m, I know, You’ve had success in this building, I would, I’m sorry to bug you. But I’d really love to get any advice that you might have. And first of all, that’s super flattering to get
Ivan Chorney 40:26 super flattering, like I was I, it just happened to me last week. And I was like, um, it was just like, more than kind of blown away or that somebody weren’t happy? Yeah. Because I was like, oh, you know, like, this guy’s like, looking up to me. And he’s, you know, he’s leaning on me for help. And I was like, this is this is this, and I was completely transparent about the deal. And he was like, beyond thankful, because like, he didn’t know that the deal included the boat slip, and what that equated to on a on a on $1 level. So it was it was great. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 40:57 this this idea of I mean, it is it, you know, I know, you guys weren’t on opposite ends of the transaction. But even when that happens, it’s still a cooperative commission, right? It’s still supposed to be cooperative. And so I think agents sometimes forget about that, when it’s when it’s just a random agent, and at a different, you know, maybe they closed the deal a week before, and you’re like, I don’t want to bother them. They don’t they don’t know me, I don’t know them. It’s, you know, I think that’s it, if they don’t call you back, it’s no big deal. But at least you made the effort. And, and again, I think that that idea of, you know, agents who are successful and my experience, and of course, there’s exceptions to this, but almost all the time that I’ve dealt with agents who are top producers, they tend to be super generous, and super friendly, and they get it, everyone’s got to start somewhere, they remember what it was like, and it’s appreciative when, when you when when somebody calls them and says, Hey, I’d love to get some advice.
Ivan Chorney 41:50 Totally, I, besides all this other stuff, and, you know, seeing this seeing my clients happy, like the other thing, I get tremendous satisfaction out of helping other people, and like helping other people to avoid some of the pitfalls and hurdles that I had to go through. And I’ll say to my team members, like, if, if your experience on my team through my, your experience on my team, you don’t end up being becoming a better person than you were when you got here, then I’m a fan, I fail, you know, so like, I really, you know, hold myself up to make to be a contribution to everybody and to, you know, make sure that they leave a better person or better professional than when they got here.
D.J. Paris 42:34 I wonder how many of our listeners right now having just heard you say that are thinking, I would love it, if my team lead or my managing broker, or whoever is sort of in charge of me, as an agent said, I want everybody here to become a better human being. And my job is to help you become a better human being not just become successful real estate, I want to help. You know, that is, that is a really powerful thing that you said. And I want to honor that. Because I don’t know that every team lead or managing broker has that same philosophy, it’s certainly a tremendous responsibility that you’re taking on, and one that you take very seriously. And so I think it’s a great place to mention that if somebody is a realtor in the Miami, sort of Miami Dade area, and you’re looking to maybe see what other options exist, and you think you might be a fit for the Ivan and Mike team. And again, remember, it might take some time because these guys want to see a level of commitment and dedication. But you got to start somewhere. If if somebody was wanting to consider working on your team, with your team providing some value to your team, tell me like what are you looking for in an agent? And and how could they get in touch with you?
Ivan Chorney 43:46 Yeah, well, I mean, we’re not looking for green agents, green as inexperience. That doesn’t mean it’s an absolute no, nothing is ever an absolute no. You know, that this last gentleman we brought on he was green. And that’s why it was it was it was a no for now, which is also you know, people should be taking notes as far as sales go. No, it was only know for now. But it wasn’t know at the time, it became a it became a yes, because he was tenacious enough. But right right out of the gates, we’re looking for people that are a little bit more seasoned, you know, listing specialists, you know, somebody that can go out there and get single family home listings that can go out there and, you know, kind of kill their own prey, not just that they’re not just going to sit back and wait for us to just feeding off of, you know, that’s that we’re not looking for that, you know, but we’re looking for people that that that want to be part of a team and want to be part of a special team, a team that’s more about it’s not just about the numbers and just about you know, Gucci Gucci belts and parties on you know, on South Beach on Friday like we Really, we’re about personal development, we’re about giving back to our community. And we really, you know, feel like, like we’re a family, you know? So if you’re if you’re about that jam, cool, if that’s not your game, and that’s cool, too. Just, we’re not the fit for you.
D.J. Paris 45:16 Like, yeah, no, I think that’s very fair. And if people if they want to, if anyone out there wants to reach out to the Ivan and Mike team, go to Ivan and mike.com, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes or hit them up on Instagram or Facebook, on Instagram. They’re only miami luxury. I have one last question for you, because and it’s kind of a funny thing, I get a little nervous asking it because I’m always afraid somebody’s going to chastise me for bringing up something that might be a bit negative. No, no, it’s I think it’s realistic. And I’m just curious to get your take. I think 2023 is going to be a really tough year for agents. I don’t I don’t think I’m going on a limb by saying that I think but there’s some people that just like to see the positive side of everything. And they’re like, it’s gonna be fine. i We have almost eight that’s major. Well, that’s good. No, that’s good. Because I want to hear that perspective. Because for me, we have about 800 agents here at our company. And I’m terrified because I’m like, Oh, my God, rates are up, inventories down, this is going to be tough. What are you doing to stay positive? And also stay productive, despite the fact that there are definitely challenges right now, that didn’t maybe exist a couple years ago.
Ivan Chorney 46:24 Okay, so where attention goes energy flows, right. So if you’re constantly focused on the, the sensationalism that’s out there about, you know, fuck, sorry, housing bubble, it’s Bubble, Bubble, Bubble, Bubble, bubble, collapse, you know, the housing market is blah, blah, is this and I’m like, You know what noise, it’s just noise. I’m, I’m always reading between the lines, I’m looking at the market, I’m I got my boots on the ground here, Miami, we’re very low inventory. So you know what I’m like, I’m focused on the fact that, like, I know what the reality is. And I’m focused on the fact that there are still great opportunities out there. So I truly believe there are opportunities out there for people and I truly believe there are great, great products out there for people to buy. And that’s why I just did 25 million this past weekend. And three deals. Unbelievable. Three, three deals, I was out of the country, I did 25 million. I’m not trying to like say I’m like, you know this,
D.J. Paris 47:31 no, you’re not. You’re just reporting you’re, like,
Ivan Chorney 47:34 i i Stay positive. I listen, I get up in the morning, I listened to, to meditation, I have affirmations like I am started standing gate at the car, I’m standing guard at the gate of my mind. That’s and I just can’t let the crap come in. That’s just noise.
D.J. Paris 47:54 Yeah, it’s but Well, you said something very important. You said I know the reality. It’s not like I’m Pollyanna. I’m not paying attention. I don’t actually know what’s going on. No, I know what’s going on. Which is why I’m choosing to focus my energy in things that will actually help drive my business because you can’t control inventory or rates, but you can find opportunity within within those things. It but if you’re right, if your mind is being entertained by information that isn’t particularly helpful to actually creating a plan, then it becomes like just consumerism, I’m just taking in information and it’s gonna bum me out because of course it is. And it’s not like you’re not strong enough to push it away. It’s just human nature to when you absorb things to sort of react to them. And so, you said something really important. It’s like, you can pay attention, and you can not pay too much attention so that you’re immobilized. Yeah, exactly.
Ivan Chorney 48:48 It’s like, you know, you’re not trying to be like a car salesman. Nobody wants that, like, you know, and, you know, all of our, all of our buyers are sophisticated, right? They’re, they’re seeing all the headlines out there, and I can’t be like, you know, don’t read those. Don’t listen, any of that. It’s all fucking crap. You know? Like, there’s, there’s some truth in that, too. It’s just like, you know, let me let me understand you, and what what your needs are what what fits your lifestyle. Let me present some options, and then let me go to work and negotiate. You will. Frickin hell of a deal.
D.J. Paris 49:23 Yeah, I love it. I think I think again, my mindset, we’re talking about focusing our energy in a way that is actually going to help us continue in our business, despite whatever challenges are before us because there’s always challenges even and let’s remember to everyone, low interest rate environment, the 3% days. That was not a lot of fun. If you were working with buyers, it was it was a lot of fun if you had a lot of listings, but if you were working with buyers, all my like let’s not forget that your buyers who got homes were thrilled. There’s a lot of unhappy people though that didn’t get one But they wanted or who paid, you know, X amount over what they probably should have, because that was the condition. So
Ivan Chorney 50:06 I’m so glad that days of multiple offers are like, almost over like that stuff was. That was stressful.
D.J. Paris 50:13 Yeah, yeah. So So that’s I love that I love that you said all this because that just reminded me that yes, things are different now but not necessarily worse or better, just different. And so within different you have
Ivan Chorney 50:26 to be chameleon. Yeah, to be a chameleon that’s in real estate, you real estate is is moving, whether it’s a down market, an up market, a middle market, that there’s there’s stuff being transacted. So just just be able to kind of take the ebbs and the flows, you know, don’t get don’t get don’t get pulled into the weeds.
D.J. Paris 50:47 Well, I think this is a great place to wrap up. Because for anyone listening who thinks, gosh, you know, I would like to have a connection, maybe down to the Miami area, or you know, somebody that I could possibly refer business to as well in the future, because, of course, lots of people retire or move to Florida or buy second, third, you know, plus properties. You know, you obviously deal with people with multiple, multiple properties. And, you know, you’re looking for to build those relationships, so that you when you do have those opportunities, and by the way, I haven’t find those opportunities on the flip side to where those people who are buying an $8 million home, probably not their only home, they probably have other properties, he’s going to probably need to refer those people out in case they’re moving somewhere where they don’t know an agent. So this is a great reciprocal relationship, possibly. So even everyone out there, if you’re like, Well, you know, gosh, I don’t know if I’d be of any value. You know, think about it. And if you think you could provide value to Ivan or vice versa, you know, reach out and say, Hey, I’d love to be part of your network. And here’s why. And here’s what I do. That’s how relationships get get started and found it so and by the way, too, for anyone out there who’s a buyer seller investor or renter who is looking to find a property or sell a property in the Miami area. You know, Ivan and Mike are the guys so I’ve been in like.com they’re gonna take awesome care of you. I mean, the amount of transactions you guys are sorry, the production level that you did last year, I was trying to think because I don’t have our Chicago numbers pulled up for the entire metro or the entire area. But I would say that would put you as one of the if not the top team, maybe one two or three out of 47,000 agents. So I’ve been in like our big big producers and they are very, very, very good at what they do. So you should consider working with them. Whether you’re an agent, you know, or whether you’re somebody looking to work with a realtor, buy sell, rent, invest, etc. Those guys these guys are the best so everyone go out and visit Ivan and mike.com also follow them on Instagram, which is miami luxury sales. Sorry, no, it isn’t.
Ivan Chorney 52:50 Any miami luxury.
D.J. Paris 52:52 Sorry about that. Only miami luxury on Instagram. By the way guys don’t have to worry about that. There’s a link to it in our show notes. Just click on it. Subscribe and follow them. Mike it sir Mike. Ivan, your partner’s Mike. Well,
Ivan Chorney 53:05 he’s cool. He’s alright.
D.J. Paris 53:08 I guess when I when I expect to talk to an Ivan. And this is like, probably something that isn’t politically correct. But I expect like a thick heavy accent from like an Eastern European accent WOULD YOU DO NOT? Dawn? Yeah, that’s there we go. No, I’m talking to Ivan. No, Ivan, it was it was a pleasure. By the way just to ask you. Where are you from in Connecticut?
Ivan Chorney 53:29 A little town called Madison. It’s 20 minutes east of New Haven on the shoreline.
D.J. Paris 53:34 So is that near Old lime.
Ivan Chorney 53:37 It’s very close. It’s about 2025 minutes from O line O line. We just keep going a little bit further, like 10 More exits off at 95.
D.J. Paris 53:44 I’ve been to old line. That’s probably the closest I’ve been but anyway. All right. On behalf of our audience, guys, we all need to thank Ivan for coming on our show talking about how he built his business. We’re so grateful that he said spend an hour with us. So on behalf of everyone Ivan, we say thanks. And if I called you Mike at any other time during this I think now thinking just wanted to do it once just Okay, sorry about that. That’s my it’s a tough day. But on behalf of Ivan and myself, we want to say thank you to the audience for making it all the way through guys get in touch with Ivan, you know, reach out to them see if you can and we’re so grateful we just ask one thing of everyone who listens is just tell one friend about the show one other realtor that might be struggling right now that’s worried about this year that stressed a lot of agents are send them a link to this episode. This is going to turn their day around and hopefully provide them a little bit of a little bit of kindness and you know strategy for how to move through the year. So tell a friend send him over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed through a browser or if there are podcast listeners, just pull up to a search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe button. We appreciate it. All right, Ivan. It was a real pleasure. Sure And next time I’ll have Mike on the show because I won’t screw up.
Ivan Chorney 55:04 You gotta call him Ivan.
D.J. Paris 55:06 That’s true that maybe he’s got a thick accent then I’ll get confused again. Anyway, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much. We will see everybody on the next episode. Awesome.
Is Your Mindset Holding You Back In Real Estate? • Brittany Ranew
Feb 09, 2023
Brittany Ranew a St.Petersburg & Tampa Bay’s Real Estate & Lifestyle Expert talks about her own life journey with background in music and event planning and her transition into real estate. Brittany mentions the importance of mental health, consistency and commitment in what you do and what you want. Next, Brittany talks about her St. Pete Soul Podcast and what she offers to her listeners. Brittany also discusses how tracking the transactions like buying/selling is very important to build a trustful environment in the field of real estate.
D.J. Paris 0:00 mindset is talked a lot about in the realtor training and coaching space. But what does it actually mean? What we’re going to talk about mindset today and do a deep dive. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer Brittany Renu. Before we get to Brittany, just a couple of quick favors that we ask of you. One and really the most important favor we ask is to please keep this train moving by telling a friend about the show. Think of one other realtor that could really benefit from hearing from top producers like Britney and send them a link either to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or any podcast app, they could just search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button, we’d appreciate it. But please tell a friend we really want to help as many Realtors as we can this year stay in the business. It’s a very vulnerable year for realtors with the way the market conditions have been going. And we just want to make sure everyone has got all the resources they need. And hopefully this podcast can help them. So please tell a friend and then also please support our sponsors. They are the reason we can keep doing these episodes, they pay the bills. We are so grateful to our sponsors. So please check out their products and services, consider investing in them. And all the services that we promote on this, this podcast are only to assist your business going forward. So please consider sponsoring or actually supporting our sponsors sponsor our sponsors by buying their services. Anyway guys, thank you so much for being a valued and trusted member of this podcast. We love you so much and we’re grateful to have you but now on to the main event my conversation with Brittany Renu.
Today on the show we have Brittany renew with Premier Sotheby’s International in St. Louis and Tampa Bay. Let me tell you more about Britney. Britney Renu is a licensed realtor and relocation expert with Premier Sotheby’s International as the official relocation expert of Tampa Bay. She’s also the host of the St. Pete soul podcast, and Brittany provides valuable resources to her customers by immersing herself in the community in which she lives and works and we’re going to talk about that today. She believes it’s not simply about buying or selling a home but building community I could not agree more. I want everybody to go visit Brittany’s website which tells you every all things Brittany including her podcast, which is Brittany renew.com Let me spell that for you br ittanyranew.com There’s also links to that in our show notes. And I also want you to follow her on Instagram and YouTube search for Brittany Renu realtor on both Instagram and YouTube. Also links to that will be in the show notes. And if you’re in the Tampa or St. Pete area, please consider Subscribing to our podcast, the st. A St Pete soul which you can also find on her website. Brittany, welcome to the show.
Brittany Ranew 4:35 Hi, DJ. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 4:39 I get very nervous when I talk to other podcast hosts and when people hear this final version, they won’t know that I screwed up three times in my introduction to you. So I am a little frazzled right now so I have to get back to my center or else I am going to be it’s funny I get very nervous like I can’t screw up in front of another another broadcaster Oh I did. Well, I think I think this is great. It’s actually a great segue into what we’re eventually going to talk about which are, which are one of the topics would be mindset. So we’ll get to a place where maybe I can take a lesson from you and learn how to quiet the, you know, the voices in my head that are telling me I’m screwing this up. But before we get to me, let’s, let’s talk about you. And I would love to hear what actually I don’t know this story is how you got into real estate. So if you don’t mind sharing that.
Brittany Ranew 5:34 Yeah, so kind of an interesting path. I have a music background. So I actually went to school for music. I was a vocal major.
D.J. Paris 5:42 Wow, wait, did you do that in Florida or somewhere else?
Brittany Ranew 5:45 So I’m from Mobile, Alabama, originally born and raised. So it was a local school there. And so we moved to St. Pete 2015. So I just like my husband, and I born and raised in mobiele, and took a leap and moved to St. Pete. So so yeah.
D.J. Paris 6:01 So did you did you have dreams of being like a singer? Did you want to sing professionally? Or?
Brittany Ranew 6:07 I did I and I had a writing background as well. So definitely in that creative space. And so I was like, Well, you know what, I’m not going to be a professional singer, at least at this moment in time. So why don’t I pursue the music industry as on the business side. So there was a local company media company that I started working for immobile. I mentioned having a creative side. So that was something I wanted to have my own business. So I started an event planning company. So I was doing that on the side while I worked full time at this media company. And that was like, slowly growing, kind of getting my feet wet. And then I got laid off from my job after they sold to another company, and closed down operations in mobile. So I was like, Oh, what am I supposed to do with myself now, I mean, I’m young and my first like, real full time job at a college. So it was kind of traumatic to get laid off. So had the event planning company and I was like, you know, what, I’ve always loved houses. Real Estate sounds like something else that I could really make my own. So I got my real estate license, it was I was doing both trying to, like build real estate had the event planning company, then that wasn’t really going the way I wanted it to. And I was starting to fall in love with real estate. I was like, You know what, I’m gonna just go all in, in real estate. And that was about I got licensed in 2013 and 13. And 2014 is where I really kind of like went full time so
D.J. Paris 7:44 yeah, it’s that’s a quite a shift. But I guess with the event planning background and the media company background, it probably especially you were doing your own event planning. I imagine that probably was that the sort of first entrepreneurial thing that you did where you’re like, Okay, I want to be in charge in my own life and my own time and all of that.
Brittany Ranew 8:01 Yeah. And my husband was in kind of a not so great work environment. And I was like, you know, what, if I have my own business, that the it’s limitless, I can do whatever I want, you know, the income is limitless. And so I just had these dreams of like, Alright, I’m gonna help us build this different life, you know, life that we always imagined. And things didn’t go exactly as planned. It was a lot slower growth than I wanted it to be. Which came back to my mindset but I didn’t know that at the time. So when we moved to St. P It was a job opportunity for my husband Steven. That was just life. It was a life changing move. And it just really helped me kind of get out of my shell and it helped put us on a path for really a better future.
D.J. Paris 8:56 But so when you move to St. Pete And by the way, if anyone out there has not visited St P it is just a lovely even if it’s just a day trip because a lot of times because I visit my sister in Tampa which I’m there a lot and I was telling Brittany earlier that I mean, we didn’t really talk about St. Pete But because my mom my parents didn’t Clearwater which is also kind of a comparable type of area. Although very different but but cool as well. In a different way. And St. Pete I always I love the Dali museum. I love it. Just everything about St. Pete is just it just feels kind of fancy and trendy and fun and cool and easy to fall in love with. It is easy to fall in love with and every time I leave it I even though it’s only like a 30 minute drive back to my sister’s or 40 minutes. I’m like, I love this place. There’s more going on, I think in St. Pete And Clearwater and that’s not a dig at Clearwater at all I love Clearwater it’s just a different Clearwater is more of a beachy vibe and st Pete’s a little bit more like an upscale kind of fun but it It’s also a very difficult place to become a realtor, because it’s such an exclusive area. Obviously, prices are high competition is high. There’s just lots going on there. So I am really curious how you got started in, you know, in St. Pete, because that’s not an easy place to get started.
Brittany Ranew 10:20 No. And, you know, I was, like I said, I had some mindset issues that I was dealing with. So that was a struggle as well. So I decided to not start selling right away when we moved. And it was a hard decision, because I loved real estate. But it was the ultimately the right one because I needed to kind of get my get myself settled. So I actually was the office administrator for my office that I’m at at Premier Sotheby’s International Realty. So it was, it was cool, because I got to immerse myself in the market, learn. And I had like a steady, steady paycheck. And then I could learn the company, and how amazing an amazing company is, and all the resources that we have. And it gave me time to build that sense of community. So that was in 2017, is when I got back into sales full time. And I hit the ground running at that point. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 11:25 Because you you know, that is, that’s the first time and all of the people I’ve interviewed, that I believe someone has gone that particular path. And as I’m hearing it now, it makes perfect sense. And I’m sort of shocked that I don’t hear more people having done that, you know, basically the way I think about it is it was almost I mean, yes, you were paid. And you know, you were paid to do that role. But I imagine it was just a learning experience, you had to absorb so much, probably great best practices, and maybe things not worth doing. And really just watching other you’re basically or just if you were at an office where people came in and the agents work there, then boy, I can’t even imagine what an education that was.
Brittany Ranew 12:06 Yeah, it was, it was tremendous. And also just kudos to my, my company, for letting me make that transition. You know, I went from office administrator back into sales. So, you know, sometimes that can be a little sticky. Because competitive, you know, environment, especially, like Florida, you know, yeah. But yeah, it was, uh, it was, it was the way I needed to do it. And I’m not gonna lie and say it was easy, because it was, it was tough. It hurt my pride a little bit to not be selling. But it was, it was definitely the right way for me
D.J. Paris 12:43 when he finally got into production, and that so you had been in St. Pete for for several years at that point. Correct?
Brittany Ranew 12:51 Yeah, so 2015. So it was it was two, it was about a year, year and a half, basically, from when we moved to when I got back into sales. So
D.J. Paris 13:01 and so at that point, still, and again, I don’t know your sort of social life and how active you are getting out meeting people. But essentially, I’m assuming you didn’t have a sphere of influence when you move there, or at least a small one. Right now. Yeah, zero. And, and then having to build that in, in. It’s interesting, because I have Matt and I don’t know that much about St. Pete, like the residents of St. Pete, I don’t know how many are born and raised, lived their whole lives there. But I bet it’s a lot of people who move there at some point in their life. And it isn’t a lot of born and raised and sort of you know, I’m there my whole entire existence. So it’s kind of be tough to really sort of establish oneself, because there’s so much so many people coming in and leaving, that you have all these other agents that are also trying to make those those relationships with these new residents, or people who are newer to the area or thinking of moving there. How did you go about, you know, finding clients when when you got into production?
Brittany Ranew 14:00 Yeah, you know, I’m, I’m a very social person. So like, my husband, I joke that just about all the friends that we have here is because I made them first. So I was not afraid to get out there and meet people. And I think that’s something that people forget is it’s kind of hard to make friends as an adult. Totally hard. Yes. So you have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, to be able to connect with new people. It’s almost like dating. It’s kind of a it is very much that way. Yes. So it’s like I had to take the initiative to constantly meet people. And then when I met people like, Hey, would you like to hang out? You know, and it takes that until you get into rhythm with people before they start contacting you. So it was me just being really persistent because I wanted to build community because that’s how I thrive. So again, it was just me being consistent and pursuing really friendships. And, you know, over time, it just got easier and easier. And sure, you know, we’ve lived here for eight years now. And it’s just, we just love it. And we have the best friends. So
D.J. Paris 15:14 I was meeting with a newly licensed agent last night or at 430. Yesterday. And she was asking me, you know, she was, you know, interviewing our firm. And she’s like, if you were me, and she was new to Chicago, she’s like, I mean, she’s been here for a year, but she’s like, I don’t really know, hardly anyone. And I said, she goes, What would if you were me? What would you do? And I said, you know, it’s, it’s not easy. That’s a tough position for anybody to be in. And I said, Really, if it was me, I would figure out everyday how to meet like two or three new people and add them to my database. And that’s actually a pretty difficult thing to do. It sounds like pretty simple. But I said, if I go, your biggest problem is, you know, you don’t have a large sphere, but you can remedy that it just, it’s going to take a year or two. And you’re going to have to meet people that’ll be like part of your day, every day is yes, you have to learn the real estate business and develop those skills, and all of all of the normal being a good realtor stuff. But you really need to get out there and meet as many people as you can get their information, and then figure out a way that you can stay in contact with them, and provide value to them. And so that whenever they eventually are ready, but it was this adding people to your database, I’m like, it’s kind of like I call it the push ups of real estate when you’re new, like nobody really wants to do push ups. But it’s a good idea if you want to, like build strength. And you can do it anywhere. That’s kind of how I think about like building your business when he first starts, like just meet as many people as you can get their information, and then start to figure out how do I stay in, you know, in communication and community with them. And that actually leads me to this other thing I want to mention, or talk about, which I think really fits into community. Is this, the podcasts that you do, tell us why you started doing it, and how it’s sort of gone for you.
Brittany Ranew 16:55 Yeah, so I, well, I will say that kind of the initial thought came from Tom Ferry, which a lot of us agents listen to Tom Ferry. So, you know, he’s always been so big on being video first and being like, what he would call a digital mayor of your community. And I got inspired by that. It’s like, Oh, that’d be so fun. Like, I love small business. I love shopping local. Maybe I can be the digital mayor of St. Pete. And then I was like, oh, gosh, I don’t know how like, it wasn’t doing video consistently at that time. So I was like, I don’t know how to do this. This was probably in about 2019. I would say I was really mulling this over. I was like, I don’t know how to have videos and like, go into a shop. And I was thinking like, news anchor, you know, it was just kind of that’s what I was coming to mind. So I tabled it because I felt like a stuck. I don’t know what to do with this. And I, I then started thinking about podcasts. And I was like, oh, wait a second, a podcast is way easier to start. Because it’s just audio, I don’t have to worry about the video. I can just get a business owner on the other side of the mic and ask them questions. And it’s actually inexpensive to start up too with like the hosting platforms. So then I was like, okay, cool. I’ll work on that. Well, I didn’t get into it right away. It was like an idea. I had that kind of set there for a couple more months. And I started 2020 And I was I’ve been working with a business coach since the fall of 2019. So when we started 2020. And I was sharing these goals, he was like, Okay, what are we gonna do for you that you got to get this started, like you’ve been holding on to this for too long. So I’m slowly but surely kind of putting these thoughts together to make a plan to launch the podcast and then COVID happen. So I was like, oh, in our whole worlds change. So then I thought this is definitely a time that people need to be reminded about small business. Yeah, buy local. Yeah, it’s I think it motivated me to, okay, we got to launch this podcast like this is needed, we’re doing this. So that’s kind of how it was born. So
D.J. Paris 19:08 and I and so I love this idea because you interview local artisans, local retailers, you know, just local people in the community who are important to St. Pete And and the surrounding areas. And I love this because just the marketing the marketer, part of me just thinks this is such a brilliant strategy because what you’re what you’re doing is what a lot of these like shop owners are constantly receiving communication from ad agencies, people who want to sell them advertising people that want to say, hey, we we’d like to put you on a billboard or radio ad or whatever. And that’s going to obviously cost money. Whereas you’re basically contacting these retailers saying, hey, I really love your store. I like what you do. I would love to just have a chat with you on my show and kind of introduce you to my audience. And you’re basically giving them free marketing and free advertising and also So obviously, that’s a super generous thing to do. And it’s it’s part of you supporting your local community. Also, you’re probably very rarely going to get a Nam not interested. Because there’s no real downside, right. And then also, when you are sharing these podcasts, you’re I’m sure you’re tagging in the businesses or the business owners, like, Hey, by the way, if you want to promote this to your followers, or your you know, your shoppers, it’s really a brilliant strategy all the way around. I’m curious, not that you’re doing it to get business, you’re doing it to really support these local, these local merchants and, and their services, which I think is ultra noble. And I love that. I’m just curious, has it also resulted in people knowing you more in the community? And has that actually resulted in business?
Brittany Ranew 20:48 Yeah, so it’s kind of like, I think there’s like a two fold answer to that. Because number one, it plays back into the overall brand strategy, you know, I’m been working very hard at trying to build an online presence and build my personal brand. So it it, you know, rolls back into that in a really nice, nice way. So I get, I’ll get referrals from agents across the country, and only because they found me online and saw my online friends. Oh, that’s interesting. Okay, so so there’s that piece to it. But then from like, a very literal sense, the relationships that I’m making from the people I have on my podcast. You know, it wasn’t something that happened right away, because like I said, this is my fourth year, so that, you know, whenever you’re building relationships, it takes time to build that trust, know, like, and trust factor in so this past year, 2022, I will say, I had to say two transactions that I can directly link back from guests that I had on my podcast. So like, a very direct, like, you know, this is the lead source that generated
D.J. Paris 22:00 Hey, listen to your show. I’m reaching out to you that kind of thing. Yeah.
Brittany Ranew 22:04 Yeah, like, actually, those were get two guests that I had on my podcast. So then the indirect part of it from, you know, people that have reached out to me that have been listening to the podcast, you know, more just more relationships. I mean, the more conversations you have, the better chance you have for, you know, bringing, bringing in those transactions. So, yeah,
D.J. Paris 22:25 were any other realtors having a similar type of show another podcast that you were competing enough that I don’t always think podcasts compete with each other? But were you kind of the first person to do that in the St. Pete area? That’s a real estate agent?
Brittany Ranew 22:39 I think so. I mean, I researched it to a degree and I really didn’t see anything like that online. So I believe so. I mean, there’s definitely some other agents that do really good video content in our area. But from the podcast perspective, I’m, I guess I was a pioneer in that.
D.J. Paris 23:02 I mean, it’s, it’s really funny, because so my sister lives in Tampa in a neighborhood, or I don’t know if it’s a neighborhood, but an area called Pomocy. I’m sure you’re familiar. And I was thinking about this like, well, there’s probably Tampa agents that already have Tampa podcast, and I’m sure that’s true. It’s a much bigger area. But is there a policy a podcast? I don’t know. Probably not. And it’s like that would be you could even just be a policy, a podcast host. If someone’s listening, and I guarantee my sister who lives there would would listen because she’s like, I want to know what’s going on in policy. So you can get hyper specific, it doesn’t have to have, you know, 10s of 1000s of followers on every episode, if you’re still meeting the needs of whatever the community is. And I think it’s brilliant that you did that. I just love that.
Brittany Ranew 23:48 Well, and I’ll tell you, this literally just happened to me. So a couple months ago, we were at a at a event and I had someone come up to me. And she was like, You don’t know me, but I’m so and so. And I’ve been following your podcast for a couple of years. And I just love you know, it was just like, she was so excited to meet me. And I was like, oh, okay, wow. So that was such a cool moment to have like a fan in a sense. And anyway, so she’s a lender, and she had recently moved to St. Pete So that was kind of her like connection. And you know, we’re able to continue talking and we recently got together for coffee and just to hear her her say we me and my husband, listen to your podcast, and we have a date, like a date day once a week that we always try to pick places that you have on your podcast and go to so like my podcast is helping them find like a new spot to show. So just stuff like that. I’m like, Oh my God, that’s so freakin cool.
D.J. Paris 24:49 It is it’s like it even if it never resulted in actual business. It’s it’s just a good feeling of like I am providing for the community. I’m supporting the community. I’m doing it because I love live and I love and, you know, I love and I live in this community. So whether or not it ever actually translates into business, I, you know, it’s a grind. Of course, doing podcasts are not easy. But it just hearing one person say, you know, I like your show I listened to that is, is really, really heartwarming. And so I always say it’s kind of one of those things that even if it doesn’t generate, like this huge spike in production for someone, boy, you’ll get a lot of just good feelings, knowing that you’re helping the community.
Brittany Ranew 25:34 Yeah, and you got to do stuff that fills you up, you know, don’t fill ourselves up, we’re not going to be able to be the best for our clients. So
D.J. Paris 25:43 I could not agree with you more. Okay, I want to talk, let’s talk mindset. And there’s something very specific about mindset that we talked about mindset a lot on the show, and a lot of our guests, you know, reference it, and I almost don’t like the word anymore, because I feel like it’s just one of those words that gets used very, very often, without any real clear awareness of like, what does that actually mean? But I you have a particularly like, interesting story about how your minds how you identified a mindset issue, through your coaching, I’m guessing through Tom, the Tom Ferry coaching. But tell us a little bit about what was the mindset that was stopping you? And then how did you identify it? How did you first become aware of it, where you’re like, Oh, I’m doing this thing to myself? And then how did you overcome it?
Brittany Ranew 26:28 Yeah, I kind of fell into coaching it was, which I, you know, I don’t believe in coincidences. So I feel like God was like, Here, here’s your answer. So I, I have I’ve had a history of anxiety. And so when we moved here, that was a life trigger. And I was having a
D.J. Paris 26:48 that’s tough for people with anxiety moving to a new a new city where they know nobody that is brutal.
Brittany Ranew 26:55 I mean, you know, like I said, never lived anywhere else, because I went to school in mobiele. So, yeah, um, so yeah, so I started, you know, well, I went to therapy to help myself, you know, as I make the transition, which I highly recommend therapy. But getting back into real estate, you know, as I said, I started selling again in 2017. And I was just kind of struggling with, I couldn’t get any momentum, like, I just couldn’t get that traction and get over the hump of, like, I know, I can be a top producing agent, like I see it. I see that version of myself, but I can’t figure out how to get there. And I met a local coach through our chamber, because I’m really involved with the St. Pete chamber, and I met him just by happenstance. And he started probing and asking questions, and he made an offer, he was like, I feel like you could really benefit from coaching, would you be interested, and we, and that’s how we got started. And he helped me figure out that I was my own obstacle, like, it was all coming back. To me, it was limiting, limiting beliefs that I have. For myself, I couldn’t let go of that story of, well, I haven’t had much success before. So that’s just gonna be what it is. It’s just those like things that you get on repeat in your mind. I had a fixed I had a fixed mindset, I didn’t have
D.J. Paris 28:17 that sort of, sort of hobble somebody, when they’re, it’s like, I’ve always heard, like, whatever container you think your life fits in, is you’ll fill up that container, but you won’t go beyond it. And so same sort of thing with like, however long a task takes whatever amount of time you set for it, you’ll eventually just go to that whatever amount of time. So this idea of, of not even acknowledging or understanding that there’s this sort of box that’s limiting because, you know, there’s anxiety, there’s fear, there’s, there’s real feelings that are are coming up that are based in reality. It’s not like some people have anxiety that’s not based in reality, but yours obviously, is based in reality. So there’s a lot of reason to, to take that anxiety on because you’re like, No, this is a real thing that’s happening. How did you how did you start to move past that?
Brittany Ranew 29:06 You know, it’s just, it’s really tough work. It takes a lot of time to reprogram your brain. And you know what, like, with anything, you have to be consistent, and I think some people kind of, they’re like, Okay, cool, I’m gonna meditate and do some affirmations but then they don’t stick with it. It’s like you’re never gonna see the results if you don’t do it consistently. So through through my coach and also, I’ve been to ninja selling so I’ve done the ninja selling installation, which mindsets are really big part of what they teach. So learning some of those practices I would say from a daily basis really helped me so that morning morning routine of writing and reading affirmation, positive affirmations, meditation, you know, it’s really just it sounds it sounds so simple, but it’s not. But it’s like this, the basic steps that if you keep doing them over and over again, you will reprogram your brain because that’s how our brains work. You know, our non conscious brain can’t take a joke. So it’s going to whatever you feed it, it’s going to feed back to you. So if you keep feeding it positive stuff, eventually it starts to, you know, reprogram,
D.J. Paris 30:21 agreed, and there’s, most of our programming comes from mom and dad, when we were little, and a lot of it is just not helpful anymore. But it’s so deeply ingrained. And I think that’s where good therapy can kind of say, Okay, I see that you are running this old pattern that doesn’t really make sense anymore. Based on your family history. This makes perfect sense to a therapist, but to an individual, they might go God, how do I keep sabotaging? Or why am I keep? Why do I think I’m worthless? Or why do I think I can’t make it? Well, that’s because somehow you pick that up as a child from something or somewhere or whatever. And it just is unresolved, and it and it manifests and things like anxiety, and you know, certain types of behavior. I didn’t know I was an anxious, I mean, this is so funny, because everyone in my life knows me as an anxious person. I didn’t know that I’ve been in therapy for a million years, I just in the last two or three years have identified oh my gosh, I’m a really an anxious person. And I’ve had to learn how to self soothe and how to cope with anxiety and write it out and, and know that it’s not, it feels real. And it’s, it’s a real thing that’s happening to me, but it doesn’t mean that it’s actually happening in real life. Coming in, you know, so anyway, the point is, is that journey is a really important journey, I think, to go on, because you probably most people probably aren’t that aware of their limiting mindsets, or their limiting beliefs or some of these things. And, boy, if you can get out of your own way, life just gets a lot easier.
Brittany Ranew 31:53 Yeah, it, I always think about that, quote, Jim Rohn quote about, you know, your level of success rarely exceed your, you know, level of personal development or something like that. I’m not saying No, exactly. But that’s kind of what I realized was my spinning time on myself, then I was, you know, like I said, reprogramming, and it’s just, it’s that domino effect that snowball, it just starts to, you know, over time, work its way through, and it becomes like this repeatable consistent thing. And it’s almost like working a muscle, you know, you get that muscle memory and you get, it just becomes more natural to, instead of staying in the negative, you automatically flip to the positive. So it just, it just takes that repetition over and over and over again.
D.J. Paris 32:48 Yeah, it takes a tremendous dedication and a commitment. And a lot of you like you said, I, I consider it harder than digging ditches. But it’s it really is. I mean, it’s it takes a turn, and it’s exhausting to do. That being said, it’s really the most important work anybody can do. You know, take care of your feet, you take care of you’re not you I’m saying in general, we we think we want to take care of our physical health, I’m sure you do that as well. But you know, we don’t always think Well, I am going to the gym three times a week, what am I doing? For my mind? What am I actually doing to sort of explore and, and, you know, look, nobody’s mom and dad were perfect. So there are lots of wounds that every single person on this planet has, and you can start to identify and go into, and there’s, you know, all sorts of professionals that can help you sort of navigate those waters. But I’m glad you’re talking about it. I think that’s really, really important. And I every single person on our podcast deals with a some sort of level of anxiety, especially when they’re new to the business or they’re meeting you know, maybe they’re, they’ve never done a million dollar sale and they have their first listing presentation with, you know, somebody that seems like it’s Oh, I don’t think they’re gonna choose me. There’s a lot of that, that is totally normal. Totally. Okay. And there’s, there’s solutions that help through that. And then once you get through it, you realize, oh, that didn’t swallow me up. It didn’t kill me. Oh, I might actually be able to tolerate some of these. These these challenges. Let, I would love to talk about so you talked about the morning. And I know that Realtors there’s a book Miracle Morning that like every realtor loves yes, you’re a fan as well. How al Ron’s book, I have yet to meet anyone who was like, yeah, that just doesn’t work. So I’m going to assume on the 90,000 people that have told me about this book, and I’ve read it as well. That it is a really good idea. Can you talk a little bit about how you structure your mornings you talked about meditation, journaling, things like that, you know, are you still doing those things?
Brittany Ranew 34:48 Yeah, so with the ninja selling installation, it did. It taught me a lot about starting the day with gratitude. So gratitudes and affirmation was kind of my first, you know, way into having a morning group tene and I saw immediate results with that. Because again, you’re getting yourself out of a negative state by waking up watching the news or being on social media, but staying in a positive state. And then I would say in the past year, I learned about Hal Elrod and the Miracle Morning. And that took it to a whole nother level for me. So I’ve been doing the Miracle Morning for, you know, several, several months. And like there’s an app. So it’s, it’s easy to stay on top of, and, you know, just combining like a commitment to the gratitudes and affirmation, which was already important to me. But the silence which, you know, having like a daily devotional, reading my Bible praying, that’s another really big aspect for me, and the reading a book, you know, which is usually a personal, something personal development wise, and exercise. So it’s like, putting all that stuff together, was definitely took that to another level for me. So,
D.J. Paris 35:58 yeah, I think we’re talking about process, right? So we have now a process that you can follow each morning, it’s not wake up, and what do I feel like doing as much as before I start my day, I have these things that really help ground me, center me, and, you know, look, people’s look, all of our lives are chaotic, right? We have, we have things going on in our personal lives, we have things bouncing around in our heads, you know, with spouses, children, other financial situations, you know, all sorts of conflict and challenge. And those are things that just that’s just what happens, that’s just part of life. And those things can bounce around in my head at least, and I can wake up. And I, if I’m not intentional about what I’m focused going to focus on today, those anxieties about all of those things that are uncomfortable or scary to me really take the forefront and jump in front and kind of run the show and color, the way that I approach the rest of the day. So having this process in the morning that says it’s not that I’m avoiding those things, I’m going to take care of those things I’m going to you know, I’m not, I’m not being Pollyanna. But I’m also by the way, even though I don’t feel like doing it, right now, I’m going to journal or I’m going to meditate, or I’m going to pray or read or whatever it might be to help sort of you realize, you know, life has all sorts of ups and downs, and you, you can structure some some self care in that in that morning, and then you can tackle the anxiety and stuff later. So I just think that is such a brilliant strategy. So I applaud you for I need to start doing the Miracle Morning, I need to start doing it.
Brittany Ranew 37:38 It’s wonderful. And it helped me get get up earlier, because that was I struggled with that just like I don’t have kids. So I didn’t, you know, didn’t have that motivator to get up earlier with kids. Sure, I would find myself you know, sleeping in too long, just not like sleeping in really late, but just to where you feel like you’re starting the day behind, you know. And so that was, you know, getting up earlier than I had been, you know, like 645, which is to be able to get up way earlier than that. But for me, 645 was like, Alright, this is a milestone, I’m gonna do this. So that’s been that’s been great, because it’s just giving me time back, you know, I’m getting, getting my day setup, like you’re saying being intentional. And I think it does help. I think when you get your get your day started like that, it just helps the whole rest of the day, go way better and be able to tackle as they come comes your way.
D.J. Paris 38:31 I could not agree more. I told my girlfriend if she ever sees me or hears me and she hears me do this a lot. Go into like a negative rant where I’m like really fired up about something. If I’m going on too long, like it’s one thing to have an expression of anger or whatever or be upset about something that’s perfectly okay. I’m not here to tell people, they can’t have negative feelings. Because of course, you should have negative feelings that are really important. But if you’re if you if I said to my girlfriend, sometimes I get swallowed up a little bit in them. And I don’t realize that I’m really like, Okay, I’ve been going on for 15 minutes about something that’s like, just not that important. So I said, If you catch me doing that, can you just put your finger up in the air, and that’ll be my, my, my cue to stop what I’m saying. And immediately say, as bad as things seem right now, I got to list three things that are going really well in my life. You know, and it doesn’t mean the other thing that’s not going well is gone. It just means I’m trying to balance it and realize it’s not all bad. And it’s not all good. It’s kind of in the middle and I can acknowledge both things, but I have to get out of that repetition because I grew up, you know, in, in, you know, my family, lovely, amazing people, but they were more critical than you know, I would have preferred so I’m just kind of used to being super critical. So I have to have these little interruptions that go Hey, okay, you can be critical in a minute. But for now, let’s at least think about some things that are out actually going really well. So those are,
Brittany Ranew 40:02 you’re giving power to I mean, you’re right, you’re giving power to that, that negative negativity. And then it just becomes this monster, he’ll like, take takes over
D.J. Paris 40:14 can Yeah, it’s really awesome to be able to acknowledge something without giving it power. Like you’re like, No, I know you’re still there. And I know that still a problem. And I know we’ll we’ll figure out a solution, but it’s not going to swallow me up, it’s not going to take over my day, and it’s not going to ruin my day, I’m going to try to, you know, you know, try to keep persevere in the face of, of any sort of obstacle. And, and that’s where a good coach can come in, right? Like a therapist, a coach, somebody who can say, hey, I noticed you’re not doing this thing that would be really helpful for you what’s going on? What’s stopping you? Well, I don’t want to do it. Okay. And then you can start from there, you know, and kind of identify what’s what’s been what’s been missing. So I love all of this. I think this is so well said a quick. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about 2023. Because so I have a little bugaboo in the industry, because anyone who’s paying attention, not every market is this way, but most markets in the country, I just want to be really honest about it. I think this is going to be a tough year for realtors, it just as rates are high inventories low, let’s just, you know, for a lot of us, it’s it’s going to be a more difficult year than it was a year and a half ago. I think most of us would agree that’s a reasonable statement. It doesn’t mean it can’t be a great year, it’s just going to be a tough year. At least I think so. I am curious, what are you doing this year, to stay on top of it to stay active? Just you know, the markets shifted? And it’s changed? What are you doing to sort of stay on top of things so that you’re not like, again, just taking in all this? Oh, it’s gonna be a brutal year, and then sort of letting that not let you, you know, sort of take action?
Brittany Ranew 41:57 Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest things that I’ve learned last couple years is what what am I in control of, versus what am I not in control of? And we’re always in control,
D.J. Paris 42:07 or St. Francis, speaking back to prayers. Yeah.
Brittany Ranew 42:11 So we’re, we’re always in control of our thoughts and our actions. And what I fall back to, whenever I started to feel some of that negativity, like when we hear, okay, hey, it’s gonna be a tougher to Premier, you’re going to need to double down and do more to get kind of the same same results, is just getting an action. All right, I’m gonna get super focused on what I need to be doing. And I’m going to double down on which for me, I’m just focused focus on having more conversations. While that’s kind of my you know, that’s my focus for this year, and I always break things down into like, months and quarters. So because, again, want to be like super intentional and focused, and I don’t want to have like this overarching goal for the year and then not know what to do, I want to like strategize and make that actionable. So, you know, just having, having more conversations getting in front of people. And I think that also goes back to that brand, brand strategy. You know, I think some people when they hear negative news about the market, they just kind of stick their head in the sand, and then they stop doing things. And I choose to have an abundant mindset, I mean, so I’m going to keep moving forward, and I’m going to keep, you know, pursuing my marketing channels, I’m gonna have my podcasts gonna make videos, videos is a big part of that strategy for me this year, so I’m gonna keep putting myself out there. And there’s a there’s always a market and every market, there’s market, you know, like, there’s always people that are out there that have to buy and sell, it’s, it’s life, people move, you know, gotta live somewhere, location, people move, you know, obviously, marriages and unfortunately, negative things like divorce and, and people have passed away. So, you know, it just can’t stick your head in the sand, you got to get out there and take action. And it’s that it’s that snowball effect. Once you get that momentum, once you get going, it starts to, you know, roll roll faster and faster. So
D.J. Paris 44:13 and yeah, and I’ll give everyone who’s listening a couple of predictions that I pretty sure are gonna come true. That will make you feel a little better about this year number one, lots of agents are leaving will lead the industry. I know this because we own a holding company, which is for agents who are leaving the industry. And and we had within the last year, we’ve added 250 new agents to the whole, I mean, used to have 500 agents in it. And now it has almost 800 agents. And that’s just been within the last year and as much as that pains me to see people leaving the industry for people that are committed and still working in the business and on the business. It’s actually a really good thing for everyone who stays in because you can pick up some market share. Of course, lots of people will I have realtors that are still in the business that they, you know, there’s a lot of people that want to be up for grabs. And so if you can double down, especially and I love that you broke it down into the most sort of basic activity for you, which is probably the most important activity for all realtors, like, I would imagine, is having conversations. So do you have like a certain goal, you talked about having, you know, a certain amount per quarter or per month? Do you also have like a per day goals, like I really want to have X number of conversations per day?
Brittany Ranew 45:29 Yeah, I kind of have it by week. And really, I’ve always had that in the back of my head. But this year, I was like, I’m gonna track this, like, I have whiteboards in my office. And so I put up on the whiteboard, like, you know, these are the number of buyer and buyer and seller, like, you know, buyer consultation, seller listing consultation appointments that I want to have for this year. And then these are the amount of conversations that I want to have per week. So I’m like, just, you know, checking those off on the board, and for each week. So I you know, what gets measured gets managed. So it’s like, just having that in front of me. And a really visual way, I think it’s gonna help because I just like I said, it’s kind of known that’s there. And that’s a metric, but I’ve never really tracked it. So that’s, I want to
D.J. Paris 46:18 dive just a little deeper into your conversations, because I know, whenever we would we’ve ever we’ve had guests on the show, and they talk about conversations, I’ve always failed to ask this question. When you say conversation, what specifically are what what defines a conversation in your mind? Since you are measuring it?
Brittany Ranew 46:37 Yeah, I mean, to me, it’s just a meaningful conversation. So whether that’s me calling a client, a past client, and I have to leave a voicemail, because it didn’t answer, it still counts, because, you know, touching them, and it’s just having a meaningful conversation. So that or if I go to a networking event, I’m getting like 10 conversations at one time, you know, for the whole evening.
D.J. Paris 47:00 So it I’m sorry to jump in, does it have to be a real estate conversation? Or could it be anything related to just life in general,
Brittany Ranew 47:08 just having, you know, talking to someone like you care, they’re a real person, you know, hey, what’s, what’s going on with you? Do you have any vacation plans this year? Oh, okay. Your your daughter’s graduating, like just diving into life with people, because that’s how you build that rapport. I mean, in real estate always comes up at some point, because people love to talk about real estate, so you don’t have to worry about bringing up come up. Yeah. So just being a human, I think that’s what it comes down
D.J. Paris 47:41 to. But is it but isn’t that the best news of all that that is, all you have to do is show interest in someone demonstrate that you care about them? And you should, obviously, you should only do it authentically. If you do it authentically, it’s not going to work. But but it doesn’t have to be it doesn’t have to be this pressure of like, well, I know everything about the St. Petersburg real estate market. And I know every fact and figure, you know, maybe you do. But you know most agents don’t feel that way about their you know, the area they work and maybe they are like, Oh, if I talk about him, I might not have an answer for you. You don’t have to talk about real estate, right? Like you should know enough to be able to have a conversation that’s to keep to keep that going. But you can also, you know, I always love social media, I think is particularly good for this. Because if you see somebody who’s gone on vacation, you know, instead of just being the realtor that’s like, I just listed this home and I just sold this home and look at how cool I am. I personally that’s that’s that’s that doesn’t speak to me that sort of advertising. And I’m not putting people down. I’m sort of sounded like I was putting agents down who do that i really i that that is not what my intention is. And I think you should absolutely brag about your accomplishments. I think that’s an okay thing. But I like the idea of social media to go the other way where you could be like, Oh, I saw you just went on this vacation. Tell me about it.
Brittany Ranew 48:59 Yep. And people love that. Because then they course Oh, you care you actually paid attention. You know, people always want like, people want to talk about themselves, you know, they want to know that you’re interested. I mean, that’s how we work. So just showing interest in people and to your point of saying, like, do it authentically. I mean, that’s a huge part of it. And I just, it goes back to building a brand. It’s like, just be yourself. Like, you gotta be yourself. You can’t be afraid to be yourself. Because if you put yourself out there authentically, you’re going to Your vibe attracts your tribe, you’re gonna get people back, that are like minded like you. So I agreed,
D.J. Paris 49:39 and you’re right, there’s enough business for everybody. Even if agents aren’t exiting the industry this year, which they will be, but even if everyone was flooding into the market this year, and it was going to be twice as many agents. You know, people can still have incredibly successful years but I think this is the year of action. I think action will overcome on some of these, you know, again, to quote the prayer of St. Francis like things we can’t control, market conditions, etc. Those are things outside of our control. But what we can control is our effort and our action. And all all we really ever have to do as real estate agents is get people to know like, and trust us. That’s not an easy thing to do. But that is your goal. If you can, if people know like and trust you, they will choose you as their agent. Or they’re going to choose somebody they know like and trust and you want to be on that shortlist. So I think this is is just amazing. And so for everyone who’s listening, I want you to check out Brittany’s podcast. And if you’re like, Well, I don’t live in St. Pete, I don’t really care about the, you know, restaurants in St. Pete, that’s not the reason I want you to check it out. I want you to check it out to see what she’s doing and how she’s affecting her community. And why that might be something that you may want to consider for your local community. It is a brilliant strategy. This my podcast was based out of a very similar principle, which is I just want to provide value to other agents by talking to top agents like Britney, that was five years ago, I never I wasn’t sure if anyone would listen. And here we are now all these episodes later. And thankfully, we have incredible listeners and people who are really, really appreciative of what we do. And that’s not to put a feather in my cap. But it I will, what I will tell you is it is it has helped me in my business of recruiting agents. And I don’t use this to recruit agents. But obviously, we have almost 800 agents in our company here and a lot of them come over because they listen to our show. So yes, you will likely see a benefit to your business down the road. But boy, you’re going to help the community along the way. So check out Brittany’s podcast. Also, you know a lot of people retire to Florida why because state taxes are really really impressive. A lot of people move to Florida at some point in their in their lives. I’m in Illinois, so we have a lot of people who spend their like my parents, they spend basically their winters there now, and will probably eventually move moved down there for those tax benefits as well. So a lot of people move to Florida. And you probably know people in your sphere that are also moving. And you can connect with Brittany because you can say not only do I have a great Realtor in St. Louis, she actually hosts like this great podcast, where she’s like super connected to the whole community. She knows all the best areas, the best places to go and visit and she would be a great resource. So this could be a great referral source for you. So if you have clients that are considering making that transition, Brittany, what’s the best way an agent should reach out to you?
Brittany Ranew 52:47 Um, I would say shoot me an email if you’re an agent that will see it faster. So that’s Brittany dot renew at Premier ser.com. So that’s premier ser SAR short for sup dummies International Realty. Yeah, shoot me an email, follow me on Instagram, you know, send me a DM, any, any, any way. I would love, love to connect.
D.J. Paris 53:11 Yeah, and I just think I always love this idea of when you make a referral, you really want to know that the other person is going to take great care of the client. And you know, with the fact that you’re so integrated with the St. Pete community with, you know, different boards and just also with your podcast, I would be very comfortable without ever knowing how you’ve treated a client. I would be comfortable sending a client to you because I’m like, Oh, she’s really dialed in. She knows stuff. And she’s an important person in that community. Whether Brittany, whether you think you are or not, you know, I know that you are so so guys, this is how you can build you can build this exact same brand for yourself in your local community. And you can use things like podcasts video doesn’t have to be a podcast, you could do just video stuff on Facebook, but whatever you want to do be of service to your community. And, and you will find that over time people really really appreciate it. And you know, more business so if you have somebody that’s looking to move to Florida, Southern you know or Tampa, St. Pete Edgewater or Clearwater, rather, you know, any anywhere around that area. Definitely reach out to Brittany. And if she can’t help, she’ll know who to send you to. But she would be the first place that I would go. So everybody visit her website, you can find all things Brittany at Brittany renew.com. Again, that’s b r i t TANYRANEW. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. also linked to her Instagram and social which is Brittany and renew Brittany renew realtor. And yeah, guys, check out what she’s doing. You can do this too. So, Brittany, on behalf of our audience, I want to thank you for your time you were an amazing guest had a lot of fun with you. And think I’m really grateful that you came on. So on behalf of everyone we say thank you to Brittany. And on behalf of Brittany and myself want to thank the audience for continuing to listen, support our sponsors, support our guests. And also please, the best way you can help us grow is just tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that is this is Look, guys, it’s a tough year 2023. I’d love to tell you it isn’t, but I think it is. So people need help this year. Let’s send them a link to our podcast. Obviously, it’s complimentary. We just want to get in front of as many ears or eyes as possible. And so we would appreciate that. So just send anyone you know, maybe you have somebody in your office that’s being feeling a little down right now, this would be a great opportunity to send them a link to this episode, haven’t send send them over to keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from a browser there. Or if they’re a podcast listener, just search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button, we would appreciate it. And also support our sponsors are the reason we can do our show. So keep check out their goods and services and buy them all right, Brittany, thank you so much. It was a pleasure chatting with you and I am going to come and see you because I go down to that area three to four times a week. So our three to four times a week three to four times a year. And I go to St Pete every almost every time I go down there so I will definitely come by and say hi in person, I can take you to all the cool spots. So I apparently you can Yeah, I am excited for that. So anyway, Brittany, thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next episode.
Communication, Cooperation, & Empathy • Matt Kirkkegaard
Feb 01, 2023
Matt Kirkkegaard with Movement Property Group in Nashville talks about the transition from his career as a musician to real estate business. Matt talks about and explains his strategies and tools he uses as a real estate agent that has brought him success. Matt also discusses why he believes communication, cooperation and empathy are very important tools in building relationship with the clients. Last, Matt discusses a the motto “fail big to win big” and its importance.
D.J. Paris 0:00 from living in his car to build a multi million dollar real estate team, how did he do it? We’re gonna find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcasts made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Matt Kirkegaard. But before we get to Matt, just a couple of quick reminders one, the best way that you can help us grow is simply by telling a friend this is going to be a tough year 2023 In real estate right read what the economists are writing what we know other agents are experiencing out there. This is a tricky year. Let’s help our fellow Realtors send them a link to this episode and all of our episodes. They can be streamed right at our website, keeping it real pod.com And also if you are not yet a subscriber to our podcast, whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on whether it’s Apple podcasts, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, etc. Hit that subscribe button and leave us a review we would really greatly appreciate it. Alright guys, let’s get right to it my conversation with Matt Kirkegaard.
Today on the show, we have Matt Kirkegaard moved to property grid in Nashville. Let me tell you more about Matt. Now Matt Kirkegaard has been a Nashville resident since 2008. As a professional musician, he has lived and worked in every area of Nashville and the surrounding areas. He has a passion for Nashville and a passion for people. Matt and his team bring a deep level of simplicity and honesty to the buying process. They strive to make the process of buying a home an exciting one. Matt also started a program called Lift Up where 10% of his company’s profits go to the lift up Fund, which provides mortgage and rent relief for struggling families and individuals. To learn more about Matt and his company movement Property Group, please visit movement property group.com. And also follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok. Just search for movement Property Group, we will have links to those social platforms in the show notes. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Kirkkegaard 3:41 Hey, thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 3:43 Yeah, super excited to to chat. But right, right before we were going live, I was telling Matt, the last time I was in Nashville was for the Eclipse. And I was like, Oh, were you there and you were in Puerto Rico and I was saying it was really a cool thing because I don’t know that most people knew this I certainly didn’t was that because we were at Nashville which was considered like a perfect latitude longitude, no point to be able to see the Eclipse. We we were able to safely take our glasses off and stare directly at the Eclipse only for a minute or so. But there because we were at that that one space, we were actually able to see it without glasses. And it really was I honestly I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Aside from being in beautiful Nashville which is also just such a dream place to I always fantasize if I was going to move Charleston or Nashville. Anyway, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. Thanks for Thanks for coming on the show. And let’s actually I’d love to hear about how you got into real estate. I know you’re a musician, so and still a musician. So I’d love to hear about you know how you had you know the path you had through musicianship and also real estate and how you married the two.
Matt Kirkkegaard 4:57 Yeah, how long do we have I mean, flowers right? I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a kind of a crazy story I obviously as you said, I’m a musician I, I grew up musics kind of been my only most of my life, I started playing professionally I was nine. And so I’ve never known anything else. And so at school for music, I moved to Nashville for music. And, and for all intents and purposes, I really made it the music industry or started you know, kind of my my best selling music career and was on a good trajectory and moving forward really well and met a girl as all of these stories start married, said girl, and in our in our shortly after we got married, actually, we had a family member that basically stole a lot of money from us left us with a pretty intense amount of debt. And long story short, we lost our house, we were homeless for a year and a half and, and I say homeless, my wife’s corrected me many times on this, we weren’t fully homeless, we have lots of friends that offered up their couch or spot in their garage, or, you know, their driveway for our car or whatever. So we had, we had lots of lots of people who stepped in and took care of us during that season. But we were unable to we did not have our own space for a year and a half. And
D.J. Paris 6:09 you were still performing during that time.
Matt Kirkkegaard 6:11 I was yeah, some music was still the primary at that time, which, you know, I made Okay, money doing music, but not enough to recover loss like that. And this was, you know, pretty substantial. So we had, you know, an extraordinary hurdle to get over in order to even get us back to solvent and ground zero and pursuing a music career and a life as a musician of hard enough, let alone adding that to it, it just kind of became a non starter. And so I pivoted, a buddy of mine, at the time worked as a mortgage lender, he’s like, man, you should get your real estate license, and I’ll send you a deal once in a while and do the math and the money. As a musician, the money looks really great. And I was like, Man, I know a lot of people, if you are a musician, and you’ve made it as a professional musician in Nashville, Tennessee, you know how to network like nobody’s business. And so I know people and I’m relational. And I love diving into people in their stories. And so I found a buy or sell a house, I can help them with that. And that’s at least some money that I would not have had any other way. So I was of course, working about five days. And the way to do it really, yeah, just knock it out.
D.J. Paris 7:12 I always I always tell people who are taking their classes, I’m like, You’re gonna forget it anyway, you might as well forget it after the test. So do it as quick as possible.
Matt Kirkkegaard 7:19 There’s not a single thing in that class or in that education process that I’ve actually applied realistically in my career. And so anyway, sorry, State of Tennessee real estate exam, but it ended up just being something I could kind of blow through and then learn the practical side of it on the other side of it. But I just dove in. And again, I tell people all the time, you know, part of part of my success story is a factor when you don’t have another option. But for it to work, it has to work and you figure out how to make it work. And so I got very, very determined, very driven to figure out how to recover from this because the other side of this is, is that I really am passionate about music. And I knew music was where I needed to be in my career path. And, and I don’t have a long time to take my time recovering from this, I need to get to the other side of this and get back to music. And that really was my goal for the whole first part of my career. And then there’s been some shifts and some additions in there, which I’m sure we’ll get to but So ultimately, for me, it was out of necessity that this this kind of came up real estate was never on my on my purview. And it was just a mansion. And, and what’s amazing is, is I’m really grateful for that moment because real estate is such an incredible tool and vehicle as an agent, but also learning the investor side of it and how property ownership leads to wealth building and passive income. And there’s so many pieces of real estate that I never knew super countercultural in my from my world, my parents, you know, people that had given me financial advice up to that point in my mid 20s, I had heard very polar opposite advice from when I started being in the real estate industry watching investors who were making a lot of money. I started weighing those two things and realizing that there’s maybe another path here and a whole bunch of stuff that I didn’t know before that could help me become a little bit more financially solvent and still have the freedom and capacity to pursue music and do what I want to do there too. So anyway, that’s how my real estate career started and how it kind of developed there.
D.J. Paris 9:11 Wow. Well, there was lots I’d love to unpack some of that. So number one, I when you were talking about I know you’ve recovered since Otherwise, I wouldn’t make any joke at all, but I was like, well, at least it was a family member. Right? Sure. What if it can’t be family stealing? I don’t know. No. It’s awful, awful, awful.
Matt Kirkkegaard 9:32 It was it was really heartbreaking. And it was it was on top of a lot of other things. My wife and I there’s like the Barna statistics of the top 20 stressors and marriage experiences in a lifetime and we hit 18 of them our first year of our marriage. And so it really was just a hellish, hellish season for sure. And I can look back at that now and there are actually a lot of beautiful moments in there. My wife and I feel like we’ve been married for 40 years when in reality we’ve only been married. It’s probably
D.J. Paris 9:55 brought brought you both a lot closer together because you had to be Bantu Gather as a team and really, really figure life out when you were at this huge disadvantage. So in some ways it again, not that there’s that it’s a good thing. It’s not
Matt Kirkkegaard 10:08 the ideal. But the result of the less than ideal is that We clung to each other for survival, and we figured out how to move forward. And that doesn’t mean by any stretch that it’s been easy. And we’ve had an immense amount of hard in our marriage, I think they’re just too hard. Every everything worthwhile is hard. Yeah. However, through a lot of counseling, a lot of therapy, which we’re still going through, I need to proponent of therapy. We are recovering from the trauma and we are still married and still trying to fight for something we believe in. So, but I do think that that that early part of that definitely. It got us real real fast with each other got us real with ourselves real fast. And I figured out what it looks like to believe in yourself when honestly, no one else does, or no one else can, because there’s nothing to believe in at the moment in that way. So you just kind of just charge forward. And again, when you have to do it, you don’t have an option but to do it, you do it, you figure it out. You know,
D.J. Paris 11:05 it is it is like that. It’s that expression, what is it necessity is the mother of invention. In which is absolutely, it’s it’s it’s like it’s so interesting when, because people will call me a lot who are in the process of getting their real estate license. And they’ll ask that the biggest question, I think that people like me who are recruiters get from people who are entering the business is, well, I, I want a steady income. So I’m gonna stay part time for now. And what do you think about that? And I, it’s I always say, well, nobody can give you the right answer. I said, however, people will tell you that there’s no way to do it part time. And that full time is really the only way. And while in theory, I think that probably is the right approach for most people. I have seen people do it part time, but the people that do it part time because they want that steady income from their previous you know, their current job, I understand that I get that. But I think what you’re saying actually does so tend to bring out the best of somebody when you cut off the the the lifeline and you’re like, I’m just going to make this work. I’m going to figure it out like you guys were in that forced to situation. It does actually seem to get make people more resilient, and they’re able to sort of find resources, when they have that lifeline. It’s harder, I think to access that drive, when you’re trying to do two things at once. Not to say that you can’t be done. I’ve had people on the show, who started part time for years and was able to then eventually become a top producer. But I think that I think that extends the journey by doing
Matt Kirkkegaard 12:37 my argument therapy is that those years that they weren’t a top producer would have been erased had they just gone full in parallel to music per minute. I like I said, I’ve done music my whole life. So that really is my background. I went to school for music in Los Angeles. And my first day of freshman one on one class. This was a commercial commercial music business class, I was a commercial music major with a piano performance emphasis. And first day music business one on one, there’s 68 freshmen in this class. And the professor comes in kind of blows through the doors, doesn’t really even introduce himself just kind of sets his briefcase down and says how many of you guys have a plan B. And my immediate thing is, oh, well, this is where I get the lecture about how I need to have a plan B because music is so unstable, and you’ve got to have a backup plan, blah, blah, and I have a vendetta against Plan B’s. And that has never been me. So I didn’t raise my hand really ready to fight this fight. Like you don’t have a plan B when you’re a musician. And And oddly enough, 38 kids rose raise their hands with their Plan B’s and he dismissed him from the class. He said, If you have a plan B, you will end up taking it you probably should end up taking it and honestly you’re wasting my time and yours. So there’s the door. And obviously a little nicer than that. But at the end of the day, he he made a comment after you’re left, but the people make it music are the ones who will make it or die trying. And those are your options. There’s no option. There’s no other plan D because music is a notorious notoriously difficult career to enter into. And it’s going to take everything you’ve got to get there. I would say that’s true with entrepreneurship, with leadership with ownership with any company, any of that, that’s the reality is that if you are not willing to literally risk it all and put 100% of it on the line, then that doesn’t happen. And it’s not going to happen until you’re ready to do that. And so trying to weigh some sort of safety net of steady income or whatever, and then still trying to start something else. Even if you’re one of the lucky few who kind of balanced that and get to someplace where that happens. It’s going to take an extraordinarily it’s going to take a much longer period of time to get there than if you just are 100% You’re going to get it down here and move on, which is why entrepreneurs, clinical entrepreneurs, you know, Elon Musk’s and Steve Jobs and these big folks, clinically, they do something they started, they get it running and they move on to the next thing and firing people to run the thing for them. Because at the end of the day, the folks that are able to do that, or the ones that are just 100% they’re gonna establish something and then I can move on to the next thing. And so I think that I think for me getting thrown into that, already having my background in music my wife and I are both notorious risk takers as is so we’re not we have no risk aversion anyway. But there was just that was an easy transition for us to be right in that right in that mix and just go for it
D.J. Paris 15:07 reminds me speaking of like a musical metaphor that I think speaks to what you were just saying I was, I don’t remember who the musician was who did this. I don’t know if it was a violinist, and I don’t know if it’s at Pearlman or I don’t think it was him. But if somebody else some super famous violinist considered best in the world, you know, 2030 years ago, whatever. Anyway, so there was that somebody was at a party in New York, ran into this person, and was like, Oh my gosh, I’m such a huge fan. I wish I could play the violin like you are. I think it was violin and maybe it was cello, yo, yo, Ma, or something, whatever. It doesn’t matter, somebody super famous. And you know, I’m totally miss remembering who the person was, but doesn’t matter. Because what the person said was, so So the someone went up, I wish I could play like you. i Oh, no. He said, I give my life to play like you. That’s, that’s what the fans said. And he goes, No, you wouldn’t? Because he goes, Yeah, exactly. He goes, No, you wouldn’t, because I did. And he goes, You don’t, you aren’t. And he wasn’t trying to be mean, he was like, You don’t understand, like, this is all I do, this is what I do. And, you know, I, and he’s like, if you’re willing to give up everything else, then yes, you could probably play like me. And that’s, and that’s not to say that you can’t have balance in your life. Obviously, everyone, we should strive for that. And having, you know, personal and professional, you know, balance with with our activities. That being said, it is like one of those things, you dive in you, you cut off all other options. And even if it doesn’t work, I still think the lessons learned from putting in a solid, you know, attempt will then lead you to the next thing, even if that
Matt Kirkkegaard 16:43 failure is never an it shouldn’t be a negative. No, you’re it’s just simply a stepping stone, it’s a learned how not to do something when they go do it differently and do the game. And I think you said balanced. And I’m definitely a big proponent of balance, I am anti workaholic, for sure. And you have I think you need to really align your priorities and figure out what takes priority in your life. And of course, for me, my family is a huge priority my kids and and that there’s nothing real estate or music, actually, that will ever take precedence over them at the end of the day. But, but in that, I think that you, I still think that the things that you’re going to put yourself to, you’re going to find more success in those things, if you’re willing to put yourself 100% into those things and be fully present and fully there. And 100% committed. And taking the safe route almost always keeps you in the safe zone, which is which is some sort of a mediocre, not mediocre in a bad way. But mediocre mid level average zone, the people that get above that are the ones that are willing to kind of take risks to get there. So I think risk is the key component to this no matter where you are. And that doesn’t mean you don’t prioritize things that are important. It just means that you’re willing to jump into those things. Those other things that you do full, full force at first.
D.J. Paris 17:53 I think too, there’s there’s an aspect, I’m curious to your thoughts on this. There’s an aspect of getting comfortable with failure. And I don’t mean failure, obviously, we’re talking about feedback, you know, things that aren’t the ideal outcome that you’re shooting for, you know, just doesn’t work. I call it failure. But I don’t put a connotation on that that’s a bad thing. I just call it all that didn’t work. Well, it’s called did things that didn’t work, I’ll say that. It’s Oh, I think the most successful people I know are ones who are like, Well, that just like you said, it didn’t work, I learned from it, I’m going to try something else. And it’s a really simple idea. But it’s very difficult for a lot of us to sort of get comfortable with that discomfort of like, Oh, I really went for this and it didn’t turn out. So now I have like you were saying with your business and you’ve pivoted multiple times, and you’ve had to pivot obviously, with your living situation. And that’s, you know, that’s obviously a very, very serious and difficult stressful thing. This idea of being able to, to just be present for some of these, these feelings, and then go oh, okay, I’m sad that something didn’t work out. And, you know, the in the way that I wanted, but I’m going to really take it as feedback. And then and then just keep going forward and moving, I think is, you know, into a different direction, possibly. But I think it’s important to get comfortable with, you know, things not working out the way that you would anticipate them. And so that way, you can just, you know, I mean, probably 80% of the as a marketing guy 80% of the things I do don’t provide the results I’m really looking for. But yeah, it but I think
Matt Kirkkegaard 19:23 it’s a numbers game. And at the end of the day, I think you have I think I think far too many people give far too much time and emotional energy to a failed attempt. Yeah. I think that I think that those things come and oh, man, that stings. Okay, back to the drawing board. It should be a pretty quick roll off to keep going forward and move forward. And I think if you devote a lot of time and energy, you lose any momentum you did have and then you’re always starting from square one or you’re square zero. Whereas if you can roll that off, you can still capitalize on some of the momentum and keep moving with that death. And I think that becomes and again, it doesn’t matter who you are you ask anybody in the world who’s found any measure of success in any discipline, they’re gonna say that their path to that success, has 80% of the time been, oh, I failed. And I kept going. Like, that’s the that’s the point, right? It’s how it works. And again, I think part of me as a musician comes with that. And it’s such a natural thing because I was in front of juries, and on stage getting judged for my playing since I was nine. Right. So I, I there was always that, Oh, that wasn’t great. Here’s how you do it better. Oh, great. I’ll go learn to do better and blow you away next time. I mean, there’s just never, that was never a problem for me. I have a colleague, I won’t mention his name. I say colleague, because he’s, I’m not a huge, huge fan, per se of some of them. But all that to say he went bankrupt a millionaire three times, and to get to his multimillion dollar world right now. He was bankrupt three times back to millionaire and so he did the bankrupt to millionaire low three different times. And third, fourth time theoretically, got to millionaire and a stay there. But I appreciate that story. Because at the end of day, that’s just kind of what it is. It’s a numbers game, you’re gonna fail, it’s gonna happen fail big win big. Yeah, as an investor, I buy a lot of we do a lot of investments. And I challenge champion a lot of clients to be investors in the market. And I always say two out of 10 times, I’m going to break even maybe make a little bit of money. Five out of 10 times, I’m going to make some money, and three out of 10 times, I’m going to make a lot. And so then overall, in the course of 10 deals, I’ve made a lot of money. And I find that a lot of my investor friends tend to, I’m going to have one investor right now he’s been wanting to invest in Nashville for four years and hasn’t pulled the trigger on anything yet, because he’s too scared to lose any money. And I’m like, bro, you could have bought anything four years ago, and you would have made money didn’t matter, like so I think that at some point, you just gotta go for it. And man, you win some you lose some, but as long as you grow and learn and win more than you lose, yeah.
D.J. Paris 21:44 Well, that and I think there’s, there’s really even something deeper about the example you gave about the gentleman that that went broken millionaire, you know, three, three different times, is you could take all that person’s money away tomorrow, it’s already happened to him several times built, and he’s built it back up. And so he he is not worried about well, he’s probably worried about failure in the sense of he doesn’t want to lose what he’s built. But it’s happened to him. And he’s like, Oh, I know how to do this. I know how to build up from nothing, you know how to build from nothing, you have done that. And that is I mean, that in and of itself, it’s not something that can easily be taught, it sort of has to be lived and
Matt Kirkkegaard 22:22 exiled, or cut through it. It just says exactly that. But what it does is there’s a ton of freedom in that. And I wish I could communicate that freedom to someone that hasn’t experienced it, because that would allow them to launch without having to go through it. But I’m not totally sure that’s actually possible. But that is a huge part of where my story is, is the fact that I’m actually not scared of losing it all. Because I’ve been there done that. And so I lose it all. I’ll figure out how to figure it out again, like I just I’m not scared of that. Therefore, it allows me a lot of freedom to go take those risks and dive in headfirst into things that I believe in. And, you know, so I think that’s a huge part of it. I think you’re absolutely right. If you can get past the fear of losing it all and understand that there’s there’s freedom and safety in the fact that you’re gonna be able to keep going. There’s no, the worst case scenario is not really worst case right now. Like, it opens, it opens you up to keep going forward, you know?
D.J. Paris 23:09 Yeah, well, at least in this country, we have a lot of opportunity. And we’re very fortunate to live in a country where there is a lot of economic opportunity for people that absolutely are disadvantaged, not that it’s easy, of course it is not. And we should have empathy and compassion for people who don’t, you know, have have a lot of resources. But but the but it is amazing. I’m always so amazed at people who just do it. And you’re right, it seems I’ve had a lot of them on my show over the years, you’re not the first person that has told me they slept in their car. And when I mean, it’s, it’s like, they just go well, I just didn’t have another option so that I just put everything I had into it. And and it’s it’s that it’s that gift of desperation. It really is, in some ways a gift. Not a fun ride. But it is it is a ride that’ll get you there. If you can stay in the car the whole time.
Matt Kirkkegaard 23:57 I think it usually proves something about yourself to yourself. When you’re in that desperation place, and you get out of it, you look back at yourself, and you’re like, oh, I don’t I can do that. I’m not scared of my own ability to do that anymore. And I think people I just was having conversation with one of my one of my girls that works for me yesterday. And we were just talking about how sometimes she she second guess herself, she’s wildly skilled, she’s wildly talented, but she doesn’t necessarily believe in herself a lot. And that hinders her from really stepping into some of that and knowing her value as she presents herself. And I was like you’re wildly valuable. You have a ton of skills, you know, you’re you’re you have to believe in yourself. 100% Even if no one else does, and the gift of desperation. I like how you said that oftentimes give someone the ability to believe in themselves. Because you did no one else was going to do it at that point. Right? You have to believe in yourself to get there. So and
D.J. Paris 24:48 I want to I want to honor you for something that you just said because I think what you just said really highlights why you’re I would assume a very effective and a Boston mentor, because it’s something you just said that I wonder how many of our audience members have heard this from their managing broker? Where use you sat somebody down, you know, this, this woman who works with you, who is maybe not feeling super confident or struggling with, you know, her own capabilities? And you’re like, oh, no, you’re super talented. You’re super skilled, like you can do this. I don’t think that’s all that common. I think there’s a lot of training that goes on at brokerages. I mean, we we certainly do it at our brokerage, there’s lots of training, and there’s lots of here the skills, here are the activities, but to be put to put to actually say to somebody, you’re super talented, you have this, I actually think that’s pretty rare. And I want to honor you for saying that, because I bet that was exactly what she wanted or needed to hear in that moment. And for you to, to to give her what she needed. I think that is a very special thing that you say I think it’s very vulnerable to say that, and I think that probably meant a lot to her. And I would encourage anyone who’s listening, who is a managing broker who runs a team who has people, right now we know it’s a tough time, you know, rates are up, inventory is down, people, brokers or realtors are struggling. So this is a great time to make sure that people that are struggling on your team do know how valuable they are to you and how skilled they might just be. Maybe they’re feeling down, but you could maybe lift them and I think I just want to honor you for doing that. That’s that’s,
Matt Kirkkegaard 26:20 that seems so obvious to me. Maybe I suspect, I figured you would say right. But But that being said, I’ve watched a lot of team leaders bulldoze their their teams before and have the looming boss mentality and squish you down until you submit and do it. And I just think that that’s not ever working. I take leadership actually is the lowest position on my team. So we usually invert the whole org chart, and I’m at the bottom, and my team’s at the top. Because at the end of the day, they at the end of the day, I’m not going to be able to do what I do without them at this point. And I think one of the things you have to understand about people in general, and maybe this is where my this is probably where I’m I know that I’m a little bit unique in this aspect, because I get told that from my partners on a regular basis even but I I am wildly empathetic, I’m very much a relational person. So that’s what I do, I dive into relationship and I will I will give my I will give myself under the bus to ensure that someone else thrives. And in stepping in with people listening to their story, hearing where they’re at hearing who they are, I would challenge anybody trying to build a team or any brokers, managing individuals, leaders, anybody leading anybody else. Understand that the people and you not only are wildly talented and really skill set, actually really skilled, their skill set their talent, their value is something you could never bring to the table. At the end of the day, I have a skill set that I bring to the table that’s very valuable. I don’t doubt that at all. However, the other people that I work with have a skill set that they bring to the table that I do not have. And I need to know that they do something better than me, and that’s okay. My team members under me do things better than I do. That’s okay. That’s not that’s the point. That’s why teams work at the end of the day is because other people do things better than you do. Everyone did everything as good as me and I just happen to be the one in the driver’s seat just a matter of time before someone jumps in the driver’s seat and takes over me.
D.J. Paris 28:10 Well, normally I wait till the very end to say this, but I want to say it now. While I think the iron is still hot. Basically, I think what you’ve demonstrated to a lot of our audiences Boy, I wish I had a managing broker or a team lead like that. So if anyone is in the Nashville area, I you know, might as well do it now because I honestly think, you know, you spoke from the heart I think I think it was a very unique sort of value proposition in a sense and and talking about how you relate to your team members and the support you provide to them. If anyone out there is working in the Nashville area, and maybe you feel like you’re not getting that kind of support, or, or encouragement or empathy or help from your existing I guess they’re called Managing brokers in Tennessee, I’m guessing, but whoever team lead, whatever the person in charge, if you’re not getting that, you know, reach out to Matt, you can go to movement property group.com He would love to learn more about you and see if you might be a good fit for his his company. I know we haven’t talked much about the business yet. But what you just said was was a lot of really impressive things. And right now we know realtors are in recruiting mode because the markets down they’re starting to look around, maybe see what other options exist. So if you’re in the Nashville area, go to movement property group.com We can learn more about Matt and his company and maybe be a good fit for them.
Matt Kirkkegaard 29:27 Yeah, absolutely. Well, come on. I’m a huge coffee fan. So I’ll buy you a cup of coffee every time. Just let me know.
D.J. Paris 29:34 So speaking of being the market being having shifted, of course from 2021. We noticed here we’re in Chicago, we noticed that we have about 700 Some realtors that are at our company and we had a pretty good first three quarters of last year and then the final quarter was kind of where everything changed and fell apart and we’re now you know doing about half of what we were doing prior a year ago, which again to be under to be, you know, that seems like it makes sense based on what happened in the market, but certainly an uncomfortable place. And I, I’m pretty active with the realtor community here locally and I talked to a lot of agents outside of our company. And there seems to be top agents seem to be like, everything’s just gonna be fine. agents who are struggling or newer are feeling a little discouraged and down, I think right now and also isolated. And I that was another reason why I want to add that back to the sort of commercial I was giving for free for your group, because I think you probably you would be an amazing boss to work for. But I also think that if you feel alone right now in this industry, and you’re not getting that personalized attention, this would be another reason to maybe reach out, because you seem like you’re able to provide some guidance, not
Matt Kirkkegaard 30:47 on my team just have a cup of coffee, I’m all about it. I think that’s important to someone else, you know.
D.J. Paris 30:52 So how are you keeping your agents motivated? Right now, obviously, the market has shifted, it’s changed. It’s not quite as as busy as it was, although we hope that that changes this later this year. So what are you telling your agents to keep them you know, sort of on track?
Matt Kirkkegaard 31:12 I mean, I come at this, I’m a very bullish person in this type of a market. This doesn’t scare me at all. In fact, I’m really I’m actually great with it. Me and one of the other partners I have, we were both very tellers, top 100 agents. So we’ve spent a lot of time in the room with Gary Keller, if you don’t know, Gary Keller is Keller Williams, Millionaire Real Estate guru, a billionaire real estate agent, but brilliant, brilliant, brilliant businessman, and he has a really good pulse on things. And he thinks outside of the box. And I always get a lot from those times with him. But he wrote a book called shift and he talks about shifting markets and how basically, there’s just as much opportunity to capitalize on business now as there was a year and a half ago, like there’s it just as a different business, it’s a different type of market. And you’re you’re looking at a different skill set a different, you know, your day to day looks different. For our team, I you know, Nashville is unique, I have to give that preface because Nashville has its own ecosystem anyway, doesn’t rise with the rest, the country doesn’t follow the rest of the country. And currently, Nashville is the number one market in this country to move to. And so we’re a little bit insulated from some of that. So to be honest with you, we, we felt a little bit of a slowdown in September and October, we were back up in November and December to our normal numbers, and we’re, you know, exceedingly beating those numbers this year. So I don’t see. So that’s also that’s part of this. However, the conversation rates and stuff is is right now we have. And I think in any market, you’re gonna have a lot of real estate agents that exit the business, which for anybody that staying in the business is fantastic, because it just gives you awesome, right? Yes. So the people that are going to be able to stay in the business and watch all the people leaving and make sure you will call their friends and say, Hey, I do you have an agent, because your your previous agent may have left, and I would love to buy your coffee and take over and you take over that business and take that market share. So we’re really preoccupied with taking market share this year, as a lot of folks are leaving. I think the conversation is also I try to somewhat control the narrative a little bit. When the rates started going up, and inflation started going up. And things were kind of having a heading down, there was a good half of the community builders, bankers, you know, ellos, and real estate agents that are the sky is falling, we’re heading towards total economic collapse, and they just read all of this massive amounts of fear that the sky is falling. And what that does is that that that spews all of that to clients and buyers and sellers, and they’re like, Well, I don’t need to move and I’m too terrified, because everyone’s saying the sky is falling. I try to be a little bit of a voice of reason and and bring some data to support the other side of that and say it’s not falling. We’re in this type of a shift. And this is what it looks like we’ve done it lots of times in the past, we’ll do it again. And we’re fine. We’re not on the bar upgrade brink of global economic collapse, we’re just not there. I have I can’t tell you the amount of my daily conversation has been with people who are basing all of their fears on a 2008 meltdown. And I continually try to bring data to the table again and be the voice of reason in 2008 was not due to an economic recession. It was not due to to, you know, massive inflation or any of this other stuff. 2008 was due to wildly unethical lending practices subprime mortgage fraud at the end of the day, and it finally caught up with everybody and we had to pay for that. And so that’s what 2008 was. This is not 2008 this is a typical market shift. And in six of the seven last, the previous typical market shifts, properties are still appreciated, houses still sell, and so I just am not. So I try to arm myself with as much data and facts as I can to bring those conversations to the table bring a little bit of balance and reason to everybody. I have a few people in the market that are experts that I usually I always stayed very very finger on because they’re always going to bring a lot of really good data to the table that is above and Beyond my, above my paygrade, but good data that I can then bring to my clients and I say, Hey, listen, here’s some really, really great financial advisors, economic experts that are saying, This is what we’re looking at, here’s what you can expect. Here’s what this means for us. And then the second piece of that is then I pitch why I pitched in this season, what that means for you. So while right now for Nashville, what that means across the board is that while yes, rates are higher, and you will pay a little bit more sellers are getting mask mass credits and mass discounts right now. So while you might pay a little, so I’ll take that right. And I’ll say, Sure, we were 3% last year, and we’re at 8%. Now, the difference in that is going to cost you an extra $10,000. This year. However, the seller of this house that I’m selling right now that we just showed is willing to give you a $35,000 credit, which means that that would never have happened six months ago, six months ago, we were eight months ago, conceptually, we were pricing above market value, things were selling $100,000 higher than that with no appraisal, zero concessions and 00 movability from a seller. So at the end of the day thing, your foundation is broken, sorry, it’s on you to fix like at the end of there’s nothing and so I’m telling you, I’m telling my buyers, right now, it’s fantastic time to buy, because the rates are gonna go back down, you’ll be able to refinance in a year and you get a property for the actual market value with the $35,000 seller concession. And they’ll probably fix all the stuff that comes up on the repair proposal. Let’s buy the house now, refinance next year, and you’re gonna be in a better situation in a year than you would have been if you’d bought eight months ago. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 36:37 yeah, because number one, it was probably certainly overpriced because or most likely would have been overpriced due to multiple offer. Yeah, and, and even though, like I’m locked into a 3% rate, and I need to, I need to make sure that I don’t think of myself as well. Now, I can never move, because and I think, I think I think Realtors would do themselves a huge favor in really understanding the mentality of the 3% mortgage. Because most of the people who own a home refinance in the last several years or purchased a home at a low rate, those people are thinking, I don’t want to move because I don’t want to lose that rate. You as a realtor like you need to be armed with data, and in and just education to say, here’s how it could work if you were to move. And here’s why it’s not quite as ugly as it might appear
Matt Kirkkegaard 37:27 well, and understand all of the other nuances that come into play. One of my favorite things that has worked so well is I have really fantastic partners. So I have four different lending partners that I refer to all the time. My primary lender guy is one of the top in the southeast, but I have local banks and the credit union and another banker that do really specific things. So I go to a lot of my sellers. And I’m like, Okay, let’s do this, let’s turn you into a real estate investor, let’s keep your 3%. Right, let’s pull your money out on a HELOC. Let’s go buy another property that you want to buy. And this property is going to pay for that property. And you’re gonna refinance the property here, how to properties cash flowing, paying for your to live for free. And there’s so many of those opportunities right now to tell people about what it means to become a real estate investor. And now, yes, you have one property at 3%, which you get to hold on to that rate. But there’s all of this other opportunity to still do what you want to do to move forward in life to get the next house to become an investor to build whatever it is. There’s all those opportunities that you can do. And some of that’s being armed with the right tools and understanding what those tools are that you have at your disposal, which sit down, I do this probably on a two by weekly basis, I sit down with my lenders with my bankers, and I say, tell me what you’ve got right now. And all of them have really unique opportunities and unique products right now to meet the market demand. One of my one of my lenders, and this is great, is offering basically they prepay for the refinance, ultimately. And so I’m offering so they’re buying the property and they’re getting a free refinance within the next two years. That’s all we’re planning on. We’re planning on rates being down in the fives this year, I think and probably for us next year. And that’s kind of iffy, but that’s probably where we’re planning on. So at the end of the day, you can ultimately get your get your house now get the seller credits to cover all the difference and then some and then you you have literally have a zero posture refinance, when the rates go,
D.J. Paris 39:09 that’s amazing. That isn’t and and that’s just you staying in touch with your lenders going Hey, guys, what do you got right now?
Matt Kirkkegaard 39:16 Absolutely. And then helping present that to my clients because they don’t, usually lenders are a little more data driven, they’re a little bit more numbers, so they’re a little bit less personable. So then it’s me being able to interpret that data and walk through it really slowly and gently with my my buyers or sellers and say, here’s some opportunities that we have. We we’ve done a lot of right buy downs, we’ve got three to one buy downs right now happening. So rates are at seven, you buy down 3% For the first year 2% For the second year, 1% For the third year, and that’s all part of something the seller pays for. And then you refinance by the time that that goes back up and again, you save yourself money. So at the end of the day, the rate doesn’t have to be a scary thing. There’s lots of ways around it. Having a house with a 3% rate doesn’t need to lock you into that house for the rest of your life. There’s lots of ways to still make the moves you need to move your house I had one of one seller climb and they would they called me actually to list their property because they have grown out of their property. And they actually love their neighborhood there. They love their kids school, which they can walk to from their house, they brought other kids home to this house, they absolutely love this house. And their dream would be to be able to renovate it, add a little bit face to it, but they just can’t afford it. And so I talked myself out of the job, and I sat down with him. And I said, Hey, here’s, here’s, here’s what I think. I think you take the $500,000 in equity you have in this house, I think you get that and a HELOC. And then I think we’re gonna go buy some investor properties, that’ll cash flow that you’re going to take on and 50 of that and do the renovation in addition to your house, and these investment properties that you’re doing are going to pay for that renovation, and you’re going to be at the same cash monthly cash flow that you are right now. Long story short, that’s the that’s the route we went. So I talked myself out of a listing, but I talked myself into three investment purchases, and they get to stay in their house, they get to do the addition. And who are they telling everybody about, you’ve got to go talk to Matt, he has options you don’t even know exist. So it’s about arming yourself with the options and how to creatively get around people’s problems. And that starts with listening to people knowing their story, knowing what their pain points are, but then figuring out creative solutions to be able to get around those pain points and knowing the tools you have in your your back pocket. And by way of lenders and banks and options for them to be able to do the things that they need to do this market this is the perfect market for that.
D.J. Paris 41:15 Perfect. Yeah, yeah, I could not agree more. I think what we’re really talking about is education and real Realtors realizing the marketing and branding. That’s one part of your business. But continuing education, I don’t mean to be every two years thing that you have to do for your state your license, I mean, regular studying the market, and also studying what other people are doing to pivot and, and compensate for some of the deficiencies in the market. You know, and it’s really as set I mean, this podcast was birthed out of me think look thinking of, you know, top Realtors in the country going, I wonder how they did that. And I said, I wonder if I ask them if they, if they tell me on a on a podcast, there’s really nothing in it for them other than the time when I first started, right, like no listeners. Now we have, thankfully a lot of listeners. But back then I was like, I don’t think anyone’s gonna want to do this, because there’s literally nothing in it for them. And sure enough, I was I think we got turned down once or twice out of hundreds of times. So it’s one of these things where anybody could you can reach out to the top agents in your area, not everyone’s going to reply, but say, Gosh, I really admire you, I admire what you do. I would love to take you to coffee, and just get a better understanding. And you will, I think what you’ll usually find is that they have more information than you have.
Matt Kirkkegaard 42:31 And here’s what I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you that if if someone turns you down for a coffee date like that, at that type of request, they’re not actually a top agent in the area. They’re a mid to high level agent. But mid high level agents tend to be like no, my business I do it. The top agents are like, yeah, let me help you. There’s no secret. All of that. Yeah, we’ve been through this long enough that we know there’s plenty of business for everybody. Let me sit down to help you figure out your business. Oh, and what does this relationship do for me as well? Because I can, you know, you never know who you’re gonna meet and what that’s gonna lead to as well, either. So,
D.J. Paris 43:01 yeah, it’s a, it’s a great thing. Because number one, you’re not really bothering them. If they don’t want to go to coffee with you, they won’t. But the ones that do are smart, because they’re going to think, well, maybe this person might join my team, or this person might join my brokerage. Or maybe I can just be of service to this person and give them something and then they’ll have a positive feeling. You know, it’s just, top agents are generous. In my experience, this whole podcast, for the most part, for the most part. Yeah, there’s
Matt Kirkkegaard 43:26 exceptions. Absolutely true.
D.J. Paris 43:28 Yeah. And, and, you know, I think this is actually a really I know, we didn’t get to as much of your story as I as I would have liked to. However, I think this episode in particular, we’ve done 400, and I don’t know, 50 episodes or so. This is a really good episode. And I hope i Yes, because I think what what we talk, what I think came through very well and very eloquently, was how you think about the industry, how you think about managing your team, how you think about working with buyers and sellers, investors as well. It really just sort of your overall attitude approach and strategy, I think came through really, really well. And if for nothing else, listening to Matt say I am not worried about 2023. And you probably shouldn’t be either, but you should be paying attention to what successful agents are doing in the area. This is this is a great opportunity, when times are slower to reach out to some of those agents and really get some of those those coffee dates set up. And even even if you just want on one of those a week. I imagine if that I mean, that’s so funny. You’ll appreciate this. But back when you were not a top producer and you were not you know running your own business. Can you imagine the amount of of information you would have gotten just once a week you would have taken a top producer for a year to to launch it, it would have been incredible.
Matt Kirkkegaard 44:49 Oh, for sure. Well, I tell people, I tell people my team all the time. One of the things that I did do that I create a lot of SSS for is I probably took about 60 Coffee days a week. I would go to a coffee shop and I would sit there, and I would introduce myself, everyone in the coffee shop. And I would do that multiple days, multiple times a day, every single day of the week, just because I want to meet people. And so now, to your point, had I gone back and taken one of those days and actually met with other top producing agents, that probably would have been wildly valuable. But at the end of the day, meet people meet everybody you meet, because they’ve always got something to offer, everyone has something to offer, everyone has some piece of wisdom, everyone has a story. And at the end of the day, there might be business or there for you there as well. And it always begins with this relational kind of organic level. But um, everyone’s got something to offer and that space for sure, too. So yeah, go to coffee dates with everybody, you can go to coffee dates with for sure.
D.J. Paris 45:35 And I want to I want to back up one second, because what you just you also just said something that is very, very profound. And probably people’s anxiety spiked when you said it, because it is kind of a scary idea for a lot of us, which is you when you go to a coffee shop, and you introduce yourself to all the patrons there, in which by the way, not an easy thing to do, like we can be, you know, we can pretend that it’s easy. But for most of us, that’s a very, very scary proposition. Because we’re like, we don’t want to bother people. We don’t want people to yell at me, we don’t want to be rejected, etc. But if you can get comfortable with the fact that approaching somebody and saying, Hi, I am always so impressed when I go to a party, or when I go to any sort of social event, and somebody comes up to me who I don’t know. And it’s like, Hi, I’m so and so and they don’t know me. It’s not like they know me from something else. They just may right, randomly come up. And I was with a friend of mine last night who we were at a an event for the local Chicago, or association of realtors. And I asked her I said, Amy, I haven’t seen you all night. Tonight, she goes, I’m walking around talking to people who are standing by themselves. And I was like, that’s amazing. Because amazing, amazing. That amazing. Love that. And and so the point is, you guys can do this. And it’s a good idea doesn’t mean you have to pitch your services and your products. And you know, nobody really wants to be pitched in a coffee shop, or has an
Matt Kirkkegaard 46:52 idea. Here’s an idea. And this is what’s your idea. And I’ll put it out there. I think it’s I think it was one of the best moves I made is you got to spend money to make money, right? So spend a little bit of money, but I would go on every three or four times a week, I’d go to a coffee shop and I talked to the barista who know me because I’m in a coffee shop every day. And I’d say for the next two hours, I’m buying everyone’s coffee, and I’d give them my card and said hold my card and everyone that comes through the line. They’d say, Hey, your coffee is covered by that guy sitting over there. They’ll come introduce themselves to me. I didn’t have to introduce myself anyone anymore. They came in introduce themselves to me and we talk and I’d say man, I just love my community. And I love my neighborhood. I want to know the people in it want to serve my community? Well, oh, by the way, I’m a real estate agent. Here’s my rental car. Let me know if I can help.
D.J. Paris 47:30 That’s huge. Yeah, not not that not that you you, you know, it’s not easy necessarily to always draw straight line to business. But any idea about how much business that might have generated for you.
Matt Kirkkegaard 47:44 obscene amount of business.
D.J. Paris 47:47 It was a great return on investment.
Matt Kirkkegaard 47:49 The ROI was very high. For sure. Oh, my gosh,
D.J. Paris 47:53 I got to have you back on the show this this is incredible. Because let’s, let’s, let’s do it. Alright, so I want everybody who lives in who’s a realtor in the Nashville area, you got to reach out to Matt Now, understand, he’s a busy guide, and he will get back to you when he can. But if you are not getting this kind of attention from your team lead, you need to reach out property, man. He’s incredible. He’s done an incredible job on the show. And I want to make sure anyone listening, you should reach out to him. Oh, and by the way before, before we end I do have to ask you before I’ll give your your plugs here in one sec. But who’s your favorite pianist? Who are your favorite pianists of all time
Matt Kirkkegaard 48:30 highs? I’ll give you my first two hours.
D.J. Paris 48:33 I’ll give you mine first. And I only have one. I mean, there’s lots that I admired. The only one that ever really was do Bill Evans. I’m a bill up in the sky.
Matt Kirkkegaard 48:40 I was gonna say Bill Evans is one of my tops. I love Bill Evans. He’s just I mean, he’s essential though. And he’s kind of made he made like Michael Jordan. Yeah. Right. He’s the Michael Jackson, the jazz pianist. He’s amazing. So he’s, yeah, Bill Evans is great. I will go probably a little bit old school. I’ll go back to the Romantic Period say Rachmaninoff Rachmaninoff’s, my favorite composer. Oh, and, and just I think the hit the brilliant, brilliant composer always played with passion. You know, you know, 10 fingers and he would write 12 notes at once. Like, I know the amount of passion that came into his writing. And so yeah.
D.J. Paris 49:11 What was the what was the movie? The Rachmaninoff 90 shine. So everybody you need to see the movie. It is well, it’s kind of a sad movie. It’s very sad, actually. But but it’s somebody trying to attempt Rachmaninoff second,
Matt Kirkkegaard 49:27 third, third, which is the hardest piano piece in the world of all time. Yeah, there’s only several dozen people that have ever played it successfully. One of which is my teacher, actually. So I grew up. I grew up with that. And she played all while she taught at Juilliard. And
D.J. Paris 49:40 she didn’t go crazy as as in the No, I mean, everyone goes
Matt Kirkkegaard 49:43 a little crazy when you get to that level. So she was a little eccentric, but she didn’t lose it for sure. But um, but yeah, shines the David helfgott and it’s about the
D.J. Paris 49:50 David helfgott. Yes, yeah, that was the story of David helfgott The Oh my gosh. Oh, right. Gosh, I could talk to you forever. For everyone, everyone. Listening, I want you guys to check out and also support Matt’s music too. I want everybody to go to movement property group.com If you’re a Nashville agent reach out to Matt he’d love to chat with you see if you might be a good fit for him and his team or maybe he can just provide you some great advice about how to continue on in your business. And that what is your music website as well?
Matt Kirkkegaard 50:16 Matt Kirk music.com So macro music.com for music movement Property Group for real estate I have instances and Facebook’s and tic TOCs for both and and personal as well. So finally follow me connect with me. I’ll buy a cup of coffee and all that.
D.J. Paris 50:31 Yeah, yeah, in fact, maybe I’ll move to Nashville just so I can get a free cup of coffee from from time today. Let’s
Matt Kirkkegaard 50:36 go. I know a great agent. I gotta
D.J. Paris 50:40 love it. All right, Matt. On behalf of everyone listening, we want to thank you for being on our show your amazing, great, wonderful energy. And on behalf of Matt and myself, we also want to thank our audience and make make sure that they feel appreciated. We just ask everybody to do one thing. telephoned think of one other realtor that is struggling right now. Guess what a lot of realtors are struggling. Tell somebody else in your office who could use a little encouragement, maybe a boost and just wants to sort of know that the sky isn’t falling send them a link to our website and keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed live, or, or right from the browser rather, or they can just pull up a podcast app search for keeping them real. Hit that subscribe button. So Matt, thank you so much, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, man.
Matt Kirkkegaard 51:22 Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
You Need To Know About 2-1 Buydowns For Your Buyers • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Jan 31, 2023
Welcome to the January episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses how important it is to educate the first-time home-buyers about the opportunities, rates and rents. Joel also describes why the strategy that makes most sense is being comfortable with payments and today’s rates. Last, Joel sends a message to new agents which is to take off your selling shoes and put up your education and helping shoes.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Do you have clients that feel they missed the 3% rates of 2019? Well, there’s a solution for that. It’s called a two one or a three to one buy down. We’re going to talk about it today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show today, once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. Now last year alone, Joel gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers have worked with them. And that put Jolles production in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, out of 400,000 loan officers in this country, Joel is currently ranked number 137. Now last year he closed 319 transactions is and that was over $126 million. Now if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with Joel can be reached at Joel his emails joel@rates.com J oel@rates.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel, good to see you again.
Joel Schaub 2:54 A DJ, thanks so much. I love hearing the numbers. But it’s just so important to be here and give back. We love coming on and being able to share what I’m seeing out there in the industry. And it really is making a difference for agents who listen.
D.J. Paris 3:10 Yes, it really is. And I’m so grateful that you do come on. Because you know, oftentimes, our loan officers are calling agents asking for business trying to, you know, build a relationship with an agent, but not always providing a ton of value, right? There’s loan officers who will call and say we’ve got this new product, we’ve got this new service. And that’s very interesting. But I love the you know, having conversations with you because you really instruct our audience on how to actually grow their business. And oh, by the way, you also do loans on the site. So I just think that’s just a tremendous value to our audience. So I appreciate the dedication you’ve had to our show for all these years.
Joel Schaub 3:50 We’ve talked about this offline where years ago, I realized DJ like I could not control the rates. I couldn’t control what happened in the market. But I can control how much I gave. Right. So I gave my time. And I gave money and I figured out ways that I can contribute. And if you’re an agent, you need to be doing the exact same thing. Find out who your core sphere is, and figure out ways that you can give back to them, because it’s gonna be a wild year here in 2023. And you need people that are on your team and ready to promote you and help you grow your business.
D.J. Paris 4:28 Yeah, and I think that it is it is a good point because, you know, let’s face it, there was a little bit of order taking going on on the agent side and even on the ello side, you know, while rates were at, you know, almost historic lows. So I think now it’s it’s a great reminder for everyone to you know, really ramp up your activity ramp up the amount of value you can provide so that when clients are ready to start buying, selling, you know that you’re the person that’s providing It’s so much value along the way that they it’s called in, in a psychological principle called the, the rest of the rest of the reciprocal principle, which is you provide so much value to somebody they feel a psychological need to pay you back in that could be in the form of using your goods and services. So just something to keep in mind, not to Joel, of course, because that’s Joe’s whole business was built on that exact model. But it’s something to really keep in mind as you move through this year where we know activities a little slower right now.
Joel Schaub 5:31 Luckily, just finished 2022, where the mortgage brokers Association came out with the stat this week that the applications were at 26. year lows means that we gotta go out and actually drum up the business and be providing value, the days of waiting for the phones to ring are over. And this year is literally going to be the year where you have to get out, do the work and provide value. And so if you’re listening here today, one of the things that you can do is make sure that you know where your leads are coming from, who you’re getting ready to give back to and put a plan in place.
D.J. Paris 6:10 Yeah, I let’s dive into that. I think that’s all great stuff.
Joel Schaub 6:15 Well, right now we were talking about the air about buyers that come to you as an agent that say, I think I’m gonna wait until rates come down, right? I don’t want to buy it. Okay. And so let’s flush this idea out so that we have a response. If you’re listening, right now, you’ve heard a buyer say this, sure, think I’m gonna wait until rates come down,
D.J. Paris 6:34 I missed the 3%, boom. And now I don’t want to pay, you know, six plus percent. And I’m gonna wait.
Joel Schaub 6:44 And what happens, if all of a sudden rates dropped two points, there’s going to be a flood of buyers back into the market, we’re going to see it again. So the strategy that makes the most sense, is be comfortable with the payments, where the rates are at today. Go out and buy a property when there’s not much competition, and then refinance the loan down the line, we have to be comfortable explaining and teaching the story. Okay. We can’t wait for rates to drop to jump into the market. We need to be able to buy a property now and be comfortable that when rates come down, not if when they do, we’ll be able to refinance that mortgage.
D.J. Paris 7:24 I think that’s this is a good point, you know, I’m thinking about what agents might even say to their clients, like you were you were just mentioning, because I think we can, well, a lot of clients who weren’t ready to buy back when rates were at those lows, don’t didn’t really know how tough it was to actually buy or buy a property back then. So I think that’s part of the problem, too, is that we see the 3% rate, which we’re not at currently. And we go, Oh, I missed it. But the reality of it was, you were pretty lucky if you were able to buy a property during that time. And you probably overpaid for it based on all the all the competition. So Joel, what you just said is is so important, because you’re right, if if the rates dropped by 200 basis points tomorrow, you know, they go down 2%, well, gosh, think about how much competition is now flooding that same market good, great for sellers, not necessarily great for buyers.
Joel Schaub 8:17 And if I’m a realtor, we’ll get to that business when it comes Okay, when rates do come down, we’ll have all that business as well. But the strategy right now is finding those that maybe are spending too much money on rent, and you can find them an equivalent type of property, you can get out there and buy because if you’re paying X number of dollars in rent, there’s definitely properties in your market that you can buy even with smaller down payments. And that’s kind of taking the time to partner with a loan officer and figure out what those numbers look like, so that you can actually provide value back to the buyers.
D.J. Paris 8:50 I think that’s great. You know, it’s one of the great joys of my life, you’ll you’ll get a kick out of this because you’re in this business. But one of the great unexpected joys of my life, because I don’t know, maybe I’m just was ignorant around how, you know, loans worked. I’m still somewhat ignorant about how they work. But when I bought my first property, and I was not in this industry in any capacity, I was I was at the time, what was I doing? Anyway, doesn’t matter wasn’t working for an IT company. But regardless, I didn’t know the tax benefits that were coming my way through having a mortgage and they were significant. And it was one of the saddest days of my life when I sold that property because I was losing. I was I was going to I rent it after that because it made sense for me to do that. But I lost all of that great interest deduction. And so I think that’s also something that a lot of renters, they just don’t know. I mean, I didn’t know.
Joel Schaub 9:45 It’s absolutely true. And it comes back to this first point of being able to provide value and have a plan right? So if your market is working with buyers that are renting and getting ready to buy, understand the numbers you have to be ready and be able to explain exactly the questions that are going to come up. If you’re a buyer talking to you as an agent, what is the rent versus buying scenarios in my market, it’s very important that you actually understand it so that you can go out and provide value, you’re not going to get ahead, you’re going to be like anybody else who’s going to have a slower year unless you can actually take time, figure out what your market is going to be and then add value.
D.J. Paris 10:23 Yeah, too. I think you’re saying no, your numbers, it’s so important. Because if I have somebody who’s worried about rates and going, Oh, I missed out, that’s a lot of it, I missed out that FOMO fear of missing out. All you have to do is find out what properties they would have been looking at back during those times when rates were low, and show some of the close prices that that you know that that happened, and then show what they’re those same types of properties are being listed at today. Odds are in most markets, those prices are going to be a heck of a lot lower today than what they actually closed for two years ago. So you really do you show the numbers you show your work, like they used to say in school, show the math, and then that really, hopefully should make a pretty compelling argument, why now is still a reasonably decent time to buy a property even with higher rates.
Joel Schaub 11:16 Especially now with sellers being able to come to the table and give credits to a buyer. If you’re an agent right now, and you don’t understand the concept of temporary rate by downs for your clients. Take some time to look into what a temporary rate, buydown does, because right now we’re locking in clients, back in rates in the threes and fours for the next couple of years, while rates are higher. And using seller paid closing costs to do that. So we’ve seen all the rage, right? People are talking about to one rate by downs, and three to one rate by downs. And right now I kind of wanted to pull the curtain back and really hammer home, if you maybe are familiar with what this concept is, what the numbers look like, and how you can use that to get another deal for your next buyer.
D.J. Paris 12:09 Yeah, we’re talking about education. And this is the time when you go out and educate people. And you you I think it can be as simple as how would you actually do this, you would pick up the phone, you would make a list of all the people you know that are renting. And even if they’re your close friends who you want to test this out on first, maybe not your exact, you know, your your prospects who aren’t, you know, as close to you as maybe other people, get some family members and say, Hey, I’m I want to try to explain this this sort of situation we’re in, let me know if this is compelling. Does this make sense does Are you able to follow this. And I think it’s great to test it with people outside of the industry. And because the vast majority of buyers and sellers are not really connected to the real estate industry, they just own or rent. And this would be a great opportunity to get that pitch down. And then if it was me, once I got a thumbs up from a couple of friends as they heard my 510 minutes sort of explanation about where numbers are options, why it might make sense to buy now, and just having that information in front of you, I would be picking up the phone and calling every single person I know and saying, Hey, if you have a couple of minutes, I’d love to swing by by a cup of coffee and just talk about what’s going on in the market so that you can make the best decision. I mean, no one else is really doing that. So I not not nobody, I’m sure top agents are but a lot of agents are sitting on the sidelines, they’re depressed, they’re sad about the conditions in the market, they’re not making these kind of calls.
Joel Schaub 13:38 So let’s take that buyer right now and run the numbers so that if you’re listening, you really understand what the temporary buy downs offer for your client so that you can understand it, and see if it makes sense for your buyers or not. So I’d like to use the number of a $500,000 purchase. And the idea would be getting a closing cost credit of 3%. Okay, using a 3% credit where that dollar amount is 15 grand. And that 15 grand is used by the bank to lower the rate for the next two years. So right now, as of the taping, the rates on 30 year fixed mortgages are just over 6%, by the way, is down from some of the highs that we’ve seen in the last few months. So for this calculation, I’m going to use 6.125. Okay, and that means the rate gets locked in, but for the year number one, the rate is two points lower. So now the client is literally paying 4.125. In year number two, it goes up to 5.125. And then for the rest of the life of the loan, it’s at 6.125. However, we feel in the next couple of years rates are going to be lower than that so they can refinance that loan for free with almost any bank. They’re offering free refinances. And so Let’s take a minute to understand the numbers here. Because I already know you’re listening. And you say, Well, why $15,000, I’ll just take 15 grand off the price DJ, right. And so if we look at the math on that, and we take 15 grand off the price, sure, that certainly does save the client, somewhere around 150 to $200 a month, okay. But if you take that same $15,000, and apply it to driving the rate down into the force, for the first year, the payment is six or $700 less per month. And now you have buyers that are off the fence, right? Now you’re using that money, because the sellers are going to provide it. And it’s just another way for you to get a buyer and have them not have the fear of rates being so high, because it’s a temporary problem. And now we have a solution if the sellers are willing to do a credit to cover a two, one buyer down, or even a three to one buyer down. So there’s a lot of options out there. Call one of your lenders that’s calling you all the time. Ask them to explain it to you. Ask them if they understand it, and partner with them. Okay, there’s a lot of agents right now that need a good lending partner, and mortgage companies all over right now are coming out and saying, We need deals. And so it’s good to find somebody that’s local, and make sure they know what the heck they’re talking about. Work with them and make sure that you have a good partner that’s local that can help you.
D.J. Paris 16:29 Yeah, I mean, it really is that simple. And I think these are the times when agents need to lean on their loan officer relationships and really extract out of their ellos all of this information so that that the agent, because what it really does is it doesn’t only give you an actually viable strategy for somebody who’s not ready to buy or thinks they’re not ready to buy, or maybe doesn’t want to sell currently, it doesn’t just give you ammo, when you’re working with those people, it also gives you a reason to pick up the phone and call people who you maybe wouldn’t have a reason to call or wouldn’t really have much to say other than just checking in hope everything’s well, which is great, too. But when you’re calling somebody say, Hey, I wanted to have a quick conversation, and just explain to you a couple of options that I’ve seen work really well right now, just in case you guys were thinking about it. And I just want to keep you in the loop of what’s going on. I mean, that is it’s kind of like my fantasy with every single service professional in my life, whether it’s my accountant, my attorneys, I don’t you know, I don’t think we need attorneys too much. But like financial advisor, that’s a great example. Now, financial advisors are usually pretty good at this kind of thing. But let’s go back to accountants, because accountants tend, in my experience, not to be as proactive as reactive, I would my fantasy, and I love my accountant. But my fantasy would be my account calls me three times a year, and he’s like, I got this great idea how you can save tax money on your taxes next year. She doesn’t do that. That’s not really her role. But boy, I would love that, right? I would pay for that kind of advice. And so you’re really providing that level of service that really everybody wants. But very few people actually get right all the realtors come around when you’re ready to buy or sell. But when you’re not ready to buy or sell, they tend to disappear. You want to be the one that that swoops in and says, Hey, I’ve got some information for you here, whether you’re ready or not, I want to tell you what I know, so that you can make a good decision. I mean, it sounds so simple. And it really is how you in particular have grown your business over 20 years. I mean, also, you know, you’re a heck of a good loan officer on top of it. But the education piece is what every single person I know says about you. They’re like, Oh, we see Joel, all these events, you know, and he’s very present, and he does all these fun things. But when you actually talk to him, he just knows more than the average loan officer. And of course, that’s why you’re really are that successful, because you actually deliver on that. And that’s what agents can do by leaning on their loan officers relationships to get this information.
Joel Schaub 18:56 is so excited that you said that because last year was a down year, it really was right. But we still average every single month, I was able to help 26 families last year when you looked at the entire year. So 26 families closed or individuals every single month. And I talked to agents that say I would like to get to just 26 in a year. What are you doing? And the answer always leads back to education. I’m educating the borrowers do you know how many people come to me and say the same thing where I don’t think I’m ready to buy. And then we look at their scenario and we help them and we empower them. And we teach them and then the next thing you know, even though they talked to their bank, they’re ready to buy. The agent now has somebody who’s educating fears usually the number one thing they weren’t taught, nobody was helping them. Everyone was selling them. So you can take off your selling shoes, put on your education and helping shoes. You’re going to grow your business and that’s what we’re looking forward to Helping agents this year by making sure they know their market and making a plan and giving back. That’s
D.J. Paris 20:07 why I always love when I get a phone call from a new licensee, a new realtor who pass their exam. And they go, you know, just so you know, I’m a teacher, but I have the summers off. So I can I can work more in the summers, but for now, I’m probably going to keep teaching. And I always say, Well, you know, look at teachers, I think oftentimes become the best realtors, because they’re so used to educate it, like it’s literally their life and being of service, right teachers are of service and, you know, obviously, they’re, they’re one of our most valuable resources in our country. But I always get excited when when anyone who’s a service person, you know, maybe they’re a police officer, or you know, firemen, teacher, people who are of service, they sort of understand that that idea that I can be of tremendous value. And I need to earn the business and earning the business requires that you you know, you’re out there talking to your, your sphere of influence, and, and the people who are not quite ready to make a decision. But you’re that you’re ready to continue to help them. I think I think most most agents will turn you away. If you’re not pre approved. If you’re not ready to buy, they’ll just go okay, well call me when you’re ready, right? They’re not, or they’ll put you on an email list. And you’ll get their email every two weeks for the next couple of years. And that’s fine. But they’re probably not calling, they’re probably not really providing value they might be calling every so often just to go, are you ready? Are you ready? But think about just like turning that model on its head and you don’t wait for somebody to be ready, you just continue to provide value.
Joel Schaub 21:40 BJ, you are so correct. I have a new program that would be really helpful for people that are listening. And it’s catered to the first time homebuyers, right. So Freddie Mac has a loan program called the low to moderate income AMI program. And so you can actually go to Freddie mac.com and look up the area median income for your county, where we’re at here in Chicago, the area median income is $105,000. And that means for buyers that make under $105,000. They could put down as little as 3%. down and lock in rates today at 5.875. Even if they had credit scores in the six hundreds. So let me repeat that again. Yeah, say that when Mr. tambor what we talked about? Just a few moments ago, we talked about mortgage rates being above 6%. Right, conventional loans, if you’re a low to moderate income borrower, and let me ask you, I don’t think $105,000 Very low income. Good. No, in
D.J. Paris 22:47 fact, I’m looking at it. And while you were where you were doing that, I went to Google and typed in, and I’m actually at the Fannie Mae website in my neighborhood. In Chicago, same thing 100 And $6,000 is the medium income, it is kind of interesting, because I’m i It does not seem like a low number. But but that’s technically considered median.
Joel Schaub 23:09 And so that means all of the adjustments on these loan programs are taken away. So that means low downpayment, that normally results in a higher rate wiped away, the higher rates for lower credit scores wiped away. So that means literally, we were quoting borrowers just last week, where the banks were quoting them rates in the high sixes and sevens. And we were in the fives, because we know about the programs. And so it’s important that you work with people that know what they’re doing, and partner with them. Because it can literally make the difference DJ for a buyer that says I’m comfortable and ready to go to somebody that says, I think I’m going to wait. And so I send out a weekly newsletter. And I know that so many people have gotten in on this. And so if you’re listening, and you want to have access to just smart, easy, digestible tidbits that you can share, and sound like a million bucks, you can just simply drop me an email at joel@rate.com. And in the subject line, say add me to your newsletter. In the body, you can say Joel, I love you send me the letter. You don’t have to have a lot of paragraphs in there just a simple message saying you want to be added. And then we’ll drop you weekly things that you can use, that’ll be very relevant, but it is digestible. And it’s in layman’s terms instead of being so over the top with the speak of mortgage. Okay.
D.J. Paris 24:37 I love that I you know, again, we always come back to the fundamentals, but it’s also the fundamentals really are what win the game at least it’s been my experience that way I know. John Wooden the UCLA coach who won the most believe he’s not been surpassed the most number of NCAA Men’s championships. I think he wants seven in a row, by the way at one point in the 60s or 70s. He was all about the fundamentals, he’s he just everything was information and hard work and discipline, he never looked at the score, he didn’t look at it, he would, he wouldn’t be looking at the rates, he’d be looking at activity, you know, he made his player shoot 500, free throws a day, things like that, you know, just getting in the repetition get getting the skill down. And I think this is the year of skill. And we’re also going to be seeing probably a number of ellos leave the loan officers leaving the industry because you know, my activities down, we’re also seeing a tremendous number of Realtors leaving the industry. So that means there is market share up for grabs, you know, now is the time to really start establishing yourself as the Education Source so that you can swoop in in case maybe someone else’s previous agent leave is leaving the business. Just to give you an idea in the last while worrying in January. Okay, so in the last two months, prior to the last two months, are we at a holding company, which is for agents who aren’t practicing just want to keep their license active, they’re basically out of the business. We had 500 agents in that company today through two months later. And we started that company like eight or nine years ago. In the last two months, I’ve added over 200 agents, not our agents just agents in Illinois, that’s because we can serve as the whole state that way. Literally 200 agents have found us we do no marketing at found us and go hey, I’m getting out of the business. So guys, yes, that that’s that’s an unfortunate thing for them an amazing thing for you. Because you get to come in now and sharpen your tools, to everything Joel just mentioned these different loan products, you know, this is now the opportunity, you have to pick up that market share that’s being left behind.
Joel Schaub 26:39 And lead with honesty, I can’t tell you the number of times DJ where somebody just wasn’t ready to buy and they were getting pressured from somebody else, another loan officer at a bank telling them it’s a great time. And I slowly help them and say actually, what we should do is fix x, y and z. We could close this, but I can get you much better terms and lower rates, if we just did the following three things. And yes, it will take you some time. And the honesty that comes through and somebody hears that somebody’s in it, not just for themselves, the buyers then realize you are looking after them. And sometimes we never even in closing them. And they refer us people because we were honest, and we took care of them. That’s what you need to be doing as agents as well. Not everyone’s ready to buy. Just because you want to go get a commission doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. So understanding leading with empathy and trying to find out how you can help people that’s always going to win. And especially in this market, when people are leaving, you got to find ways that you can give back, lead with honesty, and get your plan together for 2023.
D.J. Paris 27:46 And I want to remind everyone of a statistic that my friend Ryan always reiterates when he’s on our show. And it’s an important one for those of you that are feeling like there’s just no activity out there right now. And I know how it can feel that way. I talked to top agents who feel that way, right now, I talked to new agents who feel that way. So I get it, I understand that that that thought, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. But what I will tell you is this great statistic from Brian that says, and it’s not his, he just read it somewhere. And he always reiterates it, which is 16% of the people in your sphere are going to transact in real estate this year, they’re either going to buy something, or they’re going to sell and then maybe buy something else, you know, 16% of the people you know, so you have business coming, right if you know, 100 people that’s 16 to maybe 30 Plus transactions, based on how you know if someone’s buying and selling or both. So this is the time to really lean into that education, because you can make some huge inroads. So don’t worry about the business that you don’t see right in front of you today focus on your activity, because again, you have people in your sphere that you just don’t even know are going to transact and you want to capture that and by capturing it, you’re going to want to be a value. And then, you know, that’s pretty much how it works.
Joel Schaub 29:01 And remember guys rates are down, we did see just three months ago that rates were over 7%. So take everything that you can and get out there and educate and let people know rates are lower now. And even though the feds will continue to raise short term rates, we’re gonna see a trend and that trend is lower. Okay, we might have a few bumps in the road, but this year is going to be better than you expect. Okay, so stay positive, go out and teach and find the people that really need your help.
D.J. Paris 29:31 I think that is so important. And I just got to watch the chief economist for NAR, the National Association of Realtors. We’re very lucky in Chicago because our Chicago Association while the national association is headquartered here in Chicago, and our local Chicago Association happens to be in the exact Joel already knows this. But for our listeners, the Chicago Association, the local one is actually inside the national association building. So we’re sort of lucky when we go to the car offices, the Chicago offices because we actually get to see sometimes some of these national people. And I will tell you that, you know, and I certainly am not an economist in any capacity. But the chief economist for National Association of Realtors, who is literally just a stats guy. He was not he was comparing what where we’re at now with the the 2008 to 2010 crash. And he’s like, he showed us statistics, he was like, this is just a totally different thing. This is not that. So we don’t, he was not concerned that we’re headed for some huge catastrophe. He goes, the sky is not falling. In fact, he suspects rates will be coming down even further throughout the end of the year. So he says no, things are actually pretty good. It might not feel that way. But he goes, let me show you why he made a compelling case. And I won’t, I won’t make his case for him, because I’ll probably screw it up. But the good news is National Association realtors. And again, you might say, well, they’re incentivized to want to think that things are rosy, but no, I found them to be pretty accurate. Over the years, and boy, things are not so bad. Right now, it’s just going to require more work this year, you’re just gonna have to work a little smarter. But it’s fun to educate people. I think that’s the easy part of the job really, right? Like the dealing with actual transactions. That’s the hard part. So I love the idea that you can just be of service this year, think about this as a service here. And business will come because people again, like I have that fantasy of wanting my accountant to call me now, again, I could call my accountant and I’m not picking on her in particular. But if somebody were to call me and say, I’ve got somebody who does that? I’ve got an accountant, who does that? Do you think I would take that call? I sure as heck would. So I imagine you’d be of service to somebody, they might tell other people and they might be the ones calling you.
Joel Schaub 31:43 And this is your call to action right now you can call back and say, I know you’re a first time homebuyer, I was just listening to an amazing podcast, I think we can get you back with your bank and get rates lower than other people. Is it worth us doing some business together? No, go, Wow. Thank you. And so that’s the call to action. Let’s get out there and make sure that you’re doing the things that it takes because the phones just not gonna ring. Well, I
D.J. Paris 32:08 have two, two action steps for everybody. Of course, number one, take some action from this podcast. Think about what you can do to reach out to your sphere and educate them. You know, listen to this again. Also, my second thing is sign up for Joel’s newsletter, all you have to do is send an email to joel@rate.com. Because guys, let’s face it, this stuff is complicated. And it we we as agents need to see it in small bite sized chunks with with, you know, little bullet points that we can, we can hammer home and Joel does this. And his team does this every single week. So joel@rate.com just mentioned, you want to subscribe to the newsletter, and also reach out to Joel to he provides value to agents, he will talk to your buyers and sellers possibly, and his team would love the opportunity to work with you if you don’t have a good relationship with an ello or somebody that really isn’t providing a lot of value these days. This is these are the times you get to lean on your loan officer and say, Hey, I really need some help here. This is this year’s a little tricky. Can you help me? Joel and his team are absolutely able to assist with that. And Joel, what’s the bet? Well, people can email you joel@rate.com. And is there any other way they should reach out?
Joel Schaub 33:20 People are surprised when they call and they actually get us live on the phone. So 773-654-2049 That’s a direct line right to my office. And then joel@rate.com You can sign up, I promise you, we don’t have anything to sell you. I’ll get you on the newsletter so that you can learn what we’re seeing on our end. And then if you do have buyers that you’re interested in working together with, you can actually introduce us and have no closing costs on those deals, we give a $1,500 credit so that all of the lender fees are covered. So it’s a great way to work with us for the very first time and have no fears that their clients are going to have high fees or high rates. We’re just here to help for sure. So yeah, thanks so much.
D.J. Paris 34:07 I have one last great one last question. And this is kind of a fun question. It’s it’s more of a there’s not a specific answer that I’m looking for here. But I’m just curious, because you are deep within the lending world. And you saw what people had to give up the concessions they had to make back when rates were at those historic lows. Would you as knowing everything that you know, would you and again, there’s a million variables that would influence this, this answer. But would you in general rather have been a buyer during that time, also being in competition with all of the other buyers who are also taking advantage of those rates, or being a buyer now Do you have a particular sense of whether obviously you’d be paying less if you bought this property for the same price, but it wouldn’t have been the same price. So I’m curious, do you have a general thought of what you would have preferred per Personally,
Joel Schaub 35:01 I’m all about ease. And you already know the answer to this question. I don’t like things being difficult. I want things my way, I want to make sure that I’m catered to and taken care of, and I want to see the house before,
D.J. Paris 35:15 you don’t want to buy it unseen.
Joel Schaub 35:18 Right, with no contingencies and everything waive. So right now, don’t worry about rates, if you can afford the payment, now you can go out and get the sellers to cater to you. Okay. And so it is definitely easier right now as a buyer, okay, to go out and get a property compared to what it was 1218 months ago, I still like the lower rates, I’m in mortgages, I would love to have the lower rates, but it’s so much easier now. It really is. Okay, so today would be much better than getting rates at two and a half percent where I had to go find five houses. I loved all five, and I couldn’t even get into one. Now go out, find a home, submitted a value or submit an offer under the value. And when? Awesome, well,
D.J. Paris 36:05 well said. So everyone two things, take some action, call your clients get, give them some information they can us tell them that rates have dropped and tell them why that’s significant. And yes. And explain to them what that means for the marketplace. And then also send joel@rate.com and email, get on his mailing list so he can provide you this value so that you can rely upon his team every single week to give you talking points, guys, that’s what he’s going to send you talking points. It literally gives you a reason to pick up the phone and call everyone and you don’t have to ask for business when you have talking points. You’re an educator. You’re an educator. Okay, awesome. Joel, on behalf of everyone, we want to just thank you again, I can’t tell you how amazing these episodes are for our, for our audience, they love it. And on on behalf of Joel and myself, we love you. We love the audience, we are so grateful that you are here we are at record numbers ourselves, which I’m not saying to brag, because I don’t think it’s most I don’t think I have that much to do with it. But I’m just grateful that this content seems to be resonating with agents. So please also tell another friend and you’re telling another agent about this podcast, especially someone who’s a little bit down right now, guys, I just watched the video last night, the top producer in Chicago out of 46,000 agents was not complaining. But he was saying this is going to be a tricky year. So I have to work harder. Now this is the top agent in Chicago saying he is going to work harder this year so that he can be a value to his clients. Right. So this take take these these tips we’re giving you and take put them into action. Let’s do it. Let’s all do it together. We’ll keep providing value in this in these episodes. You keep telling a friend to subscribe to Joel’s newsletter, and keep showing up every every week so we can provide you more and more value. You can grow your business and then you can tell Joel and myself how grateful you are to us for helping you and I’m teasing. You don’t have to do that part. But we’re just grateful to work to get to your ears and we’re so honored that you listen so thanks on behalf of Joel and myself Joel we will see you on the next next month and we’ll provide even more value then.
Joel Schaub 38:09 Thanks so much DJ was really really good and take this to heart. It’s going to be a great year everybody. 2023 is going to be strong.
How Lead Generation Has Changed For Real Estate Agents in 2023 • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Jan 26, 2023
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com as a real estate coach discusses strategies for the real estate agents to use. Chris discusses how new agents, especially the ones with low transactions per year, need to use lead generation and social media to start conversations with their clients. Chris also emphasizes the importance of using “boom times” as an opportunity to change the angle on how the relationships will start and the fact that the need for housing doesn’t change.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We know the market has shifted in 2023. And we know it’s going to be a tough year for realtors. So what are the cornerstone activities that you need to be focused on right now? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to get real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris and your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. This is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. Let me tell you more about the clothes. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals, they cover real estate marketing, lead gen technology team building strategies, and many other things from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business or their brokerage to the next level, please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o s e.com. Just like it’s just like you would assume and check out some of their articles. I highly encourage everybody right now go to the clothes.com. And at the very least subscribe to their newsletter because if you’re like me, sometimes you forget to check websites that you check regularly. Maybe you’ll forget. But what’s great about the clothes is when they publish articles, they send out these digests emails that are incredible. Every article they they produces I’m I’m just such a big fan of their writing style. So go there, subscribe to their newsletter, so you’ll get their regular communication with us as always as crystallin cell. He’s the staff writer, he is a staff writer at sorry, senior staff writer and real estate coach. He’s actually Head of Content creation for the whole site. I always forget to that he is he is the big kahuna over there. Chris is the closes also, he’s the closest resident expert on real estate topics, ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. But what what what else is Chris all about? Well, he’s also a licensed real estate agent in Michigan. He’s been part of hundreds of sales transactions from modest role starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he’s not writing or coaching, he you can find him fly fishing or I don’t know, maybe not this time of year, but he is into fishing. And also he performs on the stage of his community theaters, local local production. So Chris, glad to have you back on keeping it real and excited to speak with you.
Chris Linsell 3:41 DJ, thanks for having me. That might be the longest intro. I stumbled over places I speak so I’m not complaining about it. I like hearing about but you’re definitely putting in putting in the word the word count there. I like it.
D.J. Paris 3:58 Yeah, well, it’s it You deserve it. Because not only are your gracious enough to come on our show, but you speak all over the country. You’ve spoken at the NAR annual conference, you’ve spoken at local, more regional and even state level. You know conferences, you are a sought after speaker. And so we’re just excited to have you so I probably aren’t. I’m not saying enough things about enough nice things about how how lucky we are to have this.
Chris Linsell 4:25 Well, that’s nice of you to say, Yeah, happy to connect with folks wherever I get a chance to share a little bit of conversation, maybe hop on a stage and impart some some knowledge and some maybe some ideas for how we can build better businesses and actually I kind of came with a bee in my bonnet today. I hope it’s okay. That I hijack things a little bit but I let’s do it. I had some conversations over the weekend with some real estate professionals in my local market. I’m in Michigan, Northern Michigan and And, you know, up here in the northern, the northern reaches of the Lower Peninsula, it is not uncommon to real estate for real estate as a business to really be a tale of two cities, you have the agents who are like, crushing it seeing you see their signs in every other yard. They’re doing 40 5060 transactions a year, really staying busy. And then you also have the agents who are maybe clearing 10 transactions a year that are maybe working for smaller, less aggressive brokerages. And then I had some conversations around that latter group of agents that were interested in this weekend, I’d love to chat with you a little bit about it, specifically, some of the things I was talking about and hearing from agents who, you know, aren’t they, they don’t have their name up in lights, they do real estate full time, like this is their job. But they’re, they’re not clear on more than 10 or 15 transactions a year. This is going to be an interesting year for those folks, especially if they are not adequately preparing themselves.
D.J. Paris 6:08 Yeah, I agree. So the top producers I know and the ones I feature on the show when I asked them, hey, you know, sort of behind the scenes, like what do you think about 2023, they’re like, well, it’s definitely going to be most of the agents I’ve spoken to say I believe it’s going to be, you know, I’ll definitely not be hitting the number of transactions I did. 2021 2022 was also first three quarters were fine. But last quarter was was pretty tough for most people. But these top producers don’t seem to be too worried. You know, their business may take a small hit, but they have so much that their sphere is so big, and their previous client list is so vast that they tend to do just fine. It’s your right, and our brokerage in particular, the vast majority of our agents are in that lower producing category. That’s just kind of our model. And we love those agents. But we also those are very vulnerable agents when the market shifts and so I love to talk about this because it will help our agents as well. Yeah, I
Chris Linsell 7:02 mean, I mean, think about it, like if you make a million dollars GCI you’re crushing it in any just about any market. And if you take a 30% hit on your business, and that’s that’s nothing to sneeze at, but you’re gonna have to subsist on $700,000 GCI this year, which you know, I’m sure you’re going to be able to figure figure your way through. If you make $50,000 a year, and you take a 30% bath, all of a sudden you’re making $35,000 GCI is difficult to pay the rent and the mortgage and the daycare bills on 35k. So yeah, but I want to talk more more than just GCI here. I wanted to bring up the first the first kind of interesting question that I had was an agent I was chatting with said, Should I be worried about my brokerage this year, like they work in a mom and pop brokerage. They’re one of six agents. Everybody’s kind of in the same boat here. They don’t have like a big marquee. They’re not buying billboards, they’re running a pretty small business. Do they need to be worried about their brokerage right now? And I said in no uncertain terms, you don’t need to be worried. But you do need to be actively asking the right questions. It is not out of line to my will to your managing broker and say, Hey, listen, I just want to make sure we’re set up for the for the for the year for the future here. Just want to check and see how things are going. You’re gonna find some interesting conversations are gonna come from that for sure.
D.J. Paris 8:39 We found 1000 brokerages here locally that when we looked at their production, we looked at their numbers, the number of agents, number of transactions, and we said, oh, wow, we we don’t see, we see. We see challenges for these 1000 firms. And so I sent out 1000 emails to these companies and saying, Hey, if you’re nervous about this year, if you’re, if you’re worried about, you know, whether you I didn’t say stay in business, but that was the assumption. If you’re nervous about this year, you know, we may want to merge with you, or we can absorb some of your costs. And we can figure out some sort of structure that works. And so we sent out 1000 individual emails and what was really interesting, whether were the results about 30 brokerages wrote back and said, You know what, we are pretty nervous. And we would like to talk and see if there’s a way we can go join forces, awesome for us, you know, great opportunity to pick up a bunch of agents and, you know, merge and whatever. But what was really interesting was I got about a hunt, man, maybe not 100 Maybe I got another 50 responses from brokers that I can see their numbers and I’m like, I don’t know how they’re paying the bills now. But whatever, they’re somehow surviving, and they were like, this is going to be a great year. Yeah, I don’t need you like almost even a little offended and we did very polite about it. But now got offended, but just sort of like, yeah, no, I’m good. So we’re like, Okay, those are the 50 that I’ve got my eye on, because I don’t see a path forward for them. That’s, that’s easy, unless they pick up a bunch of more realtors. So that would be a concern. Now, the agent who the agents who work at these firms, I am sure that is not on their mind, they don’t think about the health of the business. They’re focused on their own production, their own business. But if it was me, I would want be wanting to have a quick conversation with whoever owns the business and say, Hey, just wanted to check in and see how are things going, you know, what do you think was gonna happen this year? How’s the business doing? Is there anything I can do to help, you know, sort of being of service of that sense, and also, hopefully getting some information?
Chris Linsell 10:47 Yeah, I completely I that’s absolutely the right approach. And I would go, as far as telling agents, if you are working in a brokerage, like this, like that is, you know, that you don’t feel has a 100% chance of of survive and thrive in 2023. I would go as far as saying, if you are in that place, you need to do some internal reflection on your own business and the health of your own business, as it applies to, you know, Surviving and Thriving in 2023. You know, it’s, it’s interesting. I don’t know exactly what the classes look like in Illinois. But in Michigan, when you’re getting a real estate license, there are no personal accounting, there’s no business planning, besides maybe half a chapter in the in the pre license class. There are no requirements for you to have the knowledge and the strategy necessary to plan and evolve a successful business when pivots come. And the reality is DJ, most agents who are currently working in the United States right now have never worked a real estate season with the sort of downturn potential that we are seeing in 2023. Never, ever, if you look at the the tenure of license, the majority of agents have only been licensed during boom times at Nationwide, this truly is uncharted water for the majority of licensed real estate professionals. If that’s you, there’s no shame in saying, hey, this might be something I haven’t experienced before, I need to do a little self reflection to make sure I’m ready for this in addition to my organization.
D.J. Paris 12:36 Yeah, and I think if the phone has stopped ringing for an individual agent, I think that’s normal. And that’s what I’m even hearing from top producers, top producers I speak to either at our firm or on this podcast, have said they have to do a lot more outbound effort. These days, they have to reach out directly to the clients, or prospects, your sphere, whatever you make, call the people in your database, and reach out and check in with them. There’s a lot more outbound effort, let’s face it in in, you know, in 2021, and even some of 2022. For a lot of us, the phone was just ringing. And we were busy. It doesn’t mean it was easy, but we didn’t necessarily have to make as many outbound touches. And now is the time when I talked to top producers, they go, Oh, I’m just doing a lot more outbound touches, that seems to be the consistent message I’m hearing from so I think that’s a great lesson for for the smaller producers.
Chris Linsell 13:36 And I think just generally speaking for the smaller producers, and for those who have not worked through a downturn year. There’s a couple of other specific strategies in addition to and I think that’s, that’s the important one to identify is lead generation. The generation of the top of your funnel during boom times is mostly inbound people are calling you, you are buying ads on Zillow or through bold leads or top producer, you are creating opportunities for people to get in contact with you, because they are already looking for those services. In boom times you are simply activating those needs and giving them a way to reach out and connect with you. during a downturn times the script gets flipped. People are the people are less looking for those services. And instead of waiting for the phone to ring, you have to make it ring for somebody else. But there is something important here that a lot of people miss that I want to make sure I highlight. The fact is, the need for housing doesn’t change. In fact, it’s pretty. It’s pretty well established that the amount of people who need and I say need instead of want who need To housing doesn’t really change much year to year, maybe as the population grows, we’ll see a number of you know, we see the number of transactions move. But there is not this extraordinary jump or dip in the need for housing, this number stays pretty steady. It’s how people approach the kind of activation of that need. Because in boom times, they’re happy to reach out, they’re making all these moves themselves, they’re getting in contact, they’re starting conversations, during slow times or cautious like market retractions, it’s up to the real estate professional to identify where those needs exist, and activate the buyers and sellers who are going to meet those needs. So we are just turning the corner as far as the how the relationships start. And if you take that, and expand that idea out across your entire real estate strategy, think about how that would affect your social media, for instance, your social media is no longer about creating opportunities for someone to reach out to you. It is now about creating media, that gives you a chance to conversation and do the outreach yourself. So like a 10 second strategy you can use here, create content that engenders interaction, we want comments and shares. But this time you want those comments so that you can get that comment and then have maybe a mini personal interaction in the comments. Or you can start a conversation in a direct message. Or you can take it offline, get on the phone get in person. But that that initial social media interaction is not about just exposure for you so that somebody can reach out to you. It is about exposure for them, so that you can reach out to them. The need doesn’t change, but our approach gets flipped.
D.J. Paris 17:07 I have a I have a social media suggestion when I hear you’re very specific. So I was thinking while you were talking. Now this does isn’t exactly your suggestion, but I think it still will get you a similar result. So what I would one of the ideas that came to mind that I would consider and I want to hear if it’s a bad idea, I want you to tell me what I would what I might do is we know that Zillow is the number one, you know, client customer facing, you know, web website that people visit to of course, see home values, search for properties, etc. And people who aren’t looking for making a move might still be on Zillow to see what their own home is worth just looking at the Zestimate and I’m sure there’s a collective groan from our audience because realtors have a particular either affinity or non affinity to more non affinity I think to Zillow, Zestimate. But we know it’s a metric that your consumers do look at. In fact, it’s probably the only metric they look at when they’re trying to figure out what their home is worth, before calling a realtor and saying what’s my home worth? They’re gonna go on Zillow, or they’re gonna go to another, you know, comparable website and see some sort of estimate. If it was me on social media, what I might do is do either a live video, or a regular video, you know, it could be a real it could be whatever, where I literally show a random Zestimate it just pick one, I would not pick one. That’s one of your customers just pick a random one don’t even show the address. And say, here’s what Zillow is showing, I went and did a did a more in depth sort of review. And I actually came back with this number. And this number, I’m pretty confident is more accurate. Demonstrating that kind of value, I think in a video and then you can say, by the way, if anyone else out there is wondering what their home is worth, I am happy to run the same thing. You know, there’s no charge. It’s just what I do. I know that homeowners want to know what their home is worth. Or at least that’s a metric that they’re probably always interested in. So just just a quick thought there.
Chris Linsell 19:05 I think it’s great. Absolutely I love you know, those those who know me know that compare and contrast content is some of my favorite no matter what you’re comparing and contrasting people like holding things side by side and picking out the differences. Whether those differences are good or bad or the other. That’s very engaging social media content. The other thing that I think is important, just generally speaking, is to remember as you are thinking about your overall strategy for 2023, especially those who are operating a smaller business, you do have a little bit smaller margin for error than you did when you are in the big times when when you had the phone won’t stop ringing for you. And it’s important to remember that your brokerage is likely offering or excuse me, operating with a smaller margin of error as well. So what does that mean? Well, it means that the leaders in your brokerage, the ones who are maybe authorizing spend, or the ones that you are negotiating your, your split and cap agreements with, these folks are in protective kind of conservation mode right now. So, plan accordingly, just like everything in real estate negotiate based on what is important for the other party. If you are up for a renewal renegotiation on your cap and split, consider taking cable, I’m gonna say this out loud, consider taking a hit in 2023. Even if it’s minuscule 2% In an effort to maybe create a balloon for yourself in three years, where you get a 10% Bump, kind of thing. Like if you can afford a 2% drop right now in your split. Just just an idea to remind us that our brokers are probably negotiating from a place of protectionism. So be thoughtful about that. Likewise, when it comes to your own business, be conservative and thoughtful and strategic about your own decision making. Right now 2023 is likely a time where you are going to lean on the things that have worked and do a little bit less blind leaning on things that you don’t have an idea of whether that they work in your market, it’s not saying that you don’t want to innovate and take some calculated risk. But this is definitely a time to lean on the things that work. And if you’re new to this business, then it’s time to lean on the things that have worked for others, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel right now.
D.J. Paris 21:45 I agree. And just one last tip, if you predict that your business may be down a certain percentage, and you can, you can, the easiest way, I think to figure that out is talk to your managing broker, have them look at what they think forecasts for your your local market. And the next year, you know, the oh, by the way your association is can help with this too. And in fact, you’re paying them a lot of money, along with whoever the MLS provider is, I would call both and say hey, what do you guys forecast for? And I shouldn’t say guys, but But whoever is doing this, what does your team predict? Or what is your best guess for what you see via data trends? And let’s just say it’s the thing, maybe the whole market is going to be down 15% for your local area? Well, I would assume that that’s going to hit me at that same level. And here’s my here’s what I’m, here’s the action step, make sure that you are reducing your expenses by at least 15%. Because if you don’t, and you just say, Well, I’m just going to grind it out and try to get as much business as I can. Well, we hope that that happens for you. And we hope that that extra effort will result in more business, but you need to take care of your business and you need to be fiscally responsible. So please, please don’t do what some of these brokerages, I think some of these brokerages are struggling to even do this as well, which is why I’m reaching out to every small brokerage in my area, because I suspect a lot of them aren’t adjusting expenses, much less the agents doing their own adjustment of their own expenses. So please talk to your managing broker, make sure that they have a grip on what’s happening. If they’re like, this is going to be an awesome year, I would say well, why do you think that? You know, what data do you do you have that’s causing you to think that and if they don’t have it, I’d be a little concerned, and then look within your own business and say, hey, where am I spending money? Maybe I could, I could, you know, reduce some of the those expenses and just try to get through this year without, you know, being non profitable?
Chris Linsell 23:39 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, one little caveat, I will say is that often, opportunity is is placed in the hands of those who are willing to get off their heels and onto their toes the fastest. So this isn’t to say if you if you see an opportunity for success that you don’t leverage that opportunity, but it is to say, apply a strict and stringent criteria for what opportunity looks like. Basically, it’s not a license to just sit back and let opportunities fly by you. That is, you know, certainly an approach but not the most profitable one. But you have to be really thoughtful about what those opportunities look like. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 24:23 honestly believe if you do a lot more outbound calling, texting, emailing, staying in touch, letting your sphere know that you care about them, giving them reasons to pick up the phone, hey, I want to I wanted to give you an update on what I think your home is worth. Give me a call back. I’ll have a few quick questions. I’m gonna send it over to you just so you know what’s going on in the market. Those kinds of things are gold. And you can do that all day long and demonstrate value and by the way, people who are renting right now rental prices again, depends on your local market have come down significantly with the concessions going up meaning more amenities, less pay. So if you have somebody who’s sitting on the sideline, because they’re worried about the six and a half percent lending rates to buy a property, maybe it’s better for them to rent right now and you can still help them do that. But having that conversation going, Hey, you’re a renter right now, you know, let’s take a look at some of the other buildings in your area. When’s your lease up? Okay, let’s talk about that. Whether or not you earn a commission from doing that is another issue, but you are demonstrating value and setting yourself up for for future success.
Chris Linsell 25:23 It’s the truth. I couldn’t agree more.
D.J. Paris 25:25 Well, let’s let’s cap it at that. Oh, what a great i, what a great place to end off. want to remind everyone to visit the closed.com. And also, so 90 to 95% or higher of their content. It’s totally free. You can go there. It’s amazing content. And actually, like, I’ve been noticing this if you go I’ll just quick aside for a moment. I’ve been doing some videos about chat GBT just because it’s fun, which is this open AI free piece of software that Microsoft owns that you can go in and ask all sorts of fun questions, and you can get some interesting results. And anyway, I won’t go into chat GBT now. But what’s interesting is I’ll ask Chet GPT writing a persuasive email to recruit a realtor because that’s what I do. And they write it. It’s pretty interesting. But But what I was gonna say is, you’re really it. The information that comes back is pretty generic. So I love chat GBT. But what I really love is great journalism. Even more than just getting you know some some some bot to regurgitate information that finds online. The close does not do that the closes got real journalism, really deep dive articles. It’s not Hey, for your next open house, let’s bake some cookies or it’s it’s really really specific stuff about what can actually drive people to that next open house or help you with your marketing efforts. They have just incredible content guys, I honestly believe that I want everybody to read it. So go to the clothes.com they also have a pro a subscription model as well. So if you want to take that to the next level, you can check out the clothes Pro. Chris, also, are you speaking anywhere anytime soon? Any? Any plugs?
Chris Linsell 27:05 Yeah, um, well, I’m actually going to be in New York City for the Inman Connect conference. I’m not speaking at any of the stages, but I’ve got a couple of little things you can come noodle noodle ramen fire, follow me on Twitter, you can find me there. And for anyone in Canada, that’s listening. Next thing I’m booked at is the realtor quest conference in Toronto this spring. So if you are selling real estate in Canada and are in the Toronto area, you should definitely come. I’ve got a lot of really great stuff planned for that event.
D.J. Paris 27:40 Awesome. Well, that’s a that’ll be a wrap for for this time everyone. Go visit the clothes.com. Consider subscribing to the close Pro as well. Thank you for listening and making it to the end of this episode. Just do us one favor, tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that’s struggling. Almost all realtors are a little bit right now. So this would be a great gift to give to somebody to say, hey, what could I be doing right now to help ensure that I’m building a strong business for this year, send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just have them subscribe to our podcast and go get episode updates from whatever app they’re using. So anyway, Chris, great to see you. We will see you next next month. And thank you, of course to our audience and of course to Chris for providing such amazing conversation. Chris, it was great seeing you.
Chris Linsell 28:26 See you guys next time.
A.B.C. = Always Be Connecting • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Jan 24, 2023
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
In this episode Ryan and D.J. discuss the merging of Ryan’s company with Coldwell Banker, and how this is a very big step. Ryan talks about the importance of following the “ABC” (Always Be Connecting) rule with clients by agents, and how this rule helps in earning their trust. DJ and Ryan also discuss how important communication is in the real estate business and also what needs to be improved.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What is a top real estate coach telling his top 1% producers to do every single day this year? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcasts made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, and I am your guide and host through the show, and today is our monthly coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re new to the show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. So let me tell you more about Ryan. Now Ryan de April is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and staff at D Pro properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style, and his dedication to training. He has 13 offices throughout Chicagoland he’s also in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan and Florida, with hundreds and hundreds of top agents. De April properties is a coaching company with eight strategic coaches who work week in and week out with every agent at the company focused on business planning, coaching and accountability. If you’ll take your career to the next level, if you’re maybe just not getting the attention that you need, check out depot properties do April properties.com. Ryan, welcome once again.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:38 Thanks, DJ. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It’s good to be back. It’s been a it’s been a little bit since I’ve been with Yeah,
D.J. Paris 2:44 it’s been a while. And we have I have some congratulations in order that you have now joined forces with with Coldwell Banker.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:53 We have Yes, yeah. So I’ve been working on that with them for the past few months. And it’s been exciting. It’s a great, great group of people over there. And I’m very excited about that. And we get to take two wonderful cultures and meld them together. And, you know, work with an organization that has basically a wonderful global presence, a lot of value added to our agents. I’m incredibly excited. My wife’s an agent of the company. So I just excited from all the things that I saw that they have access to makes me very excited. And then I get to, I get to coach I actually get to even coach even more people, which makes me makes me excited about the whole opportunity as well.
D.J. Paris 3:33 And it’s also I want this to be inspiring too, for anyone who’s in the process of building a team or thinking of starting a brokerage. If you don’t mind, Ryan, just sharing maybe a minute or so a minute or two of the journey from big being your own managing broker, starting a firm and now all these years later, integrating it with Coldwell Banker. Yeah, you
Ryan D’Aprile 3:54 know, it’s it is it’s quite a journey starts off with anything that you do. It’s you know, you reach something that you’re very passionate about. And I started the real estate company because I was very passionate about coaching agents and helping them develop and we built our company off of that about probably, you know, you know, our company did in 2001, we did about $1.2 billion. No, yeah. 21. We did about 1.2 billion in sales in 2022, which is a down year for everybody. We did over a billion dollars, but we were down. But it’s something to be really proud of the hang our hat on and probably 85% of our agents started their career at our company, and probably a lot of them. It was only seven or eight years ago and we’re putting up some pretty, pretty big numbers which we’re really proud of. And you know, that is based on something I was very passionate about is working individually with the agents i this past Saturday, you know, the company sold and this past Saturday, I was at one of our offices with a bunch of agents and I was doing a group coaching session and it’s allowed me to get back to what I was passionate really passionate about. The company grew it grew quite well. Arjun, I started to find that my desire, my passion of coaching and training was being overshadowed by a lot of administrative stuff, as you know, running a real estate company, there’s more to it than meets the eye, I guess, let’s just say put it that way. So a lot of work. So by joining forces with Coldwell Banker, it allowed me to get what I was back to what I’m more passionate about, which is working with each individual agents, also, loan officers, I coach loan officers, I coach, a coach, title sales reps, I coach insurance agents, anybody who’s in sales, I coach them, I help them, you know, set a goal and then create a path to where they want to get to.
D.J. Paris 5:43 Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. And I just I know, you’re, you’re a very humble person. But I do want to stress that you built a company, an independent brokerage. Here in Chicago, you competed with the biggest and the best, and you built a business that really was, you know, is as as big and as powerful and as impressive as the big franchise firms. And that in and of itself, is a very difficult thing to do. And so I just want to honor you for building up a company, a healthy company, a healthy, profitable company that then caught the eye of all your competitors, and what a wonderful position. And what a wonderful testament to how you built your business so that all these other brokerages wanted, wanted, wanted to join forces with you. So glad you landed with Coldwell Banker, our company, our managing broker started at Coldwell Banker. We’re big fans, of course of them as well. So congratulations to all the agents at D APR. And you’re you’ve got a great journey ahead of you. And really exciting.
Ryan D’Aprile 6:52 Thanks, thanks. Yeah, I am excited. And, you know, it is one of those things when we reflect back, I was telling my wife, I, you know, I never really pause because I was running so hard these past 11 years growing the organization. And it was, you know, after the sale, I looked back said to myself, Jesus Christ, I am probably one of the most competitive real estate markets in the country. Yeah, I mean, Chicago is
Unknown Speaker 7:17 brutal, brutal,
Ryan D’Aprile 7:19 it’s very competitive. And so I did have a moment of pride, where I’ve always kind of never really taken the time to do that. And I didn’t, and thank you, I appreciate you saying that.
D.J. Paris 7:30 Yeah, it’s, it’s a big deal. And very few independent firms have done it. So that is a real feather in your cap. And obviously, again, really highlights your ability to grow a business and keep your agents happy and keep them productive and keep them pride keep the business profitable. So speaking of all of that, it is 2023 It’s our first coaching moments of the year. And everybody I know whether they’re a broker owner or a team leader, or just an individual producing agent, everybody I know seems to be a little scared, nervous, worried about what’s going on what’s right in front of them, what they should be focused on. So they don’t get caught up in you know, inaction or you know, just the business cycles being changed or changing at the currently. So I would love to know as a coach, what you are saying what are you are hearing out there and what you’re recommending to agents who are a little nervous or scared about where we are right now in the house insurer.
Ryan D’Aprile 8:39 Yeah, absolutely. Well, so the first thing to keep in mind there’s a tremendous amount of distractions. Look, we just sold the company and I think every single recruiter in Chicagoland area his got my agents numbers on speed dial and the calling over and over and
D.J. Paris 8:54 over so it is a recruiting for people like me and by the way, I have not been doing that to your agents, but because we don’t really compete in that same way but I recruiters are having a field day right now now is the time when agents are struggling so the recruiters come out and they promised the world and every agent every one of our listeners is probably getting prospected by somebody in their local markets,
Ryan D’Aprile 9:18 you know and for people are listening that are real estate agents that are not on the corporate side or the reloc or on the corporate side or the recruiting side. You know, you got to listen to the message the message is overwhelmingly been coming to my agency has been messages a fair and and and majority of people will be able to be scared and it’s a shame you should be Lee should be inspiring, leading by inspiration. You should be you know, you should lead by hope you should not be you know leading by fear which is basically manipulating somebody to get what you want by scaring them and, and there’s a lot of scary things that are out there and got it really be smart and who you align yourself with. And, you know, when times are rough, I mean, again, I’ve been through this did a great recession. And here we are in another difficult market. You know, when times are rough, everybody is going to look outside of themselves first, and, and make the change. Look, a year ago, you know, you know, a year ago, before I was even thinking about selling or anything of that sort came, a number of agents left my company, they leave every year, they were all top producing agents, and unfortunately, all but one shit the bed. And the reason being, I think, is that we had such a strong culture of accountability and whatnot. And some excuses when he just said, like, well look at these tools and these technology and this and that. There’s tools, technology and gizmos, they’re going to come and they’re going to go, there is nothing that is earth shattering about what we do. Anybody could say tech and tools and technology. The truth is, are you even going to open up the computer six weeks later and use the technology that they gave you? And really what difference is it? And so what everybody does, when they’re trying to improve, right? They change everything outside first. That’s why 93% of them don’t improve. The work comes from within, if you want different results, you need to change. That doesn’t mean you need to change companies. And I’m not talking about my company, I’m talking about any industry, whatever it means you you personally have got to change. You know, it lies within what are you doing? What are your activities on Saturday, when I was with a group of agents, and I was coaching them? One of them said, Look, you know, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, and I and I and I time block, excuse me, I set up my all my social media posts for a month in advance. And, and she looked at me I’m like, and she’s like, well, I go ahead and I pre plan this stuff I’m like, and she’s like, Well, what do you mean? And I’m like, Well, that’s what moves the needle in your business. I mean, that’s not I mean, social media marketing, okay, is seen by a majority of the people that have already liked your post, probably 94% of them are your fellow real estate agents that are saying, Go ahead, friend, good for you. And they’re liking your stuff and is going to the same people over and over again. If you’re doing social media, if you’re using social media, by marketing versus researching and developing, right, then you’re going about this business relationship building business the wrong way. And when you point to some of the top top people out there, right, that have beautiful social media marketing out there, but they’re also selling 3040 50 $100 million real estate a year, you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg real estate agent that’s out there, you’re not seeing all the other hard work that they put in there that they’re committed to their business. I mean, those people that are selling 50 to $100 million in production a year, okay. And then they have beautiful reels or whatnot. Those reels, net marketing came after all the other hard work and time and effort they put in to build the business. So
D.J. Paris 13:11 that’s a that’s a really good point is that, so So if I hear you correctly, and I just want to pause you because I think you’re saying something really profound, which is utilizing social media while you’re not busy might the better way to do that might be through what Ryan has said time and time again on the show as research and development lert follow your your your sphere, pay attention to what is going on in their lives, because that will give you number one indications of possibly wanting to move but also reasons to pick up the phone and call them. Hey, just saw you got back from a trip to Mexico. How did it go just was thinking about you looked awesome, that kind of thing.
Ryan D’Aprile 13:51 I’m actually going in two days with Coldwell Banker.
D.J. Paris 13:56 I’m Nicole Baker, I want to go to Mexico.
Ryan D’Aprile 13:59 I had I had my so we had our we had our software’s Anello, our dashboard up at this coaching session, and I was showing everybody in their network tab, right, like look at all the hyperlinks that we have in here to, you know, DJs Facebook page or DJs Instagram page or DJs LinkedIn page and, and then I opened up Facebook, and another tab. And I said here’s the right way the wrong way. You start in your dashboard first. You start there, and you go one by one with each person and you look at you click on their hyperlink and you look at what’s going on with them. If you start on Facebook first you should say alert made a something’s wrong. Because when you look at the newsfeed you are seeing what Michael Zuckerberg wants you to see isn’t a mike Zuckerberg.
D.J. Paris 14:46 Mark but closer.
Ryan D’Aprile 14:48 Great, Mark, you’re seeing what Mark Zuckerberg wants you to see in the newsfeed you’re seeing. You don’t have control over on Instagram as well. Right You’re you’re seeing what they want you to see, you know scroll through your newsfeed, that’s just not how it works. You have to be intentional, just like success, and anybody starts a business, you got to be intentional, and what it is that you want to do. But if you’re passive, and you’re thumbing through Facebook newsfeeds, that’s fine, but you’re just wasting your day, you’re wasting your valuable time. And your time is so much more valuable than money. Okay, your time is so valuable. But so many of us in Robin Sharma says this, I love it. Some of us are so busy being busy, very few of us are busy being productive. So there’s a right way there’s a wrong way of doing it. And in these times where it quote unquote, scary for people, look in the mirror, have a direct conversation with yourself. Okay? And ask, are you doing the proper right things to be efficient in this market? Because anybody can be successful? I think the statistics came out at home sell every minute, 11,000 homes sell a day. Right now, there’s more than enough business out there. It’s just that when business was easy, everybody, it was coming to everybody. Right now that it’s scarce, a the first to flee, or the negative mindset individuals, right?
D.J. Paris 16:16 I want to ask you for a second, because I think you’re saying you’re saying something, it’s really important, I just want to put just put the cap on the social media conversation is that this so what Ryan was saying was, hey, if we were scrolling through social media, obviously, that may sometimes show us information about our sphere that we could then use to call as information and say, Hey, I saw you were just doing X, Y, and Z, I saw your kids were doing X, Y and Z. But what Ryan was saying is to be really super intentional about it is to actually, you know, specifically search for that person, look at their posts, see what they’re up to. And then that gives you possibly a reason to reach out, you can also, by the way, do that via Linked in. So in LinkedIn, a lot of times when people get job promotions, or switch companies, that information is also in their newsfeed. So you can use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and be really, really intentional about seeing what’s going on in your clients or your sphere of influences life. And the reason why you want to do that is because it gives you a reason to pick up the phone and contact them or to send an email or a text, or however you communicate with with your sphere. This, by the way, this is so much easier than trying to create an a beautiful piece of content for you that you post on your stories, your real your you know that that’s hard to do. And as Ryan said, that comes usually after what you can do today for zero money is you can find out what’s going on in people’s lives and reach out to them and connect with them.
Ryan D’Aprile 17:52 Yeah, everybody, really everybody that I observed wants to make this about marketing. And it’s it’s yes, there’s marketing is important. But that’s not I mean, that’s, that’s the easy part, right, you have to get out of your comfort zone, you have to grow a network, you have to nourish the network, you have to take care of the network. If you don’t, your business isn’t going to grow period. It just it’s just not. And the more I guess the more communal your neighborhood is, the more work it’s going to take. I mean, when I sold real estate in Chicago, the city of Chicago, it was actually easier than it would be in the suburbs, because the suburbs are so tight knit. So community where there’s larger cities like Chicago or Miami and areas where I’ve coach agents, it’s very transient, right? So because it’s transient, it’s easier to pick up an open house lead, it’s easier to get an online web lead the conversion rates higher because they don’t have those connections, right. But if you take the time to say, I’m going to take care of this building that I live in that I farm, I’m going to be a part of the social events, I’m going to get to know the people in the building, you’ll dominate, you’ll own that building, I owned the buildings, we’re now selling real estate in Chicago, that I farmed, because I got involved with them from a community and it was easier, quite honestly, because there was such a lack of community in those bigger cities, not when you’re in the suburbs, right? And you’re going to have the soccer teams and the football teams and baseball and all the stuff that comes along, you know, with, I guess, families in the suburbs, right? or whatnot, and then you’re gonna have to get even more involved in there. Now. One thing that listeners might be thinking because I brought up the family element of it that somebody said to me on Saturday, he said, Well, I don’t have a family. So is it harder for me to grow my business? So this person has been a real estate agent for five years. And I pointed to an agent of ours that doesn’t have a family doesn’t have any kids and sell 64 homes a year. And I said but look at his network. He’s got 420 people in it. Every single quarter he touches them, I said, it’s I’ve never seen anybody work this system and not be a success. I’ve seen people not work it and be successful. I’ve seen people not work it and be failures. But I’ve never seen anybody working it, and it doesn’t work for them. But it takes a commitment it takes, it takes drive, right? And it takes it takes self reliance, you got to be responsible for yourself. You’re called independent contractors for a reason. But it’s going to take even more responsibility than it is when you get a job and you have a boss telling you what to do, you are the boss. So therefore you got to be able to get plan out your day, and do what you need to do and execute it day in and day out, or it’s just not going to happen.
D.J. Paris 20:47 And I think to this idea of earning business is I think there’s, well a minimum of two different places where you need to earn business. And I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. And here’s what I came up with. The first is you want, of course, your sphere and I say client, I should just say your sphere, your prospects, you want your prospects to think about you when they do need to work with a realtor. So you have to earn that position. So you first have to earn that. And then you also have to earn once they’re ready to make a decision that that you are in fact the right person. So you first want to be thought of and then you want to be selected. And I was thinking but you do have to earn that right. And you have to earn it through effort. And Ryan, you’ve said this time and time again on our show, social media is a great place to get information to allow you the to show you the steps to earn this, these deeper connection, earn these these deals through deeper connection through intimacy through understanding what’s going on in my clients lives are and that’s as simple as paying attention and reaching out and saying, Hey, I saw that you just did this, I saw that you guys just had a birthday I you know, there’s all sorts of things that social media tells us about our, our sphere of influence. And all we have to do is acknowledge it, tell them we’re watching work, and we’re proud of them, or we’re excited for them or whatever the particular instance might be. We have to do this on the regular so that we can even be thought about when it comes time for real estate. I’ll tell you. One thing I did about a year a couple years ago was I have had an assistant. And I said to my assistant, I said I don’t know any of my friends, birthdays, anniversaries, I don’t know their children’s birthdays. These are my friends. And I said I want to be the friend that knows all of his friends that doesn’t miss a birthday doesn’t miss an anniversary doesn’t miss. So I said can you reach out to all my friends and just ask them, we’re updating our database, we DJ doesn’t want to forget your birthday. And we got their, their their wedding anniversaries, we got their kids birthdays, I know the ages of their kids. Now I’m not a practicing agent. But I’m doing this just for my own my own relationships with my friends. But this is the exact same thing you can do with your sphere. And it gives you reasons to reach out to stay in communication to build community. But but in order to build a community you have to actually build a community you have to actually want to have deeper connections with your with your spirit.
Ryan D’Aprile 23:13 That’s absolutely right. That’s exactly what you have to do. And it’s it takes time. And it’s like you know, a river running through you know, you know, a canyon or whatnot, it will carve against the stone with the consistency. Day in and day out. It’s not a one and done thing. The most important part of all this is being consistent in these activities. It’s not like there’s no silver bullet out there it is it is time it’s effort if you nurture it, it will pay huge dividends to you.
D.J. Paris 23:45 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US us his follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 days. Trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. It will but you’re right, it takes out going effort outbound efforts. So in the past, it used to be pick up the phone, we call somebody, Hey, are you thinking about selling? No, not yet. Okay, I’ll call you later. There are much better ways to do that now. And I think the best way to do that is to be entwined with, or at least aware of the happenings of your prospects lives, so that you can know and give them advice along the way. And that they go, Wow, my agent called me they, they saw that, you know, my, my partner just got a promotion they call to congratulate me. I mean, those types of things when Evers whenever somebody does something special in their life, whether it’s with their family or their profession, if somebody else comes along and says, Hey, I saw that you did that thing. Boy, that goes a heck of a long way to building a building, you know, endearment, and it does,
Ryan D’Aprile 26:02 yeah, and it’s all out there for you to know what’s going on with these individuals. I mean, today, it’s it’s so easy, everybody’s living their lives publicly. So it’s easy to see what’s going on. But again, be be intentional about that research and development that you’re doing. And what you’re seeing, just don’t don’t blindly log in and go through newsfeed, you’re the you’re going to be doing what the algorithms want you to see you have to be intentional. And look up your network, see what’s going out with them. And then and then don’t, don’t do it, don’t consider writing on the wall. You know, a, like a touch, you know, you have to pick up the phone, you need to text him You gotta reach out with them and create a dialogue. And remember Ford, right, family Occupation, Recreation and dreams, ask open ended questions. Right? You know, how’s Little Billy doing right? Or? Or hey, how’s it how’s the new job at? At? Pepsi? whatnot, I just saw you got promoted to director finance? How’s it going? What, tell me about that, let them then tell them about you, you know, have learned the art of conversing with individuals, right, open ended conversations. And remember, it’s more about them than it is you, they’re gonna give you so much valuable data. And then when they have a need and 16% of your network transacts every single year, when they have a need, they’re going to think of their friend, right? And that’s you, right? And I tolerate like, I love this business, because you’re in the business of creating friends. So get to work.
D.J. Paris 27:27 The other thing too, if you’re a brand new agent, I’ve never really heard anyone say this. So I’m curious, you might have a different opinion, you might say this is a terrible idea. But my first glance, my first thought is that it’s a good idea. But I could be wrong. So if I were a brand new agent, and I had a bunch of friends that owned homes that maybe weren’t even thinking of selling what every homeowner, or at least what most homeowners who aren’t in the process of selling still like to know is what’s their place worth. You know, at any given regular day, we can go to Zillow and look at the Zestimate I don’t ever think to do that. But sometimes people do but you’re a real estate professional, you can actually provide most likely a more accurate thing. So what I would do is I would call everybody I know who owns a house if I was new, and say hey, I know you’re not looking to buy or sell anytime soon. But I really want to send you a comp because I want to practice and I want to get better at sending comps, is it okay? If I send you what I think your home is currently worth? I just would love to get your review on it. It’ll help me in my skill, building my skills. If these are your closest people to you, I think they’d be like, great, send it over. We’re curious what you thought of that.
Ryan D’Aprile 28:35 If they’re, if mean reaching out to them and ask them
D.J. Paris 28:39 for an new agent. Hey, I don’t have any clients. I just want to get some practice, you know, running CMAs that kind of thing.
Ryan D’Aprile 28:46 I would run a CMA but I wouldn’t send it to I wouldn’t send it to I don’t think I would send it to
D.J. Paris 28:52 to them. You wouldn’t Okay, no, I
Ryan D’Aprile 28:55 wouldn’t. I want you to focus more on the relationship building aspect of it. They’re going to find out what you’re doing through your Autoflow your direct mail, your email marketing, you know, some of the social media, they’re going to know what you’re doing. Make friends with them. First, they’re going to ask you about real estate. If they ask you about comps, then you run some comps. Now what you should what you shouldn’t be doing you should be running comps, on homes, you know, but I wouldn’t be sending them out. You should be running and going to your manager broker and say what do you think about this? I think this home should be priced here based on the comps that I ran. You should be maybe talking to some friends and saying hey listen, why don’t you come see some open houses with me? I want to go around I want to get to know the marketplace. I love the front and come with me and also Hey, let’s go right up pretend to offer I’m not going to present it but let’s go take a purchase contract. Let’s go get a cup of coffee. I’m going to fill out a contract I’m gonna explain to you a contract. Would you mind me practicing on you that’s what you do with what really good friend of yours. That’s gonna give you some real life experience. Right? But you know, I’m of the mindset of your touches. Your outreach should all be relationship that should be all about them. Your real estate will naturally flow to you
D.J. Paris 30:00 So I agree you’re right. i You’re absolutely right. i It’s funny you I was talking about putting everyone’s anniversaries and birthdays in my calendar. And so now because I that I do that, especially wedding anniversaries, I routinely get messages from my friends that go, you’re the only person outside of my immediate family that knows it’s my anniversary now. Am I such an amazing guy that I because I do that? No, I just put it in my calendar. Like I literally just did the one thing? And how does how would that make that person feel about me remembering their most special day of their life, right, or the birth of a child or whatever it might be the major life events, if you can somehow be be there after the event happens to to you know, congratulate the person. Boy, that demonstrates a tremendous, a tremendous effort
Ryan D’Aprile 30:53 solely out loud, about, it’s always about them. It’s not about you. And it’s all about you showing how much you care about them through your actions, even more so than your words. And that’s being consistent and continually reaching out to them. Again, the numbers will just take care of it for you. The numbers so
D.J. Paris 31:10 you’re not. So here’s a question. But rates are really high right now. I’m an agent, none of my buyers, they’re all upset about rates. So I’m just giving a devil’s advocate. What do you say to that?
Ryan D’Aprile 31:24 About rates? Okay, great. And your buyer? Wonderful. Why are you buying?
D.J. Paris 31:33 Because I need more space.
Ryan D’Aprile 31:36 Okay, so the listeners pay close attention to this. Right? It’s the why so why do you need more space?
D.J. Paris 31:43 So that I can work from home? A couple days a week, and I need a home office?
Ryan D’Aprile 31:48 Why do you wanna work from home a couple days a week? So that I can?
D.J. Paris 31:51 Because it’s more comfortable for me? I don’t I don’t want to commute in every day. So I you know, how long 30 minutes?
Ryan D’Aprile 32:04 So is that an hour a day? Then? It’s 30 mins started our yes, they couldn’t what? You’re commuting five days a week, then if you’re not working from home? Correct? Well, that’s five hours a day. Right? Right. It’s 20 hours a month. Right? So, you know, and take that that’s 240 hours in a year? Yeah, divided by 24 hours? How many days of that? So those are the things I ask you, DJ, as my friend and my buyer. You know, what is it to you that’s more important? Is it a say a 6% interest rate on a 300,000 hour loan? Right? versus maybe dropped down to five and a quarter a year from now. So that three quarters of a point difference? What does that come out till? And then you got to ask yourself, What’s more important to you? Five days in the car 30 minutes each way, or be able to work from home? And I can’t answer that only you can. My friend, you find the home, you make that decision, you tell me if your wife’s strong enough for you to buy the home.
D.J. Paris 33:08 Right. So the rates just kind of are what they are. And I think most of our listeners have heard the expression, you know, marry the home date the rate. It’s it’s not an expression. It’s an overused expression. But it’s it’s a pretty good one. Because it is actually how most people think about purchasing property. They fall in love with the home. And whatever the rate is, is and people can refinance, of course, thank goodness. So
Ryan D’Aprile 33:35 most, most agents will ask these questions, TJ, but they don’t even have the buyer client yet. They asked him because they’re building up, they’re building up objections in their heads already, because they’ve yet to do the life flow that’s necessary for them to grow their business.
D.J. Paris 33:48 Does that make sense? A little bit more about life flow.
Ryan D’Aprile 33:51 Life flow was simply touching everybody in your database. I think we could do it once a month. Right? Personally, by you know, a text a call, right? Maybe Facebook Messenger to them about them, and checking in with them. You know, keeping keeping current with them, and keeping them in your life and you and there’s so if you have, say 300 people in your network. Okay. Do you have a calculator with you? Because I don’t know I’m pacing? Yes, I do. Okay, great. So there’s, there are 20 working days in a month. Okay, so what’s 23 divided by or what’s 300 divided by 2015? One Five. Fitting, you have to make 15 touches a day. 15 touches a day. Now do that for a full year in a row followed up with a consistent marketing campaign, not take 300 and multiply it by point one six. You know, come the 48 Yeah. 4840. That’s 40 transactions that that are living in that database of 300 people 16% of them are going to transact records Are this the market they’re gonna transact, a lot of them won’t even transact twice. Right? They might sell a transaction Yes, sell and buy. But here’s the reality is maybe 5% or less of real estate agents are actually going to do the activities they need to do. And do those 15 touches a day. Seeing the time in and time out. Right, that’s That’s it, separate you guys from the struggling real estate agent to the very few top producers that are actually out there.
D.J. Paris 35:26 And plus, like, if you really think about it, and again, everybody’s personalities are different. But I would assume it’s a lot more fun to contact somebody and, you know, you look to see what they’re doing on social you, you know, you have a reason to call them, they just did something on social media that you want to acknowledge, or there’s something going on in the market that you want to make them aware of. Either way, this should all be fun, positive stuff. Right. So making 15 phone calls a day going, Hey, I was just thinking about your saw you just went on a trip. I saw your so and so just got promoted. So you guys just had an anniversary a birthday? Oh, by the way, here’s something that’s going on in the market that you might care about down the street or whatever. Those are all activities. Vijay,
Ryan D’Aprile 36:09 I’ll even leave that out of it. Okay. That last part. Okay. I would even leave that part out of I would leave bringing it back to real estate out of it. Does that?
D.J. Paris 36:20 Yeah, just just connect with them. Personally.
Ryan D’Aprile 36:23 That’s That’s how I feel. Just connect with them. Focus on the relationship. Leave anything about your business out of it. They will ask you, here’s how you do it. Okay, DJ, we’re going to roleplay here. You’re an accountant. Okay. Okay. And say you’re an accountant at a big you know, one of the big five firms. Okay, okay. DJ, how’s business?
D.J. Paris 36:44 Whoa, I’m slammed it’s it’s it’s the beginning of the year. Everyone’s working on their taxes. It’s brutal right now I’m slammed.
Ryan D’Aprile 36:51 That’s crazy. What are you working on?
D.J. Paris 36:53 Corporate Tax taxes are due just clients are asking for everything for just shore up their year.
Ryan D’Aprile 37:00 That’s crazier, isn’t it? Yeah. Now, what are you gonna say to me eventually,
D.J. Paris 37:05 I’m gonna say hey, what’s going on with you? What’s What are you up to?
Ryan D’Aprile 37:08 Right? Now? Here’s my chance. Just busy running around works crazy families. Great.
D.J. Paris 37:14 How’s the market? How’s it? How’s
Ryan D’Aprile 37:15 it? Right? Worse, great. Finally, then you just say okay, well, how’s the market? Now, I’m not going in every call thinking that through. In fact, I tend to throw scripts away. Right? I just go and make it about the person somehow, usually, sometimes not all the time, work will pop up. But if I talk to you once a month, I text with you once a month, I send you a Facebook Messenger once a month, two years go by, I am your buddy. You know what the hell I do for a living. And when you are looking to either purchase your home or or sell a home, there’s a really strong possibility. I’m the guy you’re calling. Why? Because it did my job. I kept you close to me, I kept the relationship with you.
D.J. Paris 37:58 Yeah, this is this reminds me of an old Brian Tracy expression. And we’re not really putting this in the prospecting category. But one of my favorite Brian Tracy quotes is prospecting solves all problems, or sales solve all problems. And of course, of course he’s right. And so what we’re really doing is, even though we’re not prospecting with a capital P, what we’re doing is we are prospecting because we are staying in touch with our sphere. We know people are going to choose their realtor, most people are going to choose based on who they know, like and trust, you have to earn that you have to earn know, like and trust. So the way that you earn it is exactly how Ryan is describing it here. And if you just do this this year, and you you know, you find what 15 phone calls a day, if you have 300 people in your database 15 touches a day. What is that might take what three hours a day, maybe maybe two hours a day, maybe even less. That is a remarkable low amount of effort for building intimacy and ever sorry, not not alone in a bad way. That’s, that’s a very reasonable amount of time to spend. And that will actually result in business.
Ryan D’Aprile 39:08 That’s absolutely right. And Brian Tracy is right. Prospecting leads will solve all your problem. And I’ve seen agents I’m very empathetic individual. Don’t get me wrong, right. But I’ve seen agents struggle, and I’ve seen him complain about it. But then I’ve also watched him do nothing about it. Yeah, I watch him do nothing about it. Right. And I’ve watched him look around to see what’s gonna solve my problem, guys. There’s no silver bullet out there. You gotta get to work. You gotta look at every professional out there that’s successful in any industry. You know, it’s so funny. You know, again, I’ve worked with a lot of new agents and brought them up, right. And the first year is a lot of emotional intelligence. I have to work with them on right because they comment they might be coming into business in their 40s. Right? And then they’re gonna look at the front like, well, he or she’s so successful, like, we’ll leave it at their career. For 20 years, they’ve been building the career for a long time. Why are you expecting be a number one agent within 12 months? It makes no sense. And then why after seven years of you not doing what you really need to do, are you upset that you’re you’ve plateaued and you’re really not where you should be? Well, that’s because you just gone through time like anybody is going to be, I think it was Gary Keller wrote in his book, The Millionaire, Millionaire Real Estate Agent, the Methuselah effect, you know who Methuselah is, right? Yes. All right. And so you’re going to be in this business for 20 years, eventually, you’re gonna have enough business, just you just want to go through 20 years of being in real estate to finally hit your stride. Right. And there are a lot of agents I know, that had been in the business for 789 years that are finally hitting their stride. That’s just because we’ve been in it for 789 years. Right. You know, it’s, they’re not where they probably should be.
D.J. Paris 40:56 Yeah, it’s, it’s a really, it’s a really good point. It’s it. Also, it’s what’s nice about having sort of, you know, your life flow, like you were saying, would live flow equals connection with your, your sphere. What is so amazing about that is it has nothing to do with the market has nothing to do with the conditions of the economy. It’s just interpersonal communication, this is something that that you can do. On your best day, your worst day, whatever’s going on in your life, you can always pick up the phone, reach out to somebody, and do this, regardless of the market conditions or what’s going on in your business. So what’s what’s wonderful is if you can put the blinders on, it does, it doesn’t matter if rates are up or down. I mean, of course, that affects your clients ability to buy or sell certain things, but you want to always demonstrate care, compassion, you know, and connection.
Ryan D’Aprile 41:49 Absolutely. It’s always it’s, I say ABC, always be connecting. People say it’s always be closing, always be connecting, always keep in contact with people, and then the sales will just follow you.
D.J. Paris 42:05 That’s a great, great thing to end on. And a great reminder for all of us that are noticing all of the job cuts that are going on in the real estate world and all of the just the noise with with of course economists predicting by the way, I just went to Nar conference or saw the NAR Chief Economist speak Dr. Lawrence Yun a couple of days last week and, and by the way, he thinks that the housing market is going to be just fine. He does not think this will repeat back to 2008 2009 10, etc. So he was he’s very excited that things will be returning to normal in the next year or two. But in the meantime, and you should be doing this regardless of whether it’s up down up market down market rental market, you know, buy or sell or market connect with your your spear, there’s always going to be people like Ryan said 16% of the people you know, are going to transact in the next 24 months. That’s just a fact. So how much I’m sorry, in the next 12 months 16% Will transact in the next 12 months, some of those will have two transactions, some will have one. So you have a huge opportunity here. But you have to earn it. And the way that you earn it is through as Ryan just said, ABC always be connecting, find out these things. And guys, this is the fun part of the job. The hard parts actually working with the client. That’s actually the tough part. This is the fun part where you actually get to demonstrate that you care that you you know, this is the stuff that you should get excited about because it doesn’t require a whole lot of knowledge or skill just requires a little bit of effort. And and it requires that you do care about your clients. And if you do care about them, demonstrate it and they will they will be with you forever. Well, Ryan Well I think it’s a great place to pause we are again congratulations on the merger with with Coldwell Banker That is incredible. We’re so so excited and proud of you. And all of your agents I’m sure are thrilled about that. And also want to remind everybody to continue to follow us and sponsz Follow our sponsors and pit tape pay attention to what they are providing because our sponsors are the reason we can keep our show going. So please take a look at their products and services. We appreciate it and last please tell a friend about this show. We really want to blow this out of the water and 2023 We just crossed over 2.1 million downloads a few days ago. So please continue to tell other agents about it especially agents that are struggling and most agents are struggling right now they need a little pick me up if they listen to this episode from Ryan that’ll help get their their mindset back in order and they can start producing or make this 2023 a great year. So and also for anyone out there that is in the Chicagoland area or in Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida. Are you in Iowa Well, Ryan, I forgot if
Ryan D’Aprile 45:01 no Florida in the Eric Schmidt, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Illinois,
D.J. Paris 45:05 got it in Florida, Illinois, Florida. So
Ryan D’Aprile 45:09 we’re just not Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan.
D.J. Paris 45:12 If you are if you’re if you’re looking to work with a firm that has this kind of leadership, Ryan and his team would love to chat with EG APR properties.com. There’s a link to that in our show notes. That’s the place to go amazing company. And they are amazing, so amazing that they just got picked up by Coldwell Banker. So definitely check them out. It’s going to be going to be a great year guys. Let’s make it a good year. Ryan, thank you as always for continuing to support our show, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks CJ.
Client Attraction Strategies From A Top 1% NYC Agent • Leslie Singer
Jan 20, 2023
Leslie Singer the founder of the Singer Team with Brown Harris Steven’s in New York discusses how she started her career in real estate. Leslie talks about the strategies she used for attracting clients in the beginning of her career. Leslie also discusses the mistakes she sees agents make that can be avoided and how she handles the problems that come in any transaction at some point. Next, Leslie focuses on the importance of previewing a property before going in with the client. Leslie joined TikTok recently and describes how she’s using the platform for her business. Last, Leslie discusses how she’s feeling about and approaching 2023.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Would you like to attract more clients in 2023? Of course you would. Well, today we’re going to talk to a top 1% producer on exactly how she does it. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Top New York City agent, Lesley singer. But before we get to Lesley, just a couple of quick reminders I am asking for two favors this episode, but they promised I’ll only take you a minute total for both. So number one, if you could whatever podcast app, you might be listening to the show right now, if you could leave us a review that would greatly we’d greatly appreciate it. It helps us continue to improve and also learn what you like. So please do that. And we would really appreciate it. And also the second thing is just tell a friend think of one other realtor that is struggling right now and guess what most agents are it’s a tough year. Let’s help them as much as this podcast is hopefully helping you and send them a link over to our show so you can send them to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed from any browser or if the person you’re referring over to us is a podcast listener just have them pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Alright guys, thank you for continuing to listen and support our show. And now on to the main event my conversation with Leslie singer.
Today on the show yeah blessing singer with the Center team with Brown Harris Stevens in New York City. Let me tell you more about Lesley. Now Leslie is an award winning broker and has consistently been one of Brown Harris Stevens top performers leading a team that has repeatedly been number one in sales for the firm. She has also earned a reputation as one of the most approachable and loyal representatives in the industry. Leslie’s track record of success is a function of her exceptional negotiation skills, tailored marketing solutions and an innate ability to help clients navigate the complex New York real estate market. Her honors include winning the Real Estate Board of New York deal of the Year Award, also being acknowledged as one of the top women in real estate by New York real estate journal, and being recognized as one of the top real estate teams nationwide by The Wall Street Journal. Born and bred in New York City Leslie’s informed sophisticated sensibilities in her MBA background guide the team in preparing for transitions and transactions, discerning value and return on investment. Now I want everybody to open up Instagram and Tiktok and I want you to follow Leslie and her team. It’s the same username for both it is singer team NYC that’s si n g R. So singer team NYC both Instagram and Tiktok. And we will have a link to those in our show notes. You can click on those and follow because Leslie is doing some really really cool stuff. Enter team on social especially on tick tock which you just got into which we can talk about too. Anyway. Leslie, welcome to the show.
Leslie Singer 4:38 Oh my god, thank you for having me. But now I all of a sudden I got nervous because those accolades. I mean, now I have to live up to them.
D.J. Paris 4:46 That’s true. There’s a lot of pressure to deliver. You don’t I’m gonna say this at the beginning because I since I just really I’m so impressed with with what you’ve done and I usually leave this to the end and then I realized Not everybody makes it to the end. So before we actually start the interview, I mean, it’s funny, I’ve been doing this five years, if you think it would have occurred to me sooner, but I guess better late Better late than ever. But if you are an agent in New York City, and you are shopping around for maybe a new team, a new firm, maybe you think you could be a good asset to Lesley and her team, reach out to them and let her have a conversation, and maybe you could be a possible good fit for, for the singer team. So anyway, just wanted to throw that out there first.
Leslie Singer 5:33 Except now they’re now they need to listen to see if they actually want to do that. So I know
D.J. Paris 5:37 they’re gonna want to work with you, I assure you, you are a big, big, big deal. And, and that’s the other thing, too, is, is definitely, you know, we’re, that’s why we’re so excited to have you on the show. But let’s say I would love to start. So what I don’t really know is how you got started, because I know you’re this big, big success now. But everyone starts somewhere. And I would love to hear about how and why you got into real estate.
Leslie Singer 6:03 Um, so I’ll try and make it a shorter story than but it was actually really interesting. My background is marketing. And I was the vice president of marketing for American movie classics, I had the dream job, truly a dream job. But I was flying all over the place. And I ended up with these two little kids that like immediately, they’re 17 months apart. And I couldn’t be flying around the world and having two little little ones at home. So I tried really, really, really strategized about what my next steps were. And it was really hard to come to this decision. But I was like, huh, I have a marketing background, very, very strong marketing background, I have an MBA, so I can do board packages, and I love finances. And I grew up in Manhattan, I know it like the back of my hand. And if I were to go into real estate, I wouldn’t be traveling. So I took the MBA, and I took the marketing background, my knowledge in Manhattan, and triangulate it on real estate. So it was a very thoughtful and strategic decision for anyone that’s starting out. And so that’s how I came into the idea of real estate. And it was really, truly for those reasons. And for anyone who’s starting in real estate, I talked to a lot of firms when I was thinking about, you know, starting my career, and every firm has a very different corporate culture, and a very different way of proceeding. And so it was really fascinating. And not only does each firm have a different corporate culture, but even within a firm, certain offices, within the same firm even have a different corporate culture. So I interviewed with a lot of different firms. And the other thing I will say is having a mentor when you start is really, really, really important. So I met with someone at Brown Harris Stevens, I met with a manager, again, interviewed with a lot of different firms, but came upon some manager at Brown Harris Stevens who said, huh, I got a call, it was someone who was looking for an assistant who would bring me on and we would kind of did a handshake. But certain certain arrangements were made That I would cover all weekends, open houses, just to start and get the mentoring. And we said we would try it for six months, and six months turned into 18 years on a handshake. And everything was just above board. And it was a you know, again, for me to learn but within six months and kind of like became more of a partnership. And I really brought my marketing background to the to the whole process and marketed ourselves branded ourselves. And it was it was a it’s great. So
D.J. Paris 9:13 well, before I go I go into sort of how you got started. And with that, because I think in particular that marketing background is so incredibly useful for agents when they get well at any point in their career. But certainly when they get started, I was gonna say with AMC, I just going back to American movie classics. I always I worship the the the lists. I’m thinking of American Film Institute. Okay, American, different. Sorry. I’m thinking of AFI who puts those lists together so so I was getting confused. But But yeah, American film classes Yeah. Big. Your AMC I’m sorry, AMC. Yes. But yeah, I’m a big God I love I love American movie classics, as well as the brand that they’ve built is impressive.
Leslie Singer 9:56 But it was at Time Warner I was at an ad agent Let’s see, I’m gonna really, I just, I loved what he did. But I have to say, I’m equally passionate that I get to do and it’s a privilege to get to do what I do every day.
D.J. Paris 10:11 And I imagine you get to sort of scratch the creative itch as well. Because when you get to be in full control of your branding, your marketing, your, your messaging, so does that sort of satisfy the part of you that loves being creative, and,
Leslie Singer 10:26 oh, that but I also have to say, every deal and no two deals are alike, and you have to be creative in this industry. And think outside the box, a if you’re promoting a property, how to differentiate, but also when it comes to a board package, and someone’s financials, and I’m not saying you have to be creative with their financials, but every deal has some sort of creative component of how to make the candidate the strongest possible presentation, etc. So I get creativity. And there’s a lot of creativity in how I handle my clients. But we can we can get into that, too now, or we can get into it later.
D.J. Paris 11:09 But yeah, let’s jump into it. Now, I’d love to hear about sort of how you approach clients. Well, first, actually, no, let’s back up, I want to first find out about attracting clients. Because even though you’ve been doing this for a long time now and a really impressive career, everyone, everyone gets started with really no clients. And so I’m curious, how did you when you first started 18 years ago, what were your strategies? I imagine you had some sort of sphere of influence, because you live but New York is so transient that I don’t know how much that helps. But you did grew up there. So I’m curious. Yeah.
Leslie Singer 11:45 So I mean, interestingly enough, when you’re first starting out, and yes, it was really important that I had a strong mentor behind me, which could show that there was someone with extreme knowledge and a track record as well. And then honestly, the brown hair Stevens brand. So those are definitely great things to have in my back pocket. But you don’t always want or nor do your friends want to work with a newbie, right?
D.J. Paris 12:11 When they’re buying a million dollar home. Just got her license a week ago.
Leslie Singer 12:15 Exactly. And nor do they always want to show their finances to you. Right. That’s, that’s,
D.J. Paris 12:21 you know, it is I’m sorry to interrupt. But that is something that nobody really has ever seen. We’ve done 430 episodes. And just that little piece that you said about, I’ve had lots of guests say, Well, I didn’t want to work with my friends, because I was afraid I would screw things up, or I was afraid to ask for their business. But the one thing I never thought about was what you just said, which is, I don’t know what my friends earn. I don’t, I’ve never asked them I was taught not to ask. And I was taught that any discussion of that was either considered brat braggadocious or being rude. So, so yes, so that’s really interesting. So that’s a really strong point. So you had these people, but maybe you didn’t feel so comfortable asking for business?
Leslie Singer 13:04 Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. And look, and again, being that I had someone in my, you know, like, as almost a partnership in the beginning, I could offer that should they want to work with me, not only do they have the knowledge behind and the security of that, but then he could review their finances but even that, like felt it just, you know, I understand their their hesitation. But what I did do is in my little sphere of influence was I actually started like, the old fashioned way. And I kind of went to 10 of my really, really good friends. And I asked each of them for 10 names of people that I could contact just to start my own database. So you know, that’s okay, only 100 people, but then those 10 people so almost like, you know, those what are they like mail chain things that used to get? So that was one thing I did and I started a newsletter, which was something that my mentor had been doing, but there was always a column that was singer says, and it kind of talked about, like the New York school system or you know, those type of things that were New York based truly New York that showed that you had an insider in for like influence on Manhattan, and we would mail the buildings newsletters, and said,
D.J. Paris 14:28 that’s interested you just you would just blank it
Leslie Singer 14:32 blank and the part of my working at Time Warner was direct marketing. So I was like, Let’s do direct marketing. Let’s do a newsletter, let’s you know and people held on to those newsletters. It was pretty great. So that was one a couple of things. To think about,
D.J. Paris 14:51 can I pause? I’m going to tell you something that that’s gonna that’s not going to surprise you but also surprise you at the same time. because, well, so I moved into a new a new development a year and a half ago. And it’s a nice building, there’s 40 units, a townhome. There’s a few townhomes. There’s but but it’s it’s a, it’s a nice building and brand new development. Now, obviously all of us who have purchased probably not leaving any immediate time soon, but in a year and a half. So we’re talking about sending out mailers trying to establish your brand. At some point, all of us are probably going to move it’s at some point, it’s it’s, it’s, it would be unlikely that at our building people with lived there for 40 or 50 years, although we could, but it’s unlikely. So because of the neighborhood that we’re in, and it’s it’s just one of those younger neighborhoods. Not one piece of mail from any realtor, just saying, hey, you know, like, obviously, that would be a long term play, they’re probably like, well, if I’m going to start mailing, I’m going to be needing to mail for the next five to seven years. But why not? And And what’s amazing is not one piece of mail from any realtor in the last year and a half. And I don’t think it’s because people know that I’m in the business. I just think nobody’s thought to do this. So I think even that’s kind of a lost art these days. And there’s so much opportunity. So I just wanted to mention that three.
Leslie Singer 16:17 Yeah, and I think people are cutting back on mailing, right, because we have social media, we have everything else. But it is a really great way to cut through the clutter. And when I do a new listing, I’m mailed the neighborhood, book, and I mail the building as well, because people who love your building like you, you may not be ready to sell but you you may know someone who wants to buy there, because you love the building, and they come to visit you. So like it’s just another way to keep yourself top of mind.
D.J. Paris 16:48 You also said something else. And I apologize for like interrupting you every few moments using something that at first I sort of was like, I didn’t understand it. And then as you were talking it made sense. And I and this is such a this is no no, this is a thing nobody else has said either. Which was. So there used to be this old sales technique at the closing table, or whether you’re selling a car or I was or whatever the old salesman 101 was like, by the way, I’d like the name of three of your friends. Now that nobody likes that, right? We all are like, Yeah, but what you did was much smarter, and definitely works and isn’t uncomfortable, which is you go to your your friends, and you say, Hey, I’m starting my business. I’m not obviously, you know, if you know someone who wants to buy or sell, obviously, I’d love to talk to him. But I would just love to get to introduce to some of your friends. And basically, that’s what you were asking. And that’s just called networking. And I just want to make, I just want to make sure that anyone listening, that is a really smart strategy, because your friends are the ones that want you to succeed. And you’re not asking them to like, you know, you’re not really asking them for
Leslie Singer 17:57 a sale, you’re not asking. Like, who do you think would be really good for me to reach out to and talk to now it’s brilliant.
D.J. Paris 18:05 It’s brilliant. And I know if somebody asked me, I mean, it’s such a simple thing. But no, really people don’t do this very often. I don’t think if somebody if one of my friends were to say I’m starting this XYZ business, whatever it is, hey, could you give me some names of people that might in the future? Maybe be a candidate for me? I just want to put them on my list or reach out? I wouldn’t hesitate. And I’d be like, of course, I will like no big deal. Yeah. Asking asking a client at the closing table. That one feels more uncomfortable.
Leslie Singer 18:37 Yeah, definitely. I agree.
D.J. Paris 18:39 I just wanted to honor you for a couple of those. Those. Really, really, it’s always the small things, right? Like, people say things on the show. And and all of a sudden, like they just kind of go past it because they don’t realize how how important I think that isn’t I’ll be like, Oh, stop stop you just so you’ve done that a several times. So I promise to not interrupt as much anymore. No, I appreciate
Leslie Singer 19:00 that. Um, the other thing was, I noticed this happened. When my when my children were in nursery school. And we were applying for kindergarten, a lot of my parents would talk to me because I grew up in Manhattan, about the different schools and I only went to one or two of them, right. But they would ask me and I had a general knowledge of the school system. And I was like, Huh, why don’t I give back and this is in my first year of real estate, why don’t I give back to the community and by hosting seminars about the school system. And so we would I would have a getting into kindergarten school panel and getting into Nursery School, which is a huge thing in Manhattan. I would have these panel discussions and I would bring in not only parents but guidance counselors. And yes, they have come from nursery school. Yes, they haven’t for kindergarten. But it was my way to give back to the community with also the self serving idea that these people will be making a decision shortly, once they know where their child is getting into school as to where they want to live. Since then,
D.J. Paris 20:18 I love that and here in Chicago, I don’t know, you know, I’m not a parent myself. So I don’t know if those exist. I have not. I’ve heard of Realtors doing. So you want to buy a condo, so you want to buy a first home? Those those seminars happen? Those are pretty common. I’ve not heard about school, and that is every new parents sort of biggest one of their biggest issues is where if especially in a big city, where’s my child going to go to school? Where are the safe areas? What are the best, you know, academics, etc. That’s really
Leslie Singer 20:52 now now I do it through college, because that’s kind of as my kids got older, and I had more knowledge, and we still we do college seminars as well. And I have to say, it’s fun for me, it shows how old I am. But there are clients that I helped with the nursery that I’ve also helped with the college. I mean, isn’t that incredible? Yeah. Yeah, the way through? Yeah. Well, I,
D.J. Paris 21:17 my sister and I both went to Miami University out in Ohio, Miami of Ohio. And then my sister ended up in New York City, they actually have a pretty strong alumni. You know, contingency there in New York, which, which is surprising. Whenever I met people in Ohio that went to Miami, or from New York, I was like, how did you find out about, you know, this, this, this really, we shouldn’t be in Florida. We’re in the middle of Ohio. And, and, yeah, but anyway, um, that’s, that isn’t me. So you still do that as you still do. You’re just, if you go all the way you still do all the way from nursery school up there.
Leslie Singer 21:53 Really, we’ve been really focused more on the college because again, you know, it’s a life cycle. And it’s really nice way to give back. And, you know, eventually, people will think about, hmm, you know, my home is larger than I need, right as they go off to college. So
D.J. Paris 22:13 we’ll just even just even planning for college with 529 plans, and the financial part of it is is so daunting, and so scary for new parents, that it’s something that they have to start thinking about pretty much right away. Yeah. In your Yeah, yeah. In utero. It’s, yeah, I Yes. My, my one nephew is five. And so he’s got some time, but my, my sister’s all they’ve already figured it all out. And it’s already all figured out. And I was like, good for them. Yeah. Yeah. But so so that that is a really smart strategy, because you again, you are giving back you’re contributing, you’re providing value. And then oh, by the way, I’m also a realtor so
Leslie Singer 23:02 well, you know, in my mind, finding the perfect fit for school is very similar to finding a perfect fit for your family in a building. And the application process of a applying for these schools is not that different. Of course, you’re not showing all your financials, but you still have an application process for getting into school, you have an application process for, you know, a co op. So there was so many similarities, but again, it wasn’t, it was a nice way for me to give back with a minor ask, right. So it felt good.
D.J. Paris 23:38 So you bring in you said, you bring in guidance counselor’s? Do you ever bring in representatives from the schools themselves?
Leslie Singer 23:44 I have done that. And I’ve done parents, so you have a really, really nice range of people. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 23:51 that is such a great idea. I love that.
Leslie Singer 23:55 Wow, I think it’s really important. I think it’s really important to really think about what’s authentic and genuine to you with whatever you do because people will they they can feel it they can sense it. And it’s really where you’re you’re coming from the most honest place and I think it’s great for connecting so I would say to anyone starting out think about what’s really authentic and genuine to you and follow that so that you know those those workplaces for me that felt
D.J. Paris 24:34 Yeah, it makes makes all the sense in the world. I also want to go back to this idea of open houses because I feel like that too. Is so easily like Yeah, yeah, yeah, sit open houses, but it’s not it may be it doesn’t sound very exciting to talk about. But I will say that almost every guest I’ve had on and I only really interviewed top 1% producers, they all love and they all started doing and open houses for other agents and learning how to talk to clients as they walk in and out how to, you know, understanding how to have conversations about real estate, how to talk to clients understanding their needs, how important was it for you to do a lot of those reps sort of going to the gym, almost have open houses? How critical is that for you?
Leslie Singer 25:21 So for me, those weekend open houses, where I took over our listings and had the open houses, those were really, really, really critical. And I will tell anyone, even if you are representing a property, you should have a no inside and out all the other competitive properties. Because when you get someone at that open house, and you say to them, because it’s really critical question, does this work for you? And he’s like, Nah, you know what this or that, and then you can say, this may not work for you. But how about this, I think you should look at this, man make an appointment for you. So know your competition, and turn that person if they’re, if you’re not, they’re not going to be the buyer for your property, turn them into a buyer for another property. It’s it’s a art and it’s a great opportunity. So yes, those open houses were really, really, really important. The other thing is when other brokers are holding open houses, go to as many open houses as possible and learn the market, whether it’s a one bedroom, a studio, a two bedroom, a five bedroom, because inevitably, you’ll be at a cocktail party, and you’ll be oh, you know, oh, you’re interested on the, you know, the Upper East Side, I saw this great two bedroom the other day, right? Like, it just get to know the market. And it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’ve been doing this for so many years, and I still go to open houses so I can see what’s out there.
D.J. Paris 26:54 And also to, it’s great, I don’t love the word networking, because I just feel like that I don’t even know it and always what that means, but this idea of going to these broker open houses, allows you to interact with other realtors. And there’s a real practical reason to do this even other than just being fun and friendly and nice.
Leslie Singer 27:15 In the market, and you you learn that, you know, when I’m talking to other brokers, and I’m going to the open house, inevitably, there’s a discussion of like, you know, what are you seeing, you know, how, you know, how are you finding the market, this is what I’m experiencing? And there’s also the great discussion of, hey, I’m bringing this on, do you know anyone? Or, you know, I, someone doesn’t want to list this, but they’re thinking about listing it, would you have any, I mean, there are so many dialogues that are important. Plus, just to have your face out there,
D.J. Paris 27:51 of course, well, and I imagined to like, during the pandemic, for example, when what once once the, the sort of pandemic was subsiding. And, and people, you know, the interest rates were so low and everyone was trying to buy, I imagine it doesn’t hurt to go into an open house, you know, at some point, introducing yourself to the other agent, making nice with them developing some sort of friendship or relationship, professional friendship with them, probably doesn’t hurt them, when they see out of the 30 offers they just received, when they see a friendly a name that they recognize, like, I know this, this woman, she’s awesome. I met her at an open house, she seems great. It probably doesn’t hurt at getting a little bit more attention on that offer.
Leslie Singer 28:35 Now, you’re absolutely right about that. I’m working on a transaction right now. And the offer was accepted. Honestly, probably a good six to eight weeks ago of which we still haven’t gotten to contract. And I represent the purchaser and the broker on the other side is like, Thank God, it’s you. Thank God, it’s you. I know we’re gonna get there. Yeah. Because she said, you know, never my 40 years have I experienced this, but like, you know, so to your point, making, making contact, making connections, just as someone when a deal comes together, they have a name and a face and they feel good about it is really, truly important. So I am
D.J. Paris 29:23 I’m curious too, because you’ve been in this industry almost 20 years, you’ve seen a lot of agents come and go you’ve seen as you’ve been building your your business and your team, what are some of the mistakes that you see agents making as they are trying to build their business or, and there’s so many mistakes that that agents make. But what we tried to do on the show is help agents avoid some of those pitfalls. So is there anything that comes to mind? I mean, aside from like, not working hard enough. Yes, that’s usually the main reason I find that people tend to exit the industry. Um, but it isn’t always that. And sometimes people just make, you know, decisions that they could have made differently. So is there anything that that you sort of see agents, you know, any mistakes that agents make, that really they that could be avoided, anything that comes to mind,
Leslie Singer 30:16 I’m gonna have to think about this for a second mistakes. I think sometimes when you’re young and you’re hungry, you want the deal more than you. Like, you know, you want it too much, and you lose sight of your client, and you push for a deal. And I think a lot gets lost there. And your relationships are so important that you can’t want the deal more than your own client. And, you know, deals are going to come and go, and they’re going to come together, they’re going to fall apart or whatever. But making sure that your client feels really attended to throughout. So really spending that time and not thinking of it as just like a one deal. And then you’re on to the next because you you build your business by clients referring to you or coming back to you. And don’t make something like a one trick pony. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 31:17 that’s really, really good advice. And I’m curious to F with the amount of time and the number of deals that you have done? How important is it to anticipate your client’s needs? Or their mental state? And I don’t mean, you know, whether they’re sane or insane. I mean, their their anxiety, their fear, fears, their their joy, that? How critical is it to be able to manage those expectations and those emotions for your clients? Because I know, every time I’ve purchased and sold a property, something always goes wrong, there’s always a moment where I’m like, well, something’s going on, this is all falling apart, this is all going to be a big disaster. And then, then, you know, it isn’t. But the stress of that is real. And I’m curious about how you help your clients through those difficult, you know, moments of a transaction?
Leslie Singer 32:14 Well, so there’s, I mean, you bring up a really, really important point, which is a every deal has a moment, every single, every single deal has a moment. Like there’s you know, and you never know when it’s gonna happen, but it’s kind of like when it happens, you’re like, oh, here it is. And you you, you work through it, I try to the best of my ability, ability to always handle all those moments without including my client. So I try I take on the stress, and try and navigate to get to the right answer without having to stress them out and only go to them at those really critical moments that I’m like, I can’t do it without, you know, including them. But I do think you spend time with the client upfront. And, you know, just in your dialogue of getting to know them of is this a life transition? Right? So you come into people’s lives, whether they’re having getting married, having a baby, you know, it’s their first time purchase, some are getting divorced, sometimes it’s death. Sometimes it’s an estate sale and getting to know a, what their objectives are, where they are in their lifecycle, and understanding that will help you navigate with them. And listening throughout the entire process. You’ll get to sense whether this is someone who makes a really quick decision. This is someone who needs more hand holding, this is someone who needs to see 25 properties, they only need to see five, you know, so it’s a lot of listening, there’s a lot of hand holding. And there are times when you’re a therapist, right? Because you’re dealing with someone’s largest asset. They’ve exposed everything. You know, they’ve told their life story and aboard package, they’ve shown all their financials, they’re extremely anxious, they started envisioning themselves in the property. You know, and for whatever their reason is for their transition that comes to play so and there for sellers, that’s a really emotional time. They may have, they may have, you know, brought up their whole family there and they’re selling because they don’t need that family home anymore. But it’s still emotional, even if they’re excited about where they’re going. It’s still emotional, or you know, if it’s a death or whatever, divorce so, yes, a transitions and getting to know your client, but I really, there are a couple things I do which is I try and understand that client really well in the beginning and I listen. But I really respect someone It’s time. So I try my, if I’m working with a buyer, I try and identify, before we even go out five to 10 properties that I think are going to be a perfect fit. I lined those five properties up in a row, get a car and driver, so I only take them out of their day to day for maybe an hour and a half to two hours. And then we can kind of have a conversation after that, like, what worked, what didn’t work. And then I can refine the search that much more, but I’m always sensitive to someone’s time.
D.J. Paris 35:34 Can I ask about doing showings? This is such a simple question. Everybody does them differently. Do you visit the properties before your client?
Leslie Singer 35:44 I love previewing. I love to preview a property A, it allows me to eliminate if I don’t think it if it’s going to be appropriate, but be when I get to that property. And I think it is the right fit. Because I’ve previewed it, it not only gives me ability to be comfortable in the showing, but I have a lot of knowledge. And I can point out to my client, you know, the things that I know are, you know, important priorities for them. So whether it’s closet space, or whatever it may be. I know that that’s important to them, and I can help highlight it. So I love previewing.
D.J. Paris 36:26 So whenever possible preview, in my opinion,
Leslie Singer 36:29 yes, it takes extra time, but it’s so worth it. And that property that you see that you’re previewing may not be right for the client you had in mind. But I promise you somewhere in the next kind of like discussions you’re having all of a sudden, and it could be three weeks later, and that property, hopefully still on the market, you’re like, Oh, my God, the property that I saw for seven, so that wasn’t right is totally right for someone else. There’s, there’s no wasted time. It works.
D.J. Paris 36:59 I guess what we’re really talking about is learning the inventory. I mean, as simple as it sounds. And inventory is of course always changing. But this idea of being a master of the inventory is really, so it’s so critical. It’s not, hey, I’m gonna go on this journey with you. And we’re gonna walk into this home together and check it out. It’s I’m gonna go on the journey. First, I’m going to check everything out so that I can bring back and, you know, it’s it’s a simple thing, but I don’t know that most agents even preview properties, I think they a lot of them show up with their client. And, you know, and that is, it’s, that’s really not the it’s just my opinion, but it’s not really the best client experience that way, I believe. Yeah, I
Leslie Singer 37:44 think you know, I think, look, everybody has a different you know, a different way of handling their business. Again, it gives me the confidence walking in that I feel like it is really right, I can show it better, even though I’m not the show or you know, the listing agent might be the shower. But again, just as you said, getting to know the inventory is just so critical.
D.J. Paris 38:08 I wouldn’t I want to go ahead. I’m
Leslie Singer 38:10 sorry. No, no, I just recently there was a home that I had previewed, I thought it was absolutely like the perfect fit. Brought the couple, the wife looks at me. And she’s like, Oh my god, I love this. I love this. But there was something in the husband’s face that I was like, Huh. And I came back to her a couple days later. And I said, Look, you know, I sent you this listing. And you said you weren’t interested in seeing it for the following reasons. But I noticed your husband’s reaction. And I actually think this will appeal to him more. And she was like, hmm, okay, let’s go. And that’s the one they bought. Yeah. So it’s like, just, you know, you have to also be present when you’re showing, yes,
D.J. Paris 38:58 you have to pay it pay attention. And it’s actually a so and that probably being that the, the physical space isn’t new to you at that. Yeah. Because you’ve already previewed it, you now can focus your attention on their reaction versus what’s actually going around visually. Exactly. That’s an important tip. And so maybe that’s even the best reason of all to preview is, is well, there’s lots of great reasons to learn the property,
Leslie Singer 39:31 it allows you to really be watching. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 39:35 you know, you’re so right, because I know for me, any shiny object, you know, captures my attention. And so if I’m walking in somewhere, for the first time, I’m looking around and seeing everything visually, and of course, that’s what the client is going to be doing and you’re really watching them. Watch instead of you know, being taken in yourself by everything and that is, again, it’s it’s a simple thing, but not every realtor thinks about that and And that is really it. We’re talking about professionalism, I think and being professional. And that is such a such a great idea. So thank you for that. And another question. I wanted to switch gears a little bit because you were telling me just before we got on, Leslie, Leslie and I were talking about I am so jealous because I live in Chicago and we are the second city. And, and New York is, you know, probably the first city of ADD, so I’m, I live in a very wonderful place, but I’m so jealous because New York is such a lovely place. And we were talking about all things New York. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash reel that’s follow up boss.com forward slash reel for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. But you were telling me that you just recently had some success on social media with Tik Tok. And, you know, this is really interesting because I’ve been doing the show for five years. And no one’s tock tick tock yet. And I’m not I’m not asking you to, to, to, you know, give away any secrets or any but we are starting to see Realtors now embrace tick tock which is being used, of course by you know, the demographic of Tik Tok users are skews younger. And so I’m curious on what you’re doing there, and what sort of results you’re seeing because you just had a big success there.
Leslie Singer 42:38 Yeah. Um, so I’ve been doing Instagram, you know, obviously for quite a while now. And I have a team that helps and supports me and I kept saying I think we really need to be on tick tock think we really need to be on tick tock. And they’re like, Yeah, you know, it’s new. And I’m like, so I’m, I’m maybe even be late to the game. Because I keep I was harping on this, but we really only started a couple of weeks ago. And again, I’m doing things that are truly, truly genuine to me, and really comfortable for me. Usually around the property, you know, it’s around properties. Although, as I mentioned to you, I just happen to do one around hot chocolate because I do like to bring in a little bit of lifestyle and like things that are popping up in Manhattan, that could be useful tidbits. But they’re usually centered around a property that I’m promoting, and just having a ton of fun with it. But like, you know, again, it’s really, really new to me, and this one particular video went viral and we have like now 270,000 hits on it and like, okay, so and I’ll just share with you that my son who’s 25 He’s like, Hey, Mom, my friends are loving you on Tik Tok and they say, you’re so you’re so professional. Hey, Mom, I didn’t even know you were on Tik Tok. And he goes I don’t have tick tock
D.J. Paris 44:08 Hey, Mom, stay out of my friends tiktoks
Leslie Singer 44:12 I wasn’t there watching they’re following me and wasn’t like,
D.J. Paris 44:16 but isn’t that amazing? If you put out good quality content or fun content, entertaining content, whatever it might be, it can you know, we do have ways you know, we do have the opportunity now with technology where where things can can spread and and it’s all about value. And so I imagine tick tock is an as well as Instagram is fun for you. Because with your marketing background, you get to really project what I am. I’m curious too, about how you stay in touch with clients in between there, their sales, right, so somebody buys a co op there. Maybe they’re gonna live there for X number of years. How are you? Staying in touch with them in between.
Leslie Singer 45:02 Yeah, so that’s always a really hard thing, because you’re really, really busy with your day to day. So I do do a monthly newsletter. And sometimes it’s not, you know, as frequent. Sometimes it’s more frequent if it’s important, but I definitely do a monthly newsletter. I really love my clients, like I really, really love my clients. So fortunately, that means having coffee with them having a lunch, you know, having a drink. And it may not be as you know, sometimes you can do it more frequently. everyone’s schedules really, really busy, but your clients sometimes become your really good friends sometimes, you know, as I said, some are with me forever and repeat business. And then it’s little things like just reaching out and following up, you know, how are you enjoying your apartment love to see, I’d love to drop by, you know. And then I do every now and then I don’t do holiday gifts, because they get lost in the clutter. But I will pick a different time of year to do a gift, and do a mailing of a gift. So and it could be you know, Gears we’ve did champagne, it’s just another way of just saying, you know, thinking of you. And usually for the first year, when someone buys from me, they’ll get like wine of the month. So each month or depending on who they are. Maybe it’s flowers each month. So each month, there’s like a little and I can write the notes to them. So each like January, a different note for me, like, you know, each month for that first year they’re hearing for me,
D.J. Paris 46:42 ya know, they love that. I also just because this was you, it’s pulled back the curtain a little bit about how we book our show. We send questions to our guests, and I never ever get to the questions. But there was one that one response that you gave that I just thought was so cute. And I really wanted to you to share us this story this year that you were named the mayor of by a client so so I don’t want to give away the the punch line. But do you mind sharing the story? Because this is this is such a great, great holiday story?
Leslie Singer 47:18 Well, it’s just so you know, to be the mayor of something right? You should be actually really quite charming. And when a client of yours says you’re like the mayor, it’s like, oh, it should be really, really flattering. But this was a client that definitely wish we had identified the Upper East Side, which I know like the back of my hand. No really, really, really well. But he’s like, you’re the mayor of no foo. And I’m like, Mayor of no foo like, what, what is no foo and he’s like, it’s the Upper East Side. Leslie, you’re the mayor of no foo. And I’m like, What is no foo? And he said, no fun. And I’m like, Oh my god.
D.J. Paris 48:02 So you’re the you’re the mayor of the no fun part of New York.
Leslie Singer 48:06 And again, it wasn’t because I’m not no fun. But he was like nervous that the Upper East Side had this reputation of not being fun and that people always went downtown to have fun. So yes, I was I was named the mayor of no Fu and I got such a kick out.
D.J. Paris 48:26 That is that is that is amazing. So curious how you’ve seen like, for 20. So by the time this will be released, it will be in January? We’re actually recording it here in December 2023. You know, you’ve been you’ve been through several market cycles. You were you went through the crash of awaits. And at just 2023 Do you have any fear about 2023? How are you? How are you approaching?
Leslie Singer 48:59 I mean, not not only have I been through the crash, right, but the pandemic. You know, like, and I did not leave the city I was here for my clients, I did not leave and I had clients who would call me during the pandemic and they say, what is happening on West 79th street and I’m like, You know what, let me go over there. And I’ll go running over because the Lucerne had given over their hotel to the whatever. But you know, news can news media can make things sound that much worse. And so boots on the ground. But Anyway, point being I’ve been through so many different cycles that I think you really need to just be confident that people do need to move right there are always going to be circumstances and you need to figure out in any given market what the advantage is. So we had low interest rates and there was a time minute moment where the market kind of dropped right, but only like eight to 10%, even during the pandemic, but if you had the guts to buy, then, you know, that was a brilliant time. So 2023, we’re kind of looking at the first half of the year potentially being difficult. Maybe a couple more price increases, but I think, you know, interest rate increases, but I think people have already experienced that and have the knowledge and we’re looking at a really strong second half of the year. That’s my prediction. So if you can work with your clients, at a time, when the first half of the year, people are nervous, there are opportunities. So that’s a great time to negotiate. And there’s a great saying, date, the rate, marry the home. So if someone is, you know, nervous about interest rates, you can change your interest rate later. But if you find that home you love and you need to finance, just know that that’s a possibility. So I think you know, you just, it has to be business as usual, you have to know your market, you have to know your comps. And think about the opportunities, because you may the first half of the year, like find that there are people that are still a little bit nervous and willing to negotiate a bit more. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 51:27 there is negotiation, it happens now, it didn’t, didn’t happen.
Leslie Singer 51:32 No, I mean, there was, you know, just a year ago or whatever, you could walk around the block, and you had to make a decision. Right. So
D.J. Paris 51:42 do you have any buyers that are feeling remorse? That oh, gosh, when interest rates were at 3%? I should have pulled the trigger? Do you have to counsel people through that? You know, because again, yes. And rates prices were also super inflated, you were competing against many other buyers? And you’re going to probably pay more? So I’m just curious on Yeah,
Leslie Singer 52:11 so now that’s where that’s where you kind of have to, you know, help them understand that because you know, you’re getting that property at, you know, a better value. So yes, you may be paying more on your monthly for your mortgage, but that same property a year ago, you wouldn’t be able to negotiate on. So there’s always that and that is why kind of the date, the rate is also gives people confidence that you know what, maybe I can change it later. But historically, we are still at really low interest rates.
D.J. Paris 52:47 I know like really, really low and yeah, really, really low. Really, really low. It’s not freakout everybody. We’re not double digits, we’re not.
Leslie Singer 52:58 Exactly. And the other thing is New York, you know, not for everyone. But we’re a very cash driven city. So we have a lot of cash deals that have always happened, that will continue to happen. Bonuses may not be as strong as other years, but bonuses get paid. So you know, you have to look at Manhattan, look at the concrete things that happen. And our market continues. I’m not, I’m not concerned.
D.J. Paris 53:30 Good. Well, that that is very reassuring to our audience. And to me as well, because I have not been in it for 18 years, and haven’t weathered all of the cycles and storms that you have. But I’m glad to hear that you are not particularly worried about 2023. And that that will help call.
Leslie Singer 53:52 There’s too much discussion about recession of first half and then pulling out really fast. So in a V. Going right back.
D.J. Paris 54:01 Yeah, well, we’ll certainly hope for the best. Leslie, I am so happy that you spent time with us today you are a real treasure. And for anyone out there who is an agent who either has clients who moved to New York City, who would want to refer business to it, maybe you don’t practice in New York, Lesley would love the opportunity to connect with you. Of course many people have properties in the New York City area. So if you’re an agent in another part of the country, and you want to refer business out and get in touch with Lesley, she would love to chat with you. And also, if you’re an agent in New York City and you’re looking to join a really super successful team under Leslie’s leadership, you might be a good fit for her or they might be a good fit for you. So let’s see if, if another agent wants to reach out to you what’s the best way that they should do that?
Leslie Singer 54:55 I think email is actually really great. So I would AE l singer at BHS usa.com. And I can repeat that. It’s l singer at B H s usa.com.
D.J. Paris 55:13 And we’ll have a link to that in our show notes as well. Leslie is is a superstar agent in New York City. We are so excited that she spent the last hour here with us. And we want to thank her on behalf of our audience. So on behalf of the audience, Leslie, we say thank you for spending your time we know busy well and also on behalf that you’re welcome. And on behalf of Lesley and myself we also say thank you to our audience, to continuing to support and listen to our episodes. Best way that you can help us grow every one is just tell a friend think of one other realtor that needs to hear this episode this conversation with Lesley. Oh my god she gave like five incredible tips in this episode that can really help transform someone’s business. Send them a link to this episode. They need to hear it people who everyone is stressed about 2023 Leslie’s not. And she explained why and she gave a lot of great suggestions about how to handle 2023 So send this podcast episode over to another realtor that is struggling right now. And Leslie thank you so much for being on our show. We are so grateful to have you and we will see everybody on oh I’m sorry everybody go follow Lesley as well on Instagram and Tiktok singer team NYC singer team NYC and si ng er we will have links to those they are doing some really cool stuff on social definitely check them out. Leslie it was a such a pleasure having you on the show.
Leslie Singer 56:48 Likewise, thank you for having me.
What Does A Top Real Estate Attorney See Opportunity in 2023? • Donald Hyun Kiolbassa
Jan 17, 2023
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa is an Illinois licensed Attorney and CPA with a focus on Real Estate Law and Estate Planning talks about his newest book and why he wrote it. Donald explains how he got involved in real estate and law. Donald also discusses why he sees the primary residence as an asset and not a liability. Next, Donald talks about where is the opportunity in 2023 and where the realtors should focus on in order to keep their business rolling. Donald and D.J. discuss long-term care insurance and how it can effect the generational wealth. Last, Donald discusses the importance of the agent knowing what they’re selling in and out.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What is a top real estate attorney telling every realtor he knows what to do this year to stay productive? Or we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top real estate attorney Donald kielbasa. But before we get to Don, just a couple of quick reminders. Number one, please support our sponsors. We love our sponsors. They’re the reason we can keep doing the show. And we appreciate if you check out their products and services and consider supporting them because they support us. But even if you aren’t able to support our sponsors, and we hope that you do, please tell a friend about the show. That’s the other way that you can help us get in front of more Realtors is tell someone else in your office about this podcast we all we focus on is helping you by talking to top producers who say this is exactly what I’m doing right now to grow my business and let someone else in your office somebody who’s struggling and all a lot of us are struggling right now. Right? It’s a tough time in the market. So please share the love let other people know about this podcast. We appreciate it. But enough about that let’s get to the main event my conversation with Attorney Donald kielbasa.
Right today on the show we have best selling author, champion athlete and real estate attorney Donald Yun kielbasa. Let me tell you more about Donald. Now Donald is an Illinois licensed attorney and CPA with a focus in real estate law and estate planning. Now over the past 14 years as an attorney, Donald has managed over 8000 commercial and residential real estate transactions. Prior to becoming an attorney, Donald worked as a CPA with big four accounting firm KPMG. And he’s also the author of two books discover your dragon and Tao of the side hustle, which is his newest book, when he’s not practicing law Donald is was a gold medalist for the 2008 United States Wushu Team, wushu translates to Chinese martial arts. Now after winning gold, he caught the attention of Warner Brothers games, and is the martial arts motion capture model in some of the biggest action video games in history, including Mortal Kombat where he was scorpion and sub zero, and also the game injustice where he played Batman and flash. So please, everyone go pick up Donald’s newest bestseller, The Tao of the side hustle, which is on Amazon, we have a link to that in our show notes. And if you’re a realtor here in the Chicagoland area. Donald would love to talk to you and work with your clients, you can visit his real estate website at Chicago real estate at t y. So, Chicago real estate AT T y.com. Donald, welcome to the show.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 4:26 Hey, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.
D.J. Paris 4:29 Super excited to have you I and I I was very excited over the break to read Tao of the side hustle and actually before we get into any of your story, I normally start with your story but this because this book is so new and it’s just crushing it in the Amazon charts, you know, so that our audience doesn’t have to wait 20 minutes for us to finally get to talk about the book. Tell us what the tell us what the book is, who it’s for, and and why you wrote it.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 4:55 So ultimately, if you look at if you look at a man come from a macro perspective, people hold wealth in three places, they hold their wealth in real estate retirement plans and small businesses. So the biggest part problem with people when they’re starting small businesses is that first step. So I wanted to create kind of is a modern day Art of War, where we walk, we guide the reader through a side hustle, you know, tell the side how so we go from side hustle to stabilize to scale. Right. And it’s basically a blend of Buddhism, martial arts and business to help the reader, you know, start dipping their toe in entrepreneurship. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 5:40 love it. who’s best suited to for this book to make an impact on who’s the who needs to read this?
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 5:46 You know, that’s a good question. Why, you know, whenever you’re creating a product for distribution, like you’re always supposed to have an intended target audience, right? Historically, I would tell you, people who have that entrepreneurial itch, right, that would be the historical answer. Today, I think that definition has broadened significantly. If you go all the way back to Adam Smith, wealth nation, so I’m a big Adam Smith guy, right? Sure. You know, there’s three ways to make money, there is salary, you have a job, there is profit, you have a business, and then there is rent, you have an appreciable property that you’re able to, you know, collect passive income in some way, shape or form. It’s so so it’s like, 123. Right. Now, historically, I would tell you, like, Oh, those who have an entrepreneurial itch, right, unfortunately, you know, necessity is the mother of all innovation, right? I have a feeling with given the economic climate that we’re about to face, right? I think a lot of people are going to kind of be pushed into entrepreneurial positions, not out of desire, but out of necessity.
D.J. Paris 7:01 Yeah, that makes makes a lot of sense. And, I guess one fortunate part of that the sort of nature of the economy right now is technology has sort of enabled this global gig economy. And it’s really, it brought in this or expanded the ability of the average person to get involved and produce some of the side hustle services or products at a very minimal investment in a lot of cases, you know, with the technology and infrastructure already built that does a lot of the heavy lifting. So it is kind of an exciting time to consider a side hustle, because we just have a lot more resources now that that helped make it a little bit easier.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 7:42 Yeah, the barrier of entry to side hustles have definitely changed. Like, if you think about it, everybody has like a University of Google degree. Like you can look up everything. There’s two forms of knowledge, there’s knowledge of and there’s knowledge, how knowledge is where you going to go, when you learn something, right and knowledge how is where you put in your 10,000 hours and kind of cluster of something right now, from an entrepreneur perspective, like being able to break into new areas and create new solutions for problems on like, a micro local area is, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to do so. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 8:21 think you’re right. And with, especially with so many small businesses constantly being hit up for various services, that maybe somebody with a side hustle can do more inexpensively, can provides real value locally, as opposed to also doing it globally through places like Fiverr, and the sort of gig services, you know, TaskRabbit for people that are, you know, good with fixing and building. You know, it’s funny, I was I had a guy from TaskRabbit over who has a normal, full time job where he’s, like, an engineer and does something with construction, but he’s like a pretty decently high level guy in his salary. And he came over to swap out a door in our in our primary closet. And, and it was pretty difficult job and I said, Hey, I’m just curious, like, why do you do this on the side? He goes, he goes, if I just did this, this gig stuff, I would actually make more than in my salary, but he’s like, I just kind of like the stability of the of the thing. So he’s like, I’m just going to do this on the side. But I was like, Man, this guy, you know, he’s making an extra three $4,000 a month, just doing a couple of these gigs, you know, here and there outside of his normal business hours.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 9:34 Yeah, you know, that’s ultimately the purpose of the side hustle, like not all businesses are meant to be scaled, right. So I like to I do like to invest in startups, startups, and side hustles. They’re not the same right? Side Hustle can become a startup. But a side hustle is not, does not have the scalability sometimes as a startup There are two different cultures, two different communities, right? The startup community, they’re really looking to, you know, 10x 20x 50x. And they’re looking for an exit or liquidity event to to, you know, for the business, right? Side Hustle is something that like, Look man, like things are getting more expensive. Like, you know, it’s funny, talking about you, you’re in real estate, you know, the Fed. And today, the Fed may may or may not raise the interest rate, I don’t know if they’re, if they’ve done it yet. But right there, there’s two types of inflation there is monetary inflation, and there’s two big money supply, and then their supply side inflation, like you’re not going to be able to fix supply side inflation with increasing the interest rates. So I don’t know if I necessarily agree with the way it’s gone. Anyway. But there those impacts are going to impact the way consumers deploy their capital right now. And I think there’s going to be a huge liquidity event where all the money is sucked out of the system.
D.J. Paris 10:56 That’s interesting. Yeah, it is. It is interesting. I was also thinking too, about the recent crypto exchanges, or at least the biggest crypto Exchange, which just went under FTX, which a lot of people have probably followed by the time this came out, who knows if Sam bacon fried will actually be in prison in prison or who knows. But But and then there’s other crypto exchanges binance Is is possibly facing liquidity issues. And that’s now the biggest exchange. And I’m just curious if if those if that exchange fails to I’m curious, a lot of that crypto money comes flooding back in. And somehow it gets, you know, reinvested by people in other ways. And a side hustle is a great way to invest money, and actually, you know, make some income that’s a little bit more hopefully predictable. But before before we get too far down that rabbit hole, because I could talk about that all day. I would love to first hear your origin story. Like, how did you get involved in real estate? You were an athlete, you’re now an author as well. You know, how did you get involved in law, you are an accountant, you’re an accountant as well, you do a lot of different things. So we’d love to hear about your trajectory. So walk us through.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 12:04 So I was like, Chicago Public School dude, like Waynetech, lean tech guy. Like, I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. So I kind of figured that. Whenever you go to war, like, let’s say you and I weren’t going to engage in combat. In the end, when you break down a war or combat, there’s these five things that you need to control, right? You got to have a skill before you get into the other one. So let’s start with skill. So I knew upfront, I had no money broke, didn’t really have any connections or anything like that. So I had to become hyper focused and dominant in a skill. So I started with accounting, because that was like, the language of business, right? Sure. So I graduated in 2001. And immediately the Enron COLLAPSE HAPPENED wiping out Arthur Andersen, I couldn’t get a job. Right?
D.J. Paris 12:56 So I remember when that happened. Yes, absolutely.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 12:59 So all the school guidance counselors, like after I spent all this money and got like my accounting degree and CPA and all that other stuff, they say, oh, you should go back to law, you know, go back to school, go to law school, right. So I went to law school. Graduated in 2006, only to enter into the 2008. Crash. Alright, perfect timing. Basically, it was kind of at that point where I lost all confidence in like the guidance counselor’s and a lot of the teachers because I found that most of us who were teaching never actually worked before. So I said, okay, if I’m gonna do this, I do really respect appreciate, like, the skills that I learned, but I’m gonna I’ve had very little confidence in, like, the business training that these people gave me. So I, I basically started to ignore everybody and started to do tax returns, because I felt tax returns were like a stable thing that everybody needed, right?
D.J. Paris 13:47 Yeah, guaranteed, guaranteed. Least everyone at least once a year is asked to either do it themselves or hire someone so it makes sense.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 13:55 So the tax return business started was was amazing, because it was like annual reoccurring revenue and kept coming in. But then like, 2008, crash happens, and I’m doing wonderful, because everybody’s still just notwithstanding, like, the complete collapse of like the financial system, people still needed to file the tax returns. And like, remember, when you’re getting chased by a lion when two gazelles are getting chased by a lion, you don’t have to be the fastest Gazelle in the world. You just got to be faster than the other person. Right. So I, the firm that I was at most of the other attorneys just went belly under. And when that happened, I started gobbling up the other practice areas, one of them being real estate, right? I had no idea what real estate was at the time. Right. So fortunately, I was able to laminate for a side hustle at that point in time. 2009. So you know, with all my martial arts stuff I was able to you know, for I was lucky enough to participate in a major tournament, where wushu was a demo sport at the Olympics. I was able to win a gold medal. I’m not an official in the NBA. I never claimed to be but I was on the US team. This caught my attention Warner Brothers were in 2009. They purchase an intellectual property out of bankruptcy called Mortal Kombat nine, right? And I was one of the guys that they came in to do the motion capture, right? For a side hustle. All of a sudden, I started realizing, you know, the importance of making money, like having control of that, right? So I’m kind of taking away doing tax returns. And all of a sudden, the real estate market started a hockey stick, right? Yeah. And I happen to be like Forrest Gump. With the shrimp boat captain, I wasn’t so amazing. But I was just like one of the first guys who survived to participate in that market upswing, right. And I was never my core competency was always tax law, but it never really had. But real estate happened just because I happen to be standing in the right place. And it became a profit center. And today, I’m on board member of Delaware a real estate lawyer Association, I think I’ve done about 1000 transactions, something like that. And it was kind of over time that I realized that, you know, value propositions, you know, they go from, they go through stages, like, they go through a perceived through actual through evolving, you they start with, like, you have to have a perceived value, like what do you bring to the table, then you have to deliver actual value, it’s what you can do. And then you have to evolve as things change, right, as the market started to recover, are starting to realize that real estate is such an important percentage of like the American families portfolio, right? And that’s where I really started saying, Okay, this real estate thing is very important, because it’s part of the overall, like, part of everyone’s life. And that’s where I really got into it.
D.J. Paris 16:37 Gotcha. And did you find that, that real estate transactions were personally really fulfilling to you, like, versus other types of law that you may have dabbled in?
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 16:48 Well, what I what I do like about real estate transactions, is I believe in becoming fabric of the community, right? Like, and the way you truly become a fabric of community is you got to shake the people’s hands that you’re, you’re serving, right. And the best way to kind of build that trust is like helping them establish their nest, right. So real estate, kind of became one of our like, lead generators, where, you know, we would meet people to do their closings, they would transfer into like, trusts in the States, and then we kind of just became their go to for everything.
D.J. Paris 17:21 Yeah, imagine estate planning is like maybe the real estate transactions a nice entry point to then do the estate plan. after the fact. Does that happen a lot, where a lot of your real estate clients
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 17:33 be 100%. Like the thing is, actually, I know this is blasphemous, right, but from, from my perspective, I, Attorney CPA, I think we ought to offer a little bit of a broader value proposition and right, I believe that real estate is a subsidiary of estate planning, right? Sure. I believe there’s people who have this overall like estate plan, and you do their closing kind of as part of that overall plan. I just don’t know how you do a closing without knowing everybody’s overall plan.
D.J. Paris 18:03 We were I was just having this exact conversation with a real estate journalist. Yesterday, we actually are yesterday, and we were talking about how this is the year that realtors can really start to think of themselves more as a consultant where they actually try to take a broader, broader view of the entire financial picture. And maybe that includes having conversations with the person’s accountant, with their attorney, or with their financial adviser, and really saying, Where does this home if we’re going to call this thing an asset, which is a debatable topic to a primary residence? I know it’s an asset on the day it’s sold. But is it an asset? Really, between times I don’t know, but it’s still an important piece of the financial picture, regardless of whether it’s an asset or not. And it you’re right, it’s sort of like one of those things that, you know, when I go see a doctor, they make me fill out this massive checklist of like, what’s wrong with you? What’s your history? What’s everything going on with your physical health, energy, you know, exercise, diet, etc. And all the stats, and your head and your family history because they need to be able to make a good recommendation. And you’re right, the sort of the real estate side of, of the of someone’s financial picture is often sort of isolated and segregated from everything else. And I imagine your sort of vision is to sort of integrate everything into looking at it more holistically. Do I have that right? Yeah.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 19:29 Well, I listen, like in the end, my, my intent is the preservation of the American family. And the way you do that is by you know, ultimately, you need to make sure that they’re safe safety, and that they’re secure, financially secure, right. And I don’t I believe I do just continue to believe that homeownership and real estate investing is an important part of a diversified portfolio.
D.J. Paris 19:56 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode. sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah. Do you look at primary residence? diff? I mean, obviously, it’s different from a revenue person or a Yeah, revenue perspective. Right. So so passive income, residual income through investments, obviously we understand there’s tax benefits, there’s there’s obviously cashflow benefits. Do you look how do you encourage clients to think of their primary residence? Is it an investment? Is it an asset? And this these are very debatable topics? But I think it’s important because I think there’s a there a lot of realtors that could really benefit from hearing some language from an attorney about how to how to have those conversations because personally, I I would love to look at my primary residence as an investment if it goes up. But I don’t have much control over that. That’s not the reason I bought it as much as I would love for it to double in value probably won’t. But but it is a huge chunk of you know, the money that I’ve had put into that home. So curious on how you think about primary homes versus obviously versus you know, buying, you know, a multifamily and renting it out.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 22:20 Okay, so, Attorney CPA perspective, primary residence is absolutely an asset. I strongly disagree with the argument that it’s a liability. I respect and understand where the other where the argument comes from, you know, the the old school adage, like your primary residence is just a liability. I just I think it’s incorrect. I believe it’s a it’s an asset, especially when you start looking at things generationally, right. Like when you start looking at these generationally primary residence. You It’s like incurring an unrealized gain to all the CPAs out there, like we’re building up this store of value. Whereas if you’re renting, you’re not building that store of value. Now, it’s always possible that you overextend. I’m a big fan of Albert Einstein, and I love this little equation equal equals MC square. So n equals MC squared essentially means is energy equals mass times the speed of life squared, right? The thing I love about that equation is it proves to us that energy and mass are equivalent, because if you divide see, it’s an algebra, divided c squared by both sides, it shows that they can equal each other, they become much, right? They are relative to each other as money is a relative thing. The money that you make is only relative to the money you spend. So if you overspend relative, then yes, it becomes a liability, right? Like, if you don’t do that, and you are like normal, like it’s an asset, especially when you think and think generationally.
D.J. Paris 24:03 Well, thank you for closing the door on that, that I love that you you shut the door with some authority on that particular argument, whether primary residence and asset and you explained it very, very well. And I think that’s important. And, and historically, home prices over time generationally have historically risen, right, so we can look at historical data and say, well, we can’t you know, obviously, we can’t project that your home is going to be worth more than it is today because that would be you know, no one has the oracle at Delphi to or crystal ball but, but we can assume based on historical data that it’s likely that if trends continue that you may be here in 20 3040 years, which in case does improve the quality of that asset from you know, from a numbers perspective. So I, I am I will tell you this, I am scared about 2023 Now, there’s always opportunity when there’s fear But I think there’s I’m speaking not so much for me because truthfully, I’m not a practicing agent, I have my license, I don’t use it. I sit here at a desk all day and, and try to recruit people to join our company. But we have about 700 agents here. And they a lot of them are nervous. And a lot of my friends outside of our company who are agents are nervous about 2023. Why? Pretty obvious reasons. Of course, everyone knows we have a higher interest rate environment than we did two years ago, although I don’t think it’s that high. But it certainly in comparison to the last few years, it’s still a big bigger pill to swallow than it was double rates. You know, it was kind of where we’re at low inventory, and then dropping home prices. So curious on where’s the opportunity in 2023? What should Realtors be focused on? And what as an attorney? Do you suggest that agents start to think about to really keep their business rolling next year so that it’s not as bumpy as, as maybe the news is suggesting it might be?
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 25:58 Well, it’s gonna be bumpy, it’s definitely gonna be bumpy. It’s just finding the opportunity within that bumpiness. Right. Like, from my perspective, all ships float and high tides, right? You have when times are good, everybody is like, amazing. Like, one of the things that I tell people is I’m like an all terrain vehicle. Like I work in rain, sleet, snow, sunshine, so many of these single silo like attorneys, that’s, that’s all they do. Like they don’t work when times get when there’s a hurricane, right? So, from my perspective, you have to kind of approach your business like that, like, are you prepared for the ups and the downs, we’re in a cyclical business? So if you want to survive in a cyclical business, you’d have to be able to work in both cycles, right? So from my perspective, it’s identifying the, like, the things that people are really going to need, right? Let’s start with the supply side, there’s unlimited amount of inventory out there, right. I believe, as you see the baby boomer the silver tsunami coming, you’re gonna see these guys, they’re going to have to redeploy their assets, right?
D.J. Paris 27:09 Huge amount of assets to I mean, trillions of dollars are going to flood in.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 27:14 Yeah, so 25 trillion is going to exchange hands right now is the homes are a special asset, right? Because like, they need to figure out a way to either downsize if they’re going to pass away, and with the long term living, you know, kids are all gone. And they’re gonna have to figure out to do it. And most of those homes don’t have mortgages on them. Right? So they’re not worried about trading from three to seven or three to six or whatever. Incidentally, I haven’t I haven’t I have an ongoing, that with a couple of people have the date, I think it’s going to drop down to five, offline, I’ll enter to about with you, right, that way. I’d love that. Anyway, um, what? You know, you’re gonna have a lot of the baby boomer population population, that they have a bleeding neck, and let me restate, they don’t have a bleeding neck, they have six shotguns pointed to the back of their head, that they’re going to have to figure out what to do with that land. Right? Now. You have, you’re gonna have a motivated seller who’s gonna have to figure out what to do with that supply. Right, right. Then let’s talk about like, purchasing. Right? Number one, if the consumer doesn’t come in and buy these assets, right, you’re gonna have foreign money flooding, you know, you’re there’s so much turbulence, globalization, I just wrote an article for the State Bar, I’m shocked, it got picked up so quickly. But it was like, it’s about the collapse of globalization, I think you’re gonna see money start coming in here from other places. And, you know, listen, all the house hacking is really cool. But when you have a couple of kids, good luck doing that, you’re gonna have to find your own house to raise your family, right, your garage, would you raise your kids in their basement? Right? So you’re the supply side is going to be the baby boomers in the demand side is going to be foreign money and millennials who are are being forced kind of to, you know, as their families expand, right, now there is a segment of the population that their velocity is going to decrease dramatically, right? And that percentage of the population, they’re attracted to 3% interest rates, and they don’t want to trade out, right, I get it, right. Listen, the pie is gonna get smaller, and you really are gonna have to demonstrate and show everybody what your value proposition is. From my perspective, this is really gonna come down to who are real real estate people and who are marketers, right? A lot of people in sales that they’re great salesmen, right? Sure. If you were to go back 2030 years into the real estate market before people the sales thing like the top of the funnel, you know, everybody became great marketers, right? The real estate was a pool business. What a pool business means is you get pulled in a transaction, you have a special skill that gets you pulled in, right? You guys were never intended to be in a push business and became a push business because your commissions were so lucrative that it pushed into marketing people, right? But This is gonna force the vendors to become hyper specialized in what they do, they really got to know what they’re doing. And the consumer is canceled. goddang smart, right? That if you don’t know what they’re doing, you’re doing, they’re going to know really quick. So you really got to get back down to that core of like, man, you know what you’re doing?
D.J. Paris 30:22 Right. So this is the year to really hone those or sharpen those sticks, those skill set sticks or tools in the arsenal to know more than, you know, the average consumer who wants a month checks their Zestimate. And to see what their home values worth, which, of course, they don’t need you to do, because they can just pull that up. Now, whether that number is accurate or not, is irrelevant. But that’s what they’re going to do. So you need to be able to bring value in between transactions, right? So person, what buys and sells every, what, seven years, or whatever, the status. So here’s a here’s a great question. So I don’t know if it’s a great question. I shouldn’t say my own questions are great. But here’s a question that I think would be of great value to our audience, which is, and you’re not, you’re not a practicing broker, but you work with realtors, and you work with homeowners, not a practicing. Doctor, don’t do everything else.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 31:15 But the broker is very important to me, I like listen, you know, it’s very hard to break this shell, right. But I will be vulnerable to tell you the importance of the broker. Right? And I want my perspective. My sole agenda is the preservation, the American wealth ecosystem for a family brand. And most people have less than $1,000 in their bank account, like at least like I think it’s like 78 or 80%, something like that have less than 1000 hours.
D.J. Paris 31:50 That is that is horribly depressing. Unfortunately, true.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 31:55 So many people land do you do read all these articles JP Morgan and about a billion dollars in land, you know, this REIT bought a billion dollars, Blackstone bought 50 billion. Do you know why they do that?
D.J. Paris 32:08 You know, I actually don’t know why they do. Because it’s a good idea.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 32:11 It works.
D.J. Paris 32:14 Right? The church does a similar thing to they buy a lot of land.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 32:18 If you buy it, I’ll be more aggressive. You’re dancing, and you’re saying, oh, like you know, it might not go it’s gonna go up. It’s a store of value. Right?
D.J. Paris 32:28 I used to have a I had a friend who was an attorney who’s worked for the Catholic Church and her job, no joke in the US. And I’m sure they have these positions all over the world was to buy land where they could put schools Catholic schools Catholic education, which, of course has its own business and a huge business. But the big thing was not we want to we don’t want to rent space. We want to buy the land, put the school on it. And it’s and this is this was her full time job, just finding land for schools.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 32:59 So the reason why they do that is the isn’t worse, it’s a really good idea, right? Like, especially American dirt and American dirt American brick and mortar is amazing, right? Like, this morning, what are the important things that you’ve done? And I asked you, what did you do when you first
D.J. Paris 33:18 I went to the gym? I’d say that’s for me. That’s it. That’s probably the most important thing I did you do after you went to the gym? Came back started. started thinking about recruiting more realtors. You take a shower? I took a shower this morning. Yes. Okay, so what do you need to take shower? What do i Why did I take a shower? What do I need? I need to take a shower. So you need water and electricity? Well, you don’t need electricity, but I use electricity.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 33:46 You need water? Right? So we live in one of the biggest areas of fresh water. So before I was you know, I worked at a law firm called yield shine. It’s like number three in all of Asia in Seoul, South Korea, right. I thought it was a big shot, right? Anyway, I met this big big shot law firm, right? And I go to get my place my little studio right? And I find out how expensive it was. I was like,
Whoa, but that’s how much it costs for this like studio. That’s crazy. It turns out
if you sold South Korea, you could buy France a times that’s how expensive that land is. Right? One of the cool interesting things about South Korea, we got a river that goes right through the soul and stuff like that. Surrounded by ocean, right? And you can’t drink ocean water or Beynon. Right? So all of a sudden water becomes scarcity. So like for someone like me, I recognize like the irrelevant the relative importance of water right where people hear you take an hour long shower, and no one cares, right? But this is in the world like it’s it becomes a really big deal. So I guess what I’m trying to say is like, we ultimately the land that you purchase needs to have a value or reason why people like it right? Our soil is very abundant and natural. sources which allows you to up an acorn son grows, right? And we have water. So like, you know, so long as the resource resources remain consistent, like in theory, as long as the value of commodity goes up, so the value of land relative the value of the commodity, right? Sure. Really. It’s a good investment as when people come back home
D.J. Paris 35:22 this stuff. Yeah, it makes it makes perfect, perfect sense. So Realtors right now are thinking, Okay, I’ve got a lot of my clientele refinanced or purchased in the last couple of years when the interest rates were low. And obviously a lot didn’t. But the ones that did, you know, I, what do I say? First of all, do we say anything to the person who’s at a 3% rate right now? Who is feeling like, oh, I can’t move because then if I move, I’m going to a six and a half percent, right. What are what are we saying to those? What do you suggest we say to those people? If anything at all right now? So
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 36:06 do you have your handy dandy computer there? I do. And you look up JP Morgan Chase buys a billion dollar of single family homes. Yeah, looking it up right now? Yeah.
D.J. Paris 36:23 Got it. Yep. Single Family rentals, a billion dollars earlier this November?
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 36:27 Yeah. You want to know what date is that?
D.J. Paris 36:31 So the news articles November 16.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 36:33 Okay, would you agree November 16? That’s like a month ago, right? Like, the rates are in the sixes and sevens? Yeah. Do you want to know why they’re buying that they’re doing that?
D.J. Paris 36:45 I want to know why Jamie diamond does anything. So yes. Tell me
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 36:49 a really good idea. Because he’s
D.J. Paris 36:51 a really smart guy.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 36:53 They saw the interest rates go up, and they eliminated all the competition. Yeah, right. Interest rates went up, they eliminated the competition, they go in and acquire, do the acquisition. So like, the first of all, I do think the mortgage interest rates are gonna go down. Right? Let me open with that. Right. So with that said, I do believe that it is probably not a smart idea, to wait until they go down to buy. Because the second day go down, you’re gonna have this huge board of competition come in, and they’re gonna bid up the prices again,
D.J. Paris 37:34 which is what happened when in 3% rates, same exact things happen? Yeah.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 37:38 100%. Like, what you want to do is you want to try to go in there where there’s mild to medium competition, exactly what JPMorgan Chase is doing to you. Right? It’s hilarious, right? Your own bank priced you out. And now that
D.J. Paris 37:51 it’s my own bank, that’s funny. Your own
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 37:53 bank priced you out so they can buy your land. It’s hilarious, right? Like, you know, you really got to be conscious of like, when that rate goes down, everybody’s gonna flood in. Now, you got to make that decision. But if I was a broker, if I was in your business, right, this is a dialogue that I would be having with my people. Hey, forget about the industry. Put that to the side for a second. Tell me about your needs. Are you in a one bedroom condo with one kid? And you’re about to have a second kid? Right? Yes. This ain’t gonna work. Right? Let’s go find you something that’s within your budget that meets the needs of your family. Hey, are you is your parents 65? How are they doing? Do you think that they’re going to be in a nursing home? Do they have long term coverage? If they don’t? Like you need to have these things in mind for them? Right?
D.J. Paris 38:44 Can we just do a public service announcement and break for just a moment? Can we talk about long term care and not get into the weeds about it? But I know you’ve been you’ve been beat you beat the drum on long term care insurance. And I’m so grateful for you to do this. Because there are so many people, so everyone listening, if your parents are elderly, can you just give the quick little 32nd on why everybody’s parents need to have long term care.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 39:07 Okay, so most people don’t have long term care, which is insane. But what long term care means is if your parents are unable to function on their own, and they have to go like they get dementia, they gotta go to assisted living nursing home or something like that. Those places are really expensive. Right? So you need to have an insurance policy to cover the cost of that. Now, assuming that you don’t have that because most of you have it, right. The only way to afford that is let’s say they got a pension of 4000. Right. And let’s say you find them a nursing home that 6000 The nursing home will allow them to come in take the 4000 a month, right. And the gap the Delta they will normally get covered under Medicaid through Illinois. Now Medicaid is is provided by the state but funded by the Feds right? Now the catch of getting that free Medicaid is if your parents own a house free and clear which most baby boomers do, they paid it off, right? The state can turn around and attach a lien against the equity with a five year look back, they can go back five years, to any money that they paid on your parents behalf to live in their right. So they can essentially lose the asset that they were that they built. So if anybody’s out there thinking generational wealth, gotta have that in the back of your head.
D.J. Paris 40:36 Yeah, just ask ask your parents if they have long term care insurance talk to talk to a financial advisor get that done? Because it will I don’t even remember what the average cost is for facility care these days. But I want to say for a year a lot 1000 Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s 10s and 10s. of 1000s of dollars. Okay, anyway, back to back to our regularly scheduled program. But but this really ties in long term care, because you were talking about generational wealth, and nothing wipes out generational wealth faster than then managed care for elderly people. So, so I’m glad we were able to do our public service announcement of the year. But let’s talk about okay, so so back to being being a realtor. So I’m thinking about our audience, we’re realtors, we’re worried about 2023 interest rates are up, which means the average consumer thinks they’re not getting a deal right now, right? They’re not getting a deal. You said, don’t wait for it to don’t try to time the market don’t wait for the interest rates to come down. Why not?
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 41:39 Because when they do come down, what’s going to happen is every single person who’s waiting on the sidelines, they’re going to jump in all at the same time. Like if I was a relative So here let’s talk damage control. If you’re a realtor, you got to right size your business right now. If you know your if you believe that your top line revenue is going to decrease 20% You got to go line item by line item and you got to decrease your expenses. 20% Real simple. Okay. Right size your company if you’re if you’re carrying too much fat right now, you’re starting to carve a fan out, right. So that’s step one, do that first. That’s something you should be doing right now. Right? Yeah. Step two, once you’ve right size your company, I would turn my attention to just educating your client on like, like real realist, no, I would turn to listening to your client on what their needs are. If you know that they’re going to have a need to like, you know, move, then step three, talk to them about the difference between the interest rate and like competition, because petition comes flooding in. Did I think it’s gonna be a big wave?
D.J. Paris 42:48 People get priced out? Yeah, it’s, let’s, let’s all remember what happened with the, with the sub 4% rates in the last couple of years. Remember, you know, if we had listings, it was feast or famine, right? If you had listings, you were feasting. And if you were working with buyers, it was tough. You were submitting offers sight unseen, you were getting, you know, 30 Plus offers, trying to get yours noticed. And it is remember how hard that was to start a thread that perfect needle? You know, it was it was difficult back then. So I think I think you bring up a good point. And maybe if if looking at the math, maybe the metrics are such that you would have overpaid two years ago, despite the fact that you were in a lower interest rate environment. And maybe now even though higher interest rates, lower pricing, maybe it actually evens out more than the consumer might think.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 43:41 100% Yeah, if you get if you get a lowered lower. My father paid for his house, he paid 55,000 for his house, but it was like a 10% interest rate. So it’s not a lot, right. So if you get a discount on the retail price it oftentimes it ends up equaling out, I but the one thing I will say to everybody is, let’s be honest, guys, the last two years was probably the greatest rush of real estate velocity. And we’ll probably never see that again. Right? The rates are never going to get that low. You’re never going to see that again. Right. Right now you got to turn your attention to right sizing or operations and providing that value to the consumer and the consumers hypercritical right now.
D.J. Paris 44:22 And like you said at the very beginning, they have access to everything now. So you know, we all have access to everything. It’s in our pockets. It’s we walk around with, you know, this basically magical device that tells us anything we want to know at anytime for free, essentially. And so as an agent, so a couple things I got from what you were saying number one, a lot of agents are going to be exiting the business who work true full all in agents, the part timers, the onesie twosies they’re going to start to slowly exit the business or just become less relevant. So we’re probably going to see some sort of exit As for agents, which is a great thing for agents that are looking to scale up and grow their business, because there is going to be less competition, a lot of the maybe poor quality agents will be leaving the industry, the the stronger agents, the really savvy, value added agents will continue to thrive. But in order to get there, you have to do the heavy lifting, which is what you were talking about is sharpening the tools. This is the year 2023, where you really want to be, be better no more. What do you recommend for agents to study as far as like a daily practice? And again, I know you’re not a practicing agent, per se, but what do you wish agents knew from? From an attorney’s perspective? What do you wish agents were better at?
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 45:46 You know, I always believe in marketing, like, how you consume, right? Like you should market to people the way you consumers, like a consumer, right? How is it like, as a consumer, right? My family, when we first got here from Korea, we got heavily involved in real estate because we were in the restaurant business we sold we’re number one, number one in the state and used restaurant, we had like, 200,000 square feet. Like, you know, restaurant stuff, right? So we would we needed to buy the locations to house the equipment, right. And one of the things that I think we found important from people is like, you really have to know the assets that you’re selling, you’re helping someone buy, right. The thing if you’re in the condo business, right? Dude, you really got to know that ancient way before you get your environment. Right. If you’re if you don’t have if you have no idea of the financial health of that Hoa, like you’re just hoping that the attorney catches it on the 22.1. Like, that’s what you’re doing. It’s crazy to me, like you really got to know these things here. I’ll tell I’ll give you an example from an attorney’s perspective. In 16 years, I’ve probably done 1000 transactions. When ever I catch something on the 22.1. Read the 20.1 is a financial snapshot which shows capital upcoming, unexpected or expected capital expenditures. Whenever I catch something and I tell the buyer, this is what immediately happens. I press send on the email said what are they saying? Hey, Don, thanks for catching that thing. Why in the hell did my realtor not tell me about that? Yeah. Right. 100 times 100 out of 100. That’s what happens, right? Like, if you’re gonna go into a building, you got to know what’s going on. But the building, right? So that’s if you’re in the condo business, if you’re in like the single family home business, you got to kind of have some sort of idea of the neighborhood, you’re putting people in, right? You got to say, like, I know, there’s restrictions on what you can disclose, right? But you got to talk to your client, and let them understand like, Hey, this is you know, wonderful school systems, communities and this man, and they got to know what’s going on. Like, whenever I like, for me personally, whenever I do like investing, I like when I invest in, let’s take single family homes, for example. I believe that you have to control one of three things to be a real estate investor, you got to control the dirt, the tenant of money, one of those dirt tenant money. So I like tenant control. Tenant control is the coolest to me, right? So what I like to do is I like to buy single family homes in the best school districts, and I am the cheapest rent in the best school districts. That’s my model. Right?
D.J. Paris 48:44 I love that because that’s what every parent, not every parent but But parents want to live in the school districts not every parent in the best school district. Every parent can afford that. So you want to make the affordable option for people to enter that that education space. Yeah.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 48:59 100% I want to be the most affordable in the best school. That’s my value proposition because that’s the product that I offer right now like to me like I really know what the product that I’m buying. Right? Like surgically, right. And it can be like when your broker the client, the customer sees that you’re walking away with a big commission check, right? And they see the inspector getting paid six farebox they they see the attorney getting paid six 700 bucks, right? If, like the inspection, I get it, if there’s something that you couldn’t have found, totally get it right. But if they find out that there’s an atomic bomb there, right 999 times out of 1000 They’re mad at me, bro. They call me and they’re like, Dude, what the hell happened? How come? Nobody knew about this, right? There’s an outcome. There’s, of course we got a great deal. There’s a $70,000 special assessment coming up? Sure. Right, you know, I mean, yeah, of course, we got a great deal. This is this is going to be a deconversion. Right? Like, you know, stuff like that.
D.J. Paris 50:14 So, so realizing that realtors are highly compensated for, you know the transaction and not taking that responsibility lightly and really providing over providing value or providing more value than would be expected so that the consumer never calls the attorney who got paid the six or $700 it goes, How come you caught this in my my agent who just got 10 grand didn’t catch it.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 50:42 Like I actually think, you know,
given like your vet your role and in the transaction, top of the funnel, defending value, I don’t think you’re unfairly compensated right. But I don’t think it’s an unfair compensation. But you have to, like, if you don’t know the product that you’re selling, like really know it. And the client finds out that you’re highly compensated, and you don’t know what you’re selling, they get mad.
D.J. Paris 51:12 Yeah, I’ve had this fantasy in, and I don’t know if it probably will never come true. But I want I would love real estate to move away from for realtors, how they’re compensated to move away from transaction to work to more sort of a, like a financial advisory model where it’s, you know, assets under management fee based model, you know, you get a percentage. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen. I don’t know if it’s possible, but boy, that would that would really change the game, I think.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 51:41 I don’t know if that. I actually, you know, I respect the counter argument. But I actually think What the I don’t think they’re unfairly compensated, right, I think what they do is legit, and here’s why. Ultimately, their job is to defend the value. Yeah, that’s ultimately their job, right to defend value. And if you do defend the value, it’s worth it. Right? You know, it’s worth it. But if you don’t defend the value, then it really becomes a problem. Right? And that’s the thing, you really are going to have to know like, I recently I did a wholesale deal, where, you know, they flipped the contract. And it was a big number. Right? Huge number. The sellers got so angry at the listing that they’d have to of course, they were like, how the hell do you get this number wrong? Right? And sorry about that. They’re like, how the hell did you get this number wrong? Right, your entire reason you’re here is to value this, right. So like, if you stand by that, like, it makes sense, because it’s your that is the most important thing was the value of the home. Right? Yeah. So I actually think the the number is fair, but the but you really have to know that you just can’t be a guy or gal who switched careers. You’re really good at marketing has a great network, don’t know the product and sells it. That’s what it got to get a little scary.
D.J. Paris 53:20 Yeah, so sharpen your tools, learn, learn the inventory, learn the market, learn what to look for, you know, with with respect to closings, especially condo, you were saying HOA stuff? Yeah, boy. It because all of us, you know, consumers when we’re buying something. I, I, as long as I’ve been in this industry, I’ve always thought because I’m not a practicing agent. I’m gonna be thought, doesn’t everybody just want to know, is this a good idea? That’s really kind of what we all want. Like, should I buy that? Should I not buy that? And I really think realtors say I’ll help you by that. But I really what I want a realtor to do is say you should buy that or you shouldn’t. And in order to make that distinction or that recommendation, you really do have to have some pretty sharp tools in your sharp arrows in your quiver. But this is the year to develop that because if you can become the person that gives advice, and again, depending on what state you live in, you have to obviously you want to be compliant, make sure you’re not running afoul of compliance rules, but whatever is allowed, I think the real value is in the advice. Obviously pricing advice should I buy this? Should I sell as well? How should I do it? I just I love having people giving me advice in my life, my service providers. That’s really what I want for my accountant, my attorney, my financial advisor, my trainer, I want them telling me you should do this
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 54:47 100% I think that’s the direction everything’s gonna go. And I think if you do that, market goes up, market goes down. You’ll there will always be people who need help. And if they know that you can help them And whether it’s an up or down market that you can help, you’re going to be fine.
D.J. Paris 55:03 Well, I could talk to Don all day to all day and we certainly would love to have him back on future episodes. But for now we’re going to encourage every single person who is listening or watching right now I want you to go to Amazon. I want you to check out his book, The Tao of the side hustle, Donald. He on kielbasa I, we’re gonna promote the heck out of it. I’m gonna read it over the holiday break. By the time this is published, I will have already read it. You’re good friends with one of my other podcast friends, Lawrence Dunning. He’s like, it’s the greatest book ever. You gotta read this. And Donald was nice enough to send me a copy. So I want everybody to go and to Amazon, pick up this book. And let’s make 2023 as smooth as possible. We know there’s going to be there’s going to be a lot of dips and bumps, but let’s do what we can and let’s sharpen our skills. And yeah, let’s all have a great 2023 So Donald, thank you on behalf of our audience for everyone listening and watching really appreciate Donald spending his time he is an attorney, he bills by the hour, he is too busy to do this, and yet he did it anyway. And so we really want to support him. So also if you are a Chicago based agent, and you’re looking to work with a real estate attorney, also who by the way is a champion athlete and best selling author and a CPA and really just a wonderful human being you really should have done in your in your arsenal of attorneys to recommend to clients he would love to work with you can visit his website Chicago real estate att y.com link to that in the show notes, check out his his legal team. They can do everything from estate planning to real estate to a bunch of other specialties as well. They’re awesome. But let’s pick up the book Tao of side hustle the Tao the side hustle on amazon link in the show notes on behalf of Donald and myself to our audience who want to say thank you. We exist to help you through this tough year. We know it’s going to be a tough year. That’s okay. big deep breath in and out. We are going to provide you content and strategies and suggestions to help you get through this year. Please tell a friend that’s the only thing we ask support our sponsors. Check out Donald’s book and tell a friend that one other agent that could benefit from hearing this great interview with Donald and send this over to them it might be just what they need to help their business in 2023. Donald, thank you so much for being on the show and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Donald Hyun Kiolbassa 57:30 I appreciate you all go help people and I promise you everything would be fine.
What a Top Real Estate Coach Is Telling Agents To Do In 2023 • Steve Shull
Jan 12, 2023
Steve Shull a real estate coach talks about how and why he got into the real estate business. Steve describes how he’s spent over 60.000 hours of one-on-one coaching over his career. Next, Steve discusses what is he telling his real estate agents in order to keep them in the right mindset for 2023. Steve presents his 6 core building blocks to develop a mindset of harmony and discusses all of them. Last, Steve and D.J. discuss the importance of preparation for every aspect of your life.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Wouldn’t you like to know what a top real estate coach is telling his clients? In other words, agents about what to focus on in 2023? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interests and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Steve Shaw, who is a real estate coach to top producers about what he is talking to his clients. In other words, agents like you about what to do and what to focus on this year to help have a successful business. Before we talk to Steve, just a couple of quick reminders, please support our sponsors, they keep the show going. And we would appreciate that you check out their services and products. They’re always the you know companies that we feel very strongly about best in class. So please check out support them because they support us. And then another way that you can help us is just by telling one other realtor about this episode. Think of one other agent that really would love to know what coaches are telling top producers and send them a link, you can send them right over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be played right in in someone’s browser or if the person listens to podcasts, they can just pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. So anyway, enough about all of that let’s get to the main event my conversation with Steve Shaw.
Today on the show, we have real estate coach and author Steve Shaw. Now let me tell you more about Steve Now Steve has been coaching real estate agents full time since 1993. And from 1991 through the 1993. Steve sold residential real estate in the Fullerton California area. In his first year with his partner he closed 53 transactions. I mean that’s incredible in and of itself. And Steve second year, he was on pace to sell 100 homes when he came up with the idea to create a coaching program that marked the beginning of his real estate coaching career. And in 2007 Steve was one of the founding partners of TELUS properties. He helped the company open four offices Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Newport and Pasadena. Before leaving in 2012. Steve has coached hundreds of agents to help them shorten their sales cycle, make more appointments and close more contracts. We should also mention that Steve is a former Miami Dolphins linebacker. And on top of all of that Steve has a brand new book. He’s an author. His book is called the full fee agent it is it is available everywhere books are sold, especially on Amazon. And in particular right now it is number one on Amazon for real estate sales. Again, the full fee agent we will have links to the book on in our podcast show notes. And also please visit Steve’s website, which is about coaching for real estate agents, which is called performance coaching.com. Again, performance coaching.com link to that as well in the show notes. Steve, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. Really excited to to speak to you. And boy, you’re really are quite a renaissance man. You’ve done a lot. And I’d love to start all the way at the beginning of your real estate journey. But let’s let’s well actually let’s go back. How did you get it or how Why did you get into real estate I guess?
Steve Shull 5:03 You know, it was an absolute fluke. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, went to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. And I was fortunate enough to make it with the Miami Dolphins 1980. I was a free agent, and played four years in the NFL for knee injury, ended my career from there, I went back and got my MBA at the University of Miami, and University of Miami one day, that was career days that they have in college. And some young kid comes in from Goldman Sachs and gave his little talk and I said, Whatever he’s doing, that’s what I want to go do. I want to be a baker. Yeah, and so didn’t didn’t make it with Goldman Sachs. I did land a job with Citibank Investment Group, and went to work on Wall Street, and spent about five years on Wall Street. And from there certain circumstances landed me out in California into the world of real estate. And then I was attending Mike ferry seminars. Sure. And I listened to this interview that Mike had done with two agents in Long Beach, California Kim and Darrell Rouse, they are in their second year of business, they are on track to sell 100 100 homes and I was listening. And I got it real estate is a progression, contacts, equal leads, leads equal appointments, appointments, equal listings, listings equals sales. And that made sense to me. And I partnered up with an agent who had been in the business 1010 years or so, you know, very capable, knew the contract. And she was doing about 10 or 12 deals a year. And we partnered up. And as you mentioned, in our first year, this was 1991. And, and for anyone listening, you’ve never been through a real estate market. Like back in the early 90s. It was terrible. I was about nine months in 40 listings, no escrows that’ll give you an idea. But the market was like a multiple offer was a buyer writing multiple offers on different properties to see where they could get the best deal. You know, if you got a listing sold in three months, that was fast, and very different environment anyway, we ended up doing closing 53 deals in that first year. I was door knocking 200 doors a day calling.
D.J. Paris 7:58 I’m gonna pause for a second you were door knocking to an axe NFL or is door knocking 200 doors a day. That is that is the very definition of perseverance, hard work. Discipline, and, and and humility. Right. That’s, that’s a humbling thing to do. And not an easy thing to do back then.
Steve Shull 8:21 But I was lucky in a way. I was given the way it was presented to me you had four options. You could knock on doors, cold call, call expired listings and for sale by owners. Those are what was presented those were your four options, right. And backup, you know, I got in real estate to make money. You know, I got real estate to sell houses. And so I was looking okay, what are people doing to sell houses and as I mentioned, Kim and Darryl Rouse, and they were knocking on doors and they were calling expired listing. So I wasn’t going to cold call that was that that wasn’t happening. For whatever reason for sale by owners. I had no interest in that. And so by default, it was knock on doors and expired listings. And be very clear. Nobody wants to knock on a door. Nobody. And however, from a sports background, it’s not about your feelings. I played football for 11 years. There’s not one single day I ever wanted to go to practice,
D.J. Paris 9:36 right. You didn’t want to run the bleachers, but you had to run the blockchain.
Steve Shull 9:39 So you know my feelings what I wanted to do had nothing to do with it. So I started with $25 a day and when I got consistent at 25 Then I bumped it up to 50 and then 50 to 75 and ultimately got up to $200 a day. Wow. And And, you know, that’s what, that’s what I did. And our second year we are on track to sell 100 homes. And I just said to myself, what I did with my partner, Cynthia, because basically she knew real estate. And in that two years, I didn’t know anything about the contract, I filled out one listing agreement once, outside of that, I had no clue. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I’m not encouraging you to not know the contract. I will say this though. I didn’t let anything get in my way of selling houses. I don’t mean being unethical or dishonest. Sure, I didn’t look for obstacles. So anyway, after in my second year, and we’re gonna do 100 deals. I said, I think what I did was Cynthia, I can do with other people. I went to Mike, I said, I have this idea. He said, Great. And we went and did a program in Las Vegas at a Coldwell Banker office. And we signed up nine people that day, for a program that we didn’t have. And then we went to San Francisco. And at that program, many what he called mini retreat, I think it was called, we signed up 90 People that day. And so I had to go back from that program and create, okay, what are we doing with these people? We got to deliver now, I gotta deliver. And so in the beginning, it was a 15 minute phone call every other week, $100 a month, that was the cost of the program. And I created this fax form again, back then there was you know, the cell phones were just coming into existence, and there was no email. So I recreated create a report that people would fax in every week, you know, contacts leads appointments, and I could monitor what they were doing. And I did that with with Mike for about three years from 1993 to 96. When I left, we had about 2000 coaching clients and nine people coaching underneath me and that’s where, you know, prior to this real estate coaching did not exist. The trainers out there doing programs and workshops and creating, you know, cassette programs, not even CDs yet. Sure. And so anyway, this so this was the first coaching program. And after 1996, I left I opened up my own company, performance coaching, been coaching full time, ever since I counted it up the other day, I’ve logged over 60,000 hours of one on one coaching. Wow. So if the 10,000 hour rule is in effect, I’ve got six times that going on. And you’re the Beatle The Beatles of coaching. There you go. And then 2007, myself and two partners, opened up a real estate company sells properties out here in Southern California. And I did that for five years and then went back to my coaching practice full time. So that that’s kind of my story, real estate getting in.
D.J. Paris 13:17 It’s one heck of a story. And one of the names you mentioned early in your story was Mike ferry and I feel like he doesn’t get as much of his do today as as maybe he should. Because he was very it and is a very important person in the coaching space for real estate. And so if anyone out there isn’t familiar with Mike ferry, you really should get familiar with his material. He’s got wonderful material. And anyway, so I have a question. So I was just at a an association event. I’m on the marketing committee and we were talking about next year 2023. There’s about 20 of us on this committee and we’re trying to create programming for the realtors here in our local market to create programming for them to be successful next year. Obviously. It’s a particularly tricky time. I think for a lot of realtors we have you know, of course interest rates are are not in their most perfect place for a lot of buyers. Of course inventory is also on short supply and a lot of markets. So I’m curious. Well, I’m sorry, backing up a moment I was talking to the members of my committee I’m on and everyone is really nervous about 2023 They have buyers that are sitting on the sidelines. They have you know this this inventory shortage curious on on what you’re telling agents today to help keep them in the right mindset. You know, for 2023 Like what, what are you talking about these days?
Steve Shull 14:58 The first thing I want to bring Up is no one. And I mean, no one has the ability to predict the future, nobody. And you read the headlines all day long. And you have all these people, forecasting this forecasting that I worked on Wall Street, I worked at Porter when I worked there it was I was at Salomon Brothers. And every year, every company there are economist would give their prediction for the upcoming year. And we had, we had a very renowned economist, Henry Kaufman. And what I noticed was, every year, every big shop had their prediction. And every year one guy got it right, or one person got it right, and everybody else got it wrong. Then the next year, everyone would flock to the person who got it right. And the next year, they would get it wrong, and someone else would get it right. And, you know, so let’s be very clear. No one has the ability to predict what’s happening. And all of us think back to the pandemic, when the pandemic happened, that was the end of the world, I can remember sitting there in my seat going, the first thing that’s going to happen is everyone’s going to cut out personal coaching, because nobody has any money, and nobody can do anything, right. And every real estate agent was thinking they would never sell another home again. And the pandemic turned out to be just the biggest boon in real estate that nobody saw coming. So first of all, we do not have the ability to predict the market. More importantly, we don’t control what the market is going to do. We don’t control what buyers and sellers are going to do. The market is the market period. And no matter what kind of market there is, life is still happening. People are still being born people die, people get married, people get divorced, people get a new job, kids move in kids move out, life happens. And the things that trigger buying and selling are usually life events. What’s going on right now, in my opinion, is we’re just in a wait and see period of time. We have never experienced a market that we just came out of that was that was insanity. What was going on in it, and everyone kind of got used to, you know, that being the pace, that’s not the pace. That’s not the pace, just like interest rates, right? When I bought my first home in 1981, my mortgage was 18.6%. So and where we are right now six or 7%? What right at midpoint for the past 30 years, where where interest rates have been. So yes, compared to where we were things seem terrible. However, it’s not so bad. Anyway, we’re going to wait and see, in my opinion, a wait and see place. Real estate is not a priority for many people right now. And who knows what the new year is going to bring. So that being said, Stop worrying about the market, stop listening to what anyone says about the market and do your job, your jlb that hasn’t changed. And we can get into whenever you want what I think your job is
D.J. Paris 18:40 every day. Yeah, I do want to get into that. And I think I think you’re right, you know, you come from an athletic background, which is Hey, rain or shine, we got to gotta hit the hit the you know, hit the gym or hit the you know, the field. We’re practicing regardless. Right? And so there’s a certain amount of keep the blinders on, stay focused, do what you’re supposed to do. And and then, you know, hopefully the results will will fall your way. But let’s let’s talk about that. What is this? This is I’m really glad you said that what is the job of a realtor a day to day job for the for a realtor.
Steve Shull 19:25 And let me just say, these are my opinions that I’m sharing with everybody. I’m not saying I’m right. I’m certainly not saying I’m the only person in the world who knows anything. I’m just sharing what I think and over the 30 years of doing this, my thoughts have evolved. When I started out in this business, it was all about prospecting that that that’s how I got into it. That’s what I did. That’s what I coached forever. Where I am I’m now is now I understand this is a repeat and referral business. That’s what it is. And in my opinion, and this is what I coach to, I coach people to build a repeat and referral business. And, and what I boiled it down to a, first of all, we’re not in control of anything that goes on in the external world we don’t control and again, this may go totally against the grain in what everyone thinks, however, we have no control over how many homes we sell in the air. The only thing we control is what we do each and every day. Yeah, I was listening to an interview the other day, a young track superstar, his name is Noah Lyles, 25 years old. He’s the world champion in the 200 meters. And he was talking and he said, world records don’t get broken, when you’re ready. World Records get broken when the day is ready. And he goes on to say, a lot of things have to line up in a very specific way. And most of it has nothing to do with you. The weather’s got to be right, the wind has to be right, the track has to be right, the lane position has to be right, the crowd has to be right the energy, all these things that are not in your control. And what he was basically saying was, you got to be ready every day. Because when the moment is ready, you gotta meet the moment head on. And one of the things I say in my real estate coaching is every deal you do is a miracle. Every single deal you do is a miracle. And every single deal you do comes from left field. What does that mean? It comes from the unknown. I no longer and again, this is probably where I go away against the grain. Goal setting absolute farce business planning the way it’s taught absolute farce. And just think for a second, you go through this exercise every year, all of you who are listening, I’m sure you do your managers tapping you on the shoulder, you need to get together or there’s some program in the office being offered. Or you know, you know, everyone is being conditioned, set your goals and write out your plan. What’s reality, though? And how do I know this? Because a I taught all this nonsense forever. And be what do I find every year by January 31. You no longer paying attention to the goal. Your plan is long gone by that time. And, and then you get to the end of the year and you go back into the drawer and you pull it out and you dusted off and, you know, rinse and repeat. So what what you do control is what you do every day. Yeah. And over 30 years, I’ve boiled it down to six core building blocks. And this is what I coach to every day. And you’re in control of all six of these things. And so no matter what the markets doing, because you have no control over that you do have control of what you do every day. The core building block is developing a mindset of harmony. And I think about the word mindset. What is your mind set on that’s how I look at mindset. And where I’ve come to in a lot of this developed out of the readings of the writings of Michael singer who wrote the Untethered Soul the surrender experiment, and living untethered is we want to be in harmony with what’s happening, not fight, what’s happening, and all of you your entire life, you’ve been programmed and conditioned and brainwashed in a certain way to believe that you can make things happen, that you can make things happen. And I want to challenge each and every one of you. If you can’t change the weather, if you can’t change the weather, how do you think you’re going to change what happens in life because life is made way more bigger than just the weather? And so, when I talk about a mindset of harmony, what I’m saying is, rather than trying to make things happen every day, which is All of you are doing, and you’ve been conditioned, it’s not your fault. Learn to give your highest and best to what is happening. So again, it’s not about trying to make something happen. We go through life thinking the key to a better life is getting more of what we want, and avoiding what we don’t want. Well, again, this is complete. And this is absurdity, that we can get what we want in life, and we can avoid what we don’t want. Newsflash, what’s happening in your life, is the result of natural forces interacting for 13 point 8 billion years, right? Whatever is happening, that’s what’s happening. None of it is personal, although it feels that way. However, it’s not happening to you. It’s simply happening. And all of it is temporary. So the first building block is getting your head on straight, every single day that sets the foundation. The second building block is time blocking. And the time blocking is about prioritizing your time doing what’s most important. Agents struggle immensely with time blocking, because as an agent, and I’m sure you’ve been through this exercise, creating your ideal week or your perfect mapping out your schedule. And we’re there’s nothing wrong with that, where it goes wrong for each and every one of you. You think the way time blocking works out is the world is going to conform to your schedule. Never does. The world doesn’t conform to your schedule, then you go well, this stuff doesn’t work, you know, that I had this to do and they wanted to do this then and I had to I had to go now. No, that’s not time blocking. Time blocking is if it’s in your schedule, you do it. End of story. Yeah, end of story. So it’s about making a commitment to doing what you think is most important.
For me, time blocking has been part of my life forever. In sports, you have practice, and it happens at a certain time. And you have to be there on time, whether you want to be there or not. And if you’re not on time, you get fined or you worse, you get cut from the team. And when I got into the when I got into the NFL, or let’s go back first in college, you have class schedule, and you have to be at class at a certain time. Before everything went online, obviously. And, and when I got to the NFL, we had a schedule, we had a Monday schedule, a Tuesday schedule a Wednesday, a Thursday, or Friday, a Saturday and a Sunday schedule. Every Monday to Monday was the same Tuesday to Tuesday was the same. And you had to be where you were supposed to be on that schedule. And so that is in my DNA. In my coaching practice. I am booked from five in the morning to seven that night, back to back half hour appointments. I love it and why I love time blocking so much. For me. It’s total freedom. Everyone goes what freedom? What do you mean freedom, there’s no freedom. When your time block. I look at it differently. When I wake up every day when I wake up every day, I never have to worry about what I’m going to do today. Ever. It’s right there in front of me. And remember, the more we there’s an inverse relationship between thinking and doing. And this is where Realtors get all messed up. They’re spend most of their day thinking about what they’re going to do. And because they’re thinking about what they’re going to do, they don’t do a whole heck of a lot. Right. And remember, worrying is not the same thing as work. So I’m a big believer in time blocking. And you can create your schedule any way you want. It starts with when you map out a schedule. It starts with your day off, and this is where it breaks down immediately. For all real estate agents. I’m a firm believer that you need at least one full day off if not two or more. And that’s a set day it’s every week. And a day off means you’re not checking voicemail, you’re not checking email, you’re not set checking text, and you have a message on your voicemail with your email with your text, basically saying I’m unavailable today. I’ll be returning all calls messages The following business day So in terms of mapping out your schedule, first thing is your time off. The next thing that comes out is your personal time. You have kids, you have obligations, whatever, you’ve got to map all that out. Then you set up a start time, your workday, and an end time your workday. And you don’t start work before the start time. And end time no later than six or seven, you’re done. That leaves your workspace. And I only need one appointment every day. And that is the next building block. And that is your CRM appointment. And I asked for one hour every day, five days a week. So the mindset of harmony, time blocking, the third building block is CRM. And again, over 30 plus years, I’ve come to the realization when we do an analysis of everyone’s business, at a minimum 50% or more of their business is repeat and referral. Many cases it’s 70 80%. Some some my top clients, it’s 95%. Or even higher, it’s repeat and referral. And so knowing that we’re trying to build a repeat or referral business, your CRM is your most powerful business building tool. And CRM is one of the things that’s most misunderstood and abused. In real estate.
D.J. Paris 31:43 It definitely it’s, it’s when I when I have conversations with agents who are thinking about joining our company, I don’t even like to use the word CRM because it’s just so loaded with with meaning, but it’s not really defined by anybody. Everybody has their own definition. Alright, I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Steve Shull 33:21 In the past, CRM has been a dumping ground. That’s how people have used it just dump everything in there. And then you know, send out an email, email blast to the masses and hope and pray someone responds, that is not CRM in any way shape or form. CRM is it boils down to three things. One, you have to get the right people in your CRM. And we define the right people by the people that you’re committed to being in a relationship with. And the minimum definition of a relationship is you’re willing to call call, not text, not email. Yes, I am old school and millennials, you know the heck with you anyway. You have to call at least every 90 days, every 90 days. Imagine all of you imagine if everyone in your CRM, if it got to the point where they were expecting a call from you every 90 days. And when you didn’t call, they were surprised. Imagine how that would transform your business. So the first thing is get the right people in, organized, grouped and tagged in the right way. And this is something we do in coaching. The second part of CRM is making sure everyone’s set up on a contact plan at a minimum every 90 days. And then the third part of CRM is what I call get your dashboard down to zero every day when you turn In your CRM on, it gives you a list of people to call and a list of things to do, assuming you’ve programmed it right. And getting your dashboard down to zero during your CRM time block is making the calls and doing the tasks.
D.J. Paris 35:16 Quick, quick question. Yeah. So we have our list we’re calling are, we’re, you know, this is a great time of year. By the time this comes out, it’ll be early January. So we’re going to be, it’s going to be a little bit slower agents are going to be thinking about their CRMs. And how what the communication policy for their business should be for 2023. You just gave a great blueprint every 90 days, pick up the phone, reach out to your, you know, the people that you want to be in relationship with. Question, what are suggest? What are some suggestions you have about content? When I when I make these phone calls? What am I saying?
Steve Shull 35:58 Everyone take your notebook out? Because this is really complicated. What you say is Hello. How are you doing? All it is, is no more than a checkup is no more just checking in? You are not? Again, my opinion not saying I’m right. This is what I coach to, I’m
D.J. Paris 36:23 going to I’m going to say everything you say is right. So you don’t have to say that any longer. I’ve deemed everything you said as gospel. So go right
Steve Shull 36:29 ahead, oh, we’re doing we’re not there to talk real estate, we’re there to check in human being to human being, see how they are, if they’ve got something going on in their life, if they’re thinking about buying and selling, then they’re gonna bring it up, they’re gonna go, I can’t believe it all, we’re thinking about this or thinking about that. And by the way, everyone, the technology is there. If I set my CRM, right, and based on certain CRMs, I can actually be looking at my mobile app, and watching everyone who’s in my CRM to see if anyone’s on the web. And so every day I can do this. And imagine, here I am. So I see so and so’s searching for homes on my mobile app, and they’re in my CRM, and I call them up out of the blue and you say, You know what, I happened to be thinking about you. I’m just curious how you do it. And they’re gonna go, Oh, my God, I can’t believe you called we’re actually thinking about x. That’s the technology. And this isn’t, you know, this is not complicated stuff. It’s available with with with every CRM program. So anyway, there’s there’s ways to use technology to really be on top of people getting back to the question you asked, is just simple. Hi, I’m checking in. So
D.J. Paris 37:53 basically demonstrating that you care about somebody else finding out what’s going on in their lives. Not Have you don’t need I if I heard you correctly, you don’t need to ask them about, Hey, are you ready to buy or sell a home because of course, they are going to be thinking of you anyway, you’re just checking in to make sure that they know that you’re thinking
Steve Shull 38:14 about them. Almost every real estate agent has been taught a to have a transactional orientation. Meaning what you’re doing every day is you’re chasing a deal. You’re chasing $1 bill, it’s your whole focus, instant gratification, instant gratification. You live in the world of chasing, convert, chasing, convincing, and closing that is your life. And what you don’t really realize you are turning yourself into a commodity. In fact, every force imaginable in this business is conspiring to turn you into a commodity. So when you’re in this transactional paradigm way of thinking, then it’s all based on value. And I’ve got to show my value, I’ve got to show that I have more value than someone else. And I do that by convincing with facts, logic and reason. Let’s be very clear, this is the hard way of doing business. Now some of you listening have gotten really good at doing things the hard way. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it the best way. So don’t confuse with results. Don’t confuse results, either good ones, or lack of results with what you’re actually doing. Which brings up another point. In my coaching, it’s not about how much business you do. It’s what’s more important is how you do your business. Because one of the things that I’ve seen that I’ve seen clearly and most of my My clients are doing over 100 million in sales a year, some over 250 500 million, add a couple clients last year do over 750 million. In the next couple of years, I’ll be coaching people doing over a billion dollars, the production has skyrocketed. However, what I can tell you with absolute certainty, what more equals and all of you are out there, you know, why do you get on this podcast? Why do you do anything, you want to sell more homes, you want to sell more homes? Well, let me tell you what more equals more equals more stress. That’s what it equals, based on the way you’re doing business. Now, I’m not saying more is bad. It’s how you achieve more. And when you’re in that chasing, convincing, closing, transactional, value based convincing based paradigm, what more equals is more stress. What I coach people to do is move from a transactional orientation to a relational orientation, from value driven to trust based people are choosing you because you have positioned yourself as their trusted advisor. So when we’re checking in, we’re being that trusted adviser. We’re not trying to sell anything, we’re just making sure they don’t need anything. And then and the relational orientation. This is what in the book. It’s called Tactical empathy. This is what the book is about. I wrote it with Chris Voss, it’s called the full fee agent. Chris is the best selling author of the book never split the difference. Yeah, many people,
D.J. Paris 41:46 famous, famous, famous book,
Steve Shull 41:48 right. And what happened there, one of my clients, Chris was doing a book signing out in Malibu, one of my clients went, got a copy of the book and gave me the book. And in one Saturday afternoon, I started reading the book. And I had my lightning bolt moment. I have my sports background, all about goals, all about plans, all about fact, logic and reason. I know I’ve written more script and dialogue than any human being alive in terms of real estate. And every one of my scripts was all about fact, logic and reason, leading people to an inexcusable conclusion. And in reading Chris’s book, first of all, the title is what drew me in and never split the difference. What does every realtor do in every single transaction to get a deal done? They split the difference. Slash splitting the difference is the lazy man’s way of doing your job. And when you’re splitting the difference, yes, you may close the deal. What you don’t know is you’re killing off your repeat and referral pipeline, because compromise is never equal. If I’m splitting the difference, and let’s say it’s a $20,000 difference, and I’m giving up $10,000. In my mind, I’m giving up $20,000. They’re only giving up 10. So it’s not equal. It’s not equal. So yeah, the deal closes. But guess what? I feel like I got a bad deal. I feel like my agent wasn’t my advocate. I feel like my agent sold me down the river. Right? And that’s why you have that NAR statistic with someone at the end of a deal with someone recommend you 80% Say yes, and only 20% do. You’re killing off your repeat and referral pipeline when you split the difference. Anyway, the point that came up in the book for me was in that aha moment, is the reality that you cannot overcome emotion with facts, logic and reason. Yeah, emotion, emotion drives the bus. Right? And, and specifically, the emotion that we’re talking about is fear of loss. And again, as a real estate, salesperson, your entire career, you’re selling benefits, you’re selling benefits. That’s not how people make decisions. It’s fear of loss, that drives the decision making process and tactical empathy. And again, what this was based on Chris was a former FBI hostage negotiator. In fact, he was the lead international hostage negotiator for the FBI. And they developed this methodology and, and empathy is the skill of making people feel understood. Yeah. Being able to articulate what someone is thinking, and feeling. And until someone feels understood, they can hear anything that you’re saying. And this is the missing piece in all of sales. Think about thinking about this as a hostage negotiator, as a hostage negotiator. Your job is to sell jail time, to a highly disturbed individual,
Unknown Speaker 45:30 right?
Steve Shull 45:34 When they started the day, they didn’t wake up and say, I want to go to jail today. So I’m gonna go rob a bank, and I’m going to take some hostages. That’s not what they woke up with the intention of doing. However, that’s where they ended up. And so as a hostage negotiator, I gotta sell jail time to someone who’s very emotional, that, like you said, that is a tough sell. Real Estate isn’t that tough. However, it’s not far behind. What you do as a real estate agent every day is you’ve got to sell reality to people who have hopes and dreams that are not based in reality. That’s your job. Yeah. And the way you’re equipped right now, is you’re trying to convince these people with facts, logic and reason, guess what? Right now, every seller is sitting there thinking about what they could have sold their home for six months ago,
D.J. Paris 46:35 or what rate they could have got by purchasing a home two years ago.
Steve Shull 46:39 And on the buy side, every buyer is thinking about, I could have done this. And that’s why I say we’re in a wait and see market right now. Because people, you know, again, I’ve been doing this for 30 plus years, we’ve never, never had such a sudden shift in the market. And so you know, in such a big shift in the market. So people are processing right now. That’s what they’re doing their process. And so. So, again, you’re selling reality, to people that have hopes and dreams that are not based in reality. And what we coach to is, is a framework of how to do that, and how to do that, effectively. The five parts first part of the framework, you’ve got to get your stuff out of the way, you’ve got to get your feelings, your thoughts, your desires, and put it on the back burner. It’s not about you, it’s about them. And you can’t make them feel understood when all you’re thinking about is how is this impacting me. So the first thing you have to do take you out of the equation. So you can focus exclusively on your prospect or client. Second part of the equation, you have to let them fully express themselves, you have to give them the space or room to say whatever it is they want to say. Third part of the equation, once they’ve expressed themselves, then you have to make them feel understood. It seems like it sounds like it feels like you’re probably thinking you’re probably feeling what you’re targeting is a that’s right response. That’s what you’re targeting. And when you begin studying this, you know, these are these are tools, these are based on science of mind. This is how the human mind actually operates. So third step make people feel understood. And when you make people feel understood, it actually causes a chemical release in the body it releases two different chemicals, oxytocin, which Bond’s people to you, and promotes truth telling, and serotonin, which makes people feel satisfied and less demanding. What more could you ask for in terms of communication? Once you make them feel understood, the fourth part of the process is make them think and make them think in a specific way. You make them think in terms of reality, in terms of reality, and again, different tools in the tactical empathy, toolbox. Know oriented questions, calibrated questions, which are what and how questions, we’re not telling people what to do. We’re not explaining one of the great things that Chris says, and everyone should hear this. When you’re explaining you’re losing. When you’re explaining you’re losing. And so you have to resist this need that all of you have to demonstrate your expertise by telling people what to do that’s going in one ear and out the other. So make them thing make them thinks in terms of reality, for example, pricing, many sellers have a high price in mind right now, you would say something like this. I am not here to tell you that your home isn’t worth what you think it’s worth. Rather, I just have one question for you. What if? What if we do everything possible, which we will to attract the best qualified buyer for your home? And what happens if that buyer is not willing to pay you what you think your home is worth? What will you do? And the answer to that question is going to show you are they willing to have a realistic conversation? Or not? And if they’re not willing to have a realistic conversation, then you have a choice to make? Do I walk away now? Do they need some more time to process and I’m going to give it a little more time. However, you need to be clear. They’re not thinking realistically right now.
D.J. Paris 51:09 I want to pause here for a second because that’s the really important and interesting, calm, interesting question to ask. It really lets the agent know, a lot of information about that buyer or that seller in this case, you know, throwing those hypotheticals out is a really smart way to gauge where the where the client is. And a boy, I just want to pause you for a moment because that’s really an impactful question. So this idea, Steve just mentioned was, you know, saying, hey, if we do everything correctly, somebody comes along, wants to buy the property, but they’re not willing to pay what you’d like to list it at? What what will what would be your response? That is a brilliant question. I just wanted to honor you for that. But go right ahead.
Steve Shull 52:00 And again, we’re listening to what the answer is because, again, we’re not telling him, you’re not going to get this price. You know, they don’t want to hear that. We’re saying, I’m not here to convince you, you’re not going to get what you want. I’m asking you what happens if the best buyer isn’t willing to pay you what you want? What will you do, and their response will tell you they’re either realistic, or they’re not. And if they’re not, which is the fifth part of the framework, you have to understand, if someone doesn’t want your help, you cannot help them. If they don’t want your help, you can’t help them. Going back to hostage negotiators. They’re successful 93% of the time. That’s not bad selling jail time. Pretty, pretty amazing. What they had to learn, though, is some of these people, they wanted to die suicide by police that texture. That’s why they came. And they had and they had to quickly recognize is this someone who wants to die by, you know, getting shot. And then they have to realize I can’t help that person and they’ve got to prepare, you know, they’ve got to take a very different path, in terms of what they’re how they’re dealing with a situation. No different in real estate. If a seller isn’t willing to price and price their home at a price where it will sell, I can’t help. And that’s where we learn to exit gracefully from the situation, not making them wrong, leaving the door open and moving on. So again, selling reality five parts. Put your stuff on the backburner. Let them fully express themselves, make them feel understood. Make them think in a specific way. And know you can help people who don’t want to be held
D.J. Paris 53:56 question for you. So if you have a seller who is unrealistic, meaning they have a different price point they think their property is worth you’ve done. The more objective research to determine it’s used as the agent don’t believe it’s worth X, they believe it is worth X. What does is there? How often are they able to come around? What what do you suggest? Or do do you suggest walking away at that point?
Steve Shull 54:30 Well, again, you have it you have a you have a decision to make. Do they just need more time to process because they might need some time to process you know that you’re making them think about something they haven’t thought about? And maybe in that moment they can’t make an answer. But in the next two weeks, no more than the next two weeks. Based on their actions you’re going to see are they open to being more willing? And if they’re not open to be more willing then you That, again, when I’m going to teach you is to exit gracefully. And you would exit gracefully by saying, look, I think we have a very different opinion concerning the value of your home. And again, I’m not here to tell you, I’m right and you’re wrong. And, you know, would it be crazy to think that you might be better served working with someone who’s more in alignment with where you think your home needs to be priced. So you’re honoring them, you’re giving them a choice, you’re not making them wrong, and you’re willing to walk away because time is our most precious asset. Time is our most precious asset, and you don’t have time to waste.
D.J. Paris 55:49 That’s, it’s really, it’s a really good point. And it this willingness to walk away, is is a very important move, because what it what it signals to the individual, the realtor who’s willing to give up this client without trying to convince them, you know, hey, no, you need to come, come come to my way of thinking, Is it really, is it an incredibly respectful thing to do to the client? And whether or not that client ends up working with you in this case? Maybe they wouldn’t. They will have a tremendous respect for you as a professional by giving them a professional answer, which is I think we’re, you know, we’re not seeing eye to eye here. And as a result, I’m going to, I’m going to, you know, go elsewhere. And I wish you the best, I suspect that oftentimes leads sometimes to the to the homeowner than saying, well, we’ll tell me what you think.
Steve Shull 56:50 And this is a great one. One of the things we coach to Don’t take the bait. When someone asks you for your opinion, they don’t want your opinion. Let me repeat this. Yeah. Because you guys love it you love. When someone says will tell me what you think, to you. That’s your the door has been open, again, to demonstrate how smart you are. When they say, What do you think? What they’re really want it what they really want to know is do you think what they think,
D.J. Paris 57:28 yeah, you validate they’re the right.
Steve Shull 57:31 And so there’s lots of ways to sidestep this. For the easy one price. Well, what do you think the price would be? The way you respond to that is, it sounds like you have a very specific number in mind. Okay, it sounds like you have a very specific number in mind. And if they go yet we do. And then you say, Well, what is that number? And if they won’t tell you what the number is right that in there, know that you are now the Fool in the game. Yeah. Now the Fool in the game, they are not doing business with you. However, I can still, you know, I still have a couple moves left, which is if I saw if I say you know, tell me what your number is, and they say, you know, we want to hear from you say great, Zillow and you have to look up the number on Zillow before you go out on the appointment. Well, Zillow has your home, listed, you know, has your home valued at 895,000. And you always say no matter what the price is, you always say, and you’re probably thinking that’s too low. You always say and you’re probably thinking that’s too low. And why do you say that? Because most they are thinking that’s probably too low, right? And they’re going to make and they’re gonna go Yeah, we do. We do think that’s on the low side. Now I want to go now, I’m gonna say, I’m not gonna say you’re probably thinking closer to 1,000,002. I’m gonna go way high, way high on purpose higher than I know what they’re thinking, okay, or higher where I’m guessing they’re thinking. And when I say you’re probably thinking closer to 1,000,002, and they’re gonna say, no, no, no, no, we weren’t thinking 1,000,002 We were thinking more like, you know, 980,000 they will reveal themselves in that moment. So when someone asked me for their opinion, I can get around it the other way about the again first, never take the bait up front, about the opinion. If they press you what you want to do, look if you’re asking me what I think what I think is x however, It’s not my home, I’m not the seller. And this is not my decision. This is your decision, and you need to make this. So you can share your opinion. And again, it’s only your opinion, you know, I’m not presenting it, you know, if it were me and I was in this situation, this is how I would do it. However, it’s not me, it’s you, and you need to make this decision. So you share your opinion, then you put it right back on them. And you have to make them make the choice. One of the chapters in the book is put the responsibility where it belongs, agents are always trying to take responsibility for decisions that aren’t theirs to make. And this is what creates tremendous stress in what you do. You’re all out there, you’re always trying to make the client or the prospect feel good. There’s something much more powerful, and much less stressful on you. Make them feel understood. Make them feel understood. Don’t be trying to make them feel good. You have no ability to make anyone feel good. The way you have to make people feel good now is you got to take their stress and take it on you. Yeah, you know, when you when, when you take an overpriced listing, and you know, it’s overpriced, and you take it because you don’t want to tell them the truth about price. You’re taking the responsibility for the price of the home. And now you’re taking all that stress on you. And now you’re not going to get this thing sold. And a month later, two months later, three months later, you know, they’re in your face, why aren’t we sold, and you’re not sold? Because you didn’t tell them the truth upfront. However, you have to be able to deliver the truth in a way that they can actually hear. You know,
D.J. Paris 1:01:59 Steve, what I’m picking up, and I’m sure our audience is is has been listening to you this entire time is what I’m hearing a lot of his preparation, I’m hearing that throughout your entire career, whether it was with athletics, with real estate, obviously, with banking as well. But we’re talking about taking the job so seriously, that you have answers pre ready, ready and able to, you know, you’re thinking this out ahead of time, you’re doing the homework, you’re you’re preparing, and you’re able to to really assert yourself as as the specialist, you’re not going in blind, you’re not just showing up, you are showing up prepared. And I again, I suspect this was something you learned, obviously, well, I don’t know where you first learned it, but you certainly learned it on on on the field. How important is preparation
Steve Shull 1:03:06 very famous football coach, the will to win is important, the will to prepare is vital. And I’ve been when I first read the book by Chris never split the difference six years ago. And I’ve been studying this every day, all day long for six years. And you do this for a living. You have a huge competitive advantage over your clients, they do this once every five years, seven years, whatever. You need to be thinking way more about what’s going on, then they’re thinking about what’s going on. And another chapter in the book is called Get the elephants out early. And what we mean by this is we always want to get in front of things. We don’t we don’t react, we anticipate. And so you know what the objections are up front, from any seller or any buyer? The first thing you do when you sit down with someone, it’s what we call the cold read and you’re reading the situation. And what you’re running through this supercomputer called your mind is okay, what are they thinking and feeling? And you’re paying attention to what they’re saying how they’re saying it what the body language is. It’s no different when I played football. Now, this was a long time that I played. And even back then, again, this is you know, early 80s 30 plus years ago, before every game we would get a scouting report of the other team and it’d be you know, a thing like this thick and you had to go in there and you had to memorize all their tendencies. He’s meaning if they came out on the left, on the left hashmark at the 20 yard line, and they came out in a brown formation, and it was third down. I, they I knew 48% of the time they were going to run this play 33% of the time they were running this play, you had to you had to commit all that. So when, when you’re actually out on the field, you’re anticipating, you see the formation, the down in distance. And so you’re not just you’re not making stuff up in the moment, you’re thinking in a certain way going in the door. So whenever you’re talking to a buyer or seller, you’re trying to get in front of everything. You want to say it before they say it. All of you, you’ve probably heard, you know, never make assumptions makes an ass out of you and make right now you’re making an educated guess. And you’re putting it out there, it seems like it sounds like it feels like you’re probably thinking you’re probably feeling. And by label, what you’re doing is again, you’re trying to make them feel understood by labeling, called labeling what they’re thinking and feeling. And labeling is way more effective than asking questions. All of you have been conditioned to ask questions. When you ask someone a question, the way the mind is structured, there’s a split second, where they can think about their answer. Meaning, when you ask someone a question, most of the time you’re getting the answer, they want you to hear that you’re getting the answer they want you to hear. When you label it, when you say you’re probably feeling X hits the brain in a different spot, and you get an immediate and honest response. Right? So open house, someone walks into the door, how are you doing? Well, they’re gonna give you whatever answer they want. They walk in the door, it looks like you’ve had a long, long day. Oh, my God, you’re so right. And then you get a different response. Now, anyone listening is to go, Well, what did we get it wrong? Even better? Even better, they’ll tell you, when you miss label when you miss label. People love to correct other people. It actually makes them feel good. When you say, you know, this is probably a tough decision for you. And they go, Oh, no, this was a no brainer. It actually makes them feel good. And in fact, you can use mislabeling when you’re not sure of what’s going on when you when you’re having a hard time, understand, use a mislabel. And you’ll get an immediate response to a mislabel. So back to your question. You got to be thinking about the situation before you get there. And most importantly, again, the bad habit that many of you have gotten into is, you’re never listening, you’re always thinking about what you’re going to say next. When the way we teach is you’re paying full attention. And only when they’re done talking, you’re allowed to take time to actually think process and think about what you want to say next.
D.J. Paris 1:08:27 And by the way, Steven, I’m jumping right in, I’m sort of doing the anti, only because because I know you’re you’re a train that’s moving. And I just wanted to jump in front of it for a quick second. But you’re absolutely right, this idea of taking a moment to actually take in the information after they’re done speaking, it does take time, right, we want to fill in the blank spaces, because it feels uncomfortable. So there’s a pause and a conversation. We want to immediately jump in with some information, some facts, some some whatever, because we get this anxiety that oh my gosh, there’s a lull in the conversation. But I have found it in in my experience in just being an adult in the business world is that the savviest people I know, when they hear some informations and facts. They take a moment they take a breath, they reflect and then they respond.
Steve Shull 1:09:24 slowing things down changes the dynamic of every conversation. And when you slow it way down, then people have to lean in and listen to what’s going on. And when they actually see you taking the time to think about what you’re going to say and again this is contrary to what you know salespeople think that you know you think you need to have an answer immediately. Are you looking foolish? It’s the complete opposite. When you slow it down and literally take 10 seconds, even longer to think about your response. They see someone who’s being thoughtful about and mindful about how they’re responding. And
D.J. Paris 1:10:17 I want to I want to jump in with a with an example. This just happened to me. I was, I was going to see a dermatologist here in downtown Chicago. And I’m mentioning this because it was a really significant event. And I mean, not seeing the dermatologist. I do that every year. But I was going to see a different dermatologist than I normally do for this one particular thing. And I had never seen these, these. The it was a father, son team, actually. And I went into the room. I actually went into his office, one of one of the doctors offices at the big table sitting behind it. And he says, Okay, we need to we need to talk about this the skin thing. So we start talking about it. And he’s asking me questions, much like maybe a realtor might ask a buyer or a seller some questions. And then, and he did this exactly what you’re saying he paused, almost longer than was comfortable, like, a good, maybe 20 seconds. And if you’ve never sat face to face across from somebody, of course, I’m speaking to the audience, not Steve specifically. And if you’ve never had a 22nd pause and conversation it is it is not that common. And it made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. But I also at the moment, I went, Wow, he is really thinking about this. And he was and he even said, Boy, in my 35 years of practice, this one’s got me stumped. I need another moment. And we went back to pausing. And he gave me an update halfway through his boss. And eventually he said, Okay, I got some ideas for you. And I sat patiently and I waited. And I will tell you, Steve, not only was I I’ve never had that experience with with with a physician, usually they’re just ready with the answer. Right, right then and there. And that’s fine. But boy, did I feel like, gosh, this person cares about me now, do they actually care about me? I don’t know. But it certainly felt like it.
Steve Shull 1:12:21 You just made my point.
D.J. Paris 1:12:27 Yeah, it’s, it’s it’s so important that these are these are, these are really important pieces of the real estate process of being the agent that I feel don’t get enough attention. The really the emphasis on, you know, connection, empathy, really listening preparation. You know, you’re so right at the beginning, when he said, you know, that the focus typically is on lead generation. And lead generation, of course, is so, so important. But this idea of okay, well, once you get the leads, now, what are we doing? How seriously are we taking, you know, steps, step A is or step one is getting, getting the lead steps, two through 25,000 Is all of the all of the things that that maybe we’re not taught. And I’m assuming this is what the full fee agent is all about. This is what performance coaching.com is, you have basically given us, our listeners and our viewers on this episode, about an hour and a half coaching session, which I know is providing tremendous value to to our audience. And I really want everyone to think about when’s the last time you started working on your presentation? When’s the last time you worked on? Objection? Handling? Not objection overcoming. But dealing with people’s responses. How do you respond? Steve has for the last 80 minutes has literally been talking about step by step of how to be very intentional about how to communicate, we’re really talking about communication. And, boy, Steve, this has been a masterclass in communication, but I apologize, I didn’t mean to stop your your, your flow, but I just wanted to make a point that this is all about communication and preparation,
Steve Shull 1:14:24 writing and getting back to your question about being prepared. And again, this is where I’m gonna differ from 99% of the coaches or trainers out there. The entire and this is going to blow your mind. So sit down and buckle up. The entire industry is based on a false premise. And that premise is that you win or lose business based on your Presentation. You win or lose business based on whether you’re the favorite, or the fool. And when you get that call, what’s the greatest call to get in real estate? Hi, we’re thinking about selling our home. And we want you to come over and give us a presentation. Every agent jumps up and down with joy. They go spend 234 hours putting their presentation together, they get all dressed up, they drive over to the appointment, they’re early, they got a big smile on their face. They go in the front door for two hours, they tell them everything. You tell them everything, you know, you’ve got your beautiful presentation, you lay it out, at the end of the two hours, they say oh my god, you gave us so much to think about thank you so much. Let us process and then we’ll get back to you. And you walk out the door and you’re gone. Oh my god, did it go? Well, that did not go well, what’s going to happen for the next one to three days a week, you’re on pins and needle waiting for the phone call. And you get the phone call. And they go oh my god, you were so wonderful. And you shared such great information. However, when I let go list with Mr. Mrs. So and so. And you’re left going What the heck just happened? What happened was you were the Fool in the game, you never had a shot to begin with. And we that my top agents no longer go on listing appointments, and they list more property than they’ve ever listed before. How can that be? Because we have a 15 to 30 minute pre list zoom call. And in that call, we determine whether we’re the favorite or the fool. And in the book, we’ll go through how you do that. And in 15 to 30 minutes, you know whether you’re the favorite of the full, if you’re the favorite, you’re gonna go out to the house, sign them up answer questions, you never give your presentation. And and you get your full fee 6%. And in the areas where you can you’re keeping three and a half and paying two and a half to the buyer’s agent. Anyway. And when you’re the fool, it doesn’t make a difference what you say and it doesn’t make a difference what you charge. And so the real estate out there, the real estate, all of you are out there thinking you got to work on your presentation. No, you’ve got to work on finding out whether you’re the favorite or the fool. This is a major game changer. One of my clients today, taking 22 listings this year been on 28 appointments 22 times he thought he was the favor 22 times they listed with him and paid him six, keeping three and a half percent in a market where everyone else is charging five or less. The other six appointments that he went on and didn’t get is because he wasn’t sure am I the favorite on that short phone call? Zoom call. He wasn’t sure. So he went out anyway. And so what we learned today is when you’re not sure, don’t go you are the fool. So he’ll save himself next year, those five or six appointments that he won’t go on.
D.J. Paris 1:18:22 But again, this is an this is really incredible skills. You know, I’ve been doing the show for five years. You know, what we’re talking about, in some ways is a return to be I don’t want to call them salesman tactics because they’re not sales tactics at all. They’re they’re absolutely appropriate and respectful conversation. But what you’re doing is taking the salesy part out of the equation, right, you’re not trying to sell the person, you because most people don’t want to be sold as as we all know. But what you’re really doing is you’re making them an equal. So my time is valuable, your time is valuable. Wouldn’t it be amazing. I mean, I’m a recruiter, I recruit realtors, and I can’t tell you how many times I just go right into my presentation about why you need to join our firm versus the firm they’re already at. And they you know, and maybe they have an inkling of interest in what we do here. However, my version of that is is are they actually thinking about switching firms or are they just taking the phone call because they want to see, you know, they’re bored on a on a Wednesday afternoon. So this is what you will learn, you know, by reading full fee agent. This is also what Steve teaches agents. I mean, his you know, obviously the the value he’s been providing on this this episode is incredible, but this is what he does for his clients. He has clients that are doing 500 million in production 750 million in production a year and Steve saying and in the next year No a year or two, he has some clients that’ll probably get to a billion dollars, he gets results, which is you know why we’re having him talk to you guys today. And I can’t keep Steve on all day because he’s got other people to coach and other shows to talk to. But I want everyone who’s listening, if you got value out of this, and of course you did, I want you to go and pick up the full fee agent on Amazon. It’s the number one book right now for real estate sales, the perfect five star review. It’s written, co written by never split the difference guy, which a lot of our listeners have already read, we already know how important and impactful that book was. So I want you to go pick up the full FBI agent link to that in our show notes. And I also want you to check out to see what Steve’s coaching services are all about at performance coaching.com. Steve has been coaching, not the last five years, 10 years, he’s been coaching since 1993. This is somebody who has seen the ups and weathered the storms of the market. He knows what he’s been through these cycles, and he knows how to coach people through the cycles. That’s maybe the most important thing is 2023 going to be a difficult year. Yes, we know that we’re it’s more than likely going to be a challenging year. But does it need to be an unprofitable year? Does it need to be a down year? Not necessarily. But you need coaching? You need some skills. That’s what Steve does. He’s skill development. He’s he’s about preparation, discipline, perspiration, all of that. But real tactical skills. So I want everybody to visit performance. coaching.com see what Steve’s all about, pick up the book, the full fee agent. I mean, gosh, let’s let’s stop the race to the bottom with fees. Right. Let’s stop giving away our commission just to be competitive. Let’s let’s learn how to assert our full value. Steve’s book does that and also gives you incredible, actual tactical skills to be able to go out into the marketplace and do more business. And Steve’s clients, obviously speak for themselves with the results that that they get, Steve, I am so grateful to have had you on the show. And I know that you probably just continue going for another couple of hours. But I’m going to save you from from that on our show because we can bring you back on a future episode. But on behalf of our audience, I really want to thank Steve for coming on. Just tremendous value here really great. I love these kinds of episodes. So hopefully our audience is as appreciative as I am. I know they are. And if you want to be appreciative again, pick up full FBI agent and also visit performance coaching.com On behalf of everyone listening, want to thank Steve for coming on the show, sharing his wisdom sharing his his insight over the last 30 plus years in this business. Just truly remarkable and incredible. And also on behalf of Steve and myself. We want to thank everyone who’s watching or listening and supporting our show. Definitely again, check out the book check out Steve’s coaching program where he gets things done, and he can help you so reach out to him and see if you guys might be a good fit. Steve, thank you so much for being on our show. Really appreciate it.
Steve Shull 1:23:14 Thank you. Thanks everyone for listening.
D.J. Paris 1:23:18 And we will see everybody on the next episode. All right
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Authenticity & Kindness = More Clients • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jan 09, 2023
In our January episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties discusses how being authentic and leading with kindness are the keys to having a great impact and building great relationships with people. Carrie also talks about the importance of having a business plan and the role it plays in the success of your business. Next, Carrie emphasizes the importance of listening to your client’s needs, desires and also frustrations. Last, D.J. shares his marketing tip and discusses it with Carrie.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We all know that we’re supposed to be authentic and kind with our clients. But how does that actually translate into more business? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keep it relevant largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today on the show is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Kara McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Now Kerry is a top 1% producer here with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors. Fact in the past 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here in the Chicagoland area. Carrie is currently ranked number 13 in production, and she’s a true superstar and expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. And she also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments, please visit Carrie at our website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. By the way, we have a link to that in the show notes. And also, most importantly, follow her on Instagram can find her at at Carey McCormick real estate. Also a link to that in the show notes. Carrie, welcome once again.
Carrie McCormick 2:36 Hi there. How are you?
D.J. Paris 2:38 I’m good. I’m good. We’re recording this in December towards like the month beginning of December. This won’t go out till January. So I guess what we can talk about is 2023. And sort of what your what you’re dealing with for 2023 What how you’re feeling about the market and any ideas that you’re you toying around with?
Carrie McCormick 3:02 I love that I first have to say for those who are watching, if I look orange, I am not orange. Because I feel like this, this lighting wherever I’m at is it’s kind of bad lighting. So this is not really what I look like but and I have not gotten a suntan. So that’s that’s kind of strange. So anyways, well, happy 2023 to everybody. We are recording this in December. But I’m planning and doing all of my due diligence to start the year off, right. And I wanted just to kick it off by giving a little bit of success to everybody for 2023 our markets a little funky. But I am a true believer that it’s going to be a good year, it’s going to be a good year for us. But I wanted just to say being authentic, and leading with kindness is going to be your plan for 2023. And I think that everyone should start 2023 with a game plan of having a defined business plan. I think that is key and my success. And I’ve been doing this for 22 years, so I have a good track record of success. And my success has been built on being authentic and leading with kindness. It sounds so simple. It sounds so easy. And it truly is. And I truly believe that having authentic actions in everything that you do is key to making high impact personal connections with people. And we are all in real estate, connecting with other people. Connecting with your clients, connecting with your vendors, connecting with colleagues is the core of your business and think about it again. We’re in a relationship type business, right and relationships are going to drive your sales. They’re going to generate your leads. They’re going to build your credibility but you You have to be genuine, I’ve been with people, and I’m sure you have to that. I don’t know, you know that it’s fake, you know that it’s not real. But if you are genuine, it can be extremely effective. And I’ve also done that with my brand, just like you were saying is, you know, with social media or with any type of advertising that you do, be your own brand ambassador, yes, I look at other brands, and I find inspiration in MRI, I listen to other podcasts, or I do, you know, a lot of research and I get inspired by other brands. But if you are your own brand, Ambassador, and you are truly authentic to what you do, consumers will respond to that. I think
D.J. Paris 5:46 you’re right, I think authenticity, really Trump’s sort of the aesthetic of what we think we should look like, or what we should present to the public, sort of the image that we want people to see us app is needs to be in alignment with who you actually are as a person. So if you’re like a female realtor, and you just are somebody that isn’t somebody that spends a lot of time, on their visual, you know, their physical appearance, like they’re not putting on a ton of makeup, or they don’t, you know, you maybe don’t wear certain types of clothing or do your hair a certain way, I would, I would lean into that and just be like, I’m the agent who doesn’t, you know, do a lot of makeup or hair, if that’s, you know, you don’t have to look differently than you are. Because you’re ultimately I mean, you should obviously look professional and all of that. But, but if you’re if you’re you know I have I have friends, I have some very good friends who are women who just have very different styles than maybe what we think of when we see a billboard with a realtors face on it. And they lean into the fact that that’s just they’re different. They have different preferences. And they’re the people that want to work with them are going to respond to that because it’s authentic, versus Hey, I look perfect. And I think I think this need to look to sort of look and appear perfect. It takes away from the authenticity, which is, you know, look, we don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to even act perfectly. We just have to be ourselves. And I think people relate way more to imperfection than perfection anyway,
Carrie McCormick 7:18 I do too. And, you know, speaking of being kind, you know, sometimes kindness can be mistaken as a weakness, right. And there’s that old saying that nice guys finish last. And I think that that’s so untrue. I don’t know who started that one. But I totally disagree with that. I find that when you are authentically kind, you know, doors are gonna open, people will smile back at you, your business will just grow and to me, it’s kind of like karma, what you give out is going to come back to you. So you know, think about when you look at like I always like to focus on like, who are the successful leaders out there who are the successful managers or sales team, and you’re gonna see that they all have something very common. They’re common traits, they have the ability to understand people understand their co workers understand their clients, they listen, that’s another big thing for 2023 Everybody out there, listen to your clients listen to their needs, their desires, even their frustrations listened to that their dreams are challenges. When you really listen. You know, you’re not talking talking too much. You got to listen to them, you’re going to understand, and these successful people, they understand the drivers of change and they strive to make the people happy. And keep in mind kindness is a choice and you got to choose it.
D.J. Paris 8:42 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss And now back to our episode. Yeah, you do. And I think you’re right. I don’t think nice guys finish last I think. I think maybe there was a time in our culture where that was more true, but it was not in my lifetime really, I found that maybe in the 80s, it was a little different. If you were, you know of a certain age, then maybe there was a little bit more of like, just grind it out and be that be the very best and crush the competition. But I think that nice people are oftentimes just so valued by employers, they’re valued by your team. If you’re on a team, they’re valued by, you know, any, any, anytime you can help somebody, it really it really tends to come back I find in this industry, because it’s such a collaborative industry. Yeah, so I agree, I have a marketing thought that I wanted to, I’m a little nervous, because I have a feeling that I might not be thinking about this entirely fully. So I am going to lean on you a top top top producer to tell me if you think this if this value is it has any merit because I was thinking about for 2023. Right now, obviously market is challenged, the rates are up inventory still down. Yes, we all know this. So we’re probably all a little nervous about 2023. Or at least Everybody I talked to seems to be. So it’s thinking, Okay, what’s one proactive thing you can do? Well, we also know that home prices have probably fallen over the last couple of years, at least a little bit in most markets, not not in every case. But I also know that like 100 and some million people, unique people 100 And some unique, a million unique individuals every month, go to Zillow, this is just in the US. So you know a lot of the country is checking Zillow, every so often. Now, what’s the first thing that people do if they own a home and they go to Zillow, they check to see what the price of their home may be worth according to this estimate. And as Realtors I don’t I can hear the collective groans yes, these estimates are problematic. We don’t like them. They’re not always accurate. People think they’re accurate. And then you have to come in and save the day. Well, okay, so that’s sort of the situation we all know, people are checking, I even check this estimate, even though I just it’s just the quickest and easiest way for me to get an idea of what my place might be worth, even though I’m a no, not ready in any way to sell. But it’s kind of a fun little thing. It’s like checking your credit score once in a while. I don’t know how they figure it out. But it’s there. And it does feel good, whether it’s a high credit score number or high Zestimate. So but we also know as realtors, it’s not probably super accurate. And that’s where you guys come in. Because obviously Zestimates can’t take into account every possible eventuality in the market. And so whatever, it’s just a guess. So if it was me, I’m, here’s my idea, I would reach out to everybody you know, that owns a home in early 2023. And say, Hey, I was just browsing around on Zillow. And I noticed the Zestimate for your home is x. And I also know that when people see that they’re not always sure is that accurate? Is that not, I would love to have a quick conversation with you. And just to give you my update on what I actually think your home might be worth. And yeah, maybe the number will be less or higher than what I found here. But I just thought maybe you deserve to get an actual number, just so that you can keep an keep on top of what’s going on with your home. So the risk here is, of course, you know, maybe the numbers much lower than the person wants to see or maybe it’s higher. But I just liked the idea of the realtor adding value going hey, I just wanted to give you an update here it here it is. So that was my thought. What are your thoughts about that? What’s is there? Are there pros and cons to doing that?
Carrie McCormick 13:33 That’s interesting. You know, it’s funny that I’ve never really gone and look at these estimates. To be honest, I think any outreach to a client and giving them information is 100%. Always a great idea and educating them on what his estimate is. And I always tell people Zestimate is not even a real word. I mean, it’s an algorithm really what that is doing well, what else and sometimes it’s a good number. And sometimes it’s a bad number. But again, our jobs as professionals is to give them the true market value of the home. So I like your approach, I will give that a thumbs up because it’s doing that’s what we should do a thumbs up or thumbs down on on your ideas, but because it’s an outreach to the client, and it’s giving information to them, or at least starting that dialogue about where the market is at, I believe and I’ll have to look into this a little bit. But I do believe with Zillow, you can claim your home. Right? And you can go in there and add some of the details and facts of your home because Zillow doesn’t know Do you have a basement? Do you have a two car garage Do you have you know, whatever the features are of your home, you can go in as a homeowner, claim your home, add your features, and that will change your Zestimate of your home because Zillow now will aggregate that data to like homes with the same kind of information. So I’ll look into that and just see.
D.J. Paris 14:57 Yeah, it’s interesting because I was at a Zillow event earlier this year, and they claim that there’s estimate is within three percentage points of, of accuracy plus or minus three percentage points. So I can I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly something that people look at. So I was just thinking, you should be looking at what your clients look at. So if they’re looking at that, you should be there to say, hey, that number actually looks really good or no, I’m going to run some, some more comps, I’m going to give you a better answer. And then you solidify yourself as the person that they can still go look at this estimate. But you’re the one that comes in to kind of verify the numbers, just like an financial advisor might call you and say I want to tell you about how the market did this year, I want to talk about how your investments did in relation to the market. So I’m just sort of thinking more along bad, it’s just a reason to pick up the phone
Carrie McCormick 15:46 100% It’s a reason pick up the phone, I think always I’ve done more of that to this past year, and 2022 is picking up the phone and talking to my clients and they absolutely love it. So I think that should be a strategy to for 2023 for realtors listening is is pick up the phone, give a purpose of your call, and provide value. And I think just like you’re talking about with the this estimate, it’s providing some value of where their investment is at. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 16:13 would say I’m less texting this next year. I mean text when you have like easy, quick, simple, simple things. But when you’re talking to clients, I think nobody’s calling them anyway. They’re not getting calls from their friends. Probably everyone’s texting, everyone’s on social media. This is a way to go back a step and say, Hey, I was thinking about you. And I just think, you know, hey, I was wanting to just talk, touch base, see how everything’s going? I think that those are and a lot of people won’t even answer the phone anyway. So you’re gonna get a ton of voicemails, and you can leave, that’s even easier. It can leave like a voicemail. Hey, I was just thinking about you. I hope you’re doing well. It’s talk to you soon. And there’s a company
Carrie McCormick 16:47 that a lot of people use is called sly dial. Oh, sure. You know, and they just do their slide dial messages to people. I have not crossed over into that yet. But I hear a lot of brokers do use that that survey.
D.J. Paris 17:01 Yeah. So sly dial, bypasses the ring and goes right into somebody’s voicemail. And it’s pretty accurate. It’ll get it out right about 80% of the time, the rest of the time, it just won’t work. But it is a very, it’s like four cents a call. They’re really cheap three cents, maybe. So it’s absolutely a good idea. If you want to sort of blanket call everyone just be careful because those those calls can sound recorded a little bit. So you have to be really careful how you record it and listen back to making sure it doesn’t seem like a recording because then people probably wouldn’t respond well, but we I use slide dial to what do you do? Okay. Yeah, well, we sometimes we do it for our own brokers because we have like 800 agents. So one of the easy ways we text everybody, but then we also drop a voicemail and hey, this thing’s coming up. Just want to make sure you know. So but it’s a great way to reach as many people as you can very quickly and very cheaply. And if you have 1000s of past clients like you do, that’s going to be very hard to call everybody so so that’s that’s a good way to just do something or you can also do bulk texting to there is ways to do that. Even through an iPhone, there are little hacks around that. So maybe we can cover that. And another just another way the phone calls. I like those. Me too. Well, Carrie is this is the end of the year. And we wanted to keep this one short and sweet. And also, while this will be January, but we’re recording this of course in December wanted to thank Carrie She has been with us since the very, very beginning and we are so grateful to have her and her insight. We don’t we don’t get usually when we get top producers they do one episode with us and then they are off to run their business and carry still makes time for us every month. We are so honored and grateful to have her she always has amazing insight and really everybody listening she just do everything she says because she gets results. She gets results. All right. But I want everyone to visit her on her Instagram page, which is at Kerry McCormick real estate. Also if you are a buyer, a seller and investor or maybe you are another realtor who is thinking about partnering up with somebody, I don’t know if Carrie’s team is currently looking for someone else. But I know I would want to make friends with Carrie if I was thinking about exploring other options. Or if you have a client maybe that’s moving to the Chicagoland area. I know Kerry’s worked with a lot of transplants, people that come in from other cities. And you actually worked with the big big way that accompany my friend works for up in Michigan, who ended up moving to this area. So Carrie is a great person for anyone moving to Chicago if you’re a realtor in another market, and she might have somebody who’s moving to your area too. So reach out to her. Carrie what’s the best way someone should reach out if they want to work with
Carrie McCormick 19:39 always call me 312-961-4612
D.J. Paris 19:43 Awesome. All right, Carrie. Well, thank you for another year of service to our audience. We are we’re so I mean just it’s just amazing. By the way, Carrie does. Like I won’t even go into your production but it is it is well over the hundreds of millions of dollars of production every year. So she is she is just that busy, probably closing a home every three or four days or so. So we appreciate it. And I hope you have a great 2023 I’m sure you will. And I and it’ll be great to hear how a top producer stays positive this year and stays productive. Because of course you’re dealing with the same challenges that everyone else will be dealing with.
Carrie McCormick 20:22 Always Be kind, be positive, and you’ll have a great year.
D.J. Paris 20:27 Well said All right, everyone, we’ll see you on our next episode and let’s all have a great 2023 and tell a friend about the show. That’s that’s the way you can help us grow our audience and have a great 2023 is just tell one other realtor. Look everybody knows a realtor that is depressed that is stressed that is going I don’t know what I’m gonna do. This is the time to send them a link to this episode. Our episodes are about giving people hope and understanding how to keep them on track while the markets a little tricky. So let’s let’s share this episode with as many many agents as we can. All right. Carrie, we will see you again next month. Thank you so much.
Carrie McCormick 21:04 All right. Thank you guys.
Why You Should Work With Rentals In 2023 • Alexander Concepcion
Dec 29, 2022
Alexander Concepcion with Taco Street Locating describes how he landed in Austin and how he got into apartment locating. Alexander describes what does the rental market cycle look like and talks about non-MLS rentals. Alexander also talks about the process of finding rental leads and discusses the importance of knowing your inventory. Last, Alexander talks about his master class in rentals and what this course offers.
D.J. Paris 0:00 2023 is the year to start working with renters. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping the real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Alex Concepcion, who is a top realtor and also a top super agent for renters. But before we get to Alex, just a couple of quick reminders one, please support our sponsors. They support us during these episodes, please check out their products and services and consider investing in them for your business. And second, tell a friend to think of one other agent that hasn’t yet listened to our podcast and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever produced can be streamed right from a browser or if the person you’re sending us to is a podcast listener of other shows, just have them pull up whatever podcast app they use search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. All right, thank you so much and on to art my Episode Sorry, under my conversation, which is really the episode of Alex Concepcion.
Today on the show is Alexander Concepcion from Darko street located serving Austin Houston and Dallas. Let me tell you more about Alexander. Now Alexander is a Cuban American born and raised in Miami, Florida, he moved to Austin to chase riches and tacos. After trying a bunch of random gigs going broke, he stumbled into apartment location services and created taco street locating. Now after more than 400 deals and 700,000 in revenue, he’s becoming one of the most successful independent apartment locators in Texas, probably in the country out not just Texas, what he’s not locating, he’s working on a book that he’s writing. He’s also being a low budget Anthony Bourdain. That’s not the book that’s a coma being a low budget Anthony Bourdain, Cooking, playing disc golf and also working out I have two websites, I want everybody to check out first, just to see what Alexander is all about taco street locating is his apartment, locating service. But he also teaches and we were just chatting about this beforehand, we believe the first and maybe only course out there for agents to learn how to do apartment locating. So the best way to learn about this course and we’re going to talk about it today, visit the website apartment locating mastery.com By the way, both of those links are in the show notes. So just scroll to the show notes. Click on in particular apartment locating mastery to see his course owl Alexander I keep wanting to call you Alex because I have a very close friend named Alex. So I apologize. I might stumble over that here. But anyway, Alexandra, welcome to the show.
Alexander Concepcion 4:16 Thank you. Yeah, I I used to go by Alex but I switched to Alexander this year. Because I it’s my actual full name and I just like it more. So there’s less Alexander’s. I’m like I’m going with it to mind.
D.J. Paris 4:31 I like it. I think there’s some names that sound better shortened. And I think Alexander is not one of those names. I like it better. It sort of works all the way through. Now I My name is a nickname so I’m sort of not one to talk but, but my name is actually it’s a Spanish name. It does. It doesn’t I’m not I’m not from any sort of Spanish speaking country. But my name is Delfin is the D and J is walking. So and I I don’t look particularly Spanish, I don’t think so I DJ is just a heck of a lot easier for people to absorb. But anyway, we’re not here to talk about my my name. But I am so excited to have you because this came at just a perfect time. So we have to give you a little background. So right now, you know, by the time you’re listening to this, it’s probably mid December. And Alexander and I are recording this late, late November, just actually a few days before Thanksgiving. And we have about well between I don’t know, set between seven and 800 agents here at our company. And we do mostly sales. And we’ve tried over the years to really introduce our brokers. By the way, in Illinois, every realtor is called a broker. So I know that’s not the way it is in every state. So I’ll just say realtor, but we tried to take to really encourage our Realtors in between sales to do some do some rentals, because specifically here in Chicago, obviously big rental market, and lots of money to be had. Most agents, however, don’t get their license to do rentals, meaning they don’t, that’s not why they got their license. And so they oftentimes just overlook it. And for me, I think it is a huge mistake, especially if you’re newer to the business, and maybe aren’t as busy as somebody who’s, you know, only doing sales, you know, full time. So I think this is so perfect for for that reason. And also just the state of the market right now with interest rates being where they’re at. Every realtor I talked to even the ones at the very top of the food chain seem to be stressed about next year. And I think this is so such perfect timing to talk to you. So let’s, let’s talk about it. So first, I’d love to find out. I’d love to hear your origin story. How did how did you get to Austin? Because there’s I know there’s a good story though. So tell us why Austin and and how you got into apartment locating?
Alexander Concepcion 6:48 Yeah, I graduated from college thinking I was gonna get into like finance. I spent two years getting rejected from every single job interview I ever did. Over Over 50 I can relate to that. And I tried a little bit of real estate in Miami and just wasn’t working. And I kind of just snapped. I burned my college diplomas. And I went to Austin, because it just seemed like the right place for me. I didn’t know a lot of people had like $1,500 in the bank account. Get to Austin get like an actual job job. First time I ever quit that after nine months realizing I’ve got to be on my own. And I spent the next two years doing a bunch of random gigs. I sold cricket protein bars. I did real estate photography. I traveled to Southeast Asia on like a food travel documentary. Amazing stuff. But I come back to Austin after the after the trip and I’m completely broke. Yeah. And in the middle of all about I got my real estate license. And I’m like, I really don’t want to be in real estate at all. I just want like a job have money. It’s not the broker anymore. So I get into apartment locating thinking I’m just gonna do it for a few months. And I realized that what I’m pretty good at it. Like it’s actually cool work. Getting to be someone’s like ambassador and like, yeah, building those relationships. I realized how much money I can make. And given that was Austin 2017 ish. And people were flooding them like, yeah. Okay, this is this is a serious opportunity. So that’s how this broke in desperate, the tour became a business. I’m still running five years later.
D.J. Paris 9:00 It’s amazing. And yeah, I don’t know if it was just, you know, perfect timing meets perfect place meets, you know, meets hard work, which obviously, you are a hard worker, I just think it’s such a smart way to enter the real estate business. Because number one, you possibly are setting yourself up for future sales, at least a certain percentage of the people you service on the rental side could or will become buyers. Also. Everyone’s got to live somewhere. So if they’re not buying or renting, right, so there’s just so much opportunity and you’re in a city that is still I mean, years years later, still one of the coolest you know as far as when you put you know what, what are the cool cities of this country? Austin’s right near the top if not right at the top out there with Charleston and Nashville and others kind of of its ilk. But let’s let’s so So what’s interesting to me is you’ve built this course apartment, locating mastery and I’m actually a little jealous because because it is such a smart idea. And I was saying to Alexander earlier, I said, I don’t, I don’t know that there’s another product like this out there, which by the way, if you flip that into sales mastery or, you know, being a realtor sales mastery, there’s about a million courses, and there’s a lot of really good ones and trying to enter that market, I think is a lot more difficult. And trying to make a name for yourself, but you’ve really created something that and Alexander said, Yeah, I think I think I’m the only one out there doing this. And I’ve really created this impressive platform and program, so I am super pumped to tell you about it. But before we get into that, maybe just for because our audiences is all over. Maybe we have listeners that have never sort of done rentals. So can you just sort of go through like what is a rental look like? As far as how quickly do rentals usually close? Meaning, you know, you meet with a person, you might show them some properties, and then they sign the lease? What’s the usual average time that you find that that sort of start to finish
Alexander Concepcion 11:01 ends? And I have a great answer for that. This, the cycles can be a day, it could be a year, people are just on different timelines. So someone can reach out to me today, I schedule them a tour for the afternoon. Pay close, bam, that’s it. Yeah. Or they reach out like, Hey, I’m moving in January, because I got a new job. And then oh, now it’s like February or March. And then they move into an apartment like April. So I may not see that check till like the end of summer, right. And the actual transactions themselves, if you want to get into that are really straightforward. So when I talk about apartment locating, I’m specifically referring to these big three 400 professionally managed buildings you see popping up all over the country. Those are the only buildings I work with. Because it’s effectively a bounding system. Yeah, where I bring someone to a building, and the per se they’re spending like $2,000 on a one bedroom, which and awesome, that’s pretty common. And the building pays 100% Commission. That means I’m making $2,000 for that single deal. But I’m not touching paperwork. I’m not putting my hands on the lease on the deposit. There’s no inspections. So financing. All it is and my client, putting my name down as like, Hey, this guy referred me. And then the building pays out later.
D.J. Paris 13:04 Yeah, I here in Chicago. So we have we call it the sort of there’s like two buckets or two into two different inventories for apartments, there are what’s on the MLS. And then they’re what I just called non MLS or maybe better said third party, third party property management companies, which again, don’t list on the MLS, these apartments, a lot of times high rises, like Alexander was saying, But who do pay usually one month’s rent, like you were saying, as a commission, or even more, sometimes, depending on times of year, and how much occupied occupied, or how many of the units are occupied. So it can be incredibly fast, it can be incredibly lucrative. And in a way, it’s kind of nice. So the downside is that you may be competing, if the building works with other agents as well. I know here in Chicago, many of the buildings, they’re like, we don’t really care who rents it just someone get this thing rented. So they’ll work oftentimes with with a lot of different firms and provide that inventory to the firm. Or they’ll only work with certain agents. My girlfriend works at a building, there’s 500 units here in Chicago, and they only work with like three to three or four agents total out of 45,000. So it all just kind of depends. But a lot of agents don’t even know that this inventory really exists because they’re focused on the MLS, when they have a rental, they don’t really think beyond that in a lot of markets. And there is a market for it in a lot of places. So my question is, how did you learn about about you know, this sort of, I don’t want to call it off market because it’s not off market but non MLS style of rentals.
Alexander Concepcion 14:48 I joined the first brokerage that would where I can make any kind of money that was apartment locating and They’re like, Yeah, this is how it works. We work with these buildings, they pay us this much money and like, oh, that’s kind of cool. And I liked it, because I didn’t have to do like houses. Because I never want it to be like a home, like a classic home buying and selling real estate agent. I still don’t do any of those deals. But yeah, this is kind of just the, this was my point of entry into like making money in real estate. So I’ve kind of just stayed in this niche this entire time. And I don’t plan on getting into sales.
D.J. Paris 15:44 What’s what’s nice is that, you know, you can get paid on those referrals. So if you do have renters that turn into buyers, and you’re like, you know, I don’t really have time for that I don’t really want to do that’s not my thing. You can still earn referral commissions, of course by you know, referring, which of course, you already know, but I’m making that point for for everyone else listening. It’s like, it’s not, you know, Alexander’s still maintaining relationships with all of these renters. So if they want to move to another apartment at the end of their lease, he’s their guy. If they want to buy a home, he’s going to connect them with someone else who can assist. But But tell us. So I want to mention one thing for anyone out there who’s like, how do I get access to this inventory? Let’s say they work at a brokerage that doesn’t care about rentals, they don’t really do rentals, and they’re like, how do I get access to this inventory? How would you suggest that people start to build this? We’ll call it non MLS inventory of apartments that, you know that that these management companies will work with you for
Alexander Concepcion 16:41 with? Yeah, so there is like a database specifically for apartments, called Smart Apartment data. And it’s basically the MLS for apartments. And it’s way cheaper than the MLS. I don’t use the MLS, but yeah, there is a database where you could see which buildings are in my market, work hand I send referrals to what Commission’s do they pay? And it also functions as like, at least for me, the first point of research that I could send to my clients, I kind of all happens on that platform. But yeah, that’s getting the inventory is pretty straightforward. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 17:29 I know, like, the way that we built ours before services like that exist is we just called a lot of buildings, and said, hey, you know, if our agents want to come rent, is that okay? And you usually have to sign some sort of agreement. And but it’s, it was shockingly easy to get access to that information. And now I’m so glad to hear that there’s a service that does that for you for a relatively low fee. That’s incredible value. I didn’t even know that existed. So I’m going to take a look at that myself. What was that called? Again? If you don’t mind me asking?
Alexander Concepcion 17:59 Smart Apartment data. Got it.
D.J. Paris 18:02 So let’s, let’s talk about apartment locating itself. We talked about like the cycle, the sales cycle, the rental cycle, could be as quickly as you said, as an afternoon could be as long as a year depending on on how you know when the person’s moving. But let’s talk about lead generation. Because that’s always, you know, on our listeners minds is, hey, this is all great. How do I get leads now in the past years and years ago, when I first started in this industry, and this is going back to like 2010, or 11, there was the the way that a lot of people did is they posted ads on Craigslist, because it was free. It’s no longer free, I believe to do that. But it’s still pretty inexpensive, I believe. But it was free at the time. And people would post hundreds of ads, because there was a software that could do this. And I think it’s maybe now transitioned more to Facebook marketplace, but we’d love to hear it. Oh, I’m sorry. And so let me just complete my thought. The reason why people would post ads on Craigslist is because that was used to be the number one place people look for apartments. And so they would reply to ads. And by the way, the buildings that Alexandria is referencing oftentimes allow it sometimes they don’t, sometimes they do but they some allow you to actually promote their listings there. They’re open apartments. And so I don’t know if that existed so much in 2017. But I’d love to hear about how you recommend people go about you know, getting there getting the name out there and, and finding some leads.
Alexander Concepcion 19:29 Yeah, just start. I started on Craigslist. Early on, it worked. But Craigslist is a lot to manage. But it is something you could do to start off. There are a lot of apartment rental websites where you can like yeah, you just take a building’s information, make ads with it. Get leads like that. Yeah, pretty much all buildings I know. Just let you do that. Some don’t, some will ask you to take your stuff down, then you take it down. But it’s knowing like all the channels you’d put like those ads on and get leads like that. A lot of people do that. And a lot of people just make the ads look like how everyone else has looked like. So everyone’s kind of just blending in. The ones I would make would, would stand out. Yeah, it’s my, I do a lot of creative writing a lot of silly fun stuff. And I’ve put like a business card picture on there, as me and like my alpaca selfie business card picture. So yeah, what I do stands out at all layers. But zooming out, there’s a difference between what I’ll describe as rented channels and owned channels. So our rented channel could be like Facebook, Google, any of these platforms to post ads, Craigslist, I don’t, I don’t own any of them. I don’t control any of them. And for me to survive long term in this business, I didn’t want to rely on channels, I didn’t control. If I didn’t control my channels, then I didn’t control my business. It’s good point. So that’s why early on, I would, I got my own website, like professionally done for Taco Street. It’s a brand I own, it’s a website I own and control. And I knew that had to be one of my primary lead channels, because it’s something I’ve owned and control. So these days, by more than half of the deals I closed come from my website. But that took a while to build. That’s not something that immediately started getting traffic. But I think it’s just practical to have a website day one, that in my case, I got to be the face of my own business. It was my website. I didn’t capture leads, I use really fun, like lead form software. Yeah, so I’m very pro owned channels have a rented channels.
D.J. Paris 22:24 That’s actually really smart. Because Craigslist, in particular, going back aways used to be you could get away with posting 100 ads an hour. And then eventually Craigslist goes well, that’s we don’t really want people doing that. And they make an algorithm change or, or, or just a change to their code. And all of a sudden now you can as easily do that. All of a sudden, you know, Zillow starts charging for rental ads. These are what what Alexander’s saying these these rented channels, you’re you’re at the mercy of how friendly they are feeling at that moment. And all of a sudden, now Craigslist is like, Oh, by the way, we’re going to start charging you now for ads that used to be free. You know, and it’s probably still reasonably priced. But it now it all of a sudden now changes your business. And so this idea of creating your own brand is so smart. And I really encourage everyone to go to Taco street locating because Alexander has done such a good job of making it fun. It’s a fun experience to browse this website, which by the way, if we contrast that with the average real estate agents website, and I guess, of course, Alexandre is a real estate agent, but I mean, somebody who’s who’s a more traditional sales agent, it’s going to it’s going to give you a different experience. I think going to your website, it’s a fun experience, you get to learn about you, you get to very easily browse through inventory. And just you know, you provide a lot of value on that website. And I think it’s it’s a and also it’s funny, like you have humor in there. And humor is oftentimes doesn’t show up anywhere in a realtor website. So I love the fact that you made it fun and funny. I think that probably goes a long way with with your clients.
Alexander Concepcion 23:57 Yeah, so one big. So again, I think of everything through a survival first framework. And from this, this tangent begins on why I don’t believe competition is real. Because I’m never going head to head against another locator. Even though there’s a lot of them out there. I’m never going head to head against any of them. The reality it’s the the quote unquote, trophy is a human and they get to choose. So the risk is that I don’t It’s not that I lose a competition. It’s that I don’t get chosen. So I call them I call it like replacement risk. And I have to make myself a replaceable so I start with that with brand. I’m the only talk with the real estate company the rates. But there’s a lot of content on the website, a lot of videos, a lot of blogs, a lot of guides, which means by the time I’m people get to me, they’ve gone through all this. And I become the only one they trust. Yeah. And by the time they get to me, they’re like, Hey, I’ve seen your videos, I’ve seen your content. They’re like, I’m ready to go migrate, I’ve won. It’s a good point, because
D.J. Paris 25:21 we’re really talking about what is also known as social proof is sort of showing somebody your expertise in a way that they now feel more connected to you as an individual as, as somebody who Oh, I feel like I know Alexandria a little bit through his writing through his videos through his fun website. But also, I don’t, I don’t have another experience to sort of compare to that because no one else has this content in this particular way. And so you’re right, you’re not competing with other agents online, because you’re like my contents better, my sites more fun. And I’m going to provide a better service. So that’s a really important point, which, which really goes, I think a lot of our agents are lost, sorry, a lot of our listeners can really sort of go gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have such an incredible experience for somebody that by the time they get to me, I’ve already been chosen, which is a pretty incredible task that you’ve that you’ve completed for them.
Alexander Concepcion 26:21 And it goes a long way to me preserve my energy. Yeah, before my first calls would be like 2530 minutes. And they’d be the same phone call every single time. What’s the service? How does the process works? What neighborhoods do you recommend? What buildings do you like? And I just made videos about all of that. And just put it up front. So by the time someone gets to me, they seen those videos, what would have been a 30 minute call is out like a 510 minute call. And through a survival first framework, my most important resources, my energy, yeah. And Department locating it’s a high volume business, it to make good money, you need to work with a lot of people. And there’s just a lot of mechanics, there’s a lot of doing a lot. And most people I know who make it to a certain point in this business, burnout. Yeah. Because even though one transaction isn’t hard 100 is if you don’t have the right systems and operations. So yeah, everything is something I look at through survival first,
D.J. Paris 27:41 that’s a really, really good point. So I recruit realtors, I was thinking about this, putting it through my own lens. And I have essentially a very similar conversation with me, which about a half an hour, like you would like your apartment, locating additional conversations. And I just realized I could be doing a better job of this as well, where I could have that 30 minute sort of monologue for lack of a pitch, I guess, for lack of a better word, the way I do it. That could be that could be a video that I could send in advance to somebody, and maybe I wouldn’t make it 30 minutes, but whatever, I would make it a certain period of time where they could get the vast majority of the information, feel like they know me a little bit. This is actually helping me in my business. So thank you for that. But I love this too. Because also, you’re branding yourself in such a way that I would assume other agents are like, who don’t want to deal with rentals. It’s just not what they do. They’re like, Oh, Alexander’s the guy. He’s got all the best content. He’s got, you know, the buildings. He knows he knows the inventory. By the way. I am curious. I’m sorry. I’m gonna interrupt myself. I am curious how important knowing the inventory is as a rental agent, because as a sales agent, inventory is always changing. For rentals. You know, there’s a finite number of buildings that you probably work with, how important is it to just know those buildings in and out and everything about it?
Alexander Concepcion 29:02 I want to flip this on you. Go ahead. You go to restaurants Chicago. How important is it for you that the waiter knows the menu? It’s super important. Exactly.
D.J. Paris 29:13 Yeah. Because Because I asked the waiter, hey, I’m looking through here. What are the best things? I always ask that? Because I don’t know. And you’re absolutely right. Amazing point.
Alexander Concepcion 29:23 So the way most locators get trained, is you get a few meetings with a broker. A pat on the back. Good luck here. Some leads have at it. Yeah. And these people don’t know the inventory. They’re like people that they serve food on the menu. They just don’t know what’s on the menu. And that’s why their service kinda sucks. Yeah. Whereas I did the opposite. And I teach the opposite of my course. It’s No, you need to be an expert. First. You need to go out into the market, tour buildings see what’s going on. So when you’re talking to, like prospective leads, they know you know your stuff. Yeah, I even take it a step further. I made videos where I talked about the use of the buildings in the market. I love it. And people watch the videos are like, this guy knows his stuff. Yeah, and all that something, if you’re starting, you could do pretty fast. Like, you don’t have to wait five years to do this. It took me years to figure out how maybe I should make these videos. But that’s something you could do now.
D.J. Paris 30:43 Yeah, it’s a really, again, it goes back to this, setting yourself up, to be able to have people know that you are the expert. And having this content at the ready is like, Oh, hey, you know, I’m thinking as your chat, you know, you’re having your initial conversation with somebody. And maybe they don’t know about you yet. Maybe it’s kind of a random introduction, they don’t know you as the support great apartment, locator. And all of a sudden, you’re like, Okay, based on what you said, there’s two places that are probably the best fit, I have videos for both, I’m gonna shoot them over to you. So you can get a sense of, of what I think about it and things to learn. And all of a sudden, I mean, that is such an amazing high level of service, I guess the idea is providing the highest level of service, right, and that is an incredibly high level of service. It’s not Well, here’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna go see these properties, because you’re probably going to do that too. But you’re like, before we do that, let’s just make sure that you kind of like what you see. And of course, they can go to the building websites as well, but with your own spin on it, and your own videos, your own content. Boy, you again, you’re just branding yourself as I am the guy.
Alexander Concepcion 31:52 And that doesn’t even get into like the actual service that I’m doing is like the research process, because I don’t know if you’ve had to find your own apartment. It takes a lot of time. It’s a pain. Yeah, Superferry apps. And most locators take people who are very like, just click a bunch of options on this database, send it over. And there’s no real value add to that anyone can do that. Yeah, I built a process I call the big fancy spreadsheet, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s just a really big detailed spreadsheet. But that takes inventory where I was like, not me, my, my freelancers do this for me. But they will like call every single building you’re interested in, tell you what’s available, put all in one place, and organize it. And just it condenses your research process by so much. Yeah. I don’t know a single located that does anything close to that. So I know when I send that spreadsheet to someone, they’re like, Oh, this guy’s on messing around. Because the biggest waste of time is to tour an apartment that doesn’t have what you want. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 33:08 And both for both parties for the agent. And for that tenant. Yeah,
Alexander Concepcion 33:12 it goes back to like survival first, if I if I’m touring, if I’m spending all my day touring places that don’t have the right availability, that’s wasting my time is wasted their time. So if I do all this research ahead of time, then we’re not wasting any. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 33:32 Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a great, it’s a great point. And, you know, as you were talking about touring the building, I want to just to mention something he said at the very beginning, that I just want to make sure everyone understands. So it’s like, Okay, once somebody’s ready to make the decision. And the way that Alexandre works with with his, his prospective clients, is by the time they’re going to see a building you he they already know, this is probably the place maybe there’s one other place, but it’s going to be a short list. And here’s the beauty when the person lands on the property they want. Alexander walks them down to the to the office, where if there’s an onsite office where there usually is for these big buildings, and says I’ve got somebody and I mean that you’ve already been introduced to them at this point. But they you’re right, they do the paperwork, they have their own process. And you’re maybe you’re there to be present as they do it. But but your job is basically done at that point. You’re just handing the person off to the building, internal leasing agents, or whatever they may have, or the property management team. And they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Alexander Concepcion 34:36 Oh, yeah, I don’t touch contracts. I’m not doing any of that. It’s huge payment. Yes, I don’t want to do it. So I don’t and that’s just not part of relocating. There’s the stuff there’s still stuff. There’s like invoicing actually getting the money. That’s a pain in the ass down the line.
D.J. Paris 34:58 i We have, we have 700 plus agents here we we know that pain. So what we’re talking about just for anyone to know, and this is important, one of the and I don’t want to call it a con, I just want to call it something to know that if you’re getting into apartment locating to be aware of and be aware of is how you get paid from these third party management companies, which not like in MLS transaction where a closing agent gets the check, everyone’s happy, everyone’s paid. No, often some firms will do that. Some apartment locating, sorry, some apartment companies will pay you that way. Most in my experience. As Alexander mentioned, you have to invoice and so you have to send them an invoice saying, Hey, you’re basically sending them a bill, hey, you owe me one month’s rent or whatever the the agreement is, and then they’re going to take their time to pay the bill some pay faster than others. Some I know some in Chicago can pay as quick as a couple of weeks. Others take a couple of months. So that’s the thing to know is that getting paid? There may be a little bit of a delay, because they’re not obligated to pay you the moment. The person signs the lease.
Alexander Concepcion 36:07 Yeah, and if you’re not careful, and go through the proper steps, a building is going to find a way to not pay you. Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of money from thinking I was gonna get paid on a deal to the buildings. I actually you didn’t do this small little step. So we’re not going to pay you that $2,500 that you thought you were getting. And yeah, I that’s that’s part of the course that I teach is how do you do the upfront work to make sure that you do get paid? Yeah, it’s getting paid is a huge pain in the ass. hugeness notice my Freelancer does that for me. So I don’t I don’t do when you have because it’s okay. Survival first. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 36:58 you don’t you don’t want to be chasing you don’t want to be chasing the check. Yeah. And we have a whole department here at our company that chases those checks because and again some management companies are wonderful and easy and others are more challenging and and I like some even will have rules that like well if the person walked into our office before they met you Mr. or Mrs. Agent and you brought them in maybe they walked in we’ll turn around and walked out but somehow their name got put in the system and then you now walk them in and maybe the your person doesn’t even tell you that they’ve already been there that could that can sometimes be a thing where advantages like well we’re not going to pay you because this person already knew about us so there’s there’s these are important things to know about each building so that you’re not you know, wasting time or or not getting paid. Yeah, another
Alexander Concepcion 37:45 really important thing is the send an escort policies of a building. So in apartment locating, there’s either escorting a person to a building or you like go with them in person do the tour. That’s called escort buildings always passports. Like they’re always pay their maximum on escorts. But then there’s a second, where you don’t tour in person with the client, for whatever reason. Some buildings actually pay the exact same. Both escort and send some buildings, pay a lesser percentage, maybe like we’re in where they normally pay one month’s rent, maybe on a send, they pay 50%. Sometimes they don’t pay anything. So that’s one way to lose money is sending someone to a building that doesn’t pay commission on sending tenants who lost a lot of money that way. But that’s something you should research ahead of time. By but it also makes us a more depending on where you live. Different cities are have different blends. Austin is a blend of sending square buildings, Dallas and Houston on mostly you could send an escort at the same price, same commission, and it’s great. It’s a big reason I’m able to do business in those markets also. Sure. So that fact makes locating really interesting as remote operable business. So I don’t know how most buildings are in Chicago. But with if you have if you operate in or near market with a lot of buildings, you could send people live so get paid a good amount of money. You don’t like if you’re based in Austin, you could do business in Dallas in Houston. It’s incredible. Yeah, so it’s a really interesting market for that reason. And on the lead gen side If you can generate a lot of home buyer leads with apartments because people who rent apartments eventually buy houses. So if you’re even starting off this business apartment locating is a really good long term high quality lead source. Because you’ve already built a relationship with the client, you don’t have to sell yourself again.
D.J. Paris 40:24 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, that’s true. And you know, you just have to remember to stay in touch after after the rental. And that’s something that also there’s not that much competition for because we all know all of the listeners here know, most most agents maybe don’t do such a great job of staying in touch after a rental after a sale. I mean, there’s always those statistics and I never know which ones to believe. But it’s a certain percentage of people like three years after they buy or sell something, forget the name of their realtor. So it’s not, this is something that a lot of agents struggle with. So if you’re if you’re working in the rental space, and you want to eventually get those people who transition to become buyers, you better you better do a good job of staying in touch because you’re right, you’ve worked so hard to establish yourself as the apartment locator. And you don’t want that all that goodwill to be sort of forgotten about after after the rental.
Alexander Concepcion 42:40 Yeah, another benefit a lot of people don’t think about is because of carbon locating as a higher volume business, you get more contact more people. Or as in traditional sales you may do I don’t know what the average amount is like it doesn’t maybe. But it’s not a lot of like human to human contact. So yeah, we’re, I could do 510 1520 deals in a month. Which means I have that number of people who know me. Which means more referrals means more word of mouth. It means more repeat clients in the future. I’ve had people lease with me to be four or five times. It’s incredible. They get them they send their friends to me. So there’s a survivor’s bias. And kind of like in any in all real estate, where the longer you make it, the more likely you are to going to continue to make it. Right. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of benefit to having higher volume client exposure.
D.J. Paris 43:53 Especially if you’re brand new. Yeah. Yeah. Especially. I mean, it’s it’s such a, you made such a this is such an important point for everyone out there who is going nobody wants to buy right now it’s you know, rates are at 7%. Or, I guess they just did drop. So maybe now they’re in the sixes, but it’s still higher than a lot of consumers would like. And you know, but if people aren’t buying or renting, and yeah, you’re right, it’s a high touch business. And you just your reach just goes really far because the transactions are typically shorter in nature. So you just get to reach a lot of people. And you’re right more opportunity for referrals for, you know, for repeat business or for conversion to sales. Let’s talk I’m going to talk about apartment locating mastery your course because by now, I hope we’ve made the case that you could easily depending on the market. Now if you live in rural, I don’t know rural Iowa, maybe this would be more of a challenge. So that’s not going to fit every particular market. But I guess it could fit probably just about any market because there’s always apartment or there’s always rental opportunities but it. What LM center does is he teaches you exactly how he started the systems he’s put in place, you know, all of the best advice he has about how to run this business, even how to select brokerage, because not every brokerage is super friendly to their agents doing rentals. So some brokerages are kinda like they dissuade agents to do that. But tell us about apartment locating mastery, which by the way, website apartment locating mastery.com, but tell us about the course.
Alexander Concepcion 45:29 Yes. So before there’s been an unlimited number of options, to just learn how to do the business. Usually, the first option is to join an apartment locating specific brokerage, that’s going to realistically do like two or three meetings with you. And here’s some leads. They’re not really going to train you. I know people, I didn’t one of those quote unquote, programs. And I know dozens of agents who’ve gone through similar programs. It’s really up to you to learn about yourself to just figure things out the hard way. And the main reason I started this course was I think you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to go through one of these apartment locating brokerages who are going to take most of your money. I effectively paid $27,000 my quote unquote, training. Wow. Yeah, cuz it was it was the leads I generated on my own. That was the money I paid to my broker. Right. So he got a great deal out of me. Yeah. But yeah, I’ve spent just five years really fine tuning apartment locating. And I hit a point where I realized I don’t want to be located forever. But I do want to transition into training and coaching. Because for me, it’s been such an amazing vehicle to become an entrepreneur, something I never imagined being to making a good living for myself more than I ever imagined. And it’s given me this sense of confidence, I never imagined for myself, given given where I was where I started. So it’s given me so much sovereignty and freedom, where, in the last five years, I’ve probably traveled the world for about one of them. And I can’t imagine having freedom in any other like way. And I wanted, and I want to teach other people how to use this business to become their own solver and entrepreneurs.
D.J. Paris 48:05 Yeah, it’s, it’s great, because it gives you a lot of leverage when you are negotiating with your brokerage or when or maybe you want to open your own brokerage because I can just run it myself. But this idea of what what what Alexander was saying is really common here in Chicago is that they have these apartment locating companies who really, they’ve already curated the inventory. So they already have the inventory that you don’t have to go out and kind of build on your own and, and figure out that database. They’ve also figured out some sort of lead generation source where they’re usually providing you leads the trade off is that your commission splits, I’ve seen commission splits as low as like 30 35%. And it’s usually, you know, people would find that shocking, but but because they can, they have the inventory and the leads, and they know that you can’t do that on your own. I mean, they you could do it on your own, but they’re not going to teach you how to do it on your own. So they’re going to take the lion’s share of the income, and they’re probably not going to train you well, because you’re not probably going to make a lot of money at 35%, which means they’re going to leave at a certain point, which means they’ll just keep that machine rolling with people coming and going at all times.
Alexander Concepcion 49:19 Right. Which means if you’re an independent thinking, you don’t want to go down that route. Yeah. You don’t have to, quote unquote, compete against those people because they’re not going to be there for that long. Yeah. And so you have these agencies, or like they’re big and kind of scary on the surface I caught like compete against them. You’re not You’re on your own, building your own brand, building your own reputation. And you get to choose what brokerage you can go with. For me once I once I figured out, I could do all of it on my own. I joined One of the one of the zero commission brokerages smart, and that they’re, they’re basically a bring your own everything brokerage, where it’s on me to bring my own training, my own education, my own lead source all that stuff. But I could affect I’m effectively running my own business inside of another brokerage. And it let me do whatever I wanted to do. And no one was there to stop me. So, yes,
D.J. Paris 50:33 we’re talking and again, we’re keep continue talking about sovereignty, or now people use the word agency, this idea of is not to talk about working at an agency, but this idea of having really so much control over your own brand, your business, your destiny, that even even in the brokerage that you select, we’re 100% firm as well, we have a similar model to the firm suspect that you work at. And, and so it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s really nice. And I love the fact that if you’re an agent out there, and you’re worried about 20, even if you’re not worried about 2023, if you want to add just another revenue stream, and you’re like, well, not a lot of buyers these days, the sellers, you know, a lot of the homes are sitting sitting on the market for longer than I’d like. So even you know, just having listings isn’t a guaranteed sort of quick, quick money as it as it was before. So things might just be sitting a lot longer add rentals in because number one, like Alexander was saying high touch business, you’re going to expand your reach, you’re going to just talk to a lot of people, you’re going to probably have more opportunities to you know, get more referrals that way and just reach more. And also, again, people become buyers down the road too or or I always like to say the other way instead of some renters become buyers ago, pretty much everyone that owns used to rent. So I always like love that expression. Because it’s so true. And I’m shocked that brokerages who do take on newly licensed agents, most of them don’t really touch on rentals that much. And it’s a little surprising because I you know, by the time by the time I was ready to buy a home, I had never worked with an agent, because I found my own apartment. And I nobody, I just didn’t know that there were even people who could help you find apartments. So I was always finding my own apartments. And by the time I needed a realtor, I didn’t have one. I didn’t have one in my back pocket. Meaning I didn’t know anybody. And I had to go Wait, do I know someone who’s a realtor? And then I had to find one. And thankfully it was my friend. I was like, oh, yeah, my friends, a realtor. But had my friend helped me and it wasn’t his he wasn’t an apartment guy. But had he had somebody else helped me along the way, I probably wouldn’t have gone with my friend not because I don’t like him. But because I would have felt obligated to work with the person who I already knew, like and trusted as my agent. So you’re absolutely right, you’re building that confidence and trust early on, and hoping that you know that person stays with you your whole life, but you’re gonna learn all of this stuff. By investing in apartment locating mastery, again, the website, apartment locating mastery.com, and Alexander This isn’t or Alexander does not just teach, here’s how to show apartments, here’s how to convert he does that too. But it’s really everything. It’s like how to deal with inventory lead gen, you know, converting leads into clients, picking the market learn it, just just professionalism. And that’s another thing in the apartment space is the people that are apartment locators, sometimes professionalism is not at the top of, of everyone’s, you know, sort of value lists. So that’s another way to separate yourself is to be this highly professional, and person who’s helping people with apartments. And the best way to do that is through knowledge and experience. And Alexander’s going to teach you how to do that, you know, basically his, his goal is zero to 10,000 a month and apartment locating. So if you wanted to add anywhere from, you know, a couple of deals a couple rentals a month to, you know, gosh, 100 plus a year, he’s going to show you how to do it because he’s done it and he is doing it. So Alexander, if everyone if anyone wants to learn about this, and of course you do and of course you should. Apartment locating mastery.com is the place. And you have some bonuses to that, that exist with the with the course not just how to build successful practice. Can you tell us a little bit about the bonuses?
Alexander Concepcion 54:25 Yeah, so I’m still working on content for the course that gets more gets deeper into systems and operations, especially like how to use a CRM because it’s closing one deal is easy. And getting the basics down is fairly straightforward. But taking that next step into closing like 100 deals a year requires a lot more kind of operational muscle. So that is going to be part of the course. And so the the course is already launched, but this is going to be supplemental bonus material that’s going in there. And yeah, it’s a it’s a lot I spent months building this course. It’s extremely detailed, comprehensive. And yeah, it’s, it’s good.
D.J. Paris 55:23 Yeah. Well, I encourage everyone listening, look, let’s make 2023 the year you add another stream of income to your real estate business. I mean, this is a way I’ve always thought, you know, real estate’s transactional, of course, in nature. And we want to try to smooth out the in betweens as much as we can in between clients in between deals, rentals are a great way to say I service everyone, I service, the buyers, the sellers, the renters, or partnering with somebody who does that like and Alexander like, if you, if you, for example, for everyone listening, if you have a client that’s moving to Austin and wants to you know, find an apartment for per se, you’re going to refer Alexander, he’s the guy he is the guy. You want to be, if you if you want to take your business to that particular level, you can be that person in your local market. And I would bet there’s not as much competition as there is at the top of the I want to be the top, you know, sales agent of you know, everyone’s vying for that spot rentals are often kind of forgotten about and I think it’s a good thing for anyone listening because it means there’s less competition. And again, I Alexander was right, and saying there really isn’t competition, but there’s fewer players in the space, I guess we could say. And, you know, I mean, Alexander’s made almost a million dollars doing rentals, like, this is an incredibly lucrative business. And so you can make great money, you can help people that a lot of agents would just discard Oh, you don’t want to buy Call me when you’re ready to buy, right? I mean, I bet you have stories of renters that come to you going, I reached out to an agent, they basically told me to get lost. They don’t do rentals. I mean, it happens, which is so shocking to me, but it does happen.
Alexander Concepcion 57:08 Yeah, I get it. I get a lot of other real estate agents are like, I don’t know what to do with rentals. I’m like, I’ll take them. And then I can make like two $3,000 from their referral. And the agent just didn’t know how much money they just lost by like referring. That’s me. Yeah. And they wouldn’t have been like a lot of work for them if they only knew how to do very basic foundational things. Yeah. There is another really interesting point with locating that I think makes it really compelling in any market. So you probably saw a lot of market squeeze when it was got really hot, or there just wasn’t inventory. Yeah. That doesn’t happen with apartment locating. I mean, if you’re like in San Francisco, New York City, this doesn’t work in those markets, because there just isn’t inventory. But in your normal city. All of which only out on the website. A single building as three 400 units, and you have hundreds of buildings. You’re not running out of inventory. The inventory is gonna be there, as always turnover every month as well. Yeah, so the there’s always going to be inventory, you’re never gonna get market squeezed out of the business, where you could be the world’s best real estate agent. But if you’re in a market where there’s nothing to buy or sell, then it’s not going to work out well for you.
D.J. Paris 58:43 Yeah, this is just a great way to to work with, you know, a changing market when maybe sales are down. Rentals tend to tend to go up. So this is the time to invest in a course like this apartment locating mastery. And I’ll just end with this. So I was mentioning my girlfriend works at one of these types of buildings where there’s 500 units, it’s like a super high end luxury building. Some of their three bedrooms Now, not every market is going to have this of course, but some of their three bedrooms are like $7,000 They pay a $7,000 commission if you bring them now they only work with a couple of agents. It’s kind of a goofy building. And that’s a really extreme example not not every market has things like that. But imagine if you walked somebody into a building and you let the like my girlfriend the way that it works in her building as the agent walks in, they know the agents because they only work with a handful of them. My girlfriend does all the work she takes the tour the agent kind of hangs back kind of chimes in when need be but my girlfriend’s job is to sell the building. So she’s leading the tour the agents kind of piping in from time to time and then she goes down and she wants to close the sale to so are the rentals so she you know she does the hard heavy lifting. You know, they have quotas to hit a lot of these apartment. Internal leasing agents for these buildings. And and then a $7,000 check gets written to the agent. It’s in. There’s incredible money in this.
Alexander Concepcion 1:00:08 Yeah, for me, I would say the average check is about 1500 to 2000. But I did have a deal recently where I get a call the morning, scheduled tour with a client the afternoon. And he signs a $4,400 unit lease at a building paying 150%. Commission. Ah,
D.J. Paris 1:00:38 it’s an amazing, it’s about like a $6,000 check or so. Yeah, more.
That’s a good day’s work. Yeah.
So how would everyone out there like to learn to do that. So you know, Alexander is not just saying it’s possible, he’s like, I’m going to show you how to do it. So check out apartment locating mastery.com, why not learn from the the guy, he’s the guy. And also check out his website to get hooked on him. Because what I really want you to do, whether you invest in his course or not, I encourage you to invest in it. But even if you don’t, I want you to look at how he branded himself. His his B to C website business to consumer website is Taco street locating that’s think about how go to the website, let’s look at how fun it is. He made a really arduous process, stressful process, traditionally, not a super fun process, he made it fun. And that in and of itself is brilliant. He’s going to teach you how to do these kinds of things and build this side business. Maybe by the way, maybe you’re still like, I don’t want to be an apartment, look, I don’t want to do rentals, well, maybe you could bring on a team member and they could be the apartment, or the rental person and you be the salesperson. So it’s not like even if this doesn’t affect you, or maybe you’re a team, you don’t really have somebody doing rentals. Oh my gosh, there’s so much opportunity here. So 2023 we know it’s going to be tough on the sales side, we just know that I wish it wasn’t but it’s going to be rentals are where it’s at. So apartment, locating mastery.com is where you can learn about the course taco street locating is Alexander’s website to see how he services his clients the content he provides so that by the time they actually get to him, they’re like, he’s my guy, and he hasn’t even met them yet. That’s an amazing thing to have happen. And, Alexander, we’re so grateful that you came on the show to talk about this. So on behalf of the audience who want to thank you for coming on, we know you’re probably racing to your next apartment locating client or appointment. So thank you for taking time out of your day to tell us about the course and how you built your business. And also, on behalf of Alexander and myself, we want to thank our audience for what you know, listening or watching all the way to the end, the best way that you can help us grow is by telling a friend think of one other agent. Everybody knows a struggling agent. They need to hear this episode, send them a link to this episode. The best way you can do that, while they listen to podcasts. Just have a pull up keeping it real on any podcast app or just go to our website keeping it real pod.com every single episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from a browser. You don’t even need a podcast app to do that. So anyway, Alexandre, on behalf of everyone. Thank you. This has been a fun conversation, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Alexander. Thank you
164 Sales In 12 Months ALL From YouTube! • Levi Lascsak
Dec 28, 2022
Levi Lascsak goes back to the beginning of his story talking about why and how he got into real estate business. Levi describes how he decided to start his youtube channel and make his way into the business that way. Next, Levi talks about how he built his YouTube channel and what kind of content he provides there. Levi and D.J. discuss the power of video. Last, Levi talks about passive prospecting and the book they are working on and will be published soon.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does an agent with no prior YouTube experience generate 164 closed sales transactions in one year, all from YouTube? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking to top producer and YouTuber Levi lassic. Before we get to leave, I just a couple of quick reminders. Please help support us by supporting our sponsors. They are the reason we can keep doing these episodes, and we greatly appreciate them. So check out their products and services. And second, please tell another agent about the show. The more listeners we have, the more people we can reach and help so let them know by shooting them over to our website keeping it real pod.com They can listen to every episode we’ve ever done, we have over 430 there or if they are a regular podcast listener of other shows, just have them pull up their podcast app of choice and search for keeping it real and click that subscribe button. Alright, enough from me let’s get to the main event my conversation with Levi lassen.
Today on the show, we have Levi lassic, who released his first YouTube video on December 5 2020. As a I really want you guys to listen to this biography because what I’m about to tell you is going to sound almost impossible. So I’m going to start this over. Just so that if anyone was just passively listening, I want you to actively listen for about the next 20 seconds. So leaving Levi lassic released his first YouTube video on December 5 2020 as a brand new real estate agent and he had not sold a home in 2020, or the first quarter of 2021. So again, he started his first YouTube video in December of 2020 hadn’t sold a home that entire year. And the first quarter of 2021. Also no home sold. Levi partnered with Travis plumb and they closed their first two transactions from the YouTube channel. In other words, leads they received from their video in April of 2021. Now that’s the second quarter of 2021 over now, here’s the incredible part. Over the next year, they generated 164 transactions, which equaled 90 million in production. And then this just makes me cry because I want I wish this was my story and not Levi’s 2.7 million in commissions with an this is the really incredible part even with all of that being said, zero ad spend. So they now own the fastest growing and most viewed real estate YouTube channel in Dallas, Texas. And they generate no joke three to five qualified inbound leads every single day. Now you guys gotta check this out. I want you to do two things. I want you to go first to get hooked on Levis content because he has amazing content for you the agent, which is passive prospecting.com He’s got a book, we’re going to talk about that and he really wants you to take a look and also why I want you to watch what he’s doing on YouTube, which is also passive prospecting search for that channel. We will have links to both those books will have both those links in the show notes. Levi, welcome to the show.
Levi Lascsak 4:58 Thanks for having me.
D.J. Paris 5:00 reach. I don’t know that I don’t know that the 430 episodes or whatever we’ve done, I don’t think I’ve ever interrupted myself in the middle of a reading someone’s bio. But I was like, No, I have to make a big deal about this, because you’re not the first person we’ve had on the show that has really built a solid hyperlocal brand on YouTube. But you’re the one who’s had probably the most success so quickly. And it’s just, I’m just I am like, tongue tied? I’m not sure exactly. You know what to even ask you because this is even blowing me away. So, but let’s get let’s start at the very beginning of the story. Before we get into sort of how you did all this. How and why did you get into real estate?
Levi Lascsak 5:42 reluctantly. That’s why I’ve got a friend Michael Reese. Do you know, Michael, have you ever met Michael Reese? I don’t think so. Okay. Well, I’ve known him for 20 years, and he got licensed in 2002. And we actually sold gym memberships together, Bally total fitness. So he, that’s a rough job, by the way, oh, hey, we work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And that was literally so that’s and I did that whenever I was like 2021 years old. So I just got out of military and I needed a job. And that’s the thing is, is Michael, first of all, he sold me the most expensive membership there on a three year contract, which I couldn’t afford at all whatsoever. And then he eventually just recruited me because I ended up I had this $8 An hour job. And, and that was it. I was doing labor work and and I lost that job. And then he recruited me, which was great, because I couldn’t pay for my gym membership. I think I went up there to tell him, I needed to cancel it somehow and get me out of my three year contract and blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, Well just come work for me, you know, and I was like, okay, cool. And then we started working 12 hours a day, seven days a week making phone calls, literally, we would phone call 10 hours a day. Yeah, to try to get five appointments the next day, that was the whole goal. You were not you were not allowed to stop calling until you had five appointments the next day. And if you got your five appointments next day, they’re like, we’ll go ahead and start on the day after, you know, anyways, just call for 10 hours straight. Because we would start at 10am, the shift was literally 10am to 10pm. But we couldn’t call after 8pm. So we had a 10 hour window that we had to call and literally get in there at 10am. And start just hammering smiling and dialing. Yeah. And then the whole goal was course was to have five people in the gym to tour them around to sell possibly two or three memberships a day. So it was it was brutal. But I didn’t care. You know, the thing was, is that Michael was a Sales Machine who and you know, and I just looked up to him and was like a lot. If he can do it, I got to do better than him. That’s all I’ve ever said, I have a very simple formula for success, which is who’s at the top? How did they get there? You know, can I model that? Can I adjust it fit my personality? And then can I do better than them? Very simple. And that’s what I learned from the very beginning was Michael’s like, Well, look, here’s what I’m doing, I’m making all these phone calls, here’s what you can do. Actually, they gave me the only book they gave me the binder of all the old leads that everybody had already called 500 times and didn’t want to call anymore. And so I just started calling them. And then what happened was, is within three weeks, I became the top salesperson there and started to even beat Michael and I just figured out a better way to do it, and more creative ways. And then Michael took me to my first Brian Tracy, it was my first time I’d ever been exposed to personal education, you know, or self education and, and he’s like, Hey, I’m gonna see this guy, Brian Tracy talk. I was like, okay, cool, didn’t know who it was. Or it wasn’t even thinking about that sort of thing. And Brian Tracy, and toured the country spoke for free put on free events, of course to sell all of his courses and CDs and everything at the back of the room. And I remember I just had a $300 credit card is my first credit card had a $300 limit. And it was supposed to be for emergencies. And that day, I saw Brian Tracy speak and I went to the back of the room and I bought as many programs as I could and maxed out that $300 credit card. And I remember I bought I believe six different programs. So I bought like the psychology of selling the psychology of mindset, you know, I don’t know, he just had all these programs, and they were CDs. So they were the books with like six CDs and yeah, and the cool thing was is I had this really crappy Oh, it was really crappy but it was a Volkswagen Jetta. But the one thing it had was a six CD changer. So all six CDs in my six CD changer which was in the trunk by the way. Yeah. They open up the trunk and put it in there. And I would listen to the psychology of selling you know, driving back and forth to the gym and anywhere I went. I never listened to A music really in my 20s I believe everybody asked me about the new bands and what did who did I like? And I’d be like, I don’t know, I don’t know who you’re talking about really. Because I just, I just bought into that from the beginning and I just it just changed my perspective. And I just started consuming as much as possible. Now the thing was, is I was in the Reserves, still. And in 2002, I remember the day Michael came back from meeting a guy named Jay Kinder at the lake. And he came back onto Bally’s on Monday, I was like, I’m getting into real estate, you know, he’s like that screw this. So he’s like, I’m getting into real estate. I was like, okay, cool. All right. Good luck, you know, and he was like, No, you got to come with me. Well, he got licensed 2002 finally talked me into it in 2004. So I did get licensed in 2004. But what happened was, is as soon as I completed my training, I had my license for I think about a week, and I got called up, because I was still in the reserves, and they get you know, I got a call from the military and said, You’re being reactivated, you’re about to deploy and you’re gonna be gone for 18 months. And so and so that was it. So I literally and they gave me I think four days, it was like a four day notice. You know, this was this was 2004. So this was right in the height, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan. And so literally, I remember getting that phone call. And they said, You got four days to report to Fort Hood, you know, in Texas, and when that was it, so four days to say goodbyes pack my bags, you know, and that was it. And so I never, I never practice real estate, I never did it. And the thing was, is I was gone for 18 months, and ended up spending a year of that over and Iraq. And and whenever I got home in 2006, then I knew over that timeframe, what I over, I knew I didn’t want to be a real estate agent, I realized, you know, being gone for 18 months, Michael just talked me into it, I really didn’t want to be a real estate agent in the beginning, I got licensed just because he told me to. And then when I got deployed, I thought maybe this is divine intervention. So whenever I came back, I didn’t even you know, the license expired, I didn’t renew it. And I didn’t become an agent. And so I went I went on my own path from there now Michael and I have stayed friends over the last 20 years, watch each other grow and you know, succeed and, and dip in all, you know, all this kind of thing. But But yeah, it was really 2020 When my my financial services business, I had contracts with Dallas ISD, I worked with all the teachers on their retirement planning. And I’ve been doing that for the last five years. very lucrative, very successful at that. And then, you know, April of 2020, all the schools shut down. And whenever all the schools shut down, everything I built up over five years, just kind of was gone overnight. And you know, I’m sitting there at 41 years old asking myself, Okay, well, what just happened? How did I end up in this position? And how do I start over without starting over? So you know, it was it was an interesting time, because I was sitting there thinking, all right, is when school going to come back? When is the world going to reopen? I mean, what’s going to happen? Nobody knew, right? And so I couldn’t meet with people. I used to meet with all the teachers on campus, of course, all the schools were shut down. None of the teachers knew how to work zoom. So nobody was trying to invest. They were all calling me to pull out money from their retirement. Sure. And I was just thinking, Alright, well, what am I going to do now? And and here comes Michael. Okay, now’s the best time to get into real estate. And I was like, bro, I don’t want to be a real estate agent, you know? And, and he’s like, but I’m telling you, man. And the thing is, is with Michael is Michael has always seen the potential and everybody that he and he knows how to also pull that out of people as well. And I think you know, Michael just knows me as a person in general, ever since we sold gym memberships, we spent a lot of time together and watching each other over the years. He knows who I am. He knows my work ethic. He knows what I’m capable of. And I think that’s why he just never gave up on trying to get me in the business and always wanted to work with me again, as I’ve always wanted to work with him. But I just never wanted to be the real estate agent. So I said, well, as long as you’re an agent, I’m probably we’re probably not going to work together. Just because I had no desire to do that. I was interested in investing. I like investing and I flipped a few properties here and there. I’ve had rentals, you know, so I’ve done transactions. And I enjoyed that part of it. But I was I was a part time. You know, I was a part time investor. So I did one or two fixer flips a year. I did have seven rentals at one time. So but I always worked with an agent. So even during that time, I never renewed my license because I just again, to me, it wasn’t worth it to try to make a little extra commission. I’d rather just work with somebody that could handle that, build it into the price and just be done with it. Sure, so, so that was it. So over 2020 He was he was like, Hey, man, now’s the best time to get into real estate. And, and and as I looked at everything over the summer of 2020, every industry was going down the tank, except for real estate, it was probably one of the only industries other than online shopping that started to increase during 2020. Sure. And so I thought, well, you know, if I’m gonna make the move, maybe this is the time to do it. However, I was, I was literally scared to death, you know, because I was, first of all, I’m 41 years old at that time, and I’m 43 now, but I was 41 going okay, how do you again, how do you start over without starting over? I mean, how do I how do I get into a new industry a new business? And is there a way to, to jumpstart that is how am i How am I going to compete with every agent in Dallas that’s been in the business for 510 1530 years, when one of the most competitive markets? How am I going to position myself? How am I going to have to go out there and shake hands and kiss babies and you know, go to all these neighborhood events and start and that I was just not really interested in either, you know, nothing wrong with that at all. But I was just thinking, I’m at a different point in my life. You know, I love the movie, the boiler room, but I’m just not into all the phone calls anymore. Like,
D.J. Paris 16:20 you already did your time on the phone. Yeah,
Levi Lascsak 16:23 I mean, I can do it. I just didn’t want to do it. And I was just thinking, Okay, well, one thing that Michael said to me that always resonated was, and I and I heard him speak, you know, to other groups and do trainings. And, you know, one thing he said that always stood out to me was, he said, he said, it’s not the best real estate agent that wins. It’s the best marketer. And so as I thought about that more, I was just thinking, well, if I move into real estate, instead of getting into real estate, and then trying to figure out a plan, I just thought, let me figure out a plan. And if I can figure out a plan, maybe I’ll get into real estate, if I can see a viable option for myself. And if it if the best marketer wins, and I need a good marketing plan, and I need to find a way to attract business and how can I bring people to me, versus me having to go out there pounding the pavement, shake hands, kiss babies, try to build a brand from scratch, to be known and compete with every Joe Bob and Susie out there selling real estate. Is there a gap to I was like, Is there a gap in the market? Is there an actual gap in Dallas real estate that I could slip into somehow, and attract business and bring people to me, so that you know the traffic is inbound? Well, there’s only really I think the way to do that this day and age quickly is through social media. And so I knew that and so I was like, Okay, it’s likely going to be social media, because I also knew I didn’t want to start a postcard campaign. And I didn’t want to start a magazine and a billboard and start spending a ton of money, especially in the middle of a pandemic, where who knows what was going to happen? Anyways, and even going out and meeting people or events, all that stuff was still very questionable even for Texas. I mean, I’m in Dallas, Texas, and we we were open faster than anybody other than Florida. So but still, people were still a little on the fence about events and things like that. So. So I was just thinking, okay, social media. All right. Well, so I started looking at at people, you know, agents that that Michael knew, and everyone was like, okay, Instagram, tick tock Facebook, especially tick tock. I mean, every agent seemed like in 2020, woke up with 10,000 Tick Tock followers, you know, and so everyone was going, you got to be on tick tock, right, tick tock, where it’s at. And I’m like, Well, how much business did you get from that? Well, you know, I get a lot of inquiries. A lot of people say, hey, I’m interested, you know, but I didn’t I didn’t hear a lot of people turning over business, and I didn’t really hear people. I know people are successful on these platforms, nothing to take away from them either. I just didn’t hear anybody like driving primary business. Like I didn’t hear people saying, Man, I’ve done 100 deals from Instagram. I’ve done 50 deals from Facebook, I’ve done 75 deals from Tik Tok. I just wasn’t hearing that. I know people generate business, but it was more like supplementing their their primary business, a lot of agents that have been in the business for 510 or 15 years. And so they have marketing plans, they have sphere of influence, they have referrals coming in. So the social media, yeah, they do 1020 30 deals, but not where I really want it to be. And over my, you know, career. I’ve been in three major industries. And I’ve always been successful from the start, because again, I followed my simple model of success, which was who’s at the top, how did they get there? What are they doing? Can I model it? Can I adjusted to fit my personality, and can I do better than them? And so every time I did something else, or made a transition, that’s what I did. And so I thought, well, who can I? Who can I do that in in Real Estate you know, but I didn’t really want to be on Tik Tok or Instagram or Facebook either. I have not really been on social media that much because I’m at that was at that 41 year old age range. And if you’re like me, and you’re at that 40 age range and above, you probably have a love hate relationship with social media.
D.J. Paris 20:17 I am I am with you. And yes.
Levi Lascsak 20:20 So, you know, we didn’t grow up with it. It wasn’t there in high school, wasn’t there in college came around in our late 20s, early 30s. We felt like it’s just people bragging, posting cat videos and talking about their lunch. And yeah, it was my dinner. Yeah. And we’re like, okay, that’s stupid. But then, but then we started to see the 20 and 30 year olds make some money, and we’re going, Okay, well, maybe there’s something to this social media thing. But then, you know, nobody ever really digs into it. And so I knew going in, I was like, Well, I also knew I wanted to pick one platform, because the last thing I wanted to do was do what everybody was telling me to do as well, you got to be on five different platforms. Well, I just think if you start out that way, you’re gonna put a 20% effort into five different platforms, and you’ll never truly master one. And you’ll never truly generate business from any of them, because you’re dabbling in all of them. And they’re all so different. Yeah. extremely different. And so I thought, well, I want to choose one platform, because I want to go all in on one platform, I want to focus on that platform. And then if I can build some business or something from that platform, it’ll be much easier to branch out to the other ones than it is to try to cover all five at once. So I just started doing research and started looking into, you know, Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok. First, because that’s what everybody told me to do. And when I studied that more, and got deeper in those rabbit holes, I realized I really don’t like those platforms. For me. Nothing I was really interested in, I didn’t see anything there as far as a path that fit my personality. So I started to so then I started to think, well, I don’t know, YouTube, I actually what I did was I stopped and I started to look at people at our brokerage, like you mentioned, go go, Michael Reese, there’s another guy named Kyle handy. You know, Ricky Carruth, a couple of these people, I started working, and they were some of the top agents in in exp. And so when I looked at them, I started to say, what’s their commonality? And what I what I saw was, well, they’ve got a pretty strong YouTube presence, you know, not really in building a real estate business, but they had a YouTube business, you know, or they had YouTube, they’re talking to other agents, attracting agents, things like that. So I thought, well, and what did I do? I looked at all their YouTube channels, and they were talking about their time in production. Right, you know, Ricky’s known for, like, being one of the best cold callers, you know, Kyle’s known for being really good at SEO and blog writing and doing open houses. And gogo has her, you know, social media bootcamp. And then, you know, Michael, does his, you know, different funnels, you know, so, but they talked about their business, how they generated that, and they’re doing it on YouTube. And so that’s kind of interesting. What if I just did that for real estate clients, you know, started to find out and I started to research on YouTube. And what I soon found out was that YouTube is a search engine, not a social media platform,
D.J. Paris 23:21 right. In fact, I think it’s the number two search engine online, I believe, at least in this country.
Levi Lascsak 23:26 Yeah. Yes. Number two behind Google. So I started to see that YouTube was a search engine. And whenever I realized, Oh, it’s a search engine, and wondered if people are searching, you know, suburbs of Dallas. And so I started to look at okay, Plano, Texas, for example, went onto Google, on Google Plano gets about 90,500 searches per month, not bad at all. But whenever you find that search volume on YouTube, it’s 834,000 searches per month, it’s 10 times search volume on YouTube than it is on Google. So that immediately told me that while people are searching 10 times the amount on YouTube over Google, they want to see these places. And then it made me realize, well, you know what, I think the reason those other platforms didn’t resonate with me is because what I saw was a bunch of seasoned agents that had been in the business 510 15 years, telling their telling stories about their experiences and their clients and how to do this on a home and how to watch out for this and look out for this and look out for that. And I hadn’t even sold a home yet. So I was thinking okay, well, I could I could read about a VA loan and then regurgitate that on a 62nd video on Tik Tok, but it just didn’t seem authentic to me. It didn’t seem right. It didn’t really just that animal. I don’t want to be that guy. Start it. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 24:47 it doesn’t provide any particularly new value. It’s not a terrible idea. But maybe there’s a better idea, which is what you’re headed to.
Levi Lascsak 24:57 Yeah, yep. So yeah, so Just as I dug into YouTube a little bit more than I, what I realized was, okay, well if people are searching information about, you know, Dallas, Texas and Plano, Texas and Frisco, Texas and all the suburbs, well, I know everything about Dallas, or mostly everything about Dallas, maybe I can just talk about Dallas not even have to talk about real estate in general or talk about contracts and escrow and title and the different types of loans. What if I just talked about the suburbs and, and so that’s where I started to really dig in and build out a plan, I built out a business plan. And this is something I think nobody does whenever they start on social platforms, is treating YouTube, like a business. And what I love to say now is that if you treat YouTube like a hobby, it’ll pay you like a hobby. And if you treat YouTube, like a business, it’ll pay you like a business. And so what I did was I just started to research every possible thing I could on YouTube, and YouTube marketing, and videos and how to make videos and then, you know, look at all these different real estate channels. And then I just started to build out a plan of what I thought may do well, as far as what people are searching, and then I had the search volume that helped me as well. So it wasn’t me just guessing on Oh, my should I make this video it was no, I could actually go in and see what were people searching on
D.J. Paris 26:19 your note, you know, your potential audience size before you ever start recording? Because you have an idea of what that search volume traffic could be. And and then of course, you have people you’re competing with in that space to which you also, I imagine did research on?
Levi Lascsak 26:36 Yep. Well, the thing was, there wasn’t really a lot in Dallas, surprisingly. And that’s the thing is, is whenever Yeah, looking for a gap there was there was about five agents, maybe five agents that I found in Dallas that were mostly consistent. And one of them, the top channel had 7000 subscribers the second to top had 5000 subscribers. So and and the next one had four and the next one had three and right. I was starting to zero and I thought okay, well, the top one has 7000. So that’s the that’s my person, right? That’s the goal.
D.J. Paris 27:11 That’s the benchmark. Yeah.
Levi Lascsak 27:13 But yeah, we we passed everybody up about six months ago. So
D.J. Paris 27:18 and we should we should let people know sort of when we’re talking about you know, doing research, I’m gonna I’m gonna throw a few ideas you tell me if, if these are, you know, worthy. And again, you’re basing these based on search volume. So you’re taking a look, you’re doing the research, and so we’re saying okay, what, what kind of content are we talking about? So let’s say somebody’s moving to play now you could do a video on if there’s enough traffic best schools in Plano or reasons to move to Plano or here’s the nightlife in Plano, or here’s the here are the neighborhoods that you know are most what whatever, you know, it could be anything. Here’s, here’s the best restaurants and we’re playing our it could be top 10 reasons to move or so I’m just throwing these out there this is this the kind of content that we’re talking about? Yeah, all of those not even real estate necessarily related, but just related to people wanting information about living in Plano.
Levi Lascsak 28:10 Yep. Yeah, they want to see it. I mean, anybody can go on plane or look, go on an ibuyer platform and look at homes all day in Plano. But Zillow does it way better than we’ll ever do it right? Yeah. But they, the Zillow doesn’t show him the home across the street, the home or the playground, the community center, the community pool, the HOA pool, you know, it doesn’t show him that Chipotle around the corner doesn’t show you that stuff. So yeah, we can we actually take them out in neighborhoods and show them that. Yeah, pros and cons video, people want to know what’s the good and the bad of living in an area PROs video, you could talk about all the good things in your area, you could talk about all the bad things are actually our number one video is you know what we hate about Dallas.
D.J. Paris 28:53 That’s funny. You know, it’s funny, I was thinking about this, as you were talking, I apologized in Europe union first, by the way before, I meant to say this about 20 minutes ago, and I escaped me, but thank you, of course, for your service. Because without the safety of, of our citizens, you know, we can’t do much of anything. And so I just, you know, you said that very quickly, and I just want to, you know, force pause and admire you for dedicating service to to our country to help all of us stay safe. And so thank you for that. And also wanted to, to you know, I was just thinking about this I was in I went on a father son trip to Ireland with my dad i three or four years ago, and my dad had already been a couple of times and so he was pretty familiar with a lot of the little towns and and all the sights but we were trying a few cities that he had never been to was my first time there. And so we’re driving across, you know, all over the country, which is what everyone does when they go to Ireland, and every single night because we visit about two to three cities a day, the very first you’re so absolutely right about this because the Yes, I had the you know, Rick Steves travel Ireland book that was in our car. But we were driving a lot and my dad doesn’t like to read in the car, I was driving and it’s everything’s backwards. So it takes a lot of concentration, I can certainly look up things in the book, while I’m driving stick shift, you know, these little tiny roads in Ireland hoping I don’t get killed, because I’m driving the wrong way. But what we would do the night before is we would literally just go to YouTube and say best things to do in x. And then what we would do is we would download the video, and then we would play it in the car, you know, that next day on the way to those places. And that was the best possible education I got, because you’re right, the books are great, and they were helpful, but they didn’t really give me a sense of what it was like to go to some of these attractions and these events. So we would download it and watch it or listen to it on the way to that place and and I think a lot of people do this when they go visit places they haven’t they let go. best things to do. Right. And so, I mean that in and of itself is a is kind of the blueprint for what we’re talking about is find things that people are already searching for and just create the best possible video for that topic. Is that is that my understanding? Absolutely. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. 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But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Don’t you wish it was more complicated than that? It would sort of be like, oh, what let’s talk about this though, how how. So you’re a guy who you’re you didn’t grow up wanting to be a broadcaster, you didn’t want to be a streamer. You didn’t want to be a personality online, necessarily. You just knew that you were modeling some of these, some of these people that have come before you and trying to figure out a gap in the market. And you know, it’s funny because you were talking about Brian Tracy, I one of my favorite Brian Tracy quotes is something like well, he says sale solve all problems. And we would just maybe reframe, reframe that to leads solve all problems, because they really do, right. I mean, this is a business of leads. And of course, it’s a business of service and all the other things too, but leads are what keep the engine running. And you know, leads can come from a lot of different sources. But you basically saw your idea was I don’t want to go out into the public that much. That’s not really what I’m best at. You know, I’m not the guy on the billboard or you know, racing around all these different events. You know, I want to be the guy you know, people are doing all this searching online, I want to be the guy they go to for that. And you know, when you started making videos, you talked about reading about it learning production. How difficult was it for you to did you did you have a I need these videos to look perfect. Or were you willing to to experiment and try different methods because I know a lot of listeners are like, I don’t know anything about video production. That’s not what I do. So how complicated are your video shoots?
Levi Lascsak 34:18 Pretty basic. So I don’t think I’ve ever the only videos I’ve ever re recorded are the ones that I didn’t record audio or something whenever I made it but that’s only been a couple of times. I think for me, it was no I wasn’t seeking this out to me I am a will do what it takes to get things done type of person. So really the thing is, is I grew up in a pretty neutral environment. I would say that my parents as much as I love them, they never encouraged me to do anything with my life. They were they were just kind of like really they their mindset was is the the most thing I heard ever come from my mom was we can’t afford that. So We grew up with a very poor mentality with the same same thing as far as, you’re never gonna go to college. I mean, literally, it wasn’t my parents weren’t like, hey, let’s figure out a way you can get to college. It was like, well, we didn’t go to college or two older brothers didn’t go to college, and you’re not. In your future. Yeah. Because we’re, we can’t afford it. And that’s all they saw. They like, I don’t even think they understood about scholarships, dude. Yeah, yeah. Because they never said, Levi, get good grades, get a scholarship, you know, none of that. I mean, it was just, it was not in their, in their, in their window, you know, and so yeah, so that was the thing is that and they never, I remember, like, in a second grade, I wanted to be an astronaut, but they never bought me a Popular Mechanics magazine, or, you know, encouraged that in any way there. And so, I think I was always a little lost. And so whenever I met someone like Michael, and he was like, hey, just sell some gym memberships with me. I was like, okay, cool, you know, and then seeing someone like Brian Tracy, who talked about, oh, if you read I mean, it, whatever you want to do, you can go out there and read about it and learn it and apply it and take action. And that was like, Oh, brilliant. Genius. Okay, okay, I can do that. And, you know, and then I got deployed. Well, when I got deployed, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do whenever I came back. And really, I wanted to get into real estate investing, but I didn’t, I just got a job selling cellphones. But I knew from learning from Michael as like, I want to be the best at selling cell phones. And so what did I do? I went to the best salesperson, Hey, what are you doing? How did you do that? How did you get there? Take some little tips. And then I was like, How do I adjust it to fit my personality? How can I do better. And of course, I beat them at their own game and became the best? Well, from there, I got recruited to a pharmaceutical company. The first thing I did in the pharma company, was, as I said, Who’s the best salesperson, which you can see them at the top of the charts. And he happened to be living in Oklahoma, it’s three hours from Dallas, I asked my manager, hey, you know, Can I can I? Can I do all my calls Monday through Thursday? And can I go Friday? Can I go drive up to Oklahoma and spend the day with his top salesperson and he was blown away? Nobody had ever asked them. In the years and years and years. You’ve been amazing. Yeah, yeah. And so I got up, you know, and that salesperson was starting at like eight in the morning. So I had to get up drive three hours to Oklahoma, meet him by 8am. And then I spent the whole day with them and drove back. But that was the things I was willing to do to just to try to try to be the best. And it took, it took within 12 months. I was I never got to number one. But I got to number four out of 160 sales reps nationwide. But I did that in less than 12 months. And that’s easy to do in the pharmaceutical world. Well, from there, I transitioned into financial services. And whenever I got licensed for that and got into that business, the first thing I did was went to the best person I knew, and learn from them, and then figured out how to do it better. And I blew past them. Their production, you know, like they told me, their their best production was 1.3 million the first year. And that’s a lot whenever you’re talking about just getting up monthly accounts built up for teachers. Well, I did 1.5 the firt my first year. And so, you know, when I was making that transition into real estate, that’s why I was really scared to death, because I had not heard a you know, you hear about all the failures, more than you hear the successes.
D.J. Paris 38:39 Well, there’s a lot more, there’s a lot more failures than successes in real estate.
Levi Lascsak 38:43 Oh, yeah. And, and if you hit 100,000, in your first year in real estate, you’re a major success. You are a super superstar. Yeah. So but I was like, I’m not good with 100,000. You know, and, and also, what I just saw people doing was this the same traditional ways, right? And, and, and so that’s what scared me to death because I was like, I still wanted to come in and be successful and just be the best at real estate. I was like, and that’s what held me back for so long to because I never had the desire to do it. And I thought you know, if I do move into that, I want to do this as fast as possible. I don’t know if that’s possible. But you know, could I get to two or 300? Now that’s what I was really thinking I get to two or three or 400,000 in my first year, because then I would feel like I made an impact. I’m off to a good start. And
D.J. Paris 39:36 that’s and and by that time if you can do that you’ve clearly cracked some code. Right? It’s not just hey, I got lucky because I grew up here and all my friends still live here and they just happen to all need to buy a condo or sell a condo this year. This is a whole different thing that nobody locally had even done right so yes, you there’s there’s YouTube channels with seven 1000, which is very meager, really? I mean, it’s not really if you’re doing it, that could be enough to generate tons of tons of business. But I’m guessing those other channels probably weren’t generating a ton of business. So you didn’t even have a really amazing blueprint. You did what you did were kind of placing a bet.
Levi Lascsak 40:18 Well, going back to the the, your question, as far as the thing, what I understood was, in my research was that what I realized was, here’s why I was at the position I was at, because over my career sells gym memberships, cell phones, pharmaceuticals and retirement plans. It was always me, that was one to one selling. And so every time I stopped, or when I transitioned from cell phones to pharmaceuticals, I had nothing to show except a bunch of trophies from selling cell phones. When I went from Sitacles to financial services, I had all the trophies from pharmaceuticals, but nothing came with me know in what plus
D.J. Paris 40:59 and plus it’s not, it’s not as scalable, right? Like you, it was you it was you that was that was making all the sales and there wasn’t an avenue, like YouTube for real estate, because you couldn’t reach is easily a vast number of prospects in those other surfaces. Yep,
Levi Lascsak 41:18 yeah. So and they were and they were jobs, of course, you can’t really scale your job, you know. And when I went into financial services, that was one of the first time I started my own business. And I could bring on other reps and expand, and I did a, I did that I brought on a couple of people. But the thing is, is that the margins were small that I, you know, I had to cut into their cut, you know, if I wanted to make the overrides, and so I bring on a few people. And I just never felt right to me, I just thought, man, nobody is going to make a serious living, because I know that I’m a rare breed as well. And I’m confident in my sales ability. And I know, I know, I’m a good salesperson, and I know I’m in the top 1%. And I’ve proven that in four different industries. And I know that not everybody’s that good of a salesperson. So in the financial services, I was going to be very difficult to find somebody like me that could sell as well as me, but then it’s hard to duplicate you. Yeah, they didn’t do that. If they didn’t do that they weren’t going to make a good living either. So it never sat well with me. So I never scaled that accordingly. Because that was more of a just a personal conflict with myself, because I didn’t feel like I could get somebody on full time that could could, you know, earn a full time living so. So that’s what those are the questions I asked myself over the summer, because that’s what kept me from getting into real estate. Because I did not want to go into one to one selling again, I didn’t want to be the one shaking hands kissing babies doing the transactions. And, and so are making the calls. Because you know, as soon as you hang up the phone, your lead generation stops. And so I wanted to build something that was scalable, something that that I could do, I wasn’t a factor, you know, and so that way, if a pain or illness or you know, economy or something like that took me out of the picture, whether temporarily or permanent, I could still have a business running on the back end. So that’s just all the questions that I had to ask myself. So that’s the other part of why we’ve grown so quickly. Oh, and so going back to your original question, as far as camera presence, it wasn’t hard for me, because what I learned, what I realized was all video is is communication and sales at scale. And so I was like, well shoot, if I can make videos, I can have the conversation once with that camera. But now I’m giving the autofill once one. But 100 1050 1000 People can see that conversation. And so this is what I tell agents now is like, you do this every day. If I went to your neighborhood right now to buy a home, you could take me around all day long. Tell me everything I needed to know about that neighborhood, the schools the fun things to do. You could tell me all of that. But when I leave, it’s gone. It’s done, that conversation is dead forever. It’ll never be resurrected. So stop doing that have that exact conversation you’d have with me and have it on camera. And now you can tell 1000s of people and give them the opportunity to see that that’s passive prospecting. That is that is doing the sales pitch once and letting something else do all the work for you. Everybody loves the idea of passive income. But what do you have to do you have to do the work upfront and put a system a process in place so that it constantly works for you on the back end, right? Because no matter what anybody says passive income still takes a little bit of tweaks here and there, right? You gotta Yeah, look at it. But all video is is passive prospecting. It’s the same concept. We’re taking the time, energy and effort to make that video but once I’ve done that, it’s done and it’s going to work. Not just 24/7. But in a compound effect of time, because making video does not take time, it makes you time. And not only does it make you time, it compounds time, so that is always prospecting. And that’s why I don’t feel bad now about traveling, taking the days off, taking the weekends off, going to conferences going on vacation, because videos still get published and leads still come in no matter what I’m doing.
D.J. Paris 45:25 It’s Yes, everything you’ve said, is apps. You know, it’s funny, I, this is how this is an embarrassing thing. I’ll admit, that really speaks to everything you just said. So I recruit realtors, so I’m a bit different, because I’m not a producing agent. I recruit for our company. And I’m doing it the same way. I’ve been doing it since 2010, which is we have well we have people that make calls and say, Hey, would you like to talk about switching firms, and then they set up an appointment? And then I scheduled a 30 minute meeting, and I do my pitch. And 95% of the conversation is me explaining everything that we offer, because that’s why people are scheduling the appointment. You know, I’ll do five minutes of like, Hey, tell me about you. What are you looking for? What are you having problems that you’re existing for blah, blah, blah, find make sure I know what they want. But then I got a present for 25 minutes, because that’s what they’re there to hear. And I’ve been doing that the exact same way for a while for 12 years now. And this whole time I’m going why don’t I have a video that does most of this, like maybe it doesn’t do the full 25 minutes, but it was like 20 minutes of it. And prior to the meeting, I go, Hey, you know, just to save you time, Mr. And Mrs. prospect, I’d like you to watch this video. Because honestly, you know, you can learn most everything we do. And then I’m going to call you at the time that we have scheduled. And we’re going to have a better conversation because now you’ll know kind of what we offer. I can have sort of next level conversations with you. And you can you know, it’ll just be better. I don’t know why I haven’t done that yet. And you just reminded me that what I’m doing isn’t scalable, and it’s no different really, then, you know, somebody’s meeting with a buyer for the first time which by the way, if you’re doing that one to one, awesome good. I’m not here to tell you that that’s a bad idea. But what if you had a video with somebody? I mean, we’re now we’re sort of getting into a different realm. But if we had a video that said hey, Mister missus first time homebuyer before we meet in person, I’d like you to watch this 15 minute video, it’ll help prepare for the meeting. Blah, blah, blah. But anyway, this will save time for the agent. So it you know, YouTube? And again, I’m sorry. So that was just a no,
Levi Lascsak 47:31 no to thank you. Please. Two very important things about that. Number one, I do the exact same thing. So what’s your brokerage called kale
D.J. Paris 47:39 like the vegetable? Okay,
Levi Lascsak 47:41 so um, you know, I’m with EXP and we you know, we do agent attraction. The thing is, is that I’ve never explained exp business model to anybody, if they book a partner call with me. What happens is, as soon as they book that call, I have an automation that sends them the EXP explained video, because and I say in the message, hey, by the way, since we’re going to be chatting about exp, it’s best you watch this video about the brokerage model so that you have all the context you need and can ask the right questions when we get on the call. And so instead of them asking me, okay, what’s
D.J. Paris 48:13 the split? What’s the right, which is what I deal with all the time? Yeah,
Levi Lascsak 48:17 that you know what, you guys are done. You know, they’re number one every time I get on a call now, what their number one question is? No, how does this work? How do I how do I move away? How do I move over? Yeah, so it’s the logistics of it. That’s what their question is about. And then, and then we just chit chat, we kind of like, oh, so where did you grow up? You know, and then we just kind of go back and forth. So that that’s done the heavy lifting for me. Now, to your other point on the real estate side. The video builds the relationship for you see, the thing is, is that nobody hardly watches one video and calls us they end up watching 510 1520 videos. So whenever they come to us, number one, the the relationship is already there on their side, they already feel like they know like and trust, right. And they, when they call us, they’ve already made the decision that they want to work with us. And so and
D.J. Paris 49:10 and they feel like they know you well, yeah, because it will this this is the thing that that people don’t realize it actually builds it and maybe it’s artificial, in a sense, but it’s irrelevant, because it works. It builds a connection between you and the audience because you are speaking one to one even though that video is reaching 10s of 1000s of people possibly it is a one to one relationship each time somebody pushes play. Yep, absolutely. So how often do they feel like they know you? They’re like, it’s probably I’ve talked to other YouTubers who say it’s kind of funny in a way because people will talk to me as if they’re already my friend, because they’re so used to watching my content. They’re so hooked on my content. They’re like, I got to work with this guy. And by the time you end up talking to them, I imagine you’re right you’re not they know they at least know unlike you and hopefully trust you by then, but they know they like you because they’re calling you or they’re not contacting and we’re reaching out, and they know you know what you’re talking about because you’ve demonstrated that value through these videos. Yep.
Levi Lascsak 50:09 Yeah. And I mean people that, you know, get recognized around town. It’s funny because I was in I was actually at the airport the other day and the TSA line. And somebody started tugging on my sleeve. And I looked over and I didn’t see anybody and then I looked down, and it was this like, 85 year old forefoot lady. And she’s just looking up at me. And I was like, I said, Hello. And she goes, she goes, Are you the YouTube real estate guy?
D.J. Paris 50:34 I loved your 10 things to hate about playing a video.
Levi Lascsak 50:37 That was like, yeah, so yeah, that’s mean, she’s like, like, love your videos. And then she just walked on by you know, and that’s, and it’s funny. It’s happened in, in clothing stores and coffee shops, and coming in and out of my office. It’s like, people are like, hey, hey, you know, I was getting food the other day. And the guy standing next to me in line is sitting there staring at me. And I’m just like, hey, and he goes, because don’t you make YouTube videos? And like, yeah, yeah. He’s like, Oh, cool, you know, and it’s just funny. And so you are building that up. And it’s around this whole, you know, that’s the thing is, is right now, especially in this market, I believe the most visible agents going to win. So now, that doesn’t mean you have to be on video. But if you’re a postcard person, you should probably send more postcards. If you’re an email person, you should probably send more emails, if you’re a phone call person, you need to make more phone calls, you can be visible on the phone, when you’re actually having conversations with people. So if you’re, if you’re a caller, you need to call more people in this market. And so right now,
D.J. Paris 51:33 I want to pause for a second because because I want to make a pretty strong point is that I think I think you’ll agree with this. You talked about you just talked about postcards, email, you know, phone calls, those are all you reaching out to the customer. People don’t like emails, right? I mean, and again, I’m just generalizing. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with sending emails, but generally speaking, we don’t we don’t love unwanted emails, or certainly too many of them. We don’t want too many phone calls. We don’t want too many posts. I mean, postcards are pretty innocuous. But what you’re doing is they’re coming to you because they’re searching for the content they want. There’s no resistance at that point. There’s no like, Who’s this guy calling me it’s, Oh, this guy’s providing me content. I found him he didn’t find me.
Levi Lascsak 52:20 So we call that and actually we talked about that that’s I believe that’s the first chapter in passive prospecting is interruption versus intentional marketing. So what you just described as interruption marketing, it’s what we we’ve been conditioned to be a part of and conduct as as business people our whole lives. That’s TV commercials, billboards, magazine ads, postcards, cold calling door knocking, that is interrupting they say right now we get exposed to eight to 10,000 ads per day. Okay, credible. Now, we’re not buying that many products, which, which means we’re completely ignoring them, right? So, but they’re interrupting you. And the thing is, is that you could see a dog food commercial 10 times a day doesn’t mean you’re gonna go buy dog food, right? I don’t care how many times you see Jake from State Farm, you’re not gonna go run out and buy insurance. But the second you have a kid and you need, you need a new life policy, or you need to update it, or you run out, let’s say you run out of dog food. You do not need any marketing or advertising, to convince you to go do that you now have intention. And now Now you’re on the hunt. Now you’re out there looking and guess what? People are intentional about buying or selling real estate. But most real estate agents chase after everybody else saying that they’re in the relationship business, trying to build relationships, when all they’re doing is really interrupting people nonstop. So hopefully, one day when they’re finally in the market, they’ll actually think of them and buy or sell a home with them. And then they end up buying a home from Uncle Bob because he’s over at their house drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon. And you’re like, I’ve been chasing you down for 18 months. And they’re like, well, sorry, Uncle Bob was over at my house. And you know, I just listed with him. So intentional means people are intentional about buying and selling real estate. But what if you’re the person that’s in front of them, whenever they’re, they’re now searching for that information? When people go to research on YouTube, and they search Dallas, guess what, they’re gonna get hit with all of our videos, because we pop up everywhere, they can’t avoid us. And so now they and then they just start watching the content, guess what, it’s immediate value add. We don’t sell them on the fact that we’re real estate agents. We don’t, you know, tell them about, here’s the tips to sell your home. It’s like here’s all the information about Dallas what they’re actually searching for. And so we just become their agent by default, because they end up consuming so much content that they you know, they just can’t help themselves then like Well, I’m gonna go call this guy.
D.J. Paris 54:43 Yeah, yes. Yes. And and again, you haven’t created resistance, because you’re not pitching them directly. I mean, maybe at the end of the videos, oh, hey, by the way, if you you know, you know that there may be some of that and that’s that’s fine, but they already found you. You didn’t find them. You didn’t pitch them first. So, and that is that is just beyond beyond huge. So tell us about passive prospecting.com.
Levi Lascsak 55:06 Yeah, it’s our website. I mean, the main thing we’re doing right there is directing people to sign up to be the first to know when we released the new book. So we have written the book passive prospecting it’s in. It’s in process right now, the publisher that we’re working with, has told us probably a February timeframe, as far as release. So right now, if you go to pass a prospecting.com, you’ll see on the homepage, you can just sign up and so that way, we’ll notify you as soon as the book releases. Because we do want to create some some emphasis and some push around whenever that launches, it’s going to be awesome, but it’s it’s 14 chapters, I mean, and so it’s, it’s a, it’s a lot, it’s a lot of information. And and we tell you, we talk about all the principles in the first half of the book, and the second half of the book is how to apply them, and how to build your own channel. So it’s really going to be really, I think, everything you need. Now the thing is, is you’ll be missing the visual component, which I think, you know, like, like we walk through people through a digital course, when we help them learn YouTube, which they can see. And it’s very easy. But the book, I mean, that some people learn from reading and writing, and so we walk them through everything that they need to get through that. And so we just talked about that. And and the cool thing is, is we got the foreword, the foreword was written by Ryan serhant.
D.J. Paris 56:29 Oh, wonderful. Well, that’s, that’s certainly some nice social proof, to help help help sell some books. And yeah, I need to get I need to see if I can get him on our show. We’ve, yeah, I just I haven’t talked for all the years I need to. But yes, but that’s amazing. Congratulations on that he’s not an easy get, we actually have had him booked a couple of times over the years, and then it just fell through. So that is really impressive. And I again, I just want to sort of wrap this up with, you don’t have to be, you know, you don’t have to have a special hook. You don’t have to be, you know, the TIC tock dancing family. Although, if that’s your hook, great. But what we’re all you all you can, you know, all you really need to do is focus on your expertise, which is hyperlocal real estate, think of the questions your current your clients ask you, when they move in or move out, think of the things they need the thing, and then you can pad there’s a million tools to look up search volume, take a look. And again, just the biggest mind shift, change that I’m making in this in this conversation is YouTube is not a place to watch videos, it’s a search engine, it’s a search engine first that happens to show you videos. And if I think of it that way, then it becomes a research and development tool. Versus and also, you know, you know, fun thing if I want to screw around on YouTube, but I can actually use it for research and development. Whereas Instagram, Facebook, and even Tik Tok, you’re at the mercy of either the people you already know, or in tic TOCs, you know, case a little bit differently, you know, they have a sort of a different algorithm set. But you know, Facebook is people you know, for the most part, maybe some people find you here and there through referrals, Instagrams essentially the same way. So all you’re really do and there’s nothing wrong with creating content for your your followers. But it’s not easy to sort of branch outside of those followers in those platforms. It’s really tough, because that’s just not what those platforms are for. Instagram tries to be a search engine. I don’t think it does that all that successfully. But certainly YouTube has as the cream of the crop, that’s where everyone goes to learn how to do and how to do something, or how or about something. You know, my my dad was like, he just, you know, he goes around and fixes things all over the house. He checks everything on YouTube first, like, like a lot of us do. So I absolutely love this. And we all have essentially 4k phones with incredible resolution, incredible clarity. You don’t even have to have necessarily really amazing equipment, what you do have to have is really amazing content, which is what you have if you’re a real estate agent who cares and actually works on their craft. You just take the information you already have and and apply it and make videos. Well, just real quickly, what’s the what have you found to be an optimal length or for your videos to before the or the audience stays engaged? Or do you find it’s kind of all over the board?
Levi Lascsak 59:35 videos need to be as long as they need to be. So give the information that’s needed to create the video. Don’t keep talking just to keep talking. So if the video is 12 minutes and 19 seconds, let it be that if it’s 15 minutes and 18 seconds. I mean I’ve I’ve even done an hour video on on the channel as an experiment. And it’s one of the most viewed and most watched videos on the channel. So the thing is, is again, when your audience is researching you, you have their attention because you know their intention. So when you know their intention, you will have their attention. And so longer form video, that’s what they’re there for. And that’s what gets people dialed in and builds that relationship for you. Because they watch more and more content, the longer they watch it, the more of the relationship they develop and deepen with you. So, so yeah, I mean, the shortest, maybe 10 minutes, the longest, I’ve done an hour and everything in between. So I, I make videos. And the thing is, I didn’t intentionally make an hour video, but I knew it was going to be a lot because I was going to cover a lot. And at the end of it, it was like, oh, that’s an hour. So, you know, it is what it is. And I thought, Well, we’ll see what happens. But again, still one of the most popular one the most viewed videos. So it just told me that okay, people are are dialed in when they’re researching. I mean, making a move is a big decision for a lot of people. And people do research that but think about how do they actually research that from before. I mean, we’ve also helped people move from Japan, from Belgium, from the Philippines, from Australia, from the UK, from South Africa, where what else would they have found us other than YouTube? I mean, do you think those people would have just randomly discovered our website? Or our Facebook profile? No, no, they they’re going to search Dallas first, because they’re moving here because of a job because of a better opportunity because of a transfer this or that, you know, and, and so they’re saying, well, um, what’s Dallas? Like, let’s go on YouTube and take a look, let’s see what Dallas looks like. And then guess what, all of our videos pop up over and over and over again. And so they’re like, hey, moving from Belgium, which we just got that email two weeks ago. And that’s what the lady said, used to live in Florida, lived in Belgium, the last six years now we’re getting transferred to Dallas. So
D.J. Paris 1:02:00 So So again, in essentially, one year, we’re talking 164 transactions, 90 million in production, almost 3 million in commissions. These results speak for themselves, I don’t need to say anything other than I want to read that book. So the best place and by the way, everybody needs to read this book, because even if you’re not a YouTuber, even if you’re not somebody that thinks this is a viable path, I am guessing that with the rate rates have have, you know, essentially doubled since since then I don’t like to even say rates have doubled, because they were such low, of course, they were going to double but regardless, it’s still a tricky time to generate leads. So if you’re doing the traditional methods, then you know, you’re going to just have a lot of people sitting on the sidelines, there’s only a certain percentage of your sphere of influence that are going to be buying or selling in the next 12 months. And you’re probably a little stressed about it right now, I know all of our agents are, this provides you even if you’re like, that’s not really what I I’m not really a online personality, it doesn’t, you don’t need to necessarily be an online personality, what you need to do, I mean, I don’t care who does, I watched the video last night, I had to replace a switch, I have like a smart switch, light switch, essentially. And it has a dimmer and whatever. So anyway, I had to switch it and I was like, I better just double check that I’ve got these wires, you know, connected correctly, or I’m gonna you know, blow up my whole home. And, and I watched a one minute video, it was a guy who was not a YouTube personality. But he had the most views for this particular, you know, wiring for outlet, it had like, 3 million views. And this was a one minute video, this guy could not have been less personable. And yet his content was good. And it was quick, and it works. And so even if you’re not somebody who’s like, Oh, I’m not as dynamic, maybe I’m more introverted, it doesn’t matter. You just have to have incredible content. And yes, you should learn how to make things look good and sound good. And you should be really intentional about, you know, the way you’re speaking. And there’s a lot to learn. But regardless, I just watched a video last night this guy basically saved my life. And he is not dynamic. So I just want to make that point that if you’re thinking about, you know, another way to generate income, because like, like Levi was saying, you can create a really great piece of content, it lives forever, it might generate traffic for a very long time, or even forever, I guess it could be. And so you have this opportunity to create something that last social media is very digestible, it’s very, it’s very transient, it comes and goes we do the infinite scroll it but YouTube stuff kind of lasts forever. Now something better might come along and replace you and then you can create another video to replace that person you know, so you know that can happen. But essentially, if it’s good, it lasts and I see this all the time like this video about replacing the electrical wiring. He made it like 10 years ago and it’s still the best video 10 years yours as you would think some electrician has got a better personality is more dynamic can make it I mean, this guy literally was literally it was just his webcam, he was holding it up, there was no production, and 10 You know, like 10 million views or something. So anyway, let’s let’s all visit passive prospecting.com Sign up to find out when the book is going to be released so that you can buy a copy. This is the year to learn how to generate content online. Let’s let’s do it. If you’re tired of just posting just listed and just sold things on Instagram that honestly nobody cares. You know, it’s nice, it’s cute, it’s fine. But you can actually provide real value to people on places like you know, different mediums like, like YouTube. So go to passive prospecting.com. Also subscribe to passive prospecting, watch what Levi is doing, you know, his own admission, hey, when he goes into a new industry, he seeks out the top. And then he goes, Hey, I wonder what that guy’s or that woman is doing. You can do the same thing with him, go to his YouTube channel, we’ll have links to both. As soon as the book is released, we’re going to be promoting it, of course, because we want our audience to have another stream of income, or sorry, another stream of leads, which I guess technically is another stream of income for 2023. And this is the year guys, I’m going to do it. So if I’m going to do it, you guys should do it too. We can do it together. Levi is is a guy to model and look and watch and follow. And he’s just a heck of a nice guy. And he served our country. So let’s let’s do let’s do him a solid, let’s follow him let’s let’s walk walk out for his book. And gosh, I can’t imagine there’s any of our listeners who wouldn’t love to have another, you know, 160 transactions like Levi has got from YouTube. So, guys, let’s do this. Levi, on behalf of everyone who is listening to our show right now, we thank you for not only your service to the country, but also your service to this industry. And being on this podcast is of service. This doesn’t benefit Levi. He’s just a nice guy who’s willing to share his secrets. And yes, of course, he has a book to promote because you should all buy it, because I’m gonna buy it. But we thank you for taking the time to tell us exactly what you do being as transparent as you are. You’re just really, really refreshing. Also, on behalf of Levi and myself, we want to thank everyone who’s listening or watching right now. We appreciate you. You’re the reason we keep doing these episodes. And please let’s support our guests go to passive prospecting.com. And the only thing we ever ask of you, aside from making sure our guests are taken care of is let’s help take care of the podcast. Just tell one other realtor about our show. One other realtor that needs to hear this episode with Levi, I know you know somebody in your office that could use this, send this to him, send him over our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from there or just pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. We appreciate it. Levi, thank you so much. This was wonderful, really great content a good reminder to me to change my tactics and my strategy. And we’re excited to chat with you in the future. So thank you.
Levi Lascsak 1:08:07 Thank you for having me. It was a it was a lot of fun. Appreciate you
Why Honesty Is Your Most Valuable Tool! • Vickey Barron
Dec 23, 2022
Vickey Barron goes back to the beginning of her career in real estate. Vickey describes how honesty played a very important role in the process of getting her first clients. Next, Vickey extensively talks about the importance of authenticity and honesty. Vickey also shares her tips and advise she gives to newer agents. Vickey also talks about how she keeps in touch with old clients and the importance she gives to this part of her job. Last, Vickey talks about the biggest mistake she’s made in her career that she would change if given the chance.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We know that honesty is the best policy, but how can honesty become your very best marketing tool? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide, and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top 1% Producer Vicki Baron. Before we get to Vicki, just a couple of quick reminders. First, thank you for continuing to support our show. If you want to help us grow. The best ways you can do that is first by telling a friend to think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing these episodes and send them a link over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever produced can be streamed right from a browser, no podcast app required. And of course, we’re also on all the podcast apps so feel, feel free to subscribe if you haven’t done that already. And also, please support our amazing sponsors theory they are the reason we can keep paying the bills and keep the staff happy and keep everything running. So please check out their products and services. Consider investing in them. I promise the products and services that are talked about on the show will help take your business to the next level. Okay, let’s get to the main event my conversation with Vicki Baron.
Today on the show, we have Vicki Baron compass in New York City. Let me tell you more about Vicki. Now when Vicki Baron talks the real estate world listens she has earned the respect and admiration of her fellow brokers, along with an impressive base of buyers and sellers. Vicki has been featured in leading trade press articles and network TV shows including Wall Street Journal, the real deal, New York Times HGTV selling New York she’s also played a key role in the dramatic growth of the new development market in New York City by commanding and achieving record breaking sales prices, some marvel at how she is able to get it all done. Her answer is if you want something done, give it to a busy person I could not agree more. And by the way, Vicki’s super humble. She’s also been one of the top agents in New York City by volume, probably she is already as well. She’s been doing that before also in the country. She’s been one of the top agents, she is a very, very big deal. And we are so honored to have Vicki on the show. Vicki, welcome.
Vickey Barron 3:56 Thank you. And thank you for having me. And that’s a very nice introduction. And I just truly believe that if we all come together and just share, I tend to get involved a lot in our local board and helping agents. Some of them are new, some have been around for a long time, but kind of stumbling trying to figure out what to do and how to pivot. So anytime I’m invited to where we can have a candid conversation, because it’s not an easy business. But it can be a fun business if you don’t take yourself so seriously. And you just keep your eye on the ball and and remember that whatever you do, it’s all going to be fine. I just think there are too many people that end up with too much stress because ego gets in the way and a lot of pressure and I think that slows them down. So if I can do anything today is we’ll have a conversation and Share kind of how not to get into that trap, and a authentic and just have fun. And there’s a I’m a believer of abundance. So there’s enough business to go around, you just have to figure out what part of that business makes sense for you.
D.J. Paris 5:18 Well said, and I also want to just peel back the curtain for our listeners for a moment when I was chatting with Vicki just before we started, the very first thing she said, which, which is just really indicative of your character and, and, and your motivation, you were like, I just want to provide value to your audience and maybe help them I, I enjoy helping other realtors learn to do better. And obviously, you just said a version of that right now. And it is not always the case that when I have these types of interviews that I that I that people are as willing to to be helpful. So I think that is probably not a coincidence why you’re so successful. This act of like givers get to kind of kind of philosophy. So. And we should also mention, too, that Vicki is in the process of writing a book. And it’s not out yet. But I would encourage all of our listeners to make sure that when Vicki’s book does come out, we will be promoting it on our show, we’ll be promoting it on our Facebook group. And we will also anyone that’s interested can reach out to Vicki. And I’m sure she can put you on a list or or at least make you aware when the book is available. Because she is she is somebody who instructs agents. And so this this should be a very, very interesting and exciting book. So we’re happy to promote that once that happens. But Vicki, I’d like to start all the way at the back at the beginning to hear about how you got into real estate and why?
Vickey Barron 6:45 Well, when I was 2021 years old, I was not in real estate. But I did buy a very, very small piece of real estate in Southern California, because I realized, you know, why rent if you could buy. And to this day, I’m kind of confused why Bank of America gave me a mortgage, but they fortunately did. So I was able to put down a little down payment and and and got started and I bought it and I fixed it up, lived there for 10 months sold, it made a decent profit, I think I paid 59,000 and sold it for 79,000. So
D.J. Paris 7:32 like, Oh, that’s a nice return for 10 months
Vickey Barron 7:35 or so. And then I bought another one. And I kind of kept doing that. And people in California say you should get into real estate, you know, I just love looking at a property and seeing the potential. So I moved a lot, because this is kind of my hobby, so to speak. But I never really got into real estate, I worked in health care until I moved to New York City 22 years ago. And I thought I was coming to New York for two years. And I wanted to get to know the city. And I thought wait a minute, if I’m going to be in New York for two years, what better way to get to know the city than to get a real estate license and literally get to know the city. So I went and interviewed, my resume was not so impressive because no one wanted to hire me. And my favorite is a very large firm. The manager said to me, we don’t have a desk, call us back in a year. And I said, Wow, that’s so exciting that you don’t have a desk, you must be doing really well. And I’m thrilled to hear that. I have one question for you. She said, What’s that? I said, it’s very important for me to really find the right match the right house, if you will. So if you would be so kind to give me 10 minutes out of your day just to have an idea. I sit down quick chat, because if it’s the right fit, I’m willing to wait. And if it’s not, then I’ll accept a desk somewhere else. Does that make sense to you? She said yes. She invited me in. And when I sat in front of her. I seriously had a lot of questions because I had no idea. I didn’t know my way around New York. I didn’t have friends in New York. I didn’t have I mean, I used to come to New York, I worked in healthcare. So I would come for a lot of medical conferences, but I didn’t know anyone in New York. So I didn’t understand the lay of the land, period or real estate. So I said to her like, I have a question. You said you don’t have a desk but as I look around, I see a lot of empty desks. So where are these agents? Are they out selling Are they sleeping in or they will like can you help me understand how it works? And I must have had 20 different questions for her because I was really curious about how it all worked. And then I asked her, describe to me the top five agents in this office, who are they? What makes him tick? How do they function? And she answered it. And then I said, Now talk to me about the five agents that you’re contemplating getting rid of that a desk may open up that someday I’ll get to have, tell me about them. And she’s just started laughing. She said, You are hilarious. Like, you. You just first of all, she asked me if I had a resume. I said, don’t have a resume, you don’t have a desk. I thought, We’re doing an eyeball thing I didn’t, I wasn’t coming in for an interview, because you didn’t have a desk. I just wanted to meet you and say, Hello. So anyway, she offered me the position and I got started. And in that interview, I felt kind of bad. Like I tricked her because she offered me a desk after she said she didn’t have one. So I said, I should probably disclose it. I do not have any connections in New York, never sold real estate. I don’t. And Harriet on Park Avenue is not going to call me to sell her seven room. She said, Well, how are you going to get business? And I said, that is a very good question. And, honestly, I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don’t. But what I can tell you is I do understand people, and I understand business, and I’m confident I’ll figure something out. So fortunately, that really stupid answer, still got me a desk, because it didn’t sound very smart. Like I’m over here. No idea. Oh,
D.J. Paris 11:25 I want to jump in for a second. I actually do think it’s incredibly smart for one particular reason is it was it was honest. And I think this is an industry especially around the recruiting realtors or interviewing part where honesty doesn’t always flow both ways. And it doesn’t even flow one way sometimes. And I think I recruit realtors. And so I was just trying to put myself in the position of the woman that you were referencing. And I was thinking, I would love to have somebody come in with those with those kinds of questions. I would love it if people were asking, and that and being that honest, going out. Yeah, I don’t have in here’s what I don’t have. But I’m confident that I can get it figured out. So I actually think those were amazed. I mean, clearly they weren’t good answers in the sense that, you know, they wanted you on the team. But yeah, I know, you were sort of joking by saying they’re stupid answers. But I just I think those were great answers personally.
Vickey Barron 12:18 Well, thank you. But you know, what you just touched on that’s very important, is what I’m about to share with you next was truly the cracking the code, if you will, because so one would ask all right, so you got your desk, then what? Why was in a training class and I was sent home to do homework by calling three for sale by owners. And I procrastinated. I had an 11 year old at the time, and I was nine o’clock at night I went, Oh my word. I forgot my homework. And I can’t go in the class and lie and say I did it if I didn’t. And it’ll look disrespectful if I don’t do it. So I do quickly hop on a phone. And I got machines answer machines. And it was a woman that said, this is John and Mary. We’re not home right now, if you’re calling about the apartment, no brokers be. So I just instinctively I just wanted to get through my homework. I wasn’t trying to sell her apartment. I was like two hours in the business. So I said to her, Mary, hi, it’s me, Vicki. And here. Here’s the truth. I heard the part about no brokers, and I am an agent, but don’t hang up. Because the truth is, I just simply have a quick answer. I mean, quick question for you. And if you would be kind enough to call me back tomorrow before preferably before two o’clock. I promise it’ll be painless. Here’s my number look forward to the call. So then I went through and did my other two calls. And when I got in the class, they called upon me, how’d it go? I told them what happened. The whole class laughed. They said, you’re from California. This is New York, they’re gonna eat you a lie. You don’t leave a message. She’s never calling you back. And I kind of sunk in my seat. And I thought, Why is she not calling back? I was really kind on the phone. I think she’ll call me back. So it was so long ago, we really didn’t even have cell phones. And so I went back to my desk at lunchtime and the little red light was on. And sure enough, it was Mary. And when I called her back, she wasn’t so kind. She said you had you have a question? What is it? Well, I didn’t kind of think it through so I wasn’t sure what my question was. So I had to quickly I had to quickly come up with a question. So I just started asking her questions about her apartment. And I realized instantly she loved talking about her apartment. Like she just lit up like this lady’s went from Maine to nice and in a flat second. So then when she went on here, come To your point, the honesty, she said to me, I suppose you’re gonna tell me now you have a buyer for my apartment. And I said, Mary, honestly, with the windowed kitchen, the South views, the granite the subzero, I honestly wish I could tell you, I haven’t buyer for your apartment. But the honest truth is I, I’m thinking, I don’t even have a business card lady. I’m more or less a buyer. But I said, I don’t. I do not have a buyer for your apartment today. But Mary, doesn’t mean I won’t have one tomorrow. But I have to ask you one more question. She said, What is it? I said, You have been so generous with your time and so kind with your description of the apartment. First of all, I’m confused that it’s not sold. But that’s another story. I have one other question. Do you mind if I just poked my head in? I just want to see that kitchen with the window and that Southern view. I promise I won’t bother you. I just want to quickly look at it that way. If I come across a buyer, at least I can say I’ve seen it. She said okay, sure come by at 430. And when I went by all I had was a tablet and a pin. I mean, again, I was now maybe eight hours in the business. So I walked through her apartment, and I just had an honest conversation and I didn’t try to sell her I in fact I encouraged her I’m like you are going to sell this winter, next open house, how’d you get your pricing? And do you mind if I give you a few tips and I took notes about the apartment and then I gave her a few tips, open your blinds, pick up that pile of stuff and you marry you are going to have to So next week, I gotta go. And she called me within two weeks. And she woke up and said, I have I don’t want to be a realtor and I want to hire someone and you were so kind and so honest, that my husband, I would like to meet with you. So that’s how it started. It was I got started through the for sale by owners. And then one would refer another refer another and then I just kept calling fizz bows. And that’s how I started.
D.J. Paris 17:10 So it’s really an incredible story for a lot of different reasons. But again, that authentic honesty, all radical honesty, maybe we’ll call it although I just think honesty would suffice. I know there’s a new term radical honesty, I think, what does regular mean? If not, if not fully honest, but but that’s a perfect example of telling the truth, and really appealing to somebody from a non sales perspective, which I think not, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not like to be sold, I like to be explained, I like information, I like to also make my own decisions. And I don’t like to feel pressure. Now there is a certain subset of the population that likes to be persuaded. And that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s the majority of people. So I actually think that is a great approach for all arrow all of our listeners to consider and clearly it worked for you. And so from there, you you, you got your license, you started finding clients, and and then, you know, you continued to grow and you didn’t just grow in a small way you grow in a very, very, very, very big way. So why do you think it was that that you got to be one of one of the very top producing agents in New York City when there’s 1000s upon 1000s? What do you think it is that maybe you did differently than, than the other brokers or agents that you know?
Vickey Barron 18:33 Well, I think what I really think about it, which I have putting this book together, you know it, it’s the best therapy ever, because you you take the time to reflect and try to, you know, look at where you were, where you’re at and where you’re going. And when I really think about it, I think for me, it was almost a breath of fresh air because the people responded well, to just someone that saw them and cared about them. And I was curious about so much that. I mean, I really didn’t know what I was doing. So there was no ego because how can you have an ego when I truly note when I think back and I’m like how did I even do? And I say this not Not to brag only to encourage anybody because I swear to you if I can do it, anybody can do it. So I think I did like 20 deals in my first nine or 10 months and credible and it was you know, they were all lower price because most for sale by owners are not, you know, $5 million. So they were all you know, I think when I got started, they were three four or $500,000 and I just kept going and going and I worked really hard. But I loved every moment of it. Because each opportunity, I believed in my heart, that they would be better off. And I do believe this for for sale by owners, they think it’s better to sell on their own. And I really believe they will make more money if they identify the right agent to partner with. Because that agent, if they do what I know they’re capable of doing, when it’s time to close, whatever that commission check is, will be less. If you get the right agent to partner with you, I really do believe that I don’t think they make more money trying to sell on their own. So I believe that and I think they just learned to trust in me. And that’s I started to get 96% of my business, all referrals. So I am not the agent doing I don’t do postcard mailers, I don’t do I sometimes I think I’m a little lazy, because maybe I should be doing that. But I don’t, there are only so many hours in the day. And I feel that if I take the time to really care about someone and take care of them and go the extra mile, then they will tell their friends and their neighbors and and then the phone will ring and then I can take care of that next person. So that’s been my model, although I do have colleagues that are very successful on the marketing campaign that do mass mailers. So I applaud them and everyone has to find the lane that makes sense for them.
D.J. Paris 21:38 Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. I was thinking while you were saying that about demonstrating care, I always think that’s maybe maybe the most one of the most important parts of the job is demonstrating empathy and also managing not managing your clients, fears or anxieties, but But understanding them and being able to counsel them through large financial decisions buying selling maybe the largest financial decision they’ve ever made, certainly one that comes with with a lot of a lot of unfortunate stress, even in the best possible two types of transactions. It’s still stressful. And I’m I’m curious because you are such a student of human nature and just people how you went about trying to make sure your clients were as comfortable as possible throughout the process? Because of course there are ups and downs and most transactions if not all, and there are going to be times when when the clients, you know, dealing with some some undue stress or just freaking out. But how do you how do you do that? Because I suspect you do that better than a lot of other agents?
Vickey Barron 22:48 Well, first of all, that’s a great question. Because the truth is, and I say this many times agents, you can have seller A is a banker, seller B is an artist and seller C is a widow that never had a day job. If your conversation is exactly the same with all three of them, you may get lucky and hit one. But you have to in an authentic way. And I tell people this when I’m on Park Avenue selling a $12 million listing or I’m in the village selling a really cool fifth floor walk up. I’m still Vicki present at both of them. But one may be an artist, one may be a banker. My choice, you know, the power of words is one of the classes I love teaching that you have to know how to communicate with someone and what their needs are and how they’re going to hear you. And it’s always good to ask people how do you like to be communicated with? What is your and here’s another thing talk about honesty. There was a pretty big listing and a woman said to me, Vicki, I have I shouldn’t be admitting this, but it’s the truth. She said fishy. I’ve noticed that the other two agents for interviewing when I emailed them, they respond like that. And when I email you, you take a really long time to get back to me. And I said to her Oh, Nancy, you know what, it’s honestly the truth. What you’re saying? And I would love to tell you right now, like if you hire me that that’s going to change but it may not change. So she looked shocked. And I said like can I explain why? And she said Why? And I said you know I’ve been in your living room for 45 minutes. I haven’t looked at my phone once. I said so when I’m with you. You have me 100% And when I’m with a buyer they have me 100% When I’m showing someone through your apartment I’m not Looking at my Instagram, I’m not looking at my email. I’m looking at them. I’m listening to them, I’m answering their questions, and they have me. So unfortunately, some people, maybe I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, I’m not good at that. I just can’t do it. It’s not my forte. But if you ever need me, I have someone at the office, you can call they know how to get a hold of me. But please know that I’m here and I care. But I’m not going to win the contest of getting back so quickly on that email. And she hired me, but it was the truth. It was just, you know, and another one talk about truth. I was on a townhouse listing. And this is actually funny, the woman said to me, you know, Vicki, I really, really in my heart, I’d like to hire you. But I think I’m gonna hire this other agent. And I said, Okay, well, if you feel that that’s the right fit for you, then I’m sure. You know, I’m sure that they will do a great job. She said, Because the other agent specializes in townhouses. And I and she pointed out to me that on your website, you have things for sale for $350,000, like studios and stuff like that. And she only has really expensive townhouses. And that’s what he specializes in. He’s a vice president, and you’re whatever I was at the time,
D.J. Paris 26:26 what are you associate or whatever? Yeah.
Vickey Barron 26:30 And I said, Oh, I am. So you know what you just made my day? She said, I did. I said, Yes. I feel so good. Right now you have no idea. She said, why I said, Because I said to myself, when I entered the business, I never want to become that person that feels that there’s so important that they, they forget about everyone, because everyone needs a place to live. And I want to be able, if you call me and your knees once that fifth floor studio apartment, I want to be able to take care of them. So I hope 20 years from now, you’ll see a low end apartment for sale, which today, if you get on mine, I’m sure I have one right now. So I said, it just means a lot to me. But thank you so much for sharing that. Well, then I went back to my office and I told my manager what happened? And he said, Vicki, you’re a senior vice president. I said, I am. He said, your numbers, you don’t have that on your website. I said, What does it even mean? I don’t understand what are these titles? And he said, No, you’re a senior vice president. So I call the woman back. And I said, Listen, I just wanted to tell you, I not only do I appreciate your comment about the lower end apartment on my listing, but then that whole scene, apparently I’m a senior vice president. And so I didn’t even know that his titles are rotten. Not really that important to me. But apparently they are to some people. And thank you so much for bringing, so she called me and hired me.
D.J. Paris 28:00 Hilarious. That is and and I think there’s there’s sort of two, two lessons to learn here, which is number one, to have an answer. Ready. That’s an authentic well, to have an answer ready. If somebody were to say something like that, like, oh, this other agent, you know, thought maybe they’d be a better fit because they thought you specialized in this and we really have that and maybe you’re not. And your answer was was beautiful, and also honest. And I think again, that sort of ego less approach, and that full honest approach really resonates with people who don’t want to be sold. And also, you know, like, it’s funny, my my title is President of Sales and Marketing. And people go, Ooh, that sounds impressive. Like I made that up. Like, it’s not a real thing. It’s, you know, I guess if you say it long enough people think it’s something but but but it’s it is it is true. Like every lender is a vice president, every loan officer right now is vice president. And so yeah, but but it’s a really good point. And I think it’s also a lesson of playing nice in the sandbox, this idea of putting other firms down or other agents down whether it’s, you know, subtly like maybe this person did which was which you know, really rubs me the wrong way when people people do that. But there are people out there who will and so I appreciate that and I’m sure you know you teach agents to to be their authentic selves and to not and like you said there is no competition so there’s enough business for everyone there’s there’s the right fit for anyone. And And I’m curious on you know what you’ve what you’ve seen new agents do because you had pretty immediate success with no sphere of influence, no understanding of the New York market, limited understanding of real estate, you know, you did your own buys and sells which is amazing. And that is that is legitimate experience of course. But doesn’t necessarily translate to helping other homeowners as easily as Oh, look at my resume of all these beautiful homes I’ve listed and sold. But I’m curious on on what you tell agents who are entering the business who, you know, really want to have, you know, quicker success. there any tips or advice that you might give them?
Vickey Barron 30:21 Yes. Here’s, I feel very strong about this. I see a lot of agents that have analysis paralysis, you know, they, they, they look great. They come in the office, they sit there there, but they don’t move like what are you doing? I walked by, what are you doing? They’re thinking and they’re paralyzed of not making a move, because they’re afraid they’re gonna do something wrong, not to a right. And they also go after the other thing I say, here are things that I see that I wish I could say just stop that. One. They don’t shoot for the moon, like, why are you been in the business a month, and you’re going after 10 $15 million listings? Like your why just go sell 10 In a price point that you probably don’t have a better chance getting because those 10 15 million are going to have agents with a resume on arm or street long. So why would you put that pressure on yourself? Number one, number two, no, get to know property. Go look at every property. So when I was relatively new, the manager that didn’t have a desk that hired me, asked me to give a tour. She said, Vicki, we have a van, we’re going to go out and look at like 10 properties. And I just think you would be really good at giving the tour. So I have a problem saying no. Like I had zero what? I don’t know why she asked me but I just said yes. So on the tour. We were going I said, ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to go to 103 is 73rd Street and it was built in 1929. And you’re gonna see that, you know, 40% of the apartments have double height ceiling. And what I love the most is the bay windows and what and the doorman is amazing. And the tile in the lobby is gorgeous. After that, we’re going to have the opportunity to see bah, bah, bah, that was built 1960. And people said, what firm did you work for before you worked here? I said I didn’t work at any firm. They said how do you know that? I said because I would walk up and down the streets. And I look at the buildings I talked to the doorman then I go back and I’d ask how many apartments are in there? When was it built? So I tell agents start if you’re going to get one listing. Let’s say it’s a one bedroom, prewar apartment, you should know as the the if a buyer is out there today looking for the one bedroom, if there are 10 available, you should go visit every one of them. And today, if you can’t physically get in, at least get online and study your competition, study those apartments, so you should know them inside now. So I was actually successful at converting. When I’d have a listing buyers would come in, and they’d be without an agent. And I’d watched them walk around and I’d ask them questions I’d say talk to me. I have a question for you. How long have you been looking? Has it been two months? Six months? Are you ready to jump? Or where are you at? Oh, no, we just started. Well, how many apartments have you seen today? Three. Interesting. Have you seen the one on 79th? Street? They said yes. They said Don’t you love that view out of the back? Was that not special? Love that. And the herringbone floors? Love that. So then what else? Have you seen? No, we wouldn’t saw this other one. What did you like about it? Well, we like this, what did you hate about it? I like you have a conversation. And they know that you know, the lay of the land. But I have agents that when you go to show an apartment, they don’t even know the building and the they’re selling an apartment, but they don’t even know the answers to simple questions. So you have to do your homework. And you have to be interested enough to know you have to be knowledgeable.
D.J. Paris 34:28 I have a I have a yes, I have a question with respect to showing a property to a buyer. And I know this isn’t always going to be the case where you as the buyer’s agent will be able to see the property ahead of time but how often do you say hey, I’m bringing a buyer here tomorrow I want to get a lay of the land. I want to come in and see the property so that when I my buyer does show up, I have a better understanding of what is the is that I don’t know how common that practice is for Go ahead
Vickey Barron 35:00 I’m gonna another, you ask really good questions. See? Why, okay, I told you I didn’t know my way around New York, I had a buyer came into a place I had listed. And he this had never happened. And it’s never happened since. But he asked me to go to his office, he wanted to interview me. Now normally you get interviewed for if you’re going to be the listing agent not to work with the buyer. But he wanted to interview me because he wanted to find the right agent to help he and his wife buy an apartment. So I’m sitting in Midtown. And he said, you know, my wife and I are kind of thinking about Tribeca. Now I was maybe four months in the business. I Tribeca, I heard of it, but I never sold in Tribeca.
D.J. Paris 35:50 Was there a film festival there that?
Vickey Barron 35:53 He said, I’d like to go out next week and look at places in Tribeca. Are you for? Or have you? What did he say? Are you familiar? Have you sold in Tribeca? You don’t need to lie. But there’s a way to answer a question with confidence. I said, Oh, I love that idea of Tribeca. Love that idea of Tribeca, I didn’t say I had sold in Tribeca, I didn’t know say I knew were Tribeca was I said I love the idea of Tribeca and let’s plan on Saturday. So what I did is I did the search, I went out early the day before went to as many of them that I could. And then what I did is I hired a driver, because in Tribeca, it’s not like Midtown, where it’s all numbers. Like I thought, I’m gonna look foolish when I walk out of one building, not know if I should turn left or right.
D.J. Paris 36:52 So yeah, that’s a great point.
Vickey Barron 36:55 And then if he starts asking me questions about where the local grocery store is, I don’t know I don’t just my first time there. So I hired a driver that knew Tribeca, like the back of his hand. And I said to him, here’s the drill this what’s going to happen, I’m gonna have a buyer in here. And he or his wife may ask questions about Tribeca. And when those questions come up on you, and you’re gonna be answering them, get it, he’s like, good. I gave him a high five. I’m like, we’re gonna have fun. So when we got in the car, we went to the first lesson I said, Now the first listing, I love the lobby, you’re gonna love them mosaic floor, and I introduced myself to the doorman the day before. So when he saw me, it was like a familiar face. So when we walked in, we showed the apartment, you just do your homework and spend the time without being, you have to be honest, but you it’s okay. If you’re new, they’re not asking no one asked me, How long have you been in the business ever? Well, no, that’s not true. Actually. Someone asked me when I got a listing, why would I give $2 million to someone that’s been in the business for 14 days? did ask me that? And I said,
D.J. Paris 38:12 which which I think is a reasonable question.
Vickey Barron 38:14 Yeah. I said for three very good reasons. He said, he said, why? I said, Well, number one, I I’m on, you’re under a good umbrella, meaning the firm, we we have all the tools in the tool box that you need. Number two, I am willing, because I knew he was insecure about me. So I said, I am willing to bring on the number three agent in my office for you as insurance. And number three, I will be holding that umbrella and I simply bring magic. And he said, You didn’t even blink. And I lean forward and I said nor did you and he gave me the listing. So sometimes you just have to have confidence. And if he doesn’t hire me, I’m not going to die. Like nothing bad happens. And when I’m changing listings, why can’t you celebrate them? Like send him a note and say I’m so happy for you that you got that Listen, you’re gonna knock it out of the ballpark.
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You know, they don’t know how to respond to a question like that. Do you rehearse in your mind answers to objections? I don’t even want to call them objections, questions. We’ll just call them questions.
Vickey Barron 41:20 Never. Never. In fact, an agent had invited me on a pitch, which I was confused about also, because I wasn’t sure I didn’t know what I was doing. But she said, I think you should come with me. I’m trying to get this listen, I think you will help. I said that. So kind of you grave. Tomorrow, we’ll go. So tomorrow came, we get in the elevator, and she was really nervous. Like I could tell she was really nervous. So she said to me, are you nervous? And I said, No. But why do you ask? She said, Well, I always get nervous before I go on a pitch. And she said, Did you rehearse? So then I said, rehearse what? She said, Well, did you rehearse your pitch? Well, I didn’t know. That’s a thing, like rehearse a pitch. So I said to her, Well, no, rehearse a pitch. So then she looked even more nervous, like he or she invited me on and I didn’t rehearse. So I said, I was serious. I said, you rehearsed a pitch. She said, Yeah. I said, How could you possibly do that? She said, How could you not? I said, Well, how do I know what I’m going to say? If I don’t know who’s behind the door? Like I don’t? I don’t understand that. I said, I mean, I look at comps, but don’t rehearse, like what I’m going to say because I don’t know, when she opens the door. How do I know? How do I? So then I got nervous, because I thought if this is what I’m gonna have to do like to be in the business. I’m not sure. Like, I cannot memorize a script or I would, it would be horrible. So anyway, when we went in, the woman opened the door. And she had a storyboard from the Micronesia Island, which I had worked for many years. And I was familiar with it. So it was unbelievable. Like the door opened up. I’m like, Oh, my gosh, is that from the Micronesia and
D.J. Paris 43:20 I know what that is. Yeah. Storyboard. So started the conversation.
Vickey Barron 43:23 And then there was a book on the shelf that I we started talking about that. And then we left the woman said, you, you never really did a pitch. And I said, Well, I asked her, I asked her a lot of questions like why are you selling what’s important to you? Talk to me, have you gone through the process before? And she just felt comfortable? And she hired us, but I didn’t do No, I don’t rehearse?
D.J. Paris 43:49 Yeah, no, that’s, that’s, that’s really true. So you, you would you go in and meet someone for the first time. You’re just looking to get a better sense of who they are, maybe by scanning kind of the room scanning, who they are paying attention to what they say, how they talk about and then just asking a ton of questions. And it is, it really is, I think the biggest compliment you can give someone by is by asking them about themselves. Not everyone. Now, some people are more closed and are want to just do business, and that’s fine. But I think the vast majority of us, especially this time, as we’re now sort of being able to get back together in person over the last year. I think people are hungry for you know, interaction, and we I don’t think we asked each other as much about our lives anymore, because social media sort of taken that part of it away where we now if I want to know if my friends been on a vacation, I don’t have to ask him I can just look on Instagram or Facebook assuming that they posted and I think that it’s taken away some of that. Some of the inquisitiveness that that We used to have about each other. And I think that that’s that that’s a really an important skill to to cultivate, if you’re an agent is, you know, really being curious about who that person is, how they, how they tick, what’s what’s, you know, important to them. And and, and it seems like that’s something that you really sort of plant your flag firmly in the ground, if it’s like, I want to get to know you. And that seems to be very effective for you.
Vickey Barron 45:25 And also, I think when agents go in to do a presentation, I think it’s so unfortunate that they spend the majority of their time doing an infomercial, they spend the majority of their time wanting to talk about how great they are, and what their numbers are, and why they’re the best and why they need to hire them. And instead of taking that precious time to really understand who this person is, and what their needs are, and, and are you the right fit for them. Because sometimes we’re not, like there’s sometimes like they, they shouldn’t hire me like it is not the right fit. And why not just say that? You know how powerful that is. If you say to someone say, You know what, I? I’ve heard you today, and it’s and then repeat. This is what? And I have to tell you, as much as I’d like to do this, I’m not sure if I were in your shoes, I’d hire me I actually, I have someone in mind, I’m gonna have you, you should call them. They’re like blown away by like, yeah, what is that, but I think I’m not gonna have fun on this assignment. We don’t connect. I don’t like your apartment, and I don’t understand it. And why did you buy it in the first place is what I’m thinking, but they have to sell it, but I don’t want to be the one selling it. Because it’s, it’s, there’s someone else that could sell it, that might be a better fit.
D.J. Paris 46:52 I almost wonder if you’ve ever turned down and a listing or a buyer and had them. So because again, I think back to the times where I’ve worked with salespeople or service people who are vying for business. And the number of times somebody has said, I’m not the right fit for you. But I know someone else is a one maybe one time in my life, but probably zero. I can’t think of any instance. But it is it is such an important again, it goes back to this honesty thing. I was like Sorry. My question was going to be I wonder if you’ve ever turned someone down who has then gone on to refer business to you even though you didn’t necessarily help them. I? If that hasn’t happened? I’m sure it will happen at some point.
Vickey Barron 47:35 Yes. And you know, what else happened that I think could be helpful for any listeners is there was a for sale by owner not willing to pay a fee at all, he was not going to pay $1. But my neighbor wanted to see the apartment. So I said to him, do you mind? Can my neighbor come tonight at seven o’clock after work to see your apartment? He said Do you understand? Let me repeat this again, you are not going to get paid $1 I am not paying any commission to any agent. I said, I have heard you loud and clear. Do you mind if I just bring her in at seven o’clock? He said why would you do this? And I said Well, number one, she’s asked to see it. Number two, she wants my opinion. And number three, if she buys it, you will never forget me. Yeah, good point. And he so I went in and met them. And my neighbor called me she worked at McGraw Hill. And she said she was like 45 minutes late. And I called her and she said I’m so sorry, I had a client come in, I’m not gonna be able to make it. Well, you know what, that forsale better?
D.J. Paris 48:49 Sure I know what you’re doing. I see what you’re doing.
Vickey Barron 48:53 I was mortified. mortified. So I made her get on the phone with him. I’m like, Okay, you need to talk to him right now because he’s gonna think I made you up. So they talked so then he he left a message on my phone that night at midnight. And he said, We want to give you the listing. I was shocked. And I said, Why would you do that? He said you were so brutally honest. Like you i We couldn’t believe how honest you were that he? And I said, Well, the truth is so then my neighbor got mad that I got the listing. I said, Don’t worry, I carved your name out if you buy it. You don’t have to pay me a penny. But she didn’t buy it and we sold it. And there was another example with him paying us our fee. He still made more money. So I really do believe for sale by owners should call every one of you on this call.
D.J. Paris 49:46 I love that because those are expireds for sale by owners. Those are tough calls and you do deal with some abuse when you make those phone calls and but I think that’s also a good thing to go go through, just to get some battle wounds because you realize, oh, that didn’t kill me, somebody yelled at me told me to eff off or whatever they may have said, they may just hang up, or I said, No agents or whatever it happens, and then you realize, oh, I survived that it’s okay. And, you know, I authentically tried to help this person they weren’t interested, not the end of the world. And what most for sale by owners do is they inflate as you know, I’m not telling this to you, of course, but to our listeners, for anyone that is scared for sale by owners tend to inflate their their property price without realizing that they don’t know they’re doing it. They think it’s worth X. And by the way, we all do this, I think even realtors can do this. And they, they’re probably not going to sell it because they’ve inflated the price. So at some point, I think the stats aren’t they don’t have them in front of me is that the vast majority of for sale by owners end up hiring someone anyway at some point, and it ends up selling for more if they hire a good agent. So that’s not really a great pitch. I think I don’t think somebody would be receptive to saying those kinds of things on on the phones. Did you know that if you hire me, you’re actually going to sell it for more, they’re not going to believe you. But if this idea of Radical Honesty is Oh, my gosh, that’s I just I just love it. I I’m curious if you’re willing to share any of the book that you’re currently working on? Because now I’m super interested in, in what this book is going to be? Do you mind just giving our audience a little taste of what’s coming?
Vickey Barron 51:27 It’s it’s really just a it’s no surprise? Yes, it is. I don’t even i i Sometimes I think why am I doing this because I’m just telling stories from early on my my life journey, if you will. And what I do hope that a reader gathers after reading it, is you start to see I’m very consistent. So what I did when I was 14 2240s 50s, I It’s hasn’t changed, like the recipe is pretty consistent. And it doesn’t matter where you are in life. It’s just caring about the other person, and being brave enough to ask the question, and also being aware of your weaknesses, because we’re all not super man or super women, you know, we’re just, we’re just people, and we’re flawed. And we’re not so special. And we’re not, you know, it’s, it’s okay, like, just accept who you are, and, and do the best you can, and try to be the best version of you, but care about other people. And you don’t need to bump them and step on them to make yourself feel better and get ahead. And if you actually don’t do that, somehow you you end up in a better spot.
D.J. Paris 53:00 Yeah, well, I agree with all that I have three final questions for you, I think three things I wanted to get to, but forgot. And so I just remembered. So want to get a get your perspective on these. You are very active in, in, in the in the community, you you participate, you give back, you volunteer at the local level. I don’t know if you also do the state or the national level, I suspect those opportunities come your way as well. How so? I’m going to preface before I get to my question by saying I avoided really being part of our local association and giving back in that way for for many, many years I’ve been doing. I’ve been in this industry since 2011. Or Yeah, somewhere around there. And anyway, I, I thought to be sort of bit honest, myself, I thought, well, if I do get involved, and I serve on some committees, well, you know, I’ll be doing good. And that’s a good thing. And I’ll be contributing and that’s good. But also, you know, maybe more people will know heard or hear about our firm just by nature of me being part of this, you know, committee and maybe that would ultimately help me indirectly in recruiting. Not that that was the primary reason. Well, I’ve been participating at the local level for about three years now. It really has not helped me in recruiting because but I continue to do it and now I’m even getting more and more involved. For one reason and I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. Which is that I have tried I get a lot of fulfillment from participating at the local level being part of the industry being being in community with with other agents that are trying to make things better. And even if it never results in somebody coming to our firm going oh I know you from the association I should join your firm which by the way has never happened and probably never will. But I I am so happy to be around other realtors who are all trying to you know to do the best they can and do the best for other realtors and I’m curious if you get a tremendous amount of fulfillment in the same way that I just mentioned for being part of giving back to the local associations.
Vickey Barron 55:06 I do I you can probably tell I’m a storyteller. I love stories. I think that when stories are being shared and told, there’s value in those stories, so when I’m able to get agents up on stage to do role playing, by the way, some if we could film them, we could have a sitcom because some of them are hilarious. And one of my favorite, which I’m going to share, because I don’t want anyone on this call doing some of this is hilarious. I said to someone, what do you take, if you’re invited into someone’s home there? You’ve never met them before. And you made a cold call for an example. And they invited you in? What do you take with you? And here’s some of the answers I’ve gotten. One said, I take flowers. So flowers Interesting, okay, flowers, someone else said, a bottle of wine. Okay, you take a bottle of wine. Someone else said candy. Someone else said a pitch packet. So I get them all. And then I get to come up on stage. And I say, Let’s roleplay this. So you’ve never met this person. You knock on the door, you ring the bell, they open it, and you say, here’s some flowers, or here’s a bottle of wine. It’s like it. It’s It’s awkward. They don’t awkward. Why are you bringing them these? They don’t know you? You know, it’s it’s just now personally, this may be shocking, but I do not give closing gifts. Never. I feel that’s awkward. I do not. I feel like I just sold an apartment. And you know, you can get a good size check. And I’m going to give them a bowl, or a keychain awkward. Like I don’t do it. I know a lot of people do and good luck. And I think it’s fantastic. Keep doing it. I’m not suggesting that you don’t. But for me, it doesn’t feel right. However, they get stuff from me for 10 years in a row like we’ve closed on the apartment. And I am known for sending handmade cards and unique gifts. But I don’t go to Tiffany’s and buy 200 Anything. I think if I sold your house and your pianists in fact, this happened, a woman was a pianist and I found a vintage scarf with piano keys on it. And I bought it and wrote a note and sent it to her. So you have to really another one’s a golfer and I found a bronze little golf statue and it’s on his fireplace. So I’m thoughtful in stay once I sell you something you don’t get rid of me. So you will hear from me consistently throughout the years.
D.J. Paris 58:01 I’m curious, how do you stay in touch with with clients in between transactions so that they don’t forget about how wonderful you are?
Vickey Barron 58:12 I that’s probably my it’s what I do like the like Halloween was just here. So I went through my list. And I’m like, All right, let me look who has kids between the age of two and 12. And this year, I had custom cookies made and mailed them to the kids. And all I write on the card by the way is boo, there’s no compass, like call me for, you know, if you
D.J. Paris 58:43 best compliment is your referrals.
Vickey Barron 58:47 None of that ever, ever, ever. So another year on Halloween, I had custom little pumpkins may with the child’s name embroidered on it so they could put the candy in it. And then I get photos of their kids with the cookies or the basket. And you know, it’s it just I I find small businesses and I like to smart support small businesses. There’s a peanut butter company that has and I had custom boxes made and put the peanut butter in there. And I said the markets nuts spread the love and a little handwritten note, but never like call me for free market analysis. By the way, I think I want to start charging for market analysis.
D.J. Paris 59:27 Don’t you think that’d be interesting.
Vickey Barron 59:29 I like that. Like everyone’s like here call me for a free market analysis. I might send a mail around say for $1,000. I’ll tell you what your apartments were. When That’d be funny. I wonder if it’s legal?
D.J. Paris 59:42 I don’t know. It’s an interesting idea. I know that people don’t value free things like they do things they pay for I mean that’s but I picked up on something that I’m sure audience picked up on is you said and this is such a great a great, small thing that I want to make sure it doesn’t get overlooked by our audience, you said, I think, you know, our Halloween came was coming up. So I went through my CRM or my database. And I wanted to find out who has children that are between the ages of two and 12. I wonder what percentage of agents even have that information? And I’ll bet you it’s under 2% of the of the realtors out there have that information on their clients. And that is important critical information to be able to think of a reason to stay in touch, right? If you’re just going, Wow, they sold their home four years ago, maybe they’re in the market to maybe I should reach out and see what their plans are. Okay, fine. But what are you going to do year two, year three, where you’re like they’re not moving, you have to have reasons to reach out. And the more opera, the more data you have, the more information you have, allows you to think be fun and creative and go, Oh, it’s back to school time. Maybe I’ll put some a little, you know, kids who are entering, you know, grade school, I know that. So maybe I’ll be able to, you know, put a little care package or whatever it could be anything. Knowing knowing what holidays people celebrate, right? If you’re going to be doing things for the December holidays, there’s several of them. You know, and of course, in New York City, there’s so many different cultures melding together, you can’t just blanket send out a Hanukkah card or a Christmas card. I mean, you need to know these things.
Vickey Barron 1:01:19 Okay, you just struck something. So here, there are two categories, you’re absolutely 100% Correct. If just like you need to really study that, that building, like if you’re at a cocktail party, and they bring it that address, you should say built 1927 46 units, majority, two bedroom, blah, blah, blah, when you have your buyers, I learned this when I took a acting class years ago, the the teacher asked me a question. They said, you know, the character, was she a vegan? Like, and I’m thinking myself going through the plate and talk about that. And he said, You need to know everything about that person, you need to know where they shop at Kmart or where they shop at Bergdorf? Would they ride a bike? Or would they get? Would they get a private car? Would they go hiking? Would they go to the theater? You need to and that’s what I do with my clients. So if I meet a client, I think to myself, I’m, I’m asking questions and learning who they are. And what’s important to them. I watch if they drink coffee or tea if they don’t you go out? No, no, they only drink tea. You don’t send them coffee. If they have pets, write the pet’s names down. I one year, I had custom things done with the painting of their animal on it and in the name and sent that out. So whatever it is, like you, you listen, you know, I had one client that was allergic to nuts, well, don’t send them the peanut butter. Right? So you’re
D.J. Paris 1:02:51 sending them, send them an epi pen, but send them a peanut butter on top of
Vickey Barron 1:02:56 medicine. So anyway, it is important to even here’s another thing, my cards, I have different cards. They’re like there’s let’s say a war. Warhol, you’re not, that’s not I may not send that to a certain group, I may send a foil stamp beautiful, elegant stationery to one and a really artsy to another, they don’t get the same thing. My clients do not get the same stuff. Because they’re different people.
D.J. Paris 1:03:30 Because you know enough about them to be able to compartmentalize them into or individual individualize them, I guess it’s better the better way to say it to say, Okay, this person’s into this and everybody. Everybody wants to feel special. Everyone wants to feel like a celebrated individual. And it sounds like that’s, that’s part of part of how you operate your business. Boy, you’ve said so much. I just have one final question. I was going to ask you about 2023. But I actually, I don’t want to do that because I want to I have a different question I wanted to ask, which is what mistake What’s the biggest mistake you made in your career? Not necessarily the biggest, you know, maybe you lost a listing or I’m not talking about that, but what what, what’s something that if you could go back to your earlier self as they, as you started in real estate, what’s advice that you would have given yourself that maybe you didn’t know back then
Vickey Barron 1:04:22 I allowed my business to drive me instead of me driving my business. And what I mean by that is I got I mentioned to you the volume early on with the fizz bows. And I didn’t stop to really plan and pivot earlier on I could have gotten to a certain point earlier on. If I had taken the time to methodically think about where I wanted to be. Instead I was kind of buried in weeds in the in the trenches. And I just kept plugging along plugging along without stopping to make adjustments. So
D.J. Paris 1:05:11 working working in the business versus working on the business kind of scenario, right?
Vickey Barron 1:05:15 Correct. That’s what I’d say. If I had to do over again, I would have done. I could have, I could have done that better.
D.J. Paris 1:05:27 And I think it’s a really what’s a wonderful answer for the time of year we’re at. Because I think this is a time when often sort of activity slows down transactions slow down holidays are here, they’re taking a lot of our attention. And it’s a good time to reflect, I think, on sort of where we want to go for 2023 and beyond. But just to sort of, I think that’s a great point, for anyone out there that’s immersed in their business, make sure that you carve some time out every so often to really reflect on because you are running your own business.
Vickey Barron 1:06:00 Right? And here, can I give a couple other tips, please, you’re running your own business. So one invest in the business, I find agents don’t want to spend money investing in their business, that’s crazy. What kind of business doesn’t like put money in capital up? Number two, everyone on this call, especially with 2023 Coming, save money, save, save, save your money, because what happens is when the market gets tough, the agents that were able to prepare and have a nest egg, have less pressure when those deals fall apart. And buyers walk. They don’t freak out. You know, so many agents, I always say like you see them and sellers and buyers, they need a grounded person, they don’t need someone on the edge that’s worried about paying their rent or their mortgage, and they can’t make they’re so focused on the commission, that it kills deals and you will lose the trust if if you’re not prepared. And you should never be thinking about the commission check. In fact, I t’s agents. That is probably you can see it. It’s almost like their commission check is on the forehead. And all they care about is money, stop caring about the money and care about the assignment. Just you know, I see the end before the beginning. So when I’m working on something, I keep my eye on the end result. And I’m I visualize a lot. And the other tip I’ll give an agent is decide where you want to go visualize what you where you’re going to be, and then work backwards. How are you going to get there? So for an example, one day, I woke up and said, I want to be a townhouse specialist why and sold any townhouses. But I walked in the office, I said, we’re going to be townhouse specialists. Okay, how are we gonna do that? Well, let’s just do something different and be creative with it. So I ended up doing little books that told stories about the townhouse. And it caught on and within a period of time, I was getting some listings and townhouses. And then but I again dove in and studied and became kind of a specialist in that pocket. So you have to put the time in.
D.J. Paris 1:08:22 Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really great point, we’re talking about sort of proactive thought about where you want to be, irrespective of where you are today, right? Because today, we’ll be going back in your history. But today that one day, you weren’t the townhouse specialist. And you said, but I’d like to be so i You didn’t wait for townhouses to come to you, you you figured out a way to actually build that skill set. And, and that’s, it’s, it’s being proactive, and we live in such a reactive world now where our phones are demanding our attention every few seconds with notifications, and our clients are demanding it every, every so often with texts and emails. And it’s easy to not be as proactive and to be really good at being reactive. And that’s good, too. But then to be able to step back and say, Who do I want to be? Where do I want to be? How many people do I want to help? What kind of people do I want to help? And then you know, we’re like you were saying working backwards? Boy, I could Vicki I could talk to you all day. And I wish I could be and I know that you are busier than me. So I am going to let you get on with all of your busyness because and by the way, this is how this again, speaks out. I’ll book end of this with with another thing about Vicki’s character. If you go to her compass page, you see a list of accomplishments that are really it’s about a mile long of just incredible feats. She has not mentioned one of the most today because I don’t I suspect not that important to her and also just not who she is and I just I really risk back that I have, I have interviewed people on the show who do have some pretty impressive credits as well who love for other people to know about those credits. And I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with that either. But I really love the fact that you have this, you have a tremendous track record. And that you don’t feel the need to share that which is again, probably goes to your success, as well. So anyway, Vicki, on behalf of our audience, we want to thank you for being on our show, you gave so many unbelievable tips and advice I, I was almost thinking during and I’m like, boy, if I could, if I could have Vicki on like once a month giving these tips, that would be amazing. But regardless, even in this episode, you provided so much value. So on behalf of the audience, we say thank you. And also on behalf of Vicki and myself, we want to thank all the listeners. And our viewers this is, you know, we are so grateful that you made it to the end of the show. We’re hope that this was helpful. I know that it was but let Vicki know, you know what’s Vicki, if anyone out there wants to share their appreciation, what’s the best way that another agent might be able to say thanks,
Vickey Barron 1:11:05 probably email me at v baron@compass.com.
D.J. Paris 1:11:10 We’ll put that in the show notes too. So if you want to say hi to Vicki and say thanks. And I really encourage people to do that. Because she she spoke from the heart today. She is an incredible again, I didn’t really read her credits, which are unbelievable. If I were to read them, you you would be paying attention to every single word she says because she is a very, very important person in the New York industry for real estate. So Vicki, thank you. And we will oh one last thing, we ask all of our listeners and viewers just to do one thing, which will help us continue to grow because we don’t spend money, too much on marketing. Pretty much no marketing money. But the best way you can help tell us help us rather is by telling a friend. So think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this unbelievably candid and authentic interview with Vicki and somebody that just needs to hear a couple tips that might turn their business around, or get them to the next level 2023 It’s going to be a difficult time for all of us. So let’s, let’s share Let’s share the good here and send this over to Vicki. The best way you could do that is just gonna have sent him over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every one of our episodes can be streamed right from the website. They don’t even have to be a podcast person. Or of course, they can always subscribe to the podcast, but tell a friend that would really they would be one good deed of the day. And it would really make make me happy because then we can reach more people. So thank you in advance for that. Vicki. Thanks for being on the show. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
Vickey Barron 1:12:37 Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for all the time I appreciate it. Bye bye
What To Do RIGHT NOW For A Great 2023 • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Dec 22, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com offers an overview of the real estate market over the last years. Chris discusses where agents should shift their attention now that the market has slowed down. Chris gives tips on how should agents talks to their clients about the equity of their home. Last, Chris emphasizes the importance of transforming the transactional relationship with your clients into a recurring value relationship.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Where should you be focused in 2023 to keep your business thriving? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the closed.com No, this is a partnership between keeping it real in the clothes and let me tell you more about the clothes. Now the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals they cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o s e just like it sounds.com And subscribe to their newsletters get notified every time they publish an article with us as always is Chris Lynn sell senior staff writer and real estate coach for the close. And Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s also a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. And he’s been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris Welcome once again to keeping it real, we’re excited to have you
Chris Linsell 2:48 here. Thanks for having me back. Always a pleasure looking forward to digging into it today.
D.J. Paris 2:53 Always a pleasure to so I wanted to start with with something that I get a zillo report every, every every month as a consumer, just because I’m always interested in what Zillow sends to the public. That is my address. And they tell me you know what they believe my home to be worth. And you know, it’s a pretty depressing number. I saw it today, it’s actually gone down in the last 30 days, quite substantially. However, I am not in the market of selling. But I was thinking about sellers, because I also have a very low interest rate. So I’m at around a 3% rate. And so if I were to sell right now, which again, I’m not looking to do, I would be, you know, I would feel it, at least at first glance that I’m getting a pretty bad deal because my home is, you know, worth less than what I paid for it. And I’m still net equity positive, but not by a whole lot. And then also I would be giving up that 3% rate to you know, most likely a six plus percent rate in the new home that I were to purchase. So I was just thinking, this has got to be on the minds of a lot of homeowners right now who probably would like to buy, but maybe are seeing those rates and maybe seeing their value of their home, you know, go down in the last couple years as those rates have gone up. So just kind of curious to get your thoughts on the psychology of, of the consumer or the homeowner, and what realtors can do in 2023 to sort of adjust for that.
Chris Linsell 4:23 Yeah, it’s a great question. Because we are reaching an interesting kind of Crossroads as far as the overall consumer mindset and set of experiences that are driving their behavior. Right. I think it’s fair to say there have been I would say three, three recent relatively recent, honestly relatively recent sets of kind of eras for buyers and sellers of real estate in the United States, right we had the pre COVID era when we have Add a relatively short inventory, relative to demand, but they weren’t writing stories in the Washington Post about inventory. Then COVID came, and everybody kind of freaked out. And we needed to kind of get our heads around what that meant. In the real estate effects that happened were, you know, a lot of folks decided they were going to move from cities out into more suburban or rural areas, we saw a very high demand for housing turnover, especially for single family homes. And we also had an economy that warranted the need of kind of some kickstart programs, to give us a chance to make sure that we we could continue to function economically as a country, whether or not those were necessary or viable solutions, I’m gonna leave that up to somebody else to debate. But one of the kind of downstream results of that were extraordinarily low interest rates, as you mentioned before, for purchasers of real estate in the COVID, or the very, you know, like the current COVID, or the very post COVID. Time. So then that leads us to where we are now, interest rates, high inventory, still a bit of a challenge, and a lot of places still competitive markets in a lot of places, and real estate professionals looking to be planning their strategies for 2023. And a lot of questions are being asked about how do we reach sellers? We’ve got sellers who are unlikely to want to sell their home, because where are they going to go? They don’t have got a lot of great inventory options. They don’t have a lot of great interest rate options. What’s the benefit to sell? And I want to put forward a couple of different ideas here. The first is you talked about what’s the psychology and the mindset of sellers, I want to start by setting the tone in that we have to remember, the psychology and mindset of sellers is not a single point of light, it is a significant gradation of various perspectives and viewpoints. We have to remember that, yes, a lot of real estate was purchased in the COVID. And immediately post COVID, if you can call it that era at low interest rates. But that does not make up the majority of homeownership right now, by any stretch of the imagination. We have a good chunk of folks who owned their home long before COVID was even a thing have an incredible amount of equity in their home right now. That is likely unrealized, we have a good chunk of folks who didn’t refinance, who are sitting on even a post refinance are still sitting on a good chunk of equity. And where we find ourselves as real estate professionals is a place we haven’t found ourselves in a long time, which is the number one priority for a lot of real estate professionals when it comes to listings and sellers and their psychology and mindset is one of education, not of immediate opportunity. We are not answering calls from people saying, Hey, I heard it’s great time to sell my house, what options do I have? Real estate professionals should consider those calls to be on hold for quite a while, maybe a year, maybe two years, frankly, we are needing to now shift our strategies to education and awareness. Because a lot of owners right now, either don’t know their options, or think they know their options when they don’t really which is frankly worse. So to answer your, your mindset question, my initial response is most mindsets right now are either unaware or ignorant. And these are places where yes, it makes things challenging. But for real estate professionals who can shift their strategies, that’s a huge opportunity to
D.J. Paris 9:16 it’s such it’s such an interesting play this equity question, I think this is something that isn’t typically although I’m just thinking of myself, and I might not be representative of the John Q Public, because I’m in the real estate business. So I probably look, I’m probably not the right sort of viewpoint here. But this idea of thinking about equity, I just don’t think most homeowners are think about their equity unless they’re in the process of selling right? I think it’s they look at the appreciation. They look at the the amount they cut to the mortgage bank, the lender every month, they probably know their interest rate or there abouts. So I think those are kind of the Three key metrics is what’s my home worth? What am I paying every month? What’s my, what’s my actual rates? I don’t know, and what my home’s even worth, I think is oftentimes not really thought about all that much. But I think this idea of equity would be a real. So I think that’s a really interesting ideas like maybe being maybe thinking about from an agent perspective, what would what do you think about an agent doing an evaluation? Not just what’s your home worth? Because of course, we can do automate those through CMAs. And there’s a million tools to do that. But what if an agent in 2023 said, Hey, I know you might not be thinking of selling right now. But you did buy like seven years ago, and you’ve probably refinanced. I’m sure you have a really low right now. But let’s take a look at the equity and see if that would actually influence your decision in being able to move maybe that even trumps the interest rate that’s currently out there, because we can look at equity, we can look at, you know, pricing now has come down. So I’m just curious what you think of having that conversation with a homeowner? I don’t think anyone really has those conversations. Outside of real estate, like I don’t even think a financial adviser necessarily would say let’s talk about the equity in your home. Because I think typically, financial advisors don’t look at that as asset until you actually cash it out. Well, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 11:25 Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry. No, no,
D.J. Paris 11:27 that was my point was I think this is kind of an interesting opportunity for agents who really want to separate themselves is almost doing like a financial review of the home as opposed to just do you sell? Do you want a bigger place? Do
Chris Linsell 11:40 you? I don’t know. Yeah. 100%. In fact, I this is actually it’s funny, you mentioned this, because this was one of the topics I talked about. Last couple of weeks ago, a couple of weeks via when we’re recording this. I was a presenter at the triple play conference in Atlantic City for New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania realtors. And one of the things I chatted about in one of my sessions there was I challenged folks a challenge real estate professionals who attended there to answer the following question. When you are representing a buyer in the purchase of real estate, when you finish at the closing table, and the last signature is at the bottom of the final page, your clients, do they automatically magically, somehow supernaturally get endowed with the expertise and knowledge necessary to understand not just what they’ve purchased, but the value of their home as an investment? The answer, of course, is no signing, closing paperwork does not give you the insight to understand the value of your investment. And I keep saying investment, even if you’re just buying a single family home, to live in and to raise your kids in. You and I were talking earlier, before we started recording this real estate is one of those unique purchases, that as an investment, it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying this as income producing or not. When you purchase real estate, you’re making an investment and it can turn out good or it could turn out bad, you get to be in control of that. And your control is significantly more fine tuned when you’re aware of the ins and outs of your investment. So when I challenged folks, what I challenged folks to do at triple play was to remember, when somebody buys a home, they do not automatically become a real estate expert, and an expert in terms of their home’s value in the market, their home’s value in terms of the equity that they’ve collected, and their home’s value in terms of how competitive it could be for other home options. And so I challenged Realtors there to set a schedule to become their buyers, pro bono, real estate financial advisor, every year, set a meeting where you offer to say, Hey, I’d love to do an analysis of your investment. Let’s find out how much it’s worth. Let’s find out how much equity you have in it. Let’s find out how competitive your rates are. I don’t need to charge you for this. I don’t want to charge you for this. I only want to arm you with the information you need to make good decisions about your home. Those folks are going to not just become your client. They’re going to become your client for life by offering those services and for all those real estate professionals who are listening to this and say, Well, I don’t have this big buyer client pool to draw from. You have an unlimited set of people to draw from because there are millions 10s of millions of homeowners in this country. Whose selling agent, they are no longer in contract with, who need and deserve this information and who you could start offering it to, and by de facto become their agent. So start reaching out to folks who offer this financial analysis offer completely free. So I just want to arm you with the information that you need to make a good decision about your home, these folks are going to become your clients by virtue of offering the service and when it is time to sell and when you can demonstrate that they have a strategic advantage they’re gonna sell with you because you are the one that clearly is demonstrating that you know, the market.
D.J. Paris 15:42 Yeah, this is a consultant perspective. And I like the idea of not mentioning when you when you’re reaching out to to owners, and again, they don’t have to be past clients, they can be really anyone who owns a property. And this idea of not saying hey, I want to run a CMA, I want to run comps for you, which again, there are lots of homeowners that understand that term, or I’ve heard that term before. But the term they probably haven’t heard is I want to evaluate your investment. And this idea of it being now they hear that from their financial advisors, if they have one once a year, usually, they’ll say hey, we need to read your look at the investments, see how they did it stacked up against the the indexes or your overall you know, financial goals, and let’s make sure we’re on track to retire or whatever the you know, send the kids to college or whatever it might be. This is a very interesting alternative way to really do a CMA, but not just the CMA. So you’re saying, you know, yeah, they can get a CMA from anybody. comps are pretty easy. You can even just get them online without talking to a realtor. But this is more of a what a financial adviser would do. They’d sit down and say, let’s let’s go over all the numbers, not about all their other investments, like a financial advisor would do, but about just their home and thinking of it like an investment. Because while you were doing that, while you were talking, I was thinking what I did when I was ready to buy the property that I have now, I was very nervous, because it’s obviously it was sizable purchase. Anyone who buys a home understands the nervousness there. And everyone listening knows what it’s like for their clients. And I called a bunch of top Realtors in my area, about five of them just to go, am I making a mistake here? Because I was nervous, and I wanted to get their advice. And I reached out to people that I knew and said, Is this a good idea? Because it was new construction, I was a little nervous. Is this overpriced? And I got really good advice that way. And so I did a version of that by talking to other realtors. Most people aren’t going to do that. But I guess the point was, I wanted somebody to tell me, it’s a good time to buy. Yes, I give it my stamp of approval. And I don’t know that I would always. Yeah, I think that that’s something that a lot of people want to know, is totally agree. And I don’t know that they always trust the realtor to give them that information. I think realtors are often seen as salespeople, and salespeople are trying to sell. And so whether or not the real estate agent has the best interest of the client in mind, I think there there does have to be a little bit of change work around the language that’s used when you call like, I want to talk about your home as an investment. And I want to talk about where that investment sits right now. So that you can think about the future and think about if there’s any plans that will change as a result of you really understanding where things are. I just think that’s a powerful reframe. And a really, really like unique approach.
Chris Linsell 18:36 Well, you know, the interesting thing too, is that the reef or the the other kind of extension of this reframing the conversation gets into the way that our clients define their relationship with us. So if I asked you, you know, if I asked you, if I’d say I was new to Chicago, and I said, DJ, I’d really need some suggestions. I need a good doctor. I need a dentist, I need an accountant. I need a chiropractor. The people that you would refer to me or refer me to, you would say oh, yeah, you should definitely check out my chiropractor is down on the down on the street. Oh, you need an accountant. My accountant. I’ve been working with him for years. Great guy you you’d love this guy. Oh, you need a doctor. The doctor I’ve been going to she’s great. You know, a bunch of my family we all see her. You just those those referrals totally natural language. Every single one of them was a you got to see my doctor, my chiropractor, my dentist or a car accountant or whatever. But when it comes to real estate professionals, when you say Oh, I’m looking to move to Chicago, I need a good real estate professional. You would probably that I mean I think the default for most folks is I know a realtor. Yeah. Or I know a bunch of Realtors Yeah, I’ve, you know, I’ve worked with three different realtors in town, I can give you all of their names if you want. But I know our realtor in town, or I know a ton of Realtors, or there are a ton of Realtors, we don’t have this, my professional relationships in the real estate space. But that comes from the fact that you see your chiropractor on a regular basis, you see your accountant on a regular basis, you see your doctor, we see our real estate professional once in a blue moon. Because our relationship is completely transaction oriented with those people it’s not Care and Keeping oriented. What you can adjust in 2023, not to make our chiropractor pun here. But what you can adjust in 2023 is the way that you pursue that relationship with folks to say, Listen, I want to be your realtor, or your your broker your agent. So here’s how we can do this. And, you know, you can start by fostering these relationships with people you already are connected to. But that doesn’t have to be the case. This is, you know, you start further back, you know, closer to zero if you’re going, you know it trying to prospect with people who you don’t have a current relationship with. But imagine just for a second, this value, let’s say you say hey, you know, I’d love to help you understand the value of your home help you understand when it’s a great time to buy and sell. Somebody says yeah, sure, that’d be great. You can pull somebody, anybody you can, you can request from your bank, a mortgage statement, these are on demand, if you have an online portal, you can get it instantly, it will tell you all the details, how much your loan was for, what your current balance is, what your equity is, and what your rate is. Now, as a savvy real estate professional, I can also tell you, banks don’t typically do home equity loans, if you have less than 20% equity. But if you have more than 20% equity, a bank will often lend you money against your equity. So if you sit down with me and you say, okay, through our analysis, I can see that you, you have $200,000 left on your mortgage, you have about $150,000 in equity on this property. So you could qualify for a refinance, you could pull some of this equity out and do a project in the house, you want a brand new kitchen, this would pay for it, you could sell right now, if you sold right now, even after fees, you’d still be walking away with somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 $115,000 in your pocket. What could we do with that people aren’t gonna look at you providing this value and options as all the evidence that they need, that you have their best interest at heart and not yours, it is no longer a transactional relationship. It is a nurturing, recurring value relationship, just like those other professionals that I named earlier, this is really a chance to set the tone for how you want to operate your business and 2023. I know a lot of realtors are nervous about this, frankly, this is an opportunity. This is the time to put your foot on the gas, not get back on your heels, it’s time to get on your toes.
D.J. Paris 23:23 Yeah, and I think I think your boy, you just said so many things that I couldn’t agree more with, I think this is the opportunity to develop that annual, you know, touch that’s not just a Hey, it’s your birthday, it’s the holidays. Thanks for you know, this is your home anniversary card for when you bought or sold. All those things good, too. But this idea of actually providing real value once a year. And the real value that I think the average homeowner is thinking about is or the the average the question that they’re thinking about is should I buy or sell right now? Should I move? Right? Should I move right now, I think is usually the main question. And, you know, there’s obviously pressures that, you know, job changes, and there’s reasons that people move that have nothing to do with an annual review from a from a realtor, but boy, I would love a service like that. I would pay for a service like that. I pay up 100 or 200 bucks a year for somebody to come in and say okay, I looked at every I mean, I pay a financial advisor, I pay an accountant, I pay, you know, I would actually pay. So this is something that you can do that’s very valuable, that I think people would pay for I don’t know that you should charge people for it. And maybe in some states, you probably could charge but regardless, I think it’s it’s your right, this is the value add that is going to ensure that two things, one that they’re going to work with you in the future, but to and this goes back to your Hey, you got to talk to my hairstylist or my accountant, this this is going to get people talking, I think and I think you could even tell them that when you’re when you’re doing these reviews to say hey You know, this is something I do, and it’s just my way of providing service. But if you have other friends that are thinking, Should I buy? Should I? So is it a good time rates are up low inventories. Now, I would love to do the same analysis for them. And you could, you know, I think this could be a huge marketing strategy for people,
Chris Linsell 25:17 Big time, big time. And you know, let’s like call a spade a spade here, too. This is advantageous to real estate professionals, not just in the fact that you have the opportunity to create a more stable repeat business, which is certainly a huge upside. But let’s also not discount the fact that if you can get the sort of relationship locked in, you then have a platform to give the sort of advice that includes things like, hey, you know how, like, there are 12, there’s 12 months in the year. But if you decided that you’re going to make one extra payment a month, you can cut down on your interest costs over the course of you know, X number of years, and increase your equity by X percentage over X number of years. This is really great for you. This sounds like good advice. It is good advice to homeowners. But the other thing it does is you are setting yourself up to have distant and near future clients who are more qualified, who have higher budgets, who are more educated about real estate and the process. I mean, imagine the difference between a listing where your seller, not only did they know the real market value of their home before the listing appointment, because you’ve already educated them on this. But they also are realistic about what the next steps entail, your workload goes from 100 to five in that instant. Now, granted, you’re doing that work on the front end, but you’re establishing it’s kind of it has a slow drip of education and awareness in a way that other professionals have to kind of mainline all at once on the front end, sellers feel overwhelmed, they’re often miss the details that are necessary to take those shortcuts. I mean, this is a selfish strategy to you’re going to develop regular, a book of business from this strategy, but you’re also going to develop more qualified better informed and frankly, clients with bigger budgets as a result, which is going to affect positively our bottom lines as well.
D.J. Paris 27:37 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episodes sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it’s really it’s really interesting. It’s funny, I’ve done 430 Whatever episodes of this podcast where I’ve interviewed a lot of the very top producers in the country. And I don’t know that anyone’s ever shared with me this idea of doing an annual people have talked about doing an annual review, but they haven’t really gotten as granular about it as what you’ve mentioned. And so if we were just to recap the steps. So the idea is you would call people that are either past clients, or you could say hey, I’m trying I’m you could even tell people that weren’t your past client. And maybe you could even test it with people who might never use you. But people who you could sort of try this approach with and say, Hey, I’m, I really want to bring more value to my clients the next in this upcoming year. And I have found that my clients are constantly wondering what’s going on in the market. Is it a good time for me to move should I sell should I buy and you know, oftentimes, they are not totally sure how to make sense of that answer. And so I want to come in and just kind of evaluate what What, you know, your current position, your current home, your investment, how it’s doing, how it’s doing relative to other homes in the area. And if you were thinking about moving, you know, here’s, here’s kind of what you might be looking at. So we can we’re gonna take a look at the full financial picture of that, and give you a give you a recommendation. I think I gosh, I think that’s I mean, you know, look, if I’ve ever been to an attorney, the end of the day, I’m like, What’s the recommend? Should I do this or not, you know, or an accountant should I declare this or not, like, I just want people’s advice. And I think the, the realtors really should move away as far as they can from being labeled a salesperson, as to a service professional, or consultants. I know consultants, you have to check with your state licensing to make sure that you can call yourself other things, you definitely don’t want to call yourself something that you’re not supposed to. But this idea of acting as if you are a consultant, whether or not you use that word, acting as if you would hire somebody to come in and say, How do I fix my business? And they go, Well, I just looked at everything, here’s what you need to do?
Chris Linsell 31:07 Well, you know, I’m gonna give you the one, this is the kind of a dollop of Chris secret sauce to get this conversation started with people who you don’t know you’re like cold approaching on this. Here’s the line. And I guarantee it works, because I’ve used it many times. So if you’re listening to this, and I’ve used this on you, sorry. But here it is. When you are cold approaching somebody and you say, I was just doing a CMA for a neighbor of yours, and I used your property as a marker for value for the neighborhood. I wanted to reach out to let you to let you know that I was just looking at values there, I have a very good understanding of what your home is worth. And would love to know if you’re interested in this overall financial picture. No obligation, no cost. I’ve already got the work done. These are all the key phrases. That’s a great one. I’ve already got the work done allows people to say yes without feeling like they’re inconveniencing you or putting themselves in your debt. That’s a reason a lot of people say no to free things, because they’re like, oh, then I’m going to owe this person something, say I’ve already got the work done, then they have are free to say yes, without the feeling of true or implied obligation. Say I was doing a CMA for a neighbor of yours. This shows that you are active that you have experience that other people trust you. These are true. key phrases that are going to activate those parts in our brain were like, okay, there is real value that I’m recognizing here. I’m not being sold a gimmick. I’ve got somebody who’s providing real value in places that I trust in ways that I don’t feel obligated, I can say yes to this, you’re gonna get in the doors, if you use these lines, I promise.
D.J. Paris 32:57 Yeah, you can you can even say something like, I know, this seems like a sales tactic. But the reality of it is actually did this for your for your neighbor. And I just already have the data done. So I’m happy to share it with you. Yeah, what’s in it for me is maybe down the road, maybe you would think about me if you ever needed to find a professional but But what I wanted to share with you is actually just something I did for your neighbor anyway, you probably wouldn’t even have to say it that way. But the point is, is you could you could explain it and and be totally forthright about it and still likely get very little resistance. So this is a great, great place to wrap up. So I really want want everyone to think about 2023. And I know there’s a lot of nervous energy in the agent world. I know our agents are scared. I know, broker owners are have some fear about 2023. And what we’re trying to find is opportunities that can keep you focused, and active, and this idea of doing annual reviews, and not just what’s your home worth and what’s you know, what are the home’s near your worth, but actually looking at equity, looking at rates, looking at reef refi, looking at all of all of the things that people don’t usually look at, in one overarching sort of view, right? They look at little things like the rates that and my home is worth this over here. And it’s not really a cohesive picture. And you could provide that picture to them. And you could even if you really wanted to get granular just want to hear their ideas, you could talk to their financial advisor to you could say hey, if you have and by the way, that’s another great person to network with because of course those opportunities are pretty obvious. But you could even say hey, I want to run this by your financial advisor and just make sure I get their sign off on it which then if they liked their financial advisor and maybe you’re not their current realtor, provide some social proof where they might consider using you in the future. So you can even go that further step of saying, hey, I want to talk to your your financial advisor about this if you’re not, you know, so anyway, but Chris, um let’s talk about the clothes in the last minute and then we’ll we’ll let you go. So tell us for anyone that isn’t a current clothes reader. What is the clothes?
Chris Linsell 34:58 The clothes it is The internet’s leading publication for advice, strategy, resources, everything that real estate professionals need to level up their business and create the life through work that they want the clothes.com super easy to find us, th e c l o s e.com. Everything on the close is aimed at creating shortcuts towards the success that real estate professionals deserve. We have everything from lead generation marketing, tech reviews, education, continuing ed, things on certification, certifications and designations, we have things on every we have content on every imaginable sort of marketing strategy, social media content, lead generation platforms, you name it, we’ve got it, I’m in charge of making sure that the close has the best answers to the old questions that we’ve been asking for a long time. What we offer is free, just come to the website, read sign up for our email list, get regular updates for the new content we’re creating. Our goal is to provide the best strategies that real real estate professionals can use to, like I said, create the business that they want. We do offer a paid product called the close Pro, if you do want to level up your close experience. But frankly, that’s a small portion of what we offer on the close, it’s not even something that I really push. Because 99% of the value we offer here is completely free. We just want to help. Our goal here is to live this mantra of you can do it, the clothes can help, we have the tools that you need to be successful. So come on over the clothes.com Follow us on social, you can connect with me and all of the rest of the editorial team on the close. And that’s the last thing I’ll say is that those of us who are creating content at the close, this is not farmed out to generalists or to freelancers, or to people who have never set foot inside a home for sale or operated in open house. Anyone who’s creating content on the close is a bona fide real estate professional with real transactions under their belt. They’re speaking from experience, and that’s experienced that you can learn from.
D.J. Paris 37:15 Yeah, and just as a quick example of an article that I got really excited about they updated the clothes updated their best real estate CRM list in the last week or so for 2023. I don’t know if it’s on the homepage yet. But it is an amazing article, because every realtor I know is like am I using the right CRM. And by the way, they have another article about the best free CRM. So if you’re new to the business and don’t want to spend money, they have that article. But they also have best paid CRMs. And they’re not in bed with these companies, right? They may earn affiliate deals if you end up signing up, but their whole thing is is legitimate journalist journalistic integrity and the reviews are amazing. And they’re about the only place I trust for reviews. So, you know, in a way, I mean, I’m sure there’s other reputable, you know, real estate tech review services, or websites, I just haven’t found them, the close is the place I go, because I know I’m gonna get a deep dive into products and services that I as an agent want to or may want to consider. So guys go in there. Really, it’s stuff. It’s amazing. These are long form articles. They’re really well written. And Chris is at the helm and making sure the content is is top notch. And it is. So go to the clothes.com definitely get on their mailing list. And you know, check out the clothes pros. Well, if you want that extra 1% of just really really amazing information that’s behind their paywall. It’s like, what $1 A day maybe total. It’s ridiculously inexpensive if you want to subscribe, but you don’t ever have to you can just read their content for free as well. All right, Chris, thank you. I know we went over time, so we will let you go get on with your busy day. But on behalf of all of our listeners, we want to thank Chris give them a shout out Chris What if they want to chat with you on Twitter now that Twitter has made a resurgence? I know you’re a Twitter guy. What’s the best way they should reach on Twitter? You can argue with Chris on Twitter,
Chris Linsell 39:05 you can definitely argue with me. You would not be the first nor the last to troll me on Twitter. Uncle Elon has not shut down my account yet. So if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find it and find me at Lynn cell Chris. Maybe we can tag that in the show notes. I’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Atlin cell Chris. I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, just add my name Chris Lynn Zell, Senior Content Strategist and real estate writer at the close. Yeah, come connect with me on social media. I love interacting with folks. I love answering questions, love providing feedback, and always open to criticism. So please feel free to come and tell me how I got things wrong because, you know, that’s only happening about a dozen times a day. And I’d love to add your voice to the chorus or to the chorus of of support. So, you know, just here to help pass along what I know about building real estate businesses where We’re all in this together. Awesome. And then for everyone else listening, please just tell one friend about this episode.
D.J. Paris 40:06 Everybody scared about 2023. Chris just gave a really great strategy for how anyone can stay busy and 2023 Do something the other realtors aren’t doing these annual financial reviews, investment reviews, as Chris called it, and send them a link. This should go to everybody in your office not because I’m so great. I’m not and not even because Chris is so great, although he is. But the just because nobody else is really talking about this. So please send a link. Go to our website, keeping it real pod.com introduce other agents to us. It’s free. Please help us out. We really appreciate it. We’ll keep doing more episodes. All right, Chris. Thank you so much. We’ll see everybody on the next one.
Chris Linsell 40:45 Thanks, DJ. See you soon.
Sharing Your Why With Real Estate Clients • Kelly Parker
Dec 20, 2022
Kelly Parker the founder of Chicago Home Collective goes back to the beginning of her career in real estate. Kelly emphasizes the importance she and her team gives to making the home-buying process enjoyable to their clients. Next, Kelly discusses why she doesn’t set up goals for her business but aims in building a relationship-based business and how that’s helped in growing her business. Kelly also discusses the importance of sharing your WHY with your clients and how that helped her find her niche. Kelly also talks about how come she’s not worried about 2023 and how she plans in navigating it. Last, Kelly discusses the importance of celebrating your achievements.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you nervous about 2023? Well don’t be because today we’re talking to a top producer, and she’s going to explain exactly how she’s going to stay busy and thriving, so you can to stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Kelly Parker. Before we get to Kelly, just a couple of quick reminders. Number one, please help us continue to grow. By supporting our sponsors. They are the reason that we have such an amazing team. They keep us in business, and we want you to keep them in business. So please check out their products and services and support them because they support us. And the second part is the other way you can help us is by telling a friend I think of one other realtor that needs to hear what you’re about to hear with my conversation with Kelly and send them a link either over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com or to any podcast app, they just search for keeping it real. And they hit that subscribe button and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please subscribe as well. And if you also want to leave us a review, let us know what you think of the show. We would also greatly appreciate that Okay, let’s get to the main event, my conversation with Kelly Parker. Today on the show we have Kelly Parker with Chicago home collective with compass here in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Kelly Kelly has over 13 years of residential real estate experience and her expert guidance professionalism and passion for mentorship has allowed Kelly to grow Chicago home collective into a top 1% team across the entire country. Now this was a business that was born during the 2009 housing crash and has since transverse transversed many real estate markets serving she served over 500 clients she has generated over 250 million in production, and recently grew into a coaching platform for other female realtors. To learn more about Kelly and her team, please visit Chicago home collective.com also follow her team on Instagram, which is Chicago home collective. And also follow Kelly, personally on Instagram, which is Kelly underscore e underscore Parker, all of those links will be in our show notes so you don’t have to type them in. Kelly, welcome to the show.
Kelly Parker 4:01 Hi, thanks for having me. So nice to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:05 Yeah, I am really grateful that you’ve come on. You’re very, very popular person here in Chicago in the realtor community and we’ve never had you on the show. And I know I see you at events and I am really grateful to finally have you on after all these years. Because you’ve really built an incredible team. I’ve actually had some of your team members on the show before I’ve had Emily on and I really would love to talk to you about what you think is happening right now what’s happening was maybe will happen 2023 What agents can do to get prepared. But let’s go all the way back to the beginning because I always think it’s fun to hear about how you got into real estate so do you mind sharing with our audience you know why real estate and how you got it?
Kelly Parker 4:53 Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, I got in in 2009 the worst time according to some to get into The industry. But truthfully, it was like perfectly timed for me, I got in, because I was watching what was happening, I watched, you know, the housing market come to a screeching halt and essentially crash. And I have always been someone who really, truly like value, the power of home and what it can mean for you and your life. And I just could not understand how people could lose their homes. Like how could you have a foreclosure? How did Why were you having to do a short sale, and I really like it. It really broke my heart to watch this happening for people. And essentially quit the job that I was doing. I was in fashion merchandising, quit that and jumped in full time into real estate in the like spring summer of 2009. And truthfully never looked back since. So it’s it’s been a journey, but that my reason at the time. And it still is the reason today is that I just truly wanted to help people who were experiencing so much so many feelings around something that to me is just so important, which is your home. So
D.J. Paris 6:08 yeah, I think that’s I think that’s very right. Odd with respect to the fact that making a home buying or selling decision is it’s an incredibly big decision for most people. And I mean, even for me, when I bought my second condo, I mean, not a second, I only have one condo, but my second time purchasing a condo, I was surprised at how stressful it was for me. And I’m in the industry. And I have a lot of resources at my disposal. And I had a lot of people to ask to go, did I’m making a horrible mistake, or is this a good investment? And even with all of that, it was still like really, really scary. And I’m curious how, you know, one of the things that I’ve always admired about you is I feel like you and your team are really good at understanding your client’s needs and concerns and stress and anxiety. Do you think that’s Is that an accurate description?
Kelly Parker 7:10 Absolutely. You know, I think one of our like taglines for Chicago home Collective is the journey is just as dares the destination. And it’s because we really believe that your whole experience leading you up to actually closing on your home and moving into your home, you carry that experience with you into your new home. And so to me, it was it’s so important that you enjoy that process that you enjoy the journey of it, and that your home not be marked like one of your initial memories of your home is drama or stress, or, you know, there’s already usually a lot of life stuff already happening around a new home, you know, marriage, children, our new job or a, you know, a breakup, like there’s always something else that tends to accompany a transition to a new home. And so to us, we’ve really made it our personal responsibility that you enjoy that process because you carry that energy, you carry that memory into the new home. And so yeah, I mean, particularly in 2009. And that’s why I’m saying like, that’s why I got in was I just felt like we could do so much more, I can’t change the circumstances, I couldn’t change that people were having to short sale their homes and make these choices. But I could at least help that transition out of a home feel a lot more enjoyable, the best that it could, and then also carried that into educating those who are going to start buying in that market. And, and also enjoying that process. So yeah, I think you nailed it spot on. I mean, that’s really what we stand for in Chicago home Collective is enjoying the journey.
D.J. Paris 8:46 And you have a all female led team. And Is that intentional or in? I’m curious, tell us about your team?
Kelly Parker 8:56 Yeah, oh my gosh, where do I start? They’re the most fabulous humans in I’ve ever known. Like, seriously, they’re such an extension of my own family. Now, it would be wild to not have them, um, I, you know, started Chicago home collective eight years ago. And it wasn’t because I wanted a team. It’s just because I was growing. And I didn’t need support. But I was like, if I’m gonna have support, I’d rather do it in a mentorship form. And so I started mentoring Emily, who you’ve had on the show, and you know, that sort of birth Chicago home collective, I was like, Well, I guess I gotta give this thing a name. And it’s not the Kelly Parker team, because it was never it’s not about me. And this is what we also say at Chicago home Collective is not about us. It’s about our clients. There’s no real hierarchy within this team. We are all collaborating. We are all collectively working towards the same end goal. And so it started with with Emily and then over the years has multiplied and now there’s a total of eight of us. We are it is all female. You know, I think at first, I wouldn’t say it was intentional. I would say this, I don’t recruit people come and ask to speak to me and to join the team. And I, I’m not surprised that it’s women, because a lot of how I speak and what I stand for, I think is, is, you know, specific to females and a little bit different than some of the unusual narrative in the industry. So it’s now we are very proud all female team, and we will definitely be staying an all female team.
D.J. Paris 10:31 I love it. Well, you know, it’s we’re getting so by the time this episode airs will be in December, it’ll be basically the end of the 2022, you know, business season. Where we’re at currently is, you know, a lot of agents are thinking about 2023, trying to figure out what am I going to do differently in 2023? What are, you know, what skills do I want to develop? What goals do I want to set? You know, how many homes might I want to sell? What does my production want to look like? You have a very unique approach to thinking about sort of objectives. And I’d love to sort of dive into that. So how do you think about, you know, you’re a business owner? You have a team? How are you thinking about next year?
Kelly Parker 11:18 Wow, I think, you know, if I were to just speak to like, goal setting, specifically, I will say that I don’t set goals, I don’t have production goals, or financial goals. And I know for some people that makes them crazy. And they’re like, well, then you don’t have a business plan if you don’t have a goal. And I just don’t operate like that. Like, truthfully, I believe that it changes the way you do things, the reason you do things changes the way you do things. So if I am doing things to reach a goal, and that is my focus, I truly believe it changes the way you do things, and often disconnects us from, what our passion is why we’re really doing this. And from there is where we derive a lot of our inspiration and our drive from. And so I think that I don’t have a goal because it it also then starts to feel very transactional. Right? Like, I always use the example of cold calling, right? People are like, Well, if you cold call 10 people and you got two people to answer and then you get one of them as a client. It’s the same sort of thing, feeling of this highly transactional and removes this human to human sort of like co creation, if you will, of the work that we’re doing, I run a very relationship based business, I have I am referral based, it was intentional, it’s how I built my business from the beginning. Because I also believe that whoever controls the leads, you know, controls, the market controls the business, as I’m sure you’ve heard 1000 times and in having that relationship, then this isn’t a transaction. These are not, we cannot just reduce this to transactions and production. And so if I’m only measuring based on a production or financial goal, I missing a lot of the other, you know, opportunities for growth, I’m missing a lot of the other successes that we’re seeing, we were kind of mentioning prior to even I think recording, like success is actually very different and looks very different than just production at times. And so I really feel like the key to a lot of my success is that I didn’t I don’t have these goals. Now I measure at the end, I measure at the end of the year, and I say okay, like, yeah, how much production do we do? Let’s celebrate that because that is valuable, and it tells us something. But I use it as an after the fact measurement and not a you know, carrot that’s sort of like being dangled out in front of you. To kind of Yeah, for for all those reasons that I stated. But
D.J. Paris 14:00 you just you said a lot right there. And I want to just sort of unpack a little bit that because I think this could be really helpful for our audience. And you reminded me of and this is funny because I know nothing about sports. But there was a famous NCAA coach named John Wooden and he was it was the UNLV or UCLA I’m sorry, UCLA. He was the winningest coach in NCAA history. I think he still is I think he won like seven NCAA Tournaments in a row. I think he won like nine out of 13 or something ultimately in his career, but anyway, he’s a big deal. And he never looked at the scoreboard and so you reminded me of him? And he would say and and and reporters and people that studied him and he was literally the winningest coach in NCAA history. And they would say What do you mean you don’t look at the scoreboard How do you not look at the scoreboard? He goes because he said the scoreboard is not really an accurate representation of the performance of my team. He said something times things like luck just falls your way, sometimes luck doesn’t fall your way, the numbers up on the scoreboard may or may not be reflective of like the actual effort that was put in. And he also had said, There’s times when we’ll win a game, because the score, we’ve scored more than the other team. But we actually lost because we didn’t actually play that well. And he’s like, you can walk off the off the court. And even though we technically won, if you didn’t play your best, so and so team member, you’re going to feel crappy about yourself. And as you walk off the field, you’re off the court, you’re going to not feel good, even though you technically won. And vice versa. There’s times when, when you know, you lose technically, but you played your best and you still feel okay about it, I’m sort of getting that vibe from you. It’s sort of like, let’s, let’s just do our best and kind of let the chips fall where they may. And while that may seem a bit risky, or non traditional, you are a top 1%. Producer. So it does actually
Kelly Parker 16:03 it works. It works. Here’s the thing, I do have parameters, and I do have standards. And I think this is what’s important is like I do set out the year thinking how do I want to grow? How do I need to align my actions to where I want to go? What how can I make my process and my experience for my clients? Even better? How can I be more knowledgeable and more experienced? Like I have things that I’m working towards? That I know if they keep those is my focus, right? Then those will result in more clients and more transactions and ultimately, the production. So then at the end of the year, when we’re measuring, you know, what was the production? If we feel like, if I feel like dang, I really I could have maybe gone further, it then tells me, what do I need to learn? What do I need to do to be able to hold $50 million in business, you know, and it starts to inform a whole other set of actions beyond just, you know, the traditional tactics, if you will, of like, how to get clients and how to market yourself. I’m really way more focused on myself and also my team about our personal growth or personal development, raising our standards. And I know as we do that, right, the business comes.
D.J. Paris 17:22 It’s a lot of it’s, it’s, you’re basically taking things on faith, I mean, really, what we’re talking about is this belief that if I do the actions, that I’m pretty confident, or if I continue to develop skills, that I’m pretty confident, are skills that my clients deserve, and need and want. If I can develop those in myself, my business will, I’ll be able to offer more to my age or to mark to my clients, and therefore I’ll attract more clients, because I’ll be able to give more, and I’ll do better, and then they’ll refer more is that essentially the philosophy?
Kelly Parker 17:59 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I if I were to reduce it down to one thing, I would say that it’s personal power, I have a lot of personal power around my success. And what I’m able to create, my success does not is not predicated on the circumstances, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the market. It doesn’t matter what’s going on with interest rates. It doesn’t it doesn’t matter because I’m focused on myself and investing in myself and honing this skill and this expertise. And as long as I continue to, to prioritize that great the rest the rest follows
D.J. Paris 18:36 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episodes sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also, the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it’s it’s really it’s really impressive actually. Really, it’s sort of the way that most of us, I think, think about goal setting is we start at the end, if we were talking about this before we started today was, you sort of start with an end goal in mind, I want to, you know, I want to earn a certain amount of money, or I want to close a certain number of homes or I want to weigh a certain amount of pounds, or I want to make a certain amount of money or you know, whatever it might be. And, and then we try to figure out a way to get from from here to there. And without real, and you’re right, it can think of it can become transactional, because if you break it down to its smallest component, then you’re like, Okay, well, in order for me to get to $50 million dollars in production, I need to make 25 phone calls a day, and I need to have an end those and that may, in fact, work. I I’m not here to say that it doesn’t totally, yeah. Another way to go about it would be I want to develop skills, which would allow me to give more, to be more to do more, which is a different approach, a little bit of a different approach, actually. And I actually, I personally like that approach better in some ways. Because I also believe that there’s always more to learn, there’s always more. And I think what consumers really one is competence. I think more than anything, buyers, sellers, they just want somebody who knows what they’re talking about. And that is going to take time. And it’s an ongoing process of continuous learning. And I suspect that your clients know that about you, that you’re constantly learning, evolving, developing new skills, and therefore, you know, again, if you sort of work from a bottom up approach as a as more, as opposed to like a top down, like top down might be okay, we want to get to $100 million in production. Bottom up might be hey, here are all the skills we need to develop to get to 100 million in production, we’re gonna focus on the skills. That’s really interesting. makes all the sense in the world.
Kelly Parker 21:55 Yeah, cuz it really, it’s reducing everything down to this means to an end, like you said, right? Like, if your top and then bottom, there’s automatically a huge separation, which like you were saying, it forces your brain to be like, well, then what do I need to do to get from here to here? And it that you lose something in that process? And so when people have asked me like, how do you have the success you have? It’s like, I’ve stayed really like connected to not just the like act of doing things like mailing postcards, or sending open houses, but like, what is what is right for me? How do I develop myself and then show up in a way that’s authentic and aligned for me? And in doing so that draws in clients who liked my style, who appreciate what I’m doing? Who, you know, are connected to even my why, like, I share my why why do I do what I do? as sort of like a leading message with my clients? Because people want that connection? You know, and then they’re happy to refer me and the circle just continues. So yeah,
D.J. Paris 23:01 do you mind sharing your why with us? What is your why?
Kelly Parker 23:04 Oh, yeah, I mean, the why is I just have such a deep, I really, truly believe our homes provide a place where we can be free to be our full authentic selves. And there’s not other than our four walls and a roof, right? When we go outside, we not always are that way, we’re dressing for a certain reason, or we’re talking in a certain way, or we’re doing certain actions for a certain outcome. But our home is like the safest place that hopefully you can be right. And I just value the power of it for how it allows us to show up in our lives. That to be a play a role in people, you know, starting that chapter and creating that mark in their life is just feels so special to me, and and then again, like the further Why is like also just making sure they enjoy that process, because I understand just how powerful it can be so staying sane connected to that, I think has been one of the biggest, biggest things for myself, but also even my team as new agents come on, like sharing with them like, Okay, how do I market myself? How do I get clients? I’m gonna share your Why. Why do you do this? Because people want to know like, because if not, they’re gonna make up. This is what I’ve learned. If you don’t tell people why you do something, they will make up why you do it. We all tell stories, we all create stories about other people. So tell people why you do it. And it’s the quickest way to diffuse something feeling like a transaction is like Emily right. We use Emily’s example, but like she really wanted to help her peers who were coming out of college who didn’t have you know, advocates when it came to finding their Chicago home and and it’s true, that’s a good truth for her. But she has shared that and people resonate with that and then choose to use her because of it and So I think that if there’s one takeaway just be be vocal about your why I think I kind of took us off course is what we were talking about.
D.J. Paris 25:07 No, I don’t think it took us off course at all, I think this is all absolutely relevant, because what we’re really talking about is finding your tribe, I think and understanding that there’s going to be a certain subset of the home buying or selling population that resonates with your particular style. So you might as well be, the way I’m hearing you is you might as well be yourself. Because, you know, you got to be yourself anyway. And they’re assuming you’re authentic. And you know, you have the qualities that you know, that are helpful to people looking to buy or sell homes, you should have a pretty reasonable career, but you shouldn’t necessarily be afraid to say, here’s why I do what I do. And in fact, I think people connect more with understanding someone’s why than then maybe even their actual skills. I think we want to know why somebody does some something. I think the fact that they’re competent at it is first most important, but then we want to know like, why do you do this? What what’s in it for you and you just eloquently shared, why you do it, and why it’s important for you so that somebody can be their full, authentic self in their home. And you said it in a much better way than I just expressed it. But I think that’s really powerful. Because if you if you can have that conversation with clients and go, the reason why I do this is I want you to be full feel fully safe and authentic in your house. I think, you know, I had never thought of that until you would set it and as soon as you set it, I was like, that’s absolutely right. I feel the same way I want to feel safe and authentic in my home. And it’s it’s this is kind of an intangible thing that might even sound a little or new agey or whatever, but it’s really true feelings are real in the sense of, they’re important. And we want to we’re going to be staying in this this physical space for, you know, a good chunk of our lives every single day. So and they
Kelly Parker 27:08 transmit those transcend markets to your feeling about your home doesn’t matter what’s happening in the market, right, and your desire for a new home or needing to move out of another one. So I know it does. It does sound New Agey, but it’s to me, it’s like the heart of what this can do. And I think particularly if you’re an agent looking to grow your business, and you’re not sure how to market yourself, or what to do, it provides like to me provides like a core element of like, why do I do it? So based on why I’m doing it, then who are my clients? Who am I speaking to, you know, if it’s like Emily, it’s like, Well, why do I do this? I want to help my peers, okay, then those your clients, that’s who we market to. That’s your niche. You know, now you just have to tell them what you do and how you do it. And you’ll and then you start to see the clients come in like they had
D.J. Paris 28:02 Yeah, it Yeah, I love that. I so so it seems like what you’re saying is to find your passion, in in, in your industry in this industry of what really moves the needle for you as the realtor like what, what gets you the most excited about the process, sort of digging in leaning into that and then continuing to develop skills around whatever that passion might be. Maybe it’s first time homebuyer, maybe it’s maybe it’s maybe it’s even being with somebody all along their apartment journey until they’re ready to buy their first home. Maybe it’s being there to guide them or maybe it’s I don’t like working with those people. I only like working with sellers or condos or, or co ops or whatever it might be single family homes, or people moving from another state I guess whatever it is that that you sort of get lit up the most about is probably an indicator of like, Oh, I really liked doing real clothes or you know, I really liked doing you know, or maybe you’re one of those rare people who likes calling expires or fizz bows like people
Kelly Parker 29:09 think like it works for people but it’s not what they’re doing it’s it’s the energy behind what they’re doing it with so if you really love Calling Strangers in cold calling fizz bows and you’re like I could do this all day, then it is your indicator that that is your lane and go go crush it you know and so I think that’s where we get a little bit scrambled of like we think that there’s a certain ways that we have to get business and and then we force ourselves to show up in these ways and I’m like I don’t really want to do that I don’t really want to cold call I don’t really want to sit in open house that feels weird to me or whatever. we force ourselves and then we wonder why we’re not getting business. And is it because we can do that. And now I’m really gonna sound new age but like the frequency of that precedes you precedes your words precedes your action. So if something lights you up, double down on that, do that. And let that that excitement and that joy drive, what you do after that, and then the steps and the choices you start to make and how you show up in your business.
D.J. Paris 30:16 I think that’s really good advice. So before we started talking today, or absorbed before we started turned on the recording where I was asking you about 2023, because we have I have we have 800 agents or close to 800 agents in our firm, you’ve got a lot of agents, obviously, compasses, Kelly’s a compass, they have 1000s of agents here in Chicago. Kelly is around a lot of agents. I’m around a lot of agents. And I’m certainly getting a sense that there’s a low level of stress. That’s that’s, that’s present right now, although I feel like there’s always stress, being a realtor, but particularly right now it’s the end of the year, it’s the holiday season, we’re of course, we know where rates are, we know inventory is where it is. And I know there’s a lot of concern about 2023 as I’m hearing it in the ether from other agents, but you don’t you’re not worried about it at all. And I really, I’m bringing this up, because you’re the first person I’ve talked to who doesn’t who didn’t even break a sweat when I mentioned it. So why are you not worried about 2023?
Kelly Parker 31:23 Well, I think for some as some of the reasons I’ve mentioned, right, I think that I’ve never let my success be dictated on the circumstances. You know, I really, truly believe that the success that I’ve seen in my business is because of what I’ve, who I am and what I’ve done and the skills that I have developed. And I think that’s where we get a little bit hung up. A lot of times when people are stressed, it’s because they have made their success circumstantial on a low interest rate market or a pandemic. And I think some people, like there’s elements, there’s Is there a percentage of my business that was up because of the circumstances? Sure. But would I have still been successful and still done what I’ve done because of my own sort of, like personal power in my, my, myself and my belief and all that? Absolutely. So I’ve truly believe that, because I have that outlook, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the market. And, and so I’m not worried. But I’m also like, I’m weirdly excited, I think it’s great. I think this is the market where we get the ability, we have the opportunity to make the biggest moves and the biggest growth and secure the most market share. And, and I fully know that i i have the skill set, and I have the knowledge and i i have the inspiration to make sure that I’m able to to operate as I want to during this time. So I think that, ya
D.J. Paris 32:58 know, it’s so interesting, it’s just not even, you’re not too worried about circumstance, you’re not worried about sort of the conditions because number one, he can’t control them. So you have to deal with them anyway. And number two, you started in a down market, right? So you started at, you know, 2008 to 2010 was not the time to get into real estate. And but it was probably such a great time for you because you only knew a difficult challenge. And so and you got through it. And so then you see maybe maybe the mountain looks a little steeper this next year for a number of reasons outside of our control. But you’re just are you just going to pivot if need be and make adjustments and changes. And, you know, you’re you’re telling me what you’re thinking about?
Kelly Parker 33:49 Well, I think that like I mean, I’m curious what you mean by pivot. But I think that one thing that I talk to my team a lot about is like being aware of the context that we hold our business, right, like looking at just next year, to me is a very small context, I have a 13 year career, right, there’s going to be chapters. And even if you’ve had a three year career, this is a chapter of the greater story of the career that you are writing. And so if you’re so hyper focused on you know, the next six months or the next 12 months, again, it kind of goes back to like you start to inform how you behave and how you show up and it’s gonna change it if you can just keep a broader context of like, we might have a down year next year. Sure, possibly, yes. Do I need to be a responsible business owner and start to make some modifications to like our spend and make sure that we’re not you know, that I’m being smart? Absolutely. I can do those things. You know, and then we see what happens and we we don’t pull back on investing. I still invest in the spirit in in the support that we need and this stuff that we know works for us. But I think that I have a broader context, if you will, for, for what this will mean and the greater story. And so I know everyone’s talking about 2023. But I think in my mind, I’m already in like 2025. Because I can see how this will play in the next few years.
D.J. Paris 35:21 It’s, it’s a really important point, because I think I think you just said something really, really big, which was, I’m thinking about 2025, because 2025 is going to come. And we’re only thinking about 2023, like you were saying, a lot of us are just focused on, you know, we might be in survival mode, or we might be just nervous about. But regardless, it’s going to come and go, and we’re going to need to adapt, and also there, right there, there are cycles, and there are ups and downs, and life isn’t linear business isn’t linear. And that’s, that’s the challenge. I think, for some of us when we get into the business, and we have our first five years, and it just looks like this linear graph up into the right, because we sell more homes every year than we did previously. And then maybe all of a sudden the market, you know, has a correction or, you know, the there’s other factors at play that that affect our ability to to keep that trajectory going. And it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of our business. It just means that you know, in the natural cycle of life, there’s ups and downs and things that happen. But it’s it’s about really weathering the storm. So you were saying like, yeah, of course, as a business owner, I’m going to make responsible decisions, I’m going to keep my spending in check. And I’m going to make sure that you know, my team is getting the resources that they need. But we’re going to we’re going to make it through because I’m already thinking of 2025 I think that’s really interesting. I don’t know how many people think that way. And I think that comes with experience, which is, which is what you have?
Kelly Parker 36:55 Yeah, I think so, you know, I think I’ve always had a unique outlook, just in general on what we’re doing here. Which is why I tend to just kind of keep my head down, and I kind of just do my own thing, because I don’t, I don’t want to get too influenced, if you will, by you know, by by narratives and opinions and things like that. I think that what you touched on, about being linear, really takes us full circle back to like the whole production and goals and success. Because we think that like if we do these things, we’ll get this end result. And we can contain it into a whole year, when the truth is stuff that you’re going to do in 2023 is actually going to pay you in 2025. But we don’t let ourselves accept that or see that or measure that because it’s not this like tangible thing in front of us right now. And so I always like kind of low this time of year. I mean, we’re speaking it’s November, it’s like everyone should be so excited right now about what they did in 2022. And celebrating and go on vacation. And don’t worry, and just like live your life, because everyone has worked so hard the last couple of years. But I’m watching agents not do it. Because they’re starting to freak out about next year, and thinking they have to pull back and and they’re just like automatically bypassing to me what is the most important component to continued success, which is honoring what you’ve accomplished, celebrating it, sharing it, like sitting in it. And knowing that it doesn’t end January one it carries it carries with you and there’s going to be stuff you did this year, you never saw the production for that will show up next year, or maybe in 2024 2025. Like we don’t know. And so I think if I can just share one thing, as someone who’s been in this business as long as I have now it’s like it’s never contained to a year ever. It always bleeds over into each other. So let’s not let’s not be so linear and how we measure and and where we begin and end these chapters of the story.
D.J. Paris 39:01 Yeah, I agree. I, I want to talk about celebration because I that’s not something I’ve really delved into too much in this show. And I think it’s something that’s worth worthwhile to talk about because I think since so many realtors are individual practitioners or maybe they are on a team and there is some sort of recognition about, you know, milestones or certain types of activity gets noticed or appreciated. But I do think that it would likely be a good idea for people individually to learn how to celebrate their own achievement and it doesn’t necessarily have to be related to a goal that that got hit could be a skill that was learned it could be the way that you know somebody improved their customer service could be a way in which you know, something got better or or or something new was was brought in Here’s how do you recommend to people to celebrate their success? Because I think we don’t we do a lot of it on social media, right? There’s a lot of like, look at me, I just sold this home. I don’t, I’m not talking about that I’m talking about internally, processing, feeling actually good about something that you accomplish, because the reason I’m making such a big deal of this, and I’m going to, in a moment, just turn it over to you, is I think that can help get us through the hard times, if we can remember what it feels like. So what are your thoughts on that?
Kelly Parker 40:32 Absolutely. I love this question. And specifically, like the this, the separation to the external, right, like, social media is a tricky beast. And, and I think that a lot of people think that they have to celebrate as a form of validation. And so there’s a little bit in my mind too much ego that gets attached. And I think this is what we’ve all felt, right, we see the celebration, and you’re like, that kind of feels, feels like it’s a little bit loaded, right. And it’s, it’s, and it’s okay, we’re humans, we all have egos, there’s that moment of wanting to like wave the flag of what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished in a tangible material form. But I think that, it’s it cause that seeing other people do that there’s a certain sort of subset of people who, like myself, who are so turned off from that, that I’ve actually held off on celebrating, because I didn’t want to come off as a certain way. And I didn’t want it to feel a certain way. Because, again, why I do what I do is so heartfelt, and like heart led, that the dollars and the goals and or the, the celebrations will never really capture all of that, right. But it I have learned that celebrating is truly the biggest form of expressing your gratitude. And I’m, I’m really, I’m in I have my own mentor. And that came in light of a conversation I had with her about how, how that’s really what it is like, it can be done behind closed doors, it can be done with your team. It’s like what you’re asking. And so we do a lot of closed doors, celebrations, like, you know, we and our a lot of our goals, same thing, our personal and production and whatever. So we’re never just celebrating the metal achieved, were celebrating the whole human. And so I do think it’s incredibly important to anchor that in for the reason that you said, it’s something that creates a tangible, you know, feeling inside of you, or recognition for what you’ve done, I would say that I celebrate myself and my accomplishments and in several different ways. I think, what you were saying, for even for me, right now, this year, one of my biggest accomplishments is that I got to spend more time with my daughter, and nothing was sacrificed to do it. And that has been something I had to learn the hard way, and I worked really hard to get out. So, you know, do I have like extra production to show for something No, but I have these memories and these experiences with her. And, and that’s something right and, and so I as I’m living life, I think being very present in my moments, and recognizing that I don’t have to wait until the end of the year to celebrate that a lot of the time we are we are our goals and our dreams are actually being asked are actualized in everyday moments, but we’re just not present enough to see them. So I think I have a sense of presence out of just sort of like reverence for celebration in general. But um, I do like to travel that’s kind of always been my thing that I feel like traveling gives you this sense of experience. And I it’s like, sort of hard for me to explain without over talking. But like it, there’s something that really helps me anchor a feeling around a celebration. And so I actually tend to use use that. But again, I noticed that a lot I want to encourage people to celebrate because I think that seeing others celebrate helps to give people examples of what’s possible. And if you’re looking for a way to ground yourself in a celebration, so it doesn’t feel so showy. And looking at me. I always just go to the place of kindness provide an example to another female in the industry about what’s possible, you know, five years in your business eight years in your business, you know, and and kind of be mindful I guess of the narrative. That’s what you’re approaching it but
D.J. Paris 44:39 yeah, the idea of celebration, you you really got me thinking I was I was thinking it got me thinking about the, for anyone who’s ever looked into relationship stuff you probably you know, if you have a significant other and you’re trying to get along better with them and have a better relationship, you probably will stumble Across the Gottman, the Gottman, who are who are kind of the world experts and researchers on how people can can coexist and cohabitate and they’ve written a million books, and they’re a married couple out of, I think, out of Oregon or Washington anyway. But anyway, they have, they have this ratio that they’ve proven that for a healthy interpersonal relationship, you know, romantic relationship, the golden ratio is five affirming things. For every one sort of negative thing, a very critical thing, one critical thing. So if I want to say, oh, you know, you’re doing the dishes the wrong way, or whatever, or you didn’t do the dishes, or whatever, whatever the criticism might be, if you can, if you can have five affirming things, but here’s all here are the things you did right away, you know, you would sprinkle those throughout the day. That’s what a healthy relationship and a happy relationship looks like. It’s five affirming things to everyone. One sort of non affirming thing. And what you were saying is really important, because you’re talking about celebration. And I was thinking about that. And I was thinking, How often do I celebrate myself? For the things that I may have accomplished, or, in our listeners ears, what you have accomplished today? You definitely did some things well, today, and I did some things well, and I did some things that maybe I could improve on. But how often am I even celebrating those little milestones? And I used to think you had to get to the end of the goal before you could celebrate, but I’ve learned and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. I’ve learned that celebrating along the way. It actually keeps keeps the engine running for me. It doesn’t actually stop the motivation, like, oh, I accomplished it, I’m good. No, because that was kind of my fears. I can’t I can’t celebrate until I get to the end. And I think that’s a mistake. Because we’re talking about celebrating throughout the journey. And I think there’s a lot of, you know, you hear about, like gratitude groups. I don’t think we have a gratitude problem. I think we have a celebration problem. I think we’re all I think we’re all grateful, or if you’re not whatever, there’s there’s there’s lots of ways to become grateful. But I think the bigger issue is around celebrating one’s own, you know, Power Agency success. curious to get your thoughts on that.
Kelly Parker 47:15 Yeah, no, I would agree. I think that the celebration somewhere along the way got tainted. Right. And, and to your point, it’s like, if we just bring it back to the gratitude, and you just can focus on that, then then it helps clear the air for a lot of other people to step into their own gratitude. So I think we’ve tangled celebration and gratitude. So it’s like people aren’t even taking a moment to be grateful for what they’ve done or accomplish. Because it feels gross. And it feels showy, or they have we’re very tangled in that. And so I yeah, I would agree, I think we have more of a celebration problem. And to your to your point of, you know, I think a lot of people wait until the end of the year, they wait till they hit the goal. But the truth is the goalpost literally moves every time. Like, okay, I want to do $20 million, I did $20 million. And I was like, We did it like okay, like it. And then the next without, if you’re not conscious, and you’re not aware, it’s automatically 25 Before you even like get 20 out of your mouth, and then it’s 30 and then it’s 35. And all of a sudden, you’re living your life towards this end goal. And you’re missing all of the moments in between all of the beautiful things that have compounded and compounded that are worth celebrating on the way to this, you know, this goal. And and I also think being present in those moments of yourself and celebrating yourself really helps this to not feel like a winner or lose. Right? If you have a goal and you don’t make it then it means you lost. If you have a goal and you made it then it means you succeeded. And I think that diametrically I don’t know if that’s the right word. That’s the word I want to use. But like that, that sort of like two dimensional, like you win or you lose mentality is what keeps so many people from celebrating because like why didn’t hit my goal? Well, that wasn’t the definition of success. Did you show up every day? Have you grown? Have you changed? Did you help someone? You know, that’s what we should be celebrating?
D.J. Paris 49:28 Well, I think that’s a wonderful place to sort of wrap up because this idea of celebration, it is the time of year to celebrate, you know, we’re the holiday season. This is time to reflect, to be thankful, and also to think to the future and you’re already doing that. But I think it’s to your point about being increasing the celebration there. I think it would be really neat to almost even start like a celebration accountability partner, where every week, instead of just talking about what you accomplished, well, in addition to holding each other accountable for things that you want to accomplish, which I think is a good idea, also having some sort of celebration, even if it’s just one to one, one person to another Hey, man, great job this week. Hey, so and so, you know, you even if you didn’t necessarily achieve your goal, you’re still on target. You’re you’re still trying, you’re still, you know, this, this idea of encouragement. Really just gets everyone through the hard times. And I think I think we’re coming up on some some more difficult. Well, it’s been difficult to be a realtor in the last couple of years. I mean, I also want to say, just because rates were lower, didn’t make it any easier to be a realtor. In fact, if you I mean, I wasn’t out there in the trenches with like you and your team. I mean, it was hard to be a realtor last couple years,
Kelly Parker 50:51 it was hard. And I think that’s why my outlook for the next year is very different is because I think that, yeah, it’s it was hard. And it was, there was a lot of other things we were having to navigate. And a lot of certain clients in the market for different reasons. And I think that we, again, we’re gonna get to decide what this means. And I think I’m making this mean that it’ll be at a pace that’s more sustainable. It’ll be with, you know, slightly more favorable outcomes for all clients. I think it was very skewed the last, you know, couple years. So again, it’s just sort of that perspective shift on what we make these markets mean. But yeah, they haven’t. They haven’t been easy. And so I really hope that everybody does celebrate. I love what you said actually about an accountability partner, because something I’ve been thinking about, and we try to do this we could be better at it is celebrating agents that you don’t actually like, aren’t maybe even in your team. I see so many women, particularly in these magazines, who who accomplish amazing things. And I’m like DMing them, why isn’t this on your Instagram? Why didn’t you talk about this, like we’re celebrating you, I think we though, we can lead by example, and celebrate each other, and congratulate each other without prompt, because it really helps, I think us all feel a little bit more seen and accepted and encouraged to celebrate ourselves. So
D.J. Paris 52:21 I think that’s a great point. You know, for everyone listening, pay attention to the milestones that other people might be hitting people that you like, that you respect, reach out to them, when those milestones happen, it might be exactly what they need to hear and they may just be more like Kelly, who’s like, I don’t really want to put that out there because maybe I’d seen his show offy and, and put it out there for them. Be proud of the people that are in your community and watch what happens. You’re not going to do it for this boomerang reason that it’s going to come back to you but it probably will come back to you to this idea of of lifting other other people up, you know, in their successes. It’s worked well for me I’ve had a similar mentality when I’ve when I see things that happen to people that are very impressive to me, I’ll often I’ll reach out to them and just say congratulations on such and such, even people I don’t know. And and I found that in many cases, they will say things like you’re the only person that reached out to me it doesn’t make me a great guy. It just makes me the one person who did it. And anybody can do that. And what I think well what comes with that is a lot of times a lot of opportunity ends up coming from that because people will go wow, well that’s nice that so and so thought about me. I’m going to take a closer look at this, this particular individual it’s almost very similar to what you do for clients this idea of giving to give and give give give authentically and then you know you sort of hope that things come back and they do but we should also talk about your team your team is growing you know 2023 is not a scary year for you. So if there are any anyone who thinks that they would love to work with someone like Kelly and maybe join Chicago home collective and learn more about what they offer Kelly what’s the best way that our listeners can reach out if they think they’d be a fit.
Kelly Parker 54:15 DM us on Instagram we are in the final stages of a new website that is been a labor of love and it’s not quite done yet it will be done in the new year so don’t judge my website it’s a solid eight years old at this point. But go on our Instagram you can send me a DM on there you can follow you can you can go on my personal account you can you can message me either location. That’s how most people end up finding us.
D.J. Paris 54:41 But here are the links we got Chicago home collective.com Which again is going to get a refresh although I think it looks quite lovely even now. And then also follow Kelly on Instagram the two Instagram accounts are Chicago home collective, and Kelly underscore e underscore Parker to learn more about Kelly, I mean, if you if anyone is out there, looking at 2023, and thinking about making the shift, and saying, you know, I really want to sort of hitch my, my, my horse to, to a dip or hitch my wagon to a different horse, I don’t want to, I don’t want to I don’t want to be the horse do with being a horse. But the metaphor is, I think, okay. But I just had to think about that I was like, anyway, if you want to connect with somebody who’s who’s really got an interesting philosophy, who’s been successful, and kind of approaches her success a little bit differently, but in a way, I think that makes just all the sense in the world. You know, those Chicago home collective might be the team for you. So check out Chicago home collective.com, reach out to Kelly slide into her DMs as the young people say, although I think I think that might be like a dating reference. So don’t do that unless you more maybe do that if you want. But reach out to Kelly in any way that you want to. She is easy to find. And she would love to chat with you and see if you might be a good match to help them grow into 2023. So, and 2025 Because Kelly, many many years out. Kelly, thank you on behalf of our audience, this is a really fun conversation. For me personally, I appreciate you for being on our show I’ve always wanted to have you on and I’m so glad we finally did get you here. And hope we can continue to to get you back on the show from time to time to get your philosophies and thoughts about you know, growing a team and sort of navigating some some difficult times in the business. Thank you on behalf of the audience. On behalf of Kelly and myself to the audience. We want to also say thank you. Please remember to tell a friend that’s the only thing we will ask of you is just tell one other realtor about this episode. Send them a link over to our website, keeping it real pod.com They can stream every episode we’ve ever done right from their website, or this pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. We would appreciate it. Kelly, thank you. Thank you and AJ
Kelly Parker 57:01 Thank you. It’s a great conversation. I appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 57:05 I do I do as well and we will see everybody on the next episode.
1 Billion In Production In 10 Years • Terrence Murphy
Dec 19, 2022
Terrence Murphy talks about his football career in the NFL and how he transitioned to his real estate career. Terrence describes how he scaled his personal business to a team that brokered $1B in less than 10 years. Next, Terrence focuses on his holistic approach into being successful in his business. Terrence introduces his podcast, Real Estate Entrepreneur, and describes what it offers to the listeners. Terrence also talks about how he’s able to focus on all his businesses and endeavors and be successful at all of them and what is he telling his agents to do in order to have a successful 2023. Last Terrence discusses the importance of failure and how that leads you towards success.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does someone grow their real estate practice from zero to 1 billion in production in just 10 years? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with NFL player turned real estate billion dollar producer Terrence Murphy but before we get to Terrance just a couple of quick reminders the best ways that you can help us continue to produce these episodes and reach more audience. Number one, tell a friend to think of just one other realtor that needs to hear what Terrance for example, you’re about to hear what Terrence is saying and send another agent, a link to our show, you can always find us at keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed right there or via any podcast app. And the second part is that you can help us is by please supporting our sponsors. They’re the reason that we can continue to do these shows and let them know how much love you have for them by checking out their products and services. Alright guys, enough about that. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Terence Murphy.
Today on the show we have Murphy from exp in Texas. Let me tell you all about Terrance. Now Terrence was a second round NFL draft pick by the Green Bay Packers after graduating from Texas a&m University as a three time Academic All big 12 student athlete. Now Terrance, this is amazing has brokered if that that wasn’t amazing enough, Terrence has brokered 1.1 billion in sales volume over the last 10 years. He currently owns 20 companies actually more than 20 companies under the Terrence Murphy company’s brand and Terrance is an investor in more than 30 companies as a venture capitalist. Now investing in real estate is one of the things he is most passionate about, as he currently owns over 400 beds of residential real estate and commercial properties all over the US. Terrence is also a two time winner of Inc. Five 5000 award for America’s fastest growing privately owned businesses and also is a three time recipient of the Texas a&m Mays Business School Aggie 100. For 100 fastest growing businesses in the world. Terrance possesses the same traits that he portrayed on the football field which is integrity, passion, hard work, dedication, loyalty, desire to succeed and excellence all of which help his business continue his businesses continue to grow and his clients to receive superior service to learn all about territory by the way, he has a podcast that he just launched as well because of course he does he does everything but I want you to learn all about Terrence at his website which is Terrence Murphy I’m going to spell Terrence because it can be spelled many different ways. It’s and by the way, we’re also gonna have a link to this in the show notes. So you don’t have to type this in just go to the show notes and click but if you are typing, it’s Terence t e r r e n c e murphy.com. And you can see all of the cool things that Terrance does and you can also follow him on Instagram, which is at Terrence again te r r e n c e realtor also a link to that will be in our show notes. Terrence, welcome to the show,
Terrence Murphy 4:48 man appreciate it, man. Sorry about the long intro my team sent you. But at the same time, they always laugh because they’re like, Well, hell, you’re doing so much we have to make the intro and sighs So it’s fun, man. Thank you. Great job.
D.J. Paris 4:58 Thank you. No, thank you. Oh, and I love reading long intros like that. Or sometimes people it is funny sometimes people we interview will send us things that we have to pare down because we’re like, okay, nobody cares about this. And that everything that you guys sent over was things I’m like, I have to talk about all of this. Because this, I think it was very concise. You just, you just do a lot. And I think that I’d love to talk to you about, you know, the fact that you run so many different businesses, you have so many different interests. You’re a busy, busy guy, and at the same time running the successful real estate practice. But before we get to sort of where you are today, I’d love to learn a little bit more about how you got to where you are today. So I’d love our audience to hear about, you know, sort of your football career and then how you transitioned into real estate.
Terrence Murphy 5:46 Yeah, and so born and raised in East Texas, I grew up with a single mom. And so for all the kids that grew up with single moms, and for all you real estate agents that are single moms, I love you, and I’m proud of you. And so yeah, I just grew up with a single mom, she put a lot into me and encouraged me, pushed me and was very hard on me. And that’s the way that I’ve become who I am as an entrepreneur and as a student athlete, and as a professional athlete. And then just having the heart to help, right, because I’ve lived that life where we went, not having everything. And so I just have the mentality to try to help him like we talked about earlier, DJ. Life is like a boomerang, right? What you put out, you get back. And not only do you get it back, you get it back with precision. And so for many years, I’ve encouraged real estate agents, I’ve, I’ve coached him, I push them, I’ve given them tools. And now I’ve been able to see the benefits from those seeds that I said, as people are starting to join my organization at exp, like crazy. So it’s been cool. But yeah, that’s I grew up there, went to Texas a&m football scholarship, got drafted by the Green Bay Packers with Aaron Rodgers. And back to back end and film EPS as my roommate, my bro. And he’s killing the game. And then I retired and moved into real estate, and just grew and grew passion for it. And to start off as a developer and an investor got my license with the Keller Williams for a year, which we all do. started an independent brokers team and five, I told people I was going to scale. My independent startup brokerage. This was in my early 20s. But no experience. I did seven transactions when I started to evolve. And I said, I’m gonna scale it to a billion in sales in 10 years, I actually did it in a way and people were like, there’s no way you’re in a small town. It’s not possible, you need a franchise. And we did. And that’s that’s how I got into real estate after retirement. And
D.J. Paris 7:39 it’s, it’s incredible. And I know you’re skipping over about a million steps along the way. But I love the fact that here you are. And this idea of scaling is so, so important, especially now where I see agents flocking to teams, or teams have become more and more important, more and more prevalent, more more and more attractive, I think over the years, and we’re seeing this flocked to teams, and I’m hearing well, I’m interviewing a lot of people for the show, and also just here for our brokerage in Chicago that are struggling with scaling, trying to figure out how do I go from being like an individual producer to running a team than to scaling the team? And, and those are different skill sets? And was that difficult for you to get from? You know, well, you said you, you were just done seven transactions, you’re like I’m building a team. I’m gonna I’m gonna scale this thing up to a billion. Well, let me ask you a different question. What gave you the confidence to think that that was possible within 10 years? Because it really shouldn’t be possible, at least, you know, to the sort of my logical mind, right? This that shouldn’t be possible yet. You did it. And you did it faster than you thought. So what gave you the confidence and the courage to do that when really all signs were pointing to? It’s going to take longer than that?
Terrence Murphy 8:56 Yeah. Or even be possible at all right? I think for me, that goes back to just that background of, you know, I tell people when I was five years old, I remember having a picture of me, my mom bought me like one of those little uniforms. And that was my Christmas gift. And I remember telling people that fine, I’m gonna make it to the NFL. And so can you imagine from five to 22, for 17 years, you’re telling people something that is nearly impossible? If you look at the numbers? Absolutely. I mean, it literally is no way. Just from a number standpoint, you should make it to the NFL. And so not only to make it but to make it in the first two rounds. So I had already been there before, right holding on to a dream that coaches opponents, family members, teammates, whoever tried to talk you out of like, Hey, that’s not possible. It’s not real. You might want to do something different. And you just keep fighting for it, man, you keep holding on to it because you know, within your heart as possible. So when I achieved that dream at 22 I tell people I’m okay with playing the long game. It took me 17 years to achieve a dream. Right, right. And when I tell people one day, like I said, Hey, I’m gonna go do one in college football. Well, at that time, this is crazy DJ. My sophomore year, I was the only sophomore varsity. We went, Oh, and team. We didn’t win one day. My junior year, we wouldn’t want a nine. So going into my senior year, we were one and 19. Yeah, we hadn’t signed a D one recruit in 10 years. And I’m telling people, I’m gonna go do you want? And I ended up leaving my high school with 20 Do you want offers. And then I actually had about seven foreign academic offers to like Rice University, and UNC places like that. So I’ve been there before. So in my mind, when I feel it, and I pray about it, I’m like, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t even think about the other option of not doing it. And I would say put me in a desert, I’ll find my way to the water. That’s just the way I’m wired. And I think that’s what people are seeing now as I’m growing one of the fastest organizations in history now. VXp is because I’m giving people the roadmap to get there and get there with the right tools. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 11:08 boy, that is you just said so much in such a short period of time there. Because really, he talked about perseverance. He talked about singularly focused like, almost like, horse was happy when they put the blinders on. It’s like, Hey, I’m going to achieve this. And, you know, there’s certain things that are outside of that were really outside of your control. Right. You talked about the the, you know, the record in high school, like not great, not not your record, but just the overall team record. There was no history of of D one players, you know, any recent history from that school, and yet you did it. And I’m guessing because you were singularly focused. I imagine if you hadn’t have been drafted second round, I imagine that really wouldn’t have changed much for you anyway, because you would have just pivoted, and pointed your Northstar at something else, and made that successful. So I imagine is perseverance. How important is that to you? I mean, I imagine it’s gotta be pretty important.
Terrence Murphy 12:08 Perseverance is very important. But what I will tell you is, you know, the great thing about athletics, the great thing of growing up with a single mom, the great thing with my background is day in and day out, you have to get up and you have to work. Yeah. And, you know, I have successful businesses as an entrepreneur in middle school. Like when I was 12 years old, I had, like, different businesses that I was running. And so just the mentality of, I don’t wake up with the Oh, it’s not possible. I’ll wake up with. Okay, how am I getting there? Like, right now? What steps do I have to take day in and day out? Like, there’s a great book atomic habits, right? It’s just love atomic habits. Oh, man. And so I think the reason why, you know, I’ve been coaching real estate agent now for 10 years. And two things I’ve always said no to is people would ask me to come train their agents. And I would say, I can’t do it. I don’t have a coaching business, or can I invest in your real estate projects, I didn’t raise money, and I didn’t have time to teach. So I would just teach my agents. But as I’ve now started expanding my coaching services, people are blown away, but the athlete in me and the coaching me, I can give you very practical tools, that it doesn’t sound like man, I got to do all of that to get there. It’s like, no, just do this for the next 30 days. And once we get to 5 million in volume over the next year, and here’s how you get to 10 million. And here’s how you get to 18. One of the things I took pride in is I’m real big on studying statistics. And once I see statistics, and then I say, okay, the average agent closes seven to 10 deals a year per year. How do I five extent with my team and my brokerage. And so, for the 10 years that I ran an independent brokerage, we ever started on point five transactions per person. So our per person production was at 40 deals per person. It’s amazing. So we were so focused on just everybody being very successful versus just growing the numbers. Wow.
D.J. Paris 14:04 I mean, it’s, it’s, it is truly incredible. And you’re right, this idea of seeing what is possible, because there are people that do this, right, like, You’re not the first guy to 5x You know, a team’s productions, although you’re probably one of the first people to do it. But you’re probably not the first there’s other people that have done this, you can study some of their habits, oftentimes, you could just reach out to these people and ask, that’s what I do on the show. I’m reaching out to you right now to share, you know, your secrets with with our audience. So it is incredible. How important was it? You know, you’ve been you’ve had coaches, you know, throughout your entire academic life, you know, starting from as early as when he really got into athletics as a young man, and then all the way through, you know, high school, college professional, professional athlete athletics, and then how important is it to be coachable? Because of course, you have the perseverance you’ve got the discipline, but Having a coach, how important is
Terrence Murphy 15:01 that? I think the biggest misnomer about coaches that really shocked me, because when we squat I’m 15 years old on I kind of got removed from the world. Right? Like when we were on campus at Texas a&m Like we they like had us like overheated, like a wager. Your day is planned out. And when you get to the NFL like you see us playing, but no one really gets to personally interact with you. So when I got introduced back into the world at 22 years old, or 23, Once I retired, I was just blown away at the unwillingness to be passionate about what people do every day. It was like, where am I at right now life, because we have the best doctors, the best marketing people, the best publicists, the best everything the best nutritionists. So I just miss being around greatness. And that’s what I wanted to create. And I think the biggest misnomer with that, is that all coaches are all mentors have the right playbook. Sure, because there’s a lot of broker owners, and that’s what blew me away, they became broker owners because they were not good real estate agents. That’s true. It’s like, let me hide behind the desk and say, I don’t want to sell real estate, I just want to be a broker where you are not selling a lot of real estate anyway. And so it blows me away. And it’s like, hey, after the new year, we want to lose 10 pounds, and we show up and our trainers out of shape, well, then I got the wrong trainer. So I’m always telling people, man, when you look at getting a broker or a mentor or a team leader, our sponsor at exp, really make sure they have the successful track record. And that they can communicate it in bite sized pieces to you to follow the breadcrumbs to success. And that’s one of the things that I take a lot of pride in building out the processes and procedures to help people have the same or more success than I’ve had.
D.J. Paris 16:47 Yeah, I think that’s right, and you’re a coach, do you also still continue to get coached I’m sure people would love to, to hear that. If you do or not.
Terrence Murphy 16:55 I don’t it’s but but here’s where I find my, my, my my coaching and my wisdom, you know, in my Bible. And then I’m a book, I’m a book guy. I love tangible books. And and then I just got into podcasts. So that’s really where my books is like my lifeline. Like I read my books, I’m doing a 52 week challenge right now with my organization at exp. So we’re reading one book a week, every week. Wow. And then we meet in a room five days a week, because I do everything by five. We meet in room five days a week and clubhouse and we go over that book. So there’s a lot of accountability there. And it’s been really good man. So they’re digesting so much information at a rapid pace. And that’s been life changing for us. Do you have so far
D.J. Paris 17:43 has there been one book? And I know you’re reading so many that I’m sure they’re all valuable in certain ways, as there have been one, you know, you mentioned atomic habits before? Has there been one in the last, you know, however long you’ve been doing the 52 week challenge where you read a book once a week, that’s really sort of risen to the top of like that one spoke to me more than more than the other so far.
Terrence Murphy 18:02 I’ll give you one, but then I gotta give you five. Is that cool? Right? So the one I would tell every human being that they need to read is untethered. So Oh, yes. Until Oh my gosh. And then he’s got a new version of it. I think living an untethered life. But Untethered Soul really gave me for your, you know, because as athletes as real estate entrepreneurs, as these successful people, right, these brokers, these team leaders, these owners, we have to walk around with our chests out at all times. We got to be peacocks at all times. But some of us are broken, right. And some of us really need to be able to be in a safe place to communicate what we’re going through mentally. But you don’t you got to put this mask on every day, right? And until the soul really breaks that down. And that book is life changing to where you realize, like you need to be breathing, doing breathing exercises every day. You know, we talk about hydration and sleep and all that, oh, no one’s talking about breathing, how important it is. No one’s talking about the mental aspect of life, to be able to meditate and step away from this nauseous world of information and slow the brain down.
D.J. Paris 19:12 It reminds me of that expression. It’s an old musical expression, which is it’s not the notes that make the melody. It’s not the notes that actually create the song. It’s the space in between the notes that it’s like, oh, yeah, of course. It’s the space in between notes. Otherwise, it’s just one continual note. And that’s the silence that we don’t often give ourselves I find, you know, we have a device in our pocket. I was thinking about this this weekend. I’m not the first person to think about this. It’s not a brilliant thought. But it’s almost like a magic. It’s almost like magic. We have magic in our pocket 24/7 And we can use that to summon up whatever we desire. And you have to be really careful because it’s super addictive and it takes time away from being able to sit alone quietly and think and reflect. Do you make meditation or reflection? In a regular practice for you,
Terrence Murphy 20:02 I have, you know, we were taught to visualize as athletes, but we were never taught to meditate and breathe. And I think it talked about, you know, in the US, we are the worst at breathing, right? Our posture is terrible. Look at me right now I need to sit up now. And I’m thinking about it right. And we just don’t breathe, we don’t breathe. Well. We’re continually throughout the day, taking short breaths. And we’re not taking deep, long, continual breaths, we’re rushing to the next meeting. And I always tell everybody, that’s why I started this whole movement, we have to become real estate entrepreneurs. We can’t just be realtors, we can’t just be brokers. We can’t just be team leaders. We have to be real estate entrepreneurs. And when we become real estate entrepreneurs, we’re creating multiple income streams. We’re thinking about legacy, right? We’re not just We’re not just building a business for today, we’re building a business that will give back to our kids kids, right? We’re thinking about other people. And we’re thinking about our mental health, we’re thinking about the impact we want to leave. That’s the real estate entrepreneur piece that I’ve really like went all in on man. Like we even had a day, call rejuvenate day, I brought in all my agents. And we brought in a nutritionist, we brought in a trainer, we brought in a psychologist, like we brought in Enneagram coaches, we brought in massage therapist, a yoga instructor, we started off with yoga, and it was a beautiful day, just like really just putting them outside the box in this place of uncomfortableness, to force them to think about these things. And man, I have so many my agents, it still takes me, man, I’m still using some of the things I learned that rejuvenate days. So that’s really what I’m focused on.
D.J. Paris 21:39 I love that it’s a holistic approach to being successful at business, because you’re you’re really talking about being successful in every area of life. Because if we think of our life as a as a, you know, as a circle, or a wheel, you know, it’s we got to make sure that we’re pretty smooth, smooth, you know, around the edges, we got to make sure that, you know, our family life isn’t in the toilet, if we’re expected to do you know, but our business life is going great, it’s like it all has to be working pretty pretty well not that we don’t have ups and downs because of course, every single person does, regardless of their level of success. We all go through things, but this idea of treating not just the business side of it, treating the human side. And you know, the breathing thing is so, so interesting, because we all know this, like we’ve all heard this a million times we need to slow down or press we need to take deep diaphragmatic breaths we need to you know, and yet, I never really realize the benefit until I read some studies on on breathing, where, you know, I I am I have a lot of anxiety. It’s just kind of, you know, part of my DNA or whatever how I was raised or whatever. But regardless, there are breathing exercises that have been proven to reduce anxiety. And I’m like, Oh, this is so great. I don’t have to think my way out of it. I could do these deep breathing exercises that are super simple. And it’s like, wait two minutes, and then oh my god, I feel better. So it is it is remarkable. But you’re right, taking short breaths throughout the day, nobody talks about this in real estate, at least. It is really a big, big deal. And athletes are taught how to take deeper, longer breaths because of course, you’re also in peak physical condition, which helps. But beyond just working out, you can do this at your desk, you can do this throughout the day. And it really does center. I mean, it’s it’s the basis of meditation, right as breath. So boy, you’re you’re you’re saying you’re saying a lot of really, really great things that I’ve had done a lot of these episodes that people don’t talk about. I mean, sir, certainly we talked about being physically fit and you know, drinking enough water and eating right, but this idea of breathing and meditating and reflecting I think we’re such we’re in such a stimulus response world. And again, the phone in our pocket is going to try to grab our attention every few seconds. This is a way to to shut that out. So yeah, let’s before we get let’s talk about your podcasts. I know this is new real estate entrepreneur with tangents Murphy, so tell us about it.
Terrence Murphy 24:00 Yeah, before we go there, I want to make sure that I’m following up for your audience because I tell them I give them five books and I’m real big. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes. More books. Yeah. So untethered. So why the rich get richer by Robert Kiyosaki great book. A time atomic habits which we talked about earlier, traction by Gino Wakeman. So you got those four, and then good degree, those would be the five I would have people read. And as we pivot to the podcast, I think more than anything. People realize that they need more, especially real estate agents. And you’ve been through a downturn, I would say, a recessive market or a shifting market. I think people will start realizing that again that they need more. And one of the things that I teach my agents and sweat equity versus check equity, truly building a business with the right foundation versus just buying leads right when we saw Open Door Zillow. Redfin, So people were just was buying those leads, they’re in these contracts, real estate agents are stuck in these contracts. They’re paying 2500 a month, 3000 a month and I’m not getting the same.
D.J. Paris 25:09 And even beyond that, what happens if and when Zillow is like, you know, we’re just going to be our own thing. We’re going to have our own agents, we’re going to do our own thing. We’re good. We’re no longer selling leads to agents that day. And this, this is just a gasp, that day is coming. So, so I’m sorry, go right ahead. I interrupted you.
Terrence Murphy 25:26 No, no, you got the same passion for it as I do. They take our information from us and and sell it back to us. So I’m always trying to empower real estate agents, I have a very, very soft heart in a sense that I’ve seen so many of my friends. I worked with agents at Cohen’s. When I started, I was 23. And they were in their late 70s and 80s still selling real estate. And that’s why I would say, when have you been to a real estate agents retirement party, either get out of the industry, or they sell real estate until they don’t know what else to do. And that’s what I’m creating. I’m creating the real estate entrepreneur movement, where, like, I’ll take about on a normal real estate transaction is about 20 to 22. Companies that make money, title, mortgage survey, Home Warranty, I can keep going
D.J. Paris 26:15 right inspection appraisal, yeah, etc. Yeah, it keeps
Terrence Murphy 26:17 going. So I’m teaching my people in my world how to buy those businesses and get owner distributions. I’m teaching them how to invest in real estate, how to start their first investment portfolio because my wife and I bought commercial strip centers, we bought multifamily. We’ve done neighborhoods, we’re developing neighborhoods alongside Jack Nicklaus right now. And so we’ve done and we’re teaching people those exact steps on how to create multiple income streams.
D.J. Paris 26:44 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it really is the way to go as as somebody who I’m not a broker owner myself, although I work hand in hand with with our owner here. And he and I have created several ancillary companies to do exactly what you’re talking about, you know, because for people who might not be realizing, especially people who want to start their own firm, what you might not realize, at least on the residential side, is brokerage is a very low margin business on its own, and to really make a nice business that might be sellable one day, you need to have these ancillary lines. And also, they’re just great ways to increase the bottom line in getting involved in Title maybe lending depending on you know, what state you might be in, you know, again, commission advance, there’s a lot of title, you know, like you were saying, lots of different lines. You’re absolutely so right, because I think people oftentimes want to want to get in, be their own managing broker have their own business, and they don’t realize what the margins actually look like. And then they’re like, oh, wow, this is not the This isn’t like I just broke free from a Keller Williams, which is a great company, but now I’m on my own, I get to keep everything. And it’s like, oh, and now I have all these other expenses as well. So it becomes tricky and and but I think you’re right, this idea of an entrepreneur is Robert Kiyosaki is sort of the guy who really made this as popular as it is, is this idea of residual income and creating streams of income that are more predictable, because as we know, real estate is transactional. It’s so odd to me that no one has figured out how to make it a fee based business like what financial advisors have done, financial advisors, the smartest thing ever, which basically said we’re not stockbrokers anymore. We’re not earning commissions, where you’re going to pay us 1% Or whatever the percent, you know, of all the assets under management. Real Estate hasn’t figured out how to do that. Maybe they never will. So real estate does become very transactional. You need these other businesses just so that you can not freak out on the first of the month, every month, right?
Terrence Murphy 29:59 You and hit a wall, right? You know, it’s like this. I’m gonna draw, I’m gonna create an image one day, I may even create a t shirt. But it’s got these paths, right? And they all have a hamster wheel at the end. But they make you think that this path is better than that path. So it’s like you’re a real estate agent. You’re a brand new agent. Now you become a top producer. Now you lead a team. Now you own the brokerage? Yeah, you’ve made it when in reality, most of the brokers I talk to are the ones that are broke. It’s called broker for a reason, right? And the margins are based, you know, I ran a mastermind of the top broker owners in the world at one point or in the USSR. And, and I ran it in the shadows, and no one even knew I started this group, but I told him to one rule I have is well to if you’re not going to be here, let me know. And two is we can’t talk about this in any public forum. So I was running a mastermind for some of the top brokers in the United States for like three years. No one ever knew about this, uh, we and man we, I mean, you had Keller Williams, you had REMAX you had Coldwell Banker Sotheby’s independent brokers in that room, and I coached him every week. And everybody was saying the same stuff no matter what model they was in, they were in so. And I think that’s why exp is the fastest growing brokerage in the world because it’s figured out how to give agents shares and stock. It’s figured out how to give them new income streams. And it’s a beautiful model. But I know we’re going to talk about the podcasts. I wanted to go back and hit those books.
D.J. Paris 31:27 Oh, yeah. No, and thank you for that. And before we get to the podcast, I think you know what, what exp did is really it’s beyond remarkable because they the way I interpreted is they basically took the Keller Williams model and said it wasn’t quite exactly fully realized in the way that Keller Williams and I’m not picking on Keller Williams, obviously, they’re amazing company, of course. But basically people left Keller Williams and said, We think there’s a better way to do the same sort of thing with, you know, giving people more agency more ownership. And so they figured it out. And holy crap, did they figure it out? They are. I mean, it’s it’s like the results speak for themselves. And anyway, so yeah, let’s talk about the podcast.
Terrence Murphy 32:06 Yeah. Last thing on that I always tell people when they asked me, What’s the difference? And and I know Gary, personally, we actually met years ago, we got introduced by Tim how, because a friend of mine from college, one of their top agents, great friend, great guy. And we were supposed to meet for five minutes, and three and a half hours later. Me and Gary and Josh team, my wife was in the room, it was just us for she checked out. She was like y’all go with it. And as you can see how my mind works. I mean, we were just me and Gary, were just on the whiteboards going at it for three hours. And, man, he’s an amazing dude, sharp guy, genius. Respect for him, man. He’s a genius. And so I always respect him. And he said, Dude, I have 100. And at the time, 80,000 agencies like, You’re different. You’re special. I want to be a part of your story. Anything I can do to help you and Erica, let me know. So always will respect Gary on that. I will say on the model. I will say you explained it this way profit share if you take a p&l statement, whereas profits on the bottom. Yeah, right. And so this person gotta be paid, this person got to be paid, this person’s got to be paid. And finally, we’ll share the profit with the agents where usually there’s not a lot left, right, where exp flipped it upside down and say what’s on the top of will pay at the top? Yeah, yeah, it’s revenue. Yeah. So that’s the difference. But they figured
D.J. Paris 33:19 out how to do it. No one else had figured out how to do that. Now there’s a bit a few copycats that are coming along. Because they’re like, hey, this, this idea of this rev share model works really, really well. So it’s it is it is truly incredible. Yeah. So let’s, let’s talk about real estate entrepreneur, what’s the goal of the podcast? Who were you speaking to? And by the way, everyone should check it out. We’re gonna have a link to this directly in the show notes as well. So you can subscribe right from from the show notes. But tell us about it.
Terrence Murphy 33:45 Yeah, so when I was thinking about a podcast, my wife has really been on to me about celebrating. The overachiever in me, Chief stuff. I don’t even stop to smell the roses. I’m on to like the next one, right? I’m just. And one day, she said you got to celebrate. I said, okay, cool. So we achieved the goal in our 20s that we wanted to achieve, which was buying a strip center, we bought a script center in North Carolina in Nashville. It’s Buffalo Wild Wings, Starbucks and different tenants. So we took a picture in front of it, and I posted it. And like a week later, it had like, a million shares. And I was like, what just happened? You know, like, wow, and people were just so inspired by the story that we tell the piece that I posted. And that’s when I realized, like, what I’m doing and how I’m doing it can help a lot of people. So people started messaging me message me on Instagram, Facebook, and I could not obviously keep up with all the messages. Do you have any book? Do you have a book? Do you have a coaching course? Do you have a podcast? And you know, the crazy thing is at the time, I realized I told my wife and said we don’t have any of these. Like, we have no way to help these people. So that’s when I said alright, let’s start this podcast. And so instead of naming it real estate realtor or builder or broker, real estate entrepreneur kind of embody everything that I’m doing. But the goal is to go after realtors to go after brokers to graph the builders, go after investors and just let them know, these are the fundamental things you need to be learning and reading about and putting in place in order to scale your business. Because the one thing I’m passionate about is scalability. I know how to scale things, and I know how to grow things. And that’s something I’m passionate about doing. So that’s what the podcast is real estate entrepreneur with tears Murphy. And I’m just bringing in people to talk about that.
D.J. Paris 35:30 Yeah, scalability is is really its own skill set, it requires the willingness to probably step away from individual production or to step outside of the constraints of individual production, and which you know, it for anyone who’s a real estate agent is probably hyper focused on their own personal production or their team’s production. And then trying to say, Okay, how do I, how do I want X 2x 510 exes, and which require a whole set of systems, so your systems, your data and systems guy really at heart,
Terrence Murphy 36:05 process and people’s what we say in our organizations, because people always ask me, How do you own 20 companies and you’re invested in another 30 process and be in the cradle? Go ahead, go for Dejan.
D.J. Paris 36:17 So I have a question that I’m sure every single person on this podcast is thinking, how does this guy accomplish and do so much? This isn’t me giving you a compliment, although it is a great compliment, but it’s really, how are you able to to be a podcaster an entrepreneur, run a brokerage all your you you own bought prop lots of properties, you have a team? How is there enough time in the day? So this probably goes back to scalability, but how are you able to sort of keep it all running when most of us, you know, are focused in one or two things and we’re struggling? How are you able to maintain that focus with all the different you know, sort of adventures that you’re into, and oh, and you’re a VC. So we can keep going you do a lot, you can do it all, you know,
Terrence Murphy 37:05 I believe everything we go through in life is to to be a part of your story. And when I was 16, my mom had a heart attack. And so at that moment in time, she made it through for a couple more years after but I was working two jobs in high school, I was the team captain on the football team, I was an honor society with a 3.8 GPA. So I’d already been learning these tools. And when you are 16, I drove myself to school, I fed myself like I literally was at home by myself. And so you just kind of became an adult an early age, I didn’t understand why I was going through that. Like, why was it so hard. But looking back, like those experiences happen for a reason. Same thing with my NFL career, I worked my butt off to get to get there. And I got paralyzed. I mean, I got paralyzed from the neck down. I had a really bad neck injury. And just working my way back from something of that. Oh, man, trauma, right, just learning how to use your arms again to walk again. You know, I had neck surgery. And I’m like, why am I going through this? But it’s not why. It’s how can you use it to inspire other people? And how can you use it to be a better version of yourself. That’s what I tell everybody in my work. You are competing with you, I want you to be the best version of DJ, everybody else has already taken so be the best version of you. And in that my capacity grew. My, my passion for entrepreneurship and real estate grew my one prayer to God when I was in the middle of depression, I mean, deep in depression at 22 years of my dream was shaken when I can’t walk, I’m in a wheelchair, I’m trying to figure this stuff out. It’s just given me a passion. God gave me something that I could be passionate about. And when he gave me real estate, that’s when I knew, Okay, so that’s why when people when they hear me speak, or they listen to me, they’re like, do you just speak with his different conviction? Because when you’re praying to God in the middle of depression, and you paralyze thy God, give me a passion, and he shows it to you. There’s no way I can speak with conviction. So as I think through how we are trying to scale, I’m always challenging myself. The foundation of scalability is number one, you are you operating with the best version of your time I call it TBS, where’s my time best spent on a day to day basis? So I literally meet with my team probably every other week about my schedule with people that think well, you kind of create it and leave it right. Interesting. I mean, and I refined my schedule every two to three weeks, and no one will tell you that because no one’s doing it right. But when people ask me, Well, how did you learn that? Well, I learned it from okay, if I’m a wire receiver, and at practice, I’m running this route, right and I dropped the ball. Well, right after practice, I go right in and I put the tape on I’m like, Okay, if I were to just put my foot here and what this way it would have made it easier. So I took that all I did His take life experiences. And I translated it into real estate entrepreneurship. So that’s why when people are trying to study me, they can’t figure me out. I’m an enigma. Because I’m pulling from life experiences I’m pulling from books, I’m pulling from things that no one it’s I’ve taken, I’ve taken the ingredients of my life and made it into a recipe. And now I’m able to listen to you, I can interview your DJ. And the first thing if you were going to work and be a part of my team, I would want to know your story. I want to know those those points. And I can help you take those ingredients in your life and create it into a successful recipes to scale. So that was a long answer to say, everybody’s recipe will be different. But it starts with time blocking. And then once we understand where we’re putting our time and how we’re managing our time, then it’s processing. And so
D.J. Paris 40:52 you know, it’s so funny, because we do want to make this more complicated. We want as individuals to think, oh, my gosh, my life is so complicated. And yes, it can feel that way. And absolutely, I’m not here to say that, you know, my life is harder than anyone else’s are more complicated, because of course, everybody’s their own unique individual has their own challenges. But you’re absolutely right about this idea that what we have to do is, is constantly evaluate in not in a I’m worthless way, not in a denigrating way, but in a Where is my time best spent today? Where was my time best spent yesterday? Where did I you know, where was I not super effective. What’s another skill I can learn, just trying to keep the tools actually not even sharpen. But adding more tools and more sharp tools to the quiver. You know, this idea of reading 52 books a year, if, if every realtor read five books here, just five books, in fact, read the five that that Terence recommended, but if they just did that there would be massive change, because all it takes is one or two good ideas. And the fact that you’re doing 52 books a year is going to scale you up even faster with that knowledge. So it’s but it’s also but there’s also a limit to how much time there is so I’m curious on so you talked about time best spent TBS this idea of here’s here’s where I can leverage the the most growth within the shortest amount of time. How and, and I also want to go all the way back to your story of you know, you had to be an become an adult much earlier than a lot of us right because of your situation growing up. That’s not an easy thing for a child to have to have to do or teenager you did it you stayed focused, you achieved you know your your professional goals up until you know, and then your life was a lot of it your physical body was taken away from you really, just because that happens, things happen. And it’s it’s awful. And yet, here you are, you’re walking, you’re you’re you’re in shape, you’re you’re now running these successful businesses. And and but you also said depression is part of my story too. Like, yes, I am not a Superman, like even when you know, your whole career gets taken away. That’s going to put anyone in a massive depression. So I’m curious and wanted to ask about one thing about support group, having a support group. And I don’t mean necessarily a building that you go into and sit in a circle with other people, though, that is a version of that. It could be friends, family could be colleagues, how important is it for you to have people in your life that you can share intimately invulnerable, be vulnerable with and say, Hey, guys, I am going through something right now. I am depressed. And yet I’m still I’m still productive. I’m still getting my life together. But this is going on. And this is real. How important is it to have those relationships? And does that help you through the tougher times?
Terrence Murphy 43:52 Wow, that’s good, bro. Man, this is a really good podcast. If people aren’t listening, they need to rewind this episode. I’m gonna go back and listen to it multiple times. So I think it’s really cool man. You know, the cool thing about it is I tell people all the time. I don’t have a brokerage anymore. I don’t really have a team. I have a tribe. Man and I always say Your vibe attracts your tribe. Yeah, being you the authentic you. Not someone else. Man, like that’s gonna attract the right people, the energy and the realness not fake positivity. Like I don’t want to be in the locker room who’s not going to play a snap walking around hooting and hollering like, just day in and day out. We see tears get up at five in the morning and hit it and we see him at the office and we see him in the weight room or whatever wherever you guys are at and you’re just day in and they are just getting up and doing the work. But when you hit a wall because we all hit a wall, you can be vulnerable to and that’s what a true leader and a true because to me when you are able to be vulnerable with right people. And so that’s why I say, man having the right tribe around you, and protecting that energy. Like we’re at a place now we literally call it the zero tolerance rule. You can bring me any problem in the real estate team or organization, but it better have a solution attached. Because if not, then you’re just complaining. And no one is allowed to bring any negative energy into our space. And if you do, we’re gonna call you out unless you have a solution attached. And just creating an atmosphere like that an ecosystem like that, where there’s a lot of successful people, but and I tell everybody leave your pride at the door. No one can come into this space. And when somebody has feedback to help you have ears to hear, and not just ears to reply, because in so many times, everybody just wants to reply, they’re just ready to say something bad, versus slowing down and truly hearing what the person is saying. And I think that’s what we’re so focused on right now. And in those situations, vulnerability, and authenticity, authenticity, and real conversations, we can have a place where we can say, hey, you know what, DJ, thanks for pushing me a couple of weeks ago, and really getting on my ass. I know I can do better. But now let’s have this conversation. Man, I got a lot going on. Man. This is what I got going on. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 46:22 that’s what yeah, this ability, this ability to be honest, and to be vulnerable is, is really I found very helpful when things get tough. Having people around who who care, and that, that you care about it really helps keep it but you’re right about this idea of problems and solutions. I want to just to go back to that for a second. Because that is you just challenged me because I’m well, I’m like most people, I’m a complainer, of course. And there’s always things to complain about, you know, nothing’s perfect. There’s always, you know, I can complain about myself too, which is also not very helpful. But this idea of complaining is only helpful if you’re like, and I think I can figure out a way around, or I could ask somebody who’s been there before me. You know, like I have, I have a personal trainer, you were talking about about being in the gym with a trainer. It’s like, I have a trainer because I don’t want to hurt myself in the gym. And also, I’m not a professional athlete, and I don’t know what I’m doing. So I’ve had a trainer for I’ll probably have a trainer the rest of my life, honestly. And it’s not. It’s because I need somebody who’s like, Do this, do this, do this. That’s their expertise. I pay them for their expertise, and I get the results. If I tried to do I tried to do it all myself my whole life. I never got to the gym. Rarely went sometimes I go sometimes I didn’t. It wasn’t. It wasn’t just something I was able to do myself. So I had to, I had to find leverage. I had to say, Okay, well, if I want to hire if I need to hire a trainer, I need to make enough money to hire a trainer, which means I need to scale up my business. So I totally understand this idea of looking for solution. And and it’s not always easy solutions are not always well, they’re not always right in front of you. But if you have a good circle of people around, you know, sometimes other people can help you with your solutions, too. And this idea of masterminding, we do this. I do the same thing with brokerages, we mastermind with other brokerages that are kind of similar to us all over the country are like hey, what are you guys doing right now? Like, where are you? Where are you guys struggling? What’s working, just doing that alone has helped I get so many ideas. And I’m sort of shocked that so many real estate agents operate in a silo, they sort of operate in their own little world, they work from home, which I get, they’re not really around other agents and less sort of showing or something. And they don’t often know like, there’s lots of great ideas out there. And all you have to do is connect with other other realtors, what, how important is having, having sort of people that you look up to having idols not idle in the religious sense. But just having people that you respect having people that you know, obviously you’re a reader. And you know, you hung out with Gary Keller for three and a half hours. Like, that’s pretty cool. How important is it for you to get access to these people? And how much time has it saved you by reading something, learning something having a conversation so that you didn’t have to reinvent the wheel? Yeah, I
Terrence Murphy 49:17 think at this point, if you’re a real estate agent, and you don’t have someone who’s achieved what you’ve achieved, because always say it’s one thing to get inspiration, right? Like LeBron James did a dunk the other night. I was like, Wow, that’s awesome. I’m inspired by Yeah, but how is that actually helping me, right? So the one thing I’ve tried to become is I don’t want to just be an inspiration to anybody anymore. I want to be an inspiration that inspires you. But then I want to give you the breadcrumbs and the tools and the roadmap to go achieve the success that you want to achieve. So that other piece of puzzle is what I’m building out right now. To truly give people the tools. So now they’re inspired, but then I sell and then I’m inspired but now I plug in. Boom. And then I think That’s been the great thing. Now, because of running an independent brokerage, you kind of feel like you’re on an island somewhere now, like, you know, that was the thing. I remember going to Cabo my first exp event, and it says, making real estate fun again. And I get there. And every step I took, I knew a broker from being an independent broker, I just didn’t know they were at exp. So like, every step, I took them, like, Whoa, you’re here, you’re like a class reunion. I’m like, Oh, this is cool. And so yeah, it’s just been one of those things where, you know, when you get to a place where everybody is successful, it’s like flying with the Eagles. No one’s really like, forwarding the information. They’re not like trying to hold back, they’re just free with it. And then it creates that atmosphere. So I love kind of being in that atmosphere where we’re all gonna succeed. But it’s like, alright, let’s just put all of our tools in the middle of the table, and then you grab out of what you want to grab on. And then like, you know, like a potluck, right?
D.J. Paris 50:58 Absolutely, like a potluck. And you’re a competitive guy, but I suspect you don’t view any other realtors or brokerages as competition at all. I suspect you won’t. You said this earlier, I compete with myself, I want to be the best version of me. Obviously, you’re paying attention to what other firms are doing, of course, because why wouldn’t you? And you want to keep you know, introducing, you know, more and more skills and you know, different avenues of verticals to your business. But you’re not you don’t see the other agencies as as competitors,
Terrence Murphy 51:30 I’m guessing. No, not really, because my value proposition is so unique. You know, I’m teaching real estate agents how to create multiple income streams. I’m teaching them how to build other businesses, I’m teaching them how to invest. You know, I just closed a $45 million apartment 240 units a couple of weeks ago. So I’m doing stuff where I can show these guys and I started off my first investment was 270 $5,000 duplexes. So you can scale that’s why I say I went from that 10 years ago to a 40 $50 million deal. $70 million deal, the 50 million. There’s, there’s just following a system and the process and the breadcrumbs. But like at exp they rank, they rank, the personal attractors, and out of 87,000 agents, and I’ve been at exp now 16 months, I’m number 30. I’m in the top 30. Already, it’s been some people have been there 12 or 13 years or longer. And in the first year and a half or under two years, I’m already in the top 30 Personal attractors. But I don’t really get caught up in being anybody else other than myself. And any goal that I set, it’s gonna be well beyond any what anybody can write down for me anyway.
D.J. Paris 52:33 Yeah, yeah, you’re gonna hold yourself to a higher standard than anyone else could. And I suspect that is a huge reason. You just embrace your standards, your standards are up here. And they didn’t start up here necessarily. They start where everyone starts, and you just kept inching your way up to where you’re like, hey, I can run multiple things at the same time by scaling to two final questions for you. And then I’ll let you get back to running your empire and I do I do consider it an empire because I don’t say that as as just a nice thing to say, although it is like so nice thing to say. But it’s really true. I mean, you’re doing a lot of different things successfully. Which any one of those things is difficult and the fact that you do them all simultaneously with with a lot of help, of course, is is just truly remarkable. Two questions one is every every agent I know again, focused on on the present in the near future is freaking out about 2023 Right we’re like okay, rates are where they are. This is This is bad. Now I’m not I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying this is this is what the mentality is a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, a lot of sort of parent paralyzed agents going i Oh, next year, it’s gonna really be rough. What are you telling? What are you coaching your agents to think about? Because we can’t control rates? We can’t control inventory, we just can’t. But there are things that are within our control. What are what are you telling people to do to focus to have a successful 2023?
Terrence Murphy 54:03 Yeah, it’s really cool. Like I said, I’m an I’m an enigma man, people can’t figure me out. I’m just, you know, I got my real estate license in the middle of the downturn in investment company in 2008. So the worst
D.J. Paris 54:17 time to start an investment company and we’ve did it
Terrence Murphy 54:20 the worst, especially and start a brokerage. So I look at this just like Warren Buffett says, he says real estate recession or stock market downturn or what is
D.J. Paris 54:34 recession proof?
Terrence Murphy 54:35 Yeah, well, the real estate market not a bear market, but a bull market. Bull Market There we go. Sorry, I couldn’t get it out. He says it’s the only time that when something’s on sale, people don’t run to buy I know it’s funny you know what I mean? So like but if it’s a First Friday or what is it Black Friday, you can’t even you get trampled get. So I tell people, you got to switch the mindset and they always start With the mindset, right when I win everything, and that’s what I’m always evaluating is my mindset where it needs to be in order for me to go to that next level, because you can have all the processes you want. But if you don’t have the mindset to receive, going to a billion dollars in sales, or having 500 people in your organization, or whatever it is, it’s not going to be sustainable. You may get there, but you’re gonna go backwards. So what I’m telling my real estate agents, is look at the opportunity that’s in here, study your own hyperlocal market. Is it Arios? Is it new builders, because builders were fine when they were getting 18 offers, but now their agents might have gotten lazy, but they have to still keep selling houses. I picked up five builders in the 2012 13 range, just because I was doing what their agents had gotten tired of doing. Man, I started having these builders hired me, man, that’s when I started scaling, do you get 40 houses per builder or 20? Houses 30 houses? And so you just got to think about looking at your hyperlocal market and find those opportunities? Is it expired? Is it orphan listings, right? An orphan listings, just to listen to goes past 90 days, it’s been expired, people have forgotten about it, you know, and then you just create a value proposition to second to none. And you pick up that market share, because the market share is not going away. It’s just going to trade hands. So if we have the hunter mentality, that we’re gonna go hunt, and we’re gonna go create a value proposition is second to none. And a brand is second to none. That’s when we will take that market share, and it’s just a mentality shift. Right.
D.J. Paris 56:30 And last year, you’re not worried about 2023 at all, you’re just pivoting, pivoting, pivoting. And I only wanted to say that because you’re the only person I’ve talked to thus far, who is like not legitimately freaked out? And I think what you said made absolute perfect sense. Yes, we’ll just change well, we’ll look over here as opposed to over here. And we’ll make it work. I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Terrence Murphy 56:55 No, you hit it on the head, you picked up on it, because truth stands the test of time when you hit true. Well, there it is. Right, like, Whoa, there it is. And so I think once again, when people resonate with my message is because it’s not a woe is me. It’s not I’m scared, I don’t operate out of fear. I operate out of solutions. And at the end of the day, I’m going excited to be truthfully honest, I think there’s a lot of people who have not been coached, right. And when they realize they need the right coaching, they’re going to come to people like me, and I’m going to give them the confidence and the tools to be a competent agent, I call it the three seeds. Competence creates confidence. But if you got an industry in 16 1718, whatever, and you’re getting 17 offers, you never really sat down and created the competence. But now you gotta go create the competence.
D.J. Paris 57:48 Yeah, and nobody likes a confident person who isn’t competent. In fact, we all laugh at those people, we dislike them. Confidence needs to be earned through competence. And I think I think so here’s my last question. My final question. And this is this will be a tough a tougher one, maybe, or maybe not. I, what would you say, to your 22 year old self, or 23 year old self, you know, as you’re exiting your your football career? What do you wish you would have known then that you didn’t know but you but you do know now?
Terrence Murphy 58:22 Think even bigger than I thought. And I was a pretty big dreamer and think, yeah, you’re
D.J. Paris 58:28 already a big thinker. And yet you’re thinking too small back then is what you’re saying?
Terrence Murphy 58:32 Yeah, I remember hitting them came to me going my junior year. And I remember them talking to my parents about a Heisman campaign. Like I was really playing that well, at the time, Reggie Bush was doing really well. And Darren Sproles, and if you look at our numbers, my numbers are just as good as some of his numbers. He was winning the Heisman. And I remember hitting him was talking about at some point coming to my parents about Heisman campaign, and in my mind, I was like me, Heisman winner receiver at Texas a&m. And so I still beat myself up about that, because I’m like, You shouldn’t accept that. And be like, Yes, I am. I am a Heisman. I can’t be one of the I am one of the best players in the nation. And those of us those moments in life that I pull on now or now when I think about an idea of like, it’s possible. And whatever it is five exit in your mind and then go for that.
D.J. Paris 59:23 Well, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s as simple as that as not, it’s not easy, but it’s simple, right? Like, I guess that’s the point. It’s hard but simple. This idea of being able to, to think bigger, allows you it expands your capability. Right? It’s it’s a it’s a simple idea, think bigger, and then then the hard work comes in of trying to figure out a way through it, but you’re absolutely right. We are and we all know this. We’re limited by our beliefs. You know that there’s that old joke of like, what is BS stands for belief systems because it is it is Whatever. It’s an old joke, but But it’s true. We’re all wrapped up in our own BS our own belief systems. And when then you meet somebody like you who’s who seemingly doing things outside of what we believe is capable, but you’ve been doing that your whole life. And so you have this track record of like, oh, yeah, I got paralyzed. Yeah, that was it. I mean, I got through it. First, you know, I got into, you know, I got into college, I got into, you know, playing a pro sports, you did all the things that were already impossible. So I imagine when challenges come your way, it probably doesn’t decimate you like maybe it would somebody who hasn’t had some of those, those challenges along the way. One final question, how important is failure? And what I mean failure, I don’t mean, you know, I just mean not achieving the goal you set out for and how important because I have I have I have a theory, or at least I’ve talked to a lot of agents who say they love failure, because most of the things they do don’t end up working out. But it just takes, it just carries them over to the next thing that eventually gets them closer to working out. So how often you seem like a guy who never fails at anything. I would love to know, what role does failure play in your life? And how do you think about failure?
Terrence Murphy 1:01:14 Man, it’s a good question. It’s a great final question. I think as I think about failure, I always say it’s wins and lessons. There are no wins and losses. It’s only a loss if you quit. Yep. So I mean, they’re gonna win. I’m a learning lesson. Yeah, I’m only win and I’m gonna lose if I quit. And so as long as you keep going, there was a Martin Luther King quote, I know I’m gonna butcher it but he says, If you can’t fly, then run if you can’t run then walk. If you can’t walk then crawl. But by all means, keep going. There Yeah,
D.J. Paris 1:01:52 it boy, I’m not going to do better than Dr. Martin Luther King. So I’m gonna leave it there. One of the greatest thinkers of all time and you perfectly summed some that up I think that’s absolutely right. And also the scoreboard of life or on the field is is only the scoreboard it even if you’re victorious, it doesn’t necessarily mean you played your best right? And I’m sure you probably had games where you lost but you played your best and yes, it’s it’s no fun to lose. But to know that I did my best is is really all that ever really ultimately matters or at least in my opinion, that’s what I found is that you know, you can you could win on the scoreboard but if you didn’t play your best you just don’t feel that good about that victory. Right? So this idea of of of showing up like you’ve said, be your best self I know it’s said a lot in our society, but actually measuring what does it mean to be at my best, what does that actually look like? Boy, Terrance, you gave so much great wisdom on this episode, I need to get you back to where you need to get back to running your empire and I have taken up too much of your time. So thank you for spending as much time on our show talking to our A took not our agents, but our listeners who are agents about what it takes to be successful. Anyone wants to jump aboard the Terrance Murphy train. And you know what if you’re gonna hit your your, your horse to a wagon, it’s a pretty good wagon to hitch to check out all the stuff he does, because he is incredible, and an amazing guy and just a just a great, great guy. So check out Terrence murphy.com. Everything Terrence related is on there, you can learn about his coaching, you can learn about his brokerage, you can learn about his podcast, and of course, his story along the way and all the entrepreneurial efforts he is involved in. And if you’re an agent looking to you know, get coached by somebody, boy Terrence would be right at the top of my list. So definitely check him out Terrence murphy.com. Again, that’s t e r r e n c e murphy.com. Also follow him on Instagram, which is Terrence realtor. So at Terrence realtor, we’ll have links to all of that in our show notes. And Terence, I am super so, so grateful to you for coming on our show. I know our audience got a lot of value out of this. So on behalf of the audience, we thank you. We know how busy you are. We know you don’t have time to do this. And yet you found time for us. Thank you. On behalf of Terence and myself, we also want to thank the audience for continuing to support our show to make it all the way to the end. And we ask everybody to just do one thing. Once you after you visit Terrence Murphy’s website Terrence murphy.com. Tell a friend about this episode. Just tell one other real estate agent about this episode, maybe somebody who’s struggling or maybe somebody that’s looking for the some sort of answer or suggestion to help get them through the end of this year and into next year and shoot them a link over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every one of our episodes can be streamed there or just anywhere you can find podcasts. We are there as well. Also subscribe to Terrance pod Terrance his podcast real estate entrepreneur with Terence Murphy link to that in the show notes Terrance thank you sir you are an inspiration. I am grateful to you for coming on our show. You are The busiest man I know and you made time for us and so thank you. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks,
Terrence Murphy 1:05:07 Terrance. Appreciate you brother. I’m here if you need me on anything, man, God bless everybody keep your hands up, keep pushing, and the scorecard is measuring how many people you can impact in a positive way. Thanks, bro.
How To Deepen Relationships With Your Sphere • Skye Michiels
Dec 15, 2022
Skye Michiels the National Head of Agent Development at Compass and DJ discuss how photos give you a better chance to connect with people and how to use this tool. Skye goes back to the beginning of his career in real estate how he got into Compass and became the head of agent development there. Skye describes how he started the 6amers and built a community around it. Next, Skye discusses how to nurture and deepen your relationships with your past clients. Skye also talks about what he expects 2023 will look like and how agents can talk to their clients about the rates at the moment.
D.J. Paris 0:00 2023 is the year that you should deepen relationships with your sphere. But how do you do that? We’re going to talk about it today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Sky Michaels before we get to sky. Just a quick reminder that the best way that you can help our podcast well a couple of ways, actually two ways. So there are two best ways. One is to of course support our sponsors who are nice enough to help us continue funding our show. So we love our sponsors, please, we hope you love them to check out their products and services. And then the second best way you can help us grow is also by telling a friend, our goal is to reach as many real estate agents as possible. There’s 1.7 million of them in the United States right now. And I don’t think all of them are listeners, although we would love it if they all were so help us get one more follower or one more listener and turn somebody else on to our show, send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com. And guys, that’s enough for me. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Skye Michaels.
Today on the show we have sky Michaels from Compass and let me tell you more about Scott. Scott Michaels is here to connect, empower and cultivate kindness. He’s a dad and entrepreneur. He’s an award winning real estate professional and a national motivational speaker. Now Currently he is serving as the National Head of agent development at Compass and Sky is currently creating a national agent training curriculum based on the principle that real estate is more about creating connection and caring for people than it is about selling houses could not agree more. By the way. Sky is also the founder and host of the popular motivation and accountability group, the 6am errs, which brings together 1000s of agents across the country in the early hours every week to learn frameworks for developing a healthy mindset, reaching their goals and achieving their own happiness. I’m going to give you guys two websites that I want you to go check out about Skye first is his personal website, which is Sky michaels.com. Michaels is spelled a little differently. So there’s a link to that in our show notes. But it is M I C H I E L s.com. So sky with an E, Michael’s anyway, just click on the link in the show notes, but also want you to check out his 6am ers accountability group and podcast. You can find that anywhere podcasts are served, but go to his website, the 6am ers, and it’s the number 6am ers.com. Google it, you’ll find it. I’ll also have a link to that in the show notes. Skye, welcome to the show.
Skye Michiels 4:14 Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be on I wanted
D.J. Paris 4:17 to very quickly before we get into your story, I’m sort of going to take over for just a moment, which is like super rude and not great. Not not not great etiquette. But I wanted I saw something that really stopped me in my tracks and forced me but not forced me encouraged me and immediately captivated me to learn more about you. So we do obviously prep for the show. Although today I didn’t do my prep that early. And so I was like oh my gosh, I have to learn about sky. And I went to his website, which is Sky michaels.com And he does something that I’ve yet to see any other person in the real estate industry do and I’m sure other people have done this but this is the first time I’ve seen it in five years of looking at other agent websites. For people that are on our show, after 400, some episodes, this is super cool. If you go to his website and you go to his About Us page, he is got something called big moments. And what he’s basically showing you here is different major events in his life that are important to him or significant to his development or about his personal life. And, boy, I love this. And I just wanted to say, I literally got to learn all about your life, not necessarily by reading a bio, which, you know, I get lost after a while when I read somebody’s bio, especially if it’s really long, but I loved this because I could see pictures of each event in your life. And then if I hover over, I can read more about it. And I was like, wow, I really feel like I know this guy. And I thought, What a great idea for other realtors to do this. So please, everyone, go to his website, Sky michaels.com, go to his About Us page and just check out how he really gets intimate and vulnerable. And says, here’s the here’s what’s been most important to me in my life. I think it is super cool. So I just wanted to give you some, some kudos before we before you started.
Skye Michiels 6:01 Yeah, well, I think it ties back into the philosophy that I have around real estate too, that real estate is about people. And you know how many, every realtor that you you’ve seen or that you go and you go to their about page, it’s words and words and words. The reality is like, no client looking at me, it wants to read all that, right. But when they see a visual, and they see a picture of like, divorced, you know what I’m doing what I’m doing, right, there is a, um, I’m explaining who I am as a person. In addition, I’m also creating potential connection with the person like, oh, wow, like, if they had read paragraph and paragraph and paragraph, you know, eventually maybe they get to it. But the visual of that in, you know, the visual, my children are the visual of me rowing in college, or whatever it might be it you connect a lot easier, our brains are wired to connect visually, much quicker than we are connect when we read something. So that was sort of the mindset around it was a really one in a very, very quick situation illustrate who I am as a person, mainly because I want to connect with you as a person as well.
D.J. Paris 7:11 Yeah, it almost felt like I was, it was almost almost like a mini Instagram. Most important moments of your life in a weird way. It’s just, it’s like I don’t have to infinitely scroll through, you know, a million of your Instagram posts, I can literally just see the top 12 things that have happened that are significant. And you you really do talk about everything on there, which I think is is courageous, and a great, a great example of leadership, the ability to, you know, say, hey, not everything in my life has been easy and perfect. And here are some of the challenges and here’s how I overcame them. And I just I’m really impressed by that. And it encourages me to want to be more forthright, you know, with with my own story as well. And by the way, I’m a divorced guy, too. And it’s and as soon as I saw that, I was like, Okay, I feel good. I did, I did, I felt a little drag to do tonight. I don’t have children you do. So I wasn’t able to connect in that way. But But I was like, Oh, I’m a divorced guy that that’s, you know, it’s not really something we like, when we go around bragging about in a way or like announcing, but of course, half the people in this country are. And so even even things like that I thought was really, really
Skye Michiels 8:21 well. And I really think it goes back into owning your story. Right? The best. Realtors are authentic. And authenticity is the most powerful thing we have in real estate. It’s Be your authentic self. And when you own your story, you’re showing up as your authentic self. And, and very similar. Like, when someone is looking at you online. You don’t know what they’re going to connect with. I don’t I didn’t know if you were divorced. But now we have a course in connection. And imagine if I was showing up to a listing appointment at your house, you already feel like you know me a little bit and you have we have a connection and maybe it was the college rowing or maybe it was the children or maybe it was the we don’t know. But now I’m putting my story out there I’m saying this is who I am as a person. And now you it allows you to connect in your terms rather than me trying to force my turns on you. I don’t know if that makes sense.
D.J. Paris 9:14 It makes perfect sense. And also this this idea of vulnerability is is really the gateway to connection and you are vulnerable on this and and I like that because so so many people are desperate for connection and but it’s scary to get vulnerable. It’s scary to put your story out there because of course you know people can judge you for it or people can have a reaction that isn’t what you want. But you’re saying it’s my story. This is what it is i and and but people love that I love it. I love the anyway so we’ll move on from that because I could talk about that all day. But I think that is such a great example of who you are. Is is the the willingness to put something like that out there I think is a really great indicator of your character and and also where you’re at in life. But let’s start all the way at the beginning of your story because I really want to hear about how you got to where you are now. So how did you get started in real estate?
Skye Michiels 10:09 So I was a teacher. So I graduated from Syracuse University, I knew from a very early age, I wanted to be a teacher, like, I love that, you know. And I was inspired by some of my teachers, like most teachers are. And I got into I graduated in 2000, with my master’s degree, and I became a high school history teacher. And unfortunately, I realized very quickly, I was poor, as a teacher, so I needed a side business. And all most teachers have a little side thing, they paint their movers or they coach or whatever it might be. And I had a conversation with a teacher who was just about to retire. And he said, If I could go back and do it all over again, I would get my real estate license and sell real estate part time and then teach full time you get the best of both worlds. So I was like, Sure. So I went online, Google real estate schools, you know, found the closest one. And I literally got my license. And it was one of those, like, all weekend classes, right? So I got it, for weekends, got my license, and I was a realtor. And I started selling. And I always intended it in the beginning to be a part time thing. Like I thought it was just going to be something I sell four or five homes a year, you know, make a little extra money and be a teacher the rest of my life. And I’m also a former college athlete, so I’m a little competitive. So I got into it and actually loved it. Because I think it reminded me a sports, right? Like, if you work hard, you actually get a return here. Right? Right. And there’s a piece of my, my, my soul, so to speak, that missed that competition, right? You every day of your life as a college athlete, you’re competing, and then you leave it, you’re like, Okay, that’s over. And now it’s back in a competition mode. And I just loved it, I gravitated into it, I was successful. And I literally did both for three years as a part time agent, because of the fact that I grew up, you grew up craving stability, like I did, for years there QC University, in my opinion, the best school out there, you know, but at the end of the day, like you, you go to school for five years, become a teacher and you achieve it. And I’m going to leave it to go sell houses at 100%. Commission.
D.J. Paris 12:26 And it was probably probably difficult in a sense to because I imagine with teaching, sometimes there’s there’s a calling, like, it’s like I feel drawn to do this, you obviously could have chosen any career. You know, Syracuse is a great university. And so you could have chosen any any path and did you feel called to teach was that like part of?
Skye Michiels 12:47 Totally. And you know, the last year I stayed as the last year, I literally stayed because of the fact I didn’t want to leave the senior class to that as teaching, because I’ve been with them all for years. And yeah, it’s a relationship. Oh, yeah. The relationship and care about those kids are exactly and then on the surface, when you look at real estate on the surface, it actually it feels very, especially nowadays with like, all the housewives and the HGTV stuff, right? It feels very, like. What I discovered, though, within real estate, is all the skills I applied as a teacher, I can apply in real estate. And that’s what made me successful, between caring about someone learning about who they are making sure I could explain everything properly, making sure they really, really understood the process, right? All the skills of a teacher applied so closely, to me being a realtor, as long as they then applied sort of that competence and the sort of the drive you have as an athlete as well, when those came together really made me who I was. So I did both for three years. And then finally 2005 went full time real estate. And it was made the decision and you know, this was gonna be my career.
D.J. Paris 13:58 And then now you’re in you’re, you’re you’re a corporate guy now now you’re part of you’re part of the biggest real estate company out there right now. So you are the National Head of agent development at Compass and everybody knows compass of course, I would hope by now everyone knows compass. And you know, they just they just are crushing it everywhere. And and obviously, Robert replikins a really impressive guy, of course. And yeah, you guys are always in the news. And I’m always a lot going on with Compass. Um, how did you get to compass just out of curiosity?
Skye Michiels 14:27 Yeah. So over the course of my career, you know, I was an individual agent, oh five and then over. In 2012, I created my real estate team. And it was called Real Estate with heart you know all about caring and cared about people, etc. That team I grew that team into one of the top teams in the Philadelphia market. At the time I was with Keller Williams, which I love Keller Williams is such a great company, some great trainings and awesome culture, etc. But I was at the time I’m as also craving a little something more, shall we say. And compass at that time in 2018, was just starting to launch in the Philadelphia market. So I remember taking my first recruiting appointment only as taking it because I was like, I’m gonna learn about this company so I can recruit against them. And the minute when I walked
D.J. Paris 15:21 in, like, wait a minute, they’ve got everything. I don’t want to compete with those guys.
Skye Michiels 15:26 It was that situation, I walked into the appointment, I met a gentleman named Rob Lehman. And at the end of the day, in my head, I’m like, Oh, my God, why did I take this appointment, because I literally fell in love with a company, the philosophy, the branding, the marketing, there’s so many aspects that I wanted to create, but there’s just so many, it’s so challenging in most real estate companies to create it, because of the fact that, you know, the factors present really holds you back. And the encompass sort of overcame this, really, because of the fact that they invested so many millions of dollars in in supporting agents first. And that was like this philosophy that I had, that I really wanted to sort of pursue. And so at the time, in 2018, I came over to compass I took over as the managing director for the city of Philadelphia, and my team came over as well. And my sister ran my team. And yeah, and we launched in, we launched in June of 2018. And I came over in August of 2018. And as awesome ride, and then over the years, the teacher and me started to come out. And really, this is accentuated in the pandemic. So I’d been doing a little bit of national team teaching that our retreats and things along those lines and the pandemic hits, right. So March 2020, hard to remember it, but it everything shut down. And we’re sitting there, like, what do we do. And immediately myself and a group of probably about 13, or 14 other people were formed. And we launched a thing called coaching at Compass, which was all virtual training. So every single day, all we did was we did all this virtual training. The other thing was, I was drinking a lot, eating a lot, watching Netflix a lot, you know, we would have our virtual happy hour, and then you know, you’re like, alright, six o’clock, like what I do now Mazal just watch TV, there’s nothing to do. And this was in March. So the end of April, I launched a group called sticks hammers, which was sort of a morning and accountability group, just within my market, just within the Philadelphia market. So between the coaching and compass and the six hammers, I started to work a little more nationally, but I was still managing full time as well. And then at the beginning of this year, I was promoted to the head of agent Development here at compass to make a long story short,
D.J. Paris 17:54 no, it’s, it’s, it’s really impressive. You’ve really come full circle you’re teaching again. And and also, you know, you’re you’re obviously super engaged in in the real estate, Industry and Market. So before we I want to get some advice, because our audience are all realtors, I assume, I don’t know who else would want to listen to our show. But we love our we love our audience, of course, but we also are here to help educate them and help get them ready and AI for next year. Right, we have a shifting market that’s already shifted, and we just had a Fed rate increase, you know, a couple days ago. So we’re certainly agents are, well, you know, they’re stressed, they’re worried. And I’m super excited to learn, you know, what you’re telling agents on what to do through the end of the year, all the way into 2023. But before we do, let’s get to your podcast, because I always wait till the very end to sort of say, Oh, by the way, he’s got this, and then you know, not as many people make it to the end. So I want to make sure we get that out there right now. So tell us about the 6am errs.
Skye Michiels 18:59 Yeah, so the six hammers, once again, it was formed in April 2020. And the mindset it actually was the originally like, couple of years prior, I had gotten divorced. And one of my really good friends a guy named Jay Dreyfus at Keller Williams, I was struggling I was in a bad place. Sure. Sorry, can see this. I’ve been
D.J. Paris 19:18 there. I know. Yeah, it’s bad. Even in the best of scenarios, it’s bad.
Skye Michiels 19:24 And I have a beautiful divorce by the way, I have a great like, you know, my kids are we have great beautiful 5050 custody, et cetera, but going through it, it rocks. So Jake wood, he said, Hey, I’m gonna start texting you early in the morning. 5am We followed a guy named Jaco willing Nick, who’s like, sure,
D.J. Paris 19:43 sure. Yeah. By the way, for anyone who doesn’t know who Jocko will, because he’s got a million books. He’s a crazy what ex Navy Seal or? Yeah, I guess you’re never an ex Navy SEAL. I shouldn’t say it’s like disrespectful. I didn’t mean it to be he’s not But anyways, he’s a Navy SEAL. And this guy is hardcore. And he’s all about discipline and anyway, go Correct. Sorry.
Skye Michiels 20:07 So Jake and I formed a group called the Five Amber’s, right? We woke up at five, a couple days a week, we we’d get on a zoom call, we actually launched it like, nationwide, it was really cool. Actually, the Facebook group still exists today, Jake is one of my best friends today. But you know, he moved to Colorado, I went to compass like, you know, so it just sort of, sort of settled in, I guess we could say. So when the pandemic hit, I started just revived it as the six hammers a, it was a pandemic, so you didn’t need to get up at 5am. And 6pm is also the hour that really allows it to be accessible to everyone, you know, a little a little tough. It’s a little hard if you’re not like a crew guy swimmer, like an early morning person to Paperboy, like 5am is just it’s not healthy as well. 6am was a great time. And to make a long story short, what we do is Tuesdays and every month you sign up and you commit to doing one goal for the month, you wake up at 6am. And you get on a zoom call on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I usually will interview someone motivational on the Zoom call. And then I’ll put a post, I’ll post a question of the day on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and workplace, which is our internal Facebook system that you need to answer. And then we also read one book of the month. And the goal is let’s create a community around sort of waking up early and really taking care of ourselves. Because at the end of the day as realtors, what do we do all day every day, what makes us successful is we take care of other people. And that’s good during the day, because of the fact that’s what makes you successful. The challenge we have as Realtors is that usually that spills over into the early morning and in the late evening, because of the fact that we are always on email and text and social media. And we literally wake up from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed. Sometimes we’re on our devices. So the goal of the six embers is really to say to people that you don’t need to be all things to all people at all times. Early in the morning, early in the morning is for you. Yeah, that’s for you. And we coined a term we call Healthy selfish, that you need to be selfish in a healthy way, early in the morning, you don’t get on the phone, you win. And everyone is different, right? For some people, it’s working out for some it’s meditating. For some it’s reading. For some people, it’s folding laundry, because it makes you feel like you’re in control, whatever it is that you need to do for yourself. That’s, that’s selfish, but it’s healthy, selfish. That’s really what we try to preach. And we want people to wake up with a little bit of motivation, a little bit of positivity, a little bit of inspiration early in the morning to carry them throughout the day.
D.J. Paris 22:51 Now, is this open to only compass agents? or can anyone apply for this?
Skye Michiels 22:57 It’s a great question. So it is right. The the live group is only compass agents, right? Because of the fact we use internal communication systems, etc. And over the years, I had hours and hours of interviews that are recorded, and my mom, my mom was like, can you send me that interview? Or like, you know, people would say, Hey, can you send me the interview, I want to send it to my my kids are. And it really it got to the point where I was like, I got to put this out publicly, because there are so many great inspirational moments and interviews and a lot of there’s people within compass, but people outside of compass as well that we interview. So I was really motivated to put something out there that the world could actually see inside what we do as a group and gain inspiration from it as well. And I’ll say it’s, obviously it’s a lot of realtors will be a lot of staff members in there. And the podcast really is not about real estate per se, it’s really about you as an individual in the person, and how do you get inspired and really take care of yourself.
D.J. Paris 23:59 So Podcasts can be listened to by anyone. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes again called 6am. ers number six. And if you want to be part of the actual accountability group that’s limited to two for currently to the compass agents. So a lot of our listeners are compass agents. So if you don’t know about this, this is a great time to sign up. But let’s talk about right now what’s going on? Because of course, everyone’s focused on what’s right in front of them, which is some challenging times, right. We had, well, they’re challenging times in relation to what we had a couple of years ago. And I think that’s an obvious thing for people to to think back and go Well, that was easy. This is hard. But if we think back maybe a couple years ago, even at 3% interest rates, I don’t know that it was so easy. I think if you were working with buyers, we all remember it was not easy. If you were working with sellers, you had a great run, but now things have changed and we’re now you know rates of course are much higher. Um, obviously business still needs to continue, people still need to move. And but yet I, I’m part of our local association here. And we I’m, I’m in work on some committees that deal with programming around helping agents get through this current time. And boy, everybody I know is a little bit stressed. So as you know, so I’m curious on what you’re telling agents or what you’re seeing out there, how are successful agents sort of continuing to stay focused? Are they putting the blinders on? And just kind of doing the things they were always doing? Or are they are people pivoting? Just curious to get your thoughts on what you’re saying?
Skye Michiels 25:40 Well, the first thing I’ll give everyone is that the solution to anxiety is action. If you’re if you right now are feeling anxious. Anxiety is all about unknown things in the future. And what happens when we feel anxiety is we get, we sort of get frozen in place, almost picture the deer in the headlights, right, and we don’t move. And that is it. That is not a good thing right now. So if you’re out there, and you’re hearing this and you feel anxiety, my challenge to you is what are the actions that you need to take in order to move forward, right, get out of the headlights get out of the blind spot, get out of that frozen mode. Because the reality is there are real estate transactions that are rehab, there’s millions of transactions are going to happen. But in this moment, when you feel that frozen mode, that anxiety is going to kick in, and it’s going to paralyze you. And if you are not in a mode of action every single day, then you are literally going to sort of slide backwards, and it’s gonna get really, really hard for successful agents. And when I’m coaching everyone, this is an opportunity. We have a massive opportunity right now, as professional agents to capture market share and elevate what we do in two years ago, a year ago, let’s be real, if the property is priced right, and you had it in the MLS, like it was about all you had to do. Yeah. So at the end of the day, our role as a as an agent, or an I like calling us like advisors and consultants around real estate sales. it at the end of the day, it really we weren’t able to fulfill our greatest potential, because of the fact that it was it was the market was so crazy, it’s so fueled with, with low interest rates and low inventory, it was hyper hyper growth, right, it was not natural. And so now we’re moving back to a world where there is an opportunity for us to elevate what we do as realtors, and to elevate what we do with an industry to actually embrace that role as the advisor and the consultant. And I I really am coaching agents right now, to figure out everything you can do to be in action. And when you think about like the last two years, a lot of agents probably didn’t work in their CRM, they didn’t update their contacts, they didn’t reach out, they didn’t have those great touch points that made you successful, right, all you did was you done, you did transactions, you show properties, you listen to homes, and you were so busy and so frenetic that you were just running so fast, well, we have an opportunity now to take a step back, and we’re still going to work as hard, we’re just going to work in a different manner. Because the reality is the millions of transactions that are going to happen in this real estate industry are going to happen with people that have real life situations. But if we are not in a relationship with these people, what are they going to do, they’re going to click on a link online, and then they’re going to get connected to someone that’s paying lots of money to a third party company. And the reality is we need to be reaching out to people we know, in a human manner, in a manner that develops our relationships. So when that advisory role comes up, we are elevated and they reach out to us for help. Right when you think about financial advisors, you know, your financial advisor is constantly in touch with you hopefully about your portfolio and what you should be doing. And the reality of real estate transaction that happens once every seven 810 15 years.
D.J. Paris 29:14 But there’s a lot of lead time in between.
Skye Michiels 29:17 And the what most agents do is they they don’t remain in their clients lives as an advisor around real estate beyond the transaction. And
D.J. Paris 29:28 if I pause Can I pause for a second I have a theory about about this number one, obviously we’re talking about the time in between sales which I think is maybe is not even maybe it is more important than when you’re actually working with the client because as you said this this is I mean we’ve all seen the stats the I don’t know you know depends on what study you look at but the certain number of peeps certain percentage of people literally forget who their realtor was like three years after the transaction. My parents are this way it took them. They have a they had a home in North Myrtle Beach and it took years to sell it because it’s just kind of weird timing, whatever. Anyway, took years and many different realtors to finally, finally somebody did it after like five years, it was brutal, but they finally did it. And my parents were like, Oh, thank god, somebody finally got it sold. And my parents are super grateful to this person. I was asking my dad not that long ago, this is a couple years ago, but I said, who wasn’t even a realtor because I thought maybe I had a lead out there. I was just gonna say he goes, he goes, I don’t remember. And my parents liked this person. And they couldn’t remember now they don’t live in North Myrtle Beach, you know, they’re never going to do another transaction there. But still, that was shocking to me. And I went, Oh, yeah, I’m in the industry. Of course, that makes sense. People don’t stay in touch. And what you said, I think is really important. So here was my my thing I was going to suggest for anyone out there that’s going okay. Like Skye was saying, now’s the time to think about how can I deepen my relationships with my connection to these people? Well, that sometimes is is the challenges they might go well, I don’t know, what am I supposed to just call once in a while, or I don’t I know, they’re not they just moved in a year ago, what am I going to do, I could call and say like, what’s going on, or how you doing, and that’s fine. But what I’ve always suggested, especially you talked about your car, like really getting your CRM updated, I think now’s the time to call everybody you know, especially now if you have some extra time, and you probably do call everybody in your database, and literally just update the information be like, Hey, I’m working on my marketing thing for next year, I just want to make sure I have all the right data for you. Find out their birthdays, find out their anniversary, if they’re married, find out you know, where they work, if you don’t know, you know, and this gives you find out what their children names, ages, maybe even birthdays, too for that. So this way, if you have that information, you now have six, seven reasons to pick up the phone next year already automatically built in to your calendar, right? You’re like have the ability to pick up the phone and go, Hey, it’s your wedding anniversary, just wanted to say happy anniversary. Anyway, I was just thinking like, this is the time to get that data in there so that you have all those touch points built into your calendar.
Skye Michiels 31:58 So true. Well, I think two agents struggle with this, what do I say? And I think the reality is because of the fact that we’re looking at that former client as a client, not a human being. And when you go back, and let’s bring it back to the beginning of our interview, right, like my website, you look at it, you get an idea of who I am as a human being. And I think this is a technique you can also use as you put a touch point to do what I call reverse social media. So social media, Instagram, and Facebook, they give us what they want us to see. But we have the ability to go in and actually look at what’s happening in our clients lives. And when you ask yourself the question, well, what should I say, Well, what’s happening in their life and reach out about it? Right? Give them a compliment, give them a piece gratitude. Or you can just say, and this is one of my favorite scripts was you it’s a text or an email, and you just say, Hey, I’m just going through my records. I saw your name, and it made me smile. Just want to say hi, no need to respond back. Just letting you know.
D.J. Paris 32:58 Oh, boy, it Oh, good. Okay, and we want to emphasize only do this, if somebody’s authentically makes you smile, too. Because people are gonna smell you know, something that isn’t honest, but that you are so absolutely right is is using social media, as almost research and development, you can literally just, again, don’t wait for the feed, because Facebook’s only going to serve up things that they think you’re going to want to see. You’re not going to really get a good sense of everything that’s going on in someone’s life. So go through, type in their name, see what see if they’ve been on vacation lately, see what’s going on with their kids. And then my suggestion is don’t you can always comment on posts. And that’s great. And that’s definitely better than doing nothing. My suggestion is pick up the phone and call or text be like, Hey, man, just saw you got back from Cancun. Hope you had an amazing trip. Like, that’s the sort of stuff that people go wow.
Skye Michiels 33:46 Yeah, the other the other brilliant gem I’m gonna give you as well is to ask for help. Yes, I’m coaching next week, I’m actually coaching this within compass. And we’re going to basically be giving we have 1000s of agents signed up for that. So I’m really excited. But it’s five days of giving is the challenge. So I’m going to be basically showing how gratitude but the first thing is agents are going to reach out to their clients and say, Hey, we’re developing a recipe book. Do you have any Thanksgiving recipes that you love that I could share in this recipe book
D.J. Paris 34:20 and everybody has at least one and
Skye Michiels 34:22 even if they don’t? Yeah, what they’re gonna say, oh, you know, I don’t have anyone but that’s awesome. Can you send me that when you’re done? Absolutely. And now you have a digital recipe book you know that you can send out instead of just that the corny Hey, hope you’re having a Thanksgiving like the blast email blast we all get right like the
D.J. Paris 34:42 turkey I’m thankful you’re one of my clients or what yeah,
Skye Michiels 34:45 now like and when we wait, your parents got a Thanksgiving recipe book from their realtor like as a oscillate right? Now we got to get beyond that transaction. We got to think of like what are my clients going to need and the key aspect of asking for help is people like helping other people. And now and you’re not asking for help in a, in a bad way, you’re asking for help in a good way. Imagine that neighborhood guide. You, you ask your clients, hey, I’m building a neighborhood guide, do you have a favorite restaurant in Chicago? Or everybody has whatever, right? And now, what are you doing, you’re interacting with your clients, your former clients in a human way, and what it’s all about being present in their mind in a positive manner. Because while they may not buy or sell a house every 10 years, how many people do they know? In those 10 years that are going to buy or sell and what you want to do as an agent, you want to create raving fans, that when you say, Who is your realtor, I, my clients, they say, oh my god, Sky, you’ve got to call them like, here’s his number. And let me text them right now. Because of the fact I’m present in their lives in a manner that is nothing to do necessarily with real estate. But everything to do with real estate, if that makes sense.
D.J. Paris 36:00 Totally. Now, after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country on the show, do you know what CRM is used more than any other by our amazing guests? Well, you guessed it is follow up boss, let’s face it. Following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time. With less effort. Don’t take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US use this follow up boss and he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. I am sure Jonathan is hot on their tail. But follow up boss integrates with over 250 different systems. So you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need and get this follow up boss is so sure you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. That’s how confident they are that you’re going to keep using them. But only if you use this special link, which is visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss. With a follow up boss. Boy, I’m just absorbing what you did, I realized what I need to do is create content from our listeners. I never have asked our listeners to contribute to the show, I asked him to tell a friend and boy, that is all you ever have to do if you’re listening is tell a friend. But I’m thinking you just gave me a great idea. I would love to create a list of tips from our listeners about what’s working for them right now. And maybe what isn’t working, that would be kind of cool, too. But But putting that together and just giving that away to our audience and saying, Hey, here’s here’s all the stuff that you guys told me. So that I love that boy, what a great, great idea. I love that. So so why don’t we think about 2023 Here’s what we know, we know rates are higher than they were I don’t want to say hi, I just want to say higher than they were. Because my parents got got their first mortgage, it was double digits in the in the late 70s. So So again, it’s all relative, but we know that that that people are not as happy with rates as they as they were. So what are we how are we talking about this not just rates? I just mean, how are we talking to clients right now? Or what are you suggesting? agents do to really explain sort of, or rather to sort of set the narrative versus what maybe the media is projecting? Correct?
Skye Michiels 38:34 Well, a the media is always going to put things out there that are going to generate activity, right. The reality is that real estate transacts based around most real estate, but transacts around the life goals, not financial goals. So true, isn’t it? Yeah, we’re not talking about like, investment properties and all that stuff. Like that’s a little different. But for the vast majority of people that buy or sell real estate, they’re doing it not because of finances, but they’re doing it because of life. death, divorce, birth job. Yeah, right, you name it. So so the reality is that most people real estate’s one thing you need, that’s a necessity of life, that’s also an asset that you you need to buy and sell, right air water, like you’re not really buying and selling that it’s just like sort of natural shelter is it is a necessity of life. So one of the key things that I challenge are the realtors that are listening to this is find the people that have those life events that do have that need and with them work with them on solutions. So an entrepreneurial principle we talked about here at Compass is be solutions driven. When you are encountering a problem within your your clients life or your transactions, etc. The more you focus on the problem, the less you can accomplish, the more you focus Some potential solutions, and the pros and cons of each. Well now you can actually move into action. So the bottom line is there’s usually a solution to something. And at the end of the day, that’s what we need to drive that there’s two one buyer announcers. Yeah. Seller held financing. Yeah, there’s the there’s lots of potential solutions. But what are they? Now the one thing I’m, when I think about 2023, I went through 2008, I think you might have as well, like, no, I
D.J. Paris 40:30 got in just after that, but, but I’ve had enough guests on the show that had been through it, too. I feel like I’ve been through it.
Skye Michiels 40:37 Yeah, a, and that was a different because there was a nuclear bomb that went off underneath our feet. This is different, because what we’re doing here is we’re just pumping the brakes on the growth that was not healthy, right? Like, it was not healthy to have offered, you know, double digit growth, like multiple bids like that, that was not a good thing. So the what I’m trying to coach Realtors on, and also this, in essence, like your buyers and sellers, is that, hey, you got to go back into the life goals of what you’re trying to do. And then backfill into the finances, start with life, then go finances rather than being like, Oh, I just watched something on Fox News or CNN. And I’m scared. Well, that’s not, that’s not how you should make a decision. The second thing is that get ready for the bounce, meaning this is a little bit of a correction into normalcy. And at some point, as rates start to go down, demand is still there, we haven’t gotten rid of the demand for housing, right? We haven’t gotten in the inventory is still at an all time lows, frankly, even as we’re starting to increase, we’re still at an all time low for most markets. So the reality is there, there is probably a little bit of a bounce coming, we just don’t know exactly where that’s going to be. And once again, the work you do in the next six months, will probably dictate the next two years of your real estate career. Because if you sit there and once again, that anxiety kicks in, and you just starve your hands and say, Well, I’m just gonna sit here and go on Facebook and Instagram and you don’t give up? Well, you’re probably gonna that’s gonna dictate next two years, your real estate career, you’re gonna live pretty slim. Most realtors that I’m working with right now are are so excited, because of the fact that they actually have time now to help class. They have time to work in their serum, they have time to take those actions. Build the Thanksgiving recipe book, frankly,
D.J. Paris 42:36 they do the fun stuff. Now Now’s the fun stuff time.
Skye Michiels 42:39 Yeah, exactly. And the reality is like, yes, it’s just about getting better as a professional and improving your craft. And as you do that, you’re going to do more transactions, and you’re frankly going to gain a lot of market share. Most, most good agents are actually like, Oh, here’s an opportunity, all those like, if you do research in your local market, look up how over the last 20 months, how many deals were how many agents did one two or three deals in the last 20 months. The reality is those agents are gonna be gone in the next six months.
D.J. Paris 43:15 Like we were already we’re, we have a holding company here. At RT, we have two companies, ones for active producing agents, and ones we just created. Not every state has these. But for people that don’t actively produce or want to keep their license active. They just want to can we in the last, so we have about 700 agents in that in that company in the holding company in the last or maybe 800. Now, in the last month, we’ve added almost 50 agents just because people are exiting the business. So if you are a producing agent, whether you’re part time or full time, now’s the time to really get excited because lots of people are leaving.
Skye Michiels 43:52 That’s right. And I think too We’ll see this accelerate as dues come for like most associations operate on a yearly schedule. So you’ll see that jump in January, probably as well. So it’s, it’s key. And once again, I think it’s the positive is like they’re really solid economics people have equity. People, you know who you are, like, I know, you just got it. I mean, you probably remember doing short sales, right? Where people didn’t have equity in banks were for closing, like, we have a lot of positive economic aspects that are going on right now that are good. And if you’re buying a home, the rial, this is a really great way you can explain to buyers, here are three options, there are three things that are going to happen with interest rates, if you buy today, number one, interest rates are gonna go up and you’re gonna be really happy that you locked in this 7% Or six and a half percent, or whatever it is you locked in. Number two, they’re going to stay the same and then you’re no worse off. Or number three, they’re going to go down and then you’re going to refinance into that lower rate. So the reality is, in either one of these scenarios you’re going to be, you’re going to end up in a good space as long. And that’s a really great way that you can explain to buyers right now, the fact that interest rates going up, it’s just sort of the reality of where we are, as in the in the interest rate market, the reality of interest rates are going to change. And if they go up, and you’ve locked in, I remember I just bought a house actually in in June. And I was so pissed, it was like, Man, I could have walked you missed out. I missed it. And now I’m like, Oh, my, my mindset, like totally changed. Like, Oh, thank God, I like it. And then at the, you know, that 4.25 Like, rate I got I was, at the time, I was so mad. Now, I’m thrilled. But the reality is, no matter where you are, you can explain, one of three things is going to happen, they’re gonna go up, and you’re gonna be happy, they’re gonna stay the same, you’re gonna be happy, they’re gonna go down, and you gotta pay a little money to refinance into the lower rate.
D.J. Paris 45:59 Yeah, it’s you know, and you’re you brought up something a few minutes ago that I just want to step on a little bit, because it’s so important, which is that you said most consumers, most buyers and sellers, aren’t thinking about rates, they are thinking about their life events. And funnily enough, I just got lucky when I bought my most recent condo, which just happened to fall in a time when the rates were that low. That was not the reason I bought, it was because this new development came about. And I was like, I needed to make a move. And it just so happened that I got lucky with rates, it could have been the I was 7%. Either way, I needed to move. And so I just got lucky. So I think as agents, we often we’re so immersed in it, that it’s so much of our life, that we think everyone else is thinking about it. But you’re right. In most cases, people are thinking about what they need for their family. And whatever the rate is, is the rate. And it’ll affect what they can afford, of course, but it’s not going to. I don’t think it’s pushing people away as much as agents might be talking about it right now. Like agents are thinking people are scared, and they don’t want to pay. And I’m like, I don’t know how true that is for the vast majority of buyers and sellers.
Skye Michiels 47:08 You will feel this ad out a little bit too because right now, we probably still have the people that we’re looking at in the three to 4% rate and for those who didn’t get in, yeah, it is real for them. But the people that you will encounter over the next six months, when they meet you and you do your consultation, you explain here’s the process, here’s the payment here’s where rates are for them. That’s just where rates are right
D.J. Paris 47:35 and and and one more thing I was just gonna before I’m sorry, but also to the people who did buy a couple years ago the last couple of years probably overpaid by a significant so that’s another thing you can bring up if somebody’s like, well, rates are where they’re at, say like, well, let me just show you what it would have cost back then to purchase this home. And and you know, and then all of a sudden things get more in line like oh, okay, it’s not sky is falling. Sorry. I’m so glad
Skye Michiels 48:00 no, no, I was gonna almost say the exact same thing. And the other positives are we can actually do a home inspection, we can actually get an appraisal we can actually
D.J. Paris 48:07 you don’t have to buy it sight unseen.
Skye Michiels 48:11 I bought my home with no, I didn’t see it. I just went off the picture. Amazing. I didn’t do an inspection. I didn’t have a mortgage contingency, even though I got a mortgage. So no appraisal contingency, right? And but I knew I knew what I was doing. I’m like, look at it knew what I was basically buying. What’s that scary,
D.J. Paris 48:31 scary.
Skye Michiels 48:32 I’m in the business. And I was really scared about it. But at the end of day, that’s what buyers had to do to get home. The positive now is actually I as a real estate professional can protect you, I can actually do an inspection for you. We can do appraisal, we can have a mortgage contingency, hey, you need to sell your home and buy this one, we can actually make it contingent now because of the fact we’re back. What we’re dealing with, we’re just coming back to the ground. This is like we were we just it was a rocket that took off. And now we’re just sort of settling back into the ground of what’s normal in real estate. It’s normal for us to take 60 days to sell. It’s not normal for it to sell in two or three days back in 2010. You sold the house in two days, right? Whoo. Yeah, that’s great. You know, no, it’s like it’s normal. For this. It takes some time. And that’s what we have to adopt this mindset that we are professionals. And what we do matters. Because if what we do doesn’t matter, then the internet companies are just going to take it over and do it for us at a cheaper rate, frankly, great.
D.J. Paris 49:34 Yeah. And they’re going to do a better job digitally than we can do because that’s their business. What we can do is all the interpersonal stuff, all the we care about you stuff, and if you can be the care about you person and the AI can educate you and read you know, reassess what’s actually going on and re educate you and make you feel cared for and appreciated as a as a human being And then you know, that’s going to win out almost every time over over the tech. That being said, I think this is actually a perfect place to wrap up. So I want a couple of things. The 6am errs, if you are a compass agent, and you want to participate in the accountability group, what’s the best way that they should do? I guess they probably know, internally, they probably know how to get access. I hope
Skye Michiels 50:23 so. But just in case you don’t, you could obviously email me sky@compass.com. Or you could actually sign up on the website as a compass agent as well.
D.J. Paris 50:32 And if you are not a compass agent, which, of course most people listening are not, let’s listen to the podcast, subscribe to 6am ers and get a steal, you still get all the interviews and all the exciting parts of what Skye does. And by the way, if you are an agent, and you are, you know, not happy at your current firm, or just want to see what else is out there, obviously compass would love the opportunity to speak with you. There’s, you know, reach out to your local compass office, you can reach out to sky as well, I’m sure you haven’t directed to the right, right person. But compass is really doing some great things. And I don’t work for Compass. And I’m impressed with Compass, because I just think they do so many so many wonderful things for agents. So definitely if you’re looking to explore their options, except if you’re one of our agents stay with us. I’m only being silly, of course. But But anyway, if you are exploring other options, check out compass, they are actually a bit different than a lot of what the traditional big firms offer. So check them out, they’re there, they do a lot of great things. So Skye, thank you so much for being on the show. This was a real pleasure and a lot of fun for me. And I can’t I won’t become a compass agent only because I have my feet firmly planted here. But I wish I was only to be part of your six AMS group. So maybe I’ll figure out a way to sneak under the door because I want to I need that accountability in my life. So if anyone out there is a congress agent, you know, definitely Let’s sign up for 6am ers it’s it’s it’s I mean so many people read the how l read book of the Miracle Morning, which is like every like every realtor I know is read that book this is an extension of that and you know specific to real estate. So anyway guys, thanks we want to on behalf of sky and myself we want to thank everyone for listening and supporting our show. As I said earlier, please tell a friend that’s the only thing that you can you need to do to help us continue to grow. And also check out sky Michael’s everything he offers on the on the national stage with with Compass, as well as his 6am ORS podcast and accountability group go to Sky michaels.com link to that in the show notes and also 6am ers which I apologize I forgot the website for that is that 6am or 6am or.com yet and birthday. We’ll have links to that in the show notes. So six the 6am errs.com So anyway, Sky thank you so much and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you everyone.
The Path To Luxury Real Estate Sales • Paul Salazar
Dec 13, 2022
Paul Salazar with Hilton & Hyland Beverly Hills goes back to the beginning of his journey in real estate. Paul describes how he transitioned from working with his mom to selling luxury real estate. Next, Paul discusses how he built his business by cold calling expired listings and how he perfected his skills to get properties sold in record time. Paul also talks about cold calling, door knocking and sending handwritten letter to clients and how these activities helped him build relationships with developers. Last, Paul discusses the the major differences between working with a smaller property size compared to ultra-high-net-worth side.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever wondered how Realtors transition into luxury sales? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide, and your host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top 1% producer and luxury real estate agent, Paul Salazar before we get to Paul, well, it’s the holiday season. So I’m just going to ask for a gift. And don’t worry, though it’s it’s I’m actually going to ask for two gifts. The first is to check out what our sponsors are offering, please, please support our sponsors, we vet them, we only bring to you really high quality services and products that Realtors could use, please support our sponsors, because they’re the reason we can keep making these shows. And the second thing we’ll ask for the second gift you can give us is really simple one won’t cost you anything just tell another agent about the show, especially for 2023 Is it going to be a tough year, we know it’s going to be a tough year. Let’s make it as least tough. Now that’s there’s a better way to say that. Let’s make it as comfortable as possible. By introducing as many people as you can to our show. Our whole intention is really to help you grow your business. And the more people we can reach we really believe the more people we can help so help us fulfill our mission by reaching as many agents as possible in 2023 and let them know about keeping it real. And guys, that’s all I got. Let’s get to the main event, my interview with Paul Salazar.
Today on the show,
our guest is Paul Salazar with the Paul Salazar group of Hilton and island in Beverly Hills. Let me tell you a little bit more about Paul. Now with over 600 million in total real estate sales in over 200 satisfied clients served. Paul Salazar is a real estate veteran with a years of invaluable experience. He has partnered with one of the top luxury firms in the world Hilton and Hyland, Beverly Hills, Paul has had a string of 20 plus million dollar properties sold under his belt, making him a true standout in this highly competitive and fast paced industry. Paul’s an expert in rebranding and relaunching properties that have been lingering on the market. He also works with developers to build luxury spec properties all throughout Los Angeles. Please learn more about Paul two places want you to go visit his website, which is Paul Salazar group. And that’s Paul Pauls a Laz ar group.com and also find him on Instagram. It’s also Paul Salazar group will have links to both of those in the show notes so you don’t have to type it in. So please go visit Paul and Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Salazar 4:20 Wow, that was a great, quite the intro there. Well, it’s so funny. I was feeling weird hearing all that stuff. Yeah. All right.
D.J. Paris 4:29 It is it is weird. I had somebody recently interview me, which very rarely happens. And they went through, you know, list of things like I was just mentioning you and I was like, Well, I don’t I don’t like to hear that at all. Like, just doesn’t sound right.
Paul Salazar 4:42 I know it feels weird. I mean, it’s great, but also feels weird.
D.J. Paris 4:46 Well, I would love to talk about all of how you got into luxury. But also let’s start at the very beginning of your real estate sort of journey. How did you get into real estate and why
Paul Salazar 5:00 Okay, so let’s start from college, right? Because I will, let’s start from like, like my culture. I’m, I’m Colombian, and almost everybody in my, in my family, they have their own business that are there. They’re entrepreneurs, my dad, my brothers, my cousins, aunts, uncles, right? So it’s kind of in our blood to have her own thing. Not to have a boss not to be told what to do. Right. So that’s one. Two is that in college, I finished college on a study abroad program called Semester at Sea. And that was my last semester of college. I finished that. And then, you know, I went into the real world, and I was like, What am I going to do? Like, I just finished traveling the world with a bunch of college kids having a blast, drinking, partying, you know, traveling, literally circumnavigating the entire globe. And I was pretty depressed. I, you know, I gotta tell you, I was not I was not in a good place. I was working with my dad. He has his own business, but I knew I didn’t want to be in his business. But I also knew I didn’t want to have like a regular nine to five job, right, like so. Like, so like, what am I going to do? Right? I don’t really have any capital to like, start a business. My mom was in real estate. Century 21 beachside in Rancho Cucamonga, which is where I went to high school, and which is where I live while I was commuting back and forth to college at UC Riverside. So I would say about three months after Semester at Sea. You know, I was, you know, I had a few, a few interviews with some regular nine to five jobs. And it just, it just wasn’t clicking for me, you know, and then, you know, my mom came into my room I like I vividly remember this day. And she’s like, you know, she used to call me up. Bobbito. So she’s like, Bobbito Why don’t you you know, you know, come sell real estate with me. And this isn’t Oh, six. Right. So the market is still on fire. She’s
D.J. Paris 6:52 like, the perfect time to get in. Oh, six. Yeah, yeah. She’s
Paul Salazar 6:54 doing really well. Like she’s traveling. She’s, she’s, you know, selling a bunch of real estate. I’m like, You know what, that sounds good. You know, I was like, all right. I was like, Yeah, sure. You know, that’s let’s, let’s do it. You know. And so that’s, that’s how I started to get into real estate is selling real estate in Rancho Cucamonga first century. 21. beachside.
D.J. Paris 7:15 Wow. And you came in at such an interesting time, I actually bought my first condo in 2006. And upon retrospect, maybe, maybe not the ideal time for me to have bought a condo, of course, none of us really knew that back then. It wasn’t like the writing was so obviously on the wall, of course. But But So you started kind of towards the end of the of that boom? And what was it like, you know, starting off in into in 2006.
Paul Salazar 7:43 You know, I, I’m very grateful that I got at least a year of decent market under my belt, you know, of like, doing transactions with my mom, as I’m learning the business. Right. I also helped enhance her business as well, because, you know, I had a business background and in college, right, which helped a little bit, let’s be honest, you know, you don’t really learn a lot in college, at least, it’s specific to real estate. But, you know, I think I was able to use what I learned in college, to help her grow her business. And so we, we created the Salazar team, it was team Salazar, that was the name of our team was me and her and we had a, like, a part time assistant. And, you know, again, I’m very grateful, I didn’t start in Oh, eight, because I probably wouldn’t have made it, and I probably wouldn’t have still be in the business. So it’ll it allowed me to stay in the business to, to have some money saved up for the, you know, for the rainy days of you know, you know, 2008 through 2012. Right. So, you know, again, very, very grateful for it, but at the same time, I was selling very small properties, you know, $200,000 properties 300,000 Every once in a while, will will bring a $500,000 property, and I was really excited about that, you know, but it was it was great, you know, I’m, again, very, very grateful for that for the opportunity that my mom gave me.
D.J. Paris 9:07 Yeah, it’s, it’s a really good opportunity to be able to work with somebody who’s who’s established who’s successful. And also you get to learn, you know, so I imagine your mom was was, I imagine a pretty, pretty great mentor to you.
Paul Salazar 9:23 She was, you know, and we, we’ve always had a really great relationship. And I was living, you know, so my parents were divorced already. So it was just me and her in the house. So, again, if you’re starting real estate, and you have like a bunch of bills and debt, it’s really hard because it’s, it takes about three to six months, maybe a year to get you know, get get going. So living at home really allowed me to I had very, very little bills, you know, maybe the 1000 bucks, maybe $2,000 a month, which is nothing right? And retrospect you know, so if I closed one big deal, big been you know, 300,000 dollars or something like that I would I would keep 5000 bucks and I would have enough money for like three months. And that’s what I would do. I would save up the money and I knew I had enough money to last me another six months. And then I just kept on growing that, that that nest egg to a year to two years and that just kind of kept on going from there.
D.J. Paris 10:17 Wow. And at what point did you decide to to make a shift from from working with your mom or working in Rancho Cucamonga? And then you know, making the shift to? To where you are now.
Paul Salazar 10:29 Yeah, so. So, you know, the crash happened at the end of oh seven and oh eight, right, I started selling some short sales. And that’s what kind of kept me kind of going is just selling short sells, right? And my mom always pushed me she’s like, Bobby, though you can always sell, you know, luxury properties. Like why don’t you go out there and to like Beverly Hills and like start selling some luxury properties. And to me, I always had doubts, you know, like, my mindset wasn’t there. Like I was like, I don’t think I could do that. I don’t know anybody there. I don’t know the market there. I don’t have any connections. And even though we live only an hour away, but I could be from Ohio, it’d be the same thing. You know, like another universe almost. Yeah, completely different universe. And I had no connections like I literally knew nobody that lived in that in that area. My whole family was in Rancho where Pasadena or in this area. Right. So at the time, my girlfriend lived in Brentwood, which is like West. Sure. I still live on the west side. Right. And so I was commuting back and forth, right. And my mom had gone to Colombia in 2000 at the beginning of 2009, or actually, or 2008, or something like that. And she had met her now husband, right? So it was a perfect transition. She’s like, she had called me and she was on vacation for like a month in Colombia. And she’s like, Hey, I want to let you know that I met some guy and like, my heart drops, like we met some guy, you know, Columbia. And she’s like, Yeah, I met some guy in Colombia. And, you know, of course, being the son. And you know, she’s been divorced. I was very protective. Sure. I was, like, I don’t know about this mom. She’s like, Yeah, we’re gonna get like, think about getting married. I’m like, you just met the guy like a month ago, you know? So but it ended up working out. Right. So since I was commuting back and forth, my mom had now planned to move to Colombia to go live with her now husband. It was a perfect transition for me to be like, you know, what, let me move to LA Let me try it out. You know, give it a shot. I had saved enough money for about six months of, of living in LA, right. So so my plan was I moved to LA to downtown LA. So which is kind of like, not in Beverly Hills or not in the west side where I live. But kind of like a like a, like a middle ground because like all my friends and family still live in Rancho right. So I didn’t want to be too far away from them as well. So I moved to downtown LA with with my best friend from college. And we got a place together. And I didn’t have a job. I moved to LA without having a job. And I said, I said to myself, do I want to start selling real estate? It’s gonna take me a while to get going. I don’t have a budget to market myself. I don’t know anybody. I don’t know. Any of the markets. I don’t know any of the areas. I don’t know anything about the motor. Right? So I was starting from scratch. I knew how to I had a closed at that time, probably about 30 deals 30 or 40 deals with my mom over the last couple of years for the last three years. So I knew about the transaction, right. But I didn’t know about the players. I didn’t know about how to sell luxury real estate, which is completely different than selling a house that’s worth, you know, two or $300,000. So, so she moved to Columbia in 2009. I moved to downtown LA. And I said you know what, what I should do is I should probably work underneath a top agent, right? So I emailed my resume to about, you know, 10,000 agents, I downloaded all the emails smart. All the emails from the MLS, in had emailed, and that was emailed every single person, right. I got I got a bunch of interviews, I got about 17 interviews, you know, and my last interview was a call with Chad Rogers, who was at the time on Million Dollar Listing. Yeah, on Bravo. He was one of the original cast members. And he was working at Hilton and Hyland. And when I do my research, I’m like, this is the best firm in LA one of the best firms in the world. Like I really want to be at this firm, you know, and I had gotten no calls from anybody at Hilton. And the last call I got was from chat. He called me he left a message and he’s like, Yeah, I’m on Million Dollar Listing. I’m like, I have no idea who you are. I don’t watch that show. Right, which he actually liked. Right. So yeah, sure. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 14:42 Because you weren’t you didn’t want to hang out with him because he was on TV.
Paul Salazar 14:46 Exactly. Exactly. So So I called him up. We had an interview and it was a match. It was perfect. So and and you know I you know I have to give a lot of you know of attitude and a lot of credit to Chad for giving me the opportunity to be working under him because he was selling big properties, you know, you know, you know, 1518 2021 22 23,020 $3 million properties. So because of him, I was able to get into the luxury market. And I stayed with him for a long time, for about 10 years, I should have left earlier. And I think the reason why I didn’t leave is because again, my mindset wasn’t there, I didn’t feel that I, I can, I could, I could sell real estate on my own, you know. So Chad really taught me how to how to deal with these high net worth individuals, how to deal with business managers, how to deal with how to deal with lawyers, how the transaction works, how to list properties in this in these areas, you know, and his, his community was Malibu colony. And if you’re not familiar with Malibu colony, it’s it’s only 120 houses right on the beach in Malibu. It’s a gated community, Sting lives there. Jason Stata. Pamela Anderson. I mean, so many celebrities call this place home. And his his his family owned a house there. So he grew up in this in this community. So most of the deals that we that we did were in this community. So I really got to know all the big players from from working with him. You know, the only thing the only downside with working with Chad is that he already had a network, right? Yeah. So he wasn’t really out there prospecting, like I do nowadays. Sure. So I really didn’t learn the business side of real estate. Through chat. I just learned how to how to talk to people that are lawyers or CEOs or billionaires, right? I learned how to communicate with these kinds of people, because he would, he would give me a deal. Like, he would say, Hey, Paul, this is my listing. And I will take it on from there. Like I did most of the work, I really helped him run his business. And we did well together. And we did well together. And I think, I think after after 10 years, I think what, what, what helped me make that transition from, you know, the mindset was just like I get, I just didn’t feel, I guess worthy enough, or I didn’t feel I had the capability of going on my own. Like, I feel like I needed somebody to help me out. You know. And so I started to listen to like to like some podcasts and, and Tom ferries podcasts really kind of resonated with me. Sure, I really love to hear what he had to say. And I started to listen to him. You know, he’s like, he was talking about cold calling. And I was like, I’ve never cold called in my, you know, at this time, I think I was in the business for about 13 years. And I had never cold called once in my entire career.
D.J. Paris 17:37 And and probably didn’t want to either. You’re probably like, I don’t want to have to do that. Yeah,
Paul Salazar 17:41 yeah, exactly. I it’s like it was really scary for me. And at that time, when I was working with Chad, I was his assistant. And then after a couple years, it was like a hybrid model. And we also actually had an assistant, so it was me, him and we had an assistant. So he would give me deals, I would hold his open houses, I would get deals through the through that I would get deals now through some like friendships that I had in LA. So I kind of started to grow my business, but I didn’t really grow it that that big. That’s why I was also scared to leave him. So I didn’t really have or big, you know, a big source of business. Because I would also get like a, like a small percentage of his business as well. But if I left him, I wouldn’t be getting that anymore. Right. So that’s how I started. You know, it’s it was a long, it was a long journey with Chad, I learned a lot I should have left earlier, like probably after five years, but I didn’t. And after, you know, listening to tom toms podcast for about three months, I joined his coaching program. And after that, I started cold calling. I got a couple of my own listings, and then I left chat right after that.
D.J. Paris 18:44 Wow, I accent so I have a few questions I want to go actually. Thank you. That is really incredible story. And there’s more to the story. I know, I want to go back to just this really smart idea that in all the episodes we’ve done, I don’t think anyone has ever suggested and it was a really good idea. Be there. So obviously teams are or whether or not you want to be a solo practitioner or a team. Having a mentor, regardless, is a great idea for so many listeners. So Paul did something very creative and something that literally anybody can do, which is he got he will in your case you scraped a list off the mls of realtor emails. You can also buy these lists, they’re really not that expensive, but a couple 100 bucks, maybe for your local area. And then he just fired out 10,000 emails and that is absolutely doable. So if anyone out there is listening, that is essentially how Paul got to into luxury property he invested in reaching out to everyone in his local area and got 17 interviews and I mean it’s it is it is remarkable. I was just talking to one of the very top producers here in Chicago yesterday and I was asking her how often and she’s a solo practitioner And she does about 160 million a year just herself alone. And yeah, she, she’s amazing. And she I was like, how often do people email Realtors email, you asking for mentorship coaching? She’s like, Oh, no. And she’s super nice and very sweet. She’s like, almost never. So it’s one of those things that I guess sometimes we think maybe those people are getting inundated. And maybe they are, but maybe they’re not right. And so I just wanted to honor you for sort of being creative in that step. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Now. That’s what US recruiters do we get those lists. Yeah, we want to recruit realtors. So recruiters do this all the time. But individual agents unless unless it’s like, oh, I have I have a listing. And I want to, I want to email every realtor to let them know about it. That’s another reason why sometimes people do it. But as far as like to find a mentor or a partner, boy, what a smart idea. So again, I just wanted to step on that a little bit, because I think it was a really, really smart play. The other thing, too, I want to talk about so many of our listeners, and I’ve obviously you know people who are your peers are probably like, how do you get into luxury? Well, you just told the story of how you got introduced to that world. But then there’s that whole step of like, I didn’t grew up in Malibu, I didn’t I don’t I didn’t grow up in this gated community of 120 homes where everybody knows me because those are my neighbors. And that’s what I grew up with. And, and yes, you were introduced to that world, but then it is this pretty big shift of like, I’m going to cut the cord and try to build my own business. And you said, looking back, you know, maybe you stayed longer than then you needed to. But that does require a massive mind shift change to say, okay, I can I can survive and thrive in that world, even though that isn’t my background, and it isn’t necessarily what I what I’ve known my whole life. So I’m curious on what you learned with Tom ferries coaching program, which everybody who listens probably knows who Tom Ferry is if not, he’s he’s an He’s incredible. His dad Mike ferry is kind of a famous guy in the, in the, in the coaching movement. Brian Buffini is another guy. So it’s usually Mike ferry, Brian Buffini and Tom Ferry are kind of like the three biggest names, and all three of them have have really great stuff to offer, Tom Ferry has kind of kind of having his moment the last like 10 years, he’s kind of been the guy who’s everyone’s kind of paying attention to but what did you learn from from Tom’s coaching? You know, coaching partners about how to shift your mindset.
Paul Salazar 22:30 I mean, so much, right. I mean, there are so many different tips that that that he kind of suggested, you know, affirmations, some books, right. But I think for me, I think the biggest shift was, at the time, you know, I was, I was single, and I had just started dating this girl, who’s now my girlfriend, and she’s an entrepreneur, you know, and she was out there, you know, you know, just like putting yourself out there, you know, and I wasn’t doing that. And so she, she really kind of inspired me to be like, you know, I can do more, right? Like I can, I can do more with myself, like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t need somebody else to help me. I can do it on my own. You know, and it’s, I think, I don’t know, if there was one thing, I think was just kind of listening to his podcast, and all actually, the interviews just like this, this kind of interview that like Tom would do, and the interviews that that that you do, DJ are so important, because they allow the listeners to get inspired to hear the stories, because to me, those stories really helped me be like, Wow, that person did it. That person did it. And now, I started to say, why can I do it? You know, so those stories really helped me out. And when I was with Chad, I wasn’t really into the business. Like I was more traveling, I was partying. So I wasn’t really focused on my career, I was really more focused on just having a good time, to be honest. So and, you know, since I had a girlfriend, I had more time to kind of focus on my career, instead of, you know, traveling and doing all these other things, right. But I think hearing the stories was really the most important thing for me, in kind of shifting the mindset, right, because I heard all these stories of all these other amazing agents that started from nothing, or they, you know, didn’t have anything or it, there was, you know, everybody has their own story, right. And some stories, I can’t relate to as much as, as other stories, right. So like, like, I may relate to certain people, but I may not relate to other people, right? Sure. But But But listening to those interviews was my favorite thing. And to this day, I still love to hear those interviews because I learned so much about what these people do, how they grew their business, and I always take one or two things, and I implement that in my business.
D.J. Paris 24:47 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by me More than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, well, boy, that’s exactly our goal on this show. So glad that that worked for you. Because, you know, it’s funny, I was thinking like, oh, it would be really fun to have chat on the show. And it probably wouldn’t, I’m sure he’s, he would be excellent. But the moment people hear oh, like if I say, how’d you get into luxuries? Like, well, but you know, I grew up in this area that, you know, that’s immediately when a lot of our listeners would be like, Oh, okay, well, I didn’t I didn’t grow up in an environment like that. So yes, easy, easy for that guy. And of course, it isn’t necessarily easy if just because you grew up in that environment, but it is not as relatable, right. And so I love to present you that you sort of infiltrated in a good way and sort of went, Oh, I belong here I can I can thrive in this environment, and just learning how to communicate and maybe with people who are in that ultra high net worth space, and understanding their needs, understanding what the goals of people like that, who I imagine there’s people that you have clients that probably have whole teams of people that you have to meet with financial people, accountants, attorneys, agents, whoever it might be. It’s not I imagine it’s not just usually like one single buyer, and one seller, and then the agents on either side. So what would you say? So So anyway, just to continue on in your story. So So you, you decided you got the courage to kind of go off on on your own cut the cord? And then, you know, did you feel at that point that you had made enough headway into your your sphere of influence, that you were able to sort of survive that
Paul Salazar 27:48 way? You know, I, again, I think I’ve always had enough money to survive six or 12 months. And I think that’s an important thing for agents to hear. Right? And I don’t have any kids, right? I don’t have any kids yet. So it’s easier for me to grow that like nest egg, right, just for me. But, you know, for anybody else, that everybody knows how much they need every single month, to be able to say, you know, what, if I’m going to go into a new business or to a new venture, I have this much time to actually excel before I’m like, you know, broke. Right. So I’ve always been comfortable in that regards, where, you know, I could have again, I could have left, you know, five years before leaving chat, you know, because I had that money. I just didn’t have the courage right. So for me it was luckily, the coach I had was very inspiring to her name is Mary Jett. She is now the head of all coaches at Tom Ferry. She is an amazing person. She is like, she’s just like a mom, you know. And she was coaching junk ramen, who was like one of the top agents in the in the nation. She was coaching Gary Gould, who sold the the Playboy Mansion who was at at Hilton and Hyland and Gary was actually the one who recommended me to marry Jeff, you know. So I, again, very grateful to Gary Gould, who’s now a coal banker, because I called him and said, Hey, Gary, I know that you’re coaching with Tom Ferry. And when I’m doing you know, all my research is like, yeah, you know, call my coach Mary Jess, I called Mary jet. She was coaching like 75 people, right? And she’s like, Hey, you know, why don’t I send you, you know, three or four recommendations here at the Tom Ferry coaching network that that may be able to assist you. I talked to those coaches, but I didn’t have the same connection that I had with with Mary jet, you know, so So I call them married yet again. I say, hey, Mary, I know you’re busy. I know you have a lot of clients. I’m very coachable. I am, I am ready to go. And please coach me because I know that you have, you know what it takes to help me grow my business. And she said, You know what, Paul, let’s do it. And so again, so, so grateful. For Mary, because she actually really inspired me to leave chat. She, she, she didn’t push me, she inspired me. That’s the that’s, that’s the difference. I did it on my own. She was actually shocked. After two months of being coached by her, I left chat. And then three months later, I hired my first assistant.
D.J. Paris 30:17 Wow. Yeah, you know, so what I’m really hearing is she gave you the courage to bet on yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s funny too, because betting on yourself is a very scary endeavor, even for the most confident person because it also could, could not go well. And, and in your case, you know, you really have to commit and you did, and, and you made it work. So, so you left, you found the courage to do that. Your coach, of course helped you, you know, change your mindset to this, like, you can do this, but also, I’m not gonna push you to do it, it’s a decision you have to make on your own and whether you do it or not, I’m still your coach. And, and you did it. And, and then and then how did things, you know, blossom from there?
Paul Salazar 31:06 Well, so, again, I didn’t have a network, even though I’d been in LA for a long time. You know, I think my network was really outside of LA, you know, I had a small network in LA from, you know, just kind of meeting people, you know, going out and whatnot. But I really didn’t I I’m not really a networker. You know, that’s not how I get my business. Right. And a lot of people in LA that are successful, actually are good networkers. But that’s not me. I don’t like to go out at night. And like smoothies, that’s not my thing. So when I was, you know, listening to how other agents, you know, grow their business, you know, cold calling expireds was a great way to grow the business. So I started, I started cold calling expireds, you know, and it was, that was so hard for me to start doing that. And I actually started cold calling expireds I think before I hired Mary Jo at the Tom Ferry organization. And then I hired her, but I basically started cold calling expireds every single day. And I was horrible at it. And I was so I was so nervous getting on the phone. Like, it was, like, traumatizing for me. I was like, and my girlfriend is like, why, you know, what’s like, what’s going on? And she’s also a coach herself, you know, so she was kind of coaching me through this whole process. But again, it just like the mindset, like I just wasn’t there. And I didn’t have I guess I didn’t have the confidence yet to really cold call these people. And when you’re cold calling, you know, you know, 2345 and plus million dollar houses. They’re getting calls from everybody in there, everybody. I mean, like people from like, like, an hour away are calling them. It’s nuts.
D.J. Paris 32:44 So you were only calling luxury expireds? Or were you Okay, so So you somehow subscribed? Did you subscribe to a service that gives you those leads? Or did you just find them in the MLS as they would expire?
Paul Salazar 32:55 So at the time, I was using red X, I’m now using Vulcan. But at that time, I was using red X. And I think it was like a filter of doing like, only houses over a million dollars. So I was like, listen, anything in LA right now, right? Anything over a million dollars is like a like a, like a teardown, you know, yeah. So it’s like, I like the word luxury. It’s like, I don’t even know what that means anymore. Because I hear it here in LA is a $2 million property, like a luxury property. Because it’s like a three bedroom, two bath 1200 square foot house in an OK neighborhood. It’s insane. Right? So so with that being said, you know, I started I started cold calling expireds.
D.J. Paris 33:32 And by the way, I want to pause here for a second because because for those of you that have never I feel like that art of calling for sale by owners calling expired listings isn’t as popular anymore. Well, first of all people, you know, look, most people don’t like making cold calls, and calling for sale by owners or expireds. This particular will say just expired. It’s expired. It’s particularly difficult because it was on the market, probably with another realtor. It didn’t go well it didn’t property didn’t transact. And so you may you may be calling somebody who now hates realtors or hates the previous realtor or and as you said, it’s also because it’s a luxury property, at least by the price. It is now you know very attractive to everyone who buys these leads, which is a lot of agents. So you’re right people from an hour away. Sure. I’ll drive in for a $2 million property of course. So now the owner is getting bombarded with you’re probably not the first phone call even of the day. What do you call them? So So can you just talk a little bit about what those calls were like, just because I love the fact that you started calling fizz bows and, and or sorry, expired listings. And were able to you know, still still build a luxury practice out of it.
Paul Salazar 34:46 Yeah, I mean, I I knew that like, that was really the only way that I wanted to do things because I’m not an I’m not a networker. That’s not my thing. I’m not going out at nighttime and going to events, right? So I like to be home during the week. So it’s either open houses door knocking or expireds. And I still don’t have the courage to go door knocking yet. So I started with expireds. Right? That was the that was my first step into building my confidence into doing scary things. And a book that I like to read. That really inspired me was Miracle Morning. Oh, yeah. How Elrod Yeah, yes, exactly. Great book. So highly recommend it for any for any listeners. So me and my girlfriend started doing that. So we were still waking up early, you know, 545 alarm, getting up at five, you know, meditation journal workouts. There’s a couple other things there. I forgot what what they are. But But doing that every single morning, and then that really propels you to a very successful day, you know, so I started doing that, but by making the calls was was really tough, you know? Sure. The good thing is that I, I knew the market. So that was what I knew the market, which is really important. And number two, I was at a great brokerage, Hilton Island, and we only have one office and only 150 agents. So it was only really, in my office is only one other agent that that does expired calls. So if if I’m calling Hey, it’s Paul Salazar, a Hilton and Hyland, I kind of know, not everybody, but most people will know that, that that brand name, and they’ll they’ll say, You know what, there’s only a few agents at that at that brokerage. It’s a very, very popular brokerage here in the area for High Tech High End residential. And so they, they, they gave me a little bit more respect, right. That’s nice. Yeah. So, so that definitely helped me out, okay. But at the end of the day, it’s you just have to know how, you know, you obviously have to have a script that you that you internalized, you have to know it from, you know, you have to just understand the script, there’s only going to be a few different objections. And they have to know how to handle it. And more importantly, it’s the it’s your tonality. Yeah, that’s what I learned is tonality is so important, right. And everybody’s different. I’m really good with a certain demographic, ladies that are like 60 Plus, you know, I just, yeah, that was my sweet spot. So that was my first listing. And, and, you know, it was a, it was a, it was a $2.1 million listing. And they had interviewed the other agent in my office who was like the king of expireds, in in LA, who does a ton of expireds. And I actually beat him, I beat him to the listing, which is great. And, and the way I did it, it was just like, I was just personable, and I in what I started to create after that was, how do I become the best listing agent in LA? What do I have to do to become the best listing agent in LA? So that was really my, my mindset going forward is? How do I create? You know, a great listing, right, so what does that involve? And how do I also, so my next prospect, how I just transformed this property, sold it for record price, you know, you know, you know, shortly that Mark is on the market for six months, I sold it in a weekend, you know, so I started to, to, to create those marketing pieces, to help me get the next listing and the next listing and the next listing, and I started just to just really hone in on my listing skills, and my negotiation skills and my sales skills to really go from expired to sold, you know, and I have, I have, like, you know, like 15 now of case studies of these houses that were once on the market, I transformed them, and I was able to get them sold.
D.J. Paris 38:47 You know, that’s, that’s such a great approach, this idea of sort of what we would maybe call story selling this idea of, hey, let me tell you about this previous thing, versus, here’s why I’m the best choice, which I’m sure you do have that as part of your pitch as well of like, here’s what I’m going to do for you, here’s the XY and Z of what I’m going to do. But let me tell you about this last property I just worked on, here’s what I did to that, here’s the results. And you know, you’re sort of sharing that, that whole journey to somebody and that’s a very powerful approach that I suspect a lot of agents don’t think that way. It’s more like hey, if you look at my reputation, if you look at what I what I do in general, I’m a big deal, you know, without saying I’m a big deal, whereas you’re telling very specific stories of previous experiences you have and that is it’s a very unique approach actually, I think that’s that’s quite quite smart and obviously, is started resonating with these with these expireds and honestly,
Paul Salazar 39:45 like, because of expireds like that’s what helped me grow my business like it’s because of expireds because you know, from there, you hold open houses you find buyers from there you go door, knock the neighborhood from there, you start just started Little by little start building your business. And you know, like, again, I think 60% of my business right now is still expired still new business because I don’t have enough old business to get repeat clients. I don’t I don’t I don’t have the the like the luxury of being like, Hey, Paul, you sold my property two years ago, I want to buy something like I rarely get those calls maybe two or three times a year. Obviously, as I grow my business, I’m getting more and more of those calls. But I still cannot rely on that I still rely on circle dialing on door knocking on sending mailers on calling expireds and doing open houses.
D.J. Paris 40:37 Let’s talk about door knocking, because so few of our guests on, I’ve had a few guests that have that have talked about door knocking I suspect more more have done it, maybe just don’t talk about it. But that is also, I think, a very courageous thing to do. And it’s very difficult. So as you you know, tell us your approach for door knocking just, you know, are you are you door knocking in neighborhoods where you just or you’re currently selling a property or just sold a property? Oh, by the way, I just, you know, I helped your neighbor down the street, just wanted to introduce myself that kind of thing, or how did you go about doing that?
Paul Salazar 41:11 Well, I have a geo form, right. So here here in Venice, in the in the west side of Venice Beach, I have like a you know, like a 500 You know, home, you know, community that I’m constantly working on. Right? So that’s, that’s how I started door knocking, right. And again, this is all from Tom Ferry Mary jet, saying, Hey, you have to have a, you have to have four lead pillars. One is you know, for so when I first started coaching with them, it was geo farm expireds open houses, and then my past clients, which is very, very little, right. So so, you know, door knocking to me is the most effective way of prospecting, hands down. Wow, it can’t be more effective than calling expireds more it’s it just takes a lot of time and effort and energy. And that’s why people don’t do it. Because it’s like, you have to go out there you have to have like a marketing piece. You have to go and doorknob. It’s like it’s a lot of time and effort. You know, cold calling is a little bit easier. You’re at home, you could be in your PJs, you could just you know, get out of bed and do it right. But when your door knocking, you have to you know, I gotta say we got to look good. I look presentable. I gotta I gotta understand the market in this little area. But, you know, I’ve, from one of my door knocking deals is actually doing COVID. Right, where I couldn’t actually door knock, but I was still passing out flyers. And if somebody was out in the front of the door, I was, you know, like, if they’re out in the yard, I would talk to them. So funny story is like, I I wanted to start, I wanted to get into selling new developments. Because Santiago Araunah, who was one of the biggest agents in the nation, he’s here in Brentwood. Actually, you know, he actually interviewed me when I first came to LA and Oh, nine, he didn’t hire me. But he’s a great agent, you know, like, he like I always look up to him, because he’s kind of like me, like, he’s a, you know, Latin guy like me, he came from nothing. And he’s built an amazing business. I mean, he’s, he’s a freaking baller, right? But he, he built his business on door knocking. And, and he found a lot of tear downs. And he was able to sell those to developers. And then the developer built a 20 3040 $50 million house, and now he’s selling those houses, right. So that’s another great way of getting the luxury space, if you’re in an area where there’s a lot of tear downs and development opportunities, right, is to start, you know, door knocking those houses, finding those sellers, finding the the developers, which is super easy, right. So that was one of my first development deals a few years ago, was during COVID. Walking around in my geo farm, I knew I picked this geo farm because it had a lot of tear down potential. And a tear down is going to be three deals, three sides, right? You rep the seller who’s selling the development opportunity, you rep the developer, and then you rep the developer one, they sell it in a good chance that you get a lead out of it, or a buyer and you double ended so there’s possibly 244 sides and one one deal there. Right? So there’s a really, you know, really, you know, good chance that you can make some good money on these on these tear downs. So anyway, so I was doing walking, I met the the the older couple that were super sweet. They knew nothing about real estate at all. Their father just had passed away. So it was it was a trust sell. They had a they had to pay no capital gains. So it was perfect for them. They were going to cash out. I found a great developer that I now have sold multiple deals to. And you know, and that’s how I kind of started right now selling brand new developments was was just by door knocking these houses.
D.J. Paris 44:41 And this idea of cold calling developers not to hey, I want to rep your next project which of course every realtor would want that too. But you’re saying hey, I’ve got a deal for you essentially not not a deal. I’ve got a transaction possibly for you. Not a deal isn’t like I’ve got special offer for you. But I’ve got this property that that you might be interested in Mr. And Mrs. Developer. I’ve never heard of anybody doing that. I don’t know why that has never been talked about that is a brilliant approach to giving providing value to a developer, to which they’re like, hey, this guy’s great. He’s given us business. We’re gonna use them for, you know, maybe other things we’re doing.
Paul Salazar 45:22 Yeah, for sure. And I think, my pitch to these, the sellers that own these tear downs, and there’s not all properties are going to be considered tear downs, you know, sure. I always look out for my clients, no matter what I always look out, like, if I was them, what would I do? Right? There’s some houses that you can slap some paint on, it changed some countertops. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later on. Because I also specialize in like, re, like refurbishing a house, you know, redoing a house, and selling it to an end user, right? But But there’s certain houses that you can’t do that it’s either too small, or it needs too much work. And it’s a perfect teardown, right, like the developer is going to pay more than an end user, right? So so what my pitches to these to the sellers is that I’m going to create an offering memorandum and an OM right. And that’s not really used for for residential brokers, they don’t really understand what that means that that’s for for like commercial agents, you know, that’s our industrial buildings, or office and retail or, you know, other kind of commercial, real estate. So what I do is that I create it with my team, like a 1520, page, PDF, and it outlines, right, this is what we’re selling. This is what you know, what we’re asking, you know, this is, you know, what the what the land, you know, price per square foot, because we don’t look at price per square foot for the house, we look at the price per square foot for the land, we sell them comps of other other land cells that are similar to this in the area. We also saw on comps of what a new development will sell for in the area, we also show them what they can build, per the under built report, which is a company here in the area that can tell me how big of a house I can build on it. And then I email it to developers. And then they’ll say, give me a call. I said, give me a call. And now they they trust me even more, because I created this great marketing piece that took me three hours. And they trust me like this guy’s the real deal, right? And so I start calling these developers, I said, Hey, and it’s so easy to find developers. So there’s no excuse for anybody not to find developer, all you do is you go on the MLS, you find out all the new developments that are sold. You look at public records, you saw who sold them. If it’s an LLC, you look up the LLC, you look at the manager, you find them online, they have a website, you give them a call, it literally takes five minutes, right? Yeah, it’s super, super easy. So that’s how it started. And I luckily sold it to a great developer who I have a great relationship now. And now I’ve already sold them a few other properties that are now being built. And that house, I sold it originally teardown for 1.6 million, so I double that. And then we sold it two months ago for 4.2 million. And, and we put a big sign in front of the house as as they were building it, you know, as they were building the whole house a huge sign a massive sign with a QR code to like a website. And I got I got a buyer lead that I sold another house for 3.1 million, I got other leads that I’m working on right now. So it’s like, every single listing should give you two or three deals. At the minimum one deal. And if you really know how to maximize it, two or three deals. So that’s why I really focus on on on getting listings.
D.J. Paris 48:35 How many other agents do you know who prospect developers with with opportunities like that you put together? I’m curious if that’s a common practice. And if it is, I’m curious on how putting together that 1520 page PDF with literally step by step of like, here’s all the work we’ve done, here’s the options for what you can do mister missus developer. And here’s what we think, you know, estimated profit might might be how common is that? Are you like the only guy really doing that? Is that your sort of secret sauce? Or do you feel like other people are putting together similar packages?
Paul Salazar 49:12 I was it’s not a secret anymore. But But I don’t think anyone else is doing it. You know, again, I really pride myself in being detail oriented. And creating really nice marketing pieces like that. That’s my thing. Like I I really want to have a nice brand. So if you go to my, to my website, it’s very clean. If you look at my at my Instagram profile, I try it’s getting better and better. Right? It’s not easy to like have a nice, clean, bold and sophisticated look. But that’s that’s what we’re trying to build here. But I don’t know anybody else that’s that’s doing that. There are a lot of agents that sell a lot of developments and they’re there and they’re doing this right. And the other way of getting these deals is by sending letters So like, I would drive around a whole area with my assistant, and I will pick out, tear down, tear down, we write the address, we put it on an Excel file. And now we send handwritten envelopes. And we send them a letter, I just close it. I’m actually under contract on a deal right now from a letter that I sent three months ago, and they call me Hey, I got your letter, do you still have that buyer? I’m like, Yes, I do. I put the deal together. And now we’re under contract for another development deal. Right? So not only door knocking, or cold calling these these tear downs, but also sending letters works.
D.J. Paris 50:30 I love that you’re doing all of the things that you would assume a luxury agent probably doesn’t have to do, right? Most luxury agents I know are not calling fizz Bo’s expireds, they’re not cold calling developers. They’re not writing, you know, letters. Or maybe they are and maybe they’re just not telling us on our show. But I appreciate that, that you weren’t born into this sort of luxury business, you really built it, you bootstrapped it and and you you saved up enough money so that you could you could explore that. And, and I just go i Those are the best stories, I think, the so let’s talk about because again, so many of our agents are like, okay, I can start doing some of those things. But everybody wants to be a luxury agent. You know, what, what’s the major difference you found? Because you do 20 plus million dollar properties as well. What’s the major difference between working with you know, a seller of a, you know, let’s say a million dollar property or, you know, in LA, of course, the like you said, everything’s kind of, or at least in the area you service is kind of a million dollars, even the smallest properties? What’s the difference between working on the smaller property side to the ultra high net worth side? Are the are the needs? And the goals basically the same? Or is it is it kind of a different world?
Paul Salazar 51:51 I mean, I think at the core, it’s the same thing, somebody wants to find a home. Right? So so in that, in that respect, there’s there’s going to be an emotional attachment to selling real estate, either in high end, or in a lower price point, right? Sure. I think the only difference is, is that when you’re selling real estate here, a lot of the times they have a business manager, who can make things very difficult a lawyer, writer. And so they have, by the
D.J. Paris 52:20 way, are not emotionally involved in the property that a buyer or a seller might be there emotionally involved in keeping their their position, which their position is, is to very thoroughly review the financial component of this transaction, which I’m assuming is a big deal be so you not only have to win over the emotional side of the buyer or seller, but you also have to win over sort of the more empirical part, the objective part of dealing with now this team, which those are, those are two different very different masters to serve, I imagine.
Paul Salazar 52:51 Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think most of the people that I service here in LA, not everybody, but most of them are just sophisticated. And they, they, they’re, they’re educated. And they’re they’re business owners, they’re very smart people, right? So they may know, they may know about the property more than you do. Like, you know, if you’re showing them property, they may have done all the research. So you have to be prepared a lot more than I was prepared. When I was working in Rancho Cucamonga. I’m not saying you don’t have to be prepared selling real estate in a smaller price point. But all I’m saying is that over here, I feel like you have to be more prepared, because they are going to ask you tough questions. And they and they’re going to expect that you know that they they’re going to expect the you know, the market, they you know, the players that you know about the house, all that stuff. So I think that’s the biggest difference. And then the other thing is, is when you’re listing a property, I feel that, you know, I spend easily, you know, five to $6,000 per listing, before it’s even on the market. You know, we’re spending, you know, a grant that two grand on a photographer, same for a videographer or floor plan, I do everything like we do Instagram ads, or the YouTube ads, we do Google ads for our listings, we want to be the best of the best, right? And that’s how I this is, this is my plan to get to the next level. Like I really want to start growing my business to the next level. I’m not there yet. And I have a long way to go. But I know that if I keep doing this, I will get there because people are going to start noticing that I really take care of you. I’m going to look out for you. And I’m going to get you top dollar or I will get you the best price if I’m repping you as a buyer’s agent.
D.J. Paris 54:42 Yeah, it’s so funny to hear you hear somebody say I’ve sold 600 million in real estate. I’m not quite there yet. I’m just just but that’s that’s the motor that you have that keeps you going 600 million is is just where you’re at today. It isn’t necessarily where you want to be tomorrow. But it’s So funny to hear that that, really, it seems like your your entire career has been so much of put the blinders on do the hard things that are maybe a little scary and uncomfortable, but are healthy, and things that other agents aren’t willing to do like door knocking. I mean, gosh, I would bet less than 1% of agents have ever door knock, or made a cold call, quite honestly. You know, I don’t I don’t think people leave and do that as much anymore. And yet, here’s here’s somebody, you know, like you who who still does it. And, and that is, um, you would think a luxury agent wouldn’t be going door to door, you know, we sort of have our own, you know, misconceptions about what that even means. But it is one of those rare arts, you know, this door knocking and letter writing that, you know, people really appreciate if done the right way. It’s it’s absolutely a lost art and is obviously been part of the secret. Not secret, but part of the reason for your, for your ascent. And so let’s let’s talk about, you know, I’m sure there’s people that reach out to you that goes, I want to break into the luxury market. What What are your thoughts on that? I see, I always think most agents shouldn’t aspire to that unless they want to up their game, like you were saying, now dealing with buyers and sellers who maybe are a bit more sophisticated, maybe are just more business focused, like you said, a lot of business owners, a lot of people who have been successful in their careers, and just have a level of sophistication that, you know, maybe people at lower price points, you know, just don’t have or aren’t as interested in. And so, you know, you do have to appeal to that sort of those qualities of these of these more sophisticated buyers and sellers. You know, what would your advice be to somebody that says, I want to sell $20 million homes just like you
Paul Salazar 56:51 I you know, what, I think people glamorize because of what’s on TV sell Sharon said and Million Dollar Listing and they think it’s just like, so easy. When you go into a luxury market, the competition is at a different level. This is why I have to up my game. Like, the only reason why I’m doing is because when I lose a listing, I I’m like, Alright, why did I lose that listing? What can I do better? Now I’m adding another piece to my arsenal, little by little right. So, you know, being part of the Tom Ferry organization, I see people in much smaller markets selling $500,000 houses that they’re making 10 times more than me, you know, so I think for an agent, you got to think about is it about is it about the glamour of selling luxury real estate or is about the money because you can make a you can make more money selling $500,000 houses with, you know, obviously more units than selling luxury property and selling just, you know, five or you know, or 10 listings or sales per year,
D.J. Paris 57:53 you know, not having to spend 5000 plus per listing the market.
Paul Salazar 57:57 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I again, like if your dream, like, for me, my dream was never to sell luxury real estate like that. I never, you know, got into real estate to be in Beverly Hills, it just kind of fell into my lap, right? My mom kind of pushed me my girlfriend was living here. I got the, you know, I got the assistant position with with Chad Hilton and Hyland, so everything kind of, you know, kind of just, you know, like, like, the road kind of led me there. Right? But it wasn’t like, I was like, I want to sell, you know, 20 monopolistic so that that now I do, right. But But before that, you know, it wasn’t really a big deal for those agents that really, really want to get into luxury real estate because they they love those kinds of houses, they want to work with those kinds of people. That’s great. You should you should do it. I think joining a team is obviously I think, you know, having a mentor joining a team should be the first thing you do 100% You have to learn about how you know what it takes to be a player, learn the players learn the area, learn the markets, who are the buyers who are the sellers, right. And then after that create a plan. You know, how am I going to get you know, open houses is a great way of finding buyers right. You know, cold calling door knocking I mean, there’s so many stories out there. Santiago Irana door knock Brentwood for years. He’s killing it. You know, the guys on Bhandar listing, you know, Parnes, you know, the Bonsu brothers, they also door knock and Bel Air. So there’s so many stories of people that are not even from LA. And they want to do luxury real estate but they but they grinded their way in. You know, you gotta grind your way and it’s super, super competitive. So if you got he got what it takes, and you’re in your competitive and you’re willing to grind, then go ahead and do it. Why not? I mean, anybody can do it. I did it. And everybody, you know, a lot of other people did it too.
D.J. Paris 59:50 Well, I think that’s really such an inspiring message. If we sort of look back at your entire career. Yes, there were opportunities that allowed you to get introduced to different types of audiences that you now work with. But nothing was handed to you at all. You You made your own luck by doing the things that maybe other agents wouldn’t be willing to do, even from starting, you know, with sending out 10,000 emails to other agents. And by the way, not being a guy who’s a self promoter, right, that is something you would think maybe a self promoter or schmoozer would want to do, because it’s a good networking sort of exercise. You were just like, I need to find a mentor here. And and so you earnestly send out all these messages. And then you know, everything, you continue to do things like that, throughout your entire career and continue to do it today. It’s not like oh, now it’s just, I just get calls all day from developers and from luxury, you know, buyers and sellers. You’re still drumming up all this business on your own. And I think that’s just a great a great place to sort of wrap up for today because it is like, it’s like reminds me of that old. This ancient, I think it’s a Zen saying I can’t remember exactly where it comes from. So I apologize if I’m getting this wrong, but but the expression is a good one, which is Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood carry water. You just gotta keep keep doing the, you know, the hard things. Because that’s what keeps everything going. It’s not like you, you don’t feel like you’ve arrived, so to speak, because you’re still doing the same exact things. And that’s oddly, but but also absolutely makes sense of why your continued to be successful. And who knows, maybe one day it’ll all just come come into you without without that much effort. But it’s working for you. And it’s a great reminder of just practicing the fundamentals and consistently applying those just the same way. We built our podcast here. It wasn’t any one interview that got us, you know, it Yeah, it’s just just consistency and talking to people like yourself, and what you what you shared was really super inspiring today. So I hope, I don’t even hope I know our audience has received a tremendous amount of benefit for any agents out there who might be might have clients that are moving to, you know, to the more exclusive areas of LA in the suburbs, and are looking, you know, maybe they don’t service that particular area, maybe they’re in a different state, but they have clients who maybe have second, third, fourth homes, and they maybe want to partner with a top agent like yourself, or if there’s anyone who is in the Beverly Hills and surrounding areas who’s a buyer or seller investor developer or renter who wants to work with you directly, you know, what’s the best way that one of our listeners could reach out to you
Paul Salazar 1:02:43 call me text me email me Instagram, it like I, I check all those things. So like my cell phone 310-387-1976 Call me shoot me a text, email Paul at Paul Salazar group.com. Instagram at Paul Sallows our group, so very easy to get in touch with me. I’ve actually, you know, been, you know, I’ve had people reach out to me to ask for advice. I always you know, you know, give them a you know, a few minutes of my time to because I listen, I respect that, you know, I was there at one point. And I respect people that like, go out there and reach out and like, you know, want to ask for advice. I’ve actually given like, there’s a kid in high school that sent me a long email saying, He wants me to mentor him, I brought him to my open house. Now he helps me out with things. It’s like it when you put yourself out there, the world is gonna give you gifts, you know, and, and I think a lot of people don’t put themselves out there because it’s, it feels vulnerable. You got to get uncomfortable, you got to be durable. And the more vulnerable you get, the more uncomfortable you get, the more difficult things you do, the more you start to feel like empowered by yourself like, well, I can do that. You know, I think that’s probably my biggest tip for any listener here is just start doing small things every single day, that are that are difficult, you know, taking a cold shower in the morning, waking up early, working out in the morning, making a you know, one cold call door knocking one door, you know, going out and just meeting somebody striking up a conversation, and you start to realize that wow, why am I even worried about that? Why was I scared about that, you know, there’s that we just have these these these fears? Because you know, we have this it’s a human condition, right? Sure. But but once you get over this, then you start to get more empowered and you start to do more and more difficult things like I still have a lot of things that I want to do that are that are difficult, that I’m still you know, getting to little by little
D.J. Paris 1:04:44 cold showers is such a great example of a small thing that any anybody can try. And it is shockingly difficult. It’s more difficult than you think it’s going to be thinking about it now. It’s actually two times harder than what you’re even thinking And if you can, if you I want everybody to try this tomorrow and it’s not because having a cold shower in and of itself is anything, it’s it’s the idea of it. And people say there’s some health benefits whatever that that may or may not be. But what there definitely is a benefit is you if you can make it 30 seconds, 60 seconds and complete it you will feel as much jubilation as if you just ran a marathon because it is that difficult. And that is an easy win. It’s not an easy win. It’s a very difficult win. If you can do that daily. I promise. Just do it. Try it once tomorrow try to make it 10 seconds on ice cold all the way to cold. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s tough. It’s I did it for about a year, I need to get back into it. I did it many years ago, took me months to find the courage to do it. Months and months and months. It sounds silly. I know I’m just talking about this one specific thing. But it’s a something that you will again, you will feel unbelievable. As you walk out of that show, you’ll be like, I just did something crazy art. And you’re right then other things, which maybe aren’t quite as difficult. Don’t seem as bad as as they did before. So oh my gosh, what a great thing. So do hard things, people that are healthy, do hard things that are healthy. And Paul, what a great, great place to wrap up. So everyone go please, Paul’s a wonderful guy, reach out to him if you need some assistance. Also, if you have clients that are moving to the Southern California, talk to Paul, he wants he wants to chat with you. And he certainly is a great realtor to have in your in your database. And Paul, on behalf of our audience, thank you so much for coming on our show. We this is such a such a pleasure to have you. And if I fiber make it out to to LA I haven’t been there in many years, I need to come back. I want to say hi to you in person. And yeah, and see you in action dinner. That would be fun. And on behalf of Paul and myself, we want to thank everyone for making it to the end of the episode. Please do us to do us one favor. This hasn’t been an amazing episode, I want everybody to think of one other realtor that needs to hear what Paul had to say. And just send them a link to our either this episode or our website, which is keeping it real pod.com You will help somebody by sending this to some struggling agent in your office. Or maybe you know another agent from a different office that you know that could use, you know, this sort of this sort of past sort of pep talk from somebody who started with really no major help and built this incredible career and is really just getting started. And it’ll be inspiring to to everybody else. He’ll be actually helping people do that. And you’re helping us as well. So please send a link to this episode. Other than that, Paul, I am so excited to continue to watch your journey. And thank you so much for being on the podcast and we’ll see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Paul. Thank you, Jay. Appreciate it.
How To Get Developers To Choose YOU For Their Next Real Estate Project • Lindsay Barton Barrett
Dec 01, 2022
Lindsay Barton Barrett goes back to the beginning of her career as a real estate agent and describes her transition from a real estate attorney. Lindsay explains how how she built her business from scratch and how does she get to referrals. Next, Lindsay talks about how to build relationships with developers and describes how she gained the trust of real estate developers. Lindsay also discusses how is she educating her clients to keep her business going today when the rates ae going up and the market is shifting. Last, Lindsay provides advise for realtors on how to build and maintain relationships and how she keeps in touch with her clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever wondered how developers choose realtors to work on their projects? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Lindsey Barton barrette. Before we get to Lindsay, just a couple of quick reminders of will as always a reminder to me to thank you for listening and supporting our show. Thank you for checking out what our sponsors offer. Thank you for continuing to listen and as most importantly, thank you for telling a friend. Think of one other realtor that has not heard of our show that could benefit maybe somebody that wants to work with developers, but hasn’t quite figured out how to crack that code which we’re going to be talking about today and send them a link over to our show. You can always go directly to our website keeping it real pod.com or any place you can find podcasts just search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And also if you’d like to leave us a review that would be fantastic as well especially if you’re on like Apple podcasts or Spotify, Stitcher, wherever. Let us know what you think of the show. We read all your reviews and we take your suggestions into account. But anyway, enough about me and other show. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Lindsey Barton Barrett.
Today our guest is Lindsey Barton burette from Douglas Elliman in New York City specifically Brooklyn, although she works all of Manhattan, but let me tell you more about Lindsay now veteran New York City broker Lindsey Barton barrette sets herself apart in a crowded field with an astute advisory approach. She has over two decades of award winning experience and an unblemished reputation among her fellow agents. She’s closed and pause for dramatic effect $1 billion in total transactions throughout her career and she and her team have sold four of the six most expensive homes in Brooklyn’s history. Lindsay is methodical and prepared and thanks to her former career as a real estate attorney at a prominent New York firm clients can trust that every step of the process is buttoned up from start to finish. The result of Lindsay is unwavering professionalism isn’t only seen in her steady stream of top producer awards and accolades, but also in the legions of fiercely loyal clients and the extensive referral business she’s cultivated over the years. In addition to assisting buyers and sellers in Manhattan and Brooklyn, with a specialty in brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods. She’s worked directly with the city’s leading developers. To learn more about Lindsay, please visit her website, Lindsey Barton Barrette team.com And that’s Lindsay with an A y. But don’t worry, you’re not going to have to type it in. We have a link for that right in our show notes. But please do visit it and see what somebody who is at the very very top of the mountain in real estate, what their website looks like. It’s impressive. It’s awesome. It’s elegant. Anyway, Lindsay, welcome to the show. We’re so excited to have you.
Lindsay Barton Barrett 4:36 Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:39 We are very happy to Lindsay and I were just talking about some some other things prior to the show, not real estate related. So I’m really excited to learn more about your your path and progress and journey through real estate but I’d love to start all the way at the beginning because I know in your previous career you are a real estate attorney Well, but how did you get involved in real estate to begin with,
Lindsay Barton Barrett 5:05 I would say probably goes back a little before that I grew up in Seattle. And my, my dad was a war lots of hats over the years, but was involved in real estate development and construction a little bit at certain points. And in the hotel business as well. And that just it, it always interested me, because it covers so much ground, it’s really personal, yet also tangible. And so I was, I was intrigued by it from an early age, honestly, the construction part of it, all of that, and then I went to law school, and I went to Columbia, which is a very traditional law school approach, you know, think Paper Chase, you know, we don’t teach you to be a lawyer, we teach you to think like a lawyer. And so it was very theoretical in certain ways. And there was not a lot of specific sort of, there was not, there were not a lot of specific classes that related to practice areas necessarily offered, including real estate. And maybe there was, maybe I missed it. But I didn’t come out knowing that that was what I wanted to do. But I knew that I was interested in real estate. And so I worked as a corporate attorney briefly. And when I would do diligence on transactions, you know, m&a transactions, or something, I was still continued to gravitate to the real estate piece of it. So I ended up laterally between two big firms in Manhattan and moved to another firm where I was in a real estate, dedicated practice. And I really, I was, I loved it, I loved the pieces of the transactions. But I didn’t love the role that I was playing in transactions. I, I think they’re amazing lawyers. But often a lawyer’s job is to pinpoint all the potential pitfalls in a transaction, instead of focusing on keeping parties together and keeping parties moving forward. And I would work on big transactions where there were both commercial real estate brokers and investment bankers on the deals, and just sitting on conference calls or sitting in the room, I would look at what they were doing, and think that’s what I want to be doing. I want to be building things and putting deals together and helping really smart people who know what they want to do get together and do it in a profitable and, you know, they know what they’re doing, you know, our clients really knew what they were doing. And so I often felt that the lawyers were just bringing up the same points every single time that had been resolved in the last iteration of this document. And I just didn’t, I didn’t like the role that I was playing. And it may have been a function of being in a big firm, versus being at a smaller firm. But ultimately, I just felt like between not seeing myself as a New York lawyer, and the various sort of the various limitations that that can present in terms of hours worked and all of those things. I it just became clear to me that I wanted something different in my role and in my, in my hours and all of that and so I and then I bought an apartment with a tiny bit of money. I put 5% down I think on a condo in the East Village, it
D.J. Paris 9:06 which by the way, which by the way, 5% down on a condo in the East Village is still a tremendous downpayment. It was a long time
Lindsay Barton Barrett 9:15 ago, but yes, yes, it was. And so I you know, I put 5% down, I bought a condo in the East Village and then over the years, you know, and that was one thing that I really that has also been a driver for me of what I do is that I do have a very sort of quintessential real estate escalation story of I bought the condo in the East Village turned around and bought a co op in Cobble Hill turned around and bought a relatively you know, for the time and for New York and expensive townhouse that ultimately we got renovated and I sold it this past year for a significant multiple of a The condo in the East Village in 2000, but also what we bought it for. So it really enabled me to do this job, I was able to take out a home equity line of credit, so I had something to fall back on. And so real estate has actually really kind of done for me what I think it does for a lot of people. But what I think a lot of people don’t really believe happens anymore. So that’s sort of my backstory.
D.J. Paris 10:26 Yeah, and there was really a lot there. I just want to unpack a couple of things. Number one, I want to honor you for the courage to walk away from a legal career that you worked. Well, number one, Columbia is not one of the worst law schools in the country. It’s actually one of the very top and that I’m sure that’s how you, of course, how you got to New York. Did you also do your undergraduate in New York as well? Or did you just end up there for law school,
Lindsay Barton Barrett 10:53 I was in upstate New York, I went to Cornell undergrad. So I went to I went to great schools, you know, no complaints here, you know, but it just it this, it, it was a different path. But it brought me to where I am now.
D.J. Paris 11:08 It’s Was it difficult to walk away from working so hard to pass the bar and and of course work in in corporate, you know, the corporate law world, and then to be an m&a activity, mergers and acquisitions and then say, you know, I really, this isn’t my I’m, I don’t want to bill, you know, 1000 hours a year anymore, or whatever, the whatever lawyers are billing these days. Yeah, I know, it’s always a staggering, staggering number. And sort of trading hours for dollars is really what attorneys do, which is why they work so much. Was that,
Lindsay Barton Barrett 11:40 especially, um, it was hardest for my mom, I would say, Sure. My mom was not happy about the decision. What are you doing with your life? Yes, um, and I should be really nice to my mom right now. She’s not doing great, but I she was not happy that I quit my job. Um, it was scary. It was definitely scary. Um, and you know, it’s true, you need a real sort of, you need something to fall back on. And I, I genuinely got that exclusively by doing a home equity line of credit, where I put my job taking that money and knowing that I had it, and then leaving. And so it was definitely scary. I felt like I had maybe one client, maybe two, they were sort of friends that graciously trusted me with their home purchase or home search. I think one of them ended up buying and one of them didn’t. And then otherwise, I really, you know, I think people look at me and go, Oh, you’ve had all these like, lawyers, lawyers are very conservative. I have a lot of law school friends who still rent in New York City, and I graduated from law school 23 years ago. So, you know, lawyers turned out not to necessarily be my sort of go to client base, either. And when I when I left, I knew I didn’t really know what I was doing entirely. So I was very nervous to try to tap that resource and mess it up. And so I didn’t sort of dive back into the law firm world to try to get clients because when you first become a, an agent, your job is getting clients not doing your job. So yeah, so I, I was nervous, obviously, I had a paycheck. And at that point, I had a mortgage. And, but I was excited about it. And I felt like I had the cushion. And I could give it time. And if after six months, it didn’t work out. I will move on. But fortunately it did. It did. I landed in a good place. I had a great support system in terms of my manager and people that I worked with. And you know, I at the time, I was engaged. And then ultimately, my husband was supportive. And now he’s not my husband anymore. And so yeah, I was able to do it. It was scary. But I was really fortunate in kind of, I don’t know why managed to hit the ground running and then just build from there and get referrals from the people that I worked with. So
D.J. Paris 14:37 how did so since you didn’t tap the hey, my friends at the law firm I was at or certainly people who know me in my field, as you were saying, because I was thinking, Oh, this is so brilliant, because she’s all of her clients will be the attorneys. She knows. Yeah. And that turns out, but you you served my question by saying that is not what happened. So I’m actually really interested in and yes, I understand You know, having this previous career that you’d worked so hard for, obviously, you can fall back could have fall back fell back onto that. Very, I’m sure very easily. So that that is there’s some comfort there, I’m sure. But, you know, I don’t know, you know, when you were when you were, you know, practicing law, I don’t know, if you were out there securing clients and going out and sort of shaking the hands and getting business or if more things were assigned to you, but But now, you know, now you’re on your own, you’re in charge of every wearing every hat for the for the business, and also learning how to how to actually be a decent realtor. Of course, you have become an beyond excellent realtor now, but was, what was it like in those first six months? You know, how did you secure you had one friend that turned out to to be a buyer? You know, the other one didn’t? And then it sounded like, you know, you were you were on your own trying to drum up business? How did you do that back then, if you don’t mind sharing?
Lindsay Barton Barrett 15:55 Um, you know, it’s funny, I think back and I, in some ways, I still don’t totally know, I don’t remember. And I will also say, and we get this from agents all over the country. Price points in New York are quite high, you know, and the reality was, at the time, in order to sort of level my real estate salary salary to where my law firm had been, I think I figured out pretty quickly that I needed to sell something like $8 million. And at the time, you know, maybe it ended probably was a little more. I hate to say this, like, that’s not that hard to do in New York. And so even in 2002, I guess. And so my first sale, admittedly, was a million dollar sale, which was a big deal. It was a crappy loft in Tribeca. And then I had a cup, I did what Pete young brokers do, I worked, I worked to open houses for senior brokers for clients. That was probably my second sale was a pretty good sale. Also, I think over a million dollars from somebody that I met at an at an open house. And then I definitely I worked at Corcoran at the time, and there was a place on the website that you could go in and say this is what I’m looking for. And I think that was my third sale. And that was probably a $350,000, co op. And it sort of I mean, and then there were a couple of associates, who I knew at my law firm who referred me to friends. And so sometimes it wasn’t the lawyers, but it was friends of lawyers. And honestly, it just, it went from there. And I was fortunate to have one or two listings early on. And that was really where I got buyers, it and in 2002 people buying a $400,000 apartment, often didn’t that didn’t we’re not working with brokers. And so there were a lot of direct people. And then it you know, I don’t remember entirely, but it just it did start to it starts to snowball. And I remember very early on in my career, a woman in my office was sort of giving this motivational talk and talk about it was sort of like a fence the family tree or like the anatomy of a transaction and more so of the referral network. And she talked about how she sold very inexpensive studio to this actor in New York. And then he introduced her to this person, and they introduced her to these two people, and how from this one like $200,000 Studio sale, she ended up doing like $15 million of business. So it’s really, it’s really acknowledging that and recognizing that there’s always an opportunity, but there’s also a good way to do that and a and sort of an obnoxious way to do that. And so I think it’s finding that middle ground and staying in front of people. Obviously, I’m a huge proponent, and it’s this is a little more do as I say not as I do, because I don’t always get around to it, but newsletters I think are probably the single best source of clients because they’re also free. You know, mailers are expensive, like running an ad in New York Magazine is really expensive. Newsletters are free and you control the content and you control the presentation and you know Up to this day, anytime we send out a newsletter, we get some response, usually some referral.
D.J. Paris 20:07 Yeah, I used to I did a talk once at a conference. That was something I can’t remember the exact title. But it was said, nobody wants to read your newsletter. But that’s not the point. And I talked about how whether or not people read the actual content of the newsletter, is is largely irrelevant, although it’s obviously good to have good content. And hopefully, some some of the people that you send it to might actually read some of the articles, but just this idea from a branding perspective of, hey, this is what I do. Here’s here’s, you know, a little bit of acknowledgement that I know what’s going on in the market. I put this together, I’m sending it out. And you know, it’s always good to stay, if not front of mind back of mine from for your clients. And you’re absolutely right, that consistency does in fact, work. I was thinking about this, like I, you know, I know you work with a lot of new, well, you work with developers, you work with a lot of new developments, I actually was just thinking, so I purchased in a new development a couple year and a half ago. And so I’ve been there a year and yeah, year and a half, a little bit more than a year and a half. And I have not received any communication from any other realtors. You know, usually you start getting postcards and things. And I’m, I understand that, on the statistical side I am people who purchased it on my building probably aren’t going to purchase for the next or sell for the next I don’t know, five years, you know, who knows seven years, whatever it is. So I get it. There’s a long term play here if you want to start introducing, but you know, not one, there’s 45,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area, not one postcard from anyone going, Hey, congrats on your new purchase. By the way, you know, I would love to just learn more about you, I want to keep you updated on you know what’s going on with your place. Again, tons of opportunity, right to like build relationships. And that’s what you do really, really well is is build relationships. You were talking about this how how you know, your friend, one, one transaction, you know, for one person can lead to $15 million in production over time. Yeah, that is clearly the way that you’ve done it. But I wanted to ask you because you said something I thought was very interesting. You said there’s an obnoxious way to sort of build those relationships. And then there’s a way that that is, you know more, you know, gentle and, and non invasive. And do you mind sharing a little bit about how you think about, you know, maybe asking for a referral or maybe you don’t ask maybe you demonstrate value in a different way. But how do you do it in a way that’s most comfortable for you? I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Lindsay Barton Barrett 24:05 I definitely am one of those people who is I have a hard time asking for things honestly. They’re probably friends of mine who might say that’s not true. But I you know, I don’t like to be pushy, and I don’t like to be salesy. I remember my mom was not happy when I left my job. And my dad was said to me, you know, you’re really you really don’t have a salesman’s personality. And you know, what I said to him is I don’t feel like I’m going into sales. I’m not chasing people down on the street and saying, Do you want to buy an apartment? I’m, I’m fulfilling the need that they already have. They’re, they’re choosing to at least explore the possibility and I’m working in an advisory capacity. And I view myself as being a professional and not a salesperson. So I think that goes across the board, whether it’s how you’re trying to sell a property, or how you’re trying to sell yourself as a broker is, by and large, I try to be as valuable as possible to my clients so that, of course, they’ll refer me. I certainly have sort of, I guess, the typical call to action to kind of things in my newsletter of, you know, if anybody, if you’re looking, if anybody’s considering a real estate purchase, if you need any advice, call us. But beyond that, we don’t really every once in a while, you know, if I am talking to somebody I know really well. I will say something explicitly along the lines of hey, you know, we always really appreciate referrals. And of course, when I, when I get one, I try very hard to call that person right away. And I think it’s important. And, you know, this is a lesson I’ve learned from other people, but I think it’s I, I’ve learned it for myself to a referral is not about the sale, it’s about the referral. And so you can’t wait until somebody buys and they might not, but you want to, you want to encourage people to refer your business. So even if they refer you a crappy client, you can even call and say I really appreciate the referral, just seeing no, like, that’s not really necessarily the type of business that I do. I can find somebody to refer them to. But if you’re ever talking to someone like this isn’t a great referral for
D.J. Paris 26:45 me. Isn’t isn’t that what attorneys do as well, because attorneys get these calls all the time, because people think, oh, attorneys just can do everything and every specialty. And so this is very much often what happens with attorneys. We’re like, oh, I don’t do that. But my buddy does. And you know what? And nobody says to the attorney who who isn’t able to service that client? Well, gosh, I don’t even know why I called you. You can’t handle that. No, the person goes, Hey, you know what, I’m a specialist in this, but my buddy does this, I’m going to send you over to him or her. And so it really shouldn’t work any differently with with realtors, I think you’re right. There may be this fear of like, oh, no, they’re not going to refer me anyone else because I wasn’t able to help this person. But I think as long as you’re providing value, like you said, just passing it off to somebody who does do that. That’s I don’t see any negative to that at all.
Lindsay Barton Barrett 27:34 Yeah, and that’s exactly it, you want people to recognize you as their go to for anything real estate. And so I think to that end, it’s also really important to have a great referral network yourself. And so if you’re always getting referrals, you know, if people are always calling you who say, Okay, well, I’m looking at Park Slope, but I’m also looking at Montclair, New Jersey, it’s important to have someone in Montclair, New Jersey. And so you know, if you’re, if you don’t do rentals, you need to have a really good rental broker, I say this, again, do as I say, not as I do, because I’ve, I’ve searched for that. And it’s always a challenge, because that markets also changing quickly. And so sometimes your best rental brokers end up deciding, they also don’t want to do rentals. But I think it’s important to have a great referral network. You know, there’s the obvious ones, you gotta have a great lawyer got a great mortgage broker or several of the each, but you also need great referral brokers in other markets that you might cross over with.
D.J. Paris 28:49 Yeah, and again, that’s how attorney attorneys are very good at this, right. I think attorneys are almost better at referrals than any other profession I’m aware of. I mean, they just see, I always ask attorneys, like how do you get business and they’re like, Well, I get a lot of referrals from these different channels. And it is, it seems like so much more of a mystery and how to do it as a realtor. So I imagine with that background, you probably just are naturally more understanding of I do this. And I have this very specific focus, because that’s where I can provide them the most amount of value and I need to have this other almost team in place for anything that’s outside of those, those really strict boundaries because I’m just not going to be as effective as you know, the person down the street who that’s what they do. So that makes that makes so much sense. We talk about that a lot on the show, but I think it can’t probably be talked about enough this idea of having this really strong net, you know, referral network, which hopefully also is two way that comes Yeah, exactly. To you. Yeah, I wanted to ask about so, you know, you being in New York during of course the pandemic and seeing, you know, a lot of people sort of leaving the city because of course So, you know, New York had had a lot of publicity around, you know, COVID. And then the effects that it had you guys were basically sort of the epicenter of the United States, you know, part of COVID, at least at the beginning, and you saw a lot of uncertainty around the city, it seems like that’s changed. And so it seems like people are, are returning more, more so to the city and also to places like Brooklyn. Well, Brooklyn’s always been super cool and awesome. And I imagine, it hasn’t always been but it certainly over the last 2030 years, it’s really changed. But was that was that? Were you concerned at all during that time that Oh, my business might radically shift based on you know, the sort of uncontrollable, you know, sort of things going on in the world?
Lindsay Barton Barrett 30:42 Not for long. I definitely had that moment of just absolute panic that made no sense. You know, I remember very distinctly walking along the reservoir upstate with my kids, because we spent much of COVID at a at our house upstate, like many New Yorkers did. Near Woodstock, and I remember a moment of panic of, what am I going to do. And then really, over the course of the next couple of weeks, I was really focused on trying to get the deals done, that were kind of hanging in the balance. But it also really highlighted to me that real estate, selling residential real estate is a, everyone will always need to buy and sell. You know, and there, I think Barbara Corcoran, at some point said, you know, it’s always a broker’s market, whether it’s a buyer’s market or a seller’s market, if you’re a good broker, you should be selling because things are selling. That being said, I, you know, I, there’s been a lot of talk about all of this, because the market has changed. And I was having a conversation with someone for some sort of pretty well known publication, and it will remain really interesting conversation. And the reality is what you do need for a market as buyers, and if you have no buyers, you have no market. And so that was certainly a different, you know, and the market self correct. So if you don’t have buyers, at some point, you’re going to drop the price low enough where you have buyers, but that was certainly a fear at some point. But I, I don’t know if I’m just a little bit deep down, even though I don’t seem like it necessarily a little bit of a Pollyanna, that I believe that things are gonna work out. But I also I’ve lived in New York for 27 years, 25 years, excuse me. And New York is unlike, you know, I mean, New York is unlike any city, as is Chicago as is, you know, all of these sort of world capitals are unique, and they’re desirable, you know, they have so much to offer. And I will also say that I had a very selfish moment of going, people are really going to want to live in townhouses now. And that was absolutely the case. So yeah, there were certainly concerns, there’s there are always concerns as things change dramatically, like we’re going through right now, frankly, you know, uncertainty is difficult in any market. But I knew even if people left people would come to take their places. And I mean, we’ve already seen people who left during Cova come back. So it, you know, so so no, I was not very worried for very long, I knew that there would be a lot of adaptations, and there was a lot of talk about selling, you know, houses via FaceTime. And this and that, and I didn’t have I didn’t think that was going to last long either. And I think that’s largely the case. I mean, we’ve started we’ve done a few deals, sight unseen. Not many, certainly people who’ve done like a first tour, FaceTime, but you know, it’s a big purchase. And it’s, it’s personal. And I just, I didn’t think that there was going to be much duration of people buying from videos and stuff.
D.J. Paris 34:31 Yeah, and that seems to have kind of gone away at this point. Although what’s nice is for people that are able to do that and willing to do that it’s just much more normalized now. So even though we’re back to being in person, hopefully, that will not change, Although who knows, but at least that that that has been normalized, you know, throughout the last several years. So you do have people that are willing more willing to explore virtual Little conversations. So it’s a nice option that isn’t bizarre or weird, or, you know, it’s just been normalized. So I suspect that’s, that’s been good for agents who do have some clients who maybe are like, You know what, let’s just just show up with the FaceTime and let’s let’s do it virtually. I had a question, I have two questions, because you work with a lot of developers. And so one of the it’s funny, whenever we do episodes, of course, most of the brokers we have on the show are and I say broker, again, synonymous here, and where I’m from with realtor. So if I say broker, not everyone in the country doesn’t always know what that means. We’ll just please excuse my language. Well, that will be realtor. But anyway, a lot of the a lot of the realtors we have on the show, our top producers, almost all of them are, and a lot of them work in the luxury market. And that’s for people who don’t work in the luxury market. You know, that’s oftentimes something they feel like they should aspire to, is to being a luxury broker. But also developers, that’s the other one that people get really excited about, because it’s seen as this. I’ve arrived, if developers are now choosing me to represent their, you know, their developments, and of course, yeah, there’s a certain truth to that. How did you start to get involved with developers? What was it that allowed you to win over their trust in their business?
Lindsay Barton Barrett 36:20 Um, admittedly, in part, I, I started a development company, with my ex husband, so my ex husband was an architect. And I was, you know, I was when we talked about it on our first date, it was very pathetic. Um, so he was an architect, and I was real estate lawyer. And we were both really interested in development. And, and we started a, a real estate development company and did a bunch of condo projects in the area of Brooklyn where we lived at the time. And that really helped me get my foot in the door. And, you know, I was much more in that world of other developers. And so I think people, other developers saw that I really understood and often there is a, there isn’t always an alignment of what the broker wants, and what the developer wants in terms of incentive structure. I mean, as a broker, you’re happy for them to spend, you know, no limit of money on advertising, because it’s going to help bring people in. And of course, yeah, you’re going to be able to sell things for higher prices, if you have more, more demand for the product, and all of those things, but it’s not necessarily one to one, and, but if you’re also invested in just the the ultimate success of the project, and the absolute success of the project, you’re gonna have a different perspective. And so I think that that certainly was important. You know?
D.J. Paris 38:09 Yeah, I just wanted to jump in for a second and say, like, what you just said, is actually quite profound. Because developers want people who understand what the pain points of a developer are, which of course, yes, getting getting the property sold. Yes, obviously, that’s why they’re hiring you. But for the agent to say, or to at least have the mindset of I don’t want, I’m not going to keep coming to you, Mister developer for more ad dollars, or I don’t want to keep investing myself as the agent into, you know, more than I think is reasonable. But understanding that, that it is a business and running it like a business and it goes beyond just you selling the property, having an understanding of what developers deal with since you’ve done that is obviously part of your your family history as well, I think gives you a tremendous advantage. When meeting with developers. You’re like, I grew up with this. Number one. Yeah, I know it. I’ve been on on all sides of it. And I’ve also run my own development company, which which again, it’s it’s funny, I, I hope that our audience is really inspired by that. Because anyone listening candidate can build their own development company as well. And if you don’t, if you’re if your husband isn’t an architect, which of course most most of our listeners don’t have, that in their immediate family go out and find an architect, there are millions of them who absolutely are probably waiting for somebody to partner up with. So it is it is something that, again, is a really smart way to sort of get involved with developers because then you get to say when you’re pitching to other developers, oh, I do this also, by the way, maybe on a smaller scale or maybe on a different a different you know, sector, but this is what I know what you want you deal with and I want to help you. And I imagine that’s a very powerful pitch.
Lindsay Barton Barrett 39:53 Yeah, I certainly think it is. But I also do, you know, I think that one thing, I also believe strongly about being an agent or being a broker or realtor, it’s a job. And so I think it’s, it’s important not to sort of look at it as something where you’re also going to be doing this and also going to be doing this. Like, I think, coming to developers, I think, you know, I think one of the best ways to sort of digest that is to make sure that you do understand that person’s business just like a, you know, when you have a residential client who’s looking for a new home, knowing that they have family overseas, who comes to us today, all the time, and they need a separate place for that person to stay that’s feels a little separate, and they’ve got space, and they’ve got their own little kitchen like that, if you don’t know that you’re going to show people around fit. And so I think, understanding what, how it works as the developer and the profit structure and knowing that if you only suggest the most expensive stager, they may feel like you don’t have their interests at heart, and you don’t even understand what their business is. And so I think it’s really important to communicate that you will protect them by only coming to them with things that you have evaluated yourself and say, okay, the, you know, the juice is worth the squeeze or whatever, like, we’re gonna spend $20,000 on this campaign, but I think ultimately, it’s going to translate into a 2% increase in sale prices, which is $200,000. So, you know, I think it’s acknowledging that that’s their money, and you’re not just going to spend that money because it’s gonna produce better materials, or, you know, so I think that’s the probably the most important part is just this understanding your client?
D.J. Paris 42:15 Yeah, I agree. Yes. And again, that’s probably also the skills you develop as an attorney, it’s probably incredibly helpful for how important it is to get a good sense of what the client wants and needs, so that you can continue working for them in a way that that is most effective for them. Question about sort of today’s market. So we know, of course, everyone listening to the show knows rates have changed, doubled, in a lot of cases, maybe even more than doubled at this point, seems to change almost daily. And I don’t know what it’s at today, but, but it certainly is gone up. So rates are double what they were at the lowest point, which I don’t think is maybe the best metric to measure against. But it’s what people know, because it was so prominently featured in news and social media, how rates were so low, and now people maybe feel oh, I missed out. Except, of course, what they maybe don’t always know is there were lots and lots of buyers and places prices were inflated, and maybe it’s not so different now, even though rates have changed, but, but there just may be a lot more sentiment out there that now’s not the time to make any big moves. So understanding that those are some hurdles that realtors are dealing with all over the country. How have you been dealing with that? How have you been educating your clients and just keeping your business going, despite the fact that there probably aren’t fewer buyers in the market at
Lindsay Barton Barrett 43:42 this point? I think that’s absolutely true. There definitely are fewer buyers and fewer real buyers because even if people I mean it’s, it’s really hard, even if people feel like real buyers, if you were looking a month ago, and then you went on vacation or something and came back and then you find something and then you get your pre approval updated. You know, I think we’re seeing that a lot we’re seeing more deals fall apart. And I think that’s probably part of it is that people are not internalizing or properly sort of analyzing what these rate changes mean. But I will say I think it’s really important to recognize that rates are fluid, and they go up but they are very likely to come down again. And so if you know i I’ve had this conversation with a few clients recently, many of whom said, you know, that’s true. I really hadn’t thought about it that way. And of course when rates are super low, you’re really excited Ain’t it because you can lock in this rate for a long time, and you know what your monthly outlays gonna be. But when rates are high, it’s important to remember, it doesn’t have to stay like that forever. And so, you know, real estate is a long term play almost no matter what. And when you’re buying a home, maybe life does change, and you end up selling it in three years. But, you know, I, for most of my clients, any clients who are not investors, you know, my, my recommendation to them is, you can’t really have any expectation of appreciation, unless you plan to stay in this home for at least probably five years, you never know. And you need to have flexibility on that. Because if the markets in the toilet five years, you want to be able to hang on to it for another two or or, you know, move up. But it’s a long term play. And because rates we have seen have changed so quickly, so dramatically. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And I’m not going to promise anybody that rates are gonna go back down to, you know, 3% for a 30 year fixed, but I can tell people with some degree of confidence that I certainly think they’ll go down, again, in a meaningful way over the course of the next two to three years. So I think it is an opportunity, I think that that will take some time, because sellers are having a hard time adjusting. Sure. So
D.J. Paris 46:35 I can’t get twice the listing price anymore,
Lindsay Barton Barrett 46:39 or I can’t get exactly the same price that they got down the street. And, and then, you know, we work in we work in different markets, we work across a lot of price points. And for New York, you know, I certainly recognize that. And it’s one thing we are seeing is the very high end, Brooklyn, in particular, turnkey townhouse market is stable. There aren’t really many rental alternatives, if you want a really nice townhouse, and Brooklyn Heights, there’s not one to rent. So you may still end up in the sale market. You know, there’s a lot of liquidity at that price point. And so we are really having a hard time getting a meeting of the minds at that price point. But things are staying pretty stable. You know, at lower price points, people are a little bit more understanding that interest rates have really made a big hit. And so you know, I think I’m sure everyone’s going through the same thing. It’s educating your sellers educating your buyers keeping buyers spirits elevated, that what they’re doing is good for the good for their themselves and their family long term.
D.J. Paris 47:59 I think it seems like so many people and it’s so because it oftentimes is a buyers you know, largest asset or one of their largest assets it becomes this idea that it this primary residence is an investment and I think the realtors could I’m curious to get your thoughts on this could really do their clients a favor by readjusting that expectation that number one yes. Okay, maybe technically it’s an investment but it’s you have to live somewhere right and so even if it does go up by you know, two times what you paid for it, odds are you’re not downsizing on your next home. That’s not usually the sort of human nature psychology piece of it is, it’s like well, I’m just gonna bank this extra 500 Grand i just made usually it’s like now we can upgrade to a higher price point property. Maybe once somebody hits retirement age that changes and they downsize and then yeah, they can bank some of that money. That’s not usually what most people do with their profit from their primary residence. At least that’s not been my experience with anybody I know. Maybe maybe the most savvy people would do that. But most of us you know, we don’t buy a 20 inch TV when we’re you know, a teenager and that’s all we can afford. And then when we’re 40 we go you know, let’s go back to a 20 inch TV right? It goes No I want the 65 inch or the 80 inch or whatever. We keep going bigger and bigger until we realize maybe things are too big but but the point is is is it’s my sister did this she her place almost doubled in value in the West Village. She was on Barrow which is like beyond amazing street you I’m sure you know it. And then you know fifth floor walk up no air conditioner, you know a little tiny unit. No amenities really as a co op and fifth floor walk up and it was like 475 square feet one bedroom that includes a one bedroom as just this little tiny nothing place but it was it was lovely but it was just tiny. And everything was miniature and stuff and and then she she she took that money and then But, you know, she goes, Well, now I can’t live in my neighborhood anymore. Because even though her she had made all this money, she had actually priced herself out of her actual street. And so she ended up moving to Queens with it with her fiance at the time, and it ended up working out for them. But, but again, people don’t usually go from a 475 square foot, you know, Co Op to, you know, maybe I’ll just stay at 475 square feet, right. So this idea that people see their primary home as an investment, I think can can be very problematic. And it’s, it’s, I think it’s just not an investment, maybe, unless it is, unless it is something that generates income, or that, you know, you’re going to move to an investment property at some point, but, but this idea that realtors can can really re educate their clients about this, this let’s not think of this as an investment as much as a lifestyle, and, and quality of life sort of situation. I think that would I think that would quell it also dating the rate on the lending side marrying the home, you know, that’s that expression that, that it’s sort of a cutesy expression that people say, but it’s a good expression, because I think it’s exactly right. I mean, rates do change, people refinance. And you know, we’re not in the double digits, right? It’s not the early, early ate late 70s, early 80s anymore, which that was a really difficult times, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to try to be a buyer’s agent when it’s, you know, 12% rates, but people were doing it then, too. So, anyway, I’ve gone on enough of a rant about that, but I really appreciate your thoughts about it. Because I think, you know, for anyone out there who’s going, Gosh, the buyers just aren’t into it. They feel like they’re getting ripped off, at this point, time to re educate yourself as the agent about how to have that conversation to say, You know what, even if you would have tried to buy a place two years ago, you would have, here’s what you probably would have paid over asking for what you’re looking for, I’m going to show you evidence that would have suggested that, you know, maybe it wasn’t such a great time for you. Or maybe it can still be a good time today. And we can refinance in a couple of years. If if Yeah. So anyway, I’m sorry, I will get off my soapbox, rant there. But But I want I want agents to not be so so disheartened during this time, and you have a billion dollar business that you’ve built. And that is beyond impressive. I want to ask sort of my last question, which is, so you talked about newsletters, we talked about client relationships, and how one can lead to one plus one, you know, can lead to dozens and dozens and dozens? What advice do you have for agents who want to further develop those those relationships, make those more intimate, make those more important, really demonstrate value so that in between sales, maybe those people again, you mentioned newsletters, keep your name in front of, but what else are you doing just so that the your clients don’t forget about you, or that they keep thinking about you when they’re talking to other other people who might need your services.
Lindsay Barton Barrett 52:58 I am not as good at that as I should be, quite honestly, and in many ways, because I’ve been fortunate in in building these relationships that largely feed themselves, I mean, and the New York market, it is a unique thing, I know that it has remained strong and times when others have not been I think this COVID experience was really unique in that it was one of the few times that we’ve seen a, you know, somebody selling in New York and buying somewhere else, and they don’t come out ahead and not necessarily in actual like dollars in your pocket. But in terms of the strength of the market, that you know that you’re getting top dollar in New York, and you know that you’re buying at a little bit of a discount wherever you may be going, and that really got flipped on its head. And that was a big adjustment. But it was also a really interesting illustration of what drives people and people were buying because they wanted to move. And so they were able to just say, Look, this is what’s right for me, this is what I want. And I’m gonna do it. And this is the price. This is the price that it is today. And so I think that it’s important for people to remember that that that and this touches on what you were saying it’s you’re doing this for yourself and for your future self and for your family. And, you know, you got to make the choice that’s right for you that is somewhat untethered from is Is this the right investment? And so I’m going to I’m going to go back one second, a little bit about that because I totally understand and agree with you that it is not exclusively an investment but I think another way to look at that and I’ve spoken to clients a number of times is it is a lifetime investment. And very rarely are people selling and then renting unless it’s sort of a temporary, either move for one reason or another, or renovation, or relocation, or whatever it may be, you know, a strategic decision, but people are generally staying in the market. So, you know, I, we get so many people who say I can’t lose money on this house, well, if you’re selling at a discount, whatever you’re buying, in all likelihood is also at that same discount, it’s a lifetime. And so in your, you know, lifetime portfolio of real estate holdings, you’re probably going to come out ahead of the stock market historically, that is what has happened. And so I think don’t like Don’t get so fixated on every one transaction, because that’s not what it is, it’s a lifetime of owning your home. And there are ways to leverage that if you have a rental unit, you can do a 1031 exchange, and you feel like genius, you know, there’s a lot of different ways to leverage real estate ownership. And so I think that’s important to focus on also, and frankly, like you still do get that primary residence interest deduction. So I think that’s something we should really be focusing on right now, too, because if you’re paying more, you’re getting a much larger deduction. So that’s something that’s my that’s my sort of callback to the last one.
D.J. Paris 56:34 No, I appreciate that. And I, I want to just wrap up, because you have been, this has been so valuable to our audience, I, I always like, you know, when I first started this show, all these years ago, it was like, oh, all of these top producers are going to have all of these very specific strategies and tips that the rest of us don’t know about. What I’ve learned after 400 episodes is that is rarely the case that there’s like this little secret magic formula that, you know, we’re going to unearth on the show and, and it hasn’t happened yet. But But maybe, maybe in the next 400 episodes, somebody will have that. But the reality of it is it isn’t much about that at all. And it’s more about consistency and discipline, and also just understanding how people think, who are really at the top of the mountain in as a realtor. And so I think you’ve given us today, you’ve given us some great strategies. But on top of that, just this idea of like, here’s how I think about things, here’s how I keep going. Because at the end of the day, sort of I think mindset and I can that word is I think really overused. And it sort of doesn’t even mean a whole lot anymore, this idea of just the beliefs and the strategies that somebody has that you know, like you were saying Barbara Corcoran saying there’s always there’s always buyers and sellers, there’s always a brokers market. It’s about making sure that that you can pivot and adjust to those changes. And I also want to mention that Lindsay is currently looking for one additional team member now this is a billion dollar team. So she doesn’t, of course, take any and all agents that reach out to her. And in fact, you’d have to probably be somebody that is really impressive. And she did not say that to me, I’m saying on her behalf. Because I know that she’s going to expect somebody who is who is really somebody dynamic and special. But if you are a realtor in the, you know, the New York market, specifically Brooklyn, Manhattan, you know, anywhere there that you think you could be a value and you can be a valued member of her team. Reach out to her, you know, the best way to do that just go to her website, you can submit some information. And also, by the way, for everyone else who’s listening, who’s a realtor, whether you’re in New York or elsewhere in the country, if you have clients that are moving to the city moving to Brooklyn moving to other places in the New York metro area, and you’re looking for a top producer to send them to well, obviously Lindsay is a great choice. She’s at an amazing firm. We’ve we’ve interviewed tons of people from Douglas Elliman over the years and they’re always just really best of the best obviously Douglas Elliman is doing something right in their hiring. But also if you are looking for a broker to refer to Lindsay would love the opportunity to connect with you. Let’s see what is the best way another agent can reach out to you?
Lindsay Barton Barrett 59:22 Website definitely and we have a team email, which we did by necessity I you know, over the years sort of figured out some of the things and the everyone responding to the same email at once and sometimes responding from my email and then I also respond gave rise to the LVB team email. So LVB team@women.com is probably the best way
D.J. Paris 59:51 and we’ll we’ll post a link to that in the show notes as well. So if you are an agent that wants to partner with Lindsay with referrals, or maybe you’re looking to would explore being on a team yourself and you live in that area, reach out to Lindsay to see if you might be a good fit for her. And by the way, she’s not always hiring like most real estate firms like our firm, we’re always hiring. So you can always reach out to me if you want to join our company in Chicago. But Lindsay is not that that kind of agent and doesn’t have that kind of team. It’s a very exclusive small team that she can really manage, you know, work with and make sure that, you know, all of her team members are having success. So definitely reach out to her if you think that would be a good fit. Lindsay, thank you so much for being on the show we had, I had such fun time with you, you really, really appreciate how busy you are. And really just again, walking away from a really, really sort of something that you would work so hard for not walked away entirely, but walked away from that being your profession and your source of income is is truly, you know, it’s really again, this courageous quality that you have, I think is amazing. And so I hope it’s inspiring to our our audience. And also we want to thank Lindsey for her time we know how busy she is. And so on behalf of the audience, we say thank you to you. And also on behalf of Lindsay and myself we want to thank the audience for for not only sticking around throughout the whole episode, but also hopefully finding value here and we just ask that you do one thing which is telephoned, think of one other realtor that needs to hear this, this conversation that we just had and send them a link to our websites keeping it real pod.com We’ll have that link to that in the show notes as well. But please tell other realtors about our show. It’s how we’ve grown over the last five years now and so we want to continue to grow and reach more and more realtors. So anyway, on behalf of everyone Lindsay thank you and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Lindsay. Thank you
How To Speak With First-Time Home Buyers In Today’s Market • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Nov 29, 2022
Welcome to the November episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses how to guide buyer agents in helping their clients. Joel also talks about how to convince first-time home buyers to buy in this market. Next, Joel Joel explains the 2-1 buydown. D.J. emphasizes the importance of partnering up with a lender to offer first-time home buyers webinars/seminars to help them in their journey. Last, Joel describes how to talk to sellers about rate buydown.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We all know that rates and inventory are challenging right now. But how do you still speak to first time homebuyers? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show
Welcome to another episode of keepin it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show. And today once again, is our monthly series learn with a lender with Joel Schaub from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction making you the agent look like a hero. Last year alone, Joel gave back almost $300,000 of his commission to buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all loan officers nationwide. Out of in fact, out of 400,000 loan officers Joel is ranked number 137. Again, out of 400,000 loan officers chosen in the top 200 agents in the entire country. Last year, he closed 619 different transactions, his highest ever this year already, even in a year, we know is a bit challenging. He’s already close to 286 transactions in all the way through the end of this quarter for 116 million. But more importantly than the numbers is Joel’s dedication to education. The way that he built his business is so simpatico to what we tried to do on this podcast, which is trying to educate people so that you can thrive in markets like now. So if you’re looking for a loan officer, or if you’re looking for a different loan officer to partner with, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best I’ve ever worked with. And and anyone I’ve ever sent to him says the exact same thing. But Joe can be reached by the way you can reach out to him by emailing him joel@radio.com J oel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049 Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel welcome. And once again,
Joel Schaub 3:35 DJ, thanks so much for having me on. And those numbers they, when I hear them from you. kind of always blows my mind. But coming on each and every single month. We really like to give back and we really like to share something if I’m an agent listening that can help us get one more transaction, maybe help a new buyer right now in this market, help a seller maybe calm them and talk them off a ledge because properties aren’t selling as fast are they?
D.J. Paris 4:06 Right? Yeah, it’s it seems to be that inventory. Still low properties aren’t selling as fast because of course, interest rates have gone up. And I think it’s important that we talk about this because I know there’s a lot of stress out there in the industry. Right now realtors are stressed loan officers are stressed. And we want to do what we can to alleviate some of the stress and just keep everyone going.
Joel Schaub 4:33 I was having a conversation with an agent that and I fully disagreed with and I think this is a great one to see how many of our listeners agree with this person, right? A little controversial, right? And they had a buyer DJ and they said well, I’m gonna wait until prices come down. And the agent fully agreed that there’s a crash coming. They’ve totally agreed that there was a major price drop happening with mortgage rates going up They were fully on board that we would see an across the board drop in prices. And I said, I have to stop you right there. I’m in the exact opposite camp. And I really believe there’s only two ways for prices and all of the markets to go down drastically, and one would be a lot more inventory. Right. Right. And I said, Well, let’s walk that line for a minute. How do we get a bunch of additional inventory? are sellers going to start selling in droves? When they already have rates that are locked in in the twos and threes? No. So that will be going out there? Are we going to have a lot of new home start, right with the supply chain issues and the cost of goods going up? Are we going to have so many additional back homes where the supply ends up being so high to drive values down? No, probably either of those are going to be there. Right? And then lastly, do we think there’s going to be a big wave of foreclosures? All these people that had their income double and triple checked by a mortgage guy like me, that had good downpayment? Are they somehow going to walk away from home that they put 510 or 20%? Down? Unlikely. So without the big supply, I don’t see values across the board going down. And I explained this, then, you know, we agreed to disagree. But I think in certain markets and in certain individual sellers, we will see price reduction, and we will see buyers getting deals and that’s what I’m really excited for for buyers that are entering this market that maybe haven’t bought before.
D.J. Paris 6:39 Yeah, and I think too, it’s really important that our listeners who are realtors who are in the industry, take a step outside of the industry from time to time and realize that especially for first time homebuyers, you know rates aren’t really as relevant to a first time homebuyer not meaning that they’re not important. Of course, they’re important, but they’re not at the top of usually the list of importance of how to make a decision about buying a property. Right. So we think about the psychology of figuring out, you know, making the transition from renting to buying. I know when I first when I was ready to purchase a property, my very first property I don’t know, Joel, if you can relate to this. He had the same experience. I was ready because I knew I had to save a bunch of money for a downpayment, whatever the rates were, they just were like, it wasn’t like, well, I didn’t, you know, and I think most people sort of work that way. They’re like they save up for years, or however long it takes them for, you know, a downpayment, that’s, you know, 20% or less, or whatever they can afford. And then it’s just Okay, we’re ready, let’s let’s figure it out. And whatever the rates are, you know, that month that, you know, that day is kind of where you’re at, because you’re ready when you’re ready, emotionally. And I just think, you know, it also 7% rates, which is what we’re seeing is, you know, a common common number these days. Is not the end of the world too, right? It doesn’t, it’s not double digits, we’re not, you know, oh my gosh, nobody can afford it. But I just think it’s important for people to think about like the first time homebuyer I know, I didn’t think about it at all. When I was buying my first home, I just went, Okay, I just talked to a lender. And that’s what the rate was, what the rate was.
Joel Schaub 8:24 If I’m an agent, I need to control the narrative. Because if you watch the TV and all you hear our rates are higher. That’s what got a lot of people into the market before when they were rates were low. When rates were so low, people that had no interest in ever buying said well, I better do it because rates are so low. They went in and they bought places 2030 $50,000 over DJ right. They were overspending on the properties. And now that there’s an opportunity for buyers to get a good deal they don’t want to buy change the narrative, right? You’ve heard me say this for years, I like buying my shirts on sale. Yeah, like buying shoes on sale. This is the opportunity for buyers to buy real estate on sale. If you’re an agent, and you can teach the buyers, there is an opportunity. And the fact that we don’t see a major reduction in prices on the horizon that scares people. Right? Why would I buy now? What happens if the value goes down? 20% I just don’t see that happening in major markets across the board.
D.J. Paris 9:27 Yeah, I was reading an article today by on life hacker which the I’ll try to post a link to it but it basically says what a 7% mortgage rate really means for your monthly payment. Now this isn’t an industry you know, publication. This is just a for anyone. Life hack. It’s a great website. By the way life hacker it’s great blog, I really encourage people to check it out. There’s lots of real great tips about how to just live your life more efficiently and effectively. But anyway, they were kind of going through the different you know, rate increases and you know, here’s what monthly payments look like. 3% and 7% 8%, etc. And the article itself is great, but the thing I was most interested in was the very first comment. And I want to just read it is by a woman named Meredith Dietz, just some sort of, you know, you know, person outside of the industry. And she wrote this comment, and I thought it was so perfect, because it’s exactly how I feel she goes, and I’m quoting her quote, I hope to encourage and again, this is not the author of this is just somebody who read the article and is responding to it. So I don’t know if Meredith Dietz is even a real person. But anyway, I’m going to quote her, I hope to encourage you young first time homebuyers, when we bought our first house in the 90s, the rate on our mortgage was eight and a quarter percent. But we were able just a few years later to refinance at about 5%. So even if you end up needing to borrow now at a higher rate, there’s a pretty good likelihood you could refinance at a lower rate down the road. Now, that is exactly what Joel has been saying forever, right. And this is a good thing to to hear from people outside of the industry, you’re not being fed this just from your loan officer, who of course, you know, wants to keep keep the deals coming in. That’s actually true. And it’s exactly what happened to me. When I when I bought my first place in 2005. I don’t remember what the rate was, for something, five, something, whatever it was, a couple years later, I refinanced and I got a lower rate. And then guess what happened two years later, I refinanced again, it was not as big of a deal, because you marry the rate, sorry, you date the rate, you marry the home. And I just thought that was such a perfect comment.
Joel Schaub 11:39 I like to take it one step further. Right. Now I like to marry the home and divorce the hell out of the rate. Okay. All right. All right. These are the highest rates and at the short term problem, which is inflation, right, we know the Fed can get it under control, we just don’t know when DJ, so we can divorce that rate, and it’s going to happen. Okay, I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do. Okay, right. So think of that. I don’t have it. But we know in the industry that the Fed isn’t planning on keeping rates this high. And when they actually say that they’re going to stop with the Fed cycle of increases the Treasury yield, they’re going to drop 100 to 200 basis points. And we literally should see these rates go from the seven, we’re not gonna get back down to the twos and threes, that was during the major problems that we had, because of COVID. But we really truly expect that the rates and the fours and fives, and that isn’t 10 years from now, that’s not seven years from now, literally sometime in the next two to three years will be rate that are considerably lower. And if you can get in now and buy a property, especially if you’re a renter, and you’re in one of these major market areas where you’re paying a lot of money in rent, which does not go down, buy a place now and be able to see the future where you can actually get a lower monthly payment because those rates will come down.
D.J. Paris 13:01 Yeah, to hold totally a 100%. Agree, I think this is something that we need to be very careful as real estate professionals to limit the amount of exposure we have to some of this media information about rates equal fear rates going up equals bad, we have to remember, the economy was in such despair and turmoil that the Fed had to lower rates to keep the economy going. We were at one of we were almost at Great Depression level with respect to you know, unemployment, and lots of lots of issues. Obviously, we all we all live through that. So that was an anomaly. That was a blip. That was we were seeing rates, you know, you know, historic lows, that is not the benchmark that is not what we should be measuring against, we should be measuring against, what is the average, you know, what what has been happening is real estate professionals. We need to look at these cycles and understand and have a story to tell right now. Homes are on sale. Right? As Joel said, I like to buy things on sale. The hardest part about being a financial adviser if anyone knows if anyone is a financial advisor listening or has a financial advisor, the hardest thing a financial advisor has to do is convince people to invest when stocks are undervalued, right? Like, that’s a tough thing. Because you’re like, Oh, this one thing that’s like, it’s undervalued. And it’s it doesn’t seem like a good investment. But it actually is that like Now’s not the time to buy the thing that’s, you know, up 100% in value, right? So it’s the same, same option. Same thing with you just have to overcome the psychology of and explain to people that it’s actually a really good time to get in. And then we are going to, as Joel said, divorced the rate in the future. And we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to bring it back down to a more manageable number. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episodes sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there. Follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Joel Schaub 16:15 In the meantime, there’s a lot of buyers that would like to get lower rates and they feel like they’ve missed out. So we’ve continued to see this reoccurrence of this mortgage option where we can temporarily buy down the rate DJ. Okay, how does that work? And it comes in a couple of different forms. But you’d have to be under a rock to not have heard about this to one buy down, right? Yeah, every realtor and mortgage person recently is talking about how can I get the rate lower during these next couple of years where we anticipate the rate staying high. And a two one buy down isn’t a new idea. It means that for the first year of the mortgage, the rate is 2% lower than the current market. In your number two, the rate is 1% lower than the current market. And then in years three through 30. It was whatever the rate that was locked in at safe and secure. And it’s not an alternative that somebody you can’t qualify with that rate. It’s a way to get the sellers to lower the total cost for a buyer. So let’s walk through this to one guy down. And I want to show the strategy on both sides. Because if you’re listening, and you’re taking notes, this is a really great way to get more buyers. And it’s also a great way to get your seller to sell without making another price cut. Okay. So a two one buy down. Right now, even though the market everybody is saying rates that are in the seven. It’s not that hard with a 20% downpayment. I had a client that locked in this morning at 6.75. We just shopped it around and got a good rate. But from there, we took a seller credit. And we drove the rate down to 4.75. And you’re number one, wow. 5.75 and year number two, and then going forward, they’ll have that 6.75 rate locked in for life. And we just asked the seller to give a 3% closing cost credit.
D.J. Paris 18:12 Interesting. Interesting. So how does that so how would an agent explore these two one buyer downs?
Joel Schaub 18:21 On the buyer side, it’s very easy whenever we’re submitting an offer, or if we ask for a seller credit up to 3%, it will more than cover the buyer down for the client. So whatever bank they’re working with, every mortgage banker should know how to do this by now. Okay, I was doing it back in 2008. I was on a big development here in the city of Chicago. And the developer was looking for ways to sell more properties, right compete with the buildings that were right next door. And that’s what they did. They said we will buy down your rate for the first two years. And so the seller gives the credit. So let’s go through a scenario so that we can put some pen to paper and understand exactly how to do it and what it saves. And why not just ask for a price reduction. Right. So if we were buying a home at $400,000, and the client got a 3% reduction in the price, their payments about $88 left per month. That’s nice. But if we drove the rate down for the first two years, in year number one, that client payment is $488. Lower in the first year. $250, lower in year number two, and then again, three through 30. It’s still at a low fixed rate. But by that time the hope that we can refinance that loan, right? Yeah. So let’s take a look at this. If I’m a buyer, do I want to save $88 For the next 30 years? Or do I want to front load all of that interest and drive the rate down? Do I want a lower rate? Of course I want a lower rate I’m Yeah, so if I just get that 3% credit from the seller, all I’m getting in terms of a price reduction, I’m saving $88 If it’s just coming off the price. But if I get that inform of a seller credit, the mortgage broker can do a two one buy down. And it’s just a temporary rate reduction for the first two years. And that literally saved them hundreds of dollars. Because we’re front loading the savings and the time that we needed the most DJ. That was That is
D.J. Paris 20:30 a really smart strategy. So to one by Downs is what we’re talking about with with the seller credit. And, wow, that you’re blowing my mind right now with that I actually, I have all these ideas of thoughts about how to how to start marketing that to our agents. But for our listeners, if they wanted to learn more of these creative strategies, and they want to partner with a lender who brings ideas like this to the table, which by the way, for everyone listening, this is what you should be pushing your partners to do. Right, right now, you should be pushing them to say how do I talk to buyers? How do I talk to sellers, Joel just gave you a great option for people that are struggling right now with the high interest rates, you know, talking about, you know, actually has given many different options over the course of the episodes he’s done with us. But this is a great opportunity to reevaluate your relationships you have with specifically with loan officers, there’s a lot of loan officers out there, there aren’t a lot of loan officers who are going to consistently bring ideas like this to the table. But Joel, I also know that you are partnering with a lot of realtors right now and helping them build their business even through these stressful times. So if anyone out there is thinking about reevaluating, seeing what other loan officers offer, what’s the best way that they should reach out to you?
Joel Schaub 21:55 Well, the last time I announced this, I was actually overwhelmed by the number of emails that I got wanting to be added to the marketing list. So I have a weekly newsletter that breaks this down into plain English, and helps agents actually have some digestible talking point. So that you don’t need to know everything dammit, you just need to know enough where you can educate buyers and educate your sellers without getting into all of the deep jargon, right? Yeah, so the last time I did it, I think I had about 200 replies that was absolutely my inbox was full. And so yeah, you can email me and get added to the weekly newsletter. It’s Joel Jo e LL, AP rate.com. And that’s my Guaranteed Rate email address where I will reply, and I’ll add you to the weekly newsletters so that you can get the tip than the trick. And especially if you’re a newer agent, you need some good talking point. And you need to work with somebody in your local market to it’s not just me find a mortgage professional that wants to give to you, wants to meet with you wants to really spend money on you. Okay, there are a lot of RESPA compliant way that a mortgage professional can help a realtor. And that’s how all my relationships are built and finding ways to give back. Okay, if you do have a buyer that you need help with, you can also email me and that same email and say, Send me your lender in production template. And I’ll be happy to work with the buyer, get them pre approved, and then give back part of my commission which is $1,500 to the buyer. It makes you look good. And then we can work together on some transactions for sure.
D.J. Paris 23:39 You know, I think that’s a great idea. I hope everyone reaches out to you and joins your mailing list on your weekly mailing list because they’re going to get these ideas like the one you shared today with the two one buydown. I also just want to throw a last minute idea on there and this is something that Joel and his team can help with. And you know, other loan officers can as well if you if you’re not able to work with Joel, but this is a great time right now to start doing. You know, first time homebuyer webinars, seminars. This is these are guys, these are the people that don’t care about rates. If there’s anyone out there that doesn’t, it’s not that they don’t care about rates. They don’t care as much about rates as the person who’s buying their second, third, fourth home. Right? These are people that I’ve saved, they’re so excited. They need guidance. You can partner with someone like Joel to help you put these together. I know so many people we’ve interviewed on this show have built entire careers as Realtors for just hosting. You know I want to buy my first condo or I want to buy a five first property. You can start doing that on social media and other places and partnering up with a loan officer like Joel is a great idea. Joel you do a ton of these.
Joel Schaub 24:52 And we’re doing them via zoom. We’re doing them in person. It’s a really great way especially when you say they don’t care about rate I’d rephrase it in This way is that yeah, yeah, but they’re not dependent on it. If I’m paying your rent, I’m paying 100% of that rent in the form of interest. Right? Right, all of it is out the window, where the rate of mortgages is 7%, that’s a heck of a lot lower than 100% going out the window. So we can educate and teach. And we want to buy something when rates are higher, simply because we have the ability to refinance it down the road. And there’s a lot less competition to go buy a home right now and over the next 12 to 24 months, then we had the competition, win rate threat two or 3%, you couldn’t even get your foot in the door. So now there’s an opportunity to slow down, teach, and help. And the more people you can teach, and the more people you can help, the bigger your name gets, and the more you spread. And the way that you do this would be seminars, and teaching and education. There’s a lot of ways that we can partner together on those scenarios.
D.J. Paris 26:01 No question and Joe, you’ve been doing this since 2003. Teach help. And wait, right? Teach help, wait, meaning just can’t teach help, repeat, teach, help repeat.
Joel Schaub 26:12 And I need that on a t shirt. I love that word.
D.J. Paris 26:17 You know, it’s I was just I was talking. I was I was telling Joel this offline. I was out with a mutual friend of Joel and I’s the recently and and we were talking about Joel. Joel wasn’t there it was my friend and talking behind her say, right, yeah, behind your back. And so we were saying, you know, it’s so rare to find somebody who’s in a sales capacity, who has a sales job, who actually you don’t think of as a sales person, somebody who is legitimately all about training, education, and being just a good human being giving, giving. And we were talking about that. And we’re like, isn’t it funny that Joel is technically in sales, because you that’s just not what you think of you think of the guy who is constantly giving his time on this podcast, constantly giving to various organizations, various charities, various different things, organizations that that he believes in. And I just think that is that is really been the secret to yours. I mean, obviously, you’re incredibly skilled. And I don’t want to take anything away from your your business acumen as well. But just being a good human being. And giving has really been the secret to your success. I don’t want to speak for you. But that’s about what Mike and I came up with.
Joel Schaub 27:38 I’m terrible at sales. I’m better just being friends with people. Literally. I like making people laugh. I like educating. I like doing that. I remember I couldn’t even I got fired literally from Circuit City. I couldn’t tell. I just the people were like, should I buy this? Like, I wouldn’t buy that? No. And so it didn’t come naturally to me. But what does come naturally is the way that most agents that are highly successful, have grown their business, which is just by the more people you can touch, the more people that you can surround yourself and give back to it that whole givers gain mentality that if I’m listening to this podcast right now, I’m thinking of the five or 10 people that I want to give back to the people that maybe this year, lost out on a home they couldn’t buy when rates were low, because every time they put in an offer, somebody was coming in with cash. Or maybe every time they put in an offer, somebody had a bigger downpayment. And so now these really great couples, these families and individuals that had a low downpayment, that couldn’t compete, they can compete now, let’s go out and help those people. And the more people you help right now and putting your plan together for 2023 is going to really dictate how the next year goes. And it’s all about staying positive, controlling the narrative. And knowing that when rates are this high, there’s an opportunity for buyers. Okay, so one thing though, we got sidetracked, we talked about the two one buy down. And before we go, I got to talk about how that’s helped sellers. Oh, I’m
D.J. Paris 29:12 sorry, you’re right, to talk about sellers.
Joel Schaub 29:15 While you were telling me the story about talking behind my back and I had wanted to hear this DJ, but on the buyer side, it makes sense. Okay, so we have a rate by down for the time in which we think rates are going to be high. Okay, so how does this helps sellers. It really helps them because if a buyer comes in, and they only want a 3% credit, we’d be happy to sell the home at 97% of list today. I can already hear the agents on this nodding their head. Wouldn’t you be happy to get a full price offer? Well, 3% credit back. Oh, yeah. It’s not that the buyers needed it. So it’s a lot different than in the past when we’re submitting an offer and feeling like oh, this The buyer need the credit that close, maybe they’re not qualified. That’s not the story anymore. They’re working with true mortgage professionals that are talking to them about the to one buy down rate program, when they submit an offer, it’s just another added benefit that if you as the seller don’t take, they’re gonna go to the next listing, right. So instead of doing a price reduction, let’s work on seeing if we can put it right into the agent remarks, seller to pay for rate by down for buyer, right. And you’re seeing it in the MLS Wow, a lot lately. And so now, that idea, a lot of agents don’t know they might be hearing this for the first time. And if you see that, aren’t you going to be interested in to buyers? Yeah, what is the rate by down? Okay, so the average rate by down does cost two to 3% of the loan amount. And that’s the reason why we usually do this blanket 3%. Seller credit, okay, talk to your loan officer about the specific details, because I could go into full two hours here about how it helps the seller, and how it helps the buyer. But the average cost is based on the loan amount. So there isn’t a specific formula that I can do here that says, if it’s a $400,000 house, a cost EQ, it’s all about how much the client is putting down and what the loan amount is. But on average, it’s between two to 3% of the loan amount. And so the same thing that I’ve done, and we’ve done literally dozens of these in the last quarter, is get a seller credit for 3% trust the mortgage professional and ask questions so that you’re making sure that you’re taking care of
D.J. Paris 31:33 wow, I am completely blown away by that, that as a marketing guy, that is a brilliant strategy to promote listings. I have not seen that or or heard that. And I am so glad that you’re like what we didn’t talk about, well, how it benefits the seller. This is a this is a great strategy, guys. Obviously, benefits buyers, and it benefits sellers as well. Wow, amazing. I love that. So this is something you can put in the agent remarks. You can you can mention it, and it’ll help the homes hopefully, get a few more eyeballs and, and feet walking through the properties. I love that Joel great as always perfect way to end the show. I know now how I’m going to introduce the show, I’m going to say if you don’t about to one bite down, you got to you got to stay till the end. So when I go back and produce this episode, it’s gonna really we’re gonna make that pop, because that is really, really important. But for everyone out there who isn’t already working with Joel, Joel, we encourage you to get on his mailing list, email him joel@rate.com. Joel, also, if anyone ever wants to partner with you or work with you, what’s the best way they should reach out?
Joel Schaub 32:40 Yeah, it’s actually crazy the number of people that I’ve talked to in the last year from here and so people say I can’t believe you’re answering the phone. And I do. Don’t give out my direct line like I always do, which is 773-744-1968. You can ask for Joel because I answer and it’ll be me on the other end. And we can talk strategy there. If you do get my voicemail. Just leave me a message and I’ll call back and go through some of the things that you’re dealing with right now. And it’s all about trying to find ways that I can help use my knowledge to help you grow. Maybe get one more deal. Get one more buyer. Help one more seller.
D.J. Paris 33:19 Awesome. Well, he’s reached out to Joel He’s He’s great. He and the entire Guaranteed Rate team is incredible. All right, guys, we will see you on the next episode. Thank you to Joel on behalf of all of our audience, please tell a friend about the podcast. We’re we just crossed over 2 million downloads. We’re very proud of that. And but we need your help. So tell another realtor in your office. Everyone’s stressed right now everyone’s struggling. This is the episode they need to hear about. Send them a link to the episode keeping it real pod.com Or anywhere podcasts are served. Just tell your neighbor tell somebody who you know who needs help. Thanks, guys. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Joel.
Don’t Make These Marketing Mistakes! • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Nov 22, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses the topic he talked about in the NAR Conference in Orlando. Chris talks about marketing strategies that are still taught and used but don’t work on today’s market. Next, Chris and D.J discuss the importance of developing niches that bring you opportunities for success. Chris emphasizes the value of the time aspect of the transaction for your client especially in an unpredictable market. Last, Chris and D.J. discuss how to create a specific niche for yourself to work on and how to create a marketing strategy specific to that niche.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What are some marketing strategies that you should absolutely avoid in 2023? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Harris, I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the closed.com. And this is a partnership between keeping it real in the clothes and let me tell you more about the clothes. Now the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents, teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. Now they cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies. From the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level, please visit the clothes.com. Again, that’s the clothes th e clsc.com. And check out some of their articles. Also at the very top of of all their pages, you can subscribe to their newsletter. I’m a huge believer in that. Because if you’re like me, there’s lots of websites that you go I should be visiting that more often, but we just don’t. So if you subscribe to their newsletter, you’ll get emailed every time they produce a long form. Article, which is all the time they have such great content with us, as always is crystallin Sal, he’s a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing, lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. And Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you,
Chris Linsell 3:06 DJ, glad to have you I never get I never get tired of listening to your introduction about the clothes and about all the stuff that I’m working on. It’s genuinely a pleasure to be here. So glad that clothes can continue to partner with you guys and ready for a good time. Oh, today
D.J. Paris 3:21 it is and and we should say that by the time this episode will be released, you will have already spoken at the National Association of Realtors Conference. So let me be the first to congratulate you on your successful conversation. Which hasn’t actually happened yet. But I’m sure by the time this this is this has been released, it will have been a success. I was at your speech last year and San Diego and I thought it was the best session I went to because you were willing to take a stand and make some bold predictions. And just out of curiosity by again by the time everyone will heard this. It’s already happened. But what was your topic that you spoke about at NARA for this year?
Chris Linsell 4:00 Yeah, absolutely. So I actually am doing two sessions at NAR this year. The first one is on five missed expectations of our consumers specific to the way that technology plays a role in our in our industry. So what are consumers expect to expect from real estate professionals that we miss on a regular basis and we lose business as a result. So lots lots of chat about there. The other session that I will be slash have already delivered is five, five listing secrets from the top producers that I’ve worked with from across the country. And this ranges from everything from lead generation to listing presentations to marketing to closing and after transaction relationships. It is not an accident that the leaders in our space are consistently the same people every single year it’s because they’ve got some stuff that You’re out. And I’m sharing five big secrets about this. But actually, I want to say, you will still if you are listening to this and you are in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania, you can get a chance to hear some of this stuff. If you didn’t catch me at night, because I’m going to be at triple play in Atlantic City in December talking about a lot of the same stuff there. With some New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania specific details added. So if you’re in that tri state, come Come check me out at triple play. Well, we can rehash the conversation and get into some more together.
D.J. Paris 5:33 You guys, you know, what you did on the close? Is a and maybe you do have this and I missed it, but you need to have like a calendar or some sort of events, so that all the readers you know, will know about your upcoming speeches? If it isn’t there. Maybe. Maybe you guys could add that because you do speak a lot. And also to na NAR, NAR, I always say it the wrong way. So however it’s supposed to be I used to say NAR and then people that NAR would be like it’s really NAR. So anyway, I don’t know if it matters. But regardless of how you pronounce it, I are those sessions do we know if those sessions are also going to be recorded and available for purchase or for anyone, obviously, for attendees, I suspect they’ll will already had access, but I didn’t know if he could like buy them. So I don’t know if you know,
Chris Linsell 6:20 the recordings of the sessions will be recorded, they will be available on the NAR Conference and Expo website. For members of NAR I want to say it’s free for members of NAR, but it might just be free for attendees and super duper cheap for members that didn’t attend. So if you just can’t get enough crystal and Sal, you can, you can head to the NAR website and just mainline me right into your bloodstream there.
D.J. Paris 6:49 Oh, it’s funny, um, I don’t want to associate you with, with with addictive, destructive drugs. But getting addicted to your content is actually a good idea. So if you’re going to get addicted to anything, Chris’s content is right up there at the very best for real estate marketing, and just really just business and team planning. So I really think what they offer on the close is an actual perspective, an actual point of view. You know, I think realtors are often you know, because of their wanting to grow their business and be as accessible to so many people, there’s this idea of neutrality, that I want to be sort of in the middle, I don’t want to offend or, you know, create any division between myself and the customer. But I love that the close is willing to take a stand, but not just an uninformed opinion. They actually you guys do a ton of research and you arrive at a conclusion. And I often agree with pretty much all of all the conclusions I read on the close. So whether you see Chris live or you you’re able just to read some of the content he provides the clothes.com is really impressive, because you won’t just get a list of like, here’s five ways to spruce up your next open house, it’s going to be here’s what we’ve studied about open houses. And here’s what we know works. And here are some actual tidbits you’re not going to get anywhere else. So I love that the close is my favorite website to read about anything marketing related or business building. So anyway, but we’re not here to talk about how great the website is, because I could do that. I could do that all this all this entire time. But I’m excited to chat with you today. We were talking just before we started about what were we going to chat about today. And I think the topics a very good one. So why don’t you lead us off?
Chris Linsell 8:38 Yeah, so there’s, you know, there’s some shifts that are happening in the real estate market right now. We all know this. We can see it in our local market, we can definitely read about it in in, you know, big national publications, like, you know, the national news and the clothes and Inman, everybody is covering these shifts in the market. And I think the best way to kind of think about this is put yourself as you’re listening to this, put yourself in the shoes of the agent, you were in November 2021. Or maybe let’s go with Memorial Day 2021. Where we were seeing photos in the New York Times of people lined up around the block to get waiting to get into open houses. And we were seeing banks advertised on their website, mortgage interest rates. That would be you could you could basically fit for of inside the current mortgage rates. We were seeing opportunities for buyers and sellers that felt like they were on a different planet than the markets as we’re taping this right now sec. Can we can November 2022. So I want you to think about your business then, and your strategies for success. And I want you to think about your business now. And what I want, what I’m hoping we can chat about a little bit today is how the shift between markets is a heck of a lot bigger than the shift of between strategies. For most agents, most agents, they know the market has changed. They know their consumers needs have changed, they know their opportunities have changed. But have they changed their strategies? Almost, some of them not at all. And most of us hardly at all. And this is a problem. We’re gonna get bit by this pretty soon.
D.J. Paris 10:45 Can we talk about the strategies that are the tried and true older strategies that are adopted by agents who haven’t yet fully adapted to, to their current to the current market conditions and the needs of the of the agents, or sorry, the needs of the customers?
Chris Linsell 11:05 So that said, I say that one more time. So the tried and true strategy? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 11:09 so so maybe we should just define what are some traditional marketing strategies that may or may not make sense today, but are still being taught and taught and touted? You know, throughout the industry?
Chris Linsell 11:20 Absolutely. Absolutely. So I’m just going to use a really basic example. So we can all kind of get our heads around this real estate postcards. There is a ton of content on the internet, the close has some of it, actually, that talks about how to effectively use direct mail and postcards to generate leads. And if you think back to Memorial Day, 2021. If you sold a house in a neighborhood, you could literally just put on a postcard, I sold this house, and this mail it to 500 homes nearby, and you’d get calls because people like oh, wow, okay, this sold for six times more than I thought it would I own a house here, maybe I should sell my house. Sure, you couldn’t spit out you couldn’t walk outside and spit on the sidewalk without accidentally hitting the shoe of somebody else who wanted to buy a house at that point. That is not the case any longer. If you go out and spam blast the 500 closest homes to the latest transaction in a neighborhood. Not only are you taking a you know putting a burn barrel in the front yard and just lighting the money on fire that it cost to send those postcards, you are developing a negative industry reputation as somebody who is not in touch with the current climate and the needs of buyers and sellers. I would say a year and a half ago, we would think about our lead generation as an umbrella and upside down umbrella just turn the umbrella upside down, leads are going to fall into it. We are not in an upside down umbrella of economy and climate any longer. We are now in a samurai sword climate where you need to have Swift, deliberate thoughtful strokes in order to be effective. And you’re only going to hit a small chunk of what you’re swinging at at a time. But it’s going to be effective if you can be thoughtful around it. So in the in the example of postcards, we’re talking about adjusting from this spam blast this what I call evidence of action or evidence of activity and shifting it towards evidence of expertise. You want to show people yes, this house sold and it’s sold in part because you are a specific expert in a particular thing that got this transaction across the finish line. And the people who you are targeting with your marketing would also benefit from that specific expertise. Shifting from a an evidence of action to an evidence of expertise is a tough thing to do. But once you do it, it’s incredibly effective.
D.J. Paris 14:02 Just to make sure this is really clear evidence of action would be based around an accomplishment, right? So in the example of hey, I sold your neighbor’s home that doesn’t have action, or hey, I’m a top producer evidence of action. Well, I guess that could be both right. That could be both expertise. And so yeah, right. We’re not necessarily talking in absolutes, but this idea of I accomplished x, therefore I would be a good realtor for you Mr. or Mrs. Prospect.
Chris Linsell 14:32 That’s exactly right. Yeah, think about I mean evidence of action. The simplest form of evidence of action is your name on the right or outside the sign that’s in the front yard. That now is still that still is true. It’s evidence of action. But think about the message it sends when that sign and that name on that name writer sit in the front yard for six months instead of Six days now, yeah, it is a counter example to your evidence of expertise. The longer that sits there, the longer people are like, Oh, John Doe doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Because this, he doesn’t know how to sell real estate because this house is just sitting right now. Right. So to shift to an evidence of expertise, let’s say that same house, that you’re going to blasts that spam blast that postcard, about the postcard now reads this particular house, you know, we sold this house, and it happened to have a wood Foundation, which is not uncommon for homes in the Midwest that were built in the late late 80s, early 90s. This home happens to have a wood foundation. Wood foundations are perfectly safe and great, actually, for places that get snow. However, property inspectors don’t always like wood foundations, and they can give some tough reports on this sort of thing. I happen to have the expertise to be able to navigate the property inspector, the appraiser, the buyer and the seller, and we got the job done. And if you’ve got a wood foundation, I can get the job done for you, too. This is evidence of expertise. And of course, all of that would be difficult to put on a postcard, specifically, but what we’re talking about here is changing your strategy from that upside down umbrella, to a samurai sword. So you are can you can cut and say this is where I’m effective. This is where I can create value. This is where we can work together. That’s what’s going to be necessary for success in the next iteration of the real estate market.
D.J. Paris 16:41 So let’s talk about how to actually do this. So what we’re really talking about is hyper segmenting your prospect list by expired their needs. And or if you don’t have a prospect list, identifying a prospect list based on need, right? So are we’re talking about going after specific audiences that have similar needs, as opposed to just throwing everything out there. And whoever responds responds, we’re gonna go target and find people who specifically want X, Y, or Z. I’m going to demonstrate my my expertise of x, y and z. So I just want to make sure I’m understanding that correct.
Chris Linsell 17:22 Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, the real challenge here is fighting this urge to be everything to everyone. Right? Like, it is difficult for a lot of real estate professionals to effectively niche down because they don’t want to be seen as the one realtor who does the one thing. Well, the thing that we often forget about niching down is that it’s not a mutually exclusive act, you can have lots of niches. In fact, you should have lots of niches, you should be an expert in a handful of things. If you are an expert in a handful of things, you have lots of opportunity for success. Ultimately, I tried to tell agents that I coach, when they’re talking about transitioning their market into what I would consider to be this. It’s just a tighter real estate market, we’re going to see less demand higher interest rates, fewer transactions when we’re transitioning into these tighter markets, we ultimately have to show both our buyers and our sellers that their success is possible, relevant to what we can provide them that it is not just a matter of throwing something on Zillow and waiting for 20 offers to roll in. Success is still a path and we can get you there. This is really a chance to demonstrate your specific expertise value, and agents, even those who are still developing those who are brand new to the to the real estate field, they can still have they still have expertise value. Nobody else has access to the same MLS level data that you do. Certainly people can search properties on Zillow, but they don’t have the back end that you do. They don’t have the connections that you do, they don’t have the opportunity to network with their colleagues the way that you do. And so that right now is the time to start demonstrating that value of expert of expertise to your clients. And the faster you can do it, the more out ahead of your competition you can get, the more transactions you’re going to be capturing in the end of 2022 and the start at 2023.
D.J. Paris 19:37 Can I give you my favorite example of this and it actually comes from years ago so I my the home I lived at just prior to where I live now was a high rise in River North here in Chicago. And only well there were plenty of realtors that would send mailers that were more of the generic type flyers or brochures or postcards kind of thing. And when they would show up and are our mailbox once a month random agents, there was one agent who, every month, we got a eight and a half by 11, front and back, you know, postcard essentially, but it’s, you know, much bigger. And it in it, it basically said, I’m so and so I have sold more condos in this building than any other realtor and he said it in a slightly less direct way. But that was what he said on on the front. Also on the front. He goes here, by the way, are all the condos that have sold in the building in the last month, which was really smart, because you could see what two bedrooms were selling for and one bedrooms, etc. And then on the back, it had a list of every single time he had sold a property in the building, it had a list of all of his accomplishments. And I thought, well, if I was not in the business, and I was looking to sell my property, I was a renter at the time. So it didn’t apply to me. I said, I think I would go with this guy who seems to really know the building, he’s a total expert, or at least he has projected some sort of expertise. I don’t know if he’s actually an expert in the building. But if he’s being honest about his, his marketing, he’s sold more properties within the building, that’s usually a good sign in my mind as a consumer. So anyway, that was my favorite thing. And I’ve yet to really see anyone else ever do that. And again, not now, for anyone listening, they might think, well, I don’t I’m not the biggest, you know, seller of a particular neighborhood or a building like that. So not everyone’s going to be able to do that you have to earn your way there. But he wouldn’t have even had to say that he was the guy who sold the most property in the building. He just happened to be that guy. But he could have also some anybody could have sent everything else that was included all the prices of the places that just sold, you know, and like that’s, that’s demonstrating value. It’s demonstrating, hey, I’m not just blanketing this building, saying, Hey, we’re doing I’m a realtor. Oh, by the way, here’s information that you person who lives in, you know, apartment 1507 Are you kind of 15 or seven cares about? So that’s to me a great example.
Chris Linsell 21:58 Yeah, I totally agree. By the way. Now, we all know that DJ lived in a condo 1507. So what you know, it’s interesting, one thing I want to call out to as a as a power up to agents who are seeking to put this strategy into place is, wherever possible, highlight your ability to not just save your clients time, or excuse me tied to spoil, but not just save your clients money, but save your clients time, the time aspect of a transaction, especially in an unpredictable market is extraordinarily valuable. So your your example of the of the realtor who is consistently sending you marketing about the activity in the building. I think that that could even be taken to the next level to say something along the lines of I’ve done this now 57 times in this building, I know exactly the steps, we are not going to lose any opportunity, we’re not going to lose any time trying to figure out what we do next. Because I know exactly what needs to happen. As a consumer personally, I will go with somebody who is more expensive, if I am very confident that they not only know the steps, but they know the timeline. And they can accurately forecast that, for me, that is critical, especially for folks who have a little bit higher net worth, they can afford to spend more they are not penny pinching specific, like half a percentage point on the commission. But they only have a finite amount of time in their life to dedicate to this sort of thing. Anybody who can demonstrate that they are the best use of their time that they win the listing just about every time especially for those folks who are pushing into the you know, million dollar plus range for property.
D.J. Paris 23:47 I just talked to somebody who just got their license yesterday. And she I said, Oh, what what career you coming from? Because she was like, I’m switching careers and or she was like, I’m gonna stay with my existing career just just for a while before I go full time into real estate. I said, Oh, what are you doing? And she goes, Oh, I work it with surgeons, I work. She wasn’t a nurse, some sort of admin person for surgeons, and she’s been doing that for like 20 years. So she goes, I said, Wow, that’s kind of interesting and hyper specific. And she said, Yeah, I’m only going to work, I’m going to try my best to only work with surgeons. And I said, Oh, I said, Well, that makes sense. And she goes, I totally understand how they think I know what they I know approximately what they earn. I know, you know, she just has all this data about working with surgeons because that’s what she’s done. She goes I want to be the surgeon person. And I’m like that is a brilliant strategy. Because it is hyper specific. You understand the needs of that market, and you have access to that market.
Chris Linsell 24:45 100% I am it’s it’s a great example that you just use there. I have an agent who I’m friends with in my local market, who has signed an exclusivity agreement with the A recruiter for the local hospital system in northern Michigan. This person only takes clients from the recruiter, the recruiters office, she signed this agreement said I’m not going to work with anyone else I will turn away business I will only work with with the buyers and sellers that you send me. You have to send me your buyers and sellers. But I will only work with these people. The thing that this at first, a lot of people thought she was absolutely crazy for doing this because it’s like, you know, people want to work with you, you’re gonna send them away. She said, I am demonstrating expertise in a specific niche. I’m working with people who need to buy and sell they typically have a timeline, they typically have specific things that they’re looking for, like distance to the hospital distance to the to the physical therapy hospital or wherever they’re going. And they typically have a definable range of properties that they’re interested in. I become the expert in this space. She said, Honestly, the the fact that these folks are typically buying homes that are on the upper echelon of value, this is secondary to me, it is that is a distant second to the consistent expertise that I get to establish in a particular niche.
D.J. Paris 26:21 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, and there’s just a lot of social proof with that to saying oh, by the way, this is exclusively what I do. I’m basically, you know, a recruiter who only recruits you know, surgeons or whatever, whatever it might be so, so I think if anyone listening is wondering, well, I don’t have that I don’t know what that might be. For me, I have a suggestion, talk to all of your clients that you have worked with in the past, and maybe think about, you know, where there were their clients that you really enjoyed, you know what they did professionally, or you were really excited about, you know, what, maybe they had a hobby or an interest or a neighborhood they lived in or something that was unique to them, that maybe other people might have a shared interest or, or, you know, category of how they live their life that fits in the same category. Because if you if you are somebody that likes working with doctors, now’s the time to go start talking to doctors and saying, Hey, my I, I’m trying to make a shift, I want to work with more people like you or more teachers or more firefighters or whatever, it doesn’t have to be profession, whatever it might be, but I need to really understand your market better, you could spend the next year interviewing as many of those people and you will know, you’ll have a pretty good sense of whatever shared characteristics they have. And then you could create marketing pieces specific to that, that that hyper dialed in, sort of need
Chris Linsell 29:05 absolutely 100%. The the long the short of it is I would kind of put a bow on this conversation. The agents who are going to find the most success and are most likely to continue to be scaling their business after 2023 are the agents who can pivot away from this kind of, like operating like an opportunity vacuum cleaner, because it used to be that we saw so many opportunities in every single place. That I mean, the reality is DJ that the fact that the fact that the market conditions are changing. It doesn’t affect the fact that people still need places to live. We still need to buy and sell people are still going to get new jobs and lose their existing jobs. They’re going to have kids they’re going to get divorces, spouses You’re going to die, there’s going to be a ton of different reasons why real estate still needs to happen. So it’s not that there aren’t the transactions, it is just the accessibility and the approach to those transactions will change. And so if you are stuck operating, you’re upside down umbrella strategies and wondering why you’re not being successful. You should look to see, you know, get your samurai sword out of the closet and start swinging up.
D.J. Paris 30:28 Yeah, not now is the time to think about this to win with the, you know, with the way that we shop, and the way that we the way that we sort of navigate the world, yes, there are places for the big super stores like Amazon, virtually or Walmart, you know, with more of the brick and mortar, yes, there is convenience. And there makes sense to sort of try to be all things to a to a shopper. But the vast majority of us when we want something a little bit more specialized than just going out and getting our groceries or our household needs, we’re usually doing a lot of searching online, we’re doing a little research ourselves, or we’re looking for somebody who can help provide that to us in a much more concise way. Right. And I think I think this is, you know, I mean, if we just look at Reddit, as a great example, I don’t know how many sub Reddits there are, there’s got to be 10s, of 1000s. And these are all hyper specific to a particular interest. And if you don’t know what Reddit is, you guys can look it up. But basically, whatever you’re into, you can go find your community. And so the point is, is that can be extrapolated out to your own business as well figure out what you know, is a is a is something that you want to specialize in. And even if you’re not that familiar with it, you can get familiar with it. You want to work with developers start talking to developers and saying, how does how do agents get in with you? Like, what are they doing? How are they getting? What are your needs? What are you I mean, these are things that you can do first time homebuyers, people who have, you know, divorce attorneys if you want to work with people who are divorced, I know tons of realtors who just do that, who go well, I just get in good with the attorneys. I know the needs of a divorce. See, I understand what that process looks like, I understand some of the, the legal part of it, you know, anyway, I could go on and on. But the point is, is come up with something. And by the way, as Chris was saying, it doesn’t have to be your only niche, right? It could be niche one and the instead of having buckets of different types of of processes for marketing, like I have my farming bucket that I you know, and I have my my customer my referral bucket, you could also have buckets around your niches, right? Mm hmm.
Chris Linsell 32:42 Definitely. All right, well,
D.J. Paris 32:43 we need to we need to wrap up because Chris is is ready to board a flight very shortly. And he’s got some calls to make before he goes to Nar, and blows the blows the room out like I did last year. So anyway, we’re gonna we’re gonna say goodbye to Chris. But before we do want everyone, everyone, please, please, please, this is the website. i By the way, the clothes does not pay us for this at all. And we never, we would never ask for them to pay us. Because we are such big fans of theirs that we want everybody to go read, we actually think you’ll become a better realtor by reading the clothes.com Oh, by the way, like 99% of it’s free. So that’s even better. You don’t have to get pull your card out. Of course, they do have a premium subscription model as well, for the close Pro. We’ll talk about that on our next episode. But the very least go read their stuff, Chris, and the editorial stuff, they are not afraid of going deep, they go wide, and they have an opinion. So it’s not just facts and figures. It’s like and by the way, here’s what we recommend, guys, there isn’t really anything else out there like this that I’ve found. So go go to the clothes.com. And by the way, also, you know, we’ll keep you abreast of Chris’s speaking engagements so that maybe you can go see him live. But Chris, thank you so much for once again being on our show. We would love to, we love to have you of course, again in 2023. We will continue to have this have you on here. And you know, maybe we’ll even make some tweaks to it to to make it even better for next year. But we’re excited to continue the relationship on behalf of everyone because it’ll be the last episode of the year with you. We really appreciate everything you do for our show. So thank you on behalf of the audience.
Chris Linsell 34:20 Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure looking forward to the next time too.
D.J. Paris 34:24 Awesome. All right. Well, this that’ll do it for this episode, guys. We will see Chris in 2023. Either you can see him in person or on our show once a month. So thanks, Chris. Thanks to the audience. Please tell a friend. In fact, tell two friends that would really help us out. It’s the holiday season. Tell it tell two friends about our show. And that’s all we’ll ever ask of you. Thanks, guys. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Chris.
A 170m Producer’s Predictions For 2023 • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Nov 21, 2022
In our November episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties talks about the slowdown as we near the end of the year. Carrie also talks about the decreases in the market regarding listings and under contract single family and attached homes in Chicago. Next, Carrie emphasizes why now is a great time to start drafting your business plan for next year and shares tips on how to draft your business plan. Carrie also shares 7 tips for marketing strategy for 2023. D.J. shares his marketing tip of the month. Last, Carrie and D.J the importance of building relationships with realtors in other markets.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you worried about 2023? Well, let’s talk to a top producer and see what she’s thinking for the next year. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show, and today on the show is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors. In fact, in the last 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here in the Chicagoland area Carrie is in the top 15 producers on out of 46,000. That’s incredible. She’s in the top like 1/10 or 1/100 of 1% of all the agents here. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. And she also works with a lot of developers who have to choose her to represent their high end developments. Please visit Carrie at our website, which is Carrie McCormick, r e.com. And also definitely follow her on Instagram, I believe she has the very best Instagram account I’ve ever seen for a real estate agent, which you can find her on Instagram at Kerry McCormick real estate and by the way, those links to her website and Instagram will be in the show notes. So you can find her there. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 2:52 Thank you, you always have such a nice intro. It makes me so happy. So thanks.
D.J. Paris 2:56 Well, well, I’ll tell you, I’m always happy to talk to you because and I just it’s gonna sound like a like a humble brag. And maybe I guess it is but it’s not really my intention. We’re prefacing this by saying please forgive, please, audience and carry forgive me for the brag, but we just crossed over. Maybe we didn’t. But we’re right on the cusp of crossing over 2 million downloads in the lifetime of the show. And I bring that up because you’ve been with us almost since the very beginning. So part of the reason why we’re now doing even higher numbers than ever before is because of because of you. So thank you for helping us get to
Carrie McCormick 3:30 know amazing, yes, yeah. Awesome podcast, and you’ve got great followers and, you know, continues to grow. So I’m happy to be part of it. So thank you.
D.J. Paris 3:40 Thank you. So what’s what’s going on this month?
Carrie McCormick 3:43 All right, November. And I know we’ve got listeners, not only here in Chicago, but we have listeners all over the United States. So I just wanted to kind of talk about a broad United States market. Data and I know everyone knows this. But as we move into fall, our market continues to slow down. And we know that consumer prices and higher mortgage interest rates are squeezing our buyers and it’s just an affordability challenge and even hearing people talk about not only from homeownership, but you know auto loans and grocery everything, everything seems to be going up and people are getting squeezed. So right now mortgage rates are at 55% higher than they were a year ago. It’s just in I was saying it’s we were going 150 miles an hour last year. And now we’ve come to this I feel like it’s like 50 miles an hour. It’s like this screeching halt. We’re still, you know, driving at the limit or you know, our speeding limit, but it just feels like it’s just so quiet. So it’s it’s tough. And just here in Chicago, for those that are here in Chicago are new listings in the city of Chicago for single family homes. was down 2.7%. And it was down almost 30% For attached homes, which is our condo and townhome market, which that’s a big number are under contract. So that’s was new listings were down or under contracts for single family homes is down 22%. And down 28%, almost 30%, also for attached homes. So these are big decreases in our market. And I know that Chicago acts like a market within a market, each neighborhood is very independent. And again, those stats are just over the city of Chicago as a whole. So we’re down, you know, so it’s a message that we have to give to our sellers, all the stats, all the data, the information, we’ve got to communicate that to our sellers, so that’s important. But every November, I’ve been doing this for 22 years and been a broker here in Chicago for 22 years, every November, I look back at the year and figure out what I did, right, I figure out what I did wrong. And I tried to create a business plan for the next year into 2023. Because with the holidays coming, it’s going to go quickly, now’s a great time to to start your business plan. And it can be a daunting task for a lot of people if you’ve never done one. And I’m going to give you just a few quick tips. And anyone that wants more information or to have a quick phone call, I’m always available to talk to people about it, not to say that what I do is 100% Correct. But what I do for me, at least it works. So let me give you some quick tips on a business plan. Gather your numbers. And when you look at them, figure out what worked and what did not work. That is the important part of it. So think about the number of listing appointments you’ve taken for 2023 I’m sorry, 2020. To look at your calendar, look at the number of listing appointments that you took, look at how many deals that you closed this year, number of buyer appointments, number of days and hours that you worked each week, that’s a hard one. But for me, it’s I don’t know if I can even calculate it. But just look at your calendar of the time that you’ve taken off and look at the days that you’ve worked. Look at your number of conversations you had each day a big one is look at your marketing budget, how much money have you spent, and then look at where you spent the money. And the lead sources that came from what worked, what didn’t work. And again, just look at your GCI and then look at your volume. These are all data numbers. And hopefully through the year, if you were organized with a calendar, or writing things down, this will be easy to calculate. And you’re going to quickly see where you spent money and it didn’t have a good return or you’re quickly going to see oh my gosh, I had you know these 10 listing appointments and they were all came from this one ad that I ran or came from the one postcard that I sent out. And then you know going into 2023 Those are the things that you should double down your marketing money on and focus on so you can get more business.
D.J. Paris 8:16 I’m curious when as you’re reviewing what I would love to ask you what did you think you didn’t do a good that you have room for improvement for next year? Do you have anything as you’re reviewing the year? What you what you wish you would have done different?
Carrie McCormick 8:30 Yeah, I think, you know, I spent, I spent a lot of money online, which, through 2022, I’ve, I’m very focused on what is working with it and what is not working, and I’m constantly changing it. So I think monitoring it, and not waiting six months, you know, but monitoring your online spend monthly is important because you’re gonna those are, you know, quick stat. So you’re going to really see what’s working and what’s not working through engagement through responses on it. So I think that’s something that you do have to focus on, I would say I do a lot of print advertising as well. That’s a little bit harder to gauge the ROI. So to answer your question, I think what I need to focus on is my postcard mailings and just mailings in general of it’s a lot of money to do that. And I’m not getting as good of return. So either I’m gonna cut back on it, or I need to perfect it. And I think I’m gonna perfect it.
D.J. Paris 9:27 You know, what’s funny is the development that that I bought that that you represent, represented as as, as the seller, your group represented, I was just realizing I’ve been there a year and a half and I have I have not received one postcard not from you, because I wouldn’t expect to receive it from you, of course, but from any realtor or anywhere now under understanding that this is a new development that people just moved into. Are we looking to move anytime soon? No, obviously not. Or least we just don’t know. I hope nobody’s thinking of moving. So everything’s going great. We all love the place. But I would think now would be a great time for another agent to sort of swoop in and be like, hey, hope you’re loving your place. I know, you’re probably not going to make a shift anytime soon. But I just wanted to start a relationship because we know that a lot of realtors who represent buyers end up the person buys the home, and they don’t hear from the realtor ever again. Now, my realtor was my boss, so he doesn’t know why he and I did it together. But the point is, is I wouldn’t expect him to send me anything but no, not other one other realtor. And again, it would take just a little creativity for someone to think about that. But I don’t know, it seems like a good idea.
Carrie McCormick 10:37 It does. And you know, that’s another thing is Think outside the box a little bit, I think doing postcards or mailings, templates all over the place, there’s companies that do it, they all start to look the same. So you have to be a little bit creative think outside the box. Because you know, like, if you received something a little bit different than mail, maybe you would open it or it would stand out to you because it was a little bit different than just, you know, a glossy postcard. So again, think out of the box a little bit if you’re going to spend some money on postcards. Another thing is, think about where you’re spending your time and your energy. And this again, sounds very easy. It took me years to start kind of time blocking and looking at things that got me distracted and figuring out where do I need to spend most of my time and what do I like a time audit you know, what, what’s effective of my time what is not effective of my time and and figure that out? And you know, make a daily routine of what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. It’s different for everybody. There is a saying by Tony Robbins and it’s it’s sometimes it’s not what what what you’re willing to do that makes the difference. It’s what you’re no longer willing to stand. So there’s things that are time sucks in our day, right? And I’m just trying to think what it is but there’s there’s definitely things that you know are not productive. And you really have to realize that when it when you’re doing it and avoid it or give that task to somebody else. So they can focus on that and you can do income generating activities.
D.J. Paris 12:13 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, I agree. I think that’s it’s, it’s, you’re right, like we can’t control rates, we can’t control buyer sentiment. As much as we can try to influence it. It’s hard to influence sellers and buyers right now with the state of the market. And deals are falling apart at the last minute, we’re seeing a record number of those. So things are outside of our control, and in a lot of ways. And then there are things that are always within our control, which is our activity. And actually, I have a quick little story I thought I’d share with you and the audience because I think this is perfectly apropos to how it may be what agents can do right now. While maybe things are a little slower than normal, and everyone’s stressed. And yes, all of that is true. And there’s things you can still do. So this just happened yesterday. It was my one of my closest friends and his wife’s anniversary. It was their ninth anniversary. Here’s how I knew that I had put it in my calendar or in the contact list form. Or sorry, the contact. You know, I have for each of them. I have their anniversary date because I was there at their wedding and I wrote it down or I asked them later whatever it was because I thought this is what my closest friends I probably should know when his anniversary is so that all I could no I’m not a Producing Realtor. There’s no I’m not looking for anything here. I just want my friend to feel that I care about him. So I sent so I have in my little calendar every day if it’s Sunday. nice birthday, if it’s one of their children’s birthdays, if it’s an anniversary, it’s the only way I would ever remember to do anything is even my own family with stuff is, you know, I write it down because I don’t when it’s my parents anniversary, I think it’s, you know, April, something, but I don’t always remember it perfectly. So I put all of my friends information and so I sent a text to my friend and his wife yesterday. Oh, hey, happy ninth anniversary, it was literally took two seconds. And his wife who I’m not as close with, I don’t know her as well as I know him. She wrote me back and she’s like, You were the only person every year outside of their, like immediate family that knows it’s our anniversary, and or if they know it, nobody else writes us about it. And it was just took two seconds. And I’m like, that is so easy to do. And, and she was like, how do you do that. And I was like, why just put it in a calendar. And you know, but it’s like, there’s no magic to it at all. But the point is, is is now is a great time to think about your communication strategy for staying in touch with everybody over the next year. And now’s a great time to call your all your clients and say, Hey, I’m just updating my, my contact, you know, whatever my marketing system, I just want to make sure that I have all your data correctly in here. But I want to make sure your birthday is on such and such day. Right? Great. Okay, hey, just out of curiosity, what what’s your anniversary date, I’d love to, you know, just know that. So I can, you know, give you guys a quick hello, or something on your anniversary, like people will tell you this stuff, especially if they’re past clients. I mean, that shouldn’t be any problem at all. But certainly the you what I’m trying to the point I’m trying to make is you want to stack the deck with reasons to reach out to somebody. And it doesn’t have to be, Hey, you want to buy or sell a home. It’s like, Hey, I remember your anniversary, like people care very much when you demonstrate, you know that you care for them and that you’ve taken time to build it into your life that their their lives are important. And really simple and easy. So I know I’m talking about this a lot. But guys, this is a great time to just update your database, call all your clients say hey, I’m I’m just getting my you know, getting some things together for 2023. Just wanna make sure I have the right data for you. You know, and you can say, Oh, by the way, you know, I would even ask if you’re, if you’ll feel close enough asking when their kids birthdays are ask them what grades their kids are in. If not birthdays, ask them, hey, you know what grades are they and so you have an idea so that when school rolls around, you maybe have a list of people to you know, give some you know, care packages for kids in grade school or high school or college or I think there’s lots of cool ways you can demonstrate care, that don’t have anything to do with market conditions. And that maybe will pay dividends when people are ready to buy or sell.
Carrie McCormick 17:37 I think that’s so good. And sometimes it’s the little things that matter. And I just wanted to finalize in this, our call by saying the seven tips that I have for marketing for 2023. So I’m gonna say my seven tips will be video video video, you have to do video, you have to do video, I’m I know people don’t like to do it, or they don’t want to be in front of the camera, but it’s just, it’s going to dominate in 2023. So just get used to it and do videos. So that’s number one. Two would be teamed up with a mortgage lender to strategize you know, as we are in this market with these crazy interest rates. We do need a professional on our side to strategize there’s all these different bite down programs and different ways to message it. So definitely team up with a mortgage lender. I’m also going to tell you to create a blog which I don’t have one. So I’m going to try to do that for 2023 newsletters, your website, you know get all of that in, in the right place, refresh your social media profiles. And that’s another thing, these are all good reminders for me to do to you know, make sure that all of your profiles are up to date and refresh your headshots. You know, there’s brokers out there that you know, I’ve looked them up online, so I just know who I’m meeting and I meet them and they look nothing like their head did their picture. So you know, it’s a good time to refresh your headshots, QR codes, use those utilize those in your marketing campaign to capture client information. I don’t know where I’m at with number wise but clean up your CRM, strategize on a system just like you said, to stay in touch with your clients. There’s different tools, you know, you can call people, you can email them, you can send them a survey to get information. And then just I think, finally, a marketing tip for everyone is work on your messaging and what your purpose is. I think when you know, and you can communicate who you are, what you do, what your purpose is, to your clients, they’ll better understand you and what your job is to do for them.
D.J. Paris 19:47 Yeah, I agree on all of those are such such great ideas. So I think you know, great time to take a step back from the craziness of where inventory and rates are and sort of say well, I can’t don’t do much about that right now. But now is maybe a time to invest in some more learning some more skill development, you know, getting the marketing down for next year. And I’ll just give this one final tip for from a marketing perspective. I say it all the time. I’ve said it probably on the show a bunch. So I apologize for the review. But it’s a great fundamental. LinkedIn is really great at a couple of things. And one of those is work anniversaries. So I was talking about romantic anniversaries, you know, wedding anniversaries, dating anniversaries earlier. But work Anniversaries are another thing. So this is something that usually nobody knows it’s their work anniversary. So in a way, if you can find out like, I don’t even know it’s a work anniversary for me until I start getting messages on LinkedIn going, Hey, congrat, right. Like, we never know, most people don’t know, their actual anniversary. So another great reason is you just go to the LinkedIn act activity feed, and you’ll literally can just check it every day. And you’ll probably see when people get promotions, when they get a new job when they have a work anniversary. All of these are things that people would never expect you to, to reach out to except on LinkedIn, when they tell people it’s their work anniversary that you get a lot of messages. But how about a phone call? How about a text message? How about going a little bit beyond and noticing something like that? And again, just demonstrating care. So anyway, I love that, I think, yeah, I think it’s I think it’s a great place to wrap up. We should also mention two quick things. Right now, you know, I think is also a great time to build relationships with realtors and other markets. Right? It’s a wonderful time to really say, okay, my clients tend to move or retire to or have vacation homes in X, Y and Z places. And so for example, if you have if you’re a realtor, and you have people that live or that want to live in Chicago, some time of the year, or maybe a second home here, they’re moving to this area, or you know, down to Florida or Texas or wherever people are moving these days. You know, Charlotte, not Charlotte, but Charleston is a big one Nashville, of course, lots of places are having these big booms. now’s a great time. And so Carrie would love the opportunity to work with you if you have clients that are interested in the Chicagoland area. She’s literally one of the very most successful Realtors here. She does it all herself. It doesn’t get passed over to a team member. It’s literally her so if any and if anyone’s listening who isn’t a realtor, but just a buyer or seller or renter or investor or developer who wants to work with the top realtor here in Chicago, Carrie, we could not more highly recommend her she’s the best. Carrie what’s the best way that someone can reach out to
Carrie McCormick 22:43 always call me 312-961-4612? Or you send me an email at Carey at@properties.com.
D.J. Paris 22:52 Awesome. Well, we will bring this this episode to a close Don’t. Don’t let it bring you down. As the as the song says. This is this is a tough time most brokerages are down. production is down for agents. It’s just kind of where we’re at. We can’t do a whole lot about that except keep moving forward. Again, people want to work with people who demonstrate competence and care. So up lets up your competence level. Ask more from your from your brokerage about skill development, knowledge training, and then ask more from yourself about staying in touch so that next year, you’re like, Alright, everybody in my database, I have five different times throughout the year that I’m calling them for different milestones or reasons to reach out birthdays, anniversaries. Hey, just checking in how’s everything going? You know, school, starting school, ending whatever it might be, come up with five or six reasons to reach out not real estate related to each person in your contact list. And you’re gonna have a great 2023 At least I hope so. So anyway, I’m Carrie and on behalf of Carrie and myself, as always, thank you to the audience we are, this is our Believe it or not our most our highest month ever is this month as far as number of downloads. I don’t get I don’t say that to brag. I’m just so encouraged. And it’s really we don’t spend any money on on marketing. I wish we probably did, but we don’t. And so we’re so grateful to everyone for telling a friend about our show. Please continue to do that. Think of one other real estate agent, maybe even a new agent who wants to hear cash and wonder how somebody gets to the very top of the mountain like Carrie Well, this is how so definitely send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com. And also again, if you know anyone who is looking to buy, sell, rent, or develop in Chicago talk to Carrie. So I’d be happy to carry myself we say thank you on behalf of the audience. We say thank you to Carrie. This is it’s so incredible to get somebody of hers have her skill level and her busyness level to be on our show for years and years now we are so internally grateful. We’re so thankful. So anyway, I’m Carrie thank you again and we will see Everybody on the next episode.
Carrie McCormick 25:01 Thank you guys
The Importance Of Systems & Processes • Jen McConnell
Nov 18, 2022
Jen McConnell talks about how she got into real estate business. Jen emphasizes the importance systems and people and how these were the key to her success. Next, Jen talks about The McConnell Foundation and what’s that activity all about. Jen also talks about how they brought their services to the next level and the complimentary moving truck they offer to their clients and community. Last, Jen gives advise for new agents and describes what kind of content would she share in her social media if she was a new agent today.
D.J. Paris 0:00 When Top realtors say that systems and processes are the most important part of their business, what exactly do they mean? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Jen McConnell. But before we get to Jen, just a couple of quick reminders first, well, a reminder for me to thank you for listening to our show. We’re so grateful and appreciative that you’re listening right now and the best way you can help us continue to grow. And the only thing we ever ask is that you tell a friend think of one other realtor that needs to hear about systems and processes to take their business to the next level because Jen is going to tell you exactly how she did it, and does it and send them a link over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed right there. Or if you’re gonna send it to somebody that loves podcasts, just have them pull up their favorite podcast app search for keeping it real, and hit the subscribe button. We would appreciate it. Well that’s that’s really all I got today. So let’s get right to it my interview with Jen McConnell.
Today on the show, our guest is Jen McConnell from McConnell real estate partners in Charleston, South Carolina. Let me tell you more about Jen. Now Jen was fortunate enough to start her real estate career when she was just a junior in college. Now with over 17 years of experience in the industry she has she has particular expertise in luxury real estate and custom homebuilding. She is a certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist through the Institute for luxury home marketing, where she has been awarded the prestigious million dollar Guild Award. Jen has also earned the coveted realtor of distinction award achieving the highest rank possible as a Platinum Award winner through the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors, the Platinum Award Jen places in the top 2% of agents in Charleston and in 2021, Jen and her husband Josh opened their own brokerage on the Isle of Palms in Charleston, South Carolina, and for McConnell real estate partners where she is the broker in charge. Also, they run a foundation which we’re going to be speaking about as well. To learn about everything Jen and McConnell real estate partners visit their website see H s estates Estates is plural ch s estates.com. There will be a link to that in the show notes. You can just go to our show notes. Click on CHS estates.com. And check out everything Jen and Josh. Jana, welcome to the show.
Jen McConnell 4:13 Thank you, thank you for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:16 I am so excited because Charleston is just one of those one of those places that I just feel like everybody who visits it, you know, that I know seems to come back saying Oh, I wish I were to live there and you were telling me off camera that you’re getting like 60 plus people a day move to the Charleston area, which is just incredible.
Jen McConnell 4:36 From elsewhere, but not only that, but there are so many people that come here to vacation and then literally they just stay there like someone will pack up my stuff. I’m just gonna hang here. Here. No big deal. They literally just haven’t say especially during COVID Oh my gosh, the whole state of New York just basically came here and they’re like, Oh, we’re just going to go home. We’re gonna stay here now. We’re gonna move here and buy
D.J. Paris 4:55 so which is obviously great for real estate agents. However, I imagine there’s a lot more real estate agents probably getting their license these days at Charleston, I assume that’s probably I bet the real estate, the realtor populations. I don’t know if it’s doubled, but there’s got to be more Realtors now. So it’s good. It’s good. And it’s also there’s a lot of competition, I’m guessing. Yeah,
Jen McConnell 5:16 I mean, we have close to 7000 licensed agents. But you know, the top like, 500 make up 98%.
D.J. Paris 5:22 Do it out? Yeah, yeah. It’s funny. We do that. In Chicago, here we have about 47,000 agents total and same sort of thing. It’s like the top 20% Do you know most of the, because there’s so many people that get their license as a part time thing, or they just do it to buy and sell their own properties. But what’s really cool about Charleston is you have you have like a lot of advantages, right? You have this beautiful, wonderful city, wonderful weather, you’re you have beaches, you also have vacation rentals, like there’s so Charleston, just in the rich history, but just so much going for it. It’s just so jealous.
Jen McConnell 5:59 There’s so much no matter what your lifestyle is. It’s here in Charleston, I guarantee you no matter if it’s the arts, if it’s, you know, golfing, I mean tennis, everything boating, like everything that you fishing, anything you want to do is here for sure.
D.J. Paris 6:12 I’m so jealous. And I’m a tennis and not as much of a golfer but my dad’s a golfer and, you know, he’s been golfing all over the Carolinas for the last 30 years, like three, four times a year. So we were lucky enough to go to Kiawah Island. Actually not together. I take it back. We didn’t go together. We went we went a different trips. I was thinking we did a father son thing, but we didn’t. But anyway, that’s also right near you as well. That’s amazing.
Jen McConnell 6:38 Yeah. And one of the most impressive courses on the east coast, the ocean
D.J. Paris 6:42 course. Oh, yeah. You know, it’s funny, I’ve not that our audience doesn’t care about my golfing. But I will say, if you if you’re a golfer, you need to have an experience once in your life where you have a caddy. And the first time I ever had an actual caddy, like walk would be through the course, which is very strange experience was was at the ocean course in Cuba. And I was like, thank God, because I was like, What do I do here? It’s like literally one of the hardest courses in the world. And I’m not okay, enough about that. Nobody’s nobody’s logging out to hear my golf stories. So how did you you started, you got into real estate when you were in college, which is not very common for the guests that I have on the show. So how did that happen? And why? Sure.
Jen McConnell 7:28 So when I was a junior in college, I was a marketing and finance major. And I didn’t have an internship. And I don’t know, I just always knew that I was gonna go into real estate somehow. And I don’t know what kind of led me in the new construction realm. But I knew that there was a homebuilder on highway 30, in Ashland, Ohio, which is where the college and where I grew up. And I knew that that sounds like a really cool job, and I can do those internships, and maybe they would pay me maybe they wouldn’t. So I just literally, like walked in, I had my resume. I’m like, 20 years old. And they were like, Oh, we were hiring, but we’re actually we just hired to fill the spot. And I was like, well, that’s just not gonna work. Like, I just need to talk to your manager. Like, that’s all like, I won’t, I promise I’m not here. Like, I just wanted like a job, job or internship, it’d be fine. Like, I just talked with him. And then like, eventually, like, edge my way in and let me talk to the manager and end up getting it for like a sales assistant position. I was like, Okay, well, this is cool. And then it was just I loved it. I loved it. It was custom construction at like, 20 years old, you’re designing these ridiculous houses. In Ohio. You know, they were like, you know, what you kind of see everywhere, like on a farm or, you know, some of the nice houses for sure. But then they opened, right when I was graduating, so a year later, and they’re like, you’re gonna go to Charleston, and we’re going to Wilmington, I was like, Well, you know, I’ve never been to Charleston. Let’s do that. Like, I’ve heard. It’s great. Let’s go there. So I moved down here and didn’t know a person at all isn’t up there for stuff going on location in Charleston. We’ve been down for ever since. And, you know that and I was 21. At that time designing like ridiculous beach houses, multimillion dollar beach houses, like, who gets that opportunity, right? Like it was just, it was wild. So that’s really how I got my start in new construction, and then new construction for 11 years. And then once I got married and started having kids, and I was like, I don’t really want to work six days a week, like, I want to kind of have more flexibility with my schedule. So then I got my general brokerage license in 2008. And then actually didn’t really start doing it full time until like 2016
D.J. Paris 9:22 Wow, because you weren’t you were busy doing mom’s stuff. And you were
Jen McConnell 9:26 really like I actually so I had my kids that I had my daughter when I was still working on new construction, but literally like on maternity leave, I was like, I can’t go back to six days a week. And we’re going you know, we’re just going to general brokerage at that point. That’s when we kind of came back because we’re all saying that on our palms and yeah, the financial protection sensor 2016 When I’ve been in general brokerage
D.J. Paris 9:46 Wow. Well, I you know, as as somebody who I don’t run our brokerage, but I know the work it takes as being part of the management staff at our brokerage and, you know, I almost wonder, are you working even more now now that you run your own brokerage? Are you able to have better balance? Because you have, you know, some of that flexibility.
Jen McConnell 10:08 You know, the work life balance is an interesting topic. And I’ve been in several masterminds about that. But I do feel very close to that balance. So I found that if you’re really stressed and running on fumes, there’s either to do one of two things, or both things missing either leverage or systems. And I was missing both, like in 2016, to like, 2019 it was really just running on fumes, you know, I was doing I was the EAA, I was the assistant, I was doing all the transaction paperwork, I was going to have your clothes and whatever home inspection I was selling, and listing. It’s impossible, right? Like, you can’t keep up with that stuff. And,
D.J. Paris 10:42 oh, by the way, you’re a mom, too. And I have like
Jen McConnell 10:45 a one and two year old. So it’s like, no, it’s not. And I have a marriage, like it’s not sustainable. So I found that really quickly, and we had a major life changed in 2018. That kind of shook our world. And that’s when everything kind of came in perspective, to be honest with you that it was like look like, it’s just not going to operate that way. Like we deserve a better life than that. And things just need to change because we need to savor every moment, we came with our children, our selves, our marriage, you know, everything. So just kind of worked itself out that way. And now I’m just very focused on if we have a pain somewhere in our business, it’s a system or a person that we’re missing. And that’s really what it comes down to, I think,
D.J. Paris 11:21 wow, that’s such a, that’s a really concise, and I was trying to sort of poke holes in it as I was thinking, Is it always systems or people and okay, maybe it’s not always that, but like, probably 95% of the time. So I was thinking, like, it’s true enough, you know, and, and I was, I was just reflecting in my own business, because, you know, whatever, my own struggles, and I was thinking, yeah, she’s right, it’s systems and people. So I think that is such a great point. And I always like to remind our audience too, if if you hear this, you go, well, easy for them. They’re top producers, and they have unlimited resources to be able to, to hire people. And it’s like, well, maybe, or maybe not. But the good news is, for anyone listening, who maybe as a solo practitioner, maybe is newer to the business and doesn’t have those resources, you can hire help from all over the world these days, you know, using like, upwork.com is a great place to look. And the point is, is you don’t if you you know, if you can’t afford someone local, and you can have tasks that can be done, you know, virtually, thank God, there’s so many options now, and people can afford to have, you know, more of that virtual assistant experience at a really nice price point.
Jen McConnell 12:30 Well, yeah, and I would honestly say like, even three years ago, I was not a top producer, like I was doing well, compared to everyone else in my office, I was at a big brokerage, but nothing compared to what I’m doing now. And it’s just because I think it’s more focused on those systems first, and then I heard people that can help with help showing help doing the EAA, work, help a personal assistant role, and really just allowing me to do what I’m good at, which is being in front of my clients, where it helping them get deals, you know, listing homes, I mean, that’s what I’m good at is in front of people not sitting here filling out a dotted box, right? Like, there’s people that can do that, and are way better than I am at that type of work. And I praise them for it, because they just, they know how to do way better, and I could never touch it. So why try.
D.J. Paris 13:12 I couldn’t agree with you more. And it’s, it’s I know, it’s hard to for a lot of our listeners, and even for me as well, I’m not a practicing agent, but I work amongst agents, and just this idea of of giving over part of your business to, you know, to someone else to be able to handle and it’s like, what if they screw it up? What if they make mistakes, and, and I understand the fear there. But was that challenging for you to be able to give up? Because, again, you know, I can’t do everything, but I’m used to doing everything. And if I give up my dotloop docs to someone else, whatever, you know, it was that a fear of yours that like things would just all fall apart?
Jen McConnell 13:47 Oh, 100% and it was so silly. Like I look back and I’m like, Oh, I like literally worked skin involved, like for years, like what was I think he’s like, No, someone will mess up a document and then like, I just it’s a better fit to do it myself. No, it’s not 100% it’s not, there is someone who is better with each skill set and you can figure out what your top 20% should be. And that’s what you should focus on 100% the other 80% that you’re doing that you’re not really that good at you need to leverage that out for sure. Because they’re gonna be there 20% Then
D.J. Paris 14:17 and even with documents like transaction management companies are plentiful, they are all over the charge I don’t know three 400 bucks a deal and you only pay if the deal closes and then that person you know you have to find a good person of course but like you just you know there’s a million ways to find good good people to help with that. It’s like for 400 bucks to never have to deal with paperwork again per deal. It seems like a pretty good deal to me. Yeah,
Jen McConnell 14:41 I mean, again, like I think that just staying in your lane, which I mean husband wife, you know we own our brokerage together. So stay in our lanes is very important. But staying in your lane with what you’re good at and knowing what you’re good at is like the first thing you should find out if you’re just becoming a real estate agent, like know what you’re really good at sometimes those ages It’s far better at the paperwork. And maybe they need to be like an EAA role and just a showing assistant. So when they get that interaction with people, but they can still do their work, which really they love to check those boxes, whereas like, I don’t want to see the box, I just want to talk and I just want to go and I want to go to the houses and lets them into the marketing videos, do the fun stuff, you know. So I think just always finding your role and saying you’re staying in your lane is super important, and knowing what your role is coming into new agent, for sure. But yeah, you definitely do everything started out 100%. And you do that until you’re too tired and worn out. And hopefully don’t get to that as far as I got when I was like every day was working on like, no breaks, you know, that’s just not fun. This is we’re here to live right and give back. And that’s what we I realized kind of just a few years ago, but like I said, like three years ago, you know, my I did like 8 million, like, that’s not really a lot in our market at all. You know. And so I think implementing those things, implementing leverage implementing people and implemented systems like that’s why we are where we are today. So for sure,
D.J. Paris 16:02 yeah, I agree. And I think it’s a good place to talk about your sort of your TrueNorth. And what like, because you, you and your husband have created a foundation, and I want to, you know, whatever you’re willing to share about that, I’d love to share that with our audience. Because I think you know, for somebody to find their why or true north is so critical, especially right now when the real estate market is changed. And people are realtors, a lot of them are struggling in most markets, because inventory is changed and rates have changed. So having that sort of why to be able to kind of keep you going through through some of the more challenging times I think is really important. Tell us tell us what your TrueNorth is and why that’s important to you.
Jen McConnell 16:48 So back in 2018, my son was well 2017 Actually, who was born in July, and it was five months old was diagnosed with cancer here at MUSC Children’s Hospital in downtown Charleston. So that obviously was very earth shattering for us. But that day that he was diagnosed, my I stopped, I did not talk to clients, my phone was off, emails were cut off, social media was cut off. I did nothing but focus on getting him cured. So you know, that’s scary for real estate agent especially I was I was just getting into general brokerage I had just gotten back in general brokerage 2017. So I was just getting back into it, you know, kind of getting a groove going and then you know, that hits and you stop. So we’re didn’t care about that at all. You know, I feel like everything worked out on the end. So he was cured. Fortunately, by his five month Ursu, the 10 month birthday, I guess if you want to call it so by 10 months old, he was cured of cancer, which was of course, like the best, you know, the best thing you could ever hear in your life, like and the fact that they could say cured we were like, wait, wait, did you say the C word like cure?
D.J. Paris 17:53 remission? remission, right?
Jen McConnell 17:54 Like, that’s what we were expecting? Just like no, you know, you’re he’s cure. And if you know that, for us was just, it’s everything, right? So that really propelled our business entirely and changed everything. So my husband left corporate America within six months of my son’s here simply because we just realized, like the grind and being responsible to a corporation who kind of really doesn’t care if you’re here or not sure what’s going on in your life, they want you to be there and be president, that really changed everything. So he came on board, six months later, left corporate America, once our son was able to go back to school, there’s kind of a lag once you’re cured, and when you can go back. I only worked you know, six months that year. And in that six months, I did $8 million. So that was my top here. You know, today that has been that was amazing. Six
D.J. Paris 18:41 months really? I with all of the stress of of what’s going on? Yes,
Jen McConnell 18:46 I did. My phone did not ring and that was kind of something in the middle that you’re thinking like, okay, like I thought I would have had like a call and know what my phone was dead silent. And I’m like, wow, okay, well, you have to start over. Like, it’s alright, I can do that I can start all over again. It’s fine. Like, whatever I got to do just get this boy here. And a week before my son go back to school, my friend said bring it again. Like it was just referrals coming in ages from other markets, sending referrals, repeat clients coming back, like it was a miracle. I mean, he’s a miracle for sure. But like, it was just that to me, I’m very I’m religious. That’s God, that’s nothing to do with me at all. So that that best year was definitely him. And then from there, we just kept doubling our business. And it really comes down to at that point where we realized like, I’m not going to grind 24/7 not see my family, not see my kids, that’s my husband. And then just you worn out like who wants to go through life like that. So we’re very intentional on where we spend our time. But then implementing those those systems and and the people that we really need to be able to run and run at a high rate. So you know, this year we’ll do 45 million. And that was three years ago where I did eight, you know, so
D.J. Paris 19:53 yeah, it’s amazing. And this idea of it’s almost like saving up for a rainy day in a sense because this idea Yeah, that you guys had your your, obviously your your child was struggling with a very serious illness and and that takes up all of your attention. And of course the business does have to go on pause. And then when he said when he come back, it’s like, oh boy, my clients, you know, they’ve sort of disappeared for a while, and maybe they won’t return maybe I do have to start over and this idea of building systems so that when, you know, really unfortunate things like that happen, you know, there’s there’s ways to keep the business to some degree chugging along. And so I imagine that’s probably was motivation for you to that should, should we, you know, should we want to spend more time, you know, at home or with the kids or whatever the the goals of the family are, you now have systems in place to support that.
Jen McConnell 20:47 Right. Well, I mean, I literally used to have my client, like, my, my database was an Excel spreadsheet, like, I mean, that was just three years ago. So it’s like, you have to start somewhere like to say that very humble beginnings. But you know, yeah, it’s just, it’s not sustainable again. So like, why I was running the grind because like, I have to make sure I hit all these people, right? How many times a day, how many different weeks and two weeks out throwing it out on an Excel spreadsheet, it’s not sustainable. So I’m sure most agents have something much more sophisticated than Now, thankfully. But really, what changed our business beyond just that is, is having that Northern Star like we were talking about earlier, and, and that for us is to be able to give back to boaties oncologist. So my son’s name is Bodhi, his oncologist is Dr. Jacqueline, Rebecca and USD and she has one of the only two gastric research labs in South Carolina for cancer. So you know, we Josh and I both had prayed to God, when we were in the hospital, once we found out he was diagnosed, and we were, we just said like, if he gets through this, like, we will do whatever we can, sorry.
D.J. Paris 21:45 Oh, okay. These are these are big things. So I appreciate I appreciate that the biggest things honestly, yeah. So I appreciate your appreciate your emotion.
Jen McConnell 21:57 Yeah. And we just thought we would do whatever we could to give back.
D.J. Paris 22:03 And so and so you started a foundation. And I, the foundation is tell us about actually tell us about the foundation? Well, yeah,
Jen McConnell 22:11 so the first thing that we did, actually, so 2018, he was cured 2019, what we decided to do with our brokerage was we started setting aside a portion of every commission, and donating that to pediatric cancer research. So 2019, we did 20 or $25,000. And then $50,000, the next year, this year, we’re already over 65,000. So I think we’ll be close to like 90,000. And we’ll donate just for the brokerage. So which is awesome, right, and we involve our clients like this is a very transactional business. And but on the buyer and seller side, like it’s a very relationship, relationship based business. And so what really came super clear to us once we knew that we wanted to kind of base our business around, giving back to to Doctor practice research, because we need to really involve them into what we’re doing. And so you know, every email, we update them on where we are with our musc goal for the year and we invite them to our fundraising events. And if we have client events, we’ll have like a donate portion. And you know, it was awesome, because our clients just they come through for us and they’re always so sweet. Like, before we had our foundation, they would literally just like hand us checks and be like, well here like, I want to I want to donate to your cause. And I’m like, Well, I know but I can’t take your your like donation from a brokerage. So it’s like, the way that like I but I knew what to do so much more to write so so we’ll always do you know, from our brokerage set aside that portion that will always give back to Dr. Becker’s research. And the awesome thing is for research to share on national level, by the way, like she shared it with St. Jude and all these wonderful, amazing hospitals across the country. So that’s the cool thing is not just here that her research is going. But then so basically, once clients kept paying that money, and we’re like, guys, like we can’t do it that way. We were like, You know what, we can do it bigger, we got to get bigger, and we just need to start our own foundation. So in 2021, we started our own foundation, the McConnell Foundation, and we had our very first gala last year in June. And we raised $45,000, for our first gala for Dr. Baca, which was like really cool. I know, like, I don’t have a gauge, because I’ve never done that before. But I mean, I had great mentors in the industry. And they were like, Jim, like, that’s really, really impressive. But like, okay, good. Like, I want to double it next year. I’m like, I know, like, I love it. So it’s cool. It’s cool. And we’ve done it with almost $120,000 in the last two years to musc pediatric cancer research. So it’s Yeah. We just Yeah, I mean, and again, like, that’s why like, I feel like I’ve been given the skills in what I do real estate that is helping me give this life to someone else, hopefully, you know, and, and provide that research. So that’s really our that’s our Northern Star like we were talking about earlier. And that’s why we do what we do when we are so clear focus on know what we need to do to be able to provide for the research for sure.
D.J. Paris 24:54 I mean, that’s such an interesting and important thing that you said and I want to make sure that our audience really We heard that because I suspect that when you when when you and your husband and look at your brokerage and come up with sort of ideas of what you want to do for 2023 and beyond, I imagine, you know, a big part of the conversation is, hey, we want to raise X amount of money for, or we want to donate and raise for, you know, this pediatric cancer research. And that becomes a huge motivator to keep the business growing and operating versus just, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with of course, you know, one’s own salary and one’s own own conditions. But it is, I imagine, because of, of how much it impacted your family, that becomes a huge motivator. So it’s so interesting, you said, we just want to be able to donate more. So in order to do that, we have to do more business and raise more money. And I think that is such a such a really a beautiful thing. And I really applaud you for finding that North Star. And, and then taking action, right and realizing that so many people, you know, you know, don’t don’t take that kind of action and not to judge them in a different way but but it’s really something that’s super admirable and and you get your entire community behind you as well. And everyone now is wanting, you know, wanting you to succeed so, so I applaud you for that, for sure. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Let’s talk a little bit more about systems. And you know, because you know you were talking about, and I’ve interviewed people on our show that that still work out of an Excel spreadsheet, and that works for them and great. But there are more sophisticated options. And so I’m just curious on like how you went from Excel spreadsheet to more automation, right? I obviously, yeah, let’s just tell me sort of what that journey was like for you.
Jen McConnell 28:08 So the top priority person involved with clients is to write the top tier level experience, like we kind of coined ourselves as a concierge level of real estate. And so we want to, I mean, I think my earbuds are dying, so I’m sorry, if you let me know, if you can’t hear me for some reason, I know you’re you sound great. So to provide that context of real estate, not only just, of course, being in front of them, but everything else. So before they need us, you know, what are they seen on our website? Or were they seen on our social media? So it comes down like for me, I’m the marketing kind of behind our brand. And so I look more at our how we’re presenting ourselves, we have a client moving truck, which is a 16 foot you know, fully branded, moving truck which our clients can use complimentary when they’re moving or even if they just buy something and you know, a new sofa, they want to go pick it up. So just taking kind of the experience to the next level. You know, whereas when we started in general brokerages in 2018, probably 75% of our business was bought leads whereas now I’m at 5% which really I’m not buying those are just major corporations that I pay a referral fee to to help their execs so I do consider that thought but so we’re at a 95% referral for you know, repeat clients base now so what we’ve done but our but our margins have not changed. So what we did we took that money that we were using when you were buying your clients and I put it into the customer experience and that client experience from you know, not just once they meet us all the way through years and years down the road. So that’s your client events but just elevating them and elevating everything that we do like our we have a magazine that we give out so instead of just like a a one page like I used to have like a one page double sided like here’s Jen McConnell and you know, like, I don’t know is nothing impressive, but like we have actual like magazines Like, Apple legit? Yeah, so like, this is the first thing, anyone who needs anyone on, you know, my husband or I or we have another event, you know, that’s the first thing that they see. And then just elevating everything from there. So like a closing book is a hard bound. I mean, this is like a legit book, you know. And so just fully, it’s everything from their inspections to like, if they had invoices from repairs, you know, coming from restrictions, if it’s new construction, we have their manual there. So just elevating everything that we’re doing to give that client experience so much more than they would ever expect. By like, that’s our whole goal is to be able to do that. And then we’re intertwining that with who we really are. So connecting on an emotional level that knew who we are, is we’re a family that’s supporting musc. And by you supporting our business, like we’re able to do that on such a better level. And then they want to get involved as well. So we’re just we’re intertwined. Like we’re it’s not a transaction at all. And it’s not just a buy or sell and or investor like these are people who are in our lives. That’s the best part about it, honestly.
D.J. Paris 31:01 Yeah. Yeah. It’s like you’re almost building a, you know, continuing to add to this giant family. That’s all helping each other. So that, you know, the greater good can be can be accomplished. You said so much here in the last few minutes. I want to just unpack a little bit. No, no, no, no, no, in the best possible ways that you said a lot. I’ve wanted to talk about the truck. Because this is it’s a simple idea, really. But I don’t know I’ve been doing this podcast five years, not one person has ever told me that they do this. I don’t think anyone I’ve ever interviewed does this. So you guys went out and acquired a smaller moving truck for or I couldn’t tell how big it is from from the picture. But it was really good sized truck that your clients can use sort of when they need it. So So what was the impetus for that? Just out of curiosity.
Jen McConnell 31:49 So moving is never fun, like no matter who you are? And like, yes, a lot of our clients definitely have the movers are moving company or relocation company doing the things. But we did find a lot of clients who were just like burning these U hauls, and they break down. And they’re not cute, which is like, you know what I love about ours. But like, you know, they’re just not a fun thing. And you have to go like, all the way across town to get it and can’t return it there. It’s just, it’s a pain. So we’re like, what is one concierge service we could provide that help them in this one issue like this one obstacle that they keep hitting? Well, let’s get him let’s get a movie trailer. Right. So we got this beautiful, like 16 foot brand new movie check. It has hardwood floors in the bed, because oh
D.J. Paris 32:36 my gosh, I didn’t realize it was that nice. Wow,
Jen McConnell 32:40 it’s so pretty. Like it has, you know, the Sand Ocean waves on the side like a sandcastle on the back. Like, it’s just such a cute truck. But the cool thing is, like, all of our clients love it, it’s easy to drive this newer, so it like turns normal, and we feel like there’s driving a big SUV. But we do give it to like the schools and our church whenever they need it. So it’s just a nice tool that we can still give back, you know, to purchase charities, whoever needs it at the time, and then our clients get the full benefit. They don’t have to worry about renting a truck and it’s it’s clean yet. It’s like a little dolly and there’s a ramp and like it’s just ready to go. Like it’s just simplifying their life. Like, that’s what our concierge level is, I would I expect and really requires that we just provide that next level service. So that was just one of the little things that we do.
D.J. Paris 33:21 I love that. And it’s really, really smart, also from a branding perspective, because of course, people get to see this truck driving around town that says, you know, hey, what will you use our truck if you if you use our services, I think that’s, you know, obviously, a constant source of, you know, exposure to the community. But it was interesting that you said sort of you were buying all almost all of your business, you know, three years ago, and it’s not, and now you’re you’re almost exclusively referral based, and it’s not that your margins have really changed, you’re just taking that money and investing it back into the client experience. versus, you know, the the just meeting new people, right, this idea of deepening the client relationship, I’m assuming the theory is that by deepening the client relationship and really going way above and beyond what the client might expect, even after the sale, then you know, they’re more likely to want to tell all their friends and family like oh, you got to support the McConnell real estate business because you know, look at how the all the cool stuff they’re doing for the community and beyond. I’m assuming that was kind of the the overall idea.
Jen McConnell 34:32 Yeah, I mean, we just like we love our clients and I know most agents say that they do like we have fun with our clients like we go to like what we’ve a baseball game, we rent out the mezzanine and like all their kids come like I love seeing their kids grow older and get bigger and it’s like oh my gosh, you know, it’s just it’s sweet are like the families who like moved here during COVID and they don’t have any families like we become their family right and so it’s just like we got to keep up with grandma, grandpa you got to keep up with like the kids and you got to just, you know, it’s just such a fun relationship business. And I think agents forget, like, they’re like, it’s just a transaction. It’s like once it closes like, Oh, here’s your, your card and you’re closing it and like, you know, hopefully you’ll keep my mind but like, what’s the statistics are like what 86%, I think is the set, like, they totally forget who you are, you’re their agent is when they close on the house, because you don’t follow up. And like, it’s not just your follow up, but like, you genuinely should be interested in like, your clients and what they have
D.J. Paris 35:23 going on. Well, you mentioned, you know, paying attention to kids and grandparents and, and all of these things, these require systems, right? Because of course, with hundreds of clients, it becomes more and more difficult to be like, oh, so and so’s child is entering first grade. And I should probably, like reach out than just say, hey, oh, good luck with your, you know, first grade or whatever. But how do you do that? How do you keep it all organized? Because that’s a lot
Jen McConnell 35:48 of work. So, you think about that, right? So if you look at your client base, and you figure out what pods they’re in, so we have the newlyweds, no kids, we have kids, young family with with young kids. We have families with older kids, you have you know, retirees so kind of break everyone up into your paws. And then you say, alright, well, I’m a young family. What do I or if I’m a young couple don’t have kids, I probably would only go to happy hour, right? So like, Alright, we’re gonna target that’d be happier. And we know that, that probably, Jen and Josh aren’t coming because they have been in Bodie at home because they can’t get evicted on a weekday. So like, we know that that’s just going to be our first time homebuyers, younger homebuyers, or maybe even empty nesters will come happy hour. But then we know like the baseball game, right, we know that the kids are going to payments with the kids are going to come to that right? Well, if we go to a brand new restaurant downtown with a water, we know that’s probably going to be more of our NPS. There’s like so look at your pods who your your client base is, and do those events, specifically for them. Like one thing that we do, for instance, for kids, like we were just saying about school, so every August, we take personalized cookie boxes to every single kid of our clients. And it has like three little cookies one’s like a pencil one is like an apple and one’s a chalkboard, it has their name or not. So it’s like, have a great first day of school, you know, Harrison, or whoever, and we deliver those to their house the first day of school. Like, that’s definitely I have to be like, okay, Jonathan has a kid, you may have to has a kid like, I make sure I reach out to them individually. No, they know that every August, they need to look their emails, and they can register for that cookie box. And it’s going to come to their inbox, you know, the first of August, we know that. So it’s just a guaranteed thing. And and that’s a system, right? And I just copy that eblasts for last August, and I changed it to say this year’s date and it’s coming out. So it’s just it’s super easy. So just things like that, like just really being intentional with your touches is something that we focus on. And then what do our clients really want to do? Like, they don’t want to come to my office and like have happy hour? No, I mean, they want to do that. And they want a cool place. Oh my god, I think both of my headphones are
D.J. Paris 37:43 dead, okay, you’re still sounding great. So keep going.
Jen McConnell 37:47 So just really again, like knowing your clients and and targeting your business. So we look at our calendar year, we started November, and we look at the whole next year, and every single month, we plan out exactly how we’re going to touch our clients and what we’re gonna do with them. Like if we’re going to meet up in person, if it’s on person, we’re gonna deliver the cookies, that’s not necessarily in person. And so you just kind of break up and make sure that you’re seeing them, you’re talking to them. And obviously, you’re touching them with your emails, if they’re not gonna, if there’s gonna annoy you with everything else, or at least getting your emails and if not, they’re gonna get your you know, your quarterly newsletter that we mail out, you know, so this will have updates, like, this is a personal letter from me always. We usually always have some, this is about our gala. And then we will say something about the kids and they’re like, this was our baseball. So they’re still keeping in touch with us. Like, even if they want to ignore us. That’s totally cool. But I know that they’re still getting you know, this in the mail. I know, they’re, they’re still getting our E newsletter. And you know, eventually they’ll come out and come play if they want to. And if not, then that’s fine, too. But at least that we’re in front of them.
D.J. Paris 38:42 Yeah, it is. It is interesting. I once interviewed one of the top Realtors here in Chicago, and I was asking her, you know, Hey, why do you think you’re so successful? And she was, she was like, I wish I had a better answer for this. But I reach out and call every single one of my clients every week and just give them an update on what’s going on. And I was like, Okay, and what else she was like well that that’s kind of it she’s like, I obviously I’m do a lot of a million other things. But she goes I actually think that’s the most important thing. And most agents don’t do that. I was thinking as you were saying that to you know, you were talking about sort of even after the sale, you know, doing Hey, every year we have the cookie thing for the kids and in the fall and we you know, we have all these fun events that people can attend and they’re gonna get notified and then they also get on my newsletter and, you know, other pieces of mail from time to time, but it seems like you’re really really are focused on just constantly engaging with your, with your client and your prospect list. And it really seems to be obviously very effective for you. And it’s interesting because you’re still spending the same capital you were before but you’re probably getting a better return I would assume now because you’re now you know now it’s people who who you know who are clients, they’re in love with you for what all that you guys do for them and for the you know, the Right or community, and then you know, they’re going to tell everybody they know. So it’s really, it’s really impressive. And so as a marketing person, what advice do you would you have for somebody who is an individual practitioner, you know, somebody who doesn’t have maybe, you know, a ton of resources, or a team? What might you suggest to them to sort of help make start to make the transition from doing everything to maybe working on some systems or hiring.
Jen McConnell 40:31 Starting out as a new agent so well, for marketing? Like, like you said, marketing? I think social media for sure it’s free. You just need your time, which as a new agent, you have plenty of that would be for sure. But then your systems I think, definitely have to have a good CRM, we use follow up boss, there’s a lot of really good ones out there. We’ve been we’ve been very happy with follow boss, and probably always be with them. But that’s
D.J. Paris 40:54 our one of our sponsors. We’d love follow.
Jen McConnell 40:59 Oh, good. Yeah. Okay, go to the follow up boss conference in November. Yeah, so you have really good CRM, like, even if you’re just starting now, it’s gonna cost you money, but you have to invest, be able to get money out. One book that I would definitely recommend as a new agent would be Profit First go by that like that is really can get you in trouble. If you are a new agent, and you’re just spending spending spending, I gotta have the best business card business yard signs, best Open House signs. And then you don’t even have a deal, like, do not go down that route, like definitely read profit first. But then once you get that money invested in that CRM, and it’s going to be several $1,000, you’re like, for real? Like, I don’t get any of that commission? No, it has to go back into your business, if you’re serious about it. So I think that and then there’s just so many templates and follow bosses, you know, that’ll get you on a good path, if you don’t have a good foundation with your brokerage that kind of says, like, here’s how you really do the transaction. And here’s what you should do for follow up. There’s wonderful templates in that CRM, as as many others I’m sure. That would be my first purchase as a new agent, for sure. And then like I said, social media, that’s how you’re gonna get your big business. If you don’t, if you literally know no one, and you don’t have a good sphere, where you are, and you can’t afford to buy your bit leads, then social media, for sure.
D.J. Paris 42:10 And if you if you were in that situation, I don’t know you’re not anymore. But if you were, what would you put post your marketing person? So I want to I want to press just a little bit and find out what kind of content would you post on social, would you? And again, there isn’t one, you know, right or wrong answer to this. But I’m curious on on if you were starting out what what type of because we, you know, we say that to our agents a lot here at our company, like, oh, you should, you know, really do a lot of branding and promoting on social. And finally, our agents were like, Yeah, that’s great. But like what content you know, and so we had to really just create a whole bunch of content that they could they could borrow and use. But not everyone has that. So I’m curious. And if you were starting out new nobody, and we’re like, Okay, I’m going to do something on social, what kind of content would would you work on.
Jen McConnell 42:57 So I would be the master of my market and your market be very much like where you live, like I live on Iowa palm. So I would be the master of Iowa palms not Charleston. Like, that’s just too broad. So I will be the master bio palms, I would have 100 videos of our palms, I would be doing open houses on our palms, even though they weren’t my listings, I would be going through go and shows and doing video tour. So even if they don’t know that I’m not with a client, they’re seeing I’m doing this $5 million listing over the water and this liquidity pool. And he’s ridiculous details. They don’t know that I’m not actually with clients, but I’m in the real estate world. And they’re going to know I’m in the real estate world by what I’m showing. So I would definitely be showing all of that on social media. But again, knowing your stats, so you need to know the stats for your market and be the expert. Oh yeah, two to three forest trail just sold sold for 2.2. That’s the highest one story that we’ve seen. So not off the ground in two years, like you need to know your stats. And once you become the market expert, and you’re showing that through videos, or reels, or stories, or even just your grid, you know, I think that you gain a lot of credibility that way. And people call on you real quick on Instagram, like oh my gosh, and they feel like they know you, especially if they see you I don’t put myself on my own Instagram a whole lot. Because I feel like I’m like on the truck. I’m like everywhere. So I don’t know, I’m worried about it. But I think that if I were a new agent I for sure would be if if I were just starting out.
D.J. Paris 44:19 I love that is providing content to the community in large about the community restaurants, school districts have, you know, fun things that going on in the area also knowing the market stats and the go and show is such a great idea. That’s so just just we’ll make this our final thing because I think you’ve given us so many amazing tips, but the go and show is so you would reach out to other realtors who have listings and say, hey, I want to promote your listing. May I come over and do a quick video tour or because you if you don’t have a client that actually wants to see it. Have you found that most listing agents are receptive to that do you get some pushback sometimes or are most
Jen McConnell 44:59 back So once you and you basically are showing time, you can actually just say, virtual showing, and you can just go through and video it and then you can add it to your own real or whatever later and you can give them credit which I think most agents appreciate on the left side. You just say like, oh, Jen, just listen to this awesome listing on waterway like they, if that goes far away, and then you get tagged on their, their page as well, which is, you know, good for your page. But no, I mean, I’ve never had pushback, I do a million dollar Monday, every Monday on my social media. And sometimes I’ll use other agents listings for that. And very rarely, there’s been like, three in like four years. I’m just kinda like, okay, that’s fine. If you don’t mean to help market your listing?
D.J. Paris 45:40 No, I guess I guess they won’t help give you exposure to sell. You know,
Jen McConnell 45:42 I know. They’re gonna give you full credit, of course, to whoever it is. So who knows? If I think I lost you.
D.J. Paris 45:58 Ask agents, firms to think up anyway. So we’ve been jet if you can, are you still here? You know, oh, no, no, no, it’s not you it’s Zoom is having an issue. So anyway, this is a great place to wrap up. So I want to mention just a couple of things about Jen. Number one, if you are a realtor, and you have clients that you know, vacation, out in Charleston area, or looking to maybe retire out there, obviously a lot of people do. Jen would love to connect with you. So Jen, what’s the best way or by the way, if there are any buyers, sellers, renters, who are listening to our show, who are you know, either in the Charleston area or moving there or want to explore different you know, home options there. What’s the best way someone should reach out to you.
Jen McConnell 46:48 They can call text directly, my number is 843-300-7585, or my website, definitely check out is CH s estates.com. And honestly, like, we get a ton of vacationers so even if agents are in town, and just to have a local, you know, like coffee session, I would love to meet people from out of town, we have a ton of people relocating here from other areas, you have to sell their home, you know where they are. So yeah, I’d love to have a coffee date with anyone.
D.J. Paris 47:14 Well, I that is the invitation is open. So anyone out there who has business in the Charleston area, or who just wants to have a referral so that if business comes up, you can now say, Hey, by the way, Mr. Mrs. Client, I know you’re looking at are looking to retire, maybe get a vacation home. You know, I know somebody out out in Charleston, who you know, who’s really good. So this is a great thing that you now can bring to your clients just by introducing yourself to Jen and getting connected that way. And vice versa, maybe she’ll have people that are moving to your area. And so you guys can swap leads. So Jen, thank you so much for your your service, in, of course, the foundation that that you guys run and support and the causes that are important to you, and also just being of service to this podcast, we are so grateful to have had you on the show, you’re you’re just a obviously a really honest and compassionate and vulnerable person. And I think that is that is always something that we can all aspire to be more of. So thank you on behalf of our audience, we thank you for coming on the show. And on behalf of Jen and myself, we want to thank our audience too, for sticking around to the end. And we ask that you do just a couple of oh, by the way, Jen, if anyone out there was touched by your story, if they want to help support your foundation, what’s the best way that they can do that?
Jen McConnell 48:36 They can go to the McConnell foundation.com Or there’s links on our regular website as well.
D.J. Paris 48:42 And we will post a link to the foundation in in our show notes as well. So please contribute donate time, money, or both to to this organization to the foundation rather and Jen. So on behalf of everyone, we thank you, we thank Jen we think our audience and we ask that you just do two quick things before signing off. Number one telephone I think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing about systems people and Jen’s journey through real estate, send them a link to this episode. I mean, also, she talked about her true north, maybe there’s somebody out there who’s struggling trying to figure out their purpose. In real estate. This might just give them you know the incentive they need to keep going forward and finding their purpose. Send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com. We would appreciate it and also leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. Whatever podcast app, you might be listening to us, let us know. We take all of your comments very seriously because the only way we can get better is if we know what you like and not like or dislike so tell us how we can get better. I’m Jen, thank you so much and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Jen McConnell 49:45 Thank you DJ, appreciate it.
Mindset Strategies Of Top Real Estate Agents • David Neagle
Nov 16, 2022
David Neagle the founder of the global consulting company Life Is Now, Inc. talks about his journey in the business world and how he ended up in consulting. David describes three things he changed in his attitude that brought tremendous change and success into his life. Next, David discusses how one can identify mindset challenges they are experiencing and what to do about that. David also discusses how to identify parts of your business you should delegate and how to achieve that. Last David talks about his The Successful Minds Podcast and what information they share there.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be talking about three key mindset shifts for your real estate business that will double your revenue without doubling your workload in 2023. Stay tuned this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with David Nagle all about mindset. But before we get to David, just a couple of quick reminders, as always, well, first reminder is to remind us to thank you, the audience for continuing to listen and support our show, the best way you can help us grow is by telling a friend just think of one other realtor that you know that is needing to a mindset shift, especially for today’s episode and then send them a link to this episode, you can find all of our episodes on our website, keeping it real pod.com. And in fact, you can also follow us or find us on any place podcasts are served. Although usually podcast apps only will pull up to the last 300 episodes. And we actually have close to 430 I think at this point. So if you want all the episodes we’ve ever done, and we really believe a lot of our content is timeless and really should be something that you can go back to and get really great wisdom and advice. The best way to do that is on our website. So if you’re somebody that wants to go all the way back through our entire library, the websites the best place to do it, but we appreciate whether you listen to one episode or all 427 I think we appreciate you for being here today and please tell a friend about our show. All right enough for me let’s get to our main event my conversation with David Nagel.
Right today on the show, our guest is David Nagel with life is now and let me tell you more about David is really really an impressive guest. David Nagel is the founder of the multimillion dollar global consulting company. Life is now incorporated. He is also the host of the Business Daily News ranked podcast the successful mind. David’s quest is to teach people how to think successfully so they can experience personal freedom. Now being in the personal and professional development industry. For more than 20 years, David has worked alongside other well known mentors like Bob Proctor and Tony Robbins, and his clients include many well known people, including New York Times number one best selling author, Jen Sincero. Now David has helped 10s of 1000s of students from across the globe, and is one of the architects of the personal growth industry. Through David’s mentoring and podcast 1000s of entrepreneurs, experts and self employed professionals have gained the confidence and found the right mindset needed to increase their revenue, turning their endeavors into seven and eight figure ventures and out forever an avid student David’s core vision is to bring expanded awareness and higher consciousness to as many people as possible and to find greater ways of helping leaders make a bigger impact so that they can lead with their greatest possible so that I’m sorry so that they can lead their greatest possible lives and serve the greatest number of people and I want everyone to visit David’s website not only to learn more about David and his consulting services, but to also check out his podcast and successful mine. So for all things David go to David nagel.com and misspell that David Dav Dee and his last name is N E A, G L E, N E ag le.com. So David daigle.com, we will have a link to that in the show notes, as well as a direct link to his podcast, which we encourage you to subscribe to David, welcome to the show.
Unknown Speaker 5:14 Thanks for having me, it’s an honor to be here. Well,
D.J. Paris 5:17 it’s an honor to have you, I am always interested, I’ve, I’ve always been fascinated by consultants, because I just love that, essentially, they’re problem solvers. And this idea of, you know, real estate agents are so often their own CEO, their their own customer service team, a lot of times, you know, so many of our listeners, it’s just them, and they’re running the entire company, they have to wear every single hat. And this idea of, you know, getting a coaching sort of experience, or having some third party person come in and say, hey, you know, here’s some tweaks that you may want to consider is very, very exciting. And most of our listeners just don’t have that. So I’m excited to get some insight into you about maybe ways they could improve, you know, their mindset or, you know, part part of their behavior to help actually get the more results. But without just working more hours, I know, that’s a that’s a huge one that one of your tenants is there’s ways to become more productive without just pushing and grinding it out more. But before we get to all that, I want to hear more about you and your story. So can you tell us a little bit about your journey in the business world and how you how you ended up in consulting?
David Neagle 6:25 Yeah, it’s an interesting journey. And it’s a very interesting journey. As we were talking about off air I, I was born and raised in Chicago. And from about 13, on my, my wife was kind of taking a bit of a different twist, because my parents got divorced. And we were kind of just left alone, me and my brother to really kind of bring ourselves up, there wasn’t not a lot of engagement there or near as much as there should have been. So I was I was making a lot of mistakes. And I never liked school. As a kid, I didn’t like to like to read. Now I have a library that’s over 4000 books, and I’ve read them all. So it’s a really, it’s a really weird twist, you know, but at 17 years old, I quit high school, I went to the army, got out of the army came home got married, but I had no skills. Okay. I guarded nuclear bases in the, in the, in the army in Germany. So there, I didn’t really have anything that that transferred over into a skill it didn’t, I finished, I got my GED in the army, but I had no other formal education. So I just went to work got married, we had a couple of kids. And I found out really quickly, that I was creating more responsibility that I had the ability to actually stand up and handle. I didn’t have the skill sets to be able to provide financially for my family, but I didn’t know what to do to change it. And the other thing was that I was around the people that I was around, I would ask for help, like, can you give me some advice as to what to do? And all they would say to me, is you shouldn’t have quit high school. It’s like, yeah, kind of get that now. I realized the error, okay, but I can’t go back and change that. So what you know, what do I do now, but they really couldn’t give me any advice. They would just say, work harder, work all the overtime that you can. In the late 80s, I had a brief stint working for Metropolitan Life Insurance company selling insurance, which was actually going well until the savings and loan crisis hit. And then my policies were dropped, like people were dropping policies left and right, right, they just they just couldn’t afford them. So my paycheck went down so low that I couldn’t stay working there. And the only other thing I could do was drive a truck or drive a forklift. So I went to work for a warehouse in while Illinois key foods and at the time, Mr. Key he was the largest food importer in the country. I mean most of the things that we get and appreciate our because he brought those things in and really supplied especially really heavily supplied them to the Midwest area of the country. So I was working there but it wasn’t doing well. I hated what I did. I didn’t like it. I didn’t see any future for myself. I felt extremely stuck and things are progressively getting worse. So I wake up one morning and our cars repossessed right and and that we end up filing for bankruptcy we have to leave our apartment in the middle of the night because we can no longer afford to live there. So we have to move to a really bad neighborhood way down south by Joliet and I have to work I have to drive in to while to go to work. So it’s it things are getting really bad. And I was I was more and more humiliated by the day where we were living. Where Mike where we were bringing our kids up the stories that I was hearing about what was happening there during the day while I was at work. Sure. And I have a I got to work one day and I got reprimanded twice before I even punched in. So I was already you know, the worst possible mood, I was tired, I was exhausted. I was working six and a half days a week. And I was in this trailer, I was loading food into this trailer and I broke down and just started crying. And I was like, God, please show me something, anything how to get out of this, I don’t know how to turn this around. Because my thought was I have to go to college. But I need time and money to do that. And this is before the internet. I mean, there was no you had to go to a physical building, you had to you know, spend time to go get an education, and it was not a possibility at that time in my life. So I had this voice in my head said change your attitude that night, like it was very it was it was like very loud in my head said change your attitude. And I started playing with that idea. And really long story short, I changed three things in my attitude. And I said, I am really going to see if there’s anything to this, like, can this work? Because it wasn’t that I hadn’t heard that before. That’s what teachers used to tell my parents when I was a kid. You know, like David’s a pretty smart guy. If he would change his attitude about school, he would do well, but I hated school. I just couldn’t stand it. He just hated being there. So I started acting like I loved what I did. I started treating people with respect because actually what it wasn’t that I was a mean person, I was angry and didn’t know what to do with that anger shows taking it out disrespectfully to other people. And I really wasn’t doing the best job that I could because nobody ever showed me how to do that. So I was working to go home. I was raised in a in a in a union environment, so to speak in in Chicago, and it was only about doing what you’re paid for wasn’t there was no attitude about really trying to work your way to the top doing more than you’re paid for. Right? That kind of a of an ideal, I did not have that. So if I change this and make this change, I’m like, I am going to do this for a year and see if, if anything changes in my life because I didn’t know what else to do. In 30 days, I tripled my income. Wow. Yeah. Well, I was right. How did that happen a year? Well, I went from 20,000 a year to 62,030 days. And it so spun my head around that I thought to myself, How can this possibly be how can I how can I make this change and have this happen in in 30 days. And what? What became very interesting to observe was that the opportunity to do that had been around me for two years, but I didn’t see it as an opportunity. Because I was looking through a lens of being angry and blaming and victimized were everywhere that I went. And the what happened was there was this guy that used to come to our doc at key foods twice a week, every Tuesday and every Thursday, and he drove a fuel truck out of Lamont Okay, so a company called Osco fuel. Okay, the big red trucks. You’ve probably seen him downtown. Yeah. Right. So he would come he would come every Tuesday every Thursday, and he filled our trucks with fuel and he also filled the trailers because they were refrigerated trailers, so they had to fill them with diesel fuel. Part of my job was to make sure that he filled the right ones, the ones that we loaded with food to check his ticket off, and then you know, let’s send him on his way. But the guy always read the diesel fuel. Like he really stuck he she had to be outside working, whether it was like 100 degrees and mosquitoes and humans it gets in Chicago, or if it was 20 below out there or if it was pouring rain, he was always out in the element. And we and I used to think to myself, well at least I’m underneath this dock, you know, I get this doc over my head. Like this is some big this guy’s got it real bad. Yeah, right, exactly. And I get to know this guy over two years. His name was drew batty. He used to live in Whiting, Indiana. Now he lives in Michigan. But what but after I make this change, he comes up to me one day, and he says How long are you going to stay here? Because he knew that I wanted to get out that I was looking for something else. And I’m like, Drew, I don’t know. Uh, you know, I have I have absolutely no idea like I would so do something if I only knew what to do. And he said, Why don’t you come to work with me, like coming to work where I’m working. And I’m like, and I started ripping on the guy right in front of him. And I’m like, Dude, you drive a bomb on wheels. You deliver fuel, like, I don’t want to do that. I said, I actually said this. I said this to him. I’m like, has anybody ever died? Driving? That’s a reasonable question. I thought so. Then he says to me, Yes, last year, a guy a guy going down 65 and driving down to Indiana flips it and he burns to death. And I’m like saying, I don’t want to come work for and I want to work with you. And I made this I made the real insulting comment to him. I said, besides all of that, I said how much could you possibly be making? Oh, well, last year I made 50,000 Wow. And I went what Am I get out of here? You didn’t make no 50,000 driving that thing. I don’t know what I was thinking. Like, I didn’t know what I was comparing it to in my mind, but it was pure ignorance on my part. Sure. And he says, I will bring you by check my check stub next week when I come in, I’ll show you if you don’t believe me, I’m like, Yeah, you do that, right. Next week, he comes and he shows me and he had made a little over 50,000. And I’m like, You’re kidding me. So all of a sudden, I’m now looking at this. Like, maybe this is an opportunity pay pay attention here. I had a ton of questions, I had to get over all kinds of personal fear about what this was. Sure. Long story short, though. I went, I went there. Within a week, I got hired, I started working and my income tripled, instantly. Amazing. And the thing was this, because this could have been a story where I went to work there, I acted like I got lucky, I worked really hard and either stayed a truck driver there for the rest of my life, because there were guys that did that, that there spent their whole career driving those fuel trucks. Or maybe I could have gotten into management. It was a small family owned company. So that was kind of rare.
But I didn’t look at it as luck. I didn’t believe in luck. I thought to myself, I did something that caused this. I just don’t know what it is, and what not. So I start I pulled out a copy of thinking grow rich that I had when I worked for Metropolitan Life. And in the introduction, there’s a there’s a thing called the slide disguises of opportunity. And Hill says that most people miss opportunity, because they don’t see it as opportunity. They see it as being unfortunate, or misfortune or temporary defeat, they don’t actually see the opportunity that’s in front of them. And when I read that, I thought to myself, that’s what this is. That’s why I didn’t see this for two years, because I was looking at it as something that it’s not. I got so fascinated by that idea. I’m like, I gotta learn more. So I started reading everything I could get my hands on, I started going to seminars, I went to like Tony Robbins in like 1993. And he’s like, rah, rah, it was I thought it was like, this is the coolest thing in the world. I didn’t even know this world existed. And I was on this path for about seven years. And I started working with people because everybody saw my life changing. It just kept getting better and better and better. I started out at this company driving a truck. When I left, I was in charge of expanding the company across the country. And I never went to school, I just kept learning on the job and playing myself the best that I could. And people would say to me, How can I fix my business? Do you have any idea what I could do different, and I would give them advice and they would do it, they would start winning. And I’m like this is a business. So I so in in it’s actually it’s actually this month 1999, October of 1999 is when I started the business 24 years ago. And I started it I walked away from what I was doing, and I never went back. And it’s been a journey of a lifetime. It’s just been unbelievable.
D.J. Paris 18:05 Well, you have first of all, congratulations on 24 years in the consulting business. And also thank you for your service, as well. I know that you said that earlier in the story, but something that that, you know, I think is important to for us that are not in military service to realize that sometimes, you know, soldiers or people that you know, are in the military, whether they’re soldiers or not, are coming home, they’re finishing up their their commitment, and maybe they don’t I mean, I’m sure there’s more opportunities now for them to develop skills than than existed when you when you were there, but some people come back and they don’t know what to do. And they don’t have those skill sets. So it’s important to remember that, yeah, we and their mess.
David Neagle 18:48 Yeah. So you know, you’re I was interviewing lieutenant colonel and my own podcast a couple of weeks ago. And he told me, he said, you know, we lost about 7000 men and women in the Afghan war, he said, but we’ve lost over 30,000 due to suicide since they’ve come back. unbeli And he was telling me just you know, the PTSD, the mental illness is horrific, and we’re not doing anything to take care of them. So there’s there’s a major issue out there.
D.J. Paris 19:14 Well, and yes, and obviously there is so any of us know veterans and people that come back like let’s Let’s put on our empathy and passion hats and let’s figure out how what we can do to help serve them as they served us. But I also wanted to mention you as you were talking about your own journey, I was thinking about it’s probably the name of a book. It certainly isn’t a phrase I made up although I’d love to say that I did. But it sounded like a lot of it was this gift of desperation, right? You had responsibilities. You know, if you were a had been a single guy and you know early on in life where you’re sort of like, I have a crappy job I’m not you know, I don’t see a lot of room for improvement. But it’s only me I’m only sold dealing with my own self that that maybe isn’t for some People as painful as Oh, I have, you know, a family to support. I have, you know, trying to figure out, I have bills to pay, I have all these responsibilities, and I’m stuck. And I think a lot of even our listeners who, who get in get their real estate license, probably a big chunk of the reason why is they want freedom, they want the freedom to work, when they’d like to, they want the ability to be their own boss. Of course, nobody tells them like, that’s a lot to do. And it’s not the easiest thing to figure out on your own, which is why coaching exists and consultants and but it’s, it’s a really hard thing for an individual practitioner to figure out. But I love the fact that as you sort of, you know, progress through your career, even though you were in what, you know, admittedly lower level or lower skilled jobs, you said, your idea was, well, if if I if I change my attitude, let’s just let’s just test this out and see, is there an empirical result? Is there, you know, is my life actually going to look differently, and it tripled your salary? Because you did identify an opportunity that at first glance was not an opportunity. It was like, Oh, that would be a demotion. If I were to come work for you. I might, I might, you know, have injury or die. And also, there’s no way you make any money. You’re the guy filling our trucks. And sure enough, no, there was because, you know, that person was was kind enough to look past some of the jokey insults and go, actually, I do pretty well, and you should come work with me. And you were smart enough, or maybe desperate, and upper, whatever that part is, to be able to go, oh, okay, this is a real thing. And then take action. And I think you’re right, it’s like mindset really allows people like you were saying, in the Napoleon Hill book, you know, to some of some of operate, some of these opportunities that that come to us don’t seem like opportunities, and they almost might even seem like problems. And this idea of keeping your mind open enough to see a different path is exactly what you did. And then when you went to work for this smaller company, which he said, really didn’t have a lot of obvious opportunity, because it’s a family run business, they’re going to be promoting, probably from within, I don’t know if I’m even going to progress. But you know, the one thing that I’m sorry to keep going on and on, but I just wanted, you reminded me of something that I think is so important, which is, which I wish you know, and my parents did a wonderful job raising me but but one thing I wish it would have been drilled into me a little bit more was that even, you know, I was like a dishwasher when I was a teenager, and I had those sort of super low, low skill level jobs. And it’s really hard work is you know, working in a warehouse is crazy hard, I did construction, I did a lot of those those kinds of tasks. And every boss at any of those companies, whether it’s a small family firm or a large, they really are just looking for somebody to shine in whatever position it is, and like the boss goes, Oh, thank God, this, this person cares. And we’re going to keep our eye on this person. And opportunities do become available. Not every time but but in a lot of instances. Or if the company you’re at, doesn’t recognize how well you’re doing. Other people will, and, and they’ll might extend opportunities to you. So I love that story. Okay, so thank you for that. And I really was just really taken in by by your journey. And it’s really obviously very inspiring. So as you I know, you you, you know, work with with a lot of different businesses and also with real estate agents. I want to talk about mindset, because you really talked about, you know, changing attitude, you know, whether we call it attitude mindset, we’d love to hear sort of what your thoughts are on how somebody could actually start to, to identify maybe mindset challenges that they’re experiencing, and then what they can do about it? Well, let
Unknown Speaker 23:52 me tell you about a couple of interesting things that happened to me with real estate people along my journey very early on. One of the first that I can remember, real estate people that I that that hired me, was a guy who was doing land deals, right. And he was pretty successful here in the states doing land deals. And then the Chinese started to come in. And they were buying up enormous plots of land. These were 100 million dollar deals, and where he was succeeding before he was completely failing. So I don’t remember how he got introduced to me. And I had never really done anything with real estate before. But I had a conversation with him and he hired me. And I said, well tell me what’s going on. He was like, I can’t figure it out. Like I’m succeeding over here. He says, but every, every one of these huge deals that I tried to close with the Chinese, it’s like it’s just going out the window. Well, here’s something that’s interesting. I had some experience working with some Chinese companies, and they do business different. You know, they’re number one. They’re very meticulous about The bottom line and all the different pieces of a contract that may not be important to us here, but they’re very important. It’s very important to that. So anyway, so he’s telling me the story. And I said, Well, where are you losing the deal? And he’s like, it’s at the contract, we’re losing the deal at the contract. We can’t, we can’t seem to agree. And I said, well, like how, tell me what’s going on. So I don’t remember the exact stories. But what he was telling me. And what I I started listening to the story he was telling me it and when became very relevant to me was that what was important to the Chinese was not important to him. And he could not see why these other things were important to that. And it was a cultural issue. So I started talking to him about the reasons why these things were important to them, and that he needed to give great importance to these. And he immediately went out and closed $100 million deal. And then he closed the $200 million deal after that. And the guy just, I mean, that was it. I mean, he was just he was out a rocket ship from that point on. But he said something to me, that was also the huge breakthrough. For me, he’s like, I cannot believe that this was right in front of me, and I couldn’t see it. And I’m literally losing 10s of millions of dollars in commission, because I can’t see this problem. And I’m like, It’s the craziest thing, isn’t it? You know, it’s like we see through this bias of our own. We tried to make everything fit into that. So another another story short one, was that a woman contacted me who was working through some other company that I did work for. And she said, mainly chance, do you work with real estate agents? And I said, Well, I have on occasion, you know, broker here, broker there to everything she said, she said, My brother is in the top 1% of real estate agents with Prudential Realty in the company. And this was right around when the the crisis happened in Oh, eight. And they’re really having trouble, right? Sure. Would you would you talk to them? And I said, Yeah, sure, I’ll talk to him. So I started talking to them. And by shifting what they were focusing on, traditionally, for that not considering what had changed because of this crisis that we were in, they all became stuck. And I had them up and selling within like 10 days from that end, but it but they were so stuck in their mind that nobody would sell because of the crash in the market. Like they had made up their mind that they couldn’t do business. So after reframing it and getting them to reframe the idea of okay, because here’s something that I recognized very early on, were an actually I learned this working with salespeople, salespeople would come up with the idea that because of some situation or reason people stopped buying, right, oh, people aren’t buying because it’s summer, or it’s a Christmas holiday, or their kids are going back to school. And I’m like, That’s all BS, it’s complete BS, there’s two different value systems, you have people that have all the reasons not to buy, because of search situations or circumstances in life, possibly even the amount of money that’s coming in or out of their life, those things that value is higher on their, their priority than somebody else who has a different value set. And what’s more important to them, right? They they buy with a different idea in their mind, if you change who your market is based on, you’re looking for a different value set, instantly, you will move from people that aren’t buying to people that are buying, and they had never thought of that before. So when they would do that they would go from not selling to selling instantly. Just by just by doing that. And of course then you have the people that don’t believe you at all. And they just get us dig their heels in that they’re right. You’re wrong.
D.J. Paris 28:52 Sure. Yeah. No, this makes so much sense. You know, I was thinking back to the Napoleon Hill quote, I forgot exactly how it was phrased the sly, Sly opportunities, this idea of good opportunities at dying surprises of opportunity, slide disguises of opportunity I love that it reminds me of another phrase call don’t call the elusive obvious. It’s like it’s right there but it’s elusive. You it’s right in front of you. And and you’re absolutely right. You know, and that’s happening right now. And in the in most Realtors businesses today we have rates, you know, have doubled since their lows of A Few Years Ago and even though rates are still relatively low in comparison to Two Years Ago, you know, realtors are going oh my gosh, people people don’t want to buy right now. And it’s like okay, maybe the people that wanted to buy two Years Ago with a 3% interest rate Yeah, now that maybe they don’t want to take a loan out for six and a half percent right now even though to me that’s still pretty reasonable, but maybe to them it isn’t. But there are lots of people who who will who will find opportunities to purchase or to sell property now. That that but it You’re right, it results, it requires a shift in mindset for the agent to say, Okay, where are these people that are interested in in taking advantage? It’s almost like buying a stock when it’s undervalued. That’s right. Yes. It’s not, it’s harder to find people that, you know, will do that because it goes against some just general sort of human behavior of oh, it’s it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, at a loss right now, do I want to buy something at a loss? Yes, you do, if you think it’s going to go up, but the vast majority of people don’t maybe operate or think that way. So you do have to change your mindset, and then go, Okay, well, where are these people hanging out, or it reminds me of a quick story I heard from a really successful car dealer, when this was back during the, the oil embargo in the in the 70s, when there was oil, just massive oil, or sorry, gasoline shortages. And so, you know, people weren’t buying big cars, because they it was too difficult to get gas. And so these car salespeople were struggling, and the really successful ones went, Well, where do I Where can I go? Where people don’t care that much about this? Who can still buy luxury cars? Like, oh, what if I go hang out at a country club? What if I drive one of our fancy cars over there? Are those people still buying cars? Probably? Those are people least affected by something like that. So So yes, you’re right. There’s always opportunity. But you’re right. It’s about understanding, how do I how do I shift? And it requires a right a shift in belief and attitude? How do you? How do you suggest people start to examine their beliefs? And then and then change them?
Unknown Speaker 31:30 Well, that’s that. So that’s a great point right there. Because you talked about people coming into being a real estate agent or a broker because they would give them freedom. But psychologically, with the average business person, does that’s going to start their own business, is the sell at the level that they believe is easiest for them? Sure. Right. So they’re so they may not go after the guy that sell the $10 million house, they might go after somebody selling $130,000 house? Because that’s what they see themselves as so part of it is to address that, right? How what lens are you actually seeing the business world through, isn’t at your comfort level, because just like you said, with going to the country club, there are a ton of people out there that want to buy and sell right now, because they have different reasons for buying and selling. They’re not nickel and diming. Their their ideas of what they want to commit to it, that 3% doesn’t mean anything to them, they could care less, right? What the percentage is, they just want to move or need to move for various different reasons. And they’re probably looking at much bigger sales when they actually do that. So the first thing that I say is, if they’re not seeing if they’re actually not seeing that, that opportunity, then I challenged them to look at their own comfort zone for who they’re actually selling to. Right, because now that that opportunity has shifted, the only way that they’re going to be successful is if they grow out of that, if they grow out of that level themselves, then they have to actually start to see the opportunity at a different level. So how can they internally shift their value set to go after a different type of a client maybe even increased their own goals in their life? You know, really go after more? When that starts to click generally you see the the alternative of that go like they’ll start looking at other people. I got a 21 year old kid that that is a broker. He was a friend of my daughter’s and he’s probably doing about 5 million a year right now, man, so he just he would he just goes after commercial real estate. Like he learned. He watched he goes in he negotiates. He finds things he looks for reasons people want to sell and he’s just not going to debt and he’s a young guy with no experience.
D.J. Paris 33:48 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s fine. Follow Up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really impressive we, we bring out a lot of agents who are in their 20s, who are killing it. And because I always find like, boy that just impresses me again, most, most people I knew in my early to mid 20s weren’t buying and selling homes. So it wasn’t like I could just, you know, hit up my friends who were buying condos, no, they weren’t buying condos, they were renting, and living with roommates and all of that. But you’re you’re absolutely right. I think, you know, for anyone listening, I think there’s this, if you get a little tinge in your stomach of discomfort, when you think about, well, I would like to sell, you know, maybe it’s more luxury properties, or I want to make the switch to commercial, if I’m residential, or I just want to do something a little different than what is in my comfort zone. You know, if I’m selling homes that are 100. And you know, like you said, 140,000, and I really want to sell homes that are 300,000. And above, you know, it’s, but it scares me like that, I think is is an important thing to note is if you get a little bit scared, but you know, it’s like the next part for you, it’s probably the right path. So there’s a little bit about getting comfortable with discomfort, right? I think that’s like, if you can tolerate that little pittance in your stomach and realize that’s a signal that I’m a little bit scared to the next level, but people get to the next level people do it. And, and so what would you recommend? If you’re like, Okay, I want to get to that next level. You know, and I and I, I’m not exactly sure, you know, but I, you know, I’m scared because I don’t maybe I don’t have the skill set yet to do that. Or I don’t know how to reach those people. You know, what would you what would you recommend?
Unknown Speaker 36:44 So the first thing that I recommend is I asked them what they really want? What are your goals? What do you really want, because if you’re really being honest with yourself, part of your inner direction of what you desire will begin to lead you into the outer possibility of whatever that is that you’re looking for. But most people are not raised in an environment where it’s okay for them to want what they want. Right? So they’re right, you’re you’re kind of raised with this idea, like you don’t need that. Only buy what you need, don’t spend more than you need, or you don’t deserve it. That’s, that’s absolutely, absolutely. So they so they get stuck in a financial freedom in their mind that keeps them at a very low level. And then when they do business there, they’re actually looking for people that are struggling, just like them. So so that’s one of the first things that I do there. And the other thing is, is I kind of reframe the idea of fear, because most people will say to me, David, how do I get rid of this fear, like I just got all the all this fear. And I’m like you don’t, you know, matter of fact, you don’t want to write either is actually a good thing. It keeps us alive. If we removed all of your fear, you probably be dead in a couple of weeks, because you wouldn’t be alert to things that could actually kill you. So the idea is, what is fear doing for you? All it’s doing is it’s saying, Hey, here’s something you should pay attention to. It’s not saying follow the fear. It’s not saying listen to the fear, it’s a pay attention, because there’s something outside of the way that we’re wired. That is possible threat. So pay attention, but then you’re supposed to use your intellect to evaluate whether or not this is a fear? And if so why and if y then what is it that you need to do so that so it’s about teaching a person how to think through the possibility of whatever fear is suggesting, because it’s not an absolute, it’s just a suggestion. And it should be a suggestion, it keeps us on our toes for what we’re doing and helps us make better decisions. The other thing is that if you make a decision, and you made the wrong decision, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a great thing, because it gives you real world data to reevaluate how you made the decision. And then to go back and make a different one. Right? Every entrepreneur fails their way to their success
D.J. Paris 38:58 that I want. I want to pause for a second, because that is the most true thing I have experienced. I’d read that a lot. Certainly when I was growing up, and I yeah, all you see, all I would see is the success. And of course you don’t see the failures. It’s almost like looking on Instagram, you don’t, you don’t see as much of the botched meals that people make, or, you know, the pictures of their spouses that haven’t been retouched in the, you know, it’s like, we’re not seeing videos of them yelling at having an argument with it with their children on, you know, but, but this idea that learning actually comes from failure and failure, not failure is probably the wrong word. But but we’re not getting the results you want. Or if you you know step on your own success and you you know, make the mistake that that you know, feels like it costs you. You’re absolutely right. The most successful entrepreneurs I know are the ones that fail the most.
Unknown Speaker 39:50 Yeah, absolutely. In our in our company. We we my CEO has developed something called sun shining your mistakes which Is your we want you to make mistakes here, right? Because if you’re not making mistakes, we’re not stretching enough. And if we’re not stretching enough, we’re not learning and growing. So it’s constantly, it’s fine to make mistakes. But it’s weird because well, it’s not really weird anymore. But it is an interesting thing, that when people come to work for with us, and they you start to bring them into that culture, they’re a little standoffish about it. And the reason is, is because people are taught mistakes or not, okay, we start learning that message in grade school. And it’s like, no, you’ve got to get it right, you’ve got to get it perfect. You can’t, you know, you’ll never be able to hold down a job if you screw things up, and then up people that are paralyzed in the decision making process, and nothing like you don’t have any information. So you make a decision, you have to make a decision. It doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, just make the decision. And then we’ll pick up the pieces as we go and make new ones.
D.J. Paris 40:56 Yeah, I agree. I really well said I have nothing more to add to that. Because it is so important to what’s like that old expression, feel the fear and do it anyway. Right? Like, yes, the fear is there, pay attention, and then identify as this, you know, someone chasing me with a knife, do I really need to run and get out of harm’s way? Maybe? And then Okay, great. And if it’s if it’s, oh, I’m just worried about failing, I’m worried about, you know, taking my career to the next level. Good. Now you know what you’re afraid of, and now you can work to, to reframe that and learn whatever skills you need. Because, again, fear is, like you said, providing information to us. There’s something that’s stopping me from moving forward. Now, I’ve identified what it is, Oh, it’s this this glitch I have, because my parents always told me I wouldn’t be successful or whatever, whatever the backstory is, okay. That’s your story. That’s, that’s fine. And yes, thankfully, there are paths forward. One of the things I wanted to talk about, because I think realtors, oftentimes, you know, as I said, at the beginning, they’re wearing so many different hats. They’re basically every part of their company. And of course, one person’s skill set, inherent skill set to their, their, you know, makeup, a genetic makeup, is probably not going to be sufficient to do every part of a business, which is why, you know, why, why there are employees and businesses that can do things that maybe other people can’t do. So I want to talk about delegation, like delegating work, because so many realtors are just solo practitioners. And I’m curious about your thoughts about how to delegate and how somebody should identify parts of their business that they should step away from, and and have someone else do for that?
Unknown Speaker 42:37 Great question. So we have a saying, when when there’s a problem that shows up or there’s too much work that shows up the question in your mind should be who not how, who, not how, because you’re not supposed to be doing all the work. The the idea of a self made person is a ridiculous idea. There’s no such thing. And, you know, you’re probably only really good at one or two things, everything else you need to find people that are better than you. So the so that you should be consistently thinking who not how, and I need to build in the direction that I want to go, I should not be hiring based on an emergency in my company, but then it always comes down to well, how are you going to pay for it? Well, first of all, you have to hire strategically. But the idea is that the hiring of a person is supposed to free you up to go make more sales not bog you down to so that you can’t actually pay for the person. And what’s really fascinating is that if you look at companies that really hire in with the idea of in the direction they want to grow as a company, they always find a way to pay people, but you don’t need to pay a person until you make a decision to actually hire the person to begin with. Right. So when you make that decision, you change yourself over to a completely different type of desire and necessity in your life to be happy. So you actually start manifesting more business by taking on more responsibility.
D.J. Paris 44:03 This is a really important point and and it isn’t just a sort of a nice thing to say because it sounds good. This is really important. And I think we all all of us listening have been in a situation where we want it to get to some next level whether it’s our career or relationships are great, a great example so if we’re not in a relationship that we desire to be in one and we really work through what we want kind of partner we want the kind of partner we’re gonna be all of a sudden once that’s kind of worked out and it doesn’t work this way for everybody but for people who really put a lot of time in to going okay, I want to get serious about you know, finding a partner. It does eventually show up at usually the right exact time. But but it does it or some people just get lucky, I guess and it happens, you know when they least expect it. But for most of us once we put our mind to something you’re right, all of a sudden the blinders almost come off, and it’s Like our field of vision expands, almost I know that’s kind of a, you know, a bit of a metaphor, but But it actually sort of does happen. You’re right, opportunities just start presenting themselves. I’ll give you a perfect example. So I’ve always been, I didn’t pick up I realized I was very sensitive. And I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew that I felt things maybe more deeply than, than certain other people in my life. And I, I felt disconnected sometimes. And I was, you know, I cry easily and a few other things. And so I started, I was thinking about it. A couple of years ago, I was in an airport, and I go, I wonder if there’s a condition or not a condition. But I wonder if there’s something that there’s like a category of people, like, I can’t be the only person out there. But my whole life, I just been told, Oh, you’re just too sensitive or whatever. Or and I would tell myself that and then I just got to be some other people out there like me. And so I Google it. Well, sure enough, there’s a whole temperament it affects 20% of the population. It’s not a negative. It’s just the temperament. And it’s called highly sensitive. And it’s actually a legitimate thing. And because I just said, Maybe this isn’t a DJ thing. Maybe there’s, you know, other people that that could, you know, help give me some guidance about what to do with the sensitivity. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just something you have to learn how to cope, right? All of a sudden, I found this whole community and I went, Oh, I’m not one of every five peoples like me. And oh, and there’s all sorts of help I can get to help me learn skills to cope with this thing that I thought is a massive disadvantage. For me. It turns out, it’s not a disadvantage at all. But But this idea of, you know, 44 years of my life, I was like, Oh, this is this awful burden I have to carry. It’s like, actually, you know, now I can, because I opened up my mind to maybe there’s a there’s, this is called something. And it’s like, Oh, wow. And now I’ve gotten immersed in that community. And it’s like, oh, yeah, this is, but you’re right. It’s like it’s about changing one’s mindset and seeing what opportunities exist.
Unknown Speaker 46:51 It’s a it’s a great gift, being an empath. I mean, that your sensitivity allows you to see things in people and read people in ways that other people can’t even begin to understand. Yeah, that is a fantastic gift to have. It
D.J. Paris 47:08 sure is, and, and back to delegating for a second, because did you ever think that we would live at a time where we now can access work from all over the globe, from people who don’t live down the street who don’t live in our local communities, and if you can hire people locally, that’s awesome as well, and ice, but not everyone can right away, maybe the finances just aren’t there. But you know, you need help. I mean, it was a lot tougher to do that, you know, 20 years ago, even. And now, you know, with the with, with us just being connected globally, we can find help from all corners of the of the globe, and oftentimes for less money than maybe that we couldn’t afford to hire somebody locally for it. That’s right.
Unknown Speaker 47:52 That’s right. Yeah. And we teach people how to do that all the time. Because it is a major, it’s a major obstacle in the mind of the person. But I want to challenge everybody that’s listening this like, I’m not saying you have to believe me, do investigate this yourself. Listen, our podcasts and you’ll, you’ll begin to understand it because it does take a bit of time to understand it. But let’s, let’s be aware of something very important. If your parents were not entrepreneurial, you were basically raised middle class working class, the rules and values for surviving financially, when that’s the class that you’re raised by are completely different than if you’re in business for yourself. And I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m not doing a good bad comparison. I’m just saying different. And justifiably so if somebody else is completely in control of your income, you’re working for another person, you have to make decisions based on that reality, because you don’t have the ability to increase your income that will. But when you’re in your business, you do have that ability. So the more you understand that ability, and you have the ability to exercise it, it comes down to this, I only have to be concerned about hiring somebody, even if I don’t have the money, I only have to be concerned about hiring somebody if I’m not willing to do the work to pay for them. If I’m willing to do the work to pay for this person, I can go ahead and hire anybody that I want. And I can make the I can make the determination to make the money to be able to do it. And I become extremely focused in that direction. And we do that with companies every day, every day. And they’re just astounded by the idea that they were just psychologically stuck that they couldn’t do it. Because they didn’t necessarily have the cash in hand to do it. I’m like, you don’t need to have the cash in hand. You need to make the decision to do it. And you need to make the decision that you’re going to work in what your sales to bring the money in to be able to do it. Changes. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 49:46 it really does. And it’s it’s, it almost appears as if sometimes by magic, and it isn’t magic, but there’s a magical element to it that when we put our minds to something and we really commit and You know, like, I’m going to head to the gym here shortly. And I nobody hates the gym more than me. But all I did was I said, Look, here’s the reality, I cannot, I will not go by myself and I’m, at the time was 44 years old. I’m like, I know myself, I would love to go to the gym on my own, it’s not going to happen. And there’s a little defeatist attitude there. But it was very honest. I was like, Look, I’ve been living in this body for 44 years, I pretty much know what I’m motivated to do and not do. But is there a solution? Can I still get fit? Well, I had to go, I’m just gonna have to do the expensive option and hire a trainer. And I thought I can’t afford it. It’s It is an incredible amount of money. And yet, here I am, two years later, it’s not that my income has dramatically shifted, where I just now have so much money that I can hire trainers. No, I did it even when I really couldn’t afford it. And sure enough, the money showed up. It just kept showing up. It’s not like, you know, you know, it’s not showing enough showed up, or I could continue to do that. And here I am now two years later, and I all I did was change my attitude. I just went, I’m going to have to pay for this, I’m going to have to figure out a way to pay for this or else I’m not going to be healthy. And it was really that simple. And you’re absolutely right. Like I never thought I could afford to pay for that. And somehow I did.
Unknown Speaker 51:19 Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a very interesting dynamic with human beings. When we are split focused on something, all we do is see the confusion and the reasons that we can’t, when we make a decision, we really focus in on what it is that we need. And we have to understand something, we’re programmed to manifest what we need, we will always get what we need. But people aren’t consciously aware of that when you become consciously aware of that everything in your life changes because you’re like, holy crap, I had no idea that this would actually work if I if I did it. But you have to be willing to try it in order to be able to do it, you got to step into those decisions. To do it. It I mean, it completely changed my life. And I got the first semblance of that when I made the decision to change my attitude. And all of a sudden, everything in my life changed because of it. I’m like, wait a minute, what, what thing matrix did I just walk through, this isn’t supposed to happen to a 17 year old dropout? Like it’s not I’m not supposed to triple my income in a month. But then, so that from there, I went from 50,000 a year to 50,000 a month, and then over a million and then beyond that. And it was like it, it just kept getting better. But I kept doing the same principles that I was learning along the way. And it’s everybody else around me could not even begin to understand how this could even be possible. Except for the
D.J. Paris 52:44 people that have gone before you Of course, yes. Who know it and and they look at you and go, Oh, he’s one of us. Yeah, that’s it. And, and, and the good news, too, about pretty much every local community, you know, whether you live in rural Montana, or Iowa, or you’re in a major city, like you’re outside of Charlotte, I’m here and in Chicago, there are people that have done this, and and I would encourage you to beg, plead with them to develop a friendship or relationship or at least take them out to coffee. And say, tell me about how do you start your day? What do you what do you say, when you wake up to yours? You know, when you come across a problem or a challenge? What are you doing? And it’s amazing success leaves clues, doesn’t it? I mean, people will just not even close people will just tell you, this is what I do.
Unknown Speaker 53:30 Yeah. Yeah. And and the higher you go as far as successful people, the more information that they’ll give you, because we want to help people, right? I mean, I want to help people. That’s what I learned how to do what I did when I became aware of it. I’m like, I thought at the time, this is the greatest secret on the planet. Nobody knows this. Right? I found something out, I can’t believe and it was very true that many people don’t know, most people are not raised in that with that kind of a mindset. And people will say to me, Well, Mike, you know, come on mindset really isn’t that like, you know, looky looky are, you know? And I’m like, No, it isn’t. Mindset is the way you do anything. Right? It is the way you think about things, the way that you learn about things and your mindset is biased to the way that you were raised. Yeah. So that’s the only thing that you know, but there’s things way beyond what you know, that can have an amazing impact. Like you said, it’s almost like magic on your life and people just don’t know
D.J. Paris 54:29 it. And it might not come in the timeframe that you’re expecting. In fact, it likely won’t. It’ll either take longer or shorter. So that’s also the another challenge is to is to commit to the activity or the discipline and trust that, you know, the answers will reveal themselves at the right time. It just might not be the time that’s most convenient for you. Absolutely. Tell us about the podcast. So we’ve been talking about it and I want our audience to have a resource where they can go and reset their mind their expectations. And again, this is not from, you know, David’s not a guy who knows the the sort of, you know, cool sounding phrases and things to say he actually consults businesses, he you know, he’s worked with multibillion dollar businesses. This is somebody who is paid to get results. So, so I love that you have a podcast and you’re not just a self help guy, which you know, some self help guys are amazing. But I like people that get results in the real world, too. And so tell us about the successful mind podcast.
Unknown Speaker 55:32 So in 2017, I was I just I got the idea. Like, I want to try a podcast. At that point, there were about 500,000 podcasts today. There’s 4 million alone in in the United States, right. That’s grown that much. Yeah. So I started it. And I was doing it. And me and my partner Steph, to us. What we were having a meeting with Gary Vaynerchuk, in New York, in his office, and we were sitting around just kind of shooting the shit with him. And we were talking and he was like, how’s the podcast going? And we’re telling them, and he says to me, what, what information are you putting out in the podcast? Right? And we had been doing it for about a year at this point. And I was telling him and he said, is that your best information? And I said, What do you mean best? He’s like, is that the results driven information that you would give a private client? I’m like, No. And he said, I want you to start giving. He said, I challenge you to start giving that information for free on the podcast. And I’m like, Are you kidding me? He’s like, my secret sauce. I can’t give that for free. Yeah. So then he says something to me, that really kind of changed my my vision on Sunday, he saw me he said, David, let me ask you a question. He’s just honest, just between us? Is there anything that you teach that if a person knew what it was, they couldn’t find it on the internet? And I’m like, That’s a good point. He’s like, it’s the same thing with me. He said, so they’re not paying for the information. They’re paying for contact, right. So when you get when you consult somebody, they’re paying for contact or paying for strategy, they’re paying for that. But the information itself, they could get anywhere, they just don’t know what it is. He said, so if you give enough of that information, you’re gonna grow your business and
D.J. Paris 57:12 or they don’t know who to trust, they don’t know whose information is accurate. And you can build your brand through a podcast of, Hey, I am an authority figure here, I do actually have real world experience and results. Let me let me tell you what I do. And then you’re right, even though it maybe you didn’t, you know, create all of your own learning, you’ve learned it through others, and through other experience, you still can be of incredible value to people, even if you give away the secret sauce,
Unknown Speaker 57:42 yes. And that. So that’s what I started doing. We’re like, Okay, I’m gonna give this a try and see what happens. Our major concern was that it would piss off our private clients, if they should get angry, because they’re overpaying for this. We never had one of them even even say that it wasn’t even a thought on their mind. But what did happen was that every time that we would do a live event, or a seminar, or a speaking engagement or something, one of the one of the things that we would ask people on a forum would be how did you hear about us? And almost overnight, we started getting tons of people going the Podcast, the podcast, that was our first introduction. Now, it’s hard to measure that as you know, right? I mean, because these aren’t getting as much
D.J. Paris 58:21 data. Very little, unfortunately, very little.
Unknown Speaker 58:24 Exactly right. It’s not like it’s not like your regular marketing campaigns that give you tons of information. But you do get the information on the opposite side, when you ask people, How did you first hear about us? And they tell you, it’s the podcast, you know, that thing is working. And, you know, I mean, we went over 2 million views in a relatively short period of time, without any marketing agenda on our end, just putting it out there. So it’s spread by word of mouth. So it’s, it’s a really great thing. And there’s a ton of teaching on there. And there’s also we just started something new me and Steph tous she’s my CEO of my company. And we’re currently do once a week we’re telling stories based on real challenges that companies that we work with have and how we’re actually fixing those things for people on so so that so we’re doing that and people are loving what they’re loving it so check it out. Yeah, so everyone
D.J. Paris 59:16 I want everyone to consider no I’m not don’t consider just subscribe listen to one episode, see if you like it because you know, sometimes what you what you all you really need is a different voice telling you this is telling you in some cases, things you already know. But if it’s coming from an outside source that you trust and that has authority, a lot of times that can sort of sink in a lot a lot easier than trying to convince yourself of something that you know maybe you read in a book at some point but never implemented. So give give David’s voice and his and his partner’s voice a shot because they get results. So everyone subscribe to the successful mind. Podcast. It is available everywhere podcasts are served, so call couple ways you can find it, just go to whatever podcast app you’re using and search for the successful mind, you’ll find David, and you can subscribe there, or we’ll have a link to it in our show notes. Also, you can visit David’s website, David nagel.com. That’s an E A g l e, also a link to that is in our show notes. So you can learn about all things David, and his company at David nagel.com. Well, David, I think this is a perfect place to wrap up. And really, really appreciate your time on the show, you’ve inspired me to think even for myself outside of the box, this is my fifth year doing this podcast and I, you know, we’ve tried to make improvements and adjustments along the way, but am I putting out my very best content, I need to examine that and think about, you know, what I could be adding or subtracting from the show to to make it better. So the best way that you guys can help me do that is by letting me know what you think of the show. So best way is, let us give us a review. Good, bad or indifferent. We want to know what you think because this show is for you. And if we don’t know what you need, it’s hard for us to make improvements. So let us know. Leave us a review whatever podcast app you use, let us know send us messages, emails to the show that also helps us. And also let David know what you think about the successful mind. Go check out an episode and let him know so that he can better meet your needs on his own podcast as well. So David, thank you on behalf of our audience, thank you. This was a coaching session that you really gave, you know, 20,000 people, and we they appreciate it. So how about doing David a solid and subscribing to his podcast? Maybe you’d get more of this every single time he publishes an episode. I know I’m going to subscribe. So David, thank you for challenging pleasure, man. I mean, in my own comfort zone to do better on this podcast and everyone can always get to the next level. But sometimes you just need a different voice telling you to do certain things. So on behalf of the audience, we thank David for his his time and on behalf of David and myself we want to thank the audience for making it all the way to the end of this episode. One more thing will ask if you telephoned think of one other agent out there that’s struggling to get to the next level and maybe just needs a little bit of encouragement this episode should help them do that and also turn them on to David’s podcasts successful mind for regular you know, regular episodes about exactly that. So sent, let them know about our show. Let them know about David’s show and we would appreciate that. So David, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
From Pro-Skier to Top 1% Real Estate Agent • Leah Canfield
Nov 15, 2022
Leah Canfield a 30 under 30 laureate for 2022 from Breckenridge Colorado talks about how she transitioned from her skiing career into in real estate. Leah discusses her approach to the real estate market and how she got her name to be quoted in local newspapers. Next, Leah describes how she started working in the new development world early in her career. Leah also discusses gut instinct and how she manifests it in her business. Last, Leah describes why she believes the grind culture kills your creativity.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does one of the top skiers in the country transition to real estate and become one of the top Realtors in the country all before the age of 30? Will stay tuned we’re going to find out this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment. We’re going to be speaking with 30 under 30 Winner Lea Canfield. But before we get to Leah just a couple of quick announcements as always, thank you for listening to our show. The best way you can help us continue to do more episodes is by telling a friend so think of one other realtor that you know maybe someone in your office or a Realtor you meet out there in the field that needs to hear from conversations like the one you’re about to hear from Lea telling you how to become a top agent. So tell a friend that’s the always the best way you can help us continue to grow and now on to my conversation with Leah Canfield.
Today on the show we have Lea Winfield from Mountain homes group with Coldwell Banker mountain properties in Breckenridge and all of Summit County in Colorado. Let me tell you more about Lia. Lia Canfield is a real estate agent in her hometown of Breckenridge, Colorado and she grew up ski racing, and was at the peak of her career, the fastest Junior Super G skier in the country. Now she is now one of the top selling Coldwell Banker agents not only in the country, but actually in the entire world. She ranks in the top point 4% of all Coldwell Banker agents worldwide. She has been named to both Coldwell bankers and realtor magazine’s 30 under 30 She loves to ski mountain bike and travel, I want you to visit Leah at her group’s a homepage, which is mountain homes group.com Again, mountain homes group.com That link will be in our show notes. Leah, welcome to the show.
Leah Canfield 3:31 Thank you what what an intro?
D.J. Paris 3:34 Well, I am I will tell you the intro doesn’t even begin to really explain how excited I am. Because, you know, we’ve done I think, I don’t know what number episode this will be some 400 the low four hundreds. And you know I oftentimes this is a little embarrassing, I sometimes don’t get to do the prep for the show until pretty close to to the show. I have people that that helped put together notes for me and I was really excited this morning when I got to the office and started reading about you because not only of course, you know you have this sort of impressive background with with you know, competitive skiing and being an athlete, but also having a tremendous success pretty early on in the business career of being a real estate agent. And you also gave us a some talking points that we’re going to get into about grind culture and your thoughts on that. So I am really, really excited to chat with you. So thank you for coming on the show. I don’t always get to say that or don’t always even feel that sometimes with with all of the guests that we have as much as I love our guests. This one really speaks to me this topic of Brian culture. So I would love to start all the way at the beginning of of sort of where you entered. I’d love to start really at the beginning of competitive skiing and move our way into real estate because I think there’s probably some parallels and some disciplines that that translate it over. But tell us about this. How did Have you been skiing your entire life starting out very young or did you get it? Yeah. When you were
Leah Canfield 5:04 okay. Now Yeah, I started very young. I learned to ski when I was two, my dad actually a whole different story. But he’s an amputee above the knee. He was a big skier. And he was apparently a Paralympian. So he really got me into the sport. And I ski race through my whole childhood, through being a young adult, I got to travel internationally to series, which was very cool. I don’t think I even realized how cool it was until now. And I started to get some really good success. But I was one of those people that was always going like 120%. So that led to actually quite a bit of injury in my career, I had five knee surgeries before I turned 20. And those are really, they have quite a long recovery time period. So sure, like five or six years, I was just under the knife and in physical therapy, and just always trying to get back into sport and then re injuring myself. So that
D.J. Paris 5:57 was where the injuries were the injuries due to like, falling, or were they like wearing out the cartilage or?
Leah Canfield 6:05 Yeah, it was a little bit of both. It was some like coming back to sport too soon or too aggressively. Some certainly crashing. Some actually were due, I think, to some procedures that in the medical field, they thought were going to be very successful and actually had a pretty high failure rate. So some failed kind of installations of, you know, ligaments and so forth. But But yeah, it was it was a lot. So ultimately, that was going to be my career path. I had decided for myself.
D.J. Paris 6:35 Were you thinking like were you looking at Olympics was that?
Leah Canfield 6:38 Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was going to be this was my life. But I decided, hey, look, this is my body’s not designed for this. And this is too much I quit. Yeah, which was tough. But then after that, I wasn’t sure what to do. I worked at a coffee shop down, which is still here and record plants for a few years. And I was like, Okay, I got to, I got to do something. I felt like I had to do something. So I went to a local community college just for like a summer and went to a few classes. I had an economics teacher who says hey, like buy these books, buy these business books. So I bought them. And my now husband at the time was like, what a waste of money like those are going to put you to sleep. You’re never going to read those. I like to tell that story now. Because they literally changed our lives. We just started our journey into learning about, like financial freedom and personal finance, and how real estate can have such a huge role in this developing net worth and like freedom of your own life really had, yeah, all those great topics so
D.J. Paris 7:46 that you mind sharing one of one or more titles. If they changed your life I want to hear about
Leah Canfield 7:52 they did and there’s so many good ones. But like some of the real basics learning, like what an asset is what a liability is. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I read that, like lightbulb. You know, some people love that book. Some people hate it, but I felt like it was life changing for me.
D.J. Paris 8:06 No question about that book, because I always want to ask someone do is a primary residence and asset. I know this is a debatable topic, you know, what
Leah Canfield 8:15 is your? I? I think it depends. I can’t just say yes or no, because the definition of an asset in my mind, and probably from reading verbatim from the book is something that makes you money, right? Something which this does
D.J. Paris 8:29 not only on the day you sell it possibly could make you money. Yeah,
Leah Canfield 8:33 exactly. And we’ve taken this approach with our primary residence at least that we’ve decided to build this and build it as an investment. But, you know, the fact that we didn’t sell it after a couple years, and we’re still living here, it’s questionable, you know, so it’s a lifestyle someday. It’s a lifestyle investment. But I will say that we were very intentional about the equity we had in our house, the location, making sure that we were treating it not just as a primary residence, but also as an investment. So we had our multiple hat on when we pursued our home. And I think we always kind of will, but it depends. And that’s
D.J. Paris 9:10 the only reason I’m bringing that up is I feel that oftentimes I’ll ask Realtors not so much on the show, but just in my day to day understanding, and sometimes they’ve never been asked that question. And I’ve always thought it’s a really important thing to have a position on whether it’s yes, it’s an asset. No, it’s not or it depends. Yeah, I have an answer, because there are a lot of people who will be having questions like that. And anyway, so I’m sorry, I don’t want to get us in what’s just because you mentioned that I wanted to hear your perspective. Yeah,
Leah Canfield 9:40 I would say that it’s a really important savings account, especially for people who maybe aren’t very actively investing. Having equity built in your home is some of the it’s the only way for some people that they can actually successfully retire. So if you’re not an active investor and you’re not happy buying, you know, cash flowing investment properties and building up your 401k or your retirement plan. Sometimes a home is your only real worth when it comes to net worth. So I think it’s extremely important for a lot of people.
D.J. Paris 10:07 So anyway, you read, read books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad that can change your life. And then how did you decide to get into to get into real estate as not just maybe an investor or somebody who’s going to be selling it?
Leah Canfield 10:20 Yeah. So we started on the investment side, I actually then went to CU Boulder got my degree in finance and real estate, during which time we’ve picked started a very small investment company, like a few people and bought a little house and fix it up and rented it out and then sold it and then did that a handful of times. And after the first time, we bought that house, I was like, we bought this, and I have absolutely no idea what just happened, right? You know, I went to school to study this. And I’m like, what, you know. So then I realized I need to get my real estate license to learn what I’m doing in order to be a real investor who takes herself seriously. So I started and just got my license to support the investment side. And then it really grew from there. And I realized just how, number one, it was much more challenging than I thought it was gonna be. And number two is more lucrative than I thought it could ever be. And more fun. So yeah.
D.J. Paris 11:12 grew and how long have you been practicing as as a realtor?
Leah Canfield 11:16 It’s been almost seven years. So 2015. Yeah. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 11:21 So you got it, you really got into it pretty quickly after. So you say your your ski career sort of came to a conclusion. Then it was college and then right into sort of investing in real estate. Yeah. And being being a realtor. So let’s go back seven years only because seven years doing the quick math on that. Okay. So, yeah, yeah, 2015 ish. I’m just trying to think of what the market conditions were at that time. What was it like starting a career in real estate now? Yes, you you I imagine you have some sort of public notoriety being from Breckenridge being, being a competitive skier that that’s probably been in the newspapers a lot and sort of the, you know, whatever publications, people there read, so I’m sure you’re known to some degree in your community, although there’s probably a lot of competitive skiers there too.
Leah Canfield 12:14 incredible athletes.
D.J. Paris 12:16 But did you know but making a pivot? Oh, I’m sure making a pivot from professional being a professional athlete to then selling real estate in a person in their early 20s. What was that? Like? I imagine that couldn’t have been necessarily an easy thing.
Leah Canfield 12:33 No, it really wasn’t. People did know me for sure. But they weren’t. They knew me as like someone’s kid. They knew my parents, they know me, because I have been here since I was like mine. Right? And so they weren’t, you know, when it comes time for them to sell their multimillion dollar home, they’re not like, Yeah, let’s hire, let’s hire a friend’s kid. That was certainly tough. And not only that, but our market is extremely saturated with agents. There’s like this running joke that, you know, if you are at a dinner party, the cast people that are real estate agents. And so it was highly competitive as well. So my initial strategy actually wasn’t to go after clientele, of local people that I knew because they also already knew a dozen or more agents that have done in a business much longer than me. So that wasn’t my initial approach. I, I started really focusing on one of our our number one feeder market, which is the Denver Front Range area and working on getting those people as they come into town and stroll Main Street, and also making really good connections with the agents that work in Denver that have clients who say, Hey, we’re thinking about buying something in the mountains. So that was my approach. And I think that that really helped me get a foothold in the industry instead of you know, it’s another one of those books that I read. It’s great as the Blue Ocean Strategy,
D.J. Paris 13:47 I felt, I don’t know this. Let’s say that one more time blue ocean.
Leah Canfield 13:50 Yeah, it’s what a blue ocean and it’s just in a nutshell, it’s like, you know, you have your red ocean, which is highly competitive. You know, I think it’s like the
D.J. Paris 13:59 big a local Breckinridge agent is red ocean, competing with
Leah Canfield 14:03 the, you know, for the same clients that everyone is competing for. And the blue ocean strategy is like, hey, what’s a way that you can look at your business a little differently, where you have a lot less competition, and that was the way that I did that was say, Hey, I’m not going to compete for this one client that has, you know, a dozen realtor friends. I’m going to go after this person who doesn’t know anybody and Breck
D.J. Paris 14:22 Yeah, I love that. So you made you made friends with with realtors in the Denver area. Yeah. Because you don’t support the Denver area personally or no. And they don’t support Breckenridge. So this is this is that makes boy that makes so much sense really a great opportunity for any of our listeners who either you know, live in areas where people buy vacation homes, or maybe where they retired to, or in the flip side, you have people that are leaving to go elsewhere and in Illinois, Florida is a place where a lot of for tax purposes people retire for, obviously the weather and you know, whatever other reasons are Um, they might go there. And so that would be, you know, anyone who’s a Florida agent, you should be just calling every realtor, you know, in the country and saying, Hey, if they’re thinking of moving here, so that’s very interesting. So how so? So you then you was more about building relationships. And you also said something also as, as the people from Denver were coming into town, how were you sort of intercepting?
Leah Canfield 15:23 Well, so I don’t know if all offices have like a floor agent. Right. So I was working on floor lot. I was at the end, we have an office right on Main Street. And that was extremely difficult for me because I had to overcome this sense that there was like something wrong with salespeople that they were like, bad people. And I had that somehow ingrained in me that like, if I was going to sell something to someone, I was like, doing a bad thing, right. So I was not a natural born salesperson. And so it was very awkward. The first few times I interacted with people, I like locked up, or someone walked in, they walked out, I was like, what was up and but you know, everything takes practice. And eventually I got the competence to just be personable, and be myself and chat with these guys. And it also took me acknowledging that, hey, I’m not just like, I’m not trying to take advantage of someone I’m trying to, you know, help them because I am and a resource for them. So once I kind of shifted my mindset that a salesperson is not like a parasite, but instead a, you know, a source of wealth of information, and you know, a friend, and someone who can help you with something that you need. Once I made that shift, it was a lot easier for me. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 16:31 so agree with that. And for anyone out there who’s struggling with what Leah was talking about this idea of, I’m bothering people, they don’t want to talk to me, they think I’m gross, because I’m a salesperson. And nobody likes salespeople and all of that. Yes, there’s truth and all of that, of course. But if you’re not a gross, slimy salesperson, you don’t have to worry about coming off as slimy and gross. It’s what I say to guys all the time who go, I wonder if that girl thinks I’m a creep. I’m like, Are you a creep? If you’re not, you don’t, you can go ask her out, it’s okay. If you’re not a creep, you’re don’t have to worry about being perceived as creepy. And the same thing to salespeople. If you’re not a horrible human being, then you can go ahead and talk to people who by the way, 99% chance they’re going to use a realtor anyway. So this isn’t even something like hey, you really need to get into this bizarre insurance that you don’t even know about. But I’m going to try to convince you you need, which, by the way, is a perfectly fine industry as well. I love insurance agents. But that’s a much tougher sale sometimes because it’s selling things that people don’t even know they need. But in your case, they’re going to use a realtor. So I just wanted to really honor you for saying that. Because I think it’s so easy to forget that everybody, when they when everybody starts out in this business, it’s it’s it’s a little nerve wracking to have your first open house to sit. And I love the fact that you live in an area where people still walk into the offices that is not as common in the country. But it’s a little bit of a trial by fire because they’re coming in and or, you know, they’re walking by and you’re not having to strike up a conversation.
Leah Canfield 18:09 Yeah. Or at the end of it, I would be walking out onto Main Street like, Hey, what are you looking at in this window? Well, let’s talk about it. So yeah, took a little confidence boost.
D.J. Paris 18:19 I love that. So So you, you really jumped in. And again, you’re still a young person. But I guess I guess it too. Makes sense. Because you talked about everybody in town knows me. As you know, I’m a skier, I’m my father’s daughter. I am you know, I’m a kid, you know, and I’m a kid in my early 20s, I’m an adult technically, but people in town, maybe not only do they maybe see me a certain way, they also have, you know, a handful of other agents that maybe they’re best friends with, who are probably going to get the listings, you know, above you just because that’s how things work. So let’s talk about so So you started working at, you know, in the office, and you know, dealing with floor time and sort of trial by fire, I sort of would say is having direct one on one conversations. And then how did you grow from there?
Leah Canfield 19:09 Yeah, so, um, you know, I, I started pretty early on coming up with a business plan. And I think that those two words together cause people some a lot of anxiety. But I don’t remember who said this, it might have been Mark Cuban, but he’s like, Hey, if you can’t come up with a business plan, in the amount of time that it takes you to drink a can of soda, like you’re doing it wrong, and that stuck with me because it was like, okay, don’t overcomplicate it, I get a small piece of paper or a post it note or whatever. And I write down what I want to do in sales. You know, how does that translate? What’s my average sales price? What do I think is attainable? How many sales is that? How many appointments do I need to do? Do I need to make and then I also did some really crude math of how approximately how many people do I think I needed my database? I went to a ninja class. I think they said something like, you know, every person your database translates to something like $10,000 of it. and come or something something along those lines, I might be misquoting. But I, I said look, I need to start building my database like nobody, I need to start putting my name like I can’t feel next to luxury real estate in as many instances as I can. So I started putting more and more people in my database, and coming up with a plan that they saw my face and heard my name next to real estate. I also started doing some, like, something I learned from Barbara Corcoran, which is reach out to your local newspaper like these, these people are just usually young and hungry and overworked and have to come up with content for the newspaper. And they don’t know like, they have to do it every single day. And so if you help them and say, hey, look, this is super interesting. This is happening in our market, nine times out of 10, they’re gonna call you back and say, Hey, can you explain this to me? And can I quote you on this, and then all of a sudden, your name is in the newspaper next to luxury, real estate or whatever you decide, that’s
D.J. Paris 20:54 really, I’m gonna pause you that is incredibly interesting. Nobody has ever, ever made that suggestion on this podcast. So super exclusive for us. So I want to I want to just just sort of unwind that a little bit so that our audience really hits, I thought you were gonna go a different way with it, which is, I do have this kind of cool story about my background as a, you know, a junior skier who was, you know, headed to Olympics and now I’ve pivoted because of injuries. And like, that’s a very interesting story just in and of itself that a newspaper might be interested in. But that’s a one off. And so I thought you were gonna say, Well, I just wanted to sort of trade in a little bit on my notoriety and get some publicity, which that would have made all the sense in the world to me too. But you actually want a totally different way was, I want their their reporters to call me when they need a quote, or or they need help with definitions, or that is beyond brilliant, because you’re absolutely right. These are people that work on incredible deadlines. They’re underworked, they are certain they’re overworked and underpaid. Yeah, sorry. They’re very overworked and underpaid. And it’s a stressful position, and you have can help actually make their lives a little easier. And so people, the reporter started using you in stories, I guess.
Leah Canfield 22:13 Yes. Yeah. And I still try at least once a month to send them something interesting that’s happening because I, you know, pull data for my newsletter every month, I’m looking at, you know, what’s happening this month in our market? What are some, you know, sales that are very interesting, or what, you know, we’ve seen some really crazy stuff in our market, right, like 200% appreciation of this and, you know, this story. Yeah, right. And it’s a headline, so anything anytime I see something, and I’m like, this would be a good headline I send so
D.J. Paris 22:39 often, how often do they ended up using your, your ideas, I’m just probably
Leah Canfield 22:45 70% of the time, you know, everyone’s thing, but most of the time, they’re like, they call me back from it two weeks or three weeks later, and they’re like, hey, just circling back to this. Can you tell me more about that? And then it ends up yeah,
D.J. Paris 23:00 that is that is so incredibly smart. I I’m a little bit sort of gobsmacked with that. I really apps which is a great word that I’m just starting to incorporate more into my it’s one of those words that sort of makes you seem smarter than saying I’m stunned. But But I am I am gobsmacked and or stunned because that that is an absolutely brilliant strategy. So thank you for that. So okay, you started. Yeah, so you started doing that that helped I imagine get your name out there.
Leah Canfield 23:29 It did. Yeah, it helps with more of that. Like my sometimes my older clientele maybe I would get a referral to someone wanted to sell. And they’re like, we keep seeing your name in the newspaper. And so that gives you credibility. So my struggle was credibility. Right? I was maybe they knew my parents. You know, maybe they knew that I grew up here but they certainly didn’t trust me to sell their luxury home and so I had to kind of chip away at that credibility. And my goal is when someone thinks of luxury real estate they think of me so anytime I could put my name next to luxury real estate in people’s minds then that’s a win
D.J. Paris 24:08 because it really what you what you could really do it for those of us thinking well what kind of stories I mean you literally just can look at data and the MLS find it really interesting statistic that is like a little shocking even you send that over go guys, I have an idea for you.
Leah Canfield 24:23 Yeah, and don’t get don’t get in too much. I mean, like I said, these guys are overworked. Don’t put more than five sentences in your email, right? Give them a give them a clip, give them a taste and see if they’re interested. They’ll call you love it. Yeah. So yeah, I did that. I started. You know, I also realized pretty early on that I I was very interested in new construction and developments. And I learned that when a town or a county wants to hire a contractor, they have to go through a very The transparent process because the last thing a municipality wants to be accused of is, you know, like taking kickbacks and hiring their friend for for a job. And so when a town wants to hire a real estate agent to sell a town built project, they have to go through an RFP request for proposal process. And I learned about this pretty early on in my career, like, a year, and year and a half. And maybe, and I had a friend who just got her got her license, and we were like, Should we put a proposal in for this project? We’re total longshot, but it was for a local project, still pretty big $25 million project. And we ended up winning the bid. Because people felt we just went in and created a very professional looking proposal, we took it very seriously. And they felt that we would be a good face for the project, and we got it. So that is also something that’s interesting for people to know is that oftentimes your like towns and counties have are doing some of their own real estate development. Because in so many areas, there’s a lack of employee or locals housing, and they’re trying to address that themselves. Anyone can apply for those for those sales jobs. So that’s how I really got started in the development world and that I learned a ton during that project. And it was a really great experience. And then I faced kind of another challenge after that, which was okay, now people kind of know me as the like employee housing person, how do I pivot, and become, you know, a luxury salesperson, which was more of the area that I was interested in at the time. And so I just kept, kept doing what I was talking about earlier, which is, hey, put my name next to luxury, real estate, we’re sending the newsletter, we have luxury listings in there, right, we make comments, we’re talking about the luxury market, because that’s where you want to be you kind of like Manifest Your, your goals.
D.J. Paris 26:48 That way. Yeah, that makes sense, is you you, you really I think what we’re really talking about is branding. It sounds like you very, very early on, you know sort of developed your brand, you were clear about what you wanted your brand to represent. And yes, you’re not going to turn down a $25 million development deal from a local municipality, simply because it doesn’t necessarily fit the the brand, you know, ideal. But it’s a great opportunity, a great learning experience, and how awesome to be chosen. So you’re going to do that. And then you’re going to you’re going to still return to your North Star, which is luxury. And then your North Star is is. And I want to mention too that a lot of times, Agents, I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. And you see this as well with other agents, I’m sure in your market is a lot of times the way agents think about branding is it’s all about the visual. So they’re doing a lot on social, Instagram, Facebook, there’s a lot of, you know, but you don’t really, that’s not really your path. And that’s a very, that’s a very unique way. So talk about is social a part of your marketing strategy, or I’m just curious what the importance of it is,
Leah Canfield 28:00 I think it’s more important than we give it credit for, we could certainly improve on it. We’re always talking about it, and everyone I’ve sent to build a team, which we can talk about, but everyone on my team is like, we need to do better at this. So certainly, like anyone we’re not perfect. And social media is one of those things that we can really improve on. But we, you know, you don’t have to be good at everything, you have to do everything. Great to be great, you just have to be great at a few things. And so I think we’re kind of leaning into the things that we’re really good at. And, and it kind of makes up for some of our things that we’re not so great at, which is like social media promotion. But
D.J. Paris 28:36 I’m not saying that to identify something that’s that’s you’re not strong. And I was and I hope hopefully you didn’t get that impression that’s like that, no good because I really was saying it as as a huge differentiator, that that that obviously you could always, you know, get good at social if you want to, but that’s not how you built your luxury brand. And really sort of avoided that. Which Which again, you could have traded in a lot of your previous success as a skier as as you could have really leaned into some of these accolades that you’ve you’ve received and made that a big push on social but you didn’t do that. And I think that’s particularly interesting. Again, it it sort of creates a more of a red ocean opportunity for you to find other opportunities to find other than Yeah, yeah, red ocean.
Leah Canfield 29:26 No, we have so yeah, I think branding can be very simple. Honestly, for me, like I said, my, my, my, my mountain to climb was a credibility mountain, right? Because I was young. I was a girl a lot of people knew me as someone’s kid. So I had to, I had to convince people that I was legit. Something I actually haven’t really told anyone which is that when I first started, I didn’t every cent I had was like going towards some investment because we were so into investing. And so I didn’t really ever save up to like buy a nice car. And so I drove this kind of beat up. Little Subaru and I certainly couldn’t You know, with a straight face, bring the luxury client into it and tour them on these luxury homes. So I my parents live in Breckenridge and, and anytime I would have a client or a walk in, I told my mom who drove a Lexus. And I was like, Can I use your best mom ever? She’s like, yes, you can. And so it’s coming right down to just like how, how you present you’re not I’m not trying to say that anyone who wants to become a luxury realtor needs to drive a Lexus or a luxury car, but but presenting yourself in the most professional way that you can, anytime you can, the way that you dress, the way that you speak, that you know, how you arrive, all of that makes an impact. And all of that does a tribute to your branding. It’s not just who you are online, because even though social media has exploded so much, I’m I’m still in the generation where I was here before, you know, the energy and, and your brand really is who you are when you’re standing in front of your client. And so how can you be the person that you want to be in, you know, if you want to be a luxury real estate agent, what does that look like and if you have to fake it until you make it the time to drive your mom’s Lexus or, or, or your friend, you know, you pay your friend 50 bucks every time she lends you her BMW, because you drive a beat up Subaru duel, you know, find ways that you can present yourself as the brand you want to be. And that helped me as well with even it also helps with confidence, you know, dress to impress until you feel more competent. So
D.J. Paris 31:32 yeah, yeah, I agree. That’s, I think that’s, that’s really, really great advice. And so let’s talk about grind culture. Because before we get into this, I want to hear your, your more you are firmly in the anti grind culture camp. And I love that because so often, we hear about out working our competition, working more hours, especially in real estate, where so much happens outside of the traditional business hours. You know, our our listeners are getting text messages, voicemails, you know, all sorts of things late into the evening. Boundaries are hard to set. They’re hard to follow. It’s also an unstructured job from the realtor side. So it’s, it’s, it’s tough. And it’s easy to just keep going and going and going because the text thread really never ends until they get the keys. And then you forget to respond until you forget to respond. Yeah, yeah. And that’s, yeah, so let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about Brian culture and, and what, what, why you’ve taken sort of a stance against it.
Leah Canfield 32:40 Okay, so I live in Breckenridge. I don’t know if the listeners are familiar. But it’s a gorgeous mountain town in Colorado known for skiing, biking, outdoor activities. And when I first started in real estate, I, I was a one one woman show, as most people are, and I really wanted to be successful. And I’m a competitive person, right. So I threw everything at it, just like I did with with ski racing. And I remember, we went on this vacation, my now husband and I, and I just worked the entire time. And we were at the beach, and I was on my computer when I was going back to the room and I was taking calls. And I was and I was just, I was just running. And I was on vacation. And I came back and I was like, that was not a vacation. That was That wasn’t relaxing at all, you know. And then I also really realized, I just did a little bit of reflection and said, like, what do I really want my life to look like? Because I only get one life. And there’s no point in living a life that I’m not excited about? Because like there’s no kickbacks, right? And so I live here in this gorgeous place. Because I love to go skiing, I love to go mountain biking, I love to go for hikes, I love to be outside. And I can’t do all of that if I’m on all the time. And so I decided that this job, you know, there’s multiple things can be true at the same time. Yes, number one, I want to provide a really high level of service to my clients. Right? Number two, i i One of my very first deals I like completely dropped the ball on this thing. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what am I doing? I suck at this. And it helped me realize that I am the person who’s going to do everything at all times. Otherwise my life is not going to be what I want it to be. And so
D.J. Paris 34:27 we should mention that some people can somehow eat that out some people can seemingly do are designed for that. Some people are designed for it. I think the majority of us probably I’m not either.
Leah Canfield 34:40 No. And so and I you know, when I’m out on a mountain bike ride, and I get a call from a client, I want to be able to help them but I also don’t want to take the call because I’m on a mountain bike ride and that’s my time to you know, clear my head and, and so what I settled on was I need help, and I will plug another book that changed my life, called the E Myth. So, yeah, the entrepreneurship myth, I recommend, if you haven’t read it, every realtor should read it. It’s about the importance of building a business, like a real business and recognizing what roles you play. Because if you are a one man show, you are the CEO, you are the CEO, you’re all the whole executive suite. You’re also the receptionist, and you’re the marketing, customer service. You’re the social media per sales team, right? So write it down, say, like, Hey, I’m all these people. Am I good at all? Plus, am I a good receptionist? Or am I bad at answering the phone, if I’m bad at answering the phone, or if I don’t like it, then hire someone helped me with it. And so going back to that project that we did with a ton of brag that, that project, having that almost a guaranteed future income of that development gave me the confidence to bring on my first assistant. And that was a game changer, because I realized that I can provide the level of service that I want to my clients, while also enjoying my life. And not only that, I could provide a better level of service to my clients than if I was just grinding it up alone. Because I started, I think a lot of realtors become a victim of their own success. They’re like, Okay, if only I can reach this sales number. If only I could have a few more contracts, or a few more clients, and then they get there. And we’re like, whoa, I’ve got 10 things under contract, holy moly, and they’re like, going crazy. And then they’re like, I don’t have time to put together a monthly newsletter this month. Like I have 10 contracts, right? I don’t have time to prospect sometimes send these, whatever mailers, whatever your strategy is. And so they start dropping the ball on the things that are not urgent, because you have to, you’re gonna, you’re not gonna drop the ball on your contract, right, hopefully. And so having that assistant, having a team built around you helps so that when you do get busy, your monthly newsletter still goes out on the first of the month, right, and you can have a more consistent, reliable level of service to your clients. Because you have built a system and you understood that, hey, I cannot do it all by myself. And I’m actually I’m doing a disservice to my client trying to do everything myself, because I also get sick, and I also get burnt out. And I also want vacation.
D.J. Paris 37:13 Well, and that that probably is a lesson a lot of a lot of that you probably learned as a teenager being a competitive, you know, Super G skier, because you can pardon the pun, get to the top of the mountain and be on that Olympic team or even when when you know, whatever event of the Olympics you were going for, and then you can I mean, all of those are possible. They certainly were possible in your life. And yet, how happy you know, the happiness that you’re that, that you’re sort of wanting, or the fulfillment you’re wanting, may come at a significant cost. Because yeah, the level of of sort of output that that requires to get to the top of the mountain as a singular person is is well, you know, it’s incredible amount of demand on your body, on your mind, on your time. And so I have a question about texting a very specific question. So you were talking about, you know, you get the phone call, you’re mountain biking now you’re like, Okay, assistants gonna grab that I get it, you’ll you’ll have that routed to the assistant. What about text messages?
Leah Canfield 38:16 Yeah, text messages are tough. They are really tough. I would say that if it’s something that I either don’t have the mental space for, or I have something else going on right now. I will just screen grab that and send it to my send it to my assistant and say, Can you help me with this? Or, you know, I’ll say, Hey, Mike, this this person reached out to me about this, can you help me because and I like to recognize it. I’ve learned at the beginning of the correspondence, because if you’re really busy and you start communicating with your client, and then you try and leave someone in, then they’re like, No, I’m talking to you about this. But if they start asking you about something right away, and you can say, you know, you lose someone and immediately then that person is the point person. So I don’t have a perfect answer. Texting is really tricky. And I would be lying if I said that, you know, haven’t forgotten about a text and woken up in the middle of the night like, oh, never responded to that text, right. But I do love that the new iPhone I think you can like mark them as unread. I don’t have the newest iPhone, so I’m excited to get that so that I can like if I open up a text and I’m not prepared to deal with it, I can mark it as unread and treat it more like a email. I
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Leah Canfield 41:03 I do. I do in my own way, I’m not I don’t do it upfront, I’m not like, Hey, these are my business hours. Some people do that, I I really respect that. But I do it. Sometimes you meet if you have a client or you meet someone who you kind of can tell is like a pusher, you know, they’re gonna kind of push you and push you to kind of see what your limit is. And when I have a client or someone like that, I, I make an effort to not respond like it, let’s say someone who’s whose duck personality type text me, I had a client, and I’ll just give you an example. I had a client who I showed them a property, followed up with them. They kind of ghosted me for like a week. And then a week later, I like 10pm. They texted me and they were like, Hey, we’re ready for an offer. If we could, you know, my husband has work in the morning. But if you could have it ready, you know, before he leaves for work than we can by the morning. And I was like, You know what, I’m not responding to this, because that is in my way, how I’m going to set my boundaries. And if I don’t respond to this, it’s not going to set a precedent that for the whole contract period, I’m available to do work for you during the night hours, right? Because
D.J. Paris 42:07 because you’re in a position, when that text comes in, you’re in a position to either defend why you can’t do it, which is a lose situation, or, or you’re going to grind it out and try to get it done at the cost of sleep and energy and other things. And now also reinforcing their behavior. Now they’re going to they’re going to, it’s not like they’re magically going to snap to going forward, we’re going to, you know, not text you past five o’clock know, you’ve just told them, it’s perfectly okay, what you just did.
Leah Canfield 42:35 So yes, that’s you’re exactly right. I don’t want to reinforce that behavior. And there’s, with some clients, in certain instances, you know, I have a client who is at a surgeon, and his hours are super tough, and you wanted to have a call with me like 830. And it’s like, okay, I get it. And I can tell, he’s not that personality, who’s gonna start calling me every night at 830. So I feel like I can read people. And I don’t set exact hours, I respect the people who do. But I think that it’s important before you, you know, if you don’t feel like you want to respond to someone, because of the time of day or because of, you know, mostly it’s a time of data, right? If you’re on vacation, hopefully you have coverage from someone. But if it’s an in the middle of the night thing, don’t do it. If it’s that person who’s going to just keep, because you work, sometimes you work with these clients for like years, if they don’t find anything, or they can’t sell their house. And so then all of a sudden, it’s a lot harder to reel back. Once you’ve opened those floodgates of yeah, let me get that done for you at 11pm.
D.J. Paris 43:33 I am I I agree wholeheartedly. I just think it’s such a it’s a conversation I like to have because text community text communication really is very complicated in sort of what it what it represents, in different different side parts of the business. And so it’s something that every agent really needs to think through what’s my policy around x y&z And yes, when I have the, you know, the guy who’s the surgeon who, who’s who just got out of a 16 hour surgery and, and he needs to talk to me at eight o’clock at night, I get it, he’s not trying to push my buttons or pushing. He’s just, that’s when he’s available. Of course, we get that. But but we also understand that, you know, there’s certain ways we can set, you know, temporary boundaries around around sort of our general behavior. I also really, and I don’t talk about this enough, but I think we have a lot of women who come on our show, and I oftentimes forget as a guy, I don’t think as much about this, and I should, but I’m going to talk about sort of gut feelings and I know you’re meant to tell me a little bit about the importance of trusting your gut. It I mean, I imagine as an athlete, you have to know, you know, your you have to listen to signals to be a competitive athlete. But um, you know, I’m curious about sort of gut instinct and how that’s you know, manifested in your real estate practice.
Leah Canfield 44:53 Yeah, I’m I’m not a very I would say I’m a more logical person than any else, I don’t know if they call it left brained, I’m more logical. And so it’s easy for me. And I think people like me to dismiss certain feelings that they have, because they’re just contradictory, maybe to the logic, yeah, like, hey, this client is prepared to spend $10 million. And then your, your feeling is like, walk away, right? But your head is like, want me to have that commission before I’ve earned it, right. And so sometimes when you have those conflicting feelings, it can be tough, especially if you’re more of a logical person, because you can dismiss these feelings as just that, right? People have feelings,
D.J. Paris 45:32 the facts, the facts aren’t in yet. But the facts say everything looks okay. But something inside of me that’s more intangible, and, and and invisible, is is giving me pause, and my logical brain is going Shut up other part of you, you don’t you don’t have any facts. This is just, you know, whatever you’re getting scared or whatever it might be. And so the and by the way, this is this happens all the time. So I’m so glad we’re talking about Go ahead. I’m sorry.
Leah Canfield 45:59 Yeah, no, no, that’s, that’s good. So I think there’s a lot of us not to get into biology. But there’s a lot of the human body that I think we don’t totally understand most of us at least. And we are hardwired, with certain instincts, right for eating and registering. And yeah, for all sorts of things that have helped protect us over however many. However long in history, we’ve been a species, right. And so I think, once I recognize that, hey, sometimes that that gut feeling is a culmination of various instincts that my body has, those are legitimate, actually, those are just as legitimate as, as, you know, my logical part of my brain, potentially even more, more so because they’re older.
D.J. Paris 46:44 They’re older, they’re older, and they’re bypassing consciousness which consciousness, consciousness can can steer us wrong, right? As consciousness can tell us, you know, things are not the way they appear. Because we are imperfect. Our brains are imperfect instincts, however, tend tend to once you’re able to identify what an instinct is, and, and what and the difference between instinct and, you know, maybe things, you know, fears and things that may be getting in the way. Yeah, so I’m sorry, I don’t mean to, to Oh, yeah,
Leah Canfield 47:15 you’re right, you’re right. They’re, they’re there to protect you, your instincts are there to protect you, for the most part, so listen to them. Um, you know, being, being a woman in the business, I think, maybe comes at a little bit higher risk. I don’t generally really ever feel unsafe in the business. But I have had instances where it’s become clear to me after working with a client that they’re, they’re really trying to just spend time with me. And not, they’re not a real client. And there was one instance in particular where that happened, I was working with someone for a local selling season, and we ended up putting in an offer on something and and, you know, I referred him to some local lenders that he could call and one of the lenders called me and he’s like, this guy has no has nothing right. And the whole time, he’s of course, hyping himself up like, you know, I just sold this business I have all this money, I believe houses and and so there’s a lot that I learned from that because, you know, the lenders like doesn’t have money for downpayment doesn’t have a job, can’t get a loan, no assets, no one’s gonna loan him anything. And I realized, over the years, I’ve realized that people with real wealth, first of all, don’t flaunt it like that. The people who do that’s an immediate red flag to me, you know, people who will come in the office, and they start talking about how rich and successful they are. There’s very few of those people who actually have the means to become a real client of yours. And, and maybe that’s just our market, I know different parts, different areas are different, right? Have different people. But in our laid back mountain market, the people who can afford a $5 million house aren’t, aren’t talking to you about their net worth, you know, in the first conversation you have with them, and how they how successful they are. So anyways, it turns out this guy that I was working with had like a criminal history, and I should have done a background check on him. And certainly had no means to buy a house. And I had that gut feeling right at the beginning. And I didn’t listen to it. And so I said, Look, I’m just going to, I spent a lot of time with this guy. Who I think was
D.J. Paris 49:08 Yeah, it’s hard to accept something like that. Because, because because it could it could affect your reputation, meaning it could go online and scorched earth. This realtor dropped me as a client, I was a serious buyer blah, blah, blah, they you know, men do weird things when women when they feel rejected.
Leah Canfield 49:26 Oh, yeah. So I was, you know, I ultimately did have to drop him because he came back and wanted to work for me again and I said, Hey, you know, we need to get pre qualified this time. He’s like, Well, you don’t trust me you don’t believe in the money. I’m like, I’m when
D.J. Paris 49:38 people say, Trust me as a question. You can just not trust them. That’s
Leah Canfield 49:42 yeah, so you know, a couple of things I learned from that. Number one, we have a really good resource with our MLS, where you can do like free background checks on people. Yeah, and I think a lot of MLS is have that are working on that. So especially if you’re going to be you know, we have a lot of remote areas with like no cell service and we’re out Showing property, you know, mean, some guy that I met 20 minutes ago. So that’s something that’s key, I think we’re just looking up, I could have found this out by doing a Google search on this guy, and I just didn’t do it. And then, you know, find ways to, yes, you can ask all of your clients for a pre qualification letter, proof of funds prior to looking at homes. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But there’s also just another layer of, you know, I had a bad gut feeling when I met this guy, and I just didn’t listen to it. And, and there have been instances since then, where I’ve had a similar feeling, and I have listened to it. And I’ve never regretted it, even no matter how much because usually, with these clients, they’re waving, you know, money in your face, which is the first red flag. But you know, it’s become a lot easier for me, as I’ve become more successful to realize, I don’t need this, you know, and it’s not just about that sort of instance, there’s also a lot of people who aren’t respectable, right, or they don’t respect you, as a professional or the industry. You know, I was just going to listing appointment where the guys like, Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I think real estate professionals are overpaid. And I think it’s a whole thing is a racket, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I just, you know, I said, you know, to beat you on that I’m going to change your mind.
D.J. Paris 51:12 What are the what are the odds that you’re going to change that person? Yeah,
Leah Canfield 51:15 yeah. And also, I’m not going to, I’m not going to grovel for your business, if you think that I, you know, my place in the industry is unwarranted, because I don’t actually need I don’t need this I, I can find success working with people who are like me, who see the bigger picture and who are respectful. You know, and, and that’s also just been a lifestyle decision for me is like, hey, not only do I want to respect my own boundaries of when I when I want to be working, and when I don’t want to be working. But I also want to set my own boundaries of like, Who do I want to work with, because this is my life, you know, and, and work is a big part of my life. And so I would rather sell 80% of, of what I could sell and just work with, good, you know, honest people. And I’m not saying you know, any, to anyone in the luxury field knows that not every client, not a religious client is easy. I’m not trying to say, hey, this guy’s gonna be hard. Let’s ditch it. Because we work with our fair share of difficult clients. And I can be difficult myself. So we all have our own things, right. But when you get the feeling that someone is, you know, not trustworthy, or trying to trying to lie about who knows what, or just like, not a good person, you get that feeling? I think you should listen to it. Because why spend your time working with bad people?
D.J. Paris 52:37 Question has your gut. Ever since you’ve become a realtor? Has your gut ever steered you wrong?
Leah Canfield 52:43 No, honestly, it hasn’t. And it’s been so hard for me because that’s not my personality. To
D.J. Paris 52:48 Yes, your logical, yeah, oriented look at the data.
Leah Canfield 52:54 And it’s so hard because I can’t explain, you know, I can’t explain, like, why you
D.J. Paris 52:59 can’t walk it back and say, Oh, the reason I had that feeling was because XY and Z, it’s like, no, the feeling showed up before I was aware of anything.
Leah Canfield 53:07 Yeah, and I’m still not perfect. Like, I just, I still have instances where I have this, this gut feeling of like, this isn’t gonna end well, you know, maybe I should decline this. And then I kind of bug work, work past it, and work through it. And then sure enough, my gut was right. And I’m like, okay, so it’s not like I have, you know, just the perfect, you know, instincts that I’m always listening to, sometimes I’m like, that up, I should have listened to, should have listened to how I felt. But, um, I think that’s an important thing that, that we don’t really talk about enough. It just in general is that it’s, listen, listen to how you feel. Because also if, if for nothing less than when, when someone calls you, if you immediately get a pit in your stomach, I mean, you’re gonna get a pit in your stomach every single time you need to talk to this person. And you need to, you need to figure out whether or not you want to live with the pit in your stomach, because that’s not a way to live. Right? So try and find a way try and find a way to, to be at peace with the people that you work with. And it’s okay to say no, sometimes, you know,
D.J. Paris 54:11 so as you’ve stepped away from sort of grinding it out, which I imagine, you know, as the athlete, part of you understands, grinding it out. And that’s achieved. And it really is, you know, in many ways, such a significant part of an athlete’s life, sort of dropping that and trusting that that you can still progress and achieve and scale the mountain without necessarily burning the candle at both ends. What does your life look like now? Is it more balanced? You know, and how are you able to still achieve more which, you know, you’re still in the early early phase of your real estate career where you’re doing more and more and more and obviously, you know, this year is kind of, you know, a different year for most realtors, but you’re still moving forward and achieving. How do you do that? While maintaining balance, what what does that look like for you?
Leah Canfield 55:03 Yeah, well, so. So I will kind of like, there’s this, I’ll mention this adage that I have heard that I really appreciate. I think it’s an old African average. Hopefully, I’m not misquoting it. But it says, If you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far go as a team. And I think what they meant it very literally, like, if you need to get somewhere fast, you better start running by yourself. And if you need to cross a great distance, you better go with a group of people. And I, I really liked that saying, because I am kind of a lone wolf in my by nature, like I only did. I didn’t do team sports, I did individual sports, right. And I was extremely competitive as an individual. And I burnt myself out and was plagued with injury. And the thing that meant most to me at that time, which was ski racing, and I did, I did get to a pretty high level, but I didn’t my career didn’t last very long. You know, I retired when I was like, before I turned 20, I think. And so I realized that, you know, I should take something away from that, which is, life, hopefully, for for most of us is quite long. And if you want to have success in something, and you want to have elongated success, then it’s important that you work with a team, whatever that looks like for you. I’m not saying every single person needs to start a real estate team. But it’s important that you recognize that going at it alone, it’s it’s tough to you know, it’s tough to do stuff alone. So if that just means you have a support group or group of agents that you meet with to like, you know, talks about your, your highs and lows together, whatever that may be. So that wasn’t really the answer to your question. So to answer your question, what my life kind of looks like now is it certainly and my business, it’s not perfect, there’s always things where I’m like, oh, I need to improve on this, or we should be doing this. And, and so, it’s I think it’s always gonna be like that, though. So I’ve just kind of become comfortable with that feeling of this is not perfect, and I don’t love that I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, so but that’s okay. Right. I’m, I have to tell myself, it’s okay that my business is not perfect, because it’s improving. And
D.J. Paris 57:19 you you said something at the beginning that probably skated by a lot of us, but you said, two things can be true, right. And that’s, I think that’s called like dialectical thinking this idea of two things that could be in opposition can also be true, right? We we all know, if we have a romantic partner, we can love that person with all our heart and really be annoyed at something they did at the exact same time. And and letting one of those emotions totally take over is probably not not the healthiest thing is understanding. Yes, there’s times I’m annoyed with you. And there’s times I love you more than anything. And those can be true at the exact moment. Yeah, and so a life can be out of balance. And by the way, I don’t think balance I’m not even sure balance is possible. But the striving to sort of balance is is very, you know, important. And this idea that you can be because you are good at things and also not good at things simultaneously. Right, like,
Leah Canfield 58:16 wow. Right. So So yeah, I would agree. I think finding, I think I’ve heard of it. Maybe it’s like a false dichotomy, where it’s like, well, it has to be this or that. Right? I have to either enjoy my life or have a successful career.
D.J. Paris 58:29 I happy until Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Right. I
Leah Canfield 58:33 can either enjoy my life, or I can save up money, right? And it’s like, well, you can do both, right. So I think, I think it’s extremely important for people in our profession. They take their real estate class, if you’re new in the industry, or if you’ve been doing it forever. There’s no like you said earlier, it’s not really defined, you know, no one gives you like a manual and says, Here’s your job description. They’re like, hey, go, good luck, you know, sell stuff, because that’s how you get paid. So it’s really important to have the headspace to be able to be a little bit introspective, and figure out what you want your life to look like. Because it’s one of the best careers in the world, to be able to design your own life around it. You could say, hey, look, I’m, I don’t really feel that competitive. I only really want to sell enough to pay my rent, and go surfing every day. And you can do that, right? Or you can say like, Hey, I want to become the top agent in this market. You know, let’s start coming up with some ways that you can do that. And also go on for vacations a year, or whatever you want to do. Because the most successful people aren’t going out alone. You know, the most successful businesses aren’t one person. And every single one of us runs a business. So I think we’re just, I think, the grind, you know, grind till you die, lifestyle. It doesn’t take that into consider ERATION that you’re, you’re cutting yourself short, and you’re doing a disservice to your clients, because you really can’t. Like we are human, we have to sleep, right? And we have to take a rest. And if we really want to develop a good business, we need to sometimes take days off so that we can have a creative thought, so that we’re not just like, when’s their earnest money deadline? When it Okay, did I review that title commitment, and oh, God, I gotta get to this appointment. Because if you’re, if your mind is constantly on to do lists, you can’t operate in a creative space, that way, you can’t come up with new ways to do things better than other people. So you know, give yourself some space headspace by taking a few things off your plate. So you’re not just like running around like a chicken with your head cut off. And you can actually have an original thought, like, this is something no one else in my market is doing. What if we did that? Right. And I think that’s only possible if you if you can get some help,
D.J. Paris 1:01:02 and make and make space, right. And getting help oftentimes makes that space as as you were saying, and, and you know, to for those of us listening, who are solo practitioners who are thinking, Well, I can’t afford to hire, you know, a an assistant, well, there as you know, there are websites, where you can post jobs that all over the world, people will bid for your business, and they don’t have to live in your immediate market for for certain tasks. And there’s, you know, there’s lots of things that these are, can be highly skilled people that live in, in in areas where the compensation is much different than it is here, and oftentimes much lower, and you’re offering them an opportunity to make a good living for them, and also get the help that you need, where maybe you can’t afford to get a full time, you know, local assistant, right away.
Leah Canfield 1:01:51 And yeah, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of creative solutions like that. I mean, you can, if you live there College, people need to intern and they don’t, they don’t necessarily even need to be paid. Right? And, or if you have a group of agents in your office, and you guys don’t even work together, but you’re like, Hey, I can’t afford someone salary, but I could afford 1/5 of someone’s salary. What about you? Right? So there’s a lot of different ways you can accomplish this. But I, I do think that if you’re going to take your business seriously, you know, and you pick up the E Myth and you read it, and you realize that you’re both the CEO and the receptionist of your business and everything in between. There’s a better way. Yeah, better for you for your life.
D.J. Paris 1:02:32 I just want to circle back in this last thing I’ll mention because I think it’s really important. And you said this, and it’s quite profound. This idea of making space for ideas to emerge. So you’re talking about it reminded me of of the saying, which is technically a, it’s not even a saying it’s just true, is that the music that we enjoy? It’s not actually the notes that that are that we’re sort of interpreting, we’re actually interpreting the silence between the notes, because otherwise, it’s just one continuous sound, right? Yeah. So we all okay, yeah, we get that. But the point of it is, is that in order for us to appreciate things, we really do have to give it our attention, which means making space, which means putting down maybe the phone or the TV, and blocking out some actual time to sit alone and think for a few minutes here and there. About let’s let’s brainstorm some ideas of making, you know, x better or, or changing y. And, and if you don’t spend that time, it’s unlikely to emerge. Because we do live in this culture of cons. I mean, we have a device in our pocket that is unlimited. It’s unlimited, and its ability to entertain us. It’s completely unlimited. It’s the most powerful thing that we could have ever imagined now sits in our pocket, and you can give us any sort of feeling we wanted any given time, we just can dial it up. So it’s, it’s almost quite, it’s actually quite dangerous, in a sense. So extremely
Leah Canfield 1:03:57 difficult. Thanks a lot, Steve Jobs.
D.J. Paris 1:04:01 It’s all his fault.
Leah Canfield 1:04:03 But I mean, I struggle with it. I will mindlessly open apps on my phone. And I’m like, What am I doing? You know? And I will say that, if it sounds overwhelming to set everything aside and have a brainstorming session, some people are like, what does that even mean? It you don’t have to go forward with always having a purpose to something. And that is something that I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older because you know what, when I was younger, when I was a ski racer, I couldn’t just like go for a stroll, right? I’d have to do like intervals, right? Sprinting for 30 seconds and then recovering and sprinting and recovering and all my friends were like, You’re crazy. Can you just come on a walk with us? I’m like, No, actually, I can’t have to train. And so now it’s okay to just be great if you can figure out a way to just be so if you if you don’t want to turn your phone off and do a brainstorming session for your job, or you know, for your business, turn your phone off and just go for a walk or take a shower or, or, you know, if you’d like to paint paint just make space for you not to be so turned on all the time because all of a sudden, you will be on that walk with no intention of coming up with any ideas for your business. And you will be like, Hey, how did I not think of this sooner, because all of a sudden, your mind has the capacity to actually problem solve. And that’s just burnout, the grind culture doesn’t allow don’t have that space. So you gotta make it.
D.J. Paris 1:05:33 I think that’s perfectly said and great place for us to wrap what I what I would like to say for everyone listening is that Breckenridge is a town where people oftentimes have, you know, a condo that they go to visit and ski it or maybe they have a second home, because they enjoy, you know, everything about that part of the country, which it’s like such a perfect sort of plays. And so this is an opportunity for anyone listening, if you do have clients that love to ski or love to be outdoors and are looking in areas to maybe retire to or even have a second home. You know, Leah and her team would love the opportunity to connect with you, Leah. Or, and of course, if anyone’s listening out there who is looking to purchase or list a property in the Breckenridge and Summit County area. I mean, Leah and her team, obviously are a great choice. They are not only one of the top teams in the area, they’re Leah and her team is literally one of the top agents in all of Coldwell Banker, including not just this country, but the entire world. So if somebody out there is looking to connect with you, and in some way, Leah, what’s the best way that they should do that?
Leah Canfield 1:06:39 Oh, man, you know, here’s the thing about being a realtor, you could just look up my name, and you will find all of my personal information. So you use pretty easy to find my phone number, my website, my email,
D.J. Paris 1:06:51 but what we’ll do is, yeah, we can send everyone right over to the website, which is mountain homes group.com. Again, mountain homes, plural group.com, the link will be in our show notes and you can find all things Leah there, you can connect with her. It should you you know, want to you know, set up a referral system. And by the way, Leah also has I’m sure clients that move from the area as well. So probably a good person to connect with. So and So Leah, we are so excited. Congratulations again on the nar 30 under 30 What a huge, huge honor not surprising for what you’ve accomplished thus far. But also, I’m glad that I’m glad that National Association of REALTORS recognized you because of course, seeming seems very well deserved. And we wish you the very best as you’re, you know, again, you’re sort of going up the mountain as opposed to traditionally in the past always going down the mountain. In your in your other career. But so part part in the silly pun there but but the but but I’m very excited to continue to watch your your ascent and and as you build your business, you know, we want to check back in with you and see how it’s going and what new lessons you’ve learned. Because, you know, your business will continue to evolve, continually evolve. And you’ll have better ideas as well as as things change. So we are excited to keep that keep that conversation going for. So everyone who’s made it all the way to the end. We appreciate you our listeners or viewers. On behalf of Leah and I, we thank you for sitting and listening to us talk. Hopefully this was helpful to you. I trust that it was it was for me. And I know we’ll get a lot of great feedback from our audience. And speaking of feedback, let us know what you think of the show. So best way to do that. If you’re listening through a podcast app, leave us a review, let us know whether it’s Apple podcasts or Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts anywhere. Just let us know what you think of the show. We read every comment and on. So on behalf of Leah and I we say thank you. And of course on behalf of the audience, we say thank you to Leah for coming on and really giving us her perspective of what’s been working for her. And there’s been so many great tips in here that I know our audience is going to be thrilled to share this episode with another realtor. So best way to do that just send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com We have every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream it right online. If the person you’re sending over isn’t a podcast person, just send them to our website keeping it real pod.com And thank you again to everyone Lea thanks again and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Closes a Home Every Three Days! • Courtney Hatfield
Nov 09, 2022
Courtney Hatfield the owner & top producing agent of Your HomeCourt Team talks about how she got into the real estate business. Courtney discusses how she started her career by joining a team and how shortly after that she decided to start her own team. Next, Courtney and D.J. discuss the importance of making big decisions and seeing mistakes as only tools to learn. Courtney describes the role of social media in her success and shares strategies for posting for agents.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does a small real estate team that closes one home every three days? How do they generate almost all of their business from social media? We’re going to find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interests and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer and Team Lead Courtney Hatfield. But before we get to Courtney, just wanted to say thank you, because by the time you hear this, it’ll be probably about three weeks after I’ve recorded it. But we actually had our very biggest month ever as far as downloads and listens, which actually has been every month since we started, we’re super lucky to have always kind of gone up. But guys, we hit like a new plateau last month. So that would have been October of this year. So thank you does that November, December, you know, might not be as high because of the holidays. But we are so grateful which basically what I’m saying is thank you because we are not spending money on advertising. And the only way this is really getting out there as if people somehow stumbled across it on their own or that you’re telling them about it. My guess is you’re telling them about it. And so we want to say thanks. Really, it’s been a long wild ride five years now we’re going to keep going. But please keep telling every agent you know about our show. Our whole mission is to help every single agent you know learn from top producers like Courtney, so please tell a friend send over send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right there or of course you can find us wherever podcasts are served. So thanks. Hope everyone is having a great end of 2022 and on to our conversation with Courtney Hatfield.
All right, today on the show ruff Courtney Hatfield from McGough homes in Cleveland and the surrounding areas. By the way, they just opened up in Akron office. Let me tell you more about Courtney. Now Courtney is a wife, a mother of two and owner and top producing agent of your home core team. She’s also the co owner of your home court designs and social media and she’s a social media speaker. According to launched her career in real estate believing you 100% Get what you work for authenticity paired with hard work and determination is carried her team of six into the top 1% of Northeast Ohio. She’s closing and her and her team are closing a home every three days and again, only six team members. Now one day it just clicked said Courtney and the freedom to live life on our own terms was hers for the choosing. She held the power she chose how hard she worked her schedule her paycheck and her opportunities. And we’re excited to chat with her today and she is willing to share a lot of what she did to become successful with our audience. To learn more about Courtney wants you to visit her company website which is m c d M as in Mary C as in Charlie Diaz and David Holmes plural.com MCD homes.com And also follow Courtney on social media because she absolutely shines there. You can find her on Facebook just by searching for Courtney Hatfield, also on Instagram, Courtney Hatfield dot realtor. By the way, all of those links are in our show notes as well as a social media guide that Courtney is generously going to provide to all of our audience, which is also in the show notes. So Courtney, welcome to the show.
Courtney Hatfield 4:52 Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I am a time listener. I just an episode this morning on the way to work.
D.J. Paris 4:59 Wow. Well, I I am so honored to hear that and really grateful to have you on the podcast as well. Because you what you and your team have accomplished in a relatively short amount of time is just nothing more than incredible. But before we get to sort of the present day, I’d love to start at the beginning. So can you tell us a little bit about why you got into real estate and and how you got into real estate?
Courtney Hatfield 5:22 Absolutely. So I got into real estate truly, by happenstance in 2018. It was a family decision, my husband’s family owned a brokerage at the time. And you know, I was a stay at home mom and I was bored. I was actually spending more money as a stay at home mom out of boredom that my husband was like, You need to go do something. So I was like, Well, what if I go into the family business, and I did, and I, I loved it from the start. I had a slow start with it though. Because right after I got my license, my husband’s uncle who was the broker actually was diagnosed with cancer. And he ended up passing away a year later. So it wasn’t really until 2019 that I really hit the ground running with my career. And I chose McDowell homes. I interviewed a few different brokerages, but they were one of the smaller boutique independent brokerages in Cleveland, and I really loved their culture and what they stood for it was a good fit. And that’s just really where I’ve made myself home. And I decided to start our team here. And so over the last three years, I’ve just really poured myself into this, you know, this baby that I created your home court team, and here we are, well,
D.J. Paris 6:39 you are killing it. And I think we want to just maybe remind everyone that you’ve only been really been practicing for, you know, a handful of years. And you started right when COVID was happening. So the fact that you started and again, on the heels of a tragedy and my my condolences for that, but also disability to start at, you know, tragedy aside, just COVID its own tragedy, of course, and what it did to, you know, to agents and their production, and everyone was was obviously struggling as agents to produce. And, of course, last year was was a pretty good year for a lot of agents because there was a lot more activity as we were all getting back to some degree of normalcy, but to then, but But this, you know, just to be able to, to start at this pretty challenging time is incredible. And how did you? How did you notice to create it? Did you create a team right away? Or were you already sort of chugging along yourself and sort of needed help? Or what was that? How was the decision made for that?
Courtney Hatfield 7:41 So I will say was the one thing that I really took away, besides the opportunity that I got from my husband’s uncle, when I came on to the family brokerage was I remember him, he had just missed a phone call. And I was sitting at the desk and I was just kind of like watching him because I was new. And I didn’t know what I was doing. And it in my mind, I was like, Oh, well, he has time to call that person back. But literally, he just missed it. And he was already dialing the person back. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that’s the type of hustle that I need. And I knew that I had it, like buried down in me. And so I was like, This is what I’ve got to do. So when after everything unfolded, and I started at McDowell, I was on a team. I came to McDowell and I joined a team. And I was only on that team for a short period of time before I realized I can do this. And I had everybody leads differently. And I had my own ideas brewing up inside. And I was like, I need to put this into action. And so I know I just went on a little side tangent. No, no,
D.J. Paris 8:47 no, this is all this is all. Absolutely. This is so incredibly unique. I want you to I want to stay with this. This is amazing.
Courtney Hatfield 8:54 It’s just interesting to me. It’s almost kind of how it all happened by happenstance. And but how it all fell together just so beautifully, to give me this career that I’ve built and to give these agents the career that they now have, and the people that we’ve met along the way, and it’s just I’m truly blessed for how it all unfolded. So, yeah, I know, I feel like I just gave him a really long winded answer there. But yeah, I joined a team. I realized very quickly, you know what, everybody leads differently. I do have leadership qualities. So what’s the worst that can happen? You know, I’m not successful at it. And so I kind of took that leap and I started and I started with one agent and I very slowly just grew to where we are now. I have six agents and we are all full time top producing, and just really incredible people all the way around.
D.J. Paris 9:54 Yeah, well I hear that I hear. It’s such a unique story. I’ve done I think 400 plus of these, and I’ve not ever heard anyone say I needed to develop a team, within a short period of time of not only being in the business, but also being part of someone else’s team where you’re like, I see what they’re doing, I could maybe do this in a different way or, you know, in my own way, and, and the fact that, in a time of really difficult time to be a realtor like all of this is, is blowing my mind, it’s leaving me a bit speechless. Because, because the results really do speak for themselves. I mean, here you are now with your six, or your five other agents are, you know, and your guys are closing, you know, 100 plus homes a year. And it’s not like, well, you’re 20 years in the business. And you’re like, it was time for me to build a team. And I was tired of working 80 hours a week. And so I started, it was like, right away, you’re like, I can do this. And that’s an incredible amount of confidence. And I mean that in the most sort of lovely way, because it’s just, it’s, you really did bet on yourself. And they’re really, you know, and I don’t mean this in any sort of pejorative sense or critical sense, but maybe you shouldn’t have even had that much confidence, right? And yet, and you made it. And that means I love those stories, you bet on yourself.
Courtney Hatfield 11:17 You know, I have that mentality. And sometimes it does bite me in the butt. And I’m just like, well, what’s the worst that could happen? You know, and so here we are, and the worst, there’s nothing bad about it. I went together,
D.J. Paris 11:31 I went, I love what you just said. And I really I know, I’m sort of stuck on this point. But I think it’s so important, this mindset that you have, I went and saw the filmmaker Kevin Smith speak once and we’re probably all familiar with him or or at least we know, we know the name and, and whether you like his movies or not, he’s he’s definitely had a impressive career as somebody that like worked in a video store, essentially, and then bet on himself and made his first movie clerks with like, a credit card that that was no studio would finance it. And then of course, went on to to a lot more fame, and he’s still making movies today. But anyway, when I saw him speak, he said very similar thing to you, to you. And this was his big message that when I saw him speak was, he’s like, betting on yourself. There’s really not much downside, right? He’s like, if you don’t make it, oh, well, you find something else to do. But what if you What if you’re wrong? What if you what have you would make it? And he’s like, What if you’re What if betting on yourself is actually right. And, and I, and the fact that you’re saying this now, is just I hope our audience is taking this in as like, betting on yourself might feel risky, but it’s maybe not as risky as as people think. And so I applaud you for taking that leap. And, and obviously, you’re having an amazing ride. So congrats. Yeah,
Courtney Hatfield 12:50 thank you. Go ahead.
I was just gonna say very similarly to betting on yourself, which I feel like people, people need to do that not just in real estate, but just life in general, just have the confidence in yourself. And in your gut feeling of what you’re supposed to be doing all my life. I had been told I was, you know, bossy, or at leadership skills. And it’s like, Yes, I know these things, but how can I get there and channel them? And when? What’s that, quote, when preparation meets opportunity? perspiration?
D.J. Paris 13:21 Yeah, yeah, thing like that? Yeah, yeah.
Courtney Hatfield 13:25 It’s like, when everything comes to gather, so divinely just you have to trust it, that everything’s gonna work out in your behalf. And I think people should do that more often, not just in business, but in life. Well, I, I was just gonna say, I’m sorry, you don’t get what you don’t ask for, you know, I’m not going to ask you’re not going to get it.
D.J. Paris 13:47 And, and failure. Getting used to failure is a good thing, right? Because I’m sure as you run a team, there’s probably lots of things you’ve tried, you know, with your team that work and lots of things that don’t work. And I’ve found, and not in every case, but almost every really successful person I know, fails a lot. Like they’re just like, oh, failure is just part of the deal. But you just keep going you get back up, you try harder. And so it’s not even that failure is really the issue. It’s getting up from the failure, I think,
Courtney Hatfield 14:15 totally. And I wouldn’t even think I don’t even call it failure. Right? And it’s growing pains. We are gross. And I’m fortunate to be surrounded by agents that have a lot of grace as we grow to trust my vision, but they can say, Okay, well, this isn’t working out, you know, how can we correct this instead of just being all up in arms? You know, we have to we have to shift.
D.J. Paris 14:39 Yeah, yeah, pivoting and having having grace to for the imperfection of running a real estate business, whether it’s an individual practitioner and they just learned their best friend went with a different realtor as opposed to them or you know, somebody who’s running a team and maybe their top producer decides to leave and and it feels, you know, it feels Like, Oh, this is all failure. And it’s like, well, no, it’s just, it’s just an experience happens to be one that doesn’t feel very good and sort of sucks. But but it doesn’t have to be the end, right? It can keep keep moving you forward. And in fact, I learned, I read this, I didn’t learn it myself. But I learned it from reading it. But it’s like, we only actually learn from making mistakes. It’s only really the way that we do it. So I love the fact that you took it enormous chance on yourself. And here we are, I want to talk about social media and its role in how that’s helped really skyrocket your business. And you teach this as well. So this isn’t just something you do, you’re able to really tell agents. And I guess I want to start, before we get into it was something that I rarely, rarely ask people about social media. And I actually was telling this before we started, like, I gotta remember to ask this, because what is it maybe, first, maybe it’s a mindset thing. But how did what was the biggest mistakes that you see agents making in the way they approach social media?
Courtney Hatfield 16:01 Well, one of the biggest mistakes that I think agents make is not advertising themselves on social media. So I’m not saying don’t make a post, I’m saying when I go to your page, your Facebook page or Instagram page, how do I know that you sell real estate? If it’s a picture of the sunset as your cover photo? And you and your kids as your profile picture? That’s beautiful. But where does it tell me that you sell real estate? We are. We need to advocate for ourselves. And we need to advertise for ourselves. And so it’s free social media is free. So why aren’t we putting you know, you’ll see if you go to my Facebook page, on the very top, it my cover photo is my name, and my phone number. And you see multiple pictures of me in real estate, you see pictures of my kids, you say things like that, but there’s no question when you get on my page, what I do. And that mistake.
D.J. Paris 17:03 Boy, I agree. I think there’s certainly the going swinging all the way to the other direction. There’s too much too much advertising, of course. But I think what you’re saying is really important, because one of the stats that I might be a little off. So I apologize, you may or may not be able to correct me if I’m wrong. But one of the stats that that people forget or maybe don’t know is that especially with Facebook, and I don’t know Instagrams algorithm quite as well. But people who follow you on Facebook only see like three to 5% of your posts in general. So this idea of, of advertising is really important, because even though you put out a post saying, Hey, guys, I’m looking for clients, or whatever, or I just closed this home, only a handful of your followers are even going to see that. So you do need to make a conscious effort of doing some consistent marketing and not being afraid that people are gonna get so annoyed by this. If you’re doing 20 of those a day. Don’t do that. But or maybe do it I don’t know. But But certainly, don’t be worried about that, because Facebook is probably not going to share it with as many people as you want it to see it anyway.
Courtney Hatfield 18:10 Know, the algorithm on Facebook and Instagram, on any social media platform is only a very small sliver. See. And I can’t remember this statistic, honestly. But it’s a I want to say it’s like 30% or something like that. And I could be totally wrong. I could have just made that up that number sticking out to me for some reason. But yeah, like you said, only a small percentage of people see what you post. And so you need to be consistent in your social media posting, you’re not going to get water the same day that you dig the well. But if you keep digging, and you keep reminding people, you know, hey, I’m in real estate, look at this closing look at this review. Look at this cool kitchen, I got to show something like that, then you’re gonna stay top of mind. So you really have to be consistent and it goes first. When I go to your page. Can I see what you do? Do I know your face is your brand? Where’s your face? Where’s your phone number? I know I don’t scroll for phone numbers. You know if I want something? If it’s not right there I’m gonna find another phone number somewhere else.
D.J. Paris 19:18 Yeah, make it easy for people to reach out. Oh, and that can be done like you were saying that can all be done really in the profile or the the header image of of of a Facebook page or your own personal profile? Those your right you should make it easy. So that because and there’s nothing inherently cheap about that. I know some people struggle with like, well, I’m advertising and maybe that’s it’s like, you know what, it’s only it’s only cheap if you think it’s cheap. Like if you actually authentically I’m like I mean look, we advertise our business we I recruit Realtors as for our company, while the way I advertise is we have people who make cold calls to other realtors that’s advertising you If if that would have helped me on my Facebook page, I would put it on there. It’s not, it’s not. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that whatever your version of advertising is letting people know what you do is not bragging. It is simply telling people what you do.
Courtney Hatfield 20:15 Yeah. 100% You’re so right. It’s not like I said, your face is your brand, the brand of your real estate business, when somebody thinks real estate, I want them to think of my face, I want them to think Courtney Hatfield. And by doing that by posting and being consistent on social media, I recommend posting two to three times a week. Don’t Don’t post those filler posts, don’t post the post that, you know, just because you feel like you have to post something, post something that is going to post a survey be like, what what would you want in your dream house? You know, do you want a wine cellar? Do you want to library? Do you want to in ground pool posts, you know, get something that’s going to get the people involved? Yeah. I also recommend, why recommend posting two to three times a week, I have my notes right here. So that’s what I’m looking off at the side. So I can stay on track, but also posting on stories daily.
D.J. Paris 21:16 What do you recommend for stories, because agents have lots of different strategies, some agents are like, Hey, I met a showing or, you know, listing or whatever. And I found this really cool thing in the home that I want to show you or check out this beautiful, whatever. Or there’s people that are like in the car on the way to the gym, or you know, there’s lots of different approaches. And I’m not here to say which ones work better. But I’m curious what you found works the best for you.
Courtney Hatfield 21:43 So I keep my posts, my posts on my page are very strategic, I fake posts with faces get 30% more likes and interaction than post without faces. So I’ll post pictures of myself or my kids or whatnot. Clients, when they close in front of their house, I’ll post a picture and I’ll paint the story for them. When it comes to stories, those are a little bit more, they don’t have to be as thought out. If you’re out to eat and you’re like, look at this amazing milkshake I got and you tag the location in it. You can throw a song on there, you know, you’re out in a showing and look at this incredible bathroom. Oh my gosh, you know, it, you don’t really have to put much thought behind it. I know people go live in their stories. I think that that’s great. Show your face go live. As long as you’re consistent doing it. And it was funny because I had somebody I was I didn’t post on stories for maybe a day or so I kind of took just like a break from social media for a minute. And I had one of my agents reach out to me, she’s like, how am I supposed to know like, what you’re up to if you’re not posting on your stories? And I was like, You’re right, like people follow along. And you don’t realize that but people are like, Oh, Courtney didn’t go to Starbucks today. What’s going on, you know, and people get invested.
D.J. Paris 22:59 They do. I mean, it’s funny, like, you know, this, this I, for those for anyone listening who is into gaming, or maybe has children that are into gaming, they there’s a huge industry now people watching other people play games, or talk about playing games. And and this is something people do get invested in other people’s lives. And this is a great opportunity to get people hooked on you. And so you said something really interesting. I just want to this really particular granular thing you said that was so, so smart, which was look at this cool milkshake I’m enjoying at whatever place and you can tag of course the place and then it just in case they’re not on top of their social media. If you know if they you know that well, if they are on top their social media, they’ll see it and maybe even repost it or or sort of set it out to their audience. Or if you don’t see that you can always message them and say hey, FYI, I just put this put you in a real I wanted to support the business. Yeah, and yeah, and then that becomes an opportunity to chat with the owner or whoever’s in charge.
Courtney Hatfield 24:01 Absolutely. A few things. So you could do with that by being your market expert tagging your plate, the tagging places and social media. So then they’re going to share it. People are going to see Courtney Hatfield dot realtor shared that post. She’s a realtor in this area. And I’ve gained followers from that I’ve had people message me from that. You can also one thing that I think is really neat to do is do interviews with local owners and love that local businesses and just draw Hey, I’m your market expert. It has does not have to have anything to do with real estate. But you
D.J. Paris 24:40 can either. I’m going to take over the interview for two for 30 seconds because Courtney just in Courtney, I’m so sorry but I am such a big fan of what Courtney is saying so I apologize for jumping on top of this one but I love this so much. So Courtney just gave everybody a literally a a strategy you could do every single week, find a local business in your area that you love and support and that you want to see succeed. And you have to think about it. Now we’re going to switch to the business owners perspective. They’re getting phone calls constantly from people wanting them to spend money on marketing efforts, right? Whether it’s print ads, radio, you know, internet ads, whatever it might be, it’s all about, can we get more money out of the owner so that they can get more business? You’re basically saying, I want to give you a free shout out to everyone who follows me? And can I do a quick Can I come down to your thing and do a quick like, two minute interview or 10 minute interview about why you started this business? There is never going to be somebody that says no to that, like, oh, no, I don’t, of course, I don’t charge. It’s just something I do. And oh my god, it’s so incredibly brilliant.
Courtney Hatfield 25:46 It’s just a great way for you to be in the media. So when people think of you, the goal is to get people to think of you as their source of information for your town, it doesn’t just have to be real estate related. And so you can go to the dance studio, and you can say, Oh, this dance studio has classes Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and they’re offering a special this month, this is the owner, Billy Bob, you know, and he has done this 37 years and just really expand on that. They will show the video, you can share the video to different you know, if you have a city Facebook page, I know I know those exist, you know, a county Facebook page, and you can just get your face everywhere.
D.J. Paris 26:36 I’m pausing, you know, because you just said another amazing thing. So because I live in a little neighborhood called Wicker Park, we have a Wicker Park community group and and we’re, you know what, you know, most of the posts are either there’s a lost cat or dog and somebody wants to find her other than that, it’s does anyone have a good recommendation for an Indian restaurant or whatever, a hairdresser, or doctor or whatever. So you pretty just said this amazing thing, you you go interview the business that you want to support, whatever it is, doesn’t matter what it is just something that you are really into. And then you absolutely have a community page somewhere online on Facebook, or there’s other places too, but and then post it there. And then oh, by the way, they’ve learned that Courtney, the realtor is putting this out and that’s amazing.
Courtney Hatfield 27:21 You’re their market expert. That’s how you want to brand yourself with your face. In on social media. With social media that I I like to drill, like drill in on is going live. So people are uncomfortable, they don’t like going live in front of the camera. It’s not for you. It’s for other people. So when you go live and you’re at a showing, or you’re at an open house, or you’re at you know, we have a theater downtown, where I live, going live there and saying I’m live here with this Beatles tribute band. And just those things won’t go into your won’t go into your feed, they won’t go on to your profile, but they’re going to go in your stories. And it looks like you’re everywhere all the time. And this has nothing to do with anything I just said. But when you’re posting in your stories, people don’t need to know that you’re actually you know, on your couch ordering a pizza, you know watching a movie, like out and about, it looks like you’re constantly going.
D.J. Paris 28:31 Yes. And perception is important. Is
Courtney Hatfield 28:35 it is so if you look like you’re everywhere, and you’re involved in everything, and you dabble in everything, people will say, Oh, Courtney has done this, she’s been here. And then they’ll come to me and it just builds that relationship. And you’re
D.J. Paris 28:48 also providing value because like oh, by the way, Beatles are my favorite band of all time. So I will always go see a Beatles tribute band. But but the but what you said is really important because whether you’re actually at the event, or you’re just promoting the event saying hey, Beatles fans, there’s this there’s the Beatles thing tonight like that’s that’s still incredible value to people that like wow, Courtney really knows what’s going on whether you’re there dancing, or not even able to attend this idea of providing value, even outside of real estate just saying like, I know what’s going on because this is my community. I work in this community. Oh, yeah. Brilliant. If we’re talking about branding now really, we’re talking about this idea. Yeah. Oh my gosh,
Courtney Hatfield 29:29 nobody needs to know you’re on your couch in your pajamas. Like you’re just providing value. That’s literally what our job is to do is to provide value via market resource be people be their go to person and that will eventually you don’t get water the same day. You take the while it will turn into clients it will turn into referrals. I’ve seen this time and time again in my own business, and we’ve only been in business, you know a few years.
D.J. Paris 29:56 Unbelievable what percentage of your business comes from social median I mean, just a general idea of I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half a billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Courtney Hatfield 31:23 My my personal business is all social media. Everything that I do i We do get leads on the team. But I don’t take I don’t take leads I pass those out. Sure. So all of mine last year, I just social media referrals I had 30 I closed 30 transactions.
D.J. Paris 31:42 Amazing. That’s amazing. So this idea how long did it see you talked about? Yeah, look, you know, we’re this is a marathon, not a sprint, you post once, and then nothing happens? And you’re like, Well, that didn’t work. And it’s like, no, it probably did work. It’s just not how people make decisions about about their biggest what are their biggest assets, if not their biggest asset. They need to get comfortable, it’s going to take time if you’re the followers, the followership is going to grow. How long did it take before you started seeing results on social?
Courtney Hatfield 32:14 It was probably
maybe a year and a half or two years into consistently posting that I really started to get and you’ll see in the packet and the PDF that I’m going to share with everybody, you’ll see examples of people saying, Hey, do you have a business card or phone number I can share with my ex husband, he’s on the hunt for a house. Oh, Courtney Hatfield, 100%. She’s amazing. And local to the Canton area, one of the nicest ladies you’ll ever meet. And I share, I share a ton of screenshots. Just proof that this does work, if you keep putting in the time putting, you know, it takes time, it does take time. I’m very authentic in what I post. I’m not it’s not everything is curated. It’s right now you’ll look at my Instagram, and I just bought a house and I’m redoing it. And just little projects. And so you’ll see a bunch of reels of me, you know, attempting different projects. It’s what’s really happening in my life. And I get comments on there that people are like, I can’t wait to see how this turns out. And you know, it keeps people in the loop. So they may not need me for real estate right now. But if they want to redo their fireplace, they can call me, you know, yeah, still providing that value, even though it’s very authentic to who I am.
D.J. Paris 33:36 And they might, they might be doing their fireplace and going, you know, we don’t know the right masonry guy or or the architect or the contractor. Like, we should ask Courtney because I know I’ve been following her. And this is what she’s up to. Oh, I love that. I love that that is really, really smart. And I don’t know that anyone’s ever really talked about that in that way on the show. So I appreciate you going into that detail. And I’m a marketer. So I just absolutely love this conversation. And it’s so funny because what we’re not talking about necessarily is how to hone your actual skills as a realtor, which you absolutely should be doing on top of that. But I think agents focus on that quite a lot, which they should and they often neglect this this marathon like you were saying one and a half to two years before you saw results on social that is not a fun ride, right? Like that is a that is a it’s a grind that you just have to trust is eventually going to pay off. And it’s just look this podcast. No, nobody listen to this podcast for the first year and a half. Nobody cared about it and took that long before anyone even noticed it. So I am right with you.
Courtney Hatfield 34:41 Right you have you have to put in the time. I I’m weary about instant success. So every day that I’m like, Are we still like a top producing team? You know what I mean? I still question how I just question it because I feel like instant success. There’s something to be said about it. So we really have, you have to put in the work. And we really have to get where we are social media, I do recommend. So what I, my method on social media is I pick five topics to post about. And they are real estate related. And I can fly through those real quick, just my guess. So the first thing I posted are pictures of myself, because like I said, photos of faces get more, they get more engagement than photos of like, I don’t know, a certain set. Then I post work new listings, sold listings, reviews, market news and team news. And anytime I post team news, I am a big fan of giving credit where it’s due. So I am tagging the entire team. It’s not about me, it’s about them. This is their businesses that we are trying to grow. And so I will tag every single person. So now what I just posted about your home court team ends up on six different Facebook pages or Instagram pages or Instagram stories. And our brand grows from there. I’m a big, big advocate of posting reviews, you should absolutely don’t post a one star review. But if you’ve got a five star review, you should absolutely post it. If you sold a million dollar house, it doesn’t matter if you sold that house. Last July, you still sold that million dollar house. So post it keep posting it posts, you know, different posts like different photos of it. Because you are a million dollar agent now. You sold
D.J. Paris 36:36 Yeah. And you can even every year on the home anniversary, say congratulations to so and so who purchased or sold this home a year ago. So much fun working with you, you know could be something like that. And tagged.
Courtney Hatfield 36:49 Lee? Absolutely. Yes. i The third thing I post, I post my kids and I always try to make it business related. So my daughter had career day at school. She’s six, she wanted to dress up like me for career day. Oh, she put on her earrings. She put on her sweatshirt that says your home court team. She carried her purse, and she carried a little coffee mug. And that’s what she went to school and I posted the picture. And everybody loved it.
D.J. Paris 37:16 Where I’m supposed to do this thing I’ve ever heard. It was,
Courtney Hatfield 37:19 it was like, wow, she had my business cards in her little she had a little fake Louis Vuitton purse, and she put her business cards in there. And she took them and that was like passed those babies out, like get them everywhere.
So I’ll post
pictures of that or her in front of a listing sign. You know, pretending like she sold it. Just, that’s great. I love that. Just different ideas to kind of bring it it’s still business related, but it’s still personal to me.
D.J. Paris 37:47 Sure.
Courtney Hatfield 37:48 I’ll post quotes. I do like sales quotes. And funny. The quotes that I see get the most interaction or saves on Instagram are quotes about money. And I used to yeah, I’ve never I’ve never even spoken about this with anybody because that’s just like one of those you look at your insights and you’re like, oh, okay, but I’ve noticed quotes about money, financial freedom, things like that those get the most saves and shares on Instagram, which I thought was. So I’ve ramped up sharing those.
D.J. Paris 38:22 Well, everybody wants more money. Right. So I think that’s makes sense. Yeah,
Courtney Hatfield 38:26 absolutely. It. Yeah, it does. And then I post I, I like doing DIYs. So I that is my fifth thing that I post our DIY videos of the house, or a big thrift or something that I found a Goodwill or I’ll post things like that very authentic to me brings in a different type of audience gets the engagement and they know that I’m a realtor. In the meantime,
D.J. Paris 38:53 well and I want to point out something about the DIY crowd because DIY crowd is online. This is where they’re learning oftentimes how to do some of their DIY projects. So this this is also like going where your audience is yes, it may be it’s a different audience than then who was more attracted to other posts of yours. But that’s the whole point is you have different different sort of categories for different types of clients. And this idea of DIY, people are always looking for inspiration ideas instruction. So that is I’ve never heard anyone talk about that. That’s really smart.
Courtney Hatfield 39:26 It’s it’s home. It’s you know, we sell homes for a living so people what do they want to do they want to renovate their home or they want to update it in some way. And so I just post my personal DIY projects and products that I got things like that. And I mean, like I said, it’s a different following, but it’s it’s very in line with what I do.
D.J. Paris 39:49 You you’ve given us so many great I’m sorry, did we hit all five of your topics because I Okay, good. Because I know you You were you were wonderful, I lose track of things because I get so excited with with a lot of these ideas. And I’m realizing as a quiz, so funny. So this is This is Courtney, is was kind enough not to scold me, but she, she, she probably should have because she said to me, before we started, do you guys have Instagram? And I’m like, really for the podcast? And I was like, How stupid are we that we don’t have Instagram yet. And I’ve heard about lots of people talking about social media in the past. So this is my challenge to myself to take my own advice or Courtney’s advice, rather. And I’m going to commit to starting to post more regularly about the podcast, as well as our own business for recruiting realtors. But you are absolutely right. And you’re getting all of your business through social That is insane.
Courtney Hatfield 40:47 Yes, that one thing and I know, we talked about something mistakes, agents make
social media Polit politics COVID You know, religion, issues
that yeah, religion, things that we are, we’re not in the market to debate, we’re in the market to sell houses. So let’s, if somebody, you know, if I vote for somebody, and somebody else votes for somebody, I’m not going to not sell them house because they didn’t vote for the person I wanted, you know, I don’t care who they voted for. I care that they, you know, use me to buy their house. So I just keep all of that separate, you’ll never find a single thing on my page about anything political. And, well, it’s just
D.J. Paris 41:32 gonna polarize, it’ll polarize and alienate a certain group. And you’re as a business owner, I guess there’s, I guess, a strategy of like, if I polarized one side, maybe the other side comes? I don’t know, it seems like a very risky strategy. I would rather let everybody wanted to work with
Courtney Hatfield 41:50 100%. And I am shocked by how many agents I see that are just so like, rude about it on Facebook or Instagram, more. So Facebook, but I’m just like, oh, my gosh, don’t stop talking.
D.J. Paris 42:03 i Yeah, I’m a big fan of the the realtor community labcoat agents, which is, I think, the largest realtor community online. And it’s wonderful. And there’s so much value there. And I love Tristan, and those guys, they’re lovely. They’ve been on my show. But you’re right, like in this is just a realtor thing that other people wouldn’t necessarily see. But there’s a lot of like, you know, a brokerage has, you know, layoffs or something bad happens to a brokerage. And there is a lot of brokers out there who are like, Thank God, so and so’s going down and, and I’m just, it’s just, it’s an incredible amount. And I wonder what they’re posting on their own public stuff, if you know, they’re willing to serve. It’s very strange. So don’t really hate people. Exactly.
Courtney Hatfield 42:44 There’s enough sun to shine for every single person. And you know what, I kind of feel like if you were not, if you used your time better, maybe, maybe you should be selling a house instead of complaining on Facebook, you know?
D.J. Paris 43:01 Yeah, you’re right. And people who, you know, just being really conscious about the about your image. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s called branding. It’s really important. It’s funny, like we’re starting, I’m starting another podcast, unreal estate related for non real estate related for an organization. And as a result, I’m just interviewing people for this particular nonprofit. And it has nothing to do with me, but someone has to be the podcast host. And so I had to really think that even though I don’t speak for the organization, I’m not on their board of directors, I’m part of the community of this organization, but I’m not their main person. But it’s going to come across that I’m the main person because I’m going to be doing this podcast. And I had to realize, okay, it’s important for me not to insert myself into this new podcast, because I don’t I don’t speak for this brand, but you speak for your own brand. And on this show, I can be as you know, obnoxious says I want because it’s my own brand. But, um, but you’re absolutely right is, is really being aware that, you know, every time you post, it’s permanent, it’s forever. And, you know, maybe people should be more conscious of what their brand is because their clients are going to look them up.
Courtney Hatfield 44:10 They they really are. Yeah, just be very careful what you put on and what you’re willing, some people that’s the hill they’re willing to die on. So all right, I’ll take the clients you don’t want.
D.J. Paris 44:21 I love that. And, and also, I said this at the beginning, but I sort of said it quickly, Courtney is been generous enough to provide a guide for our audience to really help them understand best practices around social media marketing, we’re going to make that available. It’s in the show notes. It’s a PDF super easy to to get and really will help you start your journey there. What do you tell agents, people that that you speak to about doing more on social, if they’re afraid to sort of turn the camera on themselves? If there is a fear of I don’t know. I don’t really, you know, it’s hard for me to expose maybe, you know, they’re just a lot of people aren’t calm. have trouble in front of a camera. I know I’m not.
Courtney Hatfield 45:03 I’m not either. But a lot of people are in, some agents on my team aren’t comfortable with it. And a lot of the time, it really just takes practice. It just takes practice. Honestly, they’re nobody’s thinking about what you look like when you send them that video, they’re listening to what you have to say. And when people look too far into it, they really do. Yeah. So you know, I, it just takes practice, stand in front of a mirror, record yourself a few times, one thing that I have told my team is instead, so let’s say they make connection with a new lead, send that person a video and say, it was so nice to talk to you, I can’t wait to work with you, I’m going to, you know, send you properties, whatever you guys spoke about. But do it, make a video of your face and send it to them? It’s so much better than, hey, this is Courtney Hatfield, you know, it was such a pleasure and being, you know, sending them a text message that’s so much more generic, anybody can send a text message, what makes us different? Let’s send a video message.
D.J. Paris 46:09 So So I want to, I want to drill down on this for a moment because I want to make sure I understand the process because this is brilliant. So let’s say you’re at an open house, you get a list of people that have come in. And now at the end of the open house, you now have names and phone numbers and email addresses of people to follow up with who maybe they’re not going to buy the home. But but maybe they’re you know, you could show them other properties. So So you saying make a video for those people as well? Yes. Every How do you send that? I’m sorry? How do you distribute that to them?
Courtney Hatfield 46:40 Just through a text platform. We use, though I send my stuff through follow up boss.
D.J. Paris 46:46 But follow up boss. They’re there. They’re a sponsor of ours. So we love
Courtney Hatfield 46:51 shameless plug. There you go. I know.
D.J. Paris 46:54 But you’re right, you’re right. We all have phones that can easily do this turn around, hey, it was so good meeting you at the open house. I love it.
Courtney Hatfield 47:01 That’s all it is. And I just flip my camera around, I take a video, it was so nice to meet you guys at the open house. I know this home wasn’t for you. But I’m gonna go into go home and send you some options that might be looking forward to working with you. Then they see your face again. They’re more apt to respond, like we said, faces get more interaction than just a generic text message that anybody can type up a text message. sure anybody can send a video, but not everybody will.
D.J. Paris 47:27 In fact, almost nobody will. Exactly.
Courtney Hatfield 47:31 And it’s really, just really,
it makes you stand out against your competition.
D.J. Paris 47:38 It does. And it shows that you are willing to go a little bit further maybe than other realtors to sort of earn the business I guess not even when the business earn it. I think you do have to earn it. I think earning it is through showing people that you’re willing to work, work for them and making a video shows. I mean, again, it’s just a great, great idea. Now I’m gonna we’re gonna put a cap on this episode, because Courtney has given so much of herself in this episode, that I think our audience is like madly scribbling notes about what they can do, because this is incredible. And Courtney has got to go because they’re probably closing a home later today. So I’m going to, I’m going to I’m going to do this and I want to have you back in the future to even give more more and more tips. But you’ve given us a solid hour of unbelievable tips and advice for social media, I am so so grateful to have had you on our show. And I want to make make a point that if there are any realtors out there, who are maybe in the Cleveland or surrounding areas, Akron area as well, you know, and you’re looking to maybe join a team, you know, you never know reach out to Courtney and see if she might be a good fit. Or you might be a good fit for her team. And by the way, maybe you’re just somebody who’s looking for a realtor to either your realtor in another area and you have somebody moving to that area or that you know you’re not a realtor and you found our podcast and you want to work with somebody like Courtney and by the way if you live in those areas you absolutely should you know what’s the best way that someone should reach out to you.
Courtney Hatfield 49:07 You can find me on Facebook, Courtney Hatfield, or you can find me on Instagram Courtney Hatfield dot realtor all one word. I’m on all the social medias, you can find me anywhere, Courtney happy.
D.J. Paris 49:20 And all of those links will be in the show notes if you’re listening to this through a podcast app. And also remember to download her pdf of some best social media practices that she was so kind to, to provide to our audience. And Courtney on behalf of our audience, we really drink from the fire hose today. And so I am my head is spinning a bit and I am about to start to put some some things into action for our own podcast here and my own real estate business or the real estate business I work for so that I can get better results on social so I want to check back in with you shortly and and get you back on the show. So on behalf of the audience, you provided incredible value. So thank you And I know how busy you are. So thank you on top of that. And also, well, we appreciate it so much. And also, on behalf of Courtney and myself, we want to thank everyone who’s watching and listening to the end. We really appreciate your your participation in our show. And the best way you can help us grow is by telling a friend just think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing maybe somebody who needs to have a better social media presence and send them a link to this episode. The best way you can have introduced someone to us just send it to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button. And then the other only thing we ask is that you leave us a review, let us know what you think of the show. It helps us grow helps us get better. So help us get better by telling other people and letting us know what you like and what you don’t like about our show so we can keep getting better for you, Courtney, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you
Why Brokerages Are Unlikely To Save You • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Oct 31, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com and D.J discuss lay-offs by a lot of technology companies and how it’s affecting the market. Chris and D.J. also talk about the value of personal brand vs the brokerage and discuss extensively the importance of building your own brand. Next, they talk about what should agents expect from brokerages they join. Last, they discuss what can agents do to improve their services to their clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 As a realtor, what should you be expecting from your brokerage in 2022 and 2023? Well, the answers may surprise you. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this next year? And do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads into interested buyers? And are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering Realtors a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business. Real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with tons of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. This episode is also brought to you by readly Aerial maps. An aerial retail map can sell a commercial listing before it investor ever sees the property. But creating retail maps takes hours robbing you of time you could spend selling real estate. And if you’re tired of spending late nights scouring the internet for retailer logos to populate your commercial real estate map or you’re tired of paying a designer hundreds of dollars to do it for you. While you’ll love rapidly. Now readily is a real estate map generator that lets you create custom designed professional aerial retail maps for your commercial sales buyers and listing appointments in minutes not hours. Simply enter the subjects property address, auto populate nearby retailer logos with the click of a button and download your aerial retail map readily turns the headache of creating commercial property maps into a quick five minute task so you can spend less time making maps more time making money. So get your first aerial retail map for free today by visiting readily.com. That’s REBL i e.com. And sign up for an account no credit card required. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ parricide. Your Guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes.com. And actually, let me tell you about the clothes. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals that they cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology reviews, team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Now please visit the closed.com you can browse all of their articles they write incredible, long form deep dive, well researched articles about everything from how to grow your business to what tools you may want to consider which we might even talk about a little bit today. They just are absolutely it’s the some of the best content I have found in the real estate industry again, the clothes.com. And with us as always, as Chris Lynn Sal. He is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. And Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing, lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s also a licensed agent in the state of Michigan, and has been part of hundreds of real estate transactions from modest world starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris flyfishing are performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Also he’s a he’s a busy father as well. And husband. So Chris, welcome once. Oh, and by the way, everyone before we bring Chris on, although he’s already here, please visit the clothes.com Make that before you go to bed tonight. If you’re driving, go to the close read one of their articles. And trust me you will be hooked. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Linsell 4:42 DJ, thanks for having me. And I appreciate the fanfare here. It’s good to come back to come back to keeping it real because you’re welcome. So Flattery will get me everywhere. It really will get you in a lot of doors. I’ll be honest with you know, your real estate pawn there but that will opened a number of doors.
D.J. Paris 5:01 You know, it’s it’s funny, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I was I was thinking a lot, I have a friend, this is funny, I’ll just mention this for a moment, I have a friend whose father retired he worked at, I won’t mention right word, but he worked at a traditional big fortune 500 company for for his whole career. And now he’s working just for fun at like a Home Depot kind of helping people find things because he’s really into using his hands. And, again, high level business executive now just kind of more having fun doing this, this thing in retirement, and he mentioned to one of the one of the co workers who happen to be female, he said, Oh, hey, if you smiled at customers more, you probably get, like more, you know, some sort of accolades, or people would talk about you more and, and I said, Oh, you have to tell your dad, you cannot say that you cannot, you cannot, cannot encourage people, but it is one of those things as real estate agents, I think about where I would never tell somebody, make sure you smile, because of course, you know, that’s not really the job. But being professional and being conscious of body language and how you’re communicating with your clients is really important. And so much of communication is nonverbal. Not to say that you should smile when you don’t feel like smiling, that’s actually disingenuous, and probably a really bad idea. But this idea of noticing, you know, if you are faced, we are face to face, again, at least most of us, you know, it’s really important to sort of, you know, practice in the mirror, have a good awareness of, of what your posture and you know, and your different mannerisms so that you can connect more easily with CLI. Anyway, that was my little soapbox.
Chris Linsell 6:39 I totally agree, though. I mean, frankly, like, the the mandate to smile more, you’re right is a little outdated. But I think it’s true, it holds true in the real estate space, there is a mandate to create an environment where your clients will connect with you. Because, you know, I’ll say this, that’s not a requirement to have a real estate license. But it’s very often a requirement for a successful real estate business, to have a demeanor and an environment where your clients feel like they have the opportunity to connect with you. So smile, frown, laugh, cry, whatever you feel like is providing the environment for for your clients to connect with you. I don’t really care. Just be genuine about it.
D.J. Paris 7:28 Yeah, yeah. Being genuine. And you know, we’re, I thought there would be a great Instagram account. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done this. And they should, I would love to see the the makeup lists real estate agent or the an unretouched photo real estate agent Instagram feed, where it’s literally just people as they are without all the you know, sort of bells and whistles. That technology allows us all to sort of be blemish free and perfect. And I think that people oftentimes, you know, don’t connect as well to that as they do just sort of genuine intimacy. And I agree that could be as just a matter of being yourself really, what’s what’s going on in in real estate right now you’re really well connected. You have a you have a good pulse about the industry and sort of what’s happening.
Chris Linsell 8:20 I’ll tell you why there’s a lot happening, you know, we could talk about a number of different things. And here’s what I’m not going to talk about today. I’m not going to talk about interest rates, I’m not going to talk about the the the, you know, average sale price across the United States or in specific kinds of influential markets. I’m not going to talk about that stuff. I’m actually going to talk I’d like to talk to you about what I consider a second order effect of all of that other stuff. We’ll let all of that other stuff the guineas will leave that to the you know, pundits on CNBC and and an NPR and the like, let’s talk about the second order effects of all of that stuff. Specifically. The second order effect that I’m seeing a lot of which is we’re seeing a lot of real estate companies, specifically real estate brokerages and, and firms that are centered in their use of technology, and getting out in front of business and the way the transaction is conducted. We’re seeing a lot of these companies, laying people off. We’re seeing a lot of these companies, a lot of these firms, contracting, tightening their belt, you can there’s 100 Different euphemisms for it. But the long and the short of it is we’re seeing a lot of companies who are reducing their headcount and rethinking their strategy, and I think it is a valuable thing to point out and I’d love to get your insight on this. That a lot of the companies that What are leading the headlines for this sort of activity? Were the ones that just 18 months ago, were also in the headlines, but for very different reasons. They were there because they were a disruptive technology forward business. They were changing the way the real estate transaction was conducted. They were offering agents and brokers in teams, something they have never gotten anywhere else before. Those are the same companies that are now laying people off. You’re not seeing a lot of Coldwell Banker, a lot of REMAX a lot of century 20 ones in the news because they have to cut their technology staffed by 20%. Pretty interesting.
D.J. Paris 10:39 It is interesting, and I sort of, you know, it makes logical sense to me, why that’s happening, why these layoffs are happening, you have a tech heavy sort of, you know, player, whether it’s a brokerage, or a tech provider, selling individual services directly to agents, or to brokerages, who, you know, probably saw a huge boon in their business over the last, you know, 18 to 24 months. Of course, you know, we all remember, you know, what things looked like when rates were lower and inventory was was tighter, it was definitely still really difficult to be an agent, but firms flourished during that time. I know our firm did we were worried that gosh, we maybe we would have to go out of business, nobody really knew what was going to happen. And that’s like, oh, wait, all of a sudden, brokerages did really well. Individual agents were stressed out and, and they had a lot more work on their plate, but they typically did well, too. And now, of course, you’re having companies that, that maybe entered the market a little bit later with it and putting massive sort of, you know, capital behind some of this technology or the staffing. Now, mortgage companies are a perfect example. So they all staffed up because they had to, in order to fulfill orders during the boom, and then now are, you know, are now struggling and having to layoff people and firms are doing similar things. But yeah, you’re right, I don’t hear news. And maybe it’s maybe it’s just better kept quiet, or it’s actually just not happening, although wouldn’t be kept quiet. Some of those companies are public, and that information would come out in earnings reports. But this idea of not hearing it from the traditional brokerages that they’re they’re doing much much cost cutting measures at all.
Chris Linsell 12:28 It’s interesting too, because, you know, one has to kind of stop and wonder whether or not the reason that is, is that these you know, the more traditional brokerage models have less of their resources tied up in what would be considered more of these kind of forward bleeding edge sort of efforts. I think that that’s a reasonable take in this situation. But I do think it’s worth pointing out that one of the challenges with companies exploding onto the scene in the time of a boom, is that we know as real estate professionals, this market is cyclical, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world, there’s always going to be natural cycles. And if you buy in on the upswing, there’s going to be a downswing. It just is the natural course of the market and of the economics of the real estate industry in general. So, you know, one thing I’m telling agents, as we kind of talked through this sort of analysis, and people are asking me questions about this. You know, a lot of people are asking me, like, is the is the compass model? Dead? Like, are they are they doomed for failure? And the answer here is no, I think it’s unequivocally No. But what agents should be thoughtful about in this is that the compassed model, this idea of providing agents with a whole heck of a lot of technology and marketing and branding resources, as a component of your package, rather than outsourcing those things, Agent by agent. That is the v1 of that, that plan, and they’re going through a contraction right now they’re learning what did not work. They are retooling. And when the market bottoms out and scoops back up, there’s going to be a v2 there. I mean, if you think that Apple was offering the iPhone in the 1980s, had the finely tuned machine figured out, you’re crazy. They went through a number of market cycles before they really figured out exactly how to put their foot on the gas. We’re going to see that in the real estate tech and the real estate brokerage space too.
D.J. Paris 14:51 And I also think, too with a company like compass and I’m I’m at least here locally in Chicago. I’m connected to a lot of Compass agents. I’ve asked them like, hey, the news about some of this layoff and reducing staff by whatever the percentage was, I think around 25% of the back office staff maybe and please forgive me, compass people if I have that wrong. I, I, I’m not here to celebrate any sort of layoffs at all. Because I actually think that that’s not not good for, of course, those people in the company, but but I don’t hear people I know, having much concern about about the compass agents I know, in particular, are don’t seem to have much concern. And I, and I’m wondering if that’s because their individual business has not seen, you know, any sort of change the the tools that were promised, seem to still being being able to be delivered. Now. Now, you were saying, you know, maybe that will change, right? Maybe they’re the compasses ability to deliver on some of those promises may change, and they will adapt. But it doesn’t seem to have trickled down in that one specific companies instance, at least here locally in Chicago, I have not heard agents go. Agents might say, Well, I’m a little worried about what’s happening at the company. But I haven’t heard Oh, it’s affected my production. So I imagine maybe that’s part of the reason to why we’re seeing a lot of headlines, but maybe we’re not hearing a lot from Compass agents about it.
Chris Linsell 16:20 Yeah, I think that that’s, that’s probably on the nose here. And you know, one other element to kind of add to that particular point in the conversation is I speak to a lot of agents who they talk about their personal brand, versus their brokerage brand, and how those two things interplay. And the reason that this is kind of off the top of my head right now is I recently just published the 20 end of 2022. update to the best real estate companies to work for article. And in doing so in interviewing a whole bunch of agents across the United States to kind of get their take on their brokerage and on their brokerage brand. The emerges this trend of agents saying a brokerage and its brand and its offerings are all very important to me. But for most agents, their book of business is not based on the artwork on their sign placard, it’s based on the name on the rider their name on the writers, so whether or not they are a century 21, or a compass, or a side or a, you know, any of the major players in the company, or in the in the brokerage space. Regardless of what the artwork is on the sign placard, as long as their name is on the writer on top of the sign, their book of business is relatively stable. And so keeping that in mind, what’s most important to their clients is their relationship with them, like we were talking about earlier, I mean, it is about the relationship that they have with their buyers and with their sellers. And so, though, tools like an automated, you know, technology, forward listing presentation offered by compass or complete, you know, social media branding, offered by, you know, different exp teams, even though those are things that kind of grease the skids of building your business, that isn’t where transactions are won and lost most of the time, you may be reducing or increasing your conversations early on, you know, maybe as a part of that process, but at the end of the day, it’s not the tech tools that are winning new listings, it’s you that’s winning the listings.
D.J. Paris 18:44 Yeah, I agree. And obviously, this is evidenced by all the transitions that agents make, you know, in every market, this idea of moving from from company, you know, to a different company, a different firm because of whatever particular reason. I think you’re right, I think I think that’s becoming more evident to agents as well, that the Hey, our, our brand logo and our our local sort of brand. Yes, it can, of course make a huge difference, especially in smaller communities, maybe, you know, certain certain communities, maybe vacation communities that that comes up more. So yes, of course, someone’s brokerage brand can and will make a difference. But then there’s a lot of agents that self sponsor, and it’s just them and that’s the best sort of example I have of, you know, people are able to do it with zero with not not zero resources, but with just literally their own resources are able to build a successful business and many of the top agents I know have done exactly that. And it’s not because the other firms haven’t come calling saying please join our company and maybe the splits aren’t quite high enough. I’m gonna build my own thing no the splits are high enough you know brokerages right now I’m we’re seeing I don’t know what it’s if you’re noticing this with the people you you coach or or in your local market, but boy, there’s a lot of recruiting going on right now it is just constant which makes sense. But as as the, you know, business has slowed a little bit by missing a lot of recruiting.
Chris Linsell 20:21 Well, it’s so interesting you say that too, because I’m seeing the same thing. You know, agents that I talked to, I mean, are getting, I mean, it’s it is not uncommon to get multiple calls, from, you know, from different brokers entities. And one of the interesting things that kind of comes about this is that it does point out that the most successful brokerage models in our industry are not necessarily the ones that offer the best tools, but are the ones that offer the best environments for agents to build the business that they want. Like those are the brokerages that hang on to the agents that are the top performing in their markets, it is not a matter of like who’s got the flashiest listing presentation, or who has the best branding. It’s interesting, because some of that stuff does correlate, but I think it’s coincidental, but it correlates it is it is primarily in my opinion about who offers the best environment. And that’s for agents to build the business that they want to operate because that everyone else is just chasing that if you’re building, if you’re setting an environment that is not cohesive or conducive, excuse me to building you know, allowing agents to build a business that they’re actually satisfied with your your time is limited, you’re you’re you’re going to expire eventually because agents are going to find those places. And to that to that end, I think it’s important to kind of call out here. If you find yourself spooked, by like reducing of the headcount at maybe maybe you’re a part one of these brokerages, that’s cutting back on resources. Keep in mind, it is about finding that environment that is going to allow you to build your business. And so if you’re the brokerage you that you’re in right now is not offering you that environment, it’s time to answer those recruiter calls. But it’s also time to think about the fact that maybe this environment actually already exists. Maybe what you need here isn’t somebody to hand you a silver platter full of all the food that you’ve ever wanted to eat in your entire life. But maybe it’s just like this brokerage is just handing you the keys to the kitchen and saying like, listen, we got an open, open, open slate here, build whatever you feel like building, we’ll do what we can to provide the resources necessary to give you the opportunities that you want. We’re not going to build it for you. But we’re going to give you the opportunity to build it yourself. That is a very empowering feeling for agents. So be thoughtful about the fact that just because the tools maybe aren’t there in the short run doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, you just might have to build them yourself.
D.J. Paris 23:05 Yeah, or the company that you join or that you’re currently a member of or maybe even going to consider maybe they don’t have a particular tool that another company has. Well guess what there are? If not, while there’s certainly dozens, if not hundreds of pretty prominent tech firms offering those tools that you can piecemeal or ala carte order on your own. So if your business is down and individual production, if you’re enrolled in a virtual production is struggling right now, along with a lot of other people, I would encourage you like Chris said, if you’re exploring other options, I would look less for bullet points of things they’re offering versus having a conversation about so how can you help me get back on track? That how can you help me get to the next level? Not? Hey, we’re gonna you know, and then also understanding that recruiters are people who do recruiting oftentimes are, you know, these are salesy type people, and they’re going to want to persuade you to join. My advice is always randomly don’t ask the recruiter for names, randomly call three or four people at that brokerage and say, Hey, I was thinking of joining I just had a great conversation with so and so. I really wanted to, could I get just a few minutes, can I take you out for a cup of coffee and in fact, you probably already know people at those firms, saying, you know, do you think this is a good fit for me, typically, that person will have no real incentive to persuade you to join their company. But they if you have people that you trust and this goes back to having great relationships with other you know, people, other broker or other realtors in your area, you can actually have those conversations and you might find that, you know, certain offices have certain managing brokers that are more attentive. that have, you know, different types of meetings or different types of skill based training? I think anything that skill training is something that that is not as common. There’s not a lot of skill training that I find from brokerages and boy, the ones that offer it, you know, you can basically beat a, it’s hard to beat a path to their door because there’s so many people wanting to get in. So for me, my advice is look for skill focus training, versus the coolest and newest tech, I’m a tech guy, I love the coolest, the newest tech, that’s what I would be drawn to. But I wouldn’t know at the end, it’s kind of like when you go shopping for a TV and you are sorry, I when I go shopping for a TV, which happens like once every 10 or 15 years, and I do all this research and I want to buy the absolute best TV and then i i spend months researching, I buy the TV, wait for it to be on sale. And then I get it a week later, it’s just my TV, it’s just the exact same. I’m watching content as I was watching before and a slightly newer model with slightly more bells and whistles. I use none of the bells and whistles. But I just, you know, need to watch something I need to watch through a device. And so I think being aware that sometimes the bells and whistles up here are a lot more important than they actually are is something to keep in mind.
Chris Linsell 26:12 Yeah, I agree completely. And at the end of the day, also, there is this, I think the equivalent version of that that experience you just had in the real estate space, to me is a lot about agents realizing it doesn’t matter nearly as much as they thought it did. The the kind of the new, the new labels on things like the new label on the CRM or the new, the new graphic on my side placard, those things matter a lot less, if you are not transforming the way that you are operating your business. When you are switching firms or changing teams or you know, though making those level changes. And I guess that like the the moral of that story is just like DJs TV problem here. It would be a transformative experience if DJ went from he’s he’s watching us consuming his content on his TV, to consuming his content on say, a laptop. Yes, the screen is a different size, but all sudden he has a keyboard and he can have create these all of these relatively interactive experiences for consuming content that he would not have in a very passive, you know, exposure experience watching TV. The same can be said for your real estate business. Maybe it’s time frankly, I hope maybe this is a mandate for someone listening right now, maybe it’s time to turn off the business TV and turn open the business laptop as it were, maybe it’s time to stop being passive and expect your business to be built based on the tools of your brokerage, even if that brokerage is a really tech forward bleeding edge like we’re top of the line with all of our bells and whistles, sort of options. At the end of the day, all of that stuff is just a remote control with a volume knob and a channel in a channel changer. If you want to go to the next level, you got to go to a laptop or something with a keyboard and a mouse where you can start having interactive experiences and building the business that you actually want to be operating using the tools at your disposal because at the end of the day, a passive experience it doesn’t matter what the brand is, whether it’s Sony or Samsung or Coldwell Banker or REMAX a passive experience is going to get you the same basically the same result. It’s the interactive kind of active experience where things are really going to start to change.
D.J. Paris 28:50 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real So that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial, follow up like a boss with follow up, boss. And now back to our episode. I wholeheartedly agree we’re talking about really building and maintaining and evolving your own personal brand, to, uh, to sort of become adept with the times. And and really the best way that I know, if you’re trying to figure out if the goal of your business is to develop more satisfied customers, if that’s ultimately the goal is I want people who have interactions with me, and do transactions with me to be like, Wow, that was amazing if that’s your goal. And I imagine it’s probably everyone’s goal who’s listening, then what I would encourage you to do as a first step is not to try to assume that you fully understand even though you may have perfect five star reviews across the board on Google and Zillow, and that does say that you know what you’re doing. But it might, I would, I would encourage you to do is to reach out to those previous clients and say, May I take you out for a cup of coffee, I am working on my business plan for next year, you are an amazing client. And I just wanted to get ask you a few questions about how I can better sort of stay in touch or better connect with people in between transactions. You know, once I’m in a transaction, I feel like I know what I’m doing. But, you know, there’s a lot of time in between transactions. And I don’t want to be the annoying person who’s always, you know, showing up in your inbox or in your texts or on your phone going, are you You know what, what’s going on as if anything changed in your life you need to buy or sell isn’t it. But at the same time, I want to stay connected. And I wanted to, you know, sort of have a conversation with you about maybe some ideas I have and what you think of that, if you did that with one client a week, for even just, I don’t know, if three months, you would get so much incredible information about what your clients actually want and need. And then to Chris’s point, you’re now you’re developing your own brand. And yes, you know, whatever firm you’re working out, hopefully that complements what you’re doing. And helps, you know, you’re hopefully working for a firm that has a a positive brand in the community. But this idea of reaching out to your clients now is the time to it’s towards the end of the year, you can even say Hey, this is for next year’s plan. But I just wanted to get a better sense of what I can do. Maybe in between sales. I think that is such a great question to ask. And very few professions ever ask service professions ask questions that way like I was, I’m always surprised when I buy a car. Why is it that and I it’s not like I’ve bought many, many cars in my life, but I bought a few. And how come I never hear from the dealership or the or the salesperson, maybe the salesperson is no longer there. But But I don’t hear from anyone one year out. Hey, it’s your one year car buying anniversary seems like the easiest, simplest thing. I don’t ever maybe I get a postcard once in a while, but I throw it away. But even car dealers could benefit from this right? Because you’re only buying a car so often. I’m sorry, I got off on a tangent. But I want to cancel that
Chris Linsell 33:09 you’re like right on the right on the numbers there. Like, I’m sure I’m not in the automotive space either. So I don’t I don’t know the details here. But I’m confident there is a wealth of knowledge around what the typical Buck car buying cadence is. And, man, it just does not it’s not a stretch to understand that people’s experience with buying something like a car is so colored based on the professional that they work with. It is it is the same it is it is the same in real estate. There’s just no two ways about it. And so creating systems that give you the opportunity to build that relationship to build that success, like I mean, I know we started this conversation talking about, you know, layoffs in tech in the in the tech space and like, what the bleeding edge of real estate looks like next and whether or not you know, it’s a market that supports all that stuff. Frankly, you know, this conversation is actually about the fact that it doesn’t matter what the bleeding edge looks like, as if that has nothing to do with the relationship that you’re building. Yeah, that’s right. If the tools that are either available or not available, will drastically affect your ability to build relationships, then yeah, you should be paying attention to that stuff. If those things don’t drastically affect your ability to build those relationships. Then those may be just distractions and things that are preventing you from that interactive business and keeping you trapped in the passive.
D.J. Paris 34:47 Yeah, I guess. I guess the message is brokerages are unlikely to save you that being said, can they complement can they add or subtract? Obviously they can and and Joining the right brokerage is something that is very important for everyone listening to consider, but also to realize that there’s just a lot of smoke and mirrors in the marketing or recruiting of agents in this industry, just like there aren’t any any recruiting industry. So realize that most brokerages are always hiring. That’s another thing to keep in mind. So whether they tell you or not most brokerages, certainly the larger ones are. And, you know, there’s i, if it was me, and I was out there producing and wanting to find the right brokerage First, I would figure out what my brand is myself. Here’s what I want my clients to think and feel about me, here’s what I’ve built already. And then I would take that brand to other brokerages and say, Does this fit, how can you help add to my brand? And and those are great questions, and I’m a recruiter. I’ve been doing this a long time. Nobody ever brings that to me. They really don’t. I wish they did. Because in a way, it’s easier that they don’t because it’s a tougher question to answer. But it’s, it is the best one of the best possible questions you can ask. When you’re meeting with another firm is saying, Here’s my brand. What can you offer? Or how can you help me grow my brand? And not just well, we’re going to give you some leads and rehab this great tech? Yes, yes. But how does that specifically help my brand? What can you do? And maybe it’s, Hey, it you should also know what your weaknesses are? In other words, as an individual agent, are you the person that goes, you know, I’m a I’m a Brian Buffini longtime fan. And I know I’m supposed to write personal notes, because that’s part of the Buffini method, and it works, but I just don’t do it. Okay, fair enough. Why not take that to a brokerage and say, Look, I understand your maybe you can’t write individual personal notes for me, maybe they can. But this is something that I’m not good at is do you have a solution for me, that can help me get these out because it will grow my business and really bring being more active in the conversations versus passive, the recruiters gonna lay out all the bells and whistles and it’s every firm you go to is going to sound like this is the greatest firm I’ve ever talked to, because that’s what recruiters do. But bringing, saying, Hey, here’s, here’s some of my weaknesses. Here’s some of my strengths. This is what I need from a brokerage. Because I just talked to my clients. And here’s what they told me they wanted. And I need some help with X, Y, and Z. And then can we write that up in any sort of agreement? Can we actually put that on paper so that we’re both on the same page, I have a clear expectation of what what you what I need, and you have a clear expectation of what you need from me.
Chris Linsell 37:42 No 100% right on the nose was right on the nose, that the business that people want to build is within your grasp. It is just a matter of identifying what levers actually will create that opportunity for you and which ones are distractions.
D.J. Paris 37:58 We should mention, too, that the close has a lot of resources around brand building around even, you know, as Chris said, they every year update their best brokerages to work for by the way, that would be the first place I would go because it’s important to understand the close is not funded, or or I apologize, Chris, if I’m speaking out of turn, but they are not influenced in any way. They are an independent, sort of, you know, content provider, they’re not influenced by the firm’s that they write about. In fact, if they were, you know, they wouldn’t have the loyal readership they they would have, because that would be evident that their content is being manipulated or, or or changed. They are independent sort of journalists and writers who do a deep dive and are willing to say, here’s what we think. And so that would be really honestly the first place I would look because it is a trusted source of independent, you know, individually thought out opinions and reviews. So, you know, that would be a great place to start to if you are exploring other options.
Chris Linsell 39:04 Yeah, I agree. Come visit us. close.com we got tons of stuff on here that will level up your real estate business. I guarantee it.
D.J. Paris 39:12 Yeah, I do as well. I’m a huge fan. And I think it’s a great place for us to sort of wrap for for this time. So this is this is really I think, for everyone out there struggling I get it our agents, we have about 800 agents at our firm here. Everyone’s a little freaked out. It’s it’s normal. It’s not trying to say it doesn’t, you know, don’t don’t worry, because of course everyone worries and and now’s the time though to realize you can be more proactive and you can actually take some some bigger steps forward. But talk to your clients see what they need. That’s the job. Right? So so do as much of that as you can and you’re going to weather the storm just fine. But yes, the clothes.com This is a great, great place, please make it bookmark it Make it something you check a couple times a week look for their content. It’s just good it’s really good. So anyway, on behalf of our audience want to thank Chris for coming on as he does every month for years now we just amazing content every single time really really thoughtful intelligent stuff and Chris is a writer at the close and he also does coaching with them and so Jeff check out the clothes.com for all things a Chris as well as just all things from that the other wonderful members of the staff there write and produce. And on behalf of Chris and myself always thank you for making it to the end of this episode. We really appreciate it we hope this has been helpful for you please give us feedback we need to know what you want so we can better meet your needs. So let us know and the best couple of ways to do that. Number one, I actually one way to do it, leave us a review. Just go to whatever podcast app you might be listening to or if you’re watching this on YouTube, let us know in the comments. But just let us know what you like and what you’d like to see different or changed it’s okay we can take it we want the criticism and we want to always improve because that it just improves our listenership. So it all everybody wins. Let us know what you think of the show. That’s that’s all I got for this week. Chris, any final thoughts?
Chris Linsell 41:16 Go out there, be active and be be a part of your success. Don’t be don’t be on the sidelines of your own business here. This is your game to win.
D.J. Paris 41:27 I couldn’t I couldn’t have said that anywhere near as well as you did. So that will be the final word. Chris, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
Thanks
How To Talk About 7%+ Rates To Buyers & Sellers • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Oct 28, 2022
Welcome to the October episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel explains what the FED raise of the rates means for the real estate market in general. Joel discusses the importance of educating your clients and never give up. Joel also emphasizes the importance of building relationships between realtors and lending professionals. Last, D.J. and Joel explain Joel’s Weekly Market Update and Lender Introduction Template is, how agents can subscribe for them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Now that rates are above 7%. How are you talking about them with buyers and sellers? We’re going to discuss that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today, once again is our monthly series learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. And he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s gotten to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. Now last year alone, Joel gave back almost $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, out of 400,000 loan officers in the country, Joel is ranked number one 137. Now last year, he closed 619 transactions, his highest amount ever, for one year for almost $250 million. And already this year, Joel is close to 162 transactions for $106 million. Now if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. PS I’ve worked with him too. And I say the same thing. Joel can be reached. By the way, here’s his email address joel@rate.com J oel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Both of those ways to contact him are in our show notes. So you don’t have to write that down. Just go to our show notes. And you can click and call or email there. Now let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel Schaub welcome Joel
Joel Schaub 3:08 adj, thanks so much for having me. It’s crazy when you hear those numbers. But it’s always so good to come on here and give back and actually share the insight that I’ve gotten from other real estate agents who call me. And every single time we do it, we really have a black.
D.J. Paris 3:24 We do and we should start out by saying just yesterday, the the news that was being seen all over television and print and online, was of course that the Fed raised rates, raise rates, again, 75 basis points, so three quarters of a percent. And I know that you know I when I first saw that I thought oh, what does that mean? Meaning how does that affect me personally? How does it affect the real estate industry? How does it affect, you know, anything related to housing. And so I am excited to sort of get make sense of what that means and what agents can you can do with that information to help keep their business rolling.
Joel Schaub 4:05 I’ll break it down into two easy centers that you can have if you’re an agent when you’re talking to buyers, because agents really come to me and they go, how do I explain this? Right? And so, by the time this is happening, we’re getting ready for another federal rate increase of short term rates. Okay, but let’s stick with what happened yesterday, where we had a well choreographed increase of 75 basis points to the short term. And what that meant was it was already baked into mortgage rates. So people ask me all the time, how did mortgage rates not go up on a day where the Fed just raised rates 75 basis points. And as an agent, you can explain it to borrowers pretty easily. The Federal Reserve meets every six weeks, but the bond market reacts every single day and sometimes hourly, right? So the Federal Reserve increase was already baked into array So we saw them go up for sale, this announcement was already in the cards.
D.J. Paris 5:06 Yeah, the you know, I think one thing that’s that’s way to explain that for agents is to realize that these these banks, these lenders are higher economists who are tracking the what the Fed is telegraphing through some of their meetings. I know this 75 basis point height increase was absolutely expected. All the news outlets were talking about it days before it even happened. And of course, you know, companies that live and die on rates, which, of course, are lenders, this is this is their whole entire existence is making sure they’re aware of this. So the good news is, as as from what I understand, you’re saying is rates really didn’t move very much as of yesterday, because of the announcement.
Joel Schaub 5:48 And then by the time that we’re listening, we’re already getting ready for the next federal rate increase. And so what we’re going to see is pretty well choreographed another 75 basis point, hopefully, followed by a 50, and then a 25. So from here, we’re gonna see another 150 basis points of increases. So they’re not done yet. And what that means is, there’s still going to be a little bit more pain in terms of mortgage rates, which right now are already over six and a half percent. But as soon as the Federal Reserve indicates that they have completed the rounds of increases, the big mistake and the big myth, it’s wrong. And I’ll tell you as agents right now, we don’t need the Federal Reserve to cut rates for mortgage rates, the drop dead again, we’re not waiting down the line for Federal Reserve’s to cut the rate, as soon as next year happened. And they decide that they’re done with the rate increases, mortgage rates are going to come down. And they’re going to come down sharply. Okay, they don’t know how long it’s going to take. So I talked about it being next year. And that’s really what the economists think, is that they will have this under control, that the Federal Reserve might not cut interest rates for two years, two and a half years. So we’ll see exactly what happens. But as soon as they’re done with the increases, DJ, we know that anybody who’s buying today can refinance that mortgage. All right, so we go back to that one phrase, right, we’re gonna marry the home and date the rate.
D.J. Paris 7:19 Yeah, and, and so this idea, and that is such a great phrase, I kept I kept seeing this phrase over and over again, in the articles yesterday, you know, you marry the home, you date, the rate, it is such a great and imperfect, I remember back in the days, where there were even interest only loans, which I don’t, I’m sure, maybe they still exist to some capacity these days. But they were very prominent, as you remember, back in the early 2000s. And, and people would that that was part of the pitch was like, hey, as rates move, you know, you can obviously refinance. And and that’s something and also, I’m thinking as an agent, you know, if I’m thinking there’s going to be more rate increases coming, which, you know, you seem to suggest, as is happening, that you’re hearing another great reason to reach out to the buyers and say, hey, you know, rate increases aren’t over yet. And if you are, you know, thinking about making a purchasing decision, it might actually be a good idea to get in sooner rather than later not to use that as a scare tactic. But just to explain, here’s where here’s where our economists think rates are headed. And if we can get in sooner, boy, that might actually help us plus a lot of buyers sitting on the sidelines. Oh, yeah. And when rates stabilized, we can always refinance down the road. And you know, and you’re maybe not paying a premium for the homes that you would have made a paid a premium for back when rates were in, you know, much lower.
Joel Schaub 8:42 I’ll tell you a story. I’m glad you said that, by the way. DJs. Last week, I had several clients that knew that the federal increases were coming, right. And so what they wanted to do is they wanted to secure a rate even though they did not have a property. So I went down and I had probably five or six different clients that will buy sometime in the next couple of months. And what we’re able to do is do a rate lock before the increase and make sure that their rate was locked in for 90 days. And what that allowed them to do was not so much with this increase because it was just last week, but it’s going to insulate them over the next couple of months. So that when the next increases come, they still have a rate that was as of last week. And what does that mean for an agent if you’re listening, reach out to your lenders that you’re working with and ask them to do the same thing for any buyers that you have. Now you have a buyer that’s locked into a rate and as they go up, think about how much they’re going to be calling you to actually go out on showing they have a rate they’re going to have FOMO DJ they’re going to have a fear of missing out that if I don’t find a home and go under contract, I’m going to lose the rate that I have locked in. Okay, so banks have different names for this contact your mortgage advisor that you work with closely. Our our company called Audit lock and roll similar to rock and roll, where you can lock a rate and roll go out and find a home over the next 75 to 90 days. And this is one of the big advantages as an agent would be working with somebody that can do that for you. And just think of the power there, right DJ, you see how this could be an advantage for agents.
D.J. Paris 10:19 I see it as a huge advantage. I think it was much harder trying to get deals closed when rates were, you know, much lower, I think because we had more buyers, we had less, you know, less inventory, we had more competition. i All I heard was agents stressed out during that that time period, yes, deals got done at a record number. But boy, it seemed like a pretty stressful time to be a practicing agent. All of our listeners can probably remember. So even though you might have done more deals, you know, back then, remember what what amount of stress remember how many offers you were submitting? Remember how hard it was to get in touch with the other realtor? It’s actually much easier now. Yes, the hurdle is you have to educate your clients. But that’s your job, right? The job is to educate your client. So think about this, whereas I see realtors? Well, Joel does to us every single day. We have a lot here at our company, Joel works with hundreds and hundreds of agents. And he also sees this as a lot of people are kind of depressed right now. Agents meaning they’re going on. Gosh, it’s just hard. Okay,
Joel Schaub 11:20 it’s everybody. Right? Everyone seems to be that way. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, I know you’re going to say,
D.J. Paris 11:26 well, the opportunity is always still there. And in fact, I every successful not every a lot of successful business owners that I know, say it’s in these times of challenge that the real opportunities are born because a lot of people just kind of, you know, fall fall apart. And now as you were telling me, before we started that you’ve you’ve put the gas on about doing more events, where now you have time to do more events, which is kind of nice. And you can you can actually put more into marketing so that when things do stabilize, you know, you’re going to reap the benefits of that as a loan officer agents could do the same thing. Now’s the time to do client appreciation events, you know, different maybe volunteer stuff, you could do volunteer events with your with your sphere. So if you don’t want to spend a lot of money, do a volunteer event, bring your sphere. There’s lots of things you can do right now as an agent to be proactive.
Joel Schaub 12:19 Right now, I fully agree with you in the sense that it seems slower for me personally. And the volume has dropped to about 10 to $12 million a month, when a year ago, we were doing much, much more than that. The difference here of doing 10 to $12 million on a monthly basis is that it’s so much easier for buyers to get an offer accepted. Okay. So when I’m submitting an offer, now we’re really talking about how much under the asking price we can get. Whereas almost six months ago, DJ, we were still saying, I’m going to submit an offer at full price and probably lose. Yeah, yeah. So there’s definitely a mindset here that you can definitely take advantage if you’re a buyer, if you can take some time and find the right place. As these rates stay high and maybe go even higher, there’s going to be sellers, where they’re just going to take a deal on a home to get it off the books and a dominant agent, I’m touching base with all of the people that are renting at a pretty high level, they can afford a certain dollar amount per rent, they can get out there and buy and let’s go make sure that they know there’s an opportunity coming up for sellers that will be selling under asking price.
D.J. Paris 13:33 Absolutely. I think now is the time to educate customers there, educate your sphere of influence, tell them what the reality of it is, with this rate increase and don’t take your foot off the gas with respect to staying in touch now is the time now is the best time probably to reach out because if if your clients or your sphere are watching the news, and they’re like, Oh, the sky is falling, you get the opportunity to reset that expectation and provide value and that’s, that’s really I think what separates, you know, whether it’s a loan officer or realtor from the very, very cream of the crop, the people that do the most business, they are proactive, they reach out they’re not afraid to share the truth and also it helps them reset expectations and everybody in life I don’t know I always want I always have these fantasies that like I’ll start getting phone calls from my service providers, accountants attorneys, you know, financial advisors going I have an idea for you and you know what I get very few of those phone calls and I think I would love it in my life if somebody were to call me once in a while and go I have an idea for you and this is what agents can do is partner with loan officers find out what what the real story is and then be able to share that with your customers so they’re not sitting at home freaking out. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for the spy have cast Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Joel Schaub 16:10 Agents right now can go out and talk to buyers. And the same thing that why are people afraid to buy something when it’s on sale? Right? I talk about sports teams when the team is really hot. Everyone wants to go to the game and they’re willing to overpay now the theme is not so good. We can go get really good seats and get a discount and Phil have the same show. Right? So when Hamilton was in town, and it was really expensive to get Hamilton tickets, once it was lower price today, did they give a half a performance? Was it not the same show. And I know it doesn’t equate exactly the same. And people say oh, that doesn’t make sense. But it’s true. Like, I like buying my soup on sale. I like buying shoes on sale. I’m telling buyers, let’s go buy some real estate on sale. And when rates drop, you can refinance the debt, but you can never refinance if you overpaid by 40 grand.
D.J. Paris 17:06 Yeah, and you can now show with data through the MLS or whatever data systems you might be using, you can actually show how price values falling. And so it allows the person to to maybe make up that difference where they might feel the rate isn’t exactly where they want it to be. But that home price might be exactly where they need it to be. And that wasn’t the case, a year or two years ago, it was those home prices were like oh my goodness, that was that was actually in my in my mind, those were bigger hurdles to jump, I actually think the rate hurdle is is is is not as big of a hurdle. But Realtors need to sort of reset their own expectations and realize there’s opposite, there’s always opportunity, but it’s harder to sell a stock when it’s undervalued versus when it’s overvalued. Right. So it’s it is hard, but that’s your job is to reset your customers expectations, buy things on sale rates are still reasonable, although uncomfortable for some people, but they’re still very reasonable in my opinion. And I think if you’re able to have those conversations and then go, you know, hey, we’re going to have a refinance opportunity shortly anyway, then, you know, I think you should be able to proceed as as normal. And
Joel Schaub 18:15 he was telling me the story last week, DJ, and they were telling me how they were overcoming objections from a buyer, several buyers, a lot of times the objection came in that I’m gonna wait until rates come down to buy a property, right, I think I’m gonna wait. And I want to buy right now. All right, throw up I want to buy when these rates come crashing back down. And instead of putting up a big objection, the agent agreed. They said, You’re right, I think rates are going to come down in the future, too. So let me paint the picture of what that looks like. If you bought then the agent went on to describe the scenario in which if some day happens, where rates plummet? What are we going to see a bunch of buyers rushed back out into the market. Then he said, let’s talk about a scenario in which we bought right now and got a deal on the home, you owned the property. And then when rates drop, you don’t have to rush into anything. You can call your mortgage professional refinance down to the rates that you think they’re going to be. And we bought the place under value. And then we refinance the debt in the future. That client went under contract a couple of days later after them doing that. So you control the narrative, and really talk from you know, speak from the heart.
D.J. Paris 19:30 I absolutely agree. And I think part of it is just the reluctance to reach out with tough news. And I think if for all of our listeners, if you can be the proactive person that reaches out when there’s tough news to your sphere, you are so incredibly valuable to that sphere. They’re not going to choose anybody else. And so I love the fact that you come on every month and share with us and it’s not always Wine and Roses. Sometimes it’s it’s tough news, but you’re willing to share Eric, you’re willing to say, even though things have changed, here’s how to talk about it. I mean, you’re providing you’re doing the same thing that Realtors could be doing here on this podcast, I know you do it with your customers, and the agency you work with as well, we should actually mention that, that you still partner with agents, and if there are agents who are listening, who are looking for partnership opportunities, maybe sponsoring events, maybe co branding, certain, you know, flyers, brochures, loan officers can help with that, especially right now. So if anyone out there Joel is wanting to partner with you, whether they’re an agent, or maybe they’re a buyer or seller who found our podcasts or listening to you and say I would love to have a loan officer for my own property that has this much information, what’s the best way someone should reach out?
Joel Schaub 20:47 I’m happy to do that. And we could set up a conversation and just the easiest way would be there’s an email address, where I would send you the lender introduction template, where if you did have a buyer, and you wanted to refer them over to us, we would waive the fees on the lending side really partner with you. And so it’s just joel@rate.com. And I know I mentioned this probably two or three segments ago, and I paid literally 100 the agents across the United States where I’ve had email conversations, long phone calls, I talked to so many people in so many different markets. And whether we do business or not, they’re like, Wow, you actually answered, wow, you’re replying. And they think there’s like five or six of me. And sometimes DJ, I think there might be five or six of me. But there’s an opportunity out there, whether it is me or a local lender that you really like, if you’re doing business, you’re valuable, okay, so you make sure you get something from the lenders that are all reaching out asking for business. So one of the things that we deal with give back in that way. And then the second thing is you can even email us asking for the weekly market update. The market update DJ, you’ve seen this before? Tell everybody,
D.J. Paris 22:00 I love it. So every week, Joel’s team sends out a how to make sense of what’s going on in the lending world. In very short an email, very short, bite sized, digestible, easy to, you know, basically sound bites that you can then just take and use with your own clients. It’s, it’s, you know, like, for example, I’ll go to the the big mortgage website, if a news website is called mortgage News Daily, and they just aggregate tons of stuff. And I oftentimes as I read through mortgage news, daily stuff, I’m like, I don’t know what any of this means. It’s very complicated. And your team will actually take a lot of the data that’s out there and make it really digestible and easy to read in a short email format, with graphs and information. And then you can take that directly to your clients.
Joel Schaub 22:44 It just makes you sound better. And that’s what we’re about is getting information and making sure that you understand enough, and then be able to actually explain a few things to buyers. So that wow, that that email really helped from Joel.
D.J. Paris 22:58 Yeah. So if they want to join your email list, which everyone should there’s obviously no cost for it. And Joel, and his team would be happy to share that with you, should they just email joel@rate.com?
Joel Schaub 23:09 Yeah, we’d be happy to do that, we can add them directly to the list. So it’s Joel JOE l@rate.com. And so that’ll apply to the weekly newsletter. And then as for a partnership, you can absolutely ask for the lender introduction template, it’s already written out the way that you can introduce potential buyers and we can start working together and we really will, anybody that reaches out, we will absolutely partner with you and help you on your next transaction and get the lender fees waived in full and make you look good, really helped you grow the business to the next level?
D.J. Paris 23:40 Well, I love it. I hope all of our all of our listeners consider reaching out at the very least please subscribe to his newsletter, I promise you, it’s amazing. And it will help you be a better realtor, because you’ll have more information. And you don’t have to read, you know, 10 different articles, you know, to get this information, they do the hard work for you. So you can just sit back and let it hit your inbox. And then you can if I were an agent, I would take what you send every week and I would call a certain number of people in my database every single day for that next week going, Hey, I have a couple bits of news for you just wanted to keep you up to date on what’s going on. You could even leave it on someone’s voicemail really, it doesn’t have to even be you know, you don’t have to get them on the phone. And boy can you imagine I don’t get those kinds of voicemails. I don’t know about you with your different service providers in your life. But boy, I’d love to get messages like that. So I imagine your clients, everyone’s clients here would as well or sphere of influence. And you can really provide value versus just going Hey, you want to buy yourself something right now which of course you can do to but you can only ask that so many times before your friends stop answering the phone right? So if you call with with purpose, they call it I call it marketing with purpose. This is you know, obviously Joel’s team can provide you the purpose and the reason to reach out so everyone subscribed to his newsletter just email joel@rate.com asked to be placed on it. They’ll do that. And then of course you can reach out to him for any and all opportunities to work together to? Well, Joel, what a great, what a great way to sort of talk about what’s happening right now we appreciate it. I was even scared because I’m seeing all this news about the rates. And even though I know that it shouldn’t necessarily affect, you know, our business, you know, directly, I still I was freaking out yesterday, and I’m like, wait a minute, I know what I’m, I know enough to not freak out. So if I’m freaking out, your clients are probably freaking out too great opportunity to reach out calm the waters. And then you can, you know, provide some value. So anyway, Joel, thank you for helping call my waters and also for helping provide so much value here on the show. You’ve done it year after month after month, and year over year. And you have shown up every single month for gosh, years now. And that is really impeccable, remarkable, and probably no secret to the reason why you’re so successful. So everyone out there, discipline, and consistency and value. If you just focus on those three things, you’re going to be successful, you’re gonna get through this sky is not falling and stay positive. Right. All right, Joel. Well, thank you for keeping me positive, keeping us positive and keeping our show full of value. So on behalf of the listeners, thank you. And on behalf of Joel and myself, we think the listeners the viewers, you’re the reason this show, we just surpassed 2 million downloads. I think in the last week or so. We are so grateful to everyone who listens. And so please tell a friend let’s help us keep growing. Just talk to one other person about the show, send them a link, we would really appreciate it and that’s all we ask. Joel thank you so much and we will see everybody on the next show.
Are 100% Commission Firms The Future? • Oliver Graf
Oct 27, 2022
Oliver Graf the Co-Founder & President of Big Block Realty goes back to the beginning and describes how he got into real estate. Oliver discusses how he and his partner built Big Block Realty, how they’re different and how they make it work. Next, Oliver talks about what are the best practices of top real estate agents that bring them success. Oliver and D.J discuss what tools their agents use in order to leverage them to greater success. Last, Oliver Graf talks about his own podcast Founders Club and what’s it about.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What are 100%? Commission brokerages and why are they so popular these days? We’re going to talk about that. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Oliver Graf to talk about 100% Commission brokerages and why they’re so popular these days. But before we get to Oliver, just one reminder, please tell a friend about this episode. Maybe you know an agent who’s looking to switch firms or see what other options are out there or maybe somebody who just passed their licensing exam and is trying to figure out what firm to go to remember those days how difficult it was, this might provide some insight into an option they might not know exists, so send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Not only can they hear this episode of course but every I think we’ve done 420 Some episodes of the show they can hear all of them just by going to keeping it real pod.com please tell a friend we really really appreciate it But enough about me and that thank you and now on to our interview with Oliver Graf.
Right today on the show we have Oliver craft with big block Realty in California. They are also expanding out to other markets and other states. But let me tell you more about Oliver now Oliver is a four time Inc. 500 entrepreneur, co founder and president of Big Block realty is big buck Realty has been recognized as one of the fastest growing independent brokerages in the country. He’s an active real estate investor. He is also host of his own podcast called founders Club, which is a top podcast dedicated to real estate and entrepreneurship. He is also the co founder of closing table a high level real estate Mastermind along with Sam Cora, man and I may be mispronouncing that, so you’ll have to correct me and Roland Frasier and he’s also the manager and CO creator of real closers, the second largest Facebook group for realtors. He’s also a husband and a father to two awesome sons. He’s a dedicated surfer and OGN artists on top of that he does it all. And to learn more about what big block Realty does, and we’re going to talk about that as well on the show. Please visit big Blake big sorry, big block realty.com We will also have a link in their show in the show notes so you can check them out. Oliver, it is such a pleasure to to have you on the show.
Oliver Graf 4:04 Yeah, thanks for having me. DJ very much appreciated. Sam correllian That’s my business partner. Thank you. It’s a tough last name. But yeah, appreciate the great intro and very excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:19 I have to tell you, Oliver is a bit of a like a hero to me in the marketing world because and I never really talked about this but we the the firm that that I’m at here in Chicago is called Cale Realty we big block Realty and Kol Realty have pretty much identical business model or commission and fee model, which is what we call 100%, which we will certainly talk about and I realized in the bath 400 episodes we’ve done I’ve never once talked about commission models. We talk a lot about top producers how they build their business and I’m certainly want to want to get your insight there too. But we’ve never really talked about brokerages and different options. And the reason I’m saying Oliver’s a hero of mine is not just because they’re firm has about 1500 agents, which is amazing. Like we have 800 agents total. He’s he’s got almost double that. But that’s not even the impressive part. But that is impressive. But what’s really impressive is their marketing. They, their videos for recruiting are the very best I’ve ever seen. And in fact, Oliver did know this, because we’re just, we’re just meeting now, but I had told him, before we started that one, this one of his videos was an inspiration for us, because we tried to be a little silly and funny in our marketing efforts. But these guys big block really, really does it just so perfectly well. So you guys are an inspiration to us. And you were trying to get to your level of marketing with your videos, which will have a link to some of those videos in our show notes. So you guys can see what big block does. But before we get to, you know all of that I want to learn more about you. How did you get into real estate? If you don’t mind me asking?
Oliver Graf 5:56 Yeah, so first thank you for the kind words we’re we’re very passionate about marketing and and creating videos and not just our our, our big tagline is we’re not your grandpa’s brokerage. So we do everything in a way that’s designed to stand out designed to be, you know, different and kind of forward thinking. But to answer your question, my partner and I, Sam, we met in college, and we’ve had many businesses over the years, you know, we have a entrepreneurial graveyard, so to speak of things that we’ve tried since the early 2000s. And then eventually, we both kind of made our way into real estate, we were cell phone salesmen in college, that was the way we used to pay the bills. And so we developed a kind of passion and real love for sales and the sales process. And so we thought to ourselves, if you know, if you’re gonna go into the sales profession, the best thing you can do is sell something expensive, because then the Commission’s are higher. And so the three most expensive things we could think of were jets, yachts, and houses. And since we didn’t know anything about jets, or yachts, we’d have we decided that houses would be the best way to go. So kind of transitioned, we ended up selling a few people inside of our cell phone store was T Mobile, inside of our, our, our boss at the time, bought a house, then the assistant manager bought a house and they were nice enough and had faith in us to help them with those transactions. So when we got those paychecks, we thought, hey, you know, this is this is a lot better than what we were getting at the time at the cell phone store. So that kind of started our transition into real estate. This was about 2006 2005 2006. And from there, you know, the market started getting pretty rocky at the time, we ended up doing a lot of short sales, that was the big thing going into those years, and really kind of did that heavy for the first three to four years. And then about 2010 is when that kind of dried up. And then from there, we decided that we wanted to start a brokerage. But we didn’t again, we didn’t want to do it the way that it had always been done. And that was kind of the basis for big block Realty and kind of how we wanted to build it.
D.J. Paris 8:42 And let’s talk about big block Realty and how you’re different because again, the 100% model, while it’s probably technically been around for, I don’t know, probably 20 years by now, it hasn’t been as popular as I mean, it’s probably more popular than ever today. And I think there’s a lot of our listeners who are maybe not familiar with it at all. So do you mind sharing sort of how from a commission and fee perspective how you guys are different? We can talk more about other things, too, but curious just to set the table so that people know what we’re talking? Yeah,
Oliver Graf 9:14 yeah, definitely. So you know, there’s a lot of ways that brokers add value to their agents, right, you know, that you give them leads you, you know, you have great culture, great support, great training these things. And then there’s obviously the commission split. So when we were kind of deciding which direction we wanted to go, we were big on the Robert Allen books at the time and creating multiple streams of income and recurring revenue and things like that. And so we built the brokerage on what is now the 100% Commission model, which essentially means that we pay our agents 100% commission when they close a deal and in exchange For that they pay us a monthly fee to be a part of the brokerage. So essentially, it’s more of a membership model than a traditional real estate model.
D.J. Paris 10:09 Yeah, so we have the same same exact model here. And I always refer to it as you have as either membership or subscription. And this idea of, you know, being able to offer a higher commission confuses a lot of agents. I know, it maybe not as much today as it did when when not as many people knew about this as an option in a lot of major markets. But so people pay a subscription fee, and I’m guessing a transaction fee, but essentially get to keep almost 100% of the Commission on every sale.
Oliver Graf 10:45 Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. So for the most part, if they’re doing, you know, a decent amount of business, they’re almost guaranteed to make more money with us, which is great. And what we found at the time is there were other brokerages that were offering kind of the same type of thing. But when we were doing all of our research, what we found is that they were very low on support, and very low on service and had a very like, don’t call us, we’ll call you type of mentality. And so we wanted to flip that on its head, and really deliver not only, you know, a high commission split and a high profit, so that they can take that money and put it back into their business, but also really over deliver on service on training and support.
D.J. Paris 11:35 We we learned that we have that same philosophy here, we, when we started kale Realty here in Chicago, other firms had attempted to do this 100% model. Prior to us, we started doing it in about 2011 2012. And they’re just again, they weren’t a lot of firms, that there weren’t any really successful firms in the city here that Ed had done it. And I think the mistake that was made by some of these other firms was this idea of Sure, we’re going to pay you you know, almost 100% of your commission and charge you a very low fee. But we’re also going to get to kind of not be there for you when when you need us. You know, that’s the trade off. We felt Well, nobody’s going to stay at our firm, people are going to be more than happy to to give 30% of their commission away at a traditional brokerage commission structure if they’re getting the support and the training that they need. By is, which is evidenced by the fact that there are 1000s and 1000s and hundreds of 1000s of agents who are at those kind of firms. So we knew that just by offering the highest commissions and lowest fees that wasn’t necessarily going to create a line of people to come in. It certainly brings in some people, but I always say the 100% thing is maybe not it’s maybe the reason why people join, but it isn’t necessarily the reason why they stay curious to get your thoughts because we learned we have to provide, we think just as much support and training as everybody else.
Oliver Graf 13:01 Yeah, yeah, no, that’s That’s exactly right. I would echo that same sentiment. I think that, again, you know, when people build their brokerages, they have to figure out what their value proposition is. And then once you figure out what your value proposition is, it’s how do you deliver that in the best way possible? Well, we didn’t want to be as a rental broker where you know, there’s no support, there’s no training, there’s no nothing, it’s just a place to hang your license and maybe close the deal every once in a while. What we wanted to do is really build a culture of people that love to be around each other share the same vision. We were we’ve always been really entrepreneurial. So we’ve always wanted to go after the more entrepreneurial agents. And again, that’s why we felt the 100% commission structure was best for us. Because we’re all about, you know, we don’t have mandatory meetings, there’s no floor time, there’s none of that it’s really about helping the agents build their own business, their own brand, their own identity, you know, and that’s the way we believe we can help them succeed in the, you know, in the landscape of all the different broker models that are out there.
D.J. Paris 14:15 Yeah, makes perfect sense. I’m going to ask you the question that I’ve been asked a million times, and I’m sure you and your team have as well. So what’s the catch? Right? That’s right. That’s a question that sometimes like, or a different question with the same probably answers. How can you afford to do that? So those are the two questions that I’m sure you’re familiar with, as well as I am. Yeah, but let’s answer well, Mattis will answer them. So what’s the catch? Right, so I feel this a lot. I’m sure you do. How do you answer that?
Oliver Graf 14:46 Yeah. What’s the catch? And how do you guys make money? Yeah. So you know, full transparency at the very beginning. This was a lot harder of a question to answer but now that we’ve proven concept and we have as Any agencies we do, there really there is no catch, right? It’s it’s a volume game for us. And just like Costco offers better deals than the traditional place, but you have to be a member to get that take advantage of that. It’s the same thing with us. And then in addition to that, we’ve also built a series of revenue streams around the agents. So we have closing services, transaction coordinators, different things that are all value adds for our agents that also become profit centers for us. So by them, helping us our, you know, network of service providers, that allows us to pass on more savings to them, and again, ultimately put more money back in their pockets. And that’s kind of how we approach it.
D.J. Paris 15:49 We do it the same way. And when we’re talking about, you know, alternate alternate streams of income, other revenue sources, you know, we’re looking at things like title, possibly mortgage, you know, just different relationships with other providers that and we explain it this way to our agents, too, it’s like, you do not have to use our title services, but by using those title services, that helps, you know, keep us in business, and helps keep our fees low. And the funny part is, pretty much every other firm has ancillary stuff anyway, right? Like, it’s not even unusual. Now, because I’ve been looking that the app, there’s really not much money in traditional brokerage, whether you’re at a typical real estate commission firm, where you’re gonna have a split, maybe an annual fee, you know, versus 100% model, it’s, it’s really, we’re, all of these, these, these big companies are now realizing the money is more in the ancillary because commissions are going up. The firm’s are going to have to be more competitive. We’ve I’m sure you’ve seen this with with firms coming in, and even buying agents and giving them cash bonuses, and giving them great commission splits. And they have to make up that money somehow.
Oliver Graf 16:59 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it’s 80, there’s 87 different service providers that touch a real estate transaction. So what we actually encourage this, I know, there’s a lot of agents listening as well. And so I want to make sure they get a lot of value. And, and what I would encourage them to do is not only focus on their business, but they can also create either revenue streams, affiliate relationships, or even acquire or start businesses that are, you know, involved in that ad set that tree of 87 different services that are involved. So things like moving companies, or, you know, surance, insurance, solar, like out here in California, solar is a big one solar companies, they’ll pay like $1,000, per referral, you know what I mean? Like, if you create those extra relationships, and those extra revenue streams, then all of a sudden, you know, you send three or four referrals their way. And that’s a couple of three $4,000, that you’re making an extra revenue. And there’s a lot of different things out there, if you start getting creative, and we can go through some of those if you want. But there’s there’s a lot of opportunity outside of just closing the transaction.
D.J. Paris 18:19 Yeah, there is. And so I think what I love about firms like like ours, aside from being very attractive from a cost benefit perspective, the hurdle we all we jump, or I shouldn’t speak for all of our of course, but the hurdle I jump is oftentimes just making sure people know that they are going to get more than they probably would expect. And we’re always, you know, pinging our agents and serving them to say, like, anonymously, like, how are we doing, because if we’re not doing well, you’re gonna go back to that traditional firm, you’re gonna be happy to give up the 30 or 40%, whatever it might be, to get better support and training. And we better have our training and support on point. And I would encourage anyone who’s considering, you know, looking into a model like this, see if a firm exists in your in your area. It’s harder to do in smaller markets. I’m from Peoria, Illinois. And we first thought, well, maybe we’ll open an office down there and there just weren’t enough agents to support it. So you know, certain markets may not have that Madison is a great one. We actually looked at Madison, I’m glad we didn’t go there. Since you guys are there. We actually looked at Wisconsin. There’s one in Milwaukee I know, but one or two maybe. But anyway, I applaud you guys for for continuing to evolve and expand. I would like to pivot just just briefly to talk a little bit about you know, with the number of agents you’ve seen funnel through your company and who are still there and really just killing it. We’d love to hear what you see as some best practices around top agents. You know, where do you see agents having a lot of success? What are some of those, you know, those strategies or disciplines?
Oliver Graf 19:59 Yeah, slowly. So in terms of kind of what separates the top agents and the most successful people from the rest is, to me, it comes down to three things. It’s, it’s number one, we’ll call it the nuts and bolts, right? You got to know the contracts, you got to know the business, you got to know conflict resolution, and just kind of the A to Z on how to be an agent and what to do when problems arise, because they will arise. And then the other two is advertising and sales. I think that the better you are at advertising, let’s call that lead generation, whether that’s cold calling, whether that’s buying leads and converting them through a funnel, whether that’s setting up referral sources, I mean, there’s probably like seven or eight methods of advertising, I think it’s really honing in and getting good at one of those. And then also, on the other side, it’s the sales piece, and then that, you know, really just understanding what a good salesperson is kind of understanding how to be a good listener, as opposed to just verbally vomiting on someone and trying to close sales that way, but really understanding their needs, getting on their side of the table with them, and then helping them through it by you know, asking the right questions and things like that. So it’s really down to those three things, and we can expand if you want.
D.J. Paris 21:27 Let’s talk I would love to talk about advertising. I don’t often talk too much about advertising with my guests. And I should and let’s let’s talk about it. What are you seeing that’s working for your agents right now with respect to advertising. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Oliver Graf 23:03 Right so um, let’s I can go a couple different ways. With that, I think I’ll give you my favorite one first, my favorite one is referral sources, not just, you know, staying in touch with your database and getting referrals from them. But creating referral sources that can give you multiple, multiple referrals per year per month. So that’s things like, like attorneys can be a great source of leads. And by simply working let’s say all the top divorce attorneys in town, or bankruptcy attorneys in town or probate attorneys in town, if you simply start advertising to them the same way you to advertise to your database, so send them a monthly mail piece and call them go to their events go to the events that they’re at and meet them. And if you just create one or two really good referral sources, from an attorney, or a CPA or someone like that, or like here in San Diego, we have a lot of bigger companies and those bigger companies, they have relocation specialists. So if you can get in there and create the relationship with those people to where you’re the trusted go to person. I mean, that can literally be the difference between doing five to 10 deals a year and 50 to 100 deals a year, just off a few good referral relationships. So yeah, just
D.J. Paris 24:37 just to add a couple of ideas as you were talking, you know, financial advisors, another great right. They oftentimes may be the first people to know that, you know, the client, their client might be considering a move. Of course, you mentioned divorce attorneys. That’s great insurance agents. We talked about another great, great one. And yeah, there’s the accountants, there’s a lot of ancillary Businesses that aren’t necessarily directly related to real estate, but touch people who are making those kinds of decisions that they now become aware of. And they can pass that to you, and you can pass things over to them. I’ve always, I’ve always been surprised when I talk to agents. And I say you should call some accountants, you should call some financial advisors, say you’d like to develop a really good relationship and send them some leads, and, you know, offer to help their clients as well. It’s done by I would guess less than 1% of all the real deals out there. But it’s a heck of a good idea, isn’t it?
Oliver Graf 25:33 Yeah, it really is. And, and back to the initial point is, once they give you a referral, and you do a good job for them, now you you’re in line to just get referral after referral. And if you set up a few of those relationships the right way, I mean, it could really it can, it can 10x your business over the course of a year. And so some ways that I would go about targeting those people going to the places they hang out, right, like here in San Diego, there’s a place called the University Club. Anytime you go in there, it’s, it’s 50%, attorneys and accountants. So just simply going to those networking events and building the relationships, and then calling them and following up and sending them regular marketing collateral, just like you would your past clients and database, and just working those. And then also, you know, a big part of our marketing mix that we teach is doing events, in person events, whether it’s socials and trainings. So for example, let’s say you have a financial advisor that you want to work with, well, why not offer to host an event where they can be the speaker, so they benefit they have, they don’t you cover the costs, you fill the room, you put the butts in seats, and all of that with your database and your marketing. And you know, there’s lots of different ways to fill a room. But if you fill a room full of interested people that are, let’s say, learning about a 1031 exchange, or how to buy their first home, or whatever it might be right you get those referral sources involved in those events, invite them out to your socials, then all of a sudden, you know, they become your go to source and you become theirs.
D.J. Paris 27:16 Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s so it’s almost deceptively simple, right? It’s one of those things that it takes about 30 seconds to explain to somebody, and then they have to put the work in to actually build those relationships. But boy, you know, if you’re only focused on as you said, your sphere, well, that’s a great place to focus. And you should, because those are probably the people most likely to use you. But we have a limited sphere, right? All of us, you know, unless we all know, 1000s of people were limited. We know probably a couple 100 People at most, as we get into this industry, and then we’re like none of them want to buy or sell, it’s like well, okay, they’ll they’ll come around when they come around, but you can proactively go out. And, you know, you don’t have to necessarily just purchase leads from different lead providers, although you certainly can do that, too. And so I think that’s great strategic partnerships around not just referrals, but also, you know, generating additional income, as you mentioned, you know, even with different utility providers in your area, there may be affiliate relationships, you can set up with your local energy company or your local internet and TV provider, cable provider, you might you could get paid, you know, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, you know, or sell every time somebody signs up one of your clients. And, you know, these are they’re going to need internet and TV and or at least the internet, maybe not cable, but internet for sure. And they’re, they’re probably also security services, like, you know, the the different, you know, security providers are also affiliate oftentimes have those relationships that you can build. So even if you Yeah, you know, let me
Oliver Graf 28:51 let me let me give you two more on that note, these are these are really good ones, because they generally find out about someone wanting to, you know, make a move far before everybody else. And that’s general contractor’s number one, because almost anybody that wants to sell their house, they’re going to do a little bit of work first. So it’s a great way to kind of get upstream before everyone else knows about it. And then the other one is property managers, because most people are going to tell their property manager, if they’re thinking about selling, if it’s an investment property, like hey, you know this after this lease, I’m gonna don’t worry about rehabbing. I’m going to sell the place and then you know, they can put you in the front of the line for that type of transaction.
D.J. Paris 29:37 Yeah, it makes all this boy general contractors, I never would have thought of that. That is that is absolutely really a wonderful tip. Because number one, every realtor wants a great GC to refer to their clients. And we know that great GCS are, you know, not always easy to find, and then the GCS want, what more work as well. So of course your how Helping them but yeah, they’re the ones that probably do get the first oftentimes first notice of, hey, we’re about to make a move here. And the GC could say, hey, you know, I worked with so and so you should talk to them. They’re really good realtor and they might be able to give you a, you know, an idea of what your place is worth, etc. So what a great i That boy that so much. That’s amazing. I’m shocked that nobody else has ever mentioned that in the history of the show. So I appreciate you bringing that to us. Awesome. I also want to talk a little just going back a little bit to your marketing specifically, because I am I’m such a fan of your marketing. And I think our our listeners could really benefit. Now a lot of times, firms are advertising directly to brokers to get them to join. So we would call that like a b2b sort of business to business kind of type of advertising. And of course, realtors are typically more business to consumer advertising. But I think what you guys do that our listeners who are more probably B to C can take away from is really injecting humor, sort of silliness. Funny, you guys are doing that in a way that is incredibly authentic. It’s not funny for the sake of being funny. It’s funny, because that’s clearly your personalities. And pretty much nobody else does that right? Maybe individual agents might do that, because they’re kind of silly. And you’ll see some silly individual agents stuff, but you don’t typically see silly brokerage stuff. And I love that you do that. And I imagine it separates you from virtually everybody else.
Oliver Graf 31:31 Yeah, yeah, that’s true. So I think the marketing approach is the same in terms of how we do it as a broker and how I would do it. If I was an agent, I think the the first step is really understanding who your customer avatar is. So what I mean by that is, who if you could pick your ideal customer? Who would that customer be? What are their attributes? What do they like? What do they not like? Where do they like to hang out, you know, and then go from there. Because once you understand who your customer is, it makes marketing to that person, you know, a lot easier. Because what I think a lot of people make the mistake of doing is they try to market to everyone. And by marketing to everyone, you’re kind of just marketing like everybody else, and you don’t stand out to that person. That’s your ideal person. So what we did is we identified that we wanted people that are entrepreneurial, we wanted people that are fun, we wanted people that again, back to our tagline of we’re not your grandpa’s brokerage, like we, we are different, we want to be different, we want to do things different. And we want to attract the people that kind of fit into that model. And so then you can kind of reverse engineer all your marketing from there. So let’s say I’m the opposite, right? Let’s say I’m a suit and tie person. And I’m very serious all the time. And the marketing message would be a lot different. And I’m looking for, or let’s say in another scenario, I’m looking for high end luxury clients, right, the high end luxury client is a completely different avatar. And so you’re probably going to want to wear the suit and tie and you’re going to want to have, you know, the Louis Vuitton belt and all of that stuff that you can kind of show off and, and put into your marketing mix. So I think it’s really just understanding who your customer is, if you could pick your ideal customer, and then working the marketing backwards from there.
D.J. Paris 33:37 Yeah, that makes so much sense. And a lot of times, I think we we focus on the fact that, and I do this too, because I’m on the recruiting side. And so I’m always thinking about our agent pipeline isn’t full enough. Or if you’re an agent might be thinking, Oh, my client, I don’t have enough clients right now nobody’s buying or selling, and maybe taking a step back and saying, Well, if I could design my ideal client, or in my case, or in your case, in ideal realtor to come work for us, what what might that look like if we could wave that magic wand and then saying, Okay, well, now we know who we’re looking for? Where do those people hang out? Where can I reach them? What kind of messaging Do they like? You know, where do they hang out online as well, not just in person, you know, and what, what do they want? Right? What are they all about? And you’re right it? It’s not easy, but it’s simple? I guess in that sense, I guess it’s simple and hard because then you have to create the marketing that will actually hopefully attract those those agents but or consumers. I would love to talk about tools. I know you’re a big systems guy. I would love to you know what tools are you seeing agents having success with whether it’s CRMs or you know, graphic design tools or any any tools that you think really help leverage an agent to greater success?
Oliver Graf 34:56 Yeah, so, back to the marketing and making Your stuff look good and kind of coming up with a cohesive brand feel I like invento market. So if you just Google it, you can find it, they basically, you can buy like packages of pre designed, fully branded, fully customizable marketing packages. So what that could mean is it could include a listing presentation 15, social media, templates, letterhead, folders, and that way you can just go and you can buy that whatever, again, is going to resonate to you and to your, your, your ultimate, ideal customer. So that’s one, I really liked that I also really like Canva. That’s kind of I know, a lot of people use that it’s kind of an obvious one, but a lot of people don’t. And I suggest that everybody does, because it’s really cheap. I think the paid plan, they have a free plan. And the paid plan, I want to say is like 10 bucks a month. But you can make really great graphics, YouTube thumbnails, I mean, they have all the templates already in there, and they’re very plug and play. So you just upload your pictures, you can design flyers, you can do all that stuff. It works just as good on any device, so it’s easy to use. So stuff like that.
D.J. Paris 36:21 I have a quick can Canvas story just tell you, because we use Canva as well. A lot of our audience, of course, is familiar. If you’re not, it’s basically Photoshop, when when you don’t need any sort of photoshop skills, or even the Photoshop software. It’s a web web application. It’s super easy, as Oliver was saying, when I was going to tell, you just reminded me of something. So one day, we were we were surveying our agents going, you know, what, if we could wave a magic wand? What would you what would be a tool that we don’t currently have that you might want? And somebody had said, Well, you, you guys do a lot of training our firms, we do a lot of training on social media marketing, and how to brand yourself on social, but you don’t really provide us any content to post the agent. The agent was telling us and it was the kind of that’s Hey, that is kind of a problem, isn’t it? We don’t really have content. So to Oliver’s point, I actually I know that advance of the market, I use it all the time. But actually when an Etsy, which I didn’t think those kinds of things existed on Etsy, and they do, and we bought, like 850, social media templates that looked really fun and cool. And they were all sorts of different whether it’s just listed just sold or, you know, more informational, or more like, hey, this, this is learn more about me as the agent, all sorts of, you know, different trivia questions, all sorts of cool ready made posts, that you can customize, make your own in about five seconds, and then push out. And I think it cost us about $100 to buy these templates and use them with with our agents. So it’s not even a high cost thing. And then you now have, again, assuming that it resonates with with your own person with your own personality, you now have ready made content that you can use on social media and definitely so we did this to separate ourselves from a lot of other firms that also didn’t provide social media content that agents can use. And we’re like, oh, well, just I don’t know if anyone uses it, but it certainly a nice easy thing to implement for our agents. And if you’re an agent whose firm doesn’t have that, well maybe consider looking at other firms or, you know, you can purchase those yourself for very, very little money.
Oliver Graf 38:19 Yeah, yeah, they’re all very cost effective and, and fairly cheap. But all everything we just mentioned. Another one that I’m a big fan of is is lumpy mail. So lumpy mail is mail that comes to your inbox and isn’t like a flat postcard or a flat envelope. It’s something that’s lumpy. So it sticks out in the mailbox, it’s almost guaranteed to get open. There’s a website called red paper plane, or red pepper planes.com. Check them out, they have a ton of different really cool lumpy mail items that you can send out to your clients. They have like, foldable houses that when you open it, it pops up and a house pops out. And you know, they have all kinds of different really cool things again, to stand out. One thing we’re big on is we pattern interrupt, and being different. So for us, you know, back to the marketing, if you’re sending out the same postcards that every realtor sending out, you’re not doing anything to stand out. But if you have a sphere that you’re marketing to regularly, obviously send them the postcards and all that but maybe once a quarter, send them some wild send them some crazy that stands out that, you know, send it to him in a FedEx envelope that they have to sign for an open right. Just doing things like that to be different is a is a great way to stand out.
D.J. Paris 39:45 Yeah, and it’ll cost a little bit more than doing a traditional, you know, postcard mailer. But if you can get your open rate up by at least 50% Or at least your read rate by 50% on a lumpy piece of and Oliver is exactly right, who doesn’t open a lumpy piece of mail because you’re trying to figure it out with your fingers and find the corners and you’re like this, this could be very cool. And especially if it opens up into a three dimensional house, yeah, that maybe that costs $5 per card. But boy, I would certainly expect I would get a few a few transactions out of it over time. I also used to do a presentation when I would sometimes speak at events called nobody wants to read your newsletter. And while I don’t think it’s a bad idea to send one, I’m sort of being silly by saying that, and I don’t mean to disparage we, we tell our agents to send newsletters, but we say don’t just send a newsletter, right, do other things that really make you stand out, and a newsletter is fine, no one’s gonna read it, but I guess they’ll see your name. And that’s a good thing. And if you send a postcard, you know, they’re gonna see your name, and that’s a good thing. But maybe you could do something a little different. And so I love the fact that you guys are, you know, you know, really into some of those alternative ideas that, you know, just get better results.
Oliver Graf 40:58 Yeah, another one, just on the male front is, is a site called mailbox power. What I what I, you know, what we teach to our agents is creating a post closing Follow Up campaign, because I forget the statistic exactly, but it’s over 50% of people forget their Realtors name after the first year. And so if you can create a follow up campaign, and with mailbox power, they’re all greeting card style, they come with a real stamp on the envelope, they they’ll do handwriting fonts, and all that. And then you can also attach gifts. So anything from just like a $2 pack of brownies, all the way on up to you know, all sorts of other gifts that you know, towels and tumblers, and all the all the stuff. But if you create a campaign inside of mailbox power, you only have to create it one time. And then every deal you close, you have one for buyers and one for sellers. And you just put those people into that campaign. And you set it and forget it. And now for the next five years, there’ll be getting mail pieces from you at least once a quarter, sometimes maybe once a year, on their clothes, aversary you send them a you know, you attach a thing a cookies or something. And that’s just you know, that’s that’s what separates you from the rest.
D.J. Paris 42:22 Yeah, it’s really funny. I have a lot of different service providers in my life as you do, I’m sure accountants, attorneys, financial advisors, etc. dry cleaner, you know, it could be a dentist, I’ve never received any sort of ongoing little thank you other than maybe a card that you know, at the end of the year, which you get, you know, dozens and dozens, but I don’t ever get a you know, and I love my accountant and I’m not in any she will she’ll never hear this. So I don’t I’m not disparaging her, but I never got like, hey, you’ve been with me 13 years, here’s some cookies. You know, I would love that. So I guess the point of me saying that isn’t to say, you know, so many people are doing it wrong. But if you want to add that kind of value, and you should, because you’re absolutely right, my parents, they sold a condo in Myrtle Beach, it took them five years to sell it because they sort of bought it at the wrong time. And they held it for too long. And anyway, it was very difficult condo to sell. They eventually sold it and the guy was kind of a hero in our family. And six months later, I said, Hey, Dad, what was that guy’s name? I wanted to send him a referral. And my dad goes, I have no idea. I’d have to look that up. I don’t remember. And isn’t that amazing? Yeah. And they liked him. They really liked him. They didn’t, they thought like, this guy’s our hero, and they couldn’t remember his name. And it’s not because my parents are forgetful they are, they are very loyal to people. And so it’s a great example of staying in touch after the sale. You know, we haven’t talked about this at all, I don’t want to pivot only because I know we’re gonna wait, let me I’m
Oliver Graf 43:49 gonna add, I’m gonna add one more thing just to bring it full circle, because I think that was a really good point you just made, but also back to the vendors, right? Why not create a mail campaign for the referral partners that you’re targeting. So that once a month, they get a gift card or whatever it is from you. And then not only that, but you can include them in your post closing mail campaigns. So you know, if it’s a CPA around tax time, you should say, hey, you know, it’s your favorite realtor, Oliver. I’m just sending out all the best. I know this time of year is tough for a lot of people. It’s tax time. Here’s my referral source. Hope that helps, right? You’re not asking for anything, you’re delivering massive value to that CPA. And then they in turn, you know, might come back to some business with you. So that kind of brings the loop full circle.
D.J. Paris 44:39 And it does and I want to stay on that for just a moment because you just got me excited because I started thinking what so so now we start at the beginning, right? So now we’re like, wow, that’s a great idea. And now how do we implement it? Well, we go back to Oliver’s first point you pick up the phone and call some CPAs or if you have your own CPA Of course you can start there. But you can call them and say hey, I’ve got an idea. I have a big, pretty big sphere of influence. And I’ve also got past clients. Around January, people start thinking about taxes and getting you know all of their documents in order. And, you know, if you’re looking for more clients, I would love to send something out every January, maybe even in December to saying, Hey, this is my preferred CPA, if you guys don’t have an account, and you need one, or you want to see this, this person’s amazing. And, you know, and say, Hey, would you be open to that? I’ll even pay for everything if you want, if you wanted to cover the cost as the agent. I can’t imagine any CPA would turn that down.
Oliver Graf 45:34 Yeah, yeah, exactly. And not only that, you can even take it a step further, you could add a page on your website that says, These are my preferred vendors and just list them out. Now they’re getting more exposure. A lot of times, they’ll even offer to pay half, you know, most of our mailings that go out most of the events that we sponsor, our vendors are helping pay for those and bringing the cost down for us. So that makes it more of a win win for everybody. You know, if as long as you’re delivering value for them, they are going to bring the value right back.
D.J. Paris 46:10 One last question about real estate. And then I want to talk about your podcast, and we’ll wrap up here. I was seeing some of the books behind you, which some suburb lives I’ve read. And I wanted to ask if there was one book that you would recommend, above all others that an agent really should read? Do you have? And I know this is a tough question to have, you’ve read a lot, but any particular book come to mind.
Oliver Graf 46:35 I’d say probably the most impactful book I ever read was 48 Laws of Power by Robert Robert Greene. Yeah, it’s just an incredible book on the dark arts, you know, how to close deals, how to blend in how to strike when the iron is hot. I mean, he really covers the full gamut on on the Laws of Power and becoming a more powerful person. And that, you know, that helps with sales that helps with ideas for your marketing mix, and just all the way across the board. But that’s yeah, highly, highly recommend that one,
D.J. Paris 47:14 I own that book as well. And Robert Greene is not like a self help guy. He’s actually an academic. This is a this is I think he’s a college professor or he was, and he has thoroughly researched some of the most powerful types of personalities and with with lots of examples throughout history. I have not thought about that book in a long time. I’m going to pick it back up. So thank you 4848 Laws of Power Robert Greene with an E at the end, I believe. So we’ll we’ll post a link to that in the notes. And then we you have a podcast and we haven’t talked about that at all. Let’s talk about let’s talk about founders club. So tell us what founders club is. Yeah,
Oliver Graf 47:51 so founders Club was really designed to be a high level podcast for real estate entrepreneurs. So I’ve had people like Robert Kiyosaki, Grant Cardone, Chris Voss, Elena Cardone, Ryan serhant, a lot of top top people. And we really take a look at not it’s less about, you know, everyday real estate practices and more about building a big real estate business. And so we talk a lot about some of the stuff we’ve talked about today, you know, adding profit centers to your business, scaling up different tools, different things like that. But it was really just, you know, my way of giving back originally just to our agents, I wanted to just interview great people, and so the agents could hear. And then we started putting it out there. And it was really well received. And it’s been growing ever since. So you guys can check that out at founders club.tv. All the links are there. For anybody that’s interested in.
D.J. Paris 48:55 Yeah, I really encourage all of our agents as you are sorry, our agents, well, yes, our agents here at kale and all of our listeners, which are probably all agents, but they’re certainly not my agents. Everyone listening, this is the kind of value that Oliver brings in founders club. So if you’re listening to my show, you probably listen to other shows too. And as much as I would love to have no other shows out there, this is a great one for for our audience to pay attention to because think about, you know, just even the contributions he’s made in this last hour, given us a whole bunch of great marketing and advertising ideas, tool ideas, and you know, just ideas about how to really think about your business more from an entrepreneurial standpoint, versus a agent in the trenches, trying to make deals right trying to really strategize and he’s talking to business leaders who have done this in all sorts of different fields. So yeah, founders club is where you go and founders club.tv Is that does that right? Yeah,
Oliver Graf 49:53 they just yeah, if you just search founders club on your favorite player or YouTube, you’ll you’ll find us
D.J. Paris 50:00 Perfect. Well, I think what a great place to wrap up. And I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention if anyone is out there saying, Boy, I’d love to work at a firm with a guy like Oliver. And by the way, you should want to do that unless you live in Chicago, and you should work for us. But outside of Chicago, I’m just being silly. Of course, I am the biggest fan of big block Realty. And if you are an agent, and you’re not getting maybe the attention or or that you want at your current firm, maybe you’re not getting the support the training, or maybe you just want to see what else is out there and you want to explore other options, big block Realty, they’re in California, and they are expanding to other states, other markets. So they may already be in your area, they’re in Wisconsin right now. They’re looking at other states, Florida, I believe in a bunch of other places. So even even if they’re not there today, they might be there soon. So reach out. And the best place as an agent you can learn about big block is right on their website, big block realty.com. Check out their marketing, by the way, it’s great, their videos are just outstanding. And I think you know, we all have heroes in this in this industry, Oliver is unknowingly one of mine simply because of the way that they have conducted their marketing efforts. And, you know, you know that that’s going to bleed down into what they provide for their agents. So if you are exploring other options, couldn’t more highly recommend big black boy, they seem like a fun group, and Oliver. So thank you for being on our show. We really appreciate your time we know how busy we have about half the agents you do and we know how busy it is to even find time to do these kinds of shows. And you have your own show on top of that and a million other things that you do. So thank you on behalf of our audience for being part of our show and providing a tremendous amount of value. And on behalf of Oliver and myself, we want to thank our audience, the people listening, thanks for making it all the way to the end, we we appreciate you. And we ask that you just do two quick things as you sign off. One is to tell a friend I think of one other agent, maybe you know an agent that would needs to join a firm like big black, let them know about that. But also send them a link to this. This episode. You can find us right at keeping it real pod.com. And then, just like Oliver said, Any podcast app, search for not only founders club and subscribe to them, but also search for keeping it real. So let somebody else know about both podcasts and about big block Realty. And then last thing, leave us a review. We really appreciate it. The way that we get better is by hearing from our audience. So whatever podcast app you might be listening to this on. Let us know what you think of the show and we want to continue to make it better for you, Oliver, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
Oliver Graf 52:27 Alright DJ, thanks again. Appreciate it. We’ll talk soon
How Top Real Estate Agents Analyze Market Statistics • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Oct 24, 2022
In our September episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties discusses how she uses the data from the weekly market activity report issued by the Chicago Realtors Association to pivot the current shifts in the market. Carrie also discusses what to do as real estate professionals during this time to make the properties you represent attractive. D.J. emphasizes the importance understanding where you are as a realtor at the moment and the importance of a realtor’s cooperation with loan officers. Last, D.J. explains what a holding company is and how real estate agents that are thinking of exiting the market can use them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does one of the top Realtors in the country use market statistics to stay ahead of the competition? We’re going to find out today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this next year? And do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads into interested buyers? And are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering Realtors a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business. Real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with tons of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. This episode is also brought to you by readily aerial maps. An aerial retail map can sell a commercial listing before it investor ever sees the property. But creating retail maps takes hours robbing you of time you could spend selling real estate. And if you’re tired of spending late nights scouring the internet for retailer logos to populate your commercial real estate map or you’re tired of paying a designer hundreds of dollars to do it for you. While you’ll love rapidly. Now readily is a real estate map generator that lets you create custom designed professional aerial retail maps for your commercial sales buyers and listing appointments in minutes not hours. Simply enter the subjects property address, auto populate nearby retailer logos with the click of a button and download your aerial retail map readily turns the headache of creating commercial property maps into a quick five minute task so you can spend less time making maps more time making money. So get your first aerial retail map for free today by visiting readily.com. That’s REBL i e.com. And sign up for an account no credit card required. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today on the show is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Cary McCormack Real Estate Group. With that properties here in Chicago. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here in the Chicago area, she is in the top 15, not 15%, the top 15 out of that entire 46,000. She’s a true superstar and expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors, and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments, please visit Carrie at our website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. Also follow her on Instagram at Carey McCormick real estate. Both of those links are in our show notes. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:50 Thank you as always.
D.J. Paris 3:54 All right. Well, what’s what’s happening right now? It’s, it’s now the end of September. Last quarter, and what are you what are you thinking about? Like, what’s what’s big in your world right
Carrie McCormick 4:07 now? Yeah, so obviously, you know, we’re headed towards the end of the year. So there’s always a big push to, to finish out the year strong. And as everyone’s been talking about, we’ve had a significant market shift. So, you know, those of us who’ve been in the industry for a long time, I’ve been in the industry for 22 years, you know, we know how to pivot, right? And it’s important that we pay attention to market and we do that. One thing I do consistently is you know, research on the market and reading different articles and different you know, facts about it. And one thing I just wanted to share with everyone that’s here in Chicago is I we have the Chicago Association of Realtors, of course and we have these, what we call faststats These are very informative, you know stats on the market and it can drill down to all over Chicago to specific neighborhoods and I always find that these are A great resource of information. And it’s interesting, I was talking to a colleague, when I usually pull these all of these numbers, you probably can’t see him. But you know, we’re all these big pluses of inventory. And you know, the amount of contracts and pricing, it was always these double digit, plus numbers. And now I look at I pulled it this morning, they’re all negative. So we’ve got, you know, negative listings coming in the market, we’ve got under contract is down, home for sale is down. So we’ve got, obviously, you know, indications of shifts in the market. But instead of focusing this time on this market shift, I wanted to talk about what we can do as brokers during this time, right. And as we hold on to our inventory, and we’ve got our inventory here, some of the stuff is not moving, right, some of our listings are not moving. So what can we do, and I think the number one thing to do is to do a price change. And all of us know, when we approach a seller and say we need to talk, you know, they know that we’re coming to them with a price change. But before we go into the price change, I always like to make sure that we’ve exhausted every other avenue. And you know, part of it is going to be the number one thing is communication, right? So all along from the start of your listing, you’ve got to communicate with the sellers on what is going on. Because again, once you get to the point where you do need to ask for a price change. There’s been the communication with them. So you know, one way to communicate with them is through current CMAs is give them an update of what’s happening in the market, what is selling what is not selling, so that they are engaged with what’s happening in the market. Also, feedback from all of the showings is, you know, after showing, obviously, you have immediate feedback from the buyers, but follow up with that agent, you know, one or two times to find out, you know, where did they buy? Why did they buy this house? What is it and communicate that information over to the sellers? Again, the more information you give to them, you know, makes them feel like they they’re engaged, they know that you’re engaged in their listing, and that you’re trying everything possible.
D.J. Paris 7:16 I love that I’m sorry, I just wanted to say I love that because this idea of keeping the sellers informed and saying, Hey, I’m going to chase these agents after the showing and make sure that I have a good sense of what they liked, maybe where they thought we could do some improvement, if any, and just their overall thoughts. And we’ll start to see if there’s some trends that emerge. I think that’s amazing.
Carrie McCormick 7:38 Yeah, so that’s, I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s easier said than done. But I do think it’s an important part of it. And then ineffective marketing. So sometimes, you know, we launch a marketing plan for a home and then after a few weeks, it kind of dies down. So you really do have to relook at your marketing and see what’s working and what’s not working. And part of that is reevaluating, sometimes the photos that are being used. You know, I just reordered the photos in one of my listings, because one of my listings has a beautiful view of the lake. But the way I initially set up the listing was it went from the foyer to the kitchen to the living room. And once you get to the living room, that’s where these beautiful views take place. Right? And I thought okay, so obviously I’m not capturing someone online, why are they not coming to see this property? So I reordered the picture to put the view first, even though it didn’t make sense, you know, when you walk into the home, but that is that that million dollar view. So I switched up the order of the pictures, I switched him up in all of my marketing campaigns made that view that first and foremost picture, guess what we had a showing this morning, you know, so you know, people’s attention, as we know is very short. So if they get to picture four, and I’ve not engaged them, they’ll swipe right Next, go to the next property. So we have to think about, you know, how is our marketing resonating with the buyer, and really just kind of taking a deep dive into each of your listings of you know, why why are buyers not calling or why are they not buying this property? So again, sometimes it’s good to set it and just go but if it’s not selling you got to change something right? So marketing is is one of them.
D.J. Paris 9:29 i That’s a really good one too. I was thinking about this because interiors can always be modified, right? Like whether somebody likes the paint or the flooring or the fixtures or whatever the furniture in the in the pictures that all can be changed and altered. But if you’ve got a million dollar view, what’s the harm in putting it you know, right outside like the first photo is typically the exterior second photo, a million dollar view, and they’re gonna get to the interior after that anyway, I think that’s a really smart smart play. Yeah.
Carrie McCormick 9:59 The other thing is, is when there’s interior or exterior condition issues, meaning there’s flaking paint, or you have dead grass or cracks in a window or something, you know, there’s defects in the property. When a buyer comes in to see that, you know, sellers sometimes say, Oh, well, we’ll fix it once the house is sold, or we’ll get to that, you know, a seller has lived in a home for years, and they just don’t see what we see coming in. And that could turn off a buyer, you know, a buyer doesn’t look at it so much as Oh, no, I’ve got to replace the grass, or I’ve got to paint. Sometimes they think, Well, does this seller take care of this house? Right? You know, and okay, they’re not taking care of their lawn, or they’re not taking care of the broken window, what else are they not taking care of. So even though these are small fixes are easy fixes. It just, it leaves a bad impression with the buyer. So my recommendation is always just get it fixed. Just get it taken care of. And I know that’s a hard one, because I too have sellers that just don’t want to do it. You know, they just don’t want to fix it until the house gets sold. So you know, if there is something like that, I just like to hit it off, you know, right when the buyer comes in is that the seller is aware of these items, these are the only items that need fixing, we’re going to get them repaired. So at least I hit it, you know, head on that they’re not that the seller is not going to take care of it. But again, I think it’s very important just to have the Home Show to its best on that first showing.
D.J. Paris 11:37 That makes so much sense. I was just thinking about this. Because when buyers walk through even a perfectly man manicured property inside and out, the buyers are still looking at things going, Okay, we’re going to need to change that there already is creating a list of things. And the last thing you want to add to their list is Oh, and look, the paint here is chipped. And yeah, we liked the paint. But now I have to add that to my list of having to deal with that once it’s over. Yeah, that’s a really, really good point is don’t add to the buyers lists in their mind, I guess.
Carrie McCormick 12:08 Right. And again, you know, all of these little things kind of add up in the buyers mind. My last thing is here in Chicago, especially we have a lot of condos and with condos, we have HOA fees or your assessments. And we’ve got some nice healthy taxes here are two in Chicago. So we have to think when pricing a property or presenting a property into the market, you’ve got to add all those together, because that’s the cost of ownership, your HOA fees, again, your assessments, your taxes, and then you have your mortgage, and then you have insurance, right, so all of those calculate to that buyers monthly costs. So we do have to think about when pricing a property or comparing our comps to take those into consideration. And with interest rates doubling since last year, right that plays into how much affordability someone has. So we do have to start doing a little math now when we’re pricing our property and at least again, communicate that with the sellers of that’s how buyers are looking at this purchase of you know, putting all the fees together. So making sure that we communicate that to the seller. And then with all of that you know with communication with your marketing your photos, getting any condition you know bad conditions in the home, cleaned up and fixed. If the house is still not selling, then it’s your price. Then you gotta go back down to the price. But again, if you’ve exhausted all of these, your seller will know that you’ve tried everything I want to
D.J. Paris 13:42 pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss And now back to our episode. I think those are great, great ideas, and make really a lot of sense. Because right now there are fewer buyers in the market. So you can’t maybe get away with as many imperfections as existed, you know, back a year ago, even when, when rates were, you know, a lot lower. So I think that that is really strong points. So, agents, you’re going to have to either spend a little money yourself or and convince the sellers to spend a bit of money to do this. And while that’s not fun, and nobody wants to put the time into, of course, get those imperfections repaired, it’s going to help the property move a lot faster. People expect Instagram perfect. properties, which of course, no property is. But that’s the world we live in now. And so everyone’s dinner’s looked perfect from their phone. And we all know that that you know, this is just our mindset. And so do everything you and like Carrie said, if you’re if the agent or sorry, if the seller, the listing, the seller hasn’t yet, you know, corrected some of these imperfections, the listing agent can get ahead of it and say, Hey, we already know there’s a list of things we’re working on, we’re on it. And this sort of preempts the ability, the reason the buyer from them having to say I noticed the grass is kind of bare over here. I think that is so so smart. It really makes the listing agent look great to like, you know, to be able to say, we know over there, the grass is bare, we’re getting it fixed. I think that’s, that’s awesome. Because that’s really all that a buyer ever wants to hear is it’s being fixed the great
thing. So I have a couple of suggestions. I’m sorry, Terry, did you have more? Because I wanted to get your opinion on this. Yeah. Okay. So I need to get your opinion, because so right now, our listeners and most Realtors I know, I have actually two things to talk about today. I’ll try to keep them short. But my first one is probably the most important, which is understanding where we actually are as realtors in this market for our buyers and sellers. And what I mean by that is yes, we know and we know, inventories down in most markets, of course, we know rates have basically doubled if not more than doubled in the last couple of years. Not a super fun place to be working when you’re working with buyers or sellers, really. But maybe it’s not a terrible time to buy a property. Now, here’s what I mean by that. And I don’t like to make blanket statements, because of course, it all depends on a million factors. But if you’re thinking, oh my gosh, rates are up, inventories down terrible time to buy. I’m not so sure that that’s objectively true. And here’s what I’m saying. Two years ago, when and even up to a year ago, we people were buying homes sight unseen for hundreds of 1000s of dollars more, maybe millions of dollars more in certain situations above asking price, you know, a lot of things, you know, trying to get deals pushed through at that time was almost impossible. So if you’re talking if you have buyers who are like, well, rates are in the sixes now and I really wanted rates to be in the threes. What you could do is go back to the properties that maybe they would have been looking at during that time and actually see what they closed for. And then actually running sort of the analysis of well, that property, you know, the properties that you were looking at before, you know, we’re selling for $150,000 more than what they go for today. And yes, rates have maybe doubled. But, you know, you you can basically what they call date the rate marry the home. So rates can be refinanced. Right. So at some point do we assume rates can should come down? Well, I certainly hope so. At some point, we don’t know when, but it might actually not be as as devastating to the buyer as it seems, because now they’re getting a cheaper price point. Yes, the rates higher. So maybe they pay higher monthly payments for a few years, or however long before the Fed cuts rates again. But boy, it just seems like I so my point is, is talk to a mortgage, talk to a loan officer, a Lending Officer. And actually, somebody I imagine has a calculator that can figure this stuff out. And it would be a really cool thing for an agent to think about. So that when somebody says it’s just a bad time to buy, you could say well let’s let’s actually run some numbers and I actually it might not be a bad time to buy and if you can demonstrate that through data, I think people will can calm down. So I’m just curious on what your thoughts are.
Carrie McCormick 19:30 I agree with that. It’s funny that you said that term data rate marry the home because someone just said that last night and I thought that was such a great thing and it was came from a mortgage lender and he said that to your point is just get the home that you want get it the price that you want rates will come down and you just refinance on you know out of that rate. So I always think to is a homes are so special, you know, I mean you have to live somewhere and no, just don’t Don’t cut yourself short by just looking at again, if the payments $200, more $300 more a month, is that really going to change your life? Are you really going to pass up on your dream home? But again, when you do that calculation, it’s probably not as bad as you think. I mean, I would rather pay a higher rate than pay $300,000 over the price of a home personally to app. So I mean, I guess maybe we should do that poll of like, which would you rather have? Would you rather pay $300,000? Over? Or would you rather have a 4% rate versus 7%? Rate?
D.J. Paris 20:32 Right? I really love this. So so everyone who’s listening who’s a realtor, which is probably everyone who’s listening, this is a good thing to to talk to a loan officer about, see if there are any calculators or or say, Hey, I’m running into these issues when I’m dealing with buyers. And I want to actually compare more apples to apples. So can you help me figure out what the data is? Or just at least anecdotally know how to talk about this, like Carrie just did, which really makes all the sense in the world? You know? Yes, we’re seeing the news. media’s is of course pushing, you know, they’re things that are, you know, negative, like rates are up, inventories down, of course, everyone’s seeing that. So as a real estate professional, you need to be able to make sense of that information and bring that back to the client. And it might actually be a really great time for, for your buyers to buy. But you need to run the numbers. And I think this is, this is a great time to develop better relationships with loan officers, and put their feet to the fire, because they’re the ones struggling to write if you don’t bring them business, they’re not likely to do well. And they’re going through the same issues you are. So this is where I think you reach out to them and say, What are you guys telling people? You know, what, what are you? How can you educate me, so I can educate my clients. So just an idea, maybe the sky? Well, the sky certainly isn’t falling. But if it feels like the sky is falling, this is an opportunity then to get some more information. So that and really, it’s your job as a realtor to know this stuff. Anyway, so but I just talked to a lot of depressed Realtors these days. So I want everybody to get undepressed Talk to your loan officers and find out exactly what the real shift is to the to the you know, really, homeowners really only care about how much money they they spend a month on their mortgage. Right? That’s really the end of the day, the most important thing and, and if it’s only a couple $100, and that doesn’t break your client, you know, then seems like, like Carrie said, a bad time to pass up on a dream home, it’s always a bad time to pass up on a dream home if if the pricing is reasonable. This leads me just to one other thing. And again, I apologize, this is gonna be a little negative. But I think there’s an opportunity here. So we’re seeing this in in here in Illinois, we’re seeing that there are real estate agents that are exiting the business, because activity has slowed, of course, you know. And so if you are considering exiting the business course, I would encourage you, our whole show is about teaching you how to flourish. And we hope that you do stay in but if that just isn’t possible for you, then in many states, there are what are what are called holding companies. And here’s really all the holding company is it’s a company where your real estate license is active, but you’re no longer practicing real estate as an agent, your license is active, but you’re just not really using it. And the reason why people can do why people do that is because what they can still do in a holding company is refer business. So we have a holding company here in Illinois, we have about 800 800 agents in it, and what they can do, and this is all state, almost all states can do this, by the way. So what you can do is you can park your real estate license, you’ll avoid paying all your MLS fees, and your association dues and all of the brokerage dues. But you can still earn referral commissions. So if you have clients that are coming into your life, even though you’re not practicing, you can refer them you can refer them to somebody like Carrie, right if you’re in the Chicagoland area, and you can still get paid a referral split. So how it typically works is you would if you have a buyer or seller, you then reach out to someone like Carrie and say, Hey, I’ve got this buyer, I’m not practicing right now. But I’d like to take a referral, split on it. And then you and the other agent would work out the referral split, and then you get paid when the transaction closes. So I know people that have actually made this their full time job where their don’t practice at all. And all they do is refer business to other agents and they have a tremendous amount of success.
Carrie McCormick 24:25 Yeah, actually, it’s funny that you are bringing this up because I received that exact call this morning for someone that’s was never in the business super full time. They were part time and this market shift is really just pushed them out and they want to focus in another direction, which again is is great. And again, we don’t want to ever talk negative, you know, we want to keep everything positive, but everyone’s got to do what they have to do. And this you know, they asked me to be their referral partner and you know, I think it’s such a brilliant way and we we obviously want to service our clients and keep things moving. So I think it’s a brilliant idea to support everybody.
D.J. Paris 25:05 Yeah, it’s one of those things where maybe people who are listening are thinking about even just taking a temporary pause right? Sometimes people do that. So if you’re going to take a temporary pause, or maybe a more indefinite pause, maybe you’ve just accepted a full time job somewhere else, and you want to explore that opportunity, but you don’t want to lose your license, put it in a holding company and then find someone to refer to and yeah, it’s not why you got in this business we get it, it’s not fun to sort of go a different way when you really wanted to be a full time realtor, but if you’re struggling right now, and he can’t find a way forward, there’s kind of a an opportunity to to regroup and save some money and figure out your next step. So that being said, we encourage you to stay in the business and also because lots of people are going to be exiting right now. Lots of agents will exit and that’s just the reality of it. So if you’re in and you stay in and you weather through the tough times, you’re going to be sitting really well when when the market recovers so I don’t think it’s a good time to get out of the business quite frankly. But if you are considering it, there are options. So I think I think that’s a good place to wrap up I’m sorry, I had to wrap up with something a little negative but it’s really still a nice opportunity if you are thinking of leaving for a temp for a period of time and but if you follow the some of the suggestions that you hear from people like Carrie on our show, you will thrive in these in these instances and you’ll actually become stronger and better because so many agents will be you know will be exiting or or they’ll just be depressed and sort of and I think that’s what’s happening to Kerry I don’t know if you’re seeing that from from people you know, who just seemed to be like a little bit down right now realtors are struggling I think,
Carrie McCormick 26:48 ya know, but we’re all here to support each other. So whatever we can do.
D.J. Paris 26:53 I love it. Awesome. Well, for everyone who is listening, please that well first of all, thank you for making it to the end of our episode. We love you we are we just crossed over 400 episodes we’re so grateful to everyone for continuing to support us please support us by continuing to listen and also telling a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from from people like Carrie and send them a link to our our website keeping it real pod.com Also, if you I want you to watch the best thing I can always say about Carrie is not only is she an amazing realtor and really a true like icon here in Chicago so if you ever have any clients that are moving here, or you want to partner with another agent here in Chicago Carrie is amazing. On top of that she’s also does incredible work with her social media. And I think that if you’re an agent looking to do more with social media and you absolutely should follow what she’s doing use that as inspiration for what you could do to help your branding. So follow her on Instagram which is at Kerry McCormick real estate. That’s a link is in our show notes and Kerry if anyone out there is wanting to partner with you or work with you directly what’s the best way they should reach out?
Carrie McCormick 28:06 Always call me 312-961-4612 Or you can email me at Carey at@properties.com Or like you just said you could follow me and DM me as someone probably just did so put that down.
D.J. Paris 28:22 Awesome. Well Carrie, thank you. She’s Kerry’s been with us for years. We are so grateful to have her she is an insane powerhouse and somebody that you want to follow because you will never feel like you’re having a bad day in the market when you follow her especially on her Instagram. She’s always pivoting making changes and having a lot of success. So we’re glad to have her on the show as always, and again. Thanks to everyone listening. Thanks to Carrie and we will see everybody on the next episode. Guys
How Real Estate Agents Can Prospect With Purpose • Brandon Zellers
Oct 20, 2022
Brandon Zellers with Spears Group talks about his path into real estate. Brandon describes the strategy he uses for the cold calls he makes everyday. Brandon also talks about his other businesses in luxury car rentals space and his streetwear line. Next, Brandon describes how he prioritizes his day and how he’s been able to get a market share in this young age. Last, Brandon discusses the role of social media on the success of his business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How did a 28 year old close $33 million of real estate in his first year in the business? We’re going to find out today? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this next year? And do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads into interested buyers? And are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner, real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering Realtors a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business. Real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with tons of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. This episode is also brought to you by readily aerial maps. An aerial retail map can sell a commercial listing before an investor ever sees the property. But creating retail maps takes hours robbing you of time you could spend selling real estate. And if you’re tired of spending late nights scouring the internet for retailer logos to populate your commercial real estate map or you’re tired of paying a designer hundreds of dollars to do it for you. While you’ll love rubbly now readily is a real estate map generator that lets you create custom designed professional aerial retail maps for your commercial sales buyers and listing appointments in minutes not hours. Simply enter the subject property address auto populate nearby retailer logos with a click of a button and download your aerial retail map readily turns the headache of creating commercial property maps into a quick five minute task so you can spend less time making maps more time making money. So get your first aerial retail map for free today by visiting rubbly.com. That’s REBL i e.com. And sign up for an account no credit card required. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer Brandon Zellers. But before we get to Brandon, just a couple of quick announcements. As always, we first want to start off by saying thank you. Thanks for being part of our show. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting our sponsors. And also thanks for telling a friend think about one other realtor that could benefit from hearing from a top producer like Brandon, who by the way, closed over $30 million in his first year and he’s under 30 years old, which is just incredible. So I’m super excited to get to Brandon but please let other people know about our shows, so that we can continue to provide these kinds of conversations to you. So just tell a friend that’s all we ask it. Also leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. If you’re listening on Apple podcasts, you can just do it there or Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, Google Play you know everywhere else podcasts or serve leave us a review we read them and we make adjustments to better the show for you. You know what, that’s it guys. Let’s get right to it my conversation with Brandon Zellers?
Today, my guest is Brandon Zellers from the Spirit group with compass in Destin, Florida, also the 30 a corridor. Let me tell you a little bit more about Brandon. Now, this is incredible. And a lot of times when we have guests on, you know, our audience tells me they sort of tune out during someone’s bio, but I really want you to tune in for this because so much of what we’re going to be discussing today is is really woven into this particular bio. So, Brandon is 29 years old and he has been long interested in every facet of real estate from interior to architecture, but initially chose a different career path. Like so many of our listeners, Brandon had worked in sales roles over the years include locally and in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. He made the move to medical sales and began investing in real estate properties. Brandon’s entrepreneurial spirit eventually compelled him to strike out on his own, earning his real estate license and turning his investments into a full fledged career. Now, he joined the spirits group as a sales associate in 2020. Right and a very difficult time, I think, to become a realtor. And he closed over 33 million in his first year as an agent. I don’t know anybody personally that has done that. So he closed 33 million in his first year and he is 29 years old today. So that means he was 27 or 28 when that happened. But that’s not all he does, which is even more impressive in his free time. He operates Dr. Destin, which is an executive luxury car rental business, and has his own streetwear clothing line called sky sky, sorry, Sy sorry, cyc Syke, sorry, Sy ke the brand partners with organizations committing committing to abolishing slavery and trafficking around the globe. If for more information about Brandon, you can always find him at the spears group. website, which is the spears group.com. Brandon, welcome to the show.
Brandon Zellers 6:21 Thank you for having me. And thank you for that intro.
D.J. Paris 6:24 It’s it’s it’s a I love reading people’s bios, and I love putting them together. And yours really, really stands out. Among the 400 Plus episodes we’ve done, I am, I am really in awe of what you’ve accomplished. And I’ve had, I’ve had Jonathan spears, who runs the spirits group on our show before, I think I’ve actually had him on twice. And he is he’s just been a wonderful guest. And I’m so glad that we’re having you on. What I always like to do is to really start at the beginning, because you’ve done a lot of different things in you know, a short amount of time that you’ve, you know, been working as, as an adult. And I’m really interested to hear about, you know, your, your path into real estate. And I know you started out as an investor. But tell us about that, like, how did you even get started as an investor.
Brandon Zellers 7:16 So I’ll take you, I’ll take you back to 2019. I was in Kansas City. And I really just was struggling overall with you know, I had some alcohol abuse and was at a super, extremely low point in my life. And I decided to just kind of make the jump about one way ticket came to Florida. And I was like, I’m gonna figure it out. I got but I needed to get my mind. I needed to get my mental health back on track. Sure. So I came out here. I knew growing up, I was going to be in sales one way or the other. I thought medical sales would be incredible. So when I slowly, you know, got to recovery, got my mind, right, I started attacking some of these medical sales companies. And you know, putting my name in front of them. I eventually landed one I was there, it was an incredible opportunity, I was able to, you know, get a couple investment properties. This was right whenever COVID was happening. And so I got a couple investment properties. And realized, you know, my true passion is is real estate. I just I loved it. I loved every every piece of it really in the fashion. So the interior design, it goes hand in hand as well. So from there, I was like, Okay, I need to just bet on myself here. So that’s whenever I went and got my real estate license. And I think it was day three of real estate school. I picked up the phone and I called I called the broker or called spheres group. And just as like, Hey, I’m getting my license, I really want to be in real estate. I saw you guys sell the most expensive properties. I’m really interested. And mind you, I’ve never sold a piece of real estate in my life. But I was no I mean, I was determined. I tell people like I was at such a low point in my life, that I was willing to take risks, you know. And so whenever I got on the phone with them that third day, they were like, Yeah, we don’t hire new agents, and kind of went on that. That’s how the phone calls started. They left like 10 to 15 seconds. And I pitched myself as much as I could to the point they were like okay, let’s sit down next Monday. So went up and sat with them had lunch. And one thing led to another and I got on with the spirits group which was you know, one of the biggest opportunities in my life, but that’s how I got into the real estate space.
D.J. Paris 9:53 It’s an amazing story because so many brokerages our own our own include I’m here in Chicago that I work at, you know, we’re always looking to hire agents, whether they’re newly licensed or experienced. But not every firm is like that. And the spears group, for those of you that aren’t familiar, are one of the top producing real estate teams in the country, actually. And certainly within compass, which is the brokerage that that they work with, and Jonathan Spears who runs that team is in his BS, 31 years old. So the fact that he’s even accomplished all that at such a young age is is beyond remarkable. But also that yeah, they’re getting calls, I would assume every day from other realtors going, can I join your team? You guys are crushing it, I want a piece of that pie. And I have to imagine they have to play deep. I imagine they play defense a lot going well, you know, we don’t, yeah, you’re new and we don’t have time, we’re too busy. And they made time for you. And they saw something in you that maybe they you know, maybe they saw in them in themselves as well. And the fact that that they were you were able to pitch yourself in 10 to 15 seconds. I think that’s really important. And I almost want to spend just a moment on that. Having a that’s really what we call an elevator pitch, right? This idea of Do you have a way to present what you know, to somebody, you know, in an elevator setting where you only have 10 to 15 seconds before, you know the meeting ends? How what what did you if you don’t mind me asking What did you say if you don’t? Do you remember what you said in that time?
Brandon Zellers 11:27 Yeah, so I mean, I really talked about. So we live now in Destin is a beach town. So you can only imagine, you know a lot of people here. They work but they also spend a lot of time at the beach. But I’m coming from Kansas City, it’s a lot more fast paced, it’s a lot more Hustle day to day grind. So I just really, you know, talked about my mentality, bringing that that city life mentality to the beach is really advantageous that and, you know, I’m a blank, I’m a blank canvas to them. I don’t have any bad habits when it comes to real estate when it comes to sales in this space. And they can almost create, you know, the agent that they want me to be by handing me the tools.
D.J. Paris 12:13 Yeah, that’s true. However, it is a ton of work, right? They have to put in a ton of work. And obviously that investment paid off, because you know, you did 33 million in your first year, which I don’t want everyone to assume that Oh, well. He was just handed, you know, the 33 million and leads, which, you know, I don’t suspect is the case. And I know Jonathan pretty well. And I don’t suspect he is nice guy as he is. I suspect he’s not just handing you the deals. But but the fact that you did get to learn from somebody who’s had so much success. And it was literally a phone call that you made, you made one phone call. You know, and I’m sure you may be called other places too. But just this idea of, hey, I want to work with you guys. You’re the best. That is. That is that is a really, really impressive thing. So what was it like in your first year? Because you were I guess surrendering to their process, learning their process? Sort of going, Hey, I don’t have I don’t have any bad habits. What was it like to did you find that you didn’t also have some of the maybe the limitations that you might have thought in your mind of what was possible in your first year? Like I suspect most people don’t even assume that that’s even possible to do that kind of production in year one.
Brandon Zellers 13:30 Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll go back to you know, about the lead the lead generation and everything. So out of that 33,000,020 8 million was off of cold calls alone. That was strictly cold calling. I mean, I really, you know, I really focus on my processes my systems every day, I go to the exact same spot at the beach. I sit in the parking lot for four and a half hours every single day. I make X amount of calls. And I mean, it’s really just staying consistent with the basics. That’s that’s really all it is.
D.J. Paris 14:07 Wherever you sit I this is this is shocking to me, I need to I need to unpack this. You drive to the beach, which is beautiful and gorgeous. And why not? You live there, right? You might as well. And I had a beach day on Friday here in Chicago and I thought it was going to be just as a quick aside, I thought it would be really busy because it was in the 80s and I was like oh Alaska day for beach. So we went out and we were literally a block away from the downtown but but nobody was out there because it was a workday It was a Friday and and it felt like oh why don’t I do this more often? Right? And so anyway, you drive to the beach, but you’re there to work. So you literally just sit in your car and power on the phone.
Brandon Zellers 14:44 In my car. Yes. It’s it’s incredible. It’s weird. I think it’s weird to hear it but I mean it works like all beach ambassadors that walk back and forth like the ladies are all like my best friends. Now we talk every day. You Here’s your regular. Yeah, I get there like six 7am. I just like to start my day there. It’s very therapeutic, just looking at the water, you know, for sure. And getting in that zone.
D.J. Paris 15:11 I mean, that’s your that’s your office, that’s your own personal space. And it’s actually kind of brilliant in a way, because not only is it relaxing and enjoyable when you’re about to do some really difficult stuff, making four hours of calls every day is not easy for anybody to do. Right? That’s hot. That’s hard. And so you might as well put yourself in a situation where it’s at least a little bit enjoyable. also eliminates distraction, right? Like nobody. I mean, right? Yeah, I guess you could, you know, take breaks when you want to, and go talk to people, but like, no one’s knocking on the door going, Hey, what are you doing in there? What was so is that one of the reasons to is it just gives you that that private time to just get your work done?
Brandon Zellers 15:53 Yeah, the isolation, I’m really not an office person by any means. I like to, I don’t want to say like, have control of my space, but have control of my space. You know, I like to just get in my car, have my go get my coffee, go get my breakfast. It’s very routine based. That’s how I operate. So once I, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So I started started working. Like why would I stop now. So I still do that to this day. I am
D.J. Paris 16:22 in awe of that. That is that is remarkable and smart. And really something that anybody could do who owns a vehicle, right? Like, anybody could go do that. And it’s it’s a great way, if you find yourself being constantly interrupted by people in the office or at home. It’s like, Hey, I’m going to work. I’m going to a park. I’m going to the beach. I’m going, and I’m just going to Yeah, that’s Oh, man. I’ve never heard anybody say that. I absolutely just love that. And then let’s talk about those cold calls. Because I know everyone listening is going like what kind of cold calls is he making? So what what Who are you reaching out to? I’m just curious.
Brandon Zellers 16:56 I’m reaching out, I work primarily with a lot of investors. So we’re in a second home market here very vacation rental base. We have one of the great best returns in the whole country, when it when it comes to an annual, you know, return 10 to 12%, you can’t on a $4 million house like you’re not finding that anywhere else, except for Destin, Florida. So it’s pretty incredible. Which makes, there’s a lot of buyers always coming in as a lot of sellers. So I’m usually just trying to play matchmaker with that I’ll either have a buyer that is looking for a great return property, or I have a seller or I’m calling on sellers, to see if because I know this house is 4000 square feet, eight bedrooms, X proximity to the beach, it should do blank. I’m looking for those properties, if they were purchased 2019 2020. And I’m calling them I’m cold calling them and I’m asking, you know, what’s your price? conversation started.
D.J. Paris 18:02 This is really interesting. So you see yourself, maybe as much of a like a matchmaker as a like, you’re looking for opportunities, and then you’re looking for people to put those opportunities. Who would be interested in those opportunities. So when you say cold calling, you’re probably calling Are you calling other realtors as well to say, hey, you know, I know you work with these kinds of clients. Are you calling about just big, big investors from all over the country? Like, like you mentioned, I’m just curious, like, what type of people are you reaching out to?
Brandon Zellers 18:33 Yeah, so occasionally, it’ll be agents, especially if I have, you know, a hot property. And I’m looking to flip it quick. I’m calling all the agents who, you know, are in the same space as me when it comes to the investors and seeing who they have for the property. Because all of our a lot of our, you know, buyers aren’t just buying one and they’re done. They’re buying 1234 If there’s a good deal, they’re buying it, which is awesome. But I just tried to I tried to add value on both sides. Sure, kind of how I look at my day to day work. And
D.J. Paris 19:11 you’re also doing something really sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but you’re doing something really, really smart that I think anybody could do who had people purchasing properties, you know, two plus years ago, where, you know, maybe the value depending on the market, of course, not every market is up anymore. But some markets are and some properties are and you’re basically calling people who bought and saying hey, your place is worth more now. And I’m curious if do you find that the agent that helped them buy the property at first, has you have you found that that those a lot of times those agents aren’t staying on top of their clients and aren’t going hey, by the way, you’re up like 20% You know, from from two years ago, we should you may want to sell this thing like are you running into people going I already have an agent Have you run into a lot of people going? Yeah, I haven’t heard from my agent in a long time. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests, of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Brandon Zellers 21:26 That is what I had to figure out with my approach. You know, if I approach it with, we just sold the house next door? Would you would you be interested in an offer that kind of just piques their interest? You know, sure, and I can just get the conversation started. Usually I do have somebody. But there’s often times where they aren’t interested. But their price is literally 30% higher than I anticipated it was going to be it’s going to have to play a game like okay, is this even worth exploring? Or do we just kind of keep doing move on? But occasionally, obviously, we do have the sellers who are dedicated to their previous agent, which is, which is fine. But we just got to make the call, that’s the most important thing. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 22:15 I guess it is because you know, a lot of these people who have, you know, second, third, fourth homes that they use themselves, or if they’re investors who are looking, you know, for opportunities, they probably oftentimes don’t care who makes the call, they just want the deal, right? So they’re, it’s probably like, whoever gets to them with the deal is likely to maybe, you know, has a good chance of closing it too, despite whatever their previous relationships might be.
Brandon Zellers 22:42 Yeah, 100%. And it’s, it’s weird, because as you know, in real estate, it’s the only industry where you’re collabing and competing with the same people, you know, like it’s it makes it it makes it an interesting, dynamic. But the collaborative part is very important. So there are some I mean, there are times you don’t want to, you know, rub anybody wrong or step on anybody’s toes, either. You’re always just treading lightly.
D.J. Paris 23:10 But I love that idea of I have a friend who did a very similar thing to what you were talking about. And she just sold a six point something million dollar property here in Chicago, because she literally the the buyer, she had a listing, that was 6 million and the seller pulled out at the last moment the seller was like a little wacky, and anyway pulled out after our contract was already signed. And I’ve gone through attorney review and the seller just says like we’re canceling the deal. Well, she was on the listing side. And she was like mortified, because this was her biggest transaction ever. She’s professional, she’s very well respected, respected, and the seller pulled out. So what she did is she knew that the buyer was still wanting to buy something. And she literally walked next door to the property that was also worth $6 million, and said, Hey, I was representing next door, you know, it didn’t happen. If you’re looking to sell, I have a buyer for you. And it wasn’t even her client. Right? It was just, you know, whoever the buyer was, who was gonna buy the original property. And she said, I don’t know, I don’t know who you’re, you know, who you normally work with. But I think I can get x for your property if I can get that for you. Would you sell? And they were like, yeah, totally. And so she ended up salvaging that. And it’s the same thing you were talking. I mean, it’s really the same sort of opportunity. And nobody had gone to that person and said, If you sell right now, you could probably get 6 million or whatever it was. And so my friend did it and got the deal. And I go, do you know who the realtor was that originally was on the buy side of that original transaction. And she’s like, Oh, I totally know who it is. But they just dropped the ball and didn’t stay in touch. Yeah.
Brandon Zellers 24:50 It’s, I mean, it happens to all of us. You know, we all so it’s what comes around goes around But what we call that is, you know, prospecting with purpose. That’s what we like to wear, we already have the one side, we know exactly what they want. We go after that directly. And then when you because when you’re making those calls, it’s not as cold. I mean, it’s still cold, but it’s not as cold. Because you do have, it’s not hey, would you be interested in selling? We can list it for you. It’s, hey, we just sold this house, we have x amount of buyers who are also interested in the same type of property. You have it? What how do we make this work? How do we get this deal done? What’s your prize?
D.J. Paris 25:38 That is a brilliant, that is a brilliant strategy. It’s very simple to but it’s, it’s this idea of having a reason to call and not. It’s not like, hey, I want to build rapport with you. And I want to, you know, over time, win you over it. And of course, if you want to do that, as well, but this idea of leading with it’s kind of like, every year when I get to tax time, my accountant says hey, I need all your taxes. And, and I love my accountant, I’m in no way. This is gonna sound like I’m like being disparaging towards her. She’s wonderful. But you know, what I would love is if she called me and said, Hey, here’s like this new tax thing just changed. And what I really want you to do is think about this for next year, so that you can, you know, again, bringing an opportunity to me, right? And look, I’m not saying she’s not supposed to she doesn’t have to do that. But boy, I’d love it if she did because every year I Google, I go with any tax law changes I should take advantage of. But if somebody were to bring that to me, I would be I would be indebted to them. So I love that prospecting with purpose have a reason to call somebody not just a hey, what’s going on? Are you thinking about buying or selling? You know, that’s really, really smart. Now you do more than just real estate. So you didn’t just and by the way, 33 million in one year, even if you did that on one transaction, which I know it was many, many transactions. That would still be a full time thing. Yeah. And on top of that you operate Dr. Dustin, which is luxury car rental. How’d you get into luxury car rental?
Brandon Zellers 27:04 on accident, honestly, it’s kind of a funny story. I when I was in the medical sales space. I’m obviously moved down to the Florida there’s a lot of people with jeeps, I thought needed a Jeep to Jeep Wrangler. I had a Mercedes Benz CLA 250. That’s the car I bought from Kansas City here. And I had I had someone who was actually going to purchase the Mercedes. So I went ahead and bought the jeep. She backed out of buying the car. So I was sitting right with two cars. Awesome. I put it on. I put it on. There’s an app called Turo. It’s like, Sure, it’s essentially Airbnb for vehicles for renting your vehicles. I put it on there. It does. 3,001st month on a car. I was like, wow, hang on. Like, hang on.
D.J. Paris 27:56 That’s all my payments for a year or more.
Brandon Zellers 28:01 I was like this. At that time, I was only one of six vehicles on the whole, like in this area. It was relatively new here. And so I was like, this is interesting. Kind of that was the end of 2020. Are you Yeah, at the end of 2020. And then in during 2021 is when I really you know kicked it up. And it’s I just copy paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. It just kept adding, adding adding. I hired a director of operations from Kansas City, he moved down here, because now we’re up to 20 vehicles in this full plot. Yeah, I mean, we have it started with that Mercedes, but we have, you know, BMW IA, with the doors that you know, come up like that really cool. Some BMW M six, lot of Escalades because there’s a bunch of families that travel like in packs. So the asteroids are amazing. And you know, there was a there was a rental car shortage at airports, so people will just Uber. But there’s also a shortage of that here because everybody wants to go to the beach. So they’re quickly they’re calling us like, after one day, again, this is everything isn’t going to work. You guys have any cars. And so it’s kind of cool, how it’s how it’s worked out, I’m looking forward to, you know, continue continuing to grow that just to see what happens. It’s a fun business that allows me to, you know, drive multiple cars, I love cars. So it just allows me to have multiple cars that are kind of paying for themselves and switching in and out of them. It’s it’s cool. It’s cool. I love it.
D.J. Paris 29:38 I had a Jeep Wrangler many many, many years ago and here in the city of Chicago, which people oftentimes are like it it was it was a manual, it was a you know stick shift and I remember people thinking like oh, that just sounds terrible. And I’m like well it’s not great in the winter but because you know we like maybe I’d get the hard top on in time for the for just for ease or something, but what if I didn’t then it was it was fun. But I know man, rank. wranglers are super fun vehicles to and certainly in a beach town, they’re just everywhere. And so I love that you have these like this luxury fleet and you like building that business you saw an opportunity. I also want to talk about your, your streetwear. Why psych because there’s a you know, you talked about prospecting with a purpose, you know, there’s a real purpose and mission behind what you’re doing with with clothing, your clothing line about, you know, dealing with sex trafficking, slavery, things of that nature. How did you get involved in that.
Brandon Zellers 30:36 So that that actually goes back all the way to 2017. My uncle, and I actually, were just sitting, sitting in his basement. And like I said, I’ve always been into fashion. He’s always been like, my business mentor growing up, I just watch him being entrepreneur. And so here I am, like, young kid, like, hey, let’s start a clothing. Let’s start a clothing brand, not realizing it’s like literally one of the hardest industries to get into, like competing with
D.J. Paris 31:06 dickless big boys who get all the shelf space, they get all that. I mean, if you’re talking about retail, it’s like, the hardest thing to ever break into.
Brandon Zellers 31:15 Yeah, like it’s, and so it’s kind of our, it’s become like more of a lifelong mission. Like, we’re just never gonna give it up. We slowly grow it, you know, every year and my end. But the I once held, I can’t say the Fashion Week, I did a runway show for for the brand. And it was really cool, because it goes back to, you know, abolishing the sex trafficking and all of that it’s we we had like the models with their hands tied up like very, you’re making a statement? Yeah, it was, it was a very statement, which it did exactly what it needs to do. It was an incredible experience. And that kind of, you know, put our brand up there a little bit in our city, which was really cool. And we’ve kind of just been keeping keep going with that. We were very, we were very involved with a 21, which is a huge, you know, campaign for all that. And it’s Yeah, I mean, it’s fun, it’s something we’ll just do forever. I don’t think it’s ever going to be our, our priority business. I wish one day it would be that’d be awesome. If I if we had a massive brand, that was just helping, you know, global issues, like that’s incredible. But on top of that, we also have a wholesale a wholesale side of it as well. Sure. So we do merch and fulfill orders for a bunch of companies. So I love it. It’s kind of just a well oiled machine now. So yeah, I
D.J. Paris 32:51 I also wonder too, and I don’t know, if you talk about that with your clients, that oh, by the way, I have this this other thing, I’m not I’m not sure the pros and cons of talking about other businesses when you’re, you know, working with somebody on a real estate transaction, but I suspect if they were to hear the mission, and oh, by the way, I have this other thing. And here’s what we’re trying to do with it. I mean, who’s whose heart wouldn’t melt a little bit, you know, and sort of, you know, feel both sad and also grateful that that you’re out there trying to, you know, make some of those changes. So, I’m curious, does that ever come up when you’re working with clients? Or do you more keep that you know, more low key?
Brandon Zellers 33:31 Um, I usually wait till there’s a good segue, organically. Sure. And client to client, depending on because a lot of my clients are, you know, friends now. So, some of them, I definitely do bring it up, but it just, it. It differs on who it is, I
D.J. Paris 33:49 guess, of course, yeah. Well, I just I just applaud you for trying to make a difference and giving back and, and I wonder how much of this idea you talked about the beginning, like going through the surrender process of, you know, dealing with your own, you know, issues and challenges and sort of surrendering and saying, hey, you know, I’m going to make this better. I’m going to get the help you know, that that is needed and then going to the spirit group saying, Hey, I’m new, I need help I you know, I’m, I want you guys to mentor me and and here you are, but question more about prioritization, because I think a lot of us have struggled with that. So you know, not you know, not many of our listeners probably have, you know, a rental car business as well as as well as a fashion line. But but they have other things. They have families that are taking care of children, they’ve got other jobs. How do you prioritize your day? I know you’ve talked about hey, you know, you’re spending at least half a day or so. You know, at the at, you know, at your real estate job. Probably more than that is my guess. But how do you figure out where to spend your time?
Brandon Zellers 34:56 At the beginning, I’ll be honest, I didn’t. I would just try to do it. everything. And that’s why I mentioned how I had to hire someone to, to move down here and help out with the business because I had to give some of that away in order to grow. And so that’s kind of been a huge value add in terms of my business and priority prioritization, because now I’m able to focus on, you know, the bigger projects that will, you know, in the end help everything else that I’m working on. So that’s really, it’s for me, real estate. I’ll check in on Drive and stuff. But we have that that system is beautiful right now. It’s going great. We’re still growing it. And then Psych. Like I said, it’s with a couple partners. So we all that’s like a weekend thing we get together once or twice a month and chat about that. But I just like to keep my mind I like to keep I like keep going. I like to keep my mind busy. I like to see what all I can explore. I’m hoping to, you know, start on a couple new adventures as well. So this this upcoming year.
D.J. Paris 36:05 Amazing. Do you well, you know what we’ll leave that for? We won’t, we’ll leave that for a future episode. Because I’m curious, I don’t want to, I don’t want to spoil whatever secret secret of cool stuff you’re working on. I’m just excited to watch it come to come to be. But I do have question about this idea of competition, because again, for anyone listening, they just thinks, wow, they live in this vacation area, lots of wealthy people come and go. It’s just you know, handing out money and opportunities, which we you know, I’m sure is not the case. But there’s also fierce competition, because it’s not like you guys are the only brokers in town, right? Are the only actors in town, there’s probably 1000s. So you’re competing against people who have been doing this 3040 years who have really established impressive, you know, histories, right? These are not, you know, not Bozo, you know, who just got their license and you know, 55 years old person, this is somebody who’s B, these are people who have been working in this area for a very long time doing very well. And you guys come along, and you are grabbing up market share? Why do you think you’re able to do that at such a young age? Is it strictly because as you said, you prospect with purpose, you you have a reason to pick up the phone and call someone? Or is it more than that?
Brandon Zellers 37:22 That’s definitely a piece of it. Another piece is, you know, Jonathan has really pioneered a big part of this market, you know, him coming in at such a young age, and accomplishing everything he’s accomplished, you know, over a billion, that he hit that three years ago, you know, in his career, that’s, it’s incredible. So he’s really set the stage, and we’re just blessed to work alongside him and leverage his success to help us and help our brand. You know, that’s part of it.
D.J. Paris 37:52 Yeah, I guess it’s funny, he’s only 31. But he’s sort of like the big he’s been the big deal in that areas for years now. So I guess he’s, he’s not the new kid on the block. But at some point he was and, and this idea of being able to, you know, out, come out compete, you know, some because again, when I guess when you’re dealing with with multimillion dollar properties, you know, I’m guessing that, you know, a lot of times the buyers and sellers it’s not they don’t interview just one agent, they probably interview Yeah, many agents. So how do you, you know, how do you feel like you compete? When you’re up against other agents for one transaction? Like, what is it that you think you do, that’s maybe a bit different.
Brandon Zellers 38:33 So we focus on being proactive, as opposed to reactive, and building the relationships over just having a transaction, those two things alone will set you apart from 99% of your competitors, you know, truly getting in having great conversations with the seller, or the buyer, whoever you’re being interviewed with, and adding value will win every single time. And just we’re authentic. We know the space really knowledgeable on the area on the on the properties on the pricings. And it’s, it’s something that we’ve found success and just following those simple steps. So
D.J. Paris 39:16 yeah, it is funny. It’s like, when I first started working at the company here, I did not have a real estate background. And my boss said, I said, What do you think that because he was like, the Rookie of the Year, his first year and he was in his? I don’t, he might have been 30 years old, maybe? No, late 20s. And he was Rookie of the Year in Chicago. It’s kind of a big deal. And it’s a really big deal. And I said, Why do you think it was because and and Nick, our owner is like the nicest guy ever. He’s not particularly salesy, and he’s just a good guy. And I said, What do you think it is? Why do you think you had so much success in your first year? He goes, I don’t know. He goes, I only had one rule, which was I never wanted a client to have to call me first. Right? I wanted to, I wanted my clients to be like, I don’t have to ever call like they’re calling him Yeah, you know, he’s calling them going, Hey, here’s what’s going on. And he was my realtor. And I thought back because he was my realtor years before. And I thought back to my experience with him, and I had never had another experience. So I didn’t know it was anything special. But I went you right? I never had to call you when I was worried about a particular thing in my transaction, you always called me first. And it is funny. You’re right, it probably that in and of itself, being proactive versus reactive, probably does separate you from close to 99. Even if it’s just 90% of the competition. That is nine out of 10 people who are in you know, I want I’ll say finish to this. But I interviewed the one of the top, I’ve interviewed actually a bunch of the top Realtors here in Chicago. And one of them said the exact same thing. She goes, I call every one of my clients every week. And I was like, and she goes, No, that’s about it. Like, is that it? She goes, Well, there’s more to it. But that’s the thing. I do that like no one else does.
Brandon Zellers 40:52 You gotta you gotta touch them. Yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to be top of mind.
D.J. Paris 40:58 And curious about social media. Because you’re a young guy, you You certainly are no stranger to social media. Have you? How much is social media played a role in in the success of your business? Or has it not? I don’t know, if you’re, if you’re the investors and buyers and sellers, are checking you out on social or just curious what what if you’re utilizing that?
Brandon Zellers 41:21 It’s funny, because I thought that none of them were checking me out on social because they don’t follow a couple of them over the past month, you know, have mentioned that? Oh, yeah, I saw you. I saw you on Instagram, Facebook, and I was like, okay, they are watching. And I don’t know if it like, I assume that it’s helping. You know, I like to my clients say that I’m annoyingly persistent in the best way possible. And I think that’s one of my biggest strengths, because I’ve heard that multiple times. Because I just, you know, persist without exception. Regardless, like you have to just push through, oh, you can hear no, a million times. And you have to follow up. I think a big piece of this is you have to follow up. But I mean, I link all of my socials in my virtual business cards and everything. So they it’s they always have access directly to it. It’s hard to say if it I would, I like to say that it that it helps. I know there’s a lot of agents right now who think they can post on Tik Tok when video and they’re going to be selling 100 million, when it’s really still not that not that simple, especially with the market shifting. You have to, you have to maintain the fundamentals and the basics, which means you’re going to have to pick up the phone one way or the other. You can post the videos, I post the videos. But you have to stay true to the basics.
D.J. Paris 42:44 Yeah, you know, I almost forgot to ask this question because I oftentimes we ask all of our guests ahead of time, a few questions to kind of give me some things to talk about. And I almost never get to this question. And the reason I’m going to get to it isn’t so much that it’s as funny as it is one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard for for real estate. So I really want everybody to pay attention. I honestly, truly believe this. So one of the questions we ask is, what’s your funniest real estate experience? And so I’ll just tell the quick story. But I want to talk about how you solve the problem versus the actual story about the problem. Because the problem was you were brand new in one of your first showings, and you were on your way to the showing and you blank or maybe you were at the showing, but you blanked on all the information. Right? You didn’t have it memorized, which I mean, who does Right? Very few people do. So tell me about how you saw that? Because well, actually, I’m sorry. Tell us the story about how you blanked on the information. I do I actually do.
Brandon Zellers 43:42 This was at the very beginning. I had already. I mean it’s it’s nerve racking. We’re in multimillion dollar properties. I just started, you know, like, I don’t know really what I’m doing. But I’m here, like, no owl, but here we are. And so I’m like, you know, trying to fake it till I make it until that gets real without a showing and I’m sure know how, how tall the ceilings, what, what kind of lights, what kind of floors, and I’m just like, oh my gosh, like just unprepared. I thought I was prepared. I was unprepared. I wasn’t ready at all. And it was the most embarrassing thing by far in my real estate career. And from that moment, like I would just either walk through the house and talk in my phone. So I had all the information or I’d go on the MLS, type out a bunch of notes. And then what I would do is I put like a text to speech. And so basically you just copy all everything you wrote. And then you can have like a Siri voice basically play it back. So then like for if I knew I had a big showing coming up, I would just if I’m representing the buyer, I would just you know, drive, put it over my radio and just let it Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Just so that I knew. Yeah. Like just the system. overload, but then when someone asks a question, you’ll subconsciously like know the answer, because you heard it 4500 times.
D.J. Paris 45:08 I mean, it’s it’s sometimes they always, you know, sometimes the what’s awesome is razor the most direct solution or the simplest solution is oftentimes the most effective and, or something to that nature. I probably did not sort of quote that correctly. But But we understand the idea. And that is a brilliant and simple idea, right? It’s like, yeah, how cool is it to be able to walk through a property when a client asks a question, you don’t have to go to your phone, and you don’t have to, I suppose suppose you could, if you really needed to, but you’re like, I already know that because I’ve heard it replay over and over again, on the car on the way down. I’ve never heard of another agent doing that. So that is, I’m so glad that you shared that with me.
Brandon Zellers 45:48 Absolutely. I have some weird, weird things, driving to the beach and then driving and listening to MLS bios.
D.J. Paris 45:56 You know, though, but that’s really, it’s smart. It shows preparedness, it shows this idea that I take this very seriously. And I’m going to go to the beach because I like the beach, but I’m going to work and I’m going to work and I’m going to sit in my car and make dials. And I don’t know how many people make four hours of dials a day, I suspect it’s less than 1/10 of 1% of Realtors, it’s probably essentially nobody and, and you’re doing it and you close 33 million, and you’re a nice guy, you’re not you don’t seem to be a pushy salesy kind of guys, that’s not your personality. And, and it’s not the Spirit groups personality, either. I know, I know some of those guys. And they’re just nice, easygoing people, but they work hard, and they’re smart. And that’s a really smart thing to do. And it’s in it’s hard work to, it’s not easy to sit in the car and power on the phone all day long, trying to put deals together. So how much of how much of your success is just just the discipline of
Brandon Zellers 46:48 it? I would say, you know, a large majority, definitely is, you know, sticking to the processes. You know, Jonathan said at the beginning, when I started that, that was the most important thing, you have to you have to get a system in place, you have to get in process. And then you have to stick to it, you have to, there will be days that are worse than others days that are better than others who allow them knows, and you have to learn from your failures. Like I’m not afraid to fail, because I felt like I failed in the past. And I’ve you know, overcome that. Yeah, 10 fold. So, you know, back to like the drinking and then overcoming, I’m sure you’re sober now as of two weeks ago, so congratulations, and little things like that just one day at a time. And then taking risks. I mean, you have to take risks.
D.J. Paris 47:40 I think a lot of realtors could probably benefit from some of the lessons in the 12 step programs in particular, you know, for those of you that aren’t familiar with with 12 Step programs, one of the one of the sort of biggest things in them is is this idea of, of structure and having like, if you’re a meeting person, there’s meetings and you go to them as regularly as possible. And that in and of itself, just people going to these meeting rooms and saying hey, I’m I’m struggling, or I’m here to be of service, oftentimes helps keep them on track just going somewhere and doing it and you’re you know, you’re sort of saying the same thing, I go to the beach, I pick up the phone and I start dialing and some days, it’s easier than others. And some days, I you know, I strike gold and other days I do not. And but I’m just going to keep doing it. Because ultimately, you know, there’s a track record of it working for other people. And so I think there is something to this idea of structure routine. Obviously, discipline is, you know, like anybody would disagree with how important discipline is. But it is remarkable that you were able to sort of rebuild, at at a time when, you know, alcohol in particular can really take somebody down down for the count, you know, you probably, obviously are aware of that, and people, most people who have that illness do not recover. And so this idea that not only did you recover, but you’re thriving is truly truly impressive. And I wonder if you hadn’t have gone through that experience. I’m curious, would you would you be as successful as you were today? Like, if you were still able to do it all? And you know, continue, you know, with some of the the behavior that maybe wasn’t so how healthy? Do you think you’d be able to keep it all together?
Brandon Zellers 49:23 I had to say no, not definitely not. My growth wouldn’t have been as quick as it. Yeah, that has been in the last two years. I mean, it’s, I just thank God every day because it’s, it’s, I look back and I’m like, That is crazy. I see old pictures. I mean, I was 70 pounds heavier. Whenever Yeah, so and I always I remember at my old sales jobs in Kansas City, like I would always still be like a top producer. But I there was so much more I could have gave and like this is you know the fruit of that like I’m seeing that I was right because I always be like that You got it, you got to calm down, you got to chill, you got to relax, you got to get better. And like, because when I had laser when I was sober, like I had laser focus, I thought I could conquer the world. And so that’s how I feel today. And so it’s it’s literally I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go back for anything. Marathons continues, you know, like we’re still, we’re still pushing one day at a time.
D.J. Paris 50:24 One of my favorite quotes is, it’s an old Zen. I think they’re called Cohen’s anyway, Zen saying, maybe it’s not Zen, but somewhere I stole it from somewhere. But it’s, I thought it was a Zen thing, but it’s a great one and it’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood carry water. This idea that the works goes on, right? But at least at least your your mind is clear. And you’re able to give more of yourself to, to the things that you that you’re involved in and and want to do, versus the things that you find yourself doing to cope with with other things. So I think I think that is is just remarkable and a great place to wrap up. So we want to give a shout out to not only Dr. Dustin but also psych if somebody’s interested in renting a luxury car in Destin. We do have listeners who of course vacation there. So what’s the best way they can learn about your your car rental?
Brandon Zellers 51:23 Yeah, so they can go to att drive Destin, just like it sounds. Drive destined.com. Or honestly, you can type in rentalcars. Destin, and we’re right there. So yeah, there’s multiple, or they can come and DM me at BS LSB. Ze ll A S? and I’ll hook them up for sure.
D.J. Paris 51:43 Awesome. And then if anyone wants to help support the psych, brand and mission, what’s the best way they can do that?
Brandon Zellers 51:52 So on Insta on Instagram, it’s sy Ke, just for letters, and then the website is site brand.com.
D.J. Paris 51:59 Awesome. Well, we will post links to both of those side businesses, because we want to support that. And we honor your time today. And you know, Jonathan, I believe if I might have this wrong, because I My memory is garbage. But I think he had reached out to us and says you got to talk to this guy. He just joined my team. I’m pretty sure he did. And we are we are so honored. Because again, not a lot of people have had that level of success that quickly. And not not that you haven’t been, you know, successful and other things. But just that in and of itself 33 million in year one is absolutely remarkable. And I honor you for that. I’m excited to see your new your new ventures excited to see how your real estate career continues to evolve. And, you know, we’re big fans of the spirits group and what what you’re doing as well. So thank you, Brandon, on behalf of all of our listeners who want to thanks, thank you for your time, I know how busy you are, this is not an easy time to find an hour to speak to us. So I appreciate you doing that. And also, on behalf of Brandon and myself. We want to thank the listeners and the audience for sticking around to the end. We appreciate it. Let’s support Brandon let’s let’s check out oh and by the way any realtors who have investors or buyers or sellers who might be looking to move retire invest down in the destin you know 30 A area they would love to talk to you right? You probably get calls from Realtors all over the country who are like, Hey, I’m looking for, for a team to refer business to so what’s the best way that anyone who wants to either work with you or refer business to you can reach out?
Brandon Zellers 53:32 Absolutely. So just at these Ella’s again, on Instagram, or at Spears group, either one. And if you just want to call we can chat doesn’t have to even be about real estate, we can just you can just call I talk on the phone all day long. It’s kind of my thing. Well, I love it. And next,
D.J. Paris 53:52 he would love to connect. So we will put Brandon’s contact information as well in our show notes. So thank you, Brandon for being on the show for everyone listening, please. Yeah, look at and for anyone out there who is who knows somebody who is struggling in their first couple of years. Or even maybe they’re not in their first couple years and they’re struggling. And then maybe they’re losing hope, right? This is a great episode to send to them that to see what’s possible, when you just put your mind to it and buckle down and really, really just get to work. And so feel free to share this with anybody out there who’s a real estate agent that could use a little bit of motivation and to sort of reset their mind and what’s possible. It’s easy right now I think to to get bogged down and rates are up, inventories down. It’s tough. It’s tough. It’s scary. It’s and yeah, so it’s nice to hear some of these success stories with people who are thriving during, during otherwise a pretty challenging time I think and in real estate. So, Brandon, thank you again. But for everyone out there listening, share this with a friend. Just send them over to keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done could be streamed there. And also leave us a review for listening on whatever platform Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora app, Amazon, wherever Google, let us know what you think of the show. We appreciate it. All right, Brandon. Thank you so much and we will see everybody on the next episode.
How To Build A Real Estate Team • Social Bootcamp • Gogo Bethke
Oct 14, 2022
Welcome to our quarterly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo goes through the process of starting and building a team based on her own experience. Gogo also discusses what positions you need to hire first when deciding to start the team. Next, Gogo describes how she runs her own team from distance and what her expectations are from her team-members. Last, Gogo and D.J. discuss Gogo’s bootcamp and what it offers.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Thinking of building your own real estate team. Where do you start? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to get real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and today is our regular series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Now gogo Beth key came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream she was broke, she had no real estate experience no sphere of influence barely spoke English and only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing else but Facebook to help build her real estate business which is where she started and she created gogos real estate began her and began her real estate career now with the power of social media gogo has sold and I this number is old and it’s I know she’s gonna correct me because this is way low, but has sold at least 75 million in real estate. It’s hundreds more at this point. But she shares the good the bad, the ugly of real estate and her honest snippets into her daily life has earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers. And in the real estate community. She’s earned the nickname The Queen of social media and after being asked to present at various conferences and events with realtors. She built her own social media bootcamp, which is called Go Go’s bootcamp. Now today she has a team of Gosh, eight 900, maybe 1000 agents we’ll find out less than 1000 agents nationwide. She has 1000 agents on her team. Her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. Now if she can do it, this girl from Transylvania, Romania with no formal US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience, and an Eastern European accent that anyone can do it as well. Please follow gogo on Instagram. That’s the best place to learn about gogo as she is at gogos real estate. And please also consider investing in the bootcamp I just mentioned, which is called gogos boot camp. It has dozens of hours of instruction to help transform your social media into a lead generation machine. And for a special discount just for our audience, our listeners or viewers. Please go to Gogo podcast.com and go go podcast.com By doing that, it helps support our show and also you get to Go Go’s unbelievable program Coco Welcome once again to the show. Oh, thank
Gogo Bethke 3:43 you for having me. I missed you.
D.J. Paris 3:45 I miss you as well. And I this is this is funny. If you’re watching me you’re seeing me in the shadows because my blinds I have these super fancy blinds that are electric, except the battery ran out so I can’t shut them and I’m staring at the sun. So I’m in the corner. So if you’re looking at me, you can’t really see me but you can focus your eyes on Gogo. She’s the guest anyway. And she’s probably more interesting to look at than me anyway but it is it is good to see you. And so what tell us what’s going on what do we want to talk about today?
Gogo Bethke 4:18 Well I was thinking you know, usually get bring social media but I feel like social media is just the basics right? It’s how you you start building your business and continue building whatever business that you decide today I will not in companies right? But I also feel like that’s also false like the umbrella of technology and leveraging your time and building systems and processes so that you can have time freedom, location freedom and financial freedom is pretty much what all builds off alright, initially all started with social media and all works in social media for me. So I figured today I run a small local business or a small local team in Michigan, but I live in Florida. So I thought that we could talk about what it’s like running a team and not even living in the same state like what says And then processes and weekly meetings and things like that we have in places in order to make sure it’s all working properly and and you can have your cake and eat it too.
D.J. Paris 5:07 I think that’s a really great topic because we’re seeing it, you know, this trend towards teams, the last couple of years teams are becoming more and more powerful, more and more than norm. I think, you know, it’ll be interesting to see in like five years what that looks like, I think I, my guess is a lot more agents will be on teams, or now is the time to maybe think about even creating a team. So this is really interesting, because I have now talked to people like gogo, of course, which we’re talking to you today. But I’ve also talked to other agents who work in other states, and, and literally don’t live in those states anymore. So it’s very, very interesting. So yeah, let’s talk about it. So I
Gogo Bethke 5:47 started out as a as an agent, right, like everybody else selling real estate. I started with social media. And that’s why today out of necessity, right? Today, people know me as a social media cleaner real estate. But the idea is not for you to be on the hamster wheel for the rest of your life. Right? When you were trading time for money, you’re going to hit a ceiling. And when I hit my personal ceiling, I was like, Okay, I have a couple options. I can sell more homes, which requires more time, which I already didn’t have. Right? Or I could sell more expensive homes, which was also not necessarily an option because guys at the time I was in an area called Pinckney, Michigan, good luck finding it on the map. They have a population of like 9000, I was already selling in the low four, hundreds, average price range locally was 275. So my next option was to like break into the gated community. And we had like two of them in like a 20 mile radius. So it was like, Oh, that’s not gonna be an option, right? Because yeah, you can break into the communities, but the turnover rate is much less because your pool, the pool of buyers that you have, you know, the top 1% You’re talking 1% of the buyers, how many of them are on the market, those homes usually sit on the market longer, yada, yada, long story? Yes, I would make higher Commission’s but less often. Right, so that wasn’t an option for me either. So I was like, Okay, the next option is I have to create a bunch of enemies. So since there’s only one of me and only 124 hours, then how can I make possibly more money without trading more of my time that I already don’t have is by creating a bunch of other Minimes, then I can leverage their time to make commission. This is where comes in a team, right? You can also do it, you can start off with referrals, if you don’t have enough transactions, right, where you can justify hiring someone full time and to your team. And also depending on what brokerage you are, what their qualifications, what you need to hit in order to qualify to start a team, right? So at our brokerage, it’s a $6 million production to start a standard team. Right. So if you don’t have that, you might say, Okay, I’m not I don’t qualify to start a team just yet, but I don’t want to work as much as I’m already working. So then what you can potentially do is go into corner, just go
D.J. Paris 7:45 just go go saying that because she’s seen me slinking away from
Gogo Bethke 7:50 his winking at me and going to shake
D.J. Paris 7:55 up. My girlfriend’s listening, I am not winking.
Gogo Bethke 8:00 He does have one eye closed, because that’s what the,
D.J. Paris 8:03 if your husband is listening, I’m not waiting. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Gogo Bethke 8:07 I closed that. You know, what is that. So then what you want to do right is multiply yourself so it’s time for you to create a bunch of meaning use, if you don’t qualify to start a team, you can join it with an agent and just say, Hey, listen, the overflow that I have, I’m going to give them to you at a 5050 transaction fee. So now think of it this way every listing that you have, especially I want to look at your production. Right and look at let’s say the 20 deals last year, I want to see out of the 20 deals, how many were listings. If you are more than listing heavy, right, and it’s time for you to to hire a buyer’s agent for multiple reasons a because if your listing heavy, you do not have the time that it takes to babysit those listings. Each listing should bring you two buyers, one is going to buy the house one is going to buy something else in the same price range. So every time you have a listing and you didn’t get yourself to buyers off of that listing, you wasted your own time, which means if you’re a listing heavy agent, you can go ahead and hire yourself a buyer’s agent and their job is to hold your listings open and follow up with those potential buyers so you can close a salad and double dipping and V get another buyer for your team right and yourself to then go ahead and you know buy something else in the area for the same price range. So let’s assume that you had a $300,000 listing, right that should bring you to $300,000 buyers, and a commission commission on 300,000 If you charge 3% is nine grand even if you have a 5050 split that $4,500 for the buyer that’s going to buy the house and another $4,500 when a buyer is going to buy something else in the similar price range. So now you are the one listing you created yourself a $9,000 commission on the listing side and 240 $500 Commission’s on the buyer side by splitting the opportunity with the buyer’s agent. So now you turn that $9,000 Commission into $18,000 and you created someone an opportunity they just close two deals they would have not been able to close otherwise.
D.J. Paris 9:53 And you know I think you you’ve said this I just want to make this a point to is these are people that can hold open houses for you for your listings if they’re in the same area.
Gogo Bethke 10:02 Exactly, exactly. So you got it. So now that you understand the math right, now the next thing you want to get done, actually, let me just do something very quick. The next thing you want to get done is work yourself up to a team. Because when you work yourself up to a team, right, now, you’re going to be able to give an opportunity to the agent with a reduced commission versus a full commission. Think of it from the agent perspective, if the agent can go ahead and have a reduced commission or half cap, right in our case, why would they give you 50% of their commission if they don’t get a reduced cap, right, because they still have to reach a full PCAP. So the idea of starting the team is not only going is unofficial to you, but it’s also beneficial to the agent, because now they’re going to be able to sorry, now they’re going to be able to pay less into the company and make more money and take home. So the likeliness that they’re going to stay on your team for a long time is much higher.
D.J. Paris 10:56 Yeah, we’re talking about creating stickiness by giving opportunities at a reduced Commission, which makes perfect sense, because you’re providing so much incredible value to the team member. And it’s really what most the reason most people leave the industry in the first couple of years is because they don’t have enough opportunities, they can’t find enough opportunities on their own. And so this idea of even finding somebody who might be struggling in their first year or two and saying, hey, I can help get you out of the struggle. And you workout in arrangement, it creates incredible stickiness, they get to learn from you, and everyone wins.
Gogo Bethke 11:27 Exactly, you got it. So that’s the idea of starting it right. And then eventually you’re going to but before you get yourself a buyer’s agent, though, I strongly recommend to get a transaction coordination coordinator first, right? Because that is your lowest data entry is the lowest return on your investment for your time. Right. So that needs to be the first one hired out. If you can’t afford to have an assistant, that should be your second hire. And the third one should be a buyer’s agent. And eventually, if you’re really good at social media, and advertising, and you have more leads that can come in and if your buyer’s agents are not good at turning them into clients that you need to get an ISA, an internal sales associate, in case you don’t know what an ISA Yes, because I didn’t know what an ISA was right? It’s pretty much a call it’s calling center, they call on your behalf, they create opportunity, they plug that opportunity into your team’s calendar. And in return, they usually get paid a small percentage and maybe a small hourly rate.
D.J. Paris 12:21 Yeah, and let’s talk about you mentioned transaction coordinator and I we so rarely talk about that on the show. And I think it’s really important thing for people to understand. You don’t have to input everything yourself into the MLS, you don’t have to input, you want to review everything, of course to make sure it’s accurate. But you don’t have to go around chasing signatures through you know, dot loop or DocuSign, or whatever e signature platform you’re using, you don’t have to worry about setting up important dates related to the transaction that are coming up. You can hire somebody to do that. And it’s ridiculously inexpensive. You know, what, what are you seeing for prices for transaction coordinators these days,
Gogo Bethke 12:58 I mean, it’s a little different nationwide, right? Someone in Alabama is gonna pay different pricing than someone in California, right, just because the price per transaction, the regulations, and there’s way more work in California, there is in Alabama, but I would say somewhere from 250, all the way up to 500 per deal. Now in most states, you can also charge what’s called the transaction fee, right. So if you can charge a transaction fee, you pretty much justify your transaction coordinators cost by collecting a transaction fee plus commission, right, so I collect 3% on each side, plus a 595 transaction fee, which also covers our TC, our photography, all of the additional marketing costs, the broker opens all of those things that we do for our clients. Now think of it this way a TC only gets paid different that paid meaning if your deal falls apart, let’s say you have an accepted offer. And for whatever reason, buyers get cold feet, they walk away, right? Whatever reason that your deal is not going to close, you don’t owe the transaction coordinator anything. So you will lose absolutely nothing. You work for the same deal that they work for the same deal. If the deal doesn’t closes, you don’t get paid, they don’t get paid, they get paid pretty much when you get paid. So it’s an absolute no brainer. For us realtors, that should be your first hire. I mean, you should have got it done in the last few minutes when I was talking.
D.J. Paris 14:10 And it’s it I want to make this point there are not too many services in this world that I’m aware of that. If if something doesn’t happen, even though they’ve done all the work, then then they don’t get paid. But that is how the transaction coordinator services work. I don’t know what magic they have to where they can do that. But every service is kind of that way. So it there it goes at not much risk. And do you really want to spend hours chasing things your time is worth more than $300? Even if you if you spend, let’s just say I don’t know, three hours total on paperwork over the course of a transaction is probably more than that. Isn’t that worth 300 bucks? I think it is.
Gogo Bethke 14:49 i The easiest way to do it is by calculating your hourly rate. So most agents have no idea what their hourly rate is and that’s where they go wrong. That’s because they don’t know how much money they make in the hour too. Damn. Spending $300. It’s an expense versus realizing that if your hourly rate is $1,200, and here’s how you’re going to calculate it. Let’s say you made $250,000. Last year, let’s see, what, 40 hours a week, that’s 2080 hours a year, divided 250,000 by 2080 hours, and you realize that your hourly rate is 400 bucks. Now, if you’re making $1,200 an hour, should you be doing data entry, even if it’s only taking you three hours, that’s $3,600, you will be paying 300 versus saving yourself that 3600. Because that’s what it’s costing you if you do the work, right. Not only that, but if you hire that out, and you pay 300, which by the way, charge a transaction fee, so it’s not even a cost, right? But let’s say you hire it out. Now you create it yourself three hours to go get yourself more clients. So let’s say you get one client per hour. That’s three clients, what’s your average commission? Let’s say it’s 10. Grand, you created $30,000 worth of opportunity here in those three hours, and you paid out 300? If I told you give me 380,000, would you do it?
D.J. Paris 16:06 Every every I give you every penny I had?
Gogo Bethke 16:09 Exactly. I’m like, Can I do it again? How about? I want to wait, can I do it again, right? Like, of course anybody in the right minds, but people don’t start to understand what their hours worth. So because they don’t know what the how much money they can make. Everything is a cost.
D.J. Paris 16:24 Yeah, and I think to getting over this hurdle of, well, they’re not going to do it as well as I can do it. That’s, that’s, that’s what stopped me from getting virtual assistants over the years. And I wish I would have given that thought up years ago, because you can absolutely find great help. And you can coach and train them and teach them. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you hire somebody as coach and train them. And by the way, maybe they won’t do it 100% of the way that you would do it. Okay, but maybe they’ll do it 95% If 95% is acceptable, and it should be in most cases. Now, when it comes to paperwork, obviously, everything needs to be perfect. But if they can do 95% of the work for you, and you can just give them $300. And then you go off and go to a networking event or host a client appreciation event, or just call your database and say how’s everything going and trying to get leads that way? Boy, you’re gonna make money instead of wasting time, you know, making everything absolutely pixel perfect.
Gogo Bethke 17:20 You got it. I have like 40 of them. I don’t even know who does what anymore.
D.J. Paris 17:26 It is it is remarkable.
Gogo Bethke 17:27 What do I care as long as the work is done? What do I care, right and I full freedom to my, my VAs, they can do whatever they want from whatever they wanted. As long as the work is done, I always tell them, I don’t care if you’re on the beach or in the club. As long as when I message you get back to me and the work is done. You have Wi Fi and cell service. I’m good. Do it from wherever you can, right. And the other issue people have is like they have accents, right? And so it occurred to me one day, because I felt the same thing. And I occurred to me one day, I’m like, hold on a minute, I have an accent sounds like Ah, okay, so that is not an objection anymore. Because if I can build an empire here, right? With an Eastern European accent, they can certainly handle whatever job they got hired into.
D.J. Paris 18:12 Yeah, and it’s funny we’ve had we have six virtual assistants at our company who helped do administrative tasks for us. And they are constantly calling our Realtors at our firm. And they’re such a lovely people are our virtual assistants, that I don’t believe anyone has a problem with the fact that they live in the Philippines. And their accents are very minor anyway, but they’re just lovely, wonderful people. And I don’t think people care that much anymore about hearing an American voice versus a you know, a foreign voice.
Gogo Bethke 18:41 Yeah, I mean, we’re getting we’re getting used to it. I think I think COVID taught us a lot, right.
D.J. Paris 18:46 Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s talk about also like doing deals in other what when you live in another state, so let’s talk about that.
Gogo Bethke 18:55 So I moved to Florida originally, and my son is in Michigan, right? And we decided to one day, about two years ago, we were at a local mastermind, right? And I never forget and Jake, John kitchens, the coach said, go go and do it. Why are you guys still living in Michigan? You know, you’re not a tree you can move. And I was like, Oh, why do we live in Michigan? Like you only have one life? Why don’t you just go and live it wherever you want to live? Right? Yeah. And we love Florida. We love the seasons. We were kind of sick. I’m sick of the winters. We love Michigan in the summer where we were sick of the winters. So we decided to move so we came down during COVID We rented an Airbnb, we really loved it. I decided to make a purchase new construction took us 14 months. But then we moved down here. In the meantime, we built a team in Michigan, right? So I was like okay, I have two years to build the team remove myself 100% from production. And while I get to move my team stays the same transaction stays the same actually, they didn’t stay the same. They almost doubled which is amazing. Right? And that shows you that you can get it done from absolutely anywhere if you have the right systems and people in the places right. So we still do everything the same like if I was in Michigan. So we have a very structured, I have a contract with my team, I have a standard team. So the different forms of teams I’ve been the brokerage that I am with right mine is called the Center team, which means I’m a full capper. My agents are half cappers, just so you understand that. And then we have expectations. So the size of how everybody else likes to run their business, I have expectations since I built my business on social media. So they have to post they have to do analysis, they have to do all the things that I’ve done. When I was a full active agent, I’m no longer in production, I removed myself 100%. First, I stayed on the listing side, then and I gave all of my buyers away. And then one of my agents became really good, she became my listing specialist. So now all of my listings go to her, the buyers go to another agent. And that’s pretty much how we do it. We have a meeting once a week. With me, they have multiple meetings with me, they only have one meeting a week. So every Monday with all of my nine companies, I have a meeting. So I’m back to back to back on Zoom calls on Mondays. But in one day, I can get it all done. I have my meeting with everybody needs to have my meeting with for the week and I can go on with my week. Everybody knows what they need to be doing. So Mondays we have our team meeting and the team meeting, we kind of do it, we kind of have a flow to the meeting, right? We chitchat for a second, how was everybody’s weekend? How many open houses? Did you guys do, you know, do you write offers, and then what’s going on in the week, the deal is, and then we go into what we call the lead tracker. And if anybody wants a copy of my lead tracker, you can go to my Instagram, and go to my link. So if you go to Google’s real estate on Instagram, go to my bio, and in my bio, you find the links and in the links, you can find the free lead tracker, it’s my lead tracker. Now it’s a few pages long, and I walk you through it. It’s an Excel sheet. So I walk you through exactly how we use that. So an initial page is everybody that comes in there any lead no matter what source they came from, it’s a manual entry from the agents, right, I want them to get into the motion of tracking and knowing who they’re working with, right? Even though everything we collect automatically goes into our CRM program that we use Cavey core from there, the manual, one is where they actually had a conversation, and they are communicating with that person, right. So that’s our lead tracker is the first page everybody goes in there. And then all of our agents have the little drop down. So we know which lead was assigned to each agent. As soon as you assign it to that, in general, it automatically puts it over to their tab as well. So in the bottom, we have each agents has their own tab. So from the big screen, right on the very initial first stage, I want to see that we have $17 million worth of leads in our queue right now. Right, that’s our that’s our initial page. And then from there, it breaks it down to the agents. So I see that Clancy has 7 million of the 17, Kerry has 5 million of the 17. Josh has 1 million of the 17. Right. So it’s like it breaks it up. And then from there after everybody and then they also color coordinate there’s green means that they’re under contract. Right. So when you’re looking at there’s everybody that’s white on their own sheet means is that they are in communication in some shape or form. Green means that they are pending, they actually have an accepted offer. Red means they told us to fuck off. Can I say that on your show worse, and beep it out. So they pretty much tell us to go pound sand, we make them rad because that means that we are not allowed to contact them anymore. But other than that, if they are just not talking to us for whatever reason, we consider them that they are a future client at some point, right? So we stay in touch with them. So when they go pending, they all go green under the under on their tab as well. But it automatically goes over to the pending tab as well. So when I open up my initial lead tracker, it shows 17 million, but then I open up the pending tab, which was 5 million. I know that we closed about what 30% Right, so we have a 30% closing
rate. Now we have a little bit higher closing rate than nationwide average, I would say because we really only target warm audiences, meaning I don’t run ads, right. So the leads that come in organically come in, they pretty much raised their hand and they want to do business with us. They contacted us they went on their website, they went on Facebook, they commented on something that we posted. So it’s not like cold audiences when I’m running $5,000 ads a month and Joe Schmo was bored on Zillow and somehow found his way to the right, we don’t do that. So with that being said, Now, in the pending tab, I’ve see what’s going on what we are closing how many we have, what are the closing dates, who was the lender? Where did the leads come from yada yada? Now where the leads come from we also track because I want to pi? I want to see in the end of the year, where should we be spending our time? Where’s our referring partner? Who is our cheerleader? Right? That Where’s if I was to spend marketing dollars, where should I spend it? Which I don’t have to spend marketing dollars? Well, if I was to spend, where should I spend it right? You want to see where your leads are coming from? Is it your sphere of influence? Is it open houses? Is it a lender partner sending you new leads? Is it your ability to get it from your book club yoga man to man sales, whatever that is, right? So you have to create those categories, literally where those leads are coming from. So then you know in the end of the year where you need to be spending your time or your marketing efforts. Okay, so from the pending tab now goes to the clothes tab. Why do I have a separate tab for that? Here’s the reason why. How many leads we generate. How many are we able to put on contract and how many are able to actually save and close? Some deals are going to fall apart? Right? And I want to see what is our closing rate? Not our pending rate, what is our closing rate? Right? And from those mistakes that are there when pending, but we didn’t close we that means you need to learn a lesson and what is that lesson that we need to learn? Right, so then your closing rate can get higher? Because do we get paid for pending? We get paid for it almost.
D.J. Paris 25:25 Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we’re talking about tracking, we’re talking about making sure that you know, not you go go, but our listeners know exactly what they’re okay, from, from warm to pending, we need to know what that close ratio is just to get depending. And then we need to know the the close ratio from pending to closed, and not only to be able to forecast. But as gogo just said, a really important thing is maybe my pending to closed, close ratio is only 60%, which means 40 of my pet 40% of my pending deals fall through. Okay, what’s going on? What skill do I need to develop to figure out a better strategy to get that up?
Gogo Bethke 26:03 Exactly. You got it? You got it? Yes. What? How
D.J. Paris 26:09 much of coaching in real estate is about teaching people. There’s two things I think I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. I’ve always thought, Look, it’s very difficult to go out and be a successful agent. I truly believe it’s not an easy job. It’s doable, absolutely doable. But it’s not easy. Most things in life that are worthwhile aren’t easy. So that’s not a big
Gogo Bethke 26:29 Hey, I always say if it was easy, everybody would be a realtor.
D.J. Paris 26:31 That’s right. And a lot of people try and a lot of people don’t make it. But I think it’s it’s really a couple of things. I think discipline, of course, and that’s something that, you know, everyone’s got to figure out how to find their own their routines, their discipline, what works for them. But then, this idea of tracking everything, it seems daunting at first, if you’re somebody who just kind of flies by the seat of their pants, and you’re aren’t used to really having a good awareness of what your numbers are, but it is actually freeing once you get in the habit, I
Gogo Bethke 27:01 love it. I love it because you can grow something you don’t track. Right? Nor can you learn a lesson. If it’s not literally staring at you in the eye on the spreadsheet of like, shit, like two out of 10 deals fall apart. Like what? And that’s not okay. Right? So I’m attract that I like to joke and say my trackers have trackers. Yeah, I’m the biggest numbers nerd you’ll ever meet. It’s so to me. It’s so exciting. Okay, so then actually have your trackers which you should have your trackers and I’m giving mine for free. So go and download it and make it your own right? Then what you want to do is you have to one your team lead right? People will drag you by the nose if you let them. I actually had to fire my nephew. Oh, no. Because I only want to work with people that have the work ethic you can work 12 years for building your reputation and someone can run it in three seconds. And I’m not allowing not allowing that no matter who they are even if their family right. So you have to honor the business how you want to build it, they have to, they have to agree to build it with you. Right and your way. So our team contract, first of all, you have to have a team contract. And in that team contract, it has to spell out what is expected of them that the leads have to be answered within five minutes. If they don’t answer the within five minutes, they’ll never get another lead again. Yeah, they have to do two open houses every single week, hour, out of four weekends in a month, they have to do two weekends, open houses, right. Our listings always have to be held open until they sell every single weekend, if they can’t have the open houses, and it is their responsibility to find a replacement. Right. So all of these things my agents have to post we have a posting schedule, which means it’s from my Cavey core, right that in Cavey core, they’re going to take the lanes Mondays, we do a listing Tuesday, we do all of our listings Wednesday, we do search for homes, Thursday, we do open houses and Fridays we do how much your home is worth. Now, because we have multiple agents, they take turns weekly, one agent one week, the other agent next week. So I don’t care how they divided up. But as long as we made a post every single day with featuring one of these properties, right? Because that’s how you’re going to generate those leads back to you. Because Cavey core has a lead capturing ability. That’s the whole point you’re doing it, you’re not doing it because we have nothing else to do. Right You’re doing it because I want more clients, right? Then those leads come in to our Cavey core from their first one who jumps on it, they put their initials on it, that lead becomes theirs, they have five minutes to contact them in some shape or form. We do a lot of video based, so they send them video style, selfie style video, right introducing who they are, they would love to under business, yada, yada. And then kind of they go from there every Friday. So the team actually one more thing. Wednesday’s is our team meeting our organizational mindset and production training, I should say, and it’s mandatory for them. So it’s mandatory for them to come to everyone’s a one o’clock training. It’s mandatory for them to go to the contract training, which our brokers do contract training, I think every Thursday at 930 and they have to go to them until they want to do all of the trainings. I’m not I’m going to teach you the contracts because guess what is it my time was spent? DJ, no, no, somebody else already doing it. So me as the leader, it’s my responsibility to make sure that you know where to go to get the education and to hold you accountable for it. But I don’t have to be teaching you the contracts. I’m not the broker they are, like, so we send you to contracts training, and they only have to go until they get to all of the contracts. And then every Friday, they have a meeting with my operations manager on Fridays is one they have another spreadsheet, right? And that check sheet is mostly like, Did you hold an open house this weekend? Which property? How many people walk through? How many did you contact? How many buyers? Did you get out of that open house? Did you send 10 messages to your fear of influence? Did you have face to faces? Or did you have face to faces, they supposed to we have this rule of Never Eat Alone. So they have to take someone out for coffee or lunch every single day. And that could be a local vendor, it could be a title, company or lender, like anybody that you need to form a relationship with. But also your sphere of influence the cousin that you haven’t seen in three years that a high school friend that just had a baby, and you’re thinking they have to upsize, right. Like all of those things. So Christie goes through that, that that spreadsheet, so we hold them accountable, make sure that they’re doing the actual thing that is expected of them. Did you make all of your posts all these things? So all this guess what I can only through Wi Fi? Or cell service?
D.J. Paris 31:20 Yeah, you don’t have to physically be present. And I was just thinking about everything you expect from your agents. It sounds like a lot. And for those of you that there are anxiety went up with thinking about all this activity, it’s actually anxiety reducing, because once you know, at least for me, it would be I don’t want as much as I like to say, I don’t like to be told what to do, I absolutely need to be told what to do in my life. I just do. And I think a lot of us are that way. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s just knowing where, you know, look, I’m a creative person. So I don’t like structure, which is why I totally need structure, which is why I need every single day I have every just about every moment of my workday is completely planned out. And it doesn’t mean that I’m always proactive, I’m always active, but from like three to four today, I have blocked out, I just wrote busy and I’m going to relax for that hour because I am doing all these other things. But the point is, I know at three o’clock, from three to four, I’m shutting everything down. And I’ll come back online at four o’clock and finish up my day. But the point is, is I have to have everything structured, and it has been so freeing, and it actually has made my life a lot easier. And you just
Gogo Bethke 32:29 get it done. Right? Because when you don’t like people telling you what to do you also have this thing inside of you. I’m not gonna do it. Yeah. And guess who is going to not reap the benefits? Yeah, you. Right, so even my executive assistant who’s in Brazil, and she’s my assistant, I tell her all the time you’re my boss, because you can attack me where I need to be tomorrow. I love it. Yep. Right, you’re gonna make sure that five minutes before love, and you’re gonna compound to make sure I’m showing up. You can count on me, by the way, but they always still call to make sure that I’m showing up right. So they’ll absolutely structure will free you up. Because then I know that by 11 o’clock on Tuesday, I actually got it all done. Because this is what was on my calendar is good. As long as I’m doing all this, I’m going to continuously grow because one of my biggest fear is to stay at the same level. I actually got a board of directors because I’m not your typical agent. I’m not the person who’s going to make another 150,000 Next year, right? Like I literally did the math last week I was at an event in two of my businesses. Let me see if I wrote it in my notebook. Yes. So from 2019 to 2020 2021. Yes. So from 2019 to 20. I grew 89%. But from 2020 to 21. I grew 238%. Amazing, right? So it’s like and by the way prior to that every year, I doubled my business Double, double, double double. But now I want two and a half times because now I leverage. Right now I have a bunch of mini knees to do the things that you cannot possibly finish alone in the 24 hours. Do you think Tony Robbins is building? Like everything that he has today? Like he’s sending out that email that you got today? Stop it.
D.J. Paris 34:16 Yeah, he’s leveraging people you’re leveraging. And by the way, it’s never been more affordable, to be able to leverage help. It’s it used to be really cost prohibitive because we didn’t have access to people all over the globe who wanted to work. We had access maybe to just what was in our local market. And we all know if we’ve ever tried to hire locally, it can be challenging sometimes to find good help. And so now we have the whole world’s competing for your business. And so you have the opportunity to meet other people from other places who you know, like you said with a cell phone connection or Wi Fi can essentially do what it’s really it’s made us all step up our game because it means we’re all a little bit replaceable. So we really have to Step Up if we want to continue to thrive, but you can leverage some of these technological advances that we’ve had in recent years to make the make your life a lot. It’s not that it’s going to be necessarily easier. It’s going to be more efficient. And I think that’s,
Gogo Bethke 35:15 I think it’s removing things from your play that you suck at it. But you have, you’ve been doing it anyway because it needs to get done. It also it’s freeing you up and giving you time to do things that you love and you really good and it comes natural to you, right? Because I don’t work a day in my life. I feel like when you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. I get to do this. And the crazy part they pay me for it, they pay me to be me.
D.J. Paris 35:45 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it’s really cool. I it’s funny. I’m I have the same thing like with this podcast, which started out as a passion project about five years ago, maybe six years ago now. And I was doing everything because number one, it was not a revenue generating sort of project. And also, I didn’t know, I didn’t even know who to ask for anything. Well, and so Okay, so I got to a place where I was able to eventually get some help. And I wish I would have done it years before even if it would have put me in debt a little bit. If even if I didn’t have the money to do it, I really should have knowing what I know now because and I never suggest people go into debt if if they can avoid it, of course. But I looked at our numbers for our podcast and our growth in the last two or three years has been exponential. I don’t even know what the number is because I’d have to calculate it. It’s so high because I hired somebody to basically do everything producing the episode casting it, you know, doing all of the production. And then also I have a marketing person from Bangladesh of all places Bangladesh, who is so incredibly good. I don’t know what he does. I don’t know how he does it. But our numbers are skyrocketing. It’s not because I’ve gotten that much better. It’s because I’ve leveraged people who know what they’re doing. And I wasn’t very good at promotion and marketing. That’s not what I’m good at. I’m good at hosting a show. So didn’t make sense for me. And now we have more sponsors we have we actually turn away sponsors and I’m not saying that to brag because I wish I didn’t turn any sponsor away but we only have so many sponsor sponsorship opportunities. Well I have somebody looking for sponsorship opportunities for me so now I have more sponsorships it pays for all my staff these are things that anybody could do it I’m not special GO GO GO GO would probably say she’s not special. She just has systems
Gogo Bethke 38:49 yes I’m just a little girl from Romania with no college education I didn’t even speak English you couldn’t pronounce my name if you tried my real name right with no sphere of influence no money, right I’m five foot two and they were like you need to do and I’m like I’m African. I’m this little blandy like no stranger danger. Have no right so if I can do it, consider that.
D.J. Paris 39:10 Well, this is a great place I want to talk let’s talk a little bit about about about your your boot camp. Tell us about Go Go’s boot camp for those of us who are new to it.
Gogo Bethke 39:19 So go was boot camp came about kind of necessity, right? Because figuring out social media and systems and why and algorithms and how to do things and posting and CRM programs and automated drip campaigns and Zapier integrations and you know, all of those things that social media might sound like it’s simple, right? But the goal is that you want to be able to generate use traffic from one platform, right? Like the Instagram, tic tac, Facebook, being able to take them over to something else, a website or a funnel or something that you have built where you can capture the information. But after you capture their information needs to dump into a CRM program, right? And then the CRM program needs to be automated to follow up on your behalf or you have to have people that follow up right away because if you don’t follow Put the lead within five minutes, guess what another agent already did and you lost them, or they forgot all together that they just messaged you, right? So you need to have the systems in place. So over time, I would go in and speak and people would ask me, Hey, can you come and speak and so that, and I felt like they asked me all the same questions. And I was like a broken record or a parrot repeating it just answering the same question over and over again. So I figured it would be easier if I record myself. And then I can just say, Oh, just go here, watch everything, implement everything you learn into your business, and you have the same results. So we created goggles bootcamp, initially, we had social media only. And then after I switched over to exp, I bought over 1000 agents and designed and built 1000 Agent organization. And then I built a course it’s called the agent attraction for people with the idea that if they want to build teams, right, and organizations or depending on whichever brokerage they are at, if they own their own brokerage, right, and I help them agent attract to their brokerage, because I don’t know the nationwide average for agents retention, but when you’re a broker or a team lead, you’re constantly losing agents because or they’re not good. And they’re going to leave the industry altogether, because they’re not hungry enough. And they don’t have the work ethic, right? Or they’re okay, and they’ll stay with you for a while or they’re really good. And then after they became really good, then they’re gonna go out to be an individual agent. And here you’re back in the hamster wheel getting the next agent, right. So agent attraction, we are doing that we are helping agents or team leads or broker owners to build their own teams and brokerages. So that’s that the next one we came out with, it’s called V conium. And that is virtual assistant. Right? So since I talk a lot about virtual assisting people ask me all the time, can you help in getting a virtual assistant, so we built a course around that, and I can give you a link on that in a little bit as well. And then we had a TC company as well, now I realized that I can’t really put my brand with other people’s work ethic. So if it requires other people’s work ethic, I have to be very careful of what and how I’m promoting, right. So then the transaction coordination company, they actually decided to shut it down. And now the white label that to a company who has been in the industry for a very long time with a very good reputation. So if you guys need a transaction coordination company, we can also going to my links on Instagram, Google’s gonna see that calm and go ahead and use them. Those are the ones that I was able to research and I trust them, they did a great job. And right now what we are going to do, which I haven’t told you yet, we are working on through the years, the social media bootcamp, for example, it was created for agents in mind, right? So it’s very real, that very it is real estate based. Now through the years going to all of the entrepreneurial events and things like that. I’m getting asked all the time. Can you help me? I’m a lender, can you help me on a title company? Can you help me have a yoga studio? candle shop? Right? So what we are going to do now we are going to create what’s called the Small Business boot camp and social media marketing. So then everybody can use it. That’s going to be more generalized, right explaining the Google My Business, the you know, all of the different platforms and how to generate leads, what’s your programs to use all of those things for pretty much any type of business. So right now we actually retired, the current goggles, we can social media is going to get a facelift. And when that’s ready, you’re going to have a brand new link. And then you can start promoting it to all of our listeners. It’s just going to be brought up to 2022.
D.J. Paris 43:11 Awesome. Well, we’re excited. As soon as that is, is ready to go live, we’ll definitely make sure we announce it. Well, what a great place to wrap up. So go go through a lot at us in this conversation. So if you need to go back and listen to it again, grab a pen and pencil because she speaks fast. But everything she says is absolutely valuable. And it’s what exactly what she did to grow her business. There’s no secrets here. But you need to know what to do. So go back and listen to this again. And also maybe you know, somebody who’s trying to grow a team or wants to maybe consider joining a team or maybe instead of joining a team, they could create one. This is a great blueprint. And gogo is the person to follow because she when I met her, she was just an individual practitioner. She didn’t have a team. And all these years later now she has 1000 agent, and it’s not that many years later what it’s like three years later, maybe in half. Yep. Three and a half. It took me. I’ve been in the business. 12 years, 12 years, about 12 years. I have barely I have barely 800 agents. So Google is crushing it. And I have a lot that I’m
Gogo Bethke 44:11 sorry to celebrate.
D.J. Paris 44:12 Yeah.
Gogo Bethke 44:16 I don’t have 800. Local like 800 Local is amazing, like beyond amazing goal that you guys have achieved that 1000s and 45 different states and in four different countries, right? It’s very, it’s a very different it’s much easier when your pool is 1.6 million to get 1000
D.J. Paris 44:35 Well, it’s still impressive regardless, and we’re both we’re both impressive. How about that. But we love Gogo. She’s been an amazing partner for us since the beginning and she came on here when we had no listeners and we are so grateful to be able to help support her but also to learn from her. She really the only reason she has 1000 agents is because her whole value proposition is really what most firms don’t do. Do which is like I’m actually going to show you exactly what to do to grow your business, not the skills to learn, although she does that to not how to be a good realtor legitimately, here’s what you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and she and then you get her results. It’s really incredible. I’m so I hate to say proud of you, because I’m just in awe of you, I guess I should say in awe. I’m proud to be to be your friend, for sure. But I so
Gogo Bethke 45:26 I wanted to say on my camera, the friend, you know, through this, it’s like you took me on to your podcast, the same thing. Yeah, you didn’t have listener, but I was just an individual agent to write with a little bit of understanding of social media marketing, we have grown together,
D.J. Paris 45:38 we have grown together and and we want our audience to grow together as well. So when students Go Go’s new boot camp comes out, you can take a little bit of a preview at Gogo podcast.com, just to get an idea of what the previous version looks like the new version is coming soon, but you can at least go check it out. And also just tell a friend about our show. That’s the only thing we ever asked him to think of one other realtor that needs that is struggling with structure. That’s really what we were talking about today structure, struggling with structure, have them listen to this episode. By the way, they’re probably not getting structure from their current managing broker. And that’s not a knock at managing brokers. They
Gogo Bethke 46:15 grow them. That it is, by the way
D.J. Paris 46:18 we have it. We have an agent that just recently outgrew our firm. And she had been with us about 10 years. And the reality of it was we could not meet her needs anymore. And she’s the loveliest person and she was she was so upset. She goes, I feel like I’m betraying you guys. And we said, No, you have graduated to another company and we wouldn’t have been able to support her anymore. It was actually the greatest compliment. And so So anyway, the point is, is you can grow to right and maybe you’ll outgrow your existing firm. Go go by the way you can go you can join her company and her firm as well. Right. So unless you live in the Chicagoland area then join my company. I’m only I’m only teasing, join checkout Gogo. She does some really cool things, but she’s not just hey, look at me. I’m cool on social media. She’s like, here’s exactly what I do every single day to run my business. She’s incredible. She’s a powerhouse and you know exp is very lucky to have her so go go thank you once again for being on our show. Please tell everyone listening about this episode. And we will see you on next one. Thanks. Go go.
Gogo Bethke 47:21 And if I didn’t if I talked too funny, funny and too fast. You can always DM me on Instagram. That’s the only place that I personally answer messages. It’s Google’s real estate on Instagram everywhere else I have vas. Sorry, I know I did just dump some reason. And I don’t really bet so you can
D.J. Paris 47:38 you can Yes, go go go go to it’s go go real estate. Go goes real. Go go real estate or go goes goes. Go go. So go goes plural. Gio gos real estate on Instagram. We’ll have a link to that. By the way in the show notes you don’t have I didn’t even think about that. Just click on the show notes. Once this episode, once you’re listening to this episode, and it’ll be right there. So alright, go go. Have a wonderful day. It was great to see you and everyone else. Have a wonderful day too. We’ll see you on the next episode.
Gogo Bethke 48:07 Thank you guys. Bye
Why Real Estate Agents Should Prepare For Spring Market Now! • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Oct 11, 2022
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
In this episode Ryan and D.J. discuss Ryan’s technology company and what it offers. Ryan talks about how to prepare for the fall season and whether an agent’s ready for the spring market. Next, Ryan analyzes an agent’s sales funnel to get a clearer idea of what’s next. Ryan and D.J. also discuss how to maintain and nurture relationships with your network.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Are you prepped for the winter and then spring market coming up? Well, we’re going to talk about exactly what you should do to get ready today. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering clients a real sales and marketing solution to generate more business and real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. And real geeks includes an easy to use CRM so that when your leads sign up on your website, you can actually track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness so visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod again real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business. This episode is also brought to you by really aerial maps. Now an aerial retail map can sell a commercial listing before an investor ever sees the property. But creating retail maps takes hours robbing you of time you can spend selling real estate and if you’re tired of spending late nights scouring the internet for retailer logos to populate your commercial real estate map or paying a designer hundreds of dollars to do it for you. Well, you’ll love really, really as a real estate map generator that lets you custom design professional aerial retail maps for your commercial sales flyers and listing appointments in minutes, not hours. Simply enter the subject property address, auto populate nearby retail logos with the click of a button and download your aerial retail map really turns the headache of creating commercial property maps into a quick five minute task so you can spend less time making maps and more time making money. Get your first aerial retail map for free today by visiting reedley.com and signing up for an account no credit card required. Again, that’s reedley.com REBL i e.com. Get your aerial retail maps done fast. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host to the show today is our monthly series called coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now, let me tell you a little bit more about Ryan, if you’re new to our show. Ryan actually comes on every single month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. So let me tell you about Ryan Ryan de abril is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and staff at depot properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, coaching style and his dedication to training. He has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland and he’s also in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Florida. Jaipur properties focuses on high customer service, managing and executing their agents marketing and transaction management for them, so that their agents can stay focused on their business. Now if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or maybe you’re just not getting the attention you need from your existing company, please check out depot properties, visit D APR properties.com. That’s D A p r i L II. Just like it’s I guess just like it sounds D APR properties.com. There’ll be a link to that in our show notes. We should also mention that in addition to running a real estate brokerage Ryan also has a title company, a mortgage arm. And also I feel like I’m missing one lot of technology arm as well. So Ryan really runs a lot of different companies in within the real estate space. So his perspective, when we talk about how to stay on target is not just focused around brokers. It’s really kind of a holistic approach. So we’re excited to have him on and get his wisdom. Ryan welcome.
Ryan D’Aprile 4:32 Thank you. Yeah, software are our software companies and nallo so it’s it’s a custom made just since you brought it up. It’s it’s a custom a CRM that integrates with the MLS and other providers out there. We’re actually going to market with it we’re going to mark first with the mortgage product. So we’ve had a lot a tremendous amount of success. I just started just started calling on individuals about three weeks ago and getting a tremendous amount of interest on it, but we’ve been running our businesses off For the past couple of years, it’s been really successful. So we’re really excited about that. So I appreciate you mentioned that.
D.J. Paris 5:05 And it also just sort of whet the appetite of of the listeners as this, you know, there’s a million different CRMs. For realtors in the marketplace, what makes yours in particular I find most attractive and interesting is that it’s really what I would call all event focus. So it’s able to identify reasons for an agent to then reach out to their sphere of influence their existing clients, it actually identifies opportunities, and really prompts the user or the agent to then take action, which a lot of CRMs are just like, upload your database, create some sort of strategy for staying in touch, and then it will remind you to do that, but yours actually identifies opportunities, which I think is so cool.
Ryan D’Aprile 5:46 Well, a lot of them I find have too much information, and most people won’t, you’re using about 10% of it. And so I try to you know, keep the you know, the acronym kiss, keep it simple, stupid, and just minimize it. So we actually could track our business be very well aware of it, be aware of where our businesses are coming for, we have a snapshot, or it tells you your main lead source, or where your primary amount of your businesses, anniversaries, and closing dates, all that kind of stuff. tie into social media connections with your network, so you can see what’s going on with them. track how you’re, but you know, you got to participate in it, right? It’s like, anything, you know, it’s your, you’re gonna get out of it, what you put into it. And, you know, so that’s why coaching is always so important. I was with a loan officer of ours today. And he said, I could spend four hours in this thing. It’s got so much Mike exactly, you can and they’ll tell you exactly what to do step by step, and then it becomes a process, not just a guessing game, what am I going to do today, you know, most of us wake up and we just react to the day where I I’d rather you have a plan laid out and just run that plan consistently.
D.J. Paris 6:57 Yeah, I encourage everyone who’s listening, this is the this is such a simple thing that everybody already knows. But I encourage you the night before, you know, to really go over your day, and maybe just identify the three to five major things you want to accomplish the next day, and then also revisit that in the morning because I even I knowing all of that I still have to remind myself Okay, um, before I go to bed, let’s take a look at tomorrow. And let’s identify a few things. So obviously, that’s a very simple obvious step, but something that is easily overlooked.
Ryan D’Aprile 7:30 Yeah, yeah. What do you want to talk about today? Well, let’s talk about the market. Let’s talk about, you know, we’re coming in pretty soon to the fourth quarter. I mean, it goes like that, doesn’t it? But how do we, you know, prepare for this fall season, which is upon us? And then, you know, more importantly, are you ready for the spring market? And what does your spring market look like? And
D.J. Paris 7:56 I want to pause just for a moment because I want to, I want to mention why I think this is so important, because I spend a lot of time with realtors, obviously, we have a lot at our firm, and then I am involved with our local association. So I even get to talk to a lot of realtors, outside of of our company. And even the most really the more successful realtors that I talked to, everyone seems to be really focused on what’s going on today in the market. Right? And we, you know, if I ask somebody, how’s it going? They talk about what’s going on today? Oh, inventories down rates are up. You know, it’s a struggle. And I don’t hear a lot about well, what else should I be thinking about today? Right. So I’m excited for us to provide some additional insight into maybe a different way to think about today. And you were saying, you know, let’s think about the spring.
Ryan D’Aprile 8:46 Absolutely isn’t in fact, I’ll I’ll even share my screen and see if I can show you how we look at it. Is that okay
D.J. Paris 8:52 with you? Sure. And we’ll just describe it for our audio listeners. That’s fine. Oh, yeah.
Ryan D’Aprile 8:56 Okay, fine. That’s right. It’s right. It’s a podcast and thing because we’re on video here. But let me see if I could pull this up. Can I Be careful some confidentiality here. So let me just think of how I can do this here. Um, I’m gonna make this little bit. Let me come over here. Okay, I’m gonna make this a little bit bigger. But let me show you how this works.
D.J. Paris 9:20 And I’ll do my best to describe it to our audience.
Ryan D’Aprile 9:24 Oh, you have to allow me to share. Okay, we’ll do that. Sorry about that. I just just came.
D.J. Paris 9:30 I always should be able to now Yep.
Ryan D’Aprile 9:39 Okay, so you may see my screen here. I can see it. Yeah. So I’m just going to kind of quickly through this. I don’t want to be on it too long here. But like, this is in leads. This is a sales funnel. Right? And I’m gonna make it bigger. So you don’t really see client names here. Okay. So is that okay? Yep. This is one of our agents, actual dashboards, right. You could, you know, here Er, this is the visual cues are incredibly important, right? So this particular agent has closed $90 million year to date $3 million, currently pending 5.6 million active another 5.6 of clients that they feel will close this calendar year that that comes from this here closing this calendar year. So, you know, in coaching and working with this agent, this agent can manage this themselves by looking at it, they can go and filter over here by this year. And it’ll show just individuals that you have going to share, so I’m not going to show their names there. But you could go through and calibrate like, Do I really have $5.68 million of leads not active clients leads, right, here’s active, that’s a totally different animal leads that will close this calendar year. And now there were like four and a half months left in the year that’s it’s gonna get tighter and tighter. So you’re you got to get more and more critical on these particular leads, and then shift on pay, are they more or next year? Or are you even certain that they’re going to transact a higher yield? So on this particular loan off, agents dashboard here, you’ll see there $18.9 million closing next year. That’s wonderful. So I’m going to click on closing next year, right, and you’re gonna see there’s a 33 leads. So I would come over to here and when to look at again, I’m doing my best not to show you the client name. Sure. But there’s a last note date right here. Right. So now I would organize like, okay, so of this net. And this is again, you could tell this is this, this, let’s just look this little this agent will do anywhere between 25 and 30 million in volume this year. Seven years in the business, and monitors or business takes it very serious what their day is they use this dashboard, consistently, this is another product. And now we’re teaching and coaching our agents that hate, make sure you close this $5.68 million in business this year, and you’re taking care of it. And of course, look at your network and make sure you’re in flow with your network. But look at all of this business that you have next year click on it. That’s 3333 individuals for a total of $90 million of business. Almost last time we touched base with him was last time we saw him for a cup of coffee and I was I suddenly went to dinner lunch with them. This is next year this year is over this year, we’re just maintaining and closing out what we got currently going on. You gotta be looking downfield what’s going on next year.
D.J. Paris 12:21 So have a quick question. So looking at this, describing it, there are we mentioned about just about under 6 million impossible closings this year that or that rather, the this particular again, it’s I know it’s a mortgage agent, but really, it’s a real city. This is a real I’m sorry, this is real estate agent, this organization was a little bit different. Yeah. So So there’s about, you know, 6 million or so that’s that we want to close this year. And you said better make sure they’re closing this year, or or updating it to maybe next year or removing them from right from the funnel. How do you how do you recommend somebody goes in to that group? And, and sees it you know, what’s the actual process of staying in touch to say, Hey, are you are you going to close without just asking them? Or do you recommend just asking the client are you planning on?
Ryan D’Aprile 13:09 Do you ask, you know, you focus first on relationship, but then you got to be direct and have conversation. Hey, when are we going to go out? When do you want to list your home? You know, where’s the hungry price that you that’s what you’re gonna ask internally, if they’re a buyer, when do you want to get out next? And you got to? It’s like, well, let’s get out. You know, let’s start looking in November. It’s September what? 13th today? So are 12 Yes, yesterday was September 11. So if somebody says yeah, no, right. Thanks for reaching out, you know, I’m thinking we’re ready. But we don’t want to get out to like maybe like right after Thanksgiving. I’m coming here. I’m changing them to closing next next year. Yeah, they’re not going away. It’s just when I come over to my snapshot, right in my snapchat saying, Hey, I’m forecasted. 34 million this year, I’ve closed 20 million. I got 3.2 million hours of pending, got 5.6 are active. But here’s the 5.6 that are starting to close. These are the leads. So this would go down this would go up. Right, here’s your needs. And so you could have your timeline 5.8 this year 11. On certainly one transact and 90 million for next year. Right. Here’s your lead sources you can see 50% from the network referring them 40% From network referral, then we have open house internet relocation leads whatnot. So in you do the exact same thing with your actives, you come over here and act as their act of actually exactly what active means you’re currently working with them, right? So he’s got $4.96 million of sellers and $735,000 with the buyers, which comes out to that 5.6 number which is happens to be very similar to what the leads are. They’re closing this year, but they’re two different categories. This is 1414 active clients will come over to Leeds $5.68 million and a total of Have 16 leads now. Now you close out your year. Now you calibrate it, you figure that out, you close it out. And then you look downfield and say okay, great, I got 90 million here for next year, which is 33 people, you better be in flow with those 33 people this next, you know, four months so that you are their realtor in 2023. What
D.J. Paris 15:26 you’ve worked with 1000s of agents over your tenure as as you were an agent yourself, of course, you now have a company with hundreds and hundreds of, of agents and loan officers and different different different sort of jobs within the real estate industry. But with respect to realtors, I wonder what percentage of agents know what their actual pipeline looks like? I bet it’s a pretty low number who actually know okay, well, they might know where they’re at for the year. But do they really have a good sense of what’s closing before the end of the year? Yeah, maybe what’s closing next year, that’s got to be even a smaller percentage of people who know this, I wonder just by just by forecasting this way, what this does to someone’s business, even if it’s, it’s kind of like I always heard, if you just write down your goals, you have a better chance of achieving them. Even if you don’t do anything, obviously, you have to do things to but I suspect this is a major first step, just getting it all down and reviewing the numbers.
Ryan D’Aprile 16:20 It really is. And I think the key is maintaining your business and and a lot of us, gosh, I would venture to say 92 to 94% of the real estate agents out there are are reactive and not proactive, and loan officers to like look, the past 20 years in the mortgage lending business. It’s been order taking, there’s just no, except for 2008. It’s been order taking, and it has shifted. Loan Officers have got to be out there, they got to be proactive, they got to be creating relationships with their sphere of influence their network and real estate agents. And, you know, it’s probably the worst mortgage lending business we’ve seen in 20 years. And but now you’re seeing 94% of the loan officers struggling real estate agents, or real estate market shifting too. You don’t have to struggle, the business is always there. But if you’re a reactive real estate agent, when the market dips, your business will dip too. There’s no doubt. Now if you’re proactive agent when the market dips, your business will dip as well. But not dramatically. In most cases, you’ll probably have an uptick versus a minor downtick. But in the mortgage lending business, we’re seeing loan officers businesses down 45 to 65%. Real estate agents, you don’t want that. But you will get it if you’re reactive. And and I
D.J. Paris 17:43 even think there’s little subtle, subtle ways to start the day that that sort of create more reactivity. I know for me, I had to stop checking my phone the moment I woke up, because I used to check to see what emails came through over the night. Not that you don’t need to look at that. Of course you do. But it put me in a reactive mindset. Literally, within the first moment of waking up. I was like I better see see what happened over over the over the night. And it’s really never anything that can’t wait an hour or two before I start my day. But I don’t do that anymore. Because it puts me in a reactive mindset. It’s like okay, now I need to react to this. Now I need to and I’ve like No, no, I need to first set my intention for the day and really have a good awareness of what my day is going to look like. Then I can go back and and I now just only allow myself to check emails a few times a day.
Ryan D’Aprile 18:30 Yeah, that’s one of the best things you can do. It’s not easy. It’s hard. That phone is a powerful thing. I was at Iowa with my daughter over the weekend we were talking about and I left my wallet at home. Oh no. Yeah, I’m wife wife was with me. But you know, but the tab came and I just asked the lady Do you do Apple page and of course they’re cute. My daughter said bad you soon won’t need a wallet or credit cards anymore. I said honey you won’t need a wallet anymore. Right I mean it’s it’s it’s a matter of time where you won’t even need a why hate why that lump in my back that
D.J. Paris 19:10 annoying? Yeah, stand it
Ryan D’Aprile 19:12 and so um but because of that I’m getting stupid Wall Street Journal alerts. I’m Gam factoring that shit off right? I’m getting I turned my email alerts off my text messages off. I’m so it’s me too. It’s like any boss, right? It’s like, you know, things like kryptonite, once it grabs you, you know, it’ll control your day. And you know, I heard this expression one time like if you treat the market like God, right? If you treat the market like God, then like God giveth God taketh away. That’s what’s going to happen to you. So you can’t treat the market like God, you got to take control of your marketplace and your marketplace is your network. And your network should be in a database and you should have a CRM and you should use and live in it’s here. I mean, there’s a lot of people that are part time passive in this business. They it’s their full income, right? But it’s uh, it just it’s a very passive approach to it. But the top of the top, you know, the guests that you have on these shows, they treat it like a business, they’re dead serious, they’re involved, they probably do know what they have closing next year, they probably do they know the name of the clients and, and their temperatures and whatnot. And that’s why I built this, I didn’t see anything out there like that. So that’s what he created for our company, I’m now going to start sharing it with others.
D.J. Paris 20:26 It’s very exciting. And I do think this idea of, you know, text messages, we could talk about this for a moment, because I would like to get your take on this. So text message. And I only bring this up because I hear a lot of agents talk about it is that the challenge with one of the challenges with having our devices with us at all times, aside from being Well, part of being reactive is clients text. And most people, I think, find that that’s a much bigger part of their business than it used to be people are more comfortable. And a text exchange doesn’t have a beginning or an ending? Well, it has a beginning, but it doesn’t have an ending really, right. So people can just continue on this conversation anytime, day or night. Really, when there are no boundaries around texts, really. So I’m curious and how you coach your agents to not let the texting become like because it can be infinite. And whenever. And you see that text come in and you don’t want to be reactive, you’re like, I’m only going to respond a couple times during the day. But how do you set about the right boundary? And how do you let the client know that I’m only responding? Or do you recommend going a different way with that? Yeah, no,
Ryan D’Aprile 21:30 I so Okay, so there’s two different things. So one, it seems like you’re asking how do you manage the client and your time, so you’re, you got to react to what they want. But so your old days not reactive versus proactive? And so you have to do got a time block? And you have to say, When am I going to be the one sending the text out? Versus texts coming in? We’re not going to be the one send the texts out, why don’t we where am I going to track it. And so that I know, hey, DJ Paris is in my network, I want to be in touch with him once a month be in his body. Because the reality is once every seven years, he buys and sells a home, and every single year for people in his network, buy or sell a home. So he’s got potential for referrals for me, right, that’s just how it comes down to. So if I have too many people in my network that I’m in flow with every single month, potential 800 referrals from my network, and 16% of them are going to transact. So that’s another 32 potential transactions. So where’s my business come from? Where do I make my money is being in flow with DJ Paris, who is not actually an active client? Right? He’s somebody that’s in my network. And then I go on, and blog. So that’s why I built this thing, kind of like the old you know, the the Toyota manufacturing system where it’s, you know, just in time to combine the visual flow, you have, you have different silos, right? You have one is your network, and there’s 203 interference, people in there, that’s my job, I’m going to be proactive with them. Then I’ll come over my next one, which my leads closing this year, closing next year, and that’s where I’m gonna transact those leads live in that network tab, I’m skipping over them because it says it’s in your funnel. It’s either in your leads, or you’re active, or you’re under contract, tab. So when I come over to my network, and I’ve been proactive, I’ll see DJ Paris, and I touch base with him in August 15. Of 2022. It’s over 12. And guess what, I sent him a Facebook message. And that’s the note I sent. So now I’m going to just do a little research two minutes, I’m gonna pick a phone and I’m going to shoot you a text message. That’s how I’m going to do it. Now, when
D.J. Paris 23:27 we’ve been talking about about monitoring that activity, social media activity in the sense of our, you know, hey, when’s the last time I proactively, you know, reached out to DJ? And what was the the way I did it? Did I do it via text via social media?
Ryan D’Aprile 23:42 Now, right, yeah, that needs to be tracked, that needs it. And that’s for you, that your borrower, your, your, your buyer, or seller, they’re not going to it’s for you, right. And again, it’s nurturing relationships. So I see DJ, and he was at Mercer recording this past weekend. And he put it on Facebook and said, Oh, my gosh, DJ, got to friends with siblings over misery accordion, we got a call from the bums outing every year, right. And also, because of that, I’m able to create immense, immediate connection with you. And then I move on to the next important person in my network. And that’s me nurturing that relationship. And that’s the proactive. Now when I go to text you that I might see five text messages from active clients, or leads, I gotta, I gotta move on. I got it. I gotta push those aside and go through mine. I got DJ, I’m doing seven a day. I got six more to do. I start at nine I’ll be done at 945 and now I could get over to those text messages. But before I get all those text messages, I go to the network. I’m gonna go to my leads. Okay, I got 45 leads of those 45 leads. Seven of them have not heard from me in three weeks. Great. Now just get seven to go. And then all 45 have heard from me within the past three weeks. And now you go to the React that let’s go file these active clients of text me to do The Gourmet flights, I got 15 active clients, and seven taxonomy, I’ll update that, and I will knock out the other eight. I’ve just accomplished an entire day work by 11 o’clock in the morning. And I can now do whatever I want with the day. Right.
D.J. Paris 25:14 And what we haven’t talked about is servicing existing clients, we haven’t talked about checking the market, we are talking about business building activities, which are staying in touch, in your case with this example of with your network, monitoring it so that you actually are tracking it rather, and putting all the activity in. So you know exactly how long it’s been. So that because people might be listening going, Okay, well, I know I have to reach out to these 30 people today, or however many people are on my show up on my CRM today. But now you get to get a bit creative with it. You don’t have to call 30 people you can or you can Oh, you know, you can see what they’re doing posting on social, Like Ryan said he saw that I was I was at an event this weekend. And so he might comment on that, that that counts, right? Anything counts, it doesn’t have to be Hey, when are you buying or selling? It just has to be some sort of reach out? In there’s lots of ways to do that. So it’s not like you have to call everyone and say, What are you buying? You’re selling? Because Ryan knows I’m probably not buying or selling for a while.
Ryan D’Aprile 26:14 Exactly. That’s exactly right. And it’s going to be more more focused on you and the relationship, right. And then that way you attract business instead of chasing business at some point, especially in different businesses that you’re in. So if you’re mortgage lender listening to the show, you need to ask for the referral. It’s more appropriate in a business to business environment that loan officers are in versus a business to consumer. Which real estate agents are loan officers, of course, are as well because they have to deal with the consumer. But you know, a lot of majority of us probably 80% of us or our sales calls are on those real estate agents.
D.J. Paris 26:53 So that’s thinking like, I was thinking it’s it’s that that I think it’s m Scott Peck wrote the book, it’s never crowded along the extra mile. That he might have been the road less traveled guy anyway, somebody wrote, actually, it was Robert Frost, the poet but anyway, the expression, it’s never crowded along the extra mile. I don’t remember who wrote who said that or wrote it, but
Ryan D’Aprile 27:12 less traffic up there.
D.J. Paris 27:16 That’s right, because I was just thinking, so I moved into a new development a year and a half ago. And you know how many postcards I’ve received from realtors? Now again, am I going to move anytime soon? Or people who move it into a development moving? Probably not, but a heck of a good time to start a relationship? Maybe we didn’t have good experiences with our Realtors, not everyone does, right? I have gotten exactly zero postcards. Zero. That’s,
Ryan D’Aprile 27:40 that’s so so that’s another point for all of our listeners here, right? I mean, the market shifting, you got, it’s going to be a flight to quality, you got to be on your game. If you want to have a similar year you had in 2020 and 2021. You’ve it’s not, it’s not going to just come you’ve got to be deliberate, you got to be proactive. One of the things that we should all be doing is in our database, right? We have previous sales, we should be looking at 2021 and 2020, sales and even 2019 We should be looking at data close. And we should be in tune with our past buyer clients on their home anniversaries, especially the ones for the immediate year. That’s where your highest degree of referrals are going to come from. But even the past three years staying, that’s where like that juicy referral business comes from. As you saw on the agent’s dashboard, I just had a $20 million production year to date. 50% was from his network. The other 50% was from his network referring him. That’s 10 hours or referrals. People had no idea. But the network he nurtured and took care of referred in that business. By the way, that average price point is just over $300,000 that $20 million producer. So that’s like 70 Plus units in a year. So it’s so for all the listeners across the country, right? You know, who start saying to myself, well, he’s in Chicago, they’re probably eight 900,000 hours not that person. That person is average price points in the mid three, in fact, 303,000 hours in Chicagoland average price and like the climbed up in the past year or so. But those numbers are attainable anywhere. You just got to get a database, you got to get a group of people, you got to create a network and nurture that network. You got to be consistent, you know, Denzel Washington, I saw a little clip on him, it was great. Like, if you’re not committed, you’re never gonna start. But if you’re not consistent, you’re never going to finish. So many people are just not consistent. I truly feel a database. A good CRM will bring you back to that consistency and, and don’t get distracted with all the bells and whistles because less is more, in my opinion to a good CRM.
D.J. Paris 29:48 And you know, doing the little it’s always the little things. It’s it’s remembering someone’s home anniversary. Well, it’s actually not remembering because no one’s going to remember that especially the person who moved in is probably not going to remember it either. But your CRM I’m just going to remember that and it’s going to tell you today so and so’s home anniversary, are you going to call them text them, send them a social media post, drop off a gift, send them a card, you’re going to do something. And
Ryan D’Aprile 30:11 that will help you with that as well, client giant, I can’t attest to them, because I’ve never use them. But my agents have, and they like it a lot. So I’m giving them a shout out, even though I don’t know them from Adam. But I’ve heard from a lot of agents to use it. It’s really good for buyer clients when you’re active with them. And then it’s also very good for like those anniversaries. It’s customized, it’s not branded, right, which is good. It’s like coming from you. It’s genuine. So that’s a that’s a good resource for you guys to be looking at. And again, that’s going to squeeze that orange and get you more referrals.
D.J. Paris 30:49 Absolutely. And so that’s really interesting. So you were let’s go back to the example of the person that we looked at just we don’t have to see any of the stuff. But that’s really interesting. So seven years in the business 30 million average price point is actually less than the average Chicago home. So it’s not like this person is playing in the ultra high net worth space, mostly. You know, they’re they’re working with average, people
Ryan D’Aprile 31:13 read out the 14 clients that they’re currently active with that he’s currently with 260,000 hours 285,000 through $35,000 $180,000 250,000 hours. 475 That’s a big one. 1 million we got a big one there. $400,000 275. I mean, it’s your I mean, besides the exception of that $1 million, one, but there’s another one for $35,000, that’s going to bring that back. Right? It’s, you know, sold, you know, 67 units, year to date, $100,000 to 30 $700,000 155 200,000 hours, 645 $80,000 363,100 45,000. That’s just a quick sample, I’ll stop going on and on. But I wanted to just, you know, for your viewers to hear, like, you know, this is an individual who sold $20 million year to date is still below 30 years old, you know, and
D.J. Paris 32:13 is probably going to close right around 30 or 28 or so.
Ryan D’Aprile 32:17 Yeah, I mean, it’s already at $24 million, with what’s pending, as well. If you had, if you had what they’ve closed, what he’s closer to date, what’s currently under contracts at 20, about 24 million,
D.J. Paris 32:28 that is a heck of a good those are, those are fantastic numbers for somebody in their 20s. Well, for any age, but certainly somebody who’s not even 30 yet. And for being seven years in the industry and for being in a year where there’s we hear a lot of doom and gloom. That is That is fantastic. So So what’s the secret to that person’s success? It just activity and consistency? Yeah,
Ryan D’Aprile 32:50 you know, here’s the reality. In my opinion, this this person has bought in to the system, the process that we’ve coached on right now, it didn’t fight it just kind of fall through, had mediocre first year had Okay, second year, came out third year stayed consistent. I have a lot of agents that are having great bang out years. But I know they got something else coming to them because they’re not being consistent. I’ve seen it time and time again. And so it’s just it’s are you consistent with it? Or are you caught up on the latest and newest fad, and trend and everybody’s going to is going to come and tell us here’s the future of real estate, this is direction is going to go? I haven’t in my 20 years seen real estate changed that much and not going to start believing now that it’s going to completely change to a different angle. Either it comes down to individuals strength or relationships. And you and I were talking about teams, I don’t think the whole industry is gonna go to teams. I really don’t.
D.J. Paris 33:53 That’s good. Cuz that’s that’s all I keep reading about. So I’m glad to hear a different perspective.
Ryan D’Aprile 33:58 It’s not
D.J. Paris 34:00 I mean, most people are individual practitioners. So
Ryan D’Aprile 34:04 it’s going to continue to be like that and that’s why I think you know, real estate agents you know, the concept of selling your book of business sure it’d be nice thing it’s okay excited about it. There’s nothing there you guys it’s through relationships it’s you’re going to ride out the sunset in this business put away max out that SEP IRA that or self directed 401 k be smart with your money. But you know, it is high unless you’re in a completely transient marketplace. And totally transient marketplaces, say like, Chicago, right? Downtown Chicago, or Miami York or New York, right? Yeah, eyeline leads are going to give you more there right you’re gonna be able to be more transient. You know, open houses are probably gonna be more successful because there’s not such tight communities right. But in the majority of America right there, suburbs or neighborhoods or communities be a part of that community. And those individuals are hiring you because they know you they like you. They trust you. They got a relationship with you. That’s how people I mean, it’s very arbitrary what how people pick real estate agents, it’s the person that comes to mind. Right? And they usually call him one person. And same thing you know, when times when you’re you’re building a home or you’re gonna get a remodeling project done, or you’re even hiring an attorney. It’s who the first person because I sure as I like you helped me. It’s just how it works.
D.J. Paris 35:35 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, I want to go back to that individual per se. I just realized something. And I don’t I just want to sort of put this in the mind of our listeners again. Somebody’s in their seventh year, still not 30 years old yet. And my head? I can’t remember. But yes, well, right around we’ll say right around 30 and seven years in and is basically closing a deal with every five to six days. He has a transaction closing something like that. He said he did about 7070.
Ryan D’Aprile 37:21 Let’s just look care. under contract. Yeah, about 70.
D.J. Paris 37:30 So this is somebody who’s closing a transaction essentially every week. That is remarkable. Write that in there. And that is somebody who the parent and by the way, half of his business came from his sphere of influence directly. The other half came from his referrals from a sphere of influence. It’s not like he’s even buying leads
Ryan D’Aprile 37:51 40% came from his network directly. Okay, so help me with my math, what’s four times 728? Right, so 20 deals from his network. 32% came from his network referring him so referrals for his network. Okay, so another 22 or so. Right? So what do we get total? What add those two together? 60 something or no? Yes. 70 to 73%. Then 30% came from for sale signs. 8% came from a lead from that listing. Right, amazing. Yeah. And then an open house. You know what I mean? It’s like it all comes down to the power that network and then once you start going you start getting listings second leads from your listings, and starts to snowball.
D.J. Paris 38:43 Yeah, I mean, this is somebody who has not been handed a lead. I have not heard Oh, he’s either purchasing leads or been handed leads by the company. This is somebody who literally just is nurtured their sphere of influence for seven years, is very profitable.
Ryan D’Aprile 38:56 And what he’s close here today is a half a million dollars in gross commission income. That’s a very profitable GCI. And there’s a lot of people that do that kind of GCI, but it’s not nearly that profitable, because you’re paying $10,000 a month for leads or more. I’ve seen it.
D.J. Paris 39:14 You know, that that is really that that case study of that individual that is a remarkable person, because it doesn’t it might not seem remarkable, but if we think about all of those numbers, they’re stacked together is that is a heck of a that’s a heck of a career right there. For somebody who’s about 30 years old.
Ryan D’Aprile 39:32 That person does not live in Chicago. Okay, he’s in one of our outlying markets. And that person is not originally from that area moved there. Seven years. And you just saw, it’s all from network and referral network. So anybody can do it. It’s just are you committed? And if you’re, if you’re not committed, you never start and there’s probably 80% of our real estate agents are like that. And then are you consistent because if you’re not consistent, if you’re not consistent, you’re not going to finish. So it takes To really tough, you know, tubes of iron in your body to be committed and to be consistent. And I applaud those that have consistently listened to your, your podcasts that go to coaching that go on to the next level. You know, there are some that will just come easy to do, and they’ll just continue to do it. But for those of us that it’s not that there are tools out there, they’ll tell you exactly what you need to do. But you kind of use them you got to be in um, it’s surprising what would happen to your business to be dedicated three hours to it proactively, versus four or five hours just being reactive all day long.
D.J. Paris 40:38 Yeah, I think you’ve really have to figure out a way to turn off the alerts the notifications, and put the blinders on like the horses have in racing and just focus on the task ahead. And it’s hard, because we’re all so connected. And it is it is a bit of setting up your systems to sort of make sure like when I go to the gym, I make sure everything’s turned off. When I wake up in the morning, I make sure it’s turned off when I There’s certain times of the day when I we want to do what’s called one mindfulness where you’re focused on one activity at a time, so you can give it its full attention. And you’re not pulled because we get a dopamine reward when when we’re reactive, because it feels like we just did something productive, we replied to an email, we, we and you have to do those things. We just want to structure it so that you’re doing it intentionally versus oh, it just came across my plate. And I, I really didn’t want to pick up the phone right now. So I’m going to deal with that instead of picking up the phone and calling somebody and saying, Hey, I saw you were just on vacation. Where do you go? Tell me about it? That’s being proactive?
Ryan D’Aprile 41:38 Absolutely. And then your focus more on your business than the news and the marketplace. Because if you listen to the news, you just watch the marketplace, you can go to a very dark place.
D.J. Paris 41:48 You, you you? Well, look, we know this about social media, I think you know, what you’ve said about social media, about it being the way to maybe the most healthy way to think about it from a business perspective is this is your your research and development. This is paying attention to what’s going on with your clients so that you have a reason to reach out to them, versus, you know, really trying to make a splash yourself by promoting yourself. But you should probably figure out a way to do that, of course, too. And I know you agree with that, but using it more as a research and development tool versus a you know, yeah,
Ryan D’Aprile 42:22 you shouldn’t be promoting yourself, you bet you should be putting equal amount of effort into nurturing your network. Now most people spend a person their time promoting themselves, and maybe probably less than 5% nurturing the network. If people got that to 5050, their business would just take off, which is absolutely take off. But you know, we’re still in that, even though Facebook and Instagram and tic tac and everything else been around for over a decade now. if not longer, right. But it’s still kind of new to us. You know, we’re kind of jumping into that and making that like our center point of branding.
D.J. Paris 43:03 Yeah, you have to be really careful because because as we as you and I know and I mean, the research is really clear at this point, that the more time you spend on social media absorbing it is you actually get you know, you’re unhappy or your happiness goes down, you’re you feel more disconnected. So there’s a lot of good reasons to stay away from social media as a an entertainment vehicle. So if you can then say, Okay, well, what’s really can be useful about it is knowing what’s going on in my clients lives and reacting to that, that is going to bring you business,
Ryan D’Aprile 43:34 you know, and it’s interesting, so Right, like, like, you know, we could I won’t name but we can name some high profile social media people, right. And their target market is national. Right? So a real estate coach, say Buffini or give me another one. Tom Ferry. Thank you. That’s what I’m trying to say. Tom Ferry right Surrett Am I saying his name right? Yep, sir. Hmm. Right, sir. Hi, right. Those guys right there targeting a national national network, real estate agents. You know, our clients are not national. It’s really local to our network, and how many of them are really living on it? And the reality is, it’s very difficult to boost real estate related type of advertising because of fair housing. Oh, I get did things adds denied all the time that have nothing to do with Fair Housing simply because real estate’s mentioned in the title and who you should be promoting that to as your network your friends and your friends of friends. Well, you can’t do that. So the reality is probably five to 6%. Your network may be seen, not seen, don’t do it. But you got to complement it with direct mail, email marketing, some outdoor marketing, but again, if you are like most real estate agents 5% Being involved with your network and 95% branding, networking and just being reactive, you get that bounce 5050, you’re going to do what that individual that I just showed you is close $20 million year to date. And I can take the individual and put them side by side with other real estate agents that I know, in different marketplaces. And there’s no way that real estate agent should be selling more real estate than the other agent. But he’s just committed and dedicated, being consistent. And that’s all comes down to it’s my job to make everybody crystal clear. That’s the only differentiator, any one of you can have when you decide a to start, and then be to be consistent with it and fall through it for a full year.
D.J. Paris 45:36 Yeah, if you if you just too well, it’s, it’s really you need a guide, I think you need somebody that can help get you out of the habits that you’ve created that aren’t helpful. And you need a guide, meaning a coach, an accountability partner, this is where coaching comes in. And this is where you guys, your firm in particular really helps it not that every agent wants that particular help. But boy, I know, if I was a working agent, I would want somebody keeping me accountable, making sure I have systems in place to make sure that I stay on target, because we all know that everyone listening, we all have parts of our life that we want to do other things that we can’t get ourselves to do. Right, maybe we want to go to the gym more, maybe we want to spend more time with our kids, maybe we want to be better about our finances, whatever it might be, or maybe work more on our business or whatever it is, and we just don’t seem to do it. And if you can get a coach to help you. It’s worth the investment.
Ryan D’Aprile 46:31 Well, we’ll also so even besides coaching, some people don’t want to coach you, but what we’ll do is we’ll take the transaction management and the monthly marketing off your hands, and provide that for you and have it done for you so that you’re more motivated, being engaged with that network, and then taking care of your CRM and tracking your business. You know, I will, you know, I’ll attest to my wife, she does 25 million in volume every year. And you know, she, I mean, her marketing is very simple. It’s done consistently, it consists of social media posts once or twice a week, which you know, are provided to her postcard once a month to her network in her farm, some Maggie’s local magazine ads in the neighborhood. And that’s it, and she doesn’t even touch that stuff. And she’s in flow with probably five or six people in her network a day. And therefore she is able to be a mom first and foremost, and focus on three girls and taking care of me and everything else while putting up tremendous numbers and not killing herself. Because she’s consistent with it. Could she do more? Absolutely. But she doesn’t want to. She’s great where she is. So my,
D.J. Paris 47:45 by the way, that’s a that’s a heck of a good full time income without all the other responsibilities. Right? Just being an agent, that’s a heck of a good income.
Ryan D’Aprile 47:54 Absolutely. Anybody can have it. Anybody can have it, but it’s again. Are you more on the MLS? Are you more in your transaction management software? Are you more texting and emailing active and existing clients? And are you just not prospecting? And when I say prospecting is that calling and asking for a referral, it’s calling and nurturing relationships. And following a system, it’s people choose to drive blind every single day with the most important part of their life, besides family and health. But you know, the third part business, which is income and financial health, it’s like it’s beyond me, you got to take control. Anybody could do, you could start whenever you want. And especially times now like now it’s the calm, people don’t realize how more more focused you have to be. It’s not just going to come to you, we can’t be order takers, we got to be very proactive. Gotta be very business oriented, and be very proactive versus reactive.
D.J. Paris 48:54 And what this whole will do, having structure and knowing exactly what your day is, you know, sort of looks like and I know things change, of course, but knowing that the approximate structure of the day will alleviate a tremendous amount of anxiety. Because what you’ll find is you’re not worried as much about when’s that important phone call going to come in with somebody who needs me to buy or sell you, you are taking proactive steps and you’re making your own luck. those phone calls will come in over time, like you said, Work this for a year and see what happens. And then just continue to work it forever. And there you go. That’s it.
Ryan D’Aprile 49:29 It’s that simple. Awesome. Well,
D.J. Paris 49:31 what a great place to wrap up I should mention for anyone who is in the show who lives in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida. You know, Ryan has company they’re not in every part of every state. But if you live in those states, and you’re interested in learning more about what Ryan’s companies do, again, they have real estate brokerage, they’ve got a lending. So if you’re a loan officer and you’re looking to see what other options are out there, of course speak to them too. They have title they’ve got a technology firm where they’re putting out software Um, but if you’re just, you know, most most of our listeners are going to be agents, if you’re really just wanting to see what other firms offer, you know, check out April properties, they really have a unique value proposition. They’re not just like all of the other firms, they really, really try to focus on what are the hardest things that agents struggle with. And they allow you to take that off your plate. And this has to do with some marketing and staying in flow and staying in touch so that you can focus on what’s best in your business, I’ve yet to really see a firm, I don’t know of any other firms that do it. So this is this, truthfully, that’s a really, really unique proposition. And you owe it to yourself to see what they offer and see if it’s a good fit for you. So go to Depot properties.com, their team would love to chat with you. And so on behalf of all of us here at the podcast, and all the listeners, we thank Ryan for coming on every month. He’s got four businesses to run. And we are and he’s got a daughter in college and two others in. So the other two in high school to I think, right?
Ryan D’Aprile 50:55 Yeah, Junior Senior. In fact, I have a coaching session here at three o’clock. I’m going to watch my daughter cheerleader, and then come back for 530 meeting so so he’s a
D.J. Paris 51:03 busy guy, and he takes time out for us. And we appreciate it. So Thank you Ryan. And on behalf of our Ryan and myself, we thank everyone for listening. Please tell a friend about our show and support our sponsors on the show support Ryan, as well as tell a friend and also leave us a review. Just let us know what you think of the show that will help us continue to improve. All right, Ryan, thank you so much. We will see you on the next step. See you next month.
Ryan D’Aprile 51:25 Alright DJ, take care
Shocking Real Estate Statistics That Agents Need To Know! • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Oct 06, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com and D.J discuss Chris’ article with “111 shocking real estate statistics” and go through some of these statistics together. Chris discusses hype shifts in the market seen in the last couple of years. Chris also focuses on the importance of agent’s activity on social media for their business. Last, Chris discusses 3 categories that bring success to agent’s marketing efforts.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we have some statistics that you need to know as an agent that will actually help transform your business. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
buy real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host for the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with crystallin sell from the closed.com. This is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes and let me tell you more about the clothes if you’re not familiar. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Now please visit the clothes.com to check out their articles. I also recommend subscribing to their newsletter, so you get notified every time they come out with a new article. And their articles are incredibly deep and detailed. And for example, if you were looking to some ideas of how to conduct a better open house, they are not just those some of those articles you might find by searching and you see these lists of a few different ideas that you already know these are deep dive articles. So definitely check out the clothes.com with us, as always is Chris Lindh Sal, he is a staff writer and the real estate coach for the close. Now Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. So licensed agent Chris is a licensed agent in the state of Michigan, and he’s been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural, rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community, local community theater. And Chris, welcome once again to the show.
Chris Linsell 3:09 DJ pleasure to be here. Glad to see you glad to glad to get into the real estate, real estate Convo today. Man, there’s a lot going on right now in the real estate space. So excited to chat.
D.J. Paris 3:22 Well, you’re not only our Sherpa in the sense of what’s going on in real estate news and technology and sort of actionable insight from market sort of conditions. You’re also my Sherpa for my new smokers. So Chris is also into smoking meats not that this audience is that interested in hearing us discuss that but i i Chris helps me I just smoked my first brisket and Chris was was helpful during that and helpful, everyone. So you have his he has a lot of knowledge. And we’re excited to have you again. So
Chris Linsell 3:54 well. Yeah, well, you know, whatever I can do to fill your brain or fill your belly, man. You know, you just let me know how I can help.
D.J. Paris 4:00 I love it. Well, let’s you guys just recently are you in particular just released a an article a couple of days ago on shocking real estate statistics that agents and everyone needs to know about. So I’m excited to get go through some of the standard by the way you wrote. This is how detailed Chris as a writer is as well as the close itself. There’s 111 Shocking real estate statistics and imagine as an agent, if you just went through there and picked out 15 or 20 that you could just have at the ready whenever you’re having conversations about real estate or the conditions of the market today. I would imagine that would be some nice expression with arrows in the quiver, right? Yeah, arrows.
Chris Linsell 4:45 Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, I want to make sure I give credit where credit’s due. It wasn’t just me that that worked on this. We have an amazing team over the clothes, including another one of our staff writers Jody and our marketing In manager, Becky, that both played a major part in making sure that this article was exactly as valuable as it is. So major kudos to those folks and a whole close team. But I will say, you know, there are a couple of things that are worth calling out here just at the jump. That, I think if you’re, if you’re listening to this, and you’re wondering, okay, yeah, okay, I’ll here’s some, some real estate statistics, because I think it’s interesting, but how does this actually apply to making my business better. And I want to just start by telling you, a whole bunch of the things in this article, and that we’ll talk about today will directly positively affect your efforts as a real estate agent, because a part of what you do, and a part of, of how you position yourself to create the business that you want, is by showing your community and your clients and your prospects, that not only are you experienced in the spaces that you serve, but you’re also knowledgeable about what’s going on. And you can take that knowledge and apply it to benefit your clients. So as an example, as an example, just right off the jump, I was really interested to learn through the research of this article that there are currently as of July of this year, there’s 1.6 million members in the National Association of Realtors, this is an all time high, never had this many people in NAR, which is crazy. I mean, so there’s a lot of people in the real estate space, there’s actually over 3 million people with active real estate licenses in the United States. So there’s a whole cohort of people out there who have real estate licenses that aren’t a member of NAR. So when you are talking to your clients right now, you can start with some of this information and say it and internally have this knowledge that you’re not the only game in town, there’s a lot of people out there who are competing for the real estate business. And when a client chooses you, that means that they have chosen you among other competitions. So be knowledgeable of that be thoughtful of the fact that they have choices. And you can you can kind of leverage that through your initial conversations with them.
D.J. Paris 7:18 Yeah, I actually think that’s a real positive because it reminds me of I think it was M Scott Peck who wrote this book although I could be wrong, which is the road The Road Less trap while he wrote the road less traveled. But I you know, it was he wrote this book, but the axle expressed it, I was gonna say it’s not that but it’s never crowded along the extra mile. Right. So I think this allows agents to step up their game become more valuable to their clients, and also separate from the pack.
Chris Linsell 7:47 Yep, absolutely. So I want to throw out just a couple of numbers, DJ, and let’s see if you can, we’ll play a little little rapid fire and I will not be looking at the article, don’t you don’t look? Okay. Okay. This is really sick, significant number here. 66%. What do you think 66% might apply to in the real estate space?
D.J. Paris 8:10 I would, I’m curious if it has to do with the amount of agents that have been in the industry for less than a couple of years?
Chris Linsell 8:17 Oh, good, good guests. But no, as of 2022, started 2020, to a full 66 actually a little bit over 66, almost 67% of real estate professionals are women. We are living in a world and working in an industry driven by women. This is a place where the success of the market at large depends on women. Now men certainly play a major role in this too. We’re all in this together. But ladies, if you’re listening to this, you are the driving force in our industry. And you know, we as an industry as a whole those of us who talk about and work through the industry, we got to take this into account because your the perspectives and the direction of women in our profession are the driving force of success.
D.J. Paris 9:07 I’m starting to see a lot more female only or female lead brokerages and fin teams in particular, I’m seeing a lot more of that than I did a decade ago when I got into this industry. And I’m I think it is it is very fun and neat to see that. And I think that, you know, boy, some I used to see a lot of teams that that had both men and women and a lot of teams do. But I do have a there’s a special place in my heart when I see a bunch of women collectively getting together. And you know, they do sort of run this industry in a lot of ways. And I think that ultimately is is a good a good thing for everyone. But I see I’m seeing like now’s the time for the for these women who seem to be taking more leadership positions and running things and I’d be curious to see how that all plays out. You
Chris Linsell 9:54 know, I totally agree. Okay, another question DJ, what would you guess the percentage Have Realtors actively United States who have had their real estate license for one year or less? I’m talking brand new real estate agent, right? What percentage of of agents in the US have had their license for one year or less? 15% is my guess. Actually, that would be a great guest last year, but this year 18% 18% of agents out there have had their license for less than a year. And here’s what agents and brokers need to know about this information. One, there is a reasonable chance like almost one in five, that the agent across the table from you, this may be their first transaction. Okay, so for those of you who are seasoned in the space, keep in mind, almost a 20% chance here that the person sitting across the table from you is brand new to this. So how do you need to adjust your communication? How do you need to adjust kind of the shared workload of getting transactions across the finish line? You know, in the real estate space, our competitors are also our colleagues. So how are you going to how are you going to keep that in mind. Another thing to think here is if you are a managing broker, or if you are a, you know, you own a brokerage, or an indie agency, or franchise, you got to know you have more new agents in the space than then historically you’ve ever had. And this means it’s time to step up your professional development, you have to be really thoughtful and conscientious about your training. And Holy smokes. If you are a team leader who has working with brand new agents on the daily, like they’re shoulder to shoulder with you, these are folks, you have more of these people in the industry who want to learn from you than ever before. So if you’re building a team, keep in mind, you got a lot of inexperienced agents out there. But that usually means you have a lot of folks who are ready and anxious to learn kind of at the feet, so to speak, of somebody who’s done it a number of times successfully. So yeah, it’s a little bit of extra work, mentoring and training. But the payoff could be huge.
D.J. Paris 12:09 So it’s really never been a better time for a team leader who’s looking to expand the team with new newly licensed agents and mold them. Now there’s just more of them out there. And also, remembering for everyone listening, if you’re not in your first year, you probably remember your first year and if especially if you were not on a team, and you were trying to build your business, my suspicion is that that was a pretty stressful first, actually, probably for several years for you. So you know, we think about reaching out offering a bit of a lifeline to these these agents who might not be getting the training they need. From there, you know, managing broker who whatever you can bring them into your fold. And you can also charge them a little bit for that with a percentage of their income. That’s totally reasonable and acceptable. The other thing I was thinking, as Chris was saying, What if you’re on the other side of a transaction with somebody who’s newly licensed, inexperienced, probably doesn’t know a lot of the nuance of how to get certain transactions closed or moved through. If you nobody, very few people will ever tell you. This is my first real estate sale, Mr. Cooperative broker and our Mrs. Mrs. Broker, and can you help me, you know, it’s an embarrassing and difficult and vulnerable thing. So most people aren’t going to tell you, but you can actually look it up. If you suspect maybe somebody’s newer to the business, while obviously you could call their managing broker just say just that curiosity, are they new? And can can we help them a little, or you could just go on to your state website. And I think the information is public in all 50 states and see when they were licensed. And then you can always reach out to them and say, Hey, I see that you’re newer to the business. I got a few suggestions about how to make this happen better for you, you know, being of service that way. Instead of just going like, hey, this person doesn’t know what they’re doing. Well, yeah, they’re in their first year. And you can look that up. They don’t tell you
Chris Linsell 13:50 totally, totally. So I want to pivot a little bit. I was particularly fascinated in this in prepping and prepping this article. Looking at some of the interstate migration data. People have moved a bunch is since since you know, the spring and summer 2020 COVID did a number on those things. This is I don’t know guessing here. I just want to throw throw out a stat here and get your reaction from July 2020 to July 2021. The State of Texas grew its population by 30 million people. And the state of Florida grew its population by 22 million people biggest growth of states all across the country. And this includes California, which has the biggest population at large. And so you know, that sort of growth in California might be you know, that just in California would be impressive but seeing that kind of growth in states Texas and floor Which, you know, not small states by any means. But by far record growth. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Would you agree with that?
D.J. Paris 15:09 Yeah. And the Florida thing makes sense, because there’s a lot of baby boomers nearing retirement. And traditionally, you know, Florida is a destination that people consider. Also note, because of the state income tax situation, and other and weather and all sorts of other reasons. But yeah, so I think to me, what I hear when I hear things like, hey, client, people are moving to. And I, by the way, California, I believe, and I don’t know this, if this is true, true, but I believe they have a net negative, I think they’ve actually are losing people every year or the last couple years, at least, because of all sorts of regulatory issues and taxes and six, but anyway, Texas, Florida makes makes perfect sense. And Texas has favorable tax laws for businesses. I know lots of companies are moving there to but I guess the way I would interpret that or an action step would be time to develop relationships with brokers in those areas, because I now might have my clients may be moving, I’m in Chicago, but clients here, you know, my parents are probably going to retire to Florida as well. They’re gonna need a realtor down there.
Chris Linsell 16:13 Yep. 100%. That’s my my big takeaway for this. I don’t care what state you’re in. If it’s any excellent, I should say, if you live in any state, other than Florida and Texas, you need to run, don’t walk run to like a referral portal or like an agent database where you can connect with agents in those states and start setting up these referral relationships right now. Because chances are, you’re going to see folks who are looking to get to those states, at the very minimum to buy second homes for vacation properties, maybe to relocate in general, it is still, it would be statistically unlikely that you don’t experience that, you know, over the next couple of years. So be thoughtful about the fact that Florida and Texas are destinations right now, they’re likely going to be for the foreseeable future, in part because of what you mentioned. As as you know, we’ve got retirements for a lot of folks coming up, we’ve got favorable tax and regulatory environments for businesses. So definitely something that is worth worth keeping in mind. If you only have a couple of referral relationships, make sure you’ve got them. In Texas, and in Florida.
D.J. Paris 17:28 In Texas, I was gonna say in Texas, what that means in Florida as well is all the major cities are the major markets. You need to have a realtor in place for that. How do you find them? Lots of different strategies. I think we can all probably figure out ways to do that. You could Zillow reviews, you can ask if you have an internal network within your brokerage, you can go to labcoat agents on Facebook and ask about, you know, experiences that people have lots of ways to find realtors. I guess the point is Chris is saying build your database of referral partners. Yeah,
Chris Linsell 17:57 yeah. And, you know, you had mentioned retirement, which brought up another interesting stat that I’ve found since 1980, which I know feels like ancient history for folks who are, you know, in the, in the, the, you know, Generation Z or or nearby? For me, that doesn’t seem that long ago. 1980 just feels like you know, that’s that’s just a few years ago. But since 1980, the median sale price for home in the United States has increased by 781%, which is
D.J. Paris 18:31 of seven, almost eight times. Oh, I don’t know if that right.
Chris Linsell 18:35 Yeah, that’s right. That’s right, almost almost is you have seen an almost 8x increase in the median sale price in homes. And why i Why do I think this is statistically significant? Well, for real estate professionals who have a client based or a community, where you have a lot of folks who are nearing retirement age, or maybe they are have are now just past retirement age, and they are starting to think about kind of the, you know, kind of later chapters in their life. There, it will not be uncommon to see a lot of these folks who have been living in their homes since the late 80s, and 90s, and maybe even before, and what that often translates into, is are folks who, when they’ve been in their home for 30, or 40 or 50 years, many of these folks have just stopped monitoring the value of their property, because why would they they don’t need to think about how much this is worth because they own it outright, they’ll pay the taxes. They’re not looking to sell anytime soon. This is just their house. These are many of these folks are considering now what their next options are. And so, given all of this climate, if you have these folks in your market, it is a genuine possibility. They have no idea how much their property is worth. And so All right now I am encouraging folks that I coach and do consulting with, you should be spending time in the tax roles of your community, if you have public tax roles, and identifying people who have owned their homes for 20 plus years, because it is a very good chance that these folks don’t have an accurate idea of how much their home is worth. And the longer they have owned this home, the better because it is more than likely that they have even if they think they have an idea that they don’t have the complete, accurate idea. This is where you can step in and provide cold call or cold, a cold like letter value to these folks by saying listen, I ran just a really preliminary CMA on your property. And I think you’d be surprised at the results, I think your value might be and you can ballpark up higher, you know, just just a general price. And say, I’d love to give you some ad, you know, really accurate data, I’d love to just do a quick walk through the property provide you with some options. This is totally, you know, free of obligation and charge, I just noticed that this might be something that you might missing. There’s so much value you can provide for your community through this, and a ton of business that can be done as a result of it.
D.J. Paris 21:18 My parents built their home in Peoria, Illinois in I think it was 1980. Or we moved in in 1982. Not moved. These are not my parents are super, super tech. Not I mean for their age, they’re in their 70s. They’re super tech savvy. But are they going on Zillow and looking up the value of their home? They’re not? I assure you they aren’t. And they assume the next year or two are going to eventually get rid of that home, I am going to ask them how often they receive phone calls, emails, letters in the mail that say, Hey, I want to do a value, I bet you the answer is maybe one a year if that.
Chris Linsell 21:56 It’s an opportunity to right now, especially if you have good strategies for that initial approach. And that provision of value. And if you need help on those things, you can always visit the clothes.com We have a ton of resources for folks who are doing cold outreach on marketing, who are doing CMAs who are providing that sort of value to their community, lead with value, the business will come from that and a close can help you get there. I wanted to call out DJ a couple of kind of pre and I you know, I hesitate to call it post pandemic because we’re not quite post pandemic, but kind of pre COVID and kind of post COVID hype shifts that have happened in the real estate space, there’s got to kind of call these out popcorn style and get good and I want to hear your thoughts. Just in general. Number one, the the National Association of REALTORS increased their membership by nearly 50,000 people between July 2021 and the in July 2020 to 50 50,000 people join, they are pending home sales in June of 2022. We’re down over eight and a half percent over may as a direct result of these escalating mortgage rates and housing price changes. Mortgage rates are changing the way that people are shopping for homes big time right now. Another important one to call out with mortgage rates expected to likely stabilize close to 6%. Home sales are likely going to see if we predict out if we have some stabilization. 2023 may be a year that we start to see home sales stabilize and the markets balance a little bit as those as those interest rates kind of equalize a little bit. And then the last one I wanted to call out here was just the overall projection in home prices. Despite all of the craziness in the market, we are still expected to see home prices grow in 2022 on net, but 2023 There’s an expected decline in the average home price. Yeah, you know,
D.J. Paris 24:14 I think this this speaks to a I’ve always thought more of a It might even be a philosophical style question that is worth exploring, which is is a primary residence and asset. And the there’s there’s different debates about how to how to define an asset and whether a primary residence fits that criteria or not. It certainly is an asset on the day you sell it. We understand that. But I think this could be an opportunity for agents to have a deeper understanding of what an asset is and how important home value values are to somebody’s overall net worth. And you know it and I think having that in Information and being able to have a deeper conversation with somebody about the importance of home pricing today, where it’s going to be in 20 years, how it affects somebody’s overall net worth, I think is really important because I think people overestimate. So when I say people, the average buyer and seller probably overestimate the importance of where home prices go. Because it’s important when you’re buying something and when you’re selling something, and then there’s all this time in between. And, you know, do we do we want to look at a primary home as an investment? Or do we want to look at it or as an asset? Or do we want to look at it as just hey, we got to live somewhere. And and so there are different thoughts about this. And I encourage agents to have a perspective on this have a point of view, and be able to understand the different perspectives and be able to share that with somebody because I think re education or educating somebody is becomes really important, because you have to remember, buyers and sellers are going on Zillow, they’re looking at their Zestimate. They’re curious. Right? And that question is, yes, that number, whether it’s accurate or not, that’s also debatable, but people look at it, and they assign significance to it. Your job as the agent is to help them understand is, is this a significant number to you, Mr. or Mrs. Buyer and Seller? How does this fit in with your overall life plan? How it you know, and ultimately, what you might find is it’s not as important as we all in the industry think it is because we deal in home prices. And we’re always negotiating, I don’t know how important it is whether the home prices increase or decrease a little bit over time. I mean, I guess if you’re if you’re making a big giant bet on that something is going to appreciate, then yes, it is significant. If if you’re just hey, this is my family home for the next 20 years. You know, I understand having your clients understand what this asset actually does along the way. And what it does at the end, I think is a really important understanding for a realtor to have.
Chris Linsell 27:00 Yeah, I totally agree. And in fact, I coach people on a regular basis, to say, the only reason I want you to know what the kind of market sentiment and the direction of home prices is, it is it has almost nothing to do with the dollar values of the homes and almost exclusively has to do with you being connected to the sentiment of the buyers and sellers for which you are serving. Because those folks get emotionally affected by those numbers, you should only be objectively affected by those numbers, those those numbers should only change kind of how you process strategy for what’s the percentage that we should offer over or under the asking price and how many days on market, you know is you know, what’s the ratio of days on market versus versus list to sale ratios and all that stuff. Those are just objective measures for you. But for your clients, those are subjective measures. So you want to make sure that you are in tune with those market directions, in part are almost exclusively because your clients are emotionally internalizing those and you can’t be objective value to those folks without taking that into account. Right. Speaking of of kind of internalization and and kind of experience and I know we’re running up on time here, but I wanted to just call out a couple of interesting marketing statistics that we uncovered as a part of this article that I think a lot of folks would be surprised by. The first is in 2021, the closed did a survey of our readers and we found from our readership, that more than 30% of agents who we surveyed reported closing at least one transaction as a direct result of their activity on social media. One in three almost one to three agents said I got a sale because I posted on social media.
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Chris Linsell 30:22 So I thought that was worth calling out in the context of also, new data released by Mehta, who owns Facebook said that Americans and we are calling were, we are at the close, qualified some of this some of this data and took just portions of it to understand that Americans who are likely to become homebuyers or home sellers, so we’re not including folks, like under the age of 22, basically, in this, but folks who are over the age of 22, on average, spend up to 90 minutes a day, on Facebook, or Facebook connected platforms like Instagram and Messenger. These are your people, and they spend over an hour and a half a day on these platforms. And 96% of the visits to these platforms happen on mobile devices. So real estate professionals, if you are not on Facebook, get on Facebook. And if you are there, the content you are creating has to be it is not optional, it must be optimized for mobile consumption. If you are envisioning somebody opening up their laptop or logging onto their desktop computer to consume all of your wonderful Facebook information. And you are tailoring your posts to that sit down desktop experience and not to the mobile phone in the back of an Uber or on the subway or sitting on a park bench. You are wasting your efforts relative to somebody who understands exactly who is reading and consuming your content and how they are doing it. It is time to accept the fact that people are doing it on their phones. And they’re doing it a lot. In fact, the average American Facebook user clicks on 11 ads per month. So there is a lot of evidence to suggest that not only is your organic presence there important, but your paid presence can be very profitable, if you are doing it correctly and understanding the facts as they are.
D.J. Paris 32:42 And you know, there’s a couple a couple of things I thought about, as you mentioned that one is that it’s a great time if we if we know that 1/3 of every of all the agents who are online have have talked about getting at least one transaction for the year. Or maybe if we think about well, what is that worth? Right? So take your average home sale, and the average commission and obviously can figure that out pretty easily, then think what if I were to hire somebody to assist me with some of this? Would it be cost effective? If they could get me from maybe one Facebook transaction a year to three or four or five? Would it pay for their salary? Would it pay for their health, whether they’re part time full time, that’s another something to consider if you’re not super Facebook focused. The other thing I would say is, don’t neglect video video is how people are consuming a lot of social content. And you don’t have to have special lighting or you know, special devices, you can use your mobile device and literally just turn your phone around and at every show and go let me show you something really cool about this home. If that’s all you did. You can track your metrics and see if your audience appreciates that content. But it doesn’t have to be a lot more than that. It just has to be bite sized information that people find interesting. So now’s the time I agree with Chris to really put yourself out there on social talk about what you do provide think about value. What do my clients what are the questions my clients asked me and make videos or write articles specifically answering those questions.
Chris Linsell 34:18 100% 100% In fact, my I have another real estate coach named Sean modry, who also does some stuff with us on the clothes, specifically with our clothes pro product. And he and I have talked regularly about how successful real estate marketing especially on social really boils down to three categories. Evidence of success, evidence of knowledge and evidence of action. And social is such an easy place to demonstrate evidence in these three things. I love DJ I love your example of every time you were to show him just flip on your phone and say out. I’m going to show him I really want to show you something super cool by just doing that this 32nd video you are demonstrating action. Hey, you’re at a showing you’re a busy agent who’s out working, you know, about the inventory and the activity in the market. Oh wait, you know about the inventory. That’s evidence of knowledge. So you’ve got evidence of action, you’ve got evidence of knowledge. And what did I say? The third one was evidence of knowledge, evidence of blanken.
D.J. Paris 35:25 Knowledge, action and
Chris Linsell 35:29 experience, experience. Yeah. So these three things experience, you are literally working with somebody to accomplish the same sorts of things that your potential buyer or seller will want to accomplish. These three things are accomplished so easily on social with just this single piece of video, I tell you what, I follow a lot of realtors on Facebook, specifically those in my local market, because these are folks that I’m connected to, I want to see what they’re doing. I want to celebrate their successes with them. I’ll tell you what the most consistently successful agents in my markets are the ones that I see doing this constantly. And it generates a lot of conversation, because those folks who are doing this constantly are offering their audience a chance to engage at their on their own terms at their own pace. And it may be that the first 10 times you do this, you’re going to get no response from people, but I guarantee you people are watching. And it only takes one time for someone to say, Oh, I love bay windows like that, you know, I’ve always wanted bay windows in my house, then that single comment is going to lead to a text message or a Facebook Messenger message, it’s going to lead to a further conversation and it’s going to lead to another name and your CRM that you can then turn into a client.
D.J. Paris 36:51 You just gave me a great idea. I loved the bay windows idea. Because here in Chicago, we have a lot of our architecture for residential has a Windows and the windows are definitely like, I assume they’re still considered a premium nice thing to have. I had it in a previous condo of mine, I loved it. And if even if you’re just like, here’s everything you need to know about bay windows, and you do a little video or write an article about it. If that’s the thing that you’re into, or if that’s a thing people in your market are into. That would be incredibly unique content that a lot of people would or hate. What about the trend for all white? You know? I’m sorry, I’m blanking on on the term, but fixtures all white? You know, cabinets and countertops? What’s the deal with quartz versus granite? What’s that, like? These are things that when people are buying homes they care very deeply about and then they don’t care about them ever after that until they have to make another real estate transaction. So you could do these articles, you could go talk to a stone specialist and go say, tell me about Granite, tell me about quartz? What is it? What’s best for spills, you could go into a tile store and do that that’s content, you could it’d be super valuable. And I know you have to go Chris. So
Chris Linsell 38:07 Well, I do I did want to just attack on to that to two really quick little things. It’s that is content that is marketing, really valuable marketing assets. Also, you know, like Alert, alert, that’s professional development for you, as a real estate professional, you should know that stuff. And if you don’t know it, don’t worry, most of us don’t, you have to be active in learning those sorts of things. So you are actually bettering your business, your ability to advise your clients by going to learn that stuff. The end, you get to create marketing content. And I did want to throw out one example too. If you’re feeling daunted by by like you know that kind of like recurring video thing that we were talking about. I have an agent that I follow on my local market who is super smart about this. She is a lover of mid century modern furniture. So whenever she goes to a show if she spots something that is like the mid mid century modern style, she snaps a photo of it and she has a recurring thing on her Facebook and Instagram called the mid century mod alert. And she’ll share a photo of it she’ll share Oh, I was at a showing I saw this, this house is you know, this space is perfectly suited for this doesn’t get on video does it all in just in images and gets a ton of interaction as a result of that because it’s consistent. It’s something that’s attracted that people can be drawn to. And it’s something that she can do without feeling a lot of discomfort.
D.J. Paris 39:33 And you can do or totally agree that this is something you could find your own little niche. I mean Zillow Gone Wild the account on Instagram and Facebook if you’re not familiar, you need to be because this is mostly a non real estate professional followed real estate account, sort of poking fun at people’s design choices with their homes. Zillow Gone Wild is a perfect example because even though I don’t watch real estate shows on television I just I don’t watch the reality stuff with real estate. I follow Zillow gone wild because I am fascinated by what people do on the inside of their homes, especially when they do wacky things. And that’s, that’s what that sort of account is all about. You could go to every showing and find something unique. And maybe you don’t out the you know, the address of the property. But you can always say, you know, like you were saying your hashtag could be weird things, I find it showings or something. And that would be huge for people. Everyone loves to get a little everyone’s got something weird in their house anyway. So. All right, Chris. Well, this is so great. If you want to see, we’ve covered like five of these statistics, there’s 111 of them. This just came out. While by the time we released this episode will probably have been three weeks or so. But if you go to the close, and or, you know, we’re gonna have a link to this in the show notes this particular article about 111 Shocking real estate statistics you need to know but this is good stuff, guys, you can use this to reach out to clients right, deepen your connection on social all sorts of great ideas, build your team. So go visit the clothes.com they also have a premium membership called the clothes pro where in most of their content is 100% free you don’t have to subscribe but if you want to take it to the next level, they have premium content as well. It’s like $1 a day it’s totally worth it. The clothes pro when you go to the clothes.com Look at the clothes pro try it for a month see if you like it, I promise you will. Chris does a lot of coaching on there as well. And obviously he knows his stuff. So everybody visit the clothes.com They’re awesome, let’s support them. They don’t need our support, but they deserve our support because they are really the best source I have found for anything related to really deep dive non sort of non ideological or you know, basically just here’s the facts. Here’s what we find related to anything about building your brand or your business as a real estate agent. So check out the clothes.com guys You won’t regret it they’re the best. Chris thank you as always I will let you get on with your busy day but boy I wish I could talk to you for another hour with more of these stats because I find them so fascinating.
Chris Linsell 42:10 Well I’m sure we’ll connect on this and I’m gonna be smoking up pork butt this weekend. I’m sure we’ll chat about it. By the
D.J. Paris 42:17 way, Chris, if anyone out there who is into smoking you actually and I don’t want to put words in your mouth but before we go, you actually so brisket is often considered like the Holy Grail of smoking because it’s expensive. It sort of seems fancy it’s it’s it’s a cool thing. It’s not as common but I and I have now done both I’ve smoked pork butt which is pulled pulled pork for those of us not in the smoking community polpark versus brisket and Chris I believe you have told me that you actually prefer the taste of pulled pork over brisket if you had to choose one or the other. Is that that accurate?
Chris Linsell 42:51 Well, I mean, I don’t want to I don’t want to offend anybody and they like the like religious smoker community or anything here but their pork has a lot going for it when you’re smoking. A chunk of meat that size takes a long time you got a lot of good flavor in there. It lasts forever. Pulled Pork will last you forever in the fridge or the freezer and you can put it on so many things. It can be in sliders, it can be on nachos, it could be it could be so versatile. I’m not saying don’t go Brisket. Brisket is delicious, but give pork a chance people and pork.
D.J. Paris 43:26 It’s a heck of a lot cheaper. You can usually find it for a couple of bucks a pound sometimes. Whereas brisket I just did a brisket and it was like $13 a pound it was so I can
Chris Linsell 43:35 feed the entire barbecue with $25 with a pork butt. I can barely feed myself for $25 The Briscoe
D.J. Paris 43:43 well we will Chris Niobe will announce our smoking conversation. Smoker conversation podcast. But for now we will say goodbye. Maybe we’ll we will start giving some some grilling and barbecue tips. Yeah,
Chris Linsell 43:59 right. Questions about barbecue and grill. I I’m not I’m not I’m being totally serious here. If there’s one question from somebody about how to prepare meat on a smoker, I will answer it for you on the next podcast that I’m here with DJ I’m just I’m just calling out. Right DJ, find a way to get this question to him and I will answer your question. And by
D.J. Paris 44:23 the way, a grill or a smoker is a fantastic closing gift. And it doesn’t have to be 1000s of dollars you this is a great I mean assuming you understand what the family wants and needs. That is a heck of a good gift. So keep that in mind too. All right, Chris will chat with you next month Always a pleasure Chris Lynn sell by the way Chris speaks all over the country is constantly in demand. Are you have any upcoming speaking appearances? Yeah,
Chris Linsell 44:50 you guys are I you know this one’s gonna by the time this episode drops would be perfect time for conference planning during the State of California. I’ll be at the car Are reimagine event in Long Beach, middle of October. If you are in the National Association of Realtors, and coming to the NAR conference, I’ll be speaking at the NAR conference in Orlando in November. And if you are in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania and coming to the triple play conference in December in Atlantic City, I’ll be presenting actually four different stage presentations in Atlantic City so you can literally have an entire day with me if you feel like
D.J. Paris 45:25 well, that would that that sounds like a dream for I’m sure a lot of our audience. I mean, seriously, I love I love hanging out with you. All right, yeah, we will. We will call it a day. Thanks, everyone for being being a listener and participant with our show. We consider our audience our family, even though we don’t get to speak with you directly. Hopefully, we’re speaking to you. And we want your feedback as Chris said, so let us know what you want more on the show. And also send us your your questions about about grills, smoking barbecued anything, we will answer it next time. Chris, on behalf of everyone, we thank you for being part of our show for as many years as you have been. Chris is a wonderful guy and obviously real a real asset to our show. And also on behalf of Chris and myself. Every single one of you that listens. This is the reason we do it’s because of you the person I’m talking to right now in your ears, that you are the reason we do this. So we need your help. Tell us what you want more of what you want less of it. Also tell a friend about the show, the more people who know about us brings in more opportunities for us to give you better content. So just tell a friend that’s all we ask. Okay, Chris, thanks for being on the show. We’ll see you again next week or next month. Thanks, guys.
How To Think Like An Architect • Heidi Bolyard
Sep 30, 2022
Heidi Bolyard an Architect passionate about teaching realtors and other RE Professionals how to think as an architect describes how did she get interested in architecture and why she made it her career. Heidi discusses how she got into working with realtors in helping them and their clients make better decisions. Next, Heidi talks about the frameworks of SOLD, the main walkaways of her courses and how they help realtors. Heidi shares her tips to help agents think like an architect. Last, Heidi talks about the trends regarding renovation or home construction is she seeing right now.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What do architects see that Realtors often miss? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Heidi Bolyard, who is an architect and she is going to show you what architects wish Realtors knew and how to think and speak more like an architect with your clients. But before we get to it, just a couple of reminders. By the way, you probably didn’t know this. We just crossed over 400 episodes. We’ve been doing this for about five years now. And I want to encourage everyone who’s listening to please go back and listen to the early episodes. My intention, when I first started the show was not to really create even current, sort of here’s what’s going on today kind of episodes, and we do some of that. But the vast majority of what we do is really timeless. It’s talking to top producers about how they got started, what they did when they first got in the business, what they’re doing today and what they recommend agents who are looking to grow do so even though we’re pumping out two to three episodes a week now, please go back and listen to the old ones. I promise you there’s so much value there. And also just tell a friend, that’s the only other thing we ask of you is tell one other realtor, maybe somebody who’s struggling right now, it’s tough out there, tell them about our show, and that might just help them find their next idea to grow their business and keep it thriving into 2023. So enough about all that Thanks for being part of our show. Thank you to all the listeners for 400 episodes, we’re gonna keep cranking them out as per usual, but now on to the main event, my conversation with Heidi Bolyard.
Today on the show we have heightened boneyard from soiled by design. Let me tell you more about Heidi now Heidi is an architect by trade but is also extremely passionate about teaching realtors and real estate professionals how to think like an architect to get to the heart of what homebuyers actually want in a dream home. Now she started supporting Realtors when they began to hire her to do walkthroughs with their clients, I actually should have done that. That was that’s a really smart idea. But today she teaches real estate professionals how to ask questions with the same level of detail as an architect. And this the same detail that an architect needs to actually build the right home for someone. Now she received her Bachelor’s in environmental design and architecture from Ball State University and an associate’s degree in both construction management and art from Delta College. And when she’s when designing homes. Heidi’s main goal is to inspire her clients, nurture families and create more happiness and joy in their lives. Now, I want everyone to do this. We very rarely have non Realtors on the show. But this is a very special episode. So I’m really going to ask you to do this because I think it will really help your business go to sold by design dotnet sold by design dotnet. And there is a white paper I want you to download. You just have to give your email address and your name. And it’s titled Three things you need as a realtor to make money faster. But written from an architect’s perspective. This is a perspective you don’t normally get. Trust me it’s worth it. And anyway, also visit Heidi on sorry, on social media, which is at Heidi Bolyard and that’s Bo LYARD We will have links and by the way Heidi is at IDI. We’re going to have links to that in the show notes so you don’t have to Write that down, just go to our show notes. We’ll have a link to soul by design where you can download the white paper. And of course, follow Heidi Heidi, thanks for being on the show.
Heidi Bolyard 5:08 Thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 5:10 We are I’m really excited. I never get to talk to architects, I’m always fascinated. Can I tell you the only architect joke? I know, it’s it’s, I think it’s a really good one to everyone who’s, who’s in architecture. Everyone else won’t get the joke, but it’s actually a civil engineering joke. So I’ll tell you, I don’t know many jokes. But I always thought this was great. So and I’ll explain it. Because I think it’s I think it’s a great introduction to what we’re going to talk about today. So it’s an old joke that some of you might have might know and architects might have heard it. But it has to do with civil engineering, where it’s like, what’s the difference between a civil engineer and a psychotic? And the answer is one pays better. And the reason why that’s funny, for everyone going I don’t get it is because what I love about architects and civil engineers in particular, is like a civil engineer will will look at like, a river, and then the two banks on either side and, and visualize a bridge going across and actually can see this bridge that doesn’t yet exist, you know, and much like a psychotic does the difference. The architect or civil engineer can actually build the bridge. But anyway, it’s probably not a great show. But I’ve always loved that joke that based better you guys are able to visualize things that don’t exist over
Heidi Bolyard 6:28 hired any and or engineer or architecture.
D.J. Paris 6:31 Well, I, I’m embarrassed to say that’s, that’s my only one. And I probably lost half the audience on it. So if you’re still with us? No, I’m really excited because I do not know anything about architecture. And I know that our audience is always looking for an edge as a real estate professional, to be able to go inside a home and actually provide more value. So I’m excited to chat with you. But before we get to all of that, I would love to hear about your journey. How did you get started? Did you grow up? I imagine a lot of kids grew up probably wanting to be architects. I feel like it’s one of those professions that could be a childhood dream. I don’t know if that was your childhood dream. So I’d love to hear about how you got interested in architecture, and then how you made it a career.
Heidi Bolyard 7:14 Originally, my childhood dream was to be a radiologist.
D.J. Paris 7:17 Wow, wow, that is highly specific. Yeah, you wanted to look at X rays.
Heidi Bolyard 7:22 Look at bones like you could see those cool pictures. And yeah, like, you can read those. Like, that’s fascinating. So now I read blueprints instead. So very similar polarity there, maybe, yeah. But I grew up in a fairly rural area. And we didn’t have a whole lot of opportunities for electives. So one of the opportunities I did have was residential drafting. Wow, I had taken that class, it just absolutely fell in love with it. It was so much fun. And then I ended up doing it for a second year, my senior year of high school and then from there went into architecture program.
D.J. Paris 8:05 So if I mean, that’s amazing to me that your school even had a drafting a program. I mean, I wouldn’t have even known what that was it when I was in high school. And there certainly was none of that where I grew up. So the fact like did you have like the the drafting table that’s at the
Heidi Bolyard 8:22 mechanical, like drafting where you went to school?
D.J. Paris 8:26 I don’t know maybe?
Heidi Bolyard 8:28 Like did the mechanical drafting, but I’m like, that sounds boring. I wonder like, draw something? Yeah.
D.J. Paris 8:36 So So in high school, you sort of caught the bog, you started understanding how plans, you know, are made visually. And then where did you go from there.
Heidi Bolyard 8:45 So from there, I had actually went to a community college where I was going to do like a two plus two program. Somehow that turned into eight years and four degrees. I don’t know how these things happen, but they just do. But yeah, I was in a, like a set an architecture associates program. And in that I was just like, I am basically taking almost all the classes I need for construction management. And I had a good friend whose dad owned a construction company. And he was just like, hate when architects don’t know what they’re drawing, they don’t know what they’re doing. And so he really pushed me to get a better understanding of construction, so that I would be a better architect. So that’s why I ended up getting an associate’s degree in construction management, which was fantastic too, because it gave me skills for managing and like owning a company. So that worked out later in life.
D.J. Paris 9:44 Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a nice skill set to sort of complement. The design side is like now I have to do some project management and understanding how that all works and the actual boots on the ground, labor part of it, I think, That’s so interesting. So as as an architect, I think you have a really unique skill set. That is, I think, particularly attractive to realtors, when did Realtors start coming to you saying, Hey, you’re really skilled, I want you to come either check out this development I’m working on or maybe it’s home, my client wants to buy or sell. I’d love to know how that those two worlds interacted.
Heidi Bolyard 10:23 Yeah, I have a client, that’s a real estate agent. And we had done some work for her home, just she hated like, it was a, I think like an 80s 80s or 90s. Home. And she was like, this was way before modern farmhouse was popular. And she was like to turn it into a modern farmhouse. And I’m like, Oh, this will be fun. So we that’s what we did, we like change the exterior of the home the facade to make it look like a modern farmhouse. And then after that, like she, she had ran into a few different times clients that were looking at several different homes in the area that they wanted to buy, but they knew all of them needed to be renovated. So they were looking at some older areas, in the Columbus, Ohio, area smoulder suburbs. So all of those homes tend to be closed off spaces, and just kind of dark, not enough windows. So I walked through the homes with them and just kind of talked through with them, like what possibilities were with the homes or even some of the homes I’m like, this is going to take so much I think it’s best unless you’re really, you have your heart set on it like best to look at one of the other outputs, or one of the other options.
D.J. Paris 11:44 It’s really amazing. I’m thinking now, like you have such a almost complete skill set, because a realtor is able to have you come in evaluate a property, and then you don’t just know aesthetically or from an engineering perspective, what’s what’s correct, what needs to be changed, what can be changed, you know, the possibilities, but you also probably understand cost, right? Because you have this construction background as well. This knowledge of understanding time and, and how how to actually make the plans from the drafting table, you know, come to life. So I think that is incredibly valuable to realtors, I think that is so interesting. I wonder how many realtors who are listening to our show, which is pretty much our entire audience are Realtors I wonder how many of them have ever thought to reach out, you know, of course, we know inspectors and appraisers and we know people that can do bits and pieces. But you have this really sort of well rounded understanding of how homes work. And so and so now you’ve you teach people this, which I think is so cool, I’ve yet to see any other architect, even think about, you know, teaching agents. So can you tell us a little bit about sold by design, I oftentimes, by the way, only, I’m only getting to this early in the conversation because I oftentimes forget. And then we get to the end and like, oh, by the way, she’s got these great courses. But I really want to talk about these because this is the only course I’m aware of that really teaches a realtor how to think like an architect.
Heidi Bolyard 13:10 Yeah, so we have, you know, a few different like things like the, the PDF, just to get some understanding of what the soul by design framework is that we have a four part framework, that’s called sold. So it stands for simplifying the process. And then the O is outlining your clients goals and dreams, the L is for laying the layout of the existing home in the D is for details of the existing conditions within the home. So really just that overview, from the from the initial point where I meet with a client that’s looking to renovate, or add on to their existing home, kind of starting at that point. So the one thing I always start telling when I’m working with real estate agents is tell them like, you need to go in and see your client’s existing home. So even though they’re not looking to stay there, like you need to know what’s working for them in the home and what isn’t working in what they love about the home. And what yeah, they would want to improve if they stayed there, just knowing all of those things about your client. And then also to like, I think so many of us can be challenged with communicating what we’re really thinking. So if you’re in their space, they can show you what they’re thinking. So it makes it easier for them to express to the real estate agent, what they’re really looking for in a new home.
D.J. Paris 14:43 So this idea of you going into someone’s existing property and saying, Tell me what’s working in here. What do you like? And I that’s a really interesting question itself. I’ve not ever heard anyone and we’ve done I don’t know 400 or so episodes. I’ve never heard anybody asked that. So cific question. I don’t, of course know every question that our guests ask their clients. But I think that is such a smart question. Because it’s not just Hey, what’s wrong? What’s broken? What what do we need to fix? What can we improve? That that’s important, of course, as well, but understanding what’s working, and even if they’re leaving that home and selling it and going to buy another home, I think really helpful information, you know, what do you love about this current home that you’re leaving? Or that you want to change it, you know, you’re staying put you want to change? So I love that. What do you think? What do you think Realtors miss, that they could pick up and I know your courses teach this, I don’t want to give away all your secrets. But we’d love to know what what Realtors oftentimes just aren’t thinking about that an architect would would catch and I understand we can’t teach somebody a skill over this, this episode. But some ways that you would encourage agents to start thinking about properties as they go in and you know, are there and witnesses?
Heidi Bolyard 15:56 Yeah, one thing I encourage agents to do is I know, you know, I know that with the current market, a lot of people have been not doing their home inspections. But when you have a home that’s having a home inspection, go and talk with the home inspector about, like, things that he sees, and like, issues and or potential issues and things like that, just because it’s gonna give you a better understanding of existing homes, and the clients already paying for them to be there. So you might as well take advantage of that free education.
D.J. Paris 16:31 That’s a really, really good point. It’s, it’s something that I don’t know that anyone’s ever said that either on our show, this idea of going to the inspection, you know, I think Realtors might think, well, it’s gonna make me look like I’m involved in the process. I’m there, I’m supposed to be there. You know, it’s my job to sort of be there to witness it. But from a skill perspective, yeah, the agent can pick up a lot of information, just talking to the inspector and saying, Hey, what what did you see over there? Did you know you mentioned this in your report, or you had mentioned that you’re writing it down? What did you see, I’d love to know what you saw. But I have an example. I bought a condo in the last year and I have this wonderful inspector. I know at the beginning, I was joking saying I should have hired an architect but but ours was a new development, there was really no reason to do that. And in my inspector was amazing. And just in case he’s listening, he was amazing. We I loved him. But one thing he saw that I would have never seen as he saw that one of my doors was warped in our master, but I’m sorry, the primary bedroom closet was the door was warped. I still don’t see a work door when I look at it. And I didn’t, but he was able to see that and so I was like Hey Mark, how did you hear today I still have a stroke I would still struggle to see it. But there are little tricks and tips that that you know people who are you know, part of that that world understand like yourself when it comes to design because you do so much designing what do you I think many realtors are just my guess would be they’re afraid to have those conversations. They might know the basics about okay if you you know want to renovate your kitchen or if you want to add on to the home, you know they have some general knowledge maybe even specific knowledge. But what would you what do you say? I would suspect that many Realtors just don’t really understand a lot of what actually you know unless they’re developers themselves really understanding the process from start to finish I’m curious on on where you see some of those disconnects. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads and less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Heidi Bolyard 19:52 I think like looking at existing homes, it’s looking at the existing spaces. So looking at what spaces are too big, what spaces are too small? Like, where could some things be reworked, but I think that going back to that first part of like seeing their home, like really understanding what your clients are looking for so important, because if you don’t understand that, you can actually walk into a home with them, and see how it could function for them.
D.J. Paris 20:20 Yeah, it makes sense. It’s like,
Heidi Bolyard 20:21 it’s like, really understanding the client.
D.J. Paris 20:25 Lots of lots of questions. It sounds like and I think that’s, but like lifestyle questions, it sounds that that’s part of it, too, right? Like, where do you spend the most amount of time in this home? Where do you relax? What is relaxation look like?
Heidi Bolyard 20:40 The whole family cooked together in the kitchen, or is it just?
D.J. Paris 20:44 Yeah, you know, and it’s funny too, because like, I cook a lot. And I was just thinking, as you said that, that every time I’ve bought a place, and the kitchens are always been fine. But for somebody who cooks a lot, they really need a different type of kitchen than somebody who’s not as inclined to, to, you know, use the stove, and the oven and the range, and just all of all of these things that I realized, like, I’m really my next home, if possible, if I can make this happen, I need to have two ovens. And I know that now, I didn’t know that before. And just because I cook so much. And so it’s something that that I’m now realizing, but I wish somebody would have said, Hey, do you cook a lot? Because if you cook a lot, what here’s what we should do, we should give up some of your counterspace or your cabinet space, and we should put in a second oven for you. And here’s why you want to do that. But I wouldn’t have I wouldn’t have known right? So I love this idea of of people coming in and asking me questions. And this is something that any any agent can do is really, and really you should be doing it anyway. Finding out exactly. So asking people about about how they interact inside the home, I
Heidi Bolyard 21:51 think asking all of those questions, you’re asking the client questions they’ve probably never been asked in their life. So they feel more heard, than they’ve ever felt. So especially if they’re interviewing multiple agents, before they, you know, select one to help them find their new home or even sell their existing home. Like, if you’re asking them all these questions. They’re, yeah, they’re gonna be really impressed that like, you’ve taken the time to really get to know them and learn about them and learn about what they’re looking for in their new home.
D.J. Paris 22:25 Yeah, there’s there’s sort of superficial surface level rapport building sales, 101 stuff, like you see some, they, they’re there, they have a picture of them holding them, you know, a fish that they caught, you know, you’re a fisherman and you can talk about that. That’s one way of building rapport. And it’s maybe more more surface level. And then there’s really getting into somebody’s desires, their likes, their dislikes. And that is, is very complimentary to somebody. It’s actually very respectful, I think, to say, tell me, like, you know, these kinds of questions, you’re right, I think that’s a much better way to build intimacy to build trust. Because you’re demonstrating care, you’re saying, okay, yes, I see that, you know, you fish. And that’s great. And we can talk about that, too. But
Heidi Bolyard 23:10 those things, too, if you guys have, like, there’s some common connection, just because then they, yeah, people, people work with people they know, like, and trust.
D.J. Paris 23:18 Yes, yeah. So, so you started creating a platform, you realize there was this space in the market, where there was a big disconnect between your skill set, and of course, you know, you have many degrees, and most of our audience are probably not going to, you know, enroll back at university, you know, to develop these particular degrees, but they can leverage some of your, your knowledge and wisdom and actually learn some of some of this framework so that they can come in, and just, quite frankly, be be like, you were saying, if you’re in competition with a few other realtors for a listing, you’re gonna go in and say, you know, look, the person behind you might have been super charming. And maybe, maybe that’s enough to win the business, but you can come in and actually win with skill. And I think it we’re in the day and age where charm is, is being demoted as far as importance. And I think skill is rising to the surface, a little bit more than it used to, from a sales perspective. So I am so interested in learning this, and I know if I was a practicing agent, which, which I, unfortunately, I’m not, I’m still too busy to do that. But that would be the first thing I would do would be to sign up for this. Because I want to have an advantage and an edge. So when somebody goes through your course, what are the main benefits that they get to walk away with once once they’re sort of I know you have many courses, but what is the overall sort of objective?
Heidi Bolyard 24:44 overall objective is really just, it’s honestly the same process that I use when I’m working with a client to rent, renovate, or add onto their home or even build a new custom home. So it’s really that initial step of outlining their or their goals and dreams for what they’re looking for. And then the design process of, you know, laying out the home and, and seeing that and then more detailed things like mechanical systems and the kind of some structural systems like I teach, like where how to locate bearing walls, as long as you can get to a basement like it’s, it’s pretty easy to determine that or even standing on a first floor, being able to see you know, oftentimes and in the homes, it’s just you see a straight wall going right through the middle of the house. And there’s your bearing wall. So
D.J. Paris 25:36 that and again, I want to pause for a second, I apologize, Heidi, for interrupting you. But you just really important because if I as a realtor can walk into a home and have a pretty reasonable idea where the load bearing walls are, I now at least know what isn’t possible, or what is what opportunities might have opened up from knowing this information. That is incredibly valuable, because you can go into somebody’s basement, for example, or any part of the home. And if you have a little bit of that knowledge, you can even just whet the appetite of maybe the prospective buyer, if you’re if it’s a by side transaction or less, I’d say hey, I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this. But one thing I’ve seen work is you know, we opening up a certain space, and I think this wall might be able to come down. Have you ever thought about that, you know, bringing those ideas is is really exciting to people I would imagine
Heidi Bolyard 26:28 when I think too, like walking into a home just because like the people that are selling it or using it as a dining room. Like if you know what their goals are like, Oh, well, they’re using it as a dining room. But what have you used it for this space that you wanted in your new home? Like just to help the client also think differently think outside of the box when they’re walking through the home with you.
D.J. Paris 26:50 And how many of us grew up with dining homes, that we ate him twice a year, three times a year. And they they’re beautiful. And they were not to be walked in and touched and all of that.
Heidi Bolyard 27:01 Or dusted? Yeah.
D.J. Paris 27:03 But how many of those rooms could have been repurposed for something more functional, that, you know, tradition would have, you know, not, people wouldn’t have been able to see another opportunity in that room. Because they’re they grew up in a house with a dining room, as well as living rooms, even more of a mystery to me, we grew up with a dining room and a living room, we were not allowed in either. I mean, not really allowed. We didn’t do anything in either of those rooms. And they just sat dormant. They were pretty, but they had pretty things in there. But I almost think it was a good chunk of our first floor what’s like, don’t go in and don’t use them like don’t,
Heidi Bolyard 27:39 early, early 90s, late 80s The great room that they had a newer home and they had a great room. And he’s like the great thing about it is we never have to clean it because we’re never allowed in their space to never use.
D.J. Paris 27:58 I think in today’s day where we’re working from home a lot of us are well realtors have always been able to really do that. But but a lot of you know non traditional work at home jobs are now working home jobs and and so you now have there’s a premium on, on on space. And so now it’s like, hey, that living room that we open, you know, holiday presents in once a year and we never go in with the piano that none of nobody uses it practices on maybe it’s time to rethink that room into a more functional and useful space. I’m curious and I would be remiss if I didn’t sort of bug you with this question, which I’m sure you get at every cocktail party or every social event you go to because it would be the first thing I would ask an architect and it’s almost maybe an interior design question so I apologize if it’s not totally in your wheelhouse, but I suspect it is but just about like trends like what What trends are you seeing right now that maybe our audience should really learn more about as far as you know renovation or even just home construction or with this move to maybe working more from the home obviously home offices are are more
Heidi Bolyard 29:05 effective in a lot of homes with two offices now just because oh, I’m work from home. So you know, converting dining rooms adding French doors so that it can be used as a second office. We see that a fair amount. And then the other thing is interesting like people are putting in these massive pantries to basically be their messy kitchen. So it’s like where there used to be like this nice kitchen, but like you just kind of serve food there. And then that’s the one where you prepare the food. So I feel like this keeps just getting like it’s been happening for years but I just feel like it’s just continues like people are putting countertops in there even like I know for me we have our blender in our pantry we have like a a convection oven that toasts and does all this other stuff which is nice because it eliminates appliances but like just to get like to keep the kitchen counters cleaner. Just so that we don’t have all of this clutter, I say clutter creates chaos. So I like seeing our kitchen counters more cleaned up. So that one and then one thing that we heard from a contractor recently is the homeowners want to have a Costco door into their pantry. We were like, What is a Costco door and it’s a door from the garage and it’s not a full door, it’s like half door and you open it and from the garage, you can like push like all of your, all of the the non perishable stuff you got from Costco into your pantry without having to bring it all the way through the home.
D.J. Paris 30:38 That is That is brilliant. That is brilliant. I love that like your your 21,000 gallons of mayonnaise, you can just push as opposed to you know, that actually is really, really incredibly functional. I’ve seen some really interesting things too. I’ve seen people build, recycling sort of shoots, where they just put push, like what used to be, although I don’t think we see these much anymore used to be those. I used to think it was so cool growing up, and there’d be these older homes that had just these little like, yeah, those little like little doors. Yeah, well, the quick hand crushers are great too. But like just those little chutes where you could throw your laundry and it would go down two floors, you know, and end up in a basket. I’m seeing I think people are really into functionality now. And I think this idea of like you were talking about pantries, I have a massive walk in pantry now. And we you know, probably because of Marie Kondo or whoever the the, you know, organization person is, you know, everything is now organized, we have, you know, these, you know, these these tubs that we use, that are labeled, and all of that, and we really keep as much of our stuff out of the kitchen. But again, I guess the point is asking somebody, Hey, are you the kind of, you know, family that likes to have, you know, your your convection oven, your toaster oven or whatever, out out and about, so you can use it? Or is it okay? If you go into the pantry to use it? Is it better to maybe put the microwave in there and put and keeping the area, you know, simple and minimal and clean, which is you know, more, you know, public facing, I guess to guests. And we’ve done that in our home. We’ve tried to remove all the appliances from the actual, you know, the exception of the built in stuff, move those into into the pantry and it’s like, oh, that why didn’t we think of that sooner? So that’s a those are some great, great tips. What about? So the idea of two offices is great, but again, this is all about asking questions, isn’t it like it’s really about that’s so that’s so interesting.
Heidi Bolyard 32:43 I have to talk to you people are using like that, like one of the offices a lot of people are putting like a Murphy bed in it just because you have guests like how many times a year like it’s, it’s like just here and there like put on a Murphy bed. And then you could just talk you’re like I’ve seen people almost build desks into like the closet space of an old bedroom, or a bedroom to really use and then they add they can close the doors when they’re not using it and pull the Murphy bed down. And so their stuffs tucked away and somebody can use it as a guest bedroom.
D.J. Paris 33:12 I am the biggest fan of Murphy beds. I am we were we were wanting to do this. I’ve also noticed that second bedrooms for new developments. You know, not primary bedrooms. But second, secondary bedrooms, especially in condos have at least here in Chicago have shrunk. It used to be that the secondary bedroom was was not quite as big as the primary bedroom. But it was it was bigger than it seems to be now. And now there seems to be more of a premium on larger living space, smaller bedrooms. And so we looked into getting a Murphy bed for that second bedroom. Because we yeah, we have guests three times a year. It’s my parents like to come and use it. My sister and her husband once in a while. And 99% of the Year, nobody uses it. And I was like I had my first apartment out of college when I lived in St. Louis had a Murphy bed, which was so cool. I thought it was the coolest thing. And then yeah, and then I didn’t see a Murphy bed until like a year ago. Like it was like about a 20 year gap where you just never heard about them. And now they’re all the rage probably because a home offices and
Heidi Bolyard 34:15 it is COVID push people back. So placed on
D.J. Paris 34:20 there. They’re expensive, but they are awesome. And that is we ended up not doing it. And just because the cost of the Murphy beds, one that we wanted was just was too costly, but we might still do it because it really again, having this information really allows you to go into a home as an agent and say, I have an idea for this home like do you guys have a lot of guests? Or would you rather have a space that’s more functional? Have you ever thought of a Murphy again, bringing ideas to people is great and so as far as the idea but I know pools have also become very, very popular especially since COVID.
Heidi Bolyard 34:59 And now Your living spaces. Yeah, as well. Just yeah, place to be outside of the home and still be able to have some, it feels like an extension of the home, it feels like additional square footage.
D.J. Paris 35:14 Yeah, I’m, I’m a huge, huge fan of, of, of outdoor living space. And again, there seems to be now more of a focus on creating more of a living functional environment in and outside the home versus just a place where we, you know, end up at the end of the day after work and try to relax and go to bed. This idea that we can actually have fun in the home is is is a little bit more of a newer idea. I think unless, you know, you were dealing with ultra high net worth people, as an agent, of course, they have a lot of space, so they can create, they’ve always been able to create specific rooms for specific things and, and the average person really usually wasn’t able to do that. I think now there’s there’s more opportunity, because there’s just more interest in converting rooms into into various things.
Heidi Bolyard 36:03 And I think like you said, with the fun space, I think, you know, with COVID as well, like, people couldn’t go anywhere. So they were like, Okay, let’s figure out what we can do in our space so that we have more like, you know, our own personal entertaining space. So.
D.J. Paris 36:22 So for an agent that wants to learn more about how to think like an architect, obviously sold by design.net is a great resource that she Heidi has courses. She is the real deal. She has a she is not a realtor, she is an architect, she has the drafting table, she goes in and out. And what type of projects do you do you work on? Mostly? Is it mostly residential? Do you also do commercial,
Heidi Bolyard 36:47 we work on primarily residential work, we’ll do a couple commercial projects here, and they’re mostly multifamily, but some other, you know, smaller commercial projects. But those are normally for savers for clients that we have that we did their homes. So but yeah, so it’s nice to mainly focus on residential work, we love doing whole house renovation projects, especially in older homes. So taking those early 20th century homes and converting them into functional living spaces for 21st century families.
D.J. Paris 37:24 And there is a lot of lot of sort of opportunities that again, the average consumer isn’t probably aware of unless that they’re studying this on their own, too. And so I think, you know, as an agent, you have a couple of opportunities here one, of course, you know, sold by design dotnet can teach you how to think like this. And I encourage everybody to consider those courses, because, boy, just imagine how much more sort of useful you’ll be to your clients when you’re able to sort of bring some of that architect knowledge in to a higher level. Yes, yeah, the 1,000%. And also, I think, if you’re not able to do that, you know, buddy up with an architect, somebody who’s wanting to do more renovation work or development and, you know, ask to take them to lunch or asked to have them come to a property, maybe pay them for their time is another option. And have them come in and say, What do I not know that, you know? What, what about? Are you seeing a lot of additions being so I’m interested in, in sort of renovation stuff right now, because last year, of course, his home prices were soaring, you know, and rates were so low. We were seeing a lot of that it’s changed a bit of course now. But what are you seeing on the renovation front? Is that still as popular as it was in the last couple years?
Heidi Bolyard 38:52 Where we are in Columbus, Ohio, it has not slowed down? Actually, we’re even busier than we were last year. So it’s, it’s it’s amazing. So
D.J. Paris 39:05 what type of renovations are you seeing?
Heidi Bolyard 39:07 Um, a lot of a lot of still like whole house renovations just looking to update the home because they don’t want to move they know like they really liked the neighborhood they’re in they like the schools their kids go to, they’re not looking to they don’t really want to move somewhere else. So they’re willing to just to renovate their, their existing home, we see a lot of people adding on more space, some more living space, like a bigger family room space just so that they have, you know, somewhere to go within the house that gives them a little bit more room to do activities. But then to we also see a lot of people adding on in law suites. So a lot of people have done that to bring family back into the home. So having multi generational households. So yeah, a couple years when people couldn’t see their or family, they’re like we want them with us.
D.J. Paris 40:03 Yeah, nearby. So that’s such a smart idea too, because it also frees up a space in the main home too, right? Like there’s, it’s, again, it’s one of those things that most people don’t, aren’t they they’re just not oriented homeowners to even think that way. I know, I’m not I don’t think that way at all, when when I bought properties in my past, I go, Oh, this is what I got, you know, and that’s why I’ve always bought things that looked perfect for the what I wanted at that time, because I don’t have the ability to see what isn’t there, or to see opportunities, that’s just not a skill set of mine. So I suspect real, producing Realtors probably are more oriented to to think about things like that, but most homeowners might not be because they’re, that’s not their, their area of expertise. So this is where you can come in as an agent, and really helped define your worth, like being able to not just sell the home and put it on the MLS and marketed property and negotiate and all of that, but actually come in and add lifestyle value, like I’m going to help your lifestyle within this this property. I think that is, I mean, wow,
Heidi Bolyard 41:12 we’re out there design skills, some basic design skills, just to really look at the space and, you know, help walk their clients through how that home could be their perfect dream home.
D.J. Paris 41:26 Yeah, it’s funny, too, because there’s a lot of trends that people really, you know, in order to stay on top of what’s going on. And this is what architects do. And whether it’s interior trends or exterior trends or design trends, you know, or construction trends. Like for example, it’s funny I was, I was chatting with an architect, or I’m sorry, an interior designer, because our place is entirely white. Like everything is white. And you know, today that’s really cool. In 10 years, it’ll be like what were they thinking? Why? Why would they do everything? Like, that looks so silly. But I did ask I asked them interior designer, I go, am I making a horrible decision? But my countertops are white, my cabinets are white, everything’s the walls are white, everything’s white. And in 10 years, is that going to be she’s like everything in 10 years is going to be looked at as oh my god, what were they thinking? So the idea, but understanding that, that there are trends that people are interested in and not not just design trends, but but understanding that is really what architects do. That’s what they know. And I think this is a huge opportunity to build that in, instead of just being like white walls are in right now. Understanding more Yes, yes. You know, that’s more surface level stuff. But understanding functionality, I think, is really what we’re talking about is is this like, how big is the master bathroom? Do you guys need a big master bathroom? Why do you need a separate room for the you know, the toilet? For example?
Heidi Bolyard 42:50 Yeah, water closet? Do you need two sinks? Do you need a linen closet? Like, what do you need in the spaces?
D.J. Paris 42:56 Yeah, yeah, it’s funny. You know, and there’s, there’s things that you know, architects can look for. And also, they can look maybe even, most importantly, is they can look at existing design and desist existing construction, right? And be able to say, Hmm, you know, there’s some problems here or this there was, there was a construction issue here that you probably wouldn’t have ever seen. So, you know, I imagine those can be incredibly helpful as well.
Heidi Bolyard 43:26 Well, yeah, like learning, like teaching we teach are real estate agents, just like things that you can look for within the house, like cracks up in the ceiling cracks in the top of walls around windows and doors, like what, you know, kind of figuring out what that is. And then also teaching, you know, just kind of assessing agent like the age of the furnace and hot water heater and Windows. So when I was looking for a house a few years ago, my real estate agent, she had, you know, we were walking through it, and she’s just like, just so you have in mind like this was built 93 She’s like, the windows original furnaces original water heaters original. And they’re all gonna have to be replaced there. Yeah, 30 years old. So. So that having that in mind that made me think through. Well, as an architect, luckily, I was just like putting some numbers together in my head. And I was like, well, once I do that, and we offer over listing. I’m not really Yeah, it’s not really what I wanted to spend. So so it was easy for me to make that decision because she gave me so much information. And then it also saved her the time of having to write an offer on the on the home that we eventually would have not fallen through on because then we would have realized later once we had the inspection that all of these other things would need to be done. So it’s really just thinking higher level for your clients to save not only them time and money of hiring an inspector but saving you time And as well,
D.J. Paris 45:01 I mean, can you imagine the, you just said something that was so, so powerful to me? Can you imagine how? Well I see both both ways it could have gone, right. So that best case scenario is the inspector sees these issues brings it to your attention before you, you know, close on the property before you go under contract, of course and say, hey,
Heidi Bolyard 45:23 you’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on. Yeah, the inspector.
D.J. Paris 45:27 Yeah, and that’s best case scenario. Worst case scenario is Inspector misses those things. And then as the realtor, you know, two years in your clients now are spending 50 grand to replace all the stuff that you as the realtor didn’t see, the inspector may have missed, and they’re gonna blame you
Heidi Bolyard 45:43 as the HS, because you probably, you know, referred sprint inspectors, but that’s the one who chose unfortunately, the inspector missed it, but they’ll still blame you,
D.J. Paris 45:53 they will still blame you and and just to be able to say, as a realtor, Hey, before we put an offer in this furnace is 30 years old, here’s what a furnace is going to cost, let me or let me do some homework, I’m gonna get back to you real quick, I want to find out what it’s going to cost to repair it, replace it. Rather, we need to think about that before we put an offer, because I don’t want you hating my guts in two years when you have to replace it. And that in and of itself is so incredibly valuable. And as an architect, and as somebody, I know, you do a lot of other things too. But like just even knowing that is going to make you so valuable to your clients, they’re gonna go, oh, we were gonna buy this property and a realtor talked us out of it, because
Heidi Bolyard 46:33 they saw information that we didn’t know Realtors knew. And then they’re going to refer you to all of their friends with maybe a real, a real estate agent, because they’re gonna be like a real estate agent was so knowledgeable
D.J. Paris 46:45 1,000% I’m sold, I this is a great place to wrap up. Because I don’t want to beat this point in any further, this is just really cool information that I don’t, I’m sure to, you know, there’s parts of it that you can find online and other places, but why not just go to one place and learn it from a respected professional in the industry. Heidi is awesome. Her company is incredibly well respected. And she has wants to teach this to realtors as well. It’s just a passion of hers. So go to sold by design dotnet, there’s a free white paper about three things that you need to know as a Realtor that will help you make money faster, help you start down the path of thinking, like an engineer thinking like an architect. And then there’s all sorts of other she has, she has courses she has coaching, she, you know, has all sorts of resources there where you’ll start to learn. And if you’re looking to invest in your business, you know, you can invest in buying leads, or you can do other marketing efforts. But how often are you investing in your own skill set? Right? This is a skill that varies, I would assume less than 1% of Realtors really have I’m just making that number up. But it’s probably about right maybe one to 5% of Realtors know how to think like
Heidi Bolyard 47:56 realtors that have been out there for a while. So just really state agents the opportunity to just jumpstart their growth. I love
D.J. Paris 48:04 it and really separate yourself from everybody else. So guys, if you’re thinking about increasing your skill set this year, and maybe maybe things are a little slower right now, because the market shifted. This is the time to invest in your skills. And imagine being able to say to your client, you know, hey, I’ve been trained by architects to look for certain things. So I’m going to ask you some some questions. So we can have a really, really great experience here together. And boy, that’ll separate you from everybody else. So everyone visit sold by design.net. Heidi and her team run by she is busy. She’s she’s doing development, she’s doing renovation, she’s doing home construction, she does it all. And she finds time to teach you guys how to think like her. So let’s use Heidi’s knowledge and reach out and learn like so that you can think like Heidi so everyone go to sold by design.net. Heidi, I want to thank you for being on our show. I was so excited to have you. This is such a unique episode for us. And I hope that our audience so much for having me. Yeah. And I hope our audience appreciated it as much as I do. I know they did. So everyone go to Seoul by design.net. And on behalf of our audience, we think Heidi, she is a busy architect. She doesn’t have time to do these silly podcasts. But she took time because she wants to help realtors and so we appreciate that. So on behalf of the audience, we say thank you. And on behalf of Heidi and myself, we want to thank the audience for sticking around to the end, please just we ask you to do two things for us. One, tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from you know this particular episode with Heidi and send them a link to this episode. You can just have them, send them right over to keeping it real pod.com. And also, leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on. Leave us a review. Let us know write us some comments. We want to always continue to improve to better meet your needs. All right, Heidi. Well, it was a pleasure to Adding with you we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Heidi.
Heidi Bolyard 50:03 Thank you have a great day.
Why You Should Always Listen To The End • Ben Lalez
Sep 28, 2022
Ben Lalez with The Ben Lalez Team discusses how he went from an individual producer to leading one of the largest teams in Chicago. Ben describes how he and his team nurture a lead and the processes they use. Ben also discusses what changes are being seen by him and his team in the market with the changes in interest rates. Ben goes back to the beginning and describes how he got into real estate business and also describes where he sees his team headed in the future. Ben and D.J. discuss what comes next for the real estate market. Last, Ben discusses the interpersonal side of his team.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does a top 1% Producer nurture their leads? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today we have a returning guest, Ben lawless from the bend LoL is team here in Chicago with Compass. And this is a really exciting episode because not only is Ben going to tell you exactly how his team nurtures, leads, and by the way, they have just in the last several years closed 335 million in real estate, but also he I went to his office to shoot this. So if you’re listening to us, check out the video version because Ben’s team professionally shot and edited this and it looks amazing way better than anything we could do. So I want to thank Ben for you know, really taking some initiative and helping us look even better than we normally do, which is not very good. But Ben’s team did an outstanding job and he provides so much value in this conversation that you’re going to love it. So without further ado, let’s just get right to it. My second conversation with one of my favorite people in real estate Ben lawless.
Today on the show, we have Ben Lalas from the Ben Lalas team here in Chicago. Ben’s actually been on the show before. And if I sound in a little different, and if I look a little different, it’s because I’m actually in Ben’s amazing Bucktown office. And he so generously invited me to come along and I’m excited to see you again. Yeah, let’s let me tell you a little bit more about Ben. We’ll keep it short, because we have a lot to sort of talk about. But Ben really started as a general contractor, he went full time in real estate in 2019. And I want you to pay attention to these numbers, because in 2017, he did 4 million in production in 2018 14 million, so a $10 million jump in just one year. The next year he did 24 million another $10 million jump. And in the trailing 12 months, Ben Wallace team has closed 165 million in production. And it’s just incredible. There’s 45,000 Real estate agents here in the Chicagoland area. I’ve yet to see somebody quite grow so quickly and build a team as fast as Ben has. He is a household name here in Chicago amongst agents. But Ben and his team pride themselves on thinking and dreaming big and never getting out hustled. To learn more about Ben and his team, please visit Ben lawless.com. That’s BNLAL easy.com Ben is a real pleasure to be here in your office.
Ben Lalez 4:15 It’s almost like I didn’t provide all of those stats to you.
D.J. Paris 4:19 By my crack team of well, it would be I was gonna say researchers but it was you who sent us this information but really you are all I am on the Chicago Association of Realtors, which is our local association. I’m on our YPN committee which is for young professional network which is ironic because I am 46 I’m I shouldn’t technically be allowed to be on there still look
Ben Lalez 4:40 good. Thank you. That’s the game.
D.J. Paris 4:45 But what’s funny is every year what we do YPN and Ben knows this because he’s been to many of these events is we have these these breakfasts where we bring in top producers and so we have to plan these as an as a committee and your name has come up I’ve been in the maybe two years of my third year will be this next year, your name will come up again, every meeting next year, it came up every meeting this year, because of the explosive growth, people don’t understand it. Other agents are inspired slash jealous of this. It’s really, really cool to be here and to have your attention because you are, I don’t want to say even a rising star, because you’re obviously already one of the top producers here in Chicago. But the fact that you rose so quickly, is just I’ve yet to see it. And in anyone else. So congratulations on the team success.
Ben Lalez 5:32 Man, I didn’t expect so much flattery right out of the gates. But, you know, we appreciate it. It’s, you know, there’s no secret says, you know, just hard work.
D.J. Paris 5:41 Well, tell us a little bit about, you know, we you’ve been on the show before. And this was bad. It was so funny, because after we got done talking, Ben had sort of shared with me, he said, he said we really ready to take this to the next level. And I said, Okay, you know, and I, but you know, most people will say that, right? Like, that’s a very common thing that people who own businesses, or who have a team in real estate will say, Hey, we’re poised to go to the next level. And not everyone does. And then you just legitimately went to that next level, just as you said, you would in the timeframe, you said you would, and I want to know all about how you went from being an individual producer. And it’s in look, it’s not like you work at a little small company, where they just decided, You know what, everyone’s going to work with Ben, because he’s the, he’s the top sales guy in our office, you work for one of the top, you know, producing companies in the industry compass. You know, you are for lack of a better word, a cog in this wheel of compass. It’s an impressive wheel. But you are an impressive cog in that wheel. But you’re also one of 1000s of agents here. And yet you have risen even to the top of compass here in the local market. Tell us? I mean, I just I just love hearing how people do that. So yeah, share with me,
Ben Lalez 7:00 what’s really interesting is, when we first did this podcast, it was in 2020, right before COVID or late 2019. Right? And knows, right when I moved over to Compass, I think it was probably February of 2020 2020. Oh, right. Before we had our 2019 numbers, they were out. Yeah. And I was sitting, you know, on this podcast at my single desk at the compass officer. And, you know, I was just happy to be on the podcast, you guys had reached out to me, and I’m like, Oh, my God, this is unbelievable. And I didn’t know, you know, we didn’t talk about what the title of the podcast would be. But I you know, I remember it, there’s no chance there’s no way you remember, I don’t it was four to 24 million. That sounds right. Two years. Yeah. And, you know, now we’ve gone from 24 to 165, in another three years? And to answer your question, and like, for anyone who’s listening, it’s all about I mean, it’s leads and sales, right. And throughout my entire career, you know, even when I was doing 4,000,014, whatever the numbers were, my whole philosophy has been, you know, grow, organically, whatever feels normal for me, and then make the necessary changes if it feels right, just head in that direction. So what happened with me and, you know, growth doesn’t happen by accident, right, there was a game plan. But what I always tell people is, you know, you’re only as good as your sales, you’re only as good as your leads. So every time we, you know, I personally had too much business to handle, what do you do, you bring on another agent. And then when us three had too much business to handle, you hire another agent, and so on and so forth. And you know, now we have, you know, a large team. It’s one of the largest in Chicago, but it’s only because we have enough business to go around. There are teams out there who are hiring for ego, in my opinion. This has nothing to do with that we’re hiring out of, I only hire out of need, Sebastian is sitting right to our left, hired out of need our second videographer hired out of need, we have two isas. Do you get where I’m going with this is hired out of need, but it’s only because we have enough to go around. And all of these people are necessary to keep, you know, the boat afloat, if you will. Well, it’s
D.J. Paris 9:21 funny because I you hear so much about 10x or 3x 5x, you know, depending on on how much you pay attention to things like valuation and, and growth and a lot of its, you know, for lack of a better word marketing sort of smoke and mirrors Bs, and it’s the promise of something that rarely ever happens. Businesses usually don’t 10x I mean, it’s certainly possible, but you sort of have done that. And I don’t know what the actual x is from 14
Ben Lalez 9:50 to 165. If you want to look at it that way. Yeah, pretty significant. Four years. Yeah, yeah. And four
D.J. Paris 9:54 years so you’ve actually done that. So it’s not just like, hey, we’ve just organically grown I mean, yes. Have, but you’ve organically grown in a way that that’s almost exponential. And that to me is is interesting. And yes, of course it’s leads in business. Everything is leads in business when it comes to growth. But how were you able to accelerate it so much nothing was handed to you now. And that’s the other thing, that’s really important. Because a lot of times, when people get to certain levels of production, things do start to happen for them, things are handed to them. But that really wasn’t your path.
Ben Lalez 10:31 Now, so I’ll answer this two ways. One, people have to, this is my fourth business that, you know, I think if it is a business now, right, I’m not just a real estate agent. This is a business that, you know, I’ve cultivated, I had a business in college, I was a general contractor, I was a property manager. You know, this is now what I consider my fourth business, what you what I’ve learned along the way is, I mean, the most cliche thing ever, you have to spend money to make this kind of money. I mean, you’d be shocked if I showed you what my expense ratio is, you’re absolutely shocked. But you have to be very, very on top of your numbers. So I’m the one hand, I think a huge part of this, as I’m thinking about it a little bit differently, where people don’t come into the business understanding that this hat, I’m a company, we are Ben law, LLC, we’re established, we have, you know, expense reports, we have PNLs. And the average agent listening to this, I would imagine, that’s not how they’re entering, right, I have the benefit of other businesses that either I shut down or have frankly, failed, and you learn from them. The second way I would answer is this. I mean, you’re you’re a perfect example, DJ, right before this podcast started your I think your watch lit up and you got the alert, right? And how I mean, your eyes lit up.
D.J. Paris 11:53 So So yeah, just to peel back the curtain. So I recruit agents. And I got a lead. From one of our web, somebody visited our website said, Hey, I’m thinking about joining your company. I was beside myself for a moment that I couldn’t immediately respond to do we have it
Ben Lalez 12:09 on camera? I think we haven’t. And this is where we insert it right here possible, where you He looked at his watch.
Unknown Speaker 12:14 And he was like, Oh, I was like, oh, so we just started I gotta leave. Yeah.
Ben Lalez 12:17 So you know, however many years in, you know, if we get a lead via any channel, I’m getting the same notification. And, you know, if it’s a fit here, today, $13,000 parking spot, right, come, you know, someone wants to buy a $13,000 parking spot. I am making sure that whoever is getting assigned to is, you know, actually taking care of this client and may not be the sexiest thing in the world, we know it’s not, but you never know where it’s gonna lead. So every single lead, no matter how attractive or unattractive gets handled the exact, exact same way. And I think that’s a huge part of this is what is that way, it’s our system. It’s the, you know, cheesy as hell like the bend. Lala is whacked. I’ve taught it to 22 people. Now, lead comes in, you do a B, C, D, E, and the system, we use Salesforce, like it’s going to tell you exactly what to do. And when, and just do it. And if you continue to do it over and over and over, and we have a you know, funny saying like a lead isn’t dead until they tell you to screw off. Yeah, till I tell you to eff off is what we say. Yeah. And, and we have it for, you know, 365 days is our policy short where I want to, I want proof that you were talking to a wall for 365 days. And then cool, let’s kill it. Like, let’s kill the lead, and then you move on. But how many agents do you know that don’t follow up on a lead.
D.J. Paris 13:46 So I used to work. Before I got into real estate, I worked for a tech company that generated health insurance leads for health insurance agents. So we were at the time the company I worked at, we were producing about 15,000 leads a day. And then we were selling them to agents all over the country. And so one of my jobs was to help educate the lead buyer about because, of course, as a company, we want them to keep buying leads. So we have to teach them how to work these leads. We had millions of leads, data, we had millions of leads that we could go through our data and look through our servers. And actually, we had a CRM that was that would come with it. Now not everyone used our CRM. But for people who did use our CRM, we were able to take a look at that data and see how quickly an agent would drop a lead. And it was shocking. So what we found was that the average consumer when they need to buy health insurance, it would take them about 13 days before they’d actually make a buying decision. It’s kind of complicated. You got to call your doctors are you in network with this Bob? You know, it’s not quite as simple as as as other types of services. So it takes a couple of weeks, so that the buying decision happens on day 13 On average, most of our buyers would give up by day three. So here’s of the leads of the leads. Yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah. So the agents would they would buy these leads, they would, they would call, you know, maybe they’d call 10 times in three days, they’d give up persons not interested, they’d move on, we find, well, that person actually, about another week from now is really going to make that decision. Yep. So I think we’re, you know, we’re sort of saying the same thing, speaking
Ben Lalez 15:20 the exact same language. And, you know, a lot of it is, you know, for the first six months, you know, me or one of our sales managers is looking at every single lead, and we want to see that something was logged, every single day, we have like a whole process for how often before you get to recategorize them, sure, we just, you know, this is what I discovered from four to 14 and 14 to 23 million, okay, this works, and then we just duplicate it and poured gasoline on it and spent more money and, you know, people who are listening who are spending money on I don’t care what lead Ave, like, even agents on my team follow up to three times, if it doesn’t pay right away, they move on. And we have ways to make sure like I’m notified when that occurs. And we track conversion ratios pretty intensely here. So you get a lead, you know, we expect a certain conversion ratio, um, that lead for you know, the year and just do it over and over and over and over again, until you want to rip your hair out.
D.J. Paris 16:21 It’s really funny, I was driving right right down the street here. Because our offices are pretty close to each other I, I drive by this guy has got a billboard. And this is such a perfect example of follow up, although it’s going to be in the, we’re going to have to, you’d have to make a little bit of a mental leap here to to get to sort of get my best DJ. Well, it’s more for the audience. I you and I live here so you, you might have even seen it. There’s this guy’s got a ski cap and and he’s got a billboard needs to be kind of doesn’t look like a celebrity. And his I guess his name is Tim. And it says Tim cast in, which would lead me to think he has a podcast, his name’s Tim. That’s about all I know. And that’s all that it says that it says weeknights, from seven to eight, everywhere podcasts are streamed, and he’s got these billboards, and I go, it’s unusual. I’ve never seen a podcast like that in here in Chicago with a billboard. And I thought, oh, maybe he’s trying it for a month kind of God only knows what it costs. And now it’s a second month. And so finally I was like, just because I drove by it every single day. I’m like, I’m gonna check out what this guy is. Now it turns out, he’s, it’s a political show. And it’s not really my cup of tea at all. But I checked it out. Because he was in a way following up with me by I was seeing his face every day for about two months. And finally, I was like, I gotta figure out who this guy is. And again, that’s not a perfect metaphor. This is not this is perfect. But it’s all about repetition. And it’s about
Ben Lalez 17:46 layering, you’re layering these touch points. So I’m sure he was trying to get on some other your LinkedIn news. Oh, for
D.J. Paris 17:53 sure. Yeah, try. He’s not just doing billboards, I just happen to drive by it every day. But for agents who are listening, I mean, you. This is the wonder of technology. I mean, there’s a lot of things that that we could argue with the particular social media that maybe divide us and make us less happy. But from a business perspective, what a great opportunity to stay in touch with your contacts, know what they’re up to know where they’re going on vacation, and being able to comment on things outside of real estate, as a way as a as a touch point, versus just Hey, you ready to buy yourself, you have all this opportunity information is just be people just give away their lives online. And so you now have reasons to contact them and talk about it. And I’m curious for you how often or what is so you have some you know, lead comes in, you have them at least set up for 365 365 days of contact. Yeah, what do you usually find is, is what is the usually time to? How long does it take before they actually become a client? Yeah,
Ben Lalez 18:52 so I’ll kind of just give it away, because I mean, no one’s actually going to implement it. So lead comes in, everyone knows speed to lead, you need to contact that on the first, you know, we want to do it in the first 30 seconds. Sure, whatever. Once you know, hopefully, best case scenario, they become a client and you’re interacting every single day, and you guys live happily ever after you sell them a home. But if that doesn’t occur, what we want is four touch points the first day, and if they’re complete silence or not interacting, you put them on the shelf for three days. They come back, you hit them four more times, and this is all logged. If you can’t get them to engage. You put them on the shelf for a week, they come back, you know, the system tells you it’s time to reach out to DJ again, right? Hit him for more time. So what at that seven? day mark one week mark,
D.J. Paris 19:36 you have a better sense of where they’re at. Yeah. And then you know,
Ben Lalez 19:39 I let them put them on the shelf for a month. They come back you hit him four more times. Put on the shelf for three months, they come back, hit him four more times, put them on the shelf for six months, and then you know hit them four more times. And then after you aggregate all of that time that was a year they hit they come back after six months you know you try again. And you try to get them to engage. And we, you know, we can talk about exactly how we go about that. But you know, after that a lot of this is like, okay, you can feel good about how much effort you put in. So that’s four times I don’t even know, I think it’s eight. So it’s like 32 attempts to get someone to engage with you feel like that’s enough, don’t you? Yeah, that our numbers prove it, it is enough.
D.J. Paris 20:21 It is enough. And but it’s getting to that 32, right, that that most people aren’t? Well, it’s not that they’re not willing to, they don’t have a system that would tell them, you’re now at step 17. And you’re halfway through the process. And you’re six months, this is totally normal, this person’s blowing you off totally normal, it’s okay. It’s part of the process, it takes the emotion out of it, it’s I’m just running the program, essentially. So
Ben Lalez 20:45 here’s one of the biggest challenges I hear from agents across the city, country, etc, is, you can always do more, your work is never done. People don’t know when their day is done. So the system that we have, you know, I just told you about how people cycled through. So you have top priority clients, you put them on the shelf, they’re ignored, and then they become top priority clients, again, after X period of time, that’s how the system is set up. It’s actually really stupid, really simple. Sure. I you know, some people like brand new, maybe only have 10, top priority clients, Joey helper, and on my team, for example, he probably has 60 top priority clients. And that means that they need some form of contact today. Right. So it’s obviously going to take Joey a lot longer than a, you know, a brand new agent. But for both of them, it’s the same philosophy. After you get done with your top priority clients, your date is finished, it’s done. And that’s like a really big unlock, and a lot of my agent’s heads were like, go to the gym. Yeah, go on, go take your significant other out, like, go do whatever makes you happy. Let me handle the leads, let me handle the infrastructure, let me handle your transaction management, let me handle your social media, your day is done. Right, you may want to work on some other aspects of your business plan, be it marketing, you know, we have a lot of like, where we’re sitting, if you like, look at our videos, like we do a ton of our video here. So people just literally funnel in and out of that door, we handle it, we post it for you, et cetera. But that’s like the, that’s how this was built. I want you know, I wanted to know, when my day was done. Yeah. And it was impossible. Because follow up is theoretically neverending, right? Like you could prospect 24 hours a day, theoretically. But you know, we developed a way to, you know, it was through a lot of trial and error, do this. And you’re done.
D.J. Paris 22:42 You know, we talk about competition, especially around around lead generation. So, you know, we all get emails from, you know, these unknown surfaces that are promising Facebook leads, you know, or you can go there more traditional route with realtor.com, Zillow, etc. And then there’s of course, you know, referrals from existing clients. What What have you found to be because everyone else I talked to who has not grown, I’ve never met anyone who’s quite had the the growth that you’ve had. So everyone else I talked to, has grown strictly organically, but when you talked about pouring gas on the fire, you’re talking about investing into the business? Yep, finding, finding those people that raise their hand and say, I want to talk to a realtor. And and I’m what I’m curious about is what is the competition look like? Meaning understanding that the person who fills out a lead form and in get set your way, good chance that they might have filled out a lead form? And are also talking to another agent? Come on? So of course, all right, so how is it as competitive as somebody who isn’t participating in this sort of space? Or is it less competitive than that
Ben Lalez 23:57 it’s way less competitive, especially we’ll call it at this level, where we are trained, like we are training every single day, about how to go about, you know, XY and Z scenarios, so that when there’s another agent, we have to assume we assume that there’s another agent in the picture. Sure. So like we preach, you know, if you’re going to meet someone for the first time, at some point, you need to ask them for their business. Right? You know, it’s not just all right, nice to meet you know, like, our line right is and we call it a call it like the soup talk after the first showing is Hey, DJ Has anyone ever actually walked you through the home buying process here in Chicago?
D.J. Paris 24:38 And the answer that is almost always no,
Ben Lalez 24:40 especially especially with a lead like a full lead off of Zillow? realtor.com Yeah, like face whatever. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 24:46 definitely a no yeah. Oh, no. Oh,
Ben Lalez 24:49 well, do you have a couple of minutes for us to you know, run through it.
Unknown Speaker 24:53 Perfect. I love it. So
Ben Lalez 24:54 what we see happen is like this a sigh of relief like Oh, thank god someone like a human being is actually going to spend the time to walk me through it. But hey, DJ, Okay, step one is finding a real estate agent, someone like me to walk you through everything, A to Z. So if everything works out, I’d love to be that guy for you. Step one, A, we need to introduce you to a lender. I assume you don’t have $500,000 sitting under a mattress. This is a recording. So like, literally, like we have a recording. Yeah. And everyone needs to repeat a to z, sure, verbatim the way I say it, right? Because it’s your team. Yeah. And then once you have polished, you can put your spin on it, I don’t really care. But like that needs, we need to get to that we call it the stoop talk the right hook, you need to tell them like, Hey, this is who I am. This is what I’m going to do for you. But a lot of people like don’t have you know, a lead starts with a call or click or whatever. But there’s probably 40 steps to actually you know, converting this client into a I’m sorry, converting this lead into an actual client. And we have every single tiny little step formalized systemized, there’s no guessing anymore. And it’s like what I, essentially what I did to go from zero to 14, and then we just copied it. There’s agents on the team right now. I think we have four or five agents doing, you know, 10 plus million. It’s amazing. And some of them have, you should probably be interviewing them, they’re going on like zero to 10, in 12 months. That’s incredible. We have agents who, like got their license and are doing 7 million in their first year, I’m talking about, you know, Mara, if you look on our website, now, all the recruiters are gonna go after her, but
D.J. Paris 26:43 But I mean, it’s, it really is impressive. It’s, it’s, I found in pretty much every area of life, not just specifically to being a successful real estate agent, but it’s discipline and systems, it’s consistency, and it’s about the marathon, right, like, it’s just understanding that, that this is the process. And it takes, I think, I think being reactive takes a huge emotional toll. It wears me out when I’m when I’m reactive. And I know that realtors have to really figure out the balance of being proactive versus reactive, because things are flying at them all day long. emails, texts, you know, and trying to figure out how to bat that stuff away. And, you know, service the client at the same time. Also understanding how do I get this back into this process? How do I just keep this process going? To me processes? It’s funny, I think most back to your point about asking for business. I think most people don’t have any scripts at all. Right, honestly. And now, the people I interview on on this show, yes, they are people that are that they they know their pitch. They know how to present their successful like people like yourself, of course. But for our listeners if you don’t have an elevator pitch, like locked and loaded a 22nd. So when I do, this is how I can be helpful. And then here’s how to get to the next step. Oh, if if you want to give me your your email and phone number, I can send you some more information, or whatever the next step might be, if you don’t have that ready and locked, like you’re gonna just miss opportunity after opportunity after I think most people don’t even have that.
Ben Lalez 28:32 I want to play a game, I was actually looking to see if anyone was here, where you I want to like pull on one of my agents. And you just hit him with you know, a common sales objection. Sure. And you know, that person and I would say the exact same words to you at the exact same speed, the exact same tone. And that’s, you know, 22 deep mate, you know, we have four newer agents and zero, we’re still teaching them but the other 18 will say the exact same stuff to you. Yeah. And, you know, we don’t want people to think too hard. This business isn’t rocket science. The what I continue to tell these agents who I’m sending out on appointments is, whoever your meeting is, they got really lucky that it’s you. Yeah, right. As opposed to someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re doing. You have a ton of infrastructure behind you. There’s an absolute even if you don’t know the question, in real time, I’m sorry, you don’t know the answer to the question. And in real time, I guarantee someone here knows and you can acquire that information in under five minutes. Right. So I mean, that’s a huge part of this and a huge part of I think our value proposition under this roof is like you You skipped for years.
D.J. Paris 29:47 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by More than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, and the team teams have have I believe recruiting for realtors is it’s all going to be teams in the next it’s already pretty much is. But it’s certainly trending that way. And teams are just becoming more and more important. Because to the client. There’s there’s an obvious value proposition there. That’s that makes sense. To the agent, there’s an obvious value proposition there because you get the experience, like you were just saying, and the support and the wisdom of the team collectively. And I think you know is is this Do you think this is the death knell of the individual agent? Is that is the individual agent on their way out?
Ben Lalez 31:48 I don’t I personally, I personally don’t think so I think if you’re a good solo agent, I, I think you can still sell your value proposition like, Hey, you’re only dealing with me, every phone call every text, the lender, everything is gonna go through me and I got you. And it all depends if that’s what the consumer wants. Now, something for sure that we know, you know, after doing this for enough time is to get to call it 50 closed clients, it’s going to take you a whole hell of a lot longer to get there. Something that we talk about is dollar per hour. I mean, ad nauseam, like that’s all we talk about. And that’s what I’m trying to do is like, yeah, you may on those your first 20 humans that you close, you may make less money, but you got to those 20, probably four or five times faster than you ever would. And those 20 areas, you know, at least here those 20 are yours. Right. So you you know, for the rest of your career, those 20 you can jump to you know, your company like, right, those 20 are yours. And that’s I think somewhere around 50 or 75 closings is enough to, you know, perpetuate an entire career and you know, nurture those people correctly. It’s a really good
D.J. Paris 33:08 point. Yeah, it is funny. I love hearing those, those stories to where it’s like, I built my whole career off of 10 people or 20 people. And and yeah, absolutely. And but if you if you want to, if you want to grow beyond that, that’s where you got to start reinvesting. And what’s been your experience with with lead providers? I’m curious on on, have you found lead quality going up down staying consistent? You know, what have you found?
Ben Lalez 33:37 Are we familiar with the Zillow FLEX program before we jump in here?
D.J. Paris 33:40 So let me let me just explain to the audience, what we’re talking about. So Zillow FLEX program is basically so OP city, came onto the scene. And as a counter to what Zillow was doing at the time, where Zillow was just selling leads directly to agents price per lead kind of scenario, you know, somebody raises their hand, they want to talk to an agent that’s going to be a certain amount of money. opportunity comes along and says, We’re gonna give you the lead free up front, and you’re going to pay for it on the back end. So free up front, and then we’re going to take so Zillow says, Okay, we’re going to try that as well. That’s the Zillow live transfer. So it’s not available in every market only actually only in a few markets at this point, I believe, but leads free upfront pay at closing.
Ben Lalez 34:26 Yes. So, you know, we can just be I’ll peel the curtain back. So in 2019 2020, I was spending about 20 G’s 20 grand a month on Zillow leads paid up front. Sure, and we were getting something like 35 Live transfers. So there’s calls versus nurture leads, which are, frankly garbage. So of those 35 You know, we were making good enough money I was like, you know, we’re spreading you know, spreading these leads around, and they came a knock on our door and they were like, hey, like, we want you to spend more money. I’m like, get outta here. I’m spending 20 grand a month like, leave me alone. Isn’t that enough for you?
D.J. Paris 35:09 They should erect a statue to you. Yeah.
Ben Lalez 35:12 I mean, there are people who are who were spending way more. Oh, sure. So they’re like, Hey, we think you’d be a good candidate for this program. And I listened and I was really, you know, very scared about it. Because what I was doing was working. Objectively, you know, I was tracking ROI. As crazily as anyone you’ve ever met? I wanted to make sure that this $20,000 A month make sense? Yeah. Go figure. Right. Yeah. So we decided to do it. And our connection volume that 35 didn’t go up right away. But you know, I wasn’t paying for it upfront. I was like, Okay, this feels good. Fast forward. We’re only on it for you know, we’ve only been on it for 1516 months, we get 165 of those live transfers a month. Wow. Has our call quality gone down? Has our lead quality gone down with Zillow who has I mean, right. That’s our bread and butter. We mean 50% of that 165 is not really probably 35% of that 165 is from Zillow leads Sure. Has the quality gone down in the last three, four or five months? Yes, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Zillow or any other lead provider. I think the buyer quality has gone down dramatically. The people who were most serious all did what they needed to do in 21, and early part of 22. Now you have these people who are just like, these wet noodles, like, Oh, I didn’t, you know, interest rates were too low. There was too much competition. Interest rates are too high. Like, why aren’t Why aren’t these properties moving? So I think it’s more about the consumer, like consumer dynamics have changed? Not necessarily I think Zillow is and realtor I think they’re probably doing the same thing they’ve always done or the, I think a just as interesting a question is what is Zillow doing with market based pricing versus Zillow flex, and that’s all conjecture. But, you know, right now, we’re not feeling the burden quite as much as others that you know, I’ve spoken to,
D.J. Paris 37:19 ya know, and it all it the reason I was asking that question was was only because I know your systems are, are, they’re flexible, but they’re also pretty well established. So I was curious if you’ve found in any change, with interest rates, of course, changing. Inventory has changed. What are what are the biggest challenges your team is facing right now? Like, what are you guys dealing with?
Ben Lalez 37:44 Absolutely, no doubt about it. It’s so we are still 75% buyers. Buyers are flimsier. They aren’t as serious. They aren’t. Like once they go under contract, like way more are falling out and not having anything to do with the property. They just get cold feet. They just like oh, I you know, they’re coming up with any excuse you imagine, to fall out. And I think the biggest thing is is so we’re across all our lead sources, our conversion ratio is still about the same. But the time it takes to get someone across that finish line. You heard me talk about dollar per hour. Yeah, dollar per hour is going way down. So it’s taking whereas it may take 30 hours from call to going under contract, like and, you know, we’ve become used to, I think that 30 hours has become 70 hours. Wow. So I mean, in a very real way, you’re making half the money. Right? And, you know, that’s what these things like, they’re not. They weren’t intuitive to me when I first came here. Sure. Like, but that’s how, you know, we’re, we’re training people how to think DJ, let me ask you a question. Yes. Turn the tables, please. What’s your dollar per hour? If you’re sitting at home? Yeah. And you’re, you’re doing something that you love your eye? Right? You’re playing tennis, your work, whatever, whatever, whatever the cases, you’re relaxing? How much does it cost? To have you stop? And come do whatever I asked you to do? For one hour?
D.J. Paris 39:22 Yeah, I you know, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I truthfully, don’t know.
Ben Lalez 39:30 Yeah, like, and it’s not it’s not a really easy question. But it’s an important one. Yeah. So and there’s a couple ways that I have my people think about it. And that’s like, just because you may not make, you know, your $200 An hour right there. Right. What is the potential of that hour? Exactly? Right. So for me, like I have to see a path to somewhere around $1,000 an hour for me to do take on a new client. And for me to do this, right, for example, sure, there needs to be a path to $1,000. It may not happen right now. But it could definitely happen in the future. And why? Because especially in the brokerage business, if I’m gonna take on four clients, or I’m gonna take on 10 meetings with leads 10 appointments, that’s at least 10 hours, but we know that only one and a half of them are going to transact, right. So if you’re not, you know, if you don’t value your time, quite enough, you’re just going to be spinning your wheels, right? So, I mean, for all those listener listeners out there, like, what is your dollar per hour like JP, who was sitting out here before? He’s like, Man, I have no idea like 20 bucks, I’m like, okay, and now he’s up to, you know, 200 He needs to see a path to $200 an hour, because it’s probably going to shake out to one 125 or something. After it’s all said and done. And 125 an hour is not a it’s not a bad living.
D.J. Paris 40:57 No, no, it’s a fantastic living. I think that’s just Sure. It’s good. I think this is really interesting.
Ben Lalez 41:11 Yeah, it’s more team lead stuff, then, you know, I don’t know who your primary who’s your
D.J. Paris 41:17 audience are. People want to hear how you do it. So this is how I mean, you’re, you’re, you know, you’re given the recipe. I think it’s, no one’s gonna follow it. You know, it’s so funny. I, when I, when I first arrived in Chicago in 2001, I worked at Morgan Stanley for many years, and the top financial advisor in the office, he would say the same thing he would go, I’m going to tell you guys exactly what I do, and exactly how I’ve become, you know, the number one guy, and none of you are going to do it. And he’s like, you can all do it. But none of you are gonna do it. Yeah. Or he’s like, one of you will do it or something. And he was absolutely right.
Ben Lalez 41:53 I’m a Gary Vee guy. And he says the exact same thing. Like, you know, one out of 1000 people will actually, honestly, you’ve seen all my video. It’s because of Gary Vee. I’m like, fuck it. Fine. I’ll do it. Yeah, but it’s the it’s the same thing. Like the agents on my team. I’m giving you a you should go start your own team for and make, you know, do a 165
D.J. Paris 42:19 Are your but there is shocked that like, there’s other people like you doing it. Like, aren’t you? Like, how’s nobody? Oh, no,
Ben Lalez 42:25 I’m not surprised anymore. And you know, it’s really interesting, man. I’m having like, this weird moment sitting here with you, where I still felt really, really green. When we first did our interview, and I you know, I was like, I felt like I was faking it. Okay, in 2020 when we did our interview, and now I’m just like, man, like, you know, I do know what I’m doing. Yeah. And why? And why no one else is doing it is has become more and more and more shocking. And I think I’ve figured out some of it. Why not? Everyone? Wants to? Yeah, and can lead primarily?
D.J. Paris 43:03 Well, that’s true. It’s a different skill set. It’s actually a totally different skill set. Because you have to be, you have to do systems. You have to manage, you have to hire. Yeah. So it’s a it’s not typically it’s not typically the same skills that would make you a successful individual agent. Yeah. So you
Ben Lalez 43:23 have to come at it from like this completely, completely different perspective, which I think we lead with is, this is a company, we have a marketing department, we have a sales department, we have a transaction company, we have an IT department. And even on an agent level, like a solo agent level, it’s the same thing. You are the marketing department, you are the sales department, you need to get big enough to outsource Yeah, marketing, outsource outsourced sales.
D.J. Paris 43:48 Do you see yourself more as, as a manager or as a as a co leader? Or as a coach? Yeah,
Ben Lalez 43:54 you’re a coach. Yeah, that’s,
D.J. Paris 43:56 that’s always your definition. You’re I’m a coach.
Ben Lalez 43:58 Yeah, I’m a coach. And I’m also a business owner. But if I’m being again, completely honest, and it’s, you know, I told myself that I would just, you know, open book, I’m interested in outsourcing coaching as well. Sure. I want to outsource everything period. As long as the coaches as good as me or better, I’m still providing value to my agents. Right. Right. And if that person is not also, you know, doing all sorts of things, I’m unavailable right now, if that coach is available. 24/7 That’s probably a better situation for the agents on my team.
D.J. Paris 44:37 Where do you get the most satisfaction? Oh, wow. What do you enjoy the most about? Do? Do you do? Yeah. Do you like being in personal production even though you don’t do that anymore? No, no, what’s your favorite?
Ben Lalez 44:51 So I’m gonna reframe your question for the way my brain works. Like when, like, when and how do I get into flow? Yeah, you And for me, it’s like when I’m creating a new
D.J. Paris 45:02 system, you’re like, Yeah, you like systems? Yeah.
Ben Lalez 45:06 Taking something that isn’t working, correctly, finding that software that or hardware or whatever that will make it work, building out the system in order to implement it. That’s what is most interesting to my weird brain.
D.J. Paris 45:27 Yeah. How did you? How did you end? You were in real estate. You were a GC? Yeah. But how did you how did you decide to do just was real estate more of an entrepreneurial path? Or were you? Were you more about like, some people have that in them where they just, they just see real estate and becomes?
Ben Lalez 45:47 No, it’s, um, kind of goes back to something we spoke about earlier, just like what felt organic. So I’ll tell you a story in 2019. When I went full time, I had like the biggest general contracting job that I ever like, I couldn’t believe that I had won it. And I had baked in so much more juice into the pricing than I ever have. Because dollar per hour. And I didn’t I wasn’t enjoying it every time someone called me like, yeah, you talk a little Yeah. And I’m like, well, that doesn’t happen with the real estate brokering side. And I turned down, I mean, I would have made 150 grand on that one job alone. And I picked up the phone, I’m like, Hey, I don’t even remember the guy’s name. I’m like, Hey, I’m so sorry. But like, my heart just isn’t in this job anymore. I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline. Thank you so much for the opportunity, whatever. And I didn’t take on another job that day. And I, you know, went full steam ahead because this felt right, like, making good money. I enjoy it. At the time, you know, the people aspect was more interesting to me, kind of as you progress in this business. It’s really difficult to like manage I’ve I’ve personally close some somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 transactions. Like, I don’t want to manage more than that I can’t manage more than 400 relationships is not in me. Right? Despite how, like, I may not be super tight with someone. Right, but 400 was enough. But managing, you know, what’s now 22 agents and some staff, I get a ton of, you know, a ton of joy from that.
D.J. Paris 47:25 Yeah, I imagine there’s almost it feels almost like you’re creating a legacy. I think, you know, of sorts. And I don’t mean that from an ego perspective, but you’re actually building something that you have full control over the process, or collaborative control over I should say, you know, you’re the people I know, people on your team, they’re very happy. The but I this idea of skill building is really, really important to you, the skills and systems. You know, I think if if every day if I if I woke up every day, and I focused on a certain skill, and I just spent 10 to 20 minutes developing a particular skill. I feel like I feel like my career would be further along. But also, how could it be further along? Well, I just think I just think that it’s something that we stop doing. When we get into adulthood, we stopped developing skill. And I see it as a huge, huge problem. And, you know, there are really important skills that one can no matter what field you’re in, if you can devote your life to skill, and service, boy, I mean, there, you’re right, there just isn’t that much competition, because most people will end up getting comfortable. And just continuing on.
Ben Lalez 48:51 I think there’s something to be said for, like, I’m relatively young for this volume. They’re not four years old. There’s something to be said for the ability to take risks when you’re younger. And like if it doesn’t work out, whatever, even as I sit here today, I’m way less likely to take a risk because things are working. I’m not going to, you know, I’m pushing myself every day to try and do something bigger and crazier. And I kind of think of it as acquiring a new skill doing something I haven’t done yet and trying to make it work. And it gets more and more challenging every year that goes by.
D.J. Paris 49:34 What’s next for you. Where do you see where do you see the team headed?
Ben Lalez 49:37 I was having a conversation today. And I think the immediate next step what feels right because we do have lead overflow, you’ve heard me talk about it over and again is what feels natural is adding some more agents to support to the existing you know, lead in flow and then see from there? That’s it.
D.J. Paris 50:03 Yeah, it’s funny. I, when I asked, I’ve asked a lot of my guests that over the years, like, Okay, where do you what do you see? And they’re like, just, I’m just gonna keep going, you know, and because you know, they’ve built some sort of system or team or process, it works. And, you know, it’s just a matter of juicing it up a little bit.
Ben Lalez 50:23 So the the reason why it’s such a mundane answer is I recognized early, that every single thing that I do has to be built with scale in mind. So everything that we have, kind of like what you have going on, it doesn’t really make a huge difference right now. If it’s we add one or 30 agents, the infrastructures already built, where it shouldn’t be altered, burdensome. So the question is, like we talked about, a lot of this comes down to like, what is next, forget about, like, what I want to do next, like what is next for real estate, and we talk about making sure that we’re specialists still sitting right over there. So like, we talked about us making sure that we’re first, whatever it is, right. So we think we were even though we’re not the best edit in Chicago, we were first to video. We were. So right now, and everything that we do for video has scaled. So you take a look at me and you take a look at David fields, Alex Bach, Joey Halperin, JP Merritt, they all look exactly like me on all of their social channels, because we built machine right, right for editors overseas, whatever. So what is that next thing? So like we talked about being first in virtual if we’re definitely not first, but the first to like, take it to Bob and Sally homeowner? Sure. Right. So what do you think it is? I don’t know.
D.J. Paris 51:56 I don’t know. I, you know, I remember, years ago, I was, I was fortunate enough to be at a birthday party in San Francisco with somebody who was at the time on the board of directors for I’m going to say Guitar Center. But it could have been another company. I don’t remember. But anyway, it was he was also the CFO of of like a like nerd wallet, or one of those companies Jesus, okay. Yeah. Big, big, big deal tech finance guy. And he really nice guy. And I, I said, I’m getting into real estate, not as an individual producer, but just as a business opportunity. And he goes, agents will not be needed in 10 years. And
Ben Lalez 52:42 when was this again? Was that when was this conversation?
D.J. Paris 52:47 Eight years ago? Okay,
Ben Lalez 52:48 still two years for his prophecy to be fulfilled. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 52:51 And he said, agents are not necessary. And I said, and at the time, I thought, well, that that makes logical sense. Because I’m not I wasn’t a realtor. I’m, technically still, I am a realtor, but I’ve never practiced as a realtor. So I don’t really understand what Realtors do. But but the the, I know how they talk, and I have them on my shows, and I have lots of them in our office, but I don’t actually know the process, embarrassingly enough. But I absolutely thought back then that he was right. I thought, you know, why can’t this be what I’ve been through this process? We don’t, we don’t really need people. But I had enough distance from the actual buying and selling process, as a consumer to sort of forget how challenging it is. And then just a couple years ago, I bought again, and I went through the process. And now now now. So the first time I was in a tech space, I was in a tech job, I know experiences real estate. Now, you know, 10 years into real estate 750 agents at our company, you think I would have a better handle on things and I was like, oh my god, I forgot how I’m crazy and stressful. And I absolutely need help on this. And thank God there’s realtors out there to help me. And it was for my own purchase. And and so and so I he was wrong. Thankfully, because the the the challenge I think he was right in in a lot of ways in zillo comes along and basically says okay, we’re going to take all of the the objective stuff and we’re going to take care of that for you we can pretty much handle a lot of a lot of the facts and figures for you companies like Zillow and other tech providers. And then you Mr. And Mrs. Agent can now come across and you’re the interpersonal component, you’re the person you’re the reason that that you’re going to be able to handle people’s emotional reactions, you’re going to be able to guide them through the process. And by the way, oh, this is one of the most stressful processes that a human being can go through. It’s right up there with death, loss of a job it is from from on a stress, psychological stress level. is moving and buying a home and all of that it’s right up at the top with the most stressful events in someone’s life. And that’s the one part that can’t be automated. So he was wrong about that part of it and the significance of that, that that emotional connection that people have to their homes and making a switch, we all obviously, all of us know. And that’s the cool part about technology is technology can kind of take a lot of that other stuff out of of, you know, your, your to do list, and then you now get to focus on hey, I’m here for you, I’m with you. And I think that’s the coolest part about about this industry is you get to help people make really good decisions. Your team obviously is doing that. Can you talk a little bit about about that part of it, like you guys have all these processes for, you know, converting a lead to a client. But I’m curious on the interpersonal side, like, what are you guys doing to deepen those relationships? Because of course, that’s where the juice,
Ben Lalez 56:03 so it’s really funny what so for, I don’t know what what I heard was, like, if you have processes and systems you can’t have as deep and emotional connection with your clients. Is that what you said?
D.J. Paris 56:17 Well, I don’t believe that I just think having those processes allow you to then focus on and we’re
Ben Lalez 56:23 done, we’re done, we’re on exactly the same page, where because we have so much of the BS handled Exactly. All we preach, I just want you to make sure that the end user, the buyer or seller has the best possible experience and my you know, the people here just have more time to actually do what they’re best at. Yeah, I have, like the people on my team, we I tried to hire for EQ, for emotional intelligence, and we do like a personality test profile, or we’re an Enneagram team. Sure. But, you know, that’s the, the agents on my team are better than me now. Like, they’re so much better at handling buyer seller emotions, they’re probably better at value like valuations. So, just by virtue of them having the time and then the skills that we’re teaching them. We probably do too many trainings. Like that’s also my job is like literally sitting in this room up on that screen. And we go over exactly what to say and do in a whole variety of scenarios. We also spend a weird amount of time DJ essentially in a more or less group therapy. So we have a, you know, a session in this room called talk it out where people just come in and bitch and like, sure we listen, and people bounce stuff off. So that people recognize that, yeah, buyers and sellers are going through the toughest emotional situation that they can imagine. And it’s your job to help them navigate it and making sure that you know, you’re keeping things here because it’s not healthy. For you, personally, it’s also not healthy for your clients, to have you at that same level as them your whole job is to stay even keel. And making sure that that’s said to our agents over and over and over and over again. So that they can deliver. I mean, really, what we’re striving for is like a consistent level of service, right? We have deals from hell we have sure shit that hits the fan, you know, we have, I don’t know, if we have like a bad review or two because ship goes sideways. Right? But when you have stuff kind of all set up and already formalized for people, you know, you can spend time sitting here, like Claude is still over there working on the transactions, he’s our transaction coordinator, you don’t have to worry about that BS, you know,
D.J. Paris 58:50 I think that’s the real huge benefit of the team is that, you know, you with a team, you can develop people in certain ways, and you can develop them with their individual interests and talents. And I think that is, you know, in real estate realtor history has not really been something that Ben that prominent. And now in you were saying some teams, you know, grow for ego, reasons size, you know, hey, I’ve got 30 people on my team. And then you know, teams are structured a million different ways other teams are like everyone’s their own individual practitioner. So it’s not even really it’s more like a company or more like a brokerage in that sense. And then other people are like, Okay, I, you know, these are my roles. But what I think teams can really help people do is is is not have to create an influence those systems that you’ve already established and can execute. So, it is really funny. One of my very first interviews I ever had with on this podcast was a woman in the suburbs of Chicago. You And she had said, you can she’s like, you can give me anybody and I will, I will make them six figures by this time next year. But they have to do everything I say, she’s like, I’m she’s like, I’m not. I’m not saying that as an ego thing. She’s like, I legitimately know how to do this. And you sort of have that same mentality. Yeah. It’s really pretty remarkable, actually. Because I know, and I know, a lot of our listeners are, you know, wake up every day going, what do I do today? What should I be doing? Where should I be focusing my time? Oh, my gosh, there’s so many things coming at me. How do I proactively build my business? How do I respond to clients? You know, it’s a lot, it really is a lot. And I think that’s we’re going to see a flight to teams, we’ve already started to see it, this flight to teams, people like you who have these processes in place, they’re like, settle down, I got you, I’m going to create the structure that you need. And I’m going to walk you through this, and you’re gonna have a wonder you’re gonna actually have more freedom through the structure that I’m giving you.
Ben Lalez 1:00:59 Yeah, it’s interesting, because I also see the way teams are run. And we, you know, work hard play hard is a cliche, like there are teams that pride themselves on, like, no days off, worthy. I mean, exact exact opposite. If you can make as if you can make money at a high dollar per hour, and service your clients appropriately. I want you to take as many days off as you can. Because our philosophy is work hard, like rest, heart recharge, yeah, hard. But getting back to one of your other points, the way and this is something I’m still kind of sussing out. So like, there’s 22, agents, the or like, and we’re all sharing in some capacity, a transaction coordinator, videographer, CRM, like it’s a co op in some weird way, this where instead of hey, DJ, why don’t you and I go hire an assistant together, like all kind of handled already. And like, I’ll go like, and if we need a second transaction coordinator, I’ll go, you know, I’ll handle it if we need. Fourth videographer, like I’ll go handle it. And everyone on the team trusts that my hiring processes are also tight, just like every other system. So I mean, pretty, like preaching to the choir here. How tight are your hiring systems?
D.J. Paris 1:02:17 Yeah, pretty tight. You know, for us, if I had, if I had to wake up every day and try to figure out what I was supposed to do that day, I would be a mess, I would be, I probably would have, I don’t know that I would even be on this earth anymore, it would be so stressful, because I have a lot of responsibilities. And I’ve, you know, multiple companies you do as well. And this idea of of having to, you know, create structure, it’s the only way for me, it allowed what structure has done for me as allowed me to be more creative, oddly enough. Because when I when I can devote a specific amount of time to creativity, being that if I can structure my creativity, as crazy as that sounds, it actually works much, much better. And I’m a creative person, I don’t want structure. I don’t like structure. I don’t like doing the same thing over and over and over over again. But it works for me. And it works for probably most of us as well. So I don’t think it’s it’s just, you know, me being the sort of artsy podcast guy, I think most of us in this industry could benefit from, from having a more salary style job. Fortunately, you know, you can join a team and have a similar experience a hybrid experience, a hybrid experience with a lot more income.
Ben Lalez 1:03:35 Yeah. And I mean, that’s what I’m trying to provide to these agents is high dollar power, and flexibility. Some teams like you can potentially make more money, no doubt, but they own your schedule, like you do what I say when I say it, et cetera. And I’m trying to toe this line, and it’s worked so far. Yeah, were like, Yeah, I’d like you to come to these trainings. They’re not 100% mandatory, like, you need to use my CRM, it’s not like 100% mandatory. You don’t have to tell me when you’re going on vacation or anything like that. But at some point, if you don’t do things the way we say, it’s gonna, you know, it’s gonna cause problems for me, right? Because you’re not producing at a level that we all you know, expect at the end of the day. It is a company and you need to bring in money so that I can keep the lights on not only for you, but for everybody, you know, for everybody else.
D.J. Paris 1:04:36 I mean, really, you I think what we’re talking about is is you know, I don’t want to sound pejorative because it isn’t
Ben Lalez 1:04:45 definition of pejorative for those fans, not for me, I know what it means.
D.J. Paris 1:04:50 But for everyone else, it’s a it’s a fancy a fancy word for for, like, being a slight too. Somebody or being critical. This is not a criticism at all, I actually are not being pejorative, I am not being considered. But it does sound what I’m about to say is this is business one on one. And and that is not not to say that it’s simple and easy. It’s not. But it is important, right? So if you’re treating this industry like a business, you then have to figure out systems and you have to figure out processes. And I think that’s systems is really probably the best first place anyone should start is systematizing their business, finding those repeatable tasks that are continually come up, that they can automate.
Ben Lalez 1:05:40 So kind of like boiling this down, I remember our conversation, you asked me something like what is the most important thing you would tell an agent? And I think that’s a good place to kind of wrap up. So I’m leaving for Dallas tomorrow. But what I said last time was like CRM, like if you don’t have a CRM, then what are you doing? And interestingly enough, that hasn’t changed. But I personally think now after I don’t know how many more years and how many more additional sales, if you are in, what percentage of this business do you think is follow up?
D.J. Paris 1:06:21 Oh, gosh. Follow up, I’m going to I place a pretty high value on follow up, I’m going to say 70% of the businesses follow?
Ben Lalez 1:06:30 Exactly. That’s exactly the number that we talked about. So 70%. So get your CRM in place, and focus 70% of your day. On following up. If you can handle those two things, then, I mean, you’re probably I would argue 90% ahead of everyone else who’s just winging it.
D.J. Paris 1:06:50 Just two things. Yeah. It’s hard to things though. I, you know, we I’ve always thought the best people in service are always the ones that call you just before you call them. Right? They call you and they’re like, Oh, hey, that thing? Here’s the answer. You don’t have to call me again about it. You know, that’s essentially what the message is. You don’t have to call me about that thing. I’ve got it. Right. If that can be the client experience that they don’t ever have to dial your number is like, to me that’s a wild success.
Ben Lalez 1:07:22 So let’s listen to the end. You’ll like this should be the clip that we like tease people with. Yeah, make it all the way to the end for the you know, the primary useful piece of information.
D.J. Paris 1:07:32 Never Yeah, that I love it. We’re we’re ending with the most valuable piece. I love that
Ben Lalez 1:07:39 and most obvious and mundane.
D.J. Paris 1:07:42 What most obvious and mundane but you know what John Wooden, who I believe is the most winningest coach shocks tell me you’re gonna tell a sock story? Oh, no, I don’t. So this is the embarrassing part. I know nothing about sports. My, the amount of information I have goes down about one millimeter into the water for sports. I know nothing. But John Wooden was all about systems processes. And oh, like shooting free throws, you know, 500 of them a day.
Ben Lalez 1:08:09 Well, let me give you another one about exciting, but it works. Let me give you the first thing John Wooden taught his players was how to put on their socks appropriately to avoid blisters and athlete athlete’s foot. Sure. Well, you are more basic than that. Yep.
D.J. Paris 1:08:25 In winningest coach in NCAA history. Yeah. Also put your socks on right DJ also never looked at the scoreboard. Because he said the scoreboard didn’t tell him the affirmation he wanted. Yeah. And that’s a really, really interesting point. And so then it’s like, okay, well, if he wasn’t looking at the scoreboard, what was he looking at? He was looking at individual performance, performance. He was looking at each ad because he would say, as you exit the court only, you know, if you played well, you might have won or lost, but you could still feel good on a loss if you played well. And so I think that’s what really what we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about playing well, like the results end up while your results have been
Ben Lalez 1:09:04 if you play well. The volume will show and our industry.
D.J. Paris 1:09:10 Amazing. Ben, thank you for for coming on a second time. I am just completely enamored. You’re younger than me and just doing doing so many cool things in real estate. It’s really impressive. The battle all this team has taken over Chicago.
Ben Lalez 1:09:29 Before you wrap up. I want to be the first to go on record saying that if there’s ever someone to interview you, it’s me. I would love it as you need to be interviewed on the keeping a real podcast because what you have that not everyone has because I haven’t listened to every single episode. Sorry. But you but you have been sitting across
D.J. Paris 1:09:48 how many of me? I think we’ve done about 400 of these. Yeah, so
Ben Lalez 1:09:52 it’s about time. You got interviewed and everyone else can draw out the information from you
D.J. Paris 1:09:59 what But I will tell you is the funniest part of the whole. This whole thing for me this podcast is that I always say, I know the least amount about real estate that anyone who listens as certainly my guests and and probably all the ancillary people involved too. But I what I what I really That’s bullshit. Well, I’ve had conversations with you about real estate. That’s yeah, absolutely not. That’s probably untrue but but it’s true enough in the sense that I just like talking to people who are exceptional. Who knows more about recruiting than you? Well, that’s probably true. Okay, who knows more about title and finance and running a business I call
Ben Lalez 1:10:39 you to, to to pump me up every morning. It’s literally what you did at the start of this. I appreciate it. All right. Hi, on your intro for the next like six months.
D.J. Paris 1:10:48 I I am I’m very, very grateful. And yeah, I probably downplay some of my achievements. But but it is, I’m truly honored to be here and to sit in this in this room with us. What you’ve accomplished, is remarkable. just remarkable. And for everyone out there, you really should be paying attention to what Ben and his team are doing. Go to bends website, Ben lawless.com, B and L A L E z.com. Check out his team. They’re amazing systems. Check out what they’re doing with video to watch them on social Follow. Follow them there. They’re ahead of the curve. Ups. Copy us. Yes, copy them. There. And they’re just they’re just nice, nice people. So anyway, this is very uncomfortable for me, because I am not in my normal chair. So I don’t even know how to reduce
Ben Lalez 1:11:39 Do you normally have like a special I have a
D.J. Paris 1:11:42 I spin and I know and I know. But I’d be half of our audience. I want to say, Ben, thank you for coming on. Again, having here in your conference room to film this episode. This is really special.
Ben Lalez 1:11:56 Do we end with a hug? Or
D.J. Paris 1:11:57 we could end with a hug? Absolutely. Yeah, especially, you know, the best part about doing the show is I get to meet people like that. And honestly, it really isn’t. I don’t I don’t mean that in any sort of, you know, false
Ben Lalez 1:12:13 in a pejorative way. Well,
D.J. Paris 1:12:17 that wouldn’t be a pejorative statement. But, but. But, you know, it’s really fun. Because when I meet people at your level, a lot of times I just find, you know, I built friendships out of this, and I consider you a friend. I’m proud to consider you a friend. And, you know, I’m a big supporter of yours. And I just want to see you continue to grow. And you obviously are and it’s just fun to be part of the ride, I guess. I think that’s what’s most interesting about the podcast is I feel like I just get to be, like passenger in cars, that other people are driving, and I just get to sort of hang out and see what they’re all about. And, you know, maybe it will rub off on me one day, but anyway, thanks, man. I appreciate you being on the show again. Yeah. Great to see you my friend.
Using Humor In Your Marketing Campaigns • Leigh Marcus
Sep 27, 2022
Leigh Marcus a Top Real Estate Agent for @properties goes back to the beginning of his career in real estate and explains why he chose this career. Leigh talks about his marketing efforts with branding in particular and also discusses how he builds and maintains relationships with his sphere of influence. Leigh focuses on the importance of showing humor in your branding efforts. Last, Leigh shares his thoughts on open houses.
How Do Top Producers Deal With A Cooling Market? • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Sep 26, 2022
In our August episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties discusses what happens to home-pricing as the market is cooling down. Carrie explains the growth in demand for luxury properties seen especially during the last year. Next, D.J. shares his marketing tip of the month. Carrie also discusses the importance of developing new skills as the market changes and shares her 5 tips on what to do when there is a shift in the market. Last, Carrie shares what not to do as real estate agents based on her personal experience.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does a top producer doing 160 million a year just by yourself deal with low inventory and high interest rates. We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Carrie is a top 1% producer with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here locally, Carrie is ranked in the top 15 of all producers. And I don’t mean top 15% the top 15 So she is a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments, please visit Carrie at her website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. And also follow her on Instagram she is consistently rated as having the best Instagram account for realtors here in Chicago. So at Carey McCormick real estate both of those links are in our show notes. So you can just go to our show notes and tap on the links. Carrie, welcome to welcome to the show. It’s nice to see you again.
Carrie McCormick 2:48 Thank you, thank you, as always, and just on the note of Instagram and thank you for always giving a shout out to my social media. I love love love doing it. Some of you who do follow me may know that my Instagram was hacked like two weeks ago, I saw that, oh, it was unbelievable. And I guess this has been happening to a lot of people where they impersonate you. And they create fake accounts. And that’s very similar. I mean, they really just clone your account and they just read they changed your name by one letter or something and then they started contacting my followers and as you know, apparently I was selling Bitcoin to people and you know, so it was kind of crazy and I filed some reports and Instagram took my account down. They blocked my account, thinking that I was the impersonator and it took several steps and not that I want to be the techy guru of how to get your account back But if anyone does lose their account or gets impersonated in need some tips, please feel free to reach out to me it took me at least 72 hours of digging and researching of figuring out how to get my account back. But successfully I got my account back and hopefully it never happens to anyone.
D.J. Paris 4:11 Well congrat congratulations on getting the account back I know how scary that can be. I’ve had similar things happen in different ways that are very, makes you feel very vulnerable and you’re like
Carrie McCormick 4:22 yeah, and you don’t realize like how attached I was to my Instagram account. I’m losing it I would just I felt lost but again thankful that it’s back. But we’re headed into September which is unbelievable that this year is flown by so quickly, September 2022 And a lot of people been asking about home prices. You know we’re coming off of our crazy 2020 21 And you know record pricing throughout the United States and you know people are saying okay, we’re obviously the market starting to cool down. What does that mean to home pricing and, you know, do a lot of Reading and of course, I’m boots on the ground and seeing everything. But we’re forecasting that home prices are going to continue to appreciate not only in Chicago, but nationwide. And really, it just boils down to the supply factor. So we’re still in very low supply of homes. And we all know that mortgage rates have jumped up. And of course, that has dampened the demand somewhat. But the demand still outpaces the supply. So again, just standard economics of supply and demand. We don’t have much supply here. So it’s keeping prices pretty steady in our market here.
D.J. Paris 5:37 You Yeah, I think we’ve been pretty lucky in Chicago, at least in the city, it seems like pricing has still been relatively steady. I know we’re seeing some pricing drop across the country. Curious, do you think that that will affect Chicago, like city pricing, or even suburban pricing in the upcoming months?
Carrie McCormick 5:58 I think that, you know, some of the sellers, there’s a little bit of a disconnect between sellers and buyers and sellers are still kind of, you know, looking back last year of what the record prices were. And, again, that was a very inflated market. So I think we just need to educate the sellers on where the market is right now. And again, there’s still great prices out there. But we just need to be a little more realistic about the new market conditions. One area, which is surprising is the luxury market. I finally closed my $6.2 million deal last year modulations. So there was a lot of you’ll see there’s just a lot of high end luxury sales going on. And I did some digging, and I found some interesting stats. So in 2020, there was a 2.2% growth in the numbers of individuals that had wealth over $5 million. So think about that. So in 2020, if you had five people who had $5 million in income, or net income in value, there was a 2.2% growth in 2021. So one year later, that number grew by 19.8%. So 19, almost 20% growth of people that have a net value of 5 million plus that’s a huge, I think that’s a huge number huge in one year. So all of these folks that grew their net worth more than 5 million, where are they putting their money, they’re putting their money into an asset, which was a home. So because what that number, what 19.8% equals is 660,000 new individuals that entered a different net worth bracket. Okay, so that that new bracket, again, 660,000 people, and again, that’s across the United States, but we saw that in, you know, the Florida market, the Arizona market, Austin, you know, Chicago, obviously, so there was this huge demand for luxury properties in 2021 and 2022. So, and that, to me, it still continues to go, I see so much, you know, cash injected into this market. You know, some of my listings that are 3 million plus a lot of the demographic are, you know, 3040 year olds, and it’s just, it’s, it’s amazing. So it’s, it’s great to see that that Mark is still thriving.
D.J. Paris 8:21 Yeah, it’s sort of got me to think about, I can actually give my marketing tip of the week right now and then come back to carry to more information from you, because you just sparked an idea that I didn’t realize, as you were mentioning the statistic about the high net worth individuals, sort of the growth there in the last year. And it’s like, wow, I didn’t know that. And I suspect a lot of our listeners didn’t know that either. So I don’t know, of an ease of a better way to do this. But you should first friend, everybody you know who’s in your contact list on Facebook. We’re not just on Facebook, but on LinkedIn, in particular, because this is the place oftentimes where businesses post updates, work anniversary, show up promotions show up, when somebody sells a business, it shows up when somebody starts a new job, it shows up. And so this, these could all be things that oftentimes maybe are talked about, not necessarily somebody’s net worth increasing, but if someone sells a business or if someone joins a new company, or if someone’s you know, some big news at the company they’re at, you know, this is you should be following the companies and following the individuals and then just look on LinkedIn once or twice a day for a couple of minutes. See if there’s any major news there and you can reach out to your clients a hey, I just saw that, you know, you started a new career, you got a promotion, and you’re now you know, a CEO or whatever. And then you can talk to them say, Hey, is anything changing for you from a housing perspective? You know, do you thinking about you know, making a move? I think that’s a fantastic reason to pick up the phone and I can’t think of any other because people don’t always post their professional accomplishments on Facebook or Instagram. They don’t always do it on LinkedIn either, but that’s usually have a place where I see that stuff.
Carrie McCormick 10:01 That’s great. And actually on LinkedIn, there’s a little bell at the top that says notifications. And that’s a great tool because it’ll pop up any of your connections have anything new, whether it’s a birthday, or like you said, a job change. It’s obviously a professional network. And it’s definitely a great tool to use. So I love that tip. Great. Well,
D.J. Paris 10:22 what else do you want to talk about this week?
Carrie McCormick 10:24 Oh, actually, I was just going to talk about too with the market changing. And as everyone probably knows, I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. And through the years, you know, I’ve seen a lot of market shifts, and people start, when I say people, brokers, we all start to kind of retract when the market changes, and I always say, you know, what comes up must come down, right, so that, you know, the market continues to change. But when there’s a challenging market or a changing market, there’s always agents that find success, and you have to adapt, and in Pivot, you know, so you’ve got to look at developing new skills. And if you do, figure out your new skills, and how to thrive in the market, your business is going to go is gonna grow. There’s agents that don’t want to change that they stay status quo, or they just kind of put their head in the sand, and they give up, you know, or they say, you know, I’m just going to sit back and wait, you know, for the market, which is fine, if that’s what they want to do. But, you know, for those who do want to succeed, you do have to pivot and make change happen. So I wanted to share with everyone, my five tips on what happens, you know, or what we should be doing when the market changes. So my first tip is to understand the market of what’s happening, and really kind of dive into the stats and why the markets acting, the way that it is, once you understand that is really to successfully communicate that to your clients, they want to hear from you, they want to know what’s going on. And then you know, you look like a trusted adviser. So again, understanding the market and communicating that effectively to your clients. Number two would be to change your marketing plan, when the market changes, you do have to change the way you advertise or your market your properties or the again, the way that you communicate these properties online. So you know, re revamp your marketing plan, look at different ways, and different avenues for advertising. Number three is to be a resource and to be the adviser and LinkedIn is actually a great platform to do that, you know, there’s always different groups to join, or whether there’s, you know, speaking events, whatever the the topic is, people always want to know what’s going on in the real estate market, even if they’re not a buyer or seller, they just like to know, you know, their home is their biggest asset. So they want to know what’s happening. So just be a trusted resource and adviser and provide information. without expecting anything in return, I would say it’ll come around to you at some point. The fourth tip would be to learn to systemize your follow up your communication and I will say I am working on this. I’ve been working on this for years. You know, again, everyone loves communication and loves to hear from you. So if you can systemize it to some degree to make sure that you’re staying top of mind. I think that’s a great thing. If anyone’s got any tips for me on that one. I would love to brainstorm with people because it’s when you have a lot of clients. And you’re you know, it’s it’s hard to make a personal phone call every day to everybody but you definitely have to be organized and be systemized on that. And then my last tip would be number five would be to invest in your business. It’s kind of a hard thing to say at this point, especially when you know the market you know everyone feels like it’s softening or your sales aren’t as high as they were last year. But you do have to invest in your business whether it’s in your systems whether it’s in your advertising, staff now is the time to invest because again what goes up must come down and what’s down comes up eventually. So if you are prepared and ready especially for spring 2023 You have your systems in place your advertising your staff, you’ll be ready to rock and roll spring of 2023
D.J. Paris 14:15 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests? Of course it is follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support See, you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free, but only if you use this special link, visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, those are all such great suggestions I was thinking about. I spend time with a lot of realtors, of course, because of my job. And of course you do as well. And it seems like agents right now are a little frustrated because businesses slowed for the most part. And, of course rates have gone up inventory hasn’t really changed as much as we would like. So you now have people that may have been looking before, when when the market was was really going strong, and weren’t able to buy something buyers in particular, because of course, we knew how competitive it was with when rates were so low. But now that rates are higher, a lot of buyers have pulled back. And if we look at just even the mortgage application rates have gone down substantially from last year about I think about 20 Some percent. So that’s not a surprise, but is something I think agents can use. Because, you know, if we think back to when rates were in the twos and and the threes, people were were overpaying for properties, there was so much competition, as as we all remember, if we were practicing in the last couple of years, it was it was crazy. It was hard to get people were buying things sight unseen, they were waving inspections, they were they were doing a lot of things that in a normal market, they wouldn’t have been able to do. And so now that rates are, you know, 80% higher than they were back then. People might feel bad about that, like, Oh, I missed my window. But I don’t know that, that so many windows were missed. I think it was really hard to buy a property the last couple of years. So I actually think I’m curious to get your take, is it? What is your sort of perspective on that now? Because do you have clients are like, Oh, I missed the good rates? And I don’t know what to do. And
Carrie McCormick 17:24 yeah, I mean, there definitely is a little bit of remorse, you know, with with the rates, but you know, if they were paying higher for a property, but had a lower rate, now they’re paying a little less for a property a little bit higher rates, you know, the rates are still low, lower, you know, I mean, they’re not that they’re not 3%. But you know, they’re just hovering around five, so they’re not terrible. I just try not to focus on it is what it is, you know, there’s, and, you know, I say just capture the rate that we have now capture the home that you that you want, you know, in a year two or three of the rates do tick down again, then you can always refinance out of it. So I try not to look back, I try to keep keep it positive and look forward, I do want to share one quick thing with everybody that just happened to me. And it’s kind of more of what not to do. If I got to do so in this is a true story. I’m not going to mention any names. So don’t worry, as I start this story. And these wonderful clients that made we went to two showings on a home for them. And my client verbally said to the agent, the sellers agent, you know, he’s like, I really think that this house is really priced way too high. And he’s very analytical. And he kind of gave his reasons why and the agents response was, which was a good one. She said, you know, everything’s negotiable, just, you know, make us an offer. Let’s, let’s get it in front of the seller, and let’s see what we can do. So we felt good about that. We made the offer, never heard back from the agent for two days. kept following up, you know, did you get the offer? Can you please respond? I hope everything’s you know, first reaction is like, is she okay? Is everything okay? You know, and then, you know, two days later, and she says, you know, I’ll get back to you tonight. So she finally got back to us that, you know, two days later, and their response was your offers too low, we don’t want to respond to you. Really? I said, Okay, you know, so I called her and I said, you know, you know, here’s, you know, I hate playing the comp game. But you know, this is why we came in at this price. And again, you encouraged my client to make an offer wasn’t that bad, but you know, it was a little bit lower and not super insulting. And then she wrote back this email to me, that said, you know, in the future, if you want to win, you know, a home for your client, I would suggest that you do XY and Z and she was basically telling me how to do my job and how I should prepare an offer and what I shouldn’t do, and she’s like, maybe your clients will be able to get a house. She’s like, Oh, which agents and I was like, oh my god, like it was like in writing. So rude. And I just thought that is not I mean, I’ve got thick skin. But that is not a way to, I mean, my guess is if they would have countered us, we could have probably come together knowing where my clients would, would eventually end up, which would be a fair deal, but, and I just thought I just I’m, like, so flabbergasted that it just like the tone of the it was just so rude. And I wrote back and I was nice. I just said, Thank you for the advice. You know, like, I don’t know what else to say, you know, thank you for the advice. And then there has been no communication since but I really feel like that seller is missing out. Because they do have a client that is very interested in the home, and just the whole communication. So I guess my point of that story is, as real estate brokers, we all have the same goal, we are fiduciaries to our clients, we have to do what’s right for our client, listen to our clients totally get it. But also just being respectful to each other as brokers. It’s a tough market. And be nice. That’s my underlying message all the time is be nice and be kind to everybody, no, no reason for negativity and rude comments.
D.J. Paris 21:20 Well, that and I almost wonder if that other agent maybe didn’t do their fiduciary responsibility, in a sense, because obviously, this is where reputation comes into, right? Like your reputation as one of somebody who is incredibly successful kind does the right thing for their clients. I mean, obviously, your reputation here in the local Chicago area is is, is perfect, you have this perfect reputation of being a good realtor. And also, who plays well with others. She maybe she didn’t know you, or maybe she didn’t look you up or maybe she knows you. Okay, so who knows, who knows what the dynamic there is, but to go, my client will be insulted or is insulted is really a strange thing. Because what do you say if you get an A just out of curiosity, if you get an offer, so you’re on the listing side now, and you do get an offer that seems really low or lower than that you might worry that this might offend the seller, but I know this realtor, they seem to get things done. What would you do in that situation?
Carrie McCormick 22:28 I’m always trying to put a deal together, you know, kind of attitude. And I always tell my sellers, be thankful that we got an offer someone loves your home, you know, and I have seen deals and put deals together where they’re worlds apart, you know, and then we ended up bringing the deal together. I’m not saying that’s, you know, happens all the time. But you know, let’s try to work. It’s negotiations, you know, and you work back and forth and have conversations with the brokers. And again, at the end of the day, the client decides on what they want to do. And, you know, I mentioned worth the fiduciary here, but you know, you try and you you get it, you, you take it to where you can if the deal doesn’t come together, at least you tried, you know you just but again there’s, you know, there’s no point in in bashing another broker, especially in writing.
D.J. Paris 23:25 Yeah, and then also Yeah, it just and lecturing somebody I think that’s a maybe she was having a bad day or something, but are the Yeah.
Carrie McCormick 23:36 I’ve got a little file of emails from a few brokers that really decided to go off go off the rails, I don’t know what I’m gonna I’m just hanging on to them for a rainy day. But,
D.J. Paris 23:46 but it is such a such a funny thing. It’s like, you know, I think if, if, as Realtors we should be the ones that are less likely to get emotional about things, right. Like our job is to keep things steady and level and then just seems like this other realtor did everything wrong, in my opinion. So
Carrie McCormick 24:05 my tip of the day on that one is just be be nice to each other, you know, and just try to try to work through the deal. It doesn’t come together doesn’t come together. But Right.
D.J. Paris 24:16 Right. And also just trying to tell somebody with 20 plus years of experience like what to do better. That is that is an incredible Wow, that the audacity of that is is almost impressive, in a sense. Like to even think I know better than, you know somebody who’s
Carrie McCormick 24:33 and I always listen to people’s advice. Right? I mean, that’s just that’s life learning is listen to others and I did I write it and I mean, I completely disagree with her. But you know, that kind of that’s, you know, it’s but again, I think there’s a tone of you know, here’s some tips for you versus it was just a very interesting email. I’ll just leave.
D.J. Paris 24:56 So I thought that’s a it’s a great example of how how I’m poor In addition to play nice in the sandbox, you know, and we’re all we’re all in the same sandbox early. So let’s be kind like you said, be kind. And by the way, nothing wrong with apologizing the day after, if you realize you you said or did something wrong? No, you know, oh my god, I had the world’s worst day yesterday. I’m so sorry. I said and wrote those things. I deeply apologize. You know, there. That’s there’s nothing wrong with doing that. But I bet you probably won’t get one of those but but that’s the thing. You never get the apology. But you can always apologize. People are people are funny. But yeah, that’s that’s a great example of how not to make friends and influence people, right? As Dale Carnegie, like the anti Dale Carnegie’s, anyway, well, well, that’s a great place to wrap up. So let’s remember everyone be kind and nice. These are people that are going to help you make money, these other realtors, so help them feel good about themselves. And don’t don’t lecture them unless, unless there’s some really, really good reason to do. So it sounds like there was not a good reason this time. Anyway, so we want to thank Carrie for being on our show. For as long as she has been, she continues to show up every month and provide our audience with, with with tons of valuable insight. And by the way, she is so incredibly busy, she does not have a big team. It’s really just her doing all of these transactions. And the fact that she spends a few minutes with us every month is a really huge honor to us. So we are so grateful Carrie for you. And we are excited to continue to have you of course on the show in the future. So for everyone out there listening, please, please Well, a couple of things. First, if you have any clients that are moving to the Chicagoland area and you don’t work the Chicagoland area because you might be in another state or another country or wherever reach out to Carrie, she is legitimately one of the very highest producing agents here year after year after year. She has a sterling reputation and would love to talk with you. So if you have any referrals, send them to her or if you yourself are a buyer or a seller or renter or an investor you know reach out to hurt you know, my girlfriend who does leasing for a building downtown. She had a broker come in yesterday. And by the way, just to make sure we’re not confusing people in Illinois, every realtor is a broker. So I know that’s not the way it is in every state. But anyway, she had a real what’s called a realtor come in. And the client was a realtor and a practicing realtor. So and that was very interesting. And my girlfriend asked the practicing realtor who really was the the tenants or the future tenant, hey, I’m just out of curiosity, why did you Why are you working with a realtor? And they go I don’t know anything about about luxury leasing. And so I’d rather hire my friend who’s really good at it. And, and I thought, wow, that’s really, that’s really great. So even if you’re a realtor, and maybe you’re looking for some help buying, selling, renting or if you’re not a realtor, but you’re looking for a great agent Carrie would love to chat with you Carrie what’s the best way someone should reach out to you
Carrie McCormick 27:58 always call me 312-961-4612 For those who prefer to text I’m a big texter as well. Or email which is Carrie ca RR ie at@properties.com.
D.J. Paris 28:14 And please follow carry on social media. So she’s on Instagram, she’s Carrie McCormick real estate. And you can also visit our website Carrie McCormack r e.com. And and I guess I am glad I did not take the Bitcoin as suggested No, I saw that I thought, Oh, she’s been hacked. But I’m glad you got your account back because I know how important that is to you. And I know it’s it’s a great place also to see your activity. It’s really fun because I like following you because I sort of feel like I know what your days look like, which I think is is really helpful for other realtors that want to see. You know, gosh, if I get ever got to that top 1% level, what would my days look like? And I think you do a good job of sharing. You know what it’s like to be a realtor.
Carrie McCormick 29:00 I don’t share everything with you. The days that that I go through, it’d be a fun reality show.
D.J. Paris 29:09 Well, anyway, everyone follow Carrie on Instagram because she is just as impressive work there and she does it all herself as well which is even more impressive. So she doesn’t outsource it. So you can really see what she’s all about at Kerry McCormick real estate. Carrie, thank you so much for being on our show yet again. We love having carry on and she gets so much great feedback from the fans. By the way. If you have a moment everyone listening, please go to whatever podcast app you might be on whether it’s iTunes or Apple podcasts now or Spotify, Google Play Stitcher, any anywhere you find podcasts and if you’re listening through us through one of those systems platforms, leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. And also please tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing our show and send them a link over that’s all I got this week. Carrie this was a fun great episode. I know you’re you’re busy. Gotta get back to work. So we wish carry continued success. And thank you on behalf of everybody for coming on our show, and we’ll see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Kerry. Bye
How To Grow Your Business Even When Rates Are Rising • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Sep 22, 2022
Welcome to the August episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses what’s going on in the lending world. Joel focuses on why agents should center their attention on the next 6 to 12 months rather than the next sale they will get. Joel also discusses how with the market slowdown this is the time to start creating content for your clients to provide valuable information. Joel and D.J. discuss the situation in the renting market at the moment. Last, Joel explains what Lender Introduction Template is, how agents can subscribe for it and also discusses his weekly newsletter.
D.J. Paris 0:00 With rising interest rates, what do you tell your clients? And more importantly, how do you keep your business thriving? We’re going to talk about that today. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Harris, I’m your guide and host through the show today, once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the agents buyer on every transaction. So last year alone, Joel gave back $291,000 In closing costs to buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1% Sorry, top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, out of 400,000 loan officers in the United States, Joel is currently ranked ranked number 137. Last year he closed 619 transactions, his highest amount ever for one year for $249 million. And already this year, Joel has closed 243 transactions for 98,000,093% of that were purchases. Now if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel, he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with Joel can be reached via email at joel@rates.com J oel@rates.com. Or you can call him directly at 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel sharp, D Day. Thanks so
Joel Schaub 3:06 much for having me on. And you’re right. It’s very fun when I hear the numbers. But none of that matters. I really like being on each and every month because it’s the time where we can get back and have a gentle literally learn something. Because when you’re in the business, you’re so focused on buying and selling, but sometimes you don’t have that mortgage side. So it’s really good to come on and get back.
D.J. Paris 3:28 Yeah, I think this is a great time to have a conversation about what’s going on in the lending world only because I’ve noticed this because I Well, you do as well. I hang out with a lot of realtors for different reasons that socially. We try not to but yes, they’re everywhere, right? You can’t avoid them. No, but some of my closest friends now are in the in the industry. And I have noticed that there is a general malaise or a little bit of a sort of sadness around the fact that rates are not what they were at the you know, one to two years ago, which of course they aren’t. But I find that agents tend to like carry that residue around with them like this is like horrible, awful news that is just making everybody’s life so much more difficult. And I always think it’s great to like reset and sort of reset and go back to our baseline expectation of what’s going on. Because I just have to think this must influence the way that a lot of realtors interact with their clients. Like if the realtor thinks oh, my god rates are 5% and above, then maybe they bring that energy to their client. And maybe it just doesn’t really help the process.
Joel Schaub 4:37 It doesn’t it’s all about mindset right now. So I’m throwing out the whole narrative that this is a bad problem to have that rates are higher, and the agents that I work with and I teach and I coach, we’ve completely thrown that narrative out that the mainstream media tells you that oh, this is a problem. All right. It’s actually a blessing. All right. I’ve said this to you but For I mean, I like buying my shirts on sale, and I like buying my shoes on sale. And now it’s an opportunity to finally to buy real estate on sale. And by that, I don’t mean that we’re going to see a big drop in values, everybody’s waiting. And I’ll tell you now, if you’re one of these agents telling buyers wait for values to drop, you’re wrong. I don’t anticipate value, they’re going to drop drastically. But what I do know and what we’ve already seen, TJ, is that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get an offer accepted today than it was six months ago when there were 10 offers on the table.
D.J. Paris 5:33 Yeah, I mean, look, it’s sort of the analogy of buying shirts on sale is such a great one. Because I was thinking, as you said that I really rather never buy something full price, right? Like anything in my life. I don’t care if it’s at the grocery store, and it’s a bag of carrots, or, you know, a home, I want something that appears to me psychologically, I want something to feel like I’m not paying full price. And of course, as we saw in that really extremely low, almost an it was an aberration. It wasn’t I don’t even I don’t even think it should be in the same history book as traditional rate rates, because it was so unusual that it really doesn’t, it almost doesn’t even deserve a chapter in history, in a sense, because it really sort of, you know, is going to color people’s expectations today. But you’re right. Yeah, I could have gotten a much lower rate two years ago, but boy, I would have been competing with a lot more people. And I probably would be paid up paid a lot more for that same property.
Joel Schaub 6:29 And why is it DJ that? Buyers? They have this anticipation, right? Let’s think of that. I want to buy something, but I only want to buy a few months ago when everybody was doing it. And now all of a sudden, when people aren’t buying, they’re like, oh, I don’t want to buy either. You see, it’s actually wrong. Right? Yeah, it’s the home and get a deal on the price, where I could refinance the debt down the line, then be the big winner that bought a home 50 grand more than it was worth. So looking forward, if I’m an agent, I’m literally preaching this story. Um,
D.J. Paris 7:03 yeah, it’s a story that that needs to continue to be reinforced, because you’re absolutely right. You know, I was in a former life, I was a financial advisor. And, you know, one of the most, I was not a stockbroker, I wasn’t picking individual equities, or, you know, or bonds, there’s just not what I did, I’m more managed somebody’s net worth. But it is, it is psychologically difficult to think, Oh, I really need to buy when it’s low and sell high. We all know that intellectually, but it is a difficult thing. Because it you know, it’s why a lot of people lost money in crypto, because as as crypto exploded in value, and price, people started to jump in at the end, which was the wrong time to get in. And of course, with crypto, you know, any, any anything can happen. But you know, even in the traditional stock market, this idea of buying something when it’s undervalued is hard psychologically. So I understand the hurdle that the agents and have to sort of jump over for their client. But it’s, it’s a really important hurdle to jump over. Otherwise, you’re going to be as upset as the client might be.
Joel Schaub 8:07 If I’m an agent, right now, the number one thing that I would be doing is planning for the next six to 12 months. And what I mean by this is actionable steps to put out marketing and branding, where you’re not trying to get a sale today. I’ll repeat this, I know how hard it is, we want sales today. But you want to actually be building your pipeline for six to 12 months and think of this net that you could cast if you’re letting buyers know that you’re not desperate for the business today, and that you’re actually in their corner to help them when the time comes to finding the right property. I would work with somebody like that a lot more than somebody that says today’s the right day to buy, now’s the best time to buy. And guess what, when a buyer is working with you, and they want to maybe buy in the next six to 12 months, a good majority of them are gonna buy sooner, they really will, right. But making a strategy and doing social media posts, videos and actually talking about the future. And say, when there’s a little bit of snow on the ground, and I’m talking, you know, we’re here in the Midwest, so it’s not that far away. When we get to November and December here in Chicago, we definitely get snow on the ground. And traditionally, we do see a lot less inventory and the properties that are on sale, actually sell for Left, right. So teaching and educating that there’s an opportunity coming up. And if they buy sooner, that’s great. But I wouldn’t be doing videos once a week right now about are you thinking about buying the next six to 12 month, reach out to me. And then you start building a database of people that are ready, willing and able, some of whom will buy sooner, but you’re teaching and you’re educating about where the properties will be at six to 12 months from now. And there’ll be a lot less offers than there were six to 12 months ago.
D.J. Paris 9:56 I hadn’t experienced yesterday I just really want to quickly share because it was such an unusual experience, I had to go see a dermatologist. It was a specialist down at, at Northwestern. And I hadn’t ever been to this particular clinic before it, it was it was an older gentleman, he was in his 70s. And he actually took me into his office, which I always have seen that movies where you sit across the table from the doctor and you see their office, but I’d never actually realized I’ve never actually been in a doctor’s true office. And he sat down, he was an older man, I’m guessing in his 70s. And we were talking about this really like no big deal thing that that I was there to see him about. And he spent 10 minutes would be and and he did most doctors, you know, they’re so skilled. And they know what you have at the moment you walk in, and they’re like, I know what that is. It’s this, we’re going to treat it with this. But this guy didn’t do that. He was like, I’ve been doing this for two years. And I’m not totally sure what what your situation is right now. And as I was explaining it to him, he was listening. He would pause he would I would he would ask me a question, I would answer him. And he would take that information and pause and look up to the ceiling and go, Oh, okay, huh. And he would pause for about 10 seconds. And I realized I’m watching this guy think. And it was really, really, it was really exciting in a way. And it also was really comforting. And I was like, This guy’s thinking about me and trying to figure out the best solution for me. And he was clearly doing this, this this sort of, you know, intense sort of evaluation in his mind. And I was I was there to watch it. And then he called in, he was like, I gotta call a colleague, and I want a colleague to get his opinion on this. And he calls in his son who happened to work there as well, son comes in, and they’re talking about it. And it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. Because I thought, wow, this guy really cares. He’s really thinking about this silly little problem. It’s not a life or death big. It’s a totally no big deal thing. But he’s really taken seriously. And I just was like, God, I’m gonna be with this guy for the rest of my life. Like, it was such a great experience. And I thought, boy, realtors could do this exact same thing and the good ones do. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Joel Schaub 13:21 I like those awkward pauses. People are afraid to have silence. But think of this, you’re gonna live in a home for 10 years. And you’re afraid of somebody being silent for 10 seconds to think about your situation. The people that actually know what they’re doing take time to think about a situation because they don’t have a predetermined plan. The moment that you reach out, everything should be individualized. So as an agent, the one of the reasons as a mortgage professional, I was able to do 10 and $20 million a month was each scenario was different. I took my time and I listened. Whereas every other mortgage professional just talks and talks and talks. They don’t give the buyer a chance to actually explain what they need. So if you can listen and hear what they need, you’re really going to set yourself apart.
D.J. Paris 14:10 And I love this idea of creating content. Again, this is probably a time where the majority of our listeners and viewers have more time because the market slowed. You know, of course rates have increased inventory is still low. So there’s a lot of just more free time maybe than you would have and so, Joel, I think you’re absolutely right, such a great time to start creating educational content on social media. Tick tock if you’ve not a tick tock person, like it’s not going away and it’s becoming more and more and more and more popular and it doesn’t mean you have to be a 22 year old doing tick tock but but you want to speak to the next generation of homebuyers which this is the time because it people other realtors are going to start utilizing other platforms, younger platforms to get their message out. And you know the cool thing about places things like Tiktok and Instagram is you can cross post So you can actually take the same content, continue to repurpose it, use it. And you know, people are hungry for information. And I think this is a great a great opportunity to continue to tell people like, I know this stuff, I know what this stuff is, and I can talk about it.
Joel Schaub 15:18 Remember this phrase, right, and this is true, when we buy a piece of real estate, I want everyone to remember that you can marry the home and date the rate, okay, and start using that. And it’s really true. As silly as it sounds, we’re gonna marry the home, we’re gonna find the house that we love. But we know damn well that when rates come down, we’re going to refinance that loan, okay. And that’s the great thing about mortgage financing in the United States, okay. And you can always find a good mortgage professional that doesn’t charge to do a refinance. And now that’s big business, for the banks and all that. But if you’re doing the purchase mortgage, you should be able to get a mortgage professional, that will waive the costs for a refinance. And at a minimum, maybe it cost three or $400 to do an appraisal again, but other than that, work with a mortgage team, and somebody that will absolutely help your clients, buy the home, live in it. And when rates do come down, make sure that they go right back to that mortgage professional to lower the rate. And pick a rate where you don’t have to pay any fees. And maybe it’s just a bit above the lowest rate in the market. But there’s always opportunities that select an interest rate where you’re not paying closing costs. And that’s important
D.J. Paris 16:30 that marry the home date, the rate is such a great expression. And it really is exactly the truth. Because rates, of course, fluctuate, things fluctuate home is pretty, uh, pretty much considered a permanent, at least, maybe you don’t live there permanently. But it’s a permanent structure. It feels like it isn’t moveable. But but you know, when you date somebody, it may work out, it might not right, when you marry somebody, the idea is, of course, to be there for life. So, obviously, everyone understands this metaphor, I don’t need to explain it. But I think it’s such a great one, because it really is exactly the truth, right? The rates come and go, people come and go, the rates come and go, and you’re going to be able to make adjustments along the way via refinance. So that’s that is such, that’s almost enough, I think, just to explain what we’re going to date, the rate, we’re not going to marry the rate, that should pretty much solve a lot of the conflict, I think, between realtors and their buyers at this point and say Don’t, don’t worry, we’re just dating the rate, we’re going to find you the perfect home. And that’s the most important thing. And and again, also, we hear rates are up. But Joel, you always say and I love this is you don’t write a check with the rate on it right to the bank, you really just care about the total amount that’s coming out of your bank account every month. And that’s the most important thing. And those oftentimes aren’t aren’t as exciting of news headlines, right? It’s not as exciting to say, well, the average person’s you know, payment monthly went up $200, you know, from when the rates were lower, whatever that number might be. That’s not exciting news to say, Oh, the rates jumped, you know, do 200 basis points in the last year, whatever. That’s exciting. That’s if it bleeds, it leads, you know, for news. So we have to sort of bring it back to reality, saying, Actually, we’re just going to date the rate. And the rates aren’t that high at all anyway, like they’re still fine. And having that conversation, I think is going to call the buyers down. So I think you’re right, and also just this idea of like, you know, who’s thinking about doing this over the next six to 12 months, that’s really, really great. And Realtors didn’t really have the time to do that maybe so much in the last couple of years. They were they were in go mode, and they didn’t have the time to go wondering who’s going to be buying in the next six to 12 months, they were just trying to get deals closed. So now’s the time.
Joel Schaub 18:41 And DJ in our market right now rents are just going up just as fast if not faster than these mortgage rates. And so at my level 90, I’d say 80 or 90% of the clients that I work with are first time homebuyers that need the education. So agents lean on me to actually help them understand the difference between renting versus buying. And when we run just a three to five year analysis. It doesn’t matter that mortgage rates are no longer in the threes or fours. The rent rate is 100%. When you’re paying a mortgage, you’re actually getting something back when you’re renting every dollar goes out the window and so just re emphasizing for first time homebuyers it’s worth it to take a look and see what we can afford on a monthly basis that’s similar or less than what you’re paying in rent and get ready for an opportunity in the next six months where I could put you on a list and show you different properties where you’re not throwing the money out the way on on rent.
D.J. Paris 19:38 Yeah and just having the conversation to to renters about interest and deductions is is a huge wonderful surprise to anyone when they buy their first home if they’re not aware. It’s a wonderful surprise come tax time. And this is something I didn’t even know before I bought a property I had no idea I mean I just I was in my A you know, I was 30 years old I think and just didn’t know anything about real estate and, and loans and I got one and then I was like, Oh my God, I wish I kind of wish somebody had told me all the cool tax benefits of owning. And it was up to me to figure it out. But this is an opportunity for people to educate, educate renters about it, I’ll leave you with this, my girlfriend who you know, are Aggie, she works at a an apartment building downtown at a like a luxury apartment building. And Joel was saying how rates are for rental rates are going up. And that is true, I can I can attest to that. This is how crazy the rental market is, at least at my girlfriend’s building here in Chicago, the rents the rent prices change, at least about once an hour, and they have 500 units there. The technology is so advanced for some of these management companies is they don’t just like okay, that’s you know, that’s the $2,000 a month apartment. And it just that’s what it is, oh, no, it’s evaluating every other property that in the area trying to figure out how to be competitive, and they all compete with each other, and it actually ends up driving prices up. So they’re constantly trying to squeeze as much as they can out of the renter. And now technology is doing it for them. So that’s another thing to consider too is, you know, is the rental technologies getting so much better, where it’s going to try to squeeze as much as they can. Now not not every landlord uses technology like that. But you know, a lot of apartment buildings do and it’s really, really interesting. So rent prices change, they they’re going to want to, you know, extract as much income as they care as much revenue as they can out of the tenant. This is a great time to think to really educate somebody about some of the benefits of homeownership. And not just it feels good to own a home. But like there’s some legitimate tangible benefits around taxes and, and things that I bet a lot of renters just don’t know all
Joel Schaub 21:49 about education. And if you’ve been a longtime listener of keeping it real podcast, you’ve heard me come on and talk about the weekly update that I send out. And so many of you have emailed us and said, Please put me on your list for that follow up. And they use the information that I put in bite sized pieces to disseminate on video or phone calls. And it just helps them so that you don’t need to be an expert in the mortgage market. But you got to have enough knowledge that you can talk to people about certain things in a way that’s not so cumbersome, and techie. So we’ve taken that list. And then I’ve also created another follow up that people are asking for, which is they want to refer somebody over to us and they want the link so that they can get the $1,500 closing cost credit. So you can email me, and I’ll give it away here. You can literally say send me the lender introduction template, and it’s my email at joel@rate.com. So J o el@rate.com. And that short for guaranteed rate, it’ll come directly to me and you will get a reply from me. And there’ll be a template. So if you have another buyer that really wanting some education, and wanting that first time homebuyer benefit, and somebody that’s really going to look out for them, you can introduce me, we’ll get them pre approved. And then we waive all the fees. So I give a $1,500 credit back. And this will be one of the benefits of you listening to the keepin it real podcast.
D.J. Paris 23:12 Yeah, thank you for that if I were an agent, if I was a listener right now, and I may be a little slower than than I was in the last couple of years, or maybe I’m new to the business and I’m slow because I’m new. I don’t have as much business, I would be signing up for Jill’s newsletter. So just send Joel an email joel@rate.com asked to be put on the weekly newsletter also asked for his introduction template like he’s he mentioned. And Joel sends out the rate update and sort of the bite sized piece of what agents need to know, every week. And I would watch for that email, I would take several bits and pieces I would use that as the content that I would post on social media. And so you don’t even have to like you were saying you don’t have to think of or analyze or be an expert on what’s going on in the lending world. Just take these bite sized pieces. That’s why Joel and his team make them that’s exactly the purpose is so that you can take them to your client and look like you’re the expert as opposed to Joel being the only expert Joel is an expert, but he also wants the agents to be experts too. So definitely sign up for that just email joel@rei.com asked to be put on both of those well the list and then also get the template he’ll send it out to you and then there you go. Now you’ve got your social media content content for you know, for the foreseeable future do it forever it I promise you most lenders don’t even do this. I’ve noticed very few lenders on social media even educate other than you know, Joel, I know you do too, but but Joel is one of the few people that even does it in his field. So you can do it, but it’s not a crowded field and your audience wants to learn.
Joel Schaub 24:44 And just remember this, okay, the sky isn’t falling right now you can be the bearer of good news and you can let people know that regardless of where the rates are at right now. Still going to be better than renting and it’s going to be a heck of a lot easier for you as an agent to submit an offer on a property He then it’s not over asking, Okay, now we’re getting back to the point where you could come in under asking and not get laughed out of the room. And as we continue to see these rates at these elevated levels, because it could be this way for two to three years, we will have the opportunity once the Fed gets it right, they’re going to cut rates. So hearing it here first, once the Fed has inflation under control, they have to cut rates. Everybody on our floor that on the trading in terms of mortgages, we’re already predicting when and there’s various ideas as to when the Fed will cut rates. But it’s not a straight shot up from here, when they continue to trend up for a while once inflation is under control, the Fed has to cut rates, and that’s going to be the floodgates are gonna open again. So in the meantime, let’s be happy with where we’re at. Let’s help as many buyers as we can right now. And let’s keep things positive.
D.J. Paris 25:58 Yeah, and just to sort of give one one another quick idea because Joe, you always You are the epitome of this you live this now’s a great time to give back especially if you have more more spare time and to incorporate your your client list or your prospect list, do events around a charitable acts. Maybe you’re maybe it’s even just hey, we want to go support this bar down the street. That’s, that’s struggling right now. So you can do you know, some sort of event there. You can partner with somebody like like Joel, of course, who would love to partner and do events with you. But now’s the time to really, you could do a charitable thing. Now’s the time to really do some good out in the world. And you have the extra time to do it. It’ll generate goodwill with your clients. And you know, again, I just think that that’s the one of the best things you can do to develop a stronger relationship with your contacts is do something together that creates good for the world. And you know, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have that person as a client for life. I think. I love
Joel Schaub 26:58 that you say that too. And you have more time right now you’re not submitting 10 offers right now, how many times do you lose, you submit an offer in the last year or two and your great offer and it reminds me of one of my favorite weird owl songs I lost on Jeopardy. The old my loves in jeopardy remake and it’s true. You put in a really great offer and somebody beats you. And now there’s not as many offers going in so you can help your clients you have extra time find ways
D.J. Paris 27:26 to give back. Well, Joel saying that it’s funny because we we were talking about this ahead of time, I’m actually going to see Weird Al tomorrow night in Grand Rapids of all places. So I am excited. It’s probably the 10th time number
Joel Schaub 27:39 one fan here guys number one fan. Last and something to DJ at the keepin
D.J. Paris 27:43 it real send me a week something weird. related. Anyway, yeah, well, up on it. I’m embarrassed to say how many times I’ve seen it, but it’s been it’s, it’s now double digits. So excited. But anyway, it’s a great, it’s a great point. And so anyway, don’t despair. This is not the time to despair, there may be a time at some point in history that we should despair, but it isn’t now. So don’t worry, shake off some of the the stress from the last couple of years and realize that things are actually easier now and in a way. So you know, embrace the easier, easier part of where we are today. And that won’t you won’t get stuck in the harder part of today as well. So anyway, everyone, yeah, everyone should should sign up for Joel’s newsletter. So just to send an email to joel@rate.com. Let him know that you want to be on his newsletter, and there’s your social media content. And that’s the end. Here’s your talking points for your clients right now that are that are thinking about, you know, what’s going on in the news. This is how you readjust their expectation. All right, Joel, this is a great place to wrap up. Always a pleasure chatting with you and excited to continue our relationship here on the podcast. So if anyone out there is looking to partner with a with a lending professional Joel’s the very best I’ve ever worked with. So reach out to him. joel@rate.com you can also call him Joe, what’s the best number for you and your team?
Joel Schaub 29:00 My direct line? 18 years 773-744-1968 You get me directly you just test me. We’re definitely there to help.
D.J. Paris 29:11 Awesome. All right. Well, on behalf of our audience that Joel, thank you very much for continuing. You’ve been with us for years and years. We greatly appreciate it. And on behalf of Joel and myself, we wouldn’t be able to do this without the listeners. So thank you for continuing to support and listen to our show and watch us support our sponsors support Joel support all of our guests that we have on the show. They’re the reason that we have content for the show. And we’re really grateful to Joel for doing that. So support Joel support our sponsors and continue to listen and please tell a friend just think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this who’s maybe a little bummed out right now because things are slower send this episode to them it will cheer them up and it will really reset them to you know a more positive headspace. So, anyway, Joel, thank you again and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you
Smart Inside Sales For Real Estate Agents • Dale Archdekin
Sep 20, 2022
Dale Archdekin a lead conversion expert goes all the way back to the beginning of his career in real estate and describes his struggles in the beginning of this journey. Dale describes how he built his business, his failures and successes. Next, Dale discusses what Smart Inside Sales teaches and how agents can utilize it. Last, Dale talks about how to nurture leads over time.
What Real Estate Agents Are Missing Right Now • Kurt Uhlir
Sep 15, 2022
Kurt Uhlir an entrepreneurial leader discusses the importance of having a website with a home search integrated. Kurt also discusses what he feels is a huge opportunity from a marketing perspective and what real estate agents are under-utilizing at the moment. Last, how to provide value to old clients who are not actively looking to transact in real estate at the moment.
This Is The Time To Start (Or Join) A Team • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Sep 12, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com gives a review of his experience in Inman Connect Las Vegas Conference. Chris and DJ discuss the changes that are being seen in the real estate ecosystem and current technological advancements in the industry. Chris also shares his experience from the stage of Inman Connect. Last, Chris explains why he believes this is the time for agents to start or join teams if that was something in their mind.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview,click here to view on YouTube!
Chris Linsell can be reached at chris@theclose.com.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Did you miss Inman Connect in Las Vegas? I did. But today we have one of their speakers on the show Chris Lin sell from the clothes. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real with the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host to the show today is our monthly series, closing time with Chris Lynn sell from the closed.com. It’s a partnership between keeping it real in the clothes. Let me tell you about the clothes. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages. actionable strategic insight from industry professionals, they cover real estate marketing lead gen. Tech and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. By the way, before I continue, I also wanted to mention a great place to see tech reviews. If you’re considering investing in some real estate technology for your business. It’s a great place to see unbiased reviews and they go deep. So if you’re trying to figure out the best CRM or lead source or all sorts of other products and services in the tech space for realtors, that’s another great reason to visit the close. But sorry, I got I got I screwed up my own live read, because I was so excited to tell you about their reviews. But in addition to that, please visit the clothes.com and just make sure everyone knows that the close th e Cl O S E just like it sounds and the very least subscribe to their newsletter so you can get notified each time they publish a long form article with us as is. With us as a homeboy I’m having trouble with us, as always is crystallin Sal, he is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Now Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead generation, transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. And Chris has been part of hundreds of real estate transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris Welcome once again to keeping it real.
Chris Linsell 3:30 DJ, you made it that was made it through. That was an adventure to get to the well end of that.
D.J. Paris 3:37 Yeah, I yeah, I was with some friends last night, who were some guys that that I’m very close with. And I’m in my mid 40s, they are in their late 60s, early 70s. And so what’s really great is we get together regularly and I get to sort of get it get a little preview of maybe some of the challenges that are will be coming as I get to that age. And I realized that that mostly they have the same challenges that that us younger guys may have right now. But it’s like your relationship issues job, you know, all the all the same sort of things we deal with, but they have a lot of health issues. And we were chatting last night and one of the one of the main things I’ve learned from from these men is that they start to worry that they’re starting to lose their mind because they have these little episodes where they make a mistake that they don’t think they should make. And then they go hmm, is my memory failing, do I have dementia? And so there’s this constant worry. And so I was just thinking about that. Like maybe there’s something wrong with me. Or I’m just having a one of those days. So anyway, I’m excited to to spend today with you because we always have great conversation and you just came back from the Inman conference, the admin slack conference. I would love to hear how that went for you and you spoke at the conference.
Chris Linsell 4:55 Yeah, it was. It was a good time for those who are not familiar With Inman it’s this little website honestly there really nothing to sneeze at. I’m of course joking inman.com, one of the, you know, one of the founders, I would say, of the real estate news and journalism space online. Certainly a competitor of the close to some degree, though, frankly, we kind of play in different ballgames. They focus a lot on news, current events, you know, what’s happening today, in in markets across the country, and sometimes across the world. And we’ll run the close focus more on evergreen content strategies, best practices, that sort of thing. So you know, even though we have some of the some crossover audiences, we really do different things. And so we’re always excited to attend Inman conferences, Inman puts on great, great live events. The Inman Connect conference happens twice a year, once in Las Vegas, once in New York City. And the last two weeks ago or a week ago, I can’t remember now feels two weeks ago, was the Inman Connect Las Vegas conference. And yeah, it was quite quite an events, I want to I’d love to go through some details share a little bit with you. So, you know, let’s let’s kind of break this into this combo and into a few pieces here. The Inman conference for anybody who hasn’t gone really is there’s really four main things you got to think about. The first is the expo, there’s a ton of people just like it. Most real estate conferences, there’s a lot of companies there representing their wares and showing off what they’re doing a lot of tech, they’re pretty cool stuff to talk about. So you got the expo, you’ve got the the presentations, I was fortunate enough to be asked to present this year. So talk about that. The third thing that is the access, you get access to a lot of kind of movers and shakers in the real estate space that you don’t normally get access to. And then the fourth thing is the community, you have a lot of agents that come together, Inman Connect conferences, just they’re not cheap. But they are a kind of a full throated experience in the real estate space. And so you connect with a lot of like minded agents when you go because you know, everyone’s pretty committed there. So definitely a cool experience. Let’s chat a little bit about first, I guess about the expo, I saw so many cool tech companies on display at the expo and a big takeaway. I’d love to get your your thoughts on this TJ is one of the things I saw was a real conscious move away from companies that are straight up and down lead generation companies and a move towards companies that are more marketing companies that have lead generation maybe as a component. But it’s more about this holistic presentation, rather than just like a straight up. Zillow is just going to put names in your email box or bold leads is just going to put names in your CRM. And that’s it. That’s all they do. I was in a really interesting kind of conscious move away. I’m curious if you’ve seen or observed any of that, or if you have any thoughts on that?
D.J. Paris 8:29 I do. And I have seen that. And I’ve actually seen it in other industries as well. I think when Salesforce came about in the software tech space, for those of you that aren’t familiar, you probably know the name. But if you might not know what Salesforce does, they’re their CRM. So they basically created the what arguably is the most fully featured CRM on the planet. And they got a lot of enterprise level clients, big corporations to buy in and use that as their CRM. And then they started to build ancillary products to really, you know, they got you, they got the entire sales team of an organization in Salesforce. And that’s how their Salesforce navigates through through purchase through orders, and clients. And then they said, now we can create some HR resources and we can create billing and, and payments and all sorts of other products so that they create this created this eco system that has just been tremendously successful for them. And so I started to notice that real estate firms obviously have taken notice. And of course, much like Apple or Google likes you to be, you know, fully utilizing their products. Google does it sort of for free. You know, Apple’s more of a paid model, but they’re both very similar. They want you utilizing their ecosystem so that you don’t leave and you use all their products. I’ve noticed that in the real estate space. In particular, there’s companies that are in major acquisition mode. Lone Wolf is an obvious example where they have gone out and boy, they seems like they bought just about everybody and And full disclosure I like I’m very friendly with the lone wolf guys, but it isn’t a plug for them. But I’m very impressed by how they’ve tried to round out their portfolio with with just lots of different products and services. Zillow is attempting to do a similar thing I was I was fortunate enough to get to go to a Zillow conference earlier this year, and they talked about creating more products for brokerages, more products for the consumer, so that it’s not just a place to search for property for a consumer, it’s now a place to get a lot of different things done. And they’re looking to roll that out. So I this whole idea of of the eco system being you know, I mean, because if we think about it, you know, look dotloop is a really good example of something that has so much potential to do more, in my opinion, I got to meet the I forgot his name, but but the CEO of or the president of dotloop. And I said, Oh my gosh, you guys, you’re only doing DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT right now, I can’t wait to see what you have next because so many brokerages utilize DocuSign or dot loop or or zip forms, or any of the you know, these these e signature platforms. And yet, we also use 10 other systems for other other services. And, and boy, it would be nice to to use one service, maybe even pay a little bit more for the convenience of doing everything in one location. So anyway, I’m sorry, that was a very long answer. But I have noticed this this, what I see as a trend to try to kind of do what financial advisors do. Financial Advisors used to be stockbrokers years and years and years ago, they don’t really exist much anymore. But it was, hey, I got a hot stock tip for you, let’s make you some money, then it became law, I don’t just want that money. I want 100% of someone’s net worth. And I now want to manage all of their assets. And I’m going to take a percentage of those assets under management. That’s where I see sort of some of these tech acquisitions and new offerings coming to be but I’m curious to your thoughts.
Chris Linsell 11:53 Yeah, I completely agree. I think, to your point lonewolf was at the conference. constellation was at the conference. Elm Street was at the conference. Zillow was at the conference, but not as Zillow, this, I mean, I mean, they were there as Zillow. But there was not a single place where they were, you know, a booth or a stage or a presentation where they, you know, Zillow was there to, you know, kind of acquiesce on the on the virtues of Zillow premier agent, it was more of here’s what we’re doing at Zillow to support your business as a whole, in addition to providing leads, which is a dramatic shift. If anybody can think about the real estate, messaging and marketing to professionals that was happening five or 10 years ago, it was like companies like Zillow, were essentially pointing the firehose of leads at you and just drenching you in more than you could handle. Because it was just leads, leads, leads, volume, volume, volume, all I want are names, names, names, phone numbers, phone numbers, phone numbers, that is certainly something that is still important that we have the opportunity to make the connections that grow our business. But it is a much more holistic approach. And frankly, this was my big takeaway from the expo itself, is there is a startling amount of shift happening from what I would consider at one point to be single use one dimensional products towards this ecosystem approach. And I’m not going to kind of spoil spoil the reveal here. But I’m currently finishing and putting the finishing touches on a, an article for the clothes about the best real estate marketing companies that are out there. And the company that I have named as the best real estate marketing company for 2022 isn’t actually a marketing company, they are coming does something else first. And they provide marketing services as a part of their ecosystem. So you have to watch out for the clothes in the next three or four weeks to see who that gets named. But it was a surprise by and frankly, I didn’t at first want this to be the case. I did not want a provider of another service to be the number one marketing company, but they just can’t get around it. They’re better than anyone else that’s doing it. And it is a real indicator of where the technology space is headed in real estate right now.
D.J. Paris 14:35 Well, I think about this for everyone out there who is utilizing any smart home technology. So if you’re utilizing Google Home or nest, or you’re using you know Amazon’s maybe you’re using an echo be for your thermostat or you’re using Alexa for you know doing smart, smart lighting or whatever automations you might have in your home. If you notice if you’re a daily user of those services. And I am, you’ll notice that even now, they’re both magical and also super clunky. And so what I’m thinking, you know, they work and they sort of don’t work at the same time, they work more than they don’t. But if you if you’re a daily user of automated voice technology, sir automate or services, especially in your home, you’ll, you’ll have some frustrations. And I think the next evolution for tech is to somehow figure out how to round out those smooth edges. And I think a lot of it’s by getting somebody to buy in fully to an ecosystem. And that way, you’re not needing to coordinate your Philips Lighting with your Amazon, you know, Alexa app, and it sort of works and doesn’t, I think there’s going to be this idea that you’re going to pick aside, in this case, maybe Google or Alexa. And you’re just going to go full force because it works better that way. And so I’m wondering if, if if that, you know, maybe you choose Zillow because they might have a bunch of other services that they didn’t have previously, HubSpot is a great example of a company that’s kind of done this already. If you actually ask them. I have friends who work at HubSpot. And I’m always like, I don’t, I can’t exactly put my finger on how to describe what you do, because you sort of do everything. And they go, Yeah, we kind of do. Salesforce is the same thing way. So I’m interested to see how some of these companies begin to integrate their products and services together to make it a more seamless solution for the agent or for the agents client, which is also tricky. I mean, you know, think of, I always think like, you know, even putting somebody on an MLS search, you’re limited by the MLS provider that is in your local area, which may be a good piece of software, it might not be in most cases, our experience. I’ve seen many of these MLS software providers over the years. I’m wildly unimpressed with a lot of the tech that they’ve done. And I’m curious if somebody could come along and just create a better experience for the agent and somehow get the buy in of whatever the local or state associations are to create a more holistic approach so that the agent has a better experience in the client as well. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Chris Linsell 18:34 Yeah, I agree. And you know, the interesting, I think component to kind of the end game of all of this to me is that to some degree, there is going to be a dependency on these kind of exclusive data sources like MLS has to really determine whether or not these sorts of end to end solutions are feasible. A good example of this is I got a demo yesterday. Again, I’m not at liberty to say who gave me the demo, but I will say it was for a brand underneath one of these big umbrella companies. And one of the things that they are working on the reason I’m getting this demo is that they think that they have made a breakthrough in how to manage scheduled posts across various social networks, which have notoriously been difficult to kind of API to connect to a third party platform to schedule posts
D.J. Paris 19:46 talking about services that that previously have existed that you may be familiar with like Hootsuite buffer, those those services Yeah, and it’s Yeah, okay. I’m sorry, didn’t mean No,
Chris Linsell 19:57 no, you’re totally you’re right on the right track and so I’m in fact, I’ll go as far as, say I have used. I’m a Hootsuite user to use buffer in the past all tools that have been really helpful for me, except when I want to say, go to LinkedIn, and I want to make a LinkedIn post, I can schedule a post great, but I can’t tag somebody in the the buffer scheduler, and I can’t post the sort of, like, additional add ons that I could do. Like when I’m working on the platform on the LinkedIn native platform. And it kind of creates this kind of hitch in the gidea. Because if I have to, if I can schedule a post, great, but when the post goes live, I have to go to LinkedIn, I have to edit the post, I have to tag in the people I want to tag, I have to tag the photos, all the stuff that I couldn’t do off platform, I’m actually not saving any time here. In fact, I’m kind of adding to my time it feels like, well, the company I was talking to yesterday, thinks they may have cracked that when it comes to Instagram and Facebook. And so again, it just points to the fact that these companies that are working to bring these umbrella experiences together, ultimately are going to be dependent on these kind of sticky, external tools that don’t always play nice with other tools. If somebody can figure that those those kind of sticking points out. It’s game set match. I mean, there there will be a it won’t just be a walk, it’ll be a run to the companies who can bring together all of those stacked kind of disconnected tools into one place on a single dashboard. I think we’re actually getting closer to that. And actually that kind of reminds me of kind of the next thing I wanted to talk about, which was from the main stage of the Inman Connect conference heard a lot of really interesting people, but the standout for me is a heard a presentation from Fredrik Eklund is this does that name ring a bell to you? It does, but I don’t know why. Yeah, so he was one of the original million dollar listings guys on brass. Very, very big personality. His volume knob is cranked up to 11. And Brian broken off I mean, the he never does not fail to, to entertain on the TV basically. And he is he was there giving interviews. He’s co founder in a company called Real, which is basically bringing together the the a lot of the functionality of Zillow, but with the communication opportunities of like, Instagram and WhatsApp. So is much more of a like, real time conversation with leads instead of this kind of disconnected, request information from Zillow, they pass along the information, you have to get back to the lead and figure out how to make a connection. I’m not pitching the real product, though it does sound interesting. I’m excited to get my hands on it. But what I am, what I took away from this was that there are the A very common theme and the presentations at the Inman Connect conference was that it is going to take not just the kind of big brains of the real estate tech space, but the advocacy of the leaders of our industry in order to motivate and create those opportunities for breakthroughs on these connectivity issues. Like you’ve got to get the the influencers out in front of audiences who are listening to say, hey, we want this in order to make changes, and Eklund inferred that this needs to happen on the local level to like if you are a leader in your local market, and you think I hope my language isn’t too harsh here. But if you think that your MLS sucks, and that you the way that data is dispensed and dispersed from your local market is terrible. And you deserve better. You need to get in front of your board and say that you can’t just sit back and hope somebody else does it. The leaders especially but everyone, go to your local board meetings, speak up and say, Hey, listen, this sucks. This is terrible. We have competitors who do this so much better than us. Stop taking my damn money to pad your own pockets and do something with it. And I was a little taken aback by how provocative That statement was. But the more I think about it, like this is so in line with kind of the advocacy approach to real estate that I’ve always carried a banner for myself. It’s just kind of pointed in a different direction. And I really think that it’s a message that hits right now. What do you think about that?
D.J. Paris 24:53 Well, I do some I serve on a few committees at our local level here and I will one of mine is called member care taskforce which is specifically to facilitate feedback from from the realtors here in Chicago and find out number one, what the what the what the, the local association can do better for its members, but also to find out what the members think of certain tools that are being offered and trainings. And, and you know, it’s funny because I’m literally sit on a committee that would love nothing more than to send out a survey every single week to every realtor in Chicago and say, What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? That is literally our job is to figure that out. Of course, we can’t send out that sort of survey too often. But I will tell you people are listening, because there are member care tasks for task forces on on many associations. And all you have to do is just lob a phone call over and say, Hey, I have a suggestion for the association. Where do I direct that? I promise you, I mean, look, every association is different. But I promise you at least that our Association, the Chicago Association of Realtors, we listen, we’re not perfect, but boy, our jobs are dependent upon law. I don’t work for them, but but the people who do work for them, their jobs are dependent upon having paying members, so the only reason they exist. And and so you they’re you’re their boss, and in a sense, you’re not going to tell them what to do, but you’re going to offer suggestions about and remember, most of those people aren’t practicing agents, right? These are people in fact, in a lot of cases, they’re not allowed to practice the employees that most associations are my understanding is are not are not out there practicing. They’re not allowed to so they don’t really know what’s going on, unless you tell them.
Chris Linsell 26:39 Yeah, that’s that’s the truth. And that kind of leads kind of into the the third thing I wanted to talk about, which was my experience, specifically from the, from the stage at and then I spoke on the topic of recession proofing your brokerage business. And though my message wasn’t quite as provocative as acklins was, I did say a couple of things that, you know, I think are in the same vein, as far as understanding the real estate professionals, not just responsibility, but opportunity to be a leader, specifically in a changing market. So I won’t go too deep into it. But essentially, one of the things I said from the stage was asked a question about, you know, not just what brokerages can do to kind of recession proof and shore up their business, but what can agents do to and I said, this is actually a time right now where you have an opportunity to get off your, your heels and onto your toes before everyone else, and do some scooping. And the scoops that you get to get here are one as a high performing agent, you have to recognize that the needs of your buyers and sellers are going to change. The agents who do it poorly, are going to be reactive to that change and try to shift their business and their offerings. After they see those changes happening. The agents who are leaders and are going to be successful and make a lot of money through recessions are going to be the ones who are proactively changing their business offerings, their messaging, their branding, and their positioning. So recognize and predict how your client’s needs are going to change because we’re still gonna buy buying and selling houses is just going to be for different reasons. To start with, start getting a game plan for your changing of your of your marketing, branding and positioning now and be ready to pull that trigger when you see that change on the on the way. And then the other thing that this is one I got a lot of conversation about afterwards, we’ll get to that way is I told folks to remember, we’ve been in boom time in the real estate space for a couple of years now. There are a hell of a lot of real estate agents who joined our profession, when times were great. And they didn’t need to be an expert just yet, because there was so much demand for buying and so much activity in the space that you could be kind of mediocre at your job and still get some transactions done. We are not going to be in that place when the recession of the US economic recession kind of rolls through. And so as a successful agent, you need to recognize the fact that there’s going to be a heck of a lot of agents in the next six months who are going to be considering going back to bartending. These are people who have real estate licenses. They have their licenses hung at reputable brokerages. These are people who are considering quitting. Now is the time to build a team because you have a huge labor pool to pull from, you have people who want to be successful but don’t have the skills or the experience to be successful. If you’ve been thinking about starting a team, the next six months is absolutely when you should be doing it.
D.J. Paris 30:14 I’m a recruiter. So I will tell you, and this is something that I wish I wasn’t necessarily saying to our audience, but I’ll tell you the truth. I think brokerages, especially smaller brokerages, and we have almost 800 agents, which sounds like we’re this massive brokerage, but in reality, we think of ourselves as more of a small brokerage. And that’s not a false humility thing we adjust. That’s kind of how we operate. I will tell you the two biggest things work well, the thing we’re most afraid of is, is losing agents. Because as as we know that transactions are down everyone’s feeling that, of course, as Chris was saying, a lot of people who are part timers or people that haven’t had a tremendous amount of successful time are going to find other things to do with their with their time because they’re not paying the bills. So from a retention perspective brokerages are I would I would hope, who deal with not just top producers, people who, you know, will fall off a bit when when the when as the the economy change, or the the home buying market and selling market changes, and it has changed, these are people going to leave the industry or at least find other alternatives to supplement their income. So we’re scared about that. But I’m from a recruiting perspective, I am very excited, because right now is the time as we start to see production really decreased for even top producers. I mean, if it’s if it’s hitting the top, most top producers and I know lots of them, and they’re all telling me that their production is down. These are people at the top 1% level across the country. I just spoke to a top agent in I forgot what county in in, in California. It’s one of the top counties in the country anyway. He’s like, I can’t believe it. My production is down to this is a guy who sells on average, like $2 million homes is median price. So the point is it’s hitting. So what are people? What do people do when when their productions down, they start looking for other alternatives or looking for other brokerages. So, team building, really, you know, if you’re building a team, you’re no different from me recruiting for my agency, you’re just recruiting for your team, people are struggling right now brokers or agents are struggling, this is a time to you know, consider building a team and thinking about holistically as you approach a client to be able to say, here’s my team, here’s what we do, it’s not just me, we have people helping out in different capacities, that’s a much you could argue not for everybody. But for a lot of consumers. That’s a strong sales pitch. And you have this opportunity to even consider, at some point bringing on those team members with maybe salaries as opposed to cutting them in on the Commission where I’m starting to see that at certain firms as well in certain teams. So a lot of opportunity to pick up. Realtors I keep wanting to say brokers because in Illinois, everyone’s a broker, but it will just say agents picking up agents, this isn’t that this is the time where people start to freak out.
Chris Linsell 33:09 Yeah, big time. In fact, I you hit on the on something that I am glad you mentioned because I was were hesitant to bring it up. But the salaried model is something again, when whenever economies shift, people consider other options you can offer people, if you’ve got the infrastructure to do it, a steady income that puts you out in front of you know, of the cost of that, of that labor, by leaps and bounds. And one one model that I really liked. And I’ve seen a lot of teams recently starting to institute is this idea of a salary or an hourly wage plus a, they call a bonus for closing. And so and you can only offer that to somebody who is licensed, technically, there are ways to kind of structure it semantically. So unlicensed folks can be a part of that as well. But you know, this idea that you can essentially pay 15 bucks an hour, you know, or right around there, and then offer a small bonus on top of on top of that, that, you know, hourly or guaranteed for closings can bring your labor costs down significantly. I mean, they’re I mean, we’re talking 3040 50% For us based workers. That’s a game changer. If you’ve always wanted to start a team but you feel like the margins aren’t quite right. I’m telling you. This is I mean, shoot, we might have to stop doing this podcast so I can go back and start a team full time at this point because like I genuinely can see the writing on the wall in my own mind. Okay, everybody should be doing this right now.
D.J. Paris 35:02 Yeah, it’s a great, great thing to consider. And right now is when, you know, a lot of agents are just struggling and so strim know, if if, if your production is down, or if your team’s production is down, or if you’re an individual agent thinking of leaving the business, I also think now’s a great opportunity for you to reach out to teams and say, Hey, I’m struggling right now, do you have an opportunity for me, maybe not waiting for the teams to reach out to you reach out to teams, I tell you, teams are growing. They’re growing, growing, growing. And and I suspect if you reached out to five different teams, three of them would say we can, we can work something out. So this is an opportunity, at least the teams I know here locally, are like, we just need more bodies. You know, this is where there’s a labor shortage and a lot of different sectors of the economy right now, finding good health is always a challenge. And if you want to get more steady income, and you want to work out some sort of plan, maybe you’re taking just a little tiny percentage of the profit of the team, but you’re getting a steady income, and then maybe that can change over time. This is a great time to have those conversations.
Chris Linsell 36:09 And so And to that point, I just put a bow on this year, the two biggest voices as far as sponsorship at the inland connect conference were side and exp both are brokerage models that are built on the idea that teams are essential for the future of real estate.
D.J. Paris 36:29 Yeah, it’s it’s really interesting. Well, Chris, I know, I know, this is a great probably pipes place to wrap up this this conversation today. And we want to thank Chris, as always, for giving us some insight on what we missed at the admin at the admin conference, I have been to the to the New York Conference before it is exceptional. I’ve not yet been to Las Vegas. And I always think, you know, yeah, maybe it’ll run you $1,000 or so maybe more, more, probably more when you’re dealing with travel. But boy, you will get you will get at least a few good tidbits. So huge fan of those types of conferences. And anyway, I want to just thank Chris for sharing with us what the what the majority of us missed by not attending. And also want to thank you for your just insights in general, and congratulations on speaking you speak at a lot of these, but it is so impressive that we get to have you as well. So I’m very happy for that. And for everyone who is listening, please visit the closed.com. They also have a subscription model 95% of what they offer is completely free, not behind a paywall. But if you want to take it to the next level, they have a incredibly reasonable pricing model for getting to that additional level of coaching support and training. And it’s what $1 or so a day
Chris Linsell 37:44 roughly. Yeah, it’s really cheap, even less.
D.J. Paris 37:48 Boy, I would to get one good idea that might get you one sale. You know if that’s all you ever got on boy you’d make it’d be a nice ROI for the year. So definitely it’s called the clothes Pro. So visit the clothes.com number one read their articles they’re I think they’re the very best with respect to tech reviews, marketing information and just overall advice about what to do in your business. But then also consider subscribing to the close pro it’s incredibly inexpensive it’s kind of a no brainer honestly. So and you can get to cancel anytime scenario I believe as well. So definitely check that out. And Chris, I know you got to run so thank you so much. Please everyone go visit the clothes tell everyone about the clothes and of course also about our podcasts. Let’s let’s let’s keep our viewership and our listenership numbers increasing and we thank you for helping us do that. So Chris, we will see you next next month.
Chris Linsell 38:39 It was a pleasure. Can’t wait to talk to you today Express
How To Find Buyers & Sellers Through YouTube • Toby Fernie
Aug 31, 2022
Toby Fernie a realtor in Monterey California gives a brief overview of his career in real estate. Toby explains why he picked YouTube as the platform to expand his business through. Next, Toby describes how he set up his You Tub channel and how he edits his videos. Last, Toby talks about his course on video and how this course will help realtors in building/expanding their business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Ever wonder how agents generate leads through YouTube? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with actually a returning guest to the show, but but he’s going to talk about something totally different. We have Toby Ferny on the show again, and he’s going to talk about how he uses YouTube to generate a ton of business and he wants to teach you how to do the same. So stick around for that. Before we get to our interview with Toby. Just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell one other realtor about this episode. Just send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com. Also, leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show whatever podcast app you might be listening on, leave us a review and comments are also always read and appreciated as well. So thank you on behalf of the entire team here. I think we’re at about 400 episodes, we couldn’t be more grateful to the audience. You guys are the reason we do this. But enough about that, let’s get on to our conversation with Toby Ferny. Today on the show, we have a returning guest, Toby phirni from Coldwell Banker and also video for real estate.com. Before we get to that, I want to tell you a little bit about Toby. He’s actually been on the show before, and we’re super excited to have him back and we rarely have a guest ever come back. But Toby did such a great job the first time and he really has made a huge shift, since we saw him last and so we’re going to excited to talk about that. But let me give you a little background on Toby. So Toby Ferny is a realtor in Monterey, California, with nine years of residential sales experience five years of that in Massachusetts, four years in California. Now in 2021, he was recognized in the international president’s elite category for the top 3% of all Coldwell Banker agents globally. Toby has primarily built his business through home buying seminars for local educators, referrals from past clients, real estate marketing through YouTube. Last time he was on the show, we talked a lot about finding your niche. And Toby talked a lot about working with teachers, specifically out in the Monterey area and how that was a segment of the population that had really been ignored by realtors. And so he found that niche and he’s got a even a different niche now, or an additional niche that I want to talk to you about. But he’s created an online course for realtors to show them how to create their own YouTube channel and have success I want you all to check out his website, which by the way, the link for this as in the show notes, but the YouTube URL sorry, the URL for his website is video number four. So video for real estate.com video for real estate.com And Toby I were just speaking before, before I bring him on, and he was sharing with me some of the metrics. And this is pretty awesome and impressive and super cool. So we are super, very excited to have Toby back on the show Toby welcome again to the to the podcast.
Toby Fernie 4:47 DJ, nice to see you. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, we were really
D.J. Paris 4:52 really excited to have you back and I am I’m super excited but let’s let’s give everyone just who maybe is newer to this Show and maybe didn’t hear your episode last time. And I don’t want to you know retread old ground too much. But let’s just give everyone a little bit of a brief overview of your career.
Toby Fernie 5:10 So I started my real estate career in Boston, I went to Boston College, and I was trying to help pay my way through school. So I started doing real estate there primarily rentals, helping other other students who had to find housing off campus, and then young professionals at the time, and I was a teacher for around nine years after after finishing college and doing real estate for five years in Boston. And that brought me out to the Monterey area, I was a teacher for one year, and unfortunately found within a year of being here that it was difficult to live on a teacher’s salary in Monterey, which is one of the most expensive counties in California. And I switched back into real estate around five years ago, and I started doing home buying seminars for teachers, helping them through the home buying process, supporting them, and connecting them with some some different loan programs that were available for teachers at the time. And so that was primarily what I was doing during my first couple of years doing real estate here in Monterey, and then started a YouTube channel just over two years ago, and that has been the primary driver for my business for these last two years.
D.J. Paris 6:24 And, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, because I do want to sort of set the table because I, I know that there are a lot of courses, specifically targeting realtors to build up their social media presence, to create YouTube channels to have success, I’m always a little naturally just cautious because I think that sometimes there’s a lot of, you know, excitement around the idea of creating more of an online presence and generating leads. So there’s times we get pitched by by publicists, almost at least once a week for somebody that’s created, you know, one of these types of courses, and I’m not putting you in the same category. Because when we do a little deeper dive into some of these, these courses, I’m not always that impressed. But I know you and I know you well enough to know that this is something that I want my audience to check out, you’re, you know, you’re a good guy, you do good work, and, and you have a tremendous, you’ve had tremendous success with this platform with YouTube. And so I am really excited to talk about it with you. So tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of why YouTube, and what the initial thought was on, you know, creating content to actually bring business in. Yeah, well,
Toby Fernie 7:47 thank you for the kind words, I appreciate that. And thank you, again, for having me on to talk about the course and YouTube in general. So I am somebody who I go to YouTube for a lot of different things, I purchased a house around two years ago, that’s a complete fixer upper. So I’ve done a lot to fix up my house through YouTube, whether it’s, you know, working on plumbing, or electrical, or, you know, learning how to paint it seems like there’s an almost endless number of YouTube videos out there on different topics. So you can search those and learn from people who have a lot of experience in those those different areas. And when I first moved to Monterey, I’m not originally from the area that didn’t have a big sphere. And I didn’t know a lot of people, I started searching on YouTube to see what information I can find out about Monterey since I use YouTube for a lot of different if I’m going traveling somewhere, I might search different videos about best things to do or places to eat. And I was finding that YouTube did not have a lot of information out there about Monterey. There was some videos from the city of Monterey, some some travel bloggers that might have shared their weekend in Monterey that type of
D.J. Paris 9:03 yeah, they blown through town do a video about it, but there wasn’t a lot of hey, I live here I know the area here’s here’s the sort of the things to know and do.
Toby Fernie 9:13 Exactly. So just kind of if you’re somebody who’s moving to the area or if you’re even coming to town for a visit, just trying to teach people the ins and outs about the area so you know what are the pros and cons of living in the area? What’s the cost of living in the area breaking down some different neighborhoods? You know, if you have a family where some good areas with with with strong schools, what are the best walkable areas in town so there’s just a seemingly endless number of topics that relate to real estate and would be helpful information to people who are searching on YouTube and and as I got into YouTube and made a channel and started making videos, there’s so much information out there about the number of people who are on YouTube. Now there’s over 2 billion people with with active have accounts on YouTube who are searching it on a daily or weekly basis. And so there’s people that are searching all the time about real estate information in the area. And what I found is that YouTube is not flooded in the in the same way as some of these other marketing websites out there like Zillow, there’s over 250 realtors, on Zillow in Monterey County, and my name doesn’t even show up until the 21st page. So chances are somebody’s not scrolling until the 21st page to find their buyer or their sellers realtor. So I started just putting content out on YouTube that I thought would be helpful to people who are coming to town for a visit or moving to the area. And I’ve been overwhelmed by the number of people who reach out to me on a weekly basis, who are qualified buyers, they’ve learned information about the area that I live through the videos. So, you know, I was I started out when I first started real estate here, I was working on a team. And they were they were purchasing and paying for buyer leads on Zillow. And I was getting calls from people that were asking for $200,000 houses in Big Sur, which is one of the most expensive areas in Monterey, which is one of the most expensive areas in California. So at the time, there weren’t houses in in Big Sur for for less than a million dollars. So the the leads that I’ve been getting through YouTube have been people that are recognized the the area, the prices, and that are people that are higher quality and more qualified buyer or seller leads then then I was getting through some of those other marketing sites.
D.J. Paris 11:36 You know, that’s a really interesting point, I want to just sort of pause and talk about that for a moment because I never thought of that. And that’s actually makes all the sense in the world. By the time you’re, anyone can jump on Zillow, put in any, of course, any zip code any any city at any, any county any area, and immediately just get a list of things, that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily interested in moving to that area or have done any real research, there might just be browsing for homes, as we know people do sometimes for just for even for fun, and somebody who’s contacted you, you know, for Big Sur, and looking for $200,000 home clearly doesn’t understand that area. And but when you go to YouTube, and you start searching for things like best school districts in Monterey, or, you know, best restaurants, or you have a different level of commitment, I think to learn about that area. So just as you were saying that I was thinking boy, that makes a lot of sense, because by the time you’re getting a little bit more specific about an area, you’re starting to do deeper dive searches into things and and that’s where your videos I’m guessing are of real value.
Toby Fernie 12:48 Yeah, I think in a lot of ways YouTube has turned into modern day television, I mean, there is YouTube TV is a is a platform that a lot of people have their television through. But people when they’re coming on YouTube, they are you’re there, you’re able to catch their attention for a longer period of time than you would on say Facebook or Instagram where you know, people are kind of scrolling through their feed looking at their friends and maybe looking at photos, maybe they’d be interested in a video that’s less than a minute. But on YouTube people you can watch it on your phone, your computer, your television, so people are willing to sit down and watch longer, longer periods of time on your channel, you know, I have some videos that are anywhere from three to 30 minutes and you can see the analytics of how many people are engaging and interacting with your videos and how long they’re they’re watching the videos for and then from there, you’re able to try to create more videos that are like that that are going to get in front of a wider audience. And I think if you’re sitting there and you’re watching like you said you know video about you know the pros and cons of living in an area chances are you’re invested in it you’re gonna want to you know, learn more about the area and the majority of leads that I get are relocation so people that are moving from from a different area, I had a zoom call this morning with with somebody in the Navy who’s relocating from Japan to Monterey. And so these are people that are moving they might not know anybody that the area they’re moving to they’re not going to have a big network chances are they’re not going to have friends to ask you know who’s the realtor that I should work with? So people that spend time on my channel watch a lot of videos they kind of get to know you they get invested and it’s almost like they’ve already done their their buyer or seller interview with you so you know I’ve had people that reach out to me and you know via email phone calls and they already are have made their mind up that they want to work with me based on the the free content and value that I’ve provided through the channel.
D.J. Paris 14:49 Yeah, that makes perfect sense and it’s exactly what I do when I go travel. I always do my research by reading travel blogs and you know Getting some written information that I can I can, you know, check out but then I want to do I want to see what some of the tours look like, I want to see what some of the neighborhoods look like what you don’t get as good a sense of just reading someone’s travel blog, and I had to YouTube and then I’m always like, I always also searched for things like what are five things, you know, what are things tourists don’t know about that they should know about? In an area. Again, these are all deeper dive searches that you in specifically are coming up with content to help somebody like me, because if I was traveling to Monterey on a vacation, which I would love to do, that’s I would do both of those things, I would find out what TripAdvisor says are the cool things to do. And then I would also be searching on YouTube to find people who are locals who understand the area who are like, Oh, you’re coming here for a weekend. Now again, that’s, that’s not looking to buy a home. But you know, the I use it the same way somebody would be looking to buy a home who wants to know, schools, you know, restaurants, grocery stores, what’s it like to live here? All of the things that are more intangible and a little bit harder to get information about simply by looking up home prices on Zillow, for example, like you were saying, so I think that makes all the sense. And I want to just make a quick, I want have a quick question for you. So we have a lot of our agents who are going to live in these larger metropolitan areas or maybe smaller communities like Monterey, but are obviously Monterey is is pretty well known, obviously, for you know, some of the cool things that has, but then we have peep I was in French, we were talking about French Lick Indiana, Toby and I before because I just got back from there. And I’ll just make a quick point. So if I was a realtor in French Lick, which is a very tiny community, I might have, I might have thought before I went and visited there. Oh, well, I guess if you’re vacationing, which is what I was doing, you know, yeah, you’d be searching for vacation stuff. And maybe I’d think about buying a home there if I was that interested. But it’s a small community. And I might think if I’m a realtor there, oh, no one’s going to be searching for cool things to do in French Lick or the best neighborhoods to live in. But when I talk to the people in French Lick this weekend, because it’s so small, it would be considered a rural community. I said, Jerry, you know, how often do people move here and they go, Oh, it’s exploding right now. Because of, you know, the pandemic accelerated the ability for people to work from home, people now can move. And so even if you’re listening, and you live in a smaller community, the opportunity to do this, in some ways, you might even argue it’s a better opportunity, because there might be less competition. I’m shocked that in Monterey, like you were like, kind of the first guy to really, really come out and do this. But in the smaller communities, you can absolutely be the first person to do it. And people are mean, you know, Bozeman, Montana, and all of these places that you think why would anybody move there? Oh, because it’s beautiful and perfect. And people can work from home. You know, and so even if you live in the smaller communities where there’s there’s not as much traffic, boy, I think it’s a great opportunity.
Toby Fernie 18:02 Yeah, so to your point, I would say that if you’re in a small community, there’s a lot of opportunity, right? Because chances are, you might be one of the only Realtors that’s on there, putting out videos putting out content that would be helpful to people who are moving there, if you’re from a larger metropolitan area, so you’re from San Francisco, Chicago, New York, chances are there are millions of people that are searching information about about your town in your in your city. And if there are other realtors out there with the channel, that’s not necessarily a bad thing as YouTube’s algorithm is quite complex, and they certainly know what they’re doing. They will recommend videos for for videos like ones that you’ve already watched, because they want you to be on that platform. So if there are other realtors out there with the channel, and there’s a high traffic for search for your area, if they watched a video from another realtor about you know why they love living in this particular neighborhood, they will then get recommended a video if you put one out there. So I think if you’re from a small town, there’s there’s opportunity there because there may be less realtors out there with a channel. And like you said, DJ, there’s people that are relocating and moving all over the place these days as work has become more more flexible. So I would say that if you’re from a small area, you should certainly make a channel if you’re from a from a larger area, you have such a higher number of people that are that are searching for for your for your neighborhoods for your for your city named Monterey, for example, where I live, it’s a town of 30,000 people so it’s it’s a smaller community and my channel in the last two years has gotten over 120,000 different views. So I kind of relate you know, the time and the effort that you put in I can’t think of any other source where I can come across 120,000 views. I don’t know how many hours that would take to go door knock and cold call to get 120,000 People Pull, or how much money you’d have to spend in mailers to do something like that. So once you make these videos, they’re out there and they accumulate more and more views in each each day that you have those videos out there. These are more potential viewers more potential clients. And you know, the email I got yesterday from the person relocating from Japan, that came in at three o’clock in the morning. So you’re still you’re still even able to accumulate and get potential leads, even while you sleep.
D.J. Paris 20:29 And I think it’s a good point too, because realtor, realtors tend to focus on Facebook, Instagram, other social media channels, more so than than YouTube. Because it’s easier to create content on Facebook and Instagram, you can take a picture, shoot a quick video, or you know, just write a text post. And it’s easy, it’s fast, it’s easy, but, and I haven’t looked at the numbers lately. But last I checked, people who are for example, if you have your own business, if you’re on your own real Real Estate page on Facebook, with a business page, you’re only the people that have chosen to follow your page, you might only every time you post, about three to 5% of that audience is actually going to see it, which is pretty low percentage for people who have chosen to follow your stuff. So if you think well, Facebook’s where all my friends are, and I’m gonna get a lot of leads from there. And yes, you can and will. But only a small percentage of the people that are even choosing to follow you on Facebook are going to see that Toby brings up a really great point, you know, yes. Maybe you have other realtors in your area who are producing videos on YouTube. But I mean, how often does somebody just look at one video about an area when they’re thinking of moving their topis? Exactly right. When I go on vacation, I don’t just look at one person’s video about why you know what I should do when I go to, you know, wherever I’m looking at three or four different videos. And it’s always because they recommend one after you know as the conclusion of the other one. So you’re absolutely right. So whether you’re in a big a large community or more rural community, huge opportunity here. And let’s just before we get into the specifics, let’s talk about the the metrics, and I don’t know what what your you know, what you’d like to share or not. But if we put it what what has been the ROI the return on investment in, you know, you know, you’ve invested some capital and making these videos to actually do you don’t have to share numbers, of course, but can you share a little bit about, you know, the, the results that you’ve been getting from these videos?
Toby Fernie 22:34 Yeah, absolutely. And I’m kind of an open book. So I don’t I don’t mind sharing, this is a podcast, it’s meant to help people and encourage them for, you know, building their business, right. So the thing about YouTube, right, it’s a different social media platform, then you’ll get on Instagram or Facebook, where it’s more so entertainment, right. So those are, you know, you got the people doing the dancing reels where they’re pointing to the different, you know, ways that you get pre approved or whatever you have on those. But YouTube is more of a learning platform, right. So you have the ability to teach people you have the ability to connect with them and share different information about the area that you live in. The nice thing about YouTube is that it’s a free platform to use. So you know, the course I go over how to set up a channel, it’s free to set up a channel. So you can do that without any cost upfront. I also go over ways that you can set up a channel for for almost free, you know, you can do it on your iPhone, if you have an iPhone, you might just need a tripod, something to hold up your phone. If you want to invest a small amount of money. There’s there’s some videos I have on the course about how to set up a channel for $100 Maybe just with a microphone and lights. Or if you want to set up your channel for under $1,000 That’s how I initially started my channel. I wanted to start off my channel and see if I was gonna if it was gonna work out, right I didn’t know how successful that you could be on YouTube. I use YouTube all the time. So I figured that I would try it out. So I decided to buy a less expensive DSLR camera and start start making my videos just with the camera and a microphone and I was shooting outside so I had plenty of lighting. So that’s how I started it out. When I first started doing some sales, I thought okay, maybe I’ve caught on to something here. Maybe I’ll invest in upgrade some of my gear. I did buy a second camera, I bought some lights so I can can film inside and in my office. So I have invested some money up front but the nice thing is, you know whereas Zillow for example, you’re spending money 1000s of dollars every month to get leads. Whereas with YouTube, once you purchase that, that gear and that equipment, you’ve made that investment upfront It doesn’t cost me anything to make a new video and to attract new clients. So, to date, I’ve purchased some different cameras, lights, microphones, some stand And I also purchased a drone that I use for showing off the area for some of my videos or for my listing videos. So I’ve kind of invested in on the higher end, I would say that you certainly don’t need to do this you can invest as little as you want $0 If you want to film on your phone. So to date, I’ve spent $10,000 and all the gear that I’ve purchased for my for my channel, but I’ve got about a 28 to one return on the investment. So from my channel the last two years I’ve earned over $280,000.02 100,000 of that was in was in 2021 alone. I
D.J. Paris 25:38 want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. That’s incredible. So you invested 10 grand over two years, and you’re almost at $300,000. That is a that is one heck of an ROI. Now, one question I have. So congratulations, by the way, I think that is beyond impressive. And boy, not much more to say other than Wow. Question? Editing. So a lot of our listeners are not going to have experience with video editing with what we would might call post production or production in general. Do you do that yourself? Do you hire someone to do that? What’s what’s been your experience there?
Toby Fernie 27:38 Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that editing is the most time consuming portion of creating videos and putting it up on YouTube. And another thing just a side note, you can connect your YouTube with your Facebook and your Instagram. So when I’m uploading something on YouTube, I’m doing all three of those simultaneously. I have gotten some leads through my through my Facebook and Instagram, just from from videos that I was putting up on my YouTube channel. But when you’re making videos, editing, uploading, certainly the longest time period that you would put in, I would say it doesn’t take too much time to actually come up with your idea for the video and then shoot the video itself. So a couple of different options. And I go over this in the course one of the five modules that’s part of the course is all about editing. So it’s editing 101 I show people how to edit a video when I first started my channel, my first videos were horrible, I had no idea what I was doing. I had you know, no lighting, the microphone was bad and I didn’t know how to edit at all. So I found this software it’s actually called Wondershare Filmora nine sure in their in their tagline is easy to use editing software. So and that’s kind of how I would explain it, it’s easy to use even if you don’t have a tech or an editing background, you can use that iMovie if you have a Mac computer that’s a relatively easy to use editing software. So I show you how to edit it. So how to cut down to clip how to put text over your videos how to include music, B roll if you want B roll is when there’s a different you know image or video that’s playing over the main video. So if I’m trying to explain you know, this is what this neighborhood looks like I might include some bureau of some shots that I’ve that I’ve put in on my camera on my drone when I’m making those videos. And then the other thing is that you can outsource your editing so I go all about that, you know what are the pros and cons right so if you’re outsourcing your editing, there’s going to be a cost associated with with editing those videos. I think as I mentioned, you will certainly get more than your your ROI for if you’re spending money for editing or putting in some money for your videos. It will come back to you and the clients that you’re that you’re working with from your channel. So I’ll go over some different apps shins, you know, just ways that you can outsource your editing. So it’s just, you know, weighing your pros and cons, do you have the time? Or are you a realtor that, you know, maybe is trying to build your book of business? And you would like to, you know, learn how to edit and save money on that, or are you a realtor, that’s, that’s absolutely swamped. You can’t think of adding another thing onto your task list. And so I go over outsourcing ideas, and then also how to incorporate YouTube into your weekly schedule by time blocking. So making sure that you put it in there. For me personally, I think that one of the most, if not the most important thing as a realtor is new client acquisition. So if you’re, if you’re not finding ways to meet new clients and work with new clients on a regular basis, you know, you’re going to be struggling to make this a viable profession.
D.J. Paris 30:51 Yeah, and the I was just thinking, as you were mentioning, that, that since the market is has shifted, of course, not quite as active as it was last several years. This, I think a lot of realtors have some extra time right now that maybe they didn’t have in the last two years. And so this is a great opportunity, if you are in between clients, or you have more free time. And to really think about, you know, creating this and do you I have a question about comm. You were saying coming up with ideas is is actually pretty easy. I’m curious if you have a suggestion for our audience, I have a thought and I wanted to, I’ll give my thought first and I’d love to get your your thought. If you’re thinking well, I don’t know what what people want to, you know, want to find on YouTube, I would think about what a clients who are moving to the area ask right like so if a client’s moving, you know, what do they ask you? What are the questions that come up? Those are the exact questions they’re typing into YouTube.
Toby Fernie 31:56 Yeah, I try to put myself in the shoes of somebody moving to the area all the time. Right? What questions would I have? I moved to Monterey myself around seven years ago. So what questions that I have, you know, if you’re from the area, think about questions that your clients who have moved to the area have had, or if you’ve moved somewhere, put yourself you know, back in the in the time that you move, what were you thinking about? And those are often the types of videos that I’ll put together, I have kind of two different categories of videos that I put together. One is more so lifestyle. So you know, what are the best restaurants? What are the pros and cons of living in the area, the cost of living, best things to do, you know, coffee shops, bars, all those different things. So I put together videos for all those different things on the channel. If you’re worried about time, I’ve shot some of these videos just directly from my office. And so I will, you know, talk about my favorite restaurants and say, you know, here’s their address, and include some some photos that they you know, have on their Instagram, right, so talking about that. My most viewed video to date has over 20,000 views. And that’s just a restaurants video, and I didn’t even leave, leave my house to shoot that video. So that’s one category of videos, that’s the one that will draw in a lot of different viewers to your channel. And then I also do a real estate content, right? So I want people to know that I’m a realtor, I want them to know what it’s like to work with me. So I will do market updates. So I’ll do a market update every month, you know, look at home sales, what are current homes active on the market. So these are things that you should be doing already as a realtor, right? So you should be looking at the inventory looking at home sales. So you can you know, help buyers and sellers cop out home sales. So a lot of the work that I’m already doing on a day to day basis as a realtor, I’ll just turn it into a video so another video that I started doing so I can I try to put out a video once a week. So another series if you will, that I started putting out along with the monthly market update is I will do a weekly what’s new on the market. So I will talk about that. Yeah, so I actually do a screen recording I will pull up you know in Monterey is a small area. So maybe there’s you know, 25 new homes that hit the market that week. So I will pull up the different listings and I will do a screen recording. Again, these are all things that I talked about in the course and show you how to do step by step I’ll do a screen recording of those different listings talk about the listing where it is the number of bedrooms, bathrooms price, and I’ll scroll through some photos from directly from the listing it’s there’s no MLS violations to do that right it’s it’s just information that’s out there on the internet. So I’m scrolling through and then I will you know show a breakdown of the houses from from most affordable to most expensive on a weekly basis. And then each time that I make a video at the beginning and at the end of the video I’ll share my contact information and say if you’re thinking about moving to the area you’re looking to buy or sell, that they can reach out and connect with me so it’s content that I can put out on a weekly basis. Again, you don’t have to leave, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can do it directly from your office. And hopefully it’s things that you’re already doing on a daily basis as a realtor.
D.J. Paris 35:12 Do you ever? Yeah, I love that. Because it really requires probably little editing a little, a little amount of editing, tiny editing, because you’re really screen recording, you’re going over facts and figures, a few pictures here and there. So it’s, those are probably faster to produce, I’m guessing than some of the where you’re going on location somewhere to, to shoot. But do you do that sometimes when you’re? I’ve seen Realtors do this where they’ll do I see this more on Facebook and Instagram, where realtors will be on a showing, or maybe it’s a listing of theirs? And they’ll say, I want to, you know, walk you through the house? Or do you now do you incorporate those as well? Are you more about information that people want when they’re moving in? Versus here’s my new listing? Check it out?
Toby Fernie 35:55 Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that you should be incorporating video into your listings as well, a recent stat that I saw, which is kind of shocking. And I saw it through home light, which is you know, a website that collects data about real estate and realtors, it said that 51% of buyers are starting their home search on YouTube looking for their realtors, that alone that thinks should encourage realtors to get on YouTube. And then it also said that 73% of sellers want to work with realtors who are incorporating video into their marketing for their for their listings. So you know we’re in the modern age, people want to see video, they want to see, you know, the neighborhood, they want to see, you know, digital walkthroughs of the houses so they can put themselves in there, plenty of people who purchase homes in Monterey might do it sight unseen. So you got to include all those, those different things in your marketing, I do include videos of walking through, you know, listings, if I have colleagues who are okay with me doing video walkthroughs, I’ll do that. I think it’s something that people are very interested in seeing. It’ll draw a lot of traffic and a lot of views to your channel. If there’s a new housing development, and they’re willing to let you, you know, tours, some of the different models and you can just do this on your on your iPhone, you’ll want to get what’s called a gimbal. That’s something that helps to keep the camera steady as you’re walking around. Because there’s a lot of shake, when you know when you have your camera lens, and that will be distracting. But if you can do tours of listings, if you can do tours of new housing developments, those are going to get a lot of different views. And it’s things that, again, these are qualified viewers who are interested in moving and thinking about purchasing in your area.
D.J. Paris 37:36 And you mentioned the gimbal which by the way, for those that don’t know is as Tony mentioned, it’s something that that’ll keep your phone or your camera steady as you hold it. So when you see these videos of people holding what looked like maybe a selfie, stick it and you’re like how does the camera say so they must have these these pans of steel, which is you know, really what it is, is they’re using this thing that that compensates for it. And it’s by the way, a gimbal is kind of a generic term for the technology. And it’s actually you can you don’t have to spend much money at all did I’ve seen gimbals for like 30 $40 up to hundreds of dollars. So it’s it’s interesting is like, Oh, you can make your your, you know your video really steady, even if you’re walking through somebody’s home simply by you know, spending 50 bucks, which I think is such a cool thing. So I’m glad you gave us that point. I want to also real quickly talk about the website because Toby is now teaching this he’s mentioned in his course the website is video number four so video for real estate.com video for real estate.com And tell us a little bit about what you get and, and some of the content.
Toby Fernie 38:49 So I tried to basically explain from from A to Z, right? If you’re if you’re brand new, if you’re a novice for making videos, you’ve never shot a video before. How do you go from you know, setting up a channel itself right? So how do you set up a channel, I’d share some analytics and information about you know, the the way that you should name your channel, how you should label your videos with titles and go over how to make a thumbnail, which is the front image on a YouTube video, because you want to try to once you’re making these videos putting in the effort putting out good content, then you have to figure out how you’re going to distribute it and get it in front of the most amount of viewers. So that’s the course is broken down into five modules. The first one is all about how to set up your channel. Then I’ll go into the gear that you’ll want to purchase if you’re planning to invest some money for your channel. Again, I’ll go over some options of how you could do this for free. One of the videos on there is how to set up your channel for $100 or under $1,000. So we’ll talk about cameras, microphones, lights, gimbals standards, things like that, that you might want to invest in for your channel. And then I think the you know the Eat of the course, if you will, is I have two different modules that are all about the content that you should be putting out. So I have spent countless hours doing research and figuring out, you know, what are good videos, what are videos that are, that are frequently searched? What are videos that are going to attract buyers and sellers to your channel. So I go over different videos and share you know how successful they’ve been on my channel, I include outlines and scripts, so you can make your own, it’s going to help you save time on making a video, so you can print it out and just plug in information about your market to replace the things that I’ve put about Monterey. And then I have examples of those videos. So what do they look like? So it’ll help you save time and making those videos. And then I have another module that talks about distribution. So how do you get that out in front of the most amount of potential clients? And what do you do in terms of following up with those clients, once they’ve, they’ve reached out to you. So it’s kind of my two years of knowledge and experience, the mistakes that I’ve made and things that you can avoid, and I kind of put on my former teacher hat, because I do enjoy teaching and working with other realtors and helping people. So it really just is a breakdown of how you can start finding success and attracting clients to your channel on a consistent basis.
D.J. Paris 41:23 And I’m curious, when you started your channel, how long did it take to get because you were you always doing weekly videos when he first started.
Toby Fernie 41:32 So at the beginning, it was certainly not as easy to come up with ideas and content to put out on my channel. Some of the videos like the monthly market update that I do and the what’s new on the market, those are easier to do on a weekly basis. If there’s information in the news about real estate, right when rates were changing, or when you know those at a time when people were getting offers, you know, way over the asking price or now that the market is changing and shifting and slowing a little bit. I’ll do some videos out there about that. But so it’s just it took me a while to figure out a groove for how to make those videos. And so that’s some of the information that I share on this channel. So you can figure figure that out. It took a while for me to start, you know, seeing results and success from the channel. I would say it was months before I had anybody that reached out to me from the channel. And so that you know, you have to invest the time you have to it’s more of a long term investment in play rather than than expecting to get these these quick, easy leads right up front. So it’s going to take a few months for you to start, you know building momentum and having YouTube recommend your videos out there to viewers. But now I get usually about three high quality leads a week that are coming in from from the channel.
D.J. Paris 42:51 A curious one last two last questions. One Well, I I’m just trying to think the order to ask these but I’ll just ask them. So I’m curious, because I know you have a funny story about the first lead that you got from or the first reach out that you got Do you mind sharing that?
Toby Fernie 43:06 So the first call that I got, I had been making videos for a few months and you know, putting out some videos like pros and cons of living in the area and real estate updates. And the first call that I got actually missed the call and they left a voicemail. It was a 10 minute rant of this person saying how he didn’t appreciate the pros and cons video that I had put out about Monterey sounded like he was a guy that had lived in the area for a long time and just told me that you know, people don’t talk like that around here. And you’re you know, you’re not from here, and and what do you know about Monterey. So that was a very interesting 10 minute voicemail that I got, sent that out to some of my friends and colleagues. And it was an interesting first first call that I got. And then I actually got my first actual lead a week later. And I picked up the phone this time and somebody said, Oh, I just saw your cones of Monterey video and I thought I was going to have, you know, this person upset with me and I was getting ready. Okay. All right. Let’s hear it. What’s it what’s it going to be? And then he said he was actually from Pennsylvania. He was thinking of moving to Santa Cruz, which is about an hour away from my market, came across my channel saw some information about living in Monterey and had no idea about Monterey. And it was actually the first time they did come across it. So he said he was now thinking about moving to Monterey and asked for me to kind of share some of the differences and similarities between Santa Cruz and Monterey. And that was the first person who ended up purchasing with me, he purchased a near $600,000 home in the Monterey area. And so that was again somebody moving from from Pennsylvania he was moving here for work, didn’t know anybody didn’t have any connections or any realtors in the area. And so that was the the first lead that led to a successful sale.
D.J. Paris 45:00 It’s It’s amazing. And I’ll my last question is, how often do you end up getting leads for people that are moving to other areas? Does that ever happen? Where even though you’re creating content around people who are wanting to live in your community? I’m curious if you ever get leads for people who say, well, or I live in Monterey, and I’m moving somewhere else, and I came across your stuff? Does that ever happen?
Toby Fernie 45:25 Yeah, that’s a great question. It has really opened up in the area that I practice real estate the YouTube channel has, you know, when I first started my, my primary sphere that I worked with was was teachers from the home buying seminar. So it was often people that were purchasing kinda in the lower end of, of homes in Monterey County, just because it’s it’s difficult to afford on that on a teacher’s salary. So I’ve been opened up to a different type of clients, people that are that are looking in the surrounding areas. So I have some sales that I’ve done in Santa Cruz, which again, is an hour away from where I live. And then I currently have a listing that’s in San Jose. And that was somebody who came across my channel, San Jose is about an hour and a half away from where I live. And they are selling their home in San Jose, and then also going to be purchasing one. And so we’re in contract for a million dollar house in Monterey. And then their house is listed for for over over a million. And then the largest largest sale that I’ve done to date has been from the YouTube channel. It was somebody who he was initially interested in Monterey, and I helped him look at some houses in Monterey. But there were more so looking for new homes, and there aren’t too many new homes in the Monterey area. So he decided to shift and look up in the Santa Cruz area. And we have been working together for probably six months. And he called me on a Saturday out of the blue and just said, Hey, I went through an open house in Santa Cruz this weekend, love the house, we’d love to put an offer in on it. And that was a $2.5 million home. So it’s kind of you know, opened up to a new group of clientele. I think if you’re somebody who came across my my website or my Zillow profile, and you saw that I was mostly doing homes in the you know, in a certain price range, maybe you wouldn’t think to work with me but you know, the the channel, I think by providing free content and value to people, you know, they’re not then turning around and looking and seeing your sales history. They moreso want to work with you, just based on on how they’ve got to know you from the channel.
D.J. Paris 47:26 Well, Toby, thank you so much for coming on. Again, I want all of our listeners and our viewers to go to Toby’s website and consider investing in his YouTube for realtors course, his website is video, the number four real estate.com Again, video for real estate.com We actually have a coupon code for all of our listeners to get 25% off. So please enter the code real r e a l and you will get 25% off of the off of the purchase price. But boy, if I could get a return like you, in fact, you’ve inspired me as a recruiter, which I don’t practice real estate, I just realized nobody’s making recruiting videos meaning, hey, how do you choose a real estate firm? How do you consider switching real estate firms? Right, that’s the area that I play in. And I just realized nobody’s doing that. So I need to start kind of adding it on YouTube is good I, I will and I and you’ve inspired me to do that. So I hope we’ve inspired some other people to pick up your course and also start creating YouTube channels. Toby is what’s the best way someone can reach out to you if they’re interested in your course. Obviously, they can go to your website, do you mind sharing your email address with us as well?
Toby Fernie 48:44 Absolutely. So I have an email address from the course. So it’s Toby t o b y at video for real estate.com with the with the number four so you can contact me that way. If you want to see some more content and some of the videos that I’ve put out on my channel that one is called Living in Monterey, California. So you can take a look there I have my personal email address cell phone on all those videos. So yeah, feel free to
D.J. Paris 49:13 by the way, steal Toby’s ideas for your own area. Absolutely. Yeah, of course. So go to his just subscribe to his YouTube channel living in Monterey. By the way, we’ll have a link that’s up there’s a link to that in our show notes. Go pick up his his his course. Use promo code real for 25% off and boy Toby I’m I’m so excited that you did this and and congratulations on all the success. that’ll wrap up another episode here of keeping it real. We’re glad that Toby was able to come on again. It’s a good guy and he has a good good service there. And so please check it out. This is the year to get on YouTube. And and really, you know, start creating content that people want to see and watch those those leads start trickling in. And yeah, so on behalf of Our audience want to thank Toby for being present once again for the show did a great job, of course. And on behalf of Toby and myself, we want to thank everybody for continuing to listen and support our show. Please two things, go visit his website to check out his course and use promo code real for 25% off video for real estate.com. And sorry, Toby, did I say that? Yeah, that’s right video for real estate.com And please tell a friend pick a one other realtor that needs to start get on YouTube and send them a link. From this episode to your friend telling a friend is the best way you can help us continue to grow. So Toby, thank you so so much. I will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Toby.
Toby Fernie 50:41 Thanks, TJ. Appreciate it.
How To Be Your Own Brand Ambassador • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Aug 29, 2022
In our July episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties emphasizes once again the importance of being your own brand ambassador. Carrie discusses social media content and how to grow your channels. Carrie also shares tips on how to behave during the market slowdown. Last, Carrie shares traits she believes brought success to her.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What does it mean to be your own brand ambassador? And more importantly, how do you do it? We’ll talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering their clients a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod again, real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business. This episode is also brought to you by quality builders are you or one of your clients real estate investors who can’t seem to find a trustworthy general contractor. Are you tired of poor communication, excessive change orders and extensive schedule delays. We’ll look no further because quality builders as a Chicago general contractor focused on helping you the real estate investor grow your portfolio. Each and every product decision is based on quality builders core values of transparency, courage, integrity, and uniqueness which produce sustainable and predictable results that successful real estate investors are looking for. Quality builders uses innovative project management technology to keep you up to date on your projects by providing a client portal to view daily logs schedules and contract and change order updates. Schedule a free one on one consultation by visiting quality builders.com That’s quality builders.com to see how they can partner with you to build your real estate portfolio and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping your real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carrie McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer in Chicago with over 22 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors in the last 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents in the Chicagoland area. Carrie is currently ranked number I actually I didn’t look but I think you’re in the top 10 I think you’re like number seven, which is unbelievable. So out of all those 1000s and 1000s of agents. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. Please visit Carrie at Carey McCormick r e.com. And please follow her on Instagram at Carey McCormick real estate. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 3:36 Thank you for the intro happy to be here as always,
D.J. Paris 3:40 I did want to real quickly mention that you I was out with another monthly guest Joel Schaub, actually, I saw him a week well, I saw him last night, but it’s um, a week ago. And a week ago, he came up to me we were talking about social media and he says, he said Carrie McCormack has the very best Instagram account I’ve ever seen for a realtor. And so he wanted me to make sure I told you that on as you’re
Carrie McCormick 4:05 such a great guy, I just I adore him. He’s He’s such a great guy. And actually that’s a good way to kind of kick off a conversation. I spend a lot of time obviously on my social media as far as curating what I do and a lot of people do ask me you know, questions about my social media and how it came to be and who does it for me etc. And as probably a lot of you guys listening know I do it all myself. And it’s all organically grown. And I always tell people to be your own brand ambassador and really when you are creating social media posts or doing your own branding, it really mine took off because I started to be more authentic to who I am and what I wanted my brand to be and I think once it comes from within and again, who you are, that will shine through. A lot of people will end up kind copying each other, and I get it, I get inspiration from other, you know, brokers or companies or etc what it is, but you really spin it to who you are and what you’re about. It does definitely shine through and clients and people can can see it.
D.J. Paris 5:14 I was the I’m on the Young Professionals Network committee for the Chicago association here locally, and I’m on this group text, and we’re always chatting back and forth with ideas. And one of our members mentioned, oh, there’s this walking tour of a neighborhood here in Chicago called McKinley Park, which I’m not that familiar with. And so this group text, the one of our committee members was saying, Hey, there’s this, there’s this walking tour this weekend, great opportunity to learn the neighborhood. And also for social media. Content, you know, you can take pictures or videos of of the tour, and I was thinking, Wow, what a smart idea. Yeah, and I know, you do this a lot, too, when you go to showings, or you have a listing, you know, you’re constantly showcasing features of the house, or the property that you’re visiting, and putting it on social.
Carrie McCormick 6:08 Yeah, I mean, it’s every day is realtors, we’re out and about, so why not kind of document what we’re seeing what we’re feeling, you know, what’s out there. So it’s, it’s a fun way to continue to grow your social media. But actually, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about, on, you know, this, this monthly podcast is, you know, we’re headed into August, July was a slow month, you know, due to a variety of things, and not to keep talking about rising interest rates, and inflation and all that stuff that we know that’s going on the entire market has slowed down across the United States. So it’s, we’re seeing it in all different markets. And because I’ve been doing this for 22 years, I’ve been in and out of a lot of different markets. And it really is a great time for everyone to reevaluate their business and kind of pivot, right. And it’s not a bad thing to slow down, it’s not a bad thing to adjust your business. This is the time where I think is growth happens, and you learn different skill sets. And you really now need to start energizing and working on your business to set up working in your business. A lot of people told me that throughout the years, and I’ve listened to them and say like, yeah, yeah, no problem, I’ll do that. But really, when you think through it in working on your business, instead of in it, it really is a time for growth, and a few things just to share with you guys of what I’m doing through this time is revamping my database, which is a daunting task. I’m going through some of my systems and automating a few things. Again, you hear this all the time to do it, but really sit down and think of the tasks that are redundant or that take up time and really try to automate it. There’s so many different tools out there to do that. And anyone listening, I’m happy to share some of the things I’ve discovered, not to say it’s right or wrong, that what I’m using, but I definitely find it useful. And then reaching out to clients. You know, it’s it’s great to reach out to people for no reason at all, except to check in on them and say hello. You know, instead of asking them for referrals or asking them for something, it’s a great time just to reach out because so, you know, just again, working on your business and pivoting some of your marketing as well. A lot of times during slow times like this agents will do, they’ll step back in their business to the back, okay, no one’s buying no one’s selling, you know, I’m just gonna kind of take it easy, which sounds great, you know, just to kind of take a little bit of a break. And I you know, sometimes there’s days, I want to do that too. But it’s really important. I call it doubling down, you know, really work really hard because I think and this is my small prediction is that we’re going to have a very healthy fall market. I think we’re going through a slow slow time here. Interest rates will probably ease up a little bit I think people will get used to the new norm that we’re in. And I think there’s some buyers on the sidelines that are going to come back to the market so be ready. Take this time to revamp your business. pivot a little bit but be ready for the full market.
D.J. Paris 9:24 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests? Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up by integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part, they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh, yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link, visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. I was thinking I was yesterday i Sorry, I was thinking about what you were saying. Because yesterday I received an alert from a news app that I subscribe to that sends me breaking news. And I don’t specifically have it targeted for real estate or financial news, just just world news, really. And so the breaking news alert that I got yesterday was that and this is again, we’re in towards the end of July. And when this podcast goes out, it’ll be more and more into August. But it was when the Fed had their 75 basis point rate hike, which was happened to be yesterday. end of July. And I thought, boy, you know what a great opportunity. So if I’m getting this alert, a lot of other people who are following the news are also seeing this this headline, and maybe are going to start wondering, I wonder how that affects my you know, if I’m purchasing a property, would this affect my how our interest rates? Or sorry? How are our lending rates affected? Our lending rates affected? Have they already, you know, sort of prepared for this rate hike that I think the banks knew were coming. But the average person on the street, and I don’t mean on the street, I mean, the average person who’s not in the real estate industry doesn’t really know that much about how interest rates and lending rates are correlated, and how they interact. And I think it’s just another opportunity to to reach out like you were saying, you know, if you see news, maybe get ahead of it and reach out to your buyers and say you might have seen this in the news. Or well, first, I would guess talk to your lender, find out how it does, you know what you need to know as the agent, but then bring that to the client and say, Hey, don’t don’t worry, here’s, here’s what this means. I just think there’s so many opportunities for agents to reach out when those kinds of events happen.
Carrie McCormick 12:34 Yeah, I agree with that. I think that’s another point of your partnerships and your relationships in this business. Because make sure that you nurture those, like you were just talking about mortgage rates, you were talking about Joel, who’s with guaranteed rates, you know, leverage your relationships with these with these folks have, even if they’re not in position to buy or sell a home, they may be in a position to refinance. And because you’ve you know, given them that information that rates have ticked down, and you know, again, partner with your mortgage lender, they will find you to be a value resource. And again, it’s not just always about buying and selling real estate, but now you become, you know, more of a fiduciary which we are to them, and they find value in what you’re bringing them. I was actually talking with another broker. She was from Atlanta, very sweet woman. And she asked me also to be on her podcast. And it was funny, because I said, How did you find me? You know, because it’s just, you know, when I get calls from people from California, or wherever, it’s just, it’s so interesting. And she’s like, Oh, your social media. And I thought that that was spectacular. And she said, you know, give me your secret weapon. We all want to know what it is of how you became successful? And I thought, well, that’s a loaded question. Because we all know, in this industry, there’s no secret sauce, there’s no one secret weapon, and it’s truly a lot of hard work that goes into this job. But I said, if I had to pick one to answer your question, it would definitely be my network of people around me, you know that. Looking back to everyone who has supported my business and who I’ve networked with, and used and leveraged in my business really, has paid off and those relationships are key. So I would suggest to anyone out there, you know, have a key network out there, grow those relationships, maintain them, and always look for new opportunities with them as well.
D.J. Paris 14:31 Yeah, we’re in the back to school time. So this is a good opportunity for for everyone listening to think about those in your sphere of influence that have kids that are going back to school and maybe, you know, you could work on creating some little, you know, little
Unknown Speaker 14:49 I like that. I’m gonna write that one down like
D.J. Paris 14:51 notebooks, Kranz pens, whatever school supplies or maybe even better asking you’re asking Client, your clients, if the teachers need any supplies, oftentimes teachers, depending on what districts and states, the schools are in, oftentimes are in short supply of things that are needed for the classroom. So anything like that, I think is a great reason to pick up the phone or even just to say, are you excited, the kids are going back to school, having that conversation getting some more, you know, more more mom or dad time alone, versus, you know, the busy summer months. And I will also say something that I use. So Carrie and I are here in the local Chicago market. And I talk to a lot of Chicago realtors, a lot of top producers, people like carrier. And what’s interesting is, is you were talking about your success. And if you had to boil it down to one thing, it would be your network, I will say, a close second will be the way that you are perceived by other agents. And I asked people all the time associate you and I together or associate you to me because of our show, and people will come up to me and they’ll go, Carrie is not only like an absolute superstar. She’s like the nicest person to do a deal with. And I get that across the board. And I think that that matters. Of course, it matters. But it really is something that is probably not coincidental that you’re ultra successful, and, you know, apparently very pleasant to do a deal with, according to everybody I’ve talked to.
Carrie McCormick 16:28 Well, actually now you just reminded me the one thing too is that I talked about when I was being interviewed was, again, some more success stories. And I would say that three other tips would be Have patience. I think a lot of people want to have success, and they want it quickly. And I get it. Because anyone that knows me, I’m a very impatient person. But through the years, I’ve learned to be patient. Ego is another thing, I think in our industry, in sales in general, we’re all type A personalities. And we do have an ego. But my my line is ego doesn’t serve the client. Clients don’t care. I mean, they really don’t, they just they want, you know what they want. So really kind of check your ego and especially to each other as brokers, you know, we’re all in this business together. So you know, set your ego aside is number two. And number three, I say this all the time to people is Be kind, I mean, really be kind to each other. Because you know, I’m sure there were times that I wasn’t kind or whatever it was, but I’ve learned in my maturity of 22 years that again, it sounds so easy, and I truly mean this, you know, authentically is when you are truly kind of people with no, you don’t want anything back from them. You’re just kind to them and you’re giving in you’re doing with best intentions with nothing wanting anything in return, it comes back to you. And that’s again, part of my success is you know, all everything’s been good intentions behind. Don’t have any go work hard. And it’ll come
D.J. Paris 18:14 there you go. Well, it carry you has, by the way we should mentioned carry did was almost 170 million last year, just by herself. So I want to set the stage of just how busy she is. And in fact, she’s so come on. Whoa, my APOP My sincere apologies. I had it backwards. I had 168 which was was very 186 186,000,001 person, no team.
Carrie McCormick 18:41 But I do want to say thank you to my support team. I’ve got the most incredible support team and anyone out there knows we can’t do it without them. It is a team. And they support my vision. They support my brand, and couldn’t do without him.
D.J. Paris 19:00 Takes A Village. It takes a village but but yeah, so Carrie is is truly remarkable. And she has to go right now because she has to do another deal. And she has an appointment right now. So I’m going to say goodbye once again to Carrie, who is just so marvelous to be on our show every year, every month every year since we’ve started. We are so grateful. We’re so lucky to have her. So thank you Carrie Everyone, go follow Carrie on Instagram, Carrie McCormack real estate, find her on Instagram and reach out to her. She’s super helpful and nice and she is wonderful on our show. We appreciate you. Thank you and thank you to all our listeners. Stay tight. Stay stay connected to us and we’ll see on the next episode.
Carrie McCormick 19:45 Have a great day.
D.J. Paris 19:46 Okay
How Top Realtors Organize Their To-Dos • Mridu Parikh
Aug 25, 2022
Mridu Parikh goes back to the beginning of her journey into becoming a productivity coach. Mridu shares her recommendations for people that feel some part of their life is not where it should be. Mridu extensively discusses how to organize your to-do list in order to have an effective day and time-management. Next, Mridu discusses how to make space for the most important things in life. Last, Mridu talks about her Podcast and what she discusses there.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How do the most successful real estate agents organize their daily to dues? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with productivity coach Murray do Pareek from Life is organized.com. But before we do, we just always ask our audience to help us do really two things. Sometimes it’s one thing today, it’s two things, but they’re pretty easy, we really would appreciate it. Number one, please tell a friend about our show. Just think of one other realtor, maybe one that isn’t very well organized. And not just you. I know if it’s me I’m not I’m never organized. But I can also think about other people that I know that aren’t as organized. And I’m gonna send them a link to this episode because I want them to get more organized. So think about somebody that you know, maybe in your office that could benefit from getting more organized, send them a link to this episode. And the second thing is just to leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening to my voice on right now. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Leave us some comments. We always are interested to hear what the audience likes and dislikes so we can keep improving. Okay, enough about me. Let’s get organized with my conversation with redo Pareek.
All right, today on the show we have Brittany from Life is organized.com. And let me tell you more about litho. Now she is the founder of life is organized and Ruth is passionate about getting women the results they want whether it’s doubling their business revenue, losing weight, increasing time for self care, her best selling book and productivity podcast share it’s simple strategies to ditch to ditch overwhelm. Marie through us teachings on mastering tasks and habits have been featured in the Huffington Post, Forbes US News and World Report. And real simple and when she’s not wrangling a list or a schedule, you can usually find this former professional organizer turn productivity pro with her two teens and her husband in Nashville enjoying them all back. Please everyone who is listening follow her whether you’re a man or woman, or nine binary or whatever you identify as please go over to Life is organized.com. That’s the home of everything Marie through she’s got amazing resources. And if you just go to life is organized.com forward slash resources there is and we’re gonna have a link to that in the show notes. So if you’re listening to this on a podcast app, look in the show notes, we’ll have a direct link to that. But she has lots of great resources for you and also follow her on Facebook and Instagram. Also, life is organized. So just find her that way and you can get to everything from life is organized.com and last subscribed to her podcast, which is called productivity on purpose. And she brings on experts in all fields of life to help you get to that next level. So anyway, really welcome to the show. We’re so excited to have you.
Mridu Parikh 4:30 Thank you for having me. That was the best intro and by the way, you nailed my name so you have let’s
D.J. Paris 4:38 we have to tell the audience though, I I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. And so I’ve learned by miss my past mistakes to make sure and I probably set it in front of me at least 50 times going I just want to get this right and so she had to listen to me say it over and over again. So I glad I got it right.
Mridu Parikh 4:55 Yeah, and I say usually takes like a glass of wine. So I’m telling you either you’re drinking right now. Are you just really have I,
D.J. Paris 5:01 I am 17 beers, and I don’t remember what we’re doing right now. But I did get the name right. And I’m gonna pass out and just let you talk the rest of the time because I’m wildly drunk. I wish I was wildly drunk, but I am sadly I am sober. But let’s, let’s talk about, I think this is a really important topic. And by the way, I don’t have a lot of experts outside of top real estate agents on the show. And I should, because I think this is really important is real estate agents have to wear so many different hats. And they’re essentially, in many cases, most of our listeners probably are individual practitioners, right? They don’t have a team behind them. Maybe they have, the firm they work at maybe has some training, some support, they can get help when they need it, but they’re really on their own most of the time. And that is a ton of pressure, it’s a ton of stress. It’s a lot of different hats to wear. And it can be overwhelming, exhausting. And I would love to talk to you all about some some ways to minimize some of that stress and become more effective and efficient. But before that, I want to learn about your journey. Like how did you get into it into you know, becoming a productivity coach? Tell us your journey.
Mridu Parikh 6:20 Yeah, well, first i What did you want to thank you because I know I’m a little bit outside of the box of your gas. And I you know, hoping to drop a lot of value here. But I like that you started with a story because I think that a lot of real estate agents can probably resonate with it, even though I’m not in that industry. When I had an opportunity, let’s say to leave my corporate career of 10 years was because my husband’s job was bringing us from New York to Nashville. This was 17 years ago. So it’s not the it city. It’s not the cool place to be right. Nobody wants to lose. I don’t want to be here. But the only way he got me here was I had I had a two year old and was on my way with the second the only way he got me here was he said the magic words. You won’t have to work. I thought I hit the jackpot. Right? I was like, okay, Sign me up. Let’s go to Nashville, this
D.J. Paris 7:05 deal with the country music,
Mridu Parikh 7:07 right? We get here and of course store, you know, couple years and I’m like, I’m going cuckoo love my kids. I just you know, I missed my work. I want to get back. But I don’t want to go to that career, that corporate job, let me like on this entrepreneurial journey, and no business, starting a business, but let me start a business. Okay. So fast forward trying to figure out what I want to do. I actually landed on home organizing, as you mentioned, it was a professional home organizer, again, way back before like the containers door homesteaded or a condo, it was like, Oh, gee, and this. And I thought, This is my calling. I love it. And I quickly realized I don’t really love organizing other people’s stuff. But what I love is teaching them and coaching them the skills behind it. Like I don’t really like doing it, but I want to teach them how to do it. So I moved into that. And this is where I think probably some your listeners can resonate is that you know, you start this business thinking, I’m going to have so much freedom, I’m going to have so much flexibility that I want to be home with my kids. Let me start my own thing. And then you realize you’re spread too thin, you’re scattered, you’re exhausted. And then this can really kind of lead you to feel like a failure at times. Sometimes it can make you resentful. Well, that was me. That was definitely me. I was not it was not the freedom and flexibility I was looking for I was handcuffed to my business 24/7. And I was working like crazy. And I was thinking how is it possible that I’m working this hard, and I’m still not getting the results that I want. So I jumped into a completely just personal development, like route and I started learning all things productivity, time management, I just jumped into it all taking classes, tutorials book, the whole thing. And after lots of hits and misses, I discovered what worked for me, especially when I was overloaded, which was most of the time, I thought I can either go back to constantly being reactive and feeling behind or I can embrace some new simplicity, some structure, some new beliefs in my life. And that’s essentially what I did over time. Like I went from feeling really defeated to very much on top of all the demands and all the distractions that as a business owner, but also as a mom and as a wife and a community member and a sister and a daughter and all the things right. And so now I teach those skills to other time strapped top producers who want to take back control of their day to write so they have the self worth they deserve they they actually get the business that they thought they were getting when they when they signed up for it so now I help you or help people like your audience who don’t really wake up with a plan that they can stick to stop procrastinating and stop feeling so overwhelmed and just feel really successful every day.
D.J. Paris 9:45 Yeah, I Boy, that sounds great. I was thinking about you know, in my own life I’m like, boy, there’s a lot of things I as you were talking I was like some changes I would like to make for myself as well. But let’s let’s talk about So thank you that I think that’s really helpful to give our audience an understanding of your path. And your journey. And I talk about, I think life, and I’d love to get your thoughts on this is so much about being off track, I think so it’s, it’s, you know, if balance is a myth, although the strive for balance is great, but to actually achieve it, I’ve never done it, but, but that’s okay. Because we’re imperfect. So I’m okay being a little bit out of balance. But I think I always like, I’ve thought about this a lot, where it’s like, instead of striving for being in balance, what I want to do is notice when I’m out of balance, which is a lot of the time, and then, you know, getting back on track, you know, smoothing out the rough edge, and then another rough edge will pop up, and I need to smooth that one out. But I think that has been, you know, something that has taken the pressure off, I think there’s a lot of pressure on women in particular, but but also men to about doing everything. And women are the most obvious example of this, right? You were saying Mother, Wife, Daughter, you know, friend, business owner, those are a lot of responsibilities. And you know, we just expect, you know, people to be perfect, and you’re supposed to do everything. So let’s I would love to talk about, you know, when you notice yourself being a little bit off kilter, maybe your relationship with your kids is isn’t as great as you’d like it to be, or maybe your business is suffering a little or your physical body isn’t quite where you want it to be. And you notice that and then you go, Oh, you know, I’m, I’m not where I want to be, you know, what do you recommend in that in those situations?
Mridu Parikh 11:41 Yeah, so I’ll give you an in kind of a mindset thing, and then maybe like a really tactical, like, really, you know, here’s what we could do in the moment. And you know, in our day, but, you know, often I think we just kind of take a step back and ask ourselves, like, what is truly most important, I often I can usually look at someone’s calendar. And I can tell you what is most important, even though it’s totally unaligned with what you say is most important, right? And so we might say, Oh, it’s my house, of course, I gotta take care of my health, I can’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of anyone else, or it’s my kids, but I barely seen them, or it’s my partner, but we don’t ever have a date night or you know, or it’s my new business development. But I’m really just stuck in my email, and it’s getting new clients, but you know, it’s prospecting, but it’s something else. And so, you know, it’s really just taking a few minutes and just getting back and checking, like, what is it that I’m doing this all for? Like, what I can say it is, you know, it’s there’s talk, but what is really important to me. So if you start there, and this isn’t, like I’m saying, Go take a day off to figure this out. We pretty much all know this intuitively, right? Like, I mean, we could list this out in two minutes. But I think there is something about that exercise of actually like sitting focusing writing that out, because when you see it down on paper, now tactically, you can look at your calendar and say, Okay, this is this really a reflection, because this is the life I say I want. And then I look at all the things that are going on, I think about my day, and it’s just not congruent, you know? So I think it’s a good place to start to step back for a minute. Like, what is it? That’s really important? And let’s start with those goals.
D.J. Paris 13:16 Yeah, I agree. I ran into this just yesterday, I can tell you, we have this is a silly example. But I think our audience can relate to it. It’s not real estate related. But I Well, in a way, I guess it is. But anyway, we had a torrential downpour for about five minutes yesterday here in Chicago. And it was like a crazy downpour. And one of those really cool summer storms that just last a few minutes. And we have white furniture out on our balcony, which you would want to cover when there’s a downpour. And my girlfriend does not share that same belief with me. Not that she wants it to get rained on. But my thought is like whenever we’re not using it, we’re just going to cover it. And our thought is no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to we’re going to try to remember when it’s going to rain to cover it. But she’s like, I’m just not going to cover it. Each time I use it. That’s that’s does doesn’t make sense to her. And so I was like, but it makes sense to me. But it doesn’t make sense to her. So now we’re at you know, a loggerhead here where we’re at, you know, we have conflicting beliefs. And my belief isn’t really any more right than her she’s allowed to have her own belief and, and I was like, God, I really feel strongly about this. And then I started to think about, okay, I really want this, she really isn’t going to do it. And or she’s going to be resentful if I like, try to force her to, like, abide by this rule, which of course, is not a good idea, either. But if I and I started, like, you were saying, I had to reflect and think what’s most important here? Is it more important that I save this furniture? And by the way, we’re not talking about a $10,000 couch that be like, Oh my god, like, you know, we’re talking about moderately priced couch that can be it’s probably going to get tossed at three or four years anyway. And I started to think about, you know, maybe I just don’t get my way this time, but, but maybe that’s okay. Because my longer term goal is that I want a really good relationship with this woman. And I’m sort of painting her to be this like person who doesn’t care about her. She totally wants to take care of our stuff, we just have a different belief about it. And we did buy all weather furniture. So in theory, we should sort of be able to keep it outside. So she’s not like totally crazy. We just have a different belief. And by me, taking those couple of minutes to think, what’s most important here, it calmed me down. And it got me to realize, Oh, my God, my girlfriend’s way more important, the stupid couch, I’m not going to let it get ruined, but I’m not going to come at her going, we’re gonna we have this new rule, we gotta cover bla bla bla bla bla, which, by the way, she’s gonna go, Yeah, I’m not going to do that. So I just wanted to use that as an example. Because I think if I hadn’t have taken that time, I would have come in guns blazing going, it read on our couch, that you’re not gonna believe, Oh, my God, it’s all good. You know? And that’s what my my mind was. And my emotions were and then I calmed down, and I went, Oh, this is like, kind of silly. Who cares?
Mridu Parikh 16:07 I love that. I love that you put a personal example, because it’s true. Like this is, every part of every decision. Basically, we’re making Rite Aid comes down to that you’re like, is this really worth the battle? Is this the most important? Do I say it’s the most important, but then I’m not really doing what’s most important. I think that’s really where that incongruency is, and it’s just, it’s good, it’s good. Let’s just check out let’s put ourselves in check. Because no one else is gonna do it. Right. It’s up to us at the end of the day to put ourselves in check. So it’s just it’s a good practice, I think kind of like, on those days, you’re like, I’m just running what’s important, just to ask yourself what’s so you know?
D.J. Paris 16:39 So the first thing to do, I think, like you were saying is, is when things get off balance, which is most of the time we’re a little bit off balance, is noticing what’s off balance, like, where’s my life not ideally, working perfectly in the way that I want it to? And then starting to say, Okay, well, my, you know, hey, I want to lose, you know, a few pounds, or I want to get some muscle or I want to have more energy, or maybe that’s those are physical body stuff, or I want my business to grow a certain percentage, or I want to have more clients, or I want to impact more people. First is identifying, you know, what, what those goals are in relation to values, as you were saying, like, what’s really important to me, like, why am I why do I want my business to grow? 10%? Oh, well, then that will allow me to maybe take more vacations with my family, or donate more to charity, or just have build more wealth, so I can retire early, or whatever it might be. So once you start to identify your values, then then sort of where do we go from there?
Mridu Parikh 17:40 So then, here’s how I feel if it does not work on paper, it’s not going to work in real life. Okay. So if we can’t figure out a way at time or place to, to actually work on or put time and energy and effort towards those goals, we can’t figure it, we can’t even see it, it’s probably not going to happen, right? And so I would say, gotta get tactical and actually start looking at your calendar, look at your week, look at your day and say, Am I making the time? Am I making the space? am I planning that for those goals that I’ve identified? Right? Maybe it’s my health, maybe it’s meal planning, maybe it’s prospecting, whatever it may be? How do I carve out the time for it? And what we’ll find is often is, hey, you know, you might not have any time maybe like, there’s absolutely no way, well, then there’s some decisions to be made. Do we do we scale back on something else are those really your priorities, you know, it’d be really your nose aren’t your priorities, like, there are changes, but again, it’s only with that sort of introspection, and that just want to that simple exercise of, you know, deciding here, my goals, and my making the time and space for it. But what else is really great about this, when you start looking at your day like that, you start realizing well, then maybe there is there are other things I shouldn’t, that aren’t priorities that I’m giving effort to that maybe I can take away, maybe there’s some opportunity here for me to delegate something, maybe I don’t have to do everything in the house or at work or, you know, I can outsource a thing. Maybe some of this stuff is just on my to do list, and I feel guilty about it. So I put it on my calendar every day. And now it’s been a month and never happens. Like maybe it’s just time to delete it altogether. Right? And so there’s, there’s a lot of things that happen when you just kind of just sit with that for a minute and think think through, you know, is this important to me, and I think like as you know, again, as go getters and top producers, there is this sense that in order to be successful, we have to do more just doo doo doo doo doo, right? You’re in the chaos, everything’s coming, the emails are coming in phone calls, you’re like, if I just put my head down, I do more everything, it’ll feel better, I’ll feel better. But I would challenge everyone to think you know, if you really want to be successful, do more planning, plan more and do less. And that’s kind of what I’m saying like look at that calendar and say okay, so if there really is a priority for me to prospect or to work out like I’m actually going to take it from list to do my brain to on the schedule, like put it in there. There was just no massive gap between what we believe we can get done doesn’t matter how smart you are doesn’t matter how many letters you got after your name there is it there’s a gap of what I think and get done. And this is what I can actually get done. And so for some reason until we see it on the site calendar on your schedule until you can actually map it out. You can’t I don’t know why we always overestimate it. We’ll always overestimate how much time we have. And then when you see it, you’re like, oh, wait a second between my for showings today and this appointment that there’s no way I could do these, like, what was it? Oh,
D.J. Paris 20:30 and, and mom duty, wife duty, and, you know, whatever, for self care duty,
Mridu Parikh 20:36 totally, totally weak, you know, you feel like a failure often because it’s just simply one thing. It’s not again, not because you’re not smart, not because you don’t have the skills is because you don’t complete what you set out to do. That’s the only reason right? So you have your list of 10 things in your to do list in your mind. Again, this seems totally doable. I’ll just make my list, I can totally do these 10 things today. And you don’t you get through four, and therefore really good things. But all you’re thinking about the end of the day is a six you didn’t feel like a loser, you feel like losers, you only feel like a failure. But what if, what if your list only had four to begin with? Right? And you map them out in your calendar? You got your four down? Or even if you got three out of the four, what do you end up feeling like a total success at the end the day, right? You feel so much better. And that’s how you stay motivated for the next day. That’s what’s gonna get you inspired to, you know, do the hard stuff in the morning that you don’t feel like doing. And so it really is just this like self defeating thing that we do that is just writing these lists and not really like thinking through and planning, When will I get it done,
D.J. Paris 21:38 I have a theory about why we are a little bit that way where we expect ourselves to be perfect. And it’s just a theory. And it’s not backed by any sort of evidence or science. But I suspect it has to do at least here in America. I’m not sure about other countries, I think there was a whole generation and I think parents are a little smarter today. But but the generation or two ago, I think it was a lot about your special, you can do anything you can do everything any the whole world is available to you. And I think what that did is you’re special, you’re unique. And yes, all of that is true. But you can’t do everything, you can’t be everywhere at once, and you aren’t going to be great at everything. And so I think parents are a little bit sat more savvy now to realize, Wow, if I put that expectation on my child, it might actually create a lot of anxiety and stress around needing to be perfect. And so I think I think there’s a culture of like moms are the perfect example. It’s like, it’s like moms are expected to be perfect in every possible way. And it’s just like totally unfair and not going to happen. And I know it can lead to a lot of moms in particular women who are business owners, or just you know, in the working world, who are also trying to be wonderful moms and wives and and community members. And it just is it’s too much we’re asking too much of people. Or people are asking too much of themselves, you know. And and and I think you’re absolutely right, more, I used to think that the more I do, the better I get to feel about myself. That was the rule I had in my head. What a silly rule. Because I never was doing enough, there was always more to do. And therefore I always felt shitty about myself, quite honestly.
Mridu Parikh 23:25 It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality, it’s better to do three awesome kick ass things that make you feel really successful rewarded, then 10 Like, you know, whatever, I just I’m just doing it to check things off my list to get my like dopamine hit, but it doesn’t make me feel good. In fact, that’s a one thing. So one thing I share all the time podcasts like clients start every day if you start every day with this simple question. This is going to be your guide post for the day to focus on those those big goals or things that really matter to you. Just start your morning with this question. Okay. So what five things will make me feel most successful when my head hits the pillow tonight? That’s it, what five things make me feel most successful, my head hits the pillow tonight. So there’s a few things I can break that down a bit. When I say five, I typically personally would recommend three for your business and two personal Okay, so and when and if five feels big. I mean, a personal one could be I want to turn off the lights by 1030 tonight, okay, this isn’t have to be like, I’m gonna go, you know, go train for the marathon. This is just like a simple personal thing where like, what if I did that today, my next day would be great. I’d go to bed, I wouldn’t be watching TV till 1am and all the things I would feel so good if I did that one thing, right? And business wise, maybe it’s, it’s, you know, I want to create that, that that customer that CRM tool or that system or I want to, you know, whatever, create that relationship or go to that networking group. And it’s just you know, three but it could be as simple as I just that that email or that phone call that I had been procrastinating for, like forever. I just want to make that and it’s gonna take me five Minutes. I don’t know why procrastinating it, but I’m gonna get that out of my way, right. And so they’re very simple. You’re actually putting them on your calendar we talked about and you feel great at the end at the end of the day. But here’s the tricky thing about it is that you can fall into what feels good to me right now, versus the end of the day, which is why I said before my head hits the pillow, because what you can sometimes focus on is that you only feel really good right now, if I didn’t make that phone call. And instead, I did by email or jumped on social media. I mean, think about what’s gonna make me feel much better right now. That feels really good. But it’s not the thing. When you go to bed. You’re not like, dammit, I go, I
D.J. Paris 25:40 have to do it tomorrow. Yes. I
Mridu Parikh 25:41 wish I spent more time on social media today. You know, we don’t. So you’re really thinking through? Yeah, you were thinking through in the morning before I when I go to bed tonight? What are those five as tiny as they may be as insignificant as they are, but they make you feel the best. And just tap into your intuition. Again, we all know what makes us feel good. It’s the stuff we procrastinate. It’s the stuff that that’s hard, right? I want to go work out. But if I just did a 20 minute walk, it’d be great. And so those are the things and I get it like there’s no doubt in my mind, if you followed, if you asked yourself that question and followed it, your entire life is going to change, you’re just going to feel so energized every day. So like vibrant, you know?
D.J. Paris 26:23 Yeah, because and I think part of its we’re, like you were saying earlier, we’re so used to beating ourselves up for the things we don’t do. The things that we can’t get to the things that works, we think we’re expected to do that we just aren’t able to because there’s only 24 hours in the day. So let’s, let’s, let’s ask that question again. So what can you do give it and then the five things I want our audience really to because this is a brilliant idea. I I’m going to start doing it myself.
Mridu Parikh 26:52 Yeah, what five things would make me feel most successful, or most rewarded when my head hits the pillow tonight. So you might wake up with that on your alarm like something on your phone, you might have a sticky note on your bathroom? Mirror, might put it on your fridge like something just to remind you think that’s true. But do take that next step and actually think okay, if these are them, where will like when will I do it? Get that on the calendar, get it calendar it because if it’s not on the calendar, it’s not gonna happen.
D.J. Paris 27:19 It’s not gonna happen. Yeah, I, I, we were just having this conversation about motivation versus discipline with a friend of mine from grade school this morning, who we were talking about. She, she and I have been friends forever. And we were chatting about motivation. And I said, you know, I’m 46 now, and I said, motivation is not really got me very far in life, I’ve found that maybe it’s just me, my motivation level to do hard things pretty low, is actually pretty low. And I’m 46. And my motivation probably isn’t going to magically just like, shoot up the charts tomorrow, where I’m going to, you know, do some amazing things like I have found for me, discipline seems to really be what gets me to get things done. And so what you were saying is, you know, look, discipline of like asking that question at the beginning of the day. That’s a discipline, a discipline of thinking, Okay, what’s really important to me today, when I go to bed? What do I how do I want to feel? You know, oh, I want to feel like I did. I did some good work. Okay, well, what would I need to do to feel that good work? And then you and then you, you know, you start to evaluate? Like, okay, well, one of my things is, I want my kids to go like, hey, you know, mom did a mom was really was really present for me for you know, some time today? Or, or, you know, or my my clients go, Wow, you really, you know, you really helped me out. And then you realize, oh, that’s what I’m really after. I’m really after, you know, what I get from accomplishing certain things. And I think that is such a valuable resource. So you’ve actually just given me a lot to think about as a great way to start my day, because I have, you know, like out like all of our all of us, we just have a lot going on. And it’s so easy to get caught up. Like you were saying the dopamine hits. It’s like, urgency, things come in at me the emails are flying in, it’s fun to respond, it feels productive. But is it really what I’m really is that really what I should be doing in that exact moment? The answer is, I don’t know. I have to think about it. I have to reflect and determine. And the thing about scheduling, I could not agree with you more. It For Me, at least if you don’t if I don’t put it on the calendar. It does not it does not get done. So I would like to talk about it to do list because this is where I have a lot of problems. So and I’m sure a lot of us do. So I have a I even have a system I used to do list which is what I’ve been using forever, which I love. It’s great. And I tend to push things from day to day to day. It’s like I have like get my emissions tested. My emissions car test, which is really not that important, but it’s been on there for like a month or two. And I’m like, one of these days, I just gotta go do it. But how do you recommend sort of organizing your to do list so that you can have an effective day?
Mridu Parikh 30:12 Yeah. So I say I typically have about two, two different two very different to do lists. One is a call a master list it just like everything in my everything going on, actually, I’ll say three lists, everything going on. So I might have my master list for work. And I personally like to separate it, I do a work one and a personal one. Not everybody wants to do that. But I just have enough going on on each that I just need to separate ones. So that is my place. And here’s why it’s called a master list. It’s the one place the one place, not the 800, sticky notes, not the backs of envelopes, not all the notebooks not all but you know, the scribbles, little pads all over. It’s the one place that I’m getting down on my thoughts and ideas and to do’s, gosh, the sun just came out. I haven’t had to put that down in a minute. Tell me if it gets too bad. So that’s one place. So it can be by the way, what is your one place where I use Evernote, Evernote, which is similar to OneNote. I’ve recently moved to notion but I’d say Evernote for me it was the list making tool. It’s one of the easiest Evernote and OneNote. So what
D.J. Paris 31:14 was it for audience just pause for a quick second or what are for our audience, Evernote is a note taking tool that is free, you probably wouldn’t ever need to pay for it, maybe you would, but most people don’t. And it’s a great place just to capture thoughts. So we know that, you know, we have got 10s of 1000s of thoughts per day. But so thoughts come and go and when they come, there’s a good chance you’ll forget about it in about 15 seconds. So it’s a good, good thing to have is a way to easily capture that to do or the notes. You know, and you can do it with your device. I use Siri which is I have an apple, I’m an Apple user. And I’ve connected my to do list with just try not to activate the Siri by saying her name. But I do that and I just literally say, you know hey Siri, you know, and then I say add this to my to do list. So that’s my master capture system, you use Evernote, but the point is, is have one one place? Yes.
Mridu Parikh 32:15 One. And and what I do love is just some app, I don’t overthink the app, if you’re listening. It doesn’t doesn’t matter what it is just honestly, it doesn’t matter. We’re making a list. It doesn’t use a paper and a pen. But I do I will say I do like it on the phone. And I used to be a keeper persons. I know how hard it is to move, but because our phones are connected to us 24/7 That no pad isn’t. And that’s why we end up with so much paper because nothing’s with us. 24/7 that’s when you have all the different notebooks and different people. Basically, yeah, so I do like that. And I do the same thing. I connect to my Evernote with my audio. So whatever, you know, you can type it in every time you get a thought. But here’s the thing that I’ve told myself, and I’m typically very positive person. But in this case, it’s something that I have now embedded in my head that every time I think I’ll remember that later. Oh, like, oh, you should read this book or you get a follow up this person. Oh, you should just download that app. i Oh, it’s the best movie. Oh, I remember that. Now, I just tell myself, I will not remember that later. I will remember that later. I just go negative there. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 33:18 assume you have the world’s worst memory. Yeah. Because well, I actually do have the world’s worst, or one of the world’s worst memories. i i would love to be tested. They’d be like, DJ, your early stage dementia, I’m sure. But But yeah, so I just go on set. I’m such a moron. I’m going to forget everything. So I am so I have to capture it or it’s gone.
Mridu Parikh 33:37 It’s gone. Right? It is fleeting. And so I just say even if it’s rote, you’ve never ever heard it 100 times. I will not remember that later. And I just get on my phone. And by the way, it’s not rude. That’s another thing I hear from people really you just say Oh, hold on a second. I just want to write that down before I forget. That’s not rude. You know, like the people are going to appreciate that you’re actually taking the time to like take down their thoughts. So do that. So I have that and I have one like I said one for business one for personal and I’m just basically writing down everything, everything all my so let’s say for business, here’s all these like follow ups I’ve got to do with my clients. Here’s some follow up with prospecting, here’s stuff I could do my financials here you know and I’m just writing things down personally as well kids sports is not okay, so you’re getting things down. But here’s the problem was typically when you’re putting things on your list, they’re actually not to dues they’re actually not tasks they are most often projects Okay, so for example, I might just write before I would change the way I do it before I write update website. Okay great. Do financials menu, you know plan the meals or something your grocery shop okay whatever like right? These are all they seem perfectly normal. Like that’s those are all to do’s but when I think about it, I’m like why do i Why have I not done my website in three months? Why do I keep putting this off? Why does it always go on every week I put on my thing and never comes off. It’s because that is a giant project. It’s not just like updating my website, I’ve got to write the copy and get the new imagery and get the testimonials. My clients don’t you know, there’s like, there’s like, 40 different steps for me to do.
D.J. Paris 35:09 Yeah, that might be updating the website might be a 10 hour event.
Mridu Parikh 35:14 Yes, yeah. And even something much smaller, or let’s say you have to, um, you know, get some information to somebody they ask for now, it’s been like a week, and you just keep putting it off. Because even getting that information is gonna require you to make a phone call, request that thing, research it, get the right options, put together a little proposal and send it over to them, right. I mean, it’s, it’s like a project it is it. So I think anything more than with more than one step to me as a project, you have two steps. It’s a project, right? It is more than one thing. And so where I would say we most of us go wrong is go back. Now, now that you’ve heard this, go back to your to do list and look at each task, say does this have more than one step? And if it does, break it down. So now instead of update website, that will be my project update website, and then below that on Evernote, but on really most of these, you can do check boxes, or whatever I do have my check boxes, I’m like, Okay, here’s the 14 different steps I need to do in order to update that project. So that’s the first step is both two steps. Firstly, you brain dump everything going on in your life, then you go back and say, Is this really a to do or is this a project and I break it down project by project by project, it is an exercise, I’m not gonna lie, it just it takes some time, it’s an investment of time. But when you’re done, you have such a more comprehensive list of things you have to get done. And it’s amazing how much clarity you have, after that you’re like, now, oh, I see why I’ve been procrastinating this for months or weeks or whatever. Because there’s so much. And instead of me saying, when I update my website about today, all I’m gonna do is you know, get the image for the About Me page. And that’s right, you just I’m like, I’m just going to actually check off one thing off my to do list, like it’s a real to do like it’s one task instead of an entire project. So that’s, you know, one of the big things Yeah,
D.J. Paris 37:05 I love this because I am behind on building a website. So I can really relate to this, I need to rebuild our recruiting website for our for realtors. And it’s it’s time and I just keep saying I need to rebuild the website that is, by the way, about a 40 hour project for me. So so it when I think about it, we can all relate think we can all everyone listening, think about a project that you want to complete that you just put in one sentence, like I want to build a new website, or I want to get more clients or whatever it might be. And you realize it creates a lot of anxiety, and a lot of overwhelm. And a lot of like, and what Murthy really just talked about was, okay, we’re going to spend a few minutes, it’s a little bit of work. And we’re going to actually list out all of the steps or at least you know, a lot of the steps. And then we can just start chipping away. When we have you know time we’re going to chip away at these things. We’re not going to think of it as this big giant elephant that we have to eat with one bite, we’re just we’re going to piece by piece, you know, define it and then I’ll and what happens when when I do this exercise is all of a sudden I relax. I’m like, Okay, now I know what I actually need to do. And that is very comforting. It is it my anxiety comes way down. And that’s important.
Mridu Parikh 38:27 percent. And similarly, you know, think of your personal life, right? Where our lives are integrated. If you’ve been like I want to clean up the garage and that’s been on there all year. Let me be you break it down. You’re like Oh, I’m gonna do is collect all the balls. This you know it? What are all the balls in the bin and that’s my only step forward for this weekend or today. And that’s it. And then tomorrow, I’ll get all the brooms together. And that’s it, you know, and so it it it really gives you a tool to start making progress to stop procrastinating, but also feel really good. But what if that putting the brooms with the balls is one of your top five things for the day. Now you feel really great because you started making either started doing that that thing? And then I always say you know, it’s we were earlier talking about motivation discipline. For me, I think how you get motivated is action, like action, insights, motivation. You can’t wait around for motivation to take action because they didn’t comment like
D.J. Paris 39:21 me. Yeah, that’s that’s the first thing if there is a God, I’m going to ask when I was like, couldn’t you given me more motivation? That’s gonna be my first question. And he’s gonna go No. Because it’s not really the key is the key is discipline. I at least the way I see it. I’m curious to get your thoughts.
Mridu Parikh 39:37 Yeah, well, I think you know, you take that first action, so I’ll just stick with the garage because I know I’m on the garage right now. But whatever. Okay, so, you know, like, I’m just gonna go the balls together in a bin. That is going to get you motivated. He might just be like, well, since I’m doing that, I’ll just get all the paints and put them in on the side, right? It that is what’s going to get you motivated is take the one small action a little bit You’d be tiny baby step, you know, you can’t get your butt to the gym every day, don’t make that your goal. My action is I just want to put on my sneakers, there’s a good chance. So this is something I did. I’m getting way, way too personal probably here. But I do think I hear about exercise is a major problem for a lot of you know, adults, and everybody wants to do everybody, right. So I wait, I put my, um, should I even be saying this, I sleep in a T shirt. So I put my I put my yoga pants by by my bed set, but my bed every night, like my yoga pants are there. And so I just wake up more than I put them on. Like I just put them on, I just it’s the first thing that I do. And then I bathroom, I come back, I brush my teeth and I put on like my top about my basically my workout outfit is like right there. So even if I don’t go to the gym, even if I don’t go for the walk, I guarantee, I know when I have those codes on, I’m just more active in the morning, I’m like running around, I’m like to grab the dishes, I’m like running outside, I’m gonna get the guard is I am like I literally become a more active person, even if I didn’t actually get to the workout, right? But when I stay, if I just stay in pajamas all morning, like more on a Saturday, I can also tell you, I’m just slower, I’m sluggish, it’s fine, I’m not beating myself up, I’m just telling you the difference of taking a small action, but how it can impact your motivation, right how it can impact your energy. And so that’s why I do it not because I can always go work out. But I know I’m going to have more energy if I’m in the right, like clothes, you know. So my whole point is, all I’m focused on is the first action. And then I will then I will hopefully get more motivated. So you can do this with anything and anything you’re procrastinating. You’re like, when you break it down like that, especially you’re like, I just have to take the first small little action. And then you know, be whatever comes comes by just gotta take an action.
D.J. Paris 41:46 In the in the 12 step world. There’s a saying that says what’s the next right thing. So, which I love. So if you don’t have to build the whole website, you don’t have to, you know, get the six pack abs immediately. You just have to get the clothes on. Maybe that’s the next right step. And then okay, now I got the clothes on, what’s the next thing? Well, now I need to get to the car, and then I’m going to drive to the gym. And and then you know, whatever, whatever you’re able to do. And it’s you know, it sounds silly to this, I want to talk about this with respect to physical exercise, because I think it’s something we can most of us can relate to is we hear about these stories about people who run marathons, but they started like just walking to the to the mailbox, and you’re like, really? Do you just you just walk to the mailbox, and then that was enough. And then next day, you walked a little further and eventually, you know, now then, you know, six months later, you’re running a marathon and and it’s like, no people actually do that. And that there’s there it’s it’s almost something that I think most of us go, Yeah, I’m not going to be the guy that just walks to the mailbox. But like, that’s a great first step. Right. And, and I think we, you know, if you can just go, I don’t have to eat the whole elephant today, I just have to do the first action and then schedule the next action. You know, you’re gonna you’re gonna have a great life. If you can just keep moving forward with these small steps life is most I think, do you think life is mostly big steps or small steps,
Mridu Parikh 43:17 small steps, it’s just it’s a series of small, consistent steps. It’s like instant, I guess discipline, what you’re saying. It’s just that consistency of small things, small things, small things, small things always add up to big changes. Big Impact. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 43:32 let’s talk about time, because time is the one commodity that, boy, it’s probably the most precious commodity that exists because we have a finite amount of it. And, you know, we’re all kind of bound by the same rules of time. So it’s, in some ways, it’s maybe the thing that’s, you know, the great equalizer is time. And of course, some of us get more time on this planet than others. And I’m not referencing that kind of time, I just mean in a 24 hour period, you know, we can only accomplish so much. So I’m curious on how you start to think about how do you manage all these demands on your time?
Mridu Parikh 44:11 That’s so good. So one thing I think about is like, multiplying time, like how can I multiply which often multiplying time is multiplying me like if there’s an How do I create another me because I feel I need to do all these things. Right? I need I want to do it. That’s the list is so long, so that has always stuck with me that like how do I multiply, duplicate, whatever multiply me, you know, and so that is sometimes true. Sometimes it’s like through automation, right? We have all these great technology tools. So something like sending out emails in bulk or send it you know, there’s just so many ways that we can use automation and technology. Sometimes it’s delegating. We know we can. And delegating is interesting. I think that we can I’m gonna tie this back to when you have your project when you actually have your to do list and it’s all broken down. Another huge benefit of that is when you can start visually seeing all the pieces, you can start delegating little pieces of it, right? I think sometimes we think of delegating, you’re like, I can’t have somebody do my website, right? Because I, I’m the only one who knows it. Well, no one’s asking you to delegate the entire project. But you probably could ask an assistant or your kid or your babysitter or someone to go search online for some images of you know, some houses have some stock photography, you know, like, like, there are things but, but in your head, you’re like, Oh, I gotta do my website. When you break it down. You know, now you’re like, oh, wait, it’s kind of multiplying me it’s I can I can get someone else to do it. So there’s just obvious like delegation, outsourcing. There’s a Yeah, I think there’s the main way that it would say automating delegating, outsourcing. Oh, and then sorry, and then also being more efficient, but that has sometimes to do with process sizing and Systemising. So that’s a big thing is how do you just be more efficient with that time? Through not necessarily duplicating yourself, but I believe we’re multiplying your time in that way. So an example might be if someone once we can appointment with you, they might get, like, how I signed up here, you know, for for us to speak I was it was so odd. It was so systemized, it was amazing. I could get on your calendar, I could fill out some forms, I could, you know, and it kind of took you out of that process and someone you know, and it’s just all it’s just a way more efficient than maybe, you know, sending five emails back and forth and having phone calls to get to the same results. So those are all the different ways but that’s sort of like the mindset I have just how can I multiply or duplicate like what I’m doing some other way.
D.J. Paris 46:41 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episodes sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. I think when going back to your earlier point of identifying the projects and all the steps, or at least the big steps or the small steps, and looking at it and then realizing, you know, yeah, so So the initial thought is, oh, I need to build my website or I need to you know, overhaul my business or whatever it might be. And then you’re like, oh my gosh, that’s just too much. It’s overwhelming, I don’t know what to do. And then you list all the steps. And then you go that did using the website example. It’s like, oh, I got to do everything. And then you look at each step and you were saying, but you don’t have to do everything, there are parts of it that you can delegate or you can get a virtual assistant to help with or ask friends and family or co workers or you can actually ask for help. And people can do it like what if somebody could even do half of it for you? Like Wouldn’t that be amazing and thank God we live in a time where there we have the ability to to put these offers out there to in the world and we’re all interconnected. So people from all over the globe can say I can do that for you and I can do it for a reasonable price. Right. And that to me is yes. Is it going to be the level of quality that that your standard? Maybe maybe not. But what if you just what if they got you halfway there or 70% there and they use Chi Minh and and cleaned up the rest? Boy that would that would save me a lot of time for sure.
Mridu Parikh 49:33 For sure for sure. And sometimes you know people will do even better than we did like people have gifts and and here’s the thing they’re focusing 100% on that task which is why often they could do it better than you can Why am I nanny was a better mom in some ways and I wasn’t I was holding my kids because I was also trying to work and do the dishes and do the do the laundry and do the bills and you know and she is just there playing with the kids right like that’s like her only focus and so she was doing a really good job. And so I think, you know, we, we underestimate what focused support were the results that they can actually give us, it’s often better, better that we could do it ourselves.
D.J. Paris 50:11 Yeah, it’s that like one plus one equals three thing, where it’s like, it’s not just, Oh, I’m gonna hire somebody because I don’t want to do it, it’s, I’m gonna hire somebody who specializes in this. And that then frees up some time where I can, if maybe if nothing else, just relax. Or maybe I can spend that time focused in a different direction to achieve something else. Because I want to talk about how to make and I know this is a big hot button for you is how do you make space for the most important things in your life? The priorities? How do you how do you prioritize? So now we’ve got our to do list, we’ve got our projects, we know, okay, here are all the steps of the things I should do. But how do I prioritize this? How do I make space to get these things actually done?
Mridu Parikh 50:57 Yeah. So when they say is, you know, willpower is short lived, we only have so much. And typically for most of us, some, some people are truly night owls and night owls. And their best work is at 10 o’clock at night. But for most of us, our energy is dissipating over the day, like we’re, you know, we’re probably most awake and active in the morning. And by the afternoon, we’re like, I’m going to eat crap. And then by the evening, I’m just tired, right? So that’s happened. So I’d say one thing is, the news isn’t new. But it’s a good reminder that the thing that’s really hard the thing that you keep procrastinating the thing, you know, you know, if I leave this to the end of the day, it’s most likely not going to happen. Do that one first. Just knock it out, right? Like, just do that one first. Because, again, because it does a few things, one, you’re gonna feel really great, you’re gonna get the hardest thing done everything after that is easier. But it also starts it gives you a win, like you’re starting your day, with like a success, right? It’s like a big pat on the back. And it’s like that inspiration. If you start with sort of losses, if you start with this, this, you know, this idea that I’m failing it over the morning, it’s only gonna set up your day, right? That it’s like our energy only gets less and less over the day. So one thing I’d say is commit to that, make it small enough, make it doable enough commit to an action, not the whole project, like all the things we’ve been talking about. But do it first, because that’s just going to build your momentum. So that’s one thing.
D.J. Paris 52:22 I think that’s that’s such a good tip, I wanted to also just really quickly throw in a suggestion. Because I know a lot of us when we wake up, I want to get your thoughts on this. Yeah, I know a lot of us we wake up, the first thing we do is we grab our phones at, I try not to do that. But it doesn’t make me better than anyone. I just try not to because you know, whatever, I have my own routine. But a lot of us reach for our phones. And a lot of us reach for social media. Yeah, that’s going to be part of our routine. And I suspect that for most of us, when we’re for many of us, as we’re waking up, starting our day, and we’re looking at people’s Instagram and Facebook, or maybe tick tock wherever you might be scrolling, and we’re seeing everyone else’s successes. I actually think that could be a demotivator for a lot of people because we see people at their best, or we see what they’re willing to share. And most most people share, you know, their best selves on social media. They’re not sharing the fight they had last night with their spouse, they’re sharing the dinner they had where everyone’s smiling and happy and the kids are everyone’s perfect and, and all of that. And we can tap a button and make the picture look perfect, even if it isn’t actually perfect. I wonder if that demotivates people because I know for me if I looked at that every day, I’d be like, Well, I’m not that happy. I’m not that you know, I didn’t have that night last night. My my night was more rough. So I would encourage everyone to just get a sense of like, how do you feel after if you wake up and you start scrolling through social media, if it’s if it’s inspiring and encouraging, and it gives you energy and you’re like this is what I need to battle the day like awesome, but I think for a lot of us it might actually make us feel less than
Mridu Parikh 54:11 I am 100% with you. When we do like a routine with my clients and that’s the word I use is energize what is going to make you feel energized, what’s going to make you feel excited, what’s going to motivate you it’s going to make you feel vibrant for the day. And I 100% agree even though sometimes people think social media because I love to see my friends I love connecting with them. I completely read that it’s it’s you know you’re seeing oh she sold another $2 million house Oh my god. Right she wanted a perfect vacation and she looks so skinny and her husband is so nice to her but you know just like it is a comparison game. I don’t care what I mean unless you’re just abnormal. I hear you’re comparing. It does not make you feel great. You know there are other ways and like so what is energizing to you for some people it is at going for a walk for someone it’s I just want to Sitting at a coffee by myself, I would love to write, you know, gratitude is a big thing for a reason, right? I just want to read something I’m grateful for so that I can make it through this day. I want to go stare at my child’s crib for a minute. I don’t know, like, there are things that make you really energized. And so to me, I don’t necessarily believe like you have to be up at 5am. I don’t think you need an hour of all this stuff in the morning. I just want everyone to have some big heads, some few little things in the morning, small spurts that make you feel really energized. And I I couldn’t agree with you more. I don’t think social media or the news, quite frankly, is it? I don’t think either one of those serves us well. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a place there’s a place for it and our life. I don’t not first thing in the morning. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 55:38 yeah, I like I have, I have one friend. I know that he just loves seeing every everybody’s social media posts, because he’s like one of those rare people that is just absolutely does not compare himself to other people. So he’s like, the one person I know that does it. But for the rest of us. We’re all like, Oh, yeah. So I think you’re right. So really, the point we’re making is what feeds us, and what debilitates us and knowing what those things are requires attention. We have to write, we have to pay attention to how we feel after we do certain things. And then then that’ll help us go, oh, yeah, I’ll give you a perfect example. I was, this is really funny. So I was, I think we can all relate to this. So I was, I play video games at night sometimes. And I play really stressful games, because I don’t know, I like I like stressful games. And like, you know, not like violent games, really, but just like really hard games. And so I’m like, I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a realtor. And he was he was saying, I go what? He goes, Oh, I play games, too. What games do you play? We were talking about different games and, and he goes, I play golf games, and I go golf game. I’ve never really played a golf game before. Okay, I go, That sounds really relaxing. He goes, Yeah, he goes, what kind of games do you play? And I go, Oh, I play these really stressful, incorrect, you know, incredibly difficult games. And he goes, how does that make you feel? And I go, and my girlfriend was there. And she goes, and I because I was gonna say, Oh, I love it. And she goes, DJ is stressed out all the time, when he plays video games. She because she can see it, she can witness it. And I go, Wait a minute, I actually not that there’s not a place to play stress brain. Like, that’s fine. But she goes DJ is stressed out all the time when he plays video games, and, and the other realtor looked at me who’s a lot wiser than I am. And he goes, Why do you do that to yourself? Why do you play strike? Why don’t you do something that actually relaxes you? And I was like, oh, okay, never thought of it. But it’s about paying attention. Right? It’s about noticing. What result? How do we feel after something? And does this, you know, get us to take action? Or does it get us to curl up in a ball in the corner? And both of those things are valid, but just noticing what, you know, just what does social media do to us? What does the news? What does talking to my mom, you know, or whatever, you know, those kinds of things? Yeah. And the other thing that you said that’s really important is tackling the most important thing first. The hardest thing first hardest thing? Yeah, yeah, the hardest thing, maybe not the most important thing, but the thing that you you’re sort of dreading and in order to get the energy to tackle it, I suspect you have to be in the right mindset. And so what we’re, I think what you’re talking about is setting yourself up so that you have the energy to actually tackle that that big thing.
Mridu Parikh 58:35 100% Yeah, I mean, built, you know, start energetic start with a good vibes are positive, you know, so you’re like, I just gonna knock this thing out and knock this sucker out. And the rest of its gonna be gravy after this, right? If you’re gonna start from a place where you’re a comparison itis and you’re feeling low, and you’re just like, you know, you’re only with that, like, Dread kind of thing. What are you going to have to tackle that hard thing? It’s gonna be even harder, you know? And then chances are you won’t do it later. And then they’ll go back on the list, you feel like a failure. And that’s like, this whole cycle of self sabotage happens. For me, it is always 100% Something to do with my health, like exercise is just kills me. I, I’m 50 years old, I just can I do it all the time. I’m never gonna love it. I’m never gonna look forward to it. It’s just not gonna happen. I don’t like it. But if I don’t do it, and by that, by the way, I mean, like a 20 minute walk. I’m not I’m not running a marathon, but I want to do something that gets me active because I know that gives me the best energy. I know. It gives me the best energy I put on a great podcast, I put on great music. I go for a walk in nature. It just it gives me the best out of my best ideas come to me on that walk. My best. Everything happens to me during that walk. And so I know it’s the hardest thing for me to do. Personally, not professionally, personally. And but I know it’s the best thing for me. It’s the most it gives me the best energy so I’ve just come to terms with I’m not gonna like it. I just got to the first action. I just gotta get my clothes on. And then I can walk out the door and go, you know, yeah, I
D.J. Paris 1:00:01 think so much of life is about accepting your preferences, right, like understanding. I don’t like I don’t like going to the gym. I hate it. Yeah, but I still do it. And and I for for a long time in my life, I thought you had to like everything that you did. And I thought I was a failure because I didn’t like it because I would look at people comparison thing. And I would say, oh, that person built their business way faster than I did. Or they built their body way faster than they seem to get to the gym, no problem, or they’ve saved more money than I have or burned more money or whatever. And, and, and then I realized, like, Okay, well, we all have preferences. And my preference is not to go to the gym, I don’t want to work out. I don’t want to do leg day, you know, on Wednesday, I don’t want to do that. I will like you were saying I, I will probably I mean, it would be awesome. If one day I woke up and I was like, I can’t wait to do leg day. I don’t know if that day is ever going to come for me, it doesn’t really matter. Because I probably you know, if I’m being honest, I probably will just always going to hate working on my legs at the gym. Because you know, whatever. I just don’t like it. It’s painful. It sucks. But it’s important. So how do I get myself to do it? Well, for the majority of my life, I didn’t. Because I thought, Oh, I’m supposed to want to do that I’m supposed to want to and it’s like, no, you just don’t want to do it. But you still should do it. So I made peace with the fact that I was okay that I don’t want to do it. And I’m still going to do it. And I held those two things at the same time. Those two, those two thoughts of I don’t want to do this. And I’m going to do it. And that way, it removed the pressure. Because I think I think real estate agents have this tremendous pressure to just be perfect, right? Like, I’m going to every part of my business is just going to be perfect. And I’m going to love every part of it. And and I’m going to you know, and it’s like no, you’re probably not there’s going to be parts of your business that you just dread. But if you can get yourself to take action, anyway. And honor the fact that Oh, I just don’t like doing that. But I need to do it. I think that’s that’s really the path.
Mridu Parikh 1:02:15 Yeah. And I think what’s important there just just if someone takes this and says, Oh, then I guess I should be doing that thing. I hate doing it doing it anyway. Justin, make sure it gives you the result that you want. Right, so you probably still feel your hate legs, I hit mark them with you never gonna like it. But I know it makes me feel really good. I know, it’s good for my body. I know, it makes me help. But you know, like the results, I’m getting the results, right? Like that is totally better. Don’t do something, though, just because you’re like, well, they said I don’t like it. But I feel like I should do it. And it’s not serving you. So if you’re like, well, I should be on Route mom, because all the other moms are and then you hate it. And it’s sucking the life out of you. And you’re taking away time from your children. And you’re you know, don’t do it just because you know, you think you should and it’s hard. You don’t do it. Because it doesn’t give you the reward. You know what you want it like it isn’t it’s not serving you. So just keep that in mind. If anyone listening, it’s like it also doesn’t really serve you, you know,
D.J. Paris 1:03:11 what you’re saying is so, so important, because we have ideas, we have fantasies of, you know, I’m going to be this type of person, I’m going to, you know, if if I had the expectation that I was going to, like we have about 800 agents here at our firm, if my expectation was, well, we really need to be successful. We need to step 1600. Agents, well, I would feel like a giant failure. We’ve only got 800. But, but when I started, we had no agents. And so it’s like, okay, I know what my goal is. Sure, I’d love to have 1600 agents. But here I am right now at 800. I’m you know, here’s where we are. And I’m going to still try to happily achieve to get to that to get to that number. But I’m not going to feel like a failure. Because I’m I am where I am. I think that’s really one of the biggest challenges is feeling like a failure where you currently are like that is just a big, concrete wall that just stops motivation. It’s like, don’t you think?
Mridu Parikh 1:04:16 Oh, yeah, yeah, if you want to be unproductive, that’s the way good now you’re just like self sabotaging. You’re thinking you’re, you’re, you know, you’re chipping away at your self confidence or self esteem. And it’s yeah, it’s just a negative. It’s a spiraling, like, negative thing going on.
D.J. Paris 1:04:31 Yeah, yeah. So So I think what we’re really talking about is being intentional, I think mindful and really trying to get a sense of we all have preferences, and really thinking about, okay, how does this make me feel? You know, do I look do I, you know, yes, I know, the world says I’m supposed to be, you know, a certain physical shape or a certain financial have a certain financial well being or, you know, spiritual side or a certain amount of friends or money or whatever it might be. Um, but what do I really want? How do I how, what are the steps needed to sort of get there? And how does it make me feel and what’s truly important to me. And I think working through that is, is, you know, again, that’s this idea of happily achieving, you know, this idea of, of, of working through, through in alignment with values. I would love, I want to talk about your podcast, specifically because our audience are podcast listeners. So tell us about your show.
Mridu Parikh 1:05:30 Sure. It’s called productivity on purpose. And it is all about part of what we’re talking about, like the mindset, which I love that we’ve gotten there. Because I think at the end of the day, it’s, you know, we probably haven’t talked that much about time management, you and I, but we’re talking a lot about focus management and distraction management. And so that’s a lot of what I just talked about, too. It’s it’s, it’s, their tools are always there, or they don’t worry about the tools we get so caught up in the right tool on the right list maker on the right project manager tool, it doesn’t matter. It really your mindset and your beliefs. And then like the strategies behind it, all the tools are great. We live in a great now there’s there’s no shortage of tools. So yeah, so I talk a lot about you know, how do we avoid this procrastination? How do we avoid this self sabotage? How do we get out of our own perfectionistic way stop people pleasing you these are get more energy, this is what’s really going to feed to our productivity, this is what’s going to make you you know, feel really great about your day successful, motivated, inspired. So there’s a lot of talk about that. And then I do have guest experts that bring some, you know, their great expertise, whether it’s because my podcast is for is for business owners typically or you know, people that who are like your audience that are basically like their own business. So we talk a lot about you know, how to manage your finances or how to, I had someone say, Oh, she was talking about public speaking, like how to really use your voice in a conversations and take control of the conversation. So there’s a lot of amazing guests.
D.J. Paris 1:06:57 And I the other, I know that you focus a lot on boundaries, too. And I think real estate agents tend it’s been my, my experience with the 1000s of agents that I’ve known, either here at our own company, or just on our show that boundaries tend to be challenging, because we know that real estate happens at nights, nights and weekends. And you know, it’s not uncommon for an agent to get a text at midnight, from a client. And then the agent has a decision and it creates anxiety sometimes, like, do I respond? Do I not respond? You know, how do I set those boundaries. And I know that you go through that, you know, in on your show, you talk a lot about that. And I think setting healthy boundaries, which we didn’t talk about today, is really, really important. And I think that will help guide our listeners into, you know, understanding what’s healthy for you, and everyone’s different. But whatever those healthy boundaries are, you know, Mirtha can help you set those boundaries and so that you can determine what’s healthy for my business, what’s healthy for my personal life. And I just love that. And I think real estate agents boundaries and real estate agents, like, it’s a huge opportunity there to get better at that. Because real estate agents tend to be people pleasers, they tend to want to go above and beyond, because it’s a service industry sort of job. And, and if you don’t have effective boundaries, people will set their own boundaries, and they might not be the same boundaries that you set.
Mridu Parikh 1:08:26 I am so but I can’t be we didn’t we didn’t talk I went to another episode. I’m bad we’re gonna do. Because I have worked with a lot of real estate agents. And I agree, I would, I would say, I’m surprised we didn’t go there, because that’s probably the number one challenge because you’re right there. You know, you’re accessible, quote, unquote, accessible twice all the time. And but you know, it really comes back to those goals, like what is it that you want in life? What is it that’s meaningful to you? Because that’s going to help you set those boundaries. So like, it always starts there, like, what do I really want? You know?
D.J. Paris 1:08:56 Well, I think it’s a great place to wrap up our first conversation, and I would absolutely love to have you on more often. And we can dive into like specific topics. But obviously, you and I had we I love this conversation. So I want to thank you, Matthew for being on our show. And by the way, I want to give a special shout out to you because if I remember correctly, and we are already established, my memory is very poor. But I believe you reached out to us. And I want to say that this is this is something that I encourage everybody to do. If you are inspired by someone or something or you’re a fan of someone or something. You know, we’re so lucky now we live in an age where it’s pretty easy to get in touch with people who we don’t know. And if I remember correctly, Ruth who reached out to us and said hey, I do this daily walk every day. I listen to your show from time to time. I’m a real fan. I’m a fan of what you guys do. I would love to be on your show. That is how we had that is how we found her or she found us that, here we are now. Right? And, and I’m like, Oh, we got to have Ron Moore she’s awesome, right? Take that step, if you’re inspired by people, and I’m not saying I’m, I’m still inspiring, but whatever inspires you reach out to people like that, you know, tell them how much they mean to you tell them, it is, you know, is always welcomed, by, by, especially by people, you know, they love, people love to hear about how they’re inspiring others. So I applaud you for taking the having the courage to reach out to us and, and we get pitched by publicists about maybe 20 or 30 times a week. And we say no to most of them. Because, you know, we just don’t think it would be a good fit. But when somebody reaches out to us and says, I’m a fan of your show, here’s how I it’s impacted my life here. So I think I can add value. It was an instant yes for us. And not just because we want adoration. We don’t care about that. But we appreciate people who go, hey, I can add value to this. And I think I encourage everyone out there whenever you think you can add value to something or someone reach out to them and tell them and you’ll be so shocked at how much what kind of results you get from that. But anyway, shape,
Mridu Parikh 1:11:23 that’s awesome. And by the way that would have been on my list, I’m sure per day as I kept pushing it up and pushing it off. If I was like, this will make me feel so good if I finally reached out to him. So I’m so happy
D.J. Paris 1:11:31 to hear that. Well, you did. And here we are. And we are grateful. And coming up on the end of the episode here. I want everybody, everybody, everybody to please go to Life is organized.com. That’s the hub of everything read through. She is a life productivity coach, a life coach, she’s the real deal. This is a real real deal person who knows strategies, she can help you get out of your own way. And she has a podcast. So get get, get subscribed to productivity on purpose, that and also, the last thing is life is organized.com forward slash resources. We’re gonna put all of these links in the show notes, but she’s got a tremendous number of resources, subscribe to the podcast, check out our website, and hire her to help you get your life organized. Gosh, I you know, nobody’s life is too organized. At least mine isn’t. And I need help. Everybody needs help. And I think you know, this is the way to go. So Ruth, thank you so much for being on our show. We are so grateful you came on. And I’m jealous that you live in Nashville because that’s one of my favorite places. But and I know you love Chicago too. But we are grateful that you were able to talk to us today. And I hope all of our audience goes on and starts subscribing to your to your content. And then also on behalf of our behalf Rita and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to support our show, please tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with me through and send them a link to our maybe our website, keeping it real pod.com or have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button right there. Thank you so much. And I am going to want to have you on again. So we will set up some additional conversations. So thank you so much.
Mridu Parikh 1:13:23 Thank you this this was a gift and you’re amazing and thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me.
D.J. Paris 1:13:29 Alright, we’ll see everyone next time. Thank you
Nurturing Strategies For Real Estate Agents • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Aug 23, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses what’s going on in the real estate market right now. Chris talks about how should real estate professionals plan their resource allocation according to the market slowdown and inflation. Next, Chris shares nurturing strategies for agents in order to help them stay relevant. Chris also emphasizes the importance of shifting in a market for real estate professionals. Last, Chris and D.J. discuss TheClose.com and what they offer to their readers.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What does it mean to actually nurture lead? We’re going to discuss that today. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering their clients a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business. Real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod again, real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business. This episode is also brought to you by quality builders are you are one of your clients real estate investors who can’t seem to find a trustworthy general contractor. Are you tired of poor communication, excessive change orders and extensive schedule delays. We’ll look no further because quality builders is a Chicago general contractor focused on helping you the real estate investor grow your portfolio. Each and every product decision is based on quality builders core values of transparency, courage, integrity, and uniqueness which produce sustainable and predictable results that successful real estate investors are looking for. Quality builders uses innovative project management technology to keep you up to date on your projects by providing a client portal to view daily logs schedules and contract and change order updates. Schedule a free one on one consultation by visiting quality builders.com That’s quality builders.com to see how they can partner with you to build your real estate portfolio. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and hosted through this show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes.com. And if you’re not familiar with the clothes, let me tell you more. Now the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals, they cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Now please visit the clothes.com to see all of their amazing content, which by the way is was free and it’s long form and it’s exceptional. And they also by the way, they have an email newsletter to which you can subscribe to on their website, the clothes.com but with us, as always is Chris Lindh Sal, he is a senior staff writer and real estate coach for the close. And Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing, lead generation transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you.
Chris Linsell 4:03 EJ, thanks for having me. Glad to be a part of the show today a lot going on a lot to talk about in the real estate world. So yeah, let’s, let’s let’s make some. Let’s make some let’s pick up some years here. I think I think we got some real estate conversation that needs to happen.
D.J. Paris 4:20 Well, I know agents and I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time with agents even outside of my office in this this particular week, I was part of a number of different events that I’ll happen to coincide within about a seven day window. So I was around hundreds and hundreds of agents have been in a lot of conversations. And since I myself aren’t, don’t practice. I am always curious to hear how it’s going for agents and it seems to be that agents are things have slowed down. And that’s particularly interesting and I think I was talking to a top producer last night who said I can finally play some golf this summer. He’s, you know, normally too busy to even take time off. So for people who are top producers, that might be a little bit of a welcome break in activity, but for the vast majority of agents who are looking to go to grow, I and a lot of the people I talked to this week are in that category. There, there’s a little bit of frustration going on. It’s like, okay, rates of rates are up, my clients seem to be more on the fence right now. And all these deals keep falling through. That’s another thing I kept hearing. I had, I actually was last night speaking to a woman who is NAR is representative for the Philippines. And she’s just happens to be in Chicago. And she was saying in her 25 years, she had a listing in this last month, where five, five contracts all fell through single family home, nothing unusual. She said for the same property five contracts all fell through in a 30 day period. She goes as never happened in my entire 20 years, she couldn’t believe it. So it’s a really goofy time. So I’m curious to get some thoughts about what we can, you know, provide to our audience about, you know, what’s going on right now?
Chris Linsell 6:09 Yeah, this is a really goofy time. I agree, I think, you know, look like real estate is one of those industries that is so affected by sentiments and by kind of community outlook and mood, you know, what’s happening in Chicago, where you’re based, it just may not be the same thing that happens in Michigan, where I’m based in certainly, you know, major metros, like Los Angeles, or Miami or New York, and then small suburbs. And you know, and small towns across the united states in the Midwest and the South, are certainly going to have their own market conditions. But I can tell you this, we do kind of generally all get affected by the same sorts of things, including interest rates, you know, there’s a lot of conversation that happens around interest rates. And when interest rates go up, it kind of chills the sentiment in the market, I’m not surprised to see contracts start to fall through to see sellers a little bit more hesitant buyers a little bit less present, that sort of thing happens pretty quickly, when you get these kinds of, you know, major announcements are kind of dramatic indicators. But you know, what I think is really interesting is that we often kind of underestimate the effect of this sort of thing. And we only kind of think about it in its immediate, kind of the immediate ripple that comes from like an interest rate hike. You and I were talking right before we started here about how we are at, I think, an all time low, like since the year 2000. As far as mortgage application starts, and that’s, that’s a pretty major thing to think about. Because when mortgage applications are that low, it’s going to change certainly the sentiment in the market right now. But man, it’s also going to have some pretty significant effects on Realtors business moving forward for the next month, two months, five months into the future. I mean, we’re talking through the end of 2022. And a lot of people aren’t thinking about those kinds of effects right now.
D.J. Paris 8:35 Yeah, I was listening to Sirius satellite radio the other day and I heard an ad that I had, I don’t I don’t think I’ve ever heard this radio ad before. But it really was a sign of the times it was a refinance ad and I was like, Whoa, my ears perked up refinance. Okay, we’re at like the time at the time it was rates were hovering closer to 6% for a 30 year fixed. And I was like, this is interesting. And I turned up the volume because I want to hear who is this for who is refinancing. And it was, Hey, your home is probably appreciated over the last several years now is a great time to to cash out on that. And at a low rate. And I was like, Wow, is that interesting? I hadn’t heard that particular sort of push before, but that was a real sign of the times. I’ve thought so.
Chris Linsell 9:31 Yeah. I completely agree. You know, it’s one of one of those interesting scenarios that we’re facing right now. Because I and I was just not too long ago, I was in California doing some coaching and consulting for an association out there. And one of the things that I was chatting with these folks about something I’d love to chat with you about is how mortgage rates have Have some second, third and fourth order effects. And those effects tend to create these kind of new momentums in in the business. And just as an example, if mortgage starts are down right now, the immediate effect of those starts is that kind of the mood in the market gets chilled a little bit, people get a little hesitant, you know, you’re gonna see like, like this representative from the Philippines, and to see kind of more hesitancy and transactions, you know, compare that to the absolute fire of the market a year ago, where people were making on sight unseen offers on properties that they probably wouldn’t work for them in the long run, but they needed something immediately. That’s not happening right now. But think about the next order effects. If mortgage starts are down right now, that’s likely an indicator that lead volume is going to be down in maybe a month from now. I mean, think about it. If people are typically talking to their bank, going on Zillow investigated a few properties, they’ve got their pre approval. And so now they’re thinking, Well, maybe it’s about time to start reaching out to a real estate professional. Imagine a world a month from now where lead volume is down 20%. I think that that’s a realistic possibility.
D.J. Paris 11:30 It’s an interesting thought. So the idea is because mortgage apps and we know the refi world is pretty much dead. So So mortgage apps are down since the as you mentioned, the lowest rates since 2000. They’re down 19%. From this week, last year. So yes, so that’s going to ripple. And so I guess it’s some bad news, maybe that that we’re sharing, as far as a prediction for the next couple of months. If I was an agent, what might I do to Well, number one, knowing that that that may be coming, of course, is is important. I’m wondering if there’s some action steps we could take to soften the blow that might be coming?
Chris Linsell 12:15 Yeah, totally. In fact, I would go as far as saying, there are action steps you can take to turn this liability into an opportunity. So the first thing I would say is, if we, if we follow the logic that mortgage apps being down, is going to decrease lead volume in a month from now that could mean likely will mean that your transactional volume three or four months from now might be down, which means that your budget for operating your business is going to be down six months from now. So right now is the time that real estate professionals should be thinking about the way their resources are allocated, realizing that they may have to tighten their belt from a monetary perspective in the next two, one or two quarters. But thinking remember that your resources as a real estate professional aren’t just money, you also have your time, and you also have your talent or your energy, right. So I always talk to real estate professionals about how your resources get into these three buckets, you got your time you got your talent, you got your budget, they are flexible, they move, we pay for things all the time to save ourselves time, well, when the budget gets a little lighter, that just means your time investment gets a little heavier, when your budget gets a little lighter, it means you got to get smarter with your efforts in order to make up for that imbalance. And so real estate agents and brokers right now can start to be thoughtful about how they can adjust their resource allocation. And then the other thing I would say is the desire, and the need for housing is not going away, even though we may see a suppressed amount of leads and transactions. So that could mean and of course, you know nobody’s got a crystal ball. So it’s hard to say for sure. But what I could mean is that come the first of the year 2023 We may see a little bit built up pent up demand moving into these things. So now is the time to start thinking about even though these people aren’t going to be necessarily activating for transactions right away. Start thinking about these folks as longer tail leads that require a little bit more nurturing. And the agents who can get off their heels and onto their toes with active nurturing strategies, especially with the people that they’re already engaged with. These are folks who are going to be market leaders come the fourth quarter of 2022 first quarter of 20 At 23. So you can turn this into an opportunity by getting ahead of this curve faster and more efficiently than your colleagues can. Do you have
D.J. Paris 15:09 any suggestions or nurturing strategies, the specifically that you’ve seen be effective, either in your own business or in other agents that you coach?
Chris Linsell 15:20 Yeah, totally. So the first, the first thing I say is, if you haven’t investigated yet, start looking into predictive analytics tools. These are lead generation strategies that essentially use big data to help predict which of your prospects are most likely to buy and sell, you know, did they have any kind of forward looking indicators, like their consumer, their consumer behavior, their demographic data, their neighborhood, whatever it is, start using these tools to help identify your most likely clients a little bit sooner. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, and this is one that frankly, I shouldn’t give this away for free. But you know what, DJ, I’m gonna give this away to you and to your audience here. Go online Google mortgage calculator. And you’re gonna get a ton of free options here, Google actually has one that that you can use right from their search engine. And start, you start referencing this with your clients that have a specific budget, and a specific amount that they’re comfortable paying us this mortgage calculator to say, Okay, let’s, here’s the target amount, you’re comfortable pain. Here’s what that would get you in today’s market, these rates aren’t going to stay like this forever. So let’s start tracking these mortgage rates. And in the meantime, you start preparing for the purchase of the house of your dreams, save your money, get your ducks in a row. Financially, paperwork wise, this may take a year to get to a rate where your target your client is targeted, but you are creating with your clients here, a sense of not just preparedness, but anticipation, using the high mortgage rates right now as a tool, because you know that they’re not going to be high forever, these are going to move like the markets move. You can use this as an anticipation tool to get your clients amped up about the next step in their homeownership journey. And when those rates hit their like their butter zone of their other comfortable amount that they’re paying with the property that they’re comfortable purchasing. You then have a client who is not just financially paperwork and mentally prepared, they’re physically excited. In order to make this happen. These are people who are not going to hang you up to dry with 4050 showings and a bunch of indecision, they’re ready to rock and roll. And you’ll be you’ll spend a lot less time with them on the road, I would much rather spend people spend time with people prepping them in cyberspace than on the sidewalk. And so by doing so, now you ramp them up and get them ready for their purchase. Saves you a whole bunch of time in the long run and they will go in feeling a lot more prepared.
D.J. Paris 18:22 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he is built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Makes a lot of sense. I was speaking to some lenders recently, actually because of all these events I’ve been out there lenders have had been present at these events. And I said just out of curiosity I was asked a few different lenders this this week I said obviously with rates being up and applications being down. I said, What are you? What is the what are these mortgage companies doing to sort of solve for for this challenge, and they’re coming up with some new ideas and products. And I heard from two different lenders last night, that they’re now able to lock in rates without an identified property for extended periods of time. I think it’s a great opportunity to reach out to your lending partners and talk to them and say, Hey, what what are you guys doing to help my business right now? Not specifically, like, you know, are you going to invest in my business? But just what kind of products and services are you guys coming out with to help people right now, and, you know, there are things that are that are being done. And I want to give you one, one, just one simple example that I heard last night, I was talking to a bank. And I said, I asked that question, I think, uh, well, we don’t really have any products. But here’s what we are doing. We have relationships with lead providers. And we’re going to we have these pay it pay at closing lead providers that we work with, which is a free lead up front, you paid, you know, 25 to 35%, when it closes to back to the lead company that generated it, and the banks will help facilitate this, because what the big banks get is they get people that hit their website, you know, what I’m talking about the big banks, like, you know, the Bank of America’s and chase, and you know, the big city bank, and big ones, we know, there’s millions of people are hitting their websites every month filling out indications of interest, what these banks are starting to do is send those to a third party lead provider who qualifies the person, you know, talks to them, make sure they’re not already working with an agent. And then they send them to their loan officers who are trying to build relationships with other realtors, and they go, Hey, we’ve got all these leads for you. Yeah, you’re gonna have to pay at closing. But what these banks are doing to accommodate for this, this 25 to 35% that you’re going to pay. This is the interesting part, they’re willing to fate, they figured out two different banks, I’ve talked to figure this out how to actually give the realtor a bonus that basically makes up the difference. And I haven’t totally figured out how that works and sidesteps. RESPA. But apparently, it’s some of these lenders are figuring stuff like this out. So the point is, is there’s new things happening that didn’t exist six months ago. And and a lot of these bigger banks that can’t really compete rate wise with maybe some of the more competitive shops, they’re starting to think more creatively and come up with solutions. So it’s a great opportunity to just see what see what’s going on in the lending space and talk to your lender and say, what can you do for my immediate buyers, and hey, by the way, you have any business building ideas or resources for me,
Chris Linsell 22:59 big time, that’s a good, that’s a fantastic idea. And I love, I love that strategy. I always tell folks that when you are in a business, where events are going to affect different sectors of the business at different times, you take advantage of that, like, for instance, I know, in my local market, there are local like credit unions and smaller lenders, that rely a lot on the sort of the sort of kind of local direct market advertising that they use to partner, the partner, usually with other industry professionals in order to do that advertising. Well, right now, lenders are down 20%, as far as the number of clients and number of leads they’ve got, we are not just yet in that in that phase. So right now is a great time to go to that local preferred lender and say, Hey, listen, I was thinking about doing some marketing. This is the strategy XY and Z. Would you be interested in CO branding on this market, this marketing? Maybe you can pick up the cost on this because I’ve got a really big audience that is still you know, interested in hearing what I have to say, I know that your audience might be down a little bit, how can we work together in order to do this, be happy to put your name and contact information on this in exchange for you picking up the cost of XY and Z? Right now is a time to leverage that that inequity a little bit, because it’s gonna swing back around, eventually, they’re gonna leverage their their inequity on you. That’s just the way the business works. But there are plenty of ways that you can kind of leverage the situation, especially from a we’ve got leads, but nothing to do with them or we don’t have leads and we need them sort of the sort of imbalance that those sorts of situations exist right now and it’s a great time to take advantage of them.
D.J. Paris 24:54 I think so too. And I also think first time homebuyer seminars can still be incredibly effective. Because I think from the perspective of applications, for Lent, for lending, obviously, applications are down. But first time homebuyers are are still there, they’re still out there. And they probably are maybe a little spooked right now. And I think it’s a great opportunity to create content with a lending partner where maybe the agent could talk more about inventory and, and how they’re finding deals for their clients. And then the lender can talk about, here’s what’s going on with rates and different products. And here’s how we can solve for the challenges in the market. I think you could do one of those weekly, and hosted on social media or via zoom, and, and maybe post some clips on social media. And you’re gonna get interested people. And I think I was thinking about this too, psychologically, and this is this is I’m this is a very broad generalization not backed in any sort of science. But I know that when when times are stressful, and I think agents, a lot of agents are feeling stressed right now around the lack of activity and the slowdown. And I it’s been my experience, when people are stressed, they tend to retreat versus really push forward. Because that’s just what stress does to people, it typically shuts you down, it shuts the body down, decreases motivation, etc. There’s a small percentage of people where it actually activates them. But most of us get, we retreat, I think, when we’re stressed. And so I think we’re going to see a lot of agents, even considering exiting the market or pausing or just reducing their workload, not because they want to, but because that’s kind of they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. And I think it’s a great, I just don’t think the road is crowded right now. So I think like, as you were saying, Chris, these sort of nurturing activities, I don’t think there’s going to be as much competition for it as maybe. Well, I don’t know, I I’m unclear. But I talked to a lot of top producers this week, or this week that are like, I am not that busy right now. And I thought what a great opportunity for agents who are who are in growth mode, to really take advantage of these, the big hitters are all taking a sigh of a sigh of relief and taking some well needed rest. And I think it’s a great opportunity for for the younger agents or the newer agents rather, to really say, Okay, I’m going to ramp up my, my communication, I’m going to ramp up my, my social media, I’m going to start doing videos, I, you know, I think there’s just a lot you can do to start building your brand. And then hopefully, when the market changes, you know, you have a larger audience than you did when it started.
Chris Linsell 27:42 I think you’re absolutely right. I think you’re absolutely right on that. And just, you know, in closing, to think about this, it’s important for agents to remember that markets are cycles there is there is a probably an inappropriate expectation on the part of lots of agents who have been in the real estate game for 10 years or less, that were going through some sort of like, this is the real estate Apocalypse that’s happening right now. Guys markets dip, in fact, Jamie Dimon is, you know, when he was asked like, how do you define a recession, he said something that happens every seven years. And the same, it’s the same thing. The same philosophy needs to be applied to real estate markets go up, they go down power shifts between buyers and sellers. This is there are always going to be blips like these exigent events like COVID and the screen have crazy inflation as a result of I’m not going to, you know go on my soapbox as to why inflation is what it is. But those sorts of events certainly have outsized effects on that market. undulation. But this is these are market corrections that happen on a regular a regular basis. And this is okay. It’s okay for healthy markets to undulate between buyers and sellers, for rates to go up to rates to go down. The real test here is on the real estate professional community to recognize that as markets change, there’s always still opportunity. The true professionals are the ones who adjust to the changing opportunity. Anybody can sell when the market is ridiculously hot, and people are placing offers that they really shouldn’t. That’s easy. The hard thing about real estate success is creating a strategy that adjusts as the market adjust. That’s where you really separate the pretenders from the professionals.
D.J. Paris 29:44 Yeah, I think too. And not every market really supports this. But if you’re in a market where leasing is a viable stream of income, here in Metro Chicago, obviously leasing is very prominent. I know, luxury leasing in particular, is having a huge boom right now. And I’ll tell you just how big a boom it has my girlfriend works at one of the most elite luxury buildings here in Chicago for apartments, and they have 500 units, which is just insane. And they this is this is how crazy it is that she did in the last month 11 leases. Now she’s in house. And here’s the interesting part. When they do work with realtors, they do not list on the MLS, but they do work with realtors. And if you’re not in their top five realtor companies that that that give them the most business, even on like a $6,000 a month, two or three bedroom. The only the commission you get is only about either $500 or $1,000, where typically, typically it’s a full month’s rent. So yes, that’s a bummer for that particular building, if you’re an agent, and you’re not in that top five group. But it’s a real strong indicator that people are and I asked Mike Well, I asked my girlfriend, why don’t you guys pay one month’s rent, she looked at me like, like I was dumb. And she goes, we don’t have to right now. Because that’s how busy we are. And I thought okay, so that building may be not super broker friend or realtor friendly at the moment. But ironically, they’re building his name moment. So I just confused myself there. But anyway, yes, at the time, right now that building is is tougher to work with. But it’s a good indicator that a lot of people are renting. And these are people who are all going to be buying in a year or two as well. So even if you did only earn $500, which again is a you know, that’s, that’s tough on a $6,000 apartment per month. But that’s somebody that’s definitely buy property. And so maybe you eat it on the front end, and you just do your job. And you just say, Well, I’m kind of working for free at the moment, and then hope that you’ve built up enough goodwill, that when they turn around and buy their $2 million home, then you receive the benefit. So I think you know leasing. While it’s not maybe the sexiest and most exciting part of the business. Great way to keep keep rolling, quick, great way to keep some extra income coming in on a regular basis on a shorter term basis. And great way to just build that relationship so that when that person is ready to transition to homeownership, you’re there person,
Chris Linsell 32:27 I agree completely, lots of opportunity out there, shift. That’s the name of the game going to be successful. keep shifting.
D.J. Paris 32:34 Awesome. Well, what a great place to wrap up. Before we do. Can you just quickly mention we talked about the clothes and how great they are? And everyone listening? If you’re not a regular reader to the close, please become one. I don’t know that people use RSS readers anymore. I still do. I use Feedly. So they are on my feedly in my real estate category. But I think most people don’t do that. So just put it in your bookmarks and follow them everyday. Because the articles you guys are almost up to what is it 101 article a day now.
Chris Linsell 33:03 That’s the goal depends. Definitely a quality over quantity sort of place. So if it doesn’t meet our rigorous quality standards, it doesn’t go out. But yeah, where do we shoot for a good, solid, quality, actionable piece of content every day?
D.J. Paris 33:19 And we and I really want to just explain how high the quality is. And everyone who is listening can probably relate to this. Have you ever wanted some tips, maybe you have an open house coming up? Or you have you’re looking to invest into real estate technology or maybe a lead provider, or you just want successful strategies. And maybe that’s how you found this website by googling that sort of thing. And you come across lists, right? There’s so many articles that are written on different websites, different blogs that are you know, list, hey, how to have a successful open house, and there’s five strategies, five little tips, how often do you actually get a really solid tip in those lists? In my experience, you have to hunt and you have to probably look at about 15 articles before you find anything that isn’t show up early, you know, get some cookies, you know, for an open house, you know something that’s like, oh, like, Oh, that’s a really good thing I wouldn’t have thought of the close doesn’t have those kinds of lists every one of their articles. And this is this is really how I feel because I read them is the kind of article that as somebody who I consider myself a bit of a writer, I would want to aspire to that level of quality here on the show. And the close is is that level of quality. So really, they’re probably the best place to start for everything that you need for your business and their articles are not you know, the super obvious five things you need to do before an open house or a listing appointment. They actually go really deep and wide and are like, here’s something that you wouldn’t probably have thought to do. So please check out the clothes and then they also have so 95% of what’s on the clothes is totally free. but they also have a premium section and can you talk about the close Pro?
Chris Linsell 35:03 Yeah, close Pro is a chance for real estate professionals who want to take their business to the next level with coaching with long form courses that include original video, original article, content, templates, scripts, downloads, strategy guides, you name it. That’s, that’s the spot to do it, the close Pro offers close readers a chance to go just a little bit deeper, just a little bit further and just a little bit more actionable, which is tough to do, especially when you are already working on that stuff pretty hard on the free side of the clothes, chance to do that on an either even deeper level. And if you’re looking for the interaction with real estate, experts like myself, like other coaches, we’ve got a great coach named Sean motori, one of the former nar 30, under 30s in the REMAX Hall of Fame, he’s built multiple brokerages, this is the place to do it. The close Pro is also the spot that you get extra insight into our original courses like six simple systems to transform your real estate business. And one one thing that is happening might be more applicable right now is courses on our social media crash courses, our course specifically about how to generate low cost hidden leads. As we see inventory continued to undulate. That’s a great spot to a great spot to focus. And then my favorite one right now, Sara and Sophia, two of our course creators, their Facebook and Instagram at Crash Course, presented by a company called Social pop. This is the sort of thing you just don’t get elsewhere. It’s designed specifically for real estate professionals, by real estate professionals with your goals in mind. So you want to take your business to the next level, the closes where you should start. If you’re ready to get more actionable than anyone else in your brokerage, the clothes pros where you should go.
D.J. Paris 37:13 Awesome, Will everyone please go visit the clothes.com and check out their content, consider joining their premium select Close Pro, which is their premium section. And as always, Chris, we say thank you for your your time, your insight and your conversation. This I always feel like you and I, this is one of my favorite shows I do a month because I always know I’m gonna have a great conversation. So you helped make the show better. And we’re so grateful for you. And as is as well. We are grateful to the audience for continuing to listen and support us. In addition to visiting the close, which please everybody go do. Also, please tell a friend about the show just one other agent that you could think of even if you’ve already told 10 agents about us consider telling an 11 Let us let them know about the show. This is our way of giving back to the to the industry that’s been very kind to Chris and myself. And we just want to share the wealth and we’re big fans of what is it that a rising tide raises all all ships in a port or whatever that expression is, meaning that the more education we all have, the better agents we’re all going to be. And since we all have to work together, it’s good that everybody gets educated. So let them know about the clothes and let them know about this podcast. Keeping it real pod.com is the best place to find all of our episodes and follow us on facebook@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pot. All right, Chris. Well, great chatting with you again. We will see you next month.
Chris Linsell 38:41 Sounds great. Thanks, DJ. Thanks
Why Your Mental Health Needs To Be Part Of Your Business Plan • Angelica Ventrice
Aug 18, 2022
Angelica Ventrice a High-Performance Mentor & Health Coach talks about her journey into health and wellness space and how she started her business in mindset and fitness. Angelica talks about the importance of paying attention to your physical and mental wellbeing and how to deal with the guilt around your own perception of your body shape. Angelica discusses how to fit fitness into your everyday life for it to become a lifestyle. Angelica and D.J. talk about gut health and its importance. Last, Angelica describes her Fit for Life Program.
D.J. Paris 0:00 As a realtor, how do you take care of your mental health? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering their clients a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business. Real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod again, real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business. This episode is also brought to you by quality builders are you are one of your clients real estate investors who can’t seem to find a trustworthy general contractor. Are you tired of poor communication, excessive change orders and extensive schedule delays. We’ll look no further because quality builders is a Chicago general contractor focused on helping you the real estate investor grow your portfolio. Each and every product decision is based on quality builders core values of transparency, courage, integrity, and uniqueness which produce sustainable and predictable results that successful real estate investors are looking for. Quality builders uses innovative project management technology to keep you up to date on your projects by providing a client portal to view daily logs schedules and contract and change order updates. Schedule a free one on one consultation by visiting quality builders.com That’s quality builders.com to see how they can partner with you to build your real estate portfolio. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through this show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with mentor and health coach Angelica, Ben Treece to talk all about dealing with the ups and downs of the market, as well as difficult clients how do you maintain your mental health while wearing all the hats that we know Realtors wear. But before we get to Angelica, just a couple of quick reminders please remember to tell a friend about our show. Think of one other agent maybe one that’s struggling with all the stress of being a realtor and this is a perfect episode to shoot over to them, you can send them right to our website keeping it real pod.com where they can stream every episode we’ve ever done. Or they can pull up a podcast app on their mobile device and search for keeping it real hit that subscribe button we’re pretty much everywhere. So please do that that helps us continue to grow and do more episodes and give you guys better content. So tell a friend but you know what, enough about that let’s get to the main event our my conversation with Angelica Vinci’s.
Today on the show we have Angelica vantrease, who is the CEO and founder of Fit for Life. Let me tell you more about Angelica Angelica venturi is a high performance mentor and health coach to female entrepreneurs, executives and real estate agents who desire to uplevel their health and wealth. She has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine authority magazine and my fitness pal and she is obsessed with guiding driven women to shift their mindset and bank accounts while shedding those unwanted pounds along the way without ridiculous fad diets or crazy restrictions. To this date, she has helped over 700 Women transform their bodies and minds while finding a true alignment in their personal and professional lives. Please everyone listening go visit Angelica at our website which is Angelica Ben treece.com. That’s V N T R I C E so Angelica vantrease.com. We’ll have a link in the show notes and also absolutely follow her on Facebook which is at the angelica than trees. That link is also in the show notes Angelica Welcome to the show.
Angelica Ventrice 4:57 Hello everybody excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 5:00 I am really jealous of Angelica because she was like, Yeah, I’m calling you from Maui, which is I didn’t realize she lived there. And that is absolutely one of my favorite places in the world to visit. And I’ve been there several times, but not to the southern part of the island, the southwest part of the island, I guess where you are, which is supposed to be even like the best part of the island. So
Angelica Ventrice 5:21 magical place so everyone needs to be released once in their life. For sure.
D.J. Paris 5:26 It’s, it’s, I always say like you can even skip skip a wahoo. Not that there’s anything wrong with the one who like wow, who was lovely and nice.
Angelica Ventrice 5:34 But wha hoo. Don’t be on the beach. If you want to city go to New York City or LA. You don’t need it.
D.J. Paris 5:40 That’s right. Yeah, I remember the first time as a family. We started in Oahu. And I was like, oh, yeah, I was I was in I was young. I was in college, I was thrilled to be able to go to Hawaii. I was so lucky. And a wife and a wahoo was like, Okay, this is okay. Now, when we got to Maui, I was like, Oh, nice. Nice.
Angelica Ventrice 6:00 I know, the first time I got to Oahu. I was like, all right. It’s just I really felt like I was just there was a big, big city, big city, and shopping. And it’s not vacation mode for me.
D.J. Paris 6:13 Not as much fun. But that is awesome. Well, we could I could talk about Hawaii all day, because I am I just I dream about going there as and I haven’t been there in many, many years. But I’m glad that we’re able to communicate and chat. And we’re glad to have you on the show. And I was telling Angelica before we started that, well, my memory is garbage. So this might not actually be true, but I think it is true. This is the first time we’ve had a health and wellness expert on our show in about 400 episodes, and specifically one who who deals with real estate agents. So this is so exciting. I’m so excited. I am a big proponent of health, even before wealth, right? I think health is is the catalyst for everything this is this is our temple. And it’s a good idea to pay attention to what you’re shoving into your temple. While you’re while you’re having to run run your rest of your life. So I would love to start with your journey. Tell us how you got into the fitness space, the health and wellness space. What was that? Why did you do that? And how did you do it?
Angelica Ventrice 7:15 Yeah, so I’m originally from New York, you guys may hear hear come out of my accent with certain words. So um, you know, like 13 years ago, I was living in New York and I was overweight my basically my whole life like from the time I was a child, you know, all through high school, I was uncomfortable. I was heavier. I had acne yet. I had, I didn’t love myself. And it kind of lasted all the way up until my mid 20s. So I was in medical sales at the time. So this is where I find a lot of similarities to when I was in medical sales to be in real estate and I think that’s what what has led me to work with a lot of real estate agents because there I was like hustling you’re on the go You’re just like going from doctor’s office, a doctor’s office and I really was not taking care of myself I was entertaining just like how a lot of real estate agents entertain, right? Entertaining, hustling. It was just that really honestly just go go go right like
D.J. Paris 8:08 not a lot of routine right? It was like different different doctor’s office if every, every day constantly racing around grabbing food when you’re
Angelica Ventrice 8:18 grabbing food, like stopping at you know Starbucks to get the office snacks, and then just eating whatever at Starbucks or stopping at Dunkin Donuts. And it was a lot of that. And they’re just added up, added up added up on top of the weight that I had already just gained throughout, you know, my whole life. One day, it just kind of hit me I’m like, I’m done. Like, I felt so horrible. I felt lethargic, I felt uncomfortable. I was I had to keep buying bigger suits and dresses. It’s at a point. I’m just like, No, I’m done. Like you just hit you hit a breaking point. So I hired my first coach. And I worked out with him a few times a week, you know, I was in my 20s. And I really investment wise, I didn’t have the investment at the point where I was like, here’s my credit card, I just when you want to do something, you want to do it and you figure it out, that’s really high. And I was like, I’ll figure it out later, I don’t even care. So I started working with him started losing the weight. And through that journey, something just hit me. I’m like, This is what I want to do. Like I want to help other women because it wasn’t just shedding the weight, releasing the weight. When you release the weight. You release a lot of energy and stories that you had been clinging on to your whole entire life, telling myself I’m the fat girl, I’m always gonna be fat. It’s my genetics, like all those things that you’re holding on to your release and identity. And I felt so much happier so much lighter, mentally and physically and I decided to get my certifications while I was doing medical sales. And then I was like, I don’t want to live in New York. I hate the cold and I knew California really is the mecca of health and fitness like you know, it’s just everyone’s very healthy out there. It’s it’s sunny all the time. Everyone’s running around like I want to live in California. So I believe in manifestation and I just started to like, manifest it. I took a trip out there. I went I went to interview at Equinox gym, which I had never worked at a gym. They were like what experience you have. I’m like have absolutely none. But I’m really passionate about changing women’s lives. And I can prove to you that like, this is something I want to do. Left my medical sales job moved from New York to California without a job lined up like, wow, yeah. But you know, I was smart, I save. And I did get the job at the gym eventually, and worked my way up there and then decided that I wasn’t really fulfilled just doing personal training, like fitness wasn’t deep enough for me. So I got nutrition certifications, and then you can only move up so far to gym. And you could only see so many clients in a day. And I was like, I want to branch out on my own branch out on my own, and decided to move into the online space. And that’s where my program fit for life was born. And then I really got into nutrition mindset, gut health and metaphysical aspects to weight loss. And then fitness is honestly the smallest component now on my program, everyone gets customized workouts, but what I really believe is that your mindset and your gut health and and the food you intake has way more to do with your weight loss and your transformation of your happiness than just doing the workout. So yes, the workouts are important, but it’s the least important in my opinion. And here we are right now I live in Maui. So here we are.
D.J. Paris 11:09 It’s an it’s an incredible journey. And it’s impressive, that I always think it’s so fun when something grabs a hold of you. And it becomes an obsession at first and then possibly a career. And you’ve done that. And I think it’s it’s so awesome to talk to people when that whatever that thing is for them grabs a hold of them, and it just can’t really they can’t shake it loose. And then all of a sudden they’re like, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I love that. And so, I would love so I think what I would love to first because our audience, so just to give you, an you, you work with realtors, so you know, but just just to sort of set set the stage, you know, our audience, our lovely listeners who we are so thrilled are here and paying attention. These are people who you know, wear a lot of different hats. They basically are their own business owner, they maybe they’re on a team, but essentially, it’s probably they’re doing incredible amounts of work. They’re working bizarre hours of the day, sometimes into the night, nights and weekends. It’s it’s it’s a, you know, they’re there, it’s a customer service job in a lot of respects. So they are having to mold their time around when their clients are available to go see homes and be available for you know, buying and selling things. So there’s it’s tough for them for number one for structure, because they’re at their client’s beck and call. So I would just first love to let let’s first make the case and we want we’ll deal with myths, right? Now, let’s make the case about why it’s so important for all of our listeners to be paying attention to their their physical well being and their mental well being. For sure,
Angelica Ventrice 12:47 well, your body is your main vessel. So if you’re not taking care of like you said, it’s your temple, it’s your vessel. At a certain point, no matter how well you’re doing in your business, you want to grow to the next level, we all do, let’s be real real estate agents, you’re entrepreneurs, I’m an entrepreneur, we want to keep going and going. That’s why we got into these businesses in the first place. So at a certain point, if you’re not taking care of your health, your body can only hold so much hold so much energy, both so much well hold so much. So you really need to start to implement boundaries and structure being less reactive, paying attention to your mindset, your reactivity, you know, adding in things like meditate, I mean, we can go into all the things that if you’re not taking care of at a certain point, you’re going to reach burnout, you’re going to have gut health issues, you’re going to feel extreme fatigue, inflammation in your joints bloat. And then when you’re operating on it, that that leads you to operate at a low level energetically, right? The vibrations that you’re putting out, the first thing a client sees when you take them to the house is you. And if you don’t like the way you look, and you don’t feel good, what type of energy are you putting out into the world? The clients feel that no matter what sales position you’re in, whether you’re selling real estate, whether you’re selling whatever you’re selling, clients feel your energy. So if you’re not in a good vibrational state, because you’re not taking care of your health and your body, how much more wealth can you actually make?
D.J. Paris 14:10 It’s a really strong point. And let’s I always had this question and I’m curious to hear your answer. Because a lot of us who are listening, myself included, would like to lose just sheds, you know, a few pounds of fat or, or maybe more. And so a lot of us who consider maybe we consider ourselves overweight, or not the ideal body size that we would like to be. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we do have some of those negative thoughts of, oh, I can’t believe maybe I did this to myself or you know, some shame, some guilt. This idea that I don’t like the where I’m at and therefore there’s something wrong with me kind of feeling. Well, how do you how do you start with someone like that? Because I think that doesn’t get talked about a lot and I think a lot of us fall into that category where we look for what’s wrong, maybe maybe our body is really lovely. But in our mind, you know, we have, you know, some sort of distorted view of it where, or maybe it is actually not the right shape that we would like it to be. But we have a lot of shame and guilt around that. So how do you deal with that? What do we say to people who are sure, and that’s
Angelica Ventrice 15:20 very common, I can relate because when I was overweight, I felt that the first thing is, it’s really helpful when you work with an expert to help take you through releasing those feelings of shame and guilt. And I use different methods, whether it’s visualization, meditation, tapping, a mindset coaching call, but, you know, it’s okay to want to change things about yourself. But you still have to do it from a place of self love. So, friends, I’ll use myself like I got a no shop a few years ago, I’ll be totally honest about I did a YouTube video on it. People are very interested in this. I did it because I didn’t like my nose, not because I hated myself, right. And when I wanted to lose weight, there was a point where I didn’t I didn’t like the way I look. But you have to really say like, what do you love about yourself? Even if you want to lose weight? What are some great things that you love about yourself physical mental accomplishments in your career? And and remember those things and start to release the guilt and shame because what does that do? Honestly, if you’re trying to lose weight, that makes it harder. If you’re feeling guilty, if you’re feeling shameful, if you’re feeling super negative, those thoughts affect your physiological body in a negative way. They increase cortisol, they mess with your hormones. So if you can just actually learn to just say, okay, like, No, I don’t like the way I look right now. I know I have some weight to lose, what am I going to do about it instead of wallowing in the stories and the guilt and the shame? And I say to my clients, a lot of us live in the Doom dungeon, like, Oh, I wish this like hope this I shouldn’t have done this, or I’m so guilty. Oh, what if I fail, it’s like that doesn’t get you anywhere. Living in the Doom dungeon doesn’t get you anywhere. So it’s starting to release those feelings. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but there are different methods like journaling, meditation, visualization, working with a coach tapping, movement, grounding, there’s, there’s many things you can do.
D.J. Paris 17:00 Yeah, I think that’s really important. I’ve always heard the the best place you can be the best mindset you can have if you’re looking to change your your physical vitality, or your physical shape, is to look in the mirror and say, well, it’s not what I’d like it to be, I’d actually prefer it to be, you know, a different shape. And I’m really want to make that happen. But I can still love myself, even though I’m not the shape. I’m I would prefer to be and I can still go after the shape I want to be. Yes. So it’s this teasing apart of the identity of like, Oh, I’m I’m fat, right? It’s like, okay, yes, I have some fat I’d like to add, right? Yeah. And, and I’m a really great person to or I have all these other great qualities. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, right? It’s like, I’m fat, does it mean, I’m a bad person? Or it just means I have some extra weight that I would like to get rid of like, okay, cool. And by the way, sorry. No, I was I was just gonna say I think I think it’s admirable to to have an honest appraisal of your situation and, and go, and how great is it that I’m thinking about this and thinking about making changes like that, in and of itself is huge. Yes.
Angelica Ventrice 18:17 I know, I just said you can love yourself and still want to change certain things about yourself. I love myself, but I didn’t like my nose. Like I didn’t have a job. You know, there’s plenty people that do that. Like you, you love yourself, but you think that you’re a little bit overweight, change it, like let’s not wallow in it, let’s just move forward write about it. And take action always when?
D.J. Paris 18:36 Actually, yes, and action can even supersede belief, I think so it’s like
Angelica Ventrice 18:42 them believe action and then take the action, you’re not always gonna believe you can do it. Once you start to see the results on your weight loss journey, then your belief will increase. But if you just take action, imperfect action, do something action trumps the belief,
D.J. Paris 18:56 imperfect action. I love that. That is that is a great thing to remember for any any part of life that you’re looking to make a change. Just take some take some action doesn’t need to be perfect, just just do something. But let’s talk about okay, so that so thank you that I think that’s a great way to set the stage. And we should also talk about because I was looking at your website, and I was seeing the transformations of of caches, like dozens of women. And there was visual, there’s so many Yeah, it is it is apps. Oh, I know that the page is like it’s like an infinite scroll of people who have have really transformed their life. And you can see it visually and then you can they write about it as well. And I was just so impressive. And I know like, I didn’t take a before and after photo of myself when I started working out but but I do sort of look in the mirror and I’m like, Oh, if like I don’t even know we were talking about this before we start like I don’t even like working out but I do it. And as a result I get the benefit. I get the benefit. So that’s another thing too is I don’t know that you have to love every part of exercise, or being, you know fit or in shape or dieting, or sorry, not dieting, but having a good nutritional sort of plan. But as long as you do it, you get a ton of benefit from it. So I’m somebody who doesn’t enjoy working out because it’s hard. It’s painful, it’s it’s not fun. But anyway, we were talking about this outside, or before we started, when I leave the gym, I feel number one, I feel good, because I’ve got all these great sort of endorphins racing through my body. Number two, I’m proud of myself because I did something crazy hard. And, and that’s all I have to admit, I get all the benefit. So I have to go through a little bit of the pain, quite a bit of pain, actually. But that’s okay, like this paint likes got pain involved. But I get all the benefit. And I think this idea of jumping in diving headfirst into physical pain to get benefit is actually like part of the deal when you work out. Like that’s just how it is you have to be willing to be uncomfortable to get stronger.
Angelica Ventrice 21:01 You have to be willing to get uncomfortable in any area of your life, if you desire growth, in your business, in your health, in your relationships in all areas of life. So and you know, the things that we resist, they persist. So if you keep resisting the fact that you need to work out, or if you’re trying to grow in your business, and you’re resisting the fact that you know, you need to hire an assistant because you’re so busy, but it’s everything that you resist will persist and creep up on you to a worse level. In my opinion. You know what I mean? So, yeah, awesome person. I would love every one of my clients to love the workouts. Some of them love it more. Some of them don’t, but they do it. And then of course, you want to add in things that you do love. So if you don’t love strength training, maybe you do it a few days a week and you love yoga. So maybe you add in a yoga, so you never want to be miserable. But no, you don’t want to be miserable. Everyone likes like lifting weights, a lot of people hate like cardio and burpees. So I’m like, okay, you don’t need to do any of that. Just walk you know. So we really do work with our clients. I never want anyone to feel like they really hate it like I have clients are just like, I hate lifting. Can I do boxing and running? I’m like, okay, like I do believe in strength training, especially for the longevity of your joints and your bones and everything. But and especially if you’re you do desire to lose weight, you need to lift weights to build lean muscle mass, but if someone really hates it, there’s other ways and then the nutrition in the mind. That’s a big part. But yeah, it’s not just like, oh, I look good. It’s so I feel good. The endorphins, the energy, and you become so much stronger, mentally and physically from working out. Putting yourself in those challenges.
D.J. Paris 22:26 What’s your advice on the best time of day for real estate agents to exercise? I know, obviously.
Angelica Ventrice 22:35 Morning, we just had a one on one call with one of my new clients. She’s a real estate agent. And we she asked me this exact question literally. Also, she missed our tribe call last night because she was closing a deal. She’s like, I can’t believe I missed the call. And I’m like, this will we’re gonna talk about on our next coach ball boundaries, right? So she, she was she was saying like, I’m not really a morning person. But I know if I leave the workouts later in the day, I’m like, You will never do the workout after a full day of working and you’re running around, I know how real estate agents operate, you know, house to house calls, calls calls running around, you’re not going to work out at seven o’clock at night, let’s be real, like, let’s be real. So just wake up a half hour earlier. And then you can move half hour to 45 minutes and then eventually becomes an hour earlier. And then you fit in a longer workout. And remember to the real estate agents listening. In the beginning, if you’re, you’re just starting on your weight loss journey, right? The workouts don’t need to be long, you can start with like 1520 minutes and work your way up. Something is better than nothing. Moving your body is better than not doing anything. Five minutes of meditation in the morning is better than nothing. So just doing little things, little tiny, little tiny things lead to big results. So if you’re a real estate agent, and you’re listening and like why don’t have an hour in the morning, then just do a 15 minute workout a week customize all your workouts. So some of my clients literally just have 15 minute workouts because they are that busy. And then they leave for other days.
D.J. Paris 23:58 And you do sort of get hooked on it after a while even though you may or may not like it, you get hooked on it because you know it’s good for you and you can start to see maybe even see results or feel results. So it becomes I think, you know, I was thinking about when you know when you’re in an airplane, and when they do the announcements, which I usually zone out for. But they always say yeah, I’m like, I don’t know what’s if God God forbid, there’s an actual like fire on the plane or the planes going down. I’ll have no idea what to do. But but but we all know that they say you know, hey, if the oxygen becomes you know, the oxygen levels decrease and the thing comes down with the masks, put your own mask on first before you can.
Angelica Ventrice 24:43 Oh my gosh, such. Yes, save Yourself. Your clients will be okay. You don’t need 10 o’clock at night they could wait till the morning.
D.J. Paris 24:52 They can wait. Pay yourself first and that includes health and wellness and so forth. First thing of the day, it sounds like Angelica, you’re suggesting pay yourself first. And by what I mean is, you’re basically doing a favor for your future self by getting to the gym, or working out or doing something related to health or nutrition, you’re paying your future, you’re you’re doing a favor for your future, the older you have that’s coming. And so I yeah, I could not agree with you more. I don’t do them in the morning, but I have it structured in the middle of my day. And it happens to be a few blocks from where I live. So it sort of works.
Angelica Ventrice 25:28 If you can do it great for females, but I couldn’t do it after work after a lot of getting ready. So like if you’re you have the you know, your hair and your makeup, I you know, so when I didn’t medical sales, and I was on go just like be real estate agent, I would take my bag of stuff with me to my trainer, and then just shower and get ready, and then have my day from there. So either way, you have to be prepared. So if you if you know you’re going to work out in the morning, and it’s earlier than usual, set your stuff out the night before, you know, put your sleep, like make your smoothie the evening before make your egg cups that this is with our clients, we actually, we help them with routines, we’re not just like giving them meal plans and workouts, we’re like helping them fit it into their life, because that’s an integral part. And that’s how you stick with it and it becomes a lifestyle. If it feels too hard to fit into your life or too complicated, you’re going to start and then you’re going to stop, you’re gonna start and then you’re gonna stop over and over again, so really needs to fit into your lifestyle. It’s very important for real estate agents.
D.J. Paris 26:22 I agree. And I also think to this idea of like you were talking about planning in advance, eliminates the need to make more decisions. So like, throughout the day, our listeners are making having to react to a million different things that are coming at them. But if you don’t have to think about breakfast, lunch exercise, because it’s already booked into your schedule, and you already have your meals ready to go, then it’s like three or four less things to worry about. And you’re probably you’re gonna make better decisions.
Angelica Ventrice 26:52 Yeah, you feel better. When you feel better, you perform better if you’re eating well, your gut is in good health, right, your brain is clear, you feel better your skin, you have more energy so that you know that go go go maybe doesn’t feel as hard. And I’m not saying you don’t need to slow down all your real estate, you just need to slow down drink less coffee. I mean, we can go on, there’s a whole list I go, we can go into all that. But what the most important things that I teach, I work one on one with a lot of real estate agents and do health and wealth is really slowing down first thing in the morning, not going to their phone and looking at their emails and answering and going crazy, actually turning inward, the morning is the best time to slow down. It’s a it’s a time where you’re creative. So just take 510 minutes and do meditation. I mean literally, if you’ve never meditated, just sit there for five minutes and breathe. You know or find a guided meditation, there’s so many options, and then do your workout, do your you know, eat your breakfast, whatever, whatever you desire your morning routine to be but not waking up and increasing your cortisol the second you wake up, because that leads to weight gain, like oh, my gosh, this client, email me and then immediately you’re starting your day in a heightened stress state what a stress to it changes the biodiversity in your microbiome in your gut, it increases cortisol, which then leads to weight gain. So now you’re in such a cycle,
D.J. Paris 28:08 I stopped looking at social media, why I don’t really look much at social media at all, but I stopped specifically looking at it before bed and when I first wake up, because I noticed that I was just too emotionally reactive to what was happening. So some good things, some sad things, some angry things, some you know, it’s it’s this just intense environment. And it’s addictive, because because of the way that these tech companies have figured out how to sort of activate our dopamine hits. Yeah, constant dopamine hits and constant just emotional reactions to things. So it’s one of those things where I just kind of measured I was like, do I feel better? After I checked my social media first thing in the morning? Like, how do I feel? Am I more anxious? Am I less anxious and more stressful? It was all Oh, I’m actually worse off now. And I’m not saying that to everybody. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be on social media. But notice how you feel when you do these activities. And notice how it sets up the rest of your day. But you’re absolutely right. Um, let’s I want to talk about gut health, because we have never talked about gut show. And I feel this is something that most people go oh, yeah, I sort of know that there’s a mind body connection. And the gut is, is has all this information that sends signals to the brain, but I don’t think a lot of us know really what that means. So what is what is gut health mean to you, and how should we define it?
Angelica Ventrice 29:28 So Leah, what you just mentioned is the vagus nerve does link the brain down to the digestive tract. So when you actually say I have a good feeling, oh, I have a good feeling. That’s a real thing. So I mean, the gut microbiome reverse the trillions of micro organisms that make up your gut. Okay. And what happens over time, when we are highly stressed, we take a lot of antibiotics, we don’t treat our body well, nutrition wise. We’re always on the go. We’re very reactive. You know, all the things. We allow the toxins to kind of seep in because the gut lining gets thinner and thinner and thinner becomes more permeable. And when that happens that leads to a slew of symptoms that are the obvious. Poor gut health symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, everyone knows those. But then there’s the other ones that I find like a lot of real estate agents don’t even realize it. But like, I’m so tired, I’m so fatigued, my joints hurt. I have headaches. Those are all signs of poor gut health, skin irritations, eczema, depression, anxiety. A lot of people, there’s a lot of studies from a lot of people who have ADHD and high levels of anxiety, it’s related to poor gut health. So as your real estate agent and you’re very busy, you’re on the go, we don’t need to make it worse by having poor gut health, right? Because that’s stress, your constant state of stress is really changing the biodiversity of your gut microbiome. So we want to feed your gut with lots of healthy bacteria. So how do you do that you need a lot of fiber. So I always say a lot of veggies. Fruits, fruits and veggies are great and obviously lean proteins. But what happens when you eat a lot of fiber I’m always like telling my real estate agents eat more greens, eat more greens, eat more greens drink more water, less coffee, fiber, when it enters the gut gets turned into a short chain fatty acid which feeds the healthy bacteria and then there’s of course, foods you can include there’s you know, I have a list here onions, leeks, sauerkraut, veggies, leafy greens, MCT oil, coconut oil, salmon, so there’s a lot of great foods that will help the help your gut become more healthy, but you really have to pay attention to other factors like your stress levels and your thoughts. And if you’re taking antibiotics and things that you’re putting in your body unfortunate.
D.J. Paris 31:37 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is follow up boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, you just you just said a lot. No, no, no, no, it was it was all it was all really really great stuff. So let’s talk. So with respect to gut health, how do so so you talked about the symptoms. So we’re talking about bloating and other other
Angelica Ventrice 33:15 perceive Yeah, everything that affects your performance. If your brain fog, if you have poor sleep, if your joints hurt, you don’t feel well. You’re not going to be be performing at your best in your career. That’s the bottom line. I’ve been so I’ve had these things. So I got so passionate about gut health that affected my hormones. You know, you can only take so many calls or see so many clients or do so many things when you feel like
D.J. Paris 33:36 crap. And then and then we I want to talk about okay, I want to talk about carbs because I obviously there’s this lots of people have different sort of interpretations of what carbs are. But let’s let’s talk about what carbs. Well, there’s obviously good carbs and bad carbs. Okay, well, let’s go oh, let’s start right there. healthy carbs. And
Angelica Ventrice 33:59 go ahead. Okay, we’re gonna go there are no good and bad. Food has no morals. This is a very important lesson for anyone. Food has no moral value. Unfortunately, the health and fitness industry has somehow moralized foods people think they’re bad if they have a cookie, and people think they’re good. They had a salad. Let’s take this off the table. There’s no good food, there’s a bad food, there’s no good carbs. There’s no bad carbs. Certain parts are more nutrient dense. So the carbs that are more nutrient dense. I think this is your question right are going to be things like sweet potatoes, rice, quinoa, you can do chickpeas, lentil pasta, things like that. And then the non nutrient dense carbs are going to be kind of obvious like your white breads, your doughnuts, simple carbs. Yeah, basically yes, there’s complex, the most simple carbs things that you know are just regular pasta. Even if you don’t have celiac and you’re you don’t have an allergy to gluten and gluten has still been proven to be quite an issue. laboratory to people’s guts. I’m not saying never eat it. Sometimes I want pizza, I have a slice of pizza. But on a daily basis, it’s something if you minimize, I believe you’ll feel a lot better. I’ve noticed it in myself and my clients. So yeah, but there’s no good food. There’s no bad food. You’re not bad. If you have a cupcake, you’re just fine. It’s okay.
D.J. Paris 35:16 Thank you. Thank you for making that distinction. Because that’s even something that even though I know better, I just did I just gave a food. A, I evaluated it right. And I gave it a good and bad and that’s you’re right, that is absolutely not a great idea, because good and bad leads to good and bad feelings. And then there’s shame and guilt. Toto, thank you. Thank you for checking me on that. Because that’s because it’s so ingrained in our culture. I just ate something bad for me. I just
Angelica Ventrice 35:44 got a cake at my son’s party and can’t believe it. Now. I ruined my like, it’s everyone does it my clients still do it. It’s a constant reminder. So I talk about a lot on my Instagram. I’m reminding people all the time, because repetition is how you learn food has no moral value.
D.J. Paris 35:59 Can we? You mentioned MCT oil, and I don’t want to get too specific about any particular food. But I want to say that if anyone listening is not familiar with MCT oil, and it’s not a miracle sort of oil, but it is absolutely a it is a really cool sort of product that if you’re not familiar, but basically, it helps sustain sort of satiation right like this idea of being satiated. It’s it’s a really cool. So if you’re not, if you haven’t looked at MCT oil, it is absolutely a wonderful thing to help sort of smooth out your cravings. And, and anyway, it’s
Angelica Ventrice 36:37 it also helps seal your gut lining. So if you’re someone with poor gut health, you want to include coconut products, MCT oil, which is medium chain triglyceride, into your diet, because it’s really going to help, it’s going to help your gut become more permeable, more permeable, which we need, you know, less permeable. So yeah, we want you definitely want to be adding things like I mentioned some of the foods before and MCT oil was one of them. So it’s great for gut health, but also great to help you stay more more full.
D.J. Paris 37:02 So so let’s talk about like a full, a general plan that you might put together for someone. And I obviously we’re not we can’t do that here on the show tailor made to each listener. But But how like, we’re really talking about a number of things, talking about our physical well being which includes, you know, nutrition and exercise, we’re talking about our emotional well being, which includes mindset, stress, you know, just our own emotional challenges. And, and kind of marrying those two together and understanding that they, they they aren’t separate entities, they really are one. So what are some of what’s a prescription? So you talked about waking up in the morning, doing a little meditation, not jumping on social, you know, sort of centering yourself getting calm, having your breakfast, exercising, and then what other suggestions might you have for someone to
Angelica Ventrice 38:03 use that everyone is different, but if typically, with real estate it is. And everyone’s different, depending some people will like to work out and eat breakfast after to each zone, but the best thing you can do is be prepared. So we go through meal prep with our clients, we give them a meal plan. And we say you know do you want super easy meals, do you like more complicated meals, you want to be more fancy, everyone’s different. So for instance, we might give them like a cook recipes, smoothie recipes, stuff that’s really simple for them to just make for the week. So they can be prepared you can make like chia seed pudding and have jars of that in your fridge. So this way, you can just get out the door, go on your day and not have to think about your food. I mean, you can get you know, when I was a medical sales rep I had, like a cooler with me in my car I worked out in my car real estate agents work out their car, don’t make excuses. You don’t need to stop and get food just eat in your car eat. For me, you can go sit somewhere but have your food with you. There’s really no excuse you can prep it the night before get your salad and your grilled chicken ready and you’re homeless whatever you want, but have stuff prepared. Being prepared is essential just like you’re prepared for your business. When you go to show a house you know what, you know how many bedrooms you know what type of molding you know what type of floor right you know, if there’s a pool, you know all these things about it. So you’re really prepared for your career, translate that energy to your health, you will be more successful in both areas, you will lose the weight and make more money.
D.J. Paris 39:21 I agree it’s about 12 years ago, I decided I never I it was funny like sometimes it takes like years and years to notice something that’s super obvious to everyone but yourself. So I noticed that when I didn’t prepare my meals, I have more of an office job. So when I’ve always had office jobs pretty much my whole life but when I didn’t prepare my meals the night before the morning of I would make choices, you know for lunch because I didn’t have a lunch and whenever I did, I found that most of the time I made a choice that after after consuming it I went oh I wish I would have made a different choice. I wish I would have chosen so One thing that you know, was more nutrient dense and using your language. And so then I said, Well, okay, maybe I’m just not good at making those decisions in the middle of the of a business day, when there’s all this stress coming at me. And I just wanted something that’ll like satisfy or, you know, make me hungry. Yeah, you’re just like, get like, I’m hungry. And I’m stressed. And I just want I just want something that feels good in the moment, which is usually less nutrient dense types of foods, candies, you know, things like that part. So I went, Oh, well, if I just made my lunch every day, then I wouldn’t have to think about it. And at least I’d still have all the stress, but at least I wouldn’t be making things more challenging for myself by making maybe a poor decision around what what I eat that day. So like, that was just logic for me and I, you were saying a cooler, I have a little cooler under my desk with my meals. And it doesn’t look I mean, there’s plenty of parts of my life that are not in balance. But the best, I’ll tell you the two, the two big things about preparing in advance, being intentional about what what you eat, is you’re probably going to make a better decision if you prepare in advance. And, and you don’t have to think about it the next day, you have enough things to think about. Like what
Angelica Ventrice 41:14 you feel better for the ladies who are listening, like doesn’t it feel better when you’re not feeling bloated in your clothes all day, like, you know, eat crappy food, even even like Whole Foods, right? You go to the salad bar, they’re still sitting out, you just want to junk junk, you don’t really know you know, then you pick a crappy dressing. So you just feel so much better. When you feel better, you perform better and you make more money, and you look better in your clothes come on.
D.J. Paris 41:36 It’s it’s it’s a win win. But But I think you’re so right about making sure that mindset because you can be the most disciplined person in the gym or with food. But if your mindset is such that you have trauma that hasn’t been repaired, or you have beliefs about yourself that maybe were instilled when you were a child or through you know from other people that are getting in the way of you feeling good about yourself. That’s that’s a huge part of it, too. Because that will get people to think, Oh, if I just hit that perfect weight goal, I’m going to be happy. No, right? Or if I just make that certain amount of money, that’s when I get that’s when the happiness turns on. Can we talk about that a little bit like when you get to the top of the of the mountain, this is why I’m not a big fan of goals. I’ve never been a big goal guy. I think you should have direction, I think you should know where you want to head. But the reason why I don’t love goals, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. And it’s not that we shouldn’t like businesses have goals, there’s, we should have goals in certain areas of our life. But when it comes to our own personal well being I think the problem with goals is it, we sometimes get too attached to them, it’s like once, once I get X, you know I will feel good about myself,
Angelica Ventrice 42:50 your happiness can’t be dependent on something outside of yourself. It can’t be when I make this amount of money, then I’ll be happy when I lose this amount, then I’ll be happy, you may be happier, you may have a more sense of freedom, when you make more money, you may have more freedom and alignment and your body when you hit that certain number. But if you are not enjoying the journey, and you were only looking to the outcome, you’re gonna have a very miserable life, whether that’s a weight loss or your career, if you’re chasing, making a million all you’re focusing on in your businesses hitting that first million, you’re forgetting to be present in all the other aspects of your business in your life. Same thing on your weight loss journey. If you’re only focused on losing 40 pounds and getting to that 40 pound weight loss by this day, are you enjoying all the small wins along the way, how you feel how your clothes fit, how’s your energy, how, how have you lifted in the gym for the first time, you gotta pee on your run all the things that happen, how clear beautiful your skin looks, how your gut health has improved, you’re forgetting all those things, when you’re only focusing on the outcome. And your happiness cannot be dependent on something outside of you and you touch upon something else, you know, mindset and your weight or your body, we hold our issues in our tissues. So if you do not resolve past beliefs, past pattern past trauma, you’re holding on to stagnant energy in your body, which of course leads to weight gain, because it’s going to be an increase in cortisol. Most people who have tried and failed on various weight loss programs have failed to realize that their thought their thoughts 80,000 thoughts a day affect their physiological body. And that is one of the main things I teach that’s very different than many other health programs out there. So I teach the physical which is like we talked about the strategy, the routines, the macros, the calories, the workouts, but then the metaphysical is equally as important.
D.J. Paris 44:37 Yes, I absolutely agree. And I couldn’t. It’s funny. It’s like, you know, we think oh, if I just get in shape, then I’m happy or if I just eat right, and it’s like well okay, yes, you’re happy you probably will be happy or but you can be happy now even if you’re hundreds of pounds of lot more if you have hundreds of pounds. more weight than you would like to have, you can still find happiness. And as you were saying, and strive to have a different physical or mental well being so so I think I think that’s, I think it’s the, I always love when I when I meet people who have, you know, who will say, Oh, I really want to make this change, but there isn’t that shame attached to it of like, but where I’m at right now is really embarrassing. You know, as I was thinking about this, my, my girlfriend works with somebody who, well, actually, you know what, I won’t tell that story now that I think about it, because it’s gonna be, but But I will say that, that that shame will and guilt will absolutely just completely shut it down, it will shut down your motivation, right. So making sure that you’re having who are in a good mindset, you have a good sort of mental health, you know, program in place to make sure that as you’re happily achieving, you’re doing these, you know, very difficult things, because that’s the other thing too, is, is, you know, we’re talking about health and fitness. Just like any part of life, it’s difficult. It’s really a lot of work. It’s worth it. But it’s difficult. And so you really want to make sure that all your bases are covered, so you have the best chance of having the most vitality. And I love it. Tell us a little bit more about what what Fit for Life does for for clients, because we have a lot of listeners, they need a coach and tell us Well, look, I need a coach to coach. I mean, we all need coaches,
Angelica Ventrice 46:39 greatest athletes in the world have coaches and a team, right?
D.J. Paris 46:43 The very best at something in the world.
Angelica Ventrice 46:47 Athletes, right, Michael Jordan like I mean, if you ever watched that documentary, that was great, that Michael Jordan documentary, but he literally talks about how he wouldn’t have gotten to where he was without Phil Jackson, you know what I mean? So when people say to me, they’re gonna keep trying to lose weight on their own. And I’m like, All right, it’s the slowest way of doing anything is doing on your own. Tony Robbins says that at all this conferences the slowest way to learn is on your own. So what we do is everything is customized and tailored, we really we take a holistic approach everything is you know, by wind Yvette, individuality is very important to us, like how I eat is not going to be how you eat, not gonna be how Suzy eats. We all eat very different. We all have different caloric needs macronutrient needs, which is your protein, fats and carbs. So we do teach macros, and then we teach intuitive eating, the workouts are customized. So like I said, whether you’re at home or a gym, you need 15 minute workouts, our workouts, you’re a runner, you’re a cyclist, your swimmer, we do it all. Everything is customized, we had a head, we have a head of training, who does all the programming for that, from a nutrition standpoint, completely customized. We have a gut health protocol that we do with our clients. We have a functional medicine doctor on staff to do gut health testing for you to see if you know if you want to do a stool test, see if you have food sensitivities, hormonal testing blood work, and then we do a lot of mindset work. And that’s through the one on one coaching the messaging back and forth with the coaches and then every Wednesday I lead a mindset coaching call on various topics. So feminine energetics, personal power, attracting more wealth, positive mindset, we do little book clubs. So there’s there’s a lot we have a membership site, we have a spiritual coach for meditation and yoga. So I think that’s all yeah,
D.J. Paris 48:26 that’s all but that’s everything right? You touched on on on physical, right. So you touched on the physical, we touched on on on the emotional or the mental. We also touched on eating, you just touched on spiritual, too, because, hey, it’s not just me. Yes, everything’s everything. Yes. And so I love this because what the word holistic is just gets thrown around way too much. But in this in this case, you actually do have a true holistic program. So it’s not just hey, we’re going to lose weight. And that’s it, we’re going to be yes, we’re going to lose weight. Or if we well, that’s not everyone’s goal, some people’s goals to to gain weight, but we’re going to get healthier, physically, we’re gonna get healthier mentally, and spiritually. I mean, those are the three things right and, and all of those things will then feed your business, they’ll feed your interpersonal relationships, you’ll be a better you’ll be a better partner, to your
Angelica Ventrice 49:18 mom that are in your business. It goes to every area. And I always say the Fit for Life program is not a weight loss program. It is a transformation program, you will lose weight and transform your body as a byproduct of what we teach you. But it’s not just a weight loss program. And I have clients, so many of them making way more money getting raises getting promotions. I mean, one of my one new real estate agent client after one of our calls, she’s like, I already feel a shift and I just got this new house. I mean, literally, she messaged me this morning. So it’s working on your energetics too, and what energy you’re putting out to the universe and I teach a lot about manifestation and a lot of real estate agents have no idea about the three fields in the quantum field and they’re like mind blown when I so there’s so many Things that it’s amazing. I want
D.J. Paris 50:02 to end with something I just thought of this and I want to get your take on it. So instead of for a lot of us that wish we were a different wish, wish, when we looked at the scale number that it was lower than the number we see. How what if what if we were to say, instead, I’d like to lose weight, rather, because for me, like, it’s easy for me to say, I’d like to lose a few pounds of fat, but the reality of it is, I don’t really want to lose a few pounds of fat, I’d rather transform that fat into muscle. So for me, I think it’d be healthier. And I’m curious to get your take on this for me to say, I have I have a little bit of fat, I’d like to transform into muscle, you know, it? Would that be a better mindset, versus I have a few pounds to lose?
Angelica Ventrice 50:44 Yeah, I think it depends on the person. Because if you say I have some weight to lose, and you don’t feel triggered or shameful by it, then. So I think it’s a very individualistic thing. I tell some of my clients to not weigh themselves and just focus on their clothes. So I think whatever everyone is so different, and what what feelings get triggered within them. You know, like, for me, when I was on my weight loss journey, I never weighed myself, I never want to see I could look at myself in the mirror though. And I could see my clothes, I could feel my clothes or pull off of me. Right? So that is definitely that’s a good shift. Or you can just say like, I’m on this process of releasing weight and transforming my body. I’m not putting up so, you know, I say like, we don’t need to get obsessed over how many pounds it is, let’s just start the journey. Because you know, you’re we’re not done. We know, if you have 40 pounds to lose, you know, we don’t need to keep talking about the number, like let’s just do the damn thing and take action. Like we don’t need to harp on all levels to Oh, it was three, it’s like, let’s just keep going. And for me that that’s what helped me most. That’s what else a lot of my clients. I do have some clients that like to weigh themselves more. It’s all individualized, those depends on the individual. But that is a good yes, you can.
D.J. Paris 51:50 Yeah, I had to I had to stop weighing myself for a similar reason I just got too emotional about I got too happy if the number was low, and I got too upset if it was a higher number, and I went, why am I doing this to myself. And by the way, my body fluctuates all the time. Anyway, that is outside of my control and pounds come and go and and water gets retained water,
Angelica Ventrice 52:10 stress song, or your workout was and that’s a whole week to hold on the podcast that
D.J. Paris 52:15 well I was I was just like, one day I went, why am I basing how I feel about myself based on a number that I in some ways have some control over but in other ways I don’t have certain control over it. And I went this is not the indicator of health, like the indicator of health is how I feel. And also how I think I looked like you were saying closed. So now I just I do the same thing I just I just measure by clothes, I go okay, I can fit into these clothes. So that’s that makes me feel good. And I don’t I don’t weigh myself because it was funny I was at the I had to go to the an orthopedic orthopedic appointment the other day, and they weigh you and do your height because they need to. And it was funny because I go oh, I wonder kind of what Wait, I met and I got caught right back into the trap. And I saw the number and I did not like the number even though I because I thought it was going to be a lot lower because I’d never weighed myself. And I saw it and I got really angry and I was like their scale must be wrong or GJ you’re not as fit as you think you are. And I went this is why I don’t look at the number. So for me, and again, not everybody, of course, if you can look at it and not have a reaction. Great. But for those of us that look at those numbers, or we look at our bank account numbers, and we feel less than Yeah, you know, that does not have to be the way we measure our, you know, the way we measure our fitness,
Angelica Ventrice 53:33 when we talk about self worth doesn’t come from external things. So right, this is all your health, your number, your worth is not based off the number on the scale or the success in your business. You know, like the amount of money you’re making doesn’t equate your self worth, you’re worthy no matter what you’re worn worthy.
D.J. Paris 53:50 You were born worthy. I think that is a perfect place to wrap up. Because that is that is absolutely a great mindset piece to end on. You were born worthy. And also nobody is perfect. So everyone’s got imperfections in their life. And if one of your imperfections is your physical vitality, or your energy or your body shape, or your fitness or nutrition or your mindset, now’s the time to get somebody to help you because the reality of it is we can’t do things alone. We just we can do some things alone, but most things in life, we need help. And so this is a great opportunity to have somebody else come up with all the ideas and the way Yes, exactly. Yeah. So you’ve got enough to worry about hire a coach I it has transformed my life. Angelica and her team are incredible and they’re going to cover not just your your diet and not just your your your you know your your strength they’re going to take they’re going to take a look at everything and say hey here, let’s come up with a plan that makes you a happier, healthier human being. So the best place to go to learn more about what Angelica and the Fit for Life team can do for you is at our website. So go to Angelica vantrease.com. That’s B E N T R I C. E Angelica, like you might suspect, Angelica venturi stock calm, we’ll have a link to that also in the show notes, reach out to them learn about their wellness programs, they are the real deal. And I’m telling you, yes, get get away from the diet fads. And it’s amazing, like
Angelica Ventrice 55:27 cupcake and lose weight. Ladies don’t stress like you can have a glass of wine and lose weight. And so there’s a really, there’s balance to it,
D.J. Paris 55:34 for sure. Well, and we’re going to have a glass of wine and a cupcake anyway, at some point, right? So it’s like, might as well build it in to the, to the to the routine. Yeah, I absolutely could not be a bigger fan of what Angelica does. So please, everyone listening, reach out, she works with real estate agents, she gets you guys, she’s kind of one of you, in a sense, because her she has a she had a similar sort of previous career, you know, being being in medical sales is kind of the same thing. It’s a lot of racing around,
Angelica Ventrice 56:06 like you’re racing around either way, whether you’re racing around to houses or restaurants or doctor’s offices.
D.J. Paris 56:11 Well, Angelica Jelka, thank you for being on our show. We are so thrilled that and we would love to have you back as well. So for everyone listening, go visit Angelica website, Angelica, Ben trieste.com, look at some of their free downloads, they have all sorts of cool resources there. And then they can put a wellness program for you. And again, if you’re thinking, Well, gosh, there’s a cost for that there is a cost for you know, hiring them, but I suspect I would almost I can’t, of course can’t guarantee but I would almost bet I bet a good chunk of money that it would actually actually end up earning you more income because more energy to treat your 100,000%
Angelica Ventrice 56:49 all my clients make more money. Also, you can go to there we go. There we go. I can I will I can guarantee that literally, you could also go to my Instagram. It’s at the angelic of entries. And I’m very active on there. You can pop in, you could ask me questions. So checkout thinking,
D.J. Paris 57:07 jeez, I’m gonna sign up because I would like to be healthier, happier, and, and also make more money. So to me, it’s a no brainer. I’m going to and I’m not even joking. Like, like you just said, every one of your clients makes more money. If we just look at factual data. And we say, Wow, that’s actually true. Okay, sign me up, right. So I am I’m a fan. I mean it that, that’s awesome. That’s an amazing, amazing thing to say. So everyone reach out to Angelica, she’s just her job is to make your life a little easier, believe it or not, by by doing some of this structure, you actually end up with more freedom. sounds sort of counterintuitive, maybe. But you’ll get more freedom with more structure and share her team as you don’t want to try to figure this all out yourself. If I didn’t have a personal trainer, I would have absolutely hurt my body in possibly permanent ways. And the fact that they are going to guide you through and make sure you’re doing it in a in a healthy way is really important. Don’t do it on your own, you’re going to make mistakes, let them be your guide and minimize all of the errors along the way. So again, Angelica vantrease.com. Angelica, thank you so much. On behalf of our audience, we appreciate your time today. On behalf of your thank you and on behalf of Angelica and I We also thank the audience for paying, paying attention and being part of our show. As always, please tell a friend about our program. The best thing way that you can help us grow is by telling one other real estate agent about this podcast. So I have the
Angelica Ventrice 58:43 power of yes, one.
D.J. Paris 58:47 Absolutely. Yes. That’s, that is a great book as well. So yes, everybody. Think of one other real estate agent that maybe is thinking about needing to wanting more of fatality or somebody who’s who’s just struggling physically, send them a link to this episode. We can find us right on our website, keeping it real pod.com And leave us a review to whatever podcast app you might be listening to. Let us know what you like about the show and let us know what you’d like us to improve. We want to continually improve to make this better for you the listener so thanks, Angelica and thank you to everyone who has been watching and listening and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Angelica Ventrice 59:20 Bye guys.
From Almost Quitting To N.A.R.’s 30 Under 30 • Bri Brenkus
Aug 12, 2022
Bri Brenkus this year’s 30 under 30 laureate describes why she chose a career in real estate and how she got involved. Bri discusses the importance of believing in yourself. Bri talks about what her team do to keep in touch with their previous clients. Next, Bri discusses how her team is managing the changes happening in the market at the moment and how they dealt with appraisal gap.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s show, we talk to a 26 year old broker who’d closed $44 million in production last year. It that is 107 listings. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment. We’re going to be speaking with Bri blankets but before we get to Bri just a couple of quick reminders number one please leave us a review. If you’re listening to this on Apple podcast, formerly iTunes or maybe Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, anywhere you’re listening to podcasts, you can usually leave us a review we read every single one. It helps us improve and lets us know what you think of the show. And then also please tell just one friend about this podcast. Think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Bri and send them a link to our website keeping it real.com Alright enough for me. Let’s get on to Nar 30 under 30 winter and 26 year old superstars super agent Bree bronchus.
Today on the show we have Bri brings us with the breakast team in Las Vegas. Let me tell you more about Bri now rubrik is only 26 years old and is a listing agent for the brink is Realty network which is a Keller Williams in the marketplace of Las Vegas. And real estate is is Brees passion actually now this is incredible. Everyone you got you really really listen to this in 2021. Remember, she’s 26 Bri closed $44 million in volume. Personally listing 107 of the 370 properties the team closed, she did 107 listings out of the almost 400 listings herself. She was awarded one of 2020 twos honorees for the Nash from the National Association of REALTORS 30 under 30. No, no surprise there. Also this year already in 2022 Bree has received Las Vegas Realtors young professionals networks, who’s who under 40 award. Congratulations. Bri is also driven by making a difference in the lives of others. Annually she teaches a young adults class which is called Quantum Leap, and participates with adopting a struggling family with a seriously ill child. Bree is an inspiration and has only really begun her real estate career although it’s amazing how much she’s accomplished in such a short amount of time. So we are super thrilled to invite her and have her on the show before we get to Bri very quickly. Please check out the Brees website, which is the bronchus team.com And that’s th e and then b r e n k U S team.com. The Broncos team and also follow them on social media on Facebook and Instagram which is at the brink his team again br e n k US team on Facebook and social media and by the way you can get to all of our social stuff right from the breakfast team website. Bree, thank you so much. Welcome to the show.
Bri Brenkus 4:36 Thank you so much for having me, DJ.
D.J. Paris 4:38 This is this is a huge honor. We love talking to the 30 under 30 award winners first of all, congratulations that is beyond impressive. And but let’s let’s go all the way so it’s so funny because oftentimes I have on people who do you know the level of production you’re at and they’re 15, sometimes 20 years in the biz Listen, you obviously haven’t been doing it that long. But let’s start still start at the beginning. So why real estate? How did you get into it? Tell us that story.
Bri Brenkus 5:10 Yeah, so I actually grew up in a real estate family. My parents founded the bank, his team, way back in the day had been doing it for 30 plus years, never really had real estate on my radar, went to college. And I studied accounting wasn’t my passion. I was very depressed, I hated what I was doing. I was good at it. Don’t get me wrong. I and I just couldn’t see myself sitting behind a desk all day. So I was in my second to last semester trying to decide what I’m going to do, should I switch majors? And I’m sitting in my auditing class. And I’m thinking, Oh, my gosh, my parents owned a real estate company, why would I not take advantage of that, right? So I ended up graduating, and in my last semester, went to real estate school, got licensed, and I didn’t want to start practicing until I was out of school and graduated. So I graduated at the end of 2018, officially became a realtor beginning of 2019.
D.J. Paris 6:16 Wow. So you’ve only been doing this for this is your third year, I guess fourth year technically, that is really, really amazing. So you grew up in a real estate family? So I know a lot of our audience will immediately go, Oh, I see. So so everything was handed to free, which I am sure is not the case. But how did you get started? So you’re joining join the family team, the Keller Williams brand is an amazing one. And but you’re still a young person trying to get listings. So how, how does that work as a as somebody as young as yourself? How did you? How did you start? How did you find clients? You know, tell us all about that process?
Bri Brenkus 6:59 Yeah, so my parents created kind of a rigorous training process when you join the team. And if you’re going to become a listing specialist, or buyer specialist, you have to either get five for sale by owner listings on your own or five buyer brokerage agreements signed.
D.J. Paris 7:18 Wow. So you have to prove your way in I love that. Right. Exactly. Okay, well, let’s talk about let’s talk about the for sale by owners, because just only because this is like, you know, it’s such a it’s such an explosive sort of term because people have a very strong reaction to for sale by owners. For those of us who maybe are listening who don’t exactly know what that means, or why Realtors would call them. These are typically unrepresented buyers, or sorry, unrepresented sellers, who are attempting to maybe list their home on the MLS, but they’re not really using a realtor for anything other than getting it on the MLS. That’s what’s known as flat fee MLS. Or it’s somebody who’s literally just putting it up for sale sign in their yard and putting it on a few websites, not using a realtor at all. Either way, there’s lots of companies that will, you know, but these these are, these are sellers, who oftentimes don’t end up selling their property, because since they’re not using a realtor, maybe they’re just using Zillow to figure out the what what their home might be worth, or other tools, they tend to overvalue their property they listed for higher than it probably should be, and oftentimes it never sells. So these are actually great opportunities for realtors to come in and say, hey, I can help you actually sell your property. The downside is that these these leads will call them companies aggregate these leads, and they sell them to anyone that wants them. So typically, if you’re calling a for sale by owner, you’re probably the 25th person that’s called that for sale by owner. And those can be very, they’re they’re I call them the probably the world’s most hard, most difficult cold call. So I would love to hear how did you I don’t know if you did for sale by owners or if you got the buyer broker or buyer listings on your own. But can you tell us a little bit about how that went for you?
Bri Brenkus 9:06 Yeah, so I chose the listing path, because I love a challenge.
D.J. Paris 9:10 That is a challenge.
Bri Brenkus 9:13 And I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. And because of my parents daughter, they don’t want anything handed to me. And yes, you kind of have to prove your way into it because they’ve worked for 30 plus years building their brand building their names. They don’t want, you know, just anyone coming in and kind of interrupting that if you would. So because of my parents daughter, they upped it to 10 For Sale By Owner listings.
D.J. Paris 9:37 Thanks Mom and Dad. Yeah.
Bri Brenkus 9:39 Because they didn’t want anybody on the team saying Oh, because she’s your daughter, you know, you did X, Y and Z for whatever. So it was really, really difficult. And going through again, I had to prospect them on my own cold call them on my own versus the team giving them all On set up appointments for me, right? So I was calling them, I was going through these people’s homes and 20 For Sale By Owner homes, I got kicked out of their homes.
D.J. Paris 10:11 So So were you going door to door? Or how were you? Were you calling them first tell us the process. Because lots of people, it’s so funny people have such a specific reaction to for sale by owners where it’s like, oh, that doesn’t work. And then other people like, no, it totally works. Everyone’s different. But how did you do it?
Bri Brenkus 10:27 Yeah, so I was just cold calling them and would schedule an appointment with them and would go in, and literally,
D.J. Paris 10:33 they boot you out.
Bri Brenkus 10:35 I got kicked out. I was just too intense for them. And I was talking my parents and my sales manager, I and my coach, I just don’t understand I’m trying to help them, right. They just won’t listen to me. Why are you selling it on your own, we can net you so much more. So after getting kicked out of literally 20 homes, I told my coach, my manager at the time, bawling my eyes out, pulled over into a parking lot just started crying to her, I can’t do this real estate is not for me, I should go back to accounting, right? And I’m just on the phone with her for whatever, 2030 minutes. And all of a sudden I get a notification on my phone for my last appointment of the day. If you leave now, you know, you’ll get there in time, right? The time sensitive notification. Sure. So I said I’m on the other side of town, this is my last appointment of the day today. Why not? I’m just gonna go on, I have nothing to lose, right. And if I don’t get this listing, I’m out of real estate, I’m going back to accounting. So I was so close to giving up. And I could have easily just said, You know what, I’m not going to go on this appointment at all. So, finally pull up to the for sale by owners home. And I’m walking up to the front door. And I said, You know what, I’m not going to be attached to the outcome. I just had a mindset shift. And I by doing that I actually got the listing. So what why do you think that is? Yeah, so I just changed my mindset. And I thought, rather than being so focused on getting the listing and being attached to that, I just told myself, I’m not a salesperson, I’m an educator, let me come from a place of service.
D.J. Paris 12:20 So you went, you went into the home and was more about, hey, let me talk to you or give you some advice or some opinion about what’s going on with your home, as opposed to hey, you need to list with us because we can get you more. And maybe you still say that too. But you lead from a place of I want to just provide a ton of value, instead of being the salesperson so to speak. Right?
Bri Brenkus 12:42 Exactly, just being curious about their situation, because every seller situation is different, their motivation, why they’re selling, right, and just kind of sitting down and talking to them, educating them on the benefits of listing with a realtor. And by doing that it actually created trust and was easier to get a listing.
D.J. Paris 13:03 Yeah, I have had that same experience. I’m always drawn in a sales situation where maybe I’m somebody’s trying to sell me, I’m always most drawn to those people who, who seem to not need the sale. Because it definitely feels more comfortable. I don’t feel as much pressure. And I feel like there’s a level of respect that I appreciate when somebody’s not like, here’s all the reasons why you should go with me. For XY and Z. It’s like I can make my own decision. I just want to know what you do and what you’re all about and, and all of that. So it sounds like that works. So, so you were you were crying in a car just an hour before you made it to this
Bri Brenkus 13:41 listing, feeling defeated and unsure of myself, I didn’t know what to do, I almost gave up. And I called my sales manager after I got the listing of my first listing, I was so excited. And, you know, happy tears now at this point, not not crying, upset tears. And she told me God wants you to be a realtor. So that was probably one of the greatest days today.
D.J. Paris 14:07 And here you are now and not just you know, surviving that first listing in the first year in the second year. But now you’re you’re one of one of the most successful young people in this in this industry in the United States. National Association of REALTORS has awarded you the 30 under 30, which is an amazing accomplishment I’ve yet to be and I’ve yet to not be impressed by anyone in that group. And I’ve talked to a lot of those people over the years. So congratulations. I’m so glad that last listing worked out for you that last appointment, because the odds were not in your favor and it’s still for whatever reason you did something really well and you changed your direction. Let’s talk about let’s talk about failure because I know this is a big thing for you. And I also find this with the hundreds of people that I’ve had on the show in the past. Failure is something thing that comes up a lot. And it’s really funny because I know sometimes we have these these huge producers on the show like yourself and, and people who are even doing hundreds of millions of dollars in production a year. And you’ll see, you’ll think like, well, that person never fails. And the reality of it is they’re like, Oh, I fail all the time. So I would love to hear a little bit more about, you know, what we’ll actually before we get to that, let’s, let’s go. So you got your first listing, you stayed in the business? And then did you continue from there doing more for sale by owners? Are you like I am done? Or no, because you still had to do nine more, I guess, right? Yeah,
Bri Brenkus 15:36 I did. So yeah. So my biggest challenge became my biggest breakthrough. And just advice to anybody out there. Just don’t give up. Just believe in yourself. have mentors have coaches that can be there to support and motivate you. It’s it helps tremendously.
D.J. Paris 15:52 What do you what do you say on the phone? I want to ask about for sale by owner. Just one more question because nobody ever talks about this. So which I love. I love the fact that you in fact, you’re talking about what do you say? Because these are these are people as you know, these leads have been sold to lots of other realtors who also want that listing. And these are also people that maybe they worked with a realtor in the past, and they didn’t have a good experience or they don’t want to work with a realtor for whatever reason. So these are not easy phone calls. What do you do to get the appointment? What do you say? Is there anything sort of unique or special about the way that that you’re communicating that you think is different? Or you know, what, why do you think you were I mean, even to get 20 appointments, unfortunately, those didn’t close, but even to get 20 in house appointments is not easy to do.
Bri Brenkus 16:37 Yeah, and everything happens for a reason. And I don’t really think I say anything special or different. I just kind of say, Hey, I’m on a large team here in Southern Nevada. I see you’re trying to sell your home, right? Yeah, I am trying to sell my home. It’s for sale by owner. I’m not working with an agent. Well, right, whatever. Okay, well, would it be okay, if one of our buyers bought your home? Yeah, that’d be great. I’m not paying any commission or I’m only offering X percent right? Okay, great. When’s a good time for me to come by and take a look? Later today? Good. Or is tomorrow better?
D.J. Paris 17:07 Got it. So you don’t even you don’t even you just are like, hey, that’s whatever they’re saying. You know that most of those people are ultimately probably going to use a realtor at some point anyway, so you don’t worry about the fact that they’re like, Yeah, I don’t want to work with with any realtors. You’re like, yeah, no problem. No problem. And then oh, that’s so smart. I love that. What a great what a great suggestion.
Bri Brenkus 17:29 Actually, statistically over 95 98% of all for sale by owners end up listing with an agent. So you know, they’re gonna list why have it? Not the US?
D.J. Paris 17:38 Yeah, and they don’t know it at that maybe at that moment. And you know it Yeah, right. They don’t know it yet. And so that’s why you don’t have to argue with them because they’re going to use somebody anyway. Ah, that’s so smart. That’s a really really great subtle but important distinction in you’re not overcoming an objection you’re accepting where they’re at and say no problem. I’d still love to come by and say hi, and then you can start to have a better conversation face to face and it’s a lot harder to you know, slam the door on somebody once they’re there. Although I guess that happened I’m sure to you as well. But but eventually it did and also imagine somebody in their early 20s is coming over you know, that is also not it makes it much harder, right like that does not work in your favor right so that’s that’s tricky. I mean now you’re you’re you’re well known and people in the area you know they don’t look at you probably the same way when you first started but that is that is an incredibly challenging I really applaud your your your your team for putting you through that because it probably built a lot of calluses and probably built a lot of like oh yeah, I can’t be I can’t be hurt Did you did you get yelled at a lot on the phone when you call these
Bri Brenkus 18:50 it’s not even on the phone? I mean getting kicked out of people’s homes cuss words you for sale by owners. It sounds really good how DJ and I are talking about it right now. And you got to have thick skin let me tell you because people can be really really mean.
D.J. Paris 19:04 Yeah, yeah. Well I’m so glad you you you made it through that and that is a trial by fire for sure. And it’s it’s almost guaranteed failure the gift failure is built in to the working with for sale by owners because just the vast majority of them are going to be like hey, stop calling me you’re the 20th person to call me so understandably they just get annoyed and the fact that that but but eventually you get one and you got one at the very last possible moment before you would have you know started become you know, gone to the corporate world maybe and done accounting and that’s a certainly a very safe career and a very good career. And but here you are now so let’s so let’s talk a
Bri Brenkus 19:45 quick story on that. Because you asked a question before we were talking about what I say to for sale by owners. So got my first one. I have nine listings LEFT,
D.J. Paris 19:55 RIGHT more to go. Yeah, so
Bri Brenkus 19:57 my mom was on the coaching call with Our manager and said, Hey, how’s Bree doing? You know, I know she’s been doing it for several months, is she now getting incoming leads? And my manager goes, Oh, my goodness, she’s doing so well. We forgot to give her incoming leads. I got over whatever 15 For Sale By Owner listings on my own. And I finally got an incoming lead, right? So I go over there. And I’m kind of educating them on the benefits of using an agent and our team and everything. And they’re like, Bree, we know we called you here, we want to hire you. It was just really funny. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 20:36 That’s, it’s amazing. But But again, this idea of failure as being one step closer to success each time and the only way to success is through failure. As far as I can tell, unless you just get really lucky, it’s sometimes that happens. Sometimes, you know, you’re lucky somebody walks into an office and says, I have a $2 million property I’d like to put for sale, it rarely happens. But it happens once in a blue moon. And people hold on to those like, white elephant stories as like, Oh man, this one guy and look at how lucky he is this $2 million. But the real work and the real success comes from just tremendous discipline. So you, obviously your parents were smart enough to put you through that discipline. Because now I imagine if if you were to let’s say, we were to drop you off in a different city, or different state, get you went and got your license, you didn’t know anybody, I suspect you would be like, I could figure this out. Which, by the way, is a really impressive peace of mind to have. Because if it all goes away tomorrow, and I’m sure it won’t, but if it ever did, or let’s just say you know, you ended up finding a partner, and you get married at some point, and maybe they live in another, you know, part of the country or the world. And you’re like, well, now I have to leave and go, you could probably you probably feel confident that you could do that. And start over as a real estate agent, maybe in another market altogether. Which, because you already started with literally, though, like, everything should have been handed to you in theory because of of your situation, and none of it was. So I just think that is truly amazing. And cheers to your parents for that. That is an incredible, incredible thing. Well, let’s talk about
Bri Brenkus 22:20 very grateful for them. So
D.J. Paris 22:23 a lot of a lot of our guests who are a lot of our listeners, rather who when I when I interview people who make the national association Realtors 30, under 30, they think, Oh, they’re doing it all through social media that you know, I want to learn about how to do more on social. Is social a big part of how you get clients, or is it not really a big part of your business?
Bri Brenkus 22:45 Surprisingly, it’s not really a big part of our business. We’re very active, proactive. prospecting, right, we actually have a team of what they’re called inside sales agents, who are licensed agents sitting in our office right now. My brother’s actually one of them. He’s the head of that department. And they actively prospect all day, they never put a buyer in their car, they never meet with sellers. So it’s pretty awesome. And I’m a listing agent and I also do prospect if I don’t have appointments, if the inside sales agents haven’t given me appointments, so yeah, aren’t really too big on social media, we might get leads here and there. But we we kind of are proactive.
D.J. Paris 23:27 Yeah, that’s, that’s great talk, talk a little bit about how you what you guys do. And I will say, Guys, of course, I’ve been your entire team, what you do to maintain good relationships after a sale? Because I always think that I always find that to be really interesting. A question to ask, it’s like, okay, we know about getting deals and closing deals. But what are you guys doing to stay in touch? So I’d love to hear how you guys do that?
Bri Brenkus 23:57 Yeah, absolutely great question and we contact them often we actually do for client appreciation events every year. And so maintaining that way we do random giveaways as well. Kind of every other month and again our inside sales agents agents in our team buyer agents listing agents are calling them rigorously. So
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Bri Brenkus 26:10 Yeah, so we have our pool party coming up. That’s our next one on August 5. And it’s really fun. I think it’s our 13th annual something crazy like that I could be wrong could be 1511 something in that ballpark. And we rent out the multigene center. And it’s really fun. We have a snow cone machine music, fun stuff like that. For Halloween, we have our Halloween party, we, when COVID happened, we turned it into a trunk or treat just to kind of maintain distancing and have things outside. And it actually was one of our greatest largest Halloween events ever. The news ended up coming. So it was really fun. And we decided that we’re just going to do that moving forward, everyone dresses up, and it’s really fun for the kids. And then for Thanksgiving, we do our pie giveaway. And when they come to pick up their pie, if they give us a referral, then we throw in a free can of whipped cream.
D.J. Paris 27:13 That’s awesome. So So basically, so you guys buy or somehow acquire a lot of pies. You bring them to the office, and then you call your client say, hey, we have a pie here for you.
Bri Brenkus 27:25 Correct? Well, we call them and we ask, Hey, we’re doing a pie giveaway on this date from this time to this time, we have Apple or pumpkin would you like to participate? If so which one would you like,
D.J. Paris 27:37 I love it, I love it. And then it’s such a great, it’s just a great reason to see somebody’s face to face to which you know, once they’re in their home, it’s phone calls, emails, text, you know, it’s it’s the transactions done. So this is, in addition to the client appreciation events are I guess this is the client appreciation about this is an opportunity to see somebody eyeball to eyeball and just be like, hey, you know, and then you can reminisce about, you know, the particular their particular transaction or just check in on them. And it’s such a great, great idea. I really encourage all of our listeners to figure out ways that you can do that. And you can do it inexpensively. It could you could do it expensively. It just depends on budgeting. But every everyone likes to get together socially, right? Not everyone but but often a lot of a lot of your clients do, right. And I think this is a social business. So it’s a great opportunity. And it’s fun. And like I know, for me, I love it too, when I have an event planned. Like if somebody creates an event and invites me to it. What I love about that is it makes me feel like I’m doing something social. And it actually takes some stress off of me for planning something that week. So I always try to do a number of social events. And so I always actually love it when I find out also and so invited us to something, even if it’s something where like, maybe in my mind, I might be like I don’t really like that seems fun, but not that big of a deal. But I love it because then I’m like, I don’t have to think about Friday night or Thursday night or whatever. So. So I think you’re doing I think you’re doing a lot of things. Well, I want to talk about leverage because you have a team and it sounds like your team has lots of there’s there’s there’s different members with different positions. He talked about how you guys use leverage to get more business.
Bri Brenkus 29:20 Absolutely. And leverage is very important. No one succeeds alone, right. And by leveraging, we have really good system setup, so I’ll just kind of break it down from my side. So I’m a listing specialist. I go out and meet with sellers, discuss our marketing plan, talk about the market and then we come up with a price after they’re listed there kind of main point of communication is our listing manager Rachel, she’s been with us over seven years. So she sits in the office every day. She’s the one that writes of counteroffers for our sellers, ensuring they get that top price. So she just has a skill I don’t have right that’s all She’s doing all day. So she’s really, really good at that. After the sellers accept an offer, then it goes to our listing, or not listing escrow specialists, Lisa, who’s been with us over 14 years. And she handles everything after that point. So appraisal inspection, things like that.
D.J. Paris 30:19 That’s amazing. So if you have to, I always love I think teams have become so much more important in the last five years, as teams have figured out like yours have, how to leverage and how to combined resources and experience, because we think about the, you know, Bree now is, you know, she’s 24 years old, she’s in somebody’s home, who doesn’t really want her in the home. And she’s like, Hey, here’s why you should hire me, because you get access to all of us. And now she says, Hey, I’m just one person on the team. There’s this entire team here, here’s how we take care of people. And that that’s leverage, right?
Bri Brenkus 30:59 Absolutely. And I kind of like to use the analogy, if you were to go to a restaurant, right, and you go to check in, you would probably be really concerned if the chef was checking you in as the receptionist. And then the one that also walk you to your table, and then you sit down at your table, he has to go back and flip burgers. Now you’re thirsty, and you need to order water drink, you’d probably be concerned if the chef was coming out and doing all of those things. So everyone has their own unique niche and skill. And we hone in and focus on that one skill and get really, really good at it.
D.J. Paris 31:32 Yeah, it’s that expression, jack of all trades, master of none, right. And it’s like, you can’t be good at everything, you can be good at a couple of things. Most people are, we’re good at like three to five things. And that’s about it. And, and so it’s probably a good idea to delegate the rest of those things, or join forces and get someone else who can help you with that. And so it’s nice to because then you can just focus on what you’re best at. So we’ll fast forward to to last year, which is 2021. You now listed 100. And I mean, this is such such incredible number 107 listings personally, tell us how you did that? Because that’s what one every three days. That’s yeah, insane. So tell us insane and so impressive. And like you should there should be a statue of you. In the in the Realtors Association headquarters, because really, no, this is a big number. So tell us a little bit about how you did that. And how you manage that? Well, I guess having a team helps. But let’s talk about how you how you did that.
Bri Brenkus 32:40 Yeah, and I can always do more, I can always be better. So yes, thank you, thank you for that. Do you appreciate that, um, I am a very hard worker, I work every day. So it’s, um, I didn’t really take a lot of vacations, especially with the world being shut down in 2020. So that helped, kind of moving forward as well. And I just love what I do. I am kind of weird, I would rather be working then going on vacation. And if I do have time off, I’m sitting there, anticipating getting back to work and meeting with sellers and helping them put the most amount of money in their pocket, changing their lives, their families lives. And it just brings me so much joy.
D.J. Paris 33:27 So you know your why. And I think that’s an important thing. You basically just said it in that last sentence, you want to help people change their lives in a positive way. And that motivates you to work hard, because you feel like you’re serving a higher purpose other than the Commission, or you know, the sale itself. It’s like, oh, I’m actually doing a good thing for these people. That’s a really important mindset. I imagine because I suspect when it’s a difficult day, and we all have difficult days that probably helps get you through the day, or am I wrong?
Bri Brenkus 34:03 You’re exactly right. Yes. And you asked how can I manage? Over 100? Yeah, and listings? Yes, through leverage, and we all have the same goal. We’re all on the same team. We all want the same thing. So it’s a win win environment. And everybody can achieve more when we all work together.
D.J. Paris 34:25 Question about sort of the current market climate so it’s now we’re in the middle of July this episode probably won’t go out until August but I imagine not much will have changed. We have interest rates have gone up we know are now around hovering between five and a half six. I think they just went up today. So I think they’re closer to 6% again, so for the 30 year fixed as as an average and maybe a little bit less than that, but somewhere around that and we have you know not as much inventory of course so we have less inventory buyers. You know their their purchasing power has has dropped from one It was during COVID. It’s it’s it’s not the easiest time out there. So I’m curious how you guys have pivoted what what you’re doing to accommodate for not that many listings and buyers who now are going, oh, man, the rates in the fives or the sixes, that stinks. You know, how are you guys accommodating for that? Yeah, so
Bri Brenkus 35:20 it’s pricing, helping sellers price ahead of the market. Because we don’t want to be chasing the market. So we’re not in the market, we just came out of where we listed a property comps didn’t really matter, everything selling right. And it was really crazy, listed this for sale by owners home. And he was asking 685, and the same model match was in escrow for 660. Oh, right at the time, and we listed it for 785. And it sold within a week at that price. So we’re not seeing that market anymore. beginning of this year inventory here in Vegas for single family homes, was about 17 1800. Today, we’re a little over 6000. So yeah, so inventory is definitely increasing. There’s not as many buyers out there, because the interest rates going up, the demand isn’t as hot as it was pretty much all of last year and beginning of the year. So it’s just pricing ahead of the market. We’re in a shifting market now. And we don’t want to be chasing the market. So we need to be priced very, very competitively, if not even kind of under comps. So it’s just helping sellers understand that.
D.J. Paris 36:38 I think too, like I was thinking about this yesterday, I was talking to a lender, and I was saying you don’t want to be really neat. And I’m sure this tool already exists. So if it does, in any of our listeners know of it, send it over to me, I would love to see a a little calculator that could say okay, yeah, maybe you could have locked in a rate at 2.9% 2.99%. But you probably would have overpaid by X amount. And now Yeah, our rates are, you know, 6%. But the pricing has come down, I would be very curious to see what the intersection intersection there is. Because it might not actually be that different now, right? Like it actually might be better, even though the rates obviously significantly higher, because pricing has come down. Have you seen that where pricing has started to pull back? From the listing side?
Bri Brenkus 37:23 Absolutely. Yeah, within the last seven days. Sorry about that. I don’t know how to make that sound stone. That’s okay. Okay, there we go. Sorry about that. Sorry, what was the question again?
D.J. Paris 37:41 So So, as far as pricing, we’ve seen pricing come down? Or has pricing come down? That was the question is, is as inventory has gone up? Pricing, I imagine is probably gone down as well.
Bri Brenkus 37:53 Yeah, a lot of supply and demand, right? When inventory goes up, pricing comes down. And we have seen that within the past seven days, there’s been about 1700 price reductions in the MLS Wow. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 38:04 that’s it’s probably great, too. Did you did you deal during the, during the last couple of years with dealing with appraisal gaps and dealing with like, oh, gosh, you know, this person is buying. And it’s so much higher than than what the actual appraisal comes back at where it was, that was problematic to for realtors, it, it was kind of a fun time to be a listing agent. But it was also problematic time to can you talk a little bit about how you guys dealt with that? Because it had to come up all the time for you?
Bri Brenkus 38:34 Yes, it did. And we do three very specific things to prevent appraisals from coming in low, even in a bad market when interest rates are high. And the interest rates being low really helped us actually in a way because these buyers could afford more and can essentially either waive the appraisal or pay X amount above, which is what happened in that home that I sold for $125,000 more than this same model match. And it actually had an extra bedroom, which is just crazy. So we’re definitely going to start to see the market shift now that interest rates are going up.
D.J. Paris 39:11 Yeah. And are you finding buyers? I know I’m sort of getting stuck on where we are today. But I just think it’s so important to talk about because it’s what agents are dealing with in the present. Right. So when you talk to buyers, and I know you’re on the listing side, but you do work with buyers as well, occasionally or really only on the list usually when
Bri Brenkus 39:31 I was first starting out, okay, you’re not not too much here in there. So, yeah.
D.J. Paris 39:38 So mostly on the listing side, so Are are you having to have conversations then with sellers about okay, the buyers market has shifted, here’s what’s going on. We were you know, we’re not in, you know, you might have talked to neighbors who listed a home a year ago and didn’t even, you know, within 24 hours they had 40 lists 40 contracts or 40 offers rather than How do you have to have that conversation now so that these listing these, these, these sellers aren’t going Hey, where’s Where’s these crazy amazing offers?
Bri Brenkus 40:09 Right? And the market started shifting here in Vegas at least kind of around end of April May ish. So when we listed a property sellers would be calling us after a couple of days, why hasn’t my home sold. And again, it’s just really helping them understand we’re not in the market, we just came out of interest rates are going up, the buyers demand isn’t there. Another thing that’s going up is inventory. So you have more competition versus last year, beginning of the year, you know, you might have two, three, even four of the same model match or whatever, same square footage that are available, we need to price it competitively with with them.
D.J. Paris 40:49 I love that. And then let’s talk about the 30 under 30 award, because I think this is this is an amazing thing. How did you think to do it? Did someone bring that to your attention? Were you always wanting ever since you got on? Were you aware of it? Were you like, boy, I’d love to earn that award someday? Or how did that come about?
Bri Brenkus 41:09 I was not aware of it. My mother was the one that suggested it to me. And I did not think I would win?
D.J. Paris 41:19 Well, if you did, and that’s really, really, really impressive and amazing. And we are so excited to continue to watch your growth as you continue to crush it. So are you scheduling more free time for yourself this year now that things are slowing down? Not just a little bit, I guess, in a good way. So you have some more personal time? What have you learned in the last year that you maybe wish? or what have you learned more recently that you wish you would have known when he started?
Bri Brenkus 41:55 That’s a great question. And probably what happened on my 21st listing appointment is not being attached to the outcome. And again, just coming from a place of service.
D.J. Paris 42:08 You know, it’s it’s funny, it’s like, yeah, and but like, that’s really it, isn’t it? It’s like, people want to hear more that there’s some other secret sort of formula to it. But there is something very powerful about being able to say, or to be able to come across as I don’t need the business. I’m happy to take the business, but I don’t need it. I’m here out of service. And it just makes everything more relaxed. And do you still go into that to each listing presentation with that mindset?
Bri Brenkus 42:40 Definitely.
D.J. Paris 42:41 Yeah. And your close ratio is, I’m assuming has gone up ever since that mindset shift? Yes. Yeah, it’s, it’s really, it’s really amazing. Well, Bree, I am going to let you get back to your busy day because you have more listings, I’m sure to to close today. And so we want to let you get on with your amazing a career. But I really will Oh, and by the way, we should mention that Bree does not work alone, right? She works on this team, the brink is steam. They are in Las Vegas, they cover the entire Las Vegas metro area and all the surrounding areas. And you’re one of the biggest teams in that area. And as a result, you know, we do have a lot of listeners, and we have a lot of Las Vegas, realtors who are listening, if they are thinking, Gosh, I want to join a team like this or want to learn more about what your team offers, what’s the best way that another agent should reach out to you?
Bri Brenkus 43:34 Yeah, you can call us Our office number is 702-456-5959. We’re always hiring, we’d love to have you on the team and help you learn. And yeah, looking forward to
D.J. Paris 43:48 it. And also to you know, a lot of people retire to Las Vegas, which I never realized up until about five years ago that that was a big retirement community. And it is. So there’s a lot of people from all over the country who have clients that may end up, you know, retiring down there or buying a second property or so down there. So that’s another great reason to reach out to Bri and develop a relationship. Maybe there could be some, some client sharing, because Bri has clients that have other properties and other places as well. Just out of curiosity, Bri Do you find that that happens a lot where you have somebody who’s you know, feels like you know, people move to Las Vegas at some point. You know, it’s it’s it’s not as much of a born and raised kind of place. I mean, obviously, that’s where you’re from, but a lot of people move to there. And so do you end up dealing with a lot of referrals where you have clients who have other properties elsewhere as well?
Bri Brenkus 44:41 Yes, lots of referrals. Lots of our sellers are moving out of state, we’re having lots of people move in state. So we’d love to partner up with you guys, wherever you may be. We actually got a referral from France. So if you’re outside of the US, we were worldwide.
D.J. Paris 44:56 That’s amazing. Well everyone who is listening check out Bri and her team’s website, the bronchus group. Sorry, let me pull up. I’m saying that wrong. That is the brigus team.com. And that’s th e and then b r e n. So it looks like brand kiss, but it’s pronounced bronchus, the bronchus and K us team.com. And then follow them on social. By the way, both of these links, all the social links, and this website will be in the show notes. You can find it there, but follow them on Facebook and Instagram, at the bronchus team or just go to their website and it’s all there as well. Bree, congratulations on all the success 30 under 30 award winner, your superstar Are you heading to do you know if you’ll be going to the National Association of Realtors Conference this year, which I believe is in Orlando, just out of curiosity, I don’t know if you’ll be
Bri Brenkus 45:43 will be there super, super grateful my mother had me apply again. I did not think I would be one of the 2022 honorees. So I’m super excited to meet everybody down there all the other class of 22 honorees. And yeah, grateful for my team, I would not have been able to have all of these successes without them. And they’re amazing. Definitely, definitely, definitely leverage and get get help from others.
D.J. Paris 46:10 Awesome. Well, and if anyone’s listening and you’re thinking about going to the National Association, Realtors Conference, the annual conference, it is awesome. I went to my first one last year and it was so much fun at a lot a lot of the people I’ve interviewed on the show are there as well. So if you’re there Brees going to be there. I’m going to be there definitely considered going to Orlando I think it’s in November. So anyway, take a look online but everyone follow Bree go to her go to their website, the brink esteemed Brink his team.com follow them on social media and if you’re a realtor in the Las Vegas area, reach out to them Keller Williams is amazing. We love Keller Williams and Brees and her family’s team is incredible there. So thanks Bree for being on the show. Thank
Bri Brenkus 46:50 the conferences in August, by the way not shows you what I know. Yes, it’s looking forward to it. I’ll see you there DJ.
D.J. Paris 47:00 Well, maybe not. I apparently. Apparently I’m going there in November. So I will be there all by myself. So if you want to know I’m teasing. Boy that shows you how to bid I am huh. Yeah, August. Okay. Well,
Bri Brenkus 47:12 a different one. I don’t know. I’m not sure. No, no, no,
D.J. Paris 47:13 that’s that’s the right one. Anyway, Bri, thank you so much for being on the show. It was such a pleasure. And thanks to everyone. And on behalf of our audience, we think Bree for her time and on behalf of Bree and myself, we think everyone who is listening, please tell a friend about this episode. Just think of one other agent that could benefit that really could use a little boost. And you know, could hear the great words from Bree and send them a link to our website or any podcast app they might be using. But our website is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is streamed there as well. So anyway, Bree, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
Bri Brenkus 47:52 Thank you
How To Talk To Clients About Inventory & Lending Rates • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Aug 11, 2022
Welcome to the July episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel discusses what’s going on in the market right now and shares advise to agents working during these touch times with low inventory while rates are going up. Joel also advises on how to take advantage of fluctuating rates right now. Once more, Joel emphasizes the importance of building relationships with lending officers in your area and building business together. Joel and D.J. discuss Joel’s weekly market update. Last, Joel reminds everyone that refinancing the mortgage is always a great opportunity for home-owners.
D.J. Paris 0:00 With the market shifting or already shifted to lower inventory and even higher interest rates, what should you be telling your clients? We’re going to discuss that today? Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? We’ll find out why agents across the country come to real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering their clients a real estate sales and marketing solution to generate more business real geeks is easy to use. Their websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for the end user. Real geeks is mobile friendly delivering an excellent user experience on the go. Real geeks includes an easy to use CRM. So once your leads sign up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up triggers. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase your brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod again, real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business. This episode is also brought to you by quality builders are you are one of your clients real estate investors who can’t seem to find a trustworthy general contractor. Are you tired of poor communication, excessive change orders and extensive schedule delays. We’ll look no further because quality builders is a Chicago general contractor focused on helping you the real estate investor grow your portfolio. Each and every product decision is based on quality builders core values of transparency, courage, integrity, and uniqueness which produce sustainable and predictable results that successful real estate investors are looking for. Quality builders uses innovative project management technology to keep you up to date on your projects by providing a client portal to view daily logs schedules and contract and change order updates. Schedule a free one on one consultation by visiting quality builders.com. That’s quality builders.com to see how they can partner with you to build your real estate portfolio. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And today once again is our monthly series learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives that part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction making you the agent look like a hero. Now last year alone, Joel gave back almost $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him. And that puts Joel’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. And just to kind of make that making maybe a little bit more sense. There’s 400,000 loan officers in the United States. And Joel is currently ranked number 137. Last year, he closed over 619 transactions, his highest amount ever for $249 million. And already this year with the market you know changing. He’s already closed 215 transactions now. Yes, 215 transactions for $87,000,000.95 and 95.2% of that were purchases. So if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Julie’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Joel can be reached at his email address which is joel@rates.com very easy J OEL at r a t e.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049 Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel Schaub Welcome once again,
Joel Schaub 4:16 thanks, DJ, appreciate you having me on again. And I love hearing those numbers. But none of the accolades really matter. It’s like every time we get together, it’s one of my favorite times because we’re giving, we’re sharing, and we’re really educating agents out there about what’s happening right now.
D.J. Paris 4:33 Yeah, and I think now it’s such a great time to have these particular episodes because the market has changed. Rates of course have gone up. We knew they were going up, but here here we are. And I think it’s it’s agents. You know, our it’s a tough time right now to be an agent, you know, there’s not a lot of inventory rates are up so, you know, buyers are maybe more constricted. So any advice that that that you know you can help our audience understand about how to proceed. And is always going to be great in times like these. And I don’t think it’s such a terrible time. But I know for agents, you know, we had some really great years, the last few years, and it’s obviously just changing a bit. So we’d love to hear about what’s going on in the market.
Joel Schaub 5:20 I’m excited about this time, if I’m an agent, I work with buyers, it’s actually easier right now that rates are up for buyers to go under contract to a property DJ, period, cut and dry. So remember, we’re always thinking of the bright side of things right now, if you’re an agent, and you’re working with buyers, they don’t have to compete against 15 other offers, where you went in full asking price, or even 20 or 50 grand over and still lost, okay? It wasn’t that many months ago, where that was what was going on. And so now, we’re sitting here saying, Oh, my gosh, this market is so hard. The last two years have been hard. Okay, they just been hard in a different way. Okay. So I have a lot of excitement right now. And things that are going to be happening this summer and fall for buyers are that just rates being up, gives me an opportunity to go in and actually buy the home at the right price, instead of these inflated prices that buyers were paying sight unseen for homes. EJ, yeah, and
D.J. Paris 6:17 I think your experience is really relevant here too, because you started in 2003, you’ve already seen a pretty dramatic couple of cycles of the market, with rates, of course, and just the economy. And you have zero control, like the rest of us listening over what happens to rates. So you’ve had to roll with the the good, and the bad, the peaks and the valleys. And I really appreciate you talking about the bright side of it. Because there is always a way to take advantage in a healthy way of a current situation. But it’s also easy to get discouraged. And I love the fact that you’re always looking for the positives and you’re not Pollyanna about it. It’s not like oh, there’s no weeds in my garden. There’s no weeds in my garden. I know there’s weeds, I’ll pick them out. But then I have a beautiful garden again. And so I think it’s maybe now more than ever, I think it’s really important for the agents to stay positive. So we’d love to hear about anything that I know you guys have a new product or new process, I guess I should say about how agents can lock in or sorry, how buyers can lock in rates. So can we talk about that? Yeah, right
Joel Schaub 7:23 now, it’s really important that we have seen a dip in rates, right? It wasn’t that long ago, where the headlines were rates of top 6% always backed way off from them. Okay. So when rates go up like that it was a knee jerk reaction to what the Federal Reserve was gonna have to do to combat inflation. And so it was the anticipation of what they did or will do is what drove rates up. And once they actually did it, rates came down. Okay, so now we’re sitting at rates anywhere in that five and a half above or below, when it wasn’t even three weeks ago, where we saw rates considerably higher. So how do we take advantage of that if we’re agents? And how do we take advantage of these lower rates of our buyers, if we still only have a house? Okay, a lot of banks right now, including ours are offering the lock and roll type of programs DJ where you could actually secure a rate lock for 60 or 90 days, even without a home. And so if you’re out there right now, as an agent, and you’re working with a mortgage broker, call them call now and ask about any of the lock and roll type of programs. Okay, they come in different names, of course. But the concept here is, could I lock a rate? Could my clients lock a rate with you, even if we have not identified a property, find out how long they can lock for and take advantage right now because when rates are lower, these banks will either allow you to float the rate down when rates go down if they’re under contract, or if rates go up to the clients been protected because they locked in a rate before they even found the home to great opportunity right now if I’m an agent, to partner with a mortgage person in your local area that can really help you work with buyers.
D.J. Paris 9:04 Yeah, and I think this is a great thing for agents to start getting more familiar with is as we know agents study the MLS and are constantly looking especially now with with lower inventory over the last several many years. Now we’ve had inventory shortages across the across the country. And of course, it’s more important now than ever to know when things come out in the market. It’s also more important now maybe then, in recent times, to know where rates are not that you have to be an expert because of course that’s Joel what Joel and his team and other lending loan officers will do for you. But it’s good for the agents No, because I think it creates an action step for agents you know, if they do see a dip or an increase I think like like Joe like you were saying great opportunity to reach out and say, Hey, I’ve noticed rates have come down a little bit. It might be a great time just to lock in a rate well, we don’t have a property, you usually not a problem. We can still get it locked in through you know through this particular process. So, because I haven’t calculated what the percentage changes from 6% are, I know it was even well over 6%. Now down to like, you were saying five and a half, you know, and a little bit, either on either direction of that. But that’s like a 30% shift or not a 30% shift, but like a 20% change. So that’s like significant, right. So I was thinking, that would be a good thing for agents not to obsess about and not to let ruin or make your day but just to know what’s going on. So that it might, I know that if I was a buyer, I would love to get a call. Or rather, if I was thinking about buying, and I was like, oh, rates are where they are, I would love to get a call from my agent going, Hey, did you know rates dipped a little bit, it might be a good time to lock something in. And I suspect most agents will never think to make that call.
Joel Schaub 10:46 Another great talking point, if I’m an agent right now, and you hear it from buyers that they’re really on the fence about buying because of rates being up high. But to put it into perspective, we’re just back to where rates have been. For years, these are still at lows, it just took a pandemic and it took two full years where the Federal Reserve had to cut rates to near zero to get mortgage rates down below 3%. And we knew it wasn’t sustainable. We can go back to many episodes where I was on this program talking about how this won’t last. So let’s get in well, the times are good. And now the times are still good. Okay, we can still go out and obtain properties. And we don’t have to overbid. So if I’m an agent, I’m reaching back out and saying, I know the headlines recently said that rates are above 6%. There are a lot of options to get rates in the fours and fives right now. Okay, so make sure that you’re making those types of phone calls and partnering with somebody, how many times have I been on the show DJ, where I’m explaining to agents the value of partnering with a mortgage professional,
D.J. Paris 11:49 all the time constantly.
Joel Schaub 11:51 What you want to do as mortgage professionals now more than ever should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and partner with you. So right now, when you’re getting these phone calls, from great mortgage professionals, ask them what they’re willing to contribute on marketing dollars. And I love saying this because I get so much hate mail from other lenders around the country saying why are you telling people that I will spend money on them? Because good loan officers will. So partner with these people that are really in your community that you know, like and trust and ask them not just for you to send them business, but what could they partner with you on? Okay, so I partner with my agents on so many different RESPA compliant marketing initiatives, spending 1000s and 1000s of dollars a month to help agents grow their business and mortgage professionals that are good. We’ll be more than willing to do this with you if you’re an agent. Okay? So lean on them make a friend now’s the time. Lenders aren’t as busy as they were the last two years. So make sure that you’re partnering with people that are really committed to helping you grow.
D.J. Paris 12:53 I have a question, Joe, do you happen to know you? And I don’t know the answer to this. And if not, we could just estimate how many low how many loan officers do you think are in the Chicagoland area, including the suburbs, just the you know, the entire Chicagoland, it’s got to be at least a few 1000 I’m guessing maybe not that many I don’t know.
Joel Schaub 13:12 In our state right now we have just north of 17,000 in the state of Illinois, and a big minority of them are in the metro market areas. So there are 1000s in what we consider the Greater Chicago area for sure.
D.J. Paris 13:24 So that’s what I figured I was thinking 5000 Or so I don’t know what the what we obviously don’t know what the full number is. But the reason I’m bringing this up, I was thinking because you were just talking about partnering with agents and I get an email from your team. From Maria on your team every single week. That’s it, I don’t practice real estate. So this sticks out a little bit to me. So I see it. And I always think oh, I don’t I I won’t participate. I can’t participate with this. But I love the fact that it said is every week I think on Wednesday or Thursday, she sends me an email saying hey, do you have any open houses this weekend? Because we want to help you with that. If you do, we can provide all sorts of you know, marketing material, etc. And every single week without fail, you send that and so and then I’m thinking okay, so I we have about 700 Plus agents in our company. Do you know how many other loan officers send me that email saying, hey, we want to work with you? Zero? literally zero,
Joel Schaub 14:21 not even one. Isn’t that?
D.J. Paris 14:23 I mean, isn’t that shocking that another? I mean, there’s there’s lots of great loan officers. And I don’t mean to belittle anyone else. And I’m just saying this is a I guess the takeaway is the road less traveled is not that busy. So if you’re willing to go the extra mile as an agent and call your your, your, your prospective buyers and say, hey, you know rates have come down. I really want to help you lock in a good rate. You’re probably not getting that call from somebody else, just like I’m not getting those emails from other loan officers saying hey, we want to work with your agents. So I think I think the The specific sort of ideas that you’re giving our audience are just absolutely gold, because I don’t really see a lot of other givers get mentality out there in the lending space or the ello space. And I love the fact that that is that has been the cornerstone of your businesses, give, give, give. And then of course, things just happen for you as well. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Joel Schaub 16:41 I’m happy to share those tidbits because it’s actually something that’s easy to read quickly and digestible for agents so that they can have good talking points on a weekly basis that’s timely, and something that they can share and some knowledgeable about something that they probably wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to talk to their buyers about. And so it’s our weekly update in the house, I’ve literally had hundreds of people from the keeping it real podcast, reach out and want to be involved in that just get on the list. And so they can, if you’re listening now you can absolutely just email joel@rate.com. And my team will put you right on the list. And so every single week, you’ll get in timely, fresh market update of just things that are going on that will help you. And that’s truly, that’s something that will actually make you sound smarter. And who doesn’t want that. I mean, I’m not the smartest guy in the room, I’ve just figured out ways that we can actually be educational and lead with value.
D.J. Paris 17:35 And by the way, to further my point about how going the extra mile is always the way to go. You know, market updates, you send this weekly market update, which is amazing, which you’re just referencing and everybody should get on this list because it gives agents specifically those exact talking points of here’s what’s gone on in the last week, here’s what you need to know. And again gives you a reason to pick up the phone and call call your clients. And I get zero other market updates from I’m realizing not only do I get zero open house, we want to help you with open houses I get zero market updates for and it’s not because I unsubscribe from everyone’s newsletters, literally nobody else sends them to me. And you know, I think there’s an opportunity there for agents to realize communication is the key and having a couple of talking points is all you need. And then when they ask a question about rates that you don’t quite know how to answer, great, let me connect you with my partner. And then you pass over Joel or whoever your your loan officers. But we weren’t we should mention that we’re in the Chicagoland area. But Joel, you and your team, and guaranteed rate is, you know, works in all 50 states. So even if you’re not here in the Chicagoland area, you know, please reach out to Joel and his team, they will they will guide you in the right direction. And what’s the so if they want to get on your list, they can email you joel@rate.com. And then what’s another way that that somebody should reach out to you if they want to partner with you or just ask questions or learn more about guaranteed rate?
Joel Schaub 18:57 I mean, we actually answer the phone. I mean, you can text me at 773-654-2049. And that number hasn’t changed in 17 years. And they’re always surprised that we actually answer the phone, I mean on two rings. And that’s what happens on Saturdays and Sundays that most banks are closed. So you need to have a mortgage partner that will actually pick up the phone and make sure that your buyers are taken care of. And in reference to the newsletter, I mean, it kind of started as like a private insider tip right? I was writing this on a weekly basis with my agents and I started hearing from other agents go, Hey, how do I get access to this? I just want to read this Can I Can I get in even I’m not sending you business. And so that’s what this list is you can literally just ask joel@rate.com and say add me to the list. And then you’ll get the market update on a weekly basis like an insider and have really great sharing and talking points for you to go back to buyers. And when you’re leading with education, these people will notice it because right now it’s going to make a difference between those that are selling and those that are held Buying, and sales people come and go. But if you’re actually there to provide value, listen to the needs, there’s an opportunity for buyers right now. And in the months ahead, as these rates stay inflated, buyers are gonna have an opportunity to finally come in and buy properties under market value, and under list price. And that’s what I’m really excited about. So if I’m an agent, keep the hope alive. All right, the sky isn’t falling. Most of the Federal Reserve increases that affect mortgage rates are pretty much baked in at this point. So yes, the feds will continue to raise rates DJ, but we from here, don’t anticipate seeing mortgage rates go to eight or 9%, there’s a really good likelihood that we see rates in the next couple of years, hit 4% before they hit 8%. Okay, so we’re in really good shape. And just know that as long as you’re out there helping buyers, the specific rate doesn’t matter, but know that they have come down and lead with value and call some of these people right now, and see if they need to get out of a renting situation and start buying.
D.J. Paris 21:05 Well, and you know, you mentioned this at the beginning. And I think it’s important to even just reiterate, which is of course pricing, home prices have come down. And so now Yes, rates have gone up, they’re still I think reasonable and you know, not compared to the last two years, but in our historical averages. Like, boy, our parents would have loved to have a five or 6% mortgage, depending on when they bought. And the fact is that home prices are down. So this might actually be more beneficial, even though rates are are slightly higher than they were before. So because there people aren’t paying as much for the same properties. And you know, I almost wonder in a couple of years for people that really, really paid well above asking price almost wonder if there’s going to be a little bit of buyer’s remorse there. So if you have buyer’s not buyer’s remorse, but just maybe some not so great feelings. And and I think if you thought, oh, boy, it was hard working with buyers last couple years, I think it’s actually better now. You know, rates are higher. So that’s a little bit of a hurdle, but prices are way down. So I think it’s I think it’s ultimately a good thing.
Joel Schaub 22:12 That’s what’s great in the United States DJ is that you always can refinance that mortgage, right? But once you buy into a property, you’ve paid 50, grand more, there isn’t a program where you can just wipe out 50 grand worth of debt. Okay? So what you can do in the United States is always refinance the mortgage. So I love this phrase, right? I love the idea that you marry the home, but date the rate, I’ll say it again, right, we gotta find the home that we want, right? We love it. We’re gonna marry the home. We’re not gonna marry the rate, we’re gonna date the rate. Okay, yeah, one of my friends says marry the home and to force the rate. All right, let’s get rid of the rate when, when the rates no longer working for us and rates are lower, let’s kick that man to the curb or woman to the curb, right? Whatever the phrase may be. Sure, point is, there is an opportunity right now. So remember, not if rates go down. But if and when rates go down, you can refinance that mortgage. And so you definitely can get out there and buy a home right now and have got the pick of the litter coming up, because there won’t be 25 other offers on the same place. So I’m very excited, as I’ve told you, even off air, this is the time where good agents continue to grow. And just by staying positive, it really, it’s about mindset, and it’s about education. And right now, it’s not as bad as it could be. So get out there, and let’s win some business this summer, okay. And
D.J. Paris 23:31 there’s a lot of things we just can’t control. We can’t control inventory, we can’t control rates, we can’t control the economy, or the political climate, or even the social climate in a lot of ways. So a lot of things are outside of our control. But what we always can control is our activity, and our willingness to want to provide. And so Joey is a perfect example of somebody who just constantly lives that, you know, despite whatever’s going on in the market, I’ve known Joel for for many years now, and he is not his personality, his his his activity is no different. When the rates are lower, the rates are higher, because he knows that that that is largely that’s more secondary to providing amazing service, you provide amazing service rates and costs and things oftentimes take a backseat. What’s most important is the relationship. And so this is a great opportunity to reevaluate your relationship with your loan officer. And if you don’t have somebody who’s really out there pulling for you and helping you, Joel is and his team would love to chat with you. So reach out to him get on his email list. joel@rate.com asked to be on the list. I’m telling you guys that will give you a reason to pick up the phone and call your clients and say hey, just you probably seen some things about rates. Here’s what you need to know. That’s a huge thing. You you started doing that for all your clients, they’re gonna be like, Well, nobody’s ever done that. For me. The loan officer that we worked with probably didn’t do it. The agents they’ve worked with in the past probably didn’t do that either. So it’s not that hard. And Joel do all the work for you. He’ll actually send me the email and you just have to read from it. Which is better, because I go to Morgan It’s news daily, every so often, which is a great website for learning about mortgages. I can’t make heads or tails of any of the articles in there. Because they are so industry specific. They’re really challenging for me to read. So I read go through that. And my mind starts spinning. And I love the email you send once a week that says, here’s what you need to know. Because there’s News Daily is a great website. But boy, it’s a little it’s over my head. But anyway, so what a great, great episode, stay positive, everyone things are not. So they’re not trying to filter out the noise that you’re hearing in your office from other agents. You know, good agents are excited about this time, it’s a little, it’s a little different. That’s all that it is. It’s a little different. But great opportunity to build your business. And we’re probably going to see a number of Realtors exiting the business as a result of this, which will only help the ones that are dedicated. So anyway, stay positive. Joel, thank you so much for being on our show. Once again, guys reach out to Joel he’s really that good. He’s an amazing human being. And his team is amazing. And he wants to work with you guys. And of course, guys, men and women, of course. And also, as always, please tell a friend about our show. Just think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this episode from Joel, maybe somebody who’s maybe feeling a little down or depressed right now about what’s going on in the market. Send them this episode. This will probably change their attitudes a little bit, Matt, that would be great. So anyway, send them a link to our episode and then we will see everybody on the next show. So Joel, thanks so much,
Joel Schaub 26:28 TJ are the best. Thanks for having me on. Have a great day. Thanks.
From Homeless To Top Real Estate Producer • Darrin DeSilva
Aug 05, 2022
Darrin DeSilva this year’s 30 under 30 laureate goes back to the beginning of his career in real estate. Darrin discusses how his addiction lead him to homelessness but ultimately both experiences helped built his life back up and how that ultimately lead him into his career in real estate. Darrin and DJ discuss the importance of surrounding yourself with people who will inspire and lead you to success. Next, Darrin describes how he transitioned from car sales to his career in real estate. Last, Darrin discusses open houses.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How does somebody go from homeless to top real estate producer in just a few short years? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Darren de Silva. Before we get to Darren, just a couple of quick things to mention. Number one, please the best way you can help us grow telephone think of one other realtor that you know, that could benefit from hearing our episodes where we talk to top producers like Darren and ask them how they built their business. And they share all of their secrets, which is so we’re so grateful for all of our wonderful guests. So please tell other realtors about us. And second, leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on. Let us know what you think of the show. We read every review and every comment. We’re always striving to do better for you. But enough about all that let’s get on to the main event, my conversation with Darren de Silva.
Today on the show, we have Darren de Silva from Realty One in Tracy, California, and also Central Valley. Let me tell you a little bit more about Darren. Darren grew up in Pleasanton, California, and he moved around a lot. Throughout his childhood around Northern California, he ended up landing in Tracy, California. And then there he became homeless at 22 years old, and really thinking maybe his life was coming to an end. But from there, he was able, of course, to turn his life around with help. And he received his first opportunity to do sales with Kirby vacuums. From there, he moved up to car sales, and eventually into real estate, which is where he is today. And it was the best decision he ever made. And recently, in the last couple of months, Darren was just awarded the National Association of REALTORS 30, under 30 Class of 2022, which is an incredible accomplishment because like 1000s of people apply for it, and they only give it to 30 people every year. So huge, huge. Congratulations to Darren and please check out his website, which is DeSilva real estate and that’s d s iLv. A real estate.com DeSilva real estate.com Also, please follow him on Instagram, which is Darren which is d a r i n underscore de Silva. Both of those links will be in the show notes. So uh, Darren, welcome to the show.
Darrin DeSilva 4:03 Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s it’s a real honor to even be asked to be on on the show, let alone have so many interested in my in my life and kind of the things that have led me up to this point. So it’s, I’m grateful and I appreciate you guys, you know, reaching out to me.
D.J. Paris 4:20 I, I have always thought that gratitude is one of those. Well, now it’s talked about a lot I feel it’s kind of more commonly discussed. But I love that that gratitude seems to be really present for you. I’ve noticed that just in our interactions even before we started, I think I think that’s I think humility goes a long way in this industry as well where there’s so many people who you know, kind of go the other way with, with entitlement and things like that. So I am absolutely absolutely excited to hear your story. Let’s, let’s start at the beginning. So tell me about sort of growing up, and then how you ended up we mentioned that, you know, at one point you were homeless in your early 20s. We’d love to sort of hear the circumstances there. And then how you how you got out of those, that situation because, of course, a lot of people don’t. So I would love to hear you know, what got you there? And then what got you out?
Darrin DeSilva 5:21 Yeah, so, you know, you kind of I appreciate, you know, you recognizing, the way I am and interacting with you now, being grateful and everything like that, you know, honestly, the, that’s not me at the core, right, if who I am those, those types of characteristics, were born, being into me with pain and suffering and things like that, that I’ve gone through in life, unfortunately, but fortunately, today, I can say that, that’s, that’s what has molded me into the person that I am today. And the person that I’m working on becoming, as I continue to go through life, just like all of us, you know. So for me, I lived in a in a household with a single mother, she did the best she could, she had a lot of outside issues, and things like that, you know, addictions and that sort of thing. And my father, same thing, he was an alcoholic, growing up, you know, he would be one way on one day, the best father and other day and you never know what you’re gonna get. Right. So that was kind of my upbringing is just real instability, real craziness, but that’s what I was used to, you know, that’s, that was my normal, it wasn’t like, oh, my gosh, I had these weird parents. It was. That’s just life, you know, at an early age. So fast forward, you know, my, my first, my first encounter with for me, I was rebellious teenager, I was never told no, by my mother, you know, never really forced to be given responsibility. And held accountable for my actions. I’ve always was able to kind of, manipulate and things like that. These are things that I learned from my parents, you know, I was able to do it as a small kid, this is a child doing these things, you know, 1112 13 So at an early age, I was actually sent to a wilderness camp.
D.J. Paris 7:27 One of these sort of, we’re gonna get you in line teach you skills that you’re not learning at home kind of thing.
Darrin DeSilva 7:34 Right? Exactly. It was like basically, you know, like, like, your Bear Grylls right in out in the middle of Bend, Oregon, which is where I was,
D.J. Paris 7:45 right. I feel like a lot of those those. Those organizations are out in Oregon. They’re like, send your kids out here. We’ll get we’ll fix them. Right, exactly. They basically they basically taught you survival skills, as well is working together with others. I’m guessing a lot of interpersonal skills as well.
Darrin DeSilva 8:04 Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And looking back, it was one of the best experiences I think I had. It was funny, the way that they got me is me and my friend. Were actually staying in my, at our place. We were in Pleasanton, California. I was living at the time in the East Bay Area. And we we were sleeping and we got woken up by four people in black suits. It was dead middle of the night. They came up to our room. They said get up. We’re going. And they both of us. Yeah. Our parents were in on it, by the way.
D.J. Paris 8:40 Yeah, they were in on it. They gotta like, why don’t you hang out with your buddy tonight?
Darrin DeSilva 8:44 That’s exactly what happened. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was funny because they were in on it. And, you know, we were like, what’s going on? We, you know, we walked away downstairs when we were transported to Bend, Oregon. From that point, we were given to this band of people that you could smell from mile away. And they threw us in a car blindfolded us. And we were taken out the middle of nowhere driven about two hours. They drove on dirt roads, driving in circles, so we couldn’t count the directions we were we were driving. And till eventually, we were in the desert of Oregon, which at that point, I didn’t know. You know, there was a desert in Oregon, you know, my interpretation of a desert was like Dry and sand, not knee deep snow and you know, Sage bush for hundreds of miles. So and then we were separated at that point. And then we were there for two months. Two months we were we were there and like you said we had to learn survival skills. I had to make fire from steaks using like a bow drill and you know, we would we’d have to ration our food. We would, you know, always slept under was was a sleeping bag and just a tarp that was just a square sheet. You know, that’s, that’s it. But it was really cool was like a Native American base program. And, you know, after after a certain period of time they give you like a name, you know, like a Native American game. So it was really cool is like a badge of honor, you know, and for me, it was cool. They did like this ceremony when I left that they had never done for anyone before. Because you, you, you also become kind of like a leader with the people underneath you to, you know, the kids coming in, after you and so that that was kind of, I feel like one of my first experiences having to kind of be some type of leader and it felt good to be able, I got a lot of fulfillment, you know, being having to try to help other people and, and guide them. And you know what I mean? So, looking back at that, I think that’s where that started for me is just finding that, what makes me feel fulfilled in life. Is that,
D.J. Paris 11:10 and then how and then Then where did you go from there? So you went to the you went to sort of the middle of nowhere, Oregon? I think I’ve actually interviewed I know, I’ve done at least one interview from from a top Realtor in Bend Oregon. But, but but not anyone who’s had that experience. So
Darrin DeSilva 11:27 they don’t do real estate in the desert out that way.
D.J. Paris 11:30 Maybe, maybe they do, but probably not. Oh, yeah. But so So you were there for two months, you learned not only sort of individual skills about how to be responsible and disciplined and, and all of that, but then it’s like, oh, by the way, now you’re in a leadership position of sorts, and now you can, you can help others, not just helping yourself. So you know, if you really think about not you, but if our audience really thinks about it, like what an amazing, you know, obviously a lot of pain associated with with getting to that place, but But what an amazing experience for somebody to have and cheers to, you know, to your family for making that happen. That is that is that is really remarkable that enough people loved you to to want to see you succeed. And so So you came back from that and then and then then then where did you go?
Darrin DeSilva 12:22 Then I didn’t have a plan. We didn’t have a plan. We didn’t have structure, but we pull up what we like to call a geographical. And we moved from Pleasanton, California to a little cow town in the central valley called Newman, which had about 10,000 people. So we went from the Bay Area, Bay, growing up going to San Francisco, right. And Bart, I mean, all that, you know, San Jose, go into this little cow town, in, in nowhere, it’s about I would say about an hour and a half from where I was.
D.J. Paris 12:55 So So what why, what was the thought process? If I want to go to the smaller community? What was the what was the reasoning?
Darrin DeSilva 13:01 Oh, my grandparents lived there at the time. So my mom yeah, that was the Ria. Yeah, it wasn’t just some random town, it was more because my grandparents had had been living there. And our my mother, my mother, you know, wanted to live closer to them, she felt like there was some support there. And I think that was your reasoning. But from there, you know, I again, I didn’t know anybody and just kind of jumped back to what I do best, and how I how I met people at the time, and that’s, you know, finding the not so good people, if you know, what I mean, you know, people that get into trouble people that, you know, have other issues, addictions, things like that. Sure. That’s kind of, you know, the story of my, my adolescent, but my adolescence, you
D.J. Paris 13:49 know, so you fell back into some older habits. You had more skills now. So that’s good. But again, it doesn’t
Darrin DeSilva 13:56 make a fire if they needed it. Right. Right. That’s all
D.J. Paris 14:00 also some leadership skills to which, which obviously exist beyond I mean, it’s funny, it’s like, look, you know, people have these major experiences like you did out in the the Pacific Northwest desert. And, and, you know, you had a lot of success there. But then you go back to the real world, and it’s not like, well, everything’s magically fixed, right? Like, like, life is still a lot of ups and downs. So so the journey doesn’t stop. And, and as somebody who is who’s had addiction in my, in my history as well, I can absolutely, you know, understand a lot of what you’re talking about. So So you fell back in with some people that maybe weren’t the best, most positive influences you maybe fell into some old habits, and then sort of what happened?
Darrin DeSilva 14:45 Yeah, so you know, I got plugged in with the wrong people. And we were in new and I want to say six or seven years. And through that time period, I definitely got worse and worse. For me personally, you know, I’ve faced addiction alcoholism. I was I was screwed from the moment I was born because I got it all in my family, right? Oh, totally. Yeah, you know, so I think
D.J. Paris 15:12 I’m only laughing because I could I thankfully my parents don’t have it. Thank goodness. And my sister doesn’t, but love many other people in my family too. So I’m with you. I was, I was born with it as well.
Darrin DeSilva 15:26 Exactly. Yeah. So you know, it isn’t genetic. And, and it is a disease, you know? And, and, you know, there’s a lot that can be said about that, you know, especially when you’re going through, you have more of an understanding, it’s something that it’s very hard to understand. If you don’t have it, like when I talk to my girlfriend about it, she’s like, Oh, what, you know, so it’s very, like, it just doesn’t process right. So and that’s okay. And that’s why we have, you know, people that do understand and that, you know, there’s resources for people to find others who get that, you know, and that’s yeah, I just
D.J. Paris 16:01 wanted to interject with my my most I think this is a such an interesting and funny thought that maybe for the rest of our audience who isn’t, you know, doesn’t have to deal with with family members with addiction or addiction themselves. The best way I can explain addiction in one sentence, and this is I’m sure I heard this somewhere, is it’s a, it’s a read, it’s a, it’s considered a medical disease. So it is not a psychological disease, it’s an actual medical disease, acknowledged by by the American Medical Association as an actual medical disease without a medical solution. Without a medical, there is no prescription, there is no medical solution to a medical problem. And that is incredibly unique. For this type of disease, it is actually a disease. So anyway, I just wanted to make that point. Because that makes it makes treatment incredibly difficult. So people with addiction, if you haven’t been through it, or if you have family members that have it, you certainly know how tough it can be. But I always think, you know, a lot of times people think it’s more of a willpower issue. And it’s almost never willpower, in my experience. But anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean to read you, but I just wanted to make No, I appreciate that. There’s no solution to what you and I have, and there’s no way out of it, other than learning how to cope with it, and learning how to exist coexist with with it. So I just wanted to make a big point, because everybody listening knows at least one person who’s struggling with addiction. So something to think about, but I apologize, go right ahead into your
Darrin DeSilva 17:35 Yeah, no, absolutely. And I’m glad you shared that. Because you know, it’s something you know that for me, it I can’t help but be passionate about, because what allowed me to have the life I have today is because I followed people who some, for some reason didn’t find the solution. Yeah. And all I did just like with real estate, just like with with the gym, doesn’t matter, right? You know, I have a coach for real estate, I have a trainer for the gym, I have a sponsor for, you know, recovery, things like that, right? Sure. So it’s just for me, it’s the same, it’s just finding people who have some have what you want, and doing what they’re doing, right.
D.J. Paris 18:24 And also surrendering your own your own sort of identity in a sense, and not in a bad way in a really positive way. surrendering your own need for control, to say, you know, there’s certain things I just don’t do well, or I don’t know how to do, but this person over here does it. And I’m going to figure out what they’re doing. And I’m going to hang with them. Whether it’s a personal trainer, a recovery coach, you know, AAA or what, or medical doctor, you know, whatever it is, you’re you, you know that you can’t always manage everything yourself. And I think that lesson is so important. And most people don’t ever get to a place where you were at where where things were really bad. And you sort of were like, Okay, I give up, I surrender help. I need help. I think I think that is it’s it’s very painful, but it’s also a real gift because it allows you then to say, Who can help me and then you found those people?
Darrin DeSilva 19:19 Absolutely. And the cool thing about all of this is I can apply this to my real estate, business and forth. And frankly, it’s I believe, in my opinion, why I have the life I do today and why I have the career I have is because I have learned the same principles that I can apply to my business. And it’s the same thing, and that’s why I think it’s so it’s been so easy for me to transition because it’s something that I’ve internalized. And it’s it’s powerful. You know, it’s it’s the things that are taught and it teaches you how to deal with the motions it teaches you how to deal with I mean, if I’m with a client and they say something that I don’t agree with or UPS or It upsets me. Sure, you know, emotions can get involved, especially with large transactions, you know, it has allowed me as a business person to check my emotions, check how I respond to things look in the mirror, pause, and, you know, do work accordingly, right? So
D.J. Paris 20:21 make and make a better decision right now, to where maybe things are more impulsive in the past. And, look, this is not just for people with addiction, right? Impulse control is a huge problem for a lot of people, including myself who I would consider myself to be in recovery. But that being said, I still struggle with that. So I think the the all of what you’ve gone through has really set you up. In a lot of ways. I think you’re right, those skills are perfect. But before we get to the real estate, I want to go back because you did something that that I think is really, really difficult, but also awesome. Which is, you know, you then we’re like, okay, you’re trying to pull yourself out of maybe some old habits and you know, some maybe people that that weren’t working with your best interest in mind. And then you started to work at Kirby right for Kirby vacuums.
Darrin DeSilva 21:13 Yeah, so So what led to that is basically, from Newman, you know, went downhill from there. And my mother sold the house that she had paid cash for. And at the time, you know, again, I was raised, I had things, you know, I had to learn responsibility. I don’t learn how to be an adult at a late age. And, and so I didn’t, you know, have a job. I didn’t, I didn’t, you know, the my mom basically took care of me right. After high school after I didn’t, I didn’t seek it because I didn’t need to frankly, right, it was all taken care of. And so, eventually, when when she sold the house, we we were supposed to buy another house with that money. And we just kind of went from hotel to hotel, we moved from from Sonora, California to Modesto to Turlock, we stayed at a truck stop. I mean, that was the life we live for about two years. Just the craziness, you know, it’s a very difficult life. It was until eventually we blew through the entire net profit of of what she got from the home. And you know, we were just kind of living on her SSI checks and till eventually, we were sleeping in the car at times and
ended up in Tracy Tracy, California, and I had gotten a title loan against my car and obviously didn’t make the payments. And so we ended up
saving up enough money to just go stay at Motel Six to get cleaned up and everything and we were able to purchase a couple of weeks. And then the first two days I heard in the morning I hear a car alarm going off flatwork so I can rent it out. And it’s my car on a tow truck yeah being taken off because I didn’t make the payments and I was on some red flag system and that’s how I ended up in Tracy California by the way as I My car got towed and I we got left in a Motel Six so but I’ve never left and call it home so you know somewhere I started and we’re having now it’s kind of funny but we stayed in Motel Six for a while till eventually we got kicked out of there couldn’t afford it and so we were both homeless and went and found a place behind a CVS store stayed there my after about two days my mom left and said she was going to be right back she had come back so you know I’m left you know on my own everything. Everything I own is on my back I’m sleeping in a cardboard box I found a big refrigerator box that fortunately I could fit in. I was also 260 pounds at the time which was a big you know big amount of about 180 now and you know I just thought I lost everything that I had to find only pay for I feel like existed in the world at the time. Fortunately it was close by and you know called everybody in my family that normally I could call and would get me out of it right sure that that’s that was a story my life is I could always figure a way to either manipulate a situation or get my way out. And this was the first time in my life where I the people I call my grandparents everybody said sorry. Go go to Salvation Army go So we’re not helping you anymore. You’ve burned all your bridges. And that was the starting point for me of what turned my life around. My mom didn’t want anything to do with me, she left, did her own thing. And I was I ended up finding a spot on the side of the freeway. And actually, like, as I’m looking at this right now, I have a picture of myself homeless, I keep it in front of me in my office every single day, just as a reminder, and I found a place on the side of the freeway. Stay there, it was like a little igloo. Fortunately, it was like rain proof because it was raining a lot and and I would go hold a sign, I found a sign that some other homeless guy left. And it was like pre written didn’t even really make sense what it said on it, but it got the point across Hey, I’m homeless, I’m hungry, help me. And I would go Hold on the corner. And people will give me food people will give me money. And you know, I would go just try to not figure out a way to numb not dealing with today, not dealing with where I’m at in life not dealing with what happened any any way that I can numb that and just survive. That’s what I did. And did that for a while, a couple months. And until eventually somebody pulled over and talked to me. And they just talked that’s it gave me their time. Even took a picture. I mean, that’s the picture I have up there today was the first time and and then he left and then a couple of days later after I held the sign that sign on the corner. I would head over to the you know, I was heading to the liquor store, go get some food, whatever, you know, I could do and then that way I could just go back and then the gentleman saw me and he pulled over he said hop anybody have something to eat? You know, where do you want to go? I’m like, I’m going to KFC. I love KFC man. Yeah, that was some good stuff. And he took me and he got me something to eat. And eventually he got me into a, he helped. He never gave me a dime. All he did was either pay for, you know, maybe food, maybe gotten a couple packs of cigarettes at the time when I smoked. And that was it. He just gave me his time. That’s it. He didn’t say hey, Darren, here’s $20 Good luck. Right? Which it’s very easy to do. Right. And we think we’re doing good by giving people money, but in my case that would have only been enabling me. Sure if he would have gave me money.
D.J. Paris 27:40 And also, he also gave you I’m sorry, I don’t want to put words your mouth. No, no, no, I imagine that life is incredibly lonely as well. So yeah, now have because, you know, you just said everyone in the family said, Hey, we got to we got to cut you loose right now because we can’t really help you. And then this stranger comes around and says, Hey, you’re I think you’re you’re just fine. You know, I want to be part of of your life, whether it’s in a law, you know, long term capacity or short term capacity. But just even somebody reaching out, was that hard for you to even trust somebody like that? Or was it were you able to sort of, you know, embrace because a lot of times I find that, you know, people who are on their own, you know, there’s obviously a lot of mistrust. There’s a lot of dangerous people out there.
Darrin DeSilva 28:28 Right? Yeah. And you know, and unfortunately, a lot of the people that I met out there, too. I think after a period of time, you get used to being out there, I think I was fortunate enough to only be out there for you know, a few months. But these people who aren’t as fortunate as I was it just becomes their new normal. So they’re like, they’re less likely to want to change because they’ve gotten used to that lifestyle. And, you know, I think where I was at is I was so lonely, so beaten down. They call it the gift of desperation. Yes. And, and that’s where I was at. And I think fortunately, God put somebody in my life at the perfect time when I was ready, when I was when I was willing. And when I was ready to like you mentioned earlier surrender, you know, and, and, and I did you know, I had an option that day when he pulled over to hop in the truck or to continue to the liquor store, you know, and fortunately I jumped in and that’s when my life changed just making that one decision. You know, that one decision and not that you know, is when my life changed
D.J. Paris 29:46 is that day and so so how did you get to only because I just find this so so inspiring. So so you’re you’re at a particularly low moment you you found the strength somehow to make the healthy decision. Jen of, hey, this person wants to help. I’m going to, I’m going to trust you No. And then how did you how did things start to turn around for you? I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Darrin DeSilva 31:30 Well, I instantly was put in a min zone. At that point, when when I it was shared that I was you know, willing and put somewhere, you know, I had helped for the first two months as far as you know, rent. And that was it. But they taught me structure. It’s all like I mentioned, you know, for me, I was not taught, you know, responsibility, or I wasn’t, I wasn’t there was no reason because everything was typically either, you know, handed to me, I didn’t have like, a whole lot in my childhood. But I had I had more than most. And, and my mother made sure that she did the best she could but she was more of a friend, then a parent. And that was what did me wrong and affected me later on in life. So that that’s kind of that’s kind of what happened.
D.J. Paris 32:41 Yeah. And then so you’re in the men’s home. And then they say hey, it’s you know, it’s like we’re gonna help you for a little while, but you need to find employment, you need to start working, contributing to society being a good citizen. And and you started was Kirby your first sort of, and by the way, we let’s tell everybody what Kirby is because I think most of our audience isn’t familiar. I have just nothing but respect for people who who attempt the Kirby job because I think especially in this day and age particularly difficult. So can you talk a little bit about what that what what, what Kirby vacuum salespeople or like or what to do? And then and then and again? Yeah, absolutely. I think this is it. You know, 40 years ago, we’d be like, oh, yeah, people would go door to door like not that big of a deal today. That is not common. So I would love to hear this because I think it’ll people will be like, Whoa,
Darrin DeSilva 33:35 yeah, so I owe a lot to Korea. In fact, I owe everything to Kirby because that’s what opened the door for me into sales. And, you know, I was on the internet, like you said, gotten to the place and they kind of were like, Alright, after 30 days, you need to start, you start getting a job. So I looked on Craigslist, and I saw this ad Hey, open interviews, you know, come on down, right, you know, they they try to rally up and, and so I’m like, Hey, perfect, you know, here’s an opportunity I was excited. You know, when you go from a place of where you’ve lost everything, like they call it a pink cloud you’re on and I just was so happy to just be free. You know, I had been I had been without any substance or anything like that for a while. So it’s like you’re it’s almost like you’re free of your chains and like anything’s possible. So I didn’t care that you know, there was no guaranteed pay. I didn’t care that you know, I just was like hey, it’s a job. There’s opportunity. Let’s go so what their interview you know, they they hired me, right? And what Kirby vacuums is is basically you go door to door, they only sell vacuums door to door if you buy something that’s not that’s from somewhere else. It’s it’s more likely to pre owned back here. Pre Owned but brand new out of the box. They only sell door to door
D.J. Paris 35:04 and and they’re not inexpensive. They’re these are these are nice, very high end vacuums and, and just going door to door. Tell me what that experience was like.
Darrin DeSilva 35:16 Yeah, so it’s it’s nerve wracking. I mean even today when I’m knocking on doors, I use the same Kirby script, you know that I do. Hey, don’t worry, I’m not here to change a religion guys like going like, you know, all these skills and things like that, that I’ve learned in Kirby from getting doors slammed in your face I still used today. And it is it’s nerve racking, they take you in a van, you know, polyene say, Hey, you too, you go canvass this neighborhood. You go out, you walk with the flyer, you try to set up appointments for people, you know, and you say, hey, we’d like to come in and do one area rug one room free of charge, you know, to show you this, how this vacuum works. And you go in? They say yes. And you go in and you you know, I was 260 pounds, by the way at this time. And I sold I sold in about four months, I sold about 12 vacuums. And
D.J. Paris 36:11 and is that a lot? Or is that not a lot? I don’t even know that’s
Darrin DeSilva 36:14 a lot. Yeah, that’s a lot. These are $3,500 vacuum? Yeah, they’re not. And they’re not cheap, but they do everything. I mean, you know, I was washing people’s windows with these things. You could you could do the carpets, hardwood floors, everything, just the vacuum itself is so powerful. I mean, you would vacuum a rug, and it almost looked like it was shampooed because it’s sucking so much dirt out from even underneath the carpet. You know, I mean, I can go the Kirby salesman starting to come out here. You know,
we have a special code for our podcast listeners. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
D.J. Paris 36:51 Because it has to be door to door so you can’t We can’t have a code. And by the way, I want to make a point. For those of us that are familiar with Dog the Bounty Hunter. That’s where he, when he was he was in prison for for a murder charge. And he was released. And that’s how he got his life back and ultimately became well now he’s more of a celebrity but but when he was starting out, he became Kirby’s. I think I have this right. They’re basically one of their top salespeople in the country. So I don’t know if but but for anyone. But anyway, he’s got a particularly a very difficult past story as well. But anyway, so you started having success with Kirby which, by the way, not the easiest sales job, probably about the hardest sales job that exists. Yeah. And and so then Then what happened?
Darrin DeSilva 37:40 Yeah, so then it came down to, you know, a bad month where, you know, I don’t want to, I don’t want to say anything, you know, bad. But in my experience, let’s just say a meeting the manager or the owner of that curvy franchise just didn’t see eye to eye and some things there were some unfair things going on. And, and I couldn’t pay my rent is really what it comes down to came down to. So I had knocked on several doors, tried to get some appointments, to general managers of of cars, car dealerships, and, you know, sales managers, and about three or four different people told me dude, you should drop the vacuum thing and go get into car sales. And I after hearing that so many times, and then finally getting to where I could pay rent doing this thing where I’m like, You know what, I’m going to hit every car dealership, in Tracy until one of them hires me and I picked the day and I said I’m going to start at Tracy Ford at the corner I’m going to walk in and I’m going to go to Honda Volkswagen sure I’m walking in and one of these people is hiring me today. I’m going to start at the end and work my way back so I walked into Tracy Ford taught what to the manager and he hired me on the spot and and I was there for about five years for about four years Yeah, and you know worked my way up and that’s really what what really helped me you know, as I worked my way up in the car business I started seeing my effort pay off you know, I could I could you know my credit started getting better my all these little things that you know, I never really knew or took for granted you know, that mattered so much I was able to you know, get out of the bids place to get my own little spot and it was just it was it was really a blessing for me at the time you know, I moved up to like a manager role in the dealership and and from there you know, bought a brand new car and you know all these little things that they are the promises right and, and it’s just, you know, I they told me when I first kind of came in To make a list of everything you want in the next five years, and I made a list and they said, you, we, the reason we want you to do that is because if you do that, and you continue on the path you’re on, you’re going to short yourself. And I did that. And about a year and a half ago, I came across this list I made. Yeah. And I looked at it and everything was checked off, and more everything I made, that was like a dream list. Like, I’m like, There’s no way I’m gonna, it’s gonna take forever. And it’s so it was just so inspiring to see that, you know, because it really is the truth, you know, the sky’s the limit. And, and I went from the car business and, you know, working my ass off, making, I feel like as much as I could make without moving up to like a General Sales Manager position or finance. And, and I feel like that would have kind of made me just basically live at the dealership, because I already was working six days a week, practically, you know, 910 hours a day. So I was the only thing I could do to make more money at the time was given more time. And, and so that’s kind of what got me into real estate is I saw real estate as something that is the sky’s the limit. And whatever amount of effort you put into it, that’s what you’ll get in return. And it’s your own business. You know, it’s it’s something that you can be proud of, you’re not working for somebody else to make them successful. You know, it’s more risk, nothing’s guaranteed. But I felt that betting on myself was a great investment. Because I knew in my heart that I would work my ass off. And I believed I would make it work. I believed in my heart that no matter what, that’s the mindset I had going in to real estate, I feel like any new agent needs to have that mindset, especially if you’re leaving a full time job that pays you 100 grand a year. And going into this field, that you have no experience, and then there’s nothing guaranteed. You know, that took a lot for me, but I but I did it because I believed I could. And it was the best decision I ever made. One of the best decisions I should say.
D.J. Paris 42:22 Yeah, well, it certainly is incredible, that you know, so many people who start out on the path that that you were on based on, you know, hey, that’s what you knew growing up growing up. And of course, you know, you know what, you know, and, and to be able to, to, you know, to sort of get out of the cycle of that is, is tremendously difficult and also rare. Sadly, sadly rare. But obviously, the story has has a wonderful ending. And here you are today. And not only are you a practicing agent, a successful agent, you were just named one of National Association of Realtors. 30, under 30. Right in the nick of time, because you’re 30 Yeah. Or did you already turn 30 just recently turned 30. But yeah,
Darrin DeSilva 43:14 I recently turned 30. So the cut off is I want to save I think it’s June 1. And it’s weird how it works. It’s kind of like halfway, so anybody that has a birthday, even though there’s still 29 If they have a birthday before June 1, unfortunately, they their last opportunity was the year before to apply. So and my birthday is on the 15th of June. So I just I just made the cut off. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, so it was it was fortunate. Yeah, now I’m on the Big Three Oh, and, you know, I feel like, you know, my my life is, is it’s truly a blessing today. And I, I feel like if I’ve gotten this, this amount of fulfillment in this amount of this many blessings in this two to a little little less than two and a half years in real estate. I can just imagine, you know, where my life will be in my 30s. So I’m looking forward to it. That’s for sure.
D.J. Paris 44:19 I think this I’m curious because for any of for those of us that are versed in anything related to recovery or addiction, we know that surrender, you know, is is really the cornerstone, or the very first part of a recovery process. And the reason why is because our own efforts, we come to a place where we people who struggle with with addiction go, oh, I can’t actually do this. I’m not a I can’t actually live the life I want. I’m not in control, and most most people never have that experience. Right? Most people don’t get to a place where they’re out of control. Roll enough to where they have to surrender. And I’m curious because you have surrendered many times in your life in really extreme ways. How important that that sort of skill is in helping you be successful at real estate. Right, like the surrendering skill, I think I’m almost wondering if that’s maybe the most important part of who you are. Because it enables you to take your ego and your your your identity out of out of a problem, and just go, maybe there’s a solution here, and I just have to find somebody that died curious how important surrender is for you?
Darrin DeSilva 45:40 Absolutely. And I think, you know, just you bringing it up, you probably know how important that is. Because it’s like, it’s it, it’s instrumental to being successful, I think, you know, you have to detach from the outcome, you have to because then what happens is, if I’m attached to especially something as as, as, like money, right, if I’m doing this for money, like, yeah, we want to do it for money and grow. But there’s got to be something more than that, right? And if I go into a listing appointment, and I’m like, Oh, I gotta pay my bills, and I need this listing. And in this, they’re gonna sense that they’re gonna sense that I’m trying to solder desperation. And now I’m cutting my commission. Now I’m so you know, there’s no value there. Right? Like, I wouldn’t want a realtor like that. So, so for me, it’s just detaching from the outcome. Now, fortunately, I’ve had a lot, and I have lost everything more than once. Yeah. So so that’s why for me, like the pain and things that I’ve gone through, I think is it’s, I don’t say easier for me. But it’s just because I know that if I lost everything today, I would be fine. I can rebuild. And and start something new. Right. But I think you got
D.J. Paris 47:02 no, you know, what’s amazing, and I’m sorry to interject, but I think this is a good gut check for a lot of our audience, because I have, I’ve dealt with a few issues that that you have it but but a lot of issues you I have, you have experienced that I have not, and I am I am not confident that if I lost everything, it would be easy to rebuild, I’d have a lot of help. And I think people would help me. But as far as me on my own, I don’t know that I would, I could say I’m confident, but I’ve never had to do it. And I’ve never been in that position. And I think that that has obviously helped. Obviously, nobody wants to have to go through that. But boy to know that if it all went away tomorrow, if you know, for whatever reason, you had to start over again, to just know that I’d figure it out. And to be confident because you’ve actually done it more than once is, is really a tremendous skill that propels people who have you know, who might be at the bottom, who are really struggling to get to a much more elevated position. So I am really because I was thinking about that, as you were saying that I was like, oh, yeah, me too. And I went, No, would I really be okay, no, I probably wouldn’t. It would, I’d have to go through losing everything to really then develop certain skills. So I hope to god I don’t have to but but that gift of desperation is it. You know, that phrase you said earlier, the gift of desperation is a it is it’s a double edged, double edged sword gift, but, but it does actually provide freedom because you’re like, I can do this. It’s not easy, but I can do it. And knowing that I think a lot like, you talked about this with getting a job as in car sales. You’re like, I’m going to get a job, someone’s gonna hire me because I’m gonna go in there and say, you really should hire me, I’m really going. I did that really well, with Kurt with vacuums. I know how to do this, I can do this. Someone’s gonna give me a job. I never have thought that way about myself. And I think that is an incredible thing that you know, I’m going to figure this out. I can figure this out. And that is, that’s amazing. So I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to take over there. But just No, no,
Darrin DeSilva 49:23 I appreciate that. One thing, you know, I do want to make very clear for for me, and everyone who’s listening is I do not believe that I could have done any of this on my own. Right. I know for a fact that the only reason that I have the life I have today is because I surrounded myself with individuals who were willing to help me and were willing to show me away. One person that told me this great analogy. It’s kind of like if you’re trying to climb Mount Everest. You know, if I were to climb Mount Everest by myself, I probably wouldn’t make it back. Yeah, why?
D.J. Paris 50:00 When you die, yeah,
Darrin DeSilva 50:01 I’d die. Yeah, I’d be frozen up there, you know, and but the chances of me making it back with a guide, somebody who has been to the top multiple times who has found a solution, who knows the path knows the way, my chances of surviving and getting to the top are a hell of a lot better. You know, and, and that for me, I, the only reason I feel like I would be able to come come out after losing everything is because I would find the right people to be around, I would seek those people out who who have also lost everything before and came back, you know, and just follow what they’ve done. You know, and I think the only thing that I do have is that belief that it’s possible, you know, like you mentioned with the car dealership, is I believed that it was possible, and I can do it, you know, I just needed help to figure out a way to do it. And, and I truly believe that me on my own, I’m nothing but me, as was somebody else. And with the unit and with the team and with people, we can achieve impossible things. And I truly believe that.
D.J. Paris 51:18 Yeah, it’s like that one plus one equals three kind of thing. It’s like, it really is. The sum is greater than then than the parts, right? It’s it really having i I’ve always thought like, not always I took me to I was in my 30s to realize, oh, I need to counsel with people in life, who will tell me the truth, right, actually be there to say, Hey, man, you’re going a little nutty about this thing, or we see you heading in this direction, which may be great. But also people that are like we believe in you. You’re you know, and we have skills that you know, and just having people around who, who and the good news is, there are tons of people who are willing to help. The hardest part is finding those people. I think, for me, it’s it’s about being willing to ask, because it is hard to ask whether you’re a real estate agent, and you’re brand new, and you’re like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to get clients, I don’t like go talk to I mean, this whole podcast started because I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to like if we could get a list of, of all these stories of top producers and how they made it like I didn’t think, Oh, I’m going to be talking to top producers, I assume somebody else had already done this. And I was like, I’ll just find the podcast that already exists. And I’ll just give it to our agents because they want to, they want to hear from these top producers. And then I went, nobody’s done that. And I went, Oh, okay, well, we should accumulate these stories. But but it’s all because you know, it people who have risen above our, in our, in my experience, have are very willing to tell their story. And, and, and help others. And if you can find people that are willing to help you, that’s great. But you have to you have to go first you have to be willing to ask for help, right? And that’s probably not something you struggle with as much as maybe other people who haven’t been as desperate at times. So let’s talk about, you know, you’re you’re starting in real estate. How did you start your business? I mean, you don’t have the traditional background of like, well, I don’t know, actually, so So did you have a sphere of influence when you started? Or was it like, I’m starting a whole new thing, and I’m starting over from scratch.
Darrin DeSilva 53:34 I mean, a little bit of both. It the sphere I have, I’ve created from car sales and doing that, you know, I was kind of doing a lot of social media, with car sales as well. So I think that helped me because I would have people the same way they they reach out to me for houses. Um, there was the same thing with cars too. And so I would I would establish that branding, you know, as a car salesman, so that transition was really weird. But I think I made the transition very well because I went from being that car guy to real estate, you know, and I announced it ever I’d like to on your obviously I burned the boats today,
D.J. Paris 54:20 right? Yeah, so I cut off all other opera options. I burned the bridge behind me not burn bridges in a negative way. I just I burned the lifeboat. So this is all I got. I’m gonna exactly I
Darrin DeSilva 54:33 announced it to the world. I am leaving the car business. Thank you for all of that. So that way I have some sort of accountability. Yeah, when things get rough, so there’s no turning back. So again, that that just it’s gonna work mindset, you know, it’s gonna, I’m gonna make this happen. And that’s so powerful. Like I think back to that, that mindset, you know, it’s a lot sometimes Was it gonna be difficult to have that same mindset, especially having a little bit more time in the business and just continuing to have it? I don’t, I don’t really don’t know if that’s even sustainable, right, but I think you can get it in waves. But at time, at that time, I had that mindset. And, and that’s what I needed, especially breaking off in real estate. And I joined this little brokerage, you know, local brokerage, that there was like a referral to me and people that I trusted and, and I just went in there, and I had one guy, he fortunately took me under his wing. And he, he really helped me, you know, he, you know, do open houses with me, whenever I would have a question, I would reach out to him, and he would answer them for me. You know, I felt like I was pretty resourceful, fortunately. So I would try my best to not be needy for things. And if I could figure out a way to find it out myself. I would. That’s fortunately what the internet’s for. Right? And Google. And it just asking people to asking other people. So it took me, it took me two months to do my first deal.
D.J. Paris 56:24 Which, by the way, two months is pretty short timeframe for somebody’s first transaction is a real estate agent. That’s, that’s, that sounds like an eternity for those of us in, you know, but we can, everyone listening can remember, you know, doing a deal in your first couple months is not very common. So, so, but cheers to you for even getting that accomplished, you know, yeah, and that’s another
Darrin DeSilva 56:46 thing too, about mindset. Because if there’s any new agents that are listening, you’re going to be told that it may take six months to a year for your first home, you’re going to be told that. And I would hear people say that, and in my head, I would tell myself, you know, maybe for you, right, but not for me, I’m going to make this work, right. And I think if you just again, that belief system, if you have that belief system, and just continue to believe and stay consistent with your activities, just like prospecting, just like working every day, you know, treating it like a business. You know, real estate is one of those things where you put in the work today, and you get the results, a month or two, you know, at the at the soonest
D.J. Paris 57:36 I was gonna say could be a years. Yeah, could be a year. Yeah. And more than
Darrin DeSilva 57:41 likely, it’s gonna be that long, right? But you have to put in the effort to have the mindset that what you’re doing today is going to benefit you later on, right? It’s not going to be
D.J. Paris 57:52 quick. And that’s the thing too, and I hope, I’m glad you you sort of challenged me a little bit on that. I appreciate that. Because it is impressive to do a deal within your first two months, but it’s not unheard of. And it’s absolutely doable. It’s just not as common. But also most people don’t have as much desperation, to say, I gotta make some, I gotta pay my bills, I gotta make something work. It’s amazing, again, back to this gift of desperation. But what happens is by putting the blinders on and realizing, okay, most of my efforts today in real estate won’t manifest to actual income, maybe for a year, maybe six months, you know, a year, whatever, whatever the the, you know, the time sales cycle is in your particular market. But you also end up making some quick luck along the way, right? Like, exactly like it ends up like lucky things start to happen to people who are quite crazy discipline. So it’s not just like, I mean, look, we could say not a whole lot of luck fell your way. Or we could say you had a lot of luck fall your way at the right times. Either way, you have always been on your way up a very disciplined person. You’ve always sort of made your own luck. It sounds like like, going from car dealer to car dealer is no is not fun and beg, basically begging for a job. And I don’t mean begging in a bad way. But being like I gotta get a job. That is is in most people would never do that. Most people won’t go to 10 different dealerships now. You got you got lucky on the first one in a sense. Yeah. But you would have kept going until someone said yes. Anyway. So so the reality of it is you could say, oh, was lucky it was the first one well, yeah, but it might have been the third one or the fourth one or the 10th. One, you would have still got a job. Because well, or maybe you wouldn’t have it then you would have pivoted to something else. But the point is, is you were convinced that there was a way out, and all you had to do was put is put the blinders on and just go to work essentially. And someone’s always going to give somebody a chance. Who has that mentality like that is It’s really kind of a boss’s dream hire, somebody comes in and says, I have to work here, I need to work here, I want to work here. Like that attitude. And I imagine that’s probably endears you to your clients. Because as you show, or you didn’t show, but But you have that picture of, hey, here’s a time when I didn’t have anything much, or much of anything, or maybe really anything I have that picture from, I remember what it was like, and not that there’s anything wrong with with going through that experience. Of course, it’s brought you to where you are today. But it’s nice to sort of say to say, oh, at one point I that that’s that was my reality. Today, I have a different reality. And, and, and, you know, there’s been a lot of people helping me along the way. But it’s really been a lot of effort on your end. So so let’s talk about the future. So you started in real estate, you you had did your first deal, and within a couple of months, and then then how did things progress from there?
Darrin DeSilva 1:01:00 Um, so from there, I always had at least one pending, which was nice, amazing. Yeah, it was, it was nice. And a lot of my business has come from, from my sphere, you know, from referral partners from those sorts of relationships that I nurture, and have developed a system around that. And that’s really where all of my business came my first year. And, you know, it was a blessing I made, I made more my first year than I did at, at my, my car sales job where I was killed, I was selling 30 cars a month, which is pretty good in the industry. You know, and just just crushing it in, in here in real estate, working less, you know, in a sense, like, like, compared to how I was working in the car business, right, where you’re clocked in, you’re at the dealership, right. And that’s also one thing is, like, I just thought, like, if I was able to take that same mentality that I had in the car business, and apply it to, to real estate in my business, which let’s face it, I don’t think any real estate agent really does, you know, and but the ones that do, are super successful. And that’s what, that’s what I I tried to do and have a schedule, you know, just have a system and treat it like like a business, you know, just because I get to dictate my own schedule does not mean, I shouldn’t treat it like a business. And that’s what I’m starting to learn is just trying to have some structure and things like that, instead of treating it just like like a lot of agents treat it just as like a, Hey, I’m a realtor treating it more like this is my business. This is, you know, I need to have systems in place, I need to have a schedule. I add admins, transaction coordinators, you know, having team members just having that growth mindset. And that’s kind of where I am today is starting just starting that process with that. Trying to have the systems right, a guy that was living in a cardboard box, trying to develop systems for a real estate business, let me tell you is not easy. So I fail more than succeed, you know, but I learned and I learned new things every day and I invest in coaching, I invest a lot in real estate coaching, and other things because I know the value. I know the value in coaching is one of the things that I invested in right off the bat when I first started in, and if you have the funds to do it, I would 100% recommend any new agent. And quite frankly, anybody whether you’ve been in the business for 30 years to invest in coaching, because that it for me is is your game, you have to have a guide to climb Everest, you know? And yeah, and accountability as well.
D.J. Paris 1:04:16 Yeah, we all need we all need Sherpas to help us kind of lead the path guide the way Hold keep us on the path to and you know, they always say what it takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to run a business. I mean, it just does. And boy, you know, aren’t you so are aren’t we so lucky that we live in a time now where we can get help globally from people that we wouldn’t have had access to 20 years ago, that just wasn’t wasn’t a thing. You couldn’t hire a virtual assistant 20 years ago they didn’t exist. Or if they did, I didn’t have access to them. And now we can get help from people all over the globe. And who can help us for, you know, reasonable cost. And you’re you’re helping them by providing them income, they’re helping you by helping run your business. I’m always shocked that individual practitioner agents, a lot of them, don’t think to employ somebody, even if it’s just somebody to help plan your day, or somebody to help structure. So you’re now building these systems. And you’re, you know, I’m curious now as the markets shifting, so I want to sort of talk about what’s going on currently in in the real estate industry, because you’re still relatively young, as an agent, also your age, you know, you’re a younger guy. Now, things are starting to shift, right, we’re seeing a slowdown, we’re seeing interest rates rise, we’re seeing, of course, inventories has been challenging for the last couple of years. And, you know, less buyers are now flooding the market, because rates have basically doubled, more than doubled some cases. So so how were How are you adjusting to that? Has that has that hit you yet? has had things changed for your business? Just curious on what you’re doing right now?
Darrin DeSilva 1:06:10 Yeah, so I am very happy the market shifting. I think we needed to slow down. Every buyer that I have right now, it’s like first offers accepted, which is nice. You can keep contingencies. We’re asking for closing credits, we’re negotiating price, like I’m like, wow, you know, you have new builders now like raising the Commission’s they’re buying, or they’re paying out to directors like you know, and sometimes, quite frankly, I’m like, Hey, if you guys, you know,
D.J. Paris 1:06:43 I used to deal with you a month ago. Where’s where’s that? For me? Yeah,
Darrin DeSilva 1:06:48 exactly. Yeah. And, you know, um, so I actually like it. And as far as the listing side goes, you know, I think it is who you who the sellers work with matters more than ever right now. And all the agents who stopped doing the marketing and the activities that that got results, when when you needed to market a house, you couldn’t just stick it in the MLS and put a for sale sign and say, I sold it for 300,000 over asking price, right? I’m the best realtor out there. I hate those posts. I absolutely hate them. Because it’s like, Dude, come on, like, what did you put a for sale sign one. And granted, you know, we all got to market ourselves. And I get that. But you know, as an agent, perspective, agent to agent perspective, it’s like, Come on, guys, you know, so the people I think that are getting hit and doing price reductions and all those things, I think are people that may need to look at what type of marketing and strategies they’re doing on their listings, you know, are they having, are they are they you know, going door to door like, I’ll give you an example. Right after this. I’m heading to Sacramento to do door knocking to invite everybody out to our open house this weekend. Right?
D.J. Paris 1:08:16 Okay, let’s pause real quick because this is a this is a really nice thing. door knocking for open houses. It’s so funny. You mentioned this I had done it did an interview four or five years ago with a guy named Nico apostle. So if anyone else would go back look, look for the just just search on our website for apostle just like apostle from the Bible, same spelling. And he did this and he’s the only other person and I actually just saw him a few days ago, cuz he’s a local guy here. And I was like, I still tell people about your door knocking Open House thing and I’ve yet so you’re like the first person in five, four or five years to talk about it. So let’s talk about what what this is telling me about the strategy for getting people to show up to open houses.
Darrin DeSilva 1:08:58 Yeah. So you know, you pick, you know, 50 I’d say 50. I used to do 100. But it was just too much. Because when you door knock, it takes a little bit more time. If you’re just dropping off flyers, that’s one thing, but I like to go up to the door. Because you you you have a conversation. And when you talk about like cold calling and making phone calls, the whole goal of all of that is to get face to face with the client. Right? That is the only goal. So imagine you have a listing, you actually have a reason to talk to somebody and you’re I’m not asking anything for you. I’m simply inviting you to check out your neighbor’s house, right,
D.J. Paris 1:09:39 which everybody wants to do just out of their own curiosity.
Darrin DeSilva 1:09:43 Exactly. So like what better way to leverage something when I’m not asking you to buy or sell anything, right? I’m inviting you to sing Hey, come on down. You know, we want to get your take on you know the house. Maybe if you can give us some feedback. We’d love for you to come over. We got some Wine, we got some, you know, work d’oeuvres, just come down, you know, in check it out. And hey, if you happen to know anybody that’s looking to move into this neighborhood, a family of friend, you know, we’d love to maybe get in touch with them, whatever you want to say to try to try to convert, right? But yeah, you go up to the door, you know, if it’s not specific neighborhood you knock they answer and you just simply, here you go. It’s Kirby one on one for me, right? He’s
D.J. Paris 1:10:28 gonna say this is Kirby. Yeah, you know, you have
Darrin DeSilva 1:10:31 your fliers in your hand. And the first thing you do when they open the door is you just stick your hand up, you hand them the flyer Hey, guy, and smile, you always smile, right? That’s the first impression big smile. Hey, guys, you know, and, um, just that and again, you know, back to the whole cold calling, and just doing phone calls. In general, you’re the whole point is to be face to face, I’ve literally all I’ve done is walk didn’t cost me $10,000 For lead, nothing, I literally walked over to this person’s house, who is a potential lead, and I and I gave them something of value. And I’m now creating a conversation with them. And if I if I track my numbers, I’ll know that if I talk to 10 people that I’ve knocked on their door, I’ll probably get, you know, two or three emails and phone numbers and one potential appointment to come back and talk about potentially selling their house.
D.J. Paris 1:11:32 Right. So is that are those numbers about right? So maybe knocking on 50 gets you about 10 conversations, which gets you two or three emails, which maybe nets you one customer and one opportunity, one opportunity? Yeah, so
Darrin DeSilva 1:11:47 So whether it’s by buying or selling, it’s it’s just an appointment lead generation, right. And that all that all was free, you know, so
D.J. Paris 1:11:56 it’s, it’s free, and it takes it’s free. And it just takes time. And it takes willingness. And it takes a little bit of getting over the lump in your throat to knock on a door of a stranger and, and I always I always have told tried to tell our agents. It’s not creepy if you’re not a creep. If you’re a nice, normal human, and again, women have a different and I’m not here to say it’s equal for men and women, obviously women have additional safety considerations. And maybe this wouldn’t necessarily be something a woman may want to do just for safety sake. But and I’m not here to to get into a gender conversation, but certainly, you know, think about safety. But you know, for doing that. I’m curious. Well, this is this is a question that I think will better answer this. How many how many other agents in your market? Are you aware of that door knock for open houses? Like you do,
Darrin DeSilva 1:12:56 I’m outside of my brokerage zero. I think the only reason I hear some of the people in my brokerage do is because we have you know meetings every week and people share what works for them so you hear it more often than none. Now doing it and being consistent with it, I think are two different things. You know, they do it for one open house and take a couple of Facebook photos and say hey, I did it. Which I’m totally guilty of too. I’m not any you know, consistency, that’s the hardest thing. But I find myself being able to be aware of that fortunately and and really trying to look in the mirror and seeing Okay, I need to be consistent with this. Otherwise it doesn’t it doesn’t work so there’s definitely I think if more people did it and did it consistently, they would see results no matter what you do. Right right.
D.J. Paris 1:13:52 So it doesn’t have to be door knocking I’m just saying yeah, but but but but I love I love that particular one because it’s it’s got that old school kind of like I don’t really want to do it. It’s it’s it’s way harder than picking up a phone. Phones are way harder than reaching out on social media. And not always not it’s not always that the hardest activity is the best activity but this particular activity I love because it’s it’s incredibly humbling it’s it’s not an ego based thing right? You can’t you’re not showing up like hey, look at how cool I am it’s a very humbling thing to have. Most people go I don’t really want somebody knocking on my door so you so you do have to go through a lot of of people baby poking through the looking through the windows. Yeah, who is that guy? What do you want? And and obviously you’re you’re a professional person so so you know you have you know how to dress and how to present yourself. But I think it is a wonderful experience. And by the way, for those of you who say open houses don’t work, do this. Well, so how do you do Would you go? Do you do it a couple of days before? Do you do it the morning of when do you do the door knocking for open houses? Yes. So
Darrin DeSilva 1:15:05 I typically do it a couple of days before, I know some people like to do it the weekend before. But I like to be fresh. Yeah, you know, fresh in people’s minds, because chances are that paper I hand them is gonna go straight from their hand to the trash can totally toe. So all I want them to see is my name in the bait. And your name should be the biggest thing on there other than, like open house. So that way, at least if they,
D.J. Paris 1:15:32 if on their way to the to the garbage, they see your name,
Darrin DeSilva 1:15:35 they see your name exactly. So you’re brand new yourself. And you know, and then just, you know, open house invite. So,
D.J. Paris 1:15:44 I know that and I didn’t mean to get to get stuck on this. But I think this tip alone is so important. And it doesn’t mean you have to go door to door for your open houses. But if you’re having if you’re going to all the effort to put an open house together, and I’m not saying Darren, I’m talking to our audience directly, you know, go the additional extra step and canvass the neighborhood. Really politely knock on the door, say, hey, just so you know, I’m listing a home down the street, thought you might be interested in checking it out, here’s a little bit more about the property if we’d love to have you over just to see come see the property, maybe give us some feedback. That would be awesome. It’s it’s, it will net you people showing up. So if you’re somebody who says open houses don’t work, I only want to hear open houses don’t work because I also knocked on 100 doors and still nobody, then you can tell me open houses don’t work. Right. Darren is here to tell you open houses work. But you have to probably put maybe more sometimes you have to put more effort in than just throwing it up on the MLS and saying Come Come check out the open house.
Darrin DeSilva 1:16:49 Right. And the only reason for me that I’m doing open house is because you with the listing, you can leverage you know, there’s there’s ways you can leverage buyers listings to but it’s more like direct mail and stuff like that. I don’t think it’s as effective. A listing you can really leverage in the only read the open house is not going to sell you. It’s not going to sell the house. Right? The whole point is you’re very lucky. Yeah, unless you’re very lucky you get you get somebody that walks in and sees it and you know, and that that happens from time to time. But regardless, if they really want to see it, they want to call their agent and have them show it to him. You know. So really all the open houses, it’s to generate you more business. That’s it, you’re leveraging one opportunity and making three more, you know, I can’t tell you how many buyers I had come in that are unrepresented and do an open house where not only did I get them in contract on the house I was selling but they had to sell house two to three deals. And one that happened that happened twice to me last year six deals just from one open house, right. And so you know, little things like that. And it doesn’t happen every time. Right. But again, it’s just it’s consistency. So that’s what I believe, again, belief, like I know, if I stay consistent, do I do I get deterred? And do I get down like Oh, this isn’t working man. Let me try something else. Yeah, 100% I get shiny object syndrome, right?
D.J. Paris 1:18:22 Oh, he too? Sure. No, we’re gonna fix everything. If I had that. That’s what I need. Yeah,
Darrin DeSilva 1:18:28 yeah, exactly. Let me listen to this guy and do this. And I’ll try this for two weeks, and I don’t get results. So now I’m gonna try this. If you can’t, you have to, you have to be consistent, no matter what you do. And then after doing it for, you know, six months, you know, three, four months, whatever it is, everything’s different. Then make your judgment. Maybe this isn’t for me, you know? Or maybe I need to try something different, or my approach is wrong. Or, you know, it’s for me, it’s like always looking within what can I do differently, not pointing the finger. You know, that’s the one thing like just for my personal life to once I stopped pointing at everybody else. And I started pointing the finger to me and seeing what I need to do better when I need to change what what I can do. Then I started letting everybody else or not letting everybody else control my destiny control. And I started taking responsibility in allowing me to control my life and need to control where I want to end up right because I can change my actions but I can’t change yours. I can’t change the brokerage. I can’t change anything so I can’t blame it on the brokerage. I can’t blame it on the current condition the market conditions. I can’t Well all I can do is adjust right. I think this market going kind of back to your your question about the market. I think this market is it’s going to show the trooper professionals and amateurs and people who do this as a side business or just don’t treat it how they should, you know, don’t take it seriously. Like we’re dealing with people’s largest assets. Like these, these are people’s lives. You know, I have clients crying to me sometimes because of how, how stressful the process can be. And and it’s like, I want to make it so smooth for them that I don’t have to hear one person ever tear up. That’s that’s where my in like, how can I make this escrow? Or this selling or buying? How can I make this process just so smooth for my clients? To where all they have to do is worry about packing. Right?
D.J. Paris 1:20:43 You know, it’s funny, I, I just I absolutely could not agree, I went through this process. A year ago, I bought a primary residence was not my first time buying a home. But it was my first time in a while buying a home. And I also work in real estate. And we have like, almost 800 agents here. So you would think that I would be like, pretty, I’m sort of in the industry, and I’m kind of like, shouldn’t be that emotional about it. And thank God, I had a people to help me through my own emotional storms of my own transaction, which was pretty normal. And there wasn’t even any major hiccups. And I thought, you know, I started no more than the average person who’s I’m not, you know, I’m not a product practicing agent. So I don’t know as much as you. But I know enough. We have enough agents here that I sort of feel like I have a general idea of how it all works. But it was so incredibly stressful. So I was like, Oh, I forgot how it feels. And you’re so right, that having the job of the realtor, at least for me, was keep DJ calm. And I and my boss was the guy who was keeping me calm. You know, he was he was he was the one where I went, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do this, and so freaking me out. And then, you know, and I’m not somebody who doesn’t handle things? Well, I think. But even for somebody in the industry, it was crazy stressful. And it was a perfectly normal transaction. So I think you’re absolutely right. And then now think about, you know, of course, everyone else who isn’t in real estate doesn’t doesn’t remember what it was like to buy a home, because maybe they did it 10 years ago, or they haven’t ever done it. And now and now we’re in multiple offer situations, still even. So you have a lot of stress there. So I think you’re right, that you making things as stress free, of course, it’s still going to be stressful is really the main benefit of working with realtors having somebody say, Don’t worry, I will keep you up to date I’m on it. Do you find that that’s the most important part of your job is sort of managing, being on top of it so that your clients don’t you know that they’re able to, like you said, all they have to worry about is moving.
Darrin DeSilva 1:23:04 That’s it, it’s just communication to keeping people in the loop. If there’s, if there’s no update, send them a text saying hey, there’s no update, you know, don’t just not text them. Right? Like, like little things like that, that I’ve found people really appreciate. And not only that, but the service you give. Like to me it. I focus the reason I give high level service like that when I want to take care of people. But really, it’s because I want people to refer me to their friends, family and people that they know, because of how great of a job that I did, right? There’s all there’s always some, there’s a motive behind it, right? And then that’s the truth, you know, because that’s what I value, I want to be known as that guy that makes it smooth for people. So it’s in everybody’s best interest to focus on those things, too. So that way, you’re you can have a very lucrative referral business referral based business where you’re just getting referred clients left and right. You know, like, that’s the dream. You know?
D.J. Paris 1:24:15 Yeah. And it all has to do with service and discipline. Right. So So you have echoed that over and over and over again in the time we have and I think it’s a good place to sort of, sort of wrap up today because, wow, I feel like I’ve just been on this emotional journey with you. I appreciate your vulnerability, your honesty, your willingness to share some of some of your life sort of story and I think that is a takes tremendous courage and, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. So congratulations. And by the way also, not just me recognizing it. Clearly National Association of REALTORS thinks you’re poor. be special as well, awarding you the 30, under 30, which I know a few people, I know many people who have received that award. And they’re all they’re all amazing people. So you are now of course in that same same rarefied air, which is, I’m sure very humbling for you. But it is really impressive to the rest of us. So, by the way, we should also mention that Darren is now in a place where he’s like, I am now expanding, I’m building up this thing. And maybe he’s going to need some additional help and wants to build out his team. So if so, tell us, tell us who you’re looking for. Because we have lots of agents who listen from all over the country. Who are you looking for? Who would be a good fit for you and your team?
Darrin DeSilva 1:25:42 Yeah, so for me, I’m looking for somebody that’s coachable. That is, is willing to learn? I look for people that have more questions than answers, right. And that, for me is somebody who would fit into the team, I it’s not about you, selling a million houses, it’s not about it’s about your attitude and your work ethic. And you willing, if you’re putting in the work, and you’re showing up, that’s all I would ask for. And that’s, that’s, that’s the only requirement for me, is being coachable, being showing up. And getting into action doing what you say you’re going to do, you know, whatever your goals are, if you say you’re going to do something, and we then next week, we go over what you did the prior week to get there and you didn’t do them, those are things that I I don’t like to do, because here’s the thing, I, I have a coach, too, that I am accountable to who holds me accountable. So I expect the same thing from any of my agents, right. And that’s the kind of team I’m building. It’s something like that, and we grow together. And it’s a culture. And that’s, and that’s what I’m looking for. So I’d love for anybody that just wants to have a conversation or just talk about real estate, that’s, you know, in in Tracy area, San Joaquin County, Central Valley area to reach out to me, you can you can look me up online, and I would be more than happy to have a conversation with you guys and, and see if, you know, potentially working together would make sense.
D.J. Paris 1:27:27 And fun fact, my middle name is Joaquin. So I am a big fan of the Joaquin Valley. But for anyone out there who is in sort of central, or East Bay Area, Central Valley, and just you know, is is wanting to explore other options or wanting to work with somebody like Darren, who is really still at the beginning part of his career. And he’s already just on the right track to be crushing it, he’s already crushing it. But to go even beyond that, boy, I would join your team in a second. If I was a practicing agent, I don’t say that lightly. And I don’t say that, as as a platitude. It’s the absolute truth because I’m like, you have a track record of success. And you know what it takes. And so I encourage anyone out there who’s interested in looking at other options to consider the DeSilva real estate research real estate team and visit Darren at his website, which is DiSalvo, real estate.com. And that’s d s iLv. A real estate.com. Also, you can find him on Instagram at Deron, which is with an ID AR R I N underscore to Silva links will be in the show notes. Darren, this is probably the longest interview I’ve done in 400 episodes. Now, I hope I hope it was interesting for our audience as it was for me, I trust that it was I am so I don’t want to say I’m proud of you. Because that suggests that I’m in a different I see you as appear as an equal, for sure and somebody to look up to and admire. So I think you you are really somebody who has got amazing things ahead of him. But just the skills that you’ve developed, I think are are the truly truly incredible to to move from where you were to where you are now. And you can just tell that that you you seem to be at some level of peace and some level of of normalcy, which I’m so glad that you were able to find for yourself. And not only that, but be able to thrive and build something. It’s It’s It’s inspiring, and I hope our audience feels the same way I know they do. Please everyone follow Darren on Instagram. Check him out on his on his website, reach out to him. If you want to explore joining his team, he’d love to talk to you as well. And he’s just a good guy. So So reach out to him. Let him know that you appreciated him sharing on our episode. And before we go to we just ask everybody to do one quick thing to help oscaro, which is just a telephone, I think one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this really inspiring, impressive story with Darren is taking a selfie. So I am, I’m waving in the background here. But I want everyone just to tell one other person about this episode, send this to them, especially somebody who may be struggling right now in their business, or maybe with personal issues. And maybe they’re thinking of getting out of real estate. Or maybe they’re thinking that this just isn’t the right. The best path for them right now, maybe this would encourage them to get back on track. So shoot this over to him. And honestly, anyone really could could learn a lot from Darren, whether they’re a top producer or they’re struggling, so send a link out, send him over to our website, keeping it real pod.com. We appreciate it. All of our episodes are there or you can also find us anywhere podcasts are served. So please subscribe. And also last thing to please leave us a review whatever app you might be listening to this on. Let us know what you think of the show. Your comments, help us continue to improve as well. So Darren, you’ve given us a tremendous amount of time, and I know you got to race out of here to get to your next appointment. I hope I didn’t keep you too long. Really, really super proud of everything you’ve accomplished and also what you’re willing to share. You’re a great guy and we are a super excited to see your you continue to dominate the Central Valley market. So keep it up and stay in touch with us. We’re going to be checking in on you. And awesome, man. Well, hey, and congrats on the 30 under 30 thing. Huge, huge deal there. So I hope to hope hopefully you’ll come down to the Orlando NAR conference this fall. If you get out there, we’ll definitely have to meet up and say hi. So, congrats again. Thanks for being on our show. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. All right, Darren to solve everyone. Thanks for being on the show. On behalf of everyone. Thanks, Darren. And on behalf of Darren and myself. Thanks to the audience for sticking with us to the end. Tell a friend about our show and we’ll see everyone on the next episode. Thanks, Darren. Awesome. Thank you
Why Professionalism Is Your Best Marketing Strategy • Francie Malina
Jul 29, 2022
Francie Malina the team-leader of Francie Malina Team with Compass in Westchester County NY talks about how she got into real estate and how the moment she entered the market helped her build her business. Francie discusses how her team is built and how it works. Francie also emphasizes the importance of leisure time and how that makes you a better professional. Last, Francie discusses how she behave if she would have to start her career over in another country.
D.J. Paris 0:00 As an agent, how do you take your professionalism to the next level? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Francie Molina. Before we get to Francie wanted to give you a couple of quick announcements number one actually requests not even announcements, I need something but they’re pretty hopefully reasonable and simple request number one, tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from talk listening to an episode with a top producer like Francie and send them a link to either our podcast website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button. And the second thing is to leave us a review whatever app you might be listening to the show in, whether it’s Apple podcasts or Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Amazon, you know, wherever else, let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. We read every review and comment and it helps us improve. But enough about all that let’s get to the main event my conversation with Francie Molina.
Today on the show we have Francie Molina from the Francie Molina team compass in Westchester, New York. Let me tell you more about Francie. Francie is the team leader of the 10 person, Francie Molina team and went Westchester County, which is just north of New York, New York City. Francie is more than an award winning top producing agent. She’s also a powerful force in the Westchester market and a highly sought after industry thought leader through her involvement as a women of Compass regional leader, and also co founder of the women of Compass clubhouse, and a founding member of realme Global which is a worldwide luxury real estate Think Tank. Francie keeps her finger on the pulse of issues affecting the market. In 2021, France’s team held the distinction of selling the most homes in the county, which is incredible because Westchester County is incredible. Please everyone visit Francie on her and her team on their website, which is Francie molina.com. Fr ANCIE Molina ma l i n a.com. There will be a link to that in our show notes. And also please follow her on Instagram or her team on Instagram at Francie Molina team also link in the show notes. Francie, welcome to the show.
Francie Malina 4:08 Thanks for having me. I’m super excited.
D.J. Paris 4:11 I feel that you know, when we just first started talking, I was like, I feel like I’ve known you for a long time. We just very comfortably started communicating. And I am really, really excited to have you on the show first for all of our in I’m sort of geographically challenged and my a bit embarrassed to ask but for anyone who isn’t that familiar with New York geography? Where is Westchester County?
Francie Malina 4:39 That’s a great question, actually. Because most people have no idea. So it’s directly north of New York City. So you’ve got Manhattan and then you have the Bronx and then you hit Yonkers and you’re in Westchester, so no bridge between the commute which is like New Jersey you have to cross the George Washington Bridge or Long Island you’re crossing either the Throgs Neck or the Whitestone. Westchester County is a suburban commute Double area to New York City without a bridge straight up parkways highway straight up. So it’s a highly sought after suburban marketplace for folks who are in their living in New York City or just want close proximity to New York City. And it also has a distinction of being carved out of a forest. So it’s really I mean, almost every area of Westchester is just, you know, mature trees and beautiful nature. And we have bears walking in our yard and Fox and coyote and Turkey. And, you know, we have the distinction of like being 15 miles from New York City, but still have
D.J. Paris 5:33 nature. Isn’t that incredible? That that have that that juxtaposition of, you know, the the busiest city in the country? And then 15 miles beyond it. It’s you know, there’s you’re you’re battling bears and nature. And how lovely, gosh, I’ve I’ve always heard of Westchester and I’ve really never spent time in Westchester County. So I’ve been to the oh, gosh, I’m so we’re West Point. I’ve been to West Point.
Francie Malina 6:06 So beautiful. That’s the bridge Cross River. So
D.J. Paris 6:10 that’s probably the closest I’ve been in. That was insane. And I was like, just so beautiful. But let’s, let’s learn more about you. Where do you come from? How did you get into real estate? Tell us your story.
Francie Malina 6:22 So my story is not that exciting. But I’m from originally from Connecticut. And then we ended up we lived in New York City, my husband and I when we were first married. And then you know, as soon as you started to think about our family, often folks that I would say 50% of the New York City population moves out for space in schools or 30%, depending on the year. So we did the same. So we moved up to Irvington on Hudson, which is on the Hudson River side of Westchester County. So it’s the west side of the county. And I’m been living there for 31 years. And I ended up in real estate because I was a formerly in banking, I was at the Federal Reserve Bank years before that. And when I decided to, you know, I had sort of the break in the action to kind of leave the kids and start a second career. My husband and I had some less than stellar real estate transactions in our history. And I always felt and we always felt we’re pretty tight Bay on steroids. And we always felt like our agent just showed up with a key. And that was really it. And the worst story was that we live on a private road and the house we’re in now. And it was a few days before closing before we even knew that. And we were responsible for maintaining the road. And it’s unclear who owns the road. But we own at least in front of it of our house. So we’re responsible for all those potholes. So I think subconsciously, I had it in my head that, you know, the bar was pretty low in real estate, and I love people. But more importantly, I love numbers and models and financial stuff. So that combination, so I decided to get my license on a whim, I’m telling you, this was not a thought out thing. I was at the gym, and I thought I was gonna take a real estate class, a friend said I’ll do it with you. And again, now 12 years later, I run a team of 10. And it’s been amazing. It combines all the things I love.
D.J. Paris 8:08 Yeah, but you don’t just run a team of 10, you’re on a team of 10 that sells the most amount of property in the county. And to do that within a decade, let’s let’s just be honest, is a really impressive achievement. And you’re too humble to sort of brag about it, but I’m going to brag about it. Because I think that’s an incredible achievement. I’ve been in this industry longer than that. And I’ve I’ve rarely rarely seen that anywhere in the country. So tell us sort of how did you so you talked about, you know, real estate kind of put together a lot of the different qualities that are you and that you love. Tell us how that work? What what did that journey look like?
Francie Malina 8:47 Well, so in the beginning, I came into the business around two in 2010, May of 2010. So obviously the market time. But in the in the end, it was the best of times, because I could sit in the office, listen to other agents, especially when you you know, if you want to be a millionaire, you surround yourself with millionaires, if you want to be a great agent, you surround yourself with a lot of top agents. So I would listen to how they did business. And because it was slow. You know, I wasn’t they weren’t running in and out all the time. And also there still was floor time. So you could sit there and if the phone rang, you might have the honor of getting a lead. So I spent a few years doing that. And that was really good for me because for me this was going to be a marathon not a sprint anyway, even though Westchester is big, all the communities are very small. And we live in work and then our kids go to school in them. And in my experience, most of my friends raising their kids would kind of cross the street to avoid their agent after buying the house. And that was not the kind of relationship based business I was going to build. So it had I you know, got into a hot market and got all this business thrown at me. I probably wasn’t prepared to do it very well. So I was glad that I had the time to learn the business before I was hitting the road running. So therefore A couple of years were slow. And, and then, you know, as I worked with lots and lots and lots of buyers from the city, and worked lots and lots and lots of weekends, they referred me their friends and their neighbors. And over time it builds, I always say, if you run a relationship based business and you stay in touch, you show up and follow up, you start with like a little bucket of clients, and that bucket becomes the storage container, and then it becomes a moving truck. And then it becomes a factory warehouse, which is the need for the team. And that’s how it worked out. You know, we really my team is a part of the fabric of the communities in which we live, we’re always giving back, we always show up and follow up in every way that we can. So even the newest agents on my team are still are building relationships and getting referrals from those relationships. So you know, the pot just keeps getting bigger.
D.J. Paris 10:49 Wow. So you really started out helping people transition from city living out to rural, more rural living, I grew up in a more rural environment as well. So I can I can appreciate that. But yeah, so So talk about so for the first couple of years, you come in the markets kind of at the bottom at this point, which, which I think you brought up a really good point that a lot of people exited the industry, the business, a lot of realtors left the industry. And a lot of realtors were avoiding clients because of of all the of all the challenges and and also you saw an opportunity yourself you said that maybe your own experiences with with realtors weren’t always super positive, and you’re like I can do this better? Or at least I can do this as well, if not better. You know, I’m curious on since you’ve seen people come and go, you’ve seen agents start and have success and not have success. What do you usually when you bring on a new team member who’s new to the industry? What do you usually have them do to sort of, you know, so understand that, yes, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, but what are they doing day to day to kind of build that pipeline?
Francie Malina 12:04 Yeah, so all the agents on our team, we’re basically new when they join one maybe had some experience, a little experience, we just took on a seasoned agent, the first one ever, and I love new agents. Because if you join our team, you’re you’re you’re kind of following our credo we chase reviews, not commissions. So you’re going to learn the business before you’re out there doing, you know doing much so you’re shadowing you’re you’re coming to the office, you’re listening to us, we know our tax rates, and every community in Westchester has amongst the highest taxes in the county. So that’s really the most important thing you need to know when you’re showing houses. You’re understanding the different lifestyles, you’re learning all that and then you’re following us, you know, appraisals, inspections, inspections are big in the suburbs, right in the city. It’s an apartment building or a co op. And following us around learning the pricing. And we don’t really have a firm timeframe. Typically I hear other teams say oh, you can’t go out and show and sell for three months. We always that’s always the goal. But somehow an agent we just took on in September last year, we were gonna hold her out for three months. And by November she was out showing and selling and she’s like, we’ll close 10 deals already. Because she was like a sponge. There’s there’s, you know, nine others to tell you how to do things were very collaborative, we meet every Tuesday without fail. And then we also do team time blocking and other meetups. So there’s a lot of a lot of, you know, a lot of hands to help.
D.J. Paris 13:34 It’s It’s really impressive. And I’m you know how just to give our listeners some understanding of your volume, because I think it is something that that helps provide some context. Tell us what is this month look like for you guys?
Francie Malina 13:48 Yeah, so I always the stat that I was so proud of the team for last year was we sold 153 houses so every two and a half days we close to house. And I just thought there’s they’re just amazing. I mean, you know, lots of the team of young children have lots of personal things going on in their life, but they do these are full time jobs for them. They’re not agents by accident. They’re agents on purpose. They show up and follow up and it’s really amazing. My kids are grown it’s a little easier and they but they they get get there every day and and do it. So this month, I will probably in June we’ll probably close between 60 and 70 houses. But that’s typical because it’s a school district you know, this is a school district buyer. Yeah, because we have a lot going on I think so far this year, you know over 90 total.
D.J. Paris 14:37 Wow. Just just incredible. And you guys go go go and I love that. What what where do you find what’s the biggest challenge right now for your group? Because I we don’t ask that question enough. And I think oftentimes people learn the most from challenges so we’re what what do you see as the biggest challenge right now for your business?
Francie Malina 14:58 Yeah, our biggest thing challenges is the weekends. It’s you know, especially up until you know, end of May, a house came on, it was gone. If it lasted through the weekend, we were lucky if it had, you know, less than 20 offers, we were lucky. So you know, the, on a Friday night an agent puts a house on and by Sunday, if you can’t show it, because you have your fully booked or you have something else on your schedule, perhaps a wedding or a family event, you know, that client misses out on the, on the house, or obviously now there’s a team so we can help each other. But that that inability to schedule your life is so hard. And in COVID, we were busy throughout COVID. Because we were even though we were non essential in New York, we were showing I feel like I made it was March 20. By that we were out showing by April 15. Sitting outside while our clients went in, but people were calling us from all over to you know, to buy a house in the suburbs. So we were out and about. So for you know, last like two and a half years, we really haven’t had a break. So it feels like those weekend, the weekend. Is such a burden at this point.
D.J. Paris 16:04 Yeah. And have have rising rates affected your buyers much has that been a concern? Because I and the only reason I’m bringing it up and I know everyone’s got a different take on it. But I always think that this this is something that I want. It’s not that I always think I hear agents talking about rates, rates, rates, rates, rates. So I’m curious on how that how that affects your business and how you maybe talk to me, maybe pre approval letters might not really be as well, they need to be rerun right now maybe, right?
Francie Malina 16:39 They definitely do. And I mean, as you know, a 1% interest rate increase reduces their brain purchasing power by like 12%. So it definitely is affecting them. I will also, I would also like to add because I’m hearing this everywhere I go every mastermind group meeting, I mean, it’s like interest rates, interest rates, interest rates, interest rates, interest rates. It’s also this isn’t really the first summer where we feel free to go do things where families feel free to be on the sidelines of the baseball game, send their kids off to sleepaway camp kind of relatively easily, all go on vacation. So we also feel like it’s just a little bit of a there’s a buyer fatigue in the market after a really, really tough market. And people just want to live their summer, normally. So if you’re buying a house this summer, you’re on the phone with your attorney, and you’re dealing with inspections, and you have all this other stuff going on. So our slowdown is also somewhat driven by that they’ve been in the January to June or may market it was a nightmare. And now they’re just tired. Now they’re using interest rates as an excuse, or just the the normalizing of the market takes a while because the sellers don’t adjust their pricing that rapidly. They’re talking, they’re out on the lawn mowing their lawn, and their neighbor says I got X for the house. So now they want why. So it’s just a bit of a normalization process. And as we all know, change in real estate is slow. So we just have to wait for people to adjust to the new interest rates, you know, get their summer plans out of the way. And in our market, it’ll be fine. Most folks who moved to Westchester want proximity to New York City, once base schools, nature safety, whatever it is, there’s a whole litany of things you get from it. So it’ll pick back up. Again,
D.J. Paris 18:18 when you when you meet when you work with a buyer or a seller. What’s the most important part of that first interaction like what are you looking for? In order because you talked about at the beginning, hey, when you were working with with other realtors, sometimes it was like they were just opening doors and that was kind of it? What type of relationship are you looking for with your clients? Sure.
Francie Malina 18:42 I forgot to mention that when I got into the business. I had the benefit of coming into the business sort of with Zillow and with realtor.com and Redfin and all the transparency that was occurring in the market. It obviously it started a little earlier. But so to me, the industry, it was an industry that was rapidly changing. And I worked with agents who had been doing it a certain way for many, many years. And as we all know, pivoting is very tough and slow. So I’m coming into an industry that you know, everything’s on Zillow, thank God. I mean, I’m not, not because it’s on Zillow, but I do love the transparency of the information, especially in a county like ours where taxes are criminal. So in fact, Zillow is taxes are wrong for Westchester County, so maybe it’s not Zillow, but that they can go to the websites and find the real estate taxes, because that’s the most important thing that we can share with our clients is the cost of living in Westchester. It is actually cheaper to live in Westchester than in New York City, obviously real estate’s cheaper. And also you don’t pay New York City income taxes if you live in Westchester, even if you earn your income in New York. So that’s about a three or 4% reduction for a lot of people so it’s a big benefit, but the property taxes are crazy high and the property taxes on a $4 million brownstone in New York City is are like $2,000. So when we really need To make sure they understand the difference right away, because if they find their dream house, and then they’re finding out that the taxes on that dream house are, you know, 30,000 They haven’t been educated. So we’re always educating our clients as when when our when we start with a new client, they get a full buyer packet full of information about Westchester and access to our buyer resource website, which has more information than you can digest, where you know, we are trusted advisors on the West Chester marketplace, there’s almost nothing that we don’t know the answer to or can’t get the answer to. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 20:31 think knowledge is it’s one of those hurry up and wait sort of situations where if you really want to be the person that your client picks up the phone to call, you really have to accumulate information, right, you have to accumulate knowledge. I’m curious. I was I was at a breakfast this morning. Actually, I was playing Francie. I was I was at a breakfast this morning with a bunch of other compass agents use a compensation. And we were talking about studying the market every day or and I was curious. You know, do you spend time every day looking at listings looking at the MLS? Curious if you have any habits for for agents, because, you know, there’s a lot of times agents wake up and they’re like, I don’t know what I should do today. So curious what you might suggest,
Francie Malina 21:17 oh, I have habits. So we are an MLS region, which is very helpful. So I look at the hot sheet more than once a day, the hot sheet is the new listings coming soon is what went into contract. You know, you’re just that’s how you keep your finger on the pulse of the market. Right? If, like, if you go on our hot sheet today, there’s like three pages of actives. If you went on our hot sheet, you know, two months ago, there’d be you know, one half page of actives, right, and the pendings would have taken up the other pages. So definitely do that we use market insights that compass provides to on the market. You know how many price I think the other day we checked market insights, there was like 1076 listings in Westchester active and 50% of them had a price improvement, that would not have been the case in March. Right. So just that that enables us to keep our finger on the pulse of things. From a statistics perspective, there’s also 10 of us, nine of us are producing agents. The other one is our team manager, he’s like God’s gift to the world, we’re like, so blessed to have him. He’s also good at keeping track of the insights and sharing them. But also just you put, you know, nine producing agents in a room who are out showing and selling all day, we really have our finger on the pulse of what we’re hearing from buyers and sellers all the time. And we’re always sharing. So of course, we have like the team slack. And it’s running all day, and people are talking about whatever.
D.J. Paris 22:40 So you guys have you guys have a Slack channel that you’re you’re communicating and firing off questions. And that’s actually really smart. I think that’s what’s really smart, because it’s a great way to for newer agents to get answers or to collaborate or to say, Hey, I’ve got this idea. And teams have really picked up the slack. I feel in the last five years or so I’ve started to see teams take on more of a training and support role than maybe were in the past. And I’m seeing the burden for agents getting trained coming off of the managing broker, the person running the office and pushing that more towards the teams, which I think works really well in a lot of cases. And obviously that’s that’s what you guys are doing. How important do you think teams are right now in real estate? Obviously, you have one. So you’re a big fan of teams. You know, for me, I I’ve always thought that, you know, hey, two is better than one. But tell me a little bit about your team and why you built it.
Francie Malina 23:46 Sure. So if there’s any solo agents out there listening or solo with an admin or team manager or Chief of Staff, whatever, I am so impressed with you. I don’t know how you do it. Because I do feel with the entire US population being locked down or most of it for a year or two people’s patients was you know, their nerves were shot and their expectations didn’t really meet the reality. You know, I want to see this house on Saturday at one and that’s the only time I can see it. And you know, you have five clients that want to do that. How do you pull that off? So I just we just when I started and after I started to have some business I just couldn’t be a solo agent anymore. I did I build a team out of necessity because I couldn’t be in 15 places at once. in Westchester buyers are accompanied by the agent, the buyer’s agent. A lot of listings are accompanied by the listing agent higher and luxury listings. But still the buyer’s agents still comes in New York City, the buyer’s agent doesn’t go with their buyer. So maybe that’s a different situation. But for us, we had to be in 50 places at once. So it was almost impossible the solo and carry a big deck of clients especially if you’re a seller’s agent to which we do 5050 So you’ve got your sellers calling you on a Saturday because someone leaves the door unlocked and you’re with buyers and So I became a team at necessity. And I always say this, I stole it from somebody, I don’t know who but if you don’t have an assistant, you are the assistant. And that was really my first hire not because I’m brilliant, and not because I thought it through not because this was a straight perfect line, it was a very zigzag, bumpy line to where I am now. But but I just found myself coming home at six o’clock or seven o’clock at night and spending like hours doing the paperwork, or the emails or the keeping in touch. So the assistant was the first hire went through a few now I have God’s gift to the world. He’s our team manager. And he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. And then added agents. So, you know, when you have a team, you know, the team leader isn’t the only one doing trainings, you know, the other agents can help. My agents are amazing, they all take ownership to the team, they all feel a part of it. rising tide raises all ships, they’re in it for the long haul. We feel like we’ve each built each other’s careers for as long as we want to do this. And we all believe in the brand. So together, we’re rising. And I think that I love talking about teams and I can I emailed you this but you know, we’re just we’re all collaborate without ego team, we share everything out in the marketplace, we’re kind to almost everybody who reaches out and, and or some we just only communicate via text. But you know, we really want to help elevate this profession, because like I said, like my husband and I had less than stellar real estate transactions. Now we happen to be type A on steroids. So maybe our bar is too high. But I do feel that a lot of times, and I’m sure you feel this way, when you go meet with people. And you if you ask them, how are your prior real estate experiences, more than 50% say not so great. So I don’t want to feel like my industry is letting people down. And I’m sure you don’t. So our goal, as a team is to really serve our clients. And we do we show up, we follow up. We keep in touch we gift our clients twice a year religiously say say to us, some of them bought a house 10 years ago, they said when did we fall off the list? Never because you’re you’re a part of the Francie Molina teen brand. You’re part of our family. And we’re always doing things in the communities. We have volunteer fire departments and all that stuff in Westchester. So we’re always running events and doing things, we’re gonna run some events at the farmers markets this fall, we try to stay up, you know, right out in front in the communities.
D.J. Paris 27:27 Now you also founded and by the way, very well said, But you found your coach, you are co founder of the women of Compass clubhouse. Tell us about that, because that’s the first I’m hearing of it. But I think compass in so many ways is at the forefront of some, some some more progressive sort of ideas. And so I’m curious, tell us a little bit about that.
Francie Malina 27:50 Yeah, so Compass has, I mean, easily 40 affinity groups out at Compass, black at Compass, women of Compass, etc, you name it, they’ve got it. And if they don’t, you can dogs at Compass, and you and I are dog lovers. You know, if they don’t have it, somebody finds it and workplace people meet up and do things. So. So because 50% of the profession, I think a more than 50% of the profession is women. Women of compass was founded early on in urban compass days like that. It is a nationwide affinity group and it’s very, very active. I’m a regional leader for that. So I lead Connecticut, Westchester and New Jersey. And some of my colleagues decided to found a woman of Compass clubhouse that would meet every Thursday morning 8:30am on clubhouse and dragged me along. I wish I could take credit, but they really did it. I was the one who was going to fill the room. So so we have an agent from Philly, Stamford, Connecticut and Austin and me, and we invite agents, leaders, the employees, people from outside of the industry every 45 minutes. Every Thursday morning, we’re off for the summer now we’ll start back up in September and it is really it’s like a it’s a place you come you’re vulnerable. You’re honest. We talk about cancer, we talk about death. We talk about real estate, anything. Our CEOs wife, Denise Raskin, who is amazing and and his mother both have been on it and they’re both amazing in their own right. But they they had, you know, the audience in tears with both of their stories. So it’s really special. We took the summer off just because it was it’s harder especially because a lot of our guests are on different time zones to get people you know at 830 which sometimes is there 530 So we figured we’d give people a break.
D.J. Paris 29:38 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests? Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow Boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s a great thing. And I just love that you have created this. This weekly sort of I mean, you’re doing a lot how? Well I’m sorry, I’m doubling up my work. How about time? Well, you know, because you’re you’re a big, you’re a big process person and a habit person. But tell me, Tom, tell us, our audience about your habits. Let’s hear some of your real estate habits that are important. Yeah.
Francie Malina 31:24 So and our team manager, Trevor is as a systems and processes guy, and thank God, because the end is what everything that we do in any deal, buy or sell is pretty robotic, you pretty much do all the same things every time. There’s nuances to every deal. But the truth is, if you look at your you know, your transactions, they’re all they all take very similar paths. So Trevor joined us over three years ago, thank God. And he put a system in place for literally everything we do. So there’s a template for Congratulations, you have an annual Mr. Seller, congratulations, you have an AR Mr. Buyer. You know, congratulations, you’re in contract, Mrs. seller, and it it links to whatever all of our resources, whatever their next steps are, obviously has checklists for every step of listing a by all the documents, etc. But through Trevor, and through six Amer’s at Compass, which is another affinity group that meets at 6am. I’ve developed some very regimented habits of just you know, waking up, you know, you say your gratitudes. I don’t know if everybody does, but you have three things you’re grateful for. And then, like I said, checking the hot sheet, I am the queen of the remarkable two. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. But
D.J. Paris 32:41 tell us what the queen of the remarkable two are. The
Francie Malina 32:43 remarkable two is the thinnest tablet on the market. And it’s really just 1000 notebooks in one. And so, I and I, and I all my team has one now, too. So I met my week. So on Sunday night, I’ve mapped my week. So I know exactly what I’m doing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, three, Thursday, Friday, and it’s time blocked, right? So that I’m being efficient. And then on the night before I’m in my remarkable I’m doing my Monday or my Tuesday or Wednesday to do list and fine tuning it. So after I wake up and do my my gratitudes and go downstairs and get my iced coffee, I’m at my dogs out. Like I’m looking at that list. And I’m just assessing, what’s the first thing I have to do? And then you know, getting my head set on that and then possibly looking at the hot sheet on the MLS to see what’s going into contract overnight, or what’s come on, and that kind of thing. And then I kind of unfortunately, the phone drives my day, then, inevitably, I haven’t planned on the phone rings. But I’m almost you know, pretty. I’m pretty religious about getting all that stuff done before I hit the ground running.
D.J. Paris 33:49 Curious too, because you do so much volume, your team does so much volume. How do you really set boundaries in place for work life balance? I’m curious how you do that, or don’t you do that?
Francie Malina 34:01 Right? No, I was not great at that I would say up until two or three years ago. And it’s a combination of Trevor and the girls on the team. All of our producing agents are female. So coincidentally, but they’re taking on so much of the business that it’s really helped me have a work life balance. So most of the buyers, they’re handling, which is so amazing. And I’m sharing a lot of listings with them, or referring them to them so they can handle them so I can help run the team. You know, do the rainmaking do these kinds of things. And also like I’ll fly to Naples and do a woman of Compass luncheon with 16 agents to talk that you know about what they’re seeing in the market and you know, just to run events that bring agents together so we can collaborate and talk about how to make the industry better. So I love that stuff. So having the team helps me have more time to do that. And then of course, I’m a skier and I love the look eek. So I are on our team, we time block our leisure. So for years, I’ve been saying to the team on our Tuesday meetings, you know, you put in your whatever it is, you know, nephew’s birthday party and nothing changes it you go, right. I mean, if somebody on the team can’t cover you, then we lose the buyer, or the seller fires us like this is not I always say we’re not treating cancer because my father treated cancer for 60 years. So you know, we you time block your leisure, and you don’t let it go.
D.J. Paris 35:32 That’s a really smart thing. And do you? Do you ever? I always curious about how Realtors set boundaries around time. Because if you get a text in the evening, like, let’s say you’re it’s kid, it’s, you know, time with the family. What are you doing? Are you responding? Because texts, texts conversations never officially end, right? They don’t they start, but they don’t usually ever, officially. And so what’s your thought on on responding to texts? Because I know it’s we’re getting into the weeds. But I think it’s another way to get it. Yeah, good. Let’s tell me what you what your thoughts are about texting.
Francie Malina 36:08 Yeah, I have a Do Not Disturb on. So I almost won’t. By eight or nine. Now. I used to respond at 3am. And I used to get up at 5am and write to clients and be, you know, they’d be writing me back at 5am. I’d be like, Wow, I tried to get that out of the way. And now they’re, you know, I’m in a conversation with them. But in the over the last few years, as I focused more on work life balance, and most of my focus on it was also to help my team, because I’m modeling bad behavior when my hair’s on fire all the time, then their hair’s on fire, and then the poor little children are going to be raised in a family that’s, you know, on a treadmill all the time. So do not disturb. And, you know, I choose wonderful clients, a lot of my clients are doctors, and I just adore them, I’ll respond because they’re mostly reasonable. And they were in surgery probably all day. But for the most part, they they the client gets to do not disturb and it’s silenced. And they’ll hear from me in the morning. And I was telling the team and example the other day, on Father’s Day 7am, the client started on me with just like, really stuff that could be dealt with, during business hours in, they have the tendency to text like 50 texts. And I wrote it’s Father’s Day, I have a house full of people I’ll respond to during normal business hours. It was everything was fine. The next morning, I hit them at you know, 8am and nothing in the world and and so we’re really trying to help each other, remind each other that you know, we deserve respect, too. We work really hard. We work seven days a week, so evenings with the kids or Father’s Day or Easter or whatever it is, you know, leave us alone.
D.J. Paris 37:41 What would if you What What mistakes did you make the first started that you that you would love to go back? And and wish you didn’t do?
Francie Malina 37:53 Me every single solitary mistake you can possibly make. I’ve learned from most of them. But I would say hmm, what do I wish I didn’t do? Um, that’s a really tough one. I wish I mean, I wish I balanced it better. Before that I have to be honest, like I was in the Serengeti, with like elephants and lions right at my feet. And I took a call from a client back in the day, because and they knew they knew on
D.J. Paris 38:27 Safari, and you were taking the club.
Francie Malina 38:31 But you know, again, my kids are were older when I started in this business. So it’s not that I’ve been doing this with, you know, five year olds. So it didn’t feel as burdensome, but over time it does. It builds there’s so much noise in our head as real estate agents. And I do feel that when I tune out the noise and take a little time to whatever to go on the lake stand up paddleboarding, or kayaking. I come up with brilliant ideas for the future of our team. And we need to take time to do that, too. So I guess I wish I was better at that, or in the earlier stages. But you know, when you’re building phases, when you were building a business and showing the community that you were, you know, a show up follow up agent that really was I didn’t have the ability to do it, to be honest now that there’s 10 of us. We all have the ability to do it.
D.J. Paris 39:18 Yeah, I think I think that’s a great point. It reminds me of that, that old expression. It’s the space between the notes that makes music. So it’s the silence that actually allows for creativity to sort of flow through and, and this idea of getting quiet, sometimes is really is can be the birthplace birthplace of creativity. So absolutely. For those of us that are feeling because realtors have to wear so many different hats, and they just have so many responsibilities. It’s it’s easy to think busy is productive. And it may be or it may not be or it might be He, you know, you can judge the effectiveness of what you’re doing based on the results that you get. But it’s it’s easy to feel busy is is all that I need to be reality I found because I’m, I’m a pretty busy person I have found that I actually get more done when when I slow down just a little bit. Me too. And I liked what you said about in the intentional setting of leisure activities, I mean that it sounds like, again, it’s one of those things that’s easy to hear and go on. Yeah. But it actually is really important. Because I know for me, like the only reason I’m in any sort of shape right now is because for the last two years I’ve had on my calendar, my personal training sessions, right? Scheduled, if I didn’t have them scheduled, I wouldn’t be able to talk myself into going to the gym, because I’m just not that motivated to go to the what if it’s on my calendar, I tend to do again. And I think you can schedule your leisure. Well, obviously you guys do that. And and it’s also really important then because then you can give yourself fully to that to that event. Right? You can be present for that. And, and I think that’s that just creates a lot. It’s a good recharge and a refresh.
Francie Malina 41:19 When I tell I tell the girls, I say test it, we have your phone upstairs for an hour and go downstairs and play with your kids. Did the world end? It didn’t. Right? I mean it you can it’s not. Everything isn’t urgent?
D.J. Paris 41:35 And yeah, and most things that it and that’s the other thing too is there’s an urgency and importance scale. Right. I think Stephen Covey talked about that. Urgent is an important. And then there’s there’s a matrix there that that you can sort of evaluate, but, but sometimes things that are urgent seem important, because of course, that’s how our bodies are wired up to respond, you know, to and to reward us for doing things urgently, not necessarily always being important things. Do I have a question? If you were starting over today, knowing everything you know, now, if you had no real estate, you know, you have all your experience, but you’re starting over now as a new person, we drop you off in a new country where you don’t know anyone. But you have all your experience. What would you do to drum up business? I’m just curious. If we drop you off in a new place, we’ll assume you can speak the language. But you don’t know the the the area you don’t know the listings, you’re you’re not familiar with the what would you do to start your real estate practice?
Francie Malina 42:37 Okay, so I had an amateur who I call a banker who told me that if you just put me in a in a deli all day long, and then have somebody you know, and Jen, I talk and generate business all day, and then he’d have somebody run around and actually do like all the the back end of it. So if you put me in another country, I’d probably hang out in coffee shops, and meet people. And then at the same time, of course, probably spend it, you know, every day, previewing, listing, so I guess sense of the word of the market, yeah, to learn the market. And of course, if there’s you know, municipal stuff, like we have, and flood zones, and all the kinds of things that we deal with radon, we have radon gas, and we have asbestos and mold, I learn all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I’d probably just go to the local haunts and, and get to know people, like I said, you know, we we take the this is a marathon, not a sprint. So we are our most of our business is relationship based. And because of that, we started out as trusted advisors. When I first got in the business, I would say to any client I ever had the pleasure, the pleasure of being in front of I’m going to eat whether I sell you a house or not, because I had I had that ability, and that I think that automatically, you know, relieves the stress. So I would jump into that country and become somebody, you know, a part of the fabric of that area and, you know, not chased on that Chase, we often get calls. In fact, in the last six months, we got more than I’d like to think about from buyers or buyers, friends or sellers and sellers, friends, who you know, whoever fill in the name of the agent that they were working with, and they weren’t happy with their service, and they wanted to work with us. So we always ask them, well, who’s the agent and 90% of the situations were like, you’re with a fantastic agent, we love that person. We love to collaborate with them in the sandbox. This is a terrible market. But what that tells me is, you know, they don’t feel that that person is a trusted adviser, regardless of the fact that in most cases, it was like, in some cases, it was our favorite agent. It just people were frustrated, but what can we do as an industry to like, help each other so that until we would say no, we’re not taking your business and no, you’re not switching, you know, call somebody else because you’re with the best and we can do better. But But I would go into that country and I would just befriend people and show that I’m not really out just Are the commission I’m out to, you know, help them I sell lifestyles, not houses, right? So I’d learned the lifestyle and I’d start living it and sell it.
D.J. Paris 45:09 But you just set it all. I don’t have anything to fall I think that is a perfect place to wrap up because what you really said is become a fabric of the area, you know, become immersed in the area, not become a citizen of your of your community, know everything about it, be part of the community, hang out in the community, meet people. And that is, it seems like a for all the years of doing the show, that seems to be a pretty consistent message that I hope our listeners take to heart is you get to and by the way, the all the business that you’re going to get from doing that is really a side effect from contributing, right you’re going to be attributing you’re going to be making people you know learning more about people you’ll be developing friendships and relationships and learning about small businesses and helping them and and really being part of the community and being part of the solutions to whatever issues that community might be facing. And as Realtors you have a lot of opportunity, I think to get involved. And you have gotten involved in a tremendous way. And here you are now with the number one selling team in the entire county of Westchester, New York so frenzy this is I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours and I would absolutely I need to have you back on the show. Because you just have so much to say and everything you say is so valuable. But we want to thank Francie because she has to get back to her because they’re closing a couple homes a day here. So she’s gotten hurt her team have to get back to it. So we are going to let Francie get back to her busy time. But for anyone out there by the way, if you are in if you’re a realtor, and you have clients that are moving to the Westchester area, please consider reaching out to Francie and her team. The Francie Molina team, they would love to talk to your clients or if you’re a realtor, and you’re like I’m not getting the the attention I need for my firm and you want to see what other options exist, reach out to Francie as well and see if their team might be a good fit for you. So whether you’re a buyer seller, renter investor or a realtor looking for maybe another place to hang your license, reach out to her she’s awesome. She’s super generous, of course, and incredibly, incredibly impressive and successful. We are such big fans of frantically to please everyone visit France’s website which is Francie molina.com FRANCIEML. Sorry, m a l i n a.com link in the show notes so you don’t have to type that in. Also, please follow her on Instagram at Francie Molina team. We’ll also have a link to that in the show notes. I’m such a big fan of yours. Thank you, Francie. So, so much, we I’m so excited. We have to have you back on the show.
Francie Malina 47:56 Anytime I love this podcast.
D.J. Paris 48:00 Thank you so much.
Francie Malina 48:01 That is one thing I didn’t say, if I were new in the business, and it didn’t exist when I got into business then but I listened to podcasts, you learned so many nuggets from your podcast. It’s like I feel like I’ve had coffee with everybody on it. Oh,
D.J. Paris 48:15 well, that’s very sweet. And we thank you for saying that. And thank you for being a listener and one of our guests. And on behalf of all of our guests, we thank you for your time. Also, we want to tell everybody before you sign off, please please tell a friend about this episode. Just tell one other realtor that you can think of about Francie, and she had so many great nuggets of information in this episode, send them a link to the episode, send them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button. And last please leave us a review tell us let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening to the show. Let us know what you think we take those comments to heart we want to always improve to meet your needs better but anyway, we are wrapping up so we will see everybody on the next episode. Francie, you are amazing and we are so grateful to have you and we will see everybody next time. Thanks, Lindsay.
Francie Malina 49:12 Thanks for having me.
Why Agents Are Pivoting To Luxury Leasing • Stephanie Spenner
Jul 28, 2022
Stephanie Spenner the founder of Maven at Compass goes back to the beginning of her career in Milwaukee as a leasing agent. Stephanie describes her transition from Milwaukee to Chicago and how she built her business. Next Stephanie talks about social media and how to utilize these networks for lead generation. Stephanie also discusses the importance of knowing your inventory and the process in and out. Last, Stephanie focuses on the importance of building relationships and how that helps in building your business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Now that the market is shifting, are you doing rentals? Well, you should. We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re gonna be speaking with top luxury producer Stephanie spinner. Before we get to Stephanie, though, a couple of quick reminders first, the best way you can help our show is by telling a friend I think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Stephanie and send them a link to our either our show, which you can find on any podcast app, or if the person’s not really a podcast person, just send them to our website, they can stream every episode we’ve ever done right from a browser. That website is keeping it real pod.com And also follow us on Facebook, you can find us@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod every day, we find an article that’s written specifically to help agents grow their business, and we post it on Facebook. So check us out facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our conversation about the luxury rental market and luxury properties in general with Stephanie spinner.
Jay on the show, we have Stephen spinner from Maven at Compass here in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Stephanie. Stephanie spinner was born and raised in Milwaukee and she’s been living in she’s been living in Chicago for six and a half years and she started her real estate journey when she was 18. In residential property management, where all the best stories live. She has been an independent broker for almost five years now. And she started her own brokerage and then came to compass where she currently is running a team of 13 agents and an expanding team. It’ll be more by the time I finish this sentence. But right now she has 13 agents who specialize in rentals, but also helping renters become buyers become homeowners generating leads through social media marketing, and I want everyone to pay attention before we bring Stephanie on. I want everybody unless you’re driving. Or if you’re driving pullover, go visit this website because I want to show you a really impressive website that that highlights some of what the what Maven and Stephanie’s team does with respect to social media and video. It’s live shy.tv So li ve ch i.tv. And you can go see their YouTube channels and some of the cool ways in which they promote different different listings and places to live. So anyway, Stephanie, welcome to the show.
Stephanie Spenner 4:09 Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. Finally, to have you know, hear your face in person or hear your voice in person.
D.J. Paris 4:17 And you have to look at me I’d see my face which is not not always a pleasant experience, I’m sure but I appreciate you look very nice for anyone who isn’t watching Stephanie is always always looks super, super nice. And you know, I always appreciate how professional you are. I was actually really impressed. So I heard Stephanie speak just to give the audience an idea of, of you know what, why you’re on today. And I mean, we’re always wanting to talk to exceptional realtors, and you are but there’s a lot of exceptional realtors. So the reason why we thought you would be a great fit, no pressure, by the way on the show, but as you have a really unique approach to building your business and I’m sort of surprised that more people don’t Don’t do it this way. But I just think it is so smart. It makes all the sense in the world. And you have built an incredible career in a very short amount of time doing it. And it’s not the only thing you do. And I haven’t even told the audience really what it is we’re talking about rentals. But she does more than that. But this is a great entry point that I think a lot of agents overlook. But before we get into what you’re doing today, I’d love to start all the way back at the beginning and learn more about why you got into real estate and how
Stephanie Spenner 5:30 thanks so much for having me, DJ, I’m excited to share my story again, or the full thing as much as you’ll as much as I can fit into 20 or 30 minutes. So
D.J. Paris 5:40 and that’s all the time we have. So go right ahead.
Stephanie Spenner 5:46 I don’t want to miss anything, because it is all part of the journey. And it’s not like it just happens overnight. People are like, how do how do you do it if you don’t have a YouTube channel, like I didn’t always have a YouTube channel. I had it for like literally less than two years. So I started in real estate when I was 18 years old. I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my we moved to Walker Shaw, which is like 2030 minutes west where I went to high school. And then I was going to UW I started going to UW UW Milwaukee for college. And I randomly applied to be a leasing agent when I was 18. And my first semester of college where my parents made me live at home for the first semester. So I was like driving to Milwaukee for 2030 minutes to school every day. I don’t know why I did that, or listen to them. Because I always made my own money. Since I was like 14, I’ve had two jobs literally like. And so first semester I lived at home, I worked, I randomly applied to be a leasing agent at a premier property in downtown Milwaukee. It was just a high rise that had a pool. So that’s why everyone wanted to live there. But it was built in 1961. So it was like very old. Three total towers made up the complex 600 units. And so I randomly applied to be a leasing agent there and somehow I just I got the job, and how
D.J. Paris 7:13 real quick just out of curiosity, because when I was 18 I, you know, I barely like knew enough to like, get into college and figure that whole thing. How did you know that that was even I worked as like minimum wage at some, you know, whatever. How did you know that that was even an option back then just out of curiosity.
Stephanie Spenner 7:32 So I mean, basically, in high school, like I was really good at academics, but it but I was also a class clown. So no one really knew that I was smart. But I was always in AP classes and stuff. And senior year I was in this really cool business program. Because of like the grades I got, I was able to get into like this business program that we had in senior year of high school, where if you got certain grades and stuff, then you could go to school only for the first half of the day. And then you can go to business co ops. So they like they helped me get set up into an office manager job that I worked at for almost a year, like a year and a half, I worked there as an office manager position on my resume. And I’ve always been in the business mindset since like, since I can remember. And so when I like as an office manager, I mean I was bored out of my mind and but I love the like secretarial work I love to like staying organized. And that’s always been something I like, loved to do is like just be organized. But I so yeah, once I had that office manager on my resume, I just like and I was so bored at work every day that I would just sit there and look up jobs and apply to this one. I applied to that one. And I would literally just like apply a bunch of jobs. I would take interviews, I would literally go to these interviews and get a lot of the jobs but this one for some reason. Just like really, I was like this is this seems cool. Like, and like these are like older people like you know, they’re all in like their 30s working there and stuff. But I was very adult, I guess right? Yeah. And that’s just like, I’ve always been like this more mature like, kid, like, a couple steps ahead, I guess. Like mentally I feel like, but yeah, I just randomly applied to be a leasing agent. And like, I got the job at the first day the property manager is showing me model apartments and I’m like, why is this woman showing me peoples of places like I didn’t even know what a model apartment was. And next thing you know, my first paycheck, I had more sales than the other girls that were working full time. And I was like, Holy shit, like, this is my passion. Like I can’t believe I just got this lucky. Like, this is what I love to do. And no matter what I’m finishing school, that was just something that was ingrained in me that I had to have an education. No one like my family. No one in my family had has an education. But it was just like me no matter what, even though I also didn’t need it. It’s like I was already making more money than my parents were. But I was If I was going to school full time, I worked full time. And so I’d have classes like Tuesday, Thursday, all day long. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I would go clock into the premier property Fridays, or Saturdays, Sundays were open to all the five. And I would just work all day and just close a bunch of deals. And then the owner of the company, which I didn’t know, it was a shitty company. But I worked for this company for almost four years. And I loved it. And that’s how I got my backbone that I have today that I feel like I can handle anything. So once I was working as the leasing agent at that premier property for two and a half years, they promoted me to assistant property manager there. And then he’s like, Oh, you want you want more money, like here. And he gave me a stack of papers with all the availability of his properties in Milwaukee from like Whitefish Bay to Greenfield, so kind of like uptown to South Loop Streeterville to Logan Square, and he’s like, here, do whatever you want with it. And he gave me a set of 100 hard keys, like hard keys, not fast. And I’m just shaking around like the janitor. And I’m just like, what, and this was Craigslist days. So I like after a week, I was like, okay, like, let’s do this. And I went through and I looked at everything that was vacant on his list, I would go to the property, take pictures, put them up on Craigslist. Now I was a broker. But I didn’t know I was a broker until I came to Chicago and realized like, this is like, like, brokers are super legit. I didn’t have to have a license in Wisconsin, or maybe I did. But that company didn’t care. I was not licensed to do what I was doing at the time. And so I was, at the same time I was the assistant property manager working full time, there was also a broker being able to show any of his properties at any time. So like, literally in between classes, I’d be like, Yeah, I can show you at 1230. And I would literally like run down the street because a lot of his properties were on UW Milwaukee campus Eastside, which is really nice part of Waukee. And so I would just like show properties in between classes, before class after class, before work after work of the premier property where I’ve clocked in, and then he’s like, Oh, you want more money, like here, you can manage your own building. So all at the same time, I then manage my own building, which which it was only 50 units, and 50 units. You have free rent, if you just kept the building fully occupied, and shoveled and raked and clean the apartments and people moved out and change the lightbulbs in the frickin garage. And every hallway, the lanterns were gas. So when you took the light bulbs out, like you could get shocked. It was it was a great deal. I it was a great deal. So I had free rent, I managed the building, I had free parking, I went to school full time, the whole time. And I just I loved it. I can’t even believe to this day that I did as much as I did. But like I just loved it so much. And that’s how I got started. And I finished school. Five years it took me and I graduated with finance and international business.
D.J. Paris 12:50 Wow. Well, it took me five years to and I wasn’t as busy. So I really respect all the things. You’ve been a hustler since you were as old enough to work. And I mean that in the best possible way. I mean, somebody who really digs in and grits it out and that we all know that that’s one of the cornerstones of success, but I love the fact that you have been living that basically everyday sense. And you’re still continue to do that today. And so yeah, I think, oh, go ahead. I’m sorry,
Stephanie Spenner 13:24 that that’s that’s will lead right into the next story. So like, that’s where like, I just, I think when I was younger, like my, my dad, just, you know, I’d be like, hey, I want a soda he like he’d be like, how are you going to earn $1 to go get that sorta and I’d be like, let’s do it. And I like literally earn 100 pennies to go get it myself and like I did it. And like, if you want it, you gotta go get it. And like, that’s what I’ve taken from that. And that’s what I think drives me and just being proactive. And that’s one of the biggest things that like, takeaways from today is like, be proactive. Like, if you want something, go get it if you want something and you think you’re not gonna get it, then it’s never gonna happen. But if you want something and you go after it, and you don’t get it, at least you try and and you’re gonna you’re not gonna, you might not get it, but you’re going to get the next thing that you should have got that is super close to that. Now I’m trailing off like I always do, but
D.J. Paris 14:16 no, no, no, I think you’re saying something really important, which is you’re not trailing off at all you what you’re saying is it’s the it’s that old expression and I want to make sure I get it right because my, my anyway, it’s something like and I know I’m gonna say this wrong, but something like shoot for the stars land on the moon. Right? So so even if you don’t get the stars you still end up with something. That’s probably still
Stephanie Spenner 14:39 the moon which you didn’t have the stars or the moon for. Exactly. You were back on planet or
D.J. Paris 14:46 so. Yeah, no, no, you you know, it’s so funny. It’s, it’s I’ve done so many of these episodes. And I remember one of my, one of my episodes from this as a Chicago person so anyone who’s listening you can Go back and find this episode probably several 100 episodes ago, but there’s a broker here in Chicago, named Matt Larissa. He’s one of the top agents in the Chicagoland area. And I asked him, I’m like, Why do you think is he’s always like, number one or two, I know the list of top agents. So how do you why do you think you’re number one or two and all these other agents, you know, who are just as smart as you. And you know, he’s a very smart guy. And he goes, I just, I wanted more. He was just real honest. He’s like, I just, I just outwork everyone. He’s like, I’m kind of a dummy. And he’s not a dummy. But he was thinking. So it’s like, it’s not intelligence. It’s just I work hard. And I look at you the same way in again, I’m not trying to compare the two of you, because you’re very different people. But I’ve always respected the amount of energy that you put into your business. And it’s really clear what you’re doing. So let’s, let’s dive into it. Because you have this team. And you guys have really mastered the art of luxury leasing. And again, I know you do way more things that you sell million dollar homes, and you do all of that too. But what I think makes you really unique is this entry point where you decide, and it’s so smart, you decide to build the relationship when people are renting. And that is so smart, because everybody who owns or almost everybody that owns used to rent, right? I know I used to rent. And the only reason I chose my Realtors because he was my friend. But nobody helped me when I was renting. So I didn’t have a realtor to think to reach out to. And then when I got time to ready to buy a million years ago, I was like, Oh, my friend does that. But had someone been helping me along the way, I might not have ended up giving it to my friend because I might have already had that relationship. And I’m so shocked that more realtors and not every market in the country would support leasing. You know, it’s certain markets are better for that than others. Certainly here in Chicago, there’s a ton of it. But even here in Chicago, I don’t see many agents doing it. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about why you decided to go that route. Obviously, your background would suggest that you’re great at doing leasing all the way back when you were 18 or so. But love to hear more about you know how that works for you and your team.
Stephanie Spenner 16:58 Yeah, if I can go back just a second. I know that we’re short on time and stuff. But it’s funny that you just mentioned Matt literacy along with my name, because he’s now using my partner and videographer to do his videos. Oh,
D.J. Paris 17:15 what is that? That is awesome. You must have great videographer.
Stephanie Spenner 17:20 But it’s not only that, but it’s like it’s this is also a point where it’s like, am I going to be mad at him or my partner? No, there’s plenty of business to go around. And there’s plenty of personalities to go around. The same the person that wants to work with me is not the same person that’s gonna want to work with him or person on my team, which is why I love the diverse team that I have and that I’ve created. And then just just really quick going back into the proactive and how I got to Chicago so I so I came to Chicago six and a half years ago, I had no plans to move here I managed. I made my way up in Milwaukee to be managing the most luxurious rental tower in Milwaukee called the bow Dern which is right next to the Bucs arena, that when I moved here, they were breaking ground for the new arena. But I rent it to all the Bucs players, all the admirals players, all the Brewers players, they all lived in the building. I had courtside seats to all games. I had free everything because that’s just you know how Milwaukee worked and Shaw walkie and so and I had free rent, I managed the building. And I had like one of the best departments there was and I was visiting Chicago, Christmas of 2015 When I saw marquee block 37 being built on State Street, and I said I like stopped in my tracks. I’m like, What is this? Like, I have to have this building like, I have to have it. I don’t know why I just had to have it. And I finally saw the name Ballard. And I researched Gollum, the management company and part of the development team and I found the head of hrs email, and I emailed her my resume and I said, I don’t know what’s going on here. But this is what I do now. Call me if you think there’s room for me somewhere. And they call me in for an interview basically the next day, and they basically gave me a verbal offer on the spot. Because my mentor to this day is like a mother to me, she always reminds me of why she hired me in on the spot versus because I asked what is going to be the price per square foot of these units.
D.J. Paris 19:23 Ready? How do I how do I how do I how do I get these things rented? You were already thinking I need to know some specifics about this verse, which is a brilliant question to ask in that kind of interview. So so
Stephanie Spenner 19:36 different from Milwaukee. Yeah, tell
Unknown Speaker 19:38 you that. Well, that’s true, too.
Stephanie Spenner 19:40 Oh, yeah. They basically gave me a verbal offer. And I like I moved to Chicago 10 days later. And I like wow, the developers of the building that I worked for, I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to tell you guys this and they were like Stephanie like, you are Chicago you have to move this is 100% You like go freak release like we got, you will figure it out. And it was like the best decision I ever made like, and one of my favorite quotes goes along with being proactive is like jump at opportunities as quickly as you do at conclusions.
D.J. Paris 20:15 Oh, that’s I love that. I
Stephanie Spenner 20:18 love to jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions and I jumped, jump, jump, jump, jump, and Mark, he was the best decision I ever made. I, we started up, we started pre leasing marquee in February of 20. March of 2016, we opened in June of 2016, I was the leasing manager, and I released up the building and we’ve leased 690 apartments in 13 months. And I rented like 250 of those. And that is truly why I see so much value in rentals from me writing the checks for these brokers who are bringing clients in to me also seeing that I hit a ceiling and I can’t just want to be leased out marquee there was no other big building that I was gonna like that was going to be a challenging enough. And I was like, oh, like I want to be on this guy’s team, like this top producer at marquee had just left his big brokerage to start his own thing and or just to be an independent contractor and get 100% Commission and I was like, I want to be on your team. I want to build your brokerage, like let’s do this. And so him and I built epic Chicago, which he still has now. And we focus only on rentals. And we worked on a WeWork offices, I built the whole brand whole business for brokerage and I hit a ceiling with with that. team that was the brokerage that I built, I hit a ceiling there. And that’s when I came with like one other agent from that team over to compass and realize that like compasses exactly what I needed to help like, boost me up and because they truly like collaborate without ego and dream big together. And those are like all their principles of Compass directly aligned with the principles I wanted for my business. And the first day I started at Compass, I had like, my first sale opportunity. And I still had no idea what I was doing. I had my broker’s license for two years, my previous business partner did not help me at all of a sales, he barely knew sales, but he kept faking it till he makes it and he couldn’t teach me any of it because he was still faking it. And I came to campus and like, within the first month, I close my first sale, because people, all these other top producers helped me. And then they I helped them when they had these rental things and these rental questions. So that’s like, that’s really like my full story. And I, I just I love rentals, so much. I love rentals so much. And I happen to get into sales, because my renters want to buy. And, and I that’s fun, too. It’s just nowhere near as fun, it’s nowhere near as satisfying. And I just I will always do rentals, and I and I have like big plans for the city to change things. And
I truly believe that when developers see that they should separate the leasing activity from property management is when they’re going to see the ultimate the ultimate efficiencies, the ultimate maximization of rents. Decreasing a vacancy is when you separate leasing from property management, property management should be taking care of the current residents and making sure they’re happy and making sure the building is maintained. Leasing should be handled by brokers bringing in new clients, I can be showing the property any hour of the day. And like But notice, I’m late to this meeting with you today because I had to meet with another agent on site. Because that property doesn’t do self guided tours, which 90% of them do for me and my team, which means I scheduled a tour and I say I’m bringing I’m coming through with my client, they say the doors are open stuff come on through and they like let me take my client around on my own. I’m in and out in 20 minutes while that broke their leasing agent who works on site, who’s paid salary plus commission, if they close that deal, can be taking out another client while I’m taking out my client and now both of us can be closing a deal at the same time. And but that’s really a big point I wanted to say today too, is just like I really I my big goal that I’ve always had since I started epic, my last brokerage and what is about to start happening, I know and see it and I feel it it’s already happening because of the efforts that me and my team are doing is separating that leasing from management. And I truly think that’s why mark key block 37 that I was part of the lease up. I truly think that’s like the number one reason why we were the most successful. I mean, we were in newspaper or newspaper articles for like breaking records of leasing a property the fastest ever in history, especially in 2016 and nobody. People didn’t live in the loop yet. It wasn’t like a popular place. Olivia, and we made it fun so, and I think we were so successful because my mentor at the time who was the property manager of marquee Jennifer saw Seto like, powerhouse queen. She knew that cuz she went when she did every lease up in Chicago, she knew to separate property management from leasing. I was a leasing manager, I handled all leasing, I had my three leasing agents and me anything, any single leasing question went through me, I approved all the leases, I approved everything, I set up promotions, like the promotions and concessions and stuff. And Property Management handled any current resident complaints, they handled the movements of the current resident of the residents that we just closed, and everything. And it was just, it was seamless, it was seamless.
D.J. Paris 25:48 Okay, it’s what I what I love about about your business. And the way you approach it is you have a plan, you have intuition, which I believe is one of your guiding North Stars is your intuition. Because you have really good well, you have the ability to really pay attention to your intuition. Like you’ve already said it a couple times, hey, I moved to Chicago on intuition really, I saw a building I applied, I got a job. And then now you’re like, I’m changing leasing here in Chicago, here’s what I’m doing, I know that this is going to happen. Right. And and you actually get results that way. And I think that’s a really important thing is, you know, it’s sort of a more of an ethereal kind of non tangible thing, but like paying attention to what’s going on inside of us. Sometimes there’s wisdom there and knowledge that we can’t totally comprehend. Like you said, I really had no business moving to Chicago, I really shouldn’t have been here, when I saw this building, and I just knew I need to be there. And and then you, you know, you, you jumped at the opportunity, as you said, and all of a sudden, here you are now all these years later, a total superstar. Um, I want to talk about social media, and how it can be used to for lead generation. Because, again, we talked about this a lot on our podcast, but I think what you’ve done with your YouTube channels, has been really, really inspiring and interesting. And can you talk a little bit about how you think about social media and how you utilize that for, you know, engagement? And also lead? Gen.
Stephanie Spenner 27:22 Yeah, I think what’s really cool about real estate is that there’s like, really not too many rules, and especially as an independent contractor, meaning like, marketing, like you can literally be thinking outside the box, like so far outside, and like there’s just no end to it. And so like, and I just don’t think a lot of people think that way. And I don’t think a lot of brokers think that way, and they just start like postcard newsletter, cold calling networking, referrals. How can you get referrals, if you don’t frickin have any of the other things like, you know, how can you? Who are you mailing a postcard to? Who are you sending a newsletter to? Where do you start before that, like, how do you get your first lead. And I know that a lot of brokers, like myself, were taught to get a lead the wrong way. They’re taught to post a fake listing or a different address, and then oh, that person calls them and oh, now I have my first lead. And now that leads gonna give me a referral and I’m just gonna boom, boom, boom, boom, and I was like, Holy shit, I just like left my full time, like on site leasing agent manager position to be an independent broker to like, this is how we get leads. Like, we’re gonna post fake ads on Craigslist. And I’m like, I like literally, within days, I was just like, holy shit, no, and I went to Facebook, and I would just want to fake it. Like, I’m not even, I’m on Facebook. I do not use it at all. It’s a different demographic for me. And I think for a lot of people, it’s like, oh, I stay in touch with my parents, whatever. But I at that time, like five years ago, I was I went on Facebook, and I went into different groups. And I was like, Oh, shit, like new to Chicago, like, Polish people new to Chicago, or like, Chicago meetups or like, roommates looking for roommates, or sublets. And I would literally just like read them and be like, This girl will be like, I’m looking for a roommate, my budgets 1400. And I’m like, Girl, I can get you a studio on your own for 1400 Boom, she calls me I literally close her in a virtual tour like the next day. And to this day, she’s my client rented from me three times and you know her she’s ready to buy now. And she’s uh, you know that she’s a cold lead the second she’s a renter, and then she’s a warm lead, you know, the second time she rents from me again and then when she order the or the second time, she sends in her job form, which is like what we use to collect the leads. So even if it’s a previous client, and they’re like, hey, step. If you remember me, I You helped me with my place last year and like, of course, I remember you here complete the form again with your new criteria. And they’re like my budget seven grand and I’m like, You Why aren’t you buying something? I’m like, How long do you plan on Being in Chicago, you know, and then like, maybe five years, it could be longer. I’m like, let’s talk about buying. Literally a week later, we’re under contract for something. So I’m digressing. I’m bopping around here. But this is just who I am. I can’t like, it’s very hard for me to like, I have so much to say all the time. But, but that’s how I got started. I just I went through Facebook, and I started like just getting leads through Facebook market groups.
D.J. Paris 30:27 Yeah. And that’s something that I noticed, like I live in Wicker Park and which is a neighborhood here in Chicago for our listeners who aren’t familiar. And there’s a Wicker Park community group or page or whatever it is, and people are constantly posting, hey, I’m looking for a hairstylist, or I need a house cleaner, or someone know the goods, best sushi place or whatever. And at least once every couple of days was like, Hey, I’m thinking I want to move to Wicker Park, but I don’t really know what’s available. And I am shocked at how few responses that come back. If I was a realtor, I would be finding my local group for wherever I live, and work or service, and I would be a real serious presence in that Facebook group making sure I’m providing great content. And then you know, and that’s, that’s what you did. And And now, you know, Craigslist, whereas agents, what they used to do, as Stephanie was saying earlier, many, many years ago was, hey, we’re going to post ads on Facebook or Craigslist, rather, we’re going to hope people reply, and then we’re going to try but you know, when people reply to one Craigslist ad, they reply to like five. And so all of a sudden, you’re now competing with four other agents, you don’t even know. And it just gets really, really messy. Whereas well,
Stephanie Spenner 31:37 you’re saying Go ahead. Yeah, I will say too, though, like, you know, I didn’t just go to the groups and start messaging people out of the blue. So part is that, that I want people to take away from it. This is what I do is I start posting about real estate, I have a sick ass video. At that time, it was still photos of model units from the property, probably pixelated, probably, like just absolutely no personality. Maybe some had furniture in them, maybe some didn’t. And I just posted static photos, and I’d be like River North two beds, under 3000 or whatever. And then so I people so that if I’m messaging someone, and they’re like, Who is this bitch, they go to my profile and say, Oh, she does real estate? Yeah, oh, maybe I maybe Oh, my lease is up soon. Your lease is always up soon, like, you know, so, like, put it out there and like you have to be putting it out there of like how you can help people so that they know that they can DM you that they can message you. I also I also do want to throw it out there. I guess this is like not important, but it is but like you have to put what brokerage you work with on your social platforms, it is illegal to not do that. You cannot say real estate broker and not have your brokerage listed. So it’s just funny because we have a lot of eyes on us being a social media influencing team. So we get like, it’s like we do one one video I said my services are free. The properties pay me to bring them renters you never do. Boom, tick. You said free can’t say free. Damn. Like I knew that. How did I say that? Like I had to take down the video on YouTube already had like 2000 views in two days, take it down, clip that out, put it back up. So it’s like, to me it’s very and not just because of that. But like, it is ingrained in my brain that in my heart and my soul that like you have to be ethical ethics is the most important thing. Your reputation is everything going above and beyond for every single client every single time no matter who they are, what their budget is, and what you’re getting paid is the most important thing. And that’s why it’s super important. And that’s where my team is called Maven and not Stephanie Spenard. CO Maven is an expert to kind of sewer in your field. I am very hands on with my training with my agents to and I do not take on the next group of agents until my first those new mavens are actually mavens, and they feel like mavens, and we have one on one to say, you know, how are you feeling? And we look at their numbers quarterly. And you know, we’re not like other teams were like, Oh, you didn’t do this. So your one strike for you or like, I know, I’ve heard that some teams say if you don’t get your invoices in like the same day that you do them or within the week that you do them, then that’s a strike and once you get three strikes, you’re out like if somebody can’t get their invoices in that quickly, it’s because they’re fucking crushing it and you’re gonna kick them off the team like, I’m sorry, like, take you know, let me get an invoice coordinator for you to help you take this little thing off your plate that can be maximizing your efficiency of like getting more clients,
D.J. Paris 34:49 it because the same skill that’s good at closing homes, apartments, whatever is not the same skill that’s good at paperwork necessarily. Right. Those are two totally one skill sets. And by the way one can, one can be outsourced. And one is, you’ll can’t. Awesome. Oh, you know, this is a good time to do a quick sponsor read. So bear with me we love our sponsors. So we want to talk really quickly a moment for a moment about our favorite sponsor, which is called follow up boss now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for my podcast, you know, what’s that CRM is used by more than any of our guests. It’s actually follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level, Stephanie can talk about that too. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time with less effort. Don’t take my word for it, though. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States uses his follow up boss. And he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. And here’s the best part. They have a seven day a week support. We know real estate happens nights and weekends. So you’re going to get the help you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it completely risk free, but only at this special link, I want you to visit everyone visit follow up boss.com forward slash real again, follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now we’ll back to Stephanie, Stephanie, I would love let’s talk about your videos, because this is another I mean, you do so many things. Well, actually, before we get to videos, I’m sorry, let’s go. Let’s go back one step, I want to just set the table for why leasing is a great entry point for any aid, especially right now, when we have a little inventory for sales pretty much all over the country, we’re dealing with inventory issues, the Fed just raised rates, again, 75 basis points today, which I think mortgage rates have already been impacted. So that’s not a big deal for interest rates. But it’s a sign that, you know, buyers are going to be pulling back a bit. So we have a lot of opportunity here on the rental side, I am curious to hear about what your thoughts are with respect to y. Well, first of all, I also want to mention, you are incredibly passionate about rentals, regardless of the conditions of the market. This is your thing. And that I think in and of itself is a really important thing for agents and our listeners to understand is find your niche. Stephanie has found hers and she does her team do a million things. But I would love to just talk a little bit about the opportunity that so many agents Miss around rentals, number one, by the way, and I want to just make this point and then I’m gonna let you fill in the rest of the gaps, you can actually make a really good living just doing rentals. And most in some markets obviously not if you’re in you know, rural Illinois, here we’re in Chicago, there’s a lot more opportunity here in the city. But if I was in Peoria where it’s where I grew up, that would be much more difficult to do but not impossible. But I’m curious, because a lot of our listeners probably haven’t ever done a rental. So can you tell us a little bit about you know why you see that it’s such a great opportunity for agents.
Stephanie Spenner 38:36 There’s so many things, I don’t know where to start. I really don’t know where to start. Kind of tying things together with in my first year as an independent contractor, leasing agent, after Marquis, like when I started my first brokerage with my partner at the time learning to post fake listings show and then going into Facebook groups, not having a full blown social media like Instagram that I do today. And by the
D.J. Paris 39:07 way, you really didn’t have a sphere of influence of any. I mean, you were here, you were working at a building, but you’re not from here. It’s not like all your friends live here. In fact, most of your most of the people you grew up with, I’m assuming are in Wisconsin, or maybe they’ve moved elsewhere. But it’s not like you’re like oh, I just you know, all my buddies needed apartments. And so I helped them out. Right, you had to find your own leads. But anyway, I’m sorry. Go ahead. Yeah,
Stephanie Spenner 39:31 yeah, and that’s exactly it. So like I’m that first year of like, finding all my own leads and figuring out like my own lead generation, tactics like and that’s where like when I have new agents that want to join my team or just want to get into real estate in general, I’m like, your number one job as a broker as a lead generate leads to get leads, how are you going to get leads, you know, and that’s what I asked myself and my first year I closed 96 rentals.
D.J. Paris 39:56 Okay, let’s pause and because I want everyone to take a breath In her first year, she closed 96 rentals that’s a rental every three days or so. So every three days, including the weekends, you were closing a rental with virtually no sphere of influence, very small sphere of influence, right? Because you’re new to the city. This is possible. And if we think about, and we’re most of these non MLS properties, okay, so for everyone listening, yes, yes. Okay, so Stephanie has a big smile on her face. And the reason why she has a big smile on her face is here in Chicago. And in many other markets, we have what are called, well, I don’t know what they’re technically called, I call them non MLS rentals, meaning they don’t show up on the MLS, when these properties are trying to rent out their their available units, but they still work with brokers or in Illinois, all realtors are called brokers. So realtors, they work with realtors, and they usually pay one month’s rent, sometimes more, sometimes less. But typically around one month’s rent. So if you are and there’s no listing agent, because it’s not on the MLS, so you are getting, you know, 100% of one month’s rent, as opposed to splitting it with the listing agent, because there isn’t one. So this is we’re talking
Stephanie Spenner 41:13 close, if you close, closer, and if you don’t, then you don’t get paid. So, you know, it’s a it’s a it’s a you have to figure out that game and how
D.J. Paris 41:24 it’s the most fair deal ever, because you’re either getting paid or you’re not. And it’s all up to you. But the opportunity is there. And that’s that’s what you have really seized. So yeah, let’s let’s talk
Stephanie Spenner 41:36 about with that said like the reason i So with those 96 rentals and majority of them not being on the MLS, there’s no way to track that if you if someone is trying to scout me, they’re not looking at me as a top producer. You can’t see my numbers like that anywhere. If you looked at my numbers on the MLS, you’d be like, how is this like, this is a joke, like, none of my numbers are on the MLS. So when I had the opportunity to talk to compass and potentially join compass, they, at this time, three years ago, they were hard and they still are, but you had to like be vetted by two agents to even talk to them, then you had to have like five rounds of interviews with them, you had to prove your numbers show your numbers show why your team players show this and that. And then you had to be vetted by like, once they thought you were good, then you had to have, they would call two random agents that you said you knew at Compass. And they would have to say something good about you. And but they compass won’t even at that point, I don’t know how it is now. But at that point, compass won’t even talk to you unless you’re like a top producer, unless you had x number of sales. And so my 96 rentals. In
D.J. Paris 42:40 my career translate really, you had to sort of Yeah, it
Stephanie Spenner 42:43 didn’t translate directly. But I had I showed them a translation, which was over $10 million in sales. If you break it down,
D.J. Paris 42:52 I believe. This is what’s so amazing about this is Stephanie flew really under the radar. Because those transactions weren’t on the MLS. They weren’t really public knowledge. But she was crushing a deal a rental every three days. All of a sudden, she now gets to bring that to a company like compass, which is taking over everywhere, and saying, Hey, guys, I know you don’t know that I’m a top producer. But here’s what I do. And oh, by the way, these are people renting pretty luxurious properties they’re going to be buying soon. So it’s a total no brainer. And I just I’m always shocked that I mean, maybe look, maybe if you’re lucky, and you get your license, and then all your friends are like, hey, I need to buy a million dollar condo. Maybe there are people that are fit into that category that are just kind of lucky. You are not that lucky. I am not that lucky. You have built everything up by starting the relationship as early as possible via renting, and then staying in touch with that person. And then oh, yeah, by the way, let’s talk about sales. So I just think it’s really but let’s I mean, 96 rentals in a year is exceptional. And it’s a pretty darn good living to write. So even though you’re a broker, you have this license, you’re not doing many sales, because you’re just doing rentals. Boy, what a wonderful career just then. And it only goes up from there because now these people are going to be rolling over every 12 months, maybe moving to another property, maybe they’ll keep renting or maybe make the transition to homeownership. I have a quick, quick question for you. And I’m sorry, I’m cutting Stephanie off and I apologize. Two quick, two things I want to go through before we before we get to the very, very end because I could have you on every single week because you have so much to say. And I love everything that you say. I want to talk about what the role of social media in in your business, and what suggestions you have for agents that are thinking about you know, maybe I should add rentals into my practice this year. Maybe that’s a good idea. So anyway, I’ll let you
Stephanie Spenner 44:58 so I think like That is that is part of the reason why I started my YouTube channel is because I realized not enough people, not just Chicago, mainly outside of Chicago did not realize that you could call a broker, and they will help you find an apartment for free. Yeah. And so that’s why i That’s why I got so into social media because I was like, I can tell so many people that I can help them and they’re not paying me the properties or paying me to bring them renters, you’re never paying me. And like a lot of people can just say that. But it’s like, how can you say it powerfully, consistently and clear and concise so that the client like I can say all I can literally say it five times in one conversation, that my services are free to the client, and that client will still go and like, call the building without me or walk into the building without me or call another broker. Or like I, you have to, like find the right way to communicate. So that it’s very, very clear to your audience, what you do and how you can help them and that you can call me any, like, don’t hesitate to DM me, text me Call me. Nothing. And so that’s leads into social media where like, I no matter what, if you’re doing rentals or sales, you know, don’t just don’t be afraid like be don’t be afraid to show your face don’t be afraid to be authentic. Stop thinking about what your friends back home and the state that you moved from, that aren’t doing shit with their life or thinking about you. Because they don’t care. And and what are they doing? Like, just try something new, do something different. And that’s when you’re gonna see like big like, with big risks come big rewards. And I can’t believe that I almost didn’t do live shy because I was thinking about are people gonna think I’m too hot shit that I’m too full of myself for like, what are people going to? What’s their impression going to be that I’m putting this out there? Like, I’m the rental queen? I’m the rental expert, like, but I’m like, why am I doubting that? Like, I know that I know, rentals, especially professionally managed buildings better than anyone else i in Chicago, like, you know, I know that. And so with with COVID when COVID hit, like there was for me, there was me and my team. Like, and I have never said this any other time. But when we’re candid on an interview, like I wasn’t worried at all. My team was not worried at all. We had no hiccups whatsoever. There was one day where like, it was March 6, march 15. I took a client to a property the next day they said we aren’t offering on site tours anymore any buildings. One half day, we’re like shit, what are we gonna do? Boom, next day, we’re doing virtual tours. And we have it all down pat, we have all the videos on our phone already have all the stuff. We know exactly how to build a rapport with the client, have them trust you right here virtually within minutes, and have them closing with you. Like literally signing an apartment with you virtually right here. I’ve had five deals within the last 12 months, where people have bought from me virtually completely
D.J. Paris 48:06 purchased without ever seeing without or without ever seeing
Stephanie Spenner 48:09 the property. Some of them have never been to Chicago, and none of them were renters of mine before. So these were like either YouTube leads, like social media leads, maybe referrals. But these people are crazy to me that you would buy something completely virtually. But like I you know, I did multiple things sent to her sent multiple videos. So yeah, I just I think there’s a really power power for rentals, because there’s like people are always always always gonna be looking to rent, weather, no matter what their budget is. And buildings, the buildings do come and go like some buildings will be paying one month’s rent one month, the next month, they aren’t working with brokers. So that’s where you really have to pay attention to the market to and also build the rapid like I always say to my team, like your client is not just the renter your client is the property manager is the leasing agent that you’re working with on site, it is the doorman because all those people matter, those people are going to squeeze you in on a Saturday on during the summer when there’s so busy because they know you’re going to close the deal.
D.J. Paris 49:07 How important is it with respect to leasing that the broker or the realtor? Well, I should say the realtor knows the inventory in and out how important is it for you to be the knowledge source of you know, you can’t know everything about every building. But tell me about that.
Stephanie Spenner 49:27 So for me, I would say like, like kind of prior to COVID I would say it was like less as important. Like just to know just the general stuff about the buildings. It’s good enough now because like with COVID and because we do things virtually like a lot more virtually, and we don’t like it’s kind of like 5050 like 5050 people want to tour in person if it’d be fun here like I’m doing everything virtual and they’ll put it right on their job form their rent their like lead form that comes through it. They’ll say how do you want to tour in person or virtual and they’ll say virtual and so
D.J. Paris 50:02 So you have to be really knowledgeable about the inventory, because because they’re coming to you to say, hey, help me figure out the right fit. And you don’t want to be touring the building at the same time they’re touring the building meeting for the first time, right? Like your team, you you pre tour buildings, you guys go in, you know exactly what because, again, Stephanie, really, and I shouldn’t put words in your mouth. But my assumption is, you want people to come to you with all questions, right? You, you guys are the knowledge source?
Stephanie Spenner 50:36 Yes, absolutely. And that’s what I literally on my discovery call with the client. Initially, I say, I know all the buildings like the back of my hand, from Uptown to South Loop street, or build to Logan Square, that’s north to south east to west everywhere you want to be I know, every single building like back in my hand, I can tell you that carpet in the bedroom, I can tell if it was recently renovated, I can tell you, like if it has a electric range or gas range. And that helps me help them like weed things out right away. And now I’ve narrowed it down to two buildings out of 203 100 400 buildings. And I’m like, this is the only building you need to see. And then on top of that, I think the biggest value that I add is knowing every single question that they are going to ask the onsite team and or that the onsite team doesn’t even know. So there’s things that I tell people. So for example, I have I have a client that’s looking to move in September, and they’re like, oh, is the price is is it going to get better. And I’m like, Look, what we can do is you can apply today for your favor, like, we’re gonna go to her four buildings, you’re gonna say, This is my favorite building, this is my favorite unit, you’re gonna apply for that unit, and you’re gonna sign the lease today for September 1, now, you’re going to stock the website. And if something else opens up in that building, before the lease starts, you can switch to any unit in the building with no penalties or fees, as long as you qualify for the unit. And as long as it’s, you give them enough notice to have the apartment ready for you to move in. But little things like that. And like most buildings will do that. I don’t know any building that doesn’t do that. So it just gives them peace of mind that they locked in their favorite building, and their favorite unit. But then if something else better opens up, or like better price better, bigger and or their budget changes in a month, they’re like waiting for a promotion to come through, boom, they can switch before the lease starts. And, and that’s what I did with my place. And I manifested this penthouse for during COVID that like I signed, I applied here four months before my lease was up. And I signed a different lease. And I stalked the website every day and manifested like the unit that I’m in now. So and that’s what I tell people like and I tell these stories, and I know like, and I tell them to like ask, I’m like, when I wrap up the call I go this is how it’s going to work. I explained the process from start to finish. So they know when I’m starting and when I’m going to be handing it off to like when the building takes over. And so they know literally everything and I say
D.J. Paris 52:51 well, we’re talking about what we’re talking about are systems, and you have a really impressive system. And you have this information, that you have so much information that nobody that your clients and your prospects don’t have to go outside of your world to get answers is kind of what exactly,
Stephanie Spenner 53:13 yep. And so at the end of that call, I say, I’m going to send you a handful of options and check all the boxes go through those. I can always send you more based on your feedback, then we’re going to come up with your top favorite options, I will schedule the tours to go see all of your favorites. And then from there, you’re going to apply for one, this is how the application process works. I literally walk them through all of that. And then I explain that you can take if you have a quick question, you can text me anytime. If you have a bunch of questions, just write them down. And we’ll hop on a quick call and go through them together. So then when I send you options, if you want to hop on a quick call and talk through your feedback, so we can talk through, like what I sent you together and help sort through your top favorites together and we’ll narrow it down and come up with a game plan together. And I think that’s a huge takeaway is like so many people are afraid to pick up the phone. And like if a client’s texting you and they’re upset about something they’re like, oh, like I didn’t get the lease yet. Or like what’s going on over here. They said they don’t have parking like yesterday clients like what the hell they have a waitlist for parking for a year, and I just signed a lease, like I need parking by August 1. I am not going to sit there and text him or book back like no just fucking pick up the phone and call them. And as I promised you it’s easier and like every time you’re going to be able to communicate all the points better if you can just pick up the phone and call them. So that just leads right into like me and my team. So like I like with social media and with the knowledge that I have. So social media is very powerful beyond just a lead generator for literally rental people that are looking for rentals or people that are looking to buy. It’s also it shows directly my business culture and how I work and how and what I know so every person on my team has come to me has been proactive. Had DM me has messaged me and has come to the YPN breakfast and talk to me after with a line out there. Doors and I want to join your team. And they have the balls to do that, you know, so I’m giving you a chance, I’m going to meet with you for 20 minutes at least if you reach out and say, I want to join your team, I’m gonna give you that 20 minutes, even if I know you’re totally not the right fit, because I want to let them know that they need to do this again and to not lose that like, you know, and so that’s how every like social media literally so my partner Kira Kira button, she is a absolute powerhouse. She has 24,000 subscribers on YouTube. Okay, we met a bout a year and a half ago, she randomly DM me on Instagram and said, You look amazing. Like you, I want you to be my leasing agent. I actually am a leasing agent. I saw you because I do the social media management for Alta Grand Central, and you’re all over their social media, blah, blah. And I’m like, I’m confused. You’re a leasing agent, like why do you want me to be your agent then? And I like Googled her name, and Kira and YouTube 20 4000s of followers. Before I even responded, I said want to meet for coffee tomorrow. Like, if you’re a leasing agent, and you’re asking me, for me to be your leasing agent, then you clearly are like not happy with your leasing agent role. And if you have 24,000 subscribers and you had the personality to DM me, like I want to talk to you. And literally she joined my team the next day, she was with another brokerage for three months had no idea what she’s doing did not know that she could show the building that she even lived in, which was the professionally managed building, didn’t know she get paid on those deals. She was had no idea what she was doing at the other brokerage because she was not on a team. She said, Hey, how do I pull availability for this and they said ask the CEO of the company ask the managing broker. And she didn’t close the deal. She almost gave up for four months, she joined my team. And after the first day like she joined my team, the first day we met, she closed the deal two days later, her first her first rental. And in her first year she closed 192 rentals, ah and I could literally like cry. Because that just is like it just so for me as a leader. Because I and now she’s I’ve made her a partner of my team, because we are better together. And we have the same type of like, and now we’ve created her YouTube channel to turn more into luxury versus like her niche before was the studio living. And so a lot of her leads were that but anyways,
I she called 192 rentals, one because she did everything I told her to do. And she was consistent about it. And she just literally like wanted to be like me so bad. She saw what I like it’s like, and on top of that COVID. So not like she probably would have done at least 100 deals. But because of COVID She could close exponentially more than I could in my first year because of video tours. She has closed five tours right here in one hour. Right. And it would take me five days to do that. You know what I mean? On top of that, we have compass. So compass is great, where we have so many leads that our team, our team of 13 agents can’t take all them. So then if like when we can’t take them, then we overflow them. And we have this system set up. So like if somebody on my team doesn’t pick up the lead, then automatically like then my assistant pushes that out to this group of like 50 Other compass agents that are like rookies and other people’s teams that are hungry for these leads. And then we get the referrals off that. And then also I’m like all my agents on my team. I’m like, if even if you don’t want to do sales, get your broker’s license so that when your renters turn your buyers, you can at least get paid on the referral. And then we have people that we just like pay to do showings for us. So I’m like, okay, like, I like I’m going to do all the work for this. And I’m going to like put all these options together, I’m going to set up all the tours, I can’t take four people out today, I’m going to take these two that I need to see face to face. And I’m going to set up the tours for the other 2am I have another agent like another outside of my team because my team is busy better off spending their hourly rate is like $1,000 minimum. Whereas I can send it out to another rookie compass agent for $25 for showing like
D.J. Paris 59:05 yeah, it’s it’s it’s really incredible the systems that that you have built and I’m curious too, on how often the relationship transitions from renting to buying I mean it takes years right like I I know people that focused on leasing for like the first two or three years of their business. And then a lot of those people end up transitioning into buyers. What is what is your process to help transition people from renting to buying?
Stephanie Spenner 59:37 I think my biggest thing is that I’m just like super chill about it. Like I look especially because I really don’t care if you like rent again or buy again or like whatever and I think that’s why people feel so comfortable just flooding in the like questions and like and and sending me people like oh, I don’t know if you do this, but you told me anytime like And it might be Schomburg I do not do Schomburg but I can connect with an agent and Schomburg and I’m gonna get paid a referral on that deal. Absolute freakin loosely and everyone knows that I am with Compass and that I, I tell everyone I meet like I can connect you with an expert in any market and like I just I have a buyer under contract right now single new construction, my first new construction deal that is currently being built and that buyer of mine was my I rent it to him at marquee when I worked at marquee. He was my one of my first rentals. And then he then he lived at marquee for three or four years. Then he saw I was an independent broker he reached out I rented to him again at a different property in west loop. Then he’s like Steph, I’m ready to buy now we’re now we’re under contract for a place in Logan squares, new construction single family home. But right in between that he said I want to buy but we need to sell my wife’s house and Nashville, literally in a second connected in with a Nashville agent that agents sold their house in a week. And I made five grand for 25% referral doing nothing. Right. And that just is like the full cycle right there. That’s the full frickin cycle. So yes, like, just really quick touching back like yes, I I was new to Chicago, I did not have this fear that a lot of people do or that that should have had to have nine six rentals in their first year. But I do want to say I worked every single relationship that I had at marquee, like we met CITM the developers we met power the construction team. We met SCP the design team I am I sold a condo to Chiara Santini, who was our interior designer, SCB, who now has their own company like four years later, I am very good friends with the Executive Engineer of power construction, who has gotten me into one Chicago when the glass wasn’t even on the 71st floor. Yeah, I saw that building. Like before any other broker saw that building? I saw as it’s not, you know, it’s just like making those relationships with every single person. The door staff is like the most important person, like and people like people treat those people like shit. It’s like, and I was the door staff. I was the package person. I was the frickin janitor. I had to clean people’s apartments out when I evicted them. And I had to evict people. And I had to like the things that we did. And because this is probably one of the last questions, and just because we’re talking about it, just so I don’t forget, because we have so many great real estate stories. But when you get asked the question on the spot, I go blank. And so I’m like coming up, I’m trying to make notes to remember like, so and, and most of my stories are in property management. They’re like not even like in this side. But one of my favorites is when I was still in Wisconsin, and I managed that first building in the premier property. And there are some resident columns that hey, somebody’s parked in my parking space we had, we had an outdoor lot that was gated within the building that we had a parking garage. And I was like, Okay, let me go check it out. I go out there. And there’s like people standing outside of the car, and they’re like, just shooting the shit outside their car. And I’m like, Hi there. I’m like, I’m sorry, do do live here as it’s your space and like, no. And I was like, Okay, I’m so sorry. Would you mind like moving your car, like somebody pays for the spot, and she just gets all over my face. And she’s pregnant. She’s pregnant, and she’s coming at me trying to bite me. And she’s like, screaming at me telling me I don’t even live here. I don’t even live here. And I’m like, That’s my point. Like, you don’t live here. You know, you’re and we come to find out like so. She had a warrant out multiple warrants out for her arrest for pimping and pandering. Oh, pimping and pandering. In Wisconsin, you can just look up people’s public records. And we found her name because she was a friend of a resident. That’s how she got into the gate. I mean, might not even be my best one. But a pregnant woman tried to find me and she happened to be a pimp, like, Well, that’s all figured Welcome to Wisconsin.
D.J. Paris 1:03:55 I’m glad I’m glad you’re still with us. That sounds like a dangerous position. But I think you’ve given our listeners really a tremendous amount of value, you know, for everyone out there. As the as the housing market is starting to cool a bit and we’re seeing you know, rates going up and, and of course inventory shrinking, or continuing to shrink, when there’s this huge opportunity in rentals and again, and there’s also a lot of people by the way that are selling their homes that don’t have a place to buy right now. Right to right, that’s huge because inventory. So you know, this is it might even be a reasonable strategy for a lot of sellers right now, to sell their property, rent somewhere for a couple of years, wait till the market readjusts and then come back into the in becoming a homebuyer. So there’s a ton of opportunity out there. Stephanie and her team, they do everything. Obviously they do a lot of rentals. They do a tremendous amount of sales too. And they do everything from Luxury to non luxury, they do everything. But Stephanie is also building this team. She has what 13 agents or I guess maybe even, she was telling me just before we started, she’s like, I’m bringing out a couple of new people this really excited. So her team is growing. And I know we have a lot of our listeners are local here in Chicago. So if there is anyone out there who’s like, I like what Stephanie is saying, I want that kind of career, I want to learn about Maven, and compass. And Stephanie, and what she’s done. And by the way, my, we were just talking offline, my girlfriend actually works at a building where Stephanie used to live. And so I’m excited to introduce my girlfriend to you, because you’re going to be interacting with my girlfriend, I’m sure at she’s a leasing agent at this other building. But if anyone out there is like, oh my god, I got to talk to Stephanie, I want to learn these secrets of how to build my business. Or maybe that she might, they might even be a good fit, like you were saying, for your team, what’s the best way someone should reach out to you?
Stephanie Spenner 1:06:00 I would say like DM me on Instagram, that’s probably just the easiest way to find me. I mean, it’s not, you know, Stephanie spinner, that I have three different social media pages, like separately, spinners, my direct page, I manage that page. Then there’s Maven underscore compass, which is my team page. And we have a social media manager that manages that page. And then I have live shy.tv, which is my brand, and my YouTube channel, the show live shy.tv. And that’s another Instagram page that another I have another social media manager that manages that. And so you can email me Stephanie dots mentor@compass.com, or DM me on Instagram, or any which way you want, go to live shy.tv. And you can find my cell phone number on there, that website is more so for renters and leads. So I tell my leads to go there, they can fill out the form to tour with me. And yeah, check out the any new agents. And if you do want to get into rentals, my channel will also help you to learn about the building. So when I met all my new agents, I tell them go see three new properties a week. And if you don’t know, like and watch all my YouTube episodes so that you can learn those buildings and then go see the other ones that are not on there. And now you’re going to start knowing a lot to be able to talk about with your clients even if you’ve never been to the building.
D.J. Paris 1:07:27 And just one last quick question. How often do you receive leads from these videos you’ve put out on YouTube about these buildings?
Stephanie Spenner 1:07:38 Minimum we get about 30 leads a month like minimum that that’s quality leads. I mean, these are like big budget leads Kyra just to like as a nother note, she gets about 200 leads from her YouTube channel that we pass around the team now hers are inching up to be more like, because she focused on studio small living. And so where that’s kind of the difference, but yeah, that’s kind of handle that kind of handle both? Yeah, no, yeah, that’s really cool. Because she her background is actually in influencing. So she’s like an influencer. And that’s why she was got into real estate because she was doing influencing marketing for another property. And so now, now that we have like, I mean, my team is exactly how I want it to be this is everything I’ve ever dreamed of this is like, it’s perfect. And it will continue to grow how it should. And it’s I truly think that her and I together are exactly alike. It’s everything I have ever wanted. And now we are social media. Now we are real estate influencers. We’re not just real estate brokers, we’re real estate influencers, and whether you’re actually good at social media or not. I think we as brokers are influencers and if you think about that, like we truly are guiding our clients and telling them, which, you know, I always say like, I’m your broker. It’s like being your best friend. And sometimes I’m going to know you better than you know yourself. You might think you want this but I’m I’m gonna I know you want this, you know?
D.J. Paris 1:09:18 Yeah, it’s, it’s so it’s so important. I just I love your energy. I love the fact that you have just really dug in to your business and you’re so passionate and excited. And it’s just It’s infectious. And so Stephanie spent her we are so thrilled that you spent an hour with us on the show and we will let you get back to your crazy, busy, busy, busy and productive team. But before we do I want to just ask everyone to do one quick thing. Please tell one friend about this episode. Think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this great interview in conversation with Stephanie and send them a link to our show, you can visit our website at keeping it real pod.com On every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from their orbs pull the podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. I’m sorry, one more thing we’ll ask, please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. Whatever podcast app you might be listening on. Let us know what you think good and bad. We want to hear because the show is for you, the audience and we want to continue to improve to make it better. But Stephanie, on behalf of our audience, we want to thank you crushing rentals and sales and just process and doing so much with with social media as well. Everyone, please go visit live shy.tv l i v e ch i.tv. Stephanie also just brought her dog dying to say hi. Oh, that’s very sweet. My dog is dying to go to the bathroom. So I’m going to, but we want to thank everyone and we will see everybody. Next year. Thank you. And by the way, one last thing. If anyone wants to join Stephanie’s team reach out to her. She would love to talk to you as well. So anyway, I will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Steph.
Stephanie Spenner 1:11:04 Thanks, DJ.
Thinking of Joining A Team (Or Starting A Team)? • Jen Dillard
Jul 27, 2022
Jen Dillard the founder of Jen Dillard Real Estate Team with Hasson Company goes back to the beginning of her career in real estate. Jen shares advice on starting/building a team and what she’d advise a newly licensed agent. Jen also discusses what her team is doing to keep active and motivated during these challenging times. Jen talks about open houses and their importance in this market. Last, Jen describes what she expects when interviewing a new potential team member.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you thought about joining a team? Or maybe starting a team? And you’re not quite sure where to start? Or we’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, and I am your guide and host to do the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with superstar agent Jen Dillard. But before we in fact, here’s what we’re gonna be talking about, aside from how awesome Jen is, we’re gonna be talking a lot about teams today. And if you are a practicing agent, maybe you’re a solo agent, or you’re already on a team, or maybe you are thinking about joining a team or starting a team. We’re going to cover a lot of that today. So we are super excited to talk to Jen. Before we do that. Just a quick reminder, please, the best way you can help us aside from being a great listener like you are, of course right now is by telling another realtor about us. So just think of one other agent in your office. Or if you’re a solo person and you own your own firm. And it’s just you the next agent you meet out there. Tell them about our show. We appreciate it. It’s the way we’ve grown for the last five years. And it seems to be working for us. So we’re super grateful to all of you for continuing to spread the word. So share, tell a friend and also leave us a review whatever app you might be listening to my voice on right now. Let us know what you think of the show. Whether you’re on Apple podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher or Google Play Amazon wherever. Let us know what you think this show we read everything and then we want to get better and continue to improve. So enough for me but we’re going to talk about teams so let’s bring on our amazing superstar guest Jen Dillard.
Today on the show our guest is Jen Diller from the Jen Dillard real estate team with the Hassane company in Hood River, Oregon, and the Columbia River Gorge area at the Pacific Northwest right. Let me tell you more about Jen Jen Dillard is a real estate mogul based in Hood River, Oregon. With over 200 million in lifetime sales. She leads a team of 14 agents that sold over $78 million in real estate last year. She runs an in house home staging company and is a busy mom of two. I always heard if you want to get something done give it to a busy mom gentle it is over budget. But she’s also besides that selling and staging are just part of Jen’s story. She’s also committed to sharing what she knows about building a successful team in real estate or any entrepreneurial environment with others especially female leaders and fellow moms. Please check out Jen’s website which is J D R E so Jen Dillard real estate so J D R e team.com. Please also follow their team on Instagram which is J D R E team and also follow Jen herself on Instagram which is Jen Dillard. We are going to have all of those links in our show notes. So you can just head to the show notes. Follow Jen there Jen, welcome to the show.
Jen Dillard 4:33 Thanks for having me. DJ. I’m so happy to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:36 Jen is so sweet. We had a plumbing issue at the office where the water was shut off. So everyone left and then I raced over here to do the interview. I was at home this morning. And then Jen and I were just about to start and the power went out. So I’m hopeful that we will get through this without any additional interruptions But Jen has been very patient and we appreciate that skill. in it. So it’s always funny to see sometimes last minute things how it gets gets a little screwy. Just like every sort of every real estate transaction, there’s always a bump in the road to I guess. So this mirrors, a lot of our listeners, you know, average day. But anyway, Jen, I would love to really introduce our audience to you. And I’d love to hear about your journey into real estate. Can you share that with us?
Jen Dillard 5:27 Absolutely. So I got started in real estate when I was 21 years old. So like two years ago, and I’m just getting I’m 37. So you did the math, but got started in real estate at 21. And got started in as a property manager and real estate and then after that, sold condo conversions in Seattle, and, and worked in the real estate market until about until the 2000 Oh, eight housing crash we all remember so fondly. And so once that happened, I dabbled in real estate, but I kind of shifted my focus a bit. And then fast forward a few years, and I had my two beautiful children. And when my daughter who’s my second child when she was about six months old, I said to my husband, you know, I really want to get back to work. You know, want to do something that fills my bucket and gets me excited and passionate again. And he’s like, Well, what was that? When was the last time you felt that passion and drive. And I said real estate. I just missed it so much. And so I got went back full force. That’s when I really took off, I got back into real estate I joined an independent brokerage in the Seattle area and, and then and then fast forward a few years from that I moved to Hood River and started my team. And here I am.
D.J. Paris 6:52 It for any of our audience that I wasn’t familiar with Hood River. But Oregon is such such an amazing state. It’s one of our most beautiful states, I think. And I come from Illinois, and we don’t have too much beauty here in Illinois. But but the the topography of Oregon is just incredible. But can you tell us a little bit about where Hood River is located for any of our audience that isn’t familiar?
Jen Dillard 7:16 Yes. So Hood River is located about 45 minutes to an hour east of Portland, Oregon, and about two hours from Bend, Oregon. So we are separated by the Columbia River. So the other side of the river is Washington. And we live on the Oregon side. But we serve as both Oregon and Washington. So most of our Realtors on our team are duly licensed in Oregon and Washington.
D.J. Paris 7:40 And so just out of curiosity, um, do you have to join two different associations then as well? Whatever the Washington one is and the and the Oregon or are they similar? No, you
Jen Dillard 7:50 do have to take the Oregon exam and the Washington exam. But you are but it is a reciprocal state. There are reciprocal states. So but no same association.
D.J. Paris 8:01 Oh, that’s incredible. Because here we are, the moment you join another state least the ones that border Illinois, you gotta join a whole nother Association as well. So one of the one of the other million reasons to maybe move to Hood River. Because oh my goodness, what a beautiful part of the country for anyone that is hasn’t been to Oregon. Just go, just go. But anyway, we’re not here to talk about Oregon, as much as I would love to. But I would love so Jenna in particular, aside from being a top producer, and a total superstar. She has this incredible team and mostly female, right? The vast majority of your team members are women. Which makes sense because most of most more realtors are women than men, of course, in our industry anyway. But you are very passionate about team building. And I think 2022 If nothing else is at least a year of the team. It seems to have been, you know, brewing for some time. And now, all our listeners keep asking me about is let’s talk about teams. So I’m so grateful to have you on. So let’s talk about that. What how do you think about teams because you run a really successful team? How do you think about it? Because you’ve seen there’s so many different ways to structure a team. And of course, you know, we just want to give a lot of great advice to our listeners who are thinking of either starting one or joining one.
Jen Dillard 9:27 Yeah, so I think that starting a team is a good time to know when to start a team is just really knowing when you’re feeling pushed to like if there’s you are not able to service your clients and you are feeling bogged down by you have too many buyers, too many sellers, you can’t really give everybody that great quality of service. Maybe it’s time to add a team member and so that way you can still provide that great service to and to more people. Another thing that another reason that I grew my team is that I can’t be everywhere. One Surprise, surprise. So there are clients, the Columbia Gorge area is a pretty, you know, good size area. And there are there are people that, you know, there’s areas that are 45 minutes an hour away that I don’t service. So we’ve, we’ve started growing our team that way by finding great agents in those areas and having them still be a part of the team but service all different areas of the gorge.
D.J. Paris 10:26 Yeah, it makes sense. And I think to what I’ve, what I’ve noticed that teams have started to do in the last few years, and I’m really curious to get your thoughts on it is I think a lot of times agents in the past would go to their firm, for training, support coaching, and, and many firms do provide that and I respect, you know, firms that that can do that. But it put a lot of put a lot of stress on the managing broker, because the managing broker or I’m not sure what they, if they’re called Managing brokers in, in, in Oregon, but here in Illinois, we call the managing brokers,
Jen Dillard 11:02 principal broker managing broker. Cool, yeah. So I
D.J. Paris 11:05 think they had to wear a lot of hats, right, they had to recruit agents, they had to take care of the existing agents, and of course, do all the training and coaching. And I think oftentimes, that would just be a lot and all the compliance stuff, too, right. So then, I think these teams have provided this other avenue for agents to really get mentored, get coached, get, get taught by people who are out in the field doing it most managing brokers, at least most of the ones I know, there, too. They’re sitting in offices busy taking care of everything. They’re not always on the front lines working with clients. So I’m curious to get your thoughts about that.
Jen Dillard 11:38 I think that’s so true DJ, I mean, they’re this market is ever changing. It’s always changing. There’s always something new and exciting, which is what I love about it. But also something that if you’re not in the field, and you’re not part of the change, and and seeing things firsthand and have your finger on the pulse, then how are you supposed to train and to educate, you know, the agents that are working for you on what’s going on, if you’re not actually out there and seeing it firsthand. So I think that’s very true. I love being an active agent. I think I’m out there, I’m working. I’m in the trenches with them. And we talk about it often. And we sit and talk about each scenario and what’s going on, and how can we help each other and collaborate. So
D.J. Paris 12:22 win win win us? Just sorry, what happened? I don’t know. It’s all right. Yeah, thank you.
Jen Dillard 12:33 Shake it off. Just jump back back in. Oh, good.
D.J. Paris 12:37 This is why I need a calming motherly presence. Not that your mother leaves with that you are a mom and your mother. I mean, it is like my take no offense. I am I am I am. I am a rough guy who gets ah, you know, and then
Jen Dillard 12:55 my team. You’re like, Jen,
D.J. Paris 12:57 you’re like, This is no big deal. It’s fine. So thank you. We went offline for a brief moment, probably due to the construction that’s going on here in the office. So sorry about that. We are back. Jen. I’m so sorry. Please continue.
Jen Dillard 13:11 No worries. I think just what I was saying is that we were talking about how being in the trenches and being a part of what’s going on in the market and having your finger on the pulse is an important part of being a mentor and a team leader.
D.J. Paris 13:26 Yeah, and I think too, that teams are are really a way to expand the services that an individual practitioner just isn’t able to do all by themselves. And if I what the question I was asking when we got disconnected that you probably didn’t hear was if you were starting over fresh today. And obviously there’s this part of you that’s been around for quite some time now. And been successful. Would you tell you the yourself if you were brand new to join a team day one, what would be your advice to the brand newly licensed Jen Dillard?
Jen Dillard 14:05 I would say join a team right away 100% I think I wish that I had I hadn’t been on a team until I started my own. And I think that for me personally, I’m a team player. I love being around other people. I love feeding off of their energy. I love the camaraderie we have such an amazing culture on our team. And everybody, there’s everybody gets along so well. We love to collaborate. There’s no drama. It’s just, it’s just a fun atmosphere. And everybody works really hard. We have all of our agents are full time agents, and they are all producing agents. And so it makes it really fun and exciting. And it’s I mean, what how great is it to be able to share your successes and share the excitement of it to have a transaction and then also when things don’t go well and being able to commiserate or vent or have a shoulder to cry on. Yeah, so to have all of that.
D.J. Paris 14:59 So Support, right? Like if nothing else, teams or at least healthy teams can provide a tremendous amount of support. And right now is a time when a lot of agents are wanting support because we know it’s a challenging environment right now, we just had an amazing, while I hate to say the word amazing because of course, COVID was was not amazing in any possible way. But the real estate market had a pretty good couple of years during that time. And now we’re starting to see the pullback a bit rates are going up buyers, you know, the amount they can, their purchase power is has decreased. And inventory is still pretty, pretty low. So this is a time where I think there’s a lot of and we’ve also been kind of hanging out with ourselves for the last couple of years, we’re now slowly starting to reintegrate to have interpersonal communication. But I’m, I think that is, is it’s often understated and probably probably more important than we realize, I suspect because you I saw it in your face, when you said it’s just fun to be around other people who are all working together, there is something to be said for one plus one equals three, right? Like the sum is greater than the than the parts. Can you talk a little bit about how you how that helped get your team through the pandemic? And through some of those trust struggles even today?
Jen Dillard 16:25 Yes, so we have a group chat that we it’s the JDRF team group chat. And if everybody luckily has an iPhone, so we can name it, because if they had an Android,
D.J. Paris 16:37 just go green bubbles on the JVR, etc. It’s
Jen Dillard 16:39 fine. Yes. So we have this group chat, and we stay in, in touch and and contact constantly throughout the day. And just hey, do you have a question? I’ve never had experienced this before. Have you guys ever What do you do in this situation? Just answering questions, or, Hey, I’ve just closed on 123 Banana Street and everyone’s like gay high fives, great job. And it’s so important to have that and to have that support whether you’re in person or not. And so yes, we meet in person we meet once a week, our office is actually pretty active. We have people in the office, a lot of time, I think for a lot of brokerages people aren’t in the office as much as they used to be, but our our team likes to hang out at the office. And so we have that, but just having that constant communication through COVID. And through those times where we felt isolated, but we still had the support of our team, I think was really, really helpful.
D.J. Paris 17:36 You know, I love that so much the idea of support. Again, it’s it’s not I don’t mean to, to to get stuck on a particular topic. But I think for a lot of our listeners, you know, there so a lot of our listeners are in teams, a lot of them are solo practitioners, too. And, you know, we don’t really need support when everything’s going well, right? When things are going great. It’s a party we’re celebrating, we’re having a good time, where we really need the most support is when things aren’t going well. And I I’d say joining the team, or if you don’t have the ability to do that, or don’t want to do that finding a peer support group where you can do these kinds of things, hey, guys just got a new lead or just had a listing presentation or heading into a buyer consultation, wish me luck. Those are the kinds of things that not everybody wants or needs. But a good percentage of us, really, and I wanted to say one more thing, I read this study, and I have to I don’t have it in front of me, I apologize. But this is for many, many years ago, there was a study that was that really speaks to your group chat, your group text sort of system that you guys have set up that even if you witness to people being kind to each other or supportive of one another, even just the act of witnessing that creates almost the same benefit as the person who’s receiving the support. So you have created this, this hub of constant reinforcement of great job, we’re here for you. We’re together, we’re all in this we’re all a team. And boy, I just have to imagine that really keeps everyone’s spirits up when things are challenging.
Jen Dillard 19:12 It really does and I think that you can see it in. We’re active on social media and video and all of that. And I think seeing even photos or doing videos together I think you can see and you can feel that we actually as genuine, we have fun. We enjoy being around each other. We work hard. All of it is clear. It’s easy to see that and I think that’s probably why the team has grown. I haven’t recruited once I haven’t called and tried to recruit somebody from another brokerage not because I don’t believe in that but because it I haven’t had two people call me and they say hey, I saw your team looks like so much fun and like the culture seems so amazing. I’d love to join the team and I think that’s just because we put out that energy that truly is genuine
D.J. Paris 19:59 and right now As I’ve meant to get back to my point of things are challenging things aren’t picture perfect today, right? Low interest or high interest or rising interest rate environments, I apologize, rising interest, still pretty low interest rates, but rising interest rate environments, buyers are freaked out buyers purchasing power has gone down low inventory. How are you guys working through that? What are what are you guys? And I say guys, of course, I mean, men and women, what is your team? What are you? What are you doing to keep your team cohesive during some of the struggles?
Jen Dillard 20:33 I think just continuing to meet regularly and to train and talk about just talk about what we’re going through talk about scenarios. If this scenario comes up, this is what you do in this scenario, if this scenario comes up, this is what you do. And also Hey, what are you guys see? What are you feeling? How are your open houses last weekend? Tell me about that. Just talking about talking it out and being able to sit in the room with the whole team. And everybody just pitches in and talks about what they’re going through? And what’s what they’re seeing out there. And then being able to come up with solutions and go around and everybody pitches in their thoughts. It’s powerful.
D.J. Paris 21:10 It is I we do we have managed meetings, in my, in our company here and our management team, we have about 10 people, and we get together. And I’m constantly amazed. I’m on the marketing side of how many great marketing ideas I get from people that aren’t marketers that are you know, different roles. And they’re like, Oh, I’ve got an idea. And I’m like, well, it’s better than what I could come up with. Because that really does groupthink kind of thing is is it can be a negative, but it can also be a real positive in just getting more ideas to people. And in your case, you know, yeah, all these agents are having different experiences. And right now things are goofy, right? Like I I can right now. Today, the stock market fell substantially. So I was thinking, I wonder what financial advisors are getting all these probably really urgent phone calls from investors going where’s my money is going, you know, and they have to have responses to that. Well, of course, real estate has similar sorts of things with interest rates going up, and inventory being being tough. I have a question for you about if you were looking to join a team, and you were a brand new agent. So back to this idea that you just got newly licensed, or you know, maybe you’re in your first couple of years as a solo practitioner, and you’re like, I think I need to join a team. What would you look for? And because we know that most most markets in the country have lots of different options for teams, what might you suggest to yourself to look for in a team,
Jen Dillard 22:37 I would recommend doing your research, making sure that you really dig in and ask for recommendations from people, not other realtors, but people in the area. Who have you worked with who have you had a great experience with as a realtor. And And then furthermore, just really making sure that the culture go to a team meeting, go to a you know, a meeting and make sure that you really liked that culture and that you fit in you resonate, your your personality fits in you resonate with them. That’s those are really important things. These are the people that you’re going to be surrounded with all the time every day. So making sure that you really feel comfortable is important. So those are some a few of the things that I think are.
D.J. Paris 23:21 Yeah, I think that’s a great point, like making the list of all the people that you’ve worked with that you go, I liked that person I liked the way they did business, I really thought that they had a lot to offer their client. And maybe I’d like to, you know, start to experience, you know, what, what they deal with back in the back office. I think that’s a, it’s a great, great understand. And I’m curious too, so you’re, you’re a very successful team lead. And I think a lot of realtors think, Boy, I couldn’t just pick up the phone and call Jen Dillard. She’s way too busy. She’s got a million things going on. She’s running this massive team. So I’m curious. What steps might somebody take to you know, if they say, Oh, I really want to join Jen’s team. Obviously, they can go to your website and fill out a form, which by the way, anyone is around that area and Oregon where Jen and her team work and are looking for a different option or different team maybe that might better meet their needs. certainly reach out Jen and her team would love to speak with you. But you know, agents come to me all the time. They’re like, well, I don’t really know how to how to how to go up to somebody and say, Hey, I’d like to join your team that really does take a certain amount of courage and vulnerability
Jen Dillard 24:38 and so I’m curious why not on a date? It is. It is. Yeah, so I would I like when people are persistent. I think that persistence, and you know, send me a message on Instagram. That’s great. But if you also follow it up with a phone call or an email and you know, two different areas of can munication that’s where it really gets my attention. I’m like, okay, this person is serious, this person really is interested. And I always my doors always open to have a conversation. And I think that if we you come in you have a conversation with us, you feel like it’s a good fit. We feel like it’s a good fit. And I think that yeah, we are always open to grow. As long as it feels like it’s a good, it’s a good, it’s a good fit from on both sides.
D.J. Paris 25:28 I agree. And I’d love to get your opinion about leads, because this also becomes a big topic. And of course, every team does it differently. Some teams have leads, of course, some don’t. And I’m not here to suggest teams should have leads or they shouldn’t. But I’m curious, I know sometimes. Individual realtors will think well, if I join a team, that’s going to be the solution to my marketing problems, because they probably have a lot of leads. And that’s going to be my savior, so to speak. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on leads and the team’s sort of role in that.
Jen Dillard 26:06 Yeah, I think that being on a team sometimes means you get leads, which our team does, you know, give leads out to our agents. But I think that being able to prospect and come up with your own, you know, go get your own business, that’s what really incentivizes me to give leads, if you’re out there, and you’re killing it, and you’re, yeah, I can see that you’re active out in the in the market, you know what you’re talking about, you’re doing well, your clients are loving you, then I’m going to keep giving you more leads. If I see that you’re just sitting there, and you’re just waiting for a lead to come to you and you’re not going out and finding your business. I’m less in I’m less interested in giving you more leads, because I how do I know that you’re going to take great care of the client? So
D.J. Paris 26:53 that’s such an important thing you just said and I know it’s probably self evident to you. But I think it’s an important point that I want really to resonate with our audience that what Jen, Jen just said, is it in some for some of us might be counterintuitive, like, hey, the busier I am and meaning not busy as far as having clients, but the more active I am in building my business, the more that attracts more business to me, because people like Jen go, Hey, DJ is really on top of things. He’s racing around getting business. I want to reward his effort with some leads. And I think that is how most team leaders think about it, too. So I don’t think this is just a Jen Dillard thing, I think. Yeah, and but I’m so grateful that you said it because it is absolutely the truth. It’s sort of like givers get right like that, that sort of idea of putting yourself out there and giving as much as you can actually met see a lot of stuff too, without that being the main intention. So if you want more leads, go impress other people in your company with how much activity you’re putting into generating leads, because and I also think, and I’m sorry, I don’t mean to take over the interview. But I also think sometimes when people are doing, and I’m curious to get your thoughts, when people are doing certain activities to generate leads on their own. And then they bring that to a group or their office, sometimes somebody will be like, You know what, I have a little tweak for you on this. And that might just be the tweak that is needed to make it even more effective. You know, this idea of like, Oh, I’ve done that before. But try this instead of that.
Jen Dillard 28:30 Yeah, I like having the other agents on my team come in and do trainings for the rest of the team. I like them to do the trainings, I have one agent on my team who’s amazing at cold calling, he was in sales, that was his background, that’s where he got started. And that guy is incredible on the phones. So I love to have the team sit and listen to him and to you know, and to do a calling challenge and things like that, like just having Listen, I have another agent on my team. That’s amazing at reels, she does a great job. So having her come in and do a training on how she does reels. And because we’re on a team, and we’re collaborative, we’re not competing with each other. We’re collaborating with each other. It’s great, everybody’s happy to share.
D.J. Paris 29:12 I love that and having people with different specialties, even though they might still be doing all of their own business. But maybe they’re really good at like you said social or they’re good at open houses or buyer presentations or listing presentations or whatever. And then saying, hey, let’s let’s do some best practice sharing. I absolutely just think that is just the fastest way to get good at something. And I would love I am about to ask so I’m gonna ask you a question. I’m going to take a quick break. While so you can think about the answer. I don’t think you’ll need any time to think about this. But I would love to hear how important today so it’s now the middle of June to 2022. How important are open houses today for lead gen nation. So before you answer that, I want to take a quick moment to highlight our sponsor, we love our sponsor, and our one of our favorite companies in the entire real estate tech space is follow up boss. Now I’ve interviewed hundreds of top Realtors in this country for this podcast and the CRM that is used by more than any of my guests is follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Don’t take my word for it though, Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States, he’s his follow up boss. And he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 different systems so you can keep your existing tools and lead sources. Also the best part they have a seven day a week support. Because we know real estate happens nights and weekends. So you’ll get the help you need when you need it. And let’s get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to continue to use their their services, they’re going to give you for a limited time. They’re going to give keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice the amount of time they give everybody else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free, but only if you visit this special link but visit follow up boss.com forward slash real again, follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with a follow up boss. Okay, Jen, let’s talk about open houses. How important are they in 2022
Jen Dillard 31:35 open houses are back and they are in full force. Open Houses are critical right now. Because, as you’ve mentioned a few times in this interview, they the interest rates are rising, buyers are getting a little scared things are slowing down a little bit or neutralizing I like to say. And so having an open house creates this kind of it allows people to come and look at the house without feeling pressure to reach out to an agent and to engage in that sort of, you know, relationship, but it’s kind of like risk free. They can go they can look at the house. And I think that that it’s back and I think that it’s doing they’re doing very well right now because of that, in my opinion. And
D.J. Paris 32:21 do you get a lot of unrepresented buyers coming
Jen Dillard 32:25 in. So open houses are great do open houses all day long, but most important is making sure you’re tracking who’s coming into your open house. Are you writing? Are you having them fill out a form that their you know, their name, their email address, or phone number? Are you following up with them follow up us. You know, making sure that all those that’s so important. Yes, you have these phone numbers, you have these email addresses, but follow up and make sure that you reach out and you even if they weren’t interested in the house, they’ll remember you if you call and you follow up with them, and you stay, continue to nurture them.
D.J. Paris 33:02 So I want to drill down just a little bit. So when do you tell your team so someone comes in unrepresented to an open house, one of your team members is doing an open house, they fill out the form name, email, phone number. Okay, what’s step number one after they leave, and how quickly, I would love to hear what you recommend.
Jen Dillard 33:22 After the open house, you send an email individually personalized. Thank you, Jeff. And Jodi, thank you so much for coming to my open house today. It was a pleasure to meet you by law. If you’re interested in this house, please let me know. Otherwise, I’d be happy to set up a search for you. And, you know, so engage in conversation, and then and send that to each person that came into the open house. And then
D.J. Paris 33:50 I’m sorry to get so granular but or next day or what’s the same day?
Jen Dillard 33:55 100%? Yes, same day, and then you give it two days. And then you follow up. Jeff and Jody, this is Jen Dillard, I reached out to you after my open house, I just wanted to follow up make sure you got my email as if there’s a phone number you call you got to go to all the areas of communication that you have access to. If they don’t respond, maybe send a text some people just have to find their way of communicating. Some people prefer to communicate via text. Some prefer to commute and you can even go a step further with your with your sheet. You can say what prefer What is your preferred method of communication
D.J. Paris 34:37 yeah, that’s, that’s a it’s a really great idea because to assume that everyone wants text or phone or email, of course we’re all different and wow, that’s really smart. So yeah, add that checkbox everyone listening to your open house sign in sheet, preferred way of communication. I do really appreciate that when I fill those forms out online like for a doctor’s office or They oftentimes will will ask that same question. So following up, I’m curious, have you do you have a general idea of the and of course, every, every individual person is different. But the average time from the moment somebody walks into an open house, and obviously not everyone who walks out of the open house ends up becoming a client. But for those that do become a client, what’s the lead time because we’re talking about following up? How much time is typically required. And again, I know, it could be two days, they could buy a home two days later, but what’s the average time that you see, and this will just give our audience a sense of how long they should expect, on average, to stay in touch?
Jen Dillard 35:39 Six to 12 months? Perfect. Six to 12 months? And again, it can be the like you said, they could be like, Oh, my gosh, I didn’t like this house. But I just saw this house, this is the one can we go look at it and boom, and that does happen. But I would I would, I would plan for six to 12 months?
D.J. Paris 35:58 And do you have like, do you recommend people create a schedule so that for the next six or 12 months, they know for sure, here’s, you know, the general guidelines of how I’m going to stay in touch? Just curious how if you use technology for that, or if you do it manually? What is sort of your thoughts on that?
Jen Dillard 36:15 We do we have it. So we break it down to we use monday.com. That’s the software that we use, which they can and we break the break it down. And so there’s steps for everything. Okay, you just engaged with a buyer, here are the steps, okay, you’ve just engaged with the seller, here are the steps. Okay, you got a listing contract signed, here are the steps. Same for buyers. And so we break it down and make it foolproof.
D.J. Paris 36:42 I love that. So systematize, we’re talking about creating systems. And then all you have to actually do is run the system. Right? You don’t have to wake up and think, What am I doing today? What should I do?
Jen Dillard 36:57 Yeah, like, and how satisfying is it to check a box.
D.J. Paris 37:02 So I love it as well. And it just makes it you know what I’ve realized about life, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts, because it took me to I’m 46 now, which is depressing. But I, so I’m older than you. So I can say that. Jen is still super young, she’s in her early 20s. But But But But But for real, what I’ve realized is systematizing anything in life really reduces anxiety, and it reduces clutter in the mind. And it just actually makes life easier, it’s sort of the irony of it is creating a system actually makes you gives you more freedom.
Jen Dillard 37:45 I feel like that was the biggest growing the growing pains of the team growing at the pace that it did. And in our in, you know, our transactions growing at the pace that they did is that is the growing pains of the systems and processes because we had to implement new systems and processes and we had to do them quickly. And we had to hire and we had to so that I feel like was the biggest stressor was was getting those systems and processes in place. And now that they are and we have the people to support, it’s like such a breath of fresh air.
D.J. Paris 38:18 And as a new agent, Wouldn’t you love to be plugged into a team that’s kind of already got that all figured out. And you don’t have to rebuild all of it. Because there are so many ways to build those systems and so many different variables, and software providers and just lots of different tools. Wouldn’t you love just to plug into somebody’s system, and you maybe make modifications if you need to. But like, that’s another major reason to join a team is it just helps. Assuming the team has systems, it helps get your systems in order. Yes,
Jen Dillard 38:52 I completely agree.
D.J. Paris 38:55 And one last thing, if you were interviewing a team member, what do you look for in a team? In somebody that says I want to join the Jen Diller team? What are you looking for in that individual? Because I think this will help our audience when they go to really they’re interviewing sometimes for these positions. So what do you recommend?
Jen Dillard 39:15 I am looking for somebody who knows about the team show that you’ve done your research and that you you know, who are we have you done? Your research? Have you looked us up online? Have you looked at our website? Have you? Are you familiar with us? And then next I want to know, I want you to show your personality. I want to see how you’re going to interact with clients. are you just sitting there waiting for me to ask questions and just answering them with boring answers? Probably not the right bit. Show your personality show what’s different about you why why would somebody pick you to be the realtor? Show me that I want to see that. So those are some of the things that I love to see. I love to see passion and drive and somebody that’s going to reach out to me like I said for a difference Social media or social media and different communication channels, that I know that they’re really interested in they they’re really excited about the opportunity. I love those people.
D.J. Paris 40:09 Yeah, it really is like asking someone out on a date, like you said, you have to put your your best self forward. And that doesn’t mean you have to look a certain way. But you have to make sure that they know who you are and what you’re willing to bring to the table.
Jen Dillard 40:24 Do you come dress professionally?
D.J. Paris 40:27 Yeah, boy, there is a huge variance in in how Realtors dress, right? We, we have 800 agents in our company here. And so we certainly see a wide range of choices in dress. And I always say there is no downside to dressing really well, there’s actually no very little chance of having a negative impact. However, on the other side, if you dress maybe a level lower than what the client expects, then you know that you’re going to have you’re gonna have a tougher hill to climb to win that person over. Yes. Yeah, so dress dress for success. It it’s it’s not gone away. But I think the main message, Jen, that that you’ve been describing is, teams can be a real force for good and they can actually give provide more value to the client. Also, to the realtor, the realtor now has hopefully additional better resources, people to support them in the tough times, and just place to bounce ideas off of. And boy, I’ll tell you, if I was a realtor starting out, and I was in the Bend, Oregon area, I would well I guess I’m sorry. Yeah. If I was, obviously, in between Portland and Bend, Oregon, and I was living there. I heard Hood River District, I would be reaching out to Jen because not only and I think, Jen, you just said something really important in it. And if you go to Jen’s website, which I’m going to encourage everybody to do in just a moment, you will get a sense of what her team is like, just by watching some of the content that they’ve created. There, you can see just in the still images of the fun that they have, and also tracking them on social, you get a good sense of what the team is like. Now, it’s not everything, of course, you want to meet them, too. But I think that’s such a really good idea as getting a sense of the culture. And I think by watch, you know, that’s what’s really cool about social media and also having a web presence is you get it, you get a little glimpse into someone’s culture. And I think this is a great opportunity for individual agents to explore other teams cultures and see what feels like a good fit. And then just like asking out someone on a date, you have to find your courage and then reach out and say, Hey, I would like to talk to you about opportunities. I am such a big fan. And by the way, if there’s any buyers, sellers, renters investors in in Jen’s neck of the woods. Boy, her and her team would love the opportunity to to work with you directly. They’re one of the very top teams in their area, and very well respected. They’re amazing. And Jen, do you mind just sharing? What What’s the geographic boundaries of what your team sort of deals with?
Jen Dillard 43:17 Yeah, so we service pretty much everything from from Portland all the way to Golden Dale Lyle area. So yeah, those are that’s pretty much what was that?
D.J. Paris 43:33 I was just saying no, that’s that’s it’s a huge area, the area up huge team. And I think it’s a really great reminder that if you are thinking about joining a team or thinking about maybe changing teams, now’s a good time when things are maybe a little bit slow, more slow than they were a year ago where we didn’t have time to do that. But for anyone out there who is interested in working with Jen, or learning about her team and how its structured, please visit their website which is J D R E team. Again, Jen Dillard real estate. So J D R e team.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And also please follow them on on Instagram, which you can find them at J D. R E team. And at Jen Dillard. We’ll have links again in the show notes. Jen, thank you so much for being on our show. I appreciate you. Hanging with us through some of our tech difficulties today. Thankfully, we got through without the power going out good.
Jen Dillard 44:31 Yeah. Thanks for having me so much. DJ was great.
D.J. Paris 44:35 We’re super grateful. And for everyone before you sign off, please, we only ask our listeners and viewers to do one thing, which is tell a friend to think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this conversation with Jen and send them a link to this episode. You can find us on our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is there and we have about 400 episodes there now. So Jen, thank you so much. We are huge. Fans have you and your team and your company and we wish you all the best. Thank you for taking time to be on our show.
Jen Dillard 45:07 Thank you
How To Calculate Your Listing Hourly Rate and Buyer Hourly Rate • Social Bootcamp • Gogo Bethke
Jul 26, 2022
Welcome to our quarterly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo and DJ discuss the importance of determining your hourly rate. Gogo also discusses listing side hourly rate vs buyer side hourly rate. Gogo and DJ guide you on how to start hiring people to help you out when you’re just starting your business in real estate. Last, Gogo talks about the importance of outsourcing your work.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Do you know your hourly rate? We discussed that today and why knowing this will help take your business to the next level. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now onto our show.
Welcome to Real the largest podcast made for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Let me tell you more about GO GO GO GO came to the goal. Let me let me back up go go back he came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream, she was broke. She had no real estate experience and no sphere of influence barely spoke English and only $6 to her name, which left her with nothing other than Facebook to help build her business which is where she started. She created gogos real estate and began her real estate career. Now with the power of social media gogo has sold over oh gosh, these are old numbers. It’s well over 100 million in real estate transactions. She shares the good the bad and the ugly of real estate and her honest snippets into her daily life is earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers in the real estate community and as she’s earned the nickname The Queen of social media she’s actually even been presenting at conferences and events with realtors and she’s She even has built her own social media Bootcamp for realtors called Go Go’s bootcamp. Today she has a team of of 800 agents nationwide and her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. Now if she can do it, this girl from Transylvania, Romania with no formal United States education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent. Anyone else can do it too. Please, please follow gogo on Instagram. You can find her at at gogos real estate that’s Gee, oh gee Oh s real estate. We also have a link to that in the show notes. And also please invest in her bootcamp. She has an amazing social media bootcamp if you want to learn how to do more on social to attract clients deepen relationships, and you can boy, if I don’t, every one of our listeners could probably use a little boost in their social media sort of acumen. So definitely sign up for Go Go’s social media bootcamp and you can find that we have a special link. If you go to Gogo podcast.com Gogo podcast.com That will take you right to the special keeping it real link we get a special discount. Gogo. Welcome to the show.
Gogo Bethke 3:57 Hello, thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:00 I am I am your biggest fan and we I have not seen you in some time because you are so insanely busy. It is. I am so impressed with what you have accomplished. It was just a couple of years ago where you did not have a team. You had no agents. And now you have how many agents do you have now working with you?
Gogo Bethke 4:21 930
D.J. Paris 4:23 Oh my god. Oh my god, it took me in
Gogo Bethke 4:27 one month we’ll hit 1000 agents.
D.J. Paris 4:30 This is this is we should talk tell our audience about this. So what we’re talking about gogo works with EXP and she provides for her team. Incredible training support. She provides access to her programs. She is amazing. And she obviously is amazing because she has almost 1000 people on her team. And by the way, if you are out there listening if you want to join Go Go’s team or learn more about Her team, maybe you’re not getting the the training or the support or the coaching that you need. Go go if one of our listeners wants to consider joining you. And by the way you can be from any state in the country, you don’t have to be in Michigan where gogo is, you know, technically located right now. You can be from any state, um, how should they reach out to you to see if they want to join?
Gogo Bethke 5:23 Yeah, the easiest way is my name.com. So go go back to that calm. When you go to my website, you’re going to see a tab that’s called ESP partner with me. And then go there, watch the videos and see if you like what you see, when we call team gogo is not a team, as in most real estate teams in the nation, we do not take a cut. So I don’t become your team lead, I become your business partner, and you owe me absolutely nothing. So everything that the company has to offer on top of everything else, that we in the teamwork organization, bring to the table with the bootcamp and the weekly trainings and all that you get for free when you are business partners with us. And you’ll never have to give me a penny.
D.J. Paris 5:57 Yeah, it’s an awesome platform. I am a big fan. And I am somebody who recruits Realtors all day, and we only have you’ve actually surpassed me we only have about eight. You did? Yeah. So go Go is in she’s going to take over the show now. And I will be her guest and she is the No,
Gogo Bethke 6:14 I’m not competitive at all. I’m so excited. Because you’ve been you’ve been ahead of me all this time
D.J. Paris 6:22 I have I we only have 800 agents here. And now I feel like a big loser because you have 950 agents. So
Gogo Bethke 6:29 but in one location, oh, don’t forget to man like that’s insane to have in one local market that many agents like I could never do that in my neck. I don’t think we have 800 Each Well, I’m
D.J. Paris 6:41 glad you’re not in my local market, because I would not want to compete with you. Because that’s how amazing you are. But let’s talk to our audience today, which are from all over the country as well. And, you know, we You’re the queen of social media, but I think it would be really cool to talk about something, it’s one of those things that it’s a topic that we hear about. And then you sort of like, it’s not that important, but it really is important is determining your hourly rate. Let’s talk about that.
Gogo Bethke 7:12 So, you know, we are faced with so many different shiny objects and so many different things that can help you in so many different apps that you can buy and so many different things, right. But the thing is, you don’t know if you need that a number two, you don’t know if you can afford that. And what I mean by that is there’s there’s a break even point in your career at some point where for a while, you should be doing all of those activities because you cannot justify or afford to hire somebody to do those activities for you. Right. But the question is, at what point can you afford it? So in order to know that you need to know your hourly rate. So what I want you what I would like to talk to you about today is your hourly rate on the listing side, and on the buyer side, you need to figure that out because it’s different for most people. And then also to figure out how to hire a virtual assistant, a personal assistant, a transaction coordinator, should you hire that? Maybe a buyer’s agent? At what point should you hire that right? And what is that look like money wise. So I have also an exercise and I call the red light green light exercise. So we can go into that later, that will help you create the job description for that VA that you’re going to hire in the future. So let’s get started. You’re ready.
D.J. Paris 8:16 Let’s do it.
Gogo Bethke 8:17 So what do you think a nationwide commission is in average, on the listing side?
D.J. Paris 8:25 So I would think that
Gogo Bethke 8:28 5% Total something I mean, not in dollar amount. Oh, okay.
D.J. Paris 8:32 I $7,000 Maybe,
Gogo Bethke 8:35 oh, that’s I think that’s really low. I think it’s more like 12 Nowadays,
D.J. Paris 8:39 well shows you what I know. Let’s go with 12.
Gogo Bethke 8:41 So let’s meet you in the middle. Let’s say it’s 10,000. And let’s say tab. And then let’s say 7000 on the buy side. Okay, great. Usually buyers, you end up with less, you’re more buyers heavy than listing heavy. Okay, so if it’s $10,000 Think of it this way from the moment that you are on that initial phone consultation with that seller, then you go out to the appointment you and you’re gonna do some comps, maybe it’s gonna take you 20 minutes, right you’re gonna do some comps, then you’re gonna go out to the sellers house, you’re gonna have a little bit of a, a nice, meaty area to your conversation, then you are going to tell them how much is what then they’re going to tell you. Yep, they’re going to list with you, then you’re going to go home to the paperwork, they’re going to sign it with electronic signature, send it back to you, you’re going to plug it into your analyze, then you’re going to do a little bit of marketing a little bit of negotiations, you might drive out to the property a couple of times to do an open house or maybe you drive out to meet the appraiser and then you’re gonna go to the closing table. Alright, in average, if you want your sufficient if you’re really good at your job, I asked say we’ll take you about seven hours to work with the seller. Does that sound right? Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay. So if we take $10,000 And then we divided by seven hours, your listing side of hourly rate is $1,420. Wow. So every time you’re working with a seller, your hour is worth $1,400. Now that’s calculated on the buy side and the buy side, the sudden average commission would be about 7000. And the buyer side, in my opinion, you work about 12 hours with a buyer, you will work because you’re going to drive around, you’re going to show them how it says, in some cases, you might even move work more than 12 hours because the markets so hard, and you might have to, even though you work one out there, and they’re ready to make an offer on the first house, they see it might take you 237 offers before they actually buy one. So let’s say it’s 12 hours. But if your hourly is longer than that, then do the math separate, right? So take your average by side commission and divided by the 12 hours or how many hours you think you’ve worked with the buyer. In this case, the buy side commission per hour or hourly rate is $583. So just from this math, $1,420 versus 583. Were Who should I work with sellers or buyers? Sellers. Right? So now we know that I should be concentrating on sellers and listings, because that’s where I make most amount of my money for the same time spent, right, because we’re gonna spend an hour here make $583, you’re going to spend the same hour here make $1,400 When you hear, right, you make more money for the same time. Now the next thing is paperwork. That should be the first thing that every agent removes from their plate, there is this thing called a TC, a transaction coordinator, it’s going to change your life if you’re not using one of winters wait on to start using when you’re going to start loving real estate all over again. So yeah, go ahead. I
D.J. Paris 11:35 totally agree. This is something that agents oftentimes think I can’t afford to hire an assistant, I can’t afford to have a transaction coordinator. I’m new to the business. I can’t do that. So how can they do that? How can they hire somebody when they’re just starting out? They have no money.
Gogo Bethke 11:53 Okay, so I’m going to show you why you are losing money by not having one. You’re losing money. Because here’s the thing, right? Do you know how transaction coordinators get paid? They do transaction for you get paid off of when the transaction closes. So if the transaction doesn’t close, for whatever reason, your buyers got called fee, they no longer qualify, the seller no longer wants to sell whatever the basement flooded, and the buyer doesn’t want to buy it anymore. Whatever the reason is right? It doesn’t matter if you don’t get paid, they don’t get paid. So it is not a cost to you. You only pitching out that 350 bucks, $400 whatever they charge big are the only pitching that out if and when your transaction actually closed. In most states, you can actually charge what we call a broker fee or transaction fee. If you get to charge it like in Michigan, we get to charge it. So I charge 6% on my listings and a 495 transaction fee, my TC actually gets paid out of my transaction fee. Right, it’s not a cost to me, it’s already built into our model. Now I’m just using it for service. And now I’m going to show you how you are losing money by not having a TC. So number one, you’re not paying your TC is not an upfront cost. Only if and when the deal closes. Number two, think of it this way. Truly, if you thought about your listings and your biocides all of the people work, right. So on the listing side, you have to create the listing paperwork, then you have to plug it into the MLS, right? Then you have to negotiate back and forth and then you’re going to have some attendance, then you’re going to look at your closing CD and make sure everything’s on there. So me doing those, I would say you probably spend a good three hours through the lifetime of the file on paperwork. Okay, so now on the listing side, we know three hours for you on the listing side is 1428 times three is $4,314. Is what it’s costing you to push your own paper. Because if you took those three hours, and you went and got yourself one more seller, you do whatever you did to get that last seller for three hours and you got to yourself another seller, you’re gonna get yourself another $10,000 commission. So it’s costed you $4,314. Suppose you’re on paper, you try to say 400 or 350, or whatever it is he costs in your neck of the woods. Right? And you lost 4314?
D.J. Paris 14:12 Yeah, so let’s let’s pause for a moment because that’s really, really important. So what Google’s really saying is, we get excited, right? We go to a listing presentation, we win the deal, we win the listing, and then we come home and we send all the paperwork over via dot Luber or DocuSign or whatever system we’re using. And now we’re in the paperwork game. And guess what? Yes, it’s exciting. It’s fun. But is it the best use of your time? Well, we just proved that it isn’t. And wouldn’t it be cool if somebody could do that for three to $400 And oh, by the way, you only pay when it closes. So if it doesn’t close as gogo said, almost all Tec companies I’m aware of do not charge. So it is a total no brainer and we should also talk about what transaction coordinators actually do aside from paperwork?
Gogo Bethke 15:04 Well, depending if they’re licensed or unlicensed, right, but if they’re licensed, they can pretty much do everything you can. They’re not going to negotiate for you, right? They’re not going to show up at the inspection and negotiate the sellers concessions for you, right? That is your job. But when let’s say you did the home inspection, you call your TC on the way home and say, Hey, we did the inspection, everything was fine. We agreed on a $5,000 seller’s concession, can you please put together the addendum and just say all parties agree that salary has been 5000 seller’s concession that goes into the buyer, and then send it out to all parties? Done, it took me two seconds, right, I’ll give you a voice note on the phone. And then it’s done. She’s going to type it up, she’s going to send it out to all parties and all the signatures are and she’s going to read you know, resend it back to everybody. Again, make sure that it’s updated your file with your broker, and voila, it’s probably going to take this person an hour or two. And in the meantime, go get goes out of the house, go get another seller.
D.J. Paris 15:56 Yeah, and, and they can also help with important dates, right? Like all the important dates of a transaction, they are going to the transaction coordinator is going to know in advance what needs to be done when it needs to be done. And they will help keep you on track and they’ll just keep the paperwork out of your hands into their hands.
Gogo Bethke 16:17 So hire it out because you are losing money. And I’m by sight Okay, nice. Are you losing less because it’s $583? So 583 times the three hours so you’re losing 1749 Are you steal? Because if you promise yourself that those three hours that you just save for yourself, you’re going to spend it on lead generation, you’re going to easily make another at least another commission.
D.J. Paris 16:44 Right. I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Gogo Bethke 18:06 So don’t lose money. Make money, right? It’s just mad. The next thing is Okay, so who should be your next hire? Let’s say you already have a TC. Right? So like, I already got that go grab you using a DC for the last five years. Congratulations, you’re smart. Okay, the rest of you. If you don’t have us DC and you’re wondering where you should go, you can check out smooth dc.com It’s smooth DC that calm. The next hire should be a va, a virtual assistant. I have like 30 Plus, and I love it. Now in some different positions, right? Your first word. So your first virtual assistant should be your executive assistant. That should be the person that takes the everyday tasks off of your plate. So the reason when I realized finally dawned on me that this is stupid, it was LinkedIn. Not it’s not LinkedIn fault. I had 946 messages. I think when I logged in one day to LinkedIn, I’m like, oh my god, I have to check all these messages out of the 946. I had four. Then I truly needed to address the rest of them. Were all like, oh, so nice to me connected, or could you come on my podcast? Okay, blah, blah, right? Like no, not in and it was so important. Like I had four in there that I truly needed to address. And I was like, it took me like two and a half hours and I’m never going to get back. And I was like, do I don’t do these messages needs to be checked because I didn’t want to miss those four. Yes, they do need to be checked. But do they need to be checked by me?
D.J. Paris 19:30 Right? Do you need to sift through 950 messages to find the for No, not a good use of your time?
Gogo Bethke 19:36 Not a good use of my time somebody else can sift through them and then leave those for unopened. Right. So then I know when I log in, I only have to check those four because the rest was already checked and taking care of these four they couldn’t address on their own. So I can log in there take care of it. Maybe it was personal. Maybe it was like a big decision that they couldn’t make on my behalf or things like that. But other than that our virtual systems, checking all of my DMs the only social media do And then I personally check his my Instagram, everywhere else and every single email and every single DM on every single social media Facebook group or Facebook page, I have a virtual assistant. So let’s do this exercise so you can figure out what type of assistant do you need for in the first place. So there is an exercise called the red light green light exercise, I want you to take a piece of paper and clip it to your clipboard and draw a line in the middle and the left hand side you’re gonna see a red light on the right hand side, we’re gonna say green light. And you’re going to walk around with a clipboard for a straight week. It’s going to be attached to you by the hip. And every motion you take every action you take every call you make every email you answer every open house you hold, when you brush your teeth manual, do your when you run a load of laundry, when you show houses, right, everything that you do is going to be on that spreadsheet. Red light means you can stop doing it. Stop it right now, because you can hire it out. Those are your DMS, your emails, those kind of stuff, right? The green light is brushing your teeth. Can you hire somebody to brush your teeth? I mean, if you probably could, coming to America, right? You probably could. But other than that, you could probably brush your teeth for the rest of your life, right? walking your dog? Do you? Does your dog need to be walking? As does he or she needs to be walked by? You know, that’s red light. Right? I have somebody in our house assistant. And that is her job she wants Charlie now on the weekends. Don’t get me wrong. I work, Charlie, right? So you have to separate the things of like red light, green light green light for me is social media, my posts, I will always make the post, could I hire it out? Absolutely. I choose not to, because I will lose my brand. I built a brand around my own self, I built a brand around my knowledge, I built a brand about my work ethic and united in my mindset. So I can’t hire that portion out. Because there’s somebody else that are typing up things that I usually want. If I would, it wouldn’t be me anymore. Because it’d be in your voice, it needs to be my voice. So that’s not something I can hire out. But I only make one post and it’s on Instagram. And I do have a social media virtual assistant who takes it from Instagram and then plaster it everywhere else. She takes that post and I wrote and I posted on Instagram and puts it on LinkedIn, she takes the same post and puts it on all the different Facebook groups, she takes their posts and puts it right. So she helps me spread the world everywhere else, but I make the initial post. Right, so there’s a million ways how you can do that. So walk around with a clipboard red light green light exercise. And in the end of the week, everything that you put in your red light is going to be able to be broken up into two different sections. Number one is going to be anything that can be done online. And number two section is going to be things that are going to have to be done in person. So like dropping off your dry cleaning, walking your dog doing a load of laundry, grocery shopping, right? That’s in person, my virtual assistant from Brazil cannot grocery shop for me, I guess she could like the Kroger app and shipping to my house like you know, there’s always a way with that. But like the in person physical stuff like walking your dog, you will have to hire somebody for that in person, right? So you’re gonna put those aside for a minute, because those are the ones that gonna cost you more, we’re gonna talk about the virtual stuff, that’s where you can get a virtual assistant, a virtual assistant in average is going to cost you about four bucks an hour. Yeah. So if your hourly rate is 14 128 hours, right or under $20, let’s see how many hours that is 1428 divided by four, a virtual assistant would work for 357 hours for the same amount of money. Or look at it this way. For one hour, you could hire 357 virtual assistants who would get paid the same amount as you get paid for that same hour.
D.J. Paris 23:41 So where do people go if they want to find these virtual assistants?
Gogo Bethke 23:46 So I started out, I’m going between myself and my business partner Sammy, we have about 10 years of experience now having hired virtual assistants, you can start out on Upwork. So Upwork up wo rk.com, you can go on there, make a job post and they’ll apply and then you interview them right? And then you have to give them access to things and then you have to train them and you have to have SOPs and yada yada, you can absolutely take the route. Or you can hire us we have a company that’s called V clone knew that calm because the goal is they have a bunch of many years, right? So it’s cloning you and for exactly what job capacity you need a virtual assistant for, they already come trained and they come with all the SOPs, so and we guarantee them for 90 days. So if they don’t work out in that certain position for whatever reason that we replace them for you with another one. And then also they come with the SOP so in the future, you don’t have to come back to us. Right and it’s a video based training as well we explain it from the high the employee and the employer side of things. Right so for the employer, we talk about things like you know what, what kind of pay structure, what kind of access you should give them, how to pay them, where to pay them, those kinds of things that and the virtual assisting side they don’t need on a day to day basis. So on the virtual assisting side, they will get SOPs and video based training on how to do their job right Right. On this side on the employer side, you get SOPs and video based trainings on how to maintain having virtual assistants as employees.
D.J. Paris 25:08 Can I tell you, I’m a huge fan of virtual assistants, I have a virtual assistant that I that I chat with every single morning. And she and I go through my two dues every day. And she says, Here’s what you’re doing today, DJ now. And she’s amazing. And she, we go through that we prioritize we, and then I have another virtual assistant that every Saturday after in the morning, she goes through all of my expenses with me. And she goes, Hey, I noticed the spending trends, I’d like you to save a little bit more. So it’s like,
Gogo Bethke 25:43 DJ, you went this week, three times.
D.J. Paris 25:49 My one of my virtual assistants, just this week went through the entire here’s where I live in Chicago, we have all these amazing festivals going on over the weekends. She said, You know, I bet you guys want to go to a bunch of festivals, my girlfriend and I this this summer? And I said yes, she goes, I’m gonna go through all of them. And I want you to tell me which ones you want to go to? And I’m gonna set them up for you. It’s like these are you can even have been doing other tasks. If
Gogo Bethke 26:17 you haven’t. Yes. Love it.
D.J. Paris 26:21 It’s amazing, I think because if I if I go through all of those festivals that will take me a couple of hours. It’s
Gogo Bethke 26:29 and then you can if you will say, Oh, yeah, I want to go on here. Oh, nevermind. We are in Florida at that time. Right. So. So not only do you have to go through it with the idea of like, Do I even want to go into it in the first place, then you have to match it up to your calendar. Right? And that’s the part. Okay, I’ll show you. That’s the part where it’s really hard for me.
D.J. Paris 26:48 Yeah, yeah. It’s it this is this is what what we’re really trying to do is tell every all of our listeners that this is a mindset that you can, you know, if you don’t have to control and do everything, right, and this is what we’re talking about is outsource some of this stuff. I might my virtual one of my virtual assistants even gives me date night ideas. She’s like, hey, this upcoming weekend, here’s five date night ideas. That’s really helpful for me, that’s super useful. Yeah,
Gogo Bethke 27:22 she makes you be the best boyfriend ever. That’s,
D.J. Paris 27:26 well, you know, here’s another thing a virtual assistant is doing for me. Now, I don’t practice real estate. But if I did, I would use this in a different way. I have all my friends and my and my close, you know, relationships. She went in and put everybody’s birthday and anniversary date in my calendar. So that I and a week before each of those events, she, we have a task. Okay, so and so’s birthday is coming up? Are we going to do something for that? Think about as an agent, of course, go go. I’m sure you’ve already done this. But you can do this for all of your clients. Right? You could say, here’s their home anniversary date. Here’s, you know, here’s what they purchased the home last here’s their actual wedding anniversary, here’s their birthday, here’s their kids birthdays. And now you have you can have all this information. And you can use that to then deepen relationships with people.
Gogo Bethke 28:17 Absolutely. So we have what’s called a favorites list. And we do we fill that out for every client. So that’s how we find out I mean, we know the closing date, that’s their home anniversary, right? But like, you know, what is your favorite sports team? What is your favorite coffee shop? What is their favorite restaurant? What is do they have any allergies? How many kids do they have? What are their ages? When is their wedding anniversary where other individual birthdays, we plug all that into one in our CRM program into the profile and then we set reminders, and then it’s our each of our agents responsibility and our team to keep in touch with those clients.
D.J. Paris 28:48 Yeah, it’s really the best way to reach out to somebody and not be salesy and go, Hey, you’re ready to buy a home. You want to call and say, Hey, I know it’s your child’s birthday today. I just wanted to call and say happy birthday to your child. Like that’s a huge thing. It was my friend’s 40th wedding anniversary today. I sent them a text and they said every year DJ you send this and you’re the only person aside from their closest family members that knows that and it’s only because my virtual assistant put it in my calendar.
Gogo Bethke 29:17 That’s amazing. Yeah, we do that for our agents everybody’s birthdays in my calendar we create a happy like Happy Birthday music or picture all that then we posted so yeah, we tried to do a lot of things and you definitely cannot do this on your own. Right. So if you want to if especially if you have a massive database, if you have like 10 clients Yeah, maybe you can remember on your own right. But if you want to grow this to the levels that where you are making multi millions, you know, you’re you can’t possibly do this alone. It takes a village.
D.J. Paris 29:45 It takes a village and the good news is the village is the entire world. We now are connected through technology. And we can hire people virtual assistants from other parts of the world where the cost of living is substantially different. And, and very cost effective for people to hire some of these these intelligent, wonderful workers to you know, you’re you’re helping them by giving them income, and they’re helping you by making your life a lot easier. So if someone wants to sort of explore hiring some people to help with with tasks, you know, whether their business tasks or home tasks, what what what do you recommend?
Gogo Bethke 30:27 I mean, you can ask, I always go to YouTube for everything right. So first go to, you know, maybe just start watching some videos to even understand how people use virtual assistants. But I can walk you through a few different job titles that we have, right. So on my local team, we have a virtual assistant, and her job duty is to take care of all the leads, right and keep the database maintained. So when the Favorites list comes in, update everybody’s profile, set those reminders like those kinds of things right when a lead comes in, respond to them right away before an agent can respond to them. So we don’t lose them. Because our agents our market is crazy, right? They’re out on the market, they don’t necessarily have the ability to get back within five minutes, every single lead. So then this way, we earn ourselves some time by the virtual assistant responding to them. Then we have a numbers guy on our team and his name is Saeed. He runs all of our like, I’m the biggest nerd you’ll ever meet. i My trackers have trackers, right. So I drove on track everything from every angle you could possibly track it from. So he runs all of these reports. And then once a week, we have a kind of like a reports meeting, we go to everybody’s tabs right on our spreadsheets. And then once a month, we have like an overall to see what money came in what’s going out. What’s our retention, only those kinds of things, right. So that’s our numbers guy, then we have a few tech guys. So technology, I think it’s very important, especially if you start running a team, right? Because you’re going to have issues with like not all agents are created equal, right. So some of your agents are going to need more hand holding than other agents, some agents might not even know how to access the Google Calendar on their phone, right? They never use the calendar, and suddenly all of their appointments are going to be set up in a calendar, they don’t even know how to access right. So then you’re gonna have what we realize is even though I gave my Google Drive and all of my trackers and all of my apps and systems and contracts, and you name it to my overall downline, right, we realize that when they open my lead tracker, it’s 17 tabs, they’re like, but how do I use it? And what things go go, but how do I use it right? So then we do trainings on that. So have yourself a technology person, even if it comes easy to you, if you want to grow a team, right, you’re not gonna have time to show Joe Schmo How to Download Google app, right, you’re not gonna be able to do that. So have a tech person who can help your people. The next one is you of course, you should always start with an executive assistant like that should be the first thing you remove from your calendar, all the emails, the DMS, the nonsense that is just clogging your phones and your databases. And then we have a design assistant. And her job is we celebrate birthdays, and top agent attractors and top producers and icon agents and all of the celebratory things, right, all of those things have to be designed, all of those posts need to be made, right. So we have a design girl. And her job is to make things pretty. So if it’s somebody’s birthday, she creates a as these icon pictures, right? Or does birthday pictures, and then we post it. So that is her job, her job is designed, make things pretty. And then we have social media girl, her job is to take my posts from Instagram and plaster it everywhere. And then respond to those DNS and respond to those posts. And, you know, keep all of those accounts live because I am everywhere, but I can’t possibly be everywhere, right. So if I just think of it this way, if I make a post, my account reaches over 2 million accounts a month, if I make a post on Instagram, and let’s say 200 People respond. And I’m going to make that same post on Facebook, and let’s say 200 People respond, and I’m going to make that same post on LinkedIn and 200 people respond that is 600 people. Right? And I don’t want to take I mean, it’s impossible to respond to everybody. But there are some really, really good meaningful comments in there, that I would like to get back to them. So they know that it meant something. Right. So then now I’ll get back to them, maybe if I can uninstall them, but everywhere else, everybody else gonna get back to them. Right. And then same with DMS, like all of these accounts, if you want to play the social media game, all of your accounts have to stay alive. In order to stay alive, you have to go you have to have the back and forth the communications the posts, the people actually taking time out of their day to watch it to come in to like to share to follow right so in order for those things to happen, you have to keep your accounts alive and for that to happen you have to post and if you want to do it all it’s impossible.
D.J. Paris 34:33 It isn’t it is impossible and and that’s so what do you so you were talking about when you post your social media content. That’s what you really enjoy. That’s the thing that that it’s uniquely you. And so that’s what you enjoy the most to right?
Gogo Bethke 34:52 Yeah, that is like it’s always been like I don’t like to say it’s my job, but it’s my job in the sense of when I decided to take an avenue Real Estate should not be a broker agent right to actually make money in real estate. I went through the process of cold calling, buying Zillow leads like I’ve never done those but I interviewed others right and they formed areas they bought leads, they cold, call their door knock their, you know all that. And I was like, I’m not doing that. So when I decided to do social media, that is my job, just like a cold caller takes their job seriously, in a cold call form eight to 11 every single morning, I do social media every single day, because that is my job. When because I love it, it doesn’t feel like a job. I truly enjoy doing that. But it’s still a job, I have to stay consistent. And I did for 11 years.
D.J. Paris 35:35 Yeah, it’s amazing. So what we’re really talking about our systems, right, so this is a conversation about having systems. So the first thing is go go said, you get the clipboard, you make the line down the middle red light, green light. First, let’s figure out what parts of your life we can delegate, we can take off your plate. And, and some of those things we’re gonna have to do in person, we just can’t avoid it. Other things, digital things, invisible things, we can do that we can hire that out for people all over the world who would be happy to do it for you at a very reasonable price. And then you just have to give them access and like you said, and then all of a sudden, your time now opens up. It’s a bit of a shift. And it takes it there’s a little bit of a barrier there to break through. Once you do it. I mean, I started doing it years ago, it was a total game changer for me as well. And it’s not that I don’t want to do things for myself. It’s not like I sit around now with all this extra time and just stare at the sky. Yeah, I know, I’m busy. But this there’s so life is really hard. And this is a way to make life just a little bit less hard. Like if you know, every single month, you should be writing. Like Brian Buffini would say, you know, these personal notes, right, Brian Buffini is all about personal notes. But if you if you say well, I know I should be writing 100 personal notes a month, but I’m not doing it, then maybe it’s time to hire somebody to help you do that. It doesn’t mean you don’t write them, it means that somebody can help you make that faster and easier and better. There’s all sorts of things that we can hire out for. And remember, we’re running a business. So let’s
Gogo Bethke 37:25 see, I mean, even like not to create yourself more work to, you know, for a while you’re going to create yourself more work. But eventually you’re going to get to the point where you’re like, I just want to gain an hour back with my kids. Yeah, I just want to sit on the beach for an hour and everybody lose my number. Right? At some point you just gonna have some one to do some time freedom stuff.
D.J. Paris 37:49 I think it’s great. And anyone who even if you’re not on a team, even if it’s just you and you’re the only one practicing, get yourself some help. It’s really it this is the job is too hard without it don’t be an island, right? They say, you know, be be get other. It takes a village as gogo says, so get your tribe. And the good news is we live in a time where we can get our tribe from all over the world and for reasonable prices. So tell us about the the the TC and the virtual assistant platform that you have.
Gogo Bethke 38:26 Yeah, so the TC one is mu TC and that started with the idea that people I go and you know, speak all the time. And I talk about these kinds of things like you know how to make more money and remove things from your plate and grow and yada, yada. And I would get asked all the time about like what TC company do I recommend and I really the TC company that I used for my local team was not taking on any more clients and I was like, I don’t know, I don’t like to recommend companies or systems and processes that I don’t personally use. So it was like okay, I guess it’s time for me to open one. So we do have a company called Smooth TC, you’re more than welcome to check us out. It’s smooth TC, that calm smooth came from the idea of smooth sailing all the way to the closing table right. So just check us out go to smooth tc.com and see if we will be a good fit. And then the the week one you kind of came the same thing we already have the boot camp right so we have the agent attraction boot camp and the social media boot camp. And even in the in both of the boot camps we have a lot of virtual assistant that helps us run it right and so our clients are used to seeing all kinds of or correspondence with all kinds of virtual assistants to the program and so they were always asking us so how can I get my own VA? Can you recommend a VA? How about every company and we would always send everybody back to Upwork because that’s how ours came originally right? And eventually people were just like can you just get me one trained like I don’t want to go through all the trouble of finding them and training them and a cultural differences and an hourly differences and how do I pay them and they were all coming back to us with a million other questions. So we created we clone you and we call you is very similar to all of my other boot camps where it’s a video based training right so I share my knowledge on the employer side of things and all of my ways share Are their knowledge on what they do for me, every single VA has their SOPs written out step by step instructions for every step that they take for me. So then the person who’s going to buy the program, if they decide to, they can literally buy it, own it forever and never have to come back to us to hire another VA, the next VA that they get, they could just go out on the market and say, Oh, you’re an executive assistant. Hey, log in here, watch all these videos. Here’s your SOP two weeks from now start working your job.
D.J. Paris 40:25 I love it. I mean, SOP for everyone listening to standard operating procedure? Yes, sorry. Yeah. So basically, you’re you’re creating videos so that if the virtual assistant doesn’t work out, you can plug somebody new into it. But I think that’s a great place to wrap up. So what we’re really just to recap what we talked about, first, we talked about how much are you worth per hour? What is your rates? What are you worth? And then where should you spend your time? Well, if you don’t have enough time, we just created a way to get you more time by hiring virtual assistants to help I guarantee you can earn back, I would say, at least an hour or two a day, wouldn’t you say?
Gogo Bethke 41:05 Easy? Um, depending on the help you have, right? If you have one person helping you for now, then yeah, it’s an hour. But imagine the growth that you can create for yourself when you have multiple of them right in different positions. Because at first the mistake I made is I hired one and I wanted her to do everything that I do is only one crazy person like me, right? So it’s like imagine creating a bunch of you that they specialize in that one thing, right? Because for example, nowadays, you can start doing things for you that you’re not good at. Like how about trackers that you want but you hate numbers, right? Well hire that person who’s gonna plug all those numbers in there for you. I’m gonna tell you in the end of the month, if you’re positive or negative, where are you blowing money? What are you not making revenue, right? So it’s like, they can do things for you. Not only they can do things for you that you already doing, but now they can start doing things for you that you never had the time to do. Or the talent.
D.J. Paris 42:02 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. This is a great opportunity, everyone go out and consider hiring every single person who’s listening can afford to hire a virtual assistant, I promise you can. And if you if you can, so you just can and think about tasks that are dragging you down and just start slow, come up with a couple of tasks, have them do that. Even if it’s just one hour a day, even if they’re you’re just paying one hour a day wage, that’s an hour a day that you’re gonna get back. So it’s a total no brainer. I’m a huge fan. Gogo. Also, let’s talk about your boot camp. Tell us about your boot camp.
Gogo Bethke 42:40 So go goes with kim.com It started with the social media which we are updating right now actually we are stopped sales for a hot minute until we are updating everything then we start over. Then we have the agent attraction bootcamp. So that one is regarding that one is for agents or teams or team leaders or broker owners that want to grow their teams, right, or downline depending what brokerage they are with. And then we added on the TC company and the VA company so you can actually find everything that I do undergo was with Kim that calm, but also in the same time they each have their own individual company. So those websites and I said this new TC that we clone you they all pretty much need the you know, or what do they say All roads lead to Rome? Yeah, they all lead back to go was was given that karma eventually. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 43:25 I love it. So everyone, go visit Gogo podcast.com, because you get it actually a special discount for listeners of keeping it real podcast. So visit Gogo podcast.com, I promise this will be the incredible investment into your business. Everybody could use a boost in social media. And gogo has already paved the way so you don’t have to try and fail. And you just can learn from all of her trials and tribulations and she already knows what works. And she updates it all the time. I mean, gosh, I don’t know how many iterations of the bootcamp have already happened. But you have added dozens and dozens and dozens of hours since it launched. Just tons and tons of content there. So go visit go go podcast.com And also please follow gogo at on Instagram at gogos real estate that’s Gio, Gio s real estate. And also you can find her on our website, go go Beth key.com BETHKE, so Gog OBIEE thke.com. And check out everything related to go go. And if you want to join her team, if you think that she would be a great mentor to have and she would definitely go to gogo, Beth key.com. And you can find out more about joining her real estate team and she’ll help take your business to the next level. Gogo, thank you so much. Once again. You’ve been with us since the very beginning. We’re honored to have you and we were so thrilled to have you. Thanks for being such a supporter of our show, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks. Go go.
Gogo Bethke 45:01 Thank you. Thank you
How To Educate Clients About The Current Market Shift • Haley Cutter
Jul 21, 2022
Haley Cutter the founder of Cutter Luxe Living with Compass goes back to the beginning of her career in real estate. Haley discusses why she decided to build a team and how her team is built. Haley discusses what her team does to distinguish themselves from the competition and how they are educating their clients about the shift in the market. Haley also talks about balancing family/personal life and professional life.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How do you talk to your clients about the current market shift? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Haley cutter. Before we get to Haley just a couple of quick reminders please, as always, the best way you can help our show is by telling a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing the success strategies and tips from top producers like Haley send them a link to our website, right which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from a browser, or if the person you’re referring to as a podcast listener, have them pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button and last please leave us a review what other whatever app you might be listening to the show through let us know what you think of the show we read every review and comment and it helps us improve so anyway, enough of all that let’s get on to the main event my conversation with Haley cutter.
Today on the show we have Katie cutter who’s a top 1% realtor and founder of Qatar Lux living with compass in Massachusetts. Now Haley cutter is the founder of Qatar Lux living with Compass after growing up in the Boston area and graduating from Emerson. She began her career working for a Top New York City advertising agency but returned to Boston to get her MBA at Northeastern. Once she graduated she shifted gears to the real estate industry in 2014. She co founded la live in luxury, sorry live in luxury real estate. It probably happens all the time. But let me start that one part over so I don’t screw it up because it is really cool. In 2014. She co founded live in luxury real estate at Douglas Elliman and in 2021 launched Qatar Lux living at Compass as the sole founder and managing broker which is now one of Boston’s top luxury real estate groups. And in December of last year, Qatar Lux living had a record breaking month, so not a year a month with 20 million in closings. This is absolutely incredible. Qatar Lux living serves Boston’s most exclusive downtown neighborhoods and surrounding communities all led by Haley’s driving force for a better client experience. The brokerage is currently expanding also into New Hampshire, and Florida. Please everyone visit visit Haley and her team at Cutter lux.com And that is c u t t e r l u x e.com. Again, Cutter lux.com. And by the way, unbelievable realtor website. I’m always impressed whenever I see a really great one. That’s a good one. Go check it out. Haley, welcome to our show.
Haley Cutter 4:19 Well, thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 4:23 Yeah, I am so excited to talk with you. I am always you know, I’ve been doing these sorts of conversations for about four or five years now. And I never get tired, talking to top producers and finding out what it is they’ve done to get to where they are and what they’re continuing to do. And right now I think it’s particularly interesting time because I was with a couple 100 agents just a few days ago at an event with our local association. And you could feel the stress and tension in the room as people are realtors are it’s tough right now. You guys are crushing it so I’m excited to hear about what you guys are doing. But I’d love to see start at the very beginning and learn more about you because you didn’t you know, your path didn’t necessarily point towards real estate with with your education. So I’m excited to learn how you how you made that transition and why.
Haley Cutter 5:12 Absolutely. So yeah, not at all. I did not grow up thinking that I would ever be in real estate. It was not anything that I dreamed of as a little girl. I went to school I majored in marketing and advertising. Got my undergraduate degree at Emerson, as you had mentioned in Boston. And then I was off to New York City. I worked for a top agency. They’re great worldwide, and Oh, sure. Great, great. You got an account management working hand in hand with their Procter and Gamble team, Pantene Pro V. Had some great mentors, they’re really, really learned a lot. Learn how to interact with different people. You know, it was a great place to be and maybe from Boston on the East Coast, Boston’s a small city, but if people can after they graduate, I think it’s worthwhile for for anybody, even if you’re coming back to Boston to spend a year or two in New York City. It’s just such a eye opening, wonderful global experience.
D.J. Paris 6:02 I agree. I love both cities in Boston is one that my sister, she’s a brand manager and are well, yeah, she now she she’s a CMO. But she was work lived and worked in New York City as well in sort of the ad, advertising and marketing space. And so we used to visit there a lot. And Boston. I didn’t have as many close friends but I have visited several times in the last five years or six years. And boy, it’s just such a wonderful city. Boston is Boston doesn’t get its do because New York is so close. And it gets overshadowed sometimes. But I got I love Boston, it’s just a walkable, amazing city.
Haley Cutter 6:40 You’ve nailed that extremely walkable, it’s got great neighborhoods, they all have their own authentic flair. And it can become home where or sometimes New York might feel too vast. Boston becomes a neighborhood.
D.J. Paris 6:53 Yeah. So how did you make the pivot from from from being sort of in on Madison Avenue, maybe in New York City, making the switch back to to? Well, not just the Boston but of course, to a new career?
Haley Cutter 7:06 Sure. So I ended up coming back home, I really wanted to be closer to my family, there were a few things going on. And it was important to me to be here. So when I came back to Boston, I tried the advertising route. And I found that it just couldn’t compare with New York City. So at that point in time, my my fiance, who’s now my husband, he was in real estate, and I constantly found myself surrounded by him, his friends who were all in real estate, we were talking real estate, you know, every time went out for dinner every time we had a cocktail party, as we’re taking a walk in the park. And and I did enjoy it. And I thought, you know, what, if I can’t beat them, I’m just going to join them, because I was in it.
D.J. Paris 7:41 Well, to add also, I imagine I’m curious, because you’re really a marketer at heart. And that was, you know, your background, your training as well. I’m curious if you as my background is the same. And I’m curious if you ever looked at some of the marketing and the branding that was happening, the advertising in real estate in the realtor world, for example, and thinking I could do a better job of that, or I could have there’s a lots of room for improvement, I think, right.
Haley Cutter 8:09 And we’re going back to to 2008 2009. And all these great schools and apps that we have now where even if you have no advertising experience, you can put together a really cool ad, those didn’t exist. So some of the real estate advertisements just really weren’t that good.
D.J. Paris 8:30 Yeah, we didn’t we didn’t have Canva back then. Right? Like, he just changed the game for everyone who goes, I don’t really know how to use Photoshop and Canva came around and said, Oh, no problem, we can take care of that for you. And now. And now everyone can have cool looking stuff. Without really a design background. But you’re right back then you were really on your own.
Haley Cutter 8:51 You were you absolutely were. So I loved being able to put my advertising and marketing background to work. PR was also an area that I studied, and it was a perfect complement to to the real estate industry.
D.J. Paris 9:05 Yeah, makes makes so much sense. And I would love to hear about, you know, being that. That you’re you’re from that, you know, from the Boston area you guys serve as all of Massachusetts, Massachusetts, we should say. I have been as far west as which is not very far west as far west as Worcester. That is that is. But I know Massachusetts has got a lot more than just Boston in it. But you guys cover so much ground and your team. So tell us, tell us why you decided to build a team. And I always think this is interesting, because and and the reason I’m asking is there’s so many agents right now who are either solo practitioners, or maybe they’re already on a team. And they’re either thinking I want to join another team. Maybe this team isn’t the right fit or they’re not on a team thinking I either want to build my own team, or I want to join an established one I’m curious on on why you decided to build a team
Haley Cutter 10:00 So the reason that I was driven to grow and build a team is that I know my strengths, my strengths are in marketing, they’re an advertising, they’re in sales, but they’re not in so many other different areas. And I think that as Realtors as workers right now, we are not just being called on to go in open the door and show the features and benefits of a property. But, you know, we’re asked to be the financial analyst, and really, really diving deep into to all the trends where the price points, then mapping it out across the board. So finance side operations. When we work with new development clients, we’re partnering with groups that are doing visualizations. So it’s not as if a photographer can come in and just take photos. But we have members on our team that specialize in all these different areas. And my skills, that that’s not where I’m best utilized, and why I like a team and how we build our team is not just oh, you’re gonna sell in downtown Boston, you’re gonna sell in Beacon Hill, but what are the strengths and attributes that you can build? And how can we all be stronger together?
D.J. Paris 11:06 Yeah, that makes it so so the way that you have your team is our predominantly our people, our agents on your team? Do we? Are they do they have different roles? Or how does your team structure?
Haley Cutter 11:18 Sure, so it does differ project to project home to home, but I’ll give an example. So right now, we are in the process of bringing a beautiful, beautiful $6 million plus property to market. It is located in Newton mass, which is directly outside of Austin, one of the suburbs. It’s also abutting the beautiful golf course. And it is in the pre construction stage. So when we even when we pitched the developer, we’re bringing in our team members who specialized in the visualizations, we are bringing in our team members who have different speak different languages than I do. So we have manual, Cantonese speaking, specialists. We’re bringing in our finance team. And then we’re saying okay, so I’m going to be the one who shows the property 99% of the time, but, you know, Catherine is going to be helping and working with our visualization team, which is out of Vancouver. And interestingly, the team that working with this time is out of Poland, right. So we’re global it here. But no one person can manage all this and do it really, really well.
D.J. Paris 12:22 Right, it takes a village. Yeah.
Haley Cutter 12:27 What I’ve recognized and even in the last year is sometimes, you know, the question will be on a pitches, well, you know, I know that you have a big team, are you going to be the only one and what my response is, is, you know, I will show your home 99% The time but but my team, we are all stronger together than we are apart. And they obviously you know, I certainly can’t speak Mandarin and Cantonese, I cannot get behind the firewall on WeChat marketing homes. So, you know, we’re really, we’re giving the benefits of all of our team members and explaining why why we work together. And you know, the CEO of a company, he’s not doing every single job, but for whatever reason, our clients but they’ve worked for a while expecting that Realtors wear all these hats.
D.J. Paris 13:12 And I teams are a relatively new phenomenon. So I guess a lot of people had the experience of I had somebody who was a realtor, they seemed it seemed like they did everything and and now we have to almost resell our clients on this team base structure. Because you’re right, there’s there’s that fear that the client is going to think I’ve become so big, and I can’t really give them the personalized attention that they think they deserve. They’re gonna feel, and you’re right. So having that answer, ready and loaded. And of course, what you say makes perfect sense.
Haley Cutter 13:43 And it really is how we operate. You know, day in and day out, if you look at the projects that we take on, we’re putting the best team in place for every project to market and sell it and we do, I’d say probably 70% of our business is on the left side and about 30% on the buyer side. But on the left side, it is so so important to have the right people in place because you know, the social media, the brochures, the lifestyle videos, writing up the narrative, this is not like one, one person is not going to be the best fit for all of that. So my team and she previously she wrote for Bravo. So when we have to write narratives and property descriptions, she’s been a writer. Yeah, I can read. It’s not going to be as good as what Jen can write. That’s the reality of it. No, I know my strengths are and I think that my job as a team lead is really to understand the strengths that my team members bring and to utilize them appropriately.
D.J. Paris 14:44 Such a great answer and it’s such an important answer and what what I what I think is because I really want to get to this idea of luxury and luxury and working developments because I was in a Having it was at a breakfast with our local association. A couple days ago, a couple 100 agents in the room, mostly younger agents not younger, so much in age, although some of them were, but certainly younger or newer to the business and the whole, we had some speakers, some top Realtors here in Chicago, who were talking about luxury luxury rentals in this case, and the room was packed and standing room only because everybody who isn’t in luxury, who’s new to the business goes, I want to be in luxury. Can we dispel some myths about being in luxury? In other words, what I want to make sure our audience understands is what it’s really like to be in to be a luxury agent to work in that space. And it you know, while it’s something that I think a lot of people aspire to, I don’t think it’s the right fit for a lot of agents, would you agree?
Haley Cutter 15:50 I would agree. And to me luxury, it’s not about $1 amount. It’s not about wealth, but it’s about living a lifestyle that you feel uniquely abundant. And so when we’re marketing a property, whether it’s a luxury property or a $500,000 property, we are giving all of our clients the same white glove service, because I think that they deserve it.
D.J. Paris 16:11 Yeah, it i Absolutely. Believe that treating, you know, each each client, the same giving them a luxury experience, not only will of course, net you referrals and repeat business, but also will attract the I have the luxury buyers and sellers to write because that’s what they’re expecting and looking for from an agent. And also I want to also real ask you about competition, because obviously, there’s a tremendous number of agents in not only just the Boston area, but in the whole state. And of course, you’re in competition, I’m sure a lot of times with particularly with listings you do 70% of your business or listings, I’m curious, how often are you up against a multiple sort of interview? Sort of experience where they’re interviewing, you know, several different teams? Is, is that a common? Is that common for you? And if if it is, how do you go about distinguishing yourself from some of the other really amazing teams in your area?
Haley Cutter 17:09 Sure. So I think that my personal business, about 70% of it right now is either repeat clients or referrals. And thankfully, we’re it’s not necessarily an interview, they want to take the time to make sure that they they get to know me, they understand the process, but usually there’s not somebody we’re competing with. When we do really, once again, I think that cutter Luxe living utilizing all of our team members best strengths and grading the best team is nobody else is doing that here in Boston right now. So we have people who are the team members, they have the same role, right? So they’re gonna go in and they both go and the photographer comps, and they’re both fair. And they both go and they do the showing, because honestly, you know, team member a and team member B, they both feel that they should be there. So but when I started to restructure and rebrand Qatar Lux living, I looked at the way how we used to do things, and I thought, how can we improve upon it. So right now, I if I’m there meeting a photographer, I do not want another member of my team to be there, I want them to be working on visualizations, doing an analysis, making phone calls, it just, it doesn’t behoove anyone. So that’s how what I see right now in the Boston marketplace is most of the teams, they’re still operating almost as one unit. But there’s two three people, and fine, like you’re brand new, and you want to shadow and of course, that’s appropriate to do so. But I, I’ve really spent a lot of time this past year, I thinking long and hard about just the utilization of time, and how we can make sure that we have time for ourselves and our self care and our families so that then we can give back and really give 200% to our clients. Because at the level that I was operating at, you know, we did 150 transactions last year, not all sales, some rentals, but it’s impossible to do all that and you know, have an amazing family life and, you know, see your friends and enjoy hobbies, and all those things are really, really important. So just trying to do things a little differently this year.
D.J. Paris 19:16 I think it makes so much sense. You’re right. There are so many teams that currently exist that are really just a bunch of individual agents that get together. They keep doing their individual business, and I’m not here to say there’s anything wrong with that. Not at all. That’s perfectly lovely.
Haley Cutter 19:30 And it worked. It did.
D.J. Paris 19:34 But I really think you know, what you said is so important. I think as a as a society, I think, you know, we used to think things like multitasking worked and being a jack of all trades work. And then the science is now more available to everyone that is really, really clear that it does not work as effectively if you try to do everything well. There’s just a lot of things you’re not going to be good at. And you had talked about, hey, I’m a marketing person. I’m a brand Ending I’m an I’m an advert ad person. I know that side of it. I don’t I’m not a visualizations person, you know, and I, there’s certain your
Haley Cutter 20:09 I understand it. But you know, my time is not best spent doing that.
D.J. Paris 20:13 Right? Yeah. So I almost think, how did you ended up determining what was the best use of your time? Because I know right now that we have a lot of listeners who do everything themselves, and are trying to figure out, I’m not on a team, or a team structured like yours? How might somebody go about thinking, okay, maybe this part of the segment of my business isn’t the best use of my time, and not what I’m best at?
Haley Cutter 20:38 Sure. So I think for a solo agent, that the best opportunity, and the quickest would just be to outsource. So perhaps hiring on somebody to help with your marketing or administration, so start little by little, and those opportunities are available to everyone. And then I’d say if you’re a solo agent, and you’re looking to build a team, or approach it as if you’re building a business, you need a CEO, you need a CFO, you need a marketing person, you need someone who’s going to help out with a public relations, maybe maybe you just have three agents that all they do is sell and they sell really, really well. But if an event needs to be executed to promote the property, you recognize that that’s not their skill set, and you have team members that you can shift and actually in the pay accordingly.
D.J. Paris 21:19 Yeah, makes, again, makes so much sense. I am curious right now being that we’re in a shifting market, in particular, we know everyone listening, you know, pretty much everywhere in the country, here, at least the United States, we’re dealing with, of course, raising rising interest rates. So buyers price points are shifting, oftentimes not for the better. We have, of course, inventory issues, not as much on the market. And right now I imagine. There’s just a lot of client management that has to be done and expectation management and helping somebody understand the turbulence of what’s what’s happening. I’m curious on how you think about having those conversations and what you’re, you know, what you’re doing, you know, with your clients, when there’s the buyer clients, for example, which I know not isn’t the primary part of your personal business, but you know, still something you have to service and what are how are you talking to clients about gosh, guys, there’s just not much out right now. How are you educating your clients about the current conditions? So
Haley Cutter 22:25 when it comes to the buyer side, we are constantly speaking to the mortgage lenders, the banks and saying, what’s it as well as the listing agents? What’s making a difference? Why is client a getting the home over client B. And the way that offers are presented now have changed significantly in the last 12 months in the last six months, there are new vehicles and tools available to certain mortgage lenders where rather than just having a pre approval letter, you could submit an offer that’s completely gone through the underwriting process. So that did not exist, at least I’m sure Massachusetts in the pre COVID market. So it’s pretty amazing when you just look in, really these banks and these brokerages, they’re trying to figure out ways to make their clients shine and in winter homes, they know how important it is to them. So we do we stay on on top of our game, and we’re in contact with the mortgage brokers with the banks. Sometimes we’ve even asked not sometimes across the board, if we know that our clients are in a competitive situation right now, when we’re submitting the offer, we’re submitting a letter from the mortgage broker that is explaining, you know, client a has already gone completely through our underwriting process, their funds are strong, they’re putting down less, or they have more means and they’re even putting down so if something happens, and there’s an appraisal gap, so what an appraisal gap is right is if if a home right now is selling for a million, but the comps in the area really only support an $800,000 sale, then when a bank appraiser comes in he might only appraise it for $800,000. So it’s now up to the buyer to cover that difference. So we’re assuring the sellers that our clients are able to do that.
D.J. Paris 24:08 appraisal, appraisal Gap coverage is huge right now. Very common.
Haley Cutter 24:13 Absolutely. And we’re we’re setting the expectation for the buyers that this is what you need to do and right now we are in a market that in the HUD suburbs unfortunately, you’re waiving the inspection, and that’s a little scary if you don’t have any knowledge you’re not a contractor I’m not I go into home and I don’t know what’s in working order and what’s not of course, if I turn on the light and it doesn’t turn on I know it’s broken. But you know what’s going on between the walls so you know what an open house is actually the perfect opportunity if you would like to bring in an inspector your own Ah, that’s brilliant. I never thought ever it may be there’s nothing wrong with doing that. At least not here in Massachusetts. I’m sure every market is different. So I have seen in in our clients, our team members have physically brought inspectors. They’ve paid them for the day. Hey, we’re gonna go to open houses today. Please come with us. You know, no If there’s if there’s anything major, right, if it’s what’s going to nickel and dime right now, but But is this home structurally sound? Do I know what I’m getting into? Those are all really, really important questions for a buyer to ask. And they have the right to know that.
D.J. Paris 25:14 That’s a really great boy I have we’ve done almost 400 episodes, nobody has ever given that specific tip. And I want to just say it again, for anyone that might have not heard it, which was so, so smart, which is if you are in a situation where you’re having to waive the appraisal, or the inspection, you can if there’s an open house opportunity, you can just bring someone with you, do you ever get pushback from the listing agent, or, or as the listing agent and or whoever’s running the open house maybe not even aware, do you sort of do it on the quiet or
Haley Cutter 25:47 they think that they are aware, it’s not something that’s hidden. I know if we’re on the other side, we welcome it. And if I’m on the listing side, it’s not that I have a problem with an inspection, I want a buyer to go in with their eyes wide open. But the problem is, is that if you have six seven plus offers, sometimes 20 offers to wait the day or two, for the inspector to come in to get the inspection report some of those buyers, they’re going to find other places you’ve already lost them. So it really comes down to timing, the sellers just want to move fast. They want to know if it’s priced appropriately in the suburbs right now that if they go to market on a Friday, and they do open houses Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they’ll have an accepted offer, you know, early in the week, and they can they can make their next move, they can figure out where they’re going next.
D.J. Paris 26:33 It’s really interesting. Now what happens in a situation? And when I say what happens, I’m saying how do you, I would think a big fear as an agent would be when you aren’t able to bring an inspector and appraiser to an open house, maybe there just isn’t an open house opportunity. And you’re not able to get someone in there to really look but you do have to make that concession on on the offer, because you’re competing with other people that have already made that concession. So if that comes up, does that ever come up? And if so, how would you talk to the client, because now the client might have some additional fear about gosh, now I’m really not going to know what I’m getting into?
Haley Cutter 27:10 Sure. So maybe at that point, just go in with your eyes extremely wide open. If this is an older home, you know, look in the basement, look for signs of water damage, look for signs of termites, for any kind of you know, rodents, bugs, etc. Take pictures, open the bulkhead. If it’s a newer home, you know constructed here in the last 10 years, I worry less about that. But once again, just go in with your eyes wide open and look less at the shiny fixtures, the lights, the appliances, but but really the structure of the home, you want to make sure that the property that you’re purchasing is structurally sound. And if it’s not that you have a good understanding of the cost that it’s going to take to get it there.
D.J. Paris 27:51 Yeah, and I also think too, I’m curious to get your thoughts that if you’re a solo practitioner, and you’re not yet super familiar with what inspectors and appraisers actually look at, structurally, go, go hang out with one for a day or spend some time with them or pay them for their time and say, Hey, in case I can’t get a hold of you, or I need to just you know, if I’m not able to bring you here somewhere, what are like 10 things I should be looking for every time I go into a home. And I imagine that would be a great little just series of things that every agent should learn?
Haley Cutter 28:21 Of course, yeah, that’s a good question. You know, what I’m gonna call Lenny Lucario. To be sure and ask him he’s the best right now is, you could if you wanted to hire inspector to go out with you for a few hours on a Saturday morning, they have time right now, it was interesting, at the beginning of COVID, you could not book an inspector, they were just so booked. But now with everybody waiving the inspection, they are available, they would be more than happy to spend a morning you know, an evening going to some open houses with a potential buyer.
D.J. Paris 28:48 I mean, I would pay somebody $500 for a few hours of their time to do that, because it would it’ll end up it’ll end up just differentiating myself from all the other agents that exist. I want to talk about balance because you had mentioned this earlier. So we’re gonna I’m gonna change topics because so many of I, you know, I don’t have children, I don’t I have a girlfriend who lives with me. But that’s the extent of my account my complicated family life. But of course, you have children, you have a husband, you have a career not only as an agent, but as a as an as a managing broker, as a team leader. And then of course, your own individual business. How do you what what do you do to stay balanced so that you’re not burning the candle at both ends? And you know, being that you want to be there of course, for your family and for your team? And for your clients? How do you figure out how to how to structure all of that? Sure. So
Haley Cutter 29:41 no one’s perfect. And this is definitely an area that that I I worked at, I work every single day, but I do get up really early. I take time for myself in the morning. So I tend to rise about five o’clock and if I’m not going to work out Pilates or yoga then I’m just taking a nice walk in in my neighborhood and clearing my head so that when my children get up and really start their day, and they’re running, and they’re crazy, and they’re active, because they’re nine and 11, then I have the the energy and the mindset to welcome that. Whereas if I was just waking up at the same time as them, I wouldn’t have a chance to reset and refresh.
D.J. Paris 30:18 That’s a good point. So you’re like a big fan. For anyone listening? There’s a great book that a lot of realtors have read called the Miracle Morning. It’s not a specifically a real estate related book, but it is about how to take those first hours of the day for yourself. And, and, and do that before the chaos all begins. I’m curious about boundaries. And when I mean boundaries, I don’t mean personal boundaries more about work boundaries. So for you only because this question comes up so often, you know, if you get a text from a client late in the evening, do you have do you have special rules around? You know, if it’s after a certain time I, you know, I don’t worry about it, or are you Uh, hey, no matter if I’m awake, I’m responding. You know, what are your thoughts about
Haley Cutter 31:01 it, I’ll respond, but I also go to bed really early. And my team members know that. So sometimes, if they’re texting at 9pm, I might be up. But by 930, I’m asleep. And I’m up really early in the morning, I have a lot of responsibilities. And I don’t feel guilty about that.
D.J. Paris 31:16 No, and nor should you, I just think it can be very difficult for agents sometimes to feel like it’s okay to tell their clients, hey, I’m available from, you know, usually from this time to this time, if I’m up, I’ll certainly respond after that, if I’m not first thing in the morning. But so many agents have a hard time setting those boundaries with their clients. Do you feel that that’s appropriate to, to set expectations early on with the client so that they’re so that their expectations are, are in alignment with what you’re able to provide? Thank you.
Haley Cutter 31:47 And I know a lot of brokers that will say I’m available between x and x time. And if you set that if you set the framework in the beginning, then I don’t foresee any problems with a client. Yeah. That’s what I think I could get better at. And I noticed that sometimes people say like, oh, I respond to emails between X and X hours. I like the idea of it practically, I have not been able to find a way to make it work. But who knows, maybe one day
D.J. Paris 32:12 I I’m laughing because I have the same problem. I’m like, I know I shouldn’t be checking my emails all day long. I know, it’s not good use of my time. But it’s it’s addictive. And it feels good to immediately respond.
Haley Cutter 32:24 I don’t want to call these nines, like when I fall behind that gets overwhelming. Yeah, if I can just keep up throughout the course of the day, and it’s okay.
D.J. Paris 32:33 Well, I have a question I’m going to ask. And then before you answer, I want to I have to do a quick sponsorship read. But my question is about team members now. And I know you have a large team. And when you think about adding a team member, I’m curious to know what qualities and somebody you’re looking for not so much their skills, because obviously you’re going to you pick people with very specific skills. I’m more interested in qualities, because I am sure so many agents want to work with your team want to join your team, you guys are one of the most successful teams in all of Massachusetts. So I’m curious on what you look for, because I think that’ll help. And again, you’re you’re one team and there’s millions of teams that look for different things. But I’m curious on the qualities you look for in a in somebody that you’re considering to join your team. And I think that will help our audience understand what somebody at your level might be interested in. But before we do that, I want to take pause for a quick moment to talk about our episode sponsor. It’s one of my favorite companies out there in the real estate tech space, which is called follow up boss. And after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors all over the country for this podcast, the CRM that is talked about by more of our guests than any other Believe it or not, it is follow up boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time with less effort and don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States for real estate agents use his follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss also integrates with 250 existing external systems. So if you’re already using other pieces of technology for your real estate business, no problem follow up boss integrates with them you keep those tools too. But here’s the best part. Follow up boss has seven day a week support. We know real estate happens at nights and weekends right so they are available so you’ll get the help you need when you need it. Get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM and for a limited time, they are offering keeping it real podcast listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everybody else. So oh and by the way, no credit card required. So they are so confident you’re going to keep using their systems and you will once you try it that you’ve they’re gonna give you 30 free days and then they’re going to ask for payment if you want to keep going but only if you visit the special link which is follow up boss.com forward slash real file Follow Up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial, follow up like a boss with follow up, boss. And now back to our question. So when you’re looking to expand your team, what qualities do you look for in an agent?
Haley Cutter 35:16 So first and foremost is character, because if I’m bringing somebody onto my team, then they are indirectly but also directly linked to me. So that that is the number one trait that I am looking for in an agent. We want people who are go getters and are gonna go the extra mile, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, it’s not all what you see on selling sunset and the stiletto heels and walking around and pointing out the attributes of a condo, we’ve sold nine and a half million dollar condos, they’re beautiful, that’s great. But that probably is 1% of what we’re doing on any given day. So sometimes we’re moving furniture, and we might be moving furniture up the stairs. So it’s, it’s not all glitz and glam. And you have to work really, really hard and be willing to put your time in. Also, our team, we are large right now. And it’s extremely important to me that any new team member that we bring on has compatible. It really is competitive with our team has complementary skill sets isn’t directly competing with anybody. And it’s going to fit in and feel welcome. So something that we’ve done in this didn’t exist initially. But now if anybody does want to join our team, and initially I’ll have a conversation and interview, if you will. And if I think that the person would be a good fit for our team, our next step is that they come in and they attend one of our team meetings. So we meet at 11 o’clock every Wednesday on Newbury Street, it’s the one time that I’m in the Boston office, because otherwise I’m just running around home to home, showing and selling and everything else. So it’s a good opportunity. And we roundtable it’s really fun. Wednesday is my favorite day of the week. And, you know, first is just, you know, observe, see what’s going on? Like, does this seem too crazy for you? Or is it like these people? I like them that are my tribe, you know, where do you feel? And then after that the team, we as a team, not just me, but it’s Hey, you know, Sarah came in? And what does everybody think? Do we think that she’d be a fit? And the Fit goes two ways, too, right? So if we feel you’re a fit, like you also have to feel that you’re fit. And then we’re taking it even a step further. And until we formally onboard anyone, we’ll have a trial. So based on what’s going on, if someone’s traveling, maybe it’s a little extended, if they’re going to spend a lot of time with us, maybe it’s long. But that’s an opportunity for you to come in to go to our events shadow me or any of the team members on listings to help out and and then feel like is does this feel right for you? Because it’s so important right now that the team members we’re bringing in, we need we need the team to be strong. We’re currently strong. And we just want to make sure that if we’re adding it’s the right person, and it’s the right fit. We’re not putting on a team member just to get your ear, you know, you’re, what $10 million in sales that that’s, that’s irrelevant.
D.J. Paris 38:14 It’s irrelevant, and it doesn’t help the team necessarily,
Haley Cutter 38:17 it doesn’t. Do you have a skill that you can offer that we do not have? So when Catherine came in, and she could speak Cantonese, and Mandarin, and she has an amazing background, and she’s posting things on WeChat, that’s something that I can’t contribute. But that alone would not have got Katherine on our team, the fact that she fit in and everybody felt that are comfortable with her that she was willing to do anything like that’s what got her hired.
D.J. Paris 38:43 Yeah, it’s everything you said, just makes so much sense. And it’s a really great education for our listeners who are thinking about approaching a team and saying, Hey, I would like to, to work with you, I, I love this idea of you know, once they sort of get the initial Hey, we like this person, then it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna try, we’re gonna do a trial period. And that probably weeds out a lot of people as well, because there’s just not as many agents that are willing to do that. And I think that’s a really smart way to make sure that you have somebody who’s committed serious, coachable, because you’re doing your you’re making sure that that those people best represent Luxe living.
Haley Cutter 39:24 And probably the final step to as if somebody shadowed for a month plus whatever we feel is appropriate, if I’ll sit down with them, and I’m not just asking them what their goals and expectations are. I’m asking them what the goals and expectations are for me and for the team. Because I do not want to be bringing anybody on that I’m not meeting their goals and expectations. And I think that that’s a really important question that often is not asked. And I don’t even know if the agents Give It Thought until you ask. Because if somebody was expectation of me is that every morning, you know, we’re going to have a phone call for An hour, and then we’re going to recap for an hour in the evening. I apologize that I just don’t have time for that. Right? Right. But if it’s like once a week, we want to sit down, you want to do goal setting, if they want the opportunity to shadow, great, I’ll let you know. But but sometimes somebody might come in and they think in their head that their goals and expectations are going to be met by you, as a team lead or by other team members. And I just want to be sure that we’re all on the same page. You know, we take the professional photos, we have the ads and all the publications, the last thing I want is to put something out there, and then somebody’s you know, no, no longer part of the team.
D.J. Paris 40:34 Sure. I think you said something really, also really important, which is agents, you can ask those team leaders, hey, here’s what I’m looking to accomplish. You know, can you help me get there, as opposed to saying, here’s why I’d be a great fit for your team, which of course, you shouldn’t say as well, but also say, here’s what I’m looking for. And I’m really looking to accomplish this. Can you help me do XY and Z, and I imagine, you know, you get calls from from agents who are just looking for lead source and are unable to do that on their own. And so they’re like, Well, if I join a team, I might get some leads. But until you understand what that person really needs, and you you might not be willing or able to do that. But a lot of times you’re right, the agent doesn’t say, here’s what I need, right? There needs to be a fit. I think that’s really important is ask for what you need. And in you know, it’s okay. If the I mean, it’s like I, we get these calls, too, because I handle people who are interested in joining our firm, and we get that question a lot. I always say what are you looking for? What do you want in a firm? And if they immediately it’s like, Oh, I really need a lot of leads. I’m like, we are not the right fit. I wish we I wish we could do that. But the truth is, we don’t. And I’d rather you know that right now. And then otherwise join us. And then you know, photos, all the all of the things and then you’re like, oh, that person isn’t happy here and they leave or we’re not happy with them. And I would love to talk with the last thing I want to talk about is something you said earlier, which is about your referral. 70% of your business is referral repeat, you know, a business. What are you doing? This is what I’m always interested in, after the sale. What are you and your team doing to stay in touch with? With clients? Maybe they just bought a home and you’re like this person and this is their forever home? Or this? They’re going to be there for a long time? What are you doing to still stay, at least in the back of someone’s mind as they progress when they’re not needing your services right away?
Haley Cutter 42:33 Sure. So for us, it’s always relationship, not a transaction. So when the home has closed for still, we’re going to call we’re going to send cards, we do a weekly newsletter. And that’s just an opportunity for us to be top of mind. And sometimes if a client purchases in downtown Boston, they might not know that we have two new listings coming on and dentists on Cape Cod, but when they get our newsletter, they’re like, oh my gosh, really? I didn’t know that you service that. And you know what? My brother? He’s thinking of buying a house on the cake? Can you help him? So it’s little things like that. So some of it is just putting them on the newsletter list. And of course, if somebody wants to unsubscribe, it’s their right to do so. Please, by all means do but most people say how much they enjoy it. Yeah, and just if you were calling them, you know, every day, you’re not going to call them every day. But you know, maybe pick up the phone every few months. Or if you know that somebody really enjoys baseball, when the season starts, they like oh my gosh, you want on the baseball game? Like let’s meet up. Just keep it real. And don’t be fake about it.
D.J. Paris 43:34 I think that’s right. I think people can sniff out in authenticity, or non authenticity. I’m not sure what’s the proper way to say it. But But yes, I think being authentic and being gracious and also thoughtful, like in your case, every week sending them what Brian Buffini value,
Haley Cutter 43:55 they probably you know, they’re busy. They don’t want to hear from you every week. But every now and then, well, I’ve got a funny story. So go ahead. We have a client who has become a friend. But when we were initially looking for properties, and she must have purchased in Beacon Hill about five years ago now, we were touring some spectacular homes for five $6 million plus and for whatever reason in the Back Bay. A lot of the homes we went into, they were just staged a little funny. So there was this one that there was actual stuffed cats arranged on every bed with a cup fake milk in front of it. Oh, no. So she was like, oh my goodness, Haley, like, you gotta get me out of this house now like she’s flipping. He’s like, no, no, no, no, no. And they also had creepy dolls. So to this day, if she goes into a gift shop and there’s like a cat joke, like she’ll take a picture and send it to me and I’ll take a picture and send it to her. So it’s just that’s authentic. That’s real.
D.J. Paris 44:49 It is. It is funny. Realtors get to sort of see how the other half live sub dives do right. We’re like, wow, that person painted a sky on their ceiling with clouds and Okay. Hey, are there taxidermy? Yeah, it was, it was bizarre. But those those experiences really bite bind you to other people, right? Because you share that sort of intimate, funny experience. And then it becomes kind of a like a lifetime, a lifelong joke, right? Yeah.
Haley Cutter 45:18 Gifts to like, it’s not just me giving them to her, she’s giving them to me. Shared commonality,
D.J. Paris 45:25 I think it’s a great, great place to wrap up being authentic and, and having fun with with your clients and just being being yourself. And, above all, you know, you demonstrate and your team demonstrates professionalism. And I think that is, at the end of the day, what seals the deal with keeps everyone happy and wanting to work with you. Because I know there’s a lot of people I really like and I’m connected to, but I don’t trust their skill set. Right. And you guys do everything, you’re authentic. You’re a well oiled team, and you have really strong, not just you, but everyone on your team is really, really skilled. And I think I think that’s just an incredible combination. Obviously, you’re having incredible success as a result.
Haley Cutter 46:11 We also have a lot of fun along the way.
D.J. Paris 46:14 Yes, yeah, I get that as well. I totally, totally believe it. Just even looking at some of the photos, everyone in your in your staff, you can tell when people smile just for Team photos, but maybe not that way. You can see it in the photos, your photos, everyone looks legitimately happy. And you just said hanging out with everybody on Wednesdays when their team meeting. That’s a really, that’s your most fun thing to do. So, you know, boy seems like a wonderful environment. I want to to wrap up by saying if anyone out there if any of our listeners have have clients who may be vacation out in Massachusetts, of course, take QA there’s lots of wonderful places on the East Coast. Or if you have clients that are relocating to Boston or anywhere in Massachusetts, Haley and her team would love the opportunity to chat with you. Or if you just happen to be a listener and you’re not a realtor, but you live in that in the in the Massachusetts area. Or if you’re moving there, definitely check with with Qatar Lux living, they would love the opportunity to chat with you see if you’d be a good fit. And if they would be a good fit. And the best way to reach them. Obviously, you can go right to their website, which is Qatar lux.com. And that’s Lux with an E at the end Qatar lux.com. With compass in in Massachusetts. And Hailey is if anyone else is wants to reach out to you, is there a better way they should touch base? Oh, so
Haley Cutter 47:31 Haley dot cutter is my handle on Instagram as well as Facebook and or haley.cutter@gmail.com.
D.J. Paris 47:37 Wonderful. And we will have links to Haley’s Instagram and Facebook in our show notes. If you’re listening on a podcast app, just look in the show notes. And you can follow her on social and contact her that way. Haley, thank you so much. We are so grateful for your time we know how busy oh my gosh, you guys are so busy. And you took the time to really help our audience improve their business. And we are so grateful for you for that. So on behalf of the audience, we say thank you. On behalf of Haley and myself, this is actually Memorial Day weekend when we’re recording. So Haley, I want to hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend. Also hope all of our audience enjoys the holiday. By the time most of you here this Memorial Day be long gone. But I hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend and we will see everybody on the next episode. Oh, one last thing please tell a friend about this episode. Think of one other agent that in your office that you know that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Haley send them a link to it. You know there’s a million ways to do that. So please let them know about our show. Haley, thank you so so much and we will say thank you so grateful to have you and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks anyway. Thank you bye guys.
What Real Estate Agents Need To Know About Branding • Elizabeth Averyanova
Jul 15, 2022
Elizabeth Averyanova the founder of Studio Classica talks about her background and how she got into brand management. Elizabeth also discusses talks about what branding is and what’s the role of the brand strategist. Last, Elizabeth discusses authenticity and picture-perfect presentation and also social media presentation and the power of videos.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever wanted to explore branding or improve your branding for your real estate business? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with brand expert or branding expert I should say Elizabeth Avery a nova, who’s going to talk all about real estate broker or realtor branding, which is something that we hear a lot we have hundreds and hundreds of agents in our firm. And that is really one of the biggest questions we get is How do I brand myself better digitally. So via social or in print, and in lots of different ways. So we’re going to talk about that. But before we get to Elizabeth, just a couple of quick reminders, please tell a friend about this show. Think of one other real estate agent maybe that needs help with their branding, and send them a link to our website if they’re not a podcast person, which they can stream all of our episodes right from a browser, which is keeping it real pod.com Is our website or they could just pull up any podcast app and do a search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button and let that last thing please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. We read every single comment. And we really want to keep getting better, right? We want to keep meeting your needs. And we need to know what your needs are. So let us know what you can do right from whatever app store you might have. Or whatever podcast directory system you might be using. So thank you for all that but enough for me. Let’s get to our main event our interview with Elizabeth Avery ANOVA.
Okay today on the show we have Elizabeth a very Nova from Studio Classica. Now let me tell you more about Elizabeth. Now Elizabeth is a brand strategist, also a digital marketing expert, a web and architectural designer. And she’s also the founder of studio Classica. Elizabeth helps purpose driven entrepreneurs and industry leaders scale their online businesses with an impactful beautiful and df y design so that they can attract dream clients elevate their online presence and book out their offers with while creating a lasting impact in the world. She has fully transformed the online presence of many real estate professionals and experts. So Elizabeth knows what it takes to stand out, attract people who want to work with you, and close more real estate transactions. Elizabeth, welcome to the show all the way from Latvia.
Elizabeth Averyanova 4:02 Thank you so much, DJ, I’m excited to talk today.
D.J. Paris 4:05 I am a marketing person at heart. And I am going to do my best to not take over this conversation because this is your episode. But I live eat and breathe marketing. My sister is a brand manager or a CMO but started off as in brand management. So this is my wheelhouse. I don’t know as much as you but I am super passionate about this. And I’m so excited to have you because I think this is a conversation that Realtors oftentimes struggle with trying to figure out what is my brand? How do I present that to my audience? How do I demonstrate who I am on social on my website, in my print advertising, you know, and so we want to have those conversations with you because this is what you do. So let’s I would love Let’s start with your background talk. Tell us a little bit about how you got into brand management.
Elizabeth Averyanova 5:05 Yeah, perfect. So, so I’m a designer, like pretty much my whole life. And actually, my background is in architecture. And from, you know, from my education in in those fields, I, you know, I started my own design business 10 years ago, where we were serving in the architecture, space and design space, and really focusing on online services and reaching people pretty much around the world, through the internet, which is amazing. And in the past two years, I really decided to focus in on the branding side of it and the marketing side of it, because I also like you, like, I love marketing, and I love figuring out online business things and, you know, tying it together to really help people connect with their ideal client and help them grow their business to a whole new level. And so that’s how I got into branding through the way of wanting to really help people who are coaches in the space or who are industry leaders who are like, you know, really changing the game in their field in their niche and real estate came about because I have a brief foray into real estate. It was my only corporate job. And it was a pretty short experience, but really amazing, which is I actually was a was a research and advisory assistant at Colliers International. I get now it was like, wow, that’s really big deal.
D.J. Paris 6:26 It is a big deal.
Elizabeth Averyanova 6:26 At the time, I was just kind of it was 10 years ago, I was a lot younger, and I was just, you know, not quite, I don’t even know how it how it came about how I got accepted to this sort of position. But I, the catch here is I was in an international office. And, you know, in Riga, Latvia, and everyone only spoke Russian and Latvian languages. I’m a native English speaker, and I didn’t speak those languages. And it was a whole different experience. But that was my first initial like, delve into real estate. And I’m really excited. Now I get to tie all these past experiences together, to you know, really focusing on a big need a big area of our niche now is helping Realtors with their branding.
D.J. Paris 7:15 Yeah, I think it’s something that we we hear a lot from our listeners, which is, hey, I, I want to really, really revamp my brand, or figure out what my brand is. And then, you know, everyone, I think always wants to start on the design with the design. So they’ll say, Oh, I like this look. But I’m curious, when you start to work with a client, like a realtor, for example, or a team, a real estate team? How do you begin to sort of help them discover their brand? And what that sort of visual aesthetic might might look like?
Elizabeth Averyanova 7:57 Hmm, yeah, so I honestly, I’m kind of contacted every single week, pretty much by a real estate agent, who’s like, I need help with branding. But you know, they’re very overwhelmed. They’re very confused, they don’t really know where to start. And the biggest thing I see is that they’re afraid to really dive into what does it mean to figure out your brand name. And you know, so I have a lot of these conversations, but a lot of people are afraid to take that step forward of figuring it out. The very when I start with clients, the first thing I really need to know are what are your goals as a real estate agent or broker or realtor? What are your goals in the next six months in the next year, and in the next five years, the clients when we see have the most success are the ones who are very clear about their goals, and creating those smart, actionable, measurable goals.
D.J. Paris 8:47 So if somebody’s goal is I want to attract more home owners that want to sell, you know, sell property, right. So I want I want more homeowners to reach out to me, you know, to to, you know, sell my property. So is that a specific enough goal? Or are how specific do people need to be do? Is it better to say, well, here’s my current business, here’s where I’d like it to grow. I’m just curious on what the what that sort of looks like.
Elizabeth Averyanova 9:19 Yeah, definitely. So you know, we, you know, sometimes we do an audit of what are people currently doing? So we do an audit of, you know, of their brand and other business, but let’s just say like you said, that example if they want to reach more, I would get much more specific of of how many people but you also want to make sure it’s a goal within your control. You know, like, you want to make 20 you want to sell 20 houses this year. It what is actually in your control with related to that goal.
D.J. Paris 9:49 Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know what, maybe we should also define what branding is, and let’s, let’s talk about what is it and strategist do so let’s first define what a brand strategist does. I think that’ll give us a good intro to sort of branding 101
Elizabeth Averyanova 10:07 Sure. So, you know, so my vision of what a brand strategist is, is, is diving into your representation on line and offline. And and you know, as a realtor, you have a very unique position where you have to show up amazing online and offline both places, you know, a lot of online entrepreneurs can get away with just showing up good online, but offline, that that is not even part of the conversation, really. So a brand strategist is somebody who really strategically knows your goals. Help helps you identify your goals, your ideal clients, and you know, what, who you want to serve and what and how you want to serve them. And it helps, and they help you bridge the gap between that and and how you show up online and offline. And, yeah, go ahead.
D.J. Paris 10:58 No, I think that’s important because Realtors do struggle with that. So the thought is, okay, you know, look, I have this professional presence. And we have this social media, these social media platforms that enable me to show my professional life as well as maybe my personal life. And I know realtors are always sort of trying to figure out, how do I, how do I stay on brand another way? Let’s let’s first, you know, what actually, I’d like to talk about is determining one’s brand. Can you talk about how you determine what somebody’s brand is?
Elizabeth Averyanova 11:39 So yeah, well, we can, you know, everybody’s definition of branding is different. But I like to see that branding is simply an extension of who you are. And it will just be professionally who you are and, and how you are showing up online. So branding does go beyond the visual side of things. It also includes the visual side of of your brand’s colors, fonts, that your overall style, but I think it also combined, the way you talk as much as you know, the way you talk. So your language, your your it also ties in your values and your mission. And your your vision for yourself and your business. And it ties in all these pieces and your brand, is it’s kind of a fancy word, but it’s extension of who you are, and how you want to serve the world.
D.J. Paris 12:29 That’s really important. And I think this idea of how do I want to serve the world is is so critical, because the branding ultimately dictates not just the look and the feel of the materials that realtors will put out there, whether their digital assets like social media posts, or their you know, maybe, you know, physical print assets. So it’s, it’s I know, we think a lot about well, I want my brochures to look a certain way I want my flyers to look a certain way I want my website to look a certain way. But really what we’re talking about is demonstrating some sort of lifestyle, right, and I don’t mean lifestyle in, it has to be like a luxurious lifestyle. But But there has to be some intentional thought about what realtors are putting out whatever content they’re putting out, whether it’s social media, or web, or website content, or print content, it has to be all aligned. Is that accurate?
Elizabeth Averyanova 13:29 Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, the biggest thing I see is that the there’s a real lack of consistent consistency in how people are showing up in the online space. And it’s, it’s, you know, I, you sometimes feel like, Oh, it’s a saturated market, maybe you and there’s a lot of real estate agents, but you know, there are a lot of realtors who are not doing it well. And I honestly think it’s not that hard to take some time, put some intention into it, and you will immediately stand out, you know, be that you’ll be in that 1% of visually sitting out with a solid brand. Well, let’s
D.J. Paris 14:09 talk about maybe what real estate agents aren’t doing well. So when you’re exploring the landscape, what are some and again, obviously, this is not black and white. This is good, this is bad, but what are some things that you see that are either inconsistent or maybe not hitting the mark? Not hitting the intended sort of audience result?
Elizabeth Averyanova 14:33 Mm hmm. Yeah. So I spend a lot of time auditing people’s brands and I you know, what that means is I go to your Instagram for me, I you know, my age or my just whatever, that’s the platform I use. Typically that’s the number one thing I go to to find people that I want to work with is Instagram. You know, so maybe your audience, maybe you have to figure out maybe your artist is on Facebook, or maybe your audience is on LinkedIn, and really knowing who you’re serving and where do they where they hang out, is important. So for me, I hang out on Instagram if you if you need to know. So I go and look at other realtors on Instagram and what that means I go look at their profile, and they want that first, in first impression that I get is oftentimes like kind of kind of confused, I’m not really sure, you know what they do visually, it’s not appealing. And you know, in real estate, you want to make things really appealing to the buyer to the sellers, right? Like, you really need that first impression to be good. And so on Instagram, I see very inconsistent posts, or maybe they’re taking templates from totally different sources. We can talk about Canva. But Canva is a design tool that you know, a lot of realtors use for graphics. And there’s a lot of templates on there that are free and great. But the minute you start to mix them all together, it just looks kind of like music. So you know, that’s one the very first mistakes I often see. The next one is, what if I want to work with you, or I want to figure out more what you do. And there’s that link in the bio of Instagram. And when I click that link, what happens? Where does it take me. So a lot of times they see that it takes you to a link tree, it’s like a service link tree. So you click the link, and it’s a link tree. So then more links appear. You know, I see them the default style, they’re not branded, they’re not consistent with your look, or they’re like really funky colors. You know, so So what I’m so what I do when I’m auditing is I go through that experience of clicking through to the next step to the next step until I try to figure out okay, how can I contact you? How can I work with your How can I see your website, and that map that journey, you know, that’s your client experience? So if I’m confused, somebody’s confused or overwhelmed, or they’re like, Am I in the right place, you know that I clicked the right link, and it doesn’t look consistent, that you’re gonna lose your clients that
D.J. Paris 17:15 way. I think that’s really important because a lot of us just post content on social media as one off content without a clear, objective, right. So we, we might put a really beautiful post together, but we’re just putting it there. And that’s really just step one. And not if you don’t think through, you know, and it doesn’t not that every post on Facebook or Instagram has to have an action step. But if you do have an action step, like you were saying about link tree, so this is a very common thing that people put in their Instagram bio is in particular, our link tree is what is a link tree, a link tree is really a series of So Instagram only allows you to put one link in your bio. So because of that there’s a link tree is a free service where people are I think there’s a pay service as well. But people can basically put a series of different links when you click on that link. And it shows up as different, like action steps, essentially. I’m curious what your thoughts are about link trees in general? Because I Yes, I see that they could be very valuable, but you have to be really intentional about it. But do you like Link trees in Instagram profiles? Or would you prefer just one link going one place, and not a second? Now I have because what happens when you click on a link tree or tap on a link tree is now you have maybe six or seven or 10 additional buttons that you now have to read through to click curious what your thoughts are just in general about link tree.
Elizabeth Averyanova 18:44 Okay, so thank you for explaining link tree and and my mission is to abolish it from any any client that works. Thought you might say that link tree. So I’ve
D.J. Paris 18:58 The reason being that you don’t like Link tree is what.
Elizabeth Averyanova 19:01 So I’ve gotten rid of quite a few of my clients link trees. If you listen to this, you’ll know. But one is it’s sitting your earned traffic. So you’ve earned the attention of potential client is sending those people to a platform that’s not your platform. So it’s sending it to a link trees platform is for example, it’s not sending it to your website platform where they could dive deeper into you. So they’re just sent a link tree. So I don’t like that. That’s one reason. The other reason is you can look because
D.J. Paris 19:31 you could lose people because they could get overwhelmed by the sheer number of options you have. And so there’s it’s it’s not a great I guess what I was getting at I’m curious to get your thoughts. I don’t find that like when I when I hit a link and it goes to a link tree. I get sort of turned off as a consumer I just started go. Now I have to make another decision and I have to read through all these button options. I don’t really want to do that.
Elizabeth Averyanova 19:58 Yeah, and so that’s the Second is that there’s too many choices. And I mean, not that you don’t have to do that. But there are a lot a lot of choices. And oftentimes I see that the specific text that the description that people use on those buttons are very unclear and really make you think and like you said, you don’t, you don’t want to do that. So you have to the language is not clear. It’s not actionable, like, what is what’s going to happen then. So that’s a mistake I see. And then it just number three is just, this is not always a branded experience for your clients.
D.J. Paris 20:31 Yeah, and that’s true, it’s not. And I think if you are going to use a link tree, as a realtor, you’d want to have just a couple of options. One would be I’m thinking about buying a home, I’m thinking about selling a home, I’m thinking about, you know, or I’m thinking about moving or you want them to be super descriptive, but we can move on from link tree, but but I just see it as so common and so popular. And again, we just what I love, Elizabeth, about what you said is that your job is to take the journey of a consumer, and basically be the consumer go through the experience and find things that could be modified and changed and shore, the shore and beat to make things more direct, more simple, and to give the client the actual experience that they want. Right. So let’s talk about a little bit about what good so we know that there’s a there’s a lot of problems with realtors just posting half Hazzard, images, videos, there’s no consistency. How important by the way is consistency in the visual. So the aesthetic, the vision that there’s consistency in the look, and also in the, the frequency. So I’m curious about frequency, because that’s another thing we hear on the podcast is how often should I be posting? And I know there isn’t a magical answer, but how important is the consistency from the from the style and design to the actual frequency? Mm hmm.
Elizabeth Averyanova 22:03 Yeah. So, you know, it’s as important as you want to make it and the reason you would want to be consistent, and you would want to post regularly, and by that I would mean at least once a week, but more like Lehigh higher volume, so two or three times a week, and that you consistently show up in your audience’s, you know, feed on their social platform, or in their inbox. If you’re, if you happen to be sending emails out on an email list, you both of these things are important, because then you start to gain recognition. Visually, people start to recognize you. Oh, that’s, you know, this post. Yeah, that’s her look, that’s Oh, you they don’t even have to spend, you know, more than a mil set a couple of milliseconds, saying, Oh, I know who was post that is, I’m gonna check it out. Because she always provides really high value, or he always gives really great tips about this or that. And so is she, you know, showing up consistently, you start to build that recognition. So you build that that no factor, you always hear about know, like, trust factor, but you build that no fat, no factor. So people start to know you, and start to build up that trust in you. Over time, when they’re ready for your services, you keep showing up, you’re gonna stay top of mind.
D.J. Paris 23:29 Yeah, you came from the architecture world. And we’re here in Chicago, one of the most prolific sort of architects here in Chicago’s history is Mies van der Rohe, who has a very specific style. And you can essentially, from a branding perspective, all of the buildings are I think, I’m not familiar with everything, he’s dead, but for the buildings, I know that he did, they’re all a very specific style, there are very specific brand. And you can look at these buildings here. And if you’re a Chicago person that’s listening, you know, what we’re talking about, because they have a very specific brand and style. And, you know, and so I’m curious, you know, just thinking about you in the architecture world. How can how can an agent because what you really want is you want somebody to look at something and immediately know that that’s you, right? Like, we want somebody to associate a certain look a certain feel a certain style to to a broker or to to a realtor. How should they start that journey? What’s the what’s the first thing that an agent should do to really start down the sort of branding, you know, exercise path?
Elizabeth Averyanova 24:47 Hmm, okay, so you made a really good analogy with architecture and you know it Chicago has a number of amazing architects in history and I love the history of Chicago, but Oh, The you want that moment that instantly they can recognize you. So it could be visually, but it also could be a specific color that people see that color. And they always think of you. Or it could even be a specific word or like a phrase. And they they think of you, you know, I have a client. You know, for example, like if I think of the word remarkable, or I think of like a deep, like a kind of a deep red color. We have a client, we work with Mark Kilimanjaro,
D.J. Paris 25:28 who has been
Elizabeth Averyanova 25:31 amazing. Yeah, I instantly think of her you know, so that is brand recognition. It can be a color or a word or something. So you have to think about you and what, what, you don’t need to think of 10 things, but it really is what it can be that one thing that is extension of who you are, what you like, and also relates to your ideal client was what can be the one thing that’s part of your brand?
D.J. Paris 25:56 And how would somebody determine, you know, what, or what’s a way somebody could determine what that one thing is? If somebody says, I don’t really know, you know, Marquis lemons, you mentioned has remarkable that’s her. Remarkable, right. That’s her. That’s her, her brand. And, and it works. But if for somebody that doesn’t have that, how would you suggest that they might go about figuring out what their brand is?
Elizabeth Averyanova 26:19 Hmm. Okay. There’s, I think, at least two questions. But you could ask yourself one question, which is, if you had the perfect birthday celebration, what would that look like for you? You know, maybe that’s, you know, a quiet evening with just your family, you know, with a with a glass of wine, and it’s very, you know, peaceful, maybe outdoor dinner with candle lights? Or maybe it’s a more like, outgoing type of party at night in the city, you know, what is? What would be your your birthday party? That’s one way to figure out, start to figure out your personality. Another question would be if you didn’t have, you know, all the work tasks on your to do list in your planner today, what would you spend your day doing? And think about that? And no, these are questions just to really start to dig in your personality. And, and, you know, we all we’re all multi passionate people, but that, you know, what is the one recurring theme that keeps coming up? If you’re more visual, and you just feel like, okay, I want to choose a specific color. You can say, when you go to your closet, what’s the number one color you see? For me, I have like a very neutral like monochrome, clean white style, I opened my closet, it’s 90% white clothes.
D.J. Paris 27:40 Right, that’s, that’s your look, you’re you, you enjoy monochrome. And, you know, we, you know, you also talked about what we’re really talking about, I think is authenticity. How important is it in real estate? Well, look, I mean, for being honest, authenticity for realtors has not always been a top priority. In the marketing side, right? We take pictures, and we Photoshop them so that we all look perfect, we erase wrinkles, we look younger, you know, we we want to demonstrate perfection in the photos of the listings that we have, we want to artificially fix problems. How important is authenticity? And when I mean authenticity, I mean showing some of the cracks, showing some of the faults, the fault lines, right the imperfections? Is it okay to show imperfections in and does do our audience? Do our audience want to see imperfection? Or do they expect everything to look perfect?
Elizabeth Averyanova 28:46 Well, absolutely, they just want to see real life, your real life. You don’t have to expose everything of course, but you know, they want to see reality more than the perfect world you know, that’s that’s absolutely I think it’s a non negotiable at this point when we all have smartphones all connected 24/7 And you know that yes, there’s filters on Instagram and those are great, but they really you really just need to show up who you are and not not change that.
D.J. Paris 29:18 I think that’s a really good point. So I know sometimes people feel insecure about you know, doing video or making you know, oh, I don’t know how to edit correctly or I don’t have the right lighting. But I My experience has been that as long as you’re providing quality content. You know, that sort of Trumps some of the imperfections maybe with editing or with shooting the you know, or even just taking a you know, an image
Elizabeth Averyanova 29:49 I think if you’re stuck in that, I don’t know how phase you know, go there are solutions out there. You don’t need to know all the answers because there are people teaching how to make Instagram reels for you know, as a real estate agent, we just created a course one of our clients created a course on how to how to master reels. You know, if you don’t know the how you don’t figure it, you can figure that out. But the best thing is just start posting and start getting out there and start getting that connection with with your audience.
D.J. Paris 30:20 I want to I want to talk about studio Classica. This is your company. And it’s Studio classica.com. And in Studio C L A s s I see a.com Let’s talk about this and what you do for for realtors I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode.
Elizabeth Averyanova 31:56 Okay, yeah, absolutely. So we you know, we. So we help real estate agents show up more professionally online. And you know, even in offline space, too, but but mainly in the online space, because that’s where people are searching. And that’s where if you keep showing up regularly on social media, in a branded, elevated, beautiful way, then, like we said earlier, your clients start to recognize you. And they you stay top of mind. And when they’re ready to sell their home or buy a home, you’ve stayed in their mind, and they will reach out to you or they’ll reach out to your real estate team. And so we help we especially help real estate, men, real estate leaders in the space who who wants to start helping other real estate agents. So a big part of who we help is people who want to teach, teach how to build a successful real estate business, or how to add six figures to your real estate income in the next year. And so that teaching mentality that mentorship or if you know, people who want to create courses, and even if you don’t feel like you’re big in your field, yet we have, you know, people rising like rising leaders who they they’re ready to create a course because they start to get a lot of the same questions from their agents or from, you know, from people online. And that’s a sign that you can package up that knowledge you have that some specific niche of real estate. And there are other people out there who want to learn from you.
D.J. Paris 33:27 Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, you can basically so when people when agents work with you, when Realtors work with you, they you can build them websites, you can work with their social media posts. Tell us some of the services that you assist with.
Elizabeth Averyanova 33:43 Yeah, perfect. Yes, absolutely. So we help, you know, figure out your branding. So figure out you know, the brand strategy, but also the visual side of it. So the visual social media posts, your your profile headers on Facebook or LinkedIn. You know, we make sure it’s consistent everywhere you want to show up online. We, for example, create social media templates that then you can use and carry forward. Usually, we do that as part of a branding package. From there, we often build like your complete website, which is your personal brand website. I know a lot of real estate people have a website that there’s sort of given. And I generally think those are not so functional, especially if you’re trying to really build your personal brand and your identity in this space. So we build your custom website. And then from there, oftentimes we build, you know, for those who want to teach, we would build the courses or membership spaces in the online space. So a full branding and design services.
D.J. Paris 34:41 Yeah, it makes it makes perfect sense. And so you know, I would What are a couple tips that you have for anyone that is out there that is thinking of redesigning their site, redesigning some of their colors. What’s what’s in right now. What what did the public want to see when they’re hitting a website or social media? Like what are some aesthetic sort of trends that you know that are, would be helpful for our audience to know. Mm hmm.
Elizabeth Averyanova 35:13 So, you know, aesthetic trends I see are incorporating videos into your website and into your definitely into your social media. But if we focus on the website, you know, tying in video to your website, whether that’s sort of a video background that’s professionally filmed, or if it’s just a video of you sitting down in front of a camera, get a nice background, and, you know, talk about, you know, a two minute three minute clip about, about what you’re doing who you help, and including that sort of video, someone on your website, that video is a huge way to connect, you know, and really accelerate that that connection with somebody watching it. And you can really, you know, accelerate the speed at which they’re, they get to know you or feel like they know you. Because, you know, for example, we you know, I have a video somewhere in my in my onboarding process, when we start new clients, I have a video somewhere there. And people will feel like that people have told me Oh, I feel like I already know you already talk to you, even though we haven’t talked yet. So just bridges that gap.
D.J. Paris 36:22 Isn’t that ultimately the goal? Right? If if it’s a stranger, who doesn’t has not actually met the agent yet? If they can say, Gosh, I feel like I know you? That’s that’s a huge victory, isn’t it?
Elizabeth Averyanova 36:39 Hmm. So So the video is, you know, it was trending from 2020. But it’s not going away. So get on the video, bandwagon is the number one.
D.J. Paris 36:50 Yeah, start start making video. And I think we’re so lucky to have devices, you know, in our pockets at all times that produce high quality, at least recording. And we have the ability to produce content that our audience wants very inexpensively. But the if you really want to take it to the next level, you really need somebody to look, I was I’ll give you a really simple example, I I’ve been a writer for a long time. And I when I write a piece for a publication, I work and rework it and rewrite it and rewrite it, I think it looks perfect, then I send it off to an editor, and it comes back looking totally different. And the editors job is to make it look better for the audience that it’s going to be read by. And I am always like, I’m going to send this off to the editor, they’re going to send it back without any changes, and they’re gonna go wow, DJ, you are brilliant. This is just gonna go, we’re going to publish this just as you wrote it. And it’s never happened. They always rewrite it. And they always make it better. And my point by saying that is yes, you can put up all your own posts, you can use Canva. As we mentioned earlier, it’s a great tool. There’s lots of really neat functionality there. And it’s awesome. But you probably should run it through and not through an editor. Somebody like Elizabeth Pryor? Because she’s going to make everything look the right way. And, and and that’s, you know that that’s really important. And how important is it to have to have somebody like that, you know, to edit to be your consistency editor, I guess I would say,
Elizabeth Averyanova 38:34 hmm, yeah, I think if you’re serious about building successful business, about growing your real estate business, you know, is deaf, I’m totally biased, but it’s worth the investment to, you know, run it through professional like work with a professional for a period of time to get that visual look at that brand figured out. Because it is going to change the game and you showing up for your clients, you’re going to feel more confident putting those posts out on social media and you’re going to feel you know, much more direction and who you’re helping and how you’re going to show up online. And it will pay back dividends in your return on your investment. You know what you get, you know, you’re gonna hit to hit your goals because you’re you’re determined to do that, and you’re serious about it. So I think it’s a game changer, really.
D.J. Paris 39:24 And for everyone listening, the reason why we had Elizabeth on is she and her team have do incredible, absolutely incredible work. I really encourage everyone listening to visit Elizabeth’s website, just take a look at what she does for realtors and other other brands that she works with. It’s really remarkable. And notice as you look through some of her work, how you feel, as you’re perusing the different websites that they’ve created different brands that they’ve worked With notice the feeling that comes through. And if that resonates with you, if you go, Gosh, I want people when they visit me digitally online, whether it’s on social media or on my own website, if I want my clients to have a similar experience, I would encourage you, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Reach out to Elizabeth, she is awesome. She’s worked with some of the top Realtors in the country. She’s worked with people that have been on our show. And that’s why we have her on the show because she is so highly recommended. But I want everyone to visit her website, which is Studio classica.com. By the way, we have a link to that in the show notes. So if you’re listening on a podcast app, just look in the show notes for studio Classica. But you can visit it yourself to studio classic cut a at the end studio classic cut.com. And take a look at what they do. It is absolutely remarkable. It’s clean. It’s minimal. It’s absolutely on trend. I am Elizabeth’s like biggest fan. Because when you look at what she does, it is absolutely just such a clean and beautiful aesthetic. And she can help you do that. You don’t have to figure out how to do that yourself. By the way, creating clean, minimal, beautiful content is not easy. That’s why you hire somebody like Elizabeth, it’s actually difficult to do. So that’s why you hire her. But Elizabeth, you know, this is a perfect time to sort of wrap up our episode because I want everyone to go visit your website. And then I want everyone to reach out to Elizabeth to if you’re looking to hire a branding expert, I will tell you, branding is one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy. It’s oftentimes overlooked. In fact, it’s almost always overlooked, because we just want to put out content. But if there’s no intention behind it, if there’s no cohesive strategy, you’re really going to run into some challenges. Hire somebody like Elizabeth, I really, really encourage you to do that. So Elizabeth, what’s the best way somebody should reach out to you if they want to work with you?
Elizabeth Averyanova 42:02 Well, thank you so much, DJ. And if you are thinking about what can we do with your branding or your website, the best way to reach out is, of course, our websites to classic.com. And we you know, go to our services page. And you can check out what more about what we do and check out our packages, you know how we can work together?
D.J. Paris 42:22 Yeah, I really encourage our all of our listeners to check it out. And I wish I wish you were an advertiser of ours because I am so passionate about your work. And maybe one day you will be but but for now I really encourage our audience to check it out. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for being on our show. We are We are honored to have you. And for everyone out there visit Studio classical.com. Please also tell a friend about this podcast. Think about one other agent in your office that needs help with their branding send them a link to this episode. They can find us at keeping it real pod.com all of our episodes are there can be downloaded and streamed right from a browser or just pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real hit the subscribe button. And please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of our show. So whatever system you might be listening to us on Apple podcasts, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon wherever. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Elizabeth, thank you so much all the way from Latvia. We are excited to chat with you. Thank you for taking time with us and we will see everybody on the next episode.
The Slowdown Is Here! What You Need To Know • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jul 11, 2022
In our June episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties discusses the shift and the slowdown in the real estate market. Carrie shares tips on what agents should do when there is a slowdown in the market. Carrie also emphasizes the importance of surrounding yourself with good people and being positive. D.J. shares his marketing tip of the month.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode, one of the most successful realtors in Chicago for the last 20 plus years is going to give her take on what’s going on with the market and what she sees coming up in the next year. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast for real estate agents and by real estate agents My name is DJ HARRIS I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group here in Chicago with at properties at properties Christie’s international I should say. Carrie is a top 1% producer in the Chicagoland area with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months, there are by the way, 44 I think actually now 45,000 Real estate agents here in Chicago Carrie is ranked in the top 15. And I don’t mean 15% I mean the top 15. That is just how successful and impressive she is. She is a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. By the way, I happen to live in a development that Carrie represented. And that’s an I could not be happier. But please visit Carrie. And on Instagram it she has one of the most impressive Instagram accounts I’ve ever seen for a realtor. And she does it all herself. So follow her on Instagram, which is at Carey McCormick real estate. There’ll be a link to that in our show notes. So you don’t have to type it in. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 2:58 Well, thank you and I’d love just real quick since we talked about developments, we are getting ready to launch a new development in Chicago. It’s called Wolfram 18. It’s 18 single family homes in Lakeview. So if anyone is looking for a new construction home or has buyers, please reach out to me I would love to tell you more about that development.
D.J. Paris 3:21 And in Lakeview, it’s really rare where there’s new developments. So this is this is a huge deal for Chicago.
Carrie McCormick 3:27 Yeah, no, it’s excellent. And I wanted to also kick off by telling people that if anyone is looking for a job, I for the first time I’m going to be hiring. I am a solo agent, as a lot of people know. And I’ve got a wonderful support team that works with me, I’ve got, you know, some assistance and contract people and I would love to hire a new person for my team and it would be in a support role of Contract Administrator operations, some marketing, a little bit of everything, and I love teaching and training people. So if anyone’s looking for something new and exciting, I’d love to talk with you.
D.J. Paris 4:15 And I think to just to be able to absorb some of your practices, which I think are obviously successful practices. You know, somebody out there is thinking, you know, should I join a team obviously, you can always do that or you can also work directly like under somebody like what Carrie is is suggesting and an admin position because you’re going to learn everything and you know probably was such a such yet for some nice success in the future. So definitely reach out to Carrie if you are interested in that position. So yeah, so what’s what’s going on this this month, what are
Carrie McCormick 4:52 we what should we be rounding out May here may 2220 22. And the big headlines you No late this month are sensing a shift in the market. And I know that for the last couple of months, we’ve been talking about inventory crisis and you know, being a seller’s market, and I don’t necessarily think that it’s going to shift to a pure buyers market. But there definitely is a market of a little bit of a slowdown. I tell people, you know, again, we’ve been going the brakes a little bit down to 100, maybe 90, you know, so the market is still moving. But you know, we’re sensing in The Usual Suspects, we obviously have some interest rates that have gone up, almost doubled. And then we’ve got inflation, we’ve got fatigue in the market. So we’ve got a little bit of the stock market hasn’t been doing well. So we’ve got a little bit of everything coming at us. And it’s slowing down. And I am also you know, I’ve got partners on the East Coast and the West Coast, they are feeling the same. So it’s not just Chicago, we do think it’s a national slowdown, except our friends in Florida. It’s an Arizona, they still seem to be, you know, pumping out those crazy double digit numbers. So But anyways, you know, I read reports from Fannie Mae, I read from Zillow in men just announced something today is talking about the shift. So again, we just as brokers, you know, we have to prepare for it and gear up. And one thing I was saying to DJ earlier is, you know, because I’ve been in the industry for so long, and I was saying, it’s just incredible that I’ve been in it for 22 years, and I’m only 25 years old, right? So just unbelievable. It’s, I really hate saying I’ve been in it for 22 years, because then I can see people look up and trying to do math of how old I am. Tell anybody but anyways, you know, and I’ve been in the market for a long time, and I’ve been through several different, you know, turns in the market, you learn something from it. And I look back to a lot of you know, my successes, and you know where I’m at today. And it’s that perseverance through some of the hard times. And again, not that I’m predicting that we’re going through a hard time, but you’re going to learn just different skill sets. And a few things I wanted to talk about is what do we do in a time where we do see the slow down and one is going to be focused on your database. Everyone tells you that and you know, I know it sounds like an easy thing to do. But just think about all these people that you’ve worked so hard to get as clients and they sit there and your database or you haven’t talked to them in a year or two, and you’re just out busy looking for new clients, nurture the ones that you have, you know, you spend all that time and money getting those clients, nurture them, you know, send them updates of what’s happening in the market. You know, set them up on a search, you know, even though they may not currently be you know, looking to sell or buy, but set them up on a search it starts getting them you know, engaged. You had mentioned what was your stats on Zillow? What were you saying? Yeah, so
D.J. Paris 8:09 So Zillow, Zestimate is you know, something that agents you say that word and agents either go, I hate that or they have some sort of very visceral reaction. And whatever our listeners who are like largely going to be Realtors think about Zillow and Zestimate. The fact is 200 million unique views or users per month, visit Zillow. Now, not all of those are from the United States, but let’s assume 90% are, we only have what 450 million or so maybe 500 million people in this country. So maybe close to 30% of them are checking Zillow every month, maybe 40%. So we know that this is where people are going to look. And they are they are seeing that Zestimate and unless their agent has told them, you know, that’s not very accurate, they’re gonna think that that’s accurate. Right?
Carrie McCormick 8:59 Exactly. So you know, with all these consumers going to Zillow, and just kind of peeking out, whatever it is, you know, their home value, you know, get in front of them, you know, before another agent does. So, again, focus on your database, keep your existing clients updated of what’s happening in the market. The other thing to focus on is education. Again, every day, learn something new, there’s always something new and exciting coming out. So you know, continue to learn and don’t ever stop learning, you know, and push yourself push the envelope into doing different things with your marketing and in how you brand yourself. So again, education is going to be important during this time, and networking. You know, early on in my career, I was such a great networker and I would go to everything and then it just I kind of just stopped doing it. And it’s, um, you know, getting back into the swing of all these different networking events and connecting people and it’s just one of the best things to grow your business. Not everyone’s a buyer right now or right now. But I will tell you that you mentioned the word real. People want to know, and just educate them, you go to a networking event and just, you know, again, not talk about yourself as a broker, but you need to talk about the market talk about something that, you know, brings value to them. And it definitely works. There was a saying that says what you focus on will expand. And that’s 100%. True. You focus on your business, you focus on whatever it is, and you stay full, you stay focused on it’s going to grow.
D.J. Paris 10:39 Yeah, I agree. I think by focusing on it, it helps sort of block out some of the noise that might be happening, we could keep ourselves busy all day by following every moment of the news and what’s happening in our industry. And in, you know, obviously, there’s there’s lots to focus on outside of our industry news as well. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t follow that, but be mindful of how you spend your time and where you put your attention. Because if your business is struggling, obviously, you want to put your attention on business building activities as much as you can, so that you can keep going through, you know, a challenging time for agents right now.
Carrie McCormick 11:20 Right? Right. And just and I always say to people just be kind to each other, you know, the world is, you know, as goes in our ups and downs. And in, I’ve noticed, you know, when you give kindness to other people it gives it gives it back to you. So we all go through, we’re in sales, right? There’s ups and downs. And there’s some days, I mean, believe me, there’s days that I’m you know, it’s just you and I were talking about this before, there’s days, I’m just like, I just can’t I just can’t get up today, like, I just don’t even want to do do anything today. But you know, it’s, we all go through it, and you just have to remain positive and just surround yourself with good people a good team. And, you know, just keep it positive and be kinder to each other.
D.J. Paris 12:07 Yeah, I think I think you’re right, that kindness thing, and the giving sort of nature is seems to really work. My friend Joel from guarantee rate always, he always says it says givers givers gain mentality, like, give as much as you can and wait, just watch and see what comes back to you. And it’s almost always more than you think.
Carrie McCormick 12:28 But I though to just real quick, quick segue is Joel is such a great guy. And I called him, you know, one day out of the blue, he didn’t have to pick up the phone, he didn’t have to give me the information. He you know, he didn’t have to do what he did. He took five minutes out of his day, he gave me everything I needed and just was a great guy. And, you know, I remember the way that he treated me and was very respectful and his tone. And you know, I’ll always remember that. So he definitely does what he says he’s doing.
D.J. Paris 13:02 Yeah, he’s he is a great guy. And he’s a good representation. And we’re glad to have him on our show. He’s a good representation of, of just how to stay positive, through, you know, challenging times. Because in the mortgage side, they’re, they’re starting to experience some challenges. Not not Joel himself, but the mortgage industry. It’s with rates going up. It’s tough. So I was at a, I was at an event yesterday with about 200, I think, younger realtors, and I don’t mean younger in age, although some of them were young and age, but new to the business young to the business. And I was sitting amongst people who I did not know a lot of realtors who I just hadn’t met yet, from all sorts of companies. And I was asking, like, how are things going for you? Right? I’m just curious, like, how are you doing? Most of these people were in their first couple of years. And the the the consensus was, I just could feel the stress and tension that every buddy I talked to was feeling it was either there’s no inventory or rates are going up and my buyers are freaking out. Or, you know, I can’t seem to convince any of my owners, the people I know who own to sell, because there’s no inventory to buy. And it just felt like everyone was collectively just clenching and just being stressed and I get it. And I don’t have a solution for that. But if you are finding that you’re overly stressed right now, because of course, things can be challenging in the industry. And if I think stressed and busy is different, it’s probably better than being stressed with nothing to do. So if you are in a position where you’re like, I have a lot of free time and nothing’s really happening. What I might suggest as a marketing tip, and this is such a simple tip and I’ve given it before but I really think it’s a good idea is we talked about Zillow and there’s estimate well Zillow believes their Zestimate is within a couple of percentage points now plus or minus two. I talked to one of their data scientists and I said How accurate is estimate and when they first started it I forgot when they launched it like 2007, or something like that. And he said we were about, I think, Boy, I’m gonna get this number wrong, but I think it was 14% accurate. So we were 14% plus or minus which, that’s 28% swing. So it’s not that accurate. And they said, We think we’re down now down to based on our data about 2% accuracy. Now by saying that plus or minus 2%, of what it actually would sell for a home. Now, people listening might go, that is absolute BS, it is never within 2%. It’s always wildly off. So
Carrie McCormick 15:32 call me if you don’t like the number of people love to say it’s right. I I know that.
D.J. Paris 15:39 That’s very good point. But regardless, we know that this is what our clients or our prospective clients are looking at whether it’s accurate or not, is probably not super relevant. But what is relevant is that you can do what Zillow can, which is really look specifically at each one person in your database. You know, if you know their property, you could actually run a much better comp most likely, right? You can look and see what sold the last couple of months that are there. And you’ll probably hopefully you would do a better job not you carry but our listeners would do a better job than maybe what you know, an algorithm could spit out. So here’s what I was thinking as a homeowner who doesn’t practice real estate, I love to find out what my home was worth. And I don’t really know how to run comps that well as an agent. So I just go to zest I go to Zillow, I don’t know if it’s all that accurate, but I just use it because it’s easy. And you know, what I would do is do that for every single person you know, that owns a home and say, Hey, I was just looking on Zillow. Zillow says your home’s worth this, I wanted to see how accurate it was. So I actually went in and ran what I think is maybe even a more accurate quote. And here’s what I think. And you know, just wanted to let you know, and if you’re ever interested in exploring the option of maybe, you know, making a transition, I’d love to talk to you. But regardless, I just wanted you to know what your home was worth. Because you might be hearing a lot about inventory shortages and homes are appreciated and appreciated, etc. So will that get you more business? I don’t know, it certainly isn’t going to hurt. And I think you know, if owners are going to Zillow anyway, to see what their home is worth, then you’re just doing what they’re already doing. And just going a step a step beyond. Most realtors will never do this. So I think this is just a good tip to keep the your your sphere of influence saying boy, Mike, my agents, right on top of things are really thinking about me,
Carrie McCormick 17:31 right. And that just goes back to two of just education is, you know, anything that you learn, or I learned in the market, share it with your clients, you know, because that’s what route reading is, you know, whether it’s the whatever it is, you know, share it with your clients, and whether it’s on social media, or you send them a letter, send them an email, text, there’s just so many different ways. Another one, just to to piggyback on that is you can send a quick video I’ve gotten a few of those from like mortgage lenders or just I love those Yeah, no, I can’t I can’t do it quite yet. But is they you know, sent me a quick video of just, you know, like, Hey, I was on, I’m just making this up, you know, I was on Zillow and your Zestimate was x, you know, give me a call when you can and it was like, I don’t know it, you know, just even that more personal touch of seeing their face on my phone. It was just it’s, it’s it’s good, there’s possibilities are endless. You just have to put the effort into it and stay driven and stay focused.
D.J. Paris 18:28 And by the way, if you don’t have a sphere of influence that’s really sizable to do these sort of Zillow estimates. And then rerunning comps, you don’t it doesn’t have to be somebody you know, that’s probably the best place to start. But you could literally go into the MLS, see all the homes that were sold like two years ago, three years ago, in a particular area, and then you could just literally create this for that homeowner, and hand deliver it if you’re comfortable knocking on doors, or hand delivering it to their porch and saying, you know, there are, this could be a way to introduce yourself to somebody and most agents once the sale is over, you know, struggle with staying in touch with their clients. So this is a great way that even if you didn’t have a sphere of influence, and you’re brand new to a city and didn’t know anyone, you could do that on your own, you know, it’s a lot more work and you won’t have as much success as you would if it was your own sphere of influence your own past clients, but it is, it is not a bad idea. Believe me, most homeowners are not getting this information just randomly sent to them in the mail. They’re getting all sorts of postcards and things like that, but they’re not getting a hey, I put a little report together for you. We’d love to chat about it with you and even just hand them the report or you know, definitely another idea. So anyway, I think those are some great some some good advice from both Carrie and myself for for this month. Also. You know, it’s Memorial Day is coming up in in a couple of days. And you know, if nothing else great opportunity to wish Happy Memorial Day to not only all of our listeners, but our listeners should be wishing that to their sphere. of influence, you know, let that make sure people know, you know that you are, you know, thinking about them and thinking about their holiday weekend and just shoot them an email, or a text message or phone call or whatever. All right, well, I think that’s a great place to wrap up for this month. By the way, if anyone out there is looking to either if you’re a realtor and you’re not in the Chicagoland area, but you have clients that are either moving to Chicago, maybe they’re being relocated, or they have relatives that are, you know, here in Chicago, Carrie would love the opportunity her and her team would love the opportunity to chat with them. Or if you are a buyer or a seller and investor or renter that is looking to work with a top Realtor in Chicago. Carrie is great option. I’m Carrie, what’s the best way that someone should reach out to you
Carrie McCormick 20:45 always call me 312-961-4612 or shoot me an email it’s Kerry ca RR ie at properties that come.
D.J. Paris 20:56 And remember Kari is looking to add somebody to her team. So if you are a local Chicago realtor, and you’re thinking might be a good fit for Kerry reach out to her she can explain more about the position. And I know if it was me and I was practicing, I would want to work with a very top producer because I imagine a lot of their practices would rub off. So definitely reach out to Carrie if you’d like to consider being being a member of her team. Carrie, thanks again for all these years of service of our show. And we ask our audience to support Carrie follow her on Instagram find her at Kerry McCormick real estate on Instagram. That link is in our show notes. And also like I said, if you know anyone that needs help in Chicago, she would love to chat with them. And on behalf of Carrie and myself. We thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Carrie.
Carrie McCormick 21:46 Thank you
How To Choose A Real Estate Team • Jon Lahey
Jul 07, 2022
Jon Lahey the founder of The Fine Living Group at eXp talks about his transition from IT into real estate business and what kept him motivated to build his career in the business. Jon also describes how he built his team in 3 different locations and gives tips on how to search for the best matching team to join. Jon shares how is he keeping his team motivated, engaged and positive in the current market. Last, Jon shares his tips on how to get your offer noticed.
D.J. Paris 0:00 There are so many real estate teams out there. How do you select one to join? We’re going to discuss that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer John Leahy from Washington DC. Before we get to John, just a couple of quick reminders for everyone listening right now please tell a friend about the show. That’s how we grow. It’s how we reach more. More listeners and we can do more episodes when we get more listeners. So tell someone else in your office who wants to learn from top producers about keeping it real. And also please leave us a review if you’re listening on Apple podcasts or maybe Spotify stitcher Google Play Amazon wherever. Let us know what you think of the show. We read all the reviews and comments and that’s how we continue to improve hope everyone is having an amazing summer. And you know what you’ve heard enough of me let’s get right to it my interview with John Leahy.
Today on the show we have gotten laid fine living group with exp in the DC metro area. Let me tell you more about John John Lee. He is a best selling author and experienced speaker and the founder of the fine living group at exp. He was born in Indonesia. But John moved to the US as a child in 1990 and was inspired by his parents strong work ethic to achieve homeownership. He earned his BA in information systems and management from the University of Maryland. He launched his real estate company in 2010 and is a certified proctor coach who mentors every single member of his team. Since choosing to focus on real estate. John has consistently finished in the top 1% in the nation. As a realtor selling over 200 homes per year. John’s network has grown rapidly growing from approximately 20 realtors to 60 realtors in just a year. And before I actually bring John on going from 20 realtors to 60. What I do all day is is recruit realtors. That is an incredible feat. So John is amazing. We’re so happy to have him please visit John at his website, which is the Leahy group L A Hey, the the Leahy group.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. John, welcome to the show.
Jon Lahey 3:57 Hey, thanks for having me here. DJ.
D.J. Paris 4:00 So grateful to have you. I first you’re in one of my favorite cities. Oh, and I think most people love, love the DC area. And not just the city is so cool. The surrounding areas. I know you guys sort of tackle all of it. And do you do you end up just had a quick question? Because I know I have friends that are attorneys in that area, they oftentimes have to take the bar in different states because of course the border a border, a few of them is the same The same thing happened for for real estate where you have to get licensed in each state.
Jon Lahey 4:31 So I just laugh because not because of that. But if we were known as like, the area with the most lawyers was attorneys. So yeah, in real estate here, I have to get my license in Maryland, a DC license of Virginia license. And the best part is the continuing education or education for all three, and only a few of the classes like overlap. So most of the time, what are the classes I’ll have to take like the actual classes um Every time I ended renewal is different years. So something I don’t look forward to is that
D.J. Paris 5:05 is it? Is it three different MLS is as well or is it a one is
Jon Lahey 5:09 only 1am? I? Oh, thank
D.J. Paris 5:11 goodness, one. Anyway, I was just curious. I know that that’s not the reason why you’re here. But I did want to I was curious because of course DC is such a complicated area. And they probably should just make it its own state. But we can that’s another conversation for another time. But I would love to talk to you have done so much since since since you started in real estate, but you started out as an IT guy. So I like the I am so always loved some how people transition into real estate. You know, you were you originally when you were at University of Maryland was the thought to become a developer or to work in the tech space, or were you always thinking real estate.
Jon Lahey 5:49 So the funny thing is, real estate was never, you know, in my mind, I remember it was like four or five years after I graduated high school, I came back to my high school for my sister’s graduation. And I met my close friend my like one of my best friends from high school. And he had became a realtor. And I looked at him like what’s wrong with you? Like, why would you give up like your your engineering? He was an engineer, I’m like, Why did you give up your engineering degree to become a realtor? I’m like, That makes no sense. Like, I trashed the guy, right. Two years later, I was licensed. Like, I never had any plans of becoming a realtor. You know, it’s kind of like I don’t want to say it’s by accident. I believe it was my destiny. But it was never planned. It was never planned I, I worked as I work in IT company. And my job was to train like all these end users around the world. So I was working overnight overnight shifts with my clients in Germany, my clients in Hong Kong, and I was just always available on their hours. And then during the day here, I would show houses. That’s how that’s how I was juggling between the IT world and then the real estate world. And then just, I was I just I looked at my numbers couple days ago. And the funny thing is my first four years in real estate, I sold a total of 11 homes. So I had no business like even surviving in real estate because for years, I sold 11 homes. And then on my fifth year, I decided to go full time into real estate. Which if you think about it, it’s crazy, because
D.J. Paris 7:23 that is crazy, based on the previous four years, right? And I’m like,
Jon Lahey 7:27 I don’t know what I was thinking. But something inside me was like, Hey, you should go full time with real estate. And so I did. And thank goodness, I have a family who supported that idea and didn’t call me crazy or stupid or dumb. And my wife’s like, you know what, if you believe that, if you believe it’s time to go to real estate, I’ll support you. And my first year in full full time in real estate, I sold 11 homes and I’m like 11 is like the number apparently, you know and um, and then from
D.J. Paris 7:54 by the way, that’s not a bad number for a first year in real estate. It’s it doesn’t make me feel good from a bank account perspective. But that’s not an uncommon and again, I know you had been doing it for several years part time before but really it’s not a terrible first year but it’s not an easy first year.
Jon Lahey 8:12 It’s not an easy first year and I thought you know I’m sure a lot of the listeners have probably thought the same thing. We unlike that I just need one just like million dollar sales and this will be an amazing year and that million dollar sale never happened and I’m just like I just need one more deal one more deal it was it was like an up and down every two three months. There’s no deals right and yeah, it was a hard first year full time in real estate for me but hey, I survive and that’s where I am today so I’m so
D.J. Paris 8:44 what do you think made the difference? You know having look you had a great job you were well you’re really doing two jobs but But you had a great career in the tech space you know and and certainly that was your your training was was to stay you know stay in that world then you decided to dabble in real estate you know in your in your off hours which you really didn’t have many and then you said I want to try this full time. The first year you know 11 deals pretty good first year not a fun maybe not a fun first year but but you know, numbers wise, not terrible, but not not enough to really you know, maybe replace the income maybe even from that from the other job. So so when you got past that first year, was there anything what kept you motivated? You know, did you just see that this is going to get easier and better? Or was it like I’m just did you try different things? I’m just curious what made the difference for you?
Jon Lahey 9:39 I always believed that failure was not an option. You know, I learned early on that once you made a decision burn the boats you can’t go backwards. So I I’m like alright, well there’s no going back. I’m just gonna have to make this work somehow. After that first year, I met a mentor. And I can tell you right now you know any But who’s listening today? If you want to go to the next level, find somebody who’s already doing and accomplish what you really want to do and just find that person and hang around that person and pick up the clues, because success leaves clues, right? Figure out how to think, figure out what they’re doing, and just copy it. And so that’s what I did. My, my first year, I sold 11 homes for first year full time, I barely survive. My second year, I met a mentor. And then I just spent all my time just learning from this person. Actually, I met a couple of mentors. And so I was I was very fortunate to have met multiple mentors. And, and that really made the difference in that my second year, my third year, I went from selling 11 homes to 22 homes to 44 homes. And then it’s just that’s the rest of you know, that’s that’s, that’s the history is I just kept on doubling my production. But the doubling of the production got XL acceleration in that process, because I met somebody who’s already accomplished it. And all I did was I was like, Alright, let me just copy what you’re doing. Let me just copy how you think. Let me just copy how you troubleshoot things, you know, coming from an Information Systems background, the way my brain works is always like that, you know, if the systems follow the systems follow the outcomes predictable, because that’s the, that’s the that’s the system’s processes, right? So with that mindset, I’m like, Alright, if I just follow their process, my outcome should be the same. And so I started doing that
D.J. Paris 11:27 makes all the sense in the world. And it reminds me of that story of Roger Bannister, who I think it was Roger Bannister, who run the ran the first four minute, mile mile. Yeah. So they’re just not that I’m going to go through a whole story. But my understanding is whatever year that was, I want to say it was in the 70s. But I could be wrong. But whatever year it was that he did that. Nobody had done it prior. And then literally that next year, because he had done it. And he talked about success, success leaving clues. And I’m not sure that people necessarily knew what his regimen was, but just also even knowing that it’s possible, which is essentially what having your mentor was like, Oh, you did 11 homes I did 75 or 100, or 200. And you’re all of a sudden, you’re like, Oh, it is possible. So and then you got to actually watch what that that mentor did. And you know, and you’re so right, success leaves clues. And it probably saved you countless years, I would think of trial and error, because you already had somebody who had been through the war.
Jon Lahey 12:29 Exactly. I don’t have to I didn’t have to recreate the wheel. And I didn’t have to go through all the failures. I mean, I failed a lot to you know, that’s the other reason why I was successful. I don’t mind trying. Other people are telling me, Hey, don’t do that don’t do that’s not gonna work. And I’m like, Well, how would I know? It’s not gonna work if I don’t try it? So I’m like, let’s try. And so I realized that the more successful the person is, if what they don’t tell you is all the failures that they have along the journey that they don’t, that’s not don’t go on social media, by the way, I don’t post my failure stories. My close friends know my failure stories here on this podcast, I’ll tell you my failure stories. But it’s not something where we just tell you stuff on stage, like, oh, yeah, by the way, let me tell you about how I felt on that one, and that one and that one, but all the people who are successful in life, I bet you there’s a boatload of boatload of like less successful stories along the way that they keep on getting up from, you know, and
D.J. Paris 13:26 I was gonna say, I actually, I actually think I actually think really successful people fail more. And meaning there’s just because they’re doing more, they’re failing more. And as a result, they’re learning because you only learn when you fail, or when you make a mistake. I mean, it’s really the only way we learn. And so the idea of failure is the feedback loop. I mean, you’re a systems guy, you know, failure is is the way to improvement. And so it’s sort of the irony is failure stinks. And it’s not fun, but it really is the key is fail as much as you can just learn from it and make adjustments.
Jon Lahey 13:58 Tony Robbins said this, right, Tony, I’m sure you know who Tony Robbins is awesome and never ending improvement, which is part of the never ending improvement. It’s also there, there’s gonna be failures and stumbles and, and other things along the way where it’s not perfect. So, I mean, I love it. Somebody says, If you want to be successful, fail, and when you fail, you’re gonna, you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fall forward, you’re not falling backwards, you know. And so every time you’ll fail, you’re just gonna get there, get back up and fail again, get back up again and fail again. And you know what, I’m more sick. I’m more proud of my failure stories than where I am today. Because the failure stories defines who I am, because I have every single one of those failure opportunities. I keep on getting getting back up and everybody who’s successful has those in their, in their part of their process. It’s like, alright, where is this part of the journey? And you just keep part of a
D.J. Paris 14:49 part of the deal. As part of that. Yeah. And and also, resiliency is what you get when you bounce like you were saying, you got back up, you kept going, and all of a sudden you build the Those muscles in those calluses where it’s like the failures, don’t, you know, you’re like, Oh, I survived that. And then it’s like, Oh, it didn’t kill me that I lost that client. Okay, I guess I’m okay, I can dust myself off and keep going. And then those failures get easier and easier to handle, because you’re building that resiliency muscle and I talked to, I talked to had recently talked to a therapist about this. And she’s like, the most important skill that she thinks people don’t often develop when they’re younger is resiliency, it’s this idea of being able to fail, and then learning how to, like, soothe yourself so that you go, Okay, it’s gonna be fine. You’ll you’ll you know, and then you make some adjustments you try again, and, but the resiliency and also I love the fact that you cut off any other option to which which we don’t ever, we don’t talk about that much in our at least in our society of cutting off, like you said, burning burning the bridge behind you. It’s like, you didn’t really burn a bridge, but you’ve just like, This is it, this is what I’m doing. Of course, you I’m sure could have gone back into the IT world if you really wanted to, because of that’s your training. And that would have been a fine career too. But realizing like, I’m going to figure this out, people figure this out. And probably people a lot less intelligent than you figure this out, too. So it’s like, wait, I can do.
Jon Lahey 16:15 Exactly. And I just wrote on my paper, you know, the failure makes the success sweeter. It makes it so the celebrations much sweeter when you remember where you came from. Imagine you just get into real estate and boom, the next thing you know, you already made a million dollars, but there’s no journey to the story. What do you celebrate, you just celebrate getting there. And then you’re like, Alright, so what’s next, but the really the success, the happiness, the satisfaction is in the journey of getting back up, up and and trying something and not working. Just keeping keep going at it. You know, the determination of thinking Grow Rich, one of the first thing they said is the reason why Henry Ford, Henry Ford is successful, is because of his his determination. That’s really the secret. Yeah, determination.
D.J. Paris 17:01 Yeah. And Henry Ford would say I’m not the most intelligent person. I’m not the smartest guy in the room. In fact, I think he would have a panel of buttons on his desk that would summon you know, this is before the internet, but he would summon people from from other departments. He says I don’t need to know everything. Because I have people in my life that I just push a button. I mean, you could call that a mentor, you call that a co worker, whatever I can I can get the answer to anything by pushing this button. He but his point was like, he’s like, I’m not the smartest guy. I’m just maybe really determined. I’m going to figure it out. And I love I love that, that you have that. And I because you’re a systems guy. Our audience loves hearing about systems. So I’m curious if you know, we’re not asking you to share your secret sauce, of course. But any system ideas, you have that agents when you’re coaching agents, when you’re talking to him that you feel, gosh, I see this a lot where they’re just not they don’t have this part of their process really well defined. Or I’m curious if you have any suggestions for our audience for systems?
Jon Lahey 18:02 Oh, absolutely. So it was maybe like eight years ago, and I had just fired my third assistant in like, two months. And I was standing outside the restaurant. I’m a foodie, right, I’m sitting I’m standing outside the restaurant and my third assistant called me and I think she’s, I forgot if I fired her or she quit. And I thought to myself, I’m like, that’s gonna be a better way. Like, why am I why am I attracting the wrong people? And then I realized it’s probably me, like, I didn’t
D.J. Paris 18:28 have a common denominator.
Jon Lahey 18:31 Them it’s me. I’m the reason why it’s not working. It’s not so. So I realized I didn’t have a system, I didn’t have a process for people to follow, which means I can’t leverage the things that I shouldn’t be doing to grow my business to the next level. So I can focus on the high dollar productive, productive activities, because I’m doing everything right. And I realized that I’m the reason why this is all failing. I remember I got on a plane the next day, and I was in DCAA, Reagan National and I was flying to LAX. So it’s a good five and a half, six hour flight. I was sitting on the second second row, middle seat. So I was stuck in the middle. And this is before like internet was like common on flights. So I can’t get on today. I can’t get on the internet. And I was I was stuck in the middle seat and I pulled up my notepad, my yellow notepad. And I thought to myself, Okay, what would have to happen what happens every single time I get a client I start writing it down paperwork and sending an introduction email and making sure the listing agreement gets sent on to this person and that person and this person and I created an actual checklist system for my processes, the things that are the lowest dollar producing activities I put on paper and then when I got back home I put it all into a checklist system in my in my I use Infusionsoft. So I put everything into Infusionsoft that triggers automatic emails and you know when people follow the checklist, What I did is I can,
D.J. Paris 20:02 I’m sorry, I’m just gonna say, it’s so funny because as you were saying that I was realizing, and I hope our audience was thinking the same thing that I was thinking in my own business. And again, I’m not a Producing Realtor, but I do other things, very similar to what Realtors do. And I was thinking, Oh, what are my low income producing? Or what are my non income producing, you know, process or sorry, tasks that I have to accomplish that I should consider giving to someone else? So I’m sorry, go ahead.
Jon Lahey 20:30 Oh, so So that’s exactly what I did. And then I get back home, I put everything into Infusionsoft which is our CRM slash data process systems and, and I called the local high school. And I said to him, like, connect me to the counselor, and the counselor, but then I said, Hey, can you get me a student who needs extra hours, and I want to train her to run my system. Because I looked at it, as you know, McDonald’s, McDonald’s is run by systems. And the thing with McDonald’s is, no matter which McDonald’s you go to, you can go to McDonald’s in Chicago, you can go to McDonald’s, in Rockville, Maryland, you can go to McDonald’s in LA, you get the same stuff, you get the same process, you get the same output, because the system is predictable, right, the, the outcomes predictable. And so I called the high school, and I said, Send me a student, a smart girl or a smart person. And I’m like, Just give me somebody who needs extra hours. And so I gave her mice the key to my kingdom, which at the time was we had like four or five agents. And I said, All right, you’re gonna run my system, this is how I know if the system is going to work or not. Because when a system is followed, regardless of skill set, the outcome should be predictable. Right? And so I gave the keys to the kingdom to a 17 year old. And I said, I’m gonna train you to run my company, based on this checklist that I created on a plane. And I know it sounds funny, right? But I said, Alright, let’s try it. And then I went on a trip. So November, December 2020. What is it 2015. December 2015, we flew to Bali, we actually went to Bali. And we left and we stayed in Bali, for four weeks, flew back home. And we had $7.9 million in ratified contracts while I was out in Bali, because one of the systems follow the outcomes predictable. And I look at it, I’m like, did a high school girl just manage my team, and we just had our productive month ever. It’s incredible. And, um, and so that’s my system story. If there’s one thing that somebody who wants to scale up and first off, find out what, what things are bogging you down, that’s not really high dollar producing activities. And give it to somebody else and create a checklist system that checklist ism is the easiest way to do it. Just make a checklist of the things that has to happen every single time. Something happens, right. So that’s what I created, I gave it to somebody, and I taught her how to do it.
D.J. Paris 23:04 I love that because and also back to the McDonald’s sort of reference is McDonald’s Restaurants are essentially run by 17 year olds. Exactly. So so that’s sort of the genius of it is like, well, if they can, you know, and I’m not here putting 17 year olds down, they’re just you know, they’re just 17 year olds, they, they, you know, they can follow processes, they’re probably not great innovators of that age, or who knows, but they’re able to follow instruction. Clearly fast food restaurants know that. And so that is an incredible, I’ve never heard of anyone. I’ve heard of people hiring like an experienced person to then run their systems. But I love the fact that you’re like, I want to see, the probably it was the most sort of true test is like, I want to get somebody who really has no business running any of this. And it works. And that’s incredible.
Jon Lahey 23:53 We’ve always had good agents, but I didn’t hire a high level director, leader manager, until we were selling like 150 homes. 180 homes at that point, I’m like, All right, for us to go to the next level, I do need somebody who’s actually a high level like leader, because at that point, we get a double we need I need I need leaders because at that point, it’s more than just a system. We need leadership to go with it. Right. But until we were selling 150 homes, 120 150 homes, all of my all of my stuff was run by just systems and and assistants.
D.J. Paris 24:31 I love that and we’re so lucky now in this time to be able to with technology now we can get connected to help from all over the world and we can we are not limited. You know, simply to like local high school kids if that’s not what what somebody wants for their business. I mean, you can hire people from all over the world to assist and we’re I feel like a lot of realtors have yet to really adopt that and they they I think it’s scary to give up some of that control was that hard for you to even though you knew that this system likely should work was It was scary for you to then hand that over to somebody because I know a lot of our listeners, that’s that’s the feedback we get, as we say we should hire an assistant for and you can hire them relatively inexpensively if you look globally for people, but they’re like, Well, I just don’t want to I’m afraid they’re gonna say or do the wrong thing. I’m curious if you had those fears as well.
Jon Lahey 25:30 Obviously, I didn’t, because I hired and fired fast and then realized it was my fault, right? I really the thing is, if you have a at least a checklist or a process in place, you can you should be able to plug in any individual to help you with those processes is the key is you just have to know what needs to happen every single time. That’s really the key if you have the system and process in place, finding a person to plug in there shouldn’t be a hard thing. Right. And the reason why I did it that way is like I know some people like you should just hire somebody high level in the beginning. Well, the problem was I didn’t have any money. It’s not like I started and I was successful immediately right there. Another reason why I started this way was because we were limited in budget. I was reinvesting I was reinvesting a lot of the money that we were making on commission to for systems and technology and also for lead generation. So it’s not like I had a lot of leftover money to just hire a high level assistant. That was the thing. And so when COVID happened in 2020, we were very fortunate because we had been running in the cloud since 2015. Like all of my assistants, were in the clouds we were we were in the Philippines, we were in South America, I hadn’t we had zero like we didn’t have any transaction coordinator that’s local, we have nobody on Listen coordination, that’s local, all of my assistants, were running oversleep, everybody was like somewhere else. We were always running in the clouds based on systems COVID happen office shut down,
D.J. Paris 26:59 I was like, system doesn’t change anything
Jon Lahey 27:03 was the same, we have all the processes in place already. So I can say, you know, I’m very fortunate that that was the route that we took back in 2014 2015. As we were building the systems out, that we took that way instead of, you know, the paper,
D.J. Paris 27:21 I am such a big fan of, of hiring virtual assistants, for all sorts of areas of life, I actually have somebody that I hire, and I, which is basically she goes through all of my to dues with me every morning for an hour, we categorize them because I’m not good at staying on target with my two dues. She also helps with I mean this, I’m only saying this because I think this might be helpful for audience I have. So it part of my you know, my struggles is my work life. I’m pretty well, on top of things. But even in my home life, that’s where I struggle. And so I even have somebody or I say to them, can you come up with like 10 date ideas for this week. So I can then you know, organize something for my girlfriends, so that come up with like, restaurants that we should go to. And since she sends me a list of things, and it’s it’s the it’s some of the best money I spend, because I just Yeah, so it doesn’t even have to just be work, I have systems, I have systems to make sure because I won’t remember to do anything. So I have to have those kinds of systems. So I love that But enough about me but I want to tell talk you talked about, you know, you’ve become not only a top producer, but really a leader in the field. And, and I have to give you a huge shout out because you were a panelist at Rizz. Ras media’s 33rd annual CEO and Leadership Exchange, by the way rismedia We are i We’re in communication with them right now to to work on a project together as well. So I’m very excited. When I saw that I was like, Oh, that’s so cool. I’m a big fan of them. But I would love to hear about how you moved even from just, you know, hey, I’m just you know, I’m a Producing Realtor. I’ve got a team, too. Now I need to share some of this with with you know, the broader a broader audience.
Jon Lahey 29:07 You know, it’s a it’s exactly what you just said, How do I share this with a broader audience? My vision, you know, since like, 2017 2018, I was attending a conference, I was attending a Tony Robbins conference, and it was the last day and Tony was like, he shut the lights off, right? It was dark, pitch dark. And he’s like, alright, imagine where you are in five years. And I’m like, Oh, well, what’s Alright, let me imagine that. It’s like dream bigger. Like, is that it? And so, first, I was like, Yeah, I’ll sell like, 400 homes. And he’s like, dream bigger. And I’m like, Okay, I don’t know what that means. But he kept on challenging me to like, expand, like the goal and I was like, Alright, maybe I’ll open up and I started naming cities. I said, maybe I’ll open up in Florida. Maybe I’ll open up in San Diego and I started naming places that I want to like expand my brand might want to find living brands who which We never had that vision until like that conference. And that he’s like, where do you want to be? And I’m like Toronto, New York, Chicago, and I started naming like major cities. For out like West Palm Beach, Miami, San Diego, guess what? We’re open in San Diego. We all know, and thank you. We’re open, finally meaning group, Miami slash West Palm Beach, like that whole area, we have a team down there. We have a team in Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland. And we’re and we’re continually expanding. And so it’s it started with that, that dream, that vision that was just birthed out of a moment where, where he challenged me to dream bigger, and I’m originally my dream was, I’m just gonna sell like, a few more 100 homes, which is like, alright, we can just do that. But it’s like, Is that all you want? And so, and I think that’s what the moment I knew what we want to do what, what the vision was, it was a year and a half ago, I realized my old brokerage was just not the right model for that, that really fit that vision of expansion. And the reason we want to expand is not just to make money, it costs money to change people’s lives. But we want to expand for like, more than that reason, right? We want to change people’s lives in these marketplaces, we want to have more influence over over all these other people’s lives, and over the market, in all these markets, and and so realizing that I was not in the right brokerage, we had to make a really big and hard decision, because I had been at my old brokerage for like 11 years. And we had I had grown from like a nobody to ranked number 23 In the world of brokerage, and I’m like, gosh, like, my ego is kind of hurting here. Like I, I’m not number one, yet, I really my ultimate goal is to become number one in the world. And I’m like, Yeah, I think it’s time to go, you know, I think we found a model with exp where expansion was possible, where growing in San Diego was actually very easy to do and opening up in Florida was gonna be very easy to do. And we had the right people in place in those two markets. And so just having that vision aligned with the model in place, and the company that have the same mission, everything is accelerated. And this is pretty cool. Because media, they they saw what was happening. You know, they know they saw that the number one REMAX broker owner team in Maryland shut down. And then the next thing, like six months later, we have two other teams, which even I couldn’t have predicted that was, I had no idea it was gonna happen that fast. You know, it was a vision. But what was cool is, it just happened so fast that the people were ready. The vision was there, we have a system that we’ve been testing for, like ages, you know, with our team locally, and then we just planted the system in Florida, we planted the system in San Diego, and then boom, now we’re opening three locations. And then rismedia saw that and they’re like, Wow, I guess we should see what’s actually happening here. Because we went from 20 to 65. In 65 Real estate agents in such a short period of time. I’m very fortunate. I’m grateful for that. And I have amazing people. I’m really fortunate because I have amazing people with me. Hang around people who believe things are possible, by the way. Like if there’s one thing just will just hang around people that believe that there’s nothing impossible and impossible things will start happening. If you hang around people who just will put you down and be like, hey, that’s impossible. That’s stupid. Don’t do that. Then you’re just gonna be stuck not growing. So if there’s one thing I can like, share today, like my vision was my vision. But hang on people who believe in that vision. Hang on people who believe in the impossible, because they’ll you’ll go far with those people.
D.J. Paris 33:51 Yeah, it’s really interesting. I, I think you’re right. It is Oh, I know. You’re right. It’s this idea of being around people who go Oh, yeah, there’s a way to do that. Instead of Ooh, that seems like oh, my gosh, that’s, you know, that seems tough or not possible. Just somebody who goes, Oh, yeah, that can be done. And that’s why being around people who are doing better than you is always so encouraging, because you’re like, oh, oh, that person figured it out. And there’s a way to do that. I want to talk since your team has grown substantially. You have 65 agents. Now. You know, last year you were at 20. So So again, as somebody who spends eight hours a day recruiting agents, I know and that’s I know, you’re not spending eight hours a day recruiting because you have a million other things to do as well like running a team and doing your own production and all of that, but and speaking and writing and all of the things you do, but I want to talk, we’re going to take just a quick little commercial break for one of our sponsors. And then when we come back, I want to ask about how you go about finding people to attract to the team because there’s so many of our listeners who are looking to either join a team or maybe start a team themselves. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on, you know how they should select a team if they want to join an existing one, or maybe even create one of their own. And before we do that couple, just a quick quick note about our favorite sponsor, which is called follow up boss. So, I want to this is my favorite CRM that exists. And I’ve interviewed hundreds of top Realtors like John in the country for this podcast over the years and the CRM that is used by more than any of our guests follow up boss. Now let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level, we all know that follow up boss will actually help you drive more leads in less time with less effort. Don’t take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the United States use his follow up boss and he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with 250 different systems so you can keep your current tools and processes in place. Also, the best part follow up boss has seven day a week support. Realtors work on the weekends, right. So this is this is great because you can get the help you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that they’re for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else who visits their website. So but you have to go Oh, and by the way, no credit card required either free 30 day trial, no credit card, so you don’t have to worry about them charging you on day 31. Just but you do have to go to a special link to get the 30 day trial, which that link is follow up boss.com forward slash real again, follow up boss.com forward slash real, you have nothing to lose your check out their CRM, they’re so confident you’re going to keep using it that they’re giving it to you totally free for 30 days, follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And but now let’s get back to John. So let’s talk about recruiting, and also retaining. But we’ll start with recruiting because and I don’t know that that’s even the right word, but how we attract talent to the company. And that’s maybe a word I would suspect you would probably use over recruiting. So if someone’s out there, and they’re listening, and they want to join an existing team, maybe maybe your team even how would you recommend that they might start to explore existing options teams like yourself?
Jon Lahey 37:17 You know, there are different kinds of real estate teams, right? There are different kinds of things that they offer. Some teams offer lead some teams over appointments, some teams offer support, some teams offer system, some teams, offer coaching, some teams offer everything. And of course, depending on what you need, you need to know first of all, what do you need to take your business to the next level? Because just because there’s an awesome team out there doesn’t mean that fits what you need. And then you need to know also like, ultimately, what you want your business to look like long term, like, is there a growth potential or growth opportunity for you to join that team and actually see you hit your vision, your goal long term? Or is this going to be like a temporary stay where you learn for next six months to two years, and then take what you learn and build your own team elsewhere. So kind of like know, first off, know what you want, know what you need. And then if you have that, the next part is not as hard. The hard part is if you don’t know what you know, you don’t know what you want, and you don’t know what you need, then really, there’s no good fit out there. And it’s just gonna be like, you know, you just have to test different teams. Okay. So that’s the first thing from the perspective of the team leader. For us, or for me, at least, what I’m looking for are agents that fit our core values, you know, because like I said, I have competition out here, if we have competitors that offer the same thing. So just because they fit me doesn’t mean they’re going to fit the other team and vice versa. And so looking for agents that fit our, our core belief, our core, our core values, to me is more valuable than the skills the skills I can teach. I can I can teach them scripts, I can teach them how to overcome objections, I can teach them kind of like some of the mindset things that we believe in. But if that’s not their core, it’s not sustainable, long term. Like they’ll, they’ll go back to like who they really are long term. Right. So like, for us, the number one rule that we’re looking for, or like the number one kind of like, core value we’re looking for is we love, we care we serve, we love we care we serve, we’re looking for agents that just embodies that and live and breathe and believes that the most important thing to do to one another, and to their clients is to love care serve. And it’s really easy to it’s a really easy way to measure that. Those agents that believe in loving and caring and serving, you can see their success because they’ll get more referrals. They’ll get more repeat clients, and they get more five star reviews. And then you have the other agents who just sell, sell, sell, sell, and they get none of those things. Right. So that’s something that that just we just learned along the way that there’s a lot of producers out there and there are probably other agents that do They don’t fit our culture, but they can sell a lot more with us, but they just don’t fit our cultures. And we don’t really want those agents. We’re looking for agents who love care. So like, that’s our number one and most important role on the team.
D.J. Paris 40:13 Yeah, I love that. And it’s not just a slogan, right? It’s like is ever you probably put every process and every action through that filter. First, I imagine is does this does is every action we take under that love care surf umbrella, which probably helps, it probably makes your life your job a little easier. Because sometimes when we’re not sure what to do, if we push it through that filter of that’s my highest value, that’s it probably makes it more clear what to do. I imagine that really brings things into focus about what to actually do.
Jon Lahey 40:53 Exactly, we hire we fire based on that value of love care serve, and we make decisions and we implement programs and systems based on that core value. Will this help us love care serve our clients more? Is this going to help us show that we love care? And so let’s somebody said this before and Maya Angelou it was Maya Angelou, Maya Angelou said, people don’t remember what you say, people don’t remember what you promised them. But but people will remember how you make them feel. And I was like, you know, that’s genius. Just make people feel special, will be super successful, because people will just recommend us everywhere. They’ll remember us, they’ll recommend us. It’s and I I was in line at Disney World. You’ve been to Disney. I have it’s like 105 degrees in South Florida, right? And the line few hours long, two hours long. And it was like, Oh, I know, two hours long. And I’m like, why are all these people like smiling and happy and they’re willing to line up for an experience that they’ve experienced before. It’s because they don’t remember the line. They remember how they felt. They didn’t remember how Disney made them feel. And so they keep on coming back. And I thought to myself, What if we create a process and a system where our clients feel the same way, where they don’t remember how much money we sold their home for, they don’t remember how much savings they get from us. They don’t remember how much more money they got from us because of our amazing systems. But they remember that we carry
D.J. Paris 42:28 Yeah, I one of my favorite little Disney things. And I don’t know if this is still in effect, but it used to be a rule and probably still is at on at the park down in Orlando, which is if anybody from from staff, whether it’s the person sweeping up the, you know, the cigarette butts on the or the wrappers on the floor, to the people in the Mickey Mouse outfits walking around taking pictures, anyone on staff, apparently, if they came within if they come within, now, if you have the Mickey Mouse head, this wouldn’t work. But for people that you can see their face, who work at at the park, if if if a guest if one of you know, a visitor comes within 10 feet, they have to smile at the person, they have to make eye contact and smile. And it really goes to what you just said, it’s like that’s such a simple thing. And you don’t really think about it, except that makes people feel good. It’s it’s pretty easy to do. It’s doesn’t cost anything, it’s you don’t even have to talk, you just have to smile. It’s this idea of We’re glad you’re here and we want you to feel good. And so you’re essentially doing that same version of that with love care serve. And it’s it’s really it’s again, it sounds simple, it’s actually pretty hard to do. But when when you do it, it probably just ultimately makes everything a lot easier.
Jon Lahey 43:47 It’s easy to do when the things are good when you know, easiest situation when somebody that left your team and try to recruit from your team. Like I found out 24 hours ago. And then I had to go through that. And at the end I said to my staff and my leaders, I was like hey guys, we love we care we serve. Just don’t forget that. That’s not easy to do. No, it’s easy. When things are easy. It’s not easy. When it’s a really, really tough situation. You just have to remember your core value and as a leader, like I have to remember that you know what? People look at me and they’re waiting for me to fail to they’re like, let’s see if John’s gonna embody this love care serve belief? Or is it gonna go the other way and start like trashing someone else? And I’m like, I gotta make sure that if I preach it, and if I tell people hey, we’re all about loving and caring serving, I have to keep on showing that. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 44:45 yeah. And ultimately, you know, by focusing on your core values, and again, you know, if your processes weren’t strong, you know, then then when things shake up the business, you know, the top producer on the team leaves and if tries to recruit or or you know, people away, and there’s there’s a shake up. It really helps to, to be able to go back to that because that love care serve model because it really goes, everything’s gonna be okay. This is this is you know life has ups and downs and people are involved. So you know, people are the most random things on the planet, we don’t know what anyone’s going to do at any given moment. But but you built something without any any agent, right? You were just you. So you’re like, well, I already know I can get more agents. And so but yes, it’s not doesn’t mean it’s easy. And it’s certainly, I’ve had that exact experience that you’re referencing so many times. So it’s one of those. And I used to get very, very upset about it. And then I sort of went, That’s okay, it’s all gonna be fine. But it is it certainly can be challenging. So I would love to talk when we’re talking about challenges here a challenge that most everyone is facing. And I know you can’t solve this problem. But I’m curious how you cope with this problem for you and your team. Since you are the leader, we’re dealing with a shortage of inventory pretty much everywhere. Rates, of course, are rising, they’re still pretty historically, they’re still pretty good. But they don’t feel good in the moment because of course, rates were so low before. So you have this sort of, you know, difficult time for agents that don’t have a lot of listings, and maybe are working with buyers. So I’m just curious, what are you? How are you keeping your team motivated, engaged and positive?
Jon Lahey 46:33 I tell my, my client, my agents all the time, be be the resource, educate your clients, and, and regardless if they’re a buyer or seller, position yourself as the expert by providing valuable, valuable information, right, whether it’s through videos, whether it’s through social media, don’t just be like any other realtors saying, oh my gosh, we’re in a crazy market, they already know that. But instead, how do you educate them that how do you prepare your offer so that you win. And so we do videos, every single every week, we have a new video that we send out to all of our whole database. And we treat everybody the same we I mean, we segmented the database, but we get our whole database I treat as if they’re gonna buy and sell today. Because all these people who are afraid right now who’s hesitating, they’re looking for somebody to tell them what to do. Right? People love being told what to do. People love that the decisions are made for them. And so we tell them like, Hey, if you are still thinking of moving, here’s five costly mistakes that you need to know this week, so that you don’t end up losing your dream home. Here’s the 10 things that you shouldn’t do if you’re thinking of selling your home. And so we just become a resource, right? Because you know what, if they do want to buy and sell, you have to educate them anyways, you have to tell you need to show them so that they listen to you. And so we we believe we come in with the belief that hey, just be a resource.
D.J. Paris 47:56 You demonstrate you demonstrate that you have that skill on social media and also to your existing sphere of influence your contactless. You’re consistently reminding them we have information not so much, hey, if you’re ready to buy or sell where you’re at, I’m sure you, you say that too. Or maybe you don’t but but that’s not the main message. The main message is I have something you need to hear, I have something you need to read. And so it’s amazing how few realtors do go that route and become the place that people will tune into to get knowledge versus Oh, I’m thinking it’s time for me to sell my house. I need to find a realtor versus I’ve been following this guy for a while. He’s great. And he’s constantly telling me what to do and what not to do. I’m just gonna go with him.
Jon Lahey 48:46 Exactly. And so we’re getting, we’re getting clients are buyers and sellers calling us. They’ve been on our database for ages. And they’re finally like, coming back. They’re calling. They’re like, Hey, I’ve been watching your videos, I’m ready to go now. So we treat everybody the same. And then every seller, oh, well, not every seller, but the majority of sellers are buyers. So if you have a database of buyers, essentially you have a database of potential sellers in that database. So we just, we just educate them as if they’re buyers. Because most people don’t wake up in the morning. They’re like, I gotta sell my house. Most people wake up in the morning, like this home is too small. I need another house. So that we create a video Hey, if you’re waking up this morning, and you realize that your home is too small, you need to watch this video. Here’s three costly mistakes, people have people and we give them content based on that and because it’s their thought people don’t wake up in the morning saying I gotta sell my house.
D.J. Paris 49:42 That is that is a I’m gonna pause for a second that is a brilliant insight that you just said that I’ve done about 400 episodes. I don’t think anyone specifically ever said in that way and I want to I want to sort of just go over that again because that’s really important. Yes, people might look up their home value on Zillow. Lower that, you know, they might do little things like that. But you’re right day to day people aren’t thinking about whether they want to buy or sell, but they are thinking about whatever challenges they’re having. And so you’re basically saying, Hey, if you have this challenge, I’ve got a solution for you. And that’s, that is a great way to think about creating content, thinking about what are the actual challenges that my audience is experiencing, and then here’s some knowledge or some solution. Boy, that’s a brilliant strategy, I love that.
Jon Lahey 50:31 Just be a resource, provide information, provide solutions, and then when they’re ready, they’re gonna raise their hand, they’re gonna be like, hey, DJ, I’m ready. I’ve been watching you for the last eight years, I’ve been in your database, you’re, you’re the man like you have all the content, I’m ready to go now. Right? That’s how we do it. Now, we do create that database, we do have, you know, we generate a lot of buyers, a buyer leads and seller leads, but not everybody’s ready. Most of them just goes into our database. And then we put them into our follow up process, including content, videos with content and things like that.
D.J. Paris 51:06 I love that any make you try to make a new video weekly? Is that’s that’s the schedule.
Jon Lahey 51:11 Yep. Every single week, we’ll have a new content coming out. And my assistant will make sure I do that. She’s like, hey, you need to do more videos for for next month. I’m like, Alright. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 51:25 just out of curiosity, how long do you do you have a specific length that you try to hit your videos? Do you not worry about that? Is it more about the content? Or do you try to just because I know you’re a process guy. And I know you’ve looked at all the all the data from your videos and all the engagement metrics, curious if you found shorter videos, or longer videos tend to work better for you.
Jon Lahey 51:45 I use right now all my videos are usually between three to five minutes long. But my ironically, the video that has the most views is like 15 minutes, which I can’t figure out, but that one has, that video, I think is how to sell your home without an agent. And that one has the most views. But that’s like a 15 minute video that I can’t redo. It’s just too long.
D.J. Paris 52:09 But it works. And that’s that’s the other thing too is, is I think when you’re when our audience is trying to put out content, you can experiment, experiment with long form, experiment with short form, you know, and see what what works. But I love that you’re you’re you’re really you think of yourself, I imagine you consider yourself more of a consultant than a realtor is would that be fair to say?
Jon Lahey 52:31 Very, very accurate there. I see myself as a consultant to agents, and I’m the consultant and the content for homebuyers and homeowners who’s thinking to sell. And then oh, by the way, I do sell houses like I am a realtor on the side. But I, I provide information and I consult and that’s what I do. Advisor, I’m an advisor.
D.J. Paris 52:53 And you’re always tracking with how your agents are feeling and how the clients are feeling right. Because that you were talking about making sure that there’s as many positive feelings associated with the process as as possible. And and that can be tough, right? Because with every single real estate transaction, there’s some wrinkle that’ll happen, or we can assume there’ll be a wrinkle that will cause some stress and frustration. Right now a lot a lot of that right. We’re still in a high bidding situation, lots of multiple offers. And I’m just curious if you had any quick tips since only because you mentioned it about getting an offer noticed, is there anything that you’re doing that you could share with our audience a simple way that they can, you know, have more success, having their their offers highlighted, I guess versus
Jon Lahey 53:42 I think the first part is building rapport with the listing agent. Like if there’s anything you hear from what I say today regarding like, offers, that rapport with the listing agent goes a long way that actually that report will get you a call back versus a straight on rejection. Right, you could be the second third fourth, like on the actual chain of offers, but if there’s a report and they like and trust you, you’re gonna get a call back and a lot of times you’ll get an opportunity to get to up your offer. Okay, I tell my my agents that all the time build rapport, the most important thing in your offer is you have to build rapport with the person in charge of presenting the offer. If you have a poor you have a chance if you have no report, you can be the best offer but they don’t like you who to say the agent wants say one tell their their seller and and say hey, I don’t mind this agent. Don’t work with this agent. Right? And who does say that that agent that listing agent won’t call the second highest offer and say hey, listen, I don’t like the highest offer. Can you beat it? So that report goes a long way. There Yeah, that’s my that’s my one tip.
D.J. Paris 54:57 It’s It’s the greatest tip you could have given because Um, and I just I’m 45 or 45, I think about my age, but I really just, I didn’t figure this out, I read it. But being likeable is really a lot of what we’re talking about when you’re talking about rapport. It’s like, well, how do you build rapport with agents? Okay? Well, if you there’s a lots of different ways to do that. Lots of books, and there’s whole fields of study on rapport. But if nothing else, if you’re just a nice human being, and you are authentic, and genuine and a good human being, and you are pleasant, and happy and excited, that works for the vast majority of people in this, you know, in, in society as if you’re just a nice human, it’s kind of like, about twice a year, I’ll pass somebody on the street, and they smile at me. And I noticed that it only happens a couple of times a year. You know, it, but when it does, it’s such a magical moment where I’m like, I don’t even know that person. And I liked them, just because they smiled at me, we’re talking about the Disney thing, right? It’s, it’s but it’s like, you know, even just being a good hey, I’m so excited to be able to give you this offer, I think it’s pretty solid, I don’t know you but I want to I want to get to know you, Mr. And Mrs. Other agent, you know, Listing Agent and, and, you know, you can build a relationship, a professional friendly relationship that way and, and just be a good human. And they have to deal with so many other stressed out realtors who are not super pleasant, who you know, don’t smile, don’t do the little fun things when they’re emailing the offers. And it’s just here’s the stuff, you know, and and it goes a long way just being playing nice in the sandbox, they say,
Jon Lahey 56:34 right? You never know when you’re going to encounter the same agent again.
D.J. Paris 56:39 If you will, well,
Jon Lahey 56:41 you know, as the market turns, the good agents are gonna stay, you might as well make friends of those good agents, because you’re going to see him again. And it might be if you’re the listing agent today be nice to those buyer agents, because there’ll be a time when that buyer agents now the listing agent, and you need your offer to be reviewed. And if you’re a meeting before they’re going to remember because people remember how you make them feel.
D.J. Paris 57:06 I would love to just just ask you because we asked, we do a pre interview with with our guests, and they send us some some stories, and I rarely ever get to them. But I love this one, I would love to hear about where there was we’ll just I’ll just tee it up by saying this is that you have a long lost family member, can you tell us that story with real the real estate story?
Jon Lahey 57:27 Oh my gosh, the long lost family member. And then this has nothing to do with love care. And so this is the this is I think maybe eight years ago or so. And I was at the time we were a small team. I was the buyer’s agent in this transaction, and I was showing my buyer homes all around like gaithersburg. And I got to this one house and this long lost family member that’s related to my wife. We hadn’t seen in years, just disappeared. We didn’t know where that person went. Wow. Like, I mean, we knew he was alive. But we didn’t know where he went just like disappeared. And so this Saturday morning, I put the key in the you know, in in the key and the door handle I open and and this man was trying to behind the door and he tried to open the door for me. And I looked at was like, Are you freaking kidding me? This is your house?
D.J. Paris 58:19 It was you had no idea. I had
Jon Lahey 58:21 no idea because I don’t go out there. I don’t ask the buyer agent. I don’t I’m not researching who owns the house. And I didn’t know where he live. I thought he moved out of the area. And and yeah, he he appeared and he stuck around after that, like we read you know, we we got reconnected and now we’re you know, we’re all good and fine again. But that was Saturday morning. A long lost family member that we hadn’t seen in years, was behind the door not knowing that I was the buyer agent that was going to show his house. And then we got reconnected and I remember calling my wife was like you’re not gonna believe who I just found?
D.J. Paris 58:57 Well, and there’s only millions of homes in your immediate area. So the odds of that happening are so astronomical. It’s it that’s never going to happen. Except I did.
Jon Lahey 59:08 What’s the first time I met my niece was right there when he opened the door. I was like oh, well, hello.
D.J. Paris 59:15 Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s I just had an almost identical very similar experience, not with a family member, but I was at a party this week. And this made a little bit more sense. Yours is like amazing that that ever happened. I was at a party and an old fraternity brother of mine who I didn’t know knew the new the people that were having this party. I didn’t know they were connected in any way he walks in and I and and and we reconnected and so it this really is a it was a kind of a business II sort of thing. And so it was fun. It’s like this is such a cool business because there’s so much good feelings between agents. You know, it is called a cooperative commission when agents work together when the clients get their needs met. When people are moving into their first and Home ever or their next home when they’re selling. There’s so much excitement and yes, it’s stressful too. But boy, are there some some wonderfully great feelings that go along with this business. And I, I think agents maybe could focus on like you do focusing on the feelings really helped get you through the tough times and it is it is challenging right now it’s it’s it’s tough. But but if you if you focus on those feelings and I know your team does that I’m curious, are you guys doing anything to to help owners understand the market right now meaning, right like great time to sell tough time to buy because not as much inventory. So I’m curious, how are you coaching the sellers or your agents to coach the sellers? What are you telling them to do? Because there’s probably just a lot of people who are scared, like I want to sell and make a big profit. But then I don’t know where I’m going to live.
Jon Lahey 1:00:56 We give them market data, right? We can, we can’t change the facts. But we can help interpret the data. So we give them the data like, hey, markets are increasing. Right now. That’s one of our last messages. We actually just picked up a listing this morning, I did, where the seller said, Well, I don’t really want to move until maybe October or maybe next year. And I said, that’s fine. I’m just here to be a second opinion for you. And I said to him, I’m like, alright, well, let me just tell you about the current market conditions. And then you can decide whatever you decide, I’m not emotionally connected to the outcome of what you decide. I’m just here to provide you the market information. And but because if I don’t give you the market information, and then you realize three months from now that the market has shifted, and you just lost the opportunity to sell, then it’s my fault, right? So we just come in from the perspective like, Hey, we’re just here to provide information to educate to give you all the all the latest, and then you decide what’s best for you, including staying. So I said, Alright, here’s the here’s the truth. rates have increased, the number of buyers that used to be able to qualify for your home have also decreased. And so if you sell today, here’s the current market price here we saw in October, I really don’t know. And I said, if but you can see visually, because it’s a very visual person. I said, Imagine the pool, the circle of buyers decreasing from this big to this big. And the more demand for a home, the higher your price is going to be now that that number of pull buyers now smaller, what do you think’s going to happen to your price, and of course, I’m not going to tell you, it’s gonna go down, but you can figure that out yourself. And he said, Oh, that makes sense. And his need and again, his need was he needs to sell his home for a certain number. And I said, Well, if you sell it today, I know I can get you that number. If you sell in October or next year, I really can’t guarantee that number. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen with I mean, the stock market’s crashing. You know, rates are, who knows how high it’s gonna go, I can tell you what’s happening today. And I’m here to provide you information based on today’s data. Tomorrow, I’ll give you tomorrow’s data in next next month. I’ll tell you next month’s data next month. But today, I know what’s happening today. You know, so that’s, that’s how we come in. That’s how we we provide information to our sellers. And then of course, if the end of the day, they’re like, Well, what do I buy? Well, let’s talk about what you need to buy. Let’s see if what you want is there. Because if what you want is not there, we’re also here to provide that information to you. So that’s really the angle we come in. It’s not we’re not there to make decisions, we’re there to provide the information so they know how to make the right decision for themselves.
D.J. Paris 1:03:37 Let’s deconstruct let’s just I want to just step on this a little bit, because you just said something so incredibly valuable. I want to make sure our audience got it. Number one. Here’s what I heard. When John goes into a listing presentation or a buyer consultation. He’s like, hey, almost not that he doesn’t care what decision they make. Because of course he does. And he’s running a business and he wants clients. But the message he gives across is, hey, you get to make the decision. If you want to list your home, great if you don’t define I’m going to be with you regardless, I’m not I don’t have any particular feeling of disappointment, should you decide to sit on the sidelines for a while I’m still your guy, I’m still going to hang out with you and give you anything you need. That is a really different and if we think about it from the customer perspective, because I am not a Producing Realtor. I’m thinking myself as a customer. I would go Oh, thank God he’s not trying to like he’s not going to be upset if we don’t move forward. I just because there’s pressure there as as a consumer to go, Oh God, no, I have to pretend like I’m going to do this. And then I have to think like I would I love it when sales quote salespeople unquote, say I don’t care whether you buy or not this product. I just want you to have all the information so you can make the right decision, which is exactly what you’re doing. And that is such a simple answer. subtle but crazy powerful thing for customer experience. It is. It’s also by the way. It’s it’s also very, very thoughtful. And it’s empowering to the person because you’re like, I’m going to empower you to make the right decision, Mr. or Mrs. Client. And again, not every client wants that, but most of them probably do. I just wanted to sort of take a minute to talk about that. Because that was that is so important. And again, I know it’s just part of your process. But boy, is that a powerful thing to to be able to get across? Somebody is, yeah, whether you buy or not, if now’s not the right time, no problem. I just want you to have all the data so you can make the right decision.
Jon Lahey 1:05:38 That’s exactly what it is. And so, when when nobody wants to be sold, right? I mean, do you ever go to the car dealership to be hated? No, you go to the dealership, to test drive the car. Just like the people, when they call us for a listing appointment, they’re testing you out. But at the same time, they don’t really want to be sold. If they feel like they like you, and you give them enough information, maybe they’ll want to be like, maybe they’ll come into that agreement. But the moment you just tell them upfront, like listen, and they can feel it. By the way, if you’re going out there to close, versus you’re going out there to provide information. Regardless of what happens, I’m just here to help you, they can feel that, right. And the moment they know that you’re not out there to sell them and chase them and close them hard. And you’re just there to provide information, their guard goes down. Because before that they’re all guarded up. They’re like, I don’t really want to trust you. I don’t really want to open up really what’s important to me, because I don’t want you to sell me anything. I just want to get information. So if you just upfront be like, Hey, I’m just gonna provide you information if you decide to move with me to move and sell with me. Love to. But if you’re not ready, I’m here to provide you information today. And I’m going to help you come to an agreement as to what’s best for you, whether it’s buy, sell or stay. People like that.
D.J. Paris 1:07:00 They absolutely do. It’s respectful to it’s it’s this i i You know, yes, I will be able to provide ideas and suggestions and I have guidance and I have opinions. But Mr. And Mrs. homeowner or potentially homebuyer, I want you to make the right decision for you. So I’m here as as a knowledge source. I’m here to make sure you have everything you need. That is very different than I have to win this listing presentation. Right, which is how most, not most I don’t know what what most agents think. But I think a lot of agents go in going, Oh, my God, I hope they like me, I hope I am. And the way that they’ll they’ll like you is treat them as an equal. Show respect. And also say, here are all of your options. And you and you have opinions about those options to Well, here’s what I think makes sense. Here’s what might not make sense. But this idea that hey, if by the way, if you decide this isn’t the right time, that’s totally cool. Like, you’re not disappointing me, we want you to do the right thing for you. So we’re going to be with you regardless. And then you end up getting the sale anyway, whether it’s right then or two years from now. That’s that’s the genius of it is it works every time. It just doesn’t always work instantly.
Jon Lahey 1:08:16 Right? Exactly.
D.J. Paris 1:08:19 Yeah, boy and I for anyone listening who might be thinking, well, easy for John to say he’s doing 200 sales a day 200 Plus homes sales a year he can afford to not win every listing? I bet you were doing that at the very beginning.
Jon Lahey 1:08:34 Is this a mindset I just believed that was the right thing to do from the beginning. Now, not to say that if I realized they’re actually ready to go, and you know, they’re financially able to buy or sell, they’re interested in working there, realistically, they’re motivated, I’m gonna close them, surely I will close them. I don’t, I will not walk out of the room without a present without my paperwork sign. You know, but that’s secondary. The first part is like, I’m just here. Number one, I also get to gauge if I want to work with
D.J. Paris 1:09:01 them. Right? If I right, so if you’re interviewing them to
Jon Lahey 1:09:05 me, I’m like, I don’t want to close somebody that’s gonna give me nightmares. So I want to make sure they’re the right client that I can help. Just because they’re a client that can be helped. That doesn’t mean they’re the right client for me. So I want to make sure they’re the right client for me that I can really help and support and, and provide all the information they need and all. That’s the first part and then of course, then I do close up. Otherwise, if you don’t close them, we have no business.
D.J. Paris 1:09:33 Right? It just makes it a lot easier to close. Once you’ve given them all the information that they that they want, because you’re not restricting information. A lot of realtors do that they sort of, you know, they sort of say, well, you know, they have their own secret sort of processes to restrict information and as opposed to giving as much as possible so that the client feels informed, engaged and then you can make the decisions together. It’s really, really brilliant. Well, I feel like we’ve talked about this enough. But I want to make a point as this is not only what John does with his team, so the other agents in his company, but also he, this is what he teaches the, you know, the, to the consumers, too. So this is a great thing, if you are not getting this kind of coaching and support from the firm, or from the team that you’re currently with. John’s going to train you, that’s what he does, he’s going to teach you these systems, all based around these values that he’s developed. And he he’s been attracting agents at an incredible clip based on some of these values and processes. And John, can you talk a little bit about that? Like, what when an agent joins you sort of how what you do for them, not so much like leads, and, but just teaching them processes.
Jon Lahey 1:10:58 So we do some processes, we teach their mindset, we teach them scripts, and we coach them. But really, we we start with core values. And then we ask them, What do you actually want, this time next year, you’re smiling ear to ear, and you feel like there’s the best decision in your life? What just happened? And I’m like, write it down. Because if I don’t, if they don’t know where they are, and they don’t know where they want to go? Like, then how are we going to get them there? Right. So we help them with goal setting, we help them figure out alright, my currently my production is at this level. And I want this quality of life and this quality of production, this level of production, let’s put on paper and let’s create a roadmap from where you are now to where you want to go in the next 12 months. And let’s really break it down how many appointments you need, how much how much, how much growing, you need to do, how much time how many times you got to make phone calls, how many appointments, you have to go on how much what your conversion rates going to be, and we start tracking that. That for me is measurable, because those are all measurable numbers. But if you don’t know where they are, and you don’t know where they want to go, and they don’t tell you where they want to go, I did tell you, Oh, I just want to give me one dollars. Okay, well, I do you wanna make a million dollars, right? And then what does that give you? What will you do with a million dollars you go deeper, and this, you have to go deeper with the questions for those agents. So goal setting, and really, like planning for the future vision, vision casting with them. And then we also show them our processes and systems, okay, and show them also how to we call the fine living system because we’re called fine living group. So we have our fine living system on the first part is our lead generation system. Show them how our lead generation system work. We show them how our social media system works, we show them how our inside sales department will help make phone calls for them and convert the leads into appointments. And then we teach them the actual part of the process where our agents step in, which is the face to face consultations. So we teach them the presentation, how to build your poor, how to connect how to educate and how to close. That’s it?
D.J. Paris 1:13:07 Well, I think that a lot of our audience is going to want to reach out to you to learn more about your processes, your team, and whatever coaching opportunities exist, and maybe even joining your team. So for anyone out there who is interested in working with a team like John’s, or maybe you have clients moving to the DC metro area, or San Diego area now and as John’s fine living group continues to expand, you know, they would love to talk to you too, because again, there’s referral opportunities there. So John, what’s the best way that our one of our listeners can connect with you and either to get advice or maybe just to find opportunities that would work for both you and the end listener?
Jon Lahey 1:13:51 Send an email to John Jalen at the fine living group.com, J O N at the fine living group.com. All right, and send an email there. And we’ll connect or you can go on Instagram. My Instagram handles foodie realtor. Alright, I’m the only foodie Realtor in the world. So go to Instagram and send me a message there. And we’ll connect. And if you’re local, we’ll meet up somewhere for a drink, or grab lunch. And we’ll we’ll we’ll talk and see if what I’m doing is a good fit to help you grow your business. If you’re not local, no problem. We’ll zoom we’ll connect on Zoom. And we’ll do a zoom call and we’ll talk and we’ll do a consultation. I’d love to see what I can do to help grow your business. And really, I didn’t talk about this earlier, but it was one of our mindsets from early on. If you help enough people get what they want. You get what you want. And it’s just been our process. Our whole process is based on just help people get what they want. You want to attract good agents, figure out what that agent want and give that to them. And if it’s money, if it’s a feeling if it’s accomplishment, if it’s whatever they Want to figure out how to give them that, and you’ll attract the right people?
D.J. Paris 1:15:05 It’s really funny. I was I was with my parents in just recently a couple weeks ago. And we’re my mom has recently retired. And she was very successful in her her career. And I was asking her, I said, you started a curiosity, what was the most important part of sort of you feeling? Like, you were happy in your job, and she said, you know, it never was the money. Now, some people it is money can be the, I’m not putting a judgment on whatever anyone’s motivators are. But for her, she goes, it really wasn’t the money. I mean, the money is nice. And I’m glad that they paid me well. But she goes, you know, what I really cared about more than anything was recognition from the company that I was doing a good job. And she goes, I know, it sounds kind of silly, because the money’s the more sort of exciting thing that you can, like use this buy things with, but she goes, I really just care that they that they thought I was doing a good job. And so John, what John’s talking about is really important, right? Because that’s a great way if you have a team out there, or if you’re looking to join a team, or even just for your clients, understanding what they really want and need. And then like John said, then you give that to them, you give them what they actually want and need, and everybody’s different. So you get to sort of make that distinction between each interaction you have. And, and so anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there because I was like, Mom, you the money wasn’t the number one thing she was like, nope. And it wasn’t like they were throwing millions of dollars at her it was she had a normal salary. But she goes, you know, what was bro more important was recognition. It’s like, oh, okay, cool. So if you know that about somebody, then you can you can give them the recognition they deserved thing. Yeah. It’s so funny. Well, everyone out there who is listening, and I mean, think about the feeling you got from listening to John, during this this last hour, you probably felt great. John is a happy, positive person he doesn’t he deals with adversity. It’s not he’s not immune to challenge. But think about how he made you feel during this interview. Did you feel good? Did you feel power empowered, maybe a bit resilient and motivated? Well, that’s a feeling that you’re getting from listening to John, imagine what it might be like working with John or being one of John’s clients, right? So this is a great opportunity to to reach out and find people if it’s not John, like John to be hanging out with and learn from, but John is all his team is always growing. So check them out the fine living group, again, the fine living group.com Also the Lahey group.com. We’ll put these in the show notes. So you can find John, he just gave his email address, please reach out to him, he would love to talk to you, John. It was a pleasure. On behalf of our audience, we want to thank you for spending an hour with us today. This was incredible. What a great episode. And on behalf of John, we want to thank our audience for getting all the way to the end here. And we asked everyone just to do one thing. Number one, checkout follow up boss, two things. I’m sorry, one first checkup follow up boss free 30 day trial. Second, tell a friend about this episode. Just one other realtor that you know that could benefit that needs to hear what John said today, send them a link to this episode. Easiest way to do that keeping it real pod.com that every episode we’ve ever done is there. Or you just pull up a podcast app, send them a link to our you know our channel. So John, on behalf of everyone, thank you. Thank you, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, John. Thank you
Why Interior Design Skills Are Critical For Real Estate Agents • Beth Benalloul
Jun 29, 2022
Beth Benalloul with Corcoran in New York describes how she got into real estate a built her career. Beth discusses the changes in the real estate market she’s seen throughout her career, focusing on the changes brought by Covid-19. Beth also describes how interior design integrates with her real estate career and how these two complement each other. Last, Beth discusses open houses and how the whole concept has changed recently.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever wanted to work with developers? Well, today we discuss how? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Beth battle specifically about developers and how to build those relationships. Pardon the pun on build there. But yes, how to develop Oh, another time those relationships. Sorry, no more puns. Not sorry, probably everyone’s like, Alright, no more puns. But before we get to Beth, please, as a quick reminder, tell a friend about this show, specifically another realtor and other real estate professional or somebody that would love to hear top producer interviewed so that they can learn, for example, how to work better with developers, tell us send him a link to our podcast, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is streamed there. But if you’re listening through a podcast app, take just a moment and leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. So we can continue to do more of what you like and improve the stuff that you don’t like because this is for you. This is your show. It’s not mine. I just talked through it. But I only do things that our audience says hey, do more of that or less of that really, really helps. So please leave us a review. But enough about that. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Beth Bendele.
Right today on the show we are back from the Corcoran Group in New York City. Let me tell you more about that. Beth battle is a highly accomplished Manhattan real estate broker who’s received coveted awards for her fine work that include membership and Corkins prestigious President’s Council, placing her among the top 25 brokers in the entire company, but has also been recognized numerous times as a top producer when the Wall Street Journal’s real estate, sorry, the Wall Street Journal real trends. Additionally, she’s also earned the status in the Corcoran group’s multimillion dollar club every year since 2005. Beth listens and pays close attention to her clients needs. She’s on top of every detail of their transaction. She’s sold condos, coops and townhomes all over Manhattan, she delivers superior results to both local and out of town clients. Working with buyers, she has an uncanny ability to find the perfect property for their budget and lifestyle. Beth has even sold properties to buyers sight unseen. Sellers respect her outstanding track record for selling her exclusives quickly and profitably. Please, everybody follow Beth on Instagram, which is at Beth Sinaloa, which is b e t h BENALLOUL. And I will have a link to that in our show notes. So you don’t have to spell that out and Instagram. Just go to our show notes. Click click the link and you’ll be able to follow her and see what she’s doing. Beth, welcome to the show.
Beth Benalloul 4:21 Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here. And you know, ask away.
D.J. Paris 4:28 And I’m glad we’ve had a couple of your friends on our show to which Beth was nice enough to tell me and probably even more more than that. So we are excited. It’s funny at you know, it really is even when there’s one point I think it’s 1.6 million realtor or something like that maybe 1.4 in the country. It’s like it’s funny so often, people who are you know, these top 1% agents like yourself really do know agents and I know of course there’s lots of you know, people in New York that you would know just because you come across them but it’s amazing to me how Often, people we have on the show no, even people we’ve had on the show from other places. It seems like a small community of top top producers. So we’re grateful to have you. I always Oh, you’re welcome. Well, we bet this is I’ll just give our listeners and viewers a little behind the scenes. Beth is actually at a sales office right now she snuck into a, a conference room. And this is how busy she is. She’s a working mother, she runs a group, a team. She’s one of the top agents in New York City. And she’s at a sale center in between appointments right now. So we are really lucky to have her. And so thank you, thank you. Because, again, I don’t know how you have the time to do anything that you do, but you do it. So let’s start at the very beginning of your career, because I first would like to know, how you got into real estate, why you got into real estate? And then what did you do to get started? How did you start building your business?
Beth Benalloul 5:54 Okay, so I have been in the real estate business for a little over 17 years. I’ve been at Corcoran the entire time. Yeah, which is, which is very unusual. Most brokers jump around, but I’ve been at corporate for a very long time. I originally started after my husband and I bought our first apartment. And I had gotten pregnant, and I was frantically looking for an apartment. And I started you know, at the time, everything was in print ads. So I used to go through the Sunday newspapers, and I would scour all the ads for apartments. And it became like, my second job in life was to find this an apartment. Anyway, we ultimately bought our first apartment here in New York City. And I gave birth, and at the time I was in the fitness industry, I was doing personal training and teaching spinning and all sorts of aerobics classes. And I, after having a baby, I was like, you know, I really want to do something else, you know, something that was maybe a little less physical that I could, you know, grow into, you know, more of a career. And that was when I decided to get my real estate license. So I got the license. And I had a, actually a client of mine, one of my personal training clients knew somebody at Corcoran, so they connected me and I went in for an interview, I had no experience, I really, you know, besides buying my own apartment, really didn’t know what I was doing. But I sort of jumped in from the ground up, and, you know, started started working. And that was in 2005, the market at the time was very, very difficult for a new broker. Because every single apartment would go into multi beds. So you know, and at the beginning, when you’re first starting, you work with a lot of buyers. So you know, I would go and take my buyer out and she’d find something you know, she’d like, and I’d run back to the office to write up the offer. And by the time I got it to the broker, they would say, Well, you know, sorry, we have 17 other offers, and this one’s cash. And this one’s above ask, and, you know, here I was, you know, advising my client, let’s go in 10,000 below the Ask let’s dancing contingency. You know, I was I was really winging it. But I’ll never forget that the first sale and this shows you how hard I was working the first sale that I did. At the closing, my client bought me a gift. Because she said she had never seen someone work so hard to make a sale happened that she came with a beautiful Tiffany bowl and gave it to me at the closing. Oh, it was very funny.
D.J. Paris 8:30 That is very, very funny and very sweet. And we should also just for anyone who’s listening who isn’t all that familiar with the New York market, sort of explain and not in any real detail, but just obviously we know that New York is one of the most expensive markets in the country to live, which is why the vast majority of people rent and and even rentals are oftentimes Realtors exclusively might even focus on rentals because that of course is just a bigger market. There’s more and more people to to have as clients on New York of course very expensive to own. And I remember speaking of New York in 2005 Just because you mentioned that that time my sister and I bought bought she bought a condo in the West Village I bought a condo here in New York or in Chicago and hers was only 475 square feet it’s a one bedroom floor walk up the West Village no air conditioning everything was kind of miniature miniature like a smaller fridge a small everything was kind of skinny and small. And although when when she sold it you know five years later let’s say something like that. She sold it for like $100,000 profit I sold mine for like, you know I lost money on my so it’s but but the funny part is is then she was like well now I’m priced out of the neighborhood. I can’t I can’t afford to live here anymore. But But it ended up working out but the New York market is is really challenging. Did you start out doing rentals at all? Or was that just not a thing that that appealed to you?
Beth Benalloul 9:59 I never Because I never did rentals. I mean, I do them now. But I really do them primarily for clients of mine who buy apartments as investments, and then I rent the apartments for them. But my business has been primarily sales. And it was basically that way from the beginning. And I’m not sure, you know, I did a few rentals here and there, but for the most part, I focused on sales.
D.J. Paris 10:20 Yeah, it’s funny, you were talking about, you know, 17 years ago, working with your first buyer and being in multiple offer situations. I remember I bought during that time, low interest rates. And and also, we’re sort of in a slump. I mean, rates are rising. Now, of course, but but we’re sort of in a similar is it? Does it feel similar now than it did when you first started?
Beth Benalloul 10:41 Well, it definitely feels similar. And I feel like at this point in my career, I’ve been through a few market cycles. And, you know, it’s interesting, because sometimes broke, you know, brokers who just start will say to me, like, you know, does it get easier? Does it get, you know, and obviously, certain markets are easier to make deals than than others? There’s no question. But it’s always, you know, the real estate business is always challenging, because it’s either a supply issue or a demand issue, or an inventory issue, you know, so I feel like in a market where things move very quickly, oftentimes your buyers get outbid. And then, of course, in a market that moves slowly, if you’re working with sellers, you know, it’s hard to manage those expectations. Why isn’t my property selling? So I would say the market that we’ve been in here in New York for the last year has felt more similar to 2005, in the sense that things are moving quickly. Although to your point, now, with the increase in interest rates, I’m feeling it’s cooling a little bit. You know, New York is also in my mind, very dependent on the stock market. We have a lot of Finance, Financial people, Wall Street people, and the markets obviously been, you know, in freefall,
D.J. Paris 11:51 tumultuous, tumultuous. Yes, yesterday, I believe was the single largest drop it since 2020, which again, just a couple of years, but it was, it was a big drop yesterday.
Beth Benalloul 12:03 So I think that that also has a direct effect on our local market, probably more than other places, you know, feel it, especially in the luxury market.
D.J. Paris 12:12 Yeah, that makes sense. New York, certainly known for finance and market related it, you know, jobs. And, and also, you know, with a pandemic, and the fact that, you know, going back to sort of market type jobs, securities, jobs, you know, people who trade and are in that space, and not and I know, this happened in Chicago, because we have, we have an options. We have a whole Mercantile Exchange here, and, you know, similar to what New York has, and now a lot of those jobs where they be on the floor trading, and really, physically, there are now algorithmic and so it’s computers doing a lot of it. So I’m curious have, have you noticed that the financial part, you know, with COVID? Are people, you know, working more remote? Where is that affecting your business at all, or
Beth Benalloul 12:59 so, I mean, certainly in 2020, I think New York was probably the most affected by that, because we had a huge, you know, number of people who sort of fled the city, whether they went to, you know, south or to The Hamptons, or to New Jersey, or just the outskirts. I think a lot of that did reverse in 2021. And we saw a lot of those people come back, I think it was a variety of reasons, the schools in September of 2021, no longer offered a remote option. So even if you were only part time in your office, if your child was in school in New York City, they had to be here five days a week, which I think brought a lot of people back. But yeah, I mean, we’ve definitely seen the market has shifted because of the pandemic. And it’s shifted, you know, I would say, in a variety of ways, some people who were in smaller apartments and then fled the city only wanted to come back to larger apartments or apartments with had an outdoor space, or, you know, something that had an extra room that they could work from home in. And I think even now, you know, two years after the pandemic started, there are a lot of people that are still working. I don’t know if it’s full time from home, because I think a lot of the businesses now are hybrid. We’ll see how, you know, we’ll fast forward another two years and see how that goes. I mean, some people think it’ll be less hybrid more in office. And then you have other people you speak to the thing quite the opposite. So I don’t know. You know, I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do think it’s not wise to bet against New York because New York seems to be very resilient city
D.J. Paris 14:32 very resilient. Yes. Yeah. And, and there’s just a finite space, a very finite, finite amount of space where people can live of course, within within Manhattan and, and and a lot of people and so is it is it more difficult now finding properties that do have more physical space for people to work at? I would think it would have to be although, again, you play or you play more in the luxury space where maybe that’s more more calm. And then, but curious if that’s changed for you, are you looking for different, different qualities now in properties for your client,
Beth Benalloul 15:06 we say there’s, there’s definitely been a shortage of inventory and certain, you know, price categories or room sizes, or, you know, apartments with certain three, four or five bedrooms, obviously, those are limited. But you know, the other thing we’re starting to see now is you have people who moved out of the city, who don’t want to commute even two or three days a week. So I think we’re going to probably see an increase in even smaller apartment sales, where they have a place to crash two or three nights a week while they’re here. Because they’re going to want to have, you know, even if it’s not a huge apartment, if they’re living out in Westchester, they may want to have a place just to stay for a couple nights. So, you know, again, that brings up the smaller units, and then those people who are training out of those can trade into the bigger units.
D.J. Paris 15:52 I have a question about coops in New York. And again, most of the country, I think our listeners aren’t that familiar with coops, New York is kind of the co op hub of the country. To my to my understanding Chicago has, we have some but not not very, you know, less than probably 1%. I am curious with coops because for those of you that aren’t as familiar, there isn’t a sort of an interview process that a buyer needs to go through with a co op board. And you know, it depends they’re going to talk about financing, they’re going to talk about maybe even income and just just a general get to know you. Do we like this person? Do they seem like they’d be a good fit? Has it ever happened? And I I’m just curious, and you don’t have to give exact specifics, of course, but has it ever happened where you get all the way to the coop interview. And then in that interview goes south for some reason where maybe it’s a personality clash, or the coop boards kind of goofy or something just goes wrong, or the coop board goes, you know, where I don’t think we’re gonna move forward. Has that happened ever to you
Beth Benalloul 16:51 know, it’s happened to me twice in my career. And so what I will say is that both times in my mind, so typically, you won’t get to the phase of an interview, like an in person interview until they have reviewed your package. And in your package, you have already laid out all your financing, all of your, you know, your financial qualifications, you’ve put in personal reference letters, you’ve basically told them who you are. So I had it happen once years ago on a very, very big sale. And I had the listing and the buyers came through another broker. And after the interview, I got a call from the seller. And the seller says You won’t believe this. I thought they were a shoo in. They were the most qualified, perfect couple. And I said what do you mean, what would I believe he goes, they’re rejecting the purchaser. I thought he was joking when he said it because it just was unfathomable. So I said What do you mean, they’re rejecting the for the purchaser. He says they walked into the interview. And within five minutes of them asking questions, the wife burst out in tears and says, we’re in a terrible marriage and we’re getting divorced. No, I laughing I didn’t know at the time. I wasn’t laughing. And I said I had to ask again. Are you serious? And he said yes. Apparently, they were going to buy this apartment. And I guess over the course of the process of the transaction, because oftentimes coops take some time to put together the package and go through the board. They decided they’re getting divorced. And they asked the board to please turn down the application so they wouldn’t have to go through litigation for that deposit. Well, that
D.J. Paris 18:31 makes sense. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, what? Uh, yeah. Gosh, that is that is interesting. So that really adds another layer. And you said it’s only really happened twice, but still twice.
Beth Benalloul 18:42 Yeah, the second time, I also think it was the situation. The woman who was buying the apartment was very eccentric. And the board was very conservative. And I think she must have said something in the interview that they just really didn’t like. I couldn’t I wasn’t there. So I can’t pinpoint what it was. But you know, I was nervous for her to go into the interview. That’s not a great sign.
D.J. Paris 19:08 Maybe we can hire somebody to play you and send you to there’s a lot of actresses in New York. Boy, that is? Well, I did not mean to bring up any any negative experiences, but but I always wondered
Beth Benalloul 19:21 that level of complexity in terms of Yeah,
D.J. Paris 19:25 I remember my sister when she went for her Co Op interview. She had my sister’s totally normal and fine and did fine. But I think I remember her saying it’s sort of feels like I’m going in naked. And they’re they’ve already looked at, you know, everything about me. And I just hope that they say good enough for us. And of course, but I would so you started out in in really in fitness, right? You started in fitness, and then transition to a totally different career. And by the way, I’m going to pause for a second I have a video that I’m going to share I was telling Beth just before we started about this fit He or she made, and I apologize, I forgot the name of it already, but I’m gonna put it in the show notes. But it’s kind of a very simple intro to bath and sort of who she is what she’s about. It’s very cool. It’s very fast paced, but but fun. And I think it’s such a great example of what any one of our listeners could consider putting together for themselves. And I love it because she just like, here’s what I’m into. And of course, fitness being being a big part of your lifestyle. And you’re like you rattled off two or three different gyms that you’re like, Well, I go to one of these three places, because, of course, you know, you’re really into into staying in shape. I am, I am curious. So this this video is awesome. So look for it in our show notes, and definitely click on it, it’s just such a such a cool thing. And I don’t see a lot of sort of little, you know, video clips like that, that Realtors do. So I think that’s really cool. But I’m curious. So you made this transition from fitness to real estate? You know, you had your first client had some challenges, but got it done, then how do you keep growing from there? Were you part of a team? Were you just on your own? I’m curious on what you did.
Beth Benalloul 21:06 I was totally on my own. And at the time, like it’s this, it’s really the same advice that I would give somebody who’s starting on my team today, right? Like, where are you getting the clients from? And how are you growing the business. So and I sort of, you know, obviously, things have changed, and the business has evolved in a lot of ways. But I would say the, the main way is to be in front of people, right. And that can be your own sphere of influence. So for example, someone who just started on my team, I told her to go through all of her, you know, personal contacts, past business contacts, you know, people from her children’s school, anyone you know, at any sort of, you know, arm you can reach out to, and put together your mailing list, you know, you do a monthly newsletter every month, I personally do that. The other thing, which really helped me at the beginning, which may be a little bit less fruitful today, just the way open houses are handled that you know, during the pandemic, but every Sunday, when I started in the business, I would do an open house, and I didn’t have listings of my own. So I used to run them for other agents. And the way it works in New York is if you run it in the you know, for somebody else, and there’s a buyer who doesn’t buy that apartment, you can work those buyers. And so at the beginning, I did a lot of that. And I would, you know, you chase a lot of leads that don’t go anywhere, because there’s a lot of lookers, so to speak. But that was, you know, one of the ways that I got started, and I did a couple of my first deals from there. And then of course, you know, family and friends and referrals, and then you start getting business from other business and things like that. So, you know, it’s not, it doesn’t happen overnight. But I would say if you just keep grinding, little by little, it’s like you get something from here, and then you list something and then you get another listing from that listing. And that’s sort of the it’s an organic growth, I guess. I am
D.J. Paris 23:01 I’m sorry, I’m gonna go just back to your video for a second. I forgot the point I was going to make. But one thing I wanted to mention, sorry. And I will get right back to two sphere of influence stuff and open houses because I do have a question about that. When you watch that video, and again, I’m sorry, I’m going a bit out of order here. But I wanted to make this point and my memory is terrible. So but what’s great is the very beginning shows the insight of Beth’s home, her and her husband and their children’s home. And it is absolutely breathtaking and gorgeous. But aside, you’re welcome outs aside from that, it really lets you sort of understand her style, which you’re only in your home for about maybe 10 seconds or so maybe 15 seconds. She’s not like doing a tour. She’s not she’s more just like okay, let’s go and she walks out the door. But you do get a sense of kind of who you are at home. And I think that is also super unique. So I if you when you watch this watch for those first 15 seconds. And notice what you think about Beth. And she by the way, she’s in like almost like a casual, almost like on her way to the gym kind of like outfit. She’s not she’s not dressed up. I mean, there’s other parts of the video where you’re really dressed up and look, you know, like you’re on your way to a showing or something. But this is just you in the morning, hey, this is me with your cup, like I think you might have even had coffee with yourself. And I thought that is so cool, because and not of course not all of us have homes that maybe we want to show off. And not that you’re showing off but just just demonstrating like this is who I am. And it really like I saw that and I immediately thought wow, she knows how to style a home. And that would be really valuable to me if I was a buyer because she’d be able to look at rooms and say I know what we can do with this and I know you’re not an interior designer but the fact that you’re that you renovated your own home which we didn’t talk about but you did. And you I’m sure you you know designed it and it is it is really a great little subtle thing to learn about your skills inside of a house. If that makes any sense at all.
Beth Benalloul 24:59 Yeah, well That’s definitely true. That’s actually my third house that I’ve done. And I’m extremely into it. I’m not a designer, I have no design training. But I spend my day with floor plans and finishes. And I’m very good with that. And usually when I’m out with one of my buyers, I can definitely like show them how to re envision the space or change the floor plan to make it you know, more optimal. So I would definitely say that’s one of my, my stronger points. So it’s really impressive that you picked up on that,
D.J. Paris 25:30 well, I’m a marketing person. So I’m always looking at things like that saying, like, what are the feelings I’m getting, as I’m watching. And of course, we learn a lot more about you other than just the few seconds that you’re in your house, but those few seconds. And I think that the fact that you did that first is almost like a really interesting first impression. I just thought that was a really smart, interesting way. Again, I, I’m always thinking of branding and market. But anyway, I want to also talk to you about something that you are also really well known for, which is working with developers, this is this is oftentimes thought of as like the Holy Grail for realtors, it’s like, oh my gosh, if I could just sit inside a sales center at a development and you know, take walk ins and win that business from the developer. Boy, my life is on Easy Street. And I just want to learn more about how you started working with developers and any advice you have for our listeners who might think, Gosh, I’d like to develop those relationships, too.
Beth Benalloul 26:25 Yeah. So I originally started many years ago, when I was asked to finish the sales of a building. So basically, what that means is my company was handling the overall sales and marketing for the entire building, where they might have sold out 200 units out of 210. And there were what they call leftovers that were remaining. And instead of continuing having a full time sales team there, they gave it to a resale broker, which is what I am. And that’s actually how I initially got started doing it. It was many years ago. And it was on a project that had been very successful. And I took over I want to say it was five units at the time. And one of the units was the penthouse of the building. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it was a very big sale. And I remember at the time, the building was very far east, and every broker that had come to see the project was like, good luck, you’ll never sell that. Good luck. Good luck, people used to say you’re gonna have to put some a brown bag over someone’s head, so they don’t know where they’re located to get them there. Long story short, I ended up not only selling it, I sold it in a bidding war for I think $650,000 over the ask. And it achieved the highest price in that location that had ever been achieved. So it was a huge, huge success. And it was a great project. And I really enjoyed it. And from there, I went on to take other what I’ll call leftovers in a building. I then. So I had done, I’ve done a quite a few of these at this point. I was then approached to do a project from a developer, that was a ground up project. And I got in sort of the building the structure was up, but it wasn’t finished. And we sold that. And I will tell you, that was a very big challenge. Because we got into it. The market was softening, you know, and oftentimes with these developments, it’s timing, right? So you have a very robust market, things move very quickly. Obviously, various things go on different tax changes in New York City and things like that. And that one, I started more from the ground up, but it was a, I was on that project for three years. And it was a lot of time. So it wasn’t you know, I think sometimes people think, Oh, you just walk in and make sales. And it’s definitely definitely not that. I’m working on a project now with a developer that’s a hole in the ground. And that one, I’ve been involved in every single step since inception. So I have analyzed every floor plan every where every door opens where every sink is. And you know, we haven’t even finished the we haven’t even finished the finishes yet. We’re still finalizing the floorplans. But that one I’m super excited about because that one is the first one I’ve been in from day one.
D.J. Paris 29:19 How many years from the time that you started working with that till the time where somebody can actually move in? Do you have an estimate? I’m
Beth Benalloul 29:26 just curious. It probably three to four years.
D.J. Paris 29:29 That’s so you’re gonna work on this for three to four years. That’s amazing. And so this is not always quick, easy. Transactions, right?
Beth Benalloul 29:41 I would say the opposite of that. It can be that if you come in at the end and you get a swing on the market, that’s good. But if you’re really going after development, and you’re working with the developer who’s starting from day one, then there’s a lot of things that go into it that I don’t even think people realize, you know, doing spreadsheets so they can get fined answering and presenting to the bank. And, you know, going through floor plans, really, you know, we we had an on the building that I’m working on now, which I’ve been on for about a year and a half now. I mean, we just recently flipped half the building, because we realized that views on one side, were going to be superior to the other side. So all the floor plans we had done, we ended up rearranging half of them. So it’s really a lot that goes into it. Yeah, pricing it and trying to, you know, pin the pricing, when oftentimes you’re still a year away from launching. So you almost have to predict what’s going to be you know, so it’s challenging, but it’s fun. And it’s an it’s exciting.
D.J. Paris 30:42 I’m curious, I wanted to ask about the first development on your site on the far east side that you felt that or that other realtors who had tried said bad location? Not not great views? Yeah, how did you end not only did you sell it, but you had bidding war. So what do you think you did differently? Just because I know everyone’s wondering, I wonder what she did if there’s anything tangible, that you feel you did differently or better than the other agents that came before you.
Beth Benalloul 31:12 So in that particular situation, the developer was very open to making changes. And what we did was we hired a staging team, the apartment had not been staged, and it had sort of been shown under construction. So we ended up we decided we were going to pull it and then relist it when it was completely finished and staged out, she and I literally hand picked every single pillow that was in that apartment. And once it was staged, it honestly looked amazing. And when we first listed it again, it was a little slow at the beginning. And then all of a sudden, we had three parties who were all interested and had amazing outdoor space, gorgeous views. Really high ceilings, and the buyer who bought it I’m still friendly with her. She’s She loves living there. It was it was a really good success story.
D.J. Paris 32:01 I’m curious too, about staging. So when you’re listing properties that our resales Not, not new developments? What, and I just don’t know the New York market as well. So I’m curious, what percentage of the time do you bring in professional stagers or are staged it professionally? Versus just using whatever is currently in the in the unit?
Beth Benalloul 32:23 So I would say I mean, that varies a lot, right? Because it varies on so many factors, right? Is the person living there as the apartment already? Does it already look, okay? You know, and of course, how they live, and is there a tenant in place, I mean, so it’s there’s a big, there’s sort of a big net there, I would say almost every apartment I go into to sell, I do some elements of staging. But some element can be me having them go in clean out closets, change bed linens, put out white towels, you know, clearing things out and putting them to storage, and then it can go all the way to emptying the entire apartment and putting in all new furnishings, painting window treatments, and I’ve done both, you know, it just depends on the on the individual circumstances of the seller. You know, I ended up also selling a lot of estate apartments. And I always try to get them to stage if I can, not all the states will have the budget for it. But typically, what we do is we’ll empty the apartment, we’ll paint it white, sometimes we’ll do some like surface work just to make it look better. And then I can also virtually stage it from the back end. So that when people see the photos, at least it’s looked staged. So I would say almost every apartment that I sell, there’s some type of staging, it just can be very minimal, or it can be you know, the full gamut.
D.J. Paris 33:49 It seems like your ability to do interior design is really one of your sort of not secret sauces, because of course anyone can learn to develop those skills. But it seems to be a pretty important part of, of what you offer. Right? And I’m, I’m just curious, you know, how you started to learn, you know, interior design? Was it something that you just were into on your own? Or did you develop it once you became a realtor? Or how did you develop
Beth Benalloul 34:20 it? I’ve always been like this, I’ve always, you know, I’m very into home decor. And I would say it was even before way before I got into this business. And you know, I also think it’s how you know, maybe how you grow up like I’ll just give a funny example. But my grandmother bless her heart is still alive. She’s 98 and she lives alone. So my husband whenever we go to visit her, he always comments he’s like, I’ve never met anyone her age who lives the way she does. Everything is in its place. Everything is neat, and it looks completely formal right now. The place hasn’t been redone.
D.J. Paris 34:55 I think we might have lost you. Sorry, you’re still there. I just don’t hear your voice. Oh, Oh, there you are.
Beth Benalloul 35:01 Okay. Yeah. So I was saying that anytime I go to visit my grandmother, who’s 98, her house is in perfect shape. Okay. She has not redecorated in 60 years, but it’s still good. And my mom also basically lives that way. So I think it’s a little hereditary. Now. I spend my whole day looking at luxury apartments, and homes, townhomes. So I have like a pretty good eye for it. But a lot of my friends even tell me like you’re in the wrong business, you should be in house flipping, because you’re good at like going in, fixing it up. And moving on. So maybe one
D.J. Paris 35:38 day thought about doing Have you thought about doing some of that
Beth Benalloul 35:40 all the time, all the time. And I know there are brokers that do it on the side. But it really is a full time job to do that. If you’re gonna really do it, you know, professionally.
D.J. Paris 35:51 I want to take a quick pause for a talk about one of our sponsors. And then I want to ask Beth, a question about you’d mentioned open houses at the beginning. And I know that, of course, that that is such a so many of the people we’ve had on our show that is part of their story. And it’s usually almost 100, almost 100% of everyone we’ve interviewed talks about the importance when they started at open houses. So I wanted to ask a question about that. But before we do, I want to tell you just real quickly about our episode sponsor, which is one of my favorite companies in the real estate tech space, which is called follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for the show, which the CRM that’s talked about more than any from our guests is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort and don’t take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the United States uses follow a boss and he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 additional outside systems. So if you have other tools, you’re using no problem they can integrate with it. So you can keep your current tools and lead sources. And here’s the best part. They follow a boss a seven day a week support. You know, agents of course work on the weekends you need support during that time follow up boss will help you get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM, that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is more than twice the amount they give for anyone else. So and by the way, no credit card required, they’re so confident you’re going to use their system after the 30 days, that they’re just going to give you the 30 days to try. But only if you’ve visit this special link. So I want everybody to visit follow up boss.com forward slash real again, follow up boss.com forward slash real to do your free 30 day trial, see if you like it, and then I know you will keep using it. So follow up like a boss with a follow up boss. Thanks for the pause there. Beth, I am curious, how important for agents who are really looking to get to that next level? Um, how important are open houses today? I know you’re probably so busy, you don’t oftentimes get to do as many as you used to. But how important are they for for lead generation to finding buyers? Maybe not necessarily for that property, but certainly, you know, for other properties.
Beth Benalloul 38:13 So what happened here in New York is a little different than I would think in most of the country. So during the pandemic, we were under a lot of restrictions in terms of showing apartments. And a lot of it had to do with buildings, right? So the building would restrict you, you could only bring in two people a day or three people a day and they had to be pre registered. And you know, it made things very difficult. Many of those restrictions have loosened. However, one thing that I have noticed that has stayed is that most open houses now are by appointment. So you actually have to schedule in advance that you’re going to come or send your buyers to those open houses. So for example, the first open house I ever did was in Mother’s Day of 2005. The broker who was running who had the listing said to me, okay, here’s a show sheet, and here’s a sign in sheet and he gave me one piece of paper, okay, and it had 20 slots on it. So I said, okay, okay, and I was very eager, and I had my pen and every person who came in, you know, I’d say, please sign in and give me your email and your phone number. We had 87 signings
D.J. Paris 39:21 on Mother’s Day, which you would think nobody’s going out on Mother’s Day, but
Beth Benalloul 39:26 Mother’s Day. So I was like, I didn’t I mean, I my head was spinning. You know, it was like my first weekend out. You know, today, I think that’s pretty much unheard of, and maybe maybe not in, you know, certain areas of the country. But in New York, I think that would be unheard of. You know, I’d be happy now if I got 18 people much less 87. So I think while they’re important, and I would definitely encourage new brokers to do them because I think it’s a great place to try to source active buyers. I don’t think they’re as important as they were just because I think there’s well less, maybe less people, right? So it’s like less people, your chances of converting are less. The only flipside to that is that if you’re going to an open house, you’re probably more serious. And it’s not just like a Sunday activity.
D.J. Paris 40:14 I think that’s good. I think that’s good advice still relevant. Maybe the numbers are different than they used to be. But and now that people are going back to in person activities, maybe we’ll see those numbers climb a bit who?
Beth Benalloul 40:28 Yeah, yeah, I
D.J. Paris 40:29 agree with what we should also mention that, that Beth, by the way, is always looking for, for, of course, new clients. In particular, for a lot of our listeners, if you have clients that are moving to New York, for example, and you don’t practice in that space. In that area, then, of course, you know, Beth would love the opportunity to chat her, she and her team. And also, if you’re a realtor in the New York area, and you’re looking to maybe see if there’s a group that’s a better fit than what you’re currently at, or firm. And of course, you know, Beth would be happy to take a look and see if you might be a fit for her team. But if anyone out there would like to work with you, whether it’s to send referrals your way or just to maybe learn more about your group, in case they want are looking to make a change, or just a buyer or seller out there listening to our show, who says, you know, I am I need somebody to represent me in New York, what’s the best way that any of our listeners can reach out to you?
Beth Benalloul 41:26 Honestly, I’m always, I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I’m always on my phone. So I would say call email text. And I’ll make myself available for anyone who you know, has a question or just wants to talk about the market or referral. I’m happy to, you know, work with you on that
D.J. Paris 41:44 as well. And we’ll have all of that information in our show notes. So you don’t have to write anything down. And I’m curious about too. How often because New York, of course, we know as people get older, oftentimes they go they moved down south, maybe make a beeline for Florida, which is probably the most common destination for New York residents. Yeah, yeah. How often? Are you working with agents down in Florida saying, I’ve got somebody who’s moving down there was looking for another property, or whatever it is, that’s got to be I imagine a big, big part of your business.
Beth Benalloul 42:18 I mean, honestly, I’ve had, you know, when someone sells here, they’re going somewhere, right. So whether it’s Florida, I recently had two clients move to South Carolina. I’ve had someone moved to North Carolina, someone moved recently out west. So I just think, you know, it’s sort of everywhere. I even had a client moved to Singapore recently. I mean, work related. But yeah, so definitely, if you know, I’m happy to meet anyone who could potentially be, you know, I could send a referral to So
D.J. Paris 42:49 yeah, that’s, that’s another great point. So if you are in an area where people retire too, or just get second properties, yeah, I just interviewed a an agent from Charleston, which you talk about South Carolina, just actually this last week. And he goes, Oh, my God, it is because of course, we know people are moving to Nashville, South Carolina, Idaho, lots of these places. So you know, Beth, would obviously love to talk to anyone who is considering New York, or is maybe just moving within New York. She is a great resource. And I want everybody to also follow Beth on Instagram, so you can find her. And again, there’s a link in our show notes. But as at Beth battling with her first and last name on Instagram, and you can take a look. And she’s got a website that is currently under construction. So we’re going to once that goes live, we’re going to make sure our audience knows about that. But Beth, I want to thank you for being on our show. You have been a fantastic guest. Really given our audience. Oh, you’re so welcome. Really, on behalf of our audience, we say thanks, because so much great content and advice and loved hearing your story, as well. And on behalf of again of the audience. Thanks, Beth. And on behalf of Beth and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen, watch support our show, the best way you can help us continue to grow is just tell a friend, think of some other real estate professional that you know that could really benefit from hearing this great conversation with Beth and send them a link to our show. Easiest way to do that if the person you’re sending it to does not not a podcast person, no problem. Just send them to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is right there. Or they can just pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And also please last thing please leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening, whether it’s Apple podcasts or Google Play or Stitcher, Spotify wherever, Pandora, let us know what you think of the show. All suggestions help us continue to evolve. So thank you, to our listeners and audience for sticking around staying throughout this whole episode. Beth is amazing. We’re so glad to have had her on the show one of the very top agents in New York and within the Corcoran Real Estate Group, which is we know it’s such a powerful organization and but Wait. We are so excited to continue to watch your career from from here, wherever we may be in the country. So thank you, Beth. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Beth.
Beth Benalloul 45:12 Thank you. Thank you so much.
Social Media Strategies That Attract Buyers & Sellers • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Jun 27, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses social media strategies that bring business to agents. Chris also emphasizes the importance of selecting the right social media platform that suits best the agent’s character and business. According to Chris, is it crucial for every agent to know where their audience is so their content is shared directly to them. Finally, Chris explains why agents should not aim to go viral.
D.J. Paris 0:00 which social media strategies actually result in getting you more clients? We discussed that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast we hire real estate agents for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. And let me tell you more about the clothes the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals so they cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Please visit the clothes.com That’s th e Cl O s e.com. To check out their articles. You can also subscribe to their newsletter when they’ll send you an email every time a new article goes live with us as always is crystallin Sal, he is the staff writer. He is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. When he isn’t writing you or servicing his clients, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theatres production. In fact, Chris just got back from a week of trout fishing. So very glad to have him back. Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you,
Chris Linsell 3:01 DJ, thanks for having me. Yep. I just spent a week in the Blue Ribbon trout streams of Michigan, disconnected from all of you lovely people. So everyone who sent me emails, I’m working on it getting back to you, everyone who sent me, you know, derisive comments on Twitter. I’m probably not getting back to you. But I’m gonna read them all. So you know, keep it common. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 3:25 it’s, I am very excited to see what happens with Elon Musk’s Twitter bid, whether that goes through, I think that could really revitalize the platform that so many people just are not engaging with anymore. And I’m hoping that it’s such a great place to have conversations and some not so great conversations too. But but if they can clean up some of the toxicity of it and just, you know, somehow figure out how to have more constructive conversations. I think, I think Twitter maybe maybe due for a renaissance. We’ll
Chris Linsell 3:57 see. Thank you. Right. And you know, by the time this hits, the the podcast, the patent podcast services, we may know something else. My two cents is there’s no way this is going to close. But I hope it does, frankly. Yeah, I think it’d be pretty interesting. But that’s an interesting Convo relative to what we want to talk about today. What’s your social media, right? Yes. So I’m actually working on some content right now. Might be out pretty close to when this podcast gets released. So if you’re watching or listening on Facebook, got a little while to wait. If you’re checking it out on a podcast app, you this might be out now, but I’m working on some content for the clothes.com about social media content strategies, basically, some some ways that you can take social media content and make it more about your business and your goals instead of just, you know, random collections of likes and comments because one of the problems with so Some media content often is that we are measuring success with the wrong metrics. Like we think about a successful social media post is something that gets all these likes, and everyone is just in love with what you wrote, or the picture or the video you made. You get all these shares and all this social media accolade. And then most of us realize, at the end of the day, we say, Wow, that was just so fun. And I got no clients out of it, and I got no leads out of it. And I really have not advanced my business in any kind of measurable way. So what can we do to create content that actually does what we want it to do?
D.J. Paris 5:42 I absolutely agree. And let’s maybe define quickly, just what we’re talking about with, to sort of very common, and not that these are in any way mistakes, but but a common strategy for agents to use on social media, which is, I’m going to post because I just got a new listing, and I want to show off some photos of the home, I want to post because now it’s under contract, or it just closed, or I want to post because I’m heading to the gym this morning. And I want my, my my sphere of influence to see that not only am I a hard worker, I’m also staying in shape. You know, we I see a lot of those posts. It’s a lot of like, here’s what I’m doing in my personal life, or here’s the dinner I just made. Or here’s all the cool stuff I’m doing in my real estate business. That’s what I see more than anything for realtors.
Chris Linsell 6:32 Yeah, yeah. And you know, frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that content. There’s nothing wrong with the things that you said you want to do here. The only thing that I’m that when I hear those things that that I my ears perk up, and I say now wait a minute, let’s talk about this is why I didn’t hear anything in those in those those what I want out of social media that actually I would say are direct contributors to getting you to the closing table, that you can actually track towards building a better GCI, and a more dependable funnel of leads. And part of the reason that we we face that that challenge in social media content, as far as I have observed and and in my own practice, and in my practice of advising other agents is that most of us don’t have and this is this is one of the first strategies I’m going to highlight I want to highlight here is most of us don’t have a plan for what we want the people who are consuming our social media content to actually do after they after they read or watch or have, you know, experienced a post by us, most of us just think, Well, what I want them to do is like this, or comment on it, or share it. And those are okay things to want. But what else do you want, we should be thinking about social media content as not the end. But just as a step in our lead funnel. So for instance, if I’m posting about a new listing, my goal here should be creating content that is going to generate somebody’s somebody’s desire to click on the post to visit like the my website, the property web page may shoot even Zillow, if that’s what it takes. But we need to have some sort of plan for what we want these people to do after they consume our content. So if you this is my first strategy for folks, if you want to create better social media content, you need to think about your content. And then what’s the and then with your content, if you don’t have a clear, and then frankly, you’re creating a post without a purpose right now.
D.J. Paris 8:56 Yeah, so what we’re talking about is some sort of action step, whether it’s a direct action that you’re asking someone to do. If you’re making a video, perhaps say, Oh, by the way, I can help you in the same way for your situation. Here’s how to reach me, here’s how to, you know, reach out that that would be a call to action, right? Whether it’s a good call to action or not is debatable, but at least having something that they can do or like you said, visit my website, or perhaps even look at Zillow, having some sort of action step, either at the beginning of the content or the end of the content, I think can be very effective.
Chris Linsell 9:30 Totally agree. And I want to really encourage agents to not just have the step in mind, whatever that next step is, but to use that next step as your yardstick for measuring success. So for instance, if your post if you create some social media content and the desired next step is somebody to go to your website and fill out a form requesting information. Let’s say for instance, let’s say you have I’ve got a video on Facebook, all about how homes in a certain neighborhood of your target market have never been worth more. And so if you have a home in this area, reach out to me, let’s get a home valuation done for you. So you can at least understand what your options are. Your measure for success on this social media post needs to be how many people actually did this? It doesn’t that’s maybe not the only measure for success, because social media content is multi dimensional and has multiple purposes. But if you’re not actually measuring your success based on what you want to happen, it’s kind of like a runner, measuring the success of their training with metrics other than, well, how fast did they run the race. If you don’t think about how fast you run the race, you know, what you actually want to accomplish out of your training, then you are using the wrong metrics to measure your success. So make sure that you’re including that that next step as a metric for success. And if you’re not finding success, then you need to figure out how to adjust your content strategy so that you’re meeting those goals.
D.J. Paris 11:14 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, I’d like to just add a point to the measurement because I think so many agents put together a piece of content on social media, video, static image, post, something informational they’re super passionate about they take the time to make it, maybe they even edit it, they put it out there. And you know, maybe there is there was also an action step possibly at the end, and then they don’t get the results they want. And I think it’s important to remember from a branding perspective, you’re going to need to drip that action step likely on those that same audience, you know, maybe a couple of dozen times before they actually take action. So measuring just one video one post? Yes, over time, you’ll want to see which videos perform better, which which get you more clicks and action steps completed. But it’s gonna take a while to build up that brand, or do you disagree? I’m certainly happy to
Chris Linsell 13:28 hear either I think you’re right on that. And there, you’re right you we have to consider that social media is cumulative. Instead of is not these like sniper shots, once one shot and then you’re like jumping the entire funnel like social media bill is a cumulative strategy. Especially when you’re dealing with organic, non paid posting, like you’re just showing up in people’s feeds multiple times until they start to get the sense that this person knows what they’re talking about as I see them more often than not. But honestly, there are strategies within the social realm where your content is something that you should expect direct results from the first time like paid advertisement, which is very important on social media platforms. We’ll talk about that in a second. These are these you are paying for ads on these places, and you should expect an ROI. If your goal is to get form fills from an ad and you get no form fills this social media content was not successful. So keep in mind that organic strategy where you’re creating this, like consistent posting schedule of value that you’re delivering to your followers on a regular basis, that’s one thing but if you are if you’re paying to play, you should expect a return on your investment and if you’re not getting a return on your investment, you’re not doing it right.
D.J. Paris 14:53 And I also just a real quick pro tip if anyone out there is spending money on face Facebook, Google Instagram, certainly, you know any of the social platforms or even Google as a search engine themselves. If you’re paying for ads, and you’re not seeing the results you want, almost all of those services have free advisors that you can contact, who will literally look at your account, because it is complicated, it’s very complicated to set up these ads and understand the metrics and best practices. And they will literally I have done it, they will walk you through. And I, you know, I don’t know if everyone will get that kind of access, but you probably will, because they want you spending money on their platform. And they know that if you’re not successful, you’ll stop
Chris Linsell 15:34 100%. And I don’t mean to throw shade on real estate technology companies. But there is kind of this frustrating trend that I see, especially in the customer service, versus sales departments have a lot of real estate technology companies that they are very attentive, before you have signed on the dotted line, and then are a little less attentive after you’ve signed on the dotted line. The same is true when it comes to ad spend companies like but except you could always spend more with advertising platforms. So if you’ve got questions about spending money, 99% of the time, these folks are more than happy to answer, because they want you to keep doing that. So yeah, I wanted to hit on another platform, since we’re kind of talking a little bit about these, these platforms, another strategy, I mean, and this is kind of a call to the carpet, for agents, especially for those who, you know, have maybe one particular kind of content they’re most comfortable with. And they’re not really interested in branching out. The fact is, guys, not every social media platform is right for you. And I’m saying that generally. And for those of you who are listening, I want you to think about me saying this specifically to you individual listener, not every platform is right for you. And it’s not because you couldn’t be on there, you can start an account anywhere you want. But frankly, you might not be very good at the content necessary to be successful on that platform. And acknowledging that is really important. So why I use a pretty simple test when it comes to social media platforms, you want to if you can answer yes to the following three questions. You are in the right place. The first question is, Are my is my audience here? Are my are my clients here are my prospects are my leads here? Or is my audience on this platform? So as an example, if you live in Dubuque, Iowa, and you serve us, a lot of retirees or maybe farm buyers and sellers, Twitter is probably not a social media platform where you’re going to have a lot of success, because most of your audience is not their Twitter users tend to skew very heavily on the east and west coast, a little bit in the Midwest, but it’s mainly in cities like Chicago and Indianapolis and Cincinnati. But it’s a lot of Coasties. It’s a lot of younger, more affluent buyers, and sellers, it is very rarely the suburban or rural buyers and sellers. So Twitter is does not pass the audience test for you. That’s question number one is my audience here. Question number two is can I create the content that does well here, if you can’t do video comfortably, tick tock is not a platform for you. There is no other option on tick tock other than video and there are some people who are trying to like, like shoehorn bad non video content, like still
D.J. Paris 18:53 images that rotate or things like that. Yeah, that sort of stuff does
Chris Linsell 18:56 not do well on tick tock. And in fact, it is a like, if people laugh about it, you have a negative brand impact for being for putting the putting the content that does isn’t designed to be on a platform consistently on those spaces. So question number one is my audience there. Question number two, can I create the content that does well on these platforms? So tick tock, this would be video content, Instagram, this is a lot of photos and video, Twitter. This is a lot of text, some some images, but a lot of text, a lot of links a lot of what’s happening right now current events like in the market today, sort of thing. What are these Twitter’s is really runs the gamut but has a lot of like community oriented content. Pinterest has a lot of like home decor, Home Improvement home renovation curb appeal, a very visual search engine. YouTube is obviously a video a little bit longer form video, you need to find a platform where you know, you can create content that’s going to be successful there.
D.J. Paris 20:07 I’m just gonna suggest one quick one quick way, if you’re not sure where your audience, your, your, your previous clients, your existing clients or your, the people you want to work with, if you’re not sure where they spend their time, ask them send out a survey to everybody, you know, and say, Hey, I’m wanting to I’m looking to focus on one social media platform in the next year. And I just want to get curious, you can even make it anonymous. But say, you know, I’m curious on which platforms, we did this in a nonprofit that I helped with. And we found out that all that the vast majority of our, of our constituents, were on LinkedIn, we had no idea. And we went okay, well, we now have to now we’re going to publish more professional content on LinkedIn, because that’s where our audience hangs out. But we just assumed it was Facebook. And it turns out, it wasn’t, it’s, that’s a, that’s a really great point, your, your, your client base, the people who already know like, and trust you, they will respond to these sorts of questions. So ask them, that’s it. That’s a great, that’s a great, great strategy to use. So those those three questions it was, where’s my audience? Can I create content that does well on the platform, my audiences is where they’re living. And then the third question is, Can I do it consistently enough to meet the platform’s standards. So for instance, if you want to be active on Tik Tok, especially in the beginning, this is not a joke, you need to be posting five 610 times a day. Okay? If you want to be active on Facebook, this is a one post a day sort of thing. In fact, more than one post a day on Facebook is will downgrade you people don’t want to see that much from you. If you want to be active on Instagram, it’s more like to post three posts kind of depends on what you’re doing a little bit there. But you need to be able to commit to a consistent cadence, that’s going to give you the success that you want to have. Because if you are active in places where your audience is not, you’re not going to get any leads. If you’re active in places where your audiences but you’re not creating the content, they want to see, you’re not going to get any leads. And if you’re active in places your audiences, and you’re making the sort of content they want to see, but you’re not making it enough, you’re not going to get any leads. So use those three rules to answer the question of, should I be active here? Yeah. Or should I leave this one and focus somewhere else? The last question I’d like to ask you is around content. So that is that so once we determine our platform, maybe look at the frequency of posts, the type of posts we’re going to make, whether they’re videos, still images, etc. Now, we got to figure out, okay, we know where to go. And essentially what to do, we’re not exactly sure what content or you know, is is needed curious to get your thoughts on determining content ideas.
Yeah. So every one is going to be a little bit different here. So I want to give a couple of kind of more general 30,000 foot view, pieces of advice. And hopefully, this points people in the right direction. So a couple of content rules that you should consider. The first is, you should always create social media content with your audience in mind, not with you in mind, you’re not making what you want to see, you’re making what they want to see, you have to remember, this isn’t your personal video blog, where you are like a video diary, where you’re writing down all of your thoughts or putting all your thoughts down on video. So you can your children can review it for posterity, you’re doing this to make money. So create the content that is going to elicit a response from your audience, not just from the things that will create or elicit a response for you. So that’s the first first kind of big rule. The second rule is, think about your content as an emotional trigger. Whether it is a happy trigger, or an angry trigger, or a motivated trigger or a sad trigger. Social media platforms are designed to prompt a response. And they want their users to then share that content so that it prompts a response in the their users circles. And so if you think about content that prompts a response, frankly, just a copied URL from your local MLS with new listing, there’s no response that happens here. This is boring. You need to create content that prompts a response. Think about what the emotion is that you want to prompt and create content around that. No more boring content. I see so much boring content on social media and guess what it has zero likes, zero shares, zero comments, because most people don’t even see it. They’re blind to it now. And then the last piece of content advice that I would give folks is, frankly, we got to stop trying to go viral. going viral is not a goal. It’s not a goal for you, it’s almost not a goal for anyone. There are very few people in the social media space, who should have a goal of going viral. And the reason here is going viral first of all, is extremely difficult. And it happens based on factors that are almost always out of your control. And to consistency is a much better way to drive action on social media, social media platforms, reward consistent posting of quality content. So instead of trying to make that one crazy post, that’s going to get shared 1000 times you should be shooting to make 100 posts that get shared 10 times. Because that sort of consistency is going to help 99.9% of agents level up their social media game. If you’re an agent like Tyler Whitman, or Ryan serhant, in New York City, and you have millions of followers, going viral is a little bit easier, because you’ve got such a bigger base to build from. But if you have a couple of 1000 followers, frankly, 75% of them are probably not very engaged in what you’ve got going on. going viral is very difficult. So you should work on consistent content that is going to regularly elicit an emotional response and is content that is in line with the platform you’re participating in. So without going too deep into specific content suggestions, because everyone’s market is a little bit different. If you follow those rules, your social media content will be more successful.
Yeah, and just as a quick addition to that, for content, one content idea is to and there’s obviously a million different content ideas. But think about the questions you get asked by your clients throughout a transaction or prior to a transaction even starting. Those are all content ideas. They’re not might not be the right content, ideas for engagement with social media. But that is a great place to start. If you’re sort of thinking, Gosh, I don’t even know what to talk about. Well, what was the last question when your clients asked you and then turn that into a video if you want to. But there’s, we can talk about content ideas on on another episode too. But that was really helpful. In other words, just to recap, what we were talking about is choosing the appropriate platform that your clients are engaged with. And that also works for your type of content. So those are two different things. So we want to make sure we’re hanging out where our agents are, or sorry, where our clients are, and then giving content that is sort of best suited for that particular platform. And then also trying to come up with with a consistent model, a consistency model. That’s how we built this podcast. It’s how you guys have built the clothes. It’s all around a small victories as singles and doubles and supposed to homeruns singles and doubles will win the game. homeruns are great. But we focus on singles and doubles and will win. So consistency consistency, we are at the end of this episode. So I will we will say goodbye to our our friend and co host Chris Lynn, sell from the closed.com. Please everybody go visit the close.com. It’s just the best resource that we have found online for teaching agents how to grow their practice through best marketing, marketing practices, tech reviews, if you’re like thinking of adding a new system in and you want to see what what the experts say as far as different CRMs etc. lead sources, the close is the place they go deep and they go wide. And that is it is just they have great true journalists working there. So please check out the closed.com. And Chris, on behalf of everyone. As always, we say thank you for your contributions to the show. And Chris is now speaks all over the country. So we’ll have to have your calendar maybe put on our site so everyone can follow you and see if you’re coming to their town to talk because when Chris speaks people listen. And he has he just has great insight into what’s going on currently and what’s on the horizon for us realtors and the real estate industry in general. So, anyway, on behalf of Chris and myself, we also want to say thank you, and please tell a friend about the show. Tell a friend about this episode. Go visit the clothes.com and we’ll see everyone on the next episode.
Chris Linsell 29:27 Yep. Thanks, everybody. We’ll talk to you soon.
Should Real Estate Agents Join A Boutique Brokerage? • Drew Grossklaus
Jun 24, 2022
Drew Grossklaus the Director of Sales at William Means Real Estate, Charleston’s exclusive affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate discusses what’s it like to be an agent in Charleston area especially after Covid. Drew also talks about the importance of getting involved with the local associations and showing your leadership angle of personality. Drew points out the advantage of learning everything about the area you’re working in. Next, Drew discusses what the role of the firm is to the agent and the importance of the non-compete managing broker and also what is the role of the firm in helping agents generate or provide them with leads.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode we discussed the benefits of joining a small boutique brokerage. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Drew grassless, who by the way is the Sales Director for one of the one of the largest producing small boutique firms in Charleston. But before we get to Drew just a couple of quick reminders, please, as always tell a friend about our show. Just think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from Drew for example, and send them a link to this episode or right over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, can be streamed right there no podcast app required, or pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button and last please leave us a review. Whatever podcast system you might be listening to this on, whether it’s Apple podcast, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, etc. Let us know what you think of the show leave us a review. This is how we continue to grow and get better and better to help better meet your needs. So enough about that. Let’s get on to our conversation with Drew grassless.
Today on the show we have drew gross class from William means real estate in which is also Christie’s International in Charleston, South Carolina. Let me tell you more about Drew. DREW is the director of sales at William means real estate which is Charleston’s exclusive affiliate of Christie’s international real estate. He also serves as the broker in charge for the firm’s Mount Pleasant office. Now drew brings a wealth of strategic sales, marketing and analytical talent to the firm drawing on more than 20 years of real estate and development sales, also marketing advertising and promotions experience. He’s a licensed real estate agent and currently serves on the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors board of directors, which is he’s also he’s the treasurer actually of his local association, and also the South Carolina Realtors Board of Directors so he’s involved at the local and the state level. Drew graduated from the University of Northern Ireland, Ireland. My apologies drew graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a degree in accounting and received a master’s degree from Western Illinois University not too far from where I’m recording right now here in Chicago, but please everyone visit drew at his website, which is Charleston realestate.com. Drew, welcome to the show.
Drew Grossklaus 4:06 Thank you. Thank you. And I’ve never been to Ireland so I would like to also go there but no, it is Ireland but but thank you for that.
D.J. Paris 4:15 Well, I’ve been to Ireland I’ve not been to Northern Ireland though. And there’s you know, always debate about you know, when when or if you should go to Northern Ireland but I was thinking I just saw the movie Belfast, which is all about Northern Ireland about a week ago. It’s a fascinating movie. So I’ve got that on my brain. So my apologies there But welcome, welcome to the show. Thank you drew very excited to have you here. It was Drew and I were talking prior to us going live here and we were just talking about you know how Charleston is just on everybody’s must visit list and you know right now it’s it’s just been a darling of vacation darling for gosh, I don’t even know how many years but it seems like everybody I know especially Bro bridal parties or bachelorette parties, I should say, yeah guys guys big dude guys trips there, there’s golfing that area, it’s just got about everything anybody would want.
Drew Grossklaus 5:12 Yeah. And it’s really been amazing over the last 20 years. Conde Nast, travel and leisure, we’ve been the number one city in both of those publications for years. And it really it has exploded. And then you know, then we have some famous people Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively got married here. And then we’re a little nervous to say they got married and, you know, here because of the place they got married, but but but had famous people as well. And it really has become just a mecca for tourism. And it’s, it’s understandable, we have the history, the food, the beaches. So, so amazing real estate, obviously, when you combine all those things, but it is a place and it’s a place living here, and I get to visit lots of places, but and I always come back to where would I rather live than Charleston, and it is hard to think of another place. So so it’s an amazing place.
D.J. Paris 6:08 And I would imagine that since we’re we’re also familiar right now with places like Nashville, Charleston, Austin, you know, just just these places now that have been opened up for a lot of us that used to think we were chained to our physical location and through COVID started learning, oh, we can work remote. Obviously, the real estate agents maybe don’t have as much of the freedom there to do that. But as a lot of people are moving to Charleston, even just in the last few years, although it’s been going on lat long time before that, of course, I imagine. So it’s part of me thinks, Oh, it must be a great time to be an agent in that in that area, because there’s so much activity, and then I think, but there’s also got to be a lot of competition from agents as well. So I I’m curious, have you because you’ve been there for quite some time, you know, what’s it like now being an agent in that area, you know, than it was sort of prior to this big boom?
Drew Grossklaus 7:06 Yeah, so it really is, is a crazy situation to be an agent and a difficult one. And I tell agents who call me this all the time. Because it is a very sexy place, obviously to want to be because we do have and over the last couple of years remote people with remote and I’m moving from New York, Atlanta, Chicago, you know, I don’t have to be there, I want this place. It’s great. We have about 7000 agents, and we have a population of about in the Charleston Metro, you know, 400, if we expand it out 800,000 people, so that’s, that’s a lot of agents. And actually, you know, it was kind of interesting, we were up near that number in Oh, 809, the crash happened and we lost half the agents. And that probably is the number that worked out well. And now after the coming years, we built that back up to double again. So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s one of those things where if we have an agent truly relocate from somewhere where like you better have a plan for a year not to have any business, because it’s that competitive. And I will say this Charlson has a tremendous history. And there are a lot of things as far as where you grew up your name as far as the way you mark it here. So if you don’t have that you can be successful. We’ll talk about different ways I see agents being successful. But but but it’s a lot of work in Charleston, it really is. And don’t get me wrong as a real estate agent, you’re like, Well, why wouldn’t I want to sell real estate that has history and beaches and beauty? And I totally get it. But there are a lot of other agents that are saying the same thing?
D.J. Paris 8:42 Sure. Well, I think you brought up a really good point, I sort of started want to go back to it, because I think it’s not just applicable to the Charleston market, this this advice that you gave about, if you’re moving there, or you’re a new agent, for example, you know, you better have a plan, or you better be prepared to, you know, just work for a year or maybe without a whole lot of income, if any. And I think, you know, that’s probably not dissimilar from and, of course, increased competition where you are, but just in general, like newly licensed agents, of course, you know, probably no matter where they go, unless they join a team where there’s a lot of leads, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s important, as people ask me all the time, they just got their license, you know, when When can I start making money? And it’s like, just sort of depends, but, um, but I’m curious. So when you do have somebody who, who is relocating and isn’t, you know, somebody who was born raised has a great sphere of influence. And again, I think just talking about this relation to Charleston, I think is is applicable to a lot of our listeners for wherever they live. How what do you tell them to coach them to keep them motivated and sort of keep them engaged, even though it might be kind of a depressing, you know, first year or two? Sure. How do you do that?
Drew Grossklaus 9:59 Yeah, well, you know, Real Estate is sales. And so a lot of that you really got to understand a lot of things you’re doing may not show right away, right? We’re not making widgets, so you can make 10 of them and sell them right away. So I like to talk to people about building their real estate resume. And I think people, there’s a lot to that. And one of the things here, right, so an example with Charleston would be, you know, do you understand historic architecture, there’s books, there’s tours, there’s a lot of things that you can really learn a lot about historic architecture and historic real estate. And then you can obviously apply that further on to Okay, let’s talk about Beach Real Estate, it may be newer construction, but you’ll understand what to understand about hurricanes, Hurricane rated windows, and all that type of things to me, then you’ve got to figure out how you let people know that you’ve gained that knowledge. Again, I call it a real estate resume, it can have your bio of where you went to school, because again, all those little things that people find out that you know, have knowledge of or connections to you are things that you can use to help Garner business. So I usually tell them to add as well, when they go somewhere new, go to your local association and become involved in that as well get knowledge about what’s going on. You mentioned I served as treasurer, I’m actually currently First Vice President, I’ll be president in two years. Wow. I’m also on the South Carolina forums Committee, which isn’t necessarily a sexy committee to be on, when you deal with forms, but boy, do I get a lot of information knowledge about why we’re changing things that I can convey to the agents that we can talk about when they’re conversing with their clients about language and a contract. I was just at the NAR legislative conferences in DC two weeks ago, too. So and seeing kind of the whole process again, those things are time. And that’s not necessarily time to get business. But when you convey to people that you have a knowledge of the industry, it’s just huge, and it sets you apart, right, that’s how you really set yourself apart, obviously, then you add all that and if you get that resume, then it’s communication. And so, you know, I’m always however you have it an Excel spreadsheet, all the names, as much information about people as you can have, and that communication with those people. And again, then as you go to an NAR conference in legislative and you talk to people about what’s going on in the bigger world of real estate, you know, those people remember you more so than then maybe just receiving a postcard that they see from a lot of different agents that you have knowledge. So, you know, I just think doing as many things as you can be involved in to garner that knowledge that you can pass on to that client to show them hey, this is a person that knows what they’re talking about. I want to work with them.
D.J. Paris 12:50 Yeah, I boy, I couldn’t agree more, I just recently got involved. This is my second year of participating with committees at the local level. And I Boy, I wish I had done that a long time before. And just because, well, there’s a lot of reasons why but but I think you get connected to not only the probably the movers and shakers of your local market, or at least a lot of people, you just get access to people. And then also, I get connected to people who like to volunteer and also make things better. And that’s a fun energy to be around when we’re, you know, thinking about competing for deals nine hours a day, and maybe we’re in listing presentations, and we’re up against three other agents. And there’s just a lot of that competition and you know, cooperation thing. But getting involved is great, because, for me, I’ve just got access to to people who I wouldn’t have got had access to before and we get to share ideas and create plan events. And, and it also, one thing you didn’t mention, but I want to because you’re probably too humble to say it, but it also makes you look like a leader. I mean, if you now do have additional knowledge that someone else wouldn’t have who isn’t involved. And that goes a long way. I know our managing broker is very involved at the local level, we have some people involved the state level here at our company to and that does not go unnoticed by the community. And so I I could not agree more strongly with you to get involved. And it’s just a lot of fun to write.
Drew Grossklaus 14:25 Yeah, well, and I think any industry that you’re in, you know, you really shouldn’t want to engross yourself in that industry. Right? And so being a real estate agent, okay buying, selling, you know, customers, clients who get that, but to understand everything that goes on because it is your life, right? You are your own company, and you’re a company in this industry. So understand it the other the other great thing I would say and you make a tremendous point about showing that you’re a leader. It’s agents who can do this not just brokers, you know, that type of thing, but really agents And I think then that passes and shows leadership when a client wants is really looking for a real estate agent, they’re looking for someone to lead them with knowledge in their purchase. And so getting that experience as well and leadership, it shows your client that you’re, you’re a leader in getting their deal done as well. So it’s to me, it’s something that I think a lot of real estate agents maybe don’t think about and think of Morrow, okay, kind of the ball up the hill of making sales and getting listings. But But again, that bigger picture thing can really help expand your business.
D.J. Paris 15:35 And I think he brought up a good point, a really good point, too, I’d like to go back to about learning about your local market, of course, any reasonably decent real estate training program would tell you to learn your local market, but I liked what you said, which was even going sort of a step beyond and Charleston’s kind of known for all of this amazing history. And so there’s a lot of real obvious things to learn about. But it is really important that you know that history because of course, clients may ask about it, Charleston is rife with history, and to spend a year in not that you’re not also looking for business, but to really spend a year immersing yourself in that knowledge is going to make you so valuable, especially if people are moving from out of out of state, and maybe they’re not as familiar with the area, you now have this wealth of knowledge, I think it’s something that doesn’t get talked about as much as it probably should, for agents who are struggling, it’s like immerse yourself in this knowledge of the area, whether it’s historical or current knowledge, or just even studying the MLS, you know, of course, is important.
Drew Grossklaus 16:38 Well, and to add to that, right, what I say too, is think about that knowledge that there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge on the internet, right? And so these these clients now, yes, they’re going yes, they’re saying, think about what they can’t find on the internet, learn those type of things, right. So and that’s where, again, with Charleston, again, some historical architectural points, you’re probably not going to find that on MLS description of a home. Or even unless somebody digs really deep again, think about the information somebody can’t find on, you know, we won’t name the big name sites, but but something that’s in a description, that’s the type of information that people are looking for. And that doesn’t just apply to historical right, it can be okay things about a neighborhood. Sure, you know, some of those little factors of oh, there’s a great little wine and cheese place down the street. And again, that type of information where they can’t find it on the internet, and they hear you tell them information about that. And give that knowledge man that just goes so far to showing them that you know, more than again, they can just just find from typing into Google.
D.J. Paris 17:44 Right. And that’s, you know, those those big firms, or those big tech firms, which have, you know, our public and client facing that, you know, the entire MLS is not under lock and key. And it’s, it’s kind of neat, I think, and I’m curious to get your opinion, because clients, of course, now we’ll find their own properties, they don’t really need us to unless there’s something that isn’t listed. And of course, we have a mate, if there’s a private network of listings, they would need to use you, but But you know, really, you can bring all this additional knowledge that it frees up the time, I think for the agent, often, if the clients are already looking for properties on their own, they already have their list, they probably know those properties, maybe even better than the agent by that time. But they you’re right, the things they don’t know are that you know, those intangibles like what what’s it like to live in that area? You know, if you have a family and what’s, you know, what is it like for school? And what’s it like for socializing? And just having all of that knowledge is something that isn’t as easily find findable online?
Drew Grossklaus 18:43 Sure, no. And you know, a great a great one here in Charleston obviously talked about the story, but it’s travel time, right? Because you’ll see a lot of websites that say, oh, it’s eight miles. Well, you know, how is your life going to be right? Is that time taking kids certain places have you really looked at and you know, a real estate agent can say, Okay, well this is this may look like it’s a further distance away. But where are you the roads you have to travel in in Charleston where you need because we have a lot of water. So it’s very limiting. And so when you have that knowledge as a as somebody Yes, but that’s a that’s a 45 minute drive during prime time, versus this other area. That’s a 20 minute drive, but it may be 15 Miles versus eight miles, right. So because a lot of times people don’t know the weeds of kind of travel time and to me anywhere in most places we were everybody cares about travel time and that type of hiring. So you know, having that inside knowledge and say, okay, and or it might be Hey, you know, if you’re a retiree, and you really don’t need to travel these times, here’s a great area to be but boy, if you’ve got to get the kids to soccer, to valet, to those type of things, maybe we need to look in a different area, again, knowledge that you’re not just going to pop on Google, right and see that about an area.
D.J. Paris 19:58 I think too, you know, We’re sort of talking about it casually as having this knowledge. But I really think that knowledge, at least from my perspective, is maybe the knowledge that makes the difference. Oftentimes, it because I suspect many agents don’t. And again, I can’t speak for any agents in your area, but even we have about 800 agents in our company, and I’m just trying to think about how they, how many of them might go about it, and many of them aren’t going to have that knowledge. I think, I think if you go that extra mile to learn that information, and then be able to have those conversations, oh, my gosh, you are so valuable to somebody, it’s almost a guarantee that somebody’s going to go wow, I, I will gladly pay you or, you know, the Commission’s maybe aren’t going to be as important. If you can give me things that will save me 20 minutes a day on the road. You know, that’s a big thing. And it sounds like a small thing, but it’s really a big thing. buying the house is a huge thing. But all of those little things that you know, it’s like, here in Chicago, we have to think about, you know, when we buy like for buying here in the city, I thought about this, what I recently bought my places, and I’m gonna go buy, because I’m in this really high traffic, very social kind of area, very hip and trendy lot of bars and restaurants that stay open late. And I thought, I’m gonna come by before I buy this place, and see what it’s like Wednesday at 10pm. You know, is it? Is it crazy? Or is it totally quiet? And I wouldn’t really have known unless I did that. And so but you know, and I was my own agent. So I didn’t have somebody to ask, but but boy, that would have been great information for an agent representing me to be able to tell me, let’s I would love to talk about because of course, you you guys are facing the same inventory shortages, maybe even more so than then some other parts of the country because of how popular Charleston is. But I’m curious on how, you know, rising interest rates also are becoming a challenge. What are you doing? What are you saying to your agents to keep them motivated to sort of keep their business moving forward? Even though despite these real obvious challenges?
Drew Grossklaus 22:02 Sure. Well, you know, one of the things for me is with the agents is being optimistic. And so I just find negativity never gets you anywhere. So you know, one of the things in these times, because we hear a lot of the woe is me as real estate agents, and no inventory and whatever it may be. But But now, it’s such an amazing time to show your client, why you are so good at what you do. And so yes, with inventory, it is a little bit more of maybe knocking on doors and really, you know, under rocks, and really trying to find properties for somebody and really explaining to them how to make the best offer and how I can help you structure that to make the best decisions to try to get home. Now is such an amazing time again, for agents to really show because it’s, it’s showing them the value of an agent, it’s not just we go look at 10 homes, we narrow it down to five homes, we do second showings on three homes and, and we write a contract and we get through it, it’s really okay, I gotta dig in and work, we got to talk about maybe making some concessions on what we want. How, you know, how are we talking with the mortgage? And we structured it for us? Things like, you know, and sometimes difficult conversations like, Okay, we might need to remove appraisal, do you have cash on hand to do that? Okay, are we going to try to do an inspection report before we write a contract, which is typical here. But you know, it’s those type of things now, where if I’m an agent, I go, okay, now’s the time where I really get a shine and be amazing to my clients. And the other thing and jumping back a little bit to to, again, that knowledge that you have, and now these type of things. Those are then when the person calls you back in three years and says, Hey, we’re ready to change. And you were the one who knew the ins and outs, and you were the one who worked hard during the tough market, that now you know, we’re ready to upgrade or we’re ready to downsize. Our kids are ready to buy a home they’re calling you and that a big part of our firm is referral and repeat business. And it’s those things. Those are the reasons that people come back to us.
D.J. Paris 24:10 I agree. I think that’s very well said, I’m curious with your agents, because of course inventory is in short supply, as you mentioned, you got to, you know, be maybe sometimes more creative now to find some of these properties. Are you finding that any that agents are, for example, people that aren’t reaching out to their agent to say, I think it’s a good time to sell, I’m ready to sell. Maybe there’s, you know, there’s obviously people that need to sort of be prompted right and sort of need to be told a it might be a good time to sell and of course it might not be as well. But are your agents are you finding success with getting listings with people with homeowners that aren’t necessarily chomping at the bit to list a property?
Drew Grossklaus 24:57 Sure. It’s overdue. humming the issues that they have, right and how you do that. So, you know, a lot of people say, oh, you know, it’s great time to sell and I get it. But where will I go? Right? Okay, well, you know, let’s talk about that. And you know, there is some conversation to say, okay, but you always wanted this. And don’t get me wrong, we’re not going to be a sell high buy low situation. But it may be a great time for you if you really want it to be an X, Y, Z, and that we’re going to get the most for your home, and maybe I can find you this property we’ve always been looking for. So let’s try to create solutions or right, it’s the people who say, Well, I don’t have anywhere to go, Okay, well, right now we can get clients to really give us six months for you to stay in your home. So during that six months, we put on the push, and if we get to month four or five, we say okay, let’s go rent somewhere, right? Yeah. But you’re always in a better position to have that home sold, rather than trying to do the whole contingency, right? Because a lot of people don’t, that’s a scary word right now, and they don’t want to share it. It’s coming up with those solutions to people the obstacles to sell. And so that’s really again, where, you know, an agent can shine to say, Okay, there’s always a solution, right? The solution may not be great. And they might say, okay, that’s that, that makes me too nervous. But there are a lot of different ways we can structure things to say, Okay, let’s, let’s figure this out, we really can have some ways where we can design some things to get this done for you, during this time in this crazy market.
D.J. Paris 26:30 I’m so glad that you brought up the rent, you know, maybe sell high and rent if if you can’t find something to purchase, because it at first glance, I think that’s something that owners might have a visceral sort of negative reaction to, oh, I don’t want I don’t want to rent I’m, I’m an owner, I have this beautiful home and I don’t, I don’t want to go into a condo or you know, whatever else I might be able to rent. But it is kind of a, I think agents that bring that option to the table. I don’t think most agents tell homeowners that who aren’t necessarily looking to sell, I don’t know how often that’s brought up. And I think it’s a fantastic option to bring to somebody, whether they want to do it or not. I think just bringing that option saying, hey, there’s some luxury apartment buildings down here that would be you know, similar to your current lifestyle and in your, in your, you know, whatever type of home you have, or, you know, luxury or non luxury apartments, but there are options, like you said, Where let’s if we, if we run the numbers, I mean, my boss just did this, he had a home. Well, I won’t give specifics, but he had a home somewhere in the country who which appreciated an insane amount, like an insane amount where he, he’s like, I probably need to sell he had nowhere to buy. And, and he finally found something sort of last minute, but he was like, I guess I’m just gonna have to rent for a few years. But it was it was such a profit to him to do that, that and he has three kids and a wife. So, you know, but but they explored that. And I think that agents shouldn’t be afraid to have those conversations, because that that may be the best solution right now for someone.
Drew Grossklaus 28:11 Right? Right. And well, and it puts someone in a power position, right? It’s a low stress power position, especially again, in a competitive market of competitive offers, you know, not having again to have to sell that house or worry. Again, a lot of people in more normal markets fear that that to mortgage situation. But even if this, you know, okay, well, what if, you know, I get one under contract and the world changes quickly. And I have two mortgages. All right, well, if we sell, right, and we go to that rental option, you don’t have that concern anymore. It’s low stress, you’re in the power position. That’s a very big thing once people start to hear that explanation. Are there some inconveniences? Of course you know, if you have kids dogs, but you’ll find we always find it and we have a tough rental market too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, people are paying high prices. See that peace of mind and when we’re talking the amount of appreciation that extra little bit of rent per month really in the grand scheme of looking at numbers is not anywhere near but to be in that power position of being like at the snap of fingers say okay, yep, now we can move on this house that we do want you know, it’s it’s just a great position for them to be in a lot of people don’t think that way. They do think well, we got to stay in the home. We got to have the next home. Right. ready right away. We got to do a dual closing when we’re closing the same day. No, we you’ve got some options.
D.J. Paris 29:34 Yeah, I think that’s a really, really smart and this really brings me into this question that I would love. I very rarely get to speak to. While in Illinois, I always call everyone a broker because that’s the only designation we have here. So So I apologize for the people who are listening who might be confused. I’m just gonna say realtor just to make it easy, but I very rarely get to talk to broker owners or people in management like yourself, because I we traditionally We just talked to, you know, really just producers who are not in management. And I know you do both. I am curious to hear because again, from a, you know, not just an agent’s perspective, but somebody in management, what you think the role of a firm is to the agent? Because I know that, you know, our listeners are are always thinking, Am I at the right firm? Should I consider another option? Am I getting what I need and deserve? Or am I asking too much for my brokerage? And of course, we know that brokerages oftentimes can promise things that maybe maybe are exaggerated or whatever. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts, because you guys have this wonderful boutique firm, you had a very successful office. And I’m curious on what you think the role of the office is to churches? Sure,
Drew Grossklaus 30:51 yeah. And we have a probably a different thoughts in a lot of places. So you know, the big thing to start with is actually me, I am not, I do not sell real estate whatsoever. I am strictly Sales Director broker in charge. And to me, that’s very important. We have a lot of firms in our market where, honestly, the broker in charge is trying to get as many sales as the agents and to me, you know, that creates kind of a conflict. And I’m really available 24/7 to our agents, right? Because I’m not trying to work a deal. I’m not, hey, I’m in a closing right now. So I can’t get to your question. Because I’m having a problem with my deal. I’m helping with everybody’s deal. So and then I can also give perspective on pricing. And, you know, if they have trouble, or if I need to meet with clients to help them understand how our firm will help our agent, that’s the other big thing that I would say that I think an agent should really look forward to firm is somebody who can give you answers. You know, we tell our agents all the time. Never be somebody who goes and gives an answer that you hope is right. Always say, let me let me find out. That’s a great question. Let me find out. I’ve got someone I can call right away me. We have an attorney on retainer that I can call or we have state attorneys, like like other people. But I found as a homeowner, too, right? I had an issue recently, right? Where I had a pipe break, right? And if you’re a homeowner, and you go, Okay, wait, I’m in real estate, but I don’t know who to call right now. I need somebody to help me. And I need somebody to help me quick. And I need somebody who can give me an answer. And that’s the one of the worst feelings is when you don’t know what to do, who to call. And so for our agents, we give, hey, client, I know who to call, if you have a problem. They call me I know who to call, I have a problem and kind of on down the line. We also are a full service brokerage. And again, other business models are big smiles in great, but what we do, we have a marketing director, marketing coordinator. All we want our agents doing is working with their clients and listing and selling, we don’t want them writing anything for the MLS, we don’t want them taking any pictures for the love of goodness. You know, and so we just want them to focus on you know, that client, and we also are brokers, we don’t have a closing coordinator, because we’re like, we need you as an agent needs to be with that person all the way through the process. And actually, most of their clients become their friends. And you know, they’re having dinners with them after closing. And again, this is the referral repeat business. So our model is really give the answers have someone you can call at any time who can answer questions and be there. And again, I’m also then try to do things that show him on the local, the state and even the national level of being informed on how this business is going to operate. In unique times, like we have no,
D.J. Paris 33:47 I think that was so well said. And I’m going to unpack just a couple of things in in what you just said, because I want to make sure our audience understands. One of the things Drew said that is incredibly powerful. And also, and I’m curious to I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m gonna I’m gonna call it rare here in Chicago. I’m assuming it’s rare in Charleston as well, though you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, which is Drew said, Hey, I don’t go out and sell real estate and you have in the past but your role now is I am 100% dedicated to assisting my agents, which means I’m not out there working with clients, I don’t go to closings. You know, I you know, maybe if it was you buying or selling your own property, but but that’s probably about it. And and the idea is no, I need to be here for my agents that is often the term that I hear sometimes use, they call that sometimes a non competing managing broker or a non competing management team. These is incredibly rare. And I only know and I’m pretty well connected here in Chicago with lots of the different offices and I only know two offices. Aside from ours. We have the same philosophy that I don’t go out and practice as well. That is a huge thing. And it doesn’t get talked about enough because most firms don’t do it that way. But the fact that you are Non practicing or non competing is a enormous benefit to your age.
Drew Grossklaus 35:05 It is rare. And I will say this, we’ve had a couple other firms in Charleston, who have who followed our model. Right. And which, which is great, because that shows success when people imitate. The other funny thing that I will say about me that I think is important maybe to the listeners a little bit is I actually have never sold real estate now. I’ve never okay, I apologize. What and that’s, and that, I think the interesting part, and trust me, I’ve been so involved and so entrenched with agents, in getting deals done that I have worked with clients I have dealt with and, and but the other thing too, that is, in some ways, I bring a perspective also to the clients, right that there is someone when they have a problem that I am there, and I’m on conference calls, Zoom calls, right at their home, that they feel an assurance of that firm, they just don’t have a real estate agent, they have a firm that is working with them. And so that’s the other thing, not just about non competing and but but that there is somebody there with them who are helping them that are giving them advisement and again, using my education level experience level, right, that they go, okay. You know, even if our agent is saying the exact same thing as he is, you know, it gives them an insurance that, okay, they know what they’re doing. And I give the same answer. If they asked me a question, I don’t know, I said, I don’t know that, let me find out. Because always, you know, and we always do want to go to attorneys if we get in certain situations. But I can tell them, you know, even give them a pretty good idea through through my years of experience that this is probably what the attorney is going to say, we’re going to talk to him but but this gives you an idea so you can be prepared. So again, it’s that it’s that next level that you can add to somebody. And when you go on a listing presentation, whether you have somebody you can take with you to do that, or you just let them know there is this person. And we’ll have a lot of times where an agent will call me and say hey, I just had a listing presentation, I talked about you, the person like to talk to you give you a call, great haven’t given me a call. And then when we talk, I’ll be honest, pretty much 10 times out of 10, that person years uses our firm after they talk to me because I have that confidence level.
D.J. Paris 37:17 I’m almost curious if you see yourself more relating more to since you have have not been in sales, and I apologize for MS speech earlier. I wonder, because I’m the same way I’ve never practiced. I’ve been here for 12 years, I recruit agents, I consider myself a marketing guy. That’s my background. I know you’ve done marketing as well, and your background prior, which we didn’t we didn’t get into. But I know you’re a marketing guy, and then also an accounting guy. And so I’m curious, do you I always because I don’t practice real estate directly. Even though we have hundreds of agents here at our firm, I connect, or I see myself as relating more to the to the customer. So I think that and I’m not in the same role that you have where I have to provide that level of support. We have people, other people here on staff to do that. But But I always think I’m always more connected to the consumer experience. And I think that you feel I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But I’m curious if you feel connected to that consumer experience, because you consider yourself a bit of an outsider, even though of course you’re not really.
Drew Grossklaus 38:18 Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think, you know, from a real estate agent in this day and age, right, where they’re psychologists to their clients. I’m sort of a psychologist to all of my real estate agents, and then to sometimes to their clients. But one of the things I find and I try to make sure agents remember is what it’s like to buy and sell a home when you’re the person doing it. Right. So yes, I’ve got a showing and remember what it’s like when you had the two year old and the four year old and the two dogs and had to get them out. Remember that when you’re talking to a client remember the idea of okay, clutter, and how do I want to hear about okay, we might need to take down some of those family photos that line the stairwell. Right. And you can’t even see that there’s a wall behind an amount of pictures, right? So it’s kind of that, hey, you’re a real estate agent, you’re trying to get a contract, you’re trying to negotiate a deal, but but remember the humanity of it too, and the scariness of it too. And again, going back to those questions that you you, you don’t think of that you’re trying to help them remember, and be relatable to, hey, this process isn’t easy. But if that’s why you have me here to help you. Again, a little bit of psychology that you’re doing with your client and again, as me as a as a as a manager as a non selling broker, then don’t get me wrong. I have two agents who come in and sit down in my chair and literally we’re going to do a 30 minute talk just for them to vent about about a client and that’s you know, and that’s kind of so so maybe in the realm also, hey, it’s really hard to be a real estate agent to write I have to kind of help them through that. And again, that’s where some positivity comes in to get around that negativity and be like, we’re gonna get through this. And there’s options and there’s solutions, and we’ll figure them out. But do I gotta be, I don’t have a couch, I have a nice leather chair. But I probably could have that couch as well to kind of get get through some of those times. But but it really is that that psychology and remembering what it’s like to be, you know, that customer client and buying or selling,
D.J. Paris 40:28 I have to pause for a quick, quick break for one of our sponsors. And but I’m going to ask a question that I’d like you to think about. And we’ll we’ll break well, once we finished my little live spot here, we’ll we’ll answer, which is about leads. I know, as you know, you get that question, I’m sure when people are inquiring by agents, maybe considering joining your firm. And I know I get that question a lot, especially from agents who are struggling or newer, and of course, leads being one of the scariest parts of the business not having enough, where do I get them? So I’m curious to get your thoughts on what is the role if any of the firm with respect to helping an agent either pass leads to them, or help them generate leads, or a combination of both. So before we do that quick message from our, our, our amazing sponsor, which this is one of our favorite companies in the real estate space, which is called follow up boss. Now I’ve interviewed hundreds of top Realtors from across the country for this show. And this is absolutely true. The CRM that is used by more than any of our guests. Of course, it’s follow up boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your real estate business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Now don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one real estate team in the United States use his follow up Boss, he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 existing systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. And the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help you need. Does Drew was mentioning he has seven days a week support for his agents they have seven days a week support for their agents as are their customers who are agents follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial. No, this is twice as long as they give everyone else so but you have to follow this special link to get the 30 day free trial. And by the way, no credit card required, they’re so confident you’re going to continue to use their service, you can totally do this risk free, but only if you follow this special link, which is follow up boss.com forward slash real, again, follow up boss.com forward slash real follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episodes. So Drew, wanted to talk about how do you answer the Hey, I’m thinking about joining your company? What kind of leads do you have? Because I know you must get those calls just like we do.
Drew Grossklaus 43:05 Of course, of course. And leads are very important and follow up is very important as well. So you know, I would say and where we as a company know more and more of our money goes to the technology, right? It is it is the getting lead generation. Now, and especially given our market, we are a destination market. So a lot of people are searching for us, there’s no doubt about it, whether they intend to move here or not. Trust me when when it’s January, the lead numbers from New York and the Northeast are through the roof of people who are ready to get out from the snow and Chicago. It gets windy there I know. So but but what I would say to the to the lead, you know, the pie is only so big. And the competition for that pie gets more and more. So any in my opinion, these firms that promise you a huge amount of leads, that’s pretty difficult, because we’re all trying to get them in spending money to do it. We then say though, the leads we do get, you know, you’ve got to have the plan, right. So we have a whole plan that we give you of how to foster those leads, how to communicate with them. One of the things that we do that’s kind of unique and I think more and more people are aware that when they go to a website right there, we’re a little big brother ish, and that we can see what you looked at. When you you know when when you sign up. And so what we want to do, yes, we have the Hey, with the email that goes out to thank you for registering for that. But our agent gets that notification right away. We definitely are on the hey, you need to within an hour you really should be contacting them because those statistics are true, right? The sooner somebody gets to someone, the more likelihood they are to get them. But also you know, what is that first communication and what we kind of tell them Miz for example, you know, we can see where that lead came from, right? There’s IP addresses. And so if it is a lead in January from New York, your response might be the climate in Charleston, is, you know, we’re at 68 degrees today on January 3, right. And you might see also that they’re looking at a lot of four and five bedroom homes, you know, our schools important to you, ask them questions that make them want to communicate with you. And then with those leads, if you don’t hear anything, have that plan, right? And schedule it so that you’re not constantly looking through your leads list going, Okay, who do I need to communicate now, every time make a schedule, so Okay, two weeks, I’m gonna reach out to this person again. And again, with our system. And with lots of systems, right, you can go on the back end and see if they’re coming back what they’re looking at that type of thing. The biggest thing I would say, though, is have a plan so that you can limit your amount of time during the week, because really, our plan is that if you have two hours, one day a week, you can foster your leads and do a lot of communication that looks like you’re constantly looking at it. But if you don’t do that system, well, you’re going to be you know, we all get busy than with a listing or a buyer. And then it’s two weeks later, if you haven’t done it, you go God, I don’t know, I don’t know who to communicate with what to say, who to look at. So the planning portion of leads is really where it needs to be to be successful.
D.J. Paris 46:29 I agree. And you just said something that was very important, which was two hours once a week can really plan out your follow up protocol, whether it’s, you know, you’re posting on social, whether you’re writing personal notes, whether you’re phone calls, text messages, maybe you’re checking LinkedIn to see if any of your you know sphere of influence had anything major happen this week with professionally. And and but there are there are it what’s interesting is I think agents don’t realize that they can do it in a couple hours a week, they think, oh my gosh, I have so many other hats I have to wear. And now I’ve you know, I’m I don’t have any inventory. I’m trying to find properties and rates are going up and everyone’s freaking out. I don’t have time to follow up with people. I don’t even know what to say to people. Because you know, I don’t have a whole lot of great news right now. And I think that’s where someone like you or is so important way more important than, hey, I’ve got leads for you. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting some great leads from your, your managing broker, if that’s if that’s a possibility. But I think most agents know that that’s not really, for most firms where the value comes in from the firm itself that comes from having somebody like Drew who’s like, I will help you once you get a lead. You know, make sure we have solutions for your clients. And I’ll be there to guide you and them through the process. And let’s just be honest, too. I mean, not not that we’re not honest. But let’s just say it like it is most firms don’t have leads. So be very careful. Right? Anyone listening? Right? Yeah, Andrew, I don’t mean to make you agree with everything I said. But I’m curious if you know, people dangle the lead carrot, but some firms will dangle that,
Drew Grossklaus 48:17 of course, of course. And we don’t, you know, our firm is very much we’re trying to get you leads to supplement, right for our success. Again, we’re at Christie’s affiliate, you know, part of the reason you join us is for that name as well. But again, we want to give you tools and knowledge to help you get things the leads are just something that hopefully come in and we have had people who are very successful with leads, we have plenty of agents who don’t take leads, right? They’re like they we’ve got our own way we do business, that’s fine. The people that do have leads, though, we try to really give them okay, here’s communication plans, here’s timing plans, that you don’t get snowed under by leads, and you keep going well, every lead I get. Nobody calls me back. Nobody communicates with me. Okay, well, how are you communicating with them? What are you saying? What can you give them? Right? What kind of questions are you asking them that makes them want to interact? Not just the How soon are you moving? How much can you afford? Right? Those type of things are things that look like they were generated by a bot, right? And so it’s just like this form letter back to them to go, okay, you know, show you’re a real person. And again, that jumps back to what we talked about before the knowledge and those things they can’t find on the internet that information, ask them if they’d like to know more about that type of question. And that’s where you get those leads interacting with you. And again, you can show them, this is somebody that I want to work with.
D.J. Paris 49:42 I was just thinking while you while you were saying earlier about really immersing yourself in the local knowledge, right, making sure whatever area is your you know, area of serviceability that you know, the history and you know, a lot of facts and sort of day to day A few things that that, you know, somebody who’s might be moving into that area should know, I just had this thought and I’m curious if any of your agents have have started to do this. And I know we’re, this is kind of out of the blue. But I was wondering, you know, as you start to learn, like if I was to move to Charleston, and as I wanted to be a successful agent, they’re not knowing anything about Charleston and starting from scratch without any sphere of influence. I know one of the things that I would want to know, if I were moving there, just as a, somebody who is moving to the areas, I’d want to know more about the history. So I was thinking, Boy, it’s a great opportunity for agents to, you know, talk about this stuff on their social platforms, to, you know, if they learn a really interesting fact about Charleston, for example, in your, in your case for your agents, or a certain neighborhood, or really, they can, now they can, you know, we all have those the really professional recording equipment in our pocket, we can turn around and do a Facebook Live and say, I just learned the most interesting fact about X, Y, and Z, and be able to really share that knowledge with their social followers.
Drew Grossklaus 51:02 Yes, I mean, it’s become huge now to be able to show those pieces of information to people that make them want to use you to help them with real estate, again, they can get so much information. And that’s, that’s really the thing that people have a hard time with is okay, well, but I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know what to show him. Well, that’s where, you know, one we do live in a great area where there’s a lot of things to do, but this is where planning comes into place. Right. And even if you we like to tell our agents, right, you put things in the can, right? And so Hey, one day, it’s a beautiful day, you might shoot three things, and you’re not going to use those three until the next month. Right. But you know, you’re always thinking about that, that. And again, the amazing thing that people really love about social media that we try to say, and don’t get me wrong, high production is great. And we do luxury, but more and more people really want authentic, right, and they don’t need you to look dressed to the nines, or, you know, they like that you’re you are out for a walk, and you saw a beautiful flower box on a home. And you say this is an amazing, you know, piece of art. That is a flower box, right. And again, thankfully, we live in a beautiful place. There’s lots of things here, but also the being authentic, because we have a lot of agents who say, Well, I’m not an actor, or an actress, you know, I don’t do well on camera. And it doesn’t have to be some high produced, we and we do do some high production things we do, you know, have a company that will do the fly throughs, and the intro videos and all that stuff. And we do that a lot of times with some of our higher listings, but but the more of showing that you’re, again, down to earth person, that you see beauty in some of these things, and alley, a brick sidewalk, you know, those type of things. And you can take it in and show someone some things and again, any information that they may not know and give them a little bit of information. But this can be your kind of communication calendar to say, okay, hey, I’m going to walk on Saturday with downtown for an hour. And you might get eight things that you can use over the course of three months. So
D.J. Paris 53:16 yeah, yeah, you know, Drew, you just said something that’s so valuable to our audience is walking, walking in your local community. I mean, it even if it’s okay, so we don’t all live in beautiful Charleston, of course. But even if it’s your local community, and you go well, there isn’t a whole lot of beauty right now in my community. Okay, well, how about featuring local businesses? How about saying, oh my god, this is the best restaurant in this neighborhood, or this is my favorite, and let’s go talk to the owner, or let’s just show you what the inside of this, you know, whatever, you know, might might be interesting to the audience. And I think it’s a real cool way to show how dedicated and passionate somebody is it doesn’t mean you have to act passionate, but being able to say Look at this cool thing. In my in my area is very exciting to people and really demonstrates that you’re you’re all in as an agent.
Drew Grossklaus 54:13 Right? Right. Well, and and to that point, right, you know, you’re selling someone a house, but if you can show them where they live, right, you have your house, but you live well around the shops around you Around the restaurants around you around, it might be a lake or a water feature, you know, to be able to show them some of those things in a neighborhood or an area or downtown a place they can easily walk or bike. Again, those are the things that I know I’ve gotten back to this point. But again, people think they get so much information now. But when you show them where you really didn’t have all the information, they go, you know, this person gets it right. I have to I don’t always just live in the home. Oh, I don’t want to live, I want to live. You know what’s around me too. And they show me what that is.
D.J. Paris 55:06 It’s funny, I was thinking about this, as you were talking, as I didn’t realize that. And again, I’m not a practicing agent, like yourself. And so I was, I always think about this from the consumer perspective, when I, when I got my most recent place, there is a target a mini like a smaller target, not a full size target, but a mini target, we’ll call it right downstairs, it’s me know, 20 steps away from where I live. Now, that’s a real obvious thing to people who shop at Target, I think women tend to be a bit more connected to target than men, just generally speaking, of course, you know, just sort of speaking with stereotypes. But as a man, I, somebody who didn’t shop at Target before, I didn’t realize the value of having a mini target, which has a full, really nice, fresh produce section as well. I didn’t realize the value of having that right downstairs. And then once I moved in, I was like, Oh, that’s really important. Because if I need anything, I have that right downstairs. And it sounds silly, or not silly, but sort of obvious, but I didn’t think about it until after I’d already bought the place. And I that would have been really important to have an agent come to me and say, Hey, let’s just imagine it’s Saturday night, you’re making dinner for someone and you you missed an ingredient, or you need to run out and get a bottle of wine or whatever. Right downstairs is a target with a fresh food place. Like that’s, that’s valuable. That’s important. And it’s more of an intangible, a little bit. But boy, I’ve lived there for a year now. And I go there like three, four times a week, just grabbing things that I missed. I don’t normally shop there. So I’m just making that point that like, that was really important to me. i And and the person who was showing me that property. I mean, they mentioned it, oh, there’s target here, and certainly didn’t walk me through a real sort of scenario. And I think agents can do that. They get the ability to say let’s think about what it’s like to have this nearby and why it’s important, not just that it’s convenient and grab your stuff there. But let’s think about why that’s actually really helpful.
Drew Grossklaus 57:09 Well, think about doing that in a listing presentation. Right? So your listing presentation, and everybody wants to know how much you think it’s worth. But say you ask that seller, the question of why do you love it here? What differences does it make? Because I want to convey that to other agents and buyers that come here? Think about in a listing presentation, what that may mean to a seller and going yeah, you’re right. It’s not just my house, here’s why this was great. And I love walking here or riding my bike here doing this. And you can say, You know what, I’m going to do a video showing me riding from the house to hear and show how great it is. You know, that’s the type of thing where somebody in a listing presentation sets you apart from other people and those other agents doing that listing presentation.
D.J. Paris 57:54 Drew, I could talk to you all day about this, you and I are, are you and I are kind of marketing guys at heart. And when we think about it from the clients perspective, and I think for everyone who’s been listening, Boy, you’ve just demonstrated some tremendous value and given our audience a lot to think about, especially during those listing presentations. I think that is such a great point to end on. Ask the seller when you were there. What what is really cool about living here, yes, the interior we can we’re going to market the heck out of that. But I want to know what’s the what are things that people don’t know about living here that are really cool, because I want to make sure that anyone who comes in knows about I think just in I use it way more elegantly than I did. But whatever however you say that that not only is going to separate you but it’s really some of sometimes those are the little things that make the difference. Absolutely. Well, Drew i So boy, I could talk to you for hours. i But of course Drew’s busy running a massive, massive brokerage, a boutique brokerage, but with massive, massive sales, and drew is a busy guy. But I want to also tell anyone who is in the Charleston area who maybe you’re not getting everything that you feel you deserve from your current broker. And if you’re looking to see what other options exist, you know, you should consider speaking with Drew now of course, they’re not everyone is a fit for his company, but he would love the opportunity to chat with you to see if there would be some synergy there. So Drew Drew is by the way with William means real estate, also Christie’s affiliate Christie’s International, very white glove, luxury brand, Luxury Firm, boutique office. Drew’s a non competing managing broker, he’s literally there to help you succeed, and that is his only job. And that is a great position and 99% of firms are maybe I’m sort of making this number up, but it’s probably about 95 to 99% of managing brokers do not operate the same way. And I know this drew knows this. So this is a really cool thing. So if you’re feeling like you’re not getting the attention you deserve at your current firm Do you want to explore another option? DREW? What’s the best way an agent should reach out to you?
Drew Grossklaus 1:00:05 Sure. It’s just drew Dr. Ew at William means.com. And I’m happy to talk with people and I, I will add in this, this is for anyone, not just, you know, make sure you interview a firm. They’re not just interviewing you, you are interviewing them. And that’s what I always say, when people come in to talk to me is this is a partnership, you’re an independent contractor, and we don’t have success unless you have success and vice versa. So you know, remember that, that, you know, I feel like agents sometimes when they come in, they feel like their interview and in no like your interview the firm have questions, we find out how they’re really going to help you so and that’s what we like to do. I love to talk to anyone also, even if they have questions for me, that’s not related about joining William means please feel free to reach out to me, again, Drew at William means.com. And I’d love to chat with anyone.
D.J. Paris 1:00:58 And if there’s anyone that’s either moving to the South Carolina area, or sorry, well, I’m sure Drew can, agents can assist many different areas around Charleston. But if you have clients that are moving to that area, or if there is someone listening, who is themselves moving out there and wants to work with a top agent in the area, please consider reaching out to Drew he’s got an amazing team of Realtors, that William means. They are just some of the very top producing agents in that area. And they’re all helmed underneath drew who is going to help them as well as you if you are an agent. So Drew, thank you so much. Oh, by the way, everyone visit Drew’s website as well, which is Charleston realestate.com. Again, Drew would love to chat with you, whether you’re an agent looking for another office, or maybe somebody who’s looking to move or if you’re an agent and want to refer business to you know, my parents had a second place in South Carolina for many, many, many years. And so, you know, referrals are a thing, let’s, let’s build our referral network everyone and Charleston is a place where you should have some brokers that you can refer to because guess what, a lot of your peak clients might end up moving there at some point. So Charleston is a great, great destination. As Drew said, it’s a destination. Let’s build that referral network reach out to Drew and his team reach him at drew his emails drew at William means.com, or visit Charleston real estate.com. Drew, thank you so much for being on our show this You are wonderful guest and really provided some great insight for our audience. So thank you. You’re welcome. On behalf of our audience, we thank you. On behalf of Drew and myself. We also thank our audience for continuing to make it to the end of the show and continue to support us best thing you can do, or the only thing we ask our agents to do aside from supporting our amazing sponsors, is also tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this exact episode withdrew and send them a link. You can send them right over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream right from a browser. They don’t need to be a podcast person. They can just pull up a browser click play right at keeping it real pod.com DREW thanks so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you
Why Real Estate Agents Should Start Their Own Podcast • Aaron Masliansky
Jun 21, 2022
Aaron Masliansky realtor with Dream Town Realty and podcast host discusses how he got into real estate and why. Aaron describes why he decided to start a podcast and how he built his two podcasts. Next, Aaron explains what global real estate is and how he got involved. Aaron also discusses a couple of unusual and funny experiences he’s had as a realtor and also explains how he values meeting buyers before showings and how this helps him build relationships.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s show, we talk about why creating your own podcast will help you dominate your local market. Stay tuned to this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer and podcast host Aaron Messalonskee. Before we get to Aaron, just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend about this show. This is how we grow and reach more audience members and we’d love it if you told every realtor you knew about this, this podcast and this episode, send them a link over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from that website. You don’t even need a podcast app. And also please leave us a review that really helps us understand what we do well on the show and how we can improve. So wherever you’re listening to this show, whether it’s on Apple, iTunes or Apple podcasts now or Google Play Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon wherever. Let us know what you think of the show. It really helps us But enough about that let’s get on to the main event my interview with Aaron Masse Lansky. Today on the show we have top producer and podcast host Aaron Messalonskee with Dream town Realty in your in Chicago. Let me tell you more about Aaron now for the last 11 years, Aaron has immersed himself in the world of residential real estate with a specific emphasis on his community, which is Skokie and Evanston. And for those of you that aren’t from Chicago, those are the really the two of the closest suburbs to the city. So they’re you know, a lot of times people just consider them extensions of the city. But he doesn’t just work there. Of course, he works in all the surrounding Chicago areas. But after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in urban planning Messalonskee cultivated his interest in property development, working for a developer for many years. And now he works as a realtor with Dream town Realty. He’s also established global real estate networks, and he is proud to be the current chairman of the global real estate Council for the Chicago Association of Realtors. Now to connect with his global and local communities, Aaron has established two podcasts one’s titled The Real Estate diplomat and the second one’s called inside the scab, which was featured in the Chicago Tribune and has over 100 recorded episodes. Now if he’s not keeping up with the market or global trends, Erin can be found volunteering with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and Rotary International. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and college sweetheart, Stacy and their two children Joey and Sophia. Please everyone check out Aaron’s website, which is Aaron messalonskee.com. And I will instead of spelling that out, I will actually go to the show notes. I will have a link right there. You can go right to his his learn about what he does in his two podcasts. But Aaron, welcome to the show.
Aaron Masliansky 4:26 It’s great to be here. I appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 4:30 Well, we I was just telling Aaron that I actually had seen him in a dinner that we had at the National Association of Realtors Conference this last fall. But it was a big room with lots of people and it was my first time in in that particular room for the Chicago Association of Realtors. But Aaron is incredibly well respected here in the Chicagoland area, not just for his acumen as an agent, but also a lot of the volunteer efforts. You do and I before we sort of get started with everything else we want to talk about Aaron idle love to just hear about how you got into real estate and also why.
Aaron Masliansky 5:03 Sure. Well, it and by the way, I wish we would have met at that dinner because I am like, enamored by you and your podcasts. And it would be cool to talk. So I’m glad we have this opportunity now. But I got into real estate. You know, basically, when I was a kid, I was interested in the game Sim City. And I would play and build these cities and so much fun. And when I went to college, I thought, well, I love aviation. Also, I was going to be a pilot. So I went down to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, I was in their aviation school, but like, I had to pick another thing for my major because they didn’t have a major yet. And I thought, urban planning, like SimCity urban planning, so cool. So I started to do that. And I really just loved it. And another thing was to my grandfather and his brother, when they were working, were real estate developers. And so I kind of bounce a lot of ideas off, Tim learned about it. And as I went through college, I interned for the village of Skokie, and village and Morton Grove in the summers loved working in their planning departments. But I love the ideas of the what the people were doing, who were bringing the plans and developers. So I thought it’d be cool to get into real estate developments, or as thinking Global Affairs like two separate things as college went on. Anyway, I got a job with a real estate developer out of college by literally looking in the yellow pages. And I guess that shows my age a little bit. But I looked in the yellow pages, dressed up in a suit, walked around one day in Evanston and dropped off a resume the real estate developers office named Tom Brozek. And he called me back and I got a job. And that’s how I got started in this industry.
D.J. Paris 6:49 Wow. And then how did you make the move from working with a developer than to being an agent yourself?
Aaron Masliansky 6:54 So I worked for him from 2004 to 2009. And kinda like, learned everything about the business, he threw me at everything, it was the greatest learning experience in regards to real estate in regards to business that I could ask for. And, you know, the market turned and I had a look for something else to do. At that time. I went and did business developments. My brother owns first class Moving and Storage, I worked there for several years, but I really still wants to get back into real estate. So I thought, okay, how do I do this? I decided to get my license. And I started as a part time agent, and I worked both jobs for a while. And and I will tell you is it is much easier to do real estate full time. But I was just trying to do it, make some extra money stay in the game. And then eventually, I was able to transition to full time being a real estate broker. And that’s, it’s been a great, great move.
D.J. Paris 7:52 Isn’t it so interesting with part time agents? I understand the idea. You know, I talked to a lot of newly licensed agents. And you know, a lot of them are like, well, I can’t, I don’t feel like I can do this full time. Because you know, I don’t know what the future will hold. But at the same time, it is kind of funny. So the irony is that doing it part time, in some ways might even be harder, right? Like, even though, you know, in theory, it sort of logistically seems like that would make no sense to sort of transition slowly. But I’m curious how you found, you know, part time versus full time?
Aaron Masliansky 8:27 Well, you know, I had a baby at when I first started a one year old, and then we’re expecting our second. And my first year in the business, I lost money. My first client actually died during the transaction. Yeah. I mean, welcome to the business, right. It was crazy. I was helping him find a rental. And then you know, just, he passed away wasn’t well, anyway, you know, it could really put a dent on your psyche, and I needed to make money. So it was hard, because as I got, you know, established and got my name and marketed and did everything, like I was busier, I needed time to be able to go show properties to, to go through inspections, to network to do all the right types of things that you need to do to be successful. But at the same time, I had to make a living. So it was very, very hard to make that leap. Also working for family. I mean, you feel really guilty the leaf. So it took it took that you know, just where I got so busy, where I’m like, I gotta make this move at some point. And it was just it was a great feeling to be able to have that freedom to be able to, you know, kind of explore what you could do within the industry at that point.
D.J. Paris 9:46 Well, I’d love to talk about your podcast because you’re a two time podcast host and not just about you know, well first. I’m curious why you decided to start to start a podcast or now Yep, Do so.
Aaron Masliansky 10:00 Well, you know I, at first I was thinking, you really you search for original content to be able to put on social media. And I was putting things out sharing different links to things and and you don’t really get engagement and it’s not original. So I was thinking how do I do this and I went to a National Association of Realtors Conference in 2017 in Chicago, and Monica Neubauer, her host the National Association of realtor podcasts center for realtor development. She was giving a seminar on how to create a podcast. So I went to my listens, and I’m like, Okay, I guess this is how I do it. And then a couple a year later, I think it was, I was I meet with coach Sean perutz. She’s, she’s a great business coach, life coach. And she said to me, because she saw this video that was produced for my business, she said, Erin, you’ve got a great Acme for for media, she said, You got to figure out how to utilize this. So I started doing Facebook Lives with, like, ask me anything. Ama is for real estate. And then like, you know what, I really should do the podcast. So I was talking with Sean. And she’s like, well, what would it take for you to do it? And I said, Well, I guess I gotta get a couple microphones. And, you know, she’s like, Haha, and what else I’m like, Yeah, it’s really not that much to do. So then I just started, you know, figuring Okay, I’m gonna do it. And then I brainstormed with people at Dream town. This one person in particular Stacy smaller, she’s in the marketing departments. We were working on the concept and I wanted to do a show that would feature my community Skokie in Evanston. And I, originally, what I wanted to do was just really feature my previous clients and help as a benefit to them to promote their business or promote their organization to say thank you. And then I’m, they’re able to share it on their social media. And it’s just a it’s an easy ask for people and everyone feels good. It’s just a, it’s a nice way to network,
D.J. Paris 12:05 may I pause you for a second, just to make sure that our audience understands, because I think what you’re saying, is, is a huge, huge piece of advice and a really smart idea, which was, hey, I just I’m working with, maybe I just helped this person buy or sell a property or I’m in the process of helping them buy or sell a property. They work somewhere, you know, somebody here in the family works, maybe they have their own business, or maybe they work for a business. And I would like to create a community based podcast for residents of that community. And I want to highlight, you know, maybe their business or some story about them as a way to support the, you know, their the community, I guess, at large, so accurate,
Aaron Masliansky 12:45 okay, that is completely accurate. And, you know, for instance, like, here’s an example, one of the first people I had on the show was a friend of mine, his name’s Jacob Shapiro, Jacob bought a house with me, his whole family has been tremendous to me, they, they refer me there, they’re just wonderful people. And Jacob owns a business called barrel design builds where he does, he’s a general contractor, he does carpentry work, he does a lot of commercial work. And I’m like, Hey, come on in. And he sat right next to me here where I am in my house right now. And, you know, we had, we had a drink, we talked, we did the I was like the second or third episode. And it was a great way to promote him. And it was fun. And then everybody else who knows him got to hear it. So as I continued to do it, I people got to know the show. And I got to have a lot of the community leaders I got. And it gave people a reason to speak with me and is easy for me to ask them. And then people started coming to me. So I’ve gotten to interview like the mayors of the towns, the heads of different businesses, the new things that are coming on. I mean, it’s like I’m in the know of everything. And it’s so cool.
D.J. Paris 13:51 And, and what’s so great, too, I just want to make this point, because it’s an important one, especially if you’re featuring somebody who has a small business in the area that that your podcast is sort of featuring is that, you know, marketers are always calling those businesses saying, hey, spend money for advertising, you know, whether it’s print media, digital media, you know, there’s cost they, you know, they’re salespeople trying to say, Oh, you need to advertise. And basically what you’re offering is free advertising for for that business. But what you’re, you’re really providing value to the community too, because I’m sure you know, your friend who, you know, probably has a wonderful business, and it’s great promotion, but it’s it’s so there’s not probably I’m guessing when you when you have reached out to people does anything you said it’s an easy, yes. Has anyone ever really turned you down to be featured on your show? Yeah,
Aaron Masliansky 14:43 I’ve been turned down. You know, and I think sometimes people, I don’t know exactly what the reason is, or whatnot, but I don’t think it really necessarily has to do anything with me. It could just be something that’s going on with them in the community or they don’t you know, they Maybe salty or whatever it is,
D.J. Paris 15:02 but or just anxiety around being on a show? Well, 100%
Aaron Masliansky 15:05 I mean, you really get to know how people feel when they’re being recorded. If because the minute you’re done recording, the best conversation happens. And I get to learn everything about what’s happening, and I love that. But I almost feel like it should just keep rolling. But because people are just at ease at that point, but it’s, generally speaking, people are happy to come on, and it’s, it’s just been really fantastic.
D.J. Paris 15:33 And you’re obviously passionate about Evanston, Skokie, or stevinson. area. It’s where you live, it’s what you know, you grew up there as well. And it’s fun. I imagine it, you’re doing a lot of good, right? By promoting these businesses. They’re having, you know, getting some advertising. And then I’m curious, not that you’re doing it as a way to get more clients. But I’m curious if it’s resulted in business coming your way, buyers and sellers who hear your show, maybe they’re exposed to it through somebody you’ve interviewed, curious how often that turns into a client?
Aaron Masliansky 16:08 Well, I definitely have had some people who have reached out to me specifically because of the show, or I had them on and they read and they either worked with me, or they referred a family member or friend to me to work. So that’s happened several times. And it’s not like, you know, all of the business by any means. It’s a you know, some people, but it happens. And then there’s just the exposure itself where people people see your name, and it may not be because of the podcast originally that they’re calling you. But they Oh, yeah, I know, you know, Skokie Evanston. So well. I even have a billboard up right now, that says your realtor from stevinson. And it’s been said, yeah, it’s, oh, my God, it’s crazy to see myself like that. But it’s, you know, I really leaned in, let’s just say,
D.J. Paris 17:00 Yeah, but it’s something that you’re really passionate about. It’s not a calculated, sort of this is going to get me a lot of business. I imagine. I mean, I imagine it’s a lot of fun for you.
Aaron Masliansky 17:11 It’s a ton of fun. And you know, it has, it has changed the perception that people have of who I am, because I have, I have gotten to interview people that I never would have had the opportunity to speak to in a million years. I’ll give you some examples. So I interviewed Alison pure Sullivan, she’s one of the village board members for the village of Skokie. So it’s like the city hall. And she is the Midwest Region head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which basically helps combat anti semitism and racism. And she was bringing in these people who are former Neo Nazis to come and now they’re peace activists, they they’ve turned, and she is bringing them into Chicago to to speak and fundraisers and whatnot. And she said, Hey, I needed a location for for this event with Tim Garrett, who’s one of these people. And I said, Well, why don’t we do it at? You know, I was over at the industrious, co working space in Evanston. I said, Why don’t we do it here, my wife had an office there. And we were able to and we put on this event, and then I interviewed him before everybody. So here I am having this live conversation in front of people to this former neo Nazi and talking to him about this experience. And never in a million years as a Jewish person, when I think I’m speaking to this person who basically started the kk k in Germany. And you know, it was just unbelievable. And then other things where I’ve gotten to speak for organizations, the JCC, in Chicago, the Jewish Community Center, they’ve had me do probably upwards of 20 or so interviews for their film festival. I’ve spoken with. I mean, this one man I spoke to once his name’s Henry panion. He’s a Grammy Award winning composer. He produced this documentary about the about basically, there’s these things called the violence of hope they cease violence that were from Holocaust victims that were then restored and sent around the world and he is in. In an Alabama, I forget exactly a town right now. Anyway, he put on this whole concert with these violins. And and he’s been involved with, like, civil rights movement. He’s composed, like over 100 songs for Stevie Wonder. And here I am having a conversation with him. I mean, just unbelievable. Like so it’s not even business. It’s just like life opening.
D.J. Paris 19:42 Yeah, it’s it is it is remarkable. You get to have a lot of these really interesting conversations with interesting people have of substance. That’s that’s what I love doing. Having I like that the most. The best part for me about the show is just me being able to talk to somebody At A, hopefully a somewhat deeper level than, than I would be if I were to meet them just at a cocktail party maybe and just have a more more of a superficial conversation and you do get to meet some really interesting people. And you’re also serving the community. So there’s, I’m sure a sense of, you know, accomplishment there and just sort of contributing to something bigger than yourself. And just doing a lot of good and we’re kind of a win win all the way around. So win for the listeners who live in that area. Win for of course, the guest who gets exposure and a win for you. Because, of course, you get some additional exposure as well. And just also you get to bring all this to life. Yeah, so must be. And so the reason we’re talking about this, aside from featuring, of course, I Aaron, and all the cool things he does is is this is an idea that Aaron had he went to, you know, a conference session at NARA in 2017. I still say now, I need to remember it’s NAR I when I when I went to the NAR conference, I kept saying no. And people were like, you really should say NAR so little pro tip for anyone. But when you were there, and he just walked, you know, went into a session and here you are now with this, you know, and you have two successful shows, actually. But we just, you know, I would just say to directly to our audience, anybody can do this, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be excellent at it right? Not everyone’s going to be good at it. But it’s something that really anybody can do. I’m curious, did you when you first started your first podcast? Did you set a sort of a commitment to yourself? I know I did, where my boss said, if you’re going to do this, you got to commit to at least a year, because he goes otherwise you’re gonna get three episodes, and no one’s gonna listen, and you’re going to be disappointed and not want to do it. So I’m curious if if you had any of those challenges, because it i We did not have a ton of listeners right away on our show.
Aaron Masliansky 21:49 Um, no, I really didn’t have any kind of commitment like that it was kind of just open ended. And I I really just enjoyed it. And just it what drove me is the, the constant opening up of different opportunities I’d never thought possible of who I get to speak to, and all these different types of things. So I just kept doing it. And then when the pandemic started, I thought, Well, I gotta shut stuff down. And then I discovered zoom, like many others, and I was doing like three episodes a week, it was just insane. And then I went on to the radio, I got contacted by a radio station, and I had it on the radio for about six months. And then after about 100 episodes, I’m like, I need a break. So I did put on pause inside the scab was on pause for about a year and I just started it up again. But yeah, it’s just, it’s just was fun. And you know, another thing too, was, I got to even speak with Monica Neubauer, who does the NAR podcast and went on her show to tell the story. And at the NAR conference in San Diego, I got to sit down with her and talk with her and thank her. So there’s some just like really cool things that really just make you feel good about, you know, life and kind of being able to be grateful to other people. And, you know, I have no media training. Either. Anyone can do this. I mean, everyone’s got a podcast, I guess. But not everybody continues to do it. So I think the commitment, and just the consistency is key.
D.J. Paris 23:27 Yeah, I think so too. It is, it is just like putting the blinders on. And just like, it’s there, I almost think of it as like exercise, it’s just, I just have to do it. I don’t always want to do it. But I, of course, always am happy when it’s when I completed it just like a workout. Like I don’t want to do push ups. But it’s a good idea. And, and also at the end of it, I always go Oh, that was five is actually okay. And I and it was a lot of fun. So we encourage our audience to to do this. Aaron and I are not, you know, we’re not communication majors. We didn’t have you know, radio shows in college, although actually I wrote for a radio show now that I think about it, but I was not on air. Certainly not trained that way. And in here, both of us are, you know, hosting shows. So, so when I first was exposed to you is at this dinner in, in San Diego last fall. And I they were introducing you with this sort of global real estate focus. And I am like, I don’t even really know what that means. So I would love for you to talk to our audience about you know, global real estate and sort of your thoughts about it, what you do there and just anything you think our audience which are essentially all realtors might want to know or might want to learn about it.
Aaron Masliansky 24:42 Well, I’ll tell you how I got started in global real estate and then get to to answer your question. So one of the things I’m really interested in is in global affairs, and I mentioned at the start of this conversation, when I was in college, I either want to go into urban planning and developments. or international development and global affairs, my, my master’s degree is actually focused on international development. And when I was in college it was during the Iraq War. And I took this class in Energy and Security. And I was like, oh my god, this is so interesting, like, I’m going to move to DC. And that’s going to be my life. But I got this great opportunity that went with it. So when I was able to go full time into real estate, it kind of gave me flexibility to be able to do things that I never would have been able to do before. One of those was to go to an event from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which is a think tank in Chicago. They have amazing speakers that come in all the time. And, you know, it’s kind of intimidating to go to this. I had no anybody but I’m like, you know, it like Okay, finally, at the time I knew about for years, and they went, and I actually heard Garry Kasparov speak for the first Wow, my first event. Kasparov, by
D.J. Paris 25:53 the way, for anyone who doesn’t know is one of the all time great chess grandmasters,
Aaron Masliansky 25:59 yes, he’s an all time great chess grandmaster and he is also a peace activist, and vehemently anti Putin. And he was warning everybody about what can happen with Russia, if if Putin has not checked, and basically everything that he predicted has come to pass. But it was amazing. I got to meet him. I took a picture with him. I see got, he signed my book and everything. I mean, I was just like starstruck. And I said, I gotta keep coming to this stuff. So I started continually going to events there. Then they had an application for a young ambassador, young professional ambassador program, I signed up I got into it, which was blew my mind. And I got really involved in global affairs. And they, when, when the council saw that I was doing this podcast, they they invited me to interview one of their fellow senior fellows at a fundraiser events on stage. And it was great exposure. It was an amazing opportunity. And I met this person, his name’s Mark Peterson, he’s, he was in charge of this organization called intersect Illinois, which is state led organization to help bring in foreign direct investments into the state of Illinois. He’s like, Aaron, you should get involved in global real estate. I said, What’s global real estate? What do you mean? Because just like when you’re saying, TJ, so he explained to me what it was, and he put me in touch with the person who was in charge of global real estate for Illinois realtors, and somebody else who runs IHC global, which Judith Hermanson and that’s an organization that is basically owned by NAR, and they do research and different things on international developments around the world. So I learned about these things. I was kind of directed to get involved and start to go to different events from the global real estate Council at the Chicago Association of Realtors. I then joined them and started I basically what it is the idea of global real estate is that is helping bring buyers and sellers together from around the world. So let’s say I have somebody who wants to buy something in say Costa Rica, I can make the connection because you build your network with other realtors around the world. There’s a special designation that you can get called CIPS, which is the Certified International Property specialist through NAR. By the way, you could take the class at Chicago’s Association of Realtors in September, shout out for Maurice Hampton, who will be speaking of the teaching it and you you get connected this network, you can be part of their Facebook group and everything, and you can make referrals. And then on the other side, it’s people who are coming inbound. So where you are. So people may say, Well, I’ve never done a global real estate sale. And I’ll ask you, have you ever worked with somebody who was born outside the United States and bought real estate with you? Well, that’s a global real estate deal. So I certainly have done a lot of that in Chicago since it’s such a global city. And I think it just it also teaches you about how to work with different people’s backgrounds, expectations, culture, it makes you a more well rounded person. I think it’s really important in any day and age, but just in terms of understanding diversity, and it just makes you a more well rounded person. So I started going to all their different events. I applied to be part of the global real estate Council. I actually went on a trade mission with them to Thailand. And that was an incredible trip and I got to learn all about real estate in Thailand because the Chicago, Nancy’s Sumi Mandy, she is the has a strong connection to Thailand and she’s part of Chicago Association of Realtors, former head of the global real estate Council former head of the organization The president, and it was just incredible learning about that. So then I, when I came back, I got more involved in the council itself. And now I’m the chairman and we lead different programs for education, networking, we will do another trade mission likely in 2023. If nothing crazy happens with COVID. But it is super cool, very interesting group of people. Yeah, it
D.J. Paris 30:23 sounds really rewarding. And I was curious, too, because so and I’m curious to get your opinion about this. Because oftentimes, when I hear about people from outside of the United States, buying real estate, oftentimes it’s in a, from an investor’s sort of objective. And it doesn’t always, of course, somebody or anything here from another country, of course, that that counts do. But how I’m curious about did that. And again, you were sort of in the investor space, as well working with developers and, and sort of understanding that, but I’m curious, does that give you more exposure to understanding what foreign investors who are looking to buy real estate in the country in the United States, does that give you more experience and understanding about how to work with those clients and maybe what their objectives are?
Aaron Masliansky 31:14 Absolutely, because you’re, you’re exposed to their their needs, and it may be different than somebody who’s just looking to buy the house, they may be looking at the United States and several other countries at the same time. And you have to be able to understand what the differences the nuances are, and the advantages to them of buying in the US versus, say buying something in Dominican Republic or in Canada, and what the restrictions may be for them. And you have to be able to know what potential there is for financing. You know, I started this other podcast called The Real Estate diplomat, which is all about global real estate, and also takes into global affairs. And I’ll talk a little bit more about it. But I big through that podcast, somebody reached out to me who was interested in real estate in the Dominican Republic, and we got to season in Germany. So, you know, we started speaking about all the different nuances of it, and, you know, talking about different other potentials, and trying to get him information on that requires you to go outside your comfort zone, and find people who you can trust to be able to make that referral, and make sure that they’re going to get well taken care of. And, and through that you get to learn more about other countries, and you could speak about it. So you might be at a dinner party, and somebody’s talking about some country or whatever, and you happen to know a lot about it. I mean, that’s, that’s empowering. That is
D.J. Paris 32:39 that is really empowering. And I guess maybe in both of the topics we’ve been sort of chatting about was getting involved in podcasting, which was something that you did with essentially no experience or not a ton of sort of thought, or fourth sight, it wasn’t like a lifelong dream to have your own show. And then also getting into global real estate, which actually was sort of a major passion of yours. And you’ve now been able to explore both of those through real estate, which, which I think is, you know, with this industry and being an agent, which I think is particularly interesting. And you were saying that, especially with this global real estate, you wouldn’t have had the time to get involved with it, how would you have been maybe in a different different profession or different full time sort of, you know, traditional nine to five job. So I find that particularly interesting that you’ve got to explore some of these additional sort of avenues of fulfillment. Because maybe, maybe because of now your schedule is more how you make it
Aaron Masliansky 33:33 100% It would never have happened if I had a traditional nine to five job or a nine to six shop because you just you can’t get out of the office. And you can’t go down there somebody’s you know, asking you Hey, what are you doing? And it’s with real estate, yeah, I could, I could, okay, maybe I’m doing a listing presentation for somebody at two o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve got showings from four to five or whatever it may be. And then I’ve got a Chicago Council event at six or whatever. It allowed me to be able to go and have that flexibility. Now the pandemic has changed things in terms of when timing is and everything and I mean with Zoom, it was so easy, but not nearly as fulfilling. But now things seem to be coming back together. Like they used to be which is a little overwhelming, but it’s awesome to be able to see people and and just physically and learn so much more. It’s wonderful.
D.J. Paris 34:34 Yeah, I I’m enjoying it too. I had a meeting this morning with somebody who was thinking of joining our company. He was brand new agent and he came in and I haven’t had anybody physically come into the office in a long time. Just a couple of people over the last two and a half years or so. It’s everything else has been over zoom like you were saying and I had to even think and I’m sure everybody listening who’s a practicing Realtor will appreciate this isn’t Like, I went, he was here. And I was like, Oh, somebody’s actually here. And I went to go, Wait, am I supposed to shake hands I kind of forgot what the protocol are or what the maybe the most safe thing to do, of course, is not to shake hands. But I had to sort of fumble through it. Like you were saying, it could be a bit overwhelming, because I had to think it through like, I’ve never thought about shaking hands as a as a challenge as a potentially unsafe thing, right. Now, of course, we have to start and I’m sure every realtor I’m curious. Just because I’m not a practicing agent, when you meet clients now, are you shaking hands? Or what do most people seem to want to do?
Aaron Masliansky 35:33 I’m shaking hands, I, you know, I have gone through so much anxiety of the pandemic. But I’m really trying to just shift and live. Because like, going in October to San Diego to that conference. Definitely was anxiety provoking to be around so many people. But it was nice to be there, it was nice to go to dinner. And here, you know, just people kind of poured their hearts out. I mean, it was really, really kind of beautiful. But you know, and then we have more COVID cases, and now we do too. But I just need to get out there and and see people and I and if they don’t want to I, if somebody seems hesitant, I think I’ll hold off. And, you know, I’m washing my hands after too. But but it is nice to shake a hand to see people to be there in person. And, you know, the real estate diplomats, I’ve talked to people who are all around the world and people in Chicago, I’ve had some conversations in person. But one of the I, I’m not doing that show quite as much right now I’m focusing more on inside the scabs. And one of the reasons is, is because I want to just sit down and have the conversation in person with the people. And it’s it’s nice. And you know, this is great, too. You know, we’re remote right now. But it’s nice to try to get back into that swing of things and hopefully stay healthy. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 36:56 it could not agree more. It’s, it’s, it is nice. And you’re right though there I even have anxiety as well, going into public events, not not tremendous anxiety. But it’s something that I used to have zero wings, or very little anxiety about going into a public space for lots of people. But now, you know, it’s just we just took a flight last week, and you didn’t have to wear masks anymore. And we had been flying throughout the pandemic. And we were always wearing masks. And so it’s it was like, Oh, we can take our masks off. And then that felt weird. Like you’re naked is Yeah, yeah. And it just feels like you’re doing something where I felt like I was doing something wrong, like, oh, this, this. Yeah.
Aaron Masliansky 37:37 I mean, but even like with real estate, like throughout the whole time, I mean, I was showing properties like even at the start, and it was it was completely nerve racking and nobody knew what to do. But it’s just, I feel like we’re in a different space.
D.J. Paris 37:50 We are, it’s nice to start to go back to normal. And I’m going to we’re going to pause just for a moment. So we can talk about one of our sponsors. But before we do, I just want to, we always ask our guests a little peel back the curtain because I’m such I’m really calling myself out because we ask our guests to complete these these questionnaires. So we can have some stories to talk about. And 95% of the time, maybe even 99% of the time, I never get to these. And so I absolutely want to um, so I’m making a point to say it out loud so that as soon as we come back from the break, we’re going to get right back into some of your funny real estate experiences. But before we do, I do want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor. It’s actually one of our favorite companies in the real estate tech space, which is follow up boss. Now after I’ve interviewed hundreds of top Realtors all over the country for the show. And actually the CRM that is used by more than any other of our guests. Of course, follow a boss and let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Now follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Now don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States uses follow a boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Now follow up boss integrates with over 250 other systems so you can keep your current tools and lease or lead sources. And here’s the best part they have a seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it. So few tech companies have weekend support and of course Realtors work weekends. Now get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real podcast listeners a 30 day free trial now that’s twice as much time as they give everybody else so oh yeah, no credit card required. either. They’re so confident that you’re gonna use that you’re gonna continue to use their service that you don’t even have to pay anything or even give them your payment information upfront, but only if you visit this special URL which is follow up boss.com forward slash real wit so follow up boss.com forward slash real. That’s for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now we’ll get back to our episode Aaron I am very excited to hear first of all, I would also just like to say I love the fact that you married your college sweetheart. I only know one person that did that. Out of all the friends I had in college, and even today 20 Some years later, we it’s still just such a cool thing. So I love you met your wife, I’m guessing down at University of Illinois.
Aaron Masliansky 40:22 Yeah, she was dating one of my best friends. And I met her I’m like, Oh, my God. I was like, I’m like that. She’s awesome. And then they broke up a couple of months later, I had nothing to do with it. And then we started talking and it was like, wow, you know, thank you, Henry, for for dating Stacey. And we’ve been together ever since. And it worked out pretty well. And he ended up standing up at our wedding after a few years of a little bit tense tenseness
D.J. Paris 40:53 you still you stole his girl? Sure. Yeah, no, no, I didn’t know. I know I’m being silly. But but that is I think that’s such a cool, cool story. i We, in my high school, we only we have one couple that that got together in high school and stayed together. And so I don’t have too many examples of that in my life. So I appreciate I just think that’s really cool. But let’s talk let’s talk about, because I just love this story about an ad that you ran in the newspaper here, the local paper here. It’s called The Chicago Tribune, very prominent paper in the country. But could you talk a little bit about the experience that you had there?
Aaron Masliansky 41:32 Yeah, so I put this ad out, I think it might have been 2015 or so. And it was on the front page of the real estate section on Sunday. I thought, well, this could be a good opportunity to get my word out and advertise an open house. So I do this, and then someone I know, takes a clipping of it. And he says, you know, says something about it and posted on to Facebook, like, you know, commenting on my hair, people comments on my hair that they love, like how full it is. And I don’t know, it’s, I have good hair, I guess. So then people started photoshopping it. And they turned it into a series of movie covers. So I was in Greece, I was in Scarface I was in Terminator two. I was I mean, all these different movies, it was Howard Stern, private parts, who by the way, is an inspiration for doing podcasting. Sure, for me, but I mean, it was just crazy. It was just this huge series. And it was one of the funniest things like people totally goof that me. And I absolutely love it. It was pretty funny.
D.J. Paris 42:38 That is funny. And that’s, you know, whenever it’s funny, there’s, there’s good versions of that where your friends sort of have some fun with you and send it on social media. And then there’s the Hey, I bought the bench back ad and somebody has colored in my teeth. But so it looks like I have you know, or I’d say black into one of my eyes. And, you know, so there’s the fun, cool, funny version that we all laugh at. And then there’s that. Oh, that’s a shame.
Aaron Masliansky 43:05 That said to my billboard.
D.J. Paris 43:08 Exactly.
Aaron Masliansky 43:08 I got threats about that. Oh, you did? Oh, yeah. So far, so good. Oh, that’s
D.J. Paris 43:16 great. And only because I just it’s so funny, we ask all of our guests to give us like, you know, an unusual experience and, and real estate experience and almost always it’s like sexual, it’s like, well, I walked in on somebody and they were having sex or, you know, they were by themselves having sex or with someone else. And it’s a lot of like, or I found some sex toys, or it’s usually that and so I stopped sort of even talking about those because I realized like, that would be every show, I’d be giving a basically the same story. But this one’s pretty unique. This one is not a sexual story. So I love it. But but as a guy, I can just I can just appreciate, you know, the the immaturity of us guys being able to handle this, or I shouldn’t speak for you, but my immaturity I would like you to mind sharing the story of the of the squatter that you walked in on?
Aaron Masliansky 44:06 Well, I mean, the squatters one thing, and this this squatter was. So I had two stories. I think the one that you’re referencing actually was for an open house. And I was preparing for an open house. And yeah, I always want to make sure all the lights are on. Everything’s clean. There’s nothing out. I go into this bathroom. There’s a tampon, use tampon on the countertop and the vanity. Wow. And I’m like all right. What the hell do you do? just grabbed a bunch of toilet paper wrapped it up.
D.J. Paris 44:41 Yeah, yeah.
Aaron Masliansky 44:42 What’s a dedication to the craft I guess?
D.J. Paris 44:44 I think maybe women don’t always appreciate that when skies if we ever come across that which seems to be pretty rare. I’ve asked other guys. It’s like we almost look at it like it’s a bomb that’s about to go off and we have to defuse it. And we’re like not sure exactly what to do. We’re not sure exactly what we’re looking at. But it was it was scary for some reason. It’s
Aaron Masliansky 45:08 scary. It’s scary. And I have plenty of I mean, look, everyone who’s listening to this is probably a realtor, you guys probably all have these crazy experiences. I mean, I’ve walked in on a squatter, like, it’s just that was scary. I’ve seen other types of things over the years. But that was that one with the tampon that sticks out
D.J. Paris 45:27 when you walked in on a squatter. Did was there a moment of was there a safety concern as well? Like, yeah, could be a dangerous situation.
Aaron Masliansky 45:37 Yeah, I, I’m going around with my clients, and we walk into this house, they had shown like two or three times before to other people. And I knew nobody was living there. And I walk in and it’s got like, the smell like the smoke. And I’m like, I don’t recognize this. But okay, so we go on, we’re upstairs. It’s a ranch house. Then we go down to the basement, and I start to go turn on the lights, pistols on the lockbox. And all of a sudden, I see this little pop tart on the ground, and there’s ants crawling all over. It’s disgusting. I’m like, what, what the hell’s going on here? Then my client says, Dude, there’s a squatter. There’s a squatter. She said that she’s in the closet. I’m like, Oh, my God, and this woman, she must have been like, 20 pops out. And she’s like, Oh, I’m just packing up. I’m just leaving. And we look at each other like, Huh. And we decide to just, we just turn around, we leave. And I call the other agent, the listing agent. I’m like, you’ve got a problem. And goodbye. Yeah, it’s,
D.J. Paris 46:43 it’s, it’s actually like, Yeah, it’s interesting, though, because because you think like, as much as men, maybe we have a bit more confidence in our ability to handle the uncertainty of that situation. Certainly, we don’t have to deal with as much physical uncertainty as women do. Again, I’m speaking generally, of course, not, not everyone’s the same. But I always think like, gosh, women have felt so much more danger headed their way or at least possible potential danger. And I always think, you know, that could easily that could have been a dangerous guy, or a dangerous woman to in that closet, you could have been a 90 pound woman or 100 pound woman walking in there with your client. And it’s, it’s something to always think about safety. And I know as guys, we don’t maybe think about it quite as much as women do. But it is something to really think about, because I think just about everybody’s had some version of that story happen, right? Where it’s like, oh, that could have been really bad.
Aaron Masliansky 47:41 Well, you worry about it, you worry about it, you know, open houses, for sure. You don’t know who’s coming in? Yeah, I think it’s important to let your spouse or somebody know where you are, what time you’re going to be check in. I always like to meet with new buyers. First before I go show them properties. And I know that probably is cost me some business, but it’s probably not the worst thing in the world. If somebody
D.J. Paris 48:06 just by curiosity, I just want to ask you, just because I wouldn’t have guessed this in so Aaron just said, I meet with buyers first. And maybe that’s even cost me business. Just curious. Why would that cost? Why? Why do you think that’s costly business? I would I wouldn’t, as somebody who doesn’t practice real estate, I wouldn’t see that as a negative at all. But do some buyers? Just go? I don’t want to do that. I just want to go see homes? Or what are what’s the or were you sort of saying maybe they won’t like your personality or what was
Aaron Masliansky 48:34 nervous? I think, you know, sometimes when people buy ads on different websites, people, there’s a misconception to the public, potentially, that they think that you’re the listing agent, and they’re just requesting a showing, they just want to get in and see the house. I mean, quite frankly, they may really have an agent, and they’re just doing stuff on their own. Who knows. So they call you and then you say, Hey, I’d like to meet with you first at my office, or this or that. And they turn them off and be like, well, actually, let me just find the listing agent and call them or whatever it is. So I think that’s where it potentially can cost you business. But I would say as I’ve gone on throughout my career, it probably hasn’t. It’s probably enhanced my business because what it’s done is I set expectations, I learned about what the people wants, we talk about agency, I have them sign a buyer representation agreement, and now everyone’s comfortable with that. I get it. But I think it’s the proper thing to do to set up the relationship. So then you have a successful transaction where everybody everyone’s happier at the end of the day. So that’s why I do it. I mean, if I was losing business left and right because of that, I wouldn’t, I would strongly reconsider what I’m doing. But I think it’s, it’s best for the relationship. It’s best for your business, it’s best for your safety on an unknown.
D.J. Paris 49:50 It’s very much similar to a consultancy type relationship, right? So if we think like what do consultants do, they come in they interview the client, they learn about what the person’s challenges are, and then they come back with a solution. So it’s really no different from what a consultant or professional consultant does. But I am, I am amazed at how often Realtors don’t maybe look at the beginning of a relationship with a customer, as in that sense of doing discovery, right. And that’s basically what you’re doing as attorneys would call it right discovery.
Aaron Masliansky 50:26 And now it’s so easy with Zoom, you know, I have a Calendly link, I have people set up their time they want to meet at my office, they want to meet on Zoom, they want a phone call, whatever, it’s easier for them, pick a time boom. And it’s like, it just sets them up to think like, oh, this is a professional I’m working with, it’s so much better.
D.J. Paris 50:43 I love it. That is such a great tip for anyone, especially and again, if you’re buying leads. So what Aaron is really saying about costing businesses, a lot of times the lead providers, you know, will tell you just schedule the showing, even though it’s not your listing person wants to see this property they’ve shown interest, don’t don’t take them to a Starbucks and get to know them, or don’t have them come to your office because that that sort of stops them from what they want. But, and I think maybe generally speaking, that’s not terrible advice for that sort of lead. But I love the idea of pushing somebody through a more professional sales funnel or process because ultimately, I think that does, you’re right, I think that does set you apart. Like you were saying maybe they already have an agent or somebody they’re talking to. And all of a sudden now they’re with somebody who’s sitting down and really getting to know them before going, I’m gonna just open the door and let you walk in and see what tell me what you you know, you like it or you don’t. So I actually think that’s a really, really strong point. But I know I’m understanding what you’re saying because you know, Zillow, and those companies who sell leads will say, really, we encourage you not to do that we want you just to set the appointment, meet them at the property. And then you can have the sort of the meeting but but I love I love that, that you do that. Because I just I just think it’s more professional. So and then the right, the right kind of client will really appreciate that probably the client you want to work with is the one that’s going to be like, that’s a good thing.
Aaron Masliansky 52:09 Absolutely. It is. And it pushes away people who may have, you know, spent a lot of time with you who aren’t actually serious, you know, a lot of times I I see on different Facebook pages with realtors. And everyone’s saying, oh, like, number one thing, you got to make sure they have a pre approval letter. Yeah, that’s important to make sure that they’re qualified to be able to purchase. But I think the number one thing is have that initial conversation, see how you can help them how you can be a value to them? Do they? Do they need a lender to speak to? Do they have questions about this? Do they even know what the process is? Like? Are they from the United States? And Are they familiar with with how you buy property here, you don’t know that until you actually start to have the conversation.
D.J. Paris 52:53 I 100% agree. And I because you work in the global space as well as the sort of local space, I just wanted to give this piece of advice that I heard that I just realized, when you’re dealing with people who are of a different, possibly a different religion, different ethnicity, different background, culturally, different race, even, of course, there’s different traditions and customs with each sort of group of people, how we, you know, group people together, or how they identify as a group. And I was listening to someone speak just a couple of weeks ago, and they said, I had this little tip, because they work with a lot of international clients, they said, Ask anyone who has a different, you know, sort of set of traditions, then you if there are any important days in their calendar, or during the course of the transaction that are either religious themed or maybe tied to their, you know, their country of origin or, or their, you know, whatever particular, you know, their predilections, and knowing that, you know, certain religions and certain backgrounds and ethnicities have certain days that are considered holy days, and, and there’s just, you know, things that we may not know, unless we were part of that tradition. And so knowing that is like really helpful, because you’re like, well, we’re not scheduling a showing on that day, and we can’t do the inspection on this day. Like, that’s something I went that is so simple and so brilliant, and I never thought about it. So I just wanted to share that. It’s a huge, great point. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Aaron, Aaron is the podcast host of two shows, and we’ll mention his two shows, we have links to both of those in the show notes. The first one is called the real estate diplomat which is about global real estate. So definitely check that out. And you can and then the second one is called inside the scope, which is about stepping stone, which is Skokie and Evanston to suburbs that are side by side here in Chicago. And I encourage all of our audience to check out inside the SC Evanston not because you may be from somewhere else in the country and you don’t know or care about those two suburbs. That’s not the reason I want you to listen, I want you to listen to see what Aaron has built for his local community and and how it works, and then maybe even go duplicate that yourself in your own local community. So this is something that it is just a perfect example of what you can do. And it’s a heck of a lot of fun to build up that brand. And I’m curious, does anyone else because Scott Winston is kind of a known a very known term has, does anyone else have a scab instant podcast, as far as you know, are you the first
Aaron Masliansky 55:24 there was another group that had a Skokie podcast called it Skokie. And they did 50 episodes, and I was on it, and I had them on mine. We shared and there’s other people who have Evanston podcasts, you know, but not a scab instance, Gevinson is actually a part of Skokie that has an Evanston mailing address, and shares the school district and whatnot. So it’s a play on words, but no, but no one else is competing in the stevinson space with me.
D.J. Paris 55:52 And I didn’t even mean that in a in a joking way. Although I know it sounds sort of silly. No, no, but it’s a good question. Well, it’s what’s interesting is there’s so much opportunity, right to find a niche or when it comes to podcasts in your community, you know, maybe there’s a certain you know, neighborhood, in the community you work in, that’s, that you’re really passionate about, or at Aaron’s, of course, passionate about his local community. And, and so and people who live in that stevinson area are very passionate about that as well. Because I think that if I remember correctly, from what my friends told me, it’s you get the benefits of Evanston sort of their own. Is it that they have their own like police and their own public notes.
Aaron Masliansky 56:36 You get Skokie? All Skokie services. So I had it backwards. Yeah. And but you get the Evanson School District, and you get the Evanston post office. So this
D.J. Paris 56:47 is a very desirable thing for people who are looking in that area. And now Aaron has a podcast, not just talking about the benefits, but all the cool stuff going on in the area, all the local businesses, the local political players, and you now have more exposure, of course, in your real estate practice as a result.
Aaron Masliansky 57:05 Absolutely. And if anyone wants to chat with me, I’m happy. I’m happy to be a resource, as well. So feel free to reach out to me.
D.J. Paris 57:14 Well, thank Aaron, thank you so much for being on our show, by the way to learn about everything. Aaron is up to Aaron messalonskee.com. I’m going to post a link to that also in our show notes. And I will want everyone to check out you can find his podcast there you can see videos he’s done. And of course learn more about Aaron and his his passions. Aaron, we want to thank you for being on our show. This has been such a pleasure for me. And I’m really excited that we have we had you on today. And you really provided a lot of value for our audience. Before we sign off. I just want to ask everyone not only to go check out Aaron’s two shows, please, please do but also tell a friend about this podcast, just think of one other agent that you think would be would get a lot of value from listening to Aaron and send them a link. Easiest way to do that. Just head on over head, send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Well, Aaron, on behalf of our audience, we want to thank you we know how busy you are with all your volunteer effort. And also want to thank you for all your volunteer effort for the real estate community. You are somebody who truly does give back and we didn’t feature a ton of that on the show. But Aaron is just incredibly involved in the industry. And and also, of course, on behalf of Aaron and myself. We want to thank all of our listeners and our viewers for continuing to listen and support our show. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Well, thanks, Aaron.
Aaron Masliansky 58:36 Thank you. It’s a real pleasure and thanks everyone for listening
How Can Real Estate Agents Stay Productive During Rising Lending Rates? • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Jun 17, 2022
Welcome to the May episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel talks about the raised rates and the importance of agents’ knowledge of the market when advising clients. Joel once more emphasizes the the importance of having a lending partner who can educate you on the important topics of the business. Joel also discusses the appraisal gap and what to do when an appraisal comes in low. Last, Joel talks about his relationships with partner real estate agents and its benefits.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today we’re going to be discussing what real estate agents can do right now to pivot to adjust for rising interest rate environments to keep your business strong. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today, once again is our monthly series titled learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. And he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. So last year alone, Joel gave back almost $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with them. And that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, there’s over 400,000 loan officers in the United States, Joel is actually ranked number 137. Last year he closed 619 sales is highest amount ever for $249 million in loans already this year. And we haven’t even updated the numbers. So these are old numbers. And I’m sure they’re much higher now. But already this year is Joel’s close over 70 transactions for over 27 million. And Joel Welcome once again to Oh, I’m sorry, my apologies before i for i get to actually welcoming Joel, if you if our listeners or viewers are looking to work with a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. He can be reached by the way at his email address, which is joel@rate.com. Very easy. joel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049 Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel, welcome back to the show.
Joel Schaub 3:13 Hey, DJ, thanks so much for having me on. And maybe the Cubs keep losing I’m gonna have to drop that I am not a fair weather fan. But uh, you can’t keep losing as many games as they’re doing. So we’ll see. Kind of like the market right now. Things are up in the air. Right. We talked about it just before we got on and interest rates are moving. And there’s a lot of activity and so I’m excited to be back.
D.J. Paris 3:35 Yeah, it’s it’s a really, there’s a lot of tension right now, I think that agents are feeling, you know, there’s course we have low inventory, we’ve got raising rising rates, the Fed has, you know, changed that there’s a lot of news, there’s a lot of commotion about it, and people are freaking out. But I think this is a good time to reset and sort of talk about what’s really happening. So we can all take a breath. And maybe things aren’t quite as chaotic as as they are appearing in the media and in the news at the moment.
Joel Schaub 4:09 Well, the big thing here, if you’re an agent listening right now that you’re not going to hear when you’re looking at the media, right is that they keep talking about all the rate increases coming down the line, how many times the Fed agent is going to raise rates this year, and I’m here to tell you that most of this is already baked into mortgage rates that we’re seeing, okay. And just think about it. It wasn’t, but six months ago, where rates were hovering around 3%, and now they’re over 5%. Yeah, the feds have only raised rates by 75 basis points. So if you’re actually following the math and looking at this, you can really pick up new clients and strengthen relationships with your current clients by leading with education and value. And the idea here is that just because the feds are going to raise rates again several times this year, does not I mean, the day that they raised rates, they call it a mortgage company and say, Today’s the day to raise rates, most of that’s baked in. And we can see that right now. Now that rates are above 5%.
D.J. Paris 5:10 Yeah, so I guess that’s a really important thing for our listeners to understand is that mortgage companies have economist on staff, they know or can act pretty accurately predict what the Fed is going to do. And in anticipation of that, they make those adjustments so that they’re not caught with their pants down when the Fed does make a decision. So a lot of what we’re seeing in the news can create stress and worry for an agent or for a client, but the reality of it is, you know, lending institutions have known that this is coming. And let’s also sort of just remember, you know, historically, five and a half percent is what is that the sort of current at 30? year average? Right, right, around five and a half percent these days? For 30 years?
Joel Schaub 5:56 Yeah, a little bit below that? Yep. Absolutely.
D.J. Paris 5:58 I mean, let’s, let’s keep in perspective that, you know, we it’s always that thing where it’s easy to forget, right? We have such short memories, and it’s easy to forget that, you know, well, yeah, we were at these historic lows, you know, 1824 months ago? And yes, of course, okay, we’re not there. Now. It’s okay, we can, we still have a lot of purchasing power. To me, the bigger challenge isn’t so much lending rates, its inventory, I mean, we can focus on lending rates, because this number ticks up, you know, or ticks down, and we can feel good or bad about that. But the end of the day, if there aren’t homes to buy, you know, that’s that, to me, is the real challenge.
Joel Schaub 6:38 There’s gonna be an opportunity here right now, and I’m already prepping a lot of my buyers, as we film this here today, it’s, it’s the middle of May. And what we’re going to see is we’re not going to see rates drop anytime soon, we already know the CDA rates are moving up. However, most of it’s baked in. And that means this summer, and into the fall when properties are on the market. And maybe they’re on the market for seven or 10 days, that’s a lot longer than it’s been on the market. And a buyer will have the opportunity. And this is my prediction to go in and submit offers without so many offers coming in, because all of the buyers that were right on the cusp of qualifying, because they could qualify when rates were at two and a half percent. They’re gone. Yeah, this might be controversial, but we’re only going to help so many buyers each year, as agents, we’re only gonna have so many buyers that we help going forward, it’s going to be slightly easier to help those buyers submit offers that are going to win, because there just truly won’t be as much competition, as rates continue to rise. And that’s an opportunity that I can be very excited about.
D.J. Paris 7:49 You’re right. And we have to also remember, again, this sort memory is like when rates were that low, you know, it really opened the floodgates for a lot of people who, you know, maybe previous prior to that wouldn’t have been able to qualify to purchase, you know, certain levels of property. And now we’re seeing the that receipt a bit. Right. So there was this huge, the floodgates were open. Everyone sort of, you know, trampled into the into the yard, and everyone got access. And now it’s like, Okay, now we have to now we have to limit access, because let’s remember what it was like when he got 30 offers on a property. You know, yes, that was great for the seller. But for the buyer, not so great, right? Not so much fun for the loan officer not so great. And also for, for the agent representing that buyer, that was a stressful time. So I actually think, you know, it’s I always like balance. So I would like to see a balance place where yeah, maybe rates are a little higher, but at least you know, there’s going to be hopefully some inventory out there. And then you have a few days to actually make a decision on a property as opposed to oh my god, I have to submit it my offer before I even go see the property.
Joel Schaub 9:04 So if I’m an agent, and I’m hearing this a lot, right, I’m hearing buyers ask agents, did I miss the boat? Should I not buy now that rates are up over 5%. And the one thing that we got to kind of remember is if we’re renting a home right now and we’re renting for in our market $2,000 is pretty common for even just a one or two bedroom property in a nice neighborhood. That’s 24,000 a year, over four years. That’s $100,000. And that’s all money out the window. Right? Yeah. So we don’t need to sell anybody anything as agents. If I’m an agent today and I’m being asked by a first time buyer, should I buy or should I continue to rent? Just do the math, right? interest on rent is 100%. All of it goes right out the window. And if you’re paying rent that’s 100% rate of interest. It’s all money that you don’t get back at the end of the year. Are. Whereas rates at three and a half or even six and a half, that’s still a much better rate in terms of being lower than what we’re paying in rent. So that’s option one that we have as a talking point with first time buyers. And then the second is that this is not just a straight hill up DJ. In terms of rates, we know that when they go up, they do come back down. And the best thing about the mortgage business is it is a refinance a bull loan, meaning taking the rates that we can get today. And if they go down to three and a half, or four and a half again, in the future, you can refinance that loan, usually, with little to no cost if you’re working with the right mortgage people.
D.J. Paris 10:43 Yeah, I remember when I bought my first property in 2005. And I think my rate was about five and a half percent, maybe a little bit less than that. But somewhere in that neighborhood, I don’t exactly remember. And I remember it, but it was adjustable. It wasn’t a 30 year fixed. And it was I think it adjusted every two years. And I want to think it was a two year arm or a five year ARM. I can’t exactly remember, but it was adjustable. And it was told to me at that time rates are probably going to go up, you know, when this adjusts, it’s probably going to adjust up and I went, Oh, no. And they go, don’t worry, because we’ll be able to refinance in some capacity within that timeframe. It we’re going to figure this out, don’t worry, you’re not alone. You’re not the only person who is in this sort of, sort of vehicle. And, you know, we it’s so my point with all of this is all of these immediate sort of stresses that that seem to be the challenges ultimately end up getting figured out over time, right. But like low inventory, it gets figured out at some point, it’s stressful to day, but it won’t be stressful, maybe a year from now, looking back at today going oh, we were maybe we were being a bit over reactive to it. There are opportunities, there is a lot to do. And yes, as Joel just said, mortgages are refinancing for indefinitely, right? You can always find and there and like Joel said, things are cyclical things move. Things ebb and flow. So right now rates are on the way up, and at some point, they’ll be on their way down again. And so still, I don’t think there’s much cause for alarm right now, the biggest cause for alarm, I think, is inflation, right, we’ve got the Feds trying to do everything they can to make the price of things come come down. And that’s the most important thing. And that’s really all the Feds trying to do. As far as I can tell, that’s a good thing.
Joel Schaub 12:34 I love that you say that. And I made a name for myself years ago by doing the refinancing for clients after the OAE crash. And one big tip that I want to share with the agents that are listening or even just homeowners here that are listening, is that there’s always an option if you speak to the right mortgage professional to refinance the mortgage with no costs. And I want to explain how you could actually do that in under two minutes so that you have a leg up when this happens, because I’m already preparing for the next two to three years of everybody that’s buying right now, to get a follow up to them when rates do go down. Because it is not just straight up. There will be a time in the next couple of years, where rates are lower than they are today when the Fed stop raising rates, and it looks like this DJ back and oh wait no nine when rates did drop below 6%. Right? We’re saying oh, boy, it’s a bad time now. But we were pretty excited. When rates got into the fives. People had rates that were higher end rates literally did go down to 5%. And banks would call you like crazy and say do you want to refinance and the trick there as they’re making 1000s of dollars on the fees to refinance, right? There are title fees and appraisal fees and underwriting fees and processing. And it goes on and on. So of course, bank seven incentive to refinance a mortgage because of all the fees. So what you want to do is find out what the best rates in the market are. And in that time, they went down to 5%. And I helped clients and I got them locked in, it’s a 5.1%. Because if the rate was a little bit higher, they didn’t have to pay any fees. And I mean, nothing, no underwriting, no processing, no appraisal. And if you’re already at a rate of six and a quarter, you could go down to five and pay a bunch of money, or go down to 5.1 or 5.2 and pay nothing. So since I was upfront and honest and did the math taught them, if rates go even further down, we didn’t pay anything for this. Let’s take the lower rate for free. I literally did hundreds and hundreds of transactions over those years, where clients paid nothing and then when the market heated up, they had a friend in the business. So that’s the big trick is finding out what the rates are for a no cost refinance. And believe me, the time is coming. It’s not just gonna go up and up and up. It may go up a little bit further from here. spend the next couple of years there’ll be days and weeks, where rates are lower than they are now and we can refinance. And as an agent, I wouldn’t be spreading the word.
D.J. Paris 15:08 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course it is follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert SLAC, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. I think this really speaks to the larger point of having a lending partner that is able to give you these talking points like you’re giving our listeners. And I think that this is so critical because clients see the news, they react, they come to the agent or possibly the loan officer but probably the agent and say, oh my gosh, things things are going up. I’m freaking out. Agent then needs to have a partner to be able to say okay, how what do I say? And and the this is exactly what what we’re really talking about is, you know, the realtor doesn’t need to be the expert in lending, you know, sort of practices and where things are. But what the realtor does need to do is have somebody have a team of people that the realtor can call and say, Hey, how do I calm this person down? What can I talk to? How do I how do I phrase this? What What are what’s actually happening right now. And to me, that’s the greatest value and having these sort of partnerships is having somebody like Joel, to be able to say, Okay, let’s, let’s have this conversation, what how can I communicate what’s really happening? How can we cut through the noise of you know, the stress of the moment. But let’s also talk about the sort of creative ways, you know, let’s talk about appraisals, because at the end, we’re totally switching gears. But appraisals, I know are really, you know, think this has been very crazy right right now with the offers that have been coming in. And then oftentimes appraisals come in, under what the offer is. And then there becomes a challenge to sort of make up that difference. We are still seeing a lot of multiple offer situations with with buyers. So what’s your thoughts about appraisal Gap coverage and how agents can start to, you know, tell their clients how to begin anticipating that
Joel Schaub 18:24 last month was April and I know for a fact that appraisals are still front and center on listing agents minds when they’re looking at offers. I had 39 successful closings in April all 39 purchases. And to some degree, appraisal was one of the biggest things that we talked about upfront when we’re submitting the offer. Right. listing agents when we have a property that’s hot, they’re almost forcing the buyers to waive the appraisal, right meeting, if you even want to compete in this market, tell me that you’re not going to worry about what the appraised value is on your financing. And that can be scary. For a lot of buyers. It’s scary for agents, because they haven’t seen this even if you’ve been in the business for 20 years. The idea of wrapping your head around appraisal Gap coverage can be hard even if you’ve heard it before. Can I have so let’s go through it. And specifically what buyers do when an appraisal tells you what the fair market value is, but we’re willing to pay more than the fair market value. Right? Yeah, let’s be frank. That’s, that’s really what it is DJ to say that an appraisal came in low is kind of this throws it back to the mortgage company like they did something wrong, right? If my client is willing to pay $500,000 for all and it was listed for four ad and all the sales say that it’s worth 480 But they’re willing to pay 500 Did the appraisal came in low? Or did the appraisal tell the story of what it’s worth? But agents will say, Well, I had five offers, I had other offers that were higher the sales support a certain value. So and I’m on your side agents, I mean, I get it. So what we want to do is submit an offer designed to win. And if an appraisal comes in a little bit low, and a client has a good downpayment, the rate won’t change. Maybe they have to carry a small amount of insurance coverage for the mortgage insurance. But if you’re setting this up front correctly, and educating the buyer, I’m having buyers with good down payments, go in and just waive the appraisal. I teach them up front. That sounds scary, right? Yeah, yeah, but it’s not if we’re willing, and we have the money. And we’re working with an agent that knows what they’re doing, we can submit an offer and we need to win. Okay, if we need to win in this market to get a property, we aren’t so concerned if the property appraises 10, grand higher, 10 grand low, okay, we’ll either make up the difference with a larger downpayment, or we’ll have a small amount of mortgage insurance, and the mortgage insurance might be 50 to $60 a month. And talk to your lenders if you’re an agent right now, if you don’t know what happens when an appraisal comes in low, get on the phone with that trusted mortgage professional, he knows right now, he or she really knows how to walk you through appraisal Gap coverage, otherwise known as mortgage insurance.
D.J. Paris 21:28 Yeah, it’s, it’s one of those things where, you know, this is again, back to this trusted partnerships. You know, for information, I mean, this are what Realtors need. And I think this dovetails a great way to sort of wrap up our our episode talking about having a trusted partner that can help educate the client and the agent, so that the buyers and sellers are on the same page, they understand what’s at stake, and also having creative ways to to get offers accepted, when appraisals might be, you know, an issue when we’re over not overpaying. But when we’re paying more than than what is asked. So this is why it’s so critical to have a good team of lending partners with you. And Joel, I know you partner with a lot of agents. Can you talk a little bit about just as we wrap up? Why you partner with agent’s number one, and then what you do with them?
Joel Schaub 22:28 Well, the big thing here is what I figured out years ago is I was unable to control interest rates. I mean, go figure here we are now but I could control the fees that a buyer paid, because I was willing to take part of my commission and give it back to a buyer. So I found out early on that if I made a little bit less than every transaction, I could really grow the business and it doesn’t affect the amount of service that I provided. So I give a $1,500 closing cost credit out of my own commission, to every single buyer that buys a home where their loan amounts over $250,000. And that usually in the beginning, it really made the difference for certain buyers that just didn’t have enough money to pull deals together. And so even though I’m doing millions of dollars a month, sometimes 20 and 30 million, most of its just back to basics, teaching, educating and helping agents close just one more deal. And if I can help you close one more deal by giving a commission back to the buyer, that’ll that in turn, hopefully get them to refer you more business and it grows. And I created this newsletter so that agents don’t necessarily have to have all the talking points. I had an agent literally post this up in their office. And you guys can get added to the list. And it’ll give you just some great things that are happening in real time. We do it once per week Murray, who’s on my team is just an absolute Rockstar who helps me put this together, and it’s mortgage market update. And you can get added to the list, just email me joel@rate.com And just say add me to the mortgage list, right? There’s a mortgage market update that we do. And it talks about rates. And it talks about things that you can have conversations with just to sound one step above your competition. And that’s what it’s about is education, leading with value and just helping people and that’s what we’re about.
D.J. Paris 24:25 Wonderful well that is it I get I get your your weekly email with rate information. And it’s really helpful it what’s great about it is it gives me the exact information, I would need the little data points that you post graphs in there, but you also make it really digestible and a quick, easy read, but with a lot of specifics so that I can go out there and then, you know, be able to professionally have a conversation with a few data points. And so I can say actually, here’s here’s what we’re seeing. So definitely encourage Everybody listening to get on this email newsletter, easiest way to do it just email joel@rate.com asked to be put on his newsletter, and he will add it. His team will add that add you to that. And we just want to thank again, Joel. You know, Joel is such a great example of a trusted lending partner. And if you don’t have somebody like Joel, in your, in your quiver of with all your arrows, if you don’t have somebody like that, who’s able to get on the phone with your clients and talk to your talk to your buyers and sellers about what’s going on, then you need to find somebody like him, If not him, him. He would also like to speak with you too, if you’re interested in working with him directly. So definitely reach out to Joel get on his email newsletter. But also, if you have any questions about what’s going on in the lending world, you know, Joel works at guaranteed rate, they’re licensed in all 50 states he can assist, and if he can assist to connect you with somebody that can. But we want to thank Joel for coming on our show every month. Joel is a trusted partner to our show. He’s been providing this kind of advice ever since basically, we started and our audience loves it. So Joel, thank you on behalf of our audience for coming on yet again. And welcome back to Chicago. And we also want to on behalf of Joel and myself want to thank the audience for continuing to listen and support our show. One thing we ask that you do before you sign off or after you sign off rather, it’s just telephone I think of one other realtor that could benefit from this conversation that Joel and I had about, you know what’s going on in the world right now? And how do we talk about it, you know, in a intelligent way with our clients and send them a link to our to this episode, you can find every episode we’ve ever done at our website, keeping it real pod.com. And also anywhere podcasts are served, just look for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. But Joel, we will see you next month. And very excited to continue having a conversations around rates. And also and beyond rates Joel has is really a marketing genius. So we’re going to we’re going to not only talk about rates going forward, because that’s what’s you know, leading the news. But going forward, we’re going to go back to our basics of despite the fact that we can’t control rates, like Joel said, we’re going to give you strategies to no matter what’s going on in the rate world how you can continue to evolve your business. So that’s what we’re all about here. And Joel is we’re so grateful to have him be part of the show. Thank you for
Joel Schaub 27:30 that. No, I appreciate it a lot. If I’m an agent right now, before we go, there’s a lot to be positive about coming up this summer and fall, as those rates are a little bit higher buyers are going to have some opportunities. And it’s actually a really great thing to have some of the fineness in terms of the offers that are coming in. So lead with value. Be genuine, educate yourself, right. Make sure that you’re the person they’re going to and just stay positive. We’re here for you know, we’re really happy to be on the show again, DJ, thank you so much.
D.J. Paris 28:03 All right. Thanks, Joe. And we will see everybody on the next episode. So thank you so much. See you next time.
Pro Tips On How To Handle Stressed Buyers & Sellers • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Jun 14, 2022
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
In this episode Ryan discusses his firm’s competitive advantage in the market where he operates. Ryan and D.J. discuss what’s going on currently on the news and the state of the economy at the moment. Next, Ryan shares how he’s advising his agents on how to deal with upset clients due to the raise in the mortgage rates and also how he advises his agents to keep their emotional intelligence intact and be motivated in this very demanding market. Last, Ryan and D.J. discuss the importance of connecting with your network.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What do you say to your buyers when there’s little inventory and also rising interest rates? We’ll be discussing that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast can buy real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. Today is our monthly coaching moments with Ryan de April. Let me tell you a little bit more about Ryan, if you’re new to our show. If you’re not familiar with Ryan, he comes on every single month and gives our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching lesson. And the reason why is right April is a coach. He’s also a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and staff at deepwell properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style and his dedication to training. And he has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland also, he has offices in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Florida on April properties focuses on high customer service, managing and executing their agents, marketing and transaction management for them, so that agents can stay focused on their business. I’m gonna say that again, because that was a mouthful, managing and executing their agents marketing and transaction management, the marketing piece in particular I love because so few firms actually do marketing for their agents. But if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need from your firm, please check out D APR properties, visit D APR properties.com. That’s da p r i l e properties.com. Also the link in our show notes. Welcome once again, Ryan.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:54 Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me, TJ, how are you?
D.J. Paris 2:57 I’m good. I’m good. Can we just really, before we get into today, can you just talk about spend a minute or two on the really, I think your firm’s competitive advantage, which of course, you guys are an amazing company. But I think the thing you do that I don’t know any other firm that actually does is this idea of automating some of the marketing and the and the sort of stay in touch stuff with somebody sphere of influence. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I just think that’s so cool.
Ryan D’Aprile 3:27 Sure, yeah. You know, so there’s a place for everybody, right. And there’s a bunch of different types of companies, a bunch of different types of models. You know, and as we’ve gone, and we’ve grown our organization over the past 11 years, you know, one of the things that I had, you know, a lesson I had to reteach myself over and over again, is, is focus on what you have stopped looking over your shoulder and looking at everybody else. And, you know, this interesting in this industry is so interesting, because there’s so much comparison going on all the time. And there’s so many people, actually businesses, companies that are fighting so hard to be number one and market share, and to be the biggest and, and, and whatnot. And our philosophy is, you know, we just want to be the best for the agents that are in our company. And, you know, people who feel comfortable in their own skin, you know, with the organization that they’re at, and we focus holistically on each agent, one agent at a time. We do know that 80% or more of everybody’s business comes from their network, either directly or indirectly. So
D.J. Paris 4:40 you guys have the data by the way, you have data to back that up. But isn’t it that’s actually true for you is 80% I think that’s worth repeating to our listeners, who again, I know this isn’t a new number that you’ve never heard before, but it’s an important number to remember is that 80% of your business will come from your existing net worth network. Sorry.
Ryan D’Aprile 4:59 Yeah, and so you know, there are a lot of tools out there, we have the tools, and every other company has the tools out there. A lot of companies position themselves as they got the technology for you to do the marketing, ours is we have the technology, but we also have the salaried employees that we trained to actually do it for you. So you don’t have to dabble around. Now, there’s some people that are, that really want to micromanage the processes themselves. And they do, they can do it with us or anywhere, we’re just the kind of organization like, let’s just take that off your plate, let’s handle the transaction management for you, let’s do the basic monthly marketing for you, you stay focused on your network and being in flow with your network. That’s, that’s kind of that’s, that’s one of our main value propositions, in addition to continually having events and when I see events, educational events, at the offices, on marketing, on how to network properly on, on and trans management on, you know, team building, if that’s what you want to do, right, there’ll be more of an individual one on one type of process on accountability. And so it’s, you know, we are not the largest real estate company out there, nor will ever be, and it’s not what we’re striving to do, we’re, we’re just kind of focused on to be that the company for the agent that’s at our office, that’s with us. That’s, that’s really, you know, break it down it, you know, it’s, I was, I think I mentioned to you on another podcast, you know, working with an agent, and marketing a big, multi, you know, double digit Million Dollar Listing, and and dialoguing with her, I’m like, Listen, you could be a one man real estate company, or the largest real estate brokerage in the world. And the reality is, once that listing hits the MLS, it’s on every single website across the country, right across the world across the world. And, you know, the real value is emotional intelligence, and the management of the process, the real value to the agent is, how do you get that business? And is it marketing? Or is it consistent, repetitive marketing coupled with, you know, making those individuals in your network feel like the center of the universe, you’re the one making them feel like that, so that when that certain percentage, which is 60%, every year? transacts. You’re the one that they’re coming to? That’s that’s what we focus on.
D.J. Paris 7:33 Yeah, I, I didn’t mean to derail us, but I just think I’m somebody who recruits realtors. And I will tell you, recruiting agents from your firm has never been successful in all the years I’ve not that we specifically go after your agents, but but we really well, and your recruiters, I’m sure come after. Yeah, I know. It’s everyone’s recruiting everybody.
Ryan D’Aprile 7:57 Yeah, exactly. It is.
D.J. Paris 8:01 But I will say that your office is is really interesting, because the idea that you do actually do mailers, email campaigns, you know, basically the, the repetitive consistent things that agents oftentimes just maybe don’t have time for aren’t particularly skilled at, I just think is such again, I, when I was when I started, we had zero agents we have, I don’t know, almost 800 now, and I’m not saying that to brag, because who cares? But the only reason I’m saying it is I’ve seen agents come over from every just about every other firm, at least here in the Chicago area. And I’ve not ever talked to somebody who said, Oh, yeah, you know, my old firm did all of that that for me. And I think that’s a really, really impressive value add and the coaching of course, I know that that’s probably the most valuable thing you do. But I also know that every firm says they do as they do coaching so I know that doesn’t know like a big deal. Yeah,
Ryan D’Aprile 8:55 look, I’ve got you know, 11 years in business and now we’re starting to start to really see the boomerangs come back. The ones that did get pulled away in this track and yeah, it is it is it is nice to hear them say I didn’t realize how much easier it was here. And you know, you leave people are like well, I think it’d be easier because they got this technology got this I got that and you realize well shit, they got it but I’m the one who’s got to do it. I’m like yes, we all have it. It’s all at our fingertips. I just want to have one of our salaried employees do it for you consistently and then and more than that, it goes beyond that. And it’s just in to each their own you know and whatever works best for anybody I have always had the philosophy is focus on the people you have. I am shocked you know I don’t know I am surprised and how we have these standards right and work that’s right you know of course we have to protect the consumer and and then I solicitations and everything else but how just how brutal the recruiting all the release is going on and it’s it’s so much noise in it. You I really feel like it affects the production of the agent more than anything else and takes her eyes off the ball. You know, just got to wherever you are, he’s gonna figure out is this mine? Is this my tribe, and this is my home and die. You know, I always try to tell our agents is, this company might be doing that, and we’re not going to, and don’t worry about it. Otherwise, we’re living to be that other company. And that’s not who we are. We’re living to be us. And so, you know, yeah, I got in the business because I wanted to be home for breakfast with my daughters. I wanted to be home after work, I wanted to trap I didn’t want to travel for work, I wanted to coach their teams and be around and I wanted to sell real estate, so I could be with my family. And that is true, too. Today, you know, I don’t want to be the next social media star I don’t want and that’s fine. If you do I’m not not gonna just, it’s not who I am. Right? I don’t want, you know, I’m not the real estate brokerage, you know, that’s going to have a party all the time. Afterwards, I look after, you know, after four o’clock, it’s like my days done. And I’m gonna go back, like, you know, like I was telling you earlier, I’m a big personality, but I’m an introvert. You know, I, I like my space after a while. And, you know, I got into our business, because I liked the freedom, I liked the flexibility. I think sometimes we get into the business, we lose our way and also become somebody that we weren’t, and we weren’t planning on. But if there’s so much outside influence that can mold us. Three years goes by, and also you’re somebody that you didn’t plan on being when you got out of the business.
D.J. Paris 11:38 Yeah. Yeah. And you have maybe not as much time as as you’d like. Because you’re, you’re, you know, you haven’t learned how to set appropriate boundaries yet. And I
Ryan D’Aprile 11:49 and I tell people to is like, really think hard when you talk about teams. You know, why do you want to have a team, I see individuals, I know who they are, or different organizations, I know what I know, at the core, you know, what their values are and what they want. And they think that a team and a team is great. If you do it, right. But they think a team is going to get in there as like, you’re looking at three times the amount of work that you’re doing right now as an individual agent. Yeah, you know, and there’s a way that you can partner up, but not the team, and that we could talk for hours about that.
D.J. Paris 12:24 Well, I will say one thing about teams, because I know teams are one of the biggest sort of buzzwords of agents, you know, right now, in the last several years in particular is like teams, teams, teams, teams are better than individuals, we’re constantly hearing that message. And there’s obviously an argument to be made that teams are stronger, in theory, to individuals. But what I’ve noticed, and it’s not about, I’m only referencing people who want to join a team versus who want to start a team. But people who want to join a team, because I talked to a lot of agents who are newly licensed. And that is almost exclusively one of their requirements, or something they’re looking for is I want to join a team. And I say, if you want to join a team to learn from a top producer, and really just become almost like an apprentice, like I think, Boy, what a great, great, great thing to do. If you’re going to a team because you’re afraid you won’t generate enough leads, and the team is going to help you build your business. I always say that might not be always the best reason to join a team if you’re going to learn, great if you’re going because it’s going to solve a problem of I don’t have enough business. Well, that’s where Ryan would love to say, actually, you probably have a bunch of business you don’t know about in your existing network.
Ryan D’Aprile 13:36 Yeah, we have a structured mentor program to help with that. I think teams are pushed and they’re pushed by our industry. And I and I truly feel that they’re pushed by our industry, especially leadership in our industry, because these companies have just eroded who they are. And there’s next to no profit in real estate brokerages these days, next to none. And and the leaders of all these individual corporations are causing this and teams are their outlet to give them the resources to manage people because they financially can’t afford it. You seen a lot in the multi tiered multi level marketing. It started in the multi level marketing type of real estate brokerages because they mean that team leader is essentially all of a sudden as a quasi managing broker, acting as a managing broker, what a typical manager broker does and typical trainer does. And the burden gets shifts off the brokerage to that lucky, quote unquote lucky team leader. And so I think that’s why you see it across the industry because the leadership in the past 20 years of our industries, I feel have done a great job of just running the ship, the nose of the ship of our industry into the ground, and it’s been a Race to Zero. I mean, just, it’s all up now. There’s publicly traded companies, you see what the numbers look like, you know, and it’s it’s all over the place and that’s why in my philosophy That’s why I think teams are so relevant nowadays. And I think it’s because the brokers just just don’t have the resources to provide what they definitely need because the business has been eroded.
D.J. Paris 15:12 Yeah, managing brokers now have to do so much that anything that can help take some of the, you know, their workload off, like training and support team via Taenia. Teams. Yeah.
Ryan D’Aprile 15:25 Yep. Team. Team team team. Yep. Tim, Tim, Tim. That’s how they that’s how they scale leverage. And so just as a real estate and open, especially if you’re gonna be a team leader. Yeah, well, let’s,
D.J. Paris 15:36 let’s talk about what’s going on currently in the news, because I always think it’s important for realtors to know what their clients are seeing what they’re reading, and then having some sort of response so that it gives them a talking point gives them a reason to pick up the phone. And right now, we know the Fed raised rates, biggest rate increase in quite some time, I forget how many years over nine or 11 years or something. But whatever it was, they raised that I think 50 basis points and half a percent. And so we’re seeing, you know, mortgage rates now in the fives. And the news organizations are capitalizing on this news, because if it bleeds, it leads. So there’s fun, negative sort of articles to write about this and how everyone’s freaking out the market tumbled today. And I don’t know if it’s still down, but it was down 1000 points. Mostly. And funnily enough, we had a jobs report come out today where our unemployment is almost at a record low in their country history. And we just added 428,000 new jobs, I think. And yet the market still reacted, mostly, I think, to some of these interest rate, sort of news, people are freaking out, which of course, buyers now that means buyers are reading this and freaking out. And we’re also in a low inventory environment in most markets in the country. So there’s not a whole lot of inventory rates are rising. So people’s purchasing power is has come down. So I’m just curious what your what you’re talking to your agents about? Or, you know, let’s talk about Well,
Ryan D’Aprile 17:08 I was Yeah, well, actually, I was just on the news on NBC five the other day, about talking about this exact topic. So and here’s what I told, Mike sous chefs key, I believe, I hope I’m saying his name incorrectly. Um, you know, interest rates are rising clearly. And I think they’re going to reach probably eight and a half percent by the end of the year, in my opinion. Wow. Yep. That’s just an opinion. You know, they say about opinions. But yeah, I really do. I think they’re going to be there. And I think I think they have to go there. I think the the government of the Fed is doing what they can to slow down the economy, and I think there’s not gonna be any soft landing, I think they’re gonna slam on the brakes. And I think we’re gonna go into recession. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But I, you know, inflation is completely out of control. And, you know, the market is reacting to a number of things. And, and I don’t think it’s just the rise in interest rates, I think there’s a lot of flight to value right now, there. I mean, like, I don’t know, if you saw on Apple TV, we crashed, they lost $4.4 billion $4.4 billion last year. There are so many, quote unquote, tech companies, because we work so they were a tech company, they’re not a tech company. They’re, you know, shared office space environment. Yeah. And, you know, everybody, all these investment bankers backing these quote, unquote, companies become unicorns, you know, and what’s happening is there’s a flight to quality in in commodities. And these companies that have lost hundreds of millions and billions of dollars for the past decade have never made money. They’re the ones that are gonna have a real hurting, that’s coming their way. I feel, and I think it’s gonna be very similar to 2020 crash, and Warren Buffett was calling it back then I think he’s been calling it back now. It’s like, how can these companies work for this long and lose billions of dollars in cash? It’s, it’s, it’s mind boggling. And then people relate say, well, it’s Amazon. Well, it’s not Amazon, you know, these organizations, you know, and it’s even in our own industry. And it just, it makes you scratch your head. And I think there’s a lot of just poor fundamentals out there that it just the pendulum is going to come back to the center and as to, but I, you know, I think for us, as real estate agents, all that set aside, is people who are going to buy and sell regardless of rates. And, you know, put that to the side and, and you have to speak with your buyers and you have to speak with your sellers, and you have to ask them the most important question. Why are you buying and selling if you understand that, that’s going to be more important than logic. It’s going to be more important than logic. We all make our decisions based on emotion. And people get married people get divorced people have children, people upsize, people die. And there’s reasons for people to move on to the next chapters of their lives and we just have to accept it. And regardless of rate, they’re going to make that move. I mean, the price point might be different. But the move is going to happen. And if you understand at the core, what and why your client assuming that what why your client is moving, then you’re going to be able to best help them navigate the market and give them life advice as a friend, and help them walk through the process of this transition is what? And that’s what we do. So, yeah, I think rate rates are going to continually increase inventory starting to come on, I think we are leaving our quote unquote, real estate recession, which we’ve been in for four or five months, I think we’ll be coming into a real recession for the economy. But when that happens, I think the inventory is going to open up even more and transactions occur more, which is good for us as real estate agents, mortgage lenders, it’s a different story. You know, there’s a lot of lenders in the past two years that were doing 50 $60 million in volume, and learn to live at that lifestyle, when in reality, they might have been more of a $50 million producer because of those zero rates, environment that we were in for two years, never my life and and the President had companies 63 years old, he said never in his career, has he ever seen a refinance market, like we saw in 2021. If you’re a lender, and you don’t have purchased business, you’re not in the business anymore. And that’s just what it is. And it’s, it’s really kind of sad, see, there’s you know, in our industry, there’s layoffs going everywhere in the mortgage lending business. And, and only the best that and when I say the best, those who have real estate agent relationships are going to survive, quite honestly, and it’s not going to change for a few years, then there’ll be another refinance, boom, because you’re gonna go from 8%, down to seven, and maybe five, and whatever happens, right, I’m just giving us, you know, fake numbers here, just to, to make an extra point here,
I’m not seeing those specific rates, but you know, you will have those, you know, that, you know, that refinance market will come back again, but, you know, buckle up and buckle up, not in a bad way, just, you know, it’s an expression, it’s like, the the rates are rising, educate your consumer, very educate your buyer, understand that, three months from now, the rates gonna be higher than it is today, your purchasing power is going to be less. So you may want to consider settling, and getting in which you can now and it because if you want to move now, for a particular life reason, make the move. And sorry, my the lines ringing, I’m calling him from the phone here. Because rates will just continue to go up because they have to just slow down this inflation that we’re having. And there’s some serious inflation we’re having right now.
D.J. Paris 22:49 Yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. It’s crazy, brutal, it’s brutal. It’s yeah, and but for let’s think about, like a specific case, example. So let’s say I have a client, and we rate locked them three or four months ago, at at a lower rate than than what exists today for their lending, you know, percentage, and then now that has expired, because, you know, we couldn’t find inventory, or we couldn’t find the right property. So I know this is happening to a lot of agents. So all of a sudden, now, that rate needs to be reran. The purchasing power might might have come down almost certainly it has. So there’s, there’s there is a little bit of a loss there to the consumer, or at least in their mind, there’s a perceived loss of like, Oh, I really wanted the $700,000 home now I’m maybe I’m limited more towards $500,000 or $600,000 properties, which, again, doesn’t feel good as a first response to a consumer. So what what would you say to an agent to help sort of, you know, Coach that, that buyer through that, and so they don’t, you know, give up or, you know, get too upset about it?
Ryan D’Aprile 23:58 I mean, yeah, I mean, the best ways is to really, you know, and it’s, I really think this is the Achilles heels for most real estate agents, they don’t truly understand why their buyers buying, you know, and they give me very simple surface answers while they want a bigger home. What does that mean? That’s not you got to really dig in deeper, because if you understand that, you’re going to be able to help somebody navigate through that adjustment of hey, you could find a four to 700,000 home now it’s a $500,000 home. Now, again, why are you buying and maybe now you shouldn’t buy? Maybe it was an upgrade for you. Right? Maybe it was an upgrade for you. Maybe that’s why you were buying or maybe it’s a different school district and you have to and there’s reasons why you have to be in that school district. So guess what, now you got to settle and it’s not a big deal, and it’s not going to change. And again, the affordability is gonna go down and so you got to every what I love so much about this business is how unique it is. and very much how unscalable it can be as well, because each individual customer has a different scenario, and you got to give them your time and your effort, and you got to understand who they are. And then you can consult with them on the process. So, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, and I don’t want to apply logic to an either it’s more emotional, right? You know, it truly is. And they those those logical, hey, you know, it was gonna cost you $1,500 cost you 1900. But look, you can have a tax write off, you can have this and that. It glazes over them. You know what I mean? It really does. It’s, it just this is, this is what it is, it is what it is. And for any of us who are buying in the next 12 months, the rates are only going up period. They’re only going to go up. Now the good thing is is more inventory is going to come on, when the market, the economy slows down, even more. Inventory is going to come on. Yeah, and I just think I think you just got to take it day by day. And don’t let too much of this. consume you.
D.J. Paris 26:10 And I think you can also mention, too, if somebody is if a client if a buyer is struggling with this, no, oh, gosh, I have this perceived purchasing power decrease that feels bad. You can also talk to them about how inflated pricing has been. And maybe that $700,000 home that you could have afforded three months ago, if we had could find one was actually not worth maybe it was only worth 500. And as we start to see rates going up, and again, more inventory, which means low, you know, pricing comes down a bit. Maybe it all works out, you know, for exactly the same sort of property that you thought you could afford. But you really were overpaying anyway.
Ryan D’Aprile 26:53 Yeah, I don’t know about that. I mean, I think so. I mean, there’s obviously it’s a possibility. I don’t I don’t see a huge correction in prices. I see. Maybe he clearly I see eventually, you know, the multiple offers coming to a slow and then you know, people paying 95% of asking price versus 110% of asking price. I mean, it’s been a shitshow out there, to say the least. I don’t see. I see the market correction, quite honestly, mostly in the markets, not the housing market. I think the housing markets pretty healthy. With the lending, you know, regulation that was put in place and how healthy people are. I think what we have is a a grossly I think very similar to what happened on housing markets going on to the equities markets. And these companies that have lost billions of dollars that really have no right have even been in business. And you know, my question is, whose money is it? Don’t tell me it’s JP Morgan’s money or, or investment banker by that’s, that’s, that’s got to be somebody’s pension fund money. There’s got to be some police fund teacher fund, that’s got to be some, you know, Pipe Fitter pension money that’s sitting in is getting invested in these companies that, you know, you tally it up, you know, one company lost maybe $10 billion over the course of five years. That’s one company, you know, that I wonder, is that going to take its toll on our economy? I think that I think it’s gonna be equities. But who am I?
D.J. Paris 28:25 Well, let’s so we talked about maybe how to counsel the customer who maybe feels they see these new stories, they’re freaking out no inventory, raising rates. So we talked about Yeah, the emotional intelligence of the realtor to be able to counsel the client. I’m also interested in I and I only deal with realtors, I don’t deal with with consumers, like you’re sort of same way you teach, you know, you’re coaching and teaching and talking to agents. But agents are also I find, even even ones that that seemingly are usually pretty bulletproof to some of this news. I’m even seeing that sort of little bit of mild depression kicking in with realtors who are like, Ah, how do I keep going when there’s no inventory and rates keep rising and my clients just can’t find so what are you what are you talking to your agents about to keep them motivated? Keep them sort of in a positive mind frame as they navigate these choppy waters.
Ryan D’Aprile 29:23 Sure, it’s real easy one, okay, as a real estate agent and a loan officer, which are basically you eat what you kill, okay? You need to go into the office every day. You’ve got to go to work. If you want to succeed, you have to go to work. That’s it. And so many people I have seen you know, all you know, I I’m running an errand, I’m selling some furniture, I got a dentist appointment or something like that. I mean, there’s so many excuses. I became a real estate agent at the age of 28 years old 29 and from 22 to 29 or 21 to 29. I went to an office every day for to six years old, I still go to my office every single day, unless I’m taking a day off. Me too.
D.J. Paris 30:04 I have I have, I would love to be able to say that I work just as effectively from home and I can work from home, I don’t have to be here. I do not work. Well, from home. I wish I did. Because it gives me another option. The reality of it is I’m just more effective in the office. And I suspect most people are would, if they’re honest, would say the same thing.
Ryan D’Aprile 30:24 It is and everybody listen to this podcast, please understand the failure rate is 90% or higher in real estate 90% or higher. And because it’s a solopreneur, ship type business, and it’s very difficult, you got to find a tribe, you got to find a community, you need to find an accountability group, the office is the best way to get out of the house one to focus on what brings you business. What brings you businesses, your network. And so if we all look at it, 80% it’s just across the board. If 80% of your business comes from your network, then why aren’t you spending 80% of your time on your network? Get off social media, get off the MLS, get off the errands, and and all the other stuff? I understand there’s a transaction management part of the business that we have to do. But I’d be surprised if, if if I mean, if it was more than 10% of our industry spent more than an hour and a half on their network. Once a week, I really think it’s that small. And those are the ones saying state.
D.J. Paris 31:23 I was at a top producer breakfast recently. And one of they asked a similar question to what I just asked you is how do you stay motivated? And, you know, it’s certainly not the easiest time to be a realtor or me if you’re just if you’re a listing agent. It’s a wonderful time. And if you’re working with buyers, it’s more challenging. And so there was an agent, top producer who does more by side transactions. And they were asking her in this forum I was in, you know, how are you staying motivated? And she’s like, Oh, my gosh, it’s so easy right now. And everyone went, what, how? And she goes, Well, right now I’m contacting every single person I know. And she’s been doing this since December, and saying, hey, you’ve probably heard that for everyone in her Data database, as a home owner, you’ve probably heard prices have have quite gone up quite a bit. Now is a probably a pretty good time to check out to see what we think your home’s worth. And she goes, I just do this all day long. And her thought was I always am asking, How can I provide value to the people who already know me? And she’s like, I just run these reports all day. And I had that eye contact each person individually and say, Hey, I’m going to swing by and drop off this new report. So you get an idea of what’s going on. And I was like, boy, that’s so simple. And it’s brilliant. And it’s valuable to people. So if you’re wondering, well, how do I spend time on my network? I just gave you an idea from a top producer. That pretty good idea. Because every you know, book, people visit Zillow, 200 million Americans visit Zillow every single month, as some of those people are checking to see what their homes worth. And by the way, the Zestimate just as a little aside, because I was just add to Zillow forum, believe it or not, I know people will disagree with this, but a data scientist was speaking to us and he said our Zestimate is now within plus or to plus or minus to 200 basis points. So within 2%, we think we’re accurate. So people are checking this and you know, not that you have to agree with this estimate or not. But we know people are checking this, right. It’s kind of Zillow is main thing. And and so we know they’re checking it. So why not be there? The maybe give them a more accurate version of the Zestimate hand deliver it? And boy, I would love if somebody would do that. For me. I’ve never even run my own report on my own property.
Ryan D’Aprile 33:35 Yeah, how are you going to talk for hours about that? But I do agree. I agree with you about the network and diving into that network. And that’s, you know, that’s the most important thing and I think a lot of us, you know, yeah, I’m just good. My Zestimate is off by $400,000.
D.J. Paris 33:54 To use is not one of the accurate ones. Just went looked at
Ryan D’Aprile 33:59 it right now. So, but anyways, um, but it’s a great tool. It’s a great company. I just, I’m sorry, you got my curiosity. So I googled it, and I went to his estimates, I just go, you know, through my address in there. Um, but you know, I go but my
D.J. Paris 34:15 point, my point by saying that, though, is that’s an easy thing that you can do at any time to give value to your network. That is something that no one else is probably really doing that unless, you know, they’ve worked with realtors before,
Ryan D’Aprile 34:28 right? No, I agree with you. And I guess here’s an ethic. Here’s where we kind of end it. Marketing. Marketing is incredibly important. All right, in advertising, incredibly important. And then ask yourself, am I spending more time marketing and advertising myself than I am connecting with people my network that should not be unbalanced. You should be connecting with people in your network more than you’re in marketing yourself, in my opinion, in our business, in our very unscalable business and you could have three 400 people in your network. You can Make a half a million to a million dollars a year, if you do what I tell you, and spend more time connecting with those individuals than anything else, market and advertisers, of course, but I’ll bet you most people spend more money on advertising and social media marketing, and all this other stuff than actually rolling up the sleeves, digging in and saying, Hey, how are you? I was just thinking about you what’s going on? And then move into the next person.
D.J. Paris 35:27 Yeah, I’ve had my same accountant for I don’t know, however many to 13 years, maybe I’ve never met her in person. Why am I with her? Because I’m too lazy to find someone else. Is she? Maybe? Is she the very best accountant in Chicago? I don’t know. But you know, I am whether because I like her. Like her. I’ve never even met her and I but I like her when she sends me emails. She she’s, you know, I think she’s competent. I haven’t been I haven’t been audited yet. So let’s hope that she’s doing a good job. But the truth is,
Ryan D’Aprile 35:59 all decisions are made professionals are hired by other professionals based on likability. That’s it. And you know, they did a study and they realized that consumers hire real estate agents arbitrarily, it’s in one to three days, it’s very quick. It’s a very quick segment is usually the first person that comes to mind. So your job is to be friends of the people in your network, get it. Sorry about that. My phones blowing up DJ, because I got a three o’clock that it’s coming up on the heart here. So I’m sorry, it’s throwing me off. But that’s the most important thing for you guys to be doing.
D.J. Paris 36:30 Yeah, connect with your kids. Again, check in with people see how they’re doing. What’s going on in your life. Oh, by the way, mother’s days this weekend, what a great opportunity to pick up the phone and call everybody you know, who you know, either is a mother or has a mother and just say, Hey, I was just thinking about you this weekend, hope you’re having a great Mother’s Day or pet parents are also mothers, right? A lot of I know my girlfriend likes to think of herself, I had to get my girlfriend a Mother’s Day card, who because she has a cat. That’s another great thing you can if you should know which one of your clients who you know who have pets, that’s another thing you could do is call up say, hey, Happy Mother’s Day pet parent, or if they have, you know, children, you can do that, too. There’s lots of ways to connect with people. And again, that doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the news, right? We just know it’s the time it’s that time of year where mothers are celebrated. So there’s lots of ways you can deepen those relationships. And I think like you were saying, if you focus on that, I mean, how many realtors are reaching out to everybody they know to wish their their sphere of influence a Happy Mother’s Day, maybe they’ll send an email a blanket email to everyone with a little cute, you know, picture on it that says Happy Mother’s Day. We love mothers. But how many understand
Ryan D’Aprile 37:38 that marketing and advertising? That’s not? That’s not exactly good for you? Yep, exactly.
D.J. Paris 37:43 Yeah, yeah. And so what can you do this weekend, if you’re if you’re not busy, because there aren’t much inventory, call everybody you know, and say, Hey, I just wanted to wish you a Happy Mother’s Day and and see what that does for you, as a business as a business owner, as an individual agent, I’ll bet you, I’ll bet you there’s no negative you will not get one negative response to that. And you might even get a few customers on it. And you can always say, Hey, by the way, if anything changes for you, if you ever want to talk real estate stuff, just let me know. But I just wanted to call on wish you Happy Mother’s Day. You do that you’re gonna you’re gonna have great success. So I’ll let Ryan I know he has to get to his next meeting. But I think we gave a ton of value here in this in this episode. So I want to thank Ryan. Again, Ryan is the guy who runs between office to office to do in person trainings, coaching, you know and meeting with his staff. So he absolutely walks the talk. So if anyone out there is looking for a different firm, especially in the Chicagoland area, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, if you’re looking for a firm, where it’s it’s really, you know, coaching and training led and helping you with your marketing, D APR properties is a great, great option. So check them out, do properties.com Ryan has tons and people that would love to talk to you about what they offer, as well at Ryan has a lending institution Midwest lending, if you’re looking for a new loan officer, you can check with him as well. And then also, they have title and a bunch of other services they offer too. So definitely check out D APR. They have lots of lots of things. They really have a tremendous amount of products and services for their agents. And also we just want to thank Ryan for being on the show. He’s been with us almost since the very beginning comes on every month, and provides tremendous value. So thank you, Ryan. And on behalf of Brian, we want to thank everyone who’s listening has made it to the end of this episode. And we ask that you do just one thing to help us continue our show which is telephoned think one thing about one other real estate professional or if loan officers are listening or anyone that finds value in this content, please tell someone else about it. Let them know about our show and send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com they can sign up to get emailed every time we have a new episode, which I know I do for podcasts I listened to or they can you can just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. So Ryan I will let you jump to your three o’clock. Thank you so much for being on the show once yet again. And we’ll wish we wish everyone a Happy Mother’s Day to all though by the time this goes out, it will be after Mother’s Day. But if you’re watching us live right now, Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms.
Ryan D’Aprile 40:11 Thank you, JJ, appreciate very much.
D.J. Paris 40:14 All right. Thanks so much, and we’ll see everyone on the next episode. Thanks,
Ryan D’Aprile 40:17 Ryan. All right.
How To Win Every Listing • Little Sparks • Krista Mashore
Jun 10, 2022
In this episode of Little Sparks Krista describes what she does to attract sellers and provides tips on what every agent should do in order to build a competitive advantage when listing homes. Krista also emphasizes the power of videos and targeting your audience.
D.J. Paris 0:00 There’s a little secret about how to win a listing presentation before you even show up to the listing. We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Krista Mashore 1:28 Are you ready for little sparks? I am ready for little sparks. I’m presuming Sure. I’m so happy and honored to be able to contribute. Today we’re gonna be talking about how to win before you arrive, how you can have the competitive advantage amongst your competition when listing homes, how to get sellers to say yes, I want to work with you. Okay, let’s get started.
All right. So first of all, thank you so much for your time, I totally appreciate it, I know that you’re busy. And I am going to make this absolutely worth your wild. So every single month I do a boot camp. And I teach agents how to utilize social media and video to dominate their market, we show them how to truly truly stand out and position themselves as the authority in real estate or in lending. And I’m going to show you today a little bit about that process. Now. What I do when before listing presentation is really, really important. And what you have to understand is that you are always on a job interview anything and everything that you do that you’re on a job interview, right? People are watching you even before you know that they’re watching. So in order for you to be considered a solution, you need to be solving a problem. So the first step is entire process is to find out what problems people are having. Now, to do this the best way you need to understand who your client avatar is meaning Who who are you going after? Are you going after sellers? Buyers? What’s their age, socioeconomic status? You know, are they married? Do they have children? Are they moving up? Or are they moving down? Like what’s the exact type property that they’re trying to buy or sell? Like how can you truly, truly speak directly to the person that you are going after that’s the first thing know who you’re going after know, anything and everything that you can about them, because the more that your content speaks directly to somebody, the more likely you’re going to convert that person into a client. And then third, speak and teach to those problems, those concerns those dreams, like, speak to them through your videos, through your content and through your messaging. Okay, so I should just strategy at my boot camp every single month that we teach people how to get sellers to raise their hand and ask for a market analysis. If you go to Chris diminisher.com, forward slash boot camp podcast, that’s Christianae short.com forward slash boot camp podcast, we can tell you all about that three day event. And so we teach people how to get sellers to ask them for a market analysis of their home. Now, let me ask you a question. If somebody’s asking you for a market analysis, don’t you think they’re probably interested in? In selling answers? Probably yes. So what that means is we need to make sure that we do anything and everything we can to impress that client to really, really get them to say yes to us, right, super, super important. So I’m going to show you when a seller raises their hand and asks for a market analysis. First of all, there’s this whole process that we do before that step to get them to raise their hand and ask for a market analysis. I think I have a training on that somewhere. I will try to find that and stick it in the show notes. For you guys. I will I’ll stick that in the show notes for you. We teach you exactly how to get a seller to raise their hand and ask for market analysis. Now understand this works for anything. The strategy behind that training can work for credit repair, getting buyers trying to dominate a certain neighborhood. Anything at all they’re trying to do that strategy will work with this one was specifically for getting sellers to ask for market analysis now, people would ask for market analysis and what What I would do is I would create video content. And I would create video content that spoke directly to a specific problem that sellers were having. Well over the past couple of years, until just recently, it was basically limited inventory, right, there’s no inventory. They’re afraid if they sold their house, they would be homeless because they wouldn’t be able to find a replacement property. So even people that wanted to sell weren’t selling. So I created video content, all about selling, how to be able to sell a house in a seller’s market and still be able to find a replacement property, why selling is a great time, and how we can help them. That’s the first step creating content. Now, I’m going to I’m going to share my screen. So highly recommend you go into the show notes if you’re just listening to this online. And what I want you to do is I want you to
to watch the video, because I’m going to show you a graph and it really, really kind of puts the point home but you can listen along, we’ll try to be really descriptive as possible. But if you can also watch the video of this, it will really really be helpful. Okay, so I’m showing you my screen here. Now what I want you to think about is this is it’s blurry right now, what I want you to think about is when I create video ads so first of all, I’m going after sellers and I create video ads, right videos of people now when you create a video, first of all, what happens when you’re watching a video, people get to know you, they get to like you they trust you. They see you as the authority, you’re literally developing what they call a parasocial relationship with you. People act like they know you because they’re seeing you on the other side of a video. So when I know what sellers want, or no matter what the strategy is that I’m trying to accomplish, and I figure out what the problem is that people are trying to solve, I create video content around those problems, then I take those videos and I place them so people are actually seeing them. Now I know that people are afraid to do video, but here’s what I’m gonna tell you about video video has helped me create two multimillion dollar businesses, both in real estate and in coaching video is is going to fast track your success. And that’s how you love that’s how you sound so you can learn to do video. But when you put video in front of people you’re winning before you arrive, because they can watch your content they get to know you, you can break down their barriers, you can position yourself as the authority, you can make them feel more comfortable, you can add value and you can just let them binge watch and consume your content. But if nobody sees the videos, it doesn’t make a difference that you even have a video to begin with. Right. So you’ve got to make sure that people actually see your videos. And you do that through running ads, where people are showing up, where are people, they’re online, they are on social media. So I will create video content and I will put that video content in front of people. So I run a Facebook ad. Now, if I’m competing for a listing presentation, and there’s Krista and I’m running Facebook ads, and I’m putting my videos in front of people, and you’re not. Now I’m gonna be super conservative, let’s just say that that gives me a 5% better chance of winning than you know, I’m going to say something, it’s more like 50%. Somebody’s seeing my videos over and over again. And I’m targeting them and I’m retargeting them and they keep watching all my content. And they’re binge watching me and I’m like stalking them and showing up wherever they’re at. And I’m giving them value, I’m probably closer to a 50% chance of beating you out on a listing if we were competing, but let’s just be super conservative, we’re just gonna say 5%. Okay, so I put the video content out there. Well, now the next thing is, now I’m going to retarget more videos around the solution, more videos around what they’re looking for. Now I’m going to 10% Let’s just say okay, now I’m going to continue to nurture these leads, and I’m going to give them more, I’m going to retarget more videos, but more videos in front of them, I’m going to add more value, let them get to know me more, give them more value, help them more, educate them more. Now at a 15% chance of winning again, it’s probably closer to 85. But I’m going to be very, very super like like, you know, unrealistic here, let’s just say just gives me a 15% competitive edge. But you’re still at zero because you haven’t done any of those. Then what happens now now, these people have watched three videos of me talking about selling. So now I’m going to direct them to my what’s my home worth funnel, where they go to a landing page, and it’s me with the video saying, Hey, would you like to learn more about the value of your home? And if you do, just do me a favor, let me know, you know, bedrooms, bathrooms, and give me a few details and I will give you a valuation of your home. Now, I’ve directed traffic to this landing page, I’m now at a 20% chance of winning and you’re still at 00 My gosh, really I’m probably at around 200% If they get to that landing page and if they raise their hand and say I’d like analysis I would say that’s probably a 200% chance of probably meeting but let’s just be really conservative will say I have a 20% chance of beating you
D.J. Paris 9:34 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests? Of course it is a follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss and now back to our episode.
Krista Mashore 10:54 So they go to the what’s my home worth funnel 25% Now I’m going to be retargeting them to go to a seller seminar. Now they’ve requested a CMA for me, I’m sending them to a seller seminar, funnel, where there’s 20 plus videos that talks all about selling. I’m talking about, um, you know, what are contingencies? What you should pay for is marketing important important. How do you make sure buyers qualified? What kind of things that we do? What are contingencies? Like I’m educating them all about the selling process. They go to my seller seminar, they binge watch my videos, probably at about a 500% chance of winning, but let’s just say concertedly, now I’m at 30, you’re still at zero, okay? Well, now, I am going to drop off because they requested a market analysis, I’m going to drop off the market analysis to their house, I’m also going to drop off my marketing plan to their house, I’m going to drop off my book, the seller, the savvy seller that talks all about selling, I’m going to drop off a seller’s guide, that puts me probably at about 1,000%. I’m probably about 1,000%. Right now more likely to win that listing. Because I did that, okay. I’m just saying 50% I’m bulking all of those together. But we know that when they get just the marketing plan alone, which has been built and created to to really convert these people to show my authority to show what makes me different, that I am probably going to win, then they get the seller guide and to get the book. I mean, I’m an author, for God’s sake, I’m an author talking about selling a house that just gives my level of credibility, like through the roof, I’m probably at about a 3,000% chance at this point of getting that listing, but you’re still at 00 My goodness, okay. Then I’m gonna follow up with that CMA. And I’m going to do a digital review of the CMA I’m gonna do a quick video and say, hey, it’s Krista disruptive and marketing planning a book and an in market analysis to your house. Do me a favor and go to your inbox. Because I did a quick three minute review of the market analysis for you. Okay, guys, I’m seeing him at 60%. But if I when I do that, which I do, when somebody requests a CMA, I do an individualized personal review of that I am now probably closer to 5,000%. Let’s just say it’s 60%. You’re still at zero, okay? Then I’m gonna send them to my 17 minute marketing pre listing video. Okay, now that 80% You’re at zero. Now they’re watching a 17 minute video of me talking about all of the digital marketing things that I do, how we get hundreds of hours of watch time on every single video that we create. How the National Association of REALTORS says that 67% of buyers will walk through a home that they see online, right, I talk all about how we create funnels and landing pages and videos and how we you know what we do to market their properties, folks, I’ve pretty much knocked you out of the park. By now I’m pretty much guaranteed to win the listing, let’s just say it’s only 80% You’re still at zero, okay? Then I send them you know, again, they get digital copies of my CMA, a digital copy of my marketing plan, a digital copy of my book, a digital copy of my seller guide. I’m probably like, again knocking out of the park. Now, let’s just say I’m at 90% You’re still at zero, okay, then I send them a video that tells them how we get on average 21% more for our listings than our competitors based upon the marketing that we do and I show them over a year’s timeframe. How our marketing efforts can you compare like for like how we were able to sell our homes for an average of $166,000 more than our competitors. You heard zero I’m now 95%. That’s probably closer to 1,000%. Let’s just be conservative and say it’s 95 and then I’m going to send them seller testimonials. I’m going to send them marketing, marketing videos of my properties. I’m going to show them why they should hire me and then I’m going to continue to retarget to them. You are still at Zero and I am at 10,000% chance of meeting. I hope this makes sense to you. So what are you doing to win before you arrive? What are you doing to get views while you snooze? What are you doing to position yourself as differently than everyone else, folks, that is how you can win new business as a brand new agent or in a brand new area, you’ve got to be willing to do what other agents are not willing to do and other lenders are not willing to do. So. You don’t want to go up against me in a listing presentation because we will win pretty much every single time because we do all of those steps. When somebody requests a CMA, now somebody has scheduled a listing appointment, we do all of those exact same things except we do not hand deliver the CMA we do that in person. But we do everything else book marketing plan, drop it off digital copy, marketing video, why the marketing video works, what that means we do all these things before listing presentation, we also send a card to remind them a text message to remind them and a personalized phone call to remind them about the unseen equipment. So that’s what we do to attract sellers. That’s what we do to get listings. What are you doing? I thank you so much your time and I appreciate you spending this time with me. I hope this is valuable. This is helpful. I want to see your real estate business, your lending business explode, but you got to be willing to do things other regions are not willing to do to get a different result. Again, hope this is a little spark of interest to you. Thank you for your time and I’ll see you next time.
The Renaissance Real Estate Agent • Jennifer Wehner
Jun 08, 2022
Jennifer Wehner the CEO and Team Leader of Wehner Group goes back all the way to the beginning of her journey into real estate business. Jennifer talks about her failures and how they brought her success and how important it is to keeping track of your activities. Jennifer also discusses how is she coaching the management of these challenging times in the market. Jennifer shares the first piece of advise for new agents. Last, Jennifer discusses the importance of digging deeper to find your “why”.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What does it mean to be a renaissance real estate agent? We’ll discuss that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Jennifer Waner. She’s also the author of the book, The Renaissance real estate agent, we’re going to talk about what that means and why you also need to be a renaissance real estate agent. Before we get to Jennifer. A couple of quick announcements first, please tell a friend about this show. Think of one other realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Jennifer send them a link to our podcast or our website or our Facebook page, whatever. Just tell people about our show. We appreciate it. And the second second thing I asked for all for our audience is to please leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening to this my voice on right now. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Tell us what you think it helps us continue to grow and improve But enough about me and this let’s get to the main event my interview with Jennifer Weiner.
Today on the show, our guest is Jennifer Wehner group with exp in Scottsdale, Arizona and all over Arizona actually, but let me tell you about Jennifer from being a waitress and a teen mom in Riverside California, to now becoming the CEO of a $200 million a year real estate team. Jennifer Waner has a PhD in grit. In her 18 years in the business she has been through the greatest ups and downs the market has to offer from Oreos and short sales to flipping homes commercial real estate and everything in between. She kept her business alive through being on the cutting edge of digital marketing tactics, including blogging, video and internet lead generation, as well as other tactics in 2014. She started her team the winner group now in 2021. Just eight years later, the winner group did over 200 million in volume and continues to be in the top 10 producers in Arizona annually. In addition to building your own team Jennifer serves as a coach and mentor to other agents across the country. Jennifer is dedicated to helping agents create their own extraordinary real estate business, allowing them to leave a legacy, build a healthy lifestyle and empower their clients to do the same. Jennifer is a wife, a mother of four, a skydiver, a biohacker serial entrepreneur, and is a upcoming author with her book The Renaissance real estate agent coming soon. Now please Venice visit Jennifer at her website, which is Wainer group.com. That’s w e h n er group.com Waner group.com And also check her out on Instagram. She’s at Jennifer dot Waner. We will have links to those in the show notes so you can find them there Jennifer Welcome to the show.
Jennifer Wehner 4:27 Namaste Thank you for having me. It’s uh I know we were talking about channel and just I know what you’re dealing with you know it’s a gritty it’s a gritty it is one gritty roller coaster and the faster the ride is getting these times these days because when I got in and oh three it’s like we just were like cutting edge we had IDX where the it was on a CB you know the MLS? Yeah, sure. And I got into video and oh nine so also check out my YouTube channel. But you know, that was was like, cutting edge for the time. If you look at it now that video looks like it was produced in 1972. But yeah, things have changed, and they change fast. And with technology and emotions and stuff we’re changing. We’re having to pivot and change that roller coaster has gotten a little crazier.
D.J. Paris 5:16 I agree. I’d love to start all the way at the beginning of your journey, because our audience always loves to hear especially somebody with as much time in the business as you and all the different things you do. But I’d love to start all the way to eating why real estate? How did you get in? Tell us that story?
Jennifer Wehner 5:33 Well, let me even go before that. But you know, my great grandma, I’m into legacy, you know, my great grandma, on my dad’s side, she came from Ireland as an indentured slave or servant. But I think seven years to pay your ship ship was sorry, ship passage is not like a really sure mount. But you know, to be able to own land because the British, I don’t know, the British at the time, had we’re doing a genocide on on Ireland to get power against us. But you know, she escaped, you know, that famine and that war to come here for freedom, and worked off her way to buy real estate, which I grew up on that real estate, you know, I grew up cried crash motorcycles on that real estate. But, you know, I had the freedom I remember just running out in the fields like seeing, you know, it’s like owning land, to me was freedom. It truly is the American dream. Because in Britain, you didn’t get to own it. and Ireland, you didn’t get it, own it. So you know, I knew like I wanted to get out of Riverside, California, where I where I grew up. It’s like, the opportunities were just, you know, mediocrity is what most people were shooting for there. And so I moved to the beach, I got into fashion school, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I don’t know if anybody in the call has felt that way. Sometimes. I even feel that way today because we forgot to add aspiring astrologer and polymath but, you know, I got in and you know, met my husband and two dates later, I was like, congratulations. You know? Yeah, Haida. I was pregnant, you know, freshman year in college, going to fashion school, I will have multiple jobs. And you know, I’ve been pretty much supported on my own. So 16, I was homeless a little for a little bit of time between finishing high school and going to college. So you know, it’s like, you know, but always had a job or jobs that it was working towards, and I knew I’d get out of it. And I knew, I remember, like, when I first got my car, my first freedom, you know, driving through these neighborhoods, because I just grew up in a frugal house, like, you can’t have that you can’t have that. It’s like, are we waiting till we die? So we could have things you know, and I’d be like, Look at these beautiful homes, you know, all these, why not me? You know, and so and it’s sad, because I didn’t know what that visual dream was, you know, I just knew I wanted I’ve worked for enough crappy managers, but I wanted to own something I wanted to create, you know, because it kind of, like make a really crappy employee. Like, I’m really good. I was a good food server, I was a really good cashier, but like, those were not where I was going to end my life, you know? So I’m going to business school now fast track and, you know, my daughter getting close, that was always plan X, you know, it’s going to Cal State whatever, you know, doesn’t even matter. You know, for business. It was I was pricing out tanning salons, I was looking at hair salons, but from an entrepreneurial lens, and then my husband happened to have some friends flipping here. And he’s like, wow, and I’m paying $1,800 a month in rent to live in Huntington Beach and going to you know, school for whatever, like plan X. And I was like, Well, okay, we did the math and I was like, Let’s go you know, so we bought two homes and 2003 that were both of those mortgages were less than what we pay for rent and by the beach. Now I had did have to leave the beach. Did I have to leave like I was at the ocean all the time. You’d have to come to the hot hot desert and Chandler but then I did discover like Scottsdale in Cave Creek and like a lot more nature and Sonoran Desert and you know, I will say that my first open house they were skinny to have Lena by the tree and in Southern California,
D.J. Paris 9:16 our audience that doesn’t know what to have Aleta is you would you buy
Jennifer Wehner 9:20 big old hairy smelly pig and they’re like, and like all these guys and fatigues. Were holding it from the front teeth tree, the neighbor and I’m like jet my first open house. I’m like, all we see in California is like cockroaches and rats like what the heck is that and why are you doing that? But no, I will say it was a little culture and you know, the heat, but if not better hair and the heat I have to say, but uh, you know, and there’s a lot more cooler things to do out here. It was way cooler than I could ever imagine. But, you know, I do love that our you know, freedom, you know, is like really where I feel like I live and I I’m and we’re in our to the mountains we have Sedona literally vortexes that give you energy. And yeah, I love my I love my area. But
D.J. Paris 10:10 I’m also a huge fan. And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your, your, your story about your journey. But Sedona is a place that everyone should go visit just even for just the sheer beauty even if you’re like, oh, I don’t believe in energy vortexes but I have been on a couple of those hikes to those vortexes and if there is something going on, in those places, the energy is definitely different. So I know we’re talking about real estate, but I just thought that was
Jennifer Wehner 10:34 their job is actually something that we don’t talk about in real estate, but I actually coached to like one of the things we have as a visual wheel. Because I it’s like, do you want your employees to just be so maximum efficiency, and what if they hate their life, you know, how they’re not gonna be the best employee. So we have an exercise, and it’s actually in our cadence of our coaching to draw your wheel, and you want it to be as good of a wheel, you know, and it breaks it down to family love friends, money, jobs, spirituality. You know, we talked about self care and health. But you know, don’t take my word for it. The last time I was in Sedona, I’m like sitting there, and I already already touched the vortex trees that where you could feel the electricity go to you. You don’t have to sell me but this lady gave me some really kind advice to my son. And I was like, Oh, thank you. And she’s like, Yeah, I was here last week. And there was like eight of us, none of us were together. We’re all strangers. And she goes, a breeze came through and and we all looked at each other. Like, did you feel that as you feel that, and it truly was a breeze of like, love and positivity? And you know, we talked about business and numbers, and it’s so important, but what about the creativity in that? Because all execution comes out of the right side of the brain? And Are we fulfilling our spirits or minds? Because while it’s gritty, while it’s like Darwinistic right now, you know, at the same token, there’s this beautiful thing called collaboration, and people wanting to help and there’s so many opportunities and people that we can truly help. So that excites me.
D.J. Paris 12:09 You know, I think you’re right. And I don’t mean to interrupt your story again. But I think the idea of collaboration, I think technology is has made that easier in a way, because now we can find people a lot easier. But then we also know that like social media, and technology actually makes us feel more lonely. So I think you’re right, it’s kind of neat. If we use social media correctly, we can find our tribe, and then we can go meet with them in person and actually experience some of those, you know, we don’t have to be sitting on Zoom meetings. And now, I mean, I just took a flight the other day back. And you know, we don’t have to wear masks anymore. And I don’t know if that’ll change anytime soon. But it was nice. It was nice to see people’s faces in you know, maybe we’re all sick. I don’t know. But but at least it was nice for a brief moment to be around other people. And so I think you’re right, there’s something very special that that we’ve been missing for the last couple years.
Jennifer Wehner 12:59 And on the on the positive side about the mask, because I won’t get into the science, my opinions on that. But I felt we were looking at each other’s eyes more, you know, because we weren’t. And I actually think there’s so much powerful connection the eyes. And because I would look in people’s eyes, and I could see like they were like starving for connection. And I’m just kind of a person that likes to, you know, sometimes ask people like, you know, how are you doing? Really? How are you like, yeah, right, are people treating you and you’d be amazed how like, they would open up their life story to where they’re the cashier at target because no one’s talking to them?
D.J. Paris 13:35 Well, that’s and that’s because so few people in people’s lives do actually pick up the phone or or say, Hey, tell me how, where are you struggling right now? How are you doing? What’s hard for you right now? And, and everyone’s dealing with something hard at all times. But you’re right, you know, just you even thinking to ask that might be the thing that person needs to needs to hear that connection. So it’s always a good reminder for all of us to reach out to our people that we care about and find out how they’re doing.
Jennifer Wehner 14:03 Yeah, yeah, love on your people, you know, it’s out is always a person. It’s like, not always been the best with my p&l cells and stuff. Because it’s like, I’m always like, theoretical first, like, give get, and I always feel like the money always follows. Now, of course, we have systems. I mean, we have p&l and tracking and all of that. But if you do the right thing, you know, and really, like, be grateful show thankfulness show true concern and care and really, like, what’s the feedback? What’s the word on the streets, like people want that authenticity? People want to be heard. They want to know how they want people to understand, you know, and that is that thing that you know, we’re look, we’re in a new age, you know, in COVID kickstarted this new age and astrology speaking we are in the Age of Aquarius, a new age. So
D.J. Paris 14:52 yeah, it’s really it’s really interesting, I think and you know, we we have this really amazing people are so starved for connection Now, it’s never been a better time to like, decide to add more of that into, you know, your personal life and then also your business to like, you know, these are people that we’re, you know, working with that you know, are putting either buying something that’s super expensive or selling something that’s super expensive to them. And, and this is an emotional, you know, decision both ways. And it’s, it’s scary, you know, which whichever way you might be buying or selling, it’s, it’s scary and to have an agent that cares, that actually isn’t just going to get the deal closed, but sort of hold their hand emotionally through the ups and downs of a transaction and the market, I think is the real value of an agent. I’m curious to get your thoughts on that.
Jennifer Wehner 15:40 Oh, absolutely. And, you know, the client experience has always been something that we believed in, I believed in, you know, before he even had a team, I had a virtual assistant doing the really stupid stuff. And, you know, I would spending more time with people having client appreciation parties, making sure you’re sending out birthday cards and but like, the, what I have found is we’ve had to pivot faster in our conversations with clients. You know, it’s like, understanding, it’s not just an objection handler, like, oh, no, I’m not just going to tell you why you should buy with all these market stats. Of course, you should know these numbers. But you have to understand, I think the true Master right now are people that understand people’s emotions, and are pivoting in our communication, you know, across the board, you know, to our clients, to our team, to our network, to our families, you know, that that communication, and, you know, it’s like, kind of on that collaboration piece. You know, Charles Darwin once said, it’s not the most intelligent man, nor the most capable, but the most collaborative man that ultimately survives, because the most collaborative man, you know, like, if me and you were here, I might have my visual I think’s gonna happen, you add your input, and maybe my eye could see one step further. And then we bring, you know, Kyle whistle in the room was one step. And then now together, we can see a clear path together. And with change, things changing so fast, you can just sign up for a coaching program and be like, oh, yeah, here it is. This is the blueprint and tenure. Now. It’s pivoting, it’s changing fast. And you’re the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with, and not just in money, but also in collective energy and collective mindset. You know, my mentors, like, like, I feel like I have a big mindset, my my mentors will show me you Inc, you ain’t dreaming big enough. You know, and when they say the average person stops dreaming at the age of 30. You know, in Warren Buffett, he didn’t make any of his money until after the age of 65. You know, it’s never too late to really plan your legacy. And, you know, put Don’t, don’t put off tomorrow, what you can do today. And there’s always something today, we can start. And there’s always something today, we’re going to fail on
D.J. Paris 17:51 it, for sure. And having other people to help us along the way is just everything right? I was telling my, my I do so many of these interviews right after going through a personal training. So PRs are probably sick of me talking about it, because probably sounds like I’m bragging and trust me, I’m not because I actually, it’s funny, the only reason I go to the gym is because I have a trainer who there’s accountability, and I pay her and there’s accountability there as well. And it’s the only I don’t go on my own. I wish I did. But it’s just one of those things I’m not good at I fail at that. So I have it on the schedule, I have a coach, in this case, a workout coach, and she puts me through and I don’t have to think about it, I just have to follow instruction. But if I didn’t have her in my life, I and she, you know, there’s a million trainers, but But I show up because I pay her and so I can beat myself up about not getting to the gym on my own accord. Or I could just go at least I’m going and now I you know I have a trainer and I’m in better shape. But
Jennifer Wehner 18:48 it is the highest form of love. You know, they actually that truly is true. And if you think about oh, my mom lets me do everything like, like do drugs at the parties and stuff, you know, and don’t do like my mom, like like the 96,000 cc and ours. I love my mom, but like that was too many roles. But you know, it’s that accountability, like the care ability that truly is the highest form of love and knowing what you had said, Knowing your women, limitations, knowing your weaknesses, super important, you know, also know your strengths, but know your weaknesses are out. Because there’s a solution to every problem and a problem to every solution. And you found a solution.
D.J. Paris 19:26 Well, you you have your journey is I know we sort of kind of got caught in the middle and I that was my mistake, but I want to see sort of where you ended up because you weren’t just this, you know, teen mom who’s going to college got married, you know, raising a child trying to start business moving, you know, from from the west coast into the desert. You know, 18 years later here you are you have one of the very top producing teams in all of Arizona. You have this amazing team with you as well. You’re constantly adding to your team, and you have just weathered Not just a very difficult time in the market, right? I remember those early 2000s. And then of course, the crash. And then here we are now where everything’s very, very challenging, I think. And so you’ve weathered a lot of storms in this market and not only weathered them but but thrived. I’m curious. I feel like you Yeah, well, of course,
Jennifer Wehner 20:21 like, I failed a lot, you know, but
D.J. Paris 20:24 it, let’s talk about failure. Because I do want to talk about this, we were so rarely on the show talk about failure. But I always heard that the successful people fail more than the average person. And that’s why they succeed, because we learn through failure, it’s really the only way.
Jennifer Wehner 20:39 So making decision taking action. So, you know, my Done is better than your Perfectly Undone. You know, how many times do I hear in language? Like, I want to do it? I’m trying to do it like, and what did Yoda say? There is no try. Right? You know, but it’s like, yeah, I mean, I might take like, 100. Now, of course, there’s a balance, you know, if you have 100 priorities, you have none. So having like, your most important priorities and ideas, but having like structure and systems in place. And you know, I know, like with Renaissance book, you know, ever in the reason why I wrote it, because, you know, I did have a team, but I also, you know, have ancillary businesses. And you know, the compounding factor, I find most agents like they know, math like 3% and 6%. But like, do they really know understand the compound factor of what like, your investment is? And do they understand the market and the numbers so much as what we’re going into? No, because most people, and I’m not saying this to be bad. But when it comes to students, most, most of the time, their business plan is their email, maybe their to do list on a yellow piece of pad of paper and their text messages. You know, they’re just kind of flying off the seat of their pants. And that is a real estate roller coaster. It’s like, there’s no predictive, you know, and then it stops, like, do you want to get it to stop? Or do you want it to go, you know, continue to go.
D.J. Paris 21:58 And it’s all based on urgency, right? Like things are flying at them. They’re reacting, it feels busy, because I’ve got this massive to do list. And I have all these emails to respond to in text, and it feels like productive. And then at the end of the day, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t, I didn’t do anything to actually advance my business today, because I’m so busy.
Jennifer Wehner 22:15 Yeah. And that’s where, you know, in the Renaissance book I talked about. And first of all, if you look at the definition of an artist, every single person is an artist. I just discovered, like, I was an artist, and it’s what you know, inspired me to write my book with Forbes, that Renaissance real estate agent, how to unlock the art of systems into your business. You know, and because that visual wheel that we were speaking about earlier, I actually calendar block that, because you know, first put on the non negotiables, put your date nights in, do you know the top in the top 500 Fortune SEO companies, CEOs put sex into their calendar because you know, happy wife happy life, happy husband, but there’s probably no good rhyme with that. Let’s start building the foundations the non negotiables
D.J. Paris 23:09 Oh, we may have just lost Jennifer. Let’s pause for a sec. While we try to get Jennifer back. Give us just a sec. She is coming back online. So give us just a second we will fix this in post as they say. So thank you for those watching. Out there, your your back. You bought you bounced out for about a minute. So. So did I cut off? I’m sorry. You were just what we were just saying sort of how CEOs even planned things like sex, because sex is it’s important. And I you said that very quickly. And I just want to pause for a moment only because we had this weird pause app. And that’s a really important thing to track. Right? Like it’s as important as tracking your, your, your emails that you’re replying to and you might think well that’s sort of silly should I be tracking sex that doesn’t not very romantic and maybe it isn’t all that romantic but it is important because it’s a super healthy natural part of life that we should build in but so I just appreciate that use nobody has ever said in all hundreds of episodes. The importance of of you know, making sure that sex is part of the conversation and part of something that is tracked and I think we lost Jennifer again so give us just a sec to get her back
Jennifer Wehner 24:35 Oh my Gosh
D.J. Paris 24:37 Gosh, the doll is in technology fun. We were just talking about sacks. Right? We were we were for the first time ever in five years on the show the word sex came up so I appreciate that because you’re right. It is important to track every part of life that’s important. You know whether it’s how often am I calling you know, my best friend and checking in on them. How often am I you know, contributing? How often am I telling My spouse that how wonderful they are and what they need to hear. So same thing with clients. Same thing with it’s all. It’s all something that can be tracked. Yeah,
Jennifer Wehner 25:08 right. Like, I feel like my way one word of the year, we always have like a one word of the year, mine’s cadence. Because I find that there’s a cadence to everything. You can find a better cadence for your meetings, you know, why all the stupid stuff you’re doing like, there’s a cadence to like cramming in leverage to help out, there’s a cadence to relationships, friendships, children, you know, your team on the business in the business, but that what the calendar and technology allows you to do is to know exactly what you were doing. So if you really keep it updated, as a coach, I can let go and see what you were doing. You know, and otherwise, I’m, I’m just going off testimony. And most people don’t have like a visual of like, all logical facts that have transpired. And
D.J. Paris 25:53 I have I have such a horrible memory that I cannot rely upon my recall, to accurately talk about anything I you know, what did I eat yesterday? I’d have to think about it. And I’ll probably get some of that wrong. You know, the idea of writing things down and tracking is, is really, really important to avoid a lot of the like, what, you know, the sort of conscious our brains are
Jennifer Wehner 26:15 wired that way our brains every night we go to sleep, it discards all the information that thinks deletion, lots of deletion, that is actually the way our brains are wired. So if we’re expecting her to our brains to perform differently, just because we want them to, you actually know you have to work with the tools he got.
D.J. Paris 26:32 Yeah, well, let’s look. So right now, the vast majority of the country who agents are struggling in the most immediate sense with inventory, right? So I don’t know how it’s in your in your market, I’m sure it’s just like all the others little inventory rates are rising up that’s gets a little stressful for buyers, of course, with no inventory, it makes it tough for agents who are working with buyers. Of course, listing agents are having a wonderful time, although it’s also stressful being a list listing agent, because you’re getting 40 or 50 offers sometimes and having to deal with that. But how are you what how are you coaching your team right now on managing some of these these challenges? They’re right in front of them?
Jennifer Wehner 27:13 Well, first, I let them know what’s going on in the industry right now. Because Phoenix, we’re here like we’re in a special market, because every hedge fund tech fund marketing company that wants to see if their business model will work like to come here first, because we have eight to 12,000 sales a month high turnover, you know, easiest to recruit market. But what they need to understand is the industry itself is changing. The market is changing. Yeah, true. But what it should be more interesting is that the industry in itself is changing. Consumers and themselves are changing. And with that we haven’t really seen I mean, there’s been some harder some blips and you know, but there really has not been a challenging market until I’d say about last year. But if we look at what’s happening right now, now, if I could have gotten my DeLorean and gone back to like, oh, five, I would have known Oh, March of oh, five were in a market shift. However, I didn’t feel it until Oh, eight, we kind of knew you saw it no seven, but it was two years later, because that’s how fast real estate reacts. Now we have all the biome out my girls today that we actually are in a market shift as of today, by this fall, we will, we’ll hear about it more on the news, but the public’s probably not going to hear about it for two more years. So Winter is here. Now with that being said, you know, what does it take you 90 hours to get a license and 1000 hours to cut someone’s hair? You know, so
D.J. Paris 28:40 isn’t that amazing? By the way? Yeah,
Jennifer Wehner 28:43 yeah. And doing hair salon so I did the math there too. But you know, we are having we’re moving into an expert market. Our whole industry in itself is changing. It’s disrupted because real estate industry is 10 years behind every other industry in the world, in the most emotional industry in the world. So what are we having to do? First of all, we’re having to ask ourselves, do I really want to be here or do I want to bake cookies baking cookies there’s nothing wrong with it but if you want to be here because like you have the grit and the muscle and you love it so much there’s more opportunities in a challenging market then there is in a good in a good market so but it most agents that I see you know because they you know I’ve survived I still have PTSD like going through like what I went through you know, I mean made millions I lost even more millions i was i was worth negative millions. You know, just to get to zero was a win for me. But you know, that was 2011 when we really got into a good markets been loving years since we’ve been a good market. And we we’ve seen the most agents we’ve ever had. brokerages at the meantime are losing steam, they’re losing they’re not able to deliver on their value proposition. There’s not we all know real estate school is hogwash. Come on. Like, that’s why we join all the coaching but even coaching, you know, and I done 40,000 A year coaching and coaching said great for me, but to run a business, you know, coaching program never taught me how to run a business. You know, and it’s my mentors. It’s a circle of tribe and, you know, wise counsel and leveling up wise counsel, but it’s super important to know, right now begin with a long term in mind, do I have a place? What are my goals? Do I have different levels of different streams of income? Where am I learning? Who am I learning from? You know, it’s a time to kind of not like paws not be scared, not not like fear, takeover. But like concern? Yes, because we are in winter. And if you do not stop what you’re doing, and we know that there will probably be 30% less sales this year. And by fall, and by next year, it will see here we went from 33%. And appreciation last year to probably single digits next year, our rates are five and above, we’re gonna see threes and fours. But we can’t have conversations like this to our clients. Because what is it about more, it’s about feelings, it’s about emotions. And if we truly want to be here, it we’re turning into an expert market, teams are taking off. So leadership, as there’s never been more time that leadership, you know, and has a lot of responsibility, you know, and you, I believe you should accept that responsibility with integrity and character. And if you don’t want to be a leader like that, then step down. But if you really want to be a leader in the industry, and I hope every agent in this industry wants to be a leader, because what happens is leaders grow leaders, and we used to grow up in villages, right? Like, that’s how you couple 100 years ago, like we’d have three or four families helping each other out. You know, today, we’re kind of lonely on our own. And sometimes we feel like we’re on an island with no help. I certainly felt like that No, five, and I come from Podunk land, like, you know, nobody was a capitalist and my family and the, you know, people the way they looked at psychology of money, where I came from looks like money’s evil, you know, but the more money you have, the more you can give away. The more money you have, the more time choices and freedom you have. What’s the legacy not just that for your kids? Because sometimes you have to screw it up a little bit, you get a parenting coach, try to make it better, but what legacy Are we living for our children and great grandchildren, our community, our friends, because going through a weight losing everything where my home was going to be foreclosed, my card got declined for lice shampoo, that was really cool. And I was working seven days a week, so I was working the grit muscle, but I didn’t have the mentors that I had, you know, today back then. And I was just a 25 year old girl from Riverside, you know, trying to make it on her own, you know, and, you know, it’s time to level up and not rest on our laurels know that this is a sober and serious season. I have so much to grow in. I know I’m constantly being that dumb person in the room, find those rooms, you know, but be uncomfortable. You know, I know we talked about the real estate rollercoaster but I kind of almost feel like it’s a treadmill. And our FEC actually but standing treadmill, it could be running right now. But it’s kind of like you have to take one foot off the treadmill, you know, and you have to, like, it feels really uncomfortable. But if you’re on that treadmill, doing the same things every day expecting a different result, we’re working seven days a week, like that, you’re going to be doing that forever, it’s going to keep going. But when you get off that treadmill pause, because sometimes it slow down to speed up, you know, what can we do about low inventory? Well, we there’s a lot of different directions, I can go with that. Because with this, how many agents do we know that? You know, have you worked with that you like feel sorry for their clients? Like Right? Right? So
D.J. Paris 33:54 very common.
Jennifer Wehner 33:55 Who are your clients? You know, who should they work with? Like who is the best advocate for them? If you believe that’s you, it’s time to start. Start leveraging leveraging, leveraging out there’s a way a lot of different ways to leverage what conversations are you having with your client, you’re gonna have to shift and pivot those conversations to not I’m right, you’re wrong, but how, you know, how does it feel you know, and understanding you know, there was this is actually just from a mastermind I got off this morning from one of my mentors you know, where we collaborate every week, and I learned all the time, but you know, you could be if you’re looking at it, you can see this visual here.
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Jennifer Wehner 36:03 straight line and this is this is rent, or there’s a diagonal line here. So this is rent, this is equity, by equity. Oh, geez, I just kind of split that up. But it’s really kind of an activity that you’re going to do to show what the cost is of renting versus buying because it’s easier to rent might cost you a little bit more to rent. But when you show them, showing them is better than telling them and asking, you know, I find is asking, you know, as far as like how does that, you know, what are you feeling, you know, you originally wanted to sell you originally wanted to buy, you know what stopped that, you know, and they’ll tell you, you know what their biggest fears are, and it’s that we’re in those biggest fears is where we’re going to find all of the solutions of how we can be an advocate and showing them, there might be a number of different solutions for them. But there’s too many limiting beliefs out there. There’s too many false coaches out there teaching them things, and I won’t mention names, but some of them are famous. But if they’re really looking at real estate, what is still the American dream, or its real estate, what can be the biggest impact on your clients life, the compounding factor. If you know agents, this is probably good morning advice for you too, because you maybe you’re gonna want to buy some more acquire some more rental properties. But it real estate truly is American dream. And it’s fear that it’s letting people get in the way of that. And the way what we have to do is understand that and shift our conversations around what strategies in some of these long term strategies that have always worked. Robert Kiyosaki, you know, he’s one of my favorites. Sure, but look at the foundations of what’s really working and, and be able to be that expert to your clients, and you’ll win the war, because all the other saturated agents that don’t take it seriously, don’t put learning first, you’re kind of just barely flying off the seat of the pants, put iPhone photos up for their listings, those agents will go, you know, every hedge fund company thinking that they’re going to, you know, there’s a way to be everybody with just providing the best possible client experience.
D.J. Paris 38:23 Yeah, it’s so right. It’s the the client experiences is everything I just about a year ago bought a primary residence. And it wasn’t the first time buying a primary residence. But even though I’m in this industry, I’m not a practicing agent, but I work with, you know, lots of them. And I thought, oh, okay, and I had my, my boss was helping me just sort of making sure I was, you know, dotting my eyes and crossing my T’s. But I was freaked out. And I was stressed all the way through the process. And it wasn’t a particularly stressful transaction. But it just was like, I’d kind of forgotten how it feels. And I sort of wanted to relay that to all of our agents here, like, no, even if you know what you’re doing, it’s crazy stressful. And this is a great opportunity to be that stress guide to be able to help your clients as they get scared, and you know, the ups and downs of just any transaction, it’s like if you can do that, you will be so incredibly valuable to people that they’ll just tell everybody about you.
Jennifer Wehner 39:24 Value. Right? It’s it comes down to value. And I had a it’s funny, I had a client call me that she had already worked with one of my team members, they, and I think he worked with me like 12 years ago, but he called me and he’s like, What are you? And I’m like, what? And he’s like, Well, you know, the open door and the 72 sold and the but like what are you and I like I was kind of put on the spot and I was like, Oh, interesting. I’m like, real estate technician, you know, and he’s like, what is that? You know, like, you know, there’s like an art and there’s a science and there’s there’s the numbers it’s gonna be that different strata. Jeez, it’s changing fast. That’s me. I’m a real estate technician. You know, it’s, it’s really being the engineer. And if you can’t do it alone, like, let’s just put it out there. And you can’t even like, if you’re going to leverage can you leverage on one person? Because how practical is that? You know, you need to have a team. And that’s kind of my controversial opinion I put into my book. But, you know, it’s it’s growing the team. It doesn’t have to be 100 people, you know, but you need to have systems in place, and some of it can be outsourced. Some of it can be in person. But if you don’t have a team, you don’t have leverage, you don’t have a business. You pretty much indentured indentured servitude.
D.J. Paris 40:41 Yeah. Because the moment you stop the income stops as well.
Jennifer Wehner 40:45 Yeah. And then even exit strategies. When I asked agents like, what’s your exit exit strategy? You’ve been in business 30 years, you know, what are you gonna do? Like die in a front porch? You know, why are like prospecting? You know, I mean, I don’t want to go out like that. But, you know, it’s like, oh, no, buy investment properties. And we start sitting down doing the math like, Okay, how many would you have? Need to have your cash flow? 600 bucks, 800 bucks on new each one, how much would you have to save? Like, they would have to be 132 like they acquired and they would have to no whole other skill set. So, you know, it’s, it’s practical things today, like putting a plan in place, like I have a one page business plan and give it to you. It’s, it’s really simple one page, because if you again, 100 parties equals zero, you know, staying on plan, being able to pivot and being uncomfortable with change. And you know, recently it was that I’m wondering Italian because it opens up your heart chakra and, you know, excusing elitism, what, maybe someday, but I did a speech on school motto, you know, and what school motto, it means is embracing uncertainty, embracing paradox, and duality. And actually, if you think about it, anxiety is the closest thing to excitement, just as Hope is the closest thing to defeat. So in our darkest moments, and our confused moments and our nervous moments, there’s always a way to channel this to change. And to know that Elon Musk lives man, Elon Musk, and I don’t care how you believe on Him. If that doesn’t inspire you, the fact that we’ll be in Mars. And I already asked Glenn, if I could get dibs on expansion team in more hours. But you know, what does, you know, and it’s sad that people stopped dreaming after the age of 30. Because I remember when I was a kid, I had all these dreams, I got into real estate and I kind of forgot about him. But you know, dream big, you know, stop dreaming, dreaming? Don’t like live in anxiety that’s gonna give you nowhere Are you truly want to be what do you want in life? Sometimes it’s those big questions and kind of kind of throw some answers at No, seriously, sit back in a moment and journal it write it out under a tree in nature, send us some good music, but slow down to speed up, have a plan in place. And look around, who are you going for wise counsel on your tribe? And at the end of the day, it’s you, you know, you’re the captain of your own ship? Where do you want to take your ship?
D.J. Paris 43:15 Yeah, I think I think all of that is such great advice. And it’s so again, it’s like getting off the treadmill of transaction, transaction, transaction, transaction, prospecting, customer service deal closed. Getting off of that a little bit. And now it’s kind of, there’s sort of you have a little bit of time now to do that, I think maybe more than when, you know, the last couple years when things were just exploding. Now, no, it’s
Jennifer Wehner 43:41 actually I mean, you know, every time you reach a certain extent in your career, you hit your new threshold of problems. So it’s all these skill sets you have to learn. But you know, that’s the uncomfortability so I’ve had to learn because my time was getting taxed. And I had to learn how to kind of tear down my calendar and rebuild it with a different cadence, so that I could add time that I’m most passionate about self care time like I coach and and reallocating that time to where it’s going to be the most valuable based on my time per hour and you know, which level I can help and then also time I need to learn so
D.J. Paris 44:20 yeah, it’s it’s about you know, building the life like you said, it’s starting with that, you know, drawing the wheel and saying okay, how’s my relationship with my clients? How’s how’s my business? How’s my relationship at home? How how’s my physical being? What’s my spirituality look like? How often am I hanging out with my friends and what nurtures me and what am I doing and agents you know, we we now if we don’t set appropriate boundaries our clients can with technology can ping us anytime day or night we can choose how we want to respond if we don’t have systems in place even around our own behavior. Even around what what you know, what are our hours, you know, an agent, should you be available? 24/7 I don’t know I don’t think I’d want to be
Jennifer Wehner 45:01 scripting for that. So next you’re just practicing. Well, I don’t want to 911 Senator Mr. Seller, so you know, if you reach me after they just seven, if it’s like, you know, mediate like now I’m like, of course, if we’re writing an offer, I’m just gonna be that’s not likely. So if you reach me after seven, you know, I just don’t respond, you know, if they do text me if it’s over something insignificant and they didn’t listen to, you know what I told them, and I just treat it as I didn’t do anything wrong. So I’m not going to apologize, I’m gonna come back the next day in my business hours, it’s really drawing your boundaries. You know, I teach, I think, you know, a lot of women because I think Mom, I don’t know mom shame or whatever.
D.J. Paris 45:38 But you have to be perfect as a mom, you have to do everything perfect. And you have to
Jennifer Wehner 45:42 always want to like be with your kids too. You know, I put all Sundays I will not work. And that was 2014 Snow 1516 Sorry, 2016. And I’ve honored that ever since I would not work Sundays, even before I had a team. I would pivot all those conversations that were on Sunday, I did have one backup person at that time. So there’s always a different way you can build this where you can start drawing your boundaries because I mean, Albert Einstein DaVinci like we all so many of the Great’s they tell you how important r&r is. And we know that all execution comes out of the right side of the brain, which is the creative side of the brain. So without r&r, you’re not going to be able to get that creation, you know, which which is going to cause change, you know, changing the direction you want it to to not, not the panic train.
D.J. Paris 46:37 Yeah, no, you’re right. And this is right now a lot of agents a lot of our listeners are in in that panic mode, because it’s it’s stressful right now to be an agent. I mean, it’s always stressful, of course, but right now it’s tough with with little inventory, you really have to be able to take time away from your business and say, Okay, how do I how do I provide a better service right now? While things are stressful? How can I take care of myself? How can I take care of my clients? How do I call my clients down? What do I do? How do I find opportunities? But I have a question. We have so many of our listeners are newer to the business. And I’m curious in because you are you bring on new agents, of course on to your team as well. What’s What do you recommend to to like up and coming agents or new agents, what’s sort of your your first piece of advice when when you watch this is
Jennifer Wehner 47:25 not a self promotion, this is just literally like, I’m going to tell you the honest truth. And you know, if I were to backtrack and go back to where I was in 2003, I would have done the same but teams weren’t prevalent. But we know in the results and story after story, the fastest way for new agents to get into production is to is to join a team, and a good one. So definitely like interview and know that you’re joining a team who went systems and that’s a whole other story. But you know, if they say they’re already working with buyers right now, maybe you’re more buyer heavy. If you’re a new agent, what’s more valuable of your time going out to see eight homes 12 homes you’re at now you’re two months later, and they’re stopped? They’re not following up with you? Or would it be more valuable upfront to say like, let’s sit down with coffee, come into my office, let’s set expectations up front, and really build that rapport getting somebody people are either running away from pain or going towards pleasure. So really getting deeper to understanding what their pain and pleasure and desire is. setting the expectations. Yeah, it’s crazy. Yes, this is going on? This is how I’m going to solve it. These are the different strategies, I’m going to allow you take you about an hour, an hour and a half. But how much more valuable would that time be? As opposed to? How do you lose your like the house? No, okay, I’m gonna write an offer. It’s three offers. No, if you actually take time, slow down to speed up, how better pirate buyer consultations, look, your seller consultation? Are you setting expectations there because we are in a shifting market. It’s not just price your home $500,000 with meth needles on the ground and sell it now you actually you know, have to set proper expectations there as well know what’s important to them. You know, it’s really get into the more humanism side and being the to professional, because we’re all humans, we all have emotions. And our clients do too. And we’re in this world of technology where they’re hearing from their co workers, they’re hearing from zooms they’re hearing from the media, which of course they only say good news, right for me, you know, so, of course, they’re in panic. So what they do every day. So just understanding that and being empathetic, getting down to like, kind of again, the basics. Yes, definitely forgot. But for buyers for agents to know. It doesn’t matter. I have agents on my team first year in they’ve sold 30 homes. You don’t I mean, so it doesn’t matter. Like how long you’ve been in the business. There’s a lot of agents that have been around for 20 years that that don’t have like, they’ve never called the past client their life, you know, so it doesn’t matter where You’re not in the business, even if you’re 65 you’re not it’s been Colonel KFC, you know, Colonel Sanders started his business, but who you are as a person is just like somebody that cares, you know, somebody that is open and coachable, curious, you know, be around those mentors, because things pivot, they change fast and know that that is going to be a part of not just real estate industry, but this world in the new world that we live in. And we have to be able to pivot with those changes and not let fear block us or our clients. Because we can dispel those fears and limiting beliefs. And there are so many more solutions out there then, you know, possibly we even know.
D.J. Paris 50:41 Yeah, it’s funny. I was just at a conference with Zillow. And I know agents have a very visceral reaction to the word Zillow, some agents like Zillow, some agents, of course, don’t. But they’re here to stay. They’re not going anywhere, and to push against them. I understand people are allowed to have opinions and I’m not here saying I’m pro Zillow, or anti Zillow. I don’t really personally think about it one way or the other, but, but they’re not going anywhere. And so then it’s like, Okay, if that’s if that’s the case that 200 million Americans are a month, go on Zillow, then we need to learn how to accept them as somebody’s part of the transaction, right? It’s just how it’s going to be. And we can fight it and we can get mad, or we can say maybe they’re making my job a little easier in a certain way. Because now I don’t have to do as much searching because my clients do a lot of the searching for me. And I can focus like you were saying, on the more human side of things, the things that Zillow can’t do. Zillow can’t do the human side. That’s not their job. They don’t want to do it. They’re not trying to do it. They’re trying to say, well just do the tech side. And I think that’s really cool, in a sense, because it opens up an opportunity for agents to have deeper connection because you have more time.
Jennifer Wehner 51:51 Yeah. Or maybe they could have saved 200 million and compete with Zillow, you know? Yeah, yeah. And it’s funny because when I came over to exp in 2018, it was because I was like, struggling like hardcore about how to build a team. And my mentors, Kyle and Dan moved in a week later, I was like, yeah, no brainer, you can see it. But I was at four people. Today, I’m at 40, and then my network to 60, and a couple of ancillary businesses. But you know, when we launched I had an open door at the time, and Zillow was at the time but you know, those were our competitors, but I was losing listings open door. I’m like, I can either beat them or join us. And now we have Zillow. It’s a it’s, you know, I don’t put all your eggs in one basket. But Zillow has been great to us. But I had them on my panel, because then I was like, Okay, you do a referral fee. I could have my clients go to you. And maybe if it’s a better service, I could still get paid because I can help with the human side of things. So we put them on our panel people that I was crazy, like, Why do you have open door and Zillow? I’m like, Well, you know, we have to like understand these are where our clients are going. They’re like, Are you are you spending that much money marketing and retargeting to your clients? Probably not. Where our clients going, they’re going to Zillow. So why not help you and your client by running them on Zillow seeing what what homes they like, you know, so you could be right or you can be rich? Which one?
D.J. Paris 53:21 Yeah, and being right is fun for about two seconds. And then you realize, oh, I maybe I lost the battle here. I lost the war, I won the battle. Because I was right. Anyone in a relationship knows this. Right? Better to better to get along then be right, because being nobody, you know, we we all we work in collaboration with each other, you know, it is called a cooperative commission. Right? We work together. Yes, we are sort of competing against the other agent, in a sense, although we’re really working together to get the deal closed. So seeing the universe is friendly, and not that everyone’s friendly, obviously, they’re not but just try looking for ways in which we can all get along and make things better. The agents I know that are the most successful and of course, there’s exceptions, but very few at least here in Chicago, we have 46,000 agents and I know a lot of the top ones because of the show and you know, just me being around long enough. They’re all pretty giving people surprisingly like I would have thought they would be closely guarded with their secrets now they’ll pretty much tell you everything and they’re nice. Being nice is an underrated thing to is talking about. If you’re really nice to other agents, you’ll you’ll see that things will start to fall your way just being a good human being.
Jennifer Wehner 54:35 Back to the basics, I know it’s like and then it just say no and aspiring CIDA they just detected life on Venus.
D.J. Paris 54:43 Yes, I know.
Jennifer Wehner 54:46 Plenty of loving and kindness and actually with Venus in retrograde it speeded up right next to Mars. Mars is the planet of war, but Venus and Mars are right next to each other. So that meant the most passionate energy of loving and kindness for the universe. was that we could have seen that was in February. So, um, but yeah, you would, you know, kill them with kindness. You know, we kind of hear these basics, sometimes, like we forgot we complicated things, but some of those things, basics, like they actually still are true and loving and kindness, it goes a long way.
D.J. Paris 55:19 Yeah, it’s one of those things. It’s especially like, if you’re in a multiple offer situation, and you’re working with a buyer, and you have a reputation. And again, maybe there’s 30 offers also going out. And yes, you might not win it, and odds are, you probably won’t, because 30 Other people are competing, or whatever the number of people are, but if you’re known as somebody who, you know, can get deals closed, of course, the professionalism part and knowing your stuff. And then just also being a good human being, you know, just, we’re just, we’re animals, we want to be liked. We want to like other people, we want to be out of conflict as much as possible. And if you’re somebody who, you know, your offer comes in, and they’re like, Oh, I liked that person. I liked that other agent. Sometimes things fall your way that probably shouldn’t fall your way just because you’re a nice human being.
Jennifer Wehner 56:03 Yeah, and, you know, like, I will say, like, um, you know, I don’t always think that university work this way. And but I’ve always been, like, a natural giving person. And sometimes all I’d have to give was a smile, you know, and I’m gonna say, there’s like, a total, like, be word side of me. So I’m not trying to be like, like, Jesus here.
D.J. Paris 56:20 Well, that’s an important thing. It’s important to have that too, right? When you need to stand up for yourself and set boundaries and defend them and, and say, Hey, that’s not okay, behavior, but of course, absolutely is it just like,
Jennifer Wehner 56:30 was uncalled for, because that’s just, you know, I’m human.
D.J. Paris 56:34 And we all make mistakes,
Jennifer Wehner 56:35 I sin. But, you know, it’s like, sometimes all you can give is like a smile. I’m like, you know, what, I don’t feel like giving all the books I want to talk, but you look like somebody needs a smile today. But I carry gifts on me at all times. I just feel like empowered. Like, when I have gifts, it’s like, I’m gonna gift you, you know, but it’s like, you know, it truly all like, you know, the freedom, like I was at this event a month ago with agents, and I two years ago, wouldn’t have had the freedom to give $10,000 away, just without looking at p&l, I think I get 15. You know, that felt so free to be like, just give and it’s like, I came back and like, positive things happen on my team. And I’m like, you told me that was the way the universe works. But I didn’t believe it. But I really think it’s true. And it really is true. When you have that grateful giving heart and you give without expectation. You know, you’d be surprised that you know, what comes your way?
D.J. Paris 57:31 Yeah, it’s that old mentality givers get and it’s, it’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough in this in this industry. We look just so much on how do we get a how do we get a client? How do we get the deal closed? You know, and then how do we move on to the next client? How do we get referrals? All of those things, of course, are important. And every all of its important systems are important. You know, you and I are having a more human conversation then, specifically around systems because, you know, I think this is a much more interesting conversation. I think, you know, I’ve had a million conversations around systems, I rarely have these kinds of conversations. So I hope our audience is is is tuned in as I am because you are not somebody who just has theories and the sounds cool. And it’s, it’s, you know, things that that work well on a on a podcast, you’re actually one of the top producing teams in Arizona, which by the way, is one of the most competitive markets for real estate agents as well. So this stuff actually works, which is the coolest part of it, right? It’s like you get to feel good. make other people feel good, contribute, and oh, by the way, benefit, you know, financially.
Jennifer Wehner 58:34 Yes, you know, it’s like, it’s like humanizing. You can do everything you can do with technology, okay, you can do some humanizing of technology, right? The action plans or communication, but, like, truly being human, is what your biggest gift is not. You’re an artist, again, human, you can systematize human humanism into your business. And then you could add, you know, what the time element is, but it is all day, you know, at the end of the day, you know, that’s what we all want, right? We all want connection. Nobody wants to be alone. They just want to believe that somebody has their back, you know, and when you have that, and when you have that for yourself professionally, someone has your back. And then you’re like winning together and you’re failing together. Because let’s just put out there, we’re still I’m there still. So it’s under construction at all times. For every win that you see, I have 1000 fails that you don’t and but it’s a constantly evolving, constantly evolving, that’s life. That’s world that’s our industry. And what if you’re constantly evolving with it? It’s exciting, you know, it’s an adventure. And it’s what we think we’ve never we don’t even know what the ceiling is yet. You know, for real estate. And if we think about it like that, that’s crazy because well it’s one thing to help a buyer and seller and I’m not saying anything like I didn’t love that part of it. Then when you can get back at a higher level and like literally change people’s lives, I have two of my team members in escrow right now on their second home, they’re going to rent their first one out, like they listen to my advice, I got excited, that already have equity before closing. And their spouses are so happy for me their kids lives. And I’m not again, it takes it takes me a lot of people to help me to be just live, you know. So like, shout out for all the people that have helped me. And all the people that like are going to help me and I’m going to help because the more we help, and we start in our communities, the more that that energy expands, and when you change people, when you can see the change that you’ve been given. And you see that happening in people’s lives, it’s been the most rewarding thing that I’ve seen in my real estate career so far. So
D.J. Paris 1:00:50 this idea of of helping other people and seeing them benefit from from your help is is truly remarkable. We are very fortunate when the show on this podcast, because we get we get a lot of that and we love our audience for telling us, hey, this really helped me or, you know, hey, if you if you interview this person, you know, that would be really interesting. And it’s so fun. And people say like, How’d you get started doing this podcast? I was like, I just did it one day, it wasn’t I’m nobody special. I’m not particularly a great interviewer. Really, I’m not I’m fine at it. It’s I’m okay. But the reality of it is I just did it, and no one else was doing it for having these kinds of conversations. And so it’s one of those things that you don’t have to be particularly skilled, like you were saying, the best, you know, your, you know, not imperfect plan that gets done is better than the perfect plan that never gets done. It’s just a matter of just getting uncomfortable. Like you were saying,
Jennifer Wehner 1:01:47 you know, that comparison is the thief of joy. I think I like comparison for the inspiration part of it. But if you were to see me two years ago, three years ago, I joined Toastmasters, my speaking skills, like I would have been like a nervous anxiety wreck on the show. So like, again, like, you know, we’re talking here we are today, and where would we be in five years? I’d probably be laughing at myself, you know, but you know, that, like, why, you know, I think like asking yourself why, you know, we’ve kind of generic, but for me, like why I am fueled and purpose filled and like driven more and just so passionate. And I would do, I’d coach, like for free if I you know, could because it’s just that’s how passionate I am, is like when I was in defeat and I lost everything. Like my kids. I mean, I was suicidal, that was back. I don’t drink alcohol, just full disclosure, I surrendered four years ago. But I was like, in full on alcoholism, you know, and I would never want an agent to feel that way.
D.J. Paris 1:02:48 I wouldn’t be probably felt very alone.
Jennifer Wehner 1:02:50 Lone like, like, I felt like I was in this canyon that I could never get out of it like world would be better without me. And I just even if it’s not that low, you know, I don’t want to an agent that truly cares and wants to be in this industry to ever have to go through that. So if I can save, you know, and we all can like together collectively, you know, where we agents can actually thrive and grow, you know, in this business and the ones that don’t want to do this and aren’t like committed enough like it’s Okay, goodbye, namaste. But truly namaste for the leaders that step up right now. Because it’s exciting. And I promise you any leaders or agents listening thinking that you don’t do it. I like to call myself a limiting belief like murder. I was gonna take my, like, ar 15 out, like take that like limiting belief away, because I wish somebody would have done that to me. And, you know, I have limiting beliefs right now I get checked on my belief systems, like almost weekly where I’m like, Oh, I wasn’t thinking oh, I wasn’t thinking big enough. You know, and it’s, it’s yeah, the people that challenge me and fuel me and all the people that help and support it. It’s so important at the end of the day, because we don’t take anything here. Like I don’t take my CRM to have it. I don’t take my bank account to heaven, right? Or wherever going, like purgatory or everything you go, but you know, I don’t believe in like flames, but we can’t take it with us. So what are we doing here? But money, like money is important to know because money provides choices, money provides freedom, money provides time, you know, money provides, like being able to change your family’s legacy and the legacies of however many countless families that are out there that are going to be touched by simply a spark of your influence.
D.J. Paris 1:04:43 Yeah, your boy you just said you just said so much right there. And that one is is is really thinking about what’s what’s important and what is your why and he said this it’s like, again, it’s back to basics. It’s it’s sitting down and writing out what’s my why am I doing this not just you know, to close a deal and And you know, what’s what’s?
Jennifer Wehner 1:05:03 Yeah, boring? Boring anymore. Like, let’s get past level one and level two guys straight to level two. But I’m like, what does it really mean to you? When 100 million? What is that going to mean? Are you going to give a library away? Are you going to like, what are you going to do with it? But like when you ask yourself, why, what am I most passionate about? What it’s like, if I could like, take this away from you tomorrow, what would that be? You know, but literally stopping journaling. Like literally write it down, keep a piece of paper with you. Because journaling and writing is just something that we don’t encourage enough. I run a real estate school practically, I am very involved with my kids school, I’ve taught art history. Throughout my kids schools, I’m just really passionate about art and teaching. But writing and you know, I have what my first book out, but there is going to be a memoir, that I’m actually about a third way down. So that will be on another day. But for the Forbes that Renaissance real estate agent, it I really put my blood, my blood, sweat, tears and heart in it. So it’s really like the fundamentals, it will have links all of our site with the actual tools you can use. There’s, it’s good that you guys,
D.J. Paris 1:06:13 well, we were excited for that. And so the book that’s coming out is the Renaissance real estate agent that once those those links are there, we are going to make sure that we promote this to our audience. And, you know, again, just a great reminder of the human side of this conversation of this business and making sure that we’re not only taking care of our clients, we’re also taking care of ourselves. And I think throughout this conversation, we’ve stressed a lot of that it’s it’s it’s maybe even doing a little bit less to get more sometimes, like you were saying, stepping back from the business just a little bit to making sure am I getting everything I need and being collaborative, having people in your life that you were saying can call you out when you need to be called out. And we all need to be called out. And that doesn’t mean negatively. It just means Oh, I noticed you’re doing this thing. And maybe you could try this other thing or, or how are you feeling? Or how are you doing? And then, you know, like you were saying, joining a team, if you’re new boy, you learn you’ll learn so much. And you learn so much faster when you’re on a team because you’ll just absorb energy and exactly you know what they’re going through. But just the idea of having a community around you having having a advisors around you who can actually, like I’m so grateful I have an accountant. I mean, it sounds so simple, because so many people do. But like I literally never, I mean, I probably should think about my taxes a little bit more than I do. But it’s nice to go. I’ve got somebody for that. And we go through things. And you know, as long as I think she’s
Jennifer Wehner 1:07:36 sorry, your app, as soon as you have to level up on your wise counsel. Yeah, I’m sorry, I had a conversation with my mom, we could go at our health and like say I love my doctor, like my doctor three years and like, Mom, you’re in the most pain like you’ve ever been in. So that’s insanity. Like, sometimes you have to level up your wise counsel. And it’s like for sure the likability factor. But absolutely. And sometimes it is addition by subtraction, you know, look at your core values of who you are as a person, because you’re not different as a professional organization, or you should you be and are if you’re not like firing and hiring with your core values. Know that how important those are. Because one bad apple can spoil a bunch. And I can tell you that as this year’s lesson of what I learned, I feel like I was my childhood pattern out of my professional life last year. But sometimes, like there is like like activities, you can subtract people you can subtract and people, you more people that you would add, because you were able to subtract. So it’s a net positive at the end of the day.
D.J. Paris 1:08:35 I agree, what a great place to wrap up, I want everyone to really start to follow, you know, some of the what you what you do on social media in particular, because I think a lot of your wisdom comes through in your your content. And Jennifer’s just a wonderfully thoughtful human being who also has these incredible achievements behind her. So she’s, like I was saying earlier, what she says actually works. And boy, isn’t that nice. That’s somebody else’s. And there’s lots of people in this industry that have done this, but you can sort of just follow in the wake of someone else who has already made a ton of mistakes, and you’ll be able to make new mistakes, then that are better quality mistakes. And how nice is it that Jennifer is willing to come on and talk about, you know, some of her challenges. And by the way, Kurt, I wanted to acknowledge the courage of sharing addiction issues. I mean, this is something that we look every family members got somebody, right, we were all used to this, this happens. We don’t talk about it a lot. But it happens, you know, people are struggling and and you know, it could be even a friend. But this is you know, the opportunity to be vulnerable. And to be honest, I always heard the honesty is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. And I never really understood that until until more recently. I’m in my 40s now, and I’m like oh yeah, truth actually being honest about what I’m actually going through like the hard things that is is hard and having people who love and support you in your life, whether it’s in your business, whether it’s in your, you know, your family life, whatever it might be friends, it’s really, really important so that you actually have a safe a safe place to be honest. But it takes courage and you you’ve demonstrated a tremendous amount of courage throughout your entire life. And that is something that I think is beyond admirable. And so congratulations on your four years of sobriety. That is, that is a big, big thing.
Jennifer Wehner 1:10:27 I’m so an addict, it’s now a sugar. And so I gotta manage that. But if I would love to end on one note that I really didn’t waste on. And it’s a it’s a quote from one of my favorite favorite Greeks. And it’s one quote I love, but he was a philosopher. But you know, not all philosophers are kings. But you know, we often say, but we have team leaders, we have brokerage owners, we’re leaders in the industry. But all kings should be philosophers. And it’s that questioning mindset. But at the end of the day, it’s ownership. Like, when you Marcus Aurelius said, the biggest thing you’ll overcome in your life is yourself. And so we can’t control the external, but we absolutely can control the internal neuro. And I’ve looked at like, in that, with that perspective, I looked at every single situation I’m in and of course, like, maybe it was 2% ownership. But, you know, like, no matter what I could see why, why I caused that external event to happen. And maybe that external event was there to be a lesson. But there’s ownership wherever you’re at like you are, that’s what your intention lies in your results. Look at your life today, if there’s something that’s not wrong set of blaming or look within, you know, it’s internal, because when you take ownership at that high of a level, and I’m not even all the way to the level I want to be, because the more you learn, the more you know, you’ll don’t know. And the more that you know, that you might not never know. But you can, like mastering making a commitment to self discovery for the rest of your life, I feel like should be a universal core value, and that ownership piece, it for every employee that you hire a client that comes in and didn’t work out well. Like, you can see why you’re at fault. And when when you see that, that is empowerment.
D.J. Paris 1:12:11 Yeah, and we all learn the, like you were saying earlier, we learn by mistakes, it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to feel crappy about the mistake as long as you then say, okay, what can I do going forward so that I, I can improve, I can get better I can, you know, it’s all of these things are learning, we’re talking about learning and we stop learning, you know, at 18 or 21. And, you know, a structured sense, you know, for some people go on for additional degrees, but most of us stop learning around 2118 to 21. And we just know, we read a book, it is not their fault, false, because
Jennifer Wehner 1:12:44 10% is only 10% of the population that actually want to learn for the sake of learning. And that’s just the way like people are designed. It’s not saying good or bad. But like, again, like stepping outside of your comfort zone, knowing where your weaknesses is, if anything, I could be learning junkie and not implement, you know, but, you know, so there’s always like,
D.J. Paris 1:13:03 that’s real common to where people get addicted to learning, but not implementation. So that’s why you need that accountability. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I read about podcasting for like, three years. I didn’t do anything with it. I knew how to do it. But I didn’t actually do it. Because guess what, it was really scary. And guess what being scared is okay. It’s okay to be scared as long as well. Yeah. I mean, you’re, you’re scared of just the unknown?
Jennifer Wehner 1:13:31 Well, and usually what I find that is, is that you’re scared of what other people think about you, oh, First, learn about anything from high school. Like, let’s that leave in high school. Because, like being different when you know, it’s like you like, again, like you might like have like stutter a lot. And there’s actually an agent that stutters a lot and he actually got a lot more traction on his video channel and was really successful agent. So you know, like, what your biggest curse you think it is, can also be your biggest gift. Because even being an addict for me, I see it as like a superpower. Because the more empathetic and more creative, the more likely to be an addict. So, you know, that’s when I discovered I was an artist. But, you know, they’re just look at yourself, because that again, back to the Marcus Aurelius, the Greeks knew a thing or two, and you are the captain of your own ship. And I’m imagining like a Star Trek Enterprise kind of ship. But your ship can look like a yacht or you know, real estate train, but I like ships for something like that. But no matter what, like you have the power, whether you believe or not believe you’re going to be right, but you do truly have the power to accomplish, whatever it is that you want in life, especially right now here in America, where we do have the freedom,
D.J. Paris 1:14:43 we are very, very lucky the freedoms we have in this country are pretty much unparalleled. And it’s easy to forget that if we just follow the news, and we just look at what’s wrong, and there’s plenty of things that are wrong, but there’s plenty of
Jennifer Wehner 1:14:57 years ago, do we remind ourselves of that? Our ancestors, all of our collectively were starving 100 years ago. And now cheeseburgers are 99 cents. So we have to remember, we have to go back in the past for nostalgia, and yeah, healing trauma and all that. But to learn the lessons where we are, because we can’t predict the future, we can be in the present. But we can see the trends. And together we can see what that visual looks like for the future, and how we can make a change for the positive. And I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot going on in the world right now. And we can end on this. But there is absolutely things we can do about it. Not running for president maybe but maybe being a better local leader, maybe volunteering more maybe helping your agent community more helping your clients that better accent but there is absolutely a positive impact that we can do, you know, in the humanitarian cause that we’re in.
D.J. Paris 1:15:49 Yeah, it’s it’s apps and even just smiling at a stranger as they walk by on the street as long as you’re doing that in a non creepy way. Even doing that might just be what that person needs in that moment. And you’re going to feel good when they smile back at you. So all of that is being said, so I am so grateful that we had this conversation. Jennifer, I want everyone to check out Jennifer two places. First her website Wainer group.com. You can see everything that her and her team are doing as well as follow her on Instagram, which is at Jennifer Waner, which is Jennifer dot, sorry, Jennifer dot laner. And that’s w e HNER. She also has YouTube channel. She does a lot of really cool things with social. She’s a coach. She’s an author, she’s a mom, she’s a team leader. And you know, a bio hacker, skydiver, etc. Last year, I can do astrologer I would I need it, I need it. I’m a Gemini, so I’m all over the place.
Jennifer Wehner 1:16:44 Anyway, your natal chart and transits?
D.J. Paris 1:16:47 Well, I am so glad that you were on the show. And on behalf of Jennifer and myself, we want to thank our audience for showing up staying to the end, we appreciate you, you’re the reason we do this. And we hope that this was of as much fun and value as Jennifer and I had. So thank you on behalf of Jennifer and myself. And then on behalf of the audience and myself, we want to thank Jennifer, she doesn’t have time to do this. She is just that busy. And she took time she made time to give back to our audience. And so thank you on behalf of everyone who listens and watches our show. And we want to thank everyone and please the last thing that we will do before we sign off, we asked our audience of just one thing, please tell a friend think of one other realtor, real estate agent, real estate professional, whatever it’s called in your neck of the woods and send them a link to the show. Maybe somebody who’s struggling that could that could benefit from all of these things Jennifer was suggesting about how to go inside and actually, you know, figure out what’s what you can do to improve your own life and your clients life and send them a link to our episode. This episode. The best way to do that, just send it to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is there. Or if they’re a podcast listener already, just have them pull up whatever app they’re using search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button, we would appreciate it. Jennifer, thank you so much. This was such a pleasure.
Jennifer Wehner 1:18:00 Now it’s truly an honor and Namaste and Namaste to your to everyone listening because the most important thing you can invest in is yourself. And so it’s it’s fun. It was fun for me I’m selfishly saying it was fun. So thank you. It really was an honor and you know Namaste.
D.J. Paris 1:18:16 Namaste. We will see everyone or I guess everyone will hear us on the next episode. I won’t see you but we will hear you and Jeff Lee check Jennifer and her team out and by the way Jennifer’s team is hiring. I forgot to mention that. So if you are in well, you can be from anywhere. You don’t have to just be in the Scottsdale area. But if you are particularly if you are in the Scottsdale area, you want to join an amazing team. Of course reach out to her but it could be anywhere in the world and if you can reach out to her and she can talk to you about the coaching she does for her team. So anyway, Jennifer, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks
Why Every Real Estate Agent Needs A YouTube Channel • Cody Steck
Jun 02, 2022
Cody Steck a realtor based in Salt Lake City, Utah goes back at the beginning of his career in real estate. Cody shares advice for agents in their first years in the business based on his own experience. Next Cody talks about his YouTube Channel content and how it helps generate business. Cody and D.J. discuss extensively the power of video in the real estate business. Last, Cody also discusses the investment part of his business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 you brand yourself on Facebook and Instagram. But what about YouTube? That’s actually the place you need to be next. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host to the through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Cody stack about why YouTube generates almost all of his business. So this is gonna be a great episode for those of us that are already posting on Facebook and Instagram, but not totally sure what to do with YouTube. But before we get to Cody, just a couple of quick announcements, please number one, tell a friend about our show. Actually not an announcement that’s a request. We really appreciate it the more people you tell the more listeners we have, the more episodes we can do. So please tell a friend about our show. And also leave us a review whatever podcast platform you might be listening to the show. Let us know what you think of it. Leave us a review. We read every review and it helps us improve and also lets us know what you like. So anyway, enough about all that let’s get on to the main event my interview with Cody stack.
Today on the show we had Cody step from Salt Lake City let me tell you in more podium now Cody stack is a 28 year old realtor and he’s also a real estate investor based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been working as a realtor for six years and has climbed into the top 1% of agents by volume in just within his first two years, which is absolutely incredible. Although Cody has found success with selling real estate his real passion is real estate investing. He loves to invest the money urines back into real estate the exact product he sells. And over the past five years, Cody has acquired 15 rental units Currently has five more under contract. Now in addition to being an investor himself, Cody also works with new and experienced investors and property developers he’s worked with brand new investors to buy their first rental property as well as investors who have been buying and selling real estate for over 50 years. At the end of the day, Cody believes that investing in real estate is the number one way to build wealth and live an amazing lifestyle. Now Cody would like to talk I’m sorry apologize. I was just getting into you’re talking about scoring Cody I’m sorry about that. So I want everybody though to before we Cody comes on I want you to check out his YouTube channel. We’re going to be referencing a lot of that today in the strategy he uses to attract investors and also buyers and sellers to his business, which you can find him at living in Salt Lake City. So easiest way to do that. Go to YouTube type in living in Salt Lake City. Look for Cody’s name comes right up and subscribe and check out the videos that he makes. But Cody, welcome to the show. Yeah, I’m happy to be here. Thank you. I’m excited to excited to have you there’s a number of things about you that are absolutely remarkable. Number one first and this is something that that you wouldn’t necessarily know from the intro, which is you are you do not work for another real estate firm. You have your own real estate office and it’s you as a solo practitioner. So not only are you
Cody Steck 4:40 sorry, I do actually have my license underneath a broker I’m actually with with real broker, but I got you I apologize. Yeah, but it is still it is still your thing assumption. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think maybe you and I got a little confused when you’re talking about it, but I I still have my license underneath a broker but I do everything 100% on my own. So I
Yeah, apologies if I if there was no, no, it’s it gets confusing these days because companies like EXP and real. For anyone who out there who might not be familiar with real real is sort of the newer kid on the block has a similar model to exp. And so that makes perfect sense why someone like you, you would be with with great companies, both of them. I’m fans of both, I think I think, for me, I always joke that I think real has like a much cooler, like, logo and presence. exp is a little older, so that, you know, their stuff looks a little bit more dated. But I always love reels reels. From a marketing perspective, I think they have really cool looking stuff. But anyway, but you have done a lot in your early part of your career here. Number one, starting your career when you were what 22 or so that’s not easy. You know, there aren’t a lot of people that I knew at that age friends of mine who are buying and selling real estate. So that would have limited my opportunities for sure. I love that you have within a couple years of starting your business, you were a top producer, you are still a top producer. Oh, and your by the way, you you also, you know, have your own investment portfolio that you’re putting together. And we I was talking to Cody earlier about just how remarkable he is. And so I just wanted to highlight a couple of those things before we get into your story. Because I think in particular, you’ve done a lot. So I think, you know, the sky’s the limit, I’m sure but you’re already doing real well, of course. But I’d like to start all the way back at the beginning. So I’d love to learn more about why you got into real estate at such a young age. And then how you got started. You know, I again, I just think gosh, that seems like the hardest thing to do as a 20. You know, early 20 year old 20, early 20s. person, so tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, absolutely. So
I got started in real estate actually, for whatever reason, it was always a goal of mine to buy my first house. As soon as I got out of high school. I was like I want to buy my first house. I’m going to try and make this happen as soon as possible. I don’t know why maybe I had, you know, something to prove or, or whatever. I don’t know. But I wanted to buy a house. So I was going to the community college, I was working just a normal job that a 19 year old, you know, works. I was actually working at a go kart race track
for a couple years. And it was a great job was a lot of fun. I’m into cars, I’m into racing and stuff. So it was a great job. But I mean, it was it was like 13 bucks an hour. So it wasn’t anything great. But that’s how I got started. And, you know, I went I went to the community college and was working at the same time, saved up some money, eventually found a townhome to go out there and buy just a cheap little townhome, rough part of town. But it was about all I could afford on 13 bucks an hour. So
moved into the place, made one mortgage payment and then realized, wow, you know, being an adult and paying a mortgage kind of sucks. So I got two roommates after that, because it was a three bedroom place. So I got two roommates, and the roommates the rent that they were paying was almost enough to cover my entire mortgage. I mean, I was living in this house for like 200 bucks a month. And that’s when it kind of clicked I’d never been interested in real estate or knew anything about it even. But it kind of clicked. I’m like, You know what, if I actually move back in with my mom who has lived with before, I could then rent out that third bedroom and I’m making money every month, right? I’d be making two 300 bucks a month. And you know, for a 21 year old kid making 13 bucks an hour. That’s not bad, right? I was thinking man a couple 100 bucks, it goes a long way. I mean, I’d love an extra 200 bucks a month now I think that’s I think it’s it’s, you know, because really, you know, yeah, that amount isn’t going to excite somebody, but sort of guaranteed to get that for the rest of your life. Assuming you can hold on to it. That’s that’s that’s good money. And also you’re like, I mean, you sort of stumbled upon what, I guess is a version of house hacking, where it very very trendy right now to do so. Yeah, I love that. It seems like a lot of kids in college but like a lot of parents will do that sometimes if they’re forward thinking enough they have a child in college and instead of just you know paying the rent, they’ll they’ll do that. So get some roommates cover them cover the mortgage and you know, you get to live free so awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So
yeah, basically house hack that first place that kind of got my my head spinning on real estate investing, and actually started going to these investor clubs, going to different meetups and luncheons, and stuff like that and got started on the real estate investing side did that for about six, seven months trying to figure out my next move, and then eventually decided, You know what, I’m just gonna start selling real estate. I really liked this. I’m spending a lot of time doing it. I’m learning a lot. Why not just try my hand is selling and jumped in Super naively didn’t know what I was doing. I had never done sales before but just jumped in and just said, you know, I’m just gonna figure this out. And you know, I like it enough that I think I can be successful and it was a grind. In the beginning it was a
grind, you know, after I jumped in with both feet, you know, I got my license and I quit my job dropped out a dropped out of college and started selling. And that first year, I think I made 14 $15,000, which was not a lot, right. And then from there, the second year, it really took off. And that’s when I was really able to climb in and start producing, you know, at a high volume.
D.J. Paris 10:24 Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. The fact that yeah, you you, you sort of suffered through a $14,000 year, which, by the way, not uncommon, right, for people even who are, you know, you who have who’s who are starting it in their 30s or 40s, sometimes it’s or later, it’s not just a young person’s challenge, but it’s, it’s everyone’s challenge, although certainly a harder, I would suspect a harder challenge, in most cases for somebody of your age, because again, I’m assuming your peer group wasn’t lining up ready to buy, you know, buy a condo, you know, your friends are probably, you know, just like anyone struggling to figure out what they want to do with their lives, you know, graduating college, some of them and, you know, going off and doing other things and moving to write. So it’s like, there’s just a lot, a lot of things that would make it I think, really difficult for you know, somebody in their 20s, early 20s, to really be successful. And at least, you know, here in Chicago, we’re sort of lucky, because there’s such a strong rental market that a lot of times younger agents will start off just doing rentals, because it you know, their friends are renting. So it’s a good way just to sort of stay busy, and then hope that the sales pick up, but I love the fact that you did. And the other reason to have getting a license even before realizing that you wanted to sort of be an, you know, an agent working with buyers and sellers, is it gonna save you a ton on the Commission’s when you know, of course, when you buy or buy or sell something. So
super, super forward thinking super smart, the fact that you had this figured out at a pretty young age, again, just buying a home on a $13 an hour sort of salary is like the idea of that is so far beyond what what i’ve what I would have thought of at that age. So I really applaud you for jumping in and, and starting your business. So what in those early years, you talked about it being a grind? Do you remember what worked for you? Because we have a lot of people who are listening who are in their first couple of years? And you know, they’re in that grind right now. And any advice or things that you would suggest to somebody who said, I’m just about to get started? What What should I focus on? Yeah, you know, that’s a really good question. So when I got started, I joined a team, which I’m really glad I did, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t be in the business today. Because it’s a grind, you know, there’s a lot of failure, you don’t know what you’re doing. You know, I was 22 at that point, I have a baby face. That’s why I have to carry this facial hair. It’s like, you know, there’s like the there’s like the you go out there you meet somebody, it’s a 49 year old person buying their second house and you’re like, I’m I’m 21? You know, 22? I don’t I don’t know much. So, I mean, sure. I mean, there was things working against me. But there was also things on my side, right, it got a lot of time to build a business. Yeah.
Cody Steck 13:14 A lot of hustle, you know, and that’s just kind of what it took. So in the beginning, with that team, we did, we did everything we did for sale by owners expireds door knocking open houses, Facebook ads, Google ads, you know, pay per click stuff, we did pretty much everything. The only thing that really worked for me was the Facebook ads and the Google Pay Per Click, you know, those leads that come in, they sign up on your website, you call them up, you know, start your sales pitch and,
you know, try to try to sell them a house. So that’s how I got started, I stopped expireds I sucked it for sale by owners, I knocked on 57 doors and never knocked on another one again, because it just wasn’t my thing. Which by the way, those things all work, right. If you get good enough at them, every single method of lead generation will work. It just wasn’t for me. So in the beginning, I did a lot of Facebook and Google ads, you know, this pay per click. For the first four or five years, that’s pretty much that was the majority of my business, you know, this is back in 2000 got my license and 15. So, you know, 2015 1617 18, even into 19 a little bit, it was mostly just those leads, you know, that were coming in, I got pretty good at it. You know, I’d be setting spending anywhere from 500 to $1,000 to get a closed transaction. Right? Isn’t that you know, you spend, let’s say 1000 bucks. Oh, that’s,
D.J. Paris 14:38 that’s a nice return. Yeah, you
Cody Steck 14:40 get an $8,000 Check or something, right. So no, in fact,
D.J. Paris 14:43 I will give you all of my money if you do that. Because that’s like the world’s greatest investment. And it’s not a passive investment. Of course, it’s, it requires a obviously a ton of work, but but the end result is that’s a good return.
Cody Steck 15:00 Yeah, yeah, it was really good. It was really good return. But the thing that I realized was one, it wasn’t scalable, because as soon as I stopped calling the leads dried up, right that these were not calling me, even though I generated, I don’t know, five to 10,000 leads, I don’t know the exact number, but it was a lot of names and numbers over the years. I mean, I maybe had five people who actually reached out to me and said, Hey, I’m on your website, you know, I’m interested in this house, can you help me? Most people are not are not calling me. So one, it wasn’t scalable. And then two, I kind of just hated it, you know, you when you’re making that sales call, you’re coming from a position of a Salesman, right? And not the authority, you don’t have the control, you’re basically almost in a way, like, kind of almost begging those people like, Hey, let me help you, let me help you, you know, find a house, let’s meet up like, you’re really trying to sell them. And that’s difficult. You know, I mean, real estate is a sales game. But more than that, it’s a it’s a people game, you know, it’s it’s about relationships, it’s about building those relationships, and making friends in the business. So, you know, that was, that was kind of the tipping point where I just realized and said to myself, you know, what, I’m kind of tired of this, like, I, I’m tired of making these calls, I was starting to get some referrals and past clients and stuff. And I’m like, you know, what, I need to transition my business, you know, sooner than later, or else I’m going to be the guy that’s, that’s calling every single, you know, every single day for the next 20 years.
D.J. Paris 16:26 Yeah, it’s so interesting. I think I think what you just said is really important, because I know a lot of agents have have sort of, not that they’ve painted themselves into a corner, because a look, that’s a great return, you know, when you’re, you’re spending $1,000, to then get, you know, a $7,000 net profit. What sounds awesome, we’d all do that. Except those calls are difficult. And, and a lot of times people who are completing, you know, you’re you’re having to call somebody multiple times, often. Right? And it’s, it’s, it’s still a pretty cold lead, right. It’s, it’s warmer than if you were calling an expired or for sale by owner, but, but just slightly, right. And it’s still like, yeah, like you were saying, you generated 10,000 leads, you know, it’s, it definitely works. And here, we know that it works, because we’re all getting spammed for the last couple of years from these email accounts that are like, Hey, I’m generating lots of leads online, are you interested? I think all realtors are getting these, these emails, because of course, it does work. But you’re right, it’s not really scalable, you know, unless you were hiring, you know, in an ISA, which is an inside sales agent, you know, and they sort of tackle everything and then refer it over to you or someone else. But even that’s hard, because you have to manage somebody and you have to, you know, just, it’s a lot of work. And so you’ve you’ve transitioned a bit from sort of generating colder leads now to working more by referral. But we should I really want to talk about, you know, your youtube content, because I think this is such a missed opportunity for so many agents who, you know, go well, I’m not really that adept at, you know, doing social media, and I don’t always know, sort of the best practices there. And it’s like, no, I think that’s right. I think most agents aren’t going to spend a year studying, you know, sort of YouTube SEO or, or Facebook, SEO and really getting a sense or, or just Facebook ad stuff. And it’s, it’s tough, but what I love is realtors have the content that people are searching for on YouTube. They’re hyperlocal they know, they’re all they should at least they should know their area. And what let’s talk about what you do on YouTube, that I that has been really successful for you. So can you talk a little bit about your YouTube channel and how it works to generate business for you?
Cody Steck 18:49 Sure, absolutely. So I didn’t know it at the time. But back in 2019, you know, I was getting burned out with those Facebook leads and you know, just kind of thought, You know what, I need to do more on social media and branding that was a part of my life where I kind of, you know, had this like this revolution, I guess where I realized, you know, what, I really kind of need to like build a brand around myself who I am what I am online, and just put myself out there because you know, social media does work. Everybody says it works. You just got to be strategic about it consistent, all that stuff. So I first started making videos actually kind of just for fun, you know, like it was just kind of a creative outlet, and then quickly realized, Hey, I’m actually getting views on my videos, you know, and we’re talking small amounts of views, you know, 510 15 views, for sure. Beginning but it ramped up pretty quickly. Right? And you know, I was making videos from everything from what it’s like to live in my area, the best neighborhoods, the worst neighborhoods, where to buy a house what new construction looks like the pros and cons of living in an area. The cost of living these names Road tours have been really beneficial as well. So I’m making videos all about my local market. And it’s basically just me talking about it. So I come up with the title, I look at what people are actually searching for, and then say, okay, how can I provide some type of content for that. So if you just go into your own market, and you know, you go into YouTube, and just type in living in Miami, Florida, right, you’re gonna get a number of videos that pop up, look at what those titles are, copy those titles, and then make your own video about that, you know, that’s exactly what I’ve done. When I got started, nobody was doing this in my market, and very few people were doing it around the country even at that time. So a lot of agents are kind of making videos on like, here’s how an inspection works, or here’s how a 1031 exchange works, or here’s how to stage your home or whatever. And the reality is, most people don’t care about that. They’re not searching for that. They’re not searching, how does a home inspection work? Right? It’s just not right, like, unless you get, you might get one guy who’s searching for that. But, you know, there’s nobody’s searching for that, basically. And so you really got to make content surrounding what people are actually looking for, and what they want to see. So like I said, just go on to YouTube, type in your city name. And it’s going to come up with a ton of suggestions. You know, like here in Utah, one of my best actually, my my best video is what it’s like to live in Utah as a non Mormon.
D.J. Paris 21:21 Yeah, I want to pause pause for a second because that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about. So I apologize for cutting off your, your flow there, you’re doing great, I just want to pause and give you my my observations of that video in particular, because for anyone out there who’s like, I don’t make videos, I don’t have, you know, a lot of production skills. I don’t know how to add graphics, I don’t know how to, you know, really make I don’t have proper equipment. And please forgive me because I am in no way suggesting there’s anything wrong with your video here. But I think it’s a perfect sort of demonstration of that, really, anyone and I again, I’m sort of making the sound like it’s not so cool, because it is super cool. But you are literally sitting in front of your your computers behind you, you have a couple of screens, you have a microphone in front of you, you’re you’re wearing you know your baseball hat, you’re you’re talking in front of the camera, no special setup here at all. And you were literally just talking for about 1314 minutes about what it’s like to be a non Mormon living in Utah. And I will tell you, that would be the very first thing I would search for as a non Mormon if I was moving to Salt Lake City, right? That’s exactly or anywhere in Utah, I would be like I curious what it’s like to be there to be there if I’m not part of of, you know, the the Mormon faith. So I love this video. And by the way, how many views does Cody have on this video 79,000 views. So this is he he does have some graphics that show up. It’s pretty minimal production, though. And I don’t mean that in any sort of pejorative negative way. I think it’s inspiring because that content is so valuable, that it doesn’t have to be cutting edge beautiful. It just has to be good content. And it is. And I’m sorry, I stole all your thunder on that one. But I am such a fan of this video. I want everybody to check it out, just search for living in Utah, non Mormon and it’ll pop right up or go to his channel. But can you talk a little bit about that video in particular, and, and just the results you’ve had from it?
Cody Steck 23:31 Yeah, absolutely. So I got started making videos, like I said about pros and cons, the cost of living neighborhood tours, all this stuff. And as I was doing my research, I kept, you know, looking at YouTube, trying to figure out what people are searching for doing some of that SEO research. And this title kept coming up, you know, living in Utah as a non Mormon. And for a long time, I was like, I don’t want to make that video, you know, it’s controversial. You know, I’m like, am I going to be steering people? Am I going to be Yeah, giving that information as a realtor, you know, with my ethical duties or whatever. And, and I was just kind of thinking, I’m just like, Oh, God, I don’t know, I’m not ready for that. Right. Then one day, you know, I just figured, you know what, let me just put it out there. You know, let’s see what happens. So, like you said, I’m filming in my office. Not high production quality at all. I mean, those if you go back and look at some of my first videos, they’re terrible. The audio is bad, the lighting is bad. I’m stumbling, the editing is bad. I mean, it’s just a bad video all the way around. But they do really well. And for this video, it’s no different. I’m sitting in the office baseball cap on regular clothes.
D.J. Paris 24:37 You look you look like a normal guy. You don’t look like a realtor. Because you’re in this video. You’re sort of not you’re just a non Mormon guy talking about what it’s like to live in Utah, which is exactly what I would want to know if I removing there. Sorry, go ahead.
Cody Steck 24:52 Exactly. And that’s the thing that’s underlying that that I want people to see or hear is that it doesn’t matter. matter what you look like what you wear, what the video is, people, the thing that’s amazing about YouTube and just video in general is it gets people to know you, like you and trust you. This is one thing that one of my real estate coaches taught me early on, he said, those are the three things you need, in order for somebody to do business with you, they have to know you, obviously, right? They have to like you, they have to like you as a person, and they have to trust you, they have to trust that you have the ability and the knowledge to do the job that they’re asking you to do. Right? So for me, when I’m talking about these areas, or I’m talking about what it’s like to live here, this or that, it gives people the confidence to know, hey, I live in this area. And I know a lot about it, you know, I can give you advice on like, Hey, if you’re a single person, you probably don’t want to live in this area that’s super family focused, or vice versa, if you got a big family, you probably don’t want to live in the hip part of town where it’s mostly single people going to college, right? Like, it’s just those kinds of different things that you have the insight on, and people want to see. So when you get those three things, then people start to do business with you. And that’s the thing I love about this video is or just what I’ve been able to do now is that now I’m the I’m in the position of authority. People are searching for this content, they see my face, they see my videos, they hear my voice, and they start watching videos, you know, and I’ve had people call me and tell me, hey, you know, I just watched 27 of your videos. And now I’m talking to you, this is kind of weird, but like, you know, I’m calling some random guy off of YouTube to ask him real estate questions. And I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten like that. And the thing that I love about it is, I’m already in a position of authority, right? Because they are reaching out to me, I’m not, I’m no longer making that sales call to say, Hey, let me show you this house. Let me meet with you. Let me show you how to list your home or whatever, these guys are reaching out to me almost begging to work with me. You know, they’re, they’re saying, Hey, I’m moving there, or I just moved here, I need help finding a place, can you help me, and they’re basically begging me to like work with them. And it’s, it’s still mind blowing to this day. And it’s been almost three years. So the thing about YouTube is, you just got to be yourself. It’s all about branding. It’s all about building a persona, if you will, around who you are, and what you do in your business. And that relates to all aspects, you know, sellers, buyers, investors, developers, new construction, it doesn’t matter. It all works. It just depends on what you focus on.
D.J. Paris 27:27 Yeah, I, there’s, you have another video that I am a big fan of the title, which is called what nobody will tell you about living in Salt Lake City, which I love that because years ago, I wrote an article this is this was like, I should have made a video but I wrote an article for realtors, who are people who are just passed their exam, who are newly licensed, who are now trying to figure out what firm to go out. And I wrote, well, I’m a real estate recruiter, I sort of know the tricks of real estate recruiting, why don’t I expose some of these more smoke and mirrors stuff about recruiting and sort of just tell people, here’s here, if I were a new agent, knowing what I know, here’s what I would look for when I was, you know, interviewing firms. Here’s here’s what to pay attention to, here’s what’s kind of, you know, just a little bit of, you know, exaggerated whatever. And, you know, and I thought, well, maybe somebody would find this interesting, and it ended up the, it has ended up being our most viewed page on our on our recruiting website. We don’t even promote it, it’s just buried behind many other pages. But because people search for that on on on YouTube, on Google, in this case, this like what recruiters don’t want you to know, I think it’s the title about real estate recruiting or whatever I titled differently than that, but something like that. And that’s a great also tied because I was I remember, I really got into this when I was, I was on a my dad and I went to Ireland several years ago, and we were going to all these little cities, and we had our travel guide book, but what we but you know, it’s like, well, that’s great and fine. And the Rick Steves book, or whatever we had, was was awesome. But it was also like, I kind of wanted someone else’s opinion of maybe people who live there. And so every morning before we would go to visit our you know, to two towns a day or three times a day, we would go to YouTube and say like coolest things to do in XYZ place or or, you know, what, where the locals hang out or like the really cool places. And we would do those kinds of searches. It was all YouTube. And we would listen to these YouTube videos in the cars were driving in. The power of this is so is so big. And I’m curious, just from Back to the living in Utah as a non Mormon. And I know it’s probably not super easy to quantify, but how many clients would you guess in the three years that that video has been up? How do you think you’ve received as a result?
Cody Steck 29:49 Yeah, so I’ve actually got the info right here. Let me just look on my computer and I can tell you exactly how many I’ve gotten. So here in Utah, we don’t do rentals for whatever reason, it’s just not Part of our buyers and sellers. So the leads that I’ve recorded here over the last two, almost three years, I’ve brought in 621 buyers and sellers, unbelievable. For clients, I mean, a lot of those, I guess you could call them clients or leads or whatever you want to say. But we brought in 621 people who’ve reached out to me, you know, people I didn’t know, literally from all across the world. And the last time I checked, this was maybe six months ago, I was at about a 7% closing ratio on those leads. Wow. So really, really high actually, like a lot of these leads that are coming through super high quality really interested to have money in the bank, good credit scores, you know, are ready to buy, you know, three 612 months, it varies, right? depends on the nature. But I’ve had some people who literally are in town, like you just said about Ireland, right? They’re in town, they’re like, Hey, I’m out here. I just accepted a job. I’m actually in town right now. Can we look at some houses? I’m like, Yeah, sure. Let’s meet tomorrow, we go look at some houses. And sure enough, put in an offer and have a deal, you know, in 30 days. So I mean, I’ve had deals like that literally, like come same day, just out of the blue. And yeah, the thing I love about YouTube is because these people already know me like me. And trust me, when they call me. There’s not even really a sales pitch. It’s just like, here’s what we’re gonna do. Here’s how the process works. Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. And most of the time, they’re like, great, sounds awesome. Like, when do we get started? You know, there’s no, there’s no sales pitch or anything. So, yeah, it’s good. And I mean, you know, going back to that video that you talked about, you know what, nobody will tell you about living in Salt Lake. I was actually doing that video. I decided to reach out to some of my clients who had moved here. And I just said, Hey, like, what? What did they learn once they got here? You know that they didn’t Excel? Yeah. I love that I was really kind of just looking for feedback, because then I knew those are the types of cars. Those are the types of questions I need to answer in my future videos. Because you know, you may not realize something about the weather, or the traffic or the snow that we get, or the Mormons or whatever, right? Like there might seem like you haven’t thought about, and that I can make video content around that. So I was really just looking for feedback, like a survey almost, and then decided, You know what, let me make a video out of this. And I titled it, you know what, nobody will tell you because these are things that I didn’t even think about. And I think that’s like my second or third best video on my channel. You know, a lot of really great response from it. So I have
D.J. Paris 32:35 I have a video title for you. Because it’s the exact question I asked before we went live. I used to a million a million years ago, I used to work for Anheuser Busch and I, we I was telling Cody, I used to sort of travel the country doing things for them. And we never did anything in Salt Lake City. And this is like 2000 2001, because Salt Lake City had very strict, very strict rules around alcohol. And so I was like, Oh, is it still just still really strict there? And he was like, no, no, it’s changed a lot. And so I have a video for you how alcohol works in Salt Lake City, because there’s been a lot of us who have never been there. We just We know there’s like alcohol situation. It used to be kind of more unusual. And, of course, that’s something people want to know who are moving there, too. So I don’t know if you’ve done that video yet. But I imagine that’ll be a great one for you.
Cody Steck 33:23 Yeah, I did it. I did a quick little two minute video. It’s done pretty well, I don’t know. 5000 10,000 views. I haven’t looked at it. But you’ve already done that. I love it already done it. Yeah, I just I just it was titled like weird alcohol laws in Utah or something. And I just talked about, like, hey, you know, here’s what you can get. And here’s what you can’t get. And here’s what not and you know, the percentage volumes are a little bit different and whatever. Yeah, so I mean, people are looking for that type of content. And that’s the thing that’s really important. That is not real estate specific, right, but not somebody who loves alcohol and wants to be able to get a drink. That’s something they’re going to be looking at. And they appreciate that type of content. So you know, making videos around what people are looking for is really, really important. And it’s going to vary from market to market, right? Obviously, if you’re in Pennsylvania, and making a video about Mormons is not going to do very well. If you’re in Miami, Florida, making a video about how much it snows there is not going to do very well. So like it’s really market specific. You have to you have to look at your market and say, who’s moving here? What are they looking for? What questions do they have? What information do I need to give to them and then make video around that?
D.J. Paris 34:31 And you you said something very important, which is like okay, how do you figure out this content? Well, you basically did that by reaching out to your clients and saying, Hey, what do you wish you would have known? Or rather, you had a different question was what are some of the cool things that people don’t know about? You know, here in Utah, and then you were able to take that content and make videos, but it could have you could really have asked a different question to which is what do you wish you would have known before moving to Utah, and then that’s content for you or, you know, like you were Saying you can just look it up on YouTube, see what videos already exist, see what videos seem to get a lot of traction. And because I know for me, a lot of times when I ask a question, like, for example, what it’s like to be a non Mormon in Utah, I will watch a couple because I want to get a couple different perspectives. So even if someone’s already done that video, and it’s got, you know, hundreds of 1000s of views, and you’re like, well, that’s the one people are gonna hit. Yeah, they will. And they might hit another two or three, just to get additional opinions. I know I do that. So even if it’s something that’s already well established, you’re like, Oh, that guy’s already got all the views. It’s like, well, yeah, but, but it’s good to have a second opinion. And you never know what’s going to hit either. Right? Like, could be anything really. And the other thing too, and I just want to make this point, because it might not be so obvious to our listeners, is you also get referrals for business outside of Utah, right?
Cody Steck 35:53 Yeah, so most of the people that I help are relocating here to the area, Salt Lake City has become kind of a tech hub. So there’s a lot of tech companies that are here, bringing in, you know, high paying employees, high paid employees for those positions. And so there’s a lot of people moving in from out of state, of course, the whole pandemic thing accelerated that with people moving around market going crazy. But, yeah, I have generated a lot of referrals, because those people who are generally moving here already own a home. So during that first call, you know, we talked about that a little bit. And if the opportunity presents, I say, Hey, let me help you find an agent in where you know, XYZ city that you’re moving from, let me help you, you know, find somebody who knows how to do relocation so we can make sure to make this a smooth transition for you. And, you know, I’d say 30 to 40% of the time, they’re on board with that they’re like, yeah, that’d be great. Please help us. You know, a lot of times they do have agents already. And that’s fine, whatever. But I mean, sort of really just bring it up during that initial call and get a referral out of it. It’s a pretty easy sell most of the time.
D.J. Paris 36:55 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort, do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link, visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. I know we’ve spent almost our whole time here talking about YouTube. And I apologize because I know investing is is really, really important to you and I and I really want to stay with this YouTube thing. Because yes, I am a huge fan of real estate investing in specifically around and we’ll just talk about it for a minute, you know that we as Realtors were transactional, right? We only get paid when a deal closes. No one has quite yet figured out how to make it a fee based model like financial advisors moved to that, you know, some time ago, instead of paying for stock trades, now they pay for assets under management in real estate hasn’t ever figured that out. So one way is to build that sort of residual income is through passive investing or active investing. But having like you were saying, hey, 200 bucks coming in a month. I mean, I’m 46 I would love an extra 200 bucks coming in a month for for a little bit of work. So I know that’s probably a conversation for a different a different day, because I’m so into this YouTube thing. But everyone should be I will just say this and I want to get Cody your thoughts if you aren’t investing in real estate and you feel like as a realtor, maybe I should know more about this. My big, biggest piece of advice and then I want to ask Cody for his is the best resource I have found for people really wanting to learn about how to get involved with real estate investing, whether they can do it so they can do it themselves or that they can help other people do it. Bigger. pockets.com is really my favorite resource. And I’m just curious if you have you know, any thoughts about where somebody should learn start to learn about investing if they want to?
Cody Steck 39:53 Yeah, absolutely. So, bigger pockets is a great online resource. Of course YouTube is great as well. Well, if you’re into videos, I mean, I almost like feel like I don’t even watch TV anymore because I watch a lot of YouTube. Because I get to watch for exactly what I want, right, and you find these personalities and you learn from them. So YouTube’s great. And then also, the third thing I’d recommend is look at your area and find out where the investor associations are at. So just type in your city, you know, for here, for here in my market, I just type in, you know, go to Google type in Salt Lake City Real Estate Investors Association, that’s the name of the association that’s here that I’m a part of, and they do monthly meetups that are more formal. And then they have like weekly luncheons that somebody will actually host. So there’s, I don’t know, a couple 100 investors. And some of these guys are big shots. You know, some of these guys have lots of money. They’ve been doing it for a long time, they’ve got tons of experience. And there’s a lot of deals, trading hands that Realtors don’t even know about whether it’s rental properties, or fixing flips, or big commercial deals. I mean, there’s a lot of big hitters at these associations. So I’d get involved with something like that, you know, are you going to walk up to the big hitter and pick up his business? No, probably not. But you know, there’s going to be other people there who are trying to learn and you just network with them. It’s just a big networking thing. And you meet these people, and, you know, build a relationship with them and say, Yeah, you know, I’m just getting, I’m just getting started with investing to Oh, hey, I have my license, you know, maybe I can, maybe we can partner, maybe we can, I can sell you a deal. I can represent you on a deal or, or whatever, you know, it’s all about, you know, one thing that I noticed is when you make that shift of this isn’t just a lead, but I’m building relationship here, this is a friend, that’s a major shift, and then also making the shift from, hey, I’ve got a client, I’m gonna go find a deal for them. If you can find the deal. First, you almost always can find a client for that deal, right? And so I almost like to say, Hey, I work for the deal. I don’t work for the seller, I don’t work for the buyer, I work for the deal. And that might be putting the deal together. It might be bringing in an investor on a on a property. It might be, you know, investing myself, I don’t know, it could be anything, but just kind of making those mental shifts really goes a long way. At least it did for me.
D.J. Paris 42:10 Yeah. And that’s that’s the thing we hear over and over again, when we have had investors on the show, as they said, the finding the money is the easy part, the finding the deals the hard part, because everyone’s always looking for a great deal. Like jokingly I said earlier, I’ll give Cody all my money if he can turn 1008 1000. You know, of course, anybody would take that offer in a split second. But finding the deal is really and I think to going to these meetups, so you’re absolutely right. Like here in Chicago, it’s called the Chicago what, there’s a million of them. So there’s lots of these investor associations, bigger pockets also can connect you with that stuff. But what’s great is, you know, apprentice with some of these investors, most a lot of them don’t even have their real estate license. But I would I would say, can I spend time with you, I want to learn how you evaluate a deal, what do you look for, it’s just a great place to learn it, I have found that the investor community is very, in my experience, they have been very helpful to each other. There’s a lot of support that goes on, which sometimes doesn’t happen as much on the realtor side. You know, sometimes there’s Realtors feel like they’re in competition. But I like a lot of times, I don’t get that sense as much with investors where they’re, they’re very open to share a lot of them, you know exactly how they find and process deals. And, you know, it’s a great opportunity to learn and add those skills.
Cody Steck 43:29 Yeah, yeah, it absolutely is. And I think my perspective, I would agree with you, I think my perspective is that investors, no one that it’s relationship, realtors kind of forget to remember that sometimes, believe it or not, but investors really know, hey, this is really about the relationship, either their relationship with the seller, or the person you’re trying to wholesale a deal to, or whatever it may be. So relationships are really important. But also it’s kind of the personality, it’s also kind of the, the MO, if you will, behind why people invest, right? People who go to these investor meetings are trying to level up, become a better person invest in themselves, and invest in property so that they can, you know, build a portfolio and get to the point where they can support their family better, right. And they’re always trying to level up. And I think people are willing to share when they when you get into that mindset of like, there’s a lot of deals out there, you know, I can’t handle every single one myself. So like, if somebody else picks up the deal, that’s great. And it’s all about just like putting yourself out there and continuing to build those relationships. So, I mean, yeah, I know, we’re kind of running a little short on time, but I mean, I would love to talk more about that if the opportunity ever came back up, you know, like, yeah, definitely,
D.J. Paris 44:41 we can definitely bring you back for that. I want to finish just just by sort of going recapping some of our, our video strategy because again, so much of us might even be posting videos on Facebook, Instagram. You know, really, those are the two places where Realtors they’re doing reels are stories and that’s great. And it absolutely will help you deepen the relationships you already have with your sphere of influence and anyone else who follows you. However, it’s a little trickier I think, especially on Facebook, Facebook is a friend to friend network, of course, although you know, there’s, you know, business pages a realtors have business pages as well. But typically people who find you are going to be people that already know you, unless you’re running ads, of course, and then, you know, that’s a whole different thing. But Instagram kind of the same thing. Yeah, people search by hashtags, too. But you know, it’s not the easiest way to find people. But YouTube is a total search engine, that’s really I always say, YouTube is, is exclusively, first and foremost, a search engine. In fact, I think it’s the number two search engine right behind Google, of course, Google owns that as well. But it really is, it’s think of it as a search engine. And so this is an opportunity. So what Cody’s done with very little, you know, investments, I mean, you know, probably everybody’s got the same equipment that you used to create some of your videos just in their phone even, or at least a comparable equipment, although, you know, you have a nice mic and all of that but, but you know, the fact is, is content is king and and as Realtors you have the content? Or if you don’t have it, ask your clients. Boy, what do you wish you would have learned and as a result of you putting up content on a regular basis, and it takes time, in fact, Cody quick question. If somebody were Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sort of jumbling myself, I’m gonna pause, go back to something, I realized I’m all over the place what I was gonna say about YouTube versus Facebook and Instagram, YouTube is a search engine, Facebook is more of I’m going to scroll through and see what comes up. YouTube is, is a little bit of that, but I think most people go to it, to to search for things. So you know, this is an opportunity for you as an agent to make content that people are already searching for. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the, you don’t have to have, you know, a production degree. And you have to have a whole team of makeup artists and graphic designers, you can literally just do it yourself as long as the content is good. And that’s what realtors are. They know content. They know the best bars in there in the neighborhoods, they know the best restaurants, they know the coolest retail shops, they they know, the best schools this in you know, of course, as you said, You’ve got to be very careful to make sure you’re compliant and not violating any any ethics. Or, you know, any sort of compliance regulations or licensed law. But let’s let’s just think about like, you just talked about one video and I know not every video, you know, is going to do this. Well. You just talked about one video getting over 40 clients that what did that video about being a non Mormon? What did that cost you to produce? Like the total cost of it? What would you say? For you know, what, how much money did you put into that video?
Cody Steck 48:00 Yeah, that’s a really good question. I can’t remember exactly. If I had my virtual assistant editing my videos at that point, I think I did. Some of the graphics in there, I don’t know how to even put into the video myself. You know, I know how to edit the basics, but I must have had my virtual assistant editing for me. So that was maybe three hours worth of time to script out the video and then film it and then send it off to my editor, he put in probably, I don’t know, six hours to edit it. And you know, it’s a virtual assistant. So it’s like four bucks an hour. So it probably cost me $25 To make that that was my editing.
D.J. Paris 48:37 And three years later, you’ve got over 40 clients and and hundreds of other people that I’m guessing are on like an email list or, or some sort of follow up campaign depending on what information you have about them. But 4040 actual clients, less than 100 $1 spend. Now, why did this happen? Because the most important thing on YouTube is content. Cody created really great content. Did it look great? Not really. But it sounded great because it was great. And that is the key and anybody can do that. And I apologize I’m making Cody sound like your videos look terrible. They don’t they look great. But there’s we’re not talking about a high production value. And the point I’m making is Could somebody else have done this exact video? Totally now they wouldn’t have been Cody, they wouldn’t have it his personality, but somebody else and probably other people have tried. But Cody now you know has it that’s just one video. So there is so much opportunity out there for agents to just start putting out content and just realize when it lives on Facebook and Instagram, it’s more disposable. It’s it’s there, it’s gone. It might hit some of your friends feeds maybe 3% of your friends or followers will see it that’s about it. But on YouTube that lives forever and if it’s good quality content and you can always update it too. That’s that’s something you can always do too. But So I just I love that you’re doing this, I think it is so smart. And oh, by the way, you know, so I wanted to ask you one more question, because we’re bouncing around a bit. So you make this video, somebody’s like, Hey, I’m moving from, you know, wherever some other state, other city and you’re like, I don’t know any realtors in that area, but they go, you know, I actually do need to sell my home before I move into Utah. And then Cody goes, no problem, I can help you with that. How do you go about sourcing and finding somebody that can assist in their hometown? And I mean, I already pretty much know what I think you’re gonna say, but let’s talk about that. Because you’re getting a referral commission on those do.
Cody Steck 50:36 Yeah, yeah, sure. So believe it or not, the first thing I usually do is I’ll look up their city on YouTube, you know, and see who’s doing YouTube in their area, because if they are, there’s a good chance they know about relocation, you know, relocation, there’s a couple extra things you need to know about people are making a move 500 1000 3000 miles across the country, sometimes even you know, international, and there’s a lot that goes into it. So I usually start with YouTube, I’ll say, Hey, who’s doing YouTube and selling houses in their area. If I can’t find anybody, then I usually reach out to either my mastermind group, which I’ve been a part of, for about six years, now we’ve got a pretty good referral network in there. Or, you know, worst case, I shouldn’t say worst case. But my third option is I go to the brokerage and just, you know, try to keep it in house and see if somebody else is able to do that. But, ya
D.J. Paris 51:26 know, or you could always you could also to just go to Zillow, and see who’s got the best reviews, if you absolutely, so finding realtors in these other areas, not difficult, there’s a million ways to do it.
Cody Steck 51:39 We’d love to have your business. So it’s not hard. Yeah. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 51:43 I mean, it’s it’s actually brilliant. We, you know, so I am such a such a big fan of what Cody is doing at such a young age. He’s, he’s and again, you know, I spent a lot of time on on sort of the YouTube component of it. But I think it is such an amazing opportunity that anyone can do. And you know, also, really, I encourage everyone to follow what Cody’s doing. The easiest way is to follow his YouTube channel, which is living in Ohio. I’m so sorry. My notes just shut? Yeah, living in Salt Lake City. Yeah,
Cody Steck 52:16 yeah, you can just type in my name. And that will bring up you know, other videos that I’ve done. I’ve got, I’ve actually got a handful of channels. We didn’t even talk about any of that. But, you know, I’ve done videos for other markets. So you can even just type in my name, and it’ll bring up additional content as well.
D.J. Paris 52:31 Yeah, and the name is Cody stack. And that’s cod y s t. E CK. And I have a last question for you. Yeah. Have you thought about making so you talked about making videos in other areas? Have you have you thought about getting information about a completely different area that you’re not, you know, you don’t live in, you don’t work in and you don’t know that well, and starting to develop content for there just to see if you can also get you know, and then just build referrals to other agents in that area. So you would make content for let’s say, Atlanta, Georgia, as an example where you don’t live? Have you thought about going into other markets and saying, What if I applied the same? Now, obviously, your knowledge would be different, you would have to spend more time learning about those areas. But have you thought about expanding into other cities? Yeah.
Cody Steck 53:16 So I do run another channel for St. George, Utah, which is about four and a half hours south of me. I don’t live there, but I make video content about it. And then I’ve got a partner there who’s boots on the ground. So I do all the videos, I run the channel, I do the editing, whatever, I take those first initial calls. And then as somebody comes in, you know, they say, Hey, I’m in town next week, and I look at houses, I’ll just say, hey, great, I’m going to be traveling or whatever, you know, I just tell him, I’m unavailable. My partner’s name is JD, I’m like, Hey, JD, he’s available, he’s in town. He’d love to show you some houses and then and then I just have a split setup with him. So I’m actually the face of the videos for that specific thing. And I don’t live in St. George, but I’m, you know, building the channel there. And then I’ve also partnered up with some agents as well, where I do all the backend so they actually do the filming and and work with the clients. But I do all the backend, kind of the YouTube management stuff. So we’ve attacked it from a couple different angles. And it’s been really good, but, you know, I’ve had the most success with with my main channel living in Salt Lake.
D.J. Paris 54:22 Sure, but I suspect too if anyone reached out to you for maybe a small smaller market where they said hey, can you make videos for my market just send me all the referrals you guys work out an arrangement that’s also an opportunity to so if anyone’s out there who goes you know, I’m not really good in front of a camera, but I would like to start participating. You know, maybe you’re the boots on the ground guy and again, there’s only so much of Cody to go around. But that might be an opportunity to right so that’s that’s another thing that agents can leverage, you know, and partner with you sometimes even in these other markets. So, you know, anyone out there has it as an opportunity saying hey, Cody, let’s Let’s work do some business. What if anyone does have those questions? Or maybe they want to partner with you? Or if they want to refer business to you for people that they have moving to the Utah area? What’s the best way that another agent should reach out to you?
Cody Steck 55:15 Yeah, so the best way is email. You send me an email, my email is pretty simple. It’s Cody cod. Why at fast Utah homes.com, just like it sounds, and yeah, just send me an email with an introduction on what you’re looking for. If it’s a referral, if you have questions, I’m a total open book, I’ll share anything you want to know. I’ll try to help you if I can. But email is the best way to get in touch just because I’m so busy throughout the day, you know, doing stuff like this or with clients or on the phone with with new leads or whatever, you know, sometimes calls and texts I’m not able to get to right away. So emails usually best for to get that introduction started.
D.J. Paris 55:50 Awesome. So again, that was Cody at fast Utah homes.com. Correct? Yep, yep. Awesome. Yeah. And check out faster Utah homes.com, as well, to see what all Cody’s content is also posted there. So you can find his YouTube channel, of course on YouTube living in Salt Lake City, but also find at fast Utah homes.com. Well, Cody, we are so grateful to have had you on the show. And I know we like to have you back to talk more on the investing side. But I just think you have captured I want to call it lightning in a bottle, except it’s not lightning in a bottle. It’s a ton of work. It’s really a something that anybody can do creating videos to attract other consumers. But it takes time it takes discipline, it takes the work of other people in your case, hiring virtual assistants, which absolutely can be affordable. Thank Thank God, we live in a gig economy. Now, world economy, a world gig economy, sorry, took me a few times to say that correctly, where we can put jobs out and say, Hey, who’s got a skill that can do this. And we’re not limited to the people in our local area. And we can find people from all over the world that will do it at a at a much lower price than maybe what we would have to pay in our existing area, and consistency and just getting it done. And then just, you know, seeing what happens. I know for this podcast, we didn’t really get any traction for at least a year. And we’ve we’ve spent no money on production or not no money on production, but but no money on marketing, but just trying to get content out there. So I just realized Cody just inspired me, as I’m saying goodbye to make videos for because I’m a real estate recruiter, I recruit agents to join our firm. I should be making videos about what agents are thinking about when they’re trying to evaluate firms. And I should do that for my specific market and become more of the knowledge source of hey, here’s here’s what you know, just like that blog post I wrote all those years ago. So you can just inspired me to take action and become the YouTube channel for agents trying to pick a real estate firm, so nobody’s steal that idea, please. But, but that’ll help me in the same way it’s helped Cody. So we’re huge fans of Cody stack. Please keep your eye on him. subscribe to his YouTube channel living in Salt Lake the show in the show notes. We’ll have a link right to his YouTube channel. Check out what he’s up to duplicate what he’s doing in your own local market guys. You can do this of course, guys, meaning men and women. So please do this. Cody, thank you so much for being on our show. We are huge fans of yours are 28 years old, you are a million miles ahead of where I was at 28. So I am jealous and also very proud of you. So congratulations on being a top producer and investor and a YouTuber at the same time. So for everyone out there who is listening, we call on behalf of Cody and I we say thank you for continuing to support our show. Please We ask you do one just one thing. Tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this amazing interview with Cody send them a link to our show. Best way to do that we have a website keeping it real pod.com Or if they’re already a podcast person, pretty much everyone listens to podcasts anyway, just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. So on behalf of our audience, we also think Cody for his time, Cody, it was such a pleasure and we will see everybody on next episode. Thanks Cody.
Cody Steck 59:21 My pleasure. Thank you
“Welcome Home” Is The Best Closing Gift For Clients With Children • Monika Strand
May 26, 2022
Monika Strand, realtor with Compass and author goes back to beginning of her career in real estate. Monika describes the special way she does open houses and how its brought her success. Next, Monika talks about her book “Welcome Home”, who she wrote it for and what’s the best way agents can utilize the book. Monika also discusses the importance of showing kindness to the kids of the family you’re working with. Last, Monika describes what differentiates her from her competition.
You can buy Monika’s book “Welcome Home” here with a 20% when using the code KeepingItReal20 until September 1st 2022.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode we discuss a revolutionary new Closing gift for your clients that have young children. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer and also closing gift expert Monica Strad. Before we get to Monica just a quick reminder to please tell a friend about our show. It helps us continue to grow and reach more and more real estate professionals. So think of just one other agent in your office that could use the knowledge and wisdom of someone as amazing as Monica, who you’re about to hear and let them know about our show, send him over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. And also please leave us a review whatever podcast app, you might be listening to this on my voice now or maybe it’s apple, podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. Let us know what you think of the show, leave us a review and that helps us continue to improve as well. But enough about that. Let’s get to the main event my conversation with Monica strand.
Today on the show, we have Monica strand who is a realtor and author from Compass. Or she’s with compass in Fremont, California. So let me tell you a little bit more about Monica. Monica. Stan is a realtor in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a people connector, a problem solver, strategic thinker dream maker and recently and most interesting to us a children’s author. Now her first book, which was just released is called Welcome Home and it came to life after Monica couldn’t find the perfect gift to give her buyers children on closing day so she created one now today her vision is for realtors who value client relationship building is essential to growing their business and gifting this book Welcome home to their clients who have children. Monique oh and by the way, but everyone can visit Monica you can check out the book for children. And everything related to Monica at Monica strand.com. That’s m o n i k So Monica with a K strand STR A n d.com. Monica, welcome to the show.
Monika Strand 3:49 Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me,
D.J. Paris 3:53 you. Thanks for coming on. And also please follow Monica on Instagram at Monica strand as well again, Monica with a K, before we get to the children’s book, which is so exciting because I think I remember moving as a child and I remember how, what a scary experience that was for me too. Yeah, so I’m excited to get to that. But before we get there, I would love to start all the way at the beginning and of your sort of career and how you even got into real estate. So Tasa tell us how you how you got here.
Monika Strand 4:27 Wow. Well, I go all the way back to when I was 15 I used to work at City of San Carlos in the finance department where I learned a lot about money and, and keeping things in check and taking care of a lot of tasks and I was kind of like the Girl Friday, people probably don’t even know what that is anymore. But I was a high school student. And I also was a ballerina. And I used to teach adults and little kids and I loved teaching little kids because that was like such a passion of mine, they were three and three to five year olds running around in their little outfits. But anyway, from there, I ended up opening a dance clothing store. When I was 19. And I was the youngest business woman in San Carlos at the time, I got to go back to my job at City Hall and say, hey, I want my business license. And they were all cheering me on and it was amazing. You open
D.J. Paris 5:24 the store at 19 Yeah, nobody does.
Monika Strand 5:28 I was so in love with ballet. And I, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I didn’t go away to college and waste my dad’s money. I decided I’m gonna stay local, keep doing ballet. But I knew I loved business. So I just jumped right in. And then I went to night classes at a community college. So sure. Anyway, that’s what I was doing. But a few years fast forward, I got engaged. And everything changes in life when you get engaged. Yes. So I ended up moving to the Los Angeles area where my husband was working in the movie industry. And ultimately, after we we ended up opening a coffee house, and it was such a fun community space. We we helped everyone from homeless to famous literally, I mean, I had my favorite one of my favorite clients was a homeless guy, he would come in, and I would just give him free coffee. And one day he came in, and he said, No, no coffee today. And he threw a $20 bill in my tip jar. And I literally just started crying. I was like, wow, I built community for this guy, you know. And so communities always been a very important part of my life. But anyway, that was a cool place. I would give business advice to famous people, I don’t need to ramble off names, but quite a few would come in, hang with us. And then after we had our child, and there was an earthquake down there, we decided to move back to the San Francisco Bay area where we had four grandparents that gave us free babysitting. Anyone who has kids knows it’s just it was hard. We had our coffee house, and we would bring our daughter. And anyway, we moved back to the Bay Area. So what ended up happening is we started a fundraising national Fundraising Company with coffee, our backbone from previous but this time my husband roasted it. And we did sales and marketing. And I did all the packaging, custom labels for our our schools to raise money. And most of our clients were music programs. So we helped groups all over the country raise money. And it was it was an amazing adventure. We did it for about 1617 years. And then our kids grew up. And we decided we wanted to go into some other things. So I decided to jump into real estate. I took my first real estate class right out of high school, and I didn’t jump into it. Sometimes I wonder what would have been different if I did.
D.J. Paris 7:58 So many other things. Yeah.
Monika Strand 7:59 So all the things I’ve done kind of brought me to real estate, I’m really good with people. I love community. I love caring about people and their transactions and their livelihoods and how they’re going to get into a house and all those things. And then my husband went back into the movie business. So he’s been traveling back and forth from the Bay Area where we live now back and he’s working on just cool TV shows and movies. And so here I am in real estate, five years in and constantly trying to make my own way and figure out new things to do that I can bring to the table. So my clients know like and trust me. So that’s where I Yeah,
D.J. Paris 8:41 wow, that you will use that so much. So much there. And I’d love to let’s let’s talk a little bit about I want to talk about the book. So the book is called Welcome home. It’s a children’s book. And it you tell us about why you wrote it what what the impetus was and what the book, what the book is, who the book is for and why agents should should consider buying a bunch of them to give to give to their, to their clients.
Monika Strand 9:11 Well, what happened was, I was helping my niche right now is first time homebuyers. I love them call me crazy, but I love by the buyer side of the transaction. And I know everyone says, Oh, the listing side, but I kind of find I found my space with doing really fun open houses where I would let kids do events in the backyard with little bird houses and coloring. Yeah, let’s entertain them.
D.J. Paris 9:41 I want to stop. I want to pause for a moment because this is really, really a cool thing that Monica does. So we oftentimes have guests on the show who talk specifically about how they built their business and inevitably, in many, probably most of the interviews I’ve done, people say Open House So I sit open houses, even if I don’t have listings, I asked other agents in my office, Hey, can I go to an open house for your listing? But you do something that I’ve never heard anybody do. And I, and I don’t mean we’re sort of laughing about it, and you’re about to tell, but I thought it was one of the smartest and coolest things. So I just wanted to make that point before we jump in. So that doesn’t get passed over. Tell us about your open house.
Monika Strand 10:24 Yeah, I, I think a lot of agents hate doing open houses because they think oh, you know, you’re just waiting for people to come I treat it more like a party, I’m I’m hosting a party, I do not just show up with business cards. It’s so boring. I bring I bring food. During the pandemic, I had to lighten that up. I’ll be honest, it so kind of depressed me, actually. So now we’re starting to get back into the normal, so I can’t wait. So I bring music, I bring food I bring, you know, at least water something to drink. So we can chat that I also bring stuff for the kids to stay entertained. And this is critical. If I’m in California, so a lot of times I’m blessed with really great weather. So I can, if it’s a single family home, there’s a nice backyard, all set up an area where the kids can do some kind of a craft. And it’s not anything that will take them too long, but long enough so that the parents will hang out and chat with me for a while. And I’m telling you, when you put love on the children, the client, the parents just start to fall in love with you. If they’re the right match. Of course, you can’t help everybody and I don’t want to help everybody. I don’t have time to say I can. I’m the agent for everyone I’m not. But if you have kids, and you want someone who’s going to care about your whole family, the doing something in the backyard with the children, keeps them safe and entertained. And now it gives me the opportunity to connect with the parents. And it works. It’s just a nice conversational piece. And then they get to take something home. And I’ve had these little bird houses go home from open houses and community events. And then the parents will call me later. Hey, Monica, I drove by this house. And I really would love it if you could help us by it. I didn’t even have to help them. Look, they found the house and remembered me. Yeah, it’s it’s cool. It can really work for people.
D.J. Paris 12:26 I think the birdhouse thing is so cool. So So are there just those little like birdhouse kits that you buy? Or how does it work.
Monika Strand 12:33 Um, these were just little wood birdhouses that I bought either at Michaels or JoAnn Fabrics, you don’t have that near you go online and find them in there probably about $1, maybe a little bit more, but such a fun investment. And then I would get markers and stickers and things for them to put on him. Just don’t use Sharpies, just markers up, they’re not gonna get all over their clothes. But every time I bring out the birdhouses, the adults are always this is amazing. This is such a nice gesture for you to have something for the kids. And now I’ve kind of morphed that whole idea during the pandemic, the book was born because I just was sitting on my couch one day thinking, what else can I be doing for the kids that can really benefit and also ultimately benefit the agents? Building lifetime clients? Because on key day, that shouldn’t be the ending of the relationship. It should be the beginning. So
D.J. Paris 13:33 I yeah, I think absolutely the I couldn’t agree more. And I want to just go back to the birdhouse idea just for a moment. Yes, I think it is. So such a brilliant idea. If we think about the psychology of it, the the idea or the branding and the marketing side of it. It is you know, your first of all, kids are fascinated by wildlife and animals and any, especially for kids that don’t have pets in the family. One way that you can sort of satisfy a little bit of that urge is to have a bird a birdhouse, right? So people, families, oftentimes at some point, and in most families lives, they create a birdhouse or they make one or they want to make one or the kids ask about it. So you’re providing this opportunity to satisfy a little bit of a pet sort of urge. And also, it’s it could be a permanent thing. I know like, birdhouses oftentimes get put up and then they stay. And then kids get to it’s just it’s a fun, exciting experience with very little downside. And also, like you said, they get to bring that home, there’s something tangible they get to do with them, which they maybe they visit you know, five other open houses, those buyers, and they’re probably not getting that same experience anywhere else. So I think that is it’s a very hyper specific thing. And but again, having crafts, having things for children to do, really does give the parent that free time to actually explore the property, knowing that the children are being, you know, taken care of and doing something that’s entertaining and engaging and fun. And really, and staying safe and yard. Yeah. And the idea that that every time the parent looks out of their window to see the the birdhouse that might be hanging up now, as they brought it home, they’re going to be reminded of you. And so what a wonderfully smart and just fun activity to, for children to go to an open house, probably not that much fun, I would think in many cases, but giving them this sort of activities,
Monika Strand 15:48 look, so like the minute, the minute they come into my open house, I bend down to their level. And I’m like, Oh, my goodness, thank you so much for coming to my open house today. How many houses have you seen today, and I and I let them know Are your parents dragging you around town and they look at me like, I’m so tired. You’ve hit it on the head, it’s, you know, you come to the level of the children and the parents just open up to you, they really do. And the funny thing about the whole birdhouse thing, when I created the book, I let my illustrator know, I’m a freak about birds, and I love squirrels. And there are birds like scattered through my book, like she drew them in in different places. So I just find it kind of the birdhouse was how I started interacting with the children at my open houses. And now I’ve got this book, and I I’ll bring them to my open houses. And I usually will give one away when you know, I’ll find one family that I’ll give one away. And the parents always just light up and it’s cool.
D.J. Paris 16:53 Let’s let’s talk about the book. So the book is called welcome home and tell us what it is and who it’s for.
Monika Strand 16:59 Yeah, okay, well, I created it last. Last year, during the pandemic, I was sitting on my couch and I just I always was struggling to find the perfect gift for the kids on closing day. I like to give gifts on closing day I’m that kind of agent, the warm and fuzzy agent that not everybody is that I you know, lean into who you are. So I love giving gifts. And there was nothing out there in there in the market. I looked I just you know, basic, basic gifts. So I said I need to create it. So I sat down and I literally wrote it in one sitting. It’s just it you know, it’s a small, it’s a 28 page book with that Dr. Susi kind of rhyme thing going on. Basically, it’s the journey of a little boy moving. And he’s scared to leave his old house, mom’s pregnant, and they’re moving to a new home. And you know, he just he just needs a little help. He’s now I’ll show you a picture of him. He’s right here. Yeah. And he’s, he’s just like, you know, I, I’m scared. But the reason I wrote it was I wanted to be able to hand off something. And my vision is for agents to read it right before they hand the keys to the family. And if if the child is old enough to open the door with the key, let the child do it. And let them be excited about moving into their new home rather than nervous because what I’ve seen is children hanging on to like mom’s side for dear life, like what are we doing today? And all the attention with the agent typically is eye level with the parents adults. Focus. Yeah, and the parent and the kids are just, you know, they’re, they’re lower because they’re shorter, and they’re not getting the attention. And I really started to clue into that. And I thought, This isn’t right. So what I ended up ultimately doing was writing this book with two intentions was relieving some anxiety for the child that everything’s going to be okay, they’re more important than the house, home is them, you know, the family, and wherever they go, they’re going to be the most important part. And so that’s kind of the story and journey of the book. And at the end of the book, there’s a place for the agents to send a photo of, you know, we always take a picture of closing day, and it’s usually to promote, look what I just did on social media, so much of that in our industry, but how about send it to the family to put in the book, and then they can maybe put their business card at the back of the book, but this book, I guarantee will not be thrown away or consumed like a bottle of wine. You’re not going to wipe your feet on the doormat it the book will go in the kids room and they’ll probably read it over and over and keep it and ultimately I think it’s going to build referral network and when they want to sell the house they will remember this agent if that agent is still in business, and that’s so there is two fold for the book. It’s obviously for the piled. And it’s, it’s for the agent, and I’ve created the book so that you can purchase it in bulk. So that if you’re a busy agent or you’re on a team, you will have the book out there ready to, you know, go ahead and get it ready to bring to closing day with the keys. So,
D.J. Paris 20:18 I think it makes so much sense because an agent may, you know, representing a buyer may show up at the day that the key day and keys are transferred, family moves in agent goes home, and now all of a sudden, family is now dealing with oh my gosh, the children or the child is, is freaked out, they’re there, they’re anxious, they don’t know. The scary, this is new, this is this is unknown. And so to be able to provide them with something saying, hey, you know, here’s, here’s a little guide for for you and for the child is really demonstrating a high level of consideration and care. It’s, it’s it’s very thoughtful, right. It’s a very thoughtful idea. And so, you know, I think it is a really smart thing that agents should consider having just with them, saying, Hey, Are your kids you know, how are they feeling about the move or nervous, you know, I’ve got something for them. I think that in and of itself, like you’re saying, it’s more of the intangible sort of value that you can provide? Yes, of course, anyone can sell somebody a home. And anyone can negotiate and do all the things that Realtors do. And there’s lots of super competent realtors out there. One way to differentiate yourself from all of those super competent Realtors is also to demonstrate care, and care and thoughtfulness. And I think this book does something that I have really not seen, as much of in this industry, as I think it needs to be brought to is is dealing with the move itself. And how stressful we know that psychologically, on the scale of stressful life events moving is right up at the top of the highest. Like it’s up there with, with with death, it’s up there with loss of a job, it’s it’s very even if it’s a oh my gosh, we’re moving to this amazing place, it’s still as stressful as as some of the more difficult life events that we all experience. So anything to help make that transition. And of course, realtors or like yourself are so fortunate because you have the ability to help people achieve these wonderful dreams of homeownership, but also then saying, but I’m also going to guide you, you know, through the process and, and be there to care for maybe even the children to some small extent by providing a book. So I think this is such such a smart idea. I’m curious, yeah, no, I love it. And and I know that, like because I just was thinking I moved when Well, I’m gonna tell you a story actually not about me moving. So the last time when I when I moved, I was six years old. And I absolutely could have used a book to explain, you know, and but that was that was, you know, a long, long time ago.
Monika Strand 23:22 I was six two, I swear that was that’s so funny that you said that. Weren’t you freaked out?
D.J. Paris 23:28 Yeah, I was completely freaked out, we were moving to another city. And it was it was scary. And, and again, I’m sure the realtor who worked with my parents at that time, it probably just that those resources weren’t available. So the idea of even thinking about that is you now have this opportunity as an agent to really provide emotion, more emotional support. Because I think what’s really cool about technology is technology has allowed the consumer to get access to information to help the transaction itself. So finding a property, you know, getting the data for schools and and crime rates and all of those things. Thankfully, the agent doesn’t have to spend as much time doing as they did before. And the agent can then pivot and focus on Hey, but you know, let’s talk about how how’s the stress level? How are you guys doing? How are the kids doing? Oh, by the way, I have this book for the children that will help like it’s a win all the way around. I see. So I’m I’m a huge, huge fan. I’m curious. Yeah, I’m curious how how you see agents utilizing the book. What’s the best way you think agents should you know should they give the book to the person at the closing table? Should it be before that after then what are your best your thoughts?
Monika Strand 24:52 I my main vision was, I see buyer agents or listing agents purchasing it strong Smart listing agents, if they had a really good closing, a good escrow with a buyer agent might want to leave a copy on the kitchen counter and text the buyer agent saying thanks so much for an incredible escrow. So glad you know we could close on time, I hope the family loves it if they know of families moving in, it’s a small investment for making maybe another transaction down the road go smooth with that agent. Again, it’s a great, thank you gift to the other agent, I don’t think we do enough thinking of other agents who work really hard to get business done properly and take care of everyone. That’s kind of my thought. And the buyer agent could actually bring it to the key day, not closing day, because a lot of times the kid isn’t there or the children. So but a lot of times on key day, if it can be planned when school’s out and it’s closer to dinnertime or whatever, then the the keys and the book and whatever other gifts they want to maybe have in the kitchen or what the agents doing, they can read the book on the porch before they open the door for the family to let it be kind of a really cool little moment for the family if they wanted. And then they could hand the key to the kid and let them walk in. And that’s my vision. But I’m sure agents will do it how they want. But I do see it as a great tool to to utilize your heart to do the right thing for the family moving. It’s a big big day. Scary for the kids. And when you said you moved when you were six. So did I and I kind of forgot about that when I wrote the book. And then I remembered Wow, wait, I was really pretty young. And I remember hanging onto my mom’s like, pants or whatever. And she was dragging me through the house and it was a little bit of a fixer upper. My dad found a good neighborhood a house they could fix up. And I remember my mom telling me Don’t touch anything, don’t touch anything. And I don’t remember the agent at all. Like as a six year old in my memory. I’m trying to remember back. Do you remember the agent? Like I don’t remember an agent talking to me or interacting with me. So the presence wasn’t there. But how cool if you take a moment to do something for the kids? I think that the parents really, I’ve had, I’ve had a lot of families pick me because I’ve showed kindness to the children, whether it’s at a community event or my open house. Those are the typical places where I’ll meet families. But yeah, the birdhouses have kind of responded to that. And now this book is is my my new baby that’s I’m hoping to share it with a lot of agents because I think it’s I think it’s needed out there. I think we work in such a fast paced business and we’re going from deal to deal to deal chickens with our heads cut off mentality. And if we just slow down a little bit and nurture that one client and you’ve got to remember closing day is the beginning not the end of the road with that client because they’re going to maybe refer you to someone else if you did a good job for them. Maybe they’re going to have to move again and then they’ll remember you and a book like this staying in their house I think can help do that. I do
D.J. Paris 28:25 I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast. Do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests? Of course it is follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources also the best part they have seven day a week support so you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice as much time as they give everyone else and oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free but only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss and now back to our episode. Yeah, it again everyone can pick the book up you can buy it individually or you can buy it in bulk Monica strand.com mo N ik a strand.com You’re watching She’s holding a picture of it, we’re going to have a link to it in our show notes as well. But what a great, great opportunity to provide something that you’re right isn’t a consumable product, right. So you provide a, you know, really nice bottle of wine that gets consumed, eventually thrown away. We want items that will will continue to add value on and on. And books like books obviously do that. There’s, of course, other ways to do that as well. But I would love to also get your thoughts about, you know, back to just to your real estate practice, specifically, I would love to hear because and I think I’d love to hear more about how you how you feel you’re different. You differentiate from from other agents, not that maybe we probably don’t see them as competition, I’m sure but how you see yourself as maybe providing different types of value. I know that think even just thinking about, Okay, I have this open house, and I have to create some sort of activity for children to be entertained. That is a level of care and consideration. I’m curious if there’s other things that that you may do throughout a transaction that I’m sure is different from what you’ve seen here.
Monika Strand 31:21 Like I said, my niche right now has really been first time homebuyers. I love helping them and I know some agents necessarily don’t they think it’s too much work, or it’s just going to be a headache. I love the challenge. And I love I love key day I love you know, getting them into a single family home. It’s like the American dream. It’s coming true. So taking it from someplace like an open house or a community event where I might have met someone from their care and kindness, things like making the birdhouse, you know, spending the money on these items they can take, you know, something that’s tangible that they can take away, and then they might remember Oh, yeah, Monica, I remember her, you know, they’re gonna remember you if you stand out with kindness. And from there, if I can get them to actually trust me, I always invite them to my office for a one on one meeting, which is a pretty standard practice. But I think a lot of agents are missing that step. The key for me right now is the California contract switched from 10 pages to 16 pages in December. And one of my questions at open houses, I never asked, Hey, do you have an agent I always ask, have you been making offers are ready to try to find out if they’re working and if they’re losing. And if they have, you know, I’m happy to give a little advice, even if they have agents just for small talk. But if they don’t have an agent, I always invite them. If you want to learn a little more about the buying process running from Open House to open house isn’t the best way to do it. It’s really good to sit down. I love to share a sample of the contract. I know that is like basic 101. But I think a lot of agents right now are missing that. And in this fast paced industry we work we just assume they know everything we do. And they don’t I when I share the contract with first time homebuyers, we sit down I did one last night at five o’clock at my office, we sat for an hour and chatted, I went over all their you know, hopes and desires and dreams and let them know, you know, in this crazy market right now you might have to give up something and they like that reality check. And then going over the contract, I sometimes tease them I say you can treat it like bathroom reading, take it home, read a bunch, take another page, read some more, and then ask me questions. Because in the heat of the battle, when you’re at work, and you’re at work, and we need to make an offer at two o’clock on a Tuesday, you’re going to just get the DocuSign click, click, click, click and now you’re making an offer on a home. This this business is kind of crazy when it comes to the largest purchase most likely of your life coming down to a clickable Docusign. I mean, we have that business, you know, yeah, it’s
D.J. Paris 34:11 crazy, right? It’s crazy. And right now, it’s Oh, and we need it in the next five minutes because there’s exactly 15 other offers. And so I think what you just said is really important, I want to unpack it a little bit because I think it’s really an a huge huge differentiator for you, which is sitting down and saying, Hey, before we get into all of this, let’s let me just kind of show you what a contract looks like. And let’s go through it. So that so that when we when we do need to make offers, we can do it quickly. We you you understand what you’re doing. And that’s actually a really, really smart thing to do because I know too. I recently bought a property or my primary residence, which I had done before this wasn’t my first time But it was the largest purchase I had made up until this point in my life. And even though I’m in the industry and I have a podcast, and I have we have 800 agents here at our company. So you would think I’d be like, I know, I know how everything works. I really don’t know how everything works, I’ll never know. Yeah, well, that. And it’s just an incredibly emotional experience, who you know, where people no matter what industry they’re in, but even if they’re in real estate, this is going to be a stressful experience. So this idea that, you know, people outside of the industry know anything about real estate is is the extent what people know is that they know how to go on Zillow. They know how to search for properties, they know how to look at pictures. And they go, that looks cool. And, and that’s probably why I always say, you know, that’s what everyone’s doing. But the knowledge, the emotional intelligence, the understanding about lending the understanding about the attorney, if you’re an attorney, state, escrow all of negotiations, all of those things are probably not known by the consumer.
Monika Strand 36:15 They’re not top of mind yet for them until we educate them. And I take lots of other little pieces to try to make myself stand out. I’ll do things like, once, you know, like, last night, I sat down for an hour with some new buyers, I met at an open house last weekend. And now they’re in the pre approval phase with one of my preferred lenders. And after that, because people work so much, and they’re busy, and maybe they have to travel a little bit to the area they want to come and purchasing. I’ll do things like maybe all tore the home on my own, if it’s close to where I am, because this is my area. And I’ll take a quick video tour. And I’ll I’ll text it a video and send it to them and say, hey, does this even interest you? So I’ll save them time. And it makes them know Oh, Monica is thinking about me today. And if they don’t like it, great, fine, I saved you time. But if you love it, then I’ll say okay, I need you to be ready. Today. There’s one opening at five o’clock, we’ve got to tour it today or we’re going to lose out the market here in California is so fast paced, it’s it’s absolutely crazy. So, you know, I let folks know, coming to open houses is great to to see a few homes. But if you want to get serious, you need to get connected to an agent who’s going to show you private tours. So you can walk in and feel how do I like this house? Does it fit me? Do I like it? And I’ll even step out and say I’m gonna let you guys be in there for a minute alone. Just feel the home Do you know, and you can’t do that during an open house? So they’re like, Wow, we never thought of it that way. I was like you should, you shouldn’t have to run around to every single open house. Let me weed out the things that didn’t make it on your dream list. And they they appreciate that so much. That’s that’s a big one.
D.J. Paris 38:04 Definitely I you know, my mind is just spinning from from everything you just mentioned, I was thinking if if I was practicing agent, and I saw a property that I thought was really cool or interesting, whether I’m on a showing, or maybe I just go see it on my own, like you were saying, filming that video and in whether you’re sending it directly to your customer, or your clients, hey, I’m thinking about you. If this interests you, let me know. But you can also post that on social media say I am, I love this home, this is really cool. Here’s some interesting features. That’s another opportunity to so sending it to, you know out on social media, if that’s appropriate, or to the client say, hey, so and so I was just thinking about you, I think this might be a good fit. What do you think? Again, demonstrating care demonstrating like I’m thinking about you? I think that that seems to be the overall theme for your business is is I’m thinking about you. And I’ll finish it just with this really interesting story that just happened. I’ll just love to get your thoughts on it. So I have I have a friend and I’ll keep this very vague to protect everyone who’s who’s involved in the story. But basically, I have a friend who had this is someone who will say it’s a he and he had one of his biggest listings ever and it was a we’ll call it a let’s say it’s a $10 million property. So it’s a $10 million property. He was a referral from a client. This was a listing. The family wanted to sell this $10 million property, which is obviously an amazing property probably anywhere in the country and this single family home kind of scenario. So the listing agent took took the listing and found a buyer and when we’re dealing with with those kind of high net worth kind of properties, it’s not as easy as just throwing it on the MLS waiting for the offers to roll in, you have to really go out and find those people who can afford those types of properties and really seek them out. So this this individual did this work this guy, he did it, he got a buyer. And then on the last day of attorney review, once the contract was was in place, the seller decided got cold feet, which is, yeah, and basically said, I’m out, I want to keep the property. And so this was a massive, you know, a loss to the listing agent listing, and you said, Well, okay, you know, uh, well, you win some, you lose some and the seller does change their mind, what the seller did. And this is the part I wanted to get your opinion on. So the listing agent was going back to the seller to like, cancel the listing agreement and just kind of, you know, be done with the whole thing. And, and she, he was rather licking his wounds going, oh, gosh, I just lost this the sale, and the seller changed their mind. And then the listing agent looked at the next door property and said, you know, that’s a comparable property, it probably is worth about the same amount of money. And wonder if the next door neighbor might be wanting to sell that, that his property to this other buyer who might want also to buy this property now that the seller on the first property got cold feet. So literally, this agent, he went next door next door? Yeah. Well, he actually called he found out who the owner was, he called the owner and said, You don’t know me. I was trying to sell your neighbor’s home and it didn’t happen. But I have this buyer. Even though it’s a listing agent, I have this this agent with a buyer who wants a property like this, would you be interested in selling your property at for, you know, X amount, 10 million or whatever? And, and the owner said, Yeah, I think I would. And so all of a sudden, all of a sudden, now, this transaction happens, right? Yeah. And And what’s amazing to me, is it the story itself was great, the listing agent did the right thing. So another property called The owner said, Hey, I got a buyer. What what do you think? And yes, so that’s Lesson number one is, of course, look around, and make those kinds of calls. But the second thing, the thing that I was most interested in, as I said, Wait a minute, that person would use the realtor to buy that property. I don’t know how long they lived neighbor, I don’t know how long the neighbor lived in this property. But let’s say it’s five or 10 years, they used an agent to buy that property. How upset, you know, must that agent be who represented the buyer who bought to now not get the sale, the sell side all those years later? And I think what you’re talking about is maintaining those relationships, in providing value after the sale for as many years indefinitely for the whole lifetime of the relationship, because I thought you know, it, you know, if you if you do the math, let’s just say maybe the commission is I don’t know, 250,000? I don’t know, somewhere in that neighborhood. So imagine losing that, you know, and simply because you didn’t reach out to your person that bought this amazing property all those years ago, go, Hey, what’s going on? Are you happy? Are you thinking of moving? Are you thinking? No, I’m assuming that that’s probably what happened. And so I just wanted to share that, because that is it. We hear those stories all the time.
Monika Strand 43:32 Absolutely. And you never know what the neighbor wants to do. I didn’t it wasn’t a $10 million listing I had when it was a it was a historical little home. And it was around 600k. But it had commercial real estate scenario building permit problems. So it was a hard one to sell. But in the open house, I met folks that ended up not offering on it, but I connected with them. And I realized the next door neighbor’s house was almost the exact same thing. And sure enough, I sold, sold it, I got that person in next door. And then the guy selling it wanted me to buy help him buy a house somewhere else. So I ended up getting three deals out of just paying attention to the guy next door. So power of paying attention. But I’m telling you, our brains are so hard wired with so many things to do as real estate agents, it does get to be a daunting task, where to spend your time and who to reach out to and sometimes we just have to take a deep breath and care about ourselves too. Because we can’t care about anybody else until we take care of ourselves and just start listening and try to defuse some of the noise because I know I’m dealing with that myself personally right now the pandemic really altered. I think a little bit who all of us are I don’t know if you know what I mean like being I’m actually filming right now in my home office I built in my back Back Yard last year, because of the pandemic, we got kicked out of our offices. And ultimately, I ended up building this, which is a great place to do zoom calls now. Yeah, that I missed, but I missed seeing people. So I’m really looking forward to going back to big open houses, community events, I crave seeing people and I’ve, I’ve really missed them for the last two years. So
D.J. Paris 45:28 I had the same experience last night, I had an old friend Reach Out who lives here in the city, who I haven’t seen many years in the pandemic, certainly did that make that easier for us to get together and we just haven’t got together. And she reached out to me, her and her husband said, Hey, why don’t we get together this weekend. And I definitely had a little bit of a bigger spark. I mean, I would always want to hang out with these people. But the fact that it came sort of at this time, I think, I noticed myself getting more excited than I normally would be because we are I think a little bit, not a little bit, my lot starved most of us for interpersonal interaction. And so I think open houses, events, you know, whether it’s, you know, you’re having people come to do a volunteer thing, or a client appreciation event, or a seminar about how to build, you know, buy your first home, or a dance party, or a bird or a bird.
Monika Strand 46:32 I’m telling you, the things I would love to do, and I think maybe I will this, we need it. I mean, I feel like we’ve all been pushed down and sent home and for two years to reflect on whatever it was we needed to reflect on and, you know, a lot of sadness and a lot of grief and all kinds of things. And I think I’m just usually a happy person. And I feel like I was pushed down a bit over the last few years, it’s time to come out of our shells again, and, and help one another. And, and again, I don’t like to compete with all the other real estate agents. I’m me, I’m unique, and I know it and so I’m just in my own lane doing my own thing. But if I can help other agents build their business, I this is a brand new thing for me. Matter of fact, I didn’t even mention, my husband and I are the publishers. This is our first book storytellers publishing it because my husband writes books too. So Wow. So it’s sort of like a fun new venture for us. But you know, whatever I can do to help others come out of their shells. start caring again, start start doing events start start talking to people, you know, it’s like we were in our masks that whole time and all we could see was their eyes. And yeah, it’s it’s nice to start feeling like maybe we can see more people.
D.J. Paris 47:51 Yeah, we can we can, we can touch we can congregate we can do these things. Yeah, a little bit more safely.
Monika Strand 47:59 My tomorrow, I’m doing my first Twilight tour. I haven’t done one in years, like actually with food and just invite the neighbors. You know, I’m excited, you know, turn it into a little party, you know,
D.J. Paris 48:11 yeah, I your enthusiasm is so infectious. And I absolutely, just think it’s the right energy for this time right now. And, and so everyone, please think about this, you can be a hero, or you know, small hero, Big Hero, some sort of hero to your or if not a hero, at least somebody who demonstrates care for a family going through a move, which we know is crazy and stressful, and a big pain in the butt for everybody. If you you consider giving this gift to the children, which is called Welcome home. It’s a book about moving, helping kids deal with cope with moving, have giving the parents a little framework for how to introduce the home to the child. And we’re big, big, big fans. You can find the book and order the book and you can buy it in bulk. Honestly, if it was been I’d just buy like 50 copies, keep it in my trunk and hand them out whenever I ran across an agent who are sorry a family who is in the process of moving and you can find that at Monica strand.com and Monaco’s again with a K m o n ik a stranded.com. Also Monica is an agent and she is a wonderful agent in the Freeport area. And she is with Compass and what’s and you can also if you’re interested in working with Monica directly, she is absolutely willing to speak with you whether you’re a first time homebuyer or veteran investor or somebody who is just looking to work with a top real estate agent to find their next property. What’s the best way someone should reach out to you if they are interested in talking with you?
Monika Strand 49:53 Absolutely. If they are on Instagram, just follow me on Instagram. I’m always there at Monica strand or if you want to email me, Monica mo n i k, at Compass doc actually Monica at Monica strand would be the easiest. I have two emails. So it’s my name. And then my name Annika and Monica Monica at
D.J. Paris 50:14 Monica strand.we. Will put those links in our show notes as well. Monica, thank you so much for being on our show. We had such a fun time with you, on behalf of our audience want to thank Monica for her time and also hope we there’s more books to come. I think you could create a whole series around around this. So I’m sure you do. And on behalf of Monica and myself, we want to say thank you to our audience as well. And please remember to always, the best way you can help us is to support our sponsors, as well as by telling a friend, think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing this great interview with Monica send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com Is our website or you can find us anywhere podcasts are served. Just send it over keeping it real to a friend and have them hit the subscribe button. Monica, thank you so much and we will see everybody on our next episode. Thanks Monica.
Monika Strand 51:09 Bye bye. Thank you so much.
How To Break Into Commercial Real Estate • Helen Chong
May 25, 2022
Helen Chong, the founder of Haylen Group goes back to the beginning of her journey into real estate business. Helen describes the pivotal moment when one decision changed the course of her career and her ultimately her future. Helen discusses how she used her knowledge in real estate investment to build her career as a real estate agent. Next, Helen talks about her book “Power To Change Lives” and why she decided to write it. Helen also discusses how residential agents can expand their career into commercial real estate and the complexities of commercial real estate. Last, Helen describes how she’s been able to build her successful business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Should residential agents consider adding commercial into their real estate practice? We’re going to discuss that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Helen John, before we get to Helen just a couple of quick reminders. As always, please tell a friend about our show. There’s 1.6 million realtors out there so not everyone is heard of keeping it real. So please find someone else in your office or another agent that you feel could use a boost in their business and send them a link to our website which is keeping it real pod.com We appreciate it and also follow us on Facebook you can find us@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod every single day we post an article that we find online specifically written to help agents grow their business so find us@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod alright enough from me. Let’s get on to our interview with Helen John.
Right today on the show, Helen Chong she’s the founder of the heyland group in San Jose, sunny California. Let me tell you about Helen. Now Helen Shang CCI M is the founder of the heyland group in San Jose, which is dedicated to helping clients build their real estate portfolio from residential and commercial real estate sales. She has over 16 years of real estate experience as an agent mentor as well as an investor Helens company that hailing group has been recognized as part of the top 1.5% Real Estate teams by America’s best so she’s a top one and a half percent team. She’s a sought after speaker as well on real estate related topics is written real estate investment articles featured in Forbes she’s also or has been the president of the Northern California Chapter for CCI M which stands for Certified commercial investment member in 2020 20 and 2021. And she is also recognized as one of the Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal of 2021. And recently, she’s now also an author Helen has launched her new book titled power to change lives where she documents her journey full of obstacles as an immigrant from Hong Kong and Indonesia, coming to the United States alone without any family or financial support, and how she ultimately found success in the real estate industry. We are super excited and honored to have Helen on the show. By the way. Before we I officially introduced Helen please everyone visit her website which is halen group.com and halen is H A y le n group.com halen group.com Hello, and welcome to the show.
Helen Chong 4:14 Thank you so much. I’m so excited to start talking.
D.J. Paris 4:18 I am so excited to and I I really just love your energy. And I would love to start all the way back at the beginning of your journey into real estate. So can you talk a little bit about how you found real estate why and what that was like for you?
Helen Chong 4:35 Well, actually, I mean, most people, they don’t graduate from college and want to be in real estate, right? So I as an immigrant, I was a foreign student and I really needed a job that could sponsor me for a work visa. And I interviewed for so many different jobs and finally landed a company that was willing to sponsor me and and has a pretty good Title is called an analyst for a pension consulting firm in Santa Monica. And I got this beautiful ocean view right off of Ocean Boulevard. And I thought I got the dream job. So my job was to look at these institutions, pension portfolios, and then crunch all these numbers, see how they’re doing. But in about 2002, that’s when the tech bubble busted, right. So all of a sudden, I was looking at all these people pension funds portfolio, I was just like, Oh, my God, they lost so much money. And I was like, I thought, This is how people retire, retire, you know, relying on their pension funds. Right. And, you know, my, the things you mentioned earlier, I’m an immigrant, I came here, because I was trying to find that American dream, I was trying to find that, you know, the financial, sorry, the financial security, and so I don’t have to worry about that. And then also, this whole dream just busted, I was like, Oh, my God, this is not real. And so I figured that I need to figure something out, I need to find another kind of investments that has a little bit more control over because I don’t want to retire in the wrong year. And then the circle. So
D.J. Paris 6:12 this is this is a really important point. So just to make sure everyone here is on the same page, because Helen’s making a very, very important point, which is around, if we remember, if we were around at that time, I certainly was, in fact, I have a one, I have a letter from one of my best friends who is a financial advisor. And he’s very competent financial advisor, although I’m going to make him sound like he’s not. Because back in the late 90s, I, we had just both graduated college and I was looking to invest the little, tiny, tiny amount of money that I had, which was basically nothing. And he said, and I said, Well, I should ask my friend who is a financial advisor. And so he wrote me this letter, and I still have it today, which is like 1999. And he goes, we I want you to invest in these mutual funds, their tech mutual funds, they were up 180% Last year, so sky’s the limit. And, and of course, then the tech bubble burst in the early, early 2000s 2000 2001. And then the this is really what Helen’s talking about is had you would retire now my friend, by the way, was a young financial advisor. But this is what financial advisors were telling people back then it wasn’t that my friend was a, you know, dumb or incompetent. It’s what people were doing. And a lot of people who were retiring around that time really, you know, unfortunately, the saw their their, you know, their their assets cut, maybe in half, maybe more, because they were over, you know, they were sort of, you know, in that particular tech sector, too much of their assets were there. So I’m just wanted to catch everyone up, because what you just said is very, very important is if you retire at the wrong year in the market, it could have, you know, dramatically negative effects.
Helen Chong 7:56 Exactly, I had a little I met some guy, and because I was researching different types of investments. So I started going to these real estate investment seminar. And this guy, he was 65 years old, and and we started talking, he was like, Well, I was supposed to retire this year. But then now my retirement funds dropped down to only $150,000. So I need to figure something out. And he said, like, I wished I had gotten into real estate investment earlier on to protect myself. And in the back of my mind, I kept thinking it’s true, you know, if you invest into these stocks, you are giving your life savings away to these companies that you think they would know what they’re doing, right. But you have absolutely no control and no say into this whole thing. So, and I just started reading at the time, you know, just like a computer. And I remember I was printing all these articles online, especially foreclosures.com I read every word, and every creative strategies, and I’ve gone to different kinds of seminars, and I just fell in love with real estate. And the opportunity presented itself and I basically switch my occupation from you know, having having a very stable job to try to get into like commission earn commission with no stable, stable salary. I actually I was going to start working for another company. And I interviewed I got the job and the HR called me is like okay, you know, I’m gonna send you an acceptance letter. Are you going to take the job and I was like, I was like, I really want to try real estate if it doesn’t work, can I come back? And she was like, no. But I was like, Well, I gotta try if I if I don’t make it then I’ll look for another job then I feel like jobs will always be there. But if I don’t, you know have this leap of faith. I would never know if I can make it in real estate but it’s scary. Really scary.
D.J. Paris 9:51 It really scary because number one you’re not from here. You don’t have I’m guessing I shouldn’t speak for you but did you have a A sort of sphere of influence or people that you could work with when you when you started in real estate, or did you find that? No, I don’t have that. And was that a challenge?
Helen Chong 10:10 I did not have that at all. I mean, being here by myself. And it’s not like my parents had any kind of real estate experience back in Asia either. So I didn’t, I just knew I wanted to be in real estate, I don’t even know what you can do in real estate. I didn’t understand realtor or whatever. I just know. Okay, I was an analyst, I was good with numbers. And I saw this ad on newspaper, yes, on newspaper, and it says mortgage looking for mortgage broker. So I applied and I thought, I’m interviewing for a job, I was like, doing my best and they’re like, Okay, just come in and start working. I’m just like, okay, so I literally knew nothing about real estate when I first came in.
D.J. Paris 10:49 It’s amazing too, because I think as a mortgage broker, so much of that job is, is sort of sales focused, and those skills, it’s really a sales job, more than more than anything, but the beaten that you had a more traditional consultant style, finance background, a corporate background, looking at investments, you know, looking at, at at at, you know, balance sheets, and Ledger’s I suspect that made you very valuable on the mortgage side, because you could provide probably more insight than the average loan officer.
Helen Chong 11:25 I you will, you will think that, but then I really didn’t think it just because of the fact that I mean, at the time, we were doing all these subprime loans, right, it was back into that remember, around there. And so I was like, Oh, you don’t even need to prove your income, or, I mean, I was calling home telling my parents like people who don’t need to put down payment to buy a house. You don’t need to make a lot of money. I mean, I had, I had a little a client was a taxi driver, and back then he was looking for a million dollar property. And all we did was just like, How much money do you make? And he tells you a number, you write it down? How much money do you have in a bank account? Because you write it down? There was no verification of anything. It was just like that. Yeah, it
D.J. Paris 12:14 was a weird time. And there were interest only loans. And they were you know, there was just an arm. Yeah. And it was it was a it was the Wild West. And so So talk a little bit more about like SEO. So you’re in, you’re now a loan officer, you’re seeing these sort of unusual goings on with with lending and in the mid 2000s. And then what happens after that.
Helen Chong 12:40 So then, of course, I was really trying hard to do cold calling, I never looked at myself as a salesperson, you’re like he said, I’m more of a constant consulting type of person. So I was supposed to do a lot of cold calling. And it was just like really hard to get started. And nobody, none of my friends trusted me, right? Because they all knew that. I was not in real estate before. So I had a rough start, I really didn’t make much money. And then all of a sudden, the whole market collapsed. Just mortgage industry is all gone are the brokerage company that I was working for was gone. Then I started going into real estate investments, I was learning how to invest understanding. I mean, I became a professional student, in a way, I just kept going to listen and listen and listen. But you’ve got to do it right if you’re learning all these things. So finally, these are like, Well, if you want to join this boot camp, you need to pay $15,000. And like I didn’t have $15,000 I had a credit card, they’re like well increase your credit limit and go $50,000 boot camp, and well, I did I literally was shaking, and I was crying.
D.J. Paris 13:51 That is huge. You bet you that is a pivotal moment in somebody’s life. So you didn’t have the money. You’re obviously a responsible person, you’re not somebody that probably had other debt at all. And now you’re like, This is an investment. This is my tuition, but it is there is no guarantee. Whereas if you were to continue on through academia, and you know, there’s masters and then there’s doctorates and and there’s more of a predictable sort of thing, well, if I do that, then these opportunities open, you’re going blindly into something that you can’t afford with no guarantee. I think that takes tremendous courage. So I honor you for that decision. And I understand, I believe that I would not make that same decision because I do not have that kind of courage. So I really applaud you for taking that step. Well, at
Helen Chong 14:37 the time, you probably I was thinking like, Am I one of those people who got fooled into this whole thing, right? Yeah. And honestly, I have nothing else to fall back on. If I if everything goes south. I don’t have a home to go back to I have to literally fly back to Asia. Right and that’s it. So I told the person who took my credit card I was like, this better be the moment that changed my life. And he was like, just follow what we teach you. And it will add, I’m like, okay, so it did it did change my life. I mean, it’s not just like that. But the knowledge and the experience, I’ve learned, I started investing, then I pick because I started investing, I have more people coming to me saying, Oh, can you help me to look at properties now. And that’s how I switch from a mortgage broker to investor and then to become a realtor.
D.J. Paris 15:29 It’s an incredible story. I just love the fact that you bet on yourself, and so many successful agents that I’ve spoken to and even people in other industries that are successful, or we consider to be leaders oftentimes have that moment where they bet on themselves. And it usually logically looks like a maybe a bad decision in that moment, like, oh, no, this might not work. And here you are. And everything sort of moved forward from that really difficult decision. So I hopefully that’s inspiring to our audience, that sometimes, not sometimes betting on yourself is probably the only the only person that’s ever going to bet IDEO, predictably could be you. And if you’re lucky, other people bet on you as well. But you have to take that first step. And so let’s talk about that. So you started, you basically went to school, you went to school to learn how to be the in real estate invest investments, and then you were able to take that knowledge, and then bring that to other people. And then other people were finding you, did you find that that that you see your role more as an educator, more versus a, I’m going to help you win this home, I sort of believe that you have just so much knowledge, curious how you see your role when you are working with clients,
Helen Chong 16:48 I definitely feel myself as an educator, I never looked at myself as a salesperson, I don’t know how to sell, I will say I don’t know how to sell, I cannot convince you, besides telling you the information and let you absorb it and then guide you through this, you know, all this information is funny, we we sometimes tell our clients, we tell them more no than yes, it’s like don’t buy this, you know, don’t go for this. Because we I mean, this is really our philosophy and also our, our goal within our company. We are saying like we are not here to sell our clients, we’re here to educate them, and then help them to make the right decision. So it’s it’s really an again, with that whole I’m sorry, my, my Siri kept turning is I know why? Because when I whenever I say seriously, it will turn Yeah.
D.J. Paris 17:45 Same thing happens to me when I say that same word, which I’m not going to say because it would activate it on my side. Anyone with an Apple computer knows this most this problem.
Helen Chong 17:56 Sorry about that. So but I think like there are a lot of for somebody who wants to be in the real estate industry is not just about sells, we have to remind ourselves that this is the biggest purchase for most people in this world. And we need to educate them, help them to guide them through that more of a focus. Because we know that real estate, we can make a lot of money. And that’s what clouds our judgment when we help our clients.
D.J. Paris 18:22 I yeah, I agree. I appreciate you saying that. And so you went on to do your own investments, working with other investors as well. Oh, can we just clear up a dispel a myth? For our audience who maybe is thinking, Well, I don’t know any investors, even if I had all of the knowledge of what kind of deals to look for? And how to evaluate properties, whether they’re a good investment or not. I don’t know anybody who has a lot of this cash sitting around to buy these properties. And I putting words in your mouth, and I shouldn’t. But is it? Has it been your experience that it’s hard to find the harder to find investors? Or is it harder to find opportunities for investors?
Helen Chong 19:04 I always say it’s much harder to find an opportunity finding the deal. If you find the deals, somehow investors will just appear in front of you. You won’t even know it’s crazy. How easy to find investors and money.
D.J. Paris 19:20 Yeah, yeah, that seems to be what I what I heard from from, you know, realtors that that do invest or work with investors is finding the deal is is the is the hard part. And you’re right, like almost by almost like moths to a flame. They somehow find you when you have these opportunities. So what I don’t want to do is spend time really talking about how to find investment opportunities because, gosh, there’s a million other podcasts out there that focus exclusively on that sort of education. Although I do recommend for anyone that is interested in getting more knowledge about how to invest BiggerPockets is probably the premier resource for agents to kind of just get a sense of how investors talk and how they think it’s a great Place biggerpockets.com. We’re big fans, they’ve been on our show as well. But you have written a book. And I don’t want to take more time to get because you’re already a superstar. We’ve already talked at the beginning about all these amazing accolades and awards, and you’re a top agent on the residential and the commercial side. I want to talk about your book, because this is really taking your knowledge to the next level. And really now saying, I want to give back, you know, and oftentimes people I think, always forget, people don’t really make a lot of money writing books, right. So this is not a way in which you know, we’re not here to sell books so that you can make a couple of dollars on each book, although that’s awesome, too. But the fact that you thought enough to say I want to contribute and give back and send my knowledge out, I think is so important. So let’s talk about your book. Why did you write it? It’s called power to change lives, by the way available on Amazon. If you go into the show notes for this episode, you will see a link right to the book, and I encourage everyone to pick it up. But let’s talk about what is the power to change lives. And why did you write it?
Helen Chong 21:06 Well, so I wrote this book, honestly, in the beginning was because I really want to document my journey for my kids to know in the future and something that they can go back and say, Oh, this is what my mom did and and how she came here from with nothing. But also another way to explain how real estate I’ve changed my life. And at the end of the day, as I was writing this book, I realized that real estate is about homes. And that’s what we feel the most comfortable with home a structure. But home doesn’t it’s not just a physical structure is really the feeling of being feel like Oh, I feel secured the peace and stability, everything, right. And that’s what we want to provide for ourselves and for our children, our family. And my journey was feeling like I had a great home, and then how I lost everything, and then coming to this new country. And then also I need to find my footing, where everyone was telling me like, oh, gosh, you’re Asian, you know, you will never succeed in America. Oh, you’re a woman? Oh, gosh, you can never do well, and real estate or commercial real estate. Oh, you’re a mom? No, do you know how much time it takes to be a mom, you can never you know, it’s okay, just take time off? Why can you just not work? You know, don’t be don’t ask for so much. Because your mom is constantly telling you that because of my categorization immigrant minority a woman or a mom, or you can’t be successful anymore. So I the my title is power to change lives speakers, basically saying like we we ourselves have the power to change our lives. And there are a lot of mines that a lot of struggle people only see like, wow, this is where you are now you must have come easy, you know, things must have been handed to you. But see the journey. They don’t see how hard it is. And it’s not just like, oh, you know, I pay that $15,000 Check. The next day my life changed, it still took years of struggle, and heartache and pain and kind of documented a lot of these journey a lot of people would would go through. And then at the end, how you use all of that obstacles and leverage it and then put it into along with your education that you learn and change your life and to become successful. And the but then I wanted to be very clear about what successful means though, successful, some people meaning it’s like how much money do you make, but I think it’s more important is about how happy you are where you are, is not like everyone has to make a million dollar to be happy, you can make $100,000 Only and you’re happy so is how to make your life happy doing something that you love and still enjoy your family time and your professional time. Whatever you want.
D.J. Paris 23:51 There is no sadder feeling I think then having something achieving something that’s a tangible goal maybe it’s a financial goal or some sort of life goal that that you think if only I had that then the happiness is going to come rolling in. And and I really hope that everyone listening doesn’t have this experience in their future but I have certainly had it where I hit some goal that I wanted to accomplish and I thought that’s going to equal happiness once I achieve X that I will be happy and I remember achieving x and it being one of the saddest days of my life because and then I went oh I’m actually sad because I didn’t have another thing to sort of do after that I thought oh well now what now what and and it made me feel very sad because I had put all of my happiness into this this one thing that was over and so I think you’re right I think this idea that well if I made you know X amount of money I be that that’s what happiness and yes, it certainly can help make things more comfortable and open up opportunities. But I think you’re right I think the striving for happiness and I think it is really the goal. And I think in real estate, we’re really lucky in that we, we sort of deal and happiness, certain sometimes right with, especially with people’s primary residences, or in your case, also educating clients about investment opportunities so that if the market does go down 150, you know, percent next year and you’re retiring, maybe you have some income producing properties that are going to keep income rolling in, which of course, you know, just helps everyone’s financial, you know, obligations to end goals that they want to hit. But let’s go ahead, I’m sorry.
Helen Chong 25:38 Oh, so no, I mean, I kind of want to make a point is that, you know, I always hear people’s like, oh, we this is how much money we have made this year. Oh, this is how many deals we’ve made this year. It’s so much we’ve focusing on the number that we put on ourselves and to compare with each other, then, you know, I, I don’t really like to put all these numbers out there, because I just don’t feel like this represent success or represent happiness. So I’m trying to make kind of like defining is like, yes, we do need some kind of financial security. But it’s more like the sense of security, sense of happiness and stability. That’s what we are all striving for.
D.J. Paris 26:22 How much of your happiness or fulfillment do you derive from contribution from being able to say, you know, I helped somebody make certain decisions around real estate or other areas of their life? Is that a critical part of your own happiness?
Helen Chong 26:42 I think that’s a big part of my happiness in this job and what I’m doing anyone you talk to, in real estate, whoever’s done it, they will tell you is hard. Right? You initially you work 6080 hours a week, and you’re like, I’m not making money, and how are you going to be really feeling the happiness, it’s like, when they fall down, they close the deal. It’s like, Oh, my God, this is my first home. And then also that I have this images of the kids like, Oh, my God, this is the memories they’re gonna have until they grow older. Right? When they’re at my age, they’re gonna always remember this house. That’s the happiness you get from that. But if I constant focus on this deal, how much money am I going to make? And then counting it every time? I’m, I have a client, that’s going to drive me crazy.
D.J. Paris 27:27 Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I appreciate your insight into that, because that just makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s a nice thing, especially in right now, the market is so challenging for buyers, in particular, of course, understanding that that, you know, throughout all of the frustration, what you’re really trying to do is help somebody build memories, like you were saying, and have wonderful memories. And you know, that maybe that’ll keep you keep the engine going a little bit longer. While you’re waiting for these opportunities to open up. Let’s, I would love to talk about commercial because we do get an apologize. I’m going to ask you a question. But I’m going to ask you to hold the answer while I read a do a sponsor read for our wonderful sponsor. But before I’ll let you know where I’m headed, I want to talk about commercial because there’s so many residential agents that listen to our show who we get this, these this feedback, this these emails and messages all the time saying, I’m wanting to dabble in commercial. And I’d love to get your thoughts about how a residential agent who wants to expand their skill set and maybe learn about commercial maybe added into their business, whether they should do that, and then maybe some steps about how they could start you know, taking that journey. But before we get to that, I want to just do a quick live read for our wonderful, amazing sponsor follow up boss. So this is one of our favorite tech companies in the real estate space now. I’ve interviewed over oh gosh, I think we’ve done almost 400 episodes now of this show. Hundreds and hundreds of top Realtors from all over the country like Helen and do you know which CRM is actually used by more than any of our guests of course it is follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States runs us his follow up boss and he’s built one and a half billion dollars of business in just six years. Follow up boss also integrates with over 250 different systems so you can keep your current tools your lead sources your your other systems can all integrate together and the best part follow up boss has a seven day a week support so you will get the help when you need it. Especially on the weekends when we know so often real estate happens and get this follow up boss is so sure you’re gonna love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial which is twice the amount of time that they give everyone else to test out their products. No credit card required. That’s how confident they are, you’re going to love their system. It’s totally risk free, but only if you visit this special link, please everyone visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real, can follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up, boss. Okay, Helen, let’s talk about let’s talk about commercial. So what is your thoughts about a residential agent saying, I’d like to expand into commercial?
Helen Chong 30:28 Well, first of all, I don’t find it anything wrong with it, to expand into commercial as long as you are going to go back to the advising advisory role, right? Commercial, you have to be an advisor is not about emotion. Now, in residential, it is very emotional process, you probably do a lot more hand holding counseling and all that right. But the when you go to commercial is all about numbers very analytical, can you handle it and do like it? That’s the question not, I just find that you really require two very different type of personalities to handle residential and commercial real estate. And just somehow I am able to do that. And maybe I have some split personality, I don’t know. But is this I think both are very satisfying. And if you’re willing to learn the analytical side of the commercial rules of business, absolutely. But if you feel like you just have clients that you they, their interest in commercial just refer to a commercial real estate agent, if you don’t like numbers, because you cannot get away with numbers, you have to make sure your clients making the right investments decision,
D.J. Paris 31:38 that and also, the complexities of some of the lease options, the leases that are that deal with or the purchase, you know, by cells that happen on the commercial side in the different sectors, it’s it really is not as as cookie cutter as residential, which we all agree there’s a certain types of forms that we all use and certain understandings and agreements that are all pretty consistent. On the commercial side. It’s really kind of could be anything and everything in it. And can you talk about the complexities of that and how you navigate through some of that.
Helen Chong 32:18 So commercial real estate, we’re just generalizing it right. But then there’s multifamily sector, industrial retail office, and then land or redevelopment. And then like you said, their leasing. Leasing is a huge business out there. However, it doesn’t mean that everyone is good at it. I’m not good at everything. I’m more multifamily person. I love doing my 10 year analysis, cash flow analysis and all that stuff to look at multifamily investments. I do work on some of these investment property in terms of retail and office but those are not my bread and butter work right. And leasing is a complete complete different animal like leasing, it requires a lot more negotiation, and every landlord every tenant has different needs. So I wouldn’t say like just anyone just because you’re in commercial roles that you should do it like I just don’t touch leasing because I’m I don’t think I’m good at it. So I won’t touch leasing.
D.J. Paris 33:14 And I think to your point about the fact that you’re specialized on the multifamily side is probably the closest to residential out of all the commercial opportunities. So for agents that are traditional residential brokers or Realtors we in Illinois, we call everyone a broker. So I apologize if I say that word incorrectly for people in other states, but it will just say realtor for traditional residential realtor going into multifamily is probably the easiest transition because they are most similar to residential and
Helen Chong 33:46 color, but it’s also vastly different. One to four units and five plus units the way we value it completely different. It’s just like, I have done a quite a few workshops, teaching residential agents, how to, you know, the differences between residential real estate and commercial real estate? How do we analyze each one is just different ballgame.
D.J. Paris 34:09 Yeah. I’m curious too, because I was just at the Zillow conference, and we were they were talking about the millennials and the Gen Z market place that are sorry, the the, the just that the millennials and Gen Z’s are now getting into the buying space. So they’re, they’ve grown up they now have some of them have have assets where they can now contribute into real estate and trying to figure out they were what trends that millennials and Gen Z’s what are they looking for and house hacking came up and I know, we don’t need to get too narrow of our focus. But I would say that if they Zillow was saying, if an agent isn’t really up on what house hacking is and how to talk about it elegantly, and at least intelligently. Gen Z’s are going to start running circles around you because that this is what they’re paying attention to. And I’m curious, you know, since you play in the multifamily space, if you’re seeing more of a trend towards younger people starting to want to explore these opportunities,
Helen Chong 35:11 definitely. And it’s kind of funny when I first heard about House hacking, I was like, What the heck is that? Yeah, me too. And then, when I started learning about it, I was like, oh, okay, so it’s basically you just renting out rooms, right? And in a house, and then you try. Now there’s good and bad. I mean, good is that of course, you can get a lot of great passive income, but then you also meaning that you do you have multiple tenants and a house doesn’t mean that you only have one tenant, you are dealing with multiple tenants. And so you have to comply with the rental laws. And then also, sometimes when you cut up a house too many times you actually depreciate that house value. So it’s a little I mean, it’s great passive income. But I think there’s a little bit more than just passive income, you have to think about the future Valley and but on the other hand multifamily, the way it’s like you can I have written articles on Forbes talking about how do you create a million dollar equity in a flipping I’m sorry, flipping and multifamily and create a million dollar equity without without selling it, you can still get cashflow from this building. And so I love multifamily, there’s just so many ways to play around it. And you can flip it without selling it and still get cashflow while you’re remodeling it. So
D.J. Paris 36:27 it creates a lot of opportunity to because now you have leasing opportunities to secure to secure tenants, if you’re going to keep it and use it as income, you have opportunities to do property management, or to outsource all of these. And there’s there’s a lot of revenue streams that come from multifamily that are maybe not as obvious. And so for anyone out there that is sort of interested in spending, you know, some time to get more familiar with how, you know, the multifamily sort of side works, where do you sort of suggest they start to get a little bit of education so they can decide if they want to pursue it further?
Helen Chong 37:08 Well, I know that a lot of association realtors, they offer these like basic multifamily classes. And I’m part of CCM, which is certified commercial investment member organization is an educational platform. And we do have foundation class where you can go in and start learning about these basic analysis. For me, personally, I took that first class foundation class for two days, I like fell in love with all these numbers and spreadsheets. And then so I just went on and kept taking these classes afterwards. And I can tell you just with one of these classes we call ci 101. I’ve been using just that one classes information for all of my multifamily clients, and everyone who look at the analysis was like blown away, it’s like holy cow, this is like so in depth analysis, you can see predict for the next 10 years where it goes. Do it on my own property, I do all of my multifamily transactions for our clients. So definitely check us the siam.com they have a lot of great educational classes for commercial real estate or multifamily.
D.J. Paris 38:15 Yeah, and that’s, that’s wonderful. And I also wanted to ask you, because you have your own firm, you aren’t working for one of the large franchise firms or, you know, on the residential or the commercial side. And I’m curious on on how was, you know, that’s also another amazing achievement of yours is not just being a successful agent, having successful investor relationships and having successful investments of your own. It’s also Oh, yeah, by the way, I run a business. And can you talk a little bit about, about that, and, and just, you know, how you were able to thrive? Again, without sort of a traditional backing of either Well, I grew up here, and I just know a lot of people which you didn’t, or I worked for a company that’s very sort of well known and that you didn’t have either. So can you talk a little bit about how you built your business?
Helen Chong 39:04 Yeah, you know, I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier, it’s all about education. I love educating our clients, I love taking classes, I feel like the you know, it’s too easy to get into real estate, right, getting your license, like anyone can get licensed, you can pass a test and that’s it. But we forget that there’s so much more we can learn after that. So I focus a lot of post license education, and I’m like a sponge afterwards. I just learned learn and then I digest it and then I teach to my clients. So until now, for example, I still do my month I do my monthly housing market townhall, you know, just to educate people regarding our housing market and some kind of cost segregation or anything right from real estate experts, because while I’m interviewing them, I’m also learning so That’s literally how I built my business is because people see that I just love talking real estate And I’m just so focused on that they see my passion. So I was able to build the business without needing I always believe that my clients come with me not because of my company name, doesn’t matter who I’m with, they will always follow me wherever I go. So it’s important for me that when I started my company halen group, about 10 to 12 years ago, I said that my hailing group is going to be focusing on building real estate portfolio for my client, and where I’m gonna be focusing on education and advisory, not cells. And although three, four years ago, I actually plugged myself under this brokerage because I was so tired of like looking for new technology all the time. So, side side, Inc, is a white label broker brokerage, who provided me with like technology platform, and also marketing platforms, and also their legal support, you know, having a broker. So now I don’t have to worry about any of that I have someone else to take care of that for me. But I can now focus a lot more on training my agents and also helping our clients to make sure that they get the best out of both worlds. It’s like these big brokerage platforms, technology and marketing, and also my personalized, you know, advisory role with them to work with them. One on one, so yeah,
D.J. Paris 41:25 well, I am so impressed. And I love the fact that for you, you attribute so much of your success to being an educator, we talked about that at the beginning, I said, I’m curious how you see yourself as a consultant or an educator, and you said, Oh, my gosh, that’s, that’s me. And that’s what I do. And that’s your competitive advantage, right? Because you’re right, anyone can get a license. It’s not. It’s a moderately challenging tests that that people all sorts of people can pass. And then it’s like, okay, so now I know I have a license. Now, how do I add value, and you have somebody who was not handed a whole lot of opportunities, you had to go out and find those opportunities. And you did that by earning them through through education. So I and being somebody who educates so learning and then teaching, and I think that if that’s nothing else, if you get nothing else out of this conversation, which I know you did get a lot out not not Helen, of course, but our listeners think about it as being an educator and you clients are always in need of education. It’s the one thing that AI is probably not in, we’re not in tremendous danger of AI replacing is is education. Yes, people can learn things online, but emotional intelligence, having somebody really guide you through the the, the the entirety of a process, especially the ups and downs, that hasn’t machines haven’t figured out how to do that. And hopefully,
Helen Chong 42:56 I do want to touch on something if I have a lot of time to say yes, please. I told you, if I talk about real estate, I can talk forever. As you touch on the exactly right about AI, like we were so fearful of this AI is gonna take over real estate, right. But then our clients still coming to us for advice. You know, I always I tell my kids to Yeah, you know, you need to learn how to code. But you know, one thing that robots can never take away from you, is your mind. Mindset is what you’re saying, you know, what you’re, you’re the education and can share from your brain. Robots cannot take that from you. And the creativity part is also is really important. And if we say that we we don’t like how people look down on us as a realtor, because real estate industry has such a bad name, then we better educate ourselves and become a consultant instead of just focusing on sales.
D.J. Paris 43:48 Boy, I’d love to say I can say it better, but I can’t because you just said it perfectly. Being an educator, a consultant is always going to be valued. And so Helen just said that. So what a wonderful way to end our conversation. I want to remind everybody Helen has a book that I want you all to go purchase. It is called power to change lives. It is available on Amazon and anywhere. Books are available power to change lives again, Helen Chang also please visit her website. And by the way, if you have investors in your life, guess what investors don’t always just look for opportunities in where you work, right? They look for opportunities all over specially passive income opportunities. That’s sort of Helen’s specialty, while not just passive income opportunities, but any sort of real estate investment opportunities, but they also look they also want to know what’s going on in other markets. So if you have a clients that are looking for investment opportunities, Helen would love to have a conversation and her team she has a wonderful team that can chat with them as well. Or if you have a referral maybe somebody’s moving to the San Jose area and is looking to work with the top real estate team. Obviously Helen and her team would love to chat with you, they’re one of the very highest producing teams in all of that area. But what’s the obviously you can visit her on her website, which is halen group.com H A YLEN. Group. Helen, is there another way that any one of our listeners can reach out to you if they have something they’d like you to review?
Helen Chong 45:17 Well, I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, just look me up, Helen Chung halen group, kind of, it will be hard not to be able to find me.
D.J. Paris 45:26 Well, Helen is a working mother, a business owner, and an investor, as well as an author, and, and just an overall superstar in this industry. And we are so grateful that you were to spend time with us because I know how busy that you are. And we appreciate you taking some time to chat with our audience. We want to thank on behalf of the audience thank Helen for her time. Also, on behalf of Helen and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to show up listen to our episodes. And of course, we ask that you just do one thing, tell a friend, please think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from having hearing this really motivating and encouraging story from Helen. And send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. The more people you tell the more people we can help. And we appreciate that. So Helen, thank you so much for being on our show. We’re really had a wonderful time. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks.
Helen Chong 46:26 Thank you so much for having me.
Why Real Estate Agents Need Community To Succeed • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
May 23, 2022
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
In this episode Ryan and D.J discuss the need for community and going back to physically showing up in the office. They also discuss the value of the agent and what the future of retail may look like. Next, Ryan makes a comparison between today’s market to the one in 2008 and gives tips on how agents can behave now. Last, Ryan and D.J. discuss the importance of the correct marketing campaign for an agent’s business.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Would your production actually go up by simply going into an office every day? We’re going to discuss that. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. Today is our monthly series called coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re new to our show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. Let me tell you about Ryan Now Ryan D APR is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and his staff at deeper properties. His strengths are as motivational skills coaching style and dedication to training. He has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland he’s also in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Florida. depot properties focuses on high customer service, managing and executing their agents marketing and transaction management for them so that agents can stay focused on what they do best their business. And if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need check out D APR properties, visit D APR properties.com D A p r i l e properties.com. And again, they are in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Florida. And of course, Illinois. welcome Ryan once again to the show. Thanks,
Ryan D’Aprile 2:42 TJ. Appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 2:43 When Ryan and I were just talking before we started, I was telling him I got back from the Zillow and Industry Forum that I was very fortunate to be able to attend and Ryan’s like, hey, let’s let’s save all this for the for the show because I I wanted to I was doing what a good host should not do, which is giveaway all of the conversation beforehand.
Ryan D’Aprile 3:05 But I noticed you seemed like like it was almost like shifting and like earthmoving for you and so kind of like well, that emotion here for all of our listeners, right? I
D.J. Paris 3:17 was, I am energized. I want to I want to tell you, I had a very fun experience because and I think this is still relevant for me. I had just the weirdest coincidence that my sister, who is a chief marketing officer for a pet food company called candidate, just in the weirdest of coincidences also happened to be in the same small town in Southern California that I was at for the Zillow conference. And she does not live in California, nor do I. And we were both there at the exact same days for different conferences two miles apart. So she was able to come see mine and I was able to come see hers. And I was so excited to see my sister present the CMO of target was introducing her and then did a q&a with her. So this was a roomful of very, very powerful chief marketing officers. And after the Zillow conference, I went and saw her speak. And I got energized by that as well, because the big focus of that there was a branding conference. And the big focus was on ongoing trends that consumers are most interested in, which include things like being mission driven, being a company that has something that they believe in, that is about creating good for the community or for the world. And I was excited about that. Because I’m trying to realize I’m realizing that that’s what agents, especially the millennials, and Gen Z. That’s what they’re looking for in a brokerage, having a firm that is about more than just doing a real estate transaction. But I wanted to shift all the way back to something that I know you are very passionate about. And this is a topic we didn’t get into because Ryan stopped and he’s like, don’t let’s not wait for the show. So this So it’ll be something that’s new. And I love this because I know this is a passion of yours. And so I was in this this conference with all of these broker owners. And so we ended up chatting with them. And these are people that run brokerages. And I was saying to them, because the model that we have at our firm is a bit more of a hands off model. And so physical offices aren’t that important for my model. But I was curious what other brokerages who are more traditionally focused, you know, were thinking about for office space, and most people were saying, Yeah, agents really aren’t coming in anymore. And I agree with that same with our at our office, but what I was curious to get your take on is I was hungry to be around other people in person, that because for the last couple years, you know, that was very difficult, really impossible in a lot of ways. And I thought it was so nice to be able to touch, you know, other people shake their hand, you know, hug them, if they were friendly, if we were friends, be able to just be in in community. You know, Zoom meetings weren’t aren’t really cutting it for that sort of intimacy. And I think I know that you have a lot of thoughts around around agents offices, and I’m curious to get your thoughts about where you see that headed, because the easy answer is, no one’s coming back to the office, we’re all working remote. And that’s just the way it’s going to be. I’m not so sure. And I’m curious what your thoughts are.
Ryan D’Aprile 6:28 I’m pretty sure that I think the trend will reverse. You know, even myself caught my eye, I found myself working from home over these past two years, and kind of almost lost my way a little bit. And I’ve been talking a lot of my agents and saying, Guys, I’m getting back to the basics. And what I mean by that is, I’ve been going to our offices, I’ve been leading office meetings, I, if I’m working, I’m not working over headquarters, I’m working out of an office. I’m in our Naperville office right now. And it is incredible to see the need for community, amongst a company A company, I saw Simon Sinek say your company is your tribe, it’s your people that your group. And it is and we all came to this organization based on our values of who we are as holding each other up being vulnerable, talking about where we are how we’re feeling, and how do we kind of work with each other. Now, there are times we’re in offices completely empty. Other times where it’s acids and elbows, as I like to say, I this morning, I walked in Naperville, there was a closing going on, there was six agents in like the bullpen. And there was two executives meeting in another room as a leader and another agent, you know, in a recruiting meeting, talking about joining the organization, the office was packed and was alive. And it’s it’s my Apple Watch died. It’s 230 or so. And it’s dead. But that doesn’t mean the office isn’t needed. And there might be that one particular agent says I just got to get out of my house this morning. And I have to find somewhere to work where there’s nobody around me. And I do a lot of I do a lot of recruiting and I do a lot of recruiting for our all of our companies and a lot of the people’s even loan officers that are kind of working from their homes, they kind of feel lost and a bit they they lost the camaraderie they it’s not like, Hey, I got to come to the office, and I gotta sit here and I’m gonna work here Monday through Friday nine to five. But I don’t think if you have a place for somebody to station, I, you might have a very fine company, it’s just a completely different culture from the organization that I run, and that my people are looking for. And, you know, they’re looking for that camaraderie, they’re looking for that getaway, they’re looking for that environment, you know, and every company provides different things, you know, I’m not going to be the real estate company, that’s, you know, you know, having a party every single night or every single month and all that I serve a lot of agents that you know, I want to work want to make money, I want to do my own thing I want to I want to be myself, I want to be with my family. I don’t want to be doing this. There’s a lot of different companies out there, they there, they all do it the right way because it works for them. There are companies that are you know, 100 base 100% commission based companies that are completely virtual, there are the multi level marketing companies where, you know, they’re they’re recruiting and they’re virtual and then there’s other ones that they got offices, whatever works for them then there’s real estate companies where you know, they’ve got a party going on every single feels like every two weeks they’re having a party and they’re doing something and and so it comes back to like what you said that Chief Marketing Officer for target said you know, your brand and your identity and and what are you in? It’s key to to know who you are I asked, you almost felt like I lost a little bit of that. And now that I’m getting back with the agents, and I’m in our offices, and I’m talking to my agents, side by side, it’s like, This is who we are. That’s right. This is what we are, this is what I, this is when we were right, keep doing, this is what I’m doing wrong, get back to what you are doing. Right. And that all came from physical environment and being here and learning in real time from them. Whether it’s a big beautiful office, or it’s a satellite office, we have somewhere, it’s still an office, it still works, it’s still somewhere to kind of come have your community be with the people, and then go on with your day.
D.J. Paris 10:35 I think I think there’s something that is is hard to replicate virtually, which is the getting to experience the energy of of, of a busy office, or just people being busy in an office, you know, making phone calls, you know, you walk by and someone’s making, you know, not that everyone should be making cold calls, because of course, some for a lot of people that’s that’s not in their, their what they want to do. But to watch somebody do that might just inspire someone else to go, Hey, how’s that working for you? Does that work? And then oh, yeah, it works, you should try it. You know, just even getting exposure to other ways of doing things is hard to do virtually, unless you’ve set up a structure where people are sharing that and in person, they could just walk by, and I’ve been to your office, your head office here in the city, and I and it’s bustling with activity, and that’s really exciting and fun. And it there’s an energy there. So I think I sort of think they’ll be more, there was a lot of talk at the conference about offices going away in the sense of having as many desks or as many private offices and being more lounge driven, there was a lot of, you know, hey, we want a fun place where people can hang out and learn and, and still work. There’s,
Ryan D’Aprile 11:51 there’s, there’s, there’s in between, right? I actually did the lounge at one time. And people were like, I need a place to have a conversation. I needed a little privacy. I want you to he kind of got to have to find a happy medium. It can’t be all you know, yeah. All or nothing. So it’s nice, long dresses to talk to me, but I got a call I gotta make. And I can even just sit in a workstation where there’s little things up, it’s gives me a lease enough privacy that I need to have, or, or a little telephone booth that you have, or maybe Yeah, but I think you know, it, it’s no, no thyself, right, know who you are, and what works for you, I do know that everybody gets into ruts, I know that everybody gets in patterns, you know, it’s, it’s easy, these kinds of things to do that, you know, something over and over again, that might be the wrong thing to do. And the nice thing about an office is you’re gonna be around other professionals that might dialogue with you. And sometimes you realize Jesus was the basics that got me here. And so basically, I gotta get to, there’s a post I shared with our agents this morning, we have an internal group page, and I, I like to email and post something that’s meaningful to me that I can relate to them that’s meaningful, and, and it’s by Victoria Erickson, author of edge of wonder, consistency, consistency is an underappreciated form of intentional magic, disguised as a mundane doing, as a god setting kick ass saying, What a great saying, and I think to be consistent, sometimes you need a professional environment to go to professionals around you. Yeah. And I think it’s really easy for these multibillion dollar organizations to talk about, these are the trends. And these are the shifts, but there’s macro, there’s micro, and there’s, you know, there’s theory and is reality, and I just still, you know, there are Lone Ranger’s and there are packs, right. And so a lone ranger might be able to thrive and work from home and not to anybody. Um, but there’s a lot of us that we’d like to run in packs. And it’s nice to have that, that space that place to drag to that office to come to and I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t be doing it if I wouldn’t be having on it didn’t make sense. Yes, I do have offices that some days are completely empty, but man when I needed my needle, but remember a vertically integrated right to get real estate, get mortgage got title, we got all of these different things and these offices and putting them to use as well. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 14:29 I think I think everything you said just just makes a lot of sense. And I think too, if there are any broker owners, listening who are maybe contemplating what the future of their physical space, their office offices, may be, I would say ping your agents. Now this is a great opportunity to run a survey and especially an anonymous survey and say, hey, you know, if we were to do if you’re thinking about it, if we were to do away with the office, how would you feel about that? Not how would you feel about it today, but really think about it for the next year. It was not available to you? And if and would you like to do more events, you know, and I always say, like your city, like, you got to know your customer. And the customer dictates dictates the terms really. So I think great opportunity. And if you are an agent, you ask
Ryan D’Aprile 15:14 those things, sometimes you want to the more events, they do the events, and not many people show up. So it’s kind of it’s a little bit of a questionnaire that it’s kind of observing, and then kind of just swimming downstream going and going with it. And it’s, you know, it’s a very interesting business. It really is a very interesting business. And it’s, it’s a business, it’s kind of cannibalize itself, the real estate brokerage business, I should say, um, and, and then but but, but it has to give a lot. And so there’s given take with everything, there really is a give and take with everything. And, and I think the real estate brokerage business has some adjusting and fixing to do for itself to make itself a healthy business. Again, and again, you look at some of these companies, they’re now public, and you see they lost a half a billion dollars last year. Yeah. Everything but somebody lost the half a billion dollars, and that was their investors. You don’t I mean, that’s the stuff that’s going on. And, and and the value that they add is probably tremendous and great. But it comes with a cost. And I think there was a reckoning, going to be coming, I think in in the brokerage business, the model, which maybe we could segue into what you saw over the Zillow conference, right, but of how that you know how that works, and what we see, but I do, I am adamant that you know, what we do, and what we provide in terms of marketing and transaction management and office space and coaching. And technology is a huge value. It has a price to it, though, you know, and people that pay the price benefit from it, and they actually earn more money from it. And I think they get more enjoyment out of it.
D.J. Paris 17:05 Yeah, I think technology it’s so interesting, we’re getting to a point where tech used to be behind lock and key. You know, the only people that had access to information about buying or selling a home were agents, and agents no longer are the barrier to that entry point. Right? It’s It’s on every website with an IDX data feed. Most notably, Zillow is they get 200 million unique visitors per month just from the United States alone. And if we put that in perspective, what there’s 350, or I think 350 million people in the United States. So just about everybody assume let’s just assume that’s everybody is using Zillow. And the technology that’s available for free on Zillow instantly is better than any business’s IDX website where people can browse or any individual agents website. So, you know, you I started to think at this conference, and I’d love to get your thoughts. At some point it’s going to be, I think, the disparity between the technology that agents have access to maybe through their MLS, or through the different third party vendors, they might be using. The disparity between how technologically advanced, let’s just talk about the MLS, because that’s one thing that we don’t have control over where we belong to an association, they provide an MLS solution, a software solution that you may like, or you might not like, but you’re stuck with it. Whereas, you know, consumers can go on Zillow, Zillow is a tech company. So they’re able to, that’s what they do, bats are able to consistently optimize that experience for the consumer. At some point, you know, the available tech that the consumer is going to have, is, is going to be better, faster and easier to use than what agents have. And so I I’m curious to see sort of how that impacts agents and what your thoughts are about how that texts can just going to keep getting better for the consumer and keep getting more personalized. Whereas, you know, MLS technology that agents have really can’t keep up with with that level of progress. And I’m curious if you see that as an issue or a good thing for agents,
Ryan D’Aprile 19:16 I think for probably over a decade now. The consumers already had better technology for us. And I do know now going on, I think, what 17 years 2008 1415 years. The data of the inventory of homes, what’s available, all that stuff shifted over to the consumer 15 years ago. Yeah, already. So I guess my opinion on that is if the access To the information was the key differentiator of a real estate agent or not an agent? We would have been put out of business 14 years ago. Yeah. So that’s, and I’ve been saying that, since I’ve been 32 years old. And, you know, I’m 46 now. And I’ve been looking at this stuff, and I’ve not seen it change yet. So yeah, the consumer, you know, goes to all these different websites that are out there, out here. Here’s a great point, I was chatting with one of our agents the other day, and one of our agents is, it’s a large $10 million listing. Okay. And she will be the second brokerage. Right, they’re changing companies. And I was advising her on information that the consumer was asking about marketing. Okay. And they had interviewed while they went with another real estate company prior to us, right, which was a national real estate company. And then they are interviewing us and three other organizations. One’s a small, small, independent, there’s us, we’re a regional player, right? And there’s two large international, right, or national real estate companies. And I was I was advising around this. And I said, What’s the pain point? What happened to the individuals? Right, exactly, yeah. They had two offers on the previous property. And both fell through during inspection. And I will tell you, I know who the agent is. And sort of my eight, right, we know this particular agent, I’ll tell you this particular agent, and I love our business. I love our agents. This one particular agent has probably one of the sharpest tongues you’ll ever meet. Okay, and we’ll put you in your place sooner than you even know how and like, how did that person do that to me, right? We know individuals out there like that. This independent brokerage compared to our brokerage, I said, there’s no difference. And that’s who the listing agent wants. Now, we’re now we’re shifting gears, and we’re looking at our competition, the one man chap, us and the national real estate company. Do you know when I list this particular home, the day we push a button, if you’re in Singapore, or if you’re in Johannesburg, Africa, you’re going to see the listing? Yeah. And so the marketing of that home is really kind of irrelevant. And the reality is real estate is hyperlocal. And who’s going to take care of you during this transaction, you have a $10 million property that fell through twice, you’re changing brokerages after a year of being on the market. That’s a lot of time. That’s not stress. It’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of carrying costs with that kind of property. Right. And the question is marketing data, the consumer seeing the property? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It’s consultation. It is prepping the home. It’s prepping the sellers. It’s meeting with the buyer’s agent and the buyer. It’s negotiating the contract. It’s meeting with the home inspector who may have an ego and working with that home inspector. And when there’s questions working with in Illinois with his attorneys, the two attorneys, what are the attorneys learned to do in college or in law school? What do they learn to do TJ? argue the fight? Yeah, they’re taught to fight. What a real estate agents have to do. We got to get between these attorneys and stuff fighting. We’re trying to make a deal go here. So a lot of emotional intelligence that gets involved in here. And everybody sees these things. You went to this conference, you are jacked up, right. The world is changing. The industry is changing.
Maybe, maybe, but the consumers had better data, I think than we’ve had for 14 years. Yeah, real time. And they come to us over and over again, because of the relationship we have. Because of the emotional intelligence we provide. And because we’re above, I’m a real estate agent by trade. That’s what I am when I buy a property, or I lease one of my properties. I don’t do it by myself. It save a commission. I don’t have the time. And when I’m negotiating with somebody directly a particular landlord, I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want them to hear me. I want to hear my voice tremble. I don’t want them to hear my emotion on it. I want to be able to have a direct conversation with my leasing agent. Why what exactly I want, then let him go to battle, and then come back to me and debrief me. Like, if it wasn’t a valuable service, I wouldn’t use it, I would just do it myself. For God’s sakes, I own a real estate brokerage with 14 offices, property and leased property, I have somebody come to stay in between me,
D.J. Paris 25:19 I did the same thing when I bought my condo here. And I’m more, it’s more obvious why I would as I have not a practicing agent, however, I could ask any of the 800 agents in our company or anyone in our management team, what should I do in this scenario, and they would give me great advice. And yet, I chose not to do that. Because I know that it’s that old adage, a doctor, it’s like a lawyer who represents himself in court has a fool for a client, right? It’s that that old sort of joke that is true, it’s like a doctor shouldn’t treat themselves but But what I’m and so I think you’re right, because in Zillow said said this, they said, despite the fact that, you know, this tech keeps evolving, and we’re considered the forefront leaders of this, still 90 some percent of all real estate, residential transactions go through a realtor. And why is that? Because they don’t need, you know, in the 90s, in the low 90s.
Ryan D’Aprile 26:11 And by the way, it was in the low 90s. In the 80s. Yeah, exactly.
D.J. Paris 26:15 And I am I met this is many, many years ago, about 10 years ago, I just started in this industry. And I met with a friend of mine whose husband is a CFO of a massive online, fine finance company. I’ll just kind of leave it at that. And he turned to me and he goes, Yeah, this is really not a good business to get into right now. Because tech is just going to erase the importance of a real estate agent. And and this is a guy who knows things and I said, Oh, I hope you’re wrong. And he goes, Yeah, I don’t think I’m wrong. And here we are now, 10 years later, and yeah, he was wrong. Because the right the emotional part of the journey can’t this can’t be really automated.
Ryan D’Aprile 26:56 This is the kind of stuff that shifts are real estate agents business, sometimes the negative, you went to this conference, it was mind blowing, right? And I’m like, let’s talk about this here. Because it was just like, a little bit late. You texted me the day before, right? Yeah, you this was unbelievable. The industry is changing. Like, what’s there? Is that true? Dietsch, right, we were talking about All right, so it’s kind of like, and then so that’s what I’m like to you know, we’re gonna see all the stuff. And I always tell everybody, the only thing is going to disrupt your business is you and understand the value of you and who you are. And that’s what they’re hiring. And that’s what they want. That’s the value. The data is accessible. It’s out there and Zillow has a platform. And they access the data from the MLS. They put it they have some artificial intelligence and your destiny yet they do a lot of amazing things. You’re not Zillow. You’re not I’m not another real super I’m who I am. I’ve disabled properties is who we are. This is who we want to be. We’re not trying to be another real estate brokerage. We know who we are. We know what our value proposition is. Sometimes I’ve lost that. Right? And sometimes I forgot that. And sometimes Oh, my gosh, I’m trying to be the person who will no I’m not. I this is why I miss what I like. There’s, there’s space for this, there’s value for this people value it. And that’s what we all have to give back to with our individuals is what is our value proposition you said to me, or I said asked us on the and podcast. And so when asked now, what was the question about Amazon?
D.J. Paris 28:28 So yeah, so I was we were having conversations with with some of the Zillow people, and my sister was there as well. My sister works in retail with with pet food. And I said to her so 40% of her business, is these independent of pet food stores, not the big chains, the small mom and pop shops. And I said, Dana, do you think those mom and pop shops will will be will even be around in 10 years? And she’s like, I don’t know. I’m worried about that. I’m not worried about the chains. I’m worried about the mom and pop shops. And I was think about Amazon. And so we started talking about Amazon with Zillow and my sister and I said, most of us or I shouldn’t say most of us, I am hooked on on Amazon, I buy almost everything through there that I don’t need to see in person, which is 95% of my purchases. I still go to the grocery store, I still run errands and I do things but I I do most of my shopping on online. And I’m worried about what that’s going to look what retail is going to look like in 10 years. Are we are we you know, what’s the landscape of reach of retail is going to be as important as it is today? Is technology going to kind of eliminate some of these smaller, you know, small businesses. But it’s scary. I’m scared about that. Not so much for real estate, except on the commercial side, I guess but but I’m curious what’s going to happen to small businesses as a result.
Ryan D’Aprile 29:48 So here’s how I feel about it. So you see do all your shopping on Amazon. Right? Okay, I don’t do any my shout against Amazon. Let’s not use me as an example. I’m before a six year old, over the hill, not a millennial person. So, um, do you have a pet? I do? Have,
D.J. Paris 30:11 I have a little tiny dog who’s currently right underneath this mine, this microphone sleeping. But she’s she’s, she’s almost 14. So she’s old lady. All right.
Ryan D’Aprile 30:20 So we have a, we have a, we have an 11 year old girl. And I say that she was my fourth daughter. You know, I love this girl more than anything, right. And she’s a part of the family. I have an 18 year old daughter. And then I’m 15 and 14, although these are pretty tech savvy girls. Um, we live in Western Springs. And there’s a shopping center behind us called the Garden Market. And in the Garden Market, there’s a Marianas, and a whole bunch of outlet stores. And this is a store that we go, and we buy her pet food from. And when my 18 year old wants to get something for our dog, which they want to do every once awhile, or they have like a little dog bath. It’s kind of fun, right? Because usually like a five black box warehouse, my 15 year old, I’ll tell you, my 18 year old could take me and you both down when it comes to technology. Sure. And technology advancement, right. But my daughter doesn’t go on Amazon and trust me, they have all their credit cards, they got all our shit, right? It’s overtaking my wife night. But my daughters will get in the car. And they’ll buy a new collar for Izzy at that store, or a different leash, or they’ll go buy her favorite dog treats of shirts available on Amazon. But that’s not what they do with it’s not the patterns, not the habits there, it will change obviously has changed, it will continue to change, but to say to an extreme that will be over with and there won’t be a value or a niche. I don’t think that’s the case at all. Um, you know, and Amazon’s a behemoth but I think Amazon is also behemoth, because they got AWS. Yeah, you know, I mean, Cisco is like, you know, one of the biggest clients to AWS to AWS now, AWS, which is Amazon. But that made that the billion dollar, you know, you know, technology company that’s selling cloud services, right? In fiber optics and another division, and whatever else, it’s, it’s more than, you know, a dog food or toothpaste I get quickly from here. And you know, and I look at the phone, Jesus 20 text messages, sorry about that, and come back into the call. You know, so, you know, embrace the future, embrace the change, but careful on the reaction on all of it. Because I watch Amazon and you know what I see when I see Amazon, when I say I watch Amazon when I’m walking down my street, I see the Amazon trucks. Do you know what I see?
D.J. Paris 32:58 Its ups? Yeah, yes. Yeah, their delivery system? Yeah, it’s a delivery
Ryan D’Aprile 33:02 system. It’s it’s absolutely delivery system. And there might be the individuals that say, by 90% My product for that delivery system, and good for them. But you know, I have I have, I have three daughters, they got a lot of friends. And a lot of younger friends. And I go to the grocery store, I still see it packed to people. When I go and buy gym shoes, I’m still going out Saturday afternoon, and I’m going to the gym shoe store. I’m not, I don’t want to put a label package back sticking, maybe the younger generation will be different. But I haven’t seen my kids do it. My daughter still goes to Sephora, or Sephora, or whatever a makeup store is right to do with the makeup and and they go and they do these traditional things. Sometimes like I was telling you on the call, it’s like, Man, I don’t know what to do on weekends, because my girls are out of sports or grown. And I’m twiddling my thumbs and it’s 30 degrees outside, so I’m not going to go golfing. So what am I going to do? I want something experiential. Yeah, I’m going to go to the PGA store, I guess. And check out a wedge there versus the same wedge I could buy on Amazon. Or I’m going to go to Oak Brook. And I might look for a new pair of shoes and grab lunch and a glass of wine at lunch. And I don’t think I think obviously, the change has come to change will continue to change. But a pendulum always has to settle in the middle, it will swing one way here or swing the other way there. But eventually it comes in the middle. And there’s room for everybody. And there’s room for everything.
D.J. Paris 34:31 I think your point about experiential experience, experiential sort of opportunities are really something that our listeners can can take home because we’re all hungry for having a Aden immersive experience. And agents can can take advantage of that like to give let’s give a couple of ways you can do that. Number one,
Ryan D’Aprile 34:54 Let me chime in that for a second. And that’s like a lot of things that like different businesses to do and is coming to our brokerages. Ours is an Office meeting a workshop that’s another another’s is a party, an open bar, you know, there’s no right or wrong. It’s just like, What experience do you want to fit into who you are? And it comes it comes down to that and and for the real estate agent, right? And like you said the experience and that’s, that’s being the friend of the consumer being there and talking through it, let them go through the motions, I cut you off, but I wanted to chime in on that, because that’s why our office spaces. We have them and we’ll continue to have them because it provides that.
D.J. Paris 35:40 Yeah, I was I was one of my friends, Melanie Everett here in Chicago, she built her entire now she has her own brokerage she built her entire practice up this is pre pandemic, of in her whole real estate business doing in person. Events. For first time homebuyers called sell you want to buy a condo, and she just had her first in person event a couple of days ago, since the pandemic. And so it’s two and a half years of only doing them online. And I thought and I didn’t know she was doing one in person or else I would have coached her if she would have said Not that she would ask me for coaching. But if she were to say, Do you think I should go back and be like, everyone’s on Zoom, do it on Zoom. And, boy, I saw pictures from her in person event at some restaurant. And it was absolutely JAM PACKED standing room only because peep just like me, I went to the Zillow conference, it was so nice to be there in person. So yeah, these in person experiential events, I think we’re hungry for it more than ever, right now. So you have as an agent have this opportunity to bring your sphere closer together and do something fun that no one has been able to even do for a first several years and you have this opportunity. You know, maybe it’s even just volunteering and saying, Hey, who wants to help me go spend an afternoon helping, you know, in a less fortunate, you know, community, those are experiences that people are hungry for right now. And even just getting together and hanging out or idea sharing. There’s something people are sick of, of being online. I know i
Ryan D’Aprile 37:08 i In that’s the pendulum coming to sell back in the middle. And I know a few years I was talking about office spaces are going to go away and all that other stuff. And and they have you know, I have a friend who works at HSBC, and they got rid of 70% According to him 7% of their office space. When I was walking my, my my dog two days ago, I was walk past a new neighbor of mine. And I said how are you? I’m okay, I start going back to work. Where do you work? He says Sears Tower. So that’s cool. He goes, Yeah, and kind of bomb they go, why? Because I gotta go back three days a week. We gotta go. We got to be there three days a week. And I thought to myself, get ready, buddy. Because it’s going to be five year from now.
D.J. Paris 37:46 Yeah. It’s almost paying that bill.
Ryan D’Aprile 37:49 Well, not only that, I really think you might see, oh, I did that. Who am I to give predictions? I think you might see a commercial real estate boom, here in the next few years. I think we may see a recession. We’re going through a real estate agent recession, which we have, you know, you know, there’s a lot to talk about, we talk about the next one. But when there is no inventory, and there’s not stuff to buy you guys who are listening to this podcast right now, you all should be incredibly proud of yourself. Okay, I was in this business in 2008. This is same exact environment in 2008. Except for in eight, there were all sellers, no buyers, and 22. There’s all buyers and unknown sellers. So we are in a real estate agent recession, there is no doubt, I think we’re probably four to five months through it. I think and is probably pretty clear. I think you’re eventually going to start seeing industry papers and whatnot. It’s sick, calling it a real estate agent recession, because that’s what it is. But it will change and this will pass. And then I think then you’re gonna see an economic recession. I feel like that’s going to happen. But it’s okay. You have to have these economic cycles. And then it all comes back. And the pendulum eventually comes back in the middle. And you know, if I was a young buck, corporate America, 27 year old guy, last thing I want to be doing is working from home, you I know why I want to be promoted. I want fired. I thought I want to see my boss that hey, man, here’s what I did. Or woman, here’s what I did. This is what I’m doing. This is what’s going on like that those human instinct those natural, that’s not going away. And so we’ve had an extreme two and a half years. It’s not normal. The world is not going to go that way. It’s going to sell back in the middle in my opinion.
D.J. Paris 39:36 Yeah, I think I think agents have this unique opportunity. Now we’re, you know, if they, if you have the free time, which of course is always a challenge for agents, is you have this opportunity to go visit people in person I was talking to this is a little bit of a different way of doing that, that I’m about to share. So I met I met a an owner, a brokerage owner. Who’s in the South? She has 2000 agents. And they had 15 offices? She has, she asked all of her agents, hey, I’m thinking about getting rid of the offices. What do you guys think? And so most everyone signed off on it saying, I don’t really use them, it’s no big deal. So she says, okay, but I’ll make you a deal. I don’t want to do this just to save money. Because that doesn’t help you the agent that helps me the owner, and I work for you guys. So she’s like, I promise if you if you want these offices to close, and I want you to really think about it, and we’ll just let sort of everyone vote on it. I will take the money that I’m saving on that, and I will spend it on you. And what does that mean? I’m going to come visit, you know, the same locations, the same areas, and we’re going to do lunches and we’re going to do fun events we’re going to do in person events. And I’m going to take that money and put it back into you. And she said she wasn’t sure how that was going to land. She wasn’t sure for agents who wanted to go have lunches and hang out. And, and sure enough, she’s like, Yeah, okay, we she’s closed all but two of our offices. So she has a couple places where people can still go and use. But she goes, I’m having so much more fun that I’ve she’s been doing this since 2003. She’s like, I’m having so much fun going around and meeting with my agents, seeing them in person and doing this. And so this idea of having experiential, you could do that inside of an office too. But she’s just reallocating resources. And I think agents kind of do really fun things like that now where agents can do in person events, they can go visit their clients and drop things off at their front door and maybe even get invited in which we couldn’t do for so long. This is just a great opportunity. When right now there’s a lot we can’t control. Like you were saying inventory, right? Every agent I know is frustrated because their buyer clients, of course, can’t find anything. And yes, we’re all dealing with that. But fundamentals are what win the game, right. And that’s something you can’t control. But what you can control is caring about your your your sphere and getting more in touch with them and helping them and being there to get being there to guide them. And you can do that in person now. And I think it’s I think you’re right, I think if agents can kind of weather the storm and it is a tough storm right now I totally get it. It’s feast or famine if you’re a listing agent versus a biocide agent, right? But it is, but you know what, and we I we’re starting to see Exodus, where we are starting to see people leave the industry because, you know, they’re just not able to practice anymore. And if they were, if they were able just to just eke it out and work with their, their sphere, and say, we’ll get through this, I’m with you. That’s really all that a client ever really wants is somebody that goes I’m on your side, I get that’s tough right now we’re gonna get through it. I’m working for you. And and, you know, I think this is a huge opportunity, you were saying you doubled down in 2008, with your marketing, whereas everyone else was easing off the gas, saying, I don’t know if this is a good time to be promoting my business when I can’t service my clients, and you double down and you said it was the best thing you ever did.
Ryan D’Aprile 43:00 Yeah. And then that’s why, you know, you know, I was, I was meeting with somebody and I can’t recall, but that’s why, you know, we do the marketing for our agents is I kind of want to take that decision out of their head, right? And be like, hey, it’s, it’s all about, like, what I read to you early, it’s all about consistency. It’s that, you know, it’s that it’s that magic that’s out there. It’s It’s not rocket science, it’s about being consistent. An agent is like somebody running for an office, you know, what’s your campaign? What’s your marketing campaign? And is it direct mail? Is it digital? Is it email, it’s, you know, all those things combined with, you know, pressing the flesh, right, connecting with individuals and, and I really think social media is best for r&d, research somebody that you’re and then develop a relationship with them, more so than marketing. Right? If I could show you my newsfeed, it’s going to be the same 50 People that Facebook has decided, these are the people that you want to see, I have my 4.3 1000 friends on Facebook, I’m some of them, somebody sells something to me. And I’m not seeing it because there’s like 45 or 50 people that I see, because that’s what Facebook says I should see and I’m not gonna be able to do it. But there’s other ways to getting to me, there’s direct mail, there’s digital marketing, and email marketing and, and then there’s also just connecting me and me asking me, Hey, how you doing? How’s lens, how Samantha, how are the girls, what’s going on with your life and so on and so forth. And that’s kind of individual that I’m going to transact with when I am that the decision making maker and a purchase?
D.J. Paris 44:35 You know, I’ve lived in the I bought a new development a year ago, a little over a year ago. Do you know in that entire year, the number of now again, new address, you know, not an established address that people can just, you know, send mailers to, to how many real estate, postcards or mailers I’ve received in that year zero and I You think now? Yes, of course, you could make the argument, you’re probably not going to move any anytime soon. And yeah, that’s true. I’m not
Ryan D’Aprile 45:06 matter. But what are you know, for people? Who are, of course, that’s every year, you know, for people who buy something that’s called the referral. Yep. And I
D.J. Paris 45:15 mean, even if all you did was send a congratulations on this new home that you bought, or that, you know, or just, hey, I want to introduce myself, you might not know me, I’m so and so I hope you’re enjoying your new place, I’m going to stay in touch with you. Because I know you’re probably going to be moving at some point in your life, and I want to earn that business. And you know, whether you say it that directly or you say it more subtly, I’ve gotten zero, there are 46,000 Real estate agents in the Chicagoland area, not one of them thought to send to send a postcard to a new address. And yeah, I didn’t get it, but you can’t do everything. But like nobody’s doing that. I was shocked. I am not one of my agents, either. Nobody, I
Ryan D’Aprile 45:56 have an agent that was on another agents team prior to joining us, joined us four years ago, maybe maybe three and a half years ago. And she’s been in the business since the late 2000s. Okay. And, you know, three and a half years ago was essentially a buyer’s agent for another agent and didn’t brand herself at all. By the way, it was at a really, really big real estate company, right? That’s really well known out there. But she wasn’t, she wasn’t the company was, but she wasn’t. She sold $44 million dollars worth of real estate last year, $44 million worth of real estate, with the correct campaign put around her, there was a monster, a nice monster, like a nice, cute monster inside this person. Right? That is now just completely dominating. But the marketing consistent activities are consistent. And the results are not consistent.
D.J. Paris 46:55 Yeah, and I think what what you do is so important for agents, which it’s really a unique value proposition to what I’ve seen at just about any other firm, I can’t even think of an alternative. And we have hundreds of firms here in the Chicagoland area. But you’re the only one I know who actually automates the marketing for the agents. And I’m sure there’s other people that do it. But yeah, but the fat. But here’s what I love about it, I equate this. So the reason I was a few minutes late to jumping on this call is I was coming back from the gym. And the only reason that I get to the gym, I’ve struggled with it my whole life. I’ve said it a million times on the show people are sick of me talking about it. But it’s because I have a trainer, because having a trainer. Yes, she’s extremely skilled, and she’s awesome. And I’m not trying to denigrate all of the cool things she does or diminish them. But the main reason I use her, aside from the fact that she’s super knowledgeable and really good at her job is it keeps me accountable. I don’t have to think about it. If I have to think about getting to the gym, I don’t do it. I just don’t I’ve struggled my whole life. And it’s an expensive thing to do. But it gets me to the gym, and you were just saying consistency. i i Now, you know have muscles for the first time in my life and like it doesn’t really matter, who cares. But it’s just consistency and results. And results just happen. And I no longer have to think about it. And so I think what you offer is so important because agents can’t be good at everything. And they have to run that entire business. They just can’t do it all.
Ryan D’Aprile 48:19 Look, you have any Yeah, exactly. And again, there’s a value proposition for everybody out there. And you even have like, Listen, you know, I have agents that get recruited away, too, right. And sure your agent is talking a while ago. And this particular just like the technology is really cool. I could create a Canva I could create a postcard, I could create a brochure from this thing. And and I just let it be. And I said to myself, well, yeah, that’s what we have our admins here doing for you. Do you want to be on a computer creating that stuff? Or do you want to be out with your network and selling real estate? And so everybody’s got to go on their path and journey and do it but like, that’s cool. We have all those things there. I just don’t put them in your lap. Because Is that what you want to be doing? Or do you want to be doing that administrative work? Of course, it’s out there. It’s been out there since you know, the start of of the web browser for Christ’s sakes and the evolution of a couple of these companies and whatnot. It’s always been out there. I just think somebody’s got to do it. I’d rather be a salaried employee who’s not responsible for out going out and making a kill, right to make a living, and what you need to be trained on right for your muscles like you refer to, it’s not marketing. It’s not the marketing and all that stuff. That’s all done for you. It’s we have the tools here. You can go do it yourself. But while I have a classically trained graphic designer who could do all that stuff for you, with the technology that’s out there, why don’t we get you engaged? Why don’t you brand you in your community? Why don’t we get you engaged? Why don’t we show you how to hold yourself accountable to netting with all these particular individuals and watch that $10 million business becomes $20 million worth of business. And now do the math and do the math and $10 million of additional production. You know, that’s a that’s that’s a lot of payola.
D.J. Paris 50:16 Yeah, I think it’s a great place to wrap up. I think you know, what we’re what we’re really talking about our I always call it like the John Wooden, sort of key to success. If you if you look up John Wooden, we read his Wikipedia entry, I can’t remember how many think he won seven NCAA championships for men’s basketball in a row, I think he ended up winning nine out of 11, or nine out of 13. He’s considered the winningest coach in NCAA history. And his whole thing was not about talent, although of course, he recruited talent, it was all about consistency and practice, it was everything was you’re going to shoot 500 Free throws a day, we’re going to track it, we’re going to see how you’re doing every single day. So that when you get to that foul line with you know, one second left on the clock, and you have to make that clutch free throw, you’ve you’ve you’ve put in 100,000 reps, and you’re probably going to sink the shot. Because otherwise, you know, we leave it up to emotion, we leave it up to how you feel in that moment, without having the consistency behind you of just putting the blinders on and going I’m just making another free free throw shot. You know, you’re more likely to succeed. And, and he He’s famous for saying he never looked at the scoreboard. And you know, what I’ve noticed about top producers is at least the one not not all of them. Of course, everyone’s different. But but the majority of top producers I talked to have no idea what their rank is. They don’t even really know how much their overall production is day to day. They’re just know that they’re busy. And they’re just like, oh, I you know, a lot of times I say, Oh, I just saw you hit 50 million they go did I? Oh, okay, awesome. And of course, they have a general idea. But just they put their blinders on and just get to work. And they don’t focus on the outcome as much as the discipline and the discipline ultimately gets you there.
Ryan D’Aprile 51:51 Yeah. Yeah. This was great. DJ, I appreciate you having me. I enjoy that. So I missed you last time. And I apologize. I, I was on our spring break with our family. And I completely missed the call. And I missed the scheduling. So sorry about that.
D.J. Paris 52:04 No, no problem at all. We get it. I mean, you’re running multiple companies with hundreds and hundreds of employees and a family and of course, all the other things that you do. So we appreciate your time. You’re, you’re a busy guy, and we were so grateful to have you on the show. So I want everyone to who might be in the Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, or Florida market. If you’re interested in exploring a firm that does help take some, you know, everyone talks about coaching and training, right? Every firm uses that as and you you guys do a great job, you actually have real coaches. And you do that. I don’t know that that’s always the most interesting differentiator for what do April properties offers agents, because I think you know, that buzzword of training and coaching just gets thrown around by everybody. And it’s hard to sort of understand who really provides it you guys do. But I think the idea of automating marketing is for me, I’m a marketer, I know how important it is. And that’s the thing that most agents struggle with, I think most firms offer some level of coaching, some are better than others. But this idea of automating marketing, oh my gosh, I just see that is such a great thing. So if you’re an agent, and you’re struggling in that way, or if you do want better coaching, or both, check out the April properties, they’ll they have a ton of people that would love to chat with you and tell you more about what they do. And by the way, they don’t just do real estate agent stuff. They also have a loan officer company. So they have Midwest lending, they have their type your title company, you have all sorts of different employees, you have a design firm that’s in, in your offices, as well as you know, lending and just lots of lots of other services. So check out Depot properties.com, they would love to chat with you and talk about how they’re a bit different than soon.
Ryan D’Aprile 53:45 And by the way, we may have a we might have a CRM that might be available to the public. So I still kind of working on those little things. But that might be soon as coming out as well.
D.J. Paris 53:55 I’m excited for that. Because I like CRMs that are designed by agents versus tech companies, because tech companies can build a CRM, and then they have to have the users use it and say, how is this working. And then they usually go back for version two, which tends to be better you you’re an agent focused company that happened to get into the tech space. So I always think that those tend to just get built better from the ground up. So we’ll definitely be chatting about that as that rolls out. So for everyone else who’s listening, thank you so much for being on our show. Check out April properties again, da p r i l e properties.com. They’ll be love to talk to you about what they offer. And also we want to thank our agents for our agents are well, I want to thank my agents. But for everyone listening all of our listeners and viewers, I want to thank you for supporting our show, please support our sponsors support our guests like Ryan, checkout Depot properties.com. And also, please tell a friend just that’s the only thing we really ever asked tell one other agent about our show, tell them you know, show them our website or show them our podcast and have them check out an episode see if we can get more more people to listen We would appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, TJ
Why Real Estate Agents Shouldn’t List Properties At Under-Market Prices • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
May 17, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com talks about underpricing properties to induce a price-war. Chris continues to discuss why this behavior of the agents is not healthy for the market. Next, Chris discusses how to do a comparative market analysis for the property you’re representing and the importance of building relationships with other agents. Last, Chris shares advise to both parties of agents on how to behave in this market and also for agents with aspirations to move up the real estate ladder.
D.J. Paris 0:00 is listing a property under market value to induce a bidding war? A good idea or a really bad idea? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide, and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. Let me tell you about the close. Now the closed.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals and they cover real estate marketing lead generation tech team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Now please visit the clothes.com That’s th e c l o s e just like it sounds.com And subscribe to their newsletter and you can get notified every time they publish an article, they just did a reap a refresh of their website and everything is super clean, it’s really easy to navigate. And just the articles are amazing. And in fact, before I tell you about our guest, Chris, in case you’re new to the show, we actually used one of the clauses or we’re in the process of using one of your articles about about brokerage, software around paying out commissions. And so we actually were looking to find out which which tech provider we wanted to use. And we came across the amazing article that the close has written about that. So we’re huge fans of the close. But with us as always, today is Chris Lin salah, he is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead generation, transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan, and he has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. When he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage in his community, theaters production. And also you’ll find him possibly speaking in your areas, he is often asked to come speak about topics related to real estate all over the country at different events. So definitely keep your eyes open for everything related to press. Chris, welcome once again to the show.
Chris Linsell 3:39 EJ it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. As always,
D.J. Paris 3:43 you’re soon gonna have to have a calendar with all of your speaking events so people can find out because you are you’re really you’re speaking you have a lot of speaking engagements coming up. So it’s very, very exciting. And that’s why we’re so excited to have you on the show. And let’s just jump right into it. Because you and I have oftentimes we just to sort of let people know how it works is we’ll we’ll get on and I’ll and I’ll say Oh, I hope I Chris has something to talk about because I always a lot of times I don’t. And Chris said I’m very passionate about this topic today. So we have we have a good topic today. Do you want to jump right in?
Chris Linsell 4:17 Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll just say, there’s gonna be people who disagree with me here DJ and and, you know, I actually I think you might be one of those people on a couple of points here. So please feel free to tell me you think I’m wrong. And those of you who are listening if you think I’m crazy, feel free to argue with me in any of the public social media town squares that I’m a part of. So I never, oh, gosh,
D.J. Paris 4:42 I say I never think you’re wrong, but I might take the other side. Well, just just because, you know, I always defer really all of my real estate knowledge to you, but but I do want to present sometimes some of the opposing opinions so let’s Yeah, let’s jump in.
Chris Linsell 4:58 Okay, well, I’m just gonna I’m just gonna throw the Sound here, guys. Those of you, real estate agents, brokers, those of you who are actively listing properties, you are hurting yourself, your clients, your community and the market at large by underpricing them. And I don’t mean like, Oh, my clients aren’t going to get the amount of money that they deserve. I mean, you are contributing towards the market panic that we are experiencing right now. I’m not gonna say it’s all your fault. But agents, if you are pricing properties in order to induce a bidding war, this is some of your fault. And I want to tell you why. And I know that’s a little accusatory, I know, it’s a little of a negative way to get started here, but I look at it as accountability. And what I mean by this is, real estate professionals have a duty to their clients to represent their fiduciary best interests. And that means getting the best terms for sale or purchase possible. And that also means being a thoughtful representative and advocate for the real estate process as a whole. And when we underprice properties, when we create a pricing structure that induces essentially market panic, we are not helping our buyers, we are not helping our sellers, and we are not helping the market at large. So starting today,
D.J. Paris 6:35 great. And so we’ll just define a little bit more specifically what we’re talking about. So what we’re talking about is brokers who under price or under list, price their their listings, in order to encourage competition with buyers to drive up numbers for showings. And also to be able to the theory is, the more people bidding on this property, the higher the end price is going to be. Plus it generates a lot of activity. So for if I’m the listing agent, maybe that is really impressive to my seller, like hey, look at all these people I’ve been bringing through. And right now of course, with interest rates still being relatively low, there’s still a lot of buyers out there. And we know that inventory is low. So if I price it low, there’s all these buyers that will pounce on it will drive pricing up. I’m guessing that that’s the overall thought process.
Chris Linsell 7:33 Yep, yep. 100%. And here is, here’s why I take this position that this practice is bad for everybody. It is bad for everybody. Because it is a self serving, frankly, it’s a selfish practice it is goes against the realtor code of contact, our code of conduct and code of ethics here, when a real estate agent is pricing property so that they can make a Facebook post later on about the 100 showings and 50 offers they got. It’s not good for people. And we can break down exactly why I think that is but I guess I just want to start with you, DJ by asking you a question that you and I we started chatting a little bit about this before. But you you said when I was kind of taking this position in our pre interview, you were saying, Well, isn’t it best for the sellers in order to get the highest price possible to induce this sort of multi bid scenario? Tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, what what is your position on that?
D.J. Paris 8:45 Well, I was thinking of it from just a simple supply and demand, you know, sort of econ 101 driving down supply is going to increase competition to four buyers. So it made sense to me to think and by the way, I know a lot of agents that do this. There’s one of the top agents here in Chicago. This is what I won’t say who they are, but this is what they instruct their team members to do is price it aggressively, which really means underprice it and let the bidding war commence and, and everyone wins. Now, again, I don’t you know, I don’t personally, sort of, I had never thought about it more than that. That was as much as I thought about it. I said, Oh, make sense. Simple, simple economics. But let’s talk about why that’s a bad idea. Ultimately, long term or even short
Chris Linsell 9:39 term. Yeah, well, so you use a phrase here that I think is really interesting, which is everyone wins. What about the 49 offers that didn’t get accepted to those people when
D.J. Paris 9:51 there’s only there’s only two winners, right? And there could be 100 players. And now there’s not only are there people Who don’t win? There’s a lot of just upset people because they figure they’ve got as good a shot as anyone to purchase this property. But because it’s underpriced, it’s going to bring in people. Well, I’m sure you’re going to talk about this, but maybe who are under the wrong impression. And maybe there are agents out there that aren’t as queued into what’s going on right now. And they just see this list price, bringing their clients out, and then immediately find out oh, that’s not in their price range anymore. So there are a lot of losers in the space.
Chris Linsell 10:29 Yeah, I think I think the phrase everybody wins is a, it’s one that gets thrown around a lot on this topic. Because the thought process here is well, what we what we mean by this is that the right offer will eventually come to the surface, right? And that is different than everybody wins, right? Because if you think about just from a raw opportunity cost, a buyer who spends time touring a property and writing an offer and anticipating an opportunity that they have no realistic shot to get, that person could be using their energy elsewhere. That buyer’s agent could be using their energy elsewhere, they could be pursuing property for which they have a legitimate chance to secure. And so not everybody wins. In fact, almost everybody loses when we create this panic atmosphere around our around our pricing. The other thing that happens as a result of this strategy that’s related to, you know that that sentiment of almost everybody loses is that it creates a market sentiment, for which the headlines gravitate towards what headlines always gravitate towards, like the sexiest part of the scenario. This Oh, we had this $350,000 house sold for $100,000 over asking price. Think about what I just said there. I said this $350,000 house sold for 100,000 over as a just a general civilian consumer here. I don’t know, is this house actually a $250,000? House that sold for 350? Is it a $350,000 house that sold for 450? Or is it just that everything is expensive right now, if you go on CNBC, on MSNBC, on Fox on the Chicago Tribune on the Denver Post all of these websites right now on their front pages, and I know that there’s we’re not going to be listening to this when we’re recording this. But if you go and look right now, there is talk on every major news outlets website about a real estate bubble. And that real estate bubble is being the fear of that is being fueled by this incredible explosion in price. And this perception that the Fed is going to most likely jack up interest rates, which is going to plummet buyer demand and all of a sudden we’re gonna have super high prices, nobody interested in buying and then all of a sudden, pop. Yeah, and that the the left end of this, of this lever, real estate agents and their pricing has a direct effect on how high that left side goes. We can be in control of this. We can bring the panic in the market back down to earth by appropriately pricing things. But we’re not because you can’t post on Facebook about that sort of thing. Nobody likes being Oh, yeah, we had four offers. You know, after six or seven days of showings, nobody likes posting that because that’s not sexy and flashy and fun. We do like posting all the craziness. And that is just not healthy for the market. It’s not healthy for our clients. And it’s certainly not healthy for us as professionals, if we want to have a sustainable career on this.
D.J. Paris 14:19 So I’ve two points. One This is reminds me of it. I think there’s an I have to be a little careful how I say this, but I think if you underprice a property, or if you under list, if you underprice a property when you’re listing it I think it’s it’s disingenuous at best maybe and maybe worse than that right? Because what you’re really it’s kind of like when I remember those websites it I think we can all probably we’ve all probably seen where somebody is selling some sort of knowledge product you know, learn how to do X or learn how to build a business and then there’s this long sales page and at the top there’s like this offer is only good for the next few 10 minutes, or whatever has some sort of time, you know, sort of thing on it. And and then you refresh the page and the timer resets. And you’re like, okay, there is it’s an artificial, there’s no actual timing thing, but it’s used to prey upon our sort of, you know, this FOMO this like if I don’t act now. And so I think I think it’s disingenuous, right, because, but I think maybe we should talk about and maybe worse, maybe it’s actually doing more bad than just being more of a sort of a marketing tactic. I underpriced I’ll get a lot of activity. But let’s talk about I would love to talk about how, how and why, aside from just increasing activity, if I’m an agent, I go, Well, okay, Chris, I agree that it’s a little crazy right now. But if I run comps, you know, I’m just, I’m pricing it, what I’m seeing in the last three months that’s closed in the area, and you’re telling me to price it lower than that.
Chris Linsell 15:56 So I can tell you as and I have some, a lot of personal experience, I’ve done hundreds of CMAs, probably 1000s, frankly, at this point. And I also not to brag a little I’m gonna brag just a little bit. I also have the number one Google ranked article on conducting comparative market analysis for real estate profession.
D.J. Paris 16:16 It’s amazing what we’re gonna, by the way, we’re gonna post a link to that in our show notes. Yeah. So thank you for mentioning that.
Chris Linsell 16:23 Come take a look. In fact, this is one of the things I have read presented on quite a bit last year, and the conference circuit was, I’m creating a bulletproof CMA. And one of the tenets of creating a bulletproof CMA is adjusting your comp ratios relative to the aggressiveness of the market. And that sounds like a whole bunch of gobbledygook. But let me just let me just translate that the more aggressive, the more the crazier the seller’s market is, which is like if your buyer demand is really high inventory is really low. The more aggressive that market is, the more recent your comps have to be. So if you’ve got a really balanced market, you can look at comps, 434, even six months back, that’s that seems relatively reasonable. If your markets heating up, and it’s started, you know, you’re on kind of just on the seller’s end of things. You got to be looking three months or less on your comps. If things are really getting pretty intense, you got to be looking at comps in the last month or so. And the things if the if people’s hair is on fire, like it is in my local market, for instance, there was a house that went up for sale in my neighborhood, there was literally a line out the door showings were limited to 15 minutes, there was there was literally people standing in the street in my neighborhood waiting to get in. If this is how aggressive your market is, you have to have not just the most recent sold comps, but you have to be accounting for what’s on the market. You have to be accounting for buyer activity in the moment, even on listings that haven’t closed yet. And you might be saying, well, there’s no database that I can go and look at to see how many offers something got, or what the sentiment is. There is a database, it’s called Facebook, because all of the agents I know literally cannot help themselves. They even before something is closed the moment it goes under contract, they’re on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is sitting over their shoulder and he’s like, okay, and I type in how many offers you got. Okay, you can’t say the price yet. Because the you know, this is still confidential that you can just say, oh, yeah, we’re really happy double winky face. You need to start accounting for this stuff. And you’re right, there’s no scientific means of quantifying this, there’s not a formula that you can use to say I know exactly what I have to account for where, but if you if people’s hair is on fire in your market, and you know it is when it is, you’re gonna go and you need to start accounting for kind of extraordinary circumstances. And that includes pricing your properties accordingly.
D.J. Paris 19:11 And I imagine what you could do is also reach out to those agents that have closed listings that are in you know, in that area, that you’d be running the CMA for your client, and asking them say, Hey, tell me about how you priced you know, it just because you know, an agents I think are pretty, usually pretty open about things. It’s like, hey, congratulations on the sale, I’m going to be listing something down the street. Can you talk a little bit about you know, the experience of listing right now and if the, because a lot of times agents love talking, oh my god, we got 60 offers, and it’s like, okay, and then I think the agent after that ends is probably like maybe I priced it wrong. The the listing agent that closed the property and having to deal with 60 offers or 30 offers is just a ton of work for everybody. And also you’re right there’s a lot of disappointed people. especially other agents who bring their buyers in who who look at these listing agents and going, I know what you’re doing. I know that you listed this artificially low, and I’m now pissed at you who this isn’t really, it isn’t a super friendly thing to do. And you’re really just doing this to create all this demand. But you could call that listing agent and say, Hey, how, you know how just out of curiosity, how many offers did you get? And if you were to have done it differently, again, would you do it differently and, and they might say, I’d price a little higher, or, you know, whatever, I think you’ll get a lot of feedback, if you just have these conversations with other agents and 100%, because they’re going to be exhausted by the time these things close.
Chris Linsell 20:37 The the fact of the matter is, as much as we are competitors with the other agents in our market, we are also colleagues, and there are so many instances that I can think of personally, in my own real estate career where I have thought to myself, Wow, I am so glad that I got a chance that I have the cell phone number that I can text, the agent down the street or in the next office, because I just have a question about something. And I bet you unless you are operating a real estate business on an island by yourself. Every agent listening to this has some experience of when they texted the agent that they happen to either share an office worth or be in the same brokers with or they did a deal once with and everything went great. And they kind of remained on good terms. We get information from one another. And frankly, it is not a matter. It’s not collusion is collaboration. It is not there is nothing underhanded here. And in fact, if we are not collaborating with each other, we are we begin to take on the characteristics of an industry again, that is selfish, it is not about our client’s best interest, it’s about our own best interest. If you protect information, hoard it, and you don’t share it with your colleagues. I mean, it’s one thing to disclose confidential information that you are not supposed to. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how do we work together to build a sustainable market economy that doesn’t crash and burn because frankly, if pricing continues in a panicked rise, we are going to have a really severe correction. And then the all of the agents who have been, you know, who, who put down a down payment on a boat, you know, assuming that things are going to be, you know, just a Lego gravy for the next three, four years, these people are out of luck. And these are not necessarily just the greenhorns in our in our agency, these are people who, you know, that boat that they put down the down payment on, these are people who just remodeled their kitchen or are trying to send their kids to college, we want to make sure we’re creating a sustainable atmosphere for everybody. And, and not working together. And collaborating is the opposite of that.
D.J. Paris 22:56 So I know what I just had a thought. So what I might do if I was about to list a property, and I looked at the sales, the actual final sales prices for the comps in my area, and I went, Whoa, these are really high because of course, everything’s high right now. I would probably pick up the phone, call some of those listing agents and say, Hey, obviously, you know, you can’t disclose any confidential information. But just out of curiosity, did you get a lot of offers on this property more than you thought? And if you were to do it over again, assuming you could still get to the same and price? Would you have priced? Would you have listed this at a different price? Because I think there’s a lot of agents, they get a listing. And of course, those are gold right now, because of how much activity there is on the buyer side. And then they don’t think about it until once it’s over. And they might have a different opinion. Like, you know what, I think I actually priced it lower than I should have, and it cost us a ton of extra work. You know, the owners had to deal with, you know, people not even being able to get in for showings, which is not a great experience. Because that owner wants, you know, people to come through and make an offer and, and other agents are were kind of pissed about it or, you know, and I think those are great conversations to have, like, if you would have to do this again, would you have done it a little differently? You know, and I think generally speaking that they’ll probably tell you, you know, if you have a decent relationship, and what you’ll probably I think you’ll what you’ll probably find is like well, I thought it would be cool to have 60 offers but actually really ended up being just a ton of work for everybody and a lot of upset people.
Chris Linsell 24:27 Yeah, without a doubt, without a doubt and I want to just encourage all agents here I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna speak to just both sides of the transaction here listing agents. If I am your client, if I’m your seller, and you show up on Monday at 5pm or whenever whenever the whenever offers are due on on our on our new listing, if you show up with you know a Cheshire Cat grin on your face and say well we had so 71 or 71 showings over the weekend, and here are your 45 offers Mr. Seller. If you show up to my house with that information and that smile on your face, I’m not going to be happy with you. And the reason is, if we have 45 offers on this property, you have mischaracterized who the buyer is for this house, you have not proven to me your expertise. Prove to your clients your expertise, by not getting them 45 offers, get them five offers from the best clients in the in the region that you were able to bring, because you priced appropriately. And buyer’s agents, I want to speak to you here because you’re a part of this too. You need to set your client expectations such that they are prepared to realize there are agents in our market who are just trying to create feeding frenzies. And so when we go to this listing, we have to remember, when you see that line out the door, we have to put our mindset put our mindset in the right spot here to recognize we’re likely going to be one of dozens of offers here. And we cannot hang our hat here, because it was really a lottery. And I can almost predict word for word what’s going to happen, we’re going to look at all these offers. On Monday afternoon or whenever offers or do, we’re going to get a message from the listing agents, we’re going to say we’ve had multiple offers on this property, it’s time for your highest and best if that hasn’t already been stated, basically. So we have to set buyer expectations appropriately. And make sure that as buyer’s agents, we are voicing our vocal concern that properties are being priced appropriately. That way we don’t waste our time as buyer’s agents, sellers, agents aren’t wasting their time creating all of this admin headaches to sort through. And ultimately, our buyers and sellers, our clients aren’t wasting their time, by having to go through hoops that, frankly, aren’t necessary to the process.
D.J. Paris 27:22 And buyer agents, you need to hold listing agents accountable like this, when you see this kind of low, artificially low or intentionally low priced listings, you need to pull that listing agent aside and say, Hey, man, you’re wasting a lot of our time here like this is this is not, you know, in buyer’s agents need to now run comps, they need to see what those I mean, buyer’s agents now have to go into the MLS, look at the difference between list and close price and see whatever percentage that is, and have that conversation with their buyer, like you were saying, this is this is what we’re seeing out there. So do we even want to go see this property, because number one, it’s going to, you know, odds are it’s going to go for 85%. More than you know what it’s listed for and, and oh, by the way, there’s going to be 70 other people, many of which, you know, don’t even know this, and you’re going to be competing with just a lot of other people in a way that you shouldn’t have to. And we’re not talking about things being fair or unfair, we’re talking about just just good business practice. And also, on the listing side, this is a great piece of you’ve given our listeners, and I mean this very, very sincerely, you’ve just given our listeners an amazing piece of ammo to use in a listing presentation. Because, of course, the seller only wants to know, hey, how, what do you think you can get for my or my property? Or why should I choose you? And you know, what a lot of agents will say to them is, here’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna we’re gonna price it a little bit under the market value. And here’s why. And we’re going to create this, this bidding frenzy and it sounds really cool. But you now get to come to that same seller and say, This is why we’re not going to do that it’s actually not good. And we, you know, I don’t think we’re going to actually get more, but we’re going to decrease the amount of traffic into your property, which is probably something that you want, you only really want people coming through here that can actually afford this place and want and can pay it. And also, I don’t want to artificially create a buying frenzy. Because that it’s well, there’s just a lot of reasons not to. But yeah, so I think you’re giving people a great tool to use, have that conversation with your sellers about why we’re going to price it at at where we think it might actually close.
Chris Linsell 29:45 Yeah, and I want to I want to speak. Lastly, I want to speak to those agents who have aspirations of moving up the real estate ladder, maybe you are working at the lower or the middle end of the property spectrum in your market and You want to move into luxury DJ just described when he was talking through that hypothetical conversation with his set with with this seller, he described many of what he many of the components of what he said, were components that you have with luxury sellers in normal market conditions, we’re going to only going to bring the qualified individuals through your property, we’re only going to bring people who understand the value of this property, we’re only going to bring in people who are legitimately going to write offers that you’re interested in through this property. These are the conversations that you have with frankly, with more affluent, and sellers who are usually looking at property, property value from multiple angles, if you want to move up the real estate ladder, in in towards towards the luxury market, times of disruption are the best times to do that we are in a time of disruption right now, the way the market is behaving, it is a complete disruption relative to the norm. If you look at the typical undulation of buyer and seller waves, we are in a time of disruption, this is a time to move up into the next, the next set of buyers and sellers. But you only do that by creating differentiation and not going with the flow because not everybody is moving up only the people who choose to think a little bit differently and say listen, we are going to make this the experience that you deserve relative to the amount of activity here I am going to find you the best buyer by creating the best pricing strategy here. The buyer’s agents are going to come are the ones who represent the buyers who are going to write offers that you’re most interested in seeing. Those are the people that we want here. And frankly, you can always price reduce if you feel like you overpriced, eventually, you cannot go the other way around, start a little bit higher, get the right offers the first time around and avoid the feeding frenzy.
From Rentals To Sales To 30 Under 30 • Quentin Green
May 13, 2022
Quentin Green with Downtown Apartment and Realty Company talks about how he got into real estate business and why he got focused on renting. Quentin focuses on how to build and nurture relationships with other agents. Next, Quentin discusses managing time, calendar and appointments and how he does it personally. Last, Quentin discusses giving back to the realtor community and its importance.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode why doing rentals today guarantees sales tomorrow. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with amazing person top producer and recent 30 under 30 NAR winner Quentin green. Before we get to Quinton, a few quick announcements, we’ll keep it very short. But please always, we always ask this and we’re gonna keep asking because it means so much to us. Please tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that needs to hear what we do on this podcast, send them a link either to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com or over. Or they can just pull up a podcast app and search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. we so much appreciate it. Thanks in advance for doing that. And also please leave us a review. Take just a few seconds, whatever podcast app you might be listening and let us know what you think of the show. Okay, enough for me. Let’s get to our interview with Quentin green.
Today on the show, we have Quentin Green from downtown apartment and realty company. Let me tell you about Quentin. And he by the way, Quentin is here in the Chicagoland area. But let me tell you about Quentin. Now Quentin is a partner and Director of Development at downtown apartment and realty company. He entered the business in mid 2016. Upon graduating from slew St. Louis University. Quentin comes from a long line of land entrepreneurs and is a third generation realtor, which is in a large part how he got into the industry and quittance first four years as a realtor. He was primarily leasing apartments in downtown Chicago. He’s leased over 400 apartments across the Chicagoland area. And in 2021, Clint was recognized by the Chicago Association of Realtors as a top rental producer and did a little over 10 million in sales, which was a 900% increase in sales production year over year. So in just one year, he went from essentially about one or 2 million in sales all the way up to I can’t do the math but but up to 10 million I might have that first part wrong Quentin can correct me but amazing growth in a one year period. Quentin has also served as the 2021 chair for the Chicago Association of Realtors Young Professionals Network, and was also and just up within the last week was recently selected as an honoree for realtor magazines. This is National Association of REALTORS 30, under 30 for the class of 2022. So congratulations, Clinton, and welcome to the show. Thank you happy to be here. It’s weird. You’re in all that get rattled off a lot happened in one year. But ya know, longtime listener have been tuning in, you know, well before I met you so you know, I couldn’t be happier to be on. Yeah, I first met Quentin. I think the first I met was when I joined YPN Quinton was the chair and YPN for those of you who aren’t familiar, I’m not sure if they have them at every local association across the country but in Chicagoland area at the Chicago Association, realtors. It’s the Young Professionals Network and Quentin and I actually just saw him earlier today at an event we’re still on the committee together but he used to chair the committee and so I I got to work sort of underneath him helping out and it was I was always very impressed with Quentin and congratulations on the 30 under 30 award. That is a big big deal. Many many people apply
Quentin Green 5:00 pay for it and very few ever get to achieve it. So congrats. Yeah. And also, yeah, no, I’m, it’s awesome. And I know that was it. Was this your last year of eligibility for for it? Oh, so I’m 27. So which was Yeah, time? Yeah. So it was like, if I didn’t get it, that’s my personal plan because obviously like, I just had, you know, big year, and I would never have gotten it last year. Let’s be honest. So like, I was ready for it this year. You know, I had some, some good people write recommendation letters, which I think went a long way. But yeah, I you know, even I was kind of surprised to get it figured it out to you know, apply again next year. And, and hopefully, you know, get it to enter, you know, yeah, for that. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s funny. So we want every year for our show, whenever that 30 under 30 list comes out, we usually start contacting those those agents, because we think, you know, gosh, our listeners would love to probably hear we talked to so many brokers that so many realtors that have been doing this for 20 plus years. And that’s not always super relatable to to newer agents and the fact that you were able to do it, receive that award, in really, you know, 27 and your first time applying is truly remarkable. Because we talked we end up talking to a lot of the 30 under 30 people on the show. So really, really great actually ran into Jordan Pyle, who was also on our show. He was a pastor at under 30 winner as well. I ran into him in the restroom this morning. At the event we were all at so I didn’t even see him. He was Yeah, okay. Yeah, he was there. And I know he and you are really close. So, so that yeah, he wrote, here’s what our recommendation letter is actually. Yeah, it’s a small world. It is. Well, let’s, let’s start. And I’m sorry, we should everyone should be following Quinton on Instagram, we’re gonna have a link to that in our show notes. But his Instagram account is Quinton green. And that’s que un tin green without any at the end. So just green like the color underscore RT Quentin green underscore RT on Instagram. And also you can find them on Facebook, just search for Quentin green, it’ll pop right up. But let’s talk about how you got into real estate. So so
D.J. Paris 7:04 not I was gonna say fun fact. But it’s really not fun. Anyone other than me. I lived in I lived in St. Louis, right out of college, I went to school in Ohio and, and got a job, my aunt got me this terrible, terrible job. But this this job in St. Louis. And so I moved to the Central West End. So I actually was kind of in between WashU and SLU. And, and I really, really enjoyed it. I had a lot of friends that went to SLU. And what a cool, I just liked that school. Yes.
Quentin Green 7:35 It is. And and you know, and then you came back here, of course, after school and then went basically right into real estate. Is that my understanding? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I didn’t know what I was going to do out of school. You know, I was,
yeah, I was interviewing consulting firms. And you know, like, a few banks. And I was just like, immediately intimidated. And I just didn’t think that I would I would last and you know, I don’t know, it wasn’t for me. So I had no idea what I wanted to do, I figured maybe law school would be something I would do down the road. But like, in the meantime, I was like, oh, I need a job. So, you know, having both my parents, you know, they had their own firm here for I mean, 15 years, probably.
And, you know, 10, of which I’m sure their top producers for, you know, I just got my license right away, started working at the company that I’m at now, just kind of doing rentals. And, you know, I’d say the first two years, I was very much in between staying and leaving, I was always like, sort of one foot out the door. I was like, I don’t know, if I keep doing this. But you know, I stuck to it. And, you know, it ended up being a much, much longer than I thought it would be.
Yeah, it’s, it’s impressive, and you haven’t just quite a very humble person, but you didn’t, you didn’t just stick to it, you were really, really committed whether, you know, whether you’re sort of able to sort of see that as much as maybe, maybe I’ve seen that in you because I you know, I’ve just seen lots and lots of agents, and I understand that the rental game is is a grind and it’s tough. It just is it’s a lot of flaky people, it’s a lot of you know, they maybe they’re talking to two other, you know, realtors or two leasing consultants at the same time. And, and, you know, it’s just, it’s just a lot of things that fall through. And that being said, I’ve always thought that rentals, and I know that you know, you’re now doing predominantly sales, but but rentals were I always thought such a smart way to enter the business. And of course, not every market can really support that, where an agent can kind of start, you know, doing sort of clicker deals. But boy, I mean, it’s so so funny. There’s a direct line between homeownership and rentals. And yeah, pretty much all of us rented before we bought and so I think it’s just such a smart, smart play, but tell us about how you got started in rentals. Like, like, like, really? What was that like for you? So yeah, I mean, my whole thing was like, I mean, again, part of the reason why I ended up choosing like real estate over like any other sales job was because I you know, had my parents and I saw them kind of
do it and I was like, Oh, well, you know, this is, this is a good way to get into business I have people I can get on the phone with at any moment, give them a call. And so, you know, after a lot of discussion, like I talked to, you know, a few top producers as well to see it. And I didn’t know if I was going to join a team, because there’s a very join a team of like a top producing agent, and I learned the business that way. And like, I firmly believe that you either go that route, or you gotta go the ground up route of starting at Reynolds and building your business. But like, if you do that, you have to realize that, like, this is a long term time horizon, and you’re, you’re gonna be, you know, eating shit for least a little bit if you go this route. And so I was like, you know, what, screw it, you know, I’m gonna get home to do it, I’m gonna give it a shot. And, you know, I’ll just kind of build my own books, I started doing rentals that way. And that’s what really attracted me to it. You know, of course, there’s people in between those two spectrums that end up, like crushing it and do incredibly well. I just think for most people, especially if you’re young. And it’s like when your first jobs like, you got to do one of those two options, in my opinion. Well, yeah, because you’re your friends. And you know, I mean, my friends when I was in my early 20s, they weren’t buying homes.
D.J. Paris 11:02 Right? Yeah. So it’s like, yeah, either you gotta help them rent or you join one of those teams, where they’re gonna be providing you a lot of leads, and we’ll just kind of show you the ropes, you’ll be sent open houses, you’ll be taking, you know, you’ll be showing listings, whatever. So, so yeah, I mean, I started doing downtown apartment rentals, you know, a lot of stuff, not on the MLS, you know, that’s what our company pretty much only did back then we would just take them to, you know, a lot of the depression as rental buildings. And it was really just a valium game. And you know, it still is a lot of people or companies still still do that. But that I mean, that’s pretty much how I how I got into it. There’s between that are joining like a larger team. Yeah, I want to just define what Quinton just talked about with these we’ll call the non MLS apartment listings. Because this is not only specific to the Chicagoland area, although we do have a lot of apartments here in Chicago, of course with our population that never hit the MLS so so what we’re talking about is, these could be anything from high rise buildings to even just single family homes that are managed by a property management company who still will work with realtors to get to get their stuff rented, they just don’t listed on the MLS because there’s no listing agent, they don’t want to pay a listing agent, they just wanted to pay whoever brings them the renter. And so if you are in an area where if what I just said is completely foreign to you, here’s how you can find out if these listings exist. Go to Facebook marketplace, or I don’t know, Craigslist, probably no one uses anymore. But any sort of place where there’s ads for apartments and look for, you know, if they’re posted by a, you know, a management company, or even just the building itself, and literally just pick up the phone and call the management company and say, Hey, I’m a realtor. I also do apartments sometimes, you know, can I rent your properties, because I’m guessing they’re not on the MLS. And what they’ll do is they’ll start to send you It depends on of course, the building, whether they’ll work with agents or not. But oftentimes, at least here in Chicago, most of them will almost all of them. And what’s really cool about it is because there’s no listing agent, at least here in the Chicagoland area. Typically the Commission’s are a full month’s rent, sometimes even more, depending on the time of the year if there is no more space, so you can earn 120 550% of one month’s rent. And there’s a there’s some downsides to working with property management companies too. But it opens up this huge additional amount of inventory that the MLS just doesn’t have. So for anyone listening costs some of these big buildings, or if you live in a more rural area, maybe just look up management companies call them and say, Hey, I’m a realtor. Do you have any places that need to get rented? And if so, you know, will you pay me a commission? If I find you someone? And you’ll I bet you’d be surprised that most of these management companies will probably say yes, so anyway, sorry, to pause that, you know, that’s good. I’m kind of a commission because I didn’t know what I could or couldn’t say, you know, we’re so used to like that antitrust stuff. So I’m like, alright, but that’s good. Yeah, I mean, they paid they paid twice as much typically. So it’s funny, the cats totally out of the bag. Now, like when I first started in 2016, like,
Quentin Green 13:59 I thought this was normal, but like no other companies really did this. Like there were very companies that specifically specialized in these like luxury rentals. And so like we still to this day, we have our own, like CRM, our own internal database of all these buildings and cars and all this stuff. Like it’s super built out. It’s totally custom. And we’ve had that for you know, since I’ve been with the company, and now you’re starting to see a lot of these bigger firms be like, Whoa, we’re totally like these crumbs, they’re not crumbs, right? Like, we got to start going after a lot of this stuff. And so you’re seeing more of that now. And where a lot of people, you know, regardless what company you’re at, they’ll do more of this. But yeah, back then, you know, were some of the only players in that market. And you’ve done a lot of apartments and I’m curious on the not not that there’s any specific numbers to that. I’m sure you could rattle off but how many of those customers that were rent or clients over time evolved into buyers? Is it been? Quite a few? Yeah, it’s been a few. I don’t have an exact number for you. I would say
Unknown Speaker 14:59 Like, got of you know, I don’t I think I’ve done over 400 rentals, at least maybe like 10 to 15 have went and bought for me as well. Amazing. Yeah, but I mean, like 10 to 15 out of 400. Like, in my, the way I look at it, like, I haven’t even gotten started with that, of course, you know, yeah, we I’m happy with it don’t get me wrong, but But yeah, I think there’s, there’s definitely a lot more people from that pipeline that are gonna be buying well,
D.J. Paris 15:25 and right now it’s it’s, it’s tricky because here at least here in Chicago inventory is so low that a lot of people are going to continue to rent for a while until, you know until things change with inventory and pricing. So it’s, it’s, you have a lot of people probably just waiting, or maybe they’re building up, you know, more of a down payment or whatever they’re doing. But right, but luxury apartment people eventually buy every single one pretty much unless they’re somebody that maybe floats around from from city to city for their job or something, but the vast majority of them are going to purchase, they’re going to go, they’re going to work with an agent. And you’ve set yourself up quite nicely. And I’m curious about this, because I think even for our listeners that aren’t doing rentals, I think you know, you’re talking about just getting started. And you know, you have this, these these people that you’ve worked with in the past, and yet only 10 or 15 of them have become sellers, or buyers. But still, that’s that’s an amazing number. It really is. And and this just this idea of that’s just gonna keep going rolling for you every year, maybe even quite a bit more. And I’m curious on how you stay in touch with somebody like that, like, how do you continue to just make sure that they remember that you’re the guy that rented him the apartment three years ago? Is that difficult? Or do you have systems in place? Or how do you do that?
Quentin Green 16:41 Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna lie, that’s certainly not like my expertise. I what I do now, you know, it took me three and a half to four years to really like sit down, because I don’t know, when I first started, man, I was not thinking about anything, I was like, just put my head down, like show up and just rent units. And then I got sick of doing that. To be totally honest, I was like, We got to figure out a way to get to the next step faster. So I took pretty much all my past clients, what anyone I’ve interacted with, I had just, you know, on an Excel sheet, I make sure I don’t put any agents on that. Because I hate when agents send me newsletters and all that BS, and they just get your whole inbox. It’s infuriating. I’m not your target audience. And so you know, I have that I do monthly newsletters, which is good. And it’s normally really good content. I earliest I like to think based on you know, what people tell me. So I do that. And then I always just, you know, obviously certain clients, you spark more of a connection relationship with than others. And, you know, I really go out of my way to just kind of check in every once in a while. So yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s no trick, I literally use an Excel sheet, and I throw it into Constant Contact, and bam, you know, kind of punch it out. But I didn’t start doing that. So a year and a half ago, maybe.
D.J. Paris 17:45 Yeah, it is, it is one of those things that when you’re when you’re first starting, you’re just trying to survive, and you’re like, I just gotta, I gotta pay the bills, and I gotta, I gotta get these deals close. So I can I can eat. And then the idea that four years from now, I’m gonna, like come up with a four year plan to keep on top of this for you know, which is just not, you know, not something you have the bandwidth for at that time. But, but but now being able to go back is is great, because, yeah, very few people ever go back. So like, if you ever I’ve learned this about life, like with follow up, like, even if you lose touch with somebody, or if you dropped the ball, I’m not saying you ever done that, but I know I’ve done that a lot. And it’s like, even if you just go back, and you’re like, Hey, man, sorry, for or not, you probably wouldn’t say hey, man, but but sorry for for, you know, sort of being being absent. But I, you know, I definitely want to, you know, continue the conversation and blah, blah, blah. Usually people are like, Okay, that’s great, you know, people usually, you know, they don’t go back once they dropped the ball. And I think that’s a missed opportunity to reconnect with somebody. And, you know, if they don’t like you, they’ll tell you, like, but but they probably do like you and probably are like, Oh, I’m glad to hear you know, you’re coming back. It’s kind of like getting a call from an old friend. That’s like, I know, we haven’t talked in 15 years, but I was just thinking about you. It’s like, that’s a still a nice feeling. And I understand, you know, it’s not exactly the same as that, but But it’s sort of. So I think that’s great. I also want to talk of just just briefly because I think this is particularly interesting, which is a crazy success story. But I know that you’ve also worked with investors, and you have one client in particular, who’s really been an it seems like it’s really been like this amazing force in your life. And most everyone I’ve interviewed on the show has a somewhat of a similar story where it’s like this one person that I somehow met, they ended up introducing me to, you know, a lot of other people that turned into business. Everyone seems to have this one client, and you’ve done that on the investor side. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about how you met that person and what kind of deals you guys have done?
Unknown Speaker 19:49 Totally. Yeah. So the client you’re talking about, he’s someone who, you know, he’ll just buy a couple, you know, multifamily properties once a year basically, when I met him I I didn’t know that that was what he did. So he had reached out it was right when COVID hit and he was doing Airbnbs a four unit, you know, right on right around arm to check it. So like a plus location and he was crushing it. He was he was actually starting to use bookings go down. So it was kind of ahead of like the COVID. You know, there the COVID like wave. He was like a month or two early. And he was like, Yeah, something’s off. I don’t know. But anyways, I want to get into leasing news full time. So I was literally to sit in the office he calls. You know, I
D.J. Paris 20:30 go, wow, that was that was an intelligent sort of lucky not lucky, probably had some some intelligence behind it. That didn’t make it so lucky. But just even thinking I’m going to switch from short term to long. Oh, he’s
Unknown Speaker 20:42 a super creative guy.
D.J. Paris 20:43 Yeah, it’s got Yeah, anyway, that’s it.
Unknown Speaker 20:46 I mean, he noticed the decline. He was like, something’s off. You know, I don’t know what it is. But it doesn’t really make as much sense anymore. So he ended up I ended up going to take a look at the properties. You know, they’re great units, and it was all furnished. So we rented those. And I think I’ve rented them for him within like two days, he already had professional pictures.
D.J. Paris 21:03 By the way, how did he find you?
Unknown Speaker 21:05 So he called my office. So yeah, we get just a random phone call, random phone call, totally random. I was the first guy who called I think he had used the previous agent to buy the property in like 2017. And, you know, he said, I don’t know, they didn’t, they didn’t get along, I can tell you what happened there. Sure. So yeah, we run them in two days, he was super happy. And he was actually like making the same amount he was with Airbnb, after the, you know, whatever 25 30% of fees that you pay to the manager of it. So he was good to go. And you know, since then I’ve really kept in touch with him. He ended up buying. And so this guy, he ended up buying four more properties through me in between, like today, and when I first met him, which would end which ended up being about over $3 million per year. And he doesn’t even use these properties. Like before, he says, like, I pretty much go there. And you know, I do the Proform analysis, all that stuff. Yeah. And he you know, he’s also super specific. So he’s got his own numbers that he’s that he’s working on. And so he kind of gives me his eyes, ears. And then, you know, he’s also like, like, I don’t manage units, I don’t want to get management, you know, it scares the hell out of me. But what I will do is like, I’ll handle all the leasing. So like for him specifically, like, I will be on top of the leases when it’s 6090 days out, and I’ll go and do the renewals and all that stuff. And so I just handle the entire leasing process on the back end. And honestly, it doesn’t bother me, you know, it’s easier for me, I don’t have to communicate with him, and leases are up, and all that stuff, and it saves him a ton of time. So yeah, it’s been an amazing relationship. And yeah, it’s all from one office colleges, you know, I was just sitting there.
D.J. Paris 22:37 And by the way, for everyone listening, if you want a little tip about how to reverse engineer this, and obviously, Quentin has a very fortunate story where the phone rang, and he just happened to get the call. And you know, not all of us can, can can just have that happen. And I’m not saying that, of course, Quentin works insanely hard, but it just was a nice break that fell your way. And if you want to create that own break for yourself. Yeah, the phone’s probably not going to ring for the rest of us. So instead, what we can do is if you ever just are driving down the street, you see a for rent sign, perfect reason to pick up the phone with the phone number, just call and say, Hey, Are you the owner, you’re the property manager. Hey, great. I’m a realtor and I you know, I sometimes rent properties. And I don’t know if this one’s available still. But I just wanted to learn a little bit more about you know, the place. So if I ever have a tenant, blah, blah, blah. And what eventually will happen if you make enough of those calls, at least here in the Chicagoland area, and probably everywhere, is you do find investors like that, who go like, Oh, you kind of caught me at a good time, I don’t really want to deal with the leasing side of this anymore. I want to outsource it to you. I, you know, I don’t want to do it. And and then eventually those people are like, oh, yeah, I have other properties, or I’m buying more properties. And so you hit that vein of investor, you had that great relationship, and You’ve nurtured it. And oh my gosh, like, it didn’t just it wasn’t just the leasing side. Now you have all these, you know, you have what, 6 million in sales just from this one guy. I mean, that is an amazing relationship that you’ve built.
Unknown Speaker 24:01 Totally. Yeah, no. I mean, it’s, it’s been fantastic. And one thing I’ll add to that is, like, part of me is like, you know, every once awhile, you’re like, oh, it’s like, whatever. But the thing is, like, you got to show up every day in order to get lucky. And with some, you know, something like that, like, Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to believe that some guy just you know, calls an office, but everyone’s got that one. That one, you know, Lucky moment or whatever. And one thing that they have in common, though, is that like, yeah, he called that one day, but I was at the office for like eight hours every single day, and I would be the first one into the office. So that way, the first lead would go to me directly, you know, so that’s just, you know, that’s just what you’re doing. Yeah, there’s great stories from it. And that’s another thing that I would also point out is you get these landlords the you people have no idea how many phone calls they’re getting from a lot of these middle market brokers who specifically focus on like multifamily, basically trying to get in front of them and put up presentations in order to sell their properties. And so that’s what I’m gonna be dedicating and I don’t really mind tipping my hand at all, but like, one thing I’m focusing more on is reaching out to these landlords and actually offering them rentals. ervices and then you know, towards that, and then, you know, if they ever do want to sell or acquire another property, you know, they’ll have someone who knows what they’re doing. And it’s really just all about getting in front of these people, you know, and knowing the language they speak. And if you can offer a service to them, you know, instead of just calling them up and be like, Hey, I could sell your property with this much. It’ll it’ll guarantee you, it’ll be a way better way to get your foot in the door,
D.J. Paris 25:20 to do rentals to offer the rental service.
Unknown Speaker 25:23 Yeah, I think so.
D.J. Paris 25:25 Absolutely. I could not agree more. So this, this goes back to the well, how do you find these people? Well, you look at you look at the ads, you know, if you can, a lot of times tell when you see an ad on Facebook marketplace, or elsewhere, if you look at the comments or the description, you can tell when it’s written by a realtor off, it’s supposed to say realtor on it. So they should know that. But sometimes it doesn’t. But you get a sense of like, who might, you know, who might not really want to do that side of the business, because you might just see really poorly done ads. And and, and that’s another opportunity to contact them and say, hey, I can help you with this. And, and it’s kind of one of those things, too, with those phone calls. It’s like, either the investor will know right away when you when you call them whether they’re willing to work with an agent or not, you might still have to earn the right to work with that particular investor. But this idea that you’re like, hey, this is what I do. This is what I’m good at. And yes, and I think the point you making about make your own luck is is really a very, very true point. Like Quinton didn’t just look his way into that he happened to be there, the day that that call came in, but the hundreds and hundreds of hours you put in prior to getting those calls and just kind of doing your reps. Is is really how it is in any i i It is funny because I always caution, like I always went a little when somebody tells a story like that, because I think oh, I don’t want people to think that like you just got lucky. Because like, yeah, does it really come into it?
Unknown Speaker 26:56 Yeah, it will. It does, you know, you’ll have lucky moments. But you got to show up every day in order to have those lucky moments. You know, I mean, you’d have a way more likely chance of getting lucky if you’re in a position to be lucky. You know?
D.J. Paris 27:08 Yeah, you know, let’s, let’s talk about your and I know, every Realtors days for most Realtors days are different, but I feel like you’re a pretty regimented or structured guy. So how does because you you really are do you work predominantly from home? Or do you go into the office spent off much or
Unknown Speaker 27:25 I’m a little half and half, you know, I have a monitor at home, which is like a godsend for me. And I don’t have one of the office. So I find myself being in the office mainly for, you know, like partner meetings, meetings with like, different teams for properties or doing the subset, or like, in between showings, I’ll pull my laptop, but I’m just so much more productive with a monitor. It’s I mean, I need to get a monitor in the office. It’s kind of I just figured out talking through that.
D.J. Paris 27:52 But as far as, you know, what is your day typically look like? Like? How do you structure it so that you at the end of the day, you feel like, okay, I feel like I did I had a good day today?
Unknown Speaker 28:05 Yeah, um, I would say I’m not the most structured in the world, I certainly put in a lot of hours, like, like anyone else, though, you know, I’ll be working till you know, nine o’clock on and off. But you know, at least every day, I’ll have at least five to 10 showings typically. So between rentals and sales, and, you know, between me and my team, we all have each other’s calendars. So you know, we can do all that stuff, it’s really helpful. But every morning, but like, the first thing I do is I just kind of check the market, you know, at any given moment, like, and this is a thing that I would say to anyone who like wants to get into a market or anyone who wants to do something like just set up automatic MLS searches and get a feel for like inventory. Like at any given moment, I’ll have, you know, 30 to 50 MLS auto searches running and it’ll send directly to me, you know, half of which are for clients, half of which are just stuff I want to be on top of in case I have that conversation, you know, I could rattle stuff off and exactly know the direction of the market. So I’ll go through that stuff. And I had my cell phone and I was certain I send it directly to all my clients, which you know, everyone does whatever, but that, to me is very religious. And it’s almost like meditative. Just being able to look through like all the new listings and price change and all that stuff and kind of fumble through it. But yeah, beyond that, you know, we have weekly meetings. I have structure there, but I’m not as structured. And that’s partially I think, because, you know, I haven’t really had to be to be fully honest.
D.J. Paris 29:22 Sure. Yeah, it makes sense. But I appreciate appreciate you sharing that. And then, as far as like learning the market, it’s something that I think, oftentimes is not talked about enough, unless you’re lucky enough to have a mentor or a coach that’s like you got to learn, you know, some geographic area you really have to sort of master which takes years and years truthfully. But you’re talking about studying the market every day, so did you obviously in Chicago, we have so many different neighborhoods that anybody can specialize in. But it’s not always easy to have multiple of the As markets to really understand at a detailed level, but, you know, how do you go about doing that? Do you focus in a just a? Obviously I know, you know, clients could be anywhere, but are there certain areas where you’re like, I’m going to hyper focus? So I am the expert in XYZ neighborhood. Is that? Is that something that’s important to you? Are you still trying to get your bearings and figure out what areas are most important to you?
Unknown Speaker 30:21 Yeah, I guess, sort of, you know, I do a lot of stuff in West Loop. And that’s certainly been an area that I have focused on quite a bit. Mainly, like, I use this for, just to kind of know what is hitting the market, if I get if I get a client or like a zillo lead or anything like that. And they’re, they reach out to me, and they’re like, oh, this, you know, I know exactly what they’re talking about, like right away, because I just saw that unit hit the market this morning. There’s no specific area, but like, I specifically work in the downtown markets and then the surrounding neighborhoods. So like, probably as far north as like Andersonville, as far as I’ll go pretty far on the south side, but because I grew up in Beverly, so I’ll do all that stuff. But I grew up in the city, I know all these neighborhoods really, really well. And, you know, having his officers up and just seeing what stuff trades for, for me, it just has made it so much easier to have these conversations and not think about anything, just know all these numbers. And you know, people are like, Oh, wow, like you really kind of you have the ranges down all this stuff. And, you know, it’s taken years for me just looking at stuff. But you know, it really does help. And then obviously, you can go through info sparks and get a better picture as well. But that’s obviously flawed. Because you know, you can only it only plugs through showingtime.
D.J. Paris 31:29 Right, right. Yeah, so info sparks. For some of you, you’ll have that add on. With your MLS service, we use a service called M read. But anyway, you’ll probably have some sort of plug in. But But Quinton says is really important to setting up those auto searches for yourself in the areas that you you know, you really should know what condos are available in your preferred market, you should know when something hits the market. And you really do have to set up those auto searches. That’s a great tip. I’m not sure anyone. In the five years I’ve done the show is actually given that specific tip. So that’s a really great one is set your whatever area you want to focus on set up those auto searches, condos, single family homes apartment, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 32:09 you still get exposed to it. And then with the multifamily properties, like what I would do is I would just I would have auto searches running everywhere, I would know exactly what, you know, what a two to four unit would trade for on a cap rate in various neighborhoods. And I would also go and underwrite a lot of these properties, just for the hell of it, because I didn’t have anything to do. But I knew I wanted to work more and multifamily. So I’ll just get more and more familiar with, you know, running cash and cash, we’re in cap rates and getting an idea of like, what stuff trades for, you know, on a neighborhood and like, eventually that stuff’s just gonna stick in your brain, and you’re going to sound really smart to that guy, and then be like, oh, you know what you’re talking about, like, cool. Like, we’re, let’s, let’s Yeah, let’s move forward.
D.J. Paris 32:47 Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really important. And it’s something that again, we spend so much time as Realtors thinking about marketing and, and customer service, and just the ins and outs of finding clients or keeping clients. But we don’t often talk think about, like, sharpening the tools so much for I mean, quite and of course does. But a lot of agents, you know, part of their day is not studying the market. And even if you added 30 minutes to your day, for anyone listening who’s currently not studying the market, this is a great opportunity, because within a year or two, you’re gonna be you’re gonna know more than just about any other agent in your area, you’re just you just are. And all you’ll know as much as the top agents and that’s, that’s, that’s worth its weight in gold, when you’re up against other, maybe your listing presentation. And you’re up against, you know, three other big time agents and you’re able to sort of, you know, talk intelligently and not just about, here’s all the things I can do for you. It’s like, hey, taking a look, here’s what I think here’s what I’m seeing out there, you know, and here’s some data to back it up. Totally, there’s no easy way around that other than that’s, that’s the Marathon of being a realtor, I think is really just mastering the craft and knowing your knowing your stuff. So I appreciate you sharing how you do that on a daily basis, what other habits have been helpful for you, in order to really excel and sort of get to this level? Like what what have you found that’s been sort of what makes the difference in you know, how you find then service clients?
Unknown Speaker 34:14 Yeah, I mean, this will either be obvious or not obvious to most people, like I didn’t really start using like, I would always have output stuff in my own calendar. But I wouldn’t really start like making sure everyone is on a calendar invite until like maybe two years ago, and that has just completely changed my life like being able to see like my agents calendar and then also like, just having everything on one calendar because I know some agents don’t do it, which is like crazy. And I also know that like like, there’s only a few you know, larger teams, I could think of where I received those calendar invites from, you know, like there’s not many now I you know, to be honest, that’s all there is to it. And I was like alright, well I’m doing this every time if this guy’s figure it out and like and it sounds obvious, it sounds like dumb like because a lot of people like oh, I put in my counter but like, it is been life changing for me just to do that like that. way people are getting double notice some people just go through showing time. They don’t put anything in their calendar. It’s crazy.
D.J. Paris 35:04 Right? So what Quinton is talking about is, is through through our MLS, when when you request a showing through the automated service, which which the one we use is called showingtime, then you get confirmation, but it doesn’t automatically get plugged into your calendar. And so when you’re doing that, do you also send an invite to the client as well.
Unknown Speaker 35:28 Pretty much everyone, I saw the listing agent, the listing agent, I’ll send it to my agent. But if I’m the listing agent on property, I will absolutely send it to the buyers and renters as well. And also, it helps me from waste my time because a lot of people forget to forget to cancel or something like that. And if I see that they didn’t accept something my reach out, or they’ll just cancel the showing there and they won’t cancel on showing time. So since I did that, like my, the people who would like stand me up or cancel on me has gone way down. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 35:59 Yeah, it’s, it’s a lesson I had to learn in a different way. But the same same idea was I had to really have a good reminder system. I mean, I do everything with calendar invites too. But for me, when I when I recruit realtors, and we, we have a whole system where it’s like a day before they get an email and a text, the an hour before they get an email and attacks because, you know, agents are busy and they just often forget, or it’s shocking to me how many agents themselves do not keep calendars. I mean, I certainly I don’t know who keeps a calendar. Who doesn’t because I wouldn’t really ask because I
Unknown Speaker 36:38 would be able to awesome. No, that’s what people don’t. Yeah, yeah. And it’s also hard to believe it’s like a lot of it’s like new agents and like I still do work with a lot of Reynolds so and Norman listen to everyone else. So I am dealing with a lot of new agents. And yeah, yeah, if it’s just some through showing time, you don’t have that counter invite, like, you’ll get stood up a lot. And it sucks.
D.J. Paris 36:55 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s and then also, one thing I learned from Matt, Matt, Larissa, who’s just for anyone listening I, I interviewed him several years ago on the show, but he that’s a great interview, because he’s, he’s one of the top agents here in Chicago. Actually, yeah. Oh, good. He’s, he’s he’s very earnest person. And he’s just just sort of tells it how he sees it. And one thing that he did that very few people that have ever been on my show have did, who was running a couple minutes late is about five minutes before the meeting, or maybe knows about 10 minutes before the meeting. He messages me, and we’re not like we weren’t, we’re not friends to the extent where he’s like, you know, we’re chatting, Hi, how’s it going? I’d really never spoken to him before. And he sends me a message like, Hey, man, I’m running about five minutes late. Just want to let you know, sorry. And, and I was like, sounds so simple, and so obvious. And I just, it just reminded me that he did that. And it really stuck out to me. And I was like, That is super respectful. And it would have been fine. If he never had done that, because five minutes, no big deal. Sometimes I find I’m five minutes late. But the fact that he thought to do that was just such a great practice around being respectful of someone else’s time. And so that’s really what you’re speaking to is, is setting yourself up to have as few of those people bail on you. But also, it’s really to respect everyone’s time by scheduling it. And it sounds again, it does sound obvious, but I think so many things are what I would call the elusive obvious, like so simple, but then you’re like, oh, it really does make make a difference. So there’s that. So So that’s important to you. What, as far as when when you meet somebody, how do you establish rapport with them? I think we always on the show, we never talk about that. Because we just assume that like everybody knows how to immediately build rapport. And of course, that’s not everybody’s skill set. You’re somebody who I think is very friendly, very affable. But how do you go about trying to connect with somebody who maybe is a phone call that comes in or a lead that comes in where you’re like, that’s not a referral? They don’t know me? How do you really initiate the conversation? Because again, at least here in Chicago, there’s a lot of agents that will want to work with that renter or that buyer or that seller? We have 46,000 realtors in the area. How do you go about establishing rapport?
Unknown Speaker 39:13 Yeah, I mean, I would say like, at least 85 And I hear some of this is probably like referrals or past clients to be totally honest, like a lot of new like leads that come in. Like I especially like rental leads, like I’ll give those to my team. For the other ones. It’s like there was a time when it wasn’t that way. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so I don’t know I mean, to some degree, like you either like have it or you don’t like same thing when I’m dealing with like insurance people or car sales or like whatever you know, you kind of either have it or you don’t and you know lenders like whatever you name it. But one thing I will say that you know I make a point to do is like I’m constantly just, you know, filling my brain with a ton of random shit. So you know, listen to four to six hours of podcasts at least every day. Until like a lot of my clients you know, for whatever reason, like a lot of them are like bankers. You know whether like UBS when and Blair, whatever, and like I spent like, like an embarrassing amount of time just like listening to like finance podcasts and so like, I’m able to have incredibly in depth conversations with them about like what’s going on, like, in the markets, generally speaking, and like, they’re really, you know, impressed by it. So like, I would say, find your thing and you know, try to expose yourself to as much information as possible. And just from talking to people, you’ll eventually get on a certain subject that you’ll be pretty educated on, and you’ll just kind of be able to, to rattle things off, you know, and to me, it’s been really helpful. And also, like, we talked with so many people as an agent every day, so you kind of just naturally should be getting better and better at it in general. So, you know, I would say, that’s kind of typically how I try to make connections. Other than that, like, you know, I don’t know that there’s no secret that I that I, that I’m aware of what I’m doing, you know, so
D.J. Paris 40:51 no, but But I think, do your doing your homework, really, and I think, you know, for anyone listening, here’s a really simple thing that you can do if you’re going to meet with somebody, whether it’s a renter, investor, buyer seller, you know, anyone, if you find out where they work, if you know that in advance, you could just do a quick Google search, go to the news and see what’s going on with that particular company. If there was anything in the news, you can or go to LinkedIn, check out their LinkedIn page, see what they’re up to, they’ve made a poster, and you get to learn about them quite a bit. And then you can just like, you know, William Blair’s is a great, great, great example, like, there’s a million things always going on with William Blair. But if you don’t know that you don’t know it. And because you’re not in that world, and the fact that you take the time to sort of learn about things that interest you, but also are part of your clients lives, I think, is instant rapport right there. I mean, I’m always impressed when somebody’s like, Oh, I saw this, this thing about real estate. And they’ll talk to me socially, and I don’t unfortunately, know that much about real estate, but honestly, but so I oftentimes I’m like really telling me about it, but but I’m reading a lot of other things. And so you’re right, I find, the more more information that you have about just things in general, gives you a lot to talk about when you’re when you’re chatting with somebody and so that I think that’s a really, really great tip is yes, just always keep learning.
Unknown Speaker 42:10 Yeah, like go go find a sports team and be a fan know, that sports team, you know, and like a lot of people went to college, and they’re diehard sports fans, like, go pick a team, be a fan of that team. And you know, see where that takes, I guarantee you, you’re sending the car when you go to college, or you went to Ohio State Oh, you’re a diehard Ohio State fan of Michigan, you know what I mean? Like so many different things, you’ll figure it out, but just expose yourself and put in as much information your brain as possible, and that’s helpful just come out naturally, when you’re meeting with different types of people.
D.J. Paris 42:37 Yeah, that’s a really smart thing. I’m not really a sports guy. So I’ve not particularly ever built that skill set. And it it is absolutely sports are just one of those things where, you know, I’m at a party and our cocktail thing, and people will just want to talk about professional sports or college sports, whatever. And I’m like, Oh, I don’t I don’t I can’t believe it. I can’t participate in this conversation. And it sucks. Because, yeah, okay, I, you know, I’m into other things, that’s fine. But, but yeah, it does sort of suck to not know about any part of sports. I mean, I play sports, but I really don’t watch it. And so it’s, it’s one of those things where it’s like, people, I play tennis, I don’t know any of the tennis players other than like, the two or three that everyone knows, but But it’s like, I don’t even know that. And so it really is kind of it’s it’s actually doesn’t serve me well. Not that I have to be somebody who goes to every Cubs game, for example. But, and I do like going to cubs games, I just don’t know the players. But it is one of those things where it does sort of bummed me out when I’m when I’m out socially. So it sounds sort of silly, but learning about your the local sports teams in your community. It’s, it has actually pretty important because you’re right, it’s a go to conversation piece. And I know, you know, that isn’t really exactly what you’re saying is memorized sports stats, but it is a good thing to know. Because otherwise, if you don’t know, you can’t really participate in the conversation. And you have to find something scrambled to find something else.
Unknown Speaker 44:02 It’s a little tough. But I mean, you’re such a good conversationalist, which is part of the reason why you’ve probably never felt the need to do anything like that first place, you know, so I mean, everyone’s different, but it’s just, you know, it’s a word of advice for someone who like maybe isn’t that good of a conversationalist, you know, start knowing more shit.
D.J. Paris 44:15 So the last thing I really want to talk to talk about is giving back and I don’t mean giving back to your clients, although I’m sure you do that as well. But really giving back to the realtor community. This has been something that I can I met you through one of your leadership positions at Chicago Association of Realtors. And this is something that I know is really important to you. And I’d love to just hear about why you got involved initially. And really what that’s meant to you because you now have served on on a number of committees. And you’re now part of an accelerated Leadership Program. You’re now just recognized as a 30 under 30. And by the way, National Association of REALTORS doesn’t care that much about production, they want somebody that’s doing something that gives back as well. And so obviously, that, you know, they they considered you to be a very well rounded individual in this business. So I’m just curious about giving back. Like, how did you even think to get involved? Initially?
Unknown Speaker 45:15 Yeah. So I mean, honestly, it was like a cold email I got through car and I was like, oh, applications for this thing called YPN. I never knew anything about like, YPN like, No, you weren’t, you weren’t somebody that even went to the YPN events. I didn’t know anybody like because like, I was such a closed off agent, my first two to three years, I cannot even tell you because I like wouldn’t even really do many MLS deals, I would do some, but how many, but when you’re doing MLS deals, you’re not meeting a lot of these other agents that you’re with. So like, it was very much like, kind of just on a track, put your head down. And then this like, I guess, like joining YPN I got that cold email. And I applied and I remember it was Grace Kagi Jordan Pyle and Casey Taylor, who interviewed me. And like, I never knew any of these people, nothing didn’t know what I was signing up for at all. And you know, they ended up selecting me, you know, thankfully. And so my first year, I think we had like two events, right, and then COVID hit and so then we totally shut down. And I remember towards the end, the person who was supposed to be the next year’s chair ended up stepping down. And to this day, I still have no idea why but Jordan, like, you know, pulled me aside Jordan Jordan Pyle was the past chair, or I guess was going to be the was the current chair of that year. And he was like, Hey, listen, I think you throw your name in the hat and you know, Sign of the term like, Dude, I don’t know anything. Like I basically went to events, like we were in COVID. Like, I don’t even like I was on a zoom computed computer the whole time, like meeting these people. Like, I don’t know how this works. But you know, at that time, like I was, he was a mentor to me already. And so I was like, you know, what, like, I’ll just, I’m not gonna say no to this guy, if he you know, I’d like to be where he is, too. And so, who am I to say no, so I did it. And then that was one of the best things I ever did. Because through that I met all these amazing people. You know, I unfortunately, only had three years, this is my last year there, but it’s just, you know, exposed me to different mentors, it’s allowed me to, like better, you know, understand the industry, like, you know, our PAC, like, knowing where your money goes, like, to me, it’s, it was just so huge. And it’s hard to think that like a random cold email that I just decided one day, I was like, oh, I should probably start meeting like more people and understanding, you know, what this industry is all about? So yeah, that’s pretty much how I got involved in you know, it’s been, it’s been pretty amazing ever since.
D.J. Paris 47:26 And we, you and I were sort of talking about this before we started recording, but I feel I just feel so lucky to be involved at this point. Yeah. Because, because the people that are involved, and again, every association is different, and, but most of them are full of really just nice, good people, either the staff that works for directly for the association, or the volunteers like yourself, who give up their time to help organize events, ended up just meeting a lot of great people in the industry, I think. And, yeah, that’s, it’s encouraging. It helps keep like, it keeps my spirits up, I go, I go to the events, and I’m not a practicing realtor. So oftentimes, a lot of it’s like, you know, it’s not really like where I would choose to spend my time, especially, you know, because I, it’s not really what I do, but just being around good people is, is really like uplifting, and it’s fun. And this is a tough business. And I I also think to like, when you’re when you’re somebody like yourself, who has been in some of these leadership positions, you know, people start to recognize that in you, maybe even people who aren’t in involved in giving back and you start to become somebody who’s who builds a, you know, a nice reputation for yourself as an agent who people like, and he’s really philanthropic. And I think that becomes really helpful just working with other agents. And I’m curious if that’s come up where, you know, maybe you’re, you know, you’ve noticed that people are like, Oh, aren’t you the guy from, you know, from from this committee? Or you, you know, it can only help that your career as well. I’m guessing, right? Yeah, totally. I
Unknown Speaker 49:01 mean, like, I remember, yeah, like, when I first got started, I was like, sort of, like, weirded out by like, how nice and friendly people were, and like, how open people were like, being like, you know, your mentor, I was like, this is weird. We’re not even the same company. Like, I don’t know what’s going on. Like, I just, I wasn’t it, it totally opened my eyes. And then, you know, since then, you know, I’ve had three or four mentors. And so like, for me, like a big part of it is like, the willingness that a lot of people have shown me in order to, you know, teach me mentor me, and all these things are like, I just want to be able to do what I can to pay that forward. And so yeah, I mean, that’s like the main, one of the main, you know, great things about it. But another great thing is like you’ve definitely will meet a lot of agents will get to know these agents, they’ll at least like know you, and so it definitely translates into a much better work environment as well, I would say, because it is really important to know a lot of these people and just to also like, like, from the amount of people that I’ve met through, you know, different associations and networks like it’s a tough business, especially now. Mark right now where it’s really tight inventory like people are at each other’s throats. And so be able to, like, keep people, I guess, prevent situations from exploding because you have you know, that repertoire with different agents is super helpful. And at the end of the day, like, you know, we’re just trying to help our clients get deals done. And sometimes, you know, knowing that person knowing no one’s not coming from bad place, you guys know each other, it’s just, it’s super important, it goes a really long way. So I would highly recommend anyone, you know, get involved in whatever your local network is for sure.
D.J. Paris 50:30 And I’m sure you know, you just said something. And again, this is not why you serve, and not the reason behind it. But there’s a nice benefit to being known as the guy who gives back to the realtor community, because ends up helping all realtors. And also, you know, let’s just be honest, like, and I don’t mean quite nice, to be honest, I’m just saying to everyone listening, let’s just, let’s just think about human nature here. If we’re in a multiple offer situation, and you’re the listing agent, and you see an offer come through, that’s, you know, maybe as good as any of the other offers. Or maybe it’s, maybe it isn’t quite as good. But you’re like that, oh, that’s my friend. I know that guy. You know, Quinton is a buddy of mine. And I see I want Quentin to win that listing. Now, of course, you’re always going to do what’s in your client’s best interest. As a fiduciary, you don’t really have an option not to do that, of course, or certainly hope people don’t do that. But you want your friends to win, right. And so you’re like, Oh, that’s a good guy. And maybe it just gets a little bit more attention than the person who submits an offer, where they’re not known at all. And I’m not saying that that’s how it should be. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter at all. But it does matter. And it is important, and good relationships just help, help get deals pushed through. And also to it’s like, Hey, that’s a guy that gives back, he’s probably got his his, his shit together, for lack of a better way to say it, he’s probably bringing me you know, a good offer. And again, it doesn’t mean that you get special favors it it’s not all your deals get accepted. But it can’t hurt. Right,
Unknown Speaker 51:56 exactly. It’s, it’s a nice little added bonus. For sure.
D.J. Paris 52:01 Yeah. And again, it’s just to me, it’s like a win, win all the way around as you get all this great experience. And you get to also feel good about yourself for contributing, helping the realtor community, so it’s a perfect win for you selfishly, if nothing else, you’re like, Hey, I’m doing some good stuff out there. And that feels good. And then oh, by the way, other people recognize that, and maybe that helps me just have, like you said, better relationships with other realtors, because it is called a cooperative commission. And the cooperative part is not, especially these days, it’s not always so stressed as much as as it could be. And when we see people who, you know, who give back we want we I think it activates that part of us, that wants to give back ourselves. And we see it in other people. And we’re like, I want to be like that guy. So we automatically, you know, we tend to admire people who do that. And so it really is, it’s really a it definitely will help. I don’t see any downside to
Unknown Speaker 53:00 give her Sure. And like a lot of people they don’t understand, like the plumbing of how any of like these associations and boards how this stuff works. Like, you look at like, we were one of the you know, I don’t know how many states exactly, we’re able to continue to practice, like, right when COVID hit, but like, we were fortunately one of those states. And once you kind of get involved in you kind of see the plumbing of these things and how this stuff works. Like it’s all it’s all in big part, like, you know, obviously, you know, our dad’s and lobbying like that, that stuff is a major player, but it’s also a lot of the people who volunteer, you know, and spend their time and a lot of the donations that go through our pack that really just go an incredibly long way. And a lot of these organizations are the reason why we’re able to do what we’re able to do. And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t aren’t aware of that. So, you know, I just think for that reason alone, it’s super important to, to at least get involved or donate, you know,
D.J. Paris 53:51 yeah, either way. And we know that everyone’s busy and time is the greatest resource. And it’s the most limited resource that we all have to deal with. So it’s not that everyone can can share committees or be involved in that way. But the very least you can, you can donate and you can learn about you know, what some of these lobbyists are doing to ensure that we can make a living going forward and it is important and there are disruptors in the field, you know, just sort of saying it like it is there’s a lot of tech disruptors that would very much love to cash in on the Commission’s that Realtors get to keep companies are trying very, very hard to to get that commission through different technologies and trying to remove the realtor from from that from the equation and and they they might succeed at some point. You know it to some degree and so you have to have people fighting on your behalf because technology is just going to keep making things easier, better, faster, and the realtor side of it. The actual interpersonal side is so important and that’s something that so far AI hasn’t told We figured out yet maybe they never will. And that would be great. But you know, I always think like, you know, it’s really important. And I didn’t think about it for the first 10 years that I was in this industry. I was like, Oh, I don’t know what any of that stuff is, I don’t know who’s really fighting for me or whatever. And then I’ve learned a lot. Yeah. And as I’ve learned more about it, I’m like, Oh, they’re actually doing really important stuff. And sometimes things get kind of down to the wire where legislation might get passed that would dramatically affect that. Yeah. And you were just you were just down at the you were, we should mention, Quentin just got back yesterday, from going down to Springfield, Illinois, to meet with legislators and, and also lobbyists and representatives and getting a chance to sort of see what’s going on at the state level. I mean, you were telling me off air that you were so surprised, not not maybe not so surprised, but make sense that a lot of these people who represent us, they’re not as as keyed in to the issues, because they have to know about every issue. And real estate might not be at the top of their list. And so we have these people that were that are lobbyists that are really trying hard. Can you talk about that experience? Just a little bit and, and getting involved at the state level?
Unknown Speaker 56:10 Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, that was my first time going there. And like, I again, like it comes down to like, understanding the plumbing of how things work. And I still don’t have a firm idea of how it works. But like, you know, like you mentioned, there are just a lot of legislators who, you know, they don’t fully have a clear picture, like, they’re not as informed as us like, and I know, a lot of people don’t sit here and think about that, but like, they’re not like, they’re just legislators, they’re dealing with a million different issues on a state and local level. And so, you know, just being able to sit down and talk with various realtors who are, you know, have their phone line open to some of these legislators to sit down and talk with them and get a better idea of, you know, what does this bill mean? Or, you know, what are the unintended consequences, or the intended consequences of this specific thing that they otherwise wouldn’t think of? You know, I mean, there’s, there’s 800 pages in some of these bills. And it’s, you, I don’t know, I mean, it’s both, it’s a good thing to see, it’s also a concerning thing to see. Because we’re putting so much effort into supporting the industry, and we’re making this ourselves very accessible. And, you know, we definitely have an influence over legislation. But at the same time, we’re relying on, you know, certain legislators who, you know, some, some do know, their stuff and others like don’t, and it’s just, like, kind of wild to think about that, like, a lot of a lot of the people who volunteer and a lot of money that’s spent like it’s going somewhere, and it matters. And, you know, it’s definitely a big deal. And it took me, you know, that was the first time I really saw that actually play out in front of me, I was like, Oh, wow, okay, good. Good to know. I’m gonna keep keep doing our back.
D.J. Paris 57:33 Yeah, that’s, that’s great. And so for everyone listening, just to wrap up, because Quinton Scott up, he’s a busy busy guy with in between doing five to 10 showings a day, and then all the volunteering that he does, which is quite substantial. So we’re gonna let him get back to his busy day. But I think the point is, is just getting involved in this industry really getting into it and, and quite I love that you kind of additionally started and you didn’t go to St. Louis University to become a realtor, right? You were like, I maybe I’ll go the consultant route, or become an attorney or, you know, do the law school thing, or, you know, or work in banking and finance. And I’m guessing that was more of your, your college background. And same with me, I was I was, I thought I was going to be a psychologist. I was like, oh, that’s what I’m gonna do. And then then I got out, and I never have done anything close to that. And so it’s, but you’ve got really involved, I think that’s sort of the key. And now you’re being recognized by National Association, realtors, and that’s a huge deal. So I think this idea of, of just contributing, getting passionate, getting into it, giving it your all and just being a guy who likes to contribute, and give back I think is, is, you know, probably not an insignificant reason why you become successful, I bet it’s all connected. So really, I really, I’ve always admired you, I think you’re just somebody who is just doing a lot at a really early age when I think most people in their 20s are focused predominantly on themselves, and developing themselves as as, as best we can. And the 20s are tough, IPIC but at least worse for me. But the fact that you’ve sort of found your footing and have already started contributing and giving back is a great lesson for anyone that’s you’re never too old or young to do that. And you’ll you’ll fight if nothing else, but never helps you professionally. Boy, your self esteem and confidence will go through the roof because you’re doing some good out there. So I really, really admire you for that. So to wrap up, we want to remind everybody to please visit Quentin at on Instagram. So please follow him there which is Quentin green underscore r e. Green without an E so Quentin green like the color underscore r e and also for anyone listening that may have you know now we’re just everyone can kind of live anywhere now and work anywhere it seems. And if you have people that are moving to Chicago or maybe you’re a suburban agent here in Chicago and you don’t really know the city market well
Mmm, I think most of the time you’re doing your client a disservice by pretending that you can serve a scenario that you just don’t know. So this is a great opportunity. If you have people either moving to the area, and you want to work with a great up, I don’t want to call you up and coming because you’re already we’ve already arrived. But somebody who has put in a lot of effort and time and he serviced a lot of people and his production is going up. Quite it would be a great guy to refer business to. Or if you’re interested in just getting some advice, Quentin actually just did this for my girlfriend. This is what a great guy he is. He actually just met with my girlfriend who’s trying to figure out a way back into the industry in a little bit different way. Quinn’s like, oh, let’s go out for coffee, or maybe she offered it or whatever. But he went and did that just for my girlfriend. And he did not have to do that. So he’s a great guy. And I really want to do everything we can to support great guys like, like when not that he needs our support. But if anyone out there is wanting to work with you directly, whether they’re a buyer or seller and investor developer, or maybe their realtor from another area that have people moving here, what’s the best way they should reach out?
Definitely email. Yeah, emails, you’ll probably have it, you know, somewhere, I assume. But it’s just cute green at downtown loop.com. So that’s best way and then you can look me up online. I’m pretty much everywhere. So yeah, call me email me definitely prefer email. But calling works do. Yeah, Quinton is a great guy. And again, congratulations on the 30 under 30. Your I saw some of the other 30 under 30 people, I recognize some of those names. And you’re got a great class with you. So I’m very excited to to continue to watch your growth. And congratulations for 10 million in production. Just incredible with the amount of work that you do outside of real estate or you know, to give back as well, I know you’re a busy guy. So congrats on all the success and we will on behalf of everyone want to say thanks to Quinton for spending time with us today. And on behalf of Quentin and myself, we want to thank the audience and listeners and viewers, everyone for participating in our show and also supporting us in the best way you can support us. Of course, always check out our sponsors, we have great sponsors, check them out, buy their products and services. They’re awesome. We don’t take on any just anyone as a as a, as an advertiser, we only take on, you know real estate, real estate adjacent sort of businesses that we think could really help brokers. So there’s one way another way is to tell a friend about our podcast and have one other agent that could use the knowledge that Quentin just shared in this episode and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. And then or if they’re podcast person, just have them pull up any podcast app, search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. And then last leave us a review. We really appreciate this. So this helps us get feedback. 99% of you don’t give us feedback. And that’s totally cool. And I understand that I don’t get feedback for a podcast that I listen to either. But it really is helpful for the host, me and our team to know what is working and what you would prefer to us to change. So whatever app you might be using to listen to the show, definitely leave us a review. Let us know what you like and what you’d like to see changed because we do it for you anyway, so let us know your thoughts. But Quentin thank you so much. We will see everybody on the next episode.
Quentin Green 1:03:10 Thanks, DJ
Social Media Tip From A Top 1% Realtor • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
May 09, 2022
In our April episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties talk about social media. Carrie shares 10 tips about social media to help you build a better presence. Next, D.J. shares his marketing tip for this month. Finally, D.J. shares a very specific tip about listing photos.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s show, our guest in the last 12 months did 161 million in production all herself no team and today we’re going to focus on how she runs her social media account and how you can do the same. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agents CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast for real estate agents and my real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from Carrie McCormack Real Estate Group here in Chicago with at properties Christie’s International. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer here in the Chicagoland area with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, the past 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here in the Chicagoland area Carrie is currently ranked number 13 in production and she is a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. Please visit Carrie at her website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. And also follow her on Instagram at Carey McCormick real estate. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 2:35 Thank you. Thank you happy spring.
D.J. Paris 2:38 Happy Spring happy Passover. Happy Easter. I’m not sure what other holidays happened this past weekend. But there were those were the big ones. Yeah, it’s and it’s the sun’s coming out again, finally, although today. But yeah, let’s talk about what’s going on with you this month. I know you’re pretty busy.
Carrie McCormick 2:59 Actually, the markets extremely busy, as everybody knows, but I thought I would take a break from the boring market stats and low inventory and all that, you know, information that we keep hearing over and over again and talk about something fun, like social media, a lot of people ask me questions about Instagram and social media and what to do and how to do it. So I thought I would give everyone a little bit of some tips. And I think when we tell our stories on social media, people feel more connected to us. And when people are connected, it leads to conversion. So that’s what I want to talk about. So can I dive right in?
D.J. Paris 3:38 Let’s do it.
Carrie McCormick 3:39 Okay, so I’ve got I think about upset, don’t count, but I think it’s about 10 tips that I’m going to share with everyone. And the first one is make sure that you’re let’s just talk about Instagram, right so well I guess any platform but Instagram in particular, make sure that your profile is optimized. Think of your profile as your resume people will decide to connect with you based just you know, very quick, you know, snap judgment on who you are based on your profile, make sure your picture is clear. Make sure what you do is clear. Make sure where you work, what you do your contact information. It’s all clear people don’t want to go hunting around and trying to find your information. So again, tip number one, make sure that your profile is optimized. Number two, use hashtags. A lot of people will do one or two or three hashtags. You have 30 hashtags to use. So make sure that you use hashtags that are relevant to whatever you’re posting. It’s an easy way to find ideal clients when you create content that matches the hashtag. I’ve seen some people put hashtag I don’t even know good example. Like Chicago Bulls, but the post has nothing to do with the Chicago Bulls. So again, just make sure that your hash tags are relevant to Whatever you’re posting, the next one, which is number three is use polls. If anyone knows how to do that, in your stories, polls are a great way. And I have to do more of this a great way to engage people out there by asking them their opinion, like example, which kitchen Do you prefer this one or this one, or if you have two or three or four different types of kitchens, outdoor space, you know, whatever it is, it’s great for engagement when you use polls, and people find it fun, and they find it easy. And the best thing is, sometimes people will go back to the poll, because if they chose kitchen number one, you know, the day will go by, and they’ll want to see how many people agreed with them. So it’s kind of self serving, but they come back to your page to see how well their choice did against other people. Number four, is use more video. People love to watch videos. And actually the platforms themselves, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, they are rewarding you if you have video posts, and it’ll give you more organic reach. So make sure that you do more videos. I know everyone hates doing them. I hate doing them too. But you just have to do it and get them out there.
D.J. Paris 6:23 And you can you can easily do videos now where if you have a listing, or if you’re going to see a showing if you’re on the buy side, you know, you can show up ahead of time when the client isn’t there maybe and do a little walkthrough with your phone turned around. And you know, that’s I was just at a Zillow conference. And they were saying that this isn’t exactly apples to apples with what you just said. But they were saying that in their listings, because they have more data than anything. They understand consumer online behavior better than anybody. They said four homes that are listed, that have a virtual tour, a 3d virtual tour, that they’re that 63% of home shoppers expect a home virtual tour at a listing and they they won’t even look at listings that don’t have them 63% of their their shoppers blitz past listing, so So yeah, so this just the video craze is, it’s there.
Carrie McCormick 7:19 I’m just I just wrote down a note. That’s pretty impressive. So yes, I mean, even on that front, I think that’s super important. I think I’m I’m number five, correct me if I’m wrong, I think I’m And tip number five, which is tag the people that you’re working with, again, something I need to do a better job with. But when you’re with people, and you tag them, it, you’re seen by their connections, their friends, their followers. This helps you not only in your current network, but also through mutual connections. So again, we’re trying to reach more people get more connections, get more followers get more traction, definitely tag people that you’re with, and also tag where you are, you know, some people search by location. So if you’re in Lincoln Park, if you’re in Bucktown, if you’re in Winnetka, wherever you are, people want to see you know, again where you are. And then there they do hash tags based on locations too. So make sure you tag the location that you are. Number seven ish. When we tell us we say tell a story. Every home has a story, every every event in your life has a story. So when you tell a story on social media, people feel more connected to you. And again, connection leads to conversion. So share a story about your clients and how you help them buy or sell a home. Share the story of moving or share some sort of story about your business. Again, people love storytelling, and it leads to connection. Number eight, use stories. This is a fun one. As you know, it’s easy and quick for people to to view your stories. Sometimes I struggle a little bit too with what do you share every day. If you think about your day from morning to night, there’s something great that you can do a quick, quick snapshot of what’s going on maybe what’s behind the scenes that you’re at a photo shoot, you’re attending a final walkthrough you’re attending, something’s happening, so share something behind the scenes. Again, these stories are quick, quick tidbits of your day and people love to see that. Especially if it’s something funny. People always love to have humor right or dogs. Everyone loves the dogs, cats and dogs, cats and dogs. Number nine is highlight a local business. People love to hear what’s happening in the neighborhood. Love support, have a local business. And keep in mind if it’s a restaurant, a clothing store, your favorite flower place, whatever it is you tag them In your post, and guess what, they may start sharing that as well. So again, more exposure for you. And my last tip, which I absolutely 100% agree with, and I live and breathe by this one is Be your own brand ambassador. I’ve said this for years. And this is one of the reasons that I think that my social media took off, because it’s all organic. To me. It’s authentic to me, I try not to copy other people, when I say when I try not to. I mean, there’s some words like that, you know, they’re just standard words in our market, but you have to be your own brand ambassador. And the more authentic you are, the more engaged people will be with you. And you just have to take action on it, and the results will follow
D.J. Paris 10:54 you I think people really want to know what, especially on social media, they want to know what you stand for, they want to know and since realtors are their own brand, I was at a branding conference, I was telling Carrie earlier, when I was at the Zillow conference, my sister was speaking at a branding conference a few miles away I got to go watch her speak and I got to watch some leaders from different industries talking about marketing and branding trends. And they were saying that right now it’s imperative that brands have a some sort of larger mission outside of just whatever they’re providing to their customers is like what is the company stand for? What do they believe in what what is their commitment to giving back contributing outside of just you know, what what they make and produce? And so this is social media is a great opportunity I think for a for your your following to see not only am I you know, a real estate agent, here’s here’s how I service my clients but oh by the way, this is really important to me, whatever those those issues might be or organizations that you support so I’m I’m a big believer in yet be your own brand ambassador share, like every everything that you’re comfortable sharing about your life that you know really tells people who you are.
Carrie McCormick 12:10 Right and I agree with that I was also at a branding conference different one but one thing that they were talking about the new generation, or the younger generation is being you know, luxury is less of a status symbol meaning you know, people used to wear Gucci belts, I shouldn’t say used to people would wear, you know Gucci, Gucci, Gucci, this or Chanel or you know, a ton of stuff and you know, whatever it was that that was their status symbol, but luxury is becoming less of a status symbol. And millennials and the Gen Zers influences a change of values towards like sustainable sustainability. It’s hard to understand well being diversity and inclusion and all of that stuff. So that’s kind of this new era, I think of luxury is going to be just about more of well being and being authentic. And like you said, it’s it’s, it’s a whole new change that I think’s gonna happen, and I love it.
D.J. Paris 13:09 Yeah, I agree. And that really dovetails nicely into a couple of suggestions I have on the marketing side, as a quick little tip for our listeners and viewers. Number one, Carrie, you had said this is one of your tips, which was highlight local business. So we’re talking about real estate being hyperlocal. Right. And being that agents typically service a specific geographic area, you know, this is a great opportunity for you to support via social media, some of these businesses that that you believe in, so I was at a little cafe near where I live, actually, you’ll know at Foxtrot Amil they have a bunch of them here in Chicago, they’re these little kind of like half kind of grocery fun groceries and then they have also food that they make, and I was picking up some breakfast tacos that they make, which are breakfast burritos, rather, and they’re really cool, but I think there’s a lot of people that don’t know they make those and they’re, they’re really fun and nice. And so if I were a producing agent, I would have contacted Foxtrot when I was making that order and said Hey, is it okay if I shoot a little you know 32nd video when I come to pick up thing highlighting how much I love your your products and then I’ll I’ll tag you guys in the post as Carrie was saying by tagging other people in the post or other brands oftentimes their followers will see that but you can also of course tell the people in the shop or the store oh by the way I’m going to put this post out just keep your eye out for and maybe I can email it to you guys in case you miss it and then they might want to read reshare it of course with their followers but but that’s just a huge way to to get your social media channel exposed maybe to someone else’s followers and other brands businesses. shoot a little video about how great you know someone’s breakfast burritos are do it in the store. You don’t have to make you know a big deal about it but you can do a quick little Little highlight reel or story, do that, shoot it out and see what see how many more people followers you get. And then I just have one other tip, this is a really specific tip that I just, I just didn’t know this Carrie, I’m curious if you knew this, and you probably do, but I didn’t. So I was at the Zillow conference, and they had this one statistic that was really just kind of jumped out at me. It’s so funny. They, all they do is just, you know, look at so many different variables for data and they try to figure out what consumers want, they have, they have determined that if they if if in a listing photo in the photos for a listing, if the bedroom, if the bed of the shots of the bed, rather, and I’m sort of stumbling over this, if I’m just trying to get really specific, if the shots of the bed, the camera shots of the bed, if they show white sheets, white pillowcases, and a white comforter. And this is it’s they know that consumers are 23% more likely to schedule a showing versus a printed pattern, like a floral pattern, even like a dark color, even if it’s a single color, anything that’s not white, there, they see a decline in the number of appointments that are scheduled. So it’s a silly little thing that I mean, it’s almost 25, almost 25% More showings. So if I were an agent, I would go out and buy a bunch of comforters of different sizes, all white, maybe some do vase with some white, you know, white sheets, or at least a white duvet with some white pillowcases. And I would just have that, you know, in my garage or wherever I could store that. And whenever I have a listing, I would, you know, again, it’s not going to always make sense to do that. But it certainly can make sense. A lot of times, instead of having the client go out and buy all new stuff, or I guess you could probably color it with Photoshop or something if you really wanted to in the photos, if it’s a different color, you guys, you can make it white. But I think it’d be just a good idea to buy a couple do vase and bring them along with you to do at the
Carrie McCormick 17:10 shade that was for the primary suite or just all bedrooms,
D.J. Paris 17:13 you know, they didn’t they, I’m assuming its primary. I don’t know about all bedrooms, they just kind of blitz through it. So I can find out and get back to talk about it.
Carrie McCormick 17:23 I think it’s I think it’s definitely probably the primary but it that’s very interesting. And now I’m just thinking back to some of my listings that sold extremely quickly. And guess what, they all have white bedding.
D.J. Paris 17:36 And I wonder too about white walls. I’m going to reach out to my Zillow friends. And I wonder if white walls do a similar thing as well. Maybe in the primary? Again, I don’t know. But gosh, I mean, that’s a really interesting stat that you can just literally bring it especially to like if you’re at a listing presentation, and everyone’s got the same marketing materials and you know, you’re in competition with three other agents and you’re all great agents, and, you know, all of your stats look great. And, you know, little things like that might just make a bit of a difference. But 23% increase in showings based on white bedding is that just bloom. I mean, I have all white bedding and all white walls. Just because I’m lazy and that’s that’s how it came. And I was like, that’s what I want. And apparently that’s that’s, that’s that’s the way to do it these days. So
Carrie McCormick 18:24 yeah, that find out what they say I love all the stats, you know, yeah, so interesting.
D.J. Paris 18:29 So while the white trending while the white trend is very invoke, this is a great opportunity to bring some additional value to your listings. And you know sub separate a little bit so anyway, I think I think those are some great tips all throughout this this episode. So I think this is a good opportunity for us to to just keep it short and sweet this time. So everyone who is listening though, if you have clients that are you know want to work with a top Chicago agent, maybe you’re in a different state and you have people moving to Chicago Carrie works with you know, all sorts of clients, especially referrals from other agents and other areas. Or if you yourself are looking to buy or sell a property here in the Chicagoland area. Or just looking for advice about maybe maybe you’re in a different area but you’d like you know a top Realtors sort of perspective on your situation. Definitely reach out to Carrie she’s she’s a great, amazing resource and is happy to chat with you Carrie, what’s the best way somebody who might want to work with you or speak with you can get in touch?
Carrie McCormick 19:32 Yeah, so always call me 312-961-4612 You can email me Carrie it’s ca RR ie at@properties.com or connect with me on Instagram. It’s Carrie McCormick real estate.
D.J. Paris 19:49 Yeah, that’s great everyone Visit our website to carry McCormick our e.com Please follow her as she said on Instagram at Carey McCormick real estate and everyone who’s listening of course Thank you for continuing to listen and support our show, please tell a friend and CO one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great episode with Carrie about social media and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. And also, if everyone could leave us a review of the show in whatever podcast app you might be listening to, whether it’s Apple podcasts, formerly known as iTunes or Spotify, Google Play stitcher or Pandora wherever. Let us know what you think of the show, give us leave us a review that helps us continue to improve and also gets us in front of more people based on the number of reviews we get. So we appreciate that. As always, Carrie, thank you so much for being on our show for years and years now providing so much value to our audience and our audience. Again, thank you for sticking all the way to the end, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Bye everybody.
How To Deepen Client Relationships For More Referrals! • Brittany Simon
May 06, 2022
Brittany Simon talks about her family legacy how she got into the real estate business. Brittany mentions the importance of relationships with both colleague realtors and clients. Next, Brittany discusses what’s it like working with buyers at the moment and shares advises she gives to her clients. Brittany also talks about the trends has she seen in the last year in the Chicago real estate market. Last, Brittany discusses how she gets in touch with her sphere of influence and shares how she keeps her relationship with her clients after the sale.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s episode we talk about how to prep first time homebuyers in this super crazy market. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Brittany Cummings. But before we get to Brittany, just a couple quick reminders, please, as always, the best way you can help us is by telling a friend about our show. Think of one other agent that can benefit from hearing from top producers like Britney and send them a link either to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And second, we would love it if you would take just a few seconds either while you’re listening or after to leave us a review. And you can do that through whatever podcast app you might be listening. Let us know what you think of the show. It really helps us continue to get better and better to better meet your needs. So that’s all I have. But now on to the main event our interview with Brittany Cummings.
All right, today on the show we have Brittany Simon from the Brittany Simon group with compass here in Chicago. It’s all you about Brittany. Now Brittany Simon is a full service Real Estate Group servicing buyers, sellers, renters, investors and commercial clients in the city of Chicago as well as the western suburbs. She’s a third generation real estate broker following in the footsteps of mom, grandma and her stepfather. Now Britney basically grew up in the real estate industry seeing all the ins and outs of the business from her family. Now she has been licensed for almost 12 years and cannot imagine doing anything else. Having lived all over the city and the suburbs. One of Britney’s specialties is that she has extensive knowledge of what makes each neighborhood special, and can truly guide clients on what area may meet their needs best. Brittany maintains the highest quality service so her clients always feel well cared for and know that she has their best interests at heart. I’d like everyone to visit Brittany at our website, which is Brittany Simon group.com and Brittany is spelled b r i t t a n y Simon group.com. And also please follow her on Instagram which is at realtor dot Brittany. Brittany, welcome to the show.
Brittany Simon 3:48 Thanks for having me. And thanks for also clarifying the spelling of my name. That’s always been a tricky one. So I appreciate
D.J. Paris 3:54 it. Ricky is one of those. Excuse me one of those names that has a lot of different possibilities for how it absolutely does. My first see I go by DJ but my first name is Delphin. And that’s a name that like nobody ever guesses the spelling of it right? No one’s ever heard it really before. And then when they try to spell it, they always put a pH in there instead of an F. So, so growing up DJ. Oh, yeah. Right. So and I sort of not, it’s not irony it just coincidentally, I always forget what coincidence and irony. Coincidentally, Delfin with a pH is actually the Spanish word for dolphin. So it even makes more sense why people always put that in there. But we’re not. We’re not here to talk about my weird name. We’ll talk about your will. Your name isn’t weird. Your name is very normal and cool. But let’s um, let’s put by the way, Brittany and I went to college not together. But we went to the same college so we have a little bit of we were a little late to jump on the podcast because we were talking about Miami University where we both attended a some time ago. But Brittany Let’s let’s start all the way at the beginning of your real estate career, which I know is spanned 12 years now. Yeah. How did you get into real estate? And why? And I understand that, of course, it’s part of your family. Yeah, let’s, let’s hear about, you know, three generations and all of that.
Brittany Simon 5:14 Yeah. So I mean, having my mom and my stepfather have been in the real estate industry. So when I was even in high school, my stepfather is also a builder. So he had at one point built a few homes on the block we were living on. So before, you had to be licensed to basically do anything, I would be sometimes sitting in an open house right down the street, they needed extra hands on deck. So I was kind of just, you know, going into these new builds. And you know, when I was even younger, sometimes my mom would bring me with to showings or open houses, or what have you. So kind of always seen it, those behind the scenes. And then when I graduated college, actually, or kind of unfortunately, we were going through, you know, a recession. So that made things a little tricky. And coincidentally, at the same time, they were, I believe, changing some of the rules to become licensed. So before things, I think it was going to become harder, something along those lines. So I just went ahead and got my license right out of the gate. But I was not necessarily sure that’s the path I wanted to go down on, or in, especially just having family members in it. And you know, kind of wanting to forge my own path. So
D.J. Paris 6:26 what did you study in college? If you don’t mind? me asking? Yeah,
Brittany Simon 6:28 I studied actually broadcast journalism. And I was an English Lit minor. So I really thought, you know, I really wanted to dive deeper into that I’m moving back home to Chicago. It’s obviously not a huge market. And you know, kind of California is where a lot more things happen. So I actually did get a couple of job offers in California, but at the time, I wasn’t sure that’s really where I wanted to go, that was kind of a big leap, not to mention, the salary I was being offered was not really, you know, I think I can measure with housing costs in California, right? So I tried a little bit harder in Chicago, so I was kind of doing some other things independently, and kind of with some other, I guess, techie tests, start things, startup, sure, whatnot. And then I just really started needing to make money. So I got into ad sales and, and from ad sales, I also kind of got into some startups, and then kind of just fell into sales. And through that, that led me to event planning, kind of on a higher level in the ad sales community, or in that job role, which was interesting, and I really did like it. But I felt that you know, corporate structure was still just kind of feeling like it wasn’t for me. So then, I was kind of thought I’d be at this other job for a lot longer, which is going to be delving a lot more deep into the event planning arena. And it was just kind of all over the place. And I kind of thought, it’s I wasn’t still being able to be creative, which I felt like was something that I really had a calling to do. And so I finally decided, you know, If not now When, let’s make the leap. So I finally made the leap into just full time real estate sales, although I also did some, I worked at a bar, actually one like a start. Got up and running, because I did have a mortgage. So I needed to be sure I can pay my mortgage. And then, you know, I really just hit the ground running. I started just, you know, in my mind, you know, I never even having family in the business. never realized how hard it actually is to build a business from the ground up. There’s no one who could really I guess help you do that. And it takes time. So I just took every lead I got I was prospecting like crazy, telling everybody I knew actually my bar job really is gonna
D.J. Paris 9:05 ask about that. Did Did any of the patrons the bar patrons whether they were regulars or people just passing through? Did they were you ever some somebody who was I don’t I can, I guess it depends on where you work and what what’s allowed. But were you ever like, Hey, by the way, you know, here’s your here’s your kamikaze or whatever. I’m just trying to I was trying to get the most ridiculous drink. But but whatever. Here’s your beer. Here’s your whatever. Hey, by the way, you know, this is you know, I do this as well, but I’m also a realtor did that ever come up? And did that ever turn into leads for you?
Brittany Simon 9:37 Absolutely. Actually, all the time. And I worked at this barn Lincoln Park actually called proced.
D.J. Paris 9:43 Oh, sure. Yeah. So just just pull back the curtain a little I’m actually in Lincoln Park right now. So I that’s where our office is. So yes, I’m familiar with process.
Brittany Simon 9:54 So it was great. And actually at the time, which was kind of ironic. There was actually like a hand For all of us who were actually transitioning in two different careers in life and trying to find like our path, so it was actually really enjoyable to go into work. And actually, really quickly, there’s kind of some turnarounds. So I came into like, kind of one of the lead like servers. And so I was on all the time. So I was like, you know, if I have to be here, a lot of time, I am trying to make the most of it. So I actually would have a lot of people I had in my little, I guess, I don’t know, my little server Abran stack of cards as handing them out like crazy. But also the other people that I was working with, I actually, you know, did some things with them. And some other people that came in said, hey, you know, do you want to work on my team wasn’t really what I wanted at the time, but I felt like I had options. So it was really nice. And I will say, I probably only worked there for I want to say maybe five months until I felt like okay, I really just need the time to dedicate to this. And I felt from a financial standpoint that I was ready. So it was really interesting. But I had worked in the service industry a little bit during college. So I also felt like stepping back into it really was probably one of the best roles to kind of really prepare me for going into real estate full time because you so you know, customer service for work, you really have to deal with, you know, so many different personalities, and so many different types of situations, the emotional ality of it all is high all the time. So I feel like that, especially at you know, maybe 2am on a Saturday night, when you have your section fall, and people are getting a little rowdy. It was, you know, really going to help me hone those skill set.
D.J. Paris 11:45 Yeah, it makes so much sense. I mean, I was just thinking about these skills that that you sort of either developed or had in your, in your history, which is, hey, I have a family who’s into this, and I was I was sitting at showings when I was younger. And, and I’ve been around realtors, and it’s certainly you know, three generations. And then I studied broadcast journalism in college, and which, of course, I think teaches a lot of skill sets. But most importantly, be able to present and be able to talk and interpersonal communication, or even just, you know, monologue, like presentation style. One way communication sometimes is, is is great. And then also the ability to then do customer service when working at at and food service and, and, you know, bar stuff, it’s like, that’s a that’s a true customer service position. So all those skills together to me, you know, and we haven’t talked anything about well, of course, growing up with with family that was in real estate, you probably had, you know, some knowledge of of real estate in general. But you know, that all can be learned, you know, over time. So I think, you know, those skills make perfect sense why you would go into real estate. Yeah,
Brittany Simon 12:55 and you know, I always, always kind of guessed against it in a way just because it was like my family was in it, that’s was their thing. I wanted to find my thing. And I feel like almost what I wanted to do, like broadcast journalism, this event planning, I really fell into that I loved it was all really creative, and allowed me to kind of just come up with things be myself not necessarily fit into, like this little corporate box, I guess. And real estate really allows me to do that, you know, talking here with you today. Marketing listings, trying to get new buyers, you know, social media, everything you really need to do to kind of brand yourself even is allowed me to pull it all from all these areas that I feel like I do have expertise in and kind of group it all together. So actually, you know, I fit better than I thought. Which is ironic, because yeah, having not ever wanted to do what everybody else did and falling into it and really feeling like it is my passion because I do you know, love real estate itself. I love design, I love architecture, I love just neighborhoods and knowing the ins and outs of them and you know, just being able to go into some of these awesome places. It’s awesome. It really is. And it’s nobody’s the same. Whereas sometimes with that corporate structure, too, is finding myself pulling away and just felt like you know, okay, from 830 to 530 this is what I do, and then you can turn it off whereas real estate’s on all the time, but I don’t feel like I’m you know, my personality has been sucked out. I mean, right.
D.J. Paris 14:33 Yeah, I used to I used to work in corporate, the corporate world and I used to I was a I consider myself a creative person as well. And so, I was a bit frustrated with the inability unless you specifically once I got into marketing specifically, then I was able to express myself but I was in non creative roles for some time and, and so I used to have to do things outside work to fulfill that creative itch. And, and now I, you know, and again, I’m not I’m not a practicing realtor, but I get to work with my creativity inside of real estate. And I think I think what you’re you’re talking about is just taking all of these skills that you enjoy and that you’re passionate about, and putting them together. And yeah, maybe you’re working later hours than the person that clocks out from their, you know, from from their corporate job at at five or six, but it’s probably more fulfilling and enjoyable. And you’re helping people buy and sell homes. I know, it’s not always easy. In fact, it’s never easy. But especially right now, and I know that’s going to be a focus of our talk today. But back to just being fulfilled and sort of the maybe I’m replying to a text it at 9pm at night, but I’m choosing to do that, and I want to do it and it’s still fun. And, you know, and all of that. And it seems like most of the people I’ve not most I would say everyone I’ve interviewed on the show over the years, kind of has like they really like it. And and I always just take it for granted that we all like our jobs. And I always forget that man. Don’t Yeah, it’s very sad. And I don’t have I have empathy for people who because I’ve had jobs that I didn’t like, as well. And I don’t think it’s like, well, you just quit and find something you love. And it’s like, yeah, maybe. But not everyone can do that. But I think if you can find a place where you you’re happy at work. Boy, that makes life a lot better. And so let’s talk about something that’s that that is very difficult right now, which is of course working with buyers. And the we’re still in a, you know, despite what what the what the news headlines are saying, we’re still in a pretty low interest rate environment. Yeah. Lots of people with a lot of spending power, you’re in competition to try to buy properties that are at exceedingly high values. And just, you know, people making decisions sight unseen. Yeah. And, and so I we have almost 800 Realtors at our company here. And that’s our most common question is, what do I do to get my offers noticed? So I’m just perfect timing, because I really wanted to talk about that. Anyway. But I’m not out there in the field doing it. You are. So I’d love to hear your advice about what’s been working for you. Maybe also what doesn’t work or what you see not working? Yeah. Any advice that you have for our listeners? Yeah, absolutely.
Brittany Simon 17:30 Well, I think it also comes down to you. And I always, you know, check in with my buyers first, you know, hey, when there’s a will there’s a way and I know the strategies that we can win, but it also has to depend on? Are they willing to go there? Because not everybody is. So I think it’s also important to understand, you know, really the goals of your clients and let them let them choose. Because sometimes maybe, you know, after the analysis, the numbers don’t really make sense. But if this is every single thing they want, and there’s nothing else out there, and they’re going to be in this home for the next you know, 10 plus years. I mean, then maybe it’s really time to go for it. So I would say one of the things that I see working out there, I think most people are using escalation clauses and if you’re not you definitely shut are also called an escalation writer. And what that can
D.J. Paris 18:19 we can we define what that is just in case anyone listening isn’t familiar exactly
Brittany Simon 18:23 what an escalation writer or clause is, is it really allows a client and I will say, to kind of go to their max, without initially going to your max unless you have to. So you still, I still always recommend going strong on that number on the contract itself. But an escalation writer can then say, hey, let’s say just make the numbers easy, you know, house is listed at 475. But we’ll go to 500. Because it’s worth it and they want it and this, they already have multiple offers. So but they’re really they’ll go to 525. So on the escalation writer, we have a max price of 525. And we also have an ability to say they will go X amount over the highest competing offer. So let’s say $1,000. So if highest competing offer then comes in at let’s say 510 Well, then the person who used the escalation writer for 525, it would be 511. And they wouldn’t even go to their max. So it allows them to almost not bid over yourself. I will say sometimes that’s making it tricky in today’s market is if a house has let’s say 30 offers and 25 of those offers are including escalation writers, sometimes listing agents are asking for them to be withheld because it gets too crazy. And I can understand that were the numbers are just really nuts. But I will say I have talked to some listing agents too. And sometimes if you don’t ask and they’re not telling you not to use it. You can use it Some people are asking, and they’re saying, you know, I’d rather you not know. But you know, if you have a good number on there, that’s gonna kick it in, there’s a good chance you’re gonna win. So I try not to ask unless it’s clearly noted that they’re not accepting them because I want the offer to not be considered, but I don’t know why they wouldn’t consider a great offer. You know, if it’s right there in front of them,
D.J. Paris 20:22 do you? Do you worry that the listing agent might miss the fact that there is an escalation clause in your offer? In other words, how do you make that really evident, so that again, in the case of getting 30 offers, where, again, I know escalation costs are quite common, but let’s just say they weren’t common, or you would just be worried, gosh, I’m only still going up to 490. We’re really we could go all the way to 525. I just want to make sure that that the agent, are you calling the listing agent and going, Hey, I know you’re getting a lot of offers, just FYI, this has got escalation or you just assuming that they’ll they’ll review that in the in the document.
Brittany Simon 21:00 So unless they don’t say that they’re not accepting them, and there is an understanding that they are accepted. Yeah, I usually always do call the listing agent just to find out hey, you know, also, what about what are they looking for in terms of a closed date? Do they need a lease back? Or post close possession? What is you know? And I also to ask to, you know, you, you never know, if you ask what they will say so I also say, Hey, what are you seeing things coming in, I just did this for a multiple offer. situation, I said, anything you could give me to help. And he said, You know, I’m not going to tell you numbers. But what I will say wonder strong to a lot of people are waving, inspections are going as is. And a lot of people who are going above list price, or including escalations are including appraisal waivers or appraisal, gap guarantees, and my client at that point, we did not have an appraisal gap guarantee. So we did include that. So and with that escalation to to prove to go back to your point of how to make sure it’s been included, I always send everything, all the documents over one PDF, so I include that right before the offer themselves, they can’t miss it. And then in my email summary over to the list agent, I always write that out as well. So hopefully they’re reading it. But you know, it would be hard to miss. And I will say also with the escalation writers and clauses sometimes clients worry, well, how do we know they’re telling the truth? Well, there is in at least in the one I use, there is a section that says they have to show us the highest competing offer at contract acceptance that made that clause kick in. So we know that they’re very smart. And it has to be an offer. That’s kind of you know, it can’t be another offer that has a home to clothes or home to sell
D.J. Paris 22:47 your company. You got to be apples
Brittany Simon 22:48 to apples. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
D.J. Paris 22:52 So that’s, that’s really smart. So for anyone just missed that. What Brittany does is at closing, if she’s if the escalation clause is being utilized, her concern as a fiduciary for our client is, I just want to make sure that the offer that we just beat is a real offer. So once it once once we go to closing, I need to see that you have you had a legit offer here. Otherwise, you know, who knows, maybe somebody might take advantage of?
Brittany Simon 23:18 Yeah, and you’d hope not because of ethics and everything, but I mean, also for your the, you know, the buyers are usually nervous too. So that also helps them like okay, you know, trust this process. And I would always expect, you know, the best from other agents. So, and I do have some clients too, that say, well, let’s use one right off the bat. And that doesn’t, that’s not really a good strategy to use, unless, you know, there are multiple offers, and they’re calling for highest and best because if not, if you’re just submitting it, they don’t have other offers again, they’re probably going to wait until they get other offers. So that will go into effect. So at that point, you’d rather you shouldn’t just probably offer stronger initially and wait to see if they then do call for highest and best.
D.J. Paris 24:01 I wonder if any MLS in the country and maybe I’m just not understanding why this doesn’t exist. But just to get off topic for because I think it’s an opportunity for I mean, unless there’s some compliance reason why this shouldn’t happen. Why MLS is don’t have their own system for receiving you know, offers and being able to categorize them and that the listing agent would say, you know, checkbox I showed this to the to the seller, and that way the agent would get maybe notified your it has been presented to the seller. Yeah, you know, like you would think that and maybe again, maybe smarter people than me have said there’s a good reason why we don’t have that. Yeah, it just seems like in this environment. I imagine things have just got to fall through the cracks sometimes too and I’m sure you know when 30 offers come in the list agent is you know, overwhelmed and phone calls and texting emails from agents. So I just the fact that you call the list agent and just make sure that they received it and that they
Brittany Simon 25:07 Yeah. And I always, always include either on my email or on my attachment, you know, whatever it is, like, Please confirm receipt. And if I do not have a confirmation, I follow up, because that’s, you know, at least you know, okay, they got it, because sometimes, yeah, you know, an email could be missed. So I definitely want to make sure they are can or you know, can they not open the PDF? What is it, I want to make sure that they got it, and especially they got it by before the deadline. But I will say some people, you know, in this market are throwing out crazy numbers. And for like a finance deal. I’ve actually talked to some list agents who said, you know, for numbers that are kind of way crazy, they sometimes throw those those ones out, because there’s gonna praise out Yeah, exactly. So it you know, you kind of have to also be realistic here. And I also think if you had a conversation with a list agent prior, they might say, hey, you know, what, if you are going to do that, it’d be a really good idea to include an appraisal guarantee or gap of some sorts. Writer.
D.J. Paris 26:08 Yeah, I think that’s really, really smart. And I know that that’s, it’s funny, it’s like, the concern of the of the seller is, hey, it’s great that we got 100,000 over ask Yeah. Yeah. Is the buyer gonna come to the table with $30,000? Cash, because that’s what they’re going to need? You know, and so if you if you have that that gap, you know, sort of, you know, honor or that that gap, sort of yes, then then it? So that’s really smart. So escalation clause, Gap coverage. And, and then how I’m curious on and, and, and the answer really should be it doesn’t matter. But but we all are, we’re interpersonal, humans with connections important to us. We like people that we like, and we tend to treat people better that we like, yeah, yes. How important relationships are with the within, of course, you can’t be friends with everyone. We have 46,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area. But I bet you run into a lot of the same people over and over again. And how important is it to to? You know, be? And again, the easy answer is? Well, yeah, you should be friends with everyone. Yeah, does it ever move the needle for you? Do you ever feel that like, it probably helps me, you know, if I have a good relationship with, you know, the listing agent, maybe helps, you know, if two offers come in, that are similar, maybe they’re gonna choose mine, because they know me. And they know that I would only bring a legitimate offer to the table, like how important are those relationships
Brittany Simon 27:35 extremely. And I think not only for the fact is, that’s the person that even the agent on the other side, you know, that’s okay, I’ve worked with them before, or I like them. Or, at the same time, if maybe there’s a hiccup within the transaction itself, I have confidence in them that they will help move the needle along. So we can, you know, work to a completed transaction. Whereas you know, they’re not going to get caught up in the emotionality of it as well, and take it personal. Because too often I think clients take there are I mean, I’m sorry, agents, take their clients, you know, stress on and make it personal with the other agents. And I always try to focus on you know, we all want the same thing here, we all wanted to close, nobody wants to work for free. Your clients want to sell a house, or my clients want to buy a house or vice versa. And we all want the same goal. So you know, I’ve actually been in some pretty intense and crazy situations. And I always try to keep my cool even when maybe I’m not receiving it on the other end from the agents. But I think you know, this is not going to help. And especially before you’re have an offer accepted, I think it is so critical. Because I think, you know, I’m on both sides as a listing agent, and as a buyer’s agent. And on the listing agent, you know, there, you’re getting inundated with, you know, calls and questions, did you get this what you know, showing requests or phones blowing up? So sometimes, you know, you have to have a little patience on the buyers, as a buyer’s agent to realize, you know, they are, you know, getting filled in so many calls and text messages trying to answer everybody’s questions. So if you take a little bit longer, just try to give them a little bit of grace. And on the list agents perspective, you know, as a buyer’s agent, I’m trying to get my client to win, you know, we’re probably, you know, they’ve maybe lost a few times we’re trying to get them in, I want to try to know, you know, what should we have in the offer that might make us win? What do you the seller is looking for? So kind of goes both ways here, but I think too, if you could kind of just remember that everybody is working over time right now and is trying their best. I think it was a strong way. Yeah, because I’ve actually been hearing of some agents doing some crazy things and I think to them, like you’re not starting on a good foot And, you know, I would be nervous to have my clients accept an offer where the agent, the by their buyer’s agent is already kind of acting a little nutty, and, you know, taking things up a notch, and I actually, my clients actually lost a deal over the weekend to multiple offers, but things went crazy. But it was okay, because my clients actually, given the numbers, this was going to be the most expensive sale in this particular town on thus far,
D.J. Paris 30:32 you don’t want to be the most expensive sale and
Brittany Simon 30:35 this was not their number one town. So closer to the list price are over, they are willing, but much further over. And with that appraisal gap, you know, they’re just like, you know, it comes to a certain point where that amount of money we can wait and maybe be in the town we want to be in which I think so again, it’s always important to know, you know, your clients true goals, because you never want them to end up winning a situation and they actually kind of feel disappointed that they won. You want them to be half Sure.
D.J. Paris 31:03 Yeah, that’s a really good point. I have a question. So when you first are working with a buyer, before you’ve taken them out? How do you prep them? Assuming that they are not familiar with the craziness of today’s market? What are you saying to them to let them know about the urgency about the creativity that might be involved? You know, what’s the education process look like? Because I imagine that’s going to be a huge component for you just to keep your clients from freaking out. Yeah. And because they’re gonna freak out anyway. Yeah, I’m curious on on what you say to them to sort of prep them for the environment that we’re in?
Brittany Simon 31:39 Definitely. Well, the good part is, in a sense that most people right now are aware that it’s a little bit challenging right now, for buyers. So I think one of the most important things that we talk about is their timeline, because having flexibility is pretty much essential right now, in terms for sellers, because a lot of sellers need time themselves, either to find gain, or a lot of sellers are relocating, or some are building or some are relocating and building in that new state, and they need a little bit of time. So I think, knowing that also, you know, you might close, and it’s still going to be a little bit of time. So having flexibility is really key. And if you don’t have flexibility, maybe let’s try to find some options where we can try to work that in somehow. And the next thing really, you know, going over what it takes, and what it takes is, you know, having strong financials, and you know, not everybody has that and if you don’t, there still is a way but you know, we probably want to be looking a little under than what you’re actually qualified for. Because if we’re looking around your max, and that’s really the type of home you want to be in, and you don’t have extra padding outside of that, then you know, we’re probably going to be in more situations that we lose than we went. But sometimes, you know, I will say there are certain areas that still are not always getting everything over asked and some pricing that started too high, that now there’s some wiggle room or, you know, sometimes when properties have a little bit more time on market, there is the you know, hopefully, the ability to negotiate a little bit or so, you know, sometimes those are the things that I’m telling clients that we need to look at, you know, not the ones that are just coming on the market, because they’re probably hoping to get multiple offers, or they’re probably more hoping to get the price that they listed at, they’re hoping not to negotiate. So the properties now that have been on the market for maybe 30 days, plus, the market has kind of spoken that I don’t think that that is the price they’re probably ultimately going to get. So those are the properties we should probably be looking at. So it really kind of depends on the buyer and what their financing is, you know, do you have conventional, are you cash? Or are you FHA or VA, and, you know, unfortunately, in our, you know, people who are not putting as much down are looked at as not as strong as buyers even though that’s not always the case. And there’s many reasons you’re not putting as much down. And also given that rates are so great right now, sometimes your money is doing better in other places, you don’t want to pull it out. But there is something that a lot of people feel that there is strength in the amount you’re putting down. And sometimes that’s true. So it’s it’s a lot of things that you want
D.J. Paris 34:30 it is really interesting to sight I’m sorry, didn’t mean interrupt. You’re just just as you said that it really did occur to me like I have a very I kind of just got lucky accidentally with timing when I when I bought a place about a year ago and I just kind of got lucky with with rates and you know, it is funny like I had to put a significant amount down, but I was I mean if I could take that cash and just beat under 3% Which is pretty not that difficult to do with a not as much risk, I do understand people wanting to put as little down as possible at the same time. It’s nice that you, you can lock in or you know, these rates, which are probably now hovering around the 4% range. Yeah. But, but you’re right, I think so you’re doing a lot of education. I imagine you’re Are you having the conversation with your buyers about speed? In other words, we’re gonna go see properties, there’s going to be some that you immediately know, that you’re interested in, maybe you’re not sure if you want to put an offer? And do you do give them sort of any guidance around timeline? In other words, hey, you know, in the past, you could maybe sit and think about it for some time. It’s a different environment today, or, you know, how are you educating them around the speed to decision?
Brittany Simon 35:48 Absolutely. So speed is incredibly important. And especially if something just hit the market, and I say, it’s great, you love it, it seems priced? Well, other people probably going to think so too. So I always suggest not waiting, let’s go in immediately. Or if there’s offered deadlines, so know how sometimes homes are hitting the market. And right off the bat, they’re saying, If multiple offers, they will be due as Sunday at 5pm. So there’s an expectation that they’re have a pretty good idea they are going to get multiple offers. So I try to you know, absolutely, if you’re interested and it checks a lot of your boxes, the price is right, there is really no room to wait.
D.J. Paris 36:32 I was just with a bunch of my friends at the Chicago Association of Realtors. We serve on a committee there and we were out doing a thing last weekend or two weekends ago. And we were we were laughing. And again, I’m not a practicing agent. So I’m always like the last to hear about this. But we were talking about this idea of in the MLS putting and I imagine this happens all over the country. And I’m not exactly sure why we’ve all decided that highest and best offers need to be in by Sunday at five o’clock. When nothing happens between then and Monday morning. Why not? Monday morning at 11am. Totally. Like can we all agree as Realtors like let’s it the right thing to do for our clients? I mean, five o’clock on a Sunday is a bad deadline. As far as like that’s like a day where people are well, realtors are working, everyone else is relaxing. It’s not a great day, in my opinion. And again, as a marketing guy, I’m always thinking like, give your clients the best opportunity. And I’m not saying for anyone who does highest and best it might do five o’clock on Sunday, and it works for you. Great, but I have heard so many Realtors pull me aside and go can you believe realtor? Like why are we doing this to ourselves? And I’m just, you know, but but it is it is funny. That’s the environment we’re in now. So yeah, so this education of of your buyers, it’s like, Hey, we got to make a decision quick. We have to have all of these sort of creative, ancillary or sort of conditions set up, and then we’re just going to kind of see what works and what doesn’t.
Brittany Simon 38:07 Yeah, and you know, I also talked about obviously, escalation clauses are writers and the ability to prep them also that there’s a lot of sellers who need time either you know, as a leaseback, or post closed possession, or just extending because the expectation of when you do that, as opposed closed possession or leaseback is that the seller is now going to pay you rents. But now some sellers are even trying to push that as part as much as possible. So they pay as little as possible. So having longer close dates, I think. And I, if I’m not mistaken, I think 90 days is about as long as a lender will lock without having to extend that rate lock position. So then it’s kind of a detriment to buyers, because now you might have to pay more to keep the same rate you initially locked at. So just kind of prepping them that sometimes though, that’s is what sellers looking for, and or these reverse home to buy contingencies, where you know, it’s just crazy time. So again, having that flexibility but knowing that there’s different things going on. So the more that the as much as we can try to make things easy for the sellers and kind of give them what they’re looking for that just really makes you come to the top of their list because not everybody can people are under deadlines other people need to be in by certain time. So hopefully that kind of weeds out some of the competition too. But I will find, you know, more than likely right now, most buyers understand that and are knowing they that’s part of basically playing ball. You gotta give the sellers what they’re looking for or else you don’t have stand a chance even despite what the number is because they have to find something else.
D.J. Paris 39:57 It’s so funny that you do Funny only because it makes perfect sense to me as a non practicing agent, that you contact the listing agent and say, Hey, what are you looking for? Or tell me what you’re seeing because we want to be competitive and we want to get your, your seller the exactly what they want. I, I would imagine most buyer’s agents don’t do that. It’s the same thing with like, I recruit realtors, that’s my job. So often, I talked to realtors all day who work at most, most of the time they work in other firms. And I say, Oh, well, if you’re thinking of maybe switching the first question, and it took me a, I’ve been doing this for 12 years, this is kind of embarrassing, because I knew better, but I didn’t put it into effect until several years in. And I really encourage everyone listening to to to do this. But, again, you’re not recruiting realtors. But what I what I do is I say, Hey, before we get started, and I start telling you about why our firms the greatest firm on the planet, which of course nobody really wants to hear anyway. But I’ll say, Hey, what are you looking for? You know, if you’re going to switch from XYZ firm, to another firm, like, why, like, what are you looking for what’s important to you, this is just sales 101. And it’s the same thing that Britney is doing with her with with these listing agents is calling them and saying, hey, I can put an I can throw an offer at you. But I want to know what the what your sellers really want. Because then I can maybe give you a better offer as a result of that. And, and also it’s you have a fiduciary responsibility to your buyer. And so it’s so it all of this is but it can be tricky, right? Because getting the listing agent on the phone is not easy. Yeah. So how do you do you have to be very persistent. With that, or or is it is that can that be challenging to even get in touch with the listing agent?
Brittany Simon 41:48 I will say it sometimes sometimes it is, sometimes it is. But I will find you know, the great agents know they have to answer the phone. And that you know, to get the best price for their sellers. And for them to choose help them choose the right buyer that it would most likely make sense to have that conversation if they’re getting that call, because it also will help, in my opinion, for the transaction to stay together. Because if the buyer didn’t realize that the southern needed this much time, that could be a deal breaker, and then you pick that offer, and it falls apart only to go back to market. And now what if 10 of those are offers you first have now you only have maybe two, and they’re not as good as the ones you originally had. So I think it’s really important for the agents to talk if that’s something that they both do.
D.J. Paris 42:37 Yeah, it is. And it’s just I really, it’s funny, we buyer’s agents, you know, are stressed because they’re trying to rise to the top of the pile of offers, list agents are stressed because they’re dealing with all of the communication. And there isn’t a centralized sort of way of distributing offers. And I was saying that earlier, like somebody really should, should should create some sort of system that we all agree to use, and yeah, you know, maybe streamline just a bit, and I’m sure that will likely never happen. But But this idea of understanding the other person’s pain, I think is really important. Because, you know, and Britney sort of said it without saying it is is reaching out and saying, Hey, I’m not just going to throw some offer that you know, because I know you’re getting a lot of just offers thrown at you. And you know, I want to I want to get a little bit more specific about about what you need to make this close. I would also like to hear you know, what, what trends have you seen because you work in the city, and the suburbs, and I know that we have listeners from all over the country and rural and urban areas, of course, just added just generally speaking, are you seeing a migration? And I know during COVID, we saw here in Chicago, a bit of a migration from from the city out to the suburbs. Are you still seeing that the movement there? Or are we seeing a return to more urban environments? Or? Or is it just too tough to tell? Because I’ve read because inventory is so low right now,
Brittany Simon 44:08 you know, we are seeing a return. And it’s interesting, but the city is, in my opinion, behaving different than the suburbs. So the rental market in the city is insanity. I will say really, I’m part of what we’re seeing in terms of the suburbs with buyers. But the rental markets crazy pretty much everywhere. Because I do believe that now that some offices are not maybe requiring people to be back five days a week, but maybe it’s two to three times a week. So there still now needs to be a present back. And maybe people are also I feel like switching jobs and finding jobs now that they got used to not being home and now they’re relocating so they’re renting because they’re not sure how long they’re going to stay. But with that said that I do see like a return back and I will think that I’m seeing that high rise CES are having a slower return, I’m not necessarily seeing the market be crazy for them right now, as opposed as I think Westown, in my opinion, is nuts, things are going really quickly. Whereas, you know, I think you can get a bit of a deal in a high rise right now, if that’s something you wanted. So like areas like the Gold Coast, or it’s taking a little bit longer to recover, I truly believe they rail because the location is phenomenal. And you’re right by the leg in your in many cases walking distance to you know, the loop to work. But you know, it’s taking a little bit of time, so it’s behaving a little different. And in my opinion in the surrounding suburbs, I feel like they’re all pretty much knots right now. Unless somebody I think, really missed the mark and pricing. Most of them are, you know, you’re getting multiple offers in a very short amount of time. So it’s, it’s interesting, and at many different price points, so I’m seeing it across the board. Whereas, you know, it’s almost, if you’re moving to the city, it might make sense to maybe buy something you might have the ability to rent, if you don’t think you’re going to stay or you might switching a job in the future. So then at least because some of these rent arounds are they’re crazy. I in my mind, of course, I’m like, Why pay that when you could just buy for less, but I get it, the uncertainty of not necessarily knowing you’re going to stay and not wanting to lock yourself in just in case, I guess the market changes, which, you know, there’s a lot of people that feel like in mites. I don’t think we’re going to see some type of mad rush, like, if there is some type of correction or, or balancing that comes but because comps are kind of where they’re at, and it’s gonna take a little bit for that to, you know, fade down, I guess. But
D.J. Paris 46:52 it actually might make sense, although I sure very few people would ever do this. But right now, if if you’re living in a place that’s appreciated, substantially, selling it, and then renting for a few years until the market redirects is not it’s not a bad idea, per se, practically, practically, it’s not a very easy thing to do, either, especially when there’s children in their school. Yeah, there’s, you know, the space and, and it’s not something that but, but I as a marketer, I love the idea about bringing those, I love the concept of bringing that to your client, not because they’re going to do it, but just because just because it makes you I love people who bring ideas. And yeah, this is kind of what we’re talking about. You’re talking about bringing creative ideas to the to the offer table. And you know, this, this can be the same thing. I think there’s a huge opportunity right now for you know, people to who are listening who maybe aren’t as busy with, with, you know, clients, this is a great time to reach out to every single person, you know, who owns a home and say, Hey, let me just just out of curiosity, I bet you’re curious what your home’s worth right now. Yeah, run a quick comp for you. And whether or not you’re going to move like, of course, that’s up to you. But I just want you to know, because it’s something that I think the vast majority of us outside of the industry never think about until we’re ready to move. And we go, Oh, I wonder what my home’s worth, but we all sort of, it’s kind of it’s like looking at your stock portfolio, or your your, your securities portfolio. Like I don’t exactly know what’s going on. But I kind of like to see the bottom line and my upper my down. And, and, you know, I’m, we’re not financial advisors unless we are. And so, you know, we just get a little app that sort of tells us but there really isn’t an app like that for our home. I mean, Zillow is probably the closest thing to it, but we know that the Zestimate, you know, may be accurate. So this is I think, where realtors can really demonstrate value is they can you know if you’re struggling, and I’m sorry to get on a bit of a soapbox, but I’m just curious to get your thoughts about if you if today, if you didn’t have any clients, let’s say you were just everything when you were starting fresh. What would you do to generate business? I’m just curious.
Brittany Simon 49:11 Definitely. Well, I think, of course your sphere of influence. It becomes neglected over time. Or sometimes people just they assume that this person knows me. They like me, why wouldn’t they think of me or asked me or use but people forget or just last words? Yeah. Or people also think that okay, maybe you are too busy? Or maybe you’re not doing and I don’t know. So you definitely have to be vocal and I think more often than not ask for the business but I think you’re right. If How about hypothetically let’s say this is what I’m showing, it’s worth what if we can get a little bit more would you sell then and some people you do have secondary homes or they do want to maybe travel you know, I do know of some of my friends that are currently staying in, you know, they have the flexibility with their job. So they’re just staying in Airbnbs in different parts of the country right now because it can. So you know, maybe you do have that flexibility. And you know, hey, if you’re you don’t have to worry about it, you can get this much more, you know, money in your pocket, would you? And I think a lot of people would actually say yes. Now, I mean,
D.J. Paris 50:19 I didn’t mean to interrupt you, I was just thinking I was chatting with, with a friend of mine, I’ll keep keep her name anonymous. But she’s a realtor, very successful here in Chicago. And she was saying, she goes, You know, I was just thinking about what’s my number? And I said, Well, what do you what do you mean? What’s your number? And she goes, What’s my number that if somebody offered me in, you know, she was not looking to sell her home? Yeah, she lives on the North Shore? And she said, would it be 500,000? above asking, would it be a million? Would it be whatever the number is? Would it be 50,000, above, above what I think it’s worth, whatever that number is, that is kind of a fun exercise to do. Because, you know, like, I had never thought of that. And I just bought a place a year ago. And I’ve never, I don’t know what my number is. But that is kind of a fun exercise that you can do with people and say just curiosity, if you weren’t given a number, would that encourage you to maybe move maybe rents, maybe buy another place, maybe move to another part of the country? So I imagine you’d be doing things like that as well.
Brittany Simon 51:22 Yeah. And I also think, you know, just having those conversations almost maybe for fun, but you know, if you have enough of them, you’re probably gonna have a few that are serious. And now you’re talking real numbers and what their plan is, and now all of a sudden, you’re busy. And you’re, you know, so I think you have to create opportunity for yourself. But I think don’t neglect your spirit, your sphere of influence, because, you know, people aren’t thinking about this all day long. They don’t know what you’re doing. So unless you’re telling them they forget until all sudden they have the need. So you have
D.J. Paris 51:54 to create, what do you do to stay in touch, because you talked about that spirit sphere of influence is easy to neglect, because you’re caught up in the day to day things are flying at you, and sphere of influence. You know, what we’ll talk about people, these are not current clients, these are just people that are close to you that hopefully would think to use you. But we want to remind them over time, consistently over time that oh, by the way, when you’re ready, I’m here. What? What are you doing to stay in touch with those people? Or what advice do you have?
Brittany Simon 52:25 Definitely. So I will say, you know, first of all, what I think most people have, and can be an easy way to start is, you know, social media, you know, you’re probably friends with most of the people who are in your sphere of influence, if not everybody, especially maybe even some people who are past clients, or people have referred you. So I think letting people know what you’re doing. You know, I think I’m trying to be better at this. But you know, creating video, you know, everybody says it works. So, you know, sometimes I think you’ve got to step out of your comfort zone and just do it. But also, aside from that, I also do pot buys, actually don’t always go there. But there’s ways you know, to do things that they mail things and just say, hey, you know, here’s like a, some type of gift or it doesn’t always have to be or, you know, handwritten notes or something just to say, hey, and a Starbucks card. It’s easy enough. And you know, kind of gets people thinking about you, again, without being
D.J. Paris 53:21 a couple other things, too. I want to talk about that. Because you’re really these are, these are very, this is like straight out of the Brian Buffini playbook, which is pop buys handwritten notes, items of value. What we’re talking about really is, is earning someone’s business. And I don’t mean you have to buy someone’s business by, you know, giving them extravagant gifts. Of course, you do not have to do that. But you do have to earn someone’s business and especially people in your sphere, we think, Well, those are people that know like, and trust me already. Yes. And you still need to earn their business, which means they already they already love you. And you have to remind them who you are and what you do. And then because people are people and we have a million things going on in our lives, and we I always say the best assumption you can ever make is that everybody you knows forgets that you’re a realtor. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And so and so it’s like, okay, well, that’s kind of a bummer that no one’s gonna remember what I do for a living well, okay, but you know what, that that that’s a pretty easy solution. Right? I mean, Coca Cola certainly operates out of that same mentality of we better promote ourselves a lot or in and you don’t have to be the realtor that has the billboard on the side of the highway. If that’s not your personality, you don’t have to have the bench back ads, or be in the, you know, the grocery store, shopping cart, you know, thing what, but you could just pick up the phone in contact or text or, or send items of value. So absolutely curious what I’m curious how do you what advice do you have after a sale? So this is a thing that I think Realtors often really miss you know, their their previous clients just get completely lost. So what what are you doing after the sale, you know, years down the road so knowing that these people they just I just bought them their their forever home or rather we just bought they just bought their forever home they moved in, they’re not going anywhere for the next 20 years. But I want to I still want to stay in touch. What are you doing to make sure that they don’t forget about you for referrals or whatever?
Brittany Simon 55:39 Yeah, absolutely. So I will say what I always do is I do do like Christmas or like holiday gift to pretty much everybody. Everybody who buys with me and gets like a customized ornament. It’s not It’s like Christmas either. I know some people say Oh, I am I put up on my shelf. I love that. I mean it just and again, I feel like you don’t have to spend money, but I do this is I like to. And then also for the my repeat people I always do or not my repeat people on people outside of my first time buyers that year or who bought something that year, I was kind of have like a theme that I do. And like this past year I did like customers mugs, but then I got like hot cocoa bombs and like gourmet popcorn and customize box. And I really take my time with Christmas cards and I write a personal message in every single one, every single one. It’s not just not sign my name, because I think that’s important because that’s so easy to do. And I can’t tell you how many people respond back to me how thoughtful that was thank you for reaching out or in you know, you’re always at the forefront of we ever know somebody who’s going to buy or sell will think of you. And that’s just one of the things I do that year or you know, at the end of the year. But I definitely think even if you just send a Christmas card with a nice message, it also goes a long way. I also do you know Starbucks gift cards to to you know, depending on who everybody is and where they’re at. Sometimes it doesn’t always make sense to do the box. And sometimes I say that for more of my I guess they say you’re a sphere. Because they do do Brian Buffini. So I need to separate it. But, but I like to hit everybody because sometimes I don’t always like categorizing my sphere because sometimes just because you don’t know somebody’s you’re a sphere yet, and you don’t want to lose anybody out. And something I also do and I’ve started doing more and more lately is I do send out a newsletter and I know not everybody likes it. And it’s kind of you know, sometimes just junk in your inbox. So I’ve really tried to really personalize it write something personal about what’s going on, kind of curate it a little bit, I always try to have kind of a subject line that will stand out or use an emoji that’s just who I am. So you know, I definitely try not to make it like March newsletter, because I get a lot of those myself and I don’t care and it’s just you know, I know a lot of brokerages to have really kind of just like boiler plate stuff where it’s like everybody can send out the same thing if they wanted I was trying to change it. So and I will say that I’ve done that first this year, I’ve actually gotten a handful of business from it who people sent from the news. I got two listings and one buyer from my from actually my February and March newsletter and what
D.J. Paris 58:33 type of content you’re mentioning you weren’t using the boilerplate content are you doing what type of content
Brittany Simon 58:40 some of it because sometimes it’s great but stuff that I think is kind of like a filler kind of cheesy I take out but you know I look at what’s going on right now. So people want to know Okay, springs coming How can you make your and I don’t I don’t know if I did do this or I’m planning on doing this but for instance, how some quick easy inexpensive things to you know, to create curb appeal now that we’re heading into the warmer months or you know, things going on in the neighborhood that are more specific to you know, the time I also just tried to write a message of just my you know, general thoughts on what’s going on. And I begin it with that and sometimes I include just more pictures or that are personal you know, I really just trying to make it maybe my personal newsletter not too much. This is my real estate newsletter because I can give holds more value to people and they’ll read it.
D.J. Paris 59:34 I think you’re right. I wrote an article once called nobody wants to read your newsletter for a magazine because nobody wants to read a newsletter that isn’t personalized, that doesn’t have content that is of interest to that person that’s being sent to and realtors oftentimes I mean look we’re busy you know realtors are busy they don’t have time to to write but but you have that background you have that broadcast journalism background, you’re creative person And so that fits neatly into your, into your skill set. And so you get to sort of be creative in that sense. And so Oh, by the way, maybe it’s like it’s National Women’s History Month. And here’s some cool things to know about that. And maybe it’s even outside of, of the world of real estate, but it’s important to you and you can express yourself that way or hay as as the, you know, as the spring is rearing its head now we can start talking about you know, things like front doors, front doors are becoming important and things like that. And so you could you can bring that into real estate. And I think that newsletters, it’s such a great opportunity that I think Realtors Miss oftentimes, which is I’m just going to pay a service to send out this newsletter, and that’s fine. And honestly, it’s fine. And no one’s going to read it, but that’s okay. Because at least they’ll see your name. And that sort of level one level one is just I’m gonna push something out there, my name is at the bottom, nobody cares. But it’s but it’s better than nothing. Level two is I’m going to put some actual content in here that I think is cool. And, and if I think it’s cool, that’s are my clients will be connect with that as well. Because like, like attracts like, mostly. So I think in social media is the same way I think we can get really, you can be creative and fun and passionate without being salesy. And I think the best realtors are, I think, the best, the best realtors that I’ve ever met are the least salesy people. They’re just extremely competent. And they’re passionate. And they’re like, well, here’s what I do, here’s how it works. And they talk about it. And I think that’s, that’s, you know, we were sort of really fortunate that we have the ability to find yourself, and the technology exists to express yourself in a way that 15 years ago, you know, didn’t really didn’t really exist. And so now there’s so many different ways where we can say, This is who I am, and this is what I’m into. And I think people connect with that.
Brittany Simon 1:02:02 Exactly. And you just have to actually, like, do it, I find myself sometimes getting in my head. And I sometimes bring it back to even when I was in college I was in. I was on Miami television news, I’m TM. And I remember sometimes when we were getting ready for camera, and they’re like trying to test your microphone to like say something, say something I always remember thinking like, well, what should I say in my head, but I’m like, I’m supposed to be like an anchor, or they don’t want to, they don’t know, I have to know. So sometimes it’s just just say it say something, say anything, that’s what they’re looking for. And definitely, to your point to connect, because again, what differentiates Realtors from each other is your unique personality, how you what your thoughts are your opinions, I’m sure we collectively share a lot of the same thoughts and opinions, especially with this market. But your style, your attitude, your enthusiasm, you know, I find myself able to adapt different personality types, maybe not everybody is so sometimes I can be more buttoned up, or sometimes I will be a little more loose. And you know, either with my clothing or you know, just the discussions we have, you know, maybe it’s about life instead of just real estate and other people just want to stick to real estate, which is totally fine, too. But I always find, you know, when I started thinking about it too much, just do it. Because at the end of the day, nobody’s thinking about it that much where they’re going to critique you to think that I think like you’re awful, I would never use you. I think at the end, I find this when I see other people doing it. Wow, they put themselves out there. That was cool. That was unique. I wish I could do that more. And then I think, well, I can’t lie, all I have to do is do it. So I think a lot of realtors just need to do it. Get out of your head. It’s not that deep. It’s not that serious. And that you know, you’re just wanting to people to kind of know who you are. And that’s where you built the trust, you can build rapport and the credibility so they can use you. And everything else, like you said can be learned but to adapt your personality to connect with people and to know that okay, I’m going to enjoy talking to this person on the phone for the next few months or whatnot. You got to show them who you are.
D.J. Paris 1:04:11 Yeah, my final question is, imagine you could go I’ve never done this before. And I just think it would be interesting. Maybe we’ll make it a recurring feature on the show. If if there’s no pressure that make this go well, but no, I but I’m genuinely curious if if the if you now you’ve been doing this 12 years. So if you could go back to your rookie self and give your rookie self some advice. What would you tell your first year realtor self? That of what you know now that she didn’t know back then?
Brittany Simon 1:04:47 That is a great question. And what I think I would say is for one, you know, I always kind of felt in a way I connected better with strangers. I don’t know if I felt like intimidated from other people or my sphere, or just a little bit that at the beginning, I didn’t know as much, obviously. So I didn’t feel confident. And until I felt confident, I didn’t want to feel, I guess, embarrassed or something to people I already know, I’m gonna pause
D.J. Paris 1:05:15 you for a second, this is a very, very common thing. So people get into real estate. And we, you know, we read books, and we go to trainings, and it’s like, put your sphere of influence together. And, and that’s a great thing. And you should do that. And I’m in no way telling people what they should or shouldn’t do, I’m just explaining that it is a very common occurrence where somebody goes, I don’t really want to deal with my friends right away, because I’m afraid I’m going to screw things up. But I’m not that I don’t really know that much. And I feel like maybe I’m not going to do a good job, this sort of imposter effect. It’s not even an imposter effect. It’s just, I just don’t feel competent. And I don’t want to be with my best friend. And what if I screw something up? So so this is really, really important. So go ahead, I’m sorry, I just wanted to pause because this is, this is a big thing,
Brittany Simon 1:06:02 totally. But I think I would definitely go back and put myself out there to the people who know love and care about me, way more. So I mean, it was great that I was able to connect with I feel like so many people who didn’t know me and really build my business, to where it is. But I also if I put as much effort into that to the people who, you know, I already know, my sphere of influence, I maybe would have had, it would have been a little bit easier. I don’t know that it would ever be easy. But maybe it would have been a little bit easier. Because I did was kind of, you know, they always say don’t be a secret agents. And I kind of was because I was I did feel this little tinge of embarrassment. Because what if they asked me this? And I don’t know, and, you know, almost to strangers, it’s like, they don’t know that I don’t know. So I felt more confident to tell them whereas, you know, my friends and family knew I was just really starting to get into real estate. So there was probably things that I didn’t know, and I still don’t know things, and I’m still learning. But I think that now I realize that, you know, you need people that who know you to help you people generally do, you just got to ask, and I didn’t really want to ask, and I would definitely go back. And I would ask and I would let people know, and I would have more of those real and genuine conversations with them, like, Hey, I know that I’m new. And maybe you have questions about that. But I also have, you know, family, who’s in this, we’ve been in a long time and is supportive of brokerage, so I can find out the answer. But why would you give me a shot? You
D.J. Paris 1:07:39 know, that that what you just said is I personally I love I love this honesty and vulnerability. And again, I know we’re kind of going back in time, but but the willingness to be vulnerable is an exceedingly attractive quality that and I think it’s because vulnerability is so scary. That it is it is so difficult for us to say, here’s here’s something that that I feel very exposed. And I feel like I’m letting you down. But But I do have a solution. So hey, I knew I just got my license. And or I’m, you know, in the first few years of my business, there’s going to be questions, I am sure that you will ask me that I won’t immediately have the answer for but what I will promise you, Mr. or Mrs. So and So, is that I will get the answer for you. And I will come back to you with the answer within, you know, a day or so or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. And I and you know, the funny thing about working with with friends and your sphere, is those are the people, I mean, just sort of practically those are the people are going to forgive you the most anyway. So even if you do screw up, they’re most likely but I think having that sort of vulnerable converse, like, like you said, Give me a I would love the opportunity to earn your business and I get it. I’m not 20 years in the business, but maybe that’s a benefit in a way because I will work maybe harder than somebody who’s so busy.
Brittany Simon 1:09:07 And I have the time to give you that specialized individual attention. And I want this and I want to prove myself so allow me whereas somebody who’s maybe been in the business a longer time and or maybe has more clients, they just can’t do that. So sometimes you might actually have a way better experience anyways. But yeah, vulnerability is hard. And it’s, it’s taken, it’s still hard. I’m still trying to put myself out
D.J. Paris 1:09:35 worse, but of course it is it’s hard because people can hurt you with it. I mean, people can reject vulnerability, they can they can they can damage you with it. But what most people end up doing with vulnerability is it actually vulnerability leads to intimacy and intimacy is what what we’re sort of bred for as, you know, as as a as a species. This idea of, of we’re in summit people. And so this idea that we want to be with people who we trust, we know we like. And the surest way to do that is to, to open up with, with, of course, appropriate boundaries, obviously, making sure that that, you know, you do have personal and professional boundaries set. But but being able to say, here’s what I know, and here’s what I don’t know. And here’s what I’m going to do about what I don’t know. Yeah. And and I think most people go, okay, that makes sense to me. You know, we don’t expect perfection out of anyone other than ourselves, mostly, we don’t expect our friends to be perfect. And our clients don’t expect us but they do expect us to work hard for them. Yeah. And, and, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s all, I think that is really required. Or that’s the most important thing that’s required. So this is this has been such a fun conversation, I’m grateful to Brittany for going going a little deeper than sometimes we do on on on our show here. But I think it’s important because what we’re dealing with, throughout whether it’s, you know, you’re buying a toaster or a million dollar home, we’re talking about, you know, people making buying decisions that are and of course, in the case of a primary residence, this is a very emotional decision. It’s one of the largest, maybe the largest financial decision at that time that person might be making, it’s, what is it is it buying, buying a home, kids in school or college and then retirement, those are kind of the big, the big ones. And so this is something that, that if you can hone your skills and be willing to connect with your, your, your your clients, at a, at a deeper level, you’re going to you’re going to really have some raving fans. And I think also, you know, the the being very disciplined, as Brittany, you mentioned about always consistently not neglecting the people in your life. Because, again, it’s a relationship. And if you don’t, just like anything, if you neglect anything in your life, it’s going to suffer. It’s just going to suffer. So you are obviously doing an amazing job. I very excited to continue to watch your your progression as you continue to, to do more and more. But if there’s anyone out there who is either interested in buying, selling, renting, whether it’s residential, I know you also do commercial, you know, whether it’s the city or the suburbs, and there’s looking to work with a top realtor. What’s the best way someone should reach out to you?
Brittany Simon 1:12:31 Absolutely. Well, they can definitely call me My cell phone is usually i i am a person who answers your phone and I always get back to people. So my cell phone number is 630-936-2930. Or you can reach me on social media. Like you said, my my handle is on Instagram at realtor dot Brittany with a TT a NY or Facebook and I’m under Brittany coming Simon that was my maiden name, or email me brittany.simon@compass.com But I always answer my phone. So if I don’t get back to the second you call or text it will be same day for sure.
D.J. Paris 1:13:11 Yeah, and definitely check out Britney’s website. She has a really cool logo. I’m a big fan of the Britney Simon logo. So visit her on her website, which is Brittany Simon group.com. Again, Brittany is dri two T’s a NYBRITT a NY Simon group.com. And then Brittany dot realtor and our sorry, realtor.on. Instagram, we will have links to those in the show notes. So you don’t have to type that in. We’ll have direct links. Brittany, thank you so much for being on the show. We really, really appreciate your time. This is a lot of fun for us. And maybe you and I one day we’ll go back to to our alma mater. And visit because Brittany and I were saying she has not been back since college. I don’t know if we said that on the show or off off air. But I’ve only been back once. So we’re probably both due for a visit, for sure at some point. And I do want to find out where you worked as a server in college because I’m curious if I frequented one of those establishments wasn’t when you were there, of course, but But anyway, on behalf of Brittany and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show, please tell a friend I think of one other realtor that really needs to hear what Brittany talked about today specifically around how to get offers noticed some good marketing ideas as well. And just you know, constant communication with with with your clients and send them a link to our website. Our website is keeping it real pod.com and every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right there or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. On behalf of Brittany and myself. We thank our audience and on behalf of our audience, we thank Brittany for her time today. We will see everybody on the next episode and Thanks Brittany. It was a real pleasure.
Brittany Simon 1:14:59 Yeah, likewise Thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 1:15:02 Thank you. We’ll see everyone next time.
What Residential Agents Should Know About Commercial Real Estate • Moses Hall
Apr 28, 2022
Moses Hall with MoHall Commercial talks about the beginning of his career in real estate and how he started helping the realtor community in state and national level through associations. Moses describes what commercial real estate is and breaks down the sectors and why he started with commercial real estate. Moses also discusses the commission structure for agents in the commercial space. Next, Moses talks about what he thinks office space and retail space will look like post-covid19. Last, Moses describes what has he learned about real estate by serving in the realtor communities.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever thought about adding commercial real estate into your business? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And if you’re new here, we tucked in top producing brokers and ask them how they grow their business. And today we have a super exciting episode, Moses Hall is going to be here to talk all about commercial and everything that residential agents really need to know about it. But before we get to Moses, the best way that you can help us continue to put out these episodes is by telling other realtors about us. So please tell anyone you know about our show, they can go to our website and stream every episode we’ve ever done keeping it real pod.com Or just pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and have your friend hit that subscribe button. We would appreciate it But enough about me let’s get on to our main event our interview with Moses Hall.
Right today on the show, we have Moses Hall from mo Hall commercial and urban development here in Chicago. We’re gonna tell you about Moses. Now Moses Hall is a commercial broker and started his real estate career in 2014. As a licensed Realtor, and through collaborative effort, his ultimate goal is to revitalize communities and build wealth through real estate on the south side of Chicago. Now, Moses his mission has been highlighted in publications, as he received the prestigious honor of being named realtor magazine’s 30 under 30 Class of 2019, which is a huge, huge deal. Moses previously served as a 2021 National Association of Realtors, chair of the commercial economic issues and trend forum. He’s also the chair of the Global Business Council for the Illinois realtors, and is also on the National Association of REALTORS board of directors. Please follow, please visit Moses at his website which is Mo Hall that’s m o Hall commercial UD so mo Hall commercial ud.com And also follow him on Instagram at mo Hall commercial. By the way, both of those links are in our show notes. So follow him on Instagram and visit mo Hall commercial ud.com Moses, thanks for being on our show.
Moses Hall 3:50 Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, well,
D.J. Paris 3:53 you are such a an amazing, I don’t want to call you a rising star because I think your star is already in the sky. It’s already risen. But it continues to shine bright and we are really excited and very rarely on our show. Do we have any real conversations outside of the traditional residential world and when I say traditional residential, I’m talking condos could be rental rentals or people live so so residential rentals, you know condos for sale single family homes, those type of traditional people buying or selling property where they live. We almost never to have discussed investments we did for a while when I first started five years ago. We and then we realized we can’t do it as well as some of the other podcasts like bigger pockets and and we just haven’t really explored any other sectors of commercial, whether it’s you know, multifamily investing, mixed use or like Hey, I specialize in gas stations or in factories or development deals in these you know, whatever. So So, we are really excited to chat with you because I would love to because it’s a big question we get on our, in from our listeners, which is, hey, how do I get into commercial? And it’s like, well, I don’t know what that means, right? Like, there’s commercial is such a broad term, it’s like, how do you you know, it’s like, it’s so broad, it doesn’t have a specific answer. So, before we get to all of that, I’m just giving the audience a taste of, of what we’re going to be sort of chatting about. I would love to hear your journey because you’re relatively young. Yeah, you have, you’ve accomplished a tremendous amount. And you’re actively involved in helping the National Association of Realtors, as well as on the state level, in the local community level, you have been involved in really all major areas of real estate. And really, first of all, I want to thank you for, for, you know, all of the help you’re giving every one of our listeners by helping support realtors, so thank you for your service. In all of those areas, it’s really, we’re really honored that people step up to do that like yourself. But on top of that, you’re also extremely successful as as a commercial agent. So how did you get into real estate?
Moses Hall 6:13 So funny little tidbit, I actually have a background in the performing arts, I actually grew up playing piano. And so I’m originally from New York, and if you ever seen the movie Fame, sure, that was what my high school was based off of. So wow, to the fame school, and I studied jazz performance. And so the reason I mentioned this tidbit of my life is because I started to get interested in real estate while I was in high school. And that was kind of during the phenomenon of when we have reality shows start to go crazy, like flip this house and just that nature. And that was during the real estate booming, you know, that was the Circa I was in high school between 2004 2007. And so I’ve seen a lot of, you know, my family and peers and church members get into real estate. And so it piqued my interest, because I knew people that were appraisers, agents, inspectors, and of course, you know, 1516 years old, you can’t get into the industry, you’re not legal enough yet. So, by the time I graduated high school, that was when we had the big market crash. Yeah. And so I transitioned from New York, and moved to Chicago to attend Columbia College, Chicago, and I studied music business, you know, because one of the things that I realized is you always see all these documentaries about artists, and selling millions of records, and then they’re broke. And, you know, I don’t need that starving artists. So essentially, my degree is a focus is a business degree, but with a focus and emphasis on the music industry. And so as I transitioned from, you know, college student to college grad, I decided to explore once again, because the market had shifted from when I graduated high school, I decided to explore getting back into real estate. And I knew from a personal side that I didn’t necessarily want to do residential, the goal was always commercial from an investment perspective. And so that’s kind of how I kind of transitioned into jumping into, you know, commercial real estate. So shortly after graduating college, I did one year, operating an event space. And, and then after I did that for a year, I decided to go ahead and get my broker’s license, and I started January 2014, as a licensed Realtor.
D.J. Paris 8:46 Amazing. And it’s it started immediate. Well, actually, I want to go back. So yeah, back to the New York side, because you were on your way to probably like maybe a Juilliard or. Right, so so that, that that was that was your path. And that’s, you know, that’s yeah, fame, famous, you know, a great a great, I’m glad you mentioned that, and maybe a lot of our audience will go like, I don’t know what that is. Because it was the early 80s when that movie came out, but it’s a great film, but great music. But anyway, that’s where you were headed. I can tell. There’s probably other schools to maybe I don’t know, Berkeley’s out.
Moses Hall 9:25 I actually did a summer program at Berkeley. And I was looking at that school as well. And so essentially, the arts was kind of my dad, that’s
D.J. Paris 9:34 where you were, that’s, but But and then you started, you start, I guess, started thinking, hey, you know, they’re just limited career options here. I also, you know, maybe you didn’t, yeah, it’s tough. It’s just obviously you can be the greatest pianist. Yeah. And maybe you’re playing with a symphony or you’re playing in a band or doing whatever, but it’s it there isn’t an immediate obvious path to you know, sort of Bill Building a successful, especially now with a music career be so tricky. So it makes perfect sense and opt to remind one of us will have to remind us to ask you what your favorite pieces that you ever played, if you can remember. So we could say that I say that to the end. But I, I love love music as well. I’ve been playing it most of my life I started on piano, not to the extent that you did transition to guitar when I was 13. And, and has done that ever since. But, so why why did you start with commercial just out of curiosity, because I don’t know what the percentage is. But I’m gonna guess it’s 99% of people who get their license do not start there. So let’s talk about it. Because it’s, it’s the typically the less immediate path, right? There’s, there tends to be a longer lead time between starting as a commercial agent. And again, we should probably define what commercial is in a moment. But it’s a much typically a lot longer. My brother in law is a commercial broker down in Florida. And, you know, gosh, he works mostly with storefronts and, and things. And he, it’s amazing that he’ll be like, he’ll work on a deal for two years. And and then when it hits, it’s a really good hit. But he has an eating for two years, you know, so, so I appreciate the hustle there. But why did you decide to go that route.
Moses Hall 11:24 So as I mentioned, when I transition as a college student college grad, I realized that most artists need some form of space, whether you’re a dancer, whether you’re a musician, whether you’re a singer, or painter, or whatever, you need a space to showcase your art. And so I thought, hey, why not go ahead and lease a commercial loft. So I had an artist’s loft that I leased out to other artists. And what happened was, I came across an old article about the building owners and when they bought the building, and pretty much how much they paid for it. Because before, you know, it grew to what it is now it wasn’t really developed when they bought it. And so I paid attention to what they bought it for. I did the math for what they were collecting rents from me and other tenants in the building. And I said, Man, they are making a cash cow. I want to understand commercial investment on how to see the vision of a value, add property, buy it, renovate it, lease it up. And then when I learned about how you can refinance a property and kind of, you know, I’m saying do it all over again, sure. I want to do this in commercial because the thing with resin I mean, residential, is typically if you’re doing a rental property, let’s just say a single family home or a condo, if you have one vacancy, you have 100% vacancy. versus commercial, where there’s typically additional tenants, depending on like you said, we got to define what commercial is. But typically there are multiple tenants. And if you have one vacancy, it doesn’t like a single family home, it doesn’t necessarily wipe out your entire investment. So me just reading an old article kind of sparked my interest. And then from the music side, I was watching a Ray Charles documentary. And when he passed away, they said his net worth was 75 million. And the crazy part was 50 of that was due to real estate. So I say there’s a way to combine my love for the arts and my love for real estate. And you know, just seeing other artists, when you hear about the net worth and they break it down. Real estate is always in their portfolio.
D.J. Paris 13:48 You’re absolutely right, I think to like Roger Waters, who is the basically the lead songwriter and bass player for Pink Floyd, although he’s hasn’t been thinking about it forever. He’s still because their albums still sell well. He’s still one of the highest paid musicians, but his real estate portfolio is like insanely successful. So there are a lot You are absolutely right, every sort of, you know, wealthy celebrity that that has, you know, financial advisors or those financial advisors are going to tell find income producing opportunities for them. And there’s a lot of tax advantages to so So you’re essentially doing it with the space before you became an owner you were essentially doing it on a smaller scale. You’re like, hey, wait a minute, I might as well become the owners of a place like this. And then you get of course you get to realize all those additional benefits. So let’s let’s let’s take a step back just to make sure our audience understands what part what commercial you particularly focus in, because of course, there’s so many different kinds. Let’s talk about what what what specialty that is your interest.
Moses Hall 14:59 So at So I’ve had experience in all types of commercial. So I’ll break down the commercial sectors, so we have what’s called retail. So it’s typically anytime you go into a store, and you’re buying, you know, piece of clothing, like h&m, you know, things of that nature, that’s what we kind of consider retail commercial. And then we have industrial warehouse. So typically, that’s kind of where stuff is stored, you know, Manufaktur, things of that nature, then we have Office. So that’s typically where you go to work, you know, that type of stuff. And then we have what’s multifamily. So multifamily commercial is typically five units or more. So if you live in a larger housing complex, like 100 is 100 units, we would consider that even though it’s residential, people are living there. But we consider that a commercial because it’s five units or more. So typically, the general sectors and commercial real estate and I have experience with all those sectors, I’ve done deals and all those different things. But I would say my, my sweet spot of a lot of deals that I do on a day to day basis would be multifamily and industrial deals.
D.J. Paris 16:09 Wow, that’s, that’s really cool, because those are very different, in my mind, but they’re both very cool, I think, because the the multifamily I think is easier for strictly residential agents to sort of wrap their mind around, they understand it, because they’re probably doing some rentals themselves as realtors, and they’re certainly understand people live places, and they live in apartment buildings. And here in Chicago, we have a lot of multifamily properties, you know, compared to other cities, and especially Chicago, Southside has just a ton of, of that, and, but also the, the industrial sites very interesting because to me, that’s a, that’s, you know, typically not in the the super urban areas that are mostly residential, you know, you may be going more to the outskirts, these are bigger, of course, properties that have a whole different skill set, I’m sure that’s needed from you to be able to effectively, you know, place a client in their space or find, you know, be able to list it and help you know, sell it. But I am, I am fascinate. So we get a lot of people who ask us, hey, I want to get into commercial and of course, first would be okay, well, what sector right what sector interests. But let’s talk about restorative, I want to first before we get into that I want to hear because I think this is really important as you’re not just a commercial broker, doing commercial deals, you have a mission, and a purpose that I think is really important for our audience to understand why we’re so excited to have you. So can you talk about your ultimate vision for what you can do in the commercial space? Yes.
Moses Hall 17:55 So my ultimate vision is to revitalize urban communities. I know there’s this buzzword and it’s kind of like a killed word, gentrification, gentrification, gentrification. I know, that’s kind of like everyone runs. But my goal is to improve these communities without displacing the original native residents in the area. And when you go to Chicago, Southside, it is so beautiful to understand the historic properties and history of it, especially like communities on the south side, like Brownsville to know, you know, musician, myself, and to know how many jazz musicians settled in this community, and built their name and how many clubs and, you know, performance venues happened to be in this area. And then over the years, obviously, it fell into despair. And now it’s making a comeback, or, you know, now that we have new development, and I feel like new commercial real estate is one of the best avenues to improve these communities. Because one of the things that kind of helped improve communities is new development, bringing businesses here, when you bring businesses here, that means there’s job opportunities with job opportunities, that means there’s a need for housing. So it’s kind of like a trickling effect of things that happen through commercial real estate. So that’s kind of my focus is to really build up because I feel even though I’m not originally from Chicago, I feel that Chicago is a beautiful city. It has a it has its challenges, but I think as a as a group, a collective group, we can overcome those challenges.
D.J. Paris 19:30 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more and I’m really impressed that you have this sort of higher calling aside from you know, obviously the success you’re you’re experiencing personally as this like, hey, I want to make a difference. And it doesn’t just extend to your business and and I think first of all, everyone listening, if you don’t have a higher purpose, and it doesn’t mean of course that you have to save the world. That’s not what we’re saying. But whatever. part that you can contribute to your local community as realtors, this is where we live in play is in a local community, anything you can do to, to make that community a little shinier, a little, a little more beautiful or just helping out when there’s need, I think not only will ultimately help your business, because people are very attracted to working with agents who do think that way. So aside from it, that’s kind of a secondary benefit. But the primary benefit is you’re going to have a heck of a lot of fun. And you’re going to be able to immerse yourself in a community and say, I want to help because this is where my business is. And I work here and I want to be, I want to be a beacon of light. And this for you doesn’t just extend to your business, this is something that, that you are somebody that I’ve been very impressed with for as long as I’ve known of you. Because you also give back to the realtor community. So aside from just hey, the local community in the parts of the south side that are like really interesting to you that you want to make more beautiful and better and bring jobs, you also say, hey, every realtor out there, I want to help you too. And you’ve served at the local, state and national level. So can we talk just to digress a little bit from commercial? Because if if people are listening, if nothing else, Moses is is a really great example of how you can become a leader within the realtor community, whether it’s local or nationwide, so you can talk to can you talk about why that’s important to you? And, and why you enjoy doing that?
Moses Hall 21:31 Yes, I think a lot of us get caught up in the, you know, I get a lead a short property, I put a contract in, I close it down, I get my check. And I had to learn, there’s more to this industry than that. And a big part of my job is advocacy, standing on the front lines and advocating for others that don’t have a voice. And so it was important to me once I learned that there are positions and awkward leader leadership opportunities for me to serve my my association, not just on a local level, but on a national level, it was a no brainer for me to get involved. And, you know, like I said, and there’s also a personal benefit, because there are certain things that are on the legislation table that can immediately impact our business. You know, when COVID happened, this was the first time that as Realtors if you are struggling, that you could apply for unemployment. Why was that? Right? That was because we had people advocating on our behalf on Capitol Hill. This is why it’s important to get involved because there are certain things that directly impact your day to day business.
D.J. Paris 22:42 Yeah, in there’s so much that can be said about why getting involved is, is important. And I think that, you know, it’s it’s it’s a cool thing I was thinking about this. The other day I was I was I was feeling a little down, I was having a tough day. Just not you have to get in specific spots just whenever it’s having a tough day. And I had a Chicago association was was doing a little volunteer opportunity for a couple of hours, actually at at an industrial warehouse here in Chicago. And I had already signed up for it. But I was like, Ah, it’s not that I didn’t want to go, I just was feeling kind of down. I had other things going on. And I wasn’t I was like, Okay, I’m going anyway. So I showed up and I helped and it was I love, I love doing things like that. But I came home and I thought, You know what nobody ever tells you. And I this is a little selfish, but it’s a nice selfishness, I think because you’re you’re helping is you get to feel good about yourself. When you contribute in any way. Whether it’s giving back, you know, to realtors, as you have giving back to your community, there’s a certain sense of like, I’m doing some good here that helps self esteem, it helps confidence, it just helps you feel good. And it doesn’t mean you know, you’re you should be rewarded, you know, with all these accolades, because you help out but you’re gonna get to feel good regardless of anyone ever knows you’re doing it or not. And I, I really wish I had learned that much earlier in life. Because I think that that is a tremendous way to not only further one’s career moment and knowledge and but also just to go you know what, I am actually making a little, at least a little bit of a difference.
Moses Hall 24:29 I think one of the best feelings I’ve ever had when I served on the car Foundation, we partnered with another organization that helped displace homeless families. And so there was this family of like eight single, and they were living shelter and shelter. We were able to secure them housing, and we helped them move in and set up their furniture. And so when the kids walked in, and saw that they had their own bed for the first time I mean, the I mean, the joy on their faces, like you said that gratification of I know I’m in the right field, I know I’m doing the right thing, when you can bring joy to little kids faces that were displaced for years. And to see that they were just happy just to have their own bed.
D.J. Paris 25:17 While a single parent with eight kids, I mean, that’s seems like the toughest mountain in the world to climb. And that person was and then having to move and shelter to shelter. I mean, not to get hung up in that particular story. But But like, if we all just think about that, every single one of us listening can have an impact in somebody’s life, whether it’s, you know, through helping them personally, or helping as Moses if you’ve done it even on the national level. And you are now on the board of directors for National Association of REALTORS as well. Yeah, so let’s congratulations on that. That is a huge, huge deal. Can you talk about what? What is? So you deal a lot with commercial? Yeah, and the National Association of Realtors, again, commercial is a relatively small percentage of the overall number of transactions done by realtors in the country, of course, because, you know, we all have to live somewhere. So the most of the transactions are going to be residential, but it What would you say to our audience, for anyone that says, you know, I would like to add in, I’m a residential broker, or, and I’m sorry, guys, when I say broker in Illinois, here, we only have brokers. So it just, it’s an interchangeable word with agent, realtor. So just excuse my language states are different. So we’ll just say agents going forward. So I don’t confuse the audience. Because like in Florida, brokers, like usually the person that’s in charge the Boston Anyway, whatever, every day, by the way, if anyone from National Association of REALTORS is listening, if we could just make it the same in every state, that would be awesome. Because it would make my life easier. So do it for me, please. No, I’m teasing. But for people that are thinking, hey, I’m a residential agent, and I’m thinking about, you know, maybe adding in, you know, some new skills, and maybe one of those is commercial. Number one, do you recommend that if for a true, you know, an almost exclusively residential person? Or do you typically recommend you know, what partner with somebody who really specializes in that sector.
Moses Hall 27:28 So, as we kind of mentioned before, there’s so many different sectors of commercial real estate, and it depends on the intensity of the deal. There are a lot of moving parts within the commercial real estate sector. So let’s just say we’re doing a commercial lease, like, you know, retail, you know, like you say, representing the store, there are different types of leases, it’s not like your general lease, like residential, where you may have a one year lease, you know, typically commercial, our leases are a lot longer at minimum, three years, you know, on, you know, average, but of course, it can go up to 20 years, 25 years, depending on the intensity and caliber of the deal. But the reason I mentioned that is there are so many nuances. And if you don’t understand the lease, you can do a disservice to your client, not understanding what type of lease the nuance is the lingo, the language and having understanding. So I would say it will be great if you don’t, it’s hard to take a crash course, you know, in commercial real estate, but now if it’s kind of like you’re dealing with like a small mom and pop, you know, that owns a little you know, 600 square feet, storefront, you might be able to wiggle your you know, self, you know, through the deal. But if we’re talking about you’re looking at a strip center mall, or something of that caliber, and you’re dealing with an institutional landlord, you can’t really wiggle your way, you know, through those types of deals, because like I said, we have a different process. Normally, with a residential contract, you already have a pre made contract laid out, all you got to do is fill in the terms with commercial, we start with what’s called a letter of intent. And that kind of spells out the terms that we’re looking for, and there’s a lot of moving parts. So to your question, would I recommend someone that has no commercial experience to try to do a commercial deal? No, I would definitely refer it refer it out or partner with someone. I do have a lot of residential referral partners that I do partner with. And if they do want to learn they can shadow me in the deal, what kind of work through the deal, I’ll be the lead agent on it and what kind of work and I kind of train agents in that way to you know, to do commercial deals, but it is not like a fly by night type of thing that you can do. Now, I will say depending on your local association, I know Chicago Association Realtors does a good job of offering electives and classes on commercial real estate aid. There are also other trade associations. We have what’s called ICSC that’s for a retail. We have Uli, that’s for has called Urban Land Institute. So there are different other trade organizations within the commercial industry that you can join and be a part of. And they also offer different commercial classes. But I think the biggest thing is, wherever you hold your license, if they do commercial training on that, yeah, that’s, that’s the really biggest thing.
D.J. Paris 30:31 You’re absolutely right. And I’m sorry for stepping on on what you said. And just in case it didn’t come through, because I was blabbing on Moses was saying, hey, if the company you work at if that’s not really what they do, then maybe consider, you know, referring it to a true commercial broker. And, and vice versa, right. So there’s like we get calls from people who work at these large institutional commercial firms like a Marcus and Millichap Cushman and Wakefield, Jones, Lang, LaSalle CBRE, those big huge companies where they’re like, we don’t even know about residential like, we don’t we don’t let our agents do residential, they only can do these, you know, these big giant deals, and they refer people back to residential agents as well. And they get paid on those referrals. So and I think it’s really cool, too, because, like you were saying, you partner with agents. And and I’m just curious, and please, I hope this does not come across in a way that suggests that you’re doing this for this reason, because I know you’re not you have this amazing altruistic quality to you. But I’m just curious, being as visible as you are, because of how much you serve the local associations of wells, the state and the national. I’m curious from a referral perspective, do you because you’re more visible do you do other people reach out to you simply because they know that you contribute in these ways and say, Hey, by the way, I do have an opportunity in Chicago, maybe they’re not even a local broker?
Moses Hall 32:04 Yeah, absolutely. I matter of fact, I just had the opportunity to go to France, and I represented the Illinois Realtors at one of the largest commercial real estate conferences called Mipham. And their NAR does have a presence at that booth. And I actually ran into someone from another, you know, state that was like, Oh, hey, I sent someone so I gave him your number, because they were looking for an industrial property in Chicago, and you’re like, the first person I thought of in commercial. So yeah, and I was like, Yeah, we talked in XYZ. So to your point, yes. People do. You know, because I do hold certain positions, and, you know, leadership. And I, you know, I am, you know, fortunately a top producer within the Chicago position and realtors and commercial. So top of mind people think to send me referrals from other cities, other states and other positions as well.
D.J. Paris 33:01 Yeah, it’s a nice sort of ancillary or just sort of accidental benefit, which I know is not the reason why you serve,
Moses Hall 33:09 but it is, but it is a benefit. And when you do you serve in these positions, it should be some benefit to you, because it is a lot of commitment to serve in these positions. Like you said, you were having, you know, not so the best day but you were still committed to going to this event, there should be some type of benefit in doing these things. So yes, as a as a as a byproduct of me leading many positions. Yes, I do get referrals and I am top of mind to people.
D.J. Paris 33:38 Great. And I have a question too about about the commercial side, which is around. Let you know, it’s funny, we should let’s just talk about what a typical commission might actually be because I feel like residential agents really don’t understand how Commission’s are even structured. Oftentimes for commercial again, it depends on the sector. Obviously, we’re talking what’s maybe the most accessible version of commercial which would be maybe retail because this residential agents do get those opportunities. Yeah, so
Moses Hall 34:12 the thing is, and I’m glad you mentioned that. One in commercial, you have to make sure if depending on what side you’re representing, if you’re representing the buyer or the teammate, you want to make sure that there’s a commission being offered Right? Like the MLS typically MLS. There’s a commission stated a lot of times commercial practitioners do not use the MLS we have other platforms and tools like costar loop net and Craxi anorexia. Sure sometimes the commission has not stated so number one need to x what is the commission and you’re saying you know what a general feel for what commission is not to violate any antitrust No, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not just you know, making a statement but um, but with retail, it can be structured differently like like You said I just did a lease, sometimes you can get a percentage on the first year of the lease, and then a different percentage on the rest of the year because like I said, sometimes they’re signing 510 year leases. So you may get a percentage when they first sign the lease, and then you will get another check when they actually open up for business. And then you may get another check. You know, after one year of being in business, so there’s different commission schedules, depending on what type of commercial it is, you know, if it’s sale typically, like you say, you can just do a flat percentage split between you and the cooperating broker. So I mean, it’s similar to residential and the Commission, but like I said, sometimes if it’s a larger deal, you’re not getting your money upfront, you may have to split it in quarters. And sometimes you may get paid on renewals of lease and different things like that.
D.J. Paris 35:56 Yeah, I had, I was talking to a broker yesterday, who was an attorney who only does commercial, not on this podcast, just somebody here at here at our firm. And she was telling me, I don’t even remember what the actual deal was, but she didn’t really get into too much detail. But she said she’d get paid three times on it. And it was something like 4% of that maybe the lease or whatever. Three different years. Yeah. And but I guess the point is, is it’s it can be structured, any which way?
Moses Hall 36:24 Yeah. It’s a wild wild west. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 36:29 Which is also a good reason to maybe not as a residential as a true residential agent, try to go go that route, because you there’s just a lot because it’s so flexible. And so there’s just so many different ways in which it can be structured. And you sort of just don’t want to be in a position where if you’re like, I really don’t know this, this area, that all of a sudden, maybe you’re putting the client in a bad situation without realizing it, and maybe even putting yourself in a bad situation with respect to Commission’s
Moses Hall 36:59 Yeah, because, like you said, I mean, like I said, generally speaking, sometimes, with residential rentals, you may be offered half a mile mom’s you know, there’s a range to that there’s no industry standard, but just generally speaking, but with commercial, if you represent a tenant and they sign a five year lease, you’re shortchanging yourself to only get a half a month’s rent, when you could have gotten paid like you said three times. But if you don’t know any better, and if your brokerage don’t know that this is kind of, and like you said, certain commercial agents, they may know that you don’t do commercial, so they may just say, well, they’ll take this I gotta pay them that so it pays to know these types of things.
D.J. Paris 37:43 Yeah, and also to, you mentioned, the there isn’t really a true commercial MLS, we have our MLS, which is does have some commercial properties on it, and probably every local MLS does to some extent, but a lot of commercial property, you know, never hits the local MLS, it might hit some third party, we’ll call them unofficial MLS is like Craxi Mostar loop net. And if you’re somebody who really is trying to play in the in the commercial space, and you don’t subscribe to those types of services, you don’t have as much access to those listed properties, because the MLS is just going to have a limited exposure to commercial. Because just a lot of things just just exchange hands outside of the MLS. And if you look to get those types of memberships, costar loot, net proxy, etc, they tend to be quite costly, not that they’re not worth it. They’re just expensive. And if you’re already paying, you know, $1,500 a year for your local MLS, and then you’re paying maybe another, you know, grand or two or more for these other it gets costly.
Moses Hall 38:53 Yeah, yeah. And so I think that’s the also another thing is that people want the big commission checks, but don’t want the investment. The reason there’s a higher entry barrier to commercial, because like you said the payout can be potentially bigger, but you have to be able to invest in yourself. So you said when you ask if it’s a residential president is know anything about commercial, and they try to cut corners? Because like you said, if you’re if you’re representing a buyer, and they ask, actually, oh, hey, what should our offer be? What is this property worth? You can’t go on the MLS, not easy
D.J. Paris 39:33 to run comps, yeah,
Moses Hall 39:34 because there’s not going to be any data. Right? You have to go through some of these third parties, or you have to have relationships with certain brokers to get, you know, to give them a call, like, Hey, I know you listed someone so you know, what did you end up moving for? And you have to understand that with commercial, there’s different evaluation processes. So like, you know, with residential typically, you know, you guys use the cells A comparison approach, which is for the sticks and bricks of the building right there, the value is typically the same for residential property, whether it’s occupied or vacant, you know, generally speaking now with commercial, that value may be completely different. Right? If it’s occupied or vacant prime example, there was a California investor that purchased like a KFC here in the Chicago market. He ended up he bought, you know, KFC was the tenant, he bought the real estate and KFC was on the lease, and things like a 1015 year lease, he bought it for like 1.2 million, I think the pandemic had hit. And somehow someone didn’t do their due diligence. I don’t know how but KFC they didn’t personally guarantee the lease, the franchisee didn’t personally guarantee the lease, there’s abuse of commercial terms. And they were able to wiggle out of the lease, and they end up closing. And so when they close, remember, he bought it for 1.2 million, because there was a long term tenant in place paying rent, when the KFC closed, the value of the property is only 500,000. Yeah, so with commercial, we’ve, we essentially give value based on the income that it’s producing. And so you have to understand how to, it’s not like you say multifamily, you know, similar to residential, but you have to understand certain mathematical equations to give your client an overall perspective, do you know what the capitalization rate is? Do you know the cash on cash return? Do you know, you know, different terminology that typically residential agents do do not have an understanding of so that you can give your client the full perspective of whether offers should be?
D.J. Paris 41:49 Yeah, it’s very complicated. It really is a different world in many respects. And I would say the wisest agents, I know, they say not that they don’t want to expand their skill set, because you should always be expanding your skill set. However, they don’t, you know, play in, you know, they don’t swim in waters where they’re not sure how deep it goes, because it’s just too dangerous. It’s too scary. And they’re probably just not going to do a great job for their client, not because they’re not wonderful people, they just don’t have that skill set. And for me, it seems, but you’re right, it’s it’s easy to calculate, if you find out what the commission would be. It’s, it’s, it’s easy to look at that number, and say, I could probably get this done. And maybe you can, but boy, it’s a tremendous amount of risk and stress. And for me, it seems you can refer it to a person like like, of course, like Moses, who can probably get the deal closed a lot faster, and with better terms, and he just, this is obviously what you do all day, and then still get you know, a certain percentage of the enrollments or the commission is the referral. And right away, it seems like a lot a lot, you know, a lot better path to go.
Moses Hall 43:06 Right? Yeah, like you say you want to limit your liability, and you want you don’t want to do a disservice to your client. And so like you say, you don’t want something to come back to you, you know, on the back end, that’s something that a commercial person would have called on the front end, like, Hey, did you see this term? You know, you know, like, you want to, you know, catch stuff upfront, but if you don’t know, then you don’t know to advise your client on these different things. And so kind of, like you said, there are a lot of moving parts, a lot of nuances, that it’s kind of hard to learn on the fly, unless you have you shadow someone. And like I said, I paid my dues. I’m still learning, but, you know, I’ve paid my dues. I’ve shadowed people are working on their people. I’ve, you know, done deals with others. And now I’ve built you know, to a certain point I’ve invested in myself, we have what’s called the CCI M, that’s kind of like the premier designation on investing in that completing that course. So there’s a lot of investment that goes into being a commercial real estate, not just outside of the tools, but the education and then getting the experience.
D.J. Paris 44:11 Have you noticed, and obviously the pandemic has changed so many things. You know, a lot of us are sort of concerned in our local communities. And I know you don’t have a crystal ball, obviously, nor do you speak for every commercial agent. But and I know your particular sector isn’t your specialty necessarily isn’t like office space. But you know, Have you have you seen any trends that suggest that we’re starting to return back to offices or our you know, our businesses? Obviously, it depends business to business, but are people you know, working from home as much as they did during the pandemic, or is it here to stay or where do you think we’re headed there
Moses Hall 44:54 I think is still going to be a hybrid model. I don’t think people are going to work from the office five days a week. Eat. But I think what employers are doing now is enhancing the employees experience. So now office buildings are having a lot of amenities, they’re doing a lot of stuff that, you know, encourages you to come to the office that you can’t do at home, you know, whether it’s because like you say, you want to keep company morale up, you know, there’s certain things that it’s hard to do, especially if you’re a new, newer employee to learn, you know, saying, you want to be in the field, you want to build that company morale. And so I think it’s about employers, enhancing employees experience to encourage them to come to the office. But like I said, I do think it’s going to be a hybrid model. I think most companies are not going to force you to come in five days a week, but they are going to, you know, have you come in maybe twice a week, two to three times a week. And then the other two is work from home. So I do now that a lot of restrictions have been lifted. Like you said, there’s vaccines and boosters out, I think, right now we’re just learning to live with COVID. It’s not going anywhere, at this point. And of course, when numbers spiked, then you know, it might, you know, restrictions come back. But while we’re open, you know, people returning to office, a lot of major companies, and you got to think there’s a lot of money invested in these spaces. And so to let it completely go to waste. I don’t think it’s going to be a forever work from home. But like I said, it has created a lot of other opportunities, remote opportunities. But to answer your question, I do believe it’s going to be a hybrid of of things. And employers are going to learn how to better enhance the employee experience by coming into the office. So like I say, maybe offering yoga classes, you know, you know, outdoor space, you know, company Park, like things that encourage you to come to the office they enjoy at home.
D.J. Paris 46:50 Yeah, I think you’re right. And I’ve also on the retail side, I’ve started here locally in Chicago and the neighborhoods that I’m most commonly in, I’m starting to see some of those vacant spaces, slowly start to refill. And I’m excited for that. Curious if, if that’s happening in the areas that you’re interested in, in the south side? Are we starting to see retail, returning? Where during the pandemic? Obviously, it suffered tremendously. Are we starting to see that come back?
Moses Hall 47:23 Yeah, so you know, actually, I specialize in all Chicago Chicagoland area, but I just have more of a heart and passion for this little side. But um, I do north side, west side, east side, you want me to be I’m on there. But to your point, yes, retail is making a comeback. In terms of because like you said, there’s less restrictions, before there was all the vaccine mandates, and all that type of stuff. But people are getting back out there business, our businesses are able to thrive a little bit better, with all the restrictions being lifted. So we are seeing those, you know, retail spaces, get filled leases be signed, things of that nature. So I’m seeing that across the board, not just here in the city, but also suburbs as well.
D.J. Paris 48:08 That’s a very exciting, so I always thought oh, boy commercial is going to take this big hit during the pandemic, because office space is changing, people are working remotely. Of course, that affects local businesses, retail as well, people sitting at home all day, it’s different when they get to walk around outside and shop, and now with with, you know, ways where we can get things delivered immediately to us where we don’t have to physically visit brick and mortar locations as much as we needed to buy for which was the only way mostly to get goods and services. Now, a lot of businesses are our delivery based and so which is wonderful for convenience. But it’s nice to know that that there are brick and mortar, we’re seeing this revitalization of of brick and mortar and people are, quite frankly, it seems and again, I’m not speaking for anyone or everyone but people are just tired of being inside. Correct? Yeah, it’s it’s look, you know, it’s it’s great to be able to order things and have them delivered in a day or two. It’s also cool to go out and walk down the street. And if you have retail nearby, walk in and see things and if that all goes away, you know if if we’re if that actually goes away, just think about and I really encourage everyone to really think about this and why it’s important to support local businesses in particular, especially small businesses, but certainly all businesses but but certainly small ones. Because if those go away, think about what that does to the aesthetic landscape of the actual visible landscape of the community. It changes,
Moses Hall 49:42 right. I think the biggest thing is about the user experience. I think like you said, people are tired of being cooped up inside and they want the experience and it’s so funny that you mentioned about small businesses, just because in the last 24 hours, I literally have just gotten to calls for small businesses that are literally busting out the seams in their current space, and they need more retail space, because the business is booming, people are coming back. And they’re just like, hey, our space, current space is too small, we need to purchase a larger facility that can house things. And like I said, this has been two businesses in less than 24 hours, small businesses that have caught me. And like I said, they have decent budgets to do that. So when you ask, is retail coming back? By the calls that I’m getting? Yes, it is.
D.J. Paris 50:32 That’s amazing. I’m so glad to hear that. And I, I think it’s it’s, it’s important for our audience to remember that, again, we don’t really just if you’re a residential agent, you have to not just support the homes in that community. But also think about how what can I do to support these local businesses so that people may want to live in these communities, where there’s local businesses, because I know, especially here in Chicago, we have all these wonderful neighborhoods, and you get to choose which neighborhood you want to live in, depending on you know, what, what, where you want, and what you can afford. And a lot of it for me is, especially here is I like living by cool shops, I like that personally. And I pay a premium to live by cool retail. And if my if that retail, in a lot of people where I live feel exactly the same way. There’s great restaurants and cool, you know, shops and whatever. And if that all goes away, guess what happens to the property value of my property, it goes way, way down. And not that it’s important that I you know, make a ton of money when I end up selling my condo, because who cares. But I want my community to be beautiful, because I am not looking to move anytime soon, I want to stay. So I think about that when I’m purchasing things, I think not that this is I’m just sort of soapbox telling anybody what to do. But it’s something to think about. And as Realtors we have a responsibility to help keep our local communities strong. And part of that is by supporting commercial, supporting retail supporting all of the businesses that make up that community. Sorry, a brand’s over. But I just wanted to make that point because it’s easy for us to just think house, house House House House. And we don’t think about all of the the infrastructure that goes into making those homes attractive with all these surrounding businesses, whether you’re in a suburb that you live in, in a in a residential development, while you still need retail to support that residential development. And, and you know, it’s really, really important. As we as we wrap up, I would like to talk again, about getting involved. And I Sorry for going back to this for anyone if it’s if it’s a broken record, but I really want to hear you talk about, like why we talked about why it’s important to you, how much have you learned about real estate has it furthered your knowledge by serving in all these different volunteer sort of opportunities? You know, within the realtor sort of space, I have to imagine you just have more knowledge now about the entire industry and process.
Moses Hall 53:17 Yeah, it’s not just about the industry itself. But you know, I have been an entrepreneur my entire life. And so I’ve never worked a nine to five job, I never do any of those things. And so my first like, experience and working into an organization was super eye opening to me, I didn’t know how to run a meeting and how to pass a motion and how you know, protocol and running an organization. So it gives you inside scoop on how to run an organization. So it builds your leadership skills. And then to like you said, You do learn more about the industry. You learn about the history of the industry, you learn about what’s coming and what to look out for what to warn your clients about. You can also tell your clients, you know, like I said each year, typically, the realtors, we have Capitol day and we go to Springfield, Illinois, and we go talk to our local legislators. And can you imagine telling your clients say, Hey, I went to Springfield to lobby on your behalf. I know that they’re trying to increase taxes. I know they’re trying to take away private property rights. And I talked to my local congressman and let them know that no, we Realtors we do not stand with this. You know, X, Y and Z that makes you look so good in front of your clients will absolutely have your best interests at heart because sometimes the perception is that Realtors what are we good for? You know, why are you guys getting paid all this money? Really, really, it’s not a lot of money when you break it down to how much cost and knowledge and investment that we put into our careers. And so it shows value. I think that’s the biggest thing as Realtors is showing our value. And so when you lead in when You accept these leadership positions, it creates value point, because now you’re knowledgeable. Now you’re gaining experience. And now you can advocate on your client’s behalf, not just your clients, but have but your industry’s behalf.
D.J. Paris 55:12 Well said, and and you’re absolutely right. It also is an amazing thing to be able to say to your client to say, not that you would say it for this purpose, but to be able to say, hey, just so you know, I’m not available tomorrow, because I’m heading down to our state capitol to talk to our local congressman or a senator or house, you know, a rapid to talk about rent control, or to talk about, you know, whatever topics might be important that might directly affect Realtors on either side, whether it’s commercial or residential. It’s certainly something that, yeah, I
Moses Hall 55:49 mean, not not to cut you off. But one of the biggest things that was kind of on the chopping block is what we call 1031 exchange that a lot of investors use. And that was, you know, certain legislation was coming down the pipeline that was trying to x that which would have caused a huge housing crisis more than what we’re in now. I mean, it would have been insane, if they would have chopped the 1031 exchange, which is a tax strategy that investors use to sum it up for those, but that because I was able to speak, and others were able to lobby, and thankfully, they didn’t, you know, chop it and do all those different things that was talked about initially. So that’s what you know, being in these leadership positions do for you. It not only helps you as a business person, but it helps protect your industry that can have devastating effects on on your business.
D.J. Paris 56:47 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And just to wrap up, curious about music. Let’s talk about about piano, what do you have and you might not have a favorites. Okay, but do you have a favorite piece that you ever performed?
Moses Hall 57:00 Oh, man is no, that’s, that’s super hard, because like you said, I play you know, jazz performance. And so you know, we studied Duke Ellington. We are actually Witten Marcellus, he kind of lived in the area. So anytime before large concert, he would come in and critique us and give us power and you know, things of that nature. So it’s super hard to kind of say which song because I guess I had the jazz. I actually grew up playing gospel, you know, r&b soul country. So it’s, it’s hard for me to pick one song. This depends on the mood I’m in. But that’s
D.J. Paris 57:37 a good point. I know for for jazz pianists. The only pianists that I’m super familiar with and I’m not even that familiar. would be like Bill Evans from Bill Evans is amazing. Felonious Monk. I guess Herbie Hancock, of course. And, and then there’s a guy and I’m only gonna say this is so funny that we’re not a music show. But if everyone I want everyone to check this out, I think it’s just a fun if you’re not a jazz person, this is a great album to try out. Dave Brubeck had an album called take five or timeout things called timeouts. Yes, yes. And it’s a real accessible Yeah. been, you know, and it’s kind of like, I don’t know, it’s a fun album. It’s it’s a very accessible album to Korea, of course, as well. So those are the Duke Ellington, as you mentioned, there’s so many great, oh, my gosh, I could, I could,
Moses Hall 58:33 it’s hard to choose. So like I said, I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine my love for real estate and music and actually have my own music publishing company. So what I do is, it’s called Mohawk publishing. So what I do is I acquire publishing rights to notable artists, to certain songs, anytime particular song is streamed online, played on radio placed on a TV ad I generate a royalty check.
D.J. Paris 58:59 That’s amazing. Good for you. That is that’s really awesome. And are you still playing piano as well? Yes.
Moses Hall 59:04 Yeah. So I still play out, you know, occasionally, not as much as I used to in my younger years. But I still get out there and play on the scene.
D.J. Paris 59:13 Wow, good, good for you. Well, well, if there’s any any samples that we can provide to our audience, we’d love to feature you. Maybe there’s a YouTube video we can grab or something. That would be be really fun for us. But Moses, thank you so much for being on our show. I think you’re extremely enlightening about the importance of, you know, working with a trusted commercial partner. And by the way, we should also mention that, you know, Moses is a great person to to know in this industry. So if you do have any commercial opportunities that are happening here in the Chicago area, including the suburbs, he works all over because of course, businesses are all over. He would he would love the opportunity to chat with you. So if you’re an agent that maybe has a business moving And hear or need some help, or any anyone who’s maybe an investor in the commercial space, Moses, what’s the best way somebody should reach out to you,
Moses Hall 1:00:08 you can reach me on all social media platforms at Moses, M O S, E S, Hall, H A LL. So I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, you can find me Google me, I’m definitely findable. And I’ll definitely respond to your messages as soon as possible.
D.J. Paris 1:00:23 And also visit him on his website, which is Mo Hall commercial U D, which stands for urban development, Mo Hall, commercial ud.com. And again, Mo Hall commercial on Instagram, we’ll have those links in the shownotes. Well, Mo, thank you so much for being on our show. Appreciate your time, and also appreciate all your service to the industry, you’re helping us in ways that we don’t even know because most of us aren’t as connected in it to what’s happening behind the scenes to help keep our jobs safe. And also are just the regulations in line with the you know, the National Association of REALTORS vision and goals, which is to protect our livelihoods. So we are super grateful to you for that. And also a good reminder to everyone else to think about a way that you can get involved and contribute. And, you know, you’ll just have a lot of fun doing it and also do some good along the way. So, on behalf of everyone here who’s listening, think we want to thank Moses for his time today. And of course, on behalf of Moses and myself, I want to thank our audience, you’re the reason we can continue to, to put these episodes out because you keep listening and you keep telling a friend. And we’ll remind you and ask you for a quick favor to tell one other friend about our show. If you haven’t already. Please tell other agents that we exist. And we want to keep growing as well. So anyone that you can think of that might be interested in hearing from somebody like Moses, who does so much for our industry, or just wants to learn more about commercial send them a link to this episode. Easiest way to do that we have a website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream live right there. Or if the person you’re referring to has is a podcast listener just happened pull up any podcast app, search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And also please last thing we’ll ask from you please leave us a review on whatever app you might be listening that really helps us learn more about how to better improve our show and also what you like and what you don’t like so we can keep modifying it to better meet your needs. So thank you so much, Moses for your time today. And really appreciate it. We will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Mel. Thank you
You Only Need Six People For Your Sphere Of Influence • Patrick Kilner
Apr 26, 2022
Patrick Kilner the founder and CEO of Kilner & Kirk Real Estate describes why he chose real estate and how he started his career in the industry. Patrick talks about the freedom he’s been able to create for himself and his family by building his business in real estate. Next, Patrick talks about his book “Find Your Six: Stop Lead Generating & Start Building Influence“. Patrick and DJ discuss business development and the changes that need to be done in the industry for agents to be happier. Last Patrick discusses the importance and the role of the agent.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Did you know you only really need six people to build your entire real estate career? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer and author Patrick Kilner, he’s going to teach you why you only need six people in your life to build your entire real estate practice. But before we get to Patrick, the best way that you can help us continue to thrive and grow is by telling another realtor about this show, please do that. You can send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode can be streamed there, or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And also if you could just take a moment and review our show on whatever podcast app you’re using. We would so much appreciate it helps us we read all those reviews and it helps us really make changes and getting better and better meeting your needs. So please do that if you have a spare second, but enough about me let’s get on to the main event my interview with Patrick Kilner.
Today on the show we have Patrick toner from toner and Kirkley in Maryland. Let me tell you about Pat. Pat killer is an 18 year veteran of the real estate industry and is also the founder and CEO of Kilner and Kirk real estate now killed her and Kirk is one of few very few teams nationally. And this is amazing to have total lifetime sales, weight pregnant pause, dramatic pause of over $2 billion $2 billion. Pat’s team has done between 70 million and 100 million in volume every year for the past 10 years. Without Pat going to a single appointment. I’m gonna say that again 70 million to 100 million in volume over the past 10 years per year without Pat ever going to an appointment. He also has a brand new book, which is called Find your six stop lead generating and start building influence, which debuted as a number one new release on Amazon, we encourage everyone to go out and purchase this book. In fact, we have a link to the Amazon page right in our show notes. So please go take a look at five or six and learn more about the book and everything related to Pat Kilner at Find your six.com. And that’s fine. Your si X spelled out find your six.com. That link is also in our show notes for the podcast episode here. So Pat, welcome to the show. DJ, it’s
Patrick Kilner 3:58 great to be here.
D.J. Paris 3:59 Pat and I were talking just before we got on and I could feel like I could talk to Pat all day. And I apologize because I was I was running a little bit late. And Pat was Pat is just such an enjoyable guy. So I’m really excited to learn more about you. So let’s let’s start at the beginning before you had all this amazing wild success. How did you get started in real estate? First of all, yeah, why real estate? And then how did you get started?
Patrick Kilner 4:24 I think like most really good things to get your real estate sort of found me. And they say like you when you get into writing books, right? They say a book finds you while real estate I think found me as well. And I I would say quite accidentally, really. I was doing the post grad school just back from grad school and trying to figure out what to do with myself and handing my resume out to everybody that I knew. My dad said you gotta go talk to this guy. He could run for the mayor of this town, right that you know, local town here. He knows everybody and so you gotta go talk to him. So I went and talked to Rory. And I said, Roy, here’s what I do. And you know, I speak Spanish. I lived in Spain for three years did my Master’s there. And and you know, and I’ve got a master’s degree in economics and you know, all this stuff. And so here’s my, my curriculum vitae, like, who can you introduce me to? And he goes, you know, why don’t you come work for me. And it turns out that Rory had his own brokerage, his own small boutique brokerage. And you had never thought about real estate, I had not to that point, I had not thought about real estate. But I, you know, my dad was was planting some seeds. And my dad had said to me, a few weeks prior to that, you know, Pat, my only recommendation to you because I have not done this. And here’s what I’ve seen in terms of success is to get into an industry that you can envision yourself being in for the next 30 plus years. Because the people who I know who have been in the same industry for extended periods of time, they’re the people who do the best by their family, financially. They’re the ones really doing super well in their 40s or 50s. And their 60s, because they’ve they’ve run that race, and they’ve they’ve developed themselves, and their their cachet, if you will, in that industry. And so if I could go back and do anything else, that’s what I would do. By the way, you should go talk to this, this person is this person and this person, and Rory was one of those. So I didn’t have a better offer on the table. I was newly married. And feeling pretty humbled by a really tough job market at the time, early 2000s. And said, What the heck, go get my real estate license. Little did I know, the market that I was getting into, it was totally insane. This was what was building up to the mortgage crisis. Sure, anybody could buy a house interest only low interest only no doc, right? Like, walk in here, if you can fog a mirror, we will give you a house, even though you can’t get into that rental down the street, right. So it was totally nuts. And of course, you don’t know anything you get into the into the business. And you’re like this, that’s most of you are businesses. So you can talk to anybody, and everybody wants to buy a house, because it seems like the thing to do. And those are the days when you know, four or five times more inventories on the market than is on today in the DC metro area. And so there’s plenty of homes, and there’s even more people want to buy homes. So that’s the that’s the market that I got into I tried my hand at some commercial because I didn’t know which way I wanted to go didn’t have a good mentor initially, either. And, and so that that’s, I got in and, and struggled really, really, I mean, it was really tough. First couple years. I remember my wife saying to me, like, hey, if this is real estate, and this is a stress level, you have to have, I think you need to find something else, you’re really well qualified for other things. So it’s not all, you know, coming up daisies right away. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 7:56 cuz I don’t mean to interrupt you, but but with your background, and you’re sort of the pedigree that you have. And you mean, I’m thinking consultant, I’m thinking, you know, middle management, finance right away, or some working at a corporation doing I mean, you’re an economics guy and finance guy. So seems like you’d fit very nicely into the corporate world and just sort of, you know, doing going that route and didn’t,
Patrick Kilner 8:20 I wish, I wish you would have talked to me back when I was 25. But I didn’t, you know, and serendipitously, I am so glad, by the way that I got into real estate. This has been an amazing career. But it’s a very odd, I remember telling my friends who I had just graduated with what I was doing there, like, really, you’re getting into residential real estate like, right, that’s what my mom did after we all, you know, like, you know, went to college and went to school. Right. So that’s, you know, this is this is 18 years ago, as well, I think the industry has changed, I think for the better in acquiring young talent into the industry earlier on. And, and that, I think, I think it’s a really, really great thing to get into, but you eat what you kill in this industry, you’ve got to go out there and make it happen. And so that was that was where a lot of the stress came from, initially, you’re perfectly qualified to go get a job that can pay this mortgage. Can we please pay the mortgage? Right? Yeah. And that’s, that’s how I think a lot of us start right then and fighting against that. And you move from, from survival to some stability. And this stability builds on stability. And what I’ve realized in this industry is that you create your own stability. And and, you know, here in DC, we’ve got all sorts of amazing fields that people get into. And I’ve seen plenty of those people who thought they were perfectly fine that their job was as solid as it could possibly come, especially in government, right jobs or government related jobs. And all of a sudden, they’re looking for a job. So we create our own stability, and I wouldn’t trade the stability that that I’ve been able to create in this industry for the world,
D.J. Paris 10:03 the freedom also that you get to, to enjoy. And I don’t mean that you don’t work hard, because of course you do and you work, arguably, not even arguably inarguably harder as a solo practitioner as your own sort of entity in real estate, and certainly, as you have a company and you have to manage, and you now have to do a lots of different things. But I would be curious, do you find that? Yes, maybe the financially, it would have been not as advantageous to stay at a, you know, do it more traditional corporate job finance or economics, or were something during that sort of that that path, but a lot of stability, probably a lot of like, you know, I go home in a certain time, I don’t, I can turn it off. But it gets retired a certain age, and maybe I get to retire at 6065. I have friends who are in the been in corporate finance, and they’re retiring in their 50s. And they don’t, I don’t think they’re in love so much with with their profession, or the company they work for, but it doesn’t seem to be as stressful. So so there is a bit of a trade off. But But I think the freedom is sort of ironic freedom, yes, you get freedom around your schedule. But just economic freedom is so much better. When you really fully commit to real estate, if you if you figure out a way to turn it into an actual business, as opposed to just a job that you’re sort of punching a clock and working with the next client just kind of starting over at the beginning of the month. So I’m curious on your thoughts about about the freedom that you’ve now enjoyed, yes, tremendous stress, but also tremendous freedom.
Patrick Kilner 11:37 Yeah, but there’s no, there’s no situation in which I’d would have had been able to write a book if I didn’t have the freedom, that, that building a business, and in particular, in real estate has allowed me to write so I because I am no longer client facing, it allows me to be far more creative. And to use a lot of the economics that I that I, you know, still have and enjoy using it and the research side of things that I enjoy deeply. So yeah, there’s, there’s tremendous freedom in that. And I think there’s, you know, there’s sort of three types of agents, there’s solo agents, there’s agents who talk about having a business, who are really running a really big practice, because you get hit by a bus, all of a sudden, the business is gone. So that to my mind, that’s not really a business, that’s a really profitable practice, oftentimes, and that’s what most people have. And then there’s very few who have a business, meaning you get hit by a bus, and the business keeps creating revenue, without you. And that’s, that’s the, so at different levels, you enjoy different levels of freedom. And so, you know, before I was I was running a business, truly, there’s no way I would have been able to read it, write a book, I could do a lot of other things. I’d say my, the freedom as a father, the freedom to be able to spend time, and to be creative about when I use my time as dad and as husband has been immense and tremendously fruitful. And but I’m really competitive. So I had to teach myself that through school of hard knocks, to prioritize family over this business journal because I, as we all know, that can it can become an obsession.
D.J. Paris 13:33 Yeah, it can. And I always think to freedom comes through like discipline and structure, oddly enough, sort of counter intuitively, I noticed that yeah, like I just got back from the gym. I talk about this a lot on the show, because I oftentimes schedule interviews right after I get back from the gym, so it’s just fresh in my mind. So I apologize for our listeners for talking about giving,
Patrick Kilner 13:55 while your energy level was so good when you’re maybe four I’m
D.J. Paris 13:59 just, you know, wildly, you know, have some sort of chemical imbalance either way. Could could be that, but But either way, but yeah, thank you. But what I will say about about the gym is I struggled with going to the gym, and I just use this as a metaphor for people to maybe think about different habits that they want in their life that they find it very hard to do adopt things that we all know we should do. And we don’t do go to the gym. For me, it’s always been a struggle, I just don’t like it. It’s painful, like I just, you know, not doesn’t isn’t something that I would ever choose to do, which is funny because I’ve tried to get myself to do it for years and years. And it wasn’t until I hired a trainer, which was it’s very expensive, crazy expensive, and really kind of a bummer to write the check every month. But it gets me to the gym. And through that structure for the last two years. We just see and I just we just realized we’d been doing it for two years. I haven’t missed one one time and I’m telling you I’m 46 for up until 44 I would have been like I knew I should go to the gym and I’m kind of beating myself up but I don’t but I just wouldn’t. And so because I have that structure in place where I just have to stay pending appointment, whether three times a week, I never have to think about it again, I don’t I have to go there and do the work. And that’s the that’s that sucks. But I don’t have to think about it. I just have to go. And because I have somebody else who’s going to show up, and she’s going to charge me whether I’m there or not, I better show up. And it’s so expensive that there’s no way I’m not showing up. So, so oddly, yes, it sucks to pay for it. Because God, I can. I don’t want to I’d be embarrassed to tell you how much it costs. But, but the reality of it is, I can’t do it on my own. And so that actually is like, oh, it’s actually like weight off of my mind. I don’t think about it. So I’m only
Patrick Kilner 15:36 waste. What’s the opportunity cost to you your long term health? Of not? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 15:41 I have more energy. Yeah, no, it all logically, it all makes sense. So for sure, it’s like, but I just don’t have to struggle with the beating myself up because I didn’t go, You know what I mean? So I think what a lot of times agents think about as they struggle with structure, and of course, of course they do, there’s no structure in place for an agent, unless they have a coach or they have a great trainer or a great brokerage that really helps them or they’re just naturally good at it. Because most of us, you know, I think real estate is so up so much a personality style, sort of X extroverted for most people, I think they like hanging out with people and, and being of service. And those are all great qualities that don’t always are always the same qualities that are good for structure. And so I think, you know, if there’s one thing we’ve learned, after all these years on the show is, is creating structure has just been really helpful to actually give people more freedom, ironically,
Patrick Kilner 16:34 yeah, yeah. I mean, what’s your one of the first things I’ll ask folks as we’re looking to onboard? Is what time you wake up in the morning? Yeah, and and, you know, what, okay, what’s, what are the first few hours of your day look like? Right? Just walk me through that. Not a Saturday, like a workday? What does it look like? What are your cars, you know, somebody’s priorities by what they put earlier in the day, hopefully? Right? Is checking Facebook? Or is it? You know, are you going to the gym? Or are you, you know, is there meditation? Is there, whatever it is, right? Are you hydrating, whatever it is that you need to do in order to click into a height really high performing productivity, because nobody else is going to tell you in this business? When to be somewhere, right? And so you need to have that, that discipline yourself. And that starts literally from the time you wake up. And so you know, the next question is, okay, what time do you get to bed? Right? So, because if, if that’s you, what’s your ideal day look like? You’re waking up at six in the morning? Okay, well, what time you have to get the bed in order to do that consistently? Oh, I don’t need sleep. Okay, let’s see how long that lasts. So it’s a Yeah, the beauty of this is the freedom and the Achilles heel is the freedom. If you don’t use it, well, for sure.
D.J. Paris 17:53 Let’s talk about the book, because I am so excited about this book. And this, really, and I haven’t, unfortunately had the chance to read it yet. So I apologize to our audience. But that’s what you’re here to talk about. So I want to first and again, remind people the name of the book is called Find your sixth. And the idea behind it is to stop doing as much lead generation and start doing a little bit more influence, I guess we would say, sort of proactive marketing versus versus attraction being creating so much value that that people are just instantly or over time attracted to want to work with you. I I remember, when I was a financial adviser many a million years ago, I heard one of the top real smart financial advisors in our office who had been doing it 30 years says, if you have to ask for the sale, you’re probably doing it wrong. And if you do it, right, people go, how do I sign up? How do I give you all of my money to invest? And I thought, Well, that’s easy for you. You’ve been doing this 30 years, he’s like, No, you just have to be good. You have to know what you’re doing. And you have to actually be providing value. But let’s talk about the book. Tell us what it’s about and how how agents can start thinking differently about about influence.
Patrick Kilner 19:07 Yeah, when this is very much a real estate book. I mean, this is through the blood, sweat and tears of, of really figuring out how to get through the crash of 2008 2009. And that’s sort of where I start with the book. So let’s back up for a second, I became very interested in what made really high performers, excellent at their careers. And so I began interviewing people who had been going at their careers well into their 60s, sort of, you know, in the twilight of their careers. For the most part, I found that 60 most successful people I could possibly find all very high performance across different industries. And I interviewed him. And I said, you know, I’m curious, I want to understand, who have been the people who have been fundamental to your success over the course of your career. Let’s talk about that story arc of your career and And we talked as long as it took him. And I took copious notes, and I recorded the interviews. And at the end of those 60 interviews, what I realized is that the average number of wildly influential relationships to them that had made their careers what they were, were just six. It wasn’t 600. It wasn’t 6000. It wasn’t a million, right. It wasn’t like, how many Facebook followers did you have? Right, that didn’t matter. What mattered was a handful of really amazing vision aligned relationships, that in many ways, they almost felt like this is just total serendipity. How did I happen across them? And so that hence the six that’s that’s, that’s why find your six is oftentimes why people ask, you know, one of the first things I’ll say is why why find your six? And when I first got in the business, the first thing was told to me is that no leads, no business, right. And we all do work in leisure, I have a column still in my chart of accounts, that is lead generation spending right on it, like I wrote a book, basically condemning the concept of lead generation. But but but we That’s how ubiquitous it is. What’s really interesting is that we’ve only begun speaking about lead generation, we that that word, we’ve only started using that since 1976. We didn’t actually talk about acquisition of new relationships, as leads, write those incredible relationships that we have the honor in real estate to work with. As leads, we started, we shifted, and all the sudden, and most industries did by the way, financial industry, right. Glengarry Glen Ross, right? That’s 1980s, all these things, you know, Wolf of Wall Street, 1980s 1980s, right. All of this comes out of a lead generation mindset, which is basically people’s, that the relationship between us and the consumer is a commodity. And we just need as many of those as possible to do as much business as possible. Go Outdoors, it’s a numbers, game, knock doors, pound phones, whatever it is. And I did all of that as a new agent. And I was getting awards, my broker’s, like, Hey, this is great young guy, my gosh, those people I wish they’d been, they’ve been in this business for 2030 years, I wish they could produce as much as you. And I’m like, wow, I hate this. This is this is soul stripping work. I, if I have to knock on another door, I think I’ll just change careers. And it wasn’t that I just didn’t like it. It’s just that I wasn’t having the type of relationships with those types of folks that I was having when people would refer me, people who trusted me implicitly would refer me
D.J. Paris 22:46 totally. And not just because it’s easier to get the referral clients. I want to make that point clear, because of course, it’s, of course, it’s easier in a sense. But it’s a better culture fit for you, because those are people who are probably very similar to the even if they didn’t automatically know you from a friend of theirs, which of course, is great. You’re not, there’s some sort of inherent sort of similarity of sorts with that previous client, that is likely to be a fit personality wise.
Patrick Kilner 23:21 Well, I think there’s, there’s a question of longevity in this business. Like, if you’re gonna do this for 2030 years, as my dad, you know, said I should do? Or more. What kind of what kind of business development Do you really want to do?
D.J. Paris 23:34 Right? Do you want to go on tours? Right?
Patrick Kilner 23:37 So I remember asking you, I was teaching a class, some of my own agents, some other business owners, and I remember saying, Okay, we’re halfway through the year, let’s talk about your business plan. You know, what was your goal at the beginning of the year, you’re here, you know, six months in, what’s the gap between where you are where you want to be? And they all wrote that down? And then I said, Okay, what lead generation tactic do you have in your back pocket that you’re going to use for the next six months to bridge that gap? And they all wrote that down? And then I said, you know, this, this is where it sort of struck me. I was just curious, because I was starting to research the book I said, Now, those of you wrote that down all of you. How many of you would be deeply excited to do that, that tactic every day, two hours a day, five days a week, for the next three years? Or five years? Not a hand 40 By not a hand,
D.J. Paris 24:31 we know that it can work because people have done it. And we’re not going to debate whether it works or not. We’re just gonna say do let’s assume it works. And are you going to be a happy person doing this?
Patrick Kilner 24:43 Yeah. And not a hint. I mean, some very accomplished people, right? And I was like, wow, there’s something wrong with the way we think about business development. It’s, it’s like, it’s drudgery. What if What if you could come up with a way that you could do business development For the next 20 years and be excited to do it every single day, what would you what would that do to your business? Well, that due to just how you show up to your family, that’s that’s the essence of fine your sex. And to me, if you can do business in a way that that allows you to really have great joy at this game, well, then, you know, you’re living a much, much fuller life. As far as I know, we only get one shot at this. What’s also really interesting is, well, who does real who does lead generation better than anybody? Right, who produces more leads? Or maybe a better question is who do you pay for your leads? Right? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 25:41 as you say, Zillow. upcity. Redfin, exactly these these are lead corporate, these are lead companies, and that’s not a pejorative term. It’s not negative. It’s just the truth. I, I came from a background prior to this, where we generated we were in the health insurance, lead space, essentially, and we were generating 15,000 health insurance leads a day people who needed to buy health insurance realtors, often times are in that that group. And and so I was in the lead gen business and and that’s what Zillow and and again, that’s a good thing, that that’s what they do.
Patrick Kilner 26:14 It’s an amazing mousetrap. It’s better than anything you could possibly build on your own. They got the and you’re not you’re not going to compete. I got into the business, oddly enough, the same year that Zillow got into the business. This is before the brokers had IDX agreements, right? Sure. So, so not all of the MLS data was shared across everybody. Everybody’s, you know, websites, sites. Yeah. So. So your world has changed significantly in the last 18 years. But I mean, how many travel agents you know,
D.J. Paris 26:52 I think there’s still a few because I once in a while I’ll drive by, you know, a storefront that says it I’m like, Hey, look at that. I’ve never met one and I don’t know if there’s anyone in that in that building. But yeah, it’s it’s that’s pretty much
Patrick Kilner 27:05 that used to be a thing, right? Like people with travel agent, you know, it was it was it was multiple hundreds of 1000s of people in the travel agency business making making good livings, fantastic livings gone, relatively gone. The only people who are left are people who have niche relationships that you can’t get by going on to Travelocity, right. And that’s why I use them. If we are as agents, not figuring out how to disruption proof, our business development, Zillow is going to eat your lunch,
D.J. Paris 27:38 of course. Absolutely. And by the way, that makes sense. Because what they provide, and I know people have very strong feelings, positive and negative about Zillow. And I’m not here to take any side at all. But there is a sense of they’re taking something from me and my thought has always been probably not. If you’re if you’re an agent that provides exceptional value. That’s not what they do. They provide value for looking at homes and connecting you with an agent who wants to get your business. They’re good at that. They’re excellent, or they’re the best at it. But are they good at walking somebody all the way through the process of homeownership or selling a property? No, that’s not what they do. They’re a lead company. So that’s not their forte. And thank goodness, thank God, they haven’t cracked that code. Because it means that the realtor is still front and center and absolutely important for every step of the transaction.
Patrick Kilner 28:35 100%. And but if you find yourself in your, in your your drive home, from showing that house, wondering how you can compete with Zillow, you’re probably doing the wrong type of business development. And lead generation is just a blip on the radar screen historically, in the history of how people have generated business, right. So what I really wanted to know when I wrote this book was I wanted to talk to people who had weathered their own disruptions in their own industries, and pretty much every service industry we know of, and every goods industry, we know has been disrupted in the last four years. So I figured let’s go talk to those people in different industries, and figure out who are the people that have made them disruption proof because that’s really what when you find the right people who refer you business who can only think of you as their agent, you don’t need a ton of them. I’ve built a pretty darn good based business with just a handful of amazing relationships, but we are not practiced at finding those relationships. So I the the thought process here, and what I realized about sort of my own journey was that I was fortunate enough to find my Sikhs in a very short period of time, which is why I was able to survive 2008 2009 And, and as I talk to these folks, what I realized is they were all Talking about the same characteristics of the talent that they were looking for, to affiliate themselves with. So you’re no longer in a in a lead generation business, you’re in a talent business. And if you can find the right talent to align yourself with it’s game over. And Zillow is not in that business.
D.J. Paris 30:17 Right? And nor are they interested in that business. They’re interested in capturing people who are searching online and they become the search engine and they capture that person’s information and sell it. And that’s, that’s, that’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t really it doesn’t compete with a realtor who it provides tremendous value. It’s just a totally different world, probably a different client as well.
Patrick Kilner 30:41 Amen. Couldn’t agree more. And you know, gosh, NAR numbers have only gone up since the inception of Zillow. So, you know, there’s plenty of agents getting into this business simultaneous with the growth of, of lead generation, you know, outfits like like Zillow.
D.J. Paris 30:58 It is funny to when when Zillow had its its, they, you know, they’ve had some some poor press in the last year with their home, their their eye buyer program and all of that. And, and what’s interesting is when you go to and I love labcoat agents as a community, I think it’s excellent. I love those guys. They’ve been on our show. It’s really nothing but love for labcoat agents, and what they felt is like, beyond amazing, everybody should go subscribe to that Facebook group. They got 150,000 agents in it anyway. But when that news happened, it was depressing to me because I saw nothing but Glee and joy from people saying hi, Zillow, screw you. You’ve been screwing me over for years. And it’s like really like that’s it. These are probably some really successful agents. And it was just flooded with 1000s of comments. And I was like, huh, I actually feel bad for Zillow, because I don’t think of them. I actually know a lot of people who work there. I feel bad. Like, are you okay, as you know, and it’s interesting, I never thought of them as competition. Well,
Patrick Kilner 31:59 I mean, and you talked about talking about disruption, right? Zillow is just a disrupter set. And, and, and thank God, we live in an era where there can be disruption to industries, that’s how business gets better. Like from an economic standpoint, the way that we actually get better is to have competition and people coming in don’t really, is that really why we’re, what your value is, like, if your value is finding the house? I mean, come on. No, you’re you’re a negotiation expert, you’re a marketing guru. You are, you’re much more than just somebody who, who had a bunch of houses back here that I’m not going to show you unless you signed my paperwork, well, that’s a silly proposition. And the consumer should see that as completely absurd. Versus I am a fiduciary, who’s going to guide your decision making, such that, once we’re done with this, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t believe how fortunate you were that I was in your corner. And you’ll think to yourself, and you’ll refer me by saying, you know, the cost of not having DJ in that deal was not just monetary, because it was, he’s worth much more than I would have ever paid, I could have ever paid for him. But it was also a place where our family lives now, in a place where we create memories. And that’s where we sit as agents. And if we confuse that with what we’re actually supposed to be doing, then then I think we’re in for a world of hurt. But I think that’s why people get into this business, they really deeply want to want to be sit in that in that chair with that family, and which is a place of real honor, and tremendous dignity for both the person giving that type of service and the person receiving it. That’s something that tech can’t do, and won’t ever be able to do. So the question is, and this is what I was most curious about is I want I want to be referred that way every single time. Oh, that look like well that feel like how much how much less can I spend on lead generation and more on client service, and more on a few really important relationships. And so that’s where that’s where I take things in the book. And the book is really just, here’s, here’s how to understand the talent you’re looking for. And then here’s systematically how to go find them as well. And that’s the last part of the book.
D.J. Paris 34:34 And when we’re talking about talent, we’re talking about finding your six finding your your those few will say shallow but deep water, right so what we’re wanting is we’re wanting a very specific type of relationship, which is which there’s a process to finding those people your case you interviewed people you sort of went the Napoleon Hill route from The old thinking Grow Rich from a million years ago, 100 years ago, which was about he did the same thing. He went out and interviewed, like the 100 most successful people in the world at that time, or the country and, and learned a lot and then realized, oh, there’s this, there’s a series of principles here that seem to apply to everybody. And let’s write a book about it. And it’s become probably the best selling self help book of all time, as a result, so even if even if all you did was go out and interview all the successful people that you admire, did you find that your six were among the 50 that you interviewed? Or were they different relationships? Because I know that you’ve got the idea of all of these really successful people have six relationships, or seemingly have the six important cornerstone, Cornerstone relationships? Did any of those people end up becoming part of your sex?
Patrick Kilner 35:46 It’s a great question. So yes, a few. And I kind of go through the math of it. So look, I’m running a business, simultaneous to reading a book, I need, I need a lot of this too. I can’t just do the book, right, I’ve yet to have your business. And books, by the way, don’t make you any money. So. So yeah, so I mean, it was part partially that you’re really investing into relationships, you know, and, frankly, you know, if you did that, once a day, you had one great meeting with somebody who could be a candidate for your top of the, you know, I have a paradigm in here called the, the, the influencer pyramid. And so most of the people that you know, are not going to be wildly influential for your business. The problem is a lead generation mindset will tell us, everybody, you know, go and put him in your database and like, and you’re just gonna, you’re gonna hit him once a month with this and that. And the other thing? Well, the reality is, they don’t want to hear from you that much. And most of those people are not going to be influential enough. So once you understand the talent that you’re looking for, you’re not going to go spend time with people at the bottom of the pyramid. Or that much time with people in the middle of the pyramid, you’re only going to focus on people who are candidates for the top of the pyramid, the top of the pyramid is where your six reside. And so, you know, who did I find? Let’s, let’s sort of take the gloves off for a real estate audience how to talk to audiences who are not in real estate, Bailey, who should we be looking for? Yeah, who are the people? You know, for us in the DC metro area. Some of my biggest sort of people who rose to the top of my, my influence or pyramid have been, I had a great relationship early on. And I was just so amazed that this one great tax attorney, and, and he did business law and tax, and he was a connector. And so he connected me to all sorts of other great people. He, he came to me and we did events together, and he’d bring his his best people, and I bring my best people. And we network everybody together. And he sent me, gosh, she’d send me 810 deals a year. And that’s huge. Yeah. So if you think about if you had six people will send you 10 deals a year? I mean, you know, that’s most agents would like lose their mind. You’re a top 1% Producer at that. Absolutely. So that’s the type of relationship I’m looking for. We found this in some build relationships. Sure, right. Makes sense. There’s a lot to think about the top people in almost any market, they have some really great build relationships, whether it’s infill builders, or people on Raw, fresh dirt, you know, and they’re talking to you the NA R’s of the world. That was that was a game changer for us. And so we went specifically looking for the type of talent that we’re looking for. In that sphere, I oftentimes talk to talk to agents and like, so I’ve got this guy, and I’ve been working on him for years. And it’s just, I, he could be so huge for my business. Well, if you’ve been working for years, and there’s not enough vision, alignment with where you want to go, and you’re not providing a value for that person, to see you as a consummate professional, that they will refer over the other 20 Real estate agents that they know, then move on. But unless you’re in the game of talent, I mean, you guys, you are in the game of talent in your brokerage, right? Every single day, you’re having conversations, you’re looking for the right people the right fit, there’s got to be a vision alignment. There’s got to be people who are who who value what you value. And and once you know that there’s that cultural fit, they’ll tell their friends about you. They’ll be excited about it. And so there’s a natural build that happens. That’s what happens and you find your sex as well.
D.J. Paris 39:43 Well, I you know, I know we’re we’re closing in on the end here, and I wish we weren’t because I would like to continue talking about this, but it’s a great sort of place to remind everybody. This is why he wrote a book. So go get this book. And honestly, this is such a unique idea. It’s not something that I look, I’ve been doing the show we’ve done 350 Something episodes. I have yet to really have this particular conversation around. Yes, we talk about marketing and branding. And really what we’re talking about is branding to our sphere of influence our database. And generally speaking, the the way that that most agents, even top 1% agents do it is yes. And of course, they value all their relationships. I mean, again, I’m no way criticizing this. But what they’ll do is they have a system, there’s, there’s maybe there’s mailers that go out, there’s there’s emails, maybe a text, there’s some social media postings, there’s a lot of that, but it’s kind of blanketed across, you know, possibly hundreds of people. And again, it works. To a degree it works, you do get referrals that way. But it is time intensive, it’s energy intensive, it’s not as personalized. And it doesn’t, it’s not really an attraction model, it’s more of a fishing model, I’m going to cast my net. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. It’s, of course, a perfectly fine strategy. And it absolutely works. But this idea of of a track, I’ll tell I want to give you this, because I want to hear Patrick’s take on this. This is something I heard of it blew my mind. 21 years ago, I was a financial advisor. And I heard we they had hired this, these guys from Merrill Lynch to come over and tell us this, they had written a book, and they said, here’s what you need to do. And I know you’re gonna love this. And it was the scariest idea to me at the time, I was a young kid, they said, Go find the client, you know, whatever clients you have in your business. And and the ones you really like the ones that you think are just really cool, great people, somewhat influential, but whatever. They’re just good, good human beings, and they like you. So we take them out for coffee and say, Hey, I am trying to work on my marketing for this next year, I want to work with people just like you. However, I’m not totally sure how to get in front of more people like you. Do you have any advice about what you might do? If you were me? And it’s like, well, that’s just so brilliant. And, and you know, you’ll do that. And some people will say, I don’t know, you know, I can’t and then okay, fine. But some people will be like, oh, man, you need to come hang out with me at such and such place. All my buddies are going to be there. And you’re awesome. And we’d love to, you know, and you’re not asking people for referrals, you’re not asking them for business, you’re just saying, Can you help me? And I’m curious to get your take on that. Because it sounds like that is very synergistic with what you’re talking about.
Patrick Kilner 42:35 It’s foundational. And yeah, there’s when you ask for advice the right way. You almost never get rejected.
D.J. Paris 42:43 It’s the most flattering thing you can ask him right?
Patrick Kilner 42:46 When was the last time somebody said DJ, never can I you know, you don’t you don’t get offended. You say, Wow, I’d love to you might be really busy. You might have to kick it back. The busier people will be okay, that meetings gonna be in a month. But that’s fine. Let’s put it on the calendar. Right? Oh, they missed because they were too busy. Scheduled again. Now they feel like though they owe you one. Great, go do that. So I I’m I’m a huge fan of that idea. I speak to that chapter, chapter four of my book talks about how to make the ask to get in front of people, because we’re actually unpracticed at this, your total and we spent a lot of time behind screens. And we’re really good at concocting just the right thing to put on that screen. We’re really bad at getting people just to meet with us face to face, especially post COVID. Right. Face to face, person, a person and connecting deeply with people authentically with people and not sounding like you’re pitching. And actually never pitching. And so yes, I love that. And, and, you know, one of the things that I that I talked about in the book is yes, this, this really is a high leverage activity. But you’re going to spend about as much time on this as you would on your other lead generation strategies. You’re just gonna enjoy it a whole lot more. So it’s gonna do that much. Why because we’re human beings and we enjoy more personal communication and connection with people. But your job is not actually to go and make the sale your job is to figure out on a daily basis who can I meet with? Who did I meet with and what’s the result of that what’s what’s the next step? And what great people imagine you’re doing this every day one on one a day you’re doing this every day you’re gonna have an amazing you know, old school, we’re Rolodex of people that you are you’re in the mix with and so what great people can you connect every day, when you become a connector of other great people. You’re actually what you’re doing is distributing wisdom. What to You know, it’s like what what to get the guy who has everything the most successful people, you know, what do they trade in, they trade in wisdom, they don’t trade in, like knowledge to stuff that you can google or wisdom and relationships, all of that. Absolutely. And the best way to transfer wisdom is through great minds. If you’re the connector of great minds, in your industry, and you’re doing that authentically, and you’re really looking out for people, guess who they’re gonna think, think about when they think about real estate, they’ll say to you, and this is, I always, as I started to get good at this, what I realized is, what I wanted people to say, when they walked away from me, is, wow, I spent a lot of time with real estate agents. I’ve never had a real estate agent who thinks like that. And everybody can do that, because nobody thinks like you. Right. But if you’re in the game of business, and you’re having deep relationships with people that’s unique in and of itself. Now, if you’re talking to them about things that matter to them, and you’re helping them solve those problems, you’re gonna build a really big business, you know, that it’s, it’s, it is that simple. But you have to be in that in that game. And that’s, that’s a numbers game, right? So one a day, after a number of weeks or a number of months, you have 200 meetings a year. So there in some ways, there’s a numbers game of those 200, you’ll find six, no problem, do this for six months to a year, you will utterly change the trajectory of your business over the next 12 months.
D.J. Paris 46:32 I couldn’t agree more. And it’s a good reminder, for me, as you’re talking, my wheels are spinning. Because we are I’m in the hunting mode of attracting realtors to our firm. So how do we do that we cold call, we send email, we will we don’t send unsolicited email or text. But but we were we’re constantly fishing, hey, we’re throwing our line out there, we want you to join us, which is typically how recruiting works in this industry. And I am like I’ve been doing it for 12 years, and we have 800 agents here and I’m exhausted as a number by the way, that’s a thank you. Well, it’s fun. And I’m in no way complaining. However, it is time for me to find my six. And so if I 12 years in need to do that. And by the way, I need to do it for this podcast, too. It’s not just in my real estate business. So I’m going to employ these tactics, I want everyone to go out and purchase this book guys. At the very least you’re out what 10 bucks and and you’ve done something for your personal development. And at best, you’ve completely changed your whole idea of branding, marketing and relationship building. So the book is called Find your six moving away from from, you know, traditional lead generation tactics to more influencer attraction model. And of course, it’s all through value. Patrick is clearly a very authentic solid guy who has a lot to share. And again, he didn’t write this book to get rich, because you can’t do that he is doing it to give back to the industry. So let’s support him. Let’s go out and get the book, visit his website, find your six.com. And we’ll have a link, of course to the to the Amazon page right on our on our show notes as well. But go to find your six subscribe to his mailing list and get updated with everything because he really has a lot of thoughts and opinions about. And by the way, his his company has sold over 2 billion in real estate. It’s not not that long of a time period where they’re averaging, you know, 100 million plus per year or so. So this, this is a guy you want to listen to and you want to subscribe to, and he’s a good guy. So let’s let’s, let’s make Patrick part of our six for now. And let’s let’s go subscribe and get his book. So find your six.com is the place to go. I’d love to have Patrick back on our show in the future because he’s got a lot of a lot of ideas that I think our audience needs to hear. So please let us know if you want to keep hearing Patrick’s voice. Although I already know the answer is yes. But we’ll we’ll keep reminding Patrick to come back on. But before we before we log off real quickly, if everyone could do just one quick thing for us, which is to tell a friend think of one other realtor that you know that could benefit that needs to hear who’s struggling with their marketing struggling with maybe right now the season is slowing a little bit. This is a good time to you know reach out and tell them about our show and send them a link to this episode. So send them over to keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is there that we just we have 350 Something episodes, go through the archives tell a friend it would really help us out and also leave us a review. Wherever you’re listening to this on iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify wherever. Just let us know what you think of the show leave us a whatever star review and it helps us improve and also get in front of more people. But on behalf of Patrick and myself we thank everyone for being on for listening and or watching and on behalf of the audience and myself. Boy, we really think Patrick he doesn’t have this kind of time to come on a show. He’s he’s managing a huge team, a huge company we didn’t even talk about his business. But everyone go out to find your six.com. And that’s si X not the number six. So find your six.com and buy the book and then report back on how it’s working. And we’ll have Patrick back on the show very soon. Patrick, thank you very much.
Patrick Kilner 50:14 Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. And thank you for what you’re doing for our industry as well.
D.J. Paris 50:19 Thank you. See everyone on the next episode.
What Renovations Should You Demand Of Your Sellers Before Listing? • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Apr 25, 2022
In our March episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties provides statistics for Chicago’s market for this year. Carrie suggests that every agent should googling themselves to manage their own online reputation as a part of their marketing. Next, D.J. shares his marketing tip of the month. Carrie and D.J. discuss renovations that can be done when clients are planning to put a house in the market for the best ROI ad share photography tips for the agents. Last, Carrie and D.J. discuss the importance of reviews and why agents should ask for them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 What renovations should you be insisting your sellers make before listing their property that will increase the value and the speed in which their property sells? We’ll stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads in interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made high real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Carrie is a top 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 44,000 real is actually 46,000 Real estate agents in Chicago. Carrie is actually ranked in the top, I think I think you’re number 13 right now out of all of those agents. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. I actually live at a development that carry out represented so I can vouch for that. But please, please, please visit Carrie at her website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. And also follow her on Instagram. She has an incredible Instagram account. She does it all herself. And that’s at Carey McCormack real estate. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 2:44 Thank you, thank you, how are you?
D.J. Paris 2:47 I’m good. I’m good. i i i It’s funny I was all I keep hearing about is inventory shortages from everybody. And how, how is that going? Are you working with a lot of buyers these days? Are you working more with listings? Or?
Carrie McCormick 3:06 Yeah, you know, I, I was saying to it’s I think we’re all getting tired of hearing the inventory shortage story. And it’s true, and it’s continuing. And, you know, typically in my career, I’ve always been a little bit more of a, what we call listing agents, you know, I’ve worked with primary sellers. And over the last 24 months, you know, I’ve I have so many buyers, and everybody does, you know, we’re all in this hunting mode of looking for the sellers, and you know, really kind of expanding our networks. And, you know, I’m finding myself, you know, calling and emailing people and really, you know, someone said, describe yourself, I’m like, I’m, I’m truly a hunter, I will go find, I will go find sellers, I’ll go find people who want to sell their home. So just to kind of talk a little bit about Chicago and what we’re experiencing the amount of properties that were sold in February of 2022 I have to get my years right, the number of properties that were sold in Chicago is up 14% From February of 2021. So, you know 2021 We thought was an incredible year but so far, you know, our numbers are coming in extremely strong this year. And even though the sold properties are up, this is hard to believe too. The inventory is down almost 30% from last year. So we’ve got this weird, you know, balancing act that we’re trying to, to manage here and on top of managing that, you know, managing everyone’s expectations too. So you know it’s we’re now in I don’t even know what month we’re in. We’re in March headed into April you know, it’s interest rates as everyone know are starting to tick up. So we’ll see how that affects our market
D.J. Paris 4:52 has the interest rate adjustment, which I now I was reading the Fed may make six adjustments this year. So certainly interest rates are on the rise, which makes sense because they were at historic lows. But has that impacted your buyers at all? Where are you have your have their? What they’re looking at their the range of pricing? Has that changed at all? Is it scaled down for any of your? Your buyers?
Carrie McCormick 5:19 Yeah, and I think it depends on what price point people are into. And But absolutely, I call it their buying power. So you know, just using a round number if someone was going to, you know, last year, purchase something for $500,000. And, you know, interest rates were in the threes, and they bump up to the fours. Well, guess what, they cannot afford that $500,000 home anymore. Now they’re their budgets, you know, 450, or, you know, whatever the numbers pull out of? So yes, it does definitely impact some of the buyers. And, you know, they just they have to pay more for the house now. So not only prices are up a little bit interest rates are up a little bit. So it’s definitely impacted.
D.J. Paris 5:58 Yeah, and we haven’t really seen a price correction from listings, correct. Like, there’s still so many buyers that the prices are still probably higher than than we would expect.
Carrie McCormick 6:10 Absolutely, absolutely. So one thing that I wanted to also talk about is just shifting away from the inventory. But just something kind of fun, is googling yourself. So I found the other day, I went to Google myself, the top or the fourth top, Google search for my name was Carrie McCormick’s husband. Isn’t that funny. And the funny thing is, when you click on it, there’s no pictures. Except, and if he’s listening, Matt silver, who’s a good friend of mine, he’s a broker. He was the president of Chicago Association of Realtors. And way back when we took a picture together. And when you when you google Carrie McCormick’s husband, he comes up. I thought that was so funny, you know. So I sent I sent a screenshot to him. And it just said, you know, this, just so you know, if anyone asks, this is what comes up when you say Carrie McCormick’s husband. But anyways, as I was Googling myself and just looking, it’s just interesting, you know, how Google categories is everything. And so you know, as part of our marketing, we have to manage our online reputation too. So just make sure every once in a while that you do, you know, do a search and see what comes up. What I also did, which was very helpful is Google allows you to set up a alert with your name. So you know, I’ve gotten an alert. So anytime either an article comes out or something is said, you know, with my name, I get a nice alert about it. So I can just, you know, manage what’s out there. And what’s being said, and you know, think, thank goodness, it’s nothing negative. But you know, it’s just nice to have an alert, even if something gets published in a paper or something you don’t know that your name is being published, it’s kind of nice to see that. So that’s my tip to you is to make sure that you Google yourself and watch all of your, your online profile, make sure everything looks good.
D.J. Paris 8:08 Yeah, it’s really, there’s some good good tips there. So what you can do if you have a more unique name, is type that into Google search and just see what starts to autofill. And and you were saying, you know, husband, for example, might autofill. And you’re like, Okay, well, that’s going to show up when anyone types by name. And so I should probably look to see what results come back. And then you know, you’re seeing that it looks like, you know, you’re married to Matt silver, which of course you’re aren’t and so then it’s like, okay, well, I, you know, maybe I can figure out a way to correct that. You could write to the whoever owns that website and say, Hey, I think this is inaccurate or whatever. And so there’s certainly can you know that that is important, because even in referrals, I’m pretty sure Google their realtor, right? Even the ones that he does, yeah, everybody does.
Carrie McCormick 8:56 Yeah, everybody does.
D.J. Paris 8:58 Absolutely. And setting up alerts is a really good idea. So just as a funny sort of story, I my name again, my name actually isn’t DJ Paris. I mean, that is what I go by. But my name is really Delfin Paris is the D is for dolphin, the J is Joaquin. So it’s a very unusual name, but because nobody calls me that I have an alert set up on Google for DJ Paris, which I set up a long time ago, and everyone should set this up. But in my case, just as a funny story, there is a famous DJ called DJ Paris and it’s actually Paris Hilton, the the heiress to or I don’t know if she’s actually the heiress, but you know, the Hilton family. So she actually goes by DJ Paris, so I ended up getting all of her alerts. Because if I put Delft in Paris, you know, I would never get an alert because nobody calls me that so, but it is funny. So I know everything about Paris Hilton’s life accidentally, only because we have she uses the name DJ Paris because she is a DJ, which a lot of people don’t know.
Carrie McCormick 9:53 Did not know that.
D.J. Paris 9:55 Yeah. And it but it is a good idea. And I’ll tell you this, so that was is just a cute story. But this actually just happened a few days ago. So it’s really apropos to what you were just mentioning. i We have an alert. So I work at kale Realty. So I have an alert set for Kale Realty anytime, you know, news comes up at properties, which is where Carrie works, I’m sure has, they have a whole PR department so they’re watching that stuff too? Well, we had one of our agents at Kale was just featured in a cranes article for a home that he sold in Edison Park, which was apparently a big deal. I didn’t even know he had sold this home in Edison Park. And, you know, I guess our operations team knew about it because they processed the deal, but we didn’t know about it. And cranes thought it was a big enough deal to write about. And as a as a result, the only reason we knew about it was because we set the alert up. And then we were able to send his name is John and I sent John a copy of the article. And it’s like, Hey, John, just I’m assuming you already know this. But cranes wrote that a little blurb, blurb about you and this sale. And he goes, he said, You know, I they said they might but he they didn’t. They never told me really that they were going to and the one of the funny things is, he said, Well, they actually didn’t ask permission to use this particular photo of the property. So he was sort of laughing about the fact that you know that he didn’t get the he didn’t get permission to use the photo. But the point is, is like he didn’t even know that that had been published. So and you know it? I don’t know if he’s going to send that article around to his clients and friends. And I don’t know, maybe, maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But we certainly from a brokerage level, we were like, hey, then we made a big deal about it to all of our brokers, like, Hey, look at one of our agents is in the news, how exciting. And that’s something that if you’re on a team, or if you’re, you know, even if you just set up your company name, or just realtors in general, setting up alerts for that kind of information, it’s a great way to make friends in the industry, and really, you know, celebrate everyone’s successes and be able to reach out and you know, and say, Hey, I saw your article in such and such, you know, publication and congratulations, and, and that stuff really does go a long way in building friendships and relationships. And, and maybe that maybe that sort of helps tip the scale, sometimes in a multiple offer situation, where all of a sudden, they’re like, oh, Carrie, you know, she has submitted an offer and that she called me the last time I had was published in this art, you know, it doesn’t hurt, I guess is the point to, to, you know, celebrate other people. So I think that’s such a such a great idea. I have a suggestion. And I want to carry because I don’t practice real estate. So I really want to get your opinion on the side of my marketing tip for the week, had to do around a home anniversaries. And it was really funny because Carrie and I were talking just before we started recording. And I said I want to talk a little bit about home anniversaries, or home bursaries. And Carrie says, Oh, this is really funny, because you had just actually ordered some cards. So yep, she’s showing them right now. If you’re listening, you won’t see them. But she has these really cute cards that say Happy Home anniversary. So you will be sending those out to people that have bought homes, I’m assuming do you do them for sells sales as well or just purchases?
Carrie McCormick 13:13 You know, I, you know, every year I like to call people and I just really in or send him a little gift. And I just I was browsing around online, and I saw these really cute cards, and I didn’t know home anniversary, or they started calling him home home home aversary or something like that I wasn’t even a real word. But you know, these cards were so cute. And there was a gal that was handmaking them and I thought you know, again, to support like a local business or small business, I thought it’d be a great idea. And so now let’s just start sending these cards out. I think it’s such a cute idea.
D.J. Paris 13:48 Yeah, and it’s something that I know, as, you know, as just myself, I know, I don’t have people ask when did you move in and it was only like a year ago, and I’m like, I march I think I like I honestly don’t even remember when I moved into my place. So I suspect most people don’t maybe retain, you know, the specific date that they move in or close on a property. And this is a great opportunity to just remind people about that special day and you know what it’s like to, you know, get the keys and, and you can do it through through a card or a bottle of wine or whatever, you know, whatever you want to do, gift wise if there even needs to be a gift. But I would say one thing that that would be something I would include would be or maybe I’d send it out a week later or something. But I do also want to give them an updated comp, I would want them to say hey, you know if, you know, here’s what I’m seeing in your area, and if if anything’s changed for you let us know. And here’s what your home you know, may be worth right now. That is something that I think a lot of homeowners just don’t really think about until they need to think about it until they’re like oh, we are thinking of moving. But I think if I knew that my home would appreciate it. A certain amount, and it was a legitimate thing where I was like, Oh, I could make some money, then, you know, I personally wouldn’t probably move, but I know probably there would be people that would. And so I think that’s a great thing. And I don’t think most people are hitting up Zillow and looking at these estimates as often, as Realtors may think, because we live in that world. So might be something that your clients just aren’t really thinking about. And you can bring it to their attention and maybe, you know, help facilitate that conversation if they start to realize, wow, there’s an opportunity here.
Carrie McCormick 15:33 I think that’s a great idea. And one other thing I’d like another tip I’d like to put out there is, a lot of times when I’m meeting with a seller about selling their home, you know, we walk through the home and they say, you know, what improvements can I make to, you know, get the best ROI on my home, you know, and so we go through a list of it, but a nice consultation to clients. You know, if they’ve been in the house for three years, maybe they had, you know, a five, seven year plan is, is meet with them on year three and say, okay, you know, I know, you know, have your plans changed? Are you thinking of selling and maybe 234 years from now? And if the answer is yes, it’s like, let’s start talking about, you know, you mentioned the kitchen renovation, you mentioned the bathroom renovation, you know, the landscaping, you know, why don’t you start that now, and so you can enjoy it. Right, and the time that you come to sell your home, it’s already done, and you’re not scrambling at the last minute, you know, trying to get things improve. So, you know, come together as a, as more of a consultation about what can they do to improve the home. So the time that they’re ready to sell? It’s done and ready to go?
D.J. Paris 16:37 Are there any rooms that are usually wins for an ROI return on investment? And are there any that are usually not worth doing? If you’re looking for a return on investment? Are there any just I know, it could be anything in there? There’s a million variables in place, but general rule of thumb, are there any rooms where you’re like, usually? That’s a yes. Or Usually that’s a no,
Carrie McCormick 16:58 I think it’s going to be the usual suspects, right? You think of your kitchen and baths is number one, right? Landscaping, like your curb appeal is becoming so important. Windows are becoming important as well. Roofs are important, I guess. I don’t know, it just seems like it’s a little bit of everything. I’m just trying to think if there’s anything I’ve said no to you know, maybe, you know, washers and dryers, you know, stuff like that, that can be easily replaced, you got to think about from a buyer’s perspective, when a buyer comes in the home, they want it to be perfect. And they want to be able to move right in and not have any big capital expenses, like a roof or you know, furnace or something like that. So those are big tickets, if it’s something that’s easily can that can be changed, like, again, a washer and dryer, let’s say, you know, wouldn’t focus on that. One thing I read, which was very interesting, is one of the biggest thing people are looking for is the entrance like their front door, you know, of just like, that is setting the tone of walking in the house, you know, so if you have chipped paint on your front door, if it’s banged up, for whatever reason, you know, it just as a buyer approaches the home and the property, it really gives an impression of how well that home has been maintained and how welcoming it is. And it just sets a tone. And you know, not that I never thought about that. But I just didn’t realize that that kind of snuck up on the ranks of top things to improve upon is your front door.
D.J. Paris 18:28 Yeah, it is sort of the first thing that once you take in the overall entirety of a property just visually like you see it from the street, you see everything and then you sort of narrow in I guess at least I do I narrow in on the front door. I don’t know why I do that. Maybe because that’s the entry point and just sort of make sense to think about that. But you’re right. I think about it, and I do evaluate it in a weird way. I don’t I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t think I don’t think I’m a snob about it. But I do I guess I noticed it as the point and if it’s really unique or interesting or cool. Then I go ooh, look at that they did something and if it’s maybe if it is banged up a little that I do have a slight negative thought about it like why don’t they fix that up? So that’s a really good point is keep those front doors looking great as as well as the entire outside. That’s yeah, it’s it is we live in this like Instagram world where in particular, this Instagram perfect world where we can make things that aren’t look that don’t look good, look good. On screen. But then if the person shows up and everything’s been filtered to death, it’s it’s going to be a letdown. And I see it with some of these photos that some of the photography studios do when they’re shooting homes. And they just make the sky a little too perfect and the grass a little too green and everything’s just pops a little bit too much. And it’s like it looks cool, and it’s very enticing, but it’s not going to look like that when they get out of it. You know, if it’s a rainy day, it’s not going to look like that. And even on a sunny day, it’s not going to look like that. So I always think maybe we’re doing ourselves a little bit of a disservice by making every picture look a little too perfect. I’m curious what you think online dating? Yeah, exactly. You never want somebody to show up to the first date and go, Oh, that’s what you look like. You want them to go, you look just like, it’s like, the greatest compliment you could ever get when you’re dating is You look just like your photos. Because that’s the person that is that’s the person that the person is going to fall in love with. So you might as well, but I wonder if that applies? Do you see that as well? Sometimes, like they put clouds in the skies, and sometimes these these photos, just, they don’t even look real?
Carrie McCormick 20:42 Yeah, you gotta be careful with them. And you know, there are enhancements that I think enhance, you know, like a sky or a tree or something. But if you’re really changing the integrity of the home, and what really what it looks like, I think that’s a big no, no. And I’ve been with buyers that we walk into a home and they are let down, you know, because they’re in their mind, they were expecting, you know, a certain look, you know, and then they walk in, and it’s not at all what it looks like in the picture. So,
D.J. Paris 21:09 yeah, so tip there is Don’t Don’t overdo it, it doesn’t have to look perfect, it just has to look really good. And it also has to look really good when they step out of the car. And, and so it needs to be pretty similar, I would say. But, yeah, so those are our tips for the week. So we talked about, obviously, we just talked about sort of photography, we also talked about home gifts, we talked about Google Alerts. And also, you know, this is a great time to where everybody’s is really stressed. This is a good time to to ask for reviews, as you’re looking at your online reputation. There is no shame in reaching out to a previous client and saying something to the effect via email, or text or even a phone call and saying, hey, you know, I know, I felt like we had a really great experience. If you you know, have any time. If you would love to share, you know, with with the public your experience of working with me, I would really appreciate that, that really helps me out. And I suspect, most people would want to do that. I know I would want to do that anytime. Even a restaurant, I always think restaurants missed the boat, the restaurants never asked you to do that. And I always think like, whenever I have a good experience, I would be happy to do that for anybody. I go out to eat more than anything. And I’m always surprised that nobody ever says, Hey, if you had a good experience, you know, go on Google and leave us a review. But nobody does that. But I think you can ask for that. I think it’s okay to ask for that. And, and people are gonna read that stuff. So you might as well try to try to get some in there. But you probably have to ask because usually I think people aren’t thinking about writing a review, unless they’re, you know, over the moon overjoyed. And there’s somebody who likes to write reviews, or they’re really angry. And there’s somebody that likes to write reviews. So I think you know, when you’re there’s going to be angry ones written about every business and every person at some point in someone’s career. So you should also maybe stack the deck in an ethical way by asking your clients who liked you to also talk about their experiences. And we started doing this at our company. Where we we had, we didn’t really think about this, because we didn’t want to upset our agents. So a couple years ago, I finally said, you know, we would ask our agents, please ask your agents, or please ask your clients to write reviews, and nobody ever did. Because you know, it’s kind of embarrassing. Maybe I sort of understand that. So I said, Well, we’re gonna just ask every single client once they close, like, you know, and then the next month, hey, could you please let us know how your agent did. And I let our agents know that we were going to do that nobody seemed to have a problem with it. So we started doing that. And we went from I think we had like 50 reviews before we started asking now we have like almost 400. And once in a while you do get a one star review and happens. It actually just happened to us a couple of days ago. And it’s actually good for us to know that because then we could reach out to that agent and say, hey, just FYI, this person wrote this. Is there anything we can do to fix this is there, you know, and it happens. But almost all the reviews have been five star? And it’s like, oh, yeah, because, you know, we have really great agents. Of course, Carrie is a great agent, and her company has great agents as well. So I think you can ask for it. And people seem to be really excited about that. So definitely ask it if you don’t want to do it because you feel like it’s maybe self serving, ask your managing broker to do it. Ask your manager broker to reach out to your clients and get reviews on your behalf. There’s nothing wrong with that either. In fact, in some ways, it’s kind of easier.
Carrie McCormick 24:45 I don’t want to do it. Right. But you’re right, I think nine out of 10 Well, probably 10 out of 10 I mean they do you they do like to write a review for you. So definitely need to ask though.
D.J. Paris 24:56 Yeah, and with inventory shortages. We’re just gonna keep trying We’re going to get creative. And I know you know, we talk about that a lot. And so we won’t mention any more of that today. But, but getting creative is important. And so this is a good time to build those friendships with other realtors who might have some listings that aren’t yet on the MLS, or maybe they’re in a private listing network and, you know, aren’t even there yet. And you know, you can start to get, you know, more access to some of that stuff before it gets sold. So all right, well, I think that’s a great place to wrap. On behalf of everyone listening, we want to thank you for thank Carrie for her time, she is incredibly busy. Gosh, I don’t I don’t even know how many homes you’ve already sold this year. Dozens and dozens, I assume. And it is. So Carrie is very busy. And she is takes the time every month to come on our show. We’re so grateful. And if anyone out there is looking to work with a top Chicago real estate agents, she works in the city, the suburbs, she’s everywhere. And she’s been doing it for over 20 years, he has one of the best reputations of any realtor really in the area, they should reach out to you. Or if you’re an agent who has somebody moving to the Chicagoland area, you don’t service this area, another great person to reach out to as a referral. So Carrie, what’s the best way someone should reach out to you
Carrie McCormick 26:17 always call me 312-961-4612.
D.J. Paris 26:21 And we should mention that you do not have this big, incredible team, which most of the people in your peer group who are at the level you are at. In fact, I can’t really think of any exceptions to this, although there may be, but maybe just one or two. They all have big teams. And you’re really doing this all yourself. So she when she says she gives out her phone number, it’s because she’s the one answering the calls and, and taking care of everything. And she does it very, very well. So congratulations, of course on all your continued success. And we would like to ask everybody just to help us out two quick things. Please tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing our podcast and let them know about our show. And then also please, please leave us a review. I will ask for reviews because it helps us learn not only what we can do better, but also helps us get more listeners because you know the different podcast directories, prioritize shows that have reviews. So let us know what you think whatever podcast app, you’re listening, you know, give us a review. We really appreciate it. It helps us continue to grow. So that’s all I got for this week, or this month rather. So on behalf of Carrie and myself, we want to thank the audience for continuing to support our show and we will see everybody next time. Thanks Carrie.
Carrie McCormick 27:37 Thank you
Is Wholesaling Real Estate Ethical? • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Apr 20, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com provides a definition of wholesaling in real estate. Chris and D.J. discuss processes and regulations around wholesaling. Next, Chris and D.J. discuss possible problems that can arise from this process, does this process make sense for home-sellers and when? Last, Chris describes types of people who make the best fit for this job.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode is wholesaling and ethical practice and does it ever make sense? Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lynn cell from the close now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes.com. Let me tell you about the clothes. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level, please visit the clothes.com That’s a close th e c l o s e.com And subscribe to their newsletter so you can get notified each time they publish an article with us as always as crystallin Sal, he’s a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing or coaching, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters, local production. Now, Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you,
Chris Linsell 2:52 DJ, great to be back. Happy to be here. It’s It’s a big day. It’s a big day. I don’t know why but it’s just going to be a big one. Today is going to be a big one. Whenever you’re listening to this, it’s going to be a big one. I just have a feeling 2022 It’s here.
D.J. Paris 3:07 I’m excited too. And we actually have some some possible news about Chris and our show. But we’ll we’ll tease that and hold that just for the next time. We have some big big announcements coming around Chris. But for now we want to talk about a topic that I believe agents are have been hearing more about in recent years, different states have different regulations around it. Some have license requirements, apparently others don’t. So this is a mileage may vary based on where you’re practicing real estate. But we wanted to talk about a very controversial topic, I would think for most of our listeners and probably a topic that gets a lot of negative response. And we want to discuss that and talk about, you know, the ethics of this particular process, which is called wholesaling. So I’m very excited, because this is I get just to give you a little a little insight into my under not even my understanding of wholesaling. But as a real estate recruiter, I’ve been doing this 12 years, and I end up talking to a lot of agents who, once they get their license are figuring out which firm they want to join. And they’ll interview here, usually with other firms too. And I’ve been doing this 12 years and only I would say in Illinois in Illinois, the last two years, all of a sudden I started getting calls from people saying do you allow wholesaling because Illinois did apparently change their their requirements where Chris and I actually just looked it up. If you do more than two wholesale transactions in a year, you do need a license and in state of Illinois, other states have different rules, but I’m getting a lot of these calls. So it just kind of seemingly out of nowhere. So I’m very curious to talk about this with Chris, who’s a journalist and also a practicing agent. So let’s define maybe to get start Did we should just define what wholesaling is for just anyone who might not be familiar?
Chris Linsell 5:04 Yeah. So wholesaling in a nutshell is when somebody, a wholesaler approaches a home seller, and that’s usually the way it works, it’s usually somebody soliciting a home owner, somebody who owns property and saying to them, I’d like to purchase your home. And in order to do that, we need to get the home have a contract for a particular price. And the wholesaler actually doesn’t have a specific intention to, to execute this contract, their goal is to get the home under contract at a certain price. And then they go take this contracted price, and they turn around and they try to sell this contract or in the business, we call this a sign, they try to assign the contract to another buyer, who is willing to pay a higher price than the contracted price. So a good example of this is, let’s say I am a wholesaler DJ, you are a home owner, I would approach you and I would say, I would like to purchase your home for $90,000. And we you agreed to this, you put the home under contract, we have it in writing, I’m going to purchase this home for $90,000. And then I take this contract and I turn around and I turn to say a network of investors and I say I have this contract on 123 Main Street for $90,000. I will sell it to you for $100,000. More likely than not, I wouldn’t tell you exactly how much I have under contract for because what I want is for you to pay a higher price than what I paid for it. I would then if I agreed to your offer of or the investors offer of say $100,000 Then I would transfer my con my contractual obligations to the investor, the total price would be $100,000 90,000 would be paid to the original seller because that was their agreed upon sale price. And then the remaining 10,000 would go to me as the wholesaler. So it’s not a complicated process. This is what we hear a lot in the in the internet space as arbitrage when you find something cheap, and then you sell it for more. This is a pretty straightforward arbitrage technique. But it gets a little sticky in the real estate space because we have licenses, we have regulation. We have a code of ethics. And there’s a lot of questions about whether or not all of the above apply to the wholesaling game.
D.J. Paris 8:01 So a few quick questions about who gets access to what information. So just to recap, a wholesaler goes to a homeowner Hey, I’ll buy your property for x or I’ll put it under contract I’ll buy the option to purchase it but I’m basically I am not basically I am I am saying I will purchase the contract for next purchase the the the property, then it goes under contract. So the homeowner no longer can really is going to look for additional offers. And then that wholesaler goes around to people they know who are investors, or just anyone who wants wants to possibly buy this property. Now does the home current homeowner who’s selling do they know what the total end price of the wholesaler who finds another buyer do they get to see well, I sold it for 90 and this other person bought it for 151? Well, that would be significant. But But yeah, let’s just say 150. Would the home owner ever know that?
Chris Linsell 9:05 That’s a great question. And guess what? Nobody knows. There is no regulation around this. There’s no requirement for disclosure, at least not on a national level. There is no board or local association that says Here are the rules to wholesaling. It is kind of the Wild West in the same way that if you bought a pair of sneakers at a garage sale for $10. You would you would feel pretty great if you bought the sneakers for $10 at a garage sale and then put them on eBay for $80. Would the person who sold them at the garage sale would probably feel pretty rotten about that.
D.J. Paris 9:45 And wholesaler wholesaling contracts typically are not recorded on the MLS. I don’t know of any exception to that. But that is another reason why that information is often private because you wouldn’t get to see the recorded sort of public or the record that other agents would be able to see. And then maybe the homeowner might see as well.
Chris Linsell 10:09 That’s correct. And in fact, they there would be, it would be strange if it was recorded on the MLS, because wholesaling is almost exclusively done by people without real estate licenses without the tutelage of a managing broker. And without the regulation of a local association. It really is, in many respects, it is real estate, the business of real estate being conducted without the safeguards without the data, and without the regulation of the industry that is so prevalent in what I call traditional real estate transactions. So yeah, well, you wouldn’t see that on the MLS, you wouldn’t see the wholesale price, you wouldn’t see the investor price. And unless you live in a disclosure state, this is a private sale, that would never be accounted for on your MLS unless your MLS has some sort of retroactive like tax record, kind of reconciliation later on. But here’s the other interesting thing in the majority of states, Michigan is one of these states, when it comes to these private sales, it is not required that the township record, the specific number that a private sale happens under it is only required if that number is reached via a public sale through a licensed, licensed real estate professional. So not even going to the tax records would allow you to understand the value of this property as it changes hands, it really is kind of a different side is the other side to the coin of real estate transactions is wholesaling.
D.J. Paris 12:02 So let’s talk about the possible problems. Maybe we can just keep them in, you know, any sort of category, whether it’s ethical or legal. We’ll just start discussing what what might be more obvious as an issue, and maybe less obvious. And I’d like to start with one that in case you’re not as familiar with wholesaling. A not Chris, of course is but for our oldest listeners, one of the tactics that is often used, although certainly we don’t want to paint all wholesalers with the same brush. But a tactic that is often criticized that is, you know, used enough to become something that people write and talk about, for a process, a practice that is not well received, which is that a wholesaler oftentimes has no inclination, and in most cases, would never have inclination to actually purchase a property, what they’re wanting to do, the way they get paid, is they’re going to, as Chris said, sell that to an investor. So that’s sort of the whole point of wholesaling is not for the middleman, the wholesaler to end up with the property. So what they oftentimes do is they will tell the homeowner, that they are in fact going to purchase this property, that is the commitment they’re making. And then there’s a race against the clock for that wholesaler to find a buyer. So the one of the first criticisms is there’s some sort of false or false pretense here of that I am going to purchase this property Mr. or Mrs. Seller. I don’t know how often a wholesaler would disclose. I’m going to make a promise to purchase this, but I’m really not going to purchase this. I’m going to find somebody else to purchase it. And there’s really no obligation I think on the wholesalers and illegal obligation to tell the homeowner this at all.
Chris Linsell 13:59 Yeah, that’s that’s true, though. There, let’s make no mistake in a traditional purchase contract. It is it is illegal to enter into a contract that you have no intent, or ability to fulfill. This is legally is a tort, known as the fraud in the inducement it is it is committing fraud to sign a contract that you have no intention or ability or resources to execute. So, and frankly, it kind of is a house of cards that starts to fall down pretty quickly. If a wholesaler discloses to the seller that they have no intention of actually buying this because in doing so a wholesaler would have to say, Hey, listen, I’d like to get your home under I’d like to have exclusive right to purchase your home for a certain day. dollar figure. And I know that that dollar figure is under the market value of this home. So, I’m gonna go and try and find somebody who will buy it for market value. You, I’m gonna, I am requiring a contract from you that says I’m gonna buy this home for less than what it’s worth. No home seller in their right mind would agree to that, unless there are some extraordinary circumstances. And even if there were extraordinary circumstances, the home seller is not guaranteed a sale here, they’re only guaranteed that the home wholesaler will have the exclusive right to look for an investor or look for somebody to assign this to. There is a real chink in the armor of wholesaling, when you put it on the backdrop of the real estate practice, because in no way shape or form, is any step of the real estate wholesaling process that I cannot ascertain anyway, one that offers a fiduciary responsibility to any of the parties, there is no responsibility to the seller to do them to look out for their best interests or even their interests at all. There’s no responsibility to the buyer. The only person that matters in this scenario is the wholesaler. And that is completely opposite what our Code of Ethics binds us to.
D.J. Paris 16:31 Now what happens if a, if a wholesaler does not secure an investor with this sort of this contract that they’ve put in place with the with the current homeowner?
Chris Linsell 16:44 Well, there’s a handful of things that could happen, they could say, I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to buy this. And the seller could say, Well, hey, we have a contract, you are obligated to buy this. And the seller, or the buyer could say, well, I don’t have the money. And so you can try and sue me, but what are you going to sue me for? I don’t have any cash. And laws are typically written to protect buyers, instead of sellers. So it’s usually more of a pursuit that is going to be more trouble than it’s worth. If a seller was to try and bring legal action, a buyer could, if they can’t find somebody to assign their contract to if they are smart, they are baking in escape clauses into their contracts that say, I have the right to void this contract. For no for no reason for absolutely no reason other than I just don’t want to be in it up to a certain date, these kinds of escape clauses. The other thing that they could do, hypothetically, is they could bake a contract bake into their contracts, some sort of I will, you know, at such and such a time, if you are a licensed real estate professional at such and such a time, if I don’t have somebody to assign this contract to, I will list the home for sale for the price that we have we’ve agreed upon. That does happen occasionally. But frankly, it is usually a scenario of the wholesaler just says, Well, that didn’t work out. I’m just gonna walk away and move on to the next person that I’m going to try and put under contract. It just doesn’t end well for many people, frankly.
D.J. Paris 18:37 Yeah, and I will say, oftentimes another tactic that wholesalers will use in order to justify the process is if the homeowner says, Well, why wouldn’t I listed with a realtor? And the wholesaler might say, well, let me explain to you how realtor fees and commissions work and if we you know figure out what those triggers you know, typical Commission’s might be if somebody were to sell this property well look you’re actually you know, going to be paying this X amount in fees and commissions so here’s a way to avoid fees and commissions and I’m willing to buy it right now for this for essentially no fees or commissions. So yeah, if you had a a realtor, they might be able to get you 100,000 But you’re gonna be paying possibly 10,000 And now that’s that those numbers probably aren’t accurate, but but that’s that’s sometimes another tactic that’s used to convince that seller or the homeowner to sell the property to the wholesaler right that in there to avoid a lot of those commission issues.
Chris Linsell 19:45 Yeah, it’s the truth. And frankly, it is kind of a smoke and mirrors sort of explanation because it is really hard to it’s really hard to justify and a wholesaling angle As a benefit to a seller, because, frankly, the only way that I think hypothetically, this makes sense for a home seller is if the margin that a wholesaler would clear would be less than the typical cost of a real estate transaction. And that margin would then be likely somewhere in the neighborhood of three or 4%. Maybe. And for most people that I know, that have pursued or are active in the wholesaling space 10 to 15% is kind of the only thing they get out of bed for frankly. And so there just is no, I just, there’s no math that makes sense to me as to how this this benefits anyone except for a single person in the middle of this transaction, who is essentially taking an exorbitant fee to play matchmaker between investor and property seller or property owner.
D.J. Paris 21:03 And for so we might be thinking at this point, well, what kind of owner might be susceptible to this sort of sales pitch from a wholesaler? And I can think of a few examples, one could be possibly the heirs of maybe some parents that pass away that leave a house to children or other family members who do not ever want to deal with that home again, just want to get rid of it. I imagine wholesalers probably try to find those types of situations and say, hey, I can get rid of this for you very simply. And easily. You don’t have to deal with anything, I’m just going to buy it for this. So that would be sort of, I think, a pretty obvious, you know, reason why why that could happen. Another one would be the home is in distressed state where it’s going to require a tremendous amount of upkeep to get it to be able to sell effectively on the MLS, right? So that’s another or perhaps the loan is underwater, or the homeowner can no longer pay the mortgage. And there’s a risk of defaulting on the loan. So distressed kind of situations, I would think would be more susceptible, where people are just looking to get out. And maybe they grab the first lifeboat that comes their way. Yeah, and do I have a good understanding of that?
Chris Linsell 22:22 I think that those all those situations make sense. But I can’t not a single one of those scenarios in my brain is the optimal scenario. Because if let’s say you’ve got the errors, your parents, your parents just passed away, you’ve got their house, you need to unload it for emotional or financial or logistical reasons. You name it. It will, you know, in what way does somebody saying I will conditionally buy your house assuming that I can find somebody else to pay more for it than I’m offering you. Like, how does that simplify your life? I guess there’s just I can’t think of a single scenario where having somebody who might buy my house and puts me under contract and handcuffs Me and does not allow me to do anything else with my house in the time that they’re maybe going to buy it but not really going to buy it. Like they’re just to me, there are this, this feels like, I’m just gonna be honest with you. This feels like a grift. To me, this, this does not feel like there is anything there’s any upside measurable to the other outcomes that are possible within a real estate scenario that makes sense to people is it doesn’t happen. Yeah, it happens every day. I’m sure they’re there. It happens more than we have an understanding of because of the lack of regulation and recording. And could it be, I guess, hypothetically, an option for some people, maybe. And there might be wholesalers out there who take a very different approach to this. They might say there might be wholesalers out there that say, Listen, I have a network of investors who are interested in homes that match the criteria of your home, I understand that you may have set reasons why your home doesn’t feel like a candidate for sale. Maybe it is in disrepair. Maybe you are financially in a place where you’re concerned that the amount of money that you would get for the home wouldn’t cover your loan, and it would put you in a spot where you have to bring money to the table at closing. And that’s just not an option for you. There are a handful of reasons why a home owner might want to sell and feel like they can’t sell and a wholesaler does have if they’re connected in the right ways they could have value via these connections that could provide to a home owner with the rights kind of network to execute on their goals. That being said, because of the lack of regulation, you don’t need a license. You don’t need any training. You don’t have to repeat frankly, this is income that if you wouldn’t, the, there’s no, there’s no form of reporting, there’s no state regulatory agencies, this is somebody stroking you a check. Frankly, this is there’s just so many ways that this goes sideways, that you need a, like an absolute, like a cadre of, of virtual angels who decide they want to become wholesalers to avoid the legal and ethical and just, frankly, immoral pitfalls that come with this scenario, in my opinion.
D.J. Paris 25:57 You know, I I completely agree, I think we’ve made the case that this is largely a predatory practice. You know, similar to, you know, I always think of it more similar to the days before 2008 Nine, where the real estate market crashed significantly, where there were interest only loans, the early 2000s, where people did not have to put it wasn’t a grift, per se, but it was a very vulnerable place to be if you went into an interest only loan that might adjust from 2% as your initial rate up to 7%, you know, within a year or two SEC by twos time and those, those loans aren’t even I think they’re still around. Maybe a better example is a reverse mortgage, which, which also is problematic for a lot of a lot of cases. But we I think we agree that this is a dubious and predatory practice, you know, and again, I’m sure there’s people that would would claim otherwise. But that’s just our opinions of it. That being said, I will tell you, here in Chicago, I’m a recruiter. So I deal with people who are looking to move firms, they talk to usually many firms, including ours. By the time they get to me it’s not usually I’m not the first person they’ve chatted with. And if they are wanting to go into wholesaling, at least here in Chicago, the response I get is the very first question is do you allow wholesaling? Do you allow your agents to wholesale? And our answer is no. And the reason for that is with the reasons we just mentioned, and in addition, our errors and omissions coverage does not include wholesaling, or I believe it doesn’t include or it’s like questionable about whether our insurance provider would cover any errors and omissions claim on a wholesaling transaction. And we’re just worried about it losing our license. So we we don’t allow it. And what people tell me is, I don’t even know a firm. I’m sure there are that allow it but none of the large franchise firms I’m To my knowledge, none of them allow it. And I’ve yet to find any firm here locally, even smaller firms that that do allow it again, I’m sure there are some, but it is it is it’s become very common that I get these calls, because I think what happens, at least here in Chicago, there’s a lot of seminars and courses that the people can take where they are told about this practice, and it is pitched in a way that is I’m sure you know, persuasive, seductive, even possibly, and then but Oh, but you have to really get your real estate license in Illinois to really be able to do wholesaling. Again, I guess you could do up to two transactions a year without it. But if you’re really wanting to make money at this, you probably want to do more than that. So you have people that get their license, and then they’re just stuck going well, nobody really wants me. And it’s like, well, yeah, because you were sort of sold on this, this whole concept. And you and you new agent didn’t even know that this is kind of a predatory practice. So it’s just becoming really common. I think the people benefiting the most oftentimes are the people selling these courses because like just exploded out of out of seemingly nowhere in the last couple years.
Chris Linsell 29:09 Yeah, it’s the truth. And you know, one thing that is really interesting to me, and something that I hope if you are listening to this, maybe you you saw the title of this podcast and you’re and you don’t have a real estate license, and you’re thinking well I want to get into wholesaling. So maybe this will be helpful for me if you are the sort of person who would be good at wholesaling. Now, these are the sorts of people who connect well with their community. They talk well to strangers, they are able to demonstrate value of their of their services via their I like a smart and thoughtful conversation and can answer good questions. You would do great. As a licensed Realtor, this is what we do. And in fact You get to do this with the benefit of also have been able to go to bed at night with a clear conscience knowing that you are getting paid, on average a lot of money relative to the rest of the working world. And you’re doing so with the best interests of your clients in mind. I mean, if you think that wholesaling is for you, real estate, really, I mean, it really could work out great for you that that. The last thing I want to say about this DJ, and I think this is important to say is, even though I think wholesaling is mendacious, and frankly, it’s it’s fraud in a lot of ways. It is a it is a threat to an over regulated industry that is ready and needs change in order to account for the way that business is done in the 21st century and and beyond. And though I think that this particular iteration of change and disruption is harmful on the whole, to most players in the market. Change does need to happen. regulations need to adjust. They need to be loosened in some places tightened in other places, we need to account for the way that business is done in the 21st century. And while I don’t think this is the way to do it, this is this should be a high sign. This should be a lighthouse on the ocean here that says hey, look, there are things happening over here. And we need to adjust to them, we need to change our thinking a little bit as an industry to account for these different approaches. And is this the way to do it? Probably not. But I do think that our industry deserves some disruption and some regulatory change. If this, isn’t it, which I don’t think it should be, we need to think about it in other terms and have those conversations.
D.J. Paris 32:13 Yeah, I’ll just I’ll just end with this as a something that I get I do consider myself a bit outside of the industry, because that was not my background was was not real estate when I came on board here, and I don’t practice real estate. And I have always been absolutely confused. This is a different topic for a different day about real estate commissions and who actually pays them. And that’s something that I feel is murky at best, possibly not intentionally secretive, and sort of confusing, but just by nature of the laws and processes in place. And the standards that we employ can be very difficult to understand for a homeowner who’s either selling or the person buying. And I always find it interesting to ask agents. How do you explain Commission’s you know, to your not what you get paid, but just what the overall commission is and who’s actually paying those fees? And and it’s not as comp? It’s not as simple answer, I don’t feel. And that’s something we’re also, you know, we’re talking about regulation. And maybe we can spend a whole topic on how to have conversations about what real estate commissions are and and who’s responsible for, for paying them. Because that, to me is also very confusing.
Chris Linsell 33:28 Totally, totally. And there are, there are so many different ways that we can improve our process just by educating both ourselves and our consumers and being supported by regulatory bodies and local conditions that facilitate that education rather than hinder it. So if we keep things like wholesaling on the fray and and frankly, if we over regulate in the wrong ways, it’s going to drive people to the unregulated spaces. This is why black markets occur, frankly, because we are providing over regulation that prevents the real flow of information, goods, services and money. And people say like, well shoot, I can do this better on my own. And I know how to do this. And there’s no reason that I shouldn’t do this. So I’m just gonna look out for number one and just do it like this. And that’s not the precedent we want to set as an industry.
D.J. Paris 34:23 Agreed, well, we a great place to wrap up. And just as we’re wrapping up, I want to remind everyone that if you’re not already a current reader and subscriber to the closed.com, it is our absolute recommendation that you start reading their content. 99% of it is free right on their site, and it’s good long form deep dive articles into how to become a better realtor, essentially, how to better improve your business your skills. They go deep, and very few. In fact, I’m not sure of any real estate, blogs or web sites that have this kind of level of journalism, where it’s specifically designed to help agents kind of grow and grow quickly. Can you just mention the subscription model that the close has for anyone who wants to sort of see what, what else the close offers, in addition to all this great free content?
Chris Linsell 35:17 Yeah, absolutely. If you want to come join, if you want to take your business to the next level, and you go a little deeper on the close, you can join the close Pro, close Pro is our premium service. It is the place where we keep all of our fantastic next level courses, our resource library, access to coaching access to webinars that you can’t get anywhere else. We’ve got a fantastic set of training courses, on Facebook and on Instagram and on surviving and thriving and shifting markets and long term lead generation strategies. It just goes on and on and on. We are looking at providing frankly, the next level of service if you are if you like what we do on the clothes come get a personalized level up approach by by accessing the clothes Pro, we offer this at 35 bucks a month 299 for the year. And there are a ton of things that get added to this service every single month. So come check out the closed Pro. And even if you’re not interested in closed Pro, just come come to the close we got all sorts of cool stuff going on. Including like really, really great new content that’s hitting the hitting the wire every day like just today we published or yesterday we published seven real estate, excuse me seven real estate copywriting rules. professional writers swear by Realtors you guys were writing listing descriptions and marketing and branding comm learn from professionals comm check out what we got with this is the sort of content we publish every single day.
D.J. Paris 36:58 We’re big fans, everyone should go to the close.com and read their content, get hooked on it, it will help your business and it’s not the simple five tips to have a successful open house that are things like bake cookies and things you already know. They go they like I said they go deep and wide. And they actually that because they know if the content isn’t good, you’re not going to show up again and the content is good. So please go to the clothes.com. Chris, as always, thank you so much for showing up on our on again, in really going deep in a topic of wholesaling. And for anyone else who if you have ideas of topics that you’d like Chris and I to discuss at length like wholesaling, please let us know. But also, please tell a friend about our show. Think of one other real estate professional that would benefit from hearing this or perhaps send this to homeowners as a way to educate them about wholesaling people that you know, I also see this as a huge opportunity for our listeners who are agents who think well, what do I do about this? Educate your customers, your sphere of influence is a great topic to create social media content about making videos about and really kind of a buyer beware, beware scenario that you get to talk about with everyone, you know. So anyway, hopefully this was helpful. Thank you, Chris. On behalf of Chris and myself. We also thank the entire audience for continuing to listen and support our show and we will see everybody next time. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, TJ.
How To Grow A Real Estate Agent Brand • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Apr 19, 2022
Welcome to the March episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel and DJ discuss the activities Joel’s team organizes and how it helps build and grow a brand. Joel also shares tips on how to make your offer stand out in the market right now and also what should agent tell their clients about the increase in the rates. Last, Joel discusses the mortgage rates at the moment.
D.J. Paris 0:00 As a realtor, how do you grow your brand? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of thinking of real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today, once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel Schaub from guaranteed rate. Now, Joel is the vice president of lending guaranteed rate, and he’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. Last year alone, Joe gave back almost $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume at in the top 1/10 of 1% of lenders nationwide. So there’s actually over 400,000 loan officers in the United States. And Joel is currently ranked number number 137. And last year, he closed for his record year it was 619 transactions. And that was for just shy of $250 million to 49 million. And already this year, Joel has closed 70 transactions for $27 million. By the way, 25 and a half million of the 27 million that he’s already done this year, were purchases not refi. So he has not seen a slowdown at all. But if you are looking for a loan officer who can do loans at a high level to close for your clients, we cannot highly more recommended Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Joel can be reached on Via email at Joel at get I’m sorry, joel@rate.com joel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a message text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. We know Joel Schaub,
Joel Schaub 3:17 at Hey, DJ, thanks so much for having me on. These accolades, I hear the numbers myself. And none of that matters. It really is about coming on and giving back and really teaching agents to some of the things that I’ve done over the last almost 20 years of lending. We have fun almost every time we do this don’t wait.
D.J. Paris 3:37 Yet we do and I want to before we get started today, I want to mention a couple of things that Joelle has done that I I’m always impressed by. Because I think from a branding perspective, I think, well aside from you running a great business, and you have a great team in place. And we can certainly talk about that. But I always think from a branding perspective, you’re really somebody to admire and really look because I think from branding wise, and I know your brand is really giving, but the way that you present that brand and make sure that the people in your sphere are aware of what activities are important to you. I think you do it better than just about anyone. And I want to mention just a couple of things that that I’ve seen recently from Joel and Joel doesn’t do these for any these are things that Joel just does for for himself and his business. But he really it’s something that is very, very prominent here in Chicago and this is why part of the reason why Joel is so popular. One of the things is Joel was just on the cover of the most recent issue of Chicago agent magazine, he was actually featured they only feature really one lender and their cover per year he was featured this year which is a huge deal. So congratulations there. And also with the of course the recent tragedy, or ongoing tragedy in the Ukraine. Joel took took it upon himself to one of his one of the broker realtors that he works with who I’m actually friendly With and she and I serve on a committee together. Her father is still in, she’s from the Ukraine and her father’s still over there. And her she was able to get her mother out thankfully before the invasion, but still dealing with day to day like checking in with her father and trying to do what she can to raise money for the Ukraine people. And Joel took it upon himself to really push that same message out to his social sphere, so that everyone knew that this is what’s happening. And she’s a newer agent. So she probably doesn’t have a large sphere at this point. And I really, really was impressed by that. And it actually inspired me to take action and donate as well. So Joe, I want to thank you for bringing that sort of to everyone’s attention, even though we’re all watching the war. You know, we’re not always thinking what what can we do to to, to help
Joel Schaub 5:47 you bring up a good point, it’s, it’s community, right? And that’s community on a big world scale. And when we look at our business and talk about it in terms of real estate, how can we come back and be a community in the places in which we work. And so for years, it’s just finding ways to give back and be a force for good, I guess. And that’s what I always tasked my agents with finding things that they’re passionate about, that they can go out and speak on that. Make sure that people see that you’re doing things in your community, that make you a leader and you’ll grow your business, you truly will.
D.J. Paris 6:25 Yeah, well, you you consistently do that during the pandemic, you were doing daily, sort of, I don’t want to say giveaways, but you were doing daily donations, and, and ways to support different, you know, businesses. And, and that that was how, how you guys stayed busy during during that time. And it was, it was really an inspiration to a lot of other realtors and loan officers to see what can I do to contribute. And I know that that is really been the message that ever since you’ve been on our show, you know, every single time we talked about this givers get mentality, which is which is how you live. And this this most recent post about the Ukraine was another example of of you trying to help out and contribute. So I, I applaud you for that, especially because it was a friend of mine, and a friend of yours. And I appreciate, you know, any publicity that that that could be given to them. So they can hopefully end the war as quickly as possible.
Joel Schaub 7:19 And going further back on that DJ, we did 30 Days of Giving. And that was the campaign it was the joke and smack campaign. So during the beginning stages of the pandemic, when restaurants were truly shut down, found 30 different restaurants and bought gift certificates from those restaurants, and then found people that had lost their jobs or were down on their luck and just didn’t know where their next meal was going to come from in partnered with them to give them food. And it was a two edged sword in a positive way to help the people in your community and help the businesses that you love and that you go to when times are good to support them. When times are bad. And that wasn’t my idea. So I have to give a lot of credit DJ to my team. So I know it’s the just called Joel but it’s really just called dual team. And what I really wanted to focus on today, and what we had talked about off air was just getting an understanding if you’re an agent, what a team like mine looks like to get to $250 million of annual production. And you’ll learn a few things that might help you in your day to day business, just hearing who’s on my staff what they do, and how it’s not just a one or two person show we’ve built it up to I have seven team staff members that really help make sure that clients get a white glove experience.
D.J. Paris 8:40 And these meetings are Yeah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I was going to say I got so excited because a major distinction. You know, we saw in the news, a, a virtual lender is now laying off an additional 3000 people which are not what we’re talking about when you say your team and of course a totally different company. So guaranteed raise is not in the in the layoff processing thing fully. But a lot of firms are as they’re seeing the slowdown in the number of you know, loan applications and refi is coming in. We’re starting to see some of these bigger sort of faceless, non team structured companies where it’s just a huge bullpen of of people doing all sorts of transactions on on you know, just a simple salary starting to get thinner and getting layoffs and you have an actual team that’s your team. And that’s really significant and unusual in this are unique, I should say not unusual, but unique in this industry. And that really helps you close deals a lot faster.
Joel Schaub 9:41 Agents have told me specifically they had other lenders in the past and what they found was the person they spoke with was great and maybe one other person that was directly working for them was really good as well DJ. But then once it goes into processing or once it’s handed off, you lose all control of the file. In a lot of cases, you’re taking a loan in your home state. And then it’s being underwritten in Cleveland, Ohio, and they don’t know the person so they don’t have the connection. And this business is all connections and knowing the people, so the staff membership for our team, literally is set up where they’re incentivized. So if it’s at four o’clock on a Friday, and there’s a new file coming in, or even if it’s 530, let’s say for five, let’s take a 530 or six, and it’s on a Friday, and there’s a new client coming in, they’re being handled, and they’re being handled with care, versus a lot of places like this is my last call I want to get out of here. We’ve incentivized them in a way where it is family. And we set up around the clock, Saturday and Sunday service so that agents that need a new pre approval, clients that are filing tax returns and need to get a updated letter, these types of requests get handled, not just by an assistant, somebody that’s highly trained and ready to help. And that’s how we’re able to submit offers that are designed to win. Well, let’s
D.J. Paris 11:10 let’s talk about that. Because that is when I go talk to agents, of course, we have a lot here at our own company, but also, when I’m just interacting with agents in the industry. We were just at an event A few weeks ago that I was talking to all these younger agents, and they’re all stressed because their offers are of course, you know, there’s multiple offers still going on, we’re still in a low interest rate environment, and not as much inventory. And so people are wondering, What can I do to, to to get my, my offers noticed? And how do these top agents seem to seem to slide right to the top of the pile when they’re submitting offers. So I know, you have some thoughts about, you know, some best practices there.
Joel Schaub 11:51 Yeah, we’ve been able to actually cut through all of these multiple offer situations. And of course, we don’t want every one of them. But we’re really good at succeeding when there are multiple offers, even if we’re not the highest price, because just a few things that we do right up front that make our offer stand out. Okay. And that’s really what we need to do here is when when these agents and we know we’ve all heard it, we’re calling for highest and best, or the first words highest. But you don’t have to be the highest, you need to be the best. And the best could mean several different things. And what I found recently, is that the listing agents are really looking at who’s doing the financing unless it’s cash, right? Calling the loan officers and I encourage all agents to do this, reach out to the offer and make sure that the person who says that the financing is good. It is good. All right. It’s something that we used to get away from as agents saying, Oh, I think this is fine. I encourage you now absolutely make the phone call and and try to do it on a Saturday or do it after hours, you’ll know right away who the real players are, if you’re getting an answer at 730 on a Monday, or 8am on a Sunday, these are the people that you really want to start partnering with yourself. So here’s what we’ve done DJ, when an offer goes in, and we’re submitting an offer, and we know that there’s multiple offer situations, the buyer’s agent copies me the lender on the offer to the listing agent. Okay, the email goes over where we’re writing the offer. And we’re including the lender. So if you’re a listing agent, and you’re seeing that there’s somebody actually on the other end that’s ready and willing to reply, it puts you at a whole different advantage when you’re the buyer submitting an offer, because you know that the listing agent sees that this looks like an offer that’s got their act together, okay. Then I make the phone call to the listing agent. And I review the specific file and tell them the strengths. And I say, I know that you probably have multiple offers here. Don’t you wish we had five of those properties to sell. It’s a great property. And I just wanted to share just for two minutes, a little bit about this buyer to reassure your sellers, if we come to terms that they’re going to have the easiest transaction, and I go through that. And that helps set us apart. If there’s multiple offers. And no loan officer picks up us making that first phone call to the listing agent to cut through all the clutter.
D.J. Paris 14:19 What and I know you do this, so you might not always know what other loan officers do or don’t do, although I’m sure you probably have a good sense what percentage of loan officers in your experience you know, make those kinds of calls when an offer is being submitted. I assume it’s a pretty rare thing.
Joel Schaub 14:38 But it’s so I encourage the agents right now you are working with good mortgage guys, right? There’s people that you know start asking them if they’re willing to do this for you. Because it goes a long way. I have top agents in our market that are expecting my call now they go What took you so long? Right? They submitted the offer an hour ago, right Took me 40 minutes to call. And it’s, it’s kind of a joke. But the point is they know that I’m going to be calling, I know the file. And I think right now, maybe 10% of loan officers are even being asked to do it. So they probably don’t come and do this on their own. So I don’t know if it’s necessarily the lenders fault. But what it is, is if you’re an agent right now, start implementing this, whoever use for mortgages, connect with them and say, on our next deal, where we’ve lost out, do you mind making a phone call on behalf of our buyer, and just watch it does make a difference. And if you’re a listing agent, or if you do buy and sell hearing this, you know, you would like to know a lot more about the financing, and you’d like to know without you having to call and get somebody on the other end of the phone that says, what file now who, what, you know, that’s a dud, right. So reach out, be proactive, cut through the clutter, copy that your lender on the offer, it’ll go a long way.
D.J. Paris 16:02 And also to like loan officers should really be doing this. I know everyone’s busy. And it’s hard, but also great sort of way to show your your strengths to the listing agent, in case they’re going Gosh, this loan officer is really on top of things, maybe I’ll use he or her on our next transaction. So I imagine it’s, it’s something that is surprising that maybe 10% of the ellos do so yeah. And again, your primary responsibility is to help the borrower and the agent representing the borrower, and that is just really going above and beyond and makes a huge difference when they’re getting, you know, 20 other offers. And most a lot of times agents don’t even call the listing agent, or the sort of representing the buyer saying I just submitted this offer, just wanted to let you know, and most agents, I think don’t even do that. So that’s a really impressive. Here’s
Joel Schaub 16:49 the second one DJ, having the lender, really educate the borrower on what it means to go above asking price, okay, because it’s no secret right now, the good properties have multiple offers, okay, every one of them does. If there’s a good property that hits the market, you’re not the only buyer in town, the sellers hold all the cards, and one of the phrases in highest and best is highest, okay? So we don’t have to be the highest, but we don’t have to be afraid of going above list. And that starts with the loan officer, it really comes down to educating the borrower that if we were to go in 10, grand or even 20 grand above list, because we’ve lost out on other places, and we really want to win this one, if we are 20 grand above, that might mean 90 or $100 difference in payment, it’s not something that’s going to move the needle for most buyers, if they have the ability to go above. But the unknown of what that means means that a lot of buyers don’t. So having a lender really take the time to talk through what the payments look like if you were to go 10 grand above or 20 grand above, so that you as the buyer’s agent aren’t the one informing them, they should go higher and not know what the math is on it. It’s all about education.
D.J. Paris 18:09 And you’re a big fan too, on the pre approval letter to not restrict the the highest of sort of pre approval amount to whatever the offer necessarily is in this particular environment. Right. Your your your, your philosophy is, hey, in a multiple offer situation, you should be able to show some wiggle room that hey, we can we can go up if we need to. And I guess you know, of course, the listing agent, they’re going to look at that they’re going to look and say, well, this person’s only approved for X amount, then there’s a back and forth. Well, it can if we if you go above this, are they still pre approved. And your philosophy is show all your cards because it actually strengthens your hand versus weakens it. I
Joel Schaub 18:52 know I’m gonna get a lot of flack for this. Okay, but closing over $20 million of production. And you know, every single month, I’m seeing something that works. Now, I know we’re gonna get a lot of hate mail saying I don’t want to give away my hand, right? It’s poker, right? If, if my buyer can go all the way up to $800,000. And we’re only offering 725. I want you to put 725 on the letter. And I’ll tell you a lot of agents are right. For years. That was a really good strategy. Right now I want to negotiate it from a point of strength. And I want the sellers to know that of all the offers. Here’s another reason why these buyers are strong. They’re approved for well above the asking price. It doesn’t mean we’re gonna pay 800 Because the house isn’t worth 800 But they are approved at a much higher amount. So if you have multiple offers, here’s another reason that we’re strong. So just try it. If you’re a buyer’s agent, get your lender to update the letter for the highest amount. What are they approved for? Okay, submitting an offer there really shows that a buyer could go buy anything but we’re so interested in your Ross, I hope we can make a deal.
D.J. Paris 20:02 Yeah, it’s this abundance sort of mentality to where it almost creates, I think maybe a slight sense of urgency for the seller to go, oh, this, this person’s a legit player here. And and they can just like you said they could go out and buy other things because they’re approved for hire. I almost think it’s sort of counterintuitive, like you were saying, and, and maybe in other environments that we’re not in today, maybe it would make sense to keep that a little closer to to, you know, to the to the chest. But I think now it’s like, you want to show all your strength. So I think that’s a really strong thing. And that’s also a good sort of check to have a conversation with the loan officer that the agent is using, and saying, What do you think about this? And if they go, no, no, no, we never want to do that. Well, now you have another opinion from somebody who closes a lot of transactions? He says, no, it’s actually a really good idea.
Joel Schaub 20:55 Yeah, yep, you’re absolutely right on that if something isn’t working, let’s try to find ways that we can change it up and partner with people that really know what they’re doing in terms of, are they going to listen to what you say, and try to move the needle so that you don’t have to submit five offers and continue to lose? And it’s hard right now, I’ll be the first to say it. I work with a lot of agents that they come to me all the time. And their number one question is, I see you getting these deals done, what’s the secret, and there really isn’t a secret. It’s just trial and error over all these years. And so being humble goes a long way. I don’t have all the answers at all. But I’ve seen some things that work. And I love sharing those things. And if you’re listening and you get one more deal done, or you can help one more family close on a transaction, you don’t know who they know, maybe they refer you three more people. And that’s the power of positivity, educating and leading with value. Love it. So we’ve covered a couple of ways that it works. And it’s all about the team. So it’s not just me, right? So we touched on this. And so one of the things that we do is I have a great newsletter that goes out weekly that agents literally print out and they put up in their office. And it is it’s timely, it helps agents understand kind of what’s going on, so that they don’t have to be an expert on mortgages. But each week, they have something where they could talk to the borrowers while they’re driving. And it comes from my staff. So Maria is a rock star, Marie, if you’re listening, we love you. And to be added to this list, you can simply email me it’s joel@rate.com, it’s our weekly market update. So you can just send a simple email to say add me and or add me to the market update list. And weekly, then you’ll get really good timely content about interest rates, program changes, and things that you can bring to your borrowers that make you look like a rockstar,
D.J. Paris 22:57 it’s a great place to get good answers to when the clients are saying, you know, I’m reading online that rates are going up. And this is bad. And this is scary. And and you just you sort of take the actual data, and you give agents actionable sort of sound bites, but you know, written sound bites to say, Okay, here’s how to interpret this, here’s what to say, here’s what’s going on. And that’s really what agents need, because they’re oftentimes the first person to to I was just at an event. I’ll just mention this briefly, a couple of weeks ago with about 300 agents. And I was talking to them and saying, Hey, what’s going on? What are your struggles right now? Just because I was curious, because I don’t I don’t go out and produce. And like four or five of the people I talked to out of like seven said, Oh, man rates are going up and I go, Well, I they’re still pretty low. Right? They’re like 4% and, you know, where I don’t know where they’re at today. But but sometimes it was about 4% of the time and and people go guys, that’s still really great. And and they were like yeah, but our clients are freaking out because of course they’re seeing new stories. And and what I love is, is that not that that isn’t something to be concerned about. And of course you should have an answer for it as an agent, but this is where you have a good relationship with your elbow. And you say what do I need to tell my clients how do I calm them down a little bit and and that’s what I love about you is you’re all about education. So I’m just curious are and I know that you know maybe more experienced agents aren’t freaking out but for anyone out there who’s gone oh my gosh, now my purchasing power for my buyers is maybe gone down a little because rates of course, you know, we’re in historic lows, of course they’re gonna go up a little bit. What do you suggest that agents tell their their borrowers or their buyers who are borrowing, you know, to sort of calm the storm a little bit.
Joel Schaub 24:50 Numbers don’t lie. Okay. And so if we actually take the data and see what the difference is on a typical $350,000 loan DJ where rates were at before? Okay, and what that meant for a payment, and then figure out where the $350,000 loan is today with the rates and what that payment is. And then we just compared to what it was any time before the pandemic, right, what you’ll see is it the payments today are still much lower than anytime in 2017 2018 2019. And for that matter, the first decade of the 20 is, you know, what do they call that? It wasn’t the teams, maybe it’s the on off. So the did you just do the data. And that’s what this next week’s market update is going to show is just a simple comparison so that we can talk to our buyers with some confidence and not omit the past that’s recently where rates are lower, but put it into a context to state that. If you’re paying rent, and you’re spending x number of dollars, that’s 100% interest all that money is out the window. So I don’t care if the rates are 2.75, or 4.75. It’s a hell of a lot less than 100%, that we’re throwing out the window. And just teaching and showing them that if you’re moving from homeownership from renting, now’s the time.
D.J. Paris 26:17 Yeah, I remember in the early 2000s, I guess the aughts. They,
Joel Schaub 26:23 largely cheese that’s, my grandmother would say, I
D.J. Paris 26:27 remember remember interest, and maybe they still have these, but interest only loans are really popular. And they were just in like there was like, sometimes under 2%. But and you wouldn’t have to put much down, if any. And it was just a whole different world. It was pre pre 2008 2009. And, and those days are of course long over but it’s like, well, sure, you could think back Well, gosh, I wish I would have locked in it 2% Back in the early 2000s. Except those always those always expired within about three to five, seven years. So it was it was something that that was a very sort of it was an aberration, as just like in the early 80s, when it were in the late 70s When it was double digit, you know, rates were like really good. You got a 12% rate you were a superstar. So like the idea that we’re at 4% now and people are freaking out is is really perspective, it’s about perspective and saying, Hey, this is still really great. And by the way, you know, now that now that its rates have gone up slightly. Yeah, oh, it’s only an extra 50 bucks a month or $100 a month and your mortgage payment, which probably shouldn’t make or break your decision of whether to buy a property.
Joel Schaub 27:35 You’re exactly right. So that again, test me send an email joel@rei.com and simply say, add me to the list. It could be you can do it from your phone right now, Joel, that rate, add me to the list. And then you’ll get this market update on a weekly basis. And it’ll give you information that you can go back and have good conversations with your local lending partners, and see what we’re doing in our market, how you can do the exact same things in your market partner with people that really want to truly give back to you and partner with you. And in this market, where lending is very vital to completing the transaction. Getting those partners right now are the number one thing I’d be doing. If I was an agent, it’s kind of reassessing who are the people that are really being given access to my friends, family clients, who are the people that I’m going to trust, my Commission’s with, when I go under contract, if they’re not the people that are working nights and weekends, and really being there for you add somebody else to the list, we’d happy to be that person. But the number one thing that we want to talk about here, and we didn’t get to so this is gonna be a teaser for next time is the structure for the team. Right? I want to go through and make sure that everyone knows kind of the anatomy of getting to a $250 million production annually. And even if you don’t have aspirations of getting there, what I’ll explain will really truly help you figure out who’s on your staff that you should keep who was on your staff that might be time to let them go. And who you can add right now, as a lot of people do get downsized with different positions at places, there’s an opportunity to pick up more employees. So we’re gonna go through that for sure next time, but it wouldn’t be a market, or wouldn’t be a update with me without talking about rates for a minute. You’ve mentioned it. So so much of the time. Do we even talk about rates here? Almost never. I know for a mortgage guy, I think we should.
D.J. Paris 29:29 Absolutely, let’s do it.
Joel Schaub 29:31 Right. So on average right now, mortgage rates are anywhere just below 4%. So the high threes to just above 4% When we’re talking about 30 year fixed mortgages DJ with 10 to 20%. Down the average we’ve seen rates that are still in the threes even though the headlines say over 4%. So the fear and what what people are thinking is going to happen is that the Fed Haven’t even raised rates yet. Wow, the rates are all the way up to this amount. And the Fed still haven’t raised rates yet what’s going to happen when they raise rates this year. And I always want to remind people that it’s already baked in, the Fed meets seven times a year and mortgage rates are updated daily. And in this volatility, they’re moving literally, sometimes two or three times a day. There’s new rate sheets printed based on what’s going on. So I like to tell this story that when the feds do raise rates, and it’s, you know, comes across as the headline, it’s a quarter point increase today, they don’t call all the mortgage banks and say, reminder, everyone, today’s the day, increase your rate sheets by a quarter percent. It’s kind of funny, but it’s true. It’s built in. So what how can we use this information to educate our clients? And how can we not be like the other agents that are selling fear? Okay, it’s okay to educate. But what we shouldn’t say is, we should really get this home today, even if you don’t want it, because rates are going to go up a lot. And if you don’t buy this, you’re gonna miss out. Right? I hate that I don’t like it just seems icky, right? It’s not the right way to build a business, it’s not the right way to communicate with people. And it’s just not true. So if you can take some time and educate, just learn about what the Federal Reserve reserve is going to do this year, they’re raising the prime rate, and the prime rate right now is at three and a quarter. And mortgage rates are above it. So we do have a lot of room to move before mortgage rates continually go up. I think by the end of the year, we’re going to be in that mid fours. But I don’t see a situation anytime this year, where all of a sudden, because the feds have raised rates that we go from under four to five or 6%. And I’ll buy you a steak dinner if I’m wrong. But I’m right, we won’t see the 30 year fixed rate be at five or 6%, they’re going to be in that range either a little bit below for a little bit above for for most of this year, even when the Fed start to raise rates. So as an agent, take that knowledge and educate your clients and make sure that you win because somebody else might be selling them fear, you’re okay, rates will be good. Go find the right home for you. And don’t worry if it’s 4.1 or 4.3.
D.J. Paris 32:27 Yeah, it’s it’s a really good point. And, you know, this is I always say, you should know what your clients are reading and what they’re absorbing and the news and then adjust, you can educate to adjust to their expectation and, and you know, and that’s, that’s really what, what, what just people want is they want somebody that goes, Hey, don’t worry about that. Well, not that don’t worry about it, but here’s what you’re reading, here’s the reality, they want education, and they want comfort, and we’re thankfully it’s there, the sky isn’t falling. So there’s so sky is not falling, when to make sure I didn’t sort of blur my words, the sky is not falling. This is. So this is really a great opportunity to realign your clients with and maybe getting them above the signal to noise ratio is making sure that the signals coming through and they’re maybe not paying attention as much to the noise that may be just the media hype to try to get some some clicksor eyeballs on, you know, a shocking headline. So, Joel, you gave us so much great value today. And I think it’s a great place to wrap up. We want to remind everyone out there if you’re not currently partnered with a loan officer, that is helping you actually grow your business, not just helping you close the transactions, because of course, you know, blown loan officers do that that’s their job, but actually helping you strategically do marketing partner up together in events, and are actually saying what can I do to help you Mr. And Mrs. Agent grow your business, then you really need to maybe consider finding a loan officer that can do that. And we really encourage you to take a look at Joel and his team. The easiest way to reach out to Joel to see if you guys can work together is to shoot him an email. Best email you can find them at is joel@rate.com. Very easy to remember joel@rate.com You can also email him to ask to be put on his weekly newsletter that he mentioned earlier. And then you can also call him directly Joel, do you mind giving out your phone number and suit and text message as well?
Joel Schaub 34:30 773-654-2049 And if you call that mean test me literally we answer the phone. And I can’t tell you the number of fun conversations I’ve had just from people all across the United States where they call they book a 15 minute call with me and it’s it’s just so great to see what people are doing in different markets. And it doesn’t always mean that we end up doing business together. But it’s another way that I like to give back so Oh, yeah, that number is the direct line. That’s not text messaging. So for emails, Joelle that rate, and then the phone number 773-654-2049. And that’ll be for phone calls directly to me.
D.J. Paris 35:14 Perfect. Perfect. So yeah, don’t don’t text that number. That’s his office line, my apologies there. But definitely email or call that number and he and his team will get right back to you. And, and I’ve used them personally. So I can vouch for, for for Joel, he’s excellent. He’s the only loan officer I’m going to ever work with. Because he did a great job for me. And he does a great job for everyone. Which is why of course he’s so successful. So definitely reach out to him. If you’re not getting the attention you need from your your existing loan officer. He’s with guaranteed rate Joel is and they’re licensed in all 50 states so they can help you no matter where you might be practicing. So thank you so much. We’ll go wrap up the episode, Joel, appreciate your time. And once again, you come on our show every month, you gave great content, great, valuable insight into what’s going on in the lending world. But more. On top of that, you’re really saying, Here’s how to grow your business, which like you said, we rarely even talk about rate. So I’m so grateful that you do really Joel really thinks about what he wants to communicate. And he’s constantly asking me before we get on the air, what does the audience want to hear about these days? Like, where are they struggling? And then we come up with ideas. And really, that is the best possible question a guest could ever ask me, and very few guests ever do. So I really appreciate Joel coming on and saying how can I add value time and time again. So thank you on behalf of the audience for that. And on behalf of Joel and myself, we want to thank the audience for continuing to show up. Listen, watch, support our show, please reach out to Joel for any and all lending needs. And also, please tell a friend about this podcast. Just think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers and top loan officers like Joel send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com. And we appreciate that helps us continue to grow as well. So thank you so much to Joel and of course on behalf of Joel and myself. Thanks to everyone and we will see Joel next month. So we wish everyone a great rest of the spring season here. And we’ll we’ll talk to you next next time. Thanks Joel.
Joel Schaub 37:14 You’re welcome DJ
Being a Woman in Real Estate • Little Sparks • Krista Mashore
Apr 18, 2022
In this episode of Little Sparks Krista talks about what it is like being a woman in real estate. Krista shares a recent incident she had and how it made her think about this issue and what she did about it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today Christie is going to talk about what it’s like to be a woman in real estate. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris today is our newest series called little sparks with Krista make sure Chris is going on every month to talk about very specific tips and strategies. She’s used to take her business to the next level. But today we’re going to be talking about what it’s like to be a woman in real estate. But before we get to Krista, just a couple of quick announcements please remember to tell a friend about this show. Think of one other agent that you know could benefit from listening to top producers like Krista send them a link over to our website keeping it real pod.com Every place you can listen to our at our show can be linked to from our website, keeping it real pod.com And follow us on Facebook facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. But enough about me. Let’s get on to the main event. Here we are with Chris Demacia.
Krista Mashore 2:26 I’m super excited to be able to be doing this podcast right now. Little sparks. This is a keepin it real podcast. And so I’m super excited to have you here right now. So listen, we’re going to talk today about being a woman in real estate. Now. I don’t care if you’re a man, I want you to listen to this right? And it’s so funny when they asked me if I would do keepin it real, real podcast, little sparks. And they said, Can you talk about like women issues and the kind of issues that women go through in real estate? And I said, you know, I don’t really think I’ve ever really had any issues. And that’s really not true. One of the issues that I have had is that I remember people used to always tell me for years, Christina, you do so well in real estate, because you’re cute. And I would be thinking like you just keep on thinking that that’s why I do well, why keep kicking your butt because I’m innovative. I use technology, social media, and I try to always be as different as possible. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. What I was talking about incident happened to me recently, and it was really it really, really kind of opened my eyes a little bit. So I was asked to speak. So first of all, let me just tell you, my team has been wanting to get me on stage with Gary Vaynerchuk for a four and a half years for a very, very long time. Right. And so finally, we got the opportunity to be on stage with Gary Vaynerchuk. So they asked me if I’d be on a panel. I said absolutely, yes. I didn’t do any research on it yet. I know the people that asked me I really liked the glass and I respect them. But once I went and did the research on the on the the event, it was a live event. I looked in their work 12 Male Speakers, not one woman speaker was on there. And I was like, I just felt so gross about it. And I know that sounds harsh, but I was thinking to myself, I think like 65% of real estate agents are women. And when I went to this panel, you know, their landing page, and it was all men, 12 men, no women were on there. I couldn’t do it. So I sent them an email and I said, Listen, I just have to be very honest with you. I know I said yes. And I always keep my commitments. But I should have done more research when I said yes. My team really has been excited about getting me on stage with Gary Vaynerchuk. I have to respectfully decline of being on here. And I was very honest. I said, I feel like this is a sausage festival. So when I go to this your landing page, it’s like a sausage festival. And it looks like it’s all men are no women. I said I’m gonna let you know that. I noticed it. And I can guarantee you that other women when they go to this to your website, your landing page, they’re seeing the exact same thing. They’re noticing that there are no women in there and they most likely are feeling the same way that I am. So what I ended up doing was I said listen, I stand a lot I study and analyze marketing like I’m an absolute marketing genius, right? I don’t mean that to sound conceited, but I’ve generated millions and millions of dollars online. I specialize in digital marketing, you know, we have we have over, we’re just, we’re just applied for our $8 million sales funnel, we got our, we have our 10x, or we have our two CC X ray, which is showing that we’ve done over $25 million online not in like we’ve sold that, like we’ve, we’ve generated in revenue over $25 million online in the last four years, actually, like 32 million. And so we know something about marketing online. And I was like, if I go to this landing page, and I feel that way, I know that there’s other women that feel the same. And so I sent it to to to Edwin, and without me even asking for their feedback, both of them said the exact same thing. They were like, where is all the women like this is this looks like a anyways, I won’t even deal with this if it wasn’t appropriate, right? So I want you to think about those kinds of things. Like when you’re, when you’re having events, when you’re putting on you know, anything, I want you to think about how can I make this as diverse as possible? How can I think about different ethnic ethnic groups? ethnicities, right? Male, female, different ages, different, you know, everything, even different levels of people in business, because it does matter. And people, people do count right. Now, I know most of you aren’t putting on, you know, these big major things. But it made me think about that. And I was so turned off by it, that I declined. And what they said was they said, Christa, we would like to have you be one of our main speakers, and we are going to get more women, we promise you, we’re going to get more women. So they ended up getting more women
on the panels. And it was really, really good thing. And here’s the cool thing about I told my daughter about it, and my daughter, like literally started crying, she’s like, Mom, I am so proud of you, that you and I will tell you, I’m not like this woman’s movement, like I love women, I love supporting women, I like more than anything, I love you Boss Babes out there, right? But I’m not like this, like super crazy, you know, ultra or whatever. But it bothered me and it made me just be so so much more cautious. I always try in, in my marketing, to meet to think about that. So in your own marketing, whether it’s your flyers or videos you’re creating or, you know, if you’re if you’re doing any kind of interview panels, or whatever you’re doing, try to think about, you know, everybody that you’re going after, you don’t just want to go after all God, all men or all women, or whatever it might be, you want to probably go after, you know, for something like that, you want to think about diversity, okay, think about diversity. And that kind of relates me to a really good point, one of the things that I’ve always done in real estate was I always try when I have great experiences, which I typically do with my clients, I always try to get a testimonial from them. And I love getting video testimonials. And if I’m going on a listing appointment, and I know that they’re let’s just say I’m going on a listing appointment with somebody who’s elderly, I like to have some elderly testimonials in there, right? Because people want to be able to see that I’ve worked with people that are like them, I’ll be able to relate and that kind of thing that makes people feel comfortable. So think about that. I know this is kind of a rat kind of a rave, but it just, it really, really did bother me. And but I was proud of myself, I stood up for myself or myself or for women out there. I said I’m not going to be on it. And then they ended up getting more so it was like super super victory with that with that goes. And we did get to speak on the same stage as Gary Vaynerchuk. And Ryan serhant. And Bradley and by the way, Bradley is just so handsome. So handsome. I got to take a picture, then that was really, really fun. Okay, so think about that your marketing, think about you know who you’re going after. Now that’s not that’s not to say you would do that if you were niching. Right now, what’s niching? Well, niching is when you go after a specific type of client or a specific type of client avatar, a specific type of let’s just say you want to do FHA properties, or you want to do want to work with veterans or you want to work with people that are retiring people that are moving up that are moving down, you want to work with home buyers that are that have small children you want to work with sell home sellers that are selling out of x area and moving into my neighborhood, like we can go on and on all day long about niching about client avatar. Now if you are a niche, or you have a specific client avatar, then obviously you want your marketing and your branding and your messaging and your content, your videos to speak directly to those people. And the more that your messaging and your branding speaks directly to somebody the more likely they’re actually going to convert. So I hope this was helpful. I know it’s kind of a quick one. Just a quick little rant and rave and I’m gonna try to do another one as well. So you don’t just get the seven minute one but thanks for watching Chris Demeter here. And so so glad to have you I have my own podcast called fired up. And I’m just so honored to be able to be sharing sharing via the stage here in the podcast with with keep it real podcast. So thank you have a good day everyone.
What Is Your Hourly Rate & Why Does It Matter? • Social Bootcamp • Gogo Bethke
Apr 07, 2022
Welcome to our quarterly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo and DJ discuss what is attraction and how to participate in it. Gogo also goes back to the beginning of her career in real estate. Next, Gogo discusses the importance of understanding your hourly rate and how to calculate it. Gogo also shares tips on how to set up systems, control your income and the hires you should make in order to unload your burden and grow your business. Last, Gogo describes her bootcamp and what agents can benefit from it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 As a realtor, do you know your hourly rate? We’re going to figure that out today and explain why it’s the most important number in your business. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Today on the show we have our monthly series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Now gogo Beth key came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream she was broke. She had no real estate experience no sphere of influence barely spoke English and only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing other than Facebook to help build her business which is where she started. She created gogos real estate and began her real estate career. Now with the power of social media Google has sold over I don’t need this is an old number. It’s got to be probably close to $200 million dollars in real estate transactions probably more. She shares the good the bad the ugly of real estate and her honest snippets into her daily life has earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers in the real estate community and she has earned the nickname The Queen of social media as are being asked to present at various conferences and events with realtors. She built her own social media bootcamp, which is the greatest boot camp out there for realtors called gogos bootcamp. Today she has a team of over 800 agents nationwide. Her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. Now if she can do it, this girl from Transylvania Romania with no formal US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience, and an accent. Anyone can do it as well please follow gogo on Instagram at gogos real estate so at gogos real estate G O gos real estate and also please please please consider investing in her bootcamp visit Gogo podcast.com It’s the greatest platform we we were the only platform we recommend for agents to learn how to get Social Media Domination for real estate stuff. Real Estate Leads gogo we are old friends I am so glad to have you on the show.
Gogo Bethke 3:37 Thank you so much for having me again. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while though.
D.J. Paris 3:41 I know we haven’t seen each other in a bit and gogo has exploded and we have to talk about this because I’m jealous of you at you have I have spent the last 12 years recruiting real estate agents and I only have 800 Real estate agents go go blown past me in about a three year two to three year period doing the same thing and the reason I’m bringing this up is because the way in which she attracts agents into her group is the exact same way you can attract buyers and sellers into your sphere of influence.
Gogo Bethke 4:16 Yeah, everything I do I like to do it with attraction right? I don’t cold call even in the real estate side of things. I cannot beg people for their business. Instead I do it in a way where they decide when they want to work with me right so they call me or text me or email me or whatever avenue they choose. But they entered themselves into my life. So it’s attraction on all sides.
D.J. Paris 4:35 Yeah, let’s talk about that. What is attraction and how do we participate in it?
Gogo Bethke 4:40 So I mean that’s a great question. I don’t think I ever stopped it really like dissect what is attraction but to me what that means is like we all have our energy we all have our character, right? We all have like the things that we stand for and our ethics and stuff and if you allow it to get out to the world, right so I use the avenues social media to allow people to get to know me, but by sharing Who I am in the world. This way I attract the people who are just like me, because the ones that can send my accent in never going to call me to sell a house, right? So by attracting meaning now I’m so sad pre selecting, unknowingly, people that want to do business with me, by allowing them to get to know me when they get to know me, they trust me. And as soon as I earn their trust, they’ll buy something from me right there by my services. So being a realtor, we don’t sell real estate, we sell ourselves and our services. And that’s what I need to convince them over time, I need to convince them so they choose to work with me versus working with the rest of the world where 4 million realtors in this country and same with Agent attraction, right, especially with the brokerage and I am better viewers, you want those agents to come and work with you. You don’t want them to go to doors down to another brokerage and sign up, right. So it’s attraction, I’m attracting the people that want to run business the way I want to run business, we have the same principles. And then they come to me.
D.J. Paris 5:55 If you didn’t start in a major metropolitan area, I mean, I know you’ve been on our show for years and years and most of our audience knows your your, your story, but I always like to go back to the beginning. You this you you started your real estate practice in a relatively rural area, right?
Gogo Bethke 6:13 Yeah. So even when I you know how in the US you fill out official paperwork, and there is no thing of like village it’s everything’s a city. Right. And I was so mad when I moved here initially, because I googled the definition of a city, right? And I can’t remember it was long, long time ago, but it was like a large population maybe like 200,000 Plus, right? Don’t quote me on it. I don’t remember what the number was. I live. I live in a city guys that has the population of 9000. At the time when I moved here, we had one gas station and one grocery store. No restaurants still to the day. We don’t have a single coffee shop besides the Starbucks that’s inside of a grocery store. And that’s like the only one in like 50 mile radius, right. So it’s as I like to call it the boonies. the boonies of Michigan, it’s we live off of a dirt road, everybody pretty much has an acre, right that they live on, you can wave to your neighbor, right. It’s a it’s a totally different life of actually where I live compared to how I live. Yeah. That like metropolitan city, travel, foodie, all of that stuff, right? trips and Olympic in Michigan.
D.J. Paris 7:18 Yeah, I think that’s really important too. Because there probably aren’t a lot of people who sound like you in your in your lives. Probably not a lot of Romanians in Central Michigan.
Gogo Bethke 7:29 No, no diversity rate here is less than 1%. So I mean, I put it this way, if I don’t open my mouth, you can’t tell that I’m not from here, right. But as soon as I open my mouth, you can’t.
D.J. Paris 7:42 And yet here you are, despite not being your native, this being English being your native language, and you have just completely dominated in this space. And you did it all through social media. And I know our audience already already knows that watch agents be doing now these days in social media.
Gogo Bethke 8:04 So I actually well, it’s kind of social media, right? Like everything I do is social media is all like, as they say every road leads leads wrong, right? Like everything I do is powered with social media. But what I really wanted to talk about today is understanding your hourly rate, even though it does apply to social media too, right? Like, should I be doing this? Should I be spending three hours DMing people or should I hire somebody to DM people, right? So I wanted to talk about because I just had a presentation in Nashville. So I wanted to talk about calculating your hourly rate and knowing what you’re worth and understanding like, should I be doing this task anymore? grayed out,
D.J. Paris 8:43 because we to slow this down just for a moment we’re talking about. We’re in real estate. This is a transactional business in nature. And now we’re going to figure out what our hourly rate would be and where we should devote our time.
Gogo Bethke 8:59 Sounds good. Yep. And in a sense, it will all tie back to social media and everything else that you do. Can I share my screen? Yes.
Would you disable it then? So right next to share screen, there should be a little arrow up and hit that and allow everyone please. There you go. What’s awesome, there we go. Well, where did my There we go. And share screen. Can you see my screen?
D.J. Paris 9:42 We can.
Gogo Bethke 9:44 Awesome. Let’s do this. This is the first time we actually do a presentation. We’ve never done that before. It was always just kind of question based. But I figured since I have this, let’s fly through it because this way I can share more information. I’m going to skip who I am right So I’m all about systems, I like to break things down, I like to stop for a minute, take a 10,000 foot view of my life out of my business life, and then just kind of figure out how am I going to make millions? And what is it going to take to get there and what systems I have to have in places and you know what people that have to be in my life, and then I’ll break it down backwards, meaning I know my end goal, I know where I’m at. And I’m going to stop, take a 10,000 foot view, and I’m going to say, Okay, what do I need to do today? To get one step closer? What do I need to get done in a week? What do I need to get done in a month? And then what do I need to get the new year to get to that end result? Now in order? I am the main, the major word in there was what do I have to get done? Right? So because everything else, I want you to pay attention to that, because at the end of the presentation, I want you to stop and think, what are the tasks that you can hire out, so you no longer doing it? Because it’s not worth your time. But in order to figure out what’s what your time, we have to figure out what your time is worth. Right? So let’s get into that. It’s very simple. It’s just math. I love numbers, because I don’t have to translate it in my mind. So when I look at numbers, I can look at it in English, or I can look at it in Hungarian and Romanian is the same meaning, right? So number is just mad. Also, when it comes to math, guys, when you’re trying to make a business decision, I want you to make a business decision based on your bottom line, not based on a feeling right. So I don’t do feelings in business. I don’t do like to I feel like doing that for the rest of my life. Maybe you do. Maybe you want to continue doing that and rest of your life. But what if it’s not worth it? Right? So that’s how you want to remove feelings and make it based on Matt dollar. Money. That’s how we get paid. Right? Did you if you have any questions at any time, just stop me. I don’t want a monologue the whole time?
D.J. Paris 11:45 No, no, no, no, this is really great. And what I want our audience to understand is gogo is giving you her exact strategies that she uses and her her values or thoughts, her philosophies about social media, and you can take bits and pieces of it. And then you know really start to accelerate your your reach.
Gogo Bethke 12:07 Yeah, because even though everything started for me with social media, right, if you want to build an empire, it requires systems and it requires people you cannot do it alone, right. So even though all of this ties back and everything is gets fed into all of my businesses from social media, you still have to have the backend under control as well. So you can scale it. And this is where we’re going to start with your hourly rate to see who should be your first hire. Right? So I’m going to talk about the story, the very expensive load of laundry. So I had a coach, a real estate coach in my fifth year of real estate, and I was paying $1,000 an hour. And she was amazing. And I was doing a load of laundry where I was talking to her. And she says What are you doing? And I’m like, I’m a woman, like I can multitask. Like I can run a load of laundry and talk to you on the phone like how like, that’s not hard, right? But the truth is, was I truly paying attention to her? Was I taking notes? Was I understanding what she was talking about? And most importantly, if I didn’t take notes, did I even know what to implement after the call? No, I wasn’t right. So if you’re paying for something, or if you’re doing something that’s costing you a certain or money, a certain amount of money in that hour, you have to give it all your full attention. So you should not be running a load of laundry while you’re on a coaching call, right? Because it’s not your time best friend. And also there are certain things on your calendar that you do every single day that you are going to stop doing after this conversation that we are having here today. So one question, though, do you feel like your income is in your control? So as an agent, do you feel like your commission income by the end of the year is in your control? If you said no. Go ahead.
D.J. Paris 13:40 Yeah, it’s a good question. Because agents typically think of the first of the month is starting over.
Gogo Bethke 13:47 Yeah. Right. You’re employed because you got a new listing, you saw the listing, unemployed, you got a new buyer employed, you got him a house unemployed, right? Is that employed unemployed roller coaster, but But I remember when I never knew where my next one is going to come from. Right. Like I was so excited. I’m getting a commission on this one. But I never knew where the next one is going to come from. Right. And this is what I’m talking about is controlling not only where it’s going to come from, but what is going to come to you, right, because if you don’t have a plan, you could be getting a $40,000 weekend plan or a $2.4 million listing, right, you have no idea and everything in between. So I want you to understand that what you post on social media, it has a direct correlation to the commission that you’re going to collect. So in this case, if you can see my screen and if you’re listening then let me tell you what you see on my screen. Let me ask you this question. If you posted on your social media, a $200,000 home, right, what type of buyers do you think are going to look at that post?
D.J. Paris 14:47 Want to buy $200,000 homes?
Gogo Bethke 14:49 Exactly. So you’re going to make approximately a $6,000 commission if you charge 3% Right. How about if you posted a $500,000 home what kind of buyers are going to find
D.J. Paris 14:59 well People who can afford $500,000 homes
Gogo Bethke 15:03 you’re collecting now a $15,000 commission is the word or is it a tool?
D.J. Paris 15:08 It’s exactly the same work.
Gogo Bethke 15:10 So now we are talking a $9,000 difference for doing exactly the same thing. Right? So your commission is exactly it’s a 100% in your control. So keep that in mind. You’re not You’re not posting to post you are posting because you’re searching for a certain style of buyer or persons that for certain style of seller, right? Keep that in mind. Okay, now that you know that it’s in your control, let’s calculate your hourly rate. This is one of my favorite things to do. So let’s assume that on the buy side, you have a $15,000 commission, I did the math with a 15,000. Commission, because where I was going, the price ranges in that state were a little higher than Michigan, right? But let’s for the sake of the math $15,000 commission on the buy side, how many hours do you feel like you spent with the buyer. And here’s what I’m asking you, from the moment that you took that initial phone call to the Chitty chat with them, right? To meet them at a property to explain them how you work, Kevin signed a contract showing some properties, go back or get them under contract by the contract, right? Get them under contract, then go back and do the inspection, maybe go meet the appraisal, do a final walkthrough and go to the closing and negotiate in the middle and some phone calls, right. So I calculated the math with 12 hours work. So with every buyer driving here, and there are new contracts, and yada yada calculated, you’re going to work in average about 12 hours with each buyer. If that’s the case, your hourly rate on the buy side is 1250 bucks. Now let’s calculate it on the listing side. So on the listing side, let’s assume same thing $15,000 Commission, but the truth is, and the listing side, you don’t need to spend as much time with them, right? Because that whole shopping for houses driving from here to there and drive to there. And back to the inspection and final walkthrough. You don’t have to do any of that on the listing side, right. So that four hours working with that seller down to seven. My research shows in average work about seven hours to the seller. And I
D.J. Paris 17:01 want to pause for a moment. So we’re talking about buy side versus listing side. And listing side being almost almost half as resistant. To listing side being half as almost half as much work.
Gogo Bethke 17:20 Yeah. And making twice the amount of money. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. So you working seven hours instead of 12. And making $2,143 per hour versus making 1002 50. So same and commission, last hour worked higher hourly rate. So in this case scenario, right, which side? Should you spend more time on? Why should you concentrate with your buyers and with your sellers?
D.J. Paris 17:50 Yeah, it’s pretty clear that sellers are where it is at. And now now that we know our hourly rate, sort of where do we go from here?
Gogo Bethke 18:02 Yeah. So now then, you know, you already read let’s figure out where should you be spending your time? Should you be responding to emails? Should you be working on your calendar? How about DMS and posts and scheduling trips and scheduling events and podcasts and creating presentation and your offers and treating them names and sending it over to Title Company and back to the lender and answering phone calls and doing the negotiation and showing up for listing appointment and going to you know, I mean, like walking your dog running a load of laundry? Like all of these things, right? Like all of your trackers and calls and affiliates and gifts and everything that you do right? Closing? Yes. Should you be buying your own closing gifts? Right? That’s what we need to figure out. What’s what your time from now on. So let’s work smarter, not harder. My goal is when when agents say when I asked them what their goal is, and they say, I want to double my transactions. And I’m thinking to myself, why? Because you want to work twice as hard next year, right? You don’t want to double your transactions, you want to double your income, you want to work less and make more money. And that’s why it’s working smarter, not harder, right. So one of the first hires you should have is a transaction coordinator. That was my dear.
D.J. Paris 19:11 I’m a big fan of transaction coordinators. And this is something that oftentimes real estate agents are just it’s just not in their particular skill set or wheelhouse. This is something you can offload to somebody who maybe they’re virtual, maybe they’re in person. And for a pretty reasonable fee, they will take care of all of the paperwork for you.
Gogo Bethke 19:36 Yeah, and transaction coordination coordinators usually don’t get paid if unless you get paid. Right. You could be working on the deal for four weeks. if the deal falls apart. You don’t get paid, they don’t get paid. So I love that because they have a reason to get you to the closing table. A transaction coordinator should charge somewhere in the average of 300 to $500 per deal, right? So when you close you collect your 15,000 commission that’s up and 350 right to do do paperwork for you. But now stop for a second and think I know transactions. So let’s say you’re working with a seller, right? How many hours you push paper from the moment that they decide to list with you, right? You write all of your contracts and the initials and the signatures and the yada, yada, then then they sign it. Now you’re going to have to get the app the listing active, you’re gonna have to put it into the MLS and get it active. After it’s active, you’re going to have to do like ordering your photos and all of that stuff, right? Then you have to communicate back and forth and print the attendance while you negotiate. Right, have to make sure all parties have all of your agenda items, and everybody had a copy of everything. Then the closing docs come in, you have to review the closing docs, and you have to go to the closing. Right. So with the paperwork portion of your job, what do you think DJ? Is the average that agents work on people? We’re going to file?
D.J. Paris 20:46 How many hours? Yeah, I would say, Gosh, a lot of hours, couple of 10 hours, 1012 hours?
Gogo Bethke 20:55 You think so I calculated with two to three hours? Wow. Maybe I work faster than before, right? Yeah, what I calculated because eventually, if you do many transactions, you should know your contracts in and out like I can, I can write a purchase agreement and present an offer in five minutes, right? I just like I know where I need to go on the purchase agreement, price EMD terms that are a red arrow sign here, right? So I calculate it three hours. Now let’s say you’re on the listing side, you remember our hourly rate on the listing side was 2143. Out $43. So if we take that. So 2143 times three hours, let’s say at $6,429. So that’s what it’s costing you to do your own paperwork. $1,429, if you hired it out, it would be anywhere from three to $500. So if I said, I need you in the middle, if I said give me 400 bucks, and I give you 6400 back, would you do it? Yes. Right. But it only works. If now you remove those three hours from your plate, give it to TC, but in these three hours, you’re going to lead generate or do whatever it takes you to get that new lead rider to replace that next $15,000 Commission. Because if you’re going to be sipping mimosas, poolside in those three hours, then the math doesn’t work. Because at that point, the TC becomes an expense, right? So while somebody is working for you, in those three hours that you just freed up for yourself, now you’re going to take those three hours and turn it into lead generation activity, so you can make sure you can get that nice listing or that next buyer. Right,
D.J. Paris 22:33 yeah, I think we’re really what we’re talking about is determining that expanding somebody’s awareness to be able to have people help you from all over the globe, all over this planet, that are going to bid for your business that can do this, you know, at at the times that you need it be done at a rate that is reasonable. And getting it off your plate so that you can of course, can focus on business building activities.
Gogo Bethke 23:07 Yeah, we have our own TC company and our T C’s are licensed in every state in the US. And and they can work with what is it called attorney, Attorney states and title states too. So you make sure whoever you’re working with, they can do all that for you. But here’s another thing, though, this doesn’t apply in every single state. But in some states, if you’re allowed to charge a transaction fee. So in Michigan, we charge a 495 transaction fee to our sellers and our buyers, out of the 495. I can also justify my TC, right, so I get full commission plus transaction fee from which I pay my own TC so I no longer push paper.
D.J. Paris 23:44 It’s really, really, really brilliant. You said it’s so quickly and and impressively that you know, you can build the price of the T the transaction coordinator into the commission.
Gogo Bethke 23:57 Yeah, but even if you did it even if you can charge a transaction fee right in your state, because not most but quite a few states don’t allow it or transaction fee or a broker fee as we call it in Michigan. So even if you can’t charge it, in my opinion, if you promise yourself and in those three hours, you’re going to get yourself another seller, you’re still making $6,400 versus new or you will be making 6400 but you pay 400 of that to the TC but you still are 6000 positive even after you pay the TC even if you have to pay it out of your commission
D.J. Paris 24:29 Yeah, I think this is really a great example of business entrepreneurship and really thinking about beyond the the immediate transaction right trying to figure out where can I spend the most amount of my time to get the the highest ROI return on investment. This you know, go go teaches this to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of agents all over the country. 1000s Actually, and we really encourage everyone When listening to go visit Go, go, go goes bootcamp.com, which is Go Go’s bootcamp Gog O. S boot camp.com. And check out her. Her echo system is absolutely incredible. She’s got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of agents who are in sheet goes on there. Actually, let’s tell the audience about your boot camp. Okay,
Gogo Bethke 25:24 well, let’s start with the original. As we started talking, right, everything that I do I in and grounds and grows from, I should say social media. And so the very first boot camp was Google’s boot camp Social Media course. In there, I teach everything about branding, how I built my brand, how I lead generate with my brand, right, I teach it to other agents, so they can do the same. I never bought a lead in my life. So my goal is to be able to teach agents how to fish for themselves, right not to get a fish from the Zelos and whatever, third party companies, but to actually learn to fish for yourself and put leads on the table for yourself. And then also, my main goal is affiliate income, I don’t even know I have 3040 different affiliate incomes. Now, most of my income, about 95% of my income is passive. So it’s not just about generating yourself that next lead but also generating yourself passive income, because Warren Buffett says, if you can figure out a way how to make money while you’re asleep, you will never be wealthy. And I had to figure out because commission is active, right, which means I have to actually turn time into money. Which means no matter how good you are, at some point, you’re going to hit a ceiling. Right? There’s only one of you, there’s only 24 hours. So the only way you could potentially sell more homes, right? Everybody has a ceiling mine was 52 deals in a year. And I was like that’s it, not one more I can sell without losing my mind. So the only other way I could have made more money in that scenario, if I upped my price range or created more enemies, right. So eventually you’re going to have to grow and in order if you’re not ready necessarily to grow that team, then you have to create your your yourself more time. And by hiring certain things off of your plate. Now you can create yourself more time. There’s a second half of this presentation. These are just TCS, which will remove the transaction coordination off of your plate, the paper pushing, but the next step is really to remove everything off of your plate that doesn’t serve you which will be virtual assistants so or in person assistance. So I have an exercise for that. That’s called the red light green light exercise. I don’t know how much time you assigned for this today, but maybe we can do that on the next call. It is your
D.J. Paris 27:22 Yeah, well, I’d love the red light green light idea. Yeah. So what we’re really talking about is running this like a business and gogo is a perfect example of somebody who went from personal production to now managing a huge, huge network of agents. And please, everybody who is listening to the show, go check out Gogo podcast.com Subscribe to her bootcamp get into her echo system. She has an amazing coaching and mentoring program. Gogo podcast.com. On behalf of all of our listeners, we really appreciate gogo she is one of the top producers at her company exp. We’re so thrilled to have her on the show and see her continue to just sell. Gosh, you must have had a record year last year I’m assuming your question for you.
Gogo Bethke 28:18 I got voted top 125 Most Influential People on the globe alongside Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone Wilson, all of these people by Success Magazine this year.
D.J. Paris 28:31 Congratulations. Go go first Success Magazine accolade there that is really, really amazing. Congratulations.
Gogo Bethke 28:41 That’s the only reason I exist, right? Because I put myself out there like what and shut up. And now they know I exist.
D.J. Paris 28:48 And you do exist and so everyone listening, please check out go go learn about learn from her Gogo podcast.com. But on behalf of gogo and myself, we say thank you, we appreciate you listening to our show, please tell a friend I think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing this great conversation we had about expanding your business and hiring a virtual assistant transaction coordinator and also reach send them a link to this episode. So you can send them right over to keeping it real pod.com all of our episodes can be streamed right there or they can any podcast app that they are using. They can search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. So thank you, gogo once again. You’ve been with us for years. And we are so thrilled to have you once again. And for everyone else who is listening we have on behalf of Google and myself we say thank you.
Gogo Bethke 29:44 Thank you so much for having me next time I walk you through the red light green light exercise to learn what to remove from your plate and who to hire an in person assistant or a virtual assistant first so you can remove more stuff off your plate. Create yourself even more time to make more money.
D.J. Paris 30:00 Great teaser for next time. All right, thank you go go and we’ll see everybody on the next episode.
Gogo Bethke 30:06 Thank you guys
From Addiction To Top Producer – AMAZING • Kelsey Charles
Apr 05, 2022
Kelsey Charles the leader of The Kelsey Charles Team talks about how she overcame her struggles with drugs and started her career in real estate. Kelsey discusses how she focused to serve the military families in their quest for real estate. Kelsey also discusses the importance of community support and marketing and of guiding your clients into achieving their goals. Next, Kelsey shares tips on how to choose a firm to work with and how she sees the role of a brokerage. Last, Kelsey discusses where she’s struggling right now.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Should you join a cloud brokerage? And what exactly is a cloud brokerage? On today’s episode? This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re gonna be speaking with top producer Kelsey Charles and oh Oahu, Hawaii. Before we get to Kelsey, just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing these great interviews with people like Kelsey and send them a link to our website keeping it real pod.com. That’s every episode we’ve ever done. It can be streamed right from your browser, or if they’re a podcast person, have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real. And by the way, there’s a few different podcasts named keeping it real. So look for the one with my name on it, DJ Paris, hit that subscribe button or have your friend hit that subscribe button. We really greatly appreciate it. And also last please leave us a review and whatever podcast app you might be listening. This really helps us improve our show and also reach more people like you who benefit from hearing from great top producers like Kelsey and enough about me. Let’s get right to it. Kelsey Charles.
Today on the show, we have Kelsey Charles from real broker in Hawaii. Let me tell you about Kelsey. Now Kelsey Charles is a residential real estate professionals serving the entire island of Oahu and surrounding islands to she is the leader of the Kelsey Charles team and represents both buyers and sellers, whether it be first time homebuyers or seasoned investors. As a military relocation professional, she has often represented clients from every branch of the armed forces. She is also dedicated to the real estate profession and upholds the highest standards of ethics and agency. She’s a certified residential specialist which is a prestigious, professional designation awarded to the most experienced realtors in the nation. She treats your investment in Hawaii very seriously and strives to guide you through your transaction as smoothly as possible. Now her proficiency and use of technology based marketing is unparalleled in the industry, which is why she’s on the show super excited to chat with her. She’s been taught by the best in the business and you can be confident in her ability to close the deal and advocate for your interests. Now Kelsey lives in. And I’m sort of asked you but it’s is it a while beach ever, ever beach? The W is a V. So my apologies but Kelsey lives on every beach. I have a beach getaway, which is in Ohio. With her husband Anthony, who was also a realtor and their two daughters. Please visit her website which is Kelsey Charles homes.com. And that’s Kelsey Charles homes plural. Kelsey Charles homes.com. And also please also follow her on Instagram. Her Instagram. Handle is Realtor in Hawaii. Kelsey, welcome to the show.
Kelsey Charles 4:31 Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here and no worries about E well beach. I work with a lot of military clients and some of them will live here for three years and never know where they still called
D.J. Paris 4:44 our beach.
Kelsey Charles 4:47 So not about it.
D.J. Paris 4:48 By the way, I’m gonna make a declaration I’ve never said on the show. We are about I think we’ve done about 350 episodes. If Kelsey and I lived in the same city I think I would do my best to become her new best friend, because she is a super fun person to talk to. And we were, we were chatting it up beforehand. And I’m like, this is somebody, she’s she’s very similar to myself,
Kelsey Charles 5:10 which is which we could totally hang out.
D.J. Paris 5:14 We could. We’re excited to have you on the show. And I’m really, really happy to have you. We I think you are the first realtor we’ve had from Hawaii. Not that that’s, you know, something that makes you so incredibly unique, of course, but I think you’re in the Midwest. Yeah. Well, you’re a Midwestern girl, though initially. So I would love to know. And by the way, Kelsey is not too far from where we are is from not too far from where we we are that you know where that is, anyway? No, it’s funny. She told me and I said, I don’t I think it’s up there. And she said, yeah, no, you’re wrong.
Kelsey Charles 5:53 place there was in General Motors plant, they remember the decline of the economy. And like, oh, 809 Sure, I can blame my city Janesville for having like, just too much factory going on. I don’t know.
D.J. Paris 6:05 That’s why I did see the movie, Roger and me. And like the early 90s, which was all about General Motors in Flint, Michigan. Town, that town got decimated as well. It’s just amazing what some like I’m from Peoria, Illinois, which is headquartered at Caterpillar, which is one of the biggest companies and in the world. And when they moved, you know, I know, nobody cares about this. But when they moved their executive a good part of their executive team up here to Chicago, because I think it would attract more people than Peoria. More like good talent, it really had a huge impact. So I know what that’s like in the smaller towns. But um, anyway, I read your to talk about how amazing you are. And you really are. And I She’s very Kelsey is very humble. But she does a lot of really cool things. And so let’s start at the beginning. Tell us how you got into real estate.
Kelsey Charles 7:01 Crazy story. So I’ll first start with how I got to Hawaii growing up in like Madison Janesville area. So I saw basically the recession in full force. And I was like, I am not going to live through this, I have not enough desire to stay in the cold. To make it through this whenever there’s like no job opportunities. I mean, what was I going to do like work for $7 an hour? Well, I could do that in Hawaii just as well. So that’s what I did. On a one way ticket, I became a nanny, I actually got a scholarship for college, to study social work. And I was a nanny during that time. And then after my first year of college, I realized like all these things you need as an adult, like health insurance, like paying your car insurance, you got to feed yourself like Well, that’s like a lot of stuff, right? So my dad being a retired or not retired, like laid off auto worker, he was like, I’m totally gonna help you. I’m gonna pay make sure you have health insurance just as a minimum. Turned out that wasn’t true. He either decided not to, or General Motors decided not to do the thing to help the families. So then I’m like, there I am paying for my own health insurance. And then Hawaii just stopping fun when I had to work like 90 hours a week as an 18 year old. So I came back to Wisconsin for a bed, I was like, I’m just gonna finish online classes. And then I’ll go back to Hawaii when I graduate. So you really need to make like, I used to think 90,000 was a good living in Hawaii. And that was maybe true and like, oh nine but now if you don’t make like one ad, you know, you’re struggling for sure. Sure. So I thought like, oh, getting to know nursing, I don’t know something well paying whatever it is. I just want to live in Hawaii. So during that time, I ended up hanging back with the crowd that I did in high school that was using heroin, like very casually. And that was part of like, the Midwestern recession these normal like jocks and I mean, prom, Queens, were just casually doing opiates. So there’s
D.J. Paris 9:00 not a lot of lot of depression probably going out of depression, not a lot of opportunity. Small Town woes,
Kelsey Charles 9:07 right? Very, like Detroit style. So then I got back into that and I got begin there with that. It’s actually my time back in Wisconsin. And then I went to rehab in California, which was not the best for me, I ended up coming out of rehab shooting up and I went and just like orally taking so and everyone
D.J. Paris 9:30 else. So you left you left rehab and immediately started using and accelerating your use with with with a more extreme?
Kelsey Charles 9:38 Exactly. And I’ve heard that can happen and rehab where you hear about all these stories, like people are talking about fantasizing about their youth. And I was like, oh, that sounds great. Like that’s definitely what I want to do. When I get when I wanted to get it. I didn’t see a future for myself. I just kind of wanted to make it through day to day. She was I do have depression and especially like seasonal affective disorder, right? Get out. So using IV drugs, I become homeless. I like 19 and 20. And then I get on a methadone program, which thankfully in Wisconsin was state sponsored. So if you’re on state healthcare, otherwise, that $500 a month when you have nothing is very exciting. Right? So I decided, okay, no, I’m good. I’m stable. I’m gonna go back to Hawaii go to college, even though I’m probably the only college student on methadone that has to show up to the clinic every day.
D.J. Paris 10:26 You’re probably not but you’re the only one talking about it today. Yeah.
Kelsey Charles 10:30 I didn’t see anybody else there. At least in the Hawaii Island. Right? Well, maybe maybe your school?
D.J. Paris 10:36 Yeah. Maybe it was just you.
Kelsey Charles 10:38 I mean, I like to think it wasn’t, but it could have. So yeah, I would go to the methadone clinic, I was doing really well. I was like, tearing up on my program where I only had to go in once a week, getting on a lower dose. And then I met my husband, who was in the Navy at the time, and he apparently saw something in me. Even though I wasn’t doing that one school, I pretty much spent all my days like sleeping. And he was like, yeah, like, move into my house. And I was like, No, I am an independent woman. Like, I don’t need you. I don’t need no man. I’m gonna live in my $700 a month apartment and my studio. Even though there was like more roaches than there was food in the house. And he came in one night to like, help me move myself or like, bring something up. And he’s like, You can’t stay here. This place is so sketchy. Like, I can’t have anyone I’m dating live here. And I was like, You’re just trying to force me to live with you. So you can hold me down. Because that just like this weird mindset of
D.J. Paris 11:34 like, he’s trying to control you is a concern. Yeah,
Kelsey Charles 11:37 exactly. Right. And that’s what but that was my experience, like with men and like short my father, right. So that it was just very, I was in an unhealthy place. But I he was in the Navy. So he was pretty much gone all the time. So he’s like, Hey, like, here, you can have my apartment, you can have my car. I’m pretty much always gone. And I was like, no, like, for the longest time. I’m not going to do that. And eventually, my landlord ended up coming up in the middle of the night to my apartment to just look at me and like, stare at me and be a complete felon, like, for no reason. So I took him up on the opportunity and then living with him. I was like, okay, like, well could be getting married because I was really into Christianity and my recovery. I felt like if I was gonna live with someone, I need to be married. And he’s a hardcore atheists like, Super Star Trek, like no interest in any of that. But like, I forced him basically to marry me, you could say, but he’s he’ll say it’s like the best thing he ever did. Right? So we got married. And then we had our first kid when I was on methadone. So I was addicted. And my baby was one addicted. So she had to be weaned off with morphine. And basically, when you’re on methadone, I don’t mean to make this a drug story, but I’m just like how you can? This is okay. Okay. So my baby was born on morphine. And if you’re on methadone, and you’re pregnant, if you stop that homeostasis of like, that comfortable drug or the baby is receiving every day, you can pretty much you’re almost guaranteed to self abort, right? Yeah. So people are looking down me like, oh, like you’re a junkie or taking drugs. I’m like, Alright, we’re trying
D.J. Paris 13:08 to save your baby. Yeah, exactly. And you need it the methadone to be able to not be Yeah, in the lifestyle.
Kelsey Charles 13:16 Exactly. No, totally, for sure. And just said, maintain like the mental health. I mean, there’s so many reasons people stay on methadone. And I’m not like there to judge them for that. But for me, it was like Yeah, it’s like maintain the lifestyle not want to go to the streets and hang out with the people that I had before. Right. And so I could think about my baby thinking about like, what breast pump are we going to buy just like normal people stuff instead of like, okay, how am I get a score today? Yeah, and I wasn’t using and I just said my methadone every day when my baby was born, she weaned off and she’s fine. And then my husband got basically medically retired from the Navy he has anxiety and his trigger his career just started to really trigger him. And he was an air traffic controller before he became an officer he did really well with that job and they say ATC is like one of the most stressful jobs you can have. It has
D.J. Paris 14:04 to it has to be a walk in the park. Well, that’s amazing because I when I was I know air traffic control and there’s been movies made about how stressful fictional movies and then even documentaries Yeah, it’s it’s it’s pushing 10 I think was one of the movies but but there it is. So because they’re dealing with so much traffic and yeah, 1000s of people’s lives at any given moment.
Kelsey Charles 14:30 Totally. And then the pilot sometimes you have to like override the pilot and say like, Hey, do this and I’m gonna ignore you and he was in your in a lot of like life and death situations daily. And he thought that was less stressful than his new job in the Navy, which was being asked to see like all the time. He would be gone for months at a time I barely ever saw him. And it started to really affect his mental health. He’s like, hey, this isn’t for families. I don’t want to do this. So he gets out. To make a long story short, we moved to Florida. And we bought a house and we had our baby. And I didn’t work. I never really plan to like have a job. I was like, Okay, I’ll get married. Cool. He’ll take care of me. That was my ideal lifestyle. So funny how that change right now. He actually works for me. And I didn’t like Florida. He told me it was gonna be like, Hawaii. And I was like, Okay, I trust you. Not at all. It’s very red state. Nothing like what I’m used to being from the Midwest, and very, I don’t know, it was like, maybe a desert version of Hawaii with like, crocodiles, and rednecks. I mean,
D.J. Paris 15:38 some strange residents. Yeah, I’m
Kelsey Charles 15:40 like, Who are these people? I don’t want to be around this. So I told him, I was like, we’re moving back to Hawaii, or like, like, like a cat. I’m sorry, it’s an ultimatum. But like we’re leaving. And we definitely weren’t in a place financially to do that. And while we were in this, another economically depressed town, I was doing whatever I could to make a book, like whether I’m like, flipping a couch trying to sell multilevel marketing. I would work at these jobs, and people wouldn’t pay me. So I was like a pizza server. I worked at a chamber of commerce, which I thought was legitimately pay me, I would work for months, and no one would ever give me a paycheck. And I was like, I, okay, this is not working, like we just have to go otherwise, our life is just gonna be sad again. So we put our house in the rental market. And then we moved to why and then we find out that we’re pregnant, after we played to not have another kid. But we knew if I came back to the why, if we came back to why that I would have to work just because of his pension. We’re a family of three now. But we had already rented our house. And we had already signed a lease for a two bedroom. Like it was what it was, we just have to find a way now our plane tickets, but and this wouldn’t be a huge concern for most normal people. But when I’m pregnant, I get this disease called hyperemesis. So I pretty much puke like 30 times a day. And that’s like, at a minimum, like, it’s really awful. Pregnancy is not meant for me, like I love my children, but I would never go through it again. And that was really hard to have in my life. I’m like, okay, so if I can make like, $5 to eat that school, but that’s all I could do. My husband was on retirement disability. So he couldn’t work yet, because I hadn’t been locked in right now, which is an unfortunate setup that the system has, but we didn’t have money for food, we would say our mortgage on the mainland, and the rent we were getting was like half of that mortgage. And then we had our Hawaii rent. And after that, like it was a car payment, and then struggling just day to day to get food. So there were days that like we wouldn’t eat, and then we would just have to get like water and bread. And even that was a struggle, like how do we literally learn to make bread out of like flour and yeast and water? And then I remember times that my three year old was like, Mommy, like I’m just a little bit hungry, you know, can we eat and I was like, I’m sorry. We just have to wait till tomorrow, like when the direct deposit hits. It’s how it’s going to be. So with that, I realized I never wanted to live like that again. And I knew it wasn’t permanent. I knew once I had the baby that I would be like, physically okay, I didn’t realize how much mentally that would have tormented me and I thought I had been through pretty much the worst through my life, like being an addict being like, molested all these things that had happened to me. I didn’t realize I can relive this again, as an adult now that I had, you know, created my own support system, right. So I saw this lady, she was actually at exp, and I followed her on Facebook, and I pretty much spent all my time scrolling social media, because that’s the only thing that helped me stay connected. So I mean, I would take my Benadryl, so I did puke. I mean, every moment, I would still be in the hospital every two or three days. Just getting IVs and stuff really terrible time.
D.J. Paris 18:40 Because you’re because you’d be low on fluids and you’d be dehydrated. Yeah,
Kelsey Charles 18:44 exactly. And I couldn’t keep anything down. And you know, to keep the fetus alive, everything like that. And so I started watching her and I was like, maybe I could do real estate. Like, she has my dream car, which is a Tesla acts like she’s got a husband, she’s renovating how she owns a house. I didn’t own a house in Hawaii. I was like, Oh, that’s so cool. And for so many reasons. I never wanted to get into real estate, but I don’t think I understood why. But I love sales. And I love just hanging out with people talking to them. And I still think it’s the coolest thing ever. That’s the thing that you can like, get paid to help people get what they want. And you pretty much just get to know them. They’re your friend or your family. And I’m not saying it’s easy. Like there’s a difficult times of course, but this is still the best gig I’ve ever heard that right. So I get my real estate license babies born. I go to work. I started training with Coldwell Banker Pacific properties. And then they basically just like throw you to the bowls, like go get a deal. And I remember I would find clients anywhere I could whether that was like buying a laptop like oh, hey, do you need a house? I mean, I was probably like just really putting myself out there but I know that’s what it takes, right? That I would eventually get it. But it turns out like the first few sets of buyers only wanted to hang out with me because they wanted like a female company, which we saw Repeat. I’m like, You’re literally like pulling your credit score to go into apartments and just like be alone with me. And they will say things like, Oh, this is 500,000 for an apartment. You know what I can get in Texas for that? And I was like, yes. But we’re not in Texas, like, What are you talking about, bro? And if they had bought, then that apartment would be worth like 700. Today, this was like, two, three years ago than they were like, so I’m like,
D.J. Paris 20:22 a lot of just maybe questionable people.
Kelsey Charles 20:25 Yeah, exactly. And you don’t know how to verify or how to a new a new agent. Yeah, and companies don’t really teach you, right. And I was like, shoot, I just spent all this gas, I can barely afford gas to get here. And now these people are running me around. I was like, Oh, shoot. And I quickly realized that VA buyers, military people, about my age, we’re going to be my best client, that they don’t really know a realtor, they’re gonna buy, they’re going to be super loyal, if they have a good experience, they’re gonna sell with you, and then they’re gonna refer their friends to you. And they can get a house for about 1000 bucks. I mean, literally, like a $500 house for a grand that was in the old market, right? So that became my niche. And then that’s what I did. I did 12 million, my first year, second year was like, 25,000,003rd. year last year, I did like 25 million. I don’t know what this year is gonna look like, I’m trying to put a little more focus on lifestyle and then growing like my other brands, which is like, dropping a real estate course training agents mentoring. And lately, I tried to just work with like, referrals, and then past clients who already know me.
D.J. Paris 21:31 Wow, you said so much there. And I’m trying to think what I want to sort of dive into because first, I want to honor you for your courage and vulnerability, to share, you know, difficult things or what might not be difficult to you. But for other people would be extremely private or things that that they wouldn’t want out there. I too, have an addiction background, a different addiction background. So I can I can relate to, to some of that. I was I was thinking in a really about just all the adversity, and not from a perspective of pity, or I feel sorry for you, although I do I feel sad, that there were things that happened to you that should not have happened that you didn’t invite or control, which is often the case with people who are addicted. So I can, and other times, there doesn’t seem to be that straight line. But I honor you for for being a willingness to share because I think if if nothing else, if our audience just understands the the power of being courageous and telling your story, despite, you know, the sort of fear of will people judge me, I think I you know, it’s interesting, when I I’m curious to get your take on this, I see this a lot. We interview a lot of people for our show, and really wonderfully kind, lovely people that I I don’t want to disparage in any way. But I noticed that oftentimes, they’ll be on our show, and they’ll be concerned about how they came off or there’ll be concerned about maybe they said something that they felt was maybe slightly an opinion and actual opinion. And then they’re like, oh, you know, I? I don’t you know, I don’t want that. And I think we what you just demonstrated was, you know, the willingness to sort of say, here’s, here’s, here’s my story, here’s where I’m at. And I think as a result, not only do people feel more connected to you, because that’s how intimacy works, of course, when people are open up, but I suspect it not that I don’t know if you share though that similar story with all of your clients, I don’t know your process there, but you just shared it with you’re basically sharing it with 1000s of Realtors now and and I just want to say that that that Kelsey is courage to do that is something that we can all take a little bit of a page from of being it’s it’s like the old AAA slogan to thine own self be true or whatever it says, which is, hey, this is who I am. I don’t have to be all things to all people. Here’s my story. And I suspect that your clients if they do know that story about you feel incredibly connected to you because you’re you have this ability to say here here’s where I’m at and the story didn’t end with with you being in jail or or in you know, in a pet what penitentiary or in the in the ground, right? That’s what
Kelsey Charles 24:28 they say. Yeah, if you don’t in the walls in the programs that this is the future most addicts if you don’t get clean. And I mean that is true.
D.J. Paris 24:36 It is it is a disease that is recognized by the American Medical Association with no medical with actually no medical effects, right. There’s no actual fix for addiction. They call it a spiritual problem, but it’s really a medical problem without a medical solution. And the fact that you’re here today and not just surviving and and you know, living, you’re actually in incredibly successful as a result is, is really just an amazing story. I’m so, so grateful for you for all of that. And I don’t want to make that the entire focus, because that’s just the first half of your story. Quite honestly, it’s just where you came from. And we all came from somewhere. And your story, though, I hope, I hope will inspire a lot of our listeners to really think about how they can bring more of themselves into their business, you know, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be things that you’re uncomfortable sharing. Not you, Kelsey, but our audience that maybe they would get comfortable being able to say, This is who I am, this is my who I, what I stand for, I think is incredibly important. So and by the way, just doing fifth was it 15 million in your first year 12 million, 12 million 12 million in your first year is an incredible success. And now you’re you know, you’re at that top, you know, who knows what will happen this year, but 25 million by year three? Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty awesome. So. So I want to talk about how she talked about I think that desperation oftentimes, is such a gift. It’s the worst, hardest thing to possibly
Kelsey Charles 26:10 ever but worst gift ever. Yeah. But you’re right. It’s like what else is gonna drive you until you’re completely desperate. I mean, I am amazed by people who just go out there and kill it. Like they lived a pretty okay life. And maybe they didn’t. I mean, I don’t know what their life was like, but some of them I’m like, Oh, dude, your parents love you. Like, that’s so cool. Now you did this, and you’re still driven to just go and kill it and kill it and kill it. But I think if I hadn’t had this, like, who knows where I would be? I don’t know. I mean,
D.J. Paris 26:39 I would love to talk about and this isn’t necessarily an addiction question. It’s real. But I’m curious if there’s a parallel between support, support for you with with the challenges you’ve experienced, I know, look, going to go into rehab as a supportive environment, or it’s at least supposed to supposed to be getting on methadone and being on a program that’s supportive of finding a sponsor, if you’re in you know, a 12 step thing. All of those things are about community being supportive. We try to do our little version of that here on the show to say, hey, you know, we can learn from from people like Kelsey who have really, you know, persevered. I’m curious on how important support is for you talked about starting with Coldwell Banker and sort of feeling like you’re thrown to the wolves, maybe not feeling like you have that community? How is community real important to you and your life and support? Oh, yeah,
Kelsey Charles 27:30 community is everything for me. And I think that’s one thing that I did learn in sobriety. And then as I started to, like, kind of level up my company and how much better my life got, as I was more selective of who I allowed in my day to day. And now I think I could do anything, I mean, not to be like big headed, but I know the steps, right? You want to go be an astronaut, go hang out with astronauts go listen to their YouTube channels, go stay in the rooms, bug the shit out of them until they’re your best friend. And it just becomes like a second language to you. And I feel like I could do that with real estate or pretty much any venture that I want to go into it. Now, I don’t want to be an astronaut or a doctor. But more than anything like it is your community and who you choose to be around. And I think being in some desperate places, like having to have to get housing needing to get food taught me a lot of basic survival skills that you know, apply and even high levels of business. Right.
D.J. Paris 28:26 And you also to with the extreme challenges that you faced, you now probably have a little bit less fear of the unknown. And then people who maybe have had a more on paper, comfortable life, you know, so I’m curious to that. If If for some reason it all went away tomorrow, and for some reason, you had to start yourself a new again. You probably are like, Well, I would figure something out because yeah, you have figured things out
Kelsey Charles 28:59 totally. And that’s the thing is I really don’t have a fear but that like I’m not I don’t feel entitled to any kind of lifestyle. Like you can lose everything at any moment. And I’ve seen it happen to the best of people, and I can lose everything and I will be fine because like I’m fine. Hanging out with my family. Having some decent even doesn’t even have to be good food, like ramen noodles, like I’m stoked with that. Give me Netflix, give me life and I will be perfectly content. So yeah, nothing really scares me in terms of like, lifestyle loss, like I could have a Tesla one day, the next day, I couldn’t be on my feet. And I’m like, whatever. It just is what it is.
D.J. Paris 29:34 Yeah, cuz you’ve been there and and you’ve gotten through and that’s why I say like the gift of desperation and it’s not it’s no eight meaning to be patronizing because No, I know what you went through is is is extreme and difficult. And I honor you for coming out the other side. Let’s talk about marketing, because I know that this is a huge part of how you grew your business. So can you talk a little bit about what marketing means to you? You and how you implement it in your real estate practice.
Kelsey Charles 30:02 Sure. So I’ve gotten feedback from all kinds of people that say that I don’t have good marketing. And it’s not pretty enough. And I’m like, well, it’s super effective. So you know what you have to say, and I’m trying all these kinds of things. I’ve seen people with like $20,000 a month campaigns, and I’m like, I don’t feel connected to them. Like maybe they have this pineapple. And he’s like pretty linen colors and these color schemes, and it’s really monochromatic, but they’re not speaking to people. So that means nothing to me if they’re not connecting. And I think for me marketing, it can just be as simple as like, how do you break down barriers through digital media? Conversations, putting yourself out there that make people feel more connected to you? And if I’m feeling like someone’s uncomfortable about me, I’ll just start to tell them like some weird shit about myself. I’m like, oh, yeah, like I was a heroin addict and not to like, like, ski them out. But they’re like, Oh, my God, really, because everyone is thinking like, and so many people are just like, going through a weird phase in life. And they’re just like, What the fuck am I doing? What does Kelsey think of me? Like, as a realtor? Does she think I’m like, annoying? Am I too much to deal with? Like, am I looking at this the wrong way, they’re always wondering if they’re being judged. So I’m just gonna, like, make them feel comfortable and say like, Hey, this is who I am. I’m here for you. Like, don’t feel weird. And then this is why and how like, oh, shit, like, that’s my realtor from my for life. Like, that’s my best friend. And my clients a lot of times, like, they send me gifts, like a year down the line, like thank you for doing me, right. Like, I know, we have to sell in a couple of years. And we’re not even a little worried about it. Because we know we have like the best realtor and friends backing us, right. So I’m like, really close relationships with people. So you can do that in many ways. I mean, as far as like getting leads, you can do it with houses, like having a good CRM, putting ads out there. posting on Facebook marketplace, I do have a billboard at a local mall that has a humbug QR code. So you scan it, it gives you an instant home value, I keep in touch with you every month until you decide to block me or sell your home with me, right? And I go the mall like every couple days, I’m like, Hey, guys, this is my billboard. I’m Kelsey Charles, this is me right here on this wall. And then people are like, Oh my God, is she like on drugs? Or is that really higher? Like, I don’t look like I mean, I don’t look like a local person. So like, Okay, this girl just came from Connecticut, like, What is she trying to do? And the question my intentions, right? But then I’ll talk to them and get to know them. And my local people are like some of my favorite and best years clients. And when I got into real estate, so many people said to me, like, Oh, you’re not going to do well. Everyone in Hawaii is a realtor, everyone’s Auntie as a realtor. It’s just a way to make quick money. And everyone’s seen the opportunity. And it’s like, easy to get in too hard to be successful. And so I just saw that as like, Well, fuck you. Like, I’m just gonna go do it way better than you ever thought. Right? So as far as that and you can do marketing anyway. But whatever connects people the most with you, and gets you at like an even level where you’re not like this elite agent, or you’re only this like $2 million agent, and I do all price comps. And I can talk to anyone and there’s no lead. That’s like too low for me. So I think that is like the ultimate goal of marketing. It can look like a lot of different things. But mine is to bring people to me, I want to be the realtor that they think of when they want to make a move, when they need real estate advice. I want it to be come to me, even if I might take a couple days to reply, because I do get like hundreds of text messages a day. And then at one point in my career, I realized that I kind of made it when I had like 12 escrows. And I was driving around showing clients and this lady is like, hey, we need a house. We heard you’re the best person to do it. And I was like, I’m so sorry. I cannot call you till 11pm. Like is that okay? I understand if you want to move on? She’s like, No, I’ll wait. I was like, okay, all right, I think we’re doing well we have realized God to the point where clients and consumers realize that we love them more than ourselves, and that we always put them first and we’re worth waiting for. So in such like a consumer driven society where people want instant reply, instant access and everything. And there’s always going to be those few that are easily picked off by someone else. But I think the majority of our clients are super solid, because we tell our story because we share, we talk about our mission and our our goals for them. Like I set goals for clients. I mean, I talked to them, they tell me, Hey, I’m gonna be here for this long and then I’m gonna want to upgrade it. So I’m like, Okay, this is what this looks like, we’re gonna get you in this house, it’s gonna appreciate likely this month, we’re gonna sell it. We can take that money, you can pay down your debt, you can pay your student loans, you can pay for a graduate degree or we can put it down on another house. And then you can lower your payment as you upgrade your house. And I have a plan of what that’s gonna look like with every single client we have, whether that’s like a seller or a buyer. And not that I tried to be a financial adviser, but I’m like, Okay, this is what I would do. And they always seem to like really appreciate my advice. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 34:55 I got you just said so much. This idea of you consider while I’m putting I’m putting a word in your mouth. Alright? Not. I think you think of yourself as a consultant. Absolutely. Yeah. And like almost like a Life Consultant where it’s like, okay, because you just said, okay, you know, hey, this is this is house number one, well, here’s what we’re gonna do, here’s how long we’re gonna stay there. And again, it’s not like you’re dictating the terms. No, they
Kelsey Charles 35:24 like, they want that they want someone to drive the wheel because they don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, who does their first time buying house, I definitely did it, I wanted someone to say, Hey, this is how we’re gonna build wealth for you,
D.J. Paris 35:34 before I bought now, just to give some context for anyone who might be new to our show. So I don’t run the firm that I’m at. But I’m the CMO of our firm, we have about 800 agents, you would think and I have a licensed real estate license, you would think that I know something about real estate, I don’t like literally nothing. And that’s not me being falsely humble. Like I legitimately sit at a desk all day. I’ve never worked with a client, I know nothing. So and you know, maybe I know a little bit more than the average person, but I would not be any sort of I would not be able to give any advice about is this a good investment or not?
Kelsey Charles 36:08 Within real estate, and that’s it. Yeah. And,
D.J. Paris 36:12 and yeah, and so I before I bought a property, and it was not my first time buying as the primary residence, were not my first time, I had to ask a bunch of really successful realtors. Am I making a good decision or a bad decision? Because I don’t know. And and what the reason I’m bringing this up is what would with you being able not just to say, hey, I can help you get this deal closed, which of course is part of the job. You saying, this is a good idea. Here’s why. Here’s where we’re headed. Here’s what’s down the road. Here’s what I want to do for you beyond this initial purchase or sale, and I’m going to be with you your whole career. Think about No, I’m not saying this to you, Kelsey, I’m saying that to our audience, think about how powerful we all want. Not all but most people want guidance. And we were also really afraid to ask for it. Especially the older we get. We’re like, Oh my God. Yeah, like, like, I should already know all this stuff. I should like, I should already have somebody you know, giving I should really know everything.
Kelsey Charles 37:08 A lot older. first time homebuyers are like we’re retiring. This is our first house like, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything. I’m like, I actually prefer you know, nothing. And just trust me. That’s fine. Yeah. I’ll tell you.
D.J. Paris 37:19 That’s all we all want. Look, I don’t understand my taxes. But I hope my accountant keeps me out of jail. Right. You know, like, like, I trusted my trusted. Yeah, trust will stop getting paid if I go to jail, maybe. But she probably has 500 other clients, it wouldn’t really matter. But, but I care that she knows what she’s doing. And and I hope she does. I don’t know if she actually does.
Kelsey Charles 37:44 We don’t know the questions asked, right. That’s the thing is we as consumers aren’t taught to how to vet our professionals. And I know I’m sure you hear in our industry, like real estate agents are going away, they’re not going to be a thing anymore. I’m like, No, people need more service, not less service. The way I see it is I’m like gearing up to be your realtor for life, for your family, for your auntie for your sister for your kids. And we’re gonna have a plan for you. And I want to do more for you, not less,
D.J. Paris 38:08 and people are terrified to ask for help. It is, it is it is the hardest thing in the world. Because it’s vulnerable. It’s scary, it implies that maybe you might have some shame around, I should know that. And I don’t. And you have had to ask for help in very desperate situations before becoming a realtor. So you understand the power of surrender. And that’s I think, what what every good realtor or maybe not every good realtor, but but many of them, most of them probably are good at saying is I will take care of this Mr. And Mrs. Client, I know how to do this. And I’m not here just for this one commission. So let’s talk about how you with your marketing how you connect, because you talked about connection being so important, you give us a couple of examples of you know, doing some some, you know, social media post, hey, that’s me up there. And, and, and a little bit more, but talk a little bit more about how you how you look for connection when you’re first talking to somebody.
Kelsey Charles 39:07 So I’m always looking for connection everywhere, just as like a natural salesperson. And even before I was in sales, I always want to be connecting with people around me. So if they I like their shirt. I’m like, Oh, hey, like I love your shirt. That’s super dope, right? I’m on Facebook, though. And I realized I have like about 5000 people following me. So I’m looking, I’m interacting with them like, Oh, your kid is so cute. Like, that’s so funny. That just happened and I’m being real. I don’t do it. Because I want to sell. You know, that’s not it at all. But then I start to share about my life and how fucked up it is. And the like the crazy stuff my kids do. And they’re like, wow, like she’s just like me. And I’ve been invited over to people’s houses. They’re like, hey, we actually just bought with another realtor, but you really inspired us to buy and I’m like, oh shoot like, you know, I’m really glad sorry, you didn’t reach out to me, but like, I’m glad you bought a house. I want what’s best for you. But they’re like, well, now we want to sell and it just seemed so easy with you, like you’re so natural, like, we just, we don’t feel shame or pressure galloping around you, we want you to be our agent. So sometimes it comes back and like, if someone uses someone else, I don’t get mad. I mean, I’m like, you know, whatever, you win some, you lose some, but stay in touch with those people, they’ll come back to you. They really well, because social media is the greatest gift we have as far as like, keeping an infinite connection to someone as long as you’re connected through Facebook. I mean, they’re in your life forever.
D.J. Paris 40:30 Yeah, they are. And conversations don’t have really an end, right on social media. They just, they just continue and evolve and consistency. How important is consistency with with connection? Or do those go hand in hand with you being consistent in your outreach? And
Kelsey Charles 40:47 yeah, so I’m really consistent and my clients lives. And as far as like reaching out, people say you’re supposed to have a strategy for social media. I don’t want to wear up my welcome. So I’m not posting all day, like, Oh, hey, this is so funny. I’m not posting like 50 memes, or even five memes. I don’t even post like five times a week. And they say like, um, your presence is important, but also to hide people, if I feel like they’re just trying to sell me and I see Realtors posts, like, Oh, hey, market update, well, that means nothing to your client. They don’t even know how to read that. They might have owned five houses, but you’re trying to look smart. And now they just feel dumb. Right? So I think there’s ways to go about it. And yeah, I try to do it when it’s actually natural to me when I want to post like, Hey, here’s the thing I want to do, I’m sharing a win. This is a funny thing that happened in my life, this is something that kind of sucked. I do it when I’m inspired, not just to have another post out there and to stay in someone’s feet.
D.J. Paris 41:39 Yeah, that makes sense. What I think we’re really what we’re talking about is is surface and authenticity, and connection. And I those three values, I keep hearing from you. Service, value, authenticity, connection. These are all things that what we’re not hearing about is, you know, oh, well, I also know all of the market stats for my local area, which I’m sure you do. But what we’re what we’re really talking about is what moves but a lot of people know that like that’s yeah,
Kelsey Charles 42:11 that’s fair, no value to that. I mean, I might not know everything, but people will forgive me when I don’t, because I know, they know, I’ll figure it out. And that’ll put their best interests first. And I’m not necessarily like the nerdiest realtor, but I know what kind of ROI you’re gonna get what you’re gonna buy at any upgrades. But I’m just me like, I’m just myself. And I think that’s ultimately like, why do you connect? Well, and you talk a lot about a lot of principles of sobriety, like connection, surrender, in knowing how to surrender and a business, this cutthroat can be your make or break. I mean, our failure rate is so high, right? And that’s because people feel like they need to know everything. And some of the best Realtors I know. And people would, I would never say, but they call me for advice, like some of the top agents on Wall who were like, hey, Kelsey, what would you do in this situation? Or what are you doing for marketing? And I just tell them, and I’m like, wow, that they would ask me, but that’s so badass that they’re like, because every day I wake up, I realize I know less than I thought, every day is a new learning experience. I get knocked on my ass every single day. Like, I’ll really be thinking, I’m smart. And I never really think I’m smart. I kind of just like, Oh, I’m just lucky to be here. You know, but like, every day is like, Oh, my goodness, I did not know that was coming. And real estate is so evolving, that if you’re not humbling yourself, if you’re not, if you’re not kind of like gaining more knowledge and thinking less of yourself as you go like, it’s almost the opposite way. It should happen. You’re and you’re gonna fall flat on your face and get sued.
D.J. Paris 43:36 I’ve always felt that confidence is overrated. I think. I think confidence is the willingness to be vulnerable. And the willingness to say, This is who I am. This is what I know. This is what I don’t know. And that to me is that takes a lot more confidence to be like, by the way, I’m not good at that. I can’t do that. But I can get a solution for you. But I don’t know that right now.
Kelsey Charles 44:00 Or maybe not. But at least I’m going to tell you like hey, it’d be honest. Yeah, exactly. And no, I really appreciate that. And I’m the same way as far as like, being super confident if I if I interview someone, and they’re like, Oh, I know everything. I’m a consultant, I’m gonna come in change your business. I’m immediately like, Syed, I’m so skeptical. I’m like, oh, you know everything. And you’re gonna come change in my business. And I’m like, I have no interest in hiring you like the kind of people that I bring on or that just like, oh, I don’t know, everything, but like, I think I could learn it in there just a little bit. I like a little bit of apprehension. And that’s when I’m like, okay, yeah, my person, you can come on. I also
D.J. Paris 44:34 love to win when I meet with somebody. And this this comes up all the time, I’m sure for our audience, is when somebody asks you something, the best thing that and you don’t know the answer, the best thing that I would, if I were the home owner, and I’m interviewing people to sell my property, and I have all these listing presentations and I and if I said well, I have this really unusual thing with with my home or my mortgage or whatever. And if they go I don’t know what that is. But I’m going to figure that out. And I’m going to get back to you with an answer. That is, that is as good to me as Oh, I know what that is. And I know how to fix that. Like, that’s good, too. But I love when people are like, I’ve never heard of that before, but they get excited, like, I’m gonna figure this out for you. I’m like, I want that person in my life. Because and I want to say something else. You did a version of that. In something you said it probably, I don’t want to make sure it didn’t skip over our audience’s ears. You were talking about being so busy that sometimes now you get phone calls where you’re like, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. prospect, I can’t call you until 11pm tonight. But But here’s what here’s what she’s doing. Let’s break that down. She didn’t say no problem, I’ll get right back to you and then fail. She said, here’s, here’s what I can do. Here’s what I’m willing to do. Is that okay? And by the way, if it’s not okay, I understand. We live in an immediate, you know, and I I’m saying more than you did, but But you know, we’re talking about this immediacy of feeling like you need to respond immediately, you probably do need to respond immediately, but with the expectation of when the next step is, and you just said it, and it’s just part of kind of your process. But a lot of people could learn from that is to say, Hey, Mr. Mrs. Client, I am so grateful you called me I wish I could call you back right now, unfortunately, the earliest I can call you is x, can we do that? Does that work for you? And that’s really what you did. And I think that I love that there’s nothing worse than leaving a message. And then just going like, I am waiting on a refund for a child, I won’t even say that they’ve become one child. Now. It’s one it’s like a, like a GrubHub kind of thing. And it’s not their fault that I placed an order for food didn’t show up. No big deal. I was very nice about it. I’m like, hey, guys just never came. And it’s been like three days. And I’m like, now I have to go back to them and be like, hey, just FYI. Did you guys gonna like take care of this? Because worst case scenario, I’ll call my credit card company, they’ll refund it, no big deal. But all I really want is for them to say, hey, DJ, give us a week on this. We’re on it. Don’t worry, validate me, validate me and and tell me what the next step is. If you don’t have to solve it right away, just tell me we’re on it. You don’t have to think about this again, don’t worry. If by Friday, it’s not completed, I will reach out to you and blah, blah, blah. This is what we’re talking about customer service as well. And I think this is a customer service job, at least from my perspective, or at least a good chunk of it is. I want to talk also about choosing a firm and I know this was really when we were first booking Kelsey, that was kind of our the the topic that I thought we’d be going into most was like, how do you choose a firm everyone’s you know, there’s so many options and so many different brokerage models. You’ve been, you’ve been now to this is your fourth firm you’re in and you’re happy. And we like real. And we’re super happy that you’re there. And I’m glad that that more firms who have a similar model to exp are now existing. So there’s just more opportunity for people I love that everybody Nihlus spot for everyone, I would love for you to give any sort of advice you have to our audience about how to select a firm, and maybe questions to ask or things to look for, and maybe things to look out for.
Kelsey Charles 48:20 Okay, so I’ve actually made a YouTube video on this. And it’s probably going to be the last thing that you would think I would say, as I would love to recruit love to have you at my brokerage. But my number one thing when you’re looking at a brokerage is you’re and you’re a new agent is like the split is so irrelevant. I mean, you can argue all day, like, Hey, I’m worth this much more present. But if you’re doing no deals, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. So that’s so many new agents are like, Oh, what’s your split? They come to me like, oh, Kelsey, I want to be on your team. Like, what’s your split? I’m like, Excuse me, we’re having the wrong conversation. Like, what are you going to bring to me because I’ve proven I can do this right? On my own. I don’t necessarily need to grow, I want to grow and I want to spread my mission. And I want you know, my team to cover all of why, right? But it never starts with like, Hey, I’m so good at video, I can completely take over your social media, I can do this for you and all for free. Just because I want to learn from you.
D.J. Paris 49:19 Right away, by the way, is that like your dream, your fantasy that somebody? It would be my fantasy. Somebody calls me up and says, Hey, I like what you guys are doing. I think I can add value. By the way, this is how you can prospect you can prospect the exact same way. Hey, I saw you just got a promotion at your company, Mr. or Mrs. So and so on LinkedIn. And I don’t know if you’re thinking of upgrading or moving but boy, I just wanted to say congrats. Keep up the great work. I would love to chat. We’re talking about adding value. And so absolutely. You just said something so powerful. So a lot of times people will say well, when you’re going out interviewing here are the questions. It’s actually the thing I asked you to say is what questions you’re starting with. You’re starting from a different perspective and In a much stronger position, and I used to say this to people who were in the normal corporate world, when they would say, because I’ve recruited over, I don’t know, 1500 agents or whatever that doesn’t mean I’m know all that much about recruiting other than recruiting realtors. But in the in the non realtor world what I used to tell people who are looking for jobs is go into a job and say, here’s what I think I can do for you. Does this match with what you’re looking for? And is opposed to? Here are the qualities I have here is you know, blah, blah, blah, my background? It’s
Kelsey Charles 50:28 Oh, yeah, you can tell me about your qualities. Like it means nothing to me, you know, that show me your qualities? Like, who are you? Are we going to like hanging out with you? What are you going to bring to us? And that’s what I did when I was new. And I would go to top producers, and I’m like, Hey, I’m Kelsey Charles, you have no idea who I am. But I want to dedicate 100 hours a week for free to your business. What can I do for you? Can I show houses? Can I hold your open houses, I was in five open houses a week, and like, five to seven, nobody even came. But I was just trying, right? Putting a sign up? Who’s gonna come by? And I would go to older agents and say, Hey, I know you’re super successful. You’re doing all these deals? Can I help you set up a social media and a Facebook presence? And you just let me come on a listing appointment and teach me what will you do? And that’s exactly what I did. And I was like, seriously, no catch, like, don’t pay me anything. Like I want nothing. I’m just gonna come show up every single day like, I will be your assistant, I’ll bring the coffee. I mean, no matter what you need, just like, let me come. And that’s how I got my start. And I actually learned about that from a blogger, his name is Nate green, and he’s a fitness blogger. And he got his editorial in men’s health by writing the editor everyday and saying, Hey, how can I get your job, bro? Like, these are the things I’m good at. And I mean that maybe that’s a very fresh approach. That’s not like what I did at all. But I love what you’re saying like, hey, does this match? What can I bring to your company? I just do not appreciate it. I don’t think anyone appreciates it when you come and say, hey, what can you do for me? I’m like, Well, you came to me. So don’t come to me with like, what the 10 things like I can do for you. Because what if I’m not even hiring at the moment, I really want you to show me that you have some interest in me. And you’re not shopping like five different companies. Because you know, you like how St. Charles team is different, like our dynamic. My mission. It’s not like so many of these big brokerages, like, like we’re very niche, very unique. I have like a mission that I want to create. And there’s a lot of growth for that right person. But if they’re starting out with a mindset of the opposite of growth, like what’s the most I can get at for the least amount of work? That immediately is just like such a turn off to me?
D.J. Paris 52:31 Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I’m curious. So it’s so funny, because on the recruiting side of this business, recruiting agents, it’s often a Okay, well, what do you offer? Meaning? What is your firm provide? What you know, splits leads, like we talked about leads for a second? Yeah, what shouldn’t shouldn’t agent, what is your opinion about when you’re interviewing firms, the importance of a firm providing leads,
Kelsey Charles 52:58 go get your own leads, like anyone that’s gonna teach you how to get leads, they’re gonna be the worst leads, they’re gonna keep you dependent. Your job as a salesperson is to get leads, okay. And if you’re getting leads, your value goes down so much. I mean, anyone can close a lead someone who’s like, hey, I want to buy a house. Sure, learn the humps, and make a million dollars, like learn to eat what you kill that the salespersons job that That’s crazy to me, like, No, I’m not gonna hand you all your leads on a silver platter, I will teach you how to do it, I’ll teach you how to fish. I’ll teach you how to speak to people and market is do it like me, but me feeding you leaves a short time. And when the market changes, those aren’t going to be as easy to buy, they’re going to be much more expensive, they’re going to be much more flaky. Let me teach you how to build a business. And I think there’s 1000 times more value in that.
D.J. Paris 53:46 Yeah, and also, there’s just a lot of lying that goes on with leads a lot of promises that don’t end up happening
Kelsey Charles 53:52 No, and leads lie, they’ll lead to your company’s gonna give you all the leads, and then you call and you’re like, Oh, hey, I saw you click on this. And we’re like, No, I didn’t like who are you? Why are you calling me? There’s so many better ways. And I can teach you and I teach agents for free, like, call me hit me up on social media. I’ll spend a couple hours with you on a call, we’ll get you a new system. And no, do not rely on a brokerage or team for leads. So
D.J. Paris 54:16 I could not agree with you more I 100% on the same page.
Kelsey Charles 54:21 I’m pretty strong. So I’m sure I’m glad that you do. Okay. No, I
D.J. Paris 54:25 think you’re speaking your truth. And I think your truth lines with aligns with mine. And I’m sure there are firms that provide great leads and you can have a good career I guess doing that but 99% of firms that I’m aware of really that’s probably not the way you’re going to find success by by someone else’s leads if you want to purchase leads on your own and you want to do your own thing great. Or, you know, generate your own even better. Let’s talk a little bit about what what the role of a brokerage brokerage is. So if it’s not leads, if splits and all of those things are relative big So what should people be looking for when they’re trying to figure out which firms the right match?
Kelsey Charles 55:05 So for me, personally, I’m not looking for something in the dark ages, I don’t want to see. And I don’t really care about slits as new agent, whatever, go get some deals, get some experience and you like any job start to negotiate as you go on, but prove your value first. But I’m looking for technology. Or do they have bundled discounts? Because they do have this buying power? Can they get me time for like, $25 a month, my brokerage does offer that that’s 500 bucks a month, anywhere else? You’re looking right? So I have time, which is awesome. I have an artificial intelligence chatbot that talks to everyone that comes to my site. It sets appointments, there’s always someone there on my site. And that’s because real has created with this partnership, which is what is the back end support, like Okay, so when I was at Coldwell Banker, I couldn’t log into a virtual workplace and talk to anyone in my company that you can do that with exp, you can do that with real, the thing that overwhelmed me a little bit with exp was the whole virtual world. And then there’s okay, there’s this workplace and Hey, you, if you’re not selling, it’s your fault. But it’s like information overload. That’s what exp felt like to me. So I wanted to support new producers, but they’re like, where do I start? Like, how do I navigate this abyss? All the information, sometimes it’s too much information. And that’s why I prefer real, it’s a little simpler. I look for tech forward, what are the apps like? Like I said, the backend systems that not even just leave them like on the agent side? Is it tracking my Commission’s like, my 1090 died, and can I get support within the app, I can go right into a chat and have them come into my computer and fix the problem. Through Time through the real back end app. I’m buying stock because exp made me like a nice six figure amount just being invested in the company. I see that real has this huge potential, they have this big vision, they’re acquiring escrow companies, they are wanting to change the face of real estate. And we are like, everyone has a different vision, right. But I really believe in what real is and what they’re trying to be in, I’m fine if they worked in Kinkos, because, well, they work some kinks out, because I’m gonna benefit like I have, like 30,000 shares, if that goes up just a little bit my failure failure. I’m a millionaire, you know, and that was the story for a lot of people at EXP and you know, I don’t even know if I’m allowed to talk about that. So real sorry, if I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know Not even you I my company, I think they tell you not to like use that to recruit. But that’s not the recruiting that’s just sharing like, Okay, that’s a benefit to me. And we have this app that we can go in the backend of and if we want, they use artificial intelligence to determine whether or not we can get our payment. So if I, if I haven’t sold for a couple months, pretty rare. But let’s say I have 10 pending escrows. I can click in the app. Artificial Intelligence determines how likely it is to close they have knows they know I’ve closed a lot of deals, this one’s falling out. But sometimes it I can get my commission straight through the app like months earlier. Closing deadline. And I think that’s huge. Because cash flow is the biggest problem with even producers, right? We have a lot of expenses. It’s hard to manage it just having that one thing opened up to me change my business a
D.J. Paris 58:11 lot. Yeah, I’m a part owner and a commission Advanced Business because yeah, and really we just offered internally for our agents, but because the cash flow is so challenging,
Kelsey Charles 58:23 and I haven’t noticed it and she would like to be paid whether or not I’m paid because she doesn’t make as much as me, you know what I mean? So I’m like, Okay, well, let’s figure this out. And you know, where I come from, I didn’t learn to like save money or budget, I have no business background. So I’m kind of figuring this out as I go. I don’t want anyone to suffer, you know, because of like me not having perfect, like accounting or bookkeeping skills. That’s helpful for me. I think real is gonna be super dope. I think it’s gonna blow up. And just seeing the people that came to the company from exp different brokerages. Maybe they weren’t feeling exp, but really, really spoke to them. I love the founder. He like comments and likes myself on social media. He’s like, Oh, hey, Kelsey, killin it. And hi, I’m like, How do you know who I am? Like, that’s just so cool, right? So I’ve been doing a lot of PR recently to bring attention to real because the more legitimacy it has a better idea. And no one’s heard of real yet, at least in why they’re like, Oh, you’re with real broker? And I was like, Yeah, I know. You’ll you’ll know as soon away.
D.J. Paris 59:22 I want to really conclude this with a difficult question. So I’m going to push you a little bit. Because in and I think you’re the first person I will ask this question to, and you’re the best person to ask this question to. Where are you struggling right now? You’ve had a tremendous success. You came from this really adverse sort of early life. You’ve now you’re crushing it in real estate, you’re authentic. You’re obviously doing well. What what are the struggles of a $25 million producer right now?
Kelsey Charles 59:58 Okay, so I’ve been are solid like growing too fast. And as awesome as that looks on paper, like I said, I do miss those calls. I mean, I get hundreds of texts a day, my assistant tries to wade through the best we can, but we do lose people. I mean, we lose opportunities, because my tic TOCs, blowing up like my Facebook Messenger, like, all of these avenues that are great to get clients, once you kind of like, become the go to person, you just lose people. And I’ve had people delete me on Facebook, like, oh, Kelsey, Charles doesn’t care about me. She didn’t respond to my message. And I’m like, Oh, my God, yes, I do. You did try hard enough to get through my wall, you know what I mean? Like, come to my assistant, my phone numbers right on there, I cannot reply to every Facebook message. And I’m sorry for that. And I really have tried to have like a virtual assistant handle it. But we give so much spam, that we’re literally then paying to wade through spam. So that’s why if you go to my Facebook page, it says please, PM, please DM me at this number before you pm me on Facebook, because it’s very unlikely that I will see it. And those clients that do get through that they’re like, Hey, I’ve been watching you for months, I’ve been messaging you on Facebook, and nothing will you please consult talk to me. And I’m like, Thank you for like getting through my processes. And farther down my funnel, you’re showing me you’re pretty serious. And as much as I would like to engage with everyone, I can’t number one. And then number two is I have no business background. So I’m not good at like firing people, they say you should hire slow fire fast. Like, I’m not going to fire someone unless they like, punch me in the face and steal my money. I don’t know, you know what I mean? Like it would take a lot, I’m going to try to find a role for them a way for us to work better together. But that’s like my social work background. And the way that I see conflict resolution is a lot different than a business person does, right. So that creating like other versions of me, can’t, I thought that was the thing that you could do. But like there’s one you and not everyone wants to be you know, everyone wants to work 100 hours a week, they don’t have this vision, like you can do talk up your mission statement all you want. But some people really just want to have a life. You know, they’re like, I want to go surf on the weekends, especially in Hawaii. Like they don’t want to work like me. So learning to accept that. And then learning to manage the money. Like you think it’s cool to make $600,000 a year until you never have and you’re like oh shit, I literally spent all of it. Every course that person told me to buy I did it. I spent like 300 grand one year on like, personal development that maybe helps. I mean, maybe it did it, I don’t know. But as far as like getting ahead, like I’ve not heard, I still feel like I’m just kind of figuring it out. And that some of that it’s gonna be wasted revenue. But there’s no clear path, like for business for real estate, and everyone has a different idea. And they all want you to pay $20,000 to find out what that looks like. So it’s like a lot of trial and error and getting to know yourself and who you are as a business owner. And then eventually, like, what is success for you? Like, a lot of people would say I’m successful, like, they’re like, Okay, you’re rolling in like 25 million a year. I mean, obviously just unsold volume, you should be doing well. But I’m like, that’s not afraid me. Like, I want to have this income. I want to affect these people’s lives. And I want to turn my phone off and five. So those
D.J. Paris 1:03:09 and and you’re not finished yet. And, and and maybe you never maybe you never will be Yeah, I
Unknown Speaker 1:03:17 don’t know if you’re finished. Yeah. But the good news
D.J. Paris 1:03:21 is the problems don’t stop, but they’re a better quality of problem, right? So there used to be the problem of like, oh my gosh, I’m going into withdrawal. What do I do? How do I score methadone, Suboxone or whatever? And then how do I just stay alive? And normal to now it’s like, I still have problems. And I think that’s another really important thing is is your problems never go away? They just hopefully get a little bit of a higher quality of problem.
Kelsey Charles 1:03:54 Yeah, totally. No one that makes sense. And especially like bringing that to recovery is like, Okay, you’re always gonna have problems but like, at what level are you content? And I don’t know that I found that or if I’ll ever be content, but I’ve so to be completely honest, like I don’t have that peace in my life. Like I don’t have that Zen. Like a lot of people have like I don’t eat Okay, good. Because it’s I don’t know if that’s an added thing. I’m like always like chicken brain like a hamster. I don’t know. I’d love to have that someday and that means more to me than making $20 million. Me too. That might be something we never have and just have to be
D.J. Paris 1:04:27 okay with. Yeah, I’m to the point now where where I’m thinking like I’m very self critical and so I I’d never think I’m doing well even though you know and you might maybe you tell Yeah, you’re doing so well I don’t know if I’m killing it but but I’m certainly I’m certainly had some level of you know, a lot of people like are shown or grateful for that. And maybe I’ll always just feel a little bit less than and maybe that’s okay, as long as I have community and people to help prop me up. When I’m when I’m struggling. Maybe it’s okay to fall apart. And I think you know, you are, I think what really is coming through for me in this conversation is is this will this, this courage to be vulnerable? And and I almost think, not that I’m any sort of psychological expert. But if we look at the 12 step programs that exist, and they’re not just for addiction, they’re for lots of lots of instances of things that people struggle with. The big thing in there is surrender. Being finding community, finding supportive people who say I Oh, I’ve been where you are I, I love you the way you are, because I am you. And I think that’s one thing in real estate, you don’t have to feel alone, I guess is maybe the best part of the 12 step programs is this, this idea that we’re not alone, and there’s people that care, and you clearly care about your clients, you care about your co workers, you care about yourself, and you’ve taken steps to continue to increase the quality of your life. And I honor you, I am so impressed. Not that you need me to be impressed. And it’s not. Again, I’m hopefully that doesn’t come off as patronizing because you’re an incredible success. But I am, I am humbled by by your willingness to be vulnerable and say difficult things. Because there is a place for our own individuality within our real estate business, there’s a place for us to say, This is who I am, this is what I do. This is what I’m good at, here’s what I’m not good at it. Well, everyone has different boundaries around what they want to reveal. But this idea that you don’t have to go it alone is really important to find, find, you know, you know, I, as a marketer, I’m thinking, I’m always thinking like, gosh, you should start some sort of addict. You know, like group of Realtors, where you but but of course, that’s, you know, that’s why I love
Kelsey Charles 1:07:04 that. That’s what I wanted to do. So that next coming next is I want to open a sober living home and create like a sober living brand, where I connect all of the women with addicts, but successful, right, so like in AAA, but my own spin on it, because a wasn’t my thing. I don’t like to sit in rooms, they’re super boring to me. I don’t like all the attention. I’m like, oh, and everyone told me like, you won’t get sober that way. I was like, okay, like anything, I’m gonna find a way just whatever, leave me alone, I will find it. Right. And maybe that’s why I don’t have my serenity or my peace or whatever. But yeah, that’s my next thing is I want to find people like me, who think you know, knock on wood, haven’t committed felonies or anything. And that that’s my saving grace is like I did, but I didn’t get caught in if I had done I wouldn’t have the life I do today. But I think there’s opportunities for people in addiction to get the right people in their life, maybe console why? Which breaks them away from their living environment. Sure. And then I want to show them the way and I bet we’ll have like a huge success. Right? Yeah, totally.
D.J. Paris 1:08:06 Yeah, boy, I am so excited to continue to follow. You know what? Yes,
Kelsey Charles 1:08:12 yes. I hope we’re friends. And we stay in touch. And I wouldn’t really would like to keep in touch.
D.J. Paris 1:08:16 I yeah, I certainly hope so. I will, I will, I will hope to continue to learn more about what you’re up to, because I’m just so so honored and humbled by it. So on behalf of our audience, thank you. This was a long, a long conversation, but hopefully a very poignant conversation. And I think we provided a lot of value to our audience. So thank you, Kelsey, on behalf of the audience, for your willingness to share some hard things, and also to give some really great practical advice along the way. I mean, this really was kind of the full package and, and, and also just thank you for showing where they say like the Oliver Cromwell, story, warts and all, paint me with my warts and all right, like I this is, this is who I am. These are my battle scars. And we all have them in our own little way. And so on behalf of Kelsey and myself, we also want to thank our audience for sticking around to the end of this podcast, we honor you, you’re the reason that we keep doing this. And if you could just do speaking directly to the audience. Now, if you could help us in two ways that would be wonderful one is just tell a friend, tell somebody who needs to hear Kelsey story, send them a link to our websites, probably the easiest way just haven’t go to keeping it real pod.com Or, you know, there’s a lot of other ways you can find our show. You can just subscribe to keeping it real as well on any podcast app, but also so tell a friend and then please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. This helps us get better helps us improve and also helps us get more in front of more eyeballs and ears. So thank you on behalf of all of us at the show with Kelsey and our audience. Thanks to everyone for helping make this a Fun show to do. Kelsey, thank you. And congratulations on your success. You’re a true inspiration to me. And I am excited to to build a friendship.
Kelsey Charles 1:10:10 Yes, please add me on Facebook. And if you ever want to do like a follow up or anything I’m happy to
D.J. Paris 1:10:15 and everyone should go check out Kelly’s website, which is Kelsey Charles homes.com. Hey, ELS, ey, Charles like, and then homes plural. Kelsey Charles homes.com. Link is in the show notes as well as her Instagram handle, which is Realtor in Hawaii. She’s amazing. She’s She’s honest, she’s vulnerable, and she’s very good at her job. So please reach out to her with any questions around marketing. Just any sort of realtor advice. She is a super generous kind person and wants to help so Kelsey, thank you so much, and we will see everybody You’re welcome. And we’ll see everyone on the next episode.
Kelsey Charles 1:10:53 I will talk to you soon.
Top Real Estate Agent & Coach At 20 Years Old • Madison Reeves
Mar 29, 2022
Madison Reeves, the serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of both The Bridal Project and The Reeves Method, talks about how it was like to get her license at 18 and her accomplishments in the last 3 years she’s been practicing real estate. Madison also discusses how she categorizes talent and how she teaches goal setting. Next, Madison goes into money-mindset which helped her be successful in her business. Madison also discusses how to build and grow mindset. Last, Madison shares one universal piece of advice she’d give to agents.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s show, we’re going to be speaking with a top producer and a real estate coach who’s only 20 years old. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. And in just a moment, I’m your guide and host I got ahead of myself in just a moment though. And I’m so excited, which is why I got ahead of myself, because for the first time on this show, we are speaking to a very young real estate top producer. In fact, she’s 20 years old. Her name is Madison Reed. She’s amazing. And she’s also a real estate coach. So I’m so excited. But before we get to Madison, bear with me just a few moments here. Please tell a friend about our podcast. We’ve done over 350 episodes and we keep growing our audience because you tell a friend so think of any other realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing from our show. Send them a link to keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve done can be streamed there. And also please leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening. You know, Apple podcasts, iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify excetera. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Alright, enough for me. Let’s get on to our interview with Madison Reed.
Right today on the show we have Madison Reed and Christians real estate and Keller Williams Black Hills in South Dakota. Let me tell you about Madison Madison Reeves is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of the bridle project and the Reeves method, which is an event planning company and coaching program respectively. She’s also an award winning real estate agent, a recipient of the top 100 leaders in real estate Award and a top producing Sales Team Leader with Christians team Incorporated. Madison is driven to help other entrepreneurs seek growth and take control of their results to accelerate their business and lives. Now Madison grew up in a poor neighborhood in a small town and was determined to prove that anyone could fulfill their utmost potential regardless of where they came from. Now after dropping out of college and getting fired from several jobs that’s happened to me too. She had seemingly little to no direction in life. And it wasn’t until Madison discovered entrepreneurship and creating a life she loved that she found her true calling and purpose in life. Now she wants to share the liberation of an extraordinary life with others around her. Now Madison spends her time mentoring other real estate sales agents with production coaching. She also focuses on expanding her real estate team to provide others with the same life changing opportunity that was provided for her now check out Madison’s new book which is called Project badass breaking out of your comfort zone to transform from average to extraordinary which by the way has a perfect five star review and it’s not like there’s just one review there’s lots of reviews, perfect five star review on Amazon it’s available there and of course everywhere else books are sold and she’s a podcast host please check out her show I know I’m going to which is called Project badass vailable everywhere podcasts are served, but definitely visit her website to which is called which is project badass network.com Again Project badass network.com Madison Welcome to the show.
Madison Reeves 4:44 Thank you so much. Thank you for having me here. I’m excited.
D.J. Paris 4:48 You’re our very first South Dakota guest and we’ve not had a North Dakota guest and I’m just going to say it we’re never going to have a North Dakota guest because I don’t like North Dakota I only I’m only teasing I have no problems with either Dakota but I am excited to have I’m always I always love having people from, you know, we have so many people from California and New York, Chicago, you know, Florida. And I always love talking to people in other states where I’m not as familiar I was, I was telling Madison just before Not that anyone cares. But I’ve been to almost all the states in the country, and I haven’t been to either of the Dakotas. And there is a lot to see in both. So I am, I’m excited to be talking to you, because it reminds me of something I need to do, which is figure out how I’m going to get over there and cross that off of my, my list of visiting every state, but enough about me, nobody cares, let’s talk about you. So but you do so many different things. And and I’m I’m always so interested and admiring of people who come from, you know, maybe a background where a lot of the advantages that a lot of us have have just sort of enjoyed without thinking about maybe our backgrounds as much, you know, we just sort of that’s our background. I’m always love talking to people who come from maybe a more disadvantaged background. And I don’t mean that in any sort of pejorative sense. That’s just the reality of your situation. And that and how they really break through and rise above I find that so absolutely, just inspiring and encouraging. And I’m really grateful you’re here, I would love to start at the beginning of your real estate journey, because I know you do a million other things. On top of just being a real estate agent, by the way, a top real estate agent. But tell us a little bit about why you chose real estate.
Madison Reeves 6:27 Yeah, so I guess I’ll back up a couple of years before getting my license. I actually graduated high school when I was 16. And I had this whole plan of what I was going to do. And you know, as that goes, that didn’t happen. I went to college, I did a couple semesters of that before realizing it wasn’t really for me. So I ended up dropping out. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was making like a how I don’t know, like $12,000 a year as a barista. And I was, I was very much just in the mindset of I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what the next steps are, I don’t have like a college education now is how I was raised, you have to get a college education in order to have a good job. So I discovered real estate after purchasing my first home with my ex husband. And I was like, Well, I’m not doing anything else. I kind of like this. So I’m gonna go ahead and get my license. And I got licensed in the state of South Dakota, like a month after I turned 18. And I started selling right away.
D.J. Paris 7:29 What let’s I’m gonna pause for a second because I want everyone to absorb this idea of somebody getting their license, which people can do in most states at 18. You could do it here in Illinois as well. And I imagine, you know, then you now have this arduous task of convincing people that an 18 year old knows enough to actually help them with this massive financial purchase or sale. And that in and of itself is a huge mountain to climb. So I just want to honor you for having the courage. Or maybe maybe it’s a desperation slash courage thing, but either way, the courage to follow through as an 18 year old I was, I was still like working. I mean, I was I was going to college. But I the idea of even starting a career was so far away for me, I really honor you for having the courage, but let’s talk about it. What was it like as an 18 year old to then get your license?
Madison Reeves 8:21 Yeah. So I often get asked, because, you know, I will be 21 in July. So I’m still very young. I’ve only been in this business for three years. But I get a lot of people that asked me, you know, and I focus mainly on multifamily and investments. So I worked with injectors who, you know, they’ve got a lot of money to put into real estate, and there’s just never been an issue. I’ve just never had anybody question it my age or my experience, but you just have to come with confidence and knowing what you’re doing. And I contribute a lot of that too. So backing up a little bit, I was on my first team within Keller Williams for six months. And I did about five transactions, which for six months amazing. All my sphere of influence. I liked it, but it wasn’t really the best fit for me team and culture wise. So I ended up transitioning to Christians team in April of 2020. So like, right when the world ended,
D.J. Paris 9:18 right at the perfect time.
Madison Reeves 9:19 Well, it could have gotten really bad, but luckily, you know, a pro of living in South Dakota is we never shut down. And in fact, in the real estate industry like exploded, sure, sure. Between April and the end of the year, so my first eight months on Christian’s team, I actually did 38 transactions.
D.J. Paris 9:41 So hold on, hold on, but we got to pause because to you this is like you already know all this. I want everyone to hear that. And by the way, you were what 20 At the time or a 1920 around there. I’ve just turned my team. Yeah. 19 year old doing 38 transactions in and it’s not like you didn’t grow up in a real estate firm. Amelie your sphere of influence, you have already sort of exhausted that. And by the way, who’s got a sphere of influence at 18? Nobody, so that in and of itself to do five transactions in six months, that’s amazing. And then to then go on and join a new team as a 19 year old, I’m only laughing because it’s so absurd. If you wrote that into a Hollywood movie about your life, the notes back you’d get from from the production company, you’d be like, well, that’s not believable. We’re just not we can’t do that. So really amazing.
Madison Reeves 10:27 All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So yeah, I mean, it was a whole new, like, wow, okay, this is what it’s supposed to be like, I found my people, I know what I’m doing. I have the right training and the resources. But the coolest thing that happened in those eight months, while I was selling all this real estate is I discovered that I wanted to be a coach. And so in January of 2021, so last year, I transitioned into the role of sales team leader. And basically what that means is that my job is to find talent and recruit them onto the team. And I’m responsible for helping them into production. So I started in that in at the beginning of last year, and last year, I hired probably about five agents. And I did about 12 million and sales.
D.J. Paris 11:16 Of course, unbelievable. Here. And it’s amazing,
Madison Reeves 11:20 though, my goal is really to get out of production, I’ll probably do about 15 million in production this year, and then I’ll be done. So I’m going to focus just on coaching as of the end of the year, and really just finding the right people for the team expanding into other states and helping them do what I did and you know, be able to produce a lot and meet their goals they have. So
D.J. Paris 11:44 Wow, unbelievable. And you, you still can’t legally drink alcohol. That’s an amazing series of accomplishment, just just to put a just to put like a benchmark to it. I don’t mean, there’s anything about alcohol. But just the idea of that is so unbelievably mature of you. And I really, that’s I’m a bit awestruck, so congratulations on all that success. Let’s talk a little bit about and I want to back up for one moment, because you talked about working with investors, and a lot of our audience really doesn’t, doesn’t do that. They’re more traditional realtors who are you know, helping people buy and sell primary residences, most likely, however, Madison, I asked her that question earlier, and we didn’t really go back to it. I just want to follow up on it and explain why I think her answer made sense to me, but maybe not to the audience, which was, I said, it must have been tough to convince people to help them, you know, buy or sell homes when you’re so young and inexperienced. She was like, Yeah, it really wasn’t an issue, and she did a lot of multifamily investor stuff. And the reason my guess the reason why that age wasn’t a factor, really probably didn’t have as much to do with Madison’s competence or confidence, which she clearly has both. But it’s probably a lot of what investors really are looking for are the deals, they don’t really, it’s not as important to them. What the pedigree or the experience, they just want their numbers, people they want to see, they want to see the numbers and Madison went out and found amazing deals and said, Look, if you don’t, if you don’t want to invest in this, there’s lots of other people that can so am I am I on the right track with that is that why age didn’t matter as much.
Madison Reeves 13:21 I think that was definitely part of that, especially with the investors. So the reason that I love doing investment, real estate is because there’s no emotions, it’s residential real estate, they’re buying their first house or the home that they’re going to raise their kids and like it’s a big deal. But I’m in investment, real estate, even though I’m selling residential investment, and not really diving into the commercial world. But the investors don’t care facts don’t care about feelings in this world. So just looking for someone who’s going to work the nights and weekends, to run numbers on 100 different deals before we find the right one. And to just honestly shoot them straight, you know, don’t push them around or tell them things that just to make them feel better if you just tell them how it is like they a lot of people appreciate that.
D.J. Paris 14:09 Let’s also and you’re you’re a recruiter and a coach. And to me those are oftentimes one in the same in this industry. And oftentimes, it’s the managing brokers are the ones that often have to do the recruiting, and I’m somebody who does recruiting for our company, and I am not the managing broker, thankfully. And I get to devote a lot of time to that. And I know what that chat the challenges in that piece are I don’t do coaching. Thankfully, that would be something that I wouldn’t be very skilled at. But I admire that you’re doing both and I’m curious on when you’re out there. And I’m curious when you’re out there looking for talent because I think this will help a lot of the listeners who maybe are solo practitioners, it’s just them. They’re not on a team. And right now of course teams are so prominent in the news and in communities like that. seems to be where real estate is headed, and are in his heading and has been heading. And it’s very common. And so we get a lot of questions from our audience that are like, how do we go about finding the right team? Well, I’m so grateful to have you because you’re somebody that’s looking for team members. And I’m curious, of course, we want to make sure we, for anyone in your local area that we talked about if they’re interested in joining your team, how they might join you, but I would love to hear what you look for in an agent, because you also talked about developing talent. So it doesn’t necessarily, I’m the way I heard it was yes, I’m sure you’d love to have top 1% producers on exclusively on the team. But I like it sounds like you also bring on newer agents and really try to build up their production is. And so I’m curious on when you’re out there trying to look for talent to join the team. What do you look for?
Madison Reeves 15:48 Yeah, absolutely. So before I answer that question, it’s important to understand that there’s really three types of talents. So are talented people. So you have proven talent, emerging talent, or potential talent. So whenever I’m meeting with someone who goes, you know, all I’m thinking about real estate, maybe they already have their license, and they’re selling a couple of deals, but they’re doing it part time, I really like to categorize them into whether they’re you no proven emerging, or a potential talent, because it’s different for everybody. But really, what I’m looking for, what I’m looking to recruit someone to the team is somebody who has a track record of success, and doesn’t have to necessarily be in real estate. But with my age, I attract a lot of younger people naturally. And they go, Wow, Madison, look at all these things that you’re doing the opportunities that you have, like, I want to do the same thing. And that’s, that’s great, and everything, but having that, you know, when was the first time you tried to make money on your own? I actually asked that in every interview, because I get questions from, you know, I was doing a lemonade stand when I was seven or eight so that I could buy popsicles, because my mom wouldn’t give me allowance or,
D.J. Paris 16:55 you know, that counts. Right. And that’s, that’s important. Yeah,
Madison Reeves 16:58 I mean, having that entrepreneurial spirit is really important. And just making sure that they’re, you know, their, their talent, and they have, they’re willing to take ownership, they’re not, they don’t have any victim mentality. And really, the biggest one for our team is that they’re a good culture fit. Because if you can fit in with our culture, and if you work hard, we will find you the right seat on the bus. And that’s, that’s just really what it comes down to. But it’s asking the right questions, having them self develop of self discovery, I should say, of whether real estate is really right for them or not. So we have a very extensive, very extensive interview process, they go through like five or six interviews before we give them the Yes,
D.J. Paris 17:41 wow, that’s, uh, but I guess, I guess that’s really smart. Because you want to make sure they’re the right fit, you want to make sure they can handle five or six interviews, because we all know that oftentimes, especially you know, when it’s somebody who’s not in your existing sphere of influence, who may hire you to help them buy or sell a property, they might be, they might be interviewing a number of different Realtors as well, you’re probably you might be third on the call sheet for, you know, going in for a listing presentation. So this idea that they can continue to come back. And it’s almost like an indicator of can you handle five or six interviews, which is a lot. And that’s hard. For a lot of people, it’s stressful. But it’s also a great weed out system, I’m sure to say, hey, we need to make sure that you’re the right fit is we’re going to invest a lot of time and energy in you, Mr. or Mrs. Agent. And we want to make sure that that you can handle our process. And it’s not to torture them. Of course, you guys really want to make sure it’s the right fit. But that’s really interesting. I love that process. Because I’m sure there are some people that just self select out, just go, you know, this isn’t for me.
Madison Reeves 18:45 I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the first interview, and they’re like, they just don’t show the second one. All right, well, but I mean, in our interview process is set up that way. We also have a very extensive training process their first 90 days or are very full on. But the way I see it is this is a this is a hard industry, you know that I know that there are there days where we don’t want to continue to do our job, it’s difficult. And if they can’t handle five or six interviews and the training process, we put them in the first 90 days, they’re probably not going to cut it in there. And the industry and it’s it’s kind of it’s maybe comes across as a little mean or whatever, but it’s just the truth. I mean,
D.J. Paris 19:27 it is it is the truth. And I want to talk about this idea that I know is really important to you. And I want to set it up a little bit with this idea of learning how to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I mean when I say uncomfortable, I mean uncomfortable, healthy things that we all go you know, I should be doing more of or less of x. But you may find yourself not not finding doing that because it’s uncomfortable. I met a woman, many many years ago, was a writer and she had this really interesting project For the for a year, every week, she wrote down a lot of fears and like challenges and insecurities and things that were just like, oh, I don’t do that, or I couldn’t do that, or that’s just not who I am. And she said, every week, I’m going to tackle one of these things. And I said, by the end of this year, you are going to be completely like unstoppable. Because nothing all these things, you know, if you can find the courage to step into the fire, and you know, be do a trapeze class, which was one of the things she did. And it’s not like, you’re gonna conquer your fear of heights, per se. But now you’re like, I can still do that, even though I’m terrified. I’m curious on how important it is immune again, you have done so many things at such a young age, all of which are really things that young people your age don’t do, let’s be honest, they don’t start podcasts, they don’t become top real estate agents. And they certainly don’t coach people, right? That is a very awesome thing that that I’m really proud of you only knowing you for a short time. But I’m like, wow, that is incredible. But that’s you stepping outside of your comfort zone. So I’m curious. Let’s talk about that. How important is it to learn how to step into discomfort?
Madison Reeves 21:10 Yeah, it’s I mean, it’s what I wrote my book about, my entire book about error is about getting out of your comfort zone. So with that being said, I love the way that your friend that you’re talking about did it because I kind of do the same thing. I believe getting out of your comfort zone is a muscle and the more you work a muscle, the stronger that that gets. So I try to push myself to do things that I don’t want to do. But usually, it’s things like, for example, I was in Vegas last year, and I did not want to jump off this building, but I jumped off the building because I was didn’t want to do it. You know, basically, if I ever am like, Oh, that would be kind of fun to do. And then I start thinking and get in my head and go, Oh, I don’t want to do it. Like I have to do it then. So you know, whether that’s jumping out of planes or shark diet, when you’re traveling to a different country by yourself. Like I really pushed myself out of my comfort zone in my personal life. And that builds that muscle, it makes that muscle stronger so that I translate over into business as well.
D.J. Paris 22:19 But it it’s a muscle, so it needs to be exercised often. Right? Because like, I mean, it’s okay to feel fear, right? It’s okay. It’s it’s a normal human reaction, we all feel it. Every time I go into the gym, and it’s lower body day, like leg day. I’m like, I hate this. It’s scary, it hurts. It’s the worst. And but I but I just have to do it. I don’t have to. I don’t have to, like fall in love with working out my my quads, because I don’t understand people who like that. But there are people, of course, the two, but all I have to do is do the exercise. And if I can just shut off my brain enough to go, hey, you know what, it’s healthy for you. It’s a good idea, just do it, then I get to feel proud of myself especially. And I think that’s that’s really something that doesn’t get talked about enough is the feeling of pride that you have in doing something that’s really difficult. And you are somebody that is constantly doing incredibly difficult things. Can we talk a little bit about that, even if maybe the goal doesn’t get achieved in the like, whatever the outcome you really want are, I have always been way more impressed with my own effort than the actual results because the results kind of like they either happen or they don’t. But if I can, if I can get myself just to take action, which is the hardest part. I think if you can do that, if I can do that, then I ended up going well, it might not have worked out the way I wanted to. But boy, that was hard. And I did that. And I get a little pat on the back a self pat on the back.
Madison Reeves 23:49 Right. Yeah. So I mean, I think that it just comes down to fear is a natural human emotion. And we all we all experience it quite frequently. It just It matters how you do it, how you handle it, you know, don’t let it shut you down, but let it wake you up and and the more that you do these difficult things, the more that your subconscious mind is going to go, oh, okay, I have the capability to complete all of these things. So and speaking towards like the where you’re regarding the actions, that’s actually something that I coach all of my agents on when goal setting. So we go set to things that you have in your direct control. Yeah, of course, we have an outcome that we want to get. So put this in terms that you know, real estate agents that are listening to this can understand if my outcome is to get an under contract to get a property under contract. That’s not my goal. My actual goal is to you know, have 25 Two way conversations with leads in my CRM, because you can control that. Yep. So that’s what I teach all of my agents because we’re kind of setting ourselves up for failure. If we’re goal setting things that week. can’t control, you know. So for another example would be I set a goal to write and publish my book. But I’m not the outcome, of course is I want to sell as many copies as possible, I want to be a best seller, I want to have a ton of reviews, whatever, I want it to be amazing. But my goal is writing it because I can control that. So that’s something that I teach every every agent that I work with. And I personally think that it’s very effective.
D.J. Paris 25:24 I agree. And I was thinking about a joke that I’ve right, humor, I’ve been doing that for a long time. And and some, oftentimes people will ask who know that I Right. They’ll say, oh, what’s the funniest joke? I’m not really a joke person. But say, what’s the funniest joke you ever heard? And I say, Well, I don’t know if it’s the funniest. But I like this joke, probably the most of any joke I’ve ever heard, because it’s the truest thing I’ve ever heard. And, and this isn’t a religious statement at all, it just happens to have a little bit of a religion in it. So I apologize for anyone listening who, who doesn’t like the word God, which by the way, I’m not trying to say anything other than it’s just this joke has it? So the joke is, and it’s a really simple, it’s not even really a joke. It’s, we make plans, God laughs. And I always thought that is so perfect, because it’s exactly what you’re talking about. There’s a lot of things that we just don’t control. You know, things happen, whether something goes under contract, whether it doesn’t, whether your book becomes you know, international bestseller, or it sells a modest number of copies, again, a bit outside of your control. But there are things you can do like jumping on podcasts, of course, promoting it, making sure that you’re getting your name out as best you can, which that you can you out you can control. So I always like that joke that if you can, you want to use that as the number name of your next book that that’s there’s, there’s, there’s maybe there’s a better way to say it, but I always love that joke. I want to talk about money mindset, because you are somebody who who talks about not coming from a super, you know, economically advantaged background, right? So it’s not like you grew up with all this extreme wealth, and you just know what it’s like to sell, you know, expensive homes or help people in that way, because it wasn’t your your background. How did you change your mindset to then begin to allow for like working with investors, or even just people, you know, wanting to buy or sell, you know, homes that might be different from the kind of home homes that you grew up in?
Oh, you’re muted. Sorry,
Madison Reeves 27:25 crap. Sorry. I
D.J. Paris 27:26 have like, Oh, no problem. I was like, Oh, my gosh, something just went wrong. Which by the way, that happens, too. But it didn’t. Madison accidentally muted yourself. So you heard my question, though, go right ahead.
Madison Reeves 27:37 What I said was, that’s a great question. And to put it into perspective, I actually grew up in a town of about 5500 people. I’m very small, like, everybody knows everybody, there’s no secrets. And my family grew up very poor. monetarily, we always, you know, had food on the table roof over our head and clothes on our backs. But it was definitely more of like a poor mindset when it came to money as well. what was expected of me when I was growing up and becoming an adult, was to get a job that pays, you know, 10 to $15 an hour work 40 hours a week, you know, I probably get a husband he worked to we have a couple of kids live in a, you know, a small but decent house. And like that was that was good for me. Sure. So what really changed my mindset was when I joined the real estate team I’m on now. And it was mostly because I was in in the environment with all of these people who are making so much more so much more money than I was, and we’re doing things with that money and was they were, you know, improving their lifestyle. And I’m like, okay, so I need to jump on the boat or not. And so, you know, we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with. And I just found that being in a room of, you know, 10 people and those other 10 people are making over six figures, and I made 12 grand last year, I need to get my shit together.
D.J. Paris 29:02 And and you see that it’s possible. You’re like, Oh, now I know people who do this. And they’re doing the same thing I’m doing and maybe they’re more skilled, because I’m newer. But I can learn how to do that. Like, why couldn’t I do that? Yeah,
Madison Reeves 29:14 I mean, success is simple. It’s not easy. All you have to do is just follow the clues that people leave. You know, what they did that you want to accomplish as well. And it is quite simple. The hard part is staying consistent. And you know, doing it when you don’t see results come right away. So
D.J. Paris 29:30 I’ve always thought that was something that agents, you know, this this whole podcast that I do is really very simple. I talked to the top 1% of agents across the country and I say how’d you do that? Right? It’s a very simple concept. And I when I first started doing the show, before I actually started producing I went well the biggest challenge is going to be guests because you know people are going to be who these top producers gonna be too busy to talk. They’re not going to have time they don’t care about my stupid pie. gasps, they’re just not interested. And also they’re there. These are people I don’t hang out with, you know, we have a lot of people agents at our firm, but I don’t really go out and meet agents at other firms. And it was just the opposite. I found that some of these top almost we almost never get turned down. And it’s not because I’m so special. I’m not. But it’s just because I reached out and said, Hey, would you share your story. And I think that’s a huge lesson. For anyone listening who may be struggling. And Madison just said, it is really important thing, you know, we are maybe the average, or the sum of the five people we hang out with the most. And we’re not here to say, you need to ditch all of your friends, what we’re here to say is there are people you can emulate and hang out with. And by the way, when you ask somebody, can I take you for a cup of coffee and find out how you did that? That is a an incredibly flattering thing. And more often than not, they’re going to be so honored that you did that. And they’re going to just tell you everything they did to become successful. So I really appreciate you saying that, because getting around people who have who, especially people who started without like a sphere of influence, and people who didn’t necessarily have what a lot of people think are what you need to be successful right away. Those are people you want to hang out with and learn. But I want to also talk about how do you identify? What, because I know this is important to you? How do you identify? And as a coach, you do this a lot? Sorry, I interrupted myself twice? How do you identify what’s holding you back from success?
Madison Reeves 31:28 So? That’s a great question. I have always been very self aware, it’s probably one of my best soft skills. And it was just something I naturally developed. It definitely, it’s a muscle you can strengthen over time, the more that you use it. But I mean, I have a coach who will call me out if I need to be called out, because that’s good for everybody. So that’s a big part of it. But it’s just being really in tune with yourself and having clarity on where we’re going. If I didn’t know what my outcome was long term, short term, and the next year or five years, whatever that looks like, it’s really hard to be self aware with yourself, because you don’t know the direction you’re supposed to be following. So when I’m thinking about things that you know, if I know my direction, and if I know my, you know where I’m trying to get to, and I have real clarity on that. But I feel like I’m being held back from something, well, then all I have to do is just do some investigation to figure out what that is, and then fix it because I know where I’m going. So clarity is a huge, huge priority for me in my businesses. And it’s what I coach all of my agents because you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s really important to really outline all that and get everything down on in black and white and on paper.
D.J. Paris 32:44 Yeah, I agree. Really well said. And I want to back up for a moment because Madison, who is a coach, also has a coach, like what do coaches need coaches? Of course they do? Of course they do, right? And it’s not because you’re young, and you’re like, Well, I’ve only been in the business a few three years, I don’t really, it’s you’ll probably have a coach when you’re 75 years old, I’m guessing because because coaches like you said they can identify our blind spots. And it’s not because you’re like not motivated. Or obviously you’re disciplined and you’re not stupid. And you’re not like I’m just gonna let someone else fix all my problems. No, you’re a take charge go get get her independent woman, by the way. And this is a I’m so glad we’re having you on during women’s history month. Just funny timing, because I think you are a great example of what what you know, not just what a woman can accomplish, but what anyone can, but I’m glad I’m talking to you this month. But I want to talk about choosing a coach and I know that you do coaching and by the way, are you interested in our audience, if your audience reaches out to you to do coaching, are you only coaching people on your team and in your immediate area?
Madison Reeves 33:56 So I do, I do have some openings for independent coaching, I only take on a few people at once, just based on my schedule. So I actually only have three openings right now. But yeah, anybody in any industry real estate or not? If they’re interested, they can absolutely reach out to me.
D.J. Paris 34:12 I love that. And let’s talk about so we talked about maybe how to identify some of the challenges and we all have challenges, it’s normal, if you didn’t have challenges, you’re lying to yourself, or you’re just unaware everyone has challenges, you’re gonna have challenges your whole life. That’s why coaches are so great. You know, it’s why therapists are so great. There’s so many professions designed to help people with their human challenges. But once we sort of figure that part of it out and sort of know ourselves a bit better, then I want to talk about choosing sort of making choices that really help you to to go in the direction that you want, despite the fact that you have challenges because we all have them. And really, I think we’re talking about mindset. I know that’s a big, big thing for you. So how do you go about staying in a mindset that is supportive to you, especially in those moments where things aren’t going well.
Madison Reeves 35:06 Yeah, that’s a great question. So really, it’s funny that you brought this up, because this topic is exactly what I talked about in my first episode that I’ve published for my podcast. So I’ll you know, you want to listen to it and dive deeper into it. But basically, where it comes into is your big why? Why do you do what you do every single day, if you don’t know what motivates you, then it’s really easy to you know, get held up when there’s big challenges or objections, it’s easy to you know, I don’t want to lead generate today, because it’s boring. And I don’t want to be told no or hung up on, you know, or I don’t want to do this showing all of that crap that we all deal with, we all hear that it’s our drunk monkey on our shoulder. But if we know where we’re going, and why we’re doing it, we have that clarity there, there’s a lot of power in it. So I talk a lot about this in the first episode of my podcast, actually, which worked out perfectly for timing wise. But there’s this Japanese theory basically, where your calling and your big why’s basically the intersection of what you love, what you’re great at what the world needs and what you can get paid for. So that’s really your big why. And if you can discover that, and lead with that and make decisions in your business and your lifestyle with that. I found at least that I don’t have the mindset of oh, I don’t want to do that today. Because I’m I’m working for something bigger than myself.
D.J. Paris 36:30 Yeah, it’s more than the current challenge that’s right in front of you at that moment, right. So like, I can think about it in relationship, it’s easy for me, I’m in a relationship, to get mad at my girlfriend, if she does something or says something that I don’t like. And we all struggle with these parts of relationships, right? It’s easy for me to be like, Oh, you said this, or you did this or and we can do that back and forth? Of course. And yeah, fine, whatever. Is it productive? Probably not. But it’s easy to do it when there’s this immediate problem that were challenged. This actually just came up this morning, we had a slight disagreement. So I’m just like, I’m getting all upset. And then I and then I had to take a breath. And I had to say, what’s my long term goal here, oh, I want to marry this person. And I want to spend the rest of my life with them. And they’re like the most amazing person I’ve ever met. So even though in the immediate moment, I’m struggling with this, you know, interaction, which is like no big deal, but in the moment, it feels like everything. And then or, you know, the client hangs up on you, or whatever the deal falls through, or whatever your struggles are, and then you go back to Okay, yeah, bumps in the road happen. But this is the most amazing person I’ve ever met. And that helps reset. So I’m curious on how you reset when you’re in that you know, your why. And do you have any techniques about going back to your why in those moments of like extreme hardship, where you’re like, oh, that’s just not working? Yeah, absolutely.
Madison Reeves 37:53 So that’s, that’s another great question. So this is actually a technique that my my coach shared with me. So basically, when we face problems, we need to get ahead of myself. So we’re looking at two scales, I want you to imagine that we have a scale over here from one to 10, and a scale over here from one to 10. Now, this scale over here is my level of mindset. And my commitment to my big why. So let’s say just for example, sake, on a scale of 110, or one to 10. On this side, I’m a six. If my problem is an eight, when I have a six, it’s going to feel like the world is ending. But if a problem is a two, when I’m a six, it’s not even a bump in the road. So basically, what my what my business coach taught me is that you need to continue to move yourself up on this scale, that these problems become smaller.
D.J. Paris 38:44 So in my example of getting upset with like, I hate to say this, because if she listened, she’s gonna be so upset that I’m airing our grievances, but really, it’s no big deal. We’re doing I hope we’re doing good. But now we know I’m teasing. I’m teasing. But no, I would never I would never, if we were really having problems it would not be talked about on the show, but but I’m using it as example because it came up but here’s, here’s what you really just just said to me, I get your mindset in order first. And that’s the part we can control. I can’t control if someone says something crappy to me, or if my girlfriend’s having a bad day and just kind of you know, has a bad moment. Of course, that’s those moments are going to happen. But in this case, I hadn’t got my mind set in the right spot before that happened, because I didn’t think to do that. And had I had woken up in the morning and for 20 seconds gone. Remember this amazing person lying next to you like this is the person who wants to spend the rest of her life with me, like how lucky am I and that might have helped shoulder some of this. This this particular interaction we had hours later. So what we’re really talking about is that’s what you can control you can control waking up and putting yourself in the right mindset, but you have to go first right
Madison Reeves 40:00 Yes, absolutely, you know, if you’re a two on this one, and you get a five, I mean, it literally feels like the world is ending. So and it could be something so simple, but you don’t have the skills and the knowledge and the mindset to be able to deal with that. So it feels like, you know, you’re trying to climb up Mount Everest here.
D.J. Paris 40:16 I just last night, I have to I have to share this. I’m so sorry. I feel like I’m hijacking our interview. But I think this will be really helpful because it blew my mind i I’m in a DBT class. And if people don’t know what that is, it’s it’s, it’s called dialectical behavior therapy. And I’m very fortunate to be in this course, it’s very hard to get into them right now. They’re, it’s very popular. It’s basically considered the gold standard in emotional regulation and mindfulness. And it’s a skill set. It’s not therapy, in the traditional sense of lying on a couch and talking about your life. It’s just learning skills. And we learned a skill last night that absolutely blew my mind. It’s so simple, and I won’t go into it. But it’s called cope ahead. And what I loved about it, the idea is that you can sort of fantasize or imagine what situations which will be difficult. And we all know in real estate, every transaction, there’s there’s a wrinkle, there’s at some point, something goes wrong. And it seems like the end of the world. And so we’re talking about mindset, right? So this idea that you can even fan I just fantasize isn’t the right word. But you can imagine he could vividly imagine, there’s something that is going to go wrong in every part of your life at some point. And you can’t predict when that is or what that is, but you can be honest about it and say, Hey, I’ve got this really big sale right now. And it’s everything’s going smooth. But at some point, there’s going to be a problem. And that’s just how things go. And I’m going and so we learned this skill last night called cope ahead, where you can vividly imagine yourself going through something that’s going to suck, it’s going to suck to get that call that says, You know what, I don’t want to work with you anymore, or whatever. And you can do your best to go, okay, how am I going to react? And you can actually imagine yourself as the person and it isn’t. What’s so great about it is it’s not a sort of a losers mentality. It’s being honest and saying things are gonna go wrong? And how do I give myself the best possible mindset so that when it happens, like you were saying, it’s a two, as opposed to a nine, because I’ve already prepared in advance of what what what resources I need, in order to to be able to handle that when it happens. And then like you’re saying, it’s not as big of a deal. So I apologize for going on a bit of a rant there. No, and
Madison Reeves 42:22 that actually plays perfectly into what I wanted to mention next is the more that you build and grow your mindset, you’re continuing to work that logical problem solving muscle, and as you know, kind of a repeating theme of today’s conversation. But to be honest with you, I actually like enjoy those problems. It’s kind of weird, but you know, when I get a phone call on a transaction, and it’s like, okay, well, this is probably going to be an issue. I’m like, alright, well, I like to solve the problems. So I don’t even see it as like a really big issue anymore. Because I know that I have the skill set and the mindset in order to handle whatever comes my way.
D.J. Paris 43:00 Because you practice having the mindset that allows you to handle those situations. And it like any other muscle that you were saying it gets stronger, and things become less important, because you realize they’re all just blips in the road, there’s there’s peaks, there’s valleys, I win some I lose some it all just happens. And instead of looking at the garden, saying there’s no weeds, there’s no weeds, there’s no weeds, it’s like no, the weeds will take over, if you don’t acknowledge them. And what you’re saying is I it’s not that my life is perfect, or I want it to be perfect, because that’s silly. But this idea that my life is manageable, I can handle the imperfections of life. And that is the real in my mind, that’s the most important skill set anybody can have. It’s the best thing you can do for mindset. And your book teaches people how to do that. I want to remind everyone, if you’re not that you’re just tuning in now, but remind everyone Madison has a book that tells you all about this. And, you know, you might think well, gosh, she’s 20 years old, what is she? What kind of Wisdom does she have, she has enough wisdom to have written an amazing book that has amazing reviews, she has a publicist, she’s a real estate coach, she’s on one of the most successful teams in the state. And she goes out recruiting talent, and probably you don’t probably even meet a lot of people who are as young as you in this industry. So check out her book, which is called Project badass, can find out on Amazon everywhere else and her brand new podcast, which is called also project badass, which you can visit project badass network.com And I want to ask you one last question. So this question is, what’s one piece of advice that you would have for our audience? Again, some of them are top producers. Some of them are brand new and or people who are struggling in between? What’s one piece of advice that you would say if you were coaching our entire audience, which are all different people? What’s one universal piece of advice that you find really works for everybody?
Madison Reeves 44:56 Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. So um, The biggest shift in my business as a real estate agent, was when I started to think like a business owner and not just a real estate agent. So real estate agents get in this habit where they are just focusing on the next deal. What’s the next deal? What’s the next deal versus thinking of it as the CEO who is working on developing a successful full scale business? So you know, what does that look like I have systems in place, I know my numbers, I know what I need to do and what I need to produce in sales, I know where I’m going, I have that clarity piece of where I want to end up. And I’m really treating my real estate business like a business and not just, you know where the next deal is. And the reason that is so important is because when you shift over to that business owner mindset versus just a real estate agent, we’re really more in an abundance mindset. So we’re not worried about the deal that falls apart, or the one you know, the for sale by owner who hangs up on you, or the expired listing who wants to take a different agent, we’re not worried about that, because we see the bigger picture, and we know where we’re going, that would be my biggest piece of advice.
D.J. Paris 46:05 I love that. And it really, again, distances you from the immediacy of any challenge, when you have that sort of long term vision. And again, I always think direction is so important, it’s like I just want to head in this direction. And that might be your vision, whereas I don’t know where I’m gonna end up. But I’m heading in this direction, it’s a very specific direction, I love direction. And if, if you’re heading in a direction, yes, that’s gonna fly at you all the time. That’s just part of the deal. And this, so I, I love every, every part of your messaging today. And the fact that you are this clear about how to help people at such an early age of your life is maybe the most incredible part of it all is that most people I know, I didn’t have it figured out before I turned, oh, God, I don’t know, mid 30s, maybe. So this idea that you you have a huge jump is really amazing. And I am really excited to follow your trajectory and your growth, you know, over the years, because you’re not done evolving, as well. And so I’m very excited if you’ve done all of this, by by your current, you know, your early age. And I don’t mean to say that with any sort of neg negative, it’s just very unique. And I honor you for that. So I want everybody to really check out what Madison is up to project badass network.com is where you can go to learn about the book, the podcast, this, you know, I’m sorry,
Madison Reeves 47:32 that coaching if they are interested in coaching with me, it’s on my website as well.
D.J. Paris 47:36 Yeah. And could you mind sharing your email address for anyone out there who wants to just reach out directly to you? Do you have an email that that they can meet? That sort of I communicate with you that way?
Madison Reeves 47:47 Yeah, absolutely. So the best place to reach out email would probably be Hello at to the Madison reeves.com.
D.J. Paris 47:55 Awesome. So check out project badass, the podcast go by the book. And this is somebody who is I mean, she’s already a superstar, and she’s going to be going on to do bigger things. And she’s going to be helping a lot of people along the way. So you want to hitch your wagon, to somebody that is all about helping because that is just you know, the most important thing I found in life is having supportive people in my orbit, who say I know how to help you with that if assuming you want to be helped. And Madison is devoting a good chunk of her life to doing just that. So if you’re looking for a coach, she’s an amazing person. If you’re in the South Dakota area, state and you’re looking for a team to join, she wants to talk to you as to like it’s Christians, Team real estate with Keller Williams. I mean, what’s better than Keller Williams right, Gary Keller, he’s the he’s the king, and you get all of their training, and, of course, all of Madison’s help along the way. So definitely check them out as well, Madison, I am so, so grateful to have you on the show today. You’re amazing inspiration. And I’m excited to be able to introduce you to our audience. So thank you. On behalf of our audience. Thank you for spending time today. I know you don’t have time to do this. So thanks. And also on behalf of Madison and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen watch support our show. So after you’re done subscribing to our podcast and buying her book, one, two things we ask you to do one, tell a friend about this episode. Best way to do that, just send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com. And every one of our episodes can be streamed right there. Or if they’re a podcast person, just pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And then last, please leave us a review. Whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on. Let us know what you think of the show. You don’t have to give us a five star review if you don’t want to but we hope you do. But let us know good and bad. We want to continue to improve the show is for our audience and any information you can provide us will help us continue to get better. So thank you so much Madison, we’re honored to speak to you and we wish you continued success.
Madison Reeves 49:55 Awesome. Thank you
Why Real Estate Agents Need To Stage EVERY Listing • Deanna Kory
Mar 24, 2022
Deanna Kory from The Corcoran Group in Manhattan talks the importance of her mission to educate people. Deanna returns to the beginning of her career in real estate and discusses her grandmother who inspired her to start down this path. Deanna also talks about the importance of staging in the era of picture-perfect image world and how to handle clients who refuse staging. Next, Deanna talks about her philosophy around building a business and her personal touch when in communication with clients. Last, Deanna provides her take on what’s going on in the market today and where it is going.
D.J. Paris 0:00 We’ve probably heard that staging helps sell homes faster and for more money, but let’s talk to somebody who is super passionate about it. Today’s episode, this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide, and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer Deanna quarry who by the way has sold over 2 billion in real estate in her career. So super excited to hear from Deanna before we get to Deanna a couple of quick reminders please tell a friend about our show. Think of just one other realtor that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Deana send them a link to our website which is keeping it real pod.com. Also, please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. The way you can do that is whatever podcast app you might be using. If you are using one, go to their to their review section and leave us a review. Let us know what you liked about our show. And also what you’d like to see us improve or change we’re always reading every comment and it really helps us to get more visibility more listeners and also like I said to improve But enough about that let’s get to the main event our interview with Deanna quarry.
Today on the show we have Deanna Perry from the Deanna quarry team in New York, also part of the Corcoran Group. Let me tell you a little bit about Deanna Deanna quarry has distinguished herself as one of Manhattan’s top brokers by all measures and continuously ranks among the top five agents and sales volume within the Corcoran Group year over a year. Now with over 36 years of experience in the industry. She has built a reputation as a hard working broker with a great intellect, knowledge, sensitivity and expertise and has built and leads an incredible team of esteem professionals, Deanna has sold this amazing well over 2 billion of residential real estate in Manhattan. Oh yeah. And in only in the last decade, which is beyond incredible, and her team has a unified and strong presence throughout the city. And a testament to Diana’s marketing success is the sheer variety and depth of her transactions. Deanna has marketed and sold apartments and townhomes of all varieties, and is headed up several sales teams in major new developments including one $300 million project where she was responsible for over 100 million in sales. Within nine months. She is lauded in the industry and by her loyal clientele for her brilliance in marketing, and negotiating and is highly sought after for her perspective on the state of the market. Deanna stands out in the industry as a pioneer in staging properties for resale, and has a keen knowledge of what it takes to create a visually appealing space by improving or even redesigning what exists in order to increase the market value of a property. Please everyone visit danas website, which is Deanna quarry.com and spell that D A N N A and KSRKORY I’m gonna give it one more time da nnakory.com. And Deanna, welcome to the show.
Deanna Kory 4:36 Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m excited to be here.
D.J. Paris 4:40 I am excited to have you and since I just get your website before we get started, I wanted to point something out that I after, gosh, I think 350 episodes over five years I don’t think I’ve seen before. I really encourage everyone to visit the website by the way. The website link is in our show notes. So you can you can see that if you’re listening through a pod test app, the reason I’m gonna direct you to her site other than, aside from it just being a great website is what she did specifically, what we call above the fold. And what above the fold means is really, when someone first visits a website, the initial sort of screen that they see without having to scroll, like what’s the first impression, and which she did I have never seen before, quite frankly, among all the guests I’ve had, if we think about, oftentimes, what Realtors do for their website is they often have, you know, there may be some made major sort of splash image, or maybe more, maybe even more. More commonly, you’ll see a search engine like, Hey, you want to look for properties. Here’s Danna, didn’t do that. And instead her above the fold content, and there is a lot of it, but it’s really well sort of positioned and, and decorated, is different pieces of content that buyers and sellers would actually want to see. So I think that’s really interesting, because it sets you apart. Deanna from all lots of other competitors. And I know that was really intentional for you. And before we get into your story, can you just talk a little bit about the website? Because it is so cool.
Deanna Kory 6:10 Yeah. Well, you know, part of everything I’ve done when it comes to marketing, is to provide information to people, I really believe strongly that we’re there not just to sell homes, we’re there to educate people, because education is the key to people understanding what they’re purchasing, what they’re selling. And in order to get the best possible deal both as a seller and as a buyer. So I’m always looking to educate people. And that’s really what this website is all about. It’s not just about promoting the properties, although it is as well, but it’s about providing information. So we created it not from a textbook, not from someone who we went to does hundreds of websites, but we created it independently to reflect that sort of site. So that people can come there and learn everything they need to know about buying, about selling. And even more, we do a lot of work with architectural histories and histories of neighborhoods and all sorts of things. So I encourage you to stay into go to it and explore it.
D.J. Paris 7:09 It’s a great place for broke realtors to see maybe a different way. And it’s very elegant. it the way it’s laid out is very, it’s very readable. And it’s cool how you were able to put as much content as you have, right there. When I first hit the website, I was like, Oh, I know, I don’t I never need to scroll. Not that I would scroll anyway. But I didn’t have to to get to the content, which which I think is oftentimes agents don’t think about as much. So I appreciate that. I also should mention, and not just because it’s Women’s History Month here in March, because that’s that’s not the reason to bring this up. But it is something to mention that while Deanna has has a wonderful team, and she has both men and women on her team, all of her agents are currently are women. And so she has this wonderful group of women. So we honor that, you know, specifically in this month, but we I always think that is so cool when when I see, you know, all women’s based, you know, group of agents, because it’s not that common. And I just think it is it’s really, really cool that you do that. Well, let’s talk about how, you know going back now I guess 36 years or so. We’d love to hear about you know why you got into real estate and how?
Deanna Kory 8:25 Yeah, well again, sort of honoring Women’s History Month and the story is really apropos. So my growing up my grandmother, who came over from Romania to calendaring Canada, followed in her brother’s footsteps who came to Chicago, no less your hometown. Yeah. And they were in the business of real estate. So happens. So she ended up going to Chicago and joining the firm. And within one year, she tells a story. She was the top salesperson, she walked into the room this very long day with all the salespeople, and they were honoring her and she didn’t want to have any products. She was ready to go out and sell again. She was very, very, you know, business oriented, very dedicated, very competitive. And so she was the top salesperson within a year of joining that firm. And then she eventually started her own firm. And she was responsible for originally developing part of the north side of Chicago. And then subsequently during that time, she also started to develop an all women’s golf course with Joe Nevada, if you know that name was just a golf pro. And then, of course, the depression struck and she held a lot of mortgages on buildings all across Chicago. And she fled like everybody did. I mean, the business was over and she went to Hollywood and rented movie stores homes and then eventually ended up in Miami. But for years when I was growing up, she would go back to Chicago to sign quitclaim deeds for people who were selling land and collect money. But anyway, so she was my inspiration actually for getting into real estate and cuz I knew that if she could make it in the 1920s in Chicago as a woman, as a woman as amazing, yeah, yep, she’s in all the papers. She was like Christian Science, Math or whatever, Chicago paper. And she Amelia Earhart, she was very, very big for about probably about a seven to 10 year period before the depression, and then she just got really cool, you know, she, she had her fame, and she went on and didn’t and went into oblivion relative to what she was doing back then. But I admired her so much for doing what she did. And it you know, and then she ended up in Miami and investing in real estate. And we ended up having family in Miami in real estate and all of that inspired me. So I, when I was a classical musician of all things, and I, yeah,
D.J. Paris 10:47 what instruments did you play?
Deanna Kory 10:48 The soonest? Don’t ask,
D.J. Paris 10:50 wow, you’re like the only bassoonist I’ve ever met.
Deanna Kory 10:53 Yeah, I was a musician. I went to Conservatory in Ohio. And I decided, when I was I actually studied with my idol in the Philadelphia Orchestra. And I decided that I was not going to be a professional musician. So I went to New York where I could be in the classical music business, because it’s the only place you’re sure in the classroom, he’s sure. That was there for four years making next to nothing. I think that was the lowest paid person that I knew. But I tried, because I did love music. And I just decided I need to be in business on my own. So I applied to business school, I applied to Columbia, I plan to NYU, got into both got a scholarship to NYU, and was going to go to NYU and I decided that summer, which was this June 37 years ago that I would try real estate. Wow. So I tried real estate. And I said, Wait,
D.J. Paris 11:45 so I want to I want to back up for a second. I just want to pause. So you had did I hear you correctly? Because I’m feeling like I must not have? Because did you say you had a scholarship to NYU? That you were like, no thanks. I’m gonna go into real estate.
Deanna Kory 11:58 Well, I, I was going to go I was planning on going but I thought you know what? It’s true. Let me get into real estate. And you know, let me see how I did. And within a month, I was just I was above it was like a bug because I sold my first apartment. And I really wanted to make 100,000 My first year, this is a 1985. That’s a lot of money in 1985. Oh my god. And you know, and remind you, you know, I don’t know what property is costing in Chicago, but back then the studio, you know, in a new beginner price on the studio, maybe it would cost 20 million plus $30,000. I mean, we didn’t have MLS systems, it was all 6% Commission, but still it’s like 20 or $30,000. I had a goal to make $100,000 My first year it’s a lot of sales. I ended up making 90,000 Not too bad. And I never looked back. I never ended up in business school. And here I am, you know, whatever. You know, how many years later. So, you know,
D.J. Paris 12:55 well, I’ll have to I’ll have to tell my sister because she she didn’t do NYU for undergrad. We actually both went to Miami University in Ohio. But she ended up at stern NYU business school. And she did not get a scholarship to go to business school. And thankfully, she got very lucky though, right out of college, she was working for L’Oreal at the time. And which is funny because both of our last names or Paris, we are not French and we have nothing to do with L’Oreal Paris. But that just happened to be where she worked. And L’Oreal was was kind enough to actually pay her entire way through Stern. So. So other accent would have been very ugly for her right after. But that allowed her to be able to go out and buy a place in Manhattan, which is which is obviously not an easy thing to do today. But so so you you, you may have had this goal to in 1985 to sort of sell $100,000 in net income, which is which is a difficult thing for anybody in their first year.
Deanna Kory 13:50 Yes. Yeah, no, no, I obviously was a I mean, I just have a talent for it, obviously. And maybe because of growing up around it and all of that. And I loved it. And what I ended up doing is I really love people. And I love helping people. So that I mean, I do love apartments too. But my goal really is to help people and you know, I went to Oberlin, which is an Ohio as well. Sure. And if you know anything about Oberlin, like about 5% of the Oberlin population goes into business.
D.J. Paris 14:19 Right? So it’s not really a business school. Yeah,
Deanna Kory 14:21 we are not. It’s all not for profit. I mean, yes, a lot of people become lawyers, doctors, you know, that kind of thing in some grade school. Yeah, yeah, it is. But I think it was like 10%, whatever. It was a small percentage. So I always felt very guilty for going and selling real estate because that’s like a real business. It’s like, it’s a rich person’s thing. But I decided that the only way I could live with myself doing this is to really do it to help other people and to make their process as easy as possible and to educate them. So this was the way I started my business and I just decided that I was going to be if I knew that if I thought if I have the I didn’t By having a goal, I want to make X amount of dollars, I put that out there, and then I forgot about it. I really wanted to see how I could help people make a decision, find something they love, be happy with what they bought, and have them. So when it was time to sell, so that was my goal. That’s, that’s the whole thing behind, you know how I feel that I did very well. And in my first or second year of doing this, I, one of my clients was someone who was one of the original people who started Comedy Central. Oh, wow. And she had, she was very young. And we were both very young. And I was trying to help her sell an apartment. And she was telling me about how she thought like, The Wall Street Journal used to sell subscriptions, by having people call up to get their guide to money and markets, which is an educational piece. Yeah. And she said, You know, I see that you’re doing this, I started a newsletter, also my very first year, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. But I, you know, here’s this guy to money and markets. And that’s how people are doing subscriptions. So I thought, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing already. But let me just capitalize on that. So I continue to do things to educate people. And that’s I’m big in architectural history. So it’s been about architectural histories of people’s buildings that they didn’t know about. And it was, for me great fun, because I love that kind of thing. So it’s been part of my whole Mo. And that’s why my website is also so different, because that’s just the way I operate.
D.J. Paris 16:26 We should also mention, I forgot to mention this above the fold, too, which is also a very unique place for this, but it’s such a smart place position wise on your website, on your homepage is your your newsletter, which is right there. Obviously, it’s in fact, your spring 2022 newsletters up, people can check it out. And you put this together yourself. And I just think this is part of what you just mentioned, this education, this providing value. And tell us a little bit about how important is that newsletter to your overall branding, strategy, marketing, or just keeping your clients sort of abreast of what’s going on.
Deanna Kory 17:04 I think it’s critically important for me, because my brand, and it was always this way was to be sort of someone who was like, as you said, in your intro, intellectual, you know, understanding and capable of really dealing with people on that kind of a level. So for me, that was a critical thing. And I actually started a newsletter. And when I first got into the business, now it did help that I had been in, when I was in the classical music business, I was in public relations. So I learned how to write, I learned how to promote people. And I learned that type of writing. But I decided that there was validity back in the early days in me and nobody was sending around newsletters that back then. So I was very lucky. In me, I was new, what did I know about the real estate market. But you know what I had, I had my observations. And my observations were valid. And I decided that was very important. And so I wrote a letter with dear and I have the people in the names put in. And I talked about what I was observing in the market. Because back then there weren’t, there wasn’t websites and data
D.J. Paris 18:07 where you couldn’t easily just pull data and stats, no. So people
Deanna Kory 18:10 really enjoyed seeing and hearing. And the most important thing that I did is be 100% consistent, I was extremely consistent about it. So I would do it the in in that time period, four times a year, because it was just a letter, it was simple. It wasn’t so long. And then as time went on, it got more comprehensive, more complex. And instead of taking Well, this is me, instead of taking the company newsletter, and using it where you know, they get it from everybody. It really is specifically mine. And people do recognize that which I find very interesting. They’ll they’ll call me up and they’ll say, you know, I’ve gotten your newsletter for years, it’s so well done. It’s so you know, thoughtful, or whatever they say. And they hold on to them because they’re on beautiful paper, you don’t have it, but I make sure they’re on very nice paper. They’re they’re really, in my in my mind, they’re one of my you know, prize marketing tools. But that’s not only that, and also as an educational tool. So and I do not only that generalized newsletter, but I do newsletters on specific areas in Manhattan, because I have a special specialization in those areas. So I work on those areas as well provide data and it’s my own interpretation. It’s not anybody else’s so
D.J. Paris 19:20 well that that’s what I that’s what I love about about what you’ve done. And I think so many agents today are either not confident enough to put their observations into a newsletter, it’s a heck of a lot easier to buy that information from a source that might write it all for you or might provide data that you just you know, are you know, sort of spit back out regurgitate, which is fine, and I have no no issues with that. But it’s more uncommon for me to see a content from a Realtor with an actual point of view. And that is really what most people want to see. They want to know what you think versus maybe just Here are the stats of the neighborhood. So I think that’s a really important distinction is putting your own observation. And it sounds like that was very successful for you.
Deanna Kory 20:08 Well, it has been, and frankly, I’m not sure if the company would allow everybody to do that. But I’ve been doing it for so many years, to be honest with you. And they’re very, you know, they know that I know what I’m doing. So I’m fortunate in that way, because I have their permission, I don’t even have I don’t run a I shouldn’t say I don’t run it by the company, but they see it, they’re aware of it. And you know, and I feel really very proud of it, frankly. And I think it’s a great tool. Not I mean, I actually enjoy even there’s a lot more talk about podcasting, a lot of work. These newsletters are a lot of work. And but I have a wonderful team, I have to just tell you, I’ve developed and we can talk about that if you if you’d like to develop this team. And right now I have one of the best teams I’ve ever had. I really just love everyone on my team. And they’re just fabulous. Their experience, the oldest member in terms of the years working with me on the team, someone has been with me 24 years. Wow. And I have on average the agents on my team. I just recently hired three young because I have to have, you know, young people on my team. And then their average time in the business is about two years. But my other team members, the agents, their their average time is about nine years or 10 years. So I have really experienced agents on my team. They’re all superb, I would have them handle my properties. They’re excellent. And I feel very confident in them. And I just adore them. I adore them as people and I just think they’re excellent at what they do. So anyway, it’s just it’s wonderful. And all the agents are all women, as you say. So in celebration of this particular month, but it’s great.
D.J. Paris 21:39 And I also Yeah, it is really cool. And your enthusiasm for wanting to help not just help but educate is clearly coming through even even in this conversation. You’re educating our audience on your process. And I appreciate that. And I have to ask you only because you’re a classically trained musician. Do you have a favorite composer?
Deanna Kory 22:01 Oh, my goodness, that’s a really hard thing to
D.J. Paris 22:05 do you have some favorite composers
Deanna Kory 22:08 on the south things to say that I do really love some of the Russian. You know, I love some of the Russia shows, you know, Stravinsky, and I just think that they’re perfect. I love some of that beautiful, very sort of haunting music. I’m sad to see what’s going on right now. Yeah, I mean, I you know, I, I was Asuna so the most famous bassoon concertos is Mozart Bassoon Concerto. So I obviously who doesn’t love Mozart? You know,
D.J. Paris 22:36 I I’ve yet to I’m not that I’ve been playing guitar my whole life. And I play classical guitar for a bit, which is a whole different style of playing and very, very difficult compared to like rock and roll style guitar. But um, but yeah, Mozart is in I haven’t listened to every, you know, classical composer, but Mozart to me is I’m consistently amazed. I just recently got into as a five Violin Concerto set. And I was listening to it going, this is some of the most incredible music I’d ever heard. So anyway, yeah, we everyone loves Mozart, but I would love to see on your website, you playing some bassoon? That would be
Deanna Kory 23:16 I had my instrument stolen, and I just resume all right. No, I’m not kidding. Some many years ago steals a bassoon. Don’t ask it. Anyway, recently, I joined a group of business people who were classical musicians in their former lifetimes. And actually, somebody just recently lent me their bassoon, and I just bought a read recently. So I am about to try it for the first time. And I can’t hate to tell you a few decades.
D.J. Paris 23:44 How exciting. I want to talk about staging. And I, we this is something we talked about it before on the show over the years. But I think and I have a theory and I want you to tell me if I’m if it’s an accurate theory, or if I’m wildly inaccurate, because I’m not a producing agent. I don’t go out there I sit at a desk all day. So I don’t know what you guys know. But I would assume as somebody who’s kind of more on the other side, oddly enough, even though I recruit Realtors all day long I really know so little about about the industry. But which is even more funny that I do the show but it is a lot of fun. However, I would think from somebody who still sees himself as a bit of an outsider. The idea that we’re living in an Instagram perfect world, as well as you know, with everyone having immediate access to making their faces look perfect with a tap of a thing and reducing you know, make reducing blemishes and things and we all can look young and beautiful and and we can make every thing we eat look beautiful and amazing. How important is staging today? Maybe even due to the fact that we’re so used to seeing perfect imagery online all day long. It was through an infinite scroll.
Deanna Kory 24:58 Well, I mean, I’m in for better or For worse staging is that really, I think, critical to achieving the strongest possible price. But I believe that 20 years ago when I was the first agent in the New York area to stage, so I was really I saw, I knew it was happening in California, maybe it was happening other places, but I knew it was happening in California. And I had an apartment, I’ll never forget it. It was a it was on Central Park West. And it was a small three bedroom. And the woman had her mother moved her mother in with her. So we painted it empty, that made it nice and clean, and sort of showing it and one of the bedrooms was small, and there was no dining room. So people would come in and complain. And I remember it was priced at one for 1.595. And this goes back 20 years ago, okay. And then we lowered it to 1495. We kept getting 1275 We couldn’t get higher, and she desperately wanted 1.3. So I said, you know, there’s this thing called staging, and I’ve been wanting to do it. And I think that would really help you get your 1.3. So I went out to the furniture rental company that I knew. And I said, I’m gonna try this, you know, what is it gonna cost? So for $10,000, I picked out all the furniture, I placed it, I got things from my house brought it in, and then I put it back on the market. And what do you think I got?
D.J. Paris 26:21 I am I’m excited to hear how much
Deanna Kory 26:24 1.5 from two people.
D.J. Paris 26:28 So that’s $10,000 investment essential?
Deanna Kory 26:31 Yes, yes. Well, I never looked back after that. Another thing I could do to help people achieve the highest possible price. So I started doing it, and I have a good eye for it. I still have a good eye for it. And I think that’s the key also to doing this successfully. Because I’m one of those people that some stagers don’t like to work with, because I’m very highly critical.
D.J. Paris 26:50 You know what you’re doing? Yeah,
Deanna Kory 26:51 I know what I want. At the top stager in the city, one of the top stages in the city who I work with that it’s IMG, if you know that name. They’re really wonderful. And they they’re the I’m probably one of the only people that listen to when when their corrections to be made. Because I do have a right idea of what I want to see I know exactly what I want to say I know what works, I know what doesn’t work. And when a stager doesn’t do a good job, I don’t mind to say it because I know it, you know. So I’m pretty pretty tough to work for. But if you do a good job, amazing.
D.J. Paris 27:23 Well, either ad Oh, quick question about staging, because actually have a bunch of questions. But the first one is around, are you still renting equipment? Or do you have your own product now that you store? Okay, you know, I
Deanna Kory 27:37 just don’t want to get into that business, even though I actually initially did. But it will tell you that your your question. And I think it is a good business for some agents. And it’s a great way to maybe do that. There’s some people who are very successful with that. And I think if there’s a little bit younger, maybe I would do it. But but it is a lot of work. I think so. But I will tell you asked about Instagram and you asked about, you know why it’s important? Well, when I was doing it, I was the standout apartment because nobody else was doing it. But now everybody’s doing it. And on Instagram, everybody’s perfect, right? So if you don’t have that, I mean, what can you do? You’d have to try and elevate beyond whatever it is, but you put these are sort of picture perfect images, right? That you need to compete, you have to be at least as good. So that’s part of the problem. It’s a it’s a dilemma. Because the reality is, there’s another thing about, you know, beautifully staged apartments and also beautiful photographs. Because sometimes, and I struggle with this, to be honest with you, I struggle with the fact that sometimes we do these gorgeous photographs in the apartments not as good as the photographs. And I think sometimes you have to think about that. Yes, and I sometimes don’t, I’m not, you know, sometimes it’s just these apartments are just about houses. But sometimes the rooms with the angles, it’s impossible to get a really good photo. And those are the ones that people come in, and they’re overwhelmed, because they’re so excited by it. So it’s it’s kind of one of those things, you want great photographs, but you don’t want them to good. But on the other hand, they should be picture perfect, because then you
D.J. Paris 29:07 know that that’s a really good point. It’s sort of I think about this, I’m not a single person, but if I were and when I was single in recent years, back after these, these tools became available for everyone to look young and beautiful and perfect. And then you’d meet some, you know, I’d go on a date and I meet a woman and she didn’t look as perfect as her photo because nobody does, of course, and I would go boy psychologically, I understand why people do it. But psychologically, for me, that’s a bit of a little tiny bit of a bummer. Like, Oh, of course they used to filter, okay, this is what they really look like whereas, so you’re dealing with a similar sort of thing in real estate. It’s like you want it to look beautiful and attractive, but you also don’t want somebody to go in and go, Oh, okay, this isn’t exactly what I saw in the photos. That was perfectly and you do see this. It’s so funny. We see it with I love when some of the Virtual Staging that happens. And they make the sky just a little bit too perfect if it’s an exterior shot or the lawn, if it’s, you know, if there’s grass, it’s like a little too green. And you’re like, Well, I know it doesn’t really look like that. And so I always think, boy, they just crank the the contract or the vibrancy up on these colors. And so I imagine there is an art to it a little bit of a push and pull of make it look look realistic, but also beautiful, but not too beautiful. So
Deanna Kory 30:30 we can address some of those virtual stages crazy, to be honest with you. That’s something that’s not quite right. You know?
D.J. Paris 30:38 Yeah, yeah, that’s true. And and when you’re dealing with listings, what percentage of the time do you provide staging? Is it every single listing? Is it a certain listings,
Deanna Kory 30:49 I would say about 90% of time. But not, it’s not always full staging. Sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking, I mean, I just I had an apartment. And you know, her apartment was dated, she wasn’t going to do a whole staging. But we went in there, we brought lights, I mean, we I will do what we call sort of minimal staging. I have two staging closets. Okay, that’s my inventory. And I have a lot of my inventory out right now. And so I, you know, I’ll take things in, and I’ll make it I’ll just make it a little bit more. And now nicer, put some put some orchids in there, some beautiful decor, consider nicely done, I’ll put some color, I’ve got tons of pillows, so many pillows, I mean, I could do a pillow warehouse, and I’ve got you know, accessories and so forth, you know, beautiful vases, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, just people don’t always live that way, right? I have our work, I’ve got mirrors. So I’ll bring in things to really help. And honestly, I think it makes a difference, I don’t want to say makes the full difference. But does it help me just elevate the property. Yeah. And that’s again, something that I feel is a real wonderful service. And I do I mean, if I don’t, since I have a team, I have a lot of people doing a lot for me. But when it comes to staging, especially some of the apartments that are, you know, a certain price point, I I’m there, you know, because I’m the one that everybody knows on my team that I am the perfectionist or the one who really has the best eye for staging. Well, it’s
D.J. Paris 32:19 your brand too, so you want it to aesthetically, you know, fit a certain design style and but it is interesting that now staging has become so much more popular, because we now staged all of our photos for our entire lives, you know, you scroll through, and I’ve even seen a wrinkle on someone’s face in like 10 years now. I’m like, boy, my friends must all be just aging so gracefully. It’s but it’s so easy. And it’s but it is important because we do expect and I think now also with technology, making our gratification so much faster, we’re able to get things delivered instantly, whether it’s you know, everything from food to, you know, anything you want to purchase, you can basically buy within a day or so it’ll be at your doorstep. We’re used to jumping, you know, in cabs and Ubers and just not even having to say where we’re going, they just know because we told the app, we’ve just we don’t have to do much anymore. And I think even though the DIY community is been growing, I think that’s a certain type of the popular a certain percentage of the population and there’s another percentage that’s like, why isn’t it perfect now, and so it’s so the staging, I think is really important. And I’ve seen Yeah, I’ve seen it in our own agents, we encourage everyone to do it. But if you do have clients that resist that, you know, how do you sort of handle that you know who maybe they have an emotional attachment to particular pieces of furniture or how do you address that?
Deanna Kory 33:54 Well I have such confidence in what I do then I I’m very firm with people and if I rarely get turned down when it’s about furniture and things like that, but occasionally I do just recently I have a listing where they had had this a lot of turquoises and blues which can be good in a mid century modern kind of setting but it was a little bit off it was not right and i i They would not stage and their neighbor who have referred me and I was the third broker on it because it didn’t sell on with the blues and the color and this and that they had vacated it because they bought another place and I finally said okay, if you’re not going to do that you must paint it. And I’ll give you the white because you have no idea I know every white that’s out there. So I know what’s going to be the best white in what apartment and I take the color swatches in and I really do this every time and I make sure that it’s the best it’ll provide in this case is a light prime department. How’s that? And I wanted to make sure it had the highest light reflection. I got through light fixtures I did all sorts of things and we made a beautiful clean slate. I mean they’d be you have a clean slate. And we saw that right away. So, you know, I just, you know, we do the best we can I mean, I couldn’t stage it, but obviously, whatever I did did did the right thing. So
D.J. Paris 35:12 yeah, and I love that I would love to hear your philosophy on building a real estate business as well. I know, that’s something that you’re passionate about.
Deanna Kory 35:21 I am, I am. I mean, I started out look, the world’s a lot different than when I started. And so a lot of the things that I did, but it’s the same principles anyway, had to do with you know, Hi, my big thing was about incredible customer service, as you can tell, educating and incredible customer service because I was determined that I would stand out, I always felt that I’m kind of a perfectionist, and I’ve kind of dropped a lot of the perfectionism, to being, you know, like, 90 90% is good enough, or 95% is good enough. But I, you know, I really wanted to be treating people the way that I would want to be treated. Because you know, even if you’re buying a 500,000 in New York, which was a $500,000 apartment is not a lot of money relative to other apartments, but it’s still $500,000. So you want to be treated in a certain way, it’s a lot of money. And I never lose sight of that fact. And so one of the things we do is high level of customer service, the marketing for me, as you’ve heard already, what I do in terms of the newsletters, and of course it was doing event at the time, that COVID kind of portail did a lot of events. I used to do classical music concerts, I had Steinway calm, I did, also I did things with the landmarks, organizations, I’m very interested, as you can tell an architectural history, I did all sorts of things to you know, really distinguish myself, when I was a little behind the times, although not that far behind the times in terms of Instagram and Facebook, just because, you know, it was just so new to me. And I just wasn’t quite as caught off guard. But I think we’ve caught up we have a great following and we haven’t doing great we try. And we’ve been trying to improve it and improve it. Because we know again, we want to educate people, we want to provide this beautiful content visually. But again, I’m I’m really more into educating. But I think if you stay consistent with marketing, which is part of what I’ve done, and you stay consistent with staying in touch with people, which is the other thing, I have a whole system, I have a what we call in my in my team, a deal management system, which I might end up selling at one point to people, but it’s a wonderful way, it’s different, because it’s specifically meant for the real estate industry. And I find it really helpful and I do a weekly meeting in my team. And we go over every buyer, every seller, so we know everything that’s going on. And we go over every single lead that we have. And we are constantly on top of the people that we have that are long or short term leads. So we’re constantly doing things to think about future business and building business. And and obviously, it’s it’s proven results, you know?
D.J. Paris 38:03 Yes, clearly, I’m curious on staying in touch, I always feel that that is oftentimes an agent’s Achilles heel, especially after a sale, but but of course pre sale as well. I once asked, excuse me, I once asked a of one of the top agents here in Chicago who was on our show. And she is like, like what I say top out of 46,000 agencies like number two or three. And I asked her I said, Well, what do you think the difference is between you and she was just this very polite, sweet, soft spoken kind of kind of person. And I was trying to extract what her sort of, you know, sort of secret was of success. And she goes, You know, I’m not smarter than anyone else. But I do call every one of my clients every single week. And I said, you know, regardless of whether there’s an update or not, and I said, and she goes no that that that’s it? And of course she does a million other things too. But But I’m curious on on because you’re talking about consistency with your branding, with your marketing, but also with your communication, you know, one to one communication? How does your team do that? What are you doing? You talked about having a meeting each week, where you’re going over all of the team’s leads and kind of where everyone is in the process. But can you go a little bit deeper on that and just share, you know, specifically,
Deanna Kory 39:22 what we do we have we have a meeting and then I have each of my team members is responsible for a certain number of leads. And and what they have to do is stay in touch with them not as a crazy person because we’re already touching base with them with all our newsletters and all our information. But we go through periods and we’ve just gone through the period of beginning of seasons where we want to know if people are maybe interested in selling. So what we’ll do is we’ll I don’t like to send a very simple thing I don’t want to send Oh, how are you doing? You know the markets doing blah, blah, blah. I want to give whoever I send a note to something that’s relevant to them. Okay, again, it’s about educating. So I want to let them know, this apartment has been sold, these three apartments have sold in your neighborhood, that’s great for you, it shows that your value is is, is strong right now. And then I give a little blurb about the market. And you know, as it relates to them, because in New York, I don’t know how it isn’t Chicago, but in New York, we have all these different market segments, I’m guessing you have the same there. So it’s very specific what’s going on, and whatever the segment is, so I make a very specific paragraph about what’s going on in their market. And I totally get a great response rate. And I do it on a regular basis. And we’ve just gone through a round of them. And I’m still working through them, because I have my team members write them based on what I, you know, have just said to you, and then I edit them and make sure that they’re the right, because I actually usually know the people that are the leads, I know the sellers, or the buyers, whoever it is. And, you know, it’s it’s proven to be a really good because people know that they’re carefully specifically written, they’re not a form letter. That’s why it’s hard for me to take some of those like, you know, management systems sort of thing, cut the contact management systems, which just spit out, you know, a form letter type of thing. It’s tough, because I like this personal touch, just like the woman who calls I just don’t have time to call everybody. But I do through letters, you know, so
D.J. Paris 41:23 yeah, you know, it’s really funny. I was thinking about this the other day, I purchased a place my primary residence in it was a new development. And just for fun, so funny that I should have gone to the MLS because I am technically a real estate agent, even though I don’t use my license. So I should have gone straight to the MLS to run a comp for myself, but because I’m lazy, I went just like most people straight to Zillow. And I’m like, I wonder what Zillow thinks my home after a year of purchasing not that I’m thinking of moving I am not. But I was like, you know, everyone likes to know what their home is worth. And this really speaks to what what you were talking about. So I went on to Zillow, and I typed in my address. And now I don’t know how accurate the Zestimate was. But it was a very nice number to see. Because I just happened to sort of accidentally timing the market. Well, just because of you know, the pandemic was so strange, but just kind of got lucky that way. And so I went, Oh, my God, look at what my place is worth. Now, I don’t know if that act numbers accurate. But I started thinking, you know, I’ve lived here a year i Obviously I think realtors who even know about this development might think oh, there’s nobody moved in as moving out anytime soon. And they’re you know, they’re all new. And they just spent a bunch of money on these on these places. But I have, there’s 46,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area, I have not received one postcard, and maybe they know I’m in the business, but I doubt it. Not one postcard, not hey, we noticed your home is actually appreciated since you purchased it. And these are not, you know, starter condos. These are these are more, you know, expensive type condos. And so I I’m just thinking, gosh, there’s so much opportunity for agents to do exactly what you’re talking about is to send that I mean, I had to look it up myself. And and then I ran a real confident with okay, this estimate was wasn’t totally accurate. But it was still like a nice thing to know, because everyone likes to know what their places worth. And and it’s such a simple thing that you do, but it isn’t. It isn’t easy to do. It’s simple, but it is incredibly important to those homeowners.
Deanna Kory 43:27 Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s again, educating and again, imparting information. It’s all in the same vein of everything that I do. And so, and I you know, and I like it, I just I like it, I feel like I add value. And I think by feeling. I mean I think other people feel like I do as well, otherwise I wouldn’t get the business. And I do I really try and help people out. It’s it’s just been my philosophy, because of the way I see it. I’m very blessed. I really feel like I’ve had a great run a great life. And, you know, the My business has been, you know, really excellent. So you know, if I don’t sell something, I don’t sell something, but I’d rather help that person. And that’s how I’ve always felt. That’s how I always started the business because I felt that people would understand that and feel that in their hearts. That’s how I felt. And I felt that way anyway. But you know, sort of sometimes tempted because maybe times are a little tough and you want to you know, that’s just not a good way to because people feel the anxiety or they feel whatever it is. And I sometimes say to my agents, I have one agent who came to me recently she was losing a deal. And I said, You okay, you got to calm down. I said you got to calm down because you can’t want this more than them. You have to want what’s best for them. And if they don’t want it, you have to accept it. You just have to accept it. You have to let it go and accept it. And I want you to get and I had coached her to be very accepting. I told her what to say. I said you have to put yourself in this frame of mind. Well wouldn’t you know it the first the deal fell apart and then it came back together. So you Gotta let these things go. I mean, it’s really about the other person. It’s not about you, you know, it’s about the other person.
D.J. Paris 45:07 I have two final questions for you, because and I know, I know just how busy Well, I don’t know how busy you are, I suspect, I know how busy I suspect you are managing a major team as one of the top teams in all of Manhattan. But I do have two important questions that I think our audience one’s a fun one and one’s a more serious one, we’ll start with a more serious one, which is, you’ve been in this business a long time, 36 years, you’ve had a tremendous amount of success, I would love to hear your take on what’s going on in the market today. Just to sort of set the simple stage and New York is certainly Manhattan is its its own thing, of course, as well as San Francisco and a few other our markets kind of similarly. But I know here in Chicago, which is a different market, but probably maybe more common to other major cities. You know, we’re dealing with a lot of shortages, in inventory, obviously, low and low interest rate environment, so tons of people are buying with more purchasing power than they had before. I’m sure that helps out in New York as well, when everything is so incredibly expensive to begin with. But what do you think the state of the market is? And where do you start to see it going?
Deanna Kory 46:13 Right? Well, you know, we were hit the worst, I think of all markets during the pandemic, because we were the epicenter for the pandemic when it happened. So it was a real, it was just a struggle, anyway, and we came out of it. And I like to say the bottom of the market was sometime between August and October of 2020. But then it started going up from there. So and we had a record year last year in terms of volume in terms of sales volume, what didn’t, it did not translate into the prices did come back to pre pandemic prices, but we’re still not at the peak, as we were in the 2000s, sort of 14 to 16 times are really 1415 downgrade. I will say that there was some exceptions to that. The market in general has been very, very strong in the new development condo world, which is they’re having record years, and their prices are up relative to other properties. And so that’s sort of where they are. Now, what’s happened this year as we’re going into 2022 is that we have, we’re not having a lot of inventory come on the market. So this is the first time we’re having that. So we are seeing a little bit I’m seeing a little bit of upward pressure on resales, a new development, you know, you can’t be can’t keep a decent new development on the market right now. But in terms of resales, which are resale condos, resale coops, those we’re having, you know, we have a shortage in certain categories like that one that I told you, we sold right away the classic 60s, there are certain categories where they’re sitting on the market. So it’s a little uneven, depending on location, size, price point. But what is pretty uniform is that we don’t have a lot of inventory coming on the market like we normally do at this time of year. So the lack of inventory may result in price increases. Now we are in a time period where we’re looking at very volatile stock market, for obvious reasons because of Russia and Ukraine. And that is a very, incredibly sad thing that’s going on right now. And we don’t know exactly how, you know, obviously whatever happens there is going to have an impact on our market to some degree. But people still are we do have a shortage of inventory now relative to before. And so we’re are starting to rescind people just make decisions when new things come on the market. And so it’s still a robust market. It’s still very strong. It’s like sort of like last year, which was very strong. But I think there’s a little cloud because of the Russia Ukraine thing and the volatility of the markets.
D.J. Paris 48:42 Yeah, I think that’s anytime, you know, it makes it makes sense. I think I think that’s, that’s right. I know, pre pen or bright when the pandemic started, we’re friendly with some brokerage owners in Manhattan. And they were really concerned about, you know, people fleeing the city and whether they’d come back and what the office buildings would be pop how populated they would be when we returned to normal, and we’re starting to get there which is, which is exciting. But it’s good to know that Manhattan is still doing doing well. And, and I imagine too, but it is funny too, because then you end up realtors, most of our listeners, I think as well as just realtors in the country oftentimes had their best year last year, which is sort of a weird, sort of benefit to this awful sort of tragedy that we’ve all gone through. But it’s also dripping prices up and there’s been you know, just some inventory shortages. But I imagine for you a great opportunity to reach out to your your owners and say, hey, you know if you’re looking to you know, now we’ve a lot of us have learned and maybe real estate agents don’t get to benefit as much from this. But a lot of just traditional businesses now are like hey work where If you want to do things so you know, I met people traveling, I traveled a bit and last several years, when it was safe to do so all over various countries. And I was shocked at how many people who, you know, just said, you know, I subletted my place, or I’m renting out my condo, and I’m traveling right now. And I’m not totally sure where I want to end up. So this idea that people who own now maybe some of those shackles have that immediate geographic location where they thought like, I thought I was going to have to be in Chicago my whole life, and I love the city. However, now I know, I could probably since I’m not, you know, realtors, I can have a bit of a bigger mountain to climb if they want to sort of work remotely. I think that’s harder. But, but a lot of business people now can just kind of go everywhere. So are you seeing a lot of a lot of opportunities there to say to your your people who have purchased in the past? Hey, what are your plans? What what are you thinking of doing?
Deanna Kory 50:59 You mean in terms of selling, and just in terms
D.J. Paris 51:01 of, of yeah, now, now people can say, you know, they’re able to say, Well, gosh, maybe I want to move to Nashville, or, or Austin, or Charleston, or some of these, these places where now you know, people can move, I imagine that probably has opened up conversations between you and your clients a
Deanna Kory 51:17 lot that we have a little bit of migration to Florida and some of the Southern. And so that is happening. But you know, there’s those of us who live in Manhattan and love Manhattan, ya know, and this is a large portion of the population. There’s no place like Manhattan. So one of the things that is happening in this country, a little bit of this sort of some people moving out and doing remote work elsewhere, is the fact that people want a piece of Manhattan. So we’re getting a lot of people are getting a piano tear, a second home or third home or fourth time, whatever it is. And that is driving a lot of a certain portion of the market, which is nice. So people really want to have a piece, they want to have a home here. And we’re seeing more of that. I don’t I don’t know if there any percentages, but but again, anecdotally and unlike any other agent, right? We’re getting our fair share of people like that. And more than I would say most but so I think that percentage is up, actually, which is nice.
D.J. Paris 52:18 Well, I’ve always thought which I probably will never be able to afford to do myself, Although who knows. But I if I were to get a second place, I would it would be in Manhattan. Again, that’s a huge, huge accomplishment if I were able to be able to do that. But But yeah, my mom growing up my mom used to say just just as kind of say something cute. Although I don’t certainly don’t mean to offend anyone else because I do not have any ego about where I live and about any I’ve been to almost every state this country and I really like all of them it to some degree. But my mom used to say there’s really three cities growing up, she’d go, it’s New York, number one, Chicago’s number two, San Francisco’s number three. She’s like, that’s it. And I always thought that was kind of funny. But but but there is something very magical about about New York and people who live there, you know, want to, you know, yeah, maybe they end up retiring to Florida. Like my sister now, who now lives in Florida. She’s not retired. They’re raising their son there. And it makes more sense for them to do that. But they are itching to get back. So I’m excited. I’m excited to hear that that New York is still going so strong.
Deanna Kory 53:31 And it’s not just Manhattan, by the way. Brooklyn has Ferro remarkably well, better
D.J. Paris 53:37 than it’s been. So I remember I remember Brooklyn when When? When it wasn’t. It was It wasn’t so much fun to go to Brooklyn. And now it’s just, it’s just like, Whoa, this is the coolest part.
Deanna Kory 53:53 The Brooklyn agents last year they hit out of the park. It was crazy. So Manhattanites, which I am one. My daughter she had her choice might live in Brooklyn, but she’s now living in the village. But anyway, so you know, Manhattan in Manhattan heights are sort of Manhattan ice. But Brooklyn has been really like one of the hottest locations in the New York City area. So it continues to be so
D.J. Paris 54:18 yeah, I It’s fun, Brooklyn. So I just I haven’t since my sister moved to Florida about five, five years ago, we used to spend all of our holidays in Manhattan because my sister lived there and why not? And now we’re down in Florida, which of course, weather wise is nice, but but we don’t get to go to Manhattan as much and I’m going to
Deanna Kory 54:43 show you some of my favorite restaurants and things.
D.J. Paris 54:46 I would love that or we could just go to John’s and yes, it’s a pizza. Yeah, well, I do have one one and I never, you know, it’s funny just to pull back the curtain on how we do these set up these interviews with with people like Deanna, we I have somebody on my team, her name is Donna and she does a pre interview and sends questions. And Deanna wrote a really, really, we asked these questions, and then I never ended up asking the asking them during the interview. And I always feel bad because our guests write out these really long, wonderful answers. But I’m going to ask you this one because I thought this was such a great answer. We usually ask people, what’s your like, funniest real estate experience? And yours was real comedy of errors here. It’s like, it’s almost if you were to write it into a script, it would, you’d get notes back from the from the producers going, this isn’t realistic, this isn’t going to happen. So we can’t put this it’s not no one’s going to assume that this could ever happen. But it did happen. And so they say what reality is stranger than fiction. But do you mind sharing that sort of brownstone inspection experience?
Deanna Kory 55:51 So you know, in New York City, we have these row houses, we call them brownstones townhouses, there are many different names that are used from them. This was a brownstone, which is made on a brownstone. And it’s a house, but and originally was a single family house, but they get divided up into apartments. And this was a while ago, that I had sold two floors, the lower two floors of this house. And so then we’re bringing an inspector in and this is the comedy of errors that happened. So we walk into the house with the inspector. And, you know, with inspections in New York don’t have that will happen before the contract is signed, I don’t know it’s different than outside of the city. But we had just done the thing, but had been, but I hadn’t been in the house. And in a little bit like a week or two, because it takes a little time for some of the due diligence to take place. We go into the house with the inspector, and I open the door and the alarm goes off. So I know this was the first thing that happened,
D.J. Paris 56:48 you did not know there was an alarm or how to turn it off.
Deanna Kory 56:52 I didn’t have the code for whatever reason, they hadn’t set the alarm before. And I tried calling them and they didn’t answer their phone. And I was going crazy, because I think the police are gonna come a fire department’s gonna come I don’t know what’s gonna happen. And I finally out of desperation, I go walking up the stairs to the apartment upstairs. And I knock on the door. And this man opens this opens the door in the bathroom. And I’m thinking Oh, my God, it was middle of the day, right? And I thought, Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. But I set off the alarm and I can’t reach them. And do you happen to have the code? You said no, no, it was just surgery. And I’m thinking oh my god, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you, and I’m sorry about the alarm. And I went running downstairs. And I’m meanwhile trying to figure out this alarm and, and they’re going around and they’re doing their inspection. And then they go ahead and they open the flue, and they’re testing the fireplace, and he puts the fireplace on and lo and behold, you know, you open the flue, and you would he was doing smoke comes built, here’s the alarm going off, smoke comes billowing, and there’s a Birdman and I’m like, Oh my gosh, the people call them they finally give me the alarm code, I turn it off. And I’m like, I can’t even tell them about this smoke, and I don’t know what to say. And I didn’t know what to do. And I’m like, and finally we get the fire, calm down, the windows open, everything’s everything’s, you know, complete and done. And then finally, I’m like, get through this inspection, you know, 2500 square feet of space with all sorts of things, you know, outdoor area back of the bar of the lawn inspection. So finally, we’re finally finished, we close everything up. We go out and now in these buildings, you know, there’s the front door to the apartment and we go out the front door, the apartment and then we have to go and pull the front door forward. That’s how they work the impulse. You take the knob and you pull it in and I go to take the knob and pull it in and the doorknob falls off and get out of this house. And I can’t make this up. This was just the killer. Okay, what do we do
D.J. Paris 59:04 that is incredible. Maybe Maybe all the bad luck just happened at once. And then he didn’t have hopefully any more bad luck that year. But what a great story and I think our audience can certainly relate to every every agent and has had you know those types of experiences.
Deanna Kory 59:22 This is crazy. I ended up I ended up sending flowers to the guy with the surgery. I felt so bad. I ended up selling three of three of the four apartments in that building ultimately, so it didn’t turn out so badly.
D.J. Paris 59:35 Oh, wow. Amazing. Well, Deanna, I am so appreciate you coming on our show and sharing your your truth about how you built your business suggestions for agents of what they can do with respect to branding and marketing. Talking about your process and your team’s process. It’s been incredibly valuable. I want everyone who is listening to please check out Deanna has a team’s website which is the Deanna quarry team, part of the Corcoran Group, visit Deanna on her website, which is Deanna quarry.com. And again, it’s really a cool and different way to present your hers or Deanna in particular in her team present themselves with putting really great content front and center versus, you know, below the fold, and you have to scroll to find it. And also check out her newsletter as well. But her website is Deanna quarry.com. And I’ll spell that d a nnakory.com. And I was telling Deanna ahead of time that I grew up with a lot of Corys, who are Lebanese, so I keep wanting to miss spell, Cory, because I’m used to being spelled differently, but D A nnakory.com is the category team website. Also, there’s a link to that in our show notes. And Deanna, it has been a absolute pleasure. Oh, by the way, all of her social media is also accessed right from her website. But also check her out on Instagram, which is the which is Deanna quarry team will also have a link to that in our show notes, and she has great social media. So please check her out there. And if you happen to be a buyer or a seller and investor or renter, and you are looking in the New York City area, and you would like to work with one of the top teams there Deana what some what’s the best way somebody may could reach out to you,
Deanna Kory 1:01:25 obviously, email or text and we’ll get right back to you. We have great. As I said, You agents who are very experienced, on average, they’re like seven or 10 years in the business depending. So I have fabulous people that I would have worked with me if I was a newcomer, or an experienced purchaser. So anytime would be happy to help.
D.J. Paris 1:01:48 Yeah, so just send an email to info at Deanna quarry.com, or visit their website, Deanna quarry.com, you can get in touch with them. They’re all their informations right front and center. It’s super easy, it’s easy to find. And she’s everywhere. So it’s really very, very, very present a realtor in New York, on behalf of our audience. Deanna, thank you so much for your time today. This was a real pleasure. For us. It was a real, I definitely want to see the the first bassoon sort of practice with your new read and your borrowed instrument. By the way, not a lot of the students floating around out there. So I love that it’s not an easy instrument to find. So I can appreciate appreciate you getting back into that which I think is really, really fun. And I I suspect your your your contacts and your your clients will love to see you participating in that if you decide to keep going with it. Because of course, that’s your part of your background. But also on behalf of Deanna and myself, we want to thank our listeners and our viewers for continuing to support our show for making it all the way to the end of the episode. We ask everyone before they sign off to do just two quick things. Well, three things visit Deanna cory.com. Check out what her and her team are all about. Also give you some great ideas for your own business. But also to other things is please tell a friend about this episode. Think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this wonderful conversation and insight from Deanna 36 years in the business. Billions of dollars of real estate sold, send them a link to this, this episode you can or just send them to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right there. Or if they’re a podcast person, just pull up a podcast app, have them search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And I know this is a long exit. So I apologize. But one last thing, please leave us a review whatever app you might be listening to the show on whether it’s Apple podcasts or Google Play or Stitcher, Spotify, whatever, Pandora, Amazon, wherever you’re listening to this, let us know what you think of the show. Tell us give us a star review. Hopefully more than one star but give us whatever you think is right because it helps us continue to improve and we want to we make the show for you. So let us know what we can do to get better. And that just helps us reach more people as well. So Deana, on behalf of everyone, thank you so much for coming on our show. And we are so excited to continue to watch your team, you know take over Manhattan.
Deanna Kory 1:04:14 Thank you. Thank you for having me.
What I’ve Learned From Managing 150k Real Estate Agents • Greg Sexton
Mar 21, 2022
Greg Sexton the Chief Operating Officer of Century 21 Real Estate LLC describes how he got involved in real estate. Greg talks about the the role of the brokerage in the success of the agent. Next, Greg discusses the importance of training and coaching in the real estate industry and he talks about his personal perspective for real estate in 2022. Greg and D.J. discuss Millennial and Gen-Z groups and how to prepare for their presence in the market. Last, Greg discusses leads and how to nurture them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 How would you like to hear from the CEO of one of the largest real estate companies in the world? They have 150,000 agents. How would you like to hear what they think is the keys to success? I know I do. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Barris. And in just I’m your guide and host by the way through the show, I screwed up my own intro but just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with the CEO of century 21 Greg Sexton, he has 150,000 agents and he’s going to tell you what he believes are the key to agent success. I’m really excited before we get to to Greg just a couple of quick reminders please tell a friend think of one other realtor that you know that needs to hear what Greg is about to tell you and believe me it’s all gold, send them a link to our website or send just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button but our website where they can stream every episode is keeping it real pod.com Again, keeping it real pod.com And also please leave us a review. If you’re listening on a podcast app like iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify wherever please let us know what you think of the show. We read all those reviews and it helps us improve But enough about me let’s get on to Greg Sexton.
Okay, today on the show we have Greg Sexton from Century 21. He’s the Chief Operating Officer. Let me actually let me tell me more about Greg so Greg was actually appointed the chief operating officer of century 21, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Realogy corporation. So many of you listening are probably part of the realty family which includes century 21, Better Homes and Gardens, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran, a lot of a lot of major major real estate companies that that are in your market. But Greg was, has been the CEO since September of 2020. And he serves as the chief operating officer sorry, he also served as the Chief Operating Officer of century 21 Real Estate from 2013 to 2017, before taking on his role of the chief of business services for real G. Now Upon returning to his position as Chief Operating Officer, Sexton leads the company’s domestic and international operations, which includes the iconic brands industry leading platform of tech tools and apps learning and data driven products that si 21 professionals leverage to better serve their customers and clients. Plus, he oversees the organization’s real estate field servicing staff to ensure that it’s committed to improving the quality and efficiencies and building long term relationships with a century 21 systems broker network. Now he has also spent a decade over a decade rather with the real G Corporation. He served in a number of roles including senior vice president broker services of for century 21 real estate where he oversaw the consulting, sales and service efforts of the brand’s broker services teams, and as also the Senior Vice President of Operations for Coldwell Banker, residential real estate and Coldwell Banker Commercial. So he’s he is a titan of this industry. We are beyond honored to have him on here. And this is the first time we’ve really spoken to somebody at your level. We traditionally Greg speak to producing brokers, but who better to talk about producing agents than of course you who oversees a lot of them. But welcome to the show, Greg, we appreciate your time.
Greg Sexton 4:54 Thank you, Jay. Thank you so much for having me and the opportunity to spend some time with your audience.
D.J. Paris 4:59 We are We are a very, very grateful to to have you on the show and I’ve always I have a I myself, I’m not a practicing agent, although I do have a license. I’m on the recruiting side I work for an independent brokerage here a family owned company here in Chicago. But of course century 21, Coldwell Banker, all of Better Homes and Gardens, those are all those all have a presence, pretty prominent presence here in the Chicagoland area, including the suburbs. And in fact, our owner, Nick, before he took over the company that I work at, which was his family’s company. He actually started himself at Coldwell Banker for the first four years of his career, so he could learn the business and he will tell everybody, boy, what a great experience that was, of course, century 21 being under that same umbrella. But I would love to hear about your journey into real estate. Obviously, you you’ve been on the corporate side for quite some time. But uh, how’d you get involved in real estate?
Greg Sexton 5:57 Yeah, it was interesting. So there’s the real estate side of what we do and then the franchising side and actually came in through the franchising window or door, if you will, I had actually been in the franchising industry, in a different industry other than real estate. And that was my entree in and where I came into it was on the franchise, sales side of it. And I will tell you, DJ, I’m a I’m a proponent of for those that have gone into leadership within real estate, especially within the franchise side of it. That franchise sales background is really what helped me understand what happens at the street level, if you will, because a lot of us from corporate folks, a lot of times we’re inside, we’re developing tools and systems and thinking that, wow, this is going to be the greatest thing out there. When really, if you haven’t spent time understanding what happens at the brokerage, what happens for the agents out there, I think sometimes we don’t make those great decisions. And so being in franchise sales, I spent all my time, the first 11 years with the company out there in the trenches, with our real estate brokerage companies, talking to agents, you know, working to get them to understand the value that a franchise like a central 21 provides, and all the different tools in the systems, not to mention the branding. So that was really important for my start and that so I spent the first 11 years on that franchise, sales side and real estate, then I transitioned into the operation side, which for me, made it a really great transition because I felt like I really understood what I wanted to accomplish in the corporate side, working with our field, who was out there working with our brokerages, excuse me out there working with our agents, and that was really kind of the compelling thing for me is that try to take that knowledge never forget what is important for the agent, and how they drive their business, how they grow their business. And so I’ve always tried to keep that focus and remember where I learned it from?
D.J. Paris 7:55 Well, I think it’s, I think that’s an impressive sort of experience skill set. Because you you have that sort of boots on the ground understanding as well as what it takes from a corporate level to support those boots on the ground and support the franchisees as well as the agents, and then just to create infrastructure within the company to continue to support everyone, which is a daunting task. And you know, realtors require a tremendous amount of help and as do the brokerages and the brokers who run them. I know we we are an independent brokerage. So we have about 800 agents in our company and boy it’s it’s a struggle and and so I can appreciate the resources that that companies like century 21 Coldwell Of course, provide, especially for newer agents. And not not just newer agents, of course, but I’ve always thought the resource, you know, I get this question a lot. When someone’s past their broker, while in Illinois, we’re all called brokers. So we’ll just say agents for the for the because not every state has the same terminology. But when agents, people, people just pass their exam, and then they’re interviewing, the question that I get the most is, you know, how are you guys my firm? Or the firm I work at? How are you guys different from a century 21? How’s your training, compared to Coldwell bankers? And I said, Well, I would hope they’d have better training than we do. And they do. Because of course they do because they have a lot more resources at their disposal. And to me, that’s a wonderful place as it’s not just a place to enter the business because I think, obviously, there’s a lot of top producers who have been practicing for dozens and dozens of years who stay at Century 21 and other companies like yours. But I’ve always thought especially for newer agents who really want to learn, you know, having the most amount of resources at your disposal is a really, really important sort of thing to be able to dip into and actually I have a question for you because I I’ve always wondered wondered this myself because agents, people who pass their their licensing exam, we have a lot of them that listen to the show, because really our show was was primarily designed not just to help newer agents, but to help agents who are looking to get to that those sort of higher levels of production, figure out what they need to do. And so we interview we’ve interviewed a lot of century 21 and Coldwell and betterhomes garden and Corcoran people on our show, who are over already made it. But I have a question for our audience that maybe you can help answer because agents are always especially newer ones are struggling with this one, which is what is the role of the brokerage in the success of the agent? Or how do you see you’re, you know, the resources that the corporate mothership will say, provides, you know, down to down to the individual agent? And of course, I would I know what, what my answer would be as a much smaller company. But I’m curious to hear you know, what you think the role of the brokerage is in 2022. And by the way, I know I’m talking a lot, I do want to also say one thing, I forgot a century 21 just celebrated last year, their 50th anniversary. And so congratulations to them, they also recently named and I can’t, I’m forgetting her name, but but somebody a real G, I believe, just named COO, who’s, who is a woman, and if it is national, Women’s History Month was starting today. So congratulations there. But congratulations on the 50 years, century 21. They also just went through a rebranding, which is very cool. But anyway, back to my question. Sorry for that. What is the role of the brokerage these days,
Greg Sexton 11:42 let me speak to that, because I, this really goes to a word that you’ve used a couple of times here about that you’re with an independent company. And I think that, and I’m gonna come from the passionate side of the brand and branding. And what we provide our broker owners because we want to make sure that they can then provide it to their agents is a full suite of value proposition from technology to training. And let me just dive in, if I could, for a little bit on that. Because I think it’s very important that I go back to the role that I had in franchise sales, where we’re I’m talking to independent real estate companies and agents that maybe with companies that are giving them that full value proposition of the things that they need out there. And it’s that knowledge that really caused me to really want to dive into what makes the brokerage successful. Well, what it makes it makes the brokerage successful is that their agents are successful out there, and their agents needs are being met. And we as the franchisor, in central 21, our job is to make sure that we provide those resources for our broker owners so they can be passed down. And I will tell you, one of the things that that I often say to companies that come to Century 21, they want to be part of the Sichuan family, we take them on a journey of what our full value proposition is, because I believe that we have a great value proposition, but it has to be right for that company, for that companies, agents for that broker to deliver value to their agents. And so you’ll hear me often say to these companies, I don’t know if this journey ends with you being part of century 21. Family, I don’t know if that’s right for either one of us. But this I do know, brand with someone, because I believe brand is that important. And it is when you mentioned about being independent, I believe brand is important, not just because of the brand. But the things that are wrapped around that a large company like a century 21 can provide for our brokers who then provide for their agents are very, very expensive. Let’s start with technology. Technology is changing so rapidly in this industry every day. And for an independent or even for an agent with an independent company to keep up with that technology, much less purchasing it from the start. But the moment you purchase it next thing you know, you got to update it, you gotta manage it don’t.
D.J. Paris 14:05 I’m in charge of our technology at our firm. And I will tell you, it is an incredible expense. And even beyond being an incredible expense. You’re absolutely right, the upkeep of making sure the providers that we use or that we develop are sufficient is is almost a full time job. So I absolutely understand. And I hope our audience is if you are at a firm that isn’t offering the tool set that you think you need, sir, you could go out and purchase certain tools on your own. Or you could explore firms that have already done a lot of that legwork like a century 21 and say, Hey, we will they get courted by the very best tech providers on the planet or they developed their own technology. And they have their own staff to do that. And it is in a very, very impressive tool set that you guys offer.
Greg Sexton 14:56 Yeah, one of the things that we just announced is not too long ago, a DJ We’re getting ready to roll out in the process of now it’s called Moxie works. It’s actually a product, it’s been around for a long time in the desert. But now we partner with moxie works. And that’s just kind of showing what the power of a large brand, like a century 21 can do for their brokers for their agents, is make sure that they have a suite of tools, it’s one thing to have a good piece of technology, it’s another thing to have a good suite of tools, because the agents out there demanding it as they should today, and so are in clients, those people that are out there looking to buy a home to sell their home. And I believe it’s our job to make that journey as easy as possible. And a lot of that’s coming through technology, not to mention the other aspect of what we deliver. And what I think that agents should also demand is a really good training platform. Here’s what’s interesting to you, Dan, I know you work with a lot of agents and brokers, you probably know this better than I do. It is amazing to me that in the real estate industry, those agents that take training, take coaching on a monthly basis, it’s been your $1,000 a month or whatever, these are, typically your new agents, right? These are your most experienced, most professional, most successful agents. And to me, that shows the power of a brand that has good training that agents would realize that if I’m going to be at the top of my game today, and tomorrow, I gotta keep on educating, I gotta, I gotta gain as much knowledge as I can. So I can pass that knowledge down to help my clients. And I just think that’s kind of a little bit of an interesting twist for this industry, how agents really want to absorb good coaching and good training, that’s a differentiator between us and say, other industries.
D.J. Paris 16:43 I think you’re right. And it is interesting, the coaching part of this industry is such a big and the training part is so important, because as we know, and our listeners, and viewers know that being a realtor is a ton of work because you’re not just wearing the sales guy hat, you know, you go to, and I shouldn’t say sales guy, salesperson, hat, of course, because you’re not just working at a company where they put you they give you some leads, you’re calling because you’re selling maybe a SaaS product or some sort of, you know, some product that you only have to sell as, as a realtor, you have to wear a number of hats. And whether you work at an independent firm, or you work at a franchise firm, wherever you work, you are not a lot of those hats. And it certainly helps to have resources of a big company behind you and the branding that goes with that. Because, you know, and I’ve been in this industry for for, I think 12 years now, and I work in an independent firm. So if somebody were to ask me the importance of a brand, because I work at a firm that has a much smaller footprint on the brand side, I say, oh, it’s not that important. But it is important. And it’s certainly when you’re starting out, and you haven’t built your reputation. And you haven’t established yourself as as an expert, necessarily, you know, yet in the in the community, or in real estate, having a brand behind you that is affiliated with competence. Excellence is. Jameson, by the way is also one of the real GE brands, which I forgot to mention, they are also obviously a huge presence everywhere, but certainly here in Chicago. These are these are important, they do move the needle for the consumer thinking, Well, hey, you know, I’m going to I just sat through three listing appointments, one was a century 21 person one was, you know, maybe somebody at my firm, and one was, you know, somebody from another firm that it isn’t as well known? Well, you know, it factors in and the branding factors in because, you know, we associate brands like century 21, with some level of excellence, because you’ve earned that, and you have excellent training. And a lot of firms like ours, you know, that’s, that’s our biggest struggle is training because we don’t have those resources. So I absolutely appreciate that.
Greg Sexton 19:07 You know, one of the things I was just going to add there quickly, BJ to is, let’s face it, this pandemic changed everything to and I believe, and we’re seeing a flight of independent real estate companies that have actually come to us since the pandemic, we sort of saw this after the recession call it back and oh eight through 11, that after people survived that, they also realized, I don’t want to go through this again, from this pandemic that we’re navigating ourselves through now and hopefully out very shortly. That didn’t change landscapes too. And people’s thought process, especially when it comes to training. As a big company as a big organization like ces 21. we pivoted quickly to our training to make sure that we were giving agents what they needed for the moment. None of us exactly knew what that moment was, but we knew that we were at home we couldn’t be in front of our clients. Those who wanted to buy homes sell their home And we couldn’t be face to face. So what do we do, and we were able to provide a lot of training quickly on virtual open houses, virtual closings, all of those things that caused us to be able to continue to do our business. In fact, frankly, as you, as you know, the industry continued to help people in that process of living that American dream of homeownership. Nothing was missed there. And I think it’s because of the ability to pivot there. But I think that as we go forward, there’s gonna be a lot of things that we would never would have thought about three years ago in our industry, or frankly, any industry that are going to live on that we never thought that was going to be part of who we are as Americans going forward when it comes to the home. And I think that that’s one of the things that I love about our industry is, we’ve been able to still help so many people live out that dream, when their dream just took a complete change. And what I mean by that is, think about all the people that are working from home now, that probably will the rest of their lives, and never would have thought about that three years ago, that creates such an opportunity for real estate agents, real estate broker owners, because we can help people to still solve that problem, what they perceive problem, it’s now an opportunity, finding a new home that meets the needs of their families, homeschooling, none of us thought that there would be this rush to homeschooling, but they were forced to, I think parts of that live on forever. So do those people have the right situation in their home? Or can we in the real estate industry, help them figure out what their needs are and fulfill those. So that’s what I love about our industry is yes, this pandemic has been horrible, horrible, for so many. And we want to, we want to always remember that. But what I love about what we get to do in our industry, is make things better.
D.J. Paris 21:54 Yeah. And I think too, that the pandemic, what it’s forced companies to do, especially larger corporations, like real GE and the various brands is it’ll the technology has been really adopted. So that we are able to communicate more effectively and efficiently with people with with companies now. And so now, you know, jumping on a Zoom meeting, is is not only not unusual, it’s every single person basically does it from time to time, whether you’re in real estate, or you’re not working at all, and you’re taking you know, at home like raising children, you’re still probably jumping on video conferencing. So I suspect, and I’m curious to get your take is it’s allowed you guys from the corporate side, to more directly communicate directly all the way down to the agent level. Because that communication that technology now exists, it probably makes it easier for you guys to go, here’s all the stuff, we have Mr. or Mrs agent who might be holed up at home because of the pandemic or various, you know, restrictions outside, we can still directly train you educate you and provide you those tools that years ago would have been more difficult to sort of trickle down all the way to the agent.
Greg Sexton 23:10 Yeah, without a doubt. In fact, I think of how even myself and pivoted I, all of my meetings now that I normally have had them in person, I can have them through zoom just as easily. I still believe we’re in the people business. And I can’t wait till we get to connect on a regular basis. And I think we’re starting to see that. But here’s a prime example. We have our big what we call our 121 convention, that’s where we have 1000s of central 21 agents from around the world attend that event and have for years, typically, typically in Las Vegas. But for the past few years, we haven’t been able to get there face to face, and enjoy that networking in that training and all the good things that go from that one on one person. However, we did it virtually we had our virtual 121, where we had 1000s of people coming on a zoom screen. And if I had said that we were going to do that three years ago to our staff, they would have looked at me like I had three heads, which might be the case that they do anyways. But that’s a totally, totally different story. But that’s how much in a short period of time. We have moved. And I think it’s just phenomenal that as a country, we were able to move like that. And I do think it’s the power of large brands that have been able to lead in that and make sure that the agents out there are still able to deliver what is needed in our industry.
D.J. Paris 24:32 That’s very well said. I appreciate your answer there. I have a couple of challenging or I would consider to be difficult questions. Although I think I think you’ll you’ll be able to answer them just fine. So no pressure, of course, but I did want to ask some questions. My first one is probably the most. We pulled our audience saying hey, we’re bringing on Greg, do you have some questions and and the number one question we got in This is a difficult question because I know that you are not an economist. And I also know that, you know, you that is not your particular specialty, although you are an Operations Officer, but I was curious, if you had a general thought about real estate in 2022, understanding rates have started to go up on the lending side, inventory is still a challenge in a lot of communities, especially I know, in Chicago, it is probably most major markets, it’s a problem. But still, rates are still pretty low. So we have this sort of interesting confluence of, of lots of buyers with still a lot of purchasing power that maybe they didn’t have when rates were higher than they are even now. They’re still great. But of course, a shortage of an inventory. So increased competition, increased pricing, curious on what you guys see on your side, as somebody who has to really look towards the future more so than than us little independent guys who just kind of focus on the day to day, what do you what do you think might happen this year with respect to real estate? Sure. And
Greg Sexton 26:04 I’m gonna give you my personal perspective on this. And I think the industry looks very, very bright. I look at what happened during the pandemic, and how, wow, we still sold so many homes when you take a look at what we do on a year to year basis before the pandemic? Well, I think the future looks very, very bright. And for a couple of reasons that I’ll throw out there. Because I think that this also speaks to how your listeners, your audience, that are agents can really think about their business going forward and their business plan for growing their business. The reasons why I feel really, really good about 2022. And frankly, beyond is, first of all, yes, we’re going to hear that interest rates are going up going up. But let’s just say that they’re going to be in that 3.6, that 3.7 range, which we keep on hearing kind of bantered around there. That is still amazing, amazing, amazing interest rates. And that should be the story that us in the industry are out there yelling from the rooftops about this great opportunity to get into homeownership first time homebuyers, what a great opportunity. 3.6. I know, I’ll give away my situation here. But my wife and I bought our first home 32 years ago, and I would have done anything like that. So I think it’s still so I think it’s our job as an industry to make sure that we get that great message out there. There’s another when you talk about what is the landscape look like going forward. I believe that because real estate is global, we have billions of dollars that come out of the other parts of the world that want to buy properties in the United States. And let’s face it, that’s been super challenging the last two years, I believe there’s going to be a bunch of pent up demand internationally on properties as we navigate ourselves out of this pandemic. I hope that your audience, your agents that you all work with, really understand that they should add this group of agents that are going to be coming over these investors add these group of clients that really want properties. Because you can think about those states that traditionally the Florida’s the California has, that really take an influx of properties that they want the international investors want to purchase. That’s a great opportunity. The other one reason why I think that there’s a new segment, if you will, that’s really coming in. That’s millennials, we are now seeing millennials that may have been either straddled with, with college debt and things in the past kind of stay on the sidelines. They also really wanted to live in those big major cities, they were going to rent for a while, because that panned the pandemic changed all of that. And so now
D.J. Paris 28:45 they’re all moving to Nashville where you are, there you go. That’s
Greg Sexton 28:47 exactly right. But I will tell you, millennials now are storming into the real estate, they’re realizing that real estate is a great investment. And so that’s a change. And there’s still a many years to go of that that demographic being part of that home buying experience that we could tap into just another great opportunity. Also the Hispanic, you know, all surveys show that that’s going to be really over the next 20 years, about 70% of the homeowners that are out there looking for homes, it again to your audience, if that’s not a group that there really has traditionally been part of their prospect list. I would encourage that. I think that’s another way to expand who maybe that prospect list didn’t include millennials, Hispanics, first time homebuyers. I think that we have a great opportunity to go out and give the dream of homeownership to more than we have in the past. And I think it’s gonna continue to drive what we’re gonna see in 2022 from an overall housing experience and even beyond that,
D.J. Paris 29:52 I think that those are really great, great insights and I was wanted to tag on to the millennial and I’m sort of Gen Z market, which often is ignored by realtors, because we know that that that age group, or people in that group, those groups tend to buy a little bit later than in previous generations. However, there is a an amazing transfer of wealth that is happening. For those people, a lot of them are receiving, you know, as their parents get older, they’re gonna start receiving transfers of wealth, whether in the form of gifting or as, as a parent passes away, maybe that money then funnels down to those millennials and Gen Z ers, and you’re going to see a lot of people with a huge influx of capital that they have to now do something with. And and I absolutely agree that these are people that are going to be buying a lot of property in the upcoming years. And so for all of our listeners, and viewers definitely consider how to start educating that the your, your sphere of influence who have or talking to your clients, who are of those of that advanced age, and saying, Hey, let’s talk about what is your wealth, sort of transfer strategy. And, you know, I want to be part of that. And I want to know where you’re headed so that I can help maybe for your heirs, I can help provide real estate advice.
Greg Sexton 31:23 Yeah, DJ, you’re spot on with that. And let me let me run with it just a little bit further, for your audience. Because I think that this, we’ve hit on something that’s really an opportunity for those agents out there that are that have the great fortune of listening to your podcast. I’m a firm believer in a, you can make a customer for life through really delivering unbelievable service, and then following up and keeping in touch with your clients. Because yes, your client may not buy a house next year. But all the studies show three to five years, they’re probably moving on. So I think about this millennial group that you and I have been speaking about here, what an opportunity, if this is the first time they are jumping into the home ownership, to show them the experience that they can have by dealing with you that great agent, that great central 21 agent if I if I can’t, because if you can do that, you’re going to tap into their rest of their family, their friends, and be there for them when that transition comes that you just spoke about. So if again, if they’re not part of the your prospect list, I would encourage everybody to not kind of just shy away from millennials and say, well, they’re probably just going to rent, because everything has changed.
D.J. Paris 32:34 Everything has changed. Now people can live wherever. And they can work from wherever. And I was I was shocked. I traveled overseas last last year, and got to spend some time in a few different countries. And I was able to work and I met many people who were they have a place in the United States, and they were not traveling. And, you know, they were trying to figure out what what am I going to do? Where am I going to where’s my home base going to be? And I think that’s a great opportunity, especially if you work for a company like a century 21 Because now you have access to their network of agents from all over the world, really. And all the Realogy agents I’m sure as well, which is even gosh, I got I got on the news. How many do you do? Is there a total count for the number of agents under the Realogy? Umbrella? It’s got to be it’s got to be over? 100,000? I’m guessing.
Greg Sexton 33:29 Well, we have 155,000 agents at Century 21.
D.J. Paris 33:33 So there we go. Well, hundreds of 1000s of agents.
Greg Sexton 33:37 Yeah, there is a lot of and you know, which I will tell you, it speaks to back to that global thing that I mentioned, I were in 85 countries. And that goes back to that branding is so important. But here’s why branding, and you sort of alluded to it a little while ago and some comments you make. But I think it’s super important when we think about those independent real estate companies, which there’s some fine ones out there. But when it comes to somebody who is in Germany, or France, or somebody that’s thinking about buying property, they’re probably not looking for that independent name. They don’t even know who it is, what they knew the century 21 is, and I think it is agents out there really think about the future of where this industry is going and how we are global, it’s really important to have a brand behind you that you’re immediately recognized. And then because of the great job that your agents do out there serving their clients, you combine that with a great brand. There’s your customer for life.
D.J. Paris 34:35 You know, it’s really funny, I was thinking about this psychologically there there is a sense of sort of well being when you’re in a foreign place, and you see something familiar, I was in I was in Nicaragua of all places. And this is about seven or eight years ago, and I walked by an empty storefront and I sort of had an idea for a business just a fleeting thought. You know, it wasn’t something I was going to actively pursue and I saw it was it was available for rent and it said CBRE, which is a very prominent commercial firm, global commercial firm. Or maybe it was Jones Lang LaSalle. I think it was CBRE. Anyway, I said, Oh, I know what CBRE is, and then all of a sudden I went, Oh, I trust whoever the name is, which of course the person I didn’t know what whoever was representing that property. And and, you know, of course, there’s a variety of competency and agents all over the place. And there’s good agents and not so good agents everywhere. But because I recognize that name. So you know, it’s funny as an independent person. I’m like, My inclination always like brands not that important. Of course, I’m a marketing guy. And I know the power of branding, and century 21, of course, is is a very, and Jamison and Coldwell Banker, and all the real GE Better Homes and Gardens. Corcoran, these are names that most people know, right, and they’re names that have earned a spot of a earned a spot in in a sort of Americana sort of culture because of what they provide. And I’ve always just been nice, I love when when an agent meets with me, and they’re meeting with people at Century 21 or Coldwell, or wherever, and they go, Well, what do you think of those companies? And I’m like, those companies are awesome. And that’s my only answer, because I go, I love those companies, we have maybe a different pricing model than they would but aside from that, yeah, awesome, really, really great. And their pricing model is perfect for them. And and I encourage agents to explore independent companies as well as franchise companies, because the value proposition is different. That, you know, what you guys are offering is really leaps and bounds. But I did want to ask you one more tough question. And I apologize for this question. Because I have an answer for this. And I know you have to go shortly. But let’s quickly talk about leads for a moment only because it is for a new agent who doesn’t maybe know is as much as an experienced agent, of course, about leads. Oftentimes they will, as they’re interviewing brokerages, and I know it because I get this question too. Somebody will say, Well, how do you provide leads, and I say, oh, and I love talking about it, because I say we really don’t provide leads in our company. But and I understand that you can’t speak for all the century 21 franchisees, but we talked about the difference between leads and training, and I think they’re one in the same in the sense of training is going to get you leads, leads isn’t necessarily going to get to training. But can we talk about sort of the role of leads only because it just gets asked by everybody, at some point in their career?
Greg Sexton 37:43 Yeah, lead leads are very, very important. But I also think that that goes back to what a lot of our conversation has been about brands and branding, because that does, absolutely drive leads. But I think for my personal opinion about leads is we spend a lot of time on how many leads you’re going to drive from how many leads, you’re going to get me Yeah, I like to reverse the question and say, how many leads are you going to convert? Because if we did a great job of incubating, and then actually closing the leads that we have, it would be phenomenal the amount of business we will be doing. And so what I tried to talk about you nailed it. I love what you said there about the correlation between training and leads. Because we spend our time and energy Yes, we do drive leads, but the time and energy is spent on training so that agents know how to a source even their own leads, and do a better job of that. But more importantly, once you get that lead, what do you do with it? Because not everybody and not every lead is going to want to buy a house tomorrow. And as agents, sometimes we don’t pay attention to that, that that consumer who might want to buy that house in a month from now, heaven forbid, a year from now, or maybe even five years from now. But what if we started really putting an incubation strategy, a drip campaign strategy down behind all that leads, one that start those leads from happening month after month, once we generate all of that focus on the actual closing of those leads and leading them to that, to that closing? To me, that’s where we can really control the leads, because a lot of people will just say to your point, give me leads how many leads you’re gonna give me how many? I don’t think that that’s really the focus. I think we’re focusing in the wrong place.
D.J. Paris 39:31 Yeah, I think so too. And I could not agree more with you about that. And I we used to have, actually there we believe they’re coming coming back with Zillow would come on our show monthly and talk about leads because that’s their business and they they they will talk they will talk exclusively about the incubation period and how critical it is. And the lead itself. Is is not it’s not really where I think the juice is. I think it to to your point. I think it’s about the incubation it’s How to follow up. And in order to automate that, as you get busier, you need to have tools and technology to assist. You talked about drip campaigns, whether it’s print, email, text, whatever medium, you’re going to be actively reminding your sphere of influence and your your contact list about, hey, oh, by the way, I’m the guy or the or the woman, I’m the person that wants to work with you, when you’re ready. You need to have some tool sets behind you and companies like century 21. Just have it.
Greg Sexton 40:30 You know, in one of these I know, we’ve got to run here. But quickly, just to pique my interest on when when agents are looking for the company that’s going to be best for them to grow their business to grow their career. Sometimes they don’t even look at that technology, like what what what CRM does this company make available that can really be the database for all of my prospects? And then and then does it help me do those drip campaigns? Keep up with my, my customer base, follow up with my customer base? Give me those notices when I need to follow up? And that seems kind of elementary. But how important that is that for growing, not just your next closing, but growing your career. I just think that’s an important point.
D.J. Paris 41:15 Well, I think that’s something that that the rheology brands have done an exceptionally good job of. And of course, that’s evidenced by how successful those brands are, and how they continue to be major. I mean, the biggest major players, really in the real estate brokerage space. And so hats off to Century 21, congratulations on 50 years, or 51 years now, of a successful and impressive company. Real G is just just an amazing powerhouse in Century 21. Being being one of one of their brands, is of course, also beyond impressive. And so I encourage everyone who’s listening this year 2022, if if you you know, if you do an annual audit of or you’re doing an audit this year of your brokerage, you know, are they providing me the tools I need? Am I getting the resources, the support, and I think support and training are and tools are the three pillars of what a brokerage can provide. I really encourage everybody, even our own agents at our firm, although we hope you stick around our firm, but we really encourage all of our listeners to check out real G check out century 21. In particular, Greg, Greg’s a great guy. And they the company is outstanding. And there’s just a lot that there is offered there. So really we encourage everyone to if you’re in that process of trying to figure out, is there a better fit? Or maybe I just got my license and I’m not sure where I want to go. Give century 21 a chance. We we’ve we’ve seen what they’ve done here in the Chicagoland market. Agents are exceptional here, of course, our audiences all over the world, really. But check find your local century 21 office and speak to them. And Greg, if anyone out there has questions about maybe what makes century 21 different from other firms. We didn’t really get into competition, because, you know, obviously, we just don’t have a limited amount of time. But if somebody does want to chat with somebody from Century 21, about what they offer, whether it’s as a franchise, ie somebody maybe to open an office, or maybe wants to join an office that’s already existing, what’s the best way they should reach out to you?
Greg Sexton 43:23 Absolutely. I have a email address that I’d like to give. It’s Peter dot Mosca at Century 20 one.net. And he is the aggregator of all the great emails that we receive and questions and comments. And He will direct those that to me, and if somebody has a direct question for me, DJ, I encourage them to go through Peter and I will respond personally, to engage in that conversation. And to your point. We are very proud of the SR 21 brand. And we welcome anybody that wants to take a look at the value proposition we’re offering. But most importantly, I love the fact that we’re able to do these podcasts like you who are out there serving our agents across lots of brands, and delivering that dream of homeownership. So thanks for all you’re doing.
D.J. Paris 44:05 Greg, thank you very much. And we will have a link to Peter who is works with Greg, we will have a link to Peters email address in the show notes of this episode. So don’t worry if you missed it. We will have it there. You could just click on it and talk to talk to someone from Century 21 about what they offer. Greg, we are so thankful to have you on the show, Greg’s got to run to his next meeting. He’s an important guy. So he’s got important stuff to do. But he took time out of his day to share with our audience and we’re really grateful you are the first of all we’ve been doing this five years you are the first CEO to actually have a big major brand to come on our show and even offer to come on our show. So we honor you for that. We thank you for that. On behalf of our audience we say thanks. On behalf of Greg and myself. We thank the audience for sticking around all the way to the end. And we ask everybody to just do two quick things. Number one, tell a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from I’m hearing this great conversation. Oh, by the way, if you know anyone who works at one of the real GE brands, send them this to say, hey, here’s what I just heard of somebody from leadership talking and send them a link to our episode, you can always send them right over our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. And then also, please leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening on. Let us know what you think of the show. Give us a review. It’s how we continue to improve. So Greg, thank you so much. And the next time I’m in Nashville, I, you and I can go to the Ryman and ghosts or the grand old Opry and we can go see a show because I would absolutely love to do that.
Greg Sexton 45:32 Let’s do it. It was my honor to spend time with you today. All right. Thank
D.J. Paris 45:35 you, Greg. And we’ll see everyone on the next episode. Take care everybody
Top Real Estate Team In Maryland (and #5 in the U.S.!) • Brandon Brittingham
Mar 17, 2022
Brandon Brittingham the CEO and Team Leader at The Maryland and Delaware Group of Long & Foster Real Estate talks about the start of his career in real estate industry. Brandon and D.J. discuss the importance of good customer service in the industry of service providers. Brandon also emphasizes the importance of building partnerships with other businesses to provide the best experience to your customer. Next, Brandon discusses teams and shares suggestions on what should new agent look for when joining one. Last, Brandon and D.J. discuss property management and Brandon shares tips on how to start a business in property management.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Have you ever wondered what a top real estate team in a particular state did to grow their business? We’re gonna find out today and guess what? It’s different than what you think. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solutions so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Brandon Brittingham, who has the number one team in the state of Maryland and the number five real estate team in the entire country out for production. And we want to learn exactly how he did it. And he’s willing to share it all with you. Before we get to Brandon. Just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend about our show. The way that we grow is by you telling other agents about the value you get from our show. So please continue to do that. we’d greatly appreciate it. And also leave us a review. If you’re listening to us on a podcast app. Whether it’s iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify, please let us know what you think of the show that helps us get more visibility and also improve. But enough about that. Let’s get right to it. And now our interview with Brandon Brittingham.
Today on the show we have Brandon Britton with Long and Foster in Maryland. Let me tell you a little bit about Brandon. Realtor Brandon Britton Hamm is the CEO and team leader at the mayor at the Maryland and Delaware group of Long and Foster real estate based in Salisbury, Maryland. His real estate team, which is one of the best and busiest in the country, was ranked by real trends as the number one team in the state of Maryland, and number five in the nation in 2021, as well as number one in the entirety of Long and Foster four homes sold. Brandon started as a solo agent back in 2007. Right away, he made a commitment to himself to be the very best in every aspect of his profession. He wanted to offer the very best customer service possible to each of his clients and it worked. In incredibly short time span Brandon rose to become a top seller on the Eastern Shore Peninsula, a popular real estate region spanning two states, which is Maryland and Delaware. Today, Brandon is the CEO of his own team, which has 25 agents, which is incredible for a team. He is a sought after speaker, Coach and Trainer who mentors agents in buying, selling and overall career development. He’s taught 1000s of agents across the country, how to strategically build their businesses using his inspiring go getter, entrepreneurial spirit. He also oversees 19 Plus real estate related companies. He’s an active real estate investor. And he’s built a property management business of 1200 doors in a short period of time. He’s a real estate superstar. And please everyone visit Brandon on his website, which is Brandon’s brain.org. There is a link for that in our show notes. Once again, Brandon’s brain.org. Brandon, welcome to the show.
Brandon Brittingham 4:26 Thank you. I don’t know how I follow that introduction.
D.J. Paris 4:31 It’s well, I mean, jeez, we are so impressed and thrilled to have you because you have really done so much in this industry and in a relatively short amount of time. It’s just so impressive. So I always like to start at the beginning, because our audience is always wanting to know how did you get to where you are today from where you started? So can you tell us about why you got into real estate and how that happened?
Brandon Brittingham 4:56 Yeah, so you know, it’s kind of you know, it’s funny, I got into real See by accident. So I wanted to invest in real estate like that was my whole thing I wanted to buy investment properties. And I had come from, I had another business that I was very successful at, and not to paint everybody with the same brush. But the first couple of transactions I had with realtors wasn’t the greatest experience. So I went and got my license, and I only to represent myself on your own transactions, I really didn’t care about being a real estate agent. And then just there was a lot of things in the industry, when I got in that. I just thought I could do better. So I said, Hey, I’m going to try my hand at being an agent. And that’s kind of what got me into being an agent, kind of the rest is history.
D.J. Paris 5:49 So yeah, it’s it is funny, I have had, we’ve done about 350 of these episodes, so far. And it is not uncommon that someone gets their license, either they were buying a primary residence, and they were not very impressed with, with the realtor they used or they were buying investment properties like you, and also felt like hey, maybe I could do this better, or at least save on the commission. And so I’ll go ahead and get my license. But that is a pretty big jump from, you know, doing your own investments to then becoming a traditional, you know, working with buyers and sellers, realtor. What was it that how did you make that determination that that’s kind of what you wanted your career to be.
Brandon Brittingham 6:28 So I think it was kind of like I came from a business before where it was kind of customer service centric. So I like dealing with and working with people. And I just I thought there was a lot of gaps in the industry as far as what I saw of how transactions were being handled. So I kind of just wanted to get into it, because I thought I could provide a better customer experience. And you know, when I got into it, and I kind of learned the business, then I was like, man, there’s a lot of things we could really improve on. And then I think I can build this and teach other agents how to do it. And so that was kind of how we transitioned or how I transitioned into building a team. And that’s kind of where I’m at how I ended up where I am today was just trying to improve the customer experience.
D.J. Paris 7:15 Yeah, it’s interesting, too, I was just at a, I just got back from a an event where some top producers were speaking. And they were talking about the customer experience. And that is such a huge part of overall business strategy. No matter what sector or industry you might be in right now I’m I’m myself, I’m on a advisory board for user experience or customer experience, organization. So I’m familiar with, with why it’s so important and why organizations often have on staff, even consumer experience, people or customer service specialists to then train. Because I know that and I just went through this process myself buying a property like a year ago, and it was not my first time mine. But I remember, really, I had sort of forgotten the experience of buying a property and had been a while. And I forgot just how stressful it was even for somebody within the industry, and how important it was that somebody was there to call me down. And keep me keep my head a little bit more level as I navigated some of those troubling, you know, times, you know, and there’s there’s peaks and valleys in any sort of real estate transaction, there’s always some sort of, you know, ruffle or wrinkle that happens. So, and I know that that’s a big thing that you coach agents on your team and and also agents elsewhere in the country about is really helping their clients navigate through through those through the difficulty, the emotional difficulty of of a transaction, can you speak a little bit more about the importance of, of a realtors role during that during the transaction?
Brandon Brittingham 8:56 Yeah, so I mean, I think it’s a couple of things. And I think it’s, it’s honestly almost become a lot Lost Art in our industry. And if you look at like, some of the big tech that’s coming after the realtors role, I think they’re banking on. Frankly, they believe that a lot of agents don’t do a good job and the customer experience and the customer service. And they don’t do enough of they don’t do well enough of a job of solving the consumers problems. So and if you look at like an Amazon as an example, you know, they completely disrupted multiple industries, because they said we’re going to solve all of your problems when it comes to shopping and one singular experience. And if you look at real estate as a whole, it’s pretty archaic and siloed of the different parts of the transactions. So kind of what I thought about a long time ago was I had situations where I just knocked it out of the park from my customer. And something in the transaction that I didn’t control made them have a bad transaction, right and they They weren’t, they weren’t mad with me. But they remember at the settlement table, they were upset. So one of the things that I started really looking at and changing a couple years ago was trying to control the entire process and the entire transaction. And for those people that are in our industry that don’t want to go, as far as we’ve gone, you still really have to master and understand the customer experience. Because for a lot of people, this is such a huge deal. It’s not a commodity to them, they’ve raised their children there. During the mean, mom and dad may have lived with them there. It’s an emotional experience. And I think our industry has gotten away a little bit of looking at it from the consumers lens. And the other thing too, is like you’re not competing with whoever you work for, you know, you’re not competing with kW, or exp or cola banker, you’re competing with Starbucks, you’re competing with Amazon, you’re competing with Uber, where people are having good customer service experiences and other experiences of their life. And then like you just said, you forget how stressful it is. And something always goes wrong in a real estate transaction. That is just, it’s going to happen, bad things are going to happen. And for you, as a consumer, that’s it’s painful. And it’s scary, and it’s stressful. And we’ve got to do a better job of taking care of the customer and taking that stress off of them.
D.J. Paris 11:22 Well, you just said a lot, and it was all gold. And I one of the things you said that I want to sort of highlight because I haven’t heard anybody say it. And all the years I’ve been doing the show. And I think it’s a really, really intelligent insight, which is that Brandon said, we’re not just competing with the other realtors, the other real estate firms. You know that that’s our most immediate sort of competition that we see as agents. But we’re also competing with every other experience that person has with a service provider or product provider. So and I’ll give you a really great example that just happened to me this morning, I subscribed to Blue Apron where you know that get those meals delivered. And we cook them and, and it might my package didn’t show up last night. And it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Because I actually was brought up in a way it was better than it didn’t show up, because we’re kind of overloaded with food at the moment. But it was still annoying because I went looking for my package. It said it was delivered, and it wasn’t there. And so I contacted Blue Apron. And I had a really great customer experience, which was I had a problem, hey, my package didn’t show up. I message them. And this was at 9pm. At night, I got a response within about 20 minutes with their ticketing support system that said, Oh my gosh, we’re super sorry. It says it was delivered. We understand that that you’re saying it’s not. So can you please just wait for about another 30 minutes, just because sometimes it could show up a half an hour from now. It’s possible. We’re really sorry. And then when it didn’t show up, I they actually messaged me back 30 minutes later and said we just wanted to touch base, did your package arrive? And then it didn’t? And then I said no, I actually didn’t get to until this morning. So this morning, I said no, I’m sorry, it never got here. And they said, Oh my gosh, you know, this is a huge problem, we’re going to take care of it. And I was so impressed with just basic good customer service that here I am now telling you know, 1000s of people about it. And, you know, in Blue Apron can’t control, you know, FedExes challenges with delivering or maybe they can but but the problems happen. And I was just like, wow, I didn’t have to wait 24 hours. I didn’t get a you know, I did. I didn’t have to follow up, they followed up with me. So you’re absolutely right, that that is a very sort of common experience. We all buy things. And sometimes packages don’t show up or they get stolen or whatever. And we then have to then deal with customer service. And it isn’t always the best experience. So I just wanted to share that because you’re right now, I would assume that everyone listening, you know, I was I’m sorry, I’m going to switch gears for just a sec, because I heard a great a great thing this morning when I was listening to a top producer speak at this event where he said, you know, if you’re going to be if you’re running five minutes late, of course, you want to be telling your client Sorry, I’m running late. But you also want to tell the other realtor because their time is just as valuable as yours. But the whole point of it was good, good solid customer service kind of wins the game. And I’m going to stay with Blue Apron because they gave me great customer service. There’s a lot of other meal providers that do the exact same thing. Blue Apron does. But I want a company that doesn’t never make mistakes because of course everybody makes mistakes, but that corrects it instantly. And they boy they sure did. So anyway, sorry to take over a bit there but I just wanted to share that experience because we are talking about it. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about when you said you wanted to control more of the the actual transactional experience for the consumer. How did you go about thinking about doing that and what does that mean?
Brandon Brittingham 14:59 So before we jump into that, know what you said was great. And I think everybody that’s listening to this, you need to understand this, because this is so important when the highlight that you just made is the consumer mindset and the behavior, which is what we need to understand this industry. So another thing that I like to tell people is think about when you travel to a city that you’ve never been to, or maybe you’ve been to, or whatever the case is, but you get off the plane, and you caught you know, you, you get on your phone, and you hit you hit Uber, right. Now, if Uber is more than four to five minutes, the average person gets frustrated. Now, I want you to think about that, from the time before when you would go to a foreign city, and you’d have to hail a cab. And what that was like, now you’re getting into an Uber, they got gum, they got waters, they got cell phone chargers, and you as a consumer, three to four minutes, five minutes, whatever it is, you’re frustrated. So we as agents have to understand that that’s the type of experience that you are competing with. And we forget that. So that’s the consumers expectation now, and that’s why you have to do a good job because the world is getting faster. And the attention span of people is getting shorter. And the people, it’s not just like speed, its speed to information, people want everything right now. So our business is archaic in that nature. And frankly, the Zelos of the world and everywhere else exist because our industry was scared to give information. And we hoarded the information. And now all these cottage industries were built around it. So if you’re not good at your customer experience, you will be extinct, or you will go out of business. And back to the question, you’re asking, I’ll never forget, I sold this million dollar house, you know, early in my career, and I’m sitting in the NFL quarterbacks house, and I’m sitting at settlement, and his parents were involved in it. And his mom was in tears, because the moving company had put the lawnmower upside down with gas in it, and it spilled all over there. It spilled all over their stuff. Oh, no. And, you know, that got me thinking, there’s so many parts of the transaction that I want to control, so that I can control the quality experience, and I can control the consumers experience, right. And the thing about it is that, you know, home inspection, you know, wherever the case is, when we refer people to a consumer, they have an expectation. So I looked at it as if I can control all these different silos of the business. If anything goes wrong, then the consumer can hold me responsible. And that’s what I did a few years ago, we got into just about every silo that Trent that touches a transaction. And I was able to provide a better customer experience by doing that. And that’s why I think we’ve done so well. And we have so much repeat business because someone literally, we’re like Amazon, you press one button, we’re gonna figure the entire transaction
D.J. Paris 18:12 out. So you will even coordinate the move because you’re like, I have the movers or it’s either your company or you have a partnership with or just a referral. But you know, these movers are not going to turn the you know, the the lawnmower upside down.
Brandon Brittingham 18:27 Yeah, so we got into just to give you for everybody listening, so you understand, understand, we got into partnerships on title mortgage insurance, we have the construction services, if something goes wrong in your home inspection, I need to fix it up for you. If before you list the property, you need renovations done, which right now it doesn’t really matter because you can put anything on the market and will sell. But in a lot of cases, you know, in the past, people needed it. Were in the construction business, new home construction, too. So we control that process, because that was one thing that I was frustrated with was dealing with, you know, some of the builders out there. So we created that business. Also, we are in the property management business as well. Commercial real estate, pretty much almost any vertical that touches a home sale, we’re involved in it so we can control it and ultimately provide you a better service.
D.J. Paris 19:23 It’s really, really smart. And I think that agents oftentimes don’t think about all of those ancillary parts of the transaction that yes, the realtor typically doesn’t get involved with, you know, and so I guess your advice would be to agents would be to build those partnerships and really just bring the best people on your team. And then and then and then how are you communicating that to the buyer or the seller? How, what’s the how do they know that you’re We’re going to take care of everything.
Brandon Brittingham 20:02 So we do put some marketing around it and have those conversations we try not to over confuse them of oh my god, you guys do all these things. But it’s more of, you know, in the conversations of, hey, here’s all the problems that you that we solve. And honestly, I think where you’re having such a push from the tech world into our business, and just the landscape is changing of real estate, like, I think that if you don’t figure out solving people’s problems, it’s going to be hard for you to compete. Because you have more and more companies out there that are saying, we get paid too much money, we don’t solve any problems. And I think that if if you don’t figure out how to solve problems and take care of the customer, then your Commission’s definitely going to suffer.
D.J. Paris 20:54 I agree, I think that is, you know, the days of just throwing something up on the MLS, although right now you can sort of do that and get multiple offers, because of sort of just the environment we’re in, but probably a temporary thing for now. But you’re right, the realtors that rise to the top really do it. And that’s been my experience, because I only talk to realtors on the show that are in that top 1%. They all are very similar in that sense where they know all of the best partners, and they provide that and they have a great vendor list. And as a result, they become the Amazon to their client have the home transaction, where they just go, Oh, my agents got it. That’s a really simple and yet, but it’s not, it’s not easy, but it is a simple idea is that really start. So I think that’s a great action step for all of our listeners is started. And it’s not just developing the relationship with the lender and the attorney. You know, of course, every realtor pretty much does that, because that’s so tied to the transaction, but then also looking out towards things like insurance, transportation, moving, all of those all of those ancillary things that become really important, because you’re right, you know, I would have, I wouldn’t have been happy at the closing table, if I had found out that the movers had, you know, turn, turn the something upside down and spilled gas all over my furniture. So I understand that. And while you can’t prevent that, what you could what you can do is say I know the best, the best people, because I just went out and found my own movers, which is what most people do, I’m sure.
Brandon Brittingham 22:34 Yeah, absolutely. And again, that goes back to, you know, the thing that I struggled with and that I wanted to change is, I didn’t want you to go figure it out. I want to figure it out for you. Because then long term, which I’ve seen in my business, now I’m on third generations of people’s family, right? Sure. And you become a client for life, because somebody’s gonna say, you know, I worked with Brandon’s team, and they figured everything out. And then by chance if they go to interview another agent, you know, in the agent, and they say, Well, you know, my last agent, did the punch list, renovations helped me with moving helped me build a new house, blah, blah, do you guys have the capability to do that? And probably 97 to 98% of people in our industry are going to say no, that makes you immune from disruption.
D.J. Paris 23:26 Yeah, you become so incredibly, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s the same, I was gonna say valuable and I cut myself off, but it is it’s about becoming valuable and so valuable that you can’t be replaced very easily or hopefully at all. And you’re you’re absolutely right with the Amazon metaphor, because most of us listening purchase, probably the majority of our online purchases are made through Amazon. And that isn’t by accident. And it’s because they solved a really important problem, which is where do I go to get x online and they just said, oh, we’ll just do everything. And as a result, they captured all of our all a huge chunk of this economy’s purchasing, sort of, you know, behavior. And you’re absolutely right, that top Realtors really get their hands dirty, in dirty and and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, in a very positive way. But they, they they are on the they are involved in every part of that transaction. The other thing that I know is really near and dear to you, because you have built a super impressive team obviously as I rattled off the stats earlier at the beginning of the show, but teams are on everyone’s mind right now. I know our listeners write us about it a lot have an individual agent, should I start a team should I join a team? And I know that you have very specific thoughts about how that works and when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. Do you mind talking a little bit about sort of the role of a team and and you know, can individual agents even really compete against teams, you know, these days? Well,
Brandon Brittingham 25:05 I, you know, I don’t I don’t want to sound negative when I say this, but I think that it’s going to be harder and harder for the individual agent to compete, because of the consolidation and the growth and the changes of what teams have brought to the industry, right. And then if you just look at the day to day as an agent of the amount of things you have to handle, and if you’re going to be good, and you’re going to really grow your business, it’s just it’s going to be hard. And, you know, if you don’t join a team, you should consider starting one. And that doesn’t mean you got to have 50 agents. But you know, you got to have some admin, you got to have some marketing and things of that nature. I just think in all honesty, it’s gonna be hard for a single agent to compete. In the near future, I mean, I just I really do when you look at the landscape, and again, of the demand of the consumer, which is just look, the consumer is going to win, you know, we can all have our own ideas of the way things are going to be, but the consumer always proves the market, right. And they’ve done that time and time again. And again, the reality of it is, is that you’re competing with these companies that logistically figure out all these pain points and make it easier for the consumer. It’s just going to be hard for an individual agents and compete that doesn’t start a team or doesn’t join a team, because you’re going to be outgunned and outmatched in most situations.
D.J. Paris 26:33 Yeah, I think I think that’s right, for everyone out there who is an individual, you know, solo practitioner, it’s something to just keep in mind, because there’s probably parts of every solo practitioners business that they shouldn’t be spending time on, because it’s not business building activity, or maybe they’re not particularly good at it, or they don’t like doing it, and they put it off, and then they have to fight with themselves to get certain things accomplished. You know, this is where even if you’re not in a traditional team, I mean, gosh, the the rise of the virtual assistant, you know, if that’s, you know, if that’s all you can afford, that’s a great place to start. And technically, that is sort of a team. It’s not a team in the traditional sense of having more than one realtor on it. But it’s really a great idea. Now we live in such a global gig economy, that you can hire people from all over the world that are specialists that you know, are very affordable, that can help take some of that workload off. But, um, but But I we get a lot of questions on the show about from agents who are newer, who then say, well, I want to join a team. Maybe I don’t want to create my own, I’m not quite at that level. I’m, you know, maybe I’m a newly licensed agent, or I’m in my first three years. I’m wanting to join a team, what should I look for? And I’m curious if you have any suggestions for those people who are trying to figure out if they should join an established team?
Brandon Brittingham 28:00 Yeah. So it’s a great question. I mean, number one, look at market share, look at the team’s dominance in your market. That’s certainly a barometer to look at. But I think more importantly, the biggest thing that a team can give you is training. Yeah. And teach you how to build your business. I think, another mistake we make in this industry. This is just my personal opinion is people chase splits, you know, they’re, they’re split drunk of who’s gonna pay me the highest split. And I will tell you from being a new agent, I would have given up a ton of my split in the beginning to go sit with somebody like me in the position I’m in now, to just be able to teach me how to do it every day. Yeah. And there’s a huge value, in my opinion, in doing that, I pay all kinds of money to go to all kinds of conferences and sit in the right rooms to loot learn for people to compress time, right. So I think the biggest thing is the training. In the onboarding and the mentoring are the biggest value, you can get leads, all that kind of stuff split, you know, none of that matters if you are not being trained on how to build a business. And that’s really, really important. And back to what you just said, because I think this is important too, about the single agent is you can be a single agent and be really, really good. And that’s great. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I know a ton of them. We got friends that are that do that. But here’s the thing, if you’re a really good agent, and all the income is dependent on you, you have a job. If you build a team where you can eventually leverage yourself out of out of sales, you have a business. And you need to understand in this business that there’s two very very distinct lanes, there’s a job and there’s a business. If you want to build a valuable asset that you can leverage yourself out of sales one day, you need to build a business And if you’re a new agent, and you’re coming into this, the biggest thing that you can find is someone that’s going to teach you and mentor you and train you. And that’s the team that I would look for.
D.J. Paris 30:10 You just said a lot again, and I want to want to really tread thank you for that, by the way, and I really want to transition based on something you just said into another topic, because it just so perfectly segues, which was you were talking about, you know, look, real estate brokerage, you know, working with buyers, sellers, renters investors, traditionally, as a realtor as a transactional practice, right, we get paid when, at the closing table, and only typically at the closing table, I have, I don’t think anyone’s yet figured out how to, you know, create a different fee structure where maybe people are paying a yearly fee to get access to an agent, I suspect somebody’s probably tried that before it hasn’t caught on yet. We’ll see. But for now, it’s largely a transactional practice, which, which was sort of to your point as like, Hey, if you’re a solo practitioner, this is your job. This is what you do is is there value, can you sell this business, maybe, maybe not. But if you run it, like an actual business, then it builds some, you know, build some additional value to it and increases the valuation. And one of the ways in which that you’ve done that is through these different partnerships, different, different verticals that you’ve explored. And I really am mostly interested in talking about the property management side, because to me, I’ve always thought of that as as a way to sort of annuitize or to add some, you know, a more predictable stream of income. And you’ve done that incredibly fast and short amount of time. I’m a part owner and a property management business. So I have some experience with knowing how challenging it is for us. So I need to hire you to help me because we’re not at 1200 doors yet. But let’s talk about how that works in the sense of why an agent may want to start adding that into their business.
Brandon Brittingham 32:12 So um, it’s a couple of things for me. You know, my, my biggest interest in real estate, initially was always the investment side, right? Yeah. And so for me now, I’m I’m very, very deep into the investment side, I own apartment complexes, single families, Airbnbs a lot of different things, right. So I wanted to get in that circle of other people who did it. I wanted access. And one way that I saw to be able to do that was property management in the property in the in the apartment world as an example, your multifamily apartments, most of the time, they never ever touched the market. It’s like this kind of secret society of stuff gets sold. No one knows about it, things of that nature. Yeah. It’s kind of it’s very, very interesting. No
D.J. Paris 33:03 one even knows who owns the buildings, right? Kind of this invisible owner. And and yeah, and transaction. Yeah, yeah.
Brandon Brittingham 33:09 And they trade ownership and stuff like that. And so it was a couple of things, right, it was like, I really wanted to learn it at scale from other people who had done it at scale. And then, you know, probably my third year as an agent. I had a really, really good year, you know, not a team yet. And I remember, you know, like, at the awards and everything, which again, there’s nothing wrong with this. But this was the epiphany. And it’s like, you know, I got this, this, this great plaque. And, you know, it was like, Well, what else? And it’s like, you start over in a couple of weeks.
D.J. Paris 33:43 Now, you’re back to zero. And I was like,
Brandon Brittingham 33:47 you know, that just I don’t know, I mean, that was just kind of like a gut punch, like, yeah, you know, so wait a minute, if I don’t run at this pace, or I don’t produce at this pace, you don’t I mean, then things could change for me very, very quick. So I was like, Where could I get residual income and solve a lot of problems. And then I saw that the property management and property management in our business gets a bad rap. And people don’t look at just the amount of business and silos that come out of it. Last year, we sold 900 ish homes, and a good amount of those came out of the portfolio that we managed, right? So we’ve built in this huge silo of sellers, this huge silo of buyers, right? renters. Renters? Yeah. And then I’m trading inside that portfolio left and right. So you’re, you’re a property owner, you call me Brandon. I want to sell my 50 units. I go call another one of my property owners. And I’m trading the portfolio in and out and then I’ve bought God I don’t even know. Probably five this 600 doors consecutive out of my own portfolio that we managed from the owners because I knew the product, I knew what I managed, I knew the books, I knew everything. And it creates so many other just avenues, the property management business as a business, it’s skinny, right? You can make it work and you can make it profitable. But your average profit per account is skinny, you have to do it at scale for it to make sense. But there’s so many other things that it contributes to that make it really, really makes sense. And then the other thing that I did not like in the beginning of my journey was I’d sell somebody five or six rental properties, and then they would go manage them with somebody else. And it wasn’t always a guarantee that I would get those back to resell them. So that’s what this solved also. And by the way, even though it’s not like huge amounts of money, like commission per deal, or whatever, when you amass 1200 of them in every month, that’s coming in regardless, it’s truly is residual. So that’s the other thing that I like about it as well.
D.J. Paris 36:12 And that becomes a sellable sort of business at that point, property management is probably a more sellable business than a real estate brokerage, quite honestly, right? I’m just saying that I don’t know if you would agree or disagree, but depends on the brokerage, of course, well,
Brandon Brittingham 36:27 you’re right, you are you are spot on on that. And I will tell you from experience, that five or six years ago, I had a company tried to come by us, right. And I say, you know, here’s all of our businesses. And they’re like, all the other stuff you do is complex, we can figure that out. But we’re more interested in your brokerage and your property management. And I was very surprised of the valuation they gave me on the PM. And when I when I kind of probed and they said it’s predictable, like it’s only going to move up and down so much, it’s predictable. So we can put a basis of value around it. So you just made a really, really good point.
D.J. Paris 37:12 Yeah, and it’s like, we’re, we’re really Realtors often. And I hate to say it this way, because it sounds negative. And, and I don’t mean it to but I think we need to be honest, where we’re really trading hours for dollars. Oftentimes just doing the buy sell side of the transaction, the rental side, bringing in property management, which by the way is and I’m assuming it works this way in all 50 states saying I probably should have looked that up ahead of time. But if you have a broker license, or at least in Illinois, where i where i, where I am, we call everyone who’s a realtor, a broker here. But if you have a if you’re a realtor, you have the ability to do property management. And this is an opportunity, I think, to think about creating residual income. So if somebody is hearing this and thinking, Well, that sounds cool. I’d like to have a, you know, a predictable stream of income coming in monthly, you know, what are some of the steps they might take? Maybe they’ve not done Property Management before, which I know is there’s a learning curve, of course. And also, actually, let’s go all the way back to the beginning is how do you? What are your suggestions? Obviously, if you’re purchasing or property, then you can that you can manage that’s one thing, but going out and finding property management opportunities. Do you have any suggestions on how agents might consider doing that? Yeah,
Brandon Brittingham 38:30 let’s give them the shameless plug. I actually wrote the actual manual on it, I actually literally wrote the book. It’s called converting units to dollars, it’s on Amazon, it actually made Amazon bestseller in a couple of weeks. So kind of to your point, one of the things that when I started to climb and grow this, and get in the room with a lot of high producers that you talk to, I was like, Man, you guys need to start the property management business. And then all these people asked me how. So I created I, initially, I created a training course around that, which is we still have that. But I was like, Man, I want to do a book about this. So I essentially took the training course turned it into a book and then publish the book. So because I think that if you run a good business, you have a strategic advantage from a real estate standpoint, because you’re going to understand it. Because what I saw in the property management world was a lot of people in the property management world weren’t good operators, like coming from the real estate world. Yeah, it was kind of like if you already run a good business or a good team or you’re a good agent you already have you’re so far ahead, because most of your competitors. Listen, if you you’ve dealt with property management, you understand this, No one wakes up in the morning says I want to do property management.
D.J. Paris 39:53 That’s just not how it’s an unsexy business,
Brandon Brittingham 39:56 right? Yeah, people don’t wake up and hey, let’s go do some property management. That’s Exciting, like real estate sales is sexy and exciting. Yeah, property management, it’s not. So I decided to kind of put that all together and turn that into a book.
D.J. Paris 40:09 Yeah, so we should mention, Brandon mentioned this, but go on Amazon look for converting units to dollars. That’s Brandon’s book and purchase, it will have a link for that in our show notes, as well. But, but this is really interesting, though, because I think that you said something earlier that I just want to touch base on, which was around multifamily units and saying a lot of them, a lot of the transactions never hit the market. So you know, it’s really its own sort of culture. And depending on where you are, it’s a different set of players. Oftentimes, realtors are not involved, or people might have their broker license, but they’re not traditional realtors. This is a whole different area. And, you know, we’ve had the BiggerPockets guys have been on our show. And that’s a great resource to start learning about sort of that world and a lot of those people congregate there. But what other suggestions would you have for somebody that wants to get into understanding investment properties, understanding property management, things like that.
Brandon Brittingham 41:13 So one huge point to make is which This baffled me when I got my license was how many people in this industry did not invest in real estate? Yeah. And I thought it was the opposite. So there’s all kinds of and I won’t go into detail on this. I actually do in my book, though, if you are an agent, and you’re a teen, whatever, if you’re considered a real estate professional by the IRS definition, there are all kinds of advantages for you to own real estate. I’m extremely bullish on real estate, you know, I invested way back when things were really bad. And thankfully, that really helped me propel a lot of different things that I do. But I think everybody in our industry should buy in real estate, as you said earlier, and we talked about, you know, do you want to, you know, just having a job, buying and holding real estate can create residual income for you and can create real wealth for you later in life. So I think that’s, it’s, it’s super important that you understand that. And that should be a part of your business model, regardless of where you’re at and what you do, like, you really should do that. And I think that you should really understand and figure out and educate yourself on the investment side. And then if you want to get into the apartments and things like that, the largest sale I’ve ever had in my life was a $7 million apartment building. And I ended up being on both sides. And I ended up buying that apartment complex, by the way. But I think it’s it’s a whole different world of investors and multifamily and things like that. But it’s a very lucrative world. And it’s a world filled with people who have wealth. And you know, the the average deal size is a lot bigger. And you have to make a decision from an investment standpoint, do you want to be passive or active? Well, if you’re in real estate, you’re probably going to be a little bit more active. But it’s a place where like, again, the investor side, a lot of times agents looked at that as the underbelly of real estate. Yeah. And it’s kind of like if you get into that, and you really figure that out, that can be extremely lucrative for you long term. And then if you go the track of multifamily that can get super, super lucrative.
D.J. Paris 43:36 I’m curious, so your team’s sold 900 homes, approximately, what percentage of those came from the relationships you had on the investors in the investor world, we’ll just say, like versus traditional, you know, young, young couple buying their first or, you know, are selling a property
Brandon Brittingham 43:55 last year was probably about 20%. It’s amazing. Yeah, it’s
D.J. Paris 43:59 absolutely amazing. So what a huge jump, and and so now you, you now have a business, you now are not just a realtor, you’re an investor. You’re a property manager, you have title, you have mortgage, you have the title lending, probably insurance. I’m guessing. Brandon’s nodding his head, everything I’m saying? Because Because he as he said, at the very beginning, I want to control every part of the transaction because yes, it’s lucrative and it results in the best possible customer experience. So it’s actually wins all the way around. The downside is now you know, you have to start learning about all these other different avenues. And probably now’s as good a time as any to start that journey.
Brandon Brittingham 44:48 Yeah, but see, here’s the thing. Well, think about this. You know, you you’re touching a mortgage transaction, you’re touching a title transaction, you’re touching insurance transaction in most situations. So it’s not as difficult as people think. I mean, you, you got the legal side and RESPA and all that stuff you got to figure out. But it’s not as difficult as what people think. And initially, when we started some of these companies, it was more of, you know, if they if, if they break even, and it provides a better customer service, we’re happy with it. But then when you got into some of these other verticals, and you realize the customer service of the competitors in that business stuff, too, then it was like, we got more and more market share in different silos of business. So if you run a good business, the things that make you a good business person translate into any business.
D.J. Paris 45:44 Yeah, and I would also like to mention, Brandon has a book we talked about earlier, it’s available on Amazon, and everywhere else books are sold, converting units to dollars, link in our show notes. Also, I want everybody to visit Brandon’s website, which is Brandon’s brain. He’s also a coach, he does property management training, he teaches this stuff, so and I might, I might end up hiring Brian. In fact, I should hire Brandon, for for some of our own business verticals as well, because we need we need a boost as well. And I want to learn from the best. So I want everybody out there to visit Brandon’s website, Brandon’s brain.org. And that’s Brandon with an S at the end Brandon’s brain.org. And it really has everything you want to know about Brandon, he look, he’s a sought after speaker. He’s an author. He’s been on a lot of podcasts. And he does coaching. And he’s just a heck of a nice guy. And he’s oh, by the ways, basically, the most successful real estate team in all of Maryland. So that’s a lot of really impressive accolades. And we are grateful to have grabbed an hour of your time, because I know that you don’t have it, and you’d still found it for us. So we want to thank you. So on behalf of the audience, we want to thank Brandon for coming on our show just incredible, really impressive, very inspiring. And hopefully some good actionable takeaways, about agents thinking a little bit beyond the next sale, let’s let’s think a little bit more broad. Let’s think about this as a as a business as opposed to a transaction. And don’t get caught up in the cycle of transactions or don’t only get caught in a cycle of transactions. Because soon as that, like Brandon is you said earlier, as soon as you start stop running, the money stops coming in. So this is a way to to further diversify and also annuitize the business and maybe make it valuable enough to sell one day, which wouldn’t that be nice. So ever on behalf of the audience, Brian, and thank you so so much. On behalf of Brandon and myself, we also want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show, we just recently crossed over a million downloads. So thank you for everyone for that. And we ask everybody before signing off, just to listen for a few seconds before hitting the pause button or stop to help. If you want to help our show the two ways to do that just one tell a friend. Think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Brandon and send them a link to our this episode, you can just send them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, can stream right from the browser or if they’re a podcast person, just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, and hit the subscribe button. And then also, please leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. This helps us get more visibility with a different search engine or the different podcast directories but also tells us what you like and what you don’t like so we can continue to improve our show and create a better experience. As Brandon is a big fan of for you the audience we don’t know unless you tell us please, please tell us let us leave us a review. Let us know what you think. Brandon, thank you so much. This was such a great conversation. I love to have any on and boy and I love that you have a very calm, you’re very calm person or I’m a very hyper person. So you got me calm down. I had a little bit of a fire that I was putting out just before we got on the show when I was frazzled, and boy your voice is just very soothing. So if you ever want to go into like a hypnotherapy business, you could they could use your voice for it for sure. Got it. Awesome, Brandon, thank you so much. We’ll see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Brandon. Thank you
What Can Agents Do About Housing Supply Shortages? • Ralph DiBugnara
Mar 15, 2022
Ralph DiBugnara the President of Home Qualified talks about the beginning of his career in the mortgage space. Ralph describes how he built his business and emphasizes the importance of building relationships. Ralph discusses supply chain issues and how he educates his sphere on this topic. Next, Ralph short-term rental market, primary residence and investment. Last, Ralph talks about his Disruptors Network Podcast and how he started and built it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On today’s episode, we’re going to discuss the biggest issue facing real estate agents today housing supply shortages and what that means for your business now and through the end of the year. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks, how many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. There agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, and I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be talking about housing supply issues and what you can do about it, what it means for the future of the industry and also your business. We’re going to be speaking with Ralph debug Nara from New York. He’s amazing. He’s got lots of insight into this particular issue. And we’re all dealing with it. So very excited. But before we get to Ralph, just a couple of quick reminders. First, please remember to tell a friend about our show. That’s the way we grow. We’re so grateful to everyone who’s listening. So please any other agent that you think could benefit please send them a link over to our website, keeping it real pod.com or pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and have them hit that subscribe button. And then last please, please please leave us a review and whatever podcast app you might be listening that really helps us continue to improve the show and give you guys better content so you can even get more value. But enough about that. Let’s get to our interview with Ralph debug Nara.
Today on the show we have Ralph de Bognar, let me tell you about route. Now. Ralph is a Brooklyn native and he’s also the president of home qualified, which is a digital resource for buyers, sellers and real estate agents as well as also being the vice president of Cardinal financial, which is a national mortgage loan company behind 28 billion of closed loans. Now he’s Ralph is a recognized real estate and mortgage expert. He has over 20 years of industry experience specifically working with the millennial demographic. Now prior to being at home qualified, Ralph served as vice president of retail sales at residential home funding RHF, where he established the Consumer Direct division which was created to service RHF customer’s needs through a variety of affiliate programs that offer special values and discounts based around the someone’s profession or association. He’s also a competitive athlete, and he’s been battle tested in boxing rings, and Spartan courses. Ralph is also a radically innovative mortgage banker and real estate expert. He applies the same relentlessness and fraud and ferocity for winning, to helping new homebuyers find and finance their dream homes. He’s an entrepreneur at heart, Ralph builds businesses and advises individuals to create wealth through real estate, personal branding and their own business ventures. Please visit Ralph at his website, which is Ralph debug narra.com I’m going to spell that for you. Ra LPH and then DIBUGN A R a.com. And also please follow him on Instagram at DIB ug so the first five letters of his last name di be ug Ralph, welcome to the show.
Ralph DiBugnara 4:32 Thanks. I really appreciate you having me. It’s a great intro. Thank you.
D.J. Paris 4:35 We well we’re excited to have you as well. I know you’ve have a lot of experience in this industry from from an investor perspective from a financing perspective. And also I definitely would love to hear about the athlete part of you and and also learning if there are habits and disciplines that you have, you know that you would have to have to be competing at the law Apple you are physically and if that translates over into the business world, but I would love to go all the way back to the beginning and really learn about how you got into real estate in the first place if you don’t mind sharing?
Ralph DiBugnara 5:11 Sure, yeah. I think my story is like a lot of people I got in a little bit by accident and a little. So in 2001, I had graduated college, kind of because I had you not because I wanted to, I just kind of made it through what a finance degree but I wasn’t really thrilled about being in school. I think the last day I ever showed up at my college was the last day my last class, I never picked up my diploma. But I remember being a really stressful time because I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. And I didn’t know where I was gonna go at work. And I had a friend who was in mortgages at the time. And I, I was selling copiers for Canon like door to door at that moment at that moment in Manhattan, which was Wow, nightmares, to be totally honest, it was it was not an easy to knock on, you go into a building, you just knock on doors, and so somebody would talk to you. So I was like, I need to change. And I was looking at, I think enterprise rent a car at the time for their like a training program. And my friend was like, Hey, I’m in mortgage, I’m doing really, really well. It’s a new startup company that gonna go public. I get into the sales training program, it’s a month training, and they put you on the phone. You didn’t have to be licensed at that time, is it you’re not going to rent cars come do this. So I got in, and it was a really good time to get in at the time. It was it was a tough job market because the at the time that.com bubble had just burst. Yeah. And it’s eerily similar to what’s going on now with tech stocks that were very over inflated.
D.J. Paris 6:32 I have I can I pause for a second, I have a great I, you know, I don’t know how many of our listeners were around back then. But I do. I just want to mention I, this is this is such a funny thing. I have a letter that. So I’d graduated college in 99. So I’m about the same Yeah. And so in 1999, the tech bubble had not yet burst, right. And so my friend who was taking over or becoming an apprentice to his father’s financial advisory business, and anyway, sent me a letter because I said I should probably I did my first job out of college, I was like, I should probably put some money into some outside of my 401k, maybe just a few bucks, you know, a month into some sort of investment strategy. And he goes, I have this letter he sent me this is back when we wrote letters. And he said, I have these great tech stocks last year. They were they were I’m sorry, they were tech mutual funds. Because last year, they were up like 87%. And so I kept the letter, because obviously the next year, it all went away. And I said, Can you believe you wrote this letter to me? Because oh my god, I’m so embarrassed that I ever. So anyway, sorry. It just reminded me
Ralph DiBugnara 7:41 what it was? Yeah, it was it was it’s a little similar to what’s going on this day and age, but there weren’t a lot of jobs. So I kind of got into mortgages, because it was what was available to me. And there weren’t a lot of other jobs. And it was a good time to get into mortgages. And that’s how I got started. Sure.
D.J. Paris 7:57 Yeah. And so and getting into mortgages, is I think it’s such a tough business, because you really have I think, loan officers, it’s tough because they, they really have to serve a lot of different masters, right, they have to make sure that every person involved in a transaction is happy and satisfied, including the client, the realtors, the attorneys, you know, the title companies, again, depending on what, you know, what state you practice, and, but also, just from a marketing perspective, I think, you know, realtors, loan officers, really have very similar jobs as far as trying to build their business. Um, can you talk us tell us a little bit only because I think even for our audience, which are predominantly realtors, I think just hearing about how you built your business would be super helpful. Like, were you were you partnering with realtors? Were you going directly to the public? Were you trying a little bit everything.
Ralph DiBugnara 8:51 So from where it started to where it is now a completely different options, the opposite end of the spectrum, but I you know, I started really in a lead model, where we were getting leads every single day. And it was easy at that point. And to be totally honest with you, for my first three years in the business, most of my business would refinance business, because it was the first real drop in the market. And we would do and refunds were easy. What I learned now, you know, hindsight is 2020 is that, you know, buyers and realtors are really the key to building a business that’s long lasting, and it’s a better quality of life than being stuck to your desk and answering the phone all day. So for cold calls, but essentially, so you know where it starts where it is now. Now my contribution really is built around bringing value to mostly and real estate agents, for better or worse, and some mortgage guys will admit that some are still the best source of business there always was a business right? So trying to bring value around Realtors at this point is really my main function every single day as the head of and we have about 250 salespeople between myself and my partner as our mortgage division. We did about 6000 loans last year for around 2 billion. So it was a lot of business. And I would say 75% of it is realtor referral base from realtor. So a lot of what we do now is still really based around that as our as our main partner and I’m a consumer. So what you said is very, very true. It’s not only making sure the customer is happy, it’s making sure that the realtor has a value partner, that’s making sure one of their Commission’s are protected one. And secondly, that they’re adding something that’s not just the same as the next guy is doing. And I think we, I tried to be unique in that way, whether it’s through social media or to marketing, or it’s through specific campaigns that each realtor is adding value to help them build their bid to help them build a business and not just the pipeline, right, like how we help each other build businesses long term and not just building your pipeline today.
D.J. Paris 10:41 Yeah, I think that’s that seems to be what the most successful Elos loan officers that I’m aware of do. And they’re they’re very generous with, you know, partnering and saying, How can I help you build your business? And I’m curious, how did you go about, you know, I know, you sort of you have your own firm, how did you go about making the transition from being sort of a worker bee and being on the front lines to saying, Okay, I want to manage, you know, a whole team here and kind of build it up. Obviously, that’s a very challenging thing to do. It’s a super competitive landscape, although maybe, maybe not if you had all these great relationships built in advance. But I mean, it’s still competitive, of course, but just curious about how you made that transition to sort of, you know, becoming an entrepreneur.
Ralph DiBugnara 11:27 So it kind of went up and then down and then up again. Oh, oh, 1207, I was a loan officer for a couple of years. And I was promoted to Assistant Vice President with a company that eventually became Deutsche Bank, a pretty big, large company, and then they got rid of us in 2007. So when they got rid of us in 2007, I was this manager, who really only new people within my company, which is my first mistake, because I hadn’t really built a network outside of my company. So when I lost my job, everybody else lost their job. So it was a rough three or four years for me. Besides losing everything, I was really starting over. And I, what I went back to being was a loan officer again. So I went from being this person who was running a very, very large group, too. So the only thing I could really earn money at the time was being a loan officer again. And it took a little bit of a, a year of getting humbled by the market. To me, for me to go back to doing that, again, I was trying to avoid it at all costs, which I was telling the young people in my office yesterday, actually, in hindsight, hindsight, being 2020, again, was that that was stupid, because it’s somebody who’s a direct sales person, whether you’re a realtor or a loan officer, you can have a network that’s yours that you own forever. And the truth of the matter if I was, if I stayed a loan officer throughout that market crash, and all that stuff, I would be much more insulated from suffering that I was as a person in management, because I would have had these relationships that were mine. And people still have to close on loans. So there’s always business there. So when I started to rebuild it again in 2008, and then nine and 10, when I realized that I had to get out and I really started trying to tackle relationships, and around 13, or 14, I started putting myself out front, through social media and outlets like that to generate more value on myself. So even today, what I really lead with to run a group of people, and you’ll definitely understand that cuz you have 700, realtors, 800 realtors, is I have to provide some kind of value to them, that they’re not getting someplace else. And my value always starts with relationships. So it’s my relationships that helped me get business from realtors, it’s my relationships that helped me grow my the people around me on social media through it, getting them more exposure. So I really try to lead with that value proposition. I’m the person that you can be in business with. And I see myself as a partner, even for the people that are underneath me, like they have to get something out of the relationship, just like I have to, and how can I help you grow your business, and I really do that through a lot of people coming to me to give me the business and then me dispersing it to other people. So that’s really the black and white, what’s helped me grow the business, it always starts directly with the our direct consumers and our direct referral sources. And I tried, every day continue to grow those no matter where I am, in my business, I try to grow those every single day.
D.J. Paris 14:07 You know, as I was thinking, when you were thank you for sharing that I think that is it’s it’s something that isn’t as common as one might think with, with loan officers. I know, like we, we tend to recommend, there’s there’s a great loan officer here that we work with locally, that we tend to push a lot of business to as most as best we can. However, I was just thinking about this, when you were mentioning that we have, you know, close to 800 agents. I was just realizing I don’t get these phone calls anymore than I used to. And I’m kind of like in charge of the marketing, sort of for our company. And I certainly used to get these phone calls from mortgage lenders who would say hey, I want to, you know, get in front of your agents. And I just realized I haven’t had one of those calls in years and I just realized how shocking that is that you would think that I’m getting would do get calls every day saying, you know, hey, you guys have 800 agents, I would love to get in front of your agents almost never do we get those calls. And it is shocking because there’s got to be at least 1000 ellos, here in Chicago, probably more. And so I think this, this point to your saying about partnering with either the brokerage or with the agent directly, is so important. And the good news is to so if you’re an agent that’s listening, you might not be getting those calls, either, right? So I know I’m not getting them. And so this is an opportunity, I think, to really, you know, think about who do you Who do you like on the ELO side? And who do you want to partner with that can actually help you, you know, whether it’s through social media or through doing events or, you know, branding or or, you know, physical mailers or whatever it might be? I don’t think there’s that. I think agents oftentimes have to go looking for those opportunities with loan officers, as opposed to waiting for that phone to ring and saying, hey, I want to help you build your business.
Ralph DiBugnara 16:01 Yeah, and you know, so two points that you just made me think I think the first thing is because the Mark has been so busy for the last three years, that a lot of loan offers loan officers that I’ve seen it within my group have gotten used to the phone ringing and fire hose, they and they got away from what they’re going to need now again, which is they need to go out and bring value to get the business out of Realtors, because you don’t see officers at open houses anymore, either. And I preach to my people, every single weekend, you should get a zip code, you should look at every single open house, you should show up every single day doesn’t say, hey, I’ll work you up. And, and you know, to be honest with you, our best leads still come from open houses, those are people who are actively looking, they still the best leads. And so we make it a point to work open acid and make a point to still have events that are gonna bring value to the realtors, we’re still doing all that stuff. I think that’s where the mortgage people have gotten away from, and you’ll see it come back because now they needed it again. But when they didn’t need it, they didn’t have the foresight to say, Hey, I still have to be adding referral partners every single month to make sure because you may have an agent. And again, you’ll understand because you have any agents, you have an agent to get one deal a year from but that it’s a valuable deal. Because if you have enough of those people, it makes sense for you as a loan officer. So I think people just got away from the things that were working. Because it was so easy to do business.
D.J. Paris 17:17 Yeah. It’s funny, I was I was thinking back when you started to that was kind of the era of incredibly low rates, interest only loans, you know, times where I remember somebody refinanced. I wasn’t in this industry, but I just remember it, it was like 2%, the two point something it was based on LIBOR. And I don’t know if rates are still based on LIBOR, but, but it was it was just a whole different world. And then, of course, the collapse. And now, you know, in the last couple years that we had a bit of a rebound, because of course rates being so low, and people just have more buying power than they’ve had. And but then we also have the other side of it, which is a supply shortage. And I know that that’s something that you’re really passionate about sort of coaching people through. Can you talk a little bit about how you see sort of supply chain issues or housing shortage, supply issues and what you’re doing to sort of educate realtors or the public about how they can sort of participate still.
Ralph DiBugnara 18:16 So So I saw an article last week, I read a market watch, I think that it had some alarm, it was maybe two weeks ahead, some alarming statistics. And it was this physics work done by a company called alto, she’s like a market research company for real estate anyway, there’s only 274,000 homes listed in the whole entire country right now. The country so and a healthy average nationally is somewhere between 800,000 and a million. So we’re about 600,000 homes short of a healthy average, which means it’s the same reason there’s not going to be a real estate crash again, no, definitely not now, because we’re so short on supply, and so high on demand and that shortage, you know, you’re you’re from Chicago, around that area, I’m from New York City, they’re not building we can’t build here, right? So it’s like, you know, some of these markets, you’re not going to be able to address that shortage with buildings. So that’s the first thing so I think you’re going to have a very, very low low supply for the foreseeable future. I think to deal with that as as a buyer there’s two things that we’re looking at as the first thing is is that the other thing you’re going to start reading and everybody’s reading now already is that rent had the largest raise last year that added forever and I think some cities were between 20 and 30% higher rents right? Fixing in your mortgage horse right now it’s worth going through the pain of bidding wars and overpaying a little bit and all that stuff because just being able to fix your mortgage cost right now you’re locking in value for calm and affordable yeah yeah so I think you know you see the all these Wall Street firms BlackRock and all these big Wall Street firms a buying single family homes in bulk right now, they’re doing that in my opinion, because they see a single family rental market that’s going to continue to increase they know there’s a lot of value there. So if you if you need to be on the same train I think is up Are you here to buy now and lock in your home, your home costs for the most part 90% of it to be locked in, besides your taxes, insurance, so you don’t you’re not affected by the market for the next 20 to 30 years, right? I think it’s very, very important right now to, to deal with that pressure of being in a market low supply to low cost,
D.J. Paris 20:20 I bought my first condo in 2005. And I can’t remember what my rate was, it might have been the high threes or low fours, I just I don’t remember it was a million years ago. But I was pretty happy with whatever it was, I was like, Hey, this is this is pretty low. And then I just bought a place about a year ago. And I have like a two nine, something, I think a 290 or so. And I’m just like, I get that for the next 30 years. And even though now rates have increased in anticipation of the Fed, you know, maybe mid threes, high threes, even depending on credit and everything, that’s still amazing. Like, that’s still absolutely incredible. And you’re right, it’s actually worth all of the headache. Because you’re basically a hero as an agent to a homebuyer if number one you can find them a place and get get them get their deal approved, but locking them in at that kind of a rate. I mean, it’s so funny, we’re seeing all this news about rates are going up rates are going up. And it’s like, well, yeah, except they were almost historic lows. And so it’s like, it’s still really attractive. And you’re right, you’re gonna be locking someone in. And I think the education piece is really important to to to buyers really making sure they understand, we are in a really fortunate time rate wise, and this is this is the time to really consider pulling the trigger if possible. Because, boy, yeah, you’re going to maybe you’re going to overpay, but you’re going to lock in a real nice rate for the rest of your, you know, probably adult life.
Ralph DiBugnara 21:46 You ended on the head. I mean, that’s why I was born. And I think that’s where people get frustrated. And, you know, I was saying yesterday, I was like, you know, I know it’s a bar, it’s very, very frustrating to get outta bed all the time, and you’re waiting on line to get open houses. But it doesn’t feel like this, but you’re getting an education, right, that house that you didn’t get gives you a better idea of where the market is where the price has to be, how quick of a decision you have to make and what you really need what you really have to have, right cuz you’re gonna compromise in some way, shape or form. So I think that losing all these houses is actually the best education you can get to make you a more schooled buyer and shopper when you’re going to look but it doesn’t feel like that a lot of times because it’s, you know, even for me, I’m very active in buying in the market. And I have I know all the secrets, and it’s hard for me a lot of times so I can imagine how frustrated people have got. Have you
D.J. Paris 22:31 had just out of curiosity for your own investments? Are you doing anything more creative than then maybe you had in previous years to try to either get offers noticed or just to find sellers? I know. on the investor side there’s there’s almost an art and a science to all sorts of different ways in which you can sort of find opportunities that aren’t on the MLS or, or you know, and I’m not asking for, of course, your secret sauce. But I’m just curious if if you’ve had to get bit more creative, because of the supply shortage, just trying to find these opportunities. Are these the sellers?
Ralph DiBugnara 23:07 Yeah, I mean, I think you know, from my side, you know, to be totally honest, I wish I was better at getting stuff that at discount, but I’m not getting stuff at discount right now. Like, you know, for the most part I’m paying but what I am doing is I’m going in with a very, very strong case that I’m the buyer they want. So I show up with a what I call a TBD commitment letter. So it’s it’s a to be determined the dress, but everything else on the commitment letter is been done already. So I’ve actually been my my case has been in front of an underwriter, they’ve looked at my income and looked at my assets, I’m qualified to get the loan. So it’s not a pre approval, I’m showing up. And lenders do this, we do it as a company called null. And a lot of lenders do this, I shall put an actual commit letter, which is really as good as cash, it’s okay, for sure. All I need is appraisal title and homeowners insurance. And we will we will be good to go. So So I’m showing up that way, as far as the appraisal and inspection contingencies go because I know that to become a hot thing to waive that. I’m not waiving them. But if it’s a competitive property, I’m, I’m telling the seller that I’m going to do them still, and I reserve the right to back out of the deal. But I’m not going to hold you to anything that I find. So at least I say, Hey, you’re not going to have to do any work. I’m not going to try to negotiate the price. But I’m going to do it for my own informational purposes. And I reserve the right to back out of the deal. So I’m kind of being a little bit aggressive on that end. And, you know, I will even waive an appraisal contingency because as long as I have a mortgage contingency, which says that I cannot get qualify for a mortgage, I can get my deposit back, that I will waive the appraisal contingency because I know that I still have a backup of the mortgage. So I think I gotta be as creative as I can making the offer look as attractive as possible when I go in. Because you know, at least I’m in the game. And the other thing and this is close to you could probably speak to this even better than I can is that I’ve learned more than ever. It’s important to work with a realtor who’s very very familiar with the area I’m looking in and knows the other agents in the area. Because I found that when I’ve used agents that are outside of the areas that I’m buying in, or don’t know, everybody that I’m not getting bids, you really have to have an insider, depending on where you’re looking, I feel like to get the property. So So agents that know their market and know that people in their market are super valuable right now.
D.J. Paris 25:18 And I think it’s a huge, thank you for saying that, I think that’s a really important thing that isn’t talked about as much on our show. And it’s really important, because those relationships are, you know, I know, like, especially in these competitive bidding environments where the listing agent might have, you know, 20 Plus offers, and, you know, probably just becomes dizzying after a while, but at least when they see a familiar name, and they like, Oh, I know, I know that person. That’s, that’s a great agent. And I know that that agent isn’t bringing me a garbage client, you know, this is probably, you know, it because that agent is going to make sure that it isn’t written by, you know, a lending institution that isn’t, you know, reputable or can’t close or, you know, ones that they know, are quality. That’s really, really important. So I think for everyone listening, if you’re an agent who’s newer, or in the process of building up your business, and you’re like, Well, I don’t yet know all the, the agents in my area, go to that book, go to the broker, open houses, go to the regular open houses, introduce yourself, and say, Hey, I just wanted to come by and see this in case I have a client that you know, might be interested in, I want to just meet you in person. And I mean, that you were saying, that’s what your ellos do. And it’s it’s one of those sort of lost arts, that is so important, because you’re right, in those relationships. Look, we’re all human nature, we’d like to see people’s names that we recognize, and we like, and you know, those people, they shouldn’t get preferential treatment, but just due to human nature, that might give you a slight edge over another similar or identical offer, where they’re like, Oh, I know that agent, I’m gonna go with that agent, because I know that, you know, they’re going to probably get this deal close faster, or on time or whatever. So I, you’re right, relationships are so important, whether it’s between ello, and a broker, or I guess, in New York, not everyone’s a broker, but, you know, we’ll say real estate agent, and then real estate agent to consumer as well as is having, having, and then real estate agents, real estate agent, knowing people in your area. So this is why it’s always crazy to me to that agents who are newer to the industry aren’t being told, ask other agents in your office, if you can sit in open houses, you know, because even if you’re not allowed to keep those referrals, which most I think people would let you keep the referrals, but even if they don’t, it’s like you said it’s an education, you get to see how another producer, you know, greet somebody, when they walk in an open house? How do they let them browse around? How do they get their information, so they can stay in touch, I mean, the education there is invaluable. And in most cases, the agent will say you can keep those leads because you own them. And you’re right loan officers really should be at every single open house that they can, because and in fact, I was just talking to somebody who said that loan officers oftentimes have a higher closing percentage than the actual listing agent who’s doing the open house because a lot of times, people feel a little bit intimidated or like you just like you when you walk into a clothing store, and you see the salesperson Beeline right for you, and you’re like, oh, just leave me alone for a few minutes. Get my bearings, but the loan officer typically doesn’t do that. So I’d say if you’re an agent, bring a loan officer with you. Because then it’s not their open house. They’re just there. And and I think the it’s become sometimes a little bit easier for them to communicate with, with people walking in, because I know my guard goes up as soon as somebody approaches me in a store, not because I’m not friendly it just because I just want to be left alone a lot of times.
Ralph DiBugnara 28:47 Just let me shout. Yeah, I agree.
D.J. Paris 28:52 But I think that’s pretty cool. Because a loan officer Ken can can be at be there and say, Hey, I’m a partner of so and so this isn’t my listing. But But isn’t it cool? And they can sort of pretend like, like they’re they themselves are so impressed with the property, not pretend to hopefully be authentic. But but that puts them more on the same side is that as that buyer versus maybe the realtor who they might think, Oh, that’s a salesperson I want to start to stay away from. So it’s, I think it’s a really smart, smart idea. So for everyone listening, find a loan officer who’s willing to meet with you at your, at your open houses. And then if you don’t have any listings to do open houses, ask other agents in your office. We have, like I said, we have almost eight or you mentioned we have almost 800 agents. I don’t know how often our agents are reaching out to our other agents going Can I sit and do an open house for you and what a huge missed opportunity.
Ralph DiBugnara 29:42 Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s I think it’s the biggest opportunity, especially in this market is the open houses is if you actually get to the point where there is an open house. They’re super busy most of the time. So it’s That’s right.
D.J. Paris 29:51 Yeah. I would love to talk to talk to you about millennials. So I’m not tech Typically a millennial but but I find that these are people who are buying homes right now, right this is this is the demographic that is either has already bought their first home or is considering it. And I know the age keeps going up for people buying their first home, especially, of course places like New York where it’s just, you know, difficult because of the pricing. But in most other markets, millennials are a key demographic to really approach and for any agent that isn’t sort of feeling like they have a lot of visibility with the millennial sort of group. Any suggestions about how they might want to go about sort of penetrating that market getting getting exposure to that market? Because it is probably a little different than you know how somebody like I was saying, I I’m not a millennial, but I would love a phone call from from a wall. I already have our ello relationships here, but but I would think I’d be getting a lot of those phone calls. I don’t I don’t get the emails or phone calls. But I’m curious if you have suggestions about how agents could could reach some of these, you know, younger buyers who maybe wouldn’t necessarily think to pick up the phone and call a realtor. You know, they’re going to Zillow, Redfin wherever, and just doing all their browsing there. And maybe they fill out a lead form online, and they get called by a bunch of Realtors, but but these are millennials aren’t typically people that talk a lot on the phone as well. So just curious if you have some suggestions about how to how to get in front of those people. I
Ralph DiBugnara 31:26 don’t think he talked on the phone because I think it’s a more educated buyer, right? Because they’re, they have access to old they’ve grown up online. And if any grew up online, that they’ve asked us to look at the stuff online. But I think for the most part, they still have very traditional values where they want to buy a house, they think it’s the foundation for building their life or family, whatever it is. So I think that they still have very traditional values. And that’s something you can hold on to right like a, you’re looking into a house, it’s an eye, they’re more investment savvy. So I think speaking to millennials about it being an investment, being a long term investment, it being the safest investment, proven over time, but now more than ever, in a volatile market, where we don’t know what stocks are going we don’t know what crypto is going. We don’t want NF T’s are going right real estate, something that’s of low supply. And people like to talk about cryptocurrency, that there’s only a certain amount of cryptocurrency in circulation? Well, I can say the same thing about real estate, right? There’s a home’s listed and there’s only a certain amount. So I think that if you if you speak to him, from the stance that this is a long term investment, it’s a grow your long term wealth, this is going to they still a very, very, they’re very interested in that because they’re also people who came of age during a market crash. So they have a little bit of a scary picture of the housing market. It’s still at this point that maybe they’ve never got past, right. So talking them as like how real estate estate the test of time since 1980. It’s outpaced the stock market as far as return on investment two to one, that’s a real stat. So I think that I reach people a lot that way would saying, Hey, this is how I’ve worked to grow secure long term wealth. And I really feel like it’s the way to do it. And because you’re financially savvy, because you have a 401 K and because you understand investing, we can really leverage that to get you into the right property that helps you in the future, either buy more properties, or just make the right buy for yourself, however that it’s going to be so I always try to leave it that when it comes to that, that that group of people.
D.J. Paris 33:27 Yeah, I think learning the lingo is really important to like, if anyone out there is not familiar with the term house hacking, get familiar with it, because it is the the term Millennials are using to, you know, live in a living maybe a three flat and rent out the other two units and have it sort of cover to cover the cost. And if that’s something that you’re like, I don’t really understand the investor world. I think Ralph Ralph is absolutely right, you’re going to be missing out on business, because you’re right, that millennial and younger generations these are, they’ve been online or essentially their whole lives. They know how to get information faster than us older people. And this is, you know, we, we I remember growing up and not of course, not having access to the internet until I was, I mean, the Internet was technically really around since since the mid 80s in any sort of real capacity, but only a very small percentage of people even even knew how to do that. But but as far as like having a browser to use that was like 9495 and there just wasn’t much content even available at that time. So and nobody really knew how to use it. Google didn’t exist, the search engines were kind of crappy. So it was it was difficult wasn’t really till till the very end of of you know, maybe 9998 where we started out okay, we can we can really get information here. But Millennials have always known how to do that. And so you’re right, like you have to know as much as they do at a at a minimum. And the good news is, you know, their knowledge is is really not that deep. It’s It’s It’s vast, but it’s it’s shallow. So They understand. And then you can come in and, and create that that additional depth. But I think that’s something that you really have to make a concerted effort for. If you’re just like, oh, I don’t deal with that, boy, I cannot tell you how many young Realtors get their license. And then they maybe they’ll join our firm and, and they’ll say to things like I really want to I really needed to do some house hacking. And I’m like, wow, I for the first eight years. As somebody who recruits realtors, nobody ever talked about it to me. And now it’s it’s really common. So, you know, that’s just one example. But you’re absolutely right, this whole investor side is this is the time to start getting educated. So that you can introduce a different stream of of clients into your business.
Ralph DiBugnara 35:45 Yeah. And again, I think that age, and I’ve gotten very heavy to the short term rental space, so Airbnb VRBO. But, and I see more and more of those people, whether they’re families that are doing it, or couples that are doing it, or they’re very interested in that space. And the younger generation is definitely looking at it because they have different character, you know, Gen Z, because they have different characteristics and different needs. But even the millennial generation now work from home and virtual learning. And that’s changed the market completely. And a lot of these people who grew up on technology can work from anywhere, right? So they’re going to live anywhere. So even more so with that as a realtor to getting to understand that that they’re willing to live anywhere, possibly to use the houses as an income source, and use it part time and live someplace bustle part time, but this the last COVID, and pandemic and all that stuff has really changed the world. As far as real estate goes, as far as I’m concerned.
D.J. Paris 36:42 You’re right. And I think too, you know, I I’ve been I traveled quite a bit during COVID, I was lucky enough to still be able to do that, you know, when it was safe to do it. And, and I met a bunch of people overseas, just randomly, who had, you know, decided to either sublease, if they were renting, you know, whatever major city they might have been in, and then just traveled sort of full time. And we met people in Croatia and Poland and, and other places, and even other places in this country where they weren’t from there, they don’t really live there. They’re just there for now. And, and they I think, you know, now being that the millennials, Gen Z are, you know, obviously spending a lot of time on tick tock Instagram, obviously, Facebook, they’re just seeing a lot of other opportunity of places to be and now that their jobs, don’t chain them to a particular desk, you have this opportunity to explain to them, Hey, you can travel around, and maybe you’ll even just rent wherever you go, if you’re just sort of going from city to city, but let’s get you some sort of permanent investment here, in your in your home area where that’s going to be generating revenue, or at least, you know, giving us some nice tax advantages, while you, you know, sort of find yourself, you know, all over the country or internationally. And I think, again, that’s just such a cool idea to bring to a millennial, or a Gen Z, or anyone really, is to say like, Hey, are you planning on staying here? And even if you’re not, well, you still probably want to invest in real estate. And here’s why. And having that conversation, you don’t have to live here kind of thing is, I think, really interesting, and probably doesn’t get discussed as much, from realtors to younger clients.
Ralph DiBugnara 38:27 Yeah, man, I think everybody, you know, everybody can be a digital nomad these days, right? You can really work from anywhere and I, I, you know, I travel a lot, I’m on a plane, once a week, you know, sometimes more than that, but I really don’t ever miss a step at this point. Because my communication can be done over zoom, I can do everything on my phone, I can really travel, do everything I have to do and never miss a step. And I think that people have learned that that’s a lifestyle, and that they can own, you know, again, for the short term rental market. And this is something that I recognize that there’s more revenue on first of all, than long term rentals. But secondly, it’s so it’s so multi use for me because I can use the homes to travel to for my my family for vacations and it’s still earn on them or it’s not, it’s not, it’s an asset still, and it’s an earning asset. So that’s great. I can bought homes in states that I either want to grow business in or can help me expand my income and or tax benefits. So it just like it’s a whole new world as far as that goes. I think if you’re a realtor in a place where you know, that makes sense, and you seem Airbnbs pop up or you’re seeing people be trapped. I think it’s something to focus on at this point. Okay. Because a lot of the realtors I reach out to and speak to them about it don’t necessarily know as much as I do about being an area that’s kind of on the come up for those reasons. Some of them do, some of them don’t. So I think that that’s in some places, if you’re a realtor who’s in any market that even looks like that a little bit. I think it’s something to definitely focus on because it could be a really good source of business for you.
D.J. Paris 39:56 Yeah, definitely. And it’s also just a way to separate yourself as an agent being able to have those conversations and I think having the tough conversations about things like is a primary home. Hey, mister, is it an asset? Hey, Mr. Mrs. buyer, who wants to look at their first home, you know, let’s talk about what an asset is. And let’s talk about, you know, the benefits of buying a primary residence living in it. And let’s also talk about investor, you know, sort of opportunities as well. And, and, you know, what is an asset? And and I think, you know, if you don’t have a good comp, comprehensive answer for is a primary residence and asset and I know, that’s a debatable topic, but somebody is going to come along and tell that person, hey, you know, because a lot of people don’t see primary residences as as assets until the day you sell them. And then they’re an asset. But But I subscribe to that model to I don’t look at my primary home. I mean, I’d love it to be an actual asset, I hope it appreciates, and I, but it’s all a guess, right? Like, I have to live somewhere. It’ll either go up or down, it doesn’t generate revenue, until the day I sell it. And then oh, by the way, I gotta reinvest all that money into the next place. I, I buy so so I don’t see it as an asset. Although, you know, maybe I’m maybe I’m thinking of it, you know, narrow too narrowly. But But yeah, invest in investments that can generate income, or at least cover expenses, or hopefully, or they just about do. And that’s, I mean, it’s such an important conversation. And I think that’s the more education and you know, agents can have and for anyone listening, he’s like, how do I get started learning. And by the way, before, I mentioned that Ralph has a podcast and I totally forgot to mention this at the beginning. We’re gonna post a link to this in our show notes. So if you’re listening on a podcast app, you can actually subscribe to Rob’s podcast right in our show notes. But he is the host of disruptors podcast sorry disruptors network podcast. So can you tell us just a little bit before before we move on about the about the show?
Ralph DiBugnara 41:56 Yeah. So it was originally something that we were doing a lot of live events before COVID happened. And then it turned into a virtual event. So the virtual events turned into me trying to have fun people like you, you know, you people who built businesses, and we’re showing people how they did it authentically. So it started the podcast started around that. And that actually turned into a TV show that streamed on everything last year, Amazon, it’s on YouTube, it’s on. It was on Apple TV, or Roku, and we’re having our second season on DirecTV, which called disruptors network. So the podcast is really turned into a mixture of that. It’s week, two weeks. One week, it’s a guest that we speak to and I’d love to have you on. We’ll talk about that. Yeah, that’d be fun, somebody who bring value. And then the next week, I do a part of the podcast called the growth project. And the growth project is all about how do you buy real estate? How do you get started buying properties? How do you invest? How do you grow a real estate portfolio? So there’s there’s that on there too, for people who are interested in strictly that? We do. I did an episode this week on red flags, red flags in a seller’s market. So I’m trying to address specific problems people are having with actually buying real estate. But that’s what the podcast is about.
D.J. Paris 43:01 I love it. And that’s called the podcast disruptors disrupter network. And by the way, you can access that as well right on Ralph’s website, which is also linked to in our show notes. And also, I want to talk about you as an athlete, because I think this is something I meant, oh, I was gonna say, by the way, one thing I forgot to say, all over the place, if you wanted to start to learn about investments, bigger pockets is really the place that you need to be aware of as an agent, because it’s the place where the vast majority are the it’s the number one spot that investors go to learn. It’s the number one online community for investors and so agents really need to be familiar with what they offer. So if your clients as I was reading this thing on bigger pockets, you’re like, I don’t know what that is. That’s the one website to know. It’s the one community to really become aware of because they are they’re the kings of teaching people how to do this and it’s just this nice little not little to large forum community and they do podcasts and other things. So definitely start bigger pockets you know, check out Ralph’s podcasts and TV show as well. But let’s I would love to talk about your, your, your your sort of athletic career, tell us a little bit about you know what that means to you and what you do there.
Ralph DiBugnara 44:14 I played sports growing up, I was always really an athlete at my worst years of being out of shape or during the market crash I think I was just in survival mode for years but I never forget I stopped that at some point but I bought competitively in my 20s You know, averages stuff, you know, turn pro but you know, Golden Gloves and stuff like that and then I got into being running races and I got into the Spartan Races or our obstacle races. And they found that I was pretty decent runner, which I didn’t realize until that point, and I was ranked pretty high up they have a pro circuit and I was ranked. I was ranked at least in the top 50 for like four or five years running and I was top 15 and 2017 I think so I haven’t won Since COVID, but I’m probably picking up again. But I think that in general for me is, I’m a morning, I’m really a morning person, I’ve naturally it’s not a force thing. And I think that everybody has their own energy when it comes to that, and I don’t think mornings is for everybody thinks I’m gonna get a better night’s and people, but you know, I’m just good in the mornings. So I really need exercise early in the day to kind of center me, or I’m all over the place. So I really do, I’ve always used fitness as a way to kind of keep me sharp. And that’s what the competitions were about. And I needed so I always kind of need something to try to train for. But what I’ve realized over life now is that I don’t need the competition’s necessarily trained for that I need to continue to be better and trained for life. Right. So I think my whole role for that at this point now is I want to do everything on a very, very high level, even that, but just to be healthy, I get up every single day and do it and I still train like I’m running races, even though I’m not running races anymore. So
D.J. Paris 45:58 well, well, it’s you know, it’s interesting I was I just before this podcast, I, I work out just three times a week, and I did it right before, before coming on the show today, right? So I do it for me, it’s in the middle of the day, just because it’s a nice break, I’m lucky enough to be able to do that. And it’s just a few blocks from from my office. So very easy to get to. But for me, I’ve always had the gym nearby. And I wasn’t doing it for years and years, I play tennis, and it’s a tennis club as well. But I wasn’t really working out. I was just playing tennis. And I had to realize that I guess 146 So I think I was about 44 When I said I think I have to get a trainer. And that was really depressing to me because I thought, gosh, I just can’t get to the gym on my own. And the reality of it is I can’t get to the gym on my own. I don’t do it. And so I thought okay, well, it’s an expensive problem to have, because then you have to hire a trainer. But but, you know, I was thinking about it too, like athletes have coaches. Right. And, and, and certainly, I mean, look just about every not not every agent I’ve ever interviewed on the show, but a lot of them have coaches as well who are big, massive producers. So this is also a great sort of thing to think about in your businesses, do you have a coach, you know, whether it’s, you know, for your physical body or for your business, I think at the very least you should have one for your business, but what I was gonna say about about getting in shape. And I have a similar similar goals to you, which is I just want to be healthy, I don’t really care how much today was lower body day, which is my least favorite of all the days. So I don’t really care how much I deadlift or squat or whatever. In fact, we change up exercises all the time. So I don’t even know what I’m really supposed to, you know, look for, as far as you know, my trainer figures all that out. But, but it has really changed the amount of energy I have. And of course, we all sort of know that. But I didn’t know it until I actually did it. And then I went well, I hate every moment of it, because it’s just pain. And it’s hard. And it’s I’m kind of a baby about it. But if I just show up and do the work, I have more energy for my business. And so and I mean, that’s like, of course that’s like basic health one on one, but boy is it made a huge difference. All the pain that I experienced in the gym today was a particularly painful day. It ultimately it’s just even just cut for stress. And and so but but yeah, it’s, it’s really important, I really encourage everyone out there, we all talk about wellness and, and everyone knows, yeah, I should work out. And I must have been saying that for the last 20 years. And then I finally just said, I’m not going to do this unless I get a trainer. And even though it’s crazy expensive, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And, and it also pushes me to earn a slightly higher income so I can keep paying for that. So I encourage encourage everyone to really think about their physical body and and also Realtors loan officers as well get get pulled, it’s tough to set boundaries, when you’re you know, dealing with somebody’s you know, primary home and it’s one of the largest investments they make, maybe the largest investment they’ll ever make are certainly up there. And they’re going to be really stressed. You know, the client is going to be stressed the agents going to be stressed. You know, there’s always a wrinkle, there’s always something that goes wrong in a transaction at some point. And the best thing you can do as the agent is have an outlet for that stress. So I imagine is that helpful for you as well? Does that help get rid of some of your anxiety? Or? Yeah,
Ralph DiBugnara 49:10 so much? Yeah, I mean, I think that’s how I work with a lot. I think that’s how I’m able to deal with the amount of stress that comes with the job right? Like I that really puts me and, you know, you said something about a trainer. But I think what you said is really, really important. I you know, I have accountability partners, and in some of its fitness related and some of its I said accountability traps myself, right. So what I wear a Fitbit every single day to track my steps because it just keeps me accountable to know I have to move a certain amount every single day. And I have a goal in there that I’m supposed to cross every single day and when I don’t cross it, I’m aware of it. I have a sleep tracker, and I use that to because I know I need at least six hours of sleep. That’s kind of like my sweet spot. So you know, at the end of the week, I get my report and it’s like you know, my sleep is no good last week, I have to get myself to it. So I have little reminders to keep myself accountable. Because I know if I do those little little tiny things and it Even some cameras with little tiny things, that I’m a much better person and it helps my earning potential and everything else. And it just makes me feel better. And I have an eight and a six year old and a lot of my time goes to them at this point now but you know more than anything I want to be have the energy to when I get home to give them as much attention as I’m giving everybody else during the day.
D.J. Paris 50:19 Yeah, I struggle with that a little bit myself is and I’m sure a lot of our audience can listen and just so people know, I really have a more traditional nine to five type job. So I’m not out there producing like our audience is or, you know, your your salespeople your company are. And again, you know, I have a I get to sort of mousse for the most part sort of shut down around five, six, maybe seven o’clock at latest and I don’t have to do much in the evening. But Realtors oftentimes do and loan officers do. And you know, they’re constantly, you know, people are working during the day. And so their clients are messaging them at night, and they’re getting emails and texts and trying to figure out those boundaries is not always the easiest thing. But But you’re right, like, I’ll come home, and I will have blown all my energy during the day. And then I don’t really have as much energy for my partner, my girlfriend as I as I should. And so it’s a constant sort of dance of like, yeah, how much how much but but I would have a lot less energy if I didn’t work out. And and now I’m at the point where it’s like, okay, now I have to lose a few pounds. My strength is way up, but my, my fat is way up as well. So now it’s like, oh, that I have to stop snacking. And there’s always little tweaks to make to the formula. But but you know, the physical side of it is the better and shape you are, you’re just going to have a better you’re probably just gonna have a better career. I know it’s really that simple. And you’re gonna have more energy for the people that you love in your life like your family and because because this this job is exhausting. It’s an exhausting, not my job. But But realtor, you know, job and ello jobs are. It’s tough. You’re dealing with people’s emotions and a lot of money and a lot of stress.
Ralph DiBugnara 51:59 And it’s a runaway train. Sometimes you don’t know how your day is gonna go with depending on a lot of moving parts. So yeah, for sure you need the stress reliever.
D.J. Paris 52:07 All right, Rob, I really appreciate you being on our show. This was a lot of fun for us. We really had a great conversation with you. I want to remind everyone to please check out Ralph at his website. Everything that he is involved in is right on his site, a site that’s Ralph de Bognar. att.com and that’s Ral Ph. D. Ibu G and ara.com. Also, that’s in our show notes. And check out his podcast, the disruptors network, you can find it anywhere podcasts are served, just do a search for disruptors network and you’ll find it and then also, what’s the best way that is for them to find your show as well is that that’s also on your website, I assume
Ralph DiBugnara 52:44 it’s on my website. And my Instagram kind of has everything in it that that debug and I still answered all my messages there. So if you have any questions about this, or real estate or short term rental buying or anything like that, that’s a good place to get me I answer everything over there.
D.J. Paris 52:57 And it’s really funny, right? Before we started, I had one of our newer agents, he had just passed his licensing exam and decided to join our firm. So this is just really kind of interesting timing, literally, right? Before we got on the air, he came in and he goes, Hey, I have a problem, I have a two flat, and I and this is in Chicago, and I don’t, I need to get approval from the city to be able to do short term rentals. And he said, I got denied, or this property got denied. And I had to go to the aldermen. And I had to, you know, try to, you know, get things he’s like, I really don’t know what to do now. And, and so, you know, we pass them over to our support team who can help them but but even eight, you know, this is something that agents, you know, really need to get familiar with, especially on the short term rental side, because, as you were saying earlier, millennials not only are interested in this, they’re using Airbnb, they’re using VRBO that these are, these are the services, I mean, we’re all using them really, at this point. But this is an opportunity to really, it’s, it’s one of those things where I’d say as an agent, if you can spend the next two years, spend 1520 minutes a day just looking at understanding invest in the investor world, and how investments work in two years, you’re going to be an expert, or at least you’re going to be a lot further along. And you’ll be able then to service those clients and this is why also you want to partner with a loan officer who actually is really familiar with with these types of investments in these types of loans. And that way, you know, either you can just pass it right over to your your trusted lender, or you can have that lender train you on what you need to know and this is such a great you know, we’re sort of coming into I know the markets picking up because it’s after Super Bowl now and everything’s kind of kind of gaining steam, and the rental season is upon us as well. And that’s huge. But I think you know, just carve out 1015 20 minutes a day to to master this or learn this and within a few years you’re going to be leaps and bounds above 99% of the other realtors out there.
Ralph DiBugnara 54:52 Agree? Yeah, and I 100% agree with you. I think it’s a I think it’s a great space. I think it’s the next thing for sure. So I it’s something that I’m heavy on right Now,
D.J. Paris 55:01 well, I want everyone to check out Rob’s podcast, which is called the disruptors network, we have a link to it in the show notes or just search for it. Or you can access it right on his website, Ralph de manera.com. Ralph, on behalf of all of our audience, we want to thank you for spending time with us and educating our audience on on things like investments and just you know how to reach sort of a younger demographic and some just best practice ideas from somebody who’s done it, and now runs a huge team that does it. You know, and, and also, on behalf of Ralph and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show. want to remind everyone before you sign off, or after you sign off, just help us do two quick things. One, tell a friend, think of one other realtor or real estate agent or loan officer that could really benefit from hearing this particular episode, Ralph, shoot them a link to our website, if they’re not a podcast person. And you can find us right at keeping it real pod.com. Again, keeping it real pod.com, every episode we’ve ever done is there. They can stream it right from their browser or pull up a podcast app having searched for keeping it real cert and hit the subscribe button. And then the last thing, so please tell a friend and then also review our show, we really, really use that data and that feedback to improve and continue to get better and give you guys more of what you want from this show. And we just crossed over a million downloads a couple days ago. We’re super grateful for that. And we want to hear what you want to see different we want what you like about the show. So whatever podcast app you might be using. If you’re using one, leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. We read every single comment and let us know how we can continue to keep getting better. Ralph, thank you so much for being on our show. I’d love to be on your show someday. So definitely reach out. And for everyone else on Ralph, we thank you and we’ll see everyone on the next episode.
How To Be Your Own Brand Ambassador • Moday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Mar 14, 2022
In our February episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties talks about competition in the buyers market and the very low inventory. Carrie discusses the inflation and purchasing power buyers have now. Carrie also explains why the percentage of new listings is low in the Chicago market. Next, Carrie shares her perspective of what she’s learned working for 2 decades in the real estate business. Last, D.J shares his own tips for homeowners and renters.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcasts made for real estate agents and by real estate agents My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick. She is from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties Christie’s International. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer here in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of almost 46,000 Real estate agents Carrie was ranked in the top 15 Not 15% The number 15 Top realtors in all of Chicago. She is true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. And she also works with a lot of developers and she’s often chosen to represent their high end developments. Now please visit Carrie at her website which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. And also especially follow her on Instagram she has one of the most trafficked Instagram accounts for Chicago realtors, so Carrie McCormick real estate again so on Instagram, Carrie McCormick real estate and she does all of her own posts herself. So if you want to see what a successful agent who does all their own postings on social and gets a lot of traffic, and a lot of engagement, check out Carrie McCormack real estate on Instagram. Carrie, welcome once again to the show. That’s the
Carrie McCormick 2:46 best intro I wish I could call you every morning. Here that that’s so nice. So thank you and I love being here.
D.J. Paris 2:54 Well, thank you I’m I enjoy having having you on the show and our audience really loves having you on because you have been a top producer here in Chicagoland area for gosh, forever, essentially. And you’re so well respected and your time is very valuable. So we appreciate you spending some time telling our audience what you’ve learned. And I’m so what do you want to talk about today? You will you and I were talking about just beforehand about inventory and how that is, of course, at least here in the Chicagoland market, but most likely in other markets that our audience is paying attention to. We’re dealing with a shortage, and we just are and it’s it’s affecting everybody. So anyway, I wanted to find out what you wanted to chat about today.
Carrie McCormick 3:37 Yeah, so we’ll just talk a little bit about inventory. I know everyone’s kind of tired of probably hearing it. But just you know, I’m here in Chicago, and just like all of us around the United States are having this issue. And I think going into 2022 People were excited to have a new opportunity, you know, since they lost out in 2021. But we’re still having challenges now the inventory is at its lowest we’re at 910,000. At the start of this year. It’s the lowest since 1999. According to Well, that’s according to the National Association of Realtors, just so you know, competition is still fierce. It’s It’s really crazy out there. But now in 2022 We’ve got inflation we’ve got soaring sales prices, we have mortgage rates that are pushing up a little bit so what it’s doing is it’s reducing the person purchasing power for clients. So for example, I have a client last year we’re just going to use the number of a million dollars just for a round number. You know they were looking at a million dollar homes last year we couldn’t find what they wanted or got out beat and then this year we’re back in the market but because interest rates have ticked up a little bit and they wanted to do some renovations and those costs have gone up you know now their buying power is is less so now we’re looking at nine $100,000 homes. But again, with this inventory, it’s just it’s, it’s, it’s been just a little, it’s been tough. But as brokers, you know, our job is obviously to guide our clients and be creative with how we’re presenting offers and finding properties there.
D.J. Paris 5:16 I want to jump in for a sec, because I was just thinking about this from a psychological perspective that this idea of your purchasing power going down, because you there isn’t enough inventory to really find a place right now. And rates are raising rising. And I was thinking that, you know, it probably will all be fine. If we start getting more inventory and prices come down, maybe that’ll adjust for the fact that rates rates are going up. But psychologically, it’s got to just I was just thinking of myself, if all of a sudden somebody said, Well, now you can’t get the million dollar home. Now I can only get 808 $100,000 home, even though logically that might still just work out fine. I don’t, it doesn’t feel good to hear that news. I’m almost wondering, for agents, that’s something that to realize there’s a psychological hurdle there that somebody needs to be soothed to hear that information. Because it is a, it’s a bummer. It’s like, well, you can’t get that anymore. Now, you know, you have to go down a tear, even though the down tear might not actually be a down tear. So I just think that’s a good point that people have to there is a little bit of a loss, a feeling of loss there, even though it might be invisible, that that aid that clients need to sort of be explained that, you know, don’t let this sort of throw you, for sure. I
Carrie McCormick 6:37 mean, I love what I do every day. I’ve been doing this for two decades now. And I’ve never seen a market like this. And it is I mean, I want my clients to be happy. And you know, that’s what the goal is. So it’s it’s been challenging, and I understand their frustration. So I wanted to also share with you just kind of where again, we’re in Chicago is where our inventory is here. So new listings in the city of Chicago, right now are up 0.7% for single family homes. But this is an interesting number the what we call attached properties, which is the condos and the townhomes. That inventory is down 27%, which is a huge number. And again, that just goes into the inventory realm, I think to the challenge we’re having here again, just like every market is is that sellers don’t want to sell their home because they have nowhere to go. And DJ and I were just talking about this. I’ve got clients that are making unsolicited offers to people that their homes are not on the market. And if I were to get an offer on my home, I love my house. But if I were to get an offer on my home, I don’t think I would sell it, you know? And I was thinking like, what number would would someone have to give to me? And I was just joking around saying if someone even gave me, well, I shouldn’t even say if someone gave me a lot of money. I don’t think I would move because I don’t know where I can go to so. So when we see the new listings up, you know, the single family homes up 0.7% It’s because they you know, people just don’t have anywhere to go.
D.J. Paris 8:18 Yeah, it’s interesting. And you’re so right that people are getting these offers these unsolicited letters in the mail, or maybe they’re getting phone calls or emails, because inventory is so low. But you know, it’s really interesting. So this is just kind of a behind the scenes thing. So Kerry happened to represent the developer, sort of just coincidentally, of the place that I ended up buying. So which is really fun and cute. And I got to get a place from from carious. Actually, this is before Before COVID, or rather right when COVID was was starting. And we didn’t have as many of these issues. And so I got sort of lucky and timing. But you know, what’s funny is I was thinking about this, I just celebrated a year here are about to celebrate a year here, I have received no, not only not any sort of letters, and this is a new development, and there’s new construction. So maybe I’m not on the radar as much right now. But I’ve not received any letters, any of saying, Hey, we know you just bought your place. But are you interested in selling? And I’ve also not received any marketing materials from agents, which is kind of remarkable. If you think like, obviously, yes, somebody who just moved into a new development probably isn’t moving a year in, but I would think I’d get something even a letter that said I am actually I’m just surprised, I would have just thought somebody would have gone you know, this guy’s probably five years out or whatever the you know, the he’s not moving for a while, you know, five to seven years, but I’m going to start the relationship now and nobody has done that to anyone in our building because I asked our agent or the other owners, so just a little marketing Tip there, obviously, it’s a long term strategy. But a great opportunity is to really start, you know, relationships with people that move here, because we have even people in our building that moved from other states because of job opportunities. They’re here. They’re new to Chicago. They, they just used an agent, probably, but who knows, maybe they didn’t like their agents. So just an opportunity to think about you know, and the reason I’m thinking about this a lot is I was Carrie has a colleague, or somebody she’s worked with, I’m sure many, many times, who was a guest on our show years ago. His name is Michael Rosenbloom. He’s a Chicago based agent. And he really became he built a good part of his business by just blanketing certain buildings that he wanted to really big condo buildings. And he, he became very, very popular in buildings by just saying, sending out mailers. So I just was thinking, you know, somebody could, you know, who isn’t who hasn’t started doing that, if you have some spare time on your hand, start blanketing some of these buildings, you know, every month with a little mailer. And you know, over time, probably two, three years later, you’re gonna get some leads from that, for sure.
Carrie McCormick 11:07 Absolute thing, you know, also, just kind of what we’re talking about is I read this article about FOMO fear of missing out. And he always thought about that, as far as you know, social but it’s, it’s now kind of hit the real estate market, just like you were saying is that, you know, you know, if something’s not selling in the market, you know, if you have a house, it’s not selling people, the sellers or buyers mind selling, I hear all these articles, or a buyer can’t get a house, they feel like they’re missing out. So it’s, it’s become a real thing in the real estate market now.
D.J. Paris 11:38 Yeah, there’s just it’s people are just really desperate. And it’s I know, even from a support perspective, because I’m really on the support side for our agents. We’re getting so many more questions after hours and on nights and weekends than we ever used to get before from our brokers. Because now the urgency is just it’s so much more present. It’s like I gotta get this offer in right now, even though it’s nine o’clock on a Sunday. They’re like, Oh, okay, so, so everyone’s being being taxed a little bit more. But I know you’ve been in the business for, you know, over two decades, and I know you are also going to work on some are going to share some tips of just things you’ve learned over the years. We’d love to hear those,
Carrie McCormick 12:18 ya know, I’d love to share those with everybody. Because again, when you’re in the business, for a long time, it’s it’s interesting, because every year just is very different. And you look back and you think of, you know, what was it that made me successful? Or what? What did I learn, and I would just kind of love to share my perspective of, of what I’ve learned, and the number one, not the number one. So number one, though, is just keep learning. And I know that sounds very simple, too. But it’s sometimes you just stop growing, or you you think, you know, you’ve got it all figured out. But I will say that this industry after 20 years, everyday is very different. And I’ve always, you know, I take the time to read different articles or different or listen to podcasts or you know, whatever it is, but really just continued to learn because when you stop learning, you stop growing, and your career will begin to decline. So really just always keep an open mind. listen to other people talk to other people. Just keep doing research. So learning is is one of my my number one tip number two. Success comes through hard work, and a lot of people will ask me, you know, what did you do? Or how did you do it? And there really is no shortcut to what successful people do. And it always does come through hard work. I never met a successful agent that didn’t outwork everybody else. And there’s some point in our career that you just I mean, then that’s what I feel like I did is I just, I just you know, outworked everybody and I will continue to carry that through my career. So number two would be there’s no shortcuts to success always have hard work. Number three is and I love this one because I live and breathe by this one is Be your own brand ambassador. And what I mean by that is when I started in my career I and I think this is a good thing to do. But as I looked at other agents and said, okay, this person is successful, what are they doing this person successful? What are they doing? And, you know, to be honest, like I did the balloons on the open house signs I you know, bake the chocolate chip cookies, I ordered the pens with my name on it, because that’s what everyone else was doing. And it just really wasn’t working for me or at least it wasn’t like authentic to me, you know, it’s just kind of kind of robotic, doing what I thought was the right thing to do. And I really stepped back and I decided, you know, what is my client looking for and what’s authentic to me and that’s kind of where my brand came from is it truly is What’s authentic to me, and, and I support my brand 110%. So everything I do is about my brand. But more importantly, it’s about my client experience. So my tip number three is Be your own brand ambassador. Number four is patience. And this is something I do not have. Anyone that knows me knows, I do not have patience whatsoever. But patience is so important and not patients in in the sense that we normally think of patients. But just about being successful, I think we’re in an era of everyone wants everything right now and they want an answer, they want this and that is 100% how I am. But again, if you want to grow your Instagram account, or you want to grow your business, or you want to grow whatever it is, you’ve got to have patience, because I think if you don’t, you end up making rash decisions, you make poor decisions, you just want things to be here and now. And when things are sped up too quickly, I think they just they they fail. So just have patience in your business. I’ve got three more.
D.J. Paris 16:12 So no, these are all gold. I love them.
Carrie McCormick 16:14 I think I’m on number five. So number five, is listening. And I always say that I think listening sounds like such an easy thing to do. When you know, we’re salespeople, we like to talk. And listening is such an important trait. And I will tell you, I’ve a lot of my clients come back to me, and they thank me. And they say because you really listened to what I want. And you really took the time to pay attention to me. And I thought you know, after you hear that several times, it’s really been a really good lesson for me. But now as things change, too, I think listening in a digital era is very different, right? So we’ve got just social media, for example, or, well, social media. So now you’re listening, you have to listen to your audience. And it comes in the form of likes, or emojis, or clicks or views or whatever it is. So not only You’re now watching, you know, the engagement of your social media, but that’s listening. It’s listening to what your clients want, or listening to how they respond to your posts. So it’s become a little more complicated, but I think, you know, stepping back and looking at your business and looking and listening to what your clients want is important.
D.J. Paris 17:34 Can I jump in for a sec, I’ll give everyone so I recruit Realtors all day, that’s what I’ve done for the last, I don’t know, 11 or 12 years. It’s really all I do. And after. So we have two companies. And I think we have a total of about 14 or 1500 agents total. And I’ll just give you guys a quick tip on how I’ve recruited a lot of agents. And it’s not there’s no secret. But it is one thing that I do consistently. And it’s something anybody can do, whether they’re talking to their buyers or sellers. And you know, I don’t work with buyers or sellers. I work with realtors, but one, but the principles are the same. And the most important part of the conversation I have, which is almost always over the phone. Somebody says yeah, yeah, there’s a million other real estate companies, you want me to join yours? You know, why are you know, what do you guys have going on? And my instead of me wanting to immediately say, Oh, here’s why you should join us. We’re the greatest and we’re the best, which I don’t do anyway. But that’s what they’re expecting. They’re expecting a pitch and what I do instead, I mean, ultimately, I do tell them about our firm. But the first thing I say is, hey, if you were to think about moving firms, which I don’t know whether you’re actually wanting to move right now or not, what is it that you would be looking for, and then I shut up? And I just listen? And they say, Well, I’d like more training, or I want a better split or whatever the criteria is that they would actually want to consider moving. And I, I asked them, Is there anything else, you know, and so I get a little list of three or four things. And then I literally repeat it back and say, okay, just to make sure I understand correctly, you’re looking for more training, a better split, you know what, whatever. It’s so simple, and so easy. And people go Wow, thank you. Yes, that’s exactly right. And all you’re doing is verifying what they’ve already told you. It sounds simple, but it’s it’s it’s a bit of a lost art. And I encourage everybody to do that with their sellers and buyers too, is to say, okay, based on what you told me, here’s what I heard. Is this right? And then have them confirm it. Yeah.
Carrie McCormick 19:34 No, it’s good. And it’s it is interesting how we just don’t listen, you know, because
D.J. Paris 19:38 you probably get pitched a lot. Obviously, you’re a top producer. I mean, I don’t know how, maybe maybe people leave you alone at this point. Because they know you know, you’re happy where you are. But when you get pitched by other firms, they’re well I don’t know, I don’t know what it’s like, you know, sort of at your level, but do you get a lot of people that want to just say hey, come over to our firm, we’re the greatest or is it is is it more of like, Hey, I’d love to hear about what I could do to help grow your business. I’m just curious on,
Carrie McCormick 20:04 I’ve gotten recently by two companies. And what I’m not going to say is, what one was phenomenal. And they, you know, it was just like you said, it’s What can I do? What can I do for you? Yeah, what could we do for you and send. And, you know, the issues that I have, obviously, is really just time as I don’t have enough time in the day. But, you know, we sat and strategized and talked about ways to, to alleviate that and to solve my problems. And it was such a great phone call. And, you know, so appreciative and if they’re listening, you know, who you are. And then I got pitched by another company. And it was over text, which I, first of all, it was a terrible method of pitching somebody. And then it was, this is what we can do for you. And I responded and said, you know, thank you for the text message. Because I, of course, always want to acknowledge everyone. And I said, you know, your company reached out to me before, and they were not able to give me what I was looking for. And you said, Okay, thank you.
D.J. Paris 21:14 Goodbye. That was
Carrie McCormick 21:16 like, Oh, I mean, you know, it just I don’t know. So it’s, you know, and again, that’s why I talk about whether it’s, it’s, you know, a phone call to someone and really listening with your ears, or it’s digital social media, text messaging, whatever it is, it’s a different form of communication, but you still need to listen. And it’s how those responses are that can make or break your relationship with someone. And that second relationship to me, it was completely broken. And I just thought it was very poorly executed. So anyways, listening is extremely important. Two more. Next one is ego. So this is a very interesting and again, we’re salespeople, I think it’s an ego driven, if you’re in real estate, it’s your it’s an ego driven industry. But I think what I had to do early on is set my ego aside and realize that my job is about servicing my client, it’s not about me. And I will tell you one quick story is, I call it the number one versus number three story. And what that means is I was the fourth real estate agent, to go interview with this particular seller. within the first minute of me sitting down with the seller, the seller says, Let me guess you’re the number one agent in Chicago, you’re won all these awards, and you’re gonna tell me how great you are. And it just seemed like he was really kind of fed up, I was really upset that I was the number four agent. I actually said to him, I said, I’m not number one. And I’m not going to tell you, I’m number one. I said, But I’m number three, you actually laughed at it. And I actually had the stats of all the brokers with me not for this meeting, but just I just have it with me. And I showed it to him. And I said, I’m not number one. And I’m not going to tell you, I’m number one. But what I’m going to tell you is what I’m here for, and I went through, you know what I could do for him and how I’m going to sell his house and how I’m going to do this, you know what I was going to do? And he was so happy. But you know, the interesting thing is that the three agents that were before me that said they’re number one weren’t even on that list of 10 agents. So and the purpose of me doing that wasn’t I don’t know who the other agents were. But you know, my purpose wasn’t to do that. But it was just to show it doesn’t matter if your number 1234 Or five, it doesn’t matter. What matters is how you service your clients. So you know, I really put my ego aside for that meeting, and he was so happy, you know that it wasn’t coming in. They’re like, I’m number one, and look how much I sold. And so you really need to set your ego aside, you know, in this business, I think, and my last tip to everybody, and I truly believe this it again, it’s another one that sounds so easy, is kindness. I will tell you that saying that goes kill them with kindness. Is this such the truth. And I found that kindness is been my biggest ROI in my business. Because whether you’re dealing with an inspector and attorney, another broker, a buyer seller, anyone that impacts your business, if you are kind to them, if you are nice to them, if you’re a professional, I’m not talking like you’ve got to go out and buy them gifts. It’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about just be a true professional and, you know, just be kind to everyone it’s been it’s been the nicest gift back because obviously, being kind of people makes you feel good about yourself and you know it’s giving but it comes back to you And if they choose not to be kind back to you, that’s to me, that’s their problem. But be kind to everybody. And I think we’re at a point in this world that everyone just deserves and needs a little more kindness.
D.J. Paris 25:12 I agree, I was at an event recently with a top producer who was speaking and He made a big deal. He was talking about a different something else. And he goes, You know what, I’m gonna stop my talk now, because I want every This is a roomful of Realtors, there’s a few 100 of them, he goes, I really want to make sure everybody hears this. And please, everybody do it. He was saying, if you’re running five minutes late to a showing, you, of course, should be telling your client, hey, I’m running a few minutes late, you know, but he goes, the second text you should make is to the other agents. And you should say, Hey, I am so sorry, I’m running just three minutes late, even if it’s three minutes, and he goes, you’d be shocked how few few times agents will do that. And he goes, their time is just as valuable as yours. And you’re in Yes, everyone runs late, we all understand it. It’s not the end of the world. But letting people that’s a kind, compassionate thing to do. And I one time, interviewed someone on our podcast, and I won’t mention who they are. Because this, I’m gonna say something possibly a little bit negative about them. But then go then talk about how what a wonderful thing they did. There’s somebody I had on my show years ago, who is a very intimidating person, and I won’t even mention where they are. But somebody who’s whose reputation. Well, as I had heard, it was this person is going to be difficult. And this person was running about five minutes late to our podcast, and about 15 minutes before the show. This person emailed, I’ll just say it’s a he emailed me and said, I am so terribly sorry, I am running a few minutes behind. I know your time is valuable. I just wanted to let you know I’ll be there three or four minutes after. And I do the show 34234 times a week, sometimes. Very rarely, if anyone’s late, do they ever tell me even if it’s just a few minutes, and I thought that’s why this person is successful? Because that’s a kind and compassionate thing to do. And it made me really feel so much warmer towards this individual. So even like, it’s always little things, right?
Carrie McCormick 27:20 It is it’s it’s always the little things, but it’s to me, it’s what stuff our parents taught us to do right now? No, it just it does. It goes a long way. And that’s why I say that’s your biggest ROI on your business. Because it’s, it’s simple. It’s free. It’s easy to do. And I will tell you after years of doing it, you know, it just it does come back and people do appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 27:46 And did we have one more tip I think, or was that the last one? That’s it. That’s all I think I have a few tips. So thank you, Carrie, those tips were really good. And for everyone listening? Yes, be kind, you know, she had a lot of great tips in there that seem really simple. And they are simple. But they’re that’s why they’re that’s why their tips and the fundamentals almost always win the game. It’s always the simple things executed over time consistently. That win the race. The I had a couple of things that were I was thinking about. So I was mentioning earlier in the show that I am coming up on my one year anniversary and of this awesome condo that I happen to purchase from Carrie who represented the developers and boy, people who walk into this place. It’s called ALC. By the way, if you’re a Chicago person, I think they have still have a few units that are still available. Rucker Park, it’s unbelievable. Yes, it is. It is really a cool place. I mean, this is a great place. So I am very happy. And it’s so very fun to talk to Carrie because she’s the reason that I even learned about this place. And here I am. Now I get to live here. But I will tell you, there’s no but everything’s great. I love it. And, and I’m in the industry. And I’m sort of not in the industry to because I really don’t practice real estate. So I’m one of those dummies just like all of our clients who goes to Zillow and goes what my home’s worth these days. Even though I’m a licensed broker, I can technically go on the MLS and run a CMA except I have no idea really how to do that. So I said, I’m just gonna go to Zillow because I’m feeling lazy. And I’m just curious if my place is appreciated. Not that I’m looking to move, but people just want to know what their assets are worth. So I went on, and I saw a pretty impressive number and I went, ooh, I felt good. Now it’s an invisible number doesn’t really mean much. But it made me feel good. And I thought if I’m doing that, and I’m in the industry, I would guess that a lot of people are doing that as well. A lot of, you know people that that every one of our listeners knows whether they’re a client or just a friend. So I would think a good marketing opportunity right now. And I look and I had to I looked at the number that the Zestimate gave me and I thought, boy, that doesn’t seem right that seems way higher. Then what it should be, but maybe my home’s appreciated, I don’t know. So it was a very exciting number. But remember, when people go on Zillow and they look up their own home, you don’t get notified about that the agent never knows. That’s it. That’s a something that somebody just does. But I’ll bet you a lot of people are doing that right now. Just Just out of curiosity, what’s my homework? So if it was me, and I was maybe in between clients, right now, I had some spare time, I would consider everybody in my database running a Zestimate, which takes two seconds and saying, Hey, I just looked on Zillow. And it shows that your home is worth X. But I didn’t know if you’d seen that. But then I also ran a more thorough analysis. A proper CMA, which is through the system that we use here in Chicago is one of the ways you could do it is called Cloud CMA. That’s the one of the tools that all the realtors in Chicago have access to, which is almost as fast as Zestimate, really, but it’s a little bit of a probably more thorough investigation into it. And so you can do that. And yes, you’re gonna do a lot of them and they take time. But boy, I would be doing that for all of my sellers right now and saying, just so that, you know, here’s what I saw on Zillow. Here’s what I think your home might be actually worth today, if you want to talk about it, we can certainly have a conversation. So I was just thinking that would be because I just went on Zillow. So I was thinking probably people are doing the same.
Carrie McCormick 31:24 Right? That’s awesome. I love that.
D.J. Paris 31:27 Yeah. Because as the agent, you’re just not going to know. And if somebody all of a sudden sees their home as appreciated, too, like mine. Well, I won’t I won’t share the numbers. But but it was it was sizable. It was a sizable increase. And I was like, Well, I’m not moving. But I wonder if it’s really worth this. And so then I started looking into it. And then the other tip I have is around rental. So in the Chicagoland area. And I get I know, all of our listeners are not here in the Chicagoland area. But this is the beginning of our rental season. You know, the march to sort of March to September, October time is when people usually move for apartments here in Chicago, probably the same all over the country. But right now we have inventory shortages. But we still do have pretty low rates for people that maybe aren’t, you know, like Carrie was saying, people who have been trying to buy a place, they’re not probably appreciating the rate hike, but for everyone else who’s renting that might be thinking of buying. So pretty low rate environment. So I would definitely be having conversations with renters right now and say, Hey, I don’t know, if you’re going to rent for another year inventories low, it might be a good idea to do that. But we should start the conversation. As rates start to inch upward, we should start looking at least. And now’s the time to have those conversations as leases come do. So there’s that time in the spring. And there’s a time in the fall when leases kind of tend to come due. And this is a great opportunity, even if you don’t want to do rentals just to talk to people that are renting, and say hey, what’s the goal? You know, what are you looking at? What do you want to do in next couple of years, and then start having those conversations right now. So great opportunity to talk to everyone who owns a home, and a great opportunity to talk to everyone who’s renting right now. Love it. Awesome. Well, I also want to give Kerry a very appreciative thank you on behalf of our audience. I don’t know if Carrie even knows this. But we recently within the last three weeks, we crossed over a million downloads. And so we’re very grateful to Carrie for specifically because she was the very first partner we ever had. On our show. When we started she helped take a lot of the heavy lifting off of me so that she could make her voice be heard. And we could put out more episodes and she was the very first person that ever came on our show to on a regular basis. And here she is all these years later. I think it’s about five years now. And she is just a warm hearted wonderful person that loves to give and here we are now a million downloads later we’ve had over 115,000 individuals have listened to at least one episode. So this has made some sort of impact on the real estate. Real the realtor podcast sort of space and we are so grateful. So Carrie on behalf of everyone thank you for all the years of service to us. And we are excited to continue on into the future and for everyone listening by the way, you really should be following her carry on Instagram, the carrier McCormick real estate so that’s her Instagram also you can visit her website which she is oh by the way, Carrie is actually looking to reach you should we put out the the feelers because Carrie by the way has like one of the greatest websites ever. And she’s actually looking to redo it so I encourage everyone to check it out. But if you know of anyone Carrie was asking me Hey, who do you know who does great realtor website so if anyone out there has a good leads. Carrie McCormick R e.com is her website and it I don’t think it needs a facelift at all. because I love it. But she is always looking to grow and change. So if anyone knows of a great developer out there that can build cool websites, definitely reach out to Carrie. But Carrie, if anyone out there also has a question for you, or maybe wants to, maybe have you speak or maybe has wants you to represent them in buying or selling a property, what how should they reach
Carrie McCormick 35:20 out? Always call me 312-961-4612? Or send me an email at Carey CA, rr ie at@properties.com. And yes, please keep sending the questions coming and get a lot of interaction from brokers all across the United States. And I love it. And I’m a giver. So I’m happy to you know, talk with anyone and like you said, speaking events, I’ve been doing more speaking events, which I love to do. So happy to be a guest and any speaking event for free.
D.J. Paris 35:54 And I will also say that this is something very exciting. And also another thank you to Carrie, because we crossed over. I mentioned a million downloads about maybe three weeks ago, maybe four weeks ago. And we’ve already crossed over 1,000,001. So it took us five years to get to a million. And now we’re already at 1,000,001. So on behalf of Carrie and myself, we wanted to say thank you to everyone listening, thank you for telling a friend, we spend no money on marketing, this podcast to other agents, which maybe one day we will do that. But for now, we seem to be growing organically. And we’re so grateful. And we really have the listeners to think for that, as well as our guest hosts. So Carrie, thank you so much on behalf of everyone. And on behalf of carrying myself again, thanks to the audience for continuing to tell a friend so everyone who’s listening before you sign off, we just ask that you do two things on one, tell another friend, please tell a friend about our show, let us let them know, I had a very funny experience. And this is not it did sort of it’s an ego experience. But it was it was a cute one to have. I sat I went to an event last week. And I sat down at a random table with two realtors who I did not know from a different company and they said we recognize your voice from from your podcast. And I thought that was very cute. And and then I got to meet them. And so I was really honored that people do listen and just random people and that happened at National Association of REALTORS as well. And it’s not about me because I just kind of facilitate the conversation. But I’m really grateful to this community people are so kind you were talking about kindness being a skill. That kindness goes so far and every person on our show is that we’ve either had as a guest or we’ve had on as a host like Carrie. They’re just kind lovely people and this is an industry, if you’ll look for it full of kind, lovely people and I really encourage everyone listening to get involved with their local association to meet more of those types of people because really helps the when it’s stressful. It’s nice to have good people to be able to communicate with and carry works for a great company at properties. Who has lots of that and add properties. For those of you who don’t know, is a major major powerhouse here in Chicago, the probably the top real estate company as far as volume here in the Chicagoland area. Now they’re expanding to other markets, they just moved out to California as well. And there they have their slogan is one word love. And I think that is a amazing as a brand, and an amazing thing that they have done and they attract agents who really are kind, lovely people. So we’re big fans of that properties. We’re big fans of Karis coming on our show, but we ask everyone to please tell a friend about us. And then also leave us a review. Tell us what you think of the show. So whether you’re listening on Apple up well now it’s called Apple podcasts used to be called iTunes or maybe you’re on Stitcher or Spotify or Pandora or google play anywhere you’re listening to podcast. Let us know what you think of the show. Give us a review. Tell us what you think that helps us improve and also gets us more visibility so we reach more agents. But anyway, that’s enough about me. Thanks, Carrie for a million downloads and being here for all these years. We’re so honored to have you and we will see everybody on the next episode.
Carrie McCormick 39:20 Awesome. Thank you guys.
Introducing Little Sparks With Krista Mashore • Little Sparks • Krista Mashore
Mar 10, 2022
We are excited to announce a new voice to Keeping It Real! Top producer, author, coach and podcast host Krista Mashore will be coming on twice a month to give our listeners Little Sparks of marketing help and strategies to take your real estate business to the next level. Krista has sold over 2,200 homes and has been a top 1% agent for over 20 years. Welcome to the Keeping It Real Podcast family, Krista!
D.J. Paris 0:00 Hey, everyone, it’s DJ over at the keeping it real podcast, I’m your host. But today is a very unique announcement for us. And this is not our normal episode. It’s a short episode. But I’m very so incredibly excited. I’ve been working on this podcast for since the beginning, which was almost five years, and we are now in a position to expand and grow our, our reach. And we’re going to do that by adding on a new voice to the show. So you’re used to just hearing me probably sick of hearing me. So we wanted to bring on somebody that is amazing. And really somebody who’s out there in the trenches, right. So I’m, I sit at a desk all day. And while I work in the real estate industry, I’m not out there helping buyers, sellers, investors, renters, etc. That’s what you guys do. And you really deserve some, you know, some additional perspective on what that’s like from somebody who can actually speak to that. And so that’s where, why we’re having this announcement today. So I am so incredibly excited because we have a new show on our network. And the just so you know, you don’t have to do anything. If you’re already subscribed to our feed, you’ll get these episodes, but let’s tell you what it is it is called little sparks. And it is with crystal Mae shore. And we did an episode with Krista, we were so impressed with her. We just fell in love with her instantly. And we said we need to have you on our on our network. And she already has a podcast, which is amazing. It’s called fired up. And you really should listen to it. But in case you don’t know about crystal, let me just tell you what she’s going to be doing on the show, she’s going to be speaking directly to you the audience, maybe she’ll have a guest once in a while. But the reason why she’s going to speak directly to you is this is what she does. Let me just give you a few of her credentials. She’s a top 1% Realtor nationwide, not just in her local market. She’s been that way for 20 years. So she knows what it’s like she knows what it’s like to start and to get to the top of the mountain. But she also knows what it’s like to teach you guys how to do that she is a real estate coach. She’s also Oh, she herself by the way has sold over 2000 actually over 2200 homes in her career personally. So this is somebody that knows how to do this. And she’s also a real estate coach. She teaches other agents how to do this. And she’s a digital marketing specialist. She does it all through marketing, which is the number one question that we get from our listeners is how do I do marketing better that’s what Krista is going to be on our show twice a month and we decided to name her show little sparks so it’ll be little bite sized nuggets of of really actionable insight and strategy to help you guys actually take your marketing to the next level. Krista is awesome. And we just said Do whatever you want talk into the microphone because everything she says is gold. So I just wanted to introduce her and she’s going to be coming on in just a moment and we also just wanted to say thank you please please tell other people about this addition to our show, Krista is amazing. Also subscribed to her show, which again is called fired up and we’ll have a link to that in our show notes here. Don’t worry though, that the my version of the show is staying we’re just adding on we’re not subtracting we’re adding and we’re so proud to have Krista on our network. So without further ado, let’s say hi to Krista
Krista Mashore 3:18 everyone let’s keepin it real in real estate podcast is joining with Chris Demacia and fired up and so this is my first individual podcast I’m gonna be doing and they’re going to be having me come on two times per month on the keepin it real podcast. So I I would use today to kind of tell you a little bit about myself and kind of have you get to know me a little bit
so, I have been in the real estate industry for over 21 years, I’ve sold over 2300 homes in my career. And I have been the top 1% of Realtors nationwide pretty much every year that I’ve been in the industry. Also, I specialize in digital marketing. In fact, I have done over $34 million online income that we’ve made over the past four years. I’ve left full time being a full time realtor, real estate agent about four years ago, the year that I left real estate I had sold 154 houses that year myself without a big team. It was just me, a transaction coordinator and an assistant and that you’re actually trained my brother Josh to come in and partner with me so I could teach him how to basically be me so I can exit my business and start coaching and training real estate agents and mortgage professionals across the country how to utilize digital marketing and social media and video to dominate their areas. So that’s what I do like I love marketing. I’m a wizard it I absolutely understand what real estate agents are going through, what their fears are, what their challenges are, what you know how like best marketing practices, I basically was you for you know such a long time so I understand exactly where you’re at and what you need. I I also know that many times in real estate, we are not taught, like how to actually have how to treat real estate like a business, right? We’re not taught how to become business owners or that we’re entrepreneurs, we kind of the barriers to entry, enter your real estate throughout the country is so so easy to do that it makes it difficult for real estate agents and lenders, and mortgage professionals to really think about their business like a business. So I kind of want to talk to you about some of the things I’m going to be talking about when I come on. And I, you know, I know that they’re really wanting me to talk about digital marketing. And I actually am going to talk a lot about digital marketing. But what I wanted you to understand and really, really get is that I’m also like a really big mindset person. And so you’re gonna see me intertwining mindset, and marketing and social media and video, and digital marketing, into the things I’m going to be talking about. Sometimes it might seem super strict, smore, strategy driven summers, it might be more, you know, tactics. But I’m gonna be doing a lot of mindset because I believe that mindset is more important skill set. And so anytime somebody starts doing a podcast, it’s really important to kind of understand who that person is and to learn as much about him as possible. So I figured I’d kind of tell you guys a little bit about me, so you can kind of understand where I come from. I have just created wild success online. In fact, I’ve written four best selling books on digital marketing. One book is called sell 100 homes a year by Krista Miescher. Another book is the ultimate lead gen playbook that we’ve done also three clients in 30 days, and then fire, financially independent, retire early, there’s the books that I’ve written, you can find them on Amazon, and it talks all about digital marketing and social media. But here’s the deal. I want you to understand a little bit about me personally, so that you understand that. Just sometimes I think we look at people and we see that they’re successful. And we think like, oh my gosh, that person’s, you know, successful because Chris has done a lot of energy, or because she has those pretty fake white teeth, or, you know, we make assumptions as to why people are successful. And we tell ourselves things that quite frankly, are just not true. We tell ourselves things like, Well, Chris is successful because of x, or, you know, we just say things that aren’t right. And what I want you to understand is that in most cases, that’s just really not the case. In fact, like I know, DJ, there was times that he’s gone through stuff, right, and people can DJ, they just think he’s able to keep it real podcast because of insert the reason. What I want you to understand is that we are all human, we all go through things, we all have challenges, we have marital issues, sometimes we have problems with our kids, we have problems in business with our brokers or, or people that work under us or aside from us. And there’s so many challenges right now with what’s happening in the world. And we all have them, right. And so I kind of thought I would tell you a little bit about my story. So that when as I start talking to you about things in real estate, and about marketing, that you’ll understand that I’m just like you, I’m just a human, and I’ve got a past. And because of how I’ve chosen to attack my past, and how I’ve chosen to really, you know, move forward with my past, has really, really made me who I am today. So mindset is more important in skill set. Remember that mindset is more important in skill set. And the more that you can control your mind and your thoughts is, is what you’re gonna is when you’re gonna see like your life and your business explode. And so we say things to ourselves, like I can’t do it, or it’s too hard, or I don’t have enough time or I’m too young, or I’m too old, or I’m too new, or I’m too inexperienced, or I’m too heavy, or I’m too thin, or I’m not good with technology, we tell ourselves all these things that quite frankly aren’t just true, right? We
say these things. But the brain, what happens when we say these things, and we think think these things, the brain says okay, you’re right, you’re too young. You’re right, you’re too young. You’re too You’re too inexperienced, you’re right, you’re too inexperienced, or too old, you’re right. Whether you say you’re right, or you say you are wrong, you are right. So I want you to really, really be cautious of the things that you’re saying to yourself and what you’re, you know, how are you? What are you thinking, what are those thoughts coming up, and when you have negative thoughts about your energy level about you know, not having enough time or whatever it might be, be cautious about what you are saying, and saying out loud and repeating to yourself into your mind because you are right. And the brains job is to get you more of what you think. So if you think if you notice what you’re doing well, and you celebrate your successes, and you celebrate what you’re doing, right, the brain goes, that feels good dopamine is being produced, let’s do more of it. But if you focus on the ladder, like all the things that aren’t working, what you’re doing wrong, the brain goes, Yeah, you’re right. So let’s figure out all the things that we can do and think about that are gonna help us get to the success that we want. And for some of you this might be hard, right? Maybe you have difficulty childhood or you’ve been in an abusive relationship, or maybe you’ve got PTSD or maybe you’ve got some depression going on or you’ve had physical abuse, maybe sexual abuse. I know I’m getting kind of intimate right now. But I get it I had I had some physical abuse happening when I was younger. I am so happy this I’m very, very close to my family right now my dad is one of the most precious people in the world. And I love my mom. So, so much. And this has been something I’ve had a hard time talking about until just the past couple of years. And there was some physical abuse happening in my home with my mom. And because of that, I went to bed until I was 10. I could not read in second grade, they realized I couldn’t reach they put me in a special education class for reading. I had massive, severe anxiety because of the abuse and, and a massive learning disability, right. So when I was 13, I started running away from home, I couldn’t handle it anymore. And my dad didn’t know what was happening because it was happening when he was at work. And quite frankly, was almost like really have two legs. We had this happy, sweet, amazing life. And we went to church, and we were having this great family and going on vacations. And we went, you know, we did things together. And then and then there was this, you know, other part when when there was issues with my mom, there were some physical abuse that was happening with me. And it was hard, right. And so when I turned 13, I started running away. And I ended up running away for over a year back and forth being taken back home. And then they put me in juvenile hall because finally I broke the law. And then I got sent to a group home in Cottonwood, California label Hidden Hills group home for girls. And let me tell you, there was nothing hidden about it, I got dropped off every day in this big huge green bus basically with the label of your screw up. So kids chastise us. And they were mean to us. And they kind of braided us and didn’t talk to us because we were like the weird kids, right. And so I spent a year there. And then I got sent to a foster home. And I spent the remaining years in foster home until I turned 18. Now with that being said, there’s a lot of mental mindspace that comes on up here, right. And I’ve learned the ability to be able to take those thoughts of inadequacy and of not being loved or being liked, or the anxiety ridden. And the thoughts of I’m not good enough, like who am I to sell 100 homes a year, who am I to coach people, you know, to do what I’m doing, who am I to coach these agents and lenders across the country. And I’ve had to work on who I am and my belief system, my thought process. And because of that, you know, the year I left real estate, I think we get around over a million dollars in commission, right. In fact, last year, we did around $1.4 million in gross commissions in real estate. And I only was working on my business around four or five hours a month, I’m the face of the business, my systems and processes and my attraction based marketing is what is what generates visits, my brother now acts as me. And I have been able to build that business along with my coaching business. And we do between one and $2 million a month in coaching for realtors and lenders. And the reason we’re able to do so well is because I’ve been able to master my mark my mindset and my thoughts and the things I say to myself and the things I’m doing. And I’ve I’ve learned to overcome that link limited negative voice inside that comes up that keeps you from getting and believing that you deserve anything and everything. And I believe more than anything that you deserve and believe and can achieve anything and everything that you want to in life. So that’s the kind of thing I’m gonna be talking about. When I come on this podcast twice a month, I’m gonna be teaching you about mindset tactics and strategies, digital marketing, how to use video, how to attract business,
I’m gonna teach you about things I’ve done well, and things have been wrong. And I’m just going to help you have a better life. Because I believe that, you know, if you want to have a great real estate business, or a great lending business that you first need to have a great life. And when I talk about having this, well, this awesome, financially rich, this financially abundant life, I also mean, I want your life to be abundant, right? How you feel about yourself, your relationships, your energy level, you know, I want you to be a positive force of energy. And I want you to learn to be to be excited and to really be that positive energy giver, and a people because if you do that, you’re going to make more money and you’re going to have more confidence and you’re going to show up better to the world and confident cells, enthusiasm cells and energy cells. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m going to be talking about on this podcast. My name is Kristen shore and I own the company Kristen, we share coaching. I also own homes by Krista which is a my own personal brokerage with exp I’m with exp Realty. And that’s the kind of thing we’re going to be going over in this podcast. So I’m gonna leave you with one quick trick. So I call this the stop, snap and switch trick. Okay, what this is, is our brains we have between 60 and 70,000 thoughts a day that goes to our brains. And because of everything going on many times they’re negative, right? Like, it’s like that negative voice it’s the bad wolf in our head telling us that we can’t do things and all these negative stuff. Those negative thoughts and the things we say to ourselves they turn out to be what our life is like right? Whether you say you can or you say you can’t You’re right. So I want you to say that you can only to say that you are that you do that you you’re worthy that you there’s plenty to go around, you’ve got enough energy, you’ve got enough time there is enough money there is enough inventory right? There are plenty of buyers, your stuff is getting accepted, you are attracting you deserve a full price commission. So how do you do that stop snapping switch anytime a negative thought comes into your Head, there might be like, I’m too old. I’m too old to learn technology, you’re gonna say, that wasn’t gonna stop recognize it, snap, snap the bracelet, you’re that. And I’m going to switch it over to the other hand, I’m going to say, my age is going to help give me more perspective. And it’s going to it’s given me more experience, I’m absolutely the right age to be doing real estate. I’m going to stop snapping switch, anytime a negative thought comes into my head, I’m going to recognize it, I’m going to turn that negative around that limiting belief around and I am then going to start, I’m going to switch it and restate the statement into a positive one, stop, snap and switch. That’s your assignment. Now let me ask you a question. What limiting things are you saying to yourself? What limiting beliefs are you putting out there? What things are you saying to yourself about your business, about the economy, about real estate, about marketing about you know that how many deals there are out there about lack of inventory? What are you saying to yourself, recognizing limiting beliefs recognize these limiting statements recognize these things? And let’s stop. Okay, let’s stop. I’m Kristie Ray. Sure. I’m so excited to be here with you. I keep it real. You can also follow me at fired up. Just gonna fire it up with Chris Demacia because I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to be fired up. So don’t forget everyone. It’s great to listen but if you’re not implementing nothing will change in your business and I cannot wait to see you next time. Have a great day.
Why Real Estate Agents Need To Be Working With GenZ • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Mar 08, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses how should real estate agents prepare to work with Generation Z, how the should industry adapt to this generation and in what ways this generation is different from other previous generations. Chris and D.J. discuss the importance of values about GenZ and how to differentiate yourself from your competition and the importance of sharing the same values. Next, Chris shares tips on what to do to get ready for GenZ when they enter the real estate market. Last, Chris talks about TheClose and the services they offer.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the closed.com. This is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes and let me tell you about the clothes. The clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies. From the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level, please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o s e.com And subscribe to their newsletter so you get notified every time they publish an article. And by the way, they just redesigned the website, it’s actually cleaner and even easier to sort of navigate in and although it was always pretty, pretty easy. But they’ve given it a facelift. And it looks really cool. So definitely check it out the clothes.com and with us, as always is crystal Ansel, he is a staff writer and a real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing, lead generation transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. And Chris has been part of hundreds of real estate transactions, ranging from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. And also spending time with with his two little ones and his his wife, Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you,
Chris Linsell 3:01 DJ always good to be chatting with you. How are you?
D.J. Paris 3:05 I’m good. I’m good. And I am really excited to Chris came up with a with a great topic for today that I hadn’t thought about as concretely as he was a succinctly really as, as he was talking about it. And I’m so grateful, Chris, to you for this, because I think this is an ongoing challenge. And I’ll tell you to sort of set the stage of how I’ve, as you were talking about it, one thing that popped into my head, and we’re like, what are we talking about yet? We haven’t said, but I will say if you are a real estate agent. And I am technically even though I’m not a practicing one, but I get all the emails, the same emails that real estate agents get. And one email that I have been getting over and over and over and over again over the last I would say year, I guess maybe two years to be fair, because my My memory isn’t isn’t so great about when this started, but certainly within the last two years. And it actually got one this morning, I’m getting these random emails from people I don’t know who say, Hey, I am generating a lot of leads online. Would you like to have some more appointments for your real estate business? And I think probably everyone listening can recognize these sorts of, you know, emails that come seem to come out of nowhere. They’re clearly spammy. However, I suspect there’s a real person behind it saying no, I really am delivering lots of these. I’ve never engaged with these but but anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is a topic we’re going to talk about today. And I’m wondering if there’s a connection between the rise of those emails and our topic today, which is how to real estate agents. And I have to give Chris absolute credit for this topic. I’m taking a lot of fire from Chris on this but but we’ll get to him in just a moment. But how do real estate agents prepare to work with Generation Z and how does the real estate industry begin to adopt adapt so that not only can you know The Gen Z group want to engage with real estate agents, but also possibly become real estate agents? Is this a problem? Are we seeing some disparity between how we’re doing things now? And what we would need to do to actually connect with those individuals. And just before Chris comes on, I want to explain what Gen Z Generation Z is. For those of you listening going, I know what that means. But I’m not sure what that what gears, somebody would would qualify to be in Generation Z, anyone who’s born between 1997 and 2012, which basically means anyone from the age of 10, to about 25 is in Generation Z. So at the high end of this age range, we have people in their mid 20s, who are going to start thinking or possibly thinking about homeownership. So Chris, that was a horse a big long update on I hopefully didn’t steal too much of your thunder, but wanted to set the stage for our conversation.
Chris Linsell 5:51 First of all, I thought that was a wonderful setting that well, that really well, I think you laid it out very, I am very curious, as I hope other listeners are about this conversation. And I just want to, I want to put a little bit of a fence around what DJ said, before we before we embark on this journey together. So I want everybody to think if you’re listening to this right now, I want you to think about who your typical real estate buyers and sellers are. Right now, if you are an active agent in the business, if you’re full time if you’ve been if you’re just part time, who are the typical people who are buying and selling? Obviously, everyone’s business is different. So everyone’s answer is going to be a variation. But I bet it’s a variation of the following factors. We’ve got Baby Boomers, who are spending their retirement money, and are often purchasing this is like the fourth or fifth or sixth home, potentially that they’ve purchased or sold their experience. They’ve got the budget you we know how to market to Baby Boomers. At this point, we know how to create business with baby boomers. And then a part of that is because a lot of real estate agents are baby boomers, this is a generation we connect with. And then just below that, we have got the next set of generations. And we’re not going to go through one by one here. But we’ll just baby boomers were kind of the target for real estate agents as far as the ideal client for a long time. And they are no longer the biggest cohort or likely the most influential cohort, because you’ve got, you’ve got the the Gen Xers you’ve got the millennials, you’ve got The Inbetweeners, you’ve got the Gen Z folks, there are a lot of people who are buying and selling or soon to be buying and selling. And quite frankly, the real estate industry is still focused a lot in the ways that we we market to and focus on Baby Boomers. And this could be a problem, this could be an issue, this will be a problem and an issue because I want you to imagine all of what you know, as a real estate professional, the ways that you connect with your clients, a lot of the execution of that connection is going to change. And it’s going to change in ways that we don’t quite know yet. In fact, there are ways that we are going to have to conduct our business in order to close transactions that we may not have even discovered just yet. And for a lot of real estate professionals who have made their bread and butter doing it one way to one group of people rinse and repeat. This can be scary. So let’s talk about this Gen Z. Do we have a problem? Or do we have an opportunity? And I would DJ I want to ask you a question about this. But first, I just want to start by prefacing it with with a another question. When do you think for GE like the cell phone service 4g, the fourth generation of cell service? When do you think 4g became available in the United States and guesses? What do you think? Yeah, I sort of remember I’m gonna go with 2014. Somewhere around there. You’re close, but it was even longer ago than that it was 2008 or 2000. Now, oh my gosh, that 4g came out. So let’s put that into perspective. There are members of what did you say the four What did you say the Gen Z bracket was born between when and when? 97 to 2002. Okay. 2000. And sorry, I apologize. So the Gen Z folks, these are folks who 2012 Sorry, who anyone born between 97 2012
Yeah, so these There are folks who have virtually have no memory of what it’s like to live their life without a high speed connection to all of the information in the world. These are folks who likely had their first Amazon Prime delivery, and it was their diapers. These are people who have likely considered purchasing not just a toy car online, but an actual car. These are people who may have gone through the design process of designing their own car without ever driving it, and hitting the order button on line, like they were buying a pair of shoes from Amazon, the consumer expectations of Gen Z, are significantly different than the consumer expectations of just about any other generation. So I want to ask you, DJ, if you are, let’s say you are a successful real estate broker in the beautiful Midwest City of Chicago, and you have are looking at your business planning for 2020 to 2023. And somebody comes into that meeting and says, you know, there is going to be a group of people who are going to be considering buying and selling in the next year or so that you have no idea necessarily how to communicate with Excuse me, how do you go about tackling this problem? One of the questions you ask yourself, if you say to yourself, shoot, I don’t know how to talk to these people. How do you start planning for this problem? Any ideas on that?
D.J. Paris 11:42 Yeah, a few ideas. Number one to think about what we’re really talking about is is you know, marketing, branding, and sort of the first rule is, you know, learning as much as you can about that demographic. And so my questions would be things like, where do these people congregate? Where do they congregate in person? And where do they congregate virtually? Where do they go to learn about about larger purchases, like cars, mattresses, real estate, you know, insurance, some of these, these more significant purchases? Where are they going to? How are they doing their research? Where are they learning about it? And how are they what are the what are the steps that they take to actually make a buying decision? How often are they talking to another human being? before pulling, you know, the the lever on I want to purchase that? Who are they chatting with to help make that decision? So there’s a lot of questions that I would be trying to figure out, you know, how they do it differently than how maybe my generation would do it. I
Chris Linsell 12:51 think you’re right on the numbers there. And I want to put, I want to put a little onus on those who are listening, if you lived and there’s no shame in this, okay, guys, and there’s nobody, there’s no test at the end, there’s nobody that’s sitting in your car or in your in your air pods right now. That’s, that’s gonna hold you accountable to this. So you got to hold yourself accountable to this, I want you to raise your hand, if you ever made a purchase decision based on what was in the yellow pages, or based on what you saw on the front page of Yelp. Without really reading into the, the the little bit more than just the first couple of reviews. If that is you guys, this podcast is for you. Because frankly, Gen Z doesn’t operate like that. Gen Z. This is the generation of cryptocurrency. This is the generation of virtual learning. These are kids who have likely spent some of their formative years interacting almost completely online. These are people who rely on social verification on community, community think in a way that we have not seen before. And as real estate professionals, we need to adjust the trim of our sales in order to meet these new wins. And so for a lot of professionals, if you’re thinking to yourself, Okay, I want to build my business and the next 10 years are going to be critical to me reaching a place in my career, that’s important to me. You need to start thinking to yourself, how am I creating a business that can be verified by a community online? How am I creating branding and a marketing package that doesn’t rely on somebody driving by and seeing my sign in the ground as my primary means of marketing? Because guess what? Gen Z is not driving by at least not on purpose. They’re not going to your open houses, at least not as often. And frankly, they are not well Walking by the brick and mortar, storefront of your brokerage and deciding to just pop in and work with whichever agent happens to have floor time that day. These are agents who are looking or these are these are consumers who are looking for realist estate professionals to work with, that they can identify as somebody who is commensurate with their values. That is somebody who is demonstrating that they know what they’re doing, they have experienced in what they’re doing, and they can help them achieve their goals. And that these are people who communicate in such a way that you can facilitate an effective conversation. If you are a real estate professional, or if your brokerage and all the agents through which you are shepherding is not set up to manage these expectations. The next five years are going to become tough, and the next 10 years are going to be very tough.
D.J. Paris 16:03 And I’m gonna throw in a practical reason why even for those listening, who think Well, that’s not my generation, I don’t really understand it, but my business is solid, because I work with people outside of that generation, I understand them better. And I really don’t need to introduce another way of doing things to hit this younger demographic, I’m gonna give you a practical reason why you may want to challenge that is right now we have baby boomers who are nearing retirement, and we’re going to have this incredible transfer of wealth. As as you know, baby boomers retire, they’re going to be passing and passing away as well, there’s going to be a lot of money being handed down to the younger generation, this includes Gen Z, it also includes other generations, not just Gen Z. But if you if you want to think about the future, you know, if you’re working in a specific demographic, you know, you need to look towards those other generations.
Chris Linsell 17:01 I totally agree. Absolutely agree. And frankly, this happens every time there is a kind of a passing of the torch financially and kind of buying power and selling power wise in the real estate market. Another aspect of this as well is just like there have been changes in the ways that previous generations have bought and sold, we will see fundamental systemic changes in the way that real estate is bought and sold with this next generation. But the the twist on this is the the next set of changes will likely be very technology heavy. And what I mean by that is it is within spitting distance like within the next Highwoods My prediction is the next five years. Other more conservative predictions have said the next 10 years, but I believe in the next five years, we will have a sanction. Easy to understand, I say easy in air quotes easy to understand method of using things like cryptocurrency to make real estate purchases, we are going to be having discussions around real estate. And as NF Ts. In fact, the first, the first legitimate NFT real estate auction in the United States just took place. This is something that’s going to become more mainstream than we than we anticipate. And if you are not ready to have conversations with your clients about these topics, they will go to somebody who is and that includes your baby boomers that includes the financially literate, and they the more sophisticated buyers and sellers from every generation, these are going to become instruments of our business. And just because you have built a business in the past on this doesn’t mean that it is a guarantee for the future. I mean, we built all cash businesses for quite a while until it started to become a thing that you could use a credit card in a score in a store. And I guarantee you there were retail locations in the United States are like credit cards, what do I need credit cards for I’ve had this all cash business for the last 50 years. I don’t need to start messing with that. And those are people who ended up doing something else with their with their business time because ultimately these these changes will happen and it’s just a matter of who’s going to keep up.
D.J. Paris 19:43 Well, I’d like to talk about some what we have what we have observed about Gen Z. Just it you know Chris, you and I and we can maybe give some tips about ways in which agents can start to think about their presentation whether It’s an in person presentation or virtual type of presentation, whether it’s just someone’s social media, you know, daily postings or videos they might be making or not making. But I just wanted to Chris, throw a couple of of what we were talking about Gen Z, I started thinking about what have I witnessed from people in that age range, what’s important to them, and I came up with a with a couple of things. And I’m, I’m sure there’s a much more exhaustive list we could find. But a couple of things came came to me and I’ve noticed this values, they Gen Z cares about the company that they’re purchasing from, or the individual that they’re going to be using, they care about what those people’s values are, or more importantly, what values they are sort of talking about or demonstrating. They care about things like mission. And what is that like? Well, what are you doing this for? Why are you a real estate agent? What’s your mission? What’s your, what’s your story, as far as what it means to you to be a real estate agent, they’re not as interested, I think in things like, Hey, I’m the number one producing agent in my area, and I’ve sold X amount. I think there’s an inherent mistrust of numbers like that, I just think it doesn’t resonate as well, with with the younger generation, they want to know what you what you care about. They want to know that you have things like empathy, that you’re demonstrating empathy, compassion, there’s much more of a I, you know, as an agent, I hear you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I understand you, I’m with you, I feel when you feel bad, I feel bad. And I’m, you know, I those are some of the things I’ve noticed. And also one last thing, how do you give back? I think Gen Z expects the service providers that they use to to be very philanthropic or at least have some something that they’re doing to better the community world. And that needs to be so so those are some of the qualities that I’ve seen in Gen Z. Curious if you have any thoughts about that.
Chris Linsell 22:08 100% and I like remember, Gen Z is the is the generation I one of I call Gen Z a lot of a lot of different monikers. But one of the things I call them as the et Cie generation this is the group who they didn’t go they don’t go to art fairs, they go to Etsy, and if they want like a custom, let’s see here, like a custom leather wallet, there are literally hundreds of artisans on Etsy that can provide you with a custom leather wallet, it is not something you have to hunt endlessly for, you have literally hundreds of options. Does that sound like another market we know of? It’s the real estate market. If I want to buy and sell I literally it especially in major metros, I have 1000s of agents who can execute essentially the same duties. These are people who are legally licensed to show me property to negotiate on my behalf to walk me through a transaction to help me with the contracts and to make sure that I close there are it to have a real estate license qualifies. Everyone Everyone with a real estate license can execute on that. So how do you differentiate yourself? How do you not just be leather wallet seller number 64. And actually be something that someone says, Okay, I want to work with you. Just like you said it is a value proposition. It is a does this person identify with the same things that I identify with is what’s important to them. What’s important to me, is that expressed through how they associate and build community. That’s the fill in a part of the philanthropic conversation you are having. And then also is this person, someone who is uniquely equipped to deal with specifically the things that are important to me because even though there are 100 people who make leather wallets on Etsy, maybe I want a leather wallet with my initials embossed on it. And maybe since you know I’m a I’m a trout fisherman, maybe I want a little fish stamped on there as well. I am going to be looking to work with somebody who maybe has some of the same experiences that I do that can identify with why this is important to me.
D.J. Paris 24:38 Because you just said something really, really important, which is we all have passion. Hopefully all of us have something that we’re passionate about whether it’s only work or it’s outside of work. You mentioned, you know, trout fishing, I know you act as well. You have a lot of a lot of outside interests and what I think the Gen Z you know, we think these are People who watch a lot of Tik Tok and what are they watching on Instagram and Tiktok they’re watching people play out their passion. Maybe it’s their their work or their play, but they’re watching it. People demonstrate, here’s what I’m into. So I think I think this is a really good point that whatever it is, I think Gen Z is less impressed by the bench back ad. And I’m not saying that because it’s a it’s a billboard or a bench back and we all go okay, well, maybe those aren’t as useful anymore. But but even if they are useful, what I’m saying is they’re less impressed by the perfect image of somebody airbrushed, who says, you know, hey, I’m a I’m a top agent. I think they’re more interested in seeing that top agent doing something that they’re really into, possibly on social media. Now, you don’t have to do that. But I think the younger generation is is conditioned to sort of see like, what are hey, I want to invest. For example, I want to buy that wallet. Hey, wallet company, what are you guys into? Why are you doing this?
Chris Linsell 25:56 Absolutely. Yeah. So I totally agree. And you know, frankly, this is an example I am, you know, not to not to get too far down this rabbit hole. But as a, as an angler, as an outdoorsman, and an conservationist, I spent a lot of time outside, I will regularly shop with the company Orvis because Orvis donates 5% of their profits back to causes that I also directly contribute to and you know, what, if you’re going to be a supporter of Trout Unlimited, that’s great. I’m also a supporter of this, this organization, it matters to me that some of your dollars are going to those places. Now, this is not to say that real estate agents need to be spending 50% of their salary or their Commission’s rather, donating to causes if that’s something you feel led to great, but what the point here is, in the coming generations, it will be more important than it has been in the past, for people to be able to identify with the people they do business with, as a person that they would want to invite to lunch like that this is a person that they are okay with as a human being. We are real estate professionals, for a long time have been lumped into the transactional kind of durable transactional professionals in the same way that accountants and lawyers and doctors have been in the past. And I can understand where that comes from now. But frankly, at this point, our consumers are going to be expecting more from us. And this is ultimately why I want to bring this back to what we said at the top like, is this a Gen Z problem? Or is this an opportunity, because real estate professionals who can lean into these changes, who can develop an authentic brand and marketing push that demonstrates how they connect to their audience. Those are agents and teams and brokers and managing brokers who are going to accelerate and who, frankly, are just are going to be unstoppable. And we can already see it happening. And it’s not just because they’re the kind of the cool kids in the room. The idea like the the ethos behind brands, like app properties and compass is, is that they build brands around people not around product, it is we are not building brands around the word compass. We are building brands around campus agents. And this is something that the monolith style real estate brokerage, where it was all about the name at the top of a 50 story building. That’s what got buyers and sellers in the door. That is that is changing. It’s not the name on the top of the building. It’s the name on the individual doors inside the office buildings. And so if you are structuring your business to build an authentic brand around you, and the things that are important to you, you’re going to accelerate through this, this is an opportunity to capture a new market in a way that really has not been presented before. So if I’m an older agent, or just outside of the Gen Z demographic, which I am, I’m 46. And so
D.J. Paris 29:25 how how might you suggest that I work on you know, we talked about things like authenticity, you know, but what we really haven’t talked about is what is the vehicle that are what are some ideas of ways in which I can reach this demographic. You know, they’re not going to walk in the door. We know that they’re probably not picking up the phone calling me unless it’s a referral. Maybe they’re probably not even emailing. Right. They’re there their instant messaging or they’re online. They’re they’re learning I mean, my girlfriend Is is outside of Gen Z. But she still gets a lot of product recommendation. And this has never happened to me in my life where I’ve seen a product displayed on Instagram and I went and purchased it, I only follow other people, I don’t follow brands, my girlfriend follows brands, and she becomes uniquely aware of new product offerings because she cares about certain companies enough to follow them. So that’s a world that I don’t I don’t even know, I’m the one that Google’s you know, when I want to buy something, you know, show me which has the best reviews and and I’m going that route, she’s she’s being fed that information, I have to seek it out. So I’m curious about suggestions about how an agent who isn’t that immersed in that culture can can really penetrate and start to get a presence?
Chris Linsell 30:51 Well, I think that there are two big things. If you aren’t on the outside looking in here that you can that you can think about. The first is how are you augmenting your existing strategies, rather than just throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because that is not what I’m suggesting. I am not suggesting that existing agents who are running successful businesses completely turn their strategies on their heads or throw them out completely and start from scratch. Rather, I’m suggesting, you need to start augmenting what you’re doing that is already working to account for some of these new priorities. And so here’s a great example of this, let’s just say that you’re not going to be getting the sort of walk in traffic that you might have gotten from other generations with Gen Z. And let’s just say they’re also probably not just going to pick up the phone and call you. So we need to create opportunities for these people to interact with us. And those opportunities often exist on social media. So if you don’t, if you’re not active on social media, you need to get active on social media. And if you don’t quite know how to do that, or what to do there. You’re not well, first of all, you’re not alone, there are plenty of resources to help you with that you can visit the clothes.com We have a ton of really great social media strategy guides for agents just like you in that position. There are also some really great companies that help augment your marketing push to include this because they recognize there are tons of agents in your shoes, some good companies to work with on this. And you can find a lot of these folks, I’ve written content about them on the clothes, so you can check them out. They’re companies like coffee and contracts. This is all about how to create effective social media content that’s going to connect with your audience, a company called our Turin, which is again, a social media marketing company, they’ll help you come up with the content, they’ll let you know when to post it, how to follow up. Also, there are companies that provide isa like inside sales agents services, that focus and include connection platforms like Facebook Messenger, or Instagram, DMS, where they will actually interact with and qualify and engage leads on these non traditional platforms. So if you feel completely lost, and you want to learn about it, there are plenty of resources to educate. And if you want to outsource and create this augmentation via outside resources, and this is especially I think, appealing to agents who have an established business and you’ve got your calendar pretty well locked up with the clients you’re working with right now, you don’t necessarily have to hours to learn how to be social every single day. But you might have the budget for it. So go ahead and work with some of these outside consulting firms to be able to develop that side of your business and create an opportunity for you to once the ship is in the water and going in the direction you want, then you can take over on that wheel doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You’ve got resources, so work with them. And
D.J. Paris 34:10 also, if you are just unwilling to make those adjustments, but you still want to have a presence for that the younger generations, you can always partner up with a younger agent who’s in that generation or just outside of that generation. Yeah, I think that’s also a really good idea for agents who are going you know, it’s hard enough managing my own clients. Now I have to, you know, be more present on social media if that does not appeal to you. If that’s not your in your wheelhouse or just something that’s scary or embarrassing or just, you know, whatever reason you choose not to do that. Find someone who maybe is younger and consider partnering because you guys are going to hit different demographics. You’re going to have different types of clients and you You know, maybe, maybe you would both win the same types of clients, but probably not. So this is an opportunity to partner up with someone that can do something that you feel like you can’t do or don’t want to do.
Chris Linsell 35:14 Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, I think that statement is, it kind of leads me very nicely to I think the last thing I want to say, which is kind of a word of warning here, which is, remember guys that if these are our changes that you decide not to adjust to keep in mind, that not only is the next crop of buyers and sellers on their way right now, but also, the next crop of real estate professionals are on their way right now. In fact, the oldest Gen Zers, are likely in the business for a couple of years already. And these are people who natively communicate like this, who who already have the kind of the built in knowledge to be successful, and the dynamic, the the social dynamic, to be able to engage their peers in a way that you don’t have, right now, you’ve got an advantage on these people, everyone who’s listening to this, if you’ve got some real estate experience under your belt, you have an advantage on these people, because you have experience in the industry, and a track record to be able to speak to transactional success. If you wait a few years, there are going to be plenty of Gen Z years who also have that track record of success, and can natively engage with this cohort that you have no idea how to talk to, those are folks that are going to put you out of business, because they are people who have both experience and know how, and they realize what’s important to their peers, because they know what’s important to them. Right now, experience agents have the advantage of experience, the advantage of, of knowledge and process, that experience won’t last forever. So if you want to remain relevant, now’s the time to start making adjustments.
D.J. Paris 37:19 I just wanted to make one one final point about maybe anyone watching or listening who might be thinking, Gosh, this sounds like no, I have to do all this extra work. Because now I have to reach this other generation. And yes, in theory, you will have to do different type of work, for example, if you wanted to promote yourself more in social to to really connect with that audience because maybe that’s where they’re congregating. Oh gosh, no, I have to produce videos. And I have to create content online. And, and yes, you may have to have the hard look in the mirror saying that’s probably what I need to start considering. However, the upside is that those same people who want to see who you are online, they also are going to do a lot of the legwork for you. Because they’re already used to getting information at a moment’s notice. They’re very adept at searching, they don’t need you to help them find a property. They already know Zillow, they don’t want if and they the Trulia, they’re already ahead of that. They don’t need you to find them a place, although obviously that’s part of the job, they’re going to make that part of your life a heck of a lot easier. And so I think don’t worry too much about now I have to work more. I don’t know that it’s working more, I think it’s just like you said at the beginning, Chris, this isn’t really a problem or an opportunity. It’s just a thing. And we can choose to embrace it. And we can choose to do something with it. Or we can choose not to and that’s fine. But if you want to think about a longer term strategy, this is a great way to sort of go, Okay, it’s going to it’s going to feel uncomfortable for a while for me to adjust. But at the end of the day, these these Gen Z people are incredibly resilient. They’re they’re able to get information at a moment’s notice. And you probably won’t have to do as much information transferring as you maybe would with older generations.
Chris Linsell 39:11 Yeah, you’re 100% Right. I like to think of this, of this scenario the same way a friend of mine when I was a kid, a friend of mine, his father was part owner of a ski resort in northern Michigan. And he was fond of saying the father was fond of saying because this I should preface this the ski resort also had had a golf course and so they did golf in the in the warm weather and and skiing in the in the cold weather. This wouldn’t happen to be Iron Mountain by any chance. Not Iron Mountain, but very similar similar Scott. So my friend’s dad used to say, whether you look at winter as an opportunity, or a burden, it’s gonna get cold either way, so you can decide what you want to do with it because My friend, he always like he was kind of indentured labor into this, like he had to work no matter what. And he really liked working with the golf course because it was warm out and he got thrown on the golf carts around and all that. During the ski season, he had to work outside and it was cold and he didn’t like it. But his dad always used to say it’s gonna get cold. Either way you can treat this is an opportunity or a burden, it’s up to you. And real estate professionals should have the same attitude here, guys, it’s common, the winter is coming not not to get to Game of Thrones about this, but Winter is coming, the winter of Gen Z is coming, you can either be longing for the golf course or strap on your skis and and hit the slopes, but one way or the other, it’s gonna get cold. So might as well make this into an opportunity and create a place for your business to accelerate rather than trying to hold on to something that is frankly not gonna last forever. Perfectly said in the last few minutes. Let’s talk about the clothes. Yeah, that sounds great clothes. Guys, if you haven’t visited the clothes.com Come check us out. We are. You know, in my humble opinion, the real estate, the real estate epicenter for all things in terms of strategy, best practices, technology reviews, even some what I call edutainment, if you want to learn and also be entertained, come check out the clothes.com we’ve got articles, ranging everywhere from reviews of the latest lead generation product to walkthroughs. And behind the scenes tours of education platforms. We’ve even got guest contribute contributions from authors like the broke agents, authors like Shawn Moe, Drea, and and more and more. So we’ve got a really great set of content, including some awesome videos and a brand new website for you to come check out. It’s really cool. It’s beautiful, easy to get around. If you want to upgrade your experience, we offer the close Pro, which gives you a chance to get even more content, offer access to our premium courses access to a huge resource library and access to one on one coaching. If that’s something that you’re interested in, closed Pro, it’s 199 bucks a year, we have a ton of stuff that you can check out on there. And we would love to see how the clothes can be a part of your real estate success. So 99% of what you find there is free, you can upgrade your experience and go premium if you if you so choose. And we also have a vibrant social community, including a Facebook group with 1000s of people in it. Lots of stuff happening on Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook and even find us on Twitter and LinkedIn from time to time. So if you’re not part of the close community, you’re missing out 95,000 plus other agents are and we really hope that you come join us.
D.J. Paris 42:53 I really encourage everyone to go these are long form articles specifically designed to help you grow your business. These are not five best practices at an open house that none of those five are actually helpful tips that you don’t already know this is all stuff you don’t know. Or you’ll get confirmation from real journalists who really thoroughly research these particular topics to come up with their their goal is to be the best. well researched and well written marketing advice, not just marketing advice, but just advice for realtors. And boy do they deliver, check out the clothes.com I highly encourage everyone to also subscribe to the clothes Pro. I mean for $199 a year if it helps you get one additional sale obviously it more than more than pays for it. And it’ll do more for you than even that. But as always want to say thank you to Chris for coming on our show. He’s been with us for years, we’re honored to have him and hopefully you can tell he is if you like what Chris is saying. I’m definitely read the clothes.com. And so on behalf of Chris, we want to say thank you to everyone who has made it all the way through to the end of this episode, we hope this was helpful for you. It’s always fun chatting with Chris because he is he thinks beyond the present, which is always exciting to hear about what we believe is in store for the future and how agents can adapt for that. And on behalf of Chris and myself we want to say say thank you to everyone who has made it to the end here. And we ask that everyone goes to visit the clothes.com. And also you tell one friend about this episode, just let them know especially anyone in your office who maybe is nearing retirement or who just is wanting to connect with a younger audience and maybe they’ll get a few ideas from this episode. Please let them know about our show. All right, Chris. Well, we will see you next month. And thanks again.
Chris Linsell 44:44 Thanks again. DJ. I can’t wait to talk to you soon.
Can You Sell Your Real Estate Business (Or Buy One)? • Justin Ball
Mar 01, 2022
Justin Ball with The Jessica Ball Team RE/MAX Traders Unlimited (Ball Homes LLC) and RE/MAX Traders Unlimited Commercial Division describes how he and his wife started their career in real estate. Justin discusses how they started helping retiring agents come up with a succession plan and how to transition their sphere of influence to their successor. Justin discusses the importance of building the skills that makes the retiree stand out into the successor for future success. Justin also shares suggestions for younger agents on how to build relationships with potential retirees.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of convenient real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer and succession expert Justin ball. Before we get to Justin, a few quick announcements first announcement is I have a cold. So if you’re hearing my voice sound a bit different from normal that is expected. Or at least I I assume it’s going to sound different, because it sounds different to me. And I appreciate you listening throughout. And of course this week, we’re recording four episodes while my voice is pretty shredded. So I will do my very best, I’ll probably maybe I’ll shut up more than normal, which I think will be appreciated by our audience. So you can hear from our wonderful guests who share these amazing secrets of success in it. Also, I wanted to say thank you because we just crossed over a million downloads several weeks ago. And we’re really honored about that. And thank you to everybody for helping us get there. And we we’ve actually had 115,000 unique visitors or downloads I should say. So 115,000 people have downloaded at least one episode of the show, which is really amazing. And we’re so grateful like wow. So, but there’s a lot more people that need to hear it. So please just tell one more person. Think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Justin send him a link to our website. Website is keeping it real pod.com We can stream every episode we’ve ever done right there. And last, please leave us a review. Tell us what you think about the show. If you’re listening on Apple podcasts or iTunes or Google Play or Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, wherever podcasts are served, let us know what you think. Leave us a review. Tell us what you like tell us what you don’t like so we can keep improving because this show is for you. And now on to our interview with Justin ball.
All right, today on the show. Our guest is just involved from the Jessica ball team with REMAX traders unlimited in Peoria, Illinois, which happens to be where I grew up. also author of the book secession planning. I’ll say that again, secession planning for real estate agents I have a hard time with secession. But let’s tell you a little bit about Justin. Justin ball is a realtor and a commercial broker with the Jessica ball team at REMAX traders unlimited also ball homes LLC and REMAX traders unlimited commercial division. Now his wife Jessica founded the team in 2017. And after several years of Justin being the highest performing the lowest paid unlicensed assistant around he finally got his real estate license in 2021. Justin and Jessica are getting ready to release their book succession planning for real estate agents monetizing your business in retirement, which is coming this month. The book is a strategic and tactical guide for agents looking to retire or grow their business and sponsoring broker owners wanting to keep their retiree sales volume and former clients business in their brokerage for agents working to grow their business This book will help you navigate becoming a successor to a retiring agent, Justin’s background in customer relationship management, CRM systems, marketing, lead gen and sales funnels support the team as it continues to grow. And as the industry of real estate changes faster than it ever has, with the introduction of new technology, I’d like everybody to take a look at the succession planning book, which you can find by visiting the website ar e succession.com. And I’ll spell that just in case you might not have a direct access to that, by the way, we will have the link in our show notes, but it is R E S U S, sorry, let me start that over R e su CC e s s io n.com. Once again, our e su CC e s s io n.com. You can learn all about the ideas of what you can do with your business when you’re nearing retirement, and also how you could possibly look for other people that might be retiring and work out an arrangement with them. Justin, welcome to the show. excited to have you.
Justin Ball 6:01 I’m really glad to be here. Glad to be joining you.
D.J. Paris 6:03 Well, I was I was pleasantly surprised. Oftentimes, embarrassingly enough, I don’t always do a tremendous amount of research on my guests. I know the talking points. And I know approximately, you know what I need to go over in the course of the interview. But it’s one of the things I often forget to do is check to see where people are from sometimes I know. And other times, I have to just a few minutes before I go live, go, Oh my gosh, I have to figure out where they’re located. And I was so pleased to find out your Peoria person, you and your wife because of course, that’s where I grew up. It’s near and dear to my heart. I really enjoy pyaari I think it’s a was a wonderful place to grow up. And I’ve even I’ve been in Chicago for 20 plus years, I I still really love Peoria. And I’m glad to be speaking with an agent there and also an author and you and your wife. So thanks for coming on our show. And the first question I always like to ask, although we sort of know a bit about your story, but maybe you can even talk us through the entirety of of how your wife and you got into real estate. But I’d always like to go back to the beginning. And then how you guys got started, you know, obviously talked about helping your wife as she was growing, growing her REMAX practice, and then eventually deciding, hey, we need to write a book about succession planning, which to my knowledge, and we get pitched by publicists who are representing authors in the real estate space, almost daily, by the way, and I have not yet seen an AI maybe there are books that tackle this topic. But we’ve yet to be approached by anyone. So we’re so excited to chat, because I think this is a topic that our audience definitely would like to hear. They’re building this book of business. What happens when they retire? And oh, yeah. What about people who are retiring now? What can you do to maybe, you know, partner up with them. So really excited to chat with you. But can you start us all the way back to the beginning, and how you guys got into real estate.
Justin Ball 7:53 But so my wife was in federal law enforcement and probation. And once we started our family, she said, I’m ready for a new career. I have several people in my family who are realtors, and really sat down talked with us about the business that seemed like a great fit for my wife. And she started her team and things really took off. And every year has just gotten a little bit better. I like to think I play a big role in that as an unpaid unlicensed assistant bringing all my marketing and CRM expertise into things. But she has this incredible empathy and compassion for working with families during these major life decisions going on. And time and time again, we would get these emails within the brokerage and it would say, So and so is retiring, please come to a happy hour cocktail party to see them off in style or to have cookies or whatever it may be. And I thought, where’s their business going? Like just what happens? Because in these cases, it wasn’t that, you know, please contact so and so for referring people to them or their area of expertise. It was literally just people who were locking the door and turning the lights out. And this is really an opportunity to do succession planning. That’s great for retirees to earn money, great for people who are looking to build their business and expand their business and then really for brokerages to keep that business with in their brokerage. And so I said to Jessica would when we were talking to someone thinking about retiring, let’s set up a program and a contract to generate referrals and start to work on taking over working with their sphere of influence because they were a really well connected individual in the community. And we went out and started looking for how do you do this? And just like you said about there’s nothing out there. There are handshakes and contracts and things that happen behind closed doors and privately but there’s really no information publicly about how to plan a succession plan, how to really transition that sphere of influence and book of business from a retiree to their successor. are and how to monetize that in retirement and make money from those referrals as a referral network agent. And this is where the book was born, we literally just started from scratch. And the more that we started to dig and talk to contacts across the country, and even just here in Peoria, Chicago, we found out people were writing these contracts all the time, and there was no consistency to them. And so we sat down and started the two year process that was really writing the best practices for an agent who’s retiring to earn money for referrals. And for an agent who’s taking over as their successor to really get the most out of those referrals and providing continuity to their book of business.
D.J. Paris 10:43 Yeah, wow, you said a lot there. And I want to just set the stage before we get into any sort of detail about first, just this myth that you have obviously talked about in the book, which is this idea that real estate, because it is largely transactional in nature with respect to commissions and fees, everyone listening knows, there hasn’t, I don’t think anyone’s figured out a way to do a fee based model where, you know, somebody pays you a percentage of something every year, which is typically how financial advisors do it, which when we look at like the financial advisor model, which used to be more transactional, and it was stockbrokers. Now, it’s assets under management, and they typically charge a fee, typically a percentage. And so when a financial advisor retires, it’s a pretty obvious thing, because they have this built in, you know, whatever it is 1% of fees of all the assets under management coming in sort of no matter what. So it’s, it’s a real obvious sort of transition, you could say, why can give this to somebody, and maybe you work on an arrangement where you keep some of it and, and, and but the money is automatically coming in. But then there’s this idea that, well, wait a minute, real estate is transactional in nature. So how do you actually have a business to sell? Necessarily, and I know that there’s a lot of people listening that think, well, I didn’t realize I was I was building something that actually has value once I leave. So I can we just dispel that myth, to to get started and just first set the stage that there is a business to sell or transition.
Justin Ball 12:18 Yeah, there absolutely isn’t. In my other life outside of real estate, you know, we talk about buying businesses and determining their value and their EBIT and multipliers and this, but for your average real estate agent, or small team, the business is the sphere of influence, and the book of business that they built all of those relationships that are out there, and people who think of them as their realtor and who refer them out there. And so the work that an agent has done for 1020 3040 years, and building this book of business, and these clients has a value, and they can continue to earn on it through referrals to the book of business that’s there. And I think, you know, right now, there are a lot of real estate agents who pay a lot of money to generate leads. And I loved listening to your episode with crystal Mesa where she was talking about not paying big companies for leads and generating your own leads. And this is exactly what that is low acquisition cost of no acquisition costs to get new leads in and then paying the referral fee on the back end. So you know, when we talk to agents thinking about retirement it is we build these contracts with their successor. And as they refer business or businesses made from their sphere of influence, they’re paid a referral fee and a retirement or referral network for things and there is value business, even agents who are only doing 12 transactions a year, there is still money to be earned and justification for keeping their license and a referral network.
D.J. Paris 13:50 Yeah, and it’s, it’s interesting, and I don’t know how it works in every state, I imagine it’s state specific. But I know here in Illinois, we have in fact, we, we have one here at our own company, which is called we call it a holding company, which is for which all a holding company is in Illinois, at least is a managing broker who is not a member of a local association, which means that all of the brokers underneath that managing broker also cannot become a member of the local association of wherever the agent might be listed. And what it basically means for everyone listening who’s unfamiliar with this term, is that an agent can keep their license active, but they can’t practice real estate. So they can’t represent buyers, sellers, renters, but they can still refer business to other agents from anywhere in the country and still get paid on those referrals. And it’s very popular here in Illinois, I think our holding company that we have has, I think we have about 550 agents in it. I imagine most states have some version of that. So that is something to think about. As you you know, maybe you’re nearing retirement Do you want to figure out a way where you can still earn income, you know, have finding or finding a brokerage that’s somehow just willing to hold your license. And maybe you don’t have to join a local association. There’s certainly those those firms as well. But But I know that that we built our business, we built a holding company strictly because we saw an agent or a need for that. And so that’s a great, I’m sure that’s a part of one of your strategies is once you get to that point where you’re no longer practicing, but you still are able to earn but my question, my first real question is, for everyone who’s listening, who might be younger, who’s like, well, retirements, a good deal aways away, this is an opportunity for for the younger agent to even make relationships with retiring agents, or people nearing sort of that stage of their career where they might want to consider succession planning, and start to maybe even present them with an idea that says, hey, you know, let’s talk about retirement. And I’m curious if that’s a major part of the book, where you’re talking about how do you go out, by the way, and also, if you’re on the younger side, and still sort of, you know, build these relationships?
Justin Ball 16:03 Yeah. And so that is exactly a chapter is about how to choose a successor. And if you are a younger agent, or an agent that’s still growing their business, how do you become a successor. And I think oftentimes, there’s a lot of agents out there who are retirement eligible, who aren’t pulling the trigger, making a plan or setting a date, because they don’t have a plan for what things look like after that, for how to care for their, their family, their their, you know, provide this continuity, again, that’s out there. And so talking to your managing broker about who might be a good fit, identifying some people that you could possibly build a team with, in the interim, the data from NAR is staggering. And I just had to share that and I wrote it down here, please 300,000 realtors in the United States over the age of 60, and 65,000, don’t expect to be selling real estate in two years. So in our home state of Illinois alone, there are 7000 people who don’t think they’re going to be selling real estate in two years, and 2400 of them are over 60. So the the future is ready for these succession plans to be happening. And I don’t think we’ve ever approached someone about a succession plan. And they’ve said like, hard No, leave me alone. I’m offended. You ask? The worst case scenario is I’m still going to work for another five years come see me in three or four years. Yeah. And that’s fair. Yeah, absolutely fair, there are some people who want that. And there are others who just said, this has been on my mind. And you’re giving me a really good reason to start to put pen to paper and create a tangible plan for doing this. And so for those younger agents, or those agents who are still growing their business, this is literally a chance to acquire a book of business that you’ll pay a referral fee on for one, two, maybe three years. That’s generally the type of contracts that we build. And then this is your sphere of influence to work for a lifetime. And, you know, you hear so much about the lifetime value of clients and the fact that it isn’t just one transaction, it’s one transaction now a transaction and five years a referral for other family members. And so this is an immense chance to grow your business through someone else without paying for these leads, and the leads that come through as referrals. Close most of the time. I mean, I would say our close rate on these is probably 85 90%. Because someone has done the work the retiree of priming the pump of I trust this person, I’m giving your referral to Justin, he and Jessica are going to help you buy your house, sell your house, downsize, upsize, sell off your investment portfolio, whatever that may be. So it’s
D.J. Paris 18:47 interesting, I see there’s so much opportunity here for either the retiree, or the upcoming retirees perspective, that they can go out and start, you know, either talking to their managing broker saying, hey, who in the firm would would be a good person to partner with as I sunset out, or on the other side, the younger agents looking towards some of the older agents, like you were saying here in Illinois, 1000s. And 1000s of them have this ability to, to possibly retire and I don’t suspect either side, the younger agent, or the older agent are getting a lot of phone calls about this right now. So it’s a real opportunity. And it probably there’s probably a bit of an education component to it. But I would imagine it’s a pretty interesting phone call and I know if I were a an agent, I don’t know if I would do it if I was a brand new agent, although that’s possible too, because then you could become somebody’s like apprentice or work with them specifically with the intention of, you know, learning all their skills so that when they when they sunset out you’re the person but it’s a real opportunity on both sides to start, almost prospecting other agents, not to try to recruit them so much as as to partner with them. And this is a huge opportunity and I’m curious once you find somebody who on either side where you’re going, Okay, we’re gonna work something out. I’m curious on what you recommend, because you said, Boy, the close rates are so high 85 90%, which is pretty incredible. If you think about this, like, there’s really no other lead source that doesn’t come from your direct sphere of influence, which is not what this isn’t someone else’s sphere. I mean, it might be part of your sphere, but most likely, it probably isn’t. And to get an 85, or 90%, sort of, you know, hit rate on someone else’s book of business is pretty impressive. So I’m curious once you find somebody, and you do work out some sort of financial arrangement, which I know the book goes into different models for how to do that. How do you recommend that the older agent start to introduce? Or do you recommend that they somehow introduce their successor, what’s sort of the process for getting their sphere of influence aware of what’s happening and who you’ve chosen to be your person?
Justin Ball 20:59 Yeah, this is incredibly important. And this is where the magic happens. The contracts are formalities, the ability to transfer trust and brand from a retiree to their successor is really what it’s all about. If you know, if I said what’s the best practice 18 months to two years is ideal. Because that gives you time to really start co marketing and CO branding, on all of the postcards and farming and emails and client parties that a retiring agent is doing while you are ready, you know, preparing this transition in there. And for them to say this is my team. So when people call if they’re buying their second home, getting ready to move to Florida and retirement, those people aren’t surprised when it’s getting handed off. And they start to see this as a coherent package of people in there. But really the client events and you know, if there’s a client who is a repeat buyer, or investor or does any of these things, having the chance to shake hands and introduce the successor to those clients really put your personal stamp on them saying, This person is on my team, when you call my phone number, you may get my team member doing this, you should have great confidence, they’re going to treat you like this. And we talk a lot in the book about when you find that partner, that successor and retiree that want to work together. What makes the retiree an amazing agent, is that they’re compassionate, and they sit down and they develop these deep relationships, and walk people through start to finish is that they are an incredible marketing and have a great marketing program to sell houses, is that they are deeply analytical and help evaluates rental properties and flippers and people who are doing long term buy and hold activities. And how do you really instill those things that the person sphere of influence loves about them, and respects about them to the successor, and it takes all shapes and sizes. That’s why it’s not a one size fits all, it’s really finding a pair and a match that works out really well and then transferring that trust over to him.
D.J. Paris 23:13 I love that. And I and you know, you said something earlier about starting the planning or announcing to the clients that that you’re you know, you’ll be heading out to the into the sunset, you know, 18 to 24 months, and that gives the, the the successor time to get introduced to the sphere of influence. But also it gets the successor really acclimated to how that producer does conducts business. You said, as you mentioned, talking about things like what qualities do they do they demonstrate because at the end of the day, that’s probably the most important thing is can I duplicate or replicate those experiences for this person’s book of business? Can I do I have that the ability to to be as empathic as as the person who their clients know and love and trust? And I imagine, you know, probably I’m curious if you think like even taking a personality assessment might be a good idea, like a DISC profile or something to that extent to where you could say, Okay, I’ve got this I’m in theory, I’ve got the same skill set, or the same qualities personality, because I imagine that’s just got to be critical.
Justin Ball 24:26 It is. And it really it’s why getting to know someone asking your managing broker and talking with them about are they a good fit? reveals? Are you good to work together and that transition time? I would say some of the worst or the least productive succession plans we’re doing is where someone says, I’m moving in two weeks here is the box of all of my signs and my database and my paper files. And we don’t have that time to sit down and say what are your clients love about you? What would your sphere of influence say makes you really great ones Someone makes a referral to you why are they making that referral to you directly as a person? And then how do we begin to replicate some of those activities or build that skill set? And I think what’s been really fascinating is, those skill sets may not always be up to speed with the time. So how do we change something like, I’m looked at as a great resource for this neighborhood? And how do we bring new technology into, alright, we’re gonna use brevity as a CRM, and we’re gonna send everybody in your sphere, this price evaluation tool, so that we’re taking the work that you’ve done to another potential level, with the ambition of our future earnings and that continuity of service.
D.J. Paris 25:46 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I also think it gives, you know, with the sort of 24 month, ideally 24 month, lead time, it gives the younger agent, the ability to develop some of those particular skills that the retiring agent, you know, already has and mastered. And I’d say, you know, if you spend two years focused on, you know, a certain set of skills that maybe you feel weakened, you’re going to be a heck of a lot stronger than two years. And I think you’re right about if possible, being able to even join the team of that agent, before they retire really helps set the stage for, you know, sort of just trust because that group in your case, you guys have, you know, the Jessica ball team with REMAX traitors unlimited. So this idea of of ideally, they would, they would join your team, and then you could slowly roll out, here’s my new team member, just so everybody knows, when they when I when I retire, you know, so and so is going to take amazing care of you. He’s he or she is going to be around for the next couple of years absorbing everything really making sure they understand you know, how I take care of my my clients. But it is it is such a neat idea. And I think that so if I’m a younger agent, how might I go about maybe working to secure one of these relationships? Do you have suggestions about how you may want to approach a retired or a broker who may be considering retirement or maybe isn’t considering retirement, but technically, could if they were brought an idea to let them know that they could still earn income while they go out of production?
Justin Ball 27:24 I think it’s really important to approach those conversations with a sense of empathy and a sense of respect. coming in saying I’m looking to take over your business starting point. But say, you’re an agent who I’ve watched, who is working from referrals and who I really respect for the book of business you’ve built? How can I learn to develop this? And have you ever thought of mentoring or bringing someone on as a teammate or thinking about succession planning when you’re ready to retire? And I think that opens the door for the conversation. People may say, I’m not interested in mentoring, I’m not interested in doing this. Or I’ve been pressured by my wife or my husband to begin thinking about retirement. And this is a perfect time that we may be able to do something over the course of the next two or three years because I really am ready to make this decision and plan my own retirement.
D.J. Paris 28:18 Yeah, it’s such great. And I want to also mention the book website. Again, for everyone listening who’s who says, gosh, I had no idea that succession planning can exist in the real estate sort of brokerage model. And the website is our E succession.com. Those be a link for that in our show notes. But there’s a link directly to purchase the book on Amazon. And also they’re going to have very shortly a an audiobook format, as well as a paper, a paperback version. So definitely check out our e succession.com. But let’s talk about two. This is something that is not really being discussed at the brokerage level, I suspect, managing brokers don’t really understand because it is a transaction. I’ll give you a perfect example. So I have I have a very close friend who is nearing retirement. He is a home inspector. And he is very well respected in his in the Chicagoland area. Very busy. But his he himself. He is a one man operation. And he has a couple of years left and then he’s going to retire and I had said to him, Well, how do you how do you transfer that business you built up over 40 years goes, boy, I don’t think I can because I don’t have an apprentice. I don’t have somebody. And really, if somebody were to partner with me, you know, they just would be buying a phone number basically and the phone would ring and you know and so he is even unaware that the same sort of process could happen, where he could bring on somebody start introducing them to his referral sources which are real realtors and start saying, Hey, here’s my guy, or here’s my woman who’s you know who’s going to be taking over, they’re going to be shadowing me or, or doing this. And I’m going to mention this book to him because even though he’s not an agent, although maybe he technically is an agent, but he’s, you know, his business is being an Inspector, he has a couple of years to really get this figured out, and his phone rings all the time. So I know I would, I would love to have that. But But I think you’re right, it’s critical that the retiring agent really introduces the apprentice or the person who would be taking over as early as possible. And as often as possible, just making sure that everyone understands sort of, you know, what’s happening here.
Unknown Speaker 30:41 And I think to this is, this is one of the other fascinating things when people call that agent and they’re referring business back to us. Some of the clients appreciate that it’s a team, other clients don’t even realize that those folks who have moved from Peoria across the country, Randy, you literally just say, Oh, this is excellent. What I’m going to do is I’m going to send my team member Justin to help you with this. Continuity is invisible in that, and the trust is still there. And the brand is still there in that sense. But I’m, I’m really worried, too, you know, you talked about your friend, that’s the home inspector, this is the reality, I think with a lot of baby boomers, and this is where there’s a lot of information out there. A lot of these service businesses are going to be ending in the next five to 10 years, and there aren’t these plans for how to do it. And they’re really critical to our economy and for the real estate world. In general.
D.J. Paris 31:37 Yeah, it’s, it’s such a great, a great thing to to talk about. And again, it’s just not really being talked about. Because we think, as it’s so easy to dismiss the idea as all my clients, you know, they like me, and you know, but if they like you, and they understand that, at some point you’re unable to service them, or perfect examples you gave is, hey, I moved, I’m now only in, you know, my local community half a year, or I’m a snowbird, you know, I do the Florida thing during the winter, or I just retired all together, but having somebody that you can refer to, and then I’m curious on when, when you do find this partnership, whether on either side of the transaction, making sure that that newer agent really understands not not just the qualities, you know, the things like empathy and compassion and calm and, but also understanding the expectations around how much or what actual activities that person engages in while they have a client, right, like making sure that if the retiring agent calls every single client of theirs, while they’re in the middle of a transaction every two days, you know, some agents have those kinds of policies where it’s like, I make sure I call everybody once a week, whether we have any news or not about their particular transaction, and then bring on a new agent, making sure that those those two agents really understand what the expectations are, I think is like you were saying, you go through the qualities, and I’m sure you go through the activities as well and say, you know, what are you doing on a daily basis, because that new agent is likely going to have to duplicate, you know, those those behaviors?
Justin Ball 33:19 And then those are the kinds of questions that we asked when we kind of match people up? Do you text your buyers and sellers? Do you have these regular emails that you send out? Are you a person who goes to people’s house and sits down at their kitchen table and has a cup of coffee? And engages? Or are you really high tech, and you do everything through transaction management digitally and remotely? And really, you know, again, identifying what makes your brand so that we can begin to replicate some of that brand, or at least the best practices of it?
D.J. Paris 33:54 Yeah, that’s a really good point, too. And it could even be as simple as how late do you respond? How quickly do you respond to a client request? What happens if it’s 11pm? And you’re up and you see the little SMS message or an email or phone call come through? Do your clients expect me to answer that phone call? Or do they understand that I’ll get to it first thing in the morning? Or what’s the expectation really understanding that so that the agent that’s coming in, really has a clear set of guidelines around here’s what’s expected, and I’m agreeing to do XY and Z. And I imagined the more detailed and written out and agreed upon by both parties it is the clearer and better probably smoother it goes.
Justin Ball 34:39 It is and again the the time to plan and learn that is critical. I don’t know that I can say that two years or 18 months is like the optimal amount of time but certainly having the ability to work with someone for six months up to that point so that you’re going out on visits, you can shadow them in the office and you can Learn what you don’t know. I mean, this is this is an opportunity to pass down the legacy of the secrets of real estate agents made agents amazing over the years. And it, it just kills me what I see people retire, and the brokerage loses that business and the clients go with the first realtor that they find online. And really the secrets of service that are going to withstand the test of time are lost in that transition and transaction.
D.J. Paris 35:30 What type of financial arrangements do you typically see? So the the retiring agent, you know, you were mentioning, maybe they, they, they actually exit out from actually receiving referral commissions a certain number of years. But for that, in that first year, once the agent is out of production, maybe their licenses in a holding company, like we mentioned, but they’re still able to earn referral commissions. What type of financial arrangements Do you Do you see is sort of most common. So what’s the split? What are the splits typically look like from the retiring agent to the the person taking over the book?
Justin Ball 36:06 Yeah, so as we write the different types of contracts, and there, what we see most often and what we recommend is three years of paying out specific referral fees. And as you can appreciate, we don’t have a standard set fee or a course royalty in there. But as we talked to agents across the country, I would say we saw referral splits as high as 40%. And referral splits broadly around 25%. As we recommend, or as we work with agents, putting those together, we oftentimes say, because an agent could refer to anybody, and we’re making this exclusive contract, let’s front load the amount a little more in year one, and then reduce it gradually over time. Although we do have tools in there for valuating a book of business, if you’re going to pay a flat rate to an agent for taking over their book of business as opposed to referral fee, or in a lot of cases and incentive pay. And I really like using that instead of pay after your one of, you know, we’re gonna if you, if we sell more than 2 million, or 4 million or $5 million worth, we’ll give you $5,000, or we’ll give you 10,000, or 2000, or whatever the number may be, especially because it varies region to region based on your average home sale price and average commission, but it keeps the retiree hungry and engaged. And so that they really are being diligent and sending those referrals, every opportunity that they get. And we as the successors are really being diligent and following up in there. So three years tends to be a really good amount of time, I like seeing incentives in there. And we generally will write in some additional features about if you’re selling your personal property or real estate discounts on those things, because they may be keeping a home here, or selling off a package of investment properties or any number of things.
D.J. Paris 38:02 It’s really interesting. That’s such a such a great answer. And thank you for sharing that I was just thinking, in a previous career a million years ago, I was a financial advisor, and we were a fee based model. So we would take as I sort of was mentioning that earlier, the idea of collecting someone’s investment portfolio, and then charging them a percentage of the assets under management, which is pretty much how almost all financial advisors do it these days. So you would have in that industry, and I’m sure it’s still happening there, those books of business were very valuable, because even if there wasn’t an obvious transfer of power, the firm unless the client cancelled their, you know, took their investments out of the portfolio, didn’t really matter who was who was managing it, as long as those fees kept coming in. And so those were tight, those financial advisors who are retiring, are very valuable. And they are getting called by financial advisors everywhere. And I used to fantasize of, of getting one of these calls from one of these retiring financial advisors saying, I’ve got this book of, you know, $300 million. And I want to, you know, share it with you. And we’ll figure out a, you know, a way to compensate us both, but it never happened. But it’s because it’s so common, that there’s whole industries built in the financial advisory world of trying of helping people with succession planning, because it’s so incredibly lucrative. This is a kind of a newer thing that isn’t really as widely understood in the real estate side, because again, we think of it as transaction focus. And of course it is, but there is that so I guess my point is, if I was a financial advisor back when I was and if I would have started calling. You know, if I had a list of people who are financial buyers who are nearing retirement, they probably would be like, you’re the 25th person that’s called me Get lost. I don’t know you. But I suspect that real estate agents who are nearing retirement aren’t getting these phone calls. So So I think this is such a huge opportunity that number one, most retiring agents haven’t really thought about succession planning, other than maybe chatting with their managing broker about like, you know, do you have an idea of what I should do, but there isn’t any real formal process around this. And that’s what you guys really have created in the book succession planning for real estate agents. But also you do that you do consulting work as well for agents, is that correct?
Justin Ball 40:22 It is. So if you are a person thinking about retirement, or if you have identified a successor already, we offer consultation services to come in and help you set up that contract, help go through those activities of transferring trust and introduction to clients. We do presentations to brokerages, which I think is where a broker owners can really make hay because, you know, providing this presentation to their agents who are both, you know, retiring and aspiring to grow their business can set those up and keep the business in house. But I think one of the things, you know, some of the things that we do that are so far beyond what we’ve just talked about are the value of things like a domain name, the value of things like website content, the value of things like, investor lists, a lot of these assets that are a little less tangible, in the sense, and really how important the CRM or the database is of the retiree. And so we talked about, you know, there are probably some really nice clean succession plans where it’s, I’ve downloaded my nice comma delimited spreadsheet to give to you to import it. And there are the here’s my file cabinet for the last years. And there is even another level of I really don’t have anything, I just pick up the phone when the phone rings, and we have to recreate an entire database from brokerage history and activities that are there. I’m curious,
D.J. Paris 41:56 without obviously sharing, you know, any confidential information about people that you’ve helped set these up? What kind of income have you seen? And again, it all depends on the amount of transactions and obviously, where somebody is located and the price average price of properties. But you know, I imagine there’s a lot of people who you’ve helped who are retiring? Who, yeah, they can always refer business, and maybe they would, but they don’t have a real structure for, you know, taking taking their book of business and keeping it moving. With with the the newly licensed agent, it’s just yeah, if my phone rings, I’m retired, I’ll pass it over to you. But that’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about an actual plan of, okay, here’s how you’re going to introduce your clients to me, here’s how I’m going to gain their trust. Here are the expectations on both sides, and what kind of income you know, and I know it’s a wide range, but we’re talking about a lot of income, that that retiring agent could still be retaining every year, just based on putting a plan like this together.
Justin Ball 43:01 Yeah. So it is really hard when you talk about such different types of people. But I’ll give you kind of a summary that we talked about in the book if you average an agent’s last three years of production. And let’s say that on average, they produce 15 million a year and gross sales, you can expect that out of that first year of business to do about 1/3 of that through their referral network. So if somebody is saying I average 15 million a year in sales, we can generally expect to close $5 million of that through their referrals in the first year. And then we just see it dwindle a little bit each year, is there a little further removed from the process. But I think that this brings up a really good point, you kind of set me up for this one, which was really good. You what you don’t want to do is let your your average annual sales decline, decline decline because you’re putting off the planning. And you’re maybe mentally checking out a little more. Yeah, sure. The time to do it is when you still have this robust book of business that people are still hearing from you and engaged with you to be doing that transitional work and keeping it high. And it’s it’s really challenging when we see some great agents who, maybe five years ago, were averaging 1015 7 million, whatever it may be, and that when you look at their last three years, the average is 3 million because of just the natural decline of their engagement in the business and the amount of time that they want to be working versus if you had that partnership setup. Even before they retired, they could just be referring the daily business that they can’t handle or don’t want to handle to their partner.
D.J. Paris 44:48 I am really, really excited about this. I rarely in all of the episodes that we’ve done, I think we’ve done 300 And a close to 50 I believe I’ve yet to tackle this particular topic. I just see so much opportunity for somebody either retiring or somebody, you know, in the process of building their business and making these connections. Again, it’s this is this are these are phone calls that probably that retiring agent are not getting a lot of. And so this is a great, especially if you’re young and you don’t have a huge sphere of influence it you know, you can work out an arrangement with a retiring broker, but you have to, you’re probably gonna have to approach them first. You know, if you’re lucky, they may approach you. But I always assume I’m not that lucky. And I certainly wasn’t that lucky when I was a financial advisor. All those years ago, maybe I wasn’t very good. But I certainly wasn’t getting those kinds of calls from retiring agents. So I think this is this is something that you have to go first, no matter what side you’re on, whether you’re the retiring agent, or you’re the younger agent, you’re trying to find a partner, you really got to got to think about it. And you got to start making connections. And I think you’re so right, is think about the agents that you meet out at showings that you like, if you can’t think of anyone in your immediate firm, or maybe you’re just a tiny firm without many options. Boy, I’m sure there’s agents out there that you like, and probably agents that you don’t get along with as well. And finding those people that you go boy, that I bet it’s uh, you know, they really seem to treat their clients while we all sort of know who those agents are. Those are the agents to chat with, I would think at a very minimum place to get started. But again, I just don’t think most agents get these kinds of phone calls. And I know you’ve written a book on it, but and you guys don’t appear to be nearing retirement yourself. But, you know, I just suspect most agents don’t get these calls. Is that Is that accurate?
Justin Ball 46:40 I would say 100% accurate, as we’ve talked to some brokers and as we’ve talked to agents, and as we’ve gone through this several times, it is never even on people’s radar generally is is a totally fresh conversation. And like you were saying about approaching agents that you respect, it comes off really genuine, if I were to say, I really respect the work that you do, I would love to be at a you know, a point in my career, where I’m doing the level of business getting the referrals you are and not paying on the front end for all of X, Y or Z and the services. And people generally, what if you’re the successor approaching a retiring agent? Generally they’re flattered? I would say, Absolutely. And they may say, you know, I’m planning on bringing my son or my daughter in and creating this sharp plan, or I’ve already talked to x person. But that’s, that’s the worst response.
D.J. Paris 47:36 So thanks, but I already have someone,
Justin Ball 47:40 the sky’s the limit. And the worst answer is no or not right now. With
D.J. Paris 47:45 there’s nothing more flattering than that sort of phone call. And but a you know, assuming it comes from a genuine sort of place, and, and I gosh, I just see all the opportunity out here for that. And so for everyone listening, just consider think about your current book of business. And do you have some, you know, do you have some free time? I think in particular, this is really helpful for people who move to a new service area, maybe where they’re not as familiar, they don’t have a sphere of influence, or somebody that is ultimately familiar with that market incredibly well knows the agent knows the agent feels, you know, feels like they could definitely take over those responsibilities. But either way, I sort of see it fitting just about anyone, unless you’re just so incredibly busy, that you wouldn’t even have time to take on someone else’s book. And that’s its own problem. Good problem, I guess. But still, you know, you could still figure probably figure out a solution for that. But I almost wonder if we’ll start to see teams, even dedicate somebody to you know, going out and finding these relationships, you know, because as you mentioned, so many baby boomers are retiring, and nobody’s talking about this. So I really want everybody because I’ve been talking a lot about it myself on this on this episode. And when I get really excited about things I talk a lot, so I apologize for that to Justin. But guys, I am telling you, this is a huge, huge opportunity. Please go get the book visit our e succession.com. Again, that’s our e su CC e s s i o n.com. It’s called succession planning for real estate agents available on Amazon. It very shortly there’ll be an audiobook version and other ways of consuming this content. But you can also reach directly out to Justin and his wife, Jessica’s team. They do this for agents, they will help you. What’s the best way Justin that somebody should reach out if they go gosh, I would love to consider doing this.
Justin Ball 49:44 Yeah, certainly our our email addresses and our phone number are on the website. Mine is justin.ball@remax.net you’re welcome to use the website there’s a request information form. We’re avidly On Facebook, Instagram, Jessica ball homes. If you also have any referrals for the Peoria area, you’re you’re welcome to reach out to us. And we would be happy to treat your clients wonderfully as well in there.
D.J. Paris 50:14 I think it’s great. And I’m just excited for after all these years of doing the show to have my first hometown guest on the episode, which is a very exciting for me, because I have very fond memories of Korea. So if there is anyone out there who either has clients looking to move to Central Illinois, or maybe you already live in central Illinois, and you’re looking to work with a top agent, Justin and Jessica, from from the from Remax traitors Unlimited, would be honored to speak to and we also found out that their office, there’s a, I used to see a doctor, actually in the building that Justin and Jessica work at, which is particularly cute for me to remember. But guys, this, this would be a team that that I would consider partnering with. And also whether you know whether it’s a referral, or even just if you’re looking to find a great Realtor in the central Illinois area, they are your team. So definitely reach out to them. And you can also find them on their website, Jessica ball homes.com. But definitely check out the book. This is the first of its kind. This is a conversation that as soon as brokerages start thinking about this, you’re gonna hear a lot more about it. So I feel this is a great opportunity to get ahead of the curve. And I also we’re launching a new show on our podcast in the next couple of weeks. And I can’t really I don’t want to reveal it quite yet, just because we’re the name may change. But it’s going to be a news focused show. And I’m really excited to be announcing that shortly. However, I want to get you guys back on that show, because I want our journalist to do a deep dive. And he really, he’ll he’ll be a great, great asset to have a better even deeper conversation about this topic. So again, succession planning for real estate agents is the book, visit our e succession.com. also reach out to Justin and Jessica in the event that you want them to help you figure out succession or finding a successor. Also, just reach out to them. If you have any sort of business, they would love to earn your referrals, just Cabala homes.com. Justin, thank you so much for being on the show is really a lot of fun to talk to a fellow purion. And also just love the love succession planning. I’m so excited that for you guys. And I hope that we can sell a lot of books for you, because I think this will end up making agents on both sides of the transaction, a tremendous living. So definitely keep it in mind and on behalf of our audience want to thank Justin for showing up providing a tremendous amount of value. And on behalf of Justin and myself, we want to thank our audience for sticking around listening to our episode and we ask that you just do two quick things to help us continue to grow. Number one, tell a friend I think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Justin, maybe somebody who’s nearing retirement, or maybe somebody who’s brand new to the business who could use a mentorship or an apprenticeship, send them a link to this episode. Best way to do that is just go to keeping it real pod.com all of our episodes you can stream right there. And then also please leave us a review we could really really, it really helps it’s helpful for us to understand what we do well what we could improve upon. So whatever app you might be listening to this in if you are listening via some sort of app, leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. It really helps us get better and better. So Justin, thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thank you
One Million Download And Special Announcement!!
Feb 25, 2022
Can you believe we just hit our 1 millionth download? To celebrate this event we’re announcing a new show on our network (drumroll, please!). Thanks to everyone for helping us grow! We love our listeners!
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:12 Hello, everyone, and welcome to keeping it real. The largest podcast made for real estate agents buy real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide and host. Today is a quick and special episode, we do not have any guests, or any major topics of discussion around how to build your real estate business, or how to learn from top agents who have already built their business. So what are we doing today? Well, we just wanted to spend a few minutes and give you an update on some things that are going on here at the show that I think are very exciting. But I know if I were a listener, which I’m sort of not because I’m the host, but our listeners I suspect would like to know about. So this will be a very quick episode, I appreciate you sticking with us through it, because I think it’s some exciting and cool stuff. But I sorry, at first that you downloaded this episode thinking you were going to hear from a top producer, and this one you’re not, you’re just going to hear from me. I am definitely not a top producer. I’m not a producer at all. But I am wanted first on behalf of everyone here at our show to say thank you. We do this a lot. We say a lot of things. But we really, really mean it. And the whole reason we do this show is because we have listeners, right? And we started the show, we actually had to go back and look it up. Because people asked me how how old is the show. And I’m like, I don’t know, five years, something like that? Well, it turns out, it’s four years and nine months old as of today, which we’re nearing the latter part of February of 2022. So it’s almost five years old. And we I never thought that I would continue with it for as long as I have, because I just didn’t think anyone would be that interested, quite frankly, I’m so grateful that the audience has continued to grow. And in fact, in the last six months, we also just looked up some of these statistics, our audience size has grown by almost two times. And we’re just and we don’t spend money on advertising. So this is strictly because of you guys. So I have to say thank you, because you’re the exact reason why we have got to almost 350 episodes in that amount of time. So thank you for continuing to tell other agents about the show. And that’s the only thing that we really ever asked of our audience is to tell other agents about us. We also want to say thank you, of course to all of our advertisers and sponsors, who support our show and help keep the lights on. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to keep doing this. And we have added additional members to our team based on some of the revenue that we receive from our sponsors. So please, everyone listening support our sponsors, they support us, you support us. They’re great sponsors. We handpick them, we’re so so honored to have sponsors on the show, because it allows us to do more shows. So thank you to all of the sponsors. So thanks. Also to our staff, I really have to single out zonna, who is our producer and our casting director, she’s behind the scenes, you probably don’t know her, unless you’ve been a guest on our show, or that you’ve maybe reached out to our show, she answers all viewer mail or email or different social media communication, she coordinates all of the interviews, she does the pre interviews, once the episode is over, she then post produces the episode, she creates a video version and audio version. And just really honestly does about 90% of all of the work that is needed to put out the show. And she gets very little fanfare credit. So on behalf of all the listeners, we want to thank Donna, she’s amazing. And she’s really helped keep me on track and taken our podcast to the next level. But the real reason that I there’s actually two reasons that I’m doing this episode and it’s, well, we’re always want to say thank you. But these are a couple of very special things that we wanted to talk about. The first is and this is more of a self serving thing of patting ourselves on our backs. But we thought it would be kind of cool to let the audience in, we recently crossed over a million downloads. And for a show that does very little marketing, very basically no marketing. This is why I’m so grateful to our audience to everyone listening because you’re the reason that we got to a million downloads. I could have I could create an episode every day. But if nobody listened, we would never be aware we are now so we are so excited to cross over million downloads. And just to give you another statistic that we thought was really cool. So, again,
we’ve actually crossed over a million downloads before in the past. We’re not exactly sure when because the statistics of podcasts are really goofy. It’s really hard to track but we know for sure that we have eight official over a million downloads. We think we’re actually a lot higher than that. But either way it’s a major accomplishment for For us, and, and it doesn’t really mean anything, we’re going to keep doing the show, even if we never got to a million downloads. But it is kind of a cool little number that we’re very proud of. So thank you, again for continuing to get us to that number. And hopefully, we’ll be at 2 million and who knows how long that’ll take, but we’ll keep making episodes. Also, we had the other statistic I thought was pretty interesting was that we’ve had over 115,000 people download a at least one episode, whether they listened, you know, on a mobile device, or via our website, or, you know, maybe they saw it on YouTube or wherever, over over 115,000. And I’m assuming most of those people are realtors. So if we assume that most of them are realtors, you know that that’s, you know, I don’t know, maybe 7% of all realtors have checked out our show. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but it’s probably true enough. And we’re really grateful to think that so many agents have found value in our show. And again, thanks to you guys for telling other realtors about us. We don’t hardly do any marketing. So the only way that people find out is by you know, typically than they find us online. We’ve been blessed to be featured on I think over 30 best real estate podcast lists online. And so people find us that way. So thank you to anyone who ever wrote kind word about us online.
So anyway, that was those were pretty exciting. But the other piece of exciting news that I wanted to get to is we have a new show that we are launching and the first episode should be available either this week or next. I have to ask his honor, because I don’t pay too much attention to when the shows actually air. But we are really excited. We recently had on a guest chris Christie Mae shore, who herself has a podcast, which I really encourage everyone to check out. She does it three times a week. It’s called fired up. And it is excellent. And because Christa Mesa is excellent. She’s a top producer. She herself is just a powerhouse of marketing, and branding, and teaching agents how to grow their business. A lot of it’s through virtual means or social media ways of doing things. She’s unbelievable. And if you haven’t listened to her episode, which was like, I don’t know, five or six episodes back, definitely go check it out. It’s awesome. And we got such incredible feedback from it, that we and because our audience has has really grown, and we have great sponsors, we’re like we want to expand the show. So we offered an opportunity to Krista to partner together and create her own show where we’re going to give her carte blanche to do anything she wants, she’s going to talk to you guys and her whole Oh, I should tell you what the name of the show is. So it’s going to be called since Chris, this podcast is called fired up, we thought we should come up with something that’s kind of adjacent to that. So we’re calling it little sparks. So little sparks with Chris Demacia is going to debut on our show and by on our network. But it’s also going to go through our our own feed. So if you are a subscriber to keeping it real, you don’t have to do anything. You’ll continue to get all of my episodes, and then crystal will be doing regular episodes. And it’ll just come you know, just as my episodes show up in your in your feed, they’re going to be shorter, bite sized and chock full of just great actionable content. If you know Krista, if you listen to the episode, that is what she is all about. And she is awesome. And she has way more energy than I do. So she is just a powerhouse of talent. And she’s just killing it. And so she is such a nice, lovely person we are could not be more thrilled to invite her to be a half her own. This is actually the first time we’re giving somebody their own show. And so be excited for that. I hope everyone’s excited. I know we are. So the first episode, like I said will go live either this week, it’s already been recorded, because Chris does that kind of person. And it’s already ready to go. But they were waiting on me to do this announcement. So here I am. So the first show that we’ll be launching is called little sparks with Chris Demacia. It’ll be coming out shortly. And you’ll have to let us know what you think I already know you’re gonna love it because I wouldn’t bring anyone on this pot network who wasn’t unbelievable. And she is awesome. I’m a marketing guy. And I just think she’s got a lot to say. And it’s all good stuff. So anyway, very excited. And we’ll be sending out more information on that. And I’ll tease you a little bit we have actually two more shows that are almost ready to launch as well. So I won’t tell you much about them. But they’re going to be very different from Christmas show. As we realized how much more traffic we were getting to the podcast, we wanted to introduce additional points of view. Right. So I have my own point of view, but it’s kind of limited, right? I I just I mean I don’t have the experience of somebody like Krista and so we have a couple of other people that we’ve been eyeing for years now. And we now have the ability to expand the show and so we have a couple of other shows that These are not going to be DJ. And so and so these are going to be their own shows, and they’re gonna be very different from what I do, they’re going to be real estate related or real estate. Well, they’re always gonna be real estate related, but the topics are going to be different, but we think it’s exactly what you guys want to hear. So we are really excited, I can’t reveal the names of the other two yet, just because we’re still getting it all figured out. But they are basically ready to go as well. So be on the lookout for me to make a few additional announcements. And we are so proud to be partnering with some of these industry titans. To come up with new shows for our network, it’s turning into a network, which is so funny to us. Because it was just this idea that I had, you know, five years ago, I was like somebody needs to do a podcast where they interview top producers, and I guess it was me who did it. So anyway, I just wanted to say thanks again. And if you do want to continue listening and supporting our show, please continue to tell a friend, I’ve already said that a million times today. So thank you in advance. Also, really, this really, really helps us. And it’s actually even easier than thinking of a friend to tell about our show is just leave us a review, go on whatever podcast app you might be listening to. And let us know what you think of the show, we check that stuff, we read the comments, we hope that you really like it and want to give us five stars, but we understand that not everyone, people have constructive criticism and say, Hey, do less of this or more of that, that is so important to us. So um, feel free to, you know, read us a review, it also helps to with podcast directories. So the more reviews just like with Amazon or other sites that sell things, you know, the different podcast directories, they don’t know what shows are good or not. They just look at how many people are listening and who’s writing reviews and what the engagement is. So the more engagement you can show for our show, the more people they’re going to share it with. So again, it’s a three second thing, but we really would appreciate it if you would go into whatever app you’re listening to the show and right now and leave us a review. And also please contact our show directly. Again, we get you’d be shocked we at this point, we don’t really go out and ask for guests, because we’re fortunate enough to, to receive a lot of inquiries. But a ton of the people that we feature on the show are because listeners write in and they say you have to talk to this woman, she’s killing it, or this guy or whoever. This person is really doing things differently. So please let us know if there’s anyone in your local market or just somebody that you’re really, really excited to hear their story. And maybe you don’t feel like you could ask them yourself, I will ask them. So let us know if there’s anyone we should be reaching out to. And also check out our website, you know, very few people ever visit our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. And that’s a place where you can contact zonna through our contact form and let us know maybe you’re a sponsor and you want to be part of our show, or maybe you just have a guest suggestion. Or maybe you just want to listen to episodes, you can do it all right there.
Alright guys, well, you’ve listened to me long enough. I appreciate you guys so much. And when I say guys, of course, I mean, every single person that listens to this show. We are so honored to serve you. And we hope we can continue to serve you well on into the future. So check out Christopher shores, little sparks, which is coming out this week or next, and be on the lookout for these other shows. And again, just Thanks from all of us. This is really fun, and we hope that it’s fun for you as well. All right, we’ll see everybody on the next episode.
How To Write Better Buyer Offers • Cody Tuma
Feb 24, 2022
Cody Tuma the founder of OfferForm talks about the beginning of his career in real estate and about his first sale. Cody also talks about how he built his production which led him into building his team. Next, Cody describes the way he establishes rapport with leads which helped him develop a successful business and how he started systematizing his business once it started to grow. Last, Cody discusses how he started OfferForm and how it helps agents write better offers.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Cody Touma from offer form. Before we get to Cody. Just a couple of quick announcements one. Thanks for listening to our show. Thanks for supporting us. If you want to help us keep growing, we just ask that you do two quick things. Number one, tell another realtor about our show. Think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers and innovators like Cody Touma, send them a link to our website keeping it real pod.com. If they are an avid podcast listener, just have them pull up their podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button, we would appreciate it and second, please review our show that really helps us number one, learn what our audience wants and also how we can improve but also helps us with the search engine visibility in the different podcast directories. So if you’re listening to this show on Apple podcasts or iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora wherever. Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. We really appreciate it. But enough about that right? You’re not here to listen to me ask for things you’re here to me to interview our guest. So right now let’s bring on Cody Touma.
Today on the show, we have Katie Tula 541 home sales also premier property in Oregon. And he’s also the founder of offer form.me, which is a revolutionary new way to gather offer information. Obviously super exciting to talk about right now with how challenging it can be for buyer representation to get offers noticed and written especially if you’re doing multiple offers. Anyone who’s working with buyers right now knows that struggle. And also investors tend to know that struggle all the time, because they’re always writing offer after offer. But let me tell you about Cody first. So Cody was raised and born, born and raised, not raised and born born and raised in Bend, Oregon. And he graduated the University of Oregon in 2015. He began his real estate career shortly after, and He’s doubled his production year over year, he started a team hired to admin in the last year, which has really helped him boost production even higher, he discovered another passion in real estate and has ventured into the investment side within the last few years. And his most recent venture is in the software space, which is offer form.me, which is a tool designed to help real estate agents write better, more competitive offers. So I want everybody except for the people that are driving right now to check out offer form.me To learn more, and we’re going to be talking about what offer form does. But I love the fact that we’re not just talking to a tech owner with a with a product or a service for realtors, but also an agent who is a top producer who said I need to build something to help with my own offers. So what to Cody, welcome to the show. We’re super excited to have you.
Cody Tuma 4:30 Thanks, TJ really appreciate you having me on here and excited to talk to you and your audience about kind of my career and kind of how I got started on everything and what what led me ultimately to offer form.
D.J. Paris 4:42 Yeah, let’s let’s start at the beginning. So, you know, and by the way, you know, this is you’ve really accomplished a lot in the I guess we’ll say seven years or so maybe six years that you’ve been been in this business. And now you’re starting, you know, this this tech firm, which I love because I think so many Tools end up being born out of necessity or frustration. And so I’m excited for us to start at the beginning, learn how you grew your business, and then to a point where you’re like, I gotta build my own tool, and oh, yeah, I’ll make it available for other agents to check out. So let’s start at the beginning. So you graduated school? And then did you know immediately that you wanted to be in real estate? Or did it take some time to figure that out?
Cody Tuma 5:21 I had absolutely no idea. Prior to graduating school, I was actually kind of running this online e commerce business. And it was just kind of like this side hustle. And then it just kind of turned into like a business that really wasn’t making much money, but I just liked in it, so I just kept doing it. And then it just kind of fizzled out as I graduated school. And then I was like, well shoot, what am I going to do now? Like, I don’t really want to keep doing that ecommerce thing. And I, you know, I’m probably going to move back to bend where I’m from just because, you know, I got friends and family there, and I’ll go back there, and I’ll figure it out. And I just kind of wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. And I started just kind of looking around and maybe getting a job somewhere at a startup or something. And I talked to a friend of mine who was actually a real estate agent. And she like I kind of like had picked her brain. I was like, you know, hey, look, you know, how’s this real estate thing going? You know, and she pretty much had told me she’s like, Yeah, you know, it’s great. You know, I make about $80,000 a year and I thought to myself, $1,000 You know, that’s, that’s not too bad. That’s not that I could do. Yeah, not bad. And, you know, I was asking her, you know, how’s the freedom is going and you know, you’re your own boss, you got all this flexibility. I was like, you know, maybe maybe I’ll just do real estate until I figure out my next move. And what I want to do next, because I’ve always kind of been drawn towards tech. That’s originally what I went to school for as I thought I was going to go to school and be like this computer programmer. And then I realized I didn’t want to do that. I was actually just going to get into like, the business side of things. So ended up just doing business. And then yeah, so graduating and talking to this agent. So I was like, okay, cool. Well, maybe I’ll try that. So I start taking my real estate license and takes me like, I don’t know, three, four months to do it. I just kind of keep putting it off. And it takes me a while and finally get the license. And then I ended up my brother, he tells me he’s like, hey, you know, I’m getting ready to sell my house, you want to list it? And I was like, nice. Absolutely. I would love to list your house. And so that was my first client with my brother. And I made 10,000 bucks off that commission. And I was like, wow, this is the best job ever. That was crazy.
D.J. Paris 7:24 With with family members waiting for you to
Cody Tuma 7:28 sell their house. And so I do that deal. And then about a month goes by and I don’t have anything in the pipeline. I don’t know how to generate business. I don’t know how to be more brothers, you needed more. I need more family members. And so I was just like, wow, okay, like how do I do this, I don’t really know what to do. And so I actually ended up you know, spending the next like four or five months just like not doing dollar productive activity things. I was like working on my business card. I was working on my website working on just all these things that don’t actually generate business. And so finally, I was like, Okay, I gotta do something different. So I ended up going to I was just like, independent. I didn’t have any sort of mentor I just before I listened to podcast, I literally had no clue what I was doing. And so finally I ended up going to a different brokerage, I was approached by somebody who was at like, this top brokerage, that is from Portland, Oregon, and they’re moving the band and like Cody, you got to be a part of this, you got to listen to this guy, you know, he’s got a huge team in Portland. And so I kind of got inspired by what by what he was doing and kind of like told me how he was doing his business and how he like had started his foundation on online leads and Zillow leads and all that and he’s doing like 80 million a year in production. And it’s like, yeah, come Come work for Premier Property Group. And you know, I’ll kind of take you on my wing and kind of tell you a little bit you know, what I’m doing and, you know, whatnot. So ended up going hanging my license up from your property group and this sky, Stephen Hisar, he just kind of like had inspired me to basically just do things a little bit differently than how I had been doing a little bit more structure. So I started ended up paying for online leads. So I was like, Alright, I’m gonna take all the money I have and dumping into online leads and I think I was spending like three to $4,000 a month on online leads, I was like, I’m going all in let’s see what happens. And then the leads just started just flooding in and one thing that I’ve always pride prided myself in as always being available for my clients and always picking up the phone. And that’s kind of what helped build my success is I get a lead that would come in off of Zillow, and I you know, talk to them listen to what they need go look at a house with them and then I would just stay in that constant communication with them and just always picking up the phone and one deal turned into another and another and like my, my first year you know, I’d only close like a few houses but then the second year, probably Epson started the pickup. And then in the third year, it was like, wow, okay, I’ve really got something rolling here. And I think my third year, I ended up doing 10 million in sales volume, just by myself as a solo agent started, like looking at different, like lead sources started branching out and calling expireds and fizz bows. And then it started to get to a point where I was like, wow, I’ve got, you know, so much going on here, I need to kind of expand this. So then I was like, Okay, how can I expand this, and I had heard, like, heard people like bringing on like, you know, assistants, and transaction coordinators, and I’ve always been of the mindset of, if I can do something, do it myself. And so like, I used to take all my own fists, all my own photos in the beginning, all my own videos like all that, and it would take so much time to take those photos. And those videos, and I started to learn the power of leverage. It’s like, okay, I can spend four hours photographing this house, or I can pay somebody you know, to do that, while I can be, you know, maybe doing some outbound prospecting calls, or whatnot, and have somebody else do that, while while I, you know, work on gathering more business. So, yeah, so I just worked on continuing building the team or building up my production and eventually started a team.
D.J. Paris 11:19 Yeah, a couple things I just wanted to touch on that, that I think are really interesting and important. First, just most immediately, that you were just chatting about, which is leveraging you know, other other people to help you with the parts of your business that, you know, whether you enjoy them or not, maybe you recognize is not the best use of time. And, you know, photographer, I think probably most people don’t take their own, most agents don’t probably take their own photos, because number one, they won’t do as good of a job. As you know, as a professional photographer. However, if you do have that skill set, where you’re taking unbelievable photos, it’s very difficult to then say, well, I want it, I want somebody else to do it, I’m willing to pay a few 100 bucks or, you know, and that was my problem. Well, sure. And that is a legitimate thing. So I think this is a really important conversation that I really would like to have on on a future episode, which is, how do you go from doing everything yourself, which you know, and I’m Cody, in particular, I’m sort of speaking to Cody, but anyone who’s listening understands this, because I struggle with the same sort of thing, which is, I know, when I do when I do certain things, and I’m going to do them better than I suspect, the vast majority of people that I could even hire to do it. And, and it becomes tricky to sort of let go of that, that control because you know, it’s going to be done correctly. But then that again, it’s like, you almost need like a third objective third party to look and go, Hey, that’s great, you like doing that. And that’s fine, except you’re spending, you know, four hours a week on it, or whatever it might be. And, you know, if you gave it to someone else, and maybe if they only did 80% as good a job as you is that good enough, which it might be it might not be, but if it is well, and you pay a little bit for that, boy, you just saved yourself, you know, a whole bunch of time, because you’re probably going to make more than $200 in doing business building activities in those four hours. So I know that struggle, I have it myself with certain parts of what I do. And so I think it’s really important for agents to always be objectively sort of looking at their time, and making sure that, you know, are they engaged because it can feel really exciting and fun, and fulfilling to do creative things that aren’t necessarily business building, like taking photos, videos. I mean, it’s fun, it’s exciting. It’s probably a passion of yours. So I understand. And there’s value in that. And there’s value in doing things that are really rewarding and fun. But then it’s like, okay, well, but I’m spending a lot of time on it, and it doesn’t really generate business. So I understand the struggle. So I applaud you for it has taken me years and years and years to even allow anybody to do any part of my business. Because I’m like, no one else can do it the way I can. And the fact is, that’s simply not true. But also, it just required me to like, you know, let go a little bit. So that that was one thing I wanted to mention. I’m just curious was that struggle for you to really sort of give up some of that control. And
Cody Tuma 14:17 it definitely was, and I feel like it would have been easier if I didn’t possess the skill set to do photos and to do video, if I, if I didn’t know how to do it at all, it would have been so much easier because I would have just hired it out from the beginning. But because I didn’t know how to do those things. I was like, Okay, I’m going to take the time to do it. Right. And all that other stuff. So it made it that much harder, I think.
D.J. Paris 14:38 Yeah, I also want to go back to lead generation. So what I think you’ve done is quite remarkable. And you got you sort of sort of went through this quickly and I want to step back and just slow it down just just for a moment because buying internet leads, you know, it’s such a people have such a intense response, you know, it’s either oh my god, it’s the greatest thing, or doesn’t work, you know, you get people typically on. And I think most people go well, it works for some people, it doesn’t work for me. But to me, and I’m not saying everyone should do internet leads, because I don’t think they’re for everybody, of course, but it is a skill set that can be developed. And what’s remarkable is that, you know, in depending on whether you’re getting exclusive leads, or if they’re sending them to three or four agents that you’re sort of competing with. And they certainly are difficult. But I’m curious on how did you find making those calls? These are people that don’t know, like, or trust you, at least for you know, on the first call, right? They don’t know who you are. Maybe they’re open minded, and you sound like a nice enough person. But did you find what was this? Not that you have to give away your secret sauce, but what did you find is the was sort of the, the way that you got through to some of these, and then we can get into fizz bows and expireds? Because to me, those are those are like jumping into a lion’s den without any clothing. And you’re like, please do not attack me. Yeah, because but but to have success in those people do they absolutely do. So just curious if you had any suggestions for what worked for you, and what works for you for dealing with online leads?
Cody Tuma 16:14 Yeah, for the online leads, I would say the single most important thing you can do above all else is call within seconds. As soon as that lead comes in, you press the call button. I mean, that is even if you’re terrible on the phone, the fact that you are getting back to somebody that quickly like I don’t know how many times I’ve called someone within seconds of them pressing the inquire button, and they’re like, Wow, that was really fast. And like, I think that alone shows people that like wow, this, this agent cares about his business, he’s on top of it, and he’s doing everything he can to make sure that he takes care of his clients. So that was the single most important thing that I did that really differentiated me and helped me stand out from maybe some other agents that work online leads. And then another big thing is when I get that lead on the phone is just, you know, finding some commonalities, finding some common ground, and, you know, building that rapport with that lead. And, you know, the my second biggest thing is, you know, once you know, we’ve kind of had a little bit of conversation is to, you know, if they want to look at a house, you know, even if they’re not pre approved, I didn’t ask them if they’re pre approved, I just want to get in front of these people. And I want to build that relationship with them right away. Because I think like being face to face, it’s easy to tell someone no over the phone, and go work with other people if you just only talk to them on the phone. But if you’ve actually shown looked at houses with this person with this agent, and you’ve taken the time with your client and whatnot, I think it’s a lot easier to build that relationship and someone wants to work with you a lot more if you’re, you know, actually getting face to face with them.
D.J. Paris 17:46 We used to have Zillow, in fact, they’re likely coming back and we’re very excited about that. But we had Zillow on the on our chauffeur for about a year, they’d come on every month and talk about best practices with dealing with their leads. And they said the best thing that anybody can do when they, as soon as the you know, for the live transfer leads, they already sort of pre qualified them a little bit on the phone, and then they pass them through with you know, this phone transfer. And then they would always say, just get the appointment scheduled at whatever they want to go see. Don’t ask them about pre approval, just exactly like you were saying, they want something, give that to them. And then you can always circle back to all the things that you need, and you can always cancel the appointment. That’s also the other thing. It’s like, Hey, by the way, oh, you’re not qualified. You know what, let’s let’s cancel it for now. Let’s get your pre approved and we’re going to rebook it or whatever. Yeah. And then I have one more question because to me, I just I love the courage of calling for sale by owners and expired listings, because and maybe I’ve just exaggerated it in my mind that they’re all just like, Screw you. Are you calling me? But I will tell you a funny story. So this just happened two days ago. So our owner has a property in Las Vegas. It’s a single family home. And they’re in the process of moving back to Chicago anyway, so they’re put there he’s and he’s an agent here in Illinois, not in Las Vegas. So he just for fun decided to put his to see what kind of offers he might get because the real estate market in Las Vegas is nuts right now. He decided to put his home for sale by owner think he has a friend that’s a broker out there. So anyway, he just they put it on as a for sale by owner and I go how many phone calls did you get within 24 hours because you know as as for our listeners, if you’re not aware, you can subscribe to services. There’s lots of them that will send you for sale by owners and expireds every single day. So he got put on the list for the next day for all those services. He said he got 34 phone calls from realtors and the Las Vegas market is particularly goofy so I don’t know that that’s representative of everyone in the country is experienced when they use when they go for sale by owner. But I’m curious what was what what works for you calling expireds and fizz bows which these are people who are either actively probably a little pissed off at their last agent if it expired, or there are people who said I don’t want work with an agent at all anyway, on the Fizbo side, so just curious on how you get through to those people.
Cody Tuma 20:05 Yeah, it’s kind of a similar approach to how I work might with my online leads, I want to sit down with them in person like I, I listened to their frustrations, you know, usually I’ll call them up, and they’ll tell me I’m not listing or, you know, they’re just, they’re just very angry because they had such a poor experience with their last stage. And either the last agent didn’t, you know, fulfill the expectations that were promised or, you know, they just dropped the ball somewhere. They’re very frustrated with real estate agents, but I think the statistic is like 80%, or something of expired listings will relist within like, the next 90 days, or six months or something like that, total. And, and so like, what I want to do is I want to be one of the first agents they talk to, or at least be in the group of agents that they talk to. So I just really work on just like, call them up, and you know, tell them, hey, basically, you know, give them my scale, hey knows, go to five for one home sells and notice your property recently went off off the market. You know, I was wondering, you know, what kind of, can you tell me a little bit about what happened, there is the property still for sale, and then just kind of, you know, just talk to them, and then just do whatever I can to just try and get that appointment and to get face to face with those people. And then when I get face to face with them, and then dive into more of the details, and then they really go on and tell you all their agent, blah, blah, blah, and they just really just lay it on. Yeah, and then I just kind of, you know, come from it from like a value out of you know, how I’m going to be different. And, you know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And it’s it’s it really is just, you know, having the resilience to just keep making the calls and to keep going on these appointments, because you’re not going to get every single one of them. But, you know, even if you’re you know, you make 100 calls and you get 10 appointments and five listings, you know, it’s five listings, it’s five listings it didn’t have, and in my market, the average price is 700 grand. So, you know, that’s a pretty decent sized commission check. And so,
D.J. Paris 21:56 yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. And you said something that I just want to sort of reiterate, because it’s quite brilliant, actually, what Cody just said, when when he makes the first phone call, you know, he does get really curious. And I suspect almost nobody says the phrase that you used, which is, Hey, I saw your home just, you know, for example, an expired I saw that went off the market, can you tell me what happened? That’s amazing. Because at that point, those people do you have a story to tell? And and like you were saying, usually it’s like, well, our agent wasn’t very good, or they dropped the ball or blah, blah, blah, whatever. They’re gonna want to vent about it a little bit. But just to say, can you tell me what happened is really an unassuming, disarming question, because you’re not saying, hey, I want your business, hey, what’s the deal? You want to work with an agent, but you know, you’re just like, hey, tell me your story. And I mean, that is a brilliant line, I really want to honor you for that. Because I think that sentence in and of itself is huge. So anyone listening, you’re making those kinds of calls, get get the story, and they’re probably way more willing to share that with you than going up and asking them for the listing. Write that in there. That’s really, really brilliant. I love that. So I just wanted to pinpoint that little phrase, because I think 99% of agents wouldn’t think to ask that.
Cody Tuma 23:15 Yeah, right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And, you know, if I, I just been so busy with everything else, like I, I like a lot of agents, you know, you got to time block it, you got to put it on the calendar, and you got to set a time that you got to dedicate, you know, you’re gonna make your prospecting calls, your expired your physical calls, you know, every single day or Monday through Friday, or whatever, at a dedicated time period. Because honestly, like, when I sit down, and I dedicate, and I make those calls, I get about one to two appointments per hour. I mean, that’s not bad. So it’s incredible. Incredible, it just, it just takes the time, you know, you just gotta you know, just do it. And you
D.J. Paris 23:51 got to keep calling to Right. Like, if you don’t have a person right away, how long will you pursue them before just giving up entirely?
Cody Tuma 23:59 I’ll usually continue to follow up until they tell me not to.
D.J. Paris 24:04 Brilliant. So you probably have people that you have left a lot of messages for. And yeah, and if they’re annoyed by it, well, they’ll tell you or if they’re, they don’t want to hear from you. Again, they’ll tell you or they’ll just keep banking those those calls or messages and go. And this person is really persistent. And some people, some people really are impressed by that level of of attention and persistence. So anyway, I love that. But I know we want to get on to other things. But I just wanted to really honor You just gave our audience a tremendous amount of value, even in just the first half of this. And then I want to talk about you know, you mentioned sort of time blocking and now I want to switch over to systems and of course talk about offer form.me Tell us about you know the importance of systems and then how you came to develop
Cody Tuma 24:50 offer form. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So really where I first started to systematize everything that I do is when I thought about getting an assistant to help me with my production Um, and it was right after I did 10 million I was like, Well, you know, things are really starting to get busy for me, I probably should get a transaction coordinator, my broker’s, you know, hitting me up all the time saying that there’s things wrong on my paperwork, and I don’t have time to go fix it. I’m just like, not a paperwork person, I don’t like doing the admin stuff. I was like, Alright, it’s time to hire someone out, do the tasks that I don’t want to do, and I don’t have time to do anymore. So that’s when I actually looked at getting a virtual assistant. And I had no idea I’ve never had an employee before, I’ve never had a virtual assistant or anything like that. So when I got this virtual assistant, I pretty much was like, I need to systematize everything that I do basically write it down on every single step step that I do. And I used a project management tool called Trello. And I made sure it would list out every single task that I do from when I get a contract accepted, you know, to open up escrow to make sure earnest monies and some confirmations to buyer. I mean, there’s like 30 steps involved with, you know, with these different tasks, depending on what happens. So I basically just lay it out in the entire task list. And I would record videos for this virtual assistant on all of these different steps and all these things to do. And it just was a game changer for my business. Like I pretty much didn’t have to do any admin stuff. Any any paperwork that was all done by my assistant, and it just made my life so much easier. And I was like, wow, okay, this is this is amazing. And then the real estate boom of the last 18 months, it really started to ramp things up. And I’ve been a single agent up until this point, and I was just, I was working with so many different buyers and whatnot. And what I had started to notice is that I was writing up offers, for I have one client that we wrote 25 offers for this poor family. first time homebuyers before they were actually able to get into a house. And it was like the same questions that I was asking them over and over again, it’s like Alright, guys, what do you guys want to do for purchase price? What do you guys want to do for earnest money? Okay, do you guys want to ask for any personal property on this one? Do you want to do the appraisal gap clause? Do you want to waive the inspection? How many days do you want the inspection contingency to be I mean, there’s so many different data points and information that you need to gather when writing up an offer. Like man, you know, there’s, there’s got to be a better way to do this. And so I basically just went and made a basic form online to gather some of the basic information. And it was just like the basic stuff, the spelling of their name, the address and the purchase price, earnest money and closing date, some really basic questions. And I started sending out this form to my buyers, like, Hey, guys, you know, like, based upon what we talked about, please fill this out. And as soon as I get that filled out, I’ll get writing up the offer. And so I would start sending it out to my buyers. And none of my buyers, like said it was weird. None of my buyers complained about it, it was actually like, positively received. And I was like, okay, yeah, this is really, this is really great. And then it’s really helping me systematize the process, because I can send that form out to them. And then I can be showing other houses. And it was it was great. And then a friend of mine, actually my business partner in offer form is longtime friend of mine, he actually had came over to my place, and he’s asked me about my real estate business him and I’d always talked about starting a business together. And I was telling about kind of how I’m gathering up offer information. And he’s like, that is amazing. Like I have had such a poor experience on the buyer side with my realtor getting my information wrong, because we talked on the phone, or it’s just so much back and forth over texting, you know, upwards of an hour, two hours, there’s just so much back and forth. And he’s like, if this would have existed when I was in the buying process, this would have made my life so much easier. And he’s like, we need to take this. And we need to make a business out of this to help other realtors and other consumers with this. And that’s really where offer form was born. So we took that idea of what I was using in my business and really expanded upon it. And now what offer form is and its current Inception is this beautiful form tool that real estate agents can send to their buyers. And on these forums, it’s got all the questions and stuff that I was mentioning the buyers information, contact info, earnest money, personal property, if they want to have an appraisal gap class, all these different things on there. And what’s really cool and what I know as an agent branding is so important. On this offer form. The buyer or the the agents contact information is in the top right hand corner, it’s got their bio and stuff if they if the buyer were to click the agent’s Profile link there shows them their bio and all that information on there and anytime they can click to call their agent if they have questions on the offer form. And then we’ve incorporated so much education into each of these questions that like on earnest money. For example, we have like a 35 to 45 second animated explainer video explaining what earnest money is. I don’t know how many times it’s probably something I’m asked all the time. What earnest money is at And so what’s super cool though, so we know agents are lazy. So we had offer form designed all these templates to be totally out of the box ready to go, you know, you just send it off and it’s got all this education. But for agents that would rather kind of make it more personalized, I can come in there and on these forms like with earnest money for example, when I’m asking the buyer for earnest money, I can go in there, create a video of me explaining earnest money right there on the form. So I’m, you know, it’s my face me explaining it, you know, hey, here in the central Oregon market, we’re seeing about one to 2% of the purchase price for earnest money. It’s a good faith deposit for the seller, here’s how it functions, here’s how you can get it back. And it just was really personalized conversation explainer of what earnest money is. So as your buyers filling out this form, they’re seeing that they’re like, like, wow, you know, Cody is this expert, he really knows what he’s talking about, you know, in regards to real estate, and it’s super cool, too, because it allows the buyers to fill this out on their own terms, because buyers are super busy, everyone’s super busy nowadays. Because staff, normally you’re just texting back and forth, or you’re on this long call, then it’s like, oh, shoot, I forgot to ask them Do they want the washer and dryer. And so it’s like all this back and forth banter with gathering up this information. Whereas with offer form, they can just fill it all out at their own leisure and be able to input that and get it whenever and when agents are out showing houses. They don’t have to, you know, be back and forth texting either, because they can just get that link from their buyer and get all that information.
D.J. Paris 31:26 So this is really solves a number of problems. One being all the back and forth. We’ll call it more casual communication, phone calls texting email, where oftentimes we are working with your clients or by our clients in particular, although sellers as well. There’s just a lot of different channels of communication you have. Oh, wait, did they text me that? Or did they email it to me? Or did they leave it on my voicemail? And you’re just kind of going back and making sure you have the most current? sort of answer for what’s the purchase? What do you want to offer? What what do you want to offer for, you know, the price, the earnest money, let’s make sure we get all the everything spelled correctly. So I think it solves a lot of that. But it also allows the agent to not have to draw something up from scratch each time. And it also gives I think the buyer the sort of a an accountability factor, so that we’re both on the same page. We know the actual right data. So we’re not worried about old data, or did you know I did they left me a voicemail, but I missed it or something? Can you talk a little bit about what the workflow is? So I’m a buyer’s agent, I take a buyer out see a property, they’re like, let’s put an offer in. So how does it work from there?
Cody Tuma 32:41 Yeah, so how how it would work from there is I would go into my dashboard as a realtor and to offer form, let me log into my account. And then I would see that we have templated forms. So we have like a standard buyer offer form, which is like the standard questions a new buyer form, which might have a little bit more education for someone who’s never bought a house before, then we’ve got another template, which is like a competitive buyer’s offer form. So if you know you’re going to be writing this offer in a super competitive market, it’s going to have tips and tricks on how to get your offer more likely accepted with things you could do shortening, contingencies, waiving contingencies, appraisal, gap clauses, escalation clauses, all these things built into that form with the competitive buyer offer form, which in this market, I mean, it’s it’s insane. I mean, there’s some properties in my market, it’s got 20 offers on it. So you’re writing so many offers out for these clients. You know, being able to have a template like that would be, you know, fantastic. I feel like for agents. And so as soon as you select which template you want to send based upon the scenario, you send it off to him, you can either text it to them, or you can email it to them, and then your buyer gets a notification on their phone or on their email or whatever. And they pull up the form. And they see this beautiful form with your, your picture and your contact information. And then the questions that they need to answer with videos and explainer text within that, and then as soon as the buyer fills all that information out, and then you get a notification as the agent, hey, you know, John and Susie just filled out their offer form. Here’s the summary page, and then you can look at that summary page. Make sure all the information looks good, plug that into your state forms. And then you can also use that as a cover letter, or the listing agent that hey, here’s the summary of our terms. And so that way, the listing agent doesn’t have to go through 55 pages of contract and they see what the terms are right there. Are
D.J. Paris 34:32 you shocked at how many agents don’t use a cover letter, especially in a multiple sort of, you know, buyer offer situation, it’s having a summary page if you do nothing else, everyone listening, create a summary page, make it really easy for the other agent to go okay, I get it and then present it to the client. So what you’ve done to is huge because I just want want to make this point I’m sure everyone’s already figuring this out. But one of the things Cody has in his forms is explained trainers, so he has the option to have information about things like earnest money, different contingencies, so that he doesn’t have to. And not that you wouldn’t educate your clients. Of course you would. But isn’t it great to systematize? Things? That same question you get asked over and over and over and over again, hey, I’ve got a little explainer video here that you can access so that you get and if you have more questions, let me know. But I wanted to create this so that you could watch it, understand it at your leisure, that’s in and of itself, a huge time saver. Aside from all the offer, technology that that existed in filling out the form, which is amazing to just the ability to say, here’s how all of this works, is gotta be just amazing. Because your clients then are directed to do their homework and watch the video and learn about it. And then you can discuss things with them. But you’re not having to have that same exact conversation over and over with, with different buyers.
Cody Tuma 35:54 And what’s amazing too, is I feel like I work with a lot of different buyers from all sorts of different backgrounds, first time homebuyers investors, so on and so forth. And this investor client that I’ve worked with, for for many years, were really close friends. And I was talking about offer for him. He’s like, Oh, you know, that’s really cool. And, you know, I was like, you know, talking about like, earnest money and stuff. And they’re like, well, that’s cool. But you know, I wouldn’t really need that. I know what earnest money is. I was like, Okay, well, can you tell me what earnest money is? He was like, yeah, it’s your down payment. And I’m like, it’s not really your down payment. So I like had to like, really, here’s what it is. So I feel like there’s a lot of like people out there that maybe have bought one or two homes, and they just assume they know what earnest money is. And they’re too prideful to ask the realtor what it is. So maybe when they’re filling out this form, they can just click that little 3545 second video and be like, Wow, okay, that’s actually what earnest money is.
D.J. Paris 36:47 Yeah, and that’s a really good point. There are, everyone thinks, Well, my client knows what it is. They haven’t asked me about it, they must know. Or they Googled it or something. And it’s like, well, a lot of times people are just embarrassed. I truly to this day, we have 800 agents, this is this is a real embarrassing revelation. But I don’t practice real estate myself, I have a license, but I don’t use it. So if you were to ask me to really explain the purpose of earnest money, I would be a I would have, I would have trouble because I would go, I don’t even get why it’s necessary doesn’t really seem to matter, at least in Illinois, like you can still get it back. And it doesn’t really seem to do anything except everybody does it. So if a client asked me that I would stroke so I’m in the business. And so the idea have of having things like that where maybe people are a little embarrassed to ask about it or they feel well I’m you know, especially if you’re buying in a higher price point, maybe there’s a bit of like, I’m feel sort of stupid, asking questions, you have the ability for them to get the answers without them feeling embarrassed to ask. And that in and of itself is awesome, too, because you’re servicing the client without putting them in a position where they’re like, um, I know, this is the fourth house I’ve bought, but I don’t really remember what earnest money is, you know, and again, we don’t we wouldn’t think that was embarrassing, but it might be to that person, they might feel embarrassed. So that’s a huge win right there. Because so much of the buying process, even if you’ve done it over and over again, as as a non agent as just, you know, a buyer and a seller. It’s we don’t remember, you know, outside of being realtors, we don’t remember the process unless you’re just you know, constantly doing it. So I love that you have those explainers. I think that is so cute. Tell us about how does offer form work? So do you charge the agent using it? Is there a is it a subscription? Yeah, is it up for use fee? How does it
Cody Tuma 38:30 work the lap glad you asked. So offer form. And what I knew as an agent going into this is I understand that agents are cheap. And agents are being pay our agents are being hit up with MLS dues, lockbox dues, educational dues, website, news overstays. I mean, so many different fees, I was like, I have to design this in a way that can we can give this away for free. And so that’s what we did with offer form is it’s actually a free product, you can use every function within offer, offer form for free, you can create forms, you can customize forms, edit them, put videos and stuff on them, and all that and it has saved me so much time in my business by using this that and in my team. Literally since we started using this on my team, literally no one else wants to go back to using any other way of gathering this data. They just send out the offer form. So it’s really great. And your audience is probably wondering, Okay, that’s great. What’s the catch? And so the catch is we have it’s like a freemium model. So the only difference between our free model and our premium model is we have referral partners built into our steps. So we’re going to have a question that says, Would you like to get a home warranty? Here’s the benefits of getting a home warranty. And if your client says yes, I’d love to get a home warranty. We get paid by a home warranty company that we’ve partnered with, for selling the home warranty. And then we have another question that says would you like to get In a free quote on homeowners insurance, which the lender is going to require this anyways, so it saves your buyer time by not having to track down their agent. And if they do want to, they can compare the quotes. So we’ve got a couple partners that were able to, you know, get a little bit on the back end. But if your client says no, they don’t want to listen to or they don’t want to hear from a warranty company or don’t want to get a insurance quote, then it’s, it’s the same exact tool, it’s totally free and super powerful.
D.J. Paris 40:27 Wow, that’s amazing. And of course, you have to, you know, make money in this business. And that is a perfectly reasonable, I don’t even want to call the trade off, because most agents don’t even offer warranties to their clients anyway. So I think having affiliate relationships and you know, with some of those providers, which are actually providing good services, to those those buyers, is makes all the sense in the world and really uniquely positions offer for them to be that’s that freemium sort of model. And here’s the good news guys. You can go use this right now just go visit offer form.me. An offer form.me and test it out, use it, try it. I absolutely think it’s brilliant. And the fact that it’s free, you know, with with some of these affiliate deals attached to them, I think is still the deal of a century. Every other software provider I know has subscription fees. And I know that you might even have some premium options as well, that that you’re rolling out. But for now, this is this is how it works. It’s Free For All agents to try and use. And again, I just absolutely think it’s such an incredible value. Not just because it’s, you know, cost effective being free. But it’s also just going to save you and your time, and all the time it takes to to build all of these tasks that are not. I mean, technically that I guess they ultimately result in the commission, but they don’t result in business building activities. So I love it. So what’s the best way that somebody can test offer form out?
Cody Tuma 41:59 Yeah, so we are almost ready for people to start testing it, we’re not quite there yet, we have not officially launched yet. We are officially planning on launching this within the next one to three months, just depending on on how quickly we’re pushing our developers hard to get this thing out the door because we’ve got agents beating down our door basically to try this thing out. And people reaching out even from Canada saying, Wow, this sounds amazing. I want to use this here in Canada, and I and all that. But yes, if somebody wants to get on our beta list and get on our list for when we launch, just go to offer form.me, we’ve got a coming soon button there, you just click that, put your information. And as soon as we’re ready to get you to start using the product, we’re going to send you out an email and I can’t wait for to see all the beautiful forms that you guys create. And what’s really cool is we want this to be a huge big community. So you actually have the ability to share these forms with the offer form community with other users with your team. So if you create a really cool form that you think other agents would benefit from, you can share that with the rest of the outperform community or your team.
D.J. Paris 43:03 I love it. Everyone go visit offer forum.me Get on their mailing list, maybe they’ll open up the beta for you. And of course I here at keeping it real, we’re going to be announcing when it officially drops live. I think this is this is a real game changer in the industry. There are other offer companies, but I don’t think they’re you know, offer, you know, beautiful offer templates, sort of companies, but I don’t think anyone’s doing what you’re doing, which I love, which is really eliminating a lot of the busy work that goes into this and also explaining a lot in along the way to the buyer. So everyone go visit offer forum.me Sign up for their Beta adult keep you up to date with emails about when it’s dropping. And we’re big fans, we couldn’t be happier to be able to expose our audience to this. And everyone should be checking it out. So just hang tight for another month or three. And it’ll be dropping live, but get on their Beta list now. Because it might not be free forever as well. So that’s another good point. So go to offer form.me Sign up for their Beta and for their announcements. Cody, thank you so much for being on our show. This was a really fun conversation. I love people who build things and you are somebody who is doing that. I suspect you have other ideas coming. So we will stay in touch and find out how your business is growing and hopefully our community of listeners really takes takes offer form seriously and starts using it as soon as it goes live. Thank you for for being on our show.
Cody Tuma 44:30 Awesome. Thanks TJ really appreciate it and thanks to all your listeners.
D.J. Paris 44:34 All right guys. Thanks we I gotta run and so does Cody so we will see everybody on the next episode please. Two quick things. Please tell a friend about this episode you every single buddy listen to every single person listening knows another agent that is frustrated with working with buyers. Send them a link to this episode so they can learn how to better to write better offers to make sure that the information is accurate and also to educate their buyers along the way. So then the link to the episode and also, please leave us a review whether you’re listening on Apple podcast, formerly iTunes or Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, Google Play wherever. Let us know what you think of the show. Let us leave us a review that helps our visibility helps us grow. And also lets us know what you think about us. So it helps us improve. So thanks on behalf of the audience, we think Cody first time on behalf of Cody and myself. We also think the audience for supporting our show support offer form.me He’s a good guy. This is a great product. And oh yeah, it’s free. How cool is that? All right, Cody. Thanks so much. I’ll see we’ll see everyone on the next episode.
Cody Tuma 45:35 Awesome. Thanks, guys.
Success Is About Showing Up Every Day • Dan Hellweg
Feb 21, 2022
Dan Hellweg with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate tells the beginning of his journey into real estate. Dan discusses how crucial it is to build deep relationship with the clients in order to provide the best service. Next, Dan also discusses the importance of building good relationship with other agents. Dan talks about discipline and how it helps in building a successful career in real estate. Last, Dan discusses the behaviors he adopted in his journey that he attributes to his success.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with the newest, youngest superstar we’ve had on the show in a while Dan hallwag. Before we get to Dan, just a couple of quick announcements. One, as always, thank you for continuing to listen and support our show. If you want to keep helping us grow and reach more agents, please tell a friend just think of one other realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Dan and send them a link to this episode. Easiest way is shoot them right over to our website, keeping it real pod.com. Or if they are a podcast listener, just have them pull up whatever podcast app, they’re using Ron all of them, and hit the subscribe button when they find keeping it real. And then also, if you could leave us a review in whatever podcast app you might be using, whether it’s Google Play or Apple podcasts or Stitcher, Pandora, Spotify, etc. Amazon, anywhere you find us. Let us know what you think of the show, even if it’s a one star review. Actually don’t leave us a one star review. No, I’m kidding. Leave us whatever review star that you think is appropriate and really helps us to not only know what our audience thinks about the show and how we can improve, but also helps us with visibility with the different podcast directory engines. So please leave us a review and tell a friend and that’s all we ever ask of you. But now enough about me let’s talk to Dan Halleck. Today on the show we have Dan Helic from App properties Christie’s international real estate here in Chicago. Now Daniel was born raised and currently resides here in Chicago and Dan Holic has a devout passion for the city. Unlike others as a third generation Chicago and with both his father and grandfather working for the city, Dan brings a unique perspective to his business. His approach to real estate incorporates a philosophical component regardless of buying selling or transaction type, which gives the control to his clients all while he guides maneuvers everything else around the deal. The greatest joy comes when he helps someone accomplish something they thought they could never experience, which for many is no surprise buying their first home now. Dan also trains for Iron Man’s he listens to Rick records while sipping whiskey and he enjoys time with friends family and that’s what he does when he’s not helping his clients buy and sell real estate. Please everyone up oh Dan, I apologize. I forgot to grab your Instagram everyone should follow Dan on Instagram which is a life with Dan which is there are periods between that is that correct?
Dan Hellweg 4:15 It’s periods between it but it’s get real with Dan sorry. Whoever this all life is forget that guy it’s get real with
D.J. Paris 4:24 that Screw that guy. Get Real with Dan periods in between we will have a link to his Instagram profile in the show notes. Hopefully I’ll fix that in post production as well. So we won’t sound loud sounds so unprepared. By the way, we’ll pull back the curtain just to see what kind of disaster unfortunately Dan has had to go through on because of us on our end. Not only that, so so we actually tried to record this the other day and we had for the first time in a long long I can’t even remember if it’s ever happened before the power went out in our office when we were about five minutes into the episode and and then We were like, well, what happens if it goes out? We could start it again. But what happens if it goes out again? So we had to reschedule Dan for today. So that was sort of problem number one poor Dan had to, you know, reschedule and he was so nice and sweet about it, then then today, I’m recording another episode earlier, and I get an this urgent message from my producer going, I think I put the wrong time on the schedule. Because I looked at it and I go, I thought it was three. And here, we’re doing a two. And so I go, Oh, my God. And so that happened. And then I just got danced, Instagram wrong. So we’re gonna make it up today, for sure. But we’re really excited. I’m really, really excited to have him on the show. Because Dan, I believe reached out to us. And you know, we love featuring younger, newer talent in the real estate pool. I think sometimes, you know, we over focus here at the show on people who are, who have made it to the very top of the mountain. And then oftentimes, those people, it’s harder for them to even remember that struggle of what it took to get up the mountain. And I think it’s so interesting to hear people who are on that way up, and are still dealing with some of those struggles, but have figured out a way to sort of persevere. And Dan is that guy, and we are so excited to have him. So Dan, welcome to the show. It’s all very long intro, but I did screw up your your Instagram, so I apologize.
Dan Hellweg 6:25 Okay, I feel I feel bad for the other person. They’re probably like, Hey, I got some extra people follow me who are?
D.J. Paris 6:32 Well, I did make Dan feel a little better. And I won’t, I won’t say but we just turned down a very important guest that just to have not not to have Dan on the show. But I told Dan, there’s been all these problems with us recording this episode. But I said, Guess we just turned down. So. So anyway, Dan is very special to us. And we’re grateful to have him. But tell us, Dan, tell us let’s start at the very, very beginning of your sort of journey into real estate, tell us how you got into it, why, and how you got to where you are today?
Dan Hellweg 7:03 Yeah, I have like a couple of variations of talionis. So I want to try to make it the most impactful for people who are listening and that, you know, all too touchy feely. But um, let’s see, I worked for a company that we did kitchen services in colleges. And during that time, I was there for about 2010 to about 2017 2018. And I had the ability to provide or see how I want to put it, I just got to experience a lot of roles, right, I did it from account management, to HR to marketing, and it was a lot of seeing the problem and providing a solution, which you know, at the time, you just kind of take for granted, you think that’s like what people do when they’re in those positions. And very fortunate to have that job. Got to the point where you know, it’s kind of like the seven year itch, I think I just kind of was getting a little burnt out a little spent wanted some new challenges, new things. And, you know, I think I kind of opened it up to the universe to provide that opportunity. And unfortunately came in the way of me being like, Oh, I kind of butt heads with the operations director there at the time. But it’s funny, because everything really does work out. And I’ll tell you more about that later. But um, so you know, it’s day one, then you’re like, hey, what do I want to do? What, Where am I going with this. And my passion has always really been, like marketing in connecting communications. And so it was really day one, I went to a shared office space. And I was like, I need to just keep showing up to something, right? And started working on a few little projects here and there. But I’m like, You know what, there’s, I’m not going to have the dedication to this, like what I know it needs. And I’ve had some, you know, friends in real estate, one of my best friends who we’ve been buddies, since we were little, I mean, we are best friends, you know, through and through. He has always been kind of he’s in he’s been in real estate for about eight years. And, you know, at that point, I mean, it was eight years now. It’s been, what, 1213 years. And he was basically like do real estate man, like, come on. You’ve been saying you’ve been wanting to do real estate. And it has always been on the backburner. He used to take me to different trade events. And you know, I was at guaranteed rates of rooftop parties and meeting people who are you know, top producers now and it was kind of like me now, you know, doing the hustle doing the thing and trying to figure it out. And at that time, it was kind of like, well, I’ll do it eventually. And I think it was a little bit of having an ego back then. And just, you know, I was happy with what I was doing. So it’s you know, happens when it happens. And so anyways, fast forward, I, you know, was like, Okay, this is I think this is the time to do it. Why not? I things were kind of lining up. I think it’d be a cool profession to get into. And, yeah, you know, that was kind of the way I got into it. And now it’s been you know, a few years. So
D.J. Paris 9:55 how did you go about prospecting? I know you’re, you’re from here your family least from here. So you, some people would say, Oh, you have this advantage where you must have this massive sphere of influence, and perhaps you do. But I always like to get into that, because I think even with a huge sphere of influence, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the clients just come calling because you got exactly. So talk a little bit about how you went out and found clients.
Dan Hellweg 10:23 Yeah. So when I when I had the, you know, the piece of paper saying congratulations, you can real estate now. I, I met with a bunch of brokers, right, and managing brokers, from larger companies, to smaller companies to very boutique companies. I just wanted to understand what made a brokerage successful, right. And so I wasn’t what that property is, versus another one. And the very question, one of the questions one of masters like, what’s your, you know, how big is your sphere of influence? I’m, like, a sphere of what and? And I heard that before, but you know, in my mind, it was like, the super close people in your life, right? Surely, like just the ones that I can call up and be like, hey, it’s Dan, what do you got? And I didn’t really, you know, I think at that point, because, you know, where I was at, in my life, it was the communications I was having with these people. It wasn’t from a, you know, quote, unquote, business perspective. So when I got started, it’s it was it was, it’s, it’s like, difficult, right? Because you think you have this identity with people? And I would do the thing is like, and I still do them, and I love doing them even more now. But I write letters to people, I would text people, I, you know, give a book, pick up the phone. I mean, that’s like, the strongest thing nowadays. I mean, that is like, picking up the phone, calling other agents and that kind of stuff, whatever, but picking up the phone, and just being like, Hey, how are you? And, you know, it’s like, I don’t even know what to talk about. I’m just, I was thinking about you, I just wanted to see how you’ve been doing. And, you know, I think when you get into real estate, you hear from everybody, you know, there’s obviously these top producing, you know, coaches out there, you know, five calls a day 10 text messages, and you’re like, I don’t even know, like, you know, this is gonna be one week’s worth of people. But that’s when you’re like, okay, hey, I’m meeting new people. Like, I just started, like, you know, I went to that shared office, you know, I’ve made clients through that, you know, I’ve, you know, done different things with charity, and you help out and you, you know, you, you start off, I feel like, especially for newer agents listen to this. And I see it with newer agents, they do the thing, and I think I did it too, was you do it for a few weeks, and you’re like, Well, I got nothing from this. And you’re like, Okay, and let me step back. Like, why am I doing this? If I’m only trying to touch base with people, because I’m a business? Like, what? Like, why am I doing that, right? And I think you start to evolve a little bit, you know, and then when you do get a few, you know, transactions behind you, and you start to get into the lives of people. And you know, you go out on showings with people, and you just learn, like, Oh, my God, like, life, what happens and you’re like, Oh, my God, like, I need to help people, it’s not even a want anymore, like, this is going on in people’s lives, and I want to be there for them. And it just gets easier than because then when you do make these phone calls, you’re not coming from the lens anymore. Like I want business. It’s a genuine, you know, like, innate thing in you and you want to be able to help them and you know, so yeah, I
D.J. Paris 13:20 think I think we’re talking about intimacy, I think intimacy is really well, realtors have a unique ability to develop these deeper sort of connections with their prospects, their clients, you get to help them make pretty important financial decisions, right? Like buying, selling, investing, possibly renting, there’s a lot of people’s emotion and identity are tied into where they live. And it becomes as, as we know, everyone listening knows just how powerful that experience is, especially when someone gets to buy their first home. I mean, that is truly a remarkable moment. I remember the day I bought my first place. And I’m sure everyone listening who owns a place probably remembers that as well. And real estate agents are uniquely positioned to sort of be a part of that, obviously, you’re part of the transaction, but be part of the emotional component of it and the intimacy of it. And then, you know, people intimacy is really what gets people to want to, you know, you tell other eight title or their friends about you, and it’d be like, Wow, my agent really cares about me, my agent knows about me, my agent calls me and just checks in and sees how I’m doing or reminds me that it’s the, you know, anniversary date of my purchasing this home three years ago or things like that. And I think that is so cool, because all of that stuff. It’s not that you’re also not providing value and information about the housing market and maybe some strategies that they may want to consider. I mean, there’s a skill set that is absolutely needed, but there’s and just understanding what’s going on in the market and the news and Being able to relay that to your prospects and clients. But there’s also this like, like, even my financial advisor doesn’t really have an intimate relationship with me. I mean, they know what my finances look like. But they don’t really know that much. I mean, they know my life, but it’s not the same. They’re not walking through me in their house, they’ve never seen where I live. My account has never seen where I live, they’re super important people, but real estate has, has this sort of built in intimacy and, and empathy. I think that is really cool. And it absolutely binds people together. And that’s why the vast majority of buyers decide that, you know, assuming they had a good experience, they use the same agent over and over and over again. So I didn’t I didn’t mean to go on a rant there. But I just I just touched on that. And I think that’s really, really important.
Dan Hellweg 15:50 Yeah, yeah. And just, you know, on top of that, it’s, we all have things that have occurred in our lives from the moment I mean, even before we’re born, the things that happen to everybody else impacts that person, you know, we’re all just seeing and pushing against each other at the end of the day, right? And, you know, we go out, and I’ve had some people who they’re like, oh, you know, I either have seen a few plays, it’s like, okay, we’ve got to reset, like this. And that’s why I use that term philosophical, because it’s, there’s a deeper thing going on. And it’s, you know, you want to have you want to have emotions, you want to have happy emotions, good emotions, but especially, you know, if anything, like the last year is proven, you know, it’s, it was hard on people, because, you know, so many people I talked to, and they’re like, oh, you know, you must, like real estate must be going great right now. And it’s like, yes, and no, it’s it is, but it’s difficult, because, you know, when you’ve gone out, you know, 20 3040 places. And, you know, I was very, like I looked back at all my numbers, and I couldn’t, I was trying to figure out why I had such a great conversion rate. But it’s again, it’s it’s not even just working with your clients and getting to understand where they’re at what they need all those things. But once you’ve positioned them to that, it’s really connected with that other agent then, right? That’s when you know, you’re making those phone calls. I worked with, you know, and just kind of a quick story I was working with, with this couple, and you know, we saw probably like 30 places almost just kind of mixed around the city. Yeah, you know, nothing that was ever really hitting, but we were like honing in in you know, they’re kind of right. And they’re kind of like, you know, does what we want exist, I’m like it does, I’m like it’s a timing thing. I’m like, you know, the first few, you kind of get that contrast the next few, you kind of really see what you need, you know what you don’t need what you learned about yourself, then you start to hone in, right. And that’s where we’re at, took a little bit longer. And that’s fine. It takes as long as it takes. But of course, the one they went to was just a random open house. And they’re like, Hey, Dan, we went to the open house. And you know, as I asked him all these questions about how many people were there telling me blah, blah, blah. So I called the agent. And I’m just like, hey, so guess what? I usually, you know, get out there with my clients. They just wanted they popped in, and any kind of know where we’re at, because they’re interested. He’s like, Well, we had about 45 showings today. And I was like, Wow, I’m not Yeah, I’m like, not surprised. I used to get offers, we are okay. I’m like, well, here’s what I, here’s what I need to do, I’m like, I need to get in there, I need to get in there with my clients, you know, I need we need to see this place all together. I’m like, however, that means, you know, I’m the type of agent where it’s like, you can’t make it as a client, I’m going on your behalf, we’re gonna, you know, FaceTime, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make this thing happen, right? Because I need to know really what the weight is. So we can position ourselves, you know, and we learned about what the sellers wanted all those conversations with the other agent. And, you know, we want to offer and, you know, it’s knowing those kinds of things. And that’s where that, you know, as you just said, that intimacy, it’s, it’s crazy, because it’s, it’s the deep level of those people. It’s knowing where they’re positioned. It’s, it’s knowing everything, and they’re just, you know, I would, I could sit here and ramble for, you know, days about how deep this goes. But, you know, if you’re on the outside, if you’re not in real estate, or if you don’t have that view, I think it just kind of like on a level, it’s like, oh, it’s somebody who wants to buy a home. It’s like, you know, that’s, you know, it’s everything, but just that so
D.J. Paris 19:03 how important is it for you as the let’s say the buyer’s agent, in this example, having a good relationship with the selling agent, the agent representing the seller, I should say, because it’s, yeah, like, are you able to eat because we know that on paper, these are commissions are called cooperative commissions, which means the two agents are supposed to cooperate to close a transaction. But But again, the sellers right now are sellers, selling agents, listing agents are of course, I always get confused because in Illinois, we call a selling agent, the person who represents the buyer, I always think why don’t we do that? Why don’t we maybe I’m just so we’ll say buyer and seller. So anyway, and working with the listing agent, the seller, how important is it for you to have a good relationship with other agents so that not that they’ll do you any Take our favours, although that certainly could happen. But just understanding what it’s going to take to get this deal closed, understanding what the seller is looking for, you obviously know what the buyers are, how important is it to have that kind of relationship?
Dan Hellweg 20:14 Oh, it’s, it’s, you know, the pinnacle, it’s the highest thing, it’s the most important thing, really. I think, especially in this business, you know, if you want to go on with it, you get an identity, or you get, you know, this thing attached to you. And, you know, it’s I like to be as transparent as possible, right? Of course, you know, this is a game of poker, in a sense, I could be holding pocket aces, you know, the agents around me don’t need to know that. But how I play him, you know, there’s a way to do it. Right. Right. You know, you can’t just go all in and everybody falls, and you’re done. But with the other agent, you know, it’s it’s being on the same page. We’re all from different walks of life as well, you know, we’re all come from different industries. I know agents who just got started during COVID. And they, you know, like we’re talking about, you know, closing, isn’t it like you go to closing as well? Yeah, I always go to closings. And I don’t go it’s like, oh, right, because you start at a time where you couldn’t go, right. So going back to the whole relationship with the agent, knowing who they are, and how they view and interpret real estate’s very critical to me, and even so much that if I feel this, you know, some discomfort from them, like on just a recent if this was actually me being on the listing side, just recently, but I had the agent, you know, he’s got that they won the offer. And he was like, Okay, we’ll take it off the MLS. I’m like, just slow down, like, just, you know, like, you just, we just accept that, like, just, you know, Where’s this coming from? Well, you know, so why is right so quickly, like, he thinks that I was going to entertain other offers, and you know, I got that things happen again, you know, he got the earnest money Summit. I’m just like, you know, get me the sign count, you know, just all the things that you have to have crossing the t’s dotting the i’s. And as soon as he did that, he again, he messaged me, he’s like, Okay, go ahead, like, hurry up, like, take it out. I’m like, Oh, hey, free for a call now. And I call them up. And like, I said, Hey, how, you know, how’s it going? I’m like, Do you have a little bit of time to talk right now? I’m like, we need to make sure on the same page. I’m like, what has happened in the past? You know, has it what’s going on? Right, right. And he pushed back a little bit, and then all of a sudden, he opened up and he’s like, no, like, there have been times am I you know, and I’m like, Well, you know, I don’t want to slip up and say his name. But I’m just like, look, I’m like, I, we have both interests of both of our clients at stake here. And I need to make sure we’re on the same page. Because if something comes up through now, you know, there’s a lot of things that go on between kind of tried to close. And I’m like, if we can’t be on the same page, what are we doing for our clients? And I’m like, I need to know where you’re at. I’m like, I’m not here to change you in any way. But I just need to understand some agents that you worked with, like, I don’t know what happened. But you know, and I can tell you that I will do things a little bit differently until it happens, you don’t know, right? Because, again, it’s interpretation of the individual. But I go into it with that, because I have, you know, the saying that, you know, I tell my clients, I tell everybody, I like to sleep at night, and I know you do too. If I’m gonna go to sleep, you know, thinking like, Hey, this guy is kind of being a little you know, scatterbrained all, we’re all over the place a little worried, what’s going to happen, and then if something happens to the deal does fall apart at some point. And if I did feel that discomfort, how am I supposed to go back to my client and be like, well, I guess the deal died? It’s like, no, like, I you know, we had these conversations, we were on the same page, you know, if something has happened along the way, that’s, that’s understandable that maybe it’s beyond our control, we have to just position ourselves to deal with that. But I know, you know, I’m working hard to make sure I have that reputation with the other agent. And even if they they’re like, you know, whatever, and hang up on me or something, you know, they know, that never happens. But you know, if there was somebody who was like that, great. Now, I know, that’s how they view business too. So I get more information that way, too. And that goes for both sides of the deal, then.
D.J. Paris 23:46 I think that’s really interesting. I wonder how often agents really even view the other the CO broker, you know, as as an ally, in a lot of ways, yes. Yes, you you are representing your client’s best interest, and you’re looking to either get the highest or the lowest price depending on what side you’re on. And you are it is a little bit of a battle in that sense. But it’s a cooperative battle. And both both parties really want to get to the end goal, and developing good relationships with agents, it seems so like, well, doesn’t everyone do that? But a lot of people don’t. And so Dan, I think you did something very emotionally intelligent, which was when the person started having that request about hey, get this off the MLS get this off the MLS. And by the way, for stories like this, if anyone is probably almost all of our listeners are members of labcoat agents on Facebook, it is a perfect place to learn about how agents treat each other because every day there’s probably 30 examples of you’re not going to believe what these other agents said to me, you know, and it’s shocking and it’s like wow, um, playing nice in the sandbox is really a great skill. And I have a quick question for you. This is just a simple question. So you were talking about being on the listing side? How often with and we’re in this situation with, even now I know the mortgage rates just climbed again today, but they’re still crazy low. How often because we have so many people now who can afford things because of low interest rate environments that weren’t able to buy as much property as before. So you get, as you said, a lot of offers a lot of a lot of requests for showings. How often does an agent call you and say, Hey, I already read I’ve read everything on the MLS, I feel like I have a decent sense of this property. But can you give me a couple of key things to mention when I go to the showing, as the buyer’s agent? Like, do you get those kinds of calls? You know, where you’re like, Hey, Dan, helped me sell this home for you. Does that happen a lot or not that office? So
Dan Hellweg 25:57 you know, it’s funny. You know, I think a lot of people when they get a real estate, they do a lot more by side first, right? Sure. And then you start to pick up listings, and I think that just, you know, typical, but as listing I, I get calls, but I think it’s because I was doing, I was doing that I call up agents, you know, and be like, hey, you know, we’re gonna be going to the showing, I either have seen as to, you know, photography, or whatever, you know, this is something, you know, whatever keeps give me a little bit more insights, right? You know, I’m not asking for a lot, maybe if it’s something important to my client. And then it’s like, okay, they always are like, yeah, here’s your something. And I like, you know, if you give silence to people, they’ll usually keep giving you more, and then all of a sudden, it turns into, like, well, also, I just want you to know, the seller or the, you know, this, this seller has actually already moved and you know, they want to sell quicker, it’s like, okay, well, now I’m getting more information that other agents don’t have. But yeah, I think, you know, with my listings, I’ve been surprised because I get like, offers sent to me, and nobody even calls me and I’m like, I don’t know anything about you. Like, could you have least picked up the phone and be like, Hey, Dan, just wanna let you know, I submit an offer. Like, if you have questions, let me know, give me a call. And they’re just like, throwing contracts me in the email. And I’m just kidding. They were like, poorly written. And, you know, it’s like slot when I buy it. You know, I know me, it’s, you know, there’s a lot of phenomenal agents out there. I get, you know, where they pack it up nicely. Everything’s there. But, yeah, I just, I feel like some agents I’m not, you know, getting like that due diligence, and it doesn’t take a lot. And it’s not like you have to do it all the time. But just a quick, you know, hey, can you tell me a little bit more? Is there something about it, you know, my clients, I think they’re gonna really like this place. If we were to come in with an offer, possibly, you know, is there anything I can get them, you know, ready to roll on? So, but,
D.J. Paris 27:41 yeah, conversations can be had, especially right now where you can get really creative and you can talk to the other agent, assuming they’re, they’re available to talk and say things like, hey, what if What about a buyside? Contingency? Oh, what’s that? Well, let’s talk about that. Or, or what about a warranty or whatever, you know, there’s a million different little things you can put in. But that all happens with with conversation. And it is tough when you’re getting, you know, dozens scores of offers, right? But it is also the job, right? So it’s like one of those things where I want to talk about discipline, because you’re an Ironman athlete, and to me, there is no greater display of discipline, physical discipline than the ability to perform in an Ironman competition. I, I have a trainer, a personal trainer, and I work out three times a week for an hour, three times. And that is the only way I will get to the gym. It’s embarrassing, because I spent a fortune. But it works for me, because I do not have that discipline. So I am curious on what what, how the role of discipline has played into, obviously, athletics for you, but also how that’s translated over into your real estate business.
Dan Hellweg 29:02 Yeah, and it’s funny, so the Ironman thing, I did a full Ironman in Cozumel. Last year in November, it was my it was my first one, actually. So by calling him I still even saying like, I’m like an Iron Man, I am because I did the one. But you know, meeting other people there, and it’s very similar to real estate then because it is that it’s a lifestyle, right? It’s not just you don’t, you know, and my goal was to finish. I think, as most people who do an Ironman for the first time, you know, I’ve never even swam over two miles, my wife and I did do 2.4 miles in the ocean. And, like, it’s those things that live in you that right? And so it does create a new level of discipline, it creates a new, you know, ability to process things differently. And, you know, those are the kinds of things that when I signed up for it, I signed up for it about, what eight months before it and with real estate, there would be things like you know, making tough phone calls, or you know, having Long days or going out to, you know, scheduling, you know, and you’re going to do like 14 showings and it’s like, that’s, you know, pulling data on 14 places doing an analysis on 14 places, driving 14 places parking at 14 places working with client, you know, I mean, like, I’m not telling you anything agents don’t know, oh my god, like, it’s it’s not just physically draining, it’s incredibly mentally draining, you know, and those are different clients to you know, it wasn’t I mean, there’s no way I’m going to show one person 14 places we did like which one was that again, but, um, so it’s like they go hand in hand, but it is the ability to recognize that, hey, I have the right you have the right, we all have the right to move at a pace, you know, whether we, you know, hit the throttle a little bit harder, or we can, we can come back a little bit, I think to know, when you need, you know, whether it’s a day in real estate, where you take, you know, good, you know, half half day for yourself, and, you know, you just kind of relax and you read and you know, you move your blocks around and maybe you know, a few blocks on our client related, you know, move to another day, whatever it is, we have that right? And it’s that mindset, you know, it’s always as this, you know, the, you know, term for this, as you know, it’s like the show saying, Hey, we commute, we broadcast the 1% Well, to me, 1% isn’t the agent, it’s a mindset. And it’s that push to stay focused, you know, to, if there’s going to be something that stresses you out to just get it fixed, right, then whatever that might look like, but kicking the can down the road, not going to do anything. And then if you allow those things to keep happening, your mindsets just gonna fall backwards. And that discipline is gonna fall apart in similar to mindset or just similar to Iron Man, you know, you’re just going to start to, you know, to fall apart. So,
D.J. Paris 31:40 how important is it to know your why. And again, let’s relate it to the Iron Man. So the Ironman is, is a goal of sorts. I personally, I’m not a huge fan of goals, versus direction. For me, what works better for me personally, is pushing myself in the right direction consistently. Now, if I want to run an Ironman, I have to do whatever is necessary. Sorry, I shouldn’t say run I park to compete in Iran, I have to do run biking. So I have to do all of those things in a very disciplined way to be able to get to a place where I can then go to Cozumel, and, you know, part and participate in a brutally difficult, you know, physical endurance situation. So, that, but how important is it to know why is that important for your mindset? I’m just kidding. Oh, my God. Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about that.
Dan Hellweg 32:44 Yeah, the y is in Oh, my gosh, like, the Y is your that’s your little power plant. That’s your source of energy. And I’ve been trying over the last probably, you know, a couple of years, especially getting into this, you know, to figure that out. And it’s always I think some people depending on where they’re at in their life, it can be anything, right are wise are all going to be different. And I think for me, so like, my why to go to the Connect, it was, you know, over a decade ago, somewhere when my grandfather passed away, you know, the house that you know, my grandmother lived in, my grandmother passed away a few years before him. I always like dreamt of owning it, like I wanted it. I when I was a little kid and I go over there used to think like, I’m gonna own this one day. But you know, you don’t, like you don’t know the reality of the future. You just see the future as you are right now. And you’re like, everything’s be great. Like, I’m gonna Oh, my grandfather’s house, he’s still gonna be here. It’s like, well, that doesn’t make sense. But, you know, so when he passed away, I ended up buying it from my father, my aunt, who was left to then, and I did not work with an agent at the time. The transaction to me was, I mean, at the time, I’m just like, I’m gonna make this work, I’ll figure it out. But I was really I would not have like, if I would have been out on a search by myself. I would not have bought a home I would not have bought that home. There’s nothing in the whole lineup that made sense on paper, but I was like, I’m gonna make half because I wanted it. It was early on it was important to you. Exactly. It was but the thing was, it was 100% emotional purchase and you know, if you make any decisions with a with a background or with a push of emotion, it’s not going to turn out well usually even if it’s like a super high level emotion because that energy just fades away. It turns off because emotion just like you know, it’s a drug. So throughout that time, you know, just a whole bunch of stuff. You know, I obviously obviously things like his taxes because you know, he has senior freeze on it. And this was like an Edgewater. So you know all of a sudden I’m like getting hit with like these, you know, yearly taxes of like 8000 $9,000 I basically I kind of just taken a box of whatever money I had it just lit on fire and just been there would have been the same thing. I mean, you know, like but so you know, I fast forward you know, a couple years I would just spent on it everything man it maintaining a home by myself, you know, just, it was an emotional drain on me and you know you also If there’s other things that go into it and not to go into but, you know, then I felt like a failure on that. And you know, it just like, obviously then I felt bad. Like, I felt like I let my grandfather down. And then I had to sell and and that’s a whole nother level of emotion. So I saw both ends of the spectrum of emotions in the home, tied to me. So then when I had to sell it, I had to go through all that. And then of course, you know, when I bought it, you know, I didn’t have any agency support. So selling. I’m like, learning how a listing sell a listing agent works for the first time. And then just also to remind you, I bought it like, it’s funny. It’s funny, oh, eight. And I saw that like, and I saw, like, I bought it. Yeah, I bought it in 2008. And then they sold in 2011. So like, oh, yeah, just the worst times real estate to buy at a time and then to sell at a time, you know, that’s when somebody who was buying and they gangbusters in the future, but again, money aside, but um, I’ve looked back at that a lot, and to go to the power of the why it’s changed a lot for me now over the last few years, because I’ve seen it show up and other clients, I’ve had clients are like, Oh, my God, Dad, I need to have this house. And I’m like, Okay, there’s things here like, no, like, you know, and I, I’m, I come to the become the voice of reason for them. Right? Yeah. You know, and all of a sudden, like, Oh, my God, like, you, it’s, I, when I work with clients, I tell them, like, you see things right here, your present, I see the future, I don’t, you know, I’m not selling for right now, that goes for everything that goes for, you know, your referrals for selling with you in the future buying with you in the future. You know, if a parent passes away, I want you to give me that call. I’m not I don’t care about right now. But I also, you know, in, you know, when they’re like, We want to have kids, and I’m like, why are we We’re looking at a two bedroom home and stuff, like, you want to have a family, all that kind of stuff. But the y gets activated at different times, and it charges you and it’s really powerful, because I think it’s for a lot of us, especially as agents, I mean, we’re all probably, you know, our past lives are just, they’re crazy. A lot of us, you know, it’s we’re either spent and burnt out in corporate world, or we had a transaction similar to mine, were just like, I never want anybody else to feel that pain ever again. And so those are the things and you know, when that’s the why, and it could be for whatever, it’s when you really find it, it’s it’s becomes it’s it’s like magical. You know, it’s so hard to explain, but and that’s the thing, like it’s still happening, right. So
D.J. Paris 37:24 yeah, I think I think he just said a lot. And it’s really, really good stuff. Because I think the ability to really be able to bring ideas to your clients based on what you know about them that are outside of the Hey, Dan, can you help me go see this property? Which of course, you will and can do. But this idea of being like, Hey, by the way, you told me you wanted children, we’re looking at two bedrooms. Why are we doing that? That’s, that’s an amazing question to ask somebody, many agents, I think, are afraid to push back or confront and this isn’t a negative, it’s just challenge. They’re their customer, and just say, hey, let’s let’s think about this. What do we really want here? What do we want in three years? What do we want in five years? How long are you going to be here. And you then can also say, let me tell you a story about a decision I made. That ended up being emotional. And it was important that I’m glad I made it, it ended up not really working out. But I want to sort of like you even just sharing what you did with our listeners, is a story that we all can relate to. Now, we all haven’t bought our grandparents home. But we’ve all made decisions like that, that we went past that I really did it for the right reason. But I didn’t really have all the information. And I wish somebody would have guided me through that process. That I think is the cornerstone of a good agent, the ones that can say I see the future here. And it might not line up with what you actually want versus you love the home. We want to put an offer in great, let’s do it. And yes, you have to do that too. But I think you going one step beyond that and said, Well, yes. And this is going to let’s just hold tight for a moment. Let’s really think about this. How long do we want to be here? You know? And is this actually the best fit? Because emotionally it’s way more fun just to make decisions with emotions, right? Yeah, you get excited. You go, this is perfect. Let’s do it. We’re we’re seeing that now in the building I live in to new development. And we’re starting that we’re in the process of converting the ownership from or the board from the, you know, the developer over to the homeowners. And it’s so funny because we’re on this WhatsApp, this long WhatsApp chat of all the owners, and it’s just, and the owners are lovely, wonderful people. This is not a look at any of them, but they’re always talking about what’s wrong and what’s missing and what wasn’t done correctly, which is what owners do. And I mean, look, I do the same thing. And if you were to just read The text, this text thread that is never ending it, you would think, Oh my gosh, like the developer really must have dropped the ball. And it’s like, wow, that everyone’s so unhappy. And then and then you realize, like, emotionally we react to things. And then we want to talk about those things. And oftentimes, it’s like, no, 99% of what the developer did is perfect. It’s really, really great. We’re hyper focusing on this, these issues. And now it it feels like this is everything, like these little issues are the oh my god, are we going to have to sue the developer? Like, who knows? You know, there’s, there’s a lot of those those emotions that go into it. And and I think realtors have this unique ability, if they have the experience, and they’ve been around long enough to just go hang tight here. Here’s how these things usually go. And, and especially first time homebuyers, they’re the most freaked out. And of course they are I mean, I was, and and so I think then you what you’re saying is really important, which is, you know, you’re guiding someone through the process, but you’re also making sure that they that you understand, you can be their sort of support system as they go through this process. And the discipline of your business, I think gives you the freedom because you’re so disciplined. Dan is incredible. I mean, anyone who runs, I keep saying run, anyone who participates in Ironman, triathlons have to be obviously incredibly discipline, there’s just no other way to do it. So Dan has a discipline to his business. And that enables him to then learn continually learn he’s he’s always pushing the ball forward, and enables him to be there for his clients, where he’s not reactive. You’re a proactive, realtor versus reactive. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, what do you think as you’ve been in this business a few years? What are some? What are some of the behaviors that you’ve seen other agents do that were really impressive to you? Or things you’ve adopted into your own practice? Just Just out of curiosity?
Dan Hellweg 42:07 Yeah. Oh, man, there’s a lot and but one of the things is all these like concepts and ideas and practices and beliefs and things like that. It’s something that, you know, since I got into it, when I got into real estate, it was, okay, what do I like about, you know, this agent, what they’re doing, it could be the way that they communicate something, it could be a showing schedule, it could be like, you know, hey, we’re only going to do weekends, whatever. And sometimes I view it like, Okay, how is that beneficial to me? And how is that beneficial to them? You know, whatever. One of the things that it was actually brought up on one of your recent shows, and I think, actually a couple you’ve said it, but you’re like, there’s 46,000 agents in, you know, Chicagoland area, that means I am going up against, you know, you know, 45,999 people. Now, of course, they direct competition, no, but who, how we set that bar it is it’s in because even if I had an area that I’m in, or, you know, my niche of, you know, doing multi units or something like that, if I don’t stay at, you know, you know, my strive to become the top. If I’m not there, then you know, how am I helping the clients? How am I benefiting the industry? How am I helping community? So, you know, to answer that question, like, you know, what kind of things are out there? You know, it’s so it’s doing this, right? It’s telling my story, because I want other agents who are either thinking about getting in real estate, or currently in it, to understand like, you don’t, you don’t just show up and get business like, but you also don’t have to aggressively aggressively go seek it either. You’ve got to be you, one of my, you know, recent, you know, every year I come up with a monitor, I don’t do like resolutions. But I come up with something that’s going to be a nice reminder, last year was be better than any day, you’re having a bad day, or just, you know, situation a little weird to tell yourself be better. Like, what does that mean? In the moment you figure it out? This year, it’s show up, be you, you know, you’ve got to show up. And that’s like me coming to this office every day. I come every day, you know, even if like the day is like, not a ton of business going on a day, maybe I don’t have a lot of showings, maybe I’m not doing a lot of, you know, the act of work for things. But I still am, you know, sending out my Postcards, I’m still making phone calls. I’m still going out, you know, getting coffees or drinks or lunches with people. You got to just keep going. Right. And I think that’s like the biggest thing I’ve learned from agents who are successful. And it’s everybody has the ability to be successful, right? You know, you can’t just sit around at home because you can have a good day, a good day, a good day, then all sudden, a day that you’re just not really feeling it. What are you going to do? You’re going to turn on the TV, you’re going to do things you shouldn’t, you know, no business comes to you just sitting on the couch. So it’s like these constant reminders. And I know it’s kind of like I’ll run around to the answer, but those are the things that I’ve seen in other agents because I watch you know, who’s the ones come to the office, top performers who’s, you know, shocking, right? Like, you know, you got all these crazy Real Estate shows out there. But you know, the girls are selling sunset aren’t going to their home every day, they’re going back to the office and talking and you learn so much like my managing brokers on the other side, I hear him telling stuff. And, of course, none of those details are, you know, if he’s talking about a deal with another agent, like, I don’t even I will never know who it is. But I’m hearing stuff. I’m like, wow, that’s a great idea. Or like, oh, like after remember that? Or like, Oh, my God, like, that’s an interesting situation, you know, and they’ll, you can even go in and be like, Hey, I wasn’t I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, you know, but what’s going on? And like, well, you know, like, we’re dealing with this client who’s doing this and you’re like, oh, wow, like, didn’t know that. You know what I mean? And it doesn’t matter who you are, how long you’ve been in this business, you’re gonna come across something I just like, that’s different. And, you know, that’s where like something again, the pursuit of like, you know, making it like, do you ever really make it? Because even if you touch number one, you got to hold on to that. And what does that mean? You’re, you still gotta be pushing hard. So yeah, that’s, you know, again, kind of the runaround of the answer. But
D.J. Paris 46:00 right before I started this podcast, no, it’s a great answer. When I first started this podcast, I was actually doing a version of this for the agents in our office where I was funny, I was at home, I’m really I was raised in Peoria, Illinois, which is like Central Illinois. And but I I’ve lived in Chicago, pretty much my whole adult life. And so I was in curio and I was going through the paper. This is a million years ago. And I saw a name that I recognized for a realtor advertising. So you know, some property, or maybe all the properties. This is back when Realtors did newspaper ads. And I recognized the last name. And it turned out to be the brother of a girl, I a woman, I knew that I knew when she was in high school. And so I said, Oh, hey, your brother’s seems really successful. I just got into real estate, we have a bunch of agents, would it be okay if I interview him? To ask him about how he became successful? And he’s, she’s goes, Oh, he’d love it in. And so I talked to him. He’s the seventh highest producing Realtor in Peoria at that time. And he’d been in business a while and I said, What’s the secret to your success? And he goes, You know, I show up at the office every day at I don’t know, like, a reasonable hour, like it was eight o’clock, I think, or it wasn’t later than that. But it was around 8am. He goes, there’s 100 Some agents in his office, he goes, I’m the first one here. Or maybe he shows up at 730. I mean, what it wasn’t a crazy early, right wasn’t like a 4am person. Wasn’t he wasn’t that guy. And he, oh, by the way, he sells 100 And like 15 homes a year. So it’s a home every, like, couple of days, basically. And he goes, I show up at you know, 730 or eight, I do my calls, I bet but you know, he had his whole routine. And he goes, I see I start to see agents funnel in around 930. And then they’re out to lunch. And he goes, you know, if you just show up and, and time block and actually have, you know, sort of, you know, your your day scheduled. And you know, your why? Because his whole thing was he goes, You know, I just want to be available for my kids in the afternoons and evenings because he had young kids at the time. And he said, I want to be there for their events. And you know, real estate, oftentimes, you’re not there during those things. So he goes, I’m going to try to do as much as I can during the day so that most nights and weekends that I’m available, and and he goes and I saw 100 and some homes a year and it was just him. And I went I went oh, and he goes, it’s amazing DJ, he goes, the only people that show up at the office are the people that are in his office are the ones that are actually doing a lot of business. And he goes probably not a coincidence. And so certainly not suggesting that everybody listening needs to get an office space. But Dan said something also when he started and he was doing shared office space, and oh, by the way, other people are going to be there too. And that’s a great opportunity to interact and meet people and just go somewhere and do like if you want to train for an Ironman, you have to make plants, right, you have to know where you’re swimming, where you’re biking, where you’re running, probably for a full year, you got to have that figured out. Because at some point your that’s all going to be put to the test. So you can’t just kind of go well, I need to find a pool and I need like it all has to be really, really meticulously thought out. And I think Realtors Realtors oftentimes forget that, that building your business. It doesn’t have to be as intense as an Ironman, but it really is an Ironman. I mean it truly is. I mean, you’re putting that kind of time and dedication and and I mean look, finishing an Ironman is a perfectly amazing goal. Like that’s an incredible goal. And and one that 99.99% of people will never be able to achieve. Dan did it through small consistent action that you know, over a prolonged period of time, eight months, which is by the way, impressive, but But you know, that’s real estate’s kind of the same thing. And if you can just focus on those tasks. And as Dan was saying, the driver is the why the driver is, hey, I want to do this for these reasons, you know, for Mike Amelie for myself for financial reasons for freedom for whatever, whatever those reasons are, you can lock into that every morning and then the day’s kind of exciting. And then realizing that oh yeah, now I gotta go, you know, swim for miles or, you know, or whatever it is, it’s like, that’s the part that sort of sucks, but that’s what’s gonna get me to the goal. So the part that sort of sucks is actually, you know, nobody really wants to lift weights. Nobody really wants to pick up the phone and call 50 people, but it’s a good idea. And I remember just and Dan with picking up the phone. And just because I just mentioned it, I know you’re a big, I feel like nobody picks up the phone anymore. So we talk a little bit about the importance of of the phone just as a really practical tool for for our listeners.
Dan Hellweg 50:49 Yeah. Oh my god, it’s one of my differentiators. When people like ask, you know, what’s, what’s something that’s different from other agents? I’m like, I pick up the phone, I use the phone. You know, it’s something that when you talk to other agents, you know, it’s funny, because you get some other agents like, Oh, when I call people they don’t answer. It’s like, Have you ever thought they could be at showings and meetings, just busy eating lunch, they’ll call you back? You know, hey, this is the you know, leave a quick voicemail. You know, it’s, it’s Dan, I’m gonna you know what I usually do, too, for some people, if you know, you know that they’re going to be a little apprehensive using phone. It’s like, hey, you know, Dan, just wanted to discuss whatever. Give me a call any chance? Otherwise, I’ll give you another call. Maybe later at three o’clock? You know? Yeah. So now it’s like, if they hate the phone, like crap, this guy’s gonna call again, I want to just call. But you know, and then you get them on the phone, whatever it is, if it’s a situation, if it’s a deal, if it’s just making a phone call with somebody, you know, it’s usually you start talking a little bit, you get these people who’ll be like, I only have a couple minutes, I’m like, you probably have more if you answer that means you have the time, like, and I respect that. But then they start going on and rambling. And you know, they’re telling their whole life story, and you get off the phone, and you’re just like, well, now I know too much information. And that goes for anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s like me right now, when you ask me questions, I just keep going until basically stop me, but that’s what we do. Yeah. It’s, you know, and that’s something I value, especially I think, as Israel tours, you know, we, we got to remember to listen. And when you call somebody and you pick up the phone, they’re giving you something they’re giving you first of all, they’re giving you time, they’re giving you information, they’re giving you something, and you have to appreciate that, you know, you don’t get that from, you know, you could send text messages, that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that either. But then you’re getting in this dialogue, you’re getting this back and forth, you know, and you’re losing the emotion, you’re losing the value, people will set their phones back down. And, you know, they write it and they forget to respond, because now it’s not fresh anymore. It’s stuff like that. So you know, there’s another person that an agent choose, you know, and just, she was a little bit younger, and that’s fine. But she was asking, like 10 million questions, their email, and just like, just pick up the phone, you know, and then she like, we’re gonna write an offer. And I’m, like, awesome. And then during it, she’s asking more questions. I’m just like, Oh, my God, I’m like, you’re one of those people that are gonna say, you’re super busy. But you’re super busy, because you’re making things so much more difficult for yourself. You know, so, the phone, the phone is definitely powerful. And, you know, I also have some clients where it’s like, you know, you call them and they’ll never answer. So, couple text messages here and there, whatever. And I that’s fine, too. But, you know, I’m not, I also don’t want to put people in a position of discomfort for things that they don’t enjoy. But yeah, it’s, it’s powerful. So if you’re, if you’re thinking, you know, if you’re listening to this, and you’re like, Well, I don’t like picking it up. It’s like, just pick it up, make it start getting comfortable with it, call your best friend and start getting comfortable talking to people on the phone again. So
D.J. Paris 53:49 yeah, it’s becoming a bit of a lost art. I mean, I am shocked at how few phone calls I get throughout the year other than from my closest friends. I almost never get them from service providers, accountant, financial advisor, you know, insurance, person, realtor, I really don’t, you really don’t get many calls anymore. And I think it’s a really easy way to build intimacy, I think it’s harder to build intimacy on on text. It certainly can be done and there are people that prefer it that way. But, but I think, you know, going the extra mile picking up the phone demonstrates a level of care. That is really, really important. And obviously part of the secret of Dan’s successes, but Dan’s an Iron Man, you know, participant This is a guy who knows that if you do all these daily actions, you can achieve some really big things and and he’s doing that I really encourage everyone listening to follow Dan on Instagram. And that is get real with Dan. And there’s periods between that so let’s get period real period with period Dan. We’ll put that link in our show notes. The podcast episode. have notes, but get real real with Dan on Instagram, you can learn more about what Dan’s doing. Dan also goes to the office every day. I think that is just an amazing thing. Dan, this has been a great episode. I really definitely want to have you back on and we can talk more about. Dan’s just crushing it isn’t is just a few years, and he’s really doing well. He’s got great attitude. We absolutely everyone listening knows he is on the way up. So Dan, we thank you so much for your your willingness to share, be vulnerable. Also tell us some great suggestions about how agents can stay focused and stay busy, and really build better relationships with their with their clients. And so on behalf of the audience, we want to thank you for taking time, two different times now, because if you’re just probably not tuning in now, but Dan, and I actually attempted to record this a few days ago, we had a power surge. So Dan is a super easygoing, great guy. And he’s going to be a lot of fun to watch as he continues to, you know, go up that mountain of success in real estate. So on behalf of the audience, we thank you for being so, so diligent with us, and a pleasure sharing with our audience. And then also, on behalf of Dan and myself, we want to thank the audience for listening, participating. And also please tell a friend, that’s the best way you can help our show continue to persevere, is by letting other agents know about this episode. So I guarantee you know an agent that could benefit from hearing from somebody like Dan, so please send them a link to this episode. And then also leave us a review whatever podcast system or delivery system, you might be listening to us on Apple podcast, iTunes, Google, play, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, etc. Let us know what you think of the show that really helps us improve and also tells us what you think. And gets us more visibility. So we appreciate the help there. Dan, really great chatting with you. Thank you so much. And we will see everybody on the next episode.
Dan Hellweg 56:54 Yeah. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
How Real Estate Agents Should Handle Low Inventory • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Feb 17, 2022
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
In this episode Ryan talks about creative ideas how to handle low inventory and take care of your buyers in the process. Ryan also discusses the importance of building relationships with other agents in your area. Next, Ryan discusses the rates and the impact it may have in the behavior of clients. Ryan and D.J. discuss the power of direct mail and why agents should not ignore it.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and then today is our monthly series called coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re just new to our show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. But let me tell you more about Ryan Ryan de April is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and his staff at depot properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style, and his dedication to training. He has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland and also has offices in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Florida, with hundreds and hundreds of top producers on table properties as a coaching company with eight strategic coaches who work week in and week out with every agent individually focused on business planning, coaching, and accountability. Now, if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need from your current firm, check out D APR properties, visit D APR properties.com. There’ll be a link in the show notes right there. Welcome once again, Ryan.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:33 Hey, CJ, good to be back. Good to see you,
D.J. Paris 2:34 buddy. Good to see you as well. So I know today we were thinking of sort of, you know, popcorn style, just coming up with some topics and some struggles that our listeners kind of report to us. And here’s what here’s what I’m dealing with. And the biggest one probably no surprise, is a more urgent sort of challenge. And it’s been an urgent challenge for a while for brokers. Or I should say realtors are called different things in different states, our agents are struggling with which is around working with buyers with low or lower or you know, decreased inventory and sort of having to manage the expectations for their buyers, and sort of just keep them happy with a process that you know could up could be very frustrating. So I’m curious on what you’re talking to your agents about and any suggestions you have for people dealing with us?
Ryan D’Aprile 3:28 Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So you know, it is it’s interesting, and every market has its own challenges. This one being the inventory. A lot of times I’ve I’ve coached people in the business and, and really emphasize, you know, emotional intelligence is probably one of the most important things that we have to face. But however, in a market like this, you really got to get creative. You really got to get into the weeds and help people find their mentor, you have to get the dialogue with them, you have to learn a dialogue with the entire network. There are some people that are thinking about moving, but they’re afraid to move, because there’s no inventory. So you got to educate, you got to educate your sellers on by side contingencies. Just like we have home sale contingencies. There are buyside contingencies out there, they work great. They can help kind of break up the jam. The logjam that we’re experiencing in our in our micro economies or micro markets a week or two of us working and and and then you know, spreading the word with the buyers you have within their marketplace, and then learning how to communicate with the other brokers in the market instead or not with your firms. You know, I’ve always I’ve said this over and over again. I think our industry is so interesting. I really don’t feel real estate agents compete with each other I think brokerages do and just a pure recruiting game. I mean, sure agents can call you know, six times a day from a managing broker down The Street in the office my Jesus Christ called your own agent that much. You don’t have to call our agents. It’s good point. Yeah, it’s like we are you there manager broker or are you just managing broker because all you’re doing is calling on them all the time. I’m like it’s so unproductive. But the point of my comment was, is that real estate agents don’t compete with each other brokerages do through recruiting. So as real estate agents are communicating with other realtors, that the other companies and you know, unless for that one, you know, those multi marketing real estate companies are going to try to recruit you all times. Just it’s exhausting. But I mean, literally speak with them and find out what’s going on in their marketplace. Do they have any listings there that are not yet on the market? You know, I’m also going to talk a little bit about analysis or talk about the inventory is this Zen list thing? Um, since since we’re on this topic, is it okay, for sure.
D.J. Paris 5:53 No, no, I think people tune in to hear any tips. So if he does a good job,
Ryan D’Aprile 6:00 I mean, then this gets me scratching my head. You know, it’s, it’s basically taking the private network in Illinois and opening up the public market. Well, the reason you have Zen list or excuse me, the reason why you have the private market is that the MLS came together to say some people do not want their homes blasted all over the public markets. They don’t want their home on Zillow, Redfin realtor.com, while they want to prepare their home for sale, and then all of a sudden, you know, real estate agents complain about Zillow, which I don’t think is the enemy, that their listings are out there and that they’re, you know, selling advertising space next to their own Zillow leads. And then they then at the same time to say, hey, can we get our properties on sand list? Well, it’s the exact same thing that you’re doing, you guys, you’re taking your inventory, you’re throwing out a public market, what your clients have asked you, Matt, to do. And so you know, I’m not I scratch my head, on the motivation for Zen less, I really think sometimes the private network helps us lead generate. And I think you put a pool that away from you, when if you are meeting, somebody said an open house or whatnot, you want to try to show them something else that’s on there, that’s just not on the market ever, where you can look to the private network, say, hey, there’s a property at 123 Main Street. But you know, you know, agents going to the brokers and demanding Senlis, you’re taking that tool away from an agent. Now that’s more on the lead conversion side of things. One, you know, when inventory is not an issue, so I didn’t mean to go down a rabbit hole on that. But, you know, this is where you pick up the phone, and you call the other agents or other companies and say, What do you not have on the market, and I’m not referring to the private network, what’s coming up what’s coming on. And then you got to go and work with your own network, right, and find out who wants to move what’s hesitant to move and start getting some inventory on there, you guys educate your sellers, on by side contingencies and how they can come into play. Then what comes next, which usually comes first is the emotional intelligence side of it, thanks. And just let everybody know, this too, will pass, this too will pass enough debt, the other expression, it’s going to get harder before it gets easier, rates are going to start going up. And as rates go up, you’re gonna see a mad rush of more buyers wanting to get in before it gets more expensive, all in all, making pressure, even greater and, and probably inventory even more sparse than it is already. So you know, we got some interesting times ahead of us, it’s all it will all pass. But there are many things you can do. There are many things you can do as an agent, representing buyers, right. to, to, to, to weed out, not weed out to bring the top some inventory that’s out there. But you gotta roll up your sleeves, maybe lead gen goes on the back burner for a little bit, not a big fan of that. I call that lead gen live flow. And you get down to the nitty gritty and you start really working your database, you work your database of other realtors out there. And you start communicating to people let even your friends and family know you’ve got inventory needs anybody that they know, to call you immediately.
D.J. Paris 9:21 I heard a guy, one of our guests recently gave an idea that it’s a very simple idea, but I’ve never heard it being said on the for the buy side. So I’m curious to get your opinion on it, which was if you have a client that puts an offer on a property and loses, you know, loses the deal or it sold before they can really put an offer and if it’s in a you know, maybe a more residential sort of rural style area where there isn’t a million homes right there. You know, starting some sort of campaign to reach out to those other homeowners whose homes are not listed for sale and say hey, just to let you know my client just was looking for a home in this neighborhood, put an offer and it didn’t get accepted or what you know, whatever sold quick We, so we just wanted to reach out and say my client would love a home just like yours. If you’re ever interested in exploring the option to sell it, let me know because I have an interested buyer. And I thought, boy, that is such an interesting idea. And
Ryan D’Aprile 10:13 that’s exactly what people should be doing it. But why would you say just a rural market? Why not even in, say, a three block radius of a city?
D.J. Paris 10:20 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, doesn’t matter whether you’re rural or urban, just pick an area nearby. And the same street, same block wherever you you shouldn’t
Ryan D’Aprile 10:30 be doing that if your client lost out on multiple offers. And while they’re in the negotiation process, you should be doing a direct mail campaign. And and that one and done I’d do it probably, I do it until the inventory showed up. I do probably once every two weeks, until something pops in the MLS or somebody called
D.J. Paris 10:51 me. I’d be doing right. This is what a lot of times I know investors do to try to find, especially like multifamily properties that oftentimes the MLS is they send out letters saying, hey, I want to buy your building. If you’re interested in selling, let me know and you go, Well, does that work? And it’s like, well, if it worked, you know, one half of 1% of the time, that’s a pretty amazing return on your investment.
Ryan D’Aprile 11:18 I think I think it even works more than that. And I think it is, but just so we’re not mincing words and our listeners here you need to be doing that. I mean, you having a list of buyers, and there’ll be no inventory and you’re not taking those actions, you know, you need to check yourself and what you’re doing, you’re out of your mind. You know, if you’re not campaigning, I think of some of our markets, you know, lakefront markets of ours, right? Somebody’s looking for a lakefront home, and there’s literally no lakefront homes for sale, you should be mailing every lakefront homeowner, every two to three weeks, I have a buyer, here’s the price point they want to stay under, please call me if you’re serious, this is not a solicitation to list your home, this is somebody that I’m representing that needs to buy a home, please call me very, you know, keep it simple, stupid, ship shit, don’t get too crazy on what the marketing material looks like, make sure your statement your sentence is the sick is what they see. And then be consistent and get that thing out every two to three weeks for the next 12 months, until your buyer gets the property.
D.J. Paris 12:32 And my advice to is if you’re sending those messages, because they will be perceived as possibly as as spam or they send this to everyone, at least sign it, you know, with your if you can, if it’s not, you know, if it’s not, if it’s doable, sign it with a pen, so that at least people think it’s it’s, it’s more personalized, because but it is a great idea. And Ryan said it you know, look, if you hit 100 homes, every you know, twice a month nearby, someone’s gonna reach out to you and just say, hey, is this for real? Do you really have some you know, or something, you’re going to get a conversation or two out of it at very least.
Ryan D’Aprile 13:12 Absolutely, it will work. But it is surprising. I see from a distance agents with a ton of buyer inventory, and they’re not doing the steps. It’s to you know, get it going.
D.J. Paris 13:25 Like I said, I just want to add one more thing too when you said to communicate with other brokers become friendly with other agents say, Hey, we’re all dealing with, with, you know, inventory shortages, let’s let’s help each other when we have a property, let everyone know what’s coming up. And, and I was I know, this is a great opportunity to one of the one of the advantages of working with one of the big, big large firms in your local area, whether you work there or not, is that oftentimes they have their own internal list. And so this might not be on the official private listing network, if they’re if your community has one, or it might just be internal to the company. And I know some of the bigger companies here in Chicago do have those. And so this is a great reason to become, you know, friendly with some of those people at those firms and say, Hey, I got somebody. Yeah,
Ryan D’Aprile 14:12 we have Yep, absolutely. of 600 agents, and we absolutely have that internal list that we have. However, at the same time, when an agent circulates I got a buyer three bedrooms, two bathrooms, this price point, our managing brokers have a list of all the agents at the other firms and then they will actually mail email on behalf of our agent to all those other agents. Do you have a buyer we’re looking at? So go to your managing broker. Yeah, and we all have those and say, Can you can you help me? I have this inventory, can you email all the agents in this community? And they should be able to we can facilitate that, you know, in 10 minutes time, they should be able to do the same thing. So
D.J. Paris 14:54 yeah, it absolutely and boy, those are some great creative ideas to handle. low inventory. All right, one more thing about rates going up, which I don’t think is is a huge challenge. The reason I’m bringing it up because rates are still amazingly low. The challenge is that this is what oftentimes, buyers and sellers, but in particular buyers are seeing come across their news feed. We know this is making news, the Fed might be raising rates two to three times a year, rates are already going up in anticipation of that. Not that I think it’s something that agents need to be hyper focused on the input implications of it, but more about, oh, that’s what my clients reading, I need to have a response to that in case it comes up, or I need to proactively educate my clients on what this means. I’m curious on on what you would say to agents who are, you know, are hearing those rumblings from their clients?
Ryan D’Aprile 15:48 About rates going up? And what Yeah, I think you know, okay, so with rates increasing, it makes me think about, you know, what is it? What is an element, a one of many, what’s one of many elements that causes a recession, or a boom market, and that is consumer confidence. And we are, you know, we are, we’re creatures, we’re hertz, right, we run in hertz, that’s how we, it’s how we, we as animals, right, we just run in hertz, and like, we’re like a packet cells. And so what you have this, this, this herd impact, you know, when when things happen? So you know, I remember the, the last recession, right, from the Great Recession, right, where all of a sudden gas prices were like at five bucks, that was the beginning of it, right? And then, and then all sudden, the banks started collapsing, consumer confidence, every play pulls back, and now you’re in a recession, the same exact thing happens when rates increasing, you’re going to have a panic amongst buyers, and in I truly do not think there’s any reason to panic, because, you know, I don’t know, let’s just make up a rate, right? Because I’m driving here, and I kind of keep my eyes on the road and thinking, but let’s 3% 375 really what the hell’s the difference? Right? I get it. Really, really, what is it but a couple 100 bucks a
D.J. Paris 17:11 month on a mortgage is about all it is. Yeah,
Ryan D’Aprile 17:13 if that’s right, yeah. And but it’s going to create, it’s going to create a surge of activity of buyers trying to get out. Now, what you need to do, is you really need to step back. And if you’re, like, 95% of the real estate agents out there, you’re working. And when I say real estate agents, I mean, residential real estate agents, you’re working as somebody who’s buying a home because they want to use the home, they want to live in home, it’s not an investor. Granted, we have investor clients, and it’s important to have investor clients, I’m not talking to that client right now. I’m talking to the person who’s buying the home for, you know, for their own use the highest and best use of it, which is, you know, going to be you know, you know, for their plight enjoyment for to raise their family or living there. And, you know, being in the city that they want to be for the entertainment, but they use it as their home. You got to then have your conversation around the why, and why are they buying it? And start talking about the why all this other stuff? Is my rate going to be three and a quarter? 3675? What’s it going to do? Is this a bubble? Are we going to have a correction? A lot of that goes to the wayside because somebody’s why the reason why they’re buying a home far outweighs any, you know, monetary impact it might have.
D.J. Paris 18:44 I think that’s I think that’s absolutely true. Is is getting your client away from the news of the of the moment, which oftentimes not not to be little it because it is something that to pay attention to, and to have a response to, but bringing them back to the why because you’re right. Money. Oftentimes cost takes a backseat to to you know, whatever emotion they’ve linked to that particular purpose. Yeah,
Ryan D’Aprile 19:10 yeah. I stopped my train of thought because I’m on 294 South driving from Michigan back to Chicago, and I got cut off and I just want to save my life there for a second. So sorry, it’s
D.J. Paris 19:22 perfectly fine. Save your life. That’s more important, for sure.
Ryan D’Aprile 19:26 Problem of doing these podcasts while Driving driving in Chicago. But yeah, so it does, you know, the money does take a bit a bad seat. You know, one of the expressions I’ve heard I love is that every one of us here has more money than we have time. And it’s something we got to remember, you have to remember that when you’re trying to hold your value. I mean, look, we work our asses off. We work so hard, it’s real estate agents. You really need to hold your line and get what you’re worth. There are gonna be people that are willing to work for Less than last and, and whatnot, but you know what, they’re the ones that get burnt out and leave the business because you’re, you’re making very little money at it. And, you know, we’ve come from a time where it’s somewhat of a race to the bottom look, the real estate brokerages themselves have been in a race to the bottom. Right. And at some point, that’s got to change. Because you go into business to make a living, you don’t go into business to work for free. Right. And so you got to remember that everybody has more money, the time, you can make more money, you can’t make more time period and the story, there’s nothing to discuss. And so, you know, what is the real value that you bring in to the transaction? One of the is bringing clarity to that, like, look, what is your decision really being based on being based on money? Or is it being based on time? Because two years from now, maybe rates all they think but two years is gone? You never get that two years back? That’s coming full circle, why are we doing this again? Oh, we’re doing this out? What about two years from now, when those two years have passed? You know, it’s, it’s incredibly important to keep that in mind. And that’s why this is not a commodity, our business, it’s not people have tried to commoditize it. It’s a service. And it’s, you know, it’s a lot of work. And it’s a great service. And one of the biggest parts that services bring in emotional intelligence, and stepping back and high level consulting, and helping somebody walk through why they’re doing what they’re doing. And then put it in perspective. You know, the impact of each one of the decisions being a to buy now, to wait. Example, I had a client. A mortgage lender, actually not at my mortgage company from another mortgage company, gray skies, but this mortgage company for 20 plus years and was buying a three flat in Chicago, and working with one of my agents, and I’m just kind of guiding him through it. And the three flat, he was going to move into turn into a duplex down and keep one rental above was going for like 100 something $1,000 over asking. Wow. And I talked about the transaction went Dude, what are you doing? You got to find where you are, you already got multiple properties. You’re buying this for a different reason. And it his wife really appreciated it. And I won’t get into the nuances of the deal. And I’m willing to overpay for property, because it’s what I want. But when we walked through his why it just didn’t make sense for them at the time. Yeah, I firstly overpaid for property happily overpaid, because I wanted that property for a particular reason. And that 50 to $70,000, more or less pain didn’t matter. Compared to my why that’s a service you got to provide as real estate agents don’t ever forget it. And it’s a gigantic guy, I didn’t get paid for that transaction. But I will get paid over and over and over again. Because of the level of service, the motional intelligence that brought to the deal. And the brand like what that does for me, as a consultant with those with that family, and how that ripple effect has within their community and their network.
D.J. Paris 23:31 Yeah, I want to I want to just mention this idea of emotional or rather tying, especially with with a purchase, I certainly can be done with it with on the sell side as well. But but on the buy side, we’re so lucky in this industry to have the home be such an emotional now as you were talking more about possibly even an investment decision. But but just even in a primary residence scenario, or someone’s buying the home, they’re going to live in with their family or just themselves. It is an incredibly emotionally exhausting, but also rewarding experience for that buyer. If they get the property they want to put price that they’re into. And we’re so lucky that we get to even the industry we’re in sort of touches on primal, emotional needs. Whereas like my accountant, who’s also you know, a service provider and a very important one to me, it doesn’t have as much juice, right? She doesn’t get to say tell me about your why it’s like well, I want to stay out of jail. I want to make sure that I don’t get audited. Those are my only two why’s for about paying taxes right I want to pay as little as possible without going to jail. And so of course like it’s just doesn’t have as much juice it there’s some fear factors there of like making sure I do everything correctly, but it works kind of the opposite way with with with things like you know, buying a home financial advisors also can get into wives, right, they could go let’s talk about retirements, talk about what that means to you. So other than financial advisors, and you know, realtors, those are the two big ones right like Like, maybe car salesman, I guess could could possibly, you know, talk about why things. But I think we’re so lucky, because it’s built into the transaction, all you have to do as an agent, is make sure that you talk about it with your client, because it’s already there, you don’t have to explain to them, you know, you just have to extract it out of them. And then, like you were saying, come back to that time and time again, when little issues come up in the transaction. Like, let’s go back to our why that’s really, really important.
Ryan D’Aprile 25:26 Yeah, and that’s one reason why, you know, real estate agents, you know, and there are there are books out there that talk about this, and I just completely disagree with that. Real estate agents to also I don’t feel have sellable businesses. Because of that, you’re not going to sell your book of business to another real estate agent, if you’re a real estate agent, you think you’re gonna take over somebody’s book of business, really go into this with your eyes wide open. Because, you know, if there’s an that connect, that’s why I talked about the lifelong auto flow, there’s not a personal connection, they’re going to go to somebody that they have a connection with. And so just throwing that out there, that’s why I just don’t really feel that a real estate business is a sellable business. Even a even a transferable business. Yeah, you know, I got, you know, young agents going to go join somebody’s team, because that person is going to, quote unquote, retire in a couple of years. Great. But guess what, their networks not going to work with you? You’re gonna do work for them for a few years, but their networks not going to work with you. It doesn’t work that way.
D.J. Paris 26:30 Yeah, unless the real estate industry ever figured out how to create a fee based model, where you earn a percentage, like financial advisors do over assets under management, or some sort of way to get paid every year on transactions, which they have not figured out a way to do that yet. Yeah, it’s
Ryan D’Aprile 26:48 right. And it won’t, it’s not annuity, it’s not like insurance or anything else. Or it’s, you know, it’s a one time it happens every seven to 10 years. And it is, you know, here’s the good thing. All right, for all of you listening here, all the all the all the PE firms and the companies that are publicly traded that I’ve tried to take the real estate agent out of it. I mean, you know, they’re, they’re not successful, they haven’t made money, and because of the emotional intelligence involved in it, that’s a great thing. And then your job is so secure, if you focus on what you write, and that’s the relationship. The double edged sword of that is, it’s not transferable, it’s not sellable. And guess what, don’t worry about it, we make gobs of money, be smart invest, buy real estate, yourself, have a good financial Player, Player and financial advisor, you know, put your money into a self directed 401 K or SEP IRA put up to $50,000 a year, be smart Build Your, your your net worth and build it in real estate and the equities and, and whatnot. But anyways, I don’t want to get to digest so many people, I, I’ve heard this time and time again, I do my best self, you’re not selling anything, it’s you can’t sell a real estate book or business. I’m convinced of it. And if anybody tries to convince me otherwise, it’s it’s I don’t know, I haven’t seen proof yet.
D.J. Paris 28:05 We talk about it a lot here at our firm too. We have a just under 800. Brokers, and you’d think and they pay us monthly fees and all of that. Yet, if we left, the management team and the owner owners all left and then a new crew came in. There’s other there’s other players in the space that have a very similar model to ours, right? It’s not, we have really nothing proprietary. Now maybe there just be some loyalty about or not even loyalty, it might just be I don’t want to move. So maybe agents wouldn’t move. But but our business even as a brokerage, it’s tough to sell a brokerage business, because agents are independent contractors, they can all leave at any moment, unless you have some sort of thing that prevents them from doing that which most firms don’t. So yeah, this idea that I’m going to build up a business and sell it is yeah, it’s maybe maybe not going to happen for an individual agent or even a brokerage. But the good news is we’re so well compensated along the way that a lot of sales positions, you’re not that well compensated, but you are in real estate, I feel and so you just have to
Ryan D’Aprile 29:07 Yeah, even even even the public markets don’t value brokerages, mortgage and real estate because of the people factor and how easy it is for people to leave. And you know, and then you got to see these companies rocket, right. It’s a mortgage company, sad technology company, but they’ll say they’re a technology competence company, you know, you know, compass and whatnot, they’re they’re trying to say they’re technology companies they all even call it time is trying to say it’s a technology company, right? It’s it’s because those are the companies are getting the big tech valuations. But it’s it’s not a tech company. We’re a service company, and there’s, you know, a double edged sword and that’s that’s just one of them. So not to and I’m not saying anything negative about composite great company, but in iPod $19 and cents a box and the reason being is it’s not a tech firm. It’s a real estate brokerage. It’s no different than real OG. Yeah, and I And the public markets are are saying that, yeah. And also, I think caliber or whatnot went public and they’re much below their IPO. Because the public markets because of what you just said, they don’t value because it’s, it’s so people driven.
D.J. Paris 30:16 Yeah, it’s, that’s your right, that’s a double edged sword. And the upside to all of this is your clients will never leave you, if they like you, they’re just never gonna go anywhere else unless, you know, they’re there, their son becomes a realtor, then maybe you lose the business, but they’re not going to leave you if you do a good job, most of the time,
Ryan D’Aprile 30:35 they won’t, they won’t, and that’s your business as a keeping maintain that relationship. So many agents can transaction on like, I was just added, you know, you know, just with a whole bunch of agents preaching this, it’s like, you’re just your business is your activities and what you’re doing, it’s not, it’s not the transaction, the transaction management stuff, you can, you know, you don’t need me to, to guide you through that I could give you some tricks here and there. But, you know, that’s, that’s almost the body activity. And, you know, you need you need more gun.
D.J. Paris 31:06 No, I was gonna say it’s, it were really, it’s really interesting that we live in this particular industry, you have realtors have access to largely the entire database of available sales. I mean, of course, there’s things that don’t hit the market, but I’m just just, if we just look at the MLS, every realtor who belongs to an MLS has access to all of those properties in their area. That’s not the way it works at pretty much any other sales. And I know this really a service profession, but the sales part of it, we’re really lucky, like even financial advisors typically don’t have access to every type of, you know, investment vehicle that exists there, they’re limited by what their company they work at offers, or the different companies that are partnered with, we’re really lucky in real estate that if you go to a like, and I’m using this as a car salesman, cuz everyone, a lot of us have bought cars, I’m not comparing car sales people to real estate agents, I think they’re very different. But you can have the greatest car salesperson that you fell in love with. And yet, you know, if you don’t like the particular lines they’re selling are the manufacturers, you have to find another car salesman at a different company, here, your clients will really stay around because you have access to everything, you just have to do an amazing job. And that’s really unique. We’re so lucky, in this industry, it’s it’s almost a bit surprising that there isn’t, you know, more privatization of these of listings. Now I understand why there isn’t, but we’re really, we should be very thankful for that. Because there aren’t a lot of professions where you have access to everything. My dad’s a paper salesman, he only has access to doing it for two years, he only has access to the mills he has access to doesn’t have access to every single mill. So sometimes his clients say, Well, I can’t you don’t have what I need. So this is, it’s a great reminder that yeah, you might not be able to sell your business at the end of your career. But boy, How lucky is it that you get to basically take the entirety of what’s available, and present that to your clients,
Ryan D’Aprile 32:58 you know, you got to keep in mind too, is that you are an advisor, and you’re an advisor, you should be positioning yourself as an advisor. And when I say that as don’t go around and change all your marketing senior adviser, just with people, you know, ask them what to do, because they’re going to turn ask what you do, they’re going to ask you about the market. And then you’re gonna be talking about you’re talking about, you know, a whole, you know, a 360 approach about life and life in general, it’s where my financial advisor doesn’t mean things to me, my goals, what I want, then he starts advising me and all different elements, that’s what we do is real estate agents, and it’s not transactional, you’re it’s three years prior to the client buying or selling. Let me say it again, it’s three years prior to somebody or network transacting, if you were engaged with them properly. That’s, that’s where you’re making your quote unquote, sale. Yeah, the transaction side of it. You know, that’s like the last 10%.
D.J. Paris 33:53 So wait, you just said something really important. I just want to pause Ryan just said something really, really critical. And just want to make sure you guys didn’t gloss over it or miss it, which is, when you meet somebody, you’ve got about a three year window on average before they transact. So you should have a really serious three are at a minimum plan of how am I going to touch base and Ryan, at his company, they have all sorts of tools to help automate some of it but having a plan for the next three years for every single person in your database, and well beyond three years, but at a minimum three years if they’re new to your database. And that might be a little bit of a bummer to hear. But the good news is all you have to do is stay in touch with those people for three years and care about them and demonstrate that you like them and and and then hopefully at that, you know when they’re ready there they choose you.
Ryan D’Aprile 34:46 Alright, and look, you know, I want to let people hear me out as well. Like you said kind of a bummer, right? Because it takes three years or whatnot. You know, I’m not here to say online web leads are the worst thing in the world either. Zillow realtor.com There is Pensieve go for it, if you need a quick sale, I mean, really, it’s, I am a champion of it, I think it’s a great thing to subsidize maybe 20% of your business. It might even be 80% of your business in your first year, you’re just you’re just not thinking long term. However, if you’re not coupling that with a strong net network, grand in relationship reinforcement plan afterwards. So I want to state for the record that I think those are great companies are great places to get into business. And yeah, it could be like, Wow, three years or sale? Well, that’s why there’s other ways, pretty good, quicker sales. But if you want to, you know, self sustaining, sustaining compound, interest earning type of business, you know, you got to think long term and are sent three years blink of an eye. And that’s every year. No, it’s nothing. It’s nothing. And, you know, that’s why you have to have a great marketing campaign. But you also have to have a great networking campaign, how do you network with your network, and you have to have a strategy to follow it. You know, and marketing you guys is not one channel, you need to have a multi channel marketing approach. You got it, you know, you need to have a direct mail, you need to have email, you need to have digital, you need to have a social. I do see a lot of agents doing just social hang, you’re not going to get the coverage that you need. If you’re just doing social. And it seems very 1980s ish. But I’m telling you, direct mail is still the best form of getting through to your market. time in and time out. Over and over again.
D.J. Paris 36:41 I have a quick suggestion for that. I was just thinking. So I moved into a new development. Almost a year ago, this is my 11th month. And I was just thinking about direct mail because as you were talking about it, I just realized an amazing statistic. It’s a funny statistic. I have received I was going to ask you how many how many letters how much direct mail I’ve received. Now again, I just moved in. So I understand an inclination for an agent to say like, Oh, that guy’s not going anywhere for a while he just moved into a new development. However, there’s 40 units I think in our in our building, certainly I’m sure somebody’s gonna get job transferred and need to sell but anyway, or maybe people know I’m in the business. I doubt it. I don’t think it when you’re doing direct mail you’re looking for, you know, other agents and pulling them out. But maybe, but I have not received even one message from an agent. Nothing, not a hey, congrats. You’ve just moved into this new place, which by the way, that information is public. Right? So congratulations. I just wanted to do this myself. I’m I live in Wicker Park. So it could be like I’m a Wicker Park person. I know you just moved in. You probably aren’t going anywhere. But I would love to just start a relationship with your or something. Right? I have gotten not one message and there are 46,000 realtors in Chicago. That is incredible. I guess my point is, nobody is really doing this, or very few people, I guess Ryan Ryan’s agents are, but very, very few agents. There’s not much competition in this space, especially in the direct mail space. So you have a huge opportunity to do this.
Ryan D’Aprile 38:09 Yeah, I mean, not too long ago, right. 2005 I get in the business and I started direct mail campaign to the Clinton Street lofts to 26 North Clinton Randolph place once expired North Clinton to full market, you know, 555, six, us four and 323 10 North Clinton, yada, yada, yada. And I just blew pass a police officer. All right, I’m okay. Anyways, um, you know, I didn’t get a call for 18 months, 18 months. Man, I dominated for four years after those 18 months. You know, it was me. I remember Sam Powell she lived in. I think she lived there. She might be canal play. And well, I shouldn’t say that. But my point is a great agent lover, and she was another person and I got I’m going back a long time. But like, there’s just a couple of us. You know, back then. And I’m telling you, the direct mail broke man and nothing’s changed. I have developed agents that do 2535 40 million a year that were not licensed five years ago. And that strategy still works today. And so but it’s not one it’s not just postcards, either. They got postcards, they’re in magazines. They’re digital, they’re in social. I just drove past a billboard and saw a group of our agents on one billboard and a group of loan officers another billboard. I mean, you know, you got to spend money to make money. You should be earmarking 10% of your GCI to be going back and advertising your brand new the business you should be less than investing a minimum of five to 10 grand and getting your business going five to 10 grand get another job if you can’t afford it. I mean, I’m back kidding. And that might be insensitive. You just met it’s, you know, starting a business and not marketing advertising is the way See your time? Yeah, I want to say, getting into business and not branding. And that’s funny when you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting money and monthly dues for the association, you’re wasting time. By just wasting time, you need to spend money. And once you a couple years, only 10% of your GCI should be reimbursed best back into branding. And I think that branding should be targeted primarily to your network.
D.J. Paris 40:25 Yeah. Yeah, you want you Look, nobody wants to call up their friends and ask for business, right. So what you can do is you can send them emails, direct mail, texts, jump on social, say, Hello, you can do these little subtle, even non real estate related touches, that just remind the people in your Oh, you’re still alive, you’re still checking in. And oh, by the way, you’re still a realtor. And then you don’t have to ask for business people will come to you, but you have to put the work in, right, it’s the reps, it’s the time in the gym, to you know, now to put the time in now. So by when the summer rolls around, you feel confident, you know, walking outside at the beach with you know, fewer clothes on, but you have to put in the time now. And just wait. And again, it’s not that crowded in your like I was going to ask you and I don’t know how familiar you are with the mail that comes in? I don’t know if you check the mail or, or if your wife or someone else in your family. But do you get a lot of mailers, you know, from other Realtors at your primary home?
Ryan D’Aprile 41:29 I get a bunch but they’re all from paper properties. Well, that you don’t need to put me on it, but they want it you know what I mean? But it’s fun. And it’s cute. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 41:40 What do you do? outside of your company? Do you get anything? Do you
Ryan D’Aprile 41:43 from one or two of the top producing agents and that’s it, I wanted to happen in our market. Shocking. It’s not because unfortunately, you know, even though the listeners here, you know, 20% or less of them are going to do what we’re telling them to do. And it just it’s there’s nothing you can do to change that Pareto Principle. Because I’ll tell everybody again, and again, again, success is a choice. It’s an absolute choice that you decide to make. That’s why I’m not a big fan of you know, that’s I’m a big fan of socialism. I like capitalism, you know, because I just don’t think that I want the choices taken from me. Right? I really, I really believe that. It’s a simple choice you make every day, most people just are not choosing. And I think a lot of them are just not aware of the activities that they’re doing. I mean, it is so easy to look at your text all day long on social media. That’s cool. But who’s ever texting you and whatever is on social media. That’s what’s in control of your life, not you. And so we’re all of us here, we’re on a journey together. And I think the journey and the battle is self awareness, and how do we, how do we get back to consciousness and being aware of all the time, we’re wasting? And we’re, as Robin Sharma says, We’re busy being busy, but we’re not busy being productive. Yeah. So it doesn’t surprise me just because I’m a, I’m a teacher on this. And it’s what I do all day long. And I, you know, and I’m doing this real time in real life, and it’s rampid. It’s all over the place.
D.J. Paris 43:14 Why a lot of great suggestions today, just to recap, some of them, we talked about getting creative with with low inventory and understanding in particular, we’ve heard of sell side contingencies, we want to talk about buy side contingencies, if you’re not sure what that is Google it, talk to your your trainer, your managing broker, talk to whoever or other agents, this talking about getting creative. You know, we also talked about this idea of sending out letters to people in that in those neighborhoods that your client would be interested in. And pitching, hey, I’ve got a buyer. lot lot of good suggestions there. Also the conversation around, hey, my clients are bothering you know, I feel so bad for my friends that are financial advisors, because I know they’re fielding calls whenever the market goes down, you know, they they feel the call going, what’s going on with the market? Or should I be investing in crypto and all of these things that financial advisors typically say, hey, take a breath, not a big deal. But you know, your clients are reading things too. So make sure that you have you want to get ahead of that stuff, you want to make sure to say hey, you might have seen some things about rates. Don’t worry, here’s why. Let’s run the numbers. It’s not that big a deal. Making sure that you are the are the advisor and the source of knowledge versus CNN, right, which I like CNN, but I’m saying the point is make sure that you know what your clients are into because they’re not they might not call you and say what should I do about rates rising but but they might be thinking it because that’s what they’re reading. So it’s a great reason to reach out and have conversations and then get creative about, you know, what you can do to sort of mitigate the fact that rates are rising if it’s a problem or the low inventory situation. And then we just talked a lot about marketing and branding, and having a process right process solves anxiety. I think I think process helps reduce anxiety. I shouldn’t say it solves it, but it certainly reduces it. Because if you’re worried three years from now Now, you should refocus on your process right now. So that when three years are up, and three years are coming for all of us, that you’ll go, I did, I did my workout for those those three years, which, you know, I sent out my mailers, I, I made my phone calls, and I watched the, you know, I sowed my seeds, so to speak, and I watched the harvest come in, just focus. And also remember tying everything back to the why, again, we’re lucky we get to really hit people emotionally, what would what their goals are in life, and this is what oftentimes somebody’s home’s their first or second or third largest financial transaction in their life next to retirement, maybe, do you have a child going off to college? So college as well, right, so you have college retirement, and buying home? Like those are three big big deals, you get to participate in one of those largest transactions, which oftentimes is very emotional. So tying everything back fine. Do you even know your clients why that should be the most important thing is not what they want. Because what they want is easy. Everybody’s going to know what they want, but are you going to know why they want it, and then you can help them when they get anxious. Also bringing them back to the why also reducing anxiety. So I was I always think, like, so much of an agent’s job is reducing their clients anxiety. And if you can become an expert at mitigating client anxiety, boy, you’re going to be a hero to your age your clients, because I just went through it a year ago, and I was anxious the whole time. So just a little
Ryan D’Aprile 46:27 drop the mic, buddy, you nailed it. Yeah, well, we’ll drop the mic, but
D.J. Paris 46:32 we’ll drop the mic, but only to pick it back up again, and remind everyone that if you are an agent in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, or you Iowa as well, or just I forgot if you’re Iowa, Indiana, Indiana, sorry, you have a daughter that may be headed to Iowa. So I’m thinking of that. But anyway, if you’re in the Midwest, we’ll say or down in Florida. And by the way, Ryan doesn’t just have the April properties. He also has a lending institution, he has a title company, you have a technology company, if you want to be a part of deeper properties as an agent, or one of the other businesses that Ryan is a owns and participates in. And I think they have I mean, just to brag a little bit for Ryan, they have an incredible number of full time employees like this is a real amazing operation. And I encourage everyone to explore it, if you’re not getting the help that you need at your current firm, go check out what Table Properties offers. I mean, I don’t work there. So I have no, I have no skin in this game. But I’m impressed as somebody who would, I would much rather they’ll come to our firm, but but the reality of it is what Ryan offers is really truly amazing. And you really should check it out. So if anyone out there is not getting the attention, they need go to Depot properties.com Set up a call with one of their leaders. And they can talk more about what they offer. And in particular, their main competitive advantage. As far as I can tell, and I don’t work there. But from what I understand is two things, coaching and real coaching, not just hey, we coach you because everybody says they coach you but real actual one on one coaching, as well as helping with the marketing and not just hey, we’re gonna put a flier out, making sure that there’s a process and you guys have the software and the physical sort of property as well, or the physical ability to do mailers. And so actually do that for agents.
Ryan D’Aprile 48:22 Yeah, let me chime in a little bit, cuz you make a great point. Because, you know, take coaching away and call it call it business planning. So a lot of our, you know, we got a lot of high producing agents that have joined us and loan officers. And we have different individuals that are focused on business planning. So it’s not so much coaching is just sitting back. And then business planning, then we have a VP of branding and marketing that meets with them and helps them create their brand strategy and marketing and then we execute it for them. So it’s almost like it’s an incredible branding organization with the planning department around your business. I think coaching people think I don’t want to be coached. It’s not. It’s not it’s business planning. It’s marketing. And of course, yes, we we have the software built around a model to help you continually stay focused on those daily activities and whatnot. So it’s all Yeah, and in listening, go to deeper properties.com Google me, give me a phone call. I’m very accessible. I would love to chat with you. If any of you find yourself in a in a fork in the road, and you’re and you’re looking for maybe something different gives shot we’ve we’ve impacted a lot of people’s lives.
D.J. Paris 49:27 Awesome. Well, Brian, thank you once again, and also want to just make one quick Ryan’s doing this while he’s traveling from office to office in his car. And I just want to make one last suggestion that if you are a driver, if you drive to and from work to and from the office to and from client meetings, make this year, the year that you take even just a small percentage of that drive, ideally a large percentage of it and designated for learning so there’s audible, there’s podcasts, there’s all sorts of ways to learn as you drive instead of just jamming out to your favorite tunes which you can do to buy But put a percentage of that time in learning and especially if you’re in the car every day, you’ll be shocked in a year you can become an expert in just about anything. If you just listen or read in between in between things, and especially when you’re in a car and you have to drive anyway, you know, get a subscription to Audible, you’ll you’ll be an expert in a year or two in a particular topic. And you think about how much more valuable you’ll be to your clients if you can develop some of those interests.
Ryan D’Aprile 50:27 Absolutely, right. Yep.
D.J. Paris 50:28 Well, thanks, Ryan. Really appreciate it. Thank you for taking time out of your crazy busy day. Just to come on our show and share some wisdom. We appreciate it. On behalf of the the audience. We thank Ryan once again for coming on for he’s been on with us for years now. We’re so thrilled he’s here we have on behalf of Ryan and myself, we want to thank everyone as well for listening and supporting our our program. Please continue to tell a friend just again, think of one other agent that needs to hear what Ryan said today. And believe me, pretty much every agent would like to hear we should hear that but just think of one send them a link to our show. We’d appreciate it and it helps keep us growing as well. So Thanks, Ryan. We will see everyone on the next episode. Thanks EJ
How To Overcome Limiting Beliefs of Real Estate Agents • Joanne Bolt
Feb 16, 2022
Joanne Bolt the founder of RealBossWomen discusses the limiting beliefs and how these ideas limit the development of your business. Next, Joanne talks about how do you decide what do you want to become and what keeps people from being at the top. Joanne discusses the importance of a supporting tribe and how she provides one. Another very important topic for Joanne is realtor safety and she provides suggestions on how minimize the risk on your everyday endeavors. Last, Joanne discusses her podcast and the conference she’s hosting in March.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show today’s episode, we’re going to be speaking with Joanne bolt from the B word podcast also real boss women.com. We’re going to be discussing limiting beliefs of real estate agents and how to overcome them. But before we get to Joanne just a couple of quick reminders, please tell a friend I think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from listening to our show, send them a link to our podcast, you can shoot them right over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, and I think we’re right around 350 episodes now somewhere around there. They’re all there you can live stream them. You don’t need to have a special podcast app, you can just listen right from your browser. Or if they are a podcast person just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real hit the subscribe button. And last please leave us a review. If you are listening through a podcast app whether it’s Apple podcasts, iTunes, Google Play Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, etc. Let us know what you think of the show. It really helps us to keep improving, but also gets us more visibility among those podcast directories. So spend a few moments let us know what you think of the show. We really appreciate it but now on to our interview with Joanne bolt.
Today on the show, we have a returning guest Joanne bolt from real badass women.com also the host of the podcast, the B word which we’ll talk about in a moment, but let me first tell you more about Joanne Joanne bolt is a Top Producing real estate agent, a business mentor, a top podcast host and also a speaker. She’s fiercely committed to supporting other women and invests her time and mentoring women in the real estate field and all things they need to know in order to be successful. She’s real engaging, and she tells it like it is with no nonsense and all fun. After seeing numerous women in her life stopped short of seeing the full potential of their careers because of limiting beliefs. She saw the need for more honest conversation about the ups and downs of being a female in real estate in order to show women that they don’t have to have it all together to be successful and get started. She understands that every broker can show you how to do a listing presentation, but few agents will talk to you about the reality of running your household and real estate empire at the same time. From there the real boss women community the annual events and the B word podcast were born with a motto that we show women the shit they don’t they didn’t know they needed to know. Now visit Joanne at her website which is real boss women.com And also please subscribe to our podcast b word which is available everywhere podcasts are served Welcome once again Joanne
Joanne Bolt 4:23 Hey, thanks for having me back. I love it.
D.J. Paris 4:25 Yeah, you know I really happy to have you on the show. again and we there’s always so much to talk about I always think to being a woman obviously I’m not a woman in this industry is such a unique experience. And I think women account for like 66% of all realtors are
Joanne Bolt 4:45 667 According to Nar it’s
D.J. Paris 4:49 amazing to me because there is like a national association of of women realtors, which is amazing. But there really I don’t think is enough conversation around the experience of being a woman in this industry, and I have I talk to top producers, well all the time on our show, but even just in my private life, I’m shocked at how often I will hear them say, and these are top producers like yourself, they’ll say things like, you wouldn’t believe the way sometimes men speak to me. And I go really even as a top producer, and you’re like, yeah, sometimes, you know, sometimes it can get tricky. And so I think, you know, it’s, it’s something that doesn’t get discussed as much,
Joanne Bolt 5:28 it really doesn’t. And that’s what I found. When I, when I started coaching and mentoring agents, I really discovered that there’s this common theme that happens amongst the women, realtors, and it’s sometimes we just need to talk about the shit we’re not supposed to talk about, you know, and it’s, it’s not stuff your broker can help you with. It’s not stuff that’s going to get taught at any other conference or a class you’re going to attend. But it’s the reality of being being the girl in real estate.
D.J. Paris 5:54 Yeah, well, it’s amazing to because women, I mean, we all know the pressures that women face in our in our society, which is, you’re all you’re supposed to be perfect in every possible way you’re supposed to is Oh, and you’re supposed to have an amazing career. So if there’s children, you’re supposed to, you know, be in charge of all of that. And you know, and right now, during the pandemic, a lot of it has fallen on women’s backs to take care of the education and making sure that you know, the kids are sitting in front of their zoom meetings, although hopefully, some of them are back to school at this point, not all God. But it’s still it’s an amazing amount of work. And I’ve also always heard the expression, if you want to get something done, give it to give it to a busy mother. So so it is it is amazing, and which is a cute thing. And we all laugh about it because it is true busy moms just get a lot done. And of course, not just not just mothers get things done that are women. But this idea that a woman can run her real estate career, have a family or a home life or a primary relationship that also gets the attention it needs, and really do everything in a way that’s healthy. Again, yeah, you’re right. I don’t think it’s talked about enough. And it’s like really hard to do.
Joanne Bolt 7:04 And most of us are doing it between the hours of nine and three. Yeah, because the reality is, once the kids are home from school or off their zoom, you can tell them not to come into your office, all you want, you can tell them not to interrupt you all you want. But yeah, they’re going to. And so we do most of our work from 9am to 3pm. And then after that, we really have to juggle all the things in order to make life run. Well, I
D.J. Paris 7:31 would love to dive right into today, which I know we wanted to talk about some limiting beliefs. And I don’t know if these will touch on this idea of perfection that that we expect from from women, which is completely unfair and unrealistic. But I would love to get into some of these limiting beliefs that I think are that you think are really holding women back in this in the real estate space. Yeah,
Joanne Bolt 7:54 so my, my biggest limiting belief I see women have is this doesn’t need to be the primary career for your family, that it’s a side hustle, or that they’re just doing this to pick up a little bit of extra money for the family to take a vacation or to pay for, you know, your spa treatments that you enjoy having and you don’t want your husband to always know about that you’re spending money on No, not like I’ve ever done that. And their limiting belief really does prevent them from doing the business at the highest level because they don’t see themselves as the breadwinner of the family. And whether they are are it doesn’t matter, they don’t see that they should or could be and therefore they miss a lot of opportunities to grow their business. Because they don’t, they don’t do all the lead generation and they don’t sit down and do the p&l, and they don’t look at it as a business business. They look at it as a side business or a hustle. And there’s a huge difference between that
D.J. Paris 8:50 I’ve never been a huge fan of the word side hustle. And I feel like maybe that words thankfully starting to phase out a little bit. But for many years, it was a real popular and I heard it more with women, especially busy moms who wanted to pick up some extra income on the side. But I don’t know how many people were successful with their side hustle. I think eventually, side hustles ultimately can turn into full time businesses, but it is really tough, right? Like really tough. We know, work so hard. Now Yeah.
Joanne Bolt 9:21 If you don’t give your mind fully to something to do, then it’s never gonna get to where it could be. And you never know the full potential of it. And so there’s no reason to sit back and say, Oh, well, this isn’t the primary for my family. This isn’t anything but a side job or a side hustle.
D.J. Paris 9:38 So if you were to replace that for some any of our listeners that, you know, sort of our I would assume the vast majority of our listeners maybe well, I don’t know maybe they do think that way I don’t know because we don’t get too much demographic information about our listeners. But I’m curious on if you you know, what would you say as a replacement belief for that?
Joanne Bolt 9:58 That this is Mike harir Yeah, flat out. And I know that that sounds simple. And it sounds like, you know, a lot of people are saying that they, they kind of look me with the dog look on their face. But a lot of them don’t ingrain that in their brain, they look at it and go, Oh, no, I picked this career, because I can go, you know, to the preschool during the day and drop off muffins with, you know, mommies and muffins, or because I can go play tennis three times a week, or because I can because I can. And they don’t recognize that that career really is a career. Yeah. And it doesn’t matter. If you’re working five hours a week, or 50 hours a week, it is still a career, and you need to look at it as such. So the obvious is the career,
D.J. Paris 10:41 it is a career. And we’re not necessarily saying career has to be full time, right? Because most moms, you know, working moms, you know, that’s a lot to juggle, and it doesn’t mean you’re going to be putting in 90 hours every week and not sleeping. I mean, you could certainly choose to go that route. But that’s not what really Joanne is talking about, we’re talking about creating just a healthy understanding of here’s how much time I can put into my business, or here’s how much time I’m willing to, and I’m in whatever amount that is assuming it’s a reasonable amount. I can that is my career.
Joanne Bolt 11:14 And honestly, that leads me into my second limiting belief, which is that you in order to be a super successful agent, you have to work 40 hours a week, or you have to work on weekends. Yeah, the truth is, a successful career for you is whatever really does meet the needs of your family, whether you become the primary breadwinner, or it meets whatever financial goals, you and your partner, or you and your kids, or you yourself has set for you. And you can sell 100 homes a year and not work on weekends, it can be done, I’ve done it. So that limiting belief that in order to be that top agent, or that super successful agent and not look at this as a side hustle is that I have to give up all my spare time and, and devote myself to the job that I’d like to shatter that belief because I know a lot of agents that literally do work from 10 to three, four days a week, and sell 15 million in the first quarter of the year. I myself haven’t worked a Sunday in four years. And I’m at the top of my field. So Don’t set yourself short by saying I have to work so much.
D.J. Paris 12:23 So now what what I’m hearing from our invisible audience at this moment is that sounds great. However, what happens when I have a client who says I can only go look at properties at Sunday at noon or 12? You know, 2pm and you are like, Hey, that’s my mom time, or that’s my family time or whatever, you’re busy, you know, and you’ve said you haven’t worked to Sunday. So how do you how do you work with that? Because I know realtors, often one, it’s one of the great reasons that realtors are successful is their people, people pleasers, right we want to be, we want to meet people where they’re at and whatever time they have. Realtors are notoriously challenged around setting boundaries. So what we’re really talking about is setting boundaries. So you have somebody who says, Hey, this is what I can do. And you now it bumps up against. Well, no, that’s my that’s my chuck, you know, I’m going ice skating with the kids or something. How, what do you do in that scenario?
Joanne Bolt 13:23 So there’s two things I normally do. And the second one is going to blow a lot of agents brains out there. Okay. The first one is I’m always upfront with my clients, I don’t work on Sundays, this is my family time. And this, you know, and I don’t really have to explain it. But please don’t ask me to show a home on Sunday afternoon. If it truly is the only time you can see a home maybe because today we’re in the market where if a home comes on the market, it’s gone four hours later, I will have someone in my organization or team who can meet you. But you need to know ahead of time that it’s not going to be me. Are we okay with this. And if we are we can keep moving forward. The second one, the one that
D.J. Paris 14:04 I just want, I want to pause for don’t forget your second one because I apologize. I’m interrupting Joanne, which is a horrible quality of mine. So I apologize. Interrupting women, by the way is also never a good idea I’ve learned in my life having been in relationships with women. So I apologize. However, I did want to say this is what she said is very, very profound. And I just want to pause for a moment and realize what she did is she didn’t say she gets the phone call on Sunday morning at 9am and says hey, I want to go see this property. And the person goes, well, I want to see it at noon and she goes well that says my date day off, or my day with my family, not a day off and probably never a day off from others. But this idea that she initially when she’s talking to her clients, she sets the boundaries. She tells them hey, here’s what I’m available. And oh by the way, if you need something at a very specific time, it’s the old anytime it can be done, I will do my best to make sure I have somebody to assist you with that. However, this is when I’m available. So there is no misunderstanding, there is no miscommunication. Now, again, you might have clients that test those boundaries, of course, like children, their parents, yeah, but but this is really, really critical. And I think a lot of agents are afraid to to say things like that. And I think most human beings are reasonable people, not everybody. But I think most people most of us go if my accountant, for example, who I would never expect to work on a weekend, by the way, because that’s not really when accounting stuff happens. But if if all of a sudden on a Sunday, I needed and she has never told me Don’t bother me on a Sunday, but but if I did, I wouldn’t expect to hear back from her. But if she wrote back and said, even on Monday, hey, I got your message on Sunday, I wasn’t able to get back to you as my family time. Just so you know, here are my hours. I’d be like, that makes sense. I get it. So I think most people will be understanding of that. But anyway, I just wanted to pause because I think what you said was really, really profound. But she didn’t wait until Sunday morning to then tell somebody Oh, I can’t do it today. I’m sorry, go ahead with your second one, because that was so good.
Joanne Bolt 16:10 So here’s the brain, mind blown moment, right? If you don’t want to adhere by those rules, I don’t work with you. Yeah, and it really is that simple for me, because I have nailed down who my niche client is who my ideal client is. And I let go of that limiting beliefs. So here’s the third limiting belief that I have to work with everyone in order to be successful. And the truth is, if you can’t respect that, I’m not going to work on Sundays, that you’re probably not going to be the client I’m going to enjoy working with, we’re not going to have a great relationship. And you need to go find an agent who works better to suit your needs. And I’m okay, letting a client go to find an agent that they’re better suited for than to keep a client that we’re both going to have a bad experience because I get resentful always having to tell them I can’t work on Sunday, and they get resentful always having to ask me to. And part of that really comes with, I’ve done a really good job over the years of defining my ideal client and, you know, catering to is the wrong word. But I know who I want to work with. That’s who I’m market to. That’s who I advertise to I have defined that and niche down into it. So honestly, most the time, if I get a client, I don’t actually have to have that conversation. They know enough about me to know, I’m not going to work on Sundays, and it’s okay.
D.J. Paris 17:32 Yeah, I totally agree. And I think we’re moving on, you know, we, we get so scared as agents to ever say no, to a client request, especially if we’re newer to the industry, we want to close every deal because probably we don’t have so many deals coming in at the beginning. And you know, it’s it’s, it can be very difficult to say, you know, I’m sorry, I can’t meet meet that need it. But once you learn how to say no, what I think that ends up doing, as long as you have reasonable sort of boundaries, you know, things that are reasonable, like if you tell your client, hey, by the way, here’s when I’m available to, you know, respond to a text message or an email, or by the way, here’s the best way to reach me, you know, don’t text me because that doesn’t work for me, or don’t email me or don’t, you know, you can tell your clients the best way to reach but I think, you know, setting boundaries around oh, by the way, if you text me at 11pm at night, guess what, I’m asleep, my kids are asleep, I won’t be responding to that. Now, there are plenty of realtors who just go screw the boundaries, I’m going to I’m going to respond at you know, 2am in the morning to sorry, 2am No matter what, because I want to be that fast. And that’s great and fine and whatever. But I suspect without healthy boundaries, you’re going to burn out, you’re just going to as an agent, you’re just going to get to get to a point where your clients, they know they can reach you at anytime, day or night. And now there’s an expectation that you have to respond because you have them. Because if all of a sudden if you respond at midnight, let’s and again that’s a really extraordinary thing. You’re going to date that Yeah, well, let’s just say you do one time. And then all of a sudden, what happens the next night if it comes in at 10pm. Well, that’s even earlier than midnight. And now all of a sudden you’re like, gosh, I was watching a show I was relaxing, I was having a glass of wine or whatever, or I was just playing with the kids or hanging out with whoever. I better respond. And so I think it creates this vicious cycle of you got to you got to be able to say look, any other profession. You can’t just like call an attorney up at you know, midnight on on a Wednesday answer. Yeah, they’re not going to do that. But we all all we automatically know that sort of in our society. We’ve been trained that a lot of professions are nine to five and real estate oftentimes isn’t. So I think this is really important is defining it for your clients. And you do it in and you get them to sign off
Joanne Bolt 19:51 and given yourself permission to define it. And that I think is where a lot of agents go wrong. They they really do They, you know, they can’t see 90 days out, they can only see in 30 day increments because that is the average contract that we do. They get scared that next month, they don’t already have closings on the books. So they therefore are terrified at 90 days out because they really don’t have anything on the books. And oh my gosh, I depend on commission, and they don’t give themselves permission to set the boundaries. And let me tell you something. Clients are like puppies. Okay, if you send a puppy to boarding school, and it comes home or training school, and you’ve done training, and you tell that puppy you can’t get on the couch, you can’t get on the couch if you can’t get on the couch. And then one night, you have a glass of wine and it’s cold outside and you want to snuggle up with the puppy on the couch and you let the puppy on the couch. Good luck getting that dog ever off that couch again, because that puppy is like, Nope, she broke the rules. All I got to do is give him my puppy eyes. So they’re the same thing. If you tell a client, I’m not gonna go out on Sundays. And then you go out on Sunday, guess what? You’re gonna keep expecting it.
D.J. Paris 21:01 Yeah, it’s it’s the West. Speaking of puppies, I have my 13 and a half year old, old lady Chihuahua is underneath my desk right now, who has a whole sorts of health issues, but she’s hanging in there. Anyway, I could talk about that all day. But but when I first got her 13 and a half years ago, I hired a trainer. And the funniest part. And I think this is for anyone who has who has a new dog, please hire a trainer, because the trainer came in. And she she looked over the dog and my dog was Gosh, I don’t even remember how old you know, I don’t know, if six months, maybe nine months, something like that. And she goes, okay, yeah, your dog works perfectly. And I go, well, not really like the dogs. If she goes, it’s you. That doesn’t work perfectly.
Joanne Bolt 21:40 My trainer told me he’s like, Yeah, I have to train you more than the dog. I’m like,
D.J. Paris 21:45 Oh, 100% and dogs are you know, for you know, dogs, of course are a little different than humans. But but as far as behavior, you know, we learn by repetition, we learn by by consistency. And what you’re saying is so, so important. So it goes to my point about if you respond at midnight on a Tuesday, and again, you want to you’re doing it, there’s a real positive intention there of you wanting to help the client. But now you’ve also set an expectation that that’s when you’re available.
Joanne Bolt 22:15 And you know, you don’t have to come across as a unwilling agent, when you tell your clients like please don’t call me past 10 o’clock at night or nine o’clock, or even seven o’clock. I, I tend to be very real and authentic with my clients and think that they appreciate that more. So I will laugh with them and be like, listen, I could answer your texts at 10 o’clock. But there’s a high likelihood I’ve had a glass or three of wine, and you really don’t need me to answer your texts at 10 o’clock. And the minute you you know, you laugh with them about that they’re way more understanding than if you’re just like, I only work eight to five, don’t call me after no be human, be real with them. And they’re much more likely to respond to your boundaries in a positive way.
D.J. Paris 22:56 And for me 100% And just like with a puppy, I have my dogs now Now obviously, an elder canine citizen, but, but I still make mistakes, right? I’m still not perfect. So there are times where you might all of a sudden realize, oh, my gosh, I just now set the expectation that I am available at a certain time because, you know, I responded. And what you can always do if you’re transitioning out of always being available and people are still messaging is, is you could always if you want to until you really have those boundaries well defined, just say great idea or great question. I’ll get back to you first thing in the morning. Like, if that’s what you have to do to at least they will feel bad, they will automatically reply to you and go I am so sorry for bothering you. Because that’s what we do. When we hear somebody says great idea. Let me get back to you first thing in the morning or oh my gosh, I didn’t realize it was late or no problem. Have a good evening. And
Joanne Bolt 23:50 that remember, you have to train yourself to set boundaries because no one has trained you to do that. Yeah. Industry have trained you not to
D.J. Paris 24:00 what other limiting beliefs are coming out. I think we’re on our fourth one now. Gosh, there’s so many limiting what did we or did we hit? Do we hit on all of them already?
Joanne Bolt 24:07 Well, that’s a lot of my main four, I would say my other limiting belief, especially in the in the realm of being the girl is that we can’t be the CEO, we can’t really be the owner of the business. You know, we can’t separate the business from the personal aspect. And that comes a lot from watching. You know, the high D agents out there. They struggle a lot in their offices, because when you’re at the top, it gets really lonely. And so they tend to you know, they’re perceived as unapproachable. They’re perceived as not fun to be around, because they’re just doing all the things that they have to do to run the business. And so a lot of women stopped themselves from getting to the top level because they’re like, oh, I don’t want to be like that or I don’t want to be perceived that way or I don’t want people to think of me like I’m all All business and no clay. And the truth is if we just shatter that little limiting belief, and no, it’s all in how you react to people as to whether they perceive you as being unapproachable and cold at the top, and then you can start to see the opportunities around you. But if you don’t want to get there, because you’ve made a, you know, a decision about someone else who’s above you, and that you think you have to be that way, in order to be at the top, you’re never going to see the opportunities that are there.
D.J. Paris 25:27 I think, too, I think you’re so right. And I had a very, very smart person in my life, many years ago, who was a really skilled coach. And one of just the wisest people I’ve ever met. And he had said, most people really aren’t afraid of success as much as they’re afraid of sorry, I said it backwards. They’re not as afraid of failure as their of success. Because as you said, they might see somebody who has what what in their mind, they think that would be great. And then they go, but look at all this stuff, I have to give up, look, we will who I have to become, now I have to become the unapproachable person now other people are going to resent me and envy me, maybe in my office, they’re going to look at me and go, Why is she doing? So? Why are he Why is he? Why is no? Why is he so lucky? Yeah. Why would I want to be? Why would I want to have? Why would I want other agents to be like, she got another listing? Or, you know, whatever. Yeah, I mean, these are, these are real things that happen, let’s not pretend that people at the top don’t have, you know, some arrows kind of being pointed at them. Of course they do.
Joanne Bolt 26:36 Let me tell you, when I was running my team at one of the brokerages, I was the number two team in the office, and I never let myself get to number one. And I never went to the monthly team meetings to accept the awards. Because what I found was, the more I did that, the less the newer agents wanted to pop into my office and ask for advice, the more unapproachable, they thought that I was, and I wanted them to come in, like I love mentoring agents. And so clearly a super nice person, I mean, you know, but you can be perceived all kinds of ways. And so I quit doing the things that put me at the top, because I just didn’t want agents to not feel that they could come approach me. And when I did that, it actually did make a difference. And so, you know, we all carry our own limiting beliefs on how high up in this business, we can really get in some of its our own myths, misconceptions.
D.J. Paris 27:28 I also, I think, I am so glad you had the that you had the vulnerability and the courage to share that because I am an awareness of what stopped you and not that you need to be number one, of course, nobody needs to be anything. But if you want to be at a certain level, I think too. And I’m just going to interrupt myself, because I’m curious to get your take on this. I really think the business planning portion of being a realtor is not talked about as much. There’s a lot of people that do talk about it. But it isn’t really built into a typical curriculum of like how to be a successful realtor. It’s like, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want your the perception, you know, to be of you as a as an agent, from your clients from other agents? It’s really, what are the clients I want to work with? You talked about having a well defined list of even who you want to work with. I think most people haven’t even figured that out. And I’m not saying, Look, I know why they haven’t figured it out. It’s not really taught that much. So can we talk a little bit about sort of defining what you do want in this business so that you can start moving toward, as opposed to just going well, I don’t want to be, you know, I don’t I don’t you know, there’s a lot of like, I’m worried about sort of what’s going to happen to me. So how do you sort of take ownership agency of that and go, here’s what I want to become?
Joanne Bolt 28:52 I think the first thing you have to decide is what you don’t want to become? Yeah, you know, like, I didn’t want to become the agent who worked seven days a week, and who looked up and realized my kids went to college, and I don’t remember their baseball games, you know, because I only got to attend some of them. And so when you start with what you don’t want to do, then it becomes a lot clearer on what you do want to do. And when I looked around and said, You know, I, I’m not going to work seven days a week, I’m just not going to do it. I thought okay, of my last eight years in the business, which clients were more likely to call me on a Sunday. And I found that there were two categories and I’ll be open about that. It was the men, you know, the corporate men, sure, or it was the new young first timers, because they are all hopped up on like the, you know, the high and the euphoria of buying a home. And so they they’re the ones who are getting on Zillow at three o’clock in the morning and calling you at, you know, 10am
D.J. Paris 29:51 they have all the time in the world,
Joanne Bolt 29:52 time in the world energy and yeah, and it’s funny that I kind of gave up the corporate men and the first time homebuyer And I really started focusing more on the families that are kind of in certain stages of life. And they were more close to my stage of life, and what I was going through at the time, and I found we had more to talk about, they were more flexible with how I wanted to run my business and the time involved. And they were more interesting for me to work with, quite frankly. And so I started really defining that, and niching down into that, but it really also is taking ownership of a p&l and understanding as a business owner, that if I want to make this amount of money, and I’m gonna spend this amount of money on admin, or broker fees, or whatever else it is, I might have to give up doing this piece of the business, because I’m not going to work on Sunday. And so I’m going to give up some business, you know, or I might want to give up going to this conference, or I might want to give up this event in my life. But I need to add in this, this and this in order to achieve and being open to, you know, coaching, and mentors who have been there and done that guiding me along the way and building the business, you cannot do this by yourself.
D.J. Paris 31:07 And I think that leads us into something that I know you’re super passionate about. And I have the exact same feelings, which is finding a supportive tribe. In this in this industry. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and why you’re why it’s so important to you. It
Joanne Bolt 31:23 again, it goes back to my days in the office, I found that I was super lonely at the top. And I think I think it’s super lonely at the bottom too, by the way, because we by nature are we come from a or we’re told to come from a thought process of abundance. But the truth is, we have a scarcity mindset because we never know where the next client is going to come from. And so if you hit struggles, you had no one to really talk to, if you had successes, you had no one to really talk to. Or if you had the random crap that you’re like, I don’t even know if this pertains to the business, but I just need to vent and get it out of my system. I didn’t have those people. And I’ve always heard you know, you are the sum of the five you surround yourself with. And I really struggle with acts, I was like, Listen, I want to hit here in my business. And I’m just not sure there’s anyone around me at that level that can really push me to that next one. And I kept having to go seek them, seek them seek them. And when you start finding your tribe of people, you start realizing they have the same struggles you do they have the same insecurities you do. They’ve been in your shoes or, or they need to hear from you because you’ve been in their shoes. And it really gets to where there’s no judgment. There’s no hypocrisy, there’s no gossiping, it’s just hey, this is what’s going on in the business, what’s my next step and even talk about it. And when you can do that you can hash out those thoughts about the business and what you want to do or what you’ve been through and kind of get it off your shoulder. And the path just clears a little bit more for you. And it’s a lot easier to walk down that path.
D.J. Paris 32:57 I could not agree more. And I for those who are listening who are thinking, Well, how do I how do I do that? How do I start finding my my supportive tribe, you have some suggestions or advice about what they might do to start finding those people that they can share, share their life experiences with and support each other.
Joanne Bolt 33:16 You can go on Instagram, you can go on Facebook, you can go on Google, and you can start hunting, read some books, let’s listen to some good podcast, you’re gonna get some great, great people that come on podcast and speak and, and you might be able to follow something that they’re leading. I lead a group called real boss women, I’ll be open and honest. It’s a broker agnostic group. I started just for the women in real estate, or our industry. And we have a lot of conversations about everything from what’s the best way to do social media to run your business to, hey, I’m a team owner, and I just had a team member leave and she was with me for four years. And I just want to curl up in a ball because emotionally it wrecks me that she left my team, like we’ve got all those conversations that go on. And you can find your tribe in any of those groups, you just got to keep bouncing around until you find the one that fits you.
D.J. Paris 34:10 What’s great, too about about having a tribe and I have a men’s group that I meet with, it’s the same men’s group I’ve met with I meet every other Monday. And we talk about our lives and our lives. And one of the expressions we have in there is all of you is welcome here meaning your anger is welcome. Your fears are welcome. Your sadness is welcome. And also all the good stuff is welcome to the fun stuff. But it’s a place where you can bring the hard stuff. And most of us especially if you know our partner isn’t also in real estate or isn’t isn’t of the same gender or gender identity and is just having a totally different experience because of the way we differentiate how we treat you know, different genders. And so this is a really important need and to be able to have those kinds of communications with other people. People who are just like you who want that, that connection and the ability to say, I need help, and not so much I need, you know, professional help, but just I just need somebody to talk to about this thing. And it is it’s, it’s, it’s intimate, it’s vulnerable, it’s healing. And, and it’s in, it’s also being of service to others. And it’s, it’s really just, it’s transformed my life, I’ve been doing it for 10 or 11 years, I wouldn’t change it, it’s, it’s just about the most important thing in my life. So I could not agree more and real boss woman has that, that that group they have, they have that function. So we really encourage, I think everybody needs support, everybody needs help. And this is a great opportunity to feel like oh, by the way, I’m not alone.
Joanne Bolt 35:47 And the thing I really set out to do in this group was established subsets within it. So we’ve got a monthly mastermind for our moms, we’ve got one for our team owners, we have one at the beginning of the month, where everyone comes together, and we do some form of industry learning or teaching kind of moment. I mean, this month, I taught on systems and apps that you didn’t even know you needed in your business, you know, and so and then we get to talk about all of it. And sometimes we laugh and sometimes we cry, and sometimes we you know, have to pull our big girl panties up and just move on with the business because someone will tell us that we’re being stupid, you know, and, and we’ve got that and the best thing about that it in my world is it doesn’t matter what broker you’re at. So don’t come at me just from a, you know, a REMAX perspective, or just from an Anthony Atlanta perspective, or just from a kW perspective, you know, perspective, I’m exp, I don’t care, because we are all doing the same business. We’re just choosing to do it in different platforms. So we’ve all got the same issues.
D.J. Paris 36:49 Yeah, I really encourage everyone to find a tribe, or certainly check out Joanne’s website, real boss woman.com and join join Joanne’s group and really get a good sense of, of women supporting women. I just think, you know, it’s so funny to like, us men. I don’t think we’re smart enough to put something like that together. Right.
Joanne Bolt 37:10 There’s a Women’s Council of
D.J. Paris 37:12 work. Yes. Yeah. Maybe we’re smart enough. But we’re, no, no, I would say we’re not smart enough. Because there is like there is a Women’s Council of Realtors, which is such a wonderful organization. There is
Joanne Bolt 37:21 no, that group I do. And it’s you know, and I’ve learned a lot from that group. This one just we get a little bit more. You know, I mean, last month, we laughed with the moms group over mom guilt for not wanting to go in all the time and doing muffins with mom. Yeah, like, yeah, these are the kinds of things that yet we’re gonna teach you this stuff to move your business forward and laugh with you about the other stuff. And that’s kind of the difference.
D.J. Paris 37:45 So the takeaway is, please find your tribe and.com robots. woman.com has a wonderful tribe to explore as well. And I want to sort of wrap up, I know we were going to talk about sphere of influence stuff. But I actually want to talk about safety. Just on the topic of I think women have to face this particular issue much more than men, I think most of us would agree, realtor safety. And it’s something that even on the show, we just recently had a safety expert Come on. But we’ve only done one episode on safety after over 350 episodes, so I need to talk more about it as well. And Joanne said something very important when we were asking her what you want to talk about today. She goes, it’s literally the most important topic that’s least discussed. And so I just want to spend a few minutes on this. And a lot of it too is please don’t skip past this as Oh, this is just common sense stuff, because it isn’t, and it happens. If you work in this industry long enough, you will be in a position at least once a hopefully never but probably once where all of a sudden you you know, you start to get a feeling like maybe this isn’t the most safe idea. And women have to just be more conscious of this sadly than than us man. But can we talk a little bit about what safety means to you? And maybe some suggestions you have,
Joanne Bolt 39:00 oh, my gosh, I could go on for this one for hours. It’s one of my hot buttons, because I actually left the industry in 2006 after being abducted by a buyer right out of my office. Most people who know me know that story. I know you and I have discussed it before. Yes. It’s still not talked about a lot in the industry. And I actually had a broker two years ago. Tell me I wasn’t allowed to give my speech to their office. Wait for it. Because it would scare women out of real estate and his job is to grow the office. Oh, sure.
D.J. Paris 39:36 Well, his needs are more important than yours.
Joanne Bolt 39:39 Clearly, you know? Yes, there are the standard thoughts of do not go meet a buyer that you don’t know that you haven’t checked out. I mean, yeah, we’ve all heard those. I got taken from my office at a buyer console. I mean, I did meet them an open house. I didn’t show up by myself. I went to the office. So if I could give you One biggest piece of safety advice is everyone in our family has live 360 on our phones, or on our watches, or on some, something that’s going to be on all the time that anyone else in the family can push a button and kind of get a general idea of where you are. So if I’m not home, by the time I told my husband, and he can’t reach me by text message, he can hit live 360 and get an idea of where I am. And if I’m not where he thought I should be, he can get a little concerned and, and I do tell that to a lot of women, and they’re like, I don’t want my husband’s checking up on me, or the guys are like I don’t want my wife knowing where I am all the time. That’s like stalker, you know, it’s a safety issue. You guys, when I was abducted, I did not have an opportunity to call for help. No one knew where I was, we didn’t have live 360 back then. But now you’ve got tools, there are some really fantastic bracelets out there that they sell now that look like really good jewelry. And you can literally just kind of press your hand down on it, and it will call 911 for you and alert them to your location. And it doesn’t even come across as a safety feature. It’s just, I’m not comfortable, I need some help here. And they’ll send help to you. So letting having the technology that we have today and utilizing some of that so that someone always can track you down. It’s just not a bad idea, especially as a female, because you just don’t know. And oh, by the way, just having someone call their lender and get pre approved means nothing. Because they can call the lender, they can give fake information, they can send a fake ID over, they can get pre approved and the person who meets you at the door doesn’t match the ID that got sent your lender and guess what, nine times out of 10 your lender doesn’t send you that Id anyway, they just send you a pre approval letter. Well, you think because your buyer took the time to do that, but they’re legit. No, that does not mean it. So unless you really do know them, you never show up somewhere by for the first time ever.
D.J. Paris 42:09 So what
Joanne Bolt 42:11 is right there and one
D.J. Paris 42:13 really great, really great advice. And I’m I you know and I really am saddened to, to hear again about about obviously we know you are okay today. But the idea that somebody would would do that in your office is is really, you know, unfortunate, obviously, and, and scary. And is there anything that agents can do prior to the meeting, to really get a sense of who this person is? To me, the first thought that comes to my mind, and I want you to correct me if there’s there, I’m sure there’s better ways to do this, is to even say, Hey, I know we haven’t met before. As a safety protocol, my office asks that I get a copy of your driver’s license or and I don’t even know if that would really be all that helpful. But are there suggestions you have that can be done in advance that agents can do to minimize the amount of risk? I definitely
Joanne Bolt 43:05 think that that is one of them, the more hoops your person has to jump through the less likely they are to, you know to proceed? We actually did get the driver’s license, it was not real of the person that took me because they were in it for the lot like they Yeah, they had really thought this through now they average I think person who’s going to do you harm, the more hoops you make them jump through the less likely they are to proceed with whatever you’ve got going on. But it’s just one of those things that the least amount you can put yourself in the potential for harm the better you are and not jumping up on you know if a if a buyer calls and says oh, I got your name from so and so and you happen to know so and so and like, Oh, I’m just gonna go meet you out here because this house has a hotline and we have to go look at it being okay to say no to a client until you hit figured out if it’s a safe situation is worth way more than that commission. I don’t care what that commission is. So taking time to slow down yourself as an agent and trust your gut instinct if your gut says it’s off its off period
D.J. Paris 44:12 yeah, I’ve learned that in life that my intuition is some is rarely almost never wrong. I might not always understand why I’m having the intuition to
Joanne Bolt 44:24 want to ignore it but it gave us our intuition for a reason.
D.J. Paris 44:30 And that’s a really important thing it is it is a it is something inherent in us and it keeps us safe and also you know look do not meet a buyer for the first time unless they’re you know them at the showing right like go somewhere public where you know a Starbucks or whatever. And again, I know most people who have listened to this already know that but but really have a bracelet have an app that’s always on that and have safety people in your life that know your schedule, whether it’s family or whether you just have an agreement with other realtors who you go, you know what, here’s my scheduled for today, I’m gonna be checking in with you
Joanne Bolt 45:06 with you, even if it’s another email two on one is a lot more likely to detour someone than one on one.
D.J. Paris 45:16 And in the last few minutes we have I want to talk about, by the way, great, great safety structures, we want all of our listeners to have wonderful safe careers. So thank you for for making that a priority to talk about today. It really, really appreciate that. I know our listeners do. I want to spend the last few minutes talking about you know what you’ve got going on. So you have a podcast. Let’s talk about it.
Joanne Bolt 45:38 Alright, so I started the podcast is called it’s called the B word with Joanne bolt. The B word is a play on my last name is bolt. And you can kind of be a itch sometimes in this business when you’re a high D like myself. And so I started that podcast, we do two episodes a week one episode is an interview with another person in the industry. And then on Thursdays, I draw quick tips where I do give you just some good advice on being an agent and how to get your business up and running. You know everything from social media to what the heck your first admin should actually do for you, you know, because that is a question I get asked a lot. And it’s been super fun. I really enjoy it because I get to know my audience a little bit because we let them text questions to me for me to answer and, and I go through them and I go through all of them myself. And then I hand them over to my admin so if you ever do DM me or ask a question you want answered no, it I am actually looking at it. So
D.J. Paris 46:35 and you can subscribe to b word from any podcast app, just do a search cast.
Joanne Bolt 46:41 Yeah, Apple is probably the one that we have the most people on. But Spotify you know, Google is actually everywhere. But then Megan’s thing I’ve got going on. Yes, I don’t even know your conference is the conference. We are hosting our first spring conference March 23 and 24th here in Atlanta. Holy crap, do I have some good people lined up. So I went with the concept that broker agnostic, so we’ve got speakers from several major brokerages coming in, and I looked at who our audience is and what they need. So I can’t wait for this one. We’ve got keynote speaker Giselle, who karte she’s not even a real estate agent. She is just one of the biggest badass is on Instagram around and I happen to get to know her from Chelsea pipes, who’s a friend of mine. And they were both on Inman connects panel for social media. And so she’s gonna come in and she’s really going to talk about how to get on video, why to get on video, how to use it in your business. And then we’re always going to address because you know me, we’re going to talk about the girl stuff, we’re going to address the factors of things like you don’t like your voice, you don’t like your face, you’re scared to do this because of what you think you’re going to look like. So we’re going to talk about those things too, as well as show them how to really create some darn good videos. And then we’ve got some breakout speakers that are here just to help the moms figure out how to set their schedules own their mom, Enos as well as their business. And we’ve got some good women that are going to help our team leaders know how to run a team with Grayson indignity.
D.J. Paris 48:15 And this is at the hotel Midtown in Atlanta, and I have not been to the hotel in Midtown, but I’ve been to Midtown Atlanta. And it is just a super fun area as well. But yeah, lots of great speakers. I mean, look, this is something worth traveling to, as well, for anyone who lives in elsewhere in the country. This is Women Helping Women, top producers, people outside of the industry as well with all sorts of great ideas. And this is the focus conference. It starts in March, march 23 and 24th. In Atlanta, there’s plenty, there’s plenty of time to to register. But don’t wait. Because really make a commitment. Any conference like this, this isn’t a conference you want to attend. It’s not expensive. It’s totally reasonable. And you can actually get more information on it right at real boss women.com. So you’ll see there’s a link right there. And it’s really, by the way, very beautiful page for I mean, just from a web design perspective. I love it. I think it is so cool. But there’s couple different tiers. Guys, you really as you said guys, men and women, you really should
Joanne Bolt 49:20 come I’m not going to tell him no, he may you know find some of it interesting, but I won’t tell him no. And you’re going to sweat. Only pass for the conference speakers. I do encourage you to come the night before and grab the whole past because we’re going to have a Prosecco party at the top floor of the hotel and I went today and saw the venue and it’s it’s pretty kickin
D.J. Paris 49:42 Awesome. Well everyone please there’s so many opportunities here number one subscribe to be word podcast. Check out the real boss women website which is everything Joanne but real boss women.com attend the conference March 23 24th. In Atlanta, Georgia. You even if you just get one good idea which you’ll get about have dozens of good ideas, but even you just get one good idea. It’s worth more than what the small investment is. And you’re going to just be talking to lots of wonderful, powerful, successful women who want to help. So Joanne, thank you again for being on our show. I had a great time. I love having you on. You’re so much fun. You’re so great at this. And people really, everybody should be checking out real boss woman.com And subscribe to the B word. Sorry, not the B word. Subscribe to be word podcast. We’ll put links to all of this in the show notes. So on behalf of everyone listening, thank you so much, Joanne. And we’re watching behalf of Joanna and myself. Thank you. Thank you Please tell one other agent about this episode. They have one other professional real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from Joanne send them a link to our show. That’s how we grow and also tell them subscribe to be word as well. So please do that. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Joanne. Bye guys.
Creative Ways To Get Buyer Offers Accepted • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Feb 11, 2022
Welcome to the February episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel talks strategies on how to come up with offers that are designed to win in a market where inventory is in all-time low. Joel and D.J. discuss the advantages these strategies will provide for buyers in this market and how knowing the right people will help you provide the best service and standing apart from your competition. Joel discusses what the raise in the rates by FED means and how this situation should be managed by agents. Last, Joel and D.J. discuss the weekly market update Joel sends out by email.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, I’m your guide, and hosts through the show. And today, once again, is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. And he’s been doing loans at a very high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction, he makes agents look like heroes. Now last year alone, Joel gave back over 291,000 and closing costs. In fact, I think he gave more that’s probably an old number. So he’ll correct us in a moment. But he’s gives back a lot and that’s the people who work with him. And that puts Joel’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, out of over 400,000 loan officers in the country. Joel is currently ranked number 137. Last year for his best year ever. He did 620 transactions, his highest amount ever for the year of almost $250 million in loans. Now if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we ever worked with. He did my loan, my most recent loan, he was amazing. his team’s great. He’s everybody I’ve ever known that’s worked with Joel says the same thing. But Joel can be reached. So everyone listening, you can reach him by email at joel@rate.com Again, joel@rate.com. Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. And in just a moment, we’re going to be also mentioning Joel has a a weekly update newsletter an email that I want everybody who’s listening to subscribe to because it gives you everything you need to know about what to talk to your clients about what’s going on in the world of lending. But let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel shop.
Joel Schaub 3:17 Hey, DJ, thanks so much for having me on. I can’t believe we’re already into the second month of 2022. How do we get here?
D.J. Paris 3:26 You know, it’s it’s funny. So So Joel is fortunate at the moment to not be here dealing with with the weather that we have. Thankfully, Joel is protected from the elements because today and here locally in Chicago, I think we have like seven or eight inches, maybe more. So it is it’s such a weird day today. And of course we have listeners from all over the country and guaranteed rates of every where in the country to. But here locally, it is just a weird day. So I’m only thinking about today and it’s Groundhog Day, as well by the you know the day that we’re recording this. I don’t even know if we’re getting more, more winter or spring or I forget how that works. But I don’t know what Punxsutawney Phil if he saw his shadow this morning. But yeah, it’s all of a sudden I had all these plans for things I wanted to get done in January. And now it’s February and I’m like, Oh no, I’m a month behind. I don’t know if you can relate to that at all. But you’re right. Like how did we get here? How did the time move so quickly?
Joel Schaub 4:23 I don’t know if he’s gonna see a shadow or not. But my prediction is you’re going to be shoveling snow for a while the Dan I’m going to be that’s okay. We love it. There’s no problems there. I love that you said about January or kind of planning and what you wanted to get done. And in the real estate world, it’s the exact same thing. We have goals and we need to always update and we need to refine and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today is how we can get offers in that are designed to win because right now we’re seeing a lot of multiple offer situations,
D.J. Paris 4:57 aren’t we in inventory as low as As everyone probably who’s listening, no matter what market you might be servicing, most people can appreciate that and are rather not appreciated. But most people can appreciate understanding that we’re all dealing with it. And you do have to sort of get creative these days in order to get noticed. There’s a lot of competition rates are still really low. And so there’s just a lot of people who are able to put these offers and that, boy, the competition is fierce. So yeah, I absolutely would love to talk about that. Because there’s a lot of stress, I think, in working with buyers right now, I hear it a lot with the all the agents here at our company, and even agents I know outside who are just, they’re just stressed, it’s like, it’s tough, it’s tough with you’re working with a buyer. So I’d love to hear some advice about what you can do to help get your offers a little bit more more attention than that, then then they’re getting
Joel Schaub 5:54 well over the years, I’ve talked to 1000s of agents, because of all the offers that have come in for my clients. And the one thing that’s being talked about so much more recently is the scrutiny on who’s doing the mortgage, okay, we take all the cash buyers out, if we’re lucky enough to be working with cash buyers, that’s great. Because then you can cut people out, like me that cause all the problems, right? That’s the mortgage folks that gunk up the deals, right? If you have a good buyer, and they’re paying cash that’s going to win. The Second best is having somebody that can update the pre approval letter for you to make the offer look as strong as possible. And I wanted to review the two strategies here, if you’re an agent submitting offers, and if you’re like a lot of agents right now, and you’re listening, and you’ve submitted offer number three, and number four, and number five, and we still can’t win. At the end of this, we’re gonna have some new strategies that you can absolutely walk away with, that you can put in place right away to hopefully not have to submit offer six, seven and eight to get it approved. Okay, so let’s start with Yeah, I’m excited. Yeah, I am too. So excited. Just to go through these two strategies in terms of the dollar amount that’s listed on the pre approval letter. We used to have agents that would say if the property is listed for 400, and we’re going to offer 380, please update my letter to show just 380,000 We know that strategy, right? Sure. I like the opposite strategy a lot more. I like showing that our buyers are very strong, especially when there’s multiple offers, and showing that they’re approved well over the list price. And just what wait. Yeah, well,
D.J. Paris 7:39 wait, go ahead. Does won’t. So I know what a lot of our agents, sorry, our agents, our listeners, and viewers might might have might be saying right at this moment, which is why I interrupted you. Thank you for allowing me to interrupt. But just this is important, because if what Joel just said is is very important. So I’m going to just we’re going to roll it back to slightly. So just said, Hey, when you’re putting an offer letter, maybe traditional wisdom, maybe the lender would suggest this, maybe the agent might suggest this and say, Hey, let’s Yes, we know you could be qualified for more but but I don’t want the bot the seller to look at the total amount you could be qualified for, and then maybe use that as a point of leverage to then try to drive up the price to get more out of the buyer. So that’s like the traditional sort of flinch risk responses. Oh, no. But if I show my cards, won’t that give the buyer more ammo to come back to me and say we need you to bump it up a bit?
Joel Schaub 8:37 I think you’re exactly right. In a normal market. I think you’re absolutely correct. This is a strategy where our cards are on the table, okay, I’m approved to $550,000, you want this home for 400,000 doesn’t mean that my buyer is going to go up to 550 Just because they are approved to 550. But out of the other offers you have our offer is the strongest and just think about it from the listing agent side. Why are we going to take an offer from somebody who’s barely qualified, versus somebody who’s very qualified. So talk to your loan officers, okay, the people that really help you get deals done. Right now we’re going to be your best friends. Okay. Go by also, I also think they’re busy yet,
D.J. Paris 9:26 this is a great opportunity to for the buying agent to also reiterate that to the listing agent, when the offer is being submitted to Hey, just so you know, in case you miss it, my buyers actually approved for more. And then if you need to spell it out further about what that might mean for the actual loan process, you know, which hopefully you wouldn’t have to explain that probably means that that that loan approval process will go a lot faster and smoother. And you could also say and by the way, this is not a you know and opportunities for, you know, for you to then drive up well, you wouldn’t need to say that. But but the reality of it is, is, is it might seem scary to the listing agent. But at the end of the day, what Joel just said is really, really important, which is, it actually is a stronger offer at the existing price you want to give, because it suggests that your client really has their financial life together. And this deal is going to close. And right now, in fact, just this morning on our management meeting here at our company, one of our managers said, Has anyone noticed that loans are closing a lot slower these days? Is that just me? And everybody on the call who’s practicing goes, Yeah, they really are going longer. So this is a perfect reason and timing to do it. So I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to steal all your thunder. But that is such an amazingly powerful strategy. And I’m almost wondering if again, this conventional logic of No, no, no, no, don’t show that you can pay for it, you can pay more, because that’ll maybe give them an opportunity to drive up the price. And again, maybe in a traditional market, you wouldn’t do that. But this is not a traditional market.
Joel Schaub 11:04 I like that you said thunder, you didn’t steal the thunder, you’re bringing the thunder, you’re literally talking about the things that are going to help agents that are listening, close, just one more transaction. Okay. And so now that could be a little counterintuitive to somebody saying that we’re going to show our cards, but I know it’s ringing home to a lot of people listening right now where they have had offer after offer last, okay, let’s go in and get your loan officer to update the letter to the highest amount they’re approved for show. The second thing, let’s show the highest downpayment that they could do, even if that’s not how much they plan to do. There’s a lot of people that can absolutely qualify for a loan for five or 10%, down DJ. But oftentimes, if there’s multiple offers, and the letter says 5%, down buyer, it goes right to the bottom of the barrel, right? Sure. Let’s change that. Let’s have the frank conversation with the buyer about the most that they could put down, have the loan officer update letter to show the most down that they could do in all honesty. And even if they’re approved to put down less, it’s no problem to show that they are approved with 20 or 25%, down at a much higher amount. And then once the contract comes in, it’s absolutely acceptable as long as they get out clear to close in time to select the exact loan amount that they want. Okay, big time strategy here. If you understand what I’m talking about, this will go a long way as a buyer’s agent, to submitting offers that are designed to win by making the offer as strong as possible. And it’s not lying. Okay, we’re not going to say somebody can put 20% down if they don’t have it, right. But if they have it, and they do qualify for five or 10% down, we’re not going to highlight the fact that there’s something in the offer that might be less desirable than somebody else. So we want to exemplify all the positives on these offers.
D.J. Paris 13:06 And also, for agents that aren’t all that familiar, it is a little harder these days to get through some of the approval process if you have a complicated situation. restrictions from from, you know, federal guidelines and lending guidelines and compliance really have made things a little slower and more tricky, because, of course, everyone wants to do things aboveboard. I’ll tell you a quick story. Because this just happened yesterday, I was getting my teeth cleaned by my dentist who is just a wonderful, wonderful person very successful financially, from my understanding, I don’t know his full financial picture. But from what he’s told me over the 10 years, I’ve known him, he does quite well he owns his own practice. He has a 4000 square foot condo townhome or condo down in the Gold Coast right across from his office. And he because he has an S corporation, where he pays himself a salary with a lot of business owners do and he pays himself a very modest salary because that’s what is allowed with S corporations. But on paper, he maybe doesn’t look as financially strong. He tried to refinance his wonderful condo or whatever it is. And God only knows what the cost of that condo might be. And he says two thirds of it is already paid off. So he says I’m really just refinancing 1/3 to try to take advantage rates. And he he got he got denied. And he goes, you know, the crazy thing is he goes, I have the cash to pay it off. I have cash to do it. But he goes even that he goes, it’s just complicated right now. And so that’s happening to even you know, people who are really financially secure. So I think these these examples you’re giving are really important because you know, the last thing a listing agent wants to see is an offer that looks complicated or tricky because the down payments low or lower than what they would do. Ideally law As you know, the amount that’s being financed is low, or is higher than they would prefer. So I think you’re absolutely right. Like, these are great, great ideas just to get the listing agent, Oh, this looks good, thank goodness kind of kind of feeling.
Joel Schaub 15:14 You’re exactly right. If I’m an agent, I don’t care if I’ve been in the business less than a year or more than 20 years, I’m making friends with a local lender that’s really reputable. These are the people that are going to help us get deals pushed through. Okay, as a realtor, you know, how many lenders call you all the time, right, I understand that. Find the ones that you actually know, that have a good reputation in your community. And, and partner with them. They’re the ones that are going to help you get deals through, because listing agents know which banks and which mortgage companies are easy, and which ones are a pain in the butt. Okay, for real. And if the buyer isn’t paying cash, you better well believe that the listing agents are looking at who’s doing the financing, much more than the specific terms of the offer.
D.J. Paris 16:05 I think that’s a really, really good point. And our whole intention with this show is not with Joel, this month, the monthly series that we do learn with a lender is not to say, here’s some cool rate facts that you can take to your clients, although we sometimes do that, because it’s appropriate and useful. And we certainly will talk about rates, however, what we’re really trying to do is help the agent really separate what the from all the other agents that they might be competing with in their local marketplace. And by choosing a lender that can give you tips like exactly like these, most agents aren’t thinking like this, they’re just like, just whatever the lending institution provides, as far as a pre approval, that’s what we’re using, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna submit it. And now you can say to your client, Hey, I gotta have a few ideas about ways we might be able to get this offer noticed. This is the kind of education that an agent can use to really just shine above all the other agents in their market. There’s a
Joel Schaub 17:05 big difference and seeing people that are really taking the next step in their career this year in terms of doing a lot more transactions and putting their foot on the gas, and then the ones that are not, and I’ll tell you the difference. And it may be hard to hear. But agents aren’t letting the buyers dictate the terms. They’re not letting the buyer say, Well, I went online and found a bank out of five states away. And this is what we’re using. If you don’t want to submit offer after offer, one of the things that you can do is build your team, have the people in your community that you know that are absolutely there to help you that have your back and be that resource lending as part of it. Whether you’re an attorney state or an escrow state, connecting with local attorneys, and local escrow officers and building that team up, right. Same with appraisers, and inspectors, knowing the people that are going to help you get your deals done is going to differentiate yourselves greatly when it comes back down to submitting offers that are designed to win. Because I don’t know if you’re like me, but I don’t want to go submit six or seven offers. If we have to, that’s fine. But what would be great is that we’re getting our offers accepted and recognized because we’re making it easy on the listing agent to accept our offer. Okay, so we’ve covered a lot right there. DJ, there was a couple of other things that I know that we have to get to before we
D.J. Paris 18:27 just wanted. Yeah, I wanted to talk just quickly about rate. So we talked about this a lot a month ago, because it was really prevalent in the news, it has become even more so with I would say, I don’t like to use the word mainstream media, because there’s some negative connotation, but I just mean, the news that your clients are absorbing, whether they’re watching something on TV or reading, you know, blogs, or maybe even newspapers, we’re hearing a lot about the Fed raising rates. So what is that going to mean in your interpretation of it to the lending world? And what to agents be talking to clients who are reading this information, and probably getting a little freaked out about refinancing possibly, or putting that by offering because maybe it’s not going to be as much money as as you know, fed keeps raising rates I won’t be able to afford as much are people freaking out about this right now? Are you seeing a lot of, you know, worried phone calls from from consumers? And then what would you be saying if you were an agent?
Joel Schaub 19:25 My staff and I have had to talk a lot of people off the edge in the last three or four weeks in terms of oh my gosh, rates have gone up, and they’ve gone up so much and the Feds haven’t even raised rates yet. TJ so what’s going to happen when the feds to raise rates? Is this going to be the last year am I not going to have any more transactions? are buyers going to stop buying real estate all these questions come up and we kind of say it laughingly but these are real concerns, right? So one of the things that I’ve been saying a lot lately and you can share this with your buyers that are talking about I thought rates Recently, we’re below 3%. When I look online, now they’re averaging in the mid threes. The Federal Reserve only meets eight times a year, but mortgage rates change almost daily, right? So we’re not waiting for the feds to raise rates for the full impact of these future rate increases to be baked in. So, in other words, when the Fed does raise rates, they don’t call all the mortgage companies and say, by the way, reminder, today’s the day increase your rates by a quarter percent everybody. It’s been well choreographed by Jerome Powell, and those of the Fed that they are going to raise rates two or three times this year. And since there are only eight meetings, and mortgage rates happen all day long, it would go to reason that mortgage rates are ahead of Fed meetings, right. So when the feds do raise rates here coming up in March, I don’t anticipate mortgage rates moving up that much more already from where they’re at. So what does that mean? We can talk some sense and a little bit of calmness into buyers that are really afraid that they’re going to lose out that rates are going to go to four and a half and 5% this year. And you can be the voice of reason, if you’re a realtor, where your competitors are doing the opposite. They’re selling fear, and they’re telling buyers, you better hurry up and submit this offer we’re going to lose out and rates are going to go up. I just don’t like the strategy of selling fear, be educated, educate, and help people. I know, we all want to make Commission’s and I know we all want to close transactions, but there’s a right way to do it, and a wrong way. And I’m telling you now, rates for the rest of the year are going to average in the threes, there’s not going to be some major push to four and a half or 5%. In pre COVID We’re now finally just getting back up to the point where rates were never lower than they are now. Before COVID. So let all that sink in. And then think of how bad the market is going to be. It’s gonna be really good.
D.J. Paris 22:12 Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s just always we’re all so immediately focused on headlines, right? We are. I’m susceptible to it. You know, if you, if you go to one website, you’ll see they, you know, one news outlet talks exclusively about how the President is failing the country. And then another website says no, no, he’s you know, there’s a lot of more positive stories. So it sort of depends on your news source. Also, you know what you’re paying attention to. But at the end of the day, if we look at it with perspective, rates are still really amazing. And it’s still an amazing time to be able to buy no inventories down. And that’s tough. But that’s why we gave some suggestions today about how to maybe get get towards the top of the pile versus Bottom of the Pile, especially you know, where people who are exclusively focused on rates buyers, maybe they’re shopping, some of these institutions that you know, they don’t know aren’t as reputable or aren’t as professional, they just go over the rates, lowest, you know, banks a bank while just go there. And not understanding that the, the agent, the attorney, the seller, on the other side of the deal goes, I don’t know who that is, or that I’ve had experiences with that particular lender. And it’s pretty, it’s pretty dicey. So these are things that the public doesn’t know about, right? The public only knows what they see what they read what they hear. So this is what we’re trying to break through is to give you the agent, this kind of information. So you can cut through all of some of the you know, the nonsense that’s out there and really say, No, this is this is really what’s happening, and then you become the trusted provider. And then they stop paying as much attention to things that might be trying to influence them to feel a certain way or another where you can influence them in an authentic and positive way to say, here’s what’s really happening.
Joel Schaub 23:57 DJ, I wish I could tell your listeners that there was a major difference between different banks, in terms of interest rates offered, that’s just simply not the case. Okay? There are not one bank somewhere, that’s going to be a point lower than another bank unless they’re being charged points. Okay. And as much as mortgage companies try to differentiate themselves and say, our rates are better, we’re the lowest and all that. Think of it this way. There’s a cost for an iPhone, I love telling this story because this will make sense. If you buy an iPhone from Apple, it costs whatever it is, it’s way too much. This is not an advertisement for or against Apple. But I think an iPhone today cost, you know, it’s over $1,000 to buy that phone. Are there some websites online that are somehow selling an iPhone for $599? Sure, maybe. But if they could do it every single time, they would be the number one seller of iPhones in the whole United States and we would know who they were, we would know that name. And it’s kind of the same with mortgages. If the rate today is 3.4 4% And we’re seeing somebody that’s offering something less, they might be able to do it once or twice, but they’re not going to be able to do it for the long term. And it’s all about reputation and making sure that your clients are working with somebody that can close, we all want something low. But we know chasing that deal or tripping over dollars to get dimes, there’s a lot of things that may not be the case. And at the end of the day, it’s all about teaching, educating, and making sure that your clients are working with trusted, reputable folks.
D.J. Paris 25:33 I think that’s perfectly said. And also, we want to make sure that everyone knows that Joel has an email list where every week, he sends out a market update, and it’s bite sized, it’s digestible. But it’s specifically for agents to be able to talk to clients about what’s going on. So you don’t have to wait once a month for Joel to come on our show, although we appreciate you listening here to, but I really encourage everybody to sign up for this newsletter, Joel, what’s the best way that somebody can get added to your your distribution list,
Joel Schaub 26:05 we’re never even opening it up before it just kind of became viral in terms of people were seeing this and sharing it. And even like printing it out and putting it in their office, because it gives you real ideas that you can speak to. And if you’re a managing broker, you’re in an office, how to lead a meeting and talk about just small things that are really relevant right now in the mortgage world. So yeah, you can be added, it’s as simple as sending an email now, to Joel J, o el@rate.com. It’s as simple as that joel@rate.com. And in the subject line, you can just say, add me to it, there’s nothing else to it, add me and we’ll be
D.J. Paris 26:46 able to what I’ll what I’ll do, and you’ll have to remind me to do this, because I’m sure I’ll forget. But I will create a form on keeping it reals website, which will automatically send that to you in real time. So that way, somebody can also do it right from our site and get you that that information. And I’m telling you, we have 800 agents here at our firm, it’s the only one we send our agents here. Because quite frankly, it’s the only one we receive, which is also really interesting, right? Because with the amount of agents we have at our firm, you would think we’d be getting a lot of these from other loan officers who say, hey, Please distribute this, we really don’t get that. So that’s the extra mile that Joel and his team goes and this is not Joe puts this together. This is This is him and his team’s work. And it’s really, really helpful for agents. So please, everyone, go do that. Also, if you want to work with Joel and partner with Joel, you know, guaranteed rates licensed at all, all states, they can, you know, work with with buyers from all walks of life. But if somebody wants to partner or work with you, or has a buyer that they want to talk to you about, or refi, for example, what’s the best opportunity, same way should I email you as well?
Joel Schaub 27:57 This is just a reminder that the mortgage side of things is really helpful. So whether it’s me, or somebody that you know, partner with these mortgage professionals, not only will they help your clients get deals done. But if you find the right ones that really want your business, they should spend money with you and RESPA compliant ways. And I know I get so much pushback from these lenders saying why are you explaining this, but it’s so true. If you’re a lender, and you’re working with an agent, you should find ways to co market and spend money together in a real RESPA compliant way. So if I’m an agent out there, and I have the same loan officer that I really liked, and he’s always asking me for my business, I call them up right now. And I’d ask him, can we spend some money on an event, I have an event coming up and see if they’d be willing to spend money with you. The good loan officers out there that are really doing production would have no problem splitting a good size event with you. They might spend several $1,000. And that’s one of the big things that you can have in your corner is a good trusted loan officer, whether it’s me or somebody that you know. So I appreciate all of that you can always reach me It’s easy. It’s joel@rate.com. And that’s the short email for guaranteed rate.com 773-654-2049 is a direct line and try me. You’ll actually get a reply from me. We answer the phones. And we’re really there to help you partner and get deals closed.
D.J. Paris 29:31 Yeah, and it’s all about giving and Joel is famous for saying on our show and also outside of the show is givers get and he I know that he walks that talk. And I know if I was an agent looking for a partner, I would want somebody like Joel who says Let me help you versus let me help your client get the best rate or which of course they want to do as well. But really what Joel and his team do is help you build your business versus closed deals, and Joe closes more deals than just about anybody in the country. But He does it by giving it’s sort of counterintuitive a bit in a way. It’s, it’s this give and, and law of reciprocity, almost like if I give so much people are going to want to work with me. So that’s our whole intention of doing this particular show every month, it’s packed. It’s really what we do on all of our episodes. But this is a perfect example of the kind of relationship you want somebody who wants to come on a show like this. He doesn’t promote himself, but he offers the opportunity to speak with them. But he’s constantly providing value, think about what that would mean for your clients, if he’s willing to do that for you here for free on our show. Imagine what he would be willing to do when you actually have a deal. So I could never give a big enough commercial for Joel even though we this is not a commercial because he really walks the talk. And I really encourage everyone to reach out to him and see if you guys can work together. So reach out to joel@rate.com At the very least get on his email list. It’s really great. And, and on behalf of all of our listeners, Joel, we thank you for your time. I mean, Joel is one of the top ellos in the country. He doesn’t have time to do this and he finds time. In addition to that, we also want on behalf of Joel and myself to thank everyone listening and watching really appreciate all of your your love and support. Please leave us a review whatever podcast app or system you might be listening to this on right now. Whether it’s apple, or rather now called Apple podcasts or iTunes, Google Play Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, etc. Let us know what you think of the show. And also tell a friend about this episode, you have other agents in your office, they are worried about what the clients are freaking out about rates or how to get offers accepted, send them a link to this episode that will help them and you will feel good about doing that as well. So thank you guys so much for continuing to support our show. Thanks for leaving us a review. Thanks for telling a friend. And thanks to Joel for continuing to come on year after year after year. We are so my biggest fear is one day Joe goes I really don’t have time to do this anymore. So we are so grateful that he is taking the time to do this because nobody has ever in the lending world provided this kind of value to our listeners. So thank you, Joe.
Joel Schaub 32:08 If I’m an agent right now I’m taking a big deep breath. I’m not worried about rates this year. There’s a lot of positivity. And I’m taking this and I’m reminding myself, what can I do to give back right? If every focus is givers gain, and the more you give, the more you get? What are one or two things that I can do as an agent right now to give back to my clients so that I have a really successful 2022 DJ, thanks for having me on.
D.J. Paris 32:33 Great. Thanks, everyone. We will see you on the next episode. And Joel, see you next month. Thank you
How To Develop Relationships With Developers• Heather Ditlevsen
Feb 09, 2022
Heather Ditlevsen with Lipton Luxury Living in Chicago goes back and describes how her obsession with real estate turned into her career. Heather and DJ discuss the importance of mentorship in the real estate business. Next, Heather discusses the importance of open houses, her follow-up process and and how she utilizes them. Heather also describes how she built her relationship with developers on new construction. Last, Heather discusses how she nurtures her relationship with her clients.
If you’d like to listen to Josh Lipton’s interview with Keeping it Real Podcast click here.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide, and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer an up and comer Heather debt Lipson. Before we get to Heather, just a couple of quick reminders. First, please tell a friend about our show. Think of one other real estate agent that you know that needs a boost or wants to hear success stories from top agents like Heather, send them a link to our website. Or if they’re a podcast person, just have them pull up a podcast app and search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. But if they’re not a podcast person, send them over to keeping it real pod att.com. Every episode we’ve ever done is there and you can stream it right from a browser. So for those non tech savvy people, we made it really super easy. And also, we ask you to do one other thing which is leave us a review. Tell us what you think about the show. Whether you’re listening on iTunes or Apple podcasts, Google Play Stitcher, Spotify Pandora, wherever podcasts are served, let us know what you think about it. I mean unless you’re gonna give us a one star review then you know then you can ignore my my request but seriously, whatever you think of the show, please do let us know it helps us continue to improve and also helps with our visibility with other possible listeners. So thank you on behalf of everyone at the keeping it real podcast team we have some really exciting announcements coming up very shortly but for now, let’s get to the main event. My interview with Heather didn’t listen.
Okay, today on the show, we have Heather Detlef son with Lipton luxury living which is with compass here in Chicago. And let me tell you a little bit more about Heather. Now Heather grew up as an only child in the western suburbs here in Chicago and move to the city for college. She went to Loyola University where she was studying pre med by the way, I had the same initial path, different college, but obviously did not did not. I did not end up becoming a doctor and neither did you. But after school, she she nannied, I guess right before I got to organic chemistry, I was like, I gotta get out. This is this is.
Heather Ditlevsen 3:45 Yeah, I was my senior year and I was like, nope, not for me anymore.
D.J. Paris 3:48 Well, I didn’t have the chops for it. I’m sure you probably did, but I just didn’t. But anyway, after that, Heather nannied for several years here in the city before finally taking real estate classes two years ago. She’s a very outgoing, outspoken person and has always had an obsession with real estate. So she figured why not just go for it. She knew she had the personality to succeed. She lives in old Irving Park and loves it. She spends her free time binging new shows, checking out restaurants with friends and hanging with her best friend’s baby. Who is also the cutest thing since sliced bread. We should we should what is the baby’s name by the way, his
Heather Ditlevsen 4:25 name is Joey and I’m with him constantly and everyone in my life knows about joey and I’m basically a second mom. So
D.J. Paris 4:32 Joey is is a great that’s a great baby’s name.
Heather Ditlevsen 4:36 I love that and she’s pregnant with another baby. So we’re gonna be Auntie James too. Yes.
D.J. Paris 4:40 That’s amazing. Well, since others already been talking, we we welcome you Heather. Welcome to the show. We appreciate your time.
Heather Ditlevsen 4:50 And true true passion. Mita already be interrupting and chatting. So here we go. So
D.J. Paris 4:55 just just to give everyone a little heads up about what we’re eventually going to get to um, It is. We have some show notes. So we do our research before we bring on guests and zonna, who’s the behind the scenes like she does 95% of this podcast, really. She always does research and she gives me some talking points. And she said, Heather did $10 million in her first year of production, which, if that was the truth, it would be absolutely insane. Turns out it isn’t the truth because she actually did 13 and a half million in her first year, which is beyond sort of comprehension. So we definitely want to figure out how you got there. But let’s go all the way back to the beginning. And, you know, I know we mentioned a little bit about you know, why the switch from you know, pre med into, you know, to nannying to real estate, but what was it about real estate that really caught your attention?
Heather Ditlevsen 5:46 Yeah, I’ve been all over right. Yeah, it’s funny. I always thought I wanted to go to med school from you know, early high school on and just never ended up working out that way. So yeah, I got a job nannying. And, you know, I, like I said, I’ve had this passion for real estate since I was probably 14 years old. I remember, you know, being a weirdo only child looking on realtor.com. And like houses in my parents neighborhood trying to that is when I was like 10 years, 1014 years old. I’d be like, you know, home on a Friday night looking at home, like, you know, what, what am I doing, but I promise I had friends. But yeah, so I, you know, always had this weird obsession with it. And, you know, I was actually at a friend’s extra, my friend who has the baby, I was at her lake house a couple summers ago, and we were drinking beers by the fire. And it was, you know, midnight, and we were just talking and I was like, You know what, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna sign up for classes. So at, you know, midnight, and sitting by a fire, I saw my career started, essentially. And I actually ended up signing up for the wrong course, because I wasn’t. And I had to call them Monday morning and switch. And you know, that’s how I did it. And I did an expedited six week course, I did it for six Saturdays in a row. And it was, you know, like eight hours a day and knocked it out of the park. And I ended up reaching out to a bunch of top producers that I had already kind of been following and knew the names of Josh Lipton, whose team I work on now being one of them. So I reached out to him on Instagram, because I didn’t have his number or email, you know, so I did a little stalking and I basically asked if he wanted to meet for coffee, and he asked if I had passed, you know, the state test? And I said, No, I’m taking it next weekend. And he basically told me, well reach out once you’re past and I said, Okay, fair, you know, so I took it the next weekend and pass the first try. And so I texted him, I think 20 minutes after I got my test results back with a picture of it and said, let me know when you want to meet. And we did. We met the next weekend. We talked for about three hours. And he had just you know, he had been doing a lot of business and never had anyone and it was just the stars align. I truly believe timing is everything. So he asked if I want to join him. So yeah, I gave the family I was working for some notice and started with him. Actually, tomorrow. We’ll mark two years. Exactly. I started with him February 1 of 2020. So
D.J. Paris 7:58 Wow. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, it’s really funny too. For the audience. We actually have interviewed Josh on our show. So this is just completely a coincidence because Heather has made quite a name for herself since she started as being this amazing sort of up and comer or already arrived, I guess at this point here in the Chicagoland area. And there’s 45 or 46,000 realtors. So it’s not like it would be Oh, we live in this small rural community. Everyone knows everyone and everyone knows each other. Everyone, a lot of people do know how they’re because she’s she’s made a lot of strides. And also Josh as well, who’s kind of a legend here in Chicago as well. But there’s 1000s of other realtors here in the area. And it just so happens that when I was jumped on with Heather, I had, I guess maybe I had known that you were with Josh Lipton, but I had forgotten and so she was telling me about it. And I go, Oh my gosh. And the even the way I met Josh, we were talking about was just, I’m sure we can go back. We’ve actually interviewed and we’ll put a link to his episode, because it was quite a good one. Because his whole thing at the time was he was like, you know, I listen to your show, I think I think this if I remember correctly, he said, and you have all these guys who come on or, but they have teams. And he’s like, I really do it all myself. And I would love to tell people how I do all of the production. And he was so great. And we loved having him on. And he’s such a nice guy. And so I’m glad that you’re with him. And so if you haven’t gone back, everyone who might be new to listening to the show, this is like three years ago probably interviewed Josh. So I’ll make sure we put a link in the notes for Josh’s episode because it was quite interesting because it is true that a lot of the top producers we have on have teams and there’s nothing wrong with that teams are great, but it’s always cool when somebody can do it all by themselves. And now of course he’s working with you, which is amazing. And I’m sure he’s grown, he’s grown to need a team where he’s probably he got to that level and probably said I can’t really do more without a team but boy did he get to that level and just just a great guy. Yeah. So you know,
Heather Ditlevsen 9:50 you have to join somebody great, who has good intentions and can help bring you to that level. I mean, I owe you know almost everything you know to him, obviously I do my own hardware, but you know you have to have somebody That’s in support of you and helps bring you up otherwise, you know, you’re just another fish in the sea. So
D.J. Paris 10:04 it’s so unusual that somebody has as much success as has you’ve had so early on without a mentor, or a team member who can just help you, you know, build your business, which I’m sure again, I’m sure you do almost all of it yourself anyway. But having that kind of mentorship is so important. And it’s really almost a universal experience. For top producers. It’s very rare. When I interview somebody who says, you know, I just kind of did it all on my own without really a whole lot of help from anyone, and I don’t have a team or I don’t have a mentor, it’s really uncommon. So I want to use this as it. And I want to also mention how you reached out to him, which by the way, you would, you would think these top producers get a ton of these types of emails, they really don’t carry McCormick who comes on our show every month. She’s a top producer here. And in Chicago, and as everyone who might be listening already knows her, she she she’ll message we talked before we go on every month, and she’ll say, Oh, I got you know, 10 or 20 different responses from people on your show. But outside of that, she goes, you’d be surprised very few people ever reach out and you had actually reached out to her as well, prior. So I think there’s a tremendous lesson there in reaching out to people who are doing well and saying, Hey, can we talk? I either I just want to get some advice, or maybe there’s an opportunity we can work together. So I just was curious how many people did you end up reaching out to just to sort of talk to them before? Was it just those two? Are there a lot of people?
Heather Ditlevsen 11:40 Yeah, I reached out to about five or six agents Carrie McCormick’s one of them. Hi, Carrie, and for listening, but she, I ran into her at an event that actually just brought me to my first week, there was like this fancy dinner, it was like a top agents panel. And he goes, I’m gonna bring you with I’m like, I don’t, I don’t think I belong here. Like, nobody knows who I am. And he’s like, No, you’re coming. And Carrie was there. And that was our first time meeting face to face because we had only talked to you like texts on the phone. And, and, you know, maybe now she wishes as with her just kidding. But yes,
D.J. Paris 12:11 she she doesn’t she does everything herself to that. But it is it is it is interesting that some people just function better as individuals. And and and she’ll talk about that I can see I’m like, you should have a team. And she goes, I know, but I’m too controlling. And then there’s other people who are willing to say, you know, hey, let’s let’s work together and it works for them. And but I think just this idea of a mentorship is so important.
Heather Ditlevsen 12:35 It’s everything. And I knew I didn’t want to be on my own. I knew I wasn’t going to succeed that way. I had, you know, high hopes for myself. And like I just said, like you anybody? Listen, Josh and I say it all the time, anybody can get a real estate license, right? We’re not performing heart surgery here. If you study and you pay attention, anybody can do it, right? But not anybody can succeed in it. So there’s a difference, right? My entire family can go get a real estate license, that doesn’t mean they’re gonna be good at it. I think a lot of it’s internal, I think you have to have the personality and drive. And I think a lot of its external. And you have to know, you know, who to join and who to talk to and swallow your pride a little bit and say, Hey, I’m brand new, nobody is going to hire me. When I don’t have a name for myself, right. So yeah, like I said, I reached out to Josh on social media, and both him and Carrie said the same thing that, you know, I think his exact words were, wow, it takes a lot of balls recharges. And I was like, yes, thank you. So I think he saw a lot of passion in that. I think he was that he was literally sitting on the couch with his wife like watching Netflix when my little message came up. So it really has worked out well. We are two peas in the pod, we’re very similar. You know, we’re like brother and sister that way we fight sometimes and talk but it works well. And I think our clients appreciate that, you know, we play a lot of bad cop, good cop, and we really bounce off of each other. You know, it’s just, it’s been a very good relationship and very, very grateful. So
D.J. Paris 13:59 I’ll tell you a quick story. This just happened to me. And this has never, almost never happened to me. And although I think I’ve been doing this 11 Not this show 11 years, but I’ve been in this industry for 11 years, and I had a guy come in, he had just passed his real estate license, and he was interested in possibly joining our firm, or I’m not even sure if he was interested in joining our firm, but he somehow found my the podcast and so he’s been listening to it. But he set up an appointment to learn more about what our firm offers. And he came in and he goes, You know, I absolutely need a mentor, I need a I need somebody who I can go out in the field with and you know, they can sort of be there with as a partner. And even though we have like 800 agents in our firm, I sort of thought you know, I don’t we’re probably not the right fit as much as I would love to say we’re the right fit for everybody. But anyway, I said you know, I said I can bring you on board and we’ll take great care of you and we have amazing we have all these great trainers and whatever but the coaching piece or sorry, the mentorship piece, we don’t really have a good structure for that. I said, you’re really probably better off going to these top producers, who you know, we have some top producers too but But, but we said, you know, why don’t I go through my list of people that I know. And I can give you some suggestions of who you might want to reach out to? So he goes, Oh my gosh, that’d be amazing. So we came up with 20 names that that he had already made a list of people. And I went through it. I said, here’s 20 people that I sorted, no. And I said, he goes, I’m going to take them all out for coffee. And I said, I said, I promise you, if you do that, you will have so many opportunities, because everybody wants to get that call that goes, I want to, I want to learn what you I want to he goes out, he goes, I’ll work for like, maybe I’ll just work for a small salary for now. And I was like, I go dude, in two years, you were going to be crazy successful, because he had the courage like you to reach out to people who probably don’t really have time to respond. And and people who do and because so many generous, wonderful people in this industry, and you just reach out. But I think that’s when people say I’m looking for a mentor. My thought is well, I mean, I can try to help you do that. But are you doing that on your own? And you did that? And I just think that’s so, so awesome. And that’s
Heather Ditlevsen 16:03 what we did. I took him for a coffee at Starbucks. And I remember I was so nervous. And he walked in with a giant Dunkin Donuts, coffee and true Josh fashion sticking out. And I remember being like, this is gonna go really well.
D.J. Paris 16:14 Yeah. So So you grew up here locally? So I’m curious out in the suburbs. I’m curious how your how you nurtured your sphere of influence? How important is your spirit now understanding that your sphere might also know that you just got a license, because you just recently got a license and last few years. So was that difficult, because I know, we get this feedback a lot from new agents who listen to our show, they say, I know I’m supposed to work my sphere of influence. I know I’m supposed to stay in touch. But I’m really timid about asking for business, or rather even just sort of reminding people that I’m looking for business because they know that they know me, it feels weird to ask my friends. And then also, I also feel kind of like a fraud, because I don’t know enough yet to really do a good job. But I don’t want to screw something up. I’m curious if any of those things sort of happened to you, as you were starting? Like, did you have any of those concerns about reaching out? Or how did you?
Heather Ditlevsen 17:08 I wouldn’t say it concerns I’m probably more confident than I should be. But um, I wouldn’t. I mean, if any friends or family end up listening to this, this is no offense, but I didn’t really tap into that, to be completely honest. I don’t really have. Listen, everybody has their own sphere of influence. Right? Some people have a lot of really wealthy friends, like good for them. I don’t, right. So in for me, you know, I’m not, you know, I’m 28. So Oh, my God, I’m 29 I just forgot I had a birthday. Sorry. I’m 29 Happy birthday. Thank you. A few weeks ago, when I started, I was 27. Right? Like, a lot of my friends aren’t necessarily buying yet. Or like, yeah, they are. It’s not like, you know, not enough to like really, like, make my career go wild. Right. So, I mean, I have sold a couple of friends places and a couple, you know, an ex boyfriends play stuff like that. But I wouldn’t say that was my main
D.J. Paris 17:57 source of business. reliabilt.
Heather Ditlevsen 17:58 I know, it was not. And I did you know, of course, I posted on my Facebook and Instagram when I first got licensed. And I, it’s one of my big 2022 goals is to market myself more because I don’t you know, it’s worked out fine. But I did not nearly do it as enough as I could have. Because you don’t want to you don’t want you know, your family is going on stuff to like see how your life as you don’t want to be like, do you need to buy herself by herself?
D.J. Paris 18:19 Nobody wants to be that person. Right?
Heather Ditlevsen 18:21 No. And it’s, you know, you do it occasionally, I would say maybe quarterly, right? Just remind the people you know, and what I what I’ve taken away from it is it might not be your friends and family that are binary sign but maybe they’re like, Oh, well, my neighbor is you know, so like, it’s more stuff like that, that I think could give me business because you know if it friends or family they know like my closest people they know I don’t need to post it on Facebook. Like they know what I’m doing for a living. So yeah, I mean, we can talk about it now or whatever. But I got most of my business through doing open houses. Because believe it or not, I would.
D.J. Paris 18:51 Let’s talk about that. So how important were open houses while you know then and how important are they now to your business?
Heather Ditlevsen 19:01 It was everything. I remember I did my very first open house. I think the first weekend I joined Josh it was a listing he had and he was doing X it’s like I’m not doing it by myself. So I went with him and I I was in charge of making sure people signed it and you know, on your on your first time. It’s like, oh my god, do I talk to them? Do I not talk to them? How? Like, there’s a like, looking back now two years later, I’m like there isn’t there is a formality. It’s just doing open houses, right? Like some people are just not better than like Joshua man, like he’s not good at them. Right? Like he doesn’t. You have you have to have the person typed to like want to talk to people without being too salesy, but like aggressive enough, and I will admit like, I’m very good at doing them. So I I do an open house every weekend if I can, like obviously if I’m out of town or sick, that’s different. But in the beginning, I was doing an open house every weekend. I mean, Saturday and Sunday and I still try to that’s you know, that’s what you’re meeting a lot of unwrapped buyers at least for me it was I don’t know, I don’t know for everybody but you know you want to go after if you don’t have your own list. seems to do you know, there’s a million agents out there that don’t want to do their own house, open house, especially big top producers carry Josh whoever, like, that’s the last thing they want to do, you know, so they’re more than willing to let you do it. You know, you say you’ll do it for free and your price is keeping enriched buyers, right. So you know, in some open houses are fails, I’ve done some where literally nobody comes, you know, or one group comes in, they have an agent. So it’s, you know, you don’t know what you’re gonna get. But I did an open house for one of our listings two weekends ago and ended up selling the next day. And I met
D.J. Paris 20:32 one of the people that came to the opening one of the people that came they had an agent, so what actually carry on so
Heather Ditlevsen 20:38 sell your house? Absolutely. Yeah. And we got 10 grand over list, but you know, just a little bit, but yeah, there was, we had 35 groups come through, it was absolutely insane. Nine groups were unwrapped buyers. And out of those nine, I am now working with four of them. So to me, that was an I did it, you know, it was there two hours. So two hours on a Saturday now Oh, my
D.J. Paris 21:00 God. So So you have four clients out of it? And if we say let’s just say the average commission, I don’t know, like 10 grand or seven grand, something like that price point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s like, 30k right there for two hours. Now, there’s a lot more work that’s gonna go into
Heather Ditlevsen 21:17 it. And some might not buy for six months, right. But I don’t care. I mean, I don’t, of course, not. My clients are long term to me, right? I don’t, I’m not gonna sit here, like you need to buy in the next 30 days. You know, so if they’re, if they buy in a year from now, whatever, they’re my clients, and they will send me referrals. And that is all that matters to me. So, you know, I’m just saying, where anyone listening do open houses, it is, by far 100%. Besides Josh, obviously, helping me tremendously, you know, with leads and stuff. That has been the number one way, and now I’m starting to get to the point where, like, they’re giving me referrals. Again, you know, I haven’t been doing this that long. But I’ve already had a couple of buyers give me multiple referrals, you know, and now they give referrals. So at some point, and that’s how these top producers get big, right? Especially the ones who’ve been doing it. 20 years. It’s just at that point, it is it’s just referral after referral after referral. So yeah, you know, if you’re looking for a way an easy way to do and, you know, for me being single and having no kids or like, you know, now’s the time to hustle.
D.J. Paris 22:11 I’ve got more time. Yeah, yeah.
Heather Ditlevsen 22:13 I mean, my friends always like, does that what you want to do on a weekend? I’m like, what else? Am I gonna do? Just sit on the couch, you know, drinking like, I might as well make some money. Yeah, yeah. I love open houses.
D.J. Paris 22:22 Yeah. And let’s, I want to drill down just a little bit on open houses, only in the sense of, when do you have I know, this sounds so sort of like, inconsequential. But we get these questions a lot. People will want to listen to the show. And they’ll go, Well, you guys talk a lot about open houses, but you don’t get too specific. And I only want to ask you just a couple of questions about it.
Heather Ditlevsen 22:42 And I will talk about it forever.
D.J. Paris 22:45 So when somebody walks in, are they signing in right away? Or are you leaving them alone?
Heather Ditlevsen 22:49 Okay, I have a you know, every agent does it their own way. I learned what works for me and my personality type. And I you know, it’s funny because clients I have gotten from open houses, like we will laugh and talk about the like, yeah, you know, some open houses we go to it’s like, hi, welcome. Sorry. That it’s like when you go to a car dealership, and they’re like, Hi, I’m Jeff, can I help you? Like, can I just frickin look around for a second? So
D.J. Paris 23:12 you walk into Banana Republic, and you like the salespeople face they seat? Yeah, right. They see it. And they’re super helpful. Nice, lovely people. Me, I’m like, I already know what I want. Like, if I need help, I’m coming to you. But you do get that little bit of like, Please don’t come over and talk to me.
Heather Ditlevsen 23:28 But I do make sure so Compass has an app, that there’s an open house, you know, section on it. And you can sign in sometimes I bring the iPad so that I can have it say now, but usually just use my phone that you know, we all have our phone in our hands constantly. So I don’t do the old fashioned pen and paper. I did that for a few months in the beginning. And I realized I couldn’t read anybody’s handwriting and I Yeah,
D.J. Paris 23:47 that’s a that’s a real problem. Yeah, it really is, I
Heather Ditlevsen 23:49 would look back. I’m like, I don’t even know what this says. And it sucks because I can’t follow through. So compass for any if compensations listening, use that on your app, because it is amazing. And it’ll automatically go to your CRM anyhow. So at some point, I will make people sign up. And usually when they’re about to leave, or you know, I’m a very good conversationalist. So like we’ll be talking and, you know, kind of make a joke, like, don’t forget to sign in, so I can stalk you later, you know, like, I’ll make some kind of joke and like, they laugh and they like it, you know, so, yeah, I’m very non aggressive about it. And, you know, I would say, you know, if it’s slow, or it’s only one group at a time, I obviously always get them to sign in. But every now and then a couple will slip through where I know somebody came in and out, I didn’t get them to like at this one. I was telling you, it was insanely packed. I mean, at any given time, there was five or six groups and you know, I’m trying to talk to them and, you know, you know, you see a couple come in, they do a quick walk and you see them leaving I’m like, dang it, I think up in the sign it but, you know, it happens so rarely.
D.J. Paris 24:44 But people like that might not have even become a client anyway. Right?
Heather Ditlevsen 24:49 Right. Or like, you know, a lot of times people come in, they have agents, there’s the thing on the AdWords is like, are you working with an agent? Yes. So those ones I don’t even follow through? Well, you know, obviously they’re not they’re working with somebody. So it’s really on They’re the ones that aren’t represented, obviously. But yeah, you have to know the fine line of not being too aggressive. But making sure you get it like, and there are a lot of agents that are too timid. I mean, I was at the beginning. You know, I remember doing my first met Josh was like, make sure they sign it. And I was I was so awkward. I was like, what I do is go to Nick, hey, can you sign in, but just make it part of your conversation? And then make it funny, you know, and or just say, you know, if there’s any other questions I can answer for you. A lot of times, they’ll ask certain questions, and maybe I don’t know the answer, you know, what’s the edge of the room? Oh, I don’t know, if my client makes sure you sign in for me. And I’ll follow up with you. So,
D.J. Paris 25:30 you know, and then and then what’s the follow up process for you? How do you do it?
Heather Ditlevsen 25:34 Um, so I always do it the next day. I don’t like to do it right away, because it makes me you know, it’s like going on a date and text them five minutes. Too much. You know, I
D.J. Paris 25:43 had a great time. Let’s get together again. Yeah. Yeah, it’s breathe a little. Yeah.
Heather Ditlevsen 25:48 So but if you wait too long, then maybe they really wanted you to follow through. And now they’re like, Oh, well, she doesn’t care. So Right. Always do it the next day. Usually, it’s, it’s always be attacks, I don’t like to do email. I’m a very, I’m a much more informal agent than probably most, which I think, you know, we can get to that later. I think clients that I worked with appreciate, I think I’m very relatable. And you know, I’m not the suit and tie, I’m not going to wear stilettos every showing obviously, of course, you can tie but you know what I mean? I’m not the, you know, I, I dress presentable, but I dress comfortable. And if I do a showing, and sneakers, I do a showing and sneakers, you know, but so I send a text, you know, when they sign in, they have to give their name, their number and their email. So I always send a text and I just say, hey, you know, Jessica, this is Heather. And I usually put something funny, you know, the awesome agent you met yesterday at the address. So they remember they maybe they met five agents yesterday, you know, if they went to multiple open houses, they might have signed in multiple places. So I always say the address they met him at and I’ll usually be super, you know, super chill, like, hey, you know, let me know if there’s any other questions you had about the listing. If this isn’t the place for you, you know, happy to help you guys, you know, find something that fits, would love to set up a phone call this week. And we can talk next step. And that’s it. It’s super casual. I don’t say I don’t ask them, you know, so what are you guys looking for? You know, what’s your price? Right? None of that right off the bat. If they want to work with me, they Well, again, I always relating to dating, but it’s like, you know, if a guy or girl wants to see you again, they’ll respond. You want to work with me? They’ll answer and listen. I’d say 75% of time, they may not respond. So you got probably about a 25 to 30% chance of those buyers actually responding. So, you know, if they
D.J. Paris 27:22 don’t respond to your text? Do you text them again? Or do you just let it go?
Heather Ditlevsen 27:27 I do well, so it depends. So I I’ll give it a bed. I don’t text you know, if they don’t respond the first couple days, I don’t respond again. I usually wait a few weeks, I do another very casual follow up like hey, just checking in. You know, if there’s anything I can do, let me know. Like, it might be two sentences. Yeah. And then after that, if I don’t hear from him, I usually let it go like a girl can take a sigh, you know, so. But I will say I actually have a client right now. And I met them through an open house over the summer, sent her a follow up, we were very chatty at first, and then they kind of, you know, went quiet and just whatever, maybe they’re not looking, maybe they met somebody else who knows, right. But I’ve continued once a month for the last four months, I’ve sent an email checking in, they reached out about three weeks ago and said, we’re ready to start looking seriously. We’re so sorry, but am I dealing with a lot. So you know, it happens. So I would also tell people, just because somebody’s not responding, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to reach out ever. I would keep sending those monthly follow ups don’t do more than x, you’re gonna annoy them. But monthly follow ups very simple. Just hear if you need me, you know, don’t do anything crazy. And they’ll remember your name, and they actually appreciate it like Sharna has been like, yeah, you’ve been following up. We like that, you know, so
D.J. Paris 28:35 do you and you can do only do it with taxi. It’s so interesting, because we think especially for anyone listening that might be middle aged or sorry, no, by all means, people who are middle aged or you know, even not necessarily that that old. But I know for me, I just I just assume people read their emails. And of course they don’t. Most people don’t read there. It’s like, I’m shocked. Now texting is really the only way I’m, I have a much higher probability to getting a response just from my friends even. And it’s funny we have, like I said, we have about 800 Realtors at our firm. And today we had a, we had to send out a policy update. We just made this like new rule about something. And so we needed to make sure that people knew about it. So of course we sent out emails to their work email, and also their personal just because it was important enough that that they really see it and then and then we’ve done this long enough to go we also need to text everybody because it’s it’s it’s just you know, people don’t read their email. So that’s another you know, suggestion.
Heather Ditlevsen 29:40 Yeah, and I just my friends and marketing extra she just told me this literally this week that 95% of people open their text within the first two minutes of getting it so that’s why if somebody doesn’t respond to me right away, like I know they probably see on it, and they either just don’t want to respond right now. Or like I said, same thing. I’ve had people respond a week later, you know, a month later You know, months later, so I would just say don’t give up. Just because someone’s not responding doesn’t mean they won’t don’t want to work with you. You never know what somebody’s going, you know, you don’t know somebody could have lost their job the next day after you met them, somebody could have had a death in the family the next day. And now here you are, like you want to buy a house, you know. So, you know, you have to take it with a grain of salt and know that they’ll reach out if they want to.
D.J. Paris 30:19 Let’s, let’s talk about new construction. Because I know that for a lot of newer agents, that is just a foreign sort of thing. It’s like I know, I know, top producers can sometimes get these sort of relationships with developers and, you know, they get to sit at you know, maybe there’s a sales center and a particular development or, you know, I just get some other listings or whatever. It’s not that common for a new a newer agent, like yourself to the, to the industry, especially for as young as as you are. It’s really impressive. So I’m super, I know, our audience is really excited to hear about your take on new construction and how you sort of got involved with that.
Heather Ditlevsen 31:00 Yeah, I mean, I’ll contribute it to Josh. So Josh is a for everyone listening, Josh. And hopefully me one day is a developer as well. So I kind of walked myself right into it. And that’s a huge reason why I reached out because I knew he was kind of just starting his developing developer part of my role as I was, as I joined him, he did his very first project. Literally, it completed a few months before I joined him. So I really joined him at like his peak time. And now, if you guys can see behind me, all of these pictures are actually all of our projects, our buildings that we have built. So it’s, it’s been crazy. We have like four just this year coming up for new buildings. So it’s, it’s wild. But yeah, you you know, for me, obviously, I, again, I kind of walked right into it, right. So Josh, and I do a ton of new construction. Like I said, He’s developer on them. And then obviously, also, we’re the brokers. But I have, because we work hand in hand, and he’s the developer. Like, I have a lot of hands on experience that I know, I’ve talked to plenty of agents who’ve been in his 1520 years that still are kind of, you know, unfamiliar with new construction, because it is it’s completely different than your average resale, right. There’s developer contracts, you know, that you put offers on versus your regular, you know, car contract, or, you know, it’s just it’s a completely different ballgame. So, you know, it’s been really, really cool to be a part of that. And to see on the back end, I mean, again, I still don’t know everything, trust me, I don’t, but I know a lot more than probably your average agent. And there’s, it’s been cool. There’s agents in my office that have even come to me and been like, Hey, I have clients buying a new construction. Do you have any suggestions on what we should look for during, you know, showings or final walkthroughs and, you know, it’s cool, you know, you don’t want a developer that’s, you know, you always want to look for a one year developer warranty, you know, there’s a lot of wear on here. There’s a lot of bad passwords out there. There’s a lot of bad developers out there. And so you know, you want to look for certain things and, you know, the reality is a lot of new construction is sold before it’s even, you know, on the market. Right? A lot of I’d say I don’t know, I’d say 50 to 60% of our stuff has sold while either it’s in the framing stage or the drywall stage so you know and for that for buyers that’s scary right? Because they might see renderings you know, we hire we hire you know a person to do renderings for us to show you know, buyers what’s gonna look like because we see the vision right? I can tell you Okay, yeah, powder bath kitchen, whatever. But a buyer is like what the hell is this well for so you know, but it’s still hard for them on a rendering to see that so you know, that’s a huge part of it. You gotta sell the image to people right and that’s that’s it’s you takes a special person to sell that because you know, we walk into a builder selling the dream. I’m selling Yeah, I’m selling an image that they can’t see. So you know, Josh and I, I think we stand out because a lot of developers that you know, we know personally and this is no you know, nothing bad against them. But a lot of developers will hire an actual you know, interior designer or whatever to do seven Josh I do all that ourselves, from the tile to the paint colors, the type of baseboard, you
know everything about the property, I know everything I can tell you where to go get counters, I
can tell you what lights to do. Like we pick everything literally everything we don’t hire anybody so you know, we’re both very hands on I mean, I’m at Studio 41 with him, you know, multiple days a week when we get to that phase of the project like Plumbing we pick it all so when our projects are done, I can truly say like we designed to this like not a single other person besides him and I has a say in any of that stuff. And we we know what buyers looking for, right? Like I know what’s in I know what’s going to sell. So why would I hire somebody else to do it when I know better than anyone.
D.J. Paris 34:42 So I’ll have to ask because I just bought a new a new construction place. So I went I went basically all white like ever white walls, white quartz countertops, white cabinets, or you know all variations of whites and then then all of the fixtures are all dark and black, matte black gap. So I, you know, it’s funny that things, especially fashion and just sort of aesthetics, of course rotate and change and evolve. And so, you know, I was thinking like, it’s so cool. What I like Now the way I think of it, knowing a little bit of a tiny little bit about interior design. I’m like, Oh, this is so cool today. And I want I go, I wonder in 10 years, is are people going to walk in and go? What were these people thinking? And then I realized, of course, they will, of course, they’re going to do that. That’s the nature of evolution of of aesthetics. But that’s why it’s really important for I think, agents to know what’s in now or how to correct what was in 15 years ago,
Heather Ditlevsen 35:44 which Yeah, we saw obviously, we shoe other, you know, resales and stuff. And a lot of the early 2000s Is that cherry color, right? You all know, I had my first place. Yeah, and the cherry cabinets. And when you walk in, you’re like, holy shit. It’s not what I had. Yeah. And the granite, the dark granite counter. So I had
D.J. Paris 35:59 a dark granite countertop.
Heather Ditlevsen 36:01 I can picture your place. Yeah. Another thing Josh and I are really good at is, you know, because we work with a lot of contractors and stuff, we have people for everything, you need new counters, I got you. You need to know where to get lights, I got you, you need a guy to paint your cabinets. I got you like I literally got you covered on every fret. So I think that’s another big thing we bring to our clients that, you know, I’ve been able to like, you know, that’s scary for a client. You know, we a lot of clients who buy, you know, obviously not only new construction, but they might buy something that needs a complete gut, and they’re like, holy crap, where do I start? Like, I don’t even know how to get tile. And like, it’s, you know, what do you do like Google, like best tile person in Chicago? That’s overwhelming. So, you know, I, that’s a huge selling point. For me. I think that’s a huge thing that stands, myself and Josh out for compared to other agents. Because if you don’t, if you don’t do that a lot, like not only do we do new construction, but I’d say I would constantly say 80% of listings we get we convinced our sellers to do some sort of work whether in some of its like total Reno, like kitchens, bathroom floors, like everything, sometimes it’s maybe just new counters, sometimes it’s just painting, like whatever it is. And every we’ve done, you know, every level of it. But like I said, I’d say 80% of our listings we do because again, we know what sells So sure, could we walk in and say you know, don’t do a liquor thing, we’ll schedule photos tomorrow, we’ll list it, but it might sit for a little bit because guess what people don’t want to do work. That’s the real Oh, are lazy, and they don’t want to do work because they don’t know where to start. They don’t know who to call to run a bathroom, they don’t know who to call for new countertops, they, they just don’t know what to do. So, you know, when something’s already done, it’s that much more appealing. And alleging sellers, you know, they get stressed out, like, especially if they’re living there, you know, if they’ve lived through the construction and the dust and don’t get me wrong, it is a pain in the ass. Like, I’m not saying it’s not, but when your house sells for 50k more, you’re gonna thank me. So, you know, that’s another thing that I think stands myself out is, you know, being so new in the industry, because we do so much of that on listings, I have a plethora of contractors I can give you, like I said for anything, and I myself being a licensed interior decorator, but you know, I have a good eye for staff. So I’ve had clients come back after they’ve moved in and asked me for my opinions on stuff and asked what paint colors should I do? And they you know, they actually listen to me. So it’s nice.
D.J. Paris 38:11 Well, I just, I just think how valuable that is, when you’re going around showing older properties to your your buyer clients and they go, I hate those cabinets and you go no, no, that’s it, then you get to say, oh, that’s just gonna cost two grand, and it’ll take a week or something I never said and, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, Don’t worry, I’ve you know, or you know, that old sort of goofy granite countertop that has the weird colors in it, don’t worry, we can swap that out with something different, like a white one or whatever. And that’s, you know, that’s another to grant like, Don’t worry, like, we can fix all this stuff. And I hate that. Yeah, it’s and it’s and I don’t think a lot of realtors have enough knowledge. They know that that can be done. But you have the ability to really say, hey, we do this kind of stuff for our own developments. We know how to how to get this done for you. Like really, it’s no big deal. Don’t let that stop you from from this particular property because we can we could swap all that stuff out. And very few, very few agents have that knowledge. Great. And
Heather Ditlevsen 39:11 we you know, we’re paying, you know, maybe 6070 cents on the dollar for a lot of stuff too. And that’s appealing to them like hey, you’re not paying, you’re not gonna get ripped off by somebody walking into some, you know, granite place and picking out counters and they’re up charging, which I can guarantee you every place does because you’re a new customer and what do you know, you don’t know how much a slab of granite costs so right how much you know, and it’s funny because we had a client actually this summer, she redid her master bath, right? And it was beautiful. She did a great job. And you know, we asked her how much you know I’m like curious how much did you spend on this? And she told us something wild like 30 grand and it wasn’t that big of a bathroom and I go 30 grand. I go Are you kidding me? I go this should have cost at most eight to nine. I’m telling you that and she looked at me and she goes seriously I go oh no probably should have told you that because now you’re gonna kick yourself in the butt but I don’t know who the heck you hired but like, and that’s the truth though. Like People will pay it because they don’t know what it was oh, 2525 No, it doesn’t cost. So
D.J. Paris 40:06 and ultimately, even if it’s after the fact, I think most people, this is just the psychology. I think most people want specialists in their life, even if their specialist is going to tell them something that they can’t change or fix. But the specialist like you goes, you know, you, you, sadly, I think we could have done this a lot cheaper and right, I would think next time, there’s any sort of opportunity, you’re going to be the person they contact because now they trust you. You told them something that that, unfortunately, maybe wasn’t like, for somebody who’s worried about offending somebody, they might say, and I’m just gonna keep that to myself. But you, you said, No, that’s the truth. And you need to know this. And I’m sorry that you sort of maybe paid more than you should have. But next time, just call me because we can we can do this better. And of course, the average person’s never I’m not I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know if I was getting ripped off.
Heather Ditlevsen 40:54 And you don’t yeah, you’re not gonna question because then you look like you’re being cheap. Right? Like, Oh, does it cost that like you just, you know, so
D.J. Paris 41:00 I, before I bought the condo I live in now. Yeah, I actually reached out to several of the people I’ve interviewed on, we have 800 agents at our company, like I’ve said, so i There are plenty of people to ask here. But I said, you know, I want some outside opinions. And I literally, because I’m like, I don’t know. And I literally reached out to three or four producers that have been on our show, and I go, I’m thinking about buying this, is this a good price? Or like I don’t know. And, and, and I’m so grateful I did because they told me. And, and, and I as somebody who’s I mean, I’m technically a realtor, too. I’ve never used my license, but but the reality of it is, is I’m like I better ask around. And so I think this is the value of hat of gaining this knowledge is you get to become really valuable to people.
Heather Ditlevsen 41:44 Yeah, you do. And that’s, you know, it’s funny, I was interviewed by Chicago agent magazine last month. And there was a question, I think in there that said, you know, like, you know, everyone asked them, What makes you stand out, right? And it’s true, because there’s so many agents, right? Why would Jessica hire me over somebody else? Right? So you, you have to, you have to bring value to somebody’s life. And I was listening to this motivational speaker that compass had a couple of months ago. And, you know, he said something along the lines of so many agents and anybody in any sales job really make it about them, right? Like, what are you doing for me? How are you making me money? Right? And yes, at the end of the day, your clients are making you money, right? This is our job. This is how we make money. However, like, that’s not the that’s not the tactic, you have to go into it, you know, you have to change your entire mindset. And he said something that really stuck with me. And it was, you know, he was basically saying, find something that your client likes, enjoys over the course of showing them, right, you get to know your clients, right? Are they into gardening? Are they a good cook, whatever it is, and he goes, even after the sales done, you know, when you send your quarterly follow throughs or twice a year, fellas or whatever, bring up something that is applicable to them, right? You know, if they’re really into dogs as other dogs doing, maybe send a treat to their dog like, that makes you that think, wow, she actually listened to me, and I’m not just another, you know, and the reality is DJ, a lot of agents send out these, you know, not to shoot on agents that do this, but like, the postcards that like Merry Christmas, and it’s like, let’s be honest, nobody gives a shit about this postcard, right? They’re looking at it. Oh, cool, Alex, I’m gonna post our trash like nobody cares
D.J. Paris 43:11 along with along with 20 others that I received from different other people who want my business for others.
Heather Ditlevsen 43:17 And I don’t, I will never quote me now, I will never send a single client a merry christmas postcard a Happy New Year, I would rather send them a personal text ASCO, their daughter Marianne is doing or whatever it is, even if it takes me 10 times longer to send out individual texts versus just like, you know, somebody printing cards and having my assistant mail it. Like, that’s the reality of it. And a lot of these top agents, they don’t make time for it. And I think that’s sad. I’m not saying all of them, trust me. But I think the busier we get, we become less and less personal. So like, for me, you know, I’m not, you know, at that level yet, but it’s nice because, like, make the habits now you know, I, I am on one on one communication with every single client I’ve helped in the last few years, you know, I’ve never had somebody else send a letter for me or a text. And I think you just have to, you have to keep it personal. And otherwise, they’re gonna forget about you. And they’re not going to refer you out, right? Because they’re, they’re nothing about you stuck to them. You’re just somebody who helped them buy a house. So
D.J. Paris 44:12 do you do you store personal information about them in your CRM, where you can go in and say, Oh, this, this person has two kids, and they’re this age, and they’re into gardening and,
Heather Ditlevsen 44:23 and I’ll tell you what, it sounds dumb, but people appreciate it. So for example, in the open house app, and I have people sign in, there is a note section. And I will put in there, you know, lives in, you know, Roscoe village now about to get married and daughter started new school, like I’ll put little stupid notes. And so when I go to follow up with them, it comes in play like hey, you know, it’s Heather. I know you guys are looking for new school for Maryann, you know like personal things and I’m telling you, they’re like, holy shit, she listen to me, you know? So it takes two seconds to write a note make it personal, make it seem like you’re there for them because you are at the end of the day you are there for them. So you know I think that’s key.
D.J. Paris 45:02 Yeah, I 100% I couldn’t agree. I couldn’t agree with you more, I think I think it’s what really talking about I think is fundamentals, right. It’s so much about doing the personal fundamental stuff that people feel special once it’s been done to them. And, and there’s, there’s, I think it’s not, it’s hard work, like you said, it might take 10 times longer to send out personal texts or even people, but they’re not getting that many of those. They’re not.
Heather Ditlevsen 45:37 Yeah, and for me, you know, I might only have 3040 clients. So it’s like, not that much. And obviously, when you’re been doing this for 20 years, you have 5000 clients, or whatever the number is, like, that’s a lot of work. And I get that, but like, you’re not texting everybody every day, you know, and that’s why you have a CRM and I really started to use utilizing that the last like, four or five months only, I’ll be honest, I was really bad at it. And now it’s very organized, I put everybody’s birthday in there, you know, just, you know, the stupid stuff that you want to tell people that you’re like, I simply cannot keep a track, you know, in my head, obviously, if so,
D.J. Paris 46:06 I mean, I was thinking, you have everybody’s birthday. So you know, every day you probably wake up and it tells you this is so and so’s birthday. I’m curious. So So obviously, we all have birthdays, I’m thinking about now I’m in this industry, but there’s a lot of other industries with salespeople who are trying to get business could be a financial adviser, an accountant, it could be anything, any lots of insurance, a million types of people who would probably like to have someone’s business. And I’m thinking about, I never get prospected by almost anybody. And not only that, I not only almost never get prospected I never get text messages. Certainly I never get personalized text messages. I don’t even get personalized text messages. And nothing against the people like in my life that my accountant and my financial. Like they’re all wonderful. I love them. I don’t expect anything from them. They’re great. They’ve earned their place, but I’m but I don’t even get text messages from them. Yeah,
Heather Ditlevsen 47:06 I’m not sad. Yeah. Well,
D.J. Paris 47:08 it’s not that it’s not that I need it. But I’m just saying. It’s not that I need it from people I’ve already hired, but I do love it. But what I’m saying is it’s not crowded along. What’s that? It’s that book, Scott Peck I think wrote in the 70s called, it’s never crowded along the extra mile or something like that. It legitimately is never crowded along the extra mile. Because people Yeah, people are gonna send postcards at Christmas. They’re gonna send me they’re gonna send these monthly email newsletters about real estate that their company I mean, yeah, and that’s fine. I mean, whatever, that whatever. But But how many times did somebody during COVID? Ever? Who wasn’t my close friend reach out to me and say, Hey, man, how are you doing? How are you doing right now? Like, how’s your everything? Okay? Yeah, other than my friends and family, not zero, a one person, the person who cuts my hair who I’m seeing tomorrow night. She is the only person I’ve been with her like, 10 plus years, and she absolutely does not have to do it. And she’s the only one that said I was just thinking about you. How are you doing? How’s everything going? And it really meant a lot to me. And right now, guys, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, like this is still an opportunity where you can demonstrate care and compassion, and just go hey, I’m just checking in how’s everything going? Are you still working from home? What’s going on? And and develop a deepen those relationships? I love the fact that that you do that? I think that yeah,
Heather Ditlevsen 48:26 I’m definitely overly communicative. And that’s something I think that stands out. I always tell people, I never want my clients to have to reach out to me. And so everyone should take that advice. You never want your client to have to text you and say, what’s the status? Yeah, what’s going on? Yeah, if they text you, you’re doing something wrong, you need to be on top of it and say, Hey, morning, just wanted to let you know, inspection report just came back, let’s hop on a call at five o’clock today and go over everything, whatever it is, my client should never ever, ever, ever, unless it’s something random or things like that. They have a question. But if it’s something regarding this, you know, the normal sale process, I should be letting them know, like, and I am definitely overly communicative. But I’d rather be that way. And for any clients of mine that may listen to this, you know, I’m gonna send them this little podcast. They know like, I will send them messages just randomly be like, hey, just checking in. I know the market Secretary now and there’s nothing but just saying hi, you know, like, I’m still here, and I’m still here for whatever you need. They need to know that, you know, it’s important. They don’t You don’t want no one should feel like you just forgot about them ever.
D.J. Paris 49:27 I think you’re also talking about anticipating needs ahead of time and realizing that the process for buying or selling a home no matter how if it’s somebody’s first time or their 10th time it’s still incredibly stressful. It’s still a roller coaster. something’s gonna go wrong at some point in the process, something some wrinkle is going to happen where people who are your clients gonna freak out because of course they will. And and, and this is where I think anticipating in advance. Oh, this is the part I just got some news that I have to give to the client. They’re going freakout so now I have to make sure that I already have a sort of a pre conditioned response to say, Hey, I know you’re gonna freak out right now, but don’t and here’s why. And, and, and this way, because I think so many clients, and I know this is for me, too, I’m in the industry. And when I just bought a property was not my first property. And I was freaking out. I mean, everything was going well, and I was freaking out. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, am I making a big mistake? What’s going on? And, and ultimately, I had to ask people, and I’m in the industry, and I had to ask, and I’m like, Man, if I sort of know what’s going on, and I was completely freaking out, the average buyer and seller, no matter how successful or not they are, whether they’re a top CEO of a company, or if they’re, you know, have a more normal blue collar job, whatever the situation is, they’re probably freaking out, too. And if you come and say, Hey, I was just thinking about you, here’s what, here’s what’s going on. Because you’re right, my, I now work for him. But but many, many years ago, when I bought my first place, I wasn’t in this industry. And my, my friend was my realtor, because we work with our friends. And Nick had that same pot in the Nick, who was my realtor was, he had the same policy, we’re afterwards when I started working for him. I go, boy, you are really great realtor. And he said, he said, Oh, no, no, because it’s a lot about just customer service. And he said, he goes, he had the same exact goal that you had, he said, I never wanted my clients to have to call me first. Because that was my only real goal. And he goes because of that. People just thought I was right on top of things. So
Heather Ditlevsen 51:32 you have to be and you know, you should be sending me updated email, like, yeah, I could talk about it forever. But always be
D.J. Paris 51:39 asking for referrals. Do you do it or not? Curious?
Heather Ditlevsen 51:43 So I don’t and I should, it’s another I
D.J. Paris 51:49 think your show?
Heather Ditlevsen 51:50 I think I listen, I am not the pushy type of agent, salesperson, we’re going to call it there are agents that will do that you’ll finish a transaction will be closing day you say thank you so much for your business, whatever. And a lot. I mean, I know agents who they put, they kind of send like a, you know, formal email at the end. And like, there might be a thing that says, you know, obviously, keep me in mind for referrals, you know, it’s a casual, it’s not like pushing you to do that. The way again, back to what I said earlier, the way my head works is, if they were impressed with me, and they think I did a good job. If they’re out at dinner one night, and their friends are talking about buying a place, my name is gonna come to the head. I’ll give you Heather’s number, it already has happened. If they weren’t impressive me, and they’re probably not. And guess what, I don’t want their clients business if they weren’t president, because that’s not a good way to meet somebody. Like she did a shitty job for us. But here’s her number, you know. So, I mean, I don’t push it as much as I probably could, you know, maybe, you know, I could start giving prizes. You know, you get $100 gift card, if you remember.
D.J. Paris 52:43 But some people do that. I mean, it’s it’s obviously there’s, you know, different approaches, but But I, I used to work in a sales capacity in the finance world a million years ago here in Chicago, and we talked to the one of the top guys in our office, and it was a very top tier sort of white glove type of firm, which is very professional and not super salesy, however. And anyway, I asked the one of the top guys there, I said, How do you ask for business? He goes, if you do it, right, you don’t have to. Now I’m not saying that this is the answer for everyone. But he said if you do it right, you don’t have to really ask because you have to demonstrate value. And if you can demonstrate value, eventually people just go Oh, yeah, of course I’m gonna use you, you know,
Heather Ditlevsen 53:26 100%. And even like Josh and I more so Josh than maybe like, hello, clients or clients, friends that will ask they know, he does a lot of new construction and rehab. So if they’re doing they might not be looking at yourself, they just want to hear their bathroom. Right? They’ll ask him for his opinion. Well, guess what? Maybe there’s some three years and they remember Josh being helpful during their bathroom. So and I have that too. I have my one good friend actually. She’s like, trying to buy her place. And she’s like, if I redo everything, I’m hiring you because I know you know what you’re doing? And I’m like, yes, thank you. $100 an hour but yeah. But yeah, it’s very it’s nice to have know that you bring some value to somebody’s life. Everybody in every field should feel that way.
D.J. Paris 53:59 So what is your policy? So after the sale, you still have their you have their birthdays, you those are obvious times to reach out. Are you considering doing other things like some people call on the anniversary of a buyer a sale and be like, Hey, it’s your anniversary?
Heather Ditlevsen 54:14 Yeah, I mean, I, I haven’t done that part of it. I haven’t done that yet. You know, all my sales have been last year. So I haven’t hit like the one year yeah, I mean, some of them are coming close. So I guess I could I never really thought about that. I just, I stay in touch with everybody, though so frequently, that I don’t feel like you know, the agents that do that are usually the ones that like they won’t talk to you. They send you this like robotic email or something like, I don’t know, like I am in touch with. I’ll just text him for the heck of it. Like hey, just checking in everything good. Like, you know, I’ll randomly ask them like, hey, you know, everything’s set up with the HOA, like, I might remember a problem that came up, you know, it’s like, I don’t know, for me, I feel like I talked to them enough like randomly that I feel like I don’t need to send some robotic like happy one year you know, I mean, it’s cute and all but like, do they really care like You know, but birthdays I think are smart. And even even on my CRM, you know, it’ll send me an email a day before so I set it up, let me know if so and so’s birthday is tomorrow, but I won’t send like I’m not gonna send to the, I’m not gonna send it to an email, like, I’m going to still send you a personalized text. The CRM just reminds me like, again, the email, like who wants their realtor send him an email, like that’s so impersonal. So yeah, for me, texting is everything, especially you know, myself being a millennial, I attract a lot of millennial clients. So I feel like let’s be honest, we’re all on our phones all the time, and we checked instantly. So you also have to know what clientele works for you, I’m not going to go after, you know, that’s another big thing I would tell new people like know what works for you, if you’re new in the business and your 60s, like, go after that sphere, they probably you know, they’re probably they’re not first time buyers in their 60s, they probably have a higher price point, like good for you, like go for it. For me, you know, it’s friends family, or like I said, people at open houses or that I feel like I connect with are the ones that usually the ones that reach out, are the ones that I connect with, right? I’ve, I’ve talked to a million people, open houses, you know, older couples, couples that maybe we have a little language barrier and everything, you know, seems nice, but they ended up ultimately, they’re not going to be the ones that work with me because we’re interested in connect on that level. Right? You know, if someone mostly speaks Spanish, I don’t speak any Spanish, like they’re not gonna want to they want somebody they can speak Spanish to right like so you have to know your you have to know the clientele that binds with you.
D.J. Paris 56:26 I want to ask too, about rentals, because as you mentioned, a lot of your your friends and people you’re in your age group, maybe aren’t yet buying I know, like I bought my first place I was one of the last people with my friends to do it. And I was I was 30. And at the time when I bought my first one. So I would have been a renter. And I never used a realtor when I was a renter, because I just found things on it. I didn’t really even think about it. But had I had used a realtor when I was a renter. And if they would have stayed in touch and said, Hey, you should be buying a place. And quite frankly, being that I was sort of in the finance world at that time, I was embarrassed to not really understand how buying a home actually work. And this is really sort of pre even YouTube being a big thing or it even it just we weren’t as conditioned to go online and really learn as much as we are now where now I just I mean, my whole home is is connected with Google, I just I literally we just asked out loud, hey, what about this or that? And but but that didn’t exist back then. And so I know I was a little embarrassed to even reach out to find out and I’m thinking I’m just curious. And I know you do mostly sales, of course. But we don’t you know, I I think we I think agents miss out on rental opportunities, not as a way to get by to become wealthy and rentals. I guess you could be but rentals are a great way to start a relationship. I
Heather Ditlevsen 57:54 think 100%. And actually, that’s how Josh mostly got started. Because back when he started he went to like, forget what he says I’m gonna butcher the story about he went to like his old college campus. And basically it was like helping people find rentals. And yes, that’s right, that. Yeah. So yeah, I haven’t done a ton of rentals. I mean, I’ve obviously done some. Yeah, I mean, I regularly reach out to them, you know, and just say, you know, let me know, when you’re ready to buy and a couple have and I know a couple will, you know, on the lease is up next year, and I’ve listened a lot of agents, you know, especially their top producers, and I can’t blame them. Like, they don’t want to do it. Because it’s like, you’re not making that much and you’re doing kind of just as much work. Like that’s the reality of it, right? But you have to think big picture. And for somebody who’s newer, like myself or anyone else, though, renters eventually turn into buyers, right? Whether it’s in a year, three years, five years, and guess what, then they sell and they buy again and they refer you so you know, you kind of do the big picture like okay, I might only make $600 on this. And if they buy in a year good for me, you know, so yeah, I like I said, I’ve I’ve done maybe five or six rentals, which is hardly anything but those ones that I have done. Yeah, I do. I stay in regular touch with them. And they know I’m here when they’re ready to buy and we talk about it, you know, and I when they’re ready. Again, I’m not that pushy, and I’m here so yeah, I think it is a great way to do it and people who choose not to or just missing another opportunity, honestly.
D.J. Paris 59:14 Yeah, I think sounds like the main theme of what you do is is personal connection. It’s a lot
Heather Ditlevsen 59:19 of percent it’s everything. Yeah. Yeah. And really
D.J. Paris 59:23 sort of anticipating someone’s someone’s needs through the process and sort of understanding. Okay, I My job is to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible. So I’m going to, I’m going to be the problem solver, which by the way, it takes up a huge part of an agent’s day, right like, oh, yeah, finding new business. You know, that takes up some part of the agent’s day, maybe that’s an hour, but I always Brian Buffini was sort of famous for saying if there’s an eight hour day, he said if you could spend one hour looking for business, you’re a superstar because you’re going to be spending at least Six or seven of the other seven hours working with your existing clients, but so yeah, so it doesn’t you don’t have to spend all day looking for business. But if you can just do a few things, hey, I’m thinking about you text or happy birthday.
Heather Ditlevsen 1:00:16 Yeah, yeah, I don’t, you know, I’ll Josh kind of helps bring in leads and stuff only because he’s been doing it longer, you know, hopefully in another five years I’ll have the same thing. But most of your day, yeah, I mean, I focus on the people you do have as clients, right? So many agents are like, How can I find more? How can I find more? And it’s like, well, you’re not even, you have 10 buyers you’re working with and like, maybe start, you know, I’ve, you know, as we all know, agents listening, there’s no inventory right now. So I have like six buyers all ready to go pre approved, ready to write tomorrow, but we can’t find anything. So like, maybe spend your days you know, Josh and I are, you know, a top 10% producing team. So we have access to off market stuff, which any other chat producer also does, but not everyone, obviously. So we utilize that. I mean, I found a lot of clients in the past properties via off market stuff, the reality is all the good stuff will sell off market. So, you know, focus your time looking on those to find the clients, you do have stuff or like, you know, I really, I’ve knocked on doors before, you know, I have clients who only want to be in a certain building, okay. You know, use your marketing dollars with your brokerage to get postcards made, and literally spend four hours a day and most slide I’m under the door. I’m about to do that this week for a client. So like, you know, do like spend your time on the people you actually have as clients like, the new ones will come organically at least that’s my mindset. And that’s how I want them to come. Right. I mean, there are agents that spend 30 grand a month on Zillow, which, you know, I can’t even financially do that right now. But even if I could, it’s like, there’s no connection. It’s like they meet at the property. You know, they know nothing about that. Yeah. It’s like, Hi, I’m Heather, you know, it’s not, that’s not the type of client I want. I’d rather.
D.J. Paris 1:01:56 And also, there’s a thing to that. And I look, Zillow has has been a guest on our show, and we’re actually hopefully going to be bringing this a little back as a little sneak for everyone. We’re in discussions with them. We’re big, big fans. But but that there’s, I mean, there’s a thing too, about being a woman right, and your pictures there. And sometimes people might choose you for maybe not as completely honest of a reason. Right? Or they might happen. I’m sure that’s happened and, and there’s safety considerations with that as well. And there’s, there’s just a lot it’s not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s certainly cost. We have live interview tons of people who buy Zillow leads, and I think it’s great. I mean, bad I wish I could No, no, I know you weren’t but but it is, it is like something that would Heather’s would have they’re saying is, there is no, you really have to work to build that connection with this stranger. And typically, you’re gonna meet them for the first time at the property. And that’s just tough to do. It’s just
Heather Ditlevsen 1:02:55 tough and you’re trying to sell them on your personality. And listen, the reality is, even if you got a zillo lead, they have no commitment to you, you might spend a whole day showing them 17 properties and if they didn’t vibe with you, guess what, they’re never gonna call you again. So, you know, I again, would rather have it organically and referrals, obviously.
D.J. Paris 1:03:09 Awesome. Well, I think that’s a great, great place to wrap up. Heather, you’ve given so much great value and I want to definitely invite you to come back on the show or maybe in a few years when you’re just like you know, when once you hit 30 and then I want to see where you’re at because the fact that you did 13 and a half million your first year and it wasn’t like business was really just handed to you. I I know you’re you have a great mentor and Josh is a lovely guy and and certainly helped along the way but but you really it’s it’s really clear that that you’ve put the work in and which is I’m sure why Josh brought Yan and I think that well together. Yeah. And I think it’s it’s just about fundamentals, hardwork discipline, staying in touch with people showing that you care about them and providing incredible value and I think for everyone listening you know, make this the year that you develop relationships with contractors developers, go spend, you know, an afternoon in a contractor’s office and just say I just want to talk to you about I come across buyers all the time I show them places the cabinets suck the you know the granite sucks or you know, what should I be quoting them as far as time money How easy is this to do and then oh yeah Mr. or Mrs. Contractor I’m gonna give you all the business once that happens but I want to learn so that when somebody walks in they don’t go oh that kitchens really gross. Be like no problem for 20 grand and we can maybe we can even work it into the deal somehow we can get that fixed out or maybe it’s five grand or whatever the amount is. That is an incredible value that most agents
Heather Ditlevsen 1:04:48 don’t have and I’ve had almost every seller and buyer mine I’ve used you know, I’ve given that speech to and they’ve all utilized it so it’s never gonna go anywhere. My last little base is always have more than one contractor because contractors can be flaky just like anyone else can be. And you never know. And a lot of times clients want more than one quote. So you should try to make connections with multiple people and just have you know, multiple resources you can call when you need to.
D.J. Paris 1:05:12 Awesome. Well, Heather, oh, how do you know we didn’t mention how there’s social media? What’s the best way? If anyone, audience wants to learn more about you and follow you? What how should they do that?
Heather Ditlevsen 1:05:22 Yeah. My Instagram, my gosh, I need to get better. It’s just my first and last name put together. So Heather Detlef, then maybe I’ll put the handle in the buyer or something. My last name I know, is a million letters long, but it’s just first last name smushed together. They can also reach out to me directly. You can put my number in here if you need. I’m always happy to like meet a coffee. If you’re buying if you’re selling if you’re in the industry, like whatever you need. I’m here. I love making new friends. So
D.J. Paris 1:05:47 whatever. Yeah, Heather’s extraordinarily generous with her time. She’s She’s a lovely person. And you just got back from vacation, right? Yeah, I
Heather Ditlevsen 1:05:53 don’t know. You can tell me I’m hopefully a little tan. Yeah, you look really tan. Where’d you go? I was in Tulum for six days it where I have. I have.
D.J. Paris 1:06:01 I’ve only been to Tulum as a day trip from Cancun.
Heather Ditlevsen 1:06:06 Yes. So to lose about two hours away from Cancun? Yeah, it’s its own little. I kept calling it an island. My friends. Like we’re not on an island on the mainland. But yeah, it’s one strip of road and everything’s on that road. And if people have been they know what I’m talking about, but everyone should go. I went with a couple girlfriends. It was by far the best week of my life. I’m already depressed. I’m back here. I just got back late yesterday. So yeah, it’s been it was an amazing week and ready to dive right back in now.
D.J. Paris 1:06:35 Did you go to any of them? I think they’re called snow days. Yeah.
Heather Ditlevsen 1:06:39 Three of them. Yeah, that’s a no days for anyone listening is kind of like, there’s different kinds. But yeah, you kind of swim.
D.J. Paris 1:06:45 Underground. Rock or water was?
Heather Ditlevsen 1:06:48 Yeah, we did a tour on the one we went to three different ones. Yeah. They’re very inexpensive. It’s like 20 bucks to go to them usually. Yeah, it was very cool. And whoever decides to follow me, I’m sorry, but you’ll see a million pictures for the next month until
D.J. Paris 1:07:02 you have to next time if you’re in that area should go to cheat sheets as well.
Heather Ditlevsen 1:07:06 We wanted to but we did. Yeah. There’s also like the Mayan ruins. There’s just Yeah. Then you also just want to lay on the beach and be lazy. There’s a lot to do I could honestly two weeks would have been amazing. But you know it’s very very expensive down there way more than you thought to so oh really is it’s expensive. The food the drinks, the there’s a lot of cute boutiques, I bought some clothes down there. Everything is very, very pricey. Just keep that in mind for anyone going. But yeah, it was it was absolutely amazing. So everyone should
D.J. Paris 1:07:34 get well, great. Well, we appreciate and Heather was so sweet to to be here basically on our first day back, which nobody, nobody wants to do this on their first day back. So
Heather Ditlevsen 1:07:43 I appreciate it. I’m very grateful. Thank you so much for having me.
D.J. Paris 1:07:47 We’re so excited. There’s you have such a great energy to you. And I love talking to new agents who are so happy. And they’re excited about this industry. And really, our audience loves it. So for everyone listening, please follow Heather on Instagram, we will put the link to her Instagram had their debt Lipson in the show notes, so you can click through right there. And check out what she’s all about and reach out to her. She’s a super generous person. If you have questions or just suggestions, she would be loved to talk with you as well. So yes. Let’s do it. Wonderful. Well, Heather, thank you so much. On behalf of our listeners, and our viewers, thank you so much for being on our show. We appreciate it. We know how busy you are, and really honor you for taking the time. And on behalf of Heather and myself. We want to thank our listeners and viewers for continuing to support our show. And we are at an all time high as far as downloads. And that is not anything other than because our as our listeners tell other people about our show. So thank you so much. We are I think our fifth or sixth year of doing the show, and we have more downloads than we’ve ever had. And so please continue to tell a friend if you could just think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this wonderful conversation with him either send them a link to our website is probably the best way to do it. Every episode we’ve ever done as you can stream right from our site, which is keeping it real pod.com Or if the person you’re referring to or is already a podcast listener, just have them pull up keeping it research for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And one last thing that we’re asking everyone to do, please leave us a review, you know, whatever type of app you might be listening to our show through, whether it’s iTunes or now called Apple podcast, or Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, you know google play any thing just let us know what you think of the show. This helps us improve and also helps us get in front of more people to to help so thank you so much, Heather. We appreciate you. This is a great a lot of fun. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks other Yeah, thanks. Bye, guys.
How Real Estate Agents Can Use Humor In Their Marketing • Matt Lionetti
Feb 07, 2022
Matt Lionetti with The Agency in Toronto Canada describes how he transitioned from music industry to a new career in real estate business. Matt talks about the start of shooting comedy videos relating to real estate and how this has helped build his business and he also emphasizes the importance of niche-ing down to attract your audience. Matt and DJ discuss quality vs. quantity when it comes to social media content. Last, Matt discusses how to build your community around whatever is authentic about.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Matt lionetti about humor and the role of comedy in promoting oneself as a realtor and just having a lot of fun. By the way, Matt’s YouTube videos which are not just on YouTube, they’re all over are the very funniest best realtor videos I’ve ever seen. We have a link to them in the notes. So please go check them out. And you’ll see why we’re talking to Matt. But before we get to Matt, just a couple of quick reminders. One, please keep telling a friend about the show. If every time you listen to the show, you just told one other person about us? Well, gosh, it would be a huge growth, jumping growth numbers for us. But just tell one person we really really appreciate it helps us reach more people and help more people and also helps keep our podcast going. So thanks. And also leave us a review. If you have a moment. whatever system you might be listening to this episode on, whether it’s Apple podcasts or Stitcher or Google Play or Spotify or wherever, please let us know what you think about the show. Leave us a review. We appreciate it. But enough about me let’s get to the main event my interview with Matt lionetti.
So today on the show we have Matt Lyon Eddie from agency in Toronto, Canada. Now Matt is a real estate agent and content creator with the agency in Toronto. Matt has built his brand on funny, clever and sometimes polarizing content that whether you like it or not demands your attention, now earning millions of organic views on social media, his unconventional approach has landed him on some of the biggest stages speaking with Ryan serhant, Gary Vaynerchuk. And Tom Ferry, Matt has forged his own path and become a fan favorite among agents and clients alike. Everyone, please go to Matt’s website, which is metline eddie.com. And that is Ma TT l i o n e t t i.com. Also, there’s a link to that here in our show notes. And before I just bring on Matt, I want to let you know how we got introduced to him. So we are subscribers of this amazing service called Coffee and contracts, which is in conjunction with the broke agent, which probably all of our listeners follow the broke agent on Instagram. And Facebook, if you don’t do a coffee and contracts is a is one of their little side businesses. And they sent out something with one of Matt’s videos which I had not been familiar with Matt, prior to where it was a map sort of doing a parody or satire of a Chris Hallmark Christmas movie, which I’m sure all of our listeners know about these. And then using that as you know, a showing that a realtor would be going through and it is it is just brilliantly done. And we immediately my producer and I were like we got to book this guy. So we are so thrilled to have Matt on the show. So Matt, welcome.
Matt Lionetti 4:30 Thank you so much. What an introduction. I haven’t had an introduction like that before. That’s fantastic. We,
D.J. Paris 4:36 by the way, Matt also hosts a podcast so I almost forgot to mention that. So Matt is a co host of a really great show called over ask which is the broke agent also, you know, they have the show and Matt hosts it with with the owner of the broke agent and and you know so and by the way the link to that so everyone should subscribe to over ask that is also in our show notes, so please subscribe out there and check out their show. But Matt, tell us a little bit about why real estate or how you got into real estate.
Matt Lionetti 5:07 Yeah. So before this, I was a touring musician. And I toured right out of high school for years. Wow. And it just got so I always said, like, when it stops being fun, I should maybe take a step back, because it was such a huge passion of mine for so many years. And I was hired to, you know, go on tour with different artists and record for different artists and also taught music. And, you know, for a musician, it was I was making a living, which a lot of musicians don’t. So at least I had that. But then, at the same time, I was watching like, million dollar listing a lot. And we were I remember my wife, my, my then girlfriend, now wife was, we’re on vacation in Florida. And we were in I remember the exact moment, I knew I was gonna get into real estate, we were in a cab, and our cab drivers was bringing us through and telling us about all his investment properties. And this is like when I was big on Million Dollar Listing and Ryan serhant, in particular, and right in that cab ride, I was like, I think I want to stop playing music and try real estate and like settle down a bit. I don’t have to travel all the time and do that stuff. And like, you know, go play a show for $200, like seven hours away and maybe get paid, maybe not that type of thing. So when we got back from the vacation, I started my courses. And now I’m here. That was like five, six years ago. I’ve been an agent for five years now.
D.J. Paris 6:37 Wow. And you know, when did you start? So really, your music is your background? And but also, if you watch Matt’s videos, he is an incredibly funny writer. And was comedy always a part of your life? I know music is if you’re watching us. You can see Matt has some some albums on display. But he was a touring musician. Oh, by the way, before I asked about comedy, what instrument did you play were?
Matt Lionetti 7:03 I was a guitar. So I taught every instrument like at the music school I taught at because I played drums and bass and guitar and piano and stuff. But guitar was my main instrument. And yeah, that’s where I would I got hired for.
D.J. Paris 7:17 Yeah, so you would tour? Did you have one particular band? Or were you a guy that would go on tour when when other bands needed? Needed guitar players?
Matt Lionetti 7:26 Yeah. So at first I was had my own band, and we tried our thing. And then after that ended, it was just kind of Yeah, just go play with whoever would hire me.
D.J. Paris 7:36 That’s awesome. And then so how did how did you start making funny videos because I could, I would love to sit and talk to you about how you grew your business when you started without having a real estate really background. But I really want to know about the comedy side of it because it is so unique and refreshing. And the broke agent is like a perfect sort of obvious partner for you with with your podcast, because of course that’s what they do as well. But there aren’t many other players in that space. At least I haven’t found many. There’s a lot of agents that maybe try to do try to be funny and whether they succeed or not, as is, you know, another another question, but But you do succeed. So how did you first of all, were you always a fan of comedy?
Matt Lionetti 8:16 Yeah, always a fan. So like, my dad is an A hilarious person. And we would like we I remember so many weekends, we would just stay in together and he would show me Richard Pryor. Robin Williams. Sure. Like the man Eddie Murphy, like a big, huge, you know, stand up comics and then we would always watch movies and it was we both gravitated towards comedy movies. So, you know, I grew up watching like, you know, John Ritter and like super like, you know, that kind of like problem child and Caddyshack and back to school. So like, always, like, I just loved comedy, but I never did anything with it. Like I’ve never acted before these videos. I’ve never, never wrote like a comedy skit before this, but it was just something that I loved so much. Always, like, I was always such a fan of comedy. I was a bit of like, a class clown. And it just kind of like, when I got into real estate, I was like, I you know, I got into it because I thought I had a good personality. And I thought that’s what I could really hang my hat on. And for the first three years of real estate I ironically lost all my personality because I was trying to be something else. So I didn’t start the video so about two years ago, and that’s when everything started taking off for me before that I was doing nothing. It was terrible. So yeah, the comedy has always been a big part of my life not really, you know, it wasn’t like I saw it and then I pursued a career in stand up comedy or acting or anything but I’ve just always been such a fan and and really appreciated the art of comedy.
D.J. Paris 9:55 And and let’s talk about about the vit some of the videos that you’ve put together because as they are amazing. I’ve only seen them on YouTube I imagine they’re all over Facebook and Instagram and, and other social social media outlets. But talk a little bit about some of your, your videos and the response that you’ve received and, and how has this helped grow your business as an individual agent?
Matt Lionetti 10:20 Yeah, so the response has been mainly great, which I didn’t know what to expect at first, because when you try something new a lot of the times, and I do get this, you know, people don’t like it, they don’t want anything that’s different from what everyone else is doing. And I really kind of niched down. So I’ll swear a lot in the videos, I really don’t have any boundaries anymore. When it comes to that. Some people get offended by that. It’s never my intent to offend anyone I shy away, I grew up swearing wasn’t an issue, like it’s not offensive or anything. So I didn’t think it was gonna be a big issue. But that’s mainly people say like, oh, you’re making like, a mockery? Or you’re giving, you know, agents a bad reputation. And I was like, I don’t know if you guys are aware, but like, we don’t got the best fucking reputation to begin with. But like, yeah, it’s just I don’t know. And then, as soon as I it’s so funny, because as soon as I niched down on the marketing, yeah, my whole business got broader, and you would think the opposite. But when you niche down and really focus on a specific thing, you get those people, and the people who don’t like you, the people who do like you 10 times more, because those other people don’t. And, yeah, just really niche down. And that’s like anything, anyone will tell you that in any business now, niche down, find something to focus on. And then you’re going to attract the you know, like minded people, and you can be on your way.
D.J. Paris 11:53 So that’s, it’s a really good piece of advice is don’t try to be all things to all all clients, or all potential clients, because the people that like you, who in particular are finding your content on social, you know, they’re following you on Facebook, or LinkedIn or Twitter, Instagram, etc. Tick tock. You really don’t need hundreds of 1000s of followers to be a successful real estate agent making content, but you need to have a core group of people that like what you do. And you’re right, there is a little bit of a like, I feel like I’m in the club now that likes your work. And part of me is like, well, I, I just know that his quality of content is comedy is really strong. So and I and if someone else were to say, Oh, I don’t think that’s appropriate for a real estate agent, which nobody’s ever said that to me. But if anyone did, I’d be like, Oh, no, that’s i That’s why I like him, because I like that he’s it. Quality is always King, right? And so your quality, your quality control is really strong. The videos are amazing, the level of production is solid, the music of course, I imagine you do a lot with the music because you that’s your background, but you’re absolutely right about not needing everyone to like you and and even as I know, sometimes your your content could be considered polarizing, but it’s it’s never i To me, it’s not polarizing at all. I just think it’s funny. And I think boy, I’d love to hire a realtor like that, because it really shows your level of, of just sort of creativity. It’s it whether you find it funny or not. It’s incredibly professional. I don’t know who wouldn’t find it funny, but but I think that’s something that agents oftentimes are just afraid to do. In particular, the funny thing, right, I think agents struggle enough with like, if I’m going to put a Facebook live video out today, is it okay, if I just turn my phone around my makeup if I’m a woman, you know, if somebody wears makeup, their makeup isn’t right, or their hair isn’t right, or they just woke up and they don’t look their their best. They might feel some trepidation about even pushing that record button. So I know agents struggle to even figure out how to present themselves on social as they are much less right like a funny sketch. But the reality of it is, is everybody likes comedy, right? Like you would You’d almost think there was more of it in this industry. Because why not?
Matt Lionetti 14:27 And yet show it show industry like there’s so much to make fun of like estate, the things that happen to real estate agents are crazy.
D.J. Paris 14:39 Totally crazy. And I’m just curious on you know, as as our audience oftentimes writes in and asks us questions about, hey, you know, how much should I be promoting on social and it’s not like you’re creating sketches daily, right, like the how much time does Is it take like, for example, the the Hallmark sort of movie parody that you did, which was, I don’t know, maybe that was 90 seconds, or maybe two minutes total of content, how long? How much time did you put into producing? You know, shooting it? Like what was the overall time commitment there?
Matt Lionetti 15:17 Yeah. So I mean, I’m so I do two types of videos. I do like stuff that I record myself just from, I have a camera and do that. But I have a production team who does the kind of more in depth stuff like that Hallmark video or home mat, as I called it, that I don’t like to be on location filming for a long time. So we are so prepared before we go. And so I’ll write the script in the script, just, you know, as I’m, I give myself a deadline for I needed done by here. But then I have a Zoom meeting with my video crew for one hour. And we storyboard the entire thing that way, I know, okay, we’re gonna be there for this amount of time. We’re shooting these scenes here, here and here. So there’s no hemming and hawing when we get there. I know exactly what I’m going to say. I know exactly what room I’m going to be in, I know exactly what outfit I’m going to be in. So that video took about two hours to fill all in. Because we’re just and and my guys even know, I even tell them, we scout the place. Or I’ll take a picture of the place that we’re filming. And they’ll know before they go in where they’re going to set up the lights every day. So like, because I tell them I’m not been on set for fucking six hours, man, I’m not Leonardo DiCaprio. Right. So like. So we try and be as productive as possible. And I love doing it. But like, I don’t know, to me, it’s always been like, I want to hit it when there’s that. That like I don’t want to be overworked on a set to the point where like, I’m not producing or I’m not acting my best on screen, because I’m just not really stoked about it anymore. Because I’ve been there for seven hours. Yeah, right. Oh, so I try and like strike like, oh, yeah, this is good. Okay, let’s go. And like, I want to be there and like, hopped up, and I’ve rehearsed my lines, like, mainly in the shower. Like, I’ll just rehearse, let’s make sure I know everything and how I want them delivered. And, you know, it’s like, I’m done in one or two takes, like, it’s not like, I don’t think much about it. And that’s why I think, I think people sometimes they overthink and overthink, and they do it 20 times, and really, they should have just kept the first or second take because that fire was still in them that they wanted to do it by the 19th 20th take, you know, it’s not really there anymore. They’re not. They’re not convicting the way they want to anymore. And that like, you know, how they want to project their, whatever they’re trying to project. So yeah, I really don’t overthink it. And I think that’s the best way to do it.
D.J. Paris 17:50 And how quickly when you started making videos, did you start getting a reaction where you knew how these were landing with, with your, you know, prospective audience, like, did it take, you know, was it you know, you made one video and it just sort of took off? Or was it? You know, a slower process?
Matt Lionetti 18:08 Yeah, so the first one, I think, because in the real estate comedy space, there’s really not much going on for video. So pretty much the first one, I had a listing, I did a video, it got picked up by a couple of meme places right away, I sold that listing in like seven hours. Three offers and two of the offers came from the video. And this was, you know, after I was on two teams prior to this, I left the last team to go solo. And it was really like my last, my last chance I wasn’t having success. And I was like, I don’t know what to do. I might leave the industry. Like it just wasn’t working for me. I had these ideas since I got into the industry. Everyone told me no, you can’t do that. It’s not professional. So when I went solo, I was like, You know what, I need any to try something. So I just I just figured like I was I was him and and Hans so much about it, like, you know, should I do it? Should I not? If i How’s this gonna look on my brand, if I if I do something funny, they’re not gonna like my brand. And then it all clicked one day. And I was like, I’m being so precious about a brand that I don’t have. Nobody knows who I who I am. So like, the thing is, is I could post the video and it could potentially do amazing. Or I could post it and you know, people may not like it, but I could also not post it and just have a lot of the same, which was nothing. So I was like, you know, I’m gonna post this shit. And right away it was like the most engagement I’d ever gotten on a post. So then that was enough for me it didn’t necessarily like start bringing in a bunch of business right away, but I had nothing nothing was sticking. So at very least, I was getting some traction on social media. So I once that happened, I was like okay, I think There’s something here. And I just, I just took the journey down that road and saw what I could get away with. And as it’s progressing and getting growing, there’s like, you know, taking more risks, and I’m on that line should he say that should not say that I like to be there. I think comedy should be there. Especially in a professional setting. I think that’s very funny to say something so shocking. Because a lot of the times I try and say what people want to say, but would never say,
D.J. Paris 20:32 yeah, it makes sense. And so but even in your first video, you ended up just from that alone. This wasn’t a referral. This was just someone saw the video and then and then basically hired you.
Matt Lionetti 20:47 Yeah, so the, the, well, there’s, I did the first video, and then two offers came from that video. So I sold the house in the in the first day. And then it wasn’t till my Freddie Mercury video. So that was August 2019, that I did my first video. And then I was, you know, chugging along for a couple months. And then it wasn’t till February 2020 that I filmed the Freddie Mercury video. And that’s the one that I changed my entire career. So that’s the one that got Ryan, sir, had to reach out. Like he commented and stuff he called me said he loved the videos like shit like that. And that’s when things started to, like, people started to notice and I started getting business from it. And I almost didn’t post that video. What Why is that I just thought I was too dumb. I was just walking around, dressed like Freddie Mercury at Live Aid and someone’s fucking house. I didn’t know
D.J. Paris 21:48 you haven’t, we’ll post a link to that video. But if you haven’t seen it, Matt looks like 1985. You know, Freddie Mercury, doing Live Aid, which, which is an amazing concert in and of itself. But he is absolutely just he’s, he’s nailed that look. And it’s just a brilliant, a brilliant video. So how much? How much time? Do you spend? Like, do you have a certain amount of a goal where you try to put out a certain amount of content every month? Or is it just kind of when inspiration strikes? Or, you know, how do you decide how much time to put in?
Matt Lionetti 22:27 Yeah, so I have a bunch of like, ideas in my notepad on my phone. So I kind of know what I’m doing next. I’m not so into the like, I love Gary Vee. But he’s really into like, post five times a day, six times, I don’t, that’s not for me, that does work for some people. But for me, for what I’m doing, I’m, I’d prefer more quality over quantity. So I only want to release something that I am 100% like happy with. So so that means sometimes I might miss a week of a video if I just don’t think it’s there yet. And it’s not because like, you know, there has to be a fine line there with like, you never posting anything. And then I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but I know when to be like, Okay, this is good. But if it’s just not there, and it’s not up to my standard, then I’ll just take a week off. So I have a lot of friends who bulk record in the real estate space. And I think that’s super beneficial, they’ll do they’ll take one day out of a month, and record, you know, seven to 10 videos, and they have content for the next couple weeks or months with, which is awesome. I don’t do that. And Eric, the broker agent doesn’t do that, because we try and hit on current events as well. So we want to like stay. Because we take a lot from pop culture and stuff like that. And we want to bring that in to the real estate space. So I try and like, stick on what’s relevant, and I want to add that into my videos weekly. So but it really doesn’t take like, as long as people would think like, especially I do a lot of these car rants where I just like talk about shit. And those are some of my best performing videos. Like the one I just posted last week got like 365,000 views or some shit. In my car, it took 15 seconds. Like, that’s it and people don’t realize that like that selfie style is super relatable. It doesn’t have to be a high quality video as long as the the content is there, you could produce a $20,000 video, but if the actual idea and content isn’t right, no one’s gonna care. So yeah, like do whatever talk about anything. And like that’s what people I think fail to understand like people are more interested in you than you might think. And that 15 seconds it took me in my car that day. Actually got a lead from a tube there come in In April from Australia, and they’re using me as a realtor looking for a pretty well priced home do,
D.J. Paris 25:07 we should also mention just for anyone thinking, Well, Matt, maybe you know, it, maybe his clients because he uses comedy, maybe he doesn’t attract, you know, super high net worth clients who would expect their broker to be more professional and, you know, not as silly and trying, you know, not trying to make people laugh. But Matt works in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, he is in Toronto, which is the equivalent for here in the United States of like, it’s probably it’s more expensive, actually, than San Francisco in New York, or it’s certainly right up there, but it’s usually more expensive. And so this is not a place where, you know, young people are, you know, buying their first condo for $300,000, this is this is a very exclusive place to work in real estate. And Matt is in a sea of other realtors in his area, who are that more professional wearing the suit and projecting that sort of perfect looking image, certainly not incorporating humor into whatever content they might be producing. So that I think, in particular, is also really interesting, that, you know, you have this couple coming from Australia. And of course, you know, I don’t know much about your traditional sort of types of deals that you do, but you work in, in, in a in a space, that is really kind of a high net worth sort of environment. So you are incorporating, you know, sip being silly, and I don’t put there’s no pejorative with silly, silly is awesome. I’m the biggest fan of silly, but but but silly, I think is a good way to, to, to categorize some of your content, but, but that being said, it still attracts business to you. Yeah. Which which is, was that in any way shocking to you, like, you know, I, you know, you put it out there, and then all of a sudden, then it because then you have to turn on the I’m the professional, you know, part of you as well and service that client, but people absolutely want to relate to people. And they, they, I think most people want to be considered funny. And most people I think know, they’re not as funny, as somebody who can really sort of put together you know, a good video, or in your case, a 15 second sort of car thing that maybe also just gets a smile. That’s, that’s really not always easy to do. So I think people respect quality. And you were saying this earlier, where quality not so much on the production side, not that you don’t have great quality, but that’s not really the focus as much as is the content. And so people just want to be entertained by quality, right? So whether it’s a phone that’s been turned around, and someone you know you’re making, in your car going on, you’re not gonna believe what just happened to me or whatever. That’s as long as it’s good quality, 15 seconds. People do relate to that. And they appreciate effort. I’ve also sort of figured that out. And they also appreciate different type of effort. Like, instead of just saying, look at this new home, I just listed or look at this new, you know, rental I just closed or whatever, which is what every other realtor does on social. You’re you’re more trying to entertain people without sort of bragging about, you know, your actual success. And most agents just do the bragging thing, right, it’s here’s, here’s what I just did. And that really separates you from 99% of the other brokers, I’m sure in your area.
Matt Lionetti 28:40 Yeah, it’s, that’s just was never me. I was very sick of seeing the same thing over and over. And, you know, I have some nice things. And I like nice things and I just don’t understand, you know, showing your Starbucks mug, with your Rolex and your Mercedes steering wheel. Like the subtle flex it like I don’t like I just can’t comprehend like, okay, so you leased a car could lease a car. Like I don’t, that’s that doesn’t mean like, I have a couple of nice watches. That doesn’t mean that I have more money than someone without a nice watch. It means that I wanted to be an idiot and buy a nice watch and the other person didn’t. Like I don’t understand the the like the idea behind that. So it’s weird, but yeah, like, Freddie Mercury video got me a $2.5 million buyer last year. They’re both two lawyers. Two fucking lawyers.
D.J. Paris 29:36 Right. Who by the way, another profession that doesn’t play a lot in the humor space.
Matt Lionetti 29:41 Yeah, exactly. So and I drove around in my Kia my fucking keyboard deck, because I don’t give a shit about cars either. And that’s when I think your real success you can sell a buyer $2.5 million house from dressing as Freddie Mercury and driving them around in a 2012 Kia Forte. I must be fucking talented. it as well. I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s no gate as what I was wearing Ramon shirts, like, you know, there’s no there’s nothing, no hide in there. So like, yeah, it’s never got it. I never got that. And I think people also you said you were saying they, they appreciate quality, but they also appreciate risk, they really do appreciate risk. And I do take risks with the content. And, you know, it’s, I was talking to someone way back. And he was saying, like, I was telling him my what I wanted in the industry, because from I’m very into, like law of attraction and things like that. I journal every night. And I kind of knew this, it’s weird, and it sounds fucking weird. But I kind of have seen, I know this stuff was going to happen, because this is what I said, I wanted to do the whole time, I wanted to be a big, yeah, I want to like create a presence in the industry and a one to like, maybe, maybe drive the needle a little bit in a different direction. And just kind of like, also said, I was going to speak with Ryan Serhan. And like, all this other stuff, and just kind of it’s been unfolding. And I was telling him, like, I want to be a big agent, I don’t want to just be like, a top producer who he sells a lot of homes. And that’s it. I mean, I was like, I want to be like a global agent, like sit like Ryan Serhan, or some of those other people. And he was just saying, like, you know, there’s just in Toronto, he was like, there’s like 60,000 agents here, like, and he was saying, how are you going to stand his laughing? How are you going to stand out? From all that? He said, say you go to a concert. And there’s those 60,000 people there? And you how are you going to stand out and get the business? How are you going to stand out at that show? To get business? And he was laughing? And I said well be the show? And he said, what I said, Well, I’ll be the fucking show. So who who’s everyone’s eyes on? When their other concert? On the show? Yeah, the performers. So I’ll be the show. Yeah, and I’ll stand out, and maybe I won’t, I won’t get all the business because people aren’t gonna like what I do sometimes, and that’s fine. But at least I’ll, I’ll make the noise and get the opportunity to be seen. Because people are trying to please everybody with their content. And they’re just, I can’t tell fucking agents apart anymore. I swear to God, I go to 10 agents pages, and I don’t know who any of them, I couldn’t tell you the difference between them. And that’s, you know, that’s fine if you want to, there’s tons of people who don’t utilize social media, and they still crush it with calls and door knocking, and that’s fine. But I’m saying if you want to start getting business off social media, like you got to take a bit of risk. And that’s not swearing on camera or being funny, but you got to do something a little different. Because you got to create, you got to create the opportunity for yourself to be seen. And the only way to do that is by doing something a little bit different than everyone else.
D.J. Paris 33:04 Yeah, I think it’s I think it’s through value, I think by you know, servicing your audience in whatever way that fits with your authentic self. And in your case, it’s clear that you I think we’re talking about authenticity. And I think when agents stop thinking about how do I please everyone, for example, on social, which is a great sort of example, because we, you know, agents are, of course, they’re afraid to, to say something controversial, because, yeah, they’re worried about how their audience might react, but the audience really just wants to be entertained. And that could be through high quality information. It could be through education, it could be through comedy, music. But that’s, I think, I think that’s what you’re talking about is is finding whatever is authentic to you. And being willing to talk about it, whether it’s real estate related, or maybe not even real estate related, like, you know, whatever passion you might have outside of real estate, that could be your content. And it it may or may not land with your overall you know, the majority of your audience or you’ll get feedback, and you’ll find out if it’s a good idea or not, but people do want, we are so hungry for authentic communication, you know, and we want to know who the person is. We want to know what they’re, what they’re about what they’re into. And I think that’s to me, if all of our listeners and viewers take that away as like be willing to share who you really are, if you are promoting yourself on social if you are putting out content, whether it’s written or video or you know, any type of content. If it’s just the email that the monthly email newsletter that you send out to your to your sphere of influence that you probably didn’t even write, like, no one’s reading that that’s not a bad idea to send something if better than nothing, I guess. Yeah, but like, why not talk about something that you care about in there? Or, you know, I’m sure those probably drive you nuts to just those standard. You know, real estate newsletter emails.
Matt Lionetti 35:10 Yeah, I get so many of those too. It’s like every one I do a deal with. Now I’m on their newsletter, like, yeah, they just find, yeah. Like, I don’t know why I’m on that list. But 100%. Like, bring your passions to the forefront. Like, it’s great to show accolades. But like, when you’re up against three other agents in the listing appointment, so many people hang their hat on their number of sales, and stuff like that. And to me, it’s so odd, because there’s only one person in town who has the best amount of sales, the most sales, if you don’t have the most. You know, if those people really are analytical and care about the number of sales you do, you better have the most fucking sales right, say, I’ve done 20 sales. Well, if the other person comes in has done 30 sales, you’ve now lost everything. Yeah, but yeah, the thing is, if you show that accolade I’ve done 20, you know, I’ve, I’ve sold 20 homes, and it’s me, and you in this listing appointment, then there’s someone else, okay. And these sellers, this, I use this analogy all the time, these sellers love horseback riding, okay, I sell 20 homes, you sell 30 homes, this other person sells five homes, but they fucking love horseback riding. Like, I would say, 95% of the time, the horseback rider is going to relate and get the listing. That’s just what it is.
D.J. Paris 36:36 So this is so what we’re talking about is, is putting out content that’s authentic to you. And whatever your version of horseback riding is, in your own personal life as a realtor, whether it’s something you do outside of real estate or something that you incorporate into your business. Don’t be afraid to share that because you’re absolutely right. And I used to own a horse many, many years ago, I was in a relationship with somebody was a was a horseback rider. And she she anyway, she she did a lot of competitions and things. So so that’s a perfect example. Because we would we would meet people occasionally that was like, oh, yeah, I used to be into horses. And I wasn’t really a horse person. But I would watch her connect with these other even though it was a very tiny part of her life, actually. Yes, it’s your right. People want to connect with people who have passion and interest and maybe even the same passions and interest. And comedy is a great one, because it’s a universally sort of loved experience, right? Most of us, you know, there’s a lot of endorphins that get released. There’s some obvious reasons why we like comedy and stress, relieving all of that. But I just love the fact that you’re willing to sort of be yourself and authentic and silly and it’s not an act right. Like yes, you’re you’re playing characters and you’re writing skits. But But that’s, that’s authentic to who you are. That’s what you’d like to do. And as a result, yeah, even in a Ramones t shirt and you know, a 2012 Kia, you’re closing million million plus dollar deals because people go on orbit that guy, that guy seems fun. And and then of course, you have to make sure that you do a good job, of course, which you do. But that gets that gets people to go, Oh, that guy that guy’s got my interest. Yeah. And yeah, you’re not going to attract maybe the person who goes, Oh, I don’t want somebody who’s that silly, right? Or that? You know, and that’s okay, because they probably weren’t gonna go with you anyway. Right? So the idea of just attracting people who like what you are into, and there’s so much business for everyone, really. So you can be your authentic self. I mean, maybe if you lived in a tiny little rural community that was more conservative, maybe comedy might not be the best idea. But for most of us who live in an area where, you know, it’s somewhat densely populated, like, there’s so much business out there that you could just be yourself. And you know, as long as you’re being responsible, I think and but you’re going to just generate those kinds of clients, and then you don’t have to be as concerned about your image. I bet that’s the biggest freedom that you have is you’re just not worried about looking a certain way. I mean, you look perfectly fine. You’re I hope nobody’s getting this impression that Madison sort of slob. He is not he is absolutely professional, but you don’t really need to make sure that you look a certain way, because that’s not what your audience wants.
Matt Lionetti 39:17 Yeah, no, I mean, and sometimes I like dressing up in a suit and doing all that shit. But like, yeah, I just do whatever I want to do. And it’s just it’s pretty a long time ago, I said, you know, when I’m ready to do like my last when I’m ready to retire from the business. I’m just going to spend my last year dressing and saying everything that I want to say. I just, you know, push that out for like 40 years, so I’m just doing it now instead. So yeah, it’s been Yeah, I just there’s there’s a part that I think you need to have just like not giving a fuck, right and like, I’ll go out and someone will be like, you’re wearing a leather jacket. That’s not professional. Good. I don’t give a fuck Do you know what are we doing here? Then? I don’t Yeah, I like going, when I’m in a listing appointment or doing this, like, I like being in the situation where like, I want your business and I want your listing, but I don’t need it. Right. And that’s where I think things turn for a lot of agents, because at first, I didn’t need it. And I was being so desperate to get it. And now I can go and more relaxed. And be like, listen, I, you know, I want to help you, I think I’m the best person for the job. But I don’t need this. And when I don’t need that need this listening means I’m not going to push you to sell for a price that maybe isn’t the best price for you. Like, you know, we have that luxury and like you can put that spin on it. And I feel like and I feel like every agent should feel this way. I don’t care who I’m up against, in what city? Anywhere, I’ll win the listing. I, I feel like I’ll be able to connect with someone more than other people. And I think everyone should feel that way. I’m not, you know, I think you should have that level of confidence that I can beat anyone in a listing appointment.
D.J. Paris 41:06 I think part of that confidence comes from the willingness to put yourself out there on social in the way that you do, which is like, Hey, guys, this is what’s in my head. This is what I’m putting on on the you know, on the screen, and I hope you’ll like it. But but if you don’t like it, oh, well at least you get a chuckle. But that enables you to say that you guys know who I am, right? They know who they’re who they’re getting, and that it absolutely works. We all want to work with people that we like. And you’re putting out content where people like your content. And so yeah, I’m a huge, huge fan. It’s a great place to wrap up. I would love everybody to do a couple of things. First, I want you to visit Matt’s website, which is Matt lionetti.com. link in the notes. Also, I want you to subscribe to the overcast podcast. Everyone’s a fan of the broke agent. So just subscribe it is it is their podcast Mexico’s and they do all sorts of fun content together as well that they put out on social. But yeah, check out that podcast via subscriber. And then of course, we would love for everyone out there to help us continue to grow as well. There’s two ways you can do that one by telling one other agent about our show, keeping it real. So think of one other agent that you know that could benefit from hearing from producers like Matt, who are really doing unique things that are super cool. And those are the kinds of people we interview on our show, tell them about the show, send them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, I think we have 300 and like 40 episodes or so now. So all of our episodes are there. Or if they’re a podcast person, just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button. And one last thing please leave us a review. Whatever podcast app or distribution system you might be listening to us through or watching us. Whether it’s YouTube, or you know, Apple podcast, Google Play Spotify, Stitcher, whatever, Pandora, let us know what you think of the show that helps us continue to improve. So Matt, on behalf of all of our audience, thank you so much for being on our show. It was this was great. I love authentic people that take risk. That is you. You’re obviously having tremendous success being yourself, which in this industry is not as common as as probably a lot of people would think so I appreciate that. I appreciate the courage that you have to do that. And obviously it’s working so even better. So thank you on behalf of our audience for taking time out of your data to be on the show. And then on behalf of Matt myself, I want to thank our audience for sticking with us throughout this entire show. Please subscribe to Matt’s podcast over over ask again. It’s in the notes and let them know what you think visit his website too. He’s got a great website that really gives you some more insight into who he is. And it is a non traditional realtor website, which I love in the best possible compliment I could give. Is that Is it a non traditional realtor website. It’s awesome. So take a look at it. It’s in the show notes. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show.
Matt Lionetti 44:05 Thanks so much for having me. I
D.J. Paris 44:06 loved it. All right, man. Well, thanks, guys. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.
How To Work With High Net Worth Luxury Clients • Mark Castley
Feb 04, 2022
Mark Castley, the COO of LuxuryProperty.com in Dubai goes back to the beginning of his journey in the real estate. Mark discusses the obstacles faced by top producers when they decide to start a team. Next, Mark describes how he got involved in the real estate luxury market and outlines what it’s like to work in one of the most super-rich markets in the World. Last, Mark points out what makes them stand out from other companies in the same market and the importance of building the community feeling inside the team.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with luxury International Property realtor Mark Castlereagh. Before we get to mark a couple of quick announcements first, we rarely ever ask our audience for anything except telling a friend so please continue to tell friends about our show. But we are going to ask for one other thing just Well, probably not just this ones. But today it for sure. Which is to leave us a review on whatever system you might be listening to this episode on whether it’s Apple podcast, formerly iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, etc. Wherever you’re listening to us, please let us know what you think about the show that helps with our visibility, and also helps give us feedback about what you like and what we can do to improve. So please keep telling friends about us. And take three, three seconds, leave us a review, let us know what you like about the show. We really, really appreciate it. As always, thank you for continuing to support us and allow us to grow and help us get to the place we have now are worth 300 and almost 50 episodes, I think we’re been doing this five or six years. It’s all because of you guys. So really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you. And now on to our interview with Mark Castley.
Okay, today on the show, we have Mark Cassidy from the luxury property.com. Now Mark, Mark Castle has over 15 years of international real estate experience. He’s covered the United States, Canada, the Middle East, Asia and Europe, where he has coached and mentored top 1% agents. Mark is now the Chief Operating Officer of luxury property.com, he actually works on both the Dubai business and the digital side of the business, which has huge growth plans into the United States for 2022. I’d like everybody if you haven’t ever visited luxury property.com If you’re driving, pull over or wait. But if you aren’t driving, check it out. It is an amazing portfolio of High and High Net Worth sort of real estate. And Mark is sort of in charge of of a lot of the Dubai, the middle east part of it. So we’re really excited. And then all the years we’ve been doing the show, we haven’t really ever talked about international real estate. And our audience is always asking about it. How does it work? What does it entail? You know, if I have clients that are interested in sort of exploring those areas, what do I do? And Mark is here to talk about it. So Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Castley 4:03 Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Such a lovely intro. I like that.
D.J. Paris 4:08 I will thank you. Well, Mark has has if you’ve noticed, I’m sure Mark has a lovely British accent. And Mark is from Liverpool. And I am one of the biggest Beatles fans that I know. So I got very excited when Mark told me he was from Liverpool. But Mark has actually lived all over the world. And he’s lived the United States. He’s He’s lived, he’s moved around in Asia, the Middle East. So I would love mark to actually go all the way back to the beginning of your journey into real estate and sort of get us up to where we are today. Just because I think your story is particularly fascinating. But tell us a little bit about why real estate and how you got how you got involved.
Mark Castley 4:49 It Yeah, uh, well, it’s funny because it’s a it’s a question people often say to me is, you know, was this was this what you wanted at school and, and, and it wasn’t, you know, when I was At school, I thought I was the best football soccer player. And wasn’t. But I was confident this was me, you know, going to be a professional mom used to say to me did not Well, maybe you won’t be you know, you’ve got to
D.J. Paris 5:15 have another plan.
Mark Castley 5:17 And I was like, No, I don’t need an electronic claim about that. It wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t a right fit for a career in soccer. Dad said to me, Well, look, you’ve got a job. And I was like, really haven’t planned ahead for this. So what do I do? And he took me to a local estate agents, you know, a real estate company on the high street. And I was 16. I think at the time 70, maybe 70, more probably 60, open the door. And I remember the guy’s name was Chris. He said this, you know, he needs a job. And you’re like, well, we’re not recruiting. And, you know, he’s clearly not of the age to be working well.
D.J. Paris 5:57 We don’t need a footballer in the office.
Mark Castley 6:01 Why are you in my shop, and he’s like, Just give him a job, any job. And they gave me the tea boy job, which is, as it sounds, I was making tea in bringing biscuits. And it was, you know, the salary on it was 60 pounds a week, which is about $80 a week. And had to pay keep, and it was like, Why is this not a job? You know, that’s not real. But this is the you know, the expectation felt reality wasn’t observable. The guy who owned the company here was a franchise of a national brand in the UK. And he owned quite a bit of property. And he’s quite well being and he was, you know, he told me quite a lot. And he brought me open. And let me go into viewings. And what I realized really quick was real estate couldn’t be really easy. Because I didn’t have any outside influence, there was no market, you should do this market, you should do that. I was a door one from a t porur to a door open. And I figured out when I opened some doors, and I said certain things or have aware that something a certain way, I would do a deal. And I worked my way open with my oppa. And all of a sudden I was head of property management from tea boy and I was like, What is going on? Wow, this is great. And then from there, you know, my crew progressed into buying and selling properties. I think a lot of realtors ventured down this path of flipping homes. And I did really well. I’ve built up a deposit ended up doing we call it in the UK. They want them to get worse. So with I don’t know how I forget what it’s called in the US, but basically, by property undervalue decent work, too. And all of that was done on an option agreement as making great money. And then all of a sudden the market crashed. I said to the missus issues, only my Dell friend at the time, I said, Oh, no. What did we do? You know, the markets crashed. You know what next? So I looked at Peabody, and that was that was actually my first international stock was over into Dubai came over fresh off the boat. And the goal was to just make as much money as possible, but just had the financial crisis. It was 2000. And the 2009, early 2010 share market was like it was a buyers market. Right. So I think it’s the only market is tough, really is the plateau market. If it’s a seller’s market, that’s okay. If it’s a buyers market, that’s okay, too. You just got to adjust your game plan and your profit. Yeah, that’s it. So this was a buyers market. So we were pretty aggressive in terms of offering loan getting deals done, and there’s lots of business happening in the market picked up. And when we found out, you know, quite a long story short, I found out I was having the little one, she’s six now, when we found out about here we were like, right, we probably need to stop what we’re doing in Dubai, which is Rolex Range Rover, business class here, do this, do this, but we’ve got a little person on the way let’s rein all of that in as fast as possible, moved over to the US and I was coaching. So had quite a lot of the top 1% in Florida. And it was just incredible. We lived in in Davenport, a couple of minutes outside of Disney and we have a little tail so maybe they were just good fun. For the goal was you know, I was tasked to help real estate agents go from being a real estate agent into a real estate team. Yeah, so that’s a common problem, isn’t it with the top 1% is it’s not you know, growth, and it’s very much dependent on them doing activities
D.J. Paris 9:59 scale. feeling is very difficult when you get to a certain number of personal deals. And then you’re basically back to trading hours for dollars and trying to figure out, how do we get to that next level. And usually it involves building a team. But then then the skill set changes, right? Like now you’re managing and building a team versus just doing your own personal production. And that becomes a whole learning curve in and of itself.
Mark Castley 10:23 And that’s the thing, right? So what I find is, teachers here are teachers, to anybody that will listen to me, because I genuinely think this is the most important thing is you have to have a business model that closes strangers. And that’s if you can focus on closing people into commission checks that you’ve never met before, and it wasn’t a referral, then you have a duplicatable business model. And we can scale that. The problem is if you’ve got a network at your soccer club, or tennis club, or whatever that might be your country club. It’s hard to duplicate though, on a 10x scale, with 10 people who can’t enter that market,
D.J. Paris 11:03 right? Because you can’t just throw money at that situation, or what you can do is you have to find other people and basically duplicate yourself. But they have to build those relate. Yeah, if you’re working solely by sphere of influence, you can build a wonderful business, but it’s not really a scalable business, right? Yeah, it’s finite,
Mark Castley 11:23 you know, because there’s only so much you can do. And then the rest is help. So you bring help in and, and this was something that I realized, so a lot of the a lot of the US and Canada bring in isa services from the Philippines. So I was like, Okay, well, if this is the common trend, and we’re going to bring an ISA and from Manila, I will go. So I went to Manila, and I was training them for a couple of weeks. And it was really interesting, you know, to figure out the objections of the got that, you know, the the concerns they had around the positions and really understand everything about them. And that’s something that made me realize when I went back to the US, and I’m talking about these amazing people in the Philippines who were just so much better than me on the phone, you know, and, and that’s the goal, you’re always gonna try and bring better people in. But what was happening is people the top 1% got to that level where the credit card was able to be run for anything they wanted. That wasn’t the right move in the most part. Because if you want to do a duplicatable, Stranger business, and you’ve never made a cold call to a buyer before, you can’t teach someone how to do it. Right? You don’t. That’s the that was the problem. So I went to Manila figured this out. And it was super interesting. The biggest problem in Manila is Wi Fi could go sour.
D.J. Paris 12:47 I know this because we have help at our company, via virtual assistants in the Philippines. We have seven of them who live all all throughout the Philippines. And you’re right, we’re I mean, they’re just they’re exposed to tremendous weather. I mean, I think I think they’re considered the most vulnerable nation in the world for weather for extreme weather. So their Wi Fi, their electricity. It goes, yeah, it cycles. Yeah.
Mark Castley 13:14 And that was, that was something that was interesting, because it made me realize, I’m a forever learning of revenue, teaching ourselves and being told by others, that to be successful, you have to understand every single part of your business before you can, you can educate on it. Because it’s it’s not valid education otherwise. So you pick the phone up and make 50 calls a day for the next couple of weeks, you’re probably going to understand that a little bit better, and be able to assist. And that was really interesting, you know, in the coaching, I love coaching. You know, I say this now, my where I am now, this is my forever home. And I say that to everybody, because I absolutely, I think I have the best job on the planet. And, you know, it’s it’s one of them where I’m trying to bring the best possible people in. And I’m always trying to bring people in who are better than me. And I think I’m the best in the world at what I do. And I’m trying to find better than me and successfully over the past couple of weeks TV. I’ve brought people into our business who would just incredible, but I’ve had to go through that process, right, you know, to see what makes sense. When they come to me and asked me a question mark, what do I do? And you don’t know the answer. That’s when that’s when you’re on a rapid decline. So yes, it was really important to go through that process. And that was as good because we got to travel a lot.
D.J. Paris 14:44 I imagine. But you know, I want to just go back to something you’ve said because we talked to so many top producers on the show who work exclusively by referral through their sphere of influence. And you’re right at some point, they just hit a ceiling of of, there’s only a certain amount of transactions they can physically do in a given year. And it creates, as you said, a finite, you know, sort of growth potential or certainly a some sort of ceiling. And they then have to either find a partner, who maybe has a similar sort of business model, or maybe they start divvying up response that bringing on a team and divvying up responsibilities, and that frees up some more time for them to work their sphere more, but what we don’t talk about a lot, and there certainly are agents I’ve interviewed who do talk about it, but a lot of people don’t talk about it is this idea of adding in, you know, working on internet leads, working on on, you know, a different sort of the strangers, you know, trying to convert strangers, whether it’s an internet lead, or through some other method, or you just meet somebody out somewhere. But trying to convert those into into clients, a lot of agents have never really been taught that strategy. And they don’t realize that’s something that can be taught, like, as you were saying, to isas can learn those skills, because it’s a very sort of specific set of skills that’s teachable, it’s repeatable, and it’s something that you can invest in, and, and use to scale your business. So I just wanted to make that point for anyone that that didn’t quite catch that, that Mark was was saying, you know, that is a way it may be whether you think it’s a good idea or not depends on your own personality, and, but going through that process could really add a nice stream of revenue. And it’s something you don’t really have to do, you can hire people to assist, you can hire lead providers, you can hire isas to take those calls as qualified people and get them on the schedule. And that’s something that can sort of exist independently of an individual agent’s time and energy.
Mark Castley 16:48 Yes, it’s such a powerful growth tool. You know, we see conversion rates across the world with different people I speak to from 0.2%, right the way up to 12%. And so much higher, obviously, with referrals. So what you have to do is, I mean, I hate this profile, everybody at this profile myself, my wife, and everybody I come into contact with just to better understand how to communicate with people. And, you know, I think you’ve just got to put yourself in a position where you do something that matches your personality profile, if you’re a high day, just don’t advertise on Facebook, right? His car, you’re not going to be able to handle the hundreds of leads that you get through Facebook, if you’re right. It’s just, it’s stressful, you know, and there’s different, I mean, that’s an exaggeration, but you get it right, there’s got to be something that matches your personality profile and matches your bank balance, and then gives you the return on your investment. You know, we we want to be looking at a 10x on any investments. For every $1,000 you spend, you just have to be getting 10 bucks. And if you if you’ve got that investment, it’s not so it’s not so bad to provide in the time spent isn’t isn’t crazy.
D.J. Paris 18:08 Yeah, it’s really, really important, this idea of thinking about return on investment, it’s, it’s very easy, I think, as a real estate professional, or for our listeners to think exclusively about their sphere. And maybe that’s where the majority of your thoughts should go. Because those are people that are most likely to already know like, and trust you to use you in a transaction. And of course, that makes sense, deepen those relationships, keep keep those those people close, as close as you can. But then it’s like, okay, well, if that’s what I’m best at, or maybe I’m not great on the phone, I’m not great at you know, cold door knocking, which, you know, probably the day of COVID doesn’t really know exist, but but just this idea of reaching out to strangers, maybe that’s just not something I’m good at. So my me personally, I’m not a real estate producer myself, because I do things like this, but I wouldn’t be good at that I’m good at deepening my relationships. So what I would consider doing is just like we have for our isa team here at our company, which they actually helped me recruit agents, because I don’t want to pick up the phone and make cold calls to other agents and say, Hey, come over and join our company, we’d love to have you but those calls are really powerful. And so I have a team of people doing that for me, and they get lots and lots of appointments. So there are ways that that you know these outside and we live in this worldwide gig economy now and you just have the ability to hire people from for example the Philippines from other places in the world that would be thrilled to have this job. And you know, there’s just it’s so great because my cold callers they make hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of cold calls a week for me to realtors saying hey, if you’re ever thinking about joining another firm we’d love to chat and it’s not it’s it’s it’s that’s what they do. And it works out quite well for us. If I had to do it, I would have phone hesitation I wouldn’t want to do just I just wouldn’t want to make 200 dials a day, which is what I used to do 20 years ago in a different industry. And I sort of know, that’s not really for me, but it needs to be part of my business. So I have other people assisting and then they, they set it up for me. And then hopefully I close it. So I’m so glad you mentioned that we don’t talk about that enough on the show. But I want to talk about luxury property as well. because.com Because this is such a cool, cool company. The website is amazing. Tell us how did you get to luxury property
Mark Castley 20:30 by fate really, really was you know, when the stars align, and they really did align for this position. I had quite a lot of coaching clients still in the US. When we came to Dubai, me the missus in the little one, we were to escape the UK because it was cold, and COVID. And nobody could do anything. So it gets political party by as fast as possible. And I was dealing with my coaching clients in the UK, and I really enjoyed them. And then by chance, somebody that I introduced to real estate about 12 years ago when I was first here, reached out and was like, hey, look, you know, look at what we’re doing. What you posted a comment really good. He’s still an agent here do extremely well. He’s one of the top agents in the country. So I was like, Okay, I met the C CEO, Jason who’s genuinely the he’s just the best, his vision and everything. He’s he’s the best. And we met him you know, when you get on with somebody and it’s like instant. I want to work with you no matter what it takes, because where you want to go. And it was one of them relationships where he I think he could see incredible value in what I brought to the table. So I said, look, let’s let’s do this. So I came in, took over the sales team. And we started making incredible headway in the luxury space. So we play in a in a whole nother realm and quite a lot of other brokerages in the world to be honest. And the reason we are able to do that is we generate leads at incredible price brackets, just because of our URL. It’s It’s outrageous, you know, luxury property law calm, you expect to see luxury property when you go on there. And then when you do, you’re like this is amazing. And then if you actually want to buy it, you have that level of trust, because our brand is so powerful, you come through become a lead, and we definitely have options for you. So it’s a real nice match, that not a lot of others can compete in that space, because they’re just traditional brokerages within the region that don’t have that brand awareness, though. It’s just outrageous. You know,
D.J. Paris 22:45 it is interesting, because my initial thought would be high net worth individuals. And Oracle’s made me call the mega high net worth individuals are sort of the space you play in those, you know, the prevailing sort of common sense, or I’ll just say my own common sense, which is absolutely I guess wrong. But my my, my thought would have been as a marketer, oh, those people don’t go on the web to look at properties to the same extent that somebody who’s not in that, in that, that sort of, you know, tax bracket might. And you know, what’s so cool is of course they do they do just like anybody else. And they need a place to go and look for for these types of properties throughout the world. And luxury property.com has that. And it is amazing that you actually generate leads through that because again, you think, well, someone’s not going to fill out a lead forum who’s, you know, their net worth is, you know, three or $400 million? No, apparently that that’s exactly how it works. Because they’re human beings just like anyone else, they want us find property that appeals to them. Especially I imagine your average client when they purchase for example, in Dubai, this is likely not their first home, I’m guessing this is they have multiple multiple properties. Do you have any sort of guests on on what the average person like the number of, of homes they may have throughout the world? It’s certainly got to be more than a few, I’m guessing.
Mark Castley 24:09 Yeah, it’s a lot. I mean, just to dial back into the lead gen side of it, which is so funny, because I had the exact same outlook as you should. My business model in real estate was, if you advertise on a real estate portal, you’re going to pay a lot more for your lead, but it’s going to be a lead who wants to buy some real estate so it’s worthwhile. And that’s what we did. And that’s what Dubai is built on two major portals here. You make loads of money from them. It’s great, but it costs a lot of money. I was here. I was like, No way. I mean, I’m talking like senior politicians. But we’ve had just insane people come through our CRM and lots
D.J. Paris 24:51 of nondisclosure agreements that probably get signed,
Mark Castley 24:55 trying to not get in trouble.
D.J. Paris 24:58 And you think DLP, Ebola.
Mark Castley 25:01 So you see them come through and you’re like, really that person. And then you, you know, when the guys call and they’re like, yeah, that’s, that’s who that was. And they’ll take the call. And sometimes it’s a PA or you know, it’s not always a bullet transaction is that we do it. And it really is like, it’s absolutely insane. To go back to the question about how many homes, what we find is, and this is more of a coaching element. So the model is, in any real estate across the planet, you need to be face to face with your clients to do business. And there’s just no other way to do it. So if you if you try and do business any other way, you probably won’t be as successful as if you’re face to face. And what we found is, because it’s such a high volume area, you might speak to one guy, if it gives you one property over the phone, and maybe you sell it, maybe you rent it, whatever happens if you get face to face with them. It’s very rare, you don’t get their full portfolio from them. And it’s interesting. Yeah, and it’s very rare that less than 10. Because the people that you deal with hear us all it’s a it’s a melting pot of the world’s wealthy. So you meet people love. So I’m from Super working class parts of the world where everybody where I’m from, is from where I’m from, and nobody
D.J. Paris 26:30 moves to Liverpool. They’re from Liverpool.
Mark Castley 26:34 I’m probably the only guy to ever escape me and the Beatles. That was it. And, you know, so when you get here, and you meet these people from all over the world with incredible wealth, what you find is they all successful investing in real estate on a regular basis, making incredible profits. So it’s, it makes sense to continue to put money in but we’re very tax efficient here. Because there’s no tax. So which is great. So it makes sense to keep buying property. And then you find this, people will send you a spreadsheet and say, here’s what I have. And it may be 40 properties 50 properties, sometimes it might be six, but it’s very rarely one or two. Because once you’ve been exposed to Dubai and being successful here, you people continue to buy because it’s mostly cash purchases. Sure. Finance is super cheap here anyway, you know, we we follow a US model. So the finance in the US is super cheap at the moment. So people can buy finance, but it’s it’s pretty cash rich part of the world. And yeah, we finally, you know, we’ve got lots of crypto guys in this space of the minute, you know, the, the, probably the seven or $8 million in a both. We’ve got lots of volume in the crypto guys. They’re coming in, liquidate some crypto buying luxury assets, which is you know, which is fantastic. And that part is we cover a million dollars, right up to about three or $400 million. That’s like our price bracket. Yeah. And what we’ve found is, right in the middle of that is where the where the volume is, you know, the number of leads we get on a daily basis. $25 million in both is triple digits.
D.J. Paris 28:28 Right every day. I mean, that’s incredible.
Mark Castley 28:32 Yeah. Wow. And then the thing is, when you’ve got and this is I tell I tell my guys this all the time. Dubai in real estate model is not exclusive in the most part. So the US model is everything’s exclusive exclusive. Yeah, you will exclusive and very most for 99% of the time you take the listing that you always think that it’s all here, it’s you can have those things if you want no problem. So you know, stock is king if you’ve got good stock price correctly with great images, great description, video drone, and you’re driving traffic to it. There’s there’s buyers out there at all price points.
D.J. Paris 29:19 What’s it like to to work with somebody in that mega High Net Worth space? Meaning how often is it a team of people that you now have to sort of win over not just the principal person, the the, you know, the high net worth individual, but then also maybe a surrounding team of advisors of accountants of attorneys, maybe even a publicist? Does that come up a lot where you’re dealing with with now a group of people who support that person? You know, I imagine in those types of clients, the there are teams already in place and you get added to the team.
Mark Castley 29:57 Yeah, that’s right. So there’s The hierarchy to work through what the truth is if it’s ever, ever not an investment property. So the second, third, fourth home, this holiday home was a weekend home, because there’s people in Dubai, who buy weekend property, or live somewhere and buy some somewhere for the weekend. And that might only be 10 minutes away, but a weekend property. The truth is, and it’s the same in the US as the same everywhere in the world. That decision maker is the wife every time.
D.J. Paris 30:32 So she’s the one going over.
Mark Castley 30:35 So we’ve had we’ve had full teams come to market, and there’s a due diligence process as a legal team reviewing contracts. We’ve had press people, we’ve had security teams for top level politicians who are checking the access with the elevators and the escape doors and all this type of stuff. Sure, then, if she doesn’t like it, no, get on board. And that’s that’s it, it’s the same every time.
D.J. Paris 31:02 So so it’s it’s a meet the Meet the spouse as quickly as possible and try to win win over their, their their approval, and trust, because they’re the ones that are going to pull the trigger. That’s, that just makes your right it makes perfect sense. Of course it does. It’s the same with the condo I just bought with my girl, my girlfriend who were not married, we hopefully will be. But even though it was my my purchase, I really still had to have a very serious conversation because I said, this is where we’re going to be living. What do we think? Which was really what do you think? Are you ready to sign off on this? And I had to get her I had to get her sign off? Because I know from from previous, his, you know, mistakes I’ve made that that if the partner doesn’t sign off on it, yeah, you’re in, you’re in for some trouble as the as the spouse. That makes perfect sense.
Mark Castley 31:54 And it’s funny, because, you know, when I moved to the US, what people used to say to me is the number one question I would get is, Mark, can you teach me how to sell in the million dollar plus price bracket? And often I would say you already are, it’s literally you’re doing the same thing. There’s nothing different at all, it’s the same process, the people are the same, this is nothing different. You I would prefer the $10 million dollar price bracket or the 500 Grand because the 1 million is there’s a lot of ego there. Sure. And I don’t mean this negative because I love everybody. However, there’s a lot of ego around that million dollar price bracket, and depending on your location may be slightly different. But when you then go into the ultra high net worth levels, these guys are the easiest people to deal with, you know, the super chilled about decision making, and there’s no there’s no stress around the low offer. I mean, I seen a property in the US today, you probably seen it was dropped $30 million, or went from 110 to 80 million. anybody doing anything like that it’s not that stressed over losing $30 million on real estate. So it’s actually a much easier conversation. The million dollar price point brings egos and it’s a bit of drama. And then the sub 750 grand price point is I think is the three because you do that small, you know, I don’t broke up because I think it’s a conflict of interest of I do. Because I take out a lead. So you know, you don’t want to be in a position where I get
D.J. Paris 33:39 the boss is taking all the leads.
Mark Castley 33:42 Right? So I don’t do it. But if I did, I don’t think I’d work with sellers and I still think I’d probably sit at the half a million dollar price point because that’s the type of people that I like to deal with. You know, so and you mentioned this before, but you’ve got to find the people that you really want to work with. So you find the lead generation system that works for you find your niche in the market, that should be duplicatable, but for me, it’s like you know first time homebuyers mover OPERS little kid that’s like, that’s who I am. You know, I’ve got a little kid you know, so that so it’s easy to talk to, it’s easy to relate to. And they were the easiest people I thought to deal with. And you play at that the million dollar price point is too funny place to tender. Yeah. Because it’s
D.J. Paris 34:33 it’s probably people who have earned their way up to a million dollars and they are very, you know, there’s a lot of fear about keeping it and moving it up when you play in the ultra high net worth space. As you said, there’s just less fear there’s, there’s more teams in place. They they’re people that you know, can maybe they’ve had generations of wealth so it’s really not something that concerns them on. On it. You know, a level of one transaction isn’t going to make or break them. So that makes perfect sense. But you’re right. Like, once you get to that million space, you again, you might have people who are easy and wonderful, but you also might have people that just got their way there. And I’ve been moving up. And now all of a sudden, you know, I have I have family members like that, that, that have the few that have just incredible estates, but not in the ultra high net worth space, these are people that have started from nothing and move their way up. And, and they’re cash poor, just like the rest of us, or, you know, their house poor, I guess you should say, and they’re stressed because they have to work, they have to keep their mortgage going, they have to, you know, pay the taxes, which might be, you know, $100,000 a year. And so, so these are, so you’re right, I totally understand that. With these family members, I used to talk to them and say, Wow, your life is when I was younger, so wonderful. They go, Oh, no, I’m as stressed out as anyone who, you know, it’s they don’t live month to month necessarily, but there’s a lot of fear of, if I lose my job, this all goes away. That’s obviously a different type of fear that somebody in the high net worth space as. But I guess on the flip side, you then also have to make sure the team is on board with they have a team with with that particular investment or purchase. And I imagine things fall apart sometimes because of that
Mark Castley 36:18 all the time. And I think you know, that’s when the stress really comes in on the broker level sharknose give me no control over that. Yeah. And if you’re in a position where you have a deal to go through, and you will, you’ll make $100,000 $200,000 from it, and some cases, four or $500,000 commissions on transaction, which doesn’t go through. You know, it’s like we, our training system, and within our company is really robust. So we can bring non experienced younger brokers through the ranks and have them top producers really quick. But for a 24 year old kid fresh off the plane, who’s older, you know, maybe making $100,000. And then they’re not. It’s an emotional roller coaster,
D.J. Paris 37:05 for sure.
Mark Castley 37:07 It really interesting.
D.J. Paris 37:08 Well, and there must be tremendous competition in Dubai as well, on the on the broker side. I mean, there has to be because, of course, the the sort of amount of commissions that are at stake. So you have tremendous competition, I’m sure. What do you think it is that luxury property, again, also, aside from having an amazing ly user friendly website with with really cool properties to peruse. But what is it that you think your team does differently than some of the other shops out there that are trying to capture that same business in your area?
Mark Castley 37:39 So we do a lot of ongoing personal development. And that comes from not not a lot of other companies have somebody in post with experience across the world who can handle objections? Because if you think you know, let’s say you’re a British guy, who moved from the UK to Dubai, and set up a real estate company, and you do really well not great, but to develop your agents and, and the types of clients that we get in Dubai, a multinational, so we do business all over the world, coming to Dubai. So the fact that I’ve been able to travel across the world, the fact that the organizations traveled across the world, and quite a lot of our brokers have allowed us to put ourselves in a position where we don’t lose deals because of lack of education. And in the most part deals, that’s why they fall off, right? Sure. You must have seen so many times buyer wants the property seller wants to sell agent messes the deal up deal doesn’t happen. It’s insane, right? So we don’t have that problem with the company because we have daily personal development. So we just launched something called the 5am. Club. Now, I live out on the you know, the Palm Island, as you’ve seen, it’s called Beautiful. Yes. So that’s I live out there and 5am. Every Monday, the whole office is invited to my house, we all get changed. We go on a run, we do some exercise, we get breakfast, and then we have a mastermind. Now. Let’s go it takes so many boxes. It’s great for retention. It’s great for team morale, but the truth is what the what happens there is anybody who’s willing to give me a 5am start and come and run with me. They deserve to mastermind with the best in the business. And what you find is you get the brand new rental agents who are hungry, and we’ve got the number one two and three brokers in Dubai work in this office. So if you can have breakfast with them every Monday and pick their brain and that’s the type of thing we do that others don’t. We also do something really cool. We did it today called deal clinic, where I bring as anybody’s welcome in the office over 65 brokers. It’s an office based job so you know people come in normally 2530 in the room. What I say is Okay, pick a deal. So somebody will We’ll be working on a deal. And I’ll write it out on the board. And we’ll say, Okay, tell me about the buyer. Tell me about the seller, what’s the dynamics of the deal? Are over the line yet? But instead of me just answering the questions, everybody in the room does, what? Why don’t you do this, or I remember I said this one time. And what that does is built community within the team, which is, which is amazing. But also it gives peer information, this guy is really good. So there’s a referral to pass out a huge issue. And then all of a sudden, we do multiple transactions that I genuinely don’t believe would have happened if we didn’t have this ongoing personal development. And what that ultimately result in is great service for a client. So if somebody comes through whether they’re ultra high net worth or not, they have to get the best possible service from us. And if we’ve got all of this going on in the background to help, they should, you know, they should look at this world class service from us, because that’s what we’re set up to do. And all the little details we do in the background really point towards the success of the agents.
D.J. Paris 41:10 And it’s probably I’m guessing, no different than most of the brokerages here locally in Chicago, at least that I’m familiar with, which are lovely firms, there’s lots of great firms with wonderful resources and great technology and great brands. But that idea of ongoing actual skill development, I won’t even call it Training, because training is too generic and training. Everybody says they do training, but offering skill development. And like just this idea of once a week we get in a room and we talk about our deals, if nothing else, and somebody says Well, here’s the sticking point with this one transaction, here’s where I’m stuck, I’m not sure where to go. At the very least you’re going to get as you said, you’re maybe find a referral partner. But even if not, if you don’t find that you’re gonna get options, because people are gonna say, well try it like you said, Try this, try that. And if nothing else, it just builds more more quivers in their in their in are more arrows in their quiver. Sorry. But again, just skill development is something that I have found to be at most firms severely lacking here, here in our local area, not to here to criticize any firms, because there’s lots of great ones, but it is shocking how rare it is. And then how for the firms that do offer it. A lot of agents don’t participate in it. And it seems to me like boys skill development is, well, you know, you were on your way to being a professional football player. I mean, you know, discipline and skill development is everything.
Mark Castley 42:37 It’s everything. And the thing is, and this the harsh truth, is the only reason that other companies don’t do it. And I never say anything bad about any company. And of course, everything is everybody wants their own business separately, but the only reason you don’t do skill development is if you can’t, right, exactly. And that’s it right you know, so it’s not a negative, really, it’s a different business model, they
D.J. Paris 43:00 don’t have the staff in place to do it. Or
Mark Castley 43:02 that’s probably the reason why because if you have a business, the best way to make money is have skilled employees. So if you’ve got a real estate company, and you’ve got skilled real estate agents, everybody makes more money. So if you have the ability to empower your agents with new skills every week, you would tell me why. There’s no better feeling. And you’ll you’ll back me on this, I’m sure. Then if somebody offered me $100,000 cash, or the ability to see one of my agents make $100,000, because of me helping them I would I would take the agents every time, every single day of the week, I would say I want them, I want them to make money because of something I’ve helped them with Beats 100 grand every day of the week. And when people come in to me and say, Mark, what do I do? And I say, here’s what we’re going to do. And then I bring the top performing agents in Dubai and say, What do you think we should do? And then I bring the CEO in, and he says something, and then we bring everybody else in. And all of a sudden this person who had no access to education was good. Some of the top people on the planet held the number the rental contract. It’s just outrageous. And the difference, right is that that feeling is just cannot beat it. When somebody says thank you. I made money because of you. Yeah, you win.
D.J. Paris 44:30 What’s it’s that expression? Similar? Not not a perfect corollary to this expression. But But I think it makes sense where you say like a rising tide raises all ships, right. So this idea that everyone in the firm comes together to help the agent, maybe it doesn’t directly benefit that top producer to help you know the new guy, but it really does because if that little if that new guy can get some deals close that helps the brand and that’s going to help the top producer all of it all that works together and there’s again there’s There’s a lot of joy in helping somebody and seeing them be successful. And it’s great that you foster that sort of environment where it’s not so much about competition, because you were sort of saying this earlier, when you said other other businesses, other real estate brokerages in your area, like, hey, there’s room for everybody. There’s room. Yeah. Like, there
Mark Castley 45:19 really is. The space for everyone is now that’s the thing, seven and a half 1000 Real estate agents in Dubai, it’s a pretty small place in comparison to the actual available units that are here. But there’s still space for us all. And and that’s, that’s the thing, isn’t it, you know, you just got to make sure you take your piece of the pie. And you’ve got to make sure that piece of the pie is big enough for it to be worthwhile. And that’s it right, you know, that this space forever.
D.J. Paris 45:47 So I love in this conversation, you’ve done a few things. Number one, you’ve reiterated the importance of coaching, or skill development, which I mean, if we think about, you know, you You’re, you’re a former athlete, and obviously still a very fit person, you know, the importance of coaching, right? Every athlete almost on the planet has a coach, whether they’re amateur or professional, you know, certainly the professionals all have coaches. And then we also talked about this myth of that you really busted or, you know, sort of really got me my mind is almost a little scrambled. But this idea that high net worth people are in some ways, just like the rest of us, they’re going on websites or looking at properties they’re submitting requests to to see a property or to learn more about it. That blows that blows my mind. But of course, that makes perfect sense. You know, they’re human beings, just like the rest of us, they have their internet on their phone, just like the rest of us. So they’re just playing. They’re not going to Zillow, because Zillow doesn’t really, I mean, sometimes they might be, but that really is catering to their particular needs. And then this idea of also treating your business like a business and finding other ways to, as you were saying, like to 10x. You know, we hear about that a lot. And there’s a lot of gurus out there talking about scaling and how to get 10x or 100x. And it’s like, well, if you’re if you’re trading hours for dollars, which is really what most Realtors even though that’s not exactly the job, but at some point, you do sort of just hit, I’ve only got so many hours in the day to stay in touch with my sphere to meet new people. And then you can say, Okay, well, that part I can’t really duplicate, maybe that’s just, it’s too, it’s too intimate, I have to keep those relationships. And now I can add, you know, this other thing where maybe I’m buying leads from a lead provider, or maybe I’m generating them through through my own website, like luxury property.com, which again, it’s just blowing my mind that you guys get that kind of that kind of client that visits the site and also raises their hand to say I want to learn more, I just assume people don’t play in that space. Of course they do. And so I want everybody to check out luxury property.com Because not only is it a great search engine for properties in that whole ultra high net worth space. But notice how its laid out what I particularly love, and just from a user experience perfect perspective. I love this because all it has on the what we call above the fold, which means when you visit a website, and you just see what you see without scrolling, so simply called above the fold or above the scroll, and you have nothing in there other than a search engine and a lovely picture of Dubai in the background. And that’s all you need. Because if you’re at luxury property.com The of course the URL says what it is I don’t think there needs much explanation. You don’t need a tagline above the search bar that says find your next luxury property because of course, they’re luxury property.com. I love the minimalism of that above the fold. And it seems sort of silly. And maybe a point not worth mentioning. But I assure you, if you make things easy for people to search for whatever it is you’re selling, then you’re going to just have people use the website more effectively. And I love that you guys went real minimal above the fall below the fold. There’s all sorts of information about who you guys are and what you do and, and your leadership. And that’s wonderful too. And there’s just amazing things but as you scroll, but I love the fact that you very intentionally put nothing almost at the top other than please search for properties is essentially what it’s asking me to do. And of course, there’s no real other option I’m either going to search or I’m going to scroll and learn about and I’m going to go back up to the top and search. And I want to make that point because Realtors oftentimes build really extravagant websites with really cool cutting edge sort of features that don’t necessarily translate into leads. So I love the fact that you guys went really and I don’t I don’t want to say simple because simple sounds like it’s unsophisticated it is not but I just love that simple almost always wins the game or I should say direct direct wins the game.
Mark Castley 49:50 It does my I think you know, that’s something you see. Not just online. You see this with real estate agents, newly licensed or trying to reinvent when they If they find things to do that don’t result in commission checks. And that can be, hey, look, I’ve got the best website in the world and say, Okay, did you get any traffic or any leads from it? Not yet, we’ll look what I can do. And I say, okay, and then they say, Oh, I’ll look at my business card. If you scan it, it’s a VR of media. That’s amazing. Don’t get me wrong, that’s amazing. But if you keep it simple, and you go, you will meet a buyer face to face, and you show him a property that he wants to buy. That’s where the value is. That’s it, it’s all in you keep it as simple as possible. And that’s the same here. You know, it really is, that’s the same here the goal is, keep it as simple as possible, don’t show somebody something they’re going to fall in love with, and get an offer accepted on it and move on to the next.
D.J. Paris 50:50 Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And for everyone listening, if we think like, okay, what are the action steps here? Well, if you do have clients in this sort of ultra high net worth space, you need to be aware of a website like luxury property calm, because even if your clients are only moving within the United States, and if they have properties throughout, you know, the the coasts and wherever else they may live, they are might not think about international as an investment or having a weekend home. And as an agent, you have this amazing ability to visit a website like luxury property, find some of those ideas and say, Hey, I was thinking about you, Mr. or Mrs. Client. And I just saw this and I don’t know if this appeals to you or not, but I just wanted to let you know, I was thinking about you check this out this, this might be something that you want to take a look at. And if nothing else, that makes you look incredibly valuable to somebody, because I know at some of those high net worth levels, they love people bring them ideas, whether it’s a business idea, or something. So you as an agent, have this great ability for any of your clients that that play in that higher space to be of be visited of luxury property yourself, luxury property.com, and take a look and see what they offer and then pass it over to your clients. And then remember, you can then submit, if you wanted a referral, you would Mark’s team has some of the best agents, a of the top three agents in all of Dubai and they only have 65 agents out of 7000 something in the Dubai area. So obviously their team can take great care of your client, but you need to be the one to facilitate that. That idea. And what a great website that anybody can use. It’s not behind a paywall. It’s not limited to, you know, some sort of anyone could access it, and your team will sort of take it from there. And I just I just love that.
Mark Castley 52:38 Absolutely. I mean, when, whenever I speak to guys in the US, I always say it’s insane how much traffic we get from the US. So there’s clearly a demand there. So if you have clients, you know, typically a million dollars plus bought in the most part, it’s it’s $10 Million and above. You will have clients like that and if you do we will be happy to help my what’s okay with you, you can share my email. Please. It’s just mark ma RK at luxury property law calm. People send me stuff every day. Whenever I do podcast, I get the best replies from people. I absolutely love it. I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago, somebody listened and jumped on and said, Mark, I’m moving to Dubai next week. This is this is awesome. I tell you. This is why video is so important. She said to me, Mark, I’m moving to Dubai 14th of February. Rather than send you a long email. I’ve done a video for you. Okay, clicked into the video. Hey, Mark, I’m moving to Dubai wants to come and work for you. And I was like, yeah, that’s just the meet. She was on a zoom. And she starts next month. I was like this. That’s why video is so cool. Isn’t it? Like it’s so cool. It’s the best way to do things. Well. I always meet great people gonna do podcasts. So I would love for anybody to reach out. Even if you’ve just got questions on Dubai. Like some people just say, tell me about Dubai I’ma you know, because it’s, it’s an unknown stone. People know a little bit about it, but it’s still an unknown, right?
D.J. Paris 54:13 Well, I’ll I my girlfriend will probably I know she we’ve mentioned going to Dubai on a trip at some point in the future. So we’ll maybe we’ll come on a Monday and do your 5am Run asleep and but but, but I love the fact that you have that and that you you know, this this ongoing skill development and giving people things that will help them that they can say yes to you know, they they can choose whether they want to be there at 5am which is not an easy ask. And but but the people who show up, you know, that demonstrates a level of commitment and that’s the team that that Mark has built and continues to to build and thrive in Dubai. So for everyone listening check out luxury property.com It’s just a really cool resource. If nothing else to see how the other half live, right There’s that. And then also, it just expands your own understanding of what real estate at those price points look like. So that if you do come across high net worth or ultra high net worth individuals, you now have a conversation starter, you have something to to bring to the table, because of course, you would need to be able to play in that space, or if nothing else, I’ve got a great team over in Dubai, that would love to chat with you. That’s the way I would present it. And that sort of lets you off the hook, knowing some of the intricacies around taxes and rates and you know what’s a good deal and what isn’t. But you can be the the matchmaker, so to speak. So Mark, I would love to thank you for being on our show. This was really a lot of fun for us. And I’m so grateful, by the way we should mention. Mark is doing this really late at night, he’s in a suit looks great. And you know, he was he started this at 9pm. So what a great guy for staying on being part of our show, really, we appreciate it on behalf of the listeners, thank you for staying up and giving us some some great advice. It also by the way, Mark’s a real estate coach, he has lots of great things to say. So hopefully you guys got some great actionable steps. I also will be summarizing those in the show notes for everyone listening. But on behalf of the audience, we thank Mark for staying up late. He’s got a little one at home, he’s got a wife, they would prefer that he’s home and he took time out of his day to do this weekend, hustle home spend time with them. And also on behalf of Mark and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen support our show, we’re just asked that everybody do two quick things, actually three quick things. One, visit luxury property.com. Get familiar with their website, bookmark it, make it check it out at once a week, go in there, take a look, see what’s available. See, see how those properties look like see if you can step up your own listings with some of the ways that they you know, showcase the the or highlight the benefits of certain properties, you can take that and distill it down into your own market. And number two, please tell a friend about our podcast. The best way that we grow is by agents telling other agents what we do. So if there’s an agent that you’re aware of that could go to that wants to go to that next level isn’t quite there yet. Send him over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is you can stream right through there. If they’re already a podcast listener of sorts, just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And I’m sorry, the third thing we’ll ask is please leave a review. Let us know what you think of the show. Let us know what you like what you don’t like. So if you’re on iTunes or now called Apple podcasts, or Spotify or Pandora or Google Play or Stitcher, anywhere you’re listening to podcasts, let us know what you think of the show. This helps us continue to improve and also gets us more visibility to reach more, more realtors to learn from from top people like Mark. So Mark, thank you so much. On behalf of everyone here at the show. I really appreciate your dedication and time. We were wonderful guests, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Ben.
2022 Is The Year Of Off-Market Real Estate Deals • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jan 31, 2022
In our January episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from atproperties emphasizes that this is the year of off-market deal. Carrie shares tips on how to make the best of the year of off-market deals and discuss these ideas with D.J. Next, D.J. shares his marketing tips of the month. Last, Carrie talks about her Instagram account and how it helps build relationships with her followers/clients.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show, and today on the show is our monthly market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carrie McCormick Real Estate Group with at properties here in Chicago. Carrie is a top 1% producer with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors, and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments, please visit Carrie at her website, which is Carrie McCormick, r e.com. We have that listed in our show notes and also follow her on Instagram, which is at Carey McCormick real estate and McCormick is to see so Carrie McCormick real estate on Instagram. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 2:16 Thank you, I love your introduction, I always love hearing it. So thank you. Thank you.
D.J. Paris 2:21 Happy 2022
Carrie McCormick 2:23 You got it. So I just want to kick off this call this podcast and just say that this year 2022 is going to be the year of the off market deal. So we are definitely still seeing a shortage of inventory. So what does that mean? It means there’s buyers on the sidelines, there’s buyers that want to buy, and we just don’t have inventory for people who are listening or watching from all over the United States. Everyone’s experiencing it. So I wanted to share a few things I was privileged to be asked to be on the Inman Connect, which hopefully if you guys saw it, you saw a little bit of our, our, our segment on it. And we also talk there about the 2020 off market deals. So just again, want to give you a little bit of tips about it. So number one, circle prospecting. This is something that’s new. So what does that mean? So let’s say you have a buyer that put an offer in on a home, and they were outbid multiple offer situation, what you do as a buyer representative is you send a letter to all the homes around that particular listing, or if it’s a condo in that condo building, you write a nice letter to the homeowner saying my client just made an offer on your neighbor’s unit or home, we lost out and multiple offer situation they love the neighborhood. If you or anyone you know is looking to sell, here’s my contact information, give me a call. So a new term for me it was called circle prospecting. I thought it was brilliant. And I loved that idea.
D.J. Paris 4:00 It’s such a great idea because it does a couple of things. One, it of course, possibly gets them a future, you know sale, or home to purchase. And it gives the person that’s receiving the letter, you know, a little ego boost, like ooh, somebody’s might be interested in buying my property, which especially if they’re not looking to sell prior to getting that letter now they have that sort of conversation piece with if they have a family, maybe a partner or spouse to go, Hey, you’re not going to believe we just got this should be should we call should we find out? I think it just creates a lot of excitement. And also, it also helps the real estate agents sort of get their name out there and let them know that you sort of play in the space where they live.
Carrie McCormick 4:43 Of course now there’s a lot of benefits to it. But of course our goal is to you know, find a home for our buyer. So it was such a great idea. The next one that we talked about was unsolicited CMAs so what that means is you know I’ve got a database of calls clients that I’ve sold to, or just clients in general, you know that our prospects have sold to is give them a CMA on their home, you know, this is what the value of your home is currently today, hey, I know you’re not looking to sell right now. But in the event, something changes, here’s where your your home is appreciated, and it might make them think twice, and it might make them want to sell. So I thought that was a great way also to find some new inventory. Third idea, which is something I do a lot is work your own network. So you got to think outside the box a little bit, think about, like the attorneys that you work with the accountants that you know, the wealth managers that, you know, you know, they are trusted advisors to their clients as well. So talk to them, see if they have any clients that are in need of buying or selling as well. So again, it’s kind of a little bit more old school method of, you know, picking up the phone and calling people but it’s definitely, definitely a great way to find new business.
D.J. Paris 6:01 I think to like with financial advisors, in particular, if you’re an agent, if and if someone’s listening, who’s an agent who specializes in cash flow type of real estate investing investments, where, you know, maybe it’s a house hacking opportunity, where a client would maybe buy a three flat live on one of the floors rent the other two, or it just has a bunch of cash sitting around, and they want a more regular stream of income coming to them. That’s a great opportunity. If you if you can develop that specialty in real estate, you can then take that to financial advisors and say, Hey, I don’t I’m sure you come across clients who are cash savvy, who are looking for a more reasonable return that’s maybe a little bit more secure. You know, I would love to partner with you went and start talking about that. I you know, I think that’s a huge, huge, great a great thing.
Carrie McCormick 6:53 Yeah, I agree. And then the last tip that I have for prospecting in that is again, going back to old school is finding or pulling a list of homeowners that have been in their home, let’s just say five, 710 years, right? So just let’s use seven as the average. That’s kind of the time when we start seeing people make changes in their life, whether it’s kids getting married, whatever it is outgrowing their space, we find that seven year itch, I guess that happens. So pull a list of homeowners that have been in their home, let’s just say again, seven years plus, they might be thinking about moving so send a nice targeted, you know, email or targeted postcard to those people might be a great way to pick up some new business.
D.J. Paris 7:39 You know, I love all that. Those are all really great marketing ideas as a as a guy who does marketing this is right up,
Carrie McCormick 7:45 right write it down.
D.J. Paris 7:47 i Yeah, write it down. Let’s I’m gonna go back over those. And I want to specifically talk about the unexpected CMA or I’m not sure the actual language you use, but but basically the CMA that you’re doing for somebody that you don’t know yet. So this actually, I, I’ve witnessed this before, I was in a relationship many years ago with a woman who received a packet in the mail from somebody she didn’t know it was a realtor that I guess had sold a property in that neighborhood. And he had done exactly that, or he and he had a he had good news to share, because he said, I see that you purchased it for approximately this, my best estimate shows us that we’re probably at around x, and it was about an $80,000 appreciation over three years or something just really impressive. And she didn’t really know that because, you know, she it was her first property. And just, you know, she just wasn’t checking Zillow, looking at the Zestimate every day, and didn’t really know and she already had a good relationship with a realtor. So in that case, you know, it wasn’t, I would say, didn’t translate into her reaching out to this particular agent. But it was a it was a single letter, and it had like a little packet behind it of like the actual brokers information and, you know, a little brochure kind of thing. But the letter was really good. And I was like, That is brilliant. Because it tells people what they want to know, but don’t always think to look up which is and most agents from sorry, most consumed most of homeowners, really the only place they would have any sort of awareness of what their home might be worth is if their next door neighbor sells their home and they tell them or they know or they’re going to Zillow. And so obviously we know that Zillow estimates sometimes are accurate, sometimes not. So this is a huge opportunity to to also so I was going to use it’s funny you mentioned that because I was going to do a very similar suggestion in in my marketing minute which has to do very similar to what to what Carrie was mentioning with with this sort of prospecting which is you know, once you close on a property once or sorry, once you sell someone’s home or somebody buys something in an area, this is a huge opportunity for You’d have to reach out to those neighbors. And I don’t know, during COVID You know what the best way to do that is? Certainly, I know, people who have who go who door knock. I know, I know, top 1% agents that do that. And they just go, you know, if it’s like a neighborhood, they feel comfortable, they’ll just kind of politely knock on the door and say, Oh, just want to introduce myself. That’s a very direct approach. I don’t know how well that would work these days. But certainly, you could write a handwritten note or you could, you know, I see, I think, too, you could do it when you list the property. So I’ve always thought what kind of a fun way to meet the neighbors, when you have a home that’s listed is to maybe then it’s a good time to sort of knock on a few of the neighbor’s doors, not to prospect or to say, hey, you should use me, I’m selling your, you know, this next door neighbor’s home, but to say to them, Hey, just so you know, I’m going to be kind of in and out of the neighborhood a lot. I’m going to be showing the property. If you ever see anything that looks strange or weird, you know, please let me know. But I just wanted you to know who I was. So if you see me coming and going, you know, and you could even also make a joke I didn’t want you think I was gonna rob the place, you know, but I’m, you know, you could be cute about it. And, and I think that was a really disarming, and is a really nice way. But But again, it’s this idea of whether it’s, you know, while it’s listed or right after the sale, you have this huge opportunity because everybody so this is funny Carrie, you’ll know this person for those of you who are in Chicagoland area this this name will be familiar. But if you’re not, you won’t, but I’ll explain what this person does Nikko apostle from Coldwell Banker, who is one of just the nicest, kindest, very nice love, sweet sweetheart of a guy. He did this. Whenever he gets an open house. And he’s first started. He’s a Coldwell Banker, I don’t know where he is now, I think is his own thing. Now I forget where he is. But he was at Coldwell Banker for a long time. And he, when he first started, he was in his early 20s. And he didn’t have any listings, because you know, you didn’t have any friends buying or selling anything. And and he, he would ask the agents in his office for Open House opportunities Can I can I go for your showing and do an open house. And then he would text all of his friends and say, Please come to my open house. And he said nobody would ever come because they’re all early 20s people who you know, don’t have to aren’t buying property. And he said, So where he goes, then what I would do this is me speaking as him, he said I would go to the door all of the the like within a block, I would knock on all the doors about an hour or two before the actual open house. And I would say hey, I’m you know, so and so I’m Nico. And I’m going to be doing an open house. And hey, if you just want to come by and check it out, like, just feel free. And I started when he explaining that to me, I said, but would anybody ever come by? And he goes all the time? And I said, Well, I said
why? And he goes because everybody wants to know what their neighbors homes look like? Absolutely. I was like, That is brilliant. I never thought of that. That’s the number one
Carrie McCormick 12:55 reason a lot of sellers don’t want open houses is they’re like, I don’t want my neighbors coming into my house. No, but no, I love his main ambition. And it does work. And believe it or not, I’ve had that too, where a neighbor walks in and, you know, not a direct neighbor, but maybe you know, down the street, and they’re like, You know what my friends looking I’d love for my friend have lived by me, you know. So kudos to him. It’s a great idea. Love, it
D.J. Paris 13:20 will circle prospecting. I am just now starting to get familiar with that as well over the last year, I’ve become more understanding of what that is. I’m so glad you’re talking about it, because I haven’t thought about it in a while. But this idea of hey, you know, we missed out on this. We my client put a bid on this property. It didn’t work out, you know, long shot out long shot, but hey, are you thinking of selling because we’d like to look at your property, that sort of it maybe not that direct, but however it’s phrased boy, I’m thinking of myself as a homeowner actually care, the place I purchased was actually what would have carries developments. And I would I would take that phone call, even though I just moved in a year ago, and I’m certainly not looking to move. But if somebody gets your attention, right gets my attention and it’s flattering. So Oh god, I love that it takes a little bit. So So Where Where would somebody go to get? I know there’s lots of places online but where would they go to purchase a list of like the addresses nearby? I mean, there’s I guess you just Google it.
Carrie McCormick 14:22 I don’t know I mean our systems even like we use the EM read system, the Multiple Listing Service there’s there’s different tools in there. I’m without properties here in Chicago. So we’ve got our own tool that we use as well. So I think within each brokerage there’s probably resources and there’s a ton of third party companies to pull data. It’s just you know, not all of its accurate but you know, it’s you can definitely do a data poll online.
D.J. Paris 14:48 And I love that like five to seven year thing as well like, like getting data for people that have have moved in and you know, maybe seven years as Carrie as Carrie said And and I think I was thinking from a marketing perspective, like what I say in there? Hey, according to my, my stuff you’ve been there, you know what, I wouldn’t even mention that I know they’d been there seven years because you might be wrong, or it might just it maybe they, you know, whatever have a different sort of situation. But I would absolutely send an email or a message saying, Hey, are you thinking of selling? I love that. I think that is that is so, so smart. So I think we just crammed a lot of stuff into a short episode. And I think that’s perfect. By the way, we should mention also that, please follow Carrie on Instagram, I said that earlier. But it really is a, it’s a great model for other realtors to get a sense of how to do it in a fun way, but also an elegant way. And to just have fun with your social media. And what I like about you is you really enjoy doing that you do it yourself. You You do all the graphic design. And, and I’m curious to know, how often does business and I know you’ve been in this business a long time, so you get a lot of referrals? But does business ever come directly from somebody who goes you know, I started following you on Instagram? Maybe?
Carrie McCormick 16:09 There you go. Absolutely. Yeah, it’s but it’s also you know, about engagement, because I do a lot of work have spent quite a bit of time on it, you know, someone wants to, you know, message me or have questions or talk to me over social media. So I think it’s not just posting things and you know, being out there, but it’s, it’s really that engagement with clients to and seeing you know, they they know that I respond to them. So, you know, they like that. But absolutely, to answer your question. It’s, it’s definitely a good form of advertising.
D.J. Paris 16:41 And also, for every we have, I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this with you, Carrie, but we’ve had over 100. And at our best guess and it’s not a perfect science, we know we’ve had at least 150,000 unique users. So individuals download at least one of our episodes, we don’t know if they ever listened. But we know that at least 150,000 unique people have done that. So we get people from all over the country and even in other countries who are you know, listen and subscribe to our show. And so if you have if you’re listening, and you have clients that are moving to Chicago, this is a great opportunity to make a an inroad with with one of the top Realtors here in Chicago. So definitely keep Kerry and her group in mind, you know, they’ll certainly be able to assist and if not, they’ll be able to even, you know, tell you who else would would be a better fit. But what’s the and by the way, for those that are listening that might not be real estate professionals but are interested in, you know, buying or selling or investing renting here in Chicago. And they do want to work with a top agent like you what’s the best way they should reach out,
Carrie McCormick 17:46 I always pick up my phone, so call me at 312-961-4612 You can text me, you can find me on Instagram, you’ll see I’ll respond there you can email me, Kerry, CA RR ie at@properties.com. Anytime you reach out to me, you know you’re gonna get a call back or I’ll answer my phone.
D.J. Paris 18:08 Yeah. And that’s, it’s, it’s something that seems so commonplace. But in this industry, not everyone operates like that. So it’s nice to know that you know that you you take such good care of your clients. And I know because I was on the other side of what are your deals, so I know just how high touch you are. And he really carries her reputation is beyond beyond reproach. So yeah, you’re welcome. Well, we will we are excited to you know, do another year here. This podcast was is Gosh, you and I have been together since the very beginning. And we are grateful for that as well. And on behalf of the audience, we thank Carrie for coming on. Gosh, I don’t know it’s probably four years now, three or four years at least. And coming on tirelessly, month after month, even though she’s she’s busy. In fact, to get on this she had to race home is how I don’t know how many inches of snow outside of snow outside, lot of snow. And she jumped on and I’m sure she’s going to have to jump right to something else. So we’re grateful for her and her time also great grateful to our audience really, really thankful for everyone. We are coming up on a major milestone, I won’t reveal exactly what that is. But we should hit a major milestone, we will reveal it when we had it in the next couple of weeks. And that is because of you guys listening. And I say guys, of course men and women and however you may identify, and we’re grateful to have you as a listener. So Interviewer So please help us continue to grow by just telling a friend think of one other realtor that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Carrie which by the way, she just gave like four or five great marketing ideas. So go ahead and send this over to somebody else in your office or tell your whole office about it. That would really help us continue to reach more agents and listeners and also please leave us a review. This is really important for us. It really really helps us, let us know or go on to iTunes or Wherever you’re listening to this podcast and let us know what you think of the show, you know, radar show, tell us what you like what you don’t like. That really helps us continue to improve as well. So anyway, Carrie, thank you once again. We will see everybody Yeah, we’ll see everybody on the next episode. Bye guys.
Be The Real Estate Agent Who Brings Ideas To Clients • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Jan 28, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses the new features that TheClose is preparing for their followers. Chris goes on to talk about what’s happening in the news world and focuses on housing numbers for 2021. Chris shares his tips for buyers and sellers based on the current situation in the market and the predictions for the near future. Chris and D.J. discuss the importance of bringing ideas to your clients and how this will help build your relationships.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lindh sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com Let me tell you about the close. close.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o s e.com and peruse their articles subscribe to their newsletter so you get notified each time they publish one of their long form deep dive articles. Now with us as always is Chris Lynn Sal. He is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Now let’s press Welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to
Chris Linsell 2:48 have you here. Thanks for having me back. Happy 2022 We’re in it where it’s here we started.
D.J. Paris 2:55 We are at Happy 2022 to you as well. And we actually we had to reschedule this one of Chris’s children was had a nasty cold earlier this week. We’re glad your daughter’s feeling better. And we are glad to be able to have bring you back on I know. Of course children just just throw a monkey wrench. Yeah, that’s in the works.
Chris Linsell 3:16 That’s the truth. You know, it’s funny, it’s just a little just a little cold everyone is everyone’s happy and healthy. But somehow my family my I have two daughters and my wife, the four of us have managed to avoid COVID Thus far, we feel like we’re in this like elementary school dodgeball game. And like the front lines are really thin and out so every little cold and cough and sneeze were like, oh no, oh, is it common for us? And we’re managed to stay healthy. And we’re still still COVID Free and feeling good. I know a lot of people are struggling with that right now. But you know, we’re moving in the right direction. And I think I think everyone’s moving in the right direction right now. It feels like numbers are going going where we want them to go at least for the time being.
D.J. Paris 4:04 Yeah, I always think about the teachers that especially at the well I don’t know if it matters what grade children are in, but boy I just like these teachers and they don’t get paid enough to be really on the front line. Yeah, but invisible war. Truth. Oh, boy. Well, I’m glad glad you guys are healthy. I had I just same thing I my girlfriend came down with COVID in December and really through our holiday plans off but she’s fine. But the fact that I didn’t get it and we live in the same house. or I shouldn’t say house it’s a small condo that that I didn’t get it. We have two bedrooms thankfully. But is is just dumb luck and I don’t know I it’s it’s also confusing right now. How to how to be safe and and watch. I had a guy come into my office yesterday. He used to be a Realtor with us he kind of left The industry for a while and when to come back. And he just immediately reached out to shake my hand. And I had to think about it for a second and go, boy, that’s kind of a bummer. I had to think about whether I could shake this guy’s hand and yeah, and that’s just where we’re at maybe handshake should just be done away with altogether. I don’t know. But. But anyway, it’s a strange world. But we are not here to talk. COVID per safety protocol, although it’s on all of our minds. Yeah, at the time. But let’s talk about what’s going on in the real estate market. I know you have a couple of things that have caught your attention.
Chris Linsell 5:31 Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I’m
D.J. Paris 5:34 sorry, Chris, before we get to that, hold on. Oh, yes, sir. Because I’m gonna forget to mention this. And this is really important. Can we talk about a upcoming, the close.com has an upcoming sort of rebirth or rebirth? or new release coming up? Yeah,
Chris Linsell 5:47 yeah, we totally can. I, you know, I’m not sure exactly when this episode is going to air. But if you are a close.com, visitor, if you are a fan of Chris Lin, Sal and the rest of our team, you you, I hope that you come and check out the site. And it’s gonna look a little different pretty soon, I’m not going to spill the beans on all the details here. But suffice it to say that we have been so grateful at the close for the many years. And it’s amazing to say that many years at this point that we’ve been putting in hard work to create the best real estate content on the internet. And readers have responded to that. And we’ve grown our community by leaps and bounds. And it’s about time, you know, we were in our starter house, we had bought early, we were in our starter house, we you know, we were kind of getting our getting our family in order. And you know, what the family has grown. And it’s time for us to level up to the next house. And so we’ve got a website redesign that is going to be really exciting and show off some really cool new features to close users. And again, I’m not gonna get into specifics you’re just gonna have to watch for it’s gonna be somewhere towards the beginning of February and man Oh, man, it’s it’s pretty awesome, guys. So make sure to check out the clothes.com. In fact, come every day, we got new stuff happening every day, come check out the new articles. And just you know, towards beginning of February, Bada, bing, bada boom, you’re gonna have a new site to look at. It’s It’s pretty awesome.
D.J. Paris 7:20 We should also mention too, that the clothes dot coms content is really pretty unique in the industry, where it’s hyper focused on really, it’s almost exclusively helping agents grow their business. It’s not really trying to replicate Inman for what’s going on in the news, although you do talk about the news. But a lot of it’s like deep dives into, hey, we took a look at every CRM out there that that’s that you might know, here’s what we think. And here’s a deep dive into, you know, each lead generation, you know, provider out there, and here’s some scripts that still work and, and conversations that are beyond, hey, five tips for an open house, which which we see a lot of that more superficial content elsewhere. And it’s really prevalent, because it’s easy to write, it’s easy to write some of those list based, you know, small shallow style articles. And the closed doesn’t do that they have real journalists, they go deep, they go wide, and their articles are long and not so long that you can’t, you know, get to the end because you’ll be really captivated by how good the content is. So this this is I really want to make a sort of plea to everyone listening, that our show is about helping you grow your business, the closers got the exact same model, please. And if you want to get notified about when the new site goes live, subscribe to their newsletter, they’re going to, I’m sure send something out. When that happens, you’ll be the first to know, boy, the content is just that good. They have just, I’m somebody that’s written for magazines over the years different publications. It’s not my full time profession, but I’ve been around enough full time professional writers to know they have they have great content, and it’s really excellent. So check out the course. Okay.
Chris Linsell 9:10 Thank you, DJ, thank you. No, I just, I
D.J. Paris 9:13 believe it and I believe it. And it, I get a lot of great ideas that I pass on to our Realtors at our at our brokerage here in Chicago, because it’s the best content I can find. So it just that’s just the truth. So anyway, let’s talk about what’s going on in the news news world today.
Chris Linsell 9:32 Well, okay, so a couple of a couple of interesting numbers. There’s a lot of things happening, a lot of things happening. You know, like, and I’m gonna just throw out here there’s a couple of headlines that you know are gonna catch your eye but not as much substance or a lot of effect behind it like Adam Kontos one of my favorite CEOs, he’s leaving REMAX and and moving on to other projects. That’s a that’s a that’s a story I think. He was a great leader at REMAX. It’s not going to have a huge effect on on most agents business. But there are some things that are more than just headlines that I think are big deals. Like for instance, we had some housing numbers released for the month of December. And the fact is, housing inventory was down 40%. Relative, I think it was about 40%. Year over year, it’s the lowest inventory levels that we’ve seen, in a long time pre pandemic, for sure. And when you think about the number of homes that are available, is now I mean, in a real way affecting sales numbers, this is something that is going to really have a true impact on real agents business. In fact, sales for the month of December were down nearly 5% adjusted for holiday behavior. And it wasn’t because buyers weren’t interested, it was literally because they didn’t have anything to buy 5% a 5% drop in sales is significant, especially when you think about the size of the of the communities that you’re working within, you know, you think about the number of sales that happen in your individual market. Anyone who’s listening to him, If you eliminated five out of those 100, it’s not just five transactions that don’t have Commission’s on them, which is obviously a real thing. That’s five families who don’t have a house that they that they would have before. And it’s because there’s just nothing to buy. That’s a pretty significant drop.
D.J. Paris 11:45 It is and in addition to that, with the inventory, sort of being at a at a real serious low, and of course real estate’s hyperlocal. And everyone listening might not care so much about national numbers, they’re more interested, of course, in their immediate, serviceable area. However, we also have on top of that, we see rates are starting lunga rates are starting to creep up. And they’ve made a bit of a jump. So there’s this feeling of urgency, I think that you have these buyers that are ready rates are still pretty low, and yet they’re struggling to find property.
Chris Linsell 12:20 Yeah, that’s the truth. And you know, frankly, there is there’s even even that even what you just discussed there is is maybe a house built on shifting sand, frankly, because mortgage rates are already I mean, there’s in the last the last the middle two weeks of January, as we’re recording this, rates have gone up pretty significantly relative to where they were even a month or two ago. And that’s going to continue to go up and the Fed has announced that we’re going to see at least three rate hikes officially in 2022. And we still have, you know, kind of market response hikes that will happen as well. In fact, there are I read an article on CNBC this morning that posited that something like 5 million 6 million American homeowners who were in a position to save money on a refinance, but haven’t gone through the process yet have basically lost that opportunity at this point. And so, you know, what we have right now, I think what’s important to point out, we’re pointing out, you know, identify these rate, the rate moves and you know, kind of volatility, the low inventory, and a third number, which I’ll throw in here, which is that rents are higher than they have been in a long time. In fact, we’re seeing rent, rent increases nationwide, and not just in the major metro centers. We are are beginning to see, the I don’t even want to call it the beginning of it is it is the kind of the second and third chapter in the book of a housing squeeze. That isn’t fun anymore. You know, there is there is something about a really competitive seller’s market that can be really fun, to some degree, because you’re like, Wow, I can’t believe things are selling for this high. There’s my everyone’s so excited and there’s so much intensity and we get in so many offers and and it’s just a really, you know, kind of big bam, boom kind of time to be in the business. We are approaching the chapters in this book where it’s less fun, because you’re seeing real impact on people being unable to take the steps in their homeownership journeys that are necessary to leveling up their lives and the next chapters in their prosperity, that that isn’t fun anymore. And so as real estate is we have to be cognizant there. This isn’t A, we may be approaching a sector in this market kind of curve, where we’ve got people who are not not smiling or laughing anymore. It is there are some real effects happening on the people that matter in our communities.
D.J. Paris 15:16 So as an agent as our listeners, yeah, what, you know, now they’re sort of aware we have inventory shortages, they, you know, I’m sure our listeners are, you know, they’re to live that each day we’re seeing rates creep up the average 30. year fixed is now around what 3.6 3.7%, which is still amazing, but not as amazing as it was when it was in the the high twos. So there’s, we you mentioned the Fed, you know, going to be possibly, you know, hiking rates up to three times this year. And there’s a bit of a race against the clock. So I guess, if you have sellers, there’s still that, that excitement of the urgency of, of putting it on the market and selling it. But then you have to deal with the buy side with the person’s family’s next move and feeling the struggle there. So what how would an agent use this information to just adjust their business to sort of adapt to this condition,
Chris Linsell 16:16 these versions? Yeah, there’s a couple of things I would say the first thing is, if I am a listing agent, I would be talking to my clients, specifically the ones who are who have a home to sell, but have you know, decided for one reason or another that it’s not quite time yet, or they’re not the you know, they they want to wait around and continue to see what happens. What we are seeing right now, especially with the way that rents are moving and and interest rates are moving, it is likely. And of course, I don’t have a crystal ball here, but it is likely that buying buyers, you know kind of ammunition and power is going to start to decrease over the next year or so. And what this means for sellers is the the scenarios that we’ve been enjoying over, especially over the last year, where we’ve got basically buyers who are willing to do just about anything to get into homes, the number of things that they can do is going to start to decrease. And so you are, there will be a time a tipping point where you won’t get the top dollar that you could have gotten January 2022, who knows exactly when that will be. But my suggestion to the listing agents right now are have the strike while the iron is hot conversation with your sellers, and talk about as many opportunities and options as you can I mean, if the if it is purely a financial move, you know, lay out the case for you know, here’s here’s why you should be considering this now relative to three or six or nine months from now. If it’s a we don’t have a place to go kind of move. You know, I am telling I’ve told listing clients over the last six months, right now might not be the worst time in the world. For you if you have a like a region that you want to be or like a geographic place that you want to be. Consider the idea if you have the wherewithal of selling your home right now, banking your proceeds from this renting for two years, or for a year and a half. And then shopping at the end of that that period. Because you have right now you have a lot of power on the sell side and the buy side, it is pretty challenging, I have a feeling that’s going to be switching here pretty soon. So if you want to take advantage of your of your power right now, bank those proceeds rent for a little bit and then start shopping and a little bit, you know, a year and a half, two years down the road. This is not the strategy that works for everybody. But these are these are things that listing agents can be talking about, on the buy side of things. I am telling buyers right now, to start thinking about how you can make your offers competitive relative using relative terms that are not just about price. How can you how can we structure offers so that it isn’t just the number that makes your offer stand out to sellers? So I’m talking about terms you know, do you have the opportunity to do certain amount of cash that you wouldn’t be able to do before I’m talking about possession? Can you offer your sellers extended possession after closing to make it the most convenient possible transaction in their world? I’m talking about covering closing costs I’m cutting I’m talking about a pray He’s little gaps, I’m talking about all of the different ways that you can, you know, kind of apply an extra layer of garlic butter to the top of that offer so that it is the most appetizing thing that your seller will see all day. The The time has come for us to kind of get our buyers out of the gladiator ring of price wars, and start being a little bit more thoughtful with the other terms that we can offer. Because frankly, that’s where that’s where the the the bidding wars are eventually going to be one because buyers buyers, you know, power in the market is going to start to slip here pretty soon
D.J. Paris 20:39 as rates climb up. And, you know, we should also talk about just just another sort of addition to the or another variable to this sort of equation of challenge for buyers, is inflation. Inflation is raised, it’s what’s driving our rates. But inflation went up 7% I think it was last year. And I think traditionally over time, historically, it’s about 3%, on average, somewhere in that neighborhood three to 4%. So it’s it’s basically doubled in one year. Inflation, of course, is the costs basically the cost of goods and services is, is really the best way to think of it the average, you know, employee gets what, like a 3% Raise a year. So if if you only and again, everyone listening here is probably an independent contractor realtor who doesn’t deal with salary. But you know, even if you got a 3% Raise last year as a salaried employee, you really still lost quite quite a bit of money because of inflation is outpacing you know, even raises. So there’s just a lot of sort of confusing factors. But I loved your idea back onto the the listing sort of side or, you know, I think Chris’s idea while it sounds like yeah, most most people wouldn’t go for the I don’t know that most people wouldn’t go for it. But maybe it wouldn’t be as as achievable for a lot of homeowners to sell a property, rent for a few years, and then go back to the market to buy. That’s regardless of whether someone does that. From a fiduciary perspective, it is a very valid option. Whether or not it works for them. There’s a lot of reasons why it might not. But boy, that’s an excellent sort of conversation to have, and one that would really, in my opinion, you know, really make you seem valuable to someone. I love the I love when someone brings me an idea whether I want to do it or not, of course is up to me. But I found in life that very few times in my life does do the service providers in my life come to me with ideas. You know, my my accountant doesn’t really come to me and I love my accountant. But my account doesn’t say here’s a great way to save a bunch of money next year, I have to do my Oh, maybe I don’t have an accountant. But no, I love my accountant. But you know, my attorneys don’t my attorney to say my financial advisor. Yeah, they sometimes do. But generally speaking, this is an opportunity for you to you know, even just say I’ve got this idea at first, you might sort of wins from it. But I want to go through it and just explain why it’s not maybe the the worst idea for you guys to think about or if you have people that own a home, that aren’t thinking of selling, now’s the time to talk about that inventory is down. And there’s just a lot of good conversation here. Whether it results in a transaction, I think is up to the gods, but what it what it, what I think it should do and would do is at least have the customer the client think, wow, my persons coming to me with an idea. And that means they care to some extent. And it just makes you look like a professional and most agents would never think of that. On the buy side. You know, I think just having some some of empathy around what the customer is going through, there’s a tremendous amount of stress with when there’s a low inventory for buyers. I mean, it’s just stressful, they they have to make decisions faster, they have to overpay, in a lot of times to be competitive, the agent is stressed because now they have to think about creative ways to get their offer looked at and accepted and in some of the suggestions you have. So it is it is just stressful all the way around. And I think this is a great time to realize it’s most stressful for the customer, whether it’s the buyer or seller, and I think empathy, compassion. And just being there to hear the client is is is probably the one of the most valuable parts of being a realtor. For some agents. They love that part. Others don’t. But I think I think most most people are probably a little freaked out right now.
Yeah, well, you know, one thing that I agree with you i There is a lot of kind of wide eyed, no blinking conversations happening with clients right now. But one thing I think is is a silver lining that a lot of consumers are maybe glossing over and agents really should be bringing this up right now is, despite all of the craziness that’s happening in the market, one thing that homeowners one, one significant level up that homeowners have, right in this moment, is most of them have a significant increase in equity if they have a mortgage on their property due to these incredible price spikes. And even though I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of people who have missed an opportunity to refinance to save a lot of cost. That doesn’t mean that these people have missed an opportunity to do something with this equity. In fact, there are there are people in fact, I’m doing it myself right now I was able to refinance, save a little money via a lower interest rate. But the the real value that I’m doing here is I am literally pulling some equity out of the house to do some renovations and some projects. I am you know, obviously increasing my loan amount via this this equity poll. But my payment is staying exactly the same, it is dollar for dollar, the same amount that I pay every month. And now I have money to do projects with and that’s great because I’ve got a young family who breaks stuff all the time and we need new carpet and it is a it’s a necessary part of of maintaining sanity in this house that now I live and work and spend 22 hours a day in which is great. I love it. I’m not complaining
Chris Linsell 26:48 if my wife was listening, I love this. And but what if there was the the other opportunities here, if you’re not going to do projects, is if you can pull 5060 $70,000 of equity out of your house and not change your natural change your your payment, you have an opportunity to then turn that money around and put it back to work for you in the form of a down payment on an investment property. maybe partner with somebody on purchasing an Airbnb, I have two two close friends slash clients who did this exact same thing than this in the last 90 days they have taken cashed out equity, put a downpayment together on an investment property, the the investment property Airbnbs for far more than what they will pay for the mortgage for us and their debt to income ratio. What they will use to you know what their mortgage officer will use to evaluate their next loan when they’re ready to move out of this house and move into the next house. You know, personally, their debt to income ratio has improved because they they are cashflow positive on something that people really want right now. We have equity is a powerful tool. And it isn’t just for home renovation, though that’s a powerful part of it too. We’ve got it right now homeowners across the United States have moved higher equity levels than they’ve ever had before right now. And so this is still a big opportunity for people who own a home so agents if you have clients who own homes and frankly if you don’t have any clients that that don’t own homes, you’re not doing this right like this is these are your people here reach out to them I don’t care if they bought their house six months ago, I mean the the equity jumps that are happening right now. Like I honestly I had to call the appraiser to double check that I was sent the right report when we got the appraisal back on our house because I couldn’t believe how much it had jumped even just in a year. So right now there is an opportunity agents you can be the fiduciary for your clients by bringing them these opportunities and by creating for them chances that they can use the wealth that you put in their pocket via your counsel of the purchase of this property, use that wealth to grow it into what can be a generate the start of generational wealth to pass on to to you know spouses or to family members or to whoever is going to inherit that. That doesn’t happen forever. This the equity levels relative to loan levels. These fluctuate based on market values. The iron is still hot so agents snapped to it right now is the time.
D.J. Paris 29:55 Yeah, and you know, just sort of thinking about Zillow. As as so prominent in just American daily life as being the number one most visited realtor, sorry, sorry, consumer facing website. Realtors of course use it as well. But Zillow, you know, they’re they’re known for really one thing above all else, which is their Zestimate. And we might be hearing some through the, through the invisible airwaves, some, some collective groans for realtors who think that estimates are off off base, whether they are or aren’t isn’t really the point. But that’s what consumers do look at. And so if you aren’t, if someone is looking up their home to see what Zillow thinks the value might be worth. And we know more consumers visit Zillow by a multiple, by gosh, I don’t even I mean they they get over 200 million unique visitors a month, I think at this point. That’s where people are going to look to see what the value of their home is. And you know whether Zillow is accurate or not, that’s where people are going. And so you I think you have a real opportunity, even also to do some farming, where you know, going into a neighborhood that you’ve seen some appreciation, maybe looking on Zillow, and si si just taking a look go to a neighborhood that you’d really like to have more more of a presence in, you know, look at the last time the home was sold. Look at what the Zestimate is right now. And if there’s a big jump there, I think for me, that would be an opportunity to put a letter together to that homeowner say Hey, I didn’t know if you’ve noticed, but I believe your home’s appreciated quite a bit. I’ve put I’ve run some comps for you. I know we don’t I don’t you we don’t know each other yet. But if you’re interested in having a conversation about what your home is currently worth, maybe even versus Are you looking to sell, we’re just talking about, you know what, and as Chris mentioned, here’s maybe something if you’re not looking to sell that you can do with the equity right now. And these are all really, really great secondary marketing tools, in addition to being you know, providing real value to your customers, it’s a huge opportunity just to let people know what’s going on. And I will tell you, they’re they’re just going back to my initial point about so few people in my life ever bring me an idea. Now at work I get I get that but but outside of work in my personal life, geez, it just unless I’m talking to a friend at a party, and they go, Oh, I got this new cool thing, you have to check it out. Or, you know, I got a pellet ice machine recently, in the last year, and I don’t know if you’ve ever looked into pellet ice. But there’s a great New York Times article about it years ago called pellet ice is the good ice that I read that I went, Oh, I know what pellet ice is. It’s the best. But so so whenever people come over, I talk about it. But it’s kind of a silly example. But the point is, is every single person I talked to about paradise doesn’t doesn’t really know about it until I explain it. And then when they try it, they’re like, oh my god, I have to get one of these, these little machines. The point is, is you can bring those types of real estate ideas to your customers and find a way pellet ice machine would be a great closing gift for
Chris Linsell 33:06 you know, anyone I’m just gonna shout this out right now. I know DJ, you guys don’t have have kids. But anybody who’s has a partner who has given birth to a child in a hospital, they no chips, the the pellet ice in the hospital is like it is manna from heaven. So I know about the pelletized that’s a great idea about the closing gift. And I you know, DJ what you said, I think, man, I mean, I know I don’t write the headline for what goes on this episode, or on each episodes, but I’m just gonna throw it out here. This is the theme of this episode is be the realtor who brings ideas, be the professional who don’t, don’t wait for people to call you. Okay? Don’t wait for somebody to sit back or to show up in your office and say, I have a specific problem that I need you to solve, those people are still going to come and those are still people that you need to serve us obviously. But you are going to set yourself apart by being the realtor who comes with comes to people with the ideas that you are the person who you are, you’re standing up for your clients and it shows them that you’re thinking about these people. In fact, you know, I know I know, we’re starting to get towards the end here, but I just want to share one of the one of the things that I talk about with coaching clients, it’s a way it’s actually one of the central tenets that I I coach, with with agents and with teams specifically about how to create these not just professional relationships, but these these, you know this this, this feeling of responsibility that your clients feel like you are you are you take your your professional representation of them very seriously that you’re responsible for that the term that I always use that I coach people to use, and it works like a charm is, I was thinking about you this morning. I was having coffee in a coffee shop and I was thinking about you this morning. That’s all you have to say that the phrase I was thinking about you this morning, I was thinking about you before I got started with everything else you were top of mind. And something triggered in my brain a reason that I needed to, I needed to call you I needed to reach out to you, it doesn’t matter what follows that next sentence or that statement, I was thinking about you this morning. Because whatever it was that that first half of that sentence is going to create an opportunity to connect that your responsibility for their well being with you and with the care that you provide. So be the agent who brings things don’t sit back and wait for someone to bring them to you. You be the bringer. You be the agent that says I was thinking about you this morning. I guarantee you, your business will go up into the right if you take that pack.
D.J. Paris 36:04 Yeah, I couldn’t I couldn’t agree more. And that was so beautifully said I’ll just tag on to that something that one of our monthly guests. Joel Schaub, from Guaranteed Rate says almost every episode and and I have to remind him to keep saying it because Because he’ll he’ll oftentimes say, Gosh, I say this every time it’s probably boring. I said no, it’s it’s it’s such a great thing. But he just says givers givers get givers get, and it’s not just about giving your time during a transaction, of course you should and you and you ought to, and you will and and all of that, but But giving to the people that aren’t yet selling consistently reminding them why they should choose you. And by the best way to do that, you know, there’s there’s ways to do that by sending them you know, a magnet with you know, the local sports teams scheduled for the year there. That’s one thing you can do, I guess. But boy, I would much rather have somebody say I’ve got an idea I was thinking about you have an idea. I don’t know if it makes sense for you or not. But I feel like it was I should at least tell you, I’ve seen this work, or I’ve been reading about this. And just um, I would love that. And and I know I would love that in my life. And every year around tax time, like I, I go to my accountant. And you know, we’re now starting to get all of our tax materials together, most of us probably are starting to accumulate those receipts. And the W nines are the only twos. And so you know, it’s that time of year where you’re like, God, is there anything I’m missing? Is there any strategies? And if you’re like me, you go to Google and you start looking around? Is there more things I can deduct that I just don’t know about as a tax law changed? The so I can take advantage of certain things. I would love it if so I would pay somebody, you know, to call me and say I got five ideas for you for taxes this year. And I know my accountant is excellent. But she’s got hundreds and hundreds of clients, she’s not going to be able to do that. Realistically, it’s like your insurance aid. My insurance agent who I love does not call me and say I got an idea how you can save a little bit more. With I call her she’s she’s great. But does she have time she has 2000 clients. Of course, she’s not going to call me I understand. So but boy, I would sure love somebody to call me and give me an idea here and then and they would win all of my business. They would so So Chris said it perfectly. I think that’s a great place to wrap up. I know we were also going to talk about lone wolf, we can maybe we can talk about that on our next next episode, how they have become just a powerhouse in the in the tech space. Most of us have probably touched some of the tools they use, or they own or they develop. And we certainly can have that conversation on next. The next month. Yeah, next month’s closing time. So for what, of course, remind everyone to please visit the clothes.com this is just an amazing resource. Deep Dive articles long form articles written by real journalists who really do their research and talk to companies who are providing certain certain material and then evaluating them and giving agents great ideas. Oh, by the way, like 99% of the content on there is free. There is a subscription based model where you get even additional content you get coaching opportunities, and that’s called the close Pro. Do you mind giving a quick explanation of the close Pro?
Chris Linsell 39:16 Yeah, absolutely close Pro. If you are a if you’re interested in going even deeper in what the closed has to offer, we have the closed pro it’s a like you said it’s a subscription based premium service. real the real feature and function of the close Pro is to provide agents with not just quality content but next level presentation incredible resources and really access to experts in a way that you really don’t get in any other place. So we have a ton of like I said courses we have a huge resource library my favorite course right now my favorite close Pro training course is the Facebook and in digram Crash Course for agents. It’s a fantastic video training course, there’s a ton of written material that go with it, there’s so many ways that we can use this course to level up our social media. You know, the clothes ran a big study at the end of last year and said something like 86% of agents felt like their social media was still not on par. And this is a great course to get it to get it to where it is functioning and actually generating business. So if you find if you’re if you’re in that, in that, that situation with your social, closed pros got great stuff to check out. And frankly, there are, they’re just a ton of day to day, week to week, month to month benefits for being a close pro member. So it’s cheap, 39 bucks a month, or $199 a year. And you get more of the weirdest beard in real estate, which by the way is trimmed up, I’m looking more like you and the beard department here. I just kind of figured out how to get my hair to look like that. And then I’ll basically be brothers. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 41:06 Well, I still find it so incredibly odd at 46 years old that I have actual blonde hair. I feel like it’s so it’s so weird. And I you know, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s a it’s a weird, weird life, for sure. But I like both our beards, our beards look good. And, and Chris is just such a great guest on the show. So please, if nothing else, just to support Chris and the clothes go visit the clothes.com. And by the way to subscribe to the clothes Pro. It’s what like a couple of dollars a day at most. It’s less Yeah,
Chris Linsell 41:42 easy, easy. It’s super cheap. I mean, we’ve we kind of thing is it’s really it is really an opportunity for you to for folks, you know, if you’re looking for video training, if you’re looking for checklists, and downloads and social media templates and and boot camps and access to pro coaching on demand. And it really is, it’s a no brainer. So we’d love to see you here at the close. We’d love to see you at the close Pro. And I just love to see. So come follow us come join the communities. And again, DJ, thanks a lot for having me on today. I really, I always look forward to chatting with you, buddy.
D.J. Paris 42:19 Well, us us too. And on behalf of all of our listeners, we think of viewers, we thank Chris for taking time out of his busy day and being a father and a coach and a writer, too, and a real estate agent to take time to share his wisdom and thoughts and observations of the real estate industry. Also, on behalf of Chris and myself, we thank everyone for listening and watching. And please, if you want to help us continue to grow just two quick things, one telephone, there’s got to be another agent, you know that that would love to get to that next level, or just wants to have better information about what’s going on right now in the real estate world. Send them a link to this episode, they can find us at keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, can be streamed directly there. Of course, you can find us on any Podcast Directory app as well. And then also, if you are listening through some sort of podcast app, whether it’s well now it’s called Apple podcast, formerly iTunes, or if you’re with you know, Google Play or Spotify or Pandora or Gosh, a Stitcher or any of the other podcast delivery systems. Leave us a review. Tell us what you like about the show and tell us what you don’t like we’re okay with that. We want to know that. In fact, in some ways that’s more helpful for us because we continue to improve the show is to is really meant to do nothing other than to help you grow your business. But we need to know what you think. So let us know give us a review. If it’s going to be a one star review, just email me privately instead. And I’m teasing, you can give us a one star review. I think we’ve only had one or two of those. And that seems reasonable to me. But but please let us know what you think of the show and write us let us know what other guests you’d like us to interview. But thank you so much for listening. Thanks, Chris for being on the show and we will see you next time. Thanks, TJ.
What Real Estate Agents Can Do To Maximize Safety • Helen Hudson
Jan 27, 2022
Helen Hudson with SafeShowings talks about how she got into real estate and why. Helen describes her experience when she felt unsafe and how this experience made her take actions and create SafeShowings. Next, Helen describes how the SafeShowing app works and the protocol they use to keep their clients safe. Helen describes how the app matches previous experience and how this feature help other realtors who will work with the same clients in the future. Last, Helen talks about the packages they offer to realtors and the new feature they will be adding to the app in the second quarter of this year.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Helen Hudson from safe showings.com. Before we get to Helen, a couple of quick announcements first, thank you as always for continuing to listen and support our show. We couldn’t do it without you, the audience. We are so thrilled to be able to serve you please let us know how we’re doing. The best way you could do that is to leave us a review. So whatever podcast app you might be listening to us on. If you are listening via podcast app, like iTunes, which is now called Apple podcasts, Google Play Spotify, Stitcher, Pandora, etc. Leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. If you’re not listening through a podcast app, consider subscribing to us through a podcast app. Obviously, it’s free. Just go to any podcast app search for keeping it real. Now there’s a few podcasts named keeping it real. But look for the one that has my name on it, DJ Paris, hit that subscribe button. And the last thing to do is please tell a friend about our show. The best way that you can help us grow is by telling other real estate professionals about what we do here and how we can help them grow their business. So shoot them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just like I said haven’t pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. Thanks for your continued support. And we’re so thrilled to be able to bring you this important conversation today around safety. It’s something we don’t talk enough about. So we brought on Helen from safe showings to talk exclusively about what agents can do to be safe out there. And now on to our interview with Helen Hudson.
Today on the show we have Helen Hudson from satan showing.com. Let me tell you a little bit about Helen. When Helen chose to become a real estate professional she knew it was the right move. She brought with her and extensive sales and management background as well as tools that translated well into her real estate world. Now throughout Helens sales career she has attributed her success to earning business by providing the best value for each and every client. Her clients say that she goes above and beyond expectations. Now she has created the safe showings app after escaping a terrifying incident while working alone as a realtor and the conversation around safety is something that we on this podcast have not explored extensively. So we are thrilled to welcome Helen Hudson from safe showings.com here on the podcast today. Hello and welcome.
Helen Hudson 4:14 Thank you. I’m honored to be here and share my passion for realtors across the country and for realtor safety. Well, I’ll
D.J. Paris 4:22 tell you, Helen, I actually met very briefly at the NAR conference in San Diego this past fall. And I will tell you sort of just to peel back the curtain just a little bit for our audience. We really at this point that we’ve done 300 And some episodes and we’re fortunate enough to really not have to look for guests anymore. We just get every day we get hit with by publicists or different realtors who say Oh, you should interview this person or, you know lots of different opportunities there. So we rarely go out and look for anyone to be on the show. But when we were when I was walking around the expo hall with my girlfriend And we came across safe showings and I said, Well, what’s that about? You know, that’s interesting. And we talked to Helen. And I said, Oh, my gosh, you have to be on our show, because we don’t talk about this. And very few, I feel like it doesn’t get talked about enough. So we are really excited to have a conversation around safety. This, of course, Helen is a Top Producing agent as well. But this idea that as an agent, you saw a need in the marketplace for more, you know, oversight and just you know, overall well being of agents as they you know, sometimes are working internet leads where they haven’t met anyone yet. But before we get to, let’s save showing says I’d love to just hear your story. How did you get into real estate and why?
Helen Hudson 5:41 Yes, that’s a great question. I majored in interior design and college. I graduated in 86. And, you know, I’ve dabbled a little bit in commercial design and residential design. And then I found myself doing something totally different transportation and logistics fast forward to almost five years ago, it was a bucket list. I’m from South Carolina, but I’ve always loved Charleston, like millions of others, but I wanted to live in Charleston, South Carolina, and I chose to
D.J. Paris 6:11 leave doesn’t buy. Everybody wants. It is it is i It’s like Charleston, Nashville, Austin, a Portland or maybe not Portland as much anymore. But but you know, gosh, everybody who I apologize for interrupting you. But every time I hear the word Charleston, if I’m in a group of people, everyone just goes, Oh, my God, I love Charleston. Yes. Of course, he wanted to live there. It’s amazing.
Helen Hudson 6:39 You know, I’ve always been fascinated with real estate. And I left a career with companies like UPS, I was in sales. I never drove a truck. But I was in sales for UPS and companies like that, and wanted to try something new. I got my license, pass that test on the first try, which was a miracle. Because it is hard when people laugh about it, but it’s tough. I started out working for a local firm here and then joined the team six months later. So that’s kind of my story. I’ve had my license this coming summer will be for five years.
D.J. Paris 7:14 Wow. And what was your experience? You know, when you first started out, as as a realtor, you know, were there. I know, You’ve had some safety, issue concerns and issues. But, you know, Todd, let’s talk about that experience. Because again, I’m a guy. I don’t, I live in a very dangerous city. And in fact, the neighborhood I live in here in Chicago. Unfortunately, it’s a very nice neighborhood, actually, but because it’s a very nice neighborhood. There’s a lot of crime, we’ve actually had a tremendous it’s I’m laughing only because I just moved to this area. And there’s nothing to laugh about. But just sort of the irony of me live moving into this like dream place. Unfortunately, our we’ve had an increase in carjackings a significant increase, it’s actually made the news here in Chicago. So it’s a huge bummer for all of us that just moved into this this wonderful new development. But it’s even a concern for myself now, where I as a real estate professional, I’m not really out there working with with customers. So I’m not out there really meeting people at odd hours. However, I work at a firm with 800 agents who are constantly thinking about safety. And now that I live in an area where there is some some additional crime that that wasn’t there prior, especially carjackings, you know, even myself who really just sits at a desk all day, but I really sort of think about like, okay, at night, if I’m walking to the grocery store, or a drugstore, you know, I have to really just think about it a little bit before I before I move out. And so, I’m so glad we’re having a conversation around safety, but what brought you you know, tell us talk about that experience as an agent, you know, did you did you find yourself in situations that felt unsafe, you know, on a regular basis?
Helen Hudson 9:01 Yes. Right. In the beginning, we have pretty good training for realtors, I’m sure you’ve probably heard some other stories, we’re taught to follow your intuition. Bring your buyer into the office or meet with the seller, do a listing appointment, bring a friend whatever, we’re giving good safety given good safety tips. And if you feel unsafe, you know, be sure you let others know where you’re going to be. And my background right out of college managed apartments and I was kind of used to a process in place where we were taught you can’t show an empty apartment without surrendering a driver’s license. That’s that was our safety protocol. So when I you know got back into a career and started real estate it I have to admit it’s been a while since I’ve met with stranger so one so that feeling of meeting a new person. I don’t know that a buyer I don’t know their background and being new in the business. A my my group of people I’m working with are usually internet leads, going to a property that might be in an area I’m not comfortable with. And kind of new and needing business you you are vulnerable, you’re you’re meeting people in a place that’s different that you’ve never met before you don’t know who they’re going to bring with them. And you don’t want your mind to get paranoid. But there’s a truth to that as a new realtor, you are going to sometimes experience situations where your intuition tells you this doesn’t feel right. And that’s kind of early on, I had some of those experiences, because I was working a lot of open houses alone, I probably did 50 Open Houses my first year. And then fast forward to when I joined the team, I was getting more volume of leads and my sales were going up. And it was a fast paced environment. But I let my guard down. I cared more about the sale than the safety. And that’s where my story begins.
D.J. Paris 11:00 Yeah, I think that’s a very common experience, right? Especially working leads that aren’t always and not that sphere of influence leads, I mean, it’s a safe situation, but certainly seems to be less concern about safety, if it’s, your best friend says, oh, friend wants to meet with you. You know, of course, you still want to consider safety there. But when you’re working internet leads, in particular. I mean, anyone can fill out a form right on a website, and even if that person is vetted, you know, doesn’t necessarily mean that that they’re safe. So I imagine that that you know, and again, real estate’s done oftentimes nights and nights and weekends. So that’s the other thing is, it’s sometimes you know, done at a time when not as many people are around. So if a crime wants to be committed, you know, it probably makes sense to do it at a time when, when it’s a little darker out. And so that’s when realtors are out showing and working with clients. And so it is scary. And now everything’s so virtual, that oftentimes, you know, when working those types of leads, the first time you might meet that person is at the showing. And that’s yeah, in your your point is is great about intuition. But unfortunately, intuition doesn’t solve for everything, right. It’s like, you know, the best criminals in the world. Don’t let people know they’re criminals, right. So sometimes it’s obvious. And other times, of course, it wouldn’t be which of course, you saw as an opportunity to build, you know, maybe a more structured sort of platform to help with safety. So tell us about sort of your experiences with with safety. You mentioned where your story began. But I know you had a pretty harrowing experience that that really caused you to rethink, and start to develop your own your own tool to help with that. Yes.
Helen Hudson 12:52 Four years ago, this coming March, I had received an internet lead to meet with a buyer, I set the appointment for Saturday at two. And I drove up to the neighborhood early as we’re taught to do some meal of the day. But when I drove into the neighborhood, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, it just didn’t feel right. That was really homes nearby that just didn’t feel comfortable. But I parked my car, wait for the buyer to arrive, he arrives, we go in the home, I left the door open. We’re taught to do that from a safety standpoint. And this was a very small house, no driveway. He goes to the back of the house, I kind of stand towards the front. And my guard was up because I was already nervous. And he got on his cell phone. A minute later a truck drove up to man jump on the porch. And my heart stopped I thought oh my god. Nobody knows where I am or who I’m with. That’s immediately what I felt. But thankfully I was given a second chance they weren’t there to harm me I can tell the rest of the story. They saw the realtor magnet on my car they saw the for sale sign they saw that the door was open and they thought it was an open house but I tried to gain regain my composure I gave him my card I told him I was working with the buyer and that they could call me for an appointment but I’ll never forget that feeling of fear knowing you could have gone differently
D.J. Paris 14:17 I think all of our listeners can can sort of as you were explaining that story probably relived the feelings they might have if that same situation happened where you know the person you don’t know who’s your your possible client walks to the back of a home you know sort of by themselves jumps on their phone a minute later randomly in the two o’clock on a on a random weekday to other guys show up? Yeah, that I would have put I would have had that exact same reaction is oh, I’m this place is either being robbed or someone’s these two people are here to hurt me or who are God Only Knows. That is a terrifying experience. And thank goodness, you know, it sort of, you know, was was not that but but it certainly could have been. And I live in Chicago, you know, we have a very violent city here. And it’s, it’s always just easy to forget because I think, you know, for maybe some of our audience who might be listening who think, oh, that that doesn’t really happen to me. But of course it can, and it can happen to anyone, and something to really think about, and most brokerages, at least here in Chicago, don’t. And I’m only aware because I work with a lot of different brokerages, we talk about it, very few of them have any sort of real safety technology. Of course, there is safety technology, but firms typically aren’t most of the firms I work with, aren’t giving that to their brokers. So this is something that is really, really important, especially now, when you know a lot of people are out of work and crime is up and you know, the pandemic has really changed things people are, you know, maybe more agitated. And then then they were so let’s tell me about how you started to develop safe showings and yeah, and what it’s for
Helen Hudson 16:19 perfect. That situation caused me to think about my own personal safety differently. I was more focused on the sale than my safety. And I know I was given a second chance. Nar tells us that 38% of realtors have feared for their safety. And when I’ve traveled I’ve traveled for two years prior to the pandemic, to different shows events in conferences in New York conferences and local ones. And I can’t tell you how many people came up to me to share their story. So there is a valid problem. And after that situation happened, I did my own research, TJ, I went home and I looked and I Googled simple Google search, I wanted to know am I alone, I found out that over 200 realtors have been murdered in the last decade. I even created a binder that has their stories in it and their pictures. And that’s my why I knew that I was given a second chance they were not. And first thing I had to do is do you know it I wanted to find is there a solution out there that meets the needs I’m looking for as a realtor, I wanted to make sure every buyer and seller knows that I have a protocol for safety. Also wanted to conquer the fear. I felt that day when I said nobody knows where I am, or who I’m with. And that led me to do about six months of research on the NIR side under safety resources. I looked at the tools to see if I can find a tool that for safety that I could use.
D.J. Paris 17:46 And you weren’t able to find one that satisfied your your needs and requirements. And by the way, just back to that that statistic, about 38% of realtors have felt unsafe. I feel like that’s probably a low number. And I bet if that was rerun, today, especially focused on I would love to hear specifically what percentage of men have gone through that experience of feeling unsafe, versus women. And I would bet you that number is wildly different. I would just assume we know more crime is perpetrated on women more violent crime in particular. And and sexual crime and all sorts of terrible things. And so this this is not obviously a product just for women’s safety, obviously. But that 38% does actually seem low to me. I bet it’s much higher than that.
Helen Hudson 18:37 I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t doubt it. And one thing that I would share with you, too, is the most recent ones, the ones that I’ve researched, it’s ironic. And I think it’s not a coincidence, but 16 images of faces that I’ve read their stories about half of men and half are women. So that’s probably a surprise to the listeners. It’s not. So it’s not just women, it when you look at the ratio of the ones that I can find their stories and print those images out, it’s half half men and half women well.
D.J. Paris 19:10 And the biggest mistake I make when I’m talking about where I live in such a wonderful area of Chicago, the biggest mistake I make at night when walking to there’s a target right downstairs and CVS and a Walgreens really close. The biggest mistake I make is I’m a guy I’m fine. And with my girlfriend, who lives with me also is going I’m like hey, let’s you know I actually treat it totally differently. And that is a mistake because I think Oh, I’m fine i Because I haven’t ever been attacked, and neither has she and I just assume well, she’s more vulnerable. No, she’s really not she she might be physically not as adept, as strong as I am because of you know, just genetics and, and things and you know, but that being said, doesn’t mean somebody couldn’t in fact it’s probably easier to get me in certain ways, because I’m not thinking about it. You know, thankfully, you know, I think women are a bit more tuned to that. But that’s still not enough coverage, right? Like there still needs to be tools in place to have a protocol so that it’s not left up to chance, or just intuition. So tell us about like, what, what does safe showings do and and, you know, how does it help increase somebody’s personal safety,
Helen Hudson 20:34 I’d love to share that what happens, we teach realtors to think about their safety from the moment they set the appointment, whether it’s a buyer or a seller or listing appointment, you’re in the safety of your office, and we are working more with technology not meeting people at an office. So you’re on the phone, you’re setting the appointment, you have their name and their their phone number, and you’ve confirmed the date and the time you’re going to show the property or meet them for a listing appointment. While you’re on the phone. You tell them hey, I care about safety. It’s just the world we live in, I use a safety app called Safe showings. And before I meet with anyone and go inside a property, I like to take a photo it’s captured in our app. By telling people before you meet with them, you’re gonna deter crime because criminals number one fear is getting caught not the punishment for their crime. It’s like a doorbell camera, they know there’s a risk associated with cameras so they avoid those they look for easy targets. So once you have told the person that you use a safety product, after you hang up the phone, you’ve set the appointment, you can use our app and press a button that says Create showing and the timer starts. The next thing our app will say, Who are you meeting with I start typing in your name through my contacts, and your informations uploaded. That’s the key component that deters crime and helps us if there’s crime committed catch the criminal because we got we have it in the app. And then when you get to the property, and you drive up early, when they arrived, that’s when you say, hey, let’s just go ahead and take that photo. And you can do a group shot with them. But get it before you go in the home. The timer’s running our timers is our app is so easy to use. If you can press buttons, you can use it but it starts at 45 minutes, you reset the timer because if you’re using the app, the way we teach, you’re not working with the criminal, you reset the timer. But if you forget, it’ll remind you at five minutes to reset your timer. If you have four properties, you reset the time or drive to the next property, street by street and row by road it updates you don’t ever have to key in the address. So your second showing when you put the car in park, it saves that address, it stores all the data inside the app. If for some reason you are attacked and the phone is destroyed. As long as you follow the process, your three emergency contacts will be sent the last location of the phone in that example, who you’re with, because you put that in before you create after you create the showing, and then an image of their face if you took a photo of their face.
D.J. Paris 23:08 And so you don’t ask them for an image ahead of time, because they could send you a fake image. So the idea is you prep them ahead of time on the phone say hey, just so you know, when you arrive. This might seem you know, a bit unusual if you’re working with other realtors, but it’s really important that we maximize each other’s safety. So I’m going to take a picture, you know of you should just be aware of that. It’s just for my own internal use. In case you know why you would even have to say why. But I think people would understand that. So you take a picture, you set the timer, and you also have inputted the locations of where you’re going and when into the system. So it’s scheduled.
Helen Hudson 23:50 No actually you don’t wait. It’s not climbing. It knows exactly you don’t have to key in anything. It’s it’s pushing buttons. As soon as I drive up to that property address, it knows exactly where I am, it’s in the top, top left corner of our app and an image of your face will be there if we take that photo. And if you’re not comfortable with the photo of the face, you can use the app any way you choose. We just know that’s the best way to deter crime if you want to get an image of the house read or their license plate or their driver’s license, somethings better than nothing. But the way to maximize and deter crime is to be in control. And we’ve had roundtables, discussions with realtors about the image and you know when you think about it, every one of us is on social media your faces out there, your if you’re going by doorbell cameras, your images out there public buildings, you know, airports and ATMs and all those places someone shouldn’t be upset about getting a photo taken. If they are it could be what saves your life. You want to work with buyers and sellers that are genuine and understand and respect you for caring about safety.
D.J. Paris 25:01 Yeah, that’s a really good point. So the photo itself is almost in a sense a way to self select out somebody who doesn’t want to be caught. And of course, that doesn’t ensure, of course, that the person wouldn’t agree to that. But the idea is that most criminals go well, I don’t really want a picture uploaded to the cloud of somebody that I’m about to attack or crime I’m about to commit. So, so it’s kind of like to use kind of an older example, it’ll show you my age, when I first moved to Chicago, I do get a kick out of this, I used to have a club, if you remember the club was in was a device that you would put in your steering wheel. And it would extend it was kind of this long, if you don’t know what it is Google it, you’d probably look pretty silly. And this was when cars didn’t have as sophisticated of, of anti theft devices. But it was a visual cue. Because people would say to me, you know, if somebody wants to cut through that, they can cut through it, they can they can get through that. And I would say, well, that’s not why it’s there. The reason it’s there is because it’s, it’s it’s something that a criminal who might want to break into my car, we’ll just visually see and go, I don’t want to deal with that. And they’re gonna move on to their next car. And so this, this is a very a more modern version of the club in a sense, because it’s, it’s something that a person who is a criminal, who’s premeditating, a crime is going to say, well, I don’t I don’t want somebody’s going to take my picture. So that it didn’t have itself, it seems like a subtle thing. But it’s actually a really, really powerful idea. And I’m glad we’re sort of spending some time on that. Because it really is a very important piece is does it ensure safety? Of course not. But somebody who’s going to create a crime does not want anyone to know that they were at a particular location at a particular time. And they certainly don’t want a photo of themselves. And you know, all of that. So that makes perfect sense. So all you have to do you go to you open the app, it starts tracking via GPS, where you’re going, it knows when you park, it knows the locations of where you’re going and where you’ve been. And then let’s say the phone does get destroyed. How does the system know, to then contact? You know, they’re the contacts that the safety contacts that are listed? What happens in that scenario, where if the timer ends? How does the realtor well, before before the phone getting destroyed? Sorry, I’m kind of jumping around. But let’s say, how does the app know that the purse that the realtor is safe? Like I know in a Tesla car, for example, if you want to use the auto driving every 10 seconds, you have to tap the steering wheel. So Tesla’s like, goes, well, we’re pretty sure you’re not asleep. If you’re tapping the the thing every 10 seconds, obviously, your app wouldn’t wouldn’t require that much work. But can you talk a little bit about how does the app know that the realtor is seemingly safe at that moment?
Helen Hudson 28:06 Yes, everything’s driven couple of things. When you register for our app, it’s a one step process, you’re going to enter your information, your three emergency contacts, I highly recommend you pick people that love you, and will respond. And we make you put three because everyone can get distracted. Remember, our timer starts at 45 minutes, most people can get in and out of one property and 20. So you’re probably not going to accidentally call for help unnecessarily. And again, if you’re using the app, the way we teach, you’ve already deterred criminal behavior. People, as you say, DJ, then the criminal has a mug shot, the last thing they want is to be caught on film, they’re gonna go work with someone that doesn’t have a process. So that timer started. Let’s say you had three properties who got distracted, we remind you when it gets to five minutes, are you safe, reset your timer. If you ignore that, and that timer runs out, and you don’t press in timer, we’re going to send an alert to your three emergency contacts of your exact location, who you’re with an image of their face. If you’re in trouble, like I was four and a half years ago, I would have pressed the emergency alarm button, it doesn’t take 45 seconds, 10 seconds that calls 911. And it sends your three emergency contacts, your exact location, who you’re with, and an image of their face or whatever you take. Remember, when you’re taking a photo, if it’s a squirrel or a tree, that’s what we’re gonna see. And that’s what the authorities would see. That’s why we encourage it to be the face if there’s a crime committed, we want to catch the criminal. And as you mentioned a minute ago, if the phone is destroyed, everything on our app goes to our cyber secure cloud. So when that funds destroyed your three emergency contacts as long as you started the app, and you put who you’re going to be meeting with we teach to do that before we get out of the safety of your car. The three emergency contacts will send be sent the last location of the phone and who you’re with the criminal? And yeah, and the image if you were able to take one. So if you were able to crop that image, you’ll see it.
D.J. Paris 30:10 Yeah. Because if the phone’s destroyed, the app with the timer would still be running in the cloud, it would it would expire. And then it would be like, okay, something’s wrong, or we think something might be wrong. And we’re going to notify the contacts and possibly the 911 as well. Quick question do you recommend? So if I, if I put my three contacts in, and then I’m using the tool, and I’m using it, you know, every day or several days a week? I know that and of course, you would want to have told told your contacts ahead of time? Oh, by the way, you are my safety contact? Do they do the contacts themselves also need the app on their device?
Helen Hudson 30:50 Know, what happens is when the timer runs out, and you’re exactly right, definitely tell your three emergency contacts. It should be some a friend, a family member, somebody you know, that would care. And what they’re going to see when the timer runs out. So text message goes to their cell phone, in the first part of it’ll explain there could be a problem, Helen hasn’t responded she’s showing property. This part under that will be an image a 3d image of the property, the exact address where I am, where the phone is, who I’m with the buyers name, or the selling molester, listing, appointment person’s name, and an image that I took so of their face, hopefully.
D.J. Paris 31:32 Yeah, that’s great. I’m what I was, what I’m curious about is, you know, telling your, your contacts, once that they’re part of the safety thing, I almost wonder if the realtor, again, this has a lot to do each time you do a show, and but maybe having, you know, the realtor letting those people know, hey, just so you know, today I’m out of showing. So just you know, if you don’t mind, keep your eye on on your phone. Obviously, you might not have to say that every single time. But, you know, I think it’s it’s not as you know, it would probably behoove the subscribers to shape safe showings to really consistently remind those three contacts. Oh, by the way, you know, you’re still on my three contact list. I’m still doing showings. And you know, just so you know, today I have I have some showings. And I know that sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn’t. But I would, I’m just curious how you recommend consistently reminding those, those safety contacts to know that, you know, just you know, you’re still my safety contact?
Helen Hudson 32:37 Yeah, it’s funny, you bring that up. You can imagine when I went through, working with developers to create this, every step of the app is my idea. And it’s pushing buttons, I want it to be super simple. So I have my sister as my top contact, she calls me every day. Little time, she always checks on me, she knows that it was part of the testing process. So she would get a lot alerts. And I’d say they will send me back what you saw. And it’s really cool. Because what they see is the images, the image of the house or the condominium, the person you’re with whatever you took a picture of sometimes I did some funny pictures. But you know, it is important to pick people that care. The other thing I want to point out about our app that’s unique is when you end a showing, at the very end, you’re in the safety of your privacy of your car, it was a great day, whatever. Just like Uber and Lyft, our app prompts you to write how you felt working with the buyer or the seller from a safety standpoint. And the intent for this is for us as an industry to help spread safety across the country. So for example, I’m working with you in Chicago, you and your wife or your girlfriend, and we look at properties, you’re buying somewhere and and I live in your market and then you go works, you know, I’m using safe showings, I’ve got your photo of you and your girlfriend, you’re in my safe showing that you go to Texas and you both want to go look at other properties. I’ve got you in the system. So hopefully the agent in Texas is going to say the same thing. Hey, TJ, I look forward to meeting you Saturday at two I just want you know, we care about safety. Our association requires us to use safe showings. It’s a realtor safety app. All you have to do is get a photo of every one we allow in a home. And then when you’re probably going to interrupt say I know about that app because I work with some other Realtor in Illinois and they were using the same one I’m probably in the system. While this other person in Texas is in Texas and setting the appointment they can press Create showing, put your phone number in touch your phone number, it goes in the app and your photo of the two of you will show up and you’ll hopefully have five star rating because you’re deterring crime if you do this, but if I only gave you one star just like Uber and Lyft you always have to give one there’s a note section where I could put call me I had a situation that was really strange. I want to explore I’ll tell you what happened. So you can be safe. So that’s our vision is to spread safety across the globe.
D.J. Paris 35:08 So it matches previous experiences. And it matches by the the lead or the clients name or by the phone number. Everything, right? That’s right, because there’s a million John Smith’s phone numbers are unique. So
Helen Hudson 35:26 Gotcha. And remember, we only we don’t we have a Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions, we don’t share any other pieces of information with each other. It’s only that last step, just like Uber and Lyft, the five star rating, and its intent is only to help us as an industry deter crime for each other.
D.J. Paris 35:45 Why that is such a great addition, I didn’t even think about that sort of feature. But of course that’s needed. Wow, that’s wonderful. And so how does it work for for agents that are interested? Is this a subscription model? Is it how does how does the cost work?
Helen Hudson 36:03 We have a couple of different things. And we’re excited to announce probably in the second quarter, a new enhancement, a background check feature. Our first app, we rolled out a safe showings for individuals and it’s in the app store, it’s $4.99 Less than a cup of coffee per month, or 4999 per year for you to be able to take care of safety. The other option is enterprise pricing. Those are four groups, you know, 50 or more, it could be a team or brokerage Association, Estate Association MLS, you name it anytime there’s a group that saves showings enterprise. And we we look at individual opportunities and determine what the pricing will be. And then save showings enterprise plus will be the the app with the most features that will have the facial recognition API just like we have. And also the background check.
D.J. Paris 36:58 So the background check will do like a criminal check. I’m guessing Yes,
Helen Hudson 37:03 it will be driven by reverse lookup of the phone number, and just give the basic information.
D.J. Paris 37:10 Oh, so the so the person does not have to approve the criminal background check, because you’re just using publicly accessible information based on phone number? Ah, that’s interesting, because I was thinking okay, well, it’s a criminal going to say I agree to a background check. Of course they wouldn’t. But that would also be a deterrent, but not a good enough as determined to be met matching with something where they don’t have to. Boy, that’s such a great idea. So you plan on that feature rolling out in the second quarter. And I mean, I mean, look what we’re talking about $5 a month, like, that is a nothing charge, you know, it meaning that is nobody misses $5 a month, despite whatever income level you’re at, and you can’t put a price on safety anyway. But even if it was $100 a month, it would be worth it, or more. But for $5 a month, this is really a no brainer. I mean, it’s just there’s no barrier, there’s no cost barrier to entry, it’s it’s not going to impact someone’s bottom line, to any sizable degree. On oh, by the way, it might just save their life, as you mentioned. So really, you’ve made this what I love is you’ve made this so easy. And not just because the app is easy to use, but you’ve made the price point really accessible for us. And really brand new realtors are the ones that likely have the least amount of income to invest in things like safety, they’re trying to build their business, they also have the least amount of experience. So they aren’t always aware of, you know, some of the dangers that might exist. So for newly licensed agents, this to me is this is a must. It’s an absolute no brainer. And not just for newly licensed agents. Of course, everyone should do this. But newly licensed agents, you know, oftentimes some of the software that exists to help them grow their business is cost prohibitive. Certain see lead, lead, but purchasing leads, you know, CRMs oftentimes tend to be costly. This is a absolute, I mean, it’s it’s less than half of your Netflix subscription, you know, and, and Netflix isn’t gonna Yeah, Netflix isn’t going to save your life. This actually is a real no brainer. And quite frankly, I would hope that down the road, like the National Association of Realtors, or Oregon local associations, wood and it sounds like some of them have integrated this directly into and provide this to all members. I know I will be very curious to work to check with our association here, which I do some work on some committees to find out you know what, why they haven’t integrated safe showings and it would be very cool if National Association Realtors says oh by the way, 1.6 million realtors out there now Every one has this, which I
Helen Hudson 40:01 would love it. Just so you know we over a million realtors have access to our app meaning we have partnerships with several States Women’s Council group, it’s in your area, your local associations in Illinois, but all across the country in Texas all over their certain states we aren’t, we haven’t yet partnered with but we, we checked recently, we have a little over 400,000 downloads. So we’re growing, and it’s because of our passion. I’m here to help. I’m living my purpose. God has a sense of humor, I never thought of the technology and an app. Because I’m not good with technology necessarily. I just had an idea that was put in front of me, and I knew that there’s a problem to solve, especially now our world’s not getting any safer.
D.J. Paris 40:54 And isn’t it amazing that no one had built this before you did, right? Like, I’m sure there’s other apps and other safety, you know, style apps, but not ones with this specific feature set. And isn’t that amazing? Right. And so thank goodness, you came along, and said, Oh, I can get that belt, I can I can do that. Even though you’re you’re not coding it yourself. So I applaud you for doing that work. And, and really, making it so easy and accessible to everyone. You know, we we have a lot of, you know, realtors are bombarded with different software product providers, or different pieces of technology. And, and it is often like, oh my gosh, there’s 27 Different CRMs out there, which one do I choose? And again, they tend to be quite costly. So it’s like, I really do have to do my research. And I don’t have time to, you know, this is like, just download it and subscribe. And I’m assuming it’s a cancel anytime scenario anyway, because it’s on the App Store. So there’s really not much riskier, you know, and, and again, for less than Well, it’s about the price of a cup of coffee, I guess. You know, maybe it’s a slightly more than a cup of I don’t know, actually, it’s bright.
Helen Hudson 42:12 Green, right?
D.J. Paris 42:13 Yeah. My girlfriend only drinks, just black coffee. So for her, it would be like, Oh, that’s, you know that that would be an expensive cup for her. But for everyone else, that’s nothing five bucks a month. I mean, gosh, total no brainer. I’m going to be recommending all of our agents, of course, get that here at our company, and really encouraging everyone listening and watching right now, to just just add it to your day you add it, you use it, it takes seconds to use each time. It’s not it’s not obtrusive, it will not get in the way or interfere with your ability to build rapport with that client. In fact, odds are if they’re also talking to other agents, this is a differentiator that makes you look professional. And it is in no way a negative. In my opinion, I don’t see any any reasonable customer having an issue. And if they do well, maybe that’s not the right customer to work with. I don’t see any reasonable, you know, and you know, you just would have to say, Oh, could you lower your mask like they do in the airports? When they look at your ID, could you please lower your mask for a moment. But that’s really all you need to do and snap a picture and keep the app running. Pretty, pretty easy stuff. And by the way, we should mention safe showings. best, best way to learn more about it just go to their website safe showings.com They have links directly to your respective app store, obviously on iTunes and Google Play. It’s it’s there, just search for safe showings. And and download it and use it and subscribe. And it’s a no brainer. And I am so grateful to have met you because again, this is not something as as somebody who number one doesn’t really practice real estate directly, I don’t think about and also as a man I also really don’t think about and so we encourage not not just our listeners who are women, but who anyone who identifies as any gender should absolutely be considering this because, you know, you are oftentimes meeting with people for the first time at a at a property that you may have never been to as well. So there’s a lot of unknowns. There’s a lot of uncertainty and just unfamiliarity, right? You’re you’re probably at a home that maybe you’ve never seen in a neighborhood you’ve maybe never visited and now meeting with somebody who you’ve never met. So this is a great opportunity to do this. And I also think too, I’m curious if you have an opinion about this, if you are meeting with somebody who you haven’t met in person before and your first time you’re going to physically see them is at at the showing, you know, look, we’re all zoom accustom. We’re all we’re all you Is to zoom or some sort of web conferencing. Curious if you have an opinion about having a pre meeting, even if it’s just to say hi, introduce yourself, there’s a lot of reasons to do that, that will help benefit the realtor. As far as report goes, but maybe making sure that that first in person interaction isn’t the first time you’ve at least physically seen the person. So I’m curious if you have any thoughts about scheduling like a quick little, you know, get to know each other on Zoom or something prior to the first showing,
Helen Hudson 45:33 that’s a great idea. I think that’s a any thing we can do to add a layer of protection and to differentiate ourselves from others, as you mentioned, people that are working with us, when they hear that we care about safety, they’re going to see you as confident, and that you’re a person that cares about safety, they’re gonna remember you to when they list their house. So don’t let that be a deterrent. If somebody doesn’t like what you’re offering in terms of safety, it can save your life, if you don’t see him, and it can save you a lot of time. So you don’t want to work with somebody that’s so upset about that. Why would you want to work with somebody that way? So, but no, that’s a great tip, I recommend any level of security you can add, whether it’s FaceTime, you know, quick chat, let’s let’s talk via FaceTime or Zoom might be a little bit more advanced, if it but I could see that happening with the client, you know, that it shows your professional and that you have a protocol that you like to meet people virtually, before you meet them in person. I think everything we do these days can help to save us.
D.J. Paris 46:45 Yeah, and I just couldn’t, I couldn’t encourage more our listeners and our viewers to please just download this app and use it. It’s It’s easy. It’s, it’s, it’s helpful. It’s inexpensive. And as we’ve said many times it might just actually save someone’s life, including yours. And just make sure you continuously remind those contacts, hey, by the way, you’re still on my contact list, you know, so that they know to keep an eye out. But you know, what a wonderful product and a solution here. So for everyone out there who is listening or watching, please go to safe showings.com or pull up, go to your respective App Store, download safe showings, take a chat, take a look at it integrated tell everybody at your office about about this tool. And we will do our best to promote it as well, because we want all of our listeners to keep listening to our show and and if they’re not safe, they might not be able to do that. So we want them we want everybody listening to have a wonderful career in real estate and safety is something that is easily ignored. And let’s just not ignore it going forward. So Helen, thank you so much for being on our podcast, really appreciate it. This has been super helpful. And I’m so glad I got a chance to meet you. So that we that we became aware of this wonderful piece of technology. On behalf of our listeners and viewers, thank you for the work you’re doing to keep Realtors safe. And also thanks for spending time that I know is is you’re very busy. And not it’s probably not easy to find time to be to do these kinds of interviews. So we appreciate it. We thank you. On behalf of Helen and myself, we want to thank all of our listeners and viewers as well for continuing to listen and support our show. The best way you can help us grow at keeping it real podcast is by telling a friend so tell them about safe showing. And also tell them about our podcast. And you know, if there’s an agent in your office that maybe is a little bit more lacks with safety, perfect episode to send to them, send them right over to our website, they can stream not only this episode, but all the ones we’ve ever done. I think we’ve close to 350 episodes now. But every episode we’ve ever done, including this one is they’re keeping it real pod.com Or haven’t pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And lastly, please leave us a review in whatever app you might be listening to this podcast through whether it’s iTunes, Google Play Spotify, Pandora, there’s lots of different places you can be listening here. Let us know what you think of the show. It always helps us continue to improve and grow so let leave us a review. But most importantly, tell other agents about safe showings this is this might just again save lives and it does save lives. So thank you so much, Alan for being on our show and we will see everybody on the next episode.
How To Network With YOUR Network • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Jan 26, 2022
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
In this episode Ryan thinks it’s a good time to come back to the fundamentals. Ryan discusses why he thinks that agents will be more productive and successful when they show up in the office and the importance of having a proper CRM. Last, Ryan and D.J. discuss the importance of keeping in touch with your sphere of influence and deepening your relationships.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping an REO the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today is our monthly coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re new to our show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. So let me tell you about Ryan Now Ryan de April is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and his staff at depot properties also Midwest lending as well as Hubbard Street title. Now his strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style and his dedication to training. Now Gable properties has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland and he’s also in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Florida with hundreds and hundreds of top producers. Now depot properties is a premier real estate brokerage devoted to promoting the brand that of their agents consists and is also consistently ranked as one of Chicago Tribune’s top workplaces and Inc 500 fastest growing companies. Now if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need from your current firm. Please check out deeper properties visit deep real properties.com You can also see the link to that right in our notes on the podcast here. Welcome once again, Ryan.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:40 Hey, thanks. Happy New Year. Good to be back.
D.J. Paris 2:43 Happy New Year. It’s our first episode of the first coaching moment of the year so
Ryan D’Aprile 2:50 yeah. Have you been busy the new year? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 2:54 we my girlfriend got COVID and this was in December and so it completely towards the end of December just before Christmas. And it completely derailed our our holiday plans. And so we pushed everything a week. And so we just got back from Florida, where we had celebrated the December holidays. So it was actually kind of nice, because it wasn’t as crazy. But yeah, I mean seems like everybody’s getting sick these days.
Ryan D’Aprile 3:20 It is you know a lot of our offices have been empty and whatnot because of the spike that we’ve had. Yeah, so it’s crazy times
D.J. Paris 3:29 Yeah, and I know gosh with and we should also mention and just because we’re doing this live although this episode won’t be released for about a week or week and a half but it is Martin Luther King Day so we should wish everyone a happy MLK Day today and easy thing to to acknowledge and
Ryan D’Aprile 3:46 that’s right yeah, we’re actually close I’m in our office today I’m dressed casual as you could see it companies close today. But I came to get out of the house to to speak with you guys to do with you here.
D.J. Paris 3:56 We appreciate it. So what tell us about you know what your thoughts are? It’s a new year, new year you are you and your your team of coaches are always chatting with with your agents. What do you what are you really talking about in January?
Ryan D’Aprile 4:10 You know, I think it’s a good time to come back to the fundamentals. I had the privilege of meeting with two different teams this morning and working with them and helping them build their business and one of the teams had new agents shadow them one of the new agents joining their team and and you know I had a lot of fun showing this agent why this other particular agent was so wildly successful and and also tell them how incredibly mundane and boring it is that gotten to the top and his keeping them at the top. So I think it’s you know, it’s good time to just kind of cover all those bases, you know, and what it is that it is what it is we do that you know that produces income for us, right as real estate agents and and then So talk about I think, I’ve talked about this before, I think it’s a great message to get back to everybody else is, what are you doing to shake up your routine? And, you know, and and? And how aware of you are You are of your routines? Are you? Are you working from your house every day? Are you going? Are you fortunate enough to work at a real estate brokerage that has offices? Are you getting up and going to the offices and, you know, getting in a professional environment to grow your business and whatnot. So I figured, let’s kind of cover all those bases that works for you.
D.J. Paris 5:28 Yeah, it does. And, you know, I was thinking we were talking offline about working from home, and how I was sort of forced to do it when my girlfriend got sick in December. And then we just got back from Florida, and felt it was responsible to at least take a few days before getting another test just to see if it was okay to return to the office. And I was really fortunate during during COVID, in the sense that I was able to come into the office every day. So I didn’t have a lot of the work at home experience, of course, realtors, you know, even pre COVID, a lot of them work remotely, a lot of them don’t necessarily have offices to go to or they do have offices, they don’t take advantage of them. For example, we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of agents at our firm to and very few of them ever come into our offices. And, you know, I just don’t work well from home. And I’m almost wondering what percentage of people do work well, from home and I there’s a million factors to sort of determine how successful that would be for an individual but, but I just don’t work well, from home, I’m curious if you feel the same way or
Ryan D’Aprile 6:30 No, I mean, I work well. So I have a morning routine that I get up and I’m a five o’clock in the morning and I and I work on my stuff where I don’t have to do have any interaction, right on planning and spreadsheets and stuff like that. But then I’m, I’m in my office by 830 in the morning. You know, so my day starts earlier, but I’m in a professional environment by 830 in the morning, and quite honestly, all of our top producers at our company with the exception of a couple I see them in the office, you know, we have 16 offices or so I see them in the offices regularly. When I walk in, I send an email message to our entire company, I say, I use us, I see the usual suspects in our office, every time I visit, it’s it’s always the top producing real estate agents that are there. And you know, you can get work done. I mean, you can be you can travel, you can be at your kids soccer game, you can be your your kids basketball coaching, and you can multitask and you can, we’re blessed with the technology we have, and you can multitask and get a lot of things done. But you still need, you still have to put yourself out there. And I think putting yourself into that professional mindset that, you know, I’m running a multimillion dollar business as a real estate agent or a loan officer or title or whatever it may be that you are in our real estate industry that you’re doing. And you know, to, to wake up, dress up, show up and go in consistently, four or five times a week to grow your business and work on your business separates, separates you from the pack, quite honestly. And I just think there’s an energy and an aura about it. You know, I truly think that things just come to you easier if you put yourself out there in that professional environment versus you know, you know, working from home five days a week and just kind of, you know, having your license and doing what you’re doing but not really being intentional about what you’re doing. Be more accidental.
D.J. Paris 8:33 Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s right and even just having a morning routine, where as you were saying for yours Your starts with you and you so you’re spending time where it’s quiet in the house, the kids aren’t up maybe yet or hopefully he’s not giving you some a little bit of quiet where you can really reflect on your life, your responsibilities for the day, the week, the month the quarter, and get get some you time. And then that’s compartmentalised. And then it’s okay now I need to go to the office where I’m around this energy of of just getting things done. Because it is it is you’re so right. It really is life is so much about the middle, like learning how to exist in the middle and doing the sort of mundane, not necessarily the most exciting tasks, you know, every single day or every week or month or quarter. It’s usually the little things that win the game the fundamentals, right. So
Ryan D’Aprile 9:26 yeah, yes, it is. And it’s you know, also getting out of that that environment of you know, being alone. Because your mind is a funny thing. And it could play games on you. I mean it literally could people make up stories. Oh, you know, they create dialogues, they’re just not true. And you’ve got a you got to get into an environment where there’s other top producers there. You got to shake it up. You got to stay focused on what’s important. I’m going to this morning, it was it was a great i a message in this. I’ll tell everybody here. So here we are. It’s January, what? 1617 1717. So what’s your goal for the year as a as a as a salesperson, right? And so this particular agents goal is $25 million. And they did about 21 million last year average price points about $300,000 Sold 6565 66 units last year, and had, you know, a newbie shadowing him on his team? And, and I ask them to recite the statistic of what percentage of your network transacts? And do you do recall?
D.J. Paris 10:37 saying, yeah, 16 16%
Ryan D’Aprile 10:40 Yeah, yep. 16%. And so we looked at last year, and it was, it was great, because, you know, here we are two weeks from the previous year. And, and he had 66 transactions. It’s amazing. And in his network in his network, he’s got 436. Now, I’m a little bit off on these numbers here, right. So it’s 436, or 463 was six hours ago. But the point is, is this, all of his sales came from his network. And so I’m just going to grab my calculator here and take 435 times point one 669 transactions, and that’s 65 transactions. Now, here’s the thing, though, this is incredibly important. And, and I coached this team, right after I coached another team. And the other team had somebody have been on our team for about a year. And it showed this other particular person who had the 65 transactions. And in what we call our dashboards and ello, our internal CRM and coaching platform that we’ve created. This particular person who had 60 566 transactions, as of this morning, January 17, you say today is the 17th of six, somebody has contacted 96 of his 436 contacts already,
D.J. Paris 12:06 just this year alone, just this year alone, he’s
Ryan D’Aprile 12:09 on quarterly live flow. I mean, he’s, he’s not a team. He’s got a team member joining, right. He’s showing somebody what he’s doing the previous was a team. So he’s got a new beyond there. And so he said, I’ll do quarterly LIFO. Because there’s just too many transactions. We have transaction managers and marketing coordinators to help agents but still a lot of running around and doing what sweet. He focuses on quarterly, quarterly live flow. And by January, March, by April 1, everybody in his, his dashboard, love heard from him. And then I went to his marketing audit. And
D.J. Paris 12:48 can we pause for just a moment because I want I want to make sure everyone’s hearing this. So he has a, his his sphere of influence, or his contact list is about 400, deep 400 contacts or so?
Ryan D’Aprile 12:59 Yeah, he’s got 700 total, right? Plus, because he’s got a farm in there. He’s got suspects, people that are like he just met, but of his sphere of influence, if you will, he’s going to be in been lifelong. He’s going to communicate with regularly, it’s got 400. And let’s see 440.
D.J. Paris 13:16 And let’s define life flow for any of our new new listeners.
Ryan D’Aprile 13:20 Alright, so you have life flow is networking with your own network. So systematically, reaching out and researching what’s going on with that person in your network and touching base with them, and having dialogue with them about them, not about you not about what you do, just creating a bond creating, you know, a report, that’s what life flow is. Because it’s not what you know, DJ, it’s who you know, it’s who you know. Yeah. So that’s what life flow is. It’s about networking with your own network. Because your network is your net worth, your net worth taken on board. To me, that’s exactly why they No,
D.J. Paris 14:00 it’s, it’s, it’s so it’s so true. And, you know, when Ryan’s talking about, you know, we’re really talking about deepening relationships and demonstrating care and demonstrating that, that you are present and a professional and also paying attention to your clients. And we’ve all had the experience where somebody ends up using another realtor, and we’re like, I thought that person was my friend. Well, they are your friend. But were you staying in touch with them in a way that they knew that they, they could reach out to you and they need help? A lot of times to people go, Oh, maybe I just thought you were too busy. Right? That that comes up too. It’s the I haven’t heard from you. So I went with somebody else, or Well, you seem so busy all the time. I didn’t want to reach out and bother you. So those are
Ryan D’Aprile 14:47 the reality. It’s this I want you to finish my sentence on this one too. Okay. It’s out of sight out of mind. So the next thing we shipped over is to your marketing. And so that team that I was coaching before, had an individual on the team that been in the business for about a year and a half. And this particular individual has about 180 contacts in his network. So we have what we call our marketing audit. Okay, and most CRM should have this, it’s an easy way to see everybody in your, in your dashboard. Okay? And what I want to know is, is Do I have your home address? Do I have your email address, right? Am I socially connected to you? Because if I’m out of sight, out of mind, and that’s what you know, that’s the auto flow. That’s your consistent marketing is how it’s going to happen. So here’s the learning lesson for this for everybody here, listen. So the particular agent who did the 65 transaction, $21 million in business, who had 436 contacts, right, I went to the marketing audit, and he’s missing all her to me, he’s missing 13 addresses out of everything. That’s it. Now, all email addresses offered. Now the other individual in the previous team, right, in the coaching session, had had been in the business for a year and a half, just still learning, right 176 contexts, had only 50. Completed contacts, right. And here’s the difference between doing two, 3 million a year, and somebody doing consistently $21 million a year, $21 million a year. I mean, let’s let’s let’s be real to put you in the top 1% income bracket in the country. It’s it’s big dollars, it’s to be taken seriously. And, and I said to the agents listening, I said, this is what it is, this is how you make your money in this business. This is it’s paying attention to these incredible benchmarks like incredibly important, oh, god data points, do a, where’s DJ live? What’s his email address, and I connected him socially, when was the last time I communicated with him, that’s, you know, that’s in step one, right, and then coming from that comes prospects, right, then you move those over to another category. And we could talk about that later in how you follow up with it. But the true, I think, I mean, the best message to give the listeners here is you are, you are the subject that you are studying. Yeah, you are the subject that you’re studying, and you are tracking your own progress, you should be tracking your own data, you should be holding yourself more accountable than anything else in your life. And if you do that, you know, simply put an hour and a half a day, all the other stuff will come your business will come your clients will come and pay you on autopilot. You know, I tell everybody, I don’t need a coach on how to write a contract. I don’t need to coach you on how to, you know, to negotiate a deal. I mean, there’s the pointers, and there’s tips and tricks, of course, and we could always sharpen our skill set, which is important. But the most important part of it is how are you generating more and more leads, year in year out. And if you do the fundamentals, this begins to snowball, it actually becomes easier. You know, and there are, this is another point I wanted to make to our listeners here. There are some great, you know, producing 10 $12 million real estate agents have been in business for 10 years. But I will argue that they’re $30 million producing agents performing at a 10 to $15 million year, because it’s just coming to them after an overtime, which is great. And maybe that’s where you want to be. But once you get to that structured, that discipline where you treat it like a business and you’re looking at those important data points and and really focus on the fundamentals, that $12 million producer becomes a $36 million producer in a matter of years.
D.J. Paris 18:44 Yeah, I was I was actually doing the math on while you were talking about sort of the producer that you have the $25 million producer who’s already contacted like 96 of his club is a sphere of influence list. And you know, it’s it’s so funny because you look at that giant list and you go oh my gosh, I have 400 names I got so many phone calls, but it’s really not where is this person made on average? If if he did it evenly every day? He did about five to six phone calls a day. That’s why it’s seven total Yeah, totally reasonable.
Ryan D’Aprile 19:18 Yeah, seven a day. And you know what don’t even have to be phone calls. You know, guys, they can be text messages and they can be writing somebody’s Facebook wall doesn’t count but you can instant message them you know, instant message Facebook Messenger, you can use all those and you can have a dialogue. It doesn’t have to be a phone call. But if you consider there’s 20 working days in a month, right? And you take this one student I think everybody here if you’re not at the level you want to be you should be doing this monthly. He’s doing it quarterly it’s seven, seven a day. But he doesn’t miss a day.
D.J. Paris 19:54 Right? Well that’s you know, it’s that’s that’s the you know, eight glasses of water or the Push up or, you know, it’s it’s not fun to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you’re really into water or doing push ups or,
Ryan D’Aprile 20:06 or like Donald’s Diet Coke, and I’m addicted to
D.J. Paris 20:10 I drink Diet Coke as well. But but it is, you know, life is so much about just doing getting yourself to do the mundane and then reaping all the benefits, reaping all the benefits, and you know, these these large giant, you know, luxury homes that that some people get, yes, that may or may not ever happen for you, but you can build a fantastic career selling $300,000 homes 65 of them a year. And you know, by doing all of these, I mean, that’s a wonder You said that’s at the top 1% earner, that’s a top 1% producer in this industry. And it is somebody that is going to have a wonderful life,
Ryan D’Aprile 20:49 wonderful. If you plan properly, and you invest wisely. You’re you’re disciplined in your business, it’s a wonderful, and, and and, you know, this particular agents 3233 years old, and so it’s every price points, 300,000 hours, when he’s 3548, his average price points gonna go to 4,400,000. Right, so that just takes him from 21 to 27. Without even having any more transactions, the reality is, he’s gonna get more referrals and more business. So you know, he’s got a bright future ahead of him. You know, another thing I’d like to touch on with everybody is the importance of recording and having a proper CRM. Yeah. And there’s a lot out there, we have ours, you know, dashboard, corporations, and ellos are our dashboard product that we probably will be taken to market sometime in the near future. But the really, the reason it’s important is I find out one of the most dangerous things that people do in any industry, any, any business out there, where you’re in sales is they write leads on, you know, pamphlets or pieces of paper, and it’s hard to access. And understand, like, I got this very discipline notebook, and this is how I do it. And it works for some, but it doesn’t work for the majority. And the reason why I like it is because another important part when we get out of our network is what, uh, what are all those prospects that you generated in the past year? And when was the last time you followed up with them? And how consistent are you so this particular agent, not the one that I he coached, not the 65 transactions a year, but the other one has been the business for about a year and a half, you know, many prospects he had in there. No 52 lakhs. That’s a lot, right. But then we start auditing, when was last time you contacted these 50. So I’m trying to get everybody’s head that is what you need to be looking at, at a daily basis in a prospect. You know, DJ, you could be somebody in my network, you could be a friend of mine, you are a friend of mine, but you could be somebody in my network that’s not in the real estate business, right for this example, and tell me you’re going to buy a house, but you’re not going to do it at the end of the year, you’re a prospect, and you’re in there. Now I’m staying in flow with you once every two to four weeks casually and keeping you close in mind, I’m not going for the kill, right. So you made soft touches, not touch, you may transact 18 months from now. But if you’re not, in that, if you’re not pulled out of my network, and put in that special category, I run the risk of losing you, and costing myself a significant amount of money, and then repeat business referral business. So it’s, it’s something that needs to be paid attention to by everybody that’s professional in this business. I don’t think it’s given enough phone attention in our industry, I think there’s a lot of other things that get, you know, higher priority in terms of marketing, and social media marketing, and all this other stuff that’s out there, which is all important. But the number one thing, the number one part of your business is the network and the integrity of the data that’s in your CRM for your network. And then how in tune you are with that network.
D.J. Paris 24:03 And it’s, we’re at a perfect time of the year to give a reason for you to call those people it’s, Hey, I just want to up this is a prime example. So I send out holiday cards and you know, just for my friends and family we send out about and this is not a business thing. It’s just that we do for fun, then about 60 or 70. And then we always get about 10 or 15 back you know, it’s most people don’t seem to do them anymore. But but the but most people don’t ever check to see if I had moved and I actually moved. And so I did get a bunch of people that said hey, just out of curiosity, did you ever get my card and I had about five cards that I never got and I’ve been doing holiday cards long enough to know you always ask people did you move but this is a great time to check in with people and check in with your sphere of influence and and say hey, I’m just updating my database because I’m gonna be sending you some stuff throughout the year. Just want to make sure that nothing has changed for you and and it really gives you a reason to pick up the phone and call somebody or to say Send them an email, but great opportunity right now to say, Hey, I’m done putting my marketing plan together, or you don’t have to get into details in my database, make sure if I have to send something to you that it’s going to the right spot, make sure you know, and then you can ask them and start a conversation. Hey, how are things at work? Are you staying safe? You know, are you working from home? Still? What’s going on? And it just starts the conversation. And then yeah, that’s a touch. That’s a great touch.
Ryan D’Aprile 25:22 Yeah, yeah. And, and what also is social media gives you such an insight to what’s going on in people’s lives. You know, and the most important thing to them is speak feeling significant. So you know, you could go to Instagram, feed Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and, you know, take two, three minutes to research a person, you’re, even if they haven’t posted something in seven, eight months, you could use that as a foundation to start the conversation with somebody. That’s why it’s so nothing. Like, I kind of hate social media, right. But But, but I mean, the advantage, it gives me huge, right, and the freedom that it gives me. And I use it probably 90% for researching and developing relationships, and 10% marketing. In fact, I’m not even the person posting on my social media, and somebody else is posting stuff on my Facebook and my Instagram, I don’t even look at it as a marketing tool. I look at it as a extension of my relationship building.
D.J. Paris 26:27 You know, it’s funny, as I think you’re right, and I also was thinking about different service providers. And I was thinking about, like, I’m curious to get your opinion of this, but or to get your experience. So you know, you’re a successful person, you have a lot of service professionals, wanting your business, maybe it’s financial advisor, and attorney, accountant, whatever, lots of different service providers that would love to get some part of your business. And, you know, I don’t almost ever get prospected by other service providers, for I don’t, accountants don’t reach out to me attorneys, or financial advisors don’t reach out to me, maybe I’m on some sort of Do Not Call list that I’m absolutely like, I’m not allowed to be called, but I don’t think so. But I am amazed at how few industries really do a good job of, of what we’re talking about is developing relationships. I mean, the only reason I haven’t switched accountants in 12 years is no one else has ever reached out to me to say, Hey, I could probably do a better job or this is I’d like to do an audit for you. I’m amazed. And so I guess the point I was trying to make is, if you are doing these, these things where you’re staying in contact, you’re caring about your your sphere of influence, you’re paying attention, you’re staying in touch it what’s it’s like that Scott pack book title, it’s never crowded along the extra mile, like it is literally not crowded along the extra mile. No one else is really doing this. So just by doing it half half, right? Or half? Well, you’re gonna be doing more than probably any of your peers. Would you agree?
Ryan D’Aprile 28:02 Yeah, yeah, I do. And also, you know, look, look at yourself, you know, and ask yourself how you do business. So, what I mean by that? So, we said in the show, and I say over and over again, your network is your net worth, right? It’s not who you know, it’s, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And so I have made it my, my philosophy that I only do business with people I know. And I actually go out of my way, when I have a need to see if there’s somebody that’s in my network, that does it. Because I want people to use me when they have a need. So you know, I have anything from you know, anything that you’ve used i, if you look in the community, in the neighborhood, and from legal, the financial and whatnot, it’s a neighbor. So my met on a soccer field is somebody who’s come friends of mine, because they’re kids friends with my, my child. Some people say I don’t do business with friends. That’s, that’s a, that’s a small, small amount. I do business with friends, I support my friends, I support my family. And I consider my friends, my family. And I consider my network at the most, you know, one of the most important highly, you know, highly.
Usually, as a real estate agent, you’re also consumers, and my am I supporting the people out there that I’m looking to support back.
D.J. Paris 29:43 That’s a good point. I guess I hadn’t really thought of it that way. And that’s a good point. Well, if you expect people to work with you, because they know like and trust you, you should probably look for them as well when you’re needing those kinds of providers. Absolutely.
Ryan D’Aprile 29:57 You know, and look, I’m a 46 year Old man married with three kids. And so I have a life insurance policy. And I have an insurance agent, right for my life insurance that is in my network I have, I have an estate, right, and the last will and a will and all that good stuff. And that’s an estate attorney and I have a businesses and so then I have business attorneys, right. These are all individuals that are in my neighborhood, at Google, and so on and so forth. Right, I completely, you know, a number of years, gutted and remodeled their home, guess what we hired somebody that was a friend of ours in our neighborhood was a local builder. So I just feel I feel very strong. And that’s part of my ethos. That’s how I work. That’s how I want people to work with me, I have to, I have to do the same thing back my network.
D.J. Paris 30:47 Yeah. So once you do once, our listeners, you know, can break down their sphere of influence, and realize what they’re, you know, how often they want to reach out to these people. And then they have some sort of process for doing that daily. What else are you talking to, to your your agents about helping them have a great 2022?
Ryan D’Aprile 31:08 You know, it’s probably, it’s probably 60 70% mindset 30% fundamentals, right. Um, you know, I will do not just for our company, for other companies, right, I’ll do speaking engagements and seminars and coaching sessions. And I tell everybody, you know, the statistics show a week from now you’re gonna forget 97% of the stuff that I told you. And I’m going to give you some very, for our listeners, here, I’m gonna give you some very powerful activities for you to do. And if there were 10 listeners to this call, there’s 10 people in the room that you and I are speaking with, I will say the same thing, I’ll say, eight of you will walk out of here and not do anything with it. And two of you, or less will, it’s a sad truth. So what I’m doing with our agents is I’m constantly messaging this over and over, whether it’s, you know, first thing that first in the morning, email, you know, an office meeting, you know, all company call and messaging the same good old habits over and over again.
D.J. Paris 32:16 Yeah, repetition, right. So you’re, you’re repeating the message, as often as possible about fundamentals. And we all want the big win the big exciting, sexy listing, or the high net worth client, who is buying, you know, the multimillion dollar home with cash or, or, you know, just I want to be in the luxury market, or I want to, and that’s great. But it life is usually about the small wins, and what’s repetitive, right. And you might have one friend who buys the $4 million home with cash, but you probably don’t have 20 friends that’ll do that, right. But you have, the rest of us are buying smaller priced properties. It’s it’s predictable, it’s and all you have to do is make sure that they know you care about him,
Ryan D’Aprile 33:03 I never focus on the price of the transaction. And I’ve never, you know, willed myself to a certain price point. I’ve always made my focus on network, and the business will come. And whatever comes is enough. Yeah, it’s enough. And it works out. You know, it all works out the right time. So you know, it’s like a horse put on the blinders, and get focused on what’s important, and it’s truly networking with your network, business will just come from it, an overwhelming amount of business will come from it, and it will get easier and easier over time. There are people that want to focus just on luxury market, and that’s great. I’m just, you know, I’m not that type of, um, you know, I sell luxury real estate, you know, we got, you know, we sold 1215 $16 million homes in our company, and I was a part of the transactions helping the agents out, but to particular, to target that particular market. I’m not your guy, I think that’s going to come down to essentially a person who has built their brand, their mark their network, over time, a long period of time. And they have a high net worth Rolodex of clients that they worked with over time. And there’s a word that keeps saying over and over again, it’s time, time, time, time. Give yourself time people, you know, it takes time to grow your business. But it comes it comes and if any of you stay focused on the right things it it’s no loss.
D.J. Paris 34:43 And the best part is you don’t have to be in you don’t have to even enjoy doing these tasks, right because I don’t enjoy going to the gym. I don’t enjoy I just got back from the gym. So it’s on my mind. I don’t enjoy much of it. It’s hard. It’s not my thing. It hurts. It’s painful. I’m out of breath. But it works. And all I have to do is go, and I don’t have to like it. It would be great if I did like it. But the truth is I don’t, okay, I don’t. But as long as I go, I get the result. And this is the same thing, if you’re like, I don’t like to pick up the phone. Well, Ryan said, Well, you don’t have to write, you can text, you can, you know, you can do something on social, you can email. But even if you didn’t like calling, you can still make five or six calls a day. And that’s your, I don’t want to do this, but it’s doable. It’s it’s not 200 dials a day, which would be very difficult for people who don’t like making dials, but you don’t have to even like the task, you just have to do it. And if you break it down into small enough chunks, you know, you make it easy to achieve, whether whatever your you know, personal feeling is about that particular task, right?
Ryan D’Aprile 35:47 Yeah, totally. And if you have the right tools and the right technology, you know, it should give you actually that dopamine reward, right. So, you know, our, our, our dashboard, RS Anello product, you know, it gives you many visual cues, from goal setting, to calibrating your dashboard, lead sources value, the temperature, the prospects, where they are in the process, it’s really actually kind of fun once you get into it. Sure. And then going down the line of connecting with your network, that’s the same thing that’s Check, check, check, check check, that will start to release dopamine in you as well, just as much as you know, you see a texter or a like button on your social media is releasing a dopamine, you could do the exact same thing you can, you can train yourself, you really can’t if you’re aware of it, but to get satisfaction and get addicted to that process. Um, but you got to have the right tools and the right product. That’s why we custom created our own product, because we haven’t found one out there in the marketplace that does that does that?
D.J. Paris 36:52 Well, I’m excited to share that with our audience. Once that becomes available to, you know, to the public. And we can, we can go through some demos and check it out and see how what what you built because your perspective on it most. Most CRMs are built by developers. They’re not built by agents. And there’s a lot of CRMs in the field. And some of them are very good. But one that’s built by by you know, an agent, or someone who coaches agents will look probably a bit different, and function a bit differently. Because it is important to feel good about those difficult tasks, you know, and for me, like at the gym, the thing I’m addicted to is the feeling I get as I walk out the door going, I just did something really hard. For me, that was really hard. It was really healthy for me. And I feel proud of myself and I get a dopamine hit just from being. So even if that’s your dopamine hit, right, like so if you go hate picking up the phone, okay, fine, whatever, you don’t love it. But if you do it when you’re done, you are going to be so proud of yourself. And that’s, that’s worth doing.
Unknown Speaker 37:54 That’s it exactly. Well, I
D.J. Paris 37:57 think that’s a great place to sort of wrap for our first session of 2022. Guys, it’s the fundamentals. And Ryan, when we ever whenever Ryan and I talk offline, you know, sometimes we’ll say, gosh, we’re, we’re gonna we’ll go over fundamentals again. And is that boring to the audience? And I was like, Well, I hope not. Because it’s the only thing that’s worked in my life is fundamentals. I mean, once in a while I get lucky here and there in life, sometimes I get unlucky. But the fundamentals really even out the times in between the good luck. And, and it just, it just smooths out the transition and real estate’s a perfect example of, you’re going to have some good luck, you’re gonna have some bad luck, and that is just gonna what that just this is going to happen to you. And then that you can’t really control but you couldn’t, you can certainly control your day to day effort. And if you put it in it’s, it’s not that it’s not that insurmountable of a task, right? Like making seven dials a day, just checking in with your car. That should be fun. It really should be fun.
Ryan D’Aprile 38:55 And yeah, and also to keep in mind it also, hey, audit your dashboard or audit your network. Yeah, how many? How many? How many of your contacts do not have their home address? How are you going to sell their home if you don’t know where they live? Right and like it’s like fundamentals, like you got you got to take care of your own house, you got to take care of your own business. You know, if you want to be at that top level, you got to look at all those all those all that all those data points and make sure it’s cleaned up and it’s ready so that you can you can excel
D.J. Paris 39:30 Yeah, it’s fundamentals when the game so appreciate an auditing and making sure that what you’re doing is actually creating the results you want, which you should know as Ryan said, you know, should know your why like, what why am I doing this if it’s to earn income, okay, fine. If it’s to deepen relationships, okay? Or maybe it’s a lot of different things, but know your why and that’ll help you get through the more difficult daily activities that that, like I know why I go to the gym and it’s not just for the dopamine hit on the way out and that pushes me through the hard parts. And same thing with with all of us know your why. And then just put the blinders on and start, start deepening relationships, if that’s all you got from this was to deepen relationships with the people in your network, you’re going to have an amazing 2022. Even if you aren’t that skilled as a realtor, although you should be, of course you should work on your business and develop those skills. We could talk about it a different time. But even if you just did that your pipeline is going to get full in about, what, six to nine months maybe or even sooner than that. Correct? Yeah, yes. Awesome. Well, Ryan, thank you, on behalf of all of us, we want to thank Ryan, I mean, this is a guy who runs for companies, hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of, of employees, as well as top producers. And he takes time out of his busy busy schedule to come on, we really appreciate it. So if anyone out there is in the Chicagoland area or Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida, and is looking for a firm, where the top where the leader is, is, you know, a coach, and they have lots of lots of wonderful support, and help and all these tools to help you grow. And also just to support your brand, and let you build the business you want do properties is really a great, great place to look. So um, check out Gabriel properties.com, you can reach out to Ryan’s team or Ryan directly right through their website, and you can learn more about what they offer. They also has Midwest lending. So if you’re an ello, a loan officer and maybe looking to see what other lending institutions offer, he would love to chat with you about that, as well as Title agents. And then he has a software company, which has a pretty exciting CRM coming out we’ll be talking about shortly. So on behalf of all of the listeners and viewers, Ryan, thank you. And on behalf of Ryan and myself, we want to thank you guys, right, we wouldn’t be doing this without our listeners. We are, gosh, we’re coming up on a million something downloads. I can’t remember the exact number. Awesome. Yeah, thanks. And that’s we’re so grateful. And the reason we do not spend money on advertising either. So we very much appreciate you telling other agents, you meeting our listeners about our show, feel free to shoot them over to our website, keeping it real pod.com. You can download or actually you can download but you can also stream every episode we ever ever done there and leave it please leave us a review. This is the big thing I’m pushing for this year because it’s really good feedback for us. Let us know whatever system you might be listening to this on, whether it’s iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, you know, lots of different podcasts or places that listen to podcasts. Let us know what you think of the show. Let us know what you like. And also let us know what you don’t like so we can improve. But anyway, we’ll let Ryan get back to his busy schedule. Ryan thanks again and next coaching moments.
Ryan D’Aprile 42:40 I appreciate it.
He Closes A Deal Every 100 Hours 52 Minutes and 53 Seconds!! • Jake Thomas
Jan 21, 2022
Jake Thomas with Compass in New York talks about the beginning of his career in real estate and his transition from the corporate world of luxury apparel. Jake discusses the importance of direct interaction with the customer for him and how this led him into a career in real estate and his feeling of being fulfilled. Jake also shares his advise to other realtors that are struggling at the moment. Next, Jake discusses how he closes a deal every 4th day. Last, Jake describes how he considers that his background in real estate and all the other career paths have contributed to getting him ready for stage performance.
D.J. Paris 0:00 On this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with New York City top producer Jake Thomas. Before we get to Jake, just a couple of quick announcements. First, thank you. We are so appreciative the entire team here at the podcast zonna. Myself and all the wonderful guests we have, we just always want to say thank you, our numbers continue to grow. And just peek back behind the curtain for a moment. There’s about 1.6 or 1.7 million realtors out there and over 200,000 of them have listened to at least one episode of the show. So we are so grateful that you continue to spread the word and tell other agents about us. Please continue to do that. Just think of one other agent that really could benefit from hearing from top producers like Jake and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed there. We also have links to all the major podcast apps there. So you can find us very easily right through keeping it real pod.com. And last, please leave us a review whatever podcast app you might be listening to this show on. Let us know what you think of the show leave us a review that helps us get more visibility in the different podcast directories. It also lets us know what what we do well and what we could do to improve. But enough about us. Let’s get to the main event our interview with Jake Thomas.
Today on the show, Jake Thomas from compass in New York City. Let me tell you about Jake. Now in any business and in any field people are urged to read Sun Tzu’s Art of War I know I’ve read it. And a lot of our listeners of course are familiar with it as well. But this is a means to sort of grasp the competitive nature of every industry and learn the art of winning from start to finish. It’s especially true for the real estate world in Mecca is like New York City where competition is fierce and the stakes couldn’t be higher. What happens though, when your realtor is Marine, a former professional athlete and online personality and an Off Broadway actor? Well, you have our guest today Jake Thomas. Jake’s unique upbringing sets him apart in the comparative residential real estate market of New York City. Now Jake is a renaissance man and a unicorn of sorts in the industry built on promises that are rarely met. Now Jake’s eureka moment came in the winter of 2017 when he was employed at the coveted Ralph Lauren, where he quickly realized that his desire to truly work with people just wasn’t being met. So Jake moved over to the residential real estate first with Cooper and Cooper real estate Manhattan more most recently over to compass and from the get go he’s quickly learn the ins and outs of the business while thriving on a competitiveness in seeing clients. big city dreams match the business while Thrive upside the luxuries of their reality. Now last year in Jake’s absence and amongst the COVID 19 pandemic, Cooper and Cooper posted its highest sales figures in its 17 year history. And since his returning to that Firm A month after month, out all of the previous year’s record setting numbers have been shattered. Jake has been a point man to this effort having already brokered and close 60 transactions in 2021 leading the firm’s monthly sales volume several times now the mixture of both sales and rentals sees Jake doing a deal. This is income audible every four days. In fact, it’s actually every 100 hours, 52 minutes and 53 seconds to be exact. And we know that because he’s that precise because oh yeah, he’s an A Marine and an ex professional athlete. So that’s what he knows is precision and hard work, which makes sense. Because of course, he that is his background, please, this is my most favorite inner intro I’ve ever read. By the way, I’m so excited to have Jake on our show. So please, everyone, before we get to his interview, I want you to follow Jake on Instagram, we’re gonna have a link to this in the show notes as well, but I’ll find them on Instagram at life like Jake again life like Jake, Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Thomas 5:43 How do you follow that DJ, it’s making me smile and laugh all at once.
D.J. Paris 5:48 I love working on the intros. And I’m so grateful to have you because you have such a storied past. And I think there’s probably not a coincidence between the discipline that it takes to be in the military also in to compete in professional sports. And then to take that sort of skill set into real estate. But I would love to find out how you had also being a Broadway actor, just constantly putting your, you know, an actor, putting yourself out there, you know, auditioning, you know, getting roles, practicing and performing. So it’s, it’s so many skills that combined, I could see how you would be a success in any field. But certainly real estate seems to seems to be a good fit for you. But I’d like to start all the way at the beginning and find out how you got here. Do you mind telling us how you got started? Why real estate and take us all the way back to the beginning?
Jake Thomas 6:42 Yeah, I was, you know, like you talked about being at Ralph Lauren. And that winter. I remember being up in the beautiful Madison Avenue office that we had right up there near the United Street and looking down at all the ants running around on the street and snowy day, and I just wasn’t being fulfilled with my work or by my work at the time, great company, great brand I’m wearing and as we speak, the culture, I grew up with that. What it exudes and what you know, the brand really resonates. With my family’s wanted, I’ve always been always be a part of it. But the work itself that I was doing at the time just wasn’t bringing home. And so I was looking out the window one day, and I was like, that’s where I need to be, it was just a really cool, like I said, you read or like you said eureka moment where I said, I need to be on the street, I need to be where I can be more action oriented, influencing and affecting situations in person. Not from afar, not from a terminal, not via a review of an audit or through data, I need to be, you know, my gift is giving. It’s giving of myself, and it took me to be voided to that to realize that. That’s where I needed to be. And so real estate happened to me the vessel.
D.J. Paris 8:05 It’s interesting, though, because it is a extremely competitive market. Obviously, in New York City, of course, everything’s competitive, but certainly real estate is as well. It’s just a crazy market. Because of the cost, the pricing, the way that rentals are structured is very different from most cities, where oftentimes for our listeners who may or may not be familiar, oftentimes, and I don’t, not in every case, but if you use a realtor, oftentimes you ended up paying the realtor commission if you’re the tenant in like here in Chicago, it works the opposite where the landlord pays the commission. So it is extremely challenging in New York, but everyone’s got to live somewhere. And so I love the fact that you went from having this great sort of corporate job. Prior to a million years ago, when I first got into the, into the working world, I worked with Anheuser Busch, which is another brand that that, you know, despite of what people might think of their product, it is it is sort of the king or it was, you know, the king and so I, I really learned a lot about precision, and how every detail is important. And I’ve learned as I’ve interviewed hundreds of Realtors over the years here that attention to detail is really important. Ralph Lauren is no stranger to that, of course, every single person in this country knows that brand. And so I imagine you probably learned a lot of great just sort of practices and processes in addition to the other, you know, sort of backgrounds you’ve had in the military and professional sports. But when when you made that switch over from, you know, sort of the, the apparel world into into real estate, how did you start because, to me, that would seem so daunting. How like, how do you find clients? How do you How did you do that? So I’m just curious on on how that transition was for you.
Jake Thomas 9:58 Well, it was first Having a sneak out of and don’t say anything to anybody, you know, having to leave work early from from Ralph Lauren, to go to night school at the New York Real Estate Institute to get licensed first, you know, so it was finding the time just to do that. And then, you know, walking into the classroom one evening, the first evening and I was, you know, suited and booted with company attire on and sure, you know, real estate licenses were available to anyone above the age of 18. And you know, this DJ above the age of 18, without felonies on the records, no college degrees, no, not even high school diplomas are required, right, as those are the minimum requirements, 18 years old and no felonies. So there are a myriad of people from all walks of life, ages, everything that come to those courses that take those courses. And I was that was the first thing that I was gassed to walk into the classroom and thinking, Am I in the right place? You know, it’s like, he does not look like I do. She doesn’t look like I do. They none of those people looked like I mean, I was like, I don’t know, if I’m in the right place. I’m just like, okay, just stay with it. Just stay with it. And then Jordan Cooper, one of the cofounders of Cooper and Cooper came in and was guest lecturing, and spoke just so warmly, so confidently. If you’re this kind of a person, if you’re looking for whatever you proceeded all that with, my name is Jordan Cooper. I’m a co founder of Cooper and Cooper, I went to Harvard, study economics, I worked at Goldman Sachs, during this time, I worked on these deals that a lot. And I was like, okay, you’ve got my attention, that, you know, those facts, and then everything else about I’m just exuded, like I said, confidence, and honesty, integrity, and exceptional service, which ended up being the pillars of their firm. And those three things connected with me from the Marine Corps of, you know, our core values being honor, courage and commitment. So there’s a lot of similarities that I saw right away with him. And with their firm to where it seemed like, just that alone was enough to Suevi. But thinking about the action oriented element of it, you know, being a competitor than I am, and being able to see like, okay, literally the difference, being able to give someone what they want, or need or looking for can be determined by whether I can run faster on the street than the, you know, someone else, man put me in that job, right, like being able to be selfless and providing inimitable service to someone else, against a competitor who might be a little lazy on the wheel, or just doesn’t have it in them that day. Put me in that job. Right. So I just started to find all these little edges to me, that were more more assets or more attributes or attractions, you know, like, hearing the daunting 90% washout rate of first year agents in New York City 90%. I was like, Man, that’s all me, right? Like, that’s a marine thing, or, you know, the running to gunfire kind of joke, but like, hearing that immediately made me even just want it that much more.
D.J. Paris 13:10 Yeah. And it’s also true, like, so we have a, there’s a real estate school that that teaches out of out of one of our offices. And so I tend to see the students as they file it, and, and you’re right there is it is a wide berth of different types of people who come to those classes. Some of them, you know, are just investors, they just want to save on commissions, and they’re not going to do traditional realtor stuff, then you have the more sort of people who may be more polished come from sort of that maybe corporate world, and then you have people who are, you know, you know, just trying something new, and it is very, it’s attracts a lot of different types of people. And I suspect, I’ve talked to a lot of people who are in the process of getting their license who have gotten their license. And it’s also a lot of people who go, Well, I used a realtor for buying or selling something. And I was like, Oh, I could do that. Because, you know, there is this, you know, there isn’t a sort of, in Illinois, we have what are called minimum standards of sort of, you know, minimum standard practices. But they’re pretty low. It’s a pretty low bar to hurdle. And so for those that are willing to go that extra mile or to realize that, yeah, there is there is competition here and all you have to do, it’s not that it’s easy. Of course, nothing in life is easy, and it’s worthwhile. But this idea that if I just work a little harder and a little smarter, and I’m, you know, I’m going to be a client’s choice, and understanding that that is absolutely possible. And you know, that competitive nature I’m sure is really keeps you driven but it’s exciting to hear that that the idea that 90% of people fail like excited you because you’re like why I you know, you’re not afraid of failure. Failure is like, just part of the deal, but you’re like I’m just gonna keep getting up and keep going But how was that first year? Was it difficult to find clients? And? And how did you get your name out there?
Jake Thomas 15:07 First, I mean, forget the first year just those first few days, hours, weeks, you know, of coming to terms with myself and I just gave up salary and benefits and like getting through that, that doubt wall that fear filled, scrutinizing doubt wall right that we all have and that is inevitable if you ever really go for it, you know, anyone that’s ever really gone forward, especially on any type of entrepreneurship knows that wall well. And if you don’t, I don’t know, maybe, maybe you’re missed it or you Blaze past that or you haven’t really gone for it, because it’s hard to not see that. And that was tough was first few hours, I’ll just say oh my god, I can’t believe I did this. And I remember I went home that afternoon after I punched out and submitted my resignation. And one of my windows that actually opened up my apartment and blown open and it was like feet of snow. feet of snow in my apartment, like all over the place. Oh, no, I remember my concierges calm like, Hey, man, I think there’s a draft in your place going in there. And I was like, oh, that’s why so it was a very funny little paradox. Maybe, you know, or foreshadowing. And I was like, Is this an omen of some kind? Let’s pull it on. But no, it just it was grunt work. It was conviction, it was just, you got to get those reps. And you got to just keep going back to it, keep going back to keep going back to it and just believe in the purpose, you know, remembering where I came from why I left wife, you know how I felt the way I did when I was there. And what it was that I was after knowing that it wasn’t going to happen in a day. You have to work and struggle and fail and fail and fail and fail until I found it.
D.J. Paris 16:50 Yeah, yeah, it’s boy, I could that was so well said. And you talked about that sort of pit in your stomach I was reading. I can’t remember who said this. And I wish I could. But it was some entrepreneur who’s who’s had a bunch of successful startups and said, If you don’t have a pit in your stomach, when you’re starting something, your goals, probably not big enough that you’re shooting for. And that pit in your stomach. If you don’t want to throw up at least a little bit of the time when you’re trying to figure out whether to go for it or while you’re going for it, then you’re probably not doing it right. So basically, he was saying become friends with that feeling because that feeling is totally normal. It’s totally okay. And you can still persevere despite that, that feeling. I think that feeling gets a lot of people though, I think it stops a lot of people it’s like they don’t realize like, it’s like being in the gym, it’s no fun to do a rep that goes to failure, and I just came from the gym. So I’m thinking about that. And it is no fun for me to to do any exercise that I have to sweat or, you know, you know, I went down for my last deadlift today. And I was like, Oh, I can’t get back up on this last one, which a deadlift is very short x small exercise range of motion is so tiny. It’s not that it’s easy. You know, it’s like, not as challenging as like a full squat, as far as amount of energy it takes, but I couldn’t do it. And I just didn’t want to do it. And I said, Well, I just got to do it anyway. And by doing the work, as you said, you know, putting in the reps, you know, eventually, if you’re doing it the right way you end up getting there. And most people I think they just give up because the reps or maybe they’re boring, or they’re hard, or they just can’t find the discipline to do it. But you obviously have been trained, I imagine in the military discipline is everything and process. Right. So can you talk a little bit about sort of how you pushed through, you know, when you got started having you know, maybe oh my gosh, now I have snow in my place and and maybe I just quit this amazing corporate gig with a huge brand. And, you know, how did you get yourself those that first year or two to keep going? Because you I’m imagining you could have easily Trent, you know, transition back into into that sort of corporate world with your background, but what um, what kept you going, you know, in those those early days
Jake Thomas 19:08 honestly, it was the people. The customers, you know, like, I worked with a great team at Cooper and Cooper, from top to bottom from Jeremy and Jordan, co founding brothers, to everyone on the management staff to the rest of my peers and colleagues. I mean, they’re a boutique firm, a very handpicked, and polished and selected people. So it’s very familial, very cohesive, small unit leadership again, a lot of things that I remembered from from the Marine Corps, so I was really well surrounded and insulated with positivity and encouragement. And that was critical. They never made me feel like I was not going to do it. It was always motivating and you can do this you can do this and just helping and assisting with with whatnot that it was the customers it was my interaction with customers and feeling their needs and doing my best to fulfill Hold their knees. And that satisfaction was what I realized I’d been missing. Previously on the elbow, the days where I would walk to Central Park from, from the Office of Ed Ralph, and spend my lunch on a walk and literally cry. And I’m in tears, like cry, trying to keep sunglasses on, so people can see me. But there were lunches where I would walk in the park. And I can cry, man, because I was like, this cannot be it. This can’t be it, I couldn’t have come this far. stayed alive. This long, not lost all my fingers and eyes. And, of course, you know, This can’t be it. And so remember those days, I’m like, not crying anymore. You know, we’re, we’re here, we left that. And then the more I was working with my customers and hearing their stories, meeting their parents, and feeling the reactions that took place from how relieved many of them were to work with someone who seemed to care, and how much that meant to them who seemed to listen, right? And how much that meant to people. Because clearly, there had been a big void of that. So that that really hit me hard. And I was like, Oh, man. So that was the first well, that I kept going back to. And still, I mean, it’s the well, I keep coming back to him while I still do it.
D.J. Paris 21:18 It’s nice that you know, that that feeds you because I don’t know, oftentimes, when when I have guests on the show, they will talk about the sort of personal interaction and but I don’t know that anyone said it quite quite as elegantly as you just did. And I think that’s really important, because you were talking about having this corporate job where you worked for this amazing company, and and, you know, had this incredible sort of job and but, you know, you didn’t have the direct interaction with the consumer, I’m guessing. Right? You were you were working on the corporate side. And you didn’t get to talk directly to the, you know, the people needing that particular product. Or at least that wasn’t your day to day job. And so this idea of, oh, that’s the part that feeds me, I like going direct to the consumer and saying, I want to help you, you know, one on one, or I want, you know, this most basic need to, you know, shelter, I need to live somewhere. And then you can make that happen for somebody and I just went through it myself, buying the place I’m sitting in now, like, last year or so. And I’ve been through that process before. And even though I had been through it before, and I’m in this industry, and we have 800 Realtors at the company I work at. I’m not a practicing realtor, but I’m among Realtors all the time. In fact, I have a license. So I really should be used to this whole thing. And I wasn’t, and it was emotional. It was scary. It was in the middle of a pandemic. So I was like, Am I making a horrible buying decision? You know, is everyone leaving the city I didn’t know. And I needed I my boss was my realtor, even though I could have technically done it myself. But he was a nice guy and said, I’ll help you manage your emotions through this. And and that’s really a cool thing that Realtors get to do. They get to help people manage this stressful experience of even just finding another apartment much less buying a place. And in New York finding an apartment is just as stressful sometimes, and certainly as competitive. My sister and I’ll tell you just a funny story. My sister and I back in 2005 We both bought a place for approximately the same amount of money. Hers was in the West Village on Barrow amazing location. It’s just like one of the best areas to live I think great location, great location. It’s like everywhere I turned I saw like I’m like I think that’s a professional model whether it was a male or female like everybody looked like a model. jailhouse. Yeah, yep. Yep. And, and then I bought a place here in the city in Chicago. And then, I think four years, five years later, Dana, my sister sold her place because she was dating a guy who lived in Queens and shows us moving out to Forest Hills. But anyway, so she sold her place for it was a fight you’ll appreciate this a five story walk up, no elevator. Or maybe there was but maybe just like a service elevator but certainly couldn’t use it to go up 500 square feet one bedroom, which is amazing. And no air conditioning and all that stuff. And she sold her place. I think it appreciated $200,000 like just an insane number. Mine depreciated by that time. But but that’s how crazy New York purchased in 2005.
I think so 2000 sold sold it in what sold it in when I’d have to ask or maybe five years later, somewhere in that neighborhood.
Jake Thomas 24:38 Oh then is appreciated. Over 40% Because from 2000, roughly 2000 to just post 911 to like 2018 the median appreciation for condos in Manhattan alone was 167% over that amount of time. So using that math and be scaled back, you know, years I’d say it’s at least 40% appreciation.
D.J. Paris 24:58 Yeah, well, and I think that’s That’s about what she got. And what was interesting about that is, that’s great. And if you cash that out, it’s a nice win. However, if she priced herself out of her neighborhood, right, she now no longer could it could afford to live in the neighborhood. She wasn’t going to anyway, she was moving to Queens. But the point was that that’s how crazy New York real estate is, of course, that’s a simple example, you have a million of those stories. So it is very difficult to as an agent, to really be able to meet a client’s needs strictly because there’s a limited amount of inventory, of course, so much competition, and it’s just so incredibly expensive. So I applaud you because you really are not not that it’s necessarily any easier in a rural community, those have their own challenges, too. But certainly, New York is known for just, you know, chewing up and spitting out realtors, and the fact that, that you saw it as a challenge, but a challenge to meet a really important need for you, which is I want to connect with people and I want to help them. You talked about giving, giving to me, is seems to be the most discipline and giving seems to be the two most common attributes people on the show talk about is being a giver, and then just cranking through it. So I’m curious, you’ve seen a lot of people, I’m sure come and go in the industry as well. Do you have any advice for people that are struggling right now that, you know, they’re realtors, they’re trying to get to that next level? Of course, we’re in still in the middle of a terrible pandemic. It’s still tricky, it’s still tough out there. A lot of competition rates are low so people can afford more than they could before. So there’s there’s just a lot going on. What would you what would you say to somebody who’s like oh my gosh, this is so hard right now.
Jake Thomas 26:45 In a sentence it’s never the markets fault it’s never don’t don’t blame the market or if that’s your if that’s your reason. It can’t be right you know, good good economy, bad economy, pandemic nonendemic doesn’t matter there there is always there’s always opportunity. There’s always a deal to be had. There’s always a deal to be made. Maybe it’s not where you want maybe it’s not you know, maybe you’re a buyer by heavy broker. Maybe it’s on the sell side you don’t like selling well maybe that’s where it is. Maybe you’re buying and selling isn’t working out too much but you’ve got rental clients but you don’t like renters but maybe that’s where it is you know, maybe it’s a different URL. It’s a different part of town. It’s about being you know, maybe it’s in most places you don’t want to be and you don’t like being at you know, people that only want to look at night people that only want to look early in the morning people that only want to look on the weekends, holidays, afternoons. There’s so much opportunity around if you can have a macro, I believe perspective of of all of it as opposed to where I specifically am trying to find for me because maybe it’s the most convenient there. I’ve found the lowest hanging fruit. And don’t get me wrong. It’s great when that works out like that. But if you depend on that, and you grow to learn that that’s how it happens when you get that taken away from me. There’s a joke about handstands doing handstands and learning handstands. And you may have heard this talking about the gym. If you learn to do a handstand on the wall, you’ll never get off the wall. It’s a good point. And I’d say so remember that metaphor.
D.J. Paris 28:30 Yeah, I have yet to, to get. It’s funny, even doing doing pull ups, I can relate to that. Because we use a band to help sort of, you know, because, you know, there’s just so difficult to do a pull up, as you know, but, but now when I do try to do one or two pull ups without the band, you’re right. It’s very, it basically, it’s better if I really, if I don’t have the band to some degree, because then I learned that, you know, I don’t have a helper here and I can just power through and eventually I’ll be able to do that pull up. But but you’re, you’re you’re so right about the you know, it’s the same argument, I get, I get these calls I do recruiting for our real estate company. And so I’m talking to realtors, and I don’t hear it as much anymore. But when I started 11 years ago, there was a lot of like, what kind of leads Can you give me and that’s really what what you’re talking about is, you know, being unfortunately, a lot of realtors probably think that’s that’s the solution. And and of course, that’s wonderful if you can find a firm that can fire leads over to you. Wonderful, good for you. But what happens when that those lead sources dry up or when the firm decides we don’t want to spend that kind of money anymore on that. You’re right and and also the fact that you’re you’re you’re a hustler in the most, you know, sort of complimentary way I can say hustler in a good way. Somebody who doesn’t give up somebody that understands, hey, I can just pivot and rentals are something that a lot of realtors ignore and now New York City probably not as because they’re so prevalent, but a lot of realtors, even here in Chicago are like, Oh, I don’t want to do those. And I’m like, Well, where do you think buyers come from? Like, they come from people who used to rent unless they’re super lucky. And they just, you know, have, you know, a trust fund where they can put a downpayment down when they’re 18? Most people don’t do that. So this idea of doing rentals, you know, I love that idea. And I’m curious, how have you found a lot of clients that have transition New York’s a whole different animal, because the barrier to purchase is so high, but I imagine that happens, right? That transition from I’m renting now, and I want to buy in the future.
Jake Thomas 30:36 So funny, you know, these last few years, basically, since the end of 2019. Definitely 2020. So everybody that was benefiting on the COVID deals, you know, whether it’s on the renting side, or on the buying side, because throughout 2020, there’s massive inventory. Normally, New York City sits around healthy market 6000 to 6600 available apartments, that number got up to almost 10,000, or just over 10,000, I forget by the close of the third quarter of last year. So huge bubble, and an already very large market space, right. But the demand, the normal amount of demand, which is always 98 102% Wasn’t there because of the Exodus taking place. So there was a huge amount of inventory, not a lot of demand. So of course, centers paribus, prices fell, renting, and buying. So everyone that could finally afford to live in New York, many people had been dreaming. Finally, buy could finally rent, etc. Well, now that all those renewals are coming up for renting, many of these clients are seeing 20 3040 50% increases on their rents because the rents don’t have to be fixed to the normal per annum inflation rates because the landlords can say, hey, we gave you a great deal, we did our part. Now we’re only returning the lens to fair market prices. So you have to do your part and either pay the new price, which is the normal technical price, or, you know, pack the bags. So because of that, there’s a lot of opportunity for current renters seeing these enormous inflation amounts to become buyers, you have liquidity, if you’ve got the means and liquid cash upfront, to be able to put down and buy and show money in reserves, if need be for Co Op, you can actually become a buyer and be spending what you’re spending currently, or certainly not nearly what they’re asking in the inflation amount. And you’ll be owning equity instead of paying someone else to rent their asset of which maybe you can’t even afford the new price. So this is gonna be a whole nother year of opportunity the same way, you know, 2020 was very opportunistic for the new comers to the city for for buyers, getting great deals on the sell side, and then 20. Later on, throughout 2020, it became you know, the ship, the demand went through the roof, the inventory went back down, everything got swallowed back up by by April. And now we’re seeing just kind of the elastic response of okay, I don’t know what to do. And there’s a lot of people that are stuck in the middle. But Dare I say the same amount of surge we saw on the renting side for COVID deals, there’s gonna be a lot of new buyers this year that are already happening.
D.J. Paris 33:08 That’s really that is really exciting. And I just love the fact that you seem to you see the opportunity versus this struggle, right. So the struggles there. Of course, this business, having to wear all the hats a realtor has to wear is of course, a very daunting task. And I applaud everyone who does it professionally. And that’s their full time gig, because it is not easy, of course. But I love the fact that you’re just a guy who pivots. I don’t mean to say you’re just a guy, but you’re a guy who pivots. When you see something not working you’ll you’ll move to something else. And you just look for the opportunity. And there’s always, as you said, always opportunity. But you’re absolutely right, you just painted a very rosy picture of this year. Whereas I suspect if I asked other agents in your market who who maybe aren’t doing as well, they might have a different opinion, right? They might see things in a more negative light. And they might say, Oh, well, gosh, I mean, you know, people are still freaked out, no one’s coming back to the city or whatever the the story, they’re telling themselves to keep the they’re sort of idea of why things are so hard in alignment. And I love the fact that you just gave us some really, you know, exciting news. And you also by the way, we should talk about results because it’s one thing to just have a rosy perspective on on where things are headed. But you you’re a results guy and you know, that’s you know, being in the military, being in professional sports, of course, it’s all about results, the discipline that to get those results, and you’re closing a deal every four days, you know, whether it’s a rental or a sale, that is an incredible feat for anybody in any market. How do you manage all of that? That traffic right so there’s just a lot of to dues on your plate. Every couple of days. There’s somebody closing, how do you keep that all organized? I I’m just always interested in in systems. So I’m not that you need to get too too granular with it. But But tell us a little bit about how you how you organize all that information.
Jake Thomas 35:09 That’s so funny, you know, between their own, you know, client management system. I had my own simple Excel doc that I set up and had various formulas throughout to sort and itemize and you know, Salman, configure some quant tips and COUNTIFS and other things, for me to just to be able to see kind of a pattern of consistency and like probably, really probability right? To where I could say, on Wednesdays, between three and 5pm, I need to be in the West Village business, my highest probability of success based on where I’ve been the deals I’ve done, what size I’m looking for, this is likely the profile of the buyer or the renter, he or she is going to probably be at this age are probably gonna have this budget. And this is the ideal move in date. And I had that dialed in based on everything that I put into this. And I had some friends helped me out with the algorithm. But that’s when I was drilling it as specifically as I possibly could that way to where and it was every four days, I had it at one point it was less than 48 hours, which is fun, because when I watched the numbers preflop I was like, No, you know, like I wanted to stay at one point it was less than 36 hours. So it was it was fun, because it was a big I kept it as a game. You know, it was it was playful. Like I kept that exciting. I kept it kept me interested. And at the same time, I was really doing what people wanted, or what we’re asking of me, right? So I was just running to the calls running to the to the springs running to the fires, right? And just saying, Give me more, give me more, give me more load me up. And for me, the more they came, the more they asked, the more it motivated me. So it was it’s again, really I think the consumers I like the people who I’ve been able to serve, because it’s them that that give me this drive like to me it’s reciprocal, you know, I I play off of what I’m receiving. And like you touched on with people seeing this and the negative. Yeah, I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure there’s truth to a lot of the fear and the doubt and uncertainty and speculation. Maybe I just, I don’t subscribe to it. You know, I stay with the surety that what I know and what I can affect and influence right here, from an arm’s length away. All that might be true. But in the time that you’ve spent talking about that thinking about that scuttle butting about around the water fountain, you know, it’s not going to feed out at the bar, because you’re fearful whatever, that less than four days clock has been rather than the whole time. So in your time of doing that. I’ve been on the meter doing otherwise. Yeah, yeah, you’ve
D.J. Paris 37:37 been getting your rep set. And, and I love that because at the end of the day, you know, the 24 hour news cycle is available to all of us, and we can entertain ourselves and keep ourselves busy with things that will satiate us in a sense and entertain us. But someone out someone out there is practicing while while we’re absorbing. And of course everyone should study their markets and do the you know, do that kind of work and and read the news about you know, what is important to them for for their business. But it is very easy to get caught up in what’s happening, versus charting your own path. And you are somebody of course, who doesn’t seem to subscribe to I’m going to let things happen to me. And I would love to talk about social media and the role that’s played for you because you have an impressive social media following which is is, you know, not as easy I think it and not to make this agender conversation because, of course, we’re two guys and we could talk about guy stuff. But it seems that guys have a harder time building a social media following. You’ve built up an impressive following your social media, your Instagram account, for example, is about 16,000 followers, and you post a lot about your life on there. And you’re really sort of show who you are and I wanted to curious on how that has impacted your business. You know, do you find that obviously, you have a following you have people that are interested in your life. But can you talk a little bit about how that started and how you decided to what you decide to put on on social media and how that helps your business?
Jake Thomas 39:20 Yeah, I’ve always been very inclusive of other people and to what I’m doing like I’ve always been a fan of sharing, you know, like, Hey, man, met this movie like who wants to go to the movies Harry? Oh my god, you guys have to come to this restaurant or oh my god, this this place was so cool. This is like, I always want to share it with someone so that not that I’m pushing it on you but like if you can feel it, I’m feeling it’s gonna make you feel great or if wow, if I could share this feeling with someone else, like maybe the world would be a better place. So for me, I’ve never wanted my work to dominate what I broadcast I want it to be about my the experiences that I have and trying to share those the places that I’ve gone, the foods I’ve eaten the things that I’ve seen people I’ve interacted with, you know, like right now, at this little Mexican restaurant in Williamsburg. I’m the only one in here. And conversing with the hostess and the owner and my mother’s from Mexico. They’re both from Mexico here. And I immediately started speaking to them in Spanish. And they both looks to me like, like, most people usually do it, like, Why do you speak like this, you know, with this accent and everything. And this is a million dollar moment that no one’s gonna see that no one’s gonna have that I’ve just bathed in and then just glowing from it. You know, that’s how I feel. And so that’s what I try to put out. Trying to get caught up in too much of the other stuff in there, there’s, there’s enough negative in the world, and I don’t need to personally feel that I need to add on to that people are going to find that wherever they want. There’s no shortage of it. So if I can get a little bit more smiles and Christ the world, that’s it, it’s a win for me, you know, my mission statements is, for me to find an outlet in life that permits me to give everything I have of myself away. Real estate is my way of doing that. And whether it’s a specific transaction, or just the kind of nuance of the business. Yeah, because it is lifestyle oriented, it is about people and experiences. And that’s what I’m trying to pump out. And you know, if people like it, cool.
D.J. Paris 41:18 Yeah, and I like that you’re, you are willing to share it, everyone’s got different boundaries around what’s comfortable for them and sharing on social. And I like the fact that you, you know, like, you have this incredible tattoo, sort of, you know, I don’t know if its sleeves, the right word, but one of your arms is just this really impressive, full design, it is super cool. And, and you show it and you’re like, This is what I this is, you know, you show yourself working out, you show yourself, you know, playing sports and just being active, and even just at a cursory glance, as I’m looking through through your, your, your social feed, it is, you know, what, what really comes across is your character, because I’m seeing a guy who’s who’s in an incredible physical shape, who really seems to be a giver, as well. But I’m seeing somebody who’s disciplined and seems to have their their life together as well, which is also like, why wouldn’t you want to show that? Of course you would. So I imagine a lot of your clients, you know, probably even look up to you in a lot of ways for you know, how fit you are, and, and how positive you are. And just how professional, right, it’s, it’s this willingness of showing like yourself, as you are. And you do that. So I really encourage everyone to look at subscribe to Jake’s Instagram, which is again life like Jake, but I love that and, and you also have fun with it, too. You do a lot of funny things, too. So but but I, you know, I suspect you have a lot of people follow you because you’re willing to put yourself out there and say, here’s why I’m this is me. And here’s what I’m into. And it doesn’t it’s not always real estate related. It’s like, here’s my, here’s some stuff going on in my private life. And here’s what I do when I’m not, you know, closing deals. And I think
Jake Thomas 43:06 I’m really I don’t always play to the crowds man, like, I’ve learned like anybody, people love to see me with not a lot of clothes on by what the engagement statistics which show on my analytics show. And then you know, I’ll go and talk about something that is near and dear to me. Whether it’s a play that I saw, or just an article that I read or an experience, and no one cares, but I don’t care either. You know, like I’m saying this because it’s honestly feel this is how this thing made me feel and like you go, but for sure, there’s clearly a trend of what is preferred from the audience side. It’s which makes me laugh a lot. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 43:53 Well, talking a little bit about the performance side of you with your your background in theater. We’re very lucky here in Chicago, we have so much great theater. Some people argue we might even have the best theater in the country. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t want to start that argument because I don’t know enough. But we to that to make that argument. Of course, New York City is is
Jake Thomas 44:13 fine pizza is a different story.
D.J. Paris 44:16 Pizza, yeah. Well, that’s true. We don’t have John’s like we do here. But we do have Lou Mel noddy’s and a few others, you know, Chicago, Chicago, New York have a friendly rivalry there. But it is let’s talk about about theatre and performance because I’ve interviewed a number of successful realtors who they are authentic. And I’m no way suggesting that that there’s no there’s not authenticity. But this idea of no this is still a performance. It’s an authentic performance, not not social media. But when I work with a client, I consider that a performance where I’m going to be presenting to them I’m going to be you know also listening and doing a lot of interaction, but has your you know your your background on the state Ah, has that helped you with the way you interact with the public because of course, on stage, you’re directly communicating with every single one of those audience members.
Jake Thomas 45:10 That’s funny, because it’s actually the reverse. So I only recently acted the very first time. This past year was my stage debut on Broadway or Off Broadway. Wow. Yeah, so it was really more of like, all those reps with clients, and interviews, and just different professional places or sex that I’ve worked in, you know, between the military are going to fit that was a great one, a talk about a learning experience, working in the oil field and are working in a bar and working throughout, like, all those places were different, you know, still being me in every sense, but really just observing and learning so much more about other people and the environments that I was in. So when the stage opportunity came, I was just like, oh, this is we can do this, you know, humbly, of course, and excited. But at the same time, I was like, Oh, this is what we’ve been practicing our whole life for this, you know, this is just just let it rip. Now. Let them see it, you know, and so like, it was me. Yeah, that’s, that’s what it was like, it was more of just like, Oh, we’re finally getting seen. Okay, cool, you know, and so for me, it was it was very much like a childhood. excitement about it and your eyes wide open?
D.J. Paris 46:28 Well, it’s nice to see, at least here in Chicago. The Steppenwolf and the Goodman are sort of our two most most famous theaters here. There’s a lot of other ones, of course, but I don’t think we’re back to in person yet for any of those, which is a bummer. But I know that theaters are starting to open back up. So if you do live in a community with some with some, some theater stuff, please support that. That is those those actors, directors, the stage hands those those theater owners, that’s it’s been tough. And, you know, I prefer to go to the theater over movies, almost almost. I mean, I live in Chicago, we have a lot of great theater here. But I love that you’re trying that. And I just assumed you’d been doing it a long time. So I’m, and you’re probably you probably like scary things you enjoy. And I don’t mean, so scary that they would be dangerous, but just you like difficult tasks. That’s that’s where you get a lot of satisfaction from.
Jake Thomas 47:23 Like, do I look at it as difficult? Or? I don’t know, if it’s the fact that it’s tough that I look at it as an attraction or that maybe it’s not what everyone else would pick and that I see something as unique or that it’s weird. And that it’s not normal? I don’t know. Maybe that’s more attractive to me that I’m like, it’s more about what if I don’t, as opposed to the one? Yeah,
D.J. Paris 47:49 yeah. Do I want to get to the end of my life and go, Oh, I should have done that. I should have tried. You know, whether or not you went to Tony, is is another thing, of course, but But it’s like I could have gone for that I could have tried that. And then if it ends up not being the thing that you like to do? Oh, well, yeah, I tried it, I got to do it. I was we were talking about my dog who’s had some heart issues at the moment. And the cardiologist that I saw recently said something very similar. Just a couple days ago, in Florida, he said, he goes, I want you to think about how you, you know, we have a certain amount of time left with this particular animal. And I want you to get to the end of this animal’s life. And I don’t want you to have any regrets about how you treated this animal. So he said, you’re already doing all the medical work, you’re going above and beyond there. But I want you to make sure that and this was such an unusual thing for cardiologists to say, although I suspect maybe it’s not unusual, but I wasn’t unexpected, unexpectedly hearing it, where he said, I want you to feel good at the end of as best you can at the end of her life. And I was thinking what a great metaphor for all of us to really think at some point we all you know, we all traverse off this mortal coil. And you know, to think what are some things that would really be fun to try and maybe a little scary, too. And I love the fact that you don’t even think of it as scary. You’re just like, well, that’s just what I wanted to try. And so of course, why wouldn’t I do it? And I love that, that you that you have that attitude. And it is clear to all of our listeners, I’m sure well how that’s translated into your success. But I know you’re a busy guy. And we have gone a full hour and this has been such an insightful conversation because I think for everyone listening, they got a real sense of how your beliefs and your attitude which you have full control over. Or at least you know, if you pay attention to them, and you obviously do, but for everyone listening, if you pay attention to your beliefs and attitude you can you can make things mean anything you’d like. And you can look at go jumping on stage, which is most people’s number one fear is, you know, public speaking and say that sounds cool. That sounds fun. And if it doesn’t work out, who cares? It’s going to be fun. and enjoy that. And you chose to look at things that way you chose to look at leaving a probably safer path in the corporate world with with Ralph Lauren and other you know other companies and said, I want to try something else. And that’s going to be more fulfilling for me and I’ll figure it out, I’ll make it work. And you have and not just made a living, but also made a huge splash in the New York real estate market with how successful you are. And I imagine you’re the kind of guy you could probably just drop you off in any industry, maybe you wouldn’t be as fulfilled, but you’d be able to get it done, because you just know about getting things done, and moving forward. So I really, really applaud the success you’ve had. And I know our audience really appreciate it. So on behalf of the audience, we want to say thank you for spending time with us inside a restaurant where I know you don’t have time to do this, and you found time to do it. And I really, really can’t thank you enough. And on behalf of Jake and myself, we want to thank our listeners and our viewers. for continuing to get to listen to our show. The best way to help our show is to tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing this amazing interview with Jake and send them a link to our website. If they’re not a podcast person. They can stream every episode we’ve done right from our website, keeping it real pod.com Or just pull up a podcast app, hit search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button and also one last favor. We’re asking please leave us a review whatever you’re listening through, whether it’s iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora or whatever, let us know what you think of the show. Good and bad. We’d love to know how to improve and also what you like that really helps us continue to make the show better for everyone. So thank you on behalf of the audience again, Jake, thank you so much everyone go I want everyone to listen yeah and by the way if you live in New York City and you are looking for an agent Jake is your guy best way to reach him currently find him through Instagram which is life sorry life life I’m sorry Jake. I just lost my notes just went down. And like Jake sorry life like Jake So Instagram life like Jake also look in the show notes for this episode. You can link directly to it, but you can contact him through there and he would be happy to talk real estate with you. So Jake, thank you so much for being on our show and we will see everyone on the next episode. Thanks, DJ.
How To Talk About Lending Rates Right Now • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Jan 19, 2022
Welcome to the January episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel talks about rates and the importance of understanding of where the rates were, where they are and where they’re going. Joel also discusses how agents should talk to their buyers about rates and where should agents go to get information on the lending world. Last, Joel and DJ discuss the weekly newsletter Joel sends out and how you can also do something similar.
Joel can be reached at joel@rate.com and 773.654.2049.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Joel Schaub at guaranteed rate. As a realtor it’s important to partner with only the most trusted name in mortgage lending. Joel has 1000s of satisfied clients and gives $1,500 of his commission. Back to your buyers on every closing. He is known for his ability to close even complex deals start to finish in only 14 days to learn what 1000s of others already know. Make a note to call Joel at 773-654-2049 or email joel@rate.com Guaranteed Rate is an equal housing lender licensed in all 50 States Consumer Access Number 2611. And now on with the show.
Welcome to another episode of the largest podcast they buy real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show today once again, is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with our favorite lender, Joel Schaub with guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a very high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is that he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction now last year alone, and then we’re now in 2022. So in 2021, Joe gave back over $400,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him and that put Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of lenders nationwide. out of 400,000 loan officers in the country. Joel is ranked number 137. Last year he did 611 transactions, just to let you know what a jump that was the year prior he did 535. So he did 611 transactions last year help that many families his highest amount ever for one year and it was just shy of $250 million. Now if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Joel can be reached at his email, which is Joel J oel@rate.com. So joel@rate.com Or you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Also, as a reminder, guaranteed rate is licensed in all 50 states they can help you no matter where your your client is, let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel shop. Hey, Joel. Hey,
Joel Schaub 2:41 thanks so much DJ, when I hear those numbers. It even surprises me but none of the accolades really matter. I really like coming on giving back and really having a good conversation with you and helping agents all across the country, understand mortgages and understand what their clients are going through, when they go speak to their banks, and how they can help them just get one transaction done easier.
D.J. Paris 3:06 It is it is such an important part of the job. And I think real estate agents, lenders or loan officers. You know, all of this can be done without talking to a human, right, there are real estate companies where you can buy real estate without ever talking to an agent, or you can certainly get loans without ever talking to an actual person. But it’s such a complicated and complex process, especially emotionally. So intellectually, there’s a lot to know. But then emotionally, there’s just a lot to navigate. And so, you know, I think what separates you from from all the other loan officers that I’ve had experience with in the past is you really take the time to to educate the client to make sure that the agent knows what’s going on. And, and again, I’m sure that if coming on this show, you’re now doing it nationwide to you know, 10s of 1000s of people are going to hear this. So I really love the fact that you come on because anyone can go look up rates, anyone could go look up real estate, but to talk to somebody who’s knowledgeable that can educate you is more rare than it should be. But it is really, really important. So we appreciate it.
Joel Schaub 4:16 A lot of buyers you’re exactly right. I’m glad you said that. They go online and they can shop around and most buyers DJ, they think, you know, 90% of buyers think they fit right into the box, they have a good job and their income is right. So they can go to an all online mortgage lender. Right? When in fact 90% of files don’t fit in the box. Okay. 90% of them actually need a human touching somebody to actually teach help and educate them so that it does go smooth, because when it is all online and it is all technologically driven. There’s nobody there on the other end so agents know this, the letters that are being presented with somebody who’s actually local in their market. It really works a lot better for an Office perspective, than if it’s just a big mega bank from somebody out in state. And buyers feel the same way
D.J. Paris 5:09 too. Yeah, it is, it is interesting. I know I’ve even over the years when I’ve owned property, whenever I thought to refinance, I would sometimes fill out some of those online forms, just to sort of see what would come back. And rarely did I get a phone call, sometimes, you know, I would get emails and maybe one phone call, but But it was amazing how hard it was sometimes to to even get to a human. So I really I know that your clients appreciate how accessible you are, and and how you can really help guide somebody you guided me through through my loan, which was amazing and really helped me understand. And I’m in the industry, and I needed help. And so I imagine all of the all of the rest of us who have clients need that exact same help. So let’s let’s talk about, we don’t talk a lot about rates, which is really interesting, because of course, when I first when we first started working together, I thought, Oh, we’re going to have this conversation always about rates, which of course, is interesting. But you tend to focus on more business building activities, which I think is is probably even more valuable. But today, we do want to talk about rates specifically, because we have seen a slight uptick in the in the average 30 year rate. So can you talk a little bit about what’s going on in the market, what agents need to know and maybe what they need to talk to their buyers and maybe even sellers about
Joel Schaub 6:27 headlines, if you look at it right now, say mortgage rates have surged, using the word surge right there saying that mortgage rates have jumped, mortgage rates have skyrocketed all these terms, right that you’re seeing when you go to CNBC and CNN and they’re not wrong, but we need to take a step back and get an understanding of where they were, where they are, and where they’re going. Okay, in terms of rates, so on average, right now, your 30 year fixed rate is hovering around three and a half percent, for a great client putting down a good sized downpayment, or they’re still rates below 3%. Of course, they come with shorter terms or adjustable rate periods, of course, in the future will rate to be above this most likely. Okay, so let’s just get an idea right now as to where they were, so that we know where we are. And if I’m an agent, I can speak with some confidence, right? Last year, we know that mortgage rates were in the twos It was great. Okay. Now that the New Year is here, what we’ve seen is mortgage rates move up to that three and a half percent range. And agents are asking me, they said, well, the Feds haven’t raised rates yet. Wire rates up already. Right? You’ve seen agents ask this. Yep. And it’s not when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates? Do they call all the mortgage companies and say, Hey, reminder, raise your rates today, we just raised ours. When the Fed speaks, and they say that they’re going to raise rates, the markets react right away. And that’s what we saw this year, DJ in the beginning of the year, we saw six consecutive days where the mortgage rates grinded higher, from just over 3.1 to five to almost three and a half percent.
D.J. Paris 8:17 But keeping in perspective, it’s still I mean, the idea of even having a three and a half percent loan is incredible, in credible still, and something to keep in perspective, because inflation, the most recent numbers was that, you know, inflation rose about 7%. Last year, which is amazing. I mean, that is a huge number that is a big number. But to go from three to three and a half is still pretty, pretty reasonable for for buyers, correct.
Joel Schaub 8:51 For most payments that we’re looking at, on your average, maybe it changes the payment on a $300,000 place by $60, or $70. Once you start getting up into the clients that are borrowing north of a million dollars, yes, this will have an impact of 100 or $200, every single month. But if 100 or $200, makes or breaks you you shouldn’t be buying a $1.8 billion home. Okay, where are rates gonna go? So we know where we were, we know where we’re at. And this is the takeaway right now, for agents. The biggest increases are already here. Okay, we’ve seen the big run up. So for the rest of the year, on average, this is about where we’re going to be. Maybe it goes a little bit higher. But I’ll tell you right now, mark my words, we won’t see rates go up as much as they already have later this year. Okay, so we’ve seen almost a half a point increase for almost the entire year. Our prediction on the floor here is that rates are going to be in the threes and we don’t have a big risk that rates get to four, four and quarter, four and a half percent. But there is some fear. Buyers are seeing this right. And so what are we seeing right now DJ buyers flocking to the market to go buy something before rates do hit those numbers that other people are telling them about?
D.J. Paris 10:15 Sure. So what would you recommend to a an agent who has a buyer who said, wow, I’ve seen the rates go up half a half, you know, half a percentage in the last month? What should I be doing? You know, and again, you just sort of explained why that why that matters, but also keeping it in perspective of how much it matters. But what what should an agent be telling their buyers right now,
Joel Schaub 10:44 it should be confident and you should be educating them and you should not be selling fear. They are not just talking to one agent, we know this, a lot of times a buyer is talking to multiple agents. And those other agents are the ones that are hungry for a commission, and they’re pushing these buyers and saying You better hurry up because rates are gonna skyrocket. Don’t be that agent. Don’t be the person that’s so focused on getting a commission just lead with education and honesty, okay, rates aren’t going to spike up to four or 5%. So when the other agent is selling fear, and you can be the voice of reason and teach them and help them. Not only are you going to win the business, but you’re going to win repeat business. Okay. So a lot of people out there trying to sell fear. And that’s not the way we as a good agents want to go out and approach the business.
D.J. Paris 11:39 I’m curious too, because I’ve always heard that sales people should be reading what their clients read. And we know that that buyers aren’t probably going to mortgage news daily.com. They’re not that invested in lending rates. But they are seeing some of these stories, as you mentioned by the traditional big media outlets, you know, the CNBC is of the world. So how should an agent B, because there’s probably you know, there are listeners of ours who are hearing you talk about rates right now and are thinking, Gosh, I, I really didn’t even know rates went up. And and that’s a bit of a problem. Because if you’re an agent, you don’t need to know as much as Joel knows about about lending and where things are day to day. But you need to have a pretty good idea of what your clients know. So that you can of course provide, you know, a reasonable answer to a reasonable question, which is, Hey, I saw rates going up. Is there any news that sort of news services or just, you know, anything that you recommend, so that agents can just stay abreast of what’s going on in the lending world so that they’re not caught off guard? If a client asks them a question, and they’re like, Oh, I didn’t realize that was happening?
Joel Schaub 12:54 Well, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, do a weekly survey. And so these are the rates that are usually posted, they do say where the average 30 year fixed rate, excuse me where they’re at on a weekly basis. And those are on all the news outlets, right. But you mentioned a site. And if I’m an agent, right now, I’m taking this down, and it’s called mortgage News Daily. And it’s an insider publication that literally, without the sales pitches, explains right what’s going on to the fact in terms of on a day to day basis where the mortgage rates move to so this is, this is one of those things where there’s a reason why on a Monday, this week, I got nine signed contracts on one day on a Monday, early in January. buyers know this. If you’re getting ready to buy a home, buyers know where rates are at, and they’ve seen rates move up, and they’re afraid they’re gonna continue to move up. So I’m here to say for the entire year, we’re going to be at rates in the threes the biggest move up has already happened. It’s not when the Feds raise rates, that rates go up for mortgages. It’s the anticipation that they’re going to do it. And it’s well choreographed, nothing the Fed does is a surprise to the markets. They timed this. They put out briefings, they explained well in advance. And so that’s why this start of the year, we’ve seen rates move up consistently from the low threes or below to that mid three range. That’s where we’re going to be for the next six to nine months.
D.J. Paris 14:29 Yeah, I think that’s reasonable. So right now you just got an education, all of our listeners and viewers about what to say to your clients just you know, borrow some of Joe’s language there in and educate your customers before they find themselves at you know, CNBC or maybe they stumble across mortgage news daily.com And they asked you a question and you don’t want to be blindsided by that and I also want to put a feather in Joel’s cap. I didn’t mention this to Joel ahead of time, so it’d be a little bit of a surprise, but I was thinking about Gosh, if I were an agent, maybe what news sources would I read other than mortgage News Daily. And I thought, Oh, I don’t have to do that, because Joel and his team send a market update to and I don’t know who all is on your list if it’s just agents or who. But Joel sends out a concise email once a week, exactly about what’s going on in the mortgage world in the lending world. And I think that is a hallmark. By the way, it is the only newsletter, it’s not even a newsletter, Joel and his team put it together specifically, and they email it out. It’s the only one I receive. And a lot of because we have about 800 realtors that are at the company I work at here in Chicago, we get a lot of phone calls, especially to me, because I’m the marketing guy who’s from lenders going, I want to get in front of your agents. And none of them send me a month, a weekly market update our monthly market update or any market update, Joel and his team are the only ones that do that. And so I think that is another great way to find a loan officer in your area that can and will is wanting to help you in your business, because that gives me all the bullet points, I need to be able to then have conversations with clients. So really consider if you don’t have an elbow, a loan officer in your area that is able to provide that sort of assistance to maybe consider exploring, you know, other ellos to see who can provide that because I just remember Joel that you do that every week. And it is so valuable. I read it every time. In fact, I think you just sent it out yesterday. So it’s amazing. And something that really consider for all the agents out there going well, gosh, I don’t I don’t want to read mortgage News Daily, that’s really difficult, I got a million other things to do. It’s like fine Anello that’ll keep you in the loop.
Joel Schaub 16:46 Our team helps agents close more deals, we teach them, we educate them. And we give them those few talking points so that when they are up against another realtor in their market, they know what the hell’s going on. Okay, you don’t need to know everything, you don’t need to spend hours. So what we do on a weekly basis, is digested in real talking points so that you understand what’s going on. And I have agents all the time, say I actually print this out and I share it with all the agents in my office. Yep, I’m so happy that you do this. And those are one of the things that I love to see when somebody says they’ve gotten a new buyer under contract because of something our team helped with. So testimony right now, if you’re listening, you can make a note in a reminder, to email us just joel@rate.com it’s, it’s that easy. And simply say, add me to your list. You can unsubscribe at any time, but it’ll allow you to see what we’re doing for our agents. And maybe you’ll just get one more deal because of
D.J. Paris 17:50 it. Yeah, and it’s all about getting one more deal, right, always getting one more deal. And there are ways to do that. But you have to work smarter and efficient. And that’s where you need a good partner. And Joel has proven himself to everyone that I’ve ever referred to him as a buyer. He’s, he’s proven it to me as a client of his. And he is production speaks for itself. It doesn’t happen by accident, which is really the message of this entire show that we do here at keeping it real is that and basically everyone we’ve ever interviewed, while pretty much has always said to me privately, anybody could do this, if they just do the work. And they and they build partnerships with with you know, these ancillary partners, like a loan officer, like Joel. So it’s one of those things that this is we are hammering this message over and over again, is you need somebody like Joel in your life, if you’re an agent, you need somebody like him. And if it’s not him, find somebody just like him, who can help you educate your clients and who can help you more importantly, get that next transaction. So like Joel said, if you want to be on his mailing list, just reach out joel@rate.com. Also, Joel, if anyone out there is looking for an elbow that maybe they’re not getting the service they need from from the the loan officers in their immediate area, or they’re just want to see what else is out there. What’s What’s another way that they can reach you for your telephone number, for example?
Joel Schaub 19:21 Well, directly and this happens a lot DJ, we’ve done this for a couple of years now. And each week after the show, there are a dozen or more people that either reach out they say they’ve heard me and I schedule actual calls. So try me. Everyone thinks there’s probably like 10 of me but it’s just me and it’s just staying consistent and doing it and it’s 773-654-2049 that’ll get me direct and either all answer you’ll give a voicemail and we’ll return the phone call and set up a time to talk but you bring home a good point. If you’re a realtor out there right now that partnerships this year are going to matter. Okay. And it’s not just me, there are hundreds of really good loan officers that focus on education, okay. And there’s a lot of loan officers that focus on rates and being the cheapest, okay? We don’t want those, you don’t want to be the cheapest realtor out there. You want somebody that can teach and educate, that knows what they’re doing. And that wants to contribute money. So this is where it gets, I get all the loan officers hating me for this, and I love this, okay? If you’re a realtor right now, and you have all these lenders that kind of know you, and ask them to partner with you, ask them to put their money where their mouth is, and say, Hey, I’m doing an event coming up? Would you like to co sponsor it, and see which agents to which loan officers, I should say, if you’re an agent, want to spend the money to actually mark it with you? Those are the people that I send my clients to, if I’m a realtor, do I want to send it to the mortgage guy that calls me all the time asking, or the mortgage guy all the time that’s giving to find the people that want to give partner with those people, and you’ll get up to the numbers like I’m doing where every single month we’re closing 50 or 60 families, because we sit there and we’re finding ways to give back to the agents and those agents know it. And those are the agents that have seen a real value by partnering with a loan officer. So that’s my challenge to you, sorry, loan officers that want to be cheap out there. There are there are a lot of lenders that are going to be calling you now saying, Hey, do you want to sponsor something with me, and I love that DJ, let’s do it.
D.J. Paris 21:37 Yeah, and it’s it’s really everyone wins when you find someone to partner with who is wanting to grow your business, because of course, that’ll help grow their business. So everyone wins. And that’s the it’s the win win win. They call it the Win Win Win is what you’re searching for. And so with a with a loan officer that can take good care of you, you’ll hit that that triple win. So wins for you wins for the loan officer and of course, your client. So reach out to Joel he would be a great partner. I know he’s a great partner because I have seen it in action. And everyone here in Chicago knows Joel we have 40 some 1000 Real estate agents in the Chicagoland area. Probably most of them have heard of Joel and by the way, there’s 1000s of loan officers in Chicago. So Joel has gone out of his way to and he says this a lot on our show is givers get, he is a giver. He doesn’t have time to do these podcasts, quite honestly. But he’s very nice. And he finds time to do it. And as a result, his numbers keep going up. And not just because of our show, of course, it’s a very tiny part of what Joel does, it is entire life. It’s this little tiny percentage of the time, but his time is very valuable, and he still spends it with us to give. So we honor Joel for continuing to be on our show. We thank him on behalf of the audience. And on behalf of Joel and myself, we thank you, the listeners and the viewers for continuing to support our show. It’s now 2020 to another year of podcasts, our numbers keep growing Joel’s numbers keep growing. Hopefully everyone out there who’s listening. Their numbers keep growing as well. Keep listening to our show. Keep supporting us by telling another realtor or anyone else who could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Joel tell them about our show, send him over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed there, or just pull up a podcast app and make sure you’ve hit the subscribe button to our show. And also please leave us a review whatever sort of podcast platform you might be listening to us on whether it’s iTunes, Google Play Spotify, Pandora, oh, gosh, there’s so many leave us a review. Tell us what you like about the show and tell us what you don’t like we want to keep improving. So anyway, on behalf of everyone, Joel, thank you so much for being on the show yet again. You’ve been an amazing partner to us. We’re honored to have you. And so, so proud that you had another amazing year, no surprise to us with the amount that you give back. And we will see everybody on the next next episode. Thanks, Joel.
Joel Schaub 24:00 So literally before I go remember, if you’re an agent right now, the best thing we can do is just educate our clients that with this move up in rates. We’re okay. Okay. If you’re renting a home right now you’re paying a lot more in interest than where the interest rates are at. So this will help people get off the fence, lead with education. And this is going to be a big year. There’s a lot of opportunities. So thanks for having me on again.
How To Build Your Sphere When You Didn’t Grow Up There • Kirsten Evans
Jan 14, 2022
Kirsten Evans, Agent K, with Coldwell Banker Real Estate Group talks about the beginning of her career in real estate and how she grew her brand in the business. She attributes her success in changing her attitude and getting involved in the community and giving back. Kirsten also discusses the mistakes that agents make when getting started in the business and how you can avoid them. Kirsten also describes how she structures her day day in order to stay efficient. Last, Kirsten discusses how to set boundaries for yourself/clients in order not to burnout.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast paid by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Kyrsten Evans. Before we get to Kiersten couple of quick reminders, please tell a friend about our show. The best way you can thank us for enjoying this content is by telling other agents about keeping it real. And there’s couple ways to do that. You can of course send them right over to our website where they can listen to every episode we’ve ever done right from the browser, which is our website is keeping it real pod.com. And also leave us a review. Whether you’re listening on iTunes, Google Play Spotify, Pandora, anywhere you’re listening to this podcast, let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review. Tell us what you like. Also let us know what we can do to improve. And last if you have a guest that you want to hear interviewed and 2022 it could be you too. It doesn’t have to be someone else. But if there’s someone whether it’s you or another top producer in your market that you want to hear us talk to let us know you can just message us through our website or through Facebook. And you can also follow us right on facebook@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod But enough about all those announcements. Let’s get to the main event. In my interview with Kyrsten Evans.
Today on the show, we have produced an epic Coldwell Banker Real Estate Group in Bloomington, Illinois, which is, by the way very close to where I grew up about maybe 35 minutes away in Peoria, Illinois. This is very exciting for me because I feel like Kiersten and I have this connection. But it goes actually beyond where she lives now, because we’re actually born in the same town and well as well, which I’ll get to in a moment. But before we talk about me, let’s talk about Kyrsten. So she has been licensed for four years in Illinois. In addition, she worked as a real estate assistant for a real estate mogul for two years in the suburbs of Milwaukee while attending grad school. Now something no one knows about her is that she was adopted. She was born and raised in Arlington Heights me me as well. Not adopted but but born and raised in Arlington Heights. We probably were born at the same hospital and she was given us Yeah, we she was given a second chance at life overcoming many setbacks and obstacles. And she attributes this life event to her success and can do attitude every day. And her burning desire is to change people’s perception of the average real average realtor. She is known for giving fabled service that people believe is unheard of. And she tries to train change perspectives that Realtors don’t work hard and are not full time positions. Now her secret and key to success is very simple. She works hard. She is strong, direct, upfront and honest, she is not lucky. And I love that too. She is not lucky she is always seeking out and taking advantage of opportunities that come her way and working really, really hard by putting her client’s needs above her own. Now in addition to being a top producer, she was also a Coldwell Banker national 30 under 30 winner in 2020. And in 2019, she was she was given a as for her realtor association was called the mid Illinois realtor Association. She was KRISTIN I’m so sorry. I don’t have it in front of me. What was the award you won? It’s a Rising Star Award. Which makes perfect sense because of course she is. Which is why we have her on the show. My apologies for getting that wrong. So 2019 She’s the mid Illinois realtor Association rising star, but you can follow her and find her on the web, please visit her website, which is sell with K That’s the letter gay sell with k.com. Kirsten, thank you so much for being on the show.
Kirsten Evans 4:29 Thank you, I’m so excited to be here. Really excited to
D.J. Paris 4:33 talk to you. So when you and I were born in the same town, and then we ended up being sort of raised very, very close to one another. So I love that that you and I have a lot of sort of things that we know because of where we grew up. But I would love to start all the way at the beginning, which I know is not a long time ago for you. But you know, tell us sort of you know, you went to grad school. You know why? Why did you get into real estate? What was the impetus there and Then how did you get started?
Kirsten Evans 5:01 That’s a great question. So I went to school for clinical exercise science for my undergrad at Illinois State University. My dad had a heart attack Christmas Day, actually when I was in high school. So that was my mission in life was to help people. When I went to grad school, I needed to pay for it. So I got a job working for a real estate mogul Richard Newman. He built the vice president of Harley Davidsons house and was on the Parade of Homes. So that’s his claim to fame. In addition, yeah, he owned his own real estate brokerage. And he had investment properties all over the Milwaukee area. So since it was a private brokerage, I learned so much from him. Right off the bat, I was literally his executive assistant. So I learned a lot. I never thought I’d use any of the information since I was working in a cardiac field. But when I finished my undergrad, sorry, my stepsons coming home. So anyways, when I finished my undergrad, I was my masters back up, I moved back to Bloomington where I went to school and met my husband. And there was no jobs for me down here. And I wasn’t going to sell for like a $40,000 job. There was absolutely no way not with working that hard. So I’m with my real estate knowledge. I’m like, Screw it, I’m gonna get my real estate license and never looked back. I mean, most of the realtors I met in central Illinois, it was a by chance transaction, right? They went to school with someone it was a family member. Bloomington Normal, if you’ve never visited, it’s like the biggest smallest town you’ve ever seen in your life. And so everyone knows everybody. So being new, was it was really crazy.
D.J. Paris 6:48 Yeah, it makes sense, because I’m from Peoria. So I can absolutely relate to this idea that everyone knows everyone. And it is something that but you’re right. There’s so many realtors who get their license, because they have a few people in their life. That’ll probably use them because friends family, but they don’t really turn it into a full time business. Right? And yeah, and you can tell yes. And my
Kirsten Evans 7:13 mission was I can do better.
D.J. Paris 7:16 Yeah, well, let’s talk about how you got started. So. So yes, you did have a sphere of influence, or at least you had, you know, a good contact list from you know, where you grew up. But how did you start sort of letting people know that you now can help them buy sell rent, invest? What was sort of how did you get your name out there and sort of curious. So
Kirsten Evans 7:36 that’s a great question. And actually going back moving to Bloomington Normal. I didn’t have any family here. I just went to school here. And like, Oh, I’m
D.J. Paris 7:43 sorry. You’re right.
Kirsten Evans 7:45 So I only the only person I knew is my husband. And most of the people he knows weren’t moving or selling, right. And I was such a rookie, that they weren’t going to hire me.
D.J. Paris 7:54 And you know, this is really important too. Because like I’m from I’m from Peoria where I was raised, and I’m thinking it was me, and I don’t practice real estate myself. But if I did, and if I lived in Peoria, and I, and again, I know a lot of people that are because I grew up, I actually don’t know how easy it would be for me because a lot of the realtors in in those, you know, sort of midsize cities or even maybe they’re considered small cities now. You know, the people that are really dominant in the real estate industry have been dominant forever. They’re, you know, it’s like, oh, we know those, we know that the 10 realtors that that are just you know, kick kick, you know, killing it. I imagine Bloomington is absolutely the same way. So so it didn’t have
Kirsten Evans 8:35 the spirit paper intimidating. So literally my first year in real estate, I joined a team because I’m like, I don’t know people and they’re gonna feed me leads. They don’t. I sold two homes. And I figured out within four months that the team was just not for me. So I left I went over to Coldwell Banker. And the second year it was pretty much just my attitude. I changed my attitude. I started getting involved in the community. I went from selling two homes to 38 comps. My second year in real estate that’s,
D.J. Paris 9:03 that is incredible. Two homes. How did you how did you do it? So so it was it getting involved? Was that sort of the the big reason?
Kirsten Evans 9:13 Yeah, no, it was just getting involved in the community. So I joined Lions Club, my dad’s ally, and my grandpa was a lion. So that kind of helped just to give back. But they did tell me they’re like don’t join for business because we’re not giving it to you. Right? They have now but I also joined the Chamber of Commerce. So if you don’t know a lot of people, I think that’s a really great one to join. I was scared and intimidated because of all the realtors, but honestly, they’re not all there. Wanted to get into. We have something in town a chapter for BNI networking. So that’s for sure. Yeah. And that’s pretty much about it just started meeting people. And just being genuine and nice and doing the things I like to do and not just doing things to do things because you’ll waste your time. Yeah, and I
D.J. Paris 9:58 think it’s really important. So you talked about giving back. So all of the associations or organizations you just mentioned are philanthropic. And, and not only does that, of course, you know, give you a sense of pride and, and sort of, you know, just accomplishment and, and, and helping others, which of course, is wonderful for your own personal sort of satisfaction. But it also does demonstrate to other people that you’re willing to help. And I think, you know, that is it’s, I cannot tell you how many people we’ve interviewed on the show that have very similar story where maybe they didn’t have a large sphere of influence. It wasn’t like anyone handed them deals. So they didn’t know what else to do. So they were like, I better just get involved in your case. You’re also you’re part of the the Illinois Association as well.
Kirsten Evans 10:49 You’re serving on a state level, and I’m co chair of our PAC. Yeah, so get involved with your local association, too. I think that’s probably the smartest thing I did when I was a new agent. So I’m happy you brought that up. When you first joined, that’s how people are gonna know your name, and you send them an offer. Now I’m sure Chicago’s a little bit different, right with like, more people, but Bloomington Normal is still pretty big. And we have over 500 agents here. So the fact that when I send offers people know who I am, that’s what’s nice. Well,
D.J. Paris 11:19 it’s funny, you ask that like is Chicago. So we have about 46,000 agents here. But yeah, but which sounds like a lot, I guess it is a lot. But I will tell you to your point, I interviewed somebody from our from here in Chicago, who is very active in our local association. And he said that 30% of his business, and he did not get involved with the Association, so that he could get business because there’s probably no real direct way to get business there. But he just wanted to help. And he was part of the YPN, the Young Professionals Network. And he did some other things on other committees. And he told me that now 30, and he’s probably, let’s say three years in the business, he says 30% of his business now comes from other people who just happen to know that he’s involved, like his name got out there simply because he was part of the association. You know, the, the leadership and yeah, so I’m really, really applaud the fact that you do that, because number one, it’s just doing a lot of good work for all realtors. But also, it does get your name out there. And that was really, really, really smart.
Kirsten Evans 12:31 While you’re young and have the energy, I don’t want to be doing this. Like when I’m older. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 12:37 Well, let’s talk about mistakes. Because I know that you have some thoughts about what mistakes do agents make when they’re, you know, getting started? Or maybe they’re trying to get to the next level? And they’re just maybe they’re just getting in their own way. So what what do you see out there as mistakes that agents make?
Kirsten Evans 12:56 One wouldn’t be stopped learning. Like they get their real estate license, they don’t keep up with like, the market and trends. So yeah, never stop learning. Another one is you don’t have to spend gobs and gobs and gobs of money on advertising. I think the best advertisement that you have is yourself. And like I said, being part of those groups, I’m literally advertising myself every day. I also think Another mistake that people make is not getting involved in your association. I think that’s really played a key in getting my offers accepted and playing nice in the sandbox with other
D.J. Paris 13:35 people know people know you. Yeah, other agents know who you are. And they probably Oh, she’s the one who does all the different committee stuff. Yeah,
Kirsten Evans 13:43 right. I think another myth is I know, there’s great teams out there, don’t get me wrong, there’s, there’s not a problem with teams, I just joined a one. But the fact that leads are just gonna come to anyone that promises you that like run away,
D.J. Paris 13:57 run, run the other ways, really quickly. Either way, I
Kirsten Evans 14:00 think we’ve all been there. I don’t care how seasoned you are, if you hear that, you’re gonna get a bunch of leads. It sounds exciting, and I don’t think that ever pans out and I don’t think you should have to pay for business that you can easily get just by being out in the community and being yourself.
D.J. Paris 14:15 Yeah, I agree with that. It would be very, very difficult for a team or even a broker. I mean, brokerages are probably the worst at at promising things like leads, teams have now kind of, you know, started to do that, too. And, and it’s possible, I guess, but I mean, I’ve been here 11 years, and I’ve never met an agent that really got enough leads by joining a team or a brokerage. Again, it’s I guess it’s possible, but I’d like to see it. And and, and the reality of why that doesn’t work so well. Is is really, it’s a very simple reason. It’s that the vast majority of buyers and you already know this. I’m not speaking to you, but to our audience, but the vast majority who they probably know this already, too, but it’s a good reminder, the vast majority of buyers and sellers choose somebody they know I choose somebody they know is their agent. Yeah. And so they’re just, you know, if you’re buying Zillow leads, for example, if you can convert 5% of those leads, you’re a superstar. And that’s, you know, so out of 100 people, you’re going to only convert five, because they don’t really know like, or trust you at that point. And so, you know, when if you can work your sphere of influence and meet people, and you’re doing that through all you know, your BNI group, you guys are sharing referrals and doing all and by the way, we should, that’s a nice little plug for BNI rarely gets, it rarely gets brought up on our show. And and I do encourage for everyone that’s like, what is I think it’s called business networking. International. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. So so look for your local BNI chapter. And basically, how it works is they put you in with, you know, like a financial advisor or mortgage person or an attorney. And then you basically are just there to say, Hey, does anyone do you guys have clients that need help? And I know it’s more than that. But you meet in the mornings and, and you get to do that once a week, or whatever it is. Yeah. And it’s just a really great way to meet people and you know, start to talk to
Kirsten Evans 16:04 it right? When you start to that’s another thing. I know, people who are like, Oh, I joined BNI. And I can anything, I don’t think maybe I got like one lead my first year in BNI. Again, like Bloomington Normal, being a tight knit community, you can join a group, that doesn’t mean you’re just gonna get business from it. And honestly, there’s a few people might be in a group that I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know if I’d send them business. So people’s trust, that’s for sure.
D.J. Paris 16:28 Yeah, well, let’s talk. Okay, so those, those are a few mistakes people make not not getting involved not treating it like a real job. But the fact is, this is hard to sort of treat like a real job for a lot of people. Because, you know, like, I know, for me, I go into my office every day, because if I work from home, it doesn’t work that well, for me, structure or structure is important for me, and real estate’s really a business as a realtor that there isn’t always structure. And your days change, of course, all the time. I’m curious, how did you How do you think about structuring your day so that you stay like efficient?
Kirsten Evans 17:05 I don’t know if this is a good example. I don’t know if it’s gonna show up on here. But I color code the crap out of my calendar. I don’t know if anyone else does that. But
D.J. Paris 17:14 I love it. Yeah. So what are the what are those colors represent? Sure. So
Kirsten Evans 17:19 I have an email that my selling clients that’s like aging KSL with k.com. And then I have an email for like, at FBI with k.com. So that when I set appointments, I know what they’re for. There’s like very little taking time for me, which I could be better about that in the new year. That’s what colors up. I think it’s purple.
D.J. Paris 17:42 I don’t see that’s. So that right there tells you you need to take more time because I use purple for my own private stuff. Because you don’t take enough time for yourself. But you don’t
Kirsten Evans 17:55 have to follow my lead that way. I know people who time block out, you know, money making activities, which would be networking, you know, and so forth. But I think having a structured schedule, so you can look at it. And it’s not just a jar of hoopla. I think that would help you. Another way that I’m structured is keeping clients top of mind. I mean, how often have you not talked to a client, and then you see a house and you’re like, oh, this would be perfect for him. But you haven’t talked to him for six months? Or something like that?
D.J. Paris 18:23 Well, let’s, let’s talk. I want to pause out there because I think that’s a great, and maybe one of the biggest missed opportunities is staying in touch. And so So okay, so you see a house for somebody? How do you make sure that it hasn’t been six months? Or if it has been six months, since you’ve last talked to them? You’ve sort of dropped the ball on you know, staying in touch, you know, how do you reach rekindle that sort of, you know, connection,
Kirsten Evans 18:48 I’m gonna keep going back and preach to like all the new agents or people just starting out, or maybe starting up again, please don’t spend lots of money on software and things you don’t need for lead generation. The real estate mogul I worked for in Milwaukee, he had the system that I used to make fun of it was just pen and paper and a few different like pen colors that all met something. And so on my wall, I’d love to share it with you if you ever want to see it on my office, I have a hot and I have a warm sheet. And they’re literally just strips of paper that I made with timeline, all their information, what they look for, and I go through it on a weekly basis, my warm, I’ll probably go through like every two and a half weeks, but
D.J. Paris 19:29 you have a bit like that. I think that’s like there’s a Japanese word for that called Kanban where you’re seeing this visual sort of display of an
Kirsten Evans 19:40 end, nice little sheet of paper blank on the back so that I have them in my car. I have them in my office. I have them here in my home office, but you just put that baby out and then I add it with others and I go through it on a weekly basis.
D.J. Paris 19:56 Now what about if once the transaction closes So somebody buys or sells and yeah, then what do you do?
Kirsten Evans 20:04 I have an Excel sheet. Our company actually, it’s really nice. Everything’s set up there to where I can just export it. Just say that right? Okay. I don’t know why that standard funky. But anyways, I afford it and I go through everyone, I probably touch them about four times a year past clients. And the best way to do this is set up what your touch dates are going to be like in December, right? So the calendar, reach out Yeah, and the new year and just let them know that I’m here if they ever need help with a, you know what affiliate or contractor, one I did was a client appreciation party, which was super fun. They really liked that instead of like going out and dropping off gifts. Once you get to a certain amount of clients. You can’t you can’t do that. Don’t do that to yourself. So I had a client appreciation party where it was catered drinks are provided, it was really fun. And I did that by Thanksgiving, not by Christmas, since everyone has a Christmas. Yeah. Just curiosity letters on the market two other times a year and that’s it.
D.J. Paris 21:08 So newsletters twice a year client appreciation event, once a year or so. And then you’re calling them what quarterly? Or just checking in how’s everything going about you? What about like, anniversary dates for like the buyer. So
Kirsten Evans 21:24 that’s another that’s another good one. So with my Excel sheet I have the year and the month that they bought. So I just organized it by month and I write the cards out the beginning of the month and send them out.
D.J. Paris 21:36 I love that. And it’s it’s great because it really again, it’s a very low tech solution, right? Like what you’re doing. And there’s lots of great tech providers, and some of them are nice enough to sponsor our show. We love our partners, but I know a lot of top producers that literally use an Excel spreadsheet for everything. That’s their entire CRM,
Kirsten Evans 21:56 and don’t spend a ton of money until then you don’t need to spend a ton of money.
D.J. Paris 22:00 Yeah, and odds are you’re whoever you work for Coldwell Banker, of course, has amazing technology, because of how large they are. But odds are the I mean, I know, you know, we we have a moderately large firm here in Chicago, and the technology that we provide to our agents, they don’t use most of the doesn’t get used. So you. Yeah, so you probably don’t have to spend too much just make sure that, that six months don’t go by where you haven’t talked to somebody, especially somebody who’s looking but but it may be even more importantly, somebody who was a client in the past because, you know, I think I forget what the statistic is. But a good percentage of people forget their Realtors name after like, we’re
Kirsten Evans 22:45 so bad. It’s so bad. I think if you live by the motto like I do every day, you get up and work hard, you’re going to make an impact. You’re going to be sincere and just stay in touch with people be ethical and moral and you shouldn’t have any problems.
D.J. Paris 23:00 And also, the playing nice thing is really important too. And I think there’s a gender. There’s a gender conversation there. And I’m not the right person to have it because as a as a man, I can’t really relate to what is but I talked to so many women who are top producers, who are nice, lovely people, and they say You wouldn’t believe how the way other realtors speak to me. Oh, and I’m
Kirsten Evans 23:23 terrible. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. And I never want to be one of those people now.
D.J. Paris 23:29 Yeah, it’s and it’s not just men being mean to women, but it is one of those things where it’s like it is a cooperative Commission. It is cooperative. So we can all win
Kirsten Evans 23:39 here, please. Yes, please.
D.J. Paris 23:44 So it sounds like for you, if I’m hearing correctly, you just have processes for everything. So you wake up and you you know what you’re doing every day. And you know, when your day starts and what’s really cool about the color coding thing, because for those listening, you wouldn’t see but her calendar each day it has, you know, different events that are color coded. And the reason she does that as she knows, okay, I’ve got a buyer thing tomorrow, here’s my all my buyer stuff, here’s all my seller stuff. You know, I don’t know if rentals are big in Bloomington, but maybe some rentals or investment stuff. But she knows by looking at her calendar, how much time she’s putting into her business. And she knows that every one of her clients is going to get called a certain you know, amount of time per year and and it’s again you’re treating it like it’s an actual job because of course it is and but yeah, let’s um I would love to talk a little bit more about you know, you’re you’re in a community where there has to be agents. Look, you know, Bloomington Illinois is not a destination where people necessarily go you know, I’m when I grow up. I’m going to live there, right i right out of college, I lived in St. Louis, a much bigger city. Not too far from Bloomington. And people. People don’t do that in St. Louis either they don’t they don’t go. I mean, I happen to but I was, I mean, everyone else was born and raised there. And so you are in a really tough environment because you didn’t grow up in Bloomington. Everybody already knows the top Realtors in Bloomington by the time you’re there. And it’s not like it, there’s this huge influx of young people who are moving to Bloomington. So you know, you’re very modest about how you, you know how you grew your business. But you really had to work hard. Like I was saying, if I went back
Kirsten Evans 25:31 really hard. So that’s why I said earlier, the luck thing I don’t like when people tell me I’m lucky, I’m not lucky, I work really hard. A lot of people tell you that. But also, I think a lot of it’s your mindset, right? Like my first year, I think part of only selling two homes was my mindset was, I don’t know anybody you know, what I’m doing is real estate for me, like I didn’t really have a purpose. And honestly, that’s when I really didn’t have a plan, the moment I felt I had a purpose, and I was gonna get a plan in state, that’s when everything kind of took off, I could either stay here and say, I’m not from here, I’m never gonna get business, or I could use it to my advantage. Since it’s a small town, if you look at it on the opposite way, if everyone knows each other, they don’t want you to know their financial situation. Worse, or I feel like here everyone knows, like 1015 20 realtors. So to be like, that’s easy pick me, you don’t have to pick between, you know, your your other contacts in town. So I really just tried to focus on what I could control and how I could switch it to make it work in my favor.
D.J. Paris 26:38 I want to back up for a moment because you just said something really profound that would not have occurred to me, if I were in your position. When you started, which was talking about changing your mindset, you said two things that I think are really, really important, especially being in in a smaller community. Because you’re absolutely right. I have a friend who’s a financial advisor in Peoria, and he’s he’s one of the you know, I don’t know if he’s the biggest one there. But he’s certainly as a lot. And I bet even though of course, you know, he would never disclose anyone’s financial situation. There is something about oh, that’s my friend, or I don’t really maybe not me personally, but but I know that he runs into this where it’s like, maybe he was, you know, somebody who he’s known since he was five years old. They might not go in and I don’t you know, you’re right. So this idea of them going with somebody they don’t know, is, in some ways, maybe an easier proposition, because there’s no baggage associated with that. And so that’s really interesting. How did you? And then the so how did you come up with that? Did that just occur to you? Or did someone give you that sort of insight, because I’ve never heard anybody say that before. And I think that’s brilliant.
Kirsten Evans 27:53 No, I was just, I was sick of feeling like I was in a rut. Right. And I feel like when you get backed into a corner, you’re either gonna figure it out, or you’re not like, something that’s always been a pet peeve of mine, is when people complain and do nothing about it. Yeah. And then I literally found myself doing that. I was being a big hypocrite. And so I needed to change that I really did. And that’s when I had kind of my aha moment. I feel like everyone’s had one of those.
D.J. Paris 28:20 It’s a big aha moment. That is a huge one, because now all of a sudden, it’s an old. So there’s this old marketing. My background is in marketing. There’s this old bat marketing philosophy, which I think is still applicable today, which is said if you can’t fix it, feature it. And so that’s exactly what you just did. You couldn’t fix the fact that you didn’t grow up there. You’re not on every billboard in town when you’re first starting out. Everyone already knows all the top realtors and they’re all friends with each other. So you’re right there is like, oh god if I go with so and so then the other person is going to be upset. I know my parents. If they were buying or selling in Peoria, they know all the top Realtors they’re all friends with them your exact situation, they’d be like, Oh my god, somebody’s gonna get upset. And you know, I don’t know what they would end up choosing to do. But there is sort of a I love the idea that, hey, you know, you go with me. At least
Kirsten Evans 29:13 not forget real estate is sales. Sometimes I feel like people forget it’s sales, it’s cutthroat. So when you’re in that situation, like work it, like, show your value of why they should hire you and not someone that they just went to school with, you know, part of your job.
D.J. Paris 29:29 So let’s talk about that. So, so I think what you’re talking about is having some sort of presentation, whether it’s, you know, an actual PowerPoint slide, Slide thing or whether it’s just, hey, I’m talking to you one on one and I’m going to tell you everything I’m doing or you know, you have, you know, some other material you might be presenting, but how do you approach that so you’re going to meet with a buyer or seller, you you maybe they haven’t worked with you before, they already know all the other top Realtors in town who had been doing it 3040 years. So what do you do? that you think helps when you that business,
Kirsten Evans 30:02 I think the best thing that I’ve done was really getting to open houses. And just being in front of people, I think I’m pretty good on the phone. But in person, I feel like it can really capture us. Right? And it gives you a good practice to. I’ve even had people where they said, you know, they didn’t really want to tell you if they’re working with a realtor or not, you know, those types of people are open houses. And so when I opened the door, I made sure that I said, you know, hey, welcome, come on in. You know, if you could give me some feedback at the end, that’d be great. But I’m not going to be a helicopter agent. Right? And
D.J. Paris 30:38 right, nobody wants that you they were like,
Kirsten Evans 30:42 right. And so at the end, I would try, because they would actually come back to me, then I didn’t have to be like, Hey, can you fill this out, and they wanted to learn more. So I mean, just by that statement, take it, use it, whatever. But it draws people to you, because they don’t want to be sold. And then right there, I felt like you kind of captivated them. Like, every other agent who’s like
D.J. Paris 31:07 most people do not want to be sold, there’s a small percentage that do but that’s a small percentage. And I’ll tell you the win. Sometimes, we have a lot of agents in our firm. And my job is to recruit agents. And so I talked to agents who are at other firms all day long. And the first thing I say, exactly is what you were talking about, as I say, I’m not going to try to persuade you to join us, I mean, I’m just want to tell you everything about our firm, because you’re an adult, you’ll be able to figure out if we’re the right fit for you. But you can hear it in their voice. When I say, Look, I’m legitimately not going to try to persuade you, but I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. And I’ll I hopefully, you know, give you all the info and you can make the right decision for yourself. And you can hear this audible like, Oh, thank God, you know, because people don’t like it’s like when you go into a retail store, and the salesperson comes running over and you’re like, I don’t even know what I want yet. And they’re very nice. But you’re like, just get away from me for a while. That’s the same thing with open houses. And for people that think open houses don’t work? Well. So do like what, what? So they don’t necessarily work to sell the home, although I guess it could happen. But they’re wonderful opportunities to meet other buyers. Do you? Did you? And do you continue to literally how
Kirsten Evans 32:23 I got started. Just that one year when I wanted to act more on purpose. Even if no one came to the open house or a couple of those? I’m sure we’ve all been there. Sure. I wanted to start getting in the houses and learning something that I didn’t mention earlier, as you know, with the non helicopter agent, at the end, I’d say something like, direct the conversation. So it’s not a question, right? And so I’d say look, I don’t know if you’re working with an agent or not. But here’s what I have to offer you boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I just Yeah. And that’s it, because then I’m not asking yes or no. So they kind of don’t want to know. So I’m just like, look, I don’t know if you’re working with an agent or not. But here’s the services, I can provide, you know, call me if I can do anything. And then you don’t know,
D.J. Paris 33:08 I used to work with a finance. I used to be a financial advisor a million years ago, and one of the top financial advisors in our office used to say, if you have to ask for the business, you’re doing it wrong. And so Kristin Kyrsten really just said essentially the same thing, which is, if you ask somebody a yes or no question number one, you probably may or may not want to hear the answer to they might not want to give you the answer because you’re not putting them on the spot. And it’s like they just came in to look at a house, right? And so but you can say, hey, so you what you just said was so elegant. Can you say that again? So I don’t know, if you’re working with an agent? Could you repeat that?
Kirsten Evans 33:45 Like no, oh my God, who actually say, I say, Look, I don’t know if you’re working with an agent or not insert value proposition. You know, here’s my card, call me if you need anything.
D.J. Paris 33:54 Yeah, it’s, it’s and again, people will relax. They won’t feel like they’re being sold because they’re not. And you are trying to provide value to them. And it’s it’s huge. It’s so huge. But what you just said was was so like this idea of don’t ask questions before you need to I guess at some point, you’ll have to ask why.
Kirsten Evans 34:17 I’m happy to share all this stuff, by the way is because when I first started, I felt like nobody wanted to share information. It was like they had a mind of scarcity. If I share something with you, then you’re gonna take it and be more successful than me. It was horrible. And so I feel like now that I’ve gotten to a spot in real estate, it’s my duty to give back and help people have a good start. Because if I would have been around different people who could help me change some of my mindset and what I was doing wrong, I think I would have sold more than two houses my first year easily.
D.J. Paris 34:51 That’s a really, really good point. And
Kirsten Evans 34:55 go around. We don’t have so much. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 34:58 I used to I’m the same firm, where it’s all about financial advisor, there was another guy who was the top guy in the office, and he would say, I’m going to tell we were all like 2022 23 years old, he wants me to tell you exactly what I do every day. And you can do that. And you can have the same success I have, none of you are going to do it. But I’m gonna tell you everything. Yeah, and he was right. None of us did all the work that he was willing to do. We didn’t have the success that he had. But he was it again, even if you’re in a super, super small community, there is plenty of business because there’s a number of people that are going, you know, with a discount broker, or maybe they’re going there for sale by owner. And that’s doesn’t work for most people. And so there even if it’s not, you know, you, you just have to get creative, and
Kirsten Evans 35:48 personalities, right. Like, I’m a person, like, that’s just who I am. I love when I have clients who are those two, so you can’t win them all. And you’re not going to we could give the same pitch. And it’s going to have a different delivery. If you’re being sincere with your personality, like my dad’s an electrical engineer, and he’s like, I don’t even know if he could sell me on it. You know? And yeah, you know, and there’s literally a place for everybody in this industry, for sure.
D.J. Paris 36:16 Let’s talk about because you are so incredibly busy. I was asking Kirsten before, if she went to the NAR conference, and because she’s so involved in the community, or in the real estate industry. And she goes, Oh, my gosh, I don’t have time. So I am curious, which I definitely can feel for you there. I’m curious on what what you are doing to set boundaries for yourself or for your clients. So that you you do you aren’t going to burn out and I’m not suggesting you are going to burn out. But for our listeners who might feel like oh my god, I’m responding to at 12am taxed for from one of my clients, you know, I can’t seem to escape it, you know how to use try to maintain that balance?
Kirsten Evans 36:55 That’s a great question. So my rule for last year was that if I sense like a little bit of Crazy, right? Obviously, we have to do our due diligence, and there’s ethics involved with real estate, and you have to help people. But when they’re also not respecting you, as a realtor, as a person, it’s time to just be smart about it, why not refer them to an agent who’s new and has like nothing to do, I’d get a 25% referral fee, you know, or just, what I would do to protect yourself is I have a buyer console and a seller console, and I let them know the services that I provide the times that I’m available, which for the most part, I’m pretty amicable about it. And the minute they don’t respect that, I’d be like, Look, remember when we talked about this, and if they’re not going to respect it, like let them go. So I’d rather be making no money sitting on my couch hanging out with my dog than being like in a vicious cycle with someone that’s like going nowhere, who doesn’t respect me? Like that? Yeah, time for that, like, go read a real estate book on how to be successful? Like, I can think of no, it’s nothing to do.
D.J. Paris 38:01 It’s funny, because you just said something really profound. And I want to make sure the audience heard it, which was she tells her clients, here’s what I’m available, here are the services I provide. Here’s what I’m available. And that is so smart, because she is setting the correct
Kirsten Evans 38:18 expectation. Yes. My favorite one, I had a lady real quick. One of the services when I go on a listing appointment, I let him know, flat out open house probably isn’t going to sell your house, right? Like we do want to show that we’re motivated. So we always do an open house when we list it. And if we do a price drop, otherwise, I’m not going to keep kicking you out or house or an open house. And I have an initial it at the bottom. And she was like, Well, why aren’t you here doing it open house blah. I was like, hey, remember that she from our initial conversation that we spoke about? I mean, all this stuff protects you shows your professional and keeps your people in line. So if you’re ever at a point in a transaction, where they’re asking a lot of questions, you might want to turn around and ask yourself, like, Did I not do a good job of setting the expectations? Because I feel like if you set them, you’re not going to run into a lot of those headaches later.
D.J. Paris 39:10 Yeah, it’s so gosh, it’s so important. And having people sign off on the expectations is is a great idea. Because it again, it’s not to rub it in their face when they need something and you’re like it’s outside of it. I’m just not going to do it. It’s more about just reminding them, you know, here’s what I do. Here’s what I can do. I don’t want to disappoint you. And so I want to make sure that you understand this is what I’m capable of doing. And
Kirsten Evans 39:38 on your listing appointment, they’re going to be so impressed with you not even just impressed. So you have a plan.
D.J. Paris 39:45 You have a plan and also you’re dispelling myths you’re saying here’s the deal with open houses. Really what they’re great for is for me to get more leads to sell more homes to people and maybe we’d get lucky and somebody might buy this property actually just about it
Kirsten Evans 39:59 shows that it no Have a few as a seller, because then you can still do them and they don’t seem off.
D.J. Paris 40:04 Yes, I was I was saying it in a way that you shouldn’t say, but but the point is, is that you should be explaining to people, Hey, if you’re meeting with other agents, and they’re promising, you know, they’re going to do an open house every Sunday. That’s great. And I respect that. But the reality of it is, is there’s probably a less than 1% chance that we’re going to sell a home that your home that way, we do want to show the community that we’re engaged, like you were saying, we want to we want to do these, but we want to make sure the expectation is set correctly. And I love it. I love it just you have processes for everything. And I could see do you anticipate in the future like building a team? I could see you doing that? I don’t know if that’s what you want to do or not. But I’m just curious what’s next for
Kirsten Evans 40:46 you? Maybe one, I’d love to just write a book on how to motivate people, I think coming from my adoption, we all come from different experiences, um, either write a book or do some mentoring. And I just I love that sincerely. Yeah. And it really does line with what I went to school for, like, I’m not helping people with their hearts, I’m helping them with their home. So I do have that sense of altruism, right, naturally. But yeah, I mean, just being sincere.
D.J. Paris 41:15 And I didn’t really get into to giving back until maybe 15 years ago in my life. And I’m just curious, this is not a real estate necessarily related question. But I can honestly say that that was a significant shift for me, was realizing how much joy I would receive
Kirsten Evans 41:37 from so good, it feels so good. It is the
D.J. Paris 41:40 surest way to increase that I found it to increase one’s self esteem. By just going you know, I’m not gonna make it about me right now, for the next hour, I’m gonna go help next, or I’m gonna go serve on this committee or, you know, whatever it might be. And so even if it doesn’t give you business, because in my, in my instance, all the things I’m with have nothing to do with real estate. So they don’t help you know, my business. But boy, they help they make me feel good about myself, and, and if nothing else that is worth doing. Even Yes, helping other people is really the goal, but you are gonna feel so incredibly good. And odds are it probably will help your business. Oh, yeah, you’re totally right. Well, Kristen, Kristen, this was an awesome conversation. I know how busy you are. So I want everybody to check out Pearson’s website. And by the way, reach out to Kyrsten. Tell her, she is so nice and sweet and generous. But visit her website, which is sell with k.com. It’s a great brand. By the way, I was telling Pearson ahead of time. What a great brand I love that sell with Kay, that’s an easy,
Kirsten Evans 42:46 first name. And for anyone wondering, yes, it’s here like beer. So yeah, Kirstie did that. And if I can help you in any way, send me an inquiry, and I’d love to connect.
D.J. Paris 42:56 And by the way, you know, she has lots of clients that are that retire and move away. And so, you know, if you wanted to, you know, work with her on some of those referrals. She’s not licensed in every state. So that’s another great reason to reach out.
Kirsten Evans 43:12 Again, yeah, I actually send a lot of referrals out, especially having StateFarm here, too, and referrals coming in. So yes, I’d love to collaborate and pay a referral fee as well. And I apologize towards the beginning when I got lost in my words and translation. It was like dragging the recycling bin. And it was really loud and slammed. Well, I have about that towards the end,
D.J. Paris 43:36 no, nothing, nothing to apologize for. You did great. And we are just so thrilled to have you on our show. And we’ll love to have you back in the
Kirsten Evans 43:44 future as well. I’d love to do this again, so much fun. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
D.J. Paris 43:49 Oh, you’re so welcome. So on behalf of our audience, you want to thank Kyrsten for being just an amazing younger agent. Although it’s so funny you don’t seem young in the way you’re presenting yourself which is even more impressive. Because just how incredibly professional you are. So really, really impressed with with her everyone should be following Kiersten check her out at cell with k.com and by the way, if you live in the Bloomington Normal area in central Illinois, essentially. And if you are looking to work with one of the top Realtors in the area, I know that’s how I would choose. So you know for for everyone out there who might be listening who’s looking for an agent, reach out to Kiersten she’d love the opportunity to earn your business. And on behalf of Kiersten and myself, we want to say thank you to our audience, because you guys are the reason we can keep doing these shows. So thank you, thank you for continuing to listen and the best way that everyone listening can help support us is to tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Kiersten send them a link to our podcast. The best way to do that just sending to our website which is keeping it real pod.com Or if they’re already a podcast kind of person. They just have them pull up a podcast app on their phone and searched for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button and Oh and one last thing. If you are listening on iTunes or Spotify or Pandora or any of the other places you might be listening to this podcast. Leave us a review let us know what you think of the show that helps us improve and also tells us what you like. So anyway, Kiersten thank you so much. We are honored to have you I love talking to young superstar agents because you just yourself You guys are so full of energy and you’re just crushing it. And you know, your mission about wanting the public to see professional, responsible Realtors is obviously coming through for you and I love that so keep up the great work and Kiersten is going to keep also volunteering and possibly even wanting to be in leadership for the state of Illinois with wheelchair stuff. So we are excited to watch and your continued growth there. So thank you so much for being on our show.
Kirsten Evans 45:55 Thank you have a blessed new year everyone.
How To Blow Up 2022 With Digital Domination • Krista Mashore
Jan 13, 2022
Krista Mashore with Krista Mashore Coaching talks about the beginning of her career in real estate. She emphasizes the importance of following your competitors and investing in yourself in order to stand out. Next, Krista talks extensively about videos and how she uses videos to explain statistics to her clients. Krista also describes how agents can use video to build and grow their business. Last, Krista discusses how to build relationships using videos.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet. Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with top producer, author and coach Krista mature. But before we get to Krista, just a couple of quick announcements. Number one, please tell a friend about our show. The best way you can help us continue to grow is by telling other agents about what we do here. So easiest way to do that. Tell them about our podcast and have them go to our website, keeping it real pod.com where they can sample and listen to every episode we’ve ever done right from their browser, or if they’re a podcast listener have searched for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And also, please leave us a review. Whether you’re listening on iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Anywhere, feel free to leave us a review. Let us know what you like about the show and what you feel that we could improve that really helps us. And as always, thank you for continuing to listen and support us. We appreciate it. We’re so excited to continue to provide these to you in 2022. We have more episodes that were ever we’ve ever done before that we’re doing this year and we have some big announcements that are coming so please stay tuned. But enough about that. Let’s get on to our interview with Christina shore.
Today on the show we have Christina shore from Christina short coaching. Let me tell you about Kristin now Chris has been in the top 1% of Realtors nationwide for 20 years selling over 2300 homes. She is also in the top 1% of coaches nationwide. Now Christina is the author of four best selling books and focusing on digital marketing and was named Yahoo. finance’s number one digital marketer to watch in 2021 and she has been featured in Forbes Inman News, The Wall Street Journal NBC Fox and many more Krystal recently went from zero to $30 million in just under four years. Now Krista has a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. She’s always been a teacher at heart and loves serving people and has turned her attention to sharing the secrets of her successes by coaching agents and professionals across the country through through her coaching teaching, speaking and training Krista is revolutionizing the way agents and professionals market themselves online. She offers an innovative step by step approach on how agents and entrepreneurs can gain a massive digital footprint. She is also the host of the podcast fired up where she discusses digital marketing strategies to help you dominate your industry. Her podcast is available anywhere podcasts are serving and it is called Fire fired up with Krista mature we will have a link to that in the podcast notes. Also, please visit her website we have a special link just for keeping it real podcast listeners which is Christa mature I’m going to spell that for you. That’s K R I S TA mature is M A S H O R E So Christina shore.com forward slash bootcamp podcast so Krista short.com forward slash boot camp podcast. Krista Welcome to the show.
Krista Mashore 4:02 Oh my God I need to lower that. That is the way too long of an intro I was like
D.J. Paris 4:07 hey, you know what you’ve done a lot and we are so excited. I was just joking with crystal earlier I said this is a going to be a light lifting day for me as the host because Krista host is hosting her own show and also coaches agents. So this is a perfect, perfect fit for us in this is. I don’t know when this will be released. But this is we are recording. Krista and I are both recording our very first podcast of 2020. Do we are very excited about that. So Krista, again, thank you for being our first guest for the New Year, which we greatly appreciate. But tell us a little bit I always like to start at the very beginning because I always think our audience loves to hear someone’s origin story. So you tell us about how you got into real estate when what that was like and then eventually the shift to coaching which is so perfect for what we do here. So tell us about
Krista Mashore 4:58 it. DJ, thank you so much. We’re having me and congratulations on your podcasts being like in the top 20 of podcasts, Apple, which is freaking awesome shows. I mean, that’s hard to do less, I think.
D.J. Paris 5:10 Yeah, thank you for saying our silly little show gets gets get some listeners we appreciate it by the way, just as a quick plug for myself since I never do this, please leave us a review in iTunes or whatever pod and do it for, for Krista to again her podcast is fired up you go subscribe to it right now. And make sure to leave us both the review it really really helps us reach more people and also tells us what you like and what you don’t like about the show. And that helps us improve. So anyway, Krista, I was stealing your thunder. So back to you.
Krista Mashore 5:37 No, no, you’re great. Okay, so I got into real estate, I used to be a teacher. And I taught third grade for six years, and my daughter got really sick. And so I’m like really, really sick, they told me she was probably going to die. Of course she didn’t she’s she’s 20 Now, but she got sick, and she got spinal meningitis and had kidney failure and strokes and all these things. And so I left teaching to be to be a stay at home mom, because they told me that she probably was gonna have a lot of developmental problems. And so I thought, well, I need to be home. So I left teaching to be a stay at home mom and then I thought I’ll just play real estate at the same time. And, um, but what happened was my I found out really quickly that my husband at the time was having an affair, so I had to like jump into real estate. So I sold 69 houses my first year, in real estate,
D.J. Paris 6:22 well, let’s I’m just gonna let that sink in for everyone listening. Crystal just will repeat it just in case it slid right by you. Krista sold 69 homes in her first year and and I will just quantify that by saying we have about 800 agents in our company. Now one person has ever done that at our company in their first year. That is and everyone listening is in shock and awe. So we will get back to that. But I just wanted to pause because that is an incredible achievement that probably less than 1/10 of 1% of new agents do in their first year. So congratulations. Just in that alone.
Krista Mashore 6:55 I thank you when you know when your back is behind a wall, anything is possible. I was talking about anything’s possible. Like when you have to do like we had just bought a new house. And all of a sudden my videos were drained. And we had a new home. I love my job. And I was like, Oh crap, I gotta make this work. So I just jumped all in and you know, not look amazing. Two years later, here I am.
D.J. Paris 7:12 It’s amazing. Yeah. So I’m sorry, before I move forward, just because I’m so interested in this. And again, I know this is 20 years ago, and people will say, well, things are different. And maybe things were a little different. But how did you actually start that? You know, how did you find those clients? And I apologize for breaking your momentum here. But I’m now I’m so interested in how you did this.
Krista Mashore 7:34 It’s so funny on party doesn’t remember. I know that sounds crazy. I’m like, How did I do it? I I will say one thing that I that I did do early on in real estate. And that was I was studying what my competitors were doing. And I tried to always do things completely differently or better. So like, for example, back when people were you were doing, you know, one page black and white flyers back, you know, I would do four page color brochures and take like the CD and put the CD on the sign with like 50 pictures on the sign. Smart Things like that. I remember I marketed myself I was on the buses. I marketed myself I invested in myself, right? I marketed myself on TV commercials back in the day at the movie theater, I did ads, so I just tried to like what other people weren’t willing to do I did it just you know, completely and that’s how I approach real estate. Now I approach everything I try to make sure that anything that I do, I’m doing things differently and more innovative and standing out. And it’s so important because like agents are I mean not to be rude but there are commodity they’re a dime a dozen everybody knows. Like, I mean, it’s you know, what’s the craziest thing is it takes 135 hours for real estate agent to get their pre licensing in California, but it takes 1600 hours feature cosmetology license and 600 hours get your esthetician license but a realtor and most important thing 135 hours that’s crazy, you know that is crazy. So um I just you know I like to be different and so if I can give any advice to a new agent or anyone listening in that is is to an you should know your competition you should be looking at their websites looking at the ads they run seeing what they’re doing, looking at their marketing and seeing where the gaps are, how can you improve upon what they’re doing? How can you how can you make what they’re doing even better? How can you really really truly have your unique selling proposition your value add what makes you different? And if you can’t answer that question, you are a commodity you are replaceable and the only thing you have to differentiate yourself as priced right which means you’re going to constantly be lowering your price leaving your commission and I want to encourage you not to do that but increase your value right increase your level of perceived value.
D.J. Paris 9:40 Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna just break in with with I could not agree more with you and I understand there are instances where people feel that they should discount their fee to you know, when a particular deal and fine if you want to do that. I guess that’s okay. But if you’re able to, you should know why you charge what you charge and you should be able to defend that. And it should be pretty good. Because if it’s done correctly, fees really shouldn’t play into it most of the time. If you’re able to have that conversation and be able to say, I want to, you know, and if it was me, if I was a practicing agent, it might almost it maybe I wouldn’t do this as much with buyers. But on the seller side, I would sit down and say, I want to talk about fees before it even ever comes up. Or, you know, at some point during the conversation, I would say, now, it’s the point where I talk about what I charge, why I charge it and how it benefits you. And and if you don’t, if you aren’t doing that, I know if I was a seller, I’d be thinking the whole time, what is this going to cost me? What is somebody else down the street do it for and so that’s just my little my little two cents there. But I could not agree with you more that you should not discount your fees simply because Redfin charges, you know, 1% to a seller or buyer or, you know, how are some of these discount places work, you don’t have to do that if you have incredible value that you’re providing.
Krista Mashore 11:00 So true. And unfortunately, most agents are never taught how to how to provide value, right? They’re told to do open houses into door knock and cold call and put it in the MLS and do brokers tour. And so what we do is we go in there and tell people why broke worker stores don’t work and why open houses are ineffective and completely like what everyone else is saying. We’re saying the exact opposite and why you shouldn’t do it. I’ll give you an example. today. I just got done recording a video. So before the year ended, I did 2022 market forecasts, right, we did like six video series like talk going over the market in 2021, explaining what our forecast is going to be. Yesterday, I spent literally eight hours. I know it sounds like a lot. But I spent eight hours because I wanted this video to be really good where I I analyzed the numbers of like the 2021 listings and I compared so the question was, does hiring a discount or flat fee broker make a difference? Does proper marketing and make a difference? And then I showed like all the numbers and let me tell you, it’s gonna be about an eight minute video, which I know seems like a lot. But I can show that okay, in one city, in this price range, right from homes that are all single family homes in Brentwood, in 2021, that had lot sizes under an acre. And I explained why I didn’t include an acre because that’s like, you know, changes the numbers of add that we were able to sell our home our homes an average of anywhere from 14 to 22%. Higher on like every like our $166,000 or more. It wasn’t we just didn’t sell one home. Like we sold 29 homes in that city. 20 of them were in those parameters. And then we compare the same parameters to everybody else and what their stats were. And then we showed who it was. And then we compare a discount brokers. Here’s a broker, right? They say their one percenter or flat fee. And by using the one percenter you are losing $122,000. So yes, it makes a difference of who you hire. So now when I talked to me, before I go on a listing appointment, we always we said I this whole process that I do, which we get every listing, but we send a 17 minute pre listing marketing video. Now we’re going to add that video to it as well and say, Hey, if you want to see why, you know what this what I just showed you what it makes a difference in your money. Watch this next video. And so it’s like doing the selling for me, I get there, all I have to do is they’re like, We don’t care Christina about commission like we want you where do we sign I’ve already won before I arrived. Does it make sense?
D.J. Paris 13:20 It, it makes perfect sense. And I want to I want to break that down a little bit. Because you just said a lot and a lot of all really really awesome things that many of the guests that we’ve had on the show have not talked about. So I’m going to just go back a moment. And Chris, we Chris and I were talking about objections, right? We’re talking about the idea that you know, what you charge might come up as a sticking point. Well, one of the really brilliant ways, Krista even. So I said, Well, you should sit down and talk to people and explain it. And yes, you should definitely have that ready, Krista goes one step further and says, I don’t even want that to get to that point. I want to go over that ahead of time. And I want to use data and actual research, not just charisma, and hey, I’m a cool, nice guy. And you’re going to want to give me more because you like me. Of course that would be great too. But this idea of we’re going to take a look at all of the discount brokers in the area. And we’re going to see what their average price point was in my particular community. And by the way, this is such a brilliant strategy because she said at the very beginning Christmas said something really important, know your competition. And it’s not just in advertising and in the digital marketing, it’s also in presentation. And this is a great way because if you do charge, you know maybe he charged 7% to your listeners or whatever fee you want to charge or maybe it’s more or less but you can pre you can already pre clear those hurdles that might be coming up by sending them information of some say hey, watch this video. Now whether they watch or not, of course you don’t really know but but eventually you
Krista Mashore 14:51 do we track it and let me tell you, everybody watches the video and you know why? Because it’s their most valued asset and I say Hey, promise You’re gonna watch the video because it’s really important is your most valued assets. So I have your commitment, you’re gonna watch a video yes, Christian, watch the video. I’m not kidding you, did you? If I go on 100 listing appointments, and I have 98 of them watch the video like they all watched it, I can track it to see that they haven’t they watch it and, and so the thing is, is that and this whole video is I mean, imagine a 17 minute long video where you’re like, Okay, this is why you don’t do open houses because Korea, the National Association of Realtors, less than 3% of homes sold with an open house. However 67% of buyers will walk through a home that they see online according to Nar. So look at these numbers, see these 10 homes I just sold this one had 600 hours of watch time this one had 13,000 You know, comments, this one had, you know, 186,000 people that reach and I show them over and over again, all these stats about why they want to utilize s to market their homes. And I explained the whole marketing process and what makes us different. And you know, they’re being told to do this, but why that’s wrong. I’m being so prolific and people are like, I didn’t want to do an open house anyways, because they suck I’m like, and it’s dangerous. And they’re like, Thank you for being honest. And like we all know that broker store doesn’t work for the, for the seller, it works for the broker, because you’re you’re calling your friend saying please show up to the house like, can you show up? Remember, we all know that they know it too. But they especially if they meet with an agent that’s really, really honest about it. But they can, again, through data and facts show show not tell why why it’s important. Commission does not come up people like that’s all you charge. I’m like, yeah, here you go, it doesn’t even come on.
D.J. Paris 16:31 And this idea of the open house, I don’t want to spend too much time on it. But I do just want to make a quick point, because Kristen just said something really important about open houses, you can explain in maybe your explainer video, which we’re talking about creating some explainer videos before you get to the listing presentation, or a buyer presentation, I guess. But you could also talk about what an open house really does. And what it really does is it makes the seller think the agents doing something. And the other thing does is it was a great possible great lead source for that agent to sell other homes, to the people that walk in because nobody buys a very few people ever buy a home through through an open house. So just explaining that alone, most of the competition is not going to explain that they’re gonna say we’re going to do open houses, it’s going to be great. And you’re gonna say, you know, we can do that for you. But here’s why it’s not that important for you that we do an open house. And I guess if somebody says we really want you to do one, you can probably figure out a way to do it. But you this is not going to help you sell the home. And here’s why. I mean, think about it. You’re dispelling myths, you’re you’re you’re overcoming objections before they even come up. Brilliant. Absolutely. You’re
Krista Mashore 17:39 telling the truth, like you’re telling the truth. Yeah. And I’d love to show you like, just if we have time, like two and a half minutes of the 17 minute long video, because I know, it’ll blow your mind number one, but you’ll be like, holy crap, I totally get it. And now imagine, so if we have time, I can share my screen, and I’ll show it to you. But it just gives people an example. So the more that you can position yourself is different, right? And my coach always used to tell me, Kristin be as prolific as possible, right? If everyone else is saying do open houses, you say don’t do open houses, everyone else is saying, like you’re you have got to like, and that’s the truth. And people they know it. They’re smart, they understand that the reason why most agents aren’t doing these things they have not been taught and they’re not investing in it. So it’s just fun, like, you know, so what we do is we use video to get our community to get to know us to like us and trust us. But the key is we properly distribute the video. So if you’re creating video content, and here’s the thing about video content, is that when you create video content, number one, as long as people are seeing it, but you need to properly do it. And we teach people how to do that. But then what’s happening is your community is getting to know you, you’re positioning yourself as the expert, you’re you’re showing that you’re the authority, you’re breaking down their barriers, they’re developing a relationship with you, it’s actually called a parasocial relationship, which means that people like TV character, you know, you like cheer for them, you cry for them, you yell for them. It’s the same thing that happens with with video with with people. And so now when I walk into the door, they already feel like they know me, right? And so the more the more that I could break down their barriers and let them see that I am the expert. I’m winning before I arrive, I have my conversions just increase. So so so high, right? Yeah, um, and it’s like it’s, you know, research shows that you work with someone that you know, like and trust. So I’ve already I’ve already you know, we help with that. So we take the videos, we figure out what’s happening in the market, like what problems are happening, and how we can become the solution. So remember, in order for you to be considered a solution, you must be solving a problem. So what problems are people having, then we create content around that we target people through social media on Facebook, and then we can retarget people and retarget people which means so like DJ, if I write a video on selling and like five secrets when selling your house, or you know three reasons why homes don’t sell or the five biggest mistakes sellers make when selling if I can not if we can see people are watching this video then we target more information. About selling right? So now we’re bringing them down a funnel. And then at the end, it’s like, Hey, would you like a market analysis of your home? So that one strategy, people raising their hand and saying yes, so like a market analysis, we closed way more than this, but 48 transactions resulting in seven or $40,000 of commissions just from doing that. And but here’s the key, because we know that they’re thinking about selling. So now that I know that they’ve watched these videos about selling, they’re raising their hand asking for a market analysis. So here’s what we do, which is crazy. Now, I have in hand deliver the the market analysis as well as email it, we do if we knock on the door? If they don’t answer we do a little bomb on video and say, hey, check your check your porch I just dropped off at market analysis Mart. Yeah. And oh, by the way, we also did a customized video review of a market analysis for you. So check your email. So we actually go and do we do a video analysis on Zoom like this share our screen, I drop off a book that I wrote called savvy seller, along with my marketing plan. And then I direct them to the 17 Minute marketing video. They see all of that just because they requested and people are like you you do all that stuff. Well, yeah, I got 48 transactions from it that resulted in 740 plus $1,000. Because I know they’re interested in selling, okay. Now at this point, if they’re interviewing other people, no one else sent a marketing video, no one else did a marketing plan. Nobody else wrote a book. Nobody else sent them to their seller funnel with 15 videos on it. And all those things also are getting now. I’m digitally sent to them. And then I’m now also retargeting them testimonial videos from past clients and showing them marketing like how I market my properties and targeting them that. And I’m also now sending them more videos about my community, more videos about education about real estate. So now it’s like, there’s this Omni presence that I remember because I am and I’m doing what no one else is doing. So this is the kind of thing that if agents can do, this is how you take an agent that’s that’s never sold the house before it was brand new in the industry or brand new to an area. And within 12 months, they will be beating top producers and I see it happen every single day.
D.J. Paris 22:04 Yeah, it’s it is it is incredible. And gosh, you just said so much. It was I want to talk about the retargeting, because for those of us that might have heard that and aren’t familiar with that term. What Krista is referring to is when someone visits a particular web page or website, there’s a pixel on there. And if you’re doing ads on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the different Facebook owned or meta now own properties. You can Facebook can pay attention to when people visit your website. And then when they go back to either Facebook, Instagram or even some of the other properties where Facebook advertises they now Chris’s Facebook will now serve up to those same people testimonial video. So if they already hit a certain part of the funnel, then Christa knows that they’re going to be sent very specific, sort of next step funnel videos that will help them get to that close. So her digital marketing is doing a good majority of the work that she’s still showing up knocking on the door handle livering stuff, which by the way, even if you just did that with no digital marketing, that would be above and beyond what everyone else does. I mean, maybe there’s one or two other realtors that might do that. But pretty much even that in and of itself is completely amazing. And above and beyond. But she’s also I mean, you have your whole entire system completely streamlined. And I’m not saying it’s easy, and it certainly isn’t easy, but it is streamlined and it’s efficient. And it works.
Krista Mashore 23:29 Totally works. Yeah, it positions you as being different, right. And so someone says, oh my gosh, you’re the only agent that did all these things. And I can say, hey, my job is to get a five star review from you. And you can only imagine if I did all this before you even hired me what its gonna look like when you actually hire me and are paying me. Let’s get started. I mean, it’s just like, and, you know, when they tell you I’m interviewing multiple people, as soon as you do all these things, they canceled the interviews of their people, they it’s like, they’re just like, they don’t ask you about commission. They’re just like, what’s this gonna? That’s it, you’re gonna do all that I’m like, yeah, all this stuff. And when you can show the reasoning behind why you’re doing it right. And based upon stat, you know, data and analysis and really kind of show how unique you are. And that’s what agents need to do now. Like I saw Zillow is coming after our jobs, right? Zillow wants us they want there’s so many different from ibuyer and all these different things happening we have to be different. What used to work is not going to work anymore. And I’m not know if you’ve done any research about 2022. But if you thought 2021 was hard look in the mirror, you’re gonna have the exact same thing coming ahead of you. The research shows that inventory is not going to be going up, it’s going to be still be the hardest possible to get loans. Rates are still going to be incredibly low, not as low as they were but still very, very low. And you have got to be different and unique. If people are not thinking about you prior to making the move prior to making the decision, you’re too late you they they need to be thinking about you seeing you top of mind months before they’re ready to make a decision so that when it’s time to make a decision, they’ve already made the decision and it’s you
D.J. Paris 24:59 you There’s here’s a really low tech example of this. And this one is for a lot of our listeners, they’re gonna say, well, it’s going to be very costly. And so I’m just going to use this as an example of ways that you can find your own way through this. But there we have 46,000 agents in the Chicagoland area here. There is one agent, one agent who has all of the in the grocery stores, those dividers where they sell advertising on the dividers. He has every single grocery store. There’s a big chain here called Mariano’s, as every single Mariano’s, where so now you think, Okay, well, so what? And normally, I would say, okay, yeah, I’m sort of with you a lot of these print ads, stuff doesn’t really work. Except if you’re going to the grocery store every week, and somebody in your family is there touching it, they’re seeing it. And he’s the only guy doing that. And he’s also in every shopping cart as well. And as silly as it is. And as low tech as it is. It absolutely works for him. And there’s a he’s not a smart, he’s not a dumb guy. And he’s actually a really good digital marketer too. But even if you’re doing a lower tech solution, think about think outside the box, that is actually a really smart thing, because people are going there and seeing it every single week most likely. So you can but I love the idea of the fully automated system as well. So tell us a little bit because you actually teach agents how to do this.
Krista Mashore 26:18 Yes. Yes. So okay, so we teach agents how to create video content, which I know most people want to rather eat dog crap and think about having to record a video like that it scares people or and they say things like, well, Krista, you do it a video because you’re cute. And because you have a good personality. And I’m like, Hey, listen, doesn’t matter what you look like how young you are, how old you are, how new you are in the business, how big your city is, how small your city is, it’ll work if you will work. It’s just a matter of training yourself. And anything can be taught anything can be coached, anything can be trained, right to learn to kind of just do things differently, and getting over that fear. That’s what you look like. That’s what you sound like, that’s you and you can’t put a bag over your head when you’re going to meet a seller or buyer. Right. So getting this content in front of people, we teach them how to do that. And then we teach them how to actually get it seen, because people will create video content, but if nobody’s seeing it, and like for example, you know, this DJ, on social media platforms, the only people that are seeing your content are your friends, your family, your grandma, your dog pepper, and only
D.J. Paris 27:13 maybe like less than 10% of those people are even seeing Yes, totally exactly where percent or something crazy and eat together
Krista Mashore 27:21 to get a video to go viral. It’s it’s zero to 2% of videos go viral is like because there’s like a billion hours of video every month every day, I’m sorry, like uploaded onto YouTube and everywhere else. So if we teach them how to take this content, so it’s getting seen by their whole entire community, and their friends and family, but by everyone, and they see it, they’re seen over and over and over again, there’s a lot of research about people being seen the frequency of it, and that helps conversions. And that helps what they call pre suasion, right, sure, helps convert and all this kind of stuff. So now, you’re developing a relationship with your community, you’re positioning yourself as an expert, you’re being seen, you’re not being forgotten. And then now if you learn to do that with yourself, imagine you can also do that with your properties. And you can show how that type of marketing then can help the seller. So it all kind of goes because I’m focusing on sellers, right? We don’t want buyers are impossible to show like 87 homes. 57 offers, nobody wants to do that. So focusing on sellers. And so now the sudden you start, you start to control the market. So we teach them how to how to number one, get visibility, how to get massive exposure. So they start attracting business and not chasing it kind of like I gave you the example of people raising their hand and saying, Hey, I’d like a market analysis. Most people start with that, would you like to go to my seller seminar? Would you like to go to bar it was like you go to my thing, download this download that. That’s not the case. You want to start with developing a relationship, identifying who you’re going after what they want. And then once you’ve given them that, then send them to give you their information. And yes, go to my seminar, you know, but don’t start there. Most agents start there, we teach them not to start there, but to in there, and then continuing to show Top of Mind. So when you do this, it’s just it just things just become so much easier. And it’s kind of like, like if I saw you DJ, or you called me and said, Chris, you want to have lunch? I’d be like, Heck yeah. I love your podcast. I’m like keepin it real? Yeah, let’s do it. Because I feel like I know you because I listened to you. Right? And you you experience. I don’t know where you’re from? I’m sure we do. Yeah, yes. Well add video to it. And it’s the exact same thing. People start talking to you in the grocery store, like your best friends and they think they know you and they’re having conversations and and then it’s just it’s like, all the hard stuff goes away. So we teach people how to do that. And then we teach them how to, you know, create, like massive marketing materials to convert, for example, how to, you know, be a co author with manna book and how to write this beautiful marketing plan, how to do this 17 minute listing presentation video and how to every month create content that will help them convert and position themselves as the expert. And it’s just this like, kind of a business in a box that we give them. But it’s teaching them to do things completely contradictory to what they were taught to do. We don’t they can do open houses. Cold Calling all that stuff. And in fact, when they do, they’re, they’re even more successful at it because they’re there like people know them. But it’s not like you get into real estate you want to have more time and freedom just to realize you have none right like, you know, you’re working every weekend nights like sucks. So we teach them how to get their life back and enjoy what they’re doing again and how to just come dominate in a totally non traditional ways.
D.J. Paris 30:20 And and just something that occurred to me that I forgot to mention, guess what happens when someone gets put into Chris’s sales funnel, watch his videos is interested in but all of a sudden isn’t in her service area. Maybe it’s in another state or another part of LA or, or wherever, where you’re just like, I just don’t I don’t know that area. I don’t go there. I’m not licensed in that state. Krista then finds an agent in that state and says, How would you like a referral, Mr. And Mrs. Broker? And of course, everyone says, yes, she earns a referral commission. And she is now earning money without having to do much of anything except attract people through her content.
Krista Mashore 30:56 Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So on the podcast Do you want if you don’t me share my screen, I can show you
D.J. Paris 31:02 if you’re let’s not do it here only because, but I can leave. You can. Yeah, I can add it in because 99% of our audience doesn’t watch us they listen. But but I’m going to I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes. And so for everyone listening, if you’re listening through an audio app for podcasts, look in the show notes, you’ll see a link to it. But also while while you’re there, please please subscribe to Christmas podcast, which is called fired up. So just look at any podcast app you don’t look for fired up with Krista KR, I sta you’ll and hit the subscribe button. But Krista talk and also please visit her website. So go to Krista mature.com, forward slash that was boot camp podcast. So once again, Christina shore.com, forward slash bootcamp podcast. But anyway, Chris, let’s I am I would like to ask you about content because you, you have a you have a very professional and elegant look to you. Not everyone has that same look. And so for people that are watching you going, oh my gosh, I don’t look like her. Can I still become successful? Because you talked about it doesn’t matter what you look like? Let’s talk about that. How important is it? That, that we’re that we use professional videographers when we’re shooting our content? How important is it that we have with our hair and our makeup done? Is that important? Or are there things that are more important?
Krista Mashore 32:26 Okay, so that research shows that the quality of the content is more important than the quality of the video graphics and all that kind of thing, right? I, when I’m creating a video that I’m specifically putting in front of a seller, before I go on a listing presentation, I make sure that I have eye makeup on and and the video is conveying professionalism, okay, but there’s plenty of times like people will use that as as an excuse. And I understand, you know, people will say I’ve had a lot of accents, and they’re afraid that people aren’t gonna like their accent, which is so bizarre to me, because I love listening to accents, right. And I’ve heard that so many times for my students, but we we’ve we’ve taught people that are, you know, very grossly overweight, let’s say or that are in their 70s To do this, and it’s a matter of you attract the right people. And we teach them, you know, sometimes you’re gonna, you’re gonna, you’re creating content and you’re dressed up like this, right? Sometimes you’re creating content, when you’re looking like a hot mess, and you’re in your kitchen, you’re just using your cell phone, all you need is a cell phone, you don’t need any fancy equipment, you just need a cell phone, you just need to start and peep, you’re going to start developing a relationship with your community. And as you start to get, you can learn to get better. But the idea is just to start, every single person has a cell phone, we all do. And every of those cell phones are in many cases better than a lot of the cameras out there. So just don’t worry about the graphics and the effects. Just just start and see what happens, right? And maybe
D.J. Paris 33:50 and maybe first start thinking about problems that you can solve. And and that could be as simple as think about all your client experiences, what questions come up? Where do people get really stressed? Where do they freak out. And when you’re someone’s buying possibly the largest asset of their financial life, or selling their largest asset or one of their largest assets, they’re going to be freaked out there going to be emotional. So even if you just talked about the emotional part of how challenging it is to buy or sell something, that alone everybody can relate to who’s ever bought or sold something. So so there’s there’s lots of content, but you said something really important the beginning was, know what your client’s problems are. And that doesn’t have to be all the content because it could be Hey, guys, here’s what I’m doing today. Here’s kind of a cool little insight into my life. But let’s talk about that. So how much of the content that you post on social media is here’s what’s going on in my life versus here is content to help solve a problem that the audience might be having.
Krista Mashore 34:49 I tried to mix it up big time right. So like we’ll we’ll do Hey, this is a great tip that I learned, you know, one of the things we teach is to be a reporter. So people are always worried about what they should say or talk about on on You know, write on social media. And when I say is be a reporter like, for example, today I had, I had a free accelerator, right taught people just to get comfortable with video. And I showed them this, this, this little trick called Stop, snap and switch. And what that is, is it’s like, basically we have a negative thought, whether it’s I’m too heavy, I’m too old, I’m too young, I’m tired. You notice that negative thought you snap the bracelet and then move it over to the other hand, and you rephrase that negative statement into a positive one, right, stop, snap and switch. So I said, Hey, talk and go teach that today teach people about the stop snapping switch trick. Tell them why it’s important. My thoughts become things and you know, your thoughts streams in your actions, turn drive and go teach that if you listen to a good podcast, you read a good book, you find a good tip or trick you eat it a great restaurant, you have, you know, the best Happy Hour drink and of your life, like be like, Oh my god, I’m at you know, you know, Zephyr right now we just have the best martinis and they are on sale like 50% off every day from five to six. So come down here and make sure you say hi, if you run into me, and just start creating content like that, and then you’re also going to be talking about oh, my gosh, the real estate market is so crazy. Right now, there’s only 34 active homes on the market right now in Brentwood, which is historically low. I’ve never seen it in 20 years. What does this mean? That means that it’s going to look just like 2021. Right? There’s it you mix it up, you mix it up. And you just what I would say is that first, just to get comfortable using video, one strategy that I teach my students and we’ve been able to track that on average will pick up two new listings a month, two new buyers or sellers a month is taking your cell phone, going through your contact list or going on social media, seeing something that someone who does have so for example, okay, DJ, it’s like, I’m on social media today. I see DJ, I see this awesome podcast that you did. And so it’s like, hey, DJ, it’s Kristin. I just wanted to let you know I saw that you did it keeping it real podcast. Oh, it was so awesome. Just thinking about you wanted to say hi, hope you’re having a great day. Send write don’t ask for business. Don’t ask for referrals. Don’t tell him how great you are. Do 10 of those a day video text messages it’s gonna do. Oh my god, the massive results like massive I one of my students. She said, Krista, I made more money this month, over $30,000 This month, and I made all of last year and every single one of them came from video text messages. So it’s like just a great way people love it. They feel happy. You’re not asking for business, even if it’s like, hey, DJ, I’m so sorry. I haven’t given context in the past five years.
D.J. Paris 37:21 Yeah, you can just apologize. I am I’m gonna do a better job in 2022. And I just wanted to say I was thinking about you. I hope you’re safe. Hope you’re happy. Please let me know if anything’s changed for you. But I just wanted to say I hope you have a great year. Yes. Easy.
Krista Mashore 37:36 Yes. And then what happens? Oh my gosh, I was just thinking of selling oh my gosh, I just talked to someone yesterday, and they forgot about you. This helps remind you keeps you top of mind. It’s a great way to learn to get comfortable on video. And then I love it. You said Right. Right DJ, identify what are the major and if you’ve never sold a house before, talk to your broker interview the top producer in there ask them like what is this? What is like some of the biggest mistakes that you think buyers make are the biggest concerns buyers have or what’s the, you know, what’s the best thing you’ve ever done? As you know, as a seller to you know, what’s your best advice to a seller and interview them and then go do a video on it. Right? Like yeah, I’m what happens is is that perception is reality. So when people see you over and over again, remember they’re continuing to develop that relationship with you. It’s perception is oh my gosh, DJ is doing a lot of business. It’s so funny. I have an agent Her name was Sula Favi she got voted best agent in her city okay, this is the crazy thing she didn’t like you know people they say vote for me vote for me. She did not ever sold the house yet. She got voted best agent in her swear that she had never sold the house yet but she was creating all this content and she was like I saw I did a podcast about her and she actually reached out to me on Facebook and she’s like I was cracking up I heard your you know your reference to me winning Rochester best agent of the year. She was I just had my first six figure quarter. Right? Yes, amazing. Amazing.
D.J. Paris 39:00 I love all of that. And And here’s another just quick idea just to tag on to all the other great ideas you mentioned. If you’re wondering if you don’t have that knowledge or the content that you that right now that you want to put out there. One of the things you could do it Krista sort of said this I’m just gonna expound a bit is right now who who is suffering especially during COVID Right? We have retail right retail suffering and you live in a community and we know real estate’s hyperlocal and you’re personally your your reputation is probably hyperlocal to go around to some of those businesses that you really like and you want to help succeed and just do a little Facebook Live or Instagram Live or even just record the video ahead of time. And I mean, ask the owner and say I just want to come in and help maybe promote your business a little bit. And then you could go in and say tell me about such and such clothing shop or restaurant or whatever. And that could be a two minute video where you’re just like, oh my god, I love it. I love to eat at your place or buy my clothes there. And even if that’s all you did, peep what’s the message people are gonna see Wow, Crystal really cares about her commute. Did he look at her trying to help this business? She’s not asking for business for her real estate. But but it is the perception is oh my gosh, she’s really going above and beyond. And guess what? You’re giving free advertising to the retailer, they are going to be thrilled. And back to your question about how often do you do we at our podcast, and we’ve had over I think over 150,000 agents have listened to one of our episodes. Which which is not meant to brag, because who cares? But this is the important part I think I’ve received. I know what’s happened at least once, I’m gonna say it’s probably happened twice. And probably it’s only happened once. But just because my memory is awful, I will say twice, maybe two times of I have gotten video videos from people said, I just want to let you know, I’m a big fan, we get emails, and we get messages and stuff. But videos maybe twice and the like, and only remember one, but that person who I can remember, we booked her immediately. Even though she wasn’t a top producer. I was like that’s the kind of person I want on the show. Not just because I want people to praise me, but I just thought that shows initiative, that person is going to be a superstar. And I said I want to talk to that person on the way up. So Krista is absolutely right, it made me feel good to know that somebody would took time out of their day to do that for me. And you can do that for anybody you know, whether it’s somebody who you know, sells, you know, in your in your community that you want to support or just your friends who checking in and see how they’re doing right now, because everyone’s struggling. Everyone’s getting sick right now, this is a great time. And it’s the new year to say how is your holiday season? How’s everyone doing? I’m thinking about you how you know? And that’s all you have to do?
Krista Mashore 41:34 Yes, and what you’re saying we do that all the time we interview, we just we literally I have, we just go and help people, right when COVID first hit, we did like, every single week I interviewed, I would look up like 10 Different I do a zoom like this. And I would interview 10 different local businesses and they’d come in and talk about how people can still work with them during COVID. And it, it helps people so much, and then they want to refer you and then the community sees that you’re doing you’re doing that right and just about you’re getting out there. And being in front of people helping people talking about the local community talking about what’s happening, people assume that you’re doing business and it just attracts. It’s such an attraction based marketing piece. And it works. So well.
D.J. Paris 42:19 Well, let’s talk about your, you know, the bootcamp that you do offer. So everyone who’s listening, please go to Crystal ashore.com forward slash boot camp podcast link for that also in the notes, but tell us what the boot camp is.
Krista Mashore 42:34 Yeah, so it’s a three day virtual live event. And we have it every single month. It’s coming up this month, on the 17th I believe, but it’s again, it’s every single month, so this month, to 17th 18th and 19th. And it’s literally eight hours each day online, where I could teach people about video content how to how to create videos that people watch what to say how to say it, when to say we teach them about marketing, how to have a unique value proposition how to position themselves differently teach them about marketing, we like marketer first, top producer second, right? You want to be top producer, you got to be a marketer. First we teach them how to utilize different types of marketing strategies to position themselves as the go to authority in real estate. So they’re not chasing business. We don’t teach things like open houses and cold calling and door knocking. It’s completely contradictory to what they’ve been taught originally, we teach them a very new innovative approach to really becoming that go to community market leader in their area.
D.J. Paris 43:30 I love it and you can sign up for it by visiting Christo mature.com forward slash bootcamp podcast, everything Krista does is right on that website.
Krista Mashore 43:41 I think we’re giving him a discount because it’s because of you DJ. So it’s like half price. I’m pretty darn sure right now.
D.J. Paris 43:47 You know it is I just saw that and it is half price. It is 40 Sup guys, three days of content for $47, I would pay probably 10 I would have paid 10 times that now that I think I paid more than 10 times now for three days worth of content. That is the cheapest three days of content you can get. And this is from somebody who has sold 2300 homes. She’s a top producer for over 20 years. She knows her stuff. She’s not a coach who has never practice which unfortunately, there’s a lot of coaches in this industry that fall into that category. But that’s not her and she’s in a ultra competitive area. By the way the Brentwood market if you are not familiar with Los Angeles is one of the most exclusive places to live and own property.
Krista Mashore 44:27 I’m in the other written by San Francisco but still, I am sorry. No completely massively competitive everywhere. It’s competitive, right? Well, here’s the thing which is crazy DJ this year we sold I think 56 million in real estate. We it’s like we did around 1.41 point 5 million in gross commissions earned and I only work on the real estate business five hours a month I create the video content I properly distributed. Now my brother goes in his me and they see they see our videos, they see our content they they they’re hiring our process. So we’re doing that, you know without even I’m coming gi coach 97% of the time so it’s so doable for you I know some of these things we will hear and they go That sounds impossible. Krista can only do it because you know she’s hyper no any and we have taught your normal Joe Blow total opposite personality of me how to do this because you will attract the right type of people and you will detract the people that are not not you know, interested in work with because I don’t like your personality, which makes it better because then you end up working with people that you like and love. And you enjoy your life again. So and I love what you said to it is so true. Like we’ve done this right Do you Do you own a broker? Do you have like 100 agents working for you? You’ve seen it all. You know, it’s like who do you go to to learn something, somebody who’s done it. And right now, digital marketing is essential in your business and I we’ve mastered it, but we’ve we’ve mastered on marketing. So can
D.J. Paris 45:48 everyone listening first, go to Christina shore.com forward slash bootcamp podcast to get that half off on her three day podcasts or bootcamp, which is just $47 and also subscribe to her a podcast which is called fired up, you can find that anywhere podcasts are served. You can also subscribe to it right from our website, Krista misure.com. So please, everyone could do that. And I would love to have Krista back on the show. I’m sure everyone listening would love that as well. So let us know in the comments. The best way you can help us is tell us what you like about the show and also where we can improve. And the best way to do that is
Krista Mashore 46:23 given the five star review on on Apple for his wonderful time. This is my favorite podcast that I’ve done in forever. The best house we have the best personality and it was so collaborative. And thank you so much DJ for having me. I’m honored to be here.
D.J. Paris 46:38 We’re super grateful. So everyone, leave us both reviews. And if you want to leave five star reviews, we’d be super honored. But let us know what you like and dislike about the show. But the best way to help us continue to grow and also help Krista tell a friend think of one other agent that can benefit from hearing this great conversation with Krista send them a link to our show. Easiest way to do that if the person isn’t a podcast listener, go to keeping it real pod.com and they can stream every episode we’ve ever done there. And also Christina shore.com. You can stream every episode right from her website as well. So listen to her show. Listen to my show, as well, as you already are telephoned. And thanks for helping us continue to Krista on behalf of the audience. We want to say thank you, you were an unbelievably great guest. We’d love to have you back. And everyone please go subscribe to her podcast and check out her bootcamp because it is awesome. And it’s only $47 I know I’m going to check it out. And on behalf of Kristen myself, we want to thank our listeners and our viewers for continuing to support our show and of course her show as well. So thank you, Krista. It was a pleasure and we will see everyone next time
She Just Walked Up To A Developer And Starting Talking… • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Jan 10, 2022
In our December episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties talks about how she built her business and brand in real estate. She gives credit to the way she was raised for her two characteristics: patience and accountability. She emphasizes how important it is for her that her clients get the feeling of trust, credibility and easy communication out of her brand. Last, Carrie and D.J. discuss the importance of saying “thank you” to your clients/partners.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Joel Schaub at guaranteed rate. As a realtor it’s important to partner with only the most trusted name in mortgage lending. Joel has 1000s of satisfied clients and gives $1,500 of his commission back to your buyers on every closing. He is known for his ability to close even complex deals start to finish in only 14 days to learn what 1000s of others already know. Make a note to call Joel at 773-654-2049 or email joel@rate.com Guaranteed Rate is an equal housing lender licensed in all 50 States Consumer Access Number 2611 And now on with the Show
All right welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through this show and today is our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormack Real Estate Group here in Chicago with at properties. Now Carrie is a top 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 46,000 real estate agents here in Chicago, Carrie is currently ranked a number 14 Actually maybe even lower than that lower meaning higher in the rank. But as of last time I checked, she’s was in the top 15 And always is She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. Now please visit Carrie McCormick at her website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. But also absolutely follow her on Instagram. We’re actually going to be talking to Carrie today about branding. And she there’s no better example of an amazing branding. A realtor who does branding, then Carrie, so follow her on Instagram, which is at Carey McCormick real estate. There’s also a link to that in our show notes. So at Carey McCormack, and McCormack has to cease at Carey McCormick real estate Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 2:21 Thank you, thank you love being here with you.
D.J. Paris 2:25 love having you. And we’re going to do something a little different today. We were Carrie and I were talking and the first time I met Carrie, she was actually a guest on our show this is many years ago. And then she decided to come on monthly. And we’re so grateful to have her as a partner comes on to talk about what’s going on in the market. And we’re now in the latter part of December, we’re on you know, wrapping up the year. And we thought we’d go back and revisit something that I think we did talk about on their very first time we mentioned but that was cash like three or four years ago. Yeah, so we want to talk about how Carrie grew her business. And we’ll give an abbreviated version of that, because we do have that full interview from from years ago, which which we’ll link to, but specifically branding, right, I think branding is really so much of a realtors for perception, or how people perceive realtors in the industry. And it really is difficult because there’s all sorts of different ways that realtors can brand themselves from the ones who do extraordinarily silly kind of, you know, marketing efforts to people that are ultra serious and professional. And then of course, everything in between and realtors are given a wide berth to really build their brand. So you have built your brand, I would say for you the words that come to mind when I think about your brand would be professionalism, elegance, just but but also like kind of cutting edge too. So even though you know you’ve been in the business 20 years, you are, you know, all of your branding looks fresh up to date on trend. So you must keep adapting that with the times. And I’m so curious to know how you keep your branding looking so remarkably current as sort of things, you know, our tastes evolve and change. But let’s let’s start kind of at the beginning of how you got in real estate.
Carrie McCormick 4:19 Well, that’s thank you for all of that. That was very kind and, you know, I truly love what I do. And I think when people do love what they do, it just kind of shines through and it’s it’s authentic, and it’s organic, and you’re able to be who you want to be. And that’s kind of where this all was born from. And just to kind of take a step back. As I was mentioning someone I’ve been getting a little bit more of like the questions of, you know, tell me a little bit about, you know, how you grew up and you know, tell me about your childhood or tell me about you know, whatever it is going way back when I’m like you know it doesn’t really matter and a lot of people don’t really care but as I’ve thought through A little bit of it, you know, I wanted to share with you and then with the audience, just how I did build that brand. And it really, if I look back into my life as a young child, like just 789 years old, you know, my natural state back then as a young child was very entrepreneurial. At 12 years of age, I got my first job.
D.J. Paris 5:23 What was your first job?
Carrie McCormick 5:25 So I worked at a catering company, well, this, you guys will laugh, I was a golf cart driver on a golf course, sure, they did catering then and apparently, way back when you didn’t matter how old you were. So I drove a golf cart on the golf course, and served refreshments as a 12 year old. So but I was very rebel spirited back then. And I didn’t follow the rules. I wanted things done my way. And it was really not kind of being out of being stubborn. But it was truly because I felt there was a better way to do things or to better experience things. My mom didn’t like it very much that I was, you know, had that kind of attitude. But again, it didn’t, it wasn’t born out of, you know, I’m, I’m going to break rules or not follow rules. Because of that, because of I didn’t want to it was, hey, this could be done better. You know, so let’s do it this way. So I would bend the rules. But I was raised by a single mom, she was a working mom. And she always put people first. And she was kind of that Martha Stewart, us kind of person. And, you know, because, you know, I was raised by a single mom that worked very hard, and, you know, was very authentic to what she did. I kind of got my drive and my work ethic from her. So, you know, you fast forward, you know how I grew up into a young adult, I started to learn patience and accountability, which those two lessons along with, like my drive, and my grit, definitely propelled my career.
D.J. Paris 7:08 When you say patience, can you get a little bit more specific? Do you mean, the patience to have the sort of the ability to wait for something to happen as long as you keep moving forward? Or is patients around something else?
Carrie McCormick 7:23 Well, it was. And I think we live in a world now where everything is so fast paced, and we want what we want. But you know, early in my career, things were a little bit slower. And, you know, I knew I wanted to be successful. I knew I wanted to sell luxury real estate early on, I knew what I wanted. But you know, you just couldn’t snap your fingers. And it was there. So the patience became something that I learned because I had to work hard. You know, I mean, I had to build, I had to do all that grinding work of, you know, again, way back when, you know, I would knock on people’s doors, you know, I would cold call, there’s all that stuff, that when you’re in the thick of it, you think, you know, I’ll never make it. But you know, it’s being persistent. It’s having the patience, it’s having the drive, it’s all the things that we know that we need to have, you know, to have our success. So, you know, again, how did this young like rebel spirit, bring me into real estate, you know, and then I say, Well, I think real estate actually came to me. And actually, I’ll tell you guys a very quick story of how I got into real estate. So again, a couple decades ago, I was in advertising. And I had a really beautiful office, it was looking over millennium, well, what is now Millennium Park. And I’m not sure what happened on that specific day, but I just remember, something didn’t go my way, whatever it was, and I’m like, I’m gonna go out for a walk. So I left the office and again, this is by Millennium Park. And I started walking and you know, as you’re kind of your mind is going and walk in and just kind of huffing and puffing along and I ended up in the west loop. And again, this is wow, that’s that’s quite quite a walk. This is I must have been really angry. So this is back in the late 90s. In the West, what is obviously now the west loop, which wasn’t what it is now. So when I got to the it was on Monroe Street was Monroe, or Madison, I should know this, but was on Monroe and Madison. There was a sales trailer or like a trailer home, sitting there and there was construction going on, there was a big digger there. And I stopped and I looked and some gentleman came out of the door, his of the sales trailer, the trailer, and he says, you know, you can’t be on the site, you know, you need to get off. It’s an act of construction site. And you know, I’m just looking around, like, what are they doing? I mean, it was just the weirdest thing to me. And he came out and he talked to me and he said, you know, what are you doing here? And I said, Well, I’m just curious, like, what’s going on? And what are they building? Here’s like, oh, you know, let me tell you, we’re gonna build Have a condo building on this site, you know, and we’re going to have X amount of units and blah, blah, blah. And I said, Who’s going to live in this neighborhood? Right? And he’s like, Well, you know, we’re thinking professionals, and you know, it’s so close to that. And he’s like, giving me like the sales pitch, because he probably thought I might be a good buyer for him. And I just started telling him what I thought. And I’m like, Well, this is what I, you know, why would you do that? And, you know, it’s funny. He says to me, he looks at me goes, Are you in real estate? And I’m like, Well, yes, I am. I’ve been, of course I wasn’t. And he said, I want to talk to you, you’ve got some really good ideas. I kind of like the way that you think, meet me at my office next, whatever, next Thursday. So I’m like, great. So I leave, I walk back to my office, I get on the computer, how do I get my real estate license? You know, it was, you know, like a week’s Crash Course. Sign up for the real estate class, which of course, didn’t start till the following week, I met with Tom at his office, and I told him the truth. They said, you know, with all due respect, you know, I, I signed up for the course, I’m not licensed. But I signed up for the course and I will have my license by x date. And he was completely fine with it. He thought it was kind of funny. And he was thankful that I told the truth. But he hired me. He said, You know, I like that you push the rules with me. I like that you didn’t agree with everything I said, I liked you know, your energy and your enthusiasm. And he hired me. And that’s how I started my career in real estate.
D.J. Paris 11:41 Oh, yeah, that’s, it’s really interesting. I think, oftentimes, especially for, you know, bosses or employers, they’re often looking more for quality, or qualities or personality types than they are experience. I’m in the process, right now I get to be part of this group of investors and makes me sound more important than I am, it’s not a big deal. But there’s about 50 of us. And we’re going to be finding a technology company in Las Vegas of all places, like a startup that is, you know, need some seed money. And so we’re all, you know, pooling a little tiny bit of money together to help these, this company, we’re all get to decide on which company and there’s a bunch of them, that one that are competing for the money. And so we’re I’m in the process of now looking at businesses that I have no experience with, and probably wouldn’t be able to have the eagle eye to go, oh, that’s the one that’s going to succeed. So it’s a total gamble on our end, because it’s not a real estate related, all the companies, none of them are real estate related. So what I’m like, Well, I don’t know enough about any of these technology sectors to make a really good decision on who’s got the best business plan. So I have to just go with the qualities that I see in these, the these owners, the startup founders, and that’s the only thing I get to go on. And so I I’m in the process of doing that now. And I’m like, well, this person seems like they, they have a great personality, and I never quit attitude. So you know, and I think probably a lot of people get into professions, because someone saw something in them that, you know, that they thought, oh, once they learn the skills of being part of this particular industry, they already have the personality. So they’re gonna You just have to, like, just wind them up and push them in the right direction. So I suspect that’s exactly what happened to you.
Carrie McCormick 13:36 Yeah, well, I feel like I got lucky. I feel like I got lucky. So, again, that’s how I started in the business. And then you fast forward into, you know, one of your questions was about branding, and, you know, building a brand. And what I’ve learned through the last couple of years is that the word you know, to define the word branding or brand, it’s not a logo, it’s not marketing or advertising, I like to say that a brand is your reputation and how someone feels about you. Right? You know, and just like you said, You’ve you had some really nice comments about my brand. And, you know, I didn’t set out and say, you know, Carrie McCormack, you know, this is what I am, it’s just, it’s a feeling that somebody gets, you know, when they see my name or see my marketing or see anything that I do, and I think it’s important for all of us when you’re when you have your own business is to be your own brand, Ambassador and have your own identity. You know, I’ve seen some folks, you know, and I think it is flattering when someone takes like a social media post or something and they just duplicate it or they copy it and you know, I think they say it’s, it’s flattery, you know, but it’s it’s not them, right you know, like if You take my post and repost it and put your face on it. It’s just, it’s not you, it’s not authentic. So, you know, I’ve spent quite a bit of time just figuring out what’s important to me. And you know, what’s my style and my reputation. And you know, how I want others to feel when they’re around me. And I think it’s important. Also, when you’re building a team, or you know, you have people working for you, is to those people that, that are there that they have the same identity for you, meaning, if my, if my assistants are in front of my clients, I want my clients to feel there. You know, that it supports my brand, and how I want to treat people. So it’s the energy that you put out there and it creates that brand just kind of becomes its its own.
D.J. Paris 15:48 Yeah, let us I’m curious on if you were to think about what feelings you want your clients to have, you know, after the transactions completed, they’ve either bought their home sold, the home moved in rented, you know, whatever the transaction is, and they think back to their experience, you know, what are some of those feelings that you want them to, to have in the weight as they think back about, you know, your performance as their realtor?
Carrie McCormick 16:16 Yeah, you know, everyone listening, who’s a realtor, we all work so hard. And when we just do it, you know, sometimes it may we make it look easy that what we do, but, you know, I want my clients to feel like they number one, that they can trust me, because I always always have my clients, best interests, and I’m a fiduciary, you know, so I have to protect my clients, and I want them to feel like that they are protected, the decisions and advice that I give them, is for them, you know, it’s not for me, it’s not for my company, or any it’s all about them. So I want them to feel like they’re in good hands. I want them to feel that, you know, they I trust that they can trust me. Absolutely. Communication, I also think is important, I want them to feel like if they have a question, they can call me anytime, and I’m gonna pick up the phone, so that I’m there for them. So that’s, and I feel like because that is truly how I feel about what I do, again, that my clients can 100% Trust me, I’m always there for me, they can pick up the phone, I will make the best decisions, possibly for them and their property. It’s grown my business, because it’s authentic. And it’s truly how I feel.
D.J. Paris 17:40 And, you know, it’s it’s so interesting, because I suspect a lot of realtors who haven’t had the experience is that you’ve had and the length of time in the industry, you know, something a lot of people struggle with is, is yes, I want to do a good job. But they don’t maybe forward think and say when this transaction is over, what do I want my clients to actually feel about me, and you just very elegantly sum that up. And I think, then it’s like, okay, I want them to know that I put their best interest in front of my own, that I have a fiduciary, which by the way that in and of itself is a really important thing for all of our listeners to understand about your business as a real estate agent, as Yes, you are. And you can have that conversation with your clients about what that means and what responsibility that you take to do that. But at the end of the day, you have a list of things that you want your clients to feel after a transaction. And then comes the hard part, like you said, being able to contact you at any time, the hard part is now you have to live up to to all of those expectations that that you want your clients to, you know, to feel that that you’ve met. So but it also probably drives all of your behavior, I imagine. Because you know, I know, like, example here at the firm I work at is we have just about 800 agents. And when I started we had just a couple of agents. And so we’ve grown a lot, but we always have thought of ourselves as a small little mom and pop family company. And even though we’re not so small anymore, that’s still kind of our identity. So I have to make sure when I’m talking to agents who are thinking about joining the company, I work for that I say just just so you know, we still think of ourselves that is our brand is we are this little mom and pop company. We try to treat our agents, you know, as best as we possibly can. But you know, if I say oh, we have 800 agents, somebody might think, Oh, I’m just another number, you know, or there’s firms that have 1000s of agents, you know, and there’s small and bigger firms, but our brand is actually where this little tiny company that just happens to be bigger than when we started but so so I always make sure that you know and when I tell agents who joined our firm, I’m like we’re our job is to make sure that you never say I don’t really like it here. But in order to do that, you know we have to treat agents and again, I don’t work with buyers sellers. You know, I work with realtors. And so I have to make sure our Realtors feel the same way your clients feel about you. And so but But you’re right, it’s it really governs all of our behavior at our company is how do we take such good care of people that they don’t want to leave and go somewhere else at the same with you. And but that there, there it is the hard work. Because if we do get a phone call from one of our agents that you know, 10pm at night saying, oh my god, I’m gonna lose this transaction, this deal is gonna fall through. Oftentimes, we have to step up and do that, even though we’re like when we really started, you know, at five o’clock, we all go home. But we really have to have to be there. So I can appreciate the the sort of how specific you are with wanting that. And then I can also appreciate how difficult it is to meet to meet those needs. But that’s where all the reward happens. So you’re you are somebody who is hot, I mean, nothing was handed to you, which is I’m always so impressed with people who, you know, are able to be to excel in this industry without really any specific hand help or handouts, obviously, you’ve got help along the way. And you consider yourself lucky for having to walk by that developer at the time. But the end of the day, like probably 1000 Other people walked by that developer that same day, right, and you had the you really had no business talking to them, because you don’t know anything about that business that that industry, and yet you did. And that demonstrates an impressive quality, you know, to anyone that’s looking to employ somebody, I once I once hired, I was like trying to hire an assistant. And we, this is back when Craigslist was like the place to put your job posting. And we probably got 100 responses. And it was just for this menial position. It wasn’t even a high paying position, it was embarrassingly, like maybe it was maybe we must have just been paying, you know, minimum wage or something. And so we got all these, you know, really earnest responses people wanting to, to be the assistant. And, and it was just like, oh my god, there’s 100 of these to go through. And then a woman just walks in, she was in her 20s. And she goes, I wanted to like hand my resume in person, because I know you’re probably getting a lot of those. And we just kind of looked at each other, my boss and I and we’re like you’re hired. Like if you’re gonna come all the way down here just to walk into our like crummy little office for, you know, a crummy job that you’re probably not going to want in three or four months. No, no, no, no, she she is that still there? But, but but not, but because she went on to bigger and better things? Because of course she did. Because that’s the kind of person that is going to go on to bigger and better things. And so that’s exactly what happened with you. And you and I’m not in any way suggesting, you know, you were a professional. You had a good career as before that we’re just
Carrie McCormick 22:51 very fortunate. Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. So you know, it’s, it’s taking chances, and it’s, you know, really is all about hard work. And you know, sometimes too, it’s being in the right place at the right time.
D.J. Paris 23:06 Apps, it’s so much of being in the right place at the right time. The good news is, if you just go to a lot of different places, and you you you put yourself out there at some point, someone’s going to be like, Wow, that’s impressive. And it’s happened to me, it’s it, you know, and it is what I will tell you, though, back to the branding thing, because I’m really curious if you agree with this. So I was thinking as you were talking about the feelings you want your clients to have about you. And when I was also mentioning, we want our agents to think about our company the same way your clients feel about you. And I was thinking that, and again, it really does become like our North Star. And it certainly is your North Star. Because if you don’t fulfill those obligations, those commitments you’ve made, which are really your own personal sort of values to your client, if you don’t honor those, almost perfectly, if not perfectly, you run the risk of the client thinking well, she didn’t really deliver on that, or, you know, it was a lot of just marketing, whatever. But it probably governs your behavior, I imagine, right? Like, you know, although that’s my North Star, I want everyone to go wow, she worked really hard for me, she had my best interests in mind. I could contact her she was knowledgeable, she always got back to me or she was available. And that probably in some ways frees up some anxiety you have about like, you know what to do so that people feel that way?
Carrie McCormick 24:29 I do. But it is interesting that you know, every there’s so many different personalities out there. And you know, a lot of people comment that, you know, we could be psychologists and all that stuff. And it is there’s one client in particular. I mean, I went above and beyond in the amount of work that I did for this client, but it’s all because it’s what I do, right. And we got the deal closed and again, it was for this year. It was one of the hardest deals, but it was severence it was it was everything you could possibly think of. I didn’t get a thank you, you know, but it’s not about that, you know, but I was just thinking like, I mean, I did the best that I could but you know, someone, you know, their expectations was, of course, she’s going to do that, you know, but sometimes a little thank you goes along.
D.J. Paris 25:20 Yeah, I think it’s a really good time as a marketing tip as well to remember to say thank you to your clients not carry, of course carry does this, but carries saying, Gosh, it would be nice for this person to recognize all the work I did. It’s a great really reminder for all of us to recognize all of the work that we are all the help that we get as well. So if there are people in your life, friends, family, co workers, maybe a mentor, or just people you admire in the in this industry, or just in life in general, reach out to them and tell them, even if it’s somebody you’ve never met, you know, we’re lucky to get some of our listeners write us and say things about how we helped their business, we would really never know that if we didn’t get that feedback. I mean, we assume we’re helping people. But unless people tell us, we honestly don’t really know. And so I would encourage everyone is your marketing tip. Even if it’s somebody you sold a home to four years ago, pick up the phone and wish them a happy holidays and say I just you know, especially if you really liked them, say I just want to tell you four years ago, I remember closing in your home, wasn’t that a fun time? Or? Or wasn’t that a difficult time or whatever the experience was, and just say I just want to thank you for being my customer four years ago. You know, very few people ever do that. And I think that’s a great opportunity. Definitely. This is the, the time of year where we we all you know, try to give thanks. And, and really a lot of a lot of times we think people know that we appreciate them. But they probably don’t is because you say it in your head all the time about how much you appreciate somebody. I know I deal with this in my primary relationship with my girlfriend is I think I must be complimenting her all the time. Because in my head, I do that. And then I’ll find out oh, I didn’t say anything out loud. I just I’m always thinking about how great she is. Am I telling her how great she is? As often as I should? Well, no, I’m probably not. And you know, that’s that’s something to consider is think about. Gratitude gets you a lot of just
Carrie McCormick 27:23 you just say it to everyone, everyone wants to hear it. Right? No matter what you do who you are, everyone wants to hear it.
D.J. Paris 27:30 And people I have found in my life when you are really authentically grateful to people, then they they will they will be by your side forever. Everybody wants to feel appreciated. So we appreciate Carrie for coming on our show for years and years. And continuing to do that she does not have the time really to do this. One of literally one of the top producing realtors in Chicago and the Chicago and hola Chicagoland area, not just the city. And so we appreciate you. So on behalf of all our listeners, we say thank you for being consistent Carrie is never missed. I think there are one or two times we had to reschedule because you know, just things got busy. But Carrie has not missed. She’s continues to be on the show and really helps our audience learn what it’s like to be a top producer, and what every one of our agents can do to kind of get to where you are now. So on behalf of everyone we say thank you. And on behalf of carrier You’re welcome. On behalf of Carrie and myself. We also say thank you to all of our audience for continuing to listen and support us. Thank you for another great year carry. This was a Gosh, three or four years now together. And we are so honored to have you. And just as a quick thing before we go please everyone follow Carrie on Instagram, go to her website or I’m sorry, we’ll go to our website too. But before you do that, follow her on Instagram this is really if you want to see branding in action authentic branding and action that looks brand new, every single post she does looks new, it looks hip, it’s hip, his Gosh, I’m dating myself, but but it does it look it’s on brand. And I always say that you are right on on trend for everything that’s cool and going on. And as a marketer, I can really appreciate what you do. So follow her on Instagram, which is at Carey McCormick real estate. Again, McCormick is with two C’s. So Terry McCormick real estate and also go to her website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. And before you sign off, I know you’re ready to hit the end button or the fast forward to the new next podcast episode. But please tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from Carrie about branding and send them a link to our episode. And please leave us a review on whatever podcast app you might be using, whether it’s Apple podcasts, or it’s what used to be iTunes or Google Play or Pandora or Spotify or wherever. Leave us a review that lets us know what we’re doing right and what we can do to improve so thank you Carry for another great year and we will see you in 2022. Thank you
Why Real Estate Agents Need To Conduct a Technology Audit in 2022 • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Jan 07, 2022
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com and D.J. discuss the importance of empathic communication – discussing the layoffs at better.com and the importance of working with lenders you trust. Chris reveals real estate statistics based on surveys conducted by The Close during 2021. They also talk about doing a “tech audit” to make sure the tools you’re using are still the best for your business. Last, Chris talks about what The Close Pro offers.
Chris Linsell can be reached at chris@theclose.com.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country and her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level. Keeping it real listeners receive a special discount, so please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the show.
Welcome, keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lindh sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com Let me tell you about the clothes the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents, teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology, and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level, please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o s e.com And subscribe to their newsletters so you can get notified every time they publish an article now with us as always is crystallin Sal, he is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. When he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stages of his community theaters production local community theaters production. I Chris, welcome once again. It is December. We are excited to have you close out the rest of the year. And welcome to the show. Hey, thanks
Chris Linsell 2:15 for having me. DJ. Great to be back. Yeah, it has been a crazy month, a crazy year. Good to be here. Glad to talk to you. And frankly, there’s there’s a lot going on right now. So we got some stuff to talk about here,
D.J. Paris 2:28 my friend. We do. And I apologize to anyone if my voice is a little shaky. I’m working on working on a cold and also living with a COVID Positive partner who I am trying to stay six feet away from so I do not infect myself or she doesn’t infect me. But I hope everyone out there before we get started is enjoying the holidays. Please remember to get your booster shots and be safe. Yeah, so let’s talk about the big sort of national news that happened on the lending side recently, which was better.com, which I had not heard of that company prior to the news that most of our listeners probably have been exposed to, which was there was mass layoff. That happened I think 900 employees were laid off from better.com, which is a an online lending institution, and they were laid off in unceremoniously sort of ethical way, I guess it’s not gonna be the best way to say,
Chris Linsell 3:36 Yeah, I think unceremonious is like, I think that’s putting it pretty politely frankly. You haven’t seen it there. There is definitely some crazy video on the internet. And it won’t take much just go you know, head to Google and type in better.com layoffs. And you’re gonna get hit with a lot of video that you know, actually first went viral on Tiktok of some some layoffs that happened. And here’s the here’s the thing, actually, I want to just kind of back up and say I’ve got stuff to say about this relative to the mortgage and lending industry and the real estate industry as a whole. But this is like a people problem. That doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. You know, you’re the leader of your organization is tasked with making sure you’ve got the right team in place to execute on the company’s goals and the reality is sometimes that means that you got to lay people off you got to fire people, you got to hire people you got to bring people on. So it’s it’s a leaders task to make sure that’s done effectively. This really was a swing and a miss as far as that effectiveness elements. So a separate from the real estate and lending components here. Let’s just call a spade a spade here. This was a Human Resources debacle on the highest level, I think.
D.J. Paris 5:04 So essentially what happened is they laid off 900 people simultaneously and about a three minute Zoom meeting that the people who were being fired or laid off, I’m not sure if which one it was, but were unaware. So they thought they were attending a regular meeting. And they were notified just before the holidays. So bad timing, bad presentation, or bad execution. And everyone got notified at the same time within about a three minute period. And then they were subsequently locked out of their emails. And I think there’s a couple of points that we could we could talk about outside of the outrageous pneus of firing somebody via zoom, or firing 900 people via zoom simultaneously, which I think we could all we all would sort of appropriately shutter at and maybe sneer at somebody who would consider doing that. But aside from saying, What a bad what a bad guy, for the person who was the CEO. Aside from that, I think that the conversation Could it really could lend now to talk about culture? And how do we, how do we bring people into our organization? What is our culture? Like, once somebody is part of the organization? How do we exit? How do we move people out of the organization? How do we do that in a way that respects someone’s dignity? And is that is that even important? Or is this guy a genius in the sense that he efficiently let go of 900 people all at once my, you know, I don’t believe that, that that was an appropriate way to do that. Maybe there would be some efficiency experts that that would disagree, but seems like just from a human being perspective, and just being a good citizen of the world, that that was probably not the best way to achieve that unfortunate outcome.
Chris Linsell 7:13 Yeah, I think I think you’re right in that in. And I think this points out a couple of interesting things to me. And I want to just go back, because for those of you who don’t know, I enjoy watching movies and television. I’m a little I wouldn’t call myself a cinephile. But I certainly have. I’ve seen my fair share of movies. And I am reminded right in this moment, of the Michael Lewis adaptation movie, The Big Short. And, and one of the things that is, if you haven’t seen this movie, spoiler alert, we had a housing crash in 2009. So if you hadn’t seen it, I just ruined it for you. So sorry about that. But one of the things, one of the reasons why Michael Lewis’s first was brilliant book, if you haven’t read it, and then the movie, the adaptation, one of the reasons why this plot was so compelling to people was that real estate, and specifically, both both real estate and the financing for residential real estate, were thought to be these rock solid businesses with extraordinarily low volatility. And this is both when it comes to the movement of the markets themselves, as well as kind of the health and well being of the companies that operate within that space. And so, you know, 25 years ago, it would have been a real shock, I mean, practically unheard of, for a company within the, like the mortgage space to lay off 900 people all at once, unless there was some sort of insane scandal or something that had happened with their, the industry is just too stable for that to happen. And I think it’s worth pointing out the difference between 2000 to, you know, 1999 1998, and today and 2021, relative to the volatility that we see both in markets and within companies, because we are seeing more players pop up in both real estate brokerage and, you know, kind of sales operation side, as well as the FinTech like the the financing end of things. We’re seeing more companies pop up faster, get acquired, get dissolved, then than we ever have had in our industry. And it really demonstrates the difference that we have right now as far as a climate for the developer. have meant, and ultimately, in some cases, the dissolution of some of these players, and it’s kind of turned in some of the what we think of this industry a bit on its head right now.
D.J. Paris 10:13 Yeah, I think it’s important for our listeners to start to really be, you know, in the know of what’s going on with your preferred lenders, for example, yeah, so if you are working with a particular lending institution that you tend to send your your buyers to, this would be a great time to just have a quick conversation with that ello, to discuss, Hey, how are things going at the company? You know, I would assume, and again, I am not an economist or a real estate journalist, but I would assume that we will see some layoffs from lending institutions in the next 24 months, strictly based on the fact that rates were at near historic lows, and, you know, rates are going to eventually bounce back, they are starting to climb back up. And, you know, just like any other type of business when they need to scale to take advantage of a tactical situation, which is low interest rate environment, where now people can refinance, they can purchase more. And then as the Fed starts to bump those rates up, we’re going to see less people, less homeowners maybe refinancing and buying. If that happens, then some of these institutions are going to be laying off some of their work the workforce, and as a result, what the agent needs to know is how is that going to affect workflow? Is that, you know, what, what is our, you know, from contract to close? What are we seeing out there right now, and I think now is a great time to partner with a lending institution that is, you know, to whatever degree, we call stable, find those bedrock companies, because those are the ones that are going to get your clients through, you know, through the contract. Yeah, I
Chris Linsell 12:05 completely agree. In fact, I want to even take it a step further. And just, actually, before I say this, I just want to say full disclosure, I don’t have any, you know, bought in loyalty to any of these, you know, bedrock, financial institutions. But frankly, in the moment, it might be a good idea to have relationships with the, you know, the mortgage broker, the loan officers, you know, at Chase at Bank of America, at Wells Fargo at these places where it would take really an asteroid crashing into the city of New York, City of New York or Chicago to wipe one of these banks off the map. That’s that’s not going to happen. But frankly, there are a number of mortgage options out there. And I can attest to this personally, because I spent both, you know, I spent time both in Atlantic City at triple play. And in San Diego at Norwalk walking the expo, there are tons of mortgage brokers out there, right now, mortgage companies that are offering a lot of flash and dash to try and get real estate agents plugged into their system. And the the long and the short of it is there were people at I’m confident there were people that were working in support of the efforts of better.com, and their booth at the National Association of Realtors Conference that are no longer at that company. And so if you’ve got a loan that needs to go through, you might not be working with the same person, you might have a different process than you did before. So it’s time to shore up your options. And make sure that your process as a real estate agent or broker has your clients smooth transition from one end to the other front and center. Because right now is it’s you know, it’s a good time to re re evaluating those things anyway, but especially when there’s volatility in the space, it’s a double good time to make sure you’ve got some backup.
D.J. Paris 14:11 Yeah, I would love to also talk about some of the stats that you’ve seen recently. With respect to we’re now towards the we’re at the very end of the year 2021. We have agents who are now reevaluating where they want to be. We were just talking about evaluating some of your partners including loan officers, but also your own agency. You know, are you happy at your current firm? Are you exploring other options to someone else down the street, have a brokerage with a better split, more training, more leads, more support more tools? This is the time of year which as somebody who this is my job is essentially to recruit realtors, this is the time of year that is busiest for or not just the holiday season activities, but also for agents looking to say, where do I want to hang my hat? You know, 2022? And, of course, we know there are lots of options, even in even in rural areas, there’s lots of opportunities. So could you tell us a little bit about what you’re seeing out there?
Chris Linsell 15:20 Absolutely. So I’ll say two things. One, the close has a running all the time, we’ve got some quizzes and some surveys that people can take on different articles that give us some insights into the mindset of readers of particular content. And we’ve got a little survey on our article about the choosing the right real estate brokerage or company to work for. And in that survey, we’ve got a couple of questions that are pretty telling. Just to give a little context, in so far in the year 2021. We’re recording this on December 20. So nearly the end of the year, we’ve had over 10,000 people complete this survey. And we asked him basically, we asked him a few questions, but the two that really matter here are Why are you looking for a new brokerage? And what are the values that you are most looking for in a new brokerage? So why are you considering leaving? And what are you looking for basically? And here’s a couple of interesting things. When asked people when we’re asking people, why are you considering leaving? Less than 3%? less than 3% of people responded, saying I’m dissatisfied with my brokerages brand in less than 3%, I want
D.J. Paris 16:55 to I want to just take that job. So it’s less than three. So that’s interesting to me, I wouldn’t have guessed the hat, right. Because the branding, which largely is a visual component, which I would, I would have thought that would have been a much higher number. So that’s good to know, interest. Yeah.
Chris Linsell 17:16 So I would have thought it would be a little bit higher, too. But then, you know, I started talking to some agents about it. And I came to an interesting conclusion, which is, for most agents, especially middle of the road to high performing agents, their brand is their name, it’s the writer on top of the sign more than it is the placard of the sign itself. So whether or not they’re dropping their name writer on top of a century 21 Or a Coldwell Banker or a compass. That doesn’t matter as much to them because their brand is in their name. So that to me, tells me two things. The first is if you’re a real estate broker, you should not be dropping a million dollars or a managing broker, you should not be dropping millions of dollars into your company branding, you should be setting up company branding that then facilitates and accelerates your agents, individual Brandon, because that’s where the money is for them. So that’s the first interesting tidbit. The second interesting tidbit was and this one is fascinating to me. less than 15% of people who said they were considering a new brokerage, less than 15% of these people said it was because they were dissatisfied with their brokerages, commission structures. So that is very surprising. I thought so too.
D.J. Paris 18:41 So, so. So now we’ve we’ve basically, we’ve removed the the, the opposite, what we’ve done is we’ve removed two things, we’ve removed the branding, and we’ve also removed compensation. So what has been more important than
Chris Linsell 19:03 so the things that were most important to people, in fact, overwhelming nearly 84% of people chose either that they wanted better company culture or they wanted more growth opportunities within within their company to grow as a leader to be mentored and to gain better skills and have better professional development. It’s so clear that people were leaving brokerages are considering leaving brokerages. In fact, nearly I mean more than eight out of 10 people were considering this move because they didn’t feel like they had a place in the company. They didn’t feel like they had a valued spot. And I tell you what, I’ve been working as a remote worker for many years now. priek many, much before COVID hit. I was working at home and honestly, I at the close I feel like an incredibly valued member of my team, and I see these people in person. During non COVID years, I see these people in person like maybe three times, four times a year at the most. And I have a, I have a place within the company, I’m a place within the team, your agents and brokers can have a place within your team as well. And if they don’t feel like that, if they feel isolated, that they feel like they’re on an island, like they have no path to grow and get better, they’re going to look for somewhere else to be.
D.J. Paris 20:30 Yeah, I think that’s really important. Retention is really what we’re talking about. And and I think that when we we know that, thankfully that the commission is so for everyone listening who may be thinking, well, there’s a better commission split out there. Yes, there is. Of course, there is there’s there are firms that will pay you more, though firms will pay less. What i It seems to not be the deciding the majority deciding factor. But this idea of being appreciated or being having opportunity, I think is really, really critical and really speaks to what I think is the brokerages job, which is to not only provide all the tools, the skills, the training and the support that an agent needs, so that they can build the business that they want. But then also to make sure that that agent is appreciated in the way that they recognize appreciation. And so, you know, it’s it goes back to like being in a relationship with somebody, we probably all of our listeners have heard of love languages, which is, you know, there’s various ways in which we experience love. And most of us have a predominant modality or predominant way that we like to experience love, it might be verbal praise, it might be acts of service, it might be physical touch, might be gifts. And what I would encourage all of us to do, who are listening to this, this episode, whether you’re a brokerage owner, or whether you’re just a broker, and you can apply the same principle to your clients, would be to really think about how do the people that you value whether they’re your your, if your manager, your brokers, or your agents, or if it’s your clients? How do you recognize them? How do you acknowledge them, and you know, make sure that they feel appreciated, whether they’re your client, or they’re your co worker, I think that is, is a huge opportunity for broker just to retain, and each person has their own unique style. So you almost have to, in our opinion, in my opinion, create, you know, sort of a CRM of sorts of here’s, you know, here’s what my, the, for example, we have almost 800 Realtors at our company, we have a list of all of course of all those realtors, and what we know about them and how they like to be rewarded and appreciated. And even though with our company where we pay very high commission splits, that is not usually the most important thing to any of those agents have a few of them it is but for the vast majority of them, they really appreciate when when we call them and congratulate them. So I think this is a great opportunity for for anyone listening to realize that you get to now have a deeper emotional connection with your co workers or your clients by understanding what makes them tick. And then serving them up that love language that best suits them.
Chris Linsell 23:42 Yeah. So this is some next level podcast hosted and frankly, that you tie this back to Gary Chapman’s book about love languages. Yeah, this is like so onpoint. So if you haven’t read it, it’s called The Five Love Languages by a guy named Gary Chapman. And in fact, I’m gonna give you two book reports. As we got the holidays coming up guys got plenty of time to read, you should read Gary Chapman’s original, The Five Love Languages, because this is like an invaluable book about personal relationships. But there’s also a new edition called the five languages of appreciation in the workplace that is geared specifically towards business. And guys, if you are if you own a brokerage or a managing broker, or if you’re just an agent or broker working with your clients, I’m telling you this, it’s like it’s those moments where like you read something or you hear something to say how did I not think of this? This is the sort of the sort of kind of Next Level analysis of those of those relationship specific businesses like real estate that I’m telling you, it’s gonna mean a lot to you. So check it out Gary Chapman, five love languages and the five languages of appreciation in the workplace. And it does it ties back into the second question that we’re asking people on the survey which is, what are the most important things that you’re Looking for in your new brokerage. And again, an overwhelming percent here guys like it was 40 49% of people wanted strong industry leadership and company culture. And then training and professional development was 30% of that. So between strong leadership, company culture, and training and professional development, we’re making up nearly 80% of of the of the total first priorities for people. So again, think about, if you’re an agent, you know, think about where are your buckets being filled. I’m not trying to borrow too much from Gary Chapman here. But if you read the second book here, you will talk about, you know, we all have these professional buckets that need to get filled. And you may be looking for for appreciation, and encouragement and engagement in your workplace. Are you getting your bucket filled? And if you are managing broker, are you filling the buckets of your agents, because frankly, tying it back together with better.com, what was totally lacking in the better.com layoff fiasco, was a connection between the needs of the employees who, frankly, it wasn’t a bad business move to lay these people off. I’m not trying to be cold hearted here. But the company needed to position itself with a balance sheet that had less liabilities. In order to achieve their goals. It sucks, because these are people involved. This is not just numbers on a spreadsheet, these are human beings who have Christmas shopping to do and mortgages to pay, and medical bills. And I recognize all of that, but you can’t fault a business for also being thoughtful about making sure it’s a self sustaining entity. But what this guy did totally wrong was disconnect with the people and their needs in the way that this message was communicated. And this just harkens back to the value of the companies that we work with and for connecting with our needs, both as professionals and as consumers. So you should expect more from your brokerage. And honestly, your clients should expect more from you. So make yourself better, and do so by also making your brokerage better, it really is a win win for everybody.
D.J. Paris 27:36 It is a win win. And it’s nice to know for those who are listening, who have team members, who may be you, you’re listening, and you run a team, and you’re worried that your top producer is going to leave and go off on their own, or maybe switch brokerages or you know, create their own team or, you know, in, you know, of course, all of those things can always happen. But the data in Chris’s data that he shared with us earlier, is very consistent with other data that I’ve seen over the years, which has to do with people typically leave because they feel unappreciated. People typically will leave a brokerage because they know they’re not getting what they need. Do you know what your brokers need? Does your manager know what you need? Right? If you’re an agent, now’s a great time to have those conversations. And, you know, hold the manager, if you’re an agent, hold your managers feet to the fire and say, here’s what I would like to do. And 2022 Here are the skills I need to develop. Here are the tools I might need here are the resources that would be helpful. can you assist me with this? Because sure, somebody down the street might be able to give you a better commission split. But that’s really what you want is you want your needs met. And if your need is that you need a higher commission split, well, there you go. But if you need professional development, if you need, you know, additional leadership, you know, or you need better business planning or skill development, this is the time to go to your manager and say, hey, I want to crank this thing up and 2022 What can you what can we do together to help me get there? That is their job and for managers listening that is your job. And it is my job here at my company to make sure that all of the agents we have go hey, why would I ever leave? These guys take wonderful care of me and they appreciate me and you know, they’re they’re giving me what I need. But the only way that that happens is through communication. Everybody is so unique and different. Please do not be afraid to go to your manager and say I want to work on my business plan with you. Can you spare some time with me to chart a path For us in 2022? And if they sort of give you the Yeah, yeah, well, you know, look, there’s there’s no, I would encourage you to to consider other options, right. I mean, there’s other firms out there that are that we would love to help you with that
Chris Linsell 30:16 100% 100%. One of the things that, for better or worse, we are, there is a reality in our market right now is choice, at least from a professional like, where do you hang your license? Who do you work with, as far as vendors, there’s a lot of competition in that space right now. So you can make choices. But frankly, the kind of the start and end of this conversation, for me, as far as choices go, is whatever choices you’re make, you’re making, make sure that those are being made in pursuit of providing the best experience possible for your clients. So if you are making choices between brokerages, which one is going to give you the tools you need in order to level up your client experience. Because at the end of the day, your clients certainly deserve that. And you’re going to make more money and be more successful. If you are positioning yourself to build a business around creating the best experience possible for your clients. If you were putting other things first, you might zoom out ahead, temporarily, but honestly, you’re that’s that is that is a temporary win relative to the agents and brokers who are positioning their clients best interests and a superior experience first. So you know, as you’re going into 2020, to think to yourself, you know, what am I doing every day, every week, every month, every quarter, to level up my clients experience within the real estate space. And if you are not being provided with the tools, and the training, and the opportunity to get that done, might be time to make a change, whether that’s in a brokerage, or whether that’s with a lender, or an inspector or an appraiser or whoever it is. If you right now you’ve got some choices. So it’s it’s a good time to make them. And also
D.J. Paris 32:07 a great time to evaluate or technology partners as well. So if you have services that you’re using signature platform CRMs website, front ends, this is a great time to you know, as things slow down to evaluate, reevaluate, are you getting what you need are your tools in alignment with your goals. And you know, there thankfully, there are a lot of partners out there that would love to get your business and will compete for that business. So wow, what a what a great conversation, Chris. I’m really, I was really enjoyed. I enjoyed hearing some of those statistics, because it was nice to hear that the human element is ultimately sort of the trump card in I guess, maybe I shouldn’t use the word Trump anymore. That’s got a minute. For a lot of us a negative connotation. But but sort of that, that, you know, that high ace, I guess, is the human connection. And if you can just continue to connect with your clients, with your co workers, with your team members, checking in with them, how are you doing? What’s going on, all of that really helps with retention, and keeping everyone you know, front of mind. But now, now’s the time, you know, if we’re now in the last, you know, 10 days or so of the month, if you haven’t already reached out to all of your customers, your clients, your colleagues, wishing them a happy holiday season, wishing them a happy new year. That’s the easiest way that you can do what you can do right now just to you know, make them feel appreciated and supported. But yeah, this is the time to really evaluate, what are you getting? What are you giving? And what are you going to do in 2022?
Chris Linsell 33:57 That’s the truth. That’s the truth in 2022. Honestly, it’s not going to be a calm and quiet year. It is going to be volatile, and crazy, and exciting, and heartbreaking and victorious. I’m sure we’re gonna have elements of all of that. So I can’t wait to keep talking through with you. There’s going to be a lot on the horizon this year. I have a feeling.
D.J. Paris 34:19 I agree. Tell us a little bit about the close pro before we wrap up.
Chris Linsell 34:22 Yeah. So if you are looking for a way to level up your real estate business, first and foremost, check out the clubs.com 99% of what we have there is totally free. You don’t even need an email address. Just come read about how you can make your business better. And we’ve got everything from long form strategy guides like real estate farming, or creating a better CMA or choosing a paid lead generation provider. All the way to fun stuff like real estate memes and the best real estate jokes your clients haven’t heard. I mean everything that you need To get a better real estate business we’ve got on the close. And if you want to go to the next level, you can join us on the clothes pro the clothes Pro is our premium subscription based service. It is where you can get exclusive courses taught by myself and other close pro instructors. Things like six simple systems to transform your real estate business, Facebook and Instagram Crash Course for agents or for low cost hidden listing Goldmine sources, these are all courses in just a few of what we offer on the close Pro, we also offer an extensive resource library and boot camps, a boot camp collection full of things like you know, dozens of scripts and templates, and all the different pieces components that you need to build a successful real estate strategy. Close Pro is 35 bucks a month, or you can get it for $199. For the year, we’ve got a lot of cool stuff that I can’t even I mean, just kind of scratching the surface here. But this is really, if you want to go beyond googling your answer and get an authoritative source with with resources, the sorts of resources that your brokerage should provide. But isn’t the closed pros a great option for that. So come check us out. The clothes.com is our website, you can find the clothes pro there, and come check out what we can do for your business because we’re helping a lot of folks and we’d love to help you too.
D.J. Paris 36:33 We love the clothes.com everyone who is listening or watching please go visit the clothes.com it should be your primary source for marketing journalism. I guess, I don’t know if that’s an actual term. But it’s where I go for all of my good ideas for this business. So the clothes.com th e c l o s e.com. Sign up for the clothes Pro, give it a shot 35 bucks a month. Absolutely reasonable. And before you do that, you can read almost everything they have for free, as well. Chris, on behalf of the listeners, as always, we thank you for closing out another year with us. 2021 has been a or 20. Yeah, 2021 has been a crazy year. But it’s been a very interesting year. And I hope in 2022 We’ll have even more to talk about. And we’re also going to be expanding this show as well. So be on the lookout for for all of our listeners for some some big news are very excited to to be releasing shortly. And on behalf of Chris and myself want to thank the listeners and the audience, the viewers for continuing to support our show, please tell a friend think of one other agent that you know that could benefit from hearing this great conversation that we just had with Chris and send them a link to our website the best way you can reach us send them right over to keeping it real pod.com Or over to our Facebook page which is facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod every episode we’ve ever done is all on Facebook as well as on our website or just pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real. Hit that subscribe button. Alright Chris. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. We will see you in 2022
Chris Linsell 38:18 Can’t wait. Let’s get back into it and have a good one everybody. Thanks
5 Steps To Successfully Grow Your Sphere Of Influence • Stan Ponte
Jan 06, 2022
Stan Ponte is the second highest producing real estate agent in New York City! He’s a Senior Global Real Estate Advisor and Associate Broker at Sotheby’s International Realty East Side Manhattan brokerage. During our conversation, Stan talks about how his acting aspirations transitioned into real estate. Stan gives his daily workflow and how that’s been the cornerstone for his success. Last, Stan discusses the 5 steps to successfully grow your sphere of influence.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide, and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with the number two Top Producing Realtor in New York City, Stan Ponte of Sotheby’s International, and we’re super excited to talk to Stan. But before we get to Stan, just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend you know it is not everyday that we get to talk to super high end producers like Stan, please let other agents in your office know about this show. Send them a link to our website, keeping it real pod.com or have them pull up any podcast app search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. While we’re at it. If you could leave us a review on whichever platform you listen to our show, whether it’s Apple podcast, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, etc. We would love that it helps us get more visibility so that we can reach more realtors, but it also helps us know what you like and what you don’t like about the show so we can keep improving. So please leave us a review and please tell a friend but enough of me. Let’s get on to our main guest now Stan Ponte
today on the show we have Stan Ponte from Sotheby’s International Realty in New York City. Let me tell you a little bit about Stan. Stan Ponte is a senior global real estate adviser and Associate Broker at Sotheby’s International Realty East Side in Manhattan. Stan has been named and this is beyond incredible. We’re so honored to have them and Stan has been named the number two agent in Manhattan by sales volume for his work in 2020, achieving 144 million in sales. According to both the Wall Street Journal and real trends. As a realtor in New York City for the past 21 years. Stan’s client lists range from first time homebuyers to CEOs, philanthropists, hedge fund managers, tech world and innovators and also entertainers. He is known for his extraordinary level of care integrity, and the absolute discretion he provides to his clients. I want everybody if you’re driving a car, don’t do this, maybe pull over first. But if you are passively listening, go to his website at Stan ponte.com. That’s p o n t e. So Stan, p o n t.com. For all things, Stan said, Thank you so much for being on our show. Welcome.
Stan Ponte 3:17 Wow, thank you so much. That’s some introduction. Well, it’s
D.J. Paris 3:20 not it’s not every day that we get to talk to somebody who is in one of the most challenging real estate markets in the country, or certainly the most, one of the most expensive real estate markets, and also thriving, and just doing well. And we are honored to have you here. I always like to start at the very beginning of the story only because our audience tends to love to hear how our guests got into real estate. So if you don’t mind sharing with us that story from 21 years ago, about how why you got into real estate and how that sort of evolved for you.
Stan Ponte 3:56 Yeah, you know, I do tell the story, even though it’s painful to keep reliving it. You know, I, when I read your bio, one of the things that struck me was you’re talking about mentorship. And I really do see mentorship as being willing to share the stories of our lives, you know, what has gotten us where we are, and sort of when it happened. And for me, I came to New York City from a small town in Massachusetts, and I was going to be a big Broadway star. That was my goal. Oh, kidding. Absolutely. I went to so were
D.J. Paris 4:35 you were you a song and dance man. Or?
Stan Ponte 4:38 Well, you know, I still think I’m the song and dance man. But the real answer is I can’t sing. I can’t dance. But I can but I can sell a song. And I can sell apartments but yeah, you know, it’s hard. You come to New York City, went to school of the arts studied at a really famous conservatory called the Stella Adler Conservatory.
D.J. Paris 4:59 That is Beyond famous still out there, my goodness,
Stan Ponte 5:02 Shakespeare and Ibsen and, you know, important stuff. And while I was doing these important things, I started hosting a shopping channel on satellite television, when people had big like, 12 Yeah, like dishes. So 7 million homes all over the country had the satellite dishes. And every day, I would leave NYU at 7pm and go to the Empire State Building. And from the 82nd floor, I would broadcast live this shopping show. But this is shopping shows before there were shopping shows this was like, the producer would get like 500 spiral hands, especially at this time of year, and basically sit live with my buddy from NYU film school on the camera, and I would just sit there eating this spiral ham, you know, piece by piece slowly seeing Oh, we sold 10 We sold 30 we you know, and the producers yelling at me in my ear, we have 480 spiral lambs keep eating, you know, I did a spiral ham is really good. But two and a half hours later that that that sugar coding relates, right? Get to you. Anyway, that’s a good example of why my acting career didn’t work. I was classically trained and hocking stuff on TV. And not even big TV like QVC, or home shopping network. This was on satellite TV. So it’s just all of it didn’t work. And so there I was, you know, literally couch surfing, living on a friend’s couch in Greenwich Village in New York, and waiting tables and doing all the stuff you already see your starving actors doing. And my good good friend who was my pizza buddy, because the best thing you can eat in New York City is pizza slices, because you get four C slices and a Diet Coke and like $1.99 at the time, and we would go and share, et cetera. So one day, he calls me or probably I probably didn’t, I didn’t have a phone and he came to the apartment, like buzzed the apartment, on the third floor walk up and off we go. And he’s like, You know what, tonight I’m treating you to dinner. I’m like, oh, okay, big spender, you know, dollar 99. And next thing you know, we’re sitting in this amazing steak restaurant, in the village in the Meatpacking District, actually, and treats me to this beautiful big dinner. And I’m like, well, that’s going on here. And it turns out that he had just gotten his real estate license and started doing deals in real estate, and didn’t want to tell me until he turned to have a month or so. under his belt. I’m like, you make money in real estate in less than a month doing? He’s like, Yeah, I do rentals, people like call the office. And I just go and do as they pay 15% of the first year’s rent. Mike has never even heard of that. So I laid in bed and been in the couch. Over macdougal street while people are like. For some reason the Village People throw the garbage cans make noise just because they’re having a good time. So the garbage cans wake me up at four in the morning and I stand in the ceiling. I’m like, I gotta do something with my life. And so I went to real estate school that morning. And two and a half weeks later, I had my license. And two weeks after that I had my first commission checks. And I just said 21 or 22 years later now 22 I guess as we head into 2022 Here I am.
D.J. Paris 8:45 What? Wow. Well, there’s a lot that happened in those in those 22 years. But I also just want to tell our audience because you New York City is very unique with with terms of rentals that is different from almost every other major city. I think Boston also sort of does it this way. But Chicago definitely doesn’t and most other markets don’t. And what I’m about to say, I don’t know how often it’s still in place today, but it used to be in Stan will tell me tell us but it used to be that the tenant would oftentimes pay that 15% commission so it’s an even tougher job than it sounds because it’s not just hey, I’ve got this great apartment for you. Oh, by the way, Mr. or Mrs. tenant, if you’re going to be cutting me a check for you know, several $1,000 On top of whatever the security deposit first month’s rent you might be doing. That is a tough ask. And I understand that is just how it’s done there. But, boy, that is tough. And so I honor you for for doing that because that is not an easy ask.
Stan Ponte 9:44 It was starting at the bottom of the beginning of the bottom. And it was tough, but you know, it was a chance. And I think you know, one of the hard things about coming from acting was I just felt like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even really get a chance, you know, I couldn’t get it an opportunity to succeed and with real estate, and I understand that a lot of the people that listen to your podcast and go watch the podcast, however, it may be our are maybe in the beginning parts of their career to some extent. And that’s what I always want to say is, you know what, every single day in real estate is a chance. And if you can grab the chance, if you can learn how to increase your odds, then you get a new chance every single morning. And the longer you do it, and the harder you work and the smarter you work, you increase the odds that not only will you have a chance, but you’ll have a success. So I am grateful to the real estate profession, because it’s an even playing field, anyone can do it, you need a high school education, you have to be 18 years old and a real estate license. And God save America and the Queen, it is possible to create a life to support yourself support a family, and and find a path to being a part of a part of the community where you can give back and participate and be a full, thriving person.
D.J. Paris 11:18 Yeah, it’s such an important point that you just made, I want to I want to step on it a little bit, because I think that, you know, being that also, you’re a New York guy. And somebody who really, you know, wanted to be in entertainment. You know, and you studied with Stella Adler, you went to the Stella Adler school, and that is a very, very well known and well respected sort of process to being an actor. And yet not everyone even gets an opportunity to do like a David Mamet play, or, or any of the great Broadway shows, because there’s a million other people vying for those very few finite positions that, you know, of course, New York, your your competition with the top people from entire world all come to New York for that profession. And then yet, you said something, also, which is in real estate, you know, anyone can really do it, we can all get our license. And New York City is certainly one of the most difficult maybe the most difficult place to build your business in real estate strictly because of the finances involved. And also, just just how, you know, it’s New York City, and everything’s tough. But, but the fact that anyone can do it, and it is a level playing field is a really important point and what you said about if you just keep trying to increase your odds of success, and the good news is that people before us have laid the foundation and we know what the fundamentals are I was talking to, I was doing an interview yesterday with an agent from Fargo, North Dakota, who has 10% of the market share in Fargo, which is incredible, like, like if Fargo is a small, you know, a smaller market, but but he said, you know, he was telling that he was saying that, you know, it’s not if your issue is leads, if you don’t have enough leads, then you’re just not staying in contact with with your sphere of influence enough. He said, lead should never ever be your issue. Because we know, everyone’s got to live somewhere, most people are going to choose a real estate agent. And if you stay front of mind, for the people that know like and trust you and you know, you should be able to increase the odds of getting those deals. But I want to start at the beginning. So you got your license, and you started doing rentals. Tell us how that worked. You know, what was it? Like? How did you sort of learn how to become a great realtor? What worked for you back then? And also what how do you advise agents today? who are who are newer, what maybe what they should be doing be there in your in your market?
Stan Ponte 13:55 Yeah, you know, first off, what I would say is it was it was a different job when I started, right. I mean, I didn’t even have a cell phone, you were sitting at your desk waiting for the phone to ring from someone reading an advertisement in a print newspaper. And you know, I’m 50 years old, I’m not 100 I know I sound 100 When I talk about things like print advertising and phones or anything. But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed. And that is the willingness to put in the time and the work and the ability to wake up every morning and then do it all again, even in the face of either success or failure. So when I was starting out at this tiny little real estate company, I showed up every day, seven days a week, I was the first one in the office and the last one in the office and when it was Labor Day, I wasn’t at the beach. I was in the office because guess what, there was no one else there to answer the phones. So I sat open the door there was a risk factionist desk right at the entrance, I just sat right down to the receptionist desk, I didn’t have to wait for the call to go to the receptionist, then to go to the manager, so he could, you know, meet out the leads, I just answered the phones, myself. And no one else is there. And you know what, if you’re calling on Labor Day, or Memorial Day or Valentine’s Day, or even Thanksgiving Day, you’re probably going to rent an apartment that day or the next day. Right and and that hasn’t changed. So I do have this great opportunity now to mentor brokers when they come into Sotheby’s because we have a mentorship program. And that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed, when a mentee comes in, and they are ready to work seven hours, 10 hours, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, while everyone else is on vacation. The next thing you know, they start bringing in all their own business and succeeding. So you know, it’s, it’s not exactly It’s like a It’s a terrible diet pill. Because it’s not one of those diet pills that you can just take one and lose weight. I’ve tried that. This is the get on the treadmill workout and burn more calories than you eat. And that’s what this is this is work harder, smarter, more, and the business will follow.
D.J. Paris 16:22 Yeah, I wish there were some, you know, we’ve done 300 And probably close to 30 330 episodes, roughly. And I am still waiting for a guest to say no, there’s this little secret that no one else knows about. And it, you know, does all the work for you. And I’ve yet to hear anyone give me that that secret because it likely doesn’t exist. Or if it does, those people aren’t coming on my show. But I have some of the most successful agents of the country like yourself on here, and so far haven’t heard it. But it is all about fundamentals. And it’s about getting up every day and saying and I love the fact that you said this in this way. And in all the interviews I’ve done, I don’t believe anyone has used this this sort of phrasing which is increasing your odds, I remember I was doing a top producer panel, or hosting a top producer panel for our local association here in Chicago. And we had these three big producers on stage. And we were asked taking questions from the audience. And, and this one, this, this very courageous, young realtor raises their hand and says, I’m really embarrassed, but I wanted to ask the panel, but what happens when your best friend chooses another realtor over you? And everyone laughed, because I’m sure everybody’s had that experience with somebody that was close to them deciding to use somebody else. And somebody from the panel said, Well, you know, you probably had an assumption that this person was going to use you. And but were you telling them that when they’re ready to use you that you want their business? Or were you staying in touch with them and reminding them what you do, and whether it’s, you know, really in a salesy way or, or in a in a more sort of subtle way. And and you know, and then that she said, Well, not really I just assumed she would work with me and, and the person on the panel said something to the effect of you need to learn how to increase your, your opportunity percentage, you know, here. And so you really just said that. And I just think that is such a smart thing to say. Can you talk a little bit about what you do specifically to increase your, you know, your not your close rate, but but just the chance that people in your sphere will will come to you and they need real estate help?
Stan Ponte 18:35 Well, I can and I think it starts with something I’ve practiced because I was taught it early on. And it works. So I keep doing it. And that is making sure that I’m reaching out to at least five people from my circle of influence every single day, every day, five a day, five a day, every single day. And the way I do that is I start my day, as I’m sure all of your listeners do. And I’m sure as you do, I’m reading every real estate blog and the papers that are important to me, the magazines are important to me, I’m looking at every new listing, every price drop, every contract signed, every closing, I’m reading all the dirt about what building is going to be torn down, what building is going to be a new high rise what the zoning law changes are going to be. So as I’m doing all of that which is which is the education that I need to be able to do a good job for the rest of the day. By doing that, I have found that individuals who I know who I deem is my circle of influence people who I know know people who are going to buy or sell or lease real estate if not them, they know someone within their sphere. People pop into my head because it has to do with them. If it’s a zoning issue in Soho on a street where I sold a pen Taos four years ago, I now make a little note to myself, reach out to this person and say, Wow, I was reading about this zoning that’s going on. I wonder how that might affect the apartment. Or I remember a good friend of mine, his wife, Heather has a cookie company. And she was opening up a cookie store in Madison Avenue. And I read it in one of the newspapers, that was a reason to reach out to him. So by the time I’m done with my homework, which is my morning work, I’ve got my list of five people, whether it’s text, phone, or email, because everyone has a different way of wanting to communicate. I mean, I’ve I’ve had clients that I’ve worked with for 510 years I’ve never even spoken with basically, they’re texters right? Is es GTM. And I know we have a deal. It sounds good to me. I didn’t even know what that meant. I love that I did my first deal. And it was best GTM and I turned to the person I was with, I’m like, What does that even mean? They’re like, Oh, my God, you did the deal. Sounds good to me. And like, I’ve got to learn how people are communicating differently. So it doesn’t mean you know, old fashioned dialing for dollars with the phone only. It does mean communicating. And if you do five a day, right, that’s a lot of contacts as the weeks and months and year progress. And that’s a, that’s, that’s where you can start to count on a flow of leads coming in. Because you’re making contact got to make contact.
D.J. Paris 21:31 It’s funny too, because it is really, I always say it’s simple but difficult, right? It’s like a pushup, it’s like, it’s a simple exercise, but it’s a really good one. It’s not a lot of fun to do there, there’s certainly some some pain associated with picking up the phone or doing the push up. That you know, there’s resistance there that that exists for every human. But, but if you have a reason to pick the so what I what I love about what you’re thinking your process is, I need to reach out to five people in my in my sphere, and I need to come up with a reason to reach out to them. So I’m going to see what’s going on in the in the real estate market. You know, maybe also, for agents that are in areas where maybe there isn’t so much news, maybe in a more rural area where real estate news isn’t isn’t as prevalent as it would be for New York. You know, go to social media, see what your clients are up to, you know, oh, they just got back from a vacation. Actually, Stan is on his way to a vacation. And we’re so honored by the way just as a quick pulling back the curtain on our podcast, Stan is getting ready to leave for a an amazing vacation. And he did he took time to find us to find time to help us out. So we’re so grateful because we know how busy Stan is. But again, if you were wanting to prospect Stan, for example, and he coming back from his vacation, and you’re following him on social media, that’s, that’s a phone call to Hey, I saw you just went to you know, X, and how was it telling me about it and it but the idea is finding a reason to call your clients and provide some sort of value, whether it’s real estate related or just hey, it’s the holiday season, how’s everything going? What’s up, you know, how’s everyone safe with COVID? You know, there’s lots of reasons to reach out and said, I’m curious, because obviously, you’re an ultra competitive market with I mean, New York City is known for their competitiveness. There’s some of the sharpest minds in the country, and most talented individuals among all industries flocked in New York to make it. And so you are in an extremely competitive environment. However, I’m curious, I wonder how many realtors are picking up the phone calling five people a day, every single day? I bet you it’s less than 1% of agents. And I don’t mean working your existing clients, the people you have to reply to to close out a deal. I’m talking about what you’re doing, which is finding a unique reason to call somebody who isn’t yet working with you. And saying hello and giving them so I suspect that is a very, very powerful tool for
Stan Ponte 24:08 now it is but it also matches me and you’re a bigger expert than I am when it comes to a macro look at brokers right? Because I’m just a real estate agent. You have a you have. I was talking to you right before we went live up to 800 agents that you’re working with that the firm that you created, right? So you’re looking around at these 800 people and I’m gonna say that from my perspective, you can agree or disagree that the people that succeed, of course have all these great tools. They’ve got ways of doing things, but in my opinion, the common thread is that they are their best selves. They are the most standard Ponte ish standard Ponting that’s ever been a standard pantum because there is no other person like me, which is I think a good thing It never has been, never will be. And that’s the same for every single human being on this planet. We are all gifted with individuality, which allows us to attract people to us. If we can manifest ourselves as fully as possible, that self actualization, that being yourself, right? Because listen, you say, oh, there’s all these brokers in New York City, it’s so competitive. If you were to put the top 50, New York City Real Estate Brokers on the stage, you would not be able to find one thing necessarily in common. You know, if we put 50, I won’t pick on any banking firm, because I have too many clients at all of those bankers, I shouldn’t even say that I’m in trouble. Let’s say we put 50 Somebody’s will stick with bankers, let them not hire me. 50 bankers on the stage, they’re going to be similarly dressed step. Dialed, there’ll be a tone, there’ll be there’ll be an approach, there’ll be something that side, well, if I want to do this, if I look sound do that’s not real estate, there are people who sell much more real estate than I am. And I wouldn’t want to be in a room with them for more than two minutes. They make me crazy. And then there’s others who are the nicest people ever. They’re super competitive people, super loving people, super everything. But what they all are, is there themselves totally. And that, to me is the real success, that that that self knowledge because you need it. Otherwise, this business can really get in your head, because you think you’re winning or losing every deal on your own merits. And although it’s always good to do a post mortem, especially when a deal doesn’t go, well, it’s also good to do post mortems when they go well. So you can identify parts of your business that are going particularly effectively. But the real answer is find your heart and align it with your mind. And not just business comes, but the world comes to you.
D.J. Paris 27:13 Yeah, it’s, it’s so well said, I want to pause for a moment to kind of let that sink in. And really, what I think we’re talking about is getting out of your own way. And the way to do that is to get to know yourself better and realize that we’re so fortunate to be in an industry where individuality is not always welcomed. Of course, there’s examples of that the Asian American realtor community had a very difficult time in the last few years because of, you know, just, you know, certain sentiment in our country and certain individuals have certainly more advantages than others. That being said, it’s I’m always amazed at the, at the individuality of these top producers that are also unique and different and come on our show, and have, you know, different backgrounds, different stories, and the ones that rise to the top. Obviously, like our guests, Stan, a tend to be really comfortable with themselves. And so I encourage everyone out there, if you are newer to the industry, or if you haven’t quite found your niche, that’s okay. And that’s normal. But if you can just keep plodding along and really learning about you and learning about the industry, your personality will start to emerge and stand in I’m I don’t have to say this, but I will because it’s so obvious. The reason I’m, I’m saying it, everyone’s already thought it but I’m going to say what everyone’s been thinking, it is clear that Stan is fully present. Even for this interview, he’s fully present, he’s fully he is himself. The self actualization that he mentioned is is it comes through in every syllable as he speaks. That is powerful. And it what it does as a listener, or as a client potential client of Stan’s is makes me realize this person is all in and I think clients want their service provider whether it’s an attorney, financial planner, investment banker, or realtor to be an all in you know person and and Stan I can feel that coming through. I know our audience can and the fact that you articulated it much better than I did is really an important lesson and there’s no shortcut to it probably either. But it is cool to watch agents who look totally different from one another. still go on and you’re right though like on the invest in the investor banking side investment banking side, there tends to be a template That that is very consistent. And maybe it’s better now than it used to be, but I understand what you’re saying. But in real estate, it really kind of anything goes. And I love that. And we’re so lucky to be in an industry where you can be yourself and largely be rewarded for that.
Stan Ponte 30:16 I know that an investment banking firm would not want me around, I’m really pretty, too loud, you know, I just not but not their stick.
D.J. Paris 30:27 Well, tell us a little bit I would love. So Stan is such an amazing producer and such a wonderful guy. And we are, we’re thrilled that he’s here, I would like to talk about, you know, how you decided to move from, you know, and I’m sure rentals are still part of your business, although I actually don’t know if they still aren’t, I’m happy to talk about that. But also that shift into luxury, because every realtor, or at least every realtor has had the thought, at some point, boy, if I could only get into luxury, that would, that would really be what I want. And of course, luxury is not for everyone. But it obviously has worked out well for you. So we’d love to hear the journey about how you were able to make the shift into luxury.
Stan Ponte 31:12 Well, you know, what comes to my mind is in New York City, when a studio is a million dollars. I think it’s basically all luxury, right? I mean, anyone, anyone living on the island of Manhattan, is, has either made their own money or is spending someone else’s, right. This is not, this is not a cheap Island to live on, by any stretch of the imagination. Honestly, I think that luxury, is another way of talking about in integrity of service. That applies regardless of the price. So when you say I don’t know, if you do rentals anymore, I don’t do a lot of rentals. But if it’s an important client to me, and a friend of a friend, I will certainly be a part of it, I might ask an Associate Broker that I work with to take the lead. I’m not wandering around looking at $2,000 rentals, in the afternoon, because it wouldn’t work for my business model. But I would certainly you know, pop by and make sure the ceilings are falling in or that I don’t know something wrong with the building before someone fancy, especially if they’re a friend of or clients, you know, son or daughter or grandchild or whatever it may be. So I don’t mean to sidestep the question of luxury. But I do think that sometimes people believe real estate brokers believe that there’s a difference. And having gone from the, you know, $1,200 a month, apartments near NYU, next to the water boiler, you know, steam room, all the way up to, you know, the most expensive real estate on the planet. I’ve had the benefit of doing deals in all of those places. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. I don’t think there’s a big big difference. You’ve got someone who needs a home. And I think a home a bed, a pillow safety, heat, water, electricity, right? Once you get past that, it’s just more, but the core of it is safety, where your mind can feel that you’re okay. And that luxury is the biggest luxury, especially when we think of a planet where only a small percentage of the people on the planet have that even those basics. So I, I could go on and on about, you know, every $10 million plus apartment or $30 million, plus how we micro target, how we have specific ways of reaching those buyers, all of that. But I think what’s more important is the integrity of the deal and the individual. The rest, I believe follows and it’s not just because I’ve lived it. It’s because I’ve watched so many other brokers through my career. Approach it in that way. And the next thing you know, you know, they’re like, Stan, you always told me I was gonna sell a $40 million townhouse. I just sold my first $40 million townhouse. I’m like, Of course you did. You were acting as if you were selling $40 million townhouses. When it was a $4,000 a month rental. You were working hard. There was integrity. You ran the comps. You showed up you were on time you did all the things you need to do. So if you want to break into luxury, just do a good job. And the zeros it’s a zero is zeros. It’s all like all of us every day. Is it $1 Is it $10 Is 100,000 It’s zero. Zeros have nothing to do with whether or not you did it
with zest to do a good job. And I’ll add one other tiny piece here. I think that as there are more zeros, one thing maybe that we could define as a difference with luxury, is that the client very much appreciate when you approach the transaction with a in a mentality of being the principal. So yes, you’re an agent, yes, you’re acting as the agent of the principle. But if you can, for the principle, also have that owners or sellers hat on, not just your broker hat. Yeah. And by the time you bring it the next step of the deal to the person you’re working for, you haven’t just processed it as an agent, you’ve processed it through their lens as well. So that you can mix the two together and bring the best possible options and information. You know, if we do this, these two or three things might happen. If we take this path, your risk may go up, but your risk reward might go up. And all of those things that sellers, and buyers really do love to hear. I think if you can do both put on that broker hat, and that principle hat, that may be one way to define being able to work in luxury real estate. That is
D.J. Paris 36:33 such a powerful statement. I want to I want to revisit that right now. Because I want to I don’t want to move past it just yet. Because what Stan just said is is incredibly nuanced, but important and what he said at least what I heard him saying, Stan, please correct me, or extrapolate if I am getting off target. But what I heard was, and I just went through this myself, so I haven’t I’m technically an agent, I don’t practice real estate myself, I’ve never gone out and and have worked with clients I’ve only ever bought and sold my own stuff. So I know very little about being a realtor, other than with the interviews I do, and the realtors here at our company. So embarrassingly, I’m not in the trenches with with, with Stan and all of our listeners. That being said, I am in the industry. And I just recently went through a purchase myself, and it wasn’t my first purchase, it was a primary residence. So I’ve been through this before I’m in the industry, it shouldn’t freak me out. And as I went through it, I was completely the process of buying a condo. And this is not. I mean, it was a major decision for me with financing and everything. It was just, we know how stressful it is. It was even stressful for me. And I was probably, you know, I’m a little bit more accustomed to it than maybe somebody who is. And I thankfully, I had a boss, my boss who was able to mitigate a lot of the stuff for me. But I was thinking, gosh, if I’m this stressed out about buying a condo, every single person who’s not in the industry has got to be most of most of them have to be even more stressed. And so what Stan just said was so important, because what he essentially said was, he’s identifying, you know, issues that come up and thinking about it not just from his own vantage point as the as the agent, as the guy who’s going to be receiving the commission when this thing closes, but also from the perspective of his client. And that is such an important thing. If you can be the agent that goes, Okay, here’s what’s coming in your head, you know, you’re sitting down thinking about, Okay, I have to communicate this piece of information to this client, here’s a couple of ways they might respond. And here’s what I’m how I’m going to handle each one of these responses. You are prepared that is professional, and you have done something that is incredibly important, which is you have thought about your client and their needs before just showering them with information waiting to hear what they say and then doing this reactivity thing. You’re very proactive, Stan, and I know I’m sort of making this little tiny point into a big thing. But I bet you that is so important to your success is almost predicting different scenarios that may happen and then being able to solve those problems in advance so that when you sit down with a client say, Okay, this just came up, here’s how we’re going to handle it. And that sort of thing.
Stan Ponte 39:41 Yeah, listen, I mean, you know, it’s, it is rough. Being in a real estate deal. It’s, you know, it’s a lot like sitting on a plane, which I’ll be doing in less than 24 hours, God willing. You know, you’re you’re sitting on the plane, and there’s a pilot and the pilot has As the instruments and knows what’s coming and knows, if there’s weather ahead, they’re adjusting the route of the flight to avoid the clouds, if they’re going to hit the clouds, before you hit the clouds, ideally, the captain comes on and says, you know, it’s gonna be a little rough guys, but rather than adding an hour to the trip, we’re gonna go a little higher, and it’s going to be a little bumpy. So, finish your drink, buckle up, and you know, the flight attendants are going to be seated. That’s what we want, when we’re sitting in the back of the plane. And when you’re buying or selling in a real estate transaction, you’re you’re, you are in the back of the plane, at some level, you will, you have to trust that all those conversations going on, from even the initial showing, right, here’s the home, you’ve put your love your joy your money into. And now you hire someone you’ve never met, give them the keys to your house, and hope that when they walk someone through, they can represent it with enthusiasm and truth and, and be able to convey to the buyer that this could be their home in a way that gets them to buy the home. So it ain’t easy being a client, I gotta say, you know, and the other thing I’m gonna say, because we talked a little theater, is, if you don’t know the story of Jacqueline Hyde, and you’re a real estate broker, then you know, the story of Jekyll and Hyde, because the most rational, nicest, most congenial person in the world, all of a sudden turns, because they’re, you know, they told the deal that you’re working on with them to three people, those three people gave them three different versions of what they think it might be, and they start to panic, which is why I always answered the phone. I really try from 7am till about 11pm, seven days a week, not to be too attached. But to be aware that if a client reaches out, Stan, can you call me? If it’s humanly possible? I do it. Because every moment that happens after someone has reached out to say, Can you call me if you don’t call them back? They keep calling people. Yeah. And person after person gives the wrong, terrible advice. And for the hour that I could have just sat on the couch or sat with my friends at dinner, and said, I’ll call that client later, it’s so much better to say I have to, I need a moment. And I’ll go, because if I let them talk to other people for an hour, I’ll be on the phone with them for five hours unwinding when I could have done it in three minutes. So I kind of went off on a tangent there. But
D.J. Paris 42:44 it No, it’s an important, it was a great tangent, it wasn’t a tangent at all, because it was absolutely, you know, apt for our conversation. Can you share with us your five steps for real estate brokers to successfully grow their sphere of influence their center of influence, I know, this is very important to you. And we’d love to get your your take on that?
Stan Ponte 43:07 Well, we did a little bit of it already. In fact, what we did was sort of steps three through five, which is that doing your morning work, I don’t like to call it homework, because that’s the end of the day, at least in my own mind, doing your morning prep work, and then making those five calls a day. But before that, I think in terms of the first two steps, is to have a kind of honest conversation with yourself, and understand who in your life is your friend, because you love them, and you want to hang out with them
that hopefully the rest of your lives together and who directly influence if your friend doesn’t know anyone who’s going to buy, sell or rent real estate, and you spend every night with your friend sitting and talking for four hours a night, you may not see the kind of leads that you’d like to see coming in. If you can find people that you have common interests with and share values and have fun with and like N just happen to know people who are buying and selling real estate. Now you’ve got a sphere or circle of influence. There’s a lot of ways to talk about it. It is so crucial to make sure that you can understand the difference between I’m having a casual moment and the difference between I’m having a casual genuine moment with someone who can help me do better in my career, especially at the beginning. You know when I started in this business, so it’s a lot of nights in bars with the IRS and pool tables like that was kind of my life. I wasn’t going to Gallas and, you know co chairing thing I didn’t even know it co chairing was you know As you learn, and you live, and you learn, and you continue to make sure that you’re balanced in your life, but balancing means acknowledging who’s who, what’s what. And a circle of influence person, a sphere of influence person is someone who can be a cheerleader for you, someone who is willing to introduce you around to include you in their world, whether it’s their nonprofit endeavors, or their work or their private life. It is, it is really these five steps, which I’m happy to share and are available online, are all about carefully constructing a world, which is generating contacts. There’s one goal, when people anywhere in the world say, Do you know a good broker in New York City? That I’m at least one of them? Yeah, I can’t do every deal. And I’m not necessarily the best broker in New York City. I’m the only knee. Yeah, that doesn’t mean I’m the best. But as long as that hand goes up, you’re in Chicago, when people think of who can I call and I’m moving to Chicago at dinner, someone says to a friend, the friend should say, Well, I know exactly who you can call. Yeah, that is what creates a sustainable business.
D.J. Paris 46:30 And that’s in a position that is earned. Right. And so I think that’s an important thing, for every one of our audience to understand is, you have to earn that’s that slot. And the way to earn it is professionalism is through going the extra mile is picking up the phone and calling everyone your sphere. As as Stan does his five calls every day, and continuing to grow and learn about the business. And just treating this running it like a business continuing to improve every single day. They Japanese call it Kaizen, which is just this constant little improvement. Day to day there is Scott Peck. I think it was Scott Peck wrote it’s never crowded along the extra mile. I think that was one of his, one of his books. And it’s it’s kind of funny, but it’s, it’s sort of a silly cheesy saying, you know, okay, yeah, it’s never crowded along the extra mile. But it’s actually true. And I’m, you know, standing, we’re talking about when you started, and you would show up early and leave late, and it wasn’t, you know, you weren’t putting in, you know, 100 hours a week, you were putting in more than 40. But But you were crushing yourself. And here you are 21 years later, and fundamentals, it sounds like are just win the game. I’ve always felt that way. And, you know, and you also mentioned, there’s really no difference if you treat the $1,200 rental, the same as you might treat a $12 million penthouse purchaser or seller, if you treat them the same. You will attract both of those kinds of clients because they both want the experience of somebody’s taking care of this with me or for me. And I like them. I know them and I trust them.
Stan Ponte 48:29 Yeah, absolutely.
D.J. Paris 48:32 And Stan is in he’s almost on vacation mode. So I’m just going to ask him just one or two more questions, and then we’re going to let him go let him go enjoy the end of his year that he has just desperately earned. And, again, we’re so honored to have you. What advice do you have for any of our agents or agents, our listeners who are agents, who might be you know, struggling around this time of the year so this time of the year is tricky, right? Because it’s the December holidays. Hanukkah is over this point. But Christmas is coming up Kwanzaa is coming up. I actually don’t I’m not even sure when Kwanzaa is right now, but we got a lot going on. There’s a lot of family stuff there. The market slows down a bit. What do you recommend to agents to do from now, you know, for the next several weeks,
Stan Ponte 49:25 you know, show the love, show the love. This is this is not just the holidays this year. This is like round four of a global pandemic, which is so hard. This is the perfect time to do those extra outreach calls. Those extra moments. You know, I was on the phone today with a beautiful, beautiful soul. She’s you know, I don’t know how old she is. She could be any age. She’s not young and You know, she’s got some questions around the apartment that she’s living in now that I put her in after I sold her previous apartment. And I just wanted to make sure that before I went on this vacation, if there were any extra questions, if there was anything that might come up while I was gone, and she had no, I’m still around, there’s no fee involved in that there’s nothing she just treated me like gold when we work together. And this is the time of year to remember that. From a real estate standpoint, it’s the best excuse to touch people call people. Some people do gifts, I’ve written around with real estate brokers who make, you know, a gingerbread house like a big one for every person they’ve ever sold a house to, and they drive around these gingerbread houses. I hosted a sing along every Friday night at eight o’clock. And again, can’t sing and dance. We started the program with that. But I can sing Christmas songs because everyone can sing Christmas songs and Hanukkah songs. And so I did that. And you know, that’s a way to stay in touch to, to show that you’re a real person. The other thing, though, that also caught my ear, when you talked about the holidays, was this is also the time of year where business can slow down, because people are traveling. And even if they’re not traveling, they’re focused on their families. And I think that goes to business planning. And making sure that your pipeline of income is never dependent on the next month, where the next two months or the next quarter, or even the next year. Yeah. And that’s hard to do. And I know I certainly didn’t start the business, I was I was hoping the deal would go through so I could pay my own rent. And that’s real. For a lot of real estate brokers. Yes, the key to success is to get out of that cycle. And to save and to spend as little as possible, pay your taxes quarterly, have a business meeting with yourself with your manager with someone you trust every quarter and annually. Get someone to be a financial advisor for you early so that you have things like disability insurance. So you have health insurance, so that you know when you get a commission check that how much of that is likely to have to be paid in taxes. Because if you’re approaching the end of the year, and a big tax bill, and it’s the holidays, and your phone’s not ringing, that’s not a good look. For Christmas, what you want to be doing is going on vacation and you want to be celebrating, and also recharging those batteries. And if the batteries are always running on low, whether it’s physically, mentally, emotionally, or just dollars and cents, it draining. It is raining and it starts to show and it does not attract real estate business people’s you know spidey sense kick in, and they start to realize, is this person doing this to get this commission? Did they just give me the very best advice they could have? Or is this bedient advice to close this deal? And you know what you might be able to get away with a few expedient close deals short term, but I don’t think and listen, I don’t I don’t know what other people do, because I do my own thing. But I know for me, that didn’t that didn’t work. And it was a rare moment anyway, because I just doesn’t read right for me, they’re trying to fast forward. But I certainly remember waiting for permission checks and being late for my rent. And that is that’s just not where you want to be. And you don’t have to be there. If you treat it and this is from your from your mouth. It’s not for mine. You treat it like a business. You understand your cash flow, you understand the busy times of the year and the slow times the year and when you need to take a break and when the market is going to take a break anyway. And you plan your plan and you plan and you plan like any business owner would.
D.J. Paris 54:23 And how how awesome is it that virtually every family in this country uses a realtor when they buy a home? Not everyone but like 90% of people when they purchase or sell a home use a realtor 90 something percent. So this is something that every almost everyone uses. And how fortunate you know if we were in other industries, there isn’t really many other industries of things that were universally are needed. So you talked about safety at the beginning and maybe that’s where we’ll wrap up is just making I’m sure that you as an agent, understand that this is not only one of the biggest financial, maybe the biggest financial decisions somebody could be making, you know, next to maybe their children, if they have children, their their education, or maybe their own retirement, you know, this is a major financial decision purchasing or selling a home, it you are a fiduciary as well. So you have an obligation to treat it with the proper level of respect that that it entails. And then also, just to continue to care, and give back to your customer base. Be professional, right. And obviously, this is an industry where the barrier to entry is actually quite low. You know, it’s, it’s anyone you know, can go get the license and pass the test. But if you can consistently, you know, just run your business, as if every client was the most important client, which they are, then you here we are now 21 years later, 22 years later, and Stan’s case, and he has now, did you ever think that you would be at the level that you’re at? Was that ever at as an aspiration of yours? Or did it just naturally happen? And from the results of doing what you do every day?
Stan Ponte 56:30 I remember, when I had no idea what I was doing that was new. There were certain names in the New York City Real Estate world that other agents would say, in our office, where I’d be out doing showings, and someone would bring up a name. And everyone would be like, Oh, yeah. And I would always think to myself, wouldn’t it be so cool if people knew who Stan Ponte was in New York City Real Estate? So that was my manifestation? The ranking? You know, you started the show with the rankings and the volume of business. I tiny bit of me cringes around it, because the real answer is one to 1050 75. Are you happy? Are you financially secure? Do you have time in your life to be love, loved and love other people and get people’s homes? For them? You know, rankings are today it’s a it’s a slice. It’s good for marketing, though, right? It’s good to put in the bio, nothing wrong with it. But it distills us all into this competitiveness. Yeah. And if there’s one additional thing I don’t want to forget to say before, before we end is that your best friends in the business are your colleagues in the business. So it is competitive, and we don’t sort of work together in the same way that maybe some other industries due there is a competitive nature. But I’ll tell you what, if that broker likes you, you’re going to have a better chance of getting that deal done, or getting your foot in the door when it’s a competitive environment. And there’s 25 appointments on the first Sunday. If they like you, they’ll make a room for appointment. 26 If they don’t, they won’t. And that relationship that not stepping on people, as you succeed that lifting other people up mentoring, taking those breakfasts and lunches, when people just starting in the business, who say, Can I buy you breakfast and ask you what you did? And can you give me some advice? That is the difference, I think, between feeling good about yourself, having other people feel good about you, and being able to face a challenging world, which we are living in and we cannot escape that in today’s environment. And doing it with some peace of mind and smile and hope for tomorrow.
D.J. Paris 59:07 Wow, with that is so wonderfully said and I concur with everything Stan just mentioned. So I would encourage everyone even to replay the last several minutes to really have that hit home. Because it is maybe the most important part of of being a real estate agent is understanding what the feelings that your clients are going through what what they need from you, and how you can bring peace to a very tumultuous sort of process and you can bring and including being cooperative with other agents we sometimes forget this is a cooperative business and Stan is absolutely right on Make friends in this industry be nice to other agents because there are going to be times when you know you may want to your offer to or showing to to get a little extra attention. And I have a top producer on my show every she comes on every month here in the Chicago area. And she talks she’s been doing this for 20 Some years and she says DJ you would not believe she said she goes I’m gonna write a book one day and I’m just going to scream i She’s collecting screenshots for all of these awful texts and voicemails, texts and voicemails she’s received from other agents that are just rude. I mean, she goes you would not believe the way that Realtors speak to me now the good ones are very polite and nice and sweet. But she’s it is it is not a given. So everyone out there you know build relationships not just of course with your clients but with other agents, you know, right whatever they say a rising tide raises all ships right. So let’s let’s raise each other let’s let’s let’s work together. It’s time it’s holiday season two. So a great way a great way to add and stand on behalf of all of our entire audience and we we absolutely are so thrilled that you took time just before your vacation to spend here with us on behalf of the audience. And myself. We want to say thank you for being on our show. We want to also tell everybody, please please go visit Stan on his website that is Stan ponte.com sta n p o n t.com Stan, if you are a renter, a buyer or a seller and an investor and you’re looking to work with one of the very best realtors in New York, Stan and his team would love to chat with you. So please reach out to him visit Stan and Stan ponte.com With Sotheby’s International Realty. And on behalf of Stan and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show. The best way you can help us grow is to please tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this exact conversation with Stan and send them a link to this episode. The best way to do that send them right over to our website keeping it real pod.com and or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Stan, wonderful conversation with you. We are so honored to have had you on the show. And what a what a great way to wrap up the year so thank you and we wish you continued success.
Stan Ponte 1:02:35 Thank you so much keepin it real pod.com Love it. Thank you so much.
D.J. Paris 1:02:41 Right
Do You Need A Team In 2022? • Erik Hatch
Dec 30, 2021
Erik Hatch with Hatch Realty in Fargo in North Dakota describes how he went into real estate business to fund his gambling addiction. Erik also discusses his personal and professional struggles that brought him to the success he is experiencing right now. Erik breaks down why he thinks every new agent should join a team. He also provides a blueprint of how to make hires and how to start and build a successful team. Last, Erik talks about his coaching business.
Please check the services Hatch Coaching offers by clicking here.
Erik Hatch can be reached at 701-369-4839 and erik@hatchrealty.com.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 On this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Joel Schaub at guaranteed rate. As a realtor it’s important to partner with only the most trusted name in mortgage lending. Joel has 1000s of satisfied clients and gives $1,500 of his commission. Back to your buyers on every closing. He is known for his ability to close even complex deals start to finish in only 14 days to learn what 1000s of others already know. Make a note to call Joel at 773-654-2049 or email joel@rate.com Guaranteed Rate is an equal housing lender licensed in all 50 States Consumer Access Number 2611 And now on with the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer Eric hatch from Fargo, North Dakota. And what’s really amazing about Eric among lots of other accolades as he and his team have about 10% of the local market in Fargo and the surrounding areas. So we want to learn how we did that and how you can develop more market share yourself. But before we get to Eric, just a couple of quick reminders please please please tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers like Eric send them a link to our website. Also follow us on Facebook we are@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and every single day we find an article online specifically designed to help you grow your business and we post it there so again facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and last, please review our podcast whatever podcast app you might be using. Please let us put a review and let us know what you think of the show that helps us get more visibility and also helps us know what we need to do to keep our show improving to better meet your needs. So leave us a review or shoot us an email let us know what you think of the show. As always, we say thank you for continuing to support us but now enough from me. Let’s talk to Eric hatch.
Right today on the show we have Eric catch from catch Realty in Fargo, North Dakota. Let me tell you about Eric Eric Hatch has sold nearly 6000 homes in little old Fargo, North Dakota within the last decade. He is one of the industry’s top coaches. He’s helped rainmakers and teams across the country via hatch coaching. Now the hatch team has mastered the ISA model, the showing partner model and a crazy amount of agents success and retention, which we are going to be talking about in just a moment. This fall. Eric and his team just joined real to continue to make an impact in the real estate industry. Learn more about Eric at hatch coaching. That’s H A tch coaching.com. Eric, welcome to the show.
Erik Hatch 3:17 Oh my gosh, it’s good to be here. A beautiful day in paradise. And I’m also in Fargo and it’s okay today. Yeah.
D.J. Paris 3:25 Well, that’s the best you can hope for in I would think at this time of year is it not being miserable. I know. And we’re here in Chicago and for some reason unseasonably warm, I’m guessing due to the storms that are happening. And so we’re thankfully I don’t think we’ve we’re getting any of the any of the major issues that other parts of the Midwest are getting, but we are we are participating in the warmth. So I don’t know, who knows, maybe it all come crashing down tomorrow here. But yes, it’s a nice day. For both of us. It sounds like well, I am really excited to chat with you. Because we I’m always I always really want to talk to coaches. But so few coaches out there either run brokerages or even practice anymore. And that becomes you know, their full time business and that’s perfectly fine. But I always love talking to coaches who are still also actively producing or, or managing teams that actively produce because really keeps I think they’re just sort of understanding of what’s going on out there in the trenches, you know, sort of active and, and I’m excited to chat with you. But I would love to go all the way back to the beginning of your real estate career. So could you tell us a little bit about why real estate how you got started and what that looked like.
Erik Hatch 4:35 I’m betting I’m it’s funny that he used that phrase, I’m betting I’m the only person who has a background quite like this. I was in ministry before I got in into real estate. And I was also a professional gambler. So oh my gosh. So when I said I’m betting on the other one I’m like yeah, I still got it
D.J. Paris 4:54 and integrate pong with the betting so
Erik Hatch 4:58 So I work attach my home congregation my church, I was doing youth ministry and worship leading and love. But it was in a way to pay all the bills when I was 21. My mom who’s my only parents passed away from a cancer battle. And so it was orphan. I paid off all my student loans with life insurance that I had bought all my sisters portion of the little town house that my mom owned. And then I had, like 20 grand leftover. And so I tucked away like 15,000 of it. And then I spent five just frivolously including starting to play a lot of cards. And I took some of that cash and all of a sudden, I got really good at cards. And I turned myself into a professional poker player. So I graduated college, I’m full time in the ministry, but I have this hidden career of gambling. All right, I doubt that maybe there are other people who walk this weird life. But in 2006, my, my gambling started to switch I went from playing slow and steady and winning constantly. So I was playing the rush and I was playing higher stakes. And I was playing much faster poker was my game. And I just started to lose a bunch of money
D.J. Paris 6:04 is that normal for poker players to transition from playing more conservatively and slower to as their skill starts to build? Or maybe there’s a rush that they’re looking for, or just, you know, trying to hit that big win, you know, what’s sort of the mentality of because I don’t get the chance to talk to too many former professional gamblers. So I’m, it’s very fascinating to me,
Erik Hatch 6:26 I’m still a professional gambler, I just don’t do it at the poker table anymore, right? Like, is a professional gambler. And here are a few characteristics. You go, stubbornness, arrogance, lack of taking advice from other people, right? Like these are, these are a recipe for a lot of us. And for me, I just started playing faster and turned out that I had a gambling addiction. So I’ve been cleaning up since 2008. And thank you, my, my wife was kind enough not to divorce me, and and everything else. And so I got into real estate because I was trying to fund my addictions. That’s really wow. Yeah, so I make sense. And I was so full time ministry, I was selling real estate all the time. And then I started to get pretty good at it. Next thing I knew it was 2009 2009 and 2010. I probably made and netted 40 and $80,000 each of those years. And my full time profession I was I was eight years of professional in the ministry, I was making 35 or 40,000 bucks a year. So my part time job was paying me a lot more. And I used it to rid myself of debt I had I had racked up over $70,000 in credit card debt. And that’s all out like a 22% interest rate. So and So real estate was this vehicle to rid myself of debt, but I never wanted to be in real estate. It was just a vehicle for me to channel my gambling and for me to try to play high stakes and one other way. And then my wife and I were trying to get pregnant, which was really fun to do. But then thank you for catching that little subtle, yeah, joke. But then we couldn’t get pregnant. And so we went with a sec schedule. And that is way less fun than you think it would be right? If 21 year old Eric heard this guy complaining about a sec schedule right now. But that didn’t work. And so then we went with IUI it’s like giving all these shots to your spouse and use all our medical insurance at this time. And we still are pregnant. And so I had to make a choice. It was a continuing the ministry which I love and sell real estate on the side and just try to scramble or I need to go and full into real estate to fund being a debt. I was with Keller Williams Realty at the time, so much love and respect for that company. And I I went full time in 2011 and found some great successful 52 houses in my first year on my sphere and what Whoa,
D.J. Paris 8:55 let’s just let’s just pause and let that sink in. You sold 52 houses in your first
Erik Hatch 9:00 year. Full time first year. Yep.
D.J. Paris 9:04 Yeah, I can Okay, I don’t I don’t want to stop your momentum because because it’s but I just wanted to pause and let everybody collectively gasp and feel jealous. So okay, so please continue.
Erik Hatch 9:15 Here’s the trick people will say how did i How did I do that? Because I have spent my entire life capturing mindshare to be front of mind for people. mindshare will lead to market share and I don’t I don’t ever like any aggressive sales tactics. I don’t ever I never lead gender traditional day in my life, almost 6000 sales under my belt in my team’s belt. And I’ve never lead gender traditional day in my life. It’s always been about relationships. How do I remember my background is in the ministry so I developed for eight years a reputation and hopefully taking care of people and and meeting them where they were at and I’ve continued to do that. I just use vehicles like social media and my involvement of the community and now try to scale my coaching clients and my team to do the same. So I was As a product of this community, people say, Well, how can you sell that many homes in Fargo? And I’ll say, Well, how can you sell that many homes in Chicago? Because I hear I have a nine or 10% market share for my teams. Right? So it’s incredible. So the average Joe on the streets probably recognizes the name hatch in one way, shape, or form, they maybe don’t know who I am, but they at least know my brand. In Chicago, I’d be one of 50,000 agents, right. And it’s pretty easy to get lost in that shuffle. So I’m at an advantage there, but then I also have just a limited amount of homes that I can actually sell. So I’m at a disadvantage. So no matter what it was, I was just going to make the best of the situation I had. And so in 2011, I went full time. I’ll fast forward through the details. My my wife and I continued to try to get pregnant three miscarriages and ectopic pregnancy. Some of the most painful stuff in our life. I built a team, it all came crashing down, I got kicked out of Keller Williams at the same time, I was dealing with all of these miscarriages. All of this pain I was I was the idiot I was the one who messed up. My whole team except for two people quit and left me. And I started over completely at a rebound girlfriend brokerage that I went to for nine months while I worked on opening up my own brand and getting my broker’s license, I made a bad business move with that broker that cost me 120,000 bucks. By the time that was all done in January of 2014, I opened up hatch Realty, I had restarted my team, I was selling at that point about 250 homes a year but I was 150 of the 250 Well, I guess my wife got pregnant, we now have two kids ages seven and five. I am I’ve never lived a better life than the life I get to live today. And it was real messy before it got real smooth. And it’s not without its bumps now. But we’ve been through the wringer. So from a gambling addiction to massive infertility to getting kicked out almost filing bankruptcy. I’ve been there and I’ve done that.
D.J. Paris 11:57 Wow. Well, you know, I think desperation. And I mean that in I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, I just mean in, you know, times when when things are difficult, really, really can be the greatest opportunities for growth. And really, it’s maybe the only time you can make these massive shifts in growth, when you have some sort of limitation that’s really present and urgent. And you certainly I was gonna make a joke and say, well, at least you haven’t had struggle. But But, but of course, of course you have and the fact that that has brought you to where you are, I suspect I know the answer to this question. But if you were to go back and change, you know, you know, some of those, you know, tough moments, you, I would assume you’d say no, I’m glad we went through it. Obviously, you know, nobody wants to experience pain for themselves or their loved ones. But, but here’s where it brought you and what you might not be where you are today, you know, you might still be caught up in the gambling slash real estate sort of lifestyle, because you’re good at you’re good at being a you know, a poker player. And you might be able to continue funding that for a while, but you might lose things along the way too, especially with addiction. So I have tremendous respect for for for number one for the honesty of that. And also just the fact that he kept persevering and, and congratulations on all that success that is really quite quite a story.
Erik Hatch 13:22 Well, it’s been a tumultuous ride. But I feel like and you even lead with this, as you know, there are those who are coaching and influencing. But maybe they haven’t gone down the path of running a team running a brokerage, and they certainly have insight. You’re not like Bill Belichick wasn’t this amazing NFL player and looking at the greatest coach in the history of the game. And so you don’t have to have that experience. But man, I have a pretty unique perspective having been in the fire where a lot of folks are going I still I still lead hatch Realty as CEO, I spend about a day and a half a week there. But then I spend the rest of my time coaching and it’s been really good for both organizations for me to be able to help rise the tide on either sides.
D.J. Paris 14:03 Yeah, well, let’s let’s talk about I know, Eric has a very specific point of view around team building. And of course, the trying to think if I look, if I think back to our, our listeners on the show, who sent us a tremendous amount of feedback, I’d say out of the top three topics they asked us to discuss, especially for this upcoming year, teams are on everyone’s mind. So the it seems like at least here in Chicago, and also with a lot of the guests we have that teams are really prominent and there’s a lot of logic to why that makes sense. Certainly to a buyer or seller, you can present this, you know, this this united front of you’re getting all these people and all these skills and you know, we’re charging you know, maybe 1% More than the single person down the street might charge or maybe they’re charging even the same. But I would love to get your perspective on team building because I know a lot of our listeners are thinking should I join a team and 2022 Should I start a team? Should I keep my team if I already have one, and I would love to get your perspective of somebody who runs a brokerage. Also coaches, a lot of individuals and teams just love to get your thoughts.
Erik Hatch 15:11 I have a lot of thoughts on this. My team currently we are in five markets total, Fargo be in our main hub and I’m in for expansion markets from Minneapolis to Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Bismarck, North Dakota to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. So we’re spread out in total about 450 miles from end to end. Chicago, you can I gotta go where the people are in North Dakota, there’s a total of 750,000 people in the state of North Dakota. And yeah, that’s, that’s it. So I gotta, I gotta spread out quite a bit. In order to find similar opportunity. I’ll say that if you are a solo agent, or somebody starting out, the greatest chance at your success would be to join a team. A team should provide three things. And we can speak of a brokerage in the same accord but a team and or a brokerage should provide three things depending on the split that you’re getting. We have leads, leadership and leverage. Okay, the leads portion, we have isas inside sales agents, and so are our agents don’t ever touch a lead, they don’t have to convert a pay per click lead or a zillo lead or a sign call. Those all go to a skilled set of people. And I will tell you that if you aren’t willing to grow a large team getting expertise is so important not just to have a bunch of generalists, but to have specialists. But the first is to say,
D.J. Paris 16:35 let’s, let’s talk I’m sorry, let me I’m gonna pause you just to make sure that people understand our listeners understand isa Eric defined it, it’s inside sales agent, let’s just get for anyone who’s unfamiliar with that term, Eric, just let’s talk let’s define that for the audience real
Erik Hatch 16:49 quick. You bet. And Isa is going to be the person who takes any company purchase lead, and converts it and hands it off to an agent for the appointments. And so in its purest form, they are a database manager. Here’s, here’s some true numbers for our team. If we take like a zillo lead, that’s going to convert on average from the time in which they’re in appointments until a close transaction that’s between 120 and 180 days. We have some that’ll take years to convert, but others will convert on the first day. So an average is 120 to 180 days, four to six months, right? No Pay Per Click lead, which is the fraction of the price of a zillo lead or realtor.com lead that’s going to convert on average from the time in which it hits our inbox until it closes 630 days on average.
D.J. Paris 17:44 No kidding. Wow, I would not have guessed that. So of all of
Erik Hatch 17:48 all, your pay per click leads, they should convert 1% should convert the first year. Two additional percent should convert the second year and years three and beyond the final 1%. Most people get a one to 2% conversion on Pay Per Click leads we get almost a 4% because we nurture and isas set up these people on campaigns. And they stay in constant touch and contact with them because an agent should be client facing, not always database facing. So we separate those. That’s that’s what we’re doing with our isas.
D.J. Paris 18:20 I love that and isas, you know, for for anyone who still isn’t quite understanding an ISA is basically taking the lead, doing the intake and staying on top of that lead pounding the phones, trying to get them on the phone, trying to qualify them, you know, making them feel comfortable trying to schedule an appointment or, or passing them off. So the agent does not receive that lead directly from the consumer, it’s going through an another party whose sole job is to convert that lead into an appointment.
Erik Hatch 18:49 Yeah, and there’s a couple of factors that matter an awful lot speed to lead, how quickly you can actually jump on that lead. And then your speed to respond. Most of the communication effective or 70% of communication with leads now is text. Yeah, and if you’re not jumping on that and responding on a quick, there’s some AI that can help you with that. In fact, we built an entire campaign of things within a seer interactive and follow up Boston shine that people can have all of our messaging and all of our tags, and everything else so that you’ll have an assisted department for you. You can check that out and hatch christian.com was a handsome little plug. But nonetheless, if you’re going to be joining a team and I recommend any new agent doing so the first thing they’re going to do is they’re going to get you leads and or appointments as the first. The second thing that they’re going to get you as leadership, training, development, accountability, somebody to walk alongside you, if you were to ask me, Eric, how many people work for you? I’d say I don’t know anybody that works for me. But I go to work for 70 people every day. Companies right. And that’s my job as the leader is to show up and to help them achieve their goals. You Zig Ziglar says you can have everything in life you want. But if you help enough others, you’ll get exactly what you want. And that’s what I’m, that’s what I’m striving to do. And that’s what I think a great team should do. And the third piece is leverage, you should be able to get assistance with transaction coordinating, listing, coordinating, marketing, runner responsibilities, all these things. And so if you’re starting out in real estate, I think a team is the best way unless you have this huge, massive database. And you’ve done it part time for a number of years and can actually jump in. Here’s, here’s the asinine thing of this. Here’s who can jump into real estate full time, and be full commission. And let’s say on day one, you get a buyer, it’s not going to happen. But let’s say on day one, you get a buyer, the average buyer looks for 10 to 12 weeks, and then that’s going to sit in escrow for four to six weeks. So you have to go for months without a paycheck. So here’s who qualifies for that. Number one is somebody with a sugar daddy or sugar mama. Number two, is somebody with a trust fund. Number three is somebody with a part time job. Number four, is somebody with with terrible financial habits, and they’re just loading themselves in debt. Or number five is somebody who saved up six months worth of livable income so they can actually get in real estate. And that my gang is the biggest flaw in our industry right now is we’re letting people come in without great motivation, or with a broken system, and we expect them to be successful. It’s why 87% of people fail after the first five years. It’s just, it’s just such a bad move. Real estate is a broken system of how it’s set up. And I think that those that have a team or those that are thinking about having a team, I can give you the exact blueprint effective writing a book right now called the perfect real estate agent blueprints. And what I have is a step by step. Here’s who you hire, here’s when you hire them. Here’s why you hire them. And we’re going to turn this upside down. So I’m about to go on a rabbit hole we ready to go digging, let’s do it. Alright, so hire number one, when you have been yourself doing 24 to 36 transactions in a year two to three deals a month, you should look to make your first hire. And that first hire is not an agent, it’s an admin. The first admin that you hire is on a salary in Fargo, North Dakota 35 to 40,000 bucks, maybe a little bit more. In Chicago, Illinois, my guess is 50 to 60,000. Give or take. But this is somebody who is going to take everything off your plate. They’re going to help you to breathe. In my mind. I remember 2011 halfway through my year when I sold 52 houses in my first year, I made my first hire. Her name was Mariah, in fact, her name still is Mariah.
She was one of my former youth group kids who I saw at a graduation open house and over taco in a bag. We were talking and I’m like man, Ryan, I’m really looking for somebody this summer. I’m home from Iowa State I don’t have a job right now. You’re Hired stupidest idea ever memorize a great gal. But I did not vet her. I did not set her up for success. But I was scared to death of how am I going to pay for $11 An hour and 20 hours a week, that’s $220 a week, that’s $880 a month. What if I don’t sell any houses. So before you ever make the decision to make a hire, you have to have at least four months of that person’s salary saved up. And you have to have four months of your living expenses saved up because we’re going to think of ourselves as business people and not realtors who are running around. So let’s make sure we cover those metrics 24 to 36 deals a year is what you’re doing. You got to have four months of cash in the bank to cover somebody’s salary. And then you have to be committed to giving them work instead of just expecting them to find it. You have to show up as a leader, it’s so important. And so when you make that first hire, do not hire part time, hire full time only. And they should be your transaction coordinator. They should be your listing coordinator. They should be taking all of the minutia, killing drowning things off of your plates, from running to the dry cleaners, to picking up some groceries to getting your oil changed in your vehicle. They are not just a professional assistant, they are a personal assistant as well. Yeah, so long as you frame this in the beginning, their job is to let you breathe, because if you’re doing 36 transactions a year, you’re probably working 60 or 70 hours a week. Let’s help you to breathe. Let’s help you to take a breath. And my guess is they’re going to free you up of time and then use that for income producing activities such as lead generation and actual sales.
D.J. Paris 24:36 I just yeah, thank you for that breakdown that is so incredibly helpful and insightful. I was thinking, too, I recently hired somebody I don’t practice real estate myself. I sit at a desk all day and I don’t have the stress that our our agents have with respect to building their business. But I’ve always stressed and I have we have about 800 agents here at our firm. So There’s always a lot to do to help them. However, I hired somebody to help me. And at first, I thought, well, I’m going to have them work on my work tasks, however, and I imagine, this would be an interesting question I’d like to ask you, but you know, clients are still texting the realtor directly, right. So in a lot of communication, now, of course, is over SMS, as you were saying, with the leads that come in via the isas. So knowing that you as the agent, even if you have a virtual or personal assistant, Virtual Assistant, you’re still having to do that client facing interaction, which might come at 11 o’clock at night, and, and you know, depending on on, you know, what sort of communications strategies you’ve created, or, or boundaries you’ve created, you’re going to be still doing that. But it frees up the time for the, for the, or for the personal system can do some of those home based activities that go into the dry cleaner, the groceries, I actually have a virtual assistant, she does things like tells me what’s going on in Chicago, on the weekends, helps me plan my date nights with my girlfriend, she helps me with, with my budgeting for my personal finances, a lot of things that that I wouldn’t, you know, I unfortunately, she doesn’t live here and can’t do my grocery shopping for me. But she would be doing that if she lived here. So So when you’re thinking about hiring somebody, those are the tasks you can have them do. And for sure
Erik Hatch 26:22 that from the very beginning, you’re doing what I call framing, you’re setting it up, my personal assistant has gone and picked up dog poop at my house to bring it to the vet because my dog was sick. But before we ever started, like, you’re going to do some weird stuff, there’s going to be some odd jobs you’re going to have to do and you’re going to be an extension of my personal and my professional life. And so I joke about it all the time. She’s like, I knew what I was getting myself into. And make sure that you don’t just like promise this great landscape, and then ask them to go pick up dog poop, you got to instead frame it to say, there’s going to be weird times where you’re going to have to run errands and maybe pick up dog poop. And if they never pick up dog poop dog poop, there’ll be delightfully surprised.
D.J. Paris 27:02 So now you’ve made your first hire, they are a personal assistant, you’re doing 24 to 36 transactions a year you are, you’re you’re maybe you’re getting 10 to 15 hours back a week. I actually I’m just guessing at that. But hiring a personal assistant gives you some breathing room. And what next, what do we do at that point.
Erik Hatch 27:23 So people are so anxious to hire an agent. They want to they want to start giving business, they want to start buying business, I think you’re mostly earning business. So at this point, you may be buying some leads, but the second hire is another admin. And in fact, this this is the same first couple of steps is what Gary Keller advises a Millionaire Real Estate Agent book, your first hires and admin, your second iris and admin. And I agree completely, the first person was to help you breathe, the second person is to help to help you to grow. And so you’re not giving this person your honey that you’re not giving the first person your honey do list of all the tasks you wanted to get to but didn’t have the time to your second person is helping you to grow your database, and they’re helping you to market they’re helping you to do your social media, on a better level they’re getting in front of all your past clients making sure that they feel nurtured and cared for because that is a gaping hole in most people’s businesses is they tend to drop off and not care for any past clients. This person is your growth person, they become a two headed monster and people right now are saying, oh my gosh, $80,000 in salaries, why would I ever consider doing that? Well, let’s say the average commission in Chicago What 10 or 12 grand?
D.J. Paris 28:34 Yeah, let’s say 350,000, average price point two and a half percent, I can’t do that.
Erik Hatch 28:42 That’s 10 grand 10 grand for simple math. Great. If that first admin helps me to get back 15 or 20 hours a week, I think I can go on, I can sell 10 more houses. And if I sell 10 If I sell 10 more houses and make $100,000 and I pay them 40. So I just bought back time I took all that crap off my plate I didn’t like to do. And now I’m cash ahead 60,000 bucks while my clients get a better service while my my admin gets better service and I have a better life. And you’re not you’re not burnt out. That’s the important part. Right? The mistakes so many people make is they want to go and buy all their business now. They’re gonna go buy really expensive lead sources. And as they go to try to buy those really expensive lead sources. They all of a sudden, like Oh, I’m still making good money, but you’re, you’re paying your agent split into your into your main pots, and you’re funding way too much of all these lead sources. And so the best thing you can do is to try to grow your sphere and your reach of people that are already in your database and the second hires that person to do so. This is not an ISA. This is an admin who is working on projects and is working on client connection and it gives you the runway so at this point when you’re that three person team, I see you doing anywhere from 50 to 75 transactions.
D.J. Paris 30:01 And it’s still just you practicing with these two assistants,
Erik Hatch 30:05 while you’re your client facing for sales, but they’re also touching that all the time and doing the servicing. And you’ll be amazed at how far you can go.
D.J. Paris 30:14 And and that’s a heck of a lot cheaper. I mean, there’s obviously exceptions, then hiring an agent to get to that same level. Really it is,
Erik Hatch 30:22 let’s get there right now, because I’ve seen far too many people make their first through 10th Hire as agents, because here’s what we hear. And that $10,000 Commission sounds really sweet. Yeah, but if I can get somebody in here, I can set them up with five quality appointments, or five quality leads, and they’re going to close all five of them. And I’m gonna make 25 grand, and they’re gonna make 25 grand. Sure. That is basic idiot realtor math. And I did that for a lot of years, not because people are dumb, but because they’re just naive to what’s actually there. Sure. The third hire should be a showing partner, a licensed salaried agent, they are the nurse to your doctor. And this is where most people shouldn’t grow big teams. I have a friend His name is Hank Hank, a bank. It’s a hard name to say but a fun guy to hang out with. Hank is a coach and he’s done great things with his career. He used to be my gold coach back in 2012. And Hank, has really, he said, most people shouldn’t have big teams, because it’s a leadership game. It’s not a sales game. Those are two very different skills. And the margin that happens, the teams that I coach, any team that’s doing 300 Plus transactions outside of a couple of oddities, they’re profiting 15%. Maybe it’s give or take there, they have a bigger pie, but it’s a very small slice of that bigger pie. And they’re having to do so much work. And they’re risking so much. And I live in that right now. The mistake I made I didn’t discover until last year. And the mistake was I grew a big team when I should have grown a small micro team allow me to articulate this small micro team is a micro team for the lead producer for the lead agent for the Rainmaker for the team owner. Before you ever hand off those five appointments to a random agents on your team, you keep those but you bring alongside a nurse, you grow a micro team of a salaried agent, and to salaried admin. Let’s say that’s $100,000 in total for salaries. But I can take those five out of five at bats, and instead of giving them to a new agent, and let’s be honest, that new agents not going to close five out of five, or they know they’re going to close three out of five, maybe but probably two out of five. So I could have made 25 grand than that. But I made 10 Because they’re making 10. And I’m making 10. And that’s my gross, that’s not my net. Right now the flip it on its head, I should be the one as the lead agents. And this is where everybody should go with their teams, I swear to you, of all the people I coach, people are making money out of their ears, and they’re giving everybody a better life, because they’re no longer trying to grow big, massive teams are growing these micro teams, I’m gonna hang on to those five at bats. I’m gonna pay this showing partner 2500 to $3,000 a month. And let’s say it takes two months to close these. I now am a net of $44,000. While I paid that showing partner 6000 bucks, right three grand a month, I paid him three grand a month, I’m a net positive of 44,000 bucks. But that person probably was a barista, or a server or a bartender or working in retail or working an office job that they hated. And they couldn’t get into real estate because they didn’t have the savings account. Right didn’t have the sugar daddy or sugar mama, they didn’t have the trust fund. They didn’t want to have the massive financial bad habits and they hadn’t saved up enough. And so this is their only ticket to get into real estate and you have a simple philosophy of everything is earned and nothing is given. Yeah, let me let me talk for a moment of those people that have big teams. Here’s what happens is we have all of our people sitting at the table all of our agents and they expect a certain piece of the pie and they expect a certain amount of the attention from the leaders. The minute you bring on other agents and you seat them at the same table you’ve created infighting these agents that have stuck around become flight risks because dad just had another kid he doesn’t last much there’s not enough food to go around anymore. And and our season people who are our best converters and our best predictable income these people become flight risk because we just hired competition for them.
D.J. Paris 34:46 Yeah. And and they may think either justified or unjustified. Hey, I’m not. I haven’t gotten to leave in a while or where does it wonder where those leads are really going and it just becomes problematic. Yeah.
Erik Hatch 34:59 And then We as the leaders, we give all of our attention to the new kids, don’t we? Right? There’s a book called The Pumpkin Plan by Mike McCalla. It’s he’s best known for writing profit first. But he writes all these awesome entrepreneurial books and the Pumpkin Plan is my favorite of his. And he talks about seven steps to grow these County Fair Blue Ribbon winning pumpkins and everybody wants to take their picture with ya. And he uses his as a book in which to get more clients and to retain your top your top folks but I read it as a leadership book. And step number six of the Pumpkin Plan says Give all your attention to your big pumpkins. And so for me, what I do at hatch Realty, 12 hours a week is I’m giving all my time to my top agents that turn people because what I’ve done is when I’ve hired I have all my top agents right here. I’ve hired people underneath them. I’ve hired showing partners I’ve I’ve scaled leadership, right? Jesus had 12, and none of us are Jesus. So we shouldn’t have, like the sales managers are destined to fail in most organizations, because they have so many people they’re caring for. And we have leadership issues. We have connection issues, we have proximity issues, people feel invisible on teams and brokerages, and it is eroding our profit, It’s eroding our team satisfaction. And this micro team model solves all of it. You’ll profit more that person now who’s your showing partner gets their MBA in real estate? Yeah, direct extension of you. Here here this step because this is shocking. My first year agents who don’t start off as a showing partner, convert 16% of the company appointments to closings 60%. Wow. My first year agents that first started as a showing partner they spent one or two years as a showing partner now graduated up are converting 32% of those st out that’s
D.J. Paris 36:42 twice as much. So although this success, because they went through a slower process to learn and master the business, they got a paycheck along the way. It wasn’t a huge paycheck, but it was their MBA, as you said, and now they’re going to be able to double the conversion rate and make you know, a lot better money.
Erik Hatch 37:03 So let’s break this down. If I have a showing partner, and two administrators, I think I’m going to be doing 80 deals a year. That’s $800,000 of his 10k per that’s $800,000. I’m going to spend 100 grand on salaries. I’m going to spend maybe another 100 grand on leads and some office and paying my brokerage. Am I really making $600,000 with AD transactions? Yeah, incredible. I mean, if I run a team, my profit margin that I’m writing a book on my design, profit margin for teams is 25%. So if that’s the case, and you don’t grow this micro team, you have 80 transactions that are done by your team, you’re maybe making money as a producer as well, you should make an a salary for what you do. But your actual team profit shouldn’t be $200,000. But if you do the girl micro team, if you change the way this industry is done, you give somebody a better chance you get better leverage and admin support. Because you actually have money in the bank and you’re functioning as a business, you’re gonna make $600,000
D.J. Paris 38:14 Which, by the way, which by the way, it’s so much money and for anyone, it’s so much money, and it might actually just be enough, right? So sometimes agents go, you know, I don’t, I don’t need to earn seven figures a year. But boy, I would think most for most people 600,000 would be an incredible year, certainly for a lot of our listeners. And you know, you don’t have to, you don’t have to keep growing you what you have to do is build a lifestyle based around running this practice as an actual business because oh, by the way, you are a business owner. So so that that’s, that’s I’m so glad we’re going over these numbers. Yeah, I don’t want to stop your flow, keep going.
Erik Hatch 38:55 So we saw this offline. But if you do have a big team, you don’t have to blow it up to grow it up. Okay, you don’t have to go all the way back down to just four of you to figure this out. The purpose of all this is you as the Rainmaker, you as the lead agent, you should be doing this to grow your own micro team. Now, socially, your top agents, that’s the thing is, I used to be in a mastermind used to be coached by somebody who have a lot of love and respect for, but I heard them say, every chance they got once an agent hits about 24 transactions on a team, they’re gonna leave you. And I’m like, Ah, I don’t want that like I want I want these people to be with me for a long period of time and I’m investing my heart soul into that, and I don’t want them to like just use me and then leave our jobs. And our way to retain unbelievable people are two key elements. It’s proximity. That’s the time you spend with your big pumpkins with your top people. Have proximity with your people, and then customization that you build for them a business that continues to have a glass ceiling that doesn’t exist. Right? So in 2010, I was on a real estate team was part time. But I was on a real estate team. I was out selling all the full time agents, and I was doing about 75% of the business from my own sphere. And so I went to the owners, I’m like, Hey, you’re like, hey, hey, can I get a bigger split? Or can I start working listings like I’m doing really well. But yeah, that’s not how we’re built. I left a month later, because of course, I hit my glass ceilings. And so many teams out there right now, I think glass ceilings, and agents are just leaving because they run out of runway. And our job is to provide massive revenue in these micro teams. These showing partners allow businesses within businesses, teams within teams to be creative. So you don’t have to blow it up to grow it up. It’s creating these micro teams and watch retention go through the roof of my 58 people and all my teams I’ve lost to this year. That’s incredible. In the last three years, I’ve lost three producers.
Unknown Speaker 41:04 It’s amazing. And so
Erik Hatch 41:07 you’re either going into chaos or coming out of cast. So I know there’s some hell ahead. And I get that because it’s never rainbows and butterflies. But I’ve had some really tough years. And the longer we put this energy into growing these big pumpkins and, and letting everybody earn their spot, instead of being given their spot. We don’t have the infighting like other places do. My top agent this year, is going to sell 140 houses. And seven of them are from his spirit. That’s not his team. That’s his own personal production. And he’s doing that with a showing partner. And then we have an admin that he hires full time as well. But 140 transactions, his team and total is going to do 300 All under my tutelage, we’re going to do over 1000 transactions this year as a team. And I got these little micro teams and and so I’m not trying to manage everybody, I’m just leaving a few people. And so I know I’m starting to ramble here, I want to make sure that this hits home is that your greatest success for profitability for longevity. And to change the way this game is done is to think small. If you want to go big start thinking small, a micro team of a couple of admin, and then a showing partner or two or three, I have a coaching client in Seattle, he has three soon to be four showing partners on his micro team. Just as micro team, he will net over a million dollars. He doesn’t leave the office, he has an ISA that sets his appointments for him, he just does consults in the office all day long and negotiates from his house and then meets with his needs of the showing partners, a micro team. Now the huge team of micro team is making them seven figures. And our Chicago example, you should be netting five to $600,000 by doing 80 transactions. I don’t know anybody else is doing 80 transactions making that kind of cash without trying to go wide. So the main point I’m trying to iterate here is go deep, don’t go wide. Get a micro team, you can go wide too. But when you find your talents go deep with them as well.
D.J. Paris 43:00 Yeah, I heard Barbara Corcoran say one time on Shark Tank, because of course, she’s on there. I think she’s still on there. And she was talking. Yeah. And she was talking about the you know, there was somebody pitching a whatever company had nothing to do with real estate. And the the person who was the owner of the company seemed like kind of a troublemaker, somebody that was combative and difficult. And bar and he could tell it was sort of turning the rest of the panel off about wanting to fund her business. And Barbara said, you know, I have a different opinion. People who who are difficult, oftentimes become the best producers. And she’s like, my job is to give those people all the attention and that they need because they end up being and of course she runs, you know, or ran Corcoran real estate for a long, long time. And one of the biggest real estate companies in the country, independent firms. You know, she said, I love those people that because I have to spend my time with them. They make me the most money so that that spend your time with the largest pumpkin pumpkins is makes it and same thing with referrals too, right? Like whoever your biggest referral sources are to your clients. Those are the people that you really need to be spending a lot of time with, even if it’s just thank you, thank you, thank you constant thank yous, because those are the people that will continue to of course, refer additional business. So the same principle applies to your team.
Erik Hatch 44:18 Yeah, it really does. It really does. And we are emphatic as a coaching company on trying to redefine how this industry treats people, not only clients but also team members. And we think that we’re onto something here because we’re seeing people have happier careers. They’re not having to deal with the headaches that they usually do. They’re making more money. People stick around for longer. I feel like we’ve we’ve cracked the code here.
D.J. Paris 44:42 It’s really exciting. I would love to talk about your coaching business as well. Which by the way, another plug, please everyone must you’re driving wait a few moments or pull over but if you’re not driving head over to hatch coaching.com to learn all about the different coaching options that Eric and his team have. They do in person and events they do online events, there’s courses tell us all about hopscotching.
Erik Hatch 45:05 You bet house coaching has been around now for almost six years. And we have two major elements, we have a service based on the product base. So our product base is we’re helping people to convert leads at a really, really high level, as well as train people up. And so we have a whole bunch of courses and we have things that add on and bolt on to why Lobo chime follow up boss and see are interactive, some different CRMs that are out there. And we’re continuing to add to that. And so we’re, we’re essentially an extension of your isa or lead conversion department. And it’s just, it’s making people some huge money hand over fist, or those are monthly subscription based products, where we jump in. And we really help to manage your database and do great things with that. The other side of what we have is we do we do coaching, so there’s live coaching with a few of us, there’s events that we do. And we’ve really gotten a great bit of momentum with our virtual events that we’ve been doing lately. And so if you’re at house coaching.com, you can see the right hand corner, there’s a little drop down menu, there’s something called boot camps, we’re just finishing up a boot camp right now. And that is all about lead conversion and spin awesome, you can still sign up for that and catch the last couple and we’ll send you the recordings of the first ones. Otherwise, in early 2022, we’re doing a boot camp about how to grow a team how to kind of grow and scale a team really well. And so everything we talked about today would be maybe a bit of a teaser for where we’re going, and you want to sign up for that. So go to hash coaching.com get on our mailing list and sign up for that boot camp, it’s gonna be pretty great.
D.J. Paris 46:34 Yeah, and boy, you have proven yourself as as a coach here on our show with some really practical advice. And I would love to ask you, let’s say you are so for our audience who is just an individual practitioner, who now has heard, okay, I get it. Once I get to a certain level, I can start to build my own team. But maybe somebody isn’t, you know, quite their their full time. They’re squeaking by maybe they’re doing a few million dollars a year in production, not really earning much of a living, but they’re getting through what what would you how would you coach them? What would you tell them to do? And obviously I know there’s there’s no right real specifically right answer. But I know there’s a lot of people in that in that space sort of feeling like, gosh, I don’t really know how to get to that next level where I can afford an assistant, I don’t really want to join a team, or just feels like I’d be starting over curious on what your thoughts might be.
Erik Hatch 47:29 So I had a friend once say that there would be no need for coaches if people actually honored what was on their schedule. And I thought, huh, dang it, you’re right. You need to know what should be on your schedule. And then once you know what’s on your schedule, actually honoring it. So we talk about the perfect and ideal schedule, it looks like this. Your day starts at 8am in the office. Now there’s a lot of personal care things you should be doing. Hal Elrod has some great things called the Miracle Morning. Awesome Things to do to start off your day. So I’m talking when you actually get to the office, you should get to the office by age with all intensive your day starting with intention and intensity at 830. Your first 30 minutes is prep time. You’re getting caught up on some things and you’re teeing up that golf ball for you to make a great hits. From 830 to 11. You are a slave to your business. And that sounds aggressive. I’ve heard people talk you know, you should lead gen for three or four hours a day. But man, most people, good luck. Most people aren’t in Marathon shape, you know, run for three or four hours a day. Hell no. I’m gonna do it one time. In fact, there’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother, where Barney Stinson goes and runs a marathon because he dared himself to do it runs the actual New York City Marathon but then gets on the subway to go home. And when it comes to his stop, he can’t get off the train because his body is physically shut down. And that’s what people do when they try to lead generate for three or four hours a day. It’s just it’s not effective. So I’d rather you be intentional and intense with your time. No more than 90 minutes of lead gen but it doesn’t start with lead gen it actually starts with role playing and training. So 830 till 915 You should be role playing and practicing. You should be working on honing your craft and getting better 915 till 1045 You should be lead generating this is not lead follow up lead follow up is for business that you’ve already earned or have already started massaging. Lead Generation is business for future business. This is for business that has not yet bore any fruit. And so you need to work on future business before you work on current business. And that’s where most people mess up. It’s why everybody rides the roller coaster of real estate right big sales and then drives big sales and then droughts. So 939 15 till 1045 90 minutes of intentional lead generation, then 1045 to 11. It’s a daily huddle. It’s celebrating your wins. It’s reporting your numbers. It’s your accountability time. And then at 1101 Your day starts for showings. For lead, follow up and for everything else, that’s a busy work of a realtor, if you honor that schedule, and actually, don’t spend your 90 minutes of lead generation time farting around on your phone and perusing through social media, and you actually call, email, text, sent handwritten letters, visit people, and you do that repeatedly, you’re going to find yourself with a ton of business. It’s just going to be time over task over time.
D.J. Paris 50:26 Yeah, leads are really never the issue. Right? It’s all about effort. Yeah. And by the way, if you didn’t hear Eric, he just said never as soon as I said, leads are never the issue. Never ever, ever, if leads, if leads are your issue. Let’s I’m just going to have you answer this question. If right now you’re saying if I just had more if our listeners and we and again, everyone’s everyone’s been there. We all think if I just had more leads, I would do more production. Tell us what’s wrong with with with that mentality.
Erik Hatch 50:55 So I remember as a Keller Williams agent hearing Ben Kenny, say that an agent begged him for a list of people to call and so he finally gave no less than the guy set three appointments in a day. And he’s like, Ben, how do I get more of this? Like I just pulled the name from the phonebook. Right? So I think there was a farcical answer, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna let people in on one of my favorite insider tricks. And that is that your greatest CRM is Facebook. Of course, these are people who are already in some sort of connected relationship with you. And you don’t need to buy any leads, you just need to know what to do with the people who are already in front of you. And your goal should be to make them feel heard, seen, valued and cared for, you need not be the most entertaining person, you need to instead be the most engaged person in other people’s lives. I’ll give you an example is my birthday is March 1, I expect everybody to send me lots of gifts on March 1, but nonetheless, my 5000, Facebook, Facebook, err, quote, friends, all message me on my wall, I get 510% or so of Happy Birthday generic things, I can’t tell you the name of a single person that did that. Then I’ll get like 30 direct messages and 30 text messages. But I count. I got two handwritten notes. Wow. And I got three phone calls. I can tell you who it was for, for those five as well. Because that is remarkable to me. Think of the roots of remarkable right? That you live a life that people will remark about you. Yeah, and if you want to be remarkable to your CRM, which is Facebook, or whatever social media channel you use, you need to go above and beyond and not just wish somebody, Hey, my thoughts and prayers are with you. But instead show up with a damn hot dish or a casserole. When times are tough. Go visit them, go spend time with them, celebrate their life get on the phone, the purpose of social media is not to interact online, but it’s to take things offline and to connect. And when you can do that. It is never about the leads, it’s always about the effort you put in.
D.J. Paris 52:55 And it gives you every possible reason to reach out so so a lot of times we think, you know, I don’t really want to bother my spear. I don’t know when they’re moving and when they need me and I don’t want to be that pushy sales guy going, Hey, thinking about making a move anytime soon. With social media. Now you don’t ever have to talk about that unless it comes up and you want to talk about it. Because now you can say you can pick up that phone someone’s birthday or just go Hey, I saw you were just on vacation in wherever Mexico like that looked awesome. I just called to say that was really cool. I hope you guys had a great time. Talk to you later. Even that alone, nobody else is making that call except maybe their friends, their close friends and family, you can demonstrate that you’re paying attention and that you you care.
Erik Hatch 53:37 Now while I while I never did a single lick of regular lead generation where it would be oh man, who am I going to call today from my my CRM. My social media was my CRM and i i every day for about two hours I would like you’re either networking or not working on on social, I love that I made sure to be networking.
D.J. Paris 54:00 Yeah, it’s such a great way and I also want to make it quick I say this all the time and I just want to think repetition is the mother of skill. So I’m just going to make this point LinkedIn does a really cool thing that that really no other social media platforms do and I encourage you to connect with all of your sphere in LinkedIn for even just for this one reason it will tell you if they have their information updated when something interesting happens to them maybe they get a promotion they update their their position at their company maybe they change companies maybe they have a work anniversary course their birthdays as well. Those are things that even their closest friends might not know and that’s another reason like hey man just saw you got a promotion like that’s amazing so proud of you keep up the great work or just saw something cool happened at your company. LinkedIn is great for that stuff. It’s it’s not necessarily the hey check out my vacation I just went on but it allows you to celebrate the personal or the private or sorry the professional successes of those those fears. So don’t neglect LinkedIn. I know we all want to do Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram because it’s more fun but LinkedIn has some cool stuff, some cool reasons and you can actually just go to your feed your Newt your forgot that notification feed. And it literally just has every one of these reasons to pick up the phone or text somebody or shoot them a, you know, some sort of handwritten note. I mean, I know if somebody got a promotion, the first thing I would do is write a handwritten note or maybe even a little congratulatory gift. And you’re going to be the only person who’s doing that and their entire life outside of maybe their parents and their spouse.
Erik Hatch 55:26 Yeah, and no matter the social media platform, it’s about taking it offline. Yeah, it gives you all the information online, your job is to take it offline.
D.J. Paris 55:34 Yeah, don’t just write Happy Birthday on their wall when it’s their birthday. Because like Eric said, you get about 100 or more of those, in his case, 500. You don’t even notice them, that all bleeds together. It’s not special. It’s like sending a holiday card. It’s there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a nice gesture, it’s better than doing nothing. But you’re one of 20 other cards that are also getting sent by other professional service people. And you know, maybe it’s not as unique. But even if you just hand wrote your holiday card, you’d probably be the only handwritten one they got. So that that would be advice. But yeah, social media. Think of it guys. I know. So many of our listeners are like, what do I promote? How To what do I what do I post what content? Think of it more? Yes, you should be posting content. But we haven’t even talked about that. We’re talking about just participating in other people’s lives. And then, as Eric said, so elegantly and so perfectly, taking what’s online, and then pulling it offline, because we know that social media actually makes us feel more disconnected. It does not, the research does not shows very clearly that it does not really bring people closer together. But it is a great research and development tool so that you can take it offline and actually build that relationship, one, you know, belly to belly face to face or text to text or voice to voice. So thank you, Mark, that is such a, if you get nothing else from this, this this episode, which of course you will, and you have that is you will never suffer a lack of leads. But you have to earn them just like Eric was saying, his team members have to earn their place on the team, you have to earn your place and in your clients team, as well. So your client has a team of people that they employ accountants, you know, maybe an attorney, financial advisor, etc. To earn that spot as a real estate agent you got to do you got to just care more, and you got to be more proactive in their life. Absolutely. Well, Eric, this has been awesome. And I definitely want to continue to have you come on the show from time to time going forward. Because this is so actionable. I know our audience is going to love this as much as I did. And so I want everybody again to go visit hatch coaching.com. Check out the courses, they have virtual events. And just lots of lots of great and by the way, most of the information on there is free. So check it out hatch coaching.com. Also, if you happen to be a realtor in the Fargo area, actually, Minneapolis, you mentioned what were the other areas that your team
Erik Hatch 57:58 Detroit Lakes, Minnesota Grand Forks, North Dakota in Bismarck, North Dakota, as well as Minneapolis.
D.J. Paris 58:03 I know if I was an agent in that area, I would like to work for a team that captures one out of every 1010 deals in that in that area. And certainly check out hatch real its hatch real estate, and the website there if you want it to hatch Realty rather, you can go to hatch realty.com. And you can reach out to Eric and his team. Boy, that’s a team I would join him in a heartbeat. And you get to you get to experience as you get you get not only an MBA and how to grow a business, you get to bypass all of the mistakes that Eric already made to get to where he is. And oh my god, you’re saving yourself years, literally years. And so I couldn’t agree more. Eric obviously is amazing. He’s he’s written a book, you can. He’s got coaching products. And he’s got this incredible team, which captures a huge percentage of the real estate market in his area. So please, everyone, go visit hatch coaching.com. And Eric, if there is anyone that wants to reach out to you directly, you know, who wants coaching specifically, or maybe wants to join the team who might be in the area? How should they reach out to you?
Erik Hatch 59:08 Yeah, just got to have scotian.com Easiest spot, and you’ll get to see this handsome.
D.J. Paris 59:13 Awesome. Well, everyone, thank you for continuing to listen and support our show. On behalf of Eric and myself. We want to say thank you to the audience and the best way that you can help us grow and help Eric continue to grow of course, visit hatch coaching.com. And then for our podcast, tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that needs to hear what Eric just talked about today, which was so there was no fat it was all meat right? This is an amazing episode, send them a link. Easiest way to do that. If they’re not a podcast person, just have them visit our website keeping it real pod.com or search for keeping it real podcasts will pop up. Or if they are a podcast person, or you’re a podcast person. Then just grab your podcast app on your mobile device. Do a search for keeping it real hit that subscribe button that helps us continue and also please Just leave us a review, especially if you’re an Apple user. But for any any service, you might be listening to us through Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, whatever, please leave us a review. It lets us know what you think of the show and helps us continue to improve. So on behalf of the audience and myself, we thank Eric for his time. And on behalf of Eric and myself, we say thank you to everyone listening and watching and we will see you on the next episode. Thank you. Err, hey, thank you.
How Real Estate Agents Should Talk To Buyers About Mortgage Rates • Learning With A Lender • Joel Schaub
Dec 29, 2021
Welcome to the December episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!
In this episode Joel talks about the situation in the lending market at the moment. Joel and DJ emphasize the importance of educating your clients about the rates and what that means for their own finances. Joel describes what he and his team do to give back to their clients and how this has grown over the years. Joel also discusses how he built his team building and grew it.
Joel can be reached at joel@rate.com and 773.654.2049.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 On this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Joel Schaub at guaranteed rate. As a realtor it’s important to partner with only the most trusted name in mortgage lending. Joel has 1000s of satisfied clients and gives $1,500 of his commission. Back to your buyers on every closing. He is known for his ability to close even complex deals start to finish in only 14 days to learn what 1000s of others already know. Make a note to call Joel at 773-654-2049 or email joel@rate.com Guaranteed Rate is an equal housing lender licensed in all 50 States Consumer Access Number 2611 And now on with the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast a buy real estate agents and also for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today, once again is our monthly series titled learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And he’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. Now last year alone, Joel gave back just under $300,000 In closing costs to buyers who worked with them. And that actually put Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. out of 400,000 loan officers in the United States. Joel is ranked number 137. Now last year, he closed 535 transactions, his highest amount ever for 195 million in loans this year, he smashed that record. So this is actually his biggest year ever. And it’s not over yet. But he’s already done here in December 590 transactions last year 535. This year 594 $238 million in loans. Now if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot highly more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Joel can be reached at his email, which is Joel J oel@rate.com. Again joel@rate.com Or shoot him a text message or call him at his phone number which is 773-654-2049. Let’s say Hello once again to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel Schaub welcome.
Joel Schaub 2:35 Hey, thanks so much for having me on. And when I hear those accolades, and those numbers, none of it matters. I’m so happy to be here each and every month to just give back. These are some of the best times when you and I get together.
D.J. Paris 2:47 It is a lot of fun. And I know just how busy you are. And the fact that you can find time to talk to me when you’re doing more than one closing a day, on average. And if you do business days, it’s more probably more like two to trend two closings at least on average a day. So we know how busy you and your team are. So thank you for for taking a few minutes to chat with us. So I wanted to ask before we’ve sort of got started I. And again, it’s always funny to watch the news because you know, if you’ve, if all you did is read the news, you think, wow, everything is just doing, everything’s going going to pot or everything’s going in the wrong direction. Because that’s what people are interested in reading some negative stuff sells. And and I started seeing in the last couple of weeks, like mortgage rates are starting to climb, time to freak out and time to get scared and just wanted to get your take on on a lot of those news stories that agents and maybe even their clients might be seeing.
Joel Schaub 3:47 I’m glad you asked that right out of the gate DJ because when rates are going up, it’s just important to put it into perspective, right? When we hear braids have spiked, tenure, treasury yields are up over six months, where do we actually stand in terms of long term interest rates? And what does it truly mean for the buyer? Okay, so yes, on average rates right now are north of 3%. But they’re in the low threes. And there are definitely options to get rates below 3%. But just think about what we’re talking about here for a second. We just said rates are up to just over 3% in the business is what we’re getting at right?
D.J. Paris 4:32 Yeah, it’s a great time for rates to go up quite honestly, if they’re gonna go up. Let’s do it in an environment where they were at historic lows and like yeah, perspective, because when my parents got their first loan, they got lucky because they were able to to grab a loan that someone else or rather I’m sorry, they were able to get a loan at a low price but or low rate but other people were getting double digit. This is in like the late 70s early early 80s inflation was out of control was it was like 12%. And and now we’re at 3%.
Joel Schaub 5:05 Yeah, the loans today are not assumable. Right. So when parents were able to get that property, it was a real bargain because somebody that had the mortgage before went to a bank, and that
D.J. Paris 5:14 bank either made a mistake, yeah, they made a mistake.
Joel Schaub 5:18 So banks don’t make mistakes. These days, they learned from 2008 2009, that old mistake. But guys, there’s an opportunity right now when rates are going up. And I want to talk about the two things that I wouldn’t be doing if I were an agent. In this market, where rates are going up, it means that buyers are seeing it on social media, the news, etc. And it’s about having an honest conversation with the buyers that are already pre approved if they’re right at the edge of their limits. Okay. And what I mean by that DJ is, everybody thinks because I am closing two or three transactions every single day, right? That I must work with million dollar buyers left and right. And that’s just not the case. A good majority are just first time buyers, or move up buyers that need advice, speed, guidance, okay. And these are people buying ranges anywhere from $150,000. And up. And a lot of times, they aren’t big time transactions. The big thing here is that buyers are usually limited to how much they can afford. And if rates do go up. Now, instead of being able to go out and buy that $300,000 home, they might have to go and find a home that’s only 265,000. So as an agent, is to actually educate your clients right now that it is the time, if you can get out and find a property before rates really do go up in the next year or two, to get out and buy a property.
D.J. Paris 6:47 I think that’s really important. Because we see, you know, I also just think the average consumer doesn’t, it doesn’t really know what when rates are when they say rates are going up, they’re not able to translate that into easily into real dollars unless they do an online calculation of sorts. And so that’s where I think you’re right. And as an agent, or any loan officers who might be listening, you can provide a lot of value by, you know, resetting that expectation and understanding of what the news actually is, and gives you a great reason to call your clients and say, hey, just so you know, you might have seen some some new stuff, you know, I don’t want you to freak out, but let it let’s talk about your next move. And what you know, what are you in, we also we also know that pricing for homes is has, you know, obviously gone up. And it’s starting to sort of settle a bit, I guess, but but still great time to have a conversation and just let people know, here’s where we’re at. And, you know, if it’s time to start looking. You know, it’s always a good time.
Joel Schaub 7:46 Guys, here’s the point, if a borrower is right now able to go up to 300,000, because rates are about 3%, that exact same borrower might only be able to afford 250 or 265, in a year or two when rates are at four and a half percent. So it doesn’t seem like a major difference from low threes to four and a half percent. But it really is it lowers their purchasing power by quite a bit. And for those borrowers that are first time or on a fixed income, every dollar counts and making sure that they lock into historically low rates is one of your big keys about teaching and educating the clients that you’re working with.
D.J. Paris 8:25 Yeah, it’s a great, a great time to reach out. And wish somebody a happy December holidays, if they celebrate those holidays for your clients. That’s another great reason to pick up the phone and and say hi, before the end of the year, wish them happy new year. And oh, by the way, you know, what are the plans next year? And are you thinking about upgrading or maybe moving from renting to buying or you know, investing even in another property? I would love to talk because this is one thing that I think you do so incredibly well. Maybe better than certainly better than any other loan officer I’ve ever met. But maybe even better than just about anyone I’ve ever met in any industry, which is your generosity. And I know this is gonna sound like I’m just giving you platitudes and trying to go and compliment. But but it is it is actually I think, a learning point for our agents or for our listeners rather who most of them are agents to talk about what you do for the people in your sphere of influence, which I think could be similar thing can be done for all of our with our all of our listeners as well. But can you talk a little bit about sort of gifting and why that’s important to you in your business?
Joel Schaub 9:37 I wanted to be different, right? I realized that givers gain and the more you give, the more you’re going to get in as hokey as it sounds. It’s really paid dividends for me. It started with really small things right? But this time recently this year for Thanksgiving, I’ll just tell you what we did. Next year whoever’s listening copied, just copied. We did to hundreds of hand packed boxes, and it was movie night. So I created custom pieces and filled an entire box one with a large, really nice blanket. Who doesn’t love a blank? We all have blankets, but you wash it once or twice they get dingy, right? Yep, I went and bought the nicest blankets that we could afford for the box budget, then we also filled it with a homemade cookie mix so that people could cook in their homes right along with a spatula, and a hot pad. And it was one of these things where we’re all staying at home more and more. So we did hundreds of boxes, and we filled up an entire FedEx truck and just ship them to past clients, referral partners, and people in our community just to put joy in their faces. And yeah, we spent money on it. But each and every year, it comes back to us.
D.J. Paris 11:00 i It’s funny, I It’s funny, because i we i was lucky enough to be on the list and I got the same package Joel and, and boy, you know, I don’t, I really don’t get many gifts outside of friends and family, I really get nine other than I think from you. And it really was, was was a great gift. Because all of those things are usable. And in your right. Like we are able to create a movie night out of it or, or just a night alone or romantic night. And I think it’s funny too, because they’re all things that that are usable, and especially the blankets is such a great gift. But I was talking to an agent on my show not too long ago, and and he said when he would first started out, and he had no money or very little money to spend to give, you know, give back to his clients what he did. And so, you know, of course, you can put together these amazing gifts, like what Joel does, what this guy did is he just bought one box of Girl Scout cookies for each one of his clients. And he hand delivered it for dollars, or whatever it is $5 may be a box which, you know, you’re supporting the Girl Scouts, which is a good thing. And, you know, you show up with about who doesn’t like a box of Girl Scout cookies. So if you’re listening and thinking, Well, geez, you know, I have a lot of people my database, but maybe I don’t have as much income to build something, you know, create something really, you know, extravagant. It’s like, Girl Scout cookies are a perfectly wonderful gift too. And, you know, that’s a that’s just as valid. So, so whatever your economic situation is, I think, you know, doing something for your client. And if you can’t afford that, given somebody a call and saying I’m thinking about you, I hope you have a great holiday is that’s a great thing to do, too. There’s lots of ways you can give. And Joel does it in a lot of different ways. Joel is very generous, and he’s very involved in the community as well. Especially with with charity and, and just different organizations that he supports. And, and I think that is it. You know, everybody knows that about you hear in the local Chicago community. And I think, Boy, that’s that is a great thing to be known for. And I know that’s not the reason you do it, you do it because you want to and you feel like that’s, you know, you’re obligated to support the community. And I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. But it’s also a nice thing to be known for doing. And the only way anyone’s ever going to think that way about you is if you if you get get involved, right.
Joel Schaub 13:25 You got to get involved and one of the keys is just doing them off holidays, everybody gets a birthday gift. So sending out somebody a birthday gift or a $5 Starbucks on their birthday. Not special. Right? Honestly, I’m telling you now, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s not special. Doing it on a day where nobody else is getting anything. Right. Nobody sends out Thanksgiving gifts. Right? That’s unique and different. I do St Patrick’s Day gifts. And I’ve even gotten in trouble doing Valentine’s Day gifts because my gifts are better than the husband’s gifts sometimes.
D.J. Paris 14:00 Yeah, don’t put me on the Valentine’s Day list because I usually set the scramble for that one, or I could take your gift and then you know, repurpose it and claim that it was my own and remove any branding that might be there. But But But seriously, it is really a nice thing for to receive that unexpected on an off holiday like obviously Thanksgiving and and it just it’s just whatever the gift that you want to provide to your clients. You know, regardless of the expense like figure out a way to to give back and say thank you and and boy it just brings a lot of holiday cheer. There’s there’s really no downside except a little hit to your pocketbook, I guess would you do it? But you know, that just keeps keeps the the good, the good vibes flowing and certainly hopefully would result in more and more transactions down the road. I would also like to also ask you about you have exploded this while you’ve exploded basically Every year you’ve been practicing, but the last couple years have really been outstanding in your production. And I know you’ve added a lot of team members in the last year or two. Can you talk a little bit about how that how that works for you and how that’s structured?
Joel Schaub 15:14 Well, it’s a fallacy, right? So many people look at somebody ahead of them and say, well, he must just have a bunch of loan officers that work for him. There’s no way that he’s doing all that business. And I am, it’s literally the staff that I’ve created, supports the brand and the business. Okay. So right now, we’re at 17 members on the staff. And the big thing that really made the jump I was talking to you before the show about this was bringing in my wonderful wife, Christine. And I know there’s a lot of people that have husband and wife teams, but she’s literally blown it out of the park in terms of the marketing, and growing, okay, because I’m a numbers guy, you know, I’m actually kind of shy, you wouldn’t notice this, right. But she’s the one that makes these connections for me, and I ended up out working on the actual day to day of the business. And what we’ve done is we’ve grown from just having three people on the job shop team, to a staff of 17, that helps with marketing, gift giving for realtors, okay, so we partner with agents all across the United States, and teach them in detail the things that we talk about here, how to go out and duplicate what we’re doing for their database, they get a list of friends, family members, and co workers, and create unique things that are perfect for them. And we help with the costs.
D.J. Paris 16:42 I love that. And I am always surprised at how little of that, as a homeowner in Chicago hear that I receive from other loan officers, I get none of it, quite honestly. And I’m in a newer building a brand new building really. And so maybe we’re not on everyone’s address list yet. But I don’t think there’s a whole lot of competition in that space, like this is a great time to partner with a loan officer and say, hey, I want to start doing some, you know, whether it’s mailers, or flyers or brochures or whatever, and being able to really create, and I’m almost wondering if loan officers have just been so busy this last year that they’re like, I don’t need to do a lot of that right now. Because I’m so busy. But I know you do a lot of it you partner with agents and you say how can we both work together to build your business? The agent? And then of course, that ultimately ends up helping your business too. But I don’t I don’t receive a lot of that. I don’t It’s funny, I you think you would with the number of loan officers out there. So the road is not that well traveled. And it’s a great opportunity to choose somebody like Joel to to build a relationship with and say, Hey, it’s 2022, almost what can we do together to really knock this thing out of the park. And, and a lot of loan officers are very hungry. Still, Joel obviously, is still super engaged, that I just wanted to go back to something very quickly that you had said about, you know, now that you have the staff of 17, you know, it would be not unnatural to think Oh, Joe gets to now wake up at 1010 in the morning, and he’s done by two and and that is not your life at all, you were working just as hard as you ever have. And that’s the secret to your success. It’s it’s, it doesn’t necessarily get easier or less time, right? It’s just you now have more help. So that you can do more in that same time.
Joel Schaub 18:37 We got to be very forward thinking in this business. And if you’re a realtor, you get loan officers left and right reaching out to you saying our rates are so low us us, right? What are they doing for you? Right? So take some of these people. And I know I’m gonna get flack in the lending community for saying this. But if you’re a realtor, right now reach back out to these agents that are these mortgage agents that are reaching out to you asking you for business and saying what are you going to do for me? Right, good loan officers will through RESPA compliant ways, give funds up to 50% for marketing events and giving Okay, and partner with somebody that you like, okay, that’s going to actually take care of your clients that has the behind the scenes, similar to what we have to actually close transactions in a fast amount of time. Because the secret is, most banks out there have the same rates DJ, everybody thinks that there might be some secret someplace if they search the dark web to find this lowest interest rate. That’s not the case, go with somebody that you know, like and trust, okay, and work with them and see if you’re an agent, which loan officer is actually going to help you grow your business. Okay, and that’s what’s the focus right now, going into 2022. There’s going to be a lot of lenders as rates do start to go up that are just going to be calling and we’re way ahead of the game on all of that. This is year round for We are reaching out, we don’t reach out, just when times get slow. Yes, everybody is busy. Every single week, we’re scheduling appointments, and you just wait when rates do go out, but there’s going to be a lot of people leaving the business because they didn’t do the planning. So if you’re on this call here today, or you’re listening or watching, I know, we’ve reviewed some of this before, but it’s another action step to take steps forward to just do gift giving, create your database and start giving back.
D.J. Paris 20:29 Yeah, and start talking to lenders, if you’re one of our listeners, who is things are slowing down, it’s the end of the year, you got clients that are not as present, because they’re, you know, dealing with holiday stuff. Great time to start talking to lenders, lenders are probably slightly less busy as well, or the loan officers, you know, probably winding down a bit. Except for Joel, which is still you’re cranking it out just like you always do, but there’s a lot of loan officers that are probably have a little bit more time right now. And if you, you know, wanted to partner with somebody in your local community, reach out to three or four of them and say, hey, I want to talk I here’s what here’s what I want to do next year, can you can you help me, you know, what can you do. And of course, if anyone out there does not have a great relationship with a loan officer, we would encourage you to reach out to Joel. Joel is an amazing partner. I know of many, many agents for many firms who Joel works with here in the Chicagoland area. But guaranteed rate is licensed, of course, in all 50 states, they have incredible agents, credible loan officers, and but Joel, if somebody did want to reach out to you specifically to talk about, you know, helping them with their 2022, or even just general questions, or maybe you could help point them in the right direction. What’s the best way they should reach out to you
Joel Schaub 21:41 invariably, after these podcasts, I get north of a dozen phone calls or emails, somebody just saying I really was inspired by what you said here? Do you have a few minutes and I actually take the time to answer the phone. And I do reply to emails personally. So test me, okay. Joel JO el@rate.com. It’s the short email for guaranteed rate, and then 773-654-2049. And it would be one of the things where if you are an agent, and you are spending on something, we’re happy to contribute, we really want to partner with agents that are investing in themselves, okay. And on the higher end, I know not everyone can be at this level. But if you are an agent that’s spending over $10,000 a year on something that you are doing for marketing and advertising, reach out to me, I absolutely have ways in 2022, that you could get the freight costs on those types of things in real RESPA compliant ways. So let’s have a conversation.
D.J. Paris 22:41 And you know, we’re starting to see there was some news earlier this week for an online lending institution that that had to do a massive number of layoffs. And I really think if you, if anyone you know is paying attention to those sorts of news, that that is a great reason to have a conversation with your clients about lenders. And why you have that you would, you know, I don’t wanna use the word steer, but that you would suggest to your clients, I’ve got a great relationship with someone, I would like you to talk to them, because some of these online mortgage lending institutions, which doesn’t, doesn’t really have the ability to have a personal one on one interaction between the client and the loan officer, some of them just are starting to crumble a bit, I think, and, you know, these relationships, these one to one relationships are just so critical. And like you said, rates are not that important, because everyone’s really got the same rates, but the relationship is because I know that if I refer someone to draw, it’s gonna get closed, I don’t have to think about that. And that is a real nice thing to be able to say to a client is, you know, let’s, let’s go, let’s try my my person. And so let’s good time to develop those relationships. And again, it’s your fiduciary to your clients, not Joel, of course, I’m talking to directly to our audience, you are a fiduciary, you have a financial obligation to give them good advice. And, you know, building a relationship with a loan officer in 2022, if you don’t have one, is a good opportunity to really be able to provide more value to your customers and say, Oh, no, you know, not that you don’t shouldn’t go here. But here’s somebody else that we really want you to talk to, and, and the level of experience is just different. I know, when I was recently purchasing a home, and I actually went with Joel, of course, and I tried a couple of these online things just to sort of see what would happen. I was curious the experience I would get, and it was very poor. And immediately, you know, I wasn’t really going to go with him anyway. But I was shocked at the level that the really difference. Whereas Joel, got on the phone with me had a great conversation that was quite quite lengthy about I want to educate you on the process, you know what you’re doing, and none of the other places were I mean, they didn’t even call me back really, which was surprising. So this is a great opportunity. Need to build these relationships with really good loan officers like Joel and and really, you know, help get your clients the help they need so that they’re not stressed about this large, sometimes largest financial decision they may ever make.
Joel Schaub 25:14 I’m glad that you said that, because it’s really true. It’s about having that relationship. And if you’re a realtor, it doesn’t have to be me go back to the lenders that you absolutely know and see if they’re open to helping you on any of those types of things. Because good lenders absolutely would welcome that phone call. Why wouldn’t they, you’re referring them transactions. And you want to make sure that you’re working with somebody who has a team behind them, the online lenders, they might somehow be a little bit cheaper on the surface, it looks to be that way. It’s hard to get offers accepted when you’re working with somebody like that. So there’s some pros and cons to everything, find out what’s best for you, but no, coming right from the horse’s mouth here that loan officers that are successful want to partner with you and spend money, so don’t be afraid to ask.
D.J. Paris 26:04 Yeah, it’s a great opera, great opportunity here for the end of the year for our listeners. And of course, reach out to Joel, if you would like to see what he could do with you. He would love to have that conversation with you. And Joel, we wish you a happy December holiday season, as well as the Happy New Year that is coming up and excited to have you back again for another year here on the show. And, of course, as always, on behalf of the audience, we thank you for your time, you’re always have great wisdom. And it is exactly the same steps you do with your own business. So it isn’t even unique specifically to real estate, it obviously applies to to a lot of different occupations, and you’re doing the same thing that you’re telling our audience to do. So walking, the talk is so, so rare these days. And it’s wonderful to have somebody on the show who really does that. So thank you. And then of course, on behalf of Joel and myself, we want to thank the audience, you know, you guys have been with us some of you since the very beginning, which was four or five years ago. And we appreciate it we’re I don’t know 300 And maybe 30 episodes in now. And so we are grateful wouldn’t wouldn’t be able to keep making these without the support from our, our listeners and our viewers. So please help us continue to grow. Just tell one friend, think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Joel and send him a link to our our website, which is keeping it real pod.com We have links to all the different podcasts apps on there, or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real, hit the subscribe button. And also, please leave us a review if you’re specifically if you’re whatever app you might be using to listen to our show, whether it’s Apple podcasts or Google Play, or Spotify or wherever. Leave us a review. Let us know what you think of the show. It helps us get more visibility and also helps lets us know what we’re doing right and how we can also improve. So please also do that, Joel, thank you once again. Wow, amazing year you’ve had and also you’ve never missed one of our shows. That’s how impressed that’s even more impressive that would I know how busy you are. So thank you on behalf of all of us at the show. And we will see everybody we’ll see Joel and 2022 and we’ll see everyone else on the next episode. So thanks, Joel. Thank you, DJ
The Importance Of Having Great Partners To Your Real Estate Practice • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Dec 22, 2021
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
Ryan discusses what’s happening in the lending world at the moment and emphasizes the importance of the loan officer in the process of home-buying. Ryan gives tips on what agents can do to finish the month (and this year) strong. Ryan and DJ discuss the importance of keeping in touch with people around and building relationships.
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Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Barris, I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re new to our show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. Well, let me tell you about Ryan Ryan de abril is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and staff at Table Properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style and his dedication to training. He has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland also offices in Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan with hundreds and hundreds of top real estate producers. Dr. Paul properties is also a coaching company with eight strategic coaches who work week in and week out with each agent individually focused on business planning, coaching and accountability. Now, if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need from your existing firm, check out D APR properties, visit D APR that’s da p r i l e properties.com. We can do properties. Like we should also mention, Ryan also owns a lending company called Midwest lending. So if you have any lending needs, or you’re looking to build a relationship with a great loan officer, you can always check out Midwest lending, and also Midwest title for looking for a good title company. So it’s got a lot of businesses and we are thrilled to have him on the show. Welcome again, Ryan.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:36 Thanks for having me, DJ, so good to talk to you again. And you got me in a car again. So no, no FaceTime video there. Sorry about that.
D.J. Paris 2:43 No problem. Well, Ryan, and I were just talking just before the show, because I just saw this headline. And my first reaction was, I have never heard of this company. yet. I thought it would be just a neat way to start off our show. Just to get your perspective on this as somebody who owns a lending company. So I just saw better.com, which apparently isn’t, I believe an online mortgage lender just announced they were laying off 900 employees here in one swoop. So it’s making the news because of the size of that cut. And just curious as somebody who is involved in that business, you know, sort of your thoughts about what’s going on in the mortgage industry?
Ryan D’Aprile 3:24 Well, you know, you’re seeing across the board, mortgage companies starting to cut down on staff I, there’s a little bit more to this story, right with how they did it, which is horrendous. It sounds like you and I are chatting about it. We’ll talk about that in a second. The approach that you did, because you know, these are human beings. But there is you know, 2020 20 and 21 was borderline noxious how busy it was in the morgue journey. And it was a fight for talent and, and people that were in, you know, certain roles and a certain amount of money were being offered double the to be taken away and go somewhere else. And it happened and companies are struggling looking for people because they had so much business. And unfortunately now you know, 18 months later, you hear you ever hear about mass layoffs, because business just isn’t there. And you know, supply and demand is, you know, it’s real, right? And when the demands out there. They start to really start to layoff these people know how this company did it. better.com I believe is the name right? Yep. You’re telling me they did on a zoom call?
D.J. Paris 4:38 Yeah, they did it to all 900 employees simultaneously, which is now that part of the story is really being focused on in the news, which it is upsetting. Yeah.
Ryan D’Aprile 4:51 Yeah, that’s you know, you got it. You should be thinking these things through but you know, yeah, that’s That’s too bad. And you know, Whew, you know, it’s, that’s the lot of emotion runs through me when I hear something like that. And being in, you know, our type of roles where, you know, you eat what you kill, and also being an industry, right real estate mortgage lending, there’s a ton of emotion, that, that, that that comes into this and, you know, that will just kind of just take you to a whole other level, that’s why I try to always coach, you know, allos agents and whatnot, and the importance of network and networking. And, and, you know, I’m online leads Consumer Direct, you know, it’s, it’s good at a certain time and a certain place, it’s not a bad complement to your business. But you don’t want to be the core of your business. Because, you know, when somebody gives us, somebody can taketh away, and you’re better off, you know, relying on yourself and the power of your network and, and focusing on activities to make your network attractive to you, so that they come for you for that advice. But it’s, it’s, it’s tragic. It’s very, too bad. And it’s going around and, you know, some of the biggest mortgage companies out there, you know, your, you know, maybe not in the news, but in the industry news that we see where they’re reporting massive layoffs that are happening out there. And that’s tough.
D.J. Paris 6:19 And I almost almost wonder if there’s a good sort of action step for our listeners, who are agents, mostly, who maybe see news like this, they start thinking, well, it’s gonna make sense there were business was so busy, and so they had to staff up and maybe now, the lending world has has, you know, dropped in popularity just in the immediate moment, or it’s the holidays, and people are, you know, refinancing or purchasing as much but, or it’s just the market slowed down. So use, you mentioned, supply and demand. And I’m wondering if there is an action step. So an agent might say, Well, gosh, I don’t want this to happen to my clients. Because, you know, I don’t know, maybe it’s a good time to have a conversation with your loan officer, just to see, how’s the company doing? You know, what company you work with?
Ryan D’Aprile 7:09 Yeah, you know, so a lot of our real estate agents, right, and I, I really have my finger on the pulse of this, because I, I own a mortgage company, but then I see my agents, and they’re on the other side, the listing side, or whatnot. And they’re working with lenders from all over the place. And they really cringe when you get these Consumer Direct companies on the other end. Yeah, and you know, your real estate agents want to have a relationship with a lender, I coach loan officers. And, you know, it is one of the most scalable businesses, I believe, I think real estate’s difficult to scale, they, they have these models of scaling it, and we I don’t want to get in that conversation. We could talk about that later. But you know, real estate is a high relationship type business, which makes a little bit more difficult to scale, you could really scale lending. Without having to multiply yourself. And one of the reason being is, is there’s always two real estate agents on a deal. Yeah. And I coach our loan officers and like, if you are not calling an agent, twice a week, both agents twice a week, you are missing the lowest hanging fruit in this business. And they appreciate it so much, even if they don’t call you back. And I see and I’m not going to name, I’m going to bite my tongue here, I’m not going to name any companies. But I see large mortgage companies out there. And our agents just saying please avoid these people as much as you can. And they’re actually talking their clients out of having to use them because their call centers and you know, they are in mortgage lending is not simple. It’s not a manufacturing process. It’s it’s, it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a job or, you know, everything almost.
D.J. Paris 9:02 And whatever documentation that your client may have needed to provide to the loan, the lending institution loan officer at the beginning of the transaction, even though that’s what was needed for the pre qualification letter, and even whatever, you know, once the contracts accepted, there’s going to be a wrinkle in it at some point down the road before the closing, where all of a sudden there there will be some sort of scramble for paperwork, and I think that’s where it’s like, okay, thank God, I have a great loan officer on top of this, because there’s some sort of wrinkle
Ryan D’Aprile 9:33 there is and that’s one of the reasons why loan officers have to stay on every deal and communicate because not only that, it’s you know, you have to first you know, dispatch just pick dates December 1, we’re going to go under contract and we’re gonna close December 30. Great. Right now, everybody attorney wants to order title, you know, when they’re going to order title a week before closing. Wait a minute. We have clear to close. We need that now. out, the borrower get the fifth key one that they have, but they’ll get it four days before closing, okay, but we’re not clear to close. So, you know, a lender is so dependent on so many different parties, and they are the scapegoat, have the experience totally. But you have the appraiser, you have the FHA inspector, you have the title company, you have the seller’s attorney, you have the borrower, you have the borrower’s HR department for verification of employment. So much that goes on condo associations, they have to give you condo questionnaires that, you know, you’re the bottom rung and then your processor will call, but nobody’s returning processor calls or return the loan officers call. And it’s, it’s complicated. And you know, and people have tried automating what the Automate with the Automate is online lead client acquisition, right? You know, when you’re going to mortgage company.com, you’re not cutting out a middleman because that mortgage company is spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars on billboards and commercials to drive consumers that mortgage.com company where you’re gonna get somebody on a headset, I’d rather the acquisition expense, right, the client acquisition expense, being a loan officer commission, because then they’re going to nurture it and take care of it. And you’re not gonna see a difference in rate as a consumer. It’s just a different. Yeah. Right. So that in product,
D.J. Paris 11:38 that’s a really, really strong point for all of our listeners to understand is that that a lot of these companies, what they really are our lead generation companies, and they’re spending the money they would be spending to pay the commission, a lot of their loan officers, a lot of them are actually salaried. And so they’re on a headset there. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But how motivated are they to close a deal? When they’re not really? Yeah, they have no relationship with the end user.
Ryan D’Aprile 12:07 And and in, that’s quite the opposite to the point of that it’s not cheaper for the consumer, right? Those commercials costs money, those billboards cost money to drive the consumer to that website, those headsets, those cost centers, and those salaries cost money. And in fact, they cost more in basis points, and a loan officers basis points, High Commission, in most cases, and so you’re not going to see any savings, and you’re gonna see a lot more frustration, because this is not like, you know, you know, hey, you’re 35 and five foot five. So here’s your interest rate. And that’s it, it’s you employed, are you self employed? How many K ones do you have? We need verification? Boy, I’ll even employ What’s your credit score, where does it fall, how much you borrow, and what’s your loan to, you know, your and then they gotta go sell that in secondary markets, it’s very complicated, you need a loan officer that is competent, that can handle all of these tricky things. And then, most importantly, be the person who’s going to move the whole process along. Hey, seller’s agent, we have not gotten titled back to the attorney in need to get a hold of them. If you guys want this to close, in the next two weeks, hey, we have not heard from your insurance company, and we don’t have the declaration we need, we need to know that they got proof of insurance, or we’re not gonna be able to give them the more, hey, we have not gotten the condo association back. Gotta do it. And that’s what a lot of loan officers good loan officers are doing. And that’s why that Consumer Direct portion is online, you know, call centers, you know, they’ll take an application, but automating that stuff, it’s, it gets ignored by all the other parties that are supposed to send the documentation into you. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 13:49 that’s a good point. And also, we’re now just moving on, because I think you’ve just set it all there. So So anyway, I or just maybe to put a to put a bow on that, a great opportunity to remember as the agent, you are especially working with the buyer, you are the the knowledge source, you are the person that has information. So you need to be having those conversations with your buyers, before they get their pre qualification letter, or suggesting to them why they may want to talk to so and so from, you know, the loan, the the lending institution that you have a relationship with, because you you know, these are things that as a consumer consumers don’t understand that a loan officer in person or one locally, might be able to better serve them that then you know, you know, like you said a mortgage.com type of online lead that they’re not going to know that so this is where the real estate agent will come in. Because if you think about it, you know, I shop for bank rates sometimes because sometimes I just have some cash and I don’t really need anything special done with it and I just want to see which banks giving me the best rate because it’s such a simple Will and no brainer transaction. And I can literally just search best bank rates for, you know, money market or whatever. And I can make that decision without talking to a banker. And it’s so easy and it’s no big deal that can be done. And so a lot of us are just sort of, we’re always thinking about searching online for the best rate or the best whatever. When it comes to mortgages, I don’t think the average consumer understands, even though they’ve been through it maybe multiple times, they don’t understand how complicated that whole entire processes, so find a good lender, loan officer, and we should probably this great place to plug Midwest lending. So tell us, tell us a little bit about Midwest lending.
Ryan D’Aprile 15:37 No Midwest signings a mortgage bank, we’re in Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Florida. Um, and we pride ourselves on communicating with our borrowers, and our agents and every agent on the deal. And doing it multiple times a week and keeping everybody apprised of what’s going on, and how everybody can participate. And help out on the journey to get in the closing table. Because I’m going to tell you, whatever mortgage company has, we’re going to need everybody to participate. And again, that’s the attorneys, that’s the agents, borrowers, the borrower’s employees, and whatnot. And the more the agent is informed of what’s going on the process, the more they can help out and make a phone call, say we need this documentation. So we’re gonna get our cleric close. So go ahead and schedule a closing. So Midwest lending is a great organization. You know, we have a number of loan officers in multiple states, and we work with real estate agents all over the country. And yeah, that’s about us. And you know, what? How about, I was just thinking of something. And thank you for letting me plug Midwest funding, I appreciate it greatly. How about we transition since we’re moving in the last half hour, it’s sprinkling a little coaching for our listeners here,
D.J. Paris 16:47 I’d love that. And this is we are now at the time we’re recording this, it’ll probably come out in a week or so. But we are in December, early December at the time of this recording. And it is very easy. Even I have to sort of force myself to not get too caught up in the fun of the holiday to where it’s I’m cutting corners at work, or I’m spending less hours, it’s very easy to do that. There’s so much responsibility, we have the family and friends and and just you know, getting holiday cards out or whatever all the little activities we’re doing. And it is easy to and it’s also a great time of year to take it easier if you wanted to, because it’s probably probably less busy. You’re probably getting less of those client calls. But But what can agents do to really finish the end of this month strong? What could they start doing so that sure you don’t lose that momentum?
Ryan D’Aprile 17:43 So I was thinking about this over the weekend, and I was watching Michigan play Iowa. I don’t know if you saw that game or not. And my friend’s son is the freshman quarterback JJ McCarthy. And you know, he’s behind the starter, why don’t we have the starter as the root for JJ gets put in, like, you know, once every eight plays so terrific. Watch out for that name. You’ll you’ll see him in the NFL. And as watching hardball, you know, and as watching hardball coach, and and really getting in these kids? And I thought to myself, what is it that a coach provides somebody? What is it that a manager provides somebody that’s going to the next level? What would you guess it would be DJ?
D.J. Paris 18:27 So things that come to mind would be motivation. I actually would I guess I would have said that before I got my own physical personal trainer for at the gym. And what I used to think was, Oh, she’s going to tell me what to do. And she’s going to keep me on target. And yes, she does those things. But that’s not really for me the value the value for me is when in particular with having a personal trainer is the is knowing to do the correct form. And and the fundamentals and knowing like, Oh, yes, anyone can do a deadlift, but are you doing it correctly. And I got injured. When I used a personal trainer many years ago who wasn’t very skilled. Now I have somebody that’s skilled and cost a lot more. But boy, it’s it’s in the fundamentals and the foundation for me.
Ryan D’Aprile 19:14 When I was watching hardball, it clicked to me and I was thinking to myself, I said the best of the best. And those are that were worthy of receiving the best and best are open to receiving this is my opinion. It’s discipline and structure. Yeah. And motivation is great. And people say them very motivating, and appreciate it’s a compliment. But it’s also you know, it sinks in a cliche, I’ve heard it before, you know, motivations, like a bath, it’s going to wear off. And, you know, there are people that are coachable and are people that just they’re not coachable. And you got to really look in the mirror, especially during this time and say, am I going to keep my foot on the gas? And if there’s somebody that’s going to be doing that and helping me am I coachable? to really hear the cold, hard truth, and be willing to accept discipline and structure, so I can take myself to the next level, right. And I, there’s certain amount of people that I love and I care about, but they’re not worthy of my discipline structure, because they’re not going to take it. And the truth is, is us individuals, we hold so many people to a high level, our UPS delivery person, right? The water delivery, the pizza guy did the pizza delivery come in there, you know, did it take, you know, 45 minutes or 55 minutes, I’ve heard people yell by how it’s taken so long for the pizza to comment all their stuff in the best of the best hold themselves accountable to that level. And this is a time where I tell everybody, it’s the end of the year, don’t be looking at the results, stop looking at the results. And stop tracking the results right now, the year is over, you need to be looking at your activities, you need to be looking at your actions, your you need to have your blinders on. And the only thing you are focused on is your actions. And that’s got to be like this for the next 60 days. If you want to catch that mid February, spring market, there’s always time, right? And they were they it’s the expression, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the next best time is right now. Right right now, right now is where you need to say I’m gonna start, I gotta look at my actions and my activities, stop looking at my results, get focused on my activities. And day by day, am I taking the right steps and reaching out to the right individuals, and connecting with all the people in my network systematically, being habitual about it. And then the results are simple byproduct of those activities. And I think that is what everybody should be doing right now. Especially when the majority of us, which we may call our competition is not doing it.
D.J. Paris 22:04 Yeah, this is a time where even the busiest especially the busiest agents are, maybe they are taking a bit of a break, simply because this might be the only break they get into here. And so they might be taking a well, a well deserved break. But for those of us that aren’t, go ahead,
Ryan D’Aprile 22:21 I was gonna cut you off. But listen, you guys, discipline is structure, it’s going to give you all the free time in the world. I want I just came back from a week’s vacation. You know, we all need a break, we all need to, you know, we all need to unwind and stop it. But if your discipline is structured, in your one hour a day, one hour a day? You know, that’s not a lot. No, it really is not a lot but added over. And over 52 weeks. It’s a ton. And it didn’t feel like a lot. But your results? Right? Your results are gonna put you at the pinnacle of your industry, because you did not a lot one hour, a lot throughout the year. If that makes any sense what I just said,
D.J. Paris 23:09 yeah, it makes perfect sense. Because I know that, you know if I could take this month off from exercising? Sure, I certainly would like to. But what’s that going to look like for me in January, when I come back? What’s what’s what kind of pain am I going to be putting myself through to get back in shape? Just because I took two weeks off? Can I can I take two weeks off? Sure. Is that a good idea for me when I’m going to have to go back to the gym, and it’s going to be more painful. And so I caution everyone to think about sure you can take it easy this this December, and maybe you deserve it. And that’s fine, if it’s intentional, and if it’s, you know, scheduled, but if you can also continue to do. But like Ryan says putting the blinders on and sort of almost forgetting that it’s the December holidays at the end of the year. And things are slow. If you can just remove those from your mind and go, Well, I still have to work out today or in this case, I still have to make my phone calls and check in with my clients. And also, by the way, great time to do that, since it is the December holidays, even if you’re just calling them to say, Hey, I just hope you’re having a great rest of the year. And I was thinking about you. If that’s all you did to everyone in your database. I bet that’s more than they would expect.
Ryan D’Aprile 24:22 Yeah, and if you’re one of those individuals and aren’t logging your database once a week or once a day, right, and you’re doing it you know, once a month, you’re flying blind. Yeah, you’re just you’re absolutely flying mind. And, you know, I was telling him as coaches that you could be in this business for 10 years and an econ actually a decent living, right. But you’re not going to be at the top you’re not going to be and what I mean by that top like yeah, you know, are you success? Are you are you gonna be happy at the top? No. But you know, that’s what we’re talking about when we’re coaching. And also like, don’t be afraid of success, because it’s not going to take more time. You In fact, success gives you more time. And it gives you a lot more freedom.
D.J. Paris 25:04 And a lot more a bit. Yeah, the freedom comes to in learning how to scale a business as well and getting help when when you get to a level where you can we can push through to that. Find other people to assist you. And but yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, I think you and I are, are the same in the sense of, I always like Coach John Wooden. He’s like the only coach I even know, in sports, but he was the UCLA guy. And if you don’t know who coach John Wooden is just google him. But I think he won seven NCAA Tournaments championships in a row, I think it was literally seven in a row in the 60s, and I think maybe the early 70s, and then went on to win I think 11 out of 13, or something like that. He’s the winningest coach in NCAA history. Anyway, he never looked at the scoreboard. And when I say he never looked at the scoreboard, he absolutely will tell you he never looked at the scoreboard because he said, that doesn’t indicate to me whether we’re winning or losing. And it’s like, well, how do you how does that happen, and it’s not just a cute catchy thing. He said, he said, I just told every player, you’ll walk off the court at the end of the game, and whatever the scoreboard says, you’ll either know you did your best, or you’ll know you’re dead. And you won’t feel good, even if we win if you didn’t do your best. And so I think that is such a great lesson is just put the blinders on and do the fundamentals, do the things that you know, six months from now, we’re going to pay off because it is going to be six months from now, six months from now. And you know, like me, if I if I put the blinders on and just keep at the gym and keep doing the things at work that I’m supposed to do, we’re going to keep growing our business here, and I’m going to keep getting stronger in the gym, and I, I won’t have to go back in a month and go, I should have worked out this last month and didn’t and now it’s going to suck for a couple of weeks. Don’t Don’t let Don’t Don’t let that happen.
Ryan D’Aprile 26:47 Now, and tracking everything is is important, right? So we have in our dashboard, we have a snapshot and it tracks you know, your cuckolds and warms it tracks, it tracks your active clients. So your prospects are great, cool, cold and warm volumes next to them. And there’s timing next to them, then your your actives, right, and the type of actives you have then your pending, and then your sales, we also have another bar chart that’s called the forecast, which essentially takes your warm only not your coolers and colds, adds them with your actives and adds them with your pending, and then add some of your close, they’ll give you a forecast for what your year is going to look like. So with a lot of people now we’re goal setting again. And and we’re going to look at those, those snapshots that we have in their in their dashboards. And, you know, we’re going to talk about it for a few minutes. Right? And say, hey, look, you know, you have, you know, $7 million of cold cold means closing next calendar year. That’s fantastic. And look at you have another $4 million that are already active that you know they transact is probably transacting in late December or January. So you’re already looking at $11 million a year. And then we look at okay, where did the majority of this comes from that is coming from purchase web leads? are these coming from your, your network? are these coming from your network referring you and and then most of us see that 80 to 90% of it comes either from the network or the network referring them. And then you’re able to parlay that into a lesson be like Alright, great. Now let’s get to work. Get back to your network tab. Let’s look at these 385 people that are in here. Let’s go to the filter. And let’s see who hasn’t heard from you this quarter? Who has not heard from you? Since you know, September 30. All right, there’s 100 people a great, it’s 100 people that you have not talked to in three months 16% of them are going to transact next year at 16 potential transactions, not to mention that each one of those 100 people that you haven’t talked to in a quarter, no four people they’re going to buy or sell. That’s another potential 400 referrals. So how much are you missing out on by not being aware of those statistics and not being aware of your activities? Okay, great. It’s December 6, because right now it is December 6 I know there’ll be less than a week from now. But you know, you’ve got basically 20 days 20 days to reach out to those 100 people you know
D.J. Paris 29:16 and you have you have a lot of you have a lot of things to say when you talk to these people now it’s it’s the December holidays. By the way, if you don’t know what holiday your sphere of influence each person in your contact list your CRM celebrates or doesn’t celebrate. You should know that because Hanukkah I think just wrapped up a couple days ago. I have one of my closest friends celebrate Hanukkah he in his family, and so I don’t celebrate Hanukkah, but I reached out to him on day five and just as a funny thing I said Hey, happy day five. We’ve been friends forever and I just thought it would be funny on day five to say Happy Hanukkah but but I also wanted to wish them happy Hanukkah because like oh my god, I forgot to wish Justin Happy Hanukkah. So on day five I sent him a message And I said, and he laughed, laughed back and said, Hey, thanks for remembering. And I and then I said, Hey, just out of curiosity, how many people who are not Jewish, you know, I’m not Jewish, and I said, How many people who don’t celebrate Hanukkah reached out to you aside from your family and whatever anyone, you know, really close to you how many friends or whatever reached out and said Happy Hanukkah and he goes, You’re the only one. And and so I thought, boy, you know, what a great opportunity for for our listeners to know, you know, do your clients celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas Kwanzaa, any of the December holidays? Do they not celebrate those? And if they don’t, and if they have, you know, different beliefs, then what are you doing to acknowledge you know, them, and you don’t have to get that you don’t have to be afraid. But you should know this information or Hey, rates are creeping up on the lending world, is this a great time to talk to, to our homeowners about, you know, maybe we should talk have a conversation about where rates are headed. Now, it doesn’t mean that you that that has to drive the conversation, but it’s certainly a reason to pick up the phone and start a conversation. Yeah, well,
Ryan D’Aprile 31:01 I mean, let’s break it down. Let’s look at look what we’re just talking about with that particular agent, right? Who’s got 4 million active buyers and sellers currently and $7 million of cool prospects, right? And forget the amount of money that they got pending this closing in January, just $11 million right there. And you look at their, their their dashboard, they have 285, but 100 of them have not heard from them since the third quarter, right? Because it gives you all that data. And there’s 20 more days in the month late, because I’m taking out a couple of days for Christmas and New Years and all that short stuff, right? So there’s 20 more days in the month, while 120 It’s five, it’s only five a day. I mean, it’s not a lot. So it’s only five a day. And then yeah, guess what Facebook, and Instagram is going to tell you what to talk to about people are posting once a week on there, and all you got to do is just comment on whatever they said, don’t write on their wall. So I’m a direct messenger tax, how you doing be their friend, that’s their job, because people want a real estate agent and a loan officer, that’s their friend, because that’s who they trust. And then you’re gonna take them to the process. All right, but you’re not going to take into the process. If you’re not friends with you, they may say, Oh, he was a buddy of mine share. I’ve been talking for three years, I’m not gonna call him, I’m gonna talk to this other real estate agent, I see their billboard, I get their postcards, I don’t have a relationship with them, but I trust them, because they’re doing their marketing. Where, I don’t know, I think the market is incredibly important. But you know, what, if I’m doing my life flow with you, and you’re here for me, once a month, I’m gonna beat on a billboard any postcard any online lead, because I’m your friend. And that’s what we’re going to hire. And they have not been able to prove that wrong. All the billions of dollars going to online lead acquisitions, and everything else, what they’ve been able to do as to prove most real estate agents won’t put in the time and effort to take care of those relationships. And therefore, that online purchase business does have a room in our industry, should it has a room industry, because the lack of activities most agents spend doing the right activities, if that makes
D.J. Paris 33:04 sense. I mean, you’re so right. And I’m just thinking back to the these fundamentals, it’s we always come back to fundamentals, it’s like if all you did was somehow communicate with everyone in your sphere once a month, it doesn’t have to be a phone call, as Ryan said, could be a text, it could be, you know, an email, it could be a direct message, it could be a PAMP a flyer or whatever just they’re hearing from you in some capacity that they’re seeing once a month. That’s going above and beyond probably 90, I don’t know, I’m just making this number up 95% of all other agents out there, probably like 99%. So if that’s all you decide to do, boy, I’d be sure I’d be I’d love to have somebody call after doing that for a year. Having not done that in their previous years and hearing the results. Well, I mean, this is all you
Ryan D’Aprile 33:54 let’s talk about. That’s and that’s what I tell everybody, you know, be be most critical about your activities, not about yourself, right. I mean, we’re all hard on ourselves as it is. I mean, gosh, I was watching. flying home yesterday is watching that. Yeah, Anthony Bourdain, a documentary if you saw it or not, but it’s no I haven’t got it’s moving. Right. And it’s, it’s really reminds me of the real human struggle that we all battle with, right? The feelings of inadequacy and all that stuff that we have to acknowledge is out there and that’s real. Okay. However, you know, talking about that 1% Right, we’re joking. You know, probably more than 98% 99% of the real estate agents do it. It’s true. And if you look at the discrepancy between the haves and the have nots, not just in realty, real estate, but the industry below, it comes down to the activities and the consciousness that people are how where are they are themselves and as Robin Sharma says are you busy being busy? Are you busy being productive? 99% of us are just busy being busy. 1% Choose To be busy being productive, and that’s what we’re talking about. And that’s why every time I come in coach, I’m gonna be talking about the same shit over and over again, because that’s what will happen. Right it is there is no new triple Lindy backflip, you know, cartwheels social media video that’s going to capture all this new business for you. It’s relationships, people, it’s having multiple relationships. And having multiple relationships is a job. It’s a work, it’s a, it’s a work in progress. And you need to track your activities you needed him doing daily. And then you could get to all the business busy stuff after you’ve set some time aside to do that stuff, which is creating relationships that’s working on your business. And that’s what’s going to give you your freedom and flexibility in the future. Because you’ll have more clients, and you know what to do with quite honestly.
D.J. Paris 35:52 Yeah, it’s always activity over results, because results almost always come as a result of activity. And well,
Ryan D’Aprile 36:00 yeah, it is. Angela Duckworth also said this, which I love. I’ll take effort over talent any day of the week. I see talented people all the time. But you know, the efforts just not there. And actually people that don’t have the talents, but man, they got the effort. And guess what there that 1%?
D.J. Paris 36:20 I am. It’s always funny, to me, is a moment that happens on most of the episodes. Maybe not most, but but I would say, you know, I don’t know, somewhere in the 50% range. But where I’m talking to it could actually happen in the pre interview. So the audience wouldn’t necessarily see this, but it happens a lot on the show, where we’ll be talking and I’ll say well, what do you think makes you different? You know, you mister or missus top producer versus, you know, other people that struggle or lead the industry. And usually it’s a pause and a look of confusion. Because they want to come up with something that’s that’s quite profound or maybe hasn’t been said before. And and I say, well, and then I sometimes have to keep going, because they might go well, I don’t really know what I do. That’s so different. Because to them, they’re just running the business as they see fit. But a lot of times I’ll you know, they’ll say something about intelligence, they’ll say, Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not smarter, that then my cohort, my my peers, my competitors. And most of the brokers I talked to seem to have that belief that they are not inherently more skilled at being a realtor in the sense of treating the client well, and taking them through the transaction. They don’t seem to be geniuses at being a realtor, they seem to be very hardworking discipline, consistent individuals. And that, that seems it’s kind of the boring message that everybody I interview pretty much says, but there’s a reason why everybody says it.
Ryan D’Aprile 37:45 I heard this, I’ve never met Mario Graco in my life, right? Um, and I’ve never seen him speak or anything. But one agent said to me, seven years ago, they went and saw him speak at like a Chicago car. thing. And he’s got a team, right? He’s got a huge team, I believe, again, I don’t know the man. All right. But here’s what I heard an agent tell me that she heard him say, refers his clients out to his team, and he has buyer’s agents, and they buyer’s agents work with clients. And they close the deal. And then he has he has in his system that after they close, he makes sure he calls them every two weeks for six months in a row to see if they’re happy how the houses whatever else. And that generates more leads for him that he then goes out to the buyer agents to go around work with the buyer’s agents, and he stays back at the house or at the office, making the relationship calls as it can. Brilliant, brilliant, that is brilliant. And that’s how it’s done.
D.J. Paris 38:51 And it’s also it’s how it’s done. And it’s actually very simple, right? It’s not that complicated. What you would need to do to build that structure is obviously a calendar, you and you would just all you would need to do if you’re like, Well, what do I say every every two weeks? Go online and say what do homebuyers need to know after they’ve moved in? And that’ll give you a list of talking points. And even if it’s just you don’t have a talking point, just checking in? It’s been a month congratulations. It’s been 30 days, how’s everything still going? You know?
Ryan D’Aprile 39:22 It’s the D word. It takes discipline. It takes discipline, it takes self discipline, you know, and you know, for I think, for us, it may be closing and listeners here. It’s like, you know, anybody here who wants it can have it. Are you willing to be conscious? At least one to two hours a day? What’s important to you? And then are you willing to do it and when you don’t want to do it and you’re getting busy just doing busy work? Are you honest with yourself that you’re just neglecting? What is the most important thing to your business to keep you either in business or keep you on top? Because it just comes down? To all of us being self aware and self discipline and what we have to do, because the activities and actions are simple, they’re so simple. I’m almost embarrassed that I’m repeating them over and over again, like, gosh, TJ, do I have better material for you? I don’t feel I’m worthy for this coaching call. But it’s, the actions aren’t that earth shattering, it just got to be consistent.
D.J. Paris 40:20 Well, I just got back from the gym. And I’ve been with my trainer for a year and a half now. And we do the same 20 exercises a week that we rotate, and we try once in a while, get to a level where she’s like, Okay, we got to do something new. But it’s really all just variations of the exact same thing. And I Yes, is it boring? Well, sure. Parts of it can be but but thank goodness, it’s not complicated. It’s still hard. But it’s not complicated. And if all you did, like you were saying, with that individual as 100 people to contact between now and the end of the year, five calls a day, that’s real doable. That is very, very, this whole business is very doable. If you just break it down into the daily activities. And you know, that’s the one best thing I ever heard from Brian Buffini is win the day, how do I win the day? Well, I talked to five people and I, I you know, it wasn’t I closed a deal. It was I talked to five people, I took care of the clients that I already have, and you know, whatever else, but you just need to know what is it? What do you need to win the day? And it’s usually outreach, it’s almost always outreach. That’s exactly right. Awesome. Well, what a great place to wrap up, we should also make a quick mention that if you are in and I forgot that Ryan is now in Florida, or Ryan’s companies are now in Florida, as well. But if you are in Illinois, let’s see Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Florida. missing any are those the
Ryan D’Aprile 41:50 No, I’m actually heading down to our holiday party next week to Florida. So I’m excited excited for that,
D.J. Paris 41:54 as well. So if you are an agent, or if you’re a lender, a loan officer in those areas, and you’re looking maybe to find a firm that is going to offer you actual coaching, deeper promises, that’s what they do, what’s the best way they should reach out?
Ryan D’Aprile 42:10 You know, they could log on, they go to our website, April properties.com. You know, you could give me a phone call, I’m actually working with agents that just pick up the phone, they Googled me and they called my cell phone and I’m, I’m incredibly accessible. So you know, if you want to just have a dialogue, pick up the phone and give me a call to talk about it.
D.J. Paris 42:30 Awesome. Well, everyone, please go visit D APR properties.com. That’s D A p r i l e properties.com. And as always, we want to thank Ryan on behalf of all of our audience for continuing to listen, support our show, and also just staying with us every month. We appreciate Ryan your time. And on behalf of Ryan and myself. Also a big thank you to the audience for continuing to tell a friend, just think of one other agent that’ll be that’ll be your holiday gift to us think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this coaching moment with Ryan, and send a link to this episode from this episode to your friend. And we can always just send them right over to our website, keeping it real pod.com or have them pull up whatever app they’re using for podcast and do a search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. Really appreciate it. Ryan, we will see you in 2022. Boy, that’s That’s amazing. Time goes by so quick. Yeah. Oh, I got I got things I need to get. I needed to not take my foot off the gas on the show and in my business the rest of the year. So this was a great reminder to me to not cut corners right now, when everyone else probably is starting to think to do that. So great reminder. All right. Thank you have a Happy New Year. Thank you as well. And we’re excited to have Ryan on as well in 2022. So thanks Ryan and everyone else who’s on the listing on the show. Thank you so much and we’ll see you next time.
What Real Estate Agents Need To Know About Supply Chain Issues • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Dec 17, 2021
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses topics he’ll be covering at upcoming live presentation. Chris provides tips on how to stay on top of supply chain issues and how these concerns have affected the real estate market. Chris and DJ also chat about best practices for agent-client relationship. Last, Chris discusses a NAR statistics for the real estate market he found interesting this year.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by eye guide agents you already know you need professional photography for your listings. But do you know what else you need that is equally important but overlooked by the majority of Realtors, 3d tours and accurate floor plans. National Association of REALTORS has found that buyers rate floor plans as the third most important part of a listing even more important than neighborhood information. Also 20% of buyers will ignore listings that do not contain floor plans. I guide has the most accurate floor plans and best virtual tour technology in the industry. Visit go i guide.com. To find a local photographer for your next listing. top producers know the value of floor plans and virtual tours. Take your business to the next level by visiting go i guide.com. That’s go the letter i guide.com. And now onto our show
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the closed.com. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. And let me tell you about the close. Now the close.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Please visit the clothes.com T eight that’s th e c l o s e.com to see their amazing articles, and also subscribe to their newsletter so you get notified each time they publish an article with us as always is crystallin Sal, he is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has also been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing or speaking, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris Welcome once again to keeping it real, we’re excited to have you
Chris Linsell 2:43 DJ great to be back. Glad to glad to be sitting inside I don’t know if it’s cold and snowy where you are. But I’m watching the snowfall outside. It’s got me in the mode to talk about real estate. You know, from the comfort of indoors, I’m not really doing any walkthroughs to the
D.J. Paris 3:00 way we hear we’re not too far away from each other. Um, thankfully it is sunny and relatively warm 45 degrees Fahrenheit today here in Chicago, so do not have the snow yet. So imagine it’s coming,
Chris Linsell 3:14 it’s coming, it’s coming buddy.
D.J. Paris 3:16 And we you and I got a chance to meet in person at the National Association of Realtors Conference just a few weeks ago in San Diego and that was very exciting and fun.
Chris Linsell 3:26 Oh man so much fun. It was great to get to chat with you to talk shop a little bit to just connect us as human beings to you know, real estate. This is a human being business so always taken an opportunity to meet a virtual and now in real life friend who’s also in the biz here. And man, a lot has happened in real estate this year a lot already, you know, still happening in real estate this year. So, you know a lot was going on at NAR and man, you know, my my news feeds are continuing to blow up right now about big things that are happening in the world that are affecting our industry.
D.J. Paris 4:09 And we should also mention I Chris did a presentation at NAR he was one of the featured speakers. And he did his five bold tech predictions for 2022 which was incredible. And the audience seemed to really enjoy it. I know I did. And he had a packed house there. I imagine you will, you’ll be speaking at NASCAR, you know, hopefully every year going forward because it was it was it was controversial at times but it was really well explained. And I think it’s it’s a discussion that or a lecture so to speak, that really all of our listeners need to hear. And so I believe you might still be able to get access to that, that discussion or that that you know your your talk. If I’m not sure if that’s still the case with an hour. But if you look at the nar 2021 options to hear the recorded sessions, certainly you can do that. But you are also speaking here. Well, I guess by the time this, this goes live, it will have already been. But for anyone who is listening now watching us live, do you mind sharing where you’re going to be speaking?
Chris Linsell 5:24 Yeah, you betcha. So I’m going to be at the triple play conference in Atlantic City, fabulous Atlantic City, New Jersey, in in this month in December. And there’s going to be also some other upcoming things that can’t quite talk about just yet. But those of you out in California. Keep an eye out for Chris, in your professional news feeds, I think we’re going to have some some big stuff coming up for California specific associations here in a little while. And also, you can always find me on the clothes.com If you’re not out in California, or if you’re not attending an in person conference, I am writing making videos, starting arguments on social media on a regular basis via the close. So you can always visit me at the close.com if you just can’t get enough.
D.J. Paris 6:17 And if you’d like to attend the triple play 2021 That would probably be people who are in the New Jersey area. Also New York, Pennsylvania. You know, just go to realtors, that’s Realtors plural triple play.com. And you can see it’s really an impressive conference. I have not been to it, but it looks really cool.
Chris Linsell 6:37 Yeah, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a good time. And and for the first time, the close is actually going to have a booth on the expo floor. So not only can you, you know, talk to the weirdest beard in real estate. Chris, we can also talk to all the incredibly smart and thoughtful people on my team that are a part of, you know, making these messages making making making these messages happen. So yeah, if you’re in New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, come to AAA in Atlantic City. love to chat with you there.
D.J. Paris 7:09 Yeah, and you can go do some gambling while you’re in and walk the boardwalk. That’s right. That’s famous, famous New Jersey Boardwalk.
Chris Linsell 7:16 Let’s get on the slot machines.
D.J. Paris 7:19 Wonderful. Well, what would we like to talk about today?
Chris Linsell 7:21 You know, DJ, I’ve got two things that are really interesting to me that I’d love to chat with you about love to get your take on? And to just start some conversations on. The first one is it’s about supply chain. Now. I know that we’ve been hearing a lot about supply chain issues in the United States. Pursuant to, you know, it’s been a kind of a crazy last couple of years, frankly, at this point supply chain has been a challenge. You know, just getting stuff into the United States and other countries, frankly, in North America has been a challenge over the last little bit. And you know, the real estate industry, a lot of folks, I think incorrectly assume that the real estate industry is insulated from these challenges. But we aren’t and we’re starting to see some real time effects on this is not just talking about the effects that builders and the new construction industry are having, or hey, we’re seeing some major effects in the real estate industry, relative to things like washers and dryers to refrigerators, to the somewhat durable goods that we purchase, as often as a part of a refinance or home equity loan for renovation purposes. And the reason I bring this up is right now, we are kind of at a crossroads for a lot of homeowners who are deciding, okay, I’ve got more equity in my home than I’ve ever had before. My home is worth more on the open market. I don’t really know if I want to sell it. But what should I do with this equity? Well, for a lot of homeowners, they say this is going to be the time I’m going to refinance, I’m going to pull out some equity, I’m going to do a big renovation to get the kitchen or the bathroom or the laundry room of my dreams. Well, because of the supply chain issues that’s getting harder and harder to do. And so you are finding homeowners who are at a crossroads right now saying I’d like to use my equity to benefit me right now. But with the supply chain issues, I can’t get the I can’t even get the appliances, much less the kitchen tile or the flooring, or even the paint that I need to do the renovation so maybe I should sell right now. So the supply chain issues are starting to creep into the residential real state space and the conversations that Realtors should be having with their clients need to need to keep this in mind right now.
D.J. Paris 10:07 Yeah, I know that probably most of our listeners are aware of this statistic, and I might not have it exactly perfect. But it was something to the extent of I think it was in 2020. Also, in this year that the rising lumber prices, I believe, of like a single family home was, on average, it was costing developers an extra, I believe, around $30,000, just in lumber that they weren’t paying prior to some of the supply chain shortages. So I think we’ve probably heard and heard that, but maybe we’re not so much thinking about furniture and appliances. And so as an agent, what might you suggest to our listeners to sort of stay on top of it or get in front of that, to which which could affect their business? Well,
Chris Linsell 11:02 I would say there’s two things that agents and brokers should be considering right now. The first is, and you know what this is even This is advice that’s relative to folks, even outside of the supply chain issue, you should be thinking about this, no matter what for your clients. If you have people in your sphere of influence, that are homeowners, especially if these are people that you helped purchase the home that they’re in, you need to have a almost top of your mind knowledge of the status of their home pretty much at all times. And I know that that gets difficult, when you have a really broad client base, when you’ve got hundreds of people, if you found that level of success, kudos to you, that’s great, you might not be able to keep the status of all of your past clients homes at the top of your mind. But this is when you employ great tools like a CRM to help you keep this knowledge. But the reason I bring this up is, as a real estate professional who is serving your clients, you can only best serve them, if you have the opportunities presented to them via their home ownership at at the ready to present to them whenever possible. And so I say this to say listen, if you’ve got clients who own a home in your market, and that client has not reached out to you in the last six to 12 months to say, you know, what’s my home worth right now in this crazy market, if they haven’t done that, you need to be reaching out to him right now. With a complimentary Hey, I was thinking about just CMA. And say this is how much your home is worth on today’s market. If you don’t want to sell, that’s great. But as your agent you deserve, I need it’s my obligation to be sharing that information with you. So you can use that information to better your financial position, your homeownership position. So that’s the first piece of advice.
D.J. Paris 13:15 I want to pop in for just a quick sec. Sorry, sorry to interrupt really low because that that really spoke to me and I was thinking about, you know, we, we talk a lot about this is the time of year where agents are going through their their CRM, looking at their contact list their sphere, and determining, you know, Hey, am I going to send out a holiday card? Am I going to maybe send a holiday gift? What am I going to do to make sure my clients are thinking about me. And one thing that you can add to that, especially if finances are tighter for you as the agent this year hand delivering the CMA is really that is really going above and beyond and I think that would be really pretty well received now I think you should announce Hey, I’m swinging by I just wanted to drop something off to let you know I was doing some doing some work on as well I think really this speaks to being a fiduciary which of course real estate agents are and this idea of of saying you know, I was I was thinking about your home and I was thinking about its value and I just thought it would be important for me to drop off this report to give you some idea of kind of where we’re at. I think that is a great sort of pop by I know Brian would would say you pop by with a cute little gift but this is a free gift you can I mean it’s free it’s of course takes your time to put it together but boy I would be so impressed if an agent came and dropped that off even an agent I didn’t know how to you know pop by and said hey, I don’t know if you’ve looked at your home value and and if you know if you’re only looking on Zillow, you know that might not be the most accurate representation of what your house is worth. But I ran some numbers and I just want you to have this. I think that would boy that would be impressive.
Chris Linsell 15:07 You know you’re you’re bang on on that and I actually want to, I want to let me let me go a level deeper on their advice here on agents. Think about what the value of a pop by gift and this is, you know no skin off the nose of Brian Buffini I love his strategies here. But popping by with a cute little gift, like, what is going to be more valuable to your clients and in the long run popping by with, you know, a pumpkin pie for the holidays are popping by with a tool that could end up netting your clients 10s of 1000s of dollars, that’s a lot of pumpkin pie here. So go with the go with usable tool here. And if you need if you’re feeling nervous about that pop by, here’s an arrow in your quiver that you can use to to knock out those nerves right away. The just about everyone unless you’ve been living in or under a rock with terrible Wi Fi service. And just about everyone has been fought has heard about Zelos woes in the market and the last, you know, the three, three months here. This is an opportunity for you to pop by and say listen, the market has just proven that Zillow isn’t as good at estimating the value of homes as we thought they were and certainly not as good as they thought they were right. I’m a local expert, and I know your home inside and out because we work together to get it for you. I put together this personalized valuation for you. Regardless of what you do with this, you deserve to have this because I am your fiduciary. So I work this up. Let me know if there’s any questions or anything I can do to help you use this tool. That using that Zillow as a conversation starter approach is a great way to break the ice. And it really gets people talking and thinking about how much their home is worth. Great. So so let’s let’s kind of get back into the supply chain conversation here. So you know, independent of supply chain issues, we should all be having these conversations with our clients about how much their home is worth in the current market, whether it’s for sale purposes, whether it’s for financing purposes, or just to be a good fiduciary to have make sure that your clients are keeping up to date on their investment. So how should we be thinking about this in the context of the supply chain issues? Well, if you go to your clients, and you say, Listen, your your home has picked up $40,000 in equity in the last 18 months. Right now you have this equity, but you might not have this equity two years from now or even 12 months from now as the markets shift. So what can you do to take advantage of this, one thing you could do is a cheap refinance or an equity cash out home loan. And you could do some renovations, you know, you know your clients, you talk to them about the things that they wanted in their home, maybe their kitchen wasn’t the kitchen that they wanted, they have the cash to do that. Now, if they wanted to do that. On the other hand, they might not have the opportunity to complete that renovation because they might not be able to get the materials necessary to do it. So this can be a vehicle then to have the next conversation, which is listen, you’ve got this extra equity. Have you considered if you can’t do the renovation for one reason or another? Should we be looking right now? Should we be looking to capitalize on the advantages that your home has acquired over the last 18 months? Is there a better option out there for you? The supply chain kind of trouble that we’re experiencing right now can be a vehicle towards home sales, if it’s positioned correctly. And of course, all of this conversation happens through the lens of what’s best for my clients. You know, this isn’t necessarily a drive to get more transactions, but it is drive to offer your clients options. And one of those options just has to be selling if you’re if you’re going to be considering the full picture.
D.J. Paris 19:32 And two, I think there since we had this first wave during sort of locked down where employers were starting to allow their employees to work remotely and you had people start to move and start to say, Oh, I’m not tethered to this geographic areas I once were and so I think we had the first wave of people have done that. And I think now we’re will probably if rates continued to stay low and And if employers tend to will, will continue to be flexible around that, I think we’ll now have a second wave of people who go, Well, you know, yeah, I could I could sell my home, it’s appreciated in value could sell my home locally today, but then I’m buying something else in my local area that may have also appreciated to the same degree, and that that may be a wash. But I wondering if if it’s going to prompt people to go, you know, our home here is appreciated, we’ve been kind of looking for an exit point. And now, you know, now we can start to look elsewhere in other geographic locations. And I think, regardless of what the client decides, telling them, oh, by the way, you have an extra 40,000, or whatever it is, in equity, might be something that they don’t know. And that might prompt them to make these bigger decisions. Like you were saying, whether it’s, you know, just selling and staying local, or maybe going to another, another city in other cities.
Chris Linsell 20:56 Yeah, 100% 100%. You know, we have, as real estate professionals, we have an obligation to provide our clients with the options that they need, in order to make the best decisions for their financial and homeownership well being. And I think a lot of agents, certainly agents that I speak to, they get a little squirrely and there’s almost a shyness, that happens, because we don’t want to feel like we are prodding for a sale. Right, which I think is a natural kind of hesitancy. You know, we don’t want to feel like we are pushing people into a sale that they’re not necessarily interested in or initiating. But that’s not what all of this is about. This is about providing information we have, for better or worse, through our experience, through our licensure and through our access to market data. We have a we, as real estate professionals are the gatekeepers of a lot of these options. And so simply by providing options to our clients, you are not pushing your clients into anything, you’re simply informing them. And we live in a culture in a world now where information is, is the currency, you want your clients to be rich. So keep providing them with as much information, let them make their own decisions and offer guidance when they ask for it.
D.J. Paris 22:34 And I’ll just mention one other quick thing I was in a relationship many, many years ago. And this is probably almost 10 years ago now. And I was visiting my partner at the time, and she received a packet in the mail. And it said, it was from somebody she didn’t know as a realtor. And it said something to the effect of, hey, you might not have known this. But there were three homes sold in a within a few blocks of you here in Chicago, within the last three months or something to that effect. And here’s what here’s, they’re similar to what you currently have very there. She was like a was a four flat. And they said here were some units that were similar to yours and other four, four flats. And it said, hey, just so you know, I looked up your records, it looks like you’ve purchased for about this amount, this amount, I actually think it’s worth about this amount without even seeing it. And if you ever want me to come by and do a more thorough analysis, boy, I would love to do that and introduce myself and I went, that is some of the best that is the best one of the best mailers I’ve ever seen. It was personalized, it was specific, and it offered immediate value to the homeowner. And she ended up not participating with it because she has a good relationship with it with it with her realtor. But I thought boy, that I would not want my client to get that lead. And I’m not practicing agent. But if I were I wouldn’t want my client to get that letter, I’d want to be the one sending that letter.
Chris Linsell 23:53 Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s and that’s a great example of the sort of, you know, the service approach to this industry, you are not selling you’re serving. And if you can kind of keep that approach as the lens that you see your business through. All of a sudden, the the outreach, the lead generation, the kind of maintaining and nurturing of relationships gets a heck of a lot easier because you’re serving people you’re not selling them. I’d
D.J. Paris 24:27 love to have a conversation with you sometime about how I think one of the challenges with agents sort of thinking about their business from a consultancy perspective is how they’re compensated and if financial advisors did this, which we don’t even refer to them as stockbrokers, which is what the title used to be, you know, 2030 years ago because they were paid mostly via commission and now that whole model for being a financial planner is now moved to a typically you you you’re charged He’s based on the assets under management typically, as a function of a percentage, and you get that annual fee, maybe it’s 1% 2%, whatever that financial advisor may charge. And so they truly are really a life long consultancy, to their client. And I think one of the, it’d be very interesting to see one day if the real estate industry can can move away from transactional Commission’s which I don’t know maybe that that that’s not going to happen. But I certainly think that would help agents if they were to be paid an annual fee from their client. And I don’t know if that’s ever going to be possible. But if it were, I think that would help facilitate some of this idea of treat treat your client as a consultant, or rather for as a consultant relationship, where you’re just giving them information. And obviously, you’re not going to get paid until the next transaction happens. But but certainly you do get paid in other ways, referrals and and you know that so
Chris Linsell 25:57 yeah, it’s fascinating. There’s a lot of conversation happening right now, around alternative Commission’s models. I too, and watching that very closely.
D.J. Paris 26:06 But let’s talk about some some statistics to that. Yeah, I know you’ve put together you’re working on an article for the close about some interesting cool dinar stats.
Chris Linsell 26:16 Yeah. So there’s a lot of cool statistics, like, like you said, I’m working on an update the 2022 edition of the real estate statistics article that I’ve got on the clothes.com. And so, yeah, let’s just let me just kind of give you a kind of some rapid fire interesting stat. I’d love to hear your your take on some of this. So okay, so, first step, in 2021, more than 20% of first time homebuyers were single females and less than 10% of first time homebuyers. Were single males. Pretty interesting.
D.J. Paris 26:57 And that, I believe you said that as basically flip flopped from 20 years ago, correct? Yeah,
Chris Linsell 27:03 20 years ago, it was almost it was orders of magnitude in the other direction, it was something like three or four times as many first time homebuyers were single males versus single females. And, you know, there’s a lot of you can speculate till the cows come home about the causes behind this. But you know, the fact is, women are in the economy, studies show that women are better educated than than men on the on the on the whole even more, something like 65, almost 70% of valedictorian, high school valedictorians for the last 15 years have been women, more women graduate from college from men, more women graduated from college, on time than men, more women are entering the workforce at above, a an entry level position than men. The fact is women have more command over their housing choices than they’ve ever had before. A lot of that is a function of you know, the access to information. And, frankly, the gatekeepers who have decided in a lot for a long time about who gets a mortgage, who doesn’t get a mortgage, who gets access to information about homes for sale, who doesn’t. All of those gates are coming down right now. And it’s you know, women are starting to exercise their financial rights. And we’re seeing that happening in the homeownership space.
D.J. Paris 28:33 Yeah, that’s very interesting. I’ve always heard the sort of the general stereotype with between a married couple, which is the women really make the majority of the buying decisions. And I guess there are some statistics to back that up. But it’s nice to it’s very interesting to see that, that single women in particular are also doing more than single men right now, with respect to homeownership. That’s, that’s particularly interesting. And I guess, you know, one of the takeaways is, if you’re an agent that, you know, is thinking, Well, you know, this, this idea that, that women are sort of secondary to, you know, as single people secondary to those kinds of big decisions, whereas, you know, men traditionally dominated the business, you know, business world and of course, thankfully that’s now changing and, and certainly with education, men dominated as well. And that’s amazingly changed. And I guess, you know, starting to just realize that, that those single women who may may or may not at some point, develop a partnership and a marriage are making these kinds of decisions. They’re not waiting, I guess, you know, until and men maybe the men are waiting. I’m not sure what’s going on with men, but I guess the takeaway that I can think of is just make sure you’re talking to everybody about homeownership. because I know the way I learned about it was I Googled it. And of course, that’s not a gender exclusive sort of situation. Anybody can can do that. And so that’s the only way I was renting. And I was too embarrassed to ask them. But if how homeownership worked, I really didn’t understand how loans worked. I just knew I didn’t have $350,000 in the bank, and I went, Well, I guess I’m not moving into a house. And then I went, Oh, maybe there’s a different way. And then I, I mean, and I was a smart person. And I definitely just didn’t know I was in my late 20s. So I think there’s a lot of people who are very career focused or just busy, and aren’t, you know, maybe they’re renting now. And they need to have those conversations with with a professional or else they’re just gonna go to Google and learn everything on their own. And then maybe they end up with a discount brokerage, feeling like I don’t really need a realtor. I can I’ve done this all myself.
Chris Linsell 30:52 Sure. Well, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, I, to some degree, I’m not surprised that this is happening in the real estate industry. Another interesting stat, women gained another percentage point, a full 65% of women make up the association membership for the National Association of REALTORS now. So it is a industry that is led by women, it makes sense that women are connecting more with homeownership opportunities. Frankly, this is a long time coming. And I you know, to some degree, I’m unqualified to talk about the benefits of, of these continued moves in our industry and in our space. And I’m excited to dialogue with those who have more firsthand knowledge and experience in that in that because I, you know, I’ll be I’ll be honest with you, I’m the daughter, excuse me, I’m the father of two young daughters, and I know I have an acute awareness of wanting to make sure that they have every opportunity in the world, regardless of their gender, and I’m excited to see these these shifts continue to happen.
D.J. Paris 32:04 And just a quick plug for the Women’s Council of Realtors, WC, our, they have chapters all over the country and internationally as well. And if you are an agent, you can don’t have to be a female to be part of the Women’s Council of realtors. But that is an incredibly supportive environment for agents who are who are women and men to I guess, really, it’s not exclusively for women. But but you know, I always thought when I first heard about Women’s Council is there a men’s Council, and I don’t believe there is and I always said it, maybe women are just smarter, and they know they need to support each other better than us men. But, but that is a great organization. And they were very, they were very, they were very prominent at the National Association of REALTORS as well. So if you’re not affiliated with Women’s Council of Realtors, boy get involved, it is a great organization and it will help your business
Chris Linsell 32:55 100%. So you know speaking of, of, of the statistics on buying another interesting statistic that came out in 2021 is that generation X has overtaken baby boomers as the largest cohort of real estate buyers in 2021. More than one out of every four homes in 2021 has been purchased by someone in the Gen X cohort, which is I believe that the the cutoff is like like early seven born early 70s to or excuse me, late 60s to early 80s, something like that. I don’t remember the exact years. But you know, those baby the baby boomer generation has dominated this space for a long time Gen Xers are here. People in their 40s and 50s. Right now are making more real estate purchases than any other group. I mean, more than one out of four homes. I mean, that’s it, that’s a massive percentage.
D.J. Paris 34:01 It is and also remember to for our listeners that Gen X I’m in the Gen X category. Also have parents who are likely either retiring or near possibly nearing retirement and are also might be considering a retirement move. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity here to focus on the Gen X client and really develop that relationship and then find out what’s going on with with their parents. Yeah, if their parents are of course still still around because, boy, there’s a lot of movement on the baby boomers are are there they’re, you know, they’re sunsetting
Chris Linsell 34:37 90%. So, yeah, actually, that reminds me of another statistic in 2021 11% of homes purchased had some form of multigenerational ownership in mind that this means having aging parents move back in this means having children over who are over the age of 18 living with them For more than one out of every 10 homes had some sort of multi generational dynamic to it. So you know, this is certainly something that we are seeing is not going to go away. In fact, it’s I would bet that in 2022, that’s just because going to be even higher, as you mentioned, as baby boomers are making decisions about, you know, where they will be living in these families are making decisions about you know, who’s going to be, you know, the homeowners who’s going to be staying with whom these are all decisions that are going to happen on mass, pretty soon, I bet you that 11% number is going to be closer to 14%, or even 15%, at the end of 2022. Yeah, that
D.J. Paris 35:45 makes sense, it’s a great opportunity to have the conversation with your client, about their family, because since so many homes stay in the family or transferred or the wealth may be transferred, this is a great opportunity to really get a deeper connection to the overall family structure, and to also possibly get introductions to the financial advisors for those families, because they are the ones that that maybe really have a full understanding of all all of the the total net worth. And so if you as an agent can say, you know, I would love the opportunity to talk to your family’s financial planner and say, here’s where I can provide value to you, Mr. or Mrs. Financial Planner, for the Smith family, where I can be sending you regular, you know, CMAs about the homes that this family? I mean, that is a tremendous opportunity. I know, I used to be a financial advisor, I never once had a real estate professional call me and say, hey, I want to be part of the process here for this family that you’re you’re helping with their investments.
Chris Linsell 36:53 Yeah. So if you make great points here in my last one, this is a quick one, but but potent here. In 2021. A reported 3% of home purchases were made by 3% of the home purchases made were made by active duty military members. And the reason I bring this up is 3% might not seem like a lot. In fact, I mean, I guess relative it isn’t, but what it does bring up is the absolute power of VA loans and, and the positioning of VA Veterans Affairs. For for loans for both active and retired military folks. These are extraordinarily powerful loan types. And I can tell you from personal experience, realtors who offer some sort of specialization in VA loans, you know, there’s really not much to do other than to know how the dynamic of that loan product works. And to have a specific connection with a mortgage broker who provides that service, you can become a referral source that is going to net you a ton of business, and it’s going to offer you a chance to serve a community that really deserves to have some dedicated service provided to it. You know, that 3% of homebuyers that number could be higher. So real estate agents, if you’ve got a military presence in your community, you know, be thoughtful about, you know how you can service those folks by being a thoughtful member of that process.
D.J. Paris 38:32 Yeah, talk to the talk to lenders that specialize in those types of loans, get enough information and to be able to have a brief intro conversation. And then of course, you know that that’s certainly the like, like you’ve found to say, and the more arrows you have in your quiver, you know, likely the better off you’ll be with with with all of your clients. So this is a great, great place to wrap up Chris and I could end up we could end up talking for another hour but Chris is busy on the speaking circuit and also the writing circuit Chris writes for the clothes.com and very quickly Chris, just tell us give us a little plug for the the clothes Yeah, come come a you know not not much to plug here the clothes speaks for itself. Go visit us at www dot the clothes.com you’ll check out you’ll see there you’ll see hundreds of fantastic articles, links to our social media including our YouTube our Facebook group. And if you want to take your your close readership to the next level, consider the close pro it’s our premium membership. 35 bucks a month gets you access to next level strategy guides really awesome courses coaching the whole works. It’s it’s a pretty fantastic community. We serve real estate agents, teams and brokers and if you want to level up your real estate business, come check it out the closed Yeah, everyone go visit the clothes.com they have the best articles for helping you build your business and 95% and maybe 98% of it is totally free. And it’s just exceptional writing. So everyone go visit the clothes.com. Chris, as always, thank you. We will see you in December. Although by the time this is released, it’ll will be a December but we will see you again in December for our year wrap up. So everyone, on behalf of our listeners, Thank you, Chris, for your time. And on behalf of Chris and myself, thank you to everyone listening, please tell a friend about our show, and we will see you next time. Thanks everybody.
How Real Estate Agents Should Be Planning for 2022 • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Dec 13, 2021
In our November episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties talks about planning for 2022 from an agent’s perspective. She talks about inventory challenge also. Carrie and DJ discuss the importance of analyzing the previous year and bring out the lessons learned and investing in your business. Last, DJ shares his tip for the Holidays.
Also, if you have a challenge, frustration or something funny you’d like to discuss with Carrie and DJ, please share them by sending us a message here.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Carrie can be reached at carrie@atproperties.com or by phone at 312.961.4612.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast native for real estate agents and buy real estate agents. My name is DJ Baris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carrie McCormick Real Estate Group with App properties here in Chicago. Now Carrie has been a top 1% producer in Chicago for over 20 years she has this incredible amount of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments. Now please, everyone visit Carrie at her website, which is Carrie McCormick r e.com. And that’s McCormick with two C’s. So Carrie McCormack r e.com. But also, I want you to follow her on Instagram, she has a truly impressive Instagram account. She’s consistently ranked as one of the best realtor Instagram accounts in the industry. And you can find her at Carey McCormick real estate and we’ll have a link to that, as well as to our website in our podcast show notes. You can always find it there. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
Carrie McCormick 1:58 Thank you. Thank you, I love that introduction. Makes me feel old that I’ve been around forever.
D.J. Paris 2:04 Well, at least you’re a top producer for 20 years. So at least you have a lot of success. And that’s one of the reasons why of course you come on our show. And you’ve actually been with us since the very, very beginning. We are so grateful Carrie has been our oldest and was the oldest she’s she is not the oldest, but but somebody who’s been with the show the longest as one of our regular guests. And we are super grateful, because she is incredibly busy every each and every year and she just does more and more production every every single year. So what would you like to talk about today now that we just finished Thanksgiving? We’re closing in on the end of November. What’s on your mind today?
Carrie McCormick 2:42 Yeah, so as we round out the year just you know, kind of looking back of this crazy year that you know, it doesn’t matter what market you’re you’re in right now, we all have had such an amazing 2021. So we just started now looking ahead and planning for 2022. So I think just to start off the conversation of 2022. I just want to talk about mortgage rates. I am not a mortgage lender. But we all know that the rates I shouldn’t say we know but you know the rates are going to start ticking up. And I have a quote here. It’s from Doug Duncan at Fannie Mae. He says right now we forecast mortgage rates to average 3.3% in 2022. So 3.3%, which is just a little bit higher than 2020 and 2021. But by historical standards, it’s very low. So even though we’re going to start hearing things about mortgage rates ticking up, again, they will but it’s going to be at a very moderate pace. So what does that mean? So of course, we see mortgage rates go up, we’re probably going to see some pricing go up as well. So the affordability factor for homebuyers is going to become front and center. So these are all terms that we’ve been talking about over the last, you know, year is interest rates, pricing, supply and demand, the affordability factor. So again, this is probably going to carry into 2022. And same with home pricing. So in all of our markets, we’ve seen these record breaking levels 1819 20% There’s been some markets that are 40%, which I wish I was licensed in those states. But you know, we’ve all seen these really incredible home appreciation prices. And I think in 2022 we are still going to see pricing escalate, but not as much as we did this past year. So I think it’s going to be important to communicate to our sellers, because right now they’re expecting you know, their pricing just to keep going. But I think again setting the expectation that we will see moderate, slower price increase in 2022. And of course, every market is different. I always say Chicago itself, because I’m here, obviously in Chicago is a market within a market and even some neighborhoods will appreciate a little bit differently than another neighborhood. So from those two points, if you think about mortgage rates, you think about the pricing of the home, you know, what does this all mean to us. So it’s going to be more expensive to own a home, no matter where you’re at. So in 2022, we’re still going to see our inventory challenge as well. And again, I’m tired of talking about inventory challenge, but we’re gonna see it. I am seeing, especially here in Chicago builders, being a little bit more active in the market, which is great, even though their supply chain issues, but we’re seeing more building happening here. So hopefully, it’s going to help continue with our supply issue that we’re having here as well. But I don’t see, I don’t see a slowdown here.
D.J. Paris 6:01 Well, that’s, that’s exciting. And I was thinking as you were talking about the pricing, which cross the country is most markets seem to have benefited from, well, depends on if you’re a buyer or seller, but but for homeowners seeing more appreciation than then maybe they would have expected. But I almost wonder if and I’m curious to get your thoughts. I’m almost wondering for people that were thinking of selling, but going to stay in the same general geographic area. I wonder if a lot of those people didn’t sell, because they have to live somewhere and buy the appreciation of the homes that they and also the competition from because rates being so low, I almost wonder if that prevented a lot of people from moving thinking, well, I could share, I could cash out sell my home, but then I have to buy something that’s appreciated just as much. I almost wonder if maybe, maybe that will, you know, bring those those sellers back into the market. I’m just curious if you saw any, for people that stayed local and didn’t, you know, go down south or wherever they could now work remotely, maybe didn’t feel like they were chained to their geographic area. But I think most of us still feel like our our geographic areas is where we want to be, especially if we have kids. And you know, we are in schools. So I’m just curious if I know like this happened to my sister, she many, many years ago, bought a place a little tiny, 475 square foot one bedroom, not even a studio in, in the West Village in New York. And just a like, amazing, desirable area. She was right in the middle of everything. And her home appreciated within seven years about $150,000, which is just incredible. It was a sixth floor walk up it had no no air conditioning, just just oh my gosh, it just incredible. But when she sold it, she was like, Well, I can no longer live in the West. You know, she made all this money. And then she went out to Queens, because that’s where life sort of took her. But she had priced herself out even though she got a nice and it was perfect cuz she left the area. But I’m just curious, if you think maybe this will the slowdown in the price increases, maybe we’ll get more active sellers who are thinking about staying local?
Carrie McCormick 8:12 Absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head, it’s definitely been a challenge with a lot of this, the people that did want to sell is where am I going to go? No, what am I going to buy, you know, they couldn’t find something that they loved. And even if they did find something else that they loved, the price was too high on that. But you know, again, they sell their, their home at a high price, they’re gonna buy at a high price. So some people just, you know, sat on the sidelines, or they decided not to sell. So we definitely saw all different types of situations in 2021. But I do think just as you said, some of those people that were selling, and they held off, I think we’re gonna see them in the market in 2022. And hopefully, again, it’s gonna bring back some inventory, too. So it’ll be an interesting year. But you know, at the end of the year, as we all typically do, I always like to reflect back on the year, you know, what have I learned? What can I improve? And I think it’s important for all of us to do that. And, you know, since I’ve been in the industry for so long, you know, back in when the market crashed in 2008, I learned so much from from that time, you know, and is when things are, you know, either going really bad or really good. You can always take things out of, of those situations. So, this past year 2021 was a phenomenal year. And so I just wanted to share with you a few of my reflections that, you know, I’m going to focus on for 2022 which is to invest back into my business, right and we all do that from a marketing standpoint, but also to invest in the people around around us, and to invest in the staff that’s around us. So like for myself, you know, I’ve got some wonderful admin staff that I adore and help support my business. So you know, it’s gonna be important for me to give back to them and support them. Because they’ve worked hard all year for me. So again, it’s my job to support them and invest in them, and everyone around me. So just to be thankful, and again, support that staff. So that’s number one, investing in your business from an advertising standpoint, so invest in your brand, we’ve seen a lot out there of just, you know, recognizing who you are, as a broker, you know, building a brand, that’s true to you. And that’s something that I’ve worked really hard on, through my advertising, through my social media, and through my video content. So I’m going to definitely focus a little bit more on that this year. Via good listener, I think that is one reason to that I’ve been extremely successful is, as a salesperson, we like to talk a lot, right? We like to be center stage. So I think for me, you know, I can really sit back and listen to people and there’s times I do want to jump in and, you know, give my two cents or, you know, whatever it is, but I think it’s important for all of us to sit back and be a better listener, and be kind and patient to people around us. Right? It’s been, again, a great year, but it’s been a little bit of wonky, with people being short tempered, or, you know, I can use a lot of words, but you know, it was kind of a crazy year, but it’s just being patient and respectful to people around you. I think that’s going to be important going into 2022
D.J. Paris 11:45 Yeah, I’ve always thought of this job, and I’m not out there doing it. So this is just my observation of, of being around a lot of brokers for a lot of years, and I’m a broker as well, but I, I don’t go out and practice, like, like our listeners in like you do. But it seems to be that that I’ve always thought of this as if nothing else, it’s a customer service job. And it’s being being able to, to understand what someone’s stresses and anxieties may be be in the process of buying or selling a home and, and being that that comforting sort of, you know, ear to to absorb all of their their stress, which I can’t imagine is always easy for agents. But But I think you know, that is such an important skill. If you really want to develop a skill, I think not you in particular. But our listeners, of course, is really, really look into the importance of empathy and empathy, meaning that you are sympathy at the very least which sympathy is feeling, feeling for somebody when they are when they’re struggling. And this whole buying and selling process is just a lot of struggle for even the most simple of transactions. And then But then empathy is sort of the next level, which is I’m going to suffer with you, but but I’m also going to be there to comfort you. And to sort of validate someone’s position where they are, I think is it really can’t be overstated. And the best agents I know, you know, really do that quite well. They don’t always have to have the answers. But they certainly have to have the, you know, the open ears to say, tell me what’s going on. And you know, let’s get through it.
Carrie McCormick 13:31 I mean, at the end of the day, we’re all we’re fiduciaries to our clients, right? That’s the most important thing. There’s a lot that comes around with it, like you said, in different situations. And we have to navigate them professionally through the situation. So it’s, you know, be kind, be patient, be a good listener, but you know, most importantly, be a good fiduciary to your clients. And I think we just need to all step back and remember those goals.
D.J. Paris 14:00 I also think too, like the I think the vast majority of the public has no idea that realtors are fiduciaries, I don’t think that’s a that’s a word, that unless you’re maybe a financial adviser, or you’re in the real estate industry, you probably just don’t associate with realtors at all. And it’s really an important conversation I think to have, or it’s an opportunity to say, you know, my primary goal here is is not just to get you everything that you want, although we are going to try to do that, but to do it in a way that’s fiduciary ly responsible. And here’s what that means. And I think even working on that conversation really will separate you from other realtors who maybe don’t even think to use those kinds of words.
Carrie McCormick 14:43 Yeah, I agree. I agree.
D.J. Paris 14:45 And I was curious to what do you think we’re and I know we’re kind of going back a little bit but But thinking back over the last year what were sort of the main reasons, you know, obviously, appreciation will certainly drive this but in low rates. But what were the main reasons that that people that in your experience that people decided to move this year, this last year?
Carrie McCormick 15:06 I know, isn’t it something that it seemed like the whole world wanted to move last year, it was unbelievable. And I did a little bit of research on that. And through my own clientele, you know, and just research. And if you look at Think of a pie chart, it really is kind of split four ways. And the main four reasons that people moved was one, they wanted different home features. So whether it was I don’t even know like, they wanted a pool, or they wanted a fireplace, or they wanted a new kitchen, their needs of their home changed. The second reason was, it didn’t fit their family needs. So whether they had more kids or someone was working, wanted to work out in the house or something. So it was that didn’t meet their family needs. The third one was they wanted to move closer to friends and family, which I thought was a very interesting reason for moving. And I don’t know why I do it, just, you know, I think what the pandemic did for a lot of people was make them feel like they wanted to, you know, be around their loved ones a little bit more, right. So I saw a lot of people moving again, to be closer to their parents or parents want to be closer to their kids, or, you know, whatever the reason, family reasons were, they wanted to be closer to the people that they loved. So there was a big movement of that. And the last one, which was the big one was home office, you know, as though that pandemic pushed everyone back into their home. So it really was those were the main four. And it just it moved. It moved everyone across America, people are going everywhere.
D.J. Paris 16:59 Yeah, it is. It is remarkable. I mean, even I, we were just I was just at the narc, the National Association of Realtors Conference in San Diego, and a couple of weeks ago, and my girlfriend and I were there. And we said, we could live here this is this is pretty nice. As much as I love Chicago, and boy, the weather there is hard to beat. And could I technically do my job there. And I’m gonna I’m not a practicing agent. I’m pretty sure I could, somebody did come in to see me this morning that was interested in joining our firm. And that was maybe three people in a year have come in the rest of all just talk to me on the phone. So I probably could do it remotely. And so really is opened up the freedom. And I think for everyone listening, if you haven’t had these conversations with your sphere of influence, like, hey, has anything changed? Have you guys are you guys thinking about now making a shift now that people have seen the first wave of people, you know, go out and be able to work remotely, I bet there’s a lot of people now the second wave that are like, Oh, this is really doable. And maybe we’ll start looking at some of those other areas of the country that we always thought would be great to live in. And then I think for an agent, that’s a great opportunity to start finding realtors in those areas, or maybe even getting licensed yourself in those areas, but but certainly finding a referral source to say, hey, I have clients that are interested in Nashville, or, you know, wherever it might be.
Carrie McCormick 18:20 Exactly. So I’m excited to talk about what’s coming up for next month. Do you want to tell them?
D.J. Paris 18:28 Yeah, so we have a couple of things. We would love to find out what your biggest frustrations are when dealing with other realtors. So if you have any ideas, and you can tell us your story, or you can ask questions, because we know this is a cooperative business, but it isn’t always and always feel cooperative. And there may be challenges that you’re experiencing, you know, just working with other agents. And Carrie has seen and been through all of it many, many, many, many times. And so we would love to get her opinion on how to help solve some of these problems. I see a lot of this online, on in forums with realtors, where they go, you’re not gonna believe what this realtor just said to me or did to me. And then there’s all sorts of great advice there. We want to sort of do the same thing here. So if you have a challenge, or a story you want to tell or just want to get some help in dealing with other agents, we want to we want to know about that and we want to answer that. So please, a couple of ways you can you can get those questions to us. Number one, you can email them right to us, which I will put the link in the show notes but you’re gonna send it to his actually I’m gonna give you an even easier way. We do have the email in the show notes. But I want you just to go to our website keeping it real pod.com There’s a contact us form, send it there it goes right to zonna our producer and she will send those to us and we will be able to address those. So any challenges that you’re having? Or frustrations with other agents honey, send us some yeah Funny stuff to boy, I, you know, is realtors, I’m sure you deal with stuff all the time, probably daily where you’re just like, wow, that is, and I’m sure can be very frustrating and hard for especially a newer agent to sort of know what to do. You know, there are some bullies out there. And there are some people that, you know, aren’t don’t always play nice. So we want to talk about, you know, whatever challenges you might be having with other agents. And I also have just a quick little tip for for the holidays, right now is the time where you might be thinking about getting your clients a holiday gift. Hanukkah has already started. Christmas, of course, is coming up and other holidays, New Year’s Eve, and then even other religious holidays. But I would say you know, if you’re not going to if you haven’t already put something in place, I say my advice and you can certainly send something is think about maybe sending something in January. That’s like a New Year’s gift. Certainly, there’s a lot fewer of those and it maybe won’t get lost in the December shuffle where everyone’s so busy. And you know, also getting a lot of things in the mail. But I think there’s nothing wrong with sending on New Year New you kind of gift and it doesn’t even have to be an expensive one. But don’t worry too much about a new year Christmas or a holiday gift. Being that you know, you can always send it in January two.
Carrie McCormick 21:20 That’s pretty good.
D.J. Paris 21:22 Yeah, I just I just think you know, there’s ways to do it where you don’t have to worry about, oh, gosh, I just sent out all these gifts. And it’s the middle of December and I haven’t really heard anything. Well, yeah, because people are busy. And they’re going to parties, and they’re dealing with family and they’re buying gifts themselves. And they’re getting a ton of stuff in the mail. And it’s just easy to sort of get lost in the shuffle. But so think about sending a January gift. I mean, no one’s expecting that. And that would be a lot of fun and probably separates you from everyone else. So that’s just my little tip of the day if you’re going to send a gift. Yeah, just just and then you don’t have to worry but you should know which of your you know which of your your sphere of influence are celebrating Kwanzaa or Christmas or Hanukkah, you should know that and if you don’t know it, now’s a great time to find out because even if you don’t send a gift, you could certainly call everyone and say hey, if you’re they’re Jewish, for example, and they’re celebrate Hanukkah. Oh, by the way, I know it’s the second day of Hanukkah, I just wanted to say hope you guys have a great Hanukkah, which it happens to be today. The second I think it’s the second day or the third day. Anyway, the point is, is no this stuff and it gives you a great opportunity to contact your clients and say I hope you just have a good holiday season. And they’re probably not getting a lot of those phone calls, too. So that’s another great reason to reach out. Well anyway, that’s all I got. So please send us your your agent frustrations and send those to us over at keeping it real pod.com our contact form there. Also, I want everybody to follow Carrie on Instagram, which is care at Carey McCormick then again McCormick with two C’s Carrie McCormick real estate. So at Carey McCormick real estate also visit our website Kiri McCormick, r e.com. And if there are any agents out there that have people moving to Chicago, Carrie would love to talk to you about your clients. Or if you’re just a buyer or seller investor and you want to work with a top Realtor in Chicago because you want to you want to you know, find some opportunities here. Carrie is a great resource. And so Carrie, if an agent or an investor or a buyer or seller wants to reach out to you what’s the best way they could find you
Carrie McCormick 23:26 always call me 312961461 To I always have my phone with me.
D.J. Paris 23:34 She does. And she is always responsive, and which is why she is so well respected here in the Chicagoland area. So we want to thank Carrie again. She Gosh, was this a record year for you? Or I know it’s not over yet. But I think you’re right at you’ve got to be almost at the is this like the very best year you’ve ever had? It is it’s a good one. She’s very humble. That is that’s pretty impressive. With with her history, so she’s she is killing it. And she takes time out of her day to help our show. So we appreciate that so much. So thank you, Carrie, on behalf of the listeners and on behalf of Carrie and myself, thank you to all the listeners for continuing to support our show. We’re almost finished up with another year here. And so we say thank you. But please tell a friend. Think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from great, amazing people like Carrie and send them a link to our show to send them to our website keeping it real pod.com We appreciate it. All right, Carrie. Well, we will see you next month in December and have a great day. Have a great December and end of the year everyone and take some time for yourself. It’s the holiday season and you know it’s a good time to relax and enjoy time with family and friends.
Carrie McCormick 24:41 So absolutely. All right.
D.J. Paris 24:44 All right. Thanks Carrie. Bye bye
The Real Estate UnSalesPerson • Barry Karch
Dec 10, 2021
Barry Karch from Barry and Tammy Karch in El Paso, Texas talks about what it’s like to be an introverted real estate agent. D.J. and Barry discuss how difficult it is to approach to people and start a conversation. Barry describes how his business has changed since Covid19. Barry also describes the advantages introverted agents have in the real estate business. Next, Barry talks about social media and how introverts can participate. Last, Barry describes how he keeps in touch with his previous clients.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Barry Carter, who is known as the real estate on salesperson and specifically for all of you out there going how come you don’t interview a lot of introverts? Well, today we are interviewing an introvert who has become a very successful realtor. And I think his story will be very inspiring and he’ll provide a lot of insight for all of us that don’t consider ourselves extroverts. I personally think of myself as an introvert. So I love this conversation. So please speak with Barry in just a moment. But before we get to Barry, just a couple of quick reminders. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, how about helping us grow our show by just telling one other agent about us. So think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this great conversation you’re about to hear from Barry and send them a link to our show. So they can send you can send them right over to our website which is keeping it real pod.com or pull up whatever podcast app they’re using and search for keeping it real hit that subscribe button and also please leave us a review. You know if you’re listening in Apple podcasts or Spotify or Pandora or Gosh, all the other places you can listen to podcasts. leaving us a review helps us know what we’re doing right and how we can improve as well. So we appreciate it. But guys enough about me this is the end of the year. In fact you might even be hearing this in January because we are even super behind. So I don’t know if it’s happy new year yet or happy end of the year. Either way. We’re so glad to have you on listening to our show part of our community and we thank you so on to our interview with Barry March.
Today on the show we have Barry Karcher, who is a podcast host this show is called the real estate on salesperson which we have by the way have a link to in our show notes. He’s also a Top Producing Realtor in El Paso, Texas, but let me tell you a little bit more about Barry. Barry Karcher has always considered himself an unlikely realtor. He’s quiet, introverted and and salesy or maybe that’s the best quality I love on salesy, but he’s really not your prototypical. He does not have the prototypical formula for real estate brokerage success yet. Barry has been a top selling realtor for 36 years which is beyond amazing. He sells as many as 100 homes per year. He’s also the broker owner of a real estate brokerage in El Paso, which is called the real estate powerhouses. He has come to realize that being an introvert in real estate actually gives him many advantages over his more extroverted colleagues. He has created a podcast called The Real Estate on salesperson to encourage and inspire his fellow introverted realtors and has just launched the unsafe salesperson community which you can find@patreon.com forward slash on salesperson. That link is also in our show notes. His mission is to teach introverts that they have what it takes to succeed in real estate. And before I welcome very I would like to say that we are so grateful to have Barry out not only as a fellow podcast hosts that we can help support each other in that community but also I have been dying to have an introverted realtor or someone who identifies as introverted and wants to talk about it on our show for years now. So we are so grateful to have Barry Barry, welcome to the show.
Barry Karch 4:49 Hi, DJ, thank you for having me. I’m really looking forward to being on your show and I really enjoy it.
D.J. Paris 4:54 Well, I am so glad you have the podcast you have because I think You know, I don’t know what the percentage of introverts are in, in society, at least here in the United States, but it is a significant, not insignificant chunk of people. And a lot of realtors who do identify or do are do classify themselves as introverted, oftentimes do feel lost, because they see agents who are a lot more, you know, extroverted, doing things that they feel that way, I’m not comfortable there. So I’m so glad we’re gonna have this conversation because I have seen many introverted Realtors rise to the very top, like like yourself, you’re in that category, of course. So I would love to go all the way back 36 years, though, because that is quite an accomplished career. Really, truly impressive. And we’d love to know about how you got into real estate and why real estate all those years ago?
Barry Karch 5:50 Good question. And, you know, I’m still asking myself that it was. I was a very unlikely, accidental realtor, I didn’t anticipate ever going into real estate, I never planned to be in real estate. When I went to school, I went to I went after high school, I went to college, because that’s my my parents said, you’ll go to college, it’s what you’re supposed to do. So I went to college at University of Texas at Austin. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was a good student, I got A’s pretty much in everything, I was a good student. So the school was not a problem. For me. My strengths were math numbers, I was very detail oriented, which are not feels that Realtors oftentimes are good at times, builders aren’t very detail a number of people. But I was good at that. So I probably would have been better at accounting, engineering, something like that. Sure, it probably is more suited to that. But I didn’t really have a calling when I was in my early 20s. I didn’t really have a passion for anything in particular didn’t know what I wanted to do. And so I went through school. I’m always jealous of the people that know what they want to do early on in life. I wish I was one of those people. I feel the same way. Yeah, I didn’t know. And so my parents were in real estate. And they seem to be doing quite well. Not knowing what to do. I decided I guess I’ll just follow them and go on to real estate too. So I went in there by default, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. That’s how it all started.
D.J. Paris 7:23 Yeah, well, look, it’s I love the I love the honesty there. And I’m always again, I feel the same way about how I was so jealous of people that knew that at 18 or 19, that, Oh, I’m going to be a doctor. And so they absolutely start down that path. And, you know, I guess eight, eight or 10 years later, they they’ve done it, but I boy, I was the same way. I was like, I don’t really know what I want. And I didn’t really discover marketing, which which is really I didn’t even discover that in college, I had to delete, you know, graduate school and then ended up, you know, found myself in in marketing all those years later. So I definitely appreciate that. And so what I’m curious about is, and so as somebody who talks to newly licensed agents almost daily, in fact, the reason I was a little bit late to our show was I was talking to a broker that’s just about or rather a person who’s about to become a broker in about a week and trying to give her some advice about how to get started and maybe what to look for in a firm. And she also identifies as introverted. So it’s just a coincidence that I had this conversation just before our, our conversation here. And I think that introverts, it’s, it can be very scary, thinking, Well, gosh, I see so much extroverted activity by other realtors. I’m curious and how you got started and how you prospected because that’s traditionally thought of as an extroverted activity, I’m going to proactively reach out to people I know or meet new people. Not that introverts can’t do those things. But that often becomes energy draining, you know, certain types of those activities for introverts. So I’m curious on how you got started, what worked for you? And I imagine that might even be different from what somebody who was identifies as an extrovert said how they got started.
Barry Karch 9:15 Right, right. Well, I’ll tell you what I did at the beginning. But bear in mind, I started in the stone age, because it remember it was 36 years ago. So the world was completely different. Back then there was no social media. There was no Internet, there were no mobile phones. I mean, it was a different world when I started in the business. So back in those days, we would, we would take floor time in the office when calls came in. I would follow up on leads when I first joined the business. My father who had been in business for a while he gave me a stack of old leads, like from months and months ago, people he never had time to follow up with he’s like Hear, call these people. So that’s what I did at the very beginning. And like you said, making phone calls isn’t my idea of a lot of fun, it’s not my favorite thing to do in the world. But on the other hand, I also want to be successful, and I do enjoy eating. So I guess I, the, the fear of calls was over overtaken by the fear of not being successful not having food on the table. So I just forced myself to go ahead and make some phone calls or reach out to people, I wasn’t going to let it limit me or stop me from doing what I knew I needed to do to be successful. So I reached out to a bunch of people made phone calls. And in doing it, I found out that most people were pretty friendly, when you call them, they’re pretty nice, it wasn’t so bad. And once you get going, you kind of get on a little roll, and it’s a little easier. The first call is the hardest, and then it gets a little easier and easier. So I just kind of overcame my fears of it and just forced myself to do it. So that’s how I started out way back when
D.J. Paris 11:11 I when I started in. I started in financial services in about 2001. And that was also even though the internet certainly existed and was used by most people, the telephone was still a very viable way to reach people that you didn’t know, cold calls. You know, this was right after some of the do not call stuff went into effect. But but it was still doable. And it may be it’s still doable now. It’s just I think harder making sure you’re calling people that are you know, that you’re allowed to call. But, but I had the same sort of experience and I think of myself probably is more extroverted than introverted. Although I have some introverted qualities, maybe all of us have have a little bit of both, but but certainly I lean more on the extroverted side. And I remember, they gave me they gave me a phone book, really. And it was a, it was a little bit more than a phone book. But that’s essentially what it was. And they said, Here you go make 200 dials a day. And this was for being a financial advisor. And I found the same thing, I would have people that, you know, weren’t interested. But I rarely ever got yelled at. And I thought, even as somebody who’s extroverted, it was hard for me to pick up the phone. Every morning, I had to have a little talk with myself. And then after, like you said, after the first few calls, you’re like, oh, it’s not so scary. And I’m not so sure that that that that works in in 2021, as it did when you started and and when I started in a different industry. But it was a good way to get over that fear. I was glad for that experience. Because it told me oh, I can I can make a random phone call to somebody I don’t know and not not be completely immobilized by the fear there were in the past I would have been.
Barry Karch 13:04 Right, right. And also I did a similar thing. I remember back in the day, we had what was called a criss cross directory.
D.J. Paris 13:13 That’s Yes, we had ours was called the Hanes. Hanes was the company that made the one. Yeah, they were called the criss cross. So they were giant, massive, intimidating books full of phone numbers.
Barry Karch 13:27 Yeah, I would do that for like an hour every morning to start the day calling around neighbors around listings or around homes that were sold to see if they wanted any help also, so yeah, not not my favorite thing to do. But I did it, I’d force myself to do it. Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 13:44 think it’s a good skill to have. And whenever I talk to somebody who is says, you know, I think I’m going to try calling expired listings or for sale by owner listings, which for everyone listening, there’s a lot of services online that will sell you that data on a daily basis. Those, those are difficult phone calls. Because those are people that are either upset with a realtor, possibly for not having a home sell, or they’re just people that don’t want that or choosing not to work with a realtor. So they can be difficult phone calls. But I encourage people to try it not because I think it works so well. Because I probably doesn’t work that well anymore. But it’s great experience of just learning how to pick up the phone and sort of get your way through that fear. Because I think that same sort of courage to pick up the phone and do that also comes into play during an open house. I think I think that’s courageous to go up to somebody who walks in and say, Hey, I’d love to tell you I mean, I don’t think that’s easy either.
Barry Karch 14:45 Go out of my strength, not one of my strengths. I was never good at an open house. So that’s something I did as little as possible. I was I was not very good at coming up to strangers and creating a good conversation with them.
D.J. Paris 14:57 Yeah, it’s tricky too, because I really do Believe it’s like when you go into any sort of store where they’re salespeople retail establishment, and I’m a pretty extroverted guy, but mostly I just want to be left alone. So even, I’m very polite to people who come up to me. But rarely, I always applaud people that just come up when I go into, you know, Banana Republic, let’s say, and they go, Hey, can I help you? And was like, No, I’m just browsing. But, but I always see that as, as as a good skill to have. And I think picking up the phone and calling, you know, even even neighbors of listings, which I think is such a great idea. And I think I’m curious if you still do that today. So if you get a listing, and it closes, are you contacting, still making those kinds of cold calls to the neighbors nearby saying, Hey, by the way, I, I help so and so? Or do you not do that anymore? Do you do it a different way?
Barry Karch 15:51 I stopped doing that years ago, really, when the do not call lists came out? I was like, Yes, that was my excuse to do this anymore. Because most people were on that list. So I stopped doing it pretty much about that time.
D.J. Paris 16:04 Yeah, it’s like it’s a good rule of thumb. If you had to guess, does this person want these kinds of calls? And then they might even think they’re on the Deunan call? And they might not be? And then you look like a jerk? Because they thought they were on there. And it’s not your fault. But yeah. So I’m just curious. So fast forwarding all the way. Oh, I would love to know at what point you started your own brokerage, how long into your career before you you decided to go off on your own.
Barry Karch 16:31 I started 10 years ago. So I was already in the business about 2025 26 years when I started my own company. But I started 10 years ago, and at that time, we, I had a vision of I didn’t use the office very much as always out of the office on appointments. Being an introvert, I guess maybe I didn’t like being in the office around people so much. Because I had a lot of interruptions all the time. So sure, I prefer to work at home by myself. You know, that’s a real introvert thing to do, right? So I’ll just you’re sitting in my home and my computer, doing my research there and then going out to the appointment and coming back home. So I thought 10 years ago, you know what we could do? We could do away to the office and become a virtual company. And 10 years ago, we were kind of on the early part of that trend. Yeah, you guys were pioneers. Yeah. Now, it’s not as big a deal. But 10 years ago, it was very unusual that we created a virtual company 10 years ago, for that reason how you
D.J. Paris 17:29 were really ahead of the curve, it’s and I’ll tell you, just with respect to where I work, we have a just under 800 agents here, we have two physical offices and 99% of our brokers never come in. And in fact, that’s not strictly because of COVID. I’m even pre COVID Nobody can ever came in and we, you know, our agents can use the office 24/7 will give them access anytime they want to. Yeah, nobody does. And I think what’s great, too, one of the things that’s happened, which I thought I’d be curious to get your opinion on, which is, you know, during COVID, of course, I think a lot of us in, you know, became familiar with doing, you know, online meetings, zoom in particular, and then there’s lots of different versions of that technology. But I think that, you know, even people who are retired or probably jumped on a Zoom meeting during that time with their family, or maybe a FaceTime thing. But but certainly I think we just got conditioned now to we all sort of go, oh, online meetings are really easy and doable. And we’re sort of used to it and, and I think that I’m curious on, you know, your take on as an introvert, I imagine that that was very welcomed for you because you can enabled people to be more use to not having face to face not that you don’t want to have face to face, I’m sure you do. But it’s nice that you don’t always have to anymore. I always thought real estate is all belly to belly and eye to eye and, and maybe a lot of it is but but I think it’s becoming a lot more virtual. Not just even the fact that you know, the offices is isn’t as virtual but I’m curious if that if the client experience for you has changed, or your processes have changed since COVID. We’re now we’re all conditioned to just doing doing things virtually.
Barry Karch 19:26 Oh, yeah, I love zoom. I started meeting buyers for the first time I do my initial introduction and meeting and get to know them on Zoom rather than meeting them in person. So that’s great. And also for the company. I started doing our sales meetings on Zoom and I haven’t stopped it since then. Because even before COVID Allah as people were grumbling Oh, I have to drive to the office or so much. I mean not the office but where we had the meeting. And there was so much traffic, you know now zooms easier or they can do it at their home. And we can have the meeting. So I do a lot of meetings on Zoom now. And yeah, it definitely suits my style very well.
D.J. Paris 20:07 I’m curious, too, if you’ve had any buyers in particular, who are open to you doing virtual showings, where maybe you’re at the property or one of your agents is there, you know, who’s on either a zoom or FaceTime, or some sort of conferencing video software, where, you know, they’re like, hey, you know, and they walk around, has Have you started to see, you know, are you able to do those? Have you started? Curious if that’s been working for you, or if you’ve tried that yet?
Barry Karch 20:38 I’ve done that for a long time. Actually, I’ve done that before. COVID, even for lovers and years. The reason is not that I didn’t want to show people homes in person, but a lot of my clientele were military. And they did not get a house hunting trip into town. So they bought they wanted to have a home ready when they moved to El Paso. So we would walk through a bunch of homes via zoom or FaceTime or, or Skype or something. And we would tour homes that way, and they would pick a home and buy it. But I’ve done that for years. So that really wasn’t a change. Yeah, it’s
D.J. Paris 21:08 amazing. It’s just, I’m just so glad our audience can hear that these sort of things are possible and not out of out of range. But I would love to talk about it as opposed to thinking of introverts as as being disadvantaged. Because I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I just think there’s probably more extroverted realtors. So it’s easy to think, oh, that might actually not be a strength to be introverted, and to try to grow a real estate practice. Obviously, you’re proof that it has it isn’t a challenge, or rather, it isn’t debilitating challenge. And I’ve had lots of introverts actually on our show who say, Oh my gosh, I love being an introverted realtor. But for those of our audience who maybe feels, you know, gosh, I don’t know how to incorporate my introverted this into my business. I’m curious on, you know, what advantages you think introverts have?
Barry Karch 22:01 Oh, sure. There’s a lot of advantages. And I tell you what, looking back on my career, I believe whatever success I’ve achieved has come from being an introvert. That has really been the main advantage that has enabled to set me apart. And before I go into the van, just real quickly, let me just mention that there are a lot of introverted realtors, I’ve come to find. And I’ve also come to find that the majority of the top realtors are introverts, which you might not expect, but they they are. And so advantages are many. But it all starts with being quieter, and not pushy when you meet a client. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like pushy salespeople. I don’t think most people do. You go into a store looking at a car or something, you don’t want someone coming up to you and trying to push you into vice versa lay. Yeah. So I think consumers oftentimes fear that when they meet a realtor, they’re going to be pushy, also an aggressive and they’re, they’re going to have to try to fend them off. So when I first meet clients, they see that I’m quite a bit different. I’m quieter, I’m soft spoken. I listen a lot more than I talk. I’m not super talkative. So I listen to them, I find out what they want. It’s all about them. And I think we let people talk more, it makes them feel important, first of all, and it makes them feel appreciated. And it makes them feel understood. And they just start to feel comfortable working with me, because I’m not trying to sell them a house, I’m not pushing them into one. I’m not trying to be aggressive. So they start feeling comfortable with me, they open up more tell me what they really like and don’t like. And I kind of morph into more than advisor role than a salesperson role. And it’s just, it’s a great way to build up the trust. And it just has really worked, they find that I’m different and than they expected and we hit it off real well and has led to some good long term relations with past clients too.
D.J. Paris 24:12 Yeah, I I appreciate you mentioning that. And I think too, that like attracts like, right and and I think that, you know, certainly being extroverted there are people that that enjoy a more forward sort of presentations type of broker who who does sort of give the song and dance routine. However, I think the vast majority of us don’t prefer sales people as you said, we prefer consultants we all want the consultant experience that makes us feel important. And what is a consultant do they go into to you know, a individual or business and they say, tell me about what what you want or what your problems are. And then let me come back to you with some ideas after that and they come back. And I think that that is essentially sort of how you describe a bit of your process, although I overly simplified it. But this idea of listening, I mean, this is Dale Carnegie 101. Right? The this is, you know, get interested in people learn about them, talk less, listen more, I think that is I once interviewed a woman, very early on in the show, who is one of the top Realtors in here in Chicago. And I said, tell me how what your process is when you work with a client. And she said that with buyers in particular, she sits them down in her office. And she goes, usually the meetings last about an hour or more, because I just asked them probably 100 Questions about I want to know exactly what they want. And and then I say, Okay, give me some time to come up with some ideas and come come back to you. And and I, again, it seems so obvious to top producers that that is everyone’s process, and it isn’t. So I think you’re right, I think this idea of listening is obviously a skill that introverts have in droves. And that is such an important skill, because you’re right, it makes people feel comfortable. And it also makes them feel important, like you said, but Oh, wow, someone’s listening to me, right?
Barry Karch 26:18 Yeah, right. So like, networking, for example, or in big group settings, I’m not good at all, I’m not going to make many connections. But real estate is not networking, it’s a one on one business. It’s just the realtor and the client in front of them. And introverts can be excellent and making those deep one on one connections. And extroverts can be much better at working in a room and meeting a whole bunch of people. But going deep with one person, introverts can be very good at that. So that that’s another one of the big advantages.
D.J. Paris 26:51 I think you’re right that top producers tend to be more introverted, I would be really curious if National Association of REALTORS ever does a study where they just interview agents and ask them how they identify and what their production is. I would be very curious to see what percentage are introverts? Because I think you’re right. And I think that the reason why agents become so successful is this is a referral based business. And I think the extroverted activities, although can be certainly credibly successful. But I think the idea of building strong, deep relationships with people one on one is is obviously what introverts tend to prefer energy wise. And that is, hopefully I imagine has led to a lot of referrals. I imagine a good chunk of your business is referral based, if not all of it. I imagine.
Unknown Speaker 27:44 The majority of my business nowadays is referral based, right? I’ve I mean, I’ve probably had in the last month or two about 10 listings all from past clients. So which is great. I love it. And I love when they go way, way back. I had one earlier this year, that was my furthest back client that ever came back to me to sell. It was like 32 years ago, she bought the house. And then she contacted me to resell and I, I’ve got one house now it’s coming on the market they bought from me 20 years ago. So I have people that go way back. Because I mean, we develop a good relationship, and I stay in touch with them. Which, again, probably another strength of introverts is following up following through. We tend to be more detail oriented, perhaps, and do more research, but we’re good at following up with people and being organized.
D.J. Paris 28:32 Yes, following up with people might be, in my opinion, the strongest client skill once you get clients to have and obviously, there’s probably nothing more important than follow up especially even after a sale right? That’s that’s when a lot of times follow up stops for agents and remembering trying to remember Oh, boy, I built a really strong relationship with this person, I would should probably keep it going. I’m curious to ask you about social media, which is, I think oftentimes misunderstood as an extroverted exclusive activity, where I’m I’m showcasing my life. Certainly people have different boundaries around what they’re willing to share personally or privately with the public. What what part of their private life they’re willing to share, if any, I’m curious on how social media works for someone like yourself, is that a big part of your business? Is it is it something you don’t participate in? So I’m curious to get your thoughts on that.
Barry Karch 29:31 I do very little social media. I get almost none of my business from social media. I’m not a big fan of it. I put things out there from time to time, but very little and I go through phases. Sometimes I enjoy it. And I’m in a phase right now where I’m not doing it so much. But that’s never been a very big part of my business. And I
D.J. Paris 29:52 think that’s important for our audience to hear because they’re likely hearing from a lot of different sources. You have have to be on social, that’s where you end up, you know, developing relationships. And I like the fact that that’s not been your path. And it doesn’t, maybe it doesn’t play to your strengths, or it’s something you don’t enjoy. And it’s nice to where you can say, hey, I’m, I’m still a top producer, and I don’t really participate much on social and it doesn’t seem to have affected your business. Because I think, you know, the relationships you’ve built with people are the very most important part of how to build a business. So I’m curious on what other strengths, you know, you mentioned, being detail oriented and being sort of number oriented, which, you know, being good with, with with figures, isn’t necessarily an introverted trait, although it certainly could be, but just being be able to focus on those type of activities. I’m curious how that sort of set you apart maybe from other agents, who aren’t as strong in that way.
Barry Karch 30:57 I Well, the the follow up is one of the most important things like you said. And also keeping calm under pressure. Let me give you the follow up first. I, early in my career, I heard a study that after within six months of after you close on the house, most buyers cannot remember the name of the realtor, or even the company they work for. So yeah, they’re gonna they’re gonna forget you immediately if you don’t keep in touch with them. So I always look at it like, my, my communication with them just starts at the closing. So I’m very, I’ll stay in periodic regular contact with them for years and years and years and years after closing and never stops. So I’m very detailed that way, and very good on the follow up. So that helps. And they don’t mind me
D.J. Paris 31:49 asking, I just want to pause for a second because I want to just drill down just a slight slight bit on that, because you just said something very important. Which is, you know, once the home closes, that’s really the beginning of my communication, or at least the follow up communication. How do you stay in touch? Are you making? Are we doing phone calls? Is it emails at texting? Is it anything on social? You know, what are the strategies? Is it mailers? You know, what are you doing to to periodically reach those people that are already in the past of clients?
Barry Karch 32:20 Okay, well, a few different things. I want I want to a real estate convention years ago, and Brian Buffini was a speaker there. Yeah. And he was talking about, he gave out a tape back in the day afterwards of, you know, what he recommended doing and I heard him talk about doing pop buys where you stopped by a client’s house and drop off a little gift. And I was thinking to myself, I wish I thought of that. I don’t know why I never thought that myself, but I can see myself doing that. So I started doing it. I started just popping by past clients this house periodically and dropping off a gift. And they were so surprised to see me at first. Because usually when the sale is over, they think that’s the last they’re gonna ever hear of their realtor. But I would stop by and I would give them various different things throughout the year. But my favorite thing always was the Girl Scout cookies, because you can buy a box of cookies for four bucks. And what else can you give somebody for $4 that they’re going to love. I mean, everyone loves Girl Scout cookies, everyone Yeah, $4 you can make them so happy and that is so much cheaper advertising than anything you can spend anywhere else on Zillow or anywhere else you want to talk about spend four bucks on the people that supported you and they give you referrals and repeat business. So I would pop by their house year after year after year. And like the home I just listed that I mentioned that I sold the home 20 years ago, they’ve got two sons in high school now that weren’t even born when they bought the home. And when I came over to the house, the parish introduced me and said this is the guy that’s been dropping off the bills got cookies for us and so the kids all loved me but I came over and so I do pop buys and I’ll I follow it up with personal notes because people never get handwritten notes in the mail. No right Oh,
D.J. Paris 34:10 boy, I just want to pause for a second personal notes and this is this is straight out of the blue Feeny play the Buffini playbook so I love I love this Popeyes and personal notes, handwriting notes. You know if I get an outside of birthday anniversary, you know the the December holidays outside of the major holidays, which I get very few handwritten notes. Anyway, during those I get no handwritten notes outside of that.
Barry Karch 34:36 Right? Hardly anybody ever gets a handwritten note? You just get junk mail, maybe bills in the mail. But if you ever get a handwritten notes me the first thing you open like Oh, who wrote me What is this about? So I love the handwritten notes because it makes you stand out from the crowd. And then the third thing I do as as Brian Buffini says is I make phone calls to my past clients and I know a lot of realtors, extroverts as well as introverts. They dread picking up the phone and calling their past clients. Like they think what do I say to them? You know, but I find that it’s very easy. I mean, there’s there’s nothing fancy, you just call them up and say, Hey, how are you doing? Just was thinking about you and want to see how you’re enjoying your house? That’s it. That’s all Yeah. Yeah, and they appreciate it because again, they think they can’t believe you remember them. And so that’s all it takes, and just keep in touch them periodically, and, and your business will flourish. From there.
D.J. Paris 35:28 It’s it’s 100% could not agree more. And you know, for everyone thinking in look, I believe it’s scary to to pick up a phone and call a past client. And even especially if you haven’t been contacting that client for several years, right. And you think, oh, boy, now I’m embarrassed. I think, you know, personally, I think, you know, you could always, if you feel that way, you could always call them and say hey, I just wanted to apologize, I have not done a great job of staying in touch. But I my goal this year is to make sure that I stay in touch with my, my clients, you were so good to me. And by the way, just wanted to check in see how everything’s going or, you know, as you mentioned that it could be that simple. How’s the home? How is everything going? But you could also ask to like, you know, how, how, how is the you know, how is maybe not asking so much about the pandemic, but hey, is your work situation changed? Are you working from home these days, you could just find out what’s going on in their life. And or call them on their anniversary of buying the home say, hey, five years ago, you bought this home? I don’t know if you remember it, it was this day. But I wanted to call and say Hey, happy five year anniversary. And it doesn’t have to be scary.
Barry Karch 36:38 Yeah, exactly. Those are great ideas. And you’re gonna find that they love hearing from you, they would be so impressed that you remember them and think about them, and it makes them feel special. So again,
D.J. Paris 36:48 most of the time, you’re probably going to get the voicemail anyways. Yeah, so you can always watch it, which is even in some ways easier, because then you can just leave that exact same message. It’s like, Hey, I was thinking about you. I hope you’re doing well. And just even this demonstration that I care, I care about you. I imagine you’re not somebody that asks for business. Although I certainly don’t know.
Barry Karch 37:13 No, I asked him if they might know anybody. I never asked him directly for business. But I say Do you know do you know anybody else that is thinking about buying or selling a house, and after a while become so conditioned to thinking about sending you referrals? That you get
D.J. Paris 37:25 them? Yeah, I love that. One other advantages? Do you think like, I’m curious, do you think introverts or somebody like yourself, who’s who’s very number focused? I imagine that gives you a competitive advantage when it comes to running CMAs. And just assessing value. You You’re a numbers guy, and I’m curious on how you think that translates into, you know, better servicing your clients?
Barry Karch 37:53 Yeah, great question. You know, we introverts don’t like to wing it, we’d like to be very well prepared and organized before the appointment. So I’ll do my research before listing appointment, have information with me. And when I come over to the house, if they talked to a realtor before so often I hear you were so much more prepared or has so much more information than the last realtor I talked to. So yeah, I’ll have a thorough CMA, I’ll have all kinds of data for them. And it impresses them on on my knowledge of the market. So that definitely is a big help. And that’s certainly another one of the big advantages.
D.J. Paris 38:30 And anyone just to sort of give not not an example myself, but like I identify more as an extrovert. However, I prefer working with introverts, because I don’t want to be sold. Either I want somebody that’s like, Hey, I’ve done a bunch of work here. And I want to I want you to digest it and review it, and I’ll help you understand it. But I would much prefer that versus somebody who’s fun and nice and and not that you’re not fun in nice as well, but somebody who, who that becomes really their presentation about how how you know, how they act, you know, and more of that deeper, emotional sort of thing. I think that that I much prefer I don’t like a lot of that. I like somebody that says, hey, here’s a bunch of work I did, and take a look at it, and then let’s discuss it. So I think that introverts don’t even necessarily have to only work with introverts Of course. So I imagine that makes you very valuable. Coming in and and, you know, I know also realtors who show up with a blank, blank pad of paper, and they’re they wing it and somehow it works for them. I’m, I’m not sure how, but some people are maybe better at presenting themselves off the cuff, but I certainly wouldn’t show up unprepared.
Barry Karch 39:47 No, I wouldn’t either. But like you said there’s all different styles and real estate and all different ways you can succeed there’s there’s more than one path up the mountain. So different ways to do it for different people.
D.J. Paris 39:58 Totally and And that’s what’s great about there’s great real estate coaching, as well. And now with the advent of podcasts and video streaming is, it’s so easy to find other realtors who in your podcast is a great example. And for everyone listening again, please look up the real estate on salesperson podcast. So easiest way to find that you just go to the real estate on salesperson.com. Or just pull up a podcast app search for real estate on salesperson hit that subscribe button. But tell us a little bit about the I before we get to your show. I want to just really quickly ask you, how did you last and not only last but thrive over the last three decades, which is really difficult. This is a hard industry. It’s a tough job. Tough career, but you have obviously done very, very well. And I’m curious if you have any suggestions for audience about you know, staying power? You know, maybe when it’s not so much fun? How do you keep going?
Barry Karch 40:57 Yeah, well, you have to constantly evolve, the business and the world are always changing. So what works today may not work tomorrow. So you always have to be looking at where where the world is going where the industry is going to stay abreast of it and try new things. I always always try to add a new marketing technique to the my mix every year, and test it out and see what works because looking back. My number one source of leads is probably changed about five, six times throughout my career where my business comes from. So I know people now who are in business 30 years ago, and they have not kept up with the times whatsoever. They do things like they did 30 years ago, they don’t know how to do electronic signatures or, or anything on the internet. And they’re really like dinosaurs now. But you have to you have to keep up with the times and, and evolve and always try new things out.
D.J. Paris 41:52 Yeah, and the good news is there’s no shortage of tools out there. I was just at the NAR conference, and it was in the Expo Hall. And there were several 100 vendors there. Most of them tech companies, or at least it seemed like most of them were, were those types of companies. There’s just so many tools out there. And and I think you can get sort of, you know, swallowed up and in the rabbit hole of real estate tech. But if you’re not at least keeping abreast of it and understanding, you know what efficiencies exist? Like, you know, I’m shocked whenever I talk to an agent who comes from a brokerage, where they’re not using electronic signature, I’m like, wow, you know, we started using that, like 10 years ago, and we weren’t I didn’t think we were at the forefront of that. But I guess maybe we were one of the early adopters. But But yeah, there’s really great technology that can assist, especially with things like reminding you to call somebody on their home anniversary and CRMs can do that. But I’m curious if you have any other tips for I would like to ask actually about getting started. So if you were getting started today, and you have brokers at your firm, and I imagine you probably have new brokers from time to time, how are you? What are you telling them to do to get started, especially if they’re on the introverted side?
Barry Karch 43:05 Okay. First of all, I would tell them to look for their sphere of influence, if they have one if they’re if they’re been in the city for a while. And let’s let them know that you’re in the business but in an unsafe busy manner, we’re not going to call him up and hit him over the head and say, Hey, do you have business? Or do you need you need to buy or sell a home in real estate now, I would simply drop them off a gift, or even play businesses that you frequents restaurants, hair salons, beauty parlors, wherever you go that your vet’s office, your doctor, drop off a little gift, a box of Girl Scout cookies, your box or something and say, hey, just want you know, let you know I’m now in real estate. If you know anyone else looking to buy or sell a home, please let me know. So just an easy way to get a non threatening way to get the word out. So that’s a good way to do it. And I would just let people know that have the confidence you can be yourself, you don’t have to try to be like, fit a certain mold or be like you’re not, and you can do it. But I always start with that sphere of influence. Number one, I think that’s the best way to go. If you have it. If you’re new to town, then that’s going to be a little bit different story. But you still probably know some people use some services, and you can start there. And
D.J. Paris 44:26 also just the idea of having patience and understanding that your sphere is ready when they’re ready. And all you really have to do although it’s not just as simple as I’m sure you would agree but is making sure they know that that’s what you do. And that you’re doing it going that extra mile and you know, maybe dropping off the $4 box of boy what I just realized the return on investment. You know, even if you even if you visited 100 homes, you know and spent 400 bucks, which obviously when you get started You might not necessarily have that, but if you do You have that? I would be shocked if you didn’t get one sale out of that. Probably get a lot more than that.
Barry Karch 45:06 And boy, is that cheap compared to what you could spend somewhere else to try to get business.
D.J. Paris 45:11 Yeah, it really does it I’ve always felt to like whatever the gift is, I mean, a handwritten note is essentially free. Well, maybe it’s $1 altogether. And, you know, boy, just to make somebody Cheer up, cheer them up a little bit with a little gift with the $4 box of Thin Mints. Or, you know, the, I forgot I forgot what the Girl Scout mint cookies are called. Min she got it? Yeah, 10 minutes or Samoas or whatever, you know, or just a $1 handwritten note that says, Hey, I was thinking about you. I hope you’re doing okay. Especially like right now you could still send out, you know, Hey, I didn’t you know, I’m curious on hope everything is going well for you. I know. It’s been a troubled couple of difficult couple of years. But hopefully you and your family are good. I was just thinking about you guys. That’s that’s an amazing handwritten note that probably no one else is doing. No, people would love getting it. Sure. And I and we’re running really low on time here. So and I apologize for that I could talk to Barry all day. But Barry, before we wrap up, please tell us about the podcast.
Barry Karch 46:14 Okay, so I created the podcast, the real estate on salesperson, just to encourage and inspire other people that you can be successful in real estate. Even if you don’t think you’re salesy or maybe not a prototypical salesperson, or an introvert, actually, you have the tools to be super successful. So I created to encourage people that they can do it, they can do it without having to be outgoing or extroverted.
D.J. Paris 46:41 And you also interview guests, you have guests on your show and you discuss, just tell us about some of those conversations. What what do you what’s the primary discussion,
Barry Karch 46:50 right? Okay, I have a solo show on Monday. And then I do guess every Thursday, and my guess will be most of the time there are introverted Realtors talking about how they do it, how they overcame their challenges, and where they get their business from and how it works for them. And from time to time I’ll people outside the real estate field but somewhat related to it. I have someone coming up in a couple of weeks, who is a personal trainer who so it’s not real estate, but I you have to be in good physical shape to give your best real estate. So no question. He’s talking about how you can stay in shape to do real estate, just five easy, quick steps you can take to get in good physical condition. So I have a related speaker sometimes, too.
D.J. Paris 47:41 I love that. And I think that that really inspires me to think about a little bit outside of the box of just interviewing top producers like yourself to think about other parts of wellness, and certainly physical health is one. So everyone who’s listening, please, please give, give us give a chance and listen to Barry’s podcast, which is the real estate on salesperson you can find that by visiting the real estate on salesperson.com. We’ll be promoting it as well. It’s also in our show notes here or just pull up a podcast app, look search for real estate and salesperson and and hit that subscribe button. And listen. It’s an amazing service various providing very similar in his mission to our podcast. So consider him a colleague. And we’re really honored to have Barry on the show today. And by the way, if you’re a realtor in the El Paso area, and and you would like to learn more about Barry and his company, obviously you can reach out to Barry as well. If you’re in the El Paso area, you probably know about Barry. But we’ll have a link to to his information as well in the show notes. But feel free to reach out to him. And also if you think you might be a great guest for Barry’s podcast reach out to him as well, again, the real estate on salesperson.com. I’m very I’m really, really happy to have you I’m sorry, our time is coming to a close. But I definitely want to talk to you about even possibly having you on more regularly to tackle these type of issues. Because I think there’s so much we we could we could go over. So I think this is as Barry was saying with his clients. The end of this podcast might hopefully be the beginning of other things that we can do together. So I’m really excited to continue that conversation. But we really appreciate your time today. On behalf of our audience, we want to say thank you for giving us an hour of your time which I know is not in short supply because of how successful and busy you are running a brokerage and of course working with clients and doing a podcast so I know how hard that is. So thank you on behalf of our clients and on behalf of Barry and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show. Again, please support Barry show. Go ahead and subscribe. And also subscribe to our show. If you’re not already a subscriber. Go on to whatever podcast If you use search for keeping it real, there’s a few other keeping it real podcasts which was not smart of me when I or maybe they started after I started years ago but but either way, look for the one that has the word DJ in it, which is being hit that subscribe button or just go to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve done, you can stream right from the website. And lastly, tell a friend think of one other realtor. If you have an introverted realtor, by the way, it’s somebody you should also recommend Barry’s podcast. So think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing this great interview with Barry or who would be a great person to listen to Barry show and send them links to our our show we really would appreciate it’s how we grow. And we really appreciate Barry your time. So thank you so much. And we look forward to seeing everyone on the next episode. Thank you, Barry.
Barry Karch 50:48 Thank you DJ, it was a pleasure and you got a great show. I really enjoy it.
D.J. Paris 50:52 Thank you. Well, I am super excited to check out your show because I I wish I would have come up with the idea first that you you beat me to it and likely would have done a better doing a better job with it. of talking to introverts and talking about different ways. So anyway, Barry, thank you so much. We will see everyone on the next episode.
Why Real Estate Agents Should Join Social Share Groups • Social Bootcamp • Gogo Bethke
Dec 08, 2021
Welcome to our monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo discusses how to become part of different groups that will be your way into building relationships. Next Gogo gives tips on how to use these groups to receive referrals from. Last, Gogo and DJ discuss being part local community groups and how to leverage from them.
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.
Welcome to Real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. Today on our show, we have our monthly series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Let me tell you about gogo gogo came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream, she was broke, she had no real estate experience and no sphere of influence barely spoke English, only $6 to her name. So that left her with really nothing else but Facebook to help build her business, which is where she started. Now she created gogos real estate and began her real estate career. And with the power of social media Google has sold over well, this is an old number, so you’ll have to correct me but it’s at least 75 million, it’s probably much much much higher than that in real estate transactions, and she shares the good, the bad and the ugly of real estate and our honest snippets into her daily life have earned her 10s of 1000s of social media followers. And in the real estate community, she has earned the nickname The Queen of social media. After being asked to present at various conferences and events with a realtor. She built her own social media Bootcamp for realtors called Go Go’s bootcamp. Today, she has a team of almost 600 agents nationwide, probably even more than that now. Her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. Now if she can do it, this girl from Transylvania, Romania with no formal US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent than anyone else can do it as well. Please, please follow gogo on Instagram. She is the queen of social media. So follow her on Instagram at gogos real estate and that’s there’s a link to that in our show notes. Also, please consider investing in her bootcamp. It’s the very best program we’ve ever seen for realtors to learn social media mastery. And it’s it’s it’s incredible. It’s an amazing investment. And she has a special pricing for all of our keeping it real listeners and viewers. So all you have to do is go to a browser and type in gogo, podcast.com. That’s Gogo. podcast.com Learn about her social media bootcamp. Trust me just go and buy it. It’s the very best thing. Everybody could use more social media skills, and it’s the very best program we’ve ever found. Gogo. Welcome to the show. Once again.
Gogo Bethke 3:03 Well, thank you so much for having me. I will correct you since you told me to please. You are going on 679 to Egypt today. Unbelievable. Almost 700. We did the math by the end of the year or team gogo, the overall organization, we are close to closing $1 billion this year.
D.J. Paris 3:22 On believable Wow. When I started with when he started coming on the show. It was you were just under 100 million. And now you’re at a billion in one year. Oh my gosh. Unbelievable. By the way.
Gogo Bethke 3:33 Oh, that’s right. That’s our like family of agents. But we pulled the numbers.
D.J. Paris 3:38 And and you also built all of your agent sort of business through social media as well.
Gogo Bethke 3:44 Yeah, I certainly have now they have access to all of my trainings, right. And they come to all of the weekly trainings as well, and the boot camp and all that and some do more social media and others, but they’re implementing more as we go. And many of them I would say probably 75% of them are very good already.
D.J. Paris 4:00 Well, I, I am super impressed. I have to also say, a little shout out to ourselves on the podcast, because yesterday, we hit our largest Daily Download number in our entire history. And so it’s very exciting to see your numbers skyrocket. And also our podcast is doing well which I’m very
Gogo Bethke 4:18 I wonder is that because I started sharing it in my stories with a swipe. You know,
D.J. Paris 4:22 I was just about to say that gogo started sharing this more vigorously. And I have definitely seeing those numbers increase, especially your specific episode numbers. And by the way, everyone listening, I really encourage you to do this. The the information that gogo provides is really timeless. It’s not really specific to you know, certain time of the year, although sometimes we do that, but 99% of what we talk about can be implemented at any time. So if you go to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com You scroll down to the bottom, I’ve actually separated out all of the different categories of episodes and you can literally go to all the Go Go social media bootcamp episodes. I was right in a row. And I really encourage you to go back through because every single one is just chock full of great information. But anyway, let’s, um, congratulations on all your success, by the way that is really encouraging to you guys. It
Unknown Speaker 5:11 is so exciting. It is it is
D.J. Paris 5:13 fun. All right. So I know we’re gonna talk about something, which I think is super exciting today, which is really building a network of agents, and sort of communicating with them via social media. So let’s, let’s talk about that.
Gogo Bethke 5:28 So this, this started with, ESP asked me a couple of weeks ago to take over their Instagram. So I had a couple of our agency while a few of our agents here locally, and we were celebrating, so we did a little screenshot. And as a little story sharing, I should say, of how the year has been here. And as they were talking how they double their production with triple their income. And they’re saying that one of our agents had 26 referrals from our different groups and 70 pending in a month. So then that took me to this week’s training and the timbre of organization and we talked about referrals, and how are the best ways to kind of do it, where you can just go boom, boom, boom, have systems around it. So I figured it would be a good idea to kind of talk about that, where agents if they are not doing at least a third of their business from referrals, right, and they’re not doing you’re right, in my opinion, you should be receiving referrals, no matter where you’re located. And let’s talk about that. Give some tips on that.
D.J. Paris 6:22 Yeah, let’s do that. So first, let’s talk about sort of what these groups are. Or, you know, what, how people can start to think about it, maybe?
Gogo Bethke 6:32 Yeah, so the way I want you to look, look at it, right, like start at home, I’m sure the brokerage you are with or the team that you’re with, or the group that you’re with, right? They have their own Facebook group, I would assume so. Right? So definitely want to be a part of that. Now, you might have, you know, with our brokerage, it’s a little different, how we are structured, but if your brokerage, where you’re at, you might have like that next level up, right, like maybe another group of the same brokerage in another state. Right, you definitely want to belong in that group, because guess what, they probably have to refer someone to Michigan and then Guess who’s gonna take the lead here, right? So you want to join as many that is tied to your brokerage right as you can, then you want to go outside of your brokerage, right. And you want to join that livings. Like I’m a part of Livingston County, realtors group, right, there’s a different name in there, but it’s Livingston County’s area that I mostly cover. So in that Livingston County group, there was REMAX or century 21, there’s color bands, or you name it, everybody’s in the right, you definitely want to join that. And then you want to take it one step further. And you want to create your own group, your own support group. So maybe if you go to nor if you go to any like real estate events, right, if you go to your brokerages, real estate events, I’m sure that you have made friends in the industry, that might be in different states, right? They don’t cover your area, and you don’t want them in your area. Because when you want to take referral, they’re not going to refer you if they’re in your area. Does that make sense? Do you want to build your own referral group that are anywhere but your area? Right? And then you want them to also join all of these different groups? So like labcoat agents, right? It’s a huge organization for realtors, 1000s and 1000s, probably hundreds of 1000s of Agents around? I don’t know. So which means a lot of referrals go through that group, right? You want to get a chunk of that. So what you want to do create your own referral group, right? So part of it that 1020 30 agents nationwide. And this is what you’re going to do you guys all going to belong to the same groups. So when a lead calm and you and you start your own Facebook group for that support group, okay, then you’re going to all belong to all of these other Facebook groups. Let’s say a lead comes up in your neck of the woods, Brighton, Michigan. Okay. You are going to because if you do this, right, we have 700 agents now in a team global organization, I can’t possibly remember where everybody’s located. It’s just impossible, right? What area cover? I don’t know, never been in Delaware? I don’t know, right. But what we do instead, you want to be a part of those groups. When you see a referral that is in your neck of the woods, you’re going to first of all comment, you’re going to say oh my gosh, I would love the opportunity. You’re going to call the age and you’re going to video chat age, you’re going to tax deed, you’re going to email them, you’re going to hit them from every angle, right? I strongly recommend for you to take the time and send them a quick little video introduction, right? Because this is on Facebook. So there’s a Facebook profile, push them up, push the Message button and leave a video. Hey, Jessica, I just saw that you’re looking for an agent in Brighton, Michigan. Let me introduce myself. I’m gonna go back, Kay. I’ve been in the industry since 2011. I will include a link so you can check us out your five star reviews on Google and blah, blah, blah, I would love to earn the opportunity. What can I do? Right? How can I grow your business? Right? You’re going to send that now you’re going to screenshot that message that Jessica posted that she’s looking for an agent in Brighton, Michigan. You’re going to take that screenshot. You’re going to put it in your support group and you’re going to ask those 3040 50 agents. Hey, guys, I really need your help. Now all 340 50 of I’m going to come over to that post right because they are in the same group. They’re a member of the same group. They are going to go find Jessica’s post and they are all going to recommend gogo What do you think are the chances instead of just us saying I would love to take the job and sending a video and all that which is already more than an average agent would do, right? Sure. But what do you think are your chances if within five minutes you have 40 agents recommending you,
D.J. Paris 10:09 that’s huge. And I want to slow that down. And just back that up a minute, because I want to make sure people didn’t miss that. And that’s the critical component that you probably wouldn’t think to do is to ask the people in your group to help, because they’re already you’re going to have them join all your groups too. And they’re going to do basically a little fluffing, they’re going to, they’re going to go into there and say, Hey, by the way, you should, you know, hopefully, you should check out gogo she’s, she’d be a great referral source for this particular I reminds me of there used to be a thing called when I was a writer, a blogger used to be thing called Share groups. So we would do this with with blogging, so you’d write an article, you’d say, Hey, everybody, I want you to comment on social media, the post I have for this article, and like it, and then promote it with your friends. And we would all do it for each other. And it would increase engagement, and just social proof and all of that. So it’s kind of kind of a similar thing, but you’re going directly
Gogo Bethke 11:00 to right, so you make your posts, and then you share the posts into that group. And then everybody comes over likes and comments, you can definitely do it for that as well. But you definitely want to do it for referrals. The only way this works if you don’t have agents from the same area in that group. Right. So you have any again, from California, one from Delaware, one from South Dakota, North Dakota County, Florida, Michigan, Idaho, you know, all of the states, you have a business partner referring partner from all of the states. And then when an Iowa comes up, and the Iowa agent screenshots, it takes it to the group, and all of you guys gonna go recommend her right. But this only works if you all do, right, you cannot take and not give because you would in my group, you would be booted. So if I recommend you to three times, but it’s my turn, and I don’t see your name popping up recommending me you will be booted from
D.J. Paris 11:44 it, you can also do you can make it a dual purpose group, it could be a referral group, of course. And it can also be a social media Comment and Share group as well. So every day, you know, you might not have referrals, so you might not have anything to post, you could say, Hey, guys, we only have two rules here. Anytime you make a Facebook post, I want you to post it here, or link to it here. And we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna comment, we’re gonna like it. So we’re all going to support each other. And we’re also anytime referrals come in, we’re going to do the thing you just mentioned. So I mean, that’s a very powerful thing. If you can do both of those things. I mean, it’s huge. And all you have to do is tell people anytime you post something on on Facebook, or wherever it could be another platform, Instagram, whatever, you know, here’s the here’s the thing, go in there, comment like
Gogo Bethke 12:28 some of our agents take it one step further. And they leave video messages to the referring agent. So for example, John and one of our team. This just happened in one of our team Google agents. So somebody was looking for an agent in Traverse City, Michigan, one of our team Google members is Mike savage. He’s a top top top producer out there. And he commented there, yes, I would love to take the opportunity, yada, yada, right. But then he posted it into Team goggles. So then all of us went in there and recommended him but so Taro took it one step further. And Sotero left a video message to the person who posted the lead and recommended Mike how Mike is the absolute best how he has been industry forever. Guess who got the job?
D.J. Paris 13:08 Right. And guess who’s going to get a lead back if if he gets that deal, which sounds like he’s going Mike’s gonna get the deal.
Gogo Bethke 13:16 26 leads in the last 40 days and 17 are pending.
D.J. Paris 13:21 That’s unbelievable. Incredible, you know, I want to almost stop there only because I don’t think there’s that is such an amazing so. So basically, let’s go through the steps. So the first thing you want to do is make friends with agents in other areas and other areas and you should also do within your own state to just not in your immediate area because you’re probably going to get more referrals than anything for maybe people moving out of out of the city or or wherever you are. So definitely find some people in the state that just cover totally different areas different MLS is all of that but certainly all over the country. And so I’m trying to think like how would you go about doing that? Well I guess if you go to a conference so now our conference is coming up in mins coming up. There’s lots of conferences your your brokerage might have a conference that’s nationwide. If you have a nationwide or international firm, you could always just reach out to people in the firm and say, Hey, how do I get in contact with other successful agents, I want to start this Facebook thing, but I guess you really have to do some some legwork there. And if you’re really unsure about how to do it, and you have you know, nobody, you can always go to Zillow and just start looking at people’s reviews and anyone you see that seems to be doing pretty well in a different area. Reach out to him and say hey, would you like to be part of my group? We’re going to do a couple of things here. We’re gonna support each other social posts and we’re gonna we’re gonna do this cool. Sort of lead supportive group thing and all that gosh, that’s it’s not that hard to do.
Gogo Bethke 14:43 And put in California realtor. Delaware realtor. Yep. Oh, hi. Oreo comes up, right? You comes up pick one that you kind of feel like you kind of have this thing in common, right? You do social media. I do social media. I have two kids. I have two kids, right. We get to see who they are. Pick one.
D.J. Paris 14:59 The The other thing too is do this because there are websites that do this. So like we’re, we’re lucky enough to be on a lot of like best real estate podcast lists that we don’t even know about. We just happen to see it every so often online. Same thing exists for social media, best agents in Illinois for social media, things like that, you’ll you’ll find, because that’s really what you want. You want people that are good at social media, because they get it they understand the power of referrals and engagement equity
Gogo Bethke 15:24 sparks if you don’t fall asleep, yet, yeah. I’m just saying in case you didn’t know, I’ve been number one in the States in the last three consecutive years and number 16 in the nation. And the 15, before me all have HGTV shows, and I don’t you need to get one. So maybe somebody’s listening out there. I would love my own show. Just kidding. Well,
D.J. Paris 15:45 we do we do have HGTV people that listen because they reach out to us from time to time to have some of their people on our show. We just haven’t. I don’t think we’ve ever done it yet. But we’re still working.
Gogo Bethke 15:56 They wanted luxury waterfront property. Like what do you call luxury? Because we have waterfront right but I’m in the boonies of Michigan. So luxury for me. So the luxury what they were looking for in the luxury Pinckney Michigan, right, it was a difficult luxury. So I didn’t I didn’t make the cut. But yeah, I would definitely recommend it. Whatever your style is, right? You want to find similar agents, because then it’s just it’s like being home in your own group.
D.J. Paris 16:23 And the only other suggestion I have is around your local community groups. So I live in a neighborhood called Wicker Park in Chicago, just Google wicker in Facebook, do a search for Wicker Park, and oh, there’s a community group. And it’s actually quite a big neighborhood. So there’s lots of people and here’s what I would recommend. Because every I don’t really follow every post, because I don’t really care that much. But it’s a lot of people saying, Hey, I’m selling this or I lost my dog or, you know, whatever, I hey, I need a new hairstylist, who should I go to things like that? It’s all referral based, and at least several times a week, two or three times a week, somebody’s like, Hey, I’m thinking of moving to the area, does anyone have a good realtor. And now here’s, so that’s an amazing opportunity, here’s the problem, you’re probably not so on top of that group, unless you’re really checking it all day long, you’re probably too busy to do that. If it was me, I would hire a virtual assistant 9am to 5pm, or whatever times you know, are its most active. And I would say one of your jobs is you’re going to have an eagle eye on this and you’re gonna have access to my social media account. And the moment or even better, maybe use your own account and say, You know what, you need to talk to this woman go go, or whoever. And then immediately they message you say you got to get in touch with this person. Because
Gogo Bethke 17:36 that’s a great idea. Because a virtual assistant, you can have anywhere from three to 10 bucks an hour, right. But here’s the other thing that you must do for all of these different groups, you have to set up each group notifications. So you’re going to open up the group, you’re gonna go on the top right hand side, where you see those three dots, you’re going to click here, you’re gonna go to notifications, you’re going to set it to like, I know, Doc’s cracking, or a train coming by your choo choo, like, whatever you would know, like, oh, that’s the honey badgers group. Right? So then I can jump on it. Get on it, right, because you don’t want to lose it. First. You snooze, you lose, right? If you message him three days later, that ship sailed on a long time ago, they’ve already closed.
D.J. Paris 18:13 Even if it’s been 10 minutes, it might be too long. So So definitely, you know, if you can hire somebody just to keep their eye on it. I boy speed the lead, right?
Gogo Bethke 18:21 So think of it this way. What would someone working eight hours a day? Do you think five bucks an hour is reasonable? You pay less than that? I think five is very reasonable. So they can do other things along the way, too. Yeah, five times 40 hours, it’s 200 bucks a week, it’s 820 bucks a month. What’s your average commission?
D.J. Paris 18:40 Well, if you figure like average price point, what 300,000 times two and a half percent. So 7500 in commission times, you know, whatever somebody splits at, so let’s just say $6,000. I don’t know something like
Gogo Bethke 18:52 a column. So if I told you give me 800 bucks, and I’ll give you six grand, would you do it?
D.J. Paris 18:58 I would do that. Yeah.
Gogo Bethke 19:00 That’s it, that’s if you only get one deal out of 40 hours worth of work, right? There’s no way you’re gonna get one.
D.J. Paris 19:09 And you might not get it month, one, two, or three, but month four, through whatever, it’s all going to accumulate. So if you don’t get anything, just keep keep going with it. It’s, it’s kind of,
Gogo Bethke 19:21 in my opinion, there’s no way you’re not gonna get leads, like this group that we belong to, there’s hundreds of leads that go in on every single day. And on top of it, yeah, the first month, even if you get the lead, right, it’s gonna take 345 days to close, you might not see the income of it, but you definitely gonna see the lead coming in. And then you have to have systems in place as your CRM program your follow up skills, your, your your scripts, right or how I don’t do scripts. I just like, Hey, Jessica Gaga, right? Like, I do personal conversation, but whatever your style is, you have to have that ability to turn that cold lead into a warm client into a commission. So you have to have that figured out and then have a transaction coordinator so you can bam bam, bam, boom, you don’t have to do people work right you get to the closing and close. to commission we’ll move on to the next you can. So while we work machine,
D.J. Paris 20:04 Awesome, well, I almost think that’s a perfect place to stop. I don’t want to go any further because that is such an amazing to. And I hope everyone if we went a little quickly here, just go back and re listen to it. It’s a short episode. But I just want to thank gogo for that amazing tip, social media share groups or referral groups. Definitely create one I look, every realtor wants to be part of a referral network. I mean, especially now and we’re seeing so many referral commissions coming and going in this industry. It’s just, I’ve interviewed people for the show recently who do nothing but referrals. Literally, that’s all they do. They don’t even live in the state they practice. They even refer to people in their own area, that they’re, they’re a broker because they don’t they don’t like I don’t want to do it. They just all they do is refer business. So
Gogo Bethke 20:51 here’s this kid I heard of he made 400,000. From referrals, only, he hasn’t closed, personally a single deal. All he does is make referrals. And you just collect the 25% from every single referral. And there you go. He’s really good at lead generation online, right? So he’s like a little kid that just figured out that there’s internet, right, but all he does is introduce his agents, they lead to the agent, right? Takes a 25% referral fee. I mean, 400 grand, haven’t sold a single house.
D.J. Paris 21:19 Amazing. Never did a showing. Yeah, amazing. So So for everyone listening, like just think of it this way. Like you most of us can’t probably do that next year, we probably have to still work with clients one on one. But what if you could get just one sale, a quarter out of it, or one referral a quarter, which probably you do more than that. But even if it’s just for additional deals, or three additional deals, three to four additional deals, just for creating a share group. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty that’s probably like another 10 grand in income to your pocket for doing well. If it’s
Gogo Bethke 21:53 six grand a commission, I mean, doing the quarterly that’s 24 grand. Right? And there’s no reason why you would only get one deal every quarter if you do this, right, get a deal a day, right? Because those things are happening.
D.J. Paris 22:08 And it’s reminding me what I need to do for our podcast is create a podcast share group with other real estate podcasts, and we can support each other See, I need to do this myself.
Gogo Bethke 22:20 If I may suggest what else please, I’d love to create a Instagram profile for this podcast. So I can actually tag you.
D.J. Paris 22:28 I know I know we we are in the process of that I’ve hired somebody to do that. And they’re going to start taking short clips from each episode and posting them there. Thank you for continuing to remind me because embarrassingly enough, I don’t, I have not done this for our own podcast. And our growth is going to shoot up from from just from doing that alone. But I’m also going to create a podcast share group so we can all support because there’s there are a lot of great real estate podcasts outside of mine as well. So I want to make sure I can support them. And they a lot of them support me. So I appreciate that. But go go, if anyone is out there listening, who isn’t getting the attention they need from the firm they’re at. Or maybe they’re in a team where they’re just not really happening or they feel like they’re maybe there’s something better out there. They can obviously talk talk to you about joining your team.
Gogo Bethke 23:16 Stay short, Ken. So we I started this org, I like to call it an organization, right because when I say team, it almost makes agents feel like I’m going to take a cut and I don’t write we become business partners. So sad. But you can just hit me up at Google’s real estate. If you follow me there you see all of our cute little celebrations, right of who we are and how we do it here. But we have now almost 700 agents in the team with organization in five different countries and 30 different states. So no matter where you are in the US, no matter what state you are, we can be business partners. And then I’ll help you with absolutely anything you get my bootcamp you get all of our weekly trainings, everything that I do all of my coaching and mentoring is free to everyone who partners with me.
D.J. Paris 23:57 I love it. So visit Gogo. You can also please follow her on social media at gogos real estate. And also, definitely consider it don’t even consider just please go do this. I promise you, not one person who has bought this. Bought this program who listens to our show has ever said anything other than that was the best money I’ve spent for any sort of training her Go Go goes boot camp, her social media boot camp shoot, you will learn there’s what hundreds of hours of video instruction, there’s I mean, it’s just insane. And whether you’re brand new, and you haven’t ever created a profile, or whether you’re pretty adept at social media, but just want to get to the next level. I’m telling you, and I’m going to do it too. So I am going to finally get an Instagram account set up for the this next year for our podcast and I want to see what the numbers jumped to as a result because I know it’s going to be big but consider investing in the boot camp. Just visit Gogo podcast.com again Gogo podcast.com to get a special percentage off just because you are keeping it real listener and follower gogo thank you once again for being on the show we love having you on you’re always bring great content to us and you are I have to look at our numbers but I think you’re our most listened to guests out of all the regular guests we have. So we are super grateful to have you and I know the listeners love love it when
Gogo Bethke 25:17 you can see it can I somewhere see those numbers are now
D.J. Paris 25:25 yeah, maybe I maybe I have to look through to see how easy it is something for me one day definitely I will definitely work on that. I’ll have our team take a look at that. It’s weird a podcast analytics are so goofy there’s there’s not a real easy way to do it, believe it or not. But anyway, I will work on that. But for everyone listening, please continue to tell a friend. This is a perfect episode to tell a friend about think of one other real estate agent that needs to do more with their social media or is frustrated by not getting the results they want in social and send them a link to this episode. You can just send them to our website keeping it real pod.com Or you know pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. Gogo. We will see you on the next next month. Congratulations on all the success and we’ll see you next time.
Gogo Bethke 26:11 Thank you so much for having me. See you next time.
Why Mastering Fundamentals Is The Key To Real Estate Agent Success • Joe Zimmerman
Dec 03, 2021
Joe Zimmerman with The Zimmerman Group talks about the beginning of his career in real estate and how he built his business. Joe describes how he and his team use evets to build a community with like-minded people to support each other. Joe also discusses mindset and what his approach towards work and life and how disruptors impacted his business. Last, Joe talks about how he built his team.
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s episode is brought to you by eye guide agents you already know you need professional photography for your listings. But do you know what else you need that is equally important but overlooked by the majority of Realtors, 3d tours and accurate floor plans. National Association of REALTORS has found that buyers rate floor plans as the third most important part of a listing even more important than neighborhood information. Also 20% of buyers will ignore listings that do not contain floor plans. I guide has the most accurate floor plans and best virtual tour technology in the industry. Visit go i guide.com. To find a local photographer for your next listing. top producers know the value of floor plans and virtual tours. Take your business to the next level by visiting go i guide.com. That’s go the letter i guide.com. And now onto our show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with top producer Joe Zimmerman. Before we get to Joe. Just a couple of quick reminders. Well, first, thank you for continuing to listen and support our show. If you’d like to help us keep growing, the best way you can do that is by telling a friend think of one other real estate agent that wants to get to that next level and hasn’t yet done it. Or, you know, it’s funny when I was at the National Association of REALTORS going off script for just a second, I got to meet some of our fans. And surprisingly, the fans I met out at the National Association of Realtors Conference were already top producers. So this isn’t just for agents who want to be top producers. But if there is anyone that you know that is wanting to strive to get to that next level, whether they’re already a top producer, or they’re just starting out, send them a link to our show, send them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done can be streamed right from a browser, or if the person you’re sending our show to is already a podcast fan, then just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And for everyone who is listening on an Apple device, if you’re listening through the apple podcast app, we’d really appreciate if you could leave us a review it helps us know how we’re doing and also helps us get more visibility to get more listeners tuned into our show. Hope everyone is having a great end of the year. And now on to our interview with Joe Zimmerman.
Today on the show, we have Joe Zimmerman from the Zimmerman group with Keller Williams one Chicago in here where I broadcast out of Chicago, Illinois. Let me tell you a little bit about Joe now with more than 18 years experience in the real estate industry. Joseph Herman has the tools and resources to provide each client and each agent on his team with something greater during every step of their real estate experience. Now Joe has been consistently recognized as a top producer in Chicago. He’s a he’s a bit of a legend here. He’s also built a team that sells more than 200 homes per year. Now the Zimmerman group continues to rank within the top 1% of the Chicago Association of Realtors, which is a big deal because there’s about 20,000 members so he’s in the top 1%. And he has been personally recognized by the National Association of REALTORS as one of their top 30. Under 30. We’ve had many 30 under 30 people here, Joe, of course has been one as well and the Chicago Association of Realtors has named him a top 40 under 40 list for his achievements in sales. Now as an agent, and as a team leader, Joe brings his excellent client service and extensive industry knowledge to each individual relationship. Above all else, Joe is a family man. And likewise, he encourages his colleagues to prioritize a healthy work life balance because he knows that personal joy yields professional success. Now please visit the Zimmerman group to learn more about what Joe and his team offer at and here’s the website it is the z pg.com. I’m going to spell that one more time. It’s the Z as in Zimmerman, P as in Paul G as in group.com vzpg.com. And by the way, I always forget to mention this until the very end and just in case you’re about to sign off or log off. And you’ve heard of this this far. Joe and his team are always looking for talent to join Zimmermann group. So another reason to visit zpg.com is whether you’re a client looking to work with a top producing team, or if you’re an agent wanting to work with a top producing team, check out The Z pg.com. That will also be in the show notes for this article. Sorry for this episode, Joe. Thanks for I know, there’s a long intro, but thanks so much for being on our show.
Joe Zimmerman 5:10 Hey, DJ, I appreciate it. Thank you very much as well. And I’m glad to be your Chicago representative here today. So thanks again, appreciate appreciate it. I’m honored to get this started.
D.J. Paris 5:20 It’s funny our I was telling Joe just before we started that our producers on a set, I can’t remember the last time we’ve had a Chicago guest. We have a couple of Chicago guests that regularly come on. But but not in this sort of style of episode we’re doing now. So it’s been a while for us. So excited to talk to a local Chicago guy. And you have such an impressive, just history in this industry. And your reputation is incredible as well. But I’d like to go all the way back to the beginning of your real estate career. Wouldn’t I would love to hear in our audience, I’m sure we’d love to hear sort of why you got into real estate and how it happened for you.
Joe Zimmerman 5:59 Yeah, DJ happy to share that. So I know it’s been a while now. It’s actually been 2020 plus years now. So you know, I actually got into the real estate by default, you know, I knew that I always loved the creative aspect of in the architecture and creative aspect of homes and, and things like that. And in you know, law loft, the Chicago loft like almost like this, the movie Big right Tom Hanks, always a dream right, you know, Gago, but that was that. So anyways, I started looking for real estate, you know, I’ve always been a saver and somebody that basically was an entrepreneur at heart, and I never rented right outside of college. So I saved all my money and decided, hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go look for a condo, you know, actually a loft in the city of Chicago. And when I started looking for it, I realized the love I had for it. So I was in the medical field. Right, then at that point in time out of college, I was in the medical field, and I did not like hospitals DJs. So obviously, that was not going to work out for me. So anyways, I went to my real estate agent at the time and said, This is really cool. What you do is is awesome. And he looked at me and said, you should get in this, you should do this. And literally, I took the week’s course later, and I jumped right into it.
D.J. Paris 7:13 Wow, that’s so so what age were you when when you were like right out of right out of school, basically. Yeah. So
Joe Zimmerman 7:19 I graduated college in 20. I was 21, and had a year job in the medical field at 22. And I started real estate in 2003.
D.J. Paris 7:27 Wow, that that, first of all, it’s impressive that you bought a place and never rented and we’re sort of savvy enough to save money at a time when I know at that age, that those ages, I just it wasn’t even an idea that I would own a place in the next, you know, 510 years. So that’s, I would say, Yeah, that’s probably a pretty good indicator that you’re into this industry. And I was as you were talking about the Chicago loft experience and, and like the movie Big and like I remember, you know, it’s funny that you brought that up, because I hadn’t thought about that movie in a long time. But that yeah, that scene where he gets his own his own place is I was like, man that looks like paradise because I was young at the time. And just remember
Joe Zimmerman 8:08 how beautiful that in the continent.
D.J. Paris 8:11 He had like a pinball machine. He had a video game and he had all sorts of cool things in there. But But you’re absolutely right. That’s that’s, that’s a it’s a great first introduction to real estate in a sense. And then, you know, look, I mean, a 23 year old, starting in this industry as a real estate broker is that is a tough, a tough thing, because I’m assuming most of your friends probably weren’t as forward thinking as you at that age for to start home ownership. I suspect you can do some leasing. That would keep you busy. But I am curious, like, how does a 23 year old start to get clients? It just seems like that would be a really difficult task.
Joe Zimmerman 8:53 Yeah. I mean, well, first and foremost, DJ, you know, it was different in tooth away was that 2002? Yeah. different environment than it is in 2022. Right. So, but at the end of the day, you’re right, it was difficult because more people were renting instead of buying right. And I didn’t believe in renting, right. I believed I believe in homeownership. So the hustle was real, right? You know, I’m not I’m not I’m not going to sugarcoat it any other way. You know, how did how did you do it really, really grit? Right? You know, really kind of just understanding that you’re going to have to you are going to have to work hard. Now, you know, that is that that changed, organically changed for me in my life. But in the beginning, I knew nothing other than work hard talk to people and opportunities going to come to you. So at 23 years old, I just you know, I out hustled a lot of my competitors.
D.J. Paris 9:45 Yeah, it’s funny. I’ve been doing the show a long time. And that answer is absolutely the most consistent answer we get about how do you get started? It’s particularly for agents that are that start younger, but even really for At any age at any age, that seems to be the universal answer. And I keep hoping one day somebody will say, No, I have the super secret technique that only I know about, but I’ll share it with your audience hasn’t happened yet. So it seems to be grit. And, and just learning the industry, I imagine. You know, in 2002, there was got there was so much development going on to and, and I know that I do remember those times, there were interest only loans that were real popular. And people were, you know, able to, you know, sort of see do things maybe a little differently than they are today. But you know, how important were like for a new agent like yourself, how important by using grit, were things like open houses Was that was that important for you as an agent who maybe didn’t have listings? But sort of, you know, I don’t know how popular that was back then for new agents to say to a more exist, more experienced agents. Hey, can I come to open houses for you?
Joe Zimmerman 10:55 Yeah, I mean, DJs, a great question. And I appreciate it. And I did open houses and realized early on, I did not like them. So now fast forward through some years, I’ve had some coaches in my career and stuff like that, and who have basically said to me, Hey, do what you want to do, right? Like build, build the business that you want to bid build, buy stuff that you will absolutely do? Well, I realized early on that I was not going to be doing open houses, right. So I left but I did leverage other agents that I worked with, you know, at the brokerage I worked with, to get opportunity to go out there and show places, right and build relationships with people. So I educated myself, but really what I what I did at a high level was just contact people, right, which we now know is, you know, kind of categorize in my world is the 33 touch with Gary Keller, you know, the real estate agent book. But I literally came up and grew up in, in, in a culture that my parents taught me, I’ve just, it’s a contact sport, no matter what you’re doing, as far as sales is concerned, it’s a contact sport. So just talk to people, right, and talk about an opportunity for them.
D.J. Paris 12:01 Yeah, I mean, it’s funny, that probably is. It’s funny, I have a personal trainer. And I asked, I asked her, I asked her recently, I’ve been with her for a few years. And, and I said, boy, what’s I said, you know, it’s funny, people are always looking for like the fountain of youth. And, and, you know, maybe there are some some particular lifestyle habits that will prolong people’s lives, obviously, diet, exercise, various things to prove happiness, and etc. And she goes, you know, what the real fountain of youth as she goes, it’s a strength training. And she goes, it’s, you know, that’s actually, you know, sort of what science has said, is one of the most beneficial ways to sort of slow down the aging process. And, and, you know, I wish it was something that was took a lot less effort. But But I think contacting people is, is maybe that same thing for real estate agents success, and it really is about your sphere of influence. And like, I’m a huge, huge fan of Gary Keller, and, of course, you are to your work work at his company. But Gary Keller, of course, with the Millionaire Real Estate Agent, which is, I haven’t found anything better written about how to be successful. And I know it was recently updated. But, but yeah, the 33 touches is everything, right? It’s making sure everybody you know, doesn’t forget what you do, and why they should contact you. So I’m curious, too, because I know that there’s a lot of our listeners who think, well, I don’t, yeah, I know, I should be talking to my sphere, and just, you know, you’ve mentioned presenting them with an opportunity. If you don’t mind, you know, and I don’t want you to share, you know, too much of of, you know, your, your team’s sort of secret sauce, but when you when you are talking about an opportunity, you know, what, what are some of the things that you mentioned, to to your contacts,
Joe Zimmerman 13:45 ya know, in DJ were myself and my team are open book and transparent, you know, so we will, we will share everything that we can because we believe that with each you get the industry better together, right? And, and, you know, not not become competitors, right? And just go around. So, you know, it’s to that point, what do we do? Well, you know, now in the world of social media, right, and LinkedIn and, and Facebook and all that people typically know what you do, right? And that’s a fair statement to say, right? So what what our strategy now is, is really building a community of like minded people. And we do that through events, okay. And I want to define events for you and events, your call to action. It’s not necessarily a lot of times you hear events and you think, Oh, I gotta throw a party or I gotta do something that’s gonna cost money. That is part of it. But it’s also a call to action thing, right? You know, something call to action to bring value to your clients to build a community of like, like minded people. So at the end of the day, right, it’s easy to call people up or text people in today’s world or whatever your preferred method of communication is, and just say, hey, DJ is Joe Zimmerman call I just wanted to let you know about an event that we’re having would love to invite you and see if you and your family will be welcome to come you know, are welcomed. However, that is right. If so, at the end of the day, we’re not doing the, you know, never too busy for your referrals or anything like that. We’re really just building a community of like minded people who want to help support each other.
D.J. Paris 15:11 Yeah, I love all of that. And I will just say, This is my own personal preference. And there’s of course, no right or wrong answer this, but please don’t do the I’m never too busy for your referrals thing that is that has been played out 3040 years ago. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to read it say something different. But But I think what Joe said is great. So I asked Joe, just to recap this question, you know, what, are you reaching out to people? What’s the opportunity and just said, Well, I create an event with an opportunity, I invite, it gives me a perfect reason to reach out and say, Oh, by the way, I’m posting this thing if you want to show up great. Now, I suspect with you know, I don’t know are you guys going back to doing in person? Are you still staying virtual for now?
Joe Zimmerman 15:52 You know, the day we’re doing a hybrid of both? Right? You know, sometimes it’s, Hey, come by and pick up, you know, a bottle of wine from us. Or sometimes it’s, Hey, support this local charity like paws in Chicago. We just didn’t, yeah, where we supported paws in Chicago, it was outside, right. But one of the better ones that we did DJ, which I would encourage everyone to do was last year because you couldn’t visit Santa. Right? We’d like to send it to them via zoom. Right? So we have really, yeah, absolutely. Right. We had we sent it out and sent ahead had timeslots registered zoom was Santa. Right. So we have prior to Santa had the playa Santa background, we have probably 150 families registered for
D.J. Paris 16:32 this. Why? I’ve never heard of anybody having done that it is seems like such a no brainer. And wow, what is what uh, so I love this too, because this isn’t necessarily a, you know, hey, and again, in no way am I suggesting that having events that are like first time homebuyer webinars or not, or seminars are not a good idea. Those are great ideas. But I love the fact that you’re having other types of events, social events, fun events, volunteer events, like with pause, the Santa thing is amazing. And what a great, so basically, you’re just providing value to people.
Joe Zimmerman 17:12 Yeah, just letting them really, you know, in today’s world, people want to know who you are, right? They want to know what you stand for and who you are. Obviously, now being in the real estate career for 20 years, I you know, as you said, it’s the reputation is yeah, I could sell a home, right? I could find a home for someone. But at the end of the day, people want to feel good about what you stand for and who you are. So having these events is, you know, is something that we do at a high level and do well to let them know who we are that we care about them.
D.J. Paris 17:41 Right. Sure. And being passionate, like pauses is such a great example of a a charitable organization that it I think they’re nationwide, I believe, but certainly they have a huge presence here in Chicago. And they’re, you know, they’re basically an animal shelter adoption center. And, you know, it’s funny, I’ve always thought volunteer efforts really don’t get utilized enough by real estate agents as an event. Because I think most people are very busy in their lives, especially if they have families and children. And maybe they have this aspiration to volunteer more, but they’re probably busy, they’re working a job, they’re also doing home stuff, and you know, everything else that is included and just living a life. And sometimes volunteer stuff doesn’t always make the top of that list. And so here you are giving them an opportunity to fulfill maybe even that part of them that doesn’t always get to be able to do that. So they’re gonna feel good about themselves, they’re gonna feel good about you also for introducing them to it and who doesn’t like animals, right? So like not to say that that was a calculated thing. I’m sure you’re super passionate about paws. I have I adopted a pet from actually from anti cruelty not paws. But But, but I’m a big believer in that stuff, too. But again, people just love animals and they love to, to want to give back. And so it’s really such a smart, smart thing to offer. Because it gives people a reason to feel good about themselves. And at the same time go, Hey, Joe put this really cool event together. So I love that I absolutely love that
Joe Zimmerman 19:09 opportunity, right? It’s an opportunity to feel good about yourself, right to go out and go get weather, no matter what it is. It’s some sort of opportunity to do something. Right.
D.J. Paris 19:18 Totally. I’d like to talk I know you are very extremely passionate about mindset. We talk about this a lot on the show it comes up a lot but I think it can never be talked about too much until are told my audience tells me no more mindset stuff because your five years they just asked for more and more discussion on mindset our audience they love it. So I’m just curious on on what that means to you and how you think about, you know, getting yourself in the right headspace to not only lead your own business, but you’ve got a team to lead you’ve got a lot of responsible you’ve got a family to take care of as well and children. So let’s talk about mindset and sort of what how you think about it.
Joe Zimmerman 19:57 I mean, honestly dj, i I couldn’t be more passionate about mindset, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, my belief and our belief, with a lot of people that we surround ourselves around is, you know, 90%, of center of success is mindset, right? And I’ve been passionate about around the Millionaire Real Estate Agent book, I referenced it already once. And at the end of the day, the first half of that book is about mindset. Right? And it’s about you need to think it first, right? You need to think it and believe it before you start to implement it. Because at the end of the day, if you don’t think it and believe it, you’re, you’re, you’re not going to succeed, period. Right? So it’s the same thing with so much, it’s just the passion around that around with also raising children. Right, that, you know, just talking to them about what their mindset needs to be, you know, in removing those limited beliefs from their life of, oh, I can’t do that or no, and, you know, and really kind of, you know, leading with Yes, and how instead of No, because, right, you know, and really, you know, the plans, the plans, and the strategies can always be there, somebody has already done this before you, right, whether it’s in real estate, building, a business, parenting, whatever it is investing, somebody has already done it, the plans are there. But the first domino is believing that you can do it, right. And if you don’t believe that, you can do it, you’re done. You’re toast, right? So so having that mindset,
D.J. Paris 21:21 or even just, you know, if you’re brand new to the industry, and you’re like, Well, I don’t really have any confidence, because I don’t know enough to be confident, I would say, if that’s where you are, maybe just have the belief that you can become competent, that you can learn this stuff, that thankfully, success does leave clues, and there are boy just almost an infinite amount of resources these days for successful agents, including just listening to this podcast, but certainly, there’s a million books and YouTube videos you can watch about, about sort of the skill set and just, you know, if you don’t work at an office, where there’s training or support, you know, it’s amazing, now you can actually get that. So I, I almost think you’re so right is just believing that either you have the skills already to do it, or that you can get develop the skills to be able to do it. And, and thankfully, we’re in an industry where there’s so many members, so many real estate agents that there’s just so much material out there to learn from.
Joe Zimmerman 22:19 Yeah, no, absolutely, you’re, you’re spot on what you say there. And like I said, you know, be strategic as far as how you’re going to think and what your mindset is, and then again, just just emulate somebody’s business that you want, is what I would suggest to, you know, to to others, right, there are the people that are out there that produce big numbers with big teams, you know, and, you know, they might, that might be their life by design that they want, I have chosen over my career that, you know, time is more important to me now than money, right? You know, at the end of the day, I’ve I’ve made some investments and done some things that you know, and have some some income coming in that I have funded the life that I want with some of these investments in time with my family, and the people I care for, and my team is more important. So that was a mindset shift for me. Right, you know, so again, that’s, that’s the beauty of mindset of of choose it, and then go for it.
D.J. Paris 23:15 Yeah, it’s it. Boy, you said a lot there. This idea of emulating success is it’s so interesting, I asked a lot of times are the top producers that are on our show, how often do newly licensed agents or agents that maybe they aren’t even newly licensed, but just you know, agents who are struggling or looking to sort of get that, that next level of business, how often they’re reaching out to these because we only interview top 1% agents from all over the country. And they and almost exclusively, they say, you know, I don’t get that many requests from other agents that say, Hey, can I take you out for a quick cup of coffee and learn a little bit about what you do? Or can I just sit in your office while you’re doing some stuff? It’s it’s, it’s surprising. And I’m not suggesting every one of our listeners immediately message Joe to take his time, because we know how important time is for him. But it is something that that I’m sure you’d recommend to agents is find somebody that that you admire and reach out. And I bet you’d be shocked how many people say, Sure, I’ll give you a little bit of time.
Joe Zimmerman 24:18 Absolutely. DJ 100%. I mean, that’s probably the one thing that I would like everyone to hear on this right is find, find the person that’s business you want or life you want to emulate, and then reach out to them. Right? Because at the end of the day, if you don’t hear their story, or hear how they approached it or their failures, right, you know, as long as well as their successes, you’re just assuming that how it went. And we all know what happens when you assume right? So at the end of the day, you know, you need to hear it from them, you know, and they will be willing for the most part. They’re they’re going to be willing because they don’t want you to have the same struggles that they had. They’re gonna be willing to share all of their six test says all their failures with you.
D.J. Paris 25:02 And they also might overtime say, Hey, I have a team, I have a group. You know, I’d love to talk to you about about joining forces. So I know that there’s possibly some even aside from all the skills you’ll learn, and the habits, you’ll learn, might have some business opportunities there as well. So don’t be shy reach out to these top agents. When we first started the show, the show is all about talking to top producers. And we just reached out to a bunch and eventually some people said, yeah, and now we don’t really have to do that. But but it is something that we were shining, and we were nobody, and nobody knew us. And we just said, Hey, can we have you know, on the show? And would you be willing to tell, you know, our non existent audience at the time, all about your business, and they said, Sure, and I don’t think I don’t know that we ever got turned down maybe once or twice, but hundreds and hundreds of episodes later, it’s, it’s it’s pretty, pretty amazing that most top producers, like yourself are so generous and willing to share a little bit of their knowledge with other agents. And I also know, disruption is is your is very interesting to you, as well. And we hear about the real estate industry being disrupted. I suspect since the beginning of your career, even, although maybe that word wasn’t used as much. But really, there’s been a huge evolution in technology since he started and to where we are today. And there’s new players in the space all the time. Some make it some don’t. Some are profitable, some aren’t. But it really has changed the way the real estate agent or broker here in Illinois, we call them all brokers, but how they interact with clients and what their responsibilities are, you know, probably when you started, I imagine the MLS wasn’t easily available to people outside of this industry. It was really behind lock and key, the Zillow is of the world hadn’t really become a thing yet. And so it wasn’t as easy to find the inventory if you were not working with an agent. Now, of course, anyone can get to the MLS without without an agent. But let’s talk about about disruptors and what that means to you and how you found that impacting your business?
Joe Zimmerman 27:09 Well, the reason DJ, thank you for asking me that, because the reason I’m so passionate about it is this this business This industry has been. So such a such a blessing for me and my family. Right. So I’m passionate that I that I do what I can to keep the agent as the fiduciary and keep the agent in the center of the transaction. Now, you know, in my opinion, this, the fundamentals are always going to win. Right. I’m a big, I’m a big reader of John Wooten. And, you know, oh, sure, right, you know, the fundamentals are always going to win. So master the fundamentals is what I want people to hear. And by doing that, it’s it’s time on task over time with these fundamentals, right. So you know, to go out and play in the NBA and play on an all star game, and you can’t dribble you right? You’re not going to you’re not going to do very well. Right. So at the end of the day, master that but when we talk about disruption, that you’ll agree with me DJ, I mean, there’s it’s complete chaos out there, right? I don’t know if we’d chaos. I don’t know if the consumer knows who to you know, go to or trust anything anymore. Right. So, but the reason that I see what’s what’s going on, and why I’m so passionate about it is because we can remain as a fiduciary if we’re if we all do it on a united front, right. And my suggestion is that we master the fundamentals of running a business, we don’t get attracted to those shiny objects. We use technology to enhance the experience, but we remain the judiciary in the center of the transaction, if that makes sense.
D.J. Paris 28:39 It does. I’d like to hear a little bit more about what you see the role of the agent as today, and maybe how that shifted a little I think you’re right and, and I’m a huge coach. I don’t I know nothing about sports, truthfully. But I know who coach John Wooden was and he was the UCLA coach. And he basically was the winningest coach in NCAA history. I don’t know if that’s changed, but I think he won seven NCAA championships in a row or something like that. And then I think he won like nine over 13 years or whatever, something that’s never been replicated and he was only a fundamentals guy. In fact, one of my favorite John Wooden sort of stories was I heard him interviewed once and they said you really never look at the scoreboard so you talked about shiny objects, you know, maybe getting that million dollar listing or, or whatever that that just amazing client that’s going to take your business to the next level. I thought that way when when we partnered with Facebook and Zillow to be come on our show. I thought, oh my gosh, this is the shiny object. This is going to take my podcast and I love both Facebook and Zillow. I’m in no way suggesting that they weren’t great partners. They are but did not take my take my podcast to the next level. But Coach John Wooden said I never looked at the scoreboard. And so I went okay, he looks at the scoreboard and he was like No, I legitimately never look at the scoreboard because it doesn’t matter. He said I don’t care if we win or Lose. Because if you know he would tell his players if you just, if you just exercise the fundamentals, you’ll walk off the court. And you’ll know if you if you tried your hardest, if you tried your hardest, you’re going to feel good no matter what happens to the scoreboard. And if you if even if you do win, but you didn’t try your hardest, you’re not going to feel good. So I’m such a big fan of that. I apologize for going on a little, little tear there. But I’m such a big fan of John Wooden. So anyway, but yeah, let’s talk about the the role of the agent, you know, how is it shifted? And and how is technology made part of the agent, you know, sort of responsibilities easier? Even?
Joe Zimmerman 30:36 Yeah, I mean, so, again, my my coaching and my training has always been, hey, the business has always been agent led and technology enhanced. Yeah, that has now shifted where it’s going to be now it’s now going to be technology led and Agent enhance. So at the end of the day, that experience that needs to be given to the to the consumer has never been more heightened than it is right now. Right? People want to feel good. They want to feel communicated to right. So the disruption, I personally think that you have all of the focus on the technology disruption. And at the end of the day, really the internal agent is really disrupting the industry as well with with teams and expansion. Right? Yeah, you know, so, you know, at the end of the day, like I encourage everyone to go at this at your you know, if you want to do it by yourself or build your own team. And you should also consider joining a team as well, because the service that these teams are providing now to the to the consumer is at the highest level, right. And in, you know, in, there’s an expectation now from the consumer, that there’s an instant response. And there’s a great experience and things. So using technology as that tool, right to help it’s to help the people and the systems and the tools, right as any business model people systems tools, using the technology as the tool to help communicate better is important, but giving that experience and my opinion is is the disruption that is happening and needs to happen. Right? And we are we are giving that in now. The real estate industry is just upping their game, right?
D.J. Paris 32:12 Yes, I agree. And I’m you know, I just went through a buying process myself. And even though I’m in the industry, and we have what 800 Realtors here at our own firm, and the firm you’re at there was more than that here in the Chicagoland area. And I thought, Oh, I won’t go through the emotional ups and downs of the buying process. I had been through it before I thought oh, I not only have I been through this before I’m in the industry, this is not going to be emotionally challenging for me. And it was, and I was freaking out the whole time during the process from start to finish, I was completely stressed. I was you know, going through that emotional roller coaster of, you know, well, they want this and we want this and just, you know, oh, is this gonna fall apart? Can I afford it, etc. And I really relied upon my boss who helped helped me through it to really just talk me off the ledge a bunch. And I realized, you know, the average consumer I mean, I’m I’m a little high strung, but I’m not, I don’t think I worry more than the average person. But I said, if I’m in this industry, and I’m freaking out about a purchase, and it isn’t even my first purchase, this has got to be something that I don’t think technology has solved for yet the sort of emotional intelligence that an agent can bring to sort of keeping their client, you know, the user said, feeling it at least if not good neutral, or at least if they’re feeling negative, they are there to hear that and help them and empathize and tell them you know, what is needed to so that they can relax a bit. And that’s something that I think, you know, if technology ever figures that out, I think we’re all in trouble one day, but But it’s probably not going to figure it out because it is a human to human sort of thing, empathy, sympathy connection. And just problem solving, you know, is really a still a face to face or human to human interaction. So I’m curious and how important that is for your team when you talked about, you know, the role of the agent shifting a bit. And technology is kind of leading the way but I don’t know if technology can can can solve for that yet.
Joe Zimmerman 34:11 No, I agree with that. There’s nothing like communication. Right? You know, so what’s your communication strategy? Right? So, you know, in my opinion, our team goes to, hey, what are the what are the systems that need to be that need to be running right for the people to implement? And then the tools, right people systems and tools, but when you ask about our team, it’s what is the communication system? Right? Because at the end of the day, like if you’re, if you’re a top producing team, and you’re holding, you know, 50 to 150 listings at a time, you know, some of these teams are now well, the one clients waking up that it’s only their home, right? Yeah, they don’t care about the other. They don’t care about honor. And 149 Right, they’re waking up. So what is the communication system so that these people are at ease all the time, right, you know, and you you mentioned something DJ And I’m gonna I’m gonna go back to it. So think about that anxiety, right? Have that in your in the industry, right? Yeah, at the end of the day, I, myself, my wife and I purchased a home a year ago actually, it was about a year exactly a year ago, couple days ago. And my sister in law, who’s a great real estate agent is on our team. She was our agent, like, I wasn’t, I was I was not dealing with and I couldn’t deal with it. I was like, No, this is this is, you know, this is on her. So, you know, a real a top producing real estate agent hired a real estate agent to buy to buy the home. So well,
D.J. Paris 35:35 all professional athletes have coaches, right. So it makes perfect sense, I did the same thing I was, was I technically, I think I was technically the agent on my deal. But really, my boss did everything because I said, I don’t know what I’m too emotional about this. And I also, I’m not thinking clearly and I don’t want to they sort of they say like a lawyer who represents himself as a fool for a client or something. And that’s not to say that people can’t do their own transactions, but but just the idea that it can be that stressful and emotional to have, you know, an objective third party come in and help. Again, that’s not something technology could solve or but But what use are not yet at least, and hopefully never. But what I what I what I did zero in on is something that that you said, that I think is so important for agents to hear, which is having a communication strat, like, most people don’t have a well defined communication policy or, or platform, like you were saying 33 touches, right, that’s a communication problem, strategy and process, and it’s difficult to implement that. But at least you know, that every single person in your sphere is going to get touched that, you know, whatever your, you know, team’s policy is, but they, they already know that, you know, before they’re even a client, they’re never going to forget me, they might maybe they’ll might choose one day not to use me, but they’re not going to forget about me because they’re gonna get touched by me all of these different ways. And, and I think most of our audience, you know, could if you don’t already have some sort of communication, strategy, or policy and Millionaire Real Estate Agent gives you a great example of how to set one up. That is something to consider for 2022 is, you know, don’t leave it up for chance that the people in your spirit is going to instantly use you just because you’re their friend, they might forget that you’re a realtor, or they might just out of sight out of mind. And having a communication strategy, whether it’s an existing client, I’m sorry to monopolize this, but I just was reminded of a top producer and in Chicago, I can’t remember exactly who it was. But it was somebody within like the top 10 or 15 producers and all of the Chicagoland area out of about 44,000 realtors, and I asked her, What’s the secret to communication? And she said, I’m embarrassed to say that she says, but I call every one of my clients every week and give them an update. And I said, okay, and and what else and she goes, that’s pretty much it. And I said, That’s it. And she goes, Well, I do other things, too. But she goes, that’s the one thing I do that most Realtors won’t even do is call my client every week and say, here’s what’s going on. So I just was reminded of
Joe Zimmerman 38:12 the day Think, think about think about what we’ve covered here, right? It’s like we’re talking about the workout in your trainer, right? You know, going back to that it’s like, Hey, pick something and do it right in the problem with the entrepreneurial real estate agent sometime is we think that we’re going to do it all and all at once. And we don’t do one thing and do it. So you work out as your strategy. Right with your right, this agent says, Hey, ya know, this is my system, I call them once a week. And that’s it. Well, that works. So you know, so don’t reinvent the wheel, keep doing that, right? If your trainer said to you, Hey, you want to lose some weight, you got to go run five miles a day, and you’re not a runner, you’re not going to do it. Right? So but they’re building a strategy for you that you’re going to do.
D.J. Paris 39:00 And I think too, in business, as you’ve done with building a group and building a team, which is so important, not that everyone has to do that. Of course, not everyone does. But think about it from a customer perspective. If if all of a sudden I’m going to hire Joe and get access to the resources that Joe’s team provides which Joe has a large team and they all have different skills. And Joe’s you know, going to you know, charge a particular fee for his services and say, Oh, by the way, you get access to my entire team versus just the solo practitioner. And that’s not to say that you can’t be a successful solo practitioner of course you can. Lots of people are but this idea of leveraging and what Joe said is, you know, hey, maybe you’re not good at something Well, maybe you can partner up with somebody who is good at that other thing that you just aren’t you just don’t want to do or you’re not good at or you don’t care about but you know should get done that fundamental of you know, I should be at open houses, you know, and and I’m gonna hire someone else to help do all That was or to partner with me, and maybe they’re not good at things that I am good at. So I do love this idea of, of working together and, and, and but at what point in your career did you find that it was time to start a team? I’m just curious. Yeah,
Joe Zimmerman 40:13 no, I appreciate that question, TJ. Because at my previous brokerage, I did a lot of development sales, right. Yeah. And I was juggling development, sales and outside brokerage at the same time. So again, by default, I had to just build a team before I even knew there was a strategy out there, or it was going to become a thing. Right? You know, right. I just, I had to find the leverage right away, because there weren’t, there wasn’t enough time in the day, right? You know, so, um, so you know, I now coach and know, the proven strategies a win the build the team, and I’ll get to that in a second. But I just find a fault just had to say, Hey, I needed to, I need help, right? I need leverage, I need somebody to take these buyers out, things like that. And I just did it. So I did that early on. And it was a mess. And it was chaos, because I wasn’t following a plan. So I learned a lot. But at the end of the day, when when I got when I when I walked into an environment, where it taught the fundamentals of how to build a team, and what the actual data was, and people weren’t pontificating their opinion, you know, follow the plan, right. And I follow the plan. And I would tell any realtor right now that leverage is key. And depending on your market, and where you’re at, you can do zero to about 30, maybe 36 homes a year with 36 Homes is a lot by yourself, you know, three homes a month, but when you’re tracking to do 24 to 30 homes a month, you need to start looking for leverage right away.
D.J. Paris 41:39 Yeah. And, yeah. And so it is it is one of those things where we’re now and think of it too, for our listeners on just how well that looks in a listing presentation, that you’re basically you mean, maybe you can even charge more if you have a team because you can say, well, I’m we’re have more mouths to feed here. And we’re offering more services that the individual practitioner, you know, maybe just can’t do, because we’ve sort of scaled this up. But yeah, having having people to leverage, you know, you also said something that I just was curious, this is a completely sort of off not off topic, per se, but off the the conversation we’re having. I’m just curious if you had a general thought you talked about working with developments. And that is a lot of our listeners dream situation is to work with developers, of course, every realtor wants to get chosen, maybe not every realtor, but a lot of them want to get chosen to be to represent certain projects. Do you have any suggestions about somebody who goes, you know, I’ve never really done that. But I would love to learn sort of how to develop those relationships.
Joe Zimmerman 42:47 Yeah, I mean, so I know, I sound like a broken record, and there’s no sexiness, DJ. But there’s no difference than staying in touch with your it’s building relationship. There’s no difference than staying in touch with your sphere. If this is a if this person just develops more homes than selling one, it’s really it’s the same strategy as far as forming the relationship with them. Now, there’s a second step to that, right, you know, and that you have to educate yourself on how to how to help market a building or a development and things like that, and how to price it out and all that jazz. But again, go find somebody who’s done it and ask them for their advice, you know, ask them to help you ask them for you know, you can do a referral fee from them, or some sort or partner up with them, which you said earlier, but the beginning of your question is, pick who you want to be in business with, and then go talk to them and build a community with them. Right? That’s, that’s again, there’s no no sexiness, it’s just the fundamentals.
D.J. Paris 43:46 Well, I think I almost think that’s a great place to end because it is that is really the the lesson of we’ve done cash 300 And whatever episodes of the show now, and that is that is always been a consistent message. And I think it’s a good one for people to hear. And, and yeah, maybe it isn’t sexy, but you know, when I go workout at the gym, and my trainer has me do push ups. That’s not sexy, either. But it’s, it’s a heck of a good idea. And so, you know, I think fundamentals are what win the game most of the time, sometimes you get lucky. But most people I don’t think can sustain luck over too long of a period. But certainly, fundamentals can get you through and mindset being one of those fundamentals. So I think what a perfect message to end on. I do want to mention for any of our listeners, a couple of opportunities for you with Joe and his team. If you are an agent here in the Chicagoland area and maybe you’re not getting the assistance you need from from your company or you just want to see what other opportunities are out there. Joe and his team would love the opportunity to chat with you. They are a top top top producing team here in the Chicagoland area so you can always find them at Joe’s and you can reach out to them via Joe’s website. which is the z pg.com. And also, if you’re an agent from outside of Chicago, of course, we have agents from all over the country and be in other countries. And if you do have clients moving to the Chicagoland area or you have referrals that that you are looking for a good Chicago agent to work with. Well, yeah, check out the Zimmerman group again, the zpg.com. Joe is here, I can vouch not that Joe needs me to vouch for him. But here in the Chicagoland area, Joe and his team are very incredibly well respected, and you probably won’t be in any better hands. So definitely reach out to him. And if there’s any buyers and sellers out there that also just want to work with a top producing team, or renters or developers reach out to the Zimmerman group at the z pg.com. All their contact information is there. Well, Joe, thank you so much for being on our show. I know you were on when I first started the show, believe it or not, four or five years ago, you were on my list of like people to introduce our people to get on the show. And I’m glad we were able to grab a few minutes of your time. So thank you for being on the show. And every one of your messages, I think will resonate with our audience because well, clearly it’s worked for you. And it seems to be a common sense approach. So for on behalf of the audience who want to thank Joe, and and for for coming on. And I know how much free time Joe has and isn’t much and so I appreciate you jumping on for for some time with us. And also on behalf of Joe and myself. We want to thank our listeners and our viewers for continuing to support our show. In addition to checking out Joe’s website, definitely check out ours as well, we have all of our episodes are streamed right from our browser if you go to keeping it real pod.com You can also subscribe to our show with any podcast app that you might be using, including iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, you know all the different places to listen to podcasts. So please tell a friend as well about the show. Think of one other agent that you know that could benefit from hearing from this great conversation with Joe and send them a link to this episode. We would appreciate it we’ll help continue to keep our show running. So Joe, thank you so much for being on the on the podcast. It really was about four years that I wanted to get you on here. So I’m so grateful that we finally did. And we thank you and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks,
Joe Zimmerman 47:21 Jay. Appreciate it very much.
Best Practices For Real Estate Agent Signs • Steve Siciliano & Darin Fyffe
Dec 02, 2021
Steve Siciliano and Darin Fyffe from Lowen Sign talk about their respective careers and their beginning of their joint business. Darin discusses what agents need to take into consideration before ordering signs. Next, Steve and Darin talk about the trends in design of signs and best practices around installation. Steve and Darin also discuss the the importance of updating the status of the home on the sign. Last, they present what services Lowen offers (Loyal Signs in Chicago) to their clients.
To get more information on the services Lowen Sign offers, please visit their website by clicking here.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Go Go Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee Oh gee, oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide, and host through the show. And as we’re getting ready to wrap up 2021, we have a great interview with for you here today with Darren Fife and Steve siliciano. From Lowen signs, they’re going to be talking about best practices that top producers use with respect to their signage. So I thought that would be a great conversation. And it was but before we get to that conversation, just a couple of quick reminders as we round out the year, please, the best way you can help us is by telling a friend about our podcast. Think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers and send them a link to keeping it real best way you can do that is by sending them to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up any podcast app and search for keeping it real, hit that subscribe button. And for all of you that are listening right now on an Apple device via the podcast app, the Apple podcast app, we would really appreciate it if you would go and leave us a review that helps us helps us get more visibility and more listeners and more subscribers. But as always, thank you for continuing to support our show and now on to our interview with low insights.
All right, today on the show we have Steve siliciano and Darren might from Lowen signs and also from the loyal signs now. I’m going to introduce both Steve and Darren but we’ll start with Steve Now Steve scileanna has been born and he was born in Chicagoland his entire life, graduated from Eastern Illinois. He has a culinary certificate from ch IC. He’s been a real estate broker and property manager for 25 years before acquiring a small sign installation company in February of 2019. In December of 2019, he partnered up with low incorporation to develop a second sign installation company and established loyal real estate sign installers and loyal has realized exponential growth in the short time despite the pandemic. He’s very, very excited to continue growing that business. He likes to cook, play baseball, or basketball rather. And he’s also a supporter of any Chicago sports team. And he wanted us to say including Arlington Heights bears and for those sports fans out there, especially here in Chicago, we know that that is a big ongoing debate as are the bears moving to the suburbs, which is actually I was born in Arlington Heights, but I know virtually nothing about it, unfortunately. Sort of the worst person to ask about that. But anyway, Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Siciliano 3:36 Welcome. Thank you, DJ.
D.J. Paris 3:38 I’m really excited. Go ahead and just do
Steve Siciliano 3:40 just for the record that the last name is Siciliana Oh, it’s a little, little
D.J. Paris 3:44 silly. I know. I said scileanna. Siciliana. My apologies. Yeah. Are we just could rename your scileanna But yeah, Siciliana is is much cooler. And I imagine so is your family from Sicily? Is that where Siciliana comes from?
Steve Siciliano 4:00 Well, I’m told no, we’re from Naples. But I do kid my elders a little bit about that. There has to be some sort of crossover somewhere there. Since our name kind of says it all.
D.J. Paris 4:11 Well, Naples is amazing as well unless we’re talking about Naples, Florida, which is awesome, too in a different way. We’re talking about Naples Of course it Italy. All right, and let’s talk let’s introduce Darren as well. Darren is from Darren Fife is from a small town he’s from it’s Hoisington. Kansas. Is that correct? Darren? That is correct. Hoisington Tech’s sorry, Kansas. He also graduated from Kansas State University. He has been a member of the loan signing company team for 11 years. He started out as a national sales rep worked all the way up to Vice President of Sales and Marketing. He oversees the entire sales and marketing staff of low and signs. He’s a huge fan of Kansas State Wildcats sports and the St. Louis Cardinals. I used to live in St. Louis. I can appreciate that passion. He is very passionate about his job and proud of what lowland science does and how they do it. Now please visit low and signs.com to learn what they can offer for all of your signage your physical marketing material needs. But if you’re in the local Chicagoland market, they the local version of low n is actually called loyal sign so you can visit loyal signs.com If you’re outside of Chicago, just go straight to low in signs and low in his l o w, en, and loyal signs. If you are here locally in the Chicagoland area. Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for being on. And by the way, we should mention these are one of our sponsors, we love our sponsors. And we asked, we asked the guys here from Lowen and loyal to come on today, because they actually had a really good idea. And at first, I would have never thought of this idea. And I’m so grateful that they did. And the idea was let’s talk about signs. I’ve never had a conversation in the four or five years we’ve been doing this podcast we’ve done 300 And I don’t know 15 episodes at this point. We’ve never talked about signage. So I am so glad that that we’re have you guys on so let’s let’s before we get to, to you know what low and and loyal does. Let’s first talk about you guys and how you got into this business. Steve, you’ve been a Chicagoland broker, you’re very well known here in Chicago, tell us about how you got into the business 25 years ago, and sort of, you know how that career trajectory has has has happened?
Steve Siciliano 6:28 Well, I guess in the real estate business is about as random jumping from real estate to sign installation as it was from, from culinary school to real estate back in the day, I actually have an engineering degree. So I worked in the manufacturing sector for the first 10 years of my life after college, and then broke off and did some work in the restaurants for a couple of years, before coming across an opportunity to work in the real estate business and picked up some management jobs at first and then added the license later and, and built a business, you know, on my own ever since and it seemed to work was a very enjoyable job. I like being out with people. I really liked the construction portion of it and building homes and building condos at a time and putting people in places that that make them happy. And it’s usually a very important purchase for most people and one of the largest ones. So they’re pretty excited when it comes through. Okay. 25 years later I, I came across this small sign business, that installation business, I should say, that was literally servicing my office and a couple of offices in the local area around the Grange, and the gentleman and his wife who had been doing it for 1518 years, were going to retire. So long story short, you know, I talked to him about for the last few years of his of his business life anyway, and told him, you know, we’re going to sell this thing for you, I’ll help them, you know, get some value on it, put them in touch with our people. Well, turns out, I ended up buying it and was going to manage it from a side standpoint. And while my son who was just starting college was going to be my installer. So that worked out great for about nine months. We quickly modernized it and put things online and developed a smartphone app with a software company. And that was a big hit. And that just grew very quickly. And then in about what was it Darren September of that same year? A year? Yes.
So I run across Darren and his company, I actually reached out to him because I knew of Lowen as a realtor because I always bought my science from them. Because their quality is excellent and their shipping is quick. And I started by saying I want to be your preferred installer, meaning I wanted to you know, tap into their, their resources, their clients, I should say, when they were looking for installers and one thing led to another they saw an opportunity to to establish a bigger, I guess a bigger company and a bigger kickback from from generating sign business as well as installation business for the new division. And we progressed the partnership to to employment and it’s been really great ever since I kind of put brokerage as an agent, I should say kind of on the back burner and this thing has become bigger and bigger. By the month we started out. When I first started out we were doing about 80 installs a month. And now we can do almost 100 a day.
D.J. Paris 9:38 Unbelievable. That is incredible. Congratulations on the success of the company. It is an incredibly competitive business. And often you know it’s one of those things that I think agents, you know, they get assigned company and then they sort of forget that there’s other side companies that might be able to do things better or or with, you know, sort of a more cutting edge design or faster. And so I think this is a great opportunity just for all of our listeners to say, hey, you know, I’ve been using probably the same sign company for some time. And, and if it’s not low end, like, let’s check out what Lowen does as well. Darren, I’d love to hear about how you got into into this business.
Darin Fyffe 10:21 Yeah, mine’s not as exciting as Steve’s. But yeah, I, as you mentioned earlier, I graduated from Kansas State University. And my first job was actually in commercial banking in Kansas City and lived there for about five years, met my wife, we got married. And she is actually, we didn’t know this. But before we met, but she’s from the same area in Kansas that I’m from, she grew up on a farm. And after we got married, we wanted to be closer to family. So we started poking around the Wichita area, to try to find employment there. And I found Lowen. And they are a huge company. In central Kansas, I mean, we employ over 300 people there, and do all kinds of printing from from Fleet graphics, to real estate signage. So, you know, went in for an interview, got the job, and again, as you mentioned, started off at the ground level, and was driving all over the place, spent a lot of time at Texas, selling down there and, and just kept working my way up the ladder. And now I’m the Vice President of Sales and Marketing and, and yeah, managers manage a lot of people and and I love it. It’s awesome. It’s a great company. Couldn’t be happier. So
D.J. Paris 11:45 thanks, we’re glad to have you guys. You guys have been great supporters of our show, which, which we appreciate. And I think this will be such a fun conversation, because again, I’ve not really had it before. And you know, it’s funny, I think, oftentimes, realtors don’t realize or maybe don’t put enough thought into the aesthetics of their signage, and how most signs, you know, could be easily ignored. And it’s a real opportunity for an agent to get a bill creative. I’ve noticed there are some firms in the last few years that have started doing some cooler, more modern designs. I know you guys have a lot of that. But I’d really love to tell our talk to our audience about any trends that you’re seeing from agents that you think are working really well. You know, any sort of do’s and don’ts and just curious to get some best practice advice for for people think when they want to think about signage?
Darin Fyffe 12:45 Yeah, I think the, there’s, there’s a lot of different angles, I can take your DJ. Sure. But I think the biggest thing that people need to realize now is with the advancement of technology, there’s a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with signage. You know, you could you could do cut to shape stuff. So, you know, for example, we do, we do these huge heart shaped signs for this company up in the Dakotas. Really cool signs, I mean, so yeah, we can, there’s all day and with the printing technology, I mean, you can you can get as creative as you want. You know, we can print faces, and it basically anything animals, whatever you want us to print on your signage we can do. So so there’s that aspect, but I think most importantly, is depending on where you’re at, in the United States, whatever region you’re in. So like, for example, if you’re down in Florida, you know, on the coast, there’s salty air, so you want to make sure that you have the right we call it a substrate so the right, the proper metal so that it doesn’t rust with the salty air, you know, same thing like if you’re in you’re in Arizona, for example, it’s really really hot, really sunny all the time. So you want to make sure that your signage is manufactured correctly and has you know, a clear coat or protection over your, your your logos and whatnot. So that doesn’t fade and pill. So there’s a lot of different things that, you know, most people think that signage is a sign is a sign. Right. And honestly, I thought the same thing when I got into the business like wow, this, you know, but there’s so much that goes into it. It’s a very technical product. I know many of you may laugh when you hear that, but it really is. So yeah, those are just a couple things. We can I’m sure we’ll touch on several others as the conversation continues here.
D.J. Paris 14:47 Yeah, I just had a thought while while you were talking about you know the differences in the physical material and making sure that you have not only the right aesthetic look that you want but also the right type of sign that will withstand whatever weather, you know, is is appropriate for that area. And I was thinking about the aesthetics of it and realizing that a really big sort of gift was dropped into Realtors lap laps in the last couple of years, sadly due to the pandemic, so of course, a horrible tragic thing that the world is experiencing and continues to experience. But there is one neat one myth one of many little gifts. This I want, I just realized is QR codes. So we all knew we’ve known about QR codes, it’s been around for like 20 years, this is not a new technology. And none the public really didn’t embrace QR codes until about the beginning of the pandemic, because we all know when we when they started letting us back into restaurants. We all started noticing, oh, we’re now using QR codes for menus, we’re probably still doing that at every restaurant we’ve been to. So now the entire country, the whole problem with QR QR codes has been adoption, getting people to actually get used to doing it. And most people just never would ever do that in their daily life. Now, almost everyone in the country is using QR codes whenever they go to a restaurant. And so this is a huge opportunity for realtors to put them on their signs which Realtors used to do before. But I bet the number of people who actually, you know, scan to learn more kind of stuff when they’re driving by a sign or walking by one. I bet that usage has just gone through the roof. And I’m curious if you guys have seen that. I may be wrong, but it just seems like more people are using them now than ever before.
Darin Fyffe 16:40 Yeah, it’s very interesting. You mentioned that and you are you are right. We have noticed a pretty large uptick in in the QR code printing. And we also have our own QR code management software that we wrote ourselves. It’s called mobi bricks, that’s mo b i b Rix and it’s very, very easy to use. You just log into mobi. bricks.com, create an account. And you can literally so if let’s just say, writers, real estate writers, then you had 25 different writers that you purchase with 25 Different QR codes. They’re reusable with the software system, you can go in and, you know, reassign certain URLs to to the QR codes and have them for a long time and just keep reusing them. So yes, they kind of died on the vine there for a while. But yes, the pandemic has absolutely brought them back to life.
D.J. Paris 17:40 And this is Go ahead. Go ahead, Steve. I’m sorry.
Steve Siciliano 17:44 I know Darren speaks at a national level. But I, my what I see, I should say on a daily basis has not been as it’s not as popular as you might think. I do get some requests for realtors to put a QR code on there sign like an add on not not as a pre printed like one if that’s the sign go to their website or whatnot. I don’t see a lot of them pre printing either. I have probably more I’ve got probably 5000 signs, and I don’t think there’s five that have.
D.J. Paris 18:20 That’s That’s amazing. I think that’s a huge opportunity for realtors to realize that the average consumer is using QR codes now. And you know, it can’t be that expensive to throw a little add on onto a side scan me to learn more whatever.
Steve Siciliano 18:37 Oh, yeah. It’s not expensive. Yeah, there’s a there’s a similar program out there that at least a few of the larger brokerages have adopted. And that’s the it’s similar, I should say. But it’s, it’s used as text information. So you text a pre determined code to a predetermined address, and it sends you that same thing. Sure, realtor’s website or their listing information, or whatever they want to test to it just like a QR code. And I think maybe from a realtor standpoint, those have been more popular because you don’t have to be standing next to the sign to do it, right. Whereas a QR code, you gotta be close enough for your camera to take it. And you can only print the QR code so big on a realtor sign right. You’re limited to two square feet in most towns in the Chicagoland area. So it’s not a huge sign you can’t put can’t make it all QR code. You’re right, you know, it may change, it may get better. Who knows?
D.J. Paris 19:30 Well, my thought is, you know, as a consumer thinking about it, and I know that we don’t have to spend any more time on this, but I just was thinking if I’m walking by a property and I live here in the metro Chicago area, so there’s a lot of congestion and I can walk by and see things obviously out in the suburbs. It isn’t quite so much that way. But But I know if it was me, and I was interested in looking at a property and I see the for sale sign. I know that I as a consumer would be way more willing to scan a QR code versus sending a text. And I am not suggesting people shouldn’t have both options on a sign? You absolutely should. Because, as Steve mentioned, yeah, maybe they’re driving by and the only thing they can get is the phone number. And they can text in and get and also the realtor wants that phone number, of course, as well, because they want to call the person back and say, Hey, I saw you’re interested. So I get that, that that’s preferable to a realtor to get that phone number text instead of the QR code. But if it’s me, I don’t know that I want those text messages, because then I have to unsubscribe from them. And I’m like, now I’m going to be an A, but the QR code thing we’re all conditioned to use. So I would just as a suggestion to our listeners, consider adding both to your sides, add, you know, text this To learn more, and you can create an automated system, there’s a million different services that provide that and then, you know, these guys through Moby bricks can actually do your QR codes as well. So I just just thinking of that as as an option. But I’m also curious to talk about design. Are you guys seeing what are you seeing sort of trend wise, with respect to the the sort of design of signs are we seeing, are we still seeing a lot of agents headshots, on signs? Are? We see a trend moving away from that? Obviously, there’s both. But I’m curious on on, if you have any general suggestions of and maybe urban markets and rural markets work differently that way? I’m just curious if you have any best practices, because we get that question a lot here at our own firm, we’ve got about 800 agents here in our company, and they always are asking things like, hey, on my business card, or on my site, should I have my headshot? Should I not? Just and again, there’s no right answer for everyone. But I’m curious on what you guys think about that?
Darin Fyffe 21:52 You know, that’s, that’s a good question. I think headshots are, you know, it’s 5050. I mean, some people really like them and want them and some just don’t. So if that’s just preference, but as far as as style, and, and some suggestions, I’m always a big believer that less is more, you do not want your signage to be too cluttered. You know, you want to watch your color, you don’t want to, you know, you know, a purple font on a black panel or something like that, because you’re just not gonna be able to see it from the street. So, you know, you have your major information that you absolutely want out there, your phone number, you know, your, your website, your URL, your name, obviously, and your brokerage, I mean, so all of that stuff needs to be, you know, the font needs to be the right size, and it needs to be very visible. So color schemes are very important. Another thing that I highly suggest is, have fun, get creative, you know, us writers, writers, you can tell, you can tell the story of your listing through very, very inexpensively through writers. I mean, yeah, if your listing has, you know, some crazy upgrades in it or whatnot for four or five bucks, you can buy a writer and have that out on the street. It doesn’t cost much and I feel like writers are are somewhat underutilized. Or, you know, get creative. Get funny, you know, I there’s a guy in Wichita that that has free tacos if you buy this house. I mean, some folks like that’s cheesy, but it gets attention. It really does. So I love
D.J. Paris 23:42 that. Is it cheesy? Yes. Is it will it catch someone’s eye? Yes. So I in you know what if you’re a realtor, and you’re like, hey, if you buy this home, I will give you $500 worth of free tacos or whatever, whatever the whatever you’re willing to give away. That’s just fun, and people will talk about it. And that might even get picked up by a local news outlet as well. Yeah, that would also be an opportunity to reach out saying, Hey, I’m a realtor, I just thought I’d do something kind of silly. And if you you know, here’s a picture of my son if you guys want to do a story about it, you could so there’s some there’s even some branding opportunities with that. You know, every every house you have you do some sort of giveaway, every listing you have and you put it on your writer and that would be fun for social media as well to be able to say okay, I just listed this new home Here’s the giveaway we’re doing for this new home. If you know if you buy it
Steve Siciliano 24:37 get entertaining, right make it entertaining, people want to be entertained realize what they’re doing.
D.J. Paris 24:42 And, you know, with respect to signs, how big do you usually recommend? I mean, I know that we all know what traditional sign you know, sign sizes look like, you know, I’m Oh, it’s funny. I walked by here in Chicago, and obviously real estate You know, yard space is limited here, and I don’t even have a yard where I live. So it’d be difficult to put to put a, you know, a nice looking L shape, or wooden type sign or metal sign. And so where I live, you’d have to, I don’t even know how you do it. But, but I see a lot of people making really unfortunate choices with with sometimes, you know, it’s like, they put a sign on a property and it’s just kind of zip tied to a fence or it just, it just doesn’t look that great. And you can see the zip ties and I know you guys do the installation, especially here locally in the Chicagoland area. Do you have any suggestions for just installation tips, you know, not specifically like, oh, do this, don’t do that. But just curious if you know, some some best practices around installation.
Steve Siciliano 25:52 Well around installation, you know, a lot of times you’re right, there’s still signs where there’s no place to put a post. They can very common in Chicago, for instance, where a lot of properties have an iron fence around the front yard, that would block the the post and sign if you put it inside there. So because of the city ordinance, and you can’t have it leaning out over the sidewalk, either, right kind of limited this somehow fascinating that flat against the fence. And that’s the only option you have. Right? I don’t see a lot of them like this, the only way you can probably spruce that up is to put some sort of frame around it. And still hanging on the fence that way. But I think I lean back towards there and in the printing and getting creative with with your brand. And what you have, not just on the listing that doesn’t have a place for a post, but on every listing you have, have a sign that showcases you or you know, catches the eye or intrigues the person something I see a lot of plain, pretty plain signs getting, you know, made and printed. And I think it’s a mistake, it’s maybe a lack of imagination. I know a lot of folks are trying to keep their cost down and they think that you print less, it cost less well. You know, as Darren pointed out with the digital technology nowadays, it really doesn’t matter if you’re printing five words, or 15 or less, it’s, it’s, it’s about the same price. And Less is more is a really good advice. Because it’s more eye catching, I think when you see a couple things that you can, you can grab the information or the name on a fly by and a car doing 2025 miles an hour. And then if you put a book up there to read there, they’re not only going to be able to read it all, they’re not gonna remember any of it, they’re not going to recognize who was even on the side.
D.J. Paris 27:38 I agree I, I do want to give a little bit of praise to accompany that many of our listeners, you might have this brokerage in your local area. And I don’t know if they if they use Lowen or not. So I apologize. If they don’t, they probably have their own sign company. But it for aesthetic purposes. I think if you look at what compass is doing, for our listeners, if you check out or just Google compass signage, they are really good at that minimal sort of style where it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, they have like a black background, some white lettering, it’s very crisp, it’s clean, but it looks good. And you can duplicate that whether you work at Compass or not. And you don’t have to necessarily copy that design and you shouldn’t copy someone else’s design. But to get an idea of branding, and maybe you’re not good at that. Does does. Does Lowen have a design department to assist? Or do they have people they can recommend to assist with the design?
Darin Fyffe 28:39 We do. We have our own design department. Many of the artists have been there for you know, 10 plus years, they, they’ve been around, they they know what looks good, they know what works. And most importantly, it’s free of charge. So so if you’re out there listening to this and you want to, you know rebrand, or upgrade your signage or if you’re a new agent, broker and need branding, give us a call, we’ll walk you through the process, we’ll you know, help you out, give you some ideas. And yeah, we’d love to do it.
D.J. Paris 29:12 Yeah, and you guys are so wonderful. We’ve had it’s funny, we’ve had a lot of sign companies reach out to us over the years, buddy enough. And we always went I don’t know that people are that interested in hearing about signage. And you guys just what you’re doing is so is so interested in exciting because the creativity that can be expressed with signs, you know, there’s a there’s a card company for business cards that sort of fits very similarly to what you guys do, which is called mu and they kind of came around mo they’re really neat company and they said we’re gonna make business cards cool. And they were really kind of one of the first companies to do that. And I love that you guys are doing that on the signage side. So you know you don’t have to look like everyone else. But you can get really creative and I love the fact that Lowen offers free design In services, a lot of the side companies that have reached out to us over the years, yeah, they have a lot of different design options, but they don’t really have a lot of personalized help in that way. So I love that you guys go sort of go that extra step and really help the agents, you know, showcase themselves. And really, whether or not somebody’s foot getting, whether or not your listing is going to get foot traffic, it almost doesn’t matter, because you as the agent can take pictures of your sign and maybe even with the seller, or however you want to do it or just you in front of the sign. And now you can blast that all over social media. So it doesn’t, you don’t have to think of it necessarily as well, gosh, this isn’t a rural part of the country, you know, of my area, no one’s gonna drive by it, no one’s gonna see it, that almost doesn’t matter. Because now you can broadcast it to everyone you know, through Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and Tik Tok, and it’s so exciting. So you can get really creative. And if no one ever walks by it, it doesn’t matter. Because every all your followers might see it.
Steve Siciliano 31:08 Right, I would, I would make a suggestion to the to the realtors out there is just what you said, uj if if your assigned company doesn’t have those an offer marketing services like loan does, then give a loan a shot. Or if you’re some of the larger brokerages now to have the larger ones have entire marketing departments. But even the small boutique shops will have maybe one person who’s you know, a more of a marketing or design whiz and good with the PowerPoint and whatever other software there is to create things for them. A lot of realtors, you know, because they’re independent contractors, they’re, they’re pretty much you know, there’s, they’re stuck in that groove that they got to do everything themselves, but they may not the there’s people that specialize in some of those things that they can acquire that information or that, that talents, free or, or at no charge or very little charge, and really come up with some great something, you know, what you mentioned about compass as an example, what you’ve probably noticed, and maybe didn’t realize that detail is that those Realtors seem to have a knack and a common common thing added to their signings is a personal logo. So they’ve come up with, you know, an individual Realtor can create his own brand, not just with his name, or her name, or website, but you know, come up with a logo, and there’s, there’s online resources that’ll create things for you for next to nothing. There’s in house marketing departments like low and has, it’ll create something for you. But you know, I think I had one done years back and it’s it’s you go to a professional who knows what they’re doing with that stuff. And really just, you tell them your name, you tell them some general interests, you might have to tell them what you’re trying to promote about yourself. And somehow they come up with a picture figure that represents all of it. And that looks cool. And it’s that great colors. And it just all you got to do is edit up to the corner of your sign or corner of your, your business envelopes, or your or your, your email signature at any place you can put it it’s just a simple add on. And it’s a way of creating a brand for yourself and being recognized and noticed more frequently and easier.
D.J. Paris 33:17 Yeah, 100% agree. And I think this is the time that agents can start to find some, they’re they’re probably it’s we’re getting towards the end of the year that we’re going you know, things are slowing down. It’s the holiday season, we’re wrapping up, we all have a little bit more breathing room than we probably did over the last year. And so now’s the time to think about your marketing and to really think about, you know, how do I want to brand myself and and signage and getting signs made, whether it’s an open house sign an open house signs you can get really creative with as well I know for the building that I live in, it’s a condo building, and it’s a new development. And we now have these these stickers that are on the pavement, you know, right in front of where are our places, pushing people like, hey, go check out the model home by walking this way. I mean, you can do all sorts of really cool things, you know, obviously making sure that it’s in accordance with whatever the homeowners association or the neighborhood association allows, but you could do some really fun stuff for open houses forever for listings for just sold. Lots of cool things you can do. And and lo and can help with all that before. I want to ask you guys a question. And then I’m going to pause for a quick sponsor break. But But I want you to think about this during the sponsor break, which is if you were a new agent, or or an agent that’s just starting to really build their business. What advice would you have for them with respect to when when they get these listings, you know, just any sort of dues, or any sort of what you would recommend? For, you know, a sign. So so bear with us just a second and we’re going to, we’re going to answer that question in just a moment. We want to pause for a moment to talk about our sponsor follow up boss now, after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country, you know which CRM is talked about by more than more than any other CRM by our guests. That of course is follow up boss. Now, let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time with less effort and don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar real estate business in six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 different systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial. Now that’s twice as much time as they give everybody else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. That’s how competent they are, you’re going to want to give them your credit card because you’re going to fall in love with their CRM so much, but you don’t have to give it to them up front. But only if you use this special link which is follow up boss.com forward slash real again, follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial follow up like a boss with follow up boss. So Steven Darren, I know the obvious answer is yes. You want to put a sign on a property. I am curious to hear I wanted to ask about as a sale progresses, as a listing progresses rather newly listed under contract just closed. Curious to to hear your opinion on the importance of updating the sign actually. So I’m changing the question slightly updating the sign as the home progresses. I personally think it’s a great idea. Because it catches the eye up all of a sudden I’m walking by and I go ooh, under contract, I guess that homes about to sell. I as a consumer, I’m attracted to updated sort of stuff on on signs, you know, updated status is curious to hear your guys’s thoughts.
Darin Fyffe 37:21 I agree with that. I think it also makes the agent look better. If if they’re updating their signage, it makes them seem as if you know, they’re they’re a closer, you know, they’re getting the property sold fast. It’s it’s almost as marketing yourself, hey, this this property Wow, it was just listed yesterday and it’s already under contract, it makes you look good. And then a very, in my opinion, especially where I’m from the real estate markets very, very saturated. Especially right now with with how crazy it is. So you have to do whatever you can do to stand out, get creative, you know, stay on top of your signage, as you mentioned, by updating it stand out, you know, brag on yourself, promote yourself. So yes, that’s it definitely does that when you when you say you know, under contract or sold. So, Steve, you have any thoughts on that?
Steve Siciliano 38:20 Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitely a good idea to promote the when you do accept the contract. Because the timing is noticed by the people driving by they’re on regular basis. They know that that signs went up for a week, or they know what that signs been up for six months, but somehow they know, they don’t they might even read it every day. But they know for some reason that they’ve seen that sign often enough. And in some of the realtors, I would probably suggest to and you mentioned DJ, maybe newer realtors, if you’re gonna be in this business, get your name out there. I see time and time again. A lot of realtors just putting up the generic office panel which is fine if you’re going to do that or while you’re waiting to maybe have some signs designed for yourself. But get that get a name writer up there with you. I mean it’s great to promote your brand as Bureau I’m sorry, your brokerage house. But you need to promote yourself especially
D.J. Paris 39:14 your clock fester clients don’t care about your firm they care about you.
Steve Siciliano 39:19 And you know some do some built with it. You know they’re not Yeah, you don’t want them just calling Coble banker, for example. You want to call DJ DJ sold that house in two days that under contract writer was up there to do days. I’m calling that guy see what he’s got to say when I’m ready to sell my house and updating
D.J. Paris 39:35 your miter. Yeah, it seems such a great idea. And Darren and Steve, thanks for those answers. Such a great idea too. Because now and again you have to always think about branding is if you get an opportunity to put a under contract sign or just closed or just listed you now have another opportunity to grab your phone, turn it around, hit that you know record button for video and say it record now an Instagram story or a Facebook story or just a post saying, I am so excited, we just put this on the on. And I’m just about to put my, you know, to update my sign here with just, you know, just accepted an offer or whatever that is a great that creates great content for social media. So even though it’s this physical thing that exists in the real world, and the people who drive by might appreciate it, especially neighbors. You know, it also gives you an opportunity to do create some social media content,
Steve Siciliano 40:31 right. And I wasn’t it was common this past year. So as we get installations up very fast each day, we actually promise it right on our website, it’s going to be done in two business days or less. There has been a countless number of times that before I can get them up the thing assault, there are selling them, you know, because we have this private listing network now. So they can do a little bit of pre advertising before it’s actually publicly advertised, which helps. But regardless, it’s been the order comes in today. And before I get it out tomorrow, these houses were selling. Now, some agents would call me and say, great news at an under contract writer to that thing, when you put it up, other agents would call in and say, you know, I’m going to cancel that because I already sold it. And that’s crazy. I shake my head. And I just think that is the best advertisement. And most economical advertisement you could have, you’re going to put up a side effect. Purposely and intentionally delay it, put the sign up today, put the under contract, right or up tomorrow, or in two days. I mean, now make it look like you did something and make sure it’s no, because if you don’t put the sign up, yeah, some people are going to know it. But boy, a lot more would know, when they see the sign go up and they see the under contract, right or up and the next day or two,
D.J. Paris 41:49 I know that I would be so impressed if all of a sudden, I see a new listing go up. And then like you said, the next I’m a neighbor and I see a new listing, oh, they’re neighbors of selling their home. And then the next day under contract, I want to talk to that realtor. How did you do that? Because, and and and and so for all of our listeners, you know, thinking about this from marketing perspective, you now have an opportunity to go. And look, there’s lots of ways to do it if you’re confident enough. And I’m not suggesting this is the best strategy, but it could be do some door knocking talk to the neighbors say Hey, I didn’t mean to bug you. But just wanted to let you know I’m working with selling selling their home. And not so much to brag because you can all always say, you know, instead of asking for business, which some people are uncomfortable doing, saying, hey, just so if you see me around the neighborhood, I just want you to know I’m working with selling so didn’t want you to think I’m a prowler, you know, you can be funny about it. But you could also send mailers, if you don’t want to do it in person or, you know, leave something on people’s doorsteps and say, Hey, didn’t notice it didn’t know if you noticed, but so and so I’m working with them on their home, you know, and if you ever have any questions about your the value of your home, we’d love to chat with you. So you know, there’s so much opportunity. But if you don’t have that sign, it becomes a lot harder to penetrate that neighborhood. Because right out of sight out of mind, people don’t see a sign, they might not even know that so the neighbors are moving. Because you know, I know I wouldn’t know if a home next to me goes on the market and I’m in this business, the only way I know is that there’s a sign because I don’t have alerts set up like that. So guys, signage is so much more important than just for that specific property, it is your brand. And you are such an opportunity here to really get your name out there. And you can be creative and fun. And Lowen is the company to use to get creative and fun and to get it installed quickly. So guys, let’s just talk very quickly about what Lowen offers to make sure that our audience has a good understanding. And by the way, again, if you are in the local Chicago area, loyal signs can take care of all of this, they are a part of Lowen and they can do the install as well. But let’s talk about Lowen and just kind of what they offer. So if you don’t mind just letting our listeners know what exactly you guys provide.
Darin Fyffe 44:07 Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, first of all, we’ve been around for 71 years we’ve been around amazing. Yeah, than any other side real estate, signage manufacturing company in the United States. You know, we the biggest thing that I think separates us from everybody else, is that we manufacture everything ourselves. We don’t buy container loads of goods from other countries, bring them in, mark them up and resell them. We don’t do that. We literally have metal fabrication facilities. We have our own powder coating line. We do everything ourselves and we have very, very high strict quality standards. So we know that it’s going to be right every time. That’s in my opinion. That’s that’s the most important thing about Lowen. We’re a Midwestern company, we We have Midwestern roots, and we are very fanatical about customer service. You know, if you call into Lowen, somebody’s going to answer the phone, we don’t believe in the, you know, the robots answering the phone, we want to talk to you. And we’re going to answer the phone every time. So and also, you know, we really pride ourselves on being tech savvy, you know, if you want a custom, back end web portal, or some API integration to make your lives easier, we’re more than happy to help you with that. And we have a very, very good team of, you know, web developers, that can do do all of that stuff for you. So, in a nutshell, and honestly, quality, you know, we the founder, Mike Lowen, you know, we, he took a lot of pride in it, and, you know, his son now owns the company, and he carries on that, you know, that that huge quest for having the best quality in the industry. And we’re really proud of it. And, you know, Steve, you know, he can attest to this, you know, he was a broker for a long time. And he used many other companies other than Lowen. And he’s told me many times that our, our quality is, is head and shoulders above everybody else’s. So you know, that’s it, you know, I, if you’re listening, give us a give us a shot, I’m very confident that you will be impressed with not only our service, but but the quality of your signage, and you know, what it, it’s an investment, you know, it’s a marketing tool, it’s an investment, so you want to get as much ROI as you’re out of your investments as possible. Signage is no different. I mean, if you’re going to spend money on something, you know, the old, the old adage goes, you get what you pay for. And that holds true with real estate, signage, as well. So you may pay a couple, couple more dollars for something, but you’re gonna get a lot more lifestyle. So
D.J. Paris 46:54 100%, could not agree more. And I know that if I’m a listing agent, and I’m talking about all of the different ways, I’m going to help a seller, you know, market their home, sell it for the highest price, I’m going to mention, hey, this might sound sort of trivial, but I’m gonna explain why it’s important, we’re gonna get you a really nice looking sign out front, because we want people who who drive by or walk by to know that this is a high quality home, that that it’s being represented by a high quality agent, and we want to attract, you know, I would talk about that, and I am partnered with low and signs, because they are the best. It sounds like maybe a homeowner wouldn’t care about that. But I know, as a homeowner, that if I was interviewing realtors, and I was saying, well tell me about your marketing strategy, and say, Well, I have partners, you know, for flyers, brochures, and I also have a sign partner, I want to talk about that for a moment, you know, and explain what we can do. And it’s not just that it’s going to sit in the front of your property, I’m going to promote it like crazy on social media, I’m gonna stand in front of it and make little fun videos. I mean, this could be part of the listing presentation. It sounds sort of silly, but it’s not. It’s really, really important. And it could be what separates you from all the other realtors says, oh, yeah, we’re gonna put a sign in the yard. And yeah, that’s what everyone else is gonna say. You could say, here’s what I’m going to do with that sign. I’m going to do some cool fun marketing stuff. And we’re going to blast it out on social, and it’s going to look really great. And I got the best company on the planet. They’ve been around 71 years. They know what looks cool. I mean, again, it sounds like does it sell or care about that? Well, if you if you explain it, they will care about that.
Steve Siciliano 48:39 Right. And you, you probably know, but if a realtor hasn’t picked up yet, on how important those that sign is in the front yard to the sellers, then I don’t know who they’re working with. Because I on a regular basis, I get calls, not from the agent, or from the agent, of course, but not from the agent who wants it and it’s just you know, three feet to the left or the side of an angle. It’s the it’s the homeowners, they want that thing up. The second they decide they want to sell and and are ready to go. They want that post up that day. They want it to look and clean and sharp. They want it straight and narrow, and they want it and they want it up right away. I think as technology has progressed and less so much of it has become you know, advertising has gone from paper to internet and then social media and all sorts of good stuff that I think that things go second be electronic. We’re not gonna make posts electronic you can’t do that. It’s still it’s still the first step. So the first signal the first red flag goes up when a listing is active and ready to sell the signs up in the yard. That’s how you started then started. That’s the kickoff from all the for all the marketing
D.J. Paris 49:51 is really important, which I’ll do with it. Go ahead I’m
Steve Siciliano 49:55 sorry. And one of the one of the reasons why and I know This as a realtor for all the years because I did that, but now I see it even exponentially in my clients that are now the realtors I’ve worked with for so long that it’s important to have that clean post in that in that sharp looking, color and unscratched. So one of the first things we did was reinvest in a lot of inventory, the posts that we use are much higher quality than, than some of the posts that are out there. Ours are approved to have to be produced by Lowen. But they’re aluminum, they’re powder coated, they have somewhat of a shiny luster to them, they’ve got beveled end caps, it’s just a sharper looking post and it’s it stays looking good longer. It doesn’t rust, doesn’t scratches, easy, it doesn’t warp or chip. And for that reason, you know, we we make their posts or make the sign look better, because it’s designed to stay stare straight and narrow, and it looks sharp, as good as newly painted.
D.J. Paris 51:04 And guys, for everyone listening, Look, the bottom line is low, it’s just the best out there. So I we rarely recommend really anything on our show because we try to stay product neutral. And we have lots of wonderful sponsors that we really enjoy. But lo and truly is an exceptional sign company. They’ve been around longer than anyone. They’re incredibly professional, they understand that if they don’t deliver for you, you’re gonna go back to your other sign company, they know that and they want to earn your business. We want you to support them, they support us on our show. We are big believers in them. So everyone give them an opportunity to give them a shot. Reach out to them. If you’re outside of the Chicagoland area, just go to low insights.com LOWE en signs.com. If you’re within the Chicagoland area, the the local version of them is loyal signs. So go to loyal signs.com If you’re here, Chicago, local agent and give them an opportunity to earn the rest of your business. Guys, is that important. You want a nice looking sign I was just just next door to our office here. I really probably shouldn’t say this because people could probably figure out who it is. One of the very best agents in the Chicagoland area has a listing. And I love this agent. And the sign is chipped. And it’s not a big deal. And this agent probably doesn’t know it’s chipped. It’s not her fault. It just happened. And it’s been chipped for about three weeks now. And I noticed that every time I walked by now I work here so I walked by it every day, and it sort of bugs me. And it shouldn’t bug and this agent’s awesome. And I’m not trying to disparage them, they probably don’t know, it’s Jeff. But I think you know, you want to get a high quality sign. And you Lowen is going to take care of you. So give them an opportunity Guys look, they support our show, support them, give them a shot. I trust I trust in Lowen. And I believe that they will take great care of you and your client. And if you’re here locally in Chicago, us loyal because they’ll gonna get it up for here within 48 hours. And we know how quickly things go. So it’s important for speed speed to lead, as they say, right, so I want everyone to visit Lo and signs.com and if you’re here in Chicago, visit loyal signs.com They can do everything for you, guys. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for being such a supporter of our of our podcast. We’re huge fans of yours. And, and we now I need to evaluate the signage we have at our brokerage to attract more realtors. So I might be reaching out to you guys to come up with some ideas of what we can do signage wise to attract other agents. Yeah, I know you do. So on behalf of our audience, we want to thank Darren and Steve for coming on the show. These guys are busy, they’ve got a huge massive company. And they took time out of their day to be on our show. We appreciate that. And also on behalf of Deron, Steve and myself, I want to thank the audience for continuing to listen to support our show. And I’m just asked that everyone do one thing outside of giving Lowen an opportunity. Please do also tell a friend about this podcast. Maybe an agent who’s new in the business and doesn’t really understand signage or somebody that needs to take their science to the next level, send them a link to this episode. You can always send them directly over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is stream live there. Or they can also follow us on Facebook where all of our episodes stream@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. There’s an episode section on the Facebook page. Every single episode we’ve ever done is there. Steve and Darren, thank you so much for being on the show. huge fans of you guys. And I want to just tell our audience give low in a shot. They will not let you down. They’re awesome.
D.J. Paris 54:49 Thanks, guys. And we’ll see everyone on the next episode.
How Real Estate Agents Should Plan For 2022 • Coaching Moments • Ryan D’Aprile
Nov 24, 2021
Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!
Ryan and DJ discuss how you can use negative news stories to reassure you clients and provide value. Ryan also discusses why you shouldn’t always see a property as an investment. As the new year approaches, Ryan discusses what agents should do at this period and how to plan their next year. Next, Ryan discusses why he thinks that going to the office is the best way for agents to be successful and why working from home doesn’t work. Last, Ryan wants to remind everyone of the importance of their “WHY”.
Ryan D’Aprile can be reached at 312.590.6416 and ryan@daprileproperties.com.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by show Ami. Show AMI is the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to get buyers into homes without you being the one to show it. Now we’ve all had situations where clients wanted to see properties at the most inconvenient time or in a location that was difficult for us to show. Now there’s an easy way to find another licensed agent who will show the home on your behalf for a small fee. You keep the client you keep the commission, you keep your commitments. Now show AMI is truly the Uber for realtors connecting busy Realtors with local agents who have time to show your clients the properties they want without taking any part of your commission. And if you’d like to be one of show armies featured agents that realtors can hire to have you help with their showings, you can sign up on their website at no cost. So whether you’re an agent who wants some help with showings, or you’re an agent that wants to make some money helping doing showings, show AMI is the app to use install show AMI on Apple or Android devices or simply visit their website at show ami.com That’s sh O W A mi.com sh O W ami.com to learn more and now on to our episode
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly coaching moments with Ryan de April series. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re just new to the show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. So let me tell you about Ryan Ryan de April is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and staff at depot properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style, and his dedication to training. He has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland and he also has offices in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Florida with hundreds and hundreds of top producers. Disciple properties is really a coaching company with eight strategic coaches who work week in and week out with every agent individually focused on business planning, coaching, and accountability if you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need from your current firm, check out D APR properties, visit D APR properties.com. And welcome once again, Ryan.
Ryan D’Aprile 2:40 Hey, DJ, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure being with you, again,
D.J. Paris 2:43 pleasure being with you, we should also mention that you have other companies. So we we aren’t necessarily just talking to real estate agents, you also have a lending institution Midwest lending. So I know this podcast gets gets listened to by by some of your loan officers. So if there are any loan officers listening, shout out here because again, a lot of what you talk about is really applicable against across all sorts of sales, you know, jobs.
Ryan D’Aprile 3:10 It is I’ve spoken to many companies and help them sell hedge funds. I’ve actually, in financial planning institutions, I’ve actually been a guest to speak to their sales force. Yes, I we have a mortgage company, I have an insurance company and the principles of philosophies that we teach are the same across the board. So yeah, so that’s, that’s it’s, the more things change, the more they stay the same as what I tell everybody. And the principles are really, that are identical, quite honestly, it’s a process. I think it’s more of a system than it is an art, there’s a little bit of art in it. But it’s, it’s really being aware of what your craft is and what it is that you’re doing and then improving on it day in and day out.
D.J. Paris 3:52 I also think too, I think what you said is really important. So we’re talking about process. And I like to call them fundamentals, because it’s always it seems to be that there is no magic bullet to becoming successful in this industry. Or at least if there is I haven’t found it. But the fundamentals or the processes are great. And you mentioned that there’s a little bit of art to it. What I found so, so exciting about figuring out somebody’s processes, what what is going to be successful for them is that frees up a lot of their time to where they now can focus on the art artsy sort of side of it, that putting their personality and because their systems and processes are so in place that allows them to have more time to focus on sort of the personality side
Ryan D’Aprile 4:34 of it. Yeah, and I think what you need to do is you need to process and systematize how you interact with your network. And I tell everybody is like, I’ll draw on a whiteboard, network and drive and I’m writing right next to each other. And I’ll ask people, What can I coach to? And a lot of people think it’s Dr. Like, I can coach you to network and country to grow network, and I can’t coach Dr. And that’s, that’s the number one thing for anybody who’s listening whether you’re alive Under, you’re an insurance agent, your real estate agent. I truly in my heart of hearts believe success is easy. 80% of it is just showing up. That’s a cliche for a reason, because it’s true. And you can’t coach drive, you can’t coach, Coach hunger. But if you’ve got the drive, you got the hunger, then all you gotta do is follow a system. And every year that goes by it compounds, and it gets easier and easier.
D.J. Paris 5:25 It does, because you have a bigger supply of previous clients in the wake of your business that are satisfied and happy and know like and trust you and then refer business. And I, to all of our listeners, if you’re new to this, this series that we do monthly with Ryan, he’s a big believer in having systems around communication. So making sure that your clients are getting touched every single month in different ways. And one of the ways sometimes I know, you know, we get feedback from from listeners who say, Hey, I and not necessarily because of what you’ve said, but they say hey, how do I stay in touch with with my sphere of influence? What are some of the things I should be doing? And you’ve touched on those one thing that we might not have touched on yet is, and I learned this back when I was a financial adviser, they would say read what your clients are reading. And so I saw an article today on CNN that, you know, whatever people’s feelings about CNN, are I, I just happen to be on the CNN website. And I saw this article about
Ryan D’Aprile 6:25 finding that you had to say that in today’s age, you have to say, Yep, I get you,
D.J. Paris 6:29 you have to say that. And I don’t have any particular just happened yet, but it was about the possibility of a housing crisis or a housing bubble that possibly could be bursting. And there’s different. In this article, they said, Hey, there’s no consensus on this. And lots of people say everything’s fine. But as interest rates, maybe go, you know, up to now 4%, or rather, lending rates go up to maybe 4% or so, there may be in a price correction. And anyway, these are the kinds of headlines that I don’t know, they got my attention, and they probably get your clients attention. And so I see it as an opportunity to reach out and do one of your touches and say, Hey, you might be seeing some news about this. But I’m curious on on your thoughts about how to use, you know, and I don’t want to call it a negative sort of Article, because I was the intention of it wasn’t to be negative. But But that’s gonna scare a lot of people. And I’m just curious on how you might take that information and, and reassure clients or sort of give them an action. Sure.
Ryan D’Aprile 7:30 Yeah. Well, so I would tell my clients and I’d tell, you know, agents and loan officers, anybody in the back, of course, there’s a market correction coming. There always has been there always will be it’s cyclical. And so and I would say that directly to a client, and then I’d get to what the most important thing again, the reason why, right, all these quote unquote disruptors to our industry who’ve been around since the early 2000s, that, again, you’ve heard me say this on the show before, they’ve lost quarters of you know, hundreds of millions of dollars year in a year out working for free, trying to take us out of the marketplace, okay, and have yet to be unsuccessful at it. All right, is because of the emotional intelligence aspect of our business and what we need. And if you do not know why your buyer or your seller are buying or selling, then you’re irrelevant. And, and what I mean by that is, if a buyer said to me, Well, Ryan, a market correction is going to come. Do you think that’s true? And I’d say, of course, market correction is going to come. Well, why are you buying this house? Let’s have that conversation. Sure. Are you buying this house because it’s a part of your stock portfolio? Because I believe, you know, just like Kawasaki is a cow psyche Robert Kiyosaki, Kiyosaki, and I apologize if he ever hears this and apologize, I mean, I’m an idiot. Um, but, you know, your home is not an asset. It’s a
D.J. Paris 9:06 low I could not agree more. And I know there would be there’s a lot of pushback, but I always love this idea of assets, assets, shouldn’t lose money on a regular basis, which of course, it meaning not lose money, but but cost, you know, be at be costly on a monthly basis, upkeep etc. And it doesn’t generate income either. It’s only Oh, it’s a liability. It’s an asset the day you sell it, that’s about it.
Ryan D’Aprile 9:29 Well, it is, I mean, it’s an asset that they somebody else starts paying for it. That’s, that’s when it’s an asset and you continue to own it. And so my point is, is, look, my wife and I have a home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and we bought it 17 years ago, okay. I mean, we were 2829 year old kids with a newborn and we bought the lake home. And the reason why is because we wanted our children to have that lake life experience. Now, up until recently, until COVID, quite honestly, let’s say I paid $500,000 for the house, which is what I paid for the house. So I paid $500,000 for the home. Okay. And up until two years ago, you know that home was worth.
Unknown Speaker 10:13 I know I don’t
Ryan D’Aprile 10:14 $500,000 Yeah, exactly. Okay. did two years ago, you know, after 15 years of ownership, it was worth $500,000, I think I’d put $100,000 down on it. And over 15 years, I paid off 100 grand, but I pride paid in our $150,000 in interest. That’s not a good investment. Right. But I would never, I would not do it any other way ever again. Because someday I’m not going to be on this planet. Someday my children will be adults. Unfortunately, my oldest just turned an adult and she’s still my baby, say two years old. And I bought the summer home for the quality of life. You, if you were to talk to me back then 28 years old, you were and you were my real estate agent, which I was back then you wouldn’t know what my why is. And my why is, well, I don’t care what the market does. Here’s where today is I want in on the home. And I plan on living here for the next 15 years. And so
D.J. Paris 11:07 you really treat it like almost like a primary residence, even though it isn’t your primary residence. It’s just hey, this is this is where we live when we’re not at home.
Ryan D’Aprile 11:15 Hey, the same story, you know, from my home in Western Springs. Okay, I can tell you, I’m probably, you know, you know, you know, I live you live in the homes where you know, that I wouldn’t call McMansions. But these beautiful homes come up, you know, every three months, there’s a brand new, you know, home being built gorgeous, in my neighborhood, you know, million multi million dollar home being built. And, and my home’s value, you know, it’s not like when my mom and dad bought in 75, for 100 grand, and they sold in 2010. For $500,000. I think those days are gone, just because of how wealthier society is, and how fashion and trends change so much. And so the home that I’ve purchased in 2010 in Western Springs, okay. And then the amount of money I’ve put into that home, could I get the money out of it? No. But does that mean I would do different? No, you know, we’re dealing in residential real estate, I had a wife and three kids. And, you know, people are born and people die, people get married, and people get divorced, people relocate. And for our listeners here, when this market correction comes, and it’s going to come in like five years from now, I don’t know when it’s going to come. But it’s going to come, the transactions are not going to stop, you know, I cut my teeth, my third year in the business 2008. Alright, as it was the Great Recession, and 2008 to 2011. That’s like a broken record. But I crushed it during those years. I absolutely crushed it. And we had the great recession going on. So be apprised know what’s going on, read what your customers are reading. But again, and our industry. And I truly believe that a loan officers need to be able to do this just as much as a real estate agent. Because the same is true for loan officers so much emotional intelligence and balance you have to work with your, with your buyers on this, you’re gonna know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and then be able to relate them and then bring them back to that why.
D.J. Paris 13:27 Yeah, I think you’re right. And that that’s the same thing I did. So I started reading this article, and I was like, Oh my gosh, of course, correction. I just bought a home and then I went, Well, what do I care, you know, I’m probably not going to be there in three or four years, I don’t have any control over this anyway. Plus, it’s not an investment, it’s where I live, and I’m going to have to live somewhere else after that. And it’s I just, I just, um, but But again, I had to talk myself down, and you know, have an opportunity to reach out to your clients and say, Hey, I just want to, you know, you might be seeing some, some stories about this. And I want to, you know, sort of make sure that you’re how, you know, talk check with how you’re feeling about where you’re living, and you know, and just it’s an opportunity to connect.
Ryan D’Aprile 14:09 Absolutely. 100%.
D.J. Paris 14:12 So, Ryan, some thoughts on because you coach agents, you’ve coached top producers, you coach new agents, you know, gosh, you guys have such an impressive, you know, set of agents at the April properties here in the Chicagoland and other states. What are you telling agents to do for the last two months here of the year?
Ryan D’Aprile 14:30 Yeah, well, actually, it’s a great segue because we have a CRM that we use, it’s proprietary that we built and our CRM actually shows you what your business is going to look like next year. And it times it out. So for individuals right now, as we’re coming into November, we have 60 days left of the year. I do say that the year is over. But if you click on your prospects, and you go to the timing that we have, which ours is cool Closing next year cold, not certainly going to hire me warm closing this calendar year, you look at cool. You I see agents with 5 million 10 million $20 million in leads from primarily their network, or their network referring them. Okay. I had a coachman with another agent regarding online leads, I’m going to talk about that for a second. But this is the time and you need to have a CRM, you need to be tracking this information. And most real estate agents, I feel fail at this because they don’t spend time working on their business and looking at this data. But anybody that we’re working with with our CRM, they’re looking at that bank account of business for next year. And they are looking at their data last contact, what was the touch? What are they doing, and the biggest thing that I’m always working on is grabbing somebody’s bank account and be like, Hey, get out of your active clients tab, get out of your under contract Clients tab, look to your left versus prospects, look at this bank of $14 million of business that you think you’re going to have next year. And look at that you haven’t talked to these three people since July, these four since March, like you are going to be leaving a lot of money on the table right now. If you’re not getting prepared, right now for the string market. And you already know those individuals who they are. Right? You already they’ve already identified them in your CRM. Now you need to be making the frequent reach out touch base, touching up with them, keeping it personal, making it about them, understanding their why. And if you don’t, you’ll be replaced. And then they just walk into an open house and find something or their neighbor down the street happens to be a real estate agent that shows them around. That’s where most people lose a lot of money in this business.
D.J. Paris 16:40 Yeah, and these touches can be can be phone calls, they can be text messages, they can be emails, they could be replying to or commenting on someone’s social media posts. You
Ryan D’Aprile 16:50 know, I think yeah, exactly. I think direct messaging and social media, I try to tell people don’t think of commenting on a social media as a, a touch. My birthday was the other day, I was sick as a dog under the covers. And, and I had it for like three or four days in a row. But I think I had like 400 happy birthdays, I didn’t even see one of them. Right? I tried, I couldn’t keep up. And it plus I had aches and the chills, was the worst. I think I got that rhinovirus. And everybody was getting, I got tested for everything, but it was a virus. Regardless. You know, a direct message is equivalent to a text message or a phone call. So your your follow your reach out, should be a phone call, or a text message, or a or a direct message via you know, whatever it is Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, however, whatever social media channel that your, your client, your network uses, right, you have to use them all and adapt to it. And direct message and don’t fall in the trap of by, you know, writing on their wall. Oh, so cute. You know, the dog you just posted right writing that on the wall. That’s not gonna You gotta actually got to connect with them, and try to create a dialogue.
D.J. Paris 18:07 Yeah, and I have always thought LinkedIn gets really underutilized for this. Because just today, for one, one of the little companies I have an ownership interest in, I guess it was my work anniversary, which I had no idea. And I started getting just a handful of happy work anniversary. I’m like, I didn’t even know it was my work anniversary. And those didn’t really matter to me. But I thought, boy, if I really want if I was a salesperson, and I wanted my business for whatever, I would figure out a way to direct message me or to find me. I mean, I’m not easy. I’m not hard to find, send me a phone, you know, send me a text shoot me and say, Hey, man, just saw that you, you know, work anniversaries. You know, maybe that’s not such a big deal. But but you could say when somebody starts a new position when they get promoted, I just saw one of my friends at Zillow just got promoted, and I shot her a quick test matches like, hey, saw you got promoted. That’s amazing. And she was like, Wow, thanks. You’re the only person that texted me about it other than her coworkers. So, you know, and it meant a lot to her. And we’re just buddies. But I thought you know, that’s, that’s a great opportunity. LinkedIn actually tells you, when people have these major work milestones.
Ryan D’Aprile 19:11 I was having a conversation with a broker owner the other day down in Florida, and they went virtual, probably 3040 agents. And he made a great comment to me, he said, and they’ve seen a decline in sales, right? And he said to me, you know, you’re productive until you’re not, right. It’s like, wow, that just says a lot. What he was saying is, they went virtual, right? It was working until it doesn’t work. And now you’re going the other way. And I tell every person that works in our organization that, you know, we have these offices and we’re opening up more offices, because you gotta get out of your house. Yeah, you got to you’ve got to work on your business. You know, I started my My career as a real estate agent in 2004, you know, five, late 2004 2005. And I had an office, I went to 2021, right? How many every year years later is 16 years later, I still go to the office every single day. And I’m telling you real estate agents, like, you guys get the hell out of your basement, this virtual stuff, I don’t think it’s healthy, I understand there’s an element of where you can do it. But you need to run your business you, you don’t get paid in real estate, you don’t, you don’t come to a real estate brokerage, you don’t get a salary, you don’t have a manager, you are starting your own business. And the biggest thing I can tell you now that in November and December, what’s coming in for next year, get into the office, when there’s nothing to do get into the office, get into your CRM we have it’s called the dashboard, get into your dashboard, we’re kind of minimum three days a week, just like any other business owner who wants to keep their doors open, does. And, you know, if you were to try buy a storefront of a small business, and see that the lights were out, and the door was locked for days, out of the out of the week, right? You’d say so that guy is gonna go out of business, they’re not even open for business. Yet real estate agents stay home, they get in their habits, they work from home, and you know, damn, well what’s happening there, they’re doing the dry cleaning, they’re talking about their active deals, right, but they’re not working on their business. And you know, that’s going to catch up to you, and you’re productive until you’re not. And that’s where the peaks and the valleys of this business occur. And people got to pull themselves out of the valley. And you don’t need to if you could stay consistent, and get into your office three, four days a week and work on your business, one to two hours a day.
D.J. Paris 21:43 I’ve tried many times over the last Well, I would say 15 years to work from home. I’ve tried, I want to be able to do that. Because, boy, it just seems so great. It seems so efficient. I can’t do it. And maybe there’s that rare person that somehow can, but I don’t know how anyone’s more more effective and productive at home. So you know, even even, even if I worked at a company like exp where there aren’t physical offices, and you know, assuming I could afford it, I’d rent an office somewhere go to regional sir. Yeah, place like,
Ryan D’Aprile 22:21 yeah, you do you have to, you know, and and just ask yourself, is it working? And if it’s working great. And is it not working? If it’s not working? Are you working from home, your kitchen, table, your phone, in your basement, go to a place that’s going to get you into another mindset that’s going to have you focus on working on your business. And it’s nice to be an organization where you’re next to other top producers. I tell all my agents Yeah, you know, when I go to office office, see all the usual suspects. And it’s a top selling real estate agents there all the time. Hey, DJ, don’t you have a five o’clock arts that?
D.J. Paris 22:55 I do? I’m gonna I wanted to end with just one more thought. And yes, so thanks for reminding me my of my obligations. Because I had forgotten we were I was having so much fun with this call. And what I was going to say as is and get your thoughts on is you were talking about those producers you have who are going into their dashboard in your CRM and, and sort of seeing the most important maybe part of that outside of your active clients outside of the customer service stuff you have to do day in day out to close deals, but looking at your contact list your sphere of influence and saying maybe the most important metric there is when’s the last time you know, last touch, last last communication and maybe just everyone listening, make a pact that you will have no people in that database that doesn’t hear from you every single month in some capacity and 2022. And just see what happens by the end of 2022. I would be shocked if you don’t get more referrals, or more of those people in your database use you or both. And you know, I’m just using once a month as as just a
Ryan D’Aprile 24:00 no, it’s once a month. That’s the way to do it. And I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve never ever seen anybody do it, and it not work for them. But I’ve seen people not do it. And they struggle. And I’m like, Why do you make this complicated? Why? Why is this complicated? And when I’m ever in a room of people, right? Say it’s 2020 people, right coaching, I’ll say 20 percentage, which comes to four, only four of you are going to do what I’m telling you to do. 16, you are going to get entertainment, what entertainment is education, with no action equals entertainment. So I’ll be your clown for two hours. But there’s four of you here who’s going to hear what I’m telling you, you’re gonna laugh at it. And you’re the these are the ones who can make 150 300 $450,000 a year. And it’s like a Greek tragedy, but it’s the 8020 rule and you can’t get you can’t get away from it. So I tried to bring everywhere like look at who’s going to be the 20% they’re going to walk out of the room and do what you just said for the rest of the year for the year 2022. Sadly, in that group of 20 there’ll be four and those are your top of the top. And what those four did what’s not hard. It was not hard, but you can’t draw, you can’t coach drive. You can’t coach drive, you can teach and show discipline over time. And if somebody’s willing to do that, and they get the right activities, they’ll become discipline, and that this just becomes autopilot for them.
D.J. Paris 25:21 Yeah, boy, it’s so well said and I will leave with one other idea that this I’m stealing this from my our guest Ryan, but it is if you are struggling with Drive, if that’s something you probably and Ryan, I think would agree with this, as you probably haven’t, or maybe you’ve you haven’t well defined, or maybe you did well defined this and forgot it. But you probably haven’t well defined your why, like Ryan has a very specific y for all of his different businesses. And they involve his family and the feelings he’s going to have with interacting with them and being able to have freedom to do certain things based on the success of his businesses. And he knows his why. He’s, you’ve talked about it many, many times here on the show. You know, if you need to write it on a post it and put it on your mirror, it sounds silly, but remind yourself of your why that will help I think give you a little bit more strength when you have those mornings were like I just don’t want to do anything.
Ryan D’Aprile 26:16 Yeah, and ask yourself how, how many hours of the day was I? Was I unconscious? I mean, literally, was I just not conscious of my actions, my behaviors? I mean, if you could be conscious and you could take conscious action, deliberate practice. Like oh god forget her name. Angela Duckworth said deliberate practice. If you could have deliberate practice one or two hours a day. I mean, that’s, that’s just to compound for you. And again, it’s easy, but it’s a choice. And most people unfortunately, horseshit choices, just terrible, terrible choices with their time. But success in No, no doubt, success is a choice. Either choose to average choose not to through your efforts.
D.J. Paris 27:04 Awesome. Well, this is a great place to wrap up this episode, we will see Ryan on next month’s episode of our coaching moments. We’re so grateful to Ryan, he is the one he’s probably the busiest person I know. And he takes time out of his incredible the busy schedule every month to be on our show. So please, if you live in any of these states, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Florida and you are like you know, I am not getting great coaching and support from my existing firm or you just want to see what else is out there. Check out D APR Properties, go to D APR properties.com. They just have hundreds of top producers. They’re amazing Ryan coaches as well. And he the coaches he hires I’ve seen I’ve visited his his headquarters, it’s just beyond impressive. So definitely check out Depot properties.com. Also, if you’re a loan officer and looking for see what other firms are out there, check check them out. Midwest lending is the name of the loan, the lending institution. So everyone go out there visit Depot properties.com. And on behalf of the audience want to thank Ryan for his time today. He always brings great content to us. And on behalf of Ryan and myself, we want to thank the the audience and our listeners and viewers for continuing to support our show. I think we’re at about 310 episodes. We have more listeners now than we ever did. That’s thanks to you guys telling a friend about the show. Please send this coaching moment episode to one other either loan officer that could use a little motivation boost or strategy boost or another realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing from Ryan and send them a link to our website, so you can send them right over to keeping it real pod.com all of our episodes are there. And also thanks to our sponsor follow up boss for continuing to support our show. So Ryan, thanks so much and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks CJ
Best Virtual Tour Tips For Real Estate Agents • Michael Vervena
Nov 19, 2021
Michael Vervena with iGuide talks about the start of his career and how he got involved in services helping realtors. Michael also discusses the importance of virtual tours in making informed decisions for certain properties. DJ and Michael also discuss the importance of providing accurate information on the size of the property you’re representing. Last, Michael talks about staging and gives tips on how to make the most of it.
If you’d like to get more information on the services offered by iGuide, visit their website by clicking here.
This episode is brought to you by Follow Up Boss. Get your 30 day trial by clicking here.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by follow up boss. The best of the best know that outstanding follow up is essential for a thriving real estate business. And more than ever, they’re using follow up boss the leading CRM for real estate to make it happen. Follow up boss helps you convert more leads. Robert slack, founder of the number one real estate team in United States uses it in his $1.5 billion business. Deborah Beagle uses it to guarantee that agents who join her team get two homes under contract in their first 90 days, and Barry Jenkins uses it to automate everything to run his $200 million team on a 25 hour workweek to reclaim his work life balance. For a limited time follow up boss is doubling their free trial for keeping it real podcast listeners go to follow up boss.com forward slash real for 30 days of unlimited access, no credit card required. That’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for a 30 day free trial. And now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment, we’re going to be answering a very important question, which is how should I structure my virtual tours and my photos for best customer engagement. And we actually have an industry insider Michael Verbena from Ai guide to talk specifically about these practices. But before we get to Michael and I guide, I want to remind everyone the best way you can help us grow. Actually, I’m gonna ask you for two things. Normally, I just asked for one. But it would really appreciate you helping us out in both things take less than a minute. But if you do like the show, and you want to help us continue to reach a broader audience, please do two things. Tell a friend to think of one other realtor that you know that could benefit from hearing from top producers and industry insiders like Michael and send them a link to our website, you can find us at keeping it real pod.com Or just have your friend pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And the second thing is please leave a review for us whether you’re using iTunes or it’s now known as Apple podcasts or Stitcher or Spotify or Pandora or Google Play Anywhere you listen to our podcast, please leave us a review. It really helps us reach more people. But thank you very much for continuing to support our show. I think we’re at episode like 313 right now. So we’re super, super grateful for everyone because you’re the reason that we can continue to grow and support the show. So thank you, and now on to our interview with Michael verbena.
Today on the show we have Michael Nirvana from Ai guy. Now let me tell you about Michael Michael Rivanna is a manager at AI guide which is a proprietary camera and software platform for capturing and delivering immersive 3d tours DPL four plans and reliable property data. He enjoys the process of working with others to build something unique, whether it be a product brand or a company and since 2016 Michael has established the AI guide brand and Canada as one of the leading 3d technologies and has most recently led the expansion of AI guide internationally. Visit I guide at go i guide.com. That’s go the letter ai guide.com And we are super excited to welcome Michael to the show to introduce this technology to our audience. Michael Welcome.
Michael Vervena 3:53 Welcome. Thank you for having me.
D.J. Paris 3:55 We’re really excited to have you here. Before we we talk all about you know the sort of virtual life that that we are all had been living for the last several years. No thanks to Coronavirus. Be very curious to hear about your sort of path into real estate. How did you get into this industry?
Michael Vervena 4:18 Yeah, sure. Yeah, that’s great. I well, I guess it started out I I’m a child of a product of two Realtors I guess at the end of the day. My dad is a broker owner for the last 50 years and still at it doing commercial residential real estate. My mom was a realtor for a dozen years and successful on her own right. And so I’ve always kind of been in the periphery of the real estate world. You know, listening to other episodes of of top performers on your show where they talk about how they got into real estate and, you know, in part because of their parents who were, you know, uncertain about getting into it. You know, similar story with me is, I didn’t really want to get into not less less about being in real estate, but I didn’t really want to be in sales, however, ended up finding my way into consumer packaged goods world got into sales and marketing and product development and really started to enjoy and embrace kind of the things that we do making, you know, I guess I built a career on improving processes, improving products, and you know, making the sales process easier and making the messaging easier so that people better understand of products and services are a right fit for them. So I ended up moving on from that career and helping out a lot of small and medium sized businesses in with their sales and marketing, lead generation, any removing hurdles, and helping them to streamline their processes and getting closer to their customers. And hence, it’s how I joined up with I guide, you know, came across them fascinating technology. They were pivoting, you know, when I got started, they were a company that were servicing real estate agents directly, they were, you know, producing the 3d virtual tours and photography and marketing services for photographer for agents directly. And they had just pivoted in order to scale. And that’s when I joined on on board, and we had probably less than 50 service providers around 50 service providers at that point in time. And now we’re over 1000 service providers were in 26 countries were coast to coast in the US. And yeah, it’s been it’s been fun, we’ve probably done over a quarter million 3d tours, and drafted over a half a billion square feet in, in floor plans. So it’s, we’ve come a long way. And it’s exciting to see this grow, and especially in the last couple of years. So I’ve got back into the real estate game, not directly but you know, servicing this industry. And it’s exciting. It’s nice to see how this industry is growing.
D.J. Paris 7:09 Yeah, it is really impressive. Being that, you know, virtual tours have been around for some time. But you know, I think maybe in the last several years, when we went into lockdown, and we started, you know, looking around our own, you know, four walls, most of us were probably working from home. And maybe we started thinking about, you know, as just sort of workers, do I am I going to return to the office? Or do I want to upsize? Do I need a home office? You know, am I am I going to be, you know, in? Am I going to have a home a home office life that I didn’t have previously. And, you know, for me, I know specifically I decided to upgrade. And even though I’m not working from home, it made sense for me to explore other options. And I will tell you, the very first thing that I as a consumer looking to find another place to live, we’re looking at when I was exploring different options with condos, and, you know, various sort of different types of properties here in Chicago was I went straight to the virtual tours. And I’m always surprised at how I was always rather I should say it this way, I was always disappointed a bit when a listing wouldn’t have a virtual tour. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on how important virtual tours are and what sort of trends you’re seeing as from, you know, buyers and sellers, with respect to how important they are to a listing.
Michael Vervena 8:46 Yeah, great question. You know, quite simply, you know, that 2020 This shift in terms of what we’re all dealing with and living through different two different extremes in Toronto we’ve been in we were in lockdown for probably one of the longest periods of time. And definitely a shift in terms of the use of this technology, not only in residential real estate, but we’re seeing it in commercial real estate and all these other sectors, in terms of being able to convey space and show and demonstrate what a space can be or look like communicating that and so, you know, we have a we have a technology that documents property. And what that does is it gives the ability to to be in a space virtually as simply as you know, you can just be there. And so what that really does is that helps empower people to make informed decisions about that environment. Because you can go in there now and you can, you know, get comfortable with understanding what that space is like you can measure on screen you can figure out if your furniture is going to fit. And one big part of what we provide is the floorplan side, right on the actual image 3d tour. And people find that as important, if not more important than just the 3d tour. Because as you’re walking through that space, you understand where you are in that space and where you’re positioned, how you’re fit and flow works for you, if it’s a business, or if it’s, you’re a buyer looking to buy a home, understanding that, hey, my baby’s rooms gonna be close to my room where my teenagers rooms gonna be on the other side of my room, is this going to provide enough space for me within the home, but to talk about, you know, the industry as a whole, you know, prior to COVID, you know, this was it was a slow game in terms of using this technology, to better market properties. And what’s interesting coming from my background, and consumer packaged goods, you know, marketing to consumers, when I came into residential real estate world, that it was interesting to see that there was a shift going on within the industry, you know, Zillow quickly become the gone from being a disrupter to being in the incumbent, because they had won the eyes of the consumers. Eyes are the prize. And, and so now you’ve got people like Amazon that have come into the industry. And so you’ve got this, when you’re searching for a home online, you’ve got all this wealth of information and data and great information about searching for a home. And you know, when you’re on these search portals, you can find out walk scores in the schools in the neighborhood, and you can really zone in and understand if the neighborhoods can work for you and your family. But then you kind of drill down into the house information. And as you pointed out, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, I literally looked at a property yesterday, that was $2.2 million, that had seven cell phone pictures on it, that were low res, and I couldn’t even make out with the house like a $2.2 million home. And then you go the next home. And it’s it’s a half a million dollars, they’ve got a 3d tour, drone video, beautiful photos that really convey like what this property could be for you. And so when we saw COVID hit, definitely that demand went up because people couldn’t go into homes, they, you know, they couldn’t see these properties. And even though we saw people buy homes sight unseen previously, with the 3d tour and the floor plans that just, you know, definitely did skyrocket and drove that. Over the last year, we’ve seen that come down a bit, probably more so in the US and in Canada. But that that overall trend has increased greatly over previous years. And what it’s doing is is creating a better consumer shopping experience for the home buyer. It’s giving them the information that they want. And, you know, as a consumer, myself, you know, I think everybody can relate that we’re all you know, even with working from home, I seem to have less time now than I did before. And you know, I don’t have time to run around and do those errands that I don’t know how I found time for before. And you know, if I’m searching for a home, I want to make sure that when I do go look at a home, it’s the right home for me, I’m a better qualified buyer, I’m not wasting the sellers time, I’m not wasting the agent’s time, not wasting my time. And we’ve seen redist we’ve got this tremendous feedback that this has helped to sell homes faster and made this process of the transaction easier as well.
D.J. Paris 13:33 The other thing that I guy does, that I am a huge fan of and i Everybody should be a huge fan of is that it also accurately measures rooms. This is one of the biggest challenges that Realtors face when either listing a property or showing a property. You know, obviously, buyers have specific needs around room sizes. And, you know, we you and I were speaking before we went on the air today about how challenging it is because oftentimes realtors will use previous MLS data to to to put up a new listing, which may in fact be inaccurate. And so the buyer shows up the rooms aren’t as advertised, or at least with respect to the measurements. And you guys solve for that.
Michael Vervena 14:25 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I can relate just to kind of a personal story is probably more impactful with pictures. But, you know, going into last winter, we knew we knew that we were going to be sitting outside a lot more and you know, maybe have friends outside distancing. And so I got hit on Instagram with a firepit and I’m like, This is great. I’m gonna buy this. This is perfect for you know, sitting outdoors, and it showed to be like about knee height. There was a picture of a person’s leg. It showed that it was you know, 19 inches tall and in a pocket Really 90 inches wide. So it was, you know, it probably just been bigger than a milk carton. If I don’t know if I’m beating myself if anybody knows what milk cartons look like anymore, but that size, and you know, six weeks later shows up in my mail, and it was the size of a candle holder and my, my family has not let me live this down. They teased me about this. And it was misrepresented and advertised. And even though they showed it was that size, I you know, they actually showed the inches and they totally misrepresented what they sold me. And you know, that was damaging to that company’s brand. And when I mentioned that company, I wouldn’t buy anything from them again. You know, and it was, it was disappointing to me as a consumer, and I’m actually questioning if I would ever buy anything again, on, you know, Instagram, to my wife, my wife, we said, Well, you didn’t research it. So, you know, shame on me, partly for that. But you know, at the end of the day, it was misrepresented. And that happens all the time in terms of when you go to sell a home. We see it all the time, just at the end of last year a case there was this a case here in southern Ontario. And I see that the cases all across North America, where you know, the buyer was a first time homebuyer went into the home. The home was advertised the they advertised a range between 2020 500 square feet. Yeah. Which is problematic in itself. You know, you know, it’s like if I sold you a used car and told you it’s between 60 and 80,000 miles, you how would you think like you need a new car? Yeah, I
D.J. Paris 16:35 wouldn’t trust you.
Michael Vervena 16:36 Yeah, exactly. So that’s what they said, the homeowner told the buyer, it was 2100 square feet, agents said it was 2000. And when it had an independently appraised, it was 14 150 square feet. Now, wow, that is that is a big difference. And you know, definitely, you know, upsetting, especially in markets, you know, we’ve been dealing with hot markets for years now. And you know, across North America, you’re seeing that prices of homes are going up. And in Toronto, they’re over 1000 bucks a square foot. So you can quite quickly add up in terms of what that cost is on that home. So what we do is, you know, we have a camera system that’s using a lidar time of flight measurement system. And so we’re measuring, you know, 1000s of points in each room. And we upload that data that data is uploaded to a team of drafters who draft with those four plants, they follow a prescribed methodology of measurement. And now if you don’t know what that is, it’s quite simply, as you know, you’re gonna get a final answer in terms of what the total square footage is on the home. You know, back in math class, you got marks for the final answer and your math problems? Well, that methodology of measurement tells you how you solve that problem to get to that answer, what you included, what you excluded in the rules about how to measure that home. And so then now you have an apples to apples comparison, when you’re looking at two properties, what you included, how you measure the home, all the data points that went into it. And so that gives you like that math problem, the rest of your marks, and so if there is a dispute, you can quite quickly, you know, talk to the other person, or whoever has a different measurement for that home. Because you send six appraisers into a home, you’re gonna come back with six different answers. But you know, it’s all within a range of, you know, a couple of percent if you can stay within that range. Okay, now that’s acceptable. And you can go through exactly how you got to that answer. So it’s defendable for you as an agent, when you use a builder’s plan. Sometimes it’s kind of like baking a cake, I’m going to it’s an as built plan. It’s not necessarily always built to that plan. They change things I worked as a framer for years, you know, you’d move doors and windows and you know, there will be changes in that in that property. So what is the final outcome of that baked cake, when you bake that cake, you have a recipe at the end, you have that final product, you have to go back and and measure that home to find out what that accurate measurement is. And those measurements are rather. And that helps, you know, protect you as an agent protects us your brand, and you’re providing your consumer with precise and accurate information. One last point on that is realtor.com did a study in 2020 where they asked you know, you asked about the market and what how COVID affected it, but they asked consumers what is it that you wanted to see and sure the first thing that came back was a 3d tour because they couldn’t get into the properties, but they wanted accurate and accurate listing information. And you know, so that reliable, sorry, accurate and reliable listing information. And if you’re using someone else’s MLS listing, you’re using tax data, you’re using a builder’s plan if you don’t know verify that as an agent, you’re opening yourself up to risk. And you’re doing a disservice to either the seller or the buyer, depending on if it’s bigger or smaller.
D.J. Paris 20:09 Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is a really important thing. And it’s also a way to differentiate yourself as an agent amongst all the other agents out there to say, Hey, I’m going to not only sell, you know, do a virtual tour for this property, but we’re going to accurately measure every single room to give the most immersive experience to a potential buyer, but also accuracy. The and to speak to accuracy with to a seller is really, really a nice value, add, in my opinion, to be able to say, hey, we’re not just going to take beautiful foot photographs, but we’re going to do a secondary piece on top of this, which is making sure each room is measured correctly. And then we’re going to create an environment where potential buyers can play in those rooms, and see themselves with and be able to put their own personal items in those rooms, you know, virtually. So it’s so important. And I know that every not every, of course, but a good number of buyers and sellers who are, you know, somewhat technologically savvy are going to explore options like this before they end up putting offers in. And so it from a cost perspective, you know, what does this look like to an agent? You know, what is this? Is this an expensive process? Or is it reasonable? Or?
Michael Vervena 21:39 Yeah, I think, you know, again, it’s reasonable. So, our services are usually offered through third party photography, and marketing companies, sometimes in House Media Department for a brokerage or team will have their own system. And so typically, it’s bundled in with, you know, photo package, and then they may do other things as well. I mean, if you look at the eye guide, it’s an iframe like a YouTube video is an iframe, it’s embeddable, you can put it on your website, it acts like a single property website, in a sense. And you can include things that, you know, all the top things buyers want to see when they’re searching for a home online. That’s not for me, that’s from NAR home buyer and seller study comes out every year, you know, they want to see photos, they want to see property details. You know, that’s not only the rooms and the rooms, the number of rooms and the price of the home. But what are the room sizes, what are the total area calculations of the home. And number three that comes up every year, our floor plans, because floorplans depict how that home fits and flows for them. And so it provides all this detailed information, you can include things like video and drone, video, 360s, and drone videos, it just depending on the provider that you use, it’s all for your services, but this can be delivered. And I think, you know, typically, it’s around, you know, for an average sized home, I would say between 250 and 299. With photos, all those other things like video and drone stuff would probably be extra, but that would be 3d tour for plans, room measurements, area calculations. And photos are typically in that package. Now that ranges from market to market, you know, in in Northern California, you know, San Francisco area, it’s probably going to be a little bit more than, you know, in some other markets that are out there as well in the Midwest. So it’s all dependent on the independent buyers, but it’s quite reasonable in terms of the cost of the home. It’s a fast, easy process. And the nice thing about it, it’s a marketing tool. So you get all that content together, you put that out on the MLS like through your multimedia link, and that’s gonna populate on realtor.com and on Zillow, and it doesn’t populate, like down below. So Zillow used to, you know, you know, they used to have it down below below the fold, they’ve seen the importance and the search portals have seen the importance of this. And in Canada realtor.com. They embed it right on the main listing page, Zillow and realtor.com right underneath the main photos, they have 3d tour, and you can click on that. And now you can have this immersive experience the benefit, you know, beyond the buyer where now the buyer has all this information that really qualifies them and gives them a good understanding of the property. The benefit to the agent is you’re keeping people on your listing much longer like we see the analytics. And we’ve got the analytics back from a lot of the search portals and told us this that, you know, people typically will stay on a listing much longer really dive deep in understanding that property. To boot. They’re going to see your branding there and understand that you’re the agent that’s putting this out and that again just bolsters your And and what you do to help people market and sell a home, which is one of the top things that buyers want our sellers, one
D.J. Paris 25:08 sounds, it’s such a great observation that you do want people lingering on your property that you’re selling virtually, or in person, as as much as you want, we know that, that that’s always a good thing. And by the boy, you just made a point that I want all of our listeners to understand is you want people hanging around your listing as much as possible. And by giving them a immersive experiences that will keep them engaged, and they’ll be able to explore the the property, obviously much better than just through static photos. It is it my question is, is there ever, you know, in your your business, of course, is through virtual tours? Is there ever a reason not to use a virtual tour? I mean, it seems to be the what the consumer wants? And what what it if you don’t have it, I suspect, you know, like, I when I went looking for my property, I had a neutral to negative feeling if I didn’t see a virtual tour, because then I went oh, no, I have to go see the property. And I, you know, and with photography, too. That’s the other thing that I’m curious about, is I think consumers are wising up to the fact that we don’t live in an Instagram perfect world. And when we see professional photography, we understand that there’s a little bit of staging that’s going on that that yes, the room doesn’t really exactly look like that. But with virtual with virtual tours, you can actually see what the room looks like. Because I know when I see, we have 800 agents here at our company. And when I see the photographers that they use a boy, the sky is always perfect. You know, for an exterior shot of the house, the interior shot are all perfect. But again, does the home actually look like this? The virtual tour will confirm those those particulars, right?
Michael Vervena 27:15 Yeah, you’re right. And well. So to kind of touch on that I’ll start with the last the photos first. The photos are that emotional draw. Same with video video is really about building agents branding to and join them in, in what we’ve seen in the photos kind of draw you in. And I know personally, because I’ve been looking for a home for a couple of years in the GTA. And it’s such a hard market to to try to buy in, especially when we’ve got such a limited area that we were picking. And my wife will look at it. And she goes, yeah, now don’t like it. Because the photos are not very good. I’ll put it that way. And it doesn’t it’s not enticing. But I’m like, no, no, look, look, the size is right. Like this is good for our needs. This was fit her needs. So I have to drag her there to go look at it. Well, on the opposite end, you know, she’s taken me to some homes, because the photos are gorgeous. The house is beautiful. And I’m like, Yeah, I think it’s too small. Like it’s gorgeous. But we’re gonna have less storage. You know, it’s just not it’s the right round rooms. But if we’re going to be struggling in there. And you know, in a couple of cases, the agent didn’t put the floor they had floor plans. They didn’t put them online. Yeah, had to go there walked in the house in the yard, right? We just wasted our time. Let’s go. And it’s like, so those, you’re right, it does draw you in and keep you there longer. What the beauty is, is if you have a home that’s rough or a rental property, or you know, something is demolished, because I’ve seen, I’ve seen crazy images out there and stuff that you necessarily wouldn’t put those 3d tours on, you know, nice thing with our tours, you can turn off certain rooms, you know, if you’ve stuffed that everything in the garage full of stuff or, you know, storage, messy storage, closets and stuff like that if it wasn’t staged, but the floor plans, you know, don’t show the mess they sell they sell the potential the home. And that’s what’s nice about the floor plans because it shows you where the storage is where the light comes in where the windows are, if you need to change things around and it really actually provides more information. I think Zillow does a homebuyer study where they see that four plans are higher than 3d tour is number two on their list. And wow, again, it really kind of gives you a good understanding of the fate and flow of their property if that works for you and your family. But, you know, again, the 3d tours if it’s, you don’t want to show some of those images. Yeah, absolutely. You can turn those off and just use the floorplans and some of the photos to depict it.
D.J. Paris 29:44 So it’s a really interesting so for our listeners whenever you have a listing Are you number one having a vert including a virtual tour, are you including floor plans, which that’s probably the easily overlooked option and You know, he’s absolutely right. Because I know that floor plans they do in some way. It really, Michael’s right, they give you so much more information than a static picture. And you can plan Whoo, I guess, pardon the pun or pardon the using the same word AP, it’s built into the word floor plan. So what do you have floor plans, people in particular, you know, who have a personality type where they like to, you know, visually see things and plan for that next move are going to want to, you know, put those things together. And that enables you to do that. So for plans are a must. virtual tours, of course, are also a must. And AI guide essentially does all of this for you. I’m going to pause for just a moment to acknowledge our sponsor for this episode, which is follow up boss now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country. Do you know which CRM is used by more than one of our guests than any other? Well, you guessed it, it is follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. But don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States uses follow up boss and he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business real estate business rather in six years. And follow boss also integrates with 250 different systems, keep your current lead sources. And they will integrate with all of your different platforms there and get this follow up bus is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a free 30 day trial. Now that’s twice as much time as they give everybody else. But you have to follow the special link to get that 30 day free trial. So visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real Oh yeah, and by the way, no credit card required. So you can try it through 30 days, risk free, but only by visiting follow up boss.com forward slash real follow up like a boss with a follow up boss. Michael wanted to also talk a little bit about sort of do’s and don’ts with respect to photography with with listings. I remember when I first entered this industry, and I’m not a practicing agent, myself, our listeners are practicing agents. But I remember 15 or 12 years ago, I guess that there was a prevailing thought that keeping the room as as bare as possible was a good idea so that people could visualize their own stuff within the confines of those rooms. Curious to to know how that’s changed and shifted over time. And if you have suggestions for our audience about how staging should happen when somebody has a listing.
Michael Vervena 33:03 Sure, yeah, and and then that’s the nice thing about how we offer our services through third party real estate photographer companies and, and, you know, all these these these companies are marketing companies, they’re they’re professionals in terms of really helping you kind of, you know, finding the right partner, but really helping you in terms of staging that. And on the staging side, that’s that’s part of it is reducing the amount of clutter, taking down personal photos, there’s there’s lists out there in terms of where you know, top things that you can do to, you know, make that property more appealing, changing paint colors that are very dramatic, to, you know, more muted, more whites making it look more, you know, fresh and modern. And, you know, the more things that you do, and if you’re your agent, or the company that you’re that the seller, or the agent is working with, you know, procure, like professional services to help you out with those things, because they do bring a lot of value. On the other side of it too, you know, from our 3d tour side and the photos, you can you can take, you can shop those out to third party providers, or a lot of the companies will offer these services that to virtually staged spaces. So if it is a builder’s home, or if it is an empty apartment or condo, you can get some of the rooms staged, which also help kind of, you know, help people to envision what it looks like or what it could look like. And that’s a more cost effective way to be able to, you know, add those things. I think, you know, on our side from what I see in terms of adding value, and this is a bit of a tangent.
I think in terms of any digital assets that you’re going to get and if you get propelled So in digital assets, professional photos, a 3d tour or floor plans, get the room measurements, area calculations, all that stuff together. The big thing that we, you know, I look at, I look at 1000s, and 1000s of agents in their analytics, and I can go in and look at the listing and see how they’ve done on that listing. And, you know, sometimes unfortunately, there are agents that will pay for all these services, but then they don’t really market those services or share them, and you get great analytics. And so one of the big pointers that we kind of share is about getting the most out of your online listing is by stage share and show stage that stage your digital assets just like you would stage your home. You know, getting those professional photos done, getting all your digital assets together, and packaging them up in a way where you can deliver them. Like I mentioned earlier, you know, you’ve got this into an AI guide, you can put that out through your MLS system and habit show right under the main photos on Zillow or realtor.com or realtor.ca, for examples. And that’s the stage part but the big part where you get a lot of value as an agent. And again, homebuyers home sellers are looking still one of the top things that home sellers look to their agent for his to help sell and market that home is share that you know market that property you get it on the MLS, you get it on Zillow, you get it on realtor.com and realtor.ca. You you share it on your social media. And in some cases, when I look at some of these analytics, their agents daggits 1000s of views through their social media. Now I don’t know if they’re boosting or they’re just gonna, you know, huge followings. But a lot of the top agents will, you know, get tons of views on these properties. And why is that important, because then they can show results to their clients. So one thing that we provide is analytics report, you know, here every week and analytics report, you can take that to your your home sellers and say, hey, you know, feel good about how many people came in looked at this home, because this is how many people came in looked at it virtually, this is how many people returned and looked at it again, this is how much time they spent on it. And here’s all the ways that I got your property out there for people to see. And the reason why I love Analytics, you know, being a, I guess a kid of Realtors is that I think a lot of home sellers don’t realize how hard Realtors work. They work weekends, evenings, they’re busy all the time. And part of the you know, I guess the not appealing part of real estate is get to work for yourself. Your entrepreneurial is fantastic, but you’re working all the time. So it’s that that toss up, this is something tangible that you can show to your clients to say, Hey, this is the value that I brought to the table, and you know, tuck them in after your solo home, especially in a market like across North America right now, where homes are selling in days, we’ve been dealing with that in, in Ontario, Southern Ontario in Canada for years, and you know, home sells fast. You know, your sellers, you know, they want to make sure that they’re their next referral, that they say use my agent because they did this, this this for me. And they showed me how they did such a great job for me. It just brings more value to your talking your clients and you make sure that they’re happy with what you brought to the table because referrals and winning listings this is, you know, a key part of law. I guess what my dad always used to say bread and butter, right?
D.J. Paris 38:26 Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And I think that it’s really important. So you create these great virtual tours for your listings. And then you have to promote them on social media. At the very least, of course, they’re going to also distribute to Zillow, Trulia realtor.com, as you mentioned, but promoting them on social media is really important for our audience to understand. Because not only does that get more eyeballs on the property, and hopefully, maybe even a few additional buyers come your way. But it also is a branding exercise for you to showcase. Here’s what I do for my clients. Here’s why when people hire me, why they hire me and what I can do for them. And so it really feeds every part of your business, including, of course, the end result for that particular client, which is to sell that property, but it also introduces everyone in your social sphere, to your process. And by pushing and it creates content that you want to probably, you know, most Realtors on a regular basis are thinking, what should I be posting on social media right now this is content that you can promote and you can re reshare it as well. So maybe a year after the home is sold, you can repurpose that content and say hey, you know, here’s something I did a year ago that I thought was really neat. So there’s really a lot of benefit in addition to just helping get a home sold for a higher price point. For to the to to for the seller, but I think this also really speaks to marketing and branding. And just separating yourself from every other agent out there who isn’t offering the service. Michael, if anyone is interested in having their photographer connect with with, with that guy, what’s the best way that they should reach out?
Michael Vervena 40:21 Yeah, just go right to go guy.com. And you can, you can connect with one of our product experts right there. And they’ll provide your demo and all the details that you need to better understand that for sure, they can reach directly out to us there. And that’s probably the quickest path or you know, reach out to us on our Instagram or Facebook as well. And I can provide some links for you to put in the show notes.
D.J. Paris 40:49 We will definitely have links in the show notes for everyone. You can also go to go i guide.com. That’s go Gio and letter i guide.com. Go i guide.com. And ask your photographer your photog to, to connect with I guide because they’re there what they’re doing is so impressive. It’s going to really take your business to a different level. Because what you’re going to be able to do is it’s going to create assets for you to not only sell the property that you’re currently working on, but also brand yourself as somebody who really goes that extra mile with the most cutting edge technology. So Michael, thank you so much for being on our show and be half of our audience. We want to thank Michael for his time today to share some of those tips about best practices around the aesthetics of listing a property and doing virtual showings and Virtual Staging. And also, on behalf of Michael and myself, we want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show. Best way that you can always help us grow is to tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing from this great conversation we just had with Michael and send them a link to our website. Best way to do that. Just send them right over to keeping it real pod.com and they can stream every episode we’ve ever done. We have over 300 ready to stream there as well as our Facebook page, which is facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. Every episode we’ve ever done can also be streamed right from our Facebook page. So tell a friend please. And thank you, Michael so much for coming on the show. And we will see everyone on the next episode. Thanks, Michael.
Michael Vervena 42:36 Thank you. It’s great. Appreciate you being here.
From Professional Football To Becoming A Top Real Estate Producer • Beau Blankenship
Nov 18, 2021
Beau Blankenship with Blankenship Group and License Partner for Engel & Völkers talks about the beginning of his career in real estate and how he built his business. Beau takes some time to talk about his previous career in professional football and how that helped his success in real estate business. Next, he discusses how their business-doing changed after Covid-19. Last, Beau among others shares tips on how he develops relationships with realtors from other states, the strategies he uses on selling high net-worth properties and how he determines the best time to list.
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Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by show Ami. Show AMI is the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to get buyers into homes without you being the one to show it. Now we’ve all had situations where clients wanted to see properties at the most inconvenient time or in a location that was difficult for us to show. Now there’s an easy way to find another licensed agent who will show the home on your behalf for a small fee. You keep the client you keep the commission, you keep your commitments. Now show AMI is truly the Uber for realtors connecting busy Realtors with local agents who have time to show your clients the properties they want without taking any part of your commission. And if you’d like to be one of show armies featured agents that realtors can hire to have you help with their showings, you can sign up on their website at no cost. So whether you’re an agent who wants some help with showings, or you’re an agent that wants to make some money helping doing showings, show AMI is the app to use install show AMI on Apple or Android devices or simply visit their website at show ami.com That’s sh O W A mi.com SHOW ami.com to learn more and now on to our Episode
Hello and welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris I am your guide and host through the show and for all the listeners that I got a chance to say hello to at the NAR conference in San Diego last week or by the time you’re listening to this probably several weeks ago. I wanted to say thank you it was a pleasure meeting you and also seeing everybody in person how exciting we’re starting to go back to in person stuff. But as always, we want to start out the beginning of this episode by saying thank you. We have we have more listeners now than we’ve ever had. We continue to grow and that’s because of you guys. Please continue to help us grow by telling a friend I think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing from top producers like the one we’re about to talk to which is Beau Blankenship who is a professional football player turned top real estate agent he’s amazing as we had a great conversation you’re in for a real treat. But please tell a friend about our show. Let other agents know that we exist send them over to our website keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real make sure they find the one with with my name on it DJ because there’s a few other keeping it reels out there and hit that subscribe button and also please follow us on Facebook you can find us@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod and we’re very excited to say in 2022 We’re going to be launching a very intensive Instagram account with a lot of cool stuff that we’re going to do there and sadly we haven’t done that yet. So we’re in the process of putting that together for you guys. But as always thank you and now on to our episode an interview with Beau Blankenship.
Today on the show we have Bo Blankenship in the Blankenship group with angle and Volkers 30 A beaches in the Emerald Coast slash Gulf Coast in Florida. But let me tell you a little bit about both. So Beau Blankenship is a successful business owner, a luxury real estate investor. He’s also the lead advisor for the Blankenship group and licensed partner for angle and Volkers 30 A beaches and from a young age. Beau had consistently a strong desire for success and possess the drive to go above and beyond to make his goals a reality. From the beginning of his journey, he struggled to find a foothold in the ultra competitive field of real estate and property management. As a result, Bo learned what it took to lead a company and after years of dedication to sharpening and sales and team building skills. Both finally opened up his first brokerage in 2018, which is incredible because he was only 27 years old and even more incredibly, he has since cleared nearly a billion dollars in personal sales volume since the start of his career, his brokerage which grew and I am somebody who recruits agents all day every day for the last 11 years. So I am nobody’s more impressed with what I’m about to say than me. But he has grown his brokerage from for advisors in 2018 to more than 70 in 2021. He has cleared more than $608 million year to date with grit determination and a shrewd sense for business and real estate investing. Bo also grew his brokerage sales from 235 million in 2019 to an A pro Reaching a billion dollars in sales just this year. Now bow was able to do this within a span of three years, but continues to lead the markets is number one in GCI and volume for Engel and Volkers number one in the 30. A market for personal sales number one year growth in the Engel and Volkers network and real trends 2020 20. He’s number 36 in the country, and number 71 in 2019. Bose just done amazing things, please visit him on his website, which is 30 A is an apple, so 30 a fine living.com Again, 30 a fine living.com. And also please follow his group on Instagram, they have a really cool Instagram account, Blankenship underscore group, and we will put links to those in the show notes for this podcast. Bo, welcome to the show.
Beau Blankenship 5:49 Hey, thank you so much for having us. And thank you for that great introduction. I really appreciate it.
D.J. Paris 5:54 I am always you know, it’s it’s funny that this is like a 300. And I don’t know, maybe 10th episode, something like that. And I’m always still so impressed. Talking to agents, you know, at this point, maybe I’d start getting bored talking to really successful agents, but I’m never bored. Because I’m always so impressed with people like yourself who have really started at a young age and grown something that Gosh, 99.99% of agents just haven’t done. And so they want to hear how you did it. I’m sure there isn’t any magic formula, or maybe there is. But I always like to start at the very beginning of your journey and sort of hear about how you got into real estate and you know, how you got to where you are today. So if you don’t mind taking us back to the beginning, let us know how you got started.
Beau Blankenship 6:39 Definitely. So I you know, I was growing up and I was always just interested in real estate, we started visiting down here on vacation, I was always fascinated with the properties and you know, the building side of it and how people make money and, and the spec side of things and so it just always intrigued me and then as I was getting older, just the some of the wealthiest people I knew and picking their brains I get through real estate real estate, I buy this, this this and so that always just interested in me. And I was playing football at the time. And while I was training, I got a passable, you know, the courses and all that kind of stuff. And after that career ended, I just pivoted into real estate didn’t know what to do, you know, and so I pivoted real estate and started a property management company. And that just kind of just kind of jumped both feet in and just kind of got going after one career and just pivoted completed another one.
D.J. Paris 7:31 Yeah, you know, it’s funny, I absolutely forgot to mention your football career, which I think is interesting. In for a couple of reasons. One, I think people are always fascinated by people that that play at a high level with sports but also I’m curious to know if the discipline and the hard work and the grit that it was required to make it you know, as an as an athlete translates over to real estate so if you don’t mind sharing with us your your football career I apologize for not mentioning that before.
Beau Blankenship 8:02 No, no, you’re good. No, no people always I don’t mind if people don’t bring it up because it’s typically when people talk about it’s completely fine. I don’t you know, it’s good not talk about it, but it’s so I started high school went to college. I was offered I had an early scholarship offer at Iowa State so I committed them early. Like you know, they were the first ones that really offer me and so I wanted to go play for that person that took a chance on me went there. My coach left who was Jean she’s like at the time, right like two weeks where I got there. So as a new coach came in. So that was so I played my first year didn’t redshirt so played there. And then my best friend was quarterback at another school and didn’t gel so much with the new coach. So I decided to go play with him. At Ohio someone played with him at Ohio played there for the additional three years. And then after that I had a chance to play with the Jaguars those were the Jaguars for for just a short period of time got cut and then just transition here but it is a direct correlation of how to win How to Lose training what do you have to do to win what do you have to do to get better when you have to it’s a direct correlation you know your schedule. So it’s it be watching it all the time, but I mean, it parallels completely LIS wars.
D.J. Paris 9:16 Yeah, I imagine I imagine it does. And I always when I was in college I remember thinking about it when we had in my fraternity one of the football players just happened to be in our fraternity and we never saw him because he constantly was doing two days I think just
Beau Blankenship 9:34 lifting weight lifting unites Phil, I mean, it’s just that translates to and you know, when I hire people, employees or whatever, like having that background, it’s I know, they know kind of the grind and so many parallels again really good with real estate.
D.J. Paris 9:51 Yeah, I imagine it and I imagine to one of the cool things about athletics and competitive athletics is this The idea of learning how to lose I think is so important. And I know we’re going maybe a little bit off off the real estate sort of topic. But I’m curious on how important it is to learn how to lose, because, you know, there’s so much of the business world that’s just about losing. And then, and then just getting right back up and sort of trying again. And I’m curious if that, like you, I imagine athletes probably bounce back a little faster in the business world when they come across a challenge or something doesn’t go their way, because they’re just so used to that’s just part of the deal, I imagine.
Beau Blankenship 10:32 Right? Right. Yeah. So it’s, obviously we never want to lose, and most people don’t ever want to lose, and we’re so competitive, right? And so like, I hate it more than anything, right? And but when you do you have to? I think athletes know. Alright, so that happened, what do I have to change? Now pivot? And go win it again, right? Or what do I have to do to go fix this? And to get better at this to then go win it because it hurts so bad to lose? I never want to feel it again. How can I learn from this and move on? So that’s Yeah.
D.J. Paris 11:06 Yeah. And you end up getting stronger and smarter. And just, it’s, it’s, I’d heard the saying, and it’s sort of one of those, like, it’s a bummer that it’s true, but I think it probably is one of the truest things I’ve heard is successful people just fail more. They’re just constantly like, Hey, we’re gonna keep pushing, and we’re gonna learn from our challenges. And yeah, and I’m curious, curious, go ahead. I’m
Beau Blankenship 11:29 sorry. No, I’ll just say just when you lose, the thing is that it just doesn’t crater you. Because if you if you lose it craters, you completely, and there’s just no rebound from it. Like you can’t, you can’t move at all off your path. Like it just is what happened. And we just got to keep going.
D.J. Paris 11:42 Yeah, people need to not be as afraid of losing. And all you have to do is just is just try a lot of different things. And, and you’ll you’ll you’ll learn about losing. But the cool part is, is you just end up getting smarter. And it’s the same thing with weightlifting, I mean, you don’t get stronger until you go to you don’t have to go to failure, I guess. But going to failure is a very humbling experience with any exercise. And I just came from the gym. So I’ve got that in my mind. And my train pushes me to failure a lot. And it’s the hardest part of any exercise I do, I’d probably for most people probably would feel that way. But it’s like, as much as I hate it, I’m like, No, I kind of have to go to a place where I can’t do another rep. And then let the muscles rebuild and maybe do one more. Next step
Beau Blankenship 12:24 is a it’s the exact same thing as training as weightlifting. And it’s the same thing, you wanna get stronger, you have to eat well, you have to do this, you have to have a regiment, you know, it’s just like, it’s all it’s all, it’s all the same thing.
D.J. Paris 12:33 And this is a business to where it’s tough to have a schedule. And because you’re probably you know, most firms aren’t probably setting the schedule for their agents, and just being able to go well, it’s, you know, at six o’clock, or whatever time you get up, I know exactly what I’m doing at six o’clock. I know what, you know, sort of having your day planned is something that I think a lot of agents struggle with, I suspect you are very disciplined about your time.
Beau Blankenship 13:00 Right, correct. And I think, you know, we own this brokerage, and I think the ones that are successful, treat it like a nine to five, right? The people that come in and just come in every once a while once a week, not saying they can’t be successful. But the people that fail mostly Don’t, don’t show up, the people that show up, they rarely fail to show up rarely fail.
D.J. Paris 13:22 I’ve heard that so many times from from agents who have been on the show is that, you know, if they have a physical office space, they’re like, I’m amazed, I come in at eight o’clock, and I’m the only one here and things like that. So I would love to talk about how you talked about pivoting and how important that is for as you grow your business. And of course, things change. And obviously COVID changed changed the game for all of us in so many ways. I’m curious on on how you guys pivoted because you not only, you know, were thrive during that where a lot of agents really did and I know sort of our listeners might be thinking because if they listen to this show, they’re only hearing about how people had so much successful years, you know, as as we started figuring out what to do during COVID. But there’s a lot of agents that really struggled and I’m curious how you guys not only pivoted but but really took your business to the next level. So did your processes change when COVID sort of came?
Unknown Speaker 14:19 Yeah, a little bit. And so when COVID first came, I remember there was one day, I think in one day we lost like $30 million in deals like backing out walking, walking with an earnest money and it just happened cat hat. I was like, What is going on here? And so I was like, Man, I don’t know if we’re gonna sell another house. Like,
D.J. Paris 14:40 that’s a tough day that I’m out of here.
Beau Blankenship 14:43 So no, it didn’t change. We just kind of, you know, kept our faith and just like just kept going through it and she was gonna happen and Kevin nurturing our people and all of a sudden people were like, Hey, I gotta get down there and I like we just kind of took off. I know that’s not the story for you, but it just kind of took off people wanting to get Hear, so we just kind of kept our pulse on the market, get talking to sellers, Kevin forming sellers, like, Hey, this is what’s going on. This is where I think the market is, we don’t know where it’s going. You know, we saw people get a lot of deals to like lowball deals and get them because they saw an opportunity a weakness in the market, you know, there’s about a three week period where they could, someone could really get an absolute steal on a property. So we saw some of that. But really, what we did was just, it gave us an opportunity to touch base with our sellers, and be like, Hey, this is what’s going on. And just informed because these are mostly second home owners. And so just give us opportunity to reach out and touch them. Buyers wise, you know, just kind of, hey, this is what’s going on. I think this is what’s happening, being in touch with the rental market saying, hey, the rental numbers are still here, people are still trying to get here. And then just kind of letting that kind of dictate it. And then it really just we’re just trying to ride the wave when people were coming back.
D.J. Paris 15:51 Yeah. And clearly, it’s been working really well for you, I was just having a conversation with a top producer here in Chicago. She’s in the US. There’s about 44,000 agents here. And she’s always in the top 15 or so. Which is beyond impressive, because it’s just one person. And I was asking her about her 2022 goals, like, Hey, what are you trying to do? And she said, this, I thought was really interesting. She has been in the business about 20 years. And she said, Well, my number one of my goals for next year is because COVID has, of course, enabled a lot of people to work remotely. And people are now thinking about, you know, moving and, and I know your areas, a lot of like you said, second homes, third homes, etc. But there’s still just a lot of people that are moving to other places that maybe are more climate friendly, or, you know, economical, or there’s tax benefits, like in Florida to do that. And she said what I’m going to do, she goes, I have about five locations, she’s here in Chicago, that my clients tend to either retire to, or maybe they have a vacation home or, and she goes, I’m gonna fly to all five of those locations and and start interviewing agents there and say, Hey, I get I get a ton of business out your way. And I want to develop those relationships. And I’m just curious, because I suspect that’s in Well, we talked about this actually before, going going on the air, that that’s a that’s a big part of your business’s relationships with realtors, in other parts of the country. And I’m just curious on how you develop those relationships, because you’re on the end, where people are sort of, you know, interested in, in their clients, maybe moving there? How do you develop those relationships with someone in you know, a different part of the country?
Beau Blankenship 17:27 Yeah, definitely. It’s a big part of our business. And we’re typically, you know, on the receiving end of it, which I feel bad because we typically don’t have people that, you know, like, Hey, I’m moving to Nashville or whatever, it’s typically the other way around. So Atlanta, Nashville, Houston, Oklahoma, Utah, you know, Birmingham, New York, I’m guessing New York, like, and so we’re getting a bunch of people, you know, referring and so really just letting them know. And so that’s one thing, why I chose to bring Evie here was to be able to have those connections, right, because those were the boutique before I didn’t have that, you know, I’d have to go create those organically. But with Evie, I’m able to call a Boston and call up wherever. And just kind of make those connections. And then you know, in within the V, if you can reach a level called, they call a private office. And it’s just like the top producers that they need network with each others and listening to all this kind of stuff. So it’s really, the business or the company is really helped me do that. And with gatherings and stuff like that. So keep in touch. And they really just nurturing those people letting people know, like, Hey, we’re a top producer, hey, we can do this, this, like you’ll know about our area, because it’s still kind of, it’s now the the area’s gaining ambitous typically, it was unknown for a little bit, you know, but now 30 is gonna get mad, and everyone knows about it, but really just just putting our info out that people know that we can we can do and how we can serve people and really about the area and it’s just connected with other top producers.
D.J. Paris 18:57 Yeah, it’s interesting, you sort of you’re right, you’re on probably the receiving on more than anything for that. However, you have tremendous competition. You know, there are lots of huge successful producers in your area. It’s, it’s, it’s yes. If you were the only realtor there, it’d be it’d be amazing, but you aren’t, you aren’t competing with all those other agents. And, and you’re obviously a very humble person, but it’s, you know, it doesn’t just naturally come to you, even though you’re part of Engel and Volkers, which is such a well respected brand. You’ve earned it, you know, and, and I think I think that’s, it’s so it must be so wonderful to get those referrals. I’m curious, too, when you’re dealing with high net worth individuals, which I suspect is, you know, the vast majority. Are you also oftentimes dealing not just with the principal itself, you know, the home buyer or the seller, but maybe even a team of their people who you know, manage their finances or manage their business is there a lot of that as well?
Beau Blankenship 19:54 A lot of that dealing with assistance and hey, they want to do this. This is what they’re looking for. are a lot of that, but mainly, you know, when they come in, we show them it’s, you know, it’s dealing with them, but there are several times where it’s, you’re just dealing with their system and, and, you know, manage or whatever it is. So that does happen quite a bit.
D.J. Paris 20:16 And I imagine it’s it’s, you’re now having to please many different people sometimes in the transaction on your on the on your side, where it’s not just you know the other side and try to coordinate with them, you now have to really create a really pretty impeccable sort of presentation, for lack of a better word, because you’ve got a whole team of people that are judging you and making sure that you know what you’re doing. Yeah, and clinging
Beau Blankenship 20:41 on to every single word you say. So when you give them a price, you better, you know, preach and have it dialed in, you know, like, it’s, it’s, which is you always should be, you know, man of your word, but like you, you have to be pretty, they hold you to it. So everything. So, yeah, but you have to be dialed in completely when you’re dealing with this view.
D.J. Paris 21:00 I suspect, I’m curious to that, just how you guys sort of sell a property because you are dealing on a lot of times in the high net worth space. You know, and I am curious to know, you know, what your sort of take is on on the strategy for selling some of these properties, which by the way, there are lots of those properties that are always coming and going. And because the investment into those properties are so high, I imagine the presentation has to really be special. So I’m very curious on how you, maybe what you do that you feel is a little different than than maybe what other agents are doing,
Beau Blankenship 21:37 I would say the advantage, we have another one to some area at all, I would just say we just come out hustle everybody, and we’ve got the probably some of the best connections down here, we’ve got an amazing database, we’re very, very well connected. And so really hustling that person’s property, yes, I’m gonna go put on MLS, like we’re able to reach out to our 1000s of people in our database, you know, and really get the exposure that don’t, you know, get don’t send everybody don’t think he wills down here has. And so being able to reach those people that no one else reaches, has really been our biggest thing. It’s like, hey, because I’ve got a list of clients that I can just call say, boom, this is coming. And you know, maybe I’ll sell a pre market or whatever. So really having the database and the connections, and my team just hustling it, hey, I’ve got this coming up caller when you can send it there when you can. And then on top of that is our marketing, you know, our videographer or video or photos. And then the exposure we get. So we get, you know, if it’s over a million dollars, it’s in Wall Street Journal mansions, global New York Times Architectural Digest all this kind of stuff. And so we really get really have a loud megaphone to really get them the reach they need. And so that’s part of it. And really, I would say, after all of that the core of it is us just grinding and hustling that property and get just getting it done.
D.J. Paris 22:56 It’s so well said and I, you know, it’s funny, I think that there’s a lot of, and I’m not laughing at anyone who has this thought, because I certainly would have this thought to if I was producing and not really understanding what it takes to compete that high net worth space. But I would think, gosh, if I could only get a $8 million listing, my problems would be over. And I would think, you know, I’ll drop it on the MLS, I’ll get the right price. And then I’ll just sit back and wait for the deals to come in. But I suspect that’s not, as you just said, you do a lot more because when you have properties of that size, the MLS probably isn’t that important, I suspect. I mean, it certainly helps. But you what you were saying the hustling and reaching out to buyers, even though you’re the listing agent, or reaching out to agents who have buyers who play in that space, that’s got to be the vast majority of the work, I’m guessing and saying, Hey, you got to learn about this property I’m sending it to you, versus just waiting for the listings, or the showings to come in?
Beau Blankenship 23:51 No question that is the majority of it. But really the what’s really, really been beneficial is we have such a pulse on this market and such a handle on the listing inventory, that if another agent has a buyer, where they’re first of all, like so we will this field calls from other agents and so pivot them from automatic Hey, I gotta stimulate ibuyer, what do you have, we’ll send him everything we got, you know, get him because we have such a hold on the market, the listing inventory, that that is such a pivotal role of being able to pivot or age or other agents that call us because they’ve got the buyers and so being able to just kind of have a control on it and just kind of shift whatever we need to shift to to get in people’s hands.
D.J. Paris 24:32 I’m curious to note a little bit about sort of timing when it comes to now on the seller side, knowing when to to list and obviously if somebody needs you to list right away that then that that can happen but I suspect with the clientele you’re dealing with, there’s a little bit more flexibility there to determine when they need to sell and again, these are this is usually not the primary residence it sounds like so there may be there is just more more time and so I suspect They look at you to really get the timing right. And I’m curious on how your team evaluates like, now’s a good time, or, Hey, you know now what we’re about to head into December. And, you know, I’m curious on on how you guys sort of treat that. And obviously, if somebody has an urgent need to sell something, that’s pretty obvious. But when it’s not that urgent, I’m curious on how how you guys determine when to actually list it.
Beau Blankenship 25:24 Right? I guess it just kind of ties back into COVID, because my mind changed after this. So typically, I would not track all my sales since I started. So every month, the transactions a percentage that of that much of our yearly volume, how much was in that month and subtract that completely since I started, and typically, it was, you know, February, July, and October, or heaviest closing months. So that means, you know, earlier the year, summer and fall break, you know, so that’s when our proper solvers strategically list around those times. But since COVID, I, I kind of that’s kind of gone out the window. And so I’m now I don’t know what buyers here at any given time, if we have it, we want to get it up, right. And so I’m not going to wait, because we sold the eight no 11 $9 property, and when we shouldn’t sell one, you know, that’s not normal. And so now I’m kind of getting it up because buyers are working remotely or doing home school, or whatever it is, and so they’re here all the time. So really, there’s not a time now, to get a live, it’s kind of year round.
D.J. Paris 26:30 That’s nice, that’s offers you guys, it does make sense. And it seems like just helps keep the business flowing more more regularly, too. So that’s, you know, one thing that I think most agents, you know, who are working more transactionally, and just sort of client to client, maybe don’t think about as much with because maybe the clientele is mostly just buying a primary residence, but you live in a state in Florida, and you work in a state where there’s a lot of tax benefits for people to retire there. Obviously, there’s, there’s some weather benefits, too. But But I was curious and how important it is for you as an agent to be really up on on sort of tax strategies, not to where you’re giving tax advice, of course, but that you just have a good enough understanding to say, I know why people buy here. I know, generally speaking, what the ramifications are tax wise, does that cut that comes up, I assume quite a bit.
Beau Blankenship 27:26 That’s a big part of our business, right. So we’ll have CEOs move in. Because they’re going to, you know, buy a $2 million home, but by moving here, they’re saving their homes free, what they would have paid in taxes. So they’re moving here in their home setting, you know, so. So it’s a big part of an understanding that understanding the property tax rate, I understand all this kind of stuff. And not to get political here, but political reasons, the big reason why people move here too. And so knowing all of that, and knowing what the school system is doing, and all that kind of stuff, that’s a big reason. You know, so just knowing all that being able to inform our buyers, you know, financially and all that kind of stuff. It plays a massive role in it.
D.J. Paris 28:01 Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, Florida is such a such an interesting state for, you know, politically, it’s an interesting state, or there’s really interesting tax implications to move there. And, and then, of course, you know, the weather and, and then there’s also, you know, negative parts about the weather do that need to be considered. But, but it’s interesting that that you’re right, you probably do, you probably do have to be pretty aware of what’s going on politically, even, just to sort of get a sense of like, hey, if someone’s moving here, is this even a good fit for them? Based on some of their beliefs and the way they they live their life? And taxes, of course. So that’s really interesting. So I imagine you probably have CPAs, you know, that you’re constantly either referring to and I know, again, your clients who are coming in to buy probably have their own team. But I imagine you’re probably constantly talking to CPAs locally to say, hey, you know, let’s, let’s figure out if this makes sense for these buyers.
Beau Blankenship 29:01 100% Yeah, but most of them have their own team, but like, we need to know enough to be able to talk to it, talk about it, and, you know, 1031 tax exchanges, doing reverse exchanges, all of that, because there’s so much they get down here, they bought the first one, I love it, they want to flip to another property to be able to defer the taxes. And so just knowing because they want something big or whatever. So knowing all those things, you know, talking to our CPA, Majid yet really staying up to date on all that’s a huge part of our business.
D.J. Paris 29:30 Yeah, the exchange, the 1031 exchange thing is particularly interesting, because there’s, there’s time limits on that. And so the idea of, hey, I’m going to sell I want to now move to a different property have sort of timing that is it you were saying this understanding your inventory is so critical, and having those relationships with other agents because you know, you do have some time considerations there and knowing how to make all that work is incredibly valuable to the client, of course, and they probably just expect you to have all that figured out
Beau Blankenship 30:00 Anyway, yeah, so for exchanges, we’ve got a guy that he’s been doing all of ours that we just partnered with, he’ll outline it, but there’s a lot of times we get his sellers to say, I’m not selling until I can, you know, find the exact property I want. So, it has to be a boom, boom deal. Like, it’s, we have to tie it up perfectly. So it gets a little hairy sometimes, but,
D.J. Paris 30:19 but I mean, I imagine most agents don’t, don’t really have that skill set or that knowledge set. And it’s, you know, even if you’re just doing primary residence stuff, you know, that that comes into effect as well. And so, you know, 1030, fives and 1030 ones, and, you know, I would encourage all of our listeners to really, you know, spend some time with with a CPA and just say, hey, you know, give me some talking points. So I can, it’s another great reason to reach out to all your clients and say, Hey, I don’t know, if you’re considering, you know, upgrading, or maybe getting a second property. But, you know, there’s, there’s a few sort of tax strategies that that might, might help you. And because I know that as you’ve personally have grown your business, you now have evolved into doing some of your own development. And I’m curious on did those opportunities just did they open up as you became more successful, where you’re now either representing developers or you’re developing property yourself, were those always there at the beginning for you are those sort of emerged as you become larger and more productive?
Beau Blankenship 31:22 That’s kind of how I got going was just making people money, right, that’s just like that, you make somebody money, right? They’re gonna be loyal to you, right? If you keep doing it, right. And so I was making these guys, you know, millions of dollars, I was like, I wish I could just, you know, I would just do it. And there’s opportunities I passed up, as I knew I should buy this, I know, I should buy this, and I sold it to my client, he made whatever on it, you know, it’s just, and then I just got the, you know, just said, Screw it, I’m just doing and so as I was doing it, you know, I would partner with my investors, or I just start doing it myself or whatever. And just, they were always there. It just took me the, the get the, you know, the guts to just do it. And but they were always there. And I always saw and I and I knew what they were, I just had to make myself do
D.J. Paris 32:10 it. And, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of investors who are Realtors over the years. And I’m curious to get your thoughts on this. And almost exclusively when I asked them, gosh, there’s probably a lot of listeners who go, I don’t know, any investors. And all the people I’ve interviewed in the past who do that say, oh, finding the investors is the easy part. It’s finding the deal. And that’s the hard part. I’m curious to get your thoughts on that.
Beau Blankenship 32:34 Yeah, that is exactly what I’ve got a list of investors, you know, anything you think is good doing? So in five seconds, like I’ve gotten, I’ve got no problem that it’s the finding the deal. That’s, that is the that’s 100% True, and finding the dirt and it’s hard to do right now.
D.J. Paris 32:50 Yeah, I was gonna say, with just you know, that there’s just a lot of a lot of a lot of money floating around out there. That is, you’re probably it’s probably it’s become more difficult. I imagine as as your areas become more popular. Yeah, it’s
Beau Blankenship 33:05 more difficult, but the price of lumber and building is just going through the roof. Or we’re seeing more and more people buy real estate as a hedge against inflation, because, you know, it’s through the roof. And so we’re seeing more and more, but the building costs, it’s just that’s what we’re dealing with. Right now. It’s just like, astronomical. So that’s kind of like, what our biggest hurdle is right now with it.
D.J. Paris 33:27 Yeah, it’s curious. I’m curious if I haven’t really checked in on lumber prices in a while that obviously, it’s been a hot button topic for the last two years or so. Do you see any relief in sight there or not yet?
Beau Blankenship 33:39 Well, it was coming down. But it’s it’s the you know, it’s it’s, it’s everything. It’s the the electrician, the plumbers, the lumber, the appliances, or months behind the furnitures months behind the fixtures. I mean, it’s just all of the issues with shipping and all that. It’s just it’s becoming kind of a cluster. So, I mean, hopefully we see some relief, but it doesn’t look awesome right now. But so trying to get through because that’s a big part of my business is building and so we’re trying to see what’s going on, we’re trying to adjust with it. So it’s got to get a higher price point, you know, to to justify the building part. And so that’s what we’re trying to weigh right now.
D.J. Paris 34:25 I’ve been waiting on a new door. It’s like I don’t know what it’s made out of, but it’s like some fancy heavy door, and it’s for my girlfriend’s our master bedroom closet. And when we bought the place earlier this this year it was I guess it was warped, which I didn’t even know that thankfully our mind Spectracide he goes, Oh, they’ll replace it. And I think we’re going on eight months now. And I did kind of even forget about it. And it’s like just to get one door. He and the guy I recently reached out a couple like a week ago going hey, just FYI. I don’t really care. I’m like whenever the door comes in, it comes in big was probably 2020. Like, wow,
Beau Blankenship 35:04 one door, one door, appliances back. I mean, it’s all backed up. So we deal with all that. But hopefully we see some relief and we’re buying stuff in bulk. And so we’re trying to, you know, try to solve it the best we can.
D.J. Paris 35:17 This is, this is funny, I’ll just do a quick thing. This happened just over the weekend, I’m installing a freezer, in my pantry, and I bought it through Samsung, and it’s like a stand up freezer thing. And for the last I bought it like, I don’t know, I ordered it, I don’t know, a month or two ago, and every two weeks now, and I thought this was so smart. And I’m curious, I don’t think other appliance companies have really caught on with this yet. But I get an email from them saying, it’s still going to be on time, you’re gonna get it December 2, every two weeks I went, Boy, that’s a smart thing to do with supply chain issues. Because now it really it’s so simple. And they’re just like, just don’t freak out, you’re still gonna get it December 2, if anything changes, we’ll let you know. I’m like, I’ve bought a lot of appliances over the last six months. And nobody else did that. So I just thought that was that was really cool. But again, that’s something that it’s something that that, you know, it’s like agents don’t you know, it’s not really what they do. But they have to be able to tell clients like, here’s what’s going on, here’s what you’re going to be waiting on for furniture and appliances and materials. Before I have a question that I’m going to pause to do a sponsorship read. But I’m curious to know if as because you’ve got 70 Plus agents in your office. I’m curious as your coaching, you know, maybe agents who aren’t as experienced, I’m curious to know, what’s the number one thing, and I know there again, there isn’t any sort of magic formula necessarily. But what’s the number one thing you tell them as they’re getting started to sort of keep them you know, engaged and, and productive. Because as you were saying, of course, you know, people just, you know, they either grind it out or they don’t. But before we do that, I want to pause for a moment to speak about our sponsor, which is called follow up boss. We love, love, love follow up boss. And it was really cool that they’re one of our sponsors, because after interviewing over 300 top producers in the country, and when I asked top producers, hey, what CRM do you use more than any other follow up boss comes up. So we’re super honored to have them as our sponsor. But let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level of follow up boss will help you drive more leads, in less time with less effort. Don’t take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the United States use his follow up boss and he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business. In under six years, follow up boss integrates with 250 different systems. So you can keep your current tools lead sources, also, they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so confident that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re going to give keeping it real podcast listeners a 30 day free trial. And this is twice as much time as they give everyone else and you don’t have to use a credit card. That’s how confident they are, you’re going to love it, and you’re going to offer your credit card to them. Because you’re going to want to keep it past that 30 days, but only if you use this special link. So I want everybody to to visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real that again, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. So yeah, I’m curious about how, you know, when you’re coaching agents to sort of, you know, get to that next level, you know, what are you telling them?
Beau Blankenship 38:32 You know, I so with our company, so I’ve got a non compete broker that helps run the company. And I’ve got a team of like six people. And so it’s really, really hard with new agents. And so what I typically what I typically do, if I see some skill set or something with them that I think they’ve got, you know, a really good shot and they just need to hone in a little bit, that typically partner them with a, an older agent right into follow on to learn as much as they can. And it benefits both people and so that’s, that’s what we’ve been doing. And it’s been, it’s proven to work.
D.J. Paris 39:07 Yeah, mentorship, it’s that’s also been something that almost every person we’ve ever interviewed on the show has talked about being important to them as learning from a top producer, shadowing, doing the open houses that you know, maybe other agents aren’t willing to do. And just learning learning from top agents
Beau Blankenship 39:26 just just learn how they do it, how they made it, you know, take the good take the bad and figure it out and then create your own you know, morph whatever you can do off of that and just do it and do it for free and just grind you know and whatever you can do just to to learn from these peoples without me that’s what I would recommend.
D.J. Paris 39:47 Yeah, it’s it’s so important because you’ll learn so many efficiencies and just strategies that other agents especially if you can get a top producer to to find the time to to shadow or having younger person’s shadow autonomy, sir, is you’ll just learn like, oh, that’s what they’re doing. And I know like in the last couple years, I suspect you guys had to get creative as well, to getting your offers noticed, because with low interest rate environments, although I suspect with a lot of your clientele, you know, loans aren’t aren’t that big of a deal, but, but it’s still just, you know, competitive right now with buyers and still competitive, and having to sort of get creative. I mean, me just asking that question on the show over the last couple years, we probably got 30 different creative solutions for getting your offer noticed. That was like, wow, this is really, really helpful. But that’s what you learn when you hang out with a top producer. Yeah,
Beau Blankenship 40:41 for sure. Yeah, it’s, yeah. I mean, that is the biggest thing I would say, is just hanging out with people that have been successful, and just figure out what they’re doing. And it’s not rocket science, right? I mean, yeah, but y’all just have that people skills, and you have to be able to have the market knowledge and, and, and all that, but like, it’s not rocket science, like, just learn from them as much as you stinking can.
D.J. Paris 41:04 Yeah, it’s the, it’s the reason why I got a trainer for the gym I am, I’m just somebody who doesn’t go to the gym on his own. And so there’s that. And I was like, I need some accountability. And I also know what I’m spending a fortune on a personal training, that’s certainly going to get me there. But, but maybe more importantly than that, for me was learning the, you know, with weightlifting, or, you know, just understanding what muscles I’m supposed to use and how I’m supposed to do a particular exercise because anyone can find an exercise routine and go out and do it on their own. But boy, I would have hurt myself, I would have, you know, and I think the same same can be said, for real estate, it just like don’t hurt yourself lifting something you don’t know how to lift with respect to real estate is find a top producer. And even if they’re not shadowing, you just say Can I grab five minutes of your time, I’ve got this situation with my client, I don’t know what to do. And I think I want to do this, but what would you do? And first of all, the person is going to be flattered that you ask them I mean, assuming that they have time to answer you, but boy, you’re gonna you’re gonna learn a lot to save, you have a lot of headaches. Oh, and I’ve learned now that the personal trainer, the best thing for me is just just learning form. And once I got the form down, it’s like, oh, man, I would never figure that out on my own, I would have heard my I would have thrown out my back, I would have done something. And and, and I still need a trainer every single time. But right, but but that’s what you’re saying is basically find yourself a real estate trainer, so to speak,
Beau Blankenship 42:29 on 100%? And just learn from them? And how are they reaching their audience and stuff they’re not doing that you think you can improve on take it and improve? Yeah. And it’s just, um, that’s what I would the biggest thing I would recommend,
D.J. Paris 42:42 as far as communication, you know, I’m curious to once you, you know, finish a transaction with a client. And obviously, these are large transactions. How do you stay in touch with those clients over time? Now, obviously, you’re saying if they ever want to upgrade, you’re going to always be showing them those ideas, because of course, that’s kind of the people you work with. But also, even for somebody who’s it’s a primary residence, they’re not going anywhere. This is where they’re, they’ve moved to how do you stay in touch with them over time, you know, after the sale,
Beau Blankenship 43:14 it’s not super easy. I mean, it’s, you know, because there’s a lot of people. And so, you know, we’ve been, we touch them every week, no matter what we touch them every week, with it was just an it’s not a call, it’s just an email. But that’s, that’s still, every week we touch them, we’re consistent. Every Friday, they will get an email from us, it’s an update on the market, and what’s your soul, blah, blah, blah, and then Christmas, we’ll send out something to them as like a little gift or something. And then, but then we’ll just call it like really just call on text and checking in, you know, like trying to do that when we can. But it’s really, really hard. And so at the bare minimum, we try to touch them once a week with an email.
D.J. Paris 43:55 But even just doing that, and I know you’re sort of like, gosh, we wish we could do more. But even sending out a weekly email is 99% of Realtors don’t do that. You know, even if it’s a newsletter, and you know, or anything, anything you’re sending out, and I suspect, you know, most age, most clients aren’t reading the email so to speak, but they’re seeing that you’re putting in the effort. You’re they’re seeing that you’re you’re connecting with them and sending them items of value. But again, 99% of Realtors probably don’t even do that.
Beau Blankenship 44:28 It’s an that blows my mind if you don’t have a database. I mean, it’s just yeah, I mean, I don’t know how you’re functioning, but like, just hitting them, you know, whether they read it or not. It’s in their inbox. Oh, there’s bogey and others boat every week, every Friday, you know? So it’s like the same top of mine to say do you want to sell?
D.J. Paris 44:45 They can’t forget about you if you’re in their inbox once a week. Well, you’ve given so many so many great ideas and strategies. I mean, even just as simple of and I know for you that you’re probably like, well, this isn’t so profound, but Sending out a weekly email or some sort of communication and probably changing it up every so often and sending the text once in a while and calling once in a while, but sending out that weekly email, if if if you get nothing else from this, this, this episode, just at least implement that. And by the way, you can pay people to do that it’s not even something that you have to, you know, craft on your own. But, boy, if you only did that your clients would have a very hard time forgetting forgetting about you. And if you did that, that’s 52 touches over next year. And again, maybe you’re not going to, you know, when all of your sphere of influence deals or your database deals, but you’re gonna want a heck of a lot more of them than if you send out no emails, or no messages. So I know there’s our audience got a lot more in this conversation than just that. But boy, that is a really specific action step that a billion dollar producer just gave. So please, everyone do that. And, boy, if you can’t do it yourself, you can hire a virtual assistant to do it for probably 10 bucks a week, maybe, or 20 bucks. Like it’s not even an expensive thing. But I want to I want to sort of end there. But I do want to mention that for anyone listening, I have two opportunities for you. If you are in Bo’s area, if you’re in the Gulf, Gulf area slash emerald area, in Florida, and you’re looking to work with the number one team there, and you want to work under with or with somebody like Bo and you’re not getting the attention that you need are the opportunities that that you want at your current firm. And you want to check out what Engel and Volkers is all about. With Bo, what’s the best way they should reach out to you.
Beau Blankenship 46:40 And honestly, just text me text me email me, you find my on the website, you’ll find all my info, Instagram message me, someone will get back to you quickly. But I mean, we’re pretty responsive, we try to be so any, any way that’s easiest for you email, text, whatever.
D.J. Paris 46:57 And you can find all of that at their website, which is 30 A is an apple 30 A fine living. So 30 a fine living.com. But the other opportunity is you’re an agent in another part of the country and you have clients that really liked to hang out in Florida, whether it’s like my parents who now go down there every year and spend, you know, spend the winter or maybe somebody who wants a vacation home or another property or an income producing property. And and is interested in that area reach out to Beau and his team, they, they they know that area, they have the inventory, they know it better than anyone. And you can reach him the same exact way by visiting his website 30. A is an apple 30 A fine living.com That will also be in the show notes. But Bo, I am so grateful for your time, I know how busy you are. And I know you didn’t have time to do this, but you found time for us. And we are we’re eternally grateful for you. And we are excited to see your next billion which I’m sure won’t take much time at all. And see and I’m jealous of your your growth from few agents to over 70 took me probably two years of 10 hour a day recruiting to get to that number. And so I am really impressed by that. But again, Bo’s attracting a lot of agents based on you know, his leadership. And so definitely if you’re if you’re looking in that area to work with a great firm, and goal of Volkers with with Bo is an awesome, awesome group, the Blankenship group. So definitely reach out to them. And Bo, thank you so much. And we will on behalf of our audience, we want to thank both for his time. On behalf of Bo and myself. We want to thank the audience to for continuing to listen support our show, we just ask that you do two things before you sign off on this episode. Number one is to support our sponsor, visit, follow up boss.com forward slash real test out their CRM. It’s awesome. I know you’re gonna love it, check that out. And also, the best way you can really help our show is also by telling a friend think of one other real estate professional that should hear this episode with Bo right now and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done stream right there. Or if they are a podcast person, just haven’t pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real hit that subscribe button, we would appreciate it. Well, Bo, thanks again. And we wish you another billion which I’m sure it’s coming soon and can keep up the great work.
Beau Blankenship 49:20 Thank you so much for having me. I really really appreciate it. You guys are awesome. Just thank you so much. Thank you
How To Network With Other Real Estate Agents • Monday Market Minute • Carrie McCormick
Nov 11, 2021
In our October episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @properties talks about networking with other agents and referring business but also using this network as a knowledge source. Next, Carrie discusses the state of the market at the moment and shares her predictions for 2022. Last, Carrie and DJ discuss gifts for the holidays.
This episode is brought to you by Follow Up Boss. Get your 30 day trial by clicking here.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 Today’s episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by follow up boss. The best of the best know that outstanding follow up is essential for a thriving real estate business. And more than ever, they’re using follow up boss the leading CRM for real estate to make it happen. Follow up boss helps you convert more leads. Robert slack, founder of the number one real estate team in United States uses it in his $1.5 billion business. Deborah Beagle uses it to guarantee that agents who join our team get two homes under contract in their first 90 days, and Barry Jenkins uses it to automate everything to run his $200 million team on a 25 hour workweek to reclaim his work life balance. Now for a limited time follow up boss is doubling their free trial for keeping it real podcast listeners go to follow up boss.com forward slash real for 30 days of unlimited access no credit card required. That’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for a 30 day free trial and now on to our show.
Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast paid for real estate agents and by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show today as as always is our monthly series called a Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carey McCormick Real Estate Group with add properties here in Chicago. Carrie is a top 1% producer in the Chicagoland area with over 20 years of experience helping buyers, sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 44,000 real estate agents in the Chicagoland area. Carrie is ranked in the top 15 in production that’s out of all of the real estate agents here locally. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors, and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers and is often chosen to represent their high end developments, please visit Carrie at our website, which is Carrie McCormick ar e and I’ll spell that it’s ca RR ie M ccormickre.com. And also please please please follow her on Instagram. You can find her at Carey McCormick real estate for all you Instagram people. Carrie, welcome once again to the show.
D.J. Paris 2:27 We’re excited. Well, we get excited when we have somebody who’s as successful and generous with their time as you and I know how busy you are. So what are we going to talk about today? Yeah, so
Carrie McCormick 2:39 I wanted to talk about referrals. You know, part of growing my business I’ve been doing this for 21 years has been networking with brokers outside of Chicago, whether it’s in the suburban markets, or in other states. And as we know, in this market, there’s been so much movement in and out of Chicago. So if there’s any brokers that are listening, that are outside of Chicago, and they need someone that’s good here to take care of their clients, just so you know, I am always available to do that. I love networking with other brokers and doing referrals. And I think, you know, anyone listening in their own markets should really concentrate on growing their network as well. And working with other brokers. I’ve done a ton between Florida between Arizona. I mean, it’s just it, I just feel like it’s been everywhere that I’ve been talking with these brokers, and not only for referrals and business growth, it’s just good to collaborate on marketing, and just you know what they’re seeing in their market just so we get a broader picture. So don’t look always look at referrals, as you know, an income source, which is great. And that’s important as well, but it’s just it’s a knowledge source as well.
D.J. Paris 3:50 Yeah, I agree. I’ve actually interviewed some agents recently for our show who have taken the leap to be exclusively referral based. And they don’t directly work with clients themselves anymore. And literally all they do is just refer business all over the country, and they sit at their desk all day. So you can even go to that extreme. If our listeners really want to, that’s a big shift. But even if you’re, you know, out there working with clients yourself, you’re gonna run into opportunities where people are wanting to move to another location and really a good idea to identify those retirement zones or those second second home zones or vacation home places and start talking to other agents in that area.
Carrie McCormick 4:32 Yeah, no, I think it’s great. And for 2020 to one of my goals is to pick five key markets and I’m actually going to go fly out and have lunch or dinner with some of the brokers just to really do a one on one so something fun and you can travel and you know, get some knowledge and meet brokers. So that’s gonna be one of my goals in 2022. But one thing I want to talk about is just the state of the market of where we are at and I always like to kind of give a little bit of a key word I think, right? Now we’re headed more into a balanced market. I’m gonna read some real quick stats, just of why we’re seeing this more balanced market and the median home sales went pending in nine days, which is one day longer than in August, which is not a big shift. But as you start seeing the numbers start to move a little bit, it’s just giving us indicators of where this market is going. So we’ve seen home sit on the market just a little bit longer than we did in August. And then inventory has been up, it says 0.4%, from August. It’s a very small game. But again, these small gains will start to accumulate over some time. And we’re going to start seeing a little bit more of a slowdown as we go into this holiday season. Again, we’re starting to see more inventory hit the market. And I really think buyers are a little fatigued from the battle that we had this last spring and summer. And that’s kind of how I feel I feel a little bit beat up from this market of just we’re a constant battle with our buyers of trying to get the homes in these competitive situations. So I think everyone’s taking a little bit of a breather, and we’re headed back into a balanced market. And I think it’s good, I think it’s good. But one thing we do have to think about and worry about is 2022 A lot of my buyers and sellers, you know, of course ask us as brokers for predictions, you know, What’s 2022 going to be like? And as much as we’d like to answer that question and be able to be right, we just don’t know. But we also look at indicators. And when you’re working with a broker, like myself, or anyone else who’s been in the market a long time, and we’ve seen the ups and downs of these markets, we do have a good handle on what we see, especially when you’re in and out of the market. You’re seeing the the activity, and you’re seeing what’s selling and what’s not selling. But a few things we have to worry about is mortgage rates, you know, there’s speculation that mortgage rates are going to pop up a little bit. Yeah. And then this mortgage forbearance programs, they’re all expiring soon. So we have to think about that we have to think about these folks that had overpaid for properties. And just you know what happens with the job market. And lastly, the big word that a lot of people are talking about is inflation. So there’s a risk of policy, tightening inflation, higher mortgage rates, you know, all of that is going to affect the housing market to some degree. I do my own personal opinion is I do think that 2022 is going to be a very strong year as well, maybe not as crazy as 2021. We’re probably not going to see the games that we saw this past year. But I do think we’re going to see a nice healthy 2022. And then even just looking into 2023, I think we’ll really start to see a little bit of a slowdown, but nothing major unless something crazy happens in this world. Of course stuff we can’t predict. But you know, we are seeing a nice healthy 2022 coming around the corner for us.
D.J. Paris 8:10 Yeah, that’s encouraging. I’m excited to hear hear that it seems like there’s a minor, maybe a minor correction going on with with just rates and things are slowing down. But that probably gives buyers more of an opportunity to compete. Which is in a weird way, it’s probably better than when lates rates are so low, because then it almost seemed like all the agents that I knew who were representing buyers were just really frustrated over the last year, it was really hard to get offers even noticed or to compete, and people were doing really creative things. But it was just the speed of which those offers were going out and being considered was oh my gosh, you know, you were probably dealing with it all year.
Carrie McCormick 8:51 Yeah. And I think too, as brokers we have to look back. And you know, it was a definite learning curve, even again, for someone who’s got experience, you know, I’ve went through other great markets like this, I’ve gone through crashes. But you know, really, in the last 20 years, I can’t think of any market that we were competing like this. And we all learned a new skill set to and just different ways to structure deals and to get things done. So I think from again, growing as a professional and and servicing our clients correctly, we all learned some different skills of how to get deals done and be creative and get things done. But it was it was pretty brutal. I mean, it was quite the battleground out there.
D.J. Paris 9:37 Well, you know, that really is it’s so interesting and hopefully things agents are not as overworked as they as they maybe were although I know you’re always working but I hopefully people are agents are starting to take a little bit of a breather to just catch their breath. But I have before we go to our I’m sorry. I wanted to head over to our marketing Minute, because Carrie and I wanted to talk about gifts for the holiday season because it is that time of the year where agents are starting to think about are they going to provide something or they’re going to send something out or do a pop by or, or do some sort of gesture of thanks to previous clients, or current clients are just their network their sphere of influence. But before we get to that, I have just a quick commercial to read from one of our amazing sponsors. So this is I’m going to talk very quickly about follow up boss, which is my favorite CRM and also after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country. This is the CRM that comes up more than any other when I’m talking to agents going, Hey, what tools do you use, so we’re super excited to have them as a sponsor. But let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level. Follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Don’t take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the United States use his follow up boss. And he’s built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 different systems. So you can keep your current lead sources and tools. They also have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help you need when you need it and get this follow ups boss is so sure so confident that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real podcast listeners a 30 day free trial. Now that’s twice as much time as they give everybody else so and oh, by the way, no credit card required. So it is truly risk free. But only if you use this special link. So please visit follow up boss.com forward slash real. Once again, that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up, boss. Thanks for that. And thank you to our sponsor. So Carrie, gifts for the holidays. What are your thoughts about that? I’m curious, because I have some thoughts as well.
Carrie McCormick 11:55 Yeah, every year I try something different. You know, this year, one thing I want to say before we talk about the gifts is that since it’s been such a great year for all of us as brokers. And we just keep in mind, again, someone who’s been through this before is, you know, you you did great this year, your numbers have doubled, you made a lot of money, you know, a lot of people, you know, don’t reinvest in their business, you know, they’ve made just making up numbers, you know, $10,000 Extra this year, you know, they’re like, you know, going to go buy a car or go buy, you know, something for themselves, which is great, but you’ve got to take some of that money and reinvest it back into your business. And gifting is a great way to do that. You know, because giving to someone, obviously, you want something, you know, you give it to them and you’re hoping that we’re going to give something to you in return, which is those are, you know, more business, but it’s just being thoughtful. So you know that we I always send out holiday cards, I send out magnets this year, and every year I’ve done something different. And I would really love you know if there’s any brokers out there that want to have conversations about this to hear what other gifts have done, you know, well for people this year I’m going to be sending out. I’m a chocolate lover, I’ve got such a sweet tooth and I love toffee. I love chocolate. I love truffles. And I think that’s one thing over the holiday that’s fun to give because you know, it’s something that you’re going to use. So I think that’s where I’m going this year, we’re putting our holiday plan together. But do you have any suggestions DJ,
D.J. Paris 13:32 I do. So we just started adding in, I have two different meal services that I use one locally here in Chicago for my lunches at work and then one for for dinner. And for the dinner one, I actually have to make that they send it to one of those meal kit companies. And so we just started doing this and we actually liked it. We’re like, Okay, this is actually pretty fun. So as a result, about four nights a week, I’m actually preparing a meal where I’m cutting and you know, dicing and cooking and doing all of the things to create these, these meals. And I realized I use my cutting board and my knives now, four nights a week. And I thought you know what a cool opportunity for agents to if you’re thinking about holiday gifts, maybe think about what are some tools or some just items in somebody’s home that they use regularly, or you use regularly or that you’d see regularly. And think about you know, and again, buying somebody a cutting board, I guess could be expensive, depending on the type of cutting boards you get or buying them instead of knives can be incredibly expensive. So it doesn’t have to be expensive items. But anything that’s used often and I don’t even know that you need to put your name on it, although you certainly could. But I know if somebody bought me a cutting board and I was using it I would think about them every so often maybe four times a week. So I always think you know, finding things that are in front of the agents face as or sorry, the clients face as much as possible is always a great idea. And here’s just one quick little suggestion for for those of you that We’re working with clients right now, especially buyers, I think although you could certainly do this with sellers to buyers, maybe this makes more sense, I don’t know. So as you’re going to somebody’s first showing, take a picture of them at their, at every showing that you give them before they even put an offer in because you never know which house they’re going to fall in love with. And maybe even do it with their back to you, as they’re about to enter the house for the first time. And then if that’s the home, they end up choosing, then take pictures of them every time they visit that home, or certainly when it closes. And now you probably have, you know, maybe five 610 10 photos of the entire buying process. And what you could do if you really want to do is you could just put one of those pictures every year in a in a frame, you know, which would be relatively expensive, and send that to them and say, here’s another picture of or you know, if you want to do it for 10 straight years, but maybe you send them three pictures in a frame or one picture of them and that process, and it’s really cost effective. And I think that would be so cool. And you could literally do that on the anniversary date during the holiday.
Carrie McCormick 16:02 I love that. I think that’s such a great idea.
D.J. Paris 16:05 Now it’s a fun one to help with that. Because I would love a picture. See, I went and saw the place that I purchased, which Harry happy to represent as well as it carry wasn’t there when I did the showing. So I actually went by by myself. And I thought wouldn’t it be cool, I should have taken a picture of my girlfriend and I seeing the place for the first time. I just didn’t think about it. And we did take pictures with the other agent agent Lisa, when we were looking at social. So she actually did that. And that’s what it reminded me of that. And so I thought oh, well that would be fun to be reminded of that. So that’s my only suggestion. Think about items that are used a lot or that are really emotional. And if you can attach yourself to that emotion, of course. Great idea. So either find something that’s repetitive like a, you know, some sort of kitchen device maybe or something in the bathroom, or something that is highly emotional like when they bought or when they saw the place for the first time. But that’s that’s all I got for this week, or this month rather. And so Carrie is insanely busy, so we’re gonna let her get back to her busy day. But before we do we want to mention if there are any buyers, sellers, investors or agents who have buyer’s or seller’s or investors who are moving to the Chicagoland area and you’d love to work with an agent, one of the very best agents here in Chicago. Carrie would love to chat with you. So feel free to reach out to her. Carrie what’s the best way someone should reach you? If they’re somebody that wants to work with you?
Carrie McCormick 17:30 Yes, I always say call me 312-961-4612 Or if you want to text me email me whatever you like my emails Perry ca RR ie at@properties.com
D.J. Paris 17:43 and please follow Carrie on Instagram she we didn’t talk about it on this call or this this episode but she has an incredibly effective and impressive Instagram account that she does all herself which is even more impressive. So visit and follow her at Carey McCormick real estate that’s McCormick with two C’s. So Carrie McCormick real estate on Instagram and also visit our website which is also really cool Carrie McCormack r e.com. Well thank you Carrie for your for your time. Once again. She’s been with us since the very beginning of the show. We’re so grateful to have her and we’re so grateful that she continues to find time to do this. Thanks also to our sponsor, follow up boss please visit follow up boss.com forward slash real Get Your FREE 30 day trial. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks Kerry.
Carrie McCormick 18:31 Sounds good. Enjoy the day. You too.
What Real Estate Agents Need To Know About Zillow Offers Being Discontinued • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell
Nov 09, 2021
Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.
Chris Linsell from TheClose.com and DJ follow up on the topic they discussed in the previous episode about Zillow’s iBuyer program. Chris introduces his top tech predictions for 2022. Chris also discusses house hacking and how to use AirBnB to do that. Next, Chris discusses important lessons from top realtors he has interviewed in recently. Last, Chris and DJ discuss about the client experience and how to build a relationship.
To read Chris’ article on “7 Important Lessons New Agents Can Learn From ‘Old School’ Realtors”, click here.
Chris Linsell can be reached at chris@theclose.com.
This episode is brought to you by Follow Up Boss. Get your 30 day trial by clicking here.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by show Ami. Show AMI is the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to get buyers into homes without you being the one to show it. Now we’ve all had situations where clients wanted to see properties at the most inconvenient time or in a location that was difficult for us to show. Now there’s an easy way to find another licensed agent who will show the home on your behalf for a small fee. You keep the client you keep the commission, you keep your commitments. Now show AMI is truly the Uber for realtors connecting busy Realtors with local agents who have time to show your clients the properties they want without taking any part of your commission. And if you’d like to be one of show homies featured agents that realtors can hire to have you help with their showings, you can sign up on their website at no cost. So whether you’re an agent who wants some help with showings, or you’re an agent that wants to make some money helping doing showings, show AMI is the app to use install show AMI on Apple or Android devices or simply visit their website at show ami.com That’s sh O W A mi.com SHOW. A mi ami.com To learn more, and now on to our episode
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show and today we have our monthly series, which is called I’m so sorry, Chris. I just lost our son. I’m gonna do a take two here for everyone watching live. Sometimes that happens. There we go. Once 321 Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris, and I am your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lindh sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. And let me tell you about the close. A close.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Now please visit the closes the clothes.com That’s th e c l o s e.com and read their articles subscribe to their newsletter also check out the close Pro which is their subscription based platform which we’ll also mention here shortly. But with us as always as crystallin Sal he is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. He also is a real estate coach and he is constantly working with teams and individuals and top producers to help everyone grow their production. But when he isn’t writing or helping coaching agents, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you,
Chris Linsell 3:38 DJ, it’s time to talk about real estate. I’ve been looking forward to this all week long. And yeah, I think you’re gonna get an earful today because I’m a little fired up, getting ready to take a trip cover conference, and I’m just so jazzed to be talking to people about real estate, you’re gonna get the front end of all this fire today. I hope you’re ready for it.
D.J. Paris 3:58 We are we are ready. And we should mention that as this is being recorded, and it probably will happen after this is released. But Chris is gearing up to speak at Inman Connect, which is actually coming up in just a few days, which is a big honor. And we’re very proud to be affiliated with Chris, because obviously he is a well as a renowned speaker. And not only is he doing that, but this will this will come out in time if you won’t do want to meet Chris in person. He will also be at the National Association of Realtors Conference this November and in San Diego and I will also be there just walking around. I don’t get to speak. But Chris does get to speak and so he’s going to be there and he would love to say hi to you. If you are a fan of the clothes.com and you absolutely should be because all their articles are amazing. Definitely consider saying hi to Chris if you’re at the dinar conference this this November.
Chris Linsell 4:53 Yeah, totally. And if you’re an east coaster and you don’t want to make it out. If you’re in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania come to tripleplay in Atlantic City, it’s going to be in December, I’m going to be doing two presentations there, one of them is going to be for continuing education. So not only can you check something off your list, you can also listen to the bearded wonder kind of rattle on about stuff for a while. So come take a look, I’m excited to talk to everybody. I’m excited to talk to you today. DJ, what are we going to talk about today.
D.J. Paris 5:19 So we are going to talk about a couple of things. And I by the way, I really need to give Chris the credit for all three of these topics, because he always comes prepared. So if you are considering going to watch him speak, if you if you saw him speak this year at Inman, which again, by the time you hear this, you will have already done so or over at triple play, or at NAR, this is why we love having him because he always brings right context. So we really had three things that that Chris was had on his brain. And he has some insight into all three, I’ll hopefully prod him with some questions. But we’ll really we have three things, we’ll just start with the first one now, which is pretty big news. I don’t know that it’s got as much press in the agent community as I sort of thought it would I certainly, I’m sort of in my own little silo here sit at a desk all day not, but I do communicate with realtors every single day, we have 800 of them here at our own company. And I really don’t hear people talking about this, which is a bit surprising. But big news around Zillow, which is they have paused temporarily we believe for now, their AI buying program through the end of 2021. So just a couple of months here pausing, this is a big shift for them. And I you know, I haven’t really been paying attention to the chatter on some of the online forums that Realtors frequent to sort of get a sense of what their thoughts are. But let’s talk about what what’s going on, and maybe some ideas of why we think it might be happening.
Chris Linsell 6:46 Yeah, so So this is important. This is an important story and not enough people are talking about it and almost nobody is talking about it in the correct context as far as I’m concerned. So here’s just a quick bit of insight. You know, if you’re not if you’re not hip to the IBM program, essentially Zillow is buying properties, they do kind of forced appreciation for some provement on it, and they resell them, they collect a fee on you know, any opportunity they have to collect a fee if you know like we all do. Zillow, love them or hate them is like so deep into this industry on so many different levels. It just makes sense that this was a natural step for them. So there are a lot of folks who are feeling kind of perplexed, a little concerned that Zillow is pausing this because they think maybe this is indicative of the real estate market at large that there might be problems here. But let me just kind of call out a quote I read from Jeremy Waxman, who is the CEO of Zillow. He has essentially said, we have not been and I’m speaking as Zillow, we have not been exempt from the market capacity issues that the economy at large has been facing. And we have an operational backlog for renovations, for closings, and for all the different things that it takes to get these transactions across the finish line. Right? So Zillow is not is not saying anything really specific here other than we got work, and we don’t have people to do it. Right, which is not uncommon across the the economy. Right now. A lot of people are finding these sorts of labor shortages to be a problem. We are interrupting this, you know, the supply chain of human capital here, across our economy in a lot of different industries. This is not a shocker to me. But what I think people need to keep in mind here is that AI buying as a whole has accelerated by, I mean, it’s on a magnitude it’s like multiple magnitudes through the through 2021 is in is expected to continue to crush in 2022. Just because Zillow is not doing this doesn’t mean we should think that this is going away that this is the ship is changing direction here. Open Door. Another really big IBM Platform has one poked fun a little bit at Zillow on this just sending out a tweet that says we’re open for business come on over and to the estimates for ibuyer inventory for 2022 actually went up last week. So don’t read the tea leaves too hard on this, if anything. I think Zillow is just being strategic here. They are covering the bases there. They’re cashing in the chips that they’ve got right now. They’re gonna regroup probably q2 of 2022 and see what the landscape looks like. I’m not reading anything into this other than this is this is normal economy effects happening here.
D.J. Paris 9:51 Yeah, I would imagine not being as knowledgeable about the industry of course as you and many other experts have But my intuition is telling me and having visited Zelos, New York headquarters, and having met with with some of their senior leaders, not not the very, very top, but but people who seem to know, sort of the direction of the company. I know that that it is their corporate maximum. And I used to work in in technology, so I can appreciate this. And I was able to sort of see that I believe it was a very authentic sort of conversation, where were we, I sat down with them. And they said, our customer experience is everything, it’s beyond everything, if we don’t provide a great experience for the customer, then they’re never coming back to our site, which of course, is sort of, you know, just tech 101 for customer service, but in user experience. So if that’s the case, where the ibuying sort of processes jammed, because of a labor shortage, or for whatever reason, in that sort of chain of processes, they’re going to pull it because that’s they have they have that top spot for online, you know, real estate, public access, and they don’t want anything to disrupt that. And it probably makes sense for them just to pause ibuying If they’re not going to deliver that, that top experience. Again, that’s that’s a really sort of obvious thing. But But But I suspect there’s a lot of realtors that go, hey, they’re they’re listening to us. And we don’t you know, a lot of realtors don’t like Zillow for various reasons, and maybe some are celebrating thinking, Oh, now they want to put more focus back on on the agent partnerships. I’m not so sure if that that factors in it, I read that same article or that same quote from from Jeremy Waxman. And it seems that unless he’s not being fully transparent, it appears that a labor shortage would make sense. I know a lot of restaurants are dealing with that. Even here in Chicago and across the country. We just had a top pizza place one of the very top pizza places in Chicago, on all the lists of best places to to eat for pizza, it’s a nice place, and they put out a they had to close down temporarily. And the guy said, I’ve never in my life put out an ad for a server that we use, we even pay more than most places. And I got one response in 30 days. And so, you know, that’s just a one little example. But there’s labor shortages going on all over.
Chris Linsell 12:26 Yeah, it’s so wild. And you know, it’s not, it’s not a shock to think that this would we’d start to see the effects of this in our industry. In fact, if you really think about it, seeing these ancillary kind of orbital businesses and business models to the traditional residential real estate transaction, that makes sense that we would start to see these effects in those orbital industries first. So you know, the only thing that I think real estate agents should be kind of perking their ears up about this is, if this is a systemic thing, meaning it’s not just a temporary blip in labor. This is becoming a systemic availability of resources. Here, we may see the eye buyer model shift a little bit at least when it comes from Zillow. And because Zillow really is the sun in the sky when it comes to online real estate presence, that could have some downstream effects for how I bind has done in general. But at this point, I am not crying, you know, the sky is not falling at all, when it comes to AI buying real estate agents should expect that I bind will be present and happening into 2022. Certainly, and frankly, I think it’s going to be a memorial day where we see Zillow announced, hey, by the way, we’re back I bind and by the way, we’re going to be doing it in 15 more markets. So I guess we’ll you know, only time will tell but I think it’s a little too soon to be crying wolf on that just yet.
D.J. Paris 13:53 I almost wonder too, if it would be interesting in a future episode, if you and I did some digging to see if there are any sort of reputable studies or estimations on what an AI by the profile of an eye buyer looks like. And we can determine whether there’s any opportunity there for realtors to, you know, step in. At least if Zillow is temporarily pausing, there may be some action steps there to make sure you’re having conversations with your clients about what ibuying is the pros, the cons, obviously, for realtors, there’s there’s a, that’s a really easy conversation to have around, you know, what I buying is, which is really no different of a transaction than working with a realtor except it’s a little faster and possibly the you know, the the profit to the to the seller might might be less, but to have that understanding so that they don’t accidentally find themselves in, you know, browsing websites, you know, maybe they have a parent that passes away and a home is left to them and they don’t want it and you know, now they’re searching around for how You get rid of a house. And I’m not going to call my realtor because they’re here, they’re not in Arizona, and I’m in Michigan. So they might not even think to contact their realtor to ask about different options. So at the very least, I think it’s a good opportunity to talk to your clients about, hey, you may have seen some, some information in the last few years about AI buying, and I just wanted to give you again, it’s a great reason to pick up the phone, I don’t know that most of your clients will necessarily be that interested in that conversation. But it could be an article you send them it could be, you know, a text or something. But I think most of the public has no idea what ibuying is, I would say, unless you’re in this industry, I don’t know why you would even know about that unless you were exploring it. So it’s a good thing to bring up and educate your your clients about
Chris Linsell 15:40 100%. And you know, I think to me, that’s that’s the real value call out if I’m an agent is working in, you know, every town USA, looking for value to provide my clients. This right here is one of the three key pieces of evidence that is, you know, that successful top producers consistently deliver. This is evidence of the three key pieces are evidence of knowledge, evidence of activity and evidence of success. When you send a little article like this to your clients, you know, add two lines of your of your of your own kind of, you know, commentary and thought on this, you are in about 30 seconds demonstrating evidence of knowledge and evidence of activity, you know, what’s going on, and you’re actively, you know, investing in conversations that happened with your clients, or your past clients or your prospects. These are the sorts of things that move your relationships down the pipeline. So, you know, find there’s a great article on market, watch on Wall Street Journal on CNBC, copy it, paste it dropping into a text message, or an email or a Facebook message, add two little sentences about what you think about this, you’ll be shocked at how the conversation starts there.
D.J. Paris 16:54 Great, well, let’s let’s shift gears and talk about tech prediction or your top tech prediction for 2022. And I do want to just say that, I have always had, again, just read it read articles over over the over many years. And it seems in about the last five years, I kept reading about this tech real estate bubble that was ready to burst. I never totally understood what that meant. But it seems to be that maybe the idea was that there are so many service providers in the real estate industry, a lot of tech service providers, and they’re all competing, just you know, for our listeners, you know, just think about the number of emails you get around CRMs, for example, or lead gen providers, or you know, advertising companies that can help you with your advertising or marketing. Boy, it’s it’s, it’s almost endless and infinite, it seems but if there has been a tech bubble burst, I certainly for real estate, I certainly haven’t noticed it, it seems to be as strong as ever, and almost maybe more players enter the space. So I know maybe we haven’t seen a huge bubble bursting yet there. But let’s talk about your number one pick for what what you think is going to be most impactful to realtors and the public for 2022.
Chris Linsell 18:06 Yeah, you bet done. And you know, I’m just gonna go on record saying right now, this is a presentation that I’m just gonna tease you a little bit, I’m gonna give you some of the top level. And if you want to hear the really juicy bits, you’re gonna have to come see me at NAR because I’m going to I’m going to be presenting on this but my prediction, my number one prediction, for, you know, what’s going to happen in 2022, from the from the desk of a real estate technologist. That number my number one prediction is that the company that will leverage the biggest impact on the residential real estate market in 2022. It’s not Zillow. It’s not some CRM, it’s not some it’s not even a real estate brokerage. The company with the biggest impact on the real estate market in 22 is going to be Airbnb. And let me tell you why. The rise of invest in civilian investing on platforms like Robin Hood, or Publix, or Fundrise, or AR or weeble. These have fueled the momentum that people have in the thought that I can be an investor. And it’s not just in the stock market companies like Airbnb, make it so we can be proper we can be real estate investors. You don’t have to work on Wall Street, you can live on Main Street, and you can be a real estate investor. When you own an income property. And Airbnb has they have not just greased the skids they have dumped the grease all over the ground and now they’re swimming in it to get from to get every day Mom and Pop property owners to become property investors. And there is a significant onramp to Airbnbs growth in 2022 and I’m going to give you one stat to prove what I mean. Buy this. First of all, I guess it’s two stats. The first stat is Airbnb projects that they’re going to add nearly 25% new inventory in the next 18 months 25% You think about there’s going to be, there’s going to be for every listing that you for every four listings currently on Airbnb, we’re going to see a new one in 20, the next 18 months that’s doing
D.J. Paris 20:25 do we know if that’s just us? Or if that because I know certain certain other countries have been slowly being rolled out to Airbnb, so I didn’t know if we knew if that was just us, or if that was across the globe?
Chris Linsell 20:39 That’s a good question. I don’t have a specific confirmation one way or the other on this, but I don’t believe it is the way that I read this stat. It was not Airbnb is entering new markets. Yes, Airbnb is building their inventory in existing markets.
D.J. Paris 20:57 I mean, it makes it makes perfect sense. My sister has a property and investment property that she bought, she is not a big real estate investor. In fact, this is my ticket back she has they have two properties now but but but this again is not their primary job they her and her husband have have traditional jobs and the Airbnb thing made so much sense for her because with where she lives in this property is about a mile from where she lives in Tampa. But But regardless, she’s able to cover her monthly nut her mortgage, and, you know, various expenses within and again, it all depends on how much you put down and what your what your loan, you know, you’re you’re borrowing and all of that, but for putting a pretty minimal investment down, she was able with Airbnb to pay that month monthly, not off it and I think it’s six days a month. So even though it would be a lot less work, although it really isn’t much work, she has a cleaning crew and and, you know, basically just goes and takes a look at it every so often. Other than that, you know, runs itself, essentially. And she doesn’t even have to keep it fully staffed or you know, fully occupied. So for her, it makes all the sense in the world to continue to do Airbnb versus long term renters. And I suspect there’s a lot of people that are wising up to that sort of same situation.
Chris Linsell 22:20 100% 100% You know, and like, let’s also add to this mix, the fact that in 2022, we are expected the world you know, travel organizations across the world are expecting travel to return to near pre pandemic levels in 2022. And the website hospitality tech.com rates, the current consumer confidence in hotel safety at sea minus guess what the rating is for private vacation rentals,
D.J. Paris 22:54 that’s got to be 90% plus, or I’m sorry, a or whatever.
Chris Linsell 22:58 Because B plus, yeah, people feel significantly more safe in private vacation rentals than they do in hotels and then traditional travel, which is going to drive the profitability of these short term rentals up even higher than it is right now. We’re gonna see incredible demand, we’re going to see continued reasons for property owners who are in the Airbnb system to never even think about selling why in the world would you sell a like your like your sister a near set it and forget it money making machine? In fact, you would be silly. If you are in a market right now, where you’re making money with Airbnb, you would be crazy if you didn’t consider the idea of like, okay, well, what if I took my Airbnb profits from this year, and I use them for a down payment for a second, Airbnb, all of a sudden, I could be making twice this, why stop there? Why not get four units or 10 units or 20 units. And the fact is, there is an incredible subculture that exists online that is all about Airbnb hacking and growing like crazy. And I don’t want to I again, I’m pretty fired up about this. I’m going to be speaking at length about this at both Triple Play and at NAR. So if you want to hear more about this, you want to argue with me and tell me I’m wrong. And I’m crazy. Please come do that because there’s a whole bunch more to the story. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg here.
D.J. Paris 24:28 And if you aren’t really that familiar with real estate investing, whether it is long term or short term like Airbnb, take a look at what house hacking is because this is primarily being learned about online. This is you know, regular consumers hearing about this watching discussions online, watching YouTube and Tiktok and Instagram and really under trying to understand what this process is and it’s it’s probably not spoken enough of About from realtors to their clients predominantly because we can understand that Realtors may feel that that is outside of sort of their daily sort of, to processes for working with clients, but it’s something that your clients will likely find on their own. This is just my guess. And he want to be the person that maybe has that conversation with them first, before they start getting that information elsewhere and maybe not think to ask you that professional about it.
Chris Linsell 25:28 Totally true. Totally true. This is an opportunity for clients, for consumers right now there is this new wave of consumer empowerment, the knowledge, the information, the strategies, the step by steps are all out there. And they’re being produced by more and more savvy people. You know, this, this content has been produced by more and more savvy content producers who frankly do a better job of telling the story than most real estate professionals, because you I hate to admit it, most real estate professionals, they know their contracts back and forth, but they’re shitty marketers, I’m sorry, I didn’t know if I was supposed to swear. But I just so fired up about this well allow most most real estate, I mean, let’s let’s look at most real estate agents. And I’m not talking about the top producers, who who have all of their stuff figured out perfectly. I’m talking about the other 90% of real estate agents, they have a pretty good knowledge base of the real estate industry. But they’re crummy marketers, because we’re not marketers, we’re real estate agents. And so most of us don’t know how to produce this content to give our clients the education that they need. Well Guess who’s stepping in and talking about Airbnb savvy marketers savvy production, people who are we’re putting this information out there, it is up to real estate agents. And this is my this is my call to action here on this particular tip. It is up to real estate agents in this moment. And in this scenario, to demonstrate your value to your clients in a real and tangible ways. Don’t wait for them to go to YouTube and learn about how they can produce income from a property they already own. You talk to them about that. You talked to them about the strategies they should be learning and they should be using because guess what you are their real estate adviser, not Johnny on the spot on YouTube who has no license, no liability, and absolutely no accountability, if his advice is crap, and it you know, sends your client into financial ruin, I hope that that doesn’t happen. But you have the chance to step in and be the expert here. Airbnb is going to happen, and it’s going to boom in 2020, to get ahead of that right now.
D.J. Paris 27:37 And also you just let you really never want your clients to be you’re talking about buyers, for example, you don’t want your buyer, or really or seller. But but certainly your client, you don’t want them at a cocktail party talking to their friends, they just bought or sold something. And they said, You know, I was going to do that. But my agent talked to me about city of house hacking or short term rentals and the other, your client then goes, Oh, really, I don’t know what that means, like what it tells me about that. And then all of a sudden, they’re now hearing it from a non expert source. And so I would say before you work with, especially with your buyers, definitely have that conversation before you go show them property say hey, I know we’re looking at a single family home and in a suburban neighborhood that you guys are going to live at for the next 20 years. But just in case you’re not familiar, are you are you aware of what you know, this idea of house hacking is and I just want to make sure you’re aware of it. And then you know, you guys can tell me if you want to learn more about it. But I would say that you’d be doing your clients a huge service so that they don’t feel like oh, my agent never mentioned that. That sounds kind of cool. So anyway, little extra stuff there. Before we get to our last topic, which is going to be in about an article Chris recently published on the close about seven important lessons from top producers. I want to do a quick shout out to our beloved sponsor, we are so grateful to have follow up boss supporting our show. But let me just tell you a little bit about follow up boss know after interviewing hundreds of top producers in the country. Do you know which CRM is used by more of our guests than any other while it’s follow up boss and let’s face it following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time with less effort. Don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States uses follow up boss and he’s built a one and a half billion dollar real estate business in six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 different systems. Also, this includes lead providers so you can keep your current tools and those lead sources also, they have seven day a week support, which we know is important as a realtor because you’re you know Saturdays and Sundays tend to be pretty busy for agents and if you need to get that support, you can do that from them and get this follow up boss is so sure you’re going to love their CRM that for a limit time they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial. This is twice as much time as they give every other person that signs up for a free trial. And oh yeah, no credit card required. Don’t you love free trials without credit cards, and they’re, they’re just so confident you’re going to use them, they’ll let you try it for 30 days, and you’re going to end up giving them your credit card because you love it so much. But only if you use the special link which is follow up boss.com forward slash real again, follow up boss.com forward slash real visit there for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up, boss. Thank you, Chris, back to our show here. What is uh, what are some of the lessons that you have? You just recently spoke to some top producers big and these are not these are top producers that have been top producers for some time. So these are agents who are didn’t just, you know, ride some sort of wave in the last year since COVID has obviously propelled most Realtors business. These are people that have weathered some of these ups and downs. And so tell us a little bit about what you learned.
Chris Linsell 31:05 Yeah, definitely. I want to I want to tease this a little bit. Definitely kind of the kind of the close dad comm check it out. There’s an article seven important lessons new agents can learn from old school realtors. And there’s a couple of insights I just want to share. But before I do, I just want to say follow up boss, I like you guys, I really am a big fan of especially if you’re reporting your audit your your agent, accountability, your collaboration tools. i This is not a plug follow boss is not paying me to say this. I genuinely like this about them. And so I just want to throw this out there. Follow up us. Call me man, send me a tweet or something. Let’s talk a little bit because I’d like to look into what you guys are doing a little bit more. You’re doing some cool stuff. Okay, so back to back to the important lessons. I talked to some some, some top producers from across the country. I really just wanted to ask them if you had a new agent sitting in your office and you could give them one piece of advice, what would you give them. And there’s a couple of cool things that that I heard. And the first one, honestly, it kind of everything kind of starts and ends with this particular piece of advice. It’s from Eva Lin, who is a broker in Pasadena. She’s got her own boutique brokerage there. And her advice is be obsessed with your clients experience. And I just loved the words she chose here be obsessed with your clients experience, don’t just care about it. Don’t just put it on a spreadsheet somewhere where you can check a box yes or no positive or negative, be obsessed beat beat, get up at night occasionally thinking about your clients experience. Because as real estate agents, we’ve made a commitment to put our client’s needs before our own before before others we are their fiduciary here, we are shepherding them through the some of the most financially important and impactful moments of their life, you should be obsessed with the experience that they are having with you. I really thought that that was that was valuable. And it actually kind of led into another piece of advice. A guy named LINC Moser who founded a real estate group called experience home group, excuse me experience homes group in New Hampshire. He told me that if he could give agents one piece of advice it would be to base your business on relationships, and not on technology. And these two pieces of advice felt so organic with one another because I’m gonna be honest with you, I love technology. I love the tools. I love all the bells and whistles. I love platforms like you know, follow a boss and all their automation and, and analytics tools and other CRMs and email marketers and predictive analytics. This is a table I eat at and frankly, I catch my paychecks based on these guys. So I like all that stuff. But if you’re basing your business, on your tools and not on your relationships, you are only going to last so long. Businesses that are built on relationships last forever. These are the businesses you can hand down to the next generation. If you are building your business based on the you know Zillow premier agent or based on a particular CRM or on MailChimp. If that’s your business, you only have so many transactions and you know but if you build your business based on relationships, your business lasts forever.
D.J. Paris 34:43 You had so true and just to to for our listeners. Obviously we know this but I want you to think about how we absolutely know that this idea of authentic communication and authentic sort of vulnerability which really, we’re talking about intimacy here, it’s trying to try to build intimacy between you and your contacts and your clients. And here’s some evidence that this is really super prominent now in at least American culture, which just looked at the state of advertising, advertising has finally figured out that what people what what consumers want is authentic, intimate communication as best as possible between these big corporate, you know, you know, product and service providers. So you’ll see it in the advertising, you see a lot more sort of less selling and more sort of connecting and or trying to connect the Superbowl is a great example is ads tend to which the Superbowl is coming up in about, what, three or four months, and you’ll see a lot of funny ads, and you’ll see a lot of really, very sort of intimate and vulnerable ads. And those are the ads that people talk about are the funny ones and the vulnerable ones. So this is an opportunity for you to move, not necessarily away from the technology, but to realize that personal phone call, which nobody does anymore, right phone calls, I mean, realtors still do. But this idea of picking up the phone and just checking in seeing how your client or your, your previous client, call them on the home anniversary and say, Hey, remember when we first saw this house, and then a year ago, you actually closed? That was a cool day. And hey, I have a picture of that day, let me send it to you. Right, these are some really fun opportunities that technology has a hard time replicating that you can step in and do yourself. I also had one other point, Chris, I wanted to make the client experience, which was the first tip that you had from from Evelyn. That is, you know, if you’re thinking, Well, how do I get obsessed about my client experience, my suggestion would be to find some realtors in your local market, especially if you’re a new agent. And this this advice is for, of course, all agents, but specifically, the article is sort of tips from from, from experienced producers to new agents, find people that are experienced, and if it was me, I would grab a notebook. And I would say, okay, you know, there’s seven steps in the home buying process, or however many steps you’ve identified and same thing with home selling. And I would talk to these experienced agents and say, what are the most common questions, concerns and feelings that people hit on every one of these steps? And what do you recommend that I say to preemptively sort of address these so that the client isn’t laying at night, worried about this and maybe embarrassed to ask me or just doesn’t think to ask me, because if you’re obsessed with your client experience, you’re obsessed with what they’re going through every step of the process? And so if you’re new, and you’re like, I don’t really know, well, of course, you don’t know, ask people who are ask your managing broker, ask, you know, Shadow somebody, but just sit and get take some notes. And if you can know that, then when you hit those particular stages in a transaction, you can just literally follow the script that you’ve created and say, hey, at this step, a lot of my clients start to get a little nervous about XY and Z, or they start to feel a certain way. And I want to just go through, you know, and you can kind of go from there. But just having that conversation means you’re obsessed with the client experience. And it kind of goes back to that same quiet suggestion that about telling your clients about Airbnb and house hacking, like if you’re not doing it, they might be experiencing it on their own, and then you don’t have control over how they experienced it.
Chris Linsell 38:27 Yeah. Yeah. Without a doubt, without a doubt. It’s, I mean, honestly, this conversation starts and ends with with this point here, there’s a lot of other stuff we can talk about in between. And you should definitely check out the article. There’s a lot of good information here from really cool people who are doing really cool stuff in their business. But at the end of the day, the best advice that that old school agents have for new for new Realtors is be obsessed with that client experience, build your business around those relationships, and you will your business will last forever.
D.J. Paris 39:00 And I should mention too, we have a link to this article in the show notes. So feel free to to find it there or just visit the closed.com. But I will mention in this article. This is particularly interesting because Chris said that this article idea came from a conversation that that Chris had with one of the close pro members and with it’s a really good place to talk about what the close Pro is and why our listeners should consider checking it out.
Chris Linsell 39:30 Yeah, absolutely. If you are new to the clothes, welcome. Come on over the clothes.com super easy, but all sorts of great information there. tons of content that’s going to help you level up your real estate business. If you want to take that to the next level. You can check out the clothes pro the clothes Pro is our premium subscription service. It’s 35 bucks a month, or the equivalent of $25 a month. If you if you go with the annual package. And with the clothes pro you get this incredible resource library that is packed full of dozens of scripts and templates and long form strategy guides, you get access to all of our most popular courses, like six simple systems to transform your real estate business, our most recent course, which is extraordinarily popular, we’re getting a ton of awesome feedback on our Facebook and Instagram Crash Course. Get in there, learn about Facebook and Instagram and figure out what you’re doing wrong. Get started all together. There’s so much cool stuff. And this particular course, is taught by by two women, Sophia and Sarah. And these two, their their energy is literally so infectious. I watched the recording after they did this live. And I was pumped up just from the recording. I mean, there’s just so much really high quality stuff happening in the close pro 35 bucks a month, you get access to all of this stuff, come try it out for a month or if you’re ready to dive in, make that annual that annual commitment. And we are adding new courses, new things to the resource library. And of course on demand, and live coaching sessions with me with other real estate other coaches that we’ve got at the close Pro, there is so much happening there. So if you want to take your business and your clothes experience to the next level, come check us out on the closed Pro and we can’t wait to see you there.
D.J. Paris 41:28 Awesome. Well, everyone who is listening, if you are heading out to triple play on the East Coast, or to the NAR conference in San Diego, this this November, definitely look up Chris, he is one of the speakers at both of those events, both those conferences, and I will also be roaming around as a participant like you like our listeners. So if you want to meet me and say hi, I will be available as well just shoot us shoot us a message. And we would both like to say hi to you. And on behalf of our listeners we want interviewers, I want to thank Chris As per usual, he’s been with us for many years. Now, I think a couple at least. And he always brings amazing content to our show, we are super grateful. And clearly he provides great content because again, he is speaking at three conferences here in the next month and a half or so. So we’re super honored to also have him giving up his his valuable time to be on our show. So thank you, Chris, as per usual from myself, and of course the rest of the audience. And on behalf of Chris and myself, we want to thank the audience for continuing to support the clothes by visiting, subscribing to their newsletter, checking out the clothes, a pro and just reading their articles. They’re so incredibly good. They’re really from our from my perspective, as a marketer. They’re the best, you know, sort of marketing branding. And it’s not just marketing and branding. But that is a good chunk of what they do is really designed around you building your business and a lot about customer experience as well. They just write about everything that’s important to know, as a realtor, and they’re really I think, are really the best resource out there. And it’s free, like 99% of it is free. So go check it out. So on behalf of the audience, we think Chris, and on behalf of Chris and myself, we thank the audience. And by the way, please also help support our sponsor, follow up boss by checking out that free trial that’s keeping sorry, that is follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. And check out the clothes.com and we will see everybody on the next episode. And if you are heading to Nar just let us know we’d like to say hi. So thanks, Chris.
Chris Linsell 43:35 You’re welcome DJ, I forgot to mention we have I have a special offer that I wanted to throw out there. If you are interested in the clothes Pro, we just got this set up on Friday. Sorry, I forgot to mention that before. You can go to the clothes.com/chris. And you can get $50 off an annual membership. It’ll give you give you some more information about the clothes pro clothes.com/chris CHR is 50 bucks off an annual membership. This is something we want to do for for you here at keeping it real and anybody who comes to comes and checks this stuff out, talk to me about it, come use my promo code, get 50 bucks off on me.
D.J. Paris 44:17 And that’s like a month and a half free so or close to a month free. So basically even even better deal. So yeah, and we will have that link in the show notes. But again, that’s the close.com forward slash Chris for your $50 off annual membership. So check it out, guys. It’s worth it. It just is awesome, Chris. Well, thanks so much. We thank everyone for listening and watching and we will see you next time.
Chris Linsell 44:43 Thanks, TJ. See you soon
The Best Closing Gifts To Give Your Real Estate Clients • Social Bootcamp • Gogo Bethke
Nov 05, 2021
Welcome to our monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!
In this episode, Gogo and DJ discuss closing gifts and how you should aim for usable products that are also marketing for you. Next, Gogo discusses the importance of having your brand in your client’s home and how to stay in front of your client. Gogo also talks about her vendor list and how to build your own list. Last, Gogo talks about Gogo’s Bootcamp and the benefits you will get by purchasing it.
This episode is brought to you by Follow Up Boss. Get your 30 day trial by clicking here.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00 This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the show.
Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Harris. I am your guide and host through the show, and today is our monthly series called Social bootcamp with gogo Beth key. Let me tell you about gogo, now gogo came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream. She was broke, she had no real estate experience no sphere of influence barely spoke English and only $6 to her name. So that left her with nothing else other than you guessed it social media to help build her business, which is what she did and where she started and she created gogos real estate began her real estate career. Now with the power of social media gogo has sold over I think it’s about 100 million probably more in real estate. She shares the good, the bad and the ugly of real estate. In her honest snippets in her daily life have earned her 10s of 1000s of followers on social media. And in the real estate community. She has earned the title queen of social media now app she presents at various conferences and speaks with realtors. And so over time, she decided to build her own social media Bootcamp for realtors called gogos bootcamp. Today, she has a team of almost 700 agents nationwide. I’m gonna pause for a second and just say how impressive this is. I recruit Realtors all day long. That’s my job. And we only have 800 and I’ve been doing this 10 years gogo has been recruiting Realtors for like a year or two. And now she has almost 700 bats, and she does it all through attraction, which we’re going to talk about as well. But her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. And by the way, that’s how she recruits people for her team to they find her now if she can do it. This girl from Transylvania, Romania with no formal education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent than anyone that can do it as well. Please, please, please follow gogo on social media on Instagram at gogos. That’s Gee, oh, gee, Oh, s real estate. So at gogos real estate. And also, please consider investing in her social media bootcamp. It’s unbelievable. It’s the very best product we found for social media mastery for realtors. And we have special pricing for keeping it real listeners, all you have to do is go to a browser and type in Gogo podcast.com. Go go podcast.com and buy it. It’s the best investment you’ll make for your 2022 marketing initiatives, which is also something we’re going to be speaking about today. So that was a very long intro, gogo, welcome once again, to the show. Hopefully, you didn’t fall asleep.
Gogo Bethke 3:17 Well, I’m here. I’m here. Thank you for having me.
D.J. Paris 3:19 I did so much talking. There I go, Oh, my gosh, my guest might she might go. When is he going to stop talking? So thank you, for being Chicago has been with us since the very beginning, by the way, just about the very beginning. And we have now done about 300 episodes. She is an amazing partner and always brings it every month. But I know we wanted to talk about something I don’t think we’ve talked about before, which is closing gifts.
Gogo Bethke 3:44 Yeah. And I figure since we are heading into q4, right where we are, I guess technically in q4. This is the time when you plan your next year. I know this is also the time when you want to go out with a bank right in 2021. And make sure you causing the You’re right. But at the same time, you also have to use this time to plan your next year so you can be prepared. I used to be one of those agents right myself that running or like chicken had cut off an hour before closing right running to my final walkthrough. And then from the vine between the final walkthrough, and the closing table somewhere in the middle, I would hit a grocery store for a bottle of wine, right? What do what I like trying to think for a bouquet of flowers and what am I going to get them as a closing gift right? And I don’t recommend for you to do that learn from my mistakes. It took me quite a few years to figure out that I’m not doing it right. So what we do today, actually the pre order of our closing Yep. So if you know let’s say this, you closed 30 transactions, right? And so assume you’re going to close 40 or whatever your goal is for next year. This is the time when you want to figure out okay, what is that nice universal gift that you can get for everyone, but be that it’s also marketing, right? Like you want to make sure that people are actually going to use it. Then every time they use it. It’s parks who sold my house right? Or who got me this house right? So what do you do? If you have A company that we partnered with quite quite a long time ago now, and the order all of our branded material from them and think of it this way, as long as your company logo is on there, it’s considered marketing, for your business. And if it’s marketing, it’s 100%. Right off, I know, CPA, this is my disclosure, go talk to your CPA, whatever state that you’re located in, right. But that’s what we do. So here’s one of the marketing items that we do, every single closing gift has a cutting board so they can use it for their short coterie wardrobe. Whatever, that’s I love it, I can’t pronounce the fancy word may have them in all different sizes. This is the smallest one, they have four different front designs, but the back is the most important in my opinion, because that’s where you get to personalize it. So this one shows logos real estate team, it shows my brokerage and it also shows team gogo, because those are the things that people know me for. And then it says with smaller rise there it was, it was a pleasure working with you, right, so it is branded. Now imagine they had a party, right? They have their cheese and grapes and whatever out and now they’re gonna have to do the dishes. When they’re doing it. They’re gonna flick it over. Go Go, Coco goddess this right? So your goal is to have your brand in your clients home. Did you know that within two years, helping someone buy yourself a home 80% Of the people forget who the realtor was?
D.J. Paris 6:20 That, you know, it’s shocking, but not surprising, I guess in a way. It’s like it shouldn’t be. But it makes sense. Because realtors, you know, it’s a transactional business. And we oftentimes move on to our next client, and we forget about the person we just helped. You know, maybe we don’t forget about them the day after their closing, but maybe two years after their closing. We’re like, Oh, God, well, when did that person close? So yeah. So how do you how do you help. So by the way, I want to back up just a moment because gogo said something really, really important with respect to closing gifts. She was, and this is really funny, because I, it’s so and so I So couldn’t agree with you more, because I could I do most of the cooking in my relationship, although my girlfriend loves to cook, but I’m kind of a control freak. So I end up doing most of the cooking. But that means I am spending a lot of time on a cutting board every single time I cook I use a cutting board, because you know, I can’t cut right down onto my you know, nice new countertops. So, right everyone does, right, we all use cutting boards, we all use knives, right? You can get knives that are branded that have you know, something cute on it, you get cutting boards, and what go goes is great, because she didn’t put and for those of you listening what you didn’t see, if you’re not watching the end, you’re just listening. The back of hers had her brand on it the back of the cutting board. And that was probably by design because maybe we want something and on the front of it. She had like a cute little saying like Home Sweet Home, things like that. On the back of it, it had the design, you might think well, if it’s on the back, no one’s gonna see it. But absolutely, they’re gonna see it, when as she said, they turn around and wash it. So you don’t have to necessarily put your name front and center so that they’re cutting on it because you know, let’s face it, maybe we don’t really want to see our Realtors name on our cutting board staring at us while we’re cutting. But they still will see it if it’s on the backside. Is that why you did it that way? I was just curious why you did. I mean,
Gogo Bethke 8:07 same thing. You know, like, even on my social media stuff, I don’t shove down people’s throat what I do for a living, right? Like I don’t fit on my personal face to be like, Hey guys, who wants to sell houses, he wants to buy a house with me like I’ve never done that if you followed me and I’ve been in social media for over 11 years now, you’ve probably never seen me as someone for business. So I don’t do that. But in the same time it is my job to make sure that you know what I do for a living right? So it’s very subtle. You don’t feel like I’m selling you anything but in the end of the day you will remember who I am and what I do for a living because when you flip it over towards the other side, it’s gonna connect Oh yeah, that’s right. Google got us this right yeah, where
D.J. Paris 8:43 did I get this? Yeah, that is
Gogo Bethke 8:45 Yeah,
D.J. Paris 8:46 anything that is used daily. If you can get somebody something that they use regularly in their home and it somehow just jogs their memory that you provide. Everyone’s got a favorite knife that they cut with everyone’s got a favorite. You know things in their kitchen they have favorite things other parts of their home, if you can get them something that’s important to them. So if you know your clients into cooking, perfect, get them something cooking. Okay?
Gogo Bethke 9:14 Very quick to that. So we ordered these and we have a big box of them and I’m good for the year right? So every time a closing happened we already have the three branded bags. And for that all you need to do guys is go on like a Walmart or whatever website order one color bag so ours is usually red. Order a nice red bag or black or whatever your you will call a branded color s then go on like Vistaprint order your logos, right like just just a simple sticker. And then you buy the bags you stick the logos on there you put the cutting board under you good to go. And then you can take it from there and personalize it. So if you would like to put in a I don’t know peanut butter cake or if you would like to put a bottle of wine or champagne or something else in there, but at least you have a gift that’s always going to stay there. They’re not going to consume this right they can consume my cutting board, they can consume the bottle of wine and then it’s gone, right? But the cardboard is going to say on the counter. This one is actually you guys can see us and I’m going to describe it for you very quick. This one is actually like a decor piece. Like I have it in my kitchen right next to the stove. And in front of it, I have the salt and pepper in the case of the butter, right. So it’s going to stay up there as a decor piece. But you can also use it as a shortcut to boycott your vegetables, whatever. So it’s a used item, but it’s always under on my kitchen counter. And I can see right it right next to my stove. So we have these for every single biocidal listing side. But here’s a good one that I love. We used to do this and every single by side, but then we got carried away a little bit. So if you have some more time than we have on Google’s real estate team, then the other amazing closing gifts and our clients love it, where they literally call us back when it’s faded. They want to order another one is doormats, personalized formats. So for buyers, we got doormats every time and they would say you know through the transaction, you get to know your buyer. And let’s say you figure out that they love you or them right. Or they love golf or they love they have a bulldog, you know, so let’s say they had a bulldog right, we set a stamp, we say the bat keys, the name of the house and I say so it says in big letters in the middle, the bass case then I have a bulldog on the top right, what cute little bulldog face. Then I have some puppy paws in here. And it says established 2021 Though the bottom again. So it’s not my brand, right? I don’t want everybody to see it on top. But on the bottom it has the Google’s real estate team logo, the phone number and all that. Now after they want people come to their door, they gonna put it out right because they’re like, this is our first house together like people have this in 2022 there’s so excited 2022 2021 Right. There’s so excited they have the doormat people going to start using it right? People come and go they wipe their feet, it’s going to start fading and they’re like, oh my gosh, you’d love our doorman. Can we have another one? Well, guess what just met what guests what just happened? They called you right? Because they know that they got it from you. That’s your job. Your job is for them to remember you and remember how to get a hold of you. Because if they can get a hold of you for a doormat, can they get a hold of you to sell that house when they’re having a baby inside big enough anymore.
D.J. Paris 12:08 And also you can tell them to Hey, by the way, if this ever fades and restarts looking crappy, let me know and I’ll replace it.
Gogo Bethke 12:15 Exactly. So you will stay in front of them all the time. Now Christy my right hand used to make these because she has a cricket and she used to make it if you have a cricket and you’re good with this kind of DFI kind of stuff, you can make your own closing gifts, right, it’s not gonna cost you anything, go buy something, put in a cricket printed, roll it up, put a big red bow on it and go to the closing table. But because Christie is now running multiple businesses, because she’s, she’s grown with me, she doesn’t have the time anymore. And we didn’t find a local company who can do that. But I’m sure if you put some time and effort into it, you can find a local company or buy your own cricket, and just design your own closing gaps and the the doormats are just a huge hit every time.
D.J. Paris 12:52 Quick question you had said earlier that 80% of people forget who their realtor is within a couple of years. And by the way that happened to my parents, they had an investment property, really a vacation home on the East Coast, took them years to sell it because it was just bad timing in the market. Eventually it sold and they were they had gone through like four or five Realtors over like five years to try to sell this place. Eventually it sold. And I said to my dad, hey, who is that person you used out there? And he goes, I’d have to look it up. I don’t remember. Isn’t that amazing? And, and this? And my parents liked this person. They liked this person. It wasn’t they didn’t go Oh, that guy I don’t know. You know, they were like, No, we really love that guy sold the home, no idea what his name was.
Gogo Bethke 13:33 And then you don’t even have to ask your people. So this is where social media comes in. Right? You’re going to stay in front of them for the rest of their life as long as they follow you. So when it comes to the social media portion of it, let’s say it’s a buyer, right? Let’s say they don’t know of your existence, somehow they found a way to you and are you working together during the showings and stuff? You’re going to want to take a picture together or whatever. And then you’re going to post that picture, right? I’m showing calm. So Jessica and Jane’s right over here, right? And then when I’m about to post it, I asked Jessica Hey, is this okay? If I just posted you let me tell you, and then just because they Oh yeah, we would love to and then you turn Jessica, guess what’s going to happen? Jessica’s going to get notified that you tagged them, and then Jessica is going to follow your page. And she’s also going to share it now all of Jessica friends see it. But since she followed your page, is she going to be able to see everything you do between now and the next time? They need a realtor?
D.J. Paris 14:20 No, I mean, will she get she she can for sure.
Gogo Bethke 14:24 She will see you from now until forever until she unfollowed you. Hopefully she doesn’t, right. So your job is to stay in front of them. If you can stay in front of them and constantly remind them of your existence. When they are ready next time to buy yourself which people in average move every seven years in the US. They’re gonna call you.
D.J. Paris 14:43 Everything you can do to and Facebook sometimes does this, although I don’t think they do it perfectly. And this is why we’re saying no earlier because I was thinking about this other thing, which is something that you can do and it’s fun. So this just happened to me. Just to pull back the curtain a little bit I was married previously and Um, I, my ex wife was is a veterinarian. And so she was the one who now is the reason why I have the dog that I have. And we still have, we’re still very amicable, but we don’t really communicate much. But Facebook reminded me 13 years ago that when my ex wife brought the dog home, and so I sent it to my ex wife saying, Hey, do you remember when this happened? I thought it was kind of a cute memory. And she goes, Oh, my gosh, that’s amazing. So it got me to think what you were saying about taking pictures, when you’re showing somebody, maybe they’re buying in the process of buying or selling, take some pictures, and then you you don’t have to wait for Facebook to do it. Facebook doesn’t always do it, it doesn’t seem but sometimes it’ll say, hey, remember, a year ago, you were doing this memory with so and so you can also just say, Hey, I was going through my photos. And I found this picture of us member when we were out doing the you know, we went and saw that property, we didn’t like it at all. Or remember the first time we saw the property, they ended up buying either a picture of that, like take pictures of it posted on social media and say, Hey, I was just going through, I found this picture from 2019 that I was showing, you know, we ended up buying the home. I mean, that’s content for social media, and you can send it to the client and
Gogo Bethke 16:06 out again, right, so you’re gonna reach out with that screenshot. It’s like, oh, my gosh, it was three years ago. How’s the home treating you? Yes. Do you have a need for a painter? Here’s our preferred vendors list. If you need absolutely anything, if there’s any way that I can help you, please don’t hesitate to reach out, I hope, the whole mystery of treating you well, right. It’s just another reason to keep reaching back out and keep giving right so I just gave you an our preferred vendors list and under preferred vendors list. I have painters and dog walkers and lenders and maybe want to refinance right now. Right? I have my preferred lender Xander, pick one. Maybe you have a real estate question, call me. Just stay in front of them.
D.J. Paris 16:41 Yeah, it’s it’s, you know, I think we all spend so much time on social media thinking about how do I create the perfect post, when really what we want to do is just elicit emotion is
Gogo Bethke 16:52 not something out there. Just put something out there
D.J. Paris 16:55 that’s authentic. Especially it you know, if you have like document things, when you go out with somebody, take a few pictures and say, Hey, there’s going to be a time where we’re going to be at a closing table, and you’re going to forget about all these homes that we saw. So I might snap a few pictures along the way. And to you know, just to sort of down the road, maybe remind you of the experience, or maybe you create a little video of of that process, right? You know, there’s tools to do that. But if there’s a good reason to do that, and then you know, sending people that stuff over the years after the transaction is is just going to drum up all those great memories. I would love to have seen, you know, a couple pictures of when I bought my first condo like I would love to have seen my reaction as I walked in, because I knew we all know that buyers oftentimes when they walk in and they just know within 10 seconds are like this is it, or they at least think that it might be it. And wouldn’t it have been cool to have somebody capture a little snapshot Now obviously, not everyone wants their picture taken like that. But if you have pictures like that,
Gogo Bethke 18:02 one of our closing gifts, one of our best closing gifts, I thought that was most personalized, right? And was these clients and Christie actually helped me out and she was showing the house to them because I was out of out of town. And they are in the front of the house. The two of them are facing the house was there back to Christie, right? She’s behind them. And so she just snapped a quick little photo. This is the first time they fell in love with the home, they end up buying and it’s their first home together, right? So the two of them are just standing together his arms around her they’re just staring at the house from the outside Christy shadow quick photo. And that was our closing gift. We blew that up. Awesome, nice frame. And they were like, Oh my gosh, that’s the first time we saw this home. And that’s awesome to home. And it was just so personal. So if you have that moment, grab it. And that can be your closing gift.
D.J. Paris 18:49 Oh my gosh, what a what a good, amazing gift. And they are going to look at that and feel good every time. It’s when it’s hanging on their
Gogo Bethke 18:56 wall. And don’t show it right on to the closing table. So don’t
D.J. Paris 19:00 even don’t even let them know. Yeah, don’t even let him
Gogo Bethke 19:04 snap a photo every time you’re showing them a house right? You don’t know which one they’re gonna fall in love that. You don’t know which one is going to be the one that you actually win right now even if they fall in love of mine, I think that actually gonna get it right. How crazy the market is. But if you just get into the habit of like snapping those moments of your clients, and then when you’re closing if that’s the one you have the closing gift for them and it’s personalized.
D.J. Paris 19:25 I love that and just you know, to the cool thing about memories is memories can be revisited. And you can you know, make sure that you’re odd your clients can revisit those memories by you sending them these pictures once your Hey, remember a year ago when you saw this, you know, yes, it’s a closing gift. Yes, it’s also memory, take photos, document things. And then you don’t have to worry about providing as much knowledge value where you’re, you know, talking about facts and figures on social media, which you can totally do as well. That’s all great stuff. But what people probably want more than that is they want to be reminded of the great experiences they’ve had with you. And then they’re just never gonna go anywhere else. You’re gonna work with another.
Gogo Bethke 20:09 People remember the feeling that you made them feel? Yeah.
D.J. Paris 20:14 Yeah, so everything, everything you should do should be to invoke feeling and and then oh, let’s talk about your vendor list, by the way, because I think this is important, this is a really good action step for every agent should have their own vendor list. So talk about yours and how you created it.
Gogo Bethke 20:32 So I can’t take credit for this one. This is actually my husband’s doing. He’s a licensed Realtor now too. And it was his idea in the first place. But here’s the big question and answering this question, honestly, do you expect this is to the listeners, right? I know your answer, DJ, but let’s ask the listeners. Do you expect your friends and family to use you as the realtor?
D.J. Paris 20:55 gonna pause for one second, as you’re going to answer yes. Before we I have to do a quick sponsor break. So bear with me. So the question and by the way, I’m gonna throw a statistic on top of this before, before we come back, which is 16% of the people you know, friends and family 16% of the people you know are going to need a realtor in the next 12 months. But before we get to that, I want to talk about our amazing sponsor which is follow up boss we love love, love follow up boss. After interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country, do you know which CRM is used more often by the guests on this podcast? Follow up boss let’s face it. Following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time with less effort. But don’t take my word for it. Robert slack who runs the number one team in the United States use his follow up boss and he built a one and a half billion dollar real estate business within six years. Follow up boss integrates with 250 different systems so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. They also have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help you need and get this follow up boss is so sure you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial that’s twice as much time as they give everybody else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. But only if you use a special link, visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. Okay, back to our show. Go go. Yes. Let’s talk about Yes, I do expect? And I expect our listeners are going Yes, I expect my friends and family to use me as a realtor. Sure.
Gogo Bethke 22:37 Right. So now answer me this question. So since you expecting them to know what you do for a living and use you for those services, right? Do you use them?
D.J. Paris 22:47 Good question. Reciprocity,
Gogo Bethke 22:50 right? Do you know what your friends and family your Facebook friends? If they have a side business? Do you know what they do for a living? Do you know how you can support them and feed their family? Because you’re expecting them to feed your family? Do you feed others? And that’s when it occurred to me then hold on a minute, if I’m expecting all these people to know that I’m a realtor, and most importantly, use me as their realtor. Right, then I should certainly use Joe Schmo as my friend when I need somebody to lay hardwood floors, I should use Joe small as my friend when I need somebody to paint my house, I should use Joe Schmo when I need to refinish my deck and a plumber, and this and that. And absolutely anything that I can I need not only personally but all of the listings, right? Like, if you need a plumber, who do you use you just use it call a local company? Or do you actually go into the effort of figuring out if you have a friend who’s a plumber? Yeah. Go ahead.
D.J. Paris 23:40 No, please.
Gogo Bethke 23:41 That’s how the preferred vendors list started with the idea of Hold on a minute, who do I know? And what do they do for a living? And is there a way for me to support them? Do I need their services through the process of listing or selling the home or even my own personal needs? So the preferred vendors list, it’s a Google document that we created it kind of like an old Excel sheet, right? It has the name, email address, phone number, the address of the property, what they do, how we can get a hold of them, and if they’re a discount that they’re giving to the Google Real Estate Team clients. So we have lenders, we have title companies, anything stagers moving companies, plumbers, electricians, dog, walkers, churches, you name it, whatever you could possibly need that you can put on there. And also think of it this way, there’s a thing in real estate called steering, right? So you don’t want to sorry, I’m keep having this thing pop up on my screen. You don’t want to get caught steering. So if you’re referring a plumber, you’re going to refer three if you’re in a pinch, you know, for three, same with lenders, title companies, you name it. So you should have multiple options on there. And of course, I only refer the ones that I personally worked with and I trust and I know they’re going to show up right and do a good job. Because what’s going to happen when you refer someone, can they ruin your reputation? 100% Yeah, so you want to be very, very selective of who you allow to be on your preferred vendors list. Ideally, are the people that you already worked with and you trust them and they did work for you right and they did a good job, and then they’re going to be able to come command that preferred vendors list and that is the document that goes out as the very first email to everybody that’s thinking about working with us. So it could be buyer seller renter, name it as the very first email as we are introducing ourselves and our team and who’s working on by side with and we’re listing side of what it looks like to do a transaction with us. That email goes out as the first email and we explain the preferred vendors list is attached to the process, you’re going to need different companies and different services they can possibly get to the closing table without their services, right? Like title companies, lenders, all of those things. Whoever you need through the process will freeze for you to do your own judgment, right, interview them, choose the one that fits your needs best. But here’s the list of the ones that we have worked with in the past. And we love and they did a great job, and we recommend, but you can use whoever you want. And then now you’re referring Joe Schmo as a painter, right? So Jojo is your friend. And suddenly, just this month alone, four leads came from you, and now he’s painting for people’s homes, getting him ready for the market, right? Or maybe they just moved in, they need to have the home painted. Now Joe is like, oh my gosh, Coco sent me four clients this week, right? And then Joe is going to go to a party. And they’re in the kitchen over the kitchen island. And somebody talks about oh, my gosh, you have to sell our house, we just got a new job in Ohio, and we have to move. And then Joe is gonna say I have the perfect realtor for you. Because now Joe owes me right? Doesn’t really owe me No, he doesn’t. But he feels like he does, because I felt his family four times this month read, right now he’s gonna want to make sure to feed mine. So you always give before you take, right? So you give give give to people, eventually, they’re going to give give back to you. So that’s how the preferred vendors are starting in the first place. It was my husband’s idea. He created the whole document. We use it day in and day out every single client gets it. And not only that, but it gives you content too. So let’s say you don’t have it built out yet, right? You only have one lender out there, then this Tuesday, you’re going to make a post and you’re going to say Hey guys, I’m building out my preferred vendors list. I only have one lender at the moment, I’m looking for two awesome lenders in our area. Maybe you’re looking for somebody who does new construction, because your previous lender doesn’t maybe looking for someone in give you a loan for vacant land. Because your previous lender doesn’t. Maybe you’re looking for someone who can do role development, because your previous lender does. And maybe you’re looking for someone who can do doctors loan because your previous lender does and right. So now you’re building out not only your own portfolio, so now you can just get anybody pre approved. But you’re also now building out all of these referring partners, because when you send three leads this week alone to the lender over there now they’re going to be like, I better send lead to go go.
D.J. Paris 27:32 Yeah, yeah. And it’s great too, because you can and it’s a good idea to reach out to these services. Like let’s say you’re looking for a plumber, and you want to find, you know, call three or four plumbers and say, Hey, I’m a realtor, I deal with a lot of plumbing issues. My clients are always in the room. Right? Pretty much every home has some sort of plumbing issue is obviously you know, I would love to start referring business to you. You know, and then are you accepting new clients? And of course, the question, the answer is always gonna be Yes, yes. Yes. say great, I’d love to add you to my preferred vendor list. I’d also like to maybe come and meet with you and do like a fun little we could do like a little interview about here’s some things that home first time homebuyers don’t know when they’re checking when they’re buying a property, about plumbing, here’s some things to look out for. It’ll help your business, it’ll help my business, we’ll both push it out on social media. I know gogo, you were just going to say all those things. So I just, I decided to say them for you. Oh, yeah,
Gogo Bethke 28:29 that is amazing. That creates content, right? So if you’re not busy cleaning houses today, well then create yourself something to do that is going to market your business, visit that plumber, right? and interview them and say, Hey, what is a new homebuyer need to know about buying the home. So in our our area, when someone does a water testing, arsenic is not a part of the water test. So that is my job to let them know that, hey, that you have a 5050 chance that there’s arsenic in your water. And it’s they’re not even testing for it in the regular water test. So if that’s important to you, and then maybe this plumber now can explain it to the people how to get a reverse osmosis system installed, and what is that thing cost? And can you do it yourself? Or maybe they can just call him and he installs it for them? Right? So now you can simply give him content, you helping them out with something they don’t know anything about? It makes you an expert, right? Because now you know something they don’t know. It automatically makes you an expert gives you content. That becomes your next client.
D.J. Paris 29:20 Yeah, it’s funny. I’m in the process right now. I’m a as a guy, I have big giant speakers that sit on the floor there. They’re like almost five feet tall. They’re massive. They’re just massive speakers. I’ve got four of them. Two in the front, two in the back. My girlfriend wants to kill me, because she does not want big giant. What’s that? Yeah, well, I tried to keep the I tried to keep the volume down. But I just love big speakers because I’m a guy. Well, not everybody loves big speakers. So my girlfriend said, Well, what if we could at least remove two of the rear speakers and maybe we’ll come up with little smaller ones and have them hanging from the wall or something and, and so anyway, so now I’m in This process is trying to figure this out. And what I did, and I said, Oh, maybe I’ll get in wall speakers where speakers are built into the wall at the ceiling or on the wall for my rear surround speakers, which will, will are, aesthetically probably a lot more appeasing to my, to my girlfriend. So my point is, is I don’t know anything about this. So I am now searching all over online trying to figure out what the cost of this How does it work? And is this something that people do think about when they’re moving? Of course, they think about, especially if they have a guy like me who’s into music or sound, they’re going to want to figure out how, what am I going to do with my speakers? And they’re going to want to know, how easy is it to install something into a wall? Well, that’s a video call up a speaker guy and say, Hey, I’m a realtor. And some of my clients want to know about speaker stuff. So can we talk about that I can interview you. So that’s another just quick idea. And I’m now in the process. And by the way, guys, how did I How did I actually do my research? We have a Facebook group for our building just for our the owners, and I said, Has anyone done in in home speaker stuff? Or in in wall? Speaker? If so, can you send me a referral, I’m doing the same thing that your clients are going to do. But you want them to contact you. You don’t want them to contact random people on Facebook?
Gogo Bethke 31:13 Exactly. You got it. So preferred vendors list. It’s amazing. Because you are going to have to reach out to your to these people, right? So you’re going to reach out to high school friend and be like, Oh my gosh, Jimmy, I see that you live in our area. I haven’t seen you in 14 years, just calling to see what do you do for a living trying to see if I can support your family, right. And in return Jimmy’s gonna say what do you do for a living? Right, next thing you know, Jimmy knows I’m a realtor. But at the same time, maybe Jimmy installed speakers, and now I’m gonna add him to my preferred vendors list.
D.J. Paris 31:40 I love it. And let’s, let’s finish up talking about gogos bootcamp. Because this is, this is really such an important investment that I think every one of our listeners should make, I cannot more highly recommend this product. In fact, it’s about the only product we do recommend on the entire show, outside of our wonderful sponsors. This is an incredible way to grow your business and improve your branding around social media and give you an actual structure and strategy to get not only more followers, but more engagement. And to just have people remember that this is what you do. You’re a realtor, and but you need a structure and you need to learn the skills. Tell us about Go Go’s boot camp.
Gogo Bethke 32:26 So Google’s boot camp started with the idea of you know, I was kind of forcing to figure out social media, right, I had no sphere, I had no money to market myself. I had a weird name, I had an accent. So I was forced to figure out social media so I can make it in real estate. And through the years, it went from like that chick is weird, because she’s taking selfies all the time. And fast forward a few years becoming a Top Producing agent locally and nationwide became like, why do you do that Google? How do you do that? Tell me more about Facebook business page. How do I integrate something with Zapier? What how do I hire a virtual assistant? When do I hire an assistant, you know, all of those things, and then everything in my case, it ties back to social media, we turned into a course where we have hundreds and hundreds of hours, where I literally explain anything that you possibly need everything that I do today, through the years, I explained step by step, and then all of the links, how you can get access to that track, or how you can watch a video about that. Furthermore, it’s in the core. So think of it this way, anything that I have learned in the 11 years of my career, it’s in that course when it comes to social media, and not just social media, right? Like social media, if you’re good at lead generation, eventually going to have to build a team. So then we talk about team building, right? Like how would you do that? When do you hire first assistant? What is the transaction coordinator? You know where to find them? What is a VA? How do you hire VA? What’s your job description? How much do you pay? Where do you find them? All of those things that I have today is inside of the bootcamp. And it’s called What was bootcamp Social Media course, we also have another one that’s agent attraction course. So we have two different courses, depending what is important to you. If you if you want to build a brand and lead generate with that brand, that would be the Social Media course, if you want to have everything that I have, from team building, to from the basics all the way to team building, making multiple, seven digits passively. It’s in a social media course. If you want to know how to build a team and Agent attract, not recruit because I don’t recruit I haven’t called anyone they call me. Then we have an agent attraction course, which is different from social media. So those are the two things they are both video based. You can watch it on your own time, and pretty much implement everything as you learn and get to have everything that I have since like your social media house, right? I help you build it from foundation.
D.J. Paris 34:35 Yeah, it’s just an all in one encompassing platform for really branding and marketing yourself through social media and also other ancillary parts of the businesses, like gogo was saying is like, hey, when is the time to get an assistant? When is it time to to build a team and how do I do that? What are some best practices and you get access to her entire community of realtors who are already part of this Since sharing best practices with each other, so go to Gogo podcast.com, check it out, purchase it, I promise you, it’ll be an incredible investment that will pay itself over pretty quickly. By multiples. I mean, it’s just it by 100 times, you know, within a half
Gogo Bethke 35:18 a transaction, a half a transaction will pay for a course.
D.J. Paris 35:23 Yeah, that’s a that’s a pretty good return on investment. I would love to give somebody something and have them return, you know, that kind of that kind of income. So, guys, it’d be even if it only ever did one transaction, it would more than pay for itself. But it will, it will certainly give you way more than that. So go to go go podcast.com. Go go. I think this is a great place to wrap up and Go Go’s all over the place are you are you going to be speaking anywhere wreath in the before the end of the year that our audience should know about?
Gogo Bethke 35:59 I literally just came back from Arizona, I spoke four times in three days, I think my head is spinning and I’m still recovering from last week, but I don’t know if I have now. I haven’t checked my events calendar to be honest with you. Now that I have Marianna as my right hand, she just plugs the stuff in there for me and I was supposed to speak in Vegas, and I didn’t find out in time, and I double booked myself. So now I can’t go to Vegas, which was the first week of November. But other than that, I guess just go to my name, go go back ke.com. And on my events tab, you can see all of my upcoming events. And also the preferred vendors list it’s on my links. So if you just go to mining that com Go go back to that calm. When you go to links, you can get the exact copy of the preferred vendors list and download it for yourself and just kind of start building your
D.J. Paris 36:45 own. I love it for everyone. Also check out her her boot camp Go Go’s boot camp, which is Gogo podcast.com for special pricing for keeping it real listeners. Gogo thank you once again for being on our show. We love having you on every month you provide so much incredible value. And by the way, if you want to join gogos team or learn more about what she offers agents, what’s the best way that agents should reach out to you.
Gogo Bethke 37:11 So Instagram is the only platform that you get me personally, every other platform, I have virtual assistants so you can go to Instagram and Google’s real estate or just go to my name.com. So Google back to.com There is a button that’s called partner with me. And you can watch videos, see who I am how we work, I do not take a cut. So we pretty much just become business partners, and I’ll help you with anything that I can possibly help you with.
D.J. Paris 37:33 Love it. Well on behalf of gogo and myself. We want to thank our audience for continuing to listen and support our show. Thanks to our sponsor, follow up boss thanks to go go our great guest as always. And as usual, please tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with gogo with all sorts of actionable strategies and send them a link to our podcast, send them over to keeping it real pod.com, which is where all of our episodes live, and they can stream it right there from their browser. Sorry, no, go ahead.
Gogo Bethke 38:06 I forgot to mention these cutting boards. If you want them. There’s also a link. So if you go just go to my name, google wlky.com and go to links, you’re going to find a team Google Store. Even though that’s branded to my name, you can change out my brand to your team’s brand, right or your brokerages or your personal brand. And you can order these if you like at a 10% discount.
D.J. Paris 38:25 Awesome. So go to go go Beth key that.com That’s GOGOBETHK e.com Go Go Beth key.com. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. Get those cutting boards for your clients. They will use them several times a week and think about you go go we will see you on the next episode. Thank you.
Gogo Bethke 38:44 Thank you so much for having me.
How Real Estate Agents Can Get All Their Leads From YouTube For Free • Jesse Dau & Jackson Wilkey
Nov 03, 2021
Jesse Dau and Jackson Wilkey, the Channel Junkies describe how they started their YouTube Channel and how they decided to step out of production. Jesse and Jackson continue discussing how to build a symbiotic relations that works and will bring you success. They also how discuss how they figured out in which direction their services should be headed. Jesse describes step-by-step how they built their business together with Jackson. Last, Jesse and Jackson talk about Channel Junkies and what they teach in there.
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